I check my blog stats from time to time, because I like the fuzzy, reaffirming feeling that others are reading the things I say. One topic seems to be fairly common:
how to move bad kitty wow
how to sort badkitty timer bar druid
how to move badkitty addon
how do i set up bad kitty for wow
badkitty addon behind target
how to use badkitty addon
badkitty pr0n
No joke, I get one of these roughly every day. Yes, it seems Bad Kitty has a naughty and unintuitive interface for the uninitiated. It took me a little fumbling to figure it out too, as is the case with most add-ons, but maybe I can spare a few of you that troubling pain. It’s time for:
Bad Kitty Move Configuration Naughty Tutorial J!
flashy background!
Let us begin. If you’re unfamiliar with Bad Kitty, I already discussed it a little while back.
TL;DR Version: Bad Kitty is an Add-On for WoW that tracks assorted buffs, debuffs and cooldowns related to feral druiding. It does so with indicators and bars that are highly customizable. Feral druids like this because they have a lot to watch (especially kat durid) in the way timey things.
The very basic start: Opening Bad Kitty’s control panel. Type:
/bk
That is all. You’ll get a dialog box with options. For many of you, this is where you’ll go “oh, that’s all I needed, thanks!” and run off to leave me talking to myself. Do enjoy. Glad to be of service.
For the rest of you, who’s eyes are glazing over at the sight of boxes and dongles, fear not, for we shall break it down a bit more. I am, however, going to insert the odd page break here, since this could get a bit image intensive. I like to keep my front page and RSS feed light-weight. It’s my prerogative. Don’t judge me!
Technical Specifications
Name: Survival of the Fittest
Class: Druid
Spec: Feral
Tier: 6
Ranks: 3
This is a talent I’ve wanted to highlight for some time, simply because it is recockulously amazing. I’ve been running more dungeons than anything else lately, and so I’ve been putting extra effort into refining my Critty Kitty DPS.
Survival of the Fittest is primarily a tanking talent. In fact, it is no small stretch to say that it is required for tanking. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Crit Immunity.
Tanking 101: See, when a Warrior or a Death Knight or a Paladin want to tank, they put on lots of heavy metal and defense items so as not to die. Enemy raid bosses, no matter who they are, have a 5.something-or-other % chance of scoring a critical hit on you, making you take double the deuce in damage. What’s worse, that’s spikey quick damage that healers may not be quick enough to deal with. Luckily, you can raise your defense rating and reduce your chance of being critteded. They want to hit a magical “def-cap” number (which, oddly enough, isn’t a “cap”, since it’s actually a desired minimum, not a maximum) where the crit reduction is higher than that 5.whatsit%, making it so they’re incapable of ever scoring a critical hit.
And this is all well and fine, except you’re a drood. You don’t deal in metal and shields and such. You rob the Rogue’s kinky leather wardrobe and expect to tank in it. Enter SotF! Survival of the Fittest gives you +6% crit reduction! 6% is higher than 5.Jiminy-Cricket%, and thus you can never be critted by those nasty raid bosses. What’s more, now you can spend all your gem slots and fancy armor on Stamina and Agility and chrome grills. The plateys are jealous.
You don’t have to be a tank to enjoy this protection, though. 6% is a healthy chunk of crit reduction off of what you could be taking in PvP. You’re obviously not immune, but at the cost of 3 points, there are few defenses better worth your time. Nope, you don’t have to be in your Bear Form to enjoy it. I enjoy the luxury on my PvE kitty build. As a melee damage role, I’m going to take a few lumps. A stray crit can take you out of the fight fast, so I carry insurance.
Feature #2
+6% to all attributes. Yay! It’s the better half of a Blessing of Kings up all of the time. Since every attribute is useful to a Druid in some capacity, I’ll take whatever I can get. If anyone ever asks why I took SotF on a DPS build, I quietly point to this talent, and don’t have to say anything else. Publicly, it’s about the attack power. Privately, I like not dying. You’re a druid. You can have it both ways.
Feature C (C is for Cookie!)
SoataFu’s last benefit, as if it needed more, is pure and unadulterated tanking. In Bear Costume, you get +33% armor from your cloth and leather armor. It’s roughly equivalent to giving Bear a shield. If you’re not a tank, it can still come into play. PvP Cats sometimes swap to Bear to survive a few hits or to dispense a quick Bash. If no one brought a tank to AV, you also might be able to weather the boss for them. It’s all about versatility.
