NoobDing - The Trials and Tribulations of a WoW Noob

All things 80 at a lvl a day

2010-07-10T04:32:00.001-07:00

Well there we have it. For a while I wondered if I would get it all done before the Cataclysm but in the end the pre-cataclysm excitement was just that and I was able to wrap up my levelling just before last month.

So with that I can give the last status update on my levelling progress on my army of 10 before the expansion hits and puts another 50 level deficit on my tab.

Lets take a quick look at how things were in nov 2009

Capsize - lvl 80 undead warlock
Capstone - lvl 80 blood elf paladin
Capricious - lvl 71 troll hunter
Capibara - lvl 80 tauren druid
Capone - lvl 70 Orc rogue
Capeesh - lvl 67 Orc warrior
Capacitate - lvl 70 undead priest
Capitulate - lvl 72 Blood elf mage
Capow - lvl 70 Tauren shaman
Capsickle - lvl 72 Orc Death Knight

And as of now:

Capsize - lvl 80 undead warlock
Capstone - lvl 80 blood elf paladin
Capricious - lvl 80 troll hunter
Capibara - lvl 80 tauren druid
Capone - lvl 80 Orc rogue
Capeesh - lvl 80 Orc warrior
Capacitate - lvl 80 undead priest
Capitulate - lvl 80 Blood elf mage
Capow - lvl 80 Tauren shaman
Capsickle - lvl 80 Orc Death Knight

That's another 68ish levels in the bin spread out over a good 6 months bringing it down to just under half a level a day for the final 70-80 jump. It's more or less what I had expected. The treck from 70 to 80 is significantly more time consuming than the treck from 60 to 70 for example so dropping down to .5 from 1.0 levels a day may sound bad but is actually an acceptable drop for me.

Looking at the grand totals having started to play this game at the end of 2007 after a significant hardware upgrade back then in october and the levelling fun ending at the start of june it simply comes down to 2 years and 8 months total play time.

This is about the time to come up with some cold hard numbers:

Out of the 2 years and 8 months actually played time turns out to be 158days and some odd hours. Not taking into the account all the wonderful hours I spent logged in but was watching TV, playing with my toes or looking out the window that would mean 10 times 80 levels divided by 158 days comes down to about 5 levels a day played.

It's kind of fascinating to see how figures skew right here but obviously 158 days pure played time means 24 hour activity which if you consider an absolute max of 3-4 hours of play time during the week day comes right back down to slightly over a level a day.

Looking back at the last bit of levelling I can say that for the most part it was a smooth ride. The warrior took some coaxing to get a good feel for health management but really started to shine in the late 70's when the rage management and health management probles dissolved in my two levelling specs fury and prot.

In the end I would have to vote on the rogue as the 'slowest' thing to level. While they're ideally suited for those kill 1 target quests where you can just stealth your way through overall it turned out that sequentially killing things with no decent health return made the rogue a slow leveller. In retrospect I would certainly suggest herbalism for the healing ability and definitely working on the low end of the enemy scale (green con).

The priest was a dissapointment to level but is turning out to be a real charmer now that he's 80 slowly gearing up and proving himself an excellent all round healer & basic damage dealer.

And now it's time to sit back, relax and slap some gear on the various toons in preparation for another 50 levels come cataclysm.

Have to do something to keep myself busy eh?

All things celestial

2010-04-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

All right all right I am sure you can judge by the title that I permitted myself the luxury of a celestial steed or 'sparkles' as I like to refer to it. I did a lot of research beforehand on wether or not I was going to buy one in the first place.

After all, spending money is one thing. Spending it on crap is a completely different (and substantially more annoying) thing.

So having used the celestial steed for a week or so now I decided to just list the most common facts:

1. Celestial steeds can be bought from the blizzard store (duh).
2. The mount will cost you about 20 euros, 17 pounds or $25
3. There's no delay in delivery after redeeming the item (or I got lucky)
4. Celestial steeds once redeemed are sent to each one of your characters on a single account a celestial steed via in-game mail
5. You cannot sell or trade your celestial (soulbound)
6. it is not an account bound item (once used it's gone)
7. According to blizzard all your future characters on the same account will also receive one (I've no gumption to test that one unless they give us another class)
8. count as both a land and an air mount
9. you will stay mounted when you go through portals
10. You will NOT be able to fly right away if you pass from a non-flying zone to a flying one (i.e. from dal city to the landing platform)
11. It scales with your riding skill BUT:
12. Take care to remember that if you do not having epic flying your celestial steed will be a REGULAR land mount (60%) if you are on land even if you have epic land mounts available
13. Will scale to 310 flying if you have a 310 flyer (each char separately)
14. Does count towards your mount achievements
15. produces little sparkly things (stars) that linger around the location you're standing and the steed has a small set of not so impressive but slightly different sound effects

It's not that the above points were never said but I'd figured I'd group them together before I trail off into my personal opinion on the matter.

That said I would've liked to see a few color options other than just... blizzard blue... and I am not very fond of the two very noticeable problems the sparkly steed has (being the facts that having epic land means squat and passing from non-flying into flying zones not allowing you to fly). I also could've done with a longer wing-span when in flight.
But beyond that it seems to make a decent levelling mount after purchasing epic flying at 70 and the steed then really shines in it's ability to go from running to flying seemlessly.

Interestingly enough I had expected some people hassling me for 'buying' a mount with cold hard cash but that never seemed to happen. People don't care one way or the other it seems so Its not one of those things you have to use in hidden places due to social pressures.

All in all I'd say if blizzard ironed out those two little problems the celestial would be a decent mount to consider for an altoholic with a loose wallet... in the meantime you're probably better off getting your mounts the old fashioned way unless you have a slew of lvl 70s with epic riding on an account.

Stranger things have happened...

Commendation of Service

2010-03-27T03:29:00.000-07:00

And there we have it. The inevitable. In an attempt to simplify things blizzard has decided to do away with the extra currencies of the battlegrounds the infamous marks of honor. Anything previously purchaseable for marks is now available for a (fairly low) amount of honor.
Your leftover marks (including the ever useless IOC marks) can now be turned in for 185 honor each.

Well that's good, I can turn them in now... all my marks and I know I have hundreds and hundreds of them spread out over my various characters.

So off I go with my pally to the nearest 'turn in your marks here' vendor which are conveniently located here: The Hall of Legends in Orgrimmar (Horde) and the Champions' Hall in Stormwind (Alliance).

And as I arrive, flop open the vendor window I start mashing away on the right mouse button to buy as many stacks as my 70+ AV marks would allow for only to see the familiar message 'You can't carry any more of those items' ... which of course I misinterpret for a full bags message until I notice the 33 empty bag slots.... Hmmmm

Commendation of Service: Unique(10)

No more than 10 on your character? really? Did we really have to specifically make them Unique (10) why?

Why? Why? Why are you doing this to us? I wouldn't have minded running through orgrimmar pressing the button as many times as it took to burn up the nigh infinite amount of commendation of service I would've gotten for my marks. But unique (10)?

So as I stand here trying to redeem my marks as quickly as possible I see the day progress and the vendor slowly turning into a parking lot full of people occasionally erupting in a burst of light stoically and silently trying to burn off their marks.

I know what I'll be doing all day...

A tip... stay close to the vendor, keep the trade screen open and bind the commendations to a button so you can buy while you mash the button...

Gearscore and you

2010-03-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

There's a new metric in town, well not so much new since it's not but it's becoming more and more blatant.

What I am talking about is gearscore... One score to rule them all, one score to find them, One score to bring them all and in the darkness bind them to mildly abuse a famous quotation.
To put it bluntly the gearscore indicator makes an attempt (or yet another attempt) at taking the sumtotal of all your (gear)stats and boiling it down into a simple hard number for people to judge you by.

And judge they do. Now personally I am not so much affected by it because my gearscore most likely will always be significantly higher than any skill I may have. But people get reamed and mocked pretty badly out in trade and 'bank chat' for whatever their gearscore comes down to.

Now I definitely understand where the idea of 'gearscore' comes from. It allows you to say: "hmmm he/she's probably not going to cut it" before you set foot in a potentially dangerous environment. It saves you hassle and the other person some potential embarassment right?

Yes! But it's not a measure of skill, ignorance, drunkeness, mother interference, screaming gf and all those lovely other events and states that render the average dungeoneer into a worthless pile of raid wiping sludge.

But then who really has time for a 2 hour interview just to figure out if someone is mentally capable enough to actually go to the instance in the first place?

The argument is endless and so instead of argueing I propose we simply apply some common sense, realize it's here to stay and...

1. Know what gearscore is appropriate to ask for

If you do not know what you're asking for figure it out.
That said you can ask for higher than what is needed to increase the speed of your run

2. If they ask for x and you have less, stay clear

You already know they want more than you can offer in pure gearscore even if you have the skills to make up the gap. It's not worth the argument even if you don't agree with the whole 'GS thing'. It doesn't matter whether they ask for gearscore or cooking skill... simply don't apply.

3. Gearscore isn't the universal answer

Gearscore is the answer to the question: given my current group and his/her gearscore and class spec combination will he/she likely be an asset in this run?

Despite the fact that the gearscore manages to boil most gear values down into a single stat it's still just a small piece of a larger puzzle that is 'the worthiness' of a player.

Personally I still remember most of the wipes and failures with fondness and remember very few of the victories on the average 5man run and as such I rather enjoy the occasional miserable wipe.

But if you are of the persuasion that every run must be as fast and as near to perfection as it can be remember that gearscore is a tool, a tool to be used with care.

The fascination of the impossible

2010-03-04T12:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you run into those kinds of moments where you realize that whatever you might be after in wow is completely futile and pointless... (and then you keep doing them anyway).

Take Baron Rivendare for example. We all know him, we all know what he has and most of us would enjoy having one of his rather decent looking mounts.

The problem with Rivendare is that, unlike many of the other mount carrying bosses, he is very much soloable putting a big huge carrot on a stick and dangling it in front of you.

It's soloable, it takes less than 30 minutes (15 - 30 depending on your approach), the greens disenchant into illusion dust which goes for some decent coin and you'll swim in runecloth if you do a semi clear to the baron's room (which is nice if you like runecloth).

And in that ability to take him out in what seems like no time it makes it hard to resist the lure of trying. After all, whats a few baron runs, maybe one a day, maybe two or more if you're zealous, how long could it take?

At 1% it means you'd need to do just about 460 runs to be pretty sure to have gotten it. But we all know % doesn't work that way. It's 1% every time you go. You could go you entire life and never have it drop and someone else can get it on their first run.

A lot of things are that way... remember that drop you didn't get back in TBC that you still remember fondly like the warglaive of Azzinoth, or maybe that turtle/rat pet you're still fishing for. It's all luck, or it's futile which I suppose would depend on your outlook on life.

But in the end we keep going, because in wow as it is in life: anything worth getting is damn near impossible to get.
Today's gear is tomorrow's junk but a mount will always be a mount and a warglaive will always be more than it's stats.

So here I am again, standing in front of the gates of Stratholme wondering if maybe this time I would be able to kill someone without killing their horse (I asked him to just hand it over but noooo).

Don't Nuke the Ant

2010-02-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

There has always been a lot of controversy around the 'addictive nature' of computer games in general. The topic recently flared again in the country I live in and once again about half the population screams for more warning labels on games, clinics to treat the afflicted, extra warnings in games and more of the same.

Games are addictive. There is no question of that simply because the definition of addiction includes statements like 'The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.'

So in that line I can honestly say I am addicted to games as others may be addicted to exercise, french quisine, writing in their diary, singing in the shower, playing an instrument...

Frankly I'd be quite happy to be a bit of a compulsive when it comes to exercise but alas. Still... all this just goes to show that it's not so much the 'addiction' itself that represents the problem but how it's affect your life and the lives of the people around you.

After all, just because you get a new game once in a while and then play it for as much as you can for a week or two or maybe even longer isn't representative of someone whose dangerously addicted and in need of treatment. It becomes a problem when this game takes over your life and your work/school performance starts to go down the drain and your loved ones only know you as that zombie that sits in front of the computer all day.
A recovery from that kind of situation is hard no matter the chosen addiction and definitely requires some serious kind of pro-active measure. But while everyone seems to be setting the stage every few years for a massive 'game addiction' intervention I sit here and wonder if we're not just trying to drop a nuke on an anthill.

I am sure there are those dangerously addicted to games, and they should receive adequate help but wouldn't it be simply enough to put the information out there? Burn a few million tax money on an add campain that runs for a little while that tells you the symptoms and a place to fix it and I think most people would get the gist. If not the overzealous gamers themselves then surely a friend or family member will be able to connect the add to the situation and make 'the call'.

On a side note: when your child has been playing the computer for so long you actually have to check if he/she's still sitting there it might be time to take the keyboard away for a few hours; There's no crime in that.

Instead we end up with rules and regulations that add nothing to the problem but making it cost money (regulations need to be enforced) and do very little.
Worse, If I start seeing games with warning labels that would represent glaring advertisement to me. The game is so good it has a warning sticker on it? Sweet...

But what really needs to be done? Do we not have to first determine the size of the actual problem? How many people are there really dangerously addicted to say: WoW?

You can't just see how long someone is on a day and then call it a problematic addiction after x hours simply because it doesn't take into account people that share accounts or just have a game binge and then stop playing alltogether.

In fact if you would've measured my average ultima online time for an average day about 5 or so years ago you would've come out with a staggering 18/hours a day for months due to various macro programs (*disclaimer: only did that on free servers).

The simple fact is the figures I've heard over the years from the dozens of studies don't match up even in the slightest and that's simply because there is no reliable way to measure those that are indeed dangerously addicted.

They don't turn themselves in, they're too busy playing a game and the rest of us either do not recognize the problem as a problem or wouldn't know what to do about it if we did.

So how about some decent information before we decide to nuke the ant. In fact, please don't nuke the ant at all because us ants aren't cockroaches.

Where is the love?

2010-02-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

So there I was, happily chipping away at the various achievements for the lovely holiday of lovely hearts, lovely pink stuff and lovely tokens that buy lovely little trinkets.

And while I sat at my recently purchased lovely picnic basket somewhere in dalaran filching through the lovely achievements for this lovely holiday plotting my course through them to hopefully get the lovely title I paused for a moment.

All the achievements seemed very much doable. Time consuming maybe but very much doable within a day or two or more if you're on the lazy side and with that I thought, lovely while I quested away on my priest collecting lovely little charm bracelets and turning them into tokens.

I must've done this for about an hour or so making good progress xp wise and ending up about a half a level off of 73 before I went back into town to burn off some of the lovely tokens I had gathered on the lovely valentine's vendor.

I decided to pick up a couple of love fools to get the pity the fool achievement out of the way, hopped on my lovely mount flew out of dalaran towards lovely naxxramas and...

... then it hit me. There was no chance in hell I was going to march my level 72 priest into a naxx raid anytime soon due to the level 80 restriction.

My hopes for getting a nice title out of the whole endeavour lay shattered before me. I could either try and pick it up on a different (level 80) character or not but no matter how much time I was willing to invest in it or how much I was willing to do endless repetetive runs for it there was simply no chance in hell my priest was going to walk out of this event with a title.

Why this particular title is completely out of reach for a low *caugh* level is beyond me and to make things worse they could've swapped out one of the achievements that's not in the meta achievement for 'I pity the fool' and it would've been fine.

... lovely.

Dalaran Airtraffic Tax to come!

2010-01-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

The already shaky political situation in the greater Dalaran area was rudely disturbed once more after recent reports that the local government is considering implementing a Dalaran Airport Tax (DAT) to push back the ever increasing amount of beasts being parked in the only fly zone in Dalaran.
A government spokesman for the Dalaran transportation authority stated in a recent press conference that The Flightmaster union has launched a complaint against the city of Dalaran for failing to police the quote 'ever increasing amount of foul smelling beasts clogging up the place and ~expletive deleted~expletive deleted~ all over the place' unquote.

The spokesman added that the ever increasing cost of cleaning on krasus' landing was tearing a hole in the city budget and the council would have no choice but to either limit airflight traffic to official flightmaster operated flights and 'smaller vehicles' or implement some kind of taxation to compensate for the unexpectedly high cleaning bills.

When asked about what this tax would entail the spokesman referred to a press conference that would be held on the topic next month or so. And while the governments holds it's tongue rumors of what is quickly becoming known as the 'dragon tax' are abounding.

The public opinion is clearly not in favor of the new dragon tax as the opinion on the street has quickly soured after the bill on lifting mailbox taxation was dismissed by the council in last week's referendum.

"The mailbox tax was supposed to be a temporary measure to fight inflation of our gold, now, instead of getting the taxation lifted they want to charge us more taxes?" said one of the adventurers before he lifted himself onto his dragon only to sit there and hover for the next hour.

With airtraffic tax to come, what will you do?

Mr T finally good for a laugh

2010-01-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

For a brief moment I thought it was simply one of the corpsevertisement refreshing(gold seller ads made from corpses). Only this time, rather than falling on the floor and forming the letters to one goldseller site or the other the guys just stood there in the air. About 20 orcs forming up individual letters, holding position in mid air for a while and then running to form up the next letter, holding position etc etc.

Basically air writing with orcs.

Just in case by some miracle my server isn't actually the last to get any kind of innovation (we're still on [dirge]) have a gander at a lovely mid air O.

A few things crossed my mind as I watched the scene unfold:

You have to admire whomever thought of that particulat trick and wrote the code necessary to interact with the wow client in that fashion and it just goes to show how much money there really is to be had selling virtual goods in general.

That said I am sure the display will get annoying sooner or later. With orcs running on a transparant floor right above it'll become a pain in the arse to stand anywhere near the newfangly advertisement as they do a pretty good job blocking your view at times. For me that puts them right smack dab in the same group as people that use their mammoth to block mailboxes (a practice which I still don't quite understand).

I am not sure how long it'll take blizzard to deal with the new type of advertisement. Their reactions to gold seller ads have been somewhat sluggish but in this particular case I think blizzard will be a little faster?

Why do I think this? Well apparantly all the characters forming up the advertisement ran by Mr T on their way to their floating little slavepen as they all have had their faces turned into Mr T's horrible elven visage.

Any bets on how long that one will last?

Remarkable

2010-01-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

I am finally done with desperately trying to sort out my heavily overflowing mailboxes and re-sorting most of the junk in my bags which I had left in a bit of a mess before I left on my holiday.

A mess, of course, I had to sort out eventually unless I wanted to see some of the stuff in there dissapear into the endless reaches of what must be a big magical whirlpool of stuff that is known as the WoW mailbox system.

And while you're sorting out mess you tend to come across stuff you haven't seen in a while... remarkable things like old pvp helmets that have wing animations or currency for something or the other you just can't remember what it is for like necrotic runes.

There's some remarkable stuff in there... but that's not really what this post is about.
It does however have something to do with stuff just sitting there being useless though. Namely Marks... more specifically isle of conquest and strand of the ancient marks of honor whose only purpose seems to be to annoy people doing inventory.

I always had thought they'd patch some silly little reward system in there at some point in some patch or the other, but here we are it being patch 3.3 and the only thing they still seem to be good for is turning them to honor via a quest.

Now don't get me wrong, I had never really taken a shine to SotA due to horde starting out in defense for so long the odds of actually winning were low without pre-mades. So it's not like I am swimming in sota marks and watching them waste away in my mailbox.

IoC on the other hand is something I rather enjoy. You can go different directions with it and there's enough fun things to do with catapults to keep me entertained for at least a few months.

And so while we're looking at another set of rather remarkable extensions to the game for instancing purposes slapping together a cheap nasty reward system with maybe a nifty mount for 100 marks was apparantly a little too much to ask.

At this point they should just make them tradeable for other marks 1:1 or even 2:1 because whatever they do with them eventually will have to take into account that there will be a lot of people with these marks around...

I am a bit saddened that these marks aren't getting a use, or at the very least didn't get a use of any kind sooner. I'm not that picky... I can settle for a few pets or some such but there has to be some hope for the abandoned currencies of the world?

Welcome to 2010

2010-01-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2010, I hope you had a pleasant holiday season and I'd like to welcome you back to what is undoubtedly going to be yet another exciting year of random oddball posts over here at noobding.

To start you off: A light snack before we dive into the usual wow banter...

I give you a wordle!

click to enlarge

Comprised of the word content from my blog; a feature provided by the wordle generator.

Haven't seen one yet? play around with it here: wordle

Have the forsaken been forsaken?

2009-12-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

Patch notes always manage to annoy me. Of course they do, I am a warlock after all and even though I am now far more in tune with other character classes understanding their soft spots and where they could use some help seeing the stale and uncreative changes to the warlock class never put a huge smile on my face.

But this is not about warlocks... at least not specifically. I make it about warlocks because I happen to be a warlock of the undead variety. So chosen back in the day for the race defining ability 'will of the forsaken'.

Will of the forsaken is an absolute godsent for any warlock especially in the northrend PvP game. Together with the standard PVP trinket undead warlocks can break snares twice and happily port back to their circle of magical 'there will be a warlock here soon' glowiness (you know the little green circle things where rogues like to hang out).

But the PTR patch notes for 3.3 tell us a story of foreboding doom:

"Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc."

Which in essence means that your race defining ability now shares a cooldown with quite a few silly little pvp trinkets that are available to pretty much anyone with the gumption to cap a few towers in Hellfire peninsula or do any other moderated form of pvp.

So no matter what kind of undead you are, come 3.3. your PVP trinket will be useless. After all it's not like you can exchange racials nor do you get the option to change race after such a modification so the only real thing left to do is hunt for a new trinket.

Perhaps this is the great equalizer, a cheap little trick to snuff out the value of yet another racial to bring it in line with the collection of other marginally useful racials.

But to this here warlock, whom even with a spec that is literally built for survival it's a significant kick in his non-existing nuts (organic stuff does not stay attached post death).

I can stomach the fact that I have to go look for a different trinket, in a way it's a relief not to have to go for the pvp trinket anymore but losing yet another defensive cooldown is hard especially when you know you're reliant on it for your survival.

My warlocks future looks somewhat bleaker for it. Now rather than to trinket out of the rogue stun, port back to my circle and WotF out of the rogue stun from the rogue that's surely there I get to recapture those lovely moments all us warlocks know where we get bursted down from 100% to 0 in the duration of a single stun.

But hey, maybe we can hit the sacrifice button from our otherwise useless voidwalker before the second rogue gets to us. Or perhaps they got bored waiting on that big green glowing blotch on the floor for a warlock to appear. Or maybe we can get that 1000+ resilience we're going to need to just live through the initial stunlock burst sequence so we actually get to cast something. Or maybe I'll just stay in the tree I've been sitting in casting dots at the passing crowds.

On the bright side it may, in the long run, result in a few less undead in the world and we'd all be better of without so many of us trying to develop a new plague to turn us all into forsaken (in which case all of y'all will get our spiffy racial).

WotF much?

Post Pilgrim's Profit

2009-12-03T06:44:00.000-08:00

With the pilgrimage over and most pilgrims having achieved their pilgrim title there's a large slew of people that have figured out that the harvest festival was a tremendous boon for those looking to train their cooking skills up to 350.

And while you probably saw your profits plummit to an all time low if you're selling raw food (yes there's a market for that) you can now rejoice in a very brief period where people want to equip their newly created level 350 cooks with something more than just a bit of skill.

They have just spent a few minutes looking at their achievements and figured out that with a recipe or 100 more they could score yet another few of those brilliantly useless achievement points for their characters to show off.

And like anyone else rather than traversing half the WoWverse on foot they'd much rather pay a highly inflated AH price for a good set of recipes which is where we come in to make some quick gold.

So I decided to strip down my mage completely bag content wise (a male naked Belf isn't exactly my cup of tea) and send him off to distant land to collect inane amount of recipe's to mail them to a temporary banker character for storage.

I am not going to plot a route for you but here's an overview of more or less all cooking recipes you can get your paws on: recipes

I ended up charging quite a decent sum for each recipe based on their cost price (ranging from double to triple value) and was able with some trade advertising (to create some awareness) and a night's worth of sleep to shift approximately 80% of what I was trying to auction off.

That said I was always able to sell cooking recipes but it seems that after the harvest festival the margin's have gone up a little and the amount of repeat auctions seems to be dwindling.

Of course without a doubt this clever stroke of profiteering will not go unnoticed so I am sure there will be a merry go-round of undercutting going on soon if anyone else is willing to go through the hassle of collecting all those cooking recipes.

Fortunately it is quite the hassle (I didn't bring the mage for nothing) and so hopefully the increase in popularity of cooking recipes will stay in our favor for a while.

Now if you will excuse me I have a cookbook or 200 to compile.

One bridge too far

2009-12-01T03:30:00.001-08:00

I pity the fool... who thought that was actually a good idea. Now let me start by saying I don't have any issues with Mr.T.
In fact when I was 8 years old I watched A-team on a regular basis and remember enjoying it quite a bit; But when it comes to MMORPGs you have to be careful not to rip the fabric of spacetime.

And by that I mean, you simply need to take care that whatever you introduce into the world is in some way shape or form related to the world's lore or people therein. If it's not, and you're suddenly presented with something that is so obviously not of 'this world' it is simply put the end of immersion.

Here you are fresh out of the starter zone ready to take on the world and you run into a guy trying to pawn some grenades off on you that have no purpose other than make everyone around you look twice as ugly as they did before. Not to mention the fact that if you're horde that particular night elf will look horribly out of place despite his obvious non-wow demeanor.

I say nay, if you are to introduce a quasi celebrity into a virtual environment it has to fit. I could've seen ozzy as a warlock leading a small army against the lich king and thought to myself 'sure, why not' but to have 'Mr. T's' alter ego standing at the exit of the starter zone just makes me wonder why.

Why are you standing there? What is your purpose?
Why are you handing out grenades instead of grills?
Why would I want to look like you?
Are they going to make the next class a 'mohawk'?

I like frilly things. I love giants that fart big green bubbles and pop them with their finger, I tremendously enjoy thrall and all the other characters that show up repeatedly throughout the game. I even like haris pilton and other introductions of semi famous people in interesting ways and even Ozzy's short introduction to wow was worth some giggles.

But Mr.T the night elf mohawk computer hacker that hands out cosmetic surgery grenades to anyone 'who believes'?

I'd rather french kiss a kodo.

Theres a lot of room in this world for fantasy and fun and there's nothing as funny as a well placed 'real life' reference... but if it's not done right it just ends up being a clear break from immersion, a reminder of what is going on out in the real world that we tried to get away from by playing in the first place, in short: one bridge too far.

Review Time

2009-11-27T03:21:00.000-08:00

The last 6 months I had more or less dedicated my progression to my various lowbies (of which, I am sure you won't remember, had quite a few) and since it's now officially a tradition (sadly lacking a name) it's time to take a look how NoobDing is doing with it's character progression.

Taking a swift look back to a post in may we can see that I was doing an average about half a level a day there and about 198 levels to go to the magical mark of 800 levels or 10 level 80's if that makes more sense.

With the Cataclysm looming in the distance which would tack another 50 levels onto that number I am quite interested to see how I got on over the last six months and how much I have left to go.

The last status in march (number in brackets denouncing the increase since my review before that):

Capsize - lvl 80 undead warlock (+10)
Capstone - lvl 80 blood elf paladin (+10)
Capricious - lvl 70 troll hunter (+6)
Capibara - lvl 80 tauren druid (+12)
Capone - lvl 43 Orc rogue (+0)
Capeesh - lvl 34 Orc warrior (+3)
Capacitate - lvl 44 undead priest (+9)
Capitulate - lvl 58 Blood elf mage (+18)
Capow - lvl 50 Tauren shaman (+15)
Capsickle - lvl 63 Orc Death Knight (+8 from 55)

And with that the magic numbers for november 2009:

Capsize - lvl 80 undead warlock (capped)
Capstone - lvl 80 blood elf paladin (capped)
Capricious - lvl 71 troll hunter (+1)
Capibara - lvl 80 tauren druid (capped)
Capone - lvl 70 Orc rogue (+27)
Capeesh - lvl 67 Orc warrior (+33)
Capacitate - lvl 70 undead priest (+26)
Capitulate - lvl 72 Blood elf mage (+14)
Capow - lvl 70 Tauren shaman (+20)
Capsickle - lvl 72 Orc Death Knight (+9)

A total gain of 130 levels which is still not quite a level a day but definitely a solid improvement. The most interesting part of this is that I am now only 68 levels away from being fully capped which at the current averages and my tendency for laziness over the holiday puts me at fully capped status in march/april 2010. Will it be enough time to hit fully capped before cataclysm? Hard to say...

On the less analytical side I have to say that I had a horrible and I mean absolutely horrible time levelling my rogue. Normally I'd blame the fact that I make a better ranged person than a melee person but the absolute lack of healing potential has made levelling my rogue an arduous task. Using stealth helps but tends to slow the killing down. On the other hand not killing things right away on a rogue is a sin you can only fix through resetting the entire battle. And that despite the fact that he's dragging around a good 4 heirlooms which should make him at least gear-wise superior to any mob on his level.

Joining the list of now less popular characters is much to my own surprise the priest. There's something about the priest that strikes me as sluggish and inefficient. Perhaps the spells don't lock in place like I want them to or the killing speed is just too mediocre but I can rarely motivate myself to pick him up despite loving the shield spells.

The hunter together with the warlock and paladin have received a lot of 'alternative love'. While the hunter is now proudly running around on a venomhide mount and has a good chunk of exploration completed the warlock and pally decided to lift themselves in some good old deadly/furious gladiator gear which really upped the survivability for my warlock tremendously (in pvp, the only place it really is an issue).

The druid is off in dreamland considering a tanking set that he'll probably never get together and the mage has been sent to the mines to crank out titansteel bars on a daily basis.

Overall in the last 6 months the biggest personal surprise was the warrior. Whilst in the beginning his self healing and staying power were lackluster at best now at level 60+ with some gear on him I can really tell the difference as he tears through things with few delays.

I finally understand all the wayward comments about how gear dependant warriors really are (although I suppose they meant protection) and by that I mean I finally understand they didn't mean you have to be all epicced out but with some decent gear on the warrior can go from pacifistic turtle to no holds barred rampaging warmonger... wish someone would've told me earlier.

All in all I've gotten a clearer understanding of what each character entails... and whilst I am still a natural warlock I am definitely looking forward to putting those last 10 levels on most characters especially to see if the rogue and priest will redeem themselves somewhere along the way.

And you? How are your alts doing?

The Pilgrim's kitchen

2009-11-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

I wasn't really impressed with the current pilgrim's event that's currently running on WoW but I do admit to having a fair bit of fun doing the pilgrim's peril quests which on the one hand had me standing peacefully amongst allies at stormwind and on the other had me in a fierce bind in auberdine resulting in quite a few corpse runs.

