The Kitty Collector

Addicted to Heals

2009-03-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

I "rolled" this blog when Ideale hit the 40s, mainly to document my progress, share some "noob" tips I ran across, and "infiltrate" enemy territory for kitties (and originally it was going to be entirely in-character, but I chickened out). And I've have a lot of fun with her and Cinnamon, getting to 70, figuring out what I liked to do in the game (not PVE), and generally having a good time.

But in the meantime, I leveled Ahami — and found my niche and my favorite role in the game, healing. I started out leveling resto just to see if I could do it, because all of the leveling guides said not to; and because healing did look fun and I wanted to try it out. And I fell in love with resto shamans and with healing in general. I still play my hunter, but mostly to hunt worms and rhinos or for the very occasional RP or PVP match — the vast majority of my time in game is being spent on Ahami or my other healers, and they're the ones I'm doing research for, doing new things with, and working on, while Ideale has stagnated somewhat.

My focus for the past several months has changed to reflect my in-game interests, and I was getting a little annoyed with: a.) the blog title being misleadingly hunter-centric; b.) Blogspot; c.) feeling guilty that I was not writing about my hunter in my hunter blog; d.) feeling guilty that I was not reading and linking to more hunter blogs.

After ignoring my better judgement and not only rerolling my priest to be a "real alt," but rolling shamans, druids, priests and paladins across several servers the past few weeks, and after reading this post on Sandwich Rations, I figured it was time to stop fooling myself and any potential readers who might be looking for a hunter blog.

So ... I rerolled, and I'm heading over to Addicted to Heals. There are still some changes inc — the template will be changing, as I've actually started knocking out one themed around (gasp) WoW. But I figured that at least most of the posts would line up with the blog title that way.

And now, the Kitty Collector is closed (although if I do collect more kitties, I will post about it, along with maybe a couple hunter stories now and then).

Missed connections

2009-03-05T16:53:00.000-08:00

Can you imagine if there were a missed connections-type forum, a la craigslist, for World of Warcraft?

You were an orc death knight with a handy way of punting gnomes and capturing flags. I was the troll shaman who healhealhealed you. Want to time our queues for Warsong Gulch sometime? I hope you read this!

Sorry, I had an excellent Warsong Gulch run this morning and worked really well with the flag carrier and his buddy (I thought, at least). You know that feeling you get when you have a truly excellent battleground (or raid, or [insert out-of-game pastime here]), like you're afraid you'll have eight or nine horrible matches to make up for the accidental awesome one? Yeah.

EDIT: Tambien, is it just me or do you get crazy amounts of honor in Wintergrasp? I'd done, like, two battles there until this week. I blew all my honor yesterday and I've already got almost 15K back again, one winning and two losing Wintergrasps later.

Alt-o-rama

2009-03-04T22:50:00.000-08:00

1. I am never leveling an alt again.

Don't get me wrong. I will continue rolling and playing alts. They're a blast, I love learning new playstyles, and sometimes I just need a break from the daily quests/gather stuff/rep grind of end-game. (Not the PVP, but I'm not always in the mood to shoot and/or heal people in the face.)

But I'm going to PLAY alts rather than LEVEL them. Ideale and Ahami were a blast because I just played them, my way and at my pace, instead of leveling them. Onashne is still a ton of fun — but every zone between the Arathi Highlands and the Western Plaguelands was a half-touched blur. Taking your time and savoring the "leveling process" is much more fun than shooting up 22 levels in a couple weeks.

2. My first three characters were my troll shaman, an undead priest, and a human rogue. I rolled all three within the first couple days of buying the game, and leveled them pretty much side-by-side for 20 levels each — which took a long time because I had no idea what I was doing.

The rogue I never really developed as far as story went. In fact, I only rolled her because I thought people would be RPing in an MMORPG (silly thought, right?) and didn't know enough about the lore to feel comfortable as anything but a human or undead. (The troll shaman was because I really, really wanted a shaman and liked Horde better — I spent my first few levels praying that no one would interact with me until I figured out no one on Whisperwind RPed. Ahami was much more developed than that original troll shaman, and is much more fun to play.)

The Forsaken priest, though. Oh, I pored over the WoWWiki entry on the Forsaken, and read every snippet of lore I could get my hands on. I came up with a backstory for her. I had dreams about her story (don't laugh). And she was the first character I rolled over on VeCo, but like Ideale, she was abandoned at level 8 while I tried other servers and dabbled with Alliance, because I couldn't get into shadow priests. I'm not sure now whether that was because she's just NOT a shadow priest, or because I hate the style — when I leveled her the first time on Whisperwind, I'd put all my points in discipline because I didn't know it wasn't a leveling spec (actually, she's just lucky I actually put all her points in one tree — the shaman and rogue were not so favored). I picked her up briefly when I got a real life friend to roll a warlock on VeCo, then dropped her for another hunter and eventually deleted her to roll Silang.

But probably my biggest regret about the game is that I never leveled my priest. And I had two open spots after consolidating bank alts, so a few days ago, I rerolled her. And I'm so glad I did — I missed her!

3. I still kind of hate warlocks. Which is too bad, because crazy Malisya's fun to play. Maybe I'll put her on Feathermoon with my other "fun to RP but taking up too much space" toons.

Word.

2009-03-02T15:40:00.000-08:00

Too Many Annas breaks it down pretty good right here.

I have nothing constructive to add to this, so that's all I will post right now.

On Grid

2009-02-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

I don't have much to say other than that Grid is AWESOME.

What I like: It shows who needs to be healed, whether they're in range, and any debuffs on them. I set it up so that it doesn't show heals from me, meaning that I can see if a target is being healed and ignore them in favor of someone else as needed. It's nowhere near as much excess of information as X-Perl, and it doesn't do random crap like Healbot, it just lets me select whoever needs a heal and heal them. It's exactly what I was looking for in an add-on.

What I don't like: I do need to play with it a little more to customize how debuffs/curses/etc. show up, and I need to figure out if/how I can show pets.

Otherwise it's great. I like it a lot.

So, addons with thumbs up from me: Dominos, Grid, Auctioneer, TradeSkillInfo, Guildcraft (although I wish they'd fix their Inscription issues so that stupid error message goes away).

Yeah, that's pretty much all I use.

EDIT: LIES! I have Omen, too, for group quests.

WoW Ladies

2009-02-26T13:13:00.000-08:00

A group of women who play Alliance on my realm recently decided to get together a "for fun" all-ladies premade.

Before I go any farther, I want to say that I think this sounds like awesome fun, and I hope a Horde version pops up. Now, I know that given the recent discussion of whether female bloggers should identify themselves as such, some might not "get" why women would want to form up a ladies-only premade. (Or at least, given some of the responses to the thread — okay, one person's responses to the thread — I can see this happening.) The long answer involves getting deep into sociological discussions about identity.

The short answer is that sometimes, it's nice to be able to group up with other ladies so we don't have to be "the girl" all the time. And even being in a guild where a big chunk of the members are female and the guys don't treat us any differently, there are still times when a girls night sounds like a lot of fun.

But that's not the point of this post.

That one person I mentioned who responded to the thread? He gave the perfect example of why women who game still need to identify themselves. In the course of the thread, he:

1. Attacked the women responding based on their arena ratings.
2. Implied that all women are bad at PVP.
3. Said it was okay for women to have a ladies' night because no guy wants to be involved, but they couldn't make that ladies' night battlegrounds, because everyone likes battlegrounds. The implication being that women can only do shit no one likes during ladies' nights.
4. Basically nerd-raged about it.

These are the kinds of guys some of us run into regularly. I know there are plenty of women who have never had to deal with sexism in WoW. I think it comes down to server culture sometimes — VeCo is a lot better than most, and I've only rarely had to deal with it there. When I was on Laughing Skull, I would never have admitted to being female, because it was HORRIBLE there. It's similar to racism — while VeCo has had a few spurts from a couple of guilds, it's pretty good on that front, but when I made an alt on another RP-PVP server to check it out, the second I stepped into a city I saw all kinds of anti-Jewish and anti-Asian jokes in trade, and promptly deleted my characters. (I'll hold back on the name of the server since maybe they were just having an off night, but still.)

This is, to put it in a way that will probably get me flamed, something that white guys don't generally have to think about or deal with. Off the cuff racism and sexism is something most white guys never even notice, or might think is funny. And I'm sure that there are a few ladies or gamers of color out there who would agree, because there always are.

But for those of us who do see that shit now and then, no matter how awesome your friends are, it's nice to have a group where you can hang out and KNOW that you're not going to hear some random sexist comment unless it's a joke that everyone's in on. Or where you KNOW you're not going to have someone talking like Mickey fucking Rooney because they think it's funny. And so you can let down your social guard a little bit, because they GET it in a way people who haven't experienced that won't.

Honestly, I don't know why people care so much about controlling where and when other people can hang out with their friends.

Wintergrasp

2009-02-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I have a confession. I have not fought much in the Strand or Wintergrasp.

I know, I know, I'm a battleground PVPer! How could I have not spent half my playing time in the new battlegrounds?

Well, I haven't PVPed on my hunter since before the expansion was released (aside from one-on-one matches while leveling) and I've found that, as a healer, I often don't have much to do — can't heal siege engines, sadly. So I hitch a ride or run around and heal the occasional person while trying to figure out what's going on, for the most part.

Plus, Wintergrasp is a bit buggy — like today, for example, when we were fighting in to the relic and had destroyed all of the Alliance tanks, and our towers randomly were destroyed. Despite having defenders, being at close to full repair, and no Alliance tanks in sight. You can also parachute into the keep and take the relic, bypassing the whole battle, the relic is occasionally unclickable, and so on. I've been in four times, and twice the match was bugged (we won one because of it, but it still pisses me off).

So mostly I just do my old school ones. But I was in Dalaran on Ideale when a match started, and figured, "Why not?"

As a hunter, Wintergrasp is FUN. My favorite thing to do? Target the defenders' guns and take them out. I don't think I'd like it on defense, but taking out those guns is a blast. Pewpew! Also, I learned cannot go into the keep because I lag out.

So I guess I will hop in a bit more, especially since I can buy honor with the stone keeper's shards and then buy gear with my honor. So yeah. Fun!

Spectral tiger?

2009-02-25T04:11:00.000-08:00

*twitch* Oh, I hope they aren't tamable. If they are, I'm going to have a very hard time choosing whether to camp out for Loque or get a see-through blue stripeycat.

Oh, yeah, and there are patch notes and Ulduar screenshots at MMO Champion, too. New mini-pets and mounts coming, too, including aquatic mounts. That's kind of cool.

Anyway, pretty much everyone has covered patch notes, so I will spare you.

EDIT: From something I posted ... elsewhere:

Reason No. 348 why I don't do that PVE thing: The T8 armor might be more hideous than the S4 stuff. I haven't decided yet. Seriously, if I were on the PTR, I'd be reporting that immediately. "There's a problem with T8; it's gross and I won't wear it."

If I ever do end up getting a daytime job and then raiding with my guild sometimes — because they need resto shammies and my guild kicks ass, so I'd suck it up for them — and T8 is still the best out there, I will stick to T7 and just get really, really good so I can be like, "Skill not gear! Oh please don't make me wear that." Luckily, that will probably never happen, so I dodged that bullet!

Some tips for battleground healing: Shamans

2009-02-22T12:16:00.001-08:00

Coming soon: Druids
Coming eventually: Priests

Shamans make excellent battleground healers for a lot of reasons; back before the expansion we were great in AV and okay in WSG, but because of our lack of instant heals, we had trouble with other battlegrounds (or at least I did). But with the addition of Riptide, we can be pretty effective in any situation.

General tips
1. Earth Shield yourself. For a long time I advocated putting Earth Shield on someone else, and I still do in Alterac Valley most of the time — for the boss fights, for example, or if you are way in the back and none of the other team are getting to the healers through the DPS. If you are the only healer with your side's flag carrier, Earth Shield the FC. But in the other battlegrounds and situations, you just do not have enough protection to make putting Earth Shield on someone else worth it. If you go down, you aren't healing, and Earth Shield will help keep you up, as well as cut down on pushback if you've talented for it (and if you're mostly PVP healing, you should talent for it).

2. Don't forget your totems. They're not as useful in PVP as in PVE, but they can be pretty effective. If a hunter or warlock sets a pet on you and switches to another target (which seems to happen a good 80 percent of the time in my experience), drop a Stoneclaw Totem. If there's a melee'r on the other team running around taking out totems, keep dropping it because it will stun them and that's funny. Elemental totems can be pretty effective if you're short on people at a graveyard, flag or tower and get rushed by a group. Earthbind totem kicks ass in the WSG flag room.

3. Don't limit yourself just to healing. Farsight can help out in Arathi Basin or Eye of the Storm to see what's going on at another flag/tower. A lot of shaman abilities can prevent damage and can be really helpful in, say, Warsong Gulch. If you're with your flag carrier, drop Earth Shield and a Riptide on him, then Hex one follower and Frost Shock another, drop Earthbind Totem, etc. so he can get away. Your healing should take first priority, but if you can tangle up the other team a bit without losing your healing target, do it.

4. Shift + V. In PVP, you can't really afford to be staring fixedly at raid frames — you have to be able to glance back and forth between the fight and your tools. Shift + V shows all of the health bars above the heads of your teammates. While it's kind of obnoxious at first, it makes it much easier to see who needs a heal quickly while monitoring the battle and glancing around for any potential threats.

5. Don't be upset when someone dies. In PVE, the goal is to keep your team up through the fight because enough deaths mean a wipe. In battlegrounds, your goal is to keep as many of your team members up as long as possible while making progress toward the objective. A lot of times in battlegrounds, when a mana-dependent class goes OOM, they decide it's more effective or quicker to suicide than to fall back and drink. Sometimes the other team focus-fires on one person, or someone will suicide on purpose to take the heat off of other team members and give them a chance to regroup. This doesn't mean they're out of the fight — they'll be back sometime in the next 30 seconds, so don't freak out. The goal is to move forward or keep the other team from moving forward, and as long as you are doing that, deaths aren't a horrible thing — though the fewer the better, of course.

6. If you end up in a spot with a lot of line of sight issues, don't underestimate Chain Heal. I've occasionally managed to slam a heal to someone who won't stop going around the corner by hitting the closest person in my LOS with a Chain Heal, which then bounces around the corner. Even a few seconds of bought time can help.

Alterac Valley
Healing strategy is somewhat different for Alterac Valley than anywhere else. In AV, you're likely to have three groups through most of the fight — offense, defense, and recappers. As a shaman healer, you're more effective with either the offense or the defense groups; if no healers are with the recappers, you're better than nothing, but since those fights involve a lot of LOS issues in my experience (going into and out of towers, running all around), your only really effective heal will be Riptide (since your healing targets will go around corners right before you get off that chain heal or healing wave), and with the cooldown on it, a druid or priest would be better.

If running defense, Earth Shield yourself and set a healing focus — usually a melee person with a lot of nice PVP gear is a good bet. You'll have time to inspect them while you wait for the Alliance to show. Defense groups are usually smaller on Nightfall. Depending on who you face, you'll probably mostly be using Chain Heal and Riptide with the occasional Lesser Healing Wave thrown in. Don't worry if your defense team dies — the goal is to keep the other team's tied up as long as possible. If you can wipe them, awesome, but as long as you slow them down for a few minutes, you're doing your job.

If you're running offense, you'll probably be using Chain Heal almost exclusively; usually there are at least three healers with the offense unless you get totally screwed on raid makeup, so just watch the melee folks and try to chain heal them for as much effective healing as possible. Throw a Riptide or Healing Wave on a fellow healer if they need it or if an enemy breaks through to attack the healers, but mostly just focus on melee and let your druid or priesty pals take care of the casters — you can even plan it out ahead of time. Shamans should be taking melee whenever possible, because of Chain Heal. If I get in my usual group in the wee morning hours, we generally have me, a disc priest and a tree druid healing, so I take the melee, the priesty takes the casters and healers, and the tree druid HoT rolls. It seems to work out great.

Arathi Basin
Arathi Basin is my favorite battleground, but it sucks as a shaman because people don't see the rocks swinging about you and assume you're pewpew specced, I guess? Seriously, groups always fucking leave me alone at the lumber mill or something and I have to be like, "Um, guys? You fail at life, and I'm about to lose LM." And then I die.

But if you get a non-stupid group or at least one only tinged with failure instead of dyed in it, then it can be a blast. Why? Because good groups fight on the flag, meaning you can run back a few yards and spam chain heals the whole time, and everyone ignores you. It's kind of awesome. It's also pretty fun if it's just you and one other person (my favorites are mages or warriors), because you can just heal heal heal them, and then when focus turns on you heal heal heal yourself, and then when it switches back to your partner heal heal heal them some more, until you run out of mana or they're all dead. And my gear SUCKS but it still usually ends with them all dead before I go OOM. So I like it.

I don't have much in the way of individual strategy to offer here, except that in AB, your Earth Shield should never, never be on anyone but yourself, and if there are AOE'rs on the other side, run away a tiny bit so that they can't hit you and your healing target(s) at the same time. Also, Tremor Totem is very nice if there are priests, warriors and warlocks on the other side. <3 Tremor Totem.

Warsong Gulch and Eye of the Storm
These are pretty simple. Either: a.) stay at a tower/in your base and heal the people there, or b.) follow the flag runner and keep them healed. Use your totems to good effect — these are battlegrounds where totems can come in super, duper handy. Frost Shock too. Only ever put Earth Shield on yourself or a flag carrier. And beware of line of sight issues. Really, everything else that might be useful has pretty much been covered already.

The main thing about these battlegrounds are that they are the ones where it's most likely you'll have to throw out the occasional DPS and not just straight heal. Watch your mana and make sure that you're not ignoring healing altogether, especially if you're resto rather than a hybrid spec, because all those death knights and ret pallies can do way more damage than you. But if you're not seeing a lot of damage or even a lot of spikes in damage, take a second here and there to throw out some Chain Lightning, and use Hex whenever the cooldown's up for CC help. Otherwise, use Riptide, Healing Wave and, if people are clumped close together, Chain Heal.

Strand of the Ancients
Honestly? I don't do much healing in SotA, nor do I go into it much anyway as I am working on the Conqueror title on both of my 80s. So more on this later, I guess?

Ceci n'est pas une chat

2009-02-21T01:31:00.000-08:00

In the end, I couldn't do it.

I picked out a warp stalker — named him Custard — and was having a blast with him, and I thought I could. So I went to Nagrand, pulled Gutripper out of my stable, fed her a couple treats and took a couple screenshots ... and then let Custard go.

I can't bring myself to abandon my Gutsy. Even if I dislike the changes to owls with 3.0, I just can't do it. I went through too much to tame her, and too much to level her up, and spent way too much time doing dailies with her on the Isle. I can't do it. And as much awesome fun as warp stalkers are — and they are a total blast — I can't give up my dream of taming Loque'nahak, either.

Someday, I will level Daj up to the 61-70 bracket, and tame a warp stalker with her. Or maybe Blizz will add more stable slots someday again. But I just get way too attached to my pets. I can't do it.

Why I love RP servers

2009-02-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

Scene: Booty Bay, at the leather armor shop.
Cast: Onashne, level 43 (at the time) druid; Mr. X, level 45 troll rogue.

Onashne is hard at work in the shop, carefully crafting turtlescale breastplates and Nightscape Pants and occasionally purchasing thread and other supplies. Mr. X walks in and, without a word, rudely interrupts with a group invite. Onashne declines, and another invite is offered. Onashne declines again.

Mr. X: fallow me

Onashne: No, thank you. I'm working.

Mr. X: fallow me want to lvl

Onashne: I'm sorry, I don't understand you.

Mr. X: wnt 2 lvl

Onashne: ... What? I don't know what that means!

Mr. X: HOW. DID. U. LVL. 2. 43

Onashne: I am sorry, Mr. X, but I only speak Taurahe and a little Orcish. I do not understand your language.

Mr. X: wtf

Onashne: I'm very sorry, but I don't speak troll.

Onashne mimes speaking, points at Mr. X and shakes her head.

Mr. X invites Onashne to a group. Onashne declines.

Mr. X: Y WONT U GROUP W ME?

Onashne: Um. I don't understand!

Onashne looks at Blizrex Goodstitch for help.

Onashne: You don't speak any troll, do you? Can you translate for me?

Mr. X leaves.

NOTE: Normally I would be more polite, but the invites without a word to me, nubspeak, and "shouting" pissed me off. So I figured, hey, why not? Either he'd get the point and be more polite, or he'd move on. And I was right.

Best comment ever

2009-02-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

Finding a comfortable and good looking tabard in this economy can be hard. We can help.

Linked from the word "tabard" to what I assume is a phishing site.

Maybe I'm the Alt Collector

2009-02-18T20:10:00.000-08:00

*deep breath* I'm the Kitty Collector and I'm an altoholic. There. You guys win, okay?

I briefly went into Arathi Basin on my druid the other day to try the boomkin PVP thing and ended up healing instead. And it was a blast. I can't wait to hit 80 so I can spec as a tree full-time!

And then I switched to Ahami and ran some AB on her, too, to see if the setup of my hot bars was going to be problematic (yes) and get a little comparison. Shaman is still more fun, but I think I'll like them both once I get more used to the druid. After that, I flipped back to Onashne and moved buttons around until I was happy with the results.

