Thankfulness

This might be a slightly corny blog entry, but given the meaning of the day it feels appropriate. I am most thankful to have such a wonderful wife and beautiful healthy daughter. I am thankful to live in a home and have a mortgage. I am thankful for having a caring family that never fails to deliver interesting and entertaining moments. I am thankful that my wife doesn’t eat the crust of her pizza.

I am thankful for video games, friends, alcohol, indoor plumbing, and California weather. I am thankful that Al Gore created the internet. I am thankful that my sister introduced me to Nine Inch Nails and for Trent Reznor’s musical talents. I am thankful that my first toon in WoW was a rogue. I am thankful for my guild, Awry, and all the friends that I’ve made.

I am thankful for my iPod touch and all the wonderful podcasts that I’ve discovered over the past couple of months. I am thankful for Facebook and Twitter. I am thankful for smart phones and technology in general. I am thankful for Adobe Photoshop and Notepad, the only tools I need to make a webpage. I am thankful for my artistic talents which I should make use of more often.

And finally, I am thankful for my readers. This blog I mostly write for myself, but I also write it for you. Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkinator

Happy Birthday World of Warcraft! After 5 years we finally get an in-game world event celebrating turkey day. There are no homages to the pillaging of Indian lands, just wholesome celebrations of the genocide of wild turkeys, shooting rogues with a turkey gun, and of course crashing the opposite faction’s bountiful tables. There are plenty of guides out there detailing the individual achievements so I’ll just cover a few things to provide a few tips and limit the QQ’ng to a minimum.

Pilgrim’s Paunch has you sitting at one of multiple bountiful tables at each of your faction’s capital cities and gain the Spirit of Sharing buff. All you need to do is eat 5 servings at each of the 5 chairs and if you’re nice, you can pass servings to each plate. If you are in the sharing mood, you can eat a serving and then pass a serving while waiting on the cooldown for eating a serving. Simple, easy, time consuming.

Then there are the Pilgrim’s Bounty cooking recipes. You’ll gain an achievement for cooking them all and you only need cooking skill of 280 to do so. Fret not if you haven’t bothered with cooking, Blizzard threw everyone a bone because you can skill up from 1 to 300 with these recipes!

For the associated cooking quests, you’ll need to purchase 25 potatoes, cranberries, and pumpkins as well kill 25 wild turkeys. These will send you back n’ forth from city to city, so make sure you buy 25 of the item at each capital city so you don’t have to backtrack multiple times like I did. One quest requires 20 of a particular food, and the other will require you to prepare the food while on the quest, so don’t precook everything.

Darnassus is a sticking point for the Horde.

Now for the QQ. Pilgrim’s Peril is far easier for the Alliance to achieve than it is for the horde simply because the tables for TB and UC are near the entrance to the capital cities. Whereas the tables in Darnassus require the horde to run across the width of the city. I died no less than 3 times attempting to sit at a table in Darnassus. ;_; Still, it was easy enough to achieve and I encountered no issues with Stormwind, Ironforge and the Exodar.

And finally, the coup d’etat of Pilgrim’s Bounty achievements, the Turkinator. If you’re on a high population server do yourself a favor and attempt this during the middle of the night, early morning, or whenever there are not multiple turkey killing thieves running around. Killing 40 wild turkeys is not difficult, the difficult part is finding a turkey to kill before your turkey tracker buff wears off. 30 seconds is punishing if you have competition.

I’ve read that the respawn rate is really good on them but, it’s not high enough. They’re also scattered around the entirety of Tirisfal with not nearly enough pockets of turkey density. So you’ll need some luck, a /tar wild turkey macro, and a lot of patience if you’re attempting this on a high pop server. It took me 4 attempts to accomplish Turkinator with my first yielding 28, then 33, then 35 and finally reaching the promised land.

Now I just need a bunch more turkey shooters to shoot my brethren with to finish off the meta.

Redistribution

My main character has been my rogue since the day I started playing WoW. I’ve enjoyed the experience of leveling as a rogue and over the course of 5 years we’ve seen quite a lot of changes to class. Overall our focus hasn’t strayed from the original vision, but we have gained much needed utility that makes us useful beyond our DPS. With the recreation of Azeroth in Cataclysm and new and improved leveling experience for new characters I’ve decided to chime in on some changes I’d like to see to our core skill-set.

Tricks of the Trade

Currently learned at level 75 this ability really helps solidify a tank’s threat right away especially when combined with Fan of Knives. I’d love to see this ability learned sooner than 75. While there isn’t much need for it early on since most boss encounters are tank n’ spank in the old world it could help in Outlands. There is a gap of new skills that rogues learn between 40 and 62, so it could easily be slotted in at level 58.

Shiv

Quite useless outside of PVP, something needs to be done to make shiv worth doing in PVE content. Allowing shiv to crit made the ability broken, but what if shiv allowed your next special attack (shiv excluded) a chance to award an extra CP? *shrug* Then again, maybe shiv doesn’t need to be worthwhile outside of PVP. In that case there’s no real reason a rogue should have to wait until level 70 to pick up the ability. Making it trainable at level 48 wouldn’t hurt anything and give pvp rogues a new toy to play with.

