Category Archives: Playstyle

Playstyle

Things That Make You Go Hmm…

6 Comments

Occasionally, people will do and say the darndest things. Things, in fact, that make you go “Hmmm” – or, more likely, things that make you go “WTF were they thinking?!” Here’s one I remember.

The background: pre-TBC, we used a DKP system for raiding, and we introduced a proviso that if you disappeared your DKP pool was ‘suppressed’ and unavailable for purchases until you’d been back for a few weeks (although you still earnt DKP for attendance in the meantime). When we introduced this post, we said upfront ‘if this rule has been applied to you and you don’t think it should have been, please talk with an officer to straighten it out’.

This, however, wasn’t good enough for one of our warlocks – who had disappeared for about two months, saying he wasn’t going to raid until The Burning Crusade came out. When we introduced this rule, his response was…

…no, wait for it, this is brilliant…

…to DE all his epics, and delete his character in a fit of pique.

Boy, that sure showed us! We really learnt our lesson! It’s not like it cost him far more than it cost us, not at all.

…

No, we’ve never been able to work out what he thought this would achieve, either. It induces hilarity to this day, though.

(Note that this was before paid name changes or server transfers. His character was, indeed, gone.)

Playstyle

How to Make a Gear Plan

5 Comments

I’ve just hit 70 with another alt, my night elf priest Siha. She’s currently a Holy DPS spec, running a Surge of Light/Imp Divine Spirit build (32/29/0) which allows her to do reasonable DPS and still contribute good healing if we’re short on healers.

Of course, gearing up an alt at maximum speed is always an interesting challenge; as I worked on my gear wishlists for Siha, I streamlined a mental process I’ve been using for all my high level alts.

Here’s how the process works. At each “phase” of gearing, go through an item database (like WoWhead or WoWDB) and some gear lists for your class, and pick the most desirable items in each slot. Work out what you have to do to get that item, and break it down into component parts if it involves farming a lot of mats, transmute or tailoring cooldowns, and so on. Managing your cooldowns is especially important – there’s nothing worse than farming up all your mats, and then realising you have to wait over a month to get all your cloth transmutes done. So if your gear needs primal mights, or spellcloth, or something similar, then start your transmutes while you’re still levelling.

Phase 0: Set your goals
Do you want this character to be:

  • a raiding alt or new main?
  • a PvE alt for more relaxed play (ie 5-mans, daily quests, solo play, etc)?
  • a PvP bunny?
  • a farming powerhouse?

You want to complete this phase well in advance – not only does it tell you what kind of gear you should go for (resilience? Stamina? DPS stats?) it will also help you pick tradeskills, and it will largely dictate how serious you are about gearing up hard. If you’re only levelling a mage for relaxed PvE play, you’re not likely to blow a thousand gold on the mats for a [Belt of Blasting], are you?

Phase 1: Up-front acquisitions
This phase covers gear you can get within a day or two of hitting 70. It includes:

  • BoE blues and epics from the Auction House
  • Crafted epics you’ve made or had crafted for you
  • Honor-bought PvP gear, if you’ve been PvPing while levelling (which most people don’t, at least not in amounts large enough to buy the gear you want)
  • Reputation rewards from factions where you’ve already got the rep while levelling (eg the PvP blues you can buy at Honoured from various TBC factions)

Phase 2: Guaranteed acquisitions
This phase covers gear that you know you’ll be able to get; it’ll just take time:

  • Badge purchases
  • Arena-bought gear
  • Honor-bought gear
  • Reputation rewards

Phase 3: Long-term plan
This is probably only necessary for characters that will be raiding or instancing heavily; it basically covers best-in-slot gear from raid and instance drops. Of course, many badge purchases and crafted items are awesome and will not be replaced by anything you’re likely to pick up from raiding or instancing, unless you’re in an endgame guild.

Phase 4: Maintenance
The final stage is just to keep an eye on your gear plan for each phase, and don’t be afraid to adjust the plans when something off your Phase 2 wishlist gets superseded by a lucky raid drop from your Phase 3 wishlist.