And then I sat at the character creation screen for half an hour creating a blood elf priest, before remembering that I still need to: a.) get more resilience and grind rep on my two mains; b.) level Ide's pets and hopefully tame Loque; c.) level the druid and mage; d.) max out all their professions; e.) get epic flyers for all of them. Plus I'm organizing a couple of recurring events, one for the guild and one for the Horde-side of VeCo. And I have a hunter twink and a 'lock twink who I'd like to level a little and then gear out.

I never hit the create button — mostly because WoW really doesn't need another blood elf, does it? — but I was very, very tempted. Despite having a little itty pally sitting just shy of level 10 who I was thinking about making a twink healer.

I doubt I will level another healer (or another toon, really) to 80 after my planned alts get there. I'll be completely self-sufficient with everything but enchanting gear-wise and with gathering professions once Onashne and Kamai hit 80. And since I don't PVE much, I have to work on reps and stuff the hard way, via turn-ins, dailies and other boring stuff. By the time these four hit exalted with the factions they need, the next expansion will probably be out.

Really, too, while I've been having a blast leveling Onashne, I'll be glad when she catches up with E. and I can go back to playing my mains for more than just dailies. I miss them both very much, especially Ahami. Ideale has been getting out every day to gather meat for the cooking dailies, do a handful of quests for gold or gather Nesingwary Lackey Ears so I can get her a hippogryph when she has the money for epic flying. Ahami does the cooking quest and sometimes Aces High! and then goes back to the inn to rest. The break was nice, but I'm totally ready to get back to playing them and especially hitting the battlegrounds.

But a priest looks fun. A lot more fun than a pally, really — I just rolled the pally to annoy my friend (long story). Plus, since I have my magey tailor, I'd still be self-sufficient as far as gear goes. And then I could have an alchemist/enchanter at max level.

I think I have WoW ADD. Having a night job that leaves me with too much time on my hands in the wee hours of the morning doesn't help, either.

PVP Tip #549

2009-02-16T22:17:00.000-08:00

Be aware of your surroundings.

This includes two things:

- Environment. Are there cliffs around that you might fall off of — or trick/mind control the enemy off of? Are there walls to LOS around? Are you going to get stuck on anything?

Bad PVPers use their environment as an excuse for their failures. "I'd have won, but I fell off that ledge." Good PVPers use the environment to their advantage, to gain an edge.

- People. Are there enemies in the area other than the one you're targetting? Will they give you any trouble? Are there people from your faction around, and will they help you? Don't just assume; ask.

E. and I were in the Searing Gorge about an hour ago, trying to get my druid some quick XP while giving her something to do quest-wise. We were doing some quests for a tailoring pattern for her, and I had ridden on ahead, when I saw her health start to drop.

"What's up with your health?"

"Something's on me."

So I rode back to see a rogue two levels above her poking her in the back with a very sharp knife. I heal heal heal, because that's what I do, and she quite neatly takes him out. Did he know there was a druid around? Probably not - he might have just assumed I wouldn't care because we hadn't been obviously acting like we were questing together. But when it became clear we were together and I was healing, he got overconfident. He blinded me instead of hitting vanish or destroying me, and it wore off and we took him out. (Or maybe he did vanish, but all the dots he was covered in pulled him back out.)

Lesson? Be careful that the person you're ganking doesn't have a pocket healer stashed somewhere — or, if you know they're there, take them out first.

Moooooooonkin

2009-02-15T02:46:00.000-08:00

I've found a lot of neat quests and quest chains hidden about in various lowbie zones, so I figured I'd make a non-stupid list. But right now I am le tired, so instead, a screenshot:

To do: Resilience

2009-02-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

My first task, as soon as I'm done catching Onashne up to her priesty pal, will be to start "gearing" my toons, particularly Ahami.

Because this is my problem: The resilience cap is, according to PlusHeal.com members, 1,230. Ahami's current resilience is 168.

Yeah, you read that right.

Now with Ideale, that's not as much of an issue in the battlegrounds — sure, it sucks in world PVP when people recognize me, or if I end up in 1v1, but in the battlegrounds, hunters are mostly ignored if they are not putting out insane amounts of damage. And given my gear and the fact that BM is not crazy OP anymore, I'm not putting out insane amounts of anything. Which I'm totally fine with, because any bit of pewpew helps in an AV full of cave-AFKers. Ideale is more my "for fun" character anyway — I'm totally fine with just cruising around in my Swiftarrow set.

But Ahami is a healer, and now that I'm getting to the point where I start recognizing names in the battlegrounds (it's a small crowd that hits up AB at 2:30 a.m.), many of the people I'm coming up against know she's a healer or figure it out quick. And while I can heal through damage from fresh 80s and undergeared alts, when I come up against a well-geared DPSer of any class, I melt like the Ice Stone.

As one member pointed out, healers need resilience. We really do. If we die fast, then our teammates aren't getting our heals. If we have to heal ourselves through damage instead of healing our team, our teammates aren't getting our heals.

So goal one when Onashne hits the 50s will be: a.) hitting the battlegrounds until I can grab honor gear, b.) go back to working on rep with various factions for various PVP enchants, and c.) maybe watching some VOA vids so that next time someone asks me to run it, I can go along if I want to and maybe pick up some decent drops. I hate PVE, yeah, but VOA is super-fast (or at least guildies who run it are in and out in about half an hour), allegedly super-easy, and drops PVP gear and emblems, so why not run it a couple times if I'm in the mood?

Why so much druid?

2009-02-12T02:45:00.001-08:00

1. When Wrath hit, I was pretty focused on leveling Ahami and Ideale, and trying this death knight thing out. What this meant is that Onashne was sitting at 30 for 3 months. Not awful, except her leveling partner is my roommate's first and so far only character, and she was certainly not going to stop playing and wait around for my sorry butt. So she leveled to 51 (with a little help from my DK in Stranglethorn Vale and some instances) and now I have to play catch up if I want to go through the Dark Portal with her. So I've been playing Onashne a lot.

2. I love Ideale and Ahami, but I have played Ahami basically non-stop since June, and Ideale mostly non-stop except for the three weeks it took to level Ahami from 68-80, since March-ish. Right now, all I want to do as far as end game goes is run AB on Ahami and level pets and tame kitties on Ideale, neither of which are that exciting to write about. I'm a little burnt out on Northrend questing, dailies, leveling professions, and so on. Playing Onashne is new and different, and I'm revisiting old zones I love.

3. The Ice Stone has melted!

4. I really love healing on Ahami, and I'd really like to compare druid healing to shaman healing — eventually I'd like to test out every healing class in the game, with a pally and a priest in the twink brackets. However, I am really enjoying balance, and I really like the idea of druids, and the green healyness, and the fact that usually it's me and a druid battling it out for top healer in AV, so Onashne wins and gets to go to Northrend.

5. I feel like I talk too much about the Triangle Defense.

UI update

2009-02-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

I downloaded Dominos for my action bars and I am in love. IN LOOOOOOVE. Which is appropriate for the current WoW holiday, isn't it?

But there is one problem, which may not be a problem at all. Dominos is obviously meant for players at end-game, because it shows no XP bar. I got my rep at the top of the screen, my action bars all in the lower right corner, and no XP bar in sight. This is fine on Ideale or Ahami, since they're both 80, but I logged into Onashne and I have absolutely no idea how far into 37 she is.

It's kind of, to completely misuse a term, zen.

The problem is that Onashne needs to hit 58 around the time E. hits 58-60, so we can hit Outland together. After that, I'd be cool with vanished XP bars, but right now, I'd really like to see what I'm doing.

I guess I could comment on Curse and see if anyone has a solution.

Other mods tried: X-Perl. I tried to give it a good shot, I really did, but I keep dying in AV over and over and over again because it's literally too much information. I have a lot of trouble weeding out information — it's one of the reasons I fail at math. So having too much information, instead of helping me heal, actually destroyed my reaction time. My healing per game has dropped from an average of 275K-300K all the way down to 18K on my last match, and that was the best so far. And my deaths per game went from an average of three or so to something like 15-20.

Eventually, I'm sure I would get used to it and bounce back. A big part of my problem was the newness of it; I was constantly processing everything instead of filtering/ignoring stuff. But I'm too impatient to wait until my brain sorts itself out, plus it takes up waaaaay too much screen real estate. So I deleted it.

I'm going to try Grid — it looks much less distracting — but I don't have time today, so it will have to wait.

My secret favorite

2009-02-11T12:08:00.001-08:00

I am having a BLAST playing my druid. I am seriously in love with balance. The longer I play her, the more I like her.

But my favorite thing about playing her is this: At level 37, I still have slots open on my main action bar.

With Ideale, I had every space filled up by now with shots, plus a crapton of aspects and traps and stuff on the secondary bars. With Ahami, it was totems and shock spells.

Onashne has five spells, three heals and warstomp on the main bar, and four or five things on the secondary bars. That's it. I might even be able to turn off one of her bars and just stick with four if this keeps up!

It's a magical thing.

Ammogate '09?

2009-02-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

Because adding "-gate" to anything makes it suddenly SCANDELOUS.

Anyway, the devs realized that today was Retraction Day:

"Our bad, ammo will still be consumable after 3.1. But you can stack them more and ditch your quivers!" * — The Devs

They will pry the quiver from my cold, dead pixel-hands. Okay, the removal of quivers and consumable ammo is supposed to still come in a later patch, and I don't intend to die when it happens. But I'm still keeping my quiver until then, and if it ends up holding 240,000 arrows or something, so be it.

* So I paraphrased. Big deal.

Battleground PVP changes

2009-02-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

I know that many, many things have changed with the new expansion. Major changes from the addition of tanks in Strand of the Ancients and death knights to minor things like achievements encouraging players to actually do shit in the battlegrounds has changed a few things.

Things that haven't changed, Horde edition:

1. In Arathi Basin, in the first minute, take control of the freaking lumber mill and blacksmith before you head for the gold mine or stables. The mine is strategically useless and the stables are too hard to hold if you can't count on reinforcements from either the LM, the BS or both. I've been playing this game for a year and this has never changed in that entire time — if you are heading for the mine or stables right out of the gate, you fail.

2. You know the Snowfall Graveyard in Alterac Valley? Why the hell are you capping it? If Horde controls all the graveyards, then the Alliance all rez over by Vann, and then that one stupid mage/elemental shaman combo AOE wipes the whole group over and over and over again because what else are they gonna do?

3. Achievements did not stop people from AFKing in the cave in AV. Please continue to report them. The arena season will hopefully end someday, and then they will all go away until the next arena season, I'm sure.

4. You still need to capture the flag to win Warsong Gulch. The flag is not somewhere in the middle, unless it's because the Alliance flag carrier is RP-walking by while you ignore them completely for the HKs.

5. I don't know if anything about Eye of the Storm has changed. No one ever goes there on Nightfall — including me, after losing a win four times in one week after the three or four Alliance players (to our three or four Horde) all deserted. GG.

Sorry, Alliance, I fail at leveling space goats so I have nothing for you except this: Your zerging strategy in AB? It doesn't really work. See, we just have a lone druid go recap each base as you leave it for the next. You might want to try something else.

EDIT: One really nice change I have seen is that people seem to be much nicer to each other in the battlegrounds (Horde, Nightfall, around 2 a.m. PST). There's a lot more communication and a lot less "omgwtfbbq l2play n00b."

I'm thinking it is a sickness

2009-02-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a guildmate the other day, and mentioned that while I am keeping a slot free for Loque, I was thinking about freeing Gutripper for another pet. I don't play with her very much, as she requires a little too much micromanagement in PVP and I like my cats for soloing. In fact, right now she's at level 75 only because I pulled her out of the stable when I hit 80. That seems unfair, and I think she deserves to be free.

So we were talking about pets I'd like to try, and at some point, I said, "I'd really like another cat, but that's stupid. If I get Loque, that would be four cats."

And then he pointed out that I don't raid or even PVE on Ideale, cats are perfectly good pets, and if it fits her RP, why not?

There are pets I'd like to try — I'd love to give windserpents and hyenas a shot — but there are so many cats in the game that I love, and since Cinny hit 80 and is taking a well-earned rest, I pulled out Saffron and have completely reconsidered my earlier plans to abandon her. I love my cats, they're perfectly serviceable battleground pets, and if it's silly to have three and maybe someday four cats on my only end-game hunter, well, it's a game. And I will play it how I want.

Besides, Ideale is totally a cat hunter. My other hunter, Daj, who will someday be leveled to at least 39, is high enough to tame a hyena and half a level from being able to grab Arikara, so I can play around on her. But I know what I like, and that's kitties, so kitties I shall have.

My favorite tool

2009-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

So you're rolling a class you've never played before and really don't know much about, and you want a quick guide to which stats and bonuses to look for on gear. Where do you go?

For the quickest answer, I go to the official website: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/items/armorsets/

The bonuses: You can get a very quick glimpse at which stats help your class and spec, and, by omission, learn which to ignore. Back in the day you could also see which races looked best in the high-end armor, but since it hasn't yet been updated for Wrath, all you can see is still the old stuff.

The cons: There's no explanation or theorycrafting; it's great as a quick guide, but if you're trying to figure out whether to sacrifice agility for pure AP, it's not much help, especially considering the class changes that came with the new expansion.

Basically, it's just good for when you hit the 20s and 30s and for the first time start getting stats on quest rewards and dungeon gear. By the time you get to the higher levels (I'd say probably Outland on), you probably want to have a decent grasp of what makes your class tick instead of just a checklist of stats.

One other con: If you like to play dress-up with your toons like I do, you will end up with a checklist of lower-level gear to brow-beat your achievement buddy into helping you farm. Ahami WILL be getting the old school dungeon set for RP. Onashne will likely be following suit. Luckily, most of the hunter and mage armor is hideous, so I won't have to farm crap four times in a row.

Stealth Patch

2009-02-09T03:45:00.000-08:00

According to MMO Champion, patch 3.0.9 hits Tuesday.

Shamans
Glyph of Windfury Weapon -- Increases the chance per swing for Windfury Weapon to trigger by 2%. (Down from 5%)

I don't really care about this too much, not being enhancement, but if I were enhancement, I'd probably be sad.

Hunter
Kindred Spirits (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet damage at max rank.
Serpent’s Swiftness (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet attack speed at max rank.

Ooh, looks like they are already making good on their promise to unbreak BM a little. Hopefully this will help a tiny bit, though I'm still excited about the upcoming possible new tier to BM pet talents.

There are a couple of pet changes too (tiny nerfs to fire breath and poison spit), but not for cats, so phew.

The druid changes don't affect me, and I haven't played my mage at arcane enough to have any opinion at all on the changes — or really to even know what they mean. Having played a healer and a hunter, I at least understand the "language" of druid abilities and talents enough to figure things out. But my mage is pretty different than anything else I've played before, so at level 24, I still don't really "get" the class yet.

Looks like pallies get some nice buffs, and they and priests no longer have to worry about dispels of their personal buffs.

Essay question

2009-02-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not really stealing this idea from Too Many Annas; she has five questions, first off. :-D

But I have a question for you all, to answer here or on your own blogs or whatever: Why did your characters choose to take up the professions they did? How do they feel about their professional choices now?

See, I finally just turned to RP to answer my Great Alchemy vs. Leatherworking Conundrum, and I'm sticking with leatherworking. It seems more "druidy" (using all parts of the animal), and after Hillsbrad, I think seeing the evil alchemy can be used for has turned Onashne off to its benefits. She wants no part of it, especially since she would most likely have to learn certain recipes from the Forsaken, and while she feels sorry for their situation, she doesn't really care much for them in general.

Of course, this got me thinking about Kamai's profession choices, specifically tailoring — would a troll mage who likes engineering (i.e., a mad scientist type) really want to sew pretty dresses? Or would she be mixing up potions just to see what happens? As her personality grows, both she (and myself) are growing a little less satisfied with tailoring as a profession, and she does not have the moral problems with the Forsaken that Onashne (or Ideale) would. Expect this to turn into future blog drama.

As for Ahami and Ideale?

Ideale loves jewelcrafting, not so much for the rings and other ornaments, but because she is intensely satisfied when she cuts a gem just right. She's not overly fond of mining, but it annoys her father and saves her money on supplies, so she doesn't mind it as much as she could. Plus she would hate to stumble across a vein of precious metals and leave it behind out in the wild somewhere.

Ahami loves herbalism, as a healer. She finds it peaceful — something much of her life really isn't — and as an added bonus, it's extremely useful. She also loves inscription, but feels a bit guilty when she mills herbs for ink that could be going to medicines or something else, even knowing that the glyphs and scrolls she creates can help people, too.

Leatherworking vs. Alchemy vs. Skinning

2009-02-07T14:40:00.001-08:00

And then I remembered WoWWiki and WoWHead. I am supposed to be at the movies right now, but we missed the first showing, and next one's not for another two hours, so research time. I still haven't made a decision, but I figured I would lay out my thoughts in case anyone else is considering a switch/trying to decide what to pick.

It seems like, unlike in BC, there are not a lot of BOP crafted items in the armor professions (or at least in leatherworking and tailoring, the two I have looked at).

My guild has a handful of leatherworkers. Between skinning on Onashne and the gathering professions on my other toons, I doubt I will have problems gathering necessary mats to get whatever I need craftified by one of them as far as armor goes. However, there are certain enchants to bracers and such that only leatherworkers can use. Fur Lining — Spellpower adds spellpower (what a twist!) and there is some lovely +resil and +stam leg armor, which could be super handy out the gate at level 80. Handier than spellthread? I do not know. But it's a nice option to keep open.

Considering how in love I am with the Inscription shoulder enchants for Ahami (WTB head enchants also plz), this stuff might be the deal-maker, and I'd be able to make the BOE epics and some nice leg armor kits for Ideale as well (Ahami's already covered).

Leg armor kits seem to sell quite well, as do the crafted level 78 gear sets, so I don't think this will hurt my money-making ability at all. On the other hand, aside from the PVP kit, none of the leg armor seems all that useful for Onashne herself. Though with Kamai an up-and-coming tailor, that doesn't worry me too greatly.

Alchemy does not have too much to offer on its own. I could make and sell flasks and such, but that would require farming the mats — skinning is much quicker than herbing. It'd be nice to help out the guild by stocking up the bank now and then, but like leatherworking, we have a handful of alchemists, so I'm not sure how useful it would be. On its own, the only things alchemy offers are Mixology — more handy for PVE than battleground PVP, I think — and the Mercurial Alchemist Stone, which is not really the most awesome trinket I can think of.

If Onashne were going to be my only 80 on the server, the choice would be obvious. However, I also have Ideale. Ideale is a jewelcrafter, and alchemy offers Transmute: Earthsiege Diamond and Transmute: Skyflare Diamond, along with the elemental transmutes. This is one of the reasons I originally wanted it for Ahami, before I actually found out what Inscription was and how cool it was. And on the side, I am also leveling Kamai, an engineer, who will someday have a mote extractor, making the elemental transmutes quite useful, especially with Ideale's mining, in turning relatively cheap Elementals, like earth, into ones that sell for big bucks, like fire. This could rake in all kinds of gold and be very, very handy as far as supplying folks with gems and mats.

One other thing to consider: Most of the high-level alchemy recipes are discovery or research based, while the leatherworking ones can be purchased fairly easily. While I like researching on Ahami, it is also frustrating to spend a month trying to get a specific glyph while a bunch of ones you don't want drop, then shelling out the gold to buy it on the AH, then getting it through research two days later. It's also annoying to have to trade for Snowfall Ink all the time just to do my stupid research. I'm not the most patient person. If I want something, I want it now, please. I don't want to have to go farm four stacks of herbs to get the one reagent I need, then have it not even give me the recipe I want and have to wait 20 hours to repeat the whole process. So leatherworking might be more relaxing.

Skinning ... will not be very useful as pure resto. But as hybrid resto/boomkin or with a boomkin off-spec when/if dual-speccing ever happens, the extra crit could be handy. And it will be nice to be able to farm my own mats for armor kits and stuff, plus will add to leatherworking's profitability. If I'm having to buy leather off the AH all the time, then I'm gonna be broke as a joke.

If I had another skinner, I would take both leatherworking and alchemy, but I don't, nor do I want to give up a profession on one of my 80s or on Kamai for skinning. If I level Silang, I will have another skinner — but then I'll have a high level alchemist anyway.

If I stay with leatherworking, then I stay with skinning. If I switch to alchemy, I will stick with skinning as I level and rethink it later on. But I'm still debating whether I should go with the choice that offers enhancements for one character, or the one that benefits my current and future profession network the most.

Help!

2009-02-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, so. Do I go with alchemy on my druid, or stick with leatherworking?

I should point out that I have or am soon to have all of the crafted pieces I need for both my hunter and my shaman — a friend has already promised to make them all and I have most of the mats, I just need to shell out for some Frozen Orbs and farm some Eternals.

Alchemy seems like it would be more useful for the guild, but I'm already at 180 leatherworking and have a lot of the low-level recipes. Which I bought off of the AH. And I have a bunch more saved for use later, along with a ton of leather.

I also have alchemy on my death knight, but I don't think you can train it to 450 unless you're 70, right? And she's probably staying at 59 until they implement leveling via battlegrounds. But I don't know what else I would take on her profession-wise, except maybe blacksmithing and engineering if I leave her as a twink.

