All things 80 at a lvl a day

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?

Commendation of Service

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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?