Rambling Dwarf

Conspiracy Theory Saturday

2012-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

Just because I had to think about it ...

I notice several things.

- Little kids are virulent. They meet and greet pestilence and disease whenever they go to Kindergarten (or the equivalent in other countries - is it Playschool in England?). They also tend to bring everything home, meaning that new parents usually have a LOT more sickdays two years after their first child than before (this statistical observation is based on a set of 2 (two) people in my department - me included).

- Kindergarden teachers (of the .. yeah, you get the idea) have somehow aquired immunity. I occasionally see them sniffle, which probably means that a world-threatening bug has been spotted near them.

- There are no oldish Kindergarden teachers. I've never seen one older than 40. They are all young. There are very old former Kindergarden teachers, though.

So .. what happens to Kindergarden teachers when they reach 40 years of age. Why do they only re-appear in the public eye once they are older than.. say.. 75?

My theory is this: They all get recruited by gouvernmental bio-weapons research divisions. That way their natural immunity to everything is put to good use. After 30 years of work, they are paid off, they are made to sign a non-disclosure agreement and they are off to a life in the wild.

I worry now ...

The Silmarillion Chapter 3

2011-11-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

If you are not sure what this is all about, reference to this post, please, which hopefully explains why the following sounds familiar.

The third chapter is a rather lengthy one. Which is interesting (pronounced in a very GladOS way), because I'm going to shorten it considerably. It has a lot of elvish history ... which seems rather pointless to me at this time.

Anyway, the gods lived happily in their newly built god-city on the edge of the world (not literally, it's a round world, but on the edge of the part that matters). In the north, Melkor built his army inside an underground fortress (made from creepy black stone, with creepy designs on the corridor walls, I am sure). And because the humans and elves were not really running around yet, and the dwarves were told to go back to sleep, and Melkor had a lot of imagination, he invented lots of monsters and sent them out to play in the forest.

A monster playground, that forest was. Complete with swings and see-saws and everything.

And he also invented his most fearsome monster of them all. The balrogs. Now those are like a being made from shadow, with a heart of fire and a whip made of flame. Very scary. And dangerous. And really really big, too.

He also built a second fortress (possibly underground, it's not really stated) and gave it to one of his commanders. I am loath to use names - as you may have noticed - but this is one that'll actually be around for a while. The commander of Angband fortress was called Sauron.

The gods decided to not actually decide anything and instead went on watching what was going on and sitting in their city. There were different voices among them, ranging from "Oh no, we'll wait and see" (Lady of Starlight) to "Lets hit him in the face - repeatedly - hard!" (Lord Fisticuffs, obviously). In the end they decided that it would only be fair towards the elves and humans if they didn't have to enter into a world full of monsters.

So they made some new stars [*] (Lady of Starlight) and put them where the elves could use them to navigate and actually see something (remember: sun and moon have not been made yet - although this technically is only explained later) and then went to war with Melkor.

The elves woke up and found a ginormous war raging in the north, except that they had just been born and had no idea what a war was. They just saw lightning and earthquakes and decided not to go there on their first holidays.

After the war was over (and Melkor bound in chains for three ages [which is a long time, seeing as the age of the elves counts as one and the humans as another and they are not gone yet in the later stories]) the gods wanted to bring the elves to safety. So they invited them to their city.

But the elves mostly wanted to run away from the gods, not knowing them from monsters (which doesn't say too much about the beauty of the gods messengers, really). In the end, the gods only managed to talk the three elvish kings into visiting and when those came back to their people, they said "Ah yup. It's nice there. We should all go".

Most of the elves actually went to see the gods. They are given about a zillion names in the Silmarillion, but in the end they all leave Middle Earth and go sit in the city of the gods. Except for a few. Some get captured by Melkor (probably before he is chained for three ages, to be fair) and turned into orcs. Some run off into the forest and become masters of healing herbs (and possibly smokable herbs, too). Some live near the water, because they want to play, not sit nicely at the table with the gods at a formal dinner (seriously. I'm not making this up!).

[*] Just so you can appreciate what I'm skipping here, let me quote one of the star-naming sentences:
"She took the silver dews from the vats of Telperion, and therewith she made new stars and brighter against the coming of the Firstborn; wherefor she whose name out of the deeps of time and the labours of Eä was Tintalle, the Kindler, was called after by the Elves Elentári, Queen of the Stars. Carnil and Luinil, Nénar and Lumbar, Alcarinque and Elemmíre she wrought in that time, and many other of the ancient stars she gathered together and set as signs in the heavens of Arda: Wilwarin, Telumendil, Soronúme, and Anarríma; and Menelmacar with his shining belt, that forbodes the Last Battle that shall be at the end of days."

Taken from: J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994, p. 55f.

The Silmarillion Chapter 2

2011-11-20T04:09:00.000-08:00

If you are not sure what this is all about, reference to this post, please, which hopefully explains why the following sounds familiar.

Now you might remember that so far we always waited for humans and elves to appear. Those were the two races created by the One, and the elves were supposed to be immortal and "first-born", the humans were supposed to be around.

The god of dirt - living under the earth - didn't get much involved in fighting and thus had extra time. He got bored waiting for the others to finish their playing and secretly made a new race. Molded seven dwarves from stone, gave them life and beards and bad social skills - the whole package. Of course the One, being the One and all, noticed and asked what that was all about. The two of them eventually agreed to leave the dwarves alive (and not smite them for being made without request or permission) - but they had to go back to sleep, so the elves could still claim to be the firstborn.

I'm not making this up, you know ... the dwarves were there first!

All those stories about humans and elves and dwarves running around got the goddess of fields and farming a little bit down. She didn't like all her pretty creatures and plants to be under the thumb of those two-legged freaks. So she ran off crying to the One and he granted her the power to make one of her creations able to fend for themselves. And then another one, because the god of air was also a bit grumpy. Both the eagles and the trees were given the power to talk. Limited time offer, though - only good while the firstborn (the elves, he means, even though technically ... ah you know) were in power and the secondborn (that's the humans, I think, although with all of his going back on birth-orders it does get a bit confusing) were young. Like babies. Although he doesn't mean like babies, but while they have only recently moved in.

And the chapter concludes with fruity goddess saying "Mwahahahahahaha... now the humans and elves and dwarves can't go into the forest to annoy my precious trees! Because there are other trees that walk and talk and will pounce on them if they dare! Muhahaha!" and her husband smithy-god going: "Oh ... but they'll still need wood" and crafting a few axes.

The Silmarillion Chapter 1

2011-11-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

If you are not sure what this is all about, reference to this post, please, which hopefully explains why the following sounds familiar.

Now that all the preliminaries are out of the way, it's time to start with the real story. The history of the world! (you should imagine trumpets playing here and a loud cheer, because this was an important line).

It (that's the history) starts with the first sand-pit fight. Melkor was stomping around on everyones sand-castles and they were all just about to cry and give up, because he was really mean and strong and they couldn't quite win. On that day, though, the fisticuffs god had his first day in kindergarten (I mean.. on Earth) and he decided that he had to help the others, and he scared Melkor away.

So Melkor really really didn't like fisticuffs god after that any more.

The gods and goddesses started building a proper world in their sand-pit when Melkor was gone. They made stars and mountains and rivers and trees and animals and all sorts. And when they had enough of all the building, they went for lunch. Probably all hungry. Fisticuffs god was a little tired from all the excitement and actually fell asleep on a bench nearby.

Now Melkor thought this would be a good time to get his revenge (or rewenge when I'm reading it with a german accent)! So he snuck into the playground and dug a fort under one of the stars. When everyone suddenly noticed that he was back again, he jumped on the picknick table and started kicking stuff over. When the other gods noticed and chased him off again, he hid in his little fort under the star and kicked over two stars, which fell on the earth and caused volcanoes to erupt where they struck. Everything was falling apart and all the gods were busy saving the day, so they didn't have enough time and energy left to assault Melkors fort.

They also didn't want to dig a secret tunnel to Melkors fort, because the elves and humans were still asleep under the sand of their sand-pit. They didn't know where, so they had to be extra careful where they used their shovels.

Because they couldn't dig and couldn't get rid of Melkor, the other gods decided to be the wise ones who'd stop fighting first. They walked away (probably looking regal, not like they were running scared) and built a new city (on a mountain). They put all the things they had saved into there. All sorts of cool toys and all the starlight they could find. Magical!

The goddess of gardening grew two trees in their new city. The trees had flowers and leaves at different times and the gods used them like a clock. Much like the two arms on a watch, really, just with more magic and less engineering.

Now it was almost time for the humans and elves to wake up. The One had given them some powers, so they would have fun when they woke up. The elves were supposed to be beautiful and enjoy beautiful things: they liked to dance and draw and make things from Play-Doh. The humans were a little bit different: they had fantasy and could think about things they had never seen before - which made them much better story tellers and movie directors.

He also made the elves immortal (which means they don't die from old age, they can only manage to get themselves killed in silly accidents) and the humans could die. Which seems slightly unfair, really, but the One probably had a plan. Oh ... to further confuse everyone, he said the humans would be important in the second part of his song - which even though the gods already played it hasn't happened yet.

Yep. That doesn't make much sense. It's a bit like saying "I made a movie and although it's already finished, you haven't seen it yet. It'll be on _after_ the show that's currently on, so you have to wait a bit. And the humans will be important in it!"

Valaquenta

2011-11-18T06:13:00.000-08:00

If you are not sure what this is all about, reference to this post, please, which hopefully explains why the following sounds familiar.

Remember the little gods that had walked around on Earth when they had their big sand-pit fight with Melkor? Well, turns out there was 7 boys and 7 girls among them. They had names, too, but we'll only use those when we really really need to, because Tolkien used weird spelling and made them particularily hard to pronounce if you're not an elf. And I'm not. Honest!

There is a long long chapter here that introduces the gods. To make it quick: The god of winds lives with the goddess of the stars. She's a real pretty goddess. The god of the water lives along. He doesn't like walking around on land (probably because he's a squid-thing), but he likes humans and elves and occasionally sings to them while pretending to be a waterfall. Most humans and elves are scared of him, though. The god of dirt is married to the goddess of farming. They are both powerful and good looking. Probably tanned, too, from all the working outside.

There are a few more non-fun ones, like the god of dead things and ghosties and the goddess of time (and probably watches, time-keeping and alarms in the morning). One of the cool ones is listed near the end. He's the god of fighting in a fair fight with his bare hands and of sports and running and swimming and blonde hair (which is a bit long, so we'll call him the god of fisticuffs instead). He is apparently not very good at giving good advice. I have to wonder if he got bashed on the head a lot. I mean.. he's one of those guys who likes to fight with gods.

There's also a god of hunting, who is married to the goddess of spring. While one would assume she's the prettiest (you know: spring, short dresses, flowers and so on) she's actually not as cute as the goddess of the stars. Her hubby apparently is a bit of a hot-head - and I'm not sure that's because he didn't get the best looking wife. He likes to shoot things with a bow.

Remember Melkor? He was the bad guy, stomping around on the sandcastles of the other gods when he was in a bit of a huff. Now apparently the elves bear are a bit of a grudge, so they don't actually call him by his real name. They instead call him Morgoth. Which is still the only name with M, so they didn't have to change their secret code: "M is coming - hide the children". As elvish runes are a bit of a pain (and they didn't have crayons and had to do all their writing by pouring molten metal on stone slabs in the beginning), this may have been quite a wise move of the elfish ones.

Ainulindale (or: the Beginning)

2011-11-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

If you are not sure what this is all about, reference to this post, please, which hopefully explains why the following sounds familiar.

In the beginning, the One created little gods from his thoughts - probably because he was lonely, or possibly because he had a cunning plan. Because they were little gods they already knew quite a lot, so the first thing he had to properly teach them was how to make music.

And he taught them a song and all the little gods sat together and made music and the One leaned back and enjoyed the show. One of the little ones, a guy called Melkor, wanted to show off and started playing a solo. Some of the other little gods got confused and didn't quite stay in tune, some others didn't like it and stuck to the original song. The One laughed and made them start a new song and again Melkor went to show off. And this repeated for a bit with the One inventing new songs and Melkor going on to show off.

After a while, the One had had enough and told everyone to stop. He showed them that their music had created a whole planet to live on - with elves and humans and all sorts of things on it. Some of the little gods wanted to create their own things, but they all found that Melkor had somehow fiddled with their part of the song (one of them singing of water, the next of air and so on) and made it more scary than they thought it should be.

The One started the world and some of the little gods went down onto it. They found it was not as beautiful as it had been described - they sort of fell for the IKEA model of a world. It still needed assembly.

Even though it was still a lot of work, Melkor (like a member of management) wanted the world for himself. And he said "I did something to create this, I wanna keep it!". The other little gods said "No way! We sung as well, we'll share it!" and Melkor stalked off into the void of space and sulked.

As soon as he was gone, the others decided to start working properly. They started building all sorts of things, like mountains and lakes and rivers and grass (because they were gods, obviously, not just working people). Melkor got a bit fed up when he saw them having fun and returned from his sulking spot to stomp on everything they had built. A bit like a naughty kid in the sandpit when everyone else is building sand-castles.

So they had a big fight scene, but because there was no elves or humans around yet, no one noticed.

The Silmarillion for four year olds

2011-11-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

So our little one is very interested nowadays in Lord of the Rings online. He loves the map and that he can tell where the little arrow is pointing - and that there is water where he sees blue. He also has a character, that is progressing very very ... very ... slowly. This might be due to his total disregard for safety ("Ooh.. a cliff.. can I jump off it?") or his (ir-)rational fear of caves ("I don't like it - there's no sun in here - I'll go back to the river").

Of course we considered reading him the proper story, so he could appreciate it. And then we considered that maybe the Hobbit (being a childrens book and all) might be more appropriate. However, I argued (successfully) that things need to be read in proper chronological order to make sense, so we'll have to start with the Silmarillion.

It's been a while since I read it. Quite a long while, in fact. The main facts I remember were sentences that rambled on for several page - some of them spanning more than one page solely for the introduction of a characters name. You know... suchandsuch, who was known as slightlydifferent in the region of over there, who was widely considered wise in the valleys of overyonder where he was called this.

And ... erm... if it's not too much of a spoiler... when I opened the book, the first sentence I read was "There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the off-spring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made." [1]

And somehow, that does not seem appropriate for a four year old. I want him to listen to a whole chapter before falling asleep - not get annoyed and bounce around the bed after 30 seconds. So .. in the following chapters, I'll summarize the Silmarillion (until I loose interest, realistically speaking). For a four year old. Who loves monsters, and sharks, and dinosaurs, and who needs to grow up and beat up a caveclaw, so we can level in the Shire!

[1] Taken from: J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994, p. 15

Prediction Sunday!

2011-10-22T04:09:00.000-07:00

In the tradition of "Superhero Sunday!" (tm)(r) - a tradition formed by me, last week, of watching superhero movies on sunday afternoon - I present my prediction sunday!

And, because it's a prediction, I'll already do it on Saturday! (tm)(r) - that's how good I am these days.

Now you'll probably have heard by now that another WoW expansion is on the market soon. New races, new level cap, new class, all new stuff. The official trailer video (where the above picture is taken from) can be found here.

And even though I am no longer quite as excited about new expansions as I used to be, I'm not completely bitter about it either. This actually looks quite fun. Punching and kicking in best Kung-Fu Panda style? Sure!

It's not the first time a running MMO has run out of classical medieval content and chosen to incorporate some eastern elements, after all.

Ultima Online did it first (my count - I might be wrong) with The Samurai Empire in 2004.

Age of Conan did it with Rise of the Godslayer in 2010.

So now WoW gets some oriental theme? Fine with me.

Back to predictions, though!

Firstly, I predict cunningly that the new monk healing, tanking and DPSing will be very very strong compared to _all_ other classes. Overpowered, some would say. It's a requirement of the system, because the new class will need fans that go raiding with their little bouncing buddies. To get into raids, they'll need to perform well even though the theorycrafting is new and not as developed as it is for the other classes (even with talent revamps). They will steadily get nerfed in the content patches that follow (5.1 to 5.3), until they perform about equally to the other classes near the end of the expansion.

Source: Deathknights. Exactly the same mechanics. Buffed to high heaven to introduce them, then steadily nerfed until only those who liked them remained with the class. Oh yes, and Blizzard said they wouldn't do it again. I don't believe it.

Secondly, I predict that the Pet Combat will be the new archaeology. Fun for a while at the beginning, something to do while bimbling about, only enjoyed by a small minority of players in the long run. Like fishing. And archaeology (oh wait - we already had that).

Thirdly, I predict that the new expansion will once again overhaul combat completely for almost all classes. This will make the game in general more streamlined and better to play (as it has for each and every single expansion) - but some old die-hards will be resistant to change and will grumble and quit. This won't matter, really, because it'll cause more people to play for longer.

Fourthly (does that word exist?), I predict that raiding will change in difficulty again. Blizzard seems to be interested in making more different difficulty levels available (see: Challenge Mode Dungeons). Entry level raiding will be easier, there will be two seperate harder modes available (possibly three, if we count the LFR difficulty as 1, grouped raiding as 2, hard mode as 3 and challenge mode as 4).

There.. predictions done. I bet they are better than the End of the World predictions.

Glitch: A game where pushing drugs seems to be ideal!

2011-10-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

Tobold posted a while ago about Glitch. And because my wife played it and said it was cute, and I had nothing better to do - I gave it a go.

And Glitch is rather cute. You can do all sorts of vanity things with your avatar (like buy clothes and eyebrows and noses - much like Hollywood, really). You can also pursue all sorts of skills and careers.

I spent my first few skill points in Animal Husbandry (for reasons unknown) - which allowed me to pet pigs more efficiently and sing to butterflies (no matter how stupid this sounds at the moment - give it a go. It's actually quite cool). Eventually I figured out how to travel, found my first mines and have been going a more "high tech" career path since.

Miner, Tinker, Engineer, Alchemist and Chemist.

And - much like in real life or the movies - I eventually found out that there are things to make that are possibly less than ideal for your own health. In this case: No-No Powder.

It said not to do it on the pack. It said it was a bad idea. So - for science and against the protests of my wife - I obviously had to take a dose.

Now No-No Powder is actually quite powerful. As long as you are on your No-No-High, you'll not loose mood or energy. You can mine a thousand mines, smelt a thousand ores, repair all your tools and fry a sammich to boot!

Obviously ... there is a drawback. Once you crash, the game gives you limited time to aquire a second (or third or ... a new!) dose of No-No or you will die. Let me bold that for emphasis: You Will DIE!

And this is where the problem begins, because see... there is also an auction house. And there is a certain quest:

So let me get this right. I am supposed to give something - ANYTHING! - to a new player between the levels of 3 and 5. I will actually get rewarded for doing so. And they all have a thousand currants to start with.

So ... what exactly is going to stop me from giving them a satchet of drugs and posting more on the auction house. Cheap. They will eventually get the message that they have mere seconds to live...

Issy does not condone this course of action (approximately 18 seconds in). I don't agree: As they said in McHale's Navy (Paradise Hotel): We'll be rich, we'll be famous.

...

We'll be arrested. Ooops.

What about raiding is hard?

2011-09-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

It's a weekend, and I finally had time to catch up on some of the blogs I read. One of the main topics at the moment seems to be raiding difficulty in WoW (again).

Tobold and Gevlon have formed an unlikely alliance and moan about the current gameplay. Now me, being old and wise (yeah well .. and humble, too), I would like to point out that there always always always were problems with raiding. It's just that apparently people remember the highlights more? Odd, I always thought it was the downsides that were more memorable. Maybe I'm a realist, though.

Anyway. Back to the bad old times. Some of the information I'll present will be plain wrong (because I wasn't there and have to rely on the interwebz for information), but hey ... you might not notice.

Vanilla WoW:

Raiding was done by 40 people. At the same time. Druids, Paladins and Priests healed the tank in the same cloth gear. The tank was a warrior. Doing a healing rotation, so when three ran out of mana, the next three stepped up and took over. The others moved back and sat down to drink. DPS classes didn't get healed, but then again - you could drink more than one potion per fight, so it was just a matter of money. Using class abilities was important, but there were only about half as many as there are today.

The Burning Crusade:

Raiding got better (for me, at least) with the reduction down to 10 (or 25 people). Content was either/or, though, so small guilds only saw some. Fights that were based on stacking one type of class were common (yep, we're going to sunwell now. We want three rogues with both Warglaives and twelvety shamans), as were fights that had nothing whatsoever to do with skill and depended on luck. Can't remember that? Were did the infernals fall during the prince fight in Kara? You know.. the instance everyone loved - this was a fight that actually brought fourth rampant "cheating": 'Let's all stand on the broken pillar next to the door, except for the tank, who wedges into the little crack on the right'.

Wrath of the Lich King:

I raided most in this area, so I probably noticed most of the bad things here. Initially we had complaints about just reusing old fights and adding two one single-boss raids. Then there was Ulduar (and I can't remember any complaints - this was just ace). Then there was the "no trash" room. Then there was ICC, with the stacking buff (added random link with complaint. There were plenty).

Raiding was allegedly too easy. Or too hard (especially the heroic modes). I'm personally with the "too hard" group. But maybe I play too many single player games. I want a smooth progression in my heroic difficulty, not "doable" on Marrow-thingy, then "un-frickin'-believable" on Lady Deathwhisper, then "we need one more Kingslayer to do heroic loot-ship", then "ouch ouch ouch" on 'Jaina is such a wuss for crying like a girly-girl'.

Cataclysm:

And now we're in the stage where player health and healing numbers have grown to a state where normal damage will not kill people any more. So game design had to change to include more "instant death" types of fights. Which are, certainly, based on knowing what'll happen.

I'm not entirely happy about it. Some of them also use mechanics that I cannot track to improve my performance (like Sound on Atramedes). However for the casual blokes like me, there are now nerfs. Last week I've seen Nefarian for the first time. In three attempts we had him at a stage that I'd call "stable" - we got into phase three consistently and it was an overall enjoyable learning experience. One or two more tried and we'd have had him.

Now I'll compare those to 93 attempts on the first Lich King (normal) kill and I'd say "thank you". For someone who only raids very occasionally now, this is perfect. I'm lookiug forward to actually seeing some of firelands. Even if I have to learn not to stand in the bad.

Which challenges my muscle memory.

And is not so different from Baron Geddon in the original Vanilla WoW.

Stop complaining. :p

I blame Syl - Nostalgia strikes!

2011-09-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

Right. This is all totally Syl's fault. She started it. She dug out ancient games, from the days when programming was limited to 612k of memory (well.. almost at least. Age of Conan is a tad more advanced, I think).

So ... I sort of caved and downloaded my very first MMO again. I thought I'd just play the two week free trial (linked here for your convenience). It turns out I was having so much fun in the trial that I reactivated my old account.

A really old account, apparently. If we believe the account management, it was created in 1998 (almost a year after UO started - but hey.. it was incredibly expensive in Germany back then. Mostly due to the phone bills. We used 56k modems back then.. and there was no cheap "flatrate" for phones back then).

Quite a few things changed. There have been several expansions that I missed - new skills were introduced (Ninjitsu and Bushido, Chivalry and Necromancy, Focus (mana regeneration for warriors), Imbuing (sort of like reforging) and possibly more), new champions added, new monsters, new lands, new housing styles. Oh yes.. and players can now choose to be one of three races: Humans (old), Elves (new and strange - my Ultima never had elves) and Gargoyles (very new yet a lot more sensible in an Ultima context).