I love farming meat, cooking things and dropping it in the guild bank or selling it on the AH. That's how I make the vast majority of my gold in game, actually, and one of my favorite things to do in game. So I might enjoy alchemy more, and it would definitely be more useful and make more money at end-game. Although I've seen the Stormhide stuff going for 150-300g a piece.

I could help my guild more with flasks and crap, which would make me happy because I feel like since I don't raid or PVE much, I don't contribute very much. Plus then I could sell all the leather I farm for moneys as well, or give it to guildies leveling leatherworking.

Tell me what to do! I can't decide!

WANT ARROWS

2009-02-05T21:39:00.001-08:00

Patch notes are out for hunters.

Okay, I know this is probably just me — actually, I'm positive this is only me — but I LIKE buying ammo and having a quiver.

*mumble* Plus I just got a brand new quiver.

Yeah, I know it costs money, but — well, so does real life ammo. I know it eats bag space, but why not just make it an extra slot like the key ring? Plus, what are they going to do about all of the engineering ammo recipes and leatherworking quiver and gun pouch recipes in the game? Not to mention the rep vendor stuff.

And now we're gonna have to listen to warlocks bitch about their soul pouches and not have a valid response. Unless the warlock changes I paid absolutely no attention to fixed this somehow.

And now it's gonna be a lot harder to weed the huntards out of groups because no longer will they be the ones who run out of ammo before the first boss. Although maybe this will cut down a little on melee hunters.

Sorry for being grumpy, but the pet changes and Disengage are, quite honestly, the only changes to the hunter class I have actually liked. Every time another patch comes out, I find myself being all chipper and cheerful and, "Oh, well, we needed the nerfs. Oh, well, this will up my PVP survivability. Oh, well, not having to learn pet skills by taming wild animals means we get another usable stable slot."

Dammit, Blizz, stop tempting me to focus more on Ahami or level the baby mage and druid instead of logging on to Ideale. It's not going to work. I love playing my hunter too much.

I really just need time to settle into the changes. I'll get over them. I have gotten over every other change since 3.0. I just like to grouse about them.

On a side note, I am looking forward to the new tier in pet talents. It would be nice to have a way to max out Cinny's DPS instead of just throwing points in random crap I don't even use because heck, what else am I going to do? Plus this could help to alleviate the BM DPS nerf, and brings the tree back to what it was supposed to be, one that focuses as much on pet DPS as the hunter's personal DPS.

And the shaman changes? Hooray! Nothing major aside from combining a few totems to make them slightly more useful and flexible. I'm really excited about combining Healing Stream and Mana Spring totems — I always find myself torn about which to choose. And I'm excited about the chain lightning change because a.) MOAR LIGHTNINGZ and b.) maybe it will hurt less when it hits me. :-D I loooove the shaman changes.

Kamai and Onashne are not really high enough in level for the changes to matter much, but since Kamai will probably stay fire spec into end game (I've played with frost and arcane, and I do want to try frost again with the Water Elemental, but I love setting things on fire), the extra PVP survivability will be nice. And being able to cast more stuff while shapeshifted as a druid is always a plus.

True cat stories: It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye

2009-02-05T14:13:00.000-08:00

So I was playing with Sparrow this morning, and she was up on the couch and I was running a toy up and down teasing her while she gnawed on my fingers. Yeah, this is how we play.

Anyway, I found out the hard way that when you have a cat who is as ... enthusiastic ... about playing as Sparrow, you should keep toys as far away from your face as possible. Because Sparrow is known to get a little crazy — she will follow a toy into the air and do literal somersaults for it. She will dive off of the top of the cat tree and scare the crap out of me. She knows no fear and doesn't hold back.

Result?

It doesn't really hurt, though. Except when I washed my face earlier.

Achievements, titles and class quests

2009-02-05T04:25:00.000-08:00

I was reading this post at Curse of Senility and it got me thinking. One of the things I was disappointed in with Echoes of Doom was the removal of certain quests or requirements. I am one of those freaks who liked having to tame a beast, learn the skill, and then teach my pet. I love all of the quests that grant abilities, and I'm really disappointed that I will be missing out on some of those with my itty alts.

The quests gave the classes their flavors, I think. While it's certainly convenient to learn things at the trainers, the lore and the idea of learning certain skills from quests always appealed to me.

Since the quests are still in the game, I think it would be neat for Blizz to implement a class-based achievement that requires doing all of the class-specific quest chains. There could be a couple of new ones from 70-80, and maybe a couple of other requirements (i.e., for a hunter one could be to max your bow, crossbow and gun skills). At the end, you get an achievement, with a title to go along with it. The title should be different for Horde and Alliance, of course; Horde paladins would get "Blood Knight," Horde shamans would get "of the Earthen Ring," etc. And Alliance would get their equivalents.

I think that would be a really neat idea, and a way to get people to do these quests for various abilities and spells without forcing it on anyone.

The Elder title

2009-02-04T14:09:00.000-08:00

I don't think Ahami's going to get it. I haven't done a single one of the Northrend instances yet.

I'm actually sad about this. How silly is that?

EDIT: And then I remembered that I was planning on replacing it with the Flame Keeper title at the Midsummer Fire Festival anyway, and then I reminded myself that I can either cram 7 instances into the next seven days or I could work on getting Friendly with the Warsong Outriders and the Defilers and the latter is much more fun, and then I made myself some chili, and now I'm over it.

Balance vs. feral

2009-02-04T02:01:00.000-08:00

Oh, and balance is definitely more fun than feral. Getting bashed in the face is only fun for so long. But rooting mobs to the ground and then killing them with shinies? It's a blast. Like a cross between a shaman and a mage sans any AOE (wrath instead of lightning, roots instead of frost nova, no 'splosions or chainey stuff).

I do still spend a lot of time bouncing around going, "WHEE, I R CHEETAH" though.

One thing about loving hybrid classes — I desperately want to try some of the hybrid specs floating around out there. I never got to try the resto/elem build for PVP on Ahami, since Echoes of Doom changed it all when she was just barely 60. And right now at 80 I'm having way too much fun with Riptide and (since the patch) instant Ghost Wolf to try a hybrid spec yet. I like going "Scamper scamper scamper SPLOOSH scamper scamper scamper chain heal SPLOOSH" too much.

But looking at the resto druid, HoTs seem to be the most fun, and while speccing 51 points in resto would be pretty good as a healer, a resto/balance hybrid spec might make me a bit more flexible in the battlegrounds, where there are sometimes no healers and sometimes a boatload of them.

I really love healing, though. It always looked fun, but I never expected to love it as much as I do. I love the ranged pewpew very much. It's definitely more fun for questing and wandering solo around the world, and I really do like standing behind everyone and shooting the peoples in the face, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't be leveling a magey if that part wasn't fun. But healing is where it's at as far as I'm concerned. (PVP healing, anyway — PVE healing stops being interesting the second you get the hang of a fight. I wish I could bring myself to like PVE sometimes. World PVP comes and goes in cycles even on VeCo, but it seems like people are always doing that PVE thing.) I'd totally level a priest and a pally, too, if leveling holy didn't suck and their other specs weren't boring. Or if you could start them from 55 like a death knight.

Really, I don't know why Blizz doesn't let you just roll one character of any class at level 55 for each level 55 character you have. So if you had two characters over level 55 (a shaman and a hunter, for example), you could roll two characters on the same server (a mage and a druid, perhaps?) and they would start at 55.

But then you'd be able to roll four more characters at 55 unless they wrote something into the game to keep track. And that would probably require a ton of patchiness or a new expansion. Never mind.

Resto shaman pre-raid gear

2009-02-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

I was bored at work a few weeks ago, and even though I don't do that PVE thing, I DO like doing research, and we have a few to-be-resto shamans on their way to 80 in the guild, so ... I made a list of heroic drops and crafted gear to look for before hitting up raids. I've posted rep rewards here before, I believe, but this site has a handy checklist. Didn't check quest rewards yet, because I forgot until just now. Maybe if it's slow this week I'll do that.

Crafted Gear

Wispcloak (Tailoring, Back)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41609

Revenant's Breastplate (Leatherworking, Chest)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43461

Revenant's Treads (Leatherworking, Feet)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43469

Titanium Spellshock Necklace* (Jewelcrafting, Neck)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42647

Titanium Spellshock Ring* (Jewelcrafting, Finger)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42644

And of course the Stormhide set.

BOE Gear

Benefactor's Gauntlets (Hands)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40302

Grips of the Warming Heart (Hands)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37781

Zom's Crackling Bulwark (Shield)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44313

Glowworm Cavern Bindings (Wrists)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=35615

Bands of the Sky Ring* (Wrists)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37365

Dragonflayer Seer's Bindings* (Wrists)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37069

Epaulets of Market Row (Shoulders)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37116

Helm of the Lightning Halls (Head)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37857

Je'Tze's Bell (Trinket)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37835

Heroic Drops

Back
Ancient Dragon Spirit Cape - Cache of Eregos, The Oculus
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37291

Chest
Moragg's Chestguard - Moragg, The Violet Hold
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43410

Dalronn's Jerkin - Skarvald the Constructor, Utgarde Keep
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37184

Scaled Armor of Drakos - Drakos, The Oculus
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37256

Feet
Sabatons of the Ages - Tribunal Chest, Halls of Stone
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37654

Legs
Frozen Forest Kilt - Ormorok the Tree-Shaper, The Nexus
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37155

Legguards of Nature's Power* - Dark Runed Chest, Culling of Stratholme
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37695

Patroller's War-Kilt* - General Bjarngrim, Halls of Lightning
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37818

Hands
Lightning-Charged Gloves - Maiden of Grief, Halls of Stone
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=38615

Fiery Obelisk Handguards* - Herald Volazj, Akhn'kahet: The Old Kingdom
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37623

Cracked Epoch Grasps* - Chrono-Lord Epoch, Culling of Stratholme
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37686

Shoulders
Spaulders of the Violet Hold - Cyanigosa, The Violet Hold
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37875

Mantle of Discarded Ways* - King Ymiron, Utgarde Pinnacle
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37398

Wrists
Limb Regeneration Bracers - The Prophet, Drak'Tharon Keep
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37788

Bands of Channeled Energy - Grand Maguc Telestra, The Nexus
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37138

Waist
Mail Girdle of the Audient Earth - Loken, Halls of Lightning
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37855

Girdle of the Ethereal - Xevozz, The Violet Hold
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37868

Slad'ran's Coiled Cord - Slad'ran, Gundrak
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37628

Weapon
War Mace of Unrequited Love - Keristasza, The Nexus
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37169

Gavel of the Fleshcrafter - Salramm, Culling of Stratholme
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37681

Shield
Facade Shield of Glyphs - Krik'thir, Azjol-Nerub
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37216

* I included items that had crit (marked with an asterisk), although I tend to think of those pieces as elemental gear. I like haste or mp5 better, myself, but given this discussion of haste vs. crit on World of Matticus (linked in first post), I figured I might as well include them too.

Ding, fries are done

2009-02-02T20:48:00.001-08:00

The new to-do list:

1. Finish up the achievements for Elder Ahami. I'm going to have to *shudder* PUG for this.

2. Rep for both. I need to open up the dailies in Icecrown on Ahami, too — I stalled out in Storm Peaks on her and didn't even realize they were there.

3. Do lots of quests for mad moneys so I can get an epic flyer for Ideale and head back to Sholazar for a sweep every couple days.

4. Kill people in Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch a lot.

5. Alts!

Playing here and there on the side, I think I might have straightened out the leveling/twinking rosters.

Kamai the mage will definitely be going to 80. She's just so much darned fun! I love setting things on fire. I have goals for her. Plus I LOVE engineering and would love to have a character with one of those mote extractors, since I see clouds freaking everywhere.

Onashne the druid will probably be going to 80. I would love a resto druid just to compare the healing styles. Plus I like trees and going /moo. It all depends on whether I can stand the leveling process; I really dislike feral leveling. Balance might be more fun now than it was last time I tried it (level 15). I need to figure out goals for her to keep my interest.

Silang is up in the air. Death knights are fun — but are they fun enough to hold my interest until 80? I don't know. Soloing (or duoing with my spriesty roomie) is just not as fun as running about in PVP. I don't want to tank or melee DPS at 80, either. I'm contemplating speed-leveling either the mage or druid to 50 to catch up with E. and leaving Silang at 59 to just PVP with.

Malisya will be twinking it up, probably in the 30-39 bracket. I have a couple of friends who have twinks at that level, and with death knights and their speedy horses making 60 AV sad, then this might be the way to go.

Also on hold is the level one pally whose name I don't remember. I made her as a joke (long story), but I am hanging onto her because I like her hair (I r dork) and might someday make her a little healadin for the 30-39 bracket.

Daj will be twinking it up also, probably in the 40-49 bracket, but she's on hold until I get my other characters in order. I loooove hunters, and I do want to have a hunter twink (just to have a "finished" hunter), but since I have Ide, Daj is kind of my last priority. Poor Daj.

What happened to the AV twink idea? Well, I've been battlegrounding a bit on Silang, and, well, I hate to say it but I'm part of the problem. Because with all the death knights, the 50-59/51-60 brackets kind of suck now. It seems like a lot of people decided to twink their DKs, too, because hey, at level 58 you come out of the DK starting area in a nice set of blues. Why not? But with the super-speedy horses (with talents, a 58 DK is faster than regular classes on level 60 mounts) and the class's OP-ness, I really can't blame anyone.

But that does kind of take the fun out of the bracket for other classes. I don't want to jump on the "DKs ruined EVERYTHING" bandwagon, but I've seen most other classes go down in seconds every time they rezzed, over and over and over again. And some of them are good, and several of them are twinks. So I might keep Silang there — I think keeping up with three or four 80s will be a little much for me to handle already, and the bracket is still fun as a DK, and I do have the blues and stuff, so why not?

As far as an AV twink healer ... I really, really want to try druid healing at a high enough level to get a real feel for it. But with the changes to AV brought by class changes and DKs, I don't know if it will be fun. (I should point out here that I want to twink to have characters that I never have to work on again, not because I want to be OP. I doubt I will have the best gear or enchants — I'm too cheap. But there's a difference between accepting that you're gonna die in PVP, and slamming your face into a brick wall over and over again.) If I'm gonna get up to the 60s anyway, I might as well go all the way.

Really, that's been the whole fun with Kamai. I never thought I'd like mages, but it's really interesting to play a ranged class that is not a hunter. The bag of tricks is different, but the way they're used is similar, so it's a blast. I'd really like to do the same sort of comparison between a resto druid and a resto shaman.

It's true

2009-02-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

The downside to playing on a laptop: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/

Since I got one of those cooler fan things a few months ago, the burn marks on my left thigh have started to go away, though.

Lunar Fest

2009-01-31T13:09:00.000-08:00

I'm throwing a Lunar Festival party. Big cross-faction thing in the World's End Tavern in Shatt. Starts in five hours.

I have no idea wtf I'm doing and it's going to bomb.

EDIT: It didn't bomb. It actually went pretty well. Yeah, I'm surprised too. :-D

Loque Watch '09 update

2009-01-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

I haven't seen hide nor hair of Loque since the time he killed me. I'm not giving up, but I miss Cinnamon. Gorilla was fun for a while, but now I'm like, "Okay, Gorilla, let's finish these quests so I can send you home! Buh-bye now!"

So I think I will finish up the Basin — I have a handful of quests to go — and then move on to Icecrown. If I find Loque before then, awesome, I will be ecstatic. If I do not, I will wait until I have my epic flyer (mining while Loque hunting has gotten me halfway to the training) and then put in a couple of days here and there, because aside from working on the Elder title with Ahami, I've done nothing but look for Loque for over a week.

I'm going to trust that someday, I will be in the right place at the right time again, and next time I won't screw it up. In the meantime, I want to continue to do the other stuff I love in the game, like PVP, the holidays, and maybe playing other toons sometimes.

Diving in to UIs

2009-01-26T14:30:00.001-08:00

I've been using the standard UI for WoW since I started playing, and while I didn't have any problems with it as a hunter, I'm really starting to get annoyed when healing, because:

- Everything is too far away from everything else. While all of my spells are keybound, I do click to select people. (Yes, I click sometimes. Sorry.) I want to be able to see everyone in my group or full raid in one spot, see who needs healing, click the name and hit the appropriate button. Without using Healbot, though, 'cause I hate that p.o.s. add-on. It's not too bad when I'm just with a small party because everyone's portrait is on the left, but in the battlegrounds or WG it gets really, really frustrating and slows me way down. And as I've established here, I like things to go veryvery fast.

I'd also really, really like to be able to heal someone without switching who I have selected. For example, if I am healing a five-man, I usually have the tank selected as my default heal target, so I can monitor Earth Shield, keep her health topped, etc. I want to be able to heal one of the DPS without having to switch to them, heal, and switch back. Mostly so that I can just throw a Lesser Healing Wave or Chain Heal at the ranged folks without losing my attention on keeping the tank and melee peeps alive. Or so, when I'm in a battleground, I can throw heals to the folks who need one while my pocket DPSer isn't taking damage, but not have to search and find them again. I know it can be done, but how?

- I have a lot of action bars. I hate going to my spellbook, so I use all five action bars, and most of the things on those action bars are keybound. I rarely use everything, but I want to know that Fire Resistance Totem is there should I ever need it. I need more action bars. (I'm dead serious, I need at least one more visible for both Ahami and Ideale.) Bad thing? They eat a good quarter of my screen on the bottom and the right. I want to make them smaller, stick them all in one spot, and perhaps add more actiony goodness, if that's even possible.

- I am really starting to hate the portraits/health bars/etc. I do not like fancy things (aside from fancy party clothes), and they are just too ornate for me. I want them to be plain. And maybe not round, because it looks messy on a cluttered, rectangular screen.

So what do I do? I've been looking on the official forum and at what various other people are using, but I'm still at a complete loss as far as what mods to download and how to configure things. Is there a how-to guide out there? Because I'm not finding one, and I'm hesitant to grab add-ons or mods from any site but Curse, given the rash of hacked accounts lately.

Help, please?

Dear Beast Masters

2009-01-25T21:46:00.000-08:00

Please keep respeccing as Marksmanship or Survival. While your DPS will trump mine (not that, given my level, gear and general disinterest in PVE, it wouldn't have already), I will have less competition for Loque'nahak's LOVE.

<3 Loque.

Now if only I could convince folks on VeCo to not kill him ... or bribe them into telling me where he is and letting me tame him. No takers so far, sadly.

P.S. In all seriousness, I'm really glad to see other hunter specs getting attention. BM hunters had it good for a long time (the entire time I've been playing the game, in fact), so it's about time hunters who just don't care for BM got some time in the sun.

In fact, when/if dual speccing even gets implemented, I fully intend to go with one of the other specs for PVP and just keep BM for wandering about Azeroth, farming ore and hopefully taking Loque for walks in. I certainly want to test out survival at a higher level; it was/has been fun in the low levels. And I'd like to give MM a whirl too, just because I love burst damage.

But since I don't have to think about what's best for a raid group or arena team, I think I will stick with what I love for now.

Lunar Festival coolness

2009-01-24T20:07:00.001-08:00

Did anyone notice that the new elder in Thunder Bluff is named Ezra Wheathoof? Things like this make me really love Blizz.

Who am I kidding?

2009-01-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

This is LOQUE BLOG now.

I found him. I found him! I was going to finish up a quest and then do one more round, and I happened to be in the spawn west of Nesingwary's camp, and he just appeared right in front of me!

So I quickly feigned death and abandoned my Gorilla (way better than Rhino, I may tame one for real someday), then ran over, laid a frost trap, and started the tame.

And then a longneck grazer wandered into my trap, and Loque pounced me. And since FD was on cooldown ... I panicked, broke the tame and died.

I ran back as fast as I could, praying that no one had seen him. I was literally shaking. And then I got back, and there he was! And I started to bandage — and he pounced right into another hunter's freezing trap.

I thought I would be more upset, but after three days of hunting, I'm just glad I finally saw him! Alive, and with my own eyes, not via a guildie. I was beginning to think I never would. And with two close calls in three days, I'm hoping this means that I will get him for myself eventually.

And this hunter and I had been patrolling his spawns all morning and we kept running into each other and chatted, so I knew he had stumbled on him as he was being tamed four times, and seen his corpse twice. So I was really excited for him to finally have nabbed him! If he could get him after weeks of searching and so many close calls, I can hope for my own Loque someday soon. I cheered him, saluted him, then headed back to Nesingwary to log and take my real cat for a walk.

Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

Day Two

2009-01-21T03:21:00.000-08:00

No Loque, but 450 mining makes me v. happy.

Definitely the prettiest hunter in the zone.

(I don't imagine anyone hasn't read the Very Secret Diaries, but if you are among those few, clicky click.)

Anyway, no, I do not plan to do this every day (post updates). In fact, I hadn't planned to do one today, except that right after the server came up, I logged in and about 15 minutes later was chatting with the other BM hunter in the guild about Loque, when a pally guildie was all, "Is he a glowing blue cat? 'Cause I saw him a minute ago."

Me: "omg where? OMG WHERE?"

Sadly, we flew out to the spot and he was vanished — no corpse or anything. F. had seen an Alliance hunter in the area, so she probably got to him first, darnit.