Game Info, Playstyle

The Achievements system is awesome!

6 Comments

Note: This post contains spoilers for Wrath of the Lich King.

This post could also be titled “I’m never going to run out of things to do”.

Upon loading into WotLK for the first time – and oh, I was bouncing in my chair! – I set about checking out some of the banner items for Wrath of the Lich King. Unfortunately, Inscription and the barber salons haven’t been implemented into the game yet; the next thing that caught my eye was the new Achievements system.

I’ve long wanted something like this, some way of measuring all the things us explorer-types (and rabid completionists) do for kicks. Star Wars Galaxies had badges; Lord of the Rings Online had titles; WoW had… nothing. Until now.

Continue reading The Achievements system is awesome! →

Playstyle

A Raiding Paladin UI

12 Comments

I’ve been meaning to make one of these posts for ages, so here goes:

A Guide To My UI

First up, here’s a shot of my UI, full-size, for comparison’s sake. Note that I’ve resized it down to 1200×750, so you can actually see it onscreen; I play at 1920×1200.

Now, let’s take a look at it piece-by-piece:

Sailan's UI

1. FuBar and a whole swag of FuBar plugins. This provides me with configuration menus for a lot of my other addons, and informational displays on all kinds of things (reputation progress, bag space, who I’m set to assist, and lots more). Similar to TitanBar, but much less memory-intensive.

2. BunchOfBars, my raid frames. Excellent for healers, this mod is compatible with the LibHealComm-3.0 library (which means, in practice, that you can see incoming heals being cast by other healers if they’re using BunchOfBars, Grid, VisualHeal or similar mods).

3. PallyPower, a blessings manager for Paladins that allows you to set Greater Blessings by class and single Blessings by individual, and then recast your set blessings repeatedly with just a few mouse clicks. Even better, the config allows you to set blessings for other pallies in the raid too, making sure that every blessing is covered and no-one’s doubling up. Almost essential for pallies.

4. ag_UnitFrames, also known as AGUF, which I use for my party frames…

5. …and AGUF again for my unit frames. Here you can see that on the left of my action bars, I have my own unit frame; above it is my focus frame, and above that is the target of my focus unit. On the right of the action bars is my target’s unit frame, above that is my target’s target, and above that is the target’s target’s target. (Confusing, yes? In practice: if I have the MT targeted, he’ll be my target, the boss will show above him as the MT’s target, and then the MT will show at the top as the boss target. If that top bar changes to another player, it means the MT has lost agro and someone else needs some healing – usually urgently. ;-)

6. Informational bars. The top two are PallyTimerFu, below them are main tank and tank target displays, courtesy of oRa.

7. Action bars! Trinity Bars 2.0. Others swear by Bongos or Bartender, but I love Trinity, despite the fact that it’s not an Ace mod. What I love about it more than other action bar mods: you can set each bar’s number of buttons individually, which means I can have a five-button bar here and a ten-button bar there with no problems. It also has some neat other features, as you’ll see:

7A: These are my “use in combat” consumables: health and mana pots (and various specialty variants), healthstones and charged crystal foci, bandages.

7B: My main spell bars. The square buttons at the top are activatable effects (mostly trinkets, with a macro and a cooldown spell for good measure). The round buttons below them are spell buttons. Yes, pallies have a lot of spells – and that doesn’t even include those spells that are bound to keypresses only, with no position on the actionbars. (Again, something handled by Trinity.) The class bar of auras is positioned vertically down the left side.

7C: My “tank emergency” bar. This bar is set, via Trinity, so that all spells on it are automatically cast on my focus, regardless of who I have targeted. I’ll usually set focus on someone likely to need emergency heals – usually the tank, sometimes someone else with a critical role. The bar has my “holy shit” heal macro, cleanse, Blessing of Protection and Lay On Hands, which means if I see the essential person is in trouble I can get a one-click heal onto them without having to acquire them as a target first. On Australian latency, that can be a wipe-saver.