Skill gain is different these days. Gone are the days of the bone knight wall - as I painfully found out when I recalled there. All alone in the middle of a dungeon is not good - especially when I can hardly remember what which spell does and how to run.

Dying is still the same, though. You loose pretty much everything. When you are ressurected (and none of this fancy "teleport you to the nearest healer" stuff - you run as a ghost until you find a shrine or a wandering healer) you have about 3 health and stand there in your white ghost robe. Surprisingly, the robe does not offer protection (or privacy, really, but that is another problem entirely). There are now "blessed" items that stay with you - and you can insure things - if you remember.

Anyway.. skill gain: Some things are still best done in a boat in 8x8 tiles large resource squares. Some are best done fighting something immortal (like a friend on the "you cannot attack friends" side).

Time for exhibit a, I suppose. Me, sparring with Jessica. Jessica is not actually a player (it's an old game - so far I have met four other players), but a little bunny-rabbit I managed to buy cheaply at the stable masters.

This is what the screen actually looks like. The large screen, that is. The game area is available in two sizes: 640x480 pixels and 800x600 pixels (displayed here). On my 1920x1440 pixel screen thats... not large. Leaves room for additional information, though.

Oh yes... the armour? Weeeeell... it's like this. There are matching sets around. Armour can also be dyed to actually look nice. This is more like a clown suit - admitted - but it has high mana regeneration. And if that means I need to wear an orc's chopped-off face - so be it!

But not all my time is spent leveling a new character. While good fun, it seems I was not very careful when I last logged off (back in 2004 or so). I left all my money in my house - and my house has since collapsed, been paved over and replaced.

So, the other half of my game time is spent with good, old-fashioned farming. With a dragon. On my side, that is.

The dead white wyrms have treasure. The live brown dragon and black-horse-of-firebreathing-and-spellcasting are my good buddies. They just love to pounce on anything that is held in place - inactive and unable to defend itself for 9 seconds - by my beautiful music *nodnod*.

I like fair fights... sometimes. Just not when I'm trying to earn money.

Good old times ...

Naming is seriouz business!

2011-09-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm annoyed. I should probably have expected something like this, but I'm still annoyed.

Today, while playing (and slaying level 10 brigands) my name suddenly changed. Without me paying for a name-change, obviously, and without any notification. The lovely Virginity is no more .. she is now called something else (something I cannot pronounce, that is composed of around 231 syllables and will be pure hell to invite to a kinship or fellowship).

Now, the rules in Lord of the Rings don't allow very much. In fact, it's so restrictive, that I just have to link the rules here.

Let me sum it up as well, because I can:

Proper names and places or close facsimiles thereof, from the story characters or non-player characters (NPCs) introduced in the fiction of Lord of the Rings Online.
Fantasy or non-fantasy names from popular culture or media.
Sexually explicit, defamatory, obscene, racially or ethnically offensive names or slang.
Names of historical or religious significance.
Trademarked names of products, goods, materials or services.
Common names, slang or references to drug related substances, culture or paraphernalia.
Names containing ranks, titles or denotation of power.
Names causing harm, mockery or imitation of Lord of the Rings Online players or NPCs, in addition to Turbine, Inc. employees, past or present.
Misspelled variations or homonyms of any of the above rules

The ones marked in red are listed as having a "zero tolerance" policy attached to them. Characters in violation of those will not only be renamed, they will also be banned for three days. Now interestingly enough - I wasn't.

This leaves a few open questions:

1) I'm not allowed to call a character Fred or Andrew. That's what a common name is, isn't it?

2) Which of the rules specifically affected Virginity?

3) Who THE FUCK (double emphasis there) reported the name? Really? Is someone that petty?

Gah. Way to ruin my gaming night. I'll probably reroll the hunter and name her something less ... I don't know... common?

Break from 3 to 9, back after Dinner?

2011-09-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

That's what it looks like on the blog anyway. I would like those work hours, I have to admit. Bit of a break in the afternoon, going for a cup of coffee, some cake, a little rest in the garden, some starter with a dry sherry, a soup, maybe, now that it's getting colder outside, a sorbet - vodka sorbet, server in a half coconut for instance - a main course with a nice glass of red wine, a bit of fruit salad with a generous helping of brown sugar and rum. And then back to work. Yeah... I'm sure reports would look better in the evening.

Erm.

Anyway. WoW got boring. I stopped. I tried quite a few different games. New on the list were single player games that were woefully neglected during my raiding days. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 were good. At the time of play I would have called them great, but they do suffer from "Bioware required party interaction syndrome" (that's a true medical term. Look it up!). You need to talk to your party at every single rest period to get to all the subplots. If you are a completionist, you also need to have sex with at least one of them (although I have to admit: Bioware is flexible and usually allows more creative approaches there).

Personally? Those are work mates. They are here to help me save the universe. Some of them are members of my military unit. Some of them are aliens with thought processes completely unlike my own (well - not very, but they might as well be). If they have a problem: Come to me. My door is always open! Honestly. Get off your ass, walk up to your commanding officer and say "Shepard? There is a research lab where I was tortured. I have just found the location in the ships computer. When we next pass by - could we have a look inside? The doctor said it would be good for me."

Was that hard? Seriously? But nooooo... instead we hide in the darkest, dingiest corner we could find on the whole ship and won't even mention any sort of personal problems until I tried to talk to you (that's not you, the reader, that is you, the NPC) at least three times. And apparently took you on 12 missions, at least 8 of which needed to be story relevant. No wonder I never got you into bed! (Yes, I am still bitter that I didn't get Miranda to shag Jack and Shepard at the same time.)

This probably deserved a followup on how scared I am about Star Wars: The Old Republic to do the same - but it's going to be an online game, so maybe there will be a "chatting up before sex: required 255 times" nerf in patch 1.7.2d.

Wow that was rambely... the other single player game was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. Now this game is just what I occasionally need. It's for those times when I took my level 85 warrior to Westfall to do the old quests. Those times when "kill an enemy with one blow" is what you need. Except ... in this case ... it's even better. The protagonist of the story is so ridiculously overpowered that normal NPCs are proper Mooks. Killing them is not only easy - it's so easy the character is allowed to get creative now and then: don't want to chop them in half with a lightsaber? No worries.. we have something for you.

How about:

1) Fry them with lightning (relatively tame, I agree) or choke them to death (not much better, but hey, it's a different button on the mouse).
2) Grab them by the throat (err.. not in person) and fling them over the side of a really really high up ledge and watch them fall to their deaths? (Getting better, I thought).
3) Pick up something large and heavy (like a statue), lift it off the ground, fire a lightning bolt at it to "charge" it, then throw it at the person to make the lightning ground through them just as they are squashed by a metric ton of rock?
4) Lift someone up, dangle them around and then throw a lightsaber through their chest? Good thing you got two, so you can still defend .. I think.

and last, but certainly not least:

5) Grab an approaching TIE fighter in midair, crush it into a sphere of twisted metal and then throw the wreckage (leaking toxic fuel, I'm sure) into someone.

Yay!

It didn't even bother me any more that the protagonist rammed his spaceship into another one, jumped through the roof into space, dropped towards the planet at reentry speeds (with no spacesuit? who cares, we have the force!) while shoving other broken ships out of the way, turning into a bizarro human-reentry-fireball-meteority to land in the courtyard of the enemy station. On one knee (as is required in those situations), leaving a crater in the concrete. Unharmed, obviously, I mean .. hello?

Oh yes. Sometimes that's just what I need. And I don't care that it sounds silly. It has me cackling like a maniac.

On the multiplayer front there were a few old favourites. DDO (now free to play) and LotRO (also free to play). Both of them were not really free. I did spend quite a bit of money in the DDO shop, using it to unlock new race and class options, buying "veteran character" status (all characters start at 4/20 instead of 1/20) and buying a permanent stat increase tome for my main. All good choices that actually make play nicer. They fall completely out of the "purely cosmetic" range - and smack dab into the middle of "you buy this to make your character more powerful" range. And it's good. Those options actually are the only ones I want to spend money on in DDO - purely cosmetic would not work there.

In LotRO the situation is slightly different. I (or rather we - Issy is the same) bought a lifetime membership a while ago. When we come back it's usually with a sense of "this is something we don't take seriously - we can just bimble about". I think my highest character to date is level 35 and I've been to a grand total of one dungeon (whatever they are called there). With the lifetime account come points. Lots of points. So many, in fact, that my little hobbit warden got a pony with a black/red shoulderpatch. Which is apparently rare (and possibly slightly faster than another horse).

Would I spend several tens of euros on something like that? Well no. Sorry. The item shop would sort of fail there. However, as the points are free, I don't mind. And I really really want to wait until the day before LotRO shuts down (hopefully late.. in 20 years would be nice) and then log in one last time, go to the item shop and buy "One of each, please - on second thought - make it two".

And then there was Rift. As Tobold was just asking about a verdict, I might as well post it here. It was quite fun. It suffered a bit from "Early Age of Conan" syndrome, though. The beginning areas were well done and well designed, end-game was possibly not expansive enough. There were not many options at the very start, with more being patched in rapidly though. For me, it was just more of the same. Progression and gameplay were the same as in World of Warcraft (and I really really do not care that there were lots of soultrees and that it all was named differently). Quests consisted of "go there, kill 10 of x, come back". I'm not complaining - because it was new and shiny it was a great change from WoW. Dwarf females were incredibly cute (much better even than pink ponytailed gnomes), but in the end it came down to "press button 1, press button 2 after event x, hit button 3 to finish".

Again, I'm not trying to pull down Rift because of the programming. This is basically the same as in World of Warcraft. I did come back there, however, as many of our friends are still playing. Left the old (raiding) guild and rejoined my original place. Hey.. I even got my name back.

Koch (Aszune) now is sort of active again - except that I don't want to be stressed any more. Raiding? Nah .. thanks. Maybe if someone desperately needs a spotfiller (because the fights were fun, usually), but I'm also wasting time on Archaeology, the auction house (sometimes), achievements (quite a bit) and running alts through content. Hey.. I even got a warlock to 85 - and found out that I am apparently incapable of playing casters. My damage sucketh.

The gameplay in WoW is smoother though. There are not "too many" abilities (as in Rift - try paladin tanking without macroes, please: You have .. what... four reactive abilities in addition to your four attack and 6 protective options? My fingers are not long enough for that. Or rogue tanking: Why do I need 6 different teleports instead of one with a cooldown of 1/6th of the time?), there are more parallel leveling paths (one gets really really painful after the third alt in relatively short time) and the combat "feels" smoother. Maybe that's because of the aforementioned "I need 139741 buttons" problem, but the quality of WoW only shows when you compare it to some of the other options.

Actually that makes a good finish: Go and try something else if you can't appreciate the quality. And hey.. if you find you like something else better: No reason to stick around except for your friends.

Are you not entertained?

2011-03-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

I can't help it. I need to rip open an old wound (in a painful manner, obviously). There have been a plethora of posts about the state of female armour. Like Spinks, who was unhappy. Or KiaSA who picked apart a post by the developers of Guildwars 2.

And yet...

and yet...

I still feel like it's too much serious thought wasted on the decorative aspect of a game.

WoW even has an achievement for those people.

Personally I am sticking with "I want to be entertained, not debate the realistic aspects". If this means skimpier armour on female characters - that's fine with me. I don't look at the male models anyway, if I'm fair.

It's good old-fashioned tradition as well... in more than one medium.

Let's have a look at images number one and two:

Seven of Nine. With a uniform made for... err .. practicality? By a collective of robots with no concept of male or female (err.. or Starfleet .. or something).

And then, of course, we have Storm. Her armour does more to enhance the shapely figure than provide protection - especially considering that it should be yellow spandex.

So what we basically have up here is Rift armour. It looks nice and sexy - and a tad impractical and "unrealistic" as far as proper armour goes.

Then again, we are willing to accept this flying magical spell about to impact a poor hapless goblin.

And this flying gate in the middle of the sky, spewing flaming death onto the ground below.

And we are complaining about the realism of the armour?

Now what is a girl supposed to think here?

2011-02-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around the countryside... and ended up watching this:

What is a girl supposed to think there?

I think Harrison actually nailed it there. Best not to tread there ... and then, this happened:

Those pygmies really like to party... Somehow I think this music (NSFW) is appropriate.

WoW Blogging Challenge: Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog

2011-02-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

Spite!

That's honestly all there was to it. I needed a place to rant, far away from the guild boards. You see.. back then I was in a great guild (and this is not meant sarcastically!). We had a wide variety of players, doing whatever they liked. Most had met up in real life as well. However, some of them were a little less deeply involved in researching their optimum dps rotations (or in other words: were driving me barmy with low dps).

Mostly my wife had to suffer through my shouting and screaming. Occasionally someone else would get a few annoyed whispers about certain mages (*waves to Lam*).

So... I started a blog. To write about stuff that annoyed me. None of this "I felt like I wanted to try writing" or "I saw this really cool blog and wanted to try and be like them". I mostly started because I didn't like people.

Legacy Crafted Belt warning!

2011-02-09T10:57:00.000-08:00

Patch 4.0.6 or some such. Lots of changes. One of the more interesting ones is that all Blacksmithing Crafted Epics lost +40 secondary stats. Instead they gained a socket and a +10 socket bonus. Overall most likely a stat gain (especially for jewelcrafters).

There was one nasty side effect, though. If you previously had a crafted belt and it had a belt buckle attached - the gem from the prismatic belt-buckle-socket moved into the newly created socket. And probably does not match colour.

You'll probably need to fixxit for extra power! Raar and all that!

20 Days of WoW: Day 1 - Introduce yourself

2011-02-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

Now we shall ignore - just for a moment - that I never managed to finish the last one. However, this time round, I'll only start about a week late. Might work in my favour.

Saga over at Spellbound started a new list of things. So I shall cheat on day 1, and we'll see how it goes from here.

My favourite introduction ever is this one:

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

Stolen from here.

And in the same vein of things...

Taken from here, this is also not me. It's also, apparently, not Paladin Schmaladin who was once famous for pretending to be that person.

In real life I probably weigh about twice that, am decidedly not a girl and married to this lovely person. I am currently guilded in Vengeance on Alonsus (EU) and we are recruiting for our raids. If you are not a druid and amazing, please join us. If you are a druid ... err ... I don't know. I think we have too many of those. Enough to fill a raid. With druids. Much like these people.

Sensible posting will commence soon - when I don't have to reveal too much information about myself.

20 Days of WoW - Day 17: What do you do when the server’s down?!

2011-01-26T12:17:00.000-08:00

Sleep, most likely.

Our server downs are on Wednesdays at 5 in the morning. I don't work the night-shift.

However, if - for some unfathomable reason - the servers were down during my intended playtime, I'd probably do something else. The likelyhood of finding me in a corner, shivering and shaking is slim (although there has been a flu going round lately).

Lord of the Rings, possibly. Or Raving Rabbids. Or even just read a book. I'm old fashioned like that.

Playing a Deadly Damage Dealer in Cataclysm

2011-01-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I am qualified to post about playing a DPS, but then again - that never stopped my opinion before, so why start now. I did notice a few interesting aspects about DPSing ... partly while playing one myself and partly while tanking heroics and raids.

I think Blizzard did a surprisingly good job of making the DPS job more challenging and more important. I'm also surprised at how well very different philosophies predicted this. Examples? Greedy Goblin stated in April 2010 that DPS would be the new critical role, Righteous Orbs (Chastity, in this case) predicted it to be the new "cool" role in July 2010.

And they were all right (especially those I didn't link - and I'm sure there are many more posts like this). Of course they were, because all bloggers are secretly part of an illuminated society and do know about everything in advance.

Back to the topic at hand, though...

There were a few subtle (and not so subtle) hints that DPS nowadays have to take a more active role in their own survival. The odds of getting killed outright have been reduced somewhat (in appropriate content), but at the same time you're not guaranteed healer attention any more. In the words of my wife: "If you draw aggro with your Bladestorm, you're on your own, buddy. I've no mana to waste on sponges like you!"

Do you know where all your heal buttons are? I still forget about them - healthstones, potions, victory rush procs, enraged regeneration, bandages ... are there more for warriors? Probably....

On the other hand are the DPS checks. There are quite a few in raiding content. We have so far run into two - one being Argaloth in Baradin Hold, the other being Maloriak in Blackwing Descent. One of them is a single target DPS check (70k damage required for the whole raid (10) over 5 minutes), the other an AoE damage check (kill 315k health abominations within 15 seconds - damage is doubled, though). And occasionally, my groups fail.

This is something that can partially be improved with gear, of course. More shiny stats will improve general damage output and survivability at the same time. But the general issue remains - DPS have to be good this expansion.

I like it.

This is not enough. The old "DPS really needs to be above tanks" is still true. Possibly even more so now than it was before. In hard content, the speed of the kill matters.

Immersion breaking by name and profession

2011-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

Just thought about something while popping out of a dwarven hut in the Twilight Hinterlands (or whatever they are called) - there are clearly not enough timed quests in the game any more.

In fact, are there any left?

See the problem was, my poor innocent questgiver said: "My daughter has been kidnapped by ogres - go and rescue her now!" and when I walked out of the hut I saw a flower. And then some ore. And another flower. And one thing lead to another and ... no, not that! I spent a while flying about, picking up whatever was not nailed down.

And then proceeded to rescue the bride to be. Daughter. Whatever.

There is just not enough pressure in game to do things in a timely manner sometimes. In fact.. nothing would have stopped me from wandering off to Uldum for a bit and solving the riddle of a pyramid.

Breaks immersion a bit.

On the other hand... maybe the name of my Deathknight was not ideally chosen either. It does completely ruin most NPC dialogue.

20 Days of WoW - Day 16: Favourite quest/quest chain?

2011-01-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

I was wondering what to put here. I was thinking about a lot of quests I had done, and especially about all the new ones in the 80 to 85 regions.

There were quite a few there that I liked - the wedding preparation and celebration was nice and different, I had to laugh at the Death Star reference in the King of the Mountain questline.

However, for a truly "favourite" quest or questline it would have to be something I'd like to do again. And even hacking the mainframe - and the followup - is not something I'm really looking forward to doing again.

Note: You are given the 'hacking' tool.

No, my favourite is an old world quest - newly designed with the Cataclysmic overhaul of the world. This one is available for Alliance in Northwatch hold (and there is a daily in Tol Barad). Blowing up boats just does not get old. I could do that all day!

Favourite quest: Run out the Guns!

20 Days of WoW - Day 15: Favourite Battleground and Why?

2011-01-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

Interesting question - and not one I can even evaluate properly at the moment, as I have not yet gotten around to doing Twin Peaks and the Battle for Gilneas.

I like the concept of Flagrunning more than Node Capture and Hold, so Warsong Gulch should be pretty high on the list. It is, however, a Battleground plagued by stupidity on my realms so far. I find it thoroughly enjoyable in the lower level brackets, and it declines steeply at maximum level.

I thought I'd like Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm - they looked like mostly symmetrical maps, they appeared to be sensibly complex, so you couldn't just be overrun by overwhelming force (I have bad flashbacks to Warsong Gulch in the Burning Crusade. Seeing a tauren warrior with the door riding up to the entrance, followed by a rogue with the twin blades of trade-chat-linkage, followed by 8 of their guildmates does not inspire confidence. However, I rarely have seen a victory in those games. I'm sure it's not the layout, I'm reasonably sure it's not me - but we loose an excessive amount of games there.

I don't like battlegrounds with vehicles. Fullstop. They are fiddly, stupid, encourage stupid behaviour and make it even less obvious what a good course of action is. They also occasionally make me sea-sick. So Wintergrasp, SotA and Isle of Conquest are right out.

I want some semblance of success in a battleground occasionally. After too many losses I just get frustrated and can't even treat it like a learning experience any more. Shouts like "let's loose fast" etc. don't help with the mood.

Possibly, just possibly, playing a protection warrior has something to do with the enjoyment, too. I have much more fun on my rogue or warlocks. But that is not part of this post, really.

So ... possibly unsurprisingly, my favourite battleground:

Alterac Valley.

There is a large PvE element in here, a tank is actually useful, the tactics need adjusting, but the area is large enough that adjusting mid-fight is not entirely futile. There are caves to explore, quests to complete and rams to tame.

They also have a trinket ... and back in the day, the battles in here used to take hours - possibly days. A strong defence on the bridge could lead to thousands of honourable kills. Good times.

20 Days of WoW - Day 14: Healer, tank or dps?

2011-01-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Hmm. This used to be easy, but it actually depends on the situation (and on the game). The quick and easy (and in most cases right) answer is "Tank".

However, there are a few conditions.

One: This only applies to World of Warcraft (and to a lesser extend Star Wars Galaxies). I tried tanking in Everquest 2, Asherons Call, Asherons Call 2, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragon Online. The only game I really "got" it was in WoW. Star Wars Galaxies is different, because Jedi was the only tank class and melee DPS class at the same time - and it was brought on late and rubbish as well.

Two: There are days when I enjoy something mindless. Now I do not want to look down on DPS, because performing at the top of the game is obviously easily as challenging as tanking. However, if you want to do okay, you can just play around with DPS and blow some crap up. It's fun, it's quick and for me it's a lot like a one-night stand. Nothing serious, but good fun now and then.

That said... I think I enjoy melee classes vastly over ranged. I appreciate the better view from the back, but I cannot really enjoy myself there.

Oh and healing? It terrifies me. I can't do it. I mean.. that's not entirely true. I can heal, as long as nothing goes wrong (or could in Nexus at level 72 - the last time I tried). As soon as the shitteth hath hitteth the fanneth, I flounder and fail. Not going to do that again.

Why Archaeology ROCKS!

2011-01-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

That is all. Nothing more to say. And I need to get back to "surveying" anyway.

20 Days of WoW - Day 13: Which faction are you “for”?

2011-01-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

Hmm. The obvious question here seems to be "Alliance" or "Horde", and I don't think I can answer that. Sure ... I play Alliance now. The whole war seems to be forced and unnatural, though, and I just don't get the justification of it all. Especially with larger threats looming everywhere.

The progressions changes from expansion to expansion as well - while Burning Crusade seemed to focus a bit on making Horde and Alliance cooperate, Wrath of the Lich King downplayed the whole thing a little - only dragging it out kicking and screaming when it was needed for the story. Now, with all the good deeds of Icecrown forgotten again by a dragon sitting on the clocktower, we have a hearty rivalry between Horde and Alliance again. Oh yes.

So yes, I can't decide. In fact, I don't want to decide. I think someone should brutally murder the leaders of the Alliance and Horde in their sleep and force the rest to work together in a ~~malevolent~~ benevolent dictatorship.

Someone who has a sense of priorities. Dragon first, then Barrens/Stranglethorn trade routes.

"That's the only way that we'll be able to beat the Lich King. Tirion has limits, the Horde and Alliance bicker amongst one another. The Ebon Blade has no such restraints."

I'll go with Darion - The Ebon Watcher and the Knights of the Ebon Blade.

Pet Tree Bug

2011-01-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

A-ha! I bet that title caught you by surprise! It'll be content - and it will be about hunters and their beloved animal companions tonight. I shall rival Pike and Big Red Kitty themselves!

Right. To business.