Point of note: I get in trouble during dungeons for turning into a bear. If you’re in as a damage role and people see a bear for even a split second, I’ve found that you will be scolded for breaking role. I’m not even joking. I’ll be passing out Mark of the Wild before a run and accidentally Bear it up, simply because they share the same mouse button, and people will go for the throat. And they’re sort of right. Kitties take small, quick healing really well and are remarkably easy to keep alive with minimal attention. As a dispensable damage dealer, that’s what they’re going to cast on you. Pop a potion and Barkskin and ride it out if you even remotely trust your healer.
I’ve had to, on occasions, use Bear to pull stray enemies back to the real tank, but that’s only when the tank has been really bad. Doing this to even a half-decent tank will just blow their rhythm and make their job harder.
Bear responsibly. The more you know!
Summary
Survival of the Fittest is about survival. That’s why it’s a “tanking talent,” and thus this is mandatory for Bear tanks. But it’s important not to neglect your survivability in your PvP and DPS roles as well. Kitties are quick little melee damagers who can be extremely resilient and easy to maintain with the slightest of heals. Combine with talents like Nurturing Instinct and Predatory Instincts, stir in the ample Stamina your gear already has, and your healer will love you. The extra damage afforded by the +6% to your attributes is icing on the cake, but if anyone asks, it’s why you took this talent. Let them think you’re being a good little glass cannon.
And your fortune cookie:
Buttercup is marry Humperdink in little less than half an hour, so all we have to do is get inside, break up the wedding, steal the Princess, and make our escape, after I kill Count Rugan.
As proof of my achievement, here is a screen shot. It is in no way altered or doctored.
I thought there’d be a parade. I pictured half-naked people appearing to pleasure me and feed me grapes. I mean, I am now part of the cream at the top, aren’t I? I’m an 80!
Well, nothing of the sort happened. A few people gave me congratulations in guild chat. I’m only a social member and they’re all hardened elite raid-monsters, but they were still very kind enough to take notice that it was my first 80 and to shower me with attention. I’d have made a true party of it, but the assault on the Arathi Basin Stables wasn’t going to pause for my celebration.
Shortly after, I was invited to a random heroic! ”Random heroic,” I thought. ”That sounds fancy!” I shouldn’t have felt let down when it happened, because I already knew, but there was something off-putting about rushing into my brand new “random heroic” and seeing dungeons I could’ve already done prior to 80. We’re sort of lead to believe there’s some mind-altering world behind the curtain. Instead, I saw the Wizard and found him to be a lie! I don’t even get any ruby slippers! Hmm, you know, Ruby Slippers work a lot like Hearth Stones.
Level-cap seamlessly continues along. There’s more quests to do. There’s dungeons to do. I can still PvP (if I want to spend a few hours as paste under the shoes of super-geared gods) in all the same areas. But now the number next to my name is the same as my friends, so I can join them on random dungeon runs. It’s not that there wasn’t anything new. It just came along over the last 10 levels. There’s more to come. But it doesn’t magically appear just because I’m 80.
So what of progress? Well, as anyone will tell you, it’s all gear now. Which means running heroics in rapid succession and gathering emblems and drops. I’ve gathered a strong sad 47 Emblems of Triumph and 4 Frosty ones. I finally found the emblem merchants, though I’m still sorting out just what I’m supposed to want.
I want a PvP set, because even though it was the BGs that just got me this capped level, I’m already itching for it again. I haven’t clawed out a spine in a couple days. I need my fix, man!
I guess I need to start getting some PvE gear. I’m only doing 1.5k DPS on the average heroic. I hear “that’s not horrible for a starting 80″. Everyone I’m grouping with is breaking 3k. Including the tanks. Sad kitty needs hurty sticks.
Then there’s the Heirloom items. I suspect I should save these for last. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been considering doing them first. I have a fever and the only cure is alting. My Resto Shaman is in that sweet spot of early 30s where she can heal most of her groups while AFK with a healing stream totem. There’s something satisfying about hearing “omg finally a good healer, thanks” as I spend half the fight stumbling with a spilled drink.
