HA!

Just a month in and bearly a fistful of blog posts later, I have to change my blog name. Why? Because I started Kitty DPSing. You see, at first, I didn't *want* to Cat DPS at all. I wanted to be the renegade, the rebel, the maverick! I wanted to make a full-on bear tank spec, with no regard for cat DPSing at all, the hybrid nature of Druids be damned!

Hand me that bottle of Tabasco, will you? This foot is a bit bland.

Back when I started playing my Druid, it was because my guild had hit GUILD DRAMA, and we'd lost a rogue DPS and our warrior tank. Because of this, raiding was pretty much out the window because we only *had* 10 people, and until our raid leader found someone to replace the two slots we weren't going anywhere. So we had a month of downtime, and I was getting more and more disillusioned with my Shaman. I'd originally wanted to make her an Elesham for raiding, But like any good Trekkie, I held to Spock's famous words, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," and converted her into a Restosham. But something rubbed me the wrong way about it. As time went on, I found myself growing to rely more and more and more on Chain Heal spam to heal my raids. And that was getting seriously boring for me, just mashing the same button over and over again. I've had many arguments with my Discipline priest raid leader over this. I think she still considers me a moron for giving up such a great spell. But I hated it. My line of thinking was that when that one spell becomes the *only* thing you do, something needs to change. So I went looking for a new healer to make. Now since, my favorite Shaman healing spell is Riptide, I naturally started looking at the most HoT-centric healer I could find, the Restoration Druid. And so I bought some heirlooms, and started to level.

Along the way, we discussed a number of things in guild chat. We also recruited friends from other servers to help us. In the end, it was concluded that if I were to go Bear with my druid, we could source another Resto Shaman from our alliance guild and, along with a guildie's roommate, we would be 10-man ready once again. This wasn't really a problem for me, since I was absolutely loving being a bear. A Repurposed Lava Dredger enchanted with Crusader, with a Darkmoon Card: Heroism in one trinket slot, a Mark of Conquest in the other slot, and Improved Leader of the Pack meant I could get away with all kinds of stupid antics overpulling and still get away, alive.

So I sped towards 80 blindingly fast, and geared myself up. Heck, the Restoration offspec that I originally wanted was rapidly left by the wayside, untouched from levels 40 to 80.

Now, since I was gearing a pure Bear tank, this required me to spec and gear in a certain way. All gems? +30 Stamina gems, except for one Nightmare Tear! Forget Improved Mangle, I gotta have Bash down to thirty seconds! Shredding Attacks? Who needs a reduced Lacerate energy cost, those points are going to go into 5/5 Furor instead. I want instant rage when I shift! And.... I kind of have one point left over. Eh, let's reduce shapeshifting mana costs and drop it into King of the Jungle. And I'll get a small 5% damage boost when I pop Enrage, too.

And off we went. We went through all of Ulduar 10-man and ToC 10-man, and I blissfully upgraded my gear as we went along. But as we went along, there weren't always fights that needed two tanks. Or four healers. So as to actually be contributing and pulling my weight during those one-tank fights, I started shifting into cat and whacking things, throwing down 5-point Rips before shifting back to refresh Lacerate, and struggling to even do that, with only 1/3 King of the Jungle. I even started to gem my new gear with a mix of red and blue gems, slowly inching along towards hybridism. But I still resisted, putting myself as a tank first, and using cat to help the raid burn things down faster.

And then T10 came along. If you've been playing for quite some time, you know the four-piece bonus by heart now. That was pretty much the last straw I needed to finally respec. As soon as I was able to buy an Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder off the auction house, I bought my T10 pants, and then respecced from 5/5 Furor and 1/3 KotJ into the more mainstream 3/5 Furor and 3/3 KotJ.

Which brings us to the last two weeks. My guild has been running heroic 5-mans a lot, lately. Several of us have gotten freshly-80 alts. A veritable DKpalooza, really. One of our hunters has been picking up tanking on his DK, and we've been having him Blood tank instances to practice. Our main tank's DK finally hit 80 as well, so she's feeling out Unholy DPS. And since I wasn't needed to tank, and we had healing in various forms, ranging from the aforementioned guild alliance Restosham, picking up Elemental gear for his long-neglected DPS set, to another hunter's trying out her Retadin's Holy spec.... I started DPSing as well.

And I've been liking it so far. It's only in the past week or so that I decided that I was going to embrace all three roles, Tanking, Healing, and DPS fully. So that's my story. That's going to be the focus of this blog. There are going to be Druid blogs left and right. There are going to be dozens of Feral blogs, both Bear and Cat. There will be Restoration blogs as well. But this is going to be the blog that focuses on the druid (population: me!) that wants to do all three roles with one character, and never wants to roll another alt to slog from 1 to 80 and Loremaster AGAIN.