I do play not one, but two hunters. Leveling slowly. Sometimes. Some of them. Okay, I'll admit it, it was just an experiment. But I enjoy it muchly. Especially now that there are Worgen and I can have one and I could tame a fox and name it Samantha (and the pictures are pathetic. Here, have a better one (NSFW)).

Aaaanyway.

So I trundled about, with my fox and my pig, using one in instances (with cower turned on) and the other outside (with growl turned on) unless I forgot.

And then I got to level 42 and got the third call pet. So it was finally time to grab a Monkey! Because monkeys clearly rock. And apparently fling poo - but wether that is a bonus or a problem will be decided later.

And because I am a good hunter, I actually fed my pet and named it (*) and decided to spend its talent points.

And then I found this:

Yes, Monkey obviously rocks. Monkey can also Dash! A monkey on speed - oh yeah!

However, Monkey can not learn the subsequent ability of Mobility, because that apparently requires one point spent in Dive. Which is a bit of a problem, because my Monkey does not have bloody wings!

So obviously I did a GM ticket and got the interesting reply: "This is not a known problem. Don't worry about it. Do you want to bother us further or just delete this ticket? Hmm? HMM?" (Not a literal copy of the actual ticket text, but surprisingly close).

Which puzzled me a little bit, so I actually went on and pestered them further and got a much nicer reply.

So, err, this is in fact an issue. And several players reported it already (I don't feel quite so amazing at bug-spotting any more) - but he's passed it on to the people who fix bugs. Yay.

Just in case you are still wondering: Bat, Bird of Prey, Chimera, Dragonhawk, Nether Ray, Sporebat, and Windserpent are fine. It's only Monkey, Ravager, Serpent, Silithid, and Spider that are bugged. If you've got one of those, you'll either have to invest into stick on wings (NentirelySFW), or wait for a bugfix.

(*) which is a lie - I'll do this later, when I can think of a name. The fox (Samantha) and pig (Excaliboar) were easy. The monkey is hard (and I wonder how many google hits I'll get from that comment).

Update to 20 Days of WoW - Day 12

2011-01-05T10:51:00.000-08:00

Ha! So I did have an idea that Blizzard needs to implement. Or some addon author. Or something.

Have you ever been in this lovely position, per chance?

When you need roughly 140 volatile water to craft something and there are - yes - 140 of them on the auction house. In singles.

What I want is the ability to mark multiple purchase items in the auction house. Much the same as I would in my operating system. You know... Shift+Click or drag a box around them.

Something!

Anything!

P.S. And yes, I know I can buy one, set the price in Snatch to the same price I got the first one from, run a search and then click through them reasonably rapidly. It's still clumsy and horrible! I want a dragbox.

Warrior past 4.0.3a: Cataclysmic DPS - Fury or Arms?

2011-01-05T06:43:00.000-08:00

I tend to assume many warriors were wondering about which spec would be "better" for their style of play in Cataclysm. Fury or Arms is the first (major) question - the spec and specific glyphs then are the second.

For the history: I leveled using a dual spec of Protection and Fury. Well... just Fury, really, because Protection is nice, but during leveling I want to kill things fast. I started leveling on the 8th of December 2010 and there was not very much information available yet. While leveling I heard time and time again that the new Arms tree was fun and competitive DPS.

I did play my first few instances at maximum level as Fury - with a spec pretty much identical to this (First post, headed - surprisingly - Fury). And I have to say I was happy with my DPS. It was certainly comparable to what other specs put out, sometimes even slightly ahead. Fury also has the enormous advantage of having a rotation built around Bloodthirst - and thus a self-heal. This means as long as you only rarely take damage, you'll eventually be topped up again. Even if the healers have to conserve their mana and ignore DPS in no imminent danger of death.

Luckily, I began reading the arms dps thread on Elitist Jerks. Somewhere (post 99, basically) is a compilation of damage results for arms - with a link to a simulator.

Now, if you can get the simulator to import your profile from the armoury (and by default it's set to the US version - some fiddling required) will provide damage results for an imaginary boss fight of 5 minutes length. And more importantly - it works for a large variety of specs (and classes).

My first results (and that is not in the gear I wear now - at the time of "decision making") were quite surprising. Apparently Arms seriously outperformed Fury with my gear. The theoretical DPS jumped from approximately 8500dps to 10300dps (let's not discuss how theoretical dps coincides with my results).

And much like the Battlemaiden of this questline, arms has the advantage of bringing Charge, Rend, Sweeping Strikes and ~~Whirly Twirly~~ Bladestorm with the spec.

So .. to finish with the prattling .. according to my theorycrafting (well, someone elses - my use of the simulator) Arms currently outperforms Fury for DPS. This will likely change over time and with better gear, unless the specs are better balanced than they were in the past.

What spec to use, then?

My suggestion deviates slightly from Our Girl Friday and the Elitist Jerks suggestions. I'd go for something like this for instances and heroic instances. There are several options really. The improved damage for Slam (Improved Slam, Arms tier 4) is a bit pointless and you can relocate those to Second Wind, Blitz or even Improved Hamstring. The points in Rude Interruption (Fury, tier 2) could go into Executioner instead - but I found most bosses in heroics do not live long enough to get the speed bonus more than twice. Incite (Protection, tier 1) is also negotiable and could easily turn into Blood and Thunder if you wanted more AoE damage.

And the rotation?

Well, get as much rage as you can before the pull (Battleshout, Glyphed Bloodrage, beating up a lurking tempest) and wait for your tank to position the enemy where he wants to fight them. Charge and apply rend to your primary target. After that, hit your abilities in the priority order of:

Colossus Smash, Mortal Strike, Overpower.

Make sure Rend gets reapplied as soon as it drops off (try not to clip at - I still fail at this) and use any excess rage for Heroic Strikes or Cleaves.

The amount of damage (and threat) is quite impressive.

One additional note: Heroic Leap (while good fun) is not a good ability to initiate combat with. It generates no rage and will leave your dps falling behind at the beginning - which is not made up for by the paltry damage the landing does. It is, however, an amazing ability to get away from bad stuff. Especially as it's targetted (and allows you to get away from Asaads Supremacy of the Storm at the last second for instance). Just keep in mind it requires a global cooldown.

No more escort quests, says Spinks!

2011-01-04T04:02:00.000-08:00

A while ago Spinks posted that the questing certainly had changed in Cataclysm. Now I agree with most of that post, but the first point "No more annoying escort quests" is something I heartily disagree with.

Let's just say there are still a few escort quests in the game. Let me focus ~~my ire~~ on two examples:

Exhibit A: Beer Run!

The Alliance in Twilight Highlands will be doing this. A lot. It starts innocently enough, with making sure the beer for a wedding ceremony arrives safely at the festivities. I was a little surprised when I first got there to see so many people on the same quest, but ~~stupidly~~ thought nothing of it. As long as you got the two beer-keg buffs, you're fine. Just take them through a canyon.

The second image shows why this can turn into a major annoyance. Part 1: You're not able to do the quest as a group. Everyone has to escort their own beer. Part 2: The escort help you get (in the form of a Wildhammer lookout) has selective targetting. He'll fight most of the Dragonmaw he sees. Except sometimes that means the ones of the person in front of you - and sometimes he just completely ignores threats and trundles on. So do your beer carriers, by the way. And not neccesarily both of them. I had days when one barrel of beer with an escort dwarf reached the finish line, while the second barrel of beer with my lowly self was still held up in the middle of the canyon.

Annoyance factor? Quite high - but mostly due to the bugs in the quest design. And the fact that I need at least another 10 days of it before I'm exalted with the Griffon Riders.

Exhibit the B: Walk a Mile in their Shoes!

Another daily. Accessible from Tol Barad Peninsula (the harmless part - the one where the portal leads). You can get up to 6 daily quests there, randomly chosen from a relatively large selection. So far, I was lucky - and only got this one twice.

What to do? Glad you asked. See.. there is a gnome. He's imprisoned in a keep. A standard alliance keep - layout wise. So you ride up the entrance, kill the guards, walk down into the cellar from the courtyard and find the (open - but let's not go there) cell.

You talk to your gnome (and again - ever member of the party has to do this separately) and he's up for a quick prison break.

And then you walk up the stairs and end up in the courtyard. Did I mention that you just came through here, killing the guards? Yep? Okay. He then wonders which way to go... and instead of asking the one who came in (that would be me) or refering to the standard bloody layout of bloody alliance bloody keeps (which is the same since Borean Tundra. You know.. where you got your second Northrend quest!) he decides that he must lead the way - and that he knows best.

So you are forced to escort him into the left side wing (the one labeled "NOT HERE!"), then into the library, then halfway up the tower on the opposite side before he comes back to the EXACT SAME SPOT and tells you that NOW this looks familiar.

You then take him to a horse and he rides off into the sunset.

Annoyance factor? In-bloody-credibly high. I am tempted to skip this one in the future.

No more annoying escort quests? HA!

20 Days of WoW - Day 12: Suggestion for Blizzard to put in the game.

2010-12-31T07:36:00.000-08:00

Mhmm. Right. I'm not in development for a good reason. I pick ideas apart, not come up with new ones. This is not going to work very well.

However, in the spirit of ~~competition~~ .. err... this questionaire, I shall do my best to come up with an idea. It might not be original, but I promise that it came to me without help from outside. That I can remember anyway. So basically what I am trying to say is: If I stole this idea from you - I'm sorry. I read it probably a long time ago and it stuck. This should be considered praise, but in the situation of intellectual property theft you'll probably see it differently. Think of it as an inspiration particle gone wrong.

Right. Back to the topic at hand.

The only thing I can think of currently would be proper mounted combat using my own abilities. Sadly - this has already been implemented (edit) in Halls of Origination. I wanted to crawl over the side of something like the Flame Leviathan, using my considerable swords-skills to maim rust-monsters. I wanted to ride into battle on horseback and swing my sword on the side to crush the heads of my enemies.

Raaaar!

And such.

20 Days of WoW - Day 11: Favourite WoW holiday

2010-12-30T02:56:00.000-08:00

A quick one today, it seems. I just had to look through the whole list of holidays again (thanks to long flight times during archaeology that is not a problem ... really ... got all the time in the world ... anyone out there? ... anyone?) just to be sure I didn't miss anything.

So: favourite one is Midsummer.

And it's easy, too, because almost all the other ones manage to disqualify themselves by including a stupid achievement that is entirely based on luck and which has in no part any concern for dedication (or at least they did when I had to do them - Perma Peddle is apparently now buyable!).

A close runner-up is only Children's Week, because it teaches young children everything they need to know about World of Warcraft. Killing kings and misbehaving in battlegrounds for achievements is just perfect.

Anyway...

Why midsummer festival?

Because basically, what you get is a lot of people who want to set fire to something big. Like a pile of guns. For no particular reason.

And then, when the camping bikers (that is supposed to be the image of a big strong rough tough biker gang - closest I could find on google) are all sat around their campfire, toasting their (manly - jalapeno flavoured!) marshmellows, you basically walk up to them and piss on their fire.

Each and every one of them.

I approve.

20 Days of WoW - Day 10: If a level 3 called “yurmom” asks you for gold, you say/do?

2010-12-29T05:13:00.000-08:00

I used to be a nice person and just ignore them. I think I wasn't asked too often either - must have been the stained armour and all the dried blood in the beard. Nowadays, I get pestered more often - which might be due to the shiny new greens or something. I don't know.

(spiky man-hair added myself, to make it look more realistic *nodnod*)

Nowadays, I just tend to open a trade window, put 1000 gold into the trade box, start a stopwatch and go to get a new drink, to the toilet, wash some clothes, write a blogpost, browse some blogs, the usual. Standing record is a level 17 warlock waiting for 4 minutes 47 seconds before running off. I got a whole bunch of whispers going "pleazzzzze" in all sorts of spelling styles during that time, too.

The deafening roar of chickens in choppers...

2010-12-26T19:54:00.000-08:00

So there are cooking daily quests in Stormwind these days. The ideal class is - as always - druid, as they can shift into angry walrus form. Of course, using anything to increase run or swim speed in water also works. And when I saw this shiny image ...

I knew that fish meant business. I mean ... piranha with swords, that's pretty much the same as weaponized shark.

And then I stumbled across this in the wild: Just northwest of Thunderbluff on the mountains separating Mulgore from Stonetalon Mountains are a bunch of rabbits. Hunting Prairie Dogs. With axes!

It's just like the song...

20 Days of WoW - Day 9: Which race/class combination are you most like in RL?

2010-12-26T18:42:00.000-08:00

It's a bit like painting a self-portrait, isn't it? Do I paint myself with soft focus, from a distance, behind a shrubbery or do I go with the brightly illuminated, well designed setup and some boob-tape?

Now, I'm no Ferraro (fake or otherwise), so I think I won't get around a description that fits well. Ah yes, here we are.

Less hair, overall, and nowhere near as fit as the dwarven male model, but I think the dwarf race suits me best. Dark and rich, or was it stout and bitter?

Now with the body shape out of the way, that only leaves class. And here we might have a slight discrepancy. I would never voluntarily put myself in harms way - not even to protect others. Do I look silly?

No wait.

Ignore the picture above.

Think of something else.

Right, now ... pink rhinozeros? If you have to.

Do I look silly?

I'd much rather stab someone in the back than hit a shield in their face. That way I'll also never have to find out if they are unarmed, or something.

Dwarf Rogue. That's the verdict. Possibly warlock - because of the extraordinary hats.

20 Days of WoW: Day 8 - Favourite guild name you’ve come across?

2010-12-24T04:13:00.000-08:00

It's almost Christmas (Happy Loot-Day everyone!) so there is plenty of time to post between eating calories - lots of them - and drinking more calories.

I seem to have gotten stuck on the "20 days" post series when a cataclysmic event shattered my concentration (Brilliant, eh? eh? Yeah, I thought so, too).

So .. back on track with the favourite guild names:

My favourite choice so far is still "Oh crap leggit". However, it seems the guild does not exist any more. Wether that was due to a disband or because some weird person thought it not politically correct to have "crap" on his twelve-year olds screen (who probably murdered 80.000 humanoids before he noticed the name - ah well) I cannot say. I think that probably disqualifies them.

I'll go with [Error Loading Guild Name], which seems to exist several times by now. And which would not confuse me so much, if I didn't see a lot of "Unknown" people when logging in on a busy day.

Homeless, Guildless, Guiltless?

2010-12-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

1) Introduction:

Let's steal a good idea from Tamarind, and separate the text into several chapters. I think he probably stole that idea somewhere else (*suspicious look included*) - probably the old Egyptians or Babylonians or some such. We shall also add images at random points to break up the text. The Egyptians had that down to an art - their whole wall of text was nothing but images *nodnod*. As behooves ~~a mighty tauren~~ a serious topic, we shall start with an introduction.

Snack is currently without a guild. I quit today, after a few lines from our guildmaster had me rather upset. The amount of diplomacy stuck into the delivery was low, but of course that is not the whole story. Which is why there is a whole long post about it - well that, and I love to hear myself talk.

Harry the Homeless Puppy

2) Guild Climax (Ooh, aah):

Let's start with the high point of guild life. Back when I joined Vengeance, raiding was still focused on the final chapters of Icecrown Citadel normal. The first attempts on the life of the Lich King were made in Summer, and of course it was all very exciting. The guild had an excellent system of checks and balances for raiders - performance of new recruits was (I thought) evaluated well. Quite a few people did not actually make their trial, which had me very hopeful for the future of raiding.

The general level of performance was high - mistakes happened still, though. I think it is only fair to say that some people failed more often than others - but I was certainly not in the best 5% either. I am still surprised I made it through the trial - tank mistakes are so terribly visible.

The first 10-man Lich King kill was strenuous, but brilliant. The fight was quite hard due to it's unforgiving nature. Pretty much a single mistake by anyone meant that a restart was in order. It felt even better then, when he finally bit the dust (err.. ice?) after 93 attempts.

3) Guild Plateau:

After the 10 man kill, progress was focused on heroic modes in 10 man, the achievements in 10 man after a while and obviously pulling the same off in the bigger raids. 25 man progress was a good bit slower (and took almost three months more for the Lich King kill). And while people were still raiding regularily, the drive that pushed the 10 man kill seemed to be a bit lower.

4) Guild Decline:

And this is the bit, where it all got a bit strange. After early October 2010 the decline in signups was palpable. We had just completed the first Shadowmourne for the guild and people were - understandably - a bit drained with ICC. There was some effort by the officers to keep sign-ups high - but unfortunately much of the energy invested was aimed wrongly.

Basically: It doesn't help to tell the people who are there that they need to sign up more.

Both the "need to tell people (tm)" and the "but you got the wrong guy (r)" reactions happen in pretty much any situation, though. It's not like it's not going to be the first thing in the local supermarket and the high tech company around the corner as well. Gevlon would probably call it an Ape-Subroutine ... or something.

With the drive gone, everything went pretty quickly odd. The official release date of Cataclysm had been confirmed by Blizzard as the 7th of December. Two of the officers didn't play any more. With a short "I'll be back" message they had basically given up until Cataclysm. Our guildmaster was busy in real life - which understandably put a dampener on the "pull" of players in the guild.

A few of the remaining raiders tried organizing some interim measures - raiding Ulduar and Naxxramas for fun, attempting to do Trial of the Champions with all the attempts left, that sort of thing.

A bit surprising at this stage was the total lack of communication from the officer core. I'll actually leave that in as it is, because it's important criticism. Not playing the game while waiting for the expansion is entirely acceptable and understandable - most of the officers had put in a very very high attendance record and were worn out - however, the forums were still an open option for communications.

In the last few weeks, people would hardly notice signup pages on the calender any more, and the focus in raids was frankly gone. Some would not show up, some would leave early, some would "stand in the fire" and hardly care. I think one of the most memorable moments was a raid with a second guild (because we couldn't field the 20 people for an Ulduar-25 ourselves any more) when a guildy was kicked from the raid for standing in the bad too often.

5) Officer Stress and Feedback:

On to the parts I cannot properly comment on. I don't actually know any of the data here. I think that our officers (when present) and our guildmaster in particular were doing their best to hold the guild together just before Cataclysm. There was probably some organization going on behind the scenes. One of the highlights of that time was a poll on the forums about how people wanted to go about leveling up, recruiting for raids in the future and content.

Let me quote my own answer to leveling speed, because this is the root of my current problem:

Guild holiday?
I’m all for one. In fact, I rather enjoy questing – and being prepared for the actual raids. This probably means there will be new factions to get to exalted, new areas to be enjoyed and generally lots of things to do. Again – I arrived late at Vengeance and haven’t really seen any levelling going on, but at the moment people seem to mainly log on for raids and disappear right after (or that could be me – I wonder if me not being on outside raid times plays a role?). Would the simple solution be to just set everyone to member once the expansion hits and let them ask for “raider” rank when they feel ready?

From the changes to the interface/gameplay a lot of classes will need to learn how to play the game again anyway. The AoE-days are apparently going out; crowd control and possibly even area control (with fog and line of sight and things) are coming in. It’ll be a new game.

So… I’d skip the “preset” holiday period. Raid as soon as 10 people are willing to go, but allow the other guildies to catch up at their own speeds.

This still describes how I feel about leveling up in the new and shiny Cataclysm. I personally feel that raiding is only a part of the game - there are many many more nuances to it. Treating Cataclysm like a content patch (see Ulduar, Trial of Champions or Icecrown) devalues the whole experience massively.

I also tend to stick less to a schedule around the Christmas holidays. There are presents to be sorted, a tree to be watered and decorated and all sorts of family celebrations. That dreaded "real life" shows itself in its most enjoyable form. With cake and chocolate!

And luckily, everyone seemed to basically agree.

The official statement back then was this:

We have yet to finalize and edit rules for expansion on our next meeting, but this can be said for sure: we are not going to be pressuring nor have any penalties for the 80-85 leveling time. This is very individual and depends a lot on real life commitments each of us has and off course play style (a lot have been starving for new lore and leveling experience), and there will certainly be no gkicks because of slow leveling.
We will start raiding new content only when 10 or so players will be feeling like it, then growing in raid group size.

Now unfortunately this has not played out the way I interpreted it at the time. Back then, I thought this sounded perfect for a leveling experience that was similar to Wrath of the Lich King. As a level 70 (back then - this is ancient history, mind) I had to complete pretty much all the zones, do almost all of the quests and thus got almost all of the factions up to the point where only instance runs would improve them further. The best pre-raid gear was aquired from heroic instances (back then pretty much the same as now), with crafted items making up everything that was missing in drops.

My interpretation: We won't moan about anyone who plays the whole new zones/quests in their drive to get the best gear accessible before raiding. We want quality in the raiding equipment first and foremost.

The first players in the guild reached level 85 on the second or third day of Cataclysm. The new leveling model is an entirely different one. People are expected to level early and pick the two zones they enjoy most. Much like the rest of the new game (with the Shattering) there are now multiple parallel leveling paths that are entirely equally viable. Perfect for someone who plays an Alt and wants to experience something different.

The first instances were run (and moaned about), the first heroics were attempted (and moaned about even more). A relatively small group of players was seriously rocking the heroic world. Today (21st of December 2010, so this post can last for eternity) the average item level of those is around the 348 mark (done in my head - from a sample of four - so the standard deviation might be large). My own has just barely passed the 330 - almost a tier behind everyone else.

Now interestingly enough - this is not only something I noticed, it was also noticed by the officers (Good! They care deeply about the guild after all!). However, the way they went about it was terrible.

What I would have wished for would have been some clear communication. Something along the lines of "We appreciate that everyone wants to play their own game, but this is a raiding guild. We want to start seriously raiding in week x (I would have said week 2/2011, but that's too late for some). We want everyone who's interested to have their gear ready by week x-1, so we can plan on who will be there, what to do, etc."

I would probably not have minded someone saying "Look, we currently have one well-equipped tank. We need a second one - is there anything we can do to help you get gear?". I appreciate that it's my own responsibility to gear up, but pickup groups are not the fastest way - especially if some guildies already know the instances inside out.

What I got instead (over the last three days - since a first attempt into Blackwing Descent) was increasingly hostile Guildmessages of the day and then finally a personal "talking to" from our guildmaster today.

Now I presume there are different perceptions of how the conversation went again. This is likely always the case, and I suppose our officers are actually busy on more than one thing. There is also this fresh content that everyone seems to appreciate (and that I'd like to enjoy, too, limited as my playtime is) complete with cutscenes that completely block out all chat channels (this is a bad piece of design. It truly is.)

My perception was this. I had just grouped up with Issy to do instances. We had asked in guild if anyone would want to join us for a normal and actually got one more. We had entered the instance (a new one for me) and asked around if anyone actually knew what they were doing here. Two of the DPS were willing to help with quick tactics and we set out to kill things.

The first question I got was "You guys doing heroics yet?". I was a little surprised about the choice of chat-channel, but I declined. I thought in a funny manner, but of course this is hard to judge over the interwebs. The next question was "How come? been 85 couple days". Now I know I just said it's hard to judge funny over a chat, but that appeared unneccessarily agressive to me. When I said there was plenty to do I got a "Like what? we are not a social guild tbh, other things can wait."

Now this combined with the tension and bad communication over the past days for me was too much. I may be too easily angered (especially in the mornings, while tanking things I have never seen before) but I was told I could take as much time as I wanted. Just to be told it didn't apply.

There was a new post on the forums at the same time, basically saying something like this:

It seems that we have a lot of players who have already reached level 85, but for some reason instead of getting ready for raids, decide to spend their time in-game on leveling alts and not raiding related professions, which can be done after the main character is raid ready.

