World of s4dfish

Moving

2007-11-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

Not sure if anyone follows this blog anymore, as much time as I've not put in recently, but I'm moving it. I just have too many eccentric hobbies to blog about only one of them, so will doing the more general purpose blog type thing. Anyway, here's the address for those who care:
World of s4dfish pt. 2

Karazhan

2007-11-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

So, Saturday night was our guilds first Karazhan run. A few people had pugged it before, but this was our first 'official' all guild raid effort. We ended up starting 45 min late as two of our three healers had RL issues that kept them late. Raid breakdown:

2 Tanks (Protection Warriors)
3 Healers (2 Holy Paladins, 1 Holy Priest)
5 DPS (Rogue, Arms Warrior, BM Hunter, SV Hunter, Arcane Mage)

Only three of our raid had been in the instance before, and I think those three were the only ones who'd stepped into a Heroic either. So we were going in with a mix of PvP gear, 5 man blues and the occasional green.

Had one death on trash pulls before Attumen/Midnight. Quick regroup and 1 shotted Attumen/Midnight. Healer gloves and caster bracers dropped. Unfortunately for our Mage he had raided long ago and didn't realize that he couldn't release and run back in, so he missed on the bracers, Holy Priest ended up with both :P

Worked our way to Moroes with lots of Mage deaths on the AoE Pulls. Took three tries on Moroes, first attempt was going well until a shackle resist lead to a dead priest which lead to a dead tank and you can guess from there. We'd DPS'd down two adds and planned on keeping two CC'd until after Mores. Second attempt we tried to DPS down all adds before Moroes, which was horrid. Third attempt was like the first (2 CC: Frost Trap, Shackle) and worked fine. One thing we did which I haven't read was have our OT tank an add next to Moroes so he could build aggro via thunderclap and cleave (incoming damage from the add -> aggro), seemed to work fine. Emerald Ripper and Holy Paladin boots dropped. I snagged the dagger and we had a happy Pally.

Due to our late start we made an attempt on Maiden, wiped immediately as we were not 100% on placement. Tried again with another wipe as I pulled to early (swear I was in stealth) and called it a night.

Came back last night short our OT (hanging out at the mall, who does that?). Took three wipes with progressive success (60%, 50%, 40%) before we found out that everyone wasn't in cleanse range, not standing on the first step so we were losing DPS to the Holy Fire. Corrected that and we got him down. Of course this was the only attempt that I actually died on (double vanish FTW) as I stepped off the stair to bandage and was promptly Holy Fired... The shaman totem dropped (of course...) and something else which I can't remember, think it was mage loot...

By now our OT arrived and we worked our way to Opera. Trash hits crazy hard there, was a wake up call for us. Made it to the event and drew Wizard of Oz, which I think for our group was the worst we could have got. We settled on a strategy of DPSing down Dorothee (duh), OT picking up Roar initially then having our hunters chain fear him, Mage spamming scorch on the Strawman, MT tanking Tinhead, and OT picking up Tito when he pops. We wiped 3 or 4 times getting the strategy down pat. Seems like the Mage was key to our strategy. We ended up having the MT tank Tinhead near Strawman so that he could try to keep treat on both so that in the event of a resisted stun we didn't get a dead mage -> dead raid. We did manage to do it and I'm pretty pleased with our success. The libram and Wicked Witches Hat dropped. Neither Pally was keen on the libram so they /rolled for it and the mage wasn't convinced that the hat was an upgrade over his Second Sight hat, I made him take it anyway :P

Wanted to try Curator, but had people need to log, so called it a night. Hopefully next week we can get Attumen->Moroes->Maiden in one night then try Opera->Curator on the next. Not sure if we have the gear to do Curator, but might as well see.

Gear links

2007-11-01T11:35:00.000-06:00

So, Zydari is now at 54 and looking at Outland and all those lovely quest rewards. So, I've made a list of stuff that I should keep a loot out on. Okay, technically wowhead.com made the list for me, but you know what I mean.

Plate quest rewards with +defense
Plate quest rewards with +damage
Shield quest rewards
Weapon quest rewards with +damage

Rare Plate drops with +defense
Rare Plate drops with +damage
Rare Shield drops:
Rare 1-Hand Weapon drops with +damage

Plate from Reputation with +defense
Shields from Reputation/Vendor
1-Hand Weapons from Reputation/Vendor with +damage

Pawn scales

2007-10-19T08:06:00.000-06:00

So, I'm anal retentive enough to care about specifically how much my characters benefit from stat X vs. stat Y. The addon Pawn makes this easier, but you have to have the information to put in it to begin with. I'm also OCD enough to want it normalized against the item budget cost, non-normalized numbers are in parenthesis. The advantage for normalizing against the average budget cost is that you don't get much higher values with the presence of lots of stats. What I'd done in the past was simply add STA/Resilience to my DPS values, which was nice, but made it hard to compare the relative worth of an item across categories. Sure it was easy to compare for a set purpose, but to compare the multi purpose worth of an item got harder. It's not the big a deal for Sakuran, but for Zydari and Laic who both have 3 scales, keeping 3 'best' sets is silly when one item may be pretty good across the board.

Oh, and I'm pretty cheap so I only socket green gems at this point. As Sakuran starts using Kara gear I may invest in the blue gems... but 50g for only a slight improvement? Unlikely...

Zydaria, Enhancement Shaman. My wife's toon.

DPS - Pulled from the Enhancement thread on Elitist Jerks.

Strength: 1.38 (1.1)

Stamina: .42 (.33)

Agility: .88 (.7)

Attack Power: .62 (.5)

Crit Rating: 1 (.8)

Hit Rating: .88 (.7)

Blue Socket: 5.79 (3 STR, 4 STA)

Red Socket: 8.25 (6 STR)

Yellow Socket: 7.12 (3 Crit, 3 STR)
Meta Socket: 15.5 (Relentless Earthstorm Diamond)

Healing - Yes, she does heal as enhancement spec, STR and AP are included due to the 2.3 AP -> +damage/healing talent.

Strength: .38 (.27)
MP5: 3.47 (2.5)
Attack Power: .14 (.19)
Spirit: .69 (.5)
+Healing: .63 (.46)
Intellect: 1.39 (1)
Spell Crit: 1.39 (1)
Blue Socket: 7.89 (7 +healing, 1 MP5)
Red Socket: 8.21 (13 +healing)
Yellow Socket: 8.58 (7 +healing, 3 INT)
Meta Socket: 21.65 (Insightful Earthstorm Diamond)

Laic, Survial Hunter. You'll not that I don't assign a value for +hit, with survial spec reaching the hit cap is relatively easy, so assigning a value would make it more likely that I exceed the cap, I tend to shoot for a balanced approach moving gear around to get the higher hit % while not sacrificing my pawn scores).

DPS - Max damage with little regard for mana regen.

Attack Power: .6 (.51)
Stamina: .12 (.1
Agility: 1.18 (1)
Intellect: 1.04 (.88)
Crit Rating: 1.04 (.88)
Haste Rating: 1.35 (1.14)
Blue Socket: 4.02 (3 AGI, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 7.11 (6 AGI)
Yellow Socket: 3.55 (3 AGI, 3 Hit)
Meta Socket: 19.22 (Relentless Earthstorm Diamond)

Regen - Emphasis on mana regen, good for grinding or situations where I may not be able to stop drink.

Attack Power: .55 (.51)
Stamina: .11 (.1
Agility: 1.08 (1)
Intellect: .95 (.88)
Crit Rating: .95 (.88)
Haste Rating: 1.23 (1.14)
MP5: 3.79 (3.5)
Blue Socket: 3.68 (3 AGI, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 6.5 (6 AGI)
Yellow Socket: 3.25 (3 AGI, 3 Hit)
Meta Socket: 18 (Relentless Earthstorm Diamond)

PVP - increased weight for STA and Resiliance. Decreased weigh on regen, but still has a value for MP5.

Attack Power: .52 (.51)
Stamina: .67 (.67)
Agility: 1.01 (1)
Intellect: .88 (.88)
Crit Rating: .89 (.88)
Haste Rating: 1.15 (1.14)
Resilience: 1.01 (1)
MP5: 2.53 (2.5)
Blue Socket: 5.73 (3 AGI, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 6.07 (6 AGI)
Yellow Socket: 5.37 (4 STA, 3 Crit)
Meta Socket: 17.14 (Powerful Earthstorm Diamond)

Sakuran, Combat Dagger Rogue. At least for the moment, WTB excuse to go back to subtlety.

DPS - Pretty much straight from the spreadsheet.

Strength: .69 (.57)
Stamina: . 12(.1)
Agility: 1.2 (1)
Attack Power: .69 (.57)
Crit Rating: .84 (.7)
Hit Rating: 1.17 (.97)
Expertise: 1.25 (1.12)
Blue Socket: 4.09 (3 AGI, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 8.22 (6 AGI)
Yellow Socket: 7.11 (3 AGI, 3 Hit)
Meta Socket: 19.43 (Relentless Earthstorm Diamond)

PVP - Same as Laic, higher weight for STA and Resilience.

Strength: .58 (.57)
Stamina: .68 (.67)
Agility: 1.02 (1)
Attack Power: .58 (.57)
Crit Rating: .72 (.7)
Hit Rating: .99 (.97)
Resiliance: 1.02 (1)
Blue Socket: 5.08 (3 AGI, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 7.00 (6 AGI)
Yellow Socket: 6.05 (3 AGI, 3 Hit)
Meta Socket: 17.29 (Powerful Earthstorm Diamond)

Zydari, Protection Paladin

DPS - a hard set to come up with, basically I took my start from the Tanking stats and removed anything that was exclusively defensive while retaining things that can result in damage dealt. This is not a retribution DPS scale, they favor much different stats.

Stamina: .81 (.67)
Intellect: 1.22 (1)
Expertise Rating: .61 (.5)
Mp5: 1.52 (1.25)
Spell Power: 1.04 (.86)
Block Rating: .91 (.75)
Spell Crit Rating: 1.22 (1)
Blue Socket: 7.41 (4 +Damage, 4 STA)
Red Socket: 7.29 (7 +Damage)
Yellow Socket: 7.82 (3 Spell Crit, 4 +Damage)
Meta Socket: 19.61 (Swift Starfire Diamond)

Tanking - These values are based on ones I found on the Pawn forums, haven't seen a spreadsheet yet to give more precise values, but it works. Note that I'm not necessarily offering this as valid for a raid tank as all you want to focus on there is STA/Def/Block/+damage, but for 5 man grouping this should be better. The different ratings are based on the amount of avoidance you get per rating point, so block is the fastest way to get avoidance up, followed by Defense then dodge, and lastly Parry. Yes, Parry is better than Dodge, but for this exercise I'm ignoring it.

Stamina: .72 (.67)
Intellect: .54 (.5)
ExpertiseRating: 1.08 (1)
Mp/5: 1.08 (1)
ParryRating: .72 (.66)
DefenseRating: 1.08 (1)
DodgeRating: .85 (.78)
SpellPower: .93 (.86)
BlockRating: 2.04 (1.88)
BlockValue: .7 (.65)
Blue Socket: 6.51 (9 STA)
Red Socket: 6.6 (4 +damage, 4 STA)
Yellow Socket: 6.15 (3 Def, 4 STA)
Meta Socket: 13.02 (Powerful Earthstorm Diamond)

Healing - I ultimately plan to run 20/41/0 with Zydari, yes he won't main-tank, but he'll be fine as a 5 man tank and raid off tank, plus will be able to off-heal. I'm slightly favoring +Healing to +Spell Crit until such a time as my +healing exceeds 750.

Intellect: 1 (1)
Mp5: 2.5 (2.5)
Healing: .57 (.57)
Spell Crit Rating: .57 (.57)
Blue Socket: 6.48 (7 +Healing, 1 MP5)
Red Socket: 7.39 (13 +Healing)
Yellow Socket: 6.98 (7 +Healing, 3 INT)
Meta Socket: 17 (Insightful Earthstorm Diamond)

Eventually I'll come up with some for my Priest and other toons, but for now this is about it. Hope you enjoy it.

100th post, and a substantive one at that (lol)

2007-10-10T14:28:00.000-06:00

So, guess this is my 100th post. Which strikes me as odd as I can't imagine typing that many posts. Anyway, I'll keep plugging along, slowly but slowly, this post is mostly random junk, but stick to what you know.

Hunter licenses revoked:
So, I was in a SL group as my rogue with two hunters who I'll not name. I ended up dropping out right before Murmur due to RL issues (specifically a screaming two year old). I logged on later to see how they did. Dropped Murmer and WOOT Sonic Spear dropped. I wish I had a SS of the conversation, but the jist is that it was sharded. ONE OF THE TOP 5 HUNTER WEAPONS IN THE GAME WAS PASSED OVER BY TWO HUNTERS???? I was shocked to say the least. Now one of the two hunters in question is planning on DW, getting a Felsteel blade crafted (two lazy to look it up and link it), so I suppose I can understand that. But still... I'm pretty sure Big Red Kitty doesn't read my blog, but I'm half tempted to e-mail this to him as I think he was never able to get his (though is now wielding Legacy, so the sting will be less).

Arena
I'm loling my way through the arena for a few weapons. Sakuran is losing massive numbers of games on 2v2 and 3v3. 0-20 in the last two weeks. Of course I'm grouped with some guildies who don't PvP much and we're all PvE spec. Sak's going for the S1 offhand dagger (1.4 attack speed FTW). Laic is on a 2v2 with a Warlock in our guild who's much, much better at PvP than I am. He pretty much single handedly carried us to 6-4 which is saying something as I have about zero clue how to PvP as a hunter. Still trying to figure it out.

PvE Spec FTL
In case I haven't mentioned it Sak's combat daggers now. Which is fun in a group, but man does it suck to solo. Waiting for the 2.3 PTR to come up so I can see how buffed the subtlety tree is. If it's even close to competitive I'm respeccing, it's just too much fun. I've been having some frustration with her as I've got pretty close to as good of gear as I'm going to get, outside of heroics and raids (few pieces left to upgrade, I know), but my DPS still isn't where I'd like it to be, averaged 520 DPS on my last BM run. Laic, my Suvival Spec Hunter, is getting close to her DPS levels, averaging in the upper 400s, breaking 500 on some boss fights. And that's with worse overall gear. Who knows, maybe it's just my perception and dislike for Combat Daggers...

Was thinking about rambling on more, but maybe I'll just make it a new post. You know, start that next 100...

Ding 70, time to get to work...

2007-09-24T10:00:00.000-06:00

So, Laic dinged 70 last night.

Now I get the wonderful task of grinding coin for a flying mount and working on gear upgrades. Using this list as my base guideline. I'm just listing stuff that is questable or non-heroic instancable. I'll try to include my pawn values and amend this post later.

Helm

Currently using [Gurn's Horned Helmet].
Quest Reward: [Malefactor's Eyepatch] from the quest Showdown. Most of the way done with this chain, will likely finish it soon.
Quest Reward: [Stalker's Helmet of Second Sight] from quest chain starting with A Ghost in the Machine. Requires a Flying Mount.
Quest Reward: [Earthwarden's Coif] fom the quest The Warlord's Hideout in Steamvaults.
Drop: [Beast Lord Helm] form Palthaleon the Caluculator in Mechanar. Need flying mount.

Shoulders

Currently using [Exotic Spiked Shoulders].
Quest reward: [Skybreaker's Mantle] from quest A Job Unfinished... which starts off a drop from Avoar the Rapacious. Need flying mount.
Drop: [Beast Lord Mantle] from Warlord Kalithresh in Steamvaults.

Chest

Currently using [Breastplate of Rapid Striking]. Pretty happy with it, upgrade is lower priority.
Drop: [Beast Lord Cuirass] from Warp Splinter in Botanica. Need flying mount.
Drop: [Laughing Skull Battle] from Temporus in Black Morass.

Bracers

Currently using [Felstalker Bracers]. Not really looking for an upgrade especially as there aren't any outside of rep rewards or heroics.

Gloves

Currently using [Swiftseel Gloves]. No AGI, but lots of mp/5.
Drop: [Beast Lords Handguards] from Warchief Kargath Bladefist in Shattered Halls.

Belt

Currently using [Girdle of Gale Force]. No upgrades outside of Heroics.

Pants

Currently using [Scales of the Beast].
Drop: [Scaled Greaves of Patience] from Captain Skarloc in Old Hillsbrad Foothills.
Drop: [Beast Lord Leggings] from Warlord Kalithresh in Steamvaults.

Boots

Currently using [Duro Footgear], have [Sky-Hunter Swift Boots] sitting in the bank. Can't really decide which I like more. No real upgrades.

Melee Weapon

Currently using [Crystalforged War Axe] with Savagery (+70 AP).
Quest Reward: [Terokk's Quill] from Sethekk Halls and promptly through +35 AGI on it. Probably best pre-raid Survival weapon.
Drop: [Sonic Spear] from Murmur in Shadow Labyrinth. Arguable if this is better for a Survival Hunter. I'd only think about getting it if it was going to get sharded.

Ranged Weapon

Currently using [Valanos' Longbow]. There are lots of side-grades, but nothing that is an 'upgrade'.

Back

Currently using [Cloak of the Craft]. I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with it for a while.

Neck

Currently using [Earthen Mark of Razing], but have [Necklace of the Deep] in the bank waiting for me to hit the hit cap so I can swap back to it.

Ring

Currently using [Pathfinders Band] and [Warmaul Slayer's Band]. Only looking to replace the later.
Drop: [Ravenclaw Band] off Talon King Ikiss in Sethekk Halls.
Drop: [Ring of the Exarchs] off Exarch Maladaar in Auchenai Crypts.

I'd go into Trinkets now, but I really need to get back to my day job...

Farming FTL

2007-09-19T14:44:00.000-06:00

So, Sakuran has been sitting at 360 LW for the past week or so. I managed to find the pattern for [Drums of Restoration] on the AH and was able to score the 2 skill points I needed to get to 360 for around 60g (which I promptly resold for cost, didn't realize they're listed as a 35g buyout...), which is much better than the 150-200g per point the skill ups would cost other wise.

So, sitting at 260 I have the option of competing with every other LW in the game for [Thick Clefthoof Leather] (which is stupidly overpriced), attempting to make Felstalker gear, or the Fel Skin set. Now, the Fel Skin set was the way to go until the drop rate for [Mote of Shadow] was nerfed. What used to be the cheapest and most abundant Primal is not a 14-20g buyout. Obviously I'm not the only LW leveling to 375, so the market can be flooded with certain items. Felstalker Bracers in particular and any of the Clefthoof pieces in general seem to be abundant. However, I haven't seen any Fel Skin in the last week or so. The abundance of competition has driven down prices to the point that Felstalker Bracers are selling for 30g when the mats alone would cost over 100g. So, my plan is to make Fel Leather Boots, a yellow pattern at 360 and sell them for my cost in mats. Without any competition I'm hopeful that I'll be able to charge a higher price and offset my cost and get to 375 (well, as high as I can before they go green) without throwing thousands of gold down the drain. Might even get my Consortium Rep up and make Fel Leather Leggings for a profit is this works out...