Fan of Knives

Our beloved AoE attack received some necessary tuning but is still incredibly useful. I only wish it were available earlier on especially when I was leveling my rogue through Northrend and doing dungeons. Would it be completely unbalancing to allow rogues to learn this at level 70? Or even 72? It’s an awesome ability for sure and should be near the end of the line for rogues, but it was painful having to wait until 80 to have an AoE attack outside of Blade Flurry.

Sprint

I’d love to see sprint’s duration and cooldown halved. How often do you really need a full 15 seconds of sprint? Okay, there is flag carrying duty in WSG but that’s about it. This change would improve the mobility of rogues in pvp and pve. I am envious of warriors that are able to charge back in after running out of a nova attack, so c’mon Blizz, let us use sprint a little more frequently!

Dismantle

I’ve always found it odd that Blizzard decided to retroactively give rogues the ability to disarm their foes at level 20. This ability is extremely powerful in 1 on 1 pvp situations and do rogues really need it at 20? Level 20 is already crowded with plenty of other abilities. I don’t think it would hurt much to push dismantle back to around level 42 or 44.

Failkin

One of the benefits from the RaF program was the ability to grant levels to some of my lower level alts. My mage/bank alt was taken from 14 to 31 and my druid from 46 to 58. I’m not quite sure why I granted so many levels to my mage, but should I ever dust him off, he’ll at least be more fun to play. As for my druid, I respec’d him moonkin and bought about 200g of gear to kit him out for Outlands and then gave it go.

Epic fail. Well, I never did die, but killing took almost all of his mana bar. It only took about 20 minutes of killing one monster, healing up, drinking and repeating it all over again before I gave up. Clearly I’m doing something wrong. Either my rotation is backwards, or picking up cloth pieces over leather was a mistake.

I’m trying to find some good advice on how to level as a boomkin, but right now I’m really thinking about respec’ng back to feral. Now don’t get me wrong, I know how to level as a spell-caster as I do have a draenei mage sitting at level 66, but obviously boomkin plays a lot differently. I was expecting starfire to deal significantly more damage than it was for its cost.

I attempted a few different rotations but the one I stuck with was to root the enemy first, toss a starfire and clip it with insect swarm, drop a moonfire and then spam wrath, typhooning if the monster wasn’t dead (which was 98% of the time) and then attempting another root. This worked, but would leave my mana bar drained, and I’d generally take more damage than I would like and would have to heal myself up draining the remainder of my bar.

Anyone have any advice? Or could point me in the right direction? I want to pew pew with my laser druid.

Fungi

RaF has come to an end for my wife and I. Fortunately we managed to level our toons to 60, get them through the Dark Portal and into Outlands. I am really looking forward to questing through Outlands this time, especially since I’ll have my wife by my side. It also helps that I’m getting a kick out of playing my pally as a tank. It never gets old to mount up, round up a large group and AoE them down with my wife’s vitally important DPS. At some point I know “epic mode” will become the keyword for letting my wife know that it is time for large-scale burnage of mobs. It reminds me of my unholy DK before that tree’s AoE got nerfed to the ground.

Questing during our journey wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked, but I shouldn’t have expected anything else considering how long it has been since I leveled a toon in that level range in a long time. Constantly the thought of “I know there’s a quest for this … but I don’t remember how to get it” ran through my head as we would ride through zones. For example we flew out to Tanaris in our early 40’s for a change-of-pace from the jungles of Stranglethorn, but after only one night in the desert we found ourselves back in STV to complete most of the quests out there leaving us around level 52.

When I came to the realization that we had passed level 50, I remembered an old guild tradition rooted back in vanilla where we would help fresh lv50 toons complete the cauldron quests in Western Plaguelands. It’s been a long time since I last did anything in the plaguelands, so the thought of smiting undead sounded attractive. I knew that with our RaF experience bonus we would fly through the levels as we completed the quests. Also considering that we had logged out the night prior in Undercity, it was a no-brainer to finish up our old world exploits in the plaguelands.

Once I finally dusted off my memory on how to start up the cauldron quests, things went smoothly from there on out. That is if you exclude the fear bombs from Skeleton Terrors that caused add after add and frustrated my wife to no end. Fortunately no deaths occurred in spite of the problematic fear bombs and we breezed through the remaining cauldron quests. After demolishing the western half of the plaguelands, we then turned our attention eastward.

If there’s one thing that I definitely won’t miss post-cataclysm it will be the quests in Eastern Plaguelands. Kill 30 of this, then 20 of that and while you’re over there kill 10 more of another thing. Ugh! Then there is the issue of disjointed quests sending you back n’ forth across the zone or zones to keep the quest-train chugging along. Gathering termites in EPL for a quest that you get at the Bulwark for an area in WPL has to be one of the best examples of the bad quest flow design in vanilla.