In the end I can really take or leave the holiday but it's a nice way to keep busy till christmas and the title seems easy enough to achieve.

There is however a hidden benefit to the whole festival in that you can quite easily train your cooking from 0 to 350 at nearly no cost and minimal effort.

To do that simply buy the bountiful cookbook from any of the pilgrim's bounty vendors at a festival and learn the first of 5 recipes. You can leave the rest in the book unless you already have the cooking skill required to save some space.
Make said recipe till you can learn the second recipe from the book and move on till you're done with them all.

The items you'll want to cook with are at the festivals in Undercity, Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff freely (I tend to go in that order too) for sale from any ole vendor (or one of those vendor buckets). You can pick up and do the pilgrim dailies at the same time if you like for some easy xp/gold.

For the last recipe item you'll have to head into your starter zone and kill wild turkeys that only spawn during the event. There's an achievement attached to this as well so expect quite a bit of traffic around the area.

And that's pretty much it. I suppose I could've gone into more detail but I have faith that you get the general idea and will figure out the rest on your own.

Happy cooking

Trade This!

2009-11-17T11:46:00.001-08:00

Trade is a wonderful tool. It allows the more socially oriented business (wo)man to create a nice income, allows for quick sales of obscure items and every now and then you manage to get a real deal off of someone whose just too lazy to AH their goods.

Unfortunately only about 20% of all chat traffic on the [2. Trade] channel resembles actual 'trading' or selling / buying of items or services.
The rest is, by lack of a better word, utter abysmal crap. Endless arrays of barrens escapees filling the channel with anything from high quality conversations about their school life right down to ye ole [dirge] spam which is still alive and kicking on my server for some obscure reason.

I'd almost be inclined to join the first guild that actually uses the recruitment channel for guild recruitment but considering they're just trying to buy some guildies (euhm recruit some members) I can give that a pass as useful trade information.

But mild ranting aside it seems to me that there is actually a very simple way to ensure, at least for the most part, that trade is indeed about well... trade.

What I suggest is simply that trade is put in a pre-fixed format. Next time you hit 'trade' to advertise one of your wares in you should receive a nice simple little popup.

In this little popup we find a number of dropdown lists (comboboxes or whatever you may wish to call them) and a few 'link' fields.

Basically you would be able to select one of 3 activties: WTT, WTB, WTS
and a few items perhaps up to 5 in the format of [quantity] [item link]

From the quantity dropdown you could select any number (i.e. from 1-100 or make a field that only accepts integers as input) and the item link box would allow you to insert an item link and an item link only.

By preventing the actual 'tradee' which is us for all intents and purposes to just type in whatever we come up with we would then be forced to simply select if we want to trade, buy or sell and also be forced to simply put in an item link and how many we want to sell (1 by default).

If the item link field doesn't accept anything but item links (or skill links etc.) and the quantity isn't modifiable beyond whats there to be selected there's really no choice but to use trade what it was made for in the first place.

Sure you could embelish it with an item search function or allow for more than 5 items to be offered up at the same time, maybe a color selector or whatnot to make your text stand out but that's the basic concept.

And with that you would end up wiping out all the mindless chatter, at least some of the guild recruitment spam (not dirge spam I suppose) and most gold sellers would be looking for a new way to sell us their illegal goods.

A big win in my book, since I rather like the chatting once in a while, but also the actual trading. I just think they would be better off in separate channels so I can choose to opt out of one or the other.

The hidden danger of chilled meat

2009-11-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Chilled meat is good, chilled meat is yummy stuff that once upon a time when the cooking dailies still took an obcene amount of it was a valued commodity.

Those times are over, we know it... the dailies have been adjusted and chilled meat is, well still useful enough to keep around but hardly worth the time selling it.
By now we all have a moderate supply of it stashed away somewhere... because we remember those days it was worth something and are quietly holding on to our supply just in case they add something that will use the stuff.

I thought I had a moderate supply myself... I though meh... I have a stack or 3 roaming around somewhere, until one day our only active guild mage (no pun intended) denoted that she had '412 chilled meats'.

412 chilled meats is enough to prompt me to look how much of the stuff I really had lurking around in the ancient freezers that are my various banks and I came up with: a little under 30 stacks (I rounded a bit, I am not going to count them you know) of chilled meat. That's almost 600(!) chilled meat.

So unless there's an event around the corner that will need a hell of a lot of northern stew or some such I say to you: Beware the chilled meat... you could be stashing enough to get through a cataclysm without knowing it.

Fur and Fury

2009-11-02T04:17:00.001-08:00

Having spent the last week at the SAPTeched and suffering from a generally busy work arena the last few weeks I didn't get around to playing much wow. So little even that I managed to miss the better part of Halloween which is too bad since I was all set up to go for a vicious Rant on how people kill the quest giver in the starting zones, park their oversized orange mammoths over waterpools and what not.

It was a particularly ranty rant which is always nice to do once in a while so I am a little sad I missed the opportunity to let Halloween meet my broadside.

Of course like any good rant it sticks in your system till you let it out so I found something completely different to rant about. Something in a field I previously knew very little about (and probably don't know nearly enough about as it is).

It all started a few weeks ago when I decided I wanted to do something new with my druid. Sure it was nice being a tree and frankly I haven't played any healer type character that's more fun to play than a tree druid whom can literally roll hots over half a raid without breaking a sweat... but when it comes to actually doing something other than healing, healing specs always seem crippled.

You can't kill things... unless you think killing something means applying the single dot you have and then outhealing the bastard's damage.

So I decided I'd look into some bear specs. It combined a lot of the survivability the average tree has with just that much more damage to make trying out the whole feral tree appealing.

And with that I started jotting down an outline for a spec and afterwards started digging for gear. It took me about 20 minutes before I started wondering where all the bear-tank gear was. It took me another 10 minutes to realize that there was no such thing as bear-tank gear. Bear tanks wear DPS gear...

Nothing around that really looked like it could improve damage mitigation... clearly my little furball was just meant to take hits, soak them up and pray for heals before the soaking capacity stopped.

With nothing out there in terms of gear I began to wonder how this would impact the bear tank population on various servers. After all without specifically designed bear tanking gear it means the bear tank is in direct competition with DPS of all types for most of his/her gear.

I never looked at a rogue's DPS gear and thought... hey that stuff would be nice for my bear tank but apparantly I should've all along.

Frankly I never had looked much at non-bearform bears at all... and now that I survey the few bear-tanks my server seems to have I must note that most of them look like they recently stumbled into the leftover bin at some wayward fashion show.
When they're out of form at least... when they're in form they pretty much look like a bear ... which is uneventful in itself.

I didn't shelve my plans for a bear tank but I do have to wonder how appealing a bear tank really is when your gear makes you look like a fashion accident and you have to compete with DPS to get it. And that's outside of 5 man performance which looks like it consists mostly of 'swipe swipe swipe swipe' activity.

Looking at it from a distance I think bears need something... if nothing else something that will allow them to reclaim their identities as tanks rather than an afterthought to the whole 'lets just gear a plate tank' conundrum.

That said, did anyone actually see a bear tank in the last months? I've seen maybe 3 in the last weeks... and that's nothing compared to the oodles of platewearing tanks (mostly pallies) that seem to be all over the place.

Is the bear tank heading for extinction?

The saddest Inn in WoW

2009-10-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

I was flying around in outland the other day following a set of dailies that back in TBC seemed to make a habit out of having you fly from one edge of the continent to the other.
And as always when I fly from A to B this rarely seems to happen in a straight line as I tend to take my time and look at some of the features in WoW (the designers did some nice work in a lot of places after all).

Just like everyone else I find some places more appealing than others. Sometimes this is dictated by the quests are laid out together with the flight points (It's good fun to quest in DK starter areas because the quests are nicely chained) and other time the zone just has a lot of visual appeal.

And despite all the credit you can give designers for coming up with what is an excellently done static world sometimes there are places you come across that make you go: hmmmmm

I found an Inn, it was in a well populated area on a crowded bit of rock in shadowmoon and this particular Inn has to be, without a doubt, the saddest Inn I have ever seen.

When you come up to this particular Inn everything seems to be fine at first. It's kept in the usual orcish sense of crooked but sturdy with a fair set of spikes and the guards in front of it suggested that there were a fair few bar brawls there after hours so it would be a merry crowd.
You could even see a mailbox sitting out front and Horus, the innkeeper, glaring at you with a glint in his eyes.

The first steps into the Inn crush the hopes of a nice little rest in the Inn, Horus is indeed the only person in the Inn, furniture of any kind oddly absent and the stench of urine hangs in the air.
Not only that but you immediately notice that you're not getting that restful feeling that you always get when you walk into an Inn area which might be contributable to the dragonmaw peon that just spawned and is now blindly hammering away on the Inn's wall for some odd reason but producing a significant amount of headache inducing noise.

I watched the Peon hammer away, producing nothing for a while and decided to go mail some of the loot I had gathered questing over to an alt so I wouldn't have to lug it around which brought me to the dilapidated mailbox outside.
It had looked fine from a distance but clearly this mailbox had been decomissioned ages ago as instead of the usual glimmer of arcane energies that emenate from a mailbox there was only a small squicking sound and a puff of smoke coming from opening as I dropped my item in.

I fished around in it for a while with my arm but gave up hope... I decided to log out in this dysmall Inn and move on to another character. Perhaps I would be the first and last guest here. *queue 20sec logout time*

Visit Dragonmaw Base Camp in Shadowmoon if you want to take a look... although by Medivh I wouldn't know why you'd do that.

Seen any other (non)interesting places lately?

The little rogue that could

2009-09-28T06:29:00.000-07:00

It was one of those days, one of those days I had specifically set aside to level a lowbie because I had been wasting my days in various PVP battle grounds pretending to be a raid leader and providing the crowd with intelligent sounding but, most likely, wrong tactical advice.

At any rate I was happily marching my priest out of undercity to catch a blimp to some obscure place or the other when a strange object caught my eye.
There, only a yard or 10 outside of the undercity gate sat a bunny. The obnoxiously fluffy kind that's just asking to be turned into kibble.

I started winding up my mindblast only to cancel it halfway wondering why the little bunny had an alliance tagging which would result in me being instantly pvp flagged. What's the harm I wondered for a moment, after all I wasn't even 10 yards outside of a city filled with enough horde to field a mid-sized army.

Being the defensive player that I am I decided against turning that bunny into a light afternoon snack, moved a bit off the road and sat down and waited...

I didn't have to wait long before a fellow member of the horde galloped out of the gates and without any thought dismounted and gave the bunny a good whack before I even managed to utter the words: 'possibly not the smartest idea'.
Not a second later the hordie that had decommisioned the bunny lay on the floor, quite dead, possibly quite confused about what happened and I saw a well dressed rogue (mostly furious gear) sprint off and fade into the darkness.

A few minutes later he clearly had decided to return as he unstealthed, dropped a new bunny decoy and vanished right before my very eyes.

I suppose at this point I could've gotten a high level alt, perhaps a prot paladin to dispatch the rogue... or even just stand around and warn fellow horde about their impending demise but I felt a strange attachment to the rogue. After all, how much more rogue can you get than that? Sneaking deep into enemy territory, armed with a set of decoys and then slaughtering anyone stupid enough to get pvp flagged by killing the decoy?

You have to admire that kind of dedication in some way shape or form. By the time I was done thinking about what to do about the situation the rogue had dispatched 2 more horde members and the horde had fielded a small team of level 80 characters that was combing the area with heavy aoe.

I saluted quietly into the emptiness and secretly wished the rogue all the best in his future adventures before logging out. And after I had logged back in on my warlock I had a good chuckle at myself for wishing a rogue well as a clothie after wishing doom on them since... well forever.

Doing creative things, no matter how sick or demented they may be is worth something and I thank the little rogue that could for displaying that tiny little bit of 'out of the box' thinking that should serve to inspire us all.

After all, when is the last time you did anything out of the ordinary?

Can one (wo)man change the world?

2009-09-28T02:22:00.000-07:00

WoW servers in general make for very interesting social structures, there's a great many people on a real and only a few seem to stand out.

Whether it is the griever constantly spamming the trade chat with lines that summarize a whole world of stupid in one go, the guy who has been selling and buying wares for so long he's practically part of trade or the illustrious leader of some obscure high-end raiding guild that is just known because his guild happens to be 'the most progressed'.

Despite the few good shining examples of people that deserve to stand out due to actually having achieved something (as far as one can achieve anything while playing a game anyway) there always seems to be a negative connotation to the World of warcraft.
Whether it is the person calling the guy with a question a 'stupid nub' or just some guy with 5th grade spelling making a terrible attempt at correcting someone's 3rd grade spelling in a very unfriendly way.
Or perhaps it's the guy who comes in and mines your node after you've painstackingly cleared out all the mobs only to proceed to tag your named mob kill on a 15 min respawn timer before you can close into combat range after having sat there for 15 minutes because some jackass stole your mob rather than grouping up for the kill.

The problem with things we percieve as negative is that negative things are substantially easier to remember than acts of random kindness. A strong emotional response helps to commit things to memory and negative impact generates a stronger emotional response.

That isn't to say nothing good ever happens. Getting your rear-end saved by some druid who was just flying by seeing you struggle with an elite or getting fully buffed in while you're just standing in a battleground guarding a flag does happen but in the end it seemed like those were a few solid rocks in a sea filled with grief.

At some point I grew tired of all the nonsense. The endless e-peening, the random insults about spec, gear, arena points, missing achievements, dps averages, the pointless trade spam and the generally grievous behaviour: I disconnected. I left trade, I made my own guild with people I appreciate and I simply stopped associating myself with most people that couldn't produce a legible english sentence (or a dutch or a german one, I am not that picky after all).

I wondered where all the good people had gone whilst I enjoyed my stay in my jade palace knowing full well what happened with all the good people. They had done exactly the same. They had disconnected themselves from most things they didn't like, they learned not to get involved or ignore them and went on their own merry way leaving the world to fester associating only with their own guild or even just a sub-group in their own guild.

I decided to make a change, the disconnect wasn't doing anything to make life anything more tolerable. I decided to answer the simple questions that come by in trade, to toss out a few dozen buffs every now in then as some form of good will and even started actively helping people without going particularly out of my way. For the first time since I started playing I joined /help, granted, the channel was empty, but if anyone had any questions that required help at least now there was someone available in /help.

Can one person change the course of a realm? I don't know. Perhaps I am too idealistic to say no, dreaming of a world where we can more or less get along without stabbing each other in the back.
I am not asking for some kind of utopia where it's all love, fluffy bunnies and hugging trees but a realm where when push comes to shove you can feel like you can trust your fellow faction member, where you can lock ranks and fight side by side to fight a common enemy without having to wonder what bastard is going to roll need on something they can't use anyway or how you'll be left in the dirt because someone so an opportunity to earn x gold/honor/marks/emblems instead of helping a fellow horde out for the 30 seconds it would take..

In the end: if a handful of grievers can make the world a worse place, then why couldn't a handful of good people make the world a better place?

Warlock survivability build

2009-09-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Well with all the whining going on about warlock survivability and even cataclysm promising no hope when it comes to upscaling the survivability of the warlock I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands.

Quite frankly since I did my best to complain about various warlock problems whenever I had the chance I thought it fair to take a look at the situation and come up with some kind of build that should be able to withstand a bit of a beating.

The build, how else could it be, is hardly what anyone would consider a standard warlock build, it's not highest in DPS, it's a pretty lousy instancing build and odds are you'll get kicked out a raid the second you even try raiding with it.

It's about cold hard survivability: letting go of all those lovely damage oriented skills and supplanting them with the few mediocre survivability talents a warlock has.

In the end my primary concern was to create a warlock build that would allow the warlock to take the battle to the enemy in a bg setting rather than spending the entire bg waiting on healer rez timers (aka the warlock watercooler).

Before we dive into the why lets take a quick look at the build I am proposing:
Build

Or alternatively dropping the 10% physical damage mitigation for a lot more room in the affliction tree:
Build

Clearly this is nothing like the average cookie cutter spec. We dig deep fairly deep into both affliction and demonology to pick up a few key survivability talents and then top it off with a little more damage reduction from the destruction side.

A quick look at the build will identify the focus areas: Mobility through instant cast dots, draining capability through various drain talent enhancers, boosted survivability through voidwalker sacrifice, improved shielding, master demonologist (in case of the first build) and molten skin.

We're completely ignoring the high tier options from the various trees because they generally add very little to survivability and whilst increasing the damage output is good it is not what we're looking for with this build.

The additional issue with some of the high tier talents is that they require you to stand still to cast which, as a warlock, is most likely the last thing you want.

Destruction apart from nether protection, molten skin and shadowfury stun offers very little in terms of protection so we take what we can get in this case and spend the 8 points to top off molten skin.

Playing the build

The build focusses on mobility and generally relies on having a voidwalker available. While the voidwalker himself adds very little to the battle (other than a good way to occupy people's pets) his primary purpuse is to be sacrificed. Demonic brutality will ensure that you get the benefit of a 10k damage absorption shield every minute which is something even a discipline priest wouldn't scoff at and your voidwalker makes an excellent dump for soul link damage. Try not to lose him, you'll miss him when he's gone (or are voidwalkers female? hmmm).

The trick is to stay mobile. Drop your demonic circle on a ledge, preferably somewhere elevated and focus your combat around your circle. If the battle moves away from your circle the first thing you should do is move your circle. Not having a teleport available when things get too tricky is what causes most warlocks to die.
Dropping your circle on top of a wall means you'll have a nice place to return to to lick your wounds... leave the dying to the lesser mortals.

Spread your dots around, don't worry about trying to kill single targets, instead spread the corruption, use your curse of exhaustion and even throw in the occasional seed of corruption. Non-instant cast spells can be used occasionally but don't focus on trying to spread those around unless you have a lot of breathing room.

You're not a single target combatant but you have the potential to be worse than any catapult in large groups. If you do get caught out on your lonesome use your fear liberally, drain and bubble up as much as you can, you'll be amazed how frustratingly hard to kill you can be and sooner or later someone always comes by and saves the warlock.

Last but not least remember that drains are your friend. People often say draining is a lousy way to dps but personally I think doing damage while getting a bunch of hitpoints for free which can easily be converted to mana is priceless.

On stats

There's not much to say about stats. As a caster you get very little choice in the stat department and whilst I would love to say stack up on armor it's really not an option for us. Instead focus on stamina and spellpower like an ordinary warlock.
The choice between crit, haste and spirit is a bit of a toss up. Haste clearly does nothing for you except lower some GCD's which is nice but hardly crucial. Spirit vs crit is a debate in itself and I simply put to you to go with what you appreciate more. Personally I have a tendency to run with fel armor 99% of the time and spirit translates very nicely to spellpower in that way but as said crit vs. spirit is not a debate I am willing to take on.

Resilience as always is a good choice for any bg'ing warlock. 500 of it should be easy to obtain but you'll really start to feel the difference resilience can make once you get above 700.

All in all I have to say I am quite pleased with the builds. The second build was my attempt to irk out just that more damage without sacrificing too much mitigation and it seems to be working out well so far. While the damage still remains lackluster the combined effort of my pvp trinket, the demonic circle, a much needed defensive proc with the voidwalker sacrifice and the healthstone means that I can survive the initial burst of most of anything.

In the end these builds gave me what I wanted most out of the battlegrounds: The ability to /smile at a rogue and mean it.

That's something isn't it?

For the Horde: Wintergrasp 102

2009-09-13T03:06:00.001-07:00

Welcome to wintergrasp soldier. If you have not yet done any wintergrasp battles I would suggest you go out and taste the flavor before returning here to get a few more ideas on what YOU can do to turn the entire wintergrasp battle in your faction's favor (this is not a 101 after all).

Today we will focus on the finer points of Wintergrasp looking at a few specific tips and tricks that can seriously alter the course of a WG during the battle.

NPCs

While NPCs generally add very little to a WG battle they do add rank when you kill them. The more rank you have the quicker you will be able to produce some kind of useable vehicle for the battle. If the battle starts and you're not getting the enemy contact you'd like to rank up scour the planes for NPC's to rank up on. It's not as fast as enemy players but they can help rank up in a pinch and theres a bunch of them at most bridges.

Paratrooping

Paratrooping is the fine art of dropping into wintergrasp via parachute when the battle begins. Paratrooping can have a 1001 and one (yes, 1002) applications to the creative minds and they can help turn the battle in your favor in no time.

Paratrooping comes in many shapes and forms but here's a few interesting options:

1. When on offensive drop into wintergrasp via parachute and take out the fort gun towers. More often than not high stacks of tenacity means that you can take out a gun long before you have to seriously worry about more than one enemy coming after you. Every gun they lose means longer life for your siege vehicles.

2. grab a few guys and parachute into the fort when on offense. If you can hit a less populated area you can put the wringer on the enemy right from the start and even start working on those walls. If you can get enough people together to parachute in you can control the battle right from the get go.

3. Mages use your slowfall... you'll have no greater happiness than pulverizing your foes while still in mid-air.

4. Drop in and camp the defenders graveyard. They will have to shift back some forces or be stuck there for a few minutes fighting you. The graveyard is surprisingly easy to camp with a few DPS and a tree healer.

Towers, Towers, Towers

Despite popular belief wg is all about the towers. When in offense you must have defense to protect your towers and the rear workshops. You need at least 5-10 people to put up a solid defense and you need just as many to put up a solid offense to take out the towers when defending the wg.

A southern tower represents 10 minutes off of the WG timer. If you're on offense you cannot afford to lose that time, if you're on defense you cannot afford to wait around that extra time.

Put as much pressure as you possibly can on that southern area in offense or in defense. People will not rally to your cause so you will have to take it upon yourself to go down there.

Breaking things

There's more ways than one to break things in wintergrasp. The RRPGs available at every workshop are insanely good at taking out siege vehicles and yet I rarely see them used. Even though they're horrible to aim they can also be shot into walls...

Engineering bombs and sapper charges can be used to damage walls and gates just the same so a large group of engineers can put pressure on walls and towers long long before the first catapults start rolling out of your workshops.

Dealing with Tenacity

If you have tenacity things are looking in your favor. Be aggressive be out there but don't forget to have a goal. Just running with the masses killing things will not get those walls or towers destroyed.

If you're dealing with oponents that have a tenacity buff ... CC. Crowd control them. Sheep them, do what you must to keep them busy. Rather than disabling a single person with your crowd control you're effectively eliminating a whole group of players with a single CC. Use your CC... I know you still have the button somewhere.

We strike from the west

If you ever been in defense of WG you already know that your ressurection spits you out on the east side of the fortress. As a result it's terribly easy to defend the east side of wintergrasp from incursions because you have a constant stream of fresh bodies and vehicles at the east side.

Attackers come from the west. An attack from the east is 100% more likely to fail than anything you would throw at them from the west side. If the west side is solidly defended then barge in through the front door.

The east side should only be attacked to form a distraction or if you want your side to be stuck in a long drawn out battle with an eventual loss.

Understanding catapults

Catapults are generally weak but fast vehicles. They do have a significant advantage in personell destruction that should not be underestimated. Laying down noxious clouds of gas on enemy turret positions will deter the enemy from standing there and casting spells at you. Fling your barrels over the walls and you can start inflicting damage to the enemy without them being able to do anything about it.

While siege vehicles are often prefferred a catapult or two can wreak havoc to tightly packed groups of people... say the ones defending a fort. Catapults also fit through the doorways of towers.

And that's it for wintergrasp 102. I hope you have learned a few new things soldier, or at least are willing to use the things you already knew.
In the end a group of 5 coordinated people is infinitely more powerful than the raid full of honormongers.

Now, to battle!

Walking the beaten path

2009-08-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

It's always interesting to just stand in a major faction city to observe people. Whether it is just to look at some specs and gear combinations or to see people whip out various items they just found while cleaning the bank there's always something funny, something sad and something interesting to see.

And while I sat there on the roof of the bank in Org I noticed something peculiar, something that without knowing and having lived the life of a wow gamer for a while would've struck me as odd.

So odd that had I just joined the game just now I would've stood there puzzled looking at all the people running from the AH straight to the mailbox by the bank.

There they were... whizzing into the AH and to the mailbox at the bank and back, like they had done for days, weeks, months and even years in the past....
whizzing out of the AH... right past a mailbox that was introduced in one of the last patches straight to their old familiar mailbox which is without a shadow of a doubt at least twice as far from the auction house as the one they just ran by.

And there we had it... people had become so accustomed to doing things in a certain way that even when they could clearly see the new mailbox sitting right there next to the AH they still took the time to travel to the one just a dab further away.

It makes me wonder what else we miss along the way. I am not one to walk the beaten path often but it took me a solid day to ween myself off of the old mailbox onto the new one. And so even I begin to question if my fairly unique playstyle is not simply the result of how I played so many MMORPGS before wow and even wow itself.

Has all this practice and experience with wow in fact made us blind to unique playstyles and new experiences that we could have if we just did things 'differently'? I'd like to think not, I'd like to think each and every one of us is playing our way because we want to play the way we play.

But then there's the masses of people running back and forth from the AH to the mailbox they have been running to for the last who knows how long. A throng of ants following an invisible pheromone trail laid by themselves and others too easy to follow and too hard to break away from.

Are you still loyal to your mailbox?

Retribution PVP - putting the FU in Fun

2009-08-21T04:00:00.001-07:00

Between my seemingly now standard 10-12 hour workdays I have been looking for ways to gear up some of my 80's a little to at least get them out of their blues and into something a little more epic.

The problem with running up to 12 hour workdays is that once you log in you need to know right there and then what you're going to do and whom you are going to do it with (no sexual inuendo intended).

Despite the relative easy of instances these days it turns out that getting a group as a blue geared paladin of any type can be a bit of a time-consuming challenge and so I turned to the age old gearing standby: PVP

And since I was and mostly still am fully dressed in the standard set of PVP blues I decided to go with Retribution as my primary pvp spec. Even as a blue geared ret paladin the burst is crazy enough to be able to take down most of anything.

Still as Retribution PVP there's still a few challenging classes. A good warlock is without a doubt capable of kiting the life out of me (quite literally), frost mages can pretty much snare me till I turn blue (also quite literally) and a good frost dk will definitely have the advantage over my blue geared ret pally even if it is only on the basis of lots of snares and interrupts.
Thankfully most warlocks these days are destruction in the BG's so there is only a minor worry that you'll be dotted up and CoEx'ed until you expire leaving the frost mages as biggest issue.

To try and address the whole issue of being easily kited I decided to put the FU in fun and looking towards gear that will keep me from being kited as much by frustrating the hell out of anyone who tries to lock me down in such miserable ways.

My answer to the problem was simply: Frost resistance (and liberal use of hand of freedom)

The 3 primary gear items for this goal are easily crafted (Icebane) starting you off with a chestpiece (115FR), some boots (86FR) and a belt (86FR) that together provide almost 300 Frost resistance (FR). Slap on your frost resistance aura at that point and you're sitting at a massive 400+ Frost resistance.

Incidentally 400 Frost resistance is about where you'd want to be to be resistance capped. Read a previous post of mine here on that topic.

The icebane set definitely has some disadvantages (losing crit/hit/resilience) but there is a decent amount of stamina on there and some sockets to make up for the biggest losses you may have taken.

You can also slot some gem slots with infinite spheres but at a moderate +5 resist all you can ask yourself if this is really worth it over some hit/crit/other gems.

Last but not least it's worth mentioning that there's a couple of rings such as the titanium frostguard or frozen eye that can be used to swap some gear around without losing any frost resistance over it.

Looking back at a day+ or so frost-resistance combat I can note a little less burst and some loss in resilience which is hardly noticeable. With frost resistance aura up however I can now pretty much mitigate a significant portion of frost dk damage and almost completely shrug off frost mages which previously were a huge issue.

Combining this with various engineering trinkets I am currently trying out and it seems like trading in some damage for oodles newfound mobility is paying off quite handsomely.

Perhaps once I have access to better PVP gear I will have to re-evaluate using the icebane set in favor of something else but in comparison to the pvp blues and even some of the earlier PVP gear sets icebane's tradeoff in damage vs resistance definitely puts icebane ahead of anything I have seen so far in terms of survivability.

If nothing else I can heartily recommend giving it a try simply because the overall material requirements to craft a frost resistance set is laughable by today's standards.

Now if you'll excuse me I have some frost mages to giggle at.

Flash users -> update now

2009-08-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

Funny how time flies when you're just playing the game and not paying attention to your blog.

I could bother you with the latest and greatest of patch 3.2 which has been available to us for a while now but other than the mount changes I can honestly say I didn't take a closer look yet. For some reason securing logistics to get all my characters mounted up as far as they can go took a little longer than anticipated.

Nonetheless there is a little something I encountered that you might want to take care of before it costs you your valuable wow account.

A recent vulnerability in flash player which is commonly installed on most PCs means that the flash player of certain versions have become somewhat prone to become carriers of key loggers.

I am not going to bother you with details, but since I saw some problems related to it on a corporate level I'd think and go ahead and issue a warning to my 4 readers (although those might just've died in the chairs they are sitting in, remind me to poke them with a stick later):

Go update your flash player at adobe.com or go read more about it by following this link here: Link

Be aware that it will try to install the google toolbar as well so if you don't want that don't forget to uncheck the related checkbox.

Uninstalling flash isn't really an option since it's used by quite a few websites and they will happily tell you that you need a flash plugin when you don't have one.

Normally I leave security in the hands of the individual people but this one has such a high chance of being abused by various crackers (this is not a racial slur, go look it up if you disagree) to break into your wow account that I decided to break my usual stoic silence and give you fair warning.

There's been a few reports here and there for this vulnerability but since this one can actually be abused to drop a keylogger in your system my opinion is that you can never repeat it enough.

It won't make you cracker-proof but at least you eliminate one more risk.

Back with something more wow-like soon... don't worry.

Will BG XP bring PVE to PVP?

2009-07-21T04:01:00.000-07:00

With 3.2 sitting in the background loader and my low level warrior slowly munching it's way through a few dozen quest mobs I started to think about one of the newer features that will be introduced with the next patch. To quote the allmighty patch notes:

Battleground experience has arrived!
Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar - both located near the Battlemasters in either city - and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would've been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.

No indication was given by blizzard how much XP you actually stand to gain other than it being less than questing xp. Given the fact that HKs do not yield XP it leaves only a handfull of objectives that will actually give XP per BattleGround.

Add to that the fact that different BG's have different amounts of objectives for which I assume the XP gain will be balanced enough to not favor certain BG's right from the get go and I have to come to the conclusion that we really don't know anything at all yet.