Back to the tile of the post I've been running laps around Oshu'Gun hitting the Voidies that spawn abundantly all around it. Drop rate and re-sapawn rate make for solid farming, can do a complete lap in 10-15 minutes and seem to average 10 motes per lap (AKA 1 Primal). Also had decent luck with greens and blues. My first foray resulted in 3 primal shadows, three BOE greens, and 2 BOE blue (one from a rare named, Voidhunter Yar) all in roughly an hours work.

Still dreaming of Terokk's Quill

2007-09-17T11:21:00.000-06:00

Laic is still dreaming of [Terokk's Quill], but my play time recently has been little and none. Finally moved into the new house last weekend, which unfortunately meant a week without internet access. Now that my access is back, while I wait for a group I'm doing the quest than that ultimately rewards [Malefactor's Eyepatch], which is going to be a nice upgrade as I'm still using the [Helm of Lupine Grace] from Terokkar Forest.

Where Laic's at right now:

My guild is finally getting people attuned for Kara and look at starting to run it in a week or two. For those of you how raid actively, we are a real casual guild. Most of our members have way too many alts, very irregular play schedules, and little desire to take the game 'seriously'. Honestly I like that as it fits my view towards the game. That being said I'm looking forward to something a bit more coordinated and 'serious'.

As Sakuran is going to be my raid toon, I've been thinking about how to spec her. Up till now the 5-man content/solo stuff she's been doing hasn't required her to go for a pure DPS build. Her current 17/0/44 is working just fine and with some of our under-geared tanks I have to hold back my DPS. But when we raid I want to make sure I am capable of bringing as much to the table as possible. That being said I'm not sure I can stomach going back to a combat build (100-120 DPS increase). It's so...boring. So, as a compromise I'm planning on going to 30/0/31 which should allow me higher DPS (60 more according to the spreadsheet) while still allowing the luxury of my subtlety talents that I enjoy so much. I'll miss Shadowstep, but I did love Seal Fate back in the day and I'm sure it'll make up for it.

Here's Sakuran right now:

edit: Item linking courtesy of Armory Musings by way of BigRedKitty.

Yeah, I'm a nub

2007-08-30T16:02:00.000-06:00

So, I've been using Pawn for my Hunter (well all my toons, but my hunter is most of my time right now). I've been using a scale with +hit valued, which is nice except that I'm a Survival Spec hunter with 3/3 Surefooted, so I can hit the cap somewhat easily. What this means is that a lot of time extra + Hit Rating does nothing for me. So what I did was add a second set of ratings with +hit having no value. So what I can do now is compare items in different lights. If I'm already at the cap (or close enough) I can make decisions regardless of +hit, but at the same time not completely disregard the stat as it's more important than crit until you hit the cap.

Little things in WoW keep me going :P

Not dead yet...

2007-08-28T13:28:00.000-06:00

I know it's been months since my last post. I'm still playing WoW, just life's been very crazy. Moved out of, and sold our house. Staying with family until our new house is ready (any day now, I hope). Hoping to get a new computer soon (24" iMac, /drool). For now I've kept myself occupied by grinding Laic (65 now I think) and Zydari (50). I've also redone my UI, again, so here you go:
Default lookParty Set-upRaid (not that I do, but I'm thorough)

Hunter fun

2007-06-13T11:29:00.000-06:00

So, my hunter Laic is at 61 now, halfway to 62. Been spending a lot of time reading about hunter mechanics and thinking about how to utilize him best. I'm currently planning a bit of an odd-ball survival build 5/11/45. Most deep survival builds end up with some sort of 0/21/40, option for Scatter Shot rather than the last 6 points in Survival, which is understandable. At any rate, it'll be a fun experiment.

I picked up a crossbow quest reward last night and spent this morning leveling that skill, went 1-260 autoshotting a BL servent before I had to get to work and will probably hit the rest over lunch. Need to get on Sak to make a Quiver as I've been a gun hunter since oh, level 10?

Really looking for 62 so I can pick up Steady Shot and start getting used to working with a shot rotation, rather than just spamming Arcane/Multi shot when they're not on cooldown.

Pet wise I'm working on two pets. A level 61 blue ravage from western HfP, I like the alien look and gore is great DPS. Also have a level 58 or 59 blue carrion bird from Deadwind Pass that is working out great. Screech is an amazing skill hold threat like a champ and the AoE component seems to generate enough threat to allow me to throw a Mend Pet up without pulling adds.

another 60, another epic, and soon another UI

2007-06-06T16:23:00.000-06:00

So, Laic hit 60 this week. I'm again amazed at how fast the Outlands levels you. Levels 55-58 seemed to take forever. I dinged 58 on Tuesday of last week and hit 59 the next day. I then wasn't able to play for several days and I think 60 came about as fast. Simply amazing.

I also got my mining up to 290 in there so I was able to stop spending my lunch hour running around Burning Steppes searching for Thorium. Here's to Goblin engineering for +5 and enchanted gloves for another +5.

Tamed a Ravager at 59, which is lots of fun. Working on getting his loyalty up so I can max his skills. Not sure if I prefer him to my cat, but it's a nice diversion if nothing else.

I respecced back to Survival, I think I prefer it. I enjoy the utility of the build. DPS is nice, but I already have enough of that with Sakuran, so emphasizing utility differentiates the class for me.

I'm in the process of redoing my UI. I've got a layout in mind that I want to achieve, just need the time to make it happen. Here's a really bad MS paint (I hate Windows) bitmap of my plan:

My house is showing now with a vast majority of the large projects finished last weekend. This should allow me to get a bit more game time and, as such, a bit more blogging. Now someone hurry up and buy my house...

Oh, and on an unrelated note:
http://www.phoenix-rider.it/images/fumoffu.jpg

AFK

2007-05-14T13:27:00.000-06:00

So, my wife and I are planning to move this summer. As such we're doing a large amount of projects around the house to get our ready to sell. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to discern that this will have a negative effect on my WoW time. So, don't be surprised if my infrequent, sporadic posting gets even more sporadic and infrequent. But, I'll be back, aren't you thrilled?

IMHO BG's > Arena

2007-05-04T13:03:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I'm sure vast numbers of people will disagree with me on this one, and that's okay. I've just come to the realization in the last week that I find Battlegrounds much, much more enjoyable than Arena. I'm not saying that Battlegrounds are harder or demand better skill, I'm just saying for my personality type they're more enjoyable.

Generally speaking I'm not a competitive person. I'm not playing WoW to try and prove something, I don't think I need to be the best at what I do. However, when I'm part of a 'team' I can get fairly competative. Now, before I go any further, Arena doesn't feel much like a 'team' activity to me. Feels more like a glorified duel, which is something I don't particularly enjoy. Battlegrounds though, feel much more like a team sport to me. I think that, in large part, it's the presence of goals and objectives that change the feel for me. It's not just about beat the poop out of the other team before the beat the poop out of you.

As a rogue in PvP, I'm an opportunist. I don't run into the thick of things and try and beat someone down, I prefer to remain on the outskirts of combat, in stealth, waiting for an opportunity. I don't pursue the warrior/priest pair that's heading for my tower, I keep my eyes open for the lone shaman or druid who I can easily dispatch when caught unawares. That may not be 'fair' from other classes perspectives, but I figure that's what rogues are made for.

edit: I started this post last friday and promptly lost my train of thought, I'm trying to pick it up here and at least finish it, but no problems on coherency.

Battlegrounds, as opposed to Arena's, seem to reward this style of play. It's very possible for a rogue to remain hidden for a while and strike at the most opportune moment. I like the idea of a few rogues sneaking behind enemy lines and quickly turning the tide of a battle. I love sneaking over to the Farm in AB, swifly eliminating the opposition and capping the flag. That's what PvP should be. Good PvP requires a certain amount of fear of the unknown. Rogues, and druids to a lesser extent, are that unknown. Arena, being a closed environment by design, prevents this.

L2PvP

2007-04-25T10:19:00.000-06:00

So, Athpal and I set up a 2v2 Arena team last night for fun, In Hoc Signo Vinces (should have ran a search on the name before settling on it :P). I thoroughly enjoyed PvP before the 2.0 patch and look forward to it again now that I've hit 70. Ath did a bit of PvP with me back in the day, but doesn't have a great deal of experience with it. Anyway last night we did our first matches and discovered, unsurprisingly, how much work we need to do to even be competitive.

Match 1 put us up against a shaman and a warrior. I went for the Shaman while Ath got eaten up by the warrior. I managed to get the shaman down, but Ath fell to the Warrior who quickly made short work of me.

Match 2 was the same match up, might even have been the same players. Anyway they both focused on Ath and then then cleaned the floor with me.

Match 3 was a Rogue/Warlock combo. In my idiocy I tried to sap the Warlock instead of the Rogue. Anyway we died fast.

Match 4 put us up against a druid/pally combo. They had roughly the same gameplan as us, namely DPS down the softer target while the Pally heals. So, for about the first two minutes the druid and I just smacked each other while our respective pally healed us. I think I had the advantage here as my Wound Poison reduced the effectiveness of their healing dramatically. The druid decided somewhere in there to focus on Ath and try to burn him down. I kept smacking on him while Ath kept himself alive. I got the druid down eventually, but then the opposing Pally got a Hammer of Wrath on Ath and took him out to the game, leaving me with a 1v1 vs. a Paladin. I think this match was in my favor and I burnt him down through one bubble and two life bars. I ended up having dealt over 70k damage in that match, it was funny.

Anyway, we decided to end our night with our win and vowed to run many, many BG's to get some blue PvP gear and figure out what we need to be doing.

Things that stuck out to me about what I need to be doing better is 1) Cloak of Shadows, don't forget I have it 2) Blind whenever it's up and 3) I have preparation, abuse my cooldown abilities. The dynamics have changed a lot since November, and I think it'll take a bit before I feel as comfortable with it as I used to be.

On Styles of Play

2007-04-25T08:33:00.000-06:00

This post over on Tobold's Blog got my thinking about the different types of players that Blizzard has to keep happy. Initially I think one can use three broad variables to look at players. Now, this is completely off the top of my head and everything therein is arbitrarily assigned.

Amount of play time.
Simply the raw numbers of hours you put it. I know several people in my guild play less than 10 hours a week, where as I probably play around 30 hours a week. I'm sure that individuals with minimal RL obligations could put in many more hours. I'd be willing to guess that the 'average' player puts in around 20 hours a week. If you wanted a numeric ratings, 0=5 hours of playtime, 10=40 hours of playtime. I'd put myself at 7-8 here.
Frequency of RL 'interruption'
As I mentioned, I probably play ~30 hours a week, however that time is very broken up with a variety of things. Wife needs a hand with something, son wants to play outside, food on the table, etc. About the only time I get more than an hour of uninterrupted play is if I stay up much later than my wife and son, and RL prohibits that accept on Friday night. On the other end of that spectrum is an individual who can realistically sit down and play for 5 hours with little more than a bio break. Again I'd suggest that the average player is somewhere between the two, perhaps being able to put in two uninterrupted hours when they do play. A rating here would represent the average amount of time one can play without serious interruption (one taking more than 15 min), 0=0 minutes without interruption (aka could be AFK at any time), 10=5 hours of playtime. I'd rate myself at a 4, I can reasonably expect 90 min uninterrupted.
Attitude towards Warcraft
Now, this one is a little bit more difficult to measure, and I may be presenting it all wrong. When I log into Warcraft it's to relax and have fun. I'm much less concerned about gear, advancement, or thinking I'm 'the best' than I am about just kicking back. On the other end of that spectrum are individuals who's basis for playing is advancement. I'd say that most, if not all, serious raiders play primarily for advancement. I'm not saying that's bad, just that it's not my thing. 0=Social gamer with little care of end-game, 10=extreme desire to be at the cutting edge of advancement. I'd assign myself at 4 here, I enjoy getting upgrades, but it's not my motivation really.

Now, of course this is an overly broad example and I'm sure there's plenty of cases that would contradict what I've proposed, particularly with my horrible category 3. However, I think they're good enough for the rest of my discussion. Blizzard has a vested interest in all ends of each of these spectrum. Let's see what is targeted by each type of activity in the game (for simplicity

Raiding
I would say that Raiding is targeted primarily at those players who are concerned about in-game accomplishment (category 3), have large amounts of uninterrupted time (category 2), and moderate to large amounts of play time (category 1). I think it's most appealing for people at a 6 or higher in C3, but requires a 7 in C2 and 4 in C1.
5-Man dungeons
Appeals to a broader segment that Raiding. Takes less time (generally) and with fewer people involved can be more forgiving of interruption. I'd say it's targeted at people with between a 3-7 in C3, at least a 2-6 in C1, and a 4-8 in C2.
5-Man non-dungeon content (particularly the new 2.1 content)
More targeted at the 'casual' then the dungeon content, also generally requires less time. I'd say is mostly focused at 0-5 C1, 2-6 C2, 2-6 C3.
Daily quests and level 70 solo questing
Again even more casual then above. 0-3 C1, 0-5 C2, and 0-4 C3.

So, with the examples above let's look at what patch 2.1 is offering:

The Black Temple, obviously targeted at the hardest of the hardcore raiders
Large amounts of non-instanced 5-man content, should be great for all the non-hardcore. As the content seems to tie into existing dungeons the appeal here should be broad.
Daily quests and solo content with the new factions, should be great for the most casual players out there.

I think Blizz is doing to hit a home run with this patch. BT may be coming too soon as only one guild has cleared SSC and nobody has cleared TK. But baring that I think the timing of the new 5-man content is nice as I'm sure it will appeal to a large segment of the non-hardcore population.

70

2007-04-23T15:02:00.000-06:00

So, I hit level 70 Saturday night after a day of questing in Netherstorm. Most of the quests were easy, only a few necessitating the assistance of a level 70 Warlock chum of mine. I was impressed with a number of the rewards I picked up, particularly the X-52 Pilot Leggings.

Upon hitting 70 I promptly flew over to Shadowmoon Valley and bought myself a Snowy Gryphon. Flying is pretty cool, as I'm sure many of you already know, but it wasn't as impressive as I expected. I don't know why, but for some reason I expected it be game changing. While it is not doubt very cool, it doesn't feel as cool as my first level 40 mount did, but perhaps my opinion will change over time.

Anyway, now that I have leveling out of the way and my first mount purchased, I need to decide what to focus myself on. I think my first objective is going to be hitting exalted with the Aldor for my Vindicator's Brand. A crazy 20 DPS increase of my current weapon (I side-graded to a Nexus Claw, the .3 speed difference was big enough to offset my Mag'hari Fury Brand's higher DPS). The .2 speed difference will drop my AP contributed damage by around 18, but the average damage per hit will still net me more Hemo damage, not to mention much more white DPS.

After that I believe that I'm going to focus on leveling my Leather working to 375 so that I can start working on my Primalstrike set. The bracers should be easy to make with minimal farming, the other pieces are going to require heroics though, so that'll take a while.

A fiend of my, who plays a Holy Paladin, should be hitting 70 tonight, if he didn't last night. We're going to start a 2v2 arena team for fun. Both of us enjoy PvP, but don't need to be 'the best' to have fun, so it's a good combination. I'll spend some of my time in BG's to improve my PvP 'set', but doubt I'll take it too seriously. I don't often reference other blogs, but sounds like Ming is now thinking about a 23/0/38 build for 2v2, which is very close to what I've been thinking. May end up trying it out, but I love Shadowstep for grinding...

Other than that I'm looking forward to 2.1 as there appears to a lot of very casual friendly content. I like that it's non-instanced as I lucky to do one instance a week. The new 'daily' quests sound fun. An enjoyable rep grind would be a pleasant change.

Not much to report on the Dreanei front. Completed 4 (I think) initial quests in The Hinterlands, then made the run into the Searing Gorge. Ran the escort quest and was dismayed to find it bugged (the assassinated dwarf's parchment never spawned), 45 min and one GM later it looks like we'll have to abandon it and re-do it. Didn't expect much else, but man does that dwarf walk slow...

More Macros

2007-04-20T13:13:00.000-06:00

So, not much going on this week.

Sakuran hit 69, bought some new gear (Fel Leather Boots and Legs) and promptly bought and socketed the wrong gems. Crit > Spell Crit... Also respecced back to Shadowstep/Hemo. 11/21/28 was nice, but I don't think that its DPS gain was worth the diminished fun that comes with Shadowstep. So, Sakuran is sitting 19/0/41 I think which should work much better than the combat/shadowstep I tried before.

Moving back to a Premed build led me to fixing a bunch of my macros. For all my openers I'm using somethig along the lines of:

/showtooltip Cheap Shot
/cast Pick Pocket
/stopcasting
/cast Premeditation
/stopcasting
/cast CheapShot

It's a nice way to automate a lot of things. You'll never run out of lockboxes and Premeditation will always be on cooldown.

After finishing my openers, I thought I'd play with my finishers a bit. I'd tried also having my trinkets tied to my openers but I wasn't able to get a working macro. Seemed like trinket use would take you out of stealth, so might as well put them on my finishers. I ended up with:

/showtooltip Eviscerate
/use 13
/stopcasting
/use 14
/stopcasting
/cast Eviscerate

This bad boy first tries to pop my fist AP/15 second trinket, then my other one, then cast Eviscerate. My theory being that I almost always end up with two finishers while grinding, so this should trigger after the first one and hopefully I'll gain the full benefit of it while finishing off the mob. There's a shared 15 sec cooldown on the trinkets, so the second can't trigger within 15 sec of the first, thus if I can hit my second finisher before the 'Ferocity' buff fades, I'll not waste a cooldown on a finisher that actually takes me out of combat. Didn't get a chance to play with this one, but I know that the trinket does trigger before the finisher. It gives the unpleasant error sound a lot, but I'll see what I can do about that...

Also, having Preparation is very nice, but only if you take advantage of it. I went ahead and tied my Vanish, Evasion, and Sprint to castsequences with Preparation. Thus if I try to Vanish and Vanish is on cooldown, I'll instead use Prep, a second press getting my vanish off. It automatically resets to Vanish when it's cooldown is up. As I'm typing it occurs to me that I no longer have Imp. Sprint, so Sprint probably isn't worth wasting Prep's cooldown. I may revert to a plain Sprint.