We did give everyone time to level at whatever speed you like, but abusing this to slack at level 85 is unacceptable.

This is basically where I draw the line. This ties in with the question on pretty much every guilds recruitment questionaire "Are you willing to respec for the good of the guild?". My answer usually is "Sure, as long as I can stay tank. Of course I'll get Improved Demo Shout if no one else can provide it, but I don't want to join as a warrior tank just to be playing a priest healer". This is a game I play for my enjoyment - and without knowing all the facts accusing people of slacking is not acceptable.

Especially not in the format done.

Waiting until the players are not currently busy, then taking the time to talk to them works. Snapping out one-liners in between your own heroic runs does not. I'd say a guild leadership in any way needs to be better than the members at communicating its wishes. Much like my boss at work needs to be better than me - otherwise something is going wrong.

5.5) Intermezzo: On Gearing up for Raids

There is, of course, a reason for my leveling plan. Surprisingly I actually want to raid on Snack and am aware of the gear requirements for proper raiding. Unlike the top guilds (Worldwide, obviously, but even Serverwide) I am not good enough a player to cleanly progress in the minimum level of equipment required. On the first day in Naxxramas I died to Anub. On the first day in Icecrown Citadel I wiped on Marrowgar. Hell.. the first time in Shattered Halls heroic I died to the gauntlet trash.

Luckily, Blizzard is well aware of a bell-curve of their players skill. Higher gear levels help to smooth out problems and rough corners. In the current situation that means reputation rewards (and tanks need Ramhaken, Wildhammer Clan, Therazane, and Guardians of Hyjal at exalted) and crafted items. Blacksmithing, mainly. And now I am well aware that leveling Alchemy on a second character to maximum may be considered wasteful, but the cost of raiding does actually play a role.

Wow, that sounded more angry than I thought. What I was trying to get at - I know what I need to do to raid and it takes time. More time than some other classes, possibly - and certainly more than I can spend when I have a small child at home. 16 hours of WoW time may be logged in - but certainly not at the keyboard.

5) Again: Back to Officer Stress and Feedback:

So ... I am looking at a guild with officers who (probably) talk in officer chat and on the forums in a seperate channel. They do, however, not see the need to communicate their fears, hopes and wishes to the guild - except in BOLD STATEMENTS at the end of a decision finding process.

I left at that point.

I'm unsure about the guild at the moment. There is both a certain amount of Sloth and a lack of direction here. I feel that the guild that was designed and sharpened for raiding did not cope well with enforced downtime. I wonder if they can recover. If raiding started up again, people might behave again. However, the push towards it over the playstyle of players is obviously not going down well either. This should have been forseen and probably handeled much better.

6) What can I learn from this?

It seems at the moment that a raiding guild is only good for raiding. If raiding stops (for whatever reason) people loose focus and the construct unravels.

It's true as well; while raiding I might put up with drugged and abusive guildmembers who behaved like teenagers - as long as they were pulling their weight - but in the downtimes their (well his) aggravating chat behaviour was just unbearable.

Officers of a guild have to handle recruitment (well done in Vengeance), raid signups (well done in Vengeance), guild policies (So-so done. I really liked the poll, I was completely unhappy about the sudden change in direction at the end) and communication with the members (not well done in Vengeance). I am truly glad that I am not an officer. Major props to all who are - no matter wether they blunder on one or the other topic - because this is hard work.

Oh yes. And I decided to put my own enjoyment of the game over the guild experience for the moment. Everyone makes mistakes and it was probably hasty to leave. I still feel like it was the right thing to do. I'll take my time leveling and gearing up, and when I'm ready (and back at work on a normal schedule) I'll probably have to go and find a raiding guild again. I love bashing my face against a wall three nights a week. I just don't want to burn out on the only raid in the game now when there is other stuff to do still.

Bullwhips, Fedoras and Ammonites

2010-12-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

Now that everyone has had time to try the new Archaeology, it's about time for me to start posting a few things about it as well.

If you have not tried it yet - you might like it. It does have boring stretches - much like fishing - and it does require a lot of travel, but there are some rewards that are great. I have to admit, I have not seen one of the epic items yet, but the troll one especially has me drooling. Notice how it's Bind to Account as well, so I can share it with my other alts once they are level 85.

But anyway.. back to the basics:

You want this hat, you'll have to earn it. Start by visiting one of the Archaeology trainers. You'll get two new "abilities" - Survey and Archaeology.

First stop: The archaeology window. This is not technically what you'll see when you open up the window - this is what you get after hitting the "Info" button in the top left corner. The one I marked with a red arrow.

It shows basically what you are supposed to do: Instructions built into the skill - a new thing! In short: Open your world map, find one of the spade icons, fly there. Once you get to the appropriate zone, find the red (or sometimes grey) shaded area. Land. Use your survey tools.

You'll get one of three possible results. Red light next to your contraption means you are more than 100 yards away - and it is somewhere in a 90° cone in front of the lense (the big end!).

Yellow means you are still a bit away. More than 50, but less than 100 yards. The surveying tool is pointing roughly in the right direction, though (there is a narrow cone - less than 45° I'd say).

A green, flashing light means you're basically there. Less than 50 yards away from you is your treasure. The survey tool does point at it directly. The easiest way to find it is by triangulation - so you'll just walk off to the side a bit, survey again and match the two lines. Bingo.

To find your treasure you'll need to survey again. On the spot with the X. Except there is, of course, no X.
Your reward will depends on the type of Dig Site you are at. In the beginning you are limited to Fossils, Dwarves, Night Elves and Trolls. Once you pass 300 skill, you'll also be able to grab Draenei and Orc items from the outlands, at 375 you'll unlock Nerubian and Vyrkul from Northrend and finally at 450 Tol'vir from Uldum.

Up to 100 in skill you can gain skillpoints just from picking up artifacts off the ground. Once you pass the 100, you'll gain 5 points each time you assemble (solve) a find.

The solving window looks something like this. It tells you how many total artifacts you need to collect to assemble your find. At the bottom you also see a hexagon box. If one of those is available (not always the case) you can use a secondary "currency" to solve the find quicker. Rare artifacts can use up to three of those, and you'll automatically get them on a succesful survey sometimes (like gems in mines or hides in skinning).

And that is pretty much it. Walk around, survey the land, pick up artifacts and solve the pieces of the puzzle to grab a useless price (in most cases).

Addon Corner:

There are actually two addons I can recommend to speed up Archaeology a bit.

Archy combines all the information into easily navigated boxes. It also tracks dig sites (and apparently interfaces with something called TomTom to add waypoints). More importantly: It adds a little icon to my BrokerBar which reminds me when to visit a trainer.

SAL is a tracking addon. It helps (immensely) with triangulating the actual position of your find. It is not the most intuitive of addons, however, so I think I'll add a few pictures.

First image shows the SAL window. The left icon is the one you use when you are standing on top of your surveying tool and facing in the direction of the surveying tool. It'll then give you a line superimposed on the screen. If you remembered to "measure" the size of the zone, the line will also be colourcoded by distances (as shown in the next image).

To measure, the rightmost icon. Click it, it'll prompt you to walk forward in a straight line until it's finished (a few seconds). Word of warning: Do not be mounted, flying, catform-with-speedboost or any other movement speed changing effects. Otherwise the measurements come out wrong and you'll end up in the brambles. Prickly brambles, too!

The second image shows the superimposed lines. The first one was from a red survey tool. As you can see, I moved to the "red area" on the line, then dropped another tool. And because the angle of randomness took me far, far away from the actual relics, I ended up with a yellow followup.

The second image is one I'd like to see more often. Green line from the start, which meant I could just walk off to the side a bit and do another survey. The two lines intersect somewhere - and another survey there reveals the fragment I am looking for. Almost exactly in the right spot.

Lastly, the spawnspots for artifact finds are limited. Much like ore or herb nodes they do appear in the same places. You'll probably notice when you dig for your second find in an area and it pops up right where you just found one. SAL also remembers the map locations on the minimap. When arriving in an area you already were in - why not start next to a known spot. You might get lucky.

Good luck.

Level 85 Mobility Macro

2010-12-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update for tanking warriors: Heroic Leap has a one minute cooldown, but is usable in any stance. It's doesn't follow the same rules as charge to use, but allows for more flexibility as it can be manually targetted. No rage cost, either.

So .. with that in mind, the updated Mobility macro for level 85 is something like this:

#showtooltip Charge

/cast Heroic Leap;
/castsequence [harm] reset=15 Charge, Intercept; [help] Intervene

If Heroic Leap is off cooldown, it'll use this first.
If an enemy unit is targetted, it'll attempt to use Charge, if Charge is on cooldown it'll use Intercept.
If a friendly unit is targetted, it'll use Intervene.

All this requires a point spent in Warbringer, so don't skip it.

Random Cataclysm

2010-12-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

No time to continue this 20 days thing at the moment... there are new worlds to be slain and new enemies to be conquered. Or some such. There always has to be time for things I found, though, and because I feel exceptionally generous, there is also going to be a "massively important tip"TM included.

1) Daily quests and crafting cooldowns!

Now call me old-fashioned. Call me overly sensitive. But I do not think that he was giving me a compliment there! The result of handing in some Forged Documents for the Inscription quest. Doable once per day. And.. it resets at 24.00 server time. Like all other cooldowns. So while technically my truegold transmute might state that it is only three hours 21 minutes to the next application - it'll still be once per 24 hours.

2) Quests are amazingly good fun!

I know some people tend to gloss over quest text. I would not even say I am immune to that. Especially on the 26th alt running through the same area again and again. However, new stuff is new and thus good and sacred and holy and should be consumed like a fine champagne ~~- from the shoe of a naked lady~~ - carefully and enjoying the whole thing.

Example from the random screenshot selection?

3) Professions training!

There are new crafting things. Some of them give more than one skillpoint at once.

In the example above: Hardened Elementium Girdle would give +5 skill points, the Bloodied Pyrium Belt and Gauntlets are guaranteed +1 skill point (orange colour), the Bloodied Pyrium Bracers and the Redsteel Breastplate would most likely give +1 skill point (yellow) and the Rough Copper Vest would not give any skillgains whatsoever (sad but true).

There is one case I have found so far where this is actually requires attention.

Namely: Alchemy. When at 500 skill level, both the trinket and the reusable flask become available. Whatever you do, craft the flask first! You'll get +5 for it. The trinket will give you another +5 at 505 skill, the flask will be yellow then.

Flask first, then trinket. Honest. It'll save you money! Thanks Issy for pointing it out.

20 days of WoW - Day 7: Favourite Minipet

2010-12-05T03:42:00.000-08:00

A tricky question this one. Do I actually have a favourite minipet? I don't think so - but because that is a bit short, let me provide a bit more detail.

I got a few shiny minipets. Some of them are quite cute - or come with a story of amazing discovery or some such. I have to admit that I collected them mainly for the achievement points, though. The ones that have the most "work" associated with them are my Kirin Tor Familiar and Mr. Pinchy, I think.

And yet, I'd never pull them out in an instance. I know that theoretically they were fixed a LONG LONG time ago, but let me tell you a story about Lower Blackrock Spire.

Better grab a hot drink and a blanket, though.. it's been a long time ago...

Anyway. When I was but a little nipper, we used to raid Lower Blackrock. Yes, it's only a 5 man instance these days, but back then it was possible to go there with 10 people. Just to have some additional safety. Sure.. less loot in total, but you'd actually have a chance to beat those groups of 6 angry orcs then.

After the groups had cleared the first room and pulled the patrol in the corridor leading to the proper Lower Blackrock, you'd work your way over ropebridges and past orcs. Lots of orcs. More orcs than there are today (with patch 4.0.3 the old instances were "streamlined", resulting in a lot less trash. Give them a try one of these days). And then, after you had cleared the first bit of ogres, you'd reach the trolls.

And no one in their sane mind would fight all of them. There were just too many groups. So people always always always took the shortcut.

Sorry about the messy UI there, but I needed the healthbars to display. Two hops (cunningly indicated by red arrows) would bring the whole group down into a "staging area" for the assault on the trolls. Hunters were usually warned to dismiss their pets (and sometimes forgot), warlocks were told they'd be kicked if they didn't get rid of their demons ... but someone always forgot about their little tabby cat. And it would follow the yellow brick road.

Of course it would aggro those orcs. And then run down the rest of the ramp.

And into there, dragging orcs, running into all of the trolls, shouting for help and finally deciding to cross the ramp and meet up with its owner. Who was probably by now buffing up and listening to a hunter rant about how their sabretooth cat lost happiness from being dismissed.

"What you fail to realize is my minipet ... is dragging mines!"

And that is why I don't usually have any of them out.

*nodnod*

Okay, I make two exceptions:

My little squire with his pony bridle can do bank runs. That is just useful. And I like useful minipets. I'd love one of those.

And of course there is always:

Which our baby seems to love. And he calls it his "Molted Core Hound". And it's one of those words he definitely has to know when he goes to school - every baby should learn that. Clearly.

20 days of WoW - Day 6: Favourite Dungeon

2010-12-04T07:12:00.000-08:00

A three part question if I've ever seen one! This clearly needs to be answered in a way that avoids all mention of Uldaman. It still makes me froth to think about it (although rumor has it it's a bit better these days - and I completely lost track of which level range it's supposed to be in anyway).

1) Old World

There are quite a few good ones here - but all my perception of them is tinted with years old "experience". I have to say that in retrospect I begin to like Blackrock Depths more and more - the feel of a whole city complete with bar and grill is nice. I do enjoy Schomolance a lot - the whole boss encounter at the end is quite nicely done.

The favourite, though, will probably be Zul'Farak for a while. Specifically because of the pyramid event.

This little tranquil scene soon turns into an escort mission. Of sorts. Not very far - just down the steps of the pyramid. And while all looks peaceful when you get to the edge ...

It doesn't stay peaceful. A whole army of monsters spawns there. So many, that it completely caught my breath the first time I saw them (back in ... oh no matter). Still looks amazing. Well.. and you can ride after a wipe - always good.

2) The Outlands

Only slightly harder this one. I think they become "better" now that they are a bit in the past. Some of those were run too often due to the gearing system in The Burning Crusade. Ah well.

My favourite instance was the Arcatraz. Longish introduction, quest that required completing two instances just to get a key and all that aside, it clearly had the single best NPC character in the outlands.

If you haven't been to the Arcatraz yet, you should really head over there. Millhouse is a friendly NPC to help you on the last boss fight. And back in the day he was valuable. Incredibly valuable. Some people would rather sacrifice a party member then let Millhouse die.

3) Wrath of the Lich King

I'll just be lazy and do a link-back to my own post here. I know that Trial of the Crusader/Champion was not very well recieved by the majority of players - and yes, it does have stupid moments. However, the sheer joy of running down things on horseback in heavy armour with a lance remains. As someone who likes playing plate-melee classes, I can just appreciate this. Knight-style combat. As it should be.

20 days of WoW - Day 5: Meaning behind my mains name

2010-12-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

Right. Humm. There were complaints (mainly by my lovely wife) about my last post being boring. I accept that and agree .... but I didn't pick the questions!

So anyway, in a feeble attempt to make this one a little more interesting, there is going to be backstory and such ... and a TL;DR at the end. You can skip there now, if you really want to.

So names...

My very first character in any MMO was rolled in Ultima Online. As I may have rambled before, back then everything was better, the sky was bluer (not actually true - you couldn't see the sky) and the snow was colder (possibly true - we had snow and there was polar bears). The character selection process was not based on classes, but rather on a skill set. Any skills could be combined into whatever you wanted to play, really.

Yes, there were obvious choices pretty soon - powergaming is not something that was invented only recently. Back then, the flavour of the month was a halberd wielding mage wearing fullplate with either mining or lumberjacking. How come? Well.. the swing timers had not been normalized, so a halberd hit as often as a shortsword - just much, much harder. There was no penalty for casting in armour and magery was the only reliable ranged form of attack (and almost required for any form of travel, defence and healing anyway). The mining? Well... practising your skills increased the associated statistics - and mining (and lumberjacking) gave strength. Everyone needed strength, because strength was equal to hitpoint.

So anyway.. back to the naming part. This was in 1995. Over here in Germany, my friends and I had just had a phase of watching Disney movies that had only recently come out (the newer stuff, basically). I needed the name of a sorcerer.

Jafar was born - and the above image does show the proper graphics, but was taken much, much later. That black horse was something of a rarety for a long while - and it could breathe fire and beat up small dragons without much help.

I stuck with that name for a long time. The advantage of reusing a name over several games was that people would recognize aquaintances. The world felt a lot smaller then.

I would probably still have used that name in World of Warcraft, if it had not been taken. Well that, and I was in my "girl characters" phase anyway, so I picked a female nightelf rogue as my first character - and again named her the same as I had in previous games. As this is a thing of the past (and I hardly play her any more anyway) - and my wife tells me "the name you picked could only have been chosen by a guy" - I shan't go into details there. Suffice to say - I did not put much energy into choosing and instead went something along the lines of "I really like - she won't mind having an online alter-ego. Oh ... the name is taken. Can I add a single character to make it pass?".

Fast forward to 2005.

A friend and I were rolling warriors together. We had both leveled to 60 and were occasionally PUGing Upper Blackrock - but we needed something new to level in between. We wanted a name that "matched" (and not like creepy matching child/mother pictures). There also had been that Doom Comic out and flying about the games shop for a bit.

Near the end of that comic the hero and the girl (details are fuzzy, she might have kicked zombie ass, too - I can't remember) are trapped in an elevator and she says something like "Oh no... there is just you and me left, whatever can we do". The hero powers up his chainsaw and replies with a stunning "Oh no, it's you and me and Black and Decker" (give me a break - I was a student, I enjoyed action movies, this was about as good a conversation as I got!)

So ... our warriors obviously had to be called Black and Decker. Yeah, except someone apparently took Black before (not entirely surprising) so we were lost. We tried a few other names that came in stunning combinations and made the symbiotic teamwork of our future team instantly apparent. "Smith and Wesson" also failed due to the already taken problem, but we were young and intrepid (and German) - we could think of a few other weapons manufacturers!

Heckler and Koch were born that day.

He got lucky.

Our English was not quite up to realizing just what we had done there, really. It took ages until someone laughed about it long enough for us to realize.

Ah well.

Soo... I was known as Koch for a good long while. And it only changed with the introduction of titles and achievements near the end of Burning Crusade (that's when we got achievements, not when I changed the name).

I did change the name when I server transferred to Alonsus. Not by choice (again) - Koch was already taken on that server. I had, however, just recently got the "Salty" title - and found a cute post somewhere about the name "Salty Snacks" which I thought brilliant. So these days it's Snack. Which is also more ... err... acceptable than Salty Koch. Especially to English speakers.

20 days of Wow - Day 4: Favourite Emote

2010-11-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

Now this one is a weird one. I have to say that I don't play much on roleplaying servers any more (this used to be different in other games, but I never found WoW to be a very suitable medium) - and as such my use of emotes is more limited than I might be elsewhere.

I mean ... I don't need to convey my emotional state much when I beat up 10 generic rats, and I'm sure my raid leader would frown on complicated emotes during a raiding encounter. This is different before and after the fight - but in the middle? Not really.

So my most used (and thus by default favourite) emote is /wave. It's something I use resonably often - usually when galloping past someone I know on a road in the middle of nowhere.

20 days of WoW - Day 3: Favourite NPC

2010-11-28T06:28:00.000-08:00

I thought about which one for quite a while - and it's been a bit difficult. I read the posts about faction leaders - and couldn't identify with the cause of any of them. Annoying buggers, the lot.

I wondered if there was any NPCs that made me laugh or made me want to join .. and in the end, it came down to two of them. Narain Soothfancy and Azuregos. Both are completely mental and once had the best quest text in the game. Unfortunately, it seems with Cataclysm the whole questline was removed.

You meet them both on a heroic bookstealing quest. That's right. Some of the books need to be liberated right from the library. For the Good of Azeroth, no less!

A psychic gnome versus the leader of the Blue Dragonflight.

In the end, the more bonkers one of the two comes out ahead. I couldn't help but pick Azuregos after this masterpiece of conversation:

You seek the scepter shard charged to the protection of the Blue Flight?

Snack: How did you know? I mean, yes... Yes i am looking for that shard. Do you have it?

Of course I do not have the shard. That would be asinine. I walk amongst savages in this cursed land! I cannot take five steps without some crazed orc or human trying to thrust a sharp stick into my hide. At any given time you could very well be speaking to my ghostly spirit.

Anyhow... I hid it.

Go on... Ask me Where.

Snack: Alright. Where?

Your going to love this story, dwarf. See, here is the thing. As soon as Malygos charged me with protecting the scepter shard, I knew I was in for an eternity of headache and pain.

All i want to do is study these magic rich shorelines and take in what artifacts remain from the sundering. You know, there was once a thriving Highborne civilization here! you don't have to tell me that there is going to be some solid magical items around here, dwarf I can smell it!

Snack: By Bronzebeard's... um, Beard! what are you talking about?

As I was saying, I held onto that scepter shard for a good five-hundred years and it was nothing but trouble. it attracted all kinds of attention - the wrong kind of attention. I want to be left alone to my studies not babysit some would be hero's ticket to glory. So i gave it to the fish.

Snack: Fish? You gave a piece of what could be the key to saving all life on Kalimdor to a fish?

Not just any fish mortal this fish was a minnow. A very special minnow.

Snack: A Minnow? The oceans are filled with minnows! There could be a hundred million minnows out there!

Exactly!

Snack: ...

Genius, I know... It will never be found; but, in case it if found I gave the minnow some special powers.

Snack: You put the piece on a minnow and place the minnow somewhere in the waters of the sea between here and the Eastern Kingdoms? And this minnow has special powers?

Correct. You've been listening! This minnow is really quite a terrible creature of my own creation. When I am relaxing, I like to think of the unlucky fishermen who have run into this minnow and been devoured whole. I bet they were quite surprised!

Snack: You're insane.

Genius is often misunderstood. Now, about the scepter shard... If you want that shard and do not wish to spend the next ten thousand years searching for it, you are going to have to listen very carefully.

Snack: I'm all ears.

Two words: Arcanite Buoy.

Snack: Come again.

Right then... you have to build an arcanite buoy and place it in the ocean. My minnow will be attracted to the magical emanations. When he gets near the buoy - BLAMO! it will explode in a glorious pulse of arcane energy, revealing the minnows true form. Also, you may or may not incur the wrath of Neptulon. A 50/50 chance I would say.

Snack: Ok, let me get this straight. You put the scepter shard entrusted to your Flight by Anachronos on a minnow of your own making and now expect me to build an...an arcanite buoy or something... to force your minnow out of hiding? AND potentially incur the wrath of an elemental Lord? Did I miss anything? Perhaps I am to do this without any clothes on, during a solar eclipse, on a leap year?

If I did not know better, I would think that you were mocking me, Mortal: but yes, that is mostly correct. You may remain fully clothed.

Snack: FINE! And how, dare I ask, am I supposed to acquire an arcanite buoy?

Take this ledger to an old acquaintance of mine in Tanaris. His name is Narain Soothfancy - terrible, terrible, psychic but an amazing engineer! He should be able to make sense of it all.

No need to thank me. It's the least I could do.

Good Day!

Snack: but...

I SAID GOOD DAY!

Mining and Fishing nodes, oh my!