But let's not jump the gun here. If BG XP is 'poor' than most people will ignore it for the large part and the net result will be is that we simply won't have to deal with overgeared twinks in lower brackets anymore which you may or may not find helpful.

If however BG XP all of a sudden becomes a decent way to level up your character, or if nothing else provides a suitable alternative to questing all day then we should expect to see an increase in Battleground activity.

Unfortunately much like holiday event achievements the people going into a bg for the purpose of levelling their characters will be there for just that: The XP

They will stick to objectives that give decent xp like glue rather than focussing on the absolutely vital (*caugh*) task of exterminating the enemy. In fact I can see this giving rise to a whole new slew of win trading where people will cap an objective only to stand there and wait for it to be capped back so they can re-cap it just for the purpose of xp.
You know those people in BG's that would rather do the turn-in quests or sit there and fish all day long? Just imagine that, only far far more of them.

There's some merrit to the idea of course. Why should people that are primarily interested in PVP be bothered with such trivial things as gaining XP through questing when they can just cap,recap and rerecap things ad nauseum. But the worry I have is that BG XP will either be completely trivial or worse, good enough to merrit scamming and abuse.

There's also a social aspect to the whole change. Sure, people flock to 'free xp' like flies to crap (euh... moths to light) but will someone who is primarily interested in PVE even consider PVPing for XP? Will the hoped for larger numbers in the battlegrounds materialize if you throw a handful of XP at the issue?

So the question for the time being seems to be: Will BG XP bring the PVE crowd to PVP and if it does how long will it take before someone gets the bright idea to win-trade WSG?

And what about you? will you BG for XP if it's decent enough XP?

We don't need no stinkin damage

2009-07-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

So the warlock Q&A has been answered. I am not going to bore you with details because there's really nothing concrete in there except some vague promises that things will improve for warlocks. Looking at the 3.2 patch notes it puts me in a somber mood to see that the actual warlock buff doesn't come from changes to the warlock talent tree itself but indirectly through a resilience change.

Resilience will be changed to a flat damage reduction across the board. Since previously both our dot damage and later our dot crit damage was taxed by resilience the change effectively means warlock damage will be higher relative to the damage that everyone else is doing.

The problem however never was our damage (not in pvp or pve). Warlocks left alone can output a significant amount of damage well capable of causing significant havoc in the enemy ranks.
The reason why warlocks fair so poorly in PVP at the moment is purely down to survivability of both the pet and the warlock (and maybe that darned felpup spell interrupt missing all the time).

While some changes to pet scaling will hopefully help the pet to stay alive longer (possibly even 3 whole GCDs) the actual issue is still with warlock survivability itself.

Warlocks don't live long enough to deliver their damage because their ancient high-stamina drain tanking capability has been stripped down to nothing and they received no other relevant buffs to their survivability (if anything the constant fear nerfing is really doing them in now defense-wise).

This makes warlocks easy targets for any melee that can manage to keep stepping on the warlock's toes, so easy in fact that a decent melee will maybe need 5-10 seconds to tear the warlock to shreds healing applied or not.

I see the signs on the wall though... if you keep buffing damage now to the point where the damage starts having an impact once again and only then address the survivability you can have a guess what will happen.

My thought on the current situation of the warlock class, beyond that the whole class is really poorly designed and could use at least some 'vision' is that we really don't need all the extra damage they're alloting us.

I never wanted to be a glass cannon... I wanted to apply my dots and then by the good graces of high armor (for a caster) / high stam and a few solid life-returning abilities live long enough to see my dots slowly ticking away on the enemy before having to re-apply them.

I don't envy anyone in charge of class balance but it seems to me it's harder to balance a class that was not blessed with a clear vision of what the class should/could be.

Perhaps it's time to delve deeper into the warlock design...

Corpsevertisement recycling your local graveyard

2009-07-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

In an interesting turn of events I recently noticed that a lot of the corpsevertisements as they are used by larger gold-selling companies these days are actually using a list of 'standard' person names.

Take a closer look at the corpses on the floor next time and you will usually notice that there is either a fully qualified person name somewhere in the middle or at the start of it followed by a sequential random string of characters.

So DEBBIEDESGFDE and SUEDESGFDF are good examples of this scenario. Check out your local corpsevertisements and see if you can come up with anything interesting.

It does make me wonder whether the gold seller on our realm (presumably the same as on every other realm) can then be called out on being from at the very least an english speaking country given that all the names are clearly from an english subset. Or at least I didn't see any gustav's or dmitri's in there...

Interestingly enough making gm tickets for the corpsevertisement will actually get it removed... not that it doesn't re-apply itself after a while but it definitely gets removed by some hapless GM who clearly has to remove the entire damn thing by hand which may provide you some short term entertainment while bank sitting.

I wonder if it's a bad sign for a blog to be reporting on virtual advertisements...

Become your own worst enemy

2009-07-08T06:29:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago blizzard announced that they're working on a system that will allow you to change factions for a price (and not a gold one at that). Much like many other character customizations it will now be possible to literally become your enemy changing yourself into a race of the opposite faction that can carry your class.

That said it will still not be possible to change your own race within your own faction and even switching to alliance from horde and back will not allow you to actually end up with a different race (the system remembers your previous race).

So there we have it: You can turn your Tauren Shaman into say a squid shaman (ok ok draenei for all you pro-squid folk) and back but there will be absolutely no option to turn your tauren into an orc shaman.

I have to admit this confuses me a little. I can understand the reservations blizzard may have in letting you change your own race to a certain extend because they assume that people will then always switch to the race with the 'best' racials.

But on the other hand I find that concern to be somewhat of a moot point. I am sure there's a certain amount of people that would switch for the purpose of racials but given the overall state of racials the number of people will definitely be less than 10% of the population.
Add to that the fact that people value different racials and the net effect will be very limited in terms of racial shifts (maybe a few more undead) meaning that it won't upset the race balance but will result in a nice little cash flow for blizzard.

This and the general thought that by allowing a faction switch you will still more or less be able to pick the best racials (except they'll be in a different faction and from a limited selection of races based on your class) and the whole thing becomes more of a faux argument than anything else.

Honestly the primary drawback for faction switching I see is that a lot of hordies I know would switch to alliance purely to escape the dysmal economy we have due to a 3:1 alliance:horde size difference. Which in turn would result in the already bloated alliance faction to become even bigger. Now I don't mind a bit of a tenacity buff, but being outnumbered 4:1 every place you go might be a bit over the top.
Maybe only alliance will be allowed to switch factions since they're traditionally the larger faction on most servers.

I don't know how big the percentage of people is that would dish out for faction changes, I am sure a fair share of gold sellers, scammers and grievers will find the option enticing (assuming it's cheaper than a realm transfer) but even then it'd be interesting to know how many would choose to become their own worst enemy by switching sides.

Would you?

Corpsevertisement, anyone need an undertaker?

2009-07-02T02:39:00.000-07:00

Well the past weeks I've been in a complete fire festival haze disregarding most of anything else including about 500g in returned auctions that I probably should've checked before the timer on them expired.

Still compared to the 10+ levels I managed to scrounge up through honoring/desecrating fires I'd say 500g is a paltry sum.

Suffice to say I spent a lot of time travelling and when each of your characters passes through Org or whatever other capitol city you may prefer you can't help but notice the immense amount of corpses littering the ground spelling out some obscure gold-selling site (and the fire festival has tought me that even the alliance capitols are covered in corpsevertisement).

I am not against creative advertisement... after all if I had a script that'd drop 50 corpses from the sky spelling out something you'd probably see my name written across the barrens more than a few times (or maybe someone else's if it attracts the banhammer).

The problem is that

a) it never gets cleaned up: You have to see the damned graffiti each and every day and no GM really seems to give a hoot that it's there

b) you can't make use of the advertisement because the second you actually go to the advertised site and buy their goods you're breaking the TOS and may find yourself getting banned at some time in the future, even if it is months or years further down the line.

So basically we're looking at little more than what is often referred to as 'jailbait'. Something that entices you to break the law and will get you banned but is still there and awfully tempting (for some).

I am always a little surprised that blizzard doesn't at least try and do something about it like automatically delete corpses in town after 2 mins forcing people to rez at a healer. In the end it kind of feels like the advertisement is being condoned making people think they might as well buy some gold only to be punished by blizzard who is basically exposing us to the advertisement in the first place.

Thus I would like to propose that players are given the option to remove those kinds of corpses themselves, especially considering the fact that no one else does it.

Give me a torch to set them on fire, allow me to incinerate them in a flurry of fireworks or at the very least give me a shovel that'll make it possible to burry corpses. You could even have some fun with it and throw together an achievement for it that leads to a nifty title like 'the undertaker' after you burried your 1000th corpse.

Make it only useable in town and it doesn't strike me as something would be able to abuse too easily and I would happily spend 5 minutes of my time deleting the corpsevertisement even if it is only to see them fall from the sky again a few minutes later (make the gold sellers work for it at least).

I hereby volunteer for the position of undertaker. I'll be needing a shovel, some tomb-stones, a wicked evil accent, some dark clothes and maybe a hurse of some sort...

Fire Festival - maybe?

2009-06-22T02:04:00.001-07:00

Well I was all set to jump into the fray when the fire festival hit last sunday and one of my chars was looking forward to getting a nice chunk of fireblooms for that illustrious fire pet they have on offer for 350 odd blossoms.

So I go out into the wild only to find out that I was unable to complete any of it due to having done it last year. *mutters*

Apparantly you're only allowed to celebrate summer once in a character's lifetime so while most of my characters are stuck in springtime or even winter I resigned to having to do one of my other characters first. Hopefully after 2.5 billion angry GM tickets blizzard will figure out that not all is right with the world.

Eventually I noted they did indeed post a message on the startup screen indicating they are aware of the issue so I look forward to seeing a day's worth of work go down the crapper because blizzard had to 'revert' to fix the issue (I know I know, I'm jaded).

In the end I did manage to get my mage all the achievements except slaying ahune on my magus which I had to pass up because it was getting late and I have a distinct lack of guildies I can force to help me with him.

Having run through most of the achievements behold a list of random tips for the poor lone hordie:

1. When doing some desecration in kalimdor and you have to hit azuremyst, blood isle and teldrassil as a horde note that you can take the ferry from auberdine (darkshore). You need to run straight through the town into a building before you can hit the docks so best thing to do is to wait in the water till you see the ship coming and then make a mad dash for it. (from the top of my head->) The left boat takes you to stormwind, the boat straight through goes to azuremyst and the boat to the right goes to Teldrassil. Note that azuremyst and teldrassil have multiple fires to be desecrated... don't forget one or you'll kick yourself repeatedly.

2. Most alliance are not interested in you whether you desecrate fires or not. The ones you have to watch for are usually level 80 with a really really bored look on their face (death knights mostly).

3. When stealing flames from enemy capitols note your chat text. You will just get the lootable dropped in your pack after clicking on the fire. If you find yourself clicking on the damn fire a dozen times without receiving an item check your pack: odds are you have it already (don't forget to right click it to activate the quest).

4. Save your blossoms for the fire festival outfit! you need the outfit to do one of the achievements and the darned thing is soulbound eating up some 400 blossoms at that. (reader comment: you can get a refund for the shoulders [and shoulders only] and get your blossoms back if you return them in time).

5. Once you have the blossoms for 40 torches you can do the torch tossing in dalaran achievement by yourself (although you really only need 10-20ish torches for the achievement). Simply bind the torches to a key and then click on yourself so you catch your own torches. The cooldown on the torches is almost nil so 40 torches in 15 secs should be cake. (reader comment: you can recycle torches between alts [although I just tossed mine to a guildie]).

6. You can steal torches from other players when they juggle (with storebought torches) by standing right on top of them (usually slightly in front). They won't like you for it, but if you're desperate for torches...

7. If you can't seem to get the torch catching right because you can't see the torch when you throw it use the following macro which allows you to zoom out further: /console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 5 or SetCVar("maxCameraDistance", 60)
If it doesn't work twiddle with the numbers... (reader comment: You can also watch the shadow of the torch you are throwing, if you stay 1 or 2 steps ahead of it you should be able to catch it that way too. OP comment: Note that undercity isn't a good spot to do this due to ground obscurities, ORG works quite well in this regard if it's not too busy).

8. Always walk sideways when in crab disguise... otherwise you're pretty obviously not getting into the whole crab thing properly.

9. Do your exploration achievements at the same time as putting out / honoring fires, you're there anyway.

10. You only need to do the fires in azeroth and outland for the achievements... anything more is just extra xp / blossoms

11. If you do torch tossing and torch catching on all your characters every day it'll net you a solid chunk of xp for literally no effort (both quests take maybe 5 mins per char).

And there we have it, the fire festival in a nutshell. Despite the rather annoying bug that doesn't allow my warlock to participate I'd say one of the more fun events in wow.

Happy juggling, let me know if you need some more info and I'll see what I can conjure up.

3.2 change summary

2009-06-18T01:15:00.000-07:00

Well it looks like the next patch is going to be a whole new ball-game in terms of transportation. Mount requirements and cost are going down accross the board, we're looking at extensions to and for the argent tournament and there's even a new BG in the making.

For those of you that haven't checked up on the patch notes for 3.2 yet and actually read noobding instead (catering to really small audiences here) have a look at my summarized version of all the news out there in regards to 3.2.. As usual in no particular order:

1. The argent tournament colloseum will be completed and will include new 10 / 25 man raid dungeons available through an unlock system
2. Mount requirements are going down across the board. Epic land mounts at 40, normal mounts at 20, travel abilities at 16 and regular flying at 60 and the cost has been slashed for mounts as well (we're talking hundreds of gold less, hold off on collecting mounts for now).
3. A plethora of class changes and profession changes and with a little luck shamans will be the happy owner of a new totem management bar and hopefully a little bit smoother gameplay.
4. New heirlooms a few of which will come with additional xp bonusses that stack with the old one now allowing for up to 20% faster xp generation.
5. An upgraded squire that you can use as a bank/vendor or mail.
6. 2 new quest hubs in icecrown
7. Isle of conquest battleground added supposedly a bit of a spin-off of Arathi Basin's location cap concept.
8. A zeppelin that will go from TB to OGR (horde rejoice)
9. New portals connecting capitol cities to the dark portal and a flight path from there to shattrath

That's the crux of the changes without highlighting particular classes or professions. I am definitely holding off on commenting on those since they're never carved in stone. And since there's no warlock changes announced I really have nothing good to rant about anyway.

If there's a particular topic that strikes your fancy let me know and I'll see if I can conjure up some details

Basic item gold value (vendor)

2009-06-08T03:52:00.000-07:00

We all know this situation: You finished up a quest, look at the rewards and decide nothing in there is worth anything to you so you just want to take whatever vendors for the most gold.

Even though the situation has become rare sometimes we don't have an addon readily available that will tell us what vendors for the most (usually after a patch comes by and makes your addons go up in smoke).

And since I couldn't find a decent listing I decided to simply figure out the basics myself and come up with the below tables of what sells for the most at vendors.

Before we dive into the actual table it's worth noting that the value of an item in terms of gold is mostly based both on stats and on ARMOR value (DPS in case of weapons). Since most quests give items of approximately the same item level it's rarely worth looking at how much value stats add to a specific item.

As a result this leaves armor as primary determination (we'll get to weapons in a bit) and the general rule of thumb is: The more armor, the more gold.

This already pre-determines the first thing you can look at when determining what's worth more. From most to least:

Plate
Mail
Leather
Cloth

Now besides the obvious list there's another that determines value based on type. I could go into the nitty gritty of things but in the end it's based on observations over a day's worth of auctioning and vendoring and some data I found regarding calculating the armor value of an item. Again from most valuable to least valuable:

Chest
Legs
Head
Shoulders
Feet
Hands
Waist
Wrist
Back

In case of armor this means a plate chest is worth significantly more than a mail chest but conversely a mail chest is going to be worth more than some plate boots.

Deciding between close matches is going to stay hard without an addon like auctioneer but in the end it's purely a matter of armor calculations. Generally though if you just cut the table in blocks of 3 (or so) then you can assume that a mail item from block 1 is going to be worth more than plate items in block 2.

It doesn't always work that way but 80% of the time you should get a better result than just picking up whatever plate item is in the list. When in doubt simply look at the value listed under armor and pick the highest.

Weapon gold value is calculated purely on their DPS values. That means the higher DPS the more gold a particular item is worth. And you guessed it: that makes 2handers of any kind top of the foodchain when it comes to making money. Overall the table looks mostly like this from most to least:

2handed
1handed
Wands
guns, bows and crossbows
Thrown and off-hand

Knowing that the only real question remaining is how the weapon gold values fit in with the armor type gear.

Here is what I came up with:

(weapon) 2 handed [staffs are top of the pool here]
(weapon) 1h anded
(weapon) Wands, guns, (x)bows
(Plate) chest, legs
(Mail) chest, legs
(Plate) head, shoulders, feet
(Leather) chest, legs
(Mail) head, shoulders, feet
(weapon)Thrown
(cloth) chest, legs
(Leather) legs, head, shoulders
(weapon)Off-hand
(Plate) wrist, waist, hands
(cloth) cloaks, head, shoulders, feet
(Mail) wrist, waist, hands
(Leather) wrist, waist, hands
(Cloth) wrist, waist, hands

I would like to ephasize at this point that these are ESTIMATES! Working off of this table has worked quite well for me so far but if you really want the most out of your quest reward choices you should probably look into downloading an appropriate addon.

But what about trinkets, shields, rings and other shiny things?

Currently I have no idea. After compiling the armor and weapon table I honestly had enough of compiling the data and I am still quietly hopeful that I'll just find a full list online somewhere.

Generally it seems that rings and necklaces are at the same level as leather legs, heads and shoulders. Trinkets I still have no idea and shields are right up there with other top of the line plate items (And thus generally a good pick).

Well lets hope this will be of some help to someone somewhere otherwise I just wasted an hour or two scribbling down numbers on a piece of paper ;).

Outland outable at 66

2009-06-06T03:09:00.000-07:00

I had rested my death knight for a few days to get back up to the maximum rested xp.

I had a plan... granted, it wasn't any kind of cunning plan nor a particularly impressive one but I had a plan nonetheless.

So one dark dank evening with my level 66 DK sitting in shatt I decided I had had enough of outland. I had spent about 8 levels in the place after the DK starter quests had put me on 58 and decided the level 69+ mobs in the howling fjord would be easy enough for my nigh-indestructible blood DK.

I hopped on the zepelin in undercity, arrived shortly after in vengeance landing, took a quick note of the fact that there were no quests for me to pick up (start at 68) and headed off into the wilderness to do something that has always been regarded as an inefficient way of progression:

I started grinding mobs.

It didn't take long for my DK to light up like a christmas tree having gone from nearly no experience gathered to a full level's worth in what seemed to be a fairly short grinding session (I should've timed it).

I scratched my head for a moment wondering what happened. You'd think that straight forward grinding shouldn't be able to keep up or even come close to questing in outland but it did remarkably well.

Why I wondered... and the answer was simply: double xp.

The xp you gain for killing a normal mob in northrend is approximately twice as much as the xp you get from a normal mob in outland. Given that outland quests give approximately 10k xp per completion you're looking at 5 extra kills you'd have to make to make up for a regular outland quest.

But grinding generally also means you don't have that annoying travel time from and to the various quest locations.

In other words, the travel time in outland to complete quests completely negated the advantage questing in outland had in comparison to just plain grinding northrend mobs.

The additional advantages are obvious: Even though you go through rested xp like crazy (which is of no consequence to the altaholic that is me) your income practically doubles since you're all of a sudden getting all kinds of northrend valuables. You start collecting greens that you can almost immediately put on once you're done with your grinding session and you get all kinds of resources that are in fairly high demand (meats, borean leather, frostweave to name a few).

I had effectively ruined my stay in outland with spoils of war that should've been completely out of reach.
I settled on grinding the rest of the way to 68 when the northrend quests would become available and opted out of outland on my DK on a permanent basis.

For most of my more powerful characters this means I can enter outland at 58 and leave at 66 provided I have a full 1.5 bars of rested xp to grind out some mobs in northrend (something that is rarely an issue if you have 10 or so characters).

To a certain extend this is kind of saddening. Outland has become little more than a mandatory stop-off on your way to northrend lasting a mere 8 levels from the time you step foot in deathknight peninsula.

I had always enjoyed outland for what it was, but there's no real motivation to level there past level 66, not if you take into account how much less money / xp you will be earning while there.

I already have seen most of the quests and storylines and I am sure I will return to play them all again on one char on the other, but I would've much rather experience the place fully without that nagging feeling that I am going at half-speed collecting stuff that has hardly any value.

So much for outland?

How did dual-spec impact your gameplay?

2009-06-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

With dual spec now having been around for a while and us probably being well on our way to get tri-spec or triple spec further down the line (call it prophecy if you will) there's pretty widespread yet seemingly minor changes to adapt to the option.

Most guilds seem to have undergone a short period of loot rule adjustment to deal with the whole main-spec / off-spec concept of dual speccing.
There were some pros and cons listed here and there about dual speccing but in the end most have settled on a main-spec / off-spec / not-specced concept and built their loot rules around that.

I had expected more really: guilds forcing all the classes with healer capacity into a a dual specced healer role, refusals to spec your second spec for the guild resulting in widespread drama, hefty complaints by pure dps classes that really only have another dps spec to spec into.

None of these seem to have materialized. The cost of dual spec is not prohibitive enough to assume people don't have dual spec yet at 80 and so it almost seems like dual spec was introduced and absorbed wholely by the wow community at large without too much fuss.

Bummer really... nothing like a broken system to bring all the classes closer together and end some age old class rivalries (or at least put a damper on them for a while). Although I suppose it's probably wrong to wish doom and gloom upon the system just to have something amusing to blog about (or is it?).

Personally my dual speccing adventures usually ended up with me having my usual spec as main spec and the dual spec is usually relegated to being a 'test area' where I throw fairly random stuff together to see what it does. Oddly enough my re-speccing cost have gone up significantly since dual specs were introduced because now I am in a perpetual state of having 2 specs I am not entirely happy with.

I still consider carrying extra sets of gear largely a waste and my dual specs tend to feed off of what is already equipped... but in the end my primary problem with dual specs is not the concept but the fact that I always forget I have it.

There's nothing like standing at a meeting stone waiting for that healer to arrive to fill up your party and not remembering that your moonkin is also a tree... or alternatively when I do remember repressing the thought that I might as well heal the thing and get it over with rather than standing around like a stupid dps waiting for a healer (because I don't feel like healing at that time).

That said, now that we have dual specs and no obvious problems (obvious as in even I noticed) have arised I have a feeling we'll soon be looking at tri-spec at the cost of 2k gold.

Maybe dual spec was just an elaborate gold-sink after all. So then dear blog connoiseur: How did dual spec impact your gameplay?

Is endgame gold worthless?

2009-05-27T05:03:00.001-07:00

I did inventory the other day. Outside of the infinite amounts of junk I have smeared out all over my alts I noticed that I had about 10k in gold laying around.

With my hunter, mage and death knight still a ways away from level 77 I quietly acknowledged the fact that I wouldn't have to worry about where the next 2 or even 3 epic flyers would come from.

In fact this time around I wouldn't even have to liquidate any of my assets and can reasonably expect to have another 5k gold through prodding around on the AH for maybe an hour every couple of days long before any of my 3 higher level alts gets to 77.

So looking at the current state of my characters and looking at purely what they 'need' in riding skills to get epic riding and epic flying I am looking at a grand total of almost 50k gold for all my alts left to gather (10 chars in total).

That 50k gold includes everything all my characters could ever want from riding and that is assuming you see epic flying as a requirement rather than a nice to have.

50k definitely sounds like a lot... but given that I already have 10k of that number and it took me about a month with very little effort on the AH to get 5k I could realistically achieve the 50k mark by the end of the year without putting any significant effort into making gold whatsoever. Significantly less if I just devoted a month or two to gold making activities.

I considered putting effort into the gold making process but then it hit me: Assuming you've already bought all the epic flyers you could possibly need and your professions are maxed what is there really left to buy?

A mammoth?
A chopper?
A couple of flimsy rings?
A gigantique bag?
Soap on a rope?
Some other random vendor stuff?

Most of everything else is either tied into some kind of badge/seal/token/honor/rating system or doesn't require gold to get but instead requires effort a.k.a. time. Worse still there is nothing that would allow me to trade in my gold to save some time in that regard.

So what does one buy once one has bought all the 'essentials'?

There's no gold sink big enough that would keep taking your gold and paying you off in a way that you would want to repeat it indefinitely (i.e. gold -> honor might be a start).
Repair and travel cost barely factor in at this point. Sure repair costs can be painful if you have no gold income from anywhere and you run instances all day but that's really a choice you make when you choose that particular lifestyle.

Gear comes from instances, from badges or from honor and arena rating none of which I can buy with gold. Titles come from achievements which translates to effort rather than gold and anything cosmetically interesting seems to come from an obscure trading card game which only kind of comes from gold... if you were allowed to sell gold for cash.

That indeed leaves a rather paltry selection of mounts, rings and arbitrary vendor junk...

So depending on the amount of alts you have there is actually a virtual cap on how much gold you can have before it becomes essentially nothing more than a little number on the bottom of your main bag. And even that number will stop climbing at 2^31 copper because even blizzard thinks that by the time you have that much gold you really should quit or seek help or some such thing.

So, did I miss something or is endgame gold really worthless?

WoW light - now with less flavor

2009-05-25T02:37:00.001-07:00

As it turns out levelling a fire specced mage gives me a lot of time to think on stuff and whilst scorching boars in deathknight peninsula I contemplated the progression of wow over the period that I have been around.

Mind you, I've only been playing this game for euh... about a year and a half or so which to the seasoned wow veteran probably means I am still a noob crawling around in his diapers. But even given my relative short stay with wow I can see a clear move towards simplifying things.

On the one hand there are simplifications that make life a lot more pleasant: Longer self-buff durations, dual talent specialization, gear managers, a myriad of ui improvements right down to simple things like being able to stay mounted in the water (not that I don't want to bash my head against the table whenever I see a swimming cat mount) or color-blind modes for the color-blind.

But in all this simplification I wonder if we're not starting to lose some flavor as well.

Take for example the 'flavor text' that has been disabled for the most part on existing NPC's. You were at some point in the past able to see a simple flavor text that an NPC would use to introduce him/herself with or to give some kind of story vibe to the area you're in. Now, all flavor texts are skipped automatically and apparantly (or I simply can't find it) come hell or high water you won't be able to make the flavor text appear again.
This rarely leads to problems but it sometimes seems like we're missing out on something, something not crucial but still conducive to understanding why the hell we're out here collecting x or killing y.

Another one of those examples is the absolutely gorgeous druid epic flying quest line. You can still pick it up, and most of us that remember it will do so for our druid alts but at this very moment there's generations of druids growing up that will never experience this quest simply because they can buy the epic flight form from the vendor.

There's dozens if not hundreds of other examples that indicate the loss of 'flavor' in this regard and I am starting to wonder if the new wow, the more user-friendly variant, didn't at some point trade in depth and immersion for convenience.

How far are we really from getting a quest helper built into wow that will simply show us what we have to do and dispense with all the storyline around it?

Where do we draw the line between something that is convenient, user-friendly and immersive and something that is... well progress quest?

Is blizzard playing with warlocks?

2009-05-22T01:26:00.000-07:00

Following a postlink from our good friends over at locksucks.com I decided to take a look at the newly created Q&A thread about the warlock class.

You can take a look at it here but anyone who plays a warlock already knows the issues and has known of most of the issues since the wrath beta.

Everyone playing a warlock... or playing against warlocks on a regular basis knows our pets are soft targets, knows that most melee classes are ridiculously hard counters to warlocks and know that warlocks are about as squishy as they come. With our 2 second fear (yes, it only lasts 2 secs if you throw on some dots and it's not like you can cancel the dots for max fear effect) and no escape mechanisms other than a short-range teleport we're literally snacks for anything melee. And there is the age old issue of soul shards still taking up a full bag, all our minor glyphs being practically useless and yadiyadiyadi QQ whine whimper... *sigh*

We've known all this, in fact we've known it for so long there were even decent post in the oboards for a while indicating our dismay where other classes even chime in and agree. And you know your class is doing poorly when you're being pitied by other classes.

Blizzard has done quite a bit with the warlock class since wrath but none of those have really addressed the core issues and the latest Q&A thread strikes me as something I would put up in a forum simply to give people the impression that there is someone out there who cares.

It's not all fire and brimstone of course, overall there are warlock builds out there that do ok in PVP and a good affliction build will definitely hold it's own in any raid situation (apart from killing trash) but still... the Q&A is up to 12 pages now and all blue has said was 'keep up the good work'.

The question the whole thread raises with me is not so much whether blizzard cares or not (they're not going to give up just yet after all) but whether or not they're actually serious when they put up a Q&A like that.

What do they hope to learn from the trolls on the blizzard forums that they couldn't find out themselves if they read a few dozen threads on the arenajunkies and elitistjerks forums?

To a certain extend it seems that due to not having posted on the warlock forums for a while they decided to just toss something up to keep the masses occupied for a while.

So what say you? Is blizzard playing with warlocks or is that thread actually going to be more than one huge pile of QQ about issues that we knew about for almost 6 months now?

What's in it for the new guy?

2009-05-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago I took my warrior out for a spin in 1k needles and after 9 or so characters levelling through there I figure I know the area pretty well. And still something was different than the last 8 characters I put through there... something was very different.

It wasn't the half a trillion new graveyards that would practically spit me out next to my corpse whenever I died. It wasn't the increased run-speed while dead, or the incredible leveling speed or even the fact that I was happily sitting on a mount at level 30... no:

It was the silence... the silence was absolutely deafening.

I had spent a solid 2 hours online and hadn't run into anyone all the time I was out questing. I went to 1k needles and there was nothing (Except loads of ore numnums). I went on to hillsbrad foothills to find a whole lot of no one... out of curiosity I even took a peek at stranglethorne vale and found [6] players. 3 of them level 80s that were obviously lost, on their way to Kara, grinding bloodsail rep or... well... lost.

I didn't see anyone out there outside of Booty bay... but /who clearly stated they were there.

I decided to take a look at the LFG channel for my level bracket, looked at the blank list for a while and decided to just go back to questing.

I've been a bit of a loner for most my wow existence. I like crowds of people, I enjoy the social atmosphere lots of people bring to the table but when it comes down to sticking my blade in things I always preferred to be by myself (or in exclusive company).

But what if you're not the loner type? What if you just bought wow and expected to see teaming masses of people all over the place? Expect to run dungeons in groups, explore the world and do cool things 'with' other people?

What if you really wanted to see all there is to see in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor in the way it was meant to be seen (not some bored level 80 burning through an instance leaving a path of corpses [and you] in his/her wake)?