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=210 Vanish, Preparation

Zydari and Zydaria both dinged 45 after a full clear Zul'Farrak run. The rest of the party was slightly above 50 which helped immensely on the time. I think we were finished in a touch over two hours. I'm looking forward to the 2.1 patch as the Prot Pally changes should nice. Also bought several blue tanking items for Zydari's future. Don't recall what they are specifically, that's what I get for posting away from the game. Oh, I also replaced Zydari's Green Tower with the Blackskull Shield. An amazing 600 armor increase, at the expense of about 8 STA I believe.

Laic did a Jailbreak run the other night. I'm not sure if I posted it here, but I ended up respeccing him out of Survival to try BRK's BM/MM build. It's nice, and I have noticed a DPS increase, but I really miss Wyvern Sting. That's just one of those abilities I really got used to. A buff pet is nice, but I don't know how long I'll stick with it.

67, Durn the Hungerer, Ring of Blood, and Influenza

2007-04-13T09:19:00.000-06:00

So, as I'm sure you've noticed, I haven't posted in a while. RL has kicked my butt for about the last three weeks. My wife came down with the flu in the end of March, then we got about 24" of snow which shut everything down for a few days, then I got the flu and had to stay home sick for a week. This week's just been crazy catch up for the 8 days I ended up missing all together. Finally got to the point where I have time to post, so hear goes. (of course as I type this my wife called to let me know she's going to the doctor to see if she has pneumonia, wonderful)

So, anyway, I was able to play some WoW while I was out. The two snow days I managed to get from level 64 (IIRC) to 66. Picked up Cloak of Shadows, which is just lots of fun. For those who don't know, it's a 1 minute cooldown ability that will remove all magical debuffs (basically anything but a rend) from me and increase my magical immunities by 90% (I think) for 4 seconds. Ignoring the amazing utility from a PvP perspective (haven't PvP'd in a while), it's a great PvE ability. It's nice to be able to effectively 'cleanse' myself while grinding, otherwise I'd have a lot more downtime as I waited for things to run their course.

Last weekend, when I actually felt well enough to spend a good amount of time in game, I hit 67 and made myself a few items: Fel Leather Gloves and Primalstorm Breastplate. I could have/should have down the Breastplate at 65, but hadn't gotten around to respeccing my LW (used to be Tribal, pre-BC). Both are pretty nice, though I wish the Breastplate had sockets. I just think I like everything more with sockets :P. I also bought a Mask of Veiled Death of the AH for around 25g, pretty nice. The lack of AGI is always conscerning, but it makes up for it with crit and AP, which is all AGI gives you anyway (well, that matters, I don't count dodge and armor as important for a rogue).

Wednesday night I was able to get groups together to finish Durn the Hungerer and The Ring of Blood, as such I replaced both of my weapons. My Shadowrend Longblade and Footman's Longsword with Mag'Hari Fury Brand and Hungering Bone Cudgel. That's about +10 DPS on my mainhand and +8 on my offhand. I just have to work now at getting my fist and mace skills up. Sitting at 319/290 right now, so I've my work cut out for me :P

If you check out my Armory Profile right now, you'll see where I'm at stats wise. As I type I'm sitting at 967 AP, 21.5% crit, +12.36% Hit (with 5/5 Precision), and 6.6k HP. You'll also notice that I've adopted a bit of an odd spec. At 67 I'm 11/21/26 instead of my prior experiment with 5/11/42. That old build put well over 1100 AP with 5/5 Deadliness and 5/5 Sinister Calling. Coupled with Shadowstep made for a very fun build. However, I really felt the lack of 11 points in Assassination. Relentless Strikes is simply a must have talen, and I don't think any build without those 11 points is worth doing, which is sad really. So I wanted to grab 11 points in Assassination and could have pulled them from Combat, but I liked the solid white damage combat gives, okay, not the way I had it, but you get my drift. So while researching builds I saw several references on Elitest Jerks about an 11/21/28 build. It gives the key 11 points in Assassination, solid talents in Combat through Blade Flurry, and a lot of the utility of deep Subtlety. I lost Shadowstep (/cry), Sinister Calling, Dirty Deeds, Master of Subtlety and Premeditation. It was a difficult adjustment process, but I picked up 5/5 Precision, 5/5 DW Spec, Blade Flurry, and Relentless Strikes. So far I think the trade off is worth it.

I'll discuss a couple of oddities of my build. First, I have 2/2 Imp. SS and Hemo. Typically they are viewed as mutually exclusive talents because very few talent build that have more that 5 points in Combat have 25 points in Subtlety, so you either get one or the other. Now, pre-BC you could get very slow (2.8, 2.9) one-handed weapons, as Hemo is non-normalized, it was effectively and extra 40-50% DPS contribution from AP for 5 less energy (if you had 100 DPS from AP, you'd net 40-50 more damage from AP per attack). This led to a lot of scenarios where Hemo could offer higher damage per energy than Imp. SS, if not simply more damage. However, in BC there are no rogue weapons slower than 2.7, making it much more difficult to overcome the +98 damage a max rank SS gives you. That being said, Hemo does offer faster combo point generation, and the Hemo debuff (which should not be ignored), so it does have it's uses.

Against like level mobs I'm usually hitting one 5-CP finisher and 1 3-CP finisher (on average). On my openers I have 2-3 CP (CS with Initiative), Hemo till 4 CP, Ghostly Strike for my 5th (about this time they break the CS, so I benefit from the increased dodge) then Eviscerate when I have the energy. Now generally speaking they've lost a lot of their life and it's unlikely I'll get back up to 5-CP so I switch to SS, which nets me higher damage per hit. I haven't sat down and done the math, but I think there is room in this build for both, so I grabbed both.

I've also spent 4 points reducing all my cool-downs significantly. Vanish, Sprint, and Evasion are at 3 minutes and blind is at 90 seconds. Coupled with Preperation, I'm never unable to use abilities as needed. I need to set Vanish/Sprint/Evasion up on /castsequence macros:

/castsequence reset=180 Vanish, Preperation
/castsequence reset=180 Sprint, Preperation
/castsequence reset=180 Evasion, Preperation

I've also got a nice Blind macro:

/cast Blind [target=none]

This allows me to blind an add without changing targets. I always forget I have it, but have used it with success a few times. Having Sprint as a root break should be nice, but again, I forget that it can do that. Having played without that utility for a year now will do that.

I anticipate getting back into PvP at 70. Anything other than the most casual raiding is out of the question for me, so PvP will again occupy my time I'm sure. Though the with Blizz releasing more PvE 5-man content in 2.1 I could be busy with that. Needless to say I haven't really touched any of the end-game PvE content yet, so who knows what the future holds. If I do get back into PvP in a significant manner, I'm not sure if I'll keep my current spec. Shadowstep for non-Arena PvP (which is what I see myself doing) is great. Allows you to pick and choose your targets in a manner previously only dreamed of. However, if I'm still doing significant PvE, I think my current build offers more pure PvE DPS. Gosh, who knows, I could end up going back to daggers, though at this point I'm hoping not to...

Subjective upgrades

2007-03-19T08:46:00.000-06:00

Before diving into my topic, let me update you on my play for the last week or so, which hasn't been much. I actually dusted off Sakuran (my rogue) for the first time in close to a month to run some quests with a RL friend of mine who's finally caught up to me in level. Playing her after focusing on my tankadin is very odd. I feel very vulnerable, which is odd because Sak's build is deep subtlety (aka, lots of survival tricks), but at the same time I forget how much damage she can deal. I'd read that playing a Paladin involved casting a few seals/judgments and then leaving the room... It's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is truth behind that statement. Sak on the other hand is much more involved to play, and I have to be much more careful with her. I think I forgot that I have vanish and prep, ended up making visits to the GY that simply shouldn't have been. L2P, I know...

So, I had earlier found Tim's Trusty Helmet off a quest in Zangarmarsh and, looks aside, was pleased with it. After clearing a few more early quests in Zangarmarsh, I had the opportunity to grab Scout's Hood. For those who are too lazy to click the links, Tim's Trusty Helmet is probably a much better items, but Scout's Hood has three sockets (one per color). I found myself is a somewhat new position, not knowing what was a better item. I suppose I could have cheated and looked on wowhead.com to find that Tim's Trusty Helmet has a higher item level, but I haven't decided how heavily to weight the presence of sockets. Before socketing anything Scout's Hood is sitting at -5 AGI, -22 STA, -22 AP, and +12 Hit. The socket bonus is +4 AGI, so I only needed to make up 1 point there, the rest of the stats would be a bit more difficult. Looking at the vendor gems was not encouraging. I could pick up +6 STA of a blue, +4 AGI of a red, and +4 hit or crit off a yellow. Not bad, but not good. I then decided to give my trusty neighborhood Auction House a visit.

Now, as I'm sure you all know, searching for gems in the AH is next to impossible. No way to only look at gems without an addon, and to my knowledge, no way to view by gem slot. So, I resorted to wowhead.com which offered a very robust gem search. I ended up +3 AGI/Hit yellow gem, +6 AGI red gem, and +3 AGI/+4 STA purple gem. This brought the difference between the items to +11 AGI, -18 STA, -22 AP, +15 hit. So it's 180 HP and 11 AP vs. +15 hit and some crit (don't have the calculation infront of me). Pretty close, but what ultimately made the decision for me is that Scout's Hood hands down looks cooler. While Tim's Trusty Helmet has some decent stats, I actually had to turn off my helmet display as it was so ugly... I'm not normally one who cares what the gear looks like, but Tim's Trusty Helmet looks kinda like an old early 1900's football helmet...

So, this leads me to ask the question: How long should socketable items 'last'. In my example above I started with an item of lower item level, and with the addition of ~8g of gems made it superior (IMHO) to the item I had. Down the line as my lazy butt levels my main I'm sure I'll run into a head piece that is clearly superior to what I have. In this scenario should I 1) take the item and drop what I have, or 2) buy better/more expensive gems to make the item I have 'better'. The choice is easier if said item is also socketable, but it is certainly a new dynamic.

And the winner is...Enhancement

2007-03-13T13:45:00.000-06:00

So, upon dinged 40 over the weekend I went ahead and specced Zydaria into the 20/11/0 build that I mentioned last post. I explained to my wife what was different about it, emphasizing that she could now use two-handed weapons. After playing for a moment she informs me that she thought that what I was going to do was let her wield two weapons at once (dual-weild). I let her know that she could actually do that right now, but that would require taking all her points out of elemental and focusing almost exclusively on melee combat. She said that sounded fine so back to the trainer we went :P.

Specced 31 into Enhancement, picking up Dual-Wield initially, Stormstrike at 41 (which we dinged last night). After some time at the AH to replace the caster focused gear she had and grab an off-hand (mainhanding the Hypnotic Blade from SM, not good stats at this point, but decent DPS). The worked on the first two naga quests in Ferales, the first batch of Wastewanderer quests in Gadget and then over to STV to kill Naga for the horrible low drop rate Akaris Reed. Wowhead thinks it's a 25% drop rate, but I don't buy it....

Anyone who's played an Enhancement shaman will agree that pre-BC itemiztion sucks for Shammies. I'm not sure what I'll do for her, but currently a majority of her armor is low to mid 30's mail. We'll have to see what we can find from here on out.

Shaman builds

2007-03-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

So, I've been theory crafting several different shaman builds for my wife. At level 39 she's exclusively been an Elemental Shaman, to the point of wearing cloth with +spelldamage. However, I was getting the impression that she'd rather be in melee combat. So, after some discussion it's clear that she'd like to 1) remain an effective ranged DPS class (AKA caster) and 2) be able to melee effectively. This has led me to look at a variety of hybrid builds for level 40 (no sense buying new gear at 39 that'll be replaced in a level).

The current build I'm leaning toward is 20/11/0. Deep enough in Enhancement to grab Two-Handed weapons and enough in Elemental to cover those initial bases (Convection, Concussion, Call of Thunder, Elemental Focus, 4/5 Reverberation). I'm thinking I'll fill Elemental till 51 where she'll be 31/11/0, then go back to Enhancement for a while. The problem I'll run into is at level 61 where she'll be 31/21/0. I really don't know what to do with those last 9 points. I could have her end up 40/21/0 or 31/30/0 or something in between. Heck, if melee is enjoyable for her might as well repsec towards 20/41/0. I just don't know how it'll end up.

With the change of focus I'm stumped on how to gear her up. A melee/caster hybrid seems to benefit from about all the attributes, but I think I'll lean towards STR/INT. Something along the lines of 1 INT=1 STR= 2 STA=2 SPR=2 AGI. I know that she's going to end not excelling in either regard, but hopefully she'll get a taste of both sides and be able to decide how she wants to play her class.

Any experienced shamans out there, please help me out. Me and my alliance chums just don't know enough about the class.

Too many sigs...

2007-03-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

A few cool sigs that I found here:

Can you tell what toons I haven't been playing? Here's my wife's toons

How BC has changed me / Level 32 routine

2007-02-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

No, not in big personal ways, but my gameplay has certainly changed since BC came out. The primary thing that's happened is that I'm playing more with my wife then without her. I'm not 100% what the difference was, but I think it boiled down to making a commitment to experience all the content in the Draenei starting zones with her. The reason I think this made the difference was that I was actively trying to get her to play. In the past when she's express an interest in playing it meant that I'd log off of my main and to play a toon I really wasn't too interested in with her. I'm sure it gave here the impression that I'd rather be playing without her, which (subconsciously) may have been true. I mean, I liked playing with her, but it was quests I'd already done, zones I'd already cleared, and playstyle that I'd already experienced. DPS and Warlock, done that do death...

Now, when I'm playing my 'main' it's nowhere near as fun. I'd much rather be playing with her, and I'm sure my general attitude has changed. I've really gotten excited about 'tanking' and the paladin class in general, both of which are 'new' to me. The synergy with the Shaman is also amazing, and unlike anything I've done before. While Paladins are the defensive hybrid (tanking/healing), Shaman's are the offensive hybrid (DPS/Healing). If you look at my three highest level toons (Rogue, Hunter, Shadow Priest) I've already played the DPS and Healer roles. The only role I really hadn't experienced was that of a tank. With my wife taking care of DPS and Healing, I'm able to focus on the one area do the MMO trinity that I haven't already done to death: tanking.

Speaking of synergy, Windfury Totem and Reckoning are just crazy fun. I've only got 2/5 in Reckoning, so it's a 4% proc rate, but when it does proc it's full strength. Windfury is a 20% proc rate on hit, so I've got a 59% chance of getting a windfury proc off one of my extra hits (1-(.8*4)) and roughly 30% (8!/(2!*6!)*(.2*.2)*(.8*.8*.8*.8*.8*.8)) chance of getting two procs. That translate to a pretty heavy spike in damage, and by extension, threat. It's not the flat 20% buff it is for warriors, but only because a significant portion of my damage dealt is reactive and not active (i.e. Retribution Aura, Blessing of Sanctuary, and my Shield Spike).

As I implied above, our Draenei are sitting at level 32. I think I've gotten 10 levels in the last week, so it's been very productive. The elite quests in Duskwood are so much easier with the two of us. We took out Morbent Fel at level 29 without a death. I've never seen him go down so easily. It was pretty scary at first with adds he comes with, but they were quickly attracted to my Consecration and coupled with the damage from my Aura, they quickly fell. I don't think we even focused damage on them, they died to my passive AoE. The Bride of the Embalmer went down just as easily, as did Stalven, all before level 30. Level 30 lead us to Southshore and more evil murlocs. At one point I had 7 on me while I dual boxed. I just through up all the totems, dropped consecration and whittled them down. It was a lot of damage to heal through, but it was successful. Magma Totem immediately after Consecration is great, a lot of damage. Oh, Blessing of Sanctuary is great. 10 damage less per hit really adds up when you're taking 5 hits per second (aka the murlocs) and almost assures that Redoubt is always up. Seal of Light is also nice. I'm trying to decide how when to use it in place of my normal SoR/JotC (or JoJ for runners). I'm inclined to use it when AoEing, as the added threat from Consecration offsets what I'm losing from not using SoR, plus the added healing adds a lot to my survivability. If the mob isn't a runner, and the mob hits hard, I'll use JoL instead of JotC.

Level 32 gave my wife Chain lightning which she's been happily accidental pulling with :P. Luckily my taunt effects all three of the mobs that are now really pissed at her. I think that the combination of my inherent AoE abilities with Chain Lightning, Magma Totem, and Fire Nova Totem, we should be capable of some mean feats of AoE grinding. Provided I don't die first.

My current Tanking routine:

Buffs

Righteous Fury
Blessing of Sanctuary
Aura of Retribution
Blessing of Salvation (wifey)
Windfury Weapon (wifey)
Food/Pots/Scrolls that are available

My Routine

Taunt mobs off my wife's pull
Consecration (if there's more than one mob)
Judge Light if the mob isn't a runner, Justice if they are
Cast SoR if the mob isn't a runner, SoL if they are
Back up a touch so that all mobs are in front of me (aka I can block).
If there are 3 or more mobs, I'll consecrate a second time
Otherwise just keep the mobs in front of me and keep my Seals fresh. I don't typically Judge SoR as often as I can. I generally let SoR run for 20 seconds so that I can get three ticks of mana regen before interrupting it again. Mana regen is very important for me as I don't have a very high mana pool, most of my gear is tanking gear, so +STA is a primary concern and I've been grabbing Spirit/Strenght/Int when available.
Obviously if my wife pulls aggro off of me I taunt them back and drop consecration to cement the taunt.

My wife's Routine

Pull with Lighting Bolt
Flame Shock the primary target (I taunt as soon as the shock goes off)
Drop totems (Stoneskin, Searing, Healing Stream, and Windfury)
Melee my target
Cast Chain Lightning when it's up
Cast Shocks when Available (Flame when the mob is above 80%, Frost on runners or ones are at or below 20%, Earth the rest of the time)
After my initial Consecration, drop Magma Totem
Drop Fire Nova Totem after Magma expires
Drop Searing Totem while the others are on cooldown
Heal me whenever I'm at about 50% health
Use Totemic Call (I really think it should be called Totem Recall) after the fight to restore a bit of mana, though with here Int/Spirit focus she's rarely /oom.

Realistic Expectations

2007-02-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

So, I've been thinking a lot about what I hope to do in BC and what I doubt I'll do. I'm trying to be realistic, so you won't see things like "Farm Illidan" on my list. That may be realistic for some people, but not for me. Keep in mind that these are my goals before the next expansion, not goals for the near future.

Thing I don't think I'll do in BC:

Step foot in Serpentshrine Cavern
Step foot in The Eye
Step foot in Mount Hyjal
Step foot in The Black Temple
Be competitive in the Arena
Get more than three characters (Sakuran, Zydari, and either Repentant or Laic) to level 70.