7D: Miscellaneous crap. Mount macro, hearthstone, tradeskills, food/drink/elixirs, that kind of stuff.

8. ElkBuffBars for buffs and debuffs. Buffs go to the left of the minimap, debuffs and weapon buffs go to the right (although I don’t have any in this screenshot).

9. The minimap, as repositioned and squarified by SimpleMiniMap.

10. Chat windows, managed by Prat. As a guild leader, raid healing lead and master looter, I use a lot of chat – as you can imagine. I manage this by splitting different channels into different windows. The left-most window is for guildchat, officer chat, and custom channels (healer channel, tank channel, some server-wide custom channels, etc). The middle window is for raidchat, party chat and battleground chat. The right-most window is for general chat, trade chat and whispers – ie, it’s the one I can usually safely ignore unless I hear the ‘whisper’ alert sound.

Others: You can also see a Recount window open to ‘healing done’ on the right hand side of my UI. Normally I don’t have Recount open, but this screenshot was taken during a PuG raid and I was curious to see how I rated compared with the other healers. (Top on healing, top on overheals – such is the price of Aussie latency! ;-)) I also use a number of other addons that aren’t really visible on my screen, but I still wouldn’t want to play without them. These include:

  • ItemRack inventory manager (not an Ace mod). Others swear by Closet Gnome or Outfitter, but I still prefer ItemRack.
  • BigWigs raid boss warnings, and its 5-man cousin LittleWigs.
  • ACP Addon Control Panel, for activating and deactivating addons without having to log out.
  • ClearFont2 font changer.
  • SunnViewport, for the black section underlying my chat windows.
  • AtlasLoot loot reference mod.
  • Cartographer: the best map addon ever.
  • Quartz casting bar.
  • BankItems and Possessions inventory managers, great for those of us who are packrats. BankItems is better for browsing what you have on a character, Possessions is better for searching by text string when you know you have something, you just don’t remember where you put it (or which alt you mailed it to).
  • Parrot: scrolling combat text of awesomeness.
  • TradeSkill Info: a handy browser of tradeskill recipes, filterable by name, profession, what your characters know, etc. Very useful for looking up crafting mats.
  • TankPoints helps you assess tanking gear by giving each item a points value based on how much effective health it grants. Invaluable for tanks and occasional tanks.

There are others I use, but those are the awesomest – the ones I wouldn’t want to do without.

Playstyle

Power Levelling? Why Yes!

7 Comments

I’ve been levelling an alt lately, mostly keeping a friend company while he tries out a new class. We haven’t been following any levelling guides, but we’ve still managed to belt through the levels very fast – I did nearly sixty levels in less than three weeks of real time, which is pretty good for someone not playing twelve hours a day. And it’s especially good for me, who gets bored easily and is possibly the Slowest Leveller Ever.

I’m far from a pro at speed-levelling, but here are some tips. Note that they generally assume you a) have a level 70 main, with reasonable resources, b) have friends who’ll help in your endeavours, and c) are interested in levelling fast (trying to be ready for the next expansion, or catching up to a friend’s character, or even just Skipping All These Zones I’ve Played To Death Before).

This is far from an exhaustive guide to how to level faster than previously thought possible; for that, you want to look for a levelling guide (Jame’s guide for Alliance or Horde is available free, and may be a good starting point). This is just a list of tips learnt while levelling – either things I’ve learnt the hard way, or things I’ve been taught by those wise in the ways of fast levelling.

Summary

  • In Azeroth, do instances once each, for a complete run-through of the quests, and repeat-clear a select few for excellent grinding XP
  • In Outland, do instances once each if you want to, but they’re much less attractive.
  • Don’t do drop quests.
  • Buy quest items any time you can.
  • Know quests that work together well.
  • Use time wisely.
  • Don’t burn out!

Pre-60 Instances:
Do instance quests whenever possible, as soon as the instance quests open up, and make sure you have all the quests before you go in. Instance quest XP is huge all the way to level 70; an old-world instance plus its many quests is likely to be worth an entire level, probably more. Check WoWhead, or Google for instance guides, or look at blogs like this one for instance quest checklists.