Are you well and truly hosed? Can you even expect to see a 'real' player before you step foot in deathknight peninsula? Is it really going to be good for a new player to have his/her first contact be with some poor soul's DK alt?

After all this time I always figured WoW would die a certain death from a collapsing economy (mudflation) or suffer defeat at the hands of unmanageable numbers (large number syndrome) but looking at what the game is now it seems like there is a new danger forming. New player frustration.

Sure, levelling is faster than ever... but would you really want to play an MMORPG for 55 levels (which is still going to take a while to get to) if you're surrounded by the overwhelming feeling that you're either completely alone or so late to the game that you'll never catch up?

I am not sure I would... back in the day when I started Azeroth was already a bit of a wasteland... but there were still people, they were annoying and talked a lot of nonsense but they made places like the barrens feel alive...

Now the barrens are just that: barren.

So whilst I am glad that my lowest level character is level 34 which puts me at least well on my way out of azeroth the question begs to be asked:

what's in it for the new guy?

mindflaymindflaymindflaymindflay

2009-05-15T00:33:00.000-07:00

As you can probably make up from the title I picked up my priest again. Since some patch or the other completely wiped my talents (again) I decided to opt-in on the shadow tree. Having previously levelled as a smite build I decided to heed the call of all the so-called experts who dare claim that shadow levelling is so much better.

Well it isn't... at least not from where I am sitting. Sure the mana management and health management are somewhat better and the damage appears to be mildly ahead of ye ole smite build but if your rotation looks something like:

mindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflay

You really start to wonder whether all is right with the world. Sure you can toss in a few dots every now and then but in the meantime you're reliant on mindflay which seems to be cursed with an extremely short channeling period: meaning I do little more than mash the damned mindflay button all day long.

This is in stark contrast to my smite build which I had previously used which involved mostly the spamming of smite. And yet spamming smite is infinitely easier on the fingers (and probably my 1 button) than that cursed mindflay.

I managed to mash mindflay for a solid 10 bubbles before I decided looking cool was a really lousy tradeoff for carpal tunnel syndrome.

I really don't know what Blizzard was smoking when they thought up the idea of having shadow priests go through this misery but I am fairly certain it was infinitely more funny to them than it is to me.

So in order to save my keyboard and prevent me from slipping further into insanity I will opt-out of shadow again and go back to smitewanding things... even if it is supposedly inferior (at least I'll be able to still use my hands when my priest gets to 80 and I won't feel like jabbing my eyes out in the process).

Mindflay much? I bet you do...

75% done (leveling)

2009-05-13T04:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I was digging through my blog to clean up some markup when I noticed that it was about 6 months ago since I last took a good look at my character progression.

So in what has become the only real tradition over here at noobding it's time to take another look at 'then' and 'now' in terms of character progression and hopefully, finally, come up with some worthy goals that do not involve levelling (yeah... who am I kidding).

Back in november the field looked something like this and if you'll remember wrath just hit the shelves so there's some serious TBC nostalgia here:

Capsize - lvl 70 undead warlock
Capstone - lvl 70 blood elf paladin
Capricious - lvl 64 troll hunter
Capibara - lvl 68 tauren druid
Capone - lvl 43 Orc rogue
Capeesh - lvl 31 Orc warrior
Capacitate - lvl 35 undead priest
Capitulate - lvl 40 Blood elf mage
Capow - lvl 35 Tauren shaman
Cap???? - lvl 55 ???? Death Knight

Now 6ish months further down the line the field looks like this (level diference in brackets):

Capsize - lvl 80 undead warlock (+10)
Capstone - lvl 80 blood elf paladin (+10)
Capricious - lvl 70 troll hunter (+6)
Capibara - lvl 80 tauren druid (+12)
Capone - lvl 43 Orc rogue (+0)
Capeesh - lvl 34 Orc warrior (+3)
Capacitate - lvl 44 undead priest (+9)
Capitulate - lvl 58 Blood elf mage (+18)
Capow - lvl 50 Tauren shaman (+15)
Capsickle - lvl 63 Orc Death Knight (+8 from 55)

Which comes down to about 90 levels in the period from november till now putting me at just about 1/2 a level a day.
That doesn't sound too exciting and is definitely down from my usual average but considering I took a new job back in february which cut my wow time down by at least 50% and the treck from 70 to 80 is a slow one I am not really unhappy with the progress (I have 3 80's now after all).

Looking at the totals I now have a remainder of 198 levels to go till the glorious 800 levels mark which at half a level a day would take me a solid year to complete.
Due to more relaxed job circumstances I expect that average to go back up to 1/day though so those 198 levels are looking a hell of a lot more manageable.
In the meantime I rest safely with the thought that even though I still have 198 levels to go I did already complete 602 of the 800 total putting me just over the 75% mark.

The general idea now is to slowly quest up my various characters till they hit northrend where they will be put on a slow drip of daily progression. Starting out with the kalu'ak dailies following by dailies in grizzly hills, then the oracle dailies and last but not least the argent tourney dailies (+ others) should ensure slow but stead progression whilst I work on getting the rest of the team up to northrend levels.

Primary goals at this point include getting the jewelcrafting and inscription professions up. Since they're unfortunately stuck on a pair of lowbies I'll have no choice but to prioritize both the shaman and the priest over other characters.

Mind you this doesn't exactly fill me with glee. Both characters are decent enough to level but have failed to capture my imagination so far (like most characters under level 50) so lets hope it won't be too much of a chore to get them to the level requirements for their professions (60 or 65 I believe it was).

In the meantime I remain steadfast on the course to 10x80 with other goals falling by the wayside or being picked up as things go along.

And you? Level much these days? I certainly haven't seen you in Azeroth (come to think of it I haven't seen anyone while questing in azeroth anywhere... hmmmm).

Argent Tournament Evaluated

2009-05-10T23:51:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not know I have been putting some of my characters through the ropes over at the argent tournament ground. And whilst the large collection of dailies certainly helped my druid do the jump from 78 to 80 in no time I can't help but say I am a little dissapointed.

It's not so much the concept that bothers me. Basically you go through stages where you collect 'badges' through jousting matches and dailies for your selected faction. Once you collect enough of these 'badges' you become a champion of that faction and can make use of the faction specific vendor. Once you completed a faction you can pick the next faction to pursue championhood with.

All in all the idea of unlocking faction vendors and faction specific rewards really spoke to me. After all, here is something that given time any solo player can do without too much hassle and you get a whole slew of titles while you do it.

There are however a few things on the argent tournament ground that really takes away from the intensity of it all and makes it look like more of a fair than an actual tourney.

1. Enemies don't scale well. Once you have the basic strategy down on how to beat a valiant you can use the same strategy to destroy champions, lieutenants, the black knight and even those pesky commanders out in the scourge fields. In other words, once you beat one you can beat them all.

2. No epic storyline quests (in fact very little non-dailies whatsoever). At the least something along the lines of the wrathgate quest that would take you a while to complete and offer up a nifty cinematic if nothing else. Instead we get nothing except all the factions playing pokeystick in the lich king's backyard. You'd think factions would be a tad more involved in training champions that are supposed to topple the lich king's might.

3. All the faction vendors sell 90% of the same crud. I don't mind unlocking x factions at 5 days each but I'd like it if the vendors were selling things that were more faction specific. A pet and an overprized mount are certainly not going to draw me over the line here (even if the mounts will cost less 'badges' with some patch to come). Implement some 'this faction only' kind of gear, trinkets and whatnot and you'll definitely see some motivation towards doing more than just one or two factions.

4. It doesn't feel like you're contributing anything. Sure they're building a big arena thingie in icecrown even though I can't fathom why you'd build something like that... 'there' ( You could at least pick someplace warm ). But beyond that you're not really feeling the whole 'fuel the war effort' vibe that you'd expect from a place like that. Give us a war on the outskirts of the tourney ground where you can go crazy with different types of vehicles. Gives us quests to seek out the monstrous champions of the lich king all over azeroth (medivh knows the place could use a visit), give us something to make us feel like we're doing something towards the war effort.

5. Players are not motivated to joust players other than to grab a quick achievement. If nothing else you should be able to joust other players and receive something that'll contribute to your overall standing with your faction. Hell, even some reputation at that point would be good but anything to motivate a little bit more player jousting activity.

So all in all I am a little on the fence about the whole argent tournament. There's quite a few things I rather like and the overall concept is a great one but there's just so much more that could've been done to make the tourney as epic as it should be.

Then again the argent tournament was sort of a 'bonus' that came with the whole 3.1. content patch so this is by no means a vicious rant on how terrible it all is (I am still playing it after all) but just thinking of what the tourney could be really puts a damper on the experience.

As it stands I'll settle for an 'somewhat poorly implemented'.

On the bright side: the more frustrating the tourney is the fewer people will be running around with crusader titles which is at least worth something...

So what do you think? Break a lance or would you rather try and fish up a turtle?

GC says: No more changes

2009-05-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

Well it looks like big blue got a little fed up with all the patching and decided to call an overall freeze on the more significant talent changes. Behold the post of the mighty ghostcrawler on the oboards that was made sometime last saturday:

"When players feel weak, they tend to ask how often until the next hotfix or patch comes around.
When players feel strong, they wonder why we have to change things so often.

That said, I don't think you will continue to see as much class change for the rest of Lich King. Many of the changes in 3.1 were to address problems introduced when we made big changes in 3.0. You can look at the classes that have had the most iteration, and in most cases those are the classes who were restructured a little bit in Lich King: warlocks, hunters, priests, paladins and the new class.

We will continue to tweak numbers up and down as needed, but I would not anticipate as many talent or mechanic changes for the next several patches (though there will be some)."

This is certainly a bit of a doozy since it has widespread implications on the current game. To take GC's words rather bluntly it basically says that if you're not happy with your class now your chances of it being fixed beyond some number tweaking are pretty much nil. That is until patch 4.0 or so which for all intents and purposes could be years away (or 'soon' as blizzard likes to call it).

So without too much drama or QQ about how those miserable bastards basically kicked my warlock to the curb, shot my hunter through the head and elevated my puny level 61 DK to godhood status lets take a quick look at wow census.

Why? because it's reasonable to assume that the most popular classes now, will be more or less the most popular classes all the way through wrath:

Allright, I'd say that pretty much speaks for itself... the bottom end is still clearly shared by rogues, warlocks and shamans and the top end is still looking at a lot of love for pallies and dk's.

Cross this data with the arena representation for the freshly bred season 6 here

And voila, it's safe to say: If you're on the bottom half of both curves and you're not happy with your talents as they are you might as well re-roll, well wait a few weeks and then re-roll since season 6 is fresh off the plate.

That's right... re-roll... don't roll with the punches, don't try to adapt your miserable talent spec that doesn't make you happy through adjusting a playstyle that doesn't make you happy in the hopes that a future patch will make you happy.

It won't, because there will be no patch to fix you until blizzard decides to get sick of whomever holds on to their decrepid class and maintains a steady stream of whines on the oboards for the next months.

So the waters will indeed become stagnant and start to stink over the next few months as blizzard's developers either find some time to put into diablo and starcraft or find themselves out on the street wondering what the hell happened to their cosy jobs messing up our talent trees.

At least I am not alone in this life raft of misery *waves at the hunter sitting behind him*... now if you will excuse me I have to will myself into liking my Deathknight.

*unghhhhh*

Noblegarden: Nobility in a day

2009-04-27T01:47:00.001-07:00

Who'd thought that becoming of noble blood didn't take years of arduous labour under some king or the other trying to prove your worth for all eternity or even a quick marriage into a royal bloodline.

No, Instead it turns out that with a few hours of picking up brightly colored eggs even the lowliest of jenkins can become of noble birth.

For those of you unfamiliar with the noblegarden event I can summarize it really quick by saying it's the wow-variant of easter involving mostly exclusively picking up (not so) brightly colored eggs from your respective starter zones.

Yes, starter zones, you remember those places you haven't been to in the last month or 12? Areas like brill, razor hill and falconwing squary are now brimming with life.

But enough with the inane babble and lets go on the fast-track to becoming a noble in a day. What we're after is the title 'the noble' which is available through the new noblegarden achievements of which you have to complete the following (if it's not listed here you don't need it for the title):

Blushing Bride
Kiss someone wearing an Elegant Dress while wearing a White Tuxedo Shirt and Black Tuxedo Pants.

Chocoholic
Eat 100 Noblegarden Chocolates during the Noblegarden celebration.

Desert Rose
Use Spring Robes to plant a flower in each of the deserts listed (check the achievement for locations).

Hard Boiled
Lay an egg in Un'Goro Crater's Golakka Hot Springs as a rabbit during the Noblegarden celebration. (just go there as a rabbit or bring a friend that has a rabbit transformation branch and stand around there for a few minutes as a rabbit)

I Found One!
Find a Brightly Colored Egg.

Noble Garden
Hide a Brightly Colored Egg in Silvermoon (or stormwind if you joined the other side) City.

Shake Your Bunny-Maker
Use Spring Flowers to place rabbit ears upon females of at least 18th level. (note the level requirement and the 5 minute cooldown on the quest item)

Spring Fling
Find your pet Spring Rabbit another one to love in each of the towns listed.
(basically just go to all the starter towns with your pet out and run into someone else's pet bunny)

The achievements themselves are fairly self explanatory but I added a few comments here and there. All the items you need for the achievement are purchasable from the easter candy vendor.... but...

The first thing we have to realize is that any of the needed items can also randomly be found when opening brightly colored eggs.

The second thing we need to realize is that the drop rate for whatever we want at the time (pray for the pet) is abysmal so we'll need anywhere in the neighbourhood of 200-300 brightly colored eggs. That's a lot of eggs my friends and so pick a starter area that's fairly quiet for your egg hunt. Falconwing square in my case was pretty quiet.

Pick up the 2 quests available for the easter event and then look around. Eggs spawn all over the place but respawn in the same spot quite often. Eggs like stuff to spawn in, spawn next to walls and generally any crevace or crack they can find. Observe the spawning pattern for a while and then stand at a spot where you can see 3 or more spots where eggs appear and then just stand there until they spawn.

You can run around like a headless chicken looking for eggs but that will actually result in you finding 'less' eggs than you would by just standing there and acting cool waiting for a spawn.

Yes, it's spawn camping, no it isn't exactly on the morally up and up but you need 200+ of the damn things and the sooner you're done the better for everyone.

Incidentally you also got a egg basket which next to a spiffy fashion accessory can also give you a 60% run speed buff in the egg-finding zones which is just what the doctor ordered for staying ahead, or at least at the same speed as the competition.

Crack open all the eggs you find. Eggs don't stack but the chocolate inside them will... every item from here on in is a great find but what you're hoping for is some spring flowers, a bunny pet and a robe that allows you to plant flowers. The tuxedo pants and shirt are needed for an achievement (the kiss) but are only 25 candy from the vendor so I myself opted to buy them at the time.

The trick is not to buy anything from the vendor until you're pretty sure you don't need to collect any additional 'brightly colored eggs' which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 - 300 depending on your luck (I've heard of someone finding everything they needed in the first 50 eggs... normal people will need more eggs... luck-challenged people like myself should just go for the 300 mark).

That's all there is to it except a quick trip around the world for the various achievements... but primarily it's all about collecting eggs.

A perfect title for anyone who has a few hours to burn or just can't seem to get a hold of a title at all.

Argent Tournament: Dealing with Valiants

2009-04-27T01:14:00.000-07:00

With my paladin stuck knee-deep in the noblegarden event (more on that some other time) which seems to mostly involve an infinite string of picking up not-so-brightly-colored eggs I started musing on how to continue levelling my druid.

Now at a healthy level 78, the xp/hour through questing is good but has the unfortunate side effect that in order to progress him I am literally taking time away from all my other lovely alts.

So I decided to put my druid through the initial quest chains for the argent tournament and while the first couple of days of dailies hardly proved to be a challenge the next set of dailies can, but don't have to be, a bit of a pain in the arse.

I am talking about duelling valiants. No, they're not difficult to beat in general (after the first time) but the trick is to beat them fast so you can be on your merry way to do other things.

So here's my simple approach to defeating valiants quickly:

1. Charge up your defend to max (3) before you initiate the duel
2. Accept the challenge, you'll note that the valiant will 9 out of 10 times start to move away from you so open with a ~CHARGE~
3. After the charge curve around (I mean curve, not stand and turn, just make a smoothish half circle) and close the distance between the valiant and you, if you can, spam your ~SHIELD BREAKER~ ability to see if you can get a shield breaker in before you get close to him
4. At melee range priority 1 is to keep your ~DEFEND~ up at max (you shouldn't be needing to defend much, just make sure the buff doesn't drop off if you're at max defend) and spam ~THRUST~
5. You will notice after a short stint of melee the valiant will try to get some distance between him/her and you. When that happens go back to nr 2 and rinse and repeat the entire cycle.

What doesn't work:

1. Keeping your enemy at range. Valiants don't seem to have any significant cooldowns on their abilities which means they can ~SHIELD BREAKER~ and ~CHARGE~ you quite a bit if you keep them at range
2. Melee combat with anything less than a full stack of ~DEFEND~ is really bad for your HP
3. ~SHIELD BREAKER~ before ~CHARGE~ doesn't always work and when it doesn't it usually leaves you open to be charged or otherwise attacked by the valiant.
4. Starting out without a full stack of ~DEFEND~ really puts you behind since you'll be trading in a lot of damaging attacks just on building up your shield.

On a side note: Should you ever fight a gnome valiant note that their defend icons are really really tiny so can be somewhat hard to see.

The 'strategy' seems to work quite well on any NPC you can joust including the lieutenants you have to kill in the scourge area in the southern part of icecrown (daily).

There's not much to it, but I've seen some people break a bit of a sweat over the valiants so I thought I'd throw this out there.

Warlock hate runs deep

2009-04-20T01:13:00.000-07:00

A lot of times I am struck by sheer amazement on how much hate people harbor towards classes that either counter them or that they simply do not play. More often the reasoning doesn't make sense but obviously human beings are more than just compilations of rational thought.

Still, the guy who decided to complain about the fact that soulshards can be gotten from training dummies these days and calling for a hot fix might've just gone off the deep end.

Bug, perhaps, game breaking in a fashion that it needs hotfixed: hardly

Read the original report here

Oh ... did I mention you can get soulshards from training dummies? I didn't did I... well you can, bugs are a beautiful thing.

You can also trigger your lightweave cloak enchant off of fel armor life ticks which really makes me appreciate the little bugs that seem to prevail despite any horrendous fear nerfs that seem to abound every now and then.

Also in the 'not so latest news' section it seems that warlocks and rogues are actually now the least popular classes at level 80, death knights and paladins taking the top 2 according to wow census.

Still despite all the negativity the warlock is quite decent to play as affliction in 3.1... I wouldn't want to try and pvp with it still (perhaps as destro) but if blizzard ever lets warlocks back into the drain tanking game via a boost to the health returns I'd actually be quite pleased.

On the other hand it's probably better to wonder what'll get nerfed next.

10 Random 3.1 facts

2009-04-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

3.1 has brought a multitude of new content and in-game changes which you can undoubtedly tell by the myriad of bugs, the overloaded Blizzard support lines and the somewhat random looking realm crashes.

Still all in all I'd say the 3.1 patch went in rather smoothly considering its massive size... on the bright side the 20 minute patch download on my machine gave me ample time to take a closer look at the patch notes for 3.1 and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there.

I am sure you already encountered or read about your particular class' changes (I know I read the warlock changes first) so today we devote our post to the topic of changes that have been implemented for the convenience of players that no one ever seems to notice until you accidentally run into them:

1. Your land mounts mysteriously learned to swim, mind you not all of them do it very elegantly.
2. You can dual spec at level 40 for a 'mere' 1000 gold.
4. You can turn an option on in the interface menu that allows you to allocate talent points in your talent screen without actually allocating them until you press save (or learn rather)... that way you can change your spec multiple times until you're happy with it and then save it... This option is NOT turned on by default...
5. Bored? turn on the color blind mode in the options menu.
6. Try pressing 'ALT' while hovering over an item...
7. Turn on all the quest objective tracking options in the interface menu and even useable quest items will display in the objectives screen. Very handy if you don't have quest helper.
8. Your hearth timer got cut down to 30 minutes... no you really haven't been playing that long yet.
9. Horde mount vendors got a few new mounts to show for. Go to ogrimmar, bloodhoof village and brill and get your 3 mounts if you're still looking for some.
10. If you hapen to be in the area of feralas and see sprite darters go give them a good whacking, slim changes are you will find yourself a sprite darter pet (something previously only available to the alliance)

There we have it... 10 more or less useful and interesting facts from the 3.1 patch notes.

As always after each significant patch it pays to just run through all your options menus and visit your various class and profession trainers to pick up on all those things that have been added with the patch.

There's a lot more in the patch notes that may be of interest to you and I could've easily made it 20 random facts... but then you might as well go out and read the actual patch notes.

patch 3.1 (gold making) preparations

2009-04-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of chatter about the 3.1 patch, the next content patch and there has been a lot of speculation on when we can actually expect to see the patch on the live realms.

On that topic MMOChampion and various other sources have reported that the noblegarden (easter) event in wow has been undergoing significant changes in 3.1 adding quite a few new achievements for the celebration.

Considering the feverish work on the noblegarden event and corresponding achievements it's reasonable to assume that these changes are intended to go-live for this year's easter celebration rather than next years.

The noblegarden event according to the ptr's in-game calendar is scheduled to start on the 26ths of this month of our lord Medivh (or elune if you are of that persuasion).

While the date isn't carved into stone (few blizzard PTR changes are) it's very much reasonable to assume that in order for the event to start in a more or less timely matter we can expect patch 3.1 to hit a few days before that date at the latest.

So that leaves us about 2 weeks of preparation for the 3.1 patch.

Preparation indeed. 3.1 will bring new content and with new content the raiding scene will suddenly spring to live again coming out of the drudgery of endless naxxramas runs strapping on their best buff-foods/ flasks and whatnot to go out hunting the newest perils of ulduar.

And that my friends is where the money is. Demand for high-end consumables should shoot up in the first few days / weeks of the new content patch after which we will most likely observe a (temporary) increase in enchanting requirements.

So that means if you're looking to score a quick bucketload of gold now is the time to buy up all those cheap materials and go to crafting various raid consumables in the faint hope that that stuff will sell after the patch hits.

It better... otherwise I'll end up still sitting on my 1.5k northern spices and I'd have to dump those on the market for cut throat prices (Although there is a certain charm to a level 80 warlock bank toon pissing off whomever is playing the food market for a few weeks). I wish I could convert 10 northern spices to 1 cooking award, oddly enough even reasoning with the vendor doesn't make it so.

Epic pimpage?

2009-04-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Happy april fool's...

In keeping with Blizzard april fools hereby my absolutely serious response to the thought of mount customizations.

Apparantly for a 'small fee' (I wonder what that means... small... small on a 'I make money like blizzard scale' or small as in 'I just turned level 30 and bought my mount kind of small') you would be able to customize your mount in what seems to be a great many ways.

If the pictures would be any kind of indication it would end up being a true who is who of possibly somewhat too creative customization jobs. Now I am not saying anything about taste (to each his/her own after all) but I am somewhat reminded of when ultima online freeshards strapped on a way to color your gear in a billion colors (and your mounts, furniture... etc...).

Lets just say what started out as a good idea quickly turned into a psychadelic mess with colors splattered all over the place (I remember neons and pinks being odly popular... next to black... lots of black).

A bit of customization could be great stuff... but I am not sure sabrecats with cannons and exhaust pipes would really fit into the landscape well.

Still, I am quite amused by the kodo hat and could see myself splurging on an enhancement piece every now and then but there's this nagging feeling that this is going to go horribly wrong in one way or the other.

Flipping the tables once again I wonder how many warcraft lore fans would die a little inside when they see a sabrecat with a cannon strapped to it's shoulders gallop by (no? how about a pink sabrecat with a pink cannon then?).

Well, you tell me, epic pimpage or epic fail... obviously I am indecisive but at least some of it seems like a good idea and some of it really doesn't.

I wonder what my mount would look like if I could deco it any way I wanted...

Did anything good on this fine first of april then?

PVP Season 6, a brave new world

2009-03-27T06:47:00.000-07:00

I should probably be the last person in the world of warcraft talking about PVP since I am far from experienced. Still the topic has always had my intrest since I entered my first BG and this resulted in me eagerly reading most of anything I can find on PVP even going so far as to occasionally troll the ArenaJunkies forums / sites.

Having not looked into PVP since february (coincidentally just about the time I got my new job) I decided to do my rounds and figure out what the current state of arena / PVP is.

Let me start by saying: There's massive changes incoming for the next season. Not only will the rating system be completely re-vamped to start rating from 0 for everyone but all the rewards from PVP have also been re-balanced in the cost department.

From what it looks like arena rating requirements will be significantly lower for most pieces and a lot of pieces will be relegated to the realm of honor purchase. To what extend the new rating values will be achievable with the new system remains to be seen, but only a few items are still left that seem completely off the rating charts.

The arena system has always been in a constant state of flux as blizzard tries to fight the various groups of people that abuse the system or just addressing overall balance issues. If nothing else dealing with their obscure matching system that more often than not resulted in your first 100 matches at a rating of 1500 being against better geared people that'd stomp you into the ground in no time.

Cloth wearers have had it especially hard this season as the very crit-happy wotlk expansion clearly displayed in the average survival times of cloth wearing classes being around the 5 - 15 second mark. The few arena experiences I had as a cloth wearer were dysmal at best and at times I wished I would've brought my prot pally instead just so I could actually last longer than 15secs.

The incoming flurry of arena changes for season 6 were to be expected but most likely fueled by one simple fact:

Overall arena representation / participation is down by a whopping 65% across the board.

65% ... that's almost 3 quarters of the arena population throwing the proverbial towel into the ring.

You know that feeling you had that 2 out of 3 or your former PVP partners stopped playing arena alltogether? Well, turns out that you were spot on on that one.

Sure, people levelling would account for lower arena representation but after 5 odd months of WotLK most people have been level 80 and working on gear / rep / other for a while now.

Arena play motivation is at an all time low. With no incentives for casuals to play the arena and the outlook of spending a good amount of time getting your skull crushed in just for some measly arena rating which in the current setup rarely is enough to get some decent gear caused most of the casuals to literally give up on arena alltogether.

Starting the arena rating from 0 seems the natural way to go and in the long term will hopefully allow people to fight people on their level rather than overgeared people with artificially low ratings; But then the arena matching system might throw a spanner in the works on that one.

In the end, whatever change they decide on the goal should be not to make PVP a horribly frustrating experience for the casual players, not because PVP should be easy for casuals but simply to maintain at least the impression that arenas are more than just a strap-on E-sport.

We are willing to accept the fact that we can't reach high-end pvp gear for some occasional pvp-ing but I think most casuals would agree on this: we would like to compete vs other people on our level, and we would like to be able to get something out of it even if it takes a while.

'Old World' Valuables

2009-03-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

With my job encroaching upon my valuable playtime I have resorted to the one thing a wow player can do in times where time is short: playing the AH.

The ah however doesn't really make for any exciting tales but I did notice a trend that I figured you might like to know about.

With the masses of unwashed deathknights having taken care of most of their outland levelling and even the achievement mongers having cleaned out the last parts of outland things have gotten quiet in ye ole outland.

So quiet in fact that it has begun affecting prices for outland materials. Sure sure, the demand isn't what it used to be and neither are the prices but then again the supply isn't exactly glorious either.

Primal fire prices are holding steady at a the 10g a piece mark on my server which, considering the relative ease of farming these on a level 80 character just goes to show that what once was just plain 'old' now has antique value.

Many azerothian trading materials seem to have been enjoying decent prices as well, a stack of thorium ore goes for more than a stack of saronite bars will go on my server and a lot of other trade materials are suffering from a lack of farmers and a continual demand from the profession levellers.

In other words it's good times on the ah. I am +2 epic flyers in what has been at most a pair of month of very little effort doing this and that very little of which being farming.

So if you're looking to make some quick gold and you haven't gotten around to cleaning all those alt's banks out yet, now might just be the time to find a few hundred gold hidden away in some old bank slot.

3.1 patch notes part 2

2009-03-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Warlock changes... and there's a lot of warlock changes in 3.1 to come so lets take a quick look at what I would consider one of the more aggressive changes to the warlock class. A lot of stuff has been removed or seen their talent point cost reduced which should give warlocks a little more room to breathe in terms of point distribution.

Let's dispense with the pleasantries and dive right into the sarcasm (for a full list of changes simply scroll past my endless dribble till you see the word 'warlocks' come by).

Blizzard decided to radically solve out soul shard problem by not allowing us to have more than 32 which is likewise compensated by drain soul now creating shards when fighting non-gray mobs. Considering I reguarly go out to solo instances of the low level variant and I remember burning through shards in pvp like nuts I have a few doubts about this change but this change is undoubtedly easier than making the suckers stack (*caugh*).

Curse of recklessness and siphon life go to the trash bin, one dissapearing alltogether and siphon life being rolled into corruption. The change to siphon life will change how warlock rotations look and should definitely simplify things... that is if 40% of corruption damage is about what siphon life returned in the first place at any rate and our damage doesn't go down the drain over losing siphon life (not likely). Curse of recklessness... well I won't miss it now considering they already removed the ability to control our fear with it.

With the masses of demons in northrend all those lovely changes to enslave demon will undoubtedly pass most warlocks by unnoticed, I'd wager good money that enslaving a demon will never make it past the level of novelty spell in the next 2-600 expansions.

The extra damage for curse of elements is taken out of malediction leaving affliction warlocks not really feeling the difference but now having to decide if malediction is still worth the effort.

Pandemic will make affliction warlocks a bit crit happier and went on a diet now saving us 2 points. Beyond that affliction now seems to benefit shadow more and we will probably see immolate drop out of our rotation due to not getting any benefits from talents anymore.

Demonology also got slimmed down a bit losing demonic empathy and 2 points from mana feed which can be re-invested into a new talent called nemesis reducing cooldowns on some interesting demo talents. Decimation may put soulfire back on the map as useable by reducing it's cast time and removing the reagent cost. Failing that it'll completely invalidate nemesis and soulfire will remain the absolute poorest choice for a warlock to do some damage.

I'll leave destruction to the destruction enthusiasts to comment on but it looks like the tree got tightened a little by bumping bonusses on the less used talents and shaping it to be what I would call a more pvp oriented tree. Lets hope the bump in survivability via molten skin will mean we won't have to scrape our precious warlock off the floor after each arena match... then again he better not use any soul shards anymore or start draining a little soul now and then.