Things that are likely to happen:

Sakuran

Level 70
Clear Karazhan
Blue PvP Set
Few pieces of Tier 4
Grind as many reputations as are available to me to exalted

Zydari

Level 70
Tank some end-game instances (Heroic 5-mans if I'm lucky)
Get my wife to be confident enough to actually do some instances

Laic

Get to Outland, maybe level 70
Enjoy some PvP

Repentant

Get to Outland, maybe level 70
Find a build that will let me solo effectively and still heal groups. Shadow's great, but I'm not sure I'll stay there.

Things I'd like to see, but am not 100% if they'll happen

25 man content in general. While I think we'll get to Gruul's lair, it's difficult for a guild like ours to do that kind of content. We may be able to get a group together every other week, but I'm not sure that'll be enough to actually get him down.
Magtheridan. At the moment, he's unkillable. While I give my guild 50/50 odds on Gruul at some point in the future, I'm much less optimistic about our chances with Magtheridan. I'm sure the challenge will drop once the strategy is widely known, but it still sounds like he requires heavy consumables. I really don't see us casuals as farming consumables for nights of wipes.

Fixing SotC

2007-02-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

From my post on the WoW Suggestion Forums.

Now, SotC is one of the most cast seals a Paladin has, but only for 2 reasons:
1) leveling weapon skills
2) immediate judgment
Now, what's missing here? There is basically no reason to actually let the Seal run it's course in actual play (not counting raising weapon skills). Every other Seal has some value in a real fight. Some are obviously more useful that others (I'll almost always choose SoR over SoJ), but there are situations where they are useful. In addition to each Seal having uses both as a Seal and a Judgment, each of a Paladins roles should have Seals that are useful for it. Tankadins have SoR and SoV and Retadins have SoC and SoB. Again, you'll notice that I omitted somthing: Healadins. They certain could use SoW if they are melee-healing, but I see a real opportunity for SotC.

JotC gives the Paladin a certain amount of +Holy damage to that target, what I would propose is that SotC give the Paladin half of that amount as +healing/damage. You could keep the increased melee attack speed, as the two benefits wouldn't really overlap much. If you're taking advantage of the +healing/damage you're unlikely to be concerned about attack speed and if you focus on attack speed you're unlikely to be too focused on the +healing/damage. What would happen is that a casting focused Holyadin would be able to keep SotC on themselves to augment their healing. Obviously the mechanic I propose would need to be tweaked to make it mana-efficient (not sure if that that value is enough to make it a cost effective endeavor), but I think if done correctly (aka, the +healing/damage amount is enough to not only offset the cost of the seal, but actually making it's use a step towards increased efficiency), it could be very useful.

Not sure if anyone will every see it, but I thought it was a good idea :P

Fame or Infamy?

2007-02-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Thomas mentioned a few of my posts regarding lowbie Paladin tanking, I'm glad to see others finding it useful as it's honestly been a blast for me to play. Only reason I'm posting is that his blog won't let me post a comment (keeps telling me I need to be logged into submit a comment). Anyway, two corrections: Zydari is Draenei, not a Blood Elf (though I do have a Blood Elf Paladin just for humor value), and my main is a Rogue, not a Druid. Though I often wish she was a druid, particularly with the love they've seen post-2.0...

Lowbie Pally Tanking

2007-02-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

So, my WoW for the last week has almost exclusively been on Zydari, my Paladin. He dinged 22 last night and he really is fun to play. Level 20 brought me Consecration which makes my job so much easier. AoE threat is great and coupled with Retribution Aura makes it nearly impossible for me to lose aggro.

I did a test last night on Retribution Aura. Had my wife body pull a mob while I had RA up. The damage being dealt by the aura did not pull the mob back onto me, so I conclude that it generates hate from the person being hit, not the person who casts the Aura. While this does lessen the skill's worth a bit, it's not enough for me not to use it. My tanking routine generally consists of my wife pulling from behind me, as the mobs I approach I use RD on her to get them onto me then immediately open up with a Consecration. Now the mobs are receiving damage from Consecration, attacking me which generates damage from my Retribution Aura, proccing Redoubt which ups my block rate a lot and means they'll get damaged from my Shield Spike. All that damage, except the Shield Spike, is Holy and as such generating much more threat through Improved Righteousness. So, even though if in the rare event that my wife pulls aggro off me she'd be getting more from being hit, RD is enough to get them back onto me.

I spent several hours yesterday dual-boxing with my wifes toon. I set up some macros for here to auto-follow and target me. One to cast Lightning Bolt on my target, one to stomp totems, and one to heal me. Worked very well and I was able to very quickly get through a level and work on some preliminary AoE tanking (preliminary only as I don't have Blessing of Sanctuary/Reckoning/Holy Shield). Was a lot of fun and with mobs ~2-3 levels lower than me I could easily take 3 on with my wife's toon providing the occasional heal. I think that with her actually playing and being able to pay full attention to one toon we could do three equal level mobs at once. With the AoE/reflective threat I generate, she should be able to drop the Fire Nova Totem whenever it's available to quickly burn down groups. Good fun.

One thing that has surprised me in the last week is my complete and utter disinterest with my main, Sakuran. She's been sitting at 63 for over a week now. I think that part of my disinterest stems from how much more fun I have playing with my wife, and as she's been playing a lot more lately, I find myself playing solo much less. Additionally I think that learning new mechanics and play styles is a lot of what I enjoy about the game. Yes, DPS will always have a spot in my heart, but there is something appealing to playing a tank and not focusing on DPS. I think this is the same reason that I was so stoked about the Druid a month or so ago. It was new and different. I think that with the added bonus of playing with my wife, this Paladin may become a much more regular toon for me.

The guild forum has been acting up a great deal and our Guild Master has been out of town. Stupid thing won't let me delete posts unless I do them one by one (which is not going to happen). I'm hoping that the newer forum software will end up being more reliable and allow me (as one of the forum admins) to actually do some adminning with out it being such an irksome task.

Pal-a-din > Puh-la-din

2007-02-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

So, last night Zydari, my Draenei Paladin, dinged 17. I've been reading up a lot on Paladin strategies, particularly with the focus on tanking. My only other tanking attempts are with my Warrior Daroul (level 26) who's only real experience was one Stockades run (which I posted on back in...October I think), and Didgeridoo my Tauren Shaman who tanked Ragefire Chasm at level 18 (back when Rockbiter and Earthshock still had +threat).

Needless to say I've done a lot more tanking with toon than with either of the afore-mentioned ones. This guys is exclusively leveling with my wife's Shaman, Zydaria, so is basically tanking full time. Prior to level 14 I'd keep Devotion Aura and Blessing of Might up, judge Crusader, Seal of Righteousness and hope that we'd kill it before my wifes DPS pulled the mob onto her (she's a bit trigger happy). Level 14 gave me Righteous Defense, the three-mob Paladin taunt. It's wonderful, much better that the Bear/Warrior Taunt IMHO. It is different to use though, as you target a friendly player and force mobs attacking them to instead attack me, rather than directly targeting the mob. Could be tricky, but the following macro works wonders:

/cast [target=targettarget,help] Righteous Defense, [target=none] Righteous Defense

I simply hit the macro whenever I don't have aggro. If it's because my wife pulled aggro I just get them back on me. If it's because my wife picked up an add, I get the glowy hand (because the target of my target is me, it passes onto the second condition) and click her party frame.

Level 16 gave me two new skills that have helped my tanking. Righteous Fury increase all threat from my Holy damage by 60%. As a significant amount of what I try to do is Holy damage, this is quite the buff. Additionally I picked up Retribution Aura, which deals 5 Holy damage to anyone who attacks someone in my party. Now, I'm not quite sold on this ability. If I have aggro, it's great. They're getting 5 Holy damage (for 8 threat) every time they deal damage, may not look like much, but it adds up fast. Where I'm confused is how the threat is applied if the damage stems from a mob hitting someone else in the party. My thinking, and what I've read a few places, is that it is my aura that is dealing the damage, thus I'm getting the hate regardless of who the mob is hitting. But, a high level paladin in my guild doesn't think that is the case. More investigation is needed, but for now this is my default tanking aura.

Next level (18) I'll be getting Blessing of Freedom (situational), a new rank of Seal of Righteousness (yeah!), and Spiritual Attunement. That last spell is what I'm most excited about, 8% mana from any healing from an outside source may not seem like much, but I'm always grouped with a healer. Any healing she does on me simply increased the amount of damage I can deal. I'm sure it will be more useful as time goes on and the return gets into the double digits, but I will certainly have a reason to not be healing myself :P

Level 20 will give me Consecration, which should cement my ability to tank multiple mobs. That, coupled with Retribution Aura, should be loads of fun. Get my wife to drop some AoE fire totems and we should be able to do a lot of damage, real fast.

Looking down the levels I imagine that I'll continue to use the JotC/SoR combination (with JoR when ever its up). Seems like the best way to maintain threat and deal damage. Obviously other Seals/Judgments will have situational use, but that should remain my default. Looks like at 64 Seal of Vengeance will replace Seal of Righteousness as my default. I'm just tickled at the prospect, though level 64 is barley on the horizon.

My current spec (0/8/0), at 20 (0/11/0), 30 (0/21/0), 40 (0/31/0), 50 (0/41/0), 60 (0/41/10), and 70 (0/44/17).

Altism

2007-02-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

Kinless coined (to my knowledge) the term 'Altism' in a recent post of his. I think the term is appropriate, and I think I'm suffering from it as well. I'm just not in a hurry to get to 70. Sakuran is still sitting at 62, though she'll likely hit 63 tonight. I've certainly spent more time on my alts since my last post.

Repentant - 40 Priest
I managed to finally ding 40 with Repentant. I'd stopped soloing with him at 38 so I could have available to group with guild mates. Last week weekend we did a partial Uldaman run and worked on the elites in Stomgaurd. Dinged 40 halfway through there and promptly fell in love with Shadow Form. It certainly is nice to be able to farm with a rogue and a cat-form druid, keep everyone's health up with VE and compete with the rogue for top DPS. Having read about the rediculous amount of DPS Shadow Priests are putting out in endgame content I'm fairly certain that Repentant will never spec out of shadow. Oh, and I bought a horse. Is it just me, or are human mounts just 'meh'?

Laic - 51 Hunter
Haven't dinged on him in a while, but have started the Marhsall Windsor chain in BS and will eventually get in BRD for some fun. The more I play him, the less I like his build. He's currently 0/11/31, and I'm just not liking it. Don't get wrong, I love Wyvern Sting and Counterattack, but I'm not sure those two abilities justify the 29 other points I'm putting in the tree. Who knows...

It's interesting with the new BC items that are out there, I really find myself anticipating level 58. See, Laic will not be spending any time in the old end-game content, like Sakuran did. He'll ding 58 and say goodbye to Azeroth. I curious to see how much more of a difference replacing my gear will make with Laic. Sakuran replaced almost everything within two levels of hitting Hellfire Peninsula. I imagine Laic will just have a blast.

Sakuran -62 Rogue
I respecced Sakuran, again. I kept my primary tree pretty much the same, just swapped minor trees. She's now 0/11/42 which is the only build I've ever tried without points in Assassination. Lightning Reflexes is a fairly unpopular talent, but let me tell you why I picked it. Improved Gouge is nice for solo PvP, but I don't do that. I play on a PvE server and decline duos, only PvP I see is the BG's and perhaps a little arena at 70. In those venues it's unlikely that my gouge will last that long anyways as there's 9-39 other people out there who could be hitting my target. Improved Sinister Strike is great if you're using Sinister Strike. I actually spent some time wondering if it would make sense to drop two points there and forsake Hemo. My conclusion is that without 3/3 Aggression, Sinister Strike just doesn't do enough more damage to be worth while. I love having Riposte back, it's arguably my favorite talent point in the combat tree. Best damage per energy of any rogue attack plus the disarm.

With the additional 5% parry and 5% dodge, I'm looking at 45% mitigation before my armor kicks in. With Ghostly Strike I can increase that to 60% for 7 seconds out of every 20. With Evasion and Prep that can increase by 50% for 30 seconds.

My target build of 5/13/43 will put Vanish, Sprint, and Evasion on 3 minute cooldowns and Blind on a 1.5 minute cooldown. I think that the sheer amount of utility I will bring to the table will allow me to dictate the pace of most any fight I find myself in, PvE or PvP.

Week 1

2007-01-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

So, a week has past since BC hit. The servers have had their ups and downs and I've been booted more times than I can count. All things considered though the launch was much less hectic than I anticipated.

Draenei
I've got to that I've really enjoyed the new starting zones. My wife and I have both leveled our characters to 12 (she might be 13...). The Paladin/Shaman combination is really quite astounding. My paladin is focusing on tanking the mobs/staying alive while she just focuses on killing things. Pretty amazing what we can survive. I've also leveled a shaman to 12, but am keeping behind the duo so I can experience the new content with her.

The quest rewards are all pretty good, much better than what I remember getting from rewards in the other start zones. Not to mention that the new quests are much more fun and innovative. The quest chain starting with Learning the Language is hands down the best chain I've ever done.

Hellfire Ramparts
I've run this 4 times now. The first time we started too late and I had to leave after the first boss. Second time went off without a hitch and we downed all three bosses without a wipe. Third time we just couldn't kill the dragon before the fire damage wiped the party. 4th time (last night) we wiped once on the dragon, adjusted and took him down.

If this instance is indicative of the remainder of instances in BC, I'm impressed. Just enough trash and then a boss when you start to get bored. The loot is also amazing. On my second run I picked up the Garrote-String Necklace, which is very nice. On my fourth run (last night) I snagged the Shadowrend Longblade, which at 52.9 DPS is amazing.

Oddity with the drops, I've seen the Scale Leggings of the Skirmisher and the Kilt of Rolling Thunders drop twice. The leggings were okay as they were grabbed by hunters both times, but the kilt is Shaman only. We had a Paladin last night who, if he could have, would have grabbed them for his caster gear. As far as I know it's the only item in the instance that is class restricted. There is even a staff that is basically only useful to a Druid (+AP in forms), but it's not class restricted. Oddness...

Now that I feel pretty comfortable with the Ramparts, I'm looking forward to running the Furnace. From what I've heard the pulls are actually a lot easier to set up, which will be nice as there are some tricky ones in the Ramparts. I'll have to run the Ramparts at least one more time as we've never got Prunella (priest) finished with the quest "Weaken The Ramparts". So the Furnace will have to wait till this weekend at least.

Rogue
So, as is obvious from my grabbing the afore mentioned sword, I'm no longer specced for mutilate. While I still love mutilate for PvP, I grew tired with it in PvE. I just did not like having to worry about positioning while questing and in the Ramparts. It's very burst damage intensive so it was easy to pull aggro, once I'd done that I was out of luck as my damage was gone, unless I was able to get behind the mob. So I specced back to combat, but since I wanted to try something new, I went combat fist and purchased a nice, green 48 DPS mainhand fist to go wit my Gargoyle Slashers that had been sitting in my bank from Strat (never even used). I played with that for all of one night before I discovered that combat rogue is pretty boring. Yes, it's nice not worrying about position and BF+AR+SnD=I win, but it was just...dull.

After much research yesterday I specced 11/0/41 for Shadowstep/Hemo. I've never before run a build with more than 17 points in subtlety (went 31/3/17 for a while, pre 2.0). Having done so, I've got to say that it's a lot of fun. I don't have to worry about positioning thanks to Hemo, I can burn cooldowns like they're going out of style. I always forget about Premeditation, but being able to Premed+CS->5 CP Eviscerate is just ridiculous. Of course I always forget that I have it... Shadowstep is just plain fun. It may not be effective in PvP, but it sure is fun in PvE. Last night I was able to Sap some very poorly placed mobs, just get near, Shadowstep->Sap and run. Loads of fun.. Sinister Calling and Deadliness put my AP through the roof (well, for me). I'm pretty sure that it net me 120 AP. I'm not sure if Deadliness increases the AP after my increased AGI goes in, but either way was nice. The 15% increase in AGI net me around 45 AGI, which is 45 AP, ~1.8 crit, etc.. I went from a bit over 800 AP to nearly 950 AP, and that was before the new sword :P. I'm sure for most raid equipped rogues that's nothing, but for me, who barely crested 700 AP pre-BC, it's night and day.

The morning after

2007-01-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

So, as you all know The Burning Crusade launched yesterday. Before I dive into my thoughts on that I'd like to catch you with what I've been doing since my last post.

I've primarily focused on my hunter, Laic, I manage to get him up to 51. Ran an AV for the spear, dropped some coin at the AH for new gear etc. Laic is sitting on several Sunken Temple quests so I'm hoping that one run through would get him to 52.

Picked up my druid, Azariah, who I'd parked at 12 many months ago. Levelled him to 18 so that I could group with my wifes Warlock. I've been fortunate that I've been able to get her to play a lot more recently, so that pair has made it up level 23/24. I've got to say that I really do enjoy the druid in a group. I can already tell though that this is a much more difficult class to master than the rogue and hunter. Not that they were easy, but with the druid you have to balance each of their very distinct roles.

Sakuran was parked in front of the Dark Portal for several weeks waiting in anticipation.

So, back to the Burning Crusade.

Install went smoothly on all my machines. Stormrage was a fairly large queue (> 500 when I logged on), which isn't entirely surprising given that it was expansion day. First thing I did was roll my Dreanai. A male Paladin name Zydari and a female Shaman named Zodari. My wife also rolled a female Shaman named Zydaria (original FTW). So we spent much of the evening levelling my Paladin and her Shaman to 5. Yeah, that's right, 5. There were so many other Draenai there that we had to camp spawn points for the quests that required you to get so many drops due to the insane amount of competition for kills. I'm sure that in time it will ease out, but man, that was a long time to get those first 5 levels.

After my wife went to bed I logged on Sakuran and gathered quests in Honor Hold. Upgrade my Leatherworking, Skinning, and First Aid to the new cap (10g each!). Worked on three quests, kill 20 Fel Orcs, gather 1 tailsman for other orcs and light smoke signals at 4 towers. The lag in the Outland was nearly unbearable. For a class that depends on timing it made it very difficult. Sneaking up behind and enemy mob is one thing, but with the lag it was very easy to walk through the mob blowing your opening. Competition for kills was pretty intense here also. An Tauren Shaman with the Hand of Ragnaros and I ended up sharing one spawn point, he got the casters and I killed the melee. On a PvP server I'm sure it's a blood fest.

After not thuoughly enjoying the lag I decided to mount up and find Shattrah City. This gave me more of an opportunity to appreciate the upgraded graphics. Zangermarsh and Shattrah City are simply beautiful. Hellfire Pennisula has an amazing sky to look at, but the former zones are more environmentally appealing.

