Springtime cleaning

The first sun of the spring has arrived. Merciless it's trying to look into my window, that has such a cover from air pollution and dust, that the glass looks frosted. In spite of those efforts to look it out, it manages to lighten up the room enough to make me feel blind as a mole every time I enter a dark room in the game. Which way does the corridor go in this monastery where I'm boosting a couple of guildies? Well... No, ooops, that was the wall! Ouch, I apparently left the instance. Here we go again! If you want to play during daytime this part of the year you should ignore the protests from the family, pulling down every blind you can find.

If I ever get the idea into my head to clean the house, it's in these days. It's also time for a major clean-up in the Wow-world, and then I'm most of all thinking about the addons. It's when those revolutionary huge patches arrive that the moment of truth happens. The natural selection. What addons do you really need in the end? And which ones are mostly hanging around, using space? Which ones have you completely forgotten the use of? Quite fast you can see what addons that are really paying off for the memory they occupy. Those addons that I never seem to remember to find new versions of I can probably live without. It's a little like those advice that cleaning gurus give us: if you can't throw away the junk you have at home, try putting it into the box and leave it in the attic. If you haven't touched it in a year, take it tu the tip.

At least I know what addon will be the last one for me to throw ever - the addon that always will by number one on my priority list of keeping an eye on updates: Omen. That was painfully obvious last Sunday when we were doing a badges run in Karazhan. It turned out there wasn't one version of Omen in the raid group but many, although everyone had done the homework the last few days, downloading new versions. It seems to be like trying to shoot a moving target, these days the major addons are updated hour by hour.

After some messing with it we had what was supposed to be the same version. But did it help? Everybody saw each other - except for the guy we most of all wanted to see - the main tank. For a brief moment in a fight he passed by on my list, like a ghost. Then he was gone again for the rest of the night. Sometimes the list on the other hand went completely blank - you didn't see a single name, even though we were in the middle of a fight. And then suddenly they all came back again - everybody but the MT of course.

"Well well, the hunter said patiently. I guess we'll have to play by instinct and you could always feign death". Myself I got the biggest repair bill of them all. If you're used to always be number two on the threat list, staying just below the tank, it's kind of hard to know what your top rating on the non complete threat list actually means. Well you know exactly what it means when the mob is running towards you, but by then it's often too late. Thanks god for ice block, I say, even though it felt bit strange for a fire mage to pretend to be an ice cube for such a huge part of the evening. Sometimes I played it safe, just standing there, doing absolutely nothing but trying to avoid to pull aggro and die. But I can't say that it's the play stile I like most. After all a fire mage most of all is driven by his thirst for blood. If we can't dps we could as well go to bed and sleep.

Anyhow, when the evening ended I had another 22 badges to put into the bank - now it looks as if I'll be able to buy at least both the chest and the trousers at once when the vendor opens his shop, so I won't complain. But until the next raid I beg the gods of Azeroth that the new Omen will be cured from the worst children diseases.

So dear addon developers, I hope now that you won't just close the curtains and let yourself be seduced to go out enjoying the sun. A whole word of players are waiting for you to give as a functioning Omen. Don't make us disappointed.