Anyham, I’d best get back to it. I need about a thousand emblems, and I’m getting them at a rate of about 5 a run. This could take a while.
Your fortune cookie:
There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Crap, my last bind is in Exodar. WTB port 2 Kansas.
It’s Shared Topica Time again. I’ve been promising to do these, despite them always being topics to which I really don’t relate well. This week’s is from Jaedia and her topic of Looking Back to the Start of Wrath.
I’ve never been “in the prime” of WoW, so my take is going to be a bit skewed. Let’s tell a story.
Once upon a time, there was a little Skip. Skip had friends who played WoW, but Skip did not play. Skip was too busy sleeping with super models and going out to fancy restaurants with wealthy executives, or whatever it is Skips do. When the hallucinations ended and Skip realized he was actually just sleeping with his fluffy (and very comfortable) pillow and eating overheated pot pies with his cat, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to socialize with his friends via Intrawebz Gaming. By this time, all of his friends were level 70 and running Zulnaxamon solo with rainbow epics and being followed by ultra-rare Mikhail Gorbachev mini-pets that drop off raiding heroic socialist governments. Or so I’m told. I never got to run them myself.
But some were nice enough to roll alts and play and talk to my newblet druid from time to time and I pranced around, ignorant of the world outside of starting zones. Then the 3.0 patch came out. Some fancy-smanchy new expansion was around the corner and I had to get involved! I bought Burning Crusades and… realized I was level 40, and started over from 1 with a Draenei Hunter and Shaman.
Oh yes, I remember all the new Hunter pet abilities and trees. I remember the class remakes. I remember all of Azeroth going from near empty to void of all human existence. Not to be dissuaded from my quest of doing whatever I felt like in what I was convinced to be a single-player game, it took me about a year to fumble from 40 to 58, where I was introduced to Outlands.
I was excited. I was finally getting into material I’d heard people talk about. And as the game quickly propelled me to 60 and handed me my flight form, it was as if it were saying “sorry Mario, but our princess is in another castle”. Again, no one was there. I tried to slowly enjoy it, convinced I’d never see 80, but it was as if I was leveling up by accident. Outlands was rejecting me. In little to no time, I was tossed to Northrend.
And we reach the topic of our post, I think. Was I excited? Kind of. Was I let down? A bit. What was I doing? Rapidly leveling in an environment mostly devoid of players. It seems I still hadn’t caught up. But, I wasn’t going to let Northrend be another Outlands. There are times when you have to let the princess go for a while and sleep with Toad instead. I’ve explored, done quests, PvPed, gone collecting odd achievements and done everything in my power to enjoy my progress however I felt at the time. I’ve enjoyed Northrend, and now as I grace the precipice of 80, I’ve only completed most of Borean Tundra, Dragon Blight, Zul’Drak and Grizzly Hills. I’m told this is good, as I’ll make gobs of money doing the other areas as an 80.
But, I’ve not “experienced” it yet. I’ve not been through a part of the game as the rest of the world is exploring and learning it. I’ve never experienced a new dungeon without a team of experts familiar with every level 1 critter running along its walls. Everything I touch has been documented and passed by for about a year. Cataclysm will have to be my “new” experience. Maybe I’ll finally get my princess.
Your fortune cookie:
You have died of dysentery.
It’s been a bit since I put a thingy on the whatsit, so I fall to the usual form of blog media: the meme shared topic fodder post. I don’t mean that to undermine the weight of the average meme shared topic post, but I’ll be honest, I use them to churn out buttery filler. They’re like baskets of free bread sticks that hide just how small your plate of pasta really is. So, feeding voraciously from Ophelie’s Thinking back on this blog post, which is in turn, a follow up to K’s pretentious blogging meme, I offer you this survey. I swear I promised I’d stop doing these. But they always go over so well. Do enjoy. Your soup will be out in a few moments.
1. How long have you been blogging? What made you start? Who inspired you?
It’s been a few years now. MBTY is young and innocent, but I’ve done the Internet bloggy thing to audiences of blind crickets for time long forgotten. Why’d I start? I just did. Self importance, maybe, though I’m a quiet and unimposing person, by nature. I just like writing. It doesn’t need a reader, though it helps the process. The knowledge that someone may one day randomly stumble your way gives incentive to write publicly, where it would normally just be in a spiral notebook under the bed. Still, I don’t feel much difference between the two. I always appreciate my readers, but they’re a secondary influence in the cause.
2. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog?
A few. I dunno. The average post never goes over a couple hours, including the rapid refreshing of the stats page in hopes someone will instantly land upon it. (They never do.) I’m an “off the hip” writer, and always will be. I’m told by people that they’re jealous of my ability to write quality nonsense off the cuff, but that’s just how I write. When I put time and effort into posts, they come off forced. Nothing to be done for it. You don’t want forced, do you?
3. What kind of experience or background do you have with writing?
Bloggish sort aside, I’ve always been writing. It goes back as far as 5th grade, where we had to write an essay. Three of us were chosen out of the entire year’s class. Then everyone was gathered into the auditorium and the three of us had to read them aloud. When the traumatizing ordeal was over, they gave us teddy bears. Okay, that wasn’t really my start. In fact, I cuddled up with that bear and avoided all writing that wasn’t mandatory until the 9th grade. Public speaking sucks. But my 9th grade teacher teased back out of me the interest in assorted literature, and I returned to the world of random writing with a few anonymous poems. After that, “it was on”.
4. Talk about how you come up with blog topics. Where do you get your ideas? What or who inspires you? Where and/or how do your brainstorming?
UhruuUuh… Thought enter brain. Brain move fingers. It’s a “creative” process. By “creative” I mean it just sort of happens as mood strikes and can’t be helped when it does. When demanded, my brain produces nothing. When left to its own devices, things come out. I’ve even a few “stories” in the process of writing, and they follow the same lax schedule. It just is what it is.
5. Do you have any blogging rules or guidelines you follow? Is there anything you will not blog about?
It depends on the blog. Here, I try to be civil. As I realize that my few reader lack the boundaries I tend to assume of them they fall away, but it’s probably the nicer of the places I post. As a person with few hangups, I try to respect that which disturbs others. Admittedly, who this imaginary, easily offended person is is any body’s guess, because the people I meet in WoW are anything but sensitive and civil.
6. Do you have any sort of a publishing schedule in terms of day of week or topic? Where do you do your writing?
I write when I play. As of this exact moment, I’m 1.5 bars/bubbles away from level 80 on my Druid, and you’d think I’d be amped to finish it off, but I’m not. Aside from missing the in-game company I’d really like to be chatting with right now, I’m enjoying the 8-bit NES gaming I’m doing. I’ll hit 80 and blog more in a few days. It happens. Don’t rush it. My schedule is mood imposed.
7. How many drafts of potential blog posts do you have right now? In what medium do you draft your posts? How often do you completely scratch or delete drafts or blog post ideas?
There’s half a dozen right now, or so. I have a certain loose and playful style I use when I post here. There’s also a certain “mundane” style I recognize as my sort of “informative voice”. The informative voice is boring and drab and otherwise not fun to read (entirely via my opinion, of course), and so when I catch myself writing mostly in that fashion I’ll scrap the post and leave it as purely “topic salvage” for another day. This post is looking a bit mundane, actually. Best liven it up a bit. Chop chop. Wakey wakey.
8. If you had to leave your blog in your will to another blogger, who would you choose? To ask this in a slightly less morbid way, are there other blogs that you feel are similar to yours in content, style, or voice?
That’s kind of like leaving your dying dog with expensive medical bills to a friend. I’m sure they’d appreciate the incentive, but they’d be worse off for it. My writing is my writing, and if I felt someone else filled the bill so deeply as to absorb it quietly I’d probably have gone off to do something else by now. There will be drinks at the funeral. You’re all invited.
9. Has anything surprised you since you started blogging?
My monitor caught on fire once. No joke. Sparks, smoke, etc. This shortly after my previous CPU melted to the motherboard. Straight up melted. That was a weird computer. I was just trying to play Leisure Suit Larry 1. You can so pee on the homeless guy. Hehe. Digital karma is a b****.
10. What are your goals or plans for your blog going forward? Any specific goals or plans for your blog in 2010?
Yur lookin’ at it. Who knows, maybe I’ll have “useful” information, come the turn of the year and turn of the 80, but I’m not holding my breath. If you’ve put up with me this long I don’t have to change a thing, and if you’re gone, well, pike off and good riddance. Those people won’t be invited to the drinkin’ funeral.