Interestingly, I didn't feel rushing through quests or grinding XP on Sakuran. Now that I'm able to level again, I intend to take my time. I really did rush a lot with her to get to 60, but I think I might focus more on enjoyment this time around. Do some quests, work on some professions, run some instances... You know enjoy the game.

This AM Stormrage was down so I rolled a Blood Elf Rogue (Chairi, Female) on Twisting Nether. I was curious to see how broken their racial ability is, and I"m here to say that it isn't. Yeah it's better than other races racials, but not by much. For a rogue you only get 10 energy per manatap, which is on a 30 second cooldown. That amounts to 3 seconds worth of extra energy every 90 seconds. I'm sure there will be a few PvP instances where it will be useful, but no more than the orc racial stun resist or the dwarf stone form. Mechanincs aside, the Blood Elves are pretty. The Draenai are certainly attractive in a alien way, but I do like the blood elves. And after reading all the QQ about the beefed up male Blood Elf, I certainly wouldn't have guessed it. They don't look like the male humans. They're still idealized, but not to the extreme that the other males are.

Heh, I've been tagged (for not posting enough)

2007-01-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

So, Kinless was kind enough to tag me in the "5 things you didn't know about me" game (for lack of a better term.

I work in a Juvenile Probation Office, which I think is a lot like moderating the official forums... But with urine collection and testing. My single day record is 17 samples collected, yes, it's as fun as it sounds.
Prior to WoW, which is my first MMO, I was very engrossed in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Played all the games, was reading the books, etc. I still think I can lose time in those games faster than I can in WoW, which is really saying something.
I teach Sunday School (poorly) for the teenagers at my church. I occasionally mention some in-game accomplishment and they just roll their eyes at me. Oh, and I got my Pastor into WoW.
Aside from WoW I've played a lot of collectable games, favorites being Diskwars and, back in the day, Magic: The Gathering. My wife, though she claims not to know what she's doing, kicks my butt 75% of the time. And I'm pretty good...
I started smoking cigarettes at the age of 19 (only person I know who started when it was legal) and quit cold-turkey a few years later after having an anxiety attack stemming from not being able to find my wallet to go buy more cigarettes. One of the better things I've done with my life, if I may say so myself.

Um... I'll go ahead and tag World of Rogue Theorycraft, Gahlok of Frostbolt, and Blessing of Kings.

Back to the alts...

2006-12-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

So, since I've really stopped PvPing again with Sakuran I've taken to leveling Laic and Repentant. Well mostly leveling Laic and using Repentant as a healer for instances. My hunter is sitting pretty at almost level 45 and Repentant just dinged 38. I am contemplating doing some PvP with Repentant, just to get a feel for how PvP is with a priest. I'll hold off doing anything PvP wise with Laic until 51 when I can start AV with him, the rewards for that first quest are just too nice.

Speaking of Laic I've gotten pretty comfortable with soloing with him. I'm currently 34 points into survival, primarily to pick up Wyvern Sting (which I love). My basic pull is macro'd as follows

/petattack
/castsequence reset=combat Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, Concussive Shot

The first button press sends in the pet and casts Hunter's Mark. I wait for my pets first growl to go off (auto-cast) then I hit it again for the Sing. Then just auto-shot to victory. The Concussive Shot is for accidently pulling aggro or for mobs that flee when near death. If I get one add I hit it with Wyvern Sting, which usually puts it to sleep long enough to finish the first (or else I just melee it down). If I get two adds I'll drop a Ice Trap, hit multi shot to get the two coming after men and then immediately cast Wyvern Sting. I usually have enough time to get the cast off before they're on me. One stung, one frozen, and the one my pet is on, mostly dead. After that I'll just put the pet on the mob I stung and melee the blocked one. As I'm survival specced, I do enough damage with melee to take them out. If I get in trouble I can always root, kite, and drop another freeze trap.

On Saturday (I think) I spent a couple of hours on my Hunter grinding the Highborne in Azshara with a priest in the guild. Amazingly enough, there was nobody else on them and we were uninterupted. Having a constant renew of my pet meant we had ZERO downtime. I'd just use Autoshot and he'd wand away and the mobs would just drop. Undead tracking enabled us to make very, very fast time and the XP just flew by. Might have to make a return trip pretty soon :P

PvP grind, back again...

2006-12-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, as everyone knows Patch 2.0 brought alot of changes, including the 'elimination' of the PvP grind. Well, sort of. It's true that the nefarious decay system is gone, but it's still a bit of a grind. I didn't start PvPing again with Sakuran until the nerf to honor, so I've all I've done is with the slower amount. Seems like I can pretty consistently get around 300 honor per hour (I'll ignore BG tokens as they are NOT, even remotely, a bottleneck). The first thing I grabbed was the Lieutenant Commander's Leather Shoulders (+17 STA, +1% hit, +1% crit, +22 AP). A nice upgrade from my Spaulders of the Unseen (+22 AGI, +7 STA). The cost was 4125 honor, or roughly 13-14 hours of PvPing, which is a decent amount. However the net bonus on the gear was +10 STA, +1% hit, and +.24% crit. Really doesn't look like much when you put it like that.

So, I'm looking at some other upgrades and I'm just not sure how convinced I am that I want them. My current headpiece is the Shadowcraft Cap (+20 AGI, +13 STR, +18 STA) and am looking to replace it with the Lieutenant Commander's Leather Helm (+23 STA, +1% crit, +1% hit, +36 AP) for a cost of 6375 honor and 30 AV tokens. So, we're looking at around 21 hours of work for a net improvement of 5 STA, .31% crit, 1% hit, 3 AP, and actually losing 1.43% dodge. Now, I suppose I could go for the Field Marshall's Mask (+27 AGI, +31 STA, +1% crit, +1% hit), but that's at a cost of 19125 honor or roughly 60 hours of work. With Burning Crusade 26 days away, why the heck would I do that? I do enjoy PvP, but not to the extent that I'll sink 2.5 days of my life into an upgrade that is going to be replaced within, I'd say, 3 months. Not worth. That being said, sinking 20 hours into a piece that will be replaced in 2 months is a little more reasonable, but just barely...

I think that, rather than sink my time into PvP, I'll again focus on my alts and try to level them. Repentant is still sitting at 36 waiting for some guildies to grind with (not that I can't grind on my own, but kinda promised I'd grind with them). Laic is at 43 and I think I have a decent shot of getting him to the mid-50's, or even 60, by the time BC hits. Who knows, stranger things have happened.

I <3 Mutilate

2006-12-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

So, here's a number crunchy explanation

MH Damage: 146-199, 95.6 DPS
OH Damage: 57-77, 44.8 DPS

Mutliate: 60 energy, instant attack with each weapon +88 (IIRC). +50% damage if opponent is poisoned. +20% damage from points in Subtlety. +30% crit damage from points in Assassination. Grants 2 CP.

So, without poison...
Base Mutilate: 487 damage
Mutilate with MH Crit: 999 damage
Mutilate with OH Crit: 796 damage
Mutilate with both Crit: 1297 damage
and with poison
Base Mutilate: 747.9damage
Mutilate with MH Crit: 1498 damage
Mutilate with OH Crit: 1194 damage
Mutilate with both Crit: 1944.54 damage

Now, I have around a 20% chance to crit, unbuffed. Since each weapons crit is calculated independantly I have a 64% that neither crit, 16% MH only, 16% OH only, and 4% that both crit. Taking that I get an average damage (crit included):

Mutilate w/o Poison: 658 damage
Mutilate w/ Poison: 987 damage

Also due to talents I have a 100% of getting an extra CP from any ability that grats CP that crits. With mutilate that means I have a 36% of getting a third CP.

So, as an opener I can do the following:
Energy Skill
110 Base
50 Cheap Shot
70 -tick-
10 Mutilate
30 -tick- Cheap Shot breaks
5 Kindey Shot (Find Weakness +10% damage, Improved Kidney Shot +9% damage)
25 -tick-
45 -tick-
65 -tick- Kidney Shot breaks
5 Mutilate
So, for those 10 seconds I've got my opponent locked down, and done roughly 1746 white damage and, on average, 658 damage from the first mutilate (assuming I didn't proc a poison off my initial hits) and 1086 damage off the second (presuming poison procced somewhere in there, taking into account the +10% damage bonus from Find Weakness). Grand total for damage is 3490.

None of the abilities listed above can be broke by damage, so I am free to use Deadly Poison V, which deals 136 damage over 12 seconds and stacks up to 5 times, for a total of nearly 680 damage over 12 seconds. With a full stack that's 113 damage per tick.

Now, if I wanted to I could Cold Blood that last mutilate to bring it's damage up to around 2139, pushing my total damage deal in that 10 seconds (not including poison damage) to around 4542 damage.

At this point my opponent is free, but DOT'd and crippled and I've got 3 CP :P

Patch Madness...

2006-12-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, as I'm sure everyone knows, yesterday was patch day. And what a crazy day it was. I got a few of my addons updated, most significant were Bartender and AG Unit Frames. Auctioneer is down for around two weeks, so I'll be doing no AH work in the near future...

It's funny going back to Vanilla WoW. I mean, I have my couple of addons, but so much is new again. Fubar was throwing errors, so I had to disable it. I really like the new talents, though I've very disappointed that some of the newer announced rogue talent changes didn't make it. It doesn't effect the build I'm using now, but it does effect my planned grinding build...

Of all the changes, the one I'm adapting the worst to is no longer being able to auto change pages on my hunter. The newest Bartender3 build appears to offer page swapping while holding down a modifier key, but it's still not the same thing. That being said, auto attack and auto shot interchanging is a wonderful change! Still going to have to figure out how to make this all work...

More as I know it... What are your impressions on the patch?

Addons for next week

2006-11-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

EDIT: I'm keeping this post up to date as I'll be directing people to it for info about my UI setup.

New Versions of stuff I'm using

Bartender 3 - replacing Bartender 2, which I'm currently enjoying
AG Unit Frames
oCB - simple cast bar replacement
Prat - All purpose chat mod
ElkBuffBar - Much nicer looking buff/debuff timers
OneBag and OneBank - as it sounds, consolidates your bags and bank.
GMail - Simply an Ace2'd version of CTMailMod.
FuBar - Says it's updated... But kept throwing errors last night.
ClearFont - simply replaces the default font in WoW to a much easier to read font.

Stuff that sounds interesting but I haven't played with yet.

Clique - As benecast and the like are going the way of the dodo, I think click casting is what we're left with
KC_Items - Looks like an ACE'd version of Auctioneer. I'll definitely give it a look-see.
ACE UI - cause comand line entry just plain sucks.

Stuff I really want replaced, but haven't found yet (well, I know where they are, but haven't found a WoW 2.0 version).

TheoryCraft - Such a great program. I love having the average damage for my abilities visible on my buttons. For healing it makes it much easier to select the right heal based on the damage sustained on my target.

I know there are lots that I"m leaving out, but that'll have to wait.

EDIT (12/13) - I am still getting a ton of errors form the addons on my laptop, having to disable several of them. I managed to get the Auctioneer beta, so I'm back to my usual AH routine. KC Items was nice, but I just couldn't manage to get it set up right. Bottom Scanner, packed with Auctioneer, is interesting, but I think it ultimately needs more work before I'll really try to mess with it.

What is particularly odd about this is that I get different errors after copying the addons folder directly from my Desktop. I'm not sure what is going on there, but may kill most of my saved variables folder and see if that helps.

Pwnd in RFC

2006-11-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

Now, I don't generally like to use 'l33t' speak, but I do feel it is appropriate in this instance. Last night Nascere (level 14 priest), Lugnut (level 14 Warrior), and Coberg (level 15 Hunter) tried RFC and got our butts kicked. None of us were well geared nor highly skilled at our class. The hunter's pet did a majority of the tanking, so Lugnut was short on Rage. We could handle the single and double pulls, but at three we wiped. My mana bar would run out about 3/4 of the way through the fight and I had many dead pets on my conscience :P N0t to mention a plethora of wipes or sprints to the instance portal. I am also responsible for training about 15 Troggs to us while getting ready to clear the cavern where the dead Tauren is...

Wrapped a few quests up with Laic but 40 still eludes me. I think I may have to just plug away and ignore everything else for a bit. Moved him over to Swamp of Sorrows as I read there is a decent quest chain there. If all else fails I'll just find a grind and do it.

WoW 2.0 is now announced for next Tuesday. I'm quite anxious for it as it looks to offer a TON of new stuff. Perhaps not new content (aka instances), but with new talents and spells it will feel like a content rich patch. I am really looking forward to an in-combat Wyvern Sting with Laic. Just think it will be sweet.

What part of the patch are you, faithful reader, excited about? Talent changes, UI changes, macro changes, new spells, new honor system, or something completely different?

So close...just couldn't finish

2006-11-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

So, I hopefully will ding 40 tonight with Laic. I planned on doing so last night but I hit a batch of very low motivation and after being in game for an hour while accomplishing NOTHING I gave up and logged off. Tonight is RP night and I am looking forward to some RFC goodness with Nascere. I have main healed very few instances so it will still be an educational experience for me. I am also not using any of the 'healer' addons as I want to learn to do it before WoW 2.0 lands. As I type this it occurs to me that I'm really learning to heal on my level 14 toon and not on my level 36. Just haven't done that much grouping with Repentant...

Speaking of WoW 2.0, I logged onto the test servers this AM just to play around a bit. After looking at the talents in front of me, Sakuran will be going 41/5/5 for PvP goodness until the expansion when she will be respeccing for something in a combat sword build, probably 11/40/0. Talent point at 61 would go to Surprise attacks and then go towards filling out the Assassination tree. I would imagine that I'll spec back to daggers when I hit 70. Swords>daggers for grinding, but daggers>swords for PvP.

Laic will certainly be going for 40 points in survival. The change to Aimed Shots just doesn't make it that important anymore (that change being that it resets your shot timer), it'll still be nice for an opening strike, but you'll not be seeing it used in combat anymore. I'm really looking forward to Wyvern Sting, which in BC can be used in combat. Got an add? Put it to sleep for 12 seconds, lay a trap and have a half dead mob by the time it gets to you. Also looks like my pet is getting a decent buff. Will have to really look at the numbers, but off the top of my head I'd say that the armor was up by about 200 points. Has anyone seen what the conversion is on hunter stats to pet buff?

On burnout, distractions, and the Burning Crusade

2006-11-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

So, I write this post after playing very little in the last week. A nice 4 day weekend would usually mean lots of WoW for me, but not so. In my last post I mentioned that I got my Wii on Wednesday, best console ever. I played it pretty exclusively Thursday and Friday. After literally huting my arms play Rayman Raving Rabbids I did take a bit of a break and play some WoW Friday night.

I have been enjoying my Forsaken Priest, Nascere who is now level 14. I think the quests in undead zone are about the only newb ones I haven't worked on, so that was a pleasent change. It's also odd to play on a server where you don't have piles of gold. I actually couldn't afford all my spells at level 14. 12s a piece and 5 spells means one broke priest. I find it shocking that I may need to start farming at level 14 :P

Later on that night I ended up assisting with a Deadmines run. Now, I could have just grabbed Sakuran and cleared it for the group, but instead I brought repentant and focused on healing. It was a decent run with minimal deaths until we got trained twice in a row heading up to VC. As it was very late I called it a night.

Saturday I went out of town to do some Christmas shopping and get our car looked at. Spent more money than planned, which is always fun, discovered that nobody on the face of the planet carries the Wii Nunchuk. That evening I logged Nascere for a bit finishing up a few quests.

Sunday after church I logged onto Lamentation and grouped with a buddy of mine, Reverenddan. We worked on the quest on the way to Menthil where they have you kill some orcs. Good fun. He's just learning to tank and pull so it was a bloody affair. Doesn't help that I go DPS crazy either... After that I logged Sakuran to run him through the stockades for a quest he had. Do I need to mention that I love 1-shot ambushing mobs? Lastly spent an hour or so on Laic questing in Arathi Highlands.

Later that evenging I went back to Lamentation to group with my buddy and actually got my wife to log Saian, her Warlock. The three of us made short work of the gnolls north of Lakeshire. After my wife logged (sleepy girl), Reverenddan and I spent forever working on the Redridge Goulash. I've got to say that the drop rates on the Though Condor Meat suck, plain and simple. Why, oh why, do those quest items have what feels like a 7% drop rate?

As I mentioned in my title, I'm feeling a bit of WoW burnout. I'm not really interested in doing anything with Sakuran as BC is just around the corner. Levelling alts is okay, but it feels kinda like work. Honestly I'm having a lot more fun with the Wii, so wouldn't be very surprised if I put WoW on the back burner till BC, or at least this new patch.

Thinking about patch builds

2006-11-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, as the patch is coming soon, I'm trying to think about what builds I go with once I have to respec. It also makes sense to plan these out till 70, so that's where I'll be doing with that

Sakuran will likely go 31/15/5 at 60 I'd level to 31/25/5 and likely respec depending on what my guild is doing at the time.
Repentant who is at 36 will go 0/0/26 with a goal of 20/0/41 at 70.
Laic, whose talents are a mess right now will go 0/0/29 with a goal of 0/21/40.

Those are the only of my characters that I've really given much thought to. As far as my Shaman, Warrior, and Mage are concerned what do the experts out there suggest for a level 70 build?

Illness, Guitar Hero 2, a Hunter, a Priest, and my Wii

2006-11-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, so been pretty crazy in RL recently. My son was very sick all of last week, had to take him to the ER and everything. Doing better now, but then my wife and I got sick, so fun all around.

Got Guitar Hero 2 for my birthday, I forget how much fun that game is. Two-player coop with Lead/Rhythm/Bass tracks is a blast, not to mention variable difficulties. So I can practice the Lead line on Expert while my wife tags along on Easy Bass. Should be a good time for a while. Don't knock Freebird, it's insanely hard there at the end.

Haven't played Sakuran much at all. I'm sure she'll lose Rank 8 today, which is fine. Been spending most of my time on Laic, got him from level 36 to nearly 39 in the last week. I would like him to hit 50 before BC lands, though that may be difficult. Never underestimate how freaking easy it is to grind with a hunter. Hunter's Mark-> Pet Attack->Aimed Shot-> Serpent Sting-> Feign Death-> Autoshot. Works every time.

Started a Forsaken Priest on our RP server, named Nascere. Backstory:

I was beautiful...once...

I have few memories of my life then...mostly I see images like a painting...my families estate...the Temple of the Light... Some things I only remember as a feeling, like the first time I saw the Light...such warmth and comfort... I was beautiful then, not that such things were important to me...but it is easier to be humble when you have it all...