But I am posting this because I want to share the spawn point: It was on the west side of the Lifeblood Pillar. This is not on the wowhead map, and is in fact only on one other map I've seen. So I can confirm that this seems to be a spawn point, since he appeared there immediately after server start-up. (Server was up 5-10 minutes.)

So anyone who is desperately hunting for their spirit kitty like myself, be sure to check that spot as well!

So maybe I'm being a little oversensitive

2009-01-21T01:29:00.000-08:00

But the switching r's and l's thing is suddenly en vogue on VeCo — like, literally, I've turned off every chat channel I used to follow except the Defense channels, and I see it there sometimes too — and it makes me want to choke people.

Am I missing something here? Something WoW or lore related, perhaps? Or is it the standard "mock Asian accents" bullshit? 'Cause if it's the former, I'll rein it in, but if it's the latter, I can make no promises NOT to choke people. Mostly because I thought that stopped being funny in like 1870.

I play an MMO to get away from this crap.

Death knights on any realm

2009-01-20T12:12:00.001-08:00

I saw that in the general chat. This makes me happy, because I really want to redo the death knight starting zone, but do not want to reroll my current death knight.

Of course, this means that I will add a swath of incomplete DK alts across nine servers (one for each race!) to my pile of level 25 Alliance alts.

Other changes:

Mania has the list of hunter changes, so I won't bother with those. My Arcane Shot costs less now, so that makes me happy. I've always used it in my "shot rotation" when soloing because I use it a lot in PVP and don't do instances on my hunter, so I never really worried about mana conservation or the proper ways of doing things. But now it costs less mana! So I can kite paladins longer in PVP — which is good, because those bastards never die.

Arcane Torrent has diminishing returns now. :-( Not that I am close enough to melee people to use it in PVP much, but still.

Important for world PVP — 60 graveyards have been added to old Azeroth. Please, WoW gods, have added one closer to Stormwind. That is the worst corpse run in the game, no contest.

Wisp got a buff!

I'm a bit miffed that they nerfed the quest requirement for Loremaster of Kalimdor. I realize that 700 quests is a lot, but really, why make this achievement easy? It should be time-consuming. I swear, if they nerf it again and there are 8 billion Loremaster Irhealzorz running around, I will ... complain about it and otherwise do nothing. (Let's be realistic here.)

Same with the aquatic form quest. I really liked that quest on Onashne. In fact, I really like all of the ability-granting quests, and kind of wished there were more — it is more immersive and feels like you are really earning the abilities. (For example, I LIKED training pet abilities by learning them from animals in the wild. It would have been nice if you could learn them with a temp tame stick like with the level 10 quest, or by fighting the animal, so you didn't have to have a stable slot free, but I LIKED it. I feel bad for new players who will never get to experience this stuff. I also LOVED the totem quests on my shaman.)

I get a free shaman respec! So long, PVE healing build. Hello, shorter stun durations and fewer pushbacks! And they fixed Fire Nova Totem. Which means I can actually use it for something other than making pretty flame poofs while waiting for people to hit the flag room in WSG.

Hooray for trading inks! I need Snowfall Ink badly. I have a bag full of Ink of the Sea (I am dead serious, I have the worst luck milling Icy Pigment).

Double hooray for mining not sucking so bad anymore! One hit gets you everything in the node. While I liked mining fine the slow way on PVE realms, one member of our rival guild seemed to always be mining at the same time as me and constantly ganked me all through Outland (since he was a mage and in top arena gear, it wasn't hard), and mining is a terrifying prospect (hehe) for me now. With every tap of a node, I get more and more convinced I am about to die. It will be much less stressful now!

And on an unrelated note, pro-tip to the night elf non-hunters out there: If I have Hunter's Mark on you, Shadowmeld will not help you, even with the new changes.

New zone, new pet

2009-01-20T04:47:00.000-08:00

I love Sholazar Basin. Ideale, however, has only done one quest there, despite having the achievement for exploring the whole thing, plus about six hours of /played.

I've been hunting Loque'nahak. I did a few rounds yesterday on talbuk, and then dinged 77 and finished Dragonblight today and started Loque hunting in earnest. While I saw Loque twice (dead both times) on Ahami while she leveled from 77 to 80 in Sholazar, he was quite good at hiding today.

However, terrified that I would lose Cinnamon, I stabled him and tamed a rhino as a temp pet. It turned out to be a good choice; Ideale hates how Rhino blocks her when she's mining, and Rhino hates how the only food Ideale has are some dried out Telaari Grapes that might have been gummed by a lightning bug at some point. And also how she named him Rhino. I don't think I will have a bit of trouble when it comes time to set him free and tame Loque — should that time ever come.

I've always had luck with rares, so I'm betting that this time, when I actually care, it will vanish on me and I will never find him. But hey, if it was easy, what would be the point?

I figure I'll search intensely for a few days, but after that, it's not going to interrupt my life, either out of game or in game. It'll happen or it won't.

Because it's still getting replies

2009-01-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of Yar Yar Hump Hump, a couple of folks on VeCo stumbled upon some "roleplaying" in Silvermoon City and decided to join in: Don't Cyber in Smoons: A Cautionary Tale.

Project Infiltration: I suck

2009-01-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

I am working on the blog layout thing and adding a list of "helpful" (in my mind, anyway) posts I've written, and realized that while I wrote all of the Project Infiltration posts, I never posted them all.

For those who don't feel like mucking through my archives, Project Infiltration was where I rolled a Horde hunter and an Alliance hunter, leveled them to 10, and then went to each starting zone of the other faction to tame pets you can't get elsewhere, or can't get until the high levels.

The ones I did post:

Project Infiltration: Dun Morogh
Project Infiltration: Teldrassil
Project Infiltration: Tirisfal Glades
Project Infiltration: Eversong Woods
Project Infiltration: Elwynn Forest

So I will be editing the rest, adding screen shots and posting them sometime in the next week. And maybe, maybe even add the long-promised screen shots to the already finished ones! Since they were the whole reason I even created this blog and all.

So much win

2009-01-17T03:55:00.000-08:00

When a healer suspects her tank is cheating on her ...

Housecleaning

2009-01-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

- Removed some inactive/vanished stuff from the blogroll and added a few new ones. (Including some VeCo people! Hi, VeCo people!)
- Cleaned up Armory links to get rid of my latest failed Alliance attempts.

That's about it. Still haven't created a decent blog layout, because I have WoW ADD and am now working on a "poster" for an event I'm co-planning in between working.

To Do:
- Stop stalling and take decent screenshots to use for blog layout.
- Get Ideale to 76 and Sholazar Basin to tame the spirit cat.
- Get Kamai and Malisya to 30 and mounted, so I get an idea of who I want to level next. Alternatively, find out of there are drugs that cure altitis.
- Stop dropping Ahami's fire elemental every single time I PVP and the cooldown's up. Seriously, overkill is fun, but one of these days I'm gonna need it and have blown it.
- And get the Stormhide belt made, since I've had the mats for it in my bags for, like, three weeks and I could use the space.
- And do more Wyrmrest and battleground dailies.

Finding fun in dailies

2009-01-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

I am not a dailies kind of person. I don't care for them much — oh, I do them, but I don't really like them. Not because dailies are generally gank-fests, but because they eat valuable time I could be spending PVPing or exploring or mining or something. And face it, once you've seen them once, they're pointless.

So here are a few of the things I do to make dailies less of a chore:

1. I only do 3-5 a day. That's still a good 50 gold or so, plus the rep, and takes anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on which ones I do and how much travel I put in. Honestly, I'm not in a huge hurry to get exalted with everything NOW. The next expansion will be another 2-3 years down the road and I don't do much PVE, so I have plenty of time.

2. I focus on one rep-grind at a time (well, two; one PVE and one PVP). If you're only doing a handful of dailies each day, it's nice to see one faction gaining rep in chunks rather than a trickle in three or four. It makes it feel like something is being accomplished. For example, I worked on Ahami's Kalu'ak rep, then took a PVP-only break for a few weeks. Now I am working on her Wyrmrest rep or working on Arathi Basin when I log in on her. Of course, if you're doing the heroic tabard thing, you're going to gain rep much faster plus get emblems and stuff from the heroic daily.

3. Pick one daily that I really like and do it every day. Right now, it's the cooking one (and I think the jewelcrafting one will be up there, too!). For the Kalu'ak, I liked the wolvar pups quest. I did my third Aces High! today and am really having a blast with that one (plus, when I do lose my drake, I have time to read blogs while I parachute to the ground for 15 minutes).

4. When I reach a goal (a certain amount of gold, a gain in rep from Friendly to Honored, etc.), I reward myself. For Ahami, it's harder because she's a scribe, and the recipes aren't purchasable. I've been grabbing cooking recipes or minipets for her, but I'm going to be running out of stuff soon. For Ideale, I'll splurge on an expensive jewelcrafting recipe (or go to the Isle and grab one of the few I haven't learned yet).

5. When I've reached a major goal (Exalted with a faction, or if I ever manage to save 1,000 gold), I take a break for a week and only do what I feel like doing, whether that's leveling an alt, playing around in the battlegrounds, flying around pointlessly, or whatever.

Just three questions, not 20

2009-01-14T22:39:00.001-08:00

Questions for everyone, because I am bored but don't feel like writing/finishing a substantial post today. My answers are below.

1. Do you have a preferred faction?

Horde, all the way. Maybe it's because my initial experiences playing Alliance were on Laughing Skull, the Worst Server in WoW. Maybe it's the 20-30 zones and their boring, boring quests. (Okay, Ashenvale was okay.) Maybe it's the that only realm I have liked enough to keep playing there was Venture Co., and since I have Horde there, Alliance is out. I don't know. I do know that the only Alliance character I've ever gotten past 30 stalled out at 38, and she only got that far at all because my BFF and her fiance power-leveled me in four sessions through instances.

Part of it is that I love the storylines for the Horde so much better. They have an edge that the Alliance just doesn't, and I love it.

2. What is your favorite race in the game?

Draenei. Coming off my last question, maybe that's weird, but if draenei were Horde, I'd never play anything else, except maybe my second-favorite race, trolls. For both, I love their stories, I love their cultures, and the Exodar is absolutely the most gorgeous city in the entire game.

3. What is your favorite class?

I think resto shaman is the most natural class for me to play. I just "get" it on a level I don't with any other class in the game — or maybe that's healing. (EDIT: Which is not to say I'm good at it yet. I've got a lot of work to do.) Either way, shaman is definitely my favorite class for PVP so far (though some other classes are seriously fun, and I've really never gone beyond the 29 bracket for most classes yet anyway).

That said, I think that hunters are still my favorite, partly because I spend a lot of time soloing due to my working hours. Other reasons: Cats, of course. There's just something completely relaxing about sitting at range and destroying a mob while your pet plays with them. And really, they're just fun. They're the only ranged class in the game that is not a caster, and that's kind of cool. They're like rogues at a distance (even if we never got our camouflage).

I'm also, in my latest round of testing the waters of other classes, really liking my mage, warlock and DK, and I really want to give my druid another shot — I think I'd love druid healing. Still not big on the other melee classes or priests, though.

Impatience

2009-01-13T14:23:00.001-08:00

Ideale sat at the end of the dock at Moa'ki Harbor, idly scratching Cinnamon behind his ears as he purred. So much had happened in the war against the Scourge the past few months, but a broken arm had taken her out of commission for weeks just days after she arrived in Northrend. Now she was stuck cleaning up little messes while others spent their time on the front lines.

"What's wrong, hunter?" One of the Kalu'ak guards took a seat next to her.

"I don't feel particularly useful. I came here to fight the Scourge, but it seems like all I've done is break mammoth traps, retrieve crab traps, play matchmaker to sea cows, pick flowers. Not that those things aren't important," she said hastily, "except maybe the flower thing, but they aren't what I came here to do."

"You came to cover yourself with glory? Be a hero?" he asked with a slight smile. Or she thought it was a smile, anyway. Hard to tell with those tusks.

"No. But ..."

"Ah. Revenge." Ideale nodded, then shrugged. "Vengeance isn't a path one takes lightly, shaloshka."

"I know," she said. "But it's the path I chose, and this waiting is driving me mad."

"If that's really what you seek, then I suggest you ask the goblin for passage to Venomspite. But there's value in what you are doing here as well. The Kalu'ak are grateful for all of the help the Horde has given us."

Ideale stood, her cat following suit. "You're welcome." She hesitated for a moment, then forced a smile. "And thank you for the shelter for these past few days, and the advice." Moments later, she was flying over the guard, waving as she left the village.

Finally, she would get to fight the Scourge. Finally, she would get to do what she came here to do. And maybe she'd find some sign of her family. Ideale pushed the last thought away; it wouldn't do to get her hopes up.

Below, the guard shook his head. "That one's going to get herself into trouble. What's wrong with trapping crabs?"

Haven't played

2009-01-12T19:57:00.001-08:00

Too tired. Not sure why.

Going to log into the hunter now, but don't know how long I will last.

Alliance characters are on hold (or maybe retired?) due to BFF's new schedule not meshing with my old/current one. Not renewing Recruit-A-Second-Account until we figure out what we're doing. Poor Tshaya. Three servers and I still never play her.

I did, however, play lots of Arathi Basin on Saturday. Healed until I hit that point where I couldn't actually react anymore and had fun the whole time.

Next goal: Ideale to 77 so I can get Cold Weather Flying and tame a Spirit Kitty. And then hunter PVP. Oh, I've missed you, hunter PVP. Healer PVP is fun, but sometimes I want to kill people, and taking the lowbies for a whirl is just not as fun.

The end.

EPILOGUE: I really wish my guild were way less awesome sometimes. Because they are way too cool for me to even entertain the thought of transferring my mains to an Oceanic server, thus dashing all of my hopes of doing anything fun in the game. Like get an ugly, ugly warbear.

REVISED SEQUEL OF EPILOGUE: So now I'm organizing stuff for my nights off. And it scares me! More on this later.

My new favorite

2009-01-10T11:51:00.001-08:00

I should make this an ongoing thing, because I have a "new favorite" in this game like every week.

Anyway, this one brings me back to when I first hopped into Arathi Basin on Ahami: I like to get a melee class on me, then just heal myself while my pocket rogue or DK destroys them as they focus all their fire on me. I'm not sure if it's because I switched out a couple of instance drops for pieces with resilience or if I'm just getting the hang of endgame PVP again, but I sat and healed myself through two warriors and a ret pally in AV last night — a RET PALLY — while the rogue I'd been focusing all my heals on wiped them out. Granted, the pally at least could not have been well-geared because I get two-shotted by the geared ones, but still.

Melee classes get tunnel vision too! And I love it. <3

I missed you, battlegrounds. I'll never leave you for PVE again!

Battleground rep by the numbers

2009-01-10T03:28:00.000-08:00

So you're eyeing that shiny Conqueror or Justicar title for the battlegrounds, and you need rep. Chances are if you PVP at all, you're already Exalted or close with Frostwolf or Stormpike, and heck, that was easy, so gaining exalted with your respective Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin faction should be cake, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Because you get a little reputation for every enemy NPC killed in Alterac Valley, or a lot if you take out Balinda and Vann or Galv and Drek, and there are so many quests in AV, it's pretty easy to get Exalted before you can even complete some of the other achievements (in fact, while I'm not sure due to my head start on both my mains, I believe that if you do all the quests and kill at least Balinda or Galv every match, you could probably hit Exalted before you even get the Alterac Valley Veteran achievement).

Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch, however, have no NPCs, so you have to be at least partly successful to gain any reputation.

So here's an expanded version of the little guide I wrote for myself, since I am shooting for Conqueror on Ideale and maybe Ahami as well. At least it'll get me out of Alterac Valley for a bit!

Arathi Basin
Arathi Basin has one bonus that Warsong Gulch does not: quests. Completing and turning in the quests grants 500 reputation each. In addition, you gain 10 rep for every 200 resources gathered (or 10 for every 150 on battleground weekends). That's 100-130 rep per win, and the battles go much more quickly so even if you lose, you're not spending too much time futilely. If you do the available quests, you'll need to win 312-405 battles to hit Exalted. If you lose but still put in a good show in most of the battles, that's about 500-600 games played.

Ideale needs 367 wins at 100 rep per win, plus one quest.
Ahami needs 397 wins at 100 rep per win, plus all quests.

Game Plan: Run two matches per day, every day, on at least one toon.

Warsong Gulch
Warsong Gulch is definitely the harder of the two. WSG matches can go on for a fair amount of time, and even if you win, you only gain 105 rep per game (or 135 on WSG weekends). This means that if you only play on WSG weekends, you need 934 flag captures to reach Exalted; if you miss the weekends, you need 1200. Ouch. That's 312-405 games if you win every game.

Ideale needs 1144 flag captures.
Ahami needs 1181 flag captures.

Game Plan: Cry. Just kidding. Try and shoehorn in a win a day so I don't get stuck at Friendly or something horrible when I finish up AB.

Can you tell I sort of hate Warsong Gulch?

That's a lot of time in both battlegrounds, but I think I can do it. I really want the title for Ideale, which means my best bet may be doing as many of the two battlegrounds before she hits 80 as possible. Horde in the pre-level cap brackets in Nightfall tend to be those who actually enjoy PVP, thus we work together better and have a higher success rate. End-game drops down to a 50-50 proposition. I don't intend to stop questing or anything, but I could spend half an hour in the battlegrounds before heading off to quest easily.

Ahami is already 80 and since PVE healing kind of bores me, I've pretty much just been doing dailies. So I will ditch a couple dailies and hit the battlegrounds with her more often (she's just barely Revered in AV, too, so I can keep running that; Ideale is already Exalted with Frostwolf).

Ideas to Keep It From Sucking
- Take advantage of the battleground weekends. If it's AB or WSG weekend, ignore the other battlegrounds (even the daily, if your time is limited!) and cram as many games as you can in.

- Find friends to run with. Chances are there are others on your server going for the title (and other achievements) as well, and if nothing else you can commiserate between matches. Team up with them as much as possible if you work well together, and this has the added bonus of improving your success rate. I watched a five-man premade in Alterac Valley defend and recap all four towers against the 15 or so Alliance who slipped past our front lines today. A few folks got their Frostwolf Perfection achievement that match. Ran into a priest and mage in AB who defended the Lumber Mill alone the entire game without losing it once, despite groups of 5 or so Alliance heading up there every few minutes.

- Get guildmates involved. One of VeCo's Alliance PVPers got the Battlemaster title (world fifth, world first paladin) with the help of his two guilds and in-game friends. Many of them got a bunch of the PVP achievements in the course of helping him out, and they all said it was a lot more fun that way.

- Even if you don't find friends from your own realm, work as a team with whoever you end up with. If nothing else, the exercise in strategy will give you something to do. And if you get a cooperative group (you know, the kind who doesn't type insults and cursing in all-caps while trying to singlehandedly cap the stables), you might be able to work on some of the more difficult defense achievements. In fact, if you're on around the same time every day, you might start running into familiar faces; when Ahami was 59, I spent a couple of weeks in Alterac Valley with her before leveling for some reason (I forget why). Because I usually queue up between 1:30-4 a.m., I was running into the same group every day, from several different realms in the battlegroup, and we won about 95 percent of our matches because we had a strategy and just trusted each other to listen and respond when someone said, "We could use some more defense at Galv" or "We're short healers on offense."

- Work on the other achievements. Ignore the rep at first, and work on stuff like Disgracin' the Basin and Supreme Defender and, of course, the Veteran achievements you get for 100 wins. By the time you've exhausted those, you'll be much closer to your goal (hopefully, anyway!).

- Spend your Marks of Honor. I have no idea if they stack past 100 now, because every time I get close, I go shopping. Ideale has several tabards. Ahami just got herself the Frostwolf Howler (and another achievement!). You can get six mounts via Marks of Honor, the five faction mounts and your respective AV mount; work toward the Albino Drake. I'm going to turn in Marks for honor on both of them as well until they both have the blue PVP set and the off-set pieces, which could take a while since each piece is 50k-60k honor. These are goals that can be worked on a bit here and there, so (like with the achievements) you feel like you're accomplishing something.

- Don't push it. If you keep working toward it, it'll happen, but don't burn yourself out. Take time out for exploring, professions, RP, world PVP/Wintergrasp, heroics/raiding, arenas, or whatever else floats your boat. What's the point of having a fancy title if you burn yourself out on PVP or even the game getting it?

Northrend in pictures

2009-01-08T15:08:00.001-08:00

Ahami got all dressed up and made some new friends. She wants one of those icicled helms for herself, by the way.

Ideale's favorite part of the new Aspect of the Hawk: the ability to fly.

Ideale to the mammoth calf: "You're cute and all, but I'm more of a cat elf. Now shoo. Oh no, don't look at me like that."

Now what?

2009-01-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

So a few minutes ago, a level 18 warrior whispers me and asks for 10g. Being a generous troll, I stole BRK's trick and said I'd give him 40g if he farmed me 99 Light Feathers.

"Great," he says, "I have over 100." And I get a group invite.

So I gave him his 40g, and now I have 100 Light Feathers and no idea what to do with them.

EDIT: Also, I was meant to be flying to Dalaran from K3 while writing this post, but forgot to actually do it, so now I have nothing to do for 30 seconds and that is way longer than my attention span.