2010-11-28T05:40:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you've noticed that the sheer amount of mining nodes in the wild has increased dramatically. I can't say the same for Herbalism - mainly because I haven't logged in a herbalist yet. However, it seems that there is a lot of ore lying around.

Now the same applies to fishing. Which I knew, because I've been running around Eastern Plaguelands and seeing loads and loads of Sagefish Pools where I didn't expect any. I didn't quite grasp what that meant, though.

Today (as on every Sunday) it was time for some friendly competitive fishing in Stranglethorn Vale again. And yes.. there are more fishing schools there as well. So many more, in fact, that they do not properly despawn at the beginning of the tournament. You'll end up with something like this:

Just in case this is too large: There are two pools on top of each other, one a School of Tastyfish for the contest, the other a Firefin Snapper School of uselessness. Also shown on the map is another pool just south of my current one (also double: Tastyfish and Oily Blackmouth).

The good news: As long as the School of Tastyfish is present, they have priority when fishing. You will always pull up all the Tastyfish first. However, this requires a keen eye on the Minimap now to see when your school is empty. And.. it's very problematic on the screen - hovering the mouse over the actual fishing pool does not show the Tastyfish on top.

Good luck .. or rather.. let's see what this looks like next week.

20 Days of WoW - Day 2: Favourite Race

2010-11-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

After reading quite a few of these posts in the last days, I'll have to come out with the truth, I suppose. I don't pick my favourite race based on looks or abilities or swing animations. I'm just going with "most useful gameplay bonus".

So far, no game has managed to make all races identical and just cosmetically different - there are always some stat changes.

Which is also the cause for my lovely dwarf

(who formerly looked like this)

to now look like this:

Taller, certainly, but more importantly: possessed of Diplomacy. Which will come in extra handy with all the new factions in Cataclysm. And then, I'll probably go back to dwarf - which has great tanking specials.

20 days of WoW - Day 1: Class

2010-11-25T10:50:00.000-08:00

I got this from my wife (and this time, I take longer to finish than her!), but she's grabbed it somewhere else - and to be fair I didn't quite manage to track down where it all started.

The whole list is this:

Day 1 - Favourite class and why?

Day 2 - Favourite race and why?
Day 3 - Favourite NPC?
Day 4 - Favourite Emote and the best situation to use it in.
Day 5 - The meaning behind your mains name?
Day 6 - Favourite dungeon and why?
Day 7 - Favourite companion non-combat pet?
Day 8 - Favourite guild name you’ve come across?
Day 9 - Which race/class combination are you most like in RL?
Day 10 - If a level 3 called “yurmom” asks you for gold, you say/do?
Day 11 - Favourite WoW holiday (e.g Brewfest, Childrens week)
Day 12 - Suggest any idea for Blizzard that they could put in the game.
Day 13 - Which faction are you “for”?
Day 14 - Healer, tank or dps?
Day 15 - Favourite Battleground and why?
Day 16 - Favourite quest/quest chain?
Day 17 - What do you do when the server’s down?!
Day 18 - Post your favourite Screenshot.
Day 19 - How many hours do you play a week, roughly?
Day 20 - Where would you be now if World of Warcraft never existed?

So today, we start with something easy:

Day 1 - Favourite class and why?

For me, it'll be warrior, thank you.

Now it wasn't love at first sight - my first character ever was a rogue. My warrior came along only when I was playing with a friend and we both decided to try something new. Two warriors with the same beards were born and we were merrily chopping our way to maximum level shortly after. I think the most fun we had with two Whirlwind Axes and the crazy helicopter animation.

Nowadays, I just enjoy tanking on the warrior most. I tried all four (or five, if you want to count warlock drain tanking) classes and warrior is just the most engaging. There are always buttons to press - something for every occasion.

Of course they occasionally get nerfed (and I loved the statement from Blizzard at the beginning of WotLK that "too many people are still playing warrior tanks - we are nerfing them to perform below average to even out the numbers a bit"(*) ) - but that's okay, the sheer amount of abilities dedicated to "doing your primary thing" are great.

This balances with the other classes having superb raid utility skills - like the battleres of an off-tank druid or so.

(*) I sadly cannot find that quote. Here are two links that fall into the approximately right timeframe. The gist is the same.

Things I don't understand...

2010-11-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

Obviously there are many, but let's not dwell on my personal problems. Let me talk about things that confused me lately. Word of warning: There might be a little bit of Real Life mixed into this. I'm sure no one cares, but it's my post, so pffbttt.

1) The parking situation:

My company is currently hiring people. A lot of people. Financial crisis overcome we are in the lucky position to actually need more. One of the bonus features is a new building (almost completed - started two years ago) with more room. All those new people will actually be able to sit somewhere. Another bonus feature is a new parking lot.

Except...

To make room for the new parking lot an old overgrown field/illegal dump was paved over. At the same time a new road is being built to the new building - supplies and drinks for the canteen and such need to be delivered, after all. The new road will end up where the old (smaller) parking lot was.

And here is what boggles me.

The old parking lot was closed before the new one was finished.

Eh what?

I mean ... it's not like any of those projects just jumped out of the shower, naked, screaming "what are you doing in here with a camera!". They were known in advance.

2) The lights on the car:

So ... my car burn out one of the rear lights. No big deal - they are not even mounted too horribly and can be replaced with a tiny bit of patience, a phillips head screwdriver and (not to be neglected, this bit) a new lightbulb. What makes me wonder about the sanity of designers, though: My fabeled on-board computer told me that not only the rear light was dead, I had also - at the same time - lost one of the brake lights.

Now I have met electronics before and know to trust them about as far as I can throw them (in this case: still attached to the car for the throwing bit) - but we also know that Murphy was a bloody optimist, so yeah sure - I could loose two at the same time.

Closer analysis (read: the aforementioned screwdriver and a good shake of all the bulbs to see which had a loose dangely wire) reveals that in fact only the rear light is dead. However, for whatever reason, the designer of this bit thought it would be a good idea to route the current for the brake light through the rear light. WHY?!

3) The raiding attitude:

We have officially cancelled raiding for the rest of this expansion. That doesn't mean we don't enter dungeons with more than 5 people any more, but the attendance requirements are no longer enforced, DKP are no longer used and we don't neccessarily set up raids for nights a week any more.

A few people still have "private projects" running. Finish the Ulduar25 drake meta-achievement is one such goal. And while we had quite a lot of interested in the early stages of this achievement, it has tapered off a bit. Some people who originally signed up regularily don't do it any more.

And this confuses me.

I mean, on the one hand we get messages like this:

(names removed to protect the innocent)

On the other hand, the same person has not signed up for the last 10 days, and his last comment was this:

Somehow, the heart is no longer in the raiding game.

Ah well... I think I'll just have to try and get my hands on a Cuddle-Me-Yoggy to cheer me up.

Just how many of us are there?

2010-11-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

I am amazed.

Shocked, sometimes, at how many people play World of Warcraft. I mean - yes - there are at least three in my company, and even though my attempt to recruit someone else failed that is still quite impressive for "just a game".

I think it's very easy to loose track of the sheer number of people around. I mean ... I don't doubt that Gevlon has a lot of readers, but claiming a recent patch was basically based on his activity in Wintergrasp is probably being slightly megalomaniac.

Just out of curiosity... let's play with some numbers.

World of Warcraft apparently currently has around 12 million subscribers. Gevlons blog had around 3000 regular readers about a year ago. I'm sure the number has fluctuated - increased a bit since then and dropped with the flow of players abandoning WoW for the moment as well. Let me be generous (and make my math easier) and assume he has around 4000 readers now. That is a rough 0.03% of the player base. Impressive - certainly more than my blog - but not statistically significant.

To think his words affect any amount of playerbase seems overconfident.

And why am I jumping around on this silly little number game so much?

Well... I was recently wondering what people were up to in-game. See, I did get a new achievement:

I went around to check on my progress and found that according to this data I am roughly at position 65000 worldwide for achievement points (and this info is outdated, so I might be even higher up). That sounded depressing.

But wait - that means roughly 0.5% of all players worldwide have more achievement points than me. Not so bad at all, suddenly.

So what does that tell me, though. Not all that large a percentage of the playerbase enjoys hunting after achievements. Actually, there also seems to be some regional difference there:

Is that five people from Russian servers in the top 10?

What do all the other people do, though. Some pvp, obviously. Many raid. Lots of people level alts. Some like playing the auction house. Each of those groups has their own fanbase and information sites on the internet. I'm sure there are tons more groups of interest that I cannot even guess at.

And with the numbers above, it doesn't even surprise me all that much.

12 million subscribers.

Just to put that into perspective: That is less than the 71 most populated nations of the world have as inhabitants (according to this list). Or the other way round: World of Warcraft has more players than Zimbabwe has people. Or Cuba. And as both of those countries are far away, and I never managed to have a holiday there - more than Greece or Portugal or Belgium, too.

And somehow - the population of Portugal does not strike me as people who all want the same thing. There are at least sixteen different political parties, lots of different hobbies and things to do.

So ... erm. Why exactly do we presume that everyone else playing World of Warcraft wants to do the things we do? I mean... I need only go outside and ring on the doorbell to my right to find people with a completely different idea about how to spend their Saturday afternoons (hint: It's not achievement hunting in WoW).

I might have to actually consider accepting different styles of play. Even though people who don't know how to DPS on their warriors drive me mental in pickup groups *grin*.

P.S. The achievement is not called "It's over 9000" for effect. You actually need more than 9k points.

Mindless yet almost meditative things

2010-11-16T02:54:00.000-08:00

Well yes, so there are city invasions. I saved Stormwind last night and it was bloody good fun. However, when the same happened again this morning I have to admit I thought: Oh well.. a little bit of water and wind never hurt anyone unduly - and those citizens who drown will surely find a kind spirit healer.

And buggered off.

Right out of the city and into the safe countryside (where there are growing a lot of peaches, apparently).

Anyway. I found this lovely statistic.

Apparently the lovely Merrymaker Snack should rather be called Snack, Bane of Humanity!

Honestly... eighty two thousand humanoids? That's like being personally responsible for 2 per mill of the deaths in World War two.

*boggle*

Ah well.

So what would a few more hurt, really.

I decided to work a bit more on my Ravenholt faction. Nothing like a working for a guild of thieves and assassins to feel right at home. Turns out there are two steps to being a loved and exalted member of their community (tightly knit, I tell you - and their birthday cakes are unmatched).

The first is to kill lots of Syndicate members. Lots.

To quote a random klingon (wish I had a name) from Star Trek (the original series): Day of the Dove:

Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man.

He is not that far off, actually. At the current run speed of my Snack (failing the speed boost enchant on his dps booties) I get around 400 to 450 of the little buggers per hour. It's winter - or at least getting there - so ten hours of darkness are not completely unreasonable. Those Klingons knew more about grinding reputation than I would have given them credit for.

And just so this post does not just show I am a complete geek: This is the path I take.

Run up to Durnholde Keep (closest from Southshore flight path) and have a good look at the outside walls. This'll be the last time you see them for roughly eight hours. Those two guys at the start? Yeah.. they give reputation already. Don't let them suffer.

Through the gate, over the bridge, up the hill and turn to the left towards the "castle" entrance is the most favourable way. If there is anything with a Syndicate nametag on the way? Yeah.. that. Sword through the face or some such. Walk all the way up to the broken little tower before turning around and entering the ruins of the castle.

There's two things to take note of in this pile of rubble. The poor trapped Orc is here for a horde quest (and doesn't give reputation anyway) and the Jailors can spawn in here as well. They don't give rep either - and are quest mobs for level 20s. No need to kill them. As usual ... follow the wiggly red line and crush everything in your path.

Down over the side and along the path around the pit, then jump into it and start killing in front of the little huts - and don't let anyone hide inside. They probably store secret and forbidden things there anyway.

Once you come out under the bridge, there are two more huts left and you can then climb up that fallen tree to walk along the inside wall again - taking you straight back to the entrance. Don't forget the two guards outside before going over the bridge again.

At my current damage the respawn is fast enough to never have to stop. Which is good. The little Syndicatelings only have about 521 health as well. Poor things.

You'll need to keep this up to 1 point before Revered - from there on it's the "Box hand in quest" with all of it's own problems.

Oh one last thing. While meditative and fun, I clearly recommend you do something to keep you awake. In my case it's listening to rock music in the background (I'm better at mass-murdering pixels if there is nice music on) and running Comix addon. It cheers me up immensely.

My wife says "Size matters"

2010-11-15T02:34:00.000-08:00

...and who would I be to disagree?

Just in case anyone has missed it, though - she was complaining recently about being not exactly well endowed. In the height department, that is. The buns were fine!

Just to compare sized here (out in the open, on a blog, with pictures - what else could we do), I decided to quickly check myself.

I mean - yes - compared to a tree, for instance, a cute little gnome warlock is rather on the short side.

However, by choice of the perfect accessories, a bit of hairspray and a dab of lipgoss any gnome can be talled than a simple peacebloom.

Really now.

Pfft.

Peacebloom.

Lookity here: Proof!

I completely agree. Size matters! But sometimes appearance can help - especially under bad lighting conditions and possibly with the help of some fermented drinks.

I admit, I am a bit overzealous for spelling sometimes...

2010-11-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Right. We need to conjure up the right setting for this post. I was a bit torn between posting it and .. well.. not to, but there is this nagging doubt.

*chop chop choppity chop chop* (this is important, remember it)

To start with - we had our usual guild sunday in Molten Core and Temple of Ahn'Quiraj. We walked through the place skipping non-essentials (trash in MC, Visidius the blob of "we need many attackers" in AQ40) and finally finished the instance with only a few dead people. I was playing my little mage for a change - because there was still talk of bringing frostbolts before we noticed we were only five.

The tentacle dropped. Always a bonus. We had not changed the loot options - and they were still set to group loot - and the only options available to me was "greed", "disenchant" and "pass".

Great, thinketh I, they finally noticed that this is not an item that should be needed on by anyone. It's flavour, it's colour, it's fun! This is what great items should be about!

Our Shadowpriest had the same options, also chose "greed" and then we saw a lot of "needs" scroll by. From the paladin, shaman and druid.

This might have lead to shouting and screaming were it not a guild group - as it was we congratulated our paladin on his new squishy tentacle and didn't think about it much. Until a little later, when our shadowpriest spoke up and said: "Hey wait a moment - I didn't even have the option to roll need".

*chop chop choppity chop chop*

Well.. thinking about it like that.. yes, it seems cloth wearers did not get to roll need. Odd. For a trinket?

Ticket time!

I got a GM response surprisingly quickly - took only about 15 minutes as opposed to the usual three days at the moment. *choppity chop*

And the GM was friendly and helpful, but ...

Seriously?

Line 1: Obvious macro with a %t for name of caller. How do I know this? It appeared quickly.
Line 3: "How r you?" err... sticky a and e keys? Spilled some coffee? Okay, that can happen.
Line 5: ":-)" Seriously? I mean.. yes... internet chat and email are supposed to be less formal, but seriously? Maybe I'm getting too old for this.

Line 6: Finally. We get to the good stuff and the spelling has improved. At the cost of typing speed. It is a shame the GM Chat does not display timestamps, but goodness gracious that was slow. I can probably exceed the typing speed with one finger. Okay... new person.

Yes, then there was a predesigned response that did not actually check into what item I had linked. The "you should have read the manual" response. I completely accept that - my phrasing was probably not entirely clear, although I usually try.

Last line in the image: "Did someone won the item?" ... yes, I and O are right next to each other, but at the speed of typing there must have been time to spellcheck. Minutes!

It went on for a bit (and I'm cutting the rest here, because there really is a lot of information exchange that is entirely boring and useless to the point of this post *Thudda thudda thudda* - is that getting louder?).

There was some more macro use (specifically the two farewell phrases - both spelt accurately and used quickly) and I generally felt like I had got a gamemaster new to the job with little actual understanding of what was going on. Not the first one in the last week.

And here is the point:

Is Blizzard giving me more useless gamemasters to make me feel happy about paying an extra fee for superior support in the near future?

Is that it?

Am I being "prepared"?

*THUDDA THUDDA*

Oh look. Black helicopters with a Blizzard/Activision logo on the side. I wonder why there are lots of people fast-roping into my garden....

I guess I'll go and ask. See you laters!

New Tip of the Day!

2010-11-07T02:59:00.000-08:00

Err. Maybe it's not actually new, but I found a lot of tips lately that I had not seen before. Possibly because I never pay attention. Maybe it's all because of the insanely long loading times at the end of my blue bar after I crashed (minutes, several of them).

However, when I started my game today I saw this lovely ~~boob~~ ~~err.. girl~~ TIP!

Made me think of Tam MD, of course. I might just have to pay a bit more attention to them in the future. The tips, not the other things on that page!

Oh and... does anyone know if there is a clever list of those Tips of the Day for me to read? The one on Wow-Europe I found is a tad outdated.

Scholomance. We did it.

2010-10-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

Both my lovely wife and I are approaching level 60 on a new set of alts at the moment. She plays a mighty arms warrior, I'm fiddling around with my rogue.

So since we got to level 57 we are queuing up for the late Old World instances. Scholomance was our desire in particular.

We did the sensible thing and picked up a few quests and then started the queue. I mean - we were aware that this might take a while.

And it took a bit. I grabbed the first screenshot ... oh... see for yourself:

Nothing surprising there. We found the third DPS after almost an hour and only the tank/healer team were missing.

Ah well - time to do some quests.

Not that much later, a healer showed up. Excellent, said I. What could possibly happen. Someone is bound to trundle along in a tank spec soonish. I mean .. Tamarind did a few post specifically about how enjoyable the late Old World instances are.

Sadly, one of the DPS (and it wasn't Issy or me) had to leave a minute later. Maybe he had to go to the toilet. Or to bed. Or the timezone caught up with him. Or something.

And not too long after, our healer followed.

*Sigh*

Back to were we were. About an hour ago. Or 20 minutes, depending on which screenshot you keep an eye on.

But to be fair - it wasn't all like that. The following is the last screenshot I got before we had a full group:

Shortly after that - group complete.

An hour and fourty minutes. I'm just glad I was leveling on the side and not standing around Stormwind, admiring the scenery. Hell... I might have died from old age, or met lil' Timmy or something.

As it turned out, the group was not exactly favoured by the gods, though. I mean... we had the best rogue and an incredible arms warrior and the healer was totally ace. But ...

Well. There was a warlock who liked to stand behind the enemy. I hope this was because he played a melee DPS class before, otherwise the only reason would have been so he could pull more.

Not entirely weird, just not perfect. The tank was from another planet, though. His initial pull consisted of jumping off the balcony into the library of Scholomance and engage the group in the middle at the back. Remember the abilities of those mobs? Yeah, the necrolytes like to use their Arcane Blast. A shiny knockback. There was a reason you pulled those groups carefully.

First wipe commenced after roughly three minutes inside the instance.

So we started with the "You know, if you've not done this before, it's perfectly okay. We have once or twice, though, and we're glad to offer some assistance" spiel. It lasted two pulls (along the wall), then he again charged a group in the middle.

Wipe number two.

But at least we had mostly cleared the library. And even read a few books. And got one of the Deeds.

So I (maybe stupidly) said: "You know, the next room is going to kill us messily if we just charge in. Let me quickly point out why when we get there." And we walked up to the room with the 6 groups with summoners. And I (definitely stupidly) marked up one of the summoners with a skull and then proceeded to type.

And I typed too slow. By the time I had said "Those guys summon adds, so we need to silence them and pull them back" our bear had already charged in the middle.

And ignored the patrol.

And pulled two more groups.

*SIGH*

We tried for a bit more. We offered advice (both of us), we marked mobs that needed to die fast - and then proceeded to kill them without a tank. I think he wiped us once more in the room before the dragons (by charging a group diagonally across it *boggles*).

When we told him to please pull the hatchlings outside the room for us to kill his response (I kid not - I wish I was) was "I am the tank, I decide where to go and how to pull".

It wasn't even one of us who initiated the vote-kick right after he had said "Kick me then". It passed without a hitch, though.

Now, I don't like beating on new tanks. However, if tanks don't come with built in situational awareness, I expect them to listen to advice. Not just charge off. And certainly not charge off like it was a Northrend Heroic, where he probably learnt his "skills". That was just horrid.

So .. err.. we requeued.

And while we were waiting we decided to continue on a bit. We had a warrior in our group, after all. Cute one, too. She didn't have a tanking spec. She didn't have a one-handed weapon. She had, however, done her quests and got defensive stance. So we gave her a shield we had found (grey quality, but hey - it allowed shieldslams) and a sharpened stick.

And sent her off.

And our healer showed her true quality. She managed to keep Issie alive. Through odd pulls (Oh look: you got Rattlegore and one of his constructs) and strange situations (Hmm.. I think someone just mindcontrolled our healer). Mostly.

We did die occasionally. But hey ... the queue for more was not exactly filling with enthusiastic fans.

This is the second queue window. On top of our 1 hour 40 minutes before the start, it took us 1 hour 20 minutes with no one willing to fill up the remaining spots.

A bit longer than that, actually. I think the total time from first queueing to the end of the instance was a little more than four hours.

But we all learnt new things: our healer now knows that Entangling Roots only works on one target at a time (we wiped twice for that - Lord Alexei Barov and his two minions hit hard). Our little warrior has enjoyed tanking enough to actually get a tank spec - and learnt about millions of tank abilities she never used (like revenge and shield block and intimidating shout). And me? While I am usually perfect in every which way, I had to learn lots and lots of things about rogues.

When to use sprint, when not to use sprint (hint: overshooting your target is not good), what feint is for (might come in handy), that blind works on teammembers-who-are-mindcontrolled, that bombs might stun unstable corpses, but might also blow up many of them at once, etc. etc...

We did it, though. Only three of us, but it was a greater achievement in the end this way. What can I say, though - I'm glad I'm level 58 now and can go to the outlands. I don't want to do these instances with random people again. If was great fun with three, though.

Now where had I heard that before? ...

Battlegrounds are FUBAR

2010-10-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Now I know I'm not a battleground person. Or rather - I don't enjoy loosing due to reasons beyond my control (and in battlegrounds there are many - ranging from 9 in WSG to 39 in AV).

However, there is a reason for doing rather a lot of them lately - namely the over 9k achievement. I'm quite close now and the only two departments seriously lacking are PvP (not surprisingly) and 25-man raids before ICC (also not surprising).

None of those are solo-able. And while I wouldn't mind getting the last rares for Bloody Rare and Northern Exposure, those take more time than is sensible either. So PvP it is. I can queue up all solo and then try and get things done. Many of the achievements are actually conductive to playing - use seaforium charges, kill flag carriers, etc etc.

Not all of them, obviously ... but that is beside the point.

The things that annoy me at the moment:

- I cannot get reconition for a battleground if I'm not on the scoreboard. That basically means any battleground that I was not there from the start for. If my name is on the scoreboard it's worth staying - otherwise I might just as well try and get out. Even with the deserter debuff... 15 minutes of waiting over a pointless 18 minute Warsong Gulch means I actually benefit from /afk-ing.

This has bitten me in the ass a few times this weekend - it's WSG Call to Arms - the only one I'm missing for my Call to Arms achievement - and I didn't get it even after we won.

There is a "solution": using /afk after dying (and while dead - should I mention this?) does not result in a deserter debuff. It does, however, mean the next person in has the same bloody problem. Not something I enjoy.