When the Plauge came I saw my friends and family succumb...I fought with such ferocity I have never known...little difference it made... I spent an eternity as a slave to the Lich King, all I can recall from that time is the compulsion...the rage...the hunger... All my faith and training in the Light could not prepare me for that... For that eternity I saw not the Light, I felt not it's warmth, just the compulsion...

Upon awakening recently the compulsion was gone, though the aches of hunger remain... The Light is distant, though I can again catch a glimmer of it... I have wandered a great while in this shell... Where once I was beautiful, I am now little better than the mindless corpses that shamble about in graveyards on moonless nights, still slaves to the Lich King...still bound by the compulsion...

I have stuggled to feel the Light again...to feel it's warmth... Though I can still call upon the Light, it's power is no longer the comfort it once was... I can feel the power flow through my body...but it is no longer warm...no longer comforting... Perhaps as my very body and existance have been perverted by the Lich King...can he have perverted the Light against me? I know not the answers to such things...but I intend to find them...

I once walked in the Light, comforted by its warmth...and I have walked in the Shadow bound by the compulsion...now I walk between them, neither warmed by the Light nor bound in the Shadow... I exist in the penumbral regions...where scholars have yet to walk.

I was beautiful once...now I am Forsaken

Pretty fun playing new quests as this is offically my highest Forsaken character at level 9. I hope to get her to level 12 tonight so that I can join the RFC run that we're doing. Only played that instance once, and that was with Didgeridoo at level 21. Bit overpowered.

Lastly, my sister and her husband stood in line for 12 hours for the Wii on Saturday. As they are very nice people, they picked on up for me along with the new Zelda game. I will have to delay my gratification until Wednesday after work as they live 4 hours away and won't be here till then. Oh, the anticipation is killing me!

Having not owned a Nintendo system since the SNES (Gameboys not withstanding), I look forward to the simple pleasures of console gaming. Was hoping that Red Steel would get better reviews, but it looks like a rental at best. Seems odd that the reveiew are consistently at 50% or 75%, with little in between. So, guess you'll like it or hate it...

Second lastly: Blizzard did something odd this AM, not all servers went down for service, roughly half of them only received a rolling restart at 5 AM PST. I realy hope this is a sign of things to come as it would be nice to play on Tuesday mornings before work, least in some capacity. I know it sounds really sad to be upset about one morning of downtime, when I'm only really able to play for 30 min before work...

/castsequence

2006-11-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, this has to be one of the better posts on the Blizzard forums right now. It talks about all the new, cool things we get to do with our macros. If you scroll down to the 4th post though, you get ot discover this little gem:

/castsequence [options] reset=#/target/combat spell1, spell2, spell3

Yes, I am in love with this. This macro will simply give a button you can mash to cast a series of spells. Sophisticated? No. Effective? Yes.

The classes that gain the most benefit from this feature are those who utilize spell 'combos' a great deal. Though any class can find use for this I anticipate Shamans and Warlocks utilizing this to highest effect.

Why? Both classes use spell 'cycles' a great deal. Shamans habitually throw a great deal of totems, and frequently the same ones. This macro will give them one button to mash to 'stomp' their totems. Warlocks use a large number of spells on enemies upon entering combat, this will let them mash one button for all of their DOTs.

Other uses I can see vary on class. When Sakuran was combat specced it would have been nice to mash one button to cast Evasion, Blade Flurry, and Adrenaline Rush for pure mayhem. Repentant seems to cast the same three spells at the start of every encounter: Power Word: Shield, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay, Wand. Button mashing would simplify that.

One of the example that was mentioned in the original post was mages mashing Frost Nova and Blink. For PvP I am dreading that combo... Though a lazy rogue could have his stun lock broken into a couple of buttons

/castsequence reset=combat/target Cheap Shot, Sinister Strike, Gouge
/castsequence reset=combat/target Kidney Shot, Backstab, Blind

And so on and so forth. So, yeah, I can't wait for BC. Acutally, I can't wait for this next patch which is coming SOON!!! Okay, maybe like a month, but that works for me.

Regurgitation 11-16-06

2006-11-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Life in Azeroth is trying to cut back a little...
Mystic Worlds talks about why she plays WoW and how different that is from why her son plays.
Gitr talks about WoW Addiction, seems to be trend around the blogosphere.
Mark of the Wild has some musing on PvP post WoW 2.0.

Regurgitation 11-15-06

2006-11-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

Blessing of Kings got some decent loot recently.
Gitr dinged 37 last night.
Kinless contemplates what to do now that the PTRs are up.
Mark of the Wild hits Rank 7 with Phaser.
The Many Relms of Relmstein laments a ninja looter.
Inner Fire on enjoying raids.

Regurgitation 11-14-06

2006-11-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

I had originally planned this post to be on Friday of last week, so there's a lot of content.

Mystic Worlds is on the final stretch to 60, and later dinged.
Life in Azeroth has a lengthy post on "Old School Priests"
Mark of Wild hits Rank 7 and dings 60.
AFK Gamer has a series of "Where in the WoW" which I normally don't post, but this is a very cool one that I wasn't aware of.
Frostbolt has another raid roundup and talks about swapping professions.
Gitr talks about dinging 36 and hits the big time!
Mark of the Wild posts an Eye of the Storm preview.
Inner Fire talks about Shadow Priests in raids. As I'm leveling a Shadow Priest, I found it very informative.

What brings you here?

2006-11-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

So, as Gitr and Inner Fire have both asked, I too am asking: Why are you here? I guess I see my blog as a place for me to write down my thoughts about Warcraft, point out things I'm reading about Warcraft, and toss out ideas that I have. I'm curious though if people's expectations different a great deal from what I'm providing. So, please, let me know what you're here!

Been gone

2006-11-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the absence. My son has been very sick, though doing better now, so haven't been at work to post anything.

Also been playing Final Fantasy XII which is a blast, best game in the series IMHO.

Hit Rank 7 with Sakuran, so now the big decision of whether or not to continue to grind Honor with her. Also took Laic to Rank 1, been fun playing AB with him, though at 36 with mediocre gear his use is limited.

Hopefully get a decent sized post out soon, but wanted to let everyone know that I'm not dead and haven't quit WoW, which from the blogs perspective is the same thing...

Oh, to be a n00b again

2006-11-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

So, I got a buddy of mine to pick up WoW. He's never done a MMO before, and isn't very familiar with the universe. Last night I spent my game time showing him around and it really struck me how much I miss being new to the game.

Most of what I did was help him with quests and 'coach' him in the game. I also gave him a bit of a tour of the eastern continent. As he is a human I ran him up to Stormwind, took the Tram to Ironforge, and flew back to Stormwind. Yeah, it's a short tour, but remember how cool all that stuff was the first time you did it?

I made a point of telling him to look up while taking the tram. I remember being blown away with how cool that first ride was, now it just feels tedious. Before getting on the Gryphon back to SW I explained to him what we were going to do and he replied "Flyyyy???". I had forgot how cool it was to fly from SW to IF, how scary the Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge were, how 'accomplished' I felt when I actually made it there with Sakuran. Now, I don't even think about it.

It's kind of frustrating to realize how those little things are what got me 'into' WoW, and now I don't even see them. I actually called my wife over and made her watch my first IF-SW flight. It was soooo cool. I remember the first time I went to SW from Goldshire, I literally stopped and stood in awe of the statues. Now, I'm usually auto-running and can't wait to hit the AH.

Sigh...

There are so many things that I remember being blown away by in Warcraft, and now it just feels so...normal.

EDIT: What were some of the things that made your jaw drop when you first started playing? Share below, I think it would interesting to figure out if there are some 'common' things that just floored everyone.

Regurgitation 11-9-06

2006-11-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

Gitr offers Part 2 of his Priests Guide to Deadmines and posts his wishlist.
Mystic Worlds talks about pre-BC endgame boredom.
Team Kinless runs into a rough PvP night.
Enough with the Horde losses! Or, if you are going to keep losing, do so consistently! Team Kinless for the win!
Tobold talks about the lengthened leveling curve in BC.

Regurgitation 11-08-06

2006-11-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Inner Fire finished her Priest Healing Guide.
WoW Insider has some interesting information on PvP statistics, including average rank per class and amount of time spent in-game per rank.
Blessing of Kings offers further analysis on SoC vs SotC.
Some commenters have questioned the tradeoff in the last post. I don't deny that you do give up a significant amount of damage by not using SoC. To my mind, though, the added flexibility and regeneration of SotC make up for it.
Frostbolt talks about downing Patchwork.
Gitr offers the start of a Priest's Guide to Healing Deadmines and an example of how not to endear yourself to your Priest.
Mark of the Wild rakes up the DK's in Lakeshire:
Well your server is going to be offline for 36 hours, so what do you do? I say rack up a bunch of DKs on your old toon!
Tales of a WoW Addict has fun with a Warlock Alt.
Tobold talks about the differences between PvE builds and PvP builds and then advocates for a cheaper respec cost.

Rank 7...actually no...Rank 6, still

2006-11-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I was pretty sure that my title today would be "Rank 7 FTW", but when I logged on to check my rank, I was 95% though Rank 6. I'm pretty bummed as I was really looking forward to getting a few pieces of my PvP armor. Ah, another week...

I'm currently contemplating if I still want to try and hit Rank 8. At my current pace (~90,000 honor last week) it will take me three weeks. That being said, I'm thinking that it might be nice to do anything in game aside from BG's with Sakuran.

So, Rank 7 next week for sure, beyond that...who knows...

Regurgitation 11-07-06

2006-11-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

Going to do something a bit different. I'll post regurgitation after my morning reading, rather than waiting for the end of the day. Anything that pops during the day will get queued for tomorrow's post. It's too easy for me to forget to actually publish the post before I leave from work. If you can think of a better way for me to do this, let me know. Oh, and I"m quoting, when appropriate, from the posts I'm linking to now, give it a bit more of a chunky feel.

Blessing of Kings challenges the notion that slow weapons are better for paladins.
It's for these reasons that I feel that Seal of the Crusader is actually the best Seal for a raiding paladin. It's not as spectacular as Seal of Command, but it is far more consistent, and allows a paladin to use her other abilities to larger effect.
Gitr's WoW Blog is down at the moment. The RSS feed seems to still work though, here's what I got off his last post, since you can't go view it...
I broke the stinking theme AGAIN!! After all that work, too. I’m getting a parse error for an extra ‘**DESCRIPTION**#8217; on a line that doesn’t have an ‘**DESCRIPTION**#8217; and it’s really ticking me off. So I’m switching to this theme. It’s really cool, except for the issue that it is supposed to be 3-columns. So, it will be up and down and colors all funky, but should get better all day long. When the blogroll splits into my categories and slides over from underneath the other column, you know I’m learning something.
My car is running on 3 cylinders today after a spark plug gasket blew yesterday, so it’s time to replace the whole kit. I’ll be leaving after lunch, so we’ll see how much blogging I get done.
Kinless contemplates AV, Black Dragon Scales, and bots. I actually typed boats the first time, but that would be just wrong...
Mark of Wild contemplates what to do with extended down time.
Stropp discusses Warcraft addiction:
What would I be doing if I didn’t play WoW?

I guess I’d be watching a lot more TV, I think a lot of other WoWers would be doing this if they quit.

I’d probably go out and buy a couple of other games that I’ve had my eye on. I might read a little more.

I doubt if I’d go out socialising much more than I already do. I’m a bit of a home-body anyway, playing a game or not playing it wouldn’t change that.
Tobold has more BC beta goodness:
[T]he Burning Crusade challenges my perception of what exactly a level is. I might be "leveling" twice as fast as I thought, depending on how you define it.
Zenos and Zarina sound like they may be phasing out of Warcraft.

BG screenshots from last weekend

2006-11-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

A few screenshots from the last weekend. Certainly not a complete detailing of my weekend, but the highlights.

A very long, but ultimately successful WSG.
A longish AV.
A shortish AV.
A losing AB, but what was fun about this is that I ran straight to the farm, stealthed, beat up a mage, capped the flag, beat up the mage again, then got swarmed by the Horde. Gotta love cold-blood ambush.
Was able to fill out a partial premade who proceeded to whump the opposition. Pretty sure this was the same premade I group with last week.
Then I caught them in WSG and enjoyed winning with them again.
Lastly a PUG WSG where the Alliance actually played to win, and, well, won.

Regurgitation 11-06-06

2006-11-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

Another weekend update.

Frostbolt has another raid round up and shows off a bit :P.
Gitr has Staff of Jordan lust, and rounds has some good blog roundups.
Kinless dings Exalted with his third character, and here I am bragging about hitting it for the first time.
Relmstein has a WoW class wishlist. Necromancer FTW!
Stropp has a rough Molten Core run and unbearable queues.
Tales of a WoW Addict has a new layout.
Tobold responds to Warcraft Addiction and major leveling nerf in beta.
World of Warcraft Addict talks about, wait for it, Warcraft addiction.
Zenos and Zarina talk about a guild schism.
Inner Fire talks about professions and an RP Raid (I know, oxymoron :P)
WoW Insider offer a preview of Nagrand and also discusses the grinding nerf.

Role Play

2006-11-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Okay, after being inspired by Kinless' Chronicles I've got my guild doing a RP night on Twisting Nether. I'm kinda nervous about it, because as much experience as I have with RP games, I'm not a very good at RP. I'm great at coming up with backstory, but being IC is really hard for me. That being said it looks like a lot of people are interested in it, posting the backstories on the forums and such. I'm hopeful that it will be another fun thing for the guild to do together.

That being said, here's part 1 on my Tauren Shaman Magankan:

Magankan, a Shaman of the Skychaster Tribe.

At first impression, Magankan appears older than he really is. While barely out of his adolescence, Magankan has seen more than many Tauren twice his age. Somewhat cold in affect with a distant gaze, Magankan often comes across as aloof, which is not the case. Rather, Magankan has seen the death of those close to him and that sense of loss is never far from him.

Magankan was named after a Great Tauren of the Skychaser tribe. Long before the formation of the Horde, before the Burning Legion invaded Azeroth, before even the Orcs came from beyond the Dark Portal; the Tauren warred with the foul Centaur. While the Tauren had Strength and Honor on their side, the centaur perverted nature and used it as a weapon, nay a slave.

The mightiest of the Tauren Shaman, Magankan, called out to the uncorrupted spirits of the land and asked them to strike down the foul Centaur that balance might be restored. That day fire and stone rained from the sky and destroyed the bulk of the centaur forces. However, the cost of vicotry was more than Magankan could bear. Many spirits had sacrificed themselves that they might free their bretheren from corruption. Those that remained always felt the searing heat of that flame and the weight of that stone. All of Magankan's descendants shared a charred black hide, that they might never forget the sacrifices that were made that day.

The young Magankan was raised with the knowledge that his was part of a noble line. His parents strove to live up to the expectations of their heritage. It was only natural that when the centaur rose up again, this time in a land known as Desolace, his parents were among the first to go and push back the Centaur. Again the Skychaser stopped the centaur, though also with great cost. Both of Magankan's parents fell to the centaur, though not before taking a great many with them.

Yes, it's kinda cheesy, but hey, it's my toon :P Anytime I role play I end up with some dark depressed character and I really suck and playing mopey, you'd think I'd learn from my mistakes, but people just don't do that. If we did, Cowboys wouldn't wear cotton pants.

Return of the laptop

2006-11-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

So, my laptop arrived today, which I am very excited about. As much fun as I'm having with PvP, I think I actually have more fun playing a level 5 Druid with my wife's level 5 Shaman. It's very nice being able to play the game with her instead of just staring at the computer while she goes about her evening.

Oh, and WoW while laying in bed with insomnia is not to be underestimated :P. Though who knows if WoW is helping or causing my insomnia. Much like the great line in Twin Peaks:

James: Why did you start smoking?
Donna: It helps relieve tension.
James: When did you get so tense?
Donna: When I started smoking.

Something along those lines, though no doubt I'm butchering the line. As I mentioned before though, PvP with the laptop is a mixed bag. AB and WSG run okay, but AV is almost out of the question, certainly can't try to play D with it.

Backstabber!

2006-11-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I went ahead and respecced for backstab and, I've got to say, I love it. I ended up with 31/8/12, and have no regrets. It's amazing how much it is making me relearn my class. As I was leveling I never really used daggers, think I specced swords from level 15, so I never really messed with backstab and gouge. Now that I am using it, WOW, what fun :P

Playstyle for a sword rogue is really quite simple, use your opener, mash the Sinister Strike button till you have 5CP and pop your finisher. Rinse, repeat. Now I've got to actually PAY ATTENTION while playing: Cheap Shot, Sinister Strike, Gouge, restealth, Ambush, Kidney Shot, Backstab... It's L2P all over again!

Oh, and seem to be much more effective in PvP, it's much easier for me to solo opponents and I'm occasionally able to take out two, provided my sap holds on the first.

Regurgitation 11-3-06

2006-11-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

Blessing of Kings bemoans a lack of Paladin drops.
Gitr: [sarcasm]Are guns bad?[/sarcasm]. Also had some PvP fun last night. In addition, offers an [sarcasm]apology[/sarcasm] regarding a previous post. So many posts in one day :P
Tobold talks about the lack of real skill needed in leveling tradeskills.
Inner Fire offers a Priest's Guide to Molten Core.
Adventures of Aeigelus offers the Guide to Hunters in Raids/Dungeons.

AV Exalted - so close...

2006-11-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

So, Sakuran is less that 800 points away from AV exalted. I was expecting to hit it last night, but had one of those AV's where nobody turned in their loot. For anyone out there who does AV, if you don't plan on porting and dropping stuff off, DON'T LOOT. A lot of rep comes from people turning that stuff, and as far as I can tell, everyone in the raid benefits from it. So, please, turn in your loot if you are looting.

That being said, tonight better mean AV exalted. I plan on buying Don Julio's Band and the mount right off the bat and then grabbing The Lobotomizer when I have a bit more gold. After grabbing the dagger, I'm thinking of respecing for backstab, but I'm not quite sure. I've never played as a Backstab Rogue, and am not sure if I'll adapt very well. I love Seal Fate though, so I'll certainly be trying to keep that...

Currently leaning towards 30/8/13. I'll gain a real high chance of critting on Backstab and Ambush, for lots of damage. I'm going to lose a lot of white damage, Riposte, and Blade Flurry. Now that I think some more, prehaps 31/8/12 is better... So much to think about...

Regurgitation 11-2-06

2006-11-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

Working away from my desk this afternoon, so here's what I've got. Bit shorter than usual...

Gitr talks about leveling in the low 30's.
Mark of the Wild has a great post on getting to know your guild.
Mystic Worlds talks about Alterac Valley.