Secret identities

2009-01-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

So we have a new software system at work that we've been training on, and this guy from Training Co LTD (I have no idea what the software company's called, but he works for it) has been coming in to go over all the features and whatever other random crap that he feels we need to know. He's been training us in groups, and my group went yesterday.

So we're putting pages here, and moving PostScript files there, and trying to figure out why this is working on one page and not another, and my coworker, who's on his laptop, accidentally closes the whole system, meaning that those of us sitting at the slaved monitors get to sit and look at his desktop for a few minutes while he opens it back up.

And he plays WoW.

I desperately wanted to ask what server/faction he plays, but I think that's kind of weird to ask some guy you don't even know the name of. Plus I had asked a whole ton of questions about servers and crap and felt like enough of a geek. (After we got back to the bat cave, I was all, "See!? It's totally normal!" and my boss was like, "Okay, so two whole people play that game." Thanks, boss, thanks.)

Personality in perspective

2009-01-06T23:52:00.000-08:00

I didn't really intend to roll Kamai, my troll mage. I was playing around with the character creation screen and really liked her hair (you have no idea how much gold I've blown in the barber shops of Azeroth, people). And then she was level 14.

So unlike Ahami and Silang, she didn't have a rudimentary backstory in place when I started playing her. And unlike Ideale, she did not even have a personality.

But now that I'm actually leveling her, I found I was having some trouble distinguishing her personality from Ahami's and it was really making playing her a bit odd. The backstory and personalities of my characters has always driven my enjoyment of the game. I have an eidetic memory, so once I've been through a zone, I remember all of the quests I completed down to the text (not word for word, but close enough for horseshoes and handgrenades), and if I'm not figuring out how a character would react to the lore and the quests, I get bored superfast.

The first thing I did was get her to another zone. Ahami leveled almost entirely in troll, orc and shaman zones — she did perhaps a handful of quests in the Ghostlands, and I think two in the Plaguelands. As a shaman, it made sense; as a burgeoning member of the Earthen Ring, of course she would be questing in areas where elementals were particularly active, and as a healer, of course she would be working in areas where there were other shamans and even druids who worked with nature rather than the Light to heal.

Kamai, as a mage, was particularly suited to go to the Forsaken and blood elf zones, to "learn more about magecraft," so off she went. That way, while I got to know her, at least she would be doing something different.

Nonetheless, there are similarities between the two, and knowing that Ahami had siblings, it only seems natural that Kamai would be her younger sister. Both are a bit eccentric in their intellectual pursuits for trolls; Ahami is a big reader, particularly of texts that describe healing and cleansing techniques and histories, and Kamai is an engineer and always poring over schematics. Both seem to have a deep-seated loyalty to the Horde. But that made developing a separate personality for Kamai a bit more of a challenge; I keep wanting to play her as I did Ahami.

So I sat down with some of the RP Friday Five questions from Too Many Annas. Really, for developing a character, they're fantastic. Answering some of them for Ide really helped me to get brave enough to actually roleplay with her! So if you're struggling, they're a wonderful resource.

Here's what I learned (well, Ahami I already know fairly well, but I am writing some out for comparison purposes):

AHAMI
Ahami is the more practical and grounded of the two, because she is the older, because she works with Earth and Water, or because of the nature of practicing the healing arts, or maybe some combination of all three. Because she's a healer, she tends to be patient and think logically; while she regrets every life she cannot save, as a soldier she does have to weigh who is most necessary to the fight and where to best spend her energies. She also has to think of herself, because if she burns out or uses her mana impetuously, then she's of no use to anyone.

This practicality extends to how she works with other classes; while she doesn't care much for those classes who work against nature instead of going with the flow, and particularly has a distaste for warlocks and death knights, she recognizes that they are another tool against the Horde's enemies, so she works with them. (On a side note, she realizes that death is a part of life. She also sees banning cannibalism as wasteful — people ARE made out of meat, after all, and if they're already dead ... — and often finds herself exchanging recipes for gnome with her Forsaken guildmates.)

She dreams, but they tend to be abstract and deeply rooted in the natural world around her. Sholazar Basin was a welcome relief after the snows of Howling Fjord and Dragonblight, for the dreams of waterfalls and trees alone. She likes to explore the world, but not necessarily for the sake of tourism so much as because she feels very connected to Azeroth and wants to know every nook and cranny of it. Sometimes she dreams of storms or earthquakes in completely other parts of the world.

She doesn't "get" fashion, and she hates most cities for the way that they destroy the natural world rather than working around it (though she likes Thunder Bluff and would love Darnassus if it weren't full of pesky night elves). She mostly travels, staying wherever she ends up for the night, whether in Orgrimmar or camped out in Un'Goro Crater.

Ahami's favorite holidays are the Midsummer Fire Festival and, to a lesser extent, the Lunar Festival.

She's fiercely independent — while she likes to feel as if she is useful and contributing to any group with similar goals, she has her own goals and she's not going to abridge them for anyone else, and she is quite happy spending weeks without human contact out in the wilderness.

Her philosophy? Go with the flow, work to keep balance, and stay away from da voodoo, and you'll be fine.

KAMAI
Kamai is the younger of the two, and much more of a social creature. She loves cities and can sit and talk shop with her colleagues for hours, something that would drive Ahami crazy. She's impetuous and, because of this, often gets into trouble over her head. Like her sister, she's fiercely loyal to her friends.

She's not a big reader — she learned how, because she's a mage after all, but she sees books as an annoyance that stand between her and what she needs to know. She prefers tailoring patterns and engineering schematics, because she can use them to get immediate results (by making them).

I don't think she'll ever be much of an arcane mage, since she seems to be pretty drawn to frost and fire. Arcane magic would probably require too much stuffy studying in libraries and not enough pyromania and shooting shards of frost at things. Plus, frost and fire remind her a bit of shamanism, and while she's studying magery on a whole other continent, she's still a troll and it reminds her of home.

She's far more energetic than her sister. Ahami is content to let things happen and react here, give a nudge there, until they're going the right way, then she goes with them, and what's past is past and cannot be changed. Kamai is much more hands-on, and always has to be doing something. She gets very upset in situations where she's helpless to change things, and has a tendency to obsess over them later.

One thing she does love about Silvermoon City is all of the parties. Kamai loves parties, and people, and while she recognizes that it's frivolous, she is a bit of a clotheshorse. (She has more dresses than Ideale.)

She's an inventor — while she's much less practical than her older sister, she's more cunning. She runs off of instinct, but somehow it all ends up working out, even if half of the stuff she dreams up shouldn't work. Unfortunately, Kamai also has her head in the clouds a lot, and sometimes she fails to account for reality in her schemes, with disastrous results.

She dreams, but mostly her dreams simply reflect her actual life, or she dreams of home. She's a bit of a follower, and while she recognizes that what she's doing will soon be important, she still misses her home (her childhood home, not the apartment she keeps in Silvermoon City). Trips home can be somewhat uncomfortable, though; she doesn't feel she's at all lived up to the expectation of what a Darkspear woman is supposed to be.

Her favorite holidays are Winter Veil and Children's Week — she might be an adult now herself, but she loves children.

And if she empties her pockets, there would be thread and a cloth stuck with needles (no thimble, though, because who needs them?) in one, and a handful of assorted bolts and springs in the other. She always has something in her pockets to keep her hands busy.

THEIR RELATIONSHIP
If they are sisters, they have to have some sort of relationship. My thoughts are that, as children, they were closer to each other than their other siblings because both had a deep love of learning. However, they grew apart as they grew older, since Ahami was drawn to the healing arts and shamanism, while Kamai found herself chasing more arcane pursuits. However, as Kamai follows in her sister's footsteps in serving the Horde, they are starting to regrow that connection and find common ground again.

Even so, I think Ahami is probably often exasperated with Kamai's head in the clouds personality, while Kamai probably loves to annoy her practical older sister with frivolous things. (That's what younger sisters do, right?)

Stupid PVP tricks

2009-01-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

I cannot help it. Every single time I see someone blow their trinket in PVP when I'm on Ahami, I Hex them. Even if they are one good shot from death. The only time I can resist is if my chosen target for heals is taking large amounts of damage.

Second to this is the Fire Elemental. I will wait until we are at the Stormpike Graveyard, usually, but oh, I love dropping him and then watching everyone run around trying to figure out what shaman did it or fighting him. If you can't kill the shaman, kill the totem, dummies.

It's like Disengage on Ideale. Do I need to use it? Most of the time, no. Do I use it anyway? Hell yes, it makes me fly through the air! I mean, I don't use it in situations where it's completely pointless or I might need it in a few seconds — I'll wait until after a warrior Intercepts or a death knight Death Grips, and I always am in a melee situation and need to get out when I hit Shift + D, but ... flying through the air!

Silang's Death Grip is getting there. Someone going after the flag runner? Death Grip! Someone on the flag at the Blacksmith? Death Grip! See that player over there, running innocently through the Field of Strife? Wave. Then Death Grip!

I really hope I'm not the only person who has skills or spells that are just so much fun that I use them every time I can make a case for it/every time the CD's up, squealing with glee the whole time.

Titles

2009-01-02T21:47:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, I'm kind of addicted to titles. I wasn't for a long time, but with the achievements system offering a bunch of new ones, I'm kind of hooked, especially given the wide variety. I already know certain ones I want.

For example, one of Ideale's faults is that she tries way too hard to do everything for everyone. She was short of Exalted with the Darkspear Trolls by only 300 rep when the Achievements system hit, and already Exalted with the other four Horde factions, so she's Ambassador Ideale now.

Ahami is naturally going to go for both the "Elder" and "Flame Keeper" holiday titles (Lunar Festival and Midsummer, respectively).

Silang is a bit harder, but I could aim for "Argent Champion" for now, and next year for "the Hallowed."

Kamai, my mage, who I've pretty much decided will be the next toon I level to 80 after Ideale*, will be Kamai the Loremaster and maybe Kamai the Seeker as well. That just seems appropriate for a mage.

I want to get the "Explorer" title on all of my toons who can get it, too — the twinks are probably out, though I've heard of one very determined level 21 on another server who has the title, so who knows? I might go for some of the holiday titles for them, though. I'd also like to have Conqueror Ideale and Ahami of the Horde eventually, but that will take a very long time, if I can do it at all.

Any other title junkies out there?

* I'm not going to put any serious effort into leveling Kamai until Ideale dings 80 and Ahami is exalted at least with the Wyrmrest Accord for my fancy gloves and head enchant. And probably with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, too, for the pants or kilt or whatever it is. While I've pretty much decided the PVE thing is still not for me, I would like to have a passable PVE set just in case I ever need it.

Vellums rock

2008-12-31T12:48:00.000-08:00

I had sent my enchanter a crapton of vellums that I created while leveling Ahami's inscription, and promptly forgot about them.

Well, yesterday I was a bit too sick to do anything worthwhile on Ideale, so I hopped on the warlock and the mage to test them out in PVP and see which was more fun, but two level 18 clothies in quest gear in the most notorious twink bracket in WoW was ... not a smart idea.

So I hopped on my bank alt and grabbed them some AH greens to wear, then filled in the rest with their tailoring — nothing too fancy, just some basic, level-appropriate stuff. Then I hopped on Daj and scrolled a few minor enchants (again, not the standard twink enchants, just some +stam to bracers and stuff).

And then I hopped back on. I can't compete with the rogues with 3.2K health, but 800+ is better than 200+, so I can actually survive long enough to do some damage.

The warlock is a bit more fun at this level, but I think the mage will be more fun for soloing — it's starting to get boring with the 'lock. So I'll keep playing to 30 with both of them, but the mage might be the one who goes all the way, and the 'lock might end up semi-twinked at 39 until I have the cash and time to make her a full-out twink at 59 (like the druid). That's based on first impressions, though — it could still change.

Really, it's amazing how much more fun this bracket can be if it you're not getting one-shotted every time. And if you have an enchanter and some vellums, it's pretty damn cheap to do the enchants, too.

The alt thing

2008-12-29T02:01:00.001-08:00

For a long time, I didn't get the alt thing. I could understand having more than one 70, but the idea of working on leveling more than one toon at a time just eluded me. I leveled my hunter to 70, and then, after I'd earned her a few pieces of PVP gear, explored Outland, done most of the quests to get her exalted with the five Horde factions, and maxed her mining and gotten close with her jewelcrafting, I returned to my shaman and leveled her up to 80 (basically, since Wrath came out just before I dinged 69).

And now that her herbalism is maxed, she's got gear just barely decent enough to heal heroics, and I've gotten bored with dailies, I should be leveling my hunter. And I am, a little here and there, veryvery slowly. And I am also leveling my mage and warlock and playing (but not really leveling) my death knight. I do want to sit down and focus on Ideale, and I really need to work on rep with Ahami, but I needed a break after the grind to 80, especially because I needed some time for the quests to freshen up, and having alt ADD has been a bit fun. It's getting old, though — I don't feel like I'm making any progress with any of my toons this way.

I will definitely focus on Ideale, but I kind of want to pick one other character to level to 80, to play when I'm just not feeling like spending another minute in Grizzly Hills or Strand of the Ancients. I only play my death knight with my priesty roommate, and that suits me fine; same with my survival hunter and my BFF. I want a healer in the 50-59 bracket, so the druid is out.

That leaves the mage or the warlock. The mage would be more logical — I'd be able to port people around for cash and so on, AOE farming would be kind of awesome, I could wait with Drek'thar until the Alliance attacked and then run around in circles spamming Arcane Explosion, etc.

But while I have not liked warlocks in the past, I am really taken with my current attempt, an undead 'lock. I tried the orc thing, then got a great character idea. Malisya's ... well, really crazy. As in not actually in touch with reality. And not really in a good way. I mean, she gets that the Forsaken have broken away from the Scourge and that they are supposedly working with the Horde, but she doesn't really care as long as she gets to kill stuff. And laugh about it. If I get her to Northrend, I don't know how she's going to do Wrathgate, because she'd totally just sit back and watch the whole thing, clapping gleefully, and not care who won.

I've always loved playing the chaotic evil types (even when I creep myself out with them sometimes), and I just keep coming back to play her, even though the DoT thing gets kind of frustrating sometimes. It's a really, really fun change from my other toons — Ideale is totally driven, but has a moral code and sticks to it even if it throws a wrench in her plans; Ahami is a healer first and foremost, who will kill when it is necessary without remorse, but really prefers to keep other people alive and let them do the killing; even Silang, who has no problem with doing what needs to be done even if it is technically evil (for example, the quest "A Special Surprise"), has regrets about it and prefers to act for the greater good when she can. Silang is my only red=dead character — the others mostly keep the PVP to the battlegrounds or defending Horde cities.

My original plan was to level both to 30 and then choose, but I'm getting back to my "I don't get the alt thing" mindset. I'd like to focus on one character at a time, and save the twink projects for breaks now and then. So while I level Ideale, I will be weighing warlock vs. mage.

Percula is amazing

2008-12-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

No, really. I have no idea who Percula is, but I do know that this machinima is probably the best one I've ever seen. I think I've watched it about six times since someone posted it on the VeCo forums yesterday.

The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

Makes me wish I had played my rogue to 80.

Death Knight PVP: First impressions

2008-12-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

I ventured into Warsong Gulch on Silang last night. I've been pretty focused on getting Ahami to 80, then on getting her geared up enough to heal heroics first and maybe survive for a reasonable amount of time in the battlegrounds second (I lack resilience ... a lot), raising her rep with various factions, and then on playing Ideale (don't let the Armory fool you - she's one bubble from 72!). So really, the only time I've been playing my death knight was when I was rolling with my shadow priesty friend (we're trying to catch her up).

Last night, though, I was bored and really didn't feel like running dailies. Huntering sounded fun, but I really wanted to run some battlegrounds as DPS, and with Ide still 71, that just didn't seem like a fun idea.

And then I remembered that I have a 58 death knight. Now, I suck at melee (though apparently less than I thought), but I figured it would be fun. So I did three runs of Warsong Gulch (would have done more, but the second and third took roughly 45 minutes apiece, and I stayed because we had a really good group on both sides; it was the same group both times).

First off, death knights in PVP are a total blast. I did have some trouble with ranged classes — one pretty good frost mage kept tricking me into blowing Death Grip with Ice Nova, and then kiting me around. Icy Touch is about the only ranged thing you get that doesn't cost runic power, so staying in melee is important. Death Grip and Chains of Ice help with this.

Second, Death Grip is an incredible, incredible ability. Why? You are the ultimate flag runner protector (well, other than a priest or pally). Run along about 20 yards behind the flag runner, and when someone gets right on his ass, Death Grip, Chains of Ice, and either take him down or keep following the flag runner, depending on which seems more helpful at the time.

Defense is also awesome — just wait for someone to grab the flag, then Death Grip and melee them down.

Other things I noticed: Pestilence + Blood Boil = yay. I really ought to have used Mind Freeze on that mage, now that I'm thinking about it. Unholy is super fun for PVP, mostly because when you die, you self-rez for a short time as a ghoul. If you target someone in a group of Alliance (or Horde, if you roll with the other side), do the leapy thing into the middle, and explode yourself, it's really, really satisfying. Especially when a hunter on your side has dropped frost trap and is volleying the group already. I think we took out five people at once one time. (Of course, this is not so good when the three offense who ran into their flag room suddenly have to deal with the five folks running from the graveyard. *facepalm*)

I can already see how some of these would be applied in Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm. (Death Grip is seriously one of the coolest PVP talents ever; it interrupts, it slows people down/removes their progress, etc. The Gargoyle is pretty handy, too.) I think I'm going to have to actually run Alterac Valley to get a feel for DK PVP there — it just plays so differently.

Still, for WSG I think I did okay — I topped or came close on the damage meters, protected the flag runner on a few runs, and killed the other side's flag carrier several times (although I am so slow on clicking the flag back — I play defense almost always in WSG and I think I've had a total of, like, four flag returns across all my characters because I'm just too slow). Also got the Not So Fast achievement! I must not have done too bad, because it got where every time I was on defense, they would run in and all unload on me first. So either they thought I was dangerous enough to deal with ASAP, or I'm an easy mark (the latter is probably more likely, since I really am bad at melee).

It's also nice to see AFKers forced to play. This orc shaman was standing at the graveyard for most of the first battle, and kept getting reported. Finally he got booted from the round. When we all got in the second round, he was there again, and we were like, "Oh, great, 9-man again." And then he had a flag carry and three defends, and came in third on the damage meter, and was like, "Hey, that was an awesome match!." Isn't it way more fun when you actually participate? You get more honor that way, too.

Rethinking blogging!

2008-12-21T19:12:00.000-08:00

When I started this blog, I was pretty much a total noob. I hated every class but hunter and maybe shaman, the only pets I liked were cats and owls, and I thought Arathi Basin was the absolute best thing ever. About the only thing that hasn't changed since May is my adoration of battleground PVP.

It's about time I found a niche with blogging, so I sat down and brainstormed some ideas for future blog entries, and noticed a theme:

- Battleground PVP; how have the changes with the expansion changed this? Gear changes/siege weapons/does Wintergrasp count as world or battleground PVP? New strategies.

- Pet reviews; would need an open pet slot. Instead of ranking pets, focus on what each pet is good for (PVP, PVE, soloing)/how to maximize pet skills/pros and cons of each class/etc.

- World PVP; strats for city bosses, organizing events, using old world PVP objectives to start trouble (EPL, Silithus)

- Strengths of each class for PVP, cons; what are tricks to beat each class? What are must-know skills you should have if you want to PVP as X? (i.e., hunters should know how to kite, when to use traps/big red pet/whatever, etc.)

- Roleplaying; name choices? success in organizing RP events lies in server's interests

- Twinking; gear changes (bind to account/heirloom gear), stat changes. How has inscription changed twinking (vellums make enchants easier)? Profession choices for twinks; Sidenote: ethics of twinking, why to twink, why low-level twinking sucks

- More on gear without arenas; what pieces to look for, how to make up for hit to resilience/stam

And so on. Note the common theme there? It's not hunters or kitties (although the kitties are still my favorite).

Do I refocus this blog to be more large-scale PVP oriented? (I still don't really intend to do arena.) Do I start fresh* with a new blog? And most importantly, what should my new name be!?

*I do think I'll be moving to Wordpress either way; I am less and less fond of Blogger as time goes on. Wordpress has cooler themes, blog stats tools, and I just like it better anyway. Plus I keep ending up at Blogspit.com by accident.

WTB dual specs please

2008-12-16T11:46:00.000-08:00

I think too much like a PVPer.

My 13/0/58 spec? Well, the resto part is PVE — I sort of copied from a couple of other shamans on VeCo to get an idea of where points should go. But I finally went to see where most PVE'rs were putting their points in enhancement, and a lightbulb went off — they're aiming for more mana and more mana regen. *facepalm* Seriously, I'm very new to this PVE thing.

I've been thinking like a PVPer. My points in Enhancement, when Ahami was 0/13/58, were aiming for survivability (and instant ghost wolf for flag carrying purposes!). I had also spent points in resto to cut down healing pushbacks, reduce stun/fear durations, and so on. In PVP, if you run out of mana, you can just run back from the brawl, drink, and run back in (in AV), or fights generally end before you go out of mana everywhere else (either because you killed the other players or you got killed yourself, in which case you rez with full health and mana anyway).