Welcome to Bear-y Leafy Kitty, folks.

-BearTreeCat

Settling in...

Just doing a bit of testing here, making sure those sexysexy Wowhead tooltips work.

Lightborn Spire
Lasherweave Legguards
Wrathful Gladiator's Greatstaff

First Post!

Partly because it's maintenance time again, and partly because I've been meaning to get writing for quite some time now, I'd like to just go through a bit of math for everyone who has ever complained about WoW's Tuesday maintenance.

Let's go ahead and take the North American servers, just for example, shall we?

Counting up the number of servers on Worldofwarcraft.com's Realm Status page, we can see that in North America alone, there are 241 realms, total.

241 realms, not bad. A small-or-medium-sized business has 241 boxes. But these are *realms*. They aren't just one server, even though colloquially, we use the terms "realm" and "server" interchangably. No, a "realm" is Blizzard's way of saying "This is a cluster of computers, not just one." How many are there? Well, let's start with the most obvious ones: mapservers.

The mapservers are what run the world we play in. No mapserver, no Eastern Kingdoms, no Kalimdor, no Northrend, and no Outland. Those of you who have played long enough may have come across a peculiar situation, hearing the words " is down.". The way each realm works, there is one separate computer running each continent in WoW, (Technically, The Exodar, Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isle, Silvermoon City, Eversong Woods, and Ghostland are "part" of Outland.) making it entirely possible for one part of the world to explode, while the other three continents continue chugging along.

So, 241 x 4 = 964 computers already. Let's move on.

Another server that everyone has met is the Instance server. And oh how people hate this server, because everyone hates that "Additional instances cannot be launched" message. Don't deny it, you know you hate it. It runs all the instanced content for WoW on a given realm, and you bet it gets slammed every time that new content comes out and everyone wants to get in and do stuff NOW.

241 x 5= 1205, still going.

A slightly less obvious server is the database server. This server handles all the items that exist in a given realm. And it has to track each and every item, and since we're generous, we'll assume that it also tracks each and every gold that exists as well, instead of having a different server for that as well.

241 x 6 = 1446. Now we're getting into some medium-to-large business territory.

Another slightly less obvious server is the character server, that stores all data related to your stats, your spec, your achievements, and probably your macros, glyphs, and gear sets. We'll assume that this is all run by one additional server as well.

241 x 7 = 1687.

And all of these servers have to communicate with several other shared servers as well. There's still the login server, the payment server, the account management server, the patch server, the Armory server, the Web server (checking realm status and the like) the forum server, and probably the Authenticator server as well. Again, we'll be generous and assume there is one of each, even though with an operation as large as Blizzard, there is no way in hell there is only one computer running each of these things. We're even going to ignore, for the sake of argument, the servers that run cross-server content yet, like the LFG tool, Battlegrounds, and Arena PVP. (Likely one server per Battlegroup, or a collective bunch of servers that share BG and Arena data with eachother.)

241 x 7 + 8 = 1695 servers. And maintenance is usually from 5 AM to 11 AM Pacific time. Which means that Blizzard has six hours to probably:

• Backup the data.
• Patch in any hotfixes.
• Check for connectivity problems
• Make sure that all 1695 servers are talking to each other properly, in their various capacities and amounts.

And it's not just one giant server farm, either. The North American servers are split up into four datacenters, one in Boston, one in Dallas, one in LA, and one in Seattle. You can imagine the worst tech support phonecall in the world every time that something goes wrong with two different datacenters.

This is a monumental task in and of itself. The fact that Blizzard is in fact capable of usually accomplishing all this maintenance in the allotted six-hour window should make you wonder if, in fact, they don't make regular sacrifices to Sargeras just to keep the game rolling.

In truth, we're lowballing the actual number of computers that Blizzard runs serverside. According to a graphic generated by Pixlmonster.com Blizzard actually runs about 20,000 computer serverside, worldwide. Since the percentage of Wow's subscribers in North America is roughtly 22% of their total customer base, it's probably safe to say that the number of servers is closer to 4400 computers. (Here's some additional numbers from the graphic: Worldwide, Blizzard uses about 1.3 petabytes of storage, and 75,000 CPU cores.) And bear in mind, some of these numbers were released during the Burning Crusade expansion, which means that more servers, more storage, and more CPU cores are being added frequently.

So the next time that someone complains about server maintenance..... sit 'em down and show 'em some math.