Thank you Gitr

2006-11-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

After being mentioned as one of Gitr's top 7+1 Warcraft Blogs I had a pretty significant increase in traffic. Has as many unique visitors (who accepted the cookie) yesterday as the prior three days and as many page loads as I'd had all week. Pretty amazing what one post can do to your page count.

That being said it was pretty humbling being mentioned in the same paragraph as the blogs I'm reading daily. I'll try to keep the content coming.

Regurgitation 11-1-06

2006-11-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Frostbolt recounts the last few raids, and may be taking an unwilling break from raiding.
Gitr is grinding away. Also has a list of his Top 7+1 Warcraft Blogs. Pretty elite company there :P
Kinless discusses the future of PvP rewards.
As does Tobold
AFK Gamer designs the ultimate MMO city.
Relmstein talks about Fear.

Shock and Horror - Victory in AB and WSG

2006-11-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that title right. Won AB (which if fairly unusual) and WSG (which is very rare) in the same day. Was a crazy night.

Victory in AB.
Victory in WSG.
Xelzozier and I guarding a flag.
Mythor and I screwing around in SW.

Unfortunately I had to give up my AV queue for the WSG victory, so no CE turn in for me...

Regurgitation 10-31-06

2006-10-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Gitr talks about depression of WoW players, then segues into playing with people in RL.
Tobold talks about 'luxury' servers, interesting idea.
WOW Insider asks if you care about the Lore.
Mark of the Wild discusses Honor inflation on AV weekend.

Survey says....Knight

2006-10-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm 40% through Knight. Acutally I'm a bit surprised that I'm not farther into the Rank given the mass of honor I earned. I ran over to the officers quarters, but didn't have time to really look around (lunch time WoW...). I'm curious as to how much RP I actually received, and if there is a average amount of honor per RP. I know that the higher you rank, the longer it takes, but I always figured it was due to decay, not any decrease in the honor-RP conversion.

So, hopefully I'll be able to get some good PvP time in this week and make it to Rank 7 and new gear. I also think I'll hit exalted with AV pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow night (Halloween plans are going to conflict with a lot of honor/rep gain tonight).

More honor

2006-10-31T07:04:00.000-07:00

Had some more fun with PvP last night. Grabbed a couple of screenshots to show off the highlights

Managed to join a pre-made that proceeded to 5 cap the Horde. Was beautiful.
Later was in a very, very close AB. Managed to win by 10 points, just as the Horde grabbed one of our flags. I'm not sure how it could have been closer.

Okay, this last one isn't based on PvP, but was a bit of guild humor. The lesson one should learn is to always remember when tormenting officers, we have the power of the /gkick. Pay particular attention to the lower left corner of the screen (where my guild chat is).

Ah the nuggets of humor in the mounds of drama...

100k Honor and counting

2006-10-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

After a long, long day of PvP on Saturday, and a bit yesterday, I have 100,000 honor. That should be enough to put me up to Rank 6. I'm guessing that it will translate to 9,000 CP, which after decay should be enough to put me well into Rank 6.

AV honor weekend is crazy fun. As I try to save my tokens for Concerted Effort turn ins I need to get into a lot of AB and WSG. I think I'm currently sitting on 15 AV tokens and maybe 1 each for WSG and AB. Question of the day: do I continue to hold onto the tokens for CE effort or turn in everything tonight to try and boost my honor as high as possible? I'm leaning towards the latter as I'm usually able to get enough AB and WSG tokens for one AV a night, and I've yet to see AV be the bottleneck.

Also speaking of AV, Exalted is getting close, only around 8,000 rep to go. I'm sure I'll finish that up this week sometime.

Regurgitation 10-30-06

2006-10-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

Didn't post over the weekend, so this will be a bit longer than normal.

Aeigelus is raiding again.
Blessing of Kings talks about Razorgore (again) and Spiritual Focus.
Kinless had a long AV weekend.
Mark of the Wild discusses unusual luck (for Alliance) at AB.
Mystic Worlds respecced Holy (for shame :P)
Tobold discusses the BC Beta and PUG Raids.
Inner Fire has a "Funny Airline Speach"

Regurgitation 10-27-06

2006-10-27T16:06:00.000-06:00

Gahlok @ Frostbolt clearing Naxx.
Gitr, survived the wedding.
Kinless has led the Horde to, gasp, AV victory!
Thinking with my Fingers has a very enlightened post about 'addiction' and Warcraft.
AFK Gamer offers some [sarcasm]tips[/sarcasm] for those new to raiding
Relmstein discusses the importance of positioning in raid encounters.

Back on the saddle again...

2006-10-27T09:11:00.000-06:00

Okay, so finally got to spend some time in game. Seems like I've hardly been on this week. Got some PvP and aided in a LBRS raid (link to a write up on the new COTL blog :P). Going to try and get back to a minimum of 70k honor a week and hit rank 7 soon, and 8 shortly there after. As my goal per day is roughly 10k honor, it seems that one concerted effort turn in gets me there. It would be nice if that turn it could be something other than 3 WSG losses, 3 AB losses, and an AV win. The occasional AB win does 'spice it up', but I think I've only seen two WSG wins in the last month. Very frustrating...

After reading Kinless' site for a while, I think it would be really interesting to RP a character. Not sure I'd enjoy in-game RP, but out of game RP (similar to what Kinless is already doing) could be cool. Perhaps I'll propose something like that to the guild and see what happens.

Still want to get Repentant leveled, but that's a secondary endeavor to hitting rank with Sakuran.

Regurgitation 10-26-06

2006-10-26T08:21:00.000-06:00

Blessing of Kings downed Ragnaros again and discusses the 'nerfing' of Crusader Strike and Vengence.
Tobold talks about jewlecrafting and a buggy instance in BC.
AFK Gamer informs us that Madonna is in WoW, and she's a raided out forsaken priest. Talk about Will of the Forsaken...
Gahlok, of Frostbolt fame, plays with Patchwork.
Relmstein discusses the negative effects of buying gold in WoW.

Regurgitation 10-25-06

2006-10-25T15:19:00.000-06:00

Well it occurred to me that I read a lot of great stuff on other Warcraft blogs. It also makes sense to me to direct you to those other great blogs. While the link on the side of my screen are there, i think I'm going to occasionally highlight some for you. As it's nothing new, I think Regurgitation is an appropriate, if unglamorous, title. So, here goes Regurgitation for October 25th, 2006.

Gahlok over at Frostbolt downed C'Thun for the first time. Congratulations!
Two posts from Kinless, the first is an IC back story for he and his partners Forsaken characters. The second is an OOC account of playing a warlock and priest pair. As always, great reading.
Tobold has an interesting post on the 'content patch' that we're assured will hit before the expansion. One mistake is that the current top of the trees is 41 points, not 51 as is mentioned in the post. I may just be misreading it...If I see new stuff during the day I will update this post.

Speaking of October 25th, I wanted to take a moment to tell Meghan, my RL wife, that I love her. We've been married three years today and I look forward to many, many more. Now if only she'd read my blog.

Thoughts on the BC release date

2006-10-24T13:01:00.000-06:00

Well, as I'm sure you're aware, the BC release date is out. Looks like sometime in January 2007. Honestly, I should have anticipated it, but I had convinced myself that we were looking at the end of November/beginning of December. So it'll be another 6 weeks from my best guess.

As mentioned in my last post I had been wondering why I was busting my butt with a PvP grind with stuff that would be outdated very soon after getting it. As such I had devoted my weekend to leveling my priest instead. Only got around 25k honor, which I'm sure will result in a loss of rank. Now that I know that I'm looking at two months minimum till BC, I think I'll go ahead and try to get to rank 8. Still going to try and level my priest, but that will no longer be my sole objective.

Of course there are always guild runs that need assistance, so who knows how successful I'll be in those endeavors.

So my pre-BC wishlist is as follows:

Sakuran - AV Exalted (hello Lobotomizer)
Sakuran - PvP Rank 8
Repentant - level 60
Laic - level 50+

Yes, that's a lot of wishful thinking, but I would really like to have a few toons to try the Outlands with.

Post-BC plan

Explore Outlands with whatever toons I can
Explore new 5-man instances ASAP
Roll a F Draeni Shaman
Roll a M Draeni Warrior

Just some rambling. Nothing new to report.

Now, why exactly am I doing this?

2006-10-20T09:51:00.000-06:00

So, last night it occured to me that I was on a grind that will be meaningless in two months. I had set a goal to reach Rank 8 before BC hits as I wanted the 4 pieces of the blue PvP set. After reading a number of posts about the gear that is dropping in the BC beta, it looks like Rank 7 and 8 gear would only last me a few levels. So why exactly am I grinding 2-3 hours a night for honor?

It also appears that a number of raiders are experiencing the same feelings I am. Why bust your butt in MC/BWL/AQ40/Naxx when that gear is going to be replaced fairly soon? The AQ40/Naxx gear should last you till near 70, so I imagine folks in those instances will continue to slog through them The rest of us who are looking at superior greens in the first BC dungeons have to ask ourselves, why am I grinding?

That being said, I have enjoyed PvP and don't plan to drop it all together, but I am not going to concern myself with getting X amount of honor per night/week. I'll still queue a bunch on Saturday and Sunday, but anticipate that a majority of my in-game time will be spend trying to get some of my lower level alts up in level so that I can experience the new content from a variety of perspectives.

FuBar vs TitanPanel

2006-10-17T10:51:00.000-06:00

Okay, been using FuBar on my laptop for the last month or so instead of TitanPanel, and I think I'm going to convert. Had to say what the difference is, but I just think the features are superior. From what I've read it sounds like fubar utilizes less system resources as well, which is always nice.

What do y'all use and why?

1680x1050 goodness

2006-10-17T10:49:00.000-06:00

Origionally posted on my guilds website.

Here's what I've got my UI looking like at 1680x1050

A few explanations as my screenshot really doesn't show it off as much as it could. Bottom left chat frame is just the system information (people logging on, etc.) without any chat channels. Bottom right chat frame is guild/party/raid/whispers. Beneath my minimap is my combat log, gotta see those big 5 point Cold Blood Eviscerates :P

The bar to the left of the minimap is my default bar which obviously switches when I stealth. The bar to the right alternates between an in combat bar and an out of combat bar. The Professions button right of that toggles a new bar with all my professions. As I now have more space I'm thinking of moving to two bars on left and two on the right without swapping for in combat and out.

Unit frames are a custom job utilizing Discord Unit Frames. The artwork at the bottom is from Discord Art. Action bars as Discord Action Bars. Moved the minimap and other things via Discord Frame Modifier.

Not visiable are CT colored buffs (stole from the Photek UI), enemy cast bars (Natur I think), KLH Threat Meters, and my ArcHud.

Well, aside of a few minor changes I think this is about how I want it. Whatcha think?

Sorry for the delay

2006-10-17T10:47:00.000-06:00

Well, Saturday AM my laptop died (don't know why). Still under warrenty, so is getting sent in for a replacement. Of course this left me without a computer that could run WoW all weekend. Got my 20" LCD last night so I'm back. Had a couple of lengthy posts on my guild forums that I'm copying and posting here, as they're just as valid here as there.

Enchanter run

2006-10-13T10:32:00.000-06:00

Mae the 225+ enchanting run for the first time with Repentant. Quite the pain for those who haven't done it. You have to get someone to clear the front of Uldaman for you and hope you have enough mats to get to 250 so you don't have to go again. Unfrotunately I wasn't prepeared and only levelled to 230 in there, meaning I'll have to go through it again. Oh well. Live and learn. Hopefully as I level tailoring and I can DE my products and get my tailoring to 250 before I go back. I despise that instance with a passion and set foot in there as little as possible.

Weirdness

2006-10-12T13:46:00.000-06:00

Okay, I take lunch at my parents house as it is close to my work and my own home is far enough away to make going home impractical. Normally I meet my wife and son there, but today they stayed home. As I had an hour with littel to do I logged on and got into a WSG PUG.

Then the strangest thing happened, we won 3-0. First WSG victory I've seen in maybe the last 10 matches.

What made it weirder is that I was pretty far up the charts, and my UI was all messed up. I am a bit of an addon junkie and run with a pretty customized interface. Not just flash and bang, but a lot of utility type stuff. Running without that makes me feel pretty naked. So it was odd ending doing better than I normally do with half of my 'tools'.

As odd as this is, I think it can be safely attributed to a horrible Horde PUG.

BC Rogue changes

2006-10-11T13:34:00.000-06:00

So, Drysc posted the following here:

The rogue ability and talent preview for the Burning Crusade expansion has been live for a while, and after collecting your questions and feedback we wanted to provide you with the answers to the most common of those questions and concerns. We realize that this may not cover every question that you have; however we hope that it comprises of the majority of major questions and concerns.

We wanted to first state that we are currently in the process of redesigning or adjusting many of the rogue talents and some of the new abilities. We wanted to state this first as many of the concerns specific to the current talents won’t necessarily apply as they are currently under revision. The questions we have provided answers for below remain more specific to functionality of talents and abilities, and not necessarily on the side of providing information on the talent and ability design and reasoning, as many of them are already planned to be changed.

We’ve seen some concerns that the increased emphasis on stamina in the expansion may negatively impact the ability to do damage quickly or keep incapacitate effects applied sufficiently throughout an entire fight. We do expect that crit-based builds for all classes are going to see a general “rounding” of the effectiveness of burst damage, but from our current testing the rogue class is transitioning quite well into the expansion. We’re of course going to be keeping an eye on everything and making additional changes and adjustments as we see become necessary.

There have been some questions on Resilience, which is a new crit mitigation stat visible and modifiable in the expansion. The impact of this stat has been changed and now balances the mitigation between damage reduction and crit resistance. This allows more crits so that abilities depending on them are still viable, but may reduce the damage of the crit still making resilience a worthy stat. We’re going to be continuing to evaluate this mechanic and make any necessary adjustments moving forward.

One question that came up quite a few times was how Mutilate will work with Seal Fate. Mutilate, although combining the attacks of two weapons, is only counted as a single attack and thus only gains a single combo point from Seal Fate. The most combo points you can gain from a Mutilate attack/crit with Seal Fate would be three. Although mutilate is counted as a single special attack each weapon is rolled for separately, meaning each has the ability to crit on its own.

We’re currently in the process of redesigning Disembowel. We still plan to keep the synergy with poison application to some degree, but we’re currently designing it to use up the poison applications to apply additional damage..

New poison ranks will be available in the expansion for those that already scale. We have no new poisons currently planned beyond Anesthetic.

We’re going to look at the possibility of increasing application charge amounts for the various types of poisons.

Mutilate and Shiv are both affected normally by the off-hand damage reduction modifier, but are also affected by dual wield specialization.

Find Weakness works as stated and only increases damage of offensive abilities (yellow damage) and not normal auto-attacks.

With our current implementations poisons will affect the vast majority of bosses in the expansion.

A new mechanic is being introduced with the release of the expansion that will visually indicate to a rogue that a monster is able to detect or see through stealth.

There is a cap on run speed, and Fleet Footed would max out that cap regardless of what else was increasing your run speed. You won’t be able to stack multiple ‘increase to run speed’ modifiers beyond the max 8% increase.

The mechanic of thrown weapons is being changed in the expansion to be similar to a normal weapon. Once a stack is used it will remain in your inventory and can then be repaired to refill the stack, similar to repairing broken armor or weapons. This allows us to put stats on thrown weapons and itemize them as we would any other weapon.

Although we recently removed the ability for poisons and other temporary item buffs to persist through zones due to performance issues, we believe we have overcome those technical limitations and plan to have the functionality re-implemented for the expansion.

Thank you everyone for remaining active on the boards and taking the time to submit your questions and concerns. As we move into future talent and ability updates we hope to be able to address any more that you have. Thanks for reading!

Nothing too specific at this point, but it is interesting to see the direction Blizzard is taking the rogue, particularly the mention of "redesigning or adjusting many of the rogue talents".

I may have to respec to take daggers as:
Cheap Shot->(tick)->Seal Fate->Mutilate=5 CP in two seconds

Hunter changes

2006-10-10T14:59:00.000-06:00

As Blizzard and a number of blogs have reported, the hunter talents and skills are out. There is a leaked list of pet abilities out there, but I'm going to avoid comment until Blizzard "officializes" them (yes, I made that word up).

Of note today is a post where Blizzard discusses a number of changes to the formulae that the hunter uses to calculate damage, dodge, and crit. What strikes me immediately is that Hunters are going to become much more viable in melee than previous. They're crit chance should be equivilant to a rogues and they'll acutally have a pretty decent chance to dodge. The reduction of RAP to 1 per Agility should have interesting effects as it will require massive reitemization, though I've yet to deduce how they'll do it. Oh, ranged DPS shouldn't change much as they are going to up the damage on ranged weapons significantly, which will actually help non-hunters also as ranged attacks will actually be somewhat useful for anything other than pulling.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm looking forward to the expansion and all the changes that will come with it.

Rank 4 and LCD woes

2006-10-10T13:15:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I had the day off yesterday (Yeah for silly government holidays) and was going to grind some honor and AV rep. I come downstairs and sit down at the computer only to find my LCD is dead. Well, not completely dead, only mostly dead. It will turn on for all of two seconds only to die again. Researching the problem it's somekind of inverter that has died and cost of repair is nearing $200. So I said what the heck and started shopping for new moniter as I am reluctant to throw that kinda money into a 4.5 year old moniter. Ended up settling on an Acer 20" widescreen, which I will order tonight after we sort through the bills.

What does any of the above have to do with Warcraft? Well it meant that my honor grinding was done on my laptop which made it much more challenging. I'm so used to having the numeric keypad that its absence was very noticable. I'll probably just set my laptop up with my keyboard tonight and remap all my keys so I can get some kinda grind going on. Haven't tried AV on the laptop and I'm kinda scared to try. It's not the most powerful computer and gets bogged down pretty easily by WoW. Not to mention that I can now not group with my wife as we are down to one machine. Very unfortunate as this is one of the funner elements of the game for me. Pray my moniter gets here soon.

Logged in at lunch today to see that I made Rank 4, which was a pleasent surprise. Even with camping over the weekend and a dead LCD, I was able to get 90k honor in. Will have to check it from home tonight to get some sort of an idea how long I can expect to hit Rank 7. All I'm hoping for is 1 Rank a week. If I have to step it up, I suppose I can. 15k honor in a night isn't too hard to get. My plan is to get one Concerted Effort turnin per day. Assuming I am able to win AV that is. Then again haven't lost AV yet, so who knows. But 3 AB and 3 WSG is pretty decent hon0r and winning AV is great honor. The bonus from the turn in is just plain gravy.

Leveled Repentant to 35 last night. Will probably level tailoring until I run out of vendor recipies. Then I'll start saving up enchanting supplies so I can hopefully get all my vendor recipies form Uldaman in one fell swoop. 40 is within spitting distance now, so I'll proably focus on leveling him when I'm not PvPing with Sakuran.