- Random disconnects: Occasionally I disconnect, recieve a deserter debuff and then log back in somewhere else. Nice. I suppose this way my team gets a replacement sooner, but see pet peeve no. 1.

- Achievements are not working. There, I said it (again). I'm doing this not so much for the fun, more for the achievements. I hate it when they do not properly work.

There. I just returned the bloody flag twice! In the space of 16 seconds! How come the achievement tracker pretends I just got one?

BAH!

Fix this rubbish.

See? I did play a battleground. My adrenaline is still pumping and I am actually angry at things. Rare, that.

Vengeance - all the new Rage!

2010-10-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Oh my, I am so proud of that title. Notice how I managed to sneak my guild name in there and let it sound like an advertisement at the same time? Yeah, I'm that impressive...

Anyway.

Todays topic is the new talent called "Vengeance" (not the guild) and in a very broad sense "what tanks would like non-tanks to know about it". This post was mostly inspired by Uncrittables post - which suddenly explained a lot of things about my threat management. Well worth the read if you want more pertinent information. From my side: just the quick summary.

All the tanks got it with patch 4.0.1 and it looks something like this:

Basically: As long as the tank is taking loads of damage, they are going to deal more damage. Quite a lot more damage. "Normal" tank attack power is still nothing very impressive, but with a full stack of this, damage will be through the roof.

That is a good thing, as most high-threat moves these days are based on attack power - with the possible exception of Consecrate for paladins.

Remember all those moans and complains when patch 4.0.1 came out first about tanks not able to hold threat? This is part of the problem. The other part is impatient DPS - which might be an old trend with roughly 21.000 results on a search for the year 2007 alone.

The mechanic is nothing entirely new - although paladins and deathknights won't know it as such. This is basically exactly the same rage did before. If your tank is getting hit lots, they manage to dish out lots of threat and hold the enemy just where you want them. If your DPS managed to pull aggro on the initial pull it's going to be a floudering catching up race of madness (93k results - people seem to do that a lot).

Examples? Some fights have actually got easier to hold aggro on. I know I used to struggle on Sindragosa before the patch - our dps were generally catching up very quick. I had to use intervene on every air phase just to bring some semblance of stability to the whole fight and still our top people had to use their threat-dropping-moves. No longer the case. Sindragosa now happily tears holes into my armour and blasts me with frosty fire. My vengeance stacks tic up and my shield slams would bring a smile even to a DPS players face. Threat output increases so much that it doesn't even matter that Chilled to the Bone stacks faster with the new heroic strike mechanic.

And on the other side?

Try charging into a pack of relatively low level trash in a 5-man instance. Ideally, I'd try to thunderclap, cleave, shieldslam one, thunderclap again and then use shockwave to make sure I get a nice threat lead.

Any of you think this path has worked ever? Even once?

I might have some bad news for you then - on at least two topics.

Now as I see the first snow from Blizzard and the first lightning from Hurricane strike after my initial charge my options are limited. Thunderclap, Shockwave right away to stun those things from trying to beat up my dps. This not only gives me a rather low threat to start with, it also makes sure those same mobs don't hit me (because they are stunned - Note to self: This is also a bad time to use Shield Block). Vengeance does not stack up rapidly, my following cleavage looks more like this:

rather than this:

All hell breaks loose and things run all over the place and start beating up the DPS. Will you stop looking already? There is a rather important topic on here.

I'll try a summary - and maybe, if you are very good there will be a reward image at the end of it.

Summary!

Vengeance is your tanks new ability to stay ahead on threat. To use this to it's fulle extend the tanks need to take damage from all mobs they have pulled. The ramp-up time is roughly 6 seconds in current content. This means all DPS need to wait until they have counted to 6 10 20 30 (I know how DPS count!) before starting with the massive damage dealing. If you wait patiently, you can then see large numbers bounce across your screen (eyes down here, damnit!).

Wait before shooting!

Gratituitious picture here (SFW).

Fury DPS in patch 4.0.1

2010-10-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

After a bit of fiddling around with my off-spec, I thought I'd throw in my two gold coins on doing damage.

Basically my testing went something like:

Pick spec.
Go to dummy.
Do 2800 DPS single target.

Regem and Reforge to the best of my knowledge.
Go to dummy.
Do 3200 DPS single target.

Throw arms and legs into the air and wail about life being unfair, russians conquering the moon and the sky falling down.

Sulk.

Go to bed.

Then on the next day, our guilds top fury warriors shared his wisdom, and I - being not above stealing anything - went and tested that.

The spec was alright. Basically, pick anything that hurts people. I'm using something close to this, but skipped the points in Skirmisher for one point each in Blood Craze and Piercing Howl. 2 and 3 in Arms and Protection are exchangable as well. I went for more steady damage over a weird proc mechanism.

I then reforged again. My gear had not enough hit, a little too much expertise, too much crit and some haste.

The ideal setup at this time apparently is: Hit (up to 8% cap) > Expertise (up to 26) > Strength > Hit (up to 27% - the offhand cap) > Haste > Crit.

Replace all the shiny +crit gems your Armour Penetration was turned into with +strength. How costly can it be. Then check hit and expertise. Likely you'll want to reforge a lot of your crit into additional +hit. Leave the haste alone, if you still have crit left un-reforged get more haste.

The thoughts? Hit as often as you can to generate lots of rage. Use the rage to power your attacks.

And the order of attacks?

Above 35%: Heroic Strike >> Bloodthirst > Raging Blow > Sunder Armour >> anything else.
Below 35%: Execute. That's it. Don't weave in anything - execute more.

The >> is supposed to indicate a "much better". You'll need to change from "I must not ragestarve myself with heroic strikes" to "I must not ragestarve myself out of heroic strikes".

Oh and .. Slam? I really haven't found a time in battle yet where it would ever be useful. Use Bloodthirst instead. Or Sunder. Don't forget to Shout and Berserker Rage (Glyphed) as often as you can to gain more rage.

What did it do in my gear? Remember the numbers above? Up to roughly 7400 DPS now (single target). Thats not worse than before the patch - I can live with it.

Patch 4.01 or whatever it's called

2010-10-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Time to surface briefly and see what has happened during patch day.

Firstly - ammunition is properly gone, all weapon skills are known by default (and at max level for your level) and the guild is still a naughty place. I think it was better before - it seems to have massively degenerated since someone joined.

Moving right on. As predicted a lot of people logged in. Many of them had to redo their specs and regem and reforge to change all their previously-shiny-armour-penetration into something more useful. Apparently glyph makers have been making a killing.

(Image taken from here)

I was not prepared. I had about 100 inks in my bags and it was not enough. I had stocked up on gemstones, though (and transmuted all my old currencies into them), so the money making was not completely pointless. After the initial sugar rush it has calmed down a lot by now, though. Gem prices are still slightly elevated over the pre-4.01 prices, but they are not at twice the amount any more.

On that note: Why get a spec right on the first try. You can always unlearn and relearn. Except the prices are a bit odd at the moment.

A few bugs still remain in the patch, obviously. I'm not even talking about the amusing ones, like the extremely-ultra-slow-ghost-griffon in Icecrown (try dying - really - it's great!) or the random group kicks for raid members ("You are not part of this instance and will be teleported to the graveyard" - but I'm in the group! Right now! here with all my friends!). Above is shown an image of the newly "built in" gearscore addon. Which seems to think that my average gear score of the best gear is 279. Why's that funny?

Well... currently the highest item level for all item slots _except_ for the weapon is 277. Sure, if I were decked out completely in ICC25-heroic gear and had a Shadowmourne in my hand this might be accurate. Sadly - this is not the case. But hey.. it might free up a few more instances. The first one I queued for was a heroic Violet Hold - I'm sure it required the gear.

Now.. on to something a bit more sobering.

Do I like the new patch?

Well... I was quite happy yesterday - it looked like most things actually worked (apart from the above, but allegedly a new patch is already inbound) and the specs were quite fun to build. As my DPS skills are a bit dubious at best, I thought I'd fall back on a classic. Adjusted my fury spec, walked up to a target dummy and started hitting it. Shiny things popped up all around my, great big sparkles appeared on my quickbar and when I stepped away and opened my recount I was greated by a massive 921 dps.

So I checked again - nope - not a digit missing.

Ah.. tank gear. Okay... my bad.

Switched gear, tried again. Upgraded my DPS on a single target to 2800. Hmm.

Okay, no glyphs - changed that and tried again and got up to 3200.

This is not what the other players were reporting. Our warlock was just pulling off 14k, our paladins were bouncing around the 8k marks. I seriously think that my gear needs a lot of reworking before I'll even dare to queue as DPS again.

Oh yes - in the Elitist Jerks link above is also apparently listed that my DPS is considered too low.

And what about tanking?

I ... don't know any more. At the moment it feels broken and utterly utterly boring to me. Warrior tanking used to be brilliant with zipping all over the place, using abilities based on a priority system and interweaving all the damage reduction talents you could without loosing threat (demo shout and thunderclap, basically). Sure.. my hand hurt after a while of permanently hitting heroic strike, but it gave me something to do.

Now?

Heroic strike is not affected by weapon speed any more, so a slower tanking weapon would be better for more devastate damage. Heroic strike also has a 3 second cooldown - so even when I have unlimited rage I can not perma-queue it any more. That supposedly eases my hand-cramps but at the moment just means I'm clicking an empty button. It also apparently doesn't do "a large amount of threat" any more, which helps dps warriors but leaves me wanting.

Anything else annoying? Oh yes - vigilance just reduces the damage the target takes and refreshes taunt. It does no longer grant threat from the recipient to the warrior - and I really really wish I could take some threat off the magic dps classes in our raids.

My tanking has slowed down to three buttons. Devastate, Revenge (when available), Shield Slam (when available). There is nothing else to do. The interface doesn't seem to like fast hitting any more either (sometimes skipping skill-uses when I try to do so), so I end up pushing one button every 1.5 seconds.

I am bored out of my mind. This is not what tanking was about. At the same time I see the threat of our DPS soar past me (they benefit from heroism - I do not. Not a bit. Not in the slightest) and there is nothing I can do about it.

I'm feeling right bitter and grumpy about it at the moment. At this rate I'll try an arms spec tomorrow - just to see if it'll make me feel better about chopping stuff down.

MEH.

And just so I don't leave completely without any useful hints:

1) Vigilance should go on the other tank in a raid. They'll appreciate the 3% less damage and it'll refresh taunt a lot when they are also getting beaten up.

2) Using Berserker Rage at every opportunity gives extra rage. At least then the old-fashioned perma-use of heroic strike won't hurt. With enough healers it's entirely possible to not use any damage reduction abilities at all (no demo, no thunderclap) to increase rage gain a little.

3) Battle Shout and Commanding Shout grant rage. They are the replacement to the previous

Deathnugget Project about to come to a close

2010-09-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

I posted about ... well ... two times about my spellpower deathknight project. The idea was mainly to see how much hostility I'd be subjected to just for wearing spellpower gear on a deathknight. The second part of the project was to see if it ever actually got hard to level.

The second part is easiest to answer: No, it didn't. Even wearing the entirely wrong set of shoulders, chest armour and two trinkets didn't lead to impossible quests, unbeatable mobs and lots of quiet crying. In fact, this was the fastest character I ever leveled to 80.

2 days and 22 hours isn't all bad. Most of the time was taken up by getting mining and flowerpicking to high levels anyway. I don't like moving through the outlands without being able to grab everything harvestable on the floor. Obviously, starting at 55 does give a tad of a boost there.

(image taken from here - just in case you want to buy one now)

Now, how was progress up to 80, though? Pretty much the same as I've posted about before. I got mostly comments on the robe, very occasionally on the matching shoulders. No one in all the leveling ever commented on the "spellpower/restore mana on kill" trinkets. Two of them. Most of the time I didn't really get around to spouting some nonesense about how much I prefered the colour and the cut and a fresh breeze around my undead privates - some other member of the party would usually speak up and say something like "Oh, it's all about the experience bonus". A shame really.

I met some oddities on the way to Northrend as well. Like this druid who, err, apparently had bought his account. Now I'm not about to fling that accusation around randomly, but there are a few hints.

Let me post a picture to clarify:

This is a level 80 druid (and to the best of my knowledge it is not actually possible to level to 80 in the old lands), who has at least some Icecrown Citadel faction and has actually been inside. Yet, the boat to Northrend was a new discovery. Sure, there are a few possible solutions - the player could have leveled entirely through the dungeon finder and always been summoned to ICC. The player could have taken the boat from Menethil Harbour and never actually set foot in Stormwind Harbour. It did all sound very fishy, though. More fishy than the normal harbour smell.

(image taken from here)

Right. Back on topic, though. Hostility even through the Northrend instances was actually low. I didn't once get kicked from a group (although proper dps probably played a role) and there were only two people that were remarkable in the whole experiment. Let me show you the details:

The usual reply to "why are you wearing a robe" apparently prompted a comment on my sexual orientation. I assume this just shows that around 11.12 in the mornings too many teenagers are online. Odd, though.

Note the other party member once again coming to my defence for no good reason at all. Just explaining that this is a perfectly accetable set, apparently. Or maybe that's just Lightbringer *suspicious of the server, suddenly, nodnod*.

More along the lines of what I had expected was this masterpiece of conversation. Here I was in the middle of explaining to him that he didn't even notice the spellpower trinkets and he threatened real life physical violence. Interesting. I have not had that before. And on my very own server, too. With a very cunningly chosen name - although I can hardly complain about that now, can I?

So ... it all came to a close near the end. I did actually reach level 80. I wanted to do one last thing before grabbing a fresh mining pick and settling down to wait for Cataclysm. One Northrend Heroic. Any of them. Really - I wasn't picky.

Unfortunately the problems were not players - it was the bloody game itself.

Apparently my leveling gear was too bad to even try a heroic. Any of them. Utgarde Keep was out. Seriously?

Oh well... a little bit of shopping made it all work out in the end. I had to buy a few green rings of the auctionhouse and craft boots, belt and gloves of the iLevel 187 pvp set.

Upped my Gearscore immensely, too.

Which finally got me an instance. Heroic Drak'tharon Keep - my personal Oculus. I hate the instance and I get it a lot more than anything else.

The party took almost all the way to Trollgore before the commenting started - and it then held on a little. A bit more hostile than previously - but still not really bad. Spinks and Poek (in the comments) had apparently a lot worse happen to them in normal groups.

There were even sensible suggestions on how to improve the gear. Not entirely friendly - and certainly not what a real noob would deserve - but not horrid.

And hey - for the first time since I started this project I was not actually at the top of the epeen-meters.

Look ... just barely above the tank.

The „New Expansion“ Survival Guide

2010-09-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

So Cataclysm will be released soonish. We’re all looking forward to it with varying expectations – but to be fair, anyone still reading WoW Blogs this late in the expansion either loves the writing style or is still interested in the game. As you ended up here, I’d like to pretend it is the former, but I’m not that silly.

As the bold survivor of two expansions in WoW and several others in different games I feel uniquely qualified to present a guide to surviving the new expansion. Of course, not actually knowing the date or the design changes they did this time round to solve some of the more common problems isn’t going to help – but I shall not be deterred.

There are a few things to expect that you may or may not have experienced yet, and there are also a few suggestions on what to do (see how I hooked you right there? I should go into used car sales, really).

So… what will happen that affects your playing experience?

1) Queues

Unless you bought a sparkle-pony when they first were released, the last time queues were actually a concern was on Icecrown Citadel release day. 8th of December 2009, with patch 3.3.0. What does it mean? Well… look forward to a lot of people you have not seen in a while logging on. Cities are going to be packed, chat channels will be fuller than usual (any – from trade to guild) and the servers are going to be full of life. The queue times on Icecrown Citadel day were up to one hour on my servers, I’d expect this to be actually longer during primetime for the Cataclysm launch.

Suggestions: Log in early and be prepared to wait. TV, books, drawing with crayons or eating salted peanuts are all acceptable pass-times while you wait for the counter to tick down. Most of us are aware that patience is not a strong virtue for most WoW players – better get used to it, because this’ll not be the only time you are waiting.

2) Crowding

New content is going to be full. This ties in with the point above, obviously, but worse so. Unlike on content patches the amount of people swarming the new content is not going to be limited by some artificial gear restrictions – everyone will be able to go and try out new things.

This applies both to the new starter areas and the new 80-85 leveling zones. Back in the TBC launch people tried to roll a Draenei or Bloodelf to escape the horror of Hellfire Peninsula – with very limited success.

“Kill stealing” for quest relevant mobs is going to happen. If the last two expansions are anything to go by, this’ll continue for weeks, possibly months into the new content.

On the bright side: Blizzard was aware of this and things were improved in WotLK over TBC already – two parallel zones for instance, quest drops that fell on the ground and could be used by anyone on the quest (the Halberd from Kaw the Mammoth Hunter comes to mind), spawn speed depending on the number of players in the area. I am looking forward to the new additions – but basic human idiocy will not be completely deterred.

Suggestion: None really. You’ll have to live with it. There are two possible ways to solve this a little: grouping with anyone that looks like they are on the same quest and “kill-stealing” yourself. The second suggestion is quicker and arguably more efficient; the first might lead to some conversation – the whole point of a multiplayer game. I usually set out on the moral high ground, not wanting to drop to their level, but human behaviour has been known to take its’ toll and I may (possibly) have spammed an insta-attack occasionally.

Keep in mind that the levelling progress of a large number of people follows a bell-curve. Assuming “I’ll log off for half an hour, and then the idiot will be gone” is not going to help. Yes, “that person” is going to be ahead of you, but someone else will take his place.

4) New stuff (tm)

Quests, items, craftables, mounts, achievements… the list is probably endless. This is considered a good thing by many (me included, by the way). It also means old stuff will be old – in almost all cases that means it’s worth less.

Time to start cleaning: My bank has already undergone “periodic maintenance” – two bags are still reserved for mementos, everything else is either sold, going to be sold, going into last minute crafting or is “current gear”. My backpacks are going to suffer the same. Currently I lug around several different armour sets (general tanking, general dps and subsets like “frost resist” and “expertise heavy”). There are also quest-related things like a tournament lance etc.

My plan is to start into Cataclysm with a set of dungeon gear (tanking), a levelling gear (fury dps) with all of the optionals gone. From current reports I’ll have a few potions, but not many – there is bound to be new ones and my current raid gear is better than the average, so I’m less likely to die than average.

New gear will ruthlessly replace old gear. I know my raiding epics are shiny, but if the green drop that turns my carefully assembled set into a clown suit is better, it’ll be used. Note: I am not willing to enchant levelling items, so I will make careful note of all the stats (which lead to a rather large amount of TBC epics still being better than WotLK quest drops at level 80 – they were rapidly replaced by “level 80 blues” with enchants).

4a) Crafting materials old and new

Crafting materials are a special case – personally I’m going to get rid of everything. There are guides around suggesting to stock up on materials now while they are cheap, either to rake in profit from newly levelling goblins and worgen or from materials that retain their value and/or can be used for max level crafting.

It’s a bit of a gamble. Sometimes material lists change for an expansion. I seem to recall plans to level blacksmithing by making eternium rods with very cheap materials which worked in the WotLK beta but were useless in WotLK “the game”. Eternium rods were patched to turn grey at 375 blacksmithing.

Changes like this are quite possible (and I’d consider them likely). More room for new things.

4a-i) The auction house.

This will be changing drastically in price after the expansion. If you are playing it regularly, you’ll just notice changes and live with them. If you are not interested usually, you’ll find that most prices will be amusingly/disgustingly high after the new expansion.

New materials will sell for insane amounts at the beginning (I remember frostweave (at the start of WotLK) and netherweave (at the start of TBC) to be insanely expensive). This means levelling a crafting profession will be very costly at the start. Consider carefully whether you consider investment something you can recover from max level crafting, or if you’d rather spend the time harvesting your own materials.

Harvesting them does not make them free – after all you could sell them on the AH yourself for great amounts of shinies. If you enjoy farming new mats while you level along – this might be for you, though. And I can only recommend Chases guide to gold making in all its forms.

5a-ii-alpha) So … a summary?

It’ll be full. It’ll be freaky. It’ll be a whole new game. Things will have to be learnt again, learnt completely new and there is always the option to just bumble along and see what happens. In all likelihood all of those will work. Blizzard does design the game to be accessible to a wide spread of players. No one will die all the time – even if you just got to level 80 last week and are wearing a lot of greens. You just might have to play more carefully – and possibly learn more about the new game than the overgeared people.

Have fun – and I found that a cup of tea really helps with watching the idiot factor as a bemused spectator instead of as a victim.

Battle for Gnomeregan – Meh!

2010-09-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

I hope the title didn’t give it away. I am not too terribly impressed with the Battle for Gnomeregan (week 1?) for the moment. The quests at the start (the ones available to any level) were cute. I liked the gnomish drill sergeant showing us all the valuable skills required of the infantry.

Okay, so maybe they were not the most encouraging lessons, but no matter. The “fly around and throw things at tiny targets” mission was okay – it could have been more Death-Star like if there was some incoming fire, but oh well.

And then there is the motivational speech – brilliance in itself, mostly for being so utterly rubbish. It reminded me strongly of the “40 motivational speeches in under 2 minutes” thing.

The final event of retaking the Gnomer? Not so much.

It seems Blizzard either prepared this a long while ago (hmm… this voter says nay) or didn’t listen to any of the comments about the Wrathgate questline. Basically (and sorry, spoilers ahead here): You join the mechanized army of High Tinkerer Mechatorque, approach a fortified position outside the entrance, blow up some turrets, walk towards the tunnel, destroy waves of adds driven forth by a small nuclear device, jump down into the lift-shaft (without getting specifically told you have a parachute – but you do) and then battle some more things until the High Tinker disarms another nuclear device.

Sure … the dialogue was fun. I really rather enjoyed it (What? You left it on the factory default?...), but once again players get a ridiculous damage buff and are healed by Deus Ex Gnomish-Machina every second for more than they can possibly take damage.

I only played this from a tank perspective, but this is not fun. Sure, it might be okay as dps. I don’t mind seeing big numbers bubbling up above my head, I have to admit. It’s also nice not to actually have to worry about drawing aggro – especially as the wildly random composition of each “expedition group” does not necessarily have a tank. But seriously?

My numbers for shield slam are still pathetically low. I am basically watching a guided movie – and walking behind a bunch of people. On the second try (I had to go afk during the first and was subsequently killed in an un-ressable-position – that was nice as well!) I just didn’t even bother fighting any more.

If this is the case, why not just show me an in-game movie instead. Something with better acting and more drama. Something like the Wrathgate film, which was good, not like the Invasion of Undercity, which was tedious and boring.

Stop bloody taking the game out of the game!

Thank you. And I’d really like to hear a healers comment on this one. Is it just as bad for you?

Your Soul belongs to the Lich King

2010-08-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Just a little heads-up. Because I am a curious person. And I keep hearing my raid leaders say "Whatever you do, when you die on the Lich King fight, do not release until we tell you to" (and yes, you can hear the 'bold' in there).

When you all die and the Lich King starts doing his little ressurection spell there actually is a "release" button on your screen.

Looks like this:

But when you try and actually press that release button you get that message there: "Your soul belongs to the Lich King". So unless you miss the ressurection, you're actually safe. No one can ~~fuck up~~ mess up this part. And from there on out, it's all smooth sailing anyway.