Overall some interesting changes but the cleanup to affliction's rotation will definitely be felt (and if not implemented too poorly) welcomed by what few warlocks haven't switched to dk's yet.

Warlocks

• Curse of the Elements (Rank 5) : Increased to 13% spell damage, up from 10%.
• Curse of Recklessness has been removed.
• Curse of Weakness: Now also reduces the armor of the target by 5%.
• Drain Soul: Each time Drain Soul deals damage to a target which can grant experience, it now has a chance to generate a Soul Shard.
• Enslave Demon: Spell haste penalty reduced by 10%, Melee haste penalty reduced by 10%.
• Warlocks now innately have an increased 10% spell hit chance on the Enslave Demon spell.
• Fire Shield (Imp): You can now cast this ability on raid members, rather than party members.
• Soul Shard: This item now has a maximum count of 32 in inventory.
• Ritual of Summoning: The summoning of the initial portal is now instant cast, down from 5 seconds.
• Talents

- Affliction
• Eradication re-designed: When you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 2/4/6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases the critical strike chance of your Shadow Bolt spell by 30%. Each critical strike reduces the critical strike bonus by 10%. Lasts 30 sec.
• Haunt : Now only increases your shadow damage-over-time on the target. (No longer includes non-Shadow damage over time spells.)
• Malediction - No longer increases the effect of Curse of the Elements.
• Pandemic: This talent has been reduced to a 1-point talent, now grants your Corruption and Unstable Affliction the capability to critically hit.
• Shadow Embrace: Now only increases the damage done by your shadow damage periodic spells.
• Siphon Life: The Siphon Life spell has been removed. Siphon Life now causes your Corruption spell to instantly heal you for 40% of the damage done.
• Suppression: Now increases spell hit for all of your spells.

- Demonology
• Demonic Empathy has been removed.
• Demonic Empowerment: This talent spell now has a unique spell effect and sound.
• Demonic Sacrifice: This talent has been removed.
• Fel Synergy has been moved to tier-1. No longer increases Intellect, Stamina and damage of your summoned demon.
• Improved Enslave Demon talent removed.
• Mana Feed: This talent is now a 1-point talent, down from 3-points. Now is the 21-point talent in Demonology. Now grants 100% mana return to your pet, up from 33/66/100%
• Master Conjuror: Increased from 15/30% up to 150/300%.
• New Talent: Decimation: When you Shadowbolt or Incinerate a target that is at or below 35% health, your next Soulfire cast time is reduced by 30/60% and costs no shard. Lasts 10 sec.
• New Talent: Nemesis: Reduces the cooldown of your Demonic Empowerment, Metamorphosis, Soulstone and Fel Domination spells by 10/20/30%.

- Destruction
• Aftermath re-designed: Increases the periodic damage done by your Immolate by 3/6%, and your Conflagrate has a 50/100% chance to daze the target for 5 sec.
• Backlash has been moved up to tier-5, up from tier-7. Now requires Intensity (pre-req).
• Cataclysm: Now reduces the mana cost of Destruction spells by 4/7/10%. No longer increases the chance to hit.
• Conflagrate: Spell now works similar to Swiftmend, consuming an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the target and dealing damage based on the strength of that effect. Reduced to a single rank.
• Improved Immolate: Now increases the damage done by your Immolate by 10/20/30%, rather than just the direct damage.
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases the damage done by your Shadow Bolt spell by 1/2/3/4/5%, and causes your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 1/2/3/4/5%. Effect lasts 30 sec.
• Improved Soul Leech: Now has a 50/100% chance to proc Replenishment.
• Molten Core: This talent has been moved to Demonology (Tier 8).
• New Talent: Molten Skin: Reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
• Pyroclasm re-designed: Now increases your Shadow and Fire spell power by 2/4/6% when you critically hit with Searing Pain or Conflagrate. Lasts 10 sec. Also moved down to tier 7, down from tier-5.

3.1 patch notes part 1

2009-03-03T14:11:00.001-08:00

There's been much said about the infamous 3.1 ulduar patch but it seemed to take forever for anything substantial to roll in.

I bided my time a little trying to hold off on saying anything about it without substantial information in hand and outwaited myself a little since there's now more to report than will fit in a single post.

Or at least that's what I decided.

I will get into my typical routine of highlighting the warlock changes in the next post (and there's a lot of them) and maybe grab some other interesting notes as well.

Today however I devote to the curious, the strange and the vaguely documented additions. If you want some more details on the patch you can check out mmo-champion of course or take a look at what wowinsider had to say here

Let's start with a few general ones. A notable entry here is a 'gear manager' addition to the game that will allow you to save and apply armor sets meaning you'll be able to swap out your gear for another set in an instant. Spectacular? By no means, but a hopeful candidate to replace addons like outfitter and the like meaning the end of the update season for yet another addon.

There's also a new set of high-res textures coming in. This really doesn't do much considering we're already playing on an outdated graphics engine but it's nice to have another option to turn on to decrease overall game performance ;) which is nicely coupled with a video mode ultra to show that even wow still has enough oompf in it to bring a decent fx card to it's knees.

Apparantly we're also getting some new quest tracking options. Who knows what that means, but we'll have to remember to turn that one on before we go through our alternative of updating the questhelper addon and see what this shiny new gem will do for us.

The final noteworthy entry from the general section is the fact that you will no longer be dismounted while swimming... I have a feeling it's going to look curious but if the speed increase from mounts persists then most of us will enjoy the change while druids will lament their now profoundly less impressive water form.

The glyph section and profession sections are always interesting but I think I'll check if we can't make some money out of it in a later post, what I do however want to give you is the stats for the elusive titansteel spellblade to be added to the game. Take them with a grain of salt, it didn't make it into any official databases yet it seems:

Titansteel Spellblade [440] MH Dagger, (99-316) 82.9 dps, Speed 2.5, +40 Spirit, +33 Stamina, +408 Spell Power, +37 Critical Strike Rating, +27 Haste Rating, Level 80 (Epic, BoE)(Unique-Equipped)
Materials: 6 Saronite Bars, 6 Titansteel Bars, 2 Frozen Orbs

Last but not least from the noteworthy section is: dual specs

They have been announced, I made my analysis on who would win/lose on that feature a while back and the exact functionality is still a bit sketchy beyond the fact that: you will be able to dual spec at level 80 for a price.

And there we have it, a quick glance at the patch notes from a neutral perspective. There's a lot of class changes in there though so I suggest you put on your QQ resistant outfits and wander over into the patch notes section and see what fresh hell/blessing awaits your class.

540 Defense or maybe not

2009-02-25T03:59:00.000-08:00

My pally hit 80 last night somewhere in sholazar basin in fact it was an oracle daily that did the trick. Of course I immediately aborted questing and ran back to the nearest bank to don my titansteel gear that I had crafted not too long ago. Between the boots, the helm, the shield and the two icebane epics (girdle, chest) I had hoped I would have enough slots / raw defense rating available to hit the elusive 540 defense cap.
After socketing in all the defense gems I could find, slapping on the right enchants and sidegrading some of my rings, basically doing everything elfingly possible on a low budget I was severely dissapointed to see that despite focussing 100% on defense/defense rating I only hit about 520 defense.

I figure I will reach the no-crit defense value of 540 with a little work (better gems, better enchants and some trinket/ring/neck adjustments) but in the meantime it seems that working with defense as a stat is very restrictive to what else you can possibly do in terms of gemming enchanting.

So there I am at 520 defense and I can't help but thinking that defense rating is somewhat hard to come by through pure questing/crafting. Sure, the items that do have defense rating on them usually have quite a bit, but it also takes a massive amount of defense rating to become uncrittable.

I suppose it's the mechanic that bothers me. You NEED to be uncrittable; not being uncrittable is hardly an option if you're being slapped around by some raid-boss unless you can soak up a lot of damage and have a healer or two that never heard of the words 'out of mana'.

Compare this to say a warlock where you stack spellpower till there's no tomorrow. There's no real set minimum there... you can go into an instance with a warlock that has 0 spellpower and it's not going to wipe the raid if the rest of the group can compensate for it.

You can't really compensate for a tank who is being crit regularly unless your healer is better than the content you're doing (as if it wasn't hard enough to find a healer in the first place).

That being said, my warlock in his paltry crafted gear does sufficient damage (by most scales) and still has plenty of room to gem/enchant outside of the box.

It's somewhat dissapointing, I had hoped to be able to stack some strength in there for some block value and general oompf but instead I will have to consider defense a top priority to the detriment of literally everything else.

Be that as it may, my paladin is officially done and will soon find his place in my scheme of solo-ing/duo-ing instances giving the old war veteran warlock a nice run for his money despite his obviously less than perfect un-critability.

Looking on the bright side my character sheet now says 'very good' in the frost resistance column with the frost resistance aura up and a quick test with one of the few frost mages left on my server resulted in the frost mage immediately re-speccing to arcane out of sheer frostration (pun intended).

The conclusion would be this: If you don't have a good chance at defense gear via raids/5mans (not everyone can play hours at a time) you're going to have moderate difficulty in hitting that elusive defense value of 540 and you will actually have to work for it a little (i.e. do more than just rely on Blacksmithing to bail you out like I did).

All fixable if you instance a lot, but in the meantime I will divert my attention to my next levelling victim: The druid (and yes I'll be posting something a little less personal and a bit more useful in the near future :P)

Whose next?

2009-02-24T06:22:00.000-08:00

With my paladin sitting at a mere 1.5 bubbles away from 80 and Ulduar prepping it's arrival to tear the bored masses away from mammoth banking I can't help but feel a little worried that nothing will quite top the levelling experience I had on my paladin.

I've always been the levelling type. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the occasional instance (especially solo/duoing them) but without the XP bar as a constant motivator and the knowledge that all gear eventually becomes obsolete I tend to forget my maxed-out characters in favor of a new levelling challenge. Well in all honesty I am just not enough of a gear hound to run instances ad nauseum.

But the paladin was an amazing experience. Having played him as protection for 99% of his levelling process and the brief but interesting venture into the world of the schokadin BG action I have to say it's going to be difficult to top the experience.

Paladins have massive amounts of defensive options, a solid way to do aoe and since the advent of wrath even protection paladins seem to hit like a truck.

So the question is: what's next?

I am still under the solemn impression that eventually all my characters will be reaching 80 at some point in time but what I have no grip on is what character to play right now...

My druid is sitting at level 73 quite happily munching away at some dailies, my hunter is not far behind at level 70 spending his time spanking his monkey (nono he really has a monkey as pet) and trailing a ways off we find the deathknight whom I had a fleeting love-affair with about a month ago.

It turns out I rather like the defense plate affords me so I am inclined to play my deathknight/warrior for this reason and see if I can come up with at least a moderate AOE spec for them... but I see so many deathknights that I am almost sick of the class without having played it and my warrior is so low-level that it'll be a while before he can throw his weight around.

If I look at 'needs' then I really should play my shaman or my priest for either inscription or jewelcrafting since it would be awfully convenient (not to mention profitable) to have those professions up to par.

If I am looking at the next 'best' thing I would have to go with the mage for some serious AOE potential... but going from a plate class to a cloth class is going to require some mild adjustment in strategy.

I could go on forever, each class has some advantages and disadvantages but it seems like the paladin so far is a very well rounded class that's going to be hard to top.

I need me some inspiration! So tell me friend, how do you pick your next alt?

Why Bigger bags won't solve your problem

2009-02-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

As a warlock in the wonderful World of Warcraft you learn to do a few things very well. You learn to deal with the fact that in WotLK you couldn't pvp if your life depended on it, you learn that being nerfed isn't the end of the world and thanks to soul shards you learn the most important thing of all: Inventory Management

I read a blogpost by Larisa (over at pink pigtail inn) detailing her woes with inventory management and decided it would be interesting to see if we can make inventory management a little easier for those who are continually fighting the bag space monster.

Let me start by saying: Bigger bags won't solve your issue. If you have a full bank now, you will most certainly have a full bank even if you stuff it full of 22 slot bags. Why? Because you're a disorganized packrat, that's why!

That's not to say it's bad being a packrat... I myself am a horrible packrat with a bad knack for collecting darkmoon cards, old world materials and even a fair set of white items. I swear that stuff will come in handy one day... yes it will... *nods forcefully*

The trick is to come up with a system that works for you, that takes away your need to analyze the situation and to keep you from thinking: 'what in the blazes am I going to do with this item?'

And for that you will need: Alts

If you don't have any alts consider rolling up a few death knights. Being as they start at level 55 they make both excellent bankers as well as profession slaves (something to power level professions on).

Of course any type of alt will do but if you're not into alts DK's only need to be levelled out of the starting zone and will make great choices.

Next it's time to run all your alts to the nearest bank and buy up all your bank slots and fill them with netherweave bags which go at a mere 8g a pop. If you can afford bigger bags then more power to you but realistically 16 slot bags should be ample space to store all your crud in. If you can't afford the bank slots yet just buy them as you go along.

If you have significant packrat ambitions then you might want to consider starting a guild on one of your alts and buying some bank tabs. Note that this method is expensive but may be a good long term solution to your storage problems.

So now that you have your alts, and they are all slotted up it's time to do the simple trick of assignment. Here's an example:

My paladin (incidentally my blacksmith) is responsible for all my ores/bars
My Druid (my alchemist) is responsible for all my Herbs/potions
My hunter (the leatherworker) is responsible for all my leathers/hides
My priest (friend of jewelcrafting) is responsible for all gems
etc.
etc.

The trick is to pick a responsible alt for each of the professions available. If you have dual gathering professions you can consider to store raw materials on that character and then send them off to the alts with crafting professions when needed. Last but not least pick an alt responsible for general crapola. Every now and then you come across an item that's interesting but not part of a specific crafting profession, that's where the 'crapola' alt comes in (hearts of darkness come to mind).

Got your assignments? Yes? Write them down... not in any orderly fashion, don't worry about that. Scribble them on your desk for all I care, the fact that you're scribbling them down in the first place will help you remember.

Now, we have alts, we have bankspace, we have bags, and we have a assigments.

The next time you go questing and your bags are full you simply follow these steps for each item you find:

1. Can I use it now? Use it!
2. Can I send it to an assigned alt and use it later? Send it!
3. Can't use it now? Can't use it later? Sell it!

Stop thinking about what to do with those things, use, send, sell the second you hit town. Let your alts worry about sorting out what comes in.

The last and final stage of Inventory management is dealing with all that junk you've been sending all over the place. I do my inventory management on fridays (no idea why) but you can do it on an incidental basis if you like. Just do it before your mailbox timer runs out otherwise it'll go straight back to the character who sent it in the first place.

I have a simple 2 stack policy on items. I will keep no more than 2 stacks or two items of the same kind. Two stacks are enough to supply an immediate (crafting) need. Anything else gets sold by the alt responsible for the product (that way you know what happened to that ore you sold).

The only exceptions to this rule is if you're stockpiling stuff for powerlevelling something or anticipate that you can sell it for a nice profit somewhere further down the line.

Not sure what to do with what you found? Send it to the crapola alt, that should be the only alt with any real bank-space issues and yes, you will have to sort through the crapola and decide what to do with it sooner or later.

That's all there is to it, the length of this blogpost belies its simplicity but it's a simple system with very few drawbacks.

So let's recap:

1. Make alts
2. Buy (Netherweave) bags and all bankslots on each alt
3. Assign materials to the alts (i.e. all ores/bars to the paladin)
4. Use, Send, Sell after you're done questing
5. On regular intervals (a week, two weeks) clean your alts mailbox keeping 2 stacks of each mat in total or two items of the same type (make exceptions if needed)

What you gain is an overview of where your stuff is and a general indication of how much of it you have but more importantly you can clean your bags out after you're done questing without having to do any inventory management at that time because you can simply send off whatever you have to the correct alts.

Incidentally you also build up enough stock to supply your crafting needs rather than having to buy it from the AH. Especially on low-pop servers a lot of items are simply not available on the AH when you need them... there's nothing more frustrating than being 1 mat short of what you want.

There's other ways to manage inventory... possibly better. But this way works for me so feel free to use it and modify it to suit your own needs.

Grizzled fun

2009-02-12T00:36:00.000-08:00

With my wow time being a tad restricted lately I decided to mill around a little and set my characters up in a place where they can just snag a few dailies, and end up with an extra bubble of xp and some spare change.

To kick things off I decided it would be interesting to play around with the PVP dailies over in grizzly hills simply because there's 4 of them and they're pretty easy for the rewards they give (about 5g, 250 Warsong Hold Rep and 20k+ xp each).

Unfortunately like most pvp areas that offer any kind of reward there's the occasional enemy presence. And as luck would have it the enemies always seem to be level 80, sitting on large flying mounts preying on innocent low-level noobding alts.

Granted, on my protection pally at level 77 in now halfway decent blues I generally can either manage to kill them (the proverbial rogue slaughtering themselves on my shield) or run off... on my level 73 druid however this is a completely different matter.

It turns out that feathers make for really poor armor vs. level 80s and worst of all is that even if you do get a full starfire spell off it usually misses. Add to that the frustration of the enemy always parking high up in the air waiting for victims and I was about ready to call it a night.

I decided to just jump into the nearest shredder whenever I heard any ominous wing-flapping sounds and thats when I discovered the mighty 'short-circuit' ability that you get when you climb into a shredder.

At first glance it looks like a simple shaman-like chain lightning spell but it turns out to have 3 significant benefits:

1. it dismounts the target
2. it has significant range
3. it has a massive push-back effect

My first victim was a hapless mage flying around on one of those lovely flying carpet thingies. He was pretty high up and definitely out of range of my standard spells when I noticed that my short circuit ability was more than happy to fire.

It did and boy did that mage fly. I couldn't see where he landed but considering the fall damage scaling and him being knocked off way outside of the blue sky logging ground he definitely went splat.

Another unlucky dragoneer found himself innocently flying over the logging ground apparantly just passing by. Incidentally he was still flagged (I suppose he had just finished his dailies and was heading home). He too had quite the flight as he got knocked off his dragon and landed smack dab in the middle of a pack of warsong offensive grunts which consequently pummeled him for whatever life he had left.

All in all I managed to eradicate about 4 level 80s that tried the air superiority game which is very pleasing when you're playing your level 73 druid in full greens.

Now go have some fun, those shredders are hilarious.

Timeless

2009-02-09T03:42:00.000-08:00

It turns out that getting a new job completely ruins your blog posting routine and wreaks havoc on your wow playtime and it looks like it'll be a while before everything is back to normal (if that was possible here anyway).

I normally refrain from getting my personal life out on this here blog so enjoy this rare view on my personal life before I manage to get all those little wow-related posts that are floating around in my head onto the blog.

As you will have figured out by now I recently switched jobs. It was a voluntary switch at that so by the end of the month I am hopefully looking at a grossly inflated paycheck, am already enjoying my new car and am waiting for a spiffy new phone, internet dongle and who knows what I'll need to be able to do my job here.

Even the 'here' scaled up nicely. Where I previously was stuck in an office in the same place behind the same computer day in and day out I now find myself all over the place with different computers. All over the place being mostly the Netherlands from what it looks like. Which without traffic can easily be traversed from north to south in about 3 hours worth of driving... double if you're crazy enough to try and drive anywhere during prime traffic time.

Just like everywhere else we're supposedly in a recession, or economic downturn of which I am not feeling much of anything considering I now have work piling up on my desk. Still, housing prices are steadily dropping and the bigger companies are starting to feel the churn in their profit margins.

Mind you if the just got rid of a few CEOs, who despite the downturn still make enough money to make it seem like they're doing brilliantly, they probably could afford to keep whatever staff they're firing in the various places.

It's easy to throw around blame at this point so I am not going to. I was never a fan of the bush administration, or banks... but then again I don't really like my dentist either (or maybe it's the porsche sitting in his driveway) instead I try to make whatever headway I can by making the most of the situation.

After all, dropping housing prices are nice if you don't have one, a collapsing job market may even be to the benefit of the service industry... as for your pension fund collapsing....

...well no surprise there either since that was going to happen economic crisis or not, at least for people my age.

Things aren't going well, but dutch people seem to retain their usual 'what time is it anyway?' kind of optimism. I am hearing less positive news coming from across the pond over in america but to europeans that just means that we'll be ordering our electronics from there now just to save some precious euros.

So? How are you? How is the 'recession' affecting you? Didn't cancel your WoW account(s) yet did you? ... didn't think so.

Mammoth parking

2009-01-28T04:06:00.000-08:00

I used to like mammoths, or rather I used to like the idea of having a mount where you could ride around on with multiple people and where you could maybe strap a vendor or two to it.

I am sure blizzard developers/designers thought much the same thing when they came up with the mammoth. A nice sizeable mount that could carry multiple people and or vendors that would cost so much that it'd actually make a halfway decent goldsink if it were sold often enough.

It's being sold often enough... it even seems to have gone so far that everyone who can actually afford one automatically buys one because it is one of the few mounts that have the features described earlier.

Everyone that buys one also seems to think they should park it anywhere they like... in front of doorways... on top of flightmasters, covering summoning stones and their all time favorite: right on top of the mailbox

Of course not that mailbox that's a ways away from the bank and the auction house that is rarely used, noooo, it has to be the mailbox that everyone wants to use.
And not only that... a standard sized mammoth doesn't do the situation justice so you just have to quaf one of those lovely winterspring elixirs that make you even bigger so there's absolutely no doubt that your mammoth loving, bored, have to much gold character can sit there semi-afk on a mailbox just to hear people complain. And if you don't manage to cover the mailbox completely why not get one of your guildies to join you in harassing poor hapless players?

I don't know what motivates people to be jerks, I am sure they take a distinct pleasure in it. But a mailbox is not for mammoth parking and if you do insist on parking your mammoth right on top of a mailbox making it difficult to use the mailbox then you are griefing.

That's right... you're griefing... you're obstructing other people's playing experience in a way that was not intended by blizzard and medivh help me if I don't make a ticket reporting you for it because that's what it is: a reportable offense under player harassment rules.

Spare me your 'just zoom in' comments, your inane babble about how funny you think it is or how cool you think you are. You will be reported, and I have no issues convincing 20 other people to report you too... which sooner or later will lead to a nice little ban that even your big mammoth hiney won't cover up.

I'd go so far as declare all the cities and towns non-mount zones and just provide some kind of run-speed buff like the dk's get in acherus. It won't stop people from trying to cover up important objects, but at least it won't be a 1 man job to cover an entire mailbox anymore.

Useable objects/NPCs are not for mammoth parking... shit or get off the pot.
Until then, beware where you park for you will be reported.

68 Ready for Northrend?

2009-01-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

So here we are, 3 characters in northrend and a 4th slowly crawling to that magical number of level 68 and now the time has come to determine whether or not it's worthwhile to bring number 4 - 10 to northrend at 68 or to put off till later (level 70+).

I am not going to say one way is better than the other, that varies per person (yes it does). What I can do however is list the facts and let you come to your own conclusions.

And thus, I present to you the pros and cons of going to northrend at level 68:

Pros

1. Higher XP/gold gains for quests and kills
2. Higher valued quest rewards
3. Higher grouping potential

Cons

1. Higher risk
2. Reduced max gold potential from questing at 80
3. More competition
4. Outland loremaster quests won't give XP

That's essentially it. What it comes down to is a choice between northrend's higher xp rewards, more valuable quest rewards and more grouping options vs outland's low risk environment, lower competition for mobs and the ability to squeeze the maximum amount of gold out of northrend quests later on (the more you quest in outland the more quests you can turn to gold at 80 in northrend).

Is one better than the other? That is a matter of personal preference and I am sure you will find people on both sides of the fence.

As I have pointed out in a previous post however is that ideally you'd want to ding 80 after completing Borean tundra, howling fjord, dragonblight and grizzly hills in order to get the maximum amount of gold out of northrend at level 80 for the remaining quests.

If you're interested in that and still want to go to northrend at level 68 consider taking a little break from questing and focussing on dailies for a while.
They give decent XP, decent gold and are finished quite quickly but can provide enough of a buffer to get you to ding 80 earlier than you normally would by just straight up questing through northrend.

Incidentally if you have any intention of becoming a loremaster then you'd be well advised to finish outland while there's still XP to be had from the quests.

The choice is yours... and while it's probably not interesting for your main to ponder there's always alts. Yes, that off-gray pile of dust on your character screen may in fact be a long lost tauren just waiting for you to take him/her to northrend... You're not just going to leave it there are you?

Gold 101 - Predicting future trends

2009-01-26T03:10:00.000-08:00

In today's installment of gold 101 we're going to tap into our spiritual clairvoyant side to see if we can see the future and make predictions based on our visions.

Making gold is 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration or in other words a good idea is worth more than working your rear-end off trying to flip and bid all day long.

But good ideas are hard to come by and even full time bloggers that blog about nothing else but how to make gold in wow will rarely make a post on their blog saying: if you sell x you will be able to turn a profit.

Besides obvious differences between server economies the reason for this is simple: If I reveal a niche market on a blog then chances are that people will read my blog post (even though that's pretty unlikely with noobding). If the knowledge becomes commonplace then everyone will want a piece of the pie and beforelong the pie will be gone (i.e. the market for x will collapse).
Call it greedy, call it healthy business, call it what you will but the fact remains is that people will rarely tell you exactly what steps to take to make gold (they'd rather write guides and sell those for real money see?)

But even for the completely uninspired there is one solid strategy that will work 90% of the time; And more importantly it even announces itself to you when the time comes.

Case in point: I and a fair share of other people knew that the prices for frozen orbs would go up, we knew the dream shard prices would go up slightly as well and we also knew that the prices for eternals would slowly but surely approach each other, a trend that is certain to continue.
We also knew a few other things about how the market would develop.

(Un)fortunately none of us are clairvoyant, instead we predicted a trend based on one simple thing: Patch notes

Every now and then Blizzard will roll out a patch to fix bugs, implement some changes, add new content or re-balance existing elements in the game. Before any patch is rolled out the changes are usually splattered all over the wow forums, discussed extensively and very much visible on either the PTR (public test realm) or through other channels.

So in essence, before every change to the game is implemented we know (to a certain extend) what is going to happen. We can literally see the future unfolding before our very eyes... and that future always has its roads paved in gold just waiting for someone to stroll by and pick it up.

Normally we'd look at the patch notes for the next patch and predict trends based on that but 3.0.9 or 3.1 are still too vague to make predictions on so lets take a look at 3.0.8 and see what you could've done (useful no?) before the patch went live:

The trick here is to skip the class changes (unless you're interested) and focus on anything that could be crafting related which is usually found in the professions section. So let's take a look at a few sections of the 3.0.8 patch notes and note my comments:

Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).

Result: This could very well mean that if mobs give full reputation at any level that the value of sellable reputation items may drop.

Glyphs
Glyph of Conflagrate now makes it so your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes the Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.
Glyph of Death and Decay has been changed to grant 20% additional damage instead of its current effect.
Glyph of Hammer of Justice: Now increases range by 5 yards instead of increasing stun duration.
Glyph of Invisibility duration has been increased.
Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Glyph of Holy Light now affects friendly targets in a larger radius.
Glyph of Horn of Winter now increases the duration by 60 sec.
Glyph of Spirit of Redemption: Now increases the duration of the effect by a fixed amount of 6 seconds.
Glyph of turn evil now also increases the cooldown of your turn evil spell by 8 sec.

Result: As some glyphs are now more useful and other less useful the prices for those glyphs will adjust accordingly.

The Cooldown on Transmute: Titanium has been reduced to 1 day, and the materials required have been simplified.

Result: Cheaper titanium across the board.

Increased the materials required to make several recipes that require cobalt.

Result: Cobalt prices will go up a notch and stay there.

Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.

Result: Infinite dust prices may drop a tiny amount (still needed for a lot of other things) but dream shard prices will increase.

Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.

Result: Ink of the sea cost will go up a notch.

The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials

Result: Higher frozen orb prices.

I could probably go on with a few more points and other notes in the patch can also be indirectly responsible for a shift in prices for mats but I think you get the basic idea.

Predicting trends based on patch notes is relatively easy and even though the results aren't always what you expected them to be (in my case the dream shard prices only went up by about 4g each, which is nice but not exceptional) you will generally be able to get some profit here and there (I still managed to make 200g off of selling dream shards after the patch).

So next time the big hooblah starts about new content this, new patch that and the blogosphere start filling up with PTR patch notes again take another look and read beyond your own classes' specific changes... who knows maybe the next patch will make you a whole lot wealthier.

Can't log into dalaran?

2009-01-23T05:13:00.001-08:00

Not to deter from my previous post which is so much more important but I've had a number of questions from people who were not able to log into Dalaran and I figured I'd throw those a bone who didn't figure out what the problem is yet.

I've heard of people suggesting re-installations or checking their internet connection speeds etc. and while that may contribute to solving the problem the true culprit usually is:

Questhelper

The Questhelper addon adds a tremendous amount of load on login as it tries to calculate the various quest stati and pathing information. In fact, as good as the addon may be it's often the source for various random disconnects/login problems.

If you are experiencing problems logging into dalaran or you have a character stuck there that you can't access turn off questhelper and if that doesn't help turn off all your addons before trying to log in.

Then relocate to a quieter place (pretty much any place that isn't dalaran really) and turn your addons back on.

Incidentally you should try to update the addons you use to the latest versions since a lot of them can generate errors that aren't visible per-se but can seriously slow your gaming experience.

For shits and giggles turn off all your addons and compare it to running with addons, if the difference is significant then you should consider a) updating your addons or b) replacing addons that cause problems.

Just a quick heads up for those fighting the DaLAGan monster.

Don't cater to TL:DR

2009-01-23T02:02:00.000-08:00

TL:DR a popular abbreviation for saying: "too long didn't read" commonly used after forum posts that cover a topic with extensive explanations thus resulting in long posts that some people apparantly find too long to read.

Essentially what people are saying when they say TL:DR is that whilst they want to voice their opinion they have absolutely no interest in listening to your opinion first.
Commonly used by trolls to derail forum threads / instigate arguments or by people with very very limited attention spans that never were going to listen to your opinion even if it had been compressed into 2 sentences.

People that cater to the TL:DR crowd often don't understand that by trying to compress their arguments in a sentence or two only manage to aggrivate the problem by essentially saying it's ok to say TL:DR (and as a result saying it's ok to be a troll).
By providing a TL:DR summary you either devaluate your initial argument or your argument wasn't properly set up and didn't need as much text in the first place.
In short, you managed to stab yourself in your own back before you even hit the 'submit' button.

Essentially adding a TL:DR summary to a long post is saying: Hey you don't have to read the post, it's not that important, just read this summary and you'll know everything I wanted to say without all the fluffy words.
Not only that but you literally invite people to post comments that reply solely to your TL:DR summary thus throwing your carefully crafted opinion completely overboard.

