OK, it was a slow week for gaming, fast week for flying.
Almost done with another air medal (20 combat missions flown).
But in my off-time I had the chance to do a few cool things. I was invited to help clear SoO on normal difficulty, which is one step harder than Flex. We did great! I was present for the first 7 bosses, and was ranked well in healing, usually near the top if absorbs are counted. A big shout out to the folks at Genetically Superior for offering to give me a shot.
I got a 553 ilvl staff off Galakras, which is a level of loot I never even expected to have. After 2 upgrades, that's a 561 weapon! I have a few new good lessons learned about healing on this network, which is notorious for hopping routers without warning, therefore disconnecting all connectivity. This almost always occurs in the middle of a boss fight.
A note about networks...
This is what you want to see if you're using a wireless adapter.
This shows you how many routers I can pick up at one time, however.
The network we use here is configured, perhaps inadvertently, to swap your router to a "stronger" connection upon any background scan, which Windows insists on doing no matter how much I try to avoid it. So, when that happens and my primary "good" router has a lapse, I get reconnected to a "lesser" router that effectively kills the internet. Everybody has this problem here, and it's common for folks to complain about skype cutting out at interval or for facebook to simply stop loading. That's because, in the background, their wifi connection is going to something like this:
My only solution so far is simply to initiate the background scan on my own and choose my primary router, forcing the connection to the good one. How long it will stay on that router is anybody's guess...I would say I get about 15 minutes before it hops, if I'm lucky. It's not unusual for me to literally reconnect to my router in the middle of a raid boss fight, so for a period of 10 seconds or even more, my guy is standing there uncommanded. Fortunately, I'm usually so quick that the game doesn't even boot me off. I have tried programs such as WLAN Optimizer to cancel the background check, but it seems to have no effect whatsoever. That tells me that the mil routers themselves may be the culprits. One way or another, we'll be at a different base in a few weeks, so perhaps their internet will be structured differently.
In other news, I transferred my pandaren toon over to blood elf, primarily for raiding and transmog reasons. I like the pandaren character model in theory, but in reality it looks awkward on most mounts, terrible in most good transmog sets, and the area consumed by the player in the middle of the screen is less than ideal for healing. My first 7 years, I played an undead character model when healing, and never had to deal with large character types crowding out my monitor before.
Oh, and I finally got the achievement in ICC10 I've been working on for 3 weeks. Check out the new look of Smooge. Notice the subtle glowing skeleton death dragon mount:
