Friday, October 31, 2008

Emotes Galore

Here's all the /emotes in WoW.

/massage ???

Hook a brother up!

Falling Down With Grace

Last week, I gave you a gem of a story about the Scryer's Tier path to the Going Down achievement. Cute, cute, you jump off the building, land on a canvas tent, get an achievement. If you've got a big enough monitor and a weak enough inner ear, the visual effect can actually make you experience a falling sensation.

But for the truly adventurous people, my guild found the perfect way to accomplish this little cherry.

BLOW UP YOUR RAID

Tempest Keep, High Astromancer Solarian

Periodically during the fight a random player will get a Wrath of the Somesuch debuff which turns them into a ticking time bomb. That player needs to run quick like a bunny away from their teammates, blow up in a secluded location, and then rejoin the group. If you blow up near your team, they fly high in the air in a spectacular fashion, and then die when they land. So be kind to your team and run away when you become the bomb.

Pretty simple mechanism.

As it would turn out, not quite so simple for e'rebody, because midway through the fight, the whole tightly packed clump of ranged DPS plus healers is flying high up into the air in spectacular fashion.

During the lengthy journey up into the sky and back down again, I take a gander at my BigWigs warning that shows me who blew us up (you know who you are !!!!), as any good Raid Leader would.

And, as all of us are plummeting back down to the ground and going splat upon impact, all of a sudden, an accomplishment dingy gets thrown up on the screen.

Yep, you got it. The guy who blew us up survived the fall and dinged the Going Down achievement in the process, while simultaneously wiping the raid.

The entertainment factor of the achievement more than overcame the sense of let down that comes with a silly wipe.

Of course, on the next attempt, when the same guy blew us up again, the entertainment factor was a smidge less, what with there being no achievement available to him. So he was asked to "stand in the corner" for our final attempt, which ended up being a beauty, with a dead High Astromancer.

Oh, and just for the record, Al'ar finally met his end by our hand in a one-shot progression kill. Too bad its a nerfed Al'ar, because he wiped us quite effectively during many'a pre-nerf attempt, but either way, revenge is ours.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Epic Riding IRL

Farming for 4 Cobra Scales and 8 Primal Airs to make Nethercobra Leg Armor: 3 hours

Snapping and buying the last Cobra Scale and 5 Primals: 150 gold

Shopping for 1 fancy gem and 1 Primal Nether: 25 badgers

Using your shiny new pants to win at WWS in a Tier 6 progression night: Priceless

Taking a Cowgirl on her first pony ride before the raid: EPIC

Ferocious Inspiration Stackable?

I am Beast Master, hear me roar.

And revel in the fact that I've spec'ed and geared appropriately to have my pet criting all the f'ing time, thus giving you all a 3% DPS bonus.

Patch 3.0.3 notes, which I don't think is live yet but rather coming soon (linked via WoW Grrl) indicate, all the way at the bottom, that Ferocious Inspiration will now be Raid-Wide.

Verah Nice!

The question, though. Does it stack?

It used to when it was limited to your party only.

If it stacks raid-wide, that is Verah Nice indeed.

But that might piss off the other specs because then you'd want to pack the house with Beast Masters. Bring one MM for raid-wide Trueshot Aura, bring one Survival for mana battery purposes. Yeah, the mana batteries sorta stack so you can take extra Surv's, but since ret pallies and shadow priests stack in the same fashion, twould be tough to pass on an extra stackable 3% damage increase raid-wide.

Help me Thori-um Kenobi. You're my only hope.

Alternate title: "O Thormio, Thormio, whereore fart thou Thormio?", but really, this is a video game blog so Star Wars > Shakespeare. And, yes, I know its spelled wrong, but really, this is my blog so farts >> accurate literary quotes.

Long story short, Thorium was the only tedious phase of leveling mining from 1-300 over the past three days.

Long story medium, Eastern Plaguelands sux balls, even for a level 60. I was enjoying running around unfettered through all the zones, but EPL required walking on foot, killing the mobs sitting between me and potential mineral deposits. That's slow. I hate slow. Searing Gorge comes highly recommended for Thorium, but the damn Zombie invasion was occurring there all night, so the place was being totally farmed dry by damn level 70's on their damn instant-cast flying brooms. Un'goro is another option for Thorium seekers. My love/hate relationship with Un'goro was in hate mode.

Long story long. My little explanation yesterday of how wonderfully balanced things were between herbalism and mining came to a close at herbalism 300 and mining 260. From that point forward, the balance was totally askew.