In which case you might as well only have posted the TL:DR summary and the value of your 'full' post is deflated accordingly.

Understand that while your posting length will indeed affect how many people read it, it also affects what people read it. Good posts, no matter the length will draw in an intelligent and colorfull crowd even if they span multiple pages.

So fellow bloggers that frequent this here blog, I ask you, to your own benefit, please do not cater to the TL:DR crowd for it will not increase the value of your opinion or blog.

Value your own opinion, think it out, write it down and if it's long? People will still read it because your posts are good even if the trolls TL:DR.

Gold 101 - Auction House Basics

2009-01-21T03:15:00.001-08:00

Every now and then I get the question how I handle my gold and what I do to get more of it and the simple answer is: Play the AH game

I am no farmer or grinder, I don't do many dailies and I don't really do much questing once I hit my level cap. I don't farm reputation, I don't do many (high-level) instances and to add to that I spend a lot of time on gold-sucking alts. In short, I do whatever amuses me and this rarely makes me any gold.

So truthfully said that beyond what little income I can generate through playing my alts I am 100% dependant on the AH for an income.

Rather than telling you my specific business ventures I am going to attempt to give you the basic toolkit needed to make a profit in the auction house, give you a few tips on how to discover niche markets and most importantly dispell the Nr 1 myth or rather half-truth that currently floats around in regards to making money on the AH.

In fact lets deal with the half-truth first because it can be the decider on whether or not you decide to play the AH game or stick with your daily grind:

You can make a ton of gold with only 15/30 minutes a day on the ah

This is a myth for those who start out playing the AH game and will become closer to a truth a ways further down the line.

Getting that gold train started takes a lot of time in the beginning. Organizing bagspace, supplying resources, scanning the AH, finding niche markets all these things take up time. If you're just starting out with the AH game and you're serious about getting some form of income from the AH expect to invest 3+ hours initially... Eventually you can bring it down to maybe 30 mins per session but that assumes that you already are organized and have found your various niche markets.

You will also become good friends with excel or whatever you choose to keep track of your investments. Basic bookkeeping is a necessity if you're serious about money and just writing down cost/profit will really help in the long run to determine the viability of your investments.

If nothing else you will probably have to write down some market prices for various mats or other things depending on your chosen market.

This means ADMINISTRATION and Administration takes time.

Making money on the AH is easy but while you can make much much more gold on the AH than doing dailies you should expect that you will have to sacrifice doing your dailies in favor of spending that time on the AH (or in excel).

Ok, I hope the above really made it clear what you're up against with playing the AH and so lets move on to

The Basic toolkit

Auctioneer, an addon widely available through various addon sites is your primary tool. Get it, download it, install it and run the scans preferably at least once a day. Ideally scan before you're getting ready to dump a whole bunch of stuff on the market.

Don't have Auctioneer yet? Get it, run scans daily for at least a week and only then start making decisions. You will really need the average price indications auctioneer provides and you will lose hundreds if not thousands of gold if you decide to play the AH game without auctioneer.

That said, once you're used to auctioneer check into the various option menus. You can do a lot of beneficial customizing that may help your specific ventures but until then the default settings will do fine. Auctioneer generally also comes with extra tools like bottomscanner and beancounter etc. Try them all and see what they mean to you.

Be aware that a scan can, depending on your connection speed and processing power take up to 30 minutes on a decently saturated AH. My scans currently run 10-15 mins for about 300 pages in the AH... time you stand in the auction house and pretty much can't do anything except guildies over guildchat.

Even though it takes time: Auctioneer scans are absolutely vital!

The other thing that's absolutely vital is: Bag space. Have lots of bag space available especially on characters you want to be involved in your grand gold making schemes.

Seed money

Seed money is your basic starting funds. Just like a farmer would buy seed and expect to grow crops for a profit you need seed money to expect to grow a profit in the Auction house.

The simple truth of seed money is this:
All your gold is seed money. The more seed money you have the more profit you can make. Seed money sitting in your bank does nothing for you.

You can start the AH game at any time and at any gold amount however be aware that you may lose your investment in a bad deal so make sure you have enough gold available to cover your daily repair cost/ consumable cost for about a week in case stuff really goes bad.

With your seed money in your pocket and your Auctioneer scan freshly completed there's a couple of things we can start doing:

1. Flipping
2. Bidding
3. Market research

Flipping

Flipping is the art of buying low and selling high. You don't need a specific market for this... you can simply run a blank search on the AH and then sort by the percentless column. The lower the percentless value (blue) the more the item can be re-sold for. You can check the average price of an item by hovering over it and checking what auctioneer says is the average moving price.

Pick items that you think are popular (ores, rare crafting materials, specific weapons/armors etc.) or that you know a lot about and buy the ones that have a percentless value less than 50% and immediately put them back on the auction house at approximately 80%.

So if a stack of copper ore (20 pieces) normally goes for 8g and you see it on the market for 4g buy it and re-list it for 7g or 6g50s. The only time when you don't want to do that is when there's a lot of people offering copper ore for less than the average price of 8g. In which case you can either decide to list it for less (but always more than what you paid for + the auction house cut) or to hold on to the materials until the market is more favorable.

That's all there is to flipping... buy low, sell high. The percentless column will help you tremendously in this and you can decide whether to resell specific stuff or generally try and flip everything available in the auction.

Bidding

Bidding is a lot like flipping except that it takes a little more time to 'flip' the item. Do a blank search on the AH and sort it by how much time is left on the auctions.
See all those 30m / 2h remaining auctions?

Go through them and once again look for items that either have a really low percentless value or a very low low-end bid.

Just put in the minimum bid on the item and move on to the next item.

The beauty of bidding is that even if you get outbid you don't lose money (you get your bid back) and if you win you just picked up an item for an extremely low amount of gold and can then flip it for the average price (or a little lower).

This is especially interesting for slower moving markets like weapons and armor where auctions can often run their full duration. That said there's really no restrictions on what you should bid on. If you think there's a decent chance of selling it for even a little more than what you bid then you should bid on it.

Market research

Flipping and bidding are both very basic activities. You can make decent gold off of them without really worrying about book keeping and other things. If you just want to make some money on the AH to keep your characters afloat then bidding and flipping are usually enough.

The real money however comes from the results of market research. Market research is all about figuring out what people want and then providing the supply to their demand.

There's a few things you can do to determine demand:

1. determine needs. We know people 'need' consumables. We know people 'need' certain crafting materials. People need a whole bunch of stuff, some of it is more needed than others but based on their needs markets develop. All we really need to do is figure out what isused the most (like consumables for example ) and what crafting materials are in demand and then figure out how we can get those cheap and then drop them on the AH. I recently traded a few frozen orbs to someone who had more mammoth meat than they knew what to do with.
The market for mammoth meals was terrible at the time so he happily parted with 10 stacks of mammoth meat for some frozen orbs. After a few weeks mammoth meals were back in demand and I was able to sell all my mammoth meats as mammoth meals and made enough profit to buy back my frozen orbs and still be left with a lot of gold. I determined the need and used that need to my advantage.

2. Determine gluts. Not too long ago I picked up 20 stacks of netherweave for 2g50 a stack which was exceptionally low for my server. I couldn't resell the netherweave due to the market being covered in people trying to sell netherweave but I managed to get my netherweave crafted into stuff which I then disenchanted selling the enchanting materials for quite a profit (at least a hell of a lot more than the 2g50 a stack I paid). Using raw materials from a market that is flooded with said raw materials is a very good way to turn a profit.

3. Determine shortages. There are shortages. Keep an eye on trade for people asking for specific things. If the thing is not on the AH and people are asking for it in trade then they are willing to pay a premium for the item once it does get put on the AH. A shortage is different from a need in that needed items will always be needed, a shortage may occur for very off-beat items (levelling gear for example) which no one really needs but a lot of people would want to have. If you can supply a shortage with your goods then you are practically guaranteed a profit. Unfortunately unlike needs shortages go away and may never come back. But keep in mind... there are always shortages somewhere.

4. Re-evaluate professions. You have crafting professions, or at least you're very likely to have them. Go through each item on your profession list and have a look at what the raw materials cost and what the end-product goes for. Normally you won't be able to turn a profit but every profession has a few items in there that can turn the raw materials you need into a profit.

Never stop researching your markets. All good business ventures go down the drain at some point or the other. Just because you can make a profit selling x now doesn't mean you'll be able to sell x tomorrow. Keep an eye out for opportunities.

Keeping track

I know you think you'll remember all of it. And maybe in the beginning when you have 1,2 or 3 little business ventures you will... but at some point you're going to have to keep track of how much you make and how much you spend for each of your little business ventures.

Determining what raw materials cost on your realm and how much they would have to cost (max) for you to turn them into a profit is also worth noting down.

If you do not keep track of your business ventures you will eventually have a few business ventures that seem to be profitable but really aren't. In the end if something takes 1h of your time and you make 200g then you need to ask yourself if you could make the same amount of gold doing dailies or something else. If the answer is yes, then why are you doing it?
If you can't provide a good reason then you should probably find something else to spend your time on.

Grinding / Farming

Grinding and farming generally isn't needed when playing the AH game. However if an hours worth of grinding can fork you a tremendous profit then there really is no shame in getting down and dirty with some monsters especially if you can also gain xp at the same time.

My paladin has been farming some rhino meat for a while to supply the huge demand that was present at the time based on the cooking daily. I made a good chunk of gold from the rhino dog sales and half a level to boot.

Grind and farm when it is profitable to do so. If you can do something else to make you more money then why grind in the first place?

In the end you would ideally want to bring your grind/farm time to 0. This is very much possible... but don't be so shortsighted as to say farming/grinding is for idiots because every now and then you can make some serious gold by grinding the right things.

Before I leave you to your thoughts I'll leave you with a quick comment: smaller stacks sell better than bigger ones on the AH. I alway thought that to be obvious and yet I still see a lot of people trying to sell a full stack of frozen orbs on the AH for 1000+ gold and be surprised no one ever buys it even if they sell if for half the average price. No one wants to spend 1000+ gold on a stack of frozen orbs unless they intend to sell them as singles for a profit in which case you might as well have put it on the AH as singles in the first place and made a decent amount of extra gold.

*edit* If it's hard to read leave a comment and I'll chop it up a little... the post's structure made for some very long sentences that could use shortening. if you tl:dr then it's your loss. I don't cater to people who only want to voice an opinion and not read someone else's.

NURF MY WARLOCK!

2009-01-19T02:27:00.000-08:00

With arena representation hitting an all-time low and the population of the warlock community melting away faster than a snowman in the desert blizzard is presented with the very rare opportunity to phase out an entire class in favor of the death knight population.

Since the day that Kalgan has started his blizzard sponsored vendetta against the warlock class a great many of strategic direct and indirect nerfs to the warlock class have resulted in the complete and utter loss of OPness, utility and survivability...

And yet a handful of warlocks still remain.

Having failed miserably Kalgan was executed and sacrificed to the lich king forever to roam the lands as a scourge warrior and a replacement was appointed to finish what Kalgan could not.

With the promise of being the only warlock to remain I have taken upon me the task of the eradication of the warlock class and as a result I propose the following changes to be patched in with 3.0.8. 3.1. or otherwise 'soon' (tm).

Fears

It has come to my attention that despite the dozens of hard counters that other classes now have against fear some classes are still unable to interrup the fear casts timely and effectively. To avoid further issues with fear the cast time will be increased to 4s and the effect's duration will be shortened to 5 seconds. This will ensure that even the most dimwitted keyboard turner will have ample time to interrupt the cast with minimal consequences if they fail to do so.

- The fear effect will be removed from deathcoil to be more in line with the Death Knight's death coil.
- Instant howl of terror will no longer be instant cast.

DoTs

To prevent the warlock from being overly dependant on dot timers the next patch will ensure that any and all dot-timer addons will cease to work. A new generation of dot timers will be prevented from working by removing all public methods related to reading out dot times. This will be a warlock only change as to not affect healers.
Individual dot times will also be adjusted to ensure warlocks spend 99% of their time attempting to keep dots up.

all dots will furthermore instantly be dispelled upon the untimely death of the warlock.

Drains

Token buffs will be given to drain mana. These token buffs will look good on paper but will not effectively change the spell to prevent warlocks from using it more than once.

The mana cost of drain life will be increased with each token buff to drain mana to compensate for the (non)buffs.

Drain spells will also check LOS every tick and be interrupted (with no mana refund) if LOS is broken.

Demonic circle

Due to the nature of this spell in 'certain' arena's and the potential use of this spell for exploiting terrain bugs the following changes will be implemented:

Demonic teleport will no longer work if the warlock is out of Line of Sight from his circle.
Demonic teleport will also teleport any melee currently attacking the warlock to the demonic circle.
Demonic circle now requires a soul shard as reagent.

Soul shards

To address complaints by warlocks of having soul shards take up all their bag space soul shards have been added to all cast-time spells in the warlock arsenal. This will ensure the quick removal of soulshards from the warlock's bags thus leaving him with significantly more bag space.

Pet survivability

Rather than addressing the low HP, terrible scaling and useless pet abilities warlock pets will now only last 1 minute after being summoned.
This is more in line with lore and will prevent warlocks from confusing their demons with actual pets like a hunter's pet.
Demon abilities will be set to autocast to circumvent discussions about spell-lock resistance and other similar problems.

Curses

Warlocks have long since complaint about the useless of curses outside of curse of agony. As a result all curses will be rolled into a single much much weaker curse providing: 10% movement speed reduction, 10% slower cast times, 10% attack speed reduction.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis has been reworked. While in demon form the warlock's movement speed is reduced by 50%.
immolation aura has been redesigned entirely to provide a blastwave like attack without the knockback that does damage to the demon in equal proportions to the damage done to others.
The warlock will not be able to cast any spells in demon form other than the new immolation aura and 'cleave'.

Other

- Seering pain is now instant cast but causes 25% more threat
- Soul linked warlocks will now be connected to their pet with a clearly visible bright pink line
- Due to the lack of banishable mobs in Northrend this spell has been removed from the warlock arsenal.
- Several warlock talents have had their talent point cost increased (particularly affliction talents)
- Lifetap had it's scaling adjusted and will now give 5% of max mana for 10% max health and no longer scales with spirit.

Find your buddy in any crowd

2009-01-16T02:05:00.000-08:00

We all know this scenario:

You're sitting near the bank waiting for the guy to show up whose service you picked up through the trade channel and you can't find the guy because the bank is covered in mammoth riding level 80s that have nothing better to do than sit there and block your view.

Sure you will eventually find each other, but the longer it takes the more frustrated both of you will be and the less pleasant your interaction may become.

Thankfully jewelcrafting comes to the rescue and these days you will often find these sitting on the auction house for a nominal fee (just search lens on the AH):

Focusing lens

What this puppy does is project a pretty beam of light much like the warlock's drain spells on the target. The range seems to be pretty high and the target can even walk out of LOS without losing the beam.

Not only does this little lens come in different colors and make an incredible tool to find people you can also use it to point out different objectives in instances or point out targets for those that have their video setting set lower and don't see everything. It can also help to mark objectives in BG's and there's about a dozen other fun things you can do with it. Incidentally it's absolutely bloody brilliant to find named mobs with that are always hiding in some obscure little corner.

With jewelcrafting 350 and only requiring a green quality gem to make this 40 charge lens I happily recommend it to anyone who has to deal with finding people or pointing out things on a regular basis.

Not only that but if you give it to 25 others you can make one hell of a lightshow.

Give it a try if you haven't yet.

XP Gold rewards at level 80

2009-01-13T02:23:00.001-08:00

With most people having a level 80 including myself I am now 'working' on characters number 2 and 3 to level up to 80 as well as working on getting the professions back to a useful level.

Unfortunately quest rewards from levelling my level 72s are just about enough to cover skill training and don't really contribute to levelling my professions much.

In other words: Professions are bloody expensive.

And even worse: I feel compelled to have each profession at at least a decent level to reduce my dependency on trading with others.

And while my AH business ventures are doing better than ever since I actually do invest a little time in them these days I regularly think about the fact that on my level 80 warlock I still have a large chunk of zul'drak and all of sholazar basin, icecrown and storms peaks left to do.

So how much gold could I potentally earn at level 80 from doing quests?

Before we dive into the calculations we need to be aware of a few facts:

1. Gray quests do not give any gold beyond that what is advertised in the quest text. So if a gray quest normally gives 45s and 600xp it'll give you 45s at level 80.

2. We know from wowwiki and various other sources as well as personal experience that 1xp is worth 6c at level 80. so for every 1k xp you can expect 1k * 0.0006 = 60s.

3. Most northrend quests give between 20k and 25k xp at level 80 depending on your zone meaning you can expect between 12g and 15g per quest excluding any gold you may be able to churn out by selling item quest rewards.

4. And this is an important one. If a quest says you normally get 5g and 25k xp you will only get the XP->gold conversion and not the base quest reward at level 80. So you will get 15g from this quest instead of 20g which is different from how it worked in TBC (*citation needed).

Next up we need to figure out how many quests we have per zone. On your way to 80 you either finished off Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord and the Dragonblight or not, either way you will notice that most of the quests in these 3 zones now are 'gray' to you and thus won't give you any xp->gold reward.

Grizzly hills is a bit of a toss up really since it's going to be right on the line of gray so it'll have a fair few quests that still give reward but an almost equal amount of quests that are gray already.

So the relevant zones remaining are:

Icecrown
Storms Peak
Sholazar basin
Zul'drak

Ignoring dungeon, dailies, raid and pvp quests so only looking at the group and normal quests wowhead will happily tell us the amount of quests per zone:

Icecrown - 250 quests -> 140 for achievement
Storms Peak - 159 quests -> 100 for achievement
Sholazar basin - 101 quests -> 75 for achievement
Zul'drak - 130 quests -> 100 for achievement

The reason I listed the amount needed for the achievement is quite simply because some quests are part of elongated quest chains and others can be damn near impossible to find. The achievements are however fairly easily completed and can be a good guideline to what can be achievable without investing hours upon hours in researching various questlines and travelling all over the map.

There's no point in going into detail on how much xp each quest gives and what the corresponding rewards would be since we're only looking for a rough estimate of what the total gold reward per zone would be.

As a result we're going to go with the value of 14g for each quest completed in northrend. This of course excludes reward items which may be vendored or not for additional rewards. Some of the quests are probably simple crumb-trail quests to send you from one quest hub to another but for the purpose of simplicity we will simply assume that they too earn you 14g.

What can I earn?

The low end represents the approximate gold gains for doing only the amount of quests needed for the achievement. The high number assumes you complete all normal and group quests in the zone (which is somewhat unlikely).

Icecrown: 1960g to 3500g
Storms Peak: 1400g to 2226g
Sholazar basin: 1050g to 1414g
Zul'drak - 1400g to 1820g

For a grand total of: 5810g to 8960g

This is excluding drops, item rewards and other rewards that may be turned into gold and represents and estimate. Taking extra item rewards and drops into account you can probably strap another 50% on those numbers meaning you're looking at 8k to 13k gold for those remaining 4 zones.

All in all those aren't bad numbers, especially not if you're interested in completing quests merely for the lore aspect beyond 80.

If nothing else it's good to know that you can easily pick up an epic flyer by doing nothing more than what you've been doing all the way till 80 (quest, quest, quest...)

When to help?

2009-01-12T01:28:00.000-08:00

Altruism is an interesting trait in that it enables players compassion for those in need without it resulting in a direct benefit for the one helping.

Do you know that terrible compulsion to help someone who is being brutally bludgeoned by monsters and without your help would surely die? Even if they are the opposite faction or a rival guild we often find ourselves helping even though we risk our own virtual lives and might not even receive a word of thanks for the assistance we render.

That my friends is altruism. And altruism is good. Altruism is something we learned a long long time before we even evolved into proper huoman beings because it would allow us to cooperate to overcome challenges that a single individual would not be able to handle.
Altruism allows for the building of society... people that are not altruistic are egotists; An egotist will rarely help you with anything unless it is to their direct benefit.

If we help an egotist our effort is lost. We invested our time and potentially resources in someone that will never return the favor and will most likely never pay it forward either. In the end you're not doing anyone a favor by helping an egotist and you investing time into an egotist is time you didn't invest into an altruist (meaning that you did society a big disservice).

If we help an altruist our effort turns into an investment. The altruist will eventually either help you, be willing to help you if you need it or in some form of the other pay it forward. Our effort is a service to society, we in some way shape or form have helped to make it a better place for everyone.

In both cases the behaviour is ingrained into our brain, hardcoded as it were. An altruist may run away occasionally or make an educated decision not to help but he/she is fighting their compulsion to help and a lot of people will then feel bad for not helping as a result.
An egotist in turn may help someone in the hopes or perceived certainty that he/she will get what he/she wants in return or at least receives some form of payment.

So from all this we can conclude that it's good to help an altruist and not so much to help an egotist (in fact it's probably bad to help an egotist).

The question is how do you really tell an egotist from an altruist?

"Do you have 1g?"
"Can you boost me through RFC?"

Is the person asking an egotist who just wants 1g or a boost for their own benefit or is it an altruist who really needs the help?

The difference between an egotist an an altruist is generally the will an ability to make compromises/sacrifices. If someone asks you for a boost through RFC you should not make a unilateral decision to either help or not you should actively attempt to determine what kind of person you are dealing with.

In order to determine wether someone is primarily an egotist or an altruist you have to determine to what extend he/she is willing to help you in return by displaying a bit of egotism.

"Sure I'll boost you but I need a stack of peacebloom for it. Can you arrange that?"

The egotist in general wasn't really interested in paying for your services and in most cases will move on right away or try and get the boost from you 'before' payment. In some cases the egotist will grudgingly hand over your required payment in which case the net result to society is 0. You helped someone, they refunded your time. You could've invested the same amount of time and gotten your payment so you don't win or lose anything and neither does the egotist (except he got what he wanted and you got something you think is worth what he wanted).

The altruist will at the very least be willing to negotiate the deal and more than happy to trade one favor for another without too much qualm even if it means sacrificing a bit more of his/her time than yours.

"I am sorry, I can't give you 1g but if you pick up herbalism you can go outside of town and get silverleaf and peacebloom which sells quite well on the Auction House"

The egotist will most likely ignore you after this one and move on to their next victim. They were already aware that they could make money by herbing but they had better luck begging it from people.

The altruist on the other hand will generally be either genuinely ignorant of herbalism or will be willing to negotiate some kind of deal thus your teachings will be well-received and will often result in genuine follow-up questions.

While not a perfect test you can indeed find out if people have altruistic inclinations or not. Egotists should be put on ignore as soon as possible, you are not helping anyone by helping them. A society that does not weed out it's egotists is a society doomed to fail in some form or the other. Be it by widespread poverty, creating an anchor through those unwilling to put forth effort for ayone but themselves or numerous other things that can go wrong by giving to those who only consume.

Studies have shown that monkeys generally don't put up with purely egotistical behaviour for too long, just because we have the luxury that we can doesn't mean we should.

Sometimes you can do good by not helping and harm by helping... it is up to us to discern the difference.

Winners and losers of Dual spec

2009-01-08T02:05:00.001-08:00

By now there has been so much buzz generated about dual speccing for character that blizzard will be hard-pressed to implement the feature at some point in the future or at the very least come up with one hell of a good reason why they don't.

I for one see a lot of potential problems with dual specs but despire being on the fence about the whole mechanic there's really no point in dwelling on the greatness or doom and gloom that is projected to come with dual specs.

For better or for worse we will most likely be looking at a dual spec system in the near future. So the question begs to be asked which characters will benefit the most from dual-speccing and what will those characters have to put up with as a result of actually being dual spec.

I am only going to briefly cut into what possible spec combinations could be and what pvp,pve impact that may have in favor of predicting the winners and losers of the dual spec in my humble opinion. I am also assuming that all trees are viable even if some classes clearly still have significant problems with one or more of their talent trees.

So from worst to best we start off with:

#10 The Rogue

Dual speccing will give the rogue the awesome ability to spec into not one but 2 dps trees. While we can certainly opt to have a PVP spec and a PVE spec in the end we're damage dealers and there's very few situations that require the ability to be able to switch from a pve mode to a pvp mode on the fly.
The rogue's utility is barely increased by having 2 specs available to them and the different itemization between a pvp and a non-pvp spec means the rogue would be dragging 2 sets of gear around at all times or if not would make his off-spec redundant. I can't think of any situation where having the choice between combat, assassination and subtlety could be considered crucial and as a result most rogues will get very little benefit from the ability to dual spec.

Beyond saving some gold on respeccing on a regular basis the rogue gets nothing out of the dual spec scenario and is well and truly hosed.

#9 The Mage

On position 9 we find the mighty mage. Another DPS class that will have the potential to spec into 2 different DPS trees but unlike the rogue's talent trees the mage's talent trees are very distinctly different from each other in functionality. Combining fire and frost (no not frostfire...) will allow the mage to switch between pure DPS and very controlled DPS. With arcane being the new PVP spec the mage can now choose between dual speccing into a solid raid dual spec with fire/frost or a raid/pvp combination as arc/fire or a pvp control spec as arc/frost.
All this nonwithstanding the mage is still a pure DPS class and the increased utility that comes from being able to switch between frost and fire for example will be more useful in a solo setting than in a raid setting where things are already more controlled.

#8 The Warlock

We continue with the pure DPS classes and run into the warlock that now gets the option to combine affliction/demonology/destruction which affords the warlock a certain amount of flexibility. The ability to dual spec into a demonology spec means that the warlock gains the ability to become a quasi tank via their pet (assuming the tree gets adjusted a little) and even though affliction no longer is what it was there's still the hope that it will provide some drain tanking capability. This means that to a certain extend the warlock can act as a weak off-tank and a strong dps depending on spec combinations.
Unfortunately this utility is still a long shot away from number 7 on the charts and in the end the warlock falls into the DPS = DPS trap resulting in the warlock having slightly more utility than a mage on the tanking field but this utility will most likely never be more relevant. I'd consider mages and warlocks tied on 8th/9th position but give the warlock the benefit of the doubt due to demonology potential.

#7 The Hunter

On 7 we find the hunter. With BM being a strong pet spec giving the potential to be quite a solid OT and two DPS spec the hunter seems to be in the same boat as the warlock capable of providing some pet tanking capacity coupled with solid DPS ability. What sets the hunter apart from the warlock in this regard is that the hunter's pets have benefitted from a more focussed talent tree and have talent trees themselves drastically increasing their utility (I'd trust my gorilla to tank a non-high end instance, my void walker? not so much).

Even though the hunter is still more or less a pure DPS class the added pet with own talent tree and a supporting character talent tree in BM it is clear that the hunter will be miles ahead of the warlock in terms of potential utility but still a far cry from number 6 on the charts.

#6 The Warrior

Warriors will have reason to rejoice come dual specs. No longer will they have to make the arduos choice between tanking and DPS but they can simply be both. With a significantly powerful tank spec that is also considered a viable PVP spec these days combined with the potential to do solid DPS a warrior will gain the ability to almost seemlessly switch from a tanking to DPS mode and more importantly vice versa.
Given the gear discrepancy however the warrior will have to drag 2 sets of gear around for each individual spec and unless specifically invited in a run as DPS will rely somewhat heavily on the protection spec. After all mid run it's more likely that you will end up needing another tank rather than needing you to switch out of tanking mode into DPS.

#5 The Death Knight

The death knight finds him/herself in the same boat as the warrior. With tanking options opening up via the frost tree and two alternate DPS specs the only real thing that sets the DK apart from the warrior is the higher utility of the blood/unholy trees that afford the death knight a much better survivability in solo play due to significant health return potential. The death knight may also benefit from being able to switch into an anti caster role quite easily giving it just that much more utility than the warrior affording it a slightly better place on the charts than the warrior.

#4 The Priest

The priest will be able to bring an incredible amount of utility to the table when allowed to dual spec. Combining Shadow and holy/discipline will turn the average priest into something that can both heal and DPS with almost no significant difference in gear itemization. This makes transitioning from DPS to healing a very smooth operation. Additionally the dual speccing priest will gain a significant amount of utility by being able to explore different healing specs and thus becoming a good shoe-in for any larger raid situation that will probably already have a certain amount of healers and be in search of the ideal spec to round up their group.
Traditionally the priest has had a high level of utility in any situation which can now almost be doubled with dual speccing options.

#3 The Shaman

At number 3 and maybe to some people's surprise we find the shaman. The ability to combine elemental powers with healing powers already makes the shaman a decent choice to DPS or heal even if the shaman isn't specced in one or the other. Once again the gear itemization helps to cover the gap between elemental and restoration allowing for fairly smooth transitions between ranged DPS and healing. The addition of enhancement could mean that the shaman gets the benefit of either filling the role of melee dps and ranged DPS which these days can be the difference between either participating or not participating in a run.

That's a tremendous amount of utility all rolled into one and this can be incredibly beneficial to any raid.

#2 The Paladin

It should come as no surprise that we find the paladin amongst the winners in dual spec. With each talent tree designed for a specific role the paladin can heal, tank and DPS with the best of them. Combining protection and retribution will turn the paladin into something that has literally all the benefits of a dual spec DPS/Tank warrior. Combining protection and holy will mean that the paladin will be 1 of only two character classes that are capable of switching from a tank to a healer role and vice versa which makes the paladin incredibly powerful and a highly desirable class for any raid. Add to this the already great utility of a paladin and the paladin ends up on a well deserved 2nd place.

#1 The Druid

The druid will be the character benefitting the most from the dual spec scenario and is literally the only character class that can fill all relevant roles in-game be it melee or ranged dps, healing or even tanking. A druid willing to drag around enough gear sets can potentially cover tanking + dps and healing in a single dual spec combination. Hybrid orientation can drive this even further in case of the druid.

Combine this with the tremendous base utility which the druid had anyway and I can strongly recommend rolling one of these if you want to make the most use of the dual specs.

So that's it, my personal top ten of character I anticipate will benefit the most from dual specs. Any thoughts?

Alternate self-buff management

2009-01-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

There's dozens of self-buffs in wow ranging from things like fel armor to seals that can contribute to stats, damage or have other beneficial effects on your character.

All these self-buffs have one thing in common: They're timed.

Whether they're on 2 minute, 10 minute, 30 minute or an hour timers seems to be more or less arbitrarily chosen and adjusted according to what seems the level of complaints on the forums and in-game over the years.

And it seems that most self-buffs like fel armor, divine spirit, arcane intellect and so on and so forth have a long enough duration that you would maybe have to refresh them once during an instance run.

With instance runs being significantly shorter, boss-fights being shorter in general it seems that the longer running self-buffs are almost to the point where you don't have to refresh them at all during a run.

If there's no mechanical need to refresh the self-buffs during a run and the trend for self-buff durations has always been to become longer rather than shorter to avoid forcing players to continually refresh buffs the question quickly becomes: Why are they timed at all then?

Players and blizzard developers generally agree that buffing shouldn't become a task in itself and anyone can deduct that all those timers are eating CPU cycles either on the server or on the client machines (depending on how that is coded). So why not take all these myriad of timers and scrap them in favor of much simpler toggle abilities?

Imagine this: You log in, you cast your buffs on yourself and instead of them dropping off after 30 or so minutes they actually stay on much like a paladin aura would, resetting only after being logged off for a short period or in case of death.

By using a toggle-ability approach for self-buffs (and really only buffs that you cast on yourself) you cut out the micro-management that is currently plagueing a lot of buff-heavy classes like paladins.

This would alleviate a lot of load on your standard spell rotation in general. While some classes like warlocks rarely have this problem I find myself having to squeeze in casting a new seal every 2 minutes, a blessing of sanctuary every now and then and other buffs every so often into my standard attack rotation on my paladin.

And there's really no need for this nor does there seem to be a specific reason why players should have to refresh self-buffs on such a regular basis. What is the difference between a self buff that lasts 30 minutes and one that lasts indefinitely (until death or logoff)?

Why do you have to refresh your seal every 2 minutes on your paladin? or your arcane intellect every 30 minutes etc. ?

What is the added value of this system?

Of course a toggle system wouldn't work on things you cast on other people and things like like the spell-stealing mechanic would have to be modified slightly so that a stolen 'toggle-buff' would indeed turn into a timed one. But those are minor obstacles from a programming perspective.

Self-buffs that cost 'resources' to get should of course retain their individual timers (I am thinking buff-foods, scrolls, flasks etc.) because they serve a function even if that may only be an economic one. Anything that merely costs 'mana' and is cast on yourself has no real reason to be timed.

I say save some trees and rework the self-buff system to a toggle-based system much like paladin/dk auras/presences work now, it'll simplify the management of self-buffs (thus leading to a more pleasant gaming experience) and most likely will save a good amount of cpu cycles dedicated to keeping track of all those timers (thus indirectly saving trees... ok it was far fetched).

In the end my thought is that a game should be easy to control and difficult to master rather than be riddled with complex spell and attack rotations in an environment that presents no significant challenge.

Back on Track

2009-01-05T01:50:00.000-08:00

With the christmas cheer and new years beer (well wine mostly) slowly working its way out of my system it's time to get this train back on track... if it ever really was on track in the first place.

As you can imagine I didn't play as consistently over the holidays as I would otherwise (happy new years at that) but I did manage to get a fair few hours of playtime in while no one was looking.

The thing that struck me most thusfar is the fact that I barely ran an instance. No matter where I turn I either seem to be getting bounced from the run due to lack of healers or something else happens like someone paying enough attention to see that I have an attack power enchant on my bracers and calling me a total noob over it and _then_ bouncing me out of the run.

Ok fine, so I train enchanting and I don't always re-enchant.... *sigh* it's exhausting to try and pug anything sometimes.

Most of all I think it's the massive excess of DPS classes running around these days which is causing my lousy luck with instance runs. After all, dps is easy to come by unlike tanks and healers (healers mostly it seems) and if you have to choose between a crazy mal-enchanted, weirdly geared, strangely talented warlock and a random facerolling ret paladin you go with the paladin (of course).

So I upgraded (downgraded) my level 80 warlock to banking status, put a dent in my tailoring (410), picked up leatherworking (400), did some mild enchanting (405) and pushed blacksmithing along (410) and then went to file bankruptcy after having spent something in the neighbourhood of 2k gold on various mats.

Looking at my shabby pile of 500g remaining I'd say the other professions are going to have to wait. Incidentally it sucks not having a miner in northrend (kicks self for not thinking of the expansion when dropping mining on the paladin).
Also incidentally it seems that 1 eternal whatever is worth less than 10 crystallized whatevers of the same type on my server so I have been doing my best to normalize the market by buying eternals and selling them as 10 x crystallized(s).

How do you crystallize fire anyway? Ah nevermind...

Without decent instance runs available for my warlock and it being a completely worthless class in non-BG PVP my warlock is pretty much done for now so I decided it was: Hammertime

I dusted off my pally, threw on some cobalt defense gear and went off to aoe grind some rhinos outside of warsong hold. And before I knew it I was level 71 and had a boatload of rhino meat and chunks of rhino fur in my bag... funny how paladin aoe grinding can put me in a trance sometimes.

I am thinking since the rhino's aoe so well I might just stick around for another level's worth of grinding; Sure, sure it's not as efficient as straight up questing but it's very relaxed, have a chat kind of activity that pays a decent chunk of gold at no risk. The rhino meat will make a nice stockpile for one of those dalaran cooking dailies and with the rhinos being just outside warsong hold I can just park my pally there and aoe grind a little inbetween levelling lowbies who are in dire need of some love.

For a brief moment I was worried about not having any badges and then I remembered... it hasn't even been 2 months since wrath was released.

Plenty of time to do that...

And you? Are you back on track yet?

No statue for you!

2008-12-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

While half the blogosphere is being puzzled by the workings of a MMORPG economy, something we covered back in januari, and myself having a somewhat uneventful time on my druid in northrend I decided to jot down my thoughts on the whole 'theorycrafting as bible' thought process that seems to be commonplace these days.

Not too long ago I got a tell from someone who vehemently disagreed with my gear/my gems/my enchants and even my spec and we got into a brief discussion about theorycrafting after which I blisfully ended up on his ignore list... (which I suppose is good because I couldn't possibly explain my gem choice atm :))

But since he didn't want to hear the whole story I'll post my thoughts here instead.

Let me start by saying theorycraft is amazing: Within a matter of hours of painstaking research, arduous math, spreadsheet design and the creation of complex graphs and bar-charts you can determine exactly what your spell rotation should be, what you should gear like to optimize any aspect of your game and even allows you to compare yourself to other players trying to follow the same route.

But theorycraft always operates under the assumption that the amount of variables are limited. Theorycrafting doesn't take into account common practical occurances that happen in-game because it would make it impossible to compare a to b.

Theorycraft willfully ignores lucky streaks, ignores (de)buffs and commonplace events like moving out of a fire (or not moving out of a wreath) because they don't 'math' well... (i.e. are gruesomely hard to integrate in any kind of spreadsheet).

However the old wizard school saying applies: 1 in a million chances happen all the time.

So then, does theorycraft tell you how much defense rating you should have? Yes! It can determine to the 5th decimal place exactly how much defense rating you should have and what stats should be used to achieve said rating.

So you go out, dig yourself up some trusty defense rating gear and off you go only to be splattered the next time a silence hits you between your holy shield cycles or you take an untimely stun/fear.

One might say "hey you can't blame theorycraft for that" and you'd probably be right. But then tell me you never got flak for your gear and then tell me that people didn't point out to you that you should be using gear line-up Z to optimize your defense rating because so sayeth the theorycraft.

Theorycraft is a tool that allows you to compare 'stuff' (spell damage, mitigation, gear choices etc.) and with this tool gear lists are built.

But these gear lists don't take into account practical occurances, mentalities and playstyles of the different people. Just because your spec or gear choice proves to be less than optimal when stuffed in a spreadsheet doesn't mean they're not the optimal choice for you.

And this is the point where theorycraft fails in near catastrophic ways... just because the spreadsheet says you must do x for maximum damage doesn't mean you should throw all caution to the wind and spec/gear precisely according to the theorycraft.

If you as a person are not comfortable with a low health pool, have issues with stuns or fears then it is indeed in your best interest to make up for your personal weaknesses by speccing and gearing accordingly.

Theorycrafting can be a good starter, a primer to see what 'would' be optimal if all things were equal. In practice most things are a lot less predictable and you will have to deal with the stray mobs, tanks and healers keeling over and a ton of other events that are simply impossible to put into a spreadsheet. Not to mention simple things like personal preference.

Theorycraft will fail when applied in practice if you don't use a modicum of common sense. People that criticise your gear know nothing about your situation and will never be able to motivate their 'commentary' if you yourself have taken into account theory as well as practice.

Leave the optimal build for the optimal world, in all other cases don't rely on theorycraft alone. The only way to talk about other people's choices is by asking questions... why this piece of gear, why that talent, why this gem... if they have the answers and they make sense, who are you to criticise their choices?

And if you are being criticised for your choices... and you just can't get through to them with proper arguments then rest assured with the thought: No one ever erected a statue in honor of a critic.

Warlocks Represent!

2008-12-19T05:57:00.000-08:00

I have a nasty habit of making up lack of skill with reading the appropriate material so I can at least talk like I know about things even though I don't always get to bring actual skill to the table (theory is better than execution so to speak).

I did however read and play enough to be able to predict that warlock population for this pvp season would be as they call it absolutely 'terribad'.

Take a look at this table: here

And note that the once feared all powerful OP warlock is now 'the' most underrepresented class in the entire arena world (not to mention completely not present in any top 100... unless there's a top 100 of suck online somewhere). Sure sure it's only been a few days since the season started and figures will adjust a little as resilience starts scaling, but we all know how PVP works.

The (gear)lead you build in the beginning of the season will be the lead you have for the rest of the WotLK PVP seasons. The fact that there's now around 4% of the total arena population playing a warlock means that warlocks are pretty much doomed when it comes to arena PVP.
Doomed, as in destined to always be one or more gear steps behind the rest.

I am not surprised. After seeing all the massive burst damage that is generated these days and knowing full well that a warlock is still a very much dot-based class I knew things were going south.
Add to this the fact that warlocks will now have approximately the same amount of armor and only moderately more stamina as well as 0 survival tools (no meta jokes) beyond abilities that are taxed with heavy cooldowns means we can literally kiss the warlock goodbye as OP PVP class.

I am not bitter about it, I am doing decently in PVE, but it was obviously coming down the tube and the cries from people over at arena junkies could be heard for miles and miles without being adressed which is what bothers me a little.

You know things are in a sad state when even the most experienced arena players can't think of reasons why they would want to take a lock over 'any' other class to an arena match.

And that's where the problem comes in. Assuming blizzard will eventually deal with the glaringly obvious problems of the warlock the fix will most likely be too late. It takes some arena players as little as a month or two to get a significant lead in gear... even if the warlock gets fixed they will be behind so far that only the most tenacious warlock PVPers will be able to catch up.

To me the problem is easily circumvented by levelling another alt, something I always enjoy doing, but in the end going from a decent PVP class which the warlock was at some point to being a liability for your teammate(s) is going to be a bitter pill to swallow for most warlocks.

Still, there's some hope for warlocks... something like a tenacity buff of some sorts for the fact that you had enough guts to enter the arena as a warlock in the first place...

On the plus side: If you ever make it into deadly gear as a warlock you should be rightfully considered the most 'bad ass' person on your server.

So have hope warlocks... have hope and represent!

Back to alting

2008-12-19T01:53:00.000-08:00

With my warlock having dinged 80 the day before yesterday things seem to slowly been returning to 'normal'. I had a chance to look at the next pvp season and had to note that all the interesting gear (i.e. anything that could be considered an upgrade) now requires a 1600+ arena rating which for a scrub like me will prove a challenge in itself (warlock survivability anyone?).

The irony of it all is that I now have to arena to BG (provided I want some pvp gear) which irks me tremendously. To me that says please get yourself beat up by a team that outgears you so significantly and that you will never catch up to before you enter a BG to get some honor points that will mean nothing if you don't have a decent arena rating.

I suppose there's a benefit for PVP oriented people in there somewhere that escapes me (a tiered progression path maybe).

To avoid the frustration I decided to try for an instance group, found one, arrived there only to notice that I fell in with a group of children that would spend half an hour standing in front of the dungeon argueing about what kind of gear they wanted just in case it dropped.

And then they blew off the run because they couldn't find a healer...

I turned to crafting... which lasted all about 10 minutes in which I must've burnt through at least 500 frostweave... ... I'd say it'll be a long long time before any of that gets to a level where it'll afford me with some new gear (no flying carpet for you!).

So with almost no gear progression paths outside of pugging instances ( I really don't feel like bolstering the guild with more people before the new year ) I went back to my old ways.

And so I found myself on my lowbie mage getting a few boosts from our guild's dk (caught out herbing) and did some quests in STV making a good level and a half of progress settling my magus just a few bubbles away from level 44.

All in all I am not sure what to think about level 80... it was a nice trip there and I am somewhat interested in finishing up the quests in the zones I didn't do yet but I have no clarity on what lies beyond that is interesting and worth doing.

I'll tour the instances no doubt, gain some rep through dailies but I have nothing that I can really sink my teeth in. At this point it looks like I am better off levelling some other stuff through outland and use the mats collected to improve various professions...

Maybe... and this is a truly twisted thought, I should spec my druid resto and get into the whole pugging game. I am not entirely sure I could put up with the hassle though, people are critical and unfriendly as is and that's not exactly the best place to introduce someone whose never healed anyone voluntarily except himself.

Still it's probably good to get some of the dust off of my lowbies while I think on this.

The cost of professions

2008-12-16T02:54:00.000-08:00

My last post sparked a number of interesting responses on how people deal with their resources. Some prefer to sell it all and buy it in when they need it, others stockpile and to others again any kind of inventory management is akin to spending a day in a pug as a healer with a (bad) unholy dk tank and 3 huntards (with pets on autocast growl).

To put things in perspective I decided to take a look at how many materials you can expect to use to get from 375 (the old TBC limit) to 450 for each profession.

These are rough indications based on various guides that can be found on the internet meaning that when all is said and done these figures may be up to 5-10% off the mark depending on what recipes you're using. Still, it's a good base indication and shows what you can start collecting if you are so inclined.

Tailoring

7225 x Frostweave Cloth
780 x Infinite Dust
175 x Eternium Thread (vendor item (cost rep based))

Leatherworking

List of Materials
380 x Borean Leather
310 x Heavy Borean Leather
20 x Crystalized Water
Eternals:
5 x Eternal Air or Eternal Water
50 x Eternal Life and 50 x Eternal Water
(or 50 x Eternal Water and 50 x Eternal Air
or 50 x Eternal Fire and 50 x Eternal Shadow)

A potential alternative shopping list looks like this:

280 x Heavy Borean Leather
80 x Crystallized Water
200 x Jormungar Scale
60 x Arctic Fur
400 x Nerubian Chitin
10 x Frozen Orb

20 x Icy Dragonscale
or 20 x Nerubian Chitin

Engineering

43 x Crystallized Water
10 x Crystallized Earth
8 x Frostweave Cloth
26 x Borean Leather
13 x Eternal Shadow
25 x Skinning Knife
25 x Mining Pick
25 x Blacksmithing Hammer
284 x Cobalt Bar
479 x Saronite Bar

You can probably start at 350 with this since engineering is very much a profession where you make your own components for other items. in this specific case cobalt bolts start at 350... but you'll need them later on so you have to get them no matter what you do.

Blacksmithing

180 x Cobalt Bar
530 x Saronite Bar
20 x Eternal Water
30 x Titansteel Bar
10 x Frozen Orb

Alchemy

10 x Dark Jade
10 x Eternal Air
10 x Eternal Earth
20 x Eternal Fire
10 x Eternal Water
40 x Goldclover
10 x Huge Citrine
30 x Icethorn
15 x Lichbloom
10 x Pygmy Suckerfish (from fishing)
20 x Tiger Lily
45 x Imbued Vials (vendor item)

Enchanting

1 x Titanium Rod
1060 x Infinite Dust
40 x Lesser Cosmic Essence
15 x Crystallized Water
282 x Greater Cosmic Essence
8 x Dream Shard

Inscription

75 x Ink of the Sea
75 x Resilient Parchment

not sure on these numbers to be honest

Jewelcrafting

15 x Shadow Crystal
15 x Dark Jade
60 x Eternal Earth

30 x Earthsiege Diamond
or
30 x Skyflare Diamond

First Aid

I estimate about 250 frostweave for 375-450 but I was not able to find any exact figures laying around.

There we have it. If I look back at the old TBC figures we can definitely see that professions got a whole new tier of 'expensive' strapped to them and it remains to be seen if each profession truly is worth the extreme amount of materials required to get them up.

I hope these numbers help you out in some way shape or form, they were certainly sobering to me the first time I saw them. If anything this is definitely a statement against maintaining the same non-gathering profession on your various characters unless you are indeed rather wealthy.

Managing your gold

2008-12-15T01:45:00.000-08:00

Gold is a tricky resource and even though some of us have already gone past the point of having pretty much everything they want and gold to spare for completely useless things most of us have to deal with the reality that our gold supply is limited unless we want to spend hours on end grinding, playing the AH or doing dailies.

Rather than telling you how to get more gold I am going to give you a few tips on how to manage your gold better; in fact how to manage all your resources better.

I am not going to lie to you, most of these tips are obvious and pretty much common sense. But I have applied these simple strategies for years now in various games and I have very rarely been spotted grinding/farming resources unless I was being exceptionally greedy. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I have spent no more than 24 hours out of a years worth of playing grinding any kind of resource I needed.

On that note let me add this: Managing your gold and resources is not about getting rich, it's about not getting poor.
There's targets I have that I haven't met, that I could grind and farm for but for which I have decided to just play the game instead knowing that the goal will be met in due time because I know how to control my expenditures.

So off we go into the wondrous world of resource management and a healthy chunk of self-discipline.

DON'T YOU DARE SELL THAT!

I see it happening all the time. People are out levelling their alts or playing their various characters and end up with a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have an immediate use for. So they think, hey I'll just sell this on the AH, make a small profit and then weeks/months later notice that they could've used the resources on an alt or during a crafting project for a random buyer or a guildie and end up paying a significant premium because they need the resources right away.

You can see this the most during holiday seasons. If you need a whole bunch of small eggs during christmas for some eggnog you're invariably going to have to either farm for them or pick them up from the AH for extreme prices.

Now think back how many of those small eggs you found while playing your lowbie alts and how many you simply vendored or sold on the AH for next to nothing.

The cardinal rule here is: If it stacks, don't sell it
Other than inventory management there's no reason to sell stackable items unless they're absolutely useless to everyone. Those resources will come in handy the next time you're grinding up a profession or if nothing else you will be able to sell them at a significant profit if you're willing to

WAIT FOR IT

Sell things at the right time. There's always people out there working on their professions or picking up new ones. Your resources are valuable to them because they want them 'now' and not later. If you have resources available then you're always able to make nice deals either with the buyer directly or indirectly when there's a shortage on the AH.

There's no reason to rush-sell anything... provided that you

MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY

Inventory management is crucial. Buy all your bank slots on all your toons and equip them with the most affordable but largest bags you can find (netherweave bags in my case). If you don't have any alts yet consider filling up the remaining character slots you have with alts purely for banking purposes.
Give each character a type of resource to deal with. I keep all my tailoring mats on my warlock, all my ores on my paladin, all my herbs and alchemy on my druid, all 'general' stuff on my warrior and so on and so forth.

Stop thinking about inventory management. Make a simple system for yourself and whenever you are in town simply mail whatever you have to the corresponding alts for them to deal with later.

Picking a day to manage your inventory to take care of it all can be very helpful in dealing with large mailbox queues and will cause you to have space to spare. Having space to spare is crucial if you want to be able to just ditch your spare holy set in the bank because you won't need it on the next instance run. If you can't ditch it in the bank real quick then you're just dragging it around with you...

Which brings us to the second part of inventory management:

WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DRAGGING THAT WITH YOU?

Yeah, I have a set of gear for this that and the other thing too, I have stacks of buff foods, fishing pole, trinkets, potions and whatnot in my inventory. And by Medivh I will drag them around everywhere!
Say what? Stop that: Take only what is necessary.
Are you really going to need 3 stacks of buff food while you're questing? or that extra set of gear?

Maybe you will, more likely than that you won't and you're wasting dozens of inventory slots on completely useless crud... crud that will force you to a) destroy stuff to pick up new stuff or b) cause you to run to town way more often than you need to.

This is gruesomely inefficient. You're losing money for every gray item you toss overboard and if you have to go to town all the time you're losing questing time by the bucketload. It may not seem that important but if you do a rough calculation on how much gold you are bleeding just by throwing away 'cheap' gray items you'd be surprised at how many gold you throw away a week.

There's a reason I quest a lot with my imp, it's because I can replace my soulshard bag temporarily for another 16+ slot bag leaving me with about 3-4 loose soul shards but 12 more bag slots to fill up before I have to go to town. And I can do this because I usually have an empty bag in my bank waiting to be swapped in for a full one.

In the end: Don't take things with you that you won't need and leave room in your bank for just dumping things off for a while.

THE AH IS YOUR FRENEMY

Last but not least there's the almighty Auction House. The auction house is the number 1 cause for people being as poor as they are. People buy recipes they'll never use or only use once, buy new gear on the AH that they end up replacing only days after. The AH is as much your friend as it is your enemy.
Scan it daily with tools like auctioneer so you know the average prices of stuff but don't be tempted to buy anything.
Why are you buying it should be the first question in your mind, if you can't come up with anything better than 'I want it' then don't buy it. In fact there's very little reason to buy anything from the AH unless there's no physical way for you to get the item in the first place. Patience is key. You simply have to assume that you will get what you want in good time and as a result you can curb your spending to the absolutely necessary.

The only thing the AH can be used for is to sell high and buy low. To achieve this look specifically at the resource market your stockpiling. If you're stockpiling a lot of ore and there's a shortage sell a few stacks for a decent price bearing in mind that if it's especially valuable stuff you're better off selling it in smaller stacks. Never ever sell all your resources though, since you will need them the second you have none.

Buying low is the other end of the stick and is something you'll be able to do quite easily when there's a lot of people on at one time... i.e. the weekend. Over the weekend you can get tremendous deals on things that you can sell for significantly more during the week.

Keep an eye out on the AH at all times and scoop up deals even if you can't use them yourself.

If it's not a deal, then why are you buying it? No really... why are you?

In the end the above won't make you rich but it'll allow you greater control of what you have... it'll allow you to make the snap decision to power level a profession and already have most of the resources ready, it'll give you greater flexibility and save you gold that you didn't even know you were losing.

When it's all said and done, when the day comes that I am stupendously wealthy the above will keep me stupendously wealthy no matter what I do. All that for the price of a little self-discipline... that's not so bad now is it?

So then, what do you do to keep your resources under control?

patch 3.0.8 goodness

2008-12-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Don't ask what happened to numbers 3.0.4 to 3.0.7... they were eaten by the blizzard monster. Either way 3.0.8 is on the PTR and I decided to take a quick look at the patch notes and there's a few interesting things in there.

I won't bore you with going through the entire list of class changes and similar but there's a few gems in there that you will likely miss if you just skim across right to the changes specific to your class.

I'll go into the 'massive' amount of warlock changes too since after all... I am a warlock.

Generall stuff

* Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night elves on mechanostriders? Tauren on raptors? You’re not seeing things.
Complete freedom in riding whichever mount you want should calm down some that always wanted to ride something weird but will probably cause a minor ripple with those that appreciated the racial mounts.

Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
Warlocks rejoice, no longer will you have to open with seering pain or wand to tap your kills... now even we can participate in the age old sport of kill stealing.

We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
This one is pretty weird, I know azeroth is dead but come on, don't lay it on too thick. I suppose it'll help once I pick up my lowbies again

The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at 75% speed.
Definitely a change for the better. Corpse runs always take way too much time. Carebears rejoice.

Very interesting changes and from what I can see all for the better.

Now on to some warlocky goodness and honestly I scrolled by the changes quite a few time before finally deciding to search for 'warlock' in the patch notes.

Here's what it came up with:

Warlocks

Drain Mana: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
Emberstorm: Now works with Conflagrate.
Ritual of Summoning: Will now create a summoning portal object which can be re-used for multiple summons for 5 minutes.

That's it... 3 changes... only the rogues have less this time around. No increase in pvp viability, no fixes for the glaringly obvious impossible affliction spell rotation. No clean up to make demo a more viable spec beyond levelling... nothing... warlocks are fine and I need to learn to play or wait a few patches more.

Well it doesn't say that... but it's in stark contrast with what ghostcrawler has been putting on the forums which is somewhere along the lines of this:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

Which would actually help, yes, yes it would. Either way I am dreading the PVP season. I want some pvp gear because if it still works as it did the time investment is minimal for some decent gear... but I am no fan of being first target and burnt down in the first 15 seconds of a match... or in the time of a stun in case of rogue presence.

Interesting changes overall... euh... the general ones I mean. And if you're still bored you can always read the other post I put up today... it has a similarly incoherent structure.

Just on my server?

2008-12-12T02:24:00.000-08:00

Well I had a big long rant prepared about this that and the other thing amongst which having to pay another 1k gold just to be able to fly again and how my future self is a bit of a bastard...
But apparantly over at the pink pigtail inn there seems to be a discussion going on about all the ranting that's gripped the blogosphere lately so I decided to exchange my perfectly well-formatted rant for some random useless observations :P

On that note I really wonder if most of the servers evolve in the same way. I've always been a one server kind of guy when it comes to playing MMORPG's and even when the server I play on is down I rarely feel the urge to create another character elsewhere (I like to keep all my crud in the same box).

so in essence I have a very very limited view on what's going on elsewhere. Sure, the economy is different per server, the population is too... but does this actually mean that other servers are completely different worlds?

Here's a few things I observed on my server of which I wonder if other servers are following similar trends:

There's been a crazy invasion of bear mounts in dalaran lately. 8 out of 10 people are riding that ugly brown bear you can buy for +-700g... every now and then you see a black bear or similar but still... there's a lot of bears.
There's so many bears out there I feel compelled to ask why you would still want to spend 700g on something that literally everyone has.

I haven't seen a shaman in days, weeks even. The last time I saw any trace of a shaman was a seemingly abandoned totem and it literally took me a second or two before I figured out what that strange glowing object was. Where have all the shammies gone? Are they that bad off these days?

Despite dwindling numbers according to wow census and a very questionable pvp survivability warlocks are all over the place. Out of the few group quests in the dragonblight I needed people for there was always an extra warlock in the pug and never the same one. I am still fairly certain that warlocks won't do well the next pvp season but I am kind of pleased that there are still a decent amount of warlocks about.

The warriors I have been talking to that have dk's are often telling me that their warrior feels kind of 'meh' to play after playing a dk for a while. I am wondering how other warriors feel like but there seems to be a fair few people I talk to that now prefer their dk's over their warriors. A trend perhaps?

Mages kick ass these days. I've seen fire mages crit so often in succession that I started to wonder if my damage meter was borked. Unfortunately my own 'never will crit nanaananaaanaaa' shadowbolt tells me that my damage meter is fine. I gather they're patching up arcane too and I've always wanted to try arcane. That almost makes me want to level my mage. Is it just me or is wotlk _the_ expansion for magi?

Shattrath is a ghost town... The few people that are there are rushing to level 68 and leave the place as soon as they can. Azeroth is no better off for that matter. There's still a decent amount of people in places like ogrimmar but beyond that there's maybe one or two players in each zone at most.

People are bored already. I've overheard a couple of conversations now of people that already have bought all their new badge gear, whose rep for most of the new factions is already either at or very close to exalted and whose only remaining goal is to buy a mammoth mount with vendors and buy up all the recipes available in dalaran. Now I am not saying anything about difficulty here but euhm... it's only been a month since wrath release so if you're bored now... things are not looking good for you.

So how's life on your server? Any notable trends?

How much time did you waste?

2008-12-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I hand in a quest, look at the rewards and with a certain amount of teeth-gnashing decide to replace my pretty little purple epic with one of the northrend blues or even greens.

Other times I sit on a flight looking at my reputation tab and wonder to myself if it was really worth it grinding tons of rep items just to get to that magical level of reputation that you needed to pick up this item/enchant or whatnot that has now long since been forgotten.

In short, sometimes I wonder if I didn't just plainly waste a glorious amount of time on doing things that are completely meaningless and more importantly simply weren't fun to do.

I started playing around this time last year, I knew wrath was coming and I have always known that any expansion would bring a new level of gear and other features that would completely supplant the ones from the expansion before it.

As a result I always strived to doing things for 'fun' rather than an arbitrary gear upgrade or reputation increase.

I didn't run Kara more than a handful of times, in fact I stopped quite literally the second I didn't think it was fun anymore (conveniently I fell out of grace with my guild at that time). But still, I spent hours if not days in various battlegrounds grinding up the honor and marks to get myself an upgrade.
Time I could've easily spent on well... fun stuff.

So just out of curiosity I started scribbling down a few figures in order to get a rough estimate of how much time I 'wasted' in wow... and by wasted I mean time I spent logged in doing things I didn't enjoy.

Here's what I came up with:

* I enjoyed 90% of all my instance runs.
Mostly due to the fact that I only ran instances for fun, never for loot or for reputation (yes I don't have a lot of major TBC reputations as a result).

*I enjoyed 15% of my reputation/item grinds.
Collecting various signets, armaments, marks, motes and tomes never seemed to fill me with glee, the dailies weren't horrible but could hardly be considered a blistering experience of fun. Most of my reputation/item collections were involuntary and motivated generally by gear upgrades.

* I enjoyed 65% of all BG's I ran.
I ran a lot of AV's mostly because I like the grandness of having 2 large groups of players going head to head. Controversely I quite literally hated all my WSGs that I was purely doing to get the necessary marks for upgrades. The rest was about an even split between absolutely loving it and stonefaced mark grinding.

* I enjoyed 80% of the time spent levelling alts
I like levelling... I am good at it. It gives me that zen feeling of being in utter control and having a complete overview. Levelling from 0-30 is a complete and utter pain in the rear end though and the more you do it the less fun it seems to get (try not to mention the word barrens around me)

* At level 80 for any of my characters I will retain approximately 10% of all the items I collected during the last expansion
The irony of it all is that the only items that will have survived the trip are novel trinkets, things with funny animations and various rewards from ingame festivals and events. None of the gear that contributes to my playstyle looks like it'll survive.

Then I sat around for a while, twirling the paper I had scribbled the numbers on around between my fingers.

So? What does this mean then?

I decided to scribble some more stuff down to make some sense of the figures:

I spent 60% of my time levelling alts, 15% in BGs, another 10% grinding reputation, 5% doing instances and 10% I completely wasted by throwing myself off of various landscaping features under the 'let no soulstone go to waste' policy, I might've chatted a bit too and whatnot.

So out of every 100 hours I played, 60 hours were spent levelling, 15 in bg's, 10 grinding rep/items, 5 in instances and 10 were completely shot to hell doing things to entertain myself.