I still do a lot of soloing, so I don't think I will be switching my spec just yet unless I notice a problem with my mana pool in heroics, but when dual speccing comes out, I think I will be switching to a cookie cutter resto/enh PVE spec and doing a 20/0/51 PVP spec.

On that note, I healed my first heroic yesterday. We had one partial wipe (the tank and I died, but held on long enough that the DPS could finish the boss off), but it went pretty well, and I really didn't have many mana issues. I do really need to look at healer addons again (I HATE Healbot), because my healing was a little too slow. There were a couple of scary moments where I almost lost the tank because I was trying to heal one of the DPSers, and a couple moments where I did lose a DPSer because the tank was taking enough damage that I knew I wouldn't be able to heal the mage and then switch back to her in time. Definitely harder to shaman-heal when there are only two melee folks.

But I think it went well, and I think it will go a little better next time. And I got Limb Regeneration Bracers! Finally something with haste on it! Just need to get the spellpower enchant for them now.

Rethinking twinking

2008-12-15T15:32:00.000-08:00

I had originally planned to make a pair of AV twinks, one survival hunter and one elemental shaman.

But since I now have an elemental shaman Alliance side (who will be going resto later), I have to say I'm just not really into elemental spec at all. And while I am still leveling another two hunters for fun, I want the Conqueror title for Ideale and I don't think I'll be PVPing much on the other two until she gets it. (Ditto for Ahami, actually.)

I've also been thinking that if I am going to make twinks, I should make them in classes I haven't played yet, for two reasons: 1. I can learn their weaknesses and then exploit them on my other toons; 2. when Blizz finally does start giving XP for battleground PVP like they keep saying they will and my twinks inevitably level, do I really want, like, six level 80 hunters and shamans? Plus, while I don't like any of the other classes enough to make them my main characters, I am finding that in short bursts — an hour or two here and there — they can be a whole lot of fun.

So my current plans have changed. Onashne is sitting pretty at level 30, and I have my troll magey and now an orc warlock* who I have been playing here and there for a break from Northrend. I will get some friends to run me through stuff so I can gear them for the 30-39 bracket, and there they will stay until Ahami, Ideale and Silang are all nice and leveled and maybe even geared a bit, and then I will see where to go from there. Maybe I'll level them for AV; maybe I'll leave them alone until the PVP XP starts, I don't know.

I am guessing that the title of this blog is now somewhat misleading, since hunters aren't my whole focus anymore (though I'm starting to get there with Ideale now in action again!). :-/

*I liked the human storyline and I really do want to try warlock PVP, so I am trying an orc, because maybe the secretive thing will make it more fun.

Pet choices

2008-12-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

Now that I have started leveling Ideale — with much frustration, I might add; after not having played her, literally, for a month, I am a borderline huntard mostly because I keep forgetting where I put things. "I have aggro! I have aggro! Oh yeah, Intimidation! ... Why did I just Arcane Shot?" And also ammo. Shamans do not have ammo, nor do they need it. So I'm sitting there shooting, shooting, shooting, and suddenly I am getting the out of ammo message and have to melee my way back out of Baleheim. *facepalm* Luckily, I think I got all the huntard out of my system by the time I dinged 71.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Now that I have started leveling Ideale, I've had to face facts. With the exception of my wasp, none of my pet choices are all that awesome for PVP, which is where I intend to spend all of my non-farming time on Ideale. Because really, I am not so good at PVE as DPS. And I don't know if it is a spec problem or I have the cower bug going on or what, but pre-WotLK Cinnamon had no problem holding aggro, and post-WotLK I am pulling aggro even though my DPS has tanked and even using Aspect of the Viper, thus tanking my DPS even more. (The DPS thing is a spec problem, I think — my DPS in Aspect of the Hawk is a bit lower than it used to be in Aspect of the Viper back pre-Wrath, and I don't think it's due to nerfs. I went with a hybrid spec for PVP, and because I am a defensive player went for Readiness, survivability and other tricks rather than massive DPS; this is not a leveling spec at all.)

I desperately MUST tame Loque. I have wanted to tame this cat since the moment I laid eyes on the screenshot at Mania's blog, and after having done the Har'koa quests on Ahami, I want him even more desperately. I've never wanted to tame a pet so badly, ever. I would also very much like a windserpent for PVP, and if I keep having aggro problems with Cinnamon, I would really like to tame a rhino for soloing with.

That's two pets, or maybe three. I have one remaining stable slot.

I am keeping Cinnamon, of course, and I'm already super-attached to my firefly, RIzal, even though he's still not 70. (I was leveling him through Alterac Valley ...) Plus, the wasp poison is absolutely wonderful for PVP. Not a lot of damage, but it really helps with kiting, and annoys the crap out of paladins. And there are so few wasp hunters!

I love Saffron a lot, but having two cats (hopefully soon to be three) is silly, especially since I will be respeccing full BM and the extra pet talent points make Saffy's spec and Cinnamon's incredibly similar. But she's been with me since the Badlands, and I am such a cat person.

And Gutripper — I was so excited when I managed to solo-tame her, and she's been so much fun as a pet, but after the patch, when Screech changed to Snatch, I really don't pull her out much. I don't like to micromanage a pet's abilities, but Snatch very much needs a hunter to micromanage it, or you have your owl grabbing a mage's weapon and then on CD for the rogue or warrior. It's fun to use — they always kind of pause when they lose their weapons, like "WTF???" — but not that fun. But even though I have not had her very long in comparison to my cats, I am attached to her.

So which do I choose to keep? And which do I let go? And more importantly, can I bring myself to follow through, and will I be able to go through it a second time if I can't figure out my aggro issues and need to tame a rhino, too?

I think this is why I've put off leveling Ideale so long (after I'd intended to level them together) — I knew this was coming, and I really don't want to deal with it.

Strand of the Ancients = Yay!

2008-12-12T13:09:00.000-08:00

The Strand is crazy. I ran it twice — the first time, I had no idea what the hell was going on but we won, and the second time I had figured it out but my team decided we would rather let the Alliance bottleneck us than actually use strategery, so we got curbstomped.

So, if you are doing SotA, please, for the love of Har'koa the Leopard Goddess (I think she's Ahami's new patron because Har'koa kicks ass), take out both gates instead of just throwing yourself through one gate, one siege tank at a time, right into the enemy's defense. Remember, defense has the advantage anyway — if you split them up, then you have a much better chance of making up for that imbalance.

Pretty sure SotA is going to be one of the battlegrounds I love, though. It's a lot of fun, even though I don't really have time to heal it — I'll probably spend more time in there on Ide or Silang, because it's definitely a DPSer's dream match.

I tried to do Wintergrasp, but there were no Alliance in the zone, so I was sad.

So I went to my old pal, Alterac Valley, for a quick run before I had to log, and we swept the place, getting the Everything Counts achievement. Awesome DK tank on Vann, too.

And then, after determining that I really need more resilience and testing the waters in the Strand, I went and spent 400g on training. So I guess we all know what my priorities are.

(Sadly, in the tradition I started with Ideale, I forgot to pay attention to the XP bar entirely and thus missed screen-capping the moment it disappeared.)

P.S. Lava Burst and Hex are really taking away most of my motivation to level a mage.

EDIT: On a side note, I really need to pick a name to go with for this blog. I was using MW at first (mayhemwench was an old chat handle back in the day), but I really don't use that for anything but an e-mail address anymore. Then I went with Siya ("that person") until I discovered that there is another WoW blogger who has been around a lot longer named Siha. So now I'm using KC, because Kitty Collector is just a bit too long for my lazy ass to type, but I am not big on the initials thing. I don't want to use Ahami or Ideale as my handle — that would just be kind of weird, I think.

Ideas?

Dear Alchemist Finkelstein

2008-12-12T04:46:00.000-08:00

You suck. A lot.

Love,
Ahami

***

Dear hunters,

Loque is a dude. He is the mate of Har'koa, the leopard goddess. Please take note of this.

Love,
The Kitty Collector

SO CLOSE

2008-12-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

I am a little over a third of the way through 79.

And after healing a guild group at the Amphitheater of Anguish (watched an Alliance group with a hunter, then ran our own group with the hunter class leader in it), I desperately want to play on Ideale, but I'm so. Close. To 80. Can't wait to get there, and then I can go back to tag-teaming between the two again.

Also I want to PVP. I WANT TO PVP NOW. NOW PLZ.

But if I PVP now, then I will do that for the next 2-3 weeks and be sitting at 79 the whole time. And I want at least one 80 before I start getting sidetracked so I can actually do more stuff with the guild.

Don't get me wrong. I adore playing Ahami and have been having a BLAST the past month with all the grouping and healing and exploring and stuff I've been doing. I still fully intend to keep her as my main, I love playing her so much.

But oh, it will be really nice to be able to kill things at a decent speed again, without having to stop and drink every other mob. And it'll be fun to run with Cinnamon again (lame but true, I miss my pixelcat).

P.S. The Venture Co. realm is literally the most awesome realm in WoW. Someone started cracking child molestation jokes in Zul'Drak today, and half the people in the zone jumped down their throat over it, and the person apologized. If I hadn't been there, I'd never have believed it, but it was really kind of cool. I <3 VeCo.

True cat stories: Merry Treemas

2008-12-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

I think I mentioned that Sparrow loves soft things and has stolen several stuffed toys from me because of this. If not ... Sparrow loves soft things and has stolen several stuffed toys from me because of it.

Her favorite is a terrycloth dollar store Kitten that has seen much better days, with stiff competition from Chococat and Softbunny, a soft blue bunny my roommate bought her. She carries them around from room to room throughout the day, lines them all up at the door around the time I get home from work, plays with them as if they were real cats, and is generally adorable as hell.

Sparrow also loves Christmas trees. She was much tinier her first Christmas, and spent most of the holiday launching herself at us from about halfway up the tree. Luckily, she also weighed about three pounds, and the tree never ate it.

That was last year. Many ornaments died. She doesn't climb the tree anymore, though — she just hides underneath it.

This year's Christmas tree got put up Monday night, and the roommates and I all went out for something after that. When we got home and flicked on the light, there was Sparrow laying behind the tree, content and purring. On her right was Chococat, on her left was Softbunny, and directly across from her was Kitten, all facing the tree.

(And yes, if I ask her where one of them is, she will go find it and occasionally carry it back to me, mewing the whole time. Which is hilarious when it's Chococat, because she's smaller than the toy is.)

Resto shaman item enhancements

2008-12-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

Exelus at Shamantics posted this awesome list of rep rewards from each Northrend faction and which items/enchants could be helpful to which tree.

If you are an inscriber, ditch the Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant, because Master's Inscription of the Crag is more awesome.

There are also some decent enchants out there if you are lacking in the resilience for PVP. You might take a hit in mana regen in exchange.

Enchants/enhancements for the resto shaman:
Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending (Wyrmrest Accord - Revered) or ; PVP Arcanum of Dominance (40 Stone Keeper's Shards, purchased in Wintergrasp)

Shoulders: Master's Inscription of the Crag (Inscription 400; Scribes only) or Greater Inscription of the Crag (Sons of Hodir - Exalted; Honored gives you access to the Lesser version); PVP Inscription of Dominance adds resil, but the hit in spell power and mp5 probably makes it not worth it.

Chest: Enchant Chest - Powerful Stats (Enchanting 440; 15x Infinite Dust, 4x Abyss Crystal) or Enchant Chest - Greater Mana Restoration (Enchanting 420; 20x Infinite Dust, 8x Greater Cosmic Essence)

Legs: I may be wrong, but you seem to be able to buy and use Sapphire Spellthread even if you are not a tailor.

Wrist: Enchant Bracers - Superior Spellpower (Enchanting 440; 24x Infinite Dust, 16x Greater Cosmic Essence, 2x Abyss Crystal), Enchant Bracers - Greater Spellpower (Enchanting 395; 8x Infinite Dust, 4x Greater Cosmic Essence) or Enchant Bracers - Greater Stats (Enchanting 400; 16x Infinite Dust, 3x Greater Cosmic Essence)

Hands: Enchant Gloves - Exceptional Spellpower (Enchanting 360; 4x Infinite Dust, 1x Lesser Cosmic Essence)

Feet: Enchant Boots - Greater Vitality (Enchanting 405; 14x Infinite Dust, 4x Greater Cosmic Essence)

Waist: Eternal Belt Buckle, of course.

Weapon: Enchant Weapon - Mighty Spellpower (Enchanting 435; 40x Infinite Dust, 20x Greater Cosmic Essence, 6x Abyss Crystal) or Enchant Weapon - Exceptional Spellpower (Enchanting 395; 10x Infinite Dust, 2x Greater Cosmic Essence)

Shield: Enchant Shield - Greater Intellect (12x Infinite Dust)

Rings: Enchant Ring - Greater Spellpower (Enchanting 400; Enchanters only)

I'm really not finding anything else other than armor kits, which seem to be fairly useless for casters aside from the +stam. Am I missing something?

The Great Hunter Nerf?

2008-12-09T17:02:00.001-08:00

Honestly, I haven't even played my hunter much yet, and I saw it coming a mile away. We were already way OP for PVE, and Echoes of Doom just added to that.

That said, my spec will be changing pretty immediately — no point in keeping Readiness at the expense of the extra pet talent points if it doesn't effect BW/TBW. And some of the changes (I'm thinking mainly Deterrence and Kill Shot) will actually buff us slightly for PVP. In fact, I might retry BM/SV spec — the change to Improved Tracking would be nice in PVP. I've kind of been examining the spec I used last time and I think I see why my DPS dropped so drastically — will need to work on my +agi, though, if I do this.

And the Growl fix will really help with soloing. I wasn't having too many problems for the half-level I've done in Howling Fjord on Ide, but it was a bit more of a pain to manage my threat. Since I farm the stupid way (one mob at a time), this will make soloing much less stressful on my hunter.

The point being, for raiding hunters, I do sympathize, but I'm really not all that upset about these changes. Except Volley. I wanted to PVP with awesome Volley some more before it got nerfed.

Halfway through 78 on Ahami, and about to have a massive gear upgrade in the next day or two thanks to guild leatherworkers who are on top of the recipes, so Ide should be getting play time in the next few weeks. Which means I'll actually be posting about huntering!

Wishlist: PVE gear for the almost 80 resto shaman

2008-12-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

With tomorrow and Tuesday off, I should be hitting 80 by the weekend at the latest, so I am starting to put together a little wishlist of gear from factions and the basic (non-heroic) 77-80 dungeons for PVE purposes. I really do want to give this PVE thing a real go — it's much more fun as a healer than DPS, and now that I'm finally starting to feel like part of my guild (they're awesome, it just takes me a long time to feel comfortable in new groups, honestly — I like to think I hide it well but I am excruciatingly shy in real life), running instances is much more fun.

I'm sure I will eventually be doing heroics, and since the guild has already started 10-man Naxx (and cleared a couple of wings, I think!) with a bunch of extras, I will hopefully be able to tag along on the occasional raid despite my schedule. But at the moment I don't have the gear for either and need to learn the instances a bit more thoroughly anyway, so.

Anyway, here's what I am aiming for:

- The Stormhide set (Crafted - Leatherworking) is actually better than most of the current items I have access to via PVE for the chest, feet, waist and wrist slots, at least until I hit 80 and start doing heroics.

- Hands: Gauntlets of Dark Conversion (Culling of Stratholme)

- Head: I have a few choices here. My best bets might be either the Hollow Geode Helm (Halls of Stone) or the Battle Mender's Helm (Argent Crusade - Revered), depending on my other gear. But the Sharkjaw Cap (Oracles - Revered) or Nightshock Hood (Crafted - Leatherworking) would be okay short-term choices, too.

- Legs: Kilt of Molten Golems (Halls of Lightning). And such an awesome name, too! Second choice would be the Scavenged Feather Leggings from the Frenzyheart, but Ahami doesn't care for those wolvar much and there are things I want from the Oracles first anyway.

- Shoulders: The Epaulets of Market Row (BOE drop from Culling of Stratholme) are just a titch better than the Stormhide shoulders.

- Cloak: There is a very, very nice purple BOE cloak made by tailors that I very, very much want - Wispcloak. However, it will be quite some time before I can gather the mats for it. In the meantime, the Shroud of Dedicated Research (Kirin Tor - Honored) and Shroud of Resurrection (Utgarde Pinnacle) aren't bad.

- Shield: Warsong Stormshield (Horde Expedition - Revered), which I can pick up right now. The Alliance equivalent is Lordaeron's Resolve (Alliance Vanguard - Revered).

- Neck: Chain of Fiery Orbs (Halls of Stone) would be good enough for now — I will be leveling Ide's mining and jewelcrafting soon enough.

- Finger: None of them thrill me. I'll just pick up whatever drops that looks okay and replace as I level Ide's jewelcrafting.

- Trinkets: Soul Preserver (Culling of Stratholme); not sure what to put in the second slot. Maybe Badge of the Infiltrator for now. I could try for Darkmoon Card: Illusion. There are some engineering trinkets that look nice, but I won't be leveling engineering until Ide's mining and jewelcrafting is at 450 and Silang is to Northrend to pick flowers, if at all.

- Totem: Totem of the Bay (Grizzly Hills vendors, requires Venture Co. tokens) would be nice, especially for PVP, when I basically spam Chain Heal. Savage Gladiator's Totem of the Third Wind (PVP, requires honor and arena points, no rating) might mean I'll have to suck it up and dance in arena a few times, because it might be better for some 5-mans when I'm not chain healing.

I will worry about weapons another day, since this is already tl;dr.

Spirit Kitty

2008-12-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

After seeing all the jerks in Sholazar gloating about killing Loque, and all the hunters pissed about it, and all of the horror stories on BRK's blog about people who finally, finally see the cat only to have it snatched from under them ...

I am totally taming the spirit kitty. I'll get a windserpent on one of my other hunters. That same little stubborn streak that has caused me to level Ahami from 10 to 77 (halfway to 78!) as straight resto has been activated, and as soon as Ideale is 76, I will probably be spending most of my time in game camping the spawn point for Loque.

Gearing for the battlegrounds at 80

2008-12-06T12:40:00.000-08:00

With 3.5 levels to go before I hit 80, I figured it was time to start looking at options for world and battleground PVP. Unlike the previous expansion, where you could buy the basic blue resilience set from various factions upon hitting 70, there are, as far as I have been able to tell, no faction-sold PVP sets for 80. So where do you get gear?

Well, there are a few options.

Option 1: Become an Arena Junkie
If you are into arena, then you are pretty well set — all you need for the blue Savage Gladiator set is arena points and honor, and if you manage to top a 1550 rating, you can get the mid-rate Hateful Gladiator epic set. [Note: I linked to the plate chestpiece for each set, since the links for the full sets seem to be sort of busted. Just search for "Savage Gladiator" or "Hateful Gladiator" to find the appropriate set pieces for your class.]

According to WoWHead, the blue set will also be available with Emblems of Heroism, gained from heroic 5-mans and 10-man raids; you can purchase the purple set with Emblems of Valor, gained from 25-man raids. That's all I know about arena gear, though, since I really don't intend to do it.

Option 2: That PVE Thing
As mentioned above, you can earn Emblems of Heroism and Emblems of Valor from completing PVE objectives, and use these to purchase arena gear. Why you would do that rather than purchase PVE gear, I don't know, at least right now. I could see this happening later when you are overgeared for everything and have 82 of the things, but now? That's kind of shafting your guild, if you are all working on the content, but you're not working on gearing for it. Unless you are just PUGing heroics to get them, but why would you do that to yourself?

Anyway, this is not the only way to get geared. See, in very general and oversimplified terms, PVP gear is itemized around survival first and burst damage output second, whereas PVE gear is itemized more around doing continuous damage/mana regen and efficiency/lasting power/etc. (Or so it seems to me, based on the stats for comparable pieces of both.)

If you were really dead-set against arena and enjoy that PVE thing, you could probably build a "glass cannon" PVP set around PVE gear. Use PVE gear, gem and enchant with resilience in mind, or supplement with the off-set pieces (which can be purchased with honor points; cannot find if they require an arena rating to purchase, but I'm pretty sure at least the blues will not). Basically, try to mitigate the loss of stamina and resilience with a significant increase in MQoSDPS, ranged or otherwise, or lots of healing power and staying power. (If you're a good healer and you're not in a battleground with a bunch of schmucks, the only way you're going to die is if you get zerged or some sneaky warlock DoTs the crap out of you before anyone can figure out where they are, and you'd probably die anyway in that case, after you've finished the battleground returned to Dalaran, and wandered off to fish in the sewers or something.)

If you do this, of course, be sure you aren't gimping yourself in PVE — that's unfair to the groups you run with. Use off-set pieces, pieces for slots you've upgraded, vendor gear, etc.

Option 3: Wintergrasp PVP and that Wintergrasp PVE thing
Stone Keeper's Shards. You can get them in a couple of ways: By completing the daily quests in Wintergrasp, or as boss drops when your faction controls Wintergrasp only. Stone Keeper's Shards can be used to buy some VERY nice gear, like the Prized Beastmaster's Mantle (extra nice because it binds to the account and scales with level). Or enchants or gems like the Inscription of Dominance or Trenchant Earthshatter Diamond. Or you can just blow them on fun stuff, like the Reins of the Black War Mammoth, and then ride around Dragonblight yelling, "MAAAAAAAMMOOOOOOTTTTTHHHH!"