Just cruising the zones listed above, mining slowly crept to 270 which did happily open the door for Rich Thorium. Smelting 31 Thoriums resulted in a grand total of 3 skill points, which is just silly.

At the same time, Mount Silversage, one of my old school favorites, was a'rockin, and herbalism shot up to 320's during this same time.

Bah.

Thorium was the only part of this whole process that caused pain.

But, the pain's over, and my lil dual gathering economic powerhouse is back in Outlands, farming proper gatherables.

Actually, I haven't made a dime off this yet, because I'm saving all the mats for professions for all the little babies, but the whole experience reinforced for me just how much I enjoy herbalism and mining. With Herb/Mine, its like Christmas every day, with all these little nodes waiting for you to open them. Just fly around, doing whatever you'd be doing otherwise, toggle Find Minerals / Find Herbs, and sing Gathering Carols.

Skinning still feels like work. When you need skins, or when you want to do the daily quest, fly to Nagrand, farm the bejesus out of the Clefthoven. Not very Christmas-like. And LW is stupid, and has been stupid for the past 6 months, other than the fact that I get to play drums every 2 minutes during boss fights, which would be much cooler if the animation actually had a massive drum summon and sit on the ground with magical drum sticks wailing away for 30 seconds. Still hoping for LW to be something useful while leveling to 80, or if not, then at least while gearing up at level cap in prep for WotLK raids.

But I'm back in the Dual-Gathering Saddle. Gotta figure out what broke about my little gold tracker chart when patch 3.0.2 rolled out, plus figure a way to have it aggregate the savings from toons on three different accounts, since all the babies are sucking Amava dry. But I digress.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Mt Hyjal Quickies

A couple'a quickies about Mt Hyjal:

1) Breaking news (not so much): Its been nerfed into the ground.

2) Breaking news: I dont give a hoot. Its fun as h3ll. I'm sure that wipe after wipe on a boss, after dealing with wave after wave of trash would get old in a hurry. But, I'm lovin the one-shot whirlwind tour of bosses we're gettin post-3.0.2.

3) Trash waves for Kaz'rogal are outstanding. Gargoyles? What's not to love about Gargoyles? And massive frost-breathing dragons? Bring it!

4) Thrall is the f'ing man. Way more fun than Jaina. Perhaps we know now why all my toons are chicks.

5) One-shotting two new progression bosses in a totally nerfed environment? As long as there's massive chaotic waves of trash, I'm a huge fan.

6) I've found my Kryptonite, and it is Rage Winterchill. Amava has yet to be alive at the end of a dance with this guy. Not sure if its random bad luck, or I just suck (yep, that's the one). Death & Decay, ok run. Doh, ice bolt. Ok, hit your trinket, good, now run out of DnD. Doh, frost nova and you're still in DnD. You are now a spectator. F! THAT! If I wanted to watch a fight, I'd be searching youtube.

7) Recount shows the following top 3 raw damage dealers for the entire run: BM Hunter, Retribution Paladin, MM Hunter. IN MOUNT HYJAL!!! If somebody had said that 4 months ago, they'd have been locked up, or their Warlocks and Mages would have been fired. Its a new world, and we're here to stay (until the inevitable nerf that's gonna turn Volley into the whoopie cushion novelty fart that it once was). And to add insult to injury, the Beast Master spent 75% of the Rage Winterchill fight as a spectator.

8) All our tanks are so effective at AoE threat generation now. All 4 tanks would stand right on top of eachother and the nice, neat, crisp, compact circles of corpses after each trash wave was just a sight to behold.

9) Nerfed, you say? Progression kill on Anatheron, a one shot that was total ez-mode. Progression kill on Kaz'rogal, a one shot in our first ever viewing of him. The Officers hadn't even read about him up until 1 minute before we started the fight. Ends up being..."Tank and spank, tanks share the cleave, others avoid the front. If your mana is low, run away. Go Go Go!"

Praise where Praise is Due

I dunno why, but this weekend had me pondering the genius over at Blizzard.

Sure, there's some stuff we like to complain about, and some things we'd like different about WoW. But generally, Blizzard is spot on. We complain, we whine, but we keep going back, not very unlike the relationship between crack head and crack dealer, only without the negative connotation many people associate with crack.

I shall now spew forth a few of the observations from this weekend that impressed me:

1) Balancing Gathering Professions

Spent some time this weekend on a level 60 toon who had not even trained any professions yet. Went for an oldie but a goodie: herbalism/mining. Then went around Azeroth, trying to overlap zones that would offer similar levels of herb and mineral nodes. Azuremyst Isle, Darkshore, The Barrens, Stonetalon Mountains, Arathi Highlands (ah, the memories), The Hinterlands, Tanaris, Felwood.