Mediocre PvP night

2006-10-06T13:16:00.000-06:00

Well last night was not the PvP night I was hoping for. I was on for a little bit right after work, but ended up in a Stratholme run until 7:00 when I had promised my wife I would watch My Name is Earl and The Office with her (wonderful episodes BTW). So I get back on at 8:00 and head over to the SW Chapel for an in-game service (which was wonderful BTW). That wrapped up at around 9:00, with my queue for AV popping shortly their after.

AV was horrible. The Alliance was fighting for SH making it impossible to get the Horde away from FW, and with all the combat around SH, I couldn't even stealth past without getting ganked by half a dozen Horde. That persisted for about 20 minutes when I heard my son fall and hurt himself, so I go upstairs to see if he's okay. I'm up there for a fair bit and when I come back to my computer it logs me off as /afk as soon as my butt hit my chair. So that put me at about 9:45 with 15 minutes of deserter debuff, which prevents you not only from entering a BG, but even from entering the queue! So it would be 10:00 before I could even enter the queue, which would put me at around 10:10 before getting into a BG. As I had to work this AM I gave up and went to bed. Very frustrating.

Ended up with a measly 3k honor for the day.

Duos

2006-10-05T14:52:00.000-06:00

Been thinking a bit about the best class combination for a duo to play. First thing that comes to mine is Warrior/Priest, which is wonderful, but unoriginal. So this got me thinking of what every group really need:

DPS
Damage reduction
healing
crowd control

So, the Warrior/Priest combo can do very well at three of these areas, but are week in crowd control (undead aside). What about other classes? Rather than using my brain I reference the Class page on Wowwiki and came up with the following (not taking into account talent builds):

Druid

Great Healing and Tanking
Decent DPS
Situational CC

Hunter

Great DPS and CC
No Healing and limited Tanking

Mage

Great DPS and CC
No Healing or ability to Tank

Paladin

Great Tanking
Decent Healing
Limited DPS and CC

Priest

Great Healing
Capable DPS
Situational CC and no Tanking.

Rogue

Great DPS
Decent CC
Limited Tanking and no Healing

Shaman

Decent DPS, Healing, and Tanking
Limited CC

Warlock

Decent DPS
Pet can Tank
Situational CC
No Healing

Warrior

Great DPS and Tanking
No Healing or CC

Looking at the list above the only classes that are Decent or better in three areas are Druid and Shaman. Now other classes can compensate through talent builds for added strength in specific areas. For alliance I would look at substituting Hunter for Shaman as the Hunter has great DPS and CC and has a pet that can easily Tank if the Druid is Healing.

Should it be any coincidence that my wife and I just rolled a Shaman and Druid to play together?

Rank 3

2006-10-04T16:36:00.000-06:00

Logged on yesterday to find that my 70k honor was good enough to net me Sergeant (Rank 3). Quite a move up form Rank 0. Just goes to show you how much easier honor gain is at 60 than any prior levels. My current plan is to shoot for Rank 7 and 70-100k honor per week. I'll have to wait for next Tuesday to determine if I'll have to step it up higher or not. My concern is that BC should go live in the next 6-10 weeks and I'd like to have what I want from the Honor/Rep system before it all resets.

Oh, and incase anyone didn't know, when turning in honor marks from the BGs, save up for the big turn in as it is the best Honor and Rep gain.

As far as actual play is concerned, last night was awesome. Was in two winning AB games and one shut out WSG. Amazing what communication and teamwork can do for you. I even had one flag run. Didn't get into AV, but that was okay. Was more fun to get into a group with a couple of guildies for AV anyway.

PvP

2006-10-02T09:59:00.000-06:00

Okay, so Friday night I started PvPing for the first time on Sakuran. I'd done the odd 10-19 WSG with other toons and it realy wasn't much fun, so my expectations weren't high. I certianly didn't expect to have the blast that I ended up having. I did AB and AV primarily of the weekend and ended up with some significant progress. I got ~70k honor from Friday night through Sunday night (which I'm told is fairly good) and ended up 10% into Honored with Stormpike.

One oddity I noticed is that while the Alliance sucks, I mean sucks, at AB and WSG, we won every single AV. I don't understand the difference, but regardless the rep and honor in AV were outstanding (though inflated due to AV weekend).

I actually had enough fun to respec into a PvP friendly build, 30/21/0. When BC comes out I'm not sure how I'll take it. I had origionally planned on keeping my original 31 points in Combat and simply grabbing Cold Blood/Seal Fate, but now I'm not sure. There's somthing kinda liberating about not having Sword Specialization any more. I mean, suddenly there's a whole world of weapons out there at my disposal. A nice mace drops and I can use it. A nice dagger? Same thing. Even a fist weapon. I actually forked out 200g last night for Scarlet Kris, a rediculous nice offhand weapon. It should certainly keep me happy till I hit Exalted with AV and can grab The Lobotomizer, which is just plain crazy.

The only unfortunate thing about this whole PvP thing is that the gear that's an improvement for me is found mostly in WSG and AB, or through Rank (Rank 7 and 8 Specifically). Why that is unfortunate is, as I've mentioned, that Alliance seems to suck at WSG and AB. I've been in exactly one winning AB game and 1 that was close. THe other dozen were just straight losses. Don't even get me started on WSG. And rep is gained primarily through completing the BGs objectives and then by winning. While I don't think it's impossible to get high rep with them, I don't think it'll happen by the time BC hits the shelves...

Any advice for WSG and AB? Aside from rolling Horde?

Scheduling Woes

2006-09-26T13:33:00.000-06:00

Part of the frustration I experience as an officer for my guild is scheduling acitivies for the guild. We've recently stepped up the amount of scheduled runs in an effort to have content for as much of the guild as possible. We have a very diverse mix of levels and it seems that regardless of where we direct our energy, someone is 'left out'. So I've scheduled one lower level instance and an engame instance every night of the week. Of course I can't have them at the same time as I'm sure we wouldn't be able to fill them all. So we have one run at 8:00 PM and one at 10:00 PM. Of course this works for some and not for others. The 8:00 run is a bit early for us MST and earlier folk while the 10:00 run can get late for the EST folk (though luckily our GM is a night owl, while in EST, he habitually stays up later than I).

Other things we will be incorporating are Raids, PvP, and Fellowship.

We had an awesome all guild game of Hide and Go Seek in Stormwind last night. No prizes, just good fun. Was nice to do something different. Ideally we'll have something like this planned at least once a month.

We have a couple of people in the guild who really enjoy PvP, so I'm going to attempt to schedule an Alterac Valley night, though I'm not sure how successful that will be. I've heard that entereing AV with a group takes a good chuch of time, so we'll see. I'm tenatively thinking of Saturday/Sunday nights that don't have raids associated with them. Perhaps AV one night and AB/WSG the other.

A fellow officer is taking care of scheduling and leading the raids. I believe we'll be looking at one per week on a Friday-Sunday night. As we don't have enough 60's in guild anymore to fill a 20 man, we will be relying on our alliance with the Knights of Valor to fill our runs.

So yeah, at lot to keep track of...

L2Tank

2006-09-22T09:36:00.000-06:00

Okay, so we ran Stockades a couple nights ago and I ended up bringing Daroul, my level 24 (at the time) Warrior. I don't think I've played him in several months and I've never used him to tank in a group. It was certainly a learning experience. I don't think I did bad job either. I was able to keep mobs on me 90% of the time and the only deaths we had came from unmanagable adds. We had one wipe from an accidental Psychic Scream, but we recovered well. Anoth thing that added to the general stress of the run was most people in the party were playing classes they were unfamiliar with in groups. A couple of mages who weren't sheeping adds (corrected halfway through, CC FTW), the priest was attempting to DPS rather than focus on healing (again corrected quickly), and just general carlessness. Both Dextren and Bazil were prox aggroed by someone other than me and I quite a few times I was unable to get Aggro on mobs before the mass DPS started. Not anything that was unusual, but certainly an educational experience. More later...

Horde Ho!

2006-09-22T08:00:00.000-06:00

So, I've been at a conference this week. Thankfully the hotel has wireless internet connection so I haven't been suffering too much. Weird part of out of town conferences is that they run from 8:00 to ~4:30. Like we're supposed to find something to do in the middle of nowhere. Luckily Warcraft kept me company. So, getting to the point of the post, Wifey and I created new Undead toons to level together. We've tried that before, but I'm always ended up leveling them without here and then the level discrepency is too high to group. However I think this will work better. All my other Horde toons are Orc or Tauren, so the starting areas will fresh/new. Anyway Wifey rolled a Priest and I'm on the Warrior. So a good combination.

I've got to say that starting over was nice. Don't get me wrong, I love my guild, but it was nice just having my Wife and I. I'd say that every other time I log on I wind up helping someone with something, which isn't a problem, but when you just want to unwind and play it gets in the way. So, while we have a guild on Dunemaul I'm not sure I'll be adding these toons to it. I think it might be nice to just have an unknown toon to play when I don't to deal with people (aside from my wife).

Necklace debate

2006-09-18T11:18:00.000-06:00

Now, Saturday Night in LBRS Talisman of Evasion dropped and as I have Abyssal War Beads, I passed. The other rogue already had it so I figured it would go for DE. To my surprise the group leader insisted I loot it and most of the raid (yeah, 10 60's on LBRS, went quick :P) thought it was an improvment for me. I guess I really don't see that as an improvement. In fact I used to use Talisman of Evasion and replaced it with Abyssal War Beads. Here's the stats for the link lazy out there:

Abyssal War Beads
+15 Stamina
+20 AP
vs.
Talisman of Evasion
+13 Agility
+1% Dodge

Normally I prefer to Agility to AP, but in this case I see the Abyssal War Beads as clearly superior due to the Stamina bonus. As most of what I do with Sakuran is instances, I see 150 extra HP as worth more than 1% dodge by a significant margin. If I end up with Aggro, I want to make sure I survive it and I see alot more added security from 150 HP than +1% dodge, well 1.5% with the AGI. Oh, and for those of you who reference AEP, Abyssal War Beads = 25 and Talisman of Evasion = 13.

Abyssal Leather Leggins of Overexposure

2006-09-18T10:35:00.000-06:00

Well, got some new stuff for Sakuran over the weekend. I picked up the Abyssal Leather Leggings of Striking, which are 1) very nice and 2) a little too revealing. They basically look like two leather ovals stapped to the front of the thighs and nothing else. I'm just glad that Sak is a NE female and not, say, a Dwarven male. Still, feel kinda odd running around as a half naked girly. A step up from the ugliness (in appearence, not stats) that was the Devilsaur set.

Now, the Devilsaur set is a very nice set, and has served me well. In fact, I was hesitant to replace it at all. However, I've had my Darkmantle Gloves sitting in my bag for a bit and was simply looking for some better pants. Yes, the +2% hit (15 AEP) is nice, and going to be missed. Now this is not a AEP based decision, as losing the set bonus points outweigh the gains on the indivual items. Worth noting is that my talent build includes +5% to hit already, so that 2% hit is white damage only, I'll still not miss with specials.

I don't see all +hit as the same. After the first 5% I see it's value as significantly lower, perhaps 1/3 as important as that first 5%. With that logic (faulty as it may be), the set bonus only translates to 5 AEP.

For completeness sake:
Abyssal Leather Leggings of Striking = 51 AEP
152 Armor
+15 Strength
+15 Agility
+15 Stamina
+1% Crit
vs.
Devilsaur Pants = 48 AEP
148 Armor
+12 Stamina
+46 AP
+1% Crit

and

Darkmantle Gloves = 39 AEP
108 Armor
+12 Strength
+22 Agility
+9 Stamina
vs.
Devilsaur Gauntlents = 35 AEP
103 Armor
+9 Stamina
+28 AP
+1% Crit

1-59 vs 60

2006-09-14T16:34:00.000-06:00

As any Warcraft player who's hit 60 can attest, the game changes. And this isn't new information. I know that as long as I've been reading about WoW that's been a topic of discussion. The purpose of this post is try and identify, from my perspective, what those differences are how a player addresses them.

1-59 the grind
When you start the game and get familiar with it you have one ultimate goal: XP. Sure the methods of getting XP differ and can be fun in their own right, but it all boils down to XP. I'll go kill this mob or collect these drops for an NPC and I'll get XP along the way. Ultimately I'll get a few levels and move onto other NPC's that'll offer me the same thing. Occasionally you'll get the opportunity to get some nice items, but that is really secondary to the whole XP thing.

The nice thing about XP is that it's a time sink. If I invest enough time in questing or grinding I'll get a level. With that level comes talent points, new skills (evens only), new weapons and armor I can use, etc. So you get rewarded for investing time in questing or grinding. You can even get XP for PvP with the token turn ins. All of these things are very solo friendly. While you can get nice blues from instances, it'll still be eclipsed by the greens that drop commonly in another 5-6 levels.

60 End Game
The thing that I noticed most when I hit 60 was that the only way to improve my character was by improving my gear. Now there are a lot of ways that one can get gear at 60. PvP, raiding, reputation, instancing, etc. However you no longer can count on gains from a simple investment in time. Aside from grinding reputation almost everything you do to get better gear involves a group and involves a chunk of committed time. For a lot of people, myself included, that's a significant barrier. I would not be surprised if I spend as much time in game as many 'hard-core' raiders, but my time is rarely garaunteed to be uninterrupted. With a wife and small child, I have a many significant RL responsibilities that require my attention and certainly interfere with my ability to be part of an instance or raid.

What this realization meant for me is that I play my "Main" less that I play my non-60 alts. All my toons are in the same guild and the only time I really log Sakuran is if I know there's a instance going on and I think RL can wait for a bit (AKA they're asleep), otherwise I grind Laic, Repentant, or Didgeridoo as that game can easily be in 15 minute chunks.

What do I think Blizzard could do to improve this situation? Simple make more loot obtainable through quests that don't require you to step into an instance. Now, I'm not asking that the gear you can obtain be better or even equal to what you can get inside an instance, but at least make it worthwhile. From the perspective of my main, the only gear improvements I have ahead of me are in instances. Most of my Tier 0 could be considered an improvement (all BoP from here) and even the 'casual-friendly' updrades to Tier .5 require the freaking 45 minute Baron run (yeah, right) and UBRS.

Not that I'm griping about that, but I'm just really amazed at how much my play style has changed since I dinged. Now, admittedly, when Burning Crusade comes out we'll have 10 more leves of that first game, which should also take around as long as the 1-59 originally took. If Blizzard stick to their expansion a year plan perhaps my end-game woes will be less fequent than my 'instant' gratification of the grinding game.

So, until next time I'll be grinding my alts :P

Grrr @ Goldsellers

2006-09-14T15:34:00.000-06:00

/rant true
Okay, I have the silly little Google ads, mostly for humor value. Reading the information on it they'll only send you a check once you're earned $100. Realistically I suppose that could happen in 2034. However, I'm opposed to gold selling and have worked to keep my ads free of that. So I'll ban the sites that are selling it whenever I can. That being said these guys are like the little fuzzy things on StarTrek that multiply and take over the ship. I'll call them Furbies (do to my dislike of them) though I know that is incorrect. So I notice that the Furbies are back and I ban them and two days later all my ads are Furby related again. Frustrating.....
/rant false

Life at ANC

2006-09-13T08:21:00.000-06:00

Life at ANC

Buddy of mine just started his own blog. While not Warcraft related, I know Bilder through WoW as we're both members of CotL. So hit him up and show support!

Discord, pt 2.

2006-09-12T09:45:00.000-06:00

Okay, I set up Discord on my laptop last night and it was a lot less painful than I expected. Before logging into WoW I coppied the addons from my desktop to my laptop (rather than re-download). I also copied the settings from the saved variables folder on my desktop, this let me avoid having to set up all my bars/unit frames/art/etc. again. Of course the aspect ratio on my laptop is different from my desktop so I sill had to move some stuff around, but it was very painless. One thing that I did and hadn't done before was set up my chat windows the way I like and then copy the Chat Chache and I think Layout files from one characters saved variables and paste into each other characters. I don't know why I had never thought to do this before with all the various chat frame setups I've had. Still need to remember to post a screen shot while I'm at home as I can't while at work. Of course I'd much rather be playing WoW when I'm at home... I can quit anytime, honest :P

Discord

2006-09-07T13:50:00.000-06:00

Okay, took the plunge and installed all the Discord mods. Action Bars, Unit Frames, Frame Modifier, Art, and Minipanels. Will eventually get around to playing with Group Buttons. My first victim was Sakuran. Ended up with a very nice UI with a couple of neat features. Have two bars that interchange based on whether I'm in or out of combat, very nice. My main bar has all my main attacks and finishers. I need to setup a fouth bar for tradeskills, just haven't got around to it yet. Next step is to modify it to Repentant and Laic. Both should be somewhat challenging as Repentant is a healer and will need to incorporate Group Buttons (or maybe just stick with Benecast) and Laic has all his traps/aspects/tracking to incorporate.

What's kept me from using it till now is my concern about how it'll screw up playing on multiple machines. I primarily play on my desktop but do a far bit on laptop. In addition I sometimes play on my fathers laptop when I'm over at his house. Setting everything up on three computers will suck, but thus far I think the benefits will outway the cons.

Stormrage down, to Dunemaul I go!

2006-09-07T13:41:00.000-06:00

Okay so Stormrage is down as of midnight last night till noon tomorrow. 36 hours offline! So, that means I'm off to the magical land of Dunemaul. Didgeridoo my level 23 Taruen Shaman will get the dust blown off of him. Played him for a bit over lunch and I'd honestly forgot the simply pleasure of Frost Shock and big two-handed hammers (guess who's Enhancement Spec). Hopefully some of my buds will log on tonight and maybe get a group going. Though I'm fairly certain that I'm well above them in levels. We started the guild on Dunemaul just as a distraction from CotL, so I don't think many are near me in level. But either way, will be a nice change of pace.

First shot at a BC Combat Swords Rogue

2006-09-06T16:05:00.000-06:00

28/33/0

Okay, I had originally seen my self going for a 20/41/0 build, but after looking at the pst 31 point talents I'm less than impressed. Particularly unimpressed with the WORTHLESS 41 point Combat talent. So now I'm looking to putting much more points in Assassination. I've always liked the idea of a Seal Fate build and now may get the chance to play it. I would ideally like to go 5/5 in Seal Fate, but am not sure where to shave points out of my Combat Tree. I suppose I could shave 1 point out of Dual-Weild Specialization and one from Sword Specialization, but am not sure if the extra 40% chance (to make it 100%) is worth the drop in white damage. Suppose I'll have to run the numbers. That, however, is a task for another day.