... enough numbers to do something with... so I concluded the following:

out of every 100 hours I enjoyed ((60/100)*80) + ((15/100)*65) + ((10/100)*15) + ((5/100)*90) + 10 (because I always enjoy time doing completely useless crud) = 73,75 hours or approximately 74%

Other than telling you where I spend most of my time (not in instances obviously) this means I didn't really enjoy 26% of my playtime.

In retrospect I think 26% is a pretty significant chunk of time to not be enjoying yourself in a game you pay good money for to play.
And as it turns out by looking at my obscure scribblings that 26% of time was pretty much the time I invested in trying to get some decent gear upgrades (which are going to be utterly meaningless at lvl 80).

This is a sobering figure no doubt, but it once again reinforces my resolve to avoid things that I don't enjoy like reputation grinds and the unfortunate effort that is 'gear hunting'.
After all, as a solo player I have the unique luxury to ignore the high-end, end-game items that may or may not be needed for end-game raiding. And while it is easy to get swept away by the need/greed for the latest and greatest in gear upgrades sometimes we should stop and ask ourselves: 'When is enough?'

So there we have it... I wasted about 26% of my playtime on things that weren't exactly fun...

And you? how much time did you waste?

WotLK resistance

2008-12-04T01:21:00.000-08:00

Being primarily a solo oriented player I have always strived towards making my characters tough as nails, after all survivability is king in solo play.
Whether this means overloading my warlock with stamina at the expense of some other stats or using engineering for various spell absorption or reflection items I am always looking for the next best thing to make my characters that much tougher.

With the new expansion now quickly approaching its one month anniversary it has become clear that once again all stats are on the increase and it's time to re-evaluate what have been called 'situational stats' in the past.

One such stat is resistance. Pre-WotLK resistances were the unwanted step-children of rare raiding encounters where a decent amount of resistance was required purely to be able to survive long enough to take the boss down.

Resistances beyond that were considered mostly useless outside of certain raiding encounters and a somewhat fluctuating popularity in PVP for shadow resistance gear.

So lets take a look at what has changed for resistances. If you're not yet familiar with the mechanic take a look at the wowwiki here and see if you can get a basic grasp of the concept first.

What it comes down to is that spell resistance is measured both by level difference between you and your victim and an additional check for partial resistance of direct damage spells (fireballs, icebolts, shadowbolts and other bolty things) or in case of binary spells (frost nova or anything else that carries a debuff rather than a damage component) either fully resist the spell... or not.

The magic number for the WotLK era is: 415 vs lvl 83 which puts you at the resist cap of 75% resistance.

I am not going to bore you with a re-hash of the formula's posted on the wiki but here's a little number example to clarify the formula used:

Damage reduction percentage = (effective resistance value / caster level) * 15
Damage reduction percentage = 75%
caster level = 83

75 = (effective resistance value / 83) * 15
75/15 = (effective resistance value / 83)
(75/15) * 83 = Effective resistance value
415 = Effective Resistance Value

Of course if you're more interested in PVP at level 80 resistance options then you simply jot in caster level 80 and get 400 as your magic number vs lvl 80.

Still with me? good good, I'll dispense with the math now. What is important to understand is that resistance will always work against direct damage spells. So even if you only have 50% spell resistance you can still resist a significant amount of spell damage (an about 50% chance to resist half the damage and approximately a 20% chance to resist 75% damage) which means that while you'd ideally want to be at the resistance cap you can fudge the figures a little in favor of other stats (we still need to do some damage or have some armor mitigation etc. after all).

In favor of keeping this blog post somewhat legible I will save the research of what gear is out there for another post but here's a quick display of a notable (plate) resistance set that's available for crafting:

Icebane Treads - 86 frost resistance
Icebane Girdle - 86 frost resistance
Icebane Chestguard - 115 frost resistance

If the Icebane set is any indication then you can, with just 3 pieces of gear get 287 points of pure frost resistance which means that you're a mere 113 points away from being capped against a level 80 player.

If you're a paladin running a frost resistance aura you get an additional 130 points at level 80 putting you well over the needed resistance cap for an investment of only 3 items.

Granted the items lack other important stats but make up for this with a few sockets that allow for some customization options.

Still, even without the convenience of a paladin aura you're looking at +- 54% spell resistance for those 3 items alone which gives you an above average chance to munch 50% of incoming (frost) spell damage or outright resist 50% of all frost nova's cast against you.

During one of the next blog posts here on noobding I'll delve into the topic some more and see if we can figure out an approximate maximum of resistance per magic school that we can achieve by looking at potential gear, enchantments, gems and whatnot.

The ultimate goal is to see if resistances can now be considered a significant option for increasing your survivability in solo play and potential other situations.

I'll leave the conclusions up to you; Ultimately it is your choice whether you want to put the time and effort into building a resistance set and whether it is worth it for your particular playstyle or not.

All in all it seems that the resistance caps are now easier to hit than ever with the gear available in WotLK.

Bigger numbers, bigger problems

2008-12-03T01:55:00.000-08:00

Everything gets bigger.

This is an axiom that has held true for most games in the game industry but especially MMORPGs. Patches and expansions are rolled out in order to give the player more to do and to keep the money rolling in for those that design/create the game.

Everything getting bigger has held true even in the days of the old dungeon and dragons. I remember the days where we would flail around in small groups, slaying the occasional orc or desperately running away from the dragon's cave. I remember those days where level 15 was the ultimate goal and represented a significant portion of power for anyone involved in AD&D.

But it got bigger. In the form of extra rulebooks and other expansions and in the end the old power cap of level 15 was extended for everyone.

And with this growth of the power cap things became skewed. Combat tables and rulesets that were initially designed for level 15 and under simply didn't work anymore for players that literally outgrew the content and were well on their way to level 30.
The world initially designed for a modest power cap of level 15 was only able to cope with these new godlike players by throwing new godlike challenges in their face via supplemental rulebooks and yet more expansions.

How do you provide content for godlike players?
How do you provide content for those that have accumulated wealth far beyond what the game was initially designed for?

This is a conundrum that MMORPG designers have been fighting with for ages and thusfar the only answer they could come up with are simple reactive measures to structural problems of the game design.

If people are super rich... then we make stuff super expensive (remember the cost of black dye tubs in ultima online? or say... a wow mammoth mount)
If people are super proficient... then we raise the difficulty of their proficiencies (say hello to another tier of crafting, fishing, cooking etc.)
If people are super powerful... then we simply add creatures that are more powerful than them (I heard the lich king has between 2 and 3 million hit points, assuming we get to fight him)
If people have super gear... then we add gear that is more super (ok fine... better... ).

And once again things get bigger.

Both the designer and the player find themselves stuck in a cycle. The designer raises the power cap and this immediately raises the bar for the player who will always strive to get more wealth, more power and as a result will go out and slay the more powerful creatures that have just been added to the game via the patch.

That illidan chap? He's a pushover now... curator, prince, magtherion you name them... mere jokes that have been relegated to the realm of those that like to solo dungeons with the new gear that has been added in the latest patch.

And as things get bigger, bigger numbers start to cause significant problems. A game that was initially balanced for 60 levels will find it more and more difficult to cope with 10,20,30,40 additional levels and more stats to go along with it. A 10% bonus to stamina may have been insignificant at level 30 but is a huge boost at level 100 where the stats are much greater and percentile scaling goes through the roof.
The problem becomes exponential even with a linear increase in stats across the board and designers/developers will have to jump through flaming hoops to retain even the smallest sliver of balance.

What it comes down to is this: No game system can adequately handle players that are too far outside of it's initial design.

And that's not so far fetched... look at real life. If you apply yourself, work hard or just have natural talent that you can cultivate you may become an Einstein, a Sun tzu, a vincent van gogh but your potential is capped. You will never be a god (i.e. all-powerful) whereas most game systems will lead you from the ordinary to the heroic to true godhood in the end.

If you allow people to grow beyond the hard cap of the initial design you effectively turn a player into an unknown variable. You have no control over this player other than to satisfy his/her need for 'more' and the only way to keep the player happy at that point is to add new, more powerful, bosses and give the player the equivalent of a nuclear bomb to fight them with.

Without a hard cap on player potential you invalidate your carefully crafted gaming environment. People will stumble over themselves trying to get to the end-game ignoring whatever was between just to get to those new, hastily thrown together, bosses and instances that carry the most powerful equipment and yield the highest level of rewards.

As things get bigger, your game system starts to show cracks, glitches and weird effects like sudden problems with burst damage, 100% critical hit chances, massive resistance issues and problems that previously never seemed to be an issue.

Your players are leaving the ruleset, the boundaries of initial design... they have become too powerful, the numbers too large to control. I've seen it happen a dozen times ... games that ended up so skewed that players could do so much damage that an attack was either fully resisted and no damage taken whatsoever or the player was instantly pulverized when hit.
Now that's Epic...

I am watching the numbers increase and I can see the potential problems.

I'll give you one of many examples. Try not to nitpick it too much, it's an example after all: Resistances. With the new wotlk gear its easy for a paladin with a frost resistances aura and about 3-4 pieces of gear to become fully capped in frost resistance. With a little bit of creative gearing and some aura switching the same paladin can probably achieve full frost and full fire resistance at the same time.
Once you reach this point you'll probably have a lot of unhappy mages walking the world (I for one never heard a mage curse more than when most of their spells get resisted).

Certainly this comes at the cost of other stats, but it illustrates that bigger numbers will invariably lead to bigger problems.

The spreadsheet behaviour

2008-12-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

Every now and again I tend to go off into a little game design tangent. This is partially related to the fact that I have been playing games since the advent of pong (wait, scratch that... it makes me look old... pacman... no... tank wars... no ah to hell with it... I'm old). The rest is occupational hazard (software development) and a inexplicable fascination with game theory.

So today we're going to go off in one of my tangents together and take a look at how the evolution of games in general led to what I like to call spreadsheet behaviour.

Looking back over the decades of games we can fairly clearly see that most games are little more than a simulation that is heavily reliant upon numbers / math. Not surprising of course considering the involvement of computers but we can also note a significant trend towards 'showing the numbers'. This means that in most modern MMORPGs you can clearly see how many hit points you have, how much mana/energy/rage, how much strength, int, stamina etc. etc. and you can literally compile a large spreadsheet of data about your character.

This more often than not leads to so called min-maxing, numbercrunching and theorycrafting where all of a sudden the power of your character isn't determined by using terrain effectively or knowing when to strike and when not to but increasingly becomes a game of allocating stats / talents in the correct way.

Sun tzu's art of war is conveniently discarded in favor of putting the right stats in the right place and the whole process of watching the numbers increase evolves into somewhat of an obsession for players.

This obsession results in a number of unwanted behaviours. Why do people steal kills? Why do people use 3rd party tools to gain advantages? Why do people exploit bugs? Sure, there are those that enjoy making other people's lives miserable but in general this behaviour is motivated by the spreadsheet and for the spreadsheet.

It is no longer the world or the lore that dictates the progression of characters but more and more it becomes a matter of watching the right numbers increase on your spreadsheet.

Unfortunately most game designers tend to play into this behaviour. Games quickly evolve in giving players more numbers and more things to 'spreadsheet' in order to keep the game interesting longer. Expansions are brought in in order to provide more ladders for players to climb, to provide more and better equipment forcing people to re-evaluate their current spreadsheet in favor of a new one.

And this is very much understandable from a game design perspective considering the alternative.

After all, what would happen if the numbers were not visible? What would the result be if repeatedly killing the same mob(s) [grinding] didn't give you any visual representation of improvement and you simply wouldn't know if the grind was doing you any good or not past the 10th orc you just whacked?

It would take away most of the spread-sheet behaviour but in return would put much greater demands on game designers that all of a sudden have to find ways to keep their world interesting without giving tangible feedback like: you've gained 1200xp

The question begs to be asked however: Is the game designer shooting himself in the foot with this spreadsheet orientation? If the only thing that matters in a game is getting the numbers right then what happens to that content that doesn't give the right numbers?

Are game designers trading the dream of an immersive world for more ladders and more spreadsheet math because they're too lazy to build actually engaging content?

Evil mage

2008-11-27T02:15:00.000-08:00

I don't know if gnomes are infectious and the last game of gnome gripping got to me but I was out for the count for at least 4 days... completely bedridden without even the slightest chance of picking up wow. So when I finally do manage to log in yesterday for an hour's worth of play I decided to just take it easy and take my level 42 mage out for a spin.

I decided on a little test run of my slow-fall glyph in order to get used to using the spell more regularly than my usual stack of feathers would allow me. So I hopped on over to freewind post and started jumping off of the various peaks in the area climbing back up where the grimtotem usually hang out when I all of a sudden find myself being followed up the path to the grimtotems by a lvl 46 human (didn't note the class but looked like a rogue to me).

Powerlevelling something was my first thought... when he all of a sudden flagged and started doing the chicken dance right on top of me...

No biggy... I tossed myself down the nearest cliff again and slowfalled quietly away.

Turns out the bugger was a little more persistant than that and soon rode up to me again only to dismount and start doing that stupid chicken dance again.

I wasn't about to let him bother me so I went back up the cliff... slowfalled back down and rinse and repeated that for a while until I was kind of slowfalled out all the while the human following me wherever I went, dancing, /rude /spit etc..

It must've been 10 minutes of this but he was starting to put a real damper on the fun I was having floating around all over the place and I started to wonder if I could take him on as he was only about 4 levels higher than me.

That's when it hit me...

I sported up the mountain again just like I had done many times before with the annoying human in tow and set myself up really close to the edge as if I were picking a direction to slowfall in.

As usual the human decided to park his rear end right on top of me again and display his prowess with chicken dancing.

Then I took two steps back, shot a quick prayer to the to-hit gods, flagged and hit blastwave...

and the to-hit gods were good to me indeed... the human went flying over the edge of the bluff and for a second it seemed like he was flaying his arms wildly while he was plummeting to his death.

I didn't stick around much longer after but it was that very moment that I fell head over heels in love with the spiffy new knockback mechanic and decided right there and then that mages weren't so bad after all (that's a lot coming from a warlock you know).

Gnome Gripping - A DK mini-game

2008-11-20T01:59:00.000-08:00

preamble

The death knights were changing... being released from the powers of the lich king and returning to their previous ancestral homes the death knights re-discovered emotions and desires that had been long-since supressed by the powers of the Lich King...

They redisconvered traditions long forgotten, their desire to entertain and to be entertained... in short they rediscovered their desire to play.

And so came to be the game known as Gnome gripping (or gnome grabbing). The exact origins of the game are unknown but quiet rumors have it that the game was invented by an orcish deathknight sometime during the great exodus to Northrend.

A few records remain from this troubled time detailing the general rules of the game and today we will take a look at these most hallowed of documents.

Gnome Gripping

1. Game Objectives

The objective of the game is to achieve the highest score in a 5 minute timespan or to have the highest score at the time of the 'death' of the last ball.

2. The players

This game is designed for 2 or (preferably) more Death Knight players. Ideally 4+ death Knights should be involved. Non-death knights are not permitted to play however may serve as arbiters or scorekeepers. Death knights participating in the game should be about the same level.

3. The Game Board

Any generally open mob-free areas can be used. The various arena's scattered around the world are ideally suited for a game of gnome grabbing but outdoor pvp areas are ideally suited to introduce balls into the game. Borders should be defined of what is inside the game-board and what is not.

4. Scoring

A death Knight can score 1 point by succesfully 'deathgripping' the ball and 2 points for killing the ball.

5. The Ball

Due to their aerodynamic properties gnomes are ideally suited as balls. In absentia of a gnome dwarves may be used. There are recorded instances of gnome Death Knights rebelling against this vile sport and using Tauren's as the official ball thus introducing the less popular variant to gnome grabbing called 'burger fling'. The ball should be of equal or higher level than the lowest level death knight in the game.

6. The rules of engagement

The death knights should position themselves spread out over the playing field. At no time may a death knight approach another Death Knight's melee range. Death Knights are otherwise free to roam the playing field.
Ranged abilities may be used to attempt to acquire the ball but if the ball dies to this ranged ability only the DK in melee range of the ball is awarded points.
Each death Knight may use death grip whenever they choose and may use all their abilities provided the ball is within melee range. Each succesful deathgrip awards the Death Knight a single point. Destroying the ball yields 2 points.

Points should be individually tallied by an independant scorekeeper (note that warlocks should not be appointed scorekeepers due to their tendency to lie... a lot). Within a small game score can be kept by the individual death knights.

Any and all abilities including non-dk abilities such as engineering trinkets or tailoring nets may be used in the game.

7. Obtaining a ball

Obtaining a ball can be a challenge in itself. Any method may be used to lure an unsuspecting ball to the game however the records show that a few pre-defined tactics seem to have a high level success.

a) Stand in front of Ironforge and yell: 'lone flagged death knight thinks all of y'all suck, come get me'. (Method may result in an overabundance of 'balls' being introduced to the game. Note that screaming 'bur' may be just as effective as solid translations to common are not available.

b) send a low level character to 'bait' a ball

c) ambush a ball in it's travels and begin the game at the ball's location.

8. interference

Due to the immense popularity of the game interference may come from many sources. In case of interference by additional 'balls' the balls are automatically considered part of the game and can be used to accumulate additional points. Mobs of any sorts are not considered balls and do not yield points but are considered in-game obstacles to be killed or not killed as desired.

9. Death

The game does not end with death. However no points can be accumulated outside of the designated playing area. Players are encouraged to return to the designated playing area as soon as possible to resume the game. The game continues as long as there is a living death knight on the playing field (living in the broadest sense of the word).

10. The game ends

The game automatically ends after 5 minutes (anything longer would be considered grieving) or with the death of the last ball in-game. Each ball must be given the opportunity to escape after this 5 minute timespan. New balls may be used to extend the game beyond the 5 minute limit (see ball-boy variant rule). The game also ends if the ball manages to get away (i.e. cannot be recovered by any means) or if all death knights have died / left the playing field. There must be 1 player (not the scorekeeper) alive on the playing field at all times in order for the game to continue.

After the game it is traditional to /salute your oponents and say 'GGGG' which loosely translates into: 'that was one good game of gnome gripping'.

Variants

The records show a few specific variants but due to the nature of the game the amount of modifications possible seems endless.

1. Team Ball

Death Knights split into equally sized teams. Team members accumulate points for their respective teams. An independant (non-warlock) scorekeeper is recommended.

2. Mob-ball

During time of ball scarcity a mob of equal or higher level may be used. The mob should be 'elite' to prevent untimely death of the mob. Other mobs are still not considered worth points.

3. Vicious ball

This optional rule states that in case of the death knight dying he/she loses 1 point. In case of the ball killing the death knight the DK loses 2 points.

4. Ball boy

A death Knight is automatically awarded a point for introducing a new ball. This point is awarded even if there is already one or more balls in the game.

5. Tactical ball

Death Grip and killing the ball now yields an equal amount of points (1).

6. Egg-ball

The game is played as normal but the ball may not be killed. Killing the ball costs the DK 2 points.

Side notes: The mob ball games work because of aggro mechanics because it is actually possible to generate enough threat to have the mob return to you even after another dk deathgrips the mob. It however comes highly recommended to use a proper gnome ball since they have a mind of their own and can often call in additional balls thus extending the game (or not depending on how many extra balls come in).
Trust me when I say this works a hell of a lot better with more DK's due to the fairly long cooldown on death grip.

Kill stealing - a simple solution

2008-11-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

After a brief levelling run with a guildie on my hunter yesterday I decided to pick up a stray quest I had forgotten on my lock in Nagrand.

Unfortunately, as always with warlocks, I was completely out of soulshards and had to farm a chunk of them.

So I go find myself a nice densely populated area and start the usual rotation of dotting up targets waiting for them to get to low enough health so that my drain soul spell has a decent chance at returning a soul.

I usually don't pay too much attention to this proces. After 70 odd levels of dotting, drain tanking and de-souling it becomes somewhat of a second nature and the odds of dying because of carelessness quickly approach 0 when the mobs are about 5 levels below yours.

But after a while I started noticing a suspicious trend. My soul drain didn't return shards... in fact most of my kills weren't 'my' kills as they didn't even give xp.

So I take a look around... and there he sat... a miserable bastard of a low level rogue waiting for me to dot up my target and in the 2-3 or so seconds it takes for the dot to do damage he tagged the mob only to have the mob aggro me the second my dots did any damage.

The little bastard was more than happy to follow me around snagging kill after kill.

I finally had to resort to opening with 'searing pain' with a 1.5sec cast time to get my tags in before the rogue after which he merrily sent me a /rude and rode off into the sunset (just picture nagrand with a sunset then).

It's times like these I wish I were on a PVP server.

And after I had calmed down a little tossing overboard the idea of following him around and returning the favor on my hunter I wonder how this particular problem could be solved.

Ideally one would have an instant cast spell with a significant range that does very little damage (preferably even no damage) but tags the mob for you so you can apply dots without having to worry about someone snagging your kill before your first dot-tick.

Of course this would be bloody unfair if you only gave it to warlocks (we'd be running around stealing your kills... well some of us would at any rate.) ... so instead I propose a simple baseline 'spell' for all classes that allows for the user to:

Tag a mob (either by doing 1 damage or in some other way) at a pre defined range (say 40 yards)

That way melee and ranged classes are on equal footing when it comes to tagging mobs and the one that actually pushes the button first wins the mob rather than the one that doesn't have any dots or isn't otherwise instant cast / range impaired.

Especially in heavily crowded areas like the current Northrend 'starter' areas or the DK starter area this could level the playing field for everyone without putting specific classes at a disadvantage (I am thinking warlocks, priests and possibly rogues / paladins are currently suffering the most from the lack of a good 'tagger').

Of course each class has the potential to tag a mob with something, if nothing else with a wand, but the playing field is simply unevenly distributed with some people having instant cast abilities with no travel time and others do not.

Assuming we can't teach people just to group up for named mobs, queue or show a little common sense and respect a mob tagging spell would be a decent solution to rampant killstealing in crowded areas.

Now all I need is a name... hmmmmm
'Poke' Instant cast 40 yard range. This spell does no damage but allows the user to 'tag' a mob.

okok so I didn't come up with a decent name. 'Bitch slap' was floating around in my mind though so I say be happy with 'poke'.

WotLK cleared - Did the game get 'too' easy?

2008-11-18T04:33:00.000-08:00

So while I am running around outland with my warlock trying to round up some loremaster things I run into this:

WotlK cleared

Well not physically in-game of course but I have a tendency to read some random things while making use of the various flightmasters.

Be that as it may it looks like it took the combined and obviously quite rushed forces of nihilum and SK gaming less than 3 days to wrap up whatever is available of Northrend before the 3.1 content patch.

I'd applaud their effort were it not for the fact that they literally ran out of content and get to sit around and wait / level up alts / QQ before new content comes out... which they will undoubtedly be able to deal with even quicker. So in reality this seems little more than a company sponsored outting to wrap up what little there is to see in WotLK instances before anyone else.

It's amazing what people will do for money isn't it? (make no mistake, those guys are getting paid for this)

Still, all this leads to the question if things all of a sudden didn't get a little too easy. Don't get me wrong, it's lovely to be making fast progress and being able to blast through instances without too much hassle.

But content needs to be proportionate to time invested. If people consume a game's content too quickly they will become bored and leave for other games, as a result it's in blizzard's best interest to scale difficulty according to when their content patches are released.

Of course you can't calculate in a bunch of 'hired goons' completing your content in less than 3 days but looking at the average player you need to at least be able to provide them with enough challenge/content to bridge the gap between now and the next expansion/ content patch.

If I really wanted to see it all and have it all 'NOW' I would download a wow emulator and have it all when I want it... but we all know that having everything in a game only leads to boredome and not to some glorified legendary position amongst our peers.

So despite the positive 'casual' atmosphere of the expansion the question begs to be asked if things didn't get a little 'too' easy.

Linklove and loremaster randomness

2008-11-18T02:16:00.000-08:00

So it looks like Big Bear Butt linked to one of my posts. I doubt it will result in more visitors since linklove doesn't usually come with an increase of blogpost quality but hey, it's nice to be noticed *waves at all the people that strayed away from BBB temporarily*

It's nice to get some linklove as a low-profile blogger, I think I might just return the favor once I remember how the module works I added for my blogroll (I am terrible with updating stuff).

In other news I have been more or less feverishly working on the loremaster achievements for outland. Not so much because I am aching to be a loremaster but more based on the fact that the Northrend starting areas are completely swamped with people.
And I don't really enjoy the various forms of killstealing and grieving that go rampant when you confine a whole bunch of people in a small space....
(I only like prison 'movies', actually being confined in one is not my thing for some reason).

Primarily though I had a bit of greed set in. I figure that at level 80 I'd at some point be interested in completing the loremaster achievements on one of my characters. But at level 80 the outland zones won't give me any xp so I might as well do the achievements now while they still do.

Turns out that this idea was better in theory than in practice since northrend quests give almost double the xp than outland ones.
Still, sticking around in outland has elevated me to something more than just an ordinary warlock... all of a sudden people appreciate my help... they ask for it... nay they beg for it.... so I've been peddling my services as a warlock tank, because apparantly the 2.5 billion death knights in hellfire don't spec frost (or can't tank [probably both]).

And yes, warlocks can tank lower level instances just fine... (no really, stop laughing) in fact hellfire ramps in normal mode is so easy there's not much I couldn't solo except maybe that boss that summons those nasty mana draining felpuppies.

I figure if I stick to outland for as long as it doesn't annoy me I'll end up somewhere on the way to level 72 and it'll result in having a few more quests at 80 that I can turn to gold.

Yeah, greedy... I know I know... but I am still haplessly without an epic flyer and from the looks of outland I'll be needing at least one of those if I want to keep up with mining/herbing competition in Northrend.

Incidentally I decided to pop over to azeroth to put a level or two on a lowbie (yes, I still play my lowbies, feel the love my little ones) and I can definitely confirm that Azeroth is dead... if you think azeroth was dead before I dare you to log into a low level character now... you haven't seen dead until you've seen azeroth.
Someone even stole barrens chat... I am sure it found a new home in northrend... wonder if it's called tundra chat now. Either way it means that the barrens is actually a halfway decent zone to travel in now, never thought I'd see the day.

So while the old world is taking a turn for the strangely deserted how are you liking northrend?

How to get to Dalaran (no quests)

2008-11-17T04:15:00.000-08:00

I've been spending my time musing about Northrend when it occured to me that I had no idea how to get to Dalaran. Since I am not high level enough for any kind of questing in Northrend this is somewhat theoretical but should still work just fine:

1. Get to level 71
2. Group up with someone that already is in Dalaran
3. Have that someone queue the group up for a Battleground
4. /afk out of the battleground or run out.

The level 71 will ensure you end up in the right queue, the fact that your buddy in dalaran queued the group means that is now the default location for people to pop out when they're done with the bg.

I couldn't come up with anything simpler than that other than paying a mage or figuring out what the actual questline is to get to dalaran. Assuming that the quest doesn't come any sooner than lvl 71 anyway...

Just a thought but maybe worth the post depending on how far you are at in Northrend.

Crossroads

2008-11-17T01:54:00.001-08:00

So there we have it.
Even I didn't resist the temptation of rolling up my Death Knight and so one fine cold and rainy evening Capsickle was born. I don't really have to tell you much about the deathknight. Chances are you have one and chances are he's further along than mine but from what I see he has all the feel of a melee warlock so I am sure he'll strike a note with me and will be worth levelling.

I resigned to rolling him up mostly to reserve the name (it wasn't likely to be taken but you never know), getting him out of the starter zone and parking him in Hellfire in an inn where he will rest for a week before I take another look at him.

In the meantime I picked up my warlock, sent him on a brief trip through northrend to take a look at the new art before heading back to the netherstorm and nagrand to finish up some quests I had left there.

All the while the DK's were trickling in and the world's first 80's were announced.

I am happy with the new and improved quieter outland. The DK's will surely pass and I really look forward to soloing some instances when I have some wrath gear.

In the meantime my thoughts turn away from the rampaging masses, Northrend is but a tiny blip on the radar of things I want to do... of things I aspire.

The stage is set, with the resources and the levelling potential from Northrend outland will be mine for the taking. I will as always be on the path of levelling all my characters to 80 but I have resolved myself to focus some more on solo-ing instances or dragging along a guildy every now and then.

And with that resolve comes the unwavering promise to note all my solo runs down in this here blog, screenshots and all.

And with unwavering promises in the year 2008 we have to add the following disclaimer: OP might be full of shit, deliverables will not have set deadlines or have specified content /structure and will be delivered under the logistical term 'soon' with the definition as trademarked by Blizzard (meaning: when it's done).

Quo Vadis

2008-11-13T07:39:00.000-08:00

And they're off! Thousands of Deathknights swirling around the DK starting areas, thousands more players of different types rampaging across the shores of northrend...

And when the dust settles there will be few left behind.

Few... including myself.

I don't have my copy of wrath yet ... not because I failed to pick it up this morning or because I didn't skip out of work early to get a hold of it but simply because I don't understand the rush.

Where is everybody running to and more importantly why?

Why rush to the nearest fabled end-game scenario only to end up doing all the raid content within a few short months... and then what? Back to complaints about boredome?

I can't think of any good reason beyond some potential realm-first kills, and even those will become quickly forgotten.

So what does that leave?

It leaves Greed... the universal motivator of the MMORPG community... we're not looking for fun, we're not looking for challenges. Those are the excuses we wield to cover our innate desire to be covered in the latest and greatest epics, titles and whatnot.

The mentality of 'what's in it for me?' reigns supreme; where world events such as a zombie invasion or the latest invasion of the capitol cities either go completely unnoticed (in case of the latter) or are considered worth whining about because they affect people's game for a brief period of time / don't yield substantial rewards.

'What's in it for me' has abandoned the old world and relegated it to the domain of the sporadic gold farmer. The land is barren, devoid of anything 'worthy' in the eyes of the hungering, end-game loving masses.

There's no epics worth having, no goals worth pursueing that contribute to the misconception of what is 'cool' or 'ueber'.

The exodus into the new world leaves nothing behind, nothing except the people that are either too new to enjoy the Wrath content or simply would like to enjoy the game on their own merit.

What will you do at 80 when you have consumed all the new content? What will you do when you are all epiced out? Why are you intent on getting there at such great speeds?

But then, why ask questions when the old world now is mine for the taking.

Enjoy the expansion, as will I when I get there in due time. The lich king's wrath will find you, not in the form of a challenge, not in the form of more content but in the form of boredome. And his wrath will be a terrible one for those who adhere to the maxim of 'what's in it for me'.

There is nothing in it for you that you did not put into it yourself... if you abandon the concept of fun for that of greed you will find nothing whilst your will to play will slowly bleed away.

Quo vadis stranger? Why are you in such a hurry?