However, it’s not worth going into an instance multiple times just to do one or two quests each time.

Don’t take repeat trips into instances, unless they’re easily and quickly grindable. Two premier candidates here: The Stockades, which you can do from mid-teens through to high twenties, and Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, which you can do from level 25 through to level 40. Beg a 70 friend to AoE grind you through – your best bet is a mage (preferably frost for the added control and survivability, but fire is fine too) or a paladin with decent tanking gear.

As a guide: a 70 paladin with reasonable tanking gear can clear SM Cathedral in three pulls (the bottom, the top, and the Cathedral itself), or four if they’re feeling delicate. If they’re prot, they won’t need help; if they’re holy in tanking gear, they’ll need heals and some DPS from one of the alts they’re powering through. You can do four or five full clears of SM Cathedral an hour, which will net about a level an hour for all four alts in the party. (This is assuming a party composition of: level 70 mage or pally, lowbie healer, lowbie DPSer, fill the last two spots with any friends who need the XP.)

You can apply the same sort of farming principle to Stockades, or similar instances. What you’re really looking for, when picking an instance to farm, are: not too many caster mobs (as they’re a pain to bunch up for AoEing down), lots of mobs in close proximity, and preferably a layout that makes it easy to gather up large swathes of enemies and bring them back to your party for convenient disposal.

Looking at other instances where you can do this sort of thing, Shadowfang Keep is a decent alternative to Stockades, and is more convenient for Horde players ;) Wailing Caverns is way too spread out, Blackfathom Deeps has too many casters, I can’t even remember what’s in Razorfen Downs or Kraul but no-one ever goes there anyway, Ragefire Chasm is a wee bit inaccessible for Alliance (and Horde players will outlevel it fast), everyone hates Gnomeregan (although the mobs are probably a pretty good choice for AoE farming), Uldaman’s not a bad choice but it won’t last much longer than SM anyway, and Zul Farrak mobs are way too caster-heavy and have a nasty tendency to poly the tank (thereby getting the rest of the party killed). Around the Zul’Farrak level the XP-per-hour rate starts dropping as mobs take longer to kill, so it’s not really worth “farming” somewhere like Maraudon or Sunken Temple for XP.

Don’t Do Drop Quests
Drop quests can be okay if you’re soloing, but if you’re grouping, it just takes way too long to kill the number of mobs necessary to get drops for everyone. Outside of instances, quest XP far outstrips kill XP; you’re much better off doing two kill quests in the same space of time it’d take you to do one drop quest.

The exception are those drop quests which have a near-100% drop rate, and/or lead on to a really valuable quest chain.

Buy XP
Any time you get a quest which requires items purchasable on the AH (or from vendors), do it straight away. Don’t farm for drops, just buy the items if you don’t already have them stashed on a banker alt. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Cloth handins. Five cities, three stacks of cloth per city; wool in the mid-teens (I think you can get it around level 12-14 now), silk in the late 20s (I think level 26), mageweave around level 40 and runecloth at level 50. Each type of cloth handin is worth a good half-level, and it’s a quick and easy boost to run around all the cloth quartermasters while you’re on the phone or waiting for dinner to cook. Make sure you don’t skip a cloth type, because you have to do each type to be able to do the next one, and they are worth it for XP.
  • Recipe quests. For example, on Alliance side there’s a recipe quest or two in Westfall, one in Redridge, one in Duskwood, one in Southshore. Buy the meat, hand it in; it’s XP for no work at all.
  • Ore collection quests. You can hand in bloodstone ore in Booty Bay to fix a cookpot, and there are others like it. Do it!
  • The Green Hills of Stranglethorn. Don’t farm, or wait to see if they drop while you quest in STV – just hit the AH and buy a complete set of pages. They’re really not all that pricey. One daily quest on your 70 will pay for all the pages you need (and probably cover half of your levelling buddy’s pages as well).
  • Argent Dawn handins in Light’s Hope Chapel. Available at 55, these involve handing in 30 Savage Fronds, Dark Iron Scraps, Crypt Fiend Parts, Cores of Elements or Bone Fragments. You’ll probably have to buy at least some of these, but it’s worth it; these five handins are another half a level between them, and at 55 that means something.
  • Pristine Ivory Tusks and Oshu’gun Crystal Fragments to the Consortium at Aeris’ Landing in Nagrand. Available at level 64 or 65 until you reach Friendly reputation, having 10 fragments and 3 tusk pairs in your bag when you hit Nagrand is a quick boost over over 20K xp, and they’re easily bought off the AH.