P.S. Sorry if I spoilt it for you. If you somehow managed to get this far into the expansion without learning that you get killed at 10% and then ressurected I am amazed. I feel with you. And I truly am sorry for ruining it. But hey... we sometimes learn things even though we do not want to - like "sex can lead to babies" and "fire is hot". Disappointment is just another part of life, eh?

Who does the Lich King remind you of?

2010-08-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

Well that is a serious question right there - and how did it come up? By accident, I assure you.

My lovely wife asked me what our baby was watching downstairs - and me, being the good husband that I am, answered instantly (while still reading Tams post) with no thought about what I was actually replying to, what the question was or anything else (It's like that "Does this dress look my bum look fat?" questions - you are not afforded time to think, you are required to answer instantly with a resounding "No! Of course not!").

My reply? "The Lich King"

Which .. err.. was not technically true. Our baby does not have a privately made home video of a WoW-celebrity in the video cassette player (there - showing my age again, ah well).

What he actually was watching was Winnie the Pooh.

Now admittedly, there are some differences. However, just to prove that I was not totally demented, let me offer a list of things where Winnie the Pooh and Arthas, the Lich King are very similar.

5) Both rely excessively on one item for their power (or stoutness) - Honey and Frostmourne, not neccessarily in the order of the two listed figures.

4) Both are shown wearing the same old suit forever. Arthas in his black armour since his first appearance in Howling Fjord, Winnie in his grubby red t-shirt.

3) Both have a tendency to mock their devout servants recklessly and possibly without noticing. In the case of Arthas we are talking about the "You have served me well, Drakkuru, by leading these heroes here" line, in the case of Winnie we're talking about the "This could also be named Pooh and Piglet corner, if it wasn't longer and thus not as good".

2) Both are a bit stout. Seriously.

A little less "letting your minions do all the work for you", a little more exercise, perhaps?

1) And finally: Both speak with a voice as if they had a cold. Examples? Sure... here is the official WotLK trailer, and here is Winnie, stuck in a hole.

I wonder ....

Why I have trouble roleplaying in World of Warcraft

2010-08-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

One of those confessional posts ... without much current action. I had to do one eventually, didn't I?

Right.. let's start with the rambly backstory. I play MMORPGs for a while now (as pointed out once or twice before). The first one I picked up was Ultima Online which had no quests, no endgame and non-consentual pvp. There was technically no reason to do anything - of course back then there were also no chat channels, so you could only use it as a chat client as long as you were on the same screen as the person you were talking to. Roleplaying was about as effective as it is now on the Roleplaying Servers in WoW - some people did, others did not. There were no rules, and I have not heard of an instance where Origin had to install a Goldshire Patrol.

There were a few other games coming out later that I tried, starting in the proper three-dimensional playstyle common now - Everquest, Asherons Call and others come to mind. Graphics were getting better (compared to Ultima), but they were far from what we are used today. No surprises.

(Picture taken from here)

I already found it harder to play in those games - and didn't quite grasp why. Of course the usual excuses come to mind: wrong people, getting older, outgrowing a phase, etc.

Interestingly enough, my roleplaying phase came back with Star Wars Galaxies.

And it was good fun. There was all sorts of things you could do. They even had professions in the game that were completely useless in combat - pure traders, entertainers and image designers (yes, there was basically a hairdresser profession). Of course many players mixed and matched those with combat classes - if they were not going for the optimized flavour-of-the-month design (tri-master in pistoleer, smuggler and bounty hunter comes to mind).

Now that I am again finding time to wonder about "what's going on" in World of Warcraft I may have stumbled upon another reason I personally find it hard to roleplay.

See...

There is a certain amount of munchkinism hidden in my friendly shell. I do love to optimize my characters and used to spend hours brooding over three character points at the end of a pen-and-paper session to find the optimal point to spend them. Depending on the game not even in something combat related (Combat in GURPS? Eek. You might actually get hurt!).

With time that also allows me to spin a backstory, to basically grow with the character. At the start of a game there will be a rudimentary backstory, but all the details, all the colour come with the game itself. After a while the character may have become quite powerful (or started there, for something like a Superhero game), but it's only with time that the story comes together.

Now this does transfer to online games as well. As long as there is a good amount of character development, a story is easy to find. And suddenly I find it more and more difficult to "justify" the story.

Let me post two pictures to point out what I mean:

An armed and armoured dwarf. Fabulous hairstyle, pornstar moustache. It's all there. This is not quite best-in-slot gear for a tank, but not too terribly far off either. Look at all those lovely big ... numbers! Mind and eyes up here, please!

Almost 4000 stamina, enough health to last roughly 48175 1-damage hits and 33k armour. A veritable brick wall.

The same dwarf, the same fabulous hairstyle but this time covered with nothing more substantial than a tabard. Again, I'd like to direct your attention away from the amazing physique and towards the numbers.

Only 174 stamina left (a 23rd, roughly), 9700 health (rounding generously - a fifth) and 218 armour (a 150th of the dressed amount). Not so much "Brick Wall" any more - more like moderately pudgy dwarf with a tabard draped over his shoulders.

Just because I can, there is also a screenshot of a new dwarf.

Again a drop in power: only 23 stamina left (1/8th of the amount at level 80), 70 health (a 140th, roughly) and 34 armour (1/6th).

So what does that show me? Well, I gained quite a generous amount of health from merely leveling up. Anything else completely pales in comparison to the amount of stats that my little dwarf gained from his gear. It's not the character that gets stronger, it's the equipment.

Still nothing new there - how does that tie in with me being unable to ~~cyber up some hot chicks in Dalaran~~ roleplay the character properly? Well, improvements gained from gear somehow are less "real". To me, at least (There, that's the cunningly hidden spilling the beans on my state of mind).

It won't change - not in this game, anyway. The whole design is based on this "items" thing. Makes sense, if you are trying to get people to raid the same content over and over again.

It does affect more than games, though...

However much I like the Brent Weeks "Night Angel" trilogy, the main character only becomes as good as he is at the end by an artifact (or seven - let's not spoil everything here). I find it harder to identify with the character than with someone more gritty, who can just pick up a different sword and fight just as effectively. For a good example, I'd recomment Logan from the "First Law" trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.

What does that mean for me as a person? Well, probably that I'd rather be able to fight well (in the mud, ~~with naked elf chicks,~~ with a sword) than to swing a "singing and dancing sword of superiour enchantedness" that mocks my slightly excessive weight and low stamina when I draw it.

So ... errr... let's try a quick summary: I don't like games/books/films that are based on items - I prefer personal power. The kind that cannot be stolen in the next village by a cruel thief/gamemaster.

Yep.

Too many buffs!

2010-08-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

So there is now (err… rather... a while ago, but that is beside the point) talk about spreading a few of the more iconic buffs around – mages will be shamans and such.

Now one of the curious developments also combines the effects of Blessing of Might and Wisdom. Nerf enhancement shamans and retribution paladins, says I! But overall, the effect might not be all that large. It is a good start, however, to a rather major problem.

Now I’m not sure how much of an eye you keep on your buffs during a fight. Maybe you are one of those players who use an add-on (like BuffMore) and just react to red and green light*. There are many, many buffs up there (err.. or over there, or wherever you placed yours). Too many of them. More than 10, easily, and with the latest “conversion” of some buffs to permanent (that 5% crit for everyone from fury warriors not just cats? That one!) they are always present.

This seriously reduces the visibility and impact of short-term reactive buffs. Of course there are add-ons that take care of this: Power Auras (for a shiny and popular choice) or TellMeWhen (lightweight and .. err.. rather ugly) come to mind. Those remind me when my Sword and Board is up, my arcane missiles are free or my next exorcism will be instant.

Is this really necessary? I mean, what is the benefit for me as a player of buffs. Sure – they do improve my performance (sometimes by much less than I previously thought – thanks PewPewLazers), but in the end the situation is like this:

You enter a group/raid/sparkling adventure setting and every buffs. All their buffs will be applied. Especially the ones no one really needs, because otherwise you’d forget them when they come in handy (Hello Shadow Protection! – my BuffMore also tells me you are unexpected). Our raid leaders (thank you) will remind people if they forgot a buff – thanks to add-ons, by the way, not because they memorized the icon of every single one of the 2076529 buffs that should be present.

Gah!

For the next expansion I’d want a different system. A system that allows three different situational buffs. In every 5-man instance you are awarded “Small Unit Tactics”, in every 10-man raid you are granted “We’re an army now” and in a 25-man raid you’ll have “Large Scale Combat”. Those buffs combine all those piddly little stupid things into one global buff (much like the charming presence of our King in the entrance to ICC does, maybe). All other buffs are removed. Gone. Good riddance.

And then we can focus on keeping an eye on the important things that actually change during combat. Short term buffs that really make a difference. Like Timewarp (err… Bloodlust).

* On that note: Why does my BuffMore tell me that “Defensive Stance” is an unexpected buff. Was I supposed to be a tank-spec when I first installed it? Does it default to DPS classes? What the hell is going on here!

GM Support at my worst

2010-08-14T03:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah no, that is no spelling error. See... it's like this. About two weeks ago I thought I'd jump onto my little warrior once more and bash some heads in. After all... a fully heirloomed up cow-of-doom should have a fun time.

Logged in, found my favourite axe in my bags, and off I trundled. It was only after the first few fights that I noticed my studly bare chest and the rippling six-pack.

Which ... err... made me go and look for my armour. Seems they not in the mail of any of my other characters. Nor in the mailboxes. And I checked all the platewearing classes. Suspicion aroused, I even made my deathknight finally walk down into "Whateverville" to the mailbox. Didn't steal the horse even - mail was more important. No armour.

So ... I sent a GM ticket. Asking if I had lost my heirlooms in the mail. And got a reply back that they would not reimburse items that they could not determine I had lost. Meh.

So .. I sent another mail. With more detail - oh yes!

And look, I got a reply within minutes. A reply basically saying "you are a silly bugger, go and check your characters properly". Which is ... well deserved. I might have to look into an addon that gives me a searchable inventory for all my alts.

And not Arcinventory. I hate it.

Let's be a little security conscious, shall we?

2010-07-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Not to jump on a bandwagon or anything, but there have been a few better attempts to hack accounts around lately.

This is not one of them. He didn't even point out to me that I was supposed to go there - and what was the silly thing with Blizaard about? Next time at least give the initial whisper a random name to make the shifted line appear more valid.

Anyway... on to the real concern. This morning I got an email that was about as good as the one Noisy Rogue talked about.

It read something like this:

Hello,

Blizzard Entertainment recently received a request to change the e-mail address used to log in to the Battle.net account with the username anoldandunusedbutwebpublished@emailadresshe.re. The e-mail address k***@hotmail.com has been specified as the new username for this Battle.net account. An email has been sent to this new address containing a verification link to complete the change.

Once the new address has been verified, the e-mail address anoldandunusedbutwebpublished@emailadresshe.re can no longer be used to log in to this Battle.net account or any World of Warcraft accounts merged with this Battle.net account.

If you did not initiate this request, please click here to contact the Blizzard Billing & Account Services team immediately.

Sincerely,

The Battle.net Account Team

Online Privacy Policy

MessageID hhyx9n7odruzdcck7w0aptbg

Now if I had not recently changed my email adress, this probably would have been less effective. What surprised me is that it is a perfect copy. This is the actual "you changed no email recently" email.

Spot what's wrong with it?

No?

Neither did I.

Mainly because it's not there. Displayed above is the pure text part of the email - not the html email. In the html version there is a link at the end to contact Blizzard Billing and Account Services.

Let me not quote the wrong one here, but it was not http://www.battle.net/account/support leading instead to a .us site. Well done, it did make me wonder for a while.

Oh yes, and in case you haven't done so yet - go and get an authenticator. Cunningly available from the Blizzard store, which you'll likely find linked on the real Blizzard homepage. I won't even bother linking that here, right?

The good old times

2010-07-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Right, so this post was inspired by playing a rogue again. Not a rouge, not a mascara- but if you were looking for information on either, here is a link. Don't ask me about the validity of it, I try not to use too much makeup. Doesn't go with the beard stubble.

Anyway, I played another rogue because I wanted to find out if I am still crap at it (yep, nothing changed) and if I could improve my gameplay of one (hmm. Not so far). I am trying out the guides posted by Samuel Tempus over at Slice and Dice. Combat clearly is the way I was meant to play - no thinking, just charge in and bash it to death. Just like a paladin, or deathknight, or warrior.

Except - I die a lot.

Subtlety is the most fun to play. I seriously enjoy taking somethings health out halfway in one ambush, then beating the rest to pulp - except the damage output is laughably pathetic in instances. Or maybe that's just me.

However - and this is where the post cometh from - there are class quests for rogues. Several, in fact, and they are actually great. Now the warrior quests for the defensive and berserker stance are okay, but the rogue ones are something entirely more flavoury.

There are probably a few I will get in the future (I seem to remember one about disarm trap?), the first two being a lockpicking quest and something in Westfall.

In this case, scout out a tower with an evil archmage (or some such) - steal a key from one of his guards (killing it doesn't work), abuse their weakened backsides (they die instantly from Ambush or Backstab) and finally pick the lock to his chest and grab his notes. Really really good fun.

And then you get poisoned.

With one of the old things.

Remember those diseases in Stratholme that made everyone but paladins and dwarves curse? They lasted ages.

Not quite as bad as this one, though. All the major rogue abilities taken out for a week. Of course you can get rid of it by dying (and that was, in fact, a recommended tactic back in the day) or you might find a friendly healer. But if you are a lone wolf (well, lone vegetable, in this case, but that is beside the point) you are out for a rather fun quest.

First you get told that no one can be a proper rogue without knowing about poisons. So far, so good. Apparently you can not train the poisons skill without having to do this quest, but pfft. Then you are told to get yourself checked out in the basement. By a proper doctor, which the rogue guild just has on hand. Yay for forward planning!

This quest actually required you to emote at the NPC. I don't know how many others there are - I think there might be one more? Not sure.

And then there is a conference with his collegues and off you go to collect a cure.

Oh yes... his partners in crime:

A stone statue and a squirrel. And they told me I smell. Wonderful.

Whee.. back to playing, though. This is fun.

What a short, exciting trip it has been!

2010-07-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

Erm yes. Sorry in advance, but another post admiring my own progress coming up. My excuse this week shall be ... hmm... solar flares. No wait, that's too easy. Let's pretend it helps me keep track of what I did when - yeah, that sounds much better. And martians. Under the earth.

Anyway.. took us a whole three weeks to get a shiny meta-achievement. We started basically by just doing heroic modes. The difficulty difference between the single encounters is quite interesting: heroic Blood Queen and Saurfang for instance are almost identical to the normal versions. Heroic Sindragosa and Putricide were a little more interesting. Yes. Interesting is the word I want to use.

In the next week we did the achievements. Not heroic - and in retrospect I'm incredibly happy we didn't.

Let me quote the strategy guide we used in the end (and I don't know where it was originally ripped from, sadly). My comments are just added here as well, to make it appear more "self-made". I should so get into science - I can fake own work like anything!

Marrowgar and Boned - Easy - just nuke the crap out of the spikes.

Lady Deathwhisper "Full House" - Hard - There is a guide on tankspot, but in the end it boils down to getting lucky with your add transformations. At the end we had 7 adds up when we finally killed her. The achievement was listed as "hard", same as Sindragosa. Ha!

Lootship and "I'm on a Boat" - Easy - "Just rotate the people who jump and be imba on cannons". That basically summed it up. I would have preferred the tactic with one tank, one healer and all melee dps jumping over and staying permanently - then evade the enraged and unhappy boss by hopping up on his bridge and back down again ... but this was easy.

Saurfang "I've gone and made a mess" - Easy - This is one of the "done it right" achievements. You should get this.

Festergut "Flu Shot shortage" - Easy - First spore people run away, second spore people do their normal thing and first innoculated people run away again. Third spores are distributed as normal.
Rotface "Dances with oozes" - Medium - Start as per normal - once you merge 4 oozes into the 1st big thing - move along to a secondary spawn point sufficiently after the 1st tank who is dragging the ooze in a circle. Have a 2nd kiter - possibly a ranged dps pick up the 2nd big ooze and keep kiting it after the tank - not letting the 2 merge. We used three tanks for this.

Putricide "Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion..." - Easy - Nuke the crap out of the oozes - as you are not allowed to slow them - normal strategy is fine. This works especially well with a mage casting invisibility on the first tear gas and taking out the orange ooze before it becomes active. Ranged DPS helps but is not technically required.

Princes "The Orb Whisperer" - Easy - Keleseth tank must have five dark balls and empowered flame has to be walked under before it is allowed to reach a person to minimize the incoming damage.

Blood Queen "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" - medium - Stupid achivement that can be given to a few people each weak. Other than that easy enough.

Valithria "Portal Jockey" - Easy - Either have a 4th offspec healer with us to take 3rd portal every go - which would make encounter even faster or have a random dps take the 3rd portal every time. We used the fourth healer.

Sindragosa "All you can eat" - Insane - Basically on the last phase - People have to get behind iceblocks before you can reach 5 stacks of the stacking debuff that is applied by Sindragosa on the last phase "Mystic Buffet" it's called. With some practice doable. This was (luckily) nerfed from the original 4 stacks max. And it's still incredibly hard. We finally did it by keeping two iceblocks up and only killing the older one when the tank shouted "clear". Tank communication was the most important. A close second is the placement of the iceblocks - both need to be as near the head as possible, but obviously avoid trapping anyone else. On our last attempts we tanked Sindragosa in the centre of the grey circle and dropped the iceblocks on the edge (lighter grey) - right distance, but OH BOY did this take practise.

Lich King - "Been waiting for a long time for this" - medium - The first plague has to be dispelled "away" from the horrors/ghouls (and the raid, obviously) to make sure you loose it. The second plague goes onto the monsters as normal - and by then enough ghouls and horrors have spawned to stack it to 30. A little bit of DPS control is required to not push the Lich King into the next phase prematurely. He looses his "increased damage" buff in phase 2, so once you got 30 stacks of plague and pushed him into phase 1.5 the rest of the fight works as normal.

And what was that all about. Well, the flappy thing, obviously. And because I still remember Tamarind complaining about mounting his dwarf, here are some pictures of the thing as well.

Just the "showing off" screenshot here. I have to say, I enjoy the skeletal look. Better than those ridiculous griffins the deathknights get, anyway.

And the seating position is quite nice actually. Doesn't look as weird as on the bear or the tiger. Something is wrong with the poor guys snout, though.

Oh yes.. and it's a nice mount. Because I got it from Darion Mograine, not that silly bugger Fordring.

So what have I learnt from the RealID debacle?

2010-07-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

Was there a message for me, personally, in all that mess?

Several, actually.

I’ve been going about my online life moderately carefully so far. I do have a facebook account (err no – no link, thanks), but most of my settings are locked to “friends only”. I have (in retrospect) added a few too many people there – some who I’d only consider very casual acquaintances – while a few people are clearly missing. Professional “facebookish” services are not very widely used over here (yet?).

Unfortunately, that was not always the case. On a webpage I own, I had an email published for a very long time, complete with @ and .de, for every crawling spam-bot to find and abuse. Many bloggers already are better there, using (at) and (dot) and such in their descriptions – or going to even greater lengths to make sure a human reader will understand, while a machine will be stumped (hopefully).

So apart from cancelling an account (and reactivating once they had assured us it wouldn’t happen), what have I done?

Well, I’ve been over my facebook settings again – I’ve made triple sure it’s all “friends”, not “friends of friends”. I’ve changed and created several new email accounts – Blizzard has its own (so any “official email” not appearing there has to be phishing by default), as does the Blog and the other games. I wish I could have changed my name on the Blizzard account to John Doe – sadly phone support was never available, so I couldn’t even try.

I’ve also upped the general paranoia levels a bit. Basically: It’s Blizzards fault, but no future game subscription will see a real name ever again. There will be faked parts in it – added advantage: Should I get snail-mail at home with the fake name, I’ll at least know who sold out my name.

Larissa has waxed poetically about how much of a loss of trust this was – single employees are still okay in her book, the company as a whole has lost her trust.

I can’t say that I’d put it the same way. Some Blizzard employees apparently fall for the same traps that players do. They thought that sharing a bit of information wouldn’t hurt, that it would all be secure enough. Interestingly, those are also the people who don’t mind putting their name on the forums (see the case of the poor Community Person – weather it was his information or someone else’s doesn’t really matter at this point). Those who were the ones to cry for their privacy are likely also the ones who would have been hard to find anyway.

Still, the matter remains – it is not for a game company to decide (retroactively, I might add, otherwise I would have been John Doe since the start) to share my information with other people.

So yes… internet safety is not something we can ignore. It’s also something a lot of people do not take care of properly. There are guides for safety on the web (surprise, surprise) – and even though many of them are written for parents with children in mind, the general information does apply. Let me quote from the FBI “Parents Guide to Internet Safety”:

Instruct your children:

- to never arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone they met on- line;

- to never upload (post) pictures of themselves onto the Internet or on-line service to people they do not personally know;

- to never give out identifying information such as their name, home address, school name, or telephone number;

- to never download pictures from an unknown source, as there is a good chance there could be sexually explicit images;

- to never respond to messages or bulletin board postings that are suggestive, obscene, belligerent, or harassing;

- that whatever they are told on-line may or may not be true.

Now I don’t agree to all of those suggestions myself.

I have had, in fact, many very pleasant guildmeetings in real life. They were my choice to participate in, however, and there was a promise of beer and cocktails and pizza and long debates about the state of warlocks (or earlier: Dragontaming and Lightsabers).

I also may once or twice in my life have deliberately downloaded a sexually explicit image. Again, my choice (and I'd do it again).

I decided to trust those strange people I played games with enough to go out for a beer (at a youthful 25 or so for the first time – maybe I was still overconfident), and I decide what I download.

Especially the "don't meet strangers" line appears a lot more sensible for children than adults, though, and the rest of the lines basically describe what I do not want Blizzard to distribute to the public – or even for Blizzard to just possess. My name and phone number and my photo.

Lastly: Not everything told online is true (that line applies especially to companies that want to make a profit. Yes, that is really everyone. Up the paranoia please, it is a good idea) and replying to trolls never helped – and can be used by online companies as an excuse for a blatant abuse of privacy.

A cunning plan, in retrospect!

2010-07-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

Did you notice that the instance we are currently considering "proper content" is in the frozen cold north? With lots of frost attacks and cold things and ice and such?

Even though it completely ruins immersion - it really makes me want to go there!

And now for something completely different - Part 1

2010-07-09T15:42:00.000-07:00

Part 1 - see what I did there? Keeping you all in suspense while you wait for part 2. Oh cunning, cunning me.

Anyway. Today, class, we'll be talking about tanking Sindragosa. More specifically - why on earth were we so silly to switch the tank in front of her face in phase 2.

Let me illustrate something nifty with a picture or two - after all, a picture says more than a thousand words and only uses about six-thousand times as much memory.

So this is roughly what the fight looks like in phase 2 (10-man displayed here). An angry dragon is on the ground, pulsing frost damage, rending and tearing (and cleaving - never forget about the cleavage) and she occasionally breathes ~~fire~~ frost. The frost (while welcome at a time like this, with temperatures outside in the gazillion degrees) slows down the tanks' (and hopefully not some stray dps) movement speed. Running behind the iceblock while a second tank rushes up, taunts here in the face, possibly eats half a frostbreath is thus not really the ideal solution.