Ahami and Ideale will be spending quite a lot of time in Wintergrasp, I can tell.

Plus, if you do the PVE dungeon in Wintergrasp (available only when your faction controls it), the bosses drop arena gear of various levels. And the season hasn't even started yet!

Option 4: Craft Craft Revolution
Blizz included crafting recipes in the expansion that can be used to create a full set of basic arena gear. This gear is not great — in fact, if you have S4, S3, and maybe even S2, you might want to very carefully weigh which pieces you replace — which stats are you shaky on? Will a few pieces of the Stormhide set fix that?

If you had a fresh 70 who you chose to level to 80, then the set is a very good starter set, to be supplemented with gear obtained in other ways. But if you had a 70 who was already decently geared for PVP, then weigh your choices. The nice (well, sort of) part about these sets is that they don't have a set bonus, so you can replace pieces as you go without worrying about maintaining a certain number.

Certain specs of certain classes (holy paladins and enhancement shamans, for example) might be better off looking elsewhere for PVP gear.

That said, here are the sets you can get:
Blacksmithing: Blacksmithing sets seem to be taught by trainers. Blacksmiths can make the Ornate Saronite and Savage Saronite sets.
Leatherworking: Leatherworking patterns can be purchased in exchange for pieces of Heavy Borean Leather. If you have a skinner, you might offer to supply your leatherworker if they purchase the patterns for the pieces you need. Leatherworkers can make the Stormhide, Swiftarrow, Eviscerator's, and Overcast sets.
Tailoring: Like blacksmithing, the tailoring set seem to be simply taught by the trainers. Tailors can make the Frostsavage set. As far as I can tell, this is the only tailoring set available.

Are there better ways to gear up for WotLK PVP? Probably. But with avoiding arena as much as possible in mind, this is what I've come up with to gear my peeps. (Though I might give arena a go for a couple of rounds — the new arena maps and the rebalancing is supposed to have made it somewhat closer to fun. Don't really want to commit to something I don't have a schedule for and would just be half-assing, though.)

True Cat Stories: OH GOD GET IT OFF

2008-12-06T10:42:00.000-08:00

Back when I lived in Queens, I used to hang out in the parks all the time because I missed living in the country and they were about as close as you could get.

So one day, I was in Central Park and this guy comes walking down a path with this absolutely gorgeous Himalayan cat on a leash. It was possibly the yuppiest thing I've ever seen, but also the most awesome — this can was completely unperturbed by bikers, roller bladers, and people walking their dogs, and he even let me pet her (yes, I asked!).

Ditto, my old kitty, used to just follow me along and never needed a leash, but when Sparrow was a kitten, she had a propensity to wander away to chase after bugs and stuff, and living in town, I was afraid she'd run into the street or something, so I went out and bought myself a cat leash. After the first time she wore it, it never bothered her at all, and now when she hears me taking it out of the basket, she comes running from wherever she is in the apartment to go for a walk.

Klio, on the other hand, was not all that fond of the outdoors and never needed her leash — which is good, because she's one of those cats who acts as though the leash is crushing them. (She did the same thing with her collar for a week.)

Only recently, Klio has decided that if Sparrow gets to go outside, then she should go outside, too. The first couple of times she was great. She was nervous, so she stuck to my side like glue.

Once she got used to it, it was a nightmare. See, Klio is a very playful cat, and her favorite thing in the world (Sparrow's too, actually) is to be chased. And she decided that "Time to go in" meant "Time to play chase!" and started hiding under bushes, running up trees, coming a fingertip's distance away and then running in circles around me, and so on, and for a chubby little cat she is EXTREMELY FAST.

Last time we went out, then, I put the harness and leash on her. And she stayed the entire time at the foot of the stairs (which I had to carry her down), yowling like I was killing her and pressed flat to the ground.

So when we got back inside, I left the harness on her. She'll get used to it, right? I figured I'd feed them wet food, and by the time she was done eating, she'd have forgotten it.

No dice. I carried her to the food, plopped her down inches away, and went to check my e-mail. Three or four minutes later, she started yowling again, and I went to check, and found out why she was crying. Sparrow had taken advantage of Klio's apparent inability to move the two inches to her food dish and was wolfing down Klio's treat in addition to her own. *facepalm*

So the harness is off for now, and I am at a loss as far as figuring this out. Klio desperately wants to go outside — to the point where she tries to sneak out when I am coming home from work or bringing Spar back in — but I cannot trust her off the leash and she is immobile and loud on the leash. What to do?

Clearcasting

2008-12-05T00:12:00.000-08:00

With the itemization change that led to +spell and +heal being something like the same thing (or whatever, I don't get math), I decided to shoot for a few points in the elemental tree rather than the enhancement. I figured that then I could use essentially the same gear if I got stuck DPSing for some reason, and still do a decent amount of damage. (Don't use my current spec as a guide for anything. I just stuck points in random crap until I got what I wanted in both resto and elem. I'll shell out the gold at 80 for a real spec.)

Let me just say right now, two things have made me extremely glad I did this: Lava Burst and Clearcasting.

Lava Burst is the shit, and with the points in that talent that adds to your crit and damage for Lava Burst and fire totems, I can actually burn down mobs at something resembling a normal leveling speed now. I went from 74 to 75 faster than any level since the 30s, and I'm already halfway through 76. When I put Flame Shock up first for the Lava Burst autocrit, I'm critting for 2400-2800. I think that's pretty good for a shoddily-geared resto shaman at 76, right?

And the wonderful thing about the autocrit is that it procs Clearcasting. Clearcasting is AWESOME — it basically cuts the mana cost of any two damage or healing spells by 40 percent every time it procs, meaning that in the rotation (haha, like I actually plan these things out) I am using while soloing, a good two-thirds of my spells are reduced price. I played for two hours yesterday morning and had to drink once. ONCE. And then I played for two more hours last night, a bit more intensively, and am down just four more honeymint teas.

Let me be a bit more clear: Before I got Clearcasting, I was going through 2-3 stacks of drinks every time I played and it took me ages to kill anything, but with the elem sub-spec, I'm killing things much more quickly and it's costing me much less mana.

While I do plan to go something like 13/0/58 at 80 while I relearn the battlegrounds/learn Strand of the Ancients and Wintergrasp (haven't really ventured in since WotLK hit*, though I am planning an hour or two on my death knight tomorrow, because her lack of kills is bugging me, and I might suck it up and try the 19 bracket on my mage this week, too), I do want to experiment with a resto/elem hybrid spec at some point as well. But I might wait until dual-specs are implemented, because I'm incredibly attached to Riptide. <3 Riptide.

Anyway, the point is, if you are a resto/enh shaman, you might want to give resto/elem a try — it's totally worth the loss of instant ghost wolf.

*It's my carrot, along with my hunter. I made the mistake of going into the battlegrounds on Ahami at 49 and spent two weeks doing nothing at all but PVP. And then at 59 I did the same thing, but for even longer. If I go in on her before I hit 80, I won't come out, and I'd like to get there before the New Year so poor Ideale can get some love.

Post-break breakdown

2008-12-02T03:15:00.000-08:00

So I after not playing on Thursday and Friday because of the holiday and work, and not playing Saturday, Sunday and most of today (EDIT: Today meaning Monday — it's not a new day until I've slept) due to Christmas shopping, card making, and various cooking projects, I finally got Ahami up to 75. And Silang close to 59 (I put Onashne on hold and have been going through Stranglethorn Vale with my friend E. on her priesty, but E.'s computer is in the shop, so Silang has mostly just been herbing).

Oh, and my troll mage up to 14. *shifty eyes*

Actually, the break was kind of nice. I got a lot done over the weekend and did some catching up (I've been playing fairly heavily since the patch came out, and needed to take a step back), and jumped back in ready to go.

I'm really excited, though, because in the process of getting Ahami to 75, I also completed the last of the prerequisite quests for the Wrathgate chain (yes, I'm still in Dragonblight. I still have quests in Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, too, but I think after I finish this chain and the Dragonblight group quests, I will move on for now). I held off on starting it because of the server restart, but after the vague comments about how incredible it is, I am very much looking forward to doing it in the next few days.

I'm glad I chose not to start it tonight, though, because I got a little tip just before logging off that I should do all of the quests offered by Varimathras before starting this last leg if I plan to do them at all. And while I've done them all on Ambassador Ideale, I have not done them on Ahami, so it looks like I will be doing a few lowbie quests before I continue with leveling.

And on a side note, a group needed a healer for the last boss in the Nexus (good timing, no?) and I ended up healing through 6? 7? attempts. Three levels later and that instance still blows. We finally ended up getting through it with me and an enhancement shaman both healing, and lost the tank and rogue right as that bitch finally went down. The rogue got a dagger, and I got the achievement and will never step foot in that hellhole again.

Really, I think that unless you are a druid or maybe a priest, or really, really experienced with panic healing and GOOD at it, too, that instance is not a good one to be healing. Too many of the mobs and bosses either interrupt or require you to keep moving, meaning that unless you have a decent arsenal of quick-to-instant heals or HoTs, you end up sacrificing your own life to heal only for everyone else to die when no one heals.

EDIT: Oh, and I went and did some exploring in Grizzly Hills to kill the remaining time before I logged for the night, and it looks just like camp from when I was a kid. Except at camp the bears mostly just knocked over the dumpsters a lot instead of attacking random people riding down the road, and there weren't any furbolgs. But yeah, I don't know if it was the inspiration for sure, but it sure looks an awful lot like Yosemite.

Fun questlines

2008-11-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

I took Ahami back to the Borean Tundra — in the interests of being able to afford things when I hit 80 and during Ideale's leveling process, I've been trying to stick to the first three zones (Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, and Dragonblight) until I've done all or nearly all of the quests there. I had managed about 50 quests in the Borean Tundra before I fled screaming, and I'm about halfway through Dragonblight and three-quarters through Howling Fjord (have I mentioned I love this zone?).

Borean Tundra has been much more fun the second time around, perhaps because I finished all of the Warsong Hold quests and have not had to deal with swarming, quickly-spawning insectthings this time. I really hated those stupid things. My favorite quests in the zone are most definitely the murloc quests near Bor'gorok Outpost. There's one where you run around freeing baby murlocs, and oh my god, the cuteness. They're fairly quick and easy and you feel like you accomplish a lot doing them.

I'm also really enjoying the D.E.H.T.A. questline. I have had trouble with Kaw the Mammoth Destroyer — the server lagspiked and crashed right in the middle of my first attempt, and it's been bugged ever since (yes, that was me, VeCo. I'm so sorry). His mammoth is now stuck on permanent evade — she doesn't attack but you can't kill her, so even if you kill Kaw (and I have, twice), you cannot pick up the halberd. I'll try again next Tuesday — server maintenance should reset it. I put in a ticket but got some crazy e-mail response about PVP the next day and it's still bugged, so ... yeah.

I loved the Hearthglen quests in Dragonblight, and my favorite quest in Howling Fjord was the one where you have to fight yourself. My favorite quests, though, are the ones to help the Kaluak. I'm still patiently working through the ones in Howling Fjord, having finished both Borean Tundra and Dragonblight.

So what I do each day, right now, is log on, do the Dalaran cooking quest (having finally hit Dalaran a couple days ago), do the two Kaluak dailies (the one where you kidnap wolvar pups kind of makes me cringe, but I think that's just because I did a lot of research and paper-writing on the Carlisle Industrial Schools in college), and then pick a zone and start questing.

I'm not shooting for the loremaster title at all — and would have a lot of work in the Old World and Outland to do if I were — but I would like to save as many quests as I can for later gold. (And I plan on heading back to Outland and doing the Cenarion Expedition quests in Blade's Edge Mountains and Hellfire Peninsula, since I haven't yet — I'm gonna get that damn hippogryph).

Halfway there. I'm hoping to ding 80 before or on Dec. 13 (my next day off).

Dear PVE thing

2008-11-23T13:47:00.000-08:00

Dear PVE thing,

WTF

Love,
Ahami

***

So I've been leveling Ahami veryvery slowly. Fortunately, I have so far managed to almost keep up (haha, that'll change by tomorrow) with some of the guild, and managed to get in on two instances this week: Nexus and Drak'Tharon Keep.

For Nexus, I was right smack in the middle of the suggested level and the lowest-level player there. Everyone else was at the high end or above. We wiped 4-5 times in two and a half hours, only making it to the third boss. It was SO frustrating, and I really feel like my healing was part of the problem; any time a DPSer pulled aggro, they went down before I could heal. They said I did okay, but I freak out when I let people die, so yeah. Anyway, it was ridiculously hard, and I hid from instances for the rest of the week because of it (although I really do want to go back in before I'm over-leveled, because I think it would be good practice — if I can get my guildies to go again).

So some of my best buds in the guild wanted to do Drak'Tharon Keep, and needed a healer. I ended up letting them talk me into going, even though I'm way below the suggested level and allegedly below the minimum level. To be honest, I didn't argue that hard — they're a lot of fun to run with. I was just worried I'd have to go before we were done (ended up having to go RIGHT after so I could frantically write this before my family gets here).

We blew through it in under an hour, with one almost-wipe on a bad pull that the awesome death knight off-tank and I ended up two-manning through. It was SO EASY. I went oom once during a chain pull, and that was it. Three deaths total, whole instance, on that one bad pull. SO EASY. Although I still don't know WTF was going on with this dude.

In my opinion, Blizz needs to switch these instances. For real.

Class review

2008-11-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

So I spent a good portion of my time prior to Wrath (and a little weensy bit of my post-Wrath time, though I'm mostly playing Ahami and Ideale to level and Silang to work on her professions) making lots of alts and playing around with them.

Once I had Ideale to 70 and Ahami to the mid-60s, I thought it was time to go back and retest the other classes I'd thought I hated, just to see if that had changed since I learned to play. Sort of like Pike's Alt Project, but not as organized. (Okay, to be honest, I just got addicted to the character creation screen for a while and just tried new stuff since "nothing much matters these last two weeks anyway").

The only class I haven't retried is paladin, and that's mostly because I do really not want an Alliance pally, but I also do not really want another blood elf. Dilemma.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

1. Mage: I talked a little bit about my experimental Feathermoon magey and how fun she was. She was so fun, in fact, that I now have a troll mage on VeCo, my main server, with plans to level her to 39 and twink for a while while I work on my mains, with the possibility of eventually either leveling her to end game or transferring her to my level 60 account and playing in AV to my heart's content. I especially like the fire tree. My favorite thing so far has been to ice nova mobs, then either pyroblast or arcane missiles.

2. Warrior: If you play a warrior and enjoy it, you have my respect. Especially if you play one well. I can't figure these out and I hate them hate them hate them. I hate every tree, I hate every talent except intercept, I hate melee, I hate warriors so much (unless they are keeping my healer alive, then they are my favorite class ever).

3. Warlock: I tried something different. After all of the undead warlocks I've rolled, I rolled a human 'lock over on my Alliance server, Blackhand. I like the whole secretive storyline, though it kind of falls apart when you see people roaming around Stormwind with their minions out and their skully helms and whatnot. It's more fun this time around, but I still don't think I'll make it much farther; it's just not proactive enough for me to DoT stuff and then sit and wait for it to die. I am very hands-on. I like to kill things directly with pewpew.

4. Druid: I've talked about Onashne here, and she's my highest-level non-shamunter alt (not counting the death knight). I'm torn. I really like healing as a druid, and I really like some aspects of moonkin. That said, I'm not fond of feral (aside from charging things), I'm frustrated at how quickly I go out of mana as balance (this is coming from a shaman, too), and there's really no need for a healer when grouping with a priest. Onashne will be making it at least a bit farther, because she is fun to play and I do like her character, but she's temporarily on hold while I do other stuff. Right now she's sitting at 30 and kodo-fied, so maybe I'll get a guildie to help me twink her as a healer for the 30-39 bracket for a while.

5. Priest: Meh.

6. Rogue: Stealthing and pickpocketing are fun. Too bad the rest of the class abilities are boring as hell.

7-8. You know my opinions on hunters and shamans. And yes, I rolled more. And then deleted them because crazy can only go so far and I spend most of mine on kitties. The truth is, I really don't like elemental as much as I thought I would (trying in on Mangaragan while I get leveled to resto) — I just like to chain heal — and I really want to work on Daj, but she's on hold because I only play her with my 'locky pal, and she and my other RL friends have been speed-leveling my Alliance shaman during our few hours of play time each week, so yeah.

I want to play with more pets (*gasp* I KNOW). I'm thinking I might wait and tame the spirit kitty on Tshaya (since she already has a ghost saber, so ghost pets could be her theme) and tame either a dragonhawk or a windserpent on Ideale. I'm really wanting to try out more pets now that we have the stable slots to do so, but I can't bring myself to give up Gutripper or Saffron, I'm keeping my wasp forever, and I would delete Ideale before I would abandon Cinnamon. And if I tame the spirit kitty, I will not be able to give him up either.

But on the other hand, MOAR KITTEHS. So I dunno yet.

9. Death knight: I think I mentioned how awesome fun these are, right? I really, really like the unholy tree, like, a LOT. I would probably like the frost tree, too, if I could stop playing unholy long enough to try it. They're like a super-fun cross between a mage, a warlock, and a paladin. I LOVE them.

10. Paladin: Haven't tried again yet.

Fail is also ...

2008-11-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

... being less than one bubble from 71 and having to go to work. Why didn't I schedule days off?

(And yes, 71. I was starting from 68, and I haven't been playing Ahami exclusively. ... Okay, I just fail hardcore at leveling and am the lowest-level non-death knight in my guild. /cry)

Fail is ...

2008-11-19T04:40:00.000-08:00

1. Night elf rogues who camped the Isle of QQ and picked off all of the freshly-minted 70s in quest greens, but only if they had two mobs on them and didn't fight back. And then camped.

2. Level 75 night elf hunters who camp Skorn in Howling Fjord and pick off level 70-71s, but only when they have two mobs on them and don't fight back. And then camp.

Are these the same person? YOU DECIDE.

Seriously, the one time his stupid gorilla missed and I fought back, he ran off, only to come back as soon as I was drinking and finish me off. I am a level 70 resto shaman, did he really think I was gonna kill him? (Although he did get killed by a 71 warlock twice, so maybe.)

I actually asked the rogue on the realm forum if that was his hunter, but I'm almost positive it is the same person, since the rogue hasn't been touched in weeks and they have the same modus operandi. Totally has to be the same guy. A 71 druid ended up camping him. I sent him golds. :-D

I love to PVP, but when the odds are already stacked way in your favor and you still need to camp in the most cowardly way possible? Well, when another player sees you at half health and assassinates you after I bitch in General, I will pay them.

Shoveltusk-mania

2008-11-18T12:52:00.000-08:00

Ahami has journeyed from the Borean Tundra to the Howling Fjord to join Ideale. Yes, the Not-Fundra got better, but it still sucked — I plan to go back and finish a few quests when I'm done with Howling Fjord, but the rest can wait until I'm 80 and poor and looking to finish achievements.

Anyway, I have discovered my new favorite thing in this expansion, and that is killing entire herds of shoveltusks. There are a ton of them on the western road from New Agamand to Grizzly Hills, and if you aggro one, the whole herd comes after you. So, as a resto shaman, I drop my fire elemental totem, earth shield it, then spam lightning bolt and chain lightning until the whole herd goes down. Keep an eye on his health, but those shoveltusk go down so fast it usually isn't a problem. Then heal him, mana up and pull the next herd.

I can manage two herds before the totem runs out, sometimes three.

Then I run a bit down the road, wait for the cooldown, drop my earth elemental, and do the same thing. With the earth elemental, I can only manage one herd because it takes longer, and you have to focus more on healing him, but keeping earth shield and riptide up seems to do just fine, with the occasional lesser healing wave thrown in (I never really used LHW before, but it crits like crazy now, so half the time it's like using HW with less mana).

You suck down a lot of water (well, seal whey or whatever) doing this, but just one rotation last night (after round two, you have the much longer cooldown), I made a bubble and a half of XP at level 70, plus I had a crapton of shoveltusk flanks and meat for cooking with.

I imagine you could do the same as a hunter with volley, as long as you had a pet that could AOE aggro. Probably with less downtime. I don't plan on getting an AOE'r pet on Ideale, so I can't test this out, unfortunately.

Starting out in Wrath

2008-11-16T17:14:00.001-08:00

So, with two toons over 68, I had the luxury of being able to test the waters in both start zones, Horde-side.

Sadly, I think Ideale will hit 71 before Ahami hits 70, even though Ahami is now supposedly my main. This is because the Borean Tundra may be the "Boring Tundra" to the Alliance, but to the Horde (or me at least), it's the "OH GOD WHY ARE ALL THESE BUG THINGS SWARMING ME EVERY TIME I LEAVE WARSONG HOLD!?!?! OH CRAP I DIED" Tundra. Seriously, it's a little terrifying. I finished up with the bug things and ran away to the taunka village, and now I'm afraid to leave.

Plus, Howling Fjord is both way prettier and has a giant wandering elite akin to the Fel Reaver for me to dodge, and this makes things much more interesting. And I got my turkey-killin' achievement.