Identify Fast Streams of XP
There are certain areas in the world where you can combine multiple quests for really quick XP, where the quest progression flows really smoothly and you really don’t waste much time in transit or pointless killing at all. Some examples:
– Chillwind Camp, for Alliance; the first half-dozen Western Plaguelands quests around Andorhal and the Scourge cauldrons.
– Un’goro Crater. Just kill anything you see; odds are, you’ll have a quest for it.
– Nagrand, ditto.
– Duskwood (for Alliance); there are multiple simultaneous quest chains.
– There are plenty of others; what are your favourites?

Make Use of “Dead Time”
There’s a fair amount of timewasting we all go through in front of a computer. Keep a WoW client open in the background and do stuff that doesn’t need attention – Fed-ex/delivery/message-bearing quests are a perfect example; you only need to pay attention to WoW for fifteen seconds (to hand in the quest, pick up the next quest, and get back on the griffon) every five minutes or so, but some of these quest chains are absolute goldmines of XP for no real work at all.

Note that for optimum XP return, this sort of thing should be done when you wouldn’t otherwise be playing – while you’re cooking dinner, or on the phone, or watching a DVD.

Don’t Burn Out
Playing this “hard” can lead to fast burnout, which is worth avoiding. WoW isn’t supposed to be work, after all. Work out times at which you’re going to stop and smell the flowers, and for those select brackets, quest in the relevant zones. Perhaps you particularly like the Wastewander quests in Tanaris (though I can’t imagine why you would), or you love the quest chains in Duskwood, or some such. Pick a few brackets like this throughout the levelling curve, and make sure to play through the quests properly. This helps you learn your character as you go, and also helps provide a bit of a relaxation break from the go-go-go pace of three levels a night.

Playstyle

On roleplaying, and why I don’t RP in WoW

5 Comments

I just read a very interesting post on WoWInsider talking about what roleplayers want that Blizzard’s not giving them.

In summary, the article said that what RPers want

…is customization. They want to create items and spaces which are all their own, not just appreciate the events and stories that Blizzard comes up with. They want things like houses to live in, family surnames, notebooks they can write in, clothes and disguises they can wear at any time or any place, ways to show their personal descriptions and other information without needing a special addon to make it work. For them, the game is not just consumption of whatever Blizzard creates, it is a sandbox playground, in which they can use the tools to make up stories of their own within Blizzard’s world.

This sums up really well why I feel that trying to RP in WoW would be swimming against the tide. Blizzard offers the RPers vanity frills like the Fire Festival dancing girl, but there are no ways to make your mark on the world.

I can’t help but compare this with a few other games of my experience:

  • Everquest 2: Almost as poor for RP; you could have your ‘own space’ in the world by acquiring a player apartment, but it was expensive, had little customisation, and was totally instanced so people only knew you were there if they were already looking for you.
  • Lord of the Rings Online: Better; you can have surnames, you can create and display family relationships (one character can ‘adopt’ another, and they both have access to titles like “Arwen, daughter of Elrond” and “Elrond, father of Arwen”), you can enter a character bio (which I believe is visible to people inspecting you), and there’s housing. The housing is instanced, but the instances are on a neighbourhood scale of a couple of dozen houses, so there’s a sense of making an impact on the world around you. And there are several dozen titles you can earn by doing things in the world – everything from “Fur-Cutter” (killing wolves in the Shire) to “Warlord of Angmar” (for owning everything in the face, hero-style).
  • Star Wars Galaxies: A roleplayer’s delight. SWG allowed you to choose surnames, but it allowed a lot more than that: you could place buildings in the world (as each zone was vast), so homes were accessible for all to see; there were buildings for all kinds of functions (one of our players used to run a bar in a tavern-style building); there were totally viable non-combat classes (dancers and musicians, for instance, served useful and viable roles in the world); you could create hundreds of outfits of non-combat clothing in thousands of colour combinations; et cetera. There were other factors that made SWG great for RPing, but those were the standouts.

Put simply: although I’m a roleplayer as a hobby (why yes, I do play Dungeons & Dragons) I find the idea of roleplaying in WoW actively offputting. I really enjoy some of the RP exploits in WoW I’ve read about – Anna of Too Many Annas writes great character vignettes, and no-one can forget the vastly entertaining adventures of Team Ratshag (especially Galertruby ♥). But personally, I just can’t get past the absolute inability to customise your character and the way they’re presented to the world, nor the dearth of opportunities to make your mark in the world (beyond a quest NPC yelling out zonewide thanks to $your_name_here).

Give me player housing, character customisation, visible marks of achievement (and I don’t mean Phat Epicz), and I’m there. Without them? I find it impossible to forget that WoW is a computer game, with very visible and intrusive game mechanics, and I’ll stick with Dungeons & Dragons (yes, and Shadowrun, and Exalted, and so on) for my roleplaying fix.

Game Info, Playstyle

Anyone For Cards?

2 Comments

(aka the WoW Trading Card Game Loot Guide)

There are a number of fun vanity items in the game that you can’t actually get in the game, and I often see questions about how you get them.

The World of Warcraft Trading Card Game is published by Upper Deck Entertainment, in collaboration with Blizzard. It’s a fairly typical collectible/trading card game, with cards of varying rarity purchased in small assorted randomised packs. The game itself isn’t bad, although I haven’t had as much chance to play it as I’d like.

What sets the WoW TCG apart from other trading card games such as Magic: the Gathering is that it has lots of concrete tie-ins with WoW itself, allowing you to get in-game WoW items by acquiring cards in the card game.

There are two main ways to do this:

  1. UDE Points: Every booster pack of 15 cards also contains a “UDE Points card”, usually worth 100 UDE points (although some rare examples have much higher values). Each UDE points card has a unique code on it that you enter online to add the card’s points value to your account; you can spend the UDE Points at UDE’s online store for a variety of items, including in-game items.
  2. Loot Cards: In each expansion set of the game there are three cards which have a special, much rarer, “loot” variant. The loot cards have scratch-off panels hiding a redemption code; entering the code online will net you the in-game item specific to that loot card.

1a. Redeeming Points
UDE Point Card codes are entered at UDE’s site, which functions like an online store. Once you have enough points for the item you want, you place an order, and the store software gives you a code. See step 2.

1b. Getting Loot Cards
Unless you are interested in the trading card game anyway, or have a lot of money to spend on a card game you’re not going to actually play, the best place to get the loot cards is from eBay. This site tracks eBay.com auctions for WoW TCG loot cards, showing you historical price trends and items currently available on eBay. I haven’t used it myself, but it looks like a good service. Once you have the loot card, scratch off the panel to reveal the hidden code. See step 2.

2. Getting the Item
You take your code you received either from UDE’s Points Store, or from scratching the panel on the loot card. Enter that code at Blizzard’s Promotion Code Retrieval page, which will then give you a second code, the “in-game code”. Take this in-game code, make sure you print it out or write it down, and head to Landro Longshot in Booty Bay. He has a redemption dialogue box where you select the category of item you’re seeking, enter your redemption code, and you receive the in-game item. (If your bags are full, you’re supposed to receive the item in the mail instead, but I wouldn’t want to gamble.)

The Loot!