And I still can't believe we didn't figure that out earlier.

So basically the cunning trick is to park the second tank on her right hind leg (as indicated above nicely by a red circle. No the other red circle. The one on the right hind leg! Yes... that one!) and have him step under her tail just before the taunt. The iceblocks are close, not much running is involved and the tanks get a really enormous visual indicator of aggro.

Frostbreathing dragonface? You got aggro!

Ginormous Dragon Arse? The other tank has her attention. Go and ~~have an icecream~~ remove your stacks.

Now I can see how the above image is possibly a bit confusing, so here - have another one.

See the positions now? One tank and one iceblock per side. No need to run (for the tanks) from the head to the ice and back - just a simple taunt, tank, wait, sidestep, getridofstacksnownownowohpleasedon'tkilltheiceblockalreadywhewokay, taunt, etc.

Easy peasy.

Why did we not think of this before?

How to contact Blizzard or Cancel your Account?

2010-07-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

Interesting. In this time of strife, the phone lines at Blizzard are permanently full. This being the second day that I try to reach someone to change my name (preferred) or cancel my account.

I cannot, however, reach Blizzard on the webpage either. Trying to follow the link from the homepage most of the time leads to a "failed to find this page" error.

Here you are, though: https://eu.battle.net/account/management/wow/

For us Europeans that is the link to account management on Battle.net. The "Cancel Subscription" button is near the top.

The good and the bad, all in one shiny day...

2010-07-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

A bright day it is. Sun is shining, a few white clouds about to break up the monotony and we are currently stuck at 25°C. Perfect in every sense.

Yesterday it was a little bit cooler and a little more cloudy, but of course yesterday I finally handed in my 25 saronites and a few bits and dribbles and got my Shadow's Edge. A proper highlight as well. I am now wondering about how to most quickestest get my 1000 souls. This is probably the coolest way in a long time. I have sort of decided to play DPS during trash and go back to tanking for proper fights.

And use a weird abomination spec for the fights with Putricide, Sindragosa and the Blood Queen. Of course it's possible to tank with a two-handed weapon and a shield - it just requires a bit of creativity. Ends up a lot like this, though:

Impractical, and frankly, quite hideous (to quote an old friend).

So yay! Highly cheered up and bouncy all night. Looking forward to the next days.

And then, of course, came the bad. The weather forecast predicts something around 38°C for the weekend. I play near the roof in a room with one window (and a fan, a blessed, precious fan). It's not going to be pretty (and only part of that is because I might have to play topless. I am not a supermodel).

There also is this RealID thing. When it first was announced I was sort of looking forward to it. I would love to be able to chat with my friends from other servers. It worked in Star Wars Galaxies (not very well - you had to enter the names manually as in MyFriend-ServernameofLengthyWeirdSpellingInStarWarsStyle) and it's nifty. And then I got to read the FAQ (linked again here, because it needs to be easier to find).

So friends of my friends can see my real name?

In addition, players with Real ID relationships will be able to view each other's online status, Rich Presence information, and Broadcast messages, and will be able to see which character and game their Real ID friends are playing across supported Blizzard games.

Oh really now? So people I do not know - or worse, actively do not like (we had this argument before, some of my friends really enjoy playing with someone I'd call a total tosser) - know my name, the game I currently play, which alt I am on (some of which I specifically created to avoid ~~the tosser~~ specific people) and what server and such?

Admittedly - in most cases that won't be a big problem. I am fairly laid back about abuse (see the Spellpower DK posts - I'm currently trying to generate rude remarks) and can ignore a lot, but it's a little concern.

Look, even facebook allows me to choose to share my information only with friends. Facebook. You know? The people Blizzard just signed a cooperation with? The security nightmare of security nightmares? Not Blizzard, though.

Does this concern me?

Well, it didn't so much when I started online gaming. I was a mere 20 years old, going on 21. The internet was still young and the search engine of choice was Altavista and possibly Yahoo!. Are they even still around? Seems like. I was actually proud when my email account got the first spam message.

When I finished university and applied for my first job, I didn't feel bad about listing my work on Stratics as a hobby. It outlined that I actually wrote English well enough to post on an international site. That's how I meant to play that card and that's (luckily) how my employer read it. I did get a question on "I hope you'll find enough time to work with all that internet gaming", but didn't even react to that at the time.

Currently, I see the whole situation a bit more critical. I have published a paper or two on academic subjects. I'd rather like those found than a post of mine on technical problems connecting to ~~my favourite~~ a game. I have posted on the official boards a grand total of three times in the last five years. Still too many for my employer to find out about.

I want the choice to display private information - and yes, I consider my name private.

Blizzard seemed to agree with this up until two years ago:

Nowadays, this seems to be different - and pretty much all blogs and large sites connected with World of Warcraft have pointed that out. Once or roughly 22 thousand times (at 7 pm Central European Time today).

My cunning plan was to just change my name. They don't technically need an accurate name for their billing - I can just pay by gametime card like any good troll or chinese farmer. Sadly, it's impossible to change my name without rather large legal hassle. I remembered giving up on that point before when my wife accepted my name.

Upload legal documents pertaining to my namechange? I'm sorry, but this goes too far for a game.

A lot of quite real concerns have been brought up within the uproar - about stalking, about discrimination and about using the game as an escape from real life. I'll not reiterate. Check a random link (not usually known for their lenience towards whining) for examples.

At lunchtime today I was completely with Gnomageddon. I'm real sad to see him cancel (him? her? I'll never find out via RealID now - and can't send him/her chocolates either by a simple google search. Such an opportunity lost!) but I was very much tempted to do the exact same thing.

I have calmed down a little, though. At the moment I choose not to enable RealID and I'll give Blizzard until the end of my current billing period. The outcry is rather massive and cannot really be overlooked. They are basically aware that this was not a good stunt to pull.

Make some changes to the system to allow me more choice over who and where I want to share information. I'm quite happy playing the game, but I am not willing to have World of Warcraft trample all over my privacy. When this billing period is over, I'll have to reevaluate my commitment. In the current state of affairs we will be parting.

And yes, I am aware that no one from Blizzard will reach an outlying Blog such as this. I merely use this as a medium of information for friends and family. Don't add me to RealID yet - I have no intention whatsoever of accepting anything.

So it came to pass that it was my wifes birthday...

2010-07-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

And as usual, I am out of ideas. So I got her "4 inches more".

Now before you start spluttering.... it's not as bad as it sounds. I've done it before, and even though the whole procedure does leave a sizeable dent in the finances, it's usually well worth it. Of course... there is usually a small wait involved.

Last time it was only 2 inches, for starters, but this year she's got the whole deal. Wider as well.

And not to get back at her for "My husband is a big fat meanie" or anything, but I did NOT want to hear "it looks so tiny" when she first unwrapped it. That is just NOT how it's done!

Of course, once we got it all going properly the comment of "Oh my god, this is the biggest thing I've ever seen" helped a little.

And before this all gets out of hand... this is what I am talking about.

Abolish Disease may not be the ideal choice

2010-07-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

Right. So a guy who plays melee classes (preferrably plate) decides to do a post about a healer spell. We all remember (that can be the royal we) about my single time healing in normal Nexus. It was not pretty. A bit like this, really:

However, for once I feel vaguely qualified to talk about a topic that is very dear to me. In todays case: The abolish disease spell.

More specifically, the Lich King fight.

I mentioned this before (Sockpuppet.. yay!), but I usually get to tank the Shambling Horrors and kill them with the plague of doom. Shame the damage is not counted for me on Recount - several million damage to the protection warrior would be a nice change for once.

Now if you are unsure about the mechanics, I can recommend all sorts of links - how about this one. They do make their lives unneccessarily difficult with this positioning, but ah well. At least all the abilities are touched upon and it has shiny images.

Our topic today: Necrotic Plague.

The necrotic plague bounding around the platform is what is required to kill some of the adds. It does 50k damage (10 man - 100k in 25man) per stack every 3 seconds. That also means you don't want it on a player for more than 2.95 seconds or so (2.99 if you really don't like them). Whenever the plague gets dispelled it jumps to a new eligible target in range - and range is small. So what the guide (and me) suggests is that you run close to a horror, have it dispelled off you, make it jump onto the horror and then watch the horror die messily a bit later.

The plague gains a stack whenever it jumps off a target naturally - two possible things can cause this:

1) It lasted for the full 12 seconds on a shambling horror,

2) It killed the target.

Yes, technically you can kill your offtank to gain an extra stack, however it is generally preferred to use the ghouls and horrors for having more stacks.

Also, of course our buddy Arthas does not just cast one, he will occasionally infect a new player with the plague just to make sure we have a fair chance to finish off his minions.

So .. what does that look like? Something like this...

The muddled mess on the top left side is the melee group. They are all doing their best to beat up the Lich King. A tank is also holding all the ghouls in position (all the ghouls? almost!) and merry AoE commences occasionally when people feel like it. The healers and ranged dps are grouped up in the bottom left corner. Only a leap away from the shambling horror (shown here in it's unenraged state).

Same image with more marks. All sorts of addons told me that I just got infected. And my debuff icons in the top right tell me it's 8 stacks. Oh nice. 400k damage inbound in 3 seconds and counting.

This is the point where one of our healers presses their "cure it now" buttons. And we can just hope it works. Mainly, because of this:

Note the "attempts"? Yeah.. they don't like us.

At first I thought there is hope, because of:

No attempting here, right? It's all going to be fine, right? Nothing can happen right? Notice the shaking and the edge and the slight insanity here?

Well.. it turns out that the "person" casting the spell is a level 83 boss. And of course all dispell mechanics have a chance to fail against effects cast by a higher level. Now this is where the melee-plate-dps shines through - I have not the foggiest idea how to ensure a dispell against higher level targets. Spell hit? Spell penetration? Lucky shake of the dice?

At least the official forums have no better answer either, but they confirm that "yes, Abolish and Cure Disease can fail and then people will die".

TL;DR:

If you rely on spells to cure the disease on the Lich King fight you might end up with dead people. Make sure the cure actually went through - when in doubt, trust the little green blinking light on your heal addon and cure again!

Random Screenshot Night

2010-06-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

I think I need to show that our guild is caring and thinks of everyone... so here, have a few random screenshots.

Exhibit the number one: A sock puppet.

See, I get to play adds tank on the lich king fight. So I'm all alone in my corner of the platform with just stinking horrors and a ghoul or two. So my lovely guild put a sock puppet down next to me to keep me company. *snif* I really appreciate it, guys.

Exhibit the number two: Our deathknight tank.

He always looks big and mean and scary, so to cheer him up on the Algalon fight - he got shiny bunny ears. Doesn't he look lovely with them?

Exhibit the number three: Our warlock for the day.

He told the lich king (in a stern voice, I might add) that he'd be draining his soul as punishment for his misdeeds. Well done, says I!

If I were bored...

2010-06-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

I'd probably play and blow something up with fireballs - but as both Pilf and Jakkru grabbed the list from Sorry Caps, I felt compelled to play, too.

So without further rambling (in the preamble anyway), the list:

1. Raider, farmer, PvPer, or altoholic?

A little bit of raider and altoholic, I suppose. Unlike my wife, I do have a proper "main" which I enjoy playing. And I tend to do all. I did all the quests, tried to play all the raids (since I play seriously - Molten Core was not my time of gaming) and rather enjoy the warrior tanking. I also have a vast variety of alts. Deathknight, Paladin, Druid, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, and Rogue at maximum level, several others lagging behind. I do just enjoy the leveling experience as well - although not in a healthy and sane fashion (read: playing for the quests), but rather for the success rate. Oh look! Another level!

2. Favorite raid or dungeon?

Used to be Karazhan, but I would by now shift that to Ulduar. Icecrown Citadel is actually quite fun as well, but Ulduar combines masterfully the comedy of Brann Bronzebeard with the tentacled horror from the past. The variety of ways to get into a hard-mode fight is also just brilliant - some are easy to start (beat a timer, press the red button), some require planning (so we're beating up the little guys first today, right?) and some are just flashing laser fun with fire and smoke and bombs and wheeeee....
3. Number one choice for a new playable race?

I'm not terribly bothered with new races, I have to admit. I'd like to see Murlocs, though. Nothing like charging the enemy with a fearless Mrgllbrgllhrgllll.

4. Class you suck the most at?

Difficult question again. From the leveling experience it would apparently be hunter. I find it slow and boring and cumbersome. From a raiding perspective it would have to be anything healerish. I am okay as long as nothing unexpected happens, but loose my cool when dps start blowing up and there is raidwide damage and fire and smoke and bombs and whaaaaaa....
5. Original UI or modded UI?

Slightly modded. I am personally actually a fan of Blizzards attempts to bring everything into the fold - but some things I cannot live without. My current version has more room at the top and bottom for bars and boxes and information and the game is a little compressed in the middle. Still - the layout is pretty close to the original.
6. Profession you've never levelled past 200?

None, I have to say. My lowest currently is enchanting at only 430, gaining slowly. I never found much use for it maxxed in the guild - someone is always around. I did want it high enough to disenchant my own green drops, so now is the time to get it up to Cataclysm levels, while dust is cheap and plentyful.

7. Favorite flying mount?

Hmm. I like the blue dragonhawk and the purple dragon. I love the red protodrake because of all the work that went into it. My favourite would still be one I do not have: The Ironbound Protodrake from Ulduar 25 achievements. Working on it, I'm sure. Well... if I can find another 25 mad people. Our server actually runs a weekly weekend run for those achievements, but it's always booked!
8. Nozdormu -- friend or foe, you figure?

Double answer. Personally I think the cooler storyline would be him to be evil. Using us (that's the heroesTM) to steer history into a direction he deems right towards a goal that might spell the apocalypse for the world. The bronze dragonflight is not exactly known for their gentle treatment of Azeroth. I mean... we get hired to help the orcs invade Azeroth and the Lich King become the Lich King.

However, in game lore I have to grudgingly accept that Blizzard probably intends Nozdormu to be good. As with all (harebrained) plots lately, we were shown the Lich King actually needs to be present (and there always has to be one - oh yes!) and such.

So I suppose I'd like him to be foe, I suspect he'll be friend.
9. Useless item you have in your bank that you'll never get rid of?

Never is a long time. I currently hang on to several vanity items - tabards and trinkets, mainly. I still have my voodoo gnomes and my housekeeping army, for instance. If bank space ever were truly rare, I'd be quite willing to get rid of them, though.
10. Most expensive thing you've ever bought?

I think two single items are almost tied there. The Tundra Travellers Mammoth and the Pillars of Might. The pants cost me 9 saronite + fluff (at a time when the saronites were still going around 1800 gold or so?), the mammoth just money. Overall, the Blue Dragonhawk comes out easily on top, though. I mean - this little flappy is the reason I bought 100 mounts in the first place.
11. Favorite starting area?

Bloodelfie area by far. I prefer it to the Draenei actually - and the two new ones are just better designed, better streamlined and a more pleasant experience than the old world ones. I am really looking forward to the new starting areas with Cataclysm, however.

12. Inane goal you worked hardest to achieve?

Did I mention the blue dragonhawk? Yeah? Well I personally think Loremaster is actually worse. So Loremaster wins the race.

13. Darion Mograine VS Tirion Fordring, gloves off -- winner is?

It would have to be good old Mograine. Tirion rambles too much (should I learn something from this sentence?). Sure - he can break iceblocks and shatter swords, but by the time he actually stopped talking and got around to working, Darion would have beaten him soundly.
14. Game music or your own playlist?

Game music actually - and not turned up very much. I actually rely a lot on audio clues during gaming and I need to hear when an opponent parries or when I miss my smash-in-the-face. I get ridiculed for that a lot - feel free to join in *grin*.
15. Particular option or setting that you always toggle on a new alt/server?

All quickbars set to show, profanity filter to off and auto-self-cast on. Then we go from there. Usually the next steps are setting up the mess of addons that has piled up in the centre of the screen and sort them around a little.
16. Highest amount of levels gained in one play session?

I couldn't say, but more than 10. Of course - playing from 1 to 11 only takes about 2 hours, so a new alt can probably reach level 16 to 20 in one play session. I can't say I kept track, though.
17. Thing you'd most like to experience or see in-game?

I'd love to be there for a server-first raid kill. Going in without knowing the tactics in advance, making them up on the fly and getting a boss down. However, I am well aware of the limitations to my reflexes and skill, so that'll stay a dream.

18. Worst PuG moment?

Nothing truly memorable. I do leave PUGs now and then, usually when I'm in a bad mood anyway and someone manages to upset me. It's not worth the pain and I'd rather wait for 30 minutes or do something else. However, I don't hold grudges for long and I can't really remember anything truly horrid.
19. Best dungeon/raid moment?

At the moment our second Lich King kill. We had worked for a long while, the first kill was a bit lucky (2 people dead, I think) and I wasn't sure we'd be able to repeat that. We got the bugger again with only three wipes and always ended up in the last phase (well.. the one with the vile spirits anyway) every attempt. It just shows that we actually do understand that encounter now and it was not just a lucky fluke.
20. Worst quest ever that you totally hate doing?

If I hate it, I won't do it. There are no quests that are required to be done any more. However, there were a few I did not enjoy much. In no particular order:

- The escort following the "Flute of Xavaric" drop in Felwood used to be a lot longer - and the tree was pvp flagged. Try escorting a helpless NPC for 20 minutes through a "contested" area? Bleh. Made much simpler lately.
- The Margol the Rager questline for the key to the Searing Gorge. This one was practially required in the olden days (when SG had no flightpoint) and it was a lot of senseless running back and forth.
- The necklace in Uldaman. Allegedly my bile for Uldaman is never unfunny, and this is one of the bloody reasons!

21. First thing you do when you hit 80?

Hearth to town and get my training usually. Not like those weird people who just log off.
22. Character (of yours) you would RP as if you had to?

Probably Snack, my fine warrior. However, I find that a quest/raid based game is not as well designed for roleplaying as a more open (sandbox) game - I never particularily felt like roleplaying in WoW. Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies were better suited for that.
23. Keyboard, mouse, or both for using abilities?

Both. Movement and important abilities are keyboard (because it's quicker), but the sheer amount of buttons my warrior needs cannot be fit in reach of my left hand. I have to click a few of the rare abilities and I also use the mouse for targetting (click-targetting and mouseover).

24. Thottbot or WoWhead?

Wowhead since it became available. Back in the days I used to use Thottbot (rarely) and Allakhazam (more frequently). Both are slow and horrible compared to the newer databases on the market, I thought.
25. Acronym you've seen in chat but don't understand?

Several. My favourite being IDD (and yes, Jakkru thankfully explained that to me today). I also had trouble with PMSL.
26. Plot point you'd like to see resolved someday?

Without reading a book you mean? Why does King Varian the horribly annoying have such a burning hatered for the horde? The same horde that was incredibly supportive in driving the demonic minions out of Azeroth. The guys we are at war against for no good reason. Actually: the war between Horde and Alliance would be even more interesting. Why?
27. Biggest thing you're looking forward to in Cataclysm?

I'm easy to please: New stuff! I want to be able to leap at my enemies and smite their heads with thunder, I want to fly my horse around Kalimdor and rain fire and devastation down on unsuspecting zevrah and I am really looking forward to more quests.

The overhaul of the graphics system is also a nice thing to look forward to. It's beginning to look a bit old-fashioned by now.
28. Guild event you'd like to see?

Chicken. All druids meet up on the flight platform in Dalaran and leap off the edge. Whoever deploys flight form closest to the ground wins. Bonus points for Boomkins who switch into owl-shape before going splat.

Most amusing anecdote to the above: When I suggested this in guild I got a lot of positive feedback. Two people tried it at once. One of them forgot she was on her Deathknight at the time, the other flew to the Violet Citadel spire and jumped. Know what you get close to the ground in Dalaran when you want to switch into flight form? "You cannot use that here" *evil grin*

2-0 for the floor so far.
29. Level range you hate being in?

1-20 because it's slow, you can't access half the abilities and some classes are just horrid in that range. I extend this to -40 for enhancement shamans. 78-79 is also not a big favourite of mine.
30. Favorite map to quest in?

I've seen that reply twice already, but yes. Nagrand is great. Although the starter areas in Lord of the Rings are rather amazing too.

Is that a good looking ~~dwarf~~ tree or what?

The Frost Lord Cometh!

2010-06-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

As you probably all remember, Fire Festival has started tonight at midnight. Now I'm luckily done with the torch juggling, but there are still lots of other things to do. I'm sure some of the more well-known pages will have a guide up (edit: yes they do.), so I'll just throw in a quick photo.

Remember that it is now possible to choose Ahune the Frost Lord (Slave Pens in Zangarmarsh) from the Dungeon Finder.

In case you wipe - the entrance to the graveyard is in the centre of the lake, dive down between the three pipes going under water, swim through the open pipe, turn left inside and follow the lefthand wall until you are back in the Slave Pens.

I may be a dirty old man...

2010-06-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

There is a lot more to be said about „understanding things differently“ than it first may appear. However, I do not question the validity of Tams recent post. What I might want to add to the discussion is that _my own_ dirty mind sometimes causes a misunderstanding or two.

I should probably add that the following conversation was largely held over vent, where I make a lot more language mistakes … meh… too much explanation, not enough fun. Let me start again with less rambling.

The setting: Obsidian Sanctum on a Thursday night around 10 minutes past midnight. The guild had just finished their day in ICC and decided to quickly mop up the weekly raid quest. We zoned in, walked around and killed some trash and did Sartharion 25 with three drakes up the proper way. Three tanks, lots of healers, killing the drakes (each before the next one landed), mopping up the adds, heading into portals and finally kicking a dragon into the lava. All went smoothly and we didn’t even have any deaths at the end.

Loot dropped and was merrily disenchanted. And of course there was a drake. Rolling commenced and two raiders both got a 96. At which point our lovely guildmaster and raidleader said “Okay, one of them will get head, the other one will get tail and we’re done!”

Now, I know I’m a dirty old man, but did that sound like she just offered an “a mount for a mount” deal to you?

Of course a part of my dirty mind knew there was a titanium seal involved in there, but still…

I think I need to get out more. Or go to Silvermoon City more or something.

Spellpower Deathknight Update

2010-06-11T03:14:00.000-07:00

Well. Seeing as it was ages since I last posted, why not start with something useless to get back into the swing of things.

I posted about my mini-project of leveling a deathknight in spellpower robes (and with spellpower trinkets) for fun and profit, didn't I? Turns out that now I am level 62, I actually found the nerve to go in to a few random instances.

Note 1: So far, each group has actually noticed my cloth robes and shoulders.

Note 2: No one has even bothered checking the trinkets - which is a shame, I could have used the haste ones instead.

The comments were not as bad as I thought, though. I'll post a few pictures below. I hope I edited out all the names - didn't mean to actually make anyone look bad *grin*.

The resulting dps-checking actually lead to .. err.. the second deathknight being happy about winning an all-greed roll on spellpower gear. We got a convert to the cult of spellpower DKs! (And before there are heart attacks - no, he didn't actually equip it).

The second group was more on the "WTF" side of things (thanks Calli for that Image). Not so much into the "you're a noob" line of reasoning.

I actually felt bad by that time, so I did explain the whole "I want to see how many comments I get" concept to them. And they also missed the trinkets. Shesh!

Still got to say, Frost Dual Wield Spec rocketh in outland instances.