As far as quests, there are a lot more Horde quests in Borean Tundra than Howling Fjord, but the Howling Fjord ones are way more fun. The Borean Tundra ones are more standard — go kill some bugs and destroy their egg sacks, go kill some boars and bring back their meat, go kill blah blah kill blah. It's all running around and killing and then more running around and more killing (so far, anyway). Howling Fjord, on the other hand, has a bunch of "go kill stuff" quests, but it also has some cool Forsaken-related quests, like the one where you go get the ingredients to make a plague, then bomb some ships with it, then go do some research, then run the research to New Agamand, then go get more ingredients to make another plague, etc.

Gear-wise, both zones seem great for a fresh-70 hunter; Borean Tundra seems better for enhancement shamans, while Howling Fjord seems to offer more upgrades for elemental and resto shamans. This is, of course, for 68 to fresh, green-geared 70; even the crappy blues I have on Ide are mostly about the same as any "sidegrades" I'm getting here. For example, I got a nifty axe with +61 agility and stuff on it, but the hit in, well, +hit and +stamina I took by switching has me second-guessing. If I was currently specced survival, it'd be no contest, but as a BM hunter with crappy +hit to start with, I'm not sure it's worth trading yet. I did get some boots that are much better than my old ones, and actually match my current gear, though!

I'm thinking that what I will do, because Ahami is killing things quite excruciatingly slowly compared to Nagrand, is play pocket-healer to willing guildies or others in both starting zones (and beyond once I'm a higher level) whenever I can; I should really do the quests in both to catch up and gear up a little before moving on, and this will make it a bit more fun. I am a healer, I want to heal things! It would be less frustrating, I think, had I had a month or so at 70 to heal in the battlegrounds and maybe some instances, but without a break in the leveling grind, it's a bit frustrating. And if I want to be able to do that PVE thing with her, I need to keep up at least a little with the wave of death knights in my guild who are about to hit Northrend (having already missed the first wave of people sticking with their current toons). Because I hate most PUGs veryvery much.

The best start zone in Wrath, hands down, though, is the Death Knight zone. :-D Even if you don't plan to play or keep a DK, roll one just to get to level 58 and do the quests. The lore is fantastic, the feel of the quests are pretty epic (though I do think that Blizz could have played up the redemption quests a bit more, as they were very borderline anti-climactic), and then when I saw the little scene play out between Keseleth and Anselm at Vengeance Landing, I was like, "HEY! I KNOW HIM!"

In conclusion:
Borean Tundra: Not totally horrible, but definitely not fun
Howling Fjord: Awesome
Ebon Whatever-it-is in EPL: Even more awesome
Grizzly Hills: Pretty, though the border with Howling Fjord is distinctly lacking in grizzlies

Death knight: Fun, keeping her, leveling her to 80. Been playing meat shield to my roomie's shadow priest in STV while I figure out rotations and what everything does, and to help my roomie catch up (she has another priest to solo with and solos quite a bit on her main during the week, and has the hang of the class down fairly well, so our weekend strategy is now to try and speed her through about 4-6 levels each time we play together, so she can spend her solo time playing with new abilities and rotations and exploring whatever zone I left her in; we're hoping to hit Outland by Christmas).

Professions: Taking herbalism and alchemy on Silang. Might take engineering on Ahami once I get Silang to Northrend — maxing out her inscription, Ide's jewelcrafting, and Silang's alchemy should keep me busy until then, and selling mats for mad gold could be helpful with my mount and gear situations. I need an alchemist, though, so I can stop dumping money into mana pots for Ahami all the time. And alchemy is just such a perfect fit for an undead death knight, isn't it?

EDIT: The OMG I'M GONNA DIE Tundra gets better after you get out of Warsong Hold, luckily. I would have given it a C- yesterday, but I was playing Ahami last night a bit and I think I'd raise it to a B-/B range. It's pretty and the quests are not bad, but it's still way less fun than Howling Fjord.

I have no self-control

2008-11-13T18:58:00.000-08:00

No less than an hour after my copy of Wrath was delivered, not only had I parked Ideale in Howling Fjord and reset her hearthstone, I'd also dragged Ahami off to the Borean Tundra (with her hearth still set to Garadar in Nagrand, in case said Tundra ends up being too difficult/tedious for her to tackle alone, though I'm hoping various guildies will want a pocket healer to chill with — haha, chill, get it?).

Oh, but my lack of willpower does not end there. It does not end there at all.

For I spent the remainder of my time before work leveling Silang, my death knight, partway into 56.

At first impression, death knights are ... different. I really dislike melee in general. I leveled a rogue to the mid-twenties once and loved the lockpicking and stealthing but despised the melee. I currently bounce between feral and balance on a druid. I like feral, but like the option of range. My highest warrior got to level 3; my paladin mostly healed or AOE'd (I realize now that I spent most of my time on my pally trying to play a mage ...).

The classes I've enjoyed the most have been hunters and healers (though I am growing mildly fond of mages as well, and in fact spent my frustration this morning leveling a troll mage to ... 8? I think?). I like standing in the back. I'm good at standing in the back. You can tell I suck at melee when I do better in PVP on a hunter than a rogue.

I was not planning on even rolling a death knight, let alone enjoying it. I mostly did it out of a perverse curiosity — I followed two guildies around for about half an hour last night, and then listened to people talking about hearing voices and so on, and it sounded kind of new and neat. And the quests looked fun. I rolled Silang for the same reason I rolled Ideale — to check out the start zone.

So I was really surprised to find that I'm really, really liking it. I put her points into the Unholy tree so far, but I will probably switch to Frost, since that seems to have a few more options as far as getting away from pure melee. It's a very interesting change both in playstyle and mindset. I tend to be obsessive over my health bar — it rarely budges on my hunters or baby mages (yay range!) and is constantly being refilled on my shamans and druid (yay healers!), so actually watching it go down is freaking weird. Meanwhile, my playstyle is currently running around like a spaz spamming whatever I am in range to spam, though I'm getting the hang of not panicking and almost dying. But how does one stay behind a mob when you are soloing?

The storyline in the starting area is pretty damn cool, too, though I feel kind of mean. Here's what I mean about mindset — with the exception of Daj, who is a bit "roguelike" in her point of view, all of my toons are kind of carebears at heart. Ideale likes a good fight, but will help out enemy youngsters if she runs across them in the wild. Ahami is a healer — I think she's actually earned maybe 100 HKs from offensive action (and many of those in defense), versus about 1400 from healing people who were doing the killing. She kills when it's necessary and isn't wishy-washy about it, but is more focused on keeping things alive than making them dead. Onashne is a druid who will someday be a tree. 'Nuff said. None of my Alliance toons PVP (I did two battlegrounds on Tshaya before giving up with a huge sense of guilt — killing Horde is just wrong).

So having this character who voluntarily chose to join Arthas and is now running about killing farmers begging for their lives is a bit creepy, even knowing that she will be going good eventually. But coming up with a backstory and motivations to explain why she's doing what she's doing was really kind of fun.

I'm pretty sure I will be keeping her and actually leveling her, even if I end up not caring much for the class. If I like it (and I think it's different enough that it'd be a nice "downtime" class to play around with when I'm not in the mood to work on my mains), I'll pick up engineering and herbalism on her (Ide has mining), and then drop herbalism for alchemy on Ahami. If I dislike it, well, she's still 25 levels closer to 80 than my druid or survivalist, and I only play them with friends anyway, so she can be a gatherer and badass bank alt, and I'll pick up engineering on Ide and alchemy on Ahami. It's win-win.

Now I have the sad duty of cleaning out my log-in screen — I have a lot of trouble deleting characters, but with three upcoming twinks, I can at least transfer funds and randomcrap and get rid of my bank alts, as well as the priest Silang started out as. I want to keep at least a couple of slots free for future hero classes or experimental alts, and right now, I'm using all 10. I'll probably transfer Kresha to Feathermoon eventually, after Christmas maybe — I want to check out the Horde side over there, have no need for three hunters on one realm, and can't bear to delete her.

EDIT: *pokes at Blizz* C'mon, update the armory already. And also let us rearrange our toons on our log-in screen — it bugs me that mine are not in order by level.

HURRY UPS PERSON HURRY

2008-11-13T11:03:00.001-08:00

OH GOD I SEE THE ORDER IT'S BEEN IN TOWN SINCE 4:25 AM WHY ARE YOU NOT HERE YET?

So maybe I'm a bit more anxious for WotLK than I thought ...

EDIT: I rolled a mage on VeCo out of entertainment — a guildie made a 30-39 twink guild and I think a mage would be fun in PVP, so why not? I'm literally the lowest-level person on the server right now at level five. Aside from a level 9 hunter, there is no one under level 45 on. It's bizarre.

clings to Nagrand

2008-11-13T04:07:00.000-08:00

No midnight release for me (closest was about 30 miles away and I'd have had to ditch work), but honestly, I'm not really that upset. Getting to hear my guildies' impressions of the expansion was cool, and it'll come soon enough.

I am rethinking my whole anti-death knight stance, after running about with two of my awesomest guildies and their DKs for a couple minutes, and then listening to them over Vent. But really, it gave me some time to get a bit closer to 69 on Ahami (four bars to go!), which reminded me that I needed to get my Consortium payoff still this month, which reminded me that I need to pay the electric bill.

So it works out.

And honestly, I love Azeroth and love parts of Outland, and probably won't be back to either for a while, so it was nice to kind of cruise around, check a few places out, wrap up some unfinished business (like Ambassador Ideale's exploration — oh, and ambassador title), etc.

So hopefully my copy of Wrath will come tomorrow, but if it doesn't? I'm not too worried.

I am sleeping on the couch tonight, though, so as to actually hear the postman/postwoman when s/he comes. Just because I won't be upset to miss it doesn't mean I'm going to risk it!

Expansion plans

2008-11-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Thursday: Ha, like the servers will even be up. Will probably head to the movies and see "High School Musical 3."
Friday: Morning, see above. Evening, none, because I have to be up and ready to leave at 8:30 a.m. and my normal bedtime is 4-5 a.m. Already working on resetting myself.
Saturday: None; family reunion of pure awesome, followed by sleep the moment I get home.
Sunday: Hit Blade's Edge Mountains with Ahami. Maybe do some Skettis dailies with Ideale FOR XP NOW WOOT. Or the Sporregar Naga-genocide quest. Or just work on Consortium rep — I'm getting close to Exalted with them!
Monday: Venture into one of the Northrend start zones to train professions. Work on leveling my Alliance shaman/Daj with BFF, and Onashne with roomie. Check Honor Hold for Operation: Death to Death Knights.
Tuesday: Ha, like maintenance will be over before 8 p.m. Might hit the movies again, but it's unlikely, since nothing else I want to see opens until Thanksgiving week, and probably won't play in this craptown anyway.
Wednesday: More BEM/Skettis.
Thursday following: Venture forth into Northrend. Return to Outland if it is too crowded and start working on Shadowmoon Valley.

Now, where to go in Northrend first? Since I have a short attention span and two characters of a level to go in, I will send one to the Borean Tundra and one to the Howling Fjord. Lore-wise, Ideale would be more likely to hit up the Howling Fjord while Ahami could go either way — Ide's more likely to head out with the Forsaken than the orcs when it comes to fighting the Scourge.

And at this point, I'd like to note that druids have the joy of earning rep for two druid-centric factions and will now have the D.E.H.T.A. questline. Well, I want to be able to earn rep with the Farstriders and the Earthen Ring! Why can't there be more class-related factions? That would be kind of awesome.

Professions blogs?

2008-11-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

Just out of sheer curiosity, are there any profession blogs out there? I can't imagine that there'd be that much to write about, I guess, but I'm curious.

One of the reasons I can't roll on a server without several alts is that I like to have professions that complement each other on all my toons. For example, when Daj gets to end-game, someday, I'm going to drop skinning for herbalism so that I can drop herbalism on Ahami and pick up alchemy. That way, I can transmute gems for myself, create vellums for myself (Daj is also an enchanter), and take care of all my inscription, enchanting and jewelcrafting needs as well as stock up on potions and flasks and whatnot.

Onashne will probably beat Daj to 80, since the BFF and I have been playing our Alliance alts rather than our Horde ones (by which I mean we frantically loot whatever her fiance and our other friend kill in whatever instance they are running us through repeatedly, and occasionally she sheeps a stray mob while I keep her healed until one of them can come kill it). This was unplanned — I didn't know if I'd like her or keep her, and would have picked up engineering and mining instead of leatherworking if I had — although now I can max out her skill when I get some spare cash and make PVP gear for my other two.

And the Alliance alt I mentioned? The guild needs an alchemist and that goes nicely with her eventual healing role, so I'm picking that up. But wait, if I have a healer, I'm going to need a toon to do dailies and farm with, because doing that stuff on a healer is an exercise in frustration. So I transferred Tshaya to Blackhand — she will be my miner — and rolled a warlock. If the warlock can make it to a decent level, she'll be my eventual herbalist, and M. will pick up engineering. If not, we'll see how far along Tshaya is with enchanting — the guild has an enchanter, so I could drop that and pick up herbalism with her instead.

I don't have altitis, exactly, so much as professionitis and a dislike of shelling out gold on the AH for mats I could easily gather myself.

EDIT: Oh, and I now have five mounted characters, and am really close to having a sixth. :-O

FOR THE HORDE!

2008-11-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

If you are not in the Valley of Honor in Orgrimmar right now, you are missing out. The Scourge is attacking and that fool Garrosh Hellscream is going to get himself killed.

Six days to go and vengeance will be mine

2008-11-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

And I hit 68. So I can happily go into Northrend with my guild, even if I do not manage to get another level before Thursday. This makes me superhappy.

Not that I couldn't have gone in on Ideale, of course — and I will be DPSing for the guild as well as healing, I'm sure. But Ideale I can solo to 80 with without many problems — having mostly (but not entirely!) soloed to 68 as resto, I'd really, REALLY like to group up as much as possible with Ahami.

However, I forgot how ganktastic Nagrand was to non-70s, and I am glad that I was reminded, because my first act in the expansion will not be to head straight to Northrend or to pick up the leveling game again. No, my first act in the expansion will be to chill outside Honor Hold, where I will wave and salute all of the new 60s and then gank every death knight who comes out of the doors.

My reasoning? A 60 hunter or shaman or priest or druid might be someone's first toon, and I don't want to ruin it for them. But death knights can't be made without having a high-level character already — and I don't discriminate, so I'll have to just kill them all.

Why I have not blogged this week

2008-11-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

1. I'm about halfway through 67 on Ahami, and think I might hit 68 by Saturday. So instead of writing about WoW, I've mostly been playing WoW.
1a. Also, achievements are horrible, addictive things that should be removed (oh God please ignore that I will cry if they go away).

2. For some asinine reason, I decided to inflict NaNoWriMo on myself during U.S. election season/Wrath of the Lich King release month. OH GOD WHY

3. Those of you in the U.S. know that this week is election week. Because of my job in the evil elite liberal media (only so totally not), this means that this week has been CRAZY ASS BUSY WEEK FROM HELL WEEK OF DOOM ELECTION WEEK '08 for me. And as I am a masochist (I play a hunter in PVP, like you didn't already know that), I am clinging to it, sobbing "Please never leave me, CRAZY ASS BUSY WEEK FROM HELL WEEK OF DOOM ELECTION WEEK '08, please please please PLEASE."
3a. The 5 a.m. Wednesday no-sleep-yet, adrenaline-fueled Denny's run o' joint elation-and-despair kind of tuckered me out, too.

4. My cat has felt neglected due to NaNo and CRAZY ASS BUSY WEEK FROM HELL WEEK OF DOOM ELECTION WEEK '08 and has made it quite known by doing things such as playing on top of me or eating my fingers/toes/face to wake me up after I've had no more than four hours of sleep, sitting by the door and yowling for 20-minute stretches, and laying down on top of my hands and keyboard and staring at me with the expression of a child in a World Vision commercial while I'm in the middle of AV. She needs love a bit more than both the blog and the pixel-cats — and can punish me more effectively if I don't give her attention.

5. There is no spoon.

And here I go!

2008-11-02T14:09:00.001-08:00

I have finally, finally made it past the low-60s slump. When Ide hit 62-ish, I didn't play her more than a bubble or so of XP at a time for weeks while I leveled all of my lowbie alts (including my priest!). Around the time she hit 64, I was spending most of my playing time running Ahami all over Azeroth to put out fires.

But when she hit 66, end-game was within reach, and even grinding mobs instead of questing (and I was, because I wanted that damn talbuk!) I was hooked and could not stop playing. I think part of it is that I went to Nagrand at 66 and the quests there are just a blast.

Poor Ahami was 63 when the patch hit, and even though I was unable to play for nearly a week, she was still only 65 yesterday.

And last night, at 65, I did not want to play Ahami at all. At all. I ended up running my roommate through the Scarlet Monastery and Gnomeregan on Ideale instead (we both wanted to play but were sick of killing skull-less Hillsbrad farmers and bloodless and tongueless bears and mountain lions, and I'd not gotten the achievement for SM or ever been in Gnomer). And then I went and killed scourge for a while, even though there is nothing I particularly want from this but Argent Dawn rep, and if I get Ahami a little higher in time, I could get her a couple of decent pieces of gear.

This morning, I logged on her intending to do nothing but inscription research. But I was three bubbles from 66 and sick of Terokkar, so I told myself that I would do a few more quests to get there, then abandon the rest and head for Nagrand.

And the second I dinged, I swear, I couldn't bear to log and switch to Ideale again. I kept questing in Terokkar for five or six more quests, then went to Nagrand, picked up everything, and did several of those quests. Now I'm halfway to 67 and ready to come home and buckle down tonight and get there. And since tomorrow is my day off, maybe I can bribe some guildies to go kill the Scourge with me — that'd get me to 68 pretty quick, I bet. I'd like the tabard, but I'd REALLY like the shoulders and gloves, since I'm not going to have time to gear up at 70, probably. And maybe I'll even get lucky and a couple of useful leather or mail purples will drop in the process. *crosses fingers*

Please tell me I'm not the only one who stalls out badly between Winterspring and Nagrand?

I raided!

2008-11-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

Sort of. My guild was in SSC today and downed either Tidewalker or Lurker, I don't know, and someone had to go right before Vashj. So one of the guild leaders whispers if I want to come.

Now, I am not at all geared for that on Ide. Hell, I'm barely geared for HEROICS on Ide — I am half in greens and rep blues and half in PVP gear. I don't even HAVE a PVE set. And I said so, but he was like, "We don't care, come on."

So we got Vashj to phase two, apparently, but wiped on all the adds. It was still pretty cool up until then, though!

So ... yeah. Sheer madness. And despite only being in for the last 20 minutes or so, it was a blast; not at all what I expected based on the sheer painfulness of five-mans. Definitely something I'd like to try again.

Alliance finally scores a point with me

2008-11-01T16:54:00.001-07:00

I have to say, the draenei Call of Elements quests are WAY cooler than the Horde ones.

Tips for leveling in Outland as a resto shaman

2008-10-31T23:29:00.001-07:00

I'm about halfway to level 66 and can proudly say that, were I not so stubborn, I could have been at 70 weeks ago — but I have leveled Ahami to 65 and will level her to 80 as a resto shaman. From the moment she hit level 10, she has never been another spec.

And every time I go into AV and hit first or second on the healing charts with 200K+ healing at level 64 and now 65, or keep guildmates alive through a bad pull in a lowbie dungeon run, I don't really care. It's a good feeling. (Actually, it's a freaking great feeling when someone says, "Well, we're gonna wipe" on Vent and then we get through the pull without a single death. Mostly it's due to good tanks and CC, but I help!)

That said, leveling as a resto shaman gets extremely painful once you hit Outland. The mobs are tougher and hit harder, which slows you down like crazy, and with the patch changes, it's a bit easier to go out of mana, at least at this level. So here are a few tips I've been using for myself:

- Use Flametongue Weapon. Yes, we have our new, fancy weapon buff just for resto, and when you're healing instances or PVP, yes, use it. But when you're soloing, that extra damage from the flametongue buff helps a lot — more than Windfury, which does not proc regularly enough to be useful for us.

- Shields. You can really go three ways with this — lightning shield does extra damage, water shield gives you more mana, and earth shield keeps your health topped off. I personally was using earth shield until the patch; now I am using water shield and hitting riptide on myself when I start getting low, but I don't think this actually helps me save mana. No theorycrafting to back that up, just a gut feeling.

- Be careful when using magma totem. In many areas of Outland (and even in Felwood and Winterspring) mobs are pretty thick but a good number of them are not aggressive. If you use magma totem and a sporebat or talbuk wanders in range, then you've just added another mob to deal with.

- For mana conservation, tag the mob with a flame shock, drop a totem, and keep that up, and then just melee them down. Going this route, you can take on several mobs at a time (I can manage 5 or 6 level 64-66 mobs at a time), but it will go fairly slowly.

- If you are more into speed, bring along 3-4 stacks of water and a bunch of mana pots because you will need them. You will go much faster if you are working like a caster and spamming lightning bolts (especially now that interrupts seem much less devastating than pre-patch) than trying to be an enhancement shaman, unless you have an enh/resto hybrid build. Your best bet with this is to take on no more than two or three mobs at a time and then sit and drink — or, and this seems quicker to me, just nab one at a time several in a row. Drink whenever your mana pool is about 5-10 percent. (This is my preferred method; it seems to go more quickly than the multi-mob M.O.)

Basically, leveling from 60-70 seems pretty much the same as leveling from 20-60, just slower and with more need to be aware of your environment.