So New thing here at homegrown MMO Monday! This is probably not an Every Monday thing but it does set aside a day when I can talk about one of our hobbies with some regularity.

The MMO world is a crowded one. There are hundreds if not thousands of MMOs out there some are pay to play some are free some are some where in between and you get what you pay for, but in this competitive environment nearly everyone wants a slice of that 11.5 million $14.95 per month payments that everyone talks about Blizzard racking in. So whats World of Warcraft to do to prevent themselves from going the way of Ultima Online or Ever Quest? Evolve. Darwin would be proud to see his Survival of the fittest and Evolutionary theory put to such important usage. But to be that fittest that survives you have to offer what those 11.5 million people want out of a game, and how do you know what that is? Well there is the forums... which consists mostly of people whining and complaining about how something is not making them happy and others insulting them for having that opinion, not really a good way to get an idea of what people want. So what do they do? Well they have done the evolutionary equivalent of the borg.
I'm talking about Mods of course, Modifications to the game that are written by players to fix/improve the game interface and function. And the most popular ones are then integrated into the actual game reducing the number of mods needed. (yay!)

I Hate playing a shaman. I do not like them Sam I am. They are great healers have an easy to pick up set of heals that have a decent amount of versatility. The damage I have seen people put out with them is amazing even post nurf. Plus I love the look of the gear (silly I know) and with duel specialization in the game they they can go healer, or caster, or melee with little effort that makes them great in a raid setting. I can not stand totems though and the whole class is built on them. There are 22 different totems at level 80 and you can't over lap them with other shamans or they are useless, and I have to pick 4. Just looking at The Husband's Restoration Shaman's totems makes me reach for the Advil which is not what you should be doing in combat you should be clicking on one. So introduce "totem timers" this mod allows you to do a lot of the THINKING about the totems before combat so you go into combat hit a set up button and it casts the one you need to cast AND it talks to other users of the mod like "pali power" or "healbot" so who is using what totems is coordinated without filling up chat logs or taking over the voice chat.

In patch 3.2 Blizzard is taking some of the functionality of the Mod and adding it to the general totem management of the game, no it wont talk to other shammie's but it vastly improves the way the game handles totems and I might be brave enough to try leveling my little level 28 shaman again. (now if only they would cut the number of totems back to like 12 and make them buff only... that would be great)

Thanks for visiting!