So, what can one get, in-game? Let’s take a look!

Summary as of June 08, patch 2.4.3

  • Tabards: 8
  • Non-combat pets: 5
  • Mounts: 1 flying and 1 ground (both with epic and non-epic versions), and 1 ground with no speed boost
  • Ground-placeable social items: 4
  • Other: 1 disguise trinket, 3 items with cosmetic effects, 2 miscellaneous ‘toy’ items, 1 pet buff consumable

Items from UDE Points

Items from Loot Cards
The card game was released with an original set, the Heroes of Azeroth, and a number of expansion packs. Each set has three loot cards in it:

Original Set: Heroes of Azeroth

  • Tabard of Flame – see right. Card: Landro Longshot.
  • Hippogryph Hatchling – gives you a baby Hippogryph non-combat pet. Card: Thunderhead Hippogryph.
  • Riding Turtle – a riding turtle mount that doesn’t give you any speed boost. Card: Saltwater Snapjaw.

Expansion 1: Through the Dark Portal

  • Picnic Basket – sets up a picnic grill lootable for food, and an umbrella. Card: Rest and Relaxation.
  • Banana Charm – gives you a monkey non-combat pet. Card: King Mukla.
  • Imp in a Ball – an imp, in a ball! Like the sign says! Card: Fortune Telling.

Expansion 2: Fires of Outland

  • Goblin Gumbo Kettle – sets up a kettle of Goblin Gumbo lootable for food. Card: Goblin Gumbo.
  • Fishing Chair – sets up a chair and umbrella to fish from. Card: Gone Fishin’.
  • Reins of the Swift Spectral Tiger and Reins of the Spectral Tiger – see right. A very cool translucent tiger mount; the same card lets you get both epic (Riding: 150) and non-epic (Riding: 75) versions. This card is tremendously valuable, and regularly eBays for four figures. Card: Spectral Tiger.

Expansion 3: March of the Legion

  • Paper Flying Machine Kit – creates a Paper Flying Machine, which will stack to 5 in your bags and can be thrown to others like a Heavy Leather Ball. Card: Paper Airplane.
  • Rocket Chicken – gives you a mechanical chicken pet, complete with rocket boosters. Card: Robotic Homing Chicken.
  • Dragon Kite – gives you a Chinese-style dragon kite on a string (effectively a non-combat pet). Card: Kiting.

Expansion 4: Servants of the Betrayer

Expansion 5: The Hunt for Illidan

  • Path of Illidan – see right. Gives you a buff that leaves green fel-fire in your wake. Card: The Footsteps of Illidan.
  • D.I.S.C.O. – places a disco ball (complete with sparkling reflections) on the ground. Card: Disco Inferno!.
  • Soul-Trader Beacon – summons an Ethereal Soul-Trader “pet”, an Ethereal NPC who follows you around and absorbs energy from kills you make while he’s in the vicinity; you can then use this energy to buy items from him. These include a set of cloth armor meant to look like the Ethereals’ armor, and various consumables with fun non-combat effects.
Playstyle

Link Round-Up II

1 Comment

Some useful links for your day, in bite-sized chunks:

Bre of Gun Lovin’ Dwarf Chick has a very useful list of pre-raid gear guides, by class and spec. She’s kieeping it updated, too.

Seri of World of Snarkcraft has a great guide to reputations. It’s aimed at priests, but there’s a very useful roundup of all the major Northrend factions in there as well. Wynthea over at World of Matticus just made a similar post, too, so between those two your rep-guide needs should be covered.

Last week, Anna of Too Many Annas posted a great rant about why dual specs aren’t the answer to healer DPS woes. I echo that — when I gripe about holy paladin DPS, people feel compelled to point out that healers shouldn’t be able to do great DPS. All I want, though, is parity with the other freshly-DPS-buffed healing specs.

There’s a meme circulating the WoW-blogosphere at the moment: the noble and virile Ratshag, of Need More Rage tagged me to answer: who was the first commenter on your first post? Well, my first commenter was my old friend Leafshine, welcoming me to the ranks of WoW bloggers. It’s his fault that I’m WoW-blogging at all, in fact.