At each step of the way, when I was reaching the minimum herbing level that would allow me access to the nodes in the next zone up the list, I was simultaneously within 2 mineral nodes of also being able move to the next zone for mining as well.

Not sure if this is coincidence, or what, but at each and every transition from one zone to the next, the two gathering profs were completely in synchronization (note, not numerically equal, but rather synchronized relative to the nodes in the next zone. Herbalism was consistently 30 points ahead of Mining, up to 300 Herbalism which kinda matched 260 Mining, and then smelting Thorium nearly covers the difference to get both profs up to the Master level).

During my travels, I was generally just spamming the Find Minerals, Find Herbs toggle macro every 1.5 seconds, so I don't think it was any subliminal move on my part to only migrate towards the one type of node that was lagging behind the other.

Perhaps I'm giving too much credit, and its as simple an algorithm as "spawn equal numbers of herbs and minerals", but I was impressed with the balance. But then again, due to the random mining skill ups from smelting that have no equivalent in herbalism, it cannot be quite as simple as that.

2) Motivating Customers to Buy an Expansion

Sure, with any expansion pack, you'd hope that the new content would be the only thing you'd need to motivate players to upgrade. But history, and current events, show that there's more to it than that.

With Burning Crusade, Blizz ushered in a massive economic and player stats inflation. Basically saying to the customers "buy the xpac or you'll (A) get totally pwned by some dude in level 60 Outlands quest greenies, and (B) be relatively broke other than by selling Old World junk to fancy Burning Crusaders who are powerleveling some aspect of their game."

I'm not sure how the economic inflation one will play out in WotLK. Sure, the new mini-van gold sink indicates roughly 400% inflation over TBC, but that's largely a response to the massive bank accounts many players have accrued while twiddling our thumbs waiting for the expansion, and not truly a measure of the earning potential they anticipate for players during the Lich King.

We are, however, already seeing the move they made with gear. Gear progression will be much more linear as you move through the low 70's than it was during the low 60's. Beta reports seem to indicate that T4 gear will last to around 73-74, and some T5 / Badge rewards will last perhaps as long as 76-77 (different pieces having a longer life than others, naturally).

So what did Blizzard do to us instead? They totally over powered us for The Burning Crusade. You don't have to buy the expansion pack, all you have to do is allocate the talent points they refunded you. And now you can pwn just about all the BC content you want.

The result is, anybody who does not buy the WotLK upgrade is going to get very bored very fast. The novelty of crushing through the formerly hardcore end-game is fun for now, but is going to wear off soon. If you upgrade to WotLK, you're fine. If you dont, its gonna get old in a hurry.

Kudos on finding a new way to motivate customers without making us feel like all our raiding efforts were invalidated from a gear perspective.

3) Plague

I've got a love/hate thing going on with the Plague. I hate it in that I head to IF to train Artesian Mining. Talk to the Trainer, get infected. Blow myself up. Corpse run, and I'm back in business, having wasted about 5 minutes of my time. I hate it in that I'm standing in Shattrath City, go AFK to make some noodles, come back and see my spirit standing at the Spirit Lady. There is a totally annoying aspect to the Plague thing.

But, I do have to give Blizzard a shout-out here. I think they've actually created an authentic feel, set inside of a virtual fantasy world with no actual life-or-death consequences, of what life is like during the Black Death.

Cities are littered with corpses and skeletons. Bring out'cha dead! Bring out'cha dead!

NPC shops are "shut down" due to Plague (aka, the guy is dead).

Go to turn in a quest, and the quest guy is dead (ok, this one is just pure annoyance and ended up costing me 50 gold on sunday, mutha f'ers).

When you're in a city, you see some infected slob coming towards you, you cover your mouth and run the other way. Watching people scatter after I've become a Zombie is pretty comical.

The normally active hubs of travel (flight masters), commerce (AH), and communication (mailboxes) have become disaster areas, which I'd imagine is very consistent with spread of real life disease.

Anytime you take a portal to Shatt, party members happily remind you to "mount up quick and fly away or you get plague".

Annoying aspect aside, I think Blizzard has given us a very realistic climate of plague, with a twist of fantasy (floating necropoli, zombies, and the like).

Enough

Ok, Blizz fanboi, stfu and get back to QQ'ing about something or stroking your ego.