Although I love healing, it’s not without its problems and frustrations. This thread on the official forums (relinked from a recent post by Anna) does an excellent job of summarizing the main frustrations of the role.

New Blog Recommendation: I’m really enjoying Binary Colors, from a RPing paladin on Feathermoon-US. I don’t RP in-game, although I do think about how in-game events would affect my characters, and I’m a veteran player of pen-and-paper RPGs. Binary Colors is, I’m finding, insightful and interesting and funny.

Playstyle

Find the Joy

5 Comments

I’m sure everyone knows people who only play characters of one type, whether it’s the healer who comes equipped with a pally main and shammy and druid alts, or the tank with one of each type, or the pet-lovers who play hunters and warlocks.

The trouble is, once you’ve played a character to the level cap, and spent time and thought and practice on how to be the best darn whatever-you-are you can be, it can be very easy to fall into a rut of always thinking like that character.

I’ve known a number of rogues who rolled a druid alt, feraled it up, and were deeply unhappy that their druid couldn’t Vanish, or pick pockets, or open locks – no, my friend, you’re not playing your druid. You’re trying to play another rogue. And you know, if that’s the play experience you want, more power to you! Roll another rogue! Heck, I’m levelling a new babypaladin at the moment because I haven’t played Ret since about patch 1.8 and the class has changed amazingly since then, and I want to see how Retribution plays now. There is nothing wrong with having multiple characters of one class.

But if you want to enjoy your alts, stop worrying about the ways in which they are similiar-but-inferior to a class you’ve loved before. Look for the ways they’re new and different. All the classes are basically balanced, on a broad scale – each class has advantages and disadvantages, and a unique playstyle. Blizzard did not save up all the cool toys and give them to a single class; each class has one or more factors that makes it unique, and therefore potentially fun. Stop thinking about all the things that your new class is lacking – things you used to rely on or enjoy with your last character. Instead, look at what your character can do in a way that’s unique to them – try and think about how Blizzard made their choices.

“Okay, all the cloth-wearing classes need to be able to DPS solo without a tank, but how do we make them different? Okay – mages are the squishiest, so we give them Frost Nova, a way to snare mobs at range and then cast at them from a safe distance. Shadow priests can heal themselves in a pinch, but they can’t rely on that, so let’s give them a way to mitigate the damage they wind up taking anyway – we’ll give them Vampiric Embrace. And warlocks don’t have shields, and don’t have snares, so they’ll need other ways to keep the monsters away from them – let’s give them Fear, and maybe a pet that can tank (until they do too much damage).”

When you’re playing your warlock alt instead of your mage main, don’t bemoan the fact that you don’t have Frost Nova or Sheep or Ice Barrier. Look at what you do have – Fear, a voidwalker, a succubus, Drain Life. Learn how to play the class you’ve chosen to try out – if you’re truly unhappy that it’s not more like a mage, then delete your lock and roll another mage! No-one expects everyone to enjoy every playstyle – heck, I still can’t make myself play a warrior for 20 levels or more – but it’s unfair to any class to expect it to be just like the last class you enjoyed, and to blame the class or the devs when it isn’t.

Playstyle

I have zero buyer’s remorse.

8 Comments

I picked up an epic flying mount for my main perhaps six months ago now, and zooming around at Ludicrous Speed with Crusader Aura on has been fun, but trying to farm for herbs and ore on my alt has been a horrible sluggish 60%-speed pain.

So I bought her an epic flying mount as well.

I’d been agonising about it for a few weeks; 5,000 gold on an alt? But I’ve been farming on her for a few days now, and I don’t regret it at all – farming is fast, easy and rewarding now, and that makes it actually fun. I can’t remember the last time farming for anything was fun.

(Also, sorry it’s been so quiet around these parts. RL stuff + big posts still in draft phase + social calendar = temporarily-quiet blog.)