I can’t wait until Blizzard blows up the old world quests and updates everything to being on par with WotLK questing, or at the very least TBC. I only hope that with this revision of old world content we get treated to more in-game cinematics ala Wrathgate to move important story-arcs along. Blizzard has stated that they were very happy with the Wrathgate questline so we can be assured more of these questlines. I’m just unsure if they’ll be for the 80-85 content, or if we’ll see a smattering of it through the new leveling experience.

I’m glad that my wife and I have gotten our toons past the vanilla hump and can start in earnest on the TBC content. I’m interested to see what my wife thinks of her first bombing run in Hellfire, but I’m sure that she’ll be anxious to burn through Hellfire to move onto Zangarmarsh which we have renamed “The Mushroom Kingdom.” Questing through Outlands will be far more rewarding for us if only because the quests will be quite fresh in my head considering I now have two other alts, a boomkin and a troll DK on jubei’thos, that are just starting Hellfire. I’m sure it won’t be long before I’ll be picking up a copy of WotLK for my wife so that we can keep questing together.

Destruction

It has been awhile since I’ve blogged specifically about my in-game exploits in Azeroth so it is about time I did so. Even after close to 5 years with WoW I still find enjoyment out of the game, and it has been incredible to share that experience with my wife. Specifically I’ve taken a step back from the usual “daily” grind at max-level and gone back to the roots of the game with leveling alts.

Back when TBC came out I was certain that I was going to level a paladin to 70 and tank with her but as time passed she gathered more and more dust to the point where I didn’t give a second thought to picking back up my tankadin. Having a consistent partner to quest with has made it very desirable to dust my tankadin off, especially when that partner can pick up the slack in DPS when you’re focusing specifically on being a tank. It’s a blast to tell my wife “get ready to rain down fire” while I mount up and gather up a pack of 6-8 mobs and then watch as they keel over.

As this blog title may suggest, my wife is a warlock and recently we decided that she should try out switching from affliction to destruction. Affliction just wasn’t giving her the big numbers that she was desiring, and since I’m the tank, there really wasn’t a reason for her to not switch over to the bursty damage of destruction. Conflagrate is freaking awesome, and it’ll be even more awesome once one of my guildies gets the glyph sent to my wife’s ‘lock.

Originally my tankadin was all-out protection spec’d, but while we were questing through Stranglethorn Vale I decided I needed a little more oomph and tossed 11 points into retribution for Seal of Command. While this has delayed my Avenger’s shield, it has helped out immensely with the play-style that we occasionally exercise in burning down large groups of mobs. There was one occurrence where we were “joined” by a draenei shadowpriest riding away from the pirate cove in Tanaris and collected a large group running after us. As we approached the cave tunnel I decided “what the hell” and dropped a consecrate and tanked about 8 pirates while my wife rained fire down from the heavens on them. There’s nothing more fun than doing silly stuff like that and living to tell the tale.

Currently we’re sitting just shy of level 46 and hoping to hit at least 58 before our RaF runs out. We haven’t made the most out of the RaF program as our playtime can be quite limited and considering how long it has been since I’ve actually leveled a character in our level range questing hasn’t been silky smooth. I have tried to make sure that we’ve quested through zones that will be substantially changing in Cataclysm so that my wife will be able to reflect on how Azeroth used to be.

Tanking the Rag.

Speaking off old world Azeroth, the bug to level my own ‘lock sent me on a journey to pick up the +22 INT enchant to toss on the heirloom staff. My rogue is an enchanter but he had never reached revered with the Thorium Brotherhood in order to pick up that particular enchant. Fortunately he was honored with them, but had long dropped skinning & mining so it was up to my DK to venture into Molten Core for TB farming.

In a large coincidence two of my guildies were already farming MC but were having a difficult time of it so I got an invite to come join them on my DK who happens to be a mining and skinning expert. We ended up clearing most of MC as a trio which was extremely fun. At first I was DPS’ng on my DK, but considering that I do have tanking gear on my DK, I ended up tanking the entire raid. By the time we were closing in on Ragnaros, we were joined by 6 other guildies which sped things up considerably. I’m sure we could have cleared all of MC as a trio, but it was great to get more friends in on the action and not have it drag on for hours.

By the end of the run we had acquired enough lava cores, fiery cores, dark iron ore, and core leather that even after splitting it with one of my guildmates whom was also working on TB rep I had enough to get my rogue revered with the Thorium Brotherhood. Success! I’ll be heading back into MC with my DK to continue helping my guildmate grind out TB rep although I think we’ll leave Magmadar up for lots and lots of core leather.

As an aside, leveling a lock with the heirloom shoulders, chest, and staff with +22 INT on it made leveling smooth as butter: level 10 in 2 hours!

Value

There are many varied opinions on Blizzard’s recently released pet store, some happy, some angry, but mostly indifferent. As for me, I was initially upbeat on the idea until I saw the price point for the pets. $10 is a substantial amount of money for something that is purely for vanity and I cannot justify spending that much on a non-combat pet.

Other online games that feature microtransactions generally price their vanity items a lot lower, so I’m wondering why the $10 price point. One could argue that for those games where microtransactions are their bread-n-butter they have to price low in order to attract impluse purchasing. These games also run on the model of microtransactions for game progression or features and that’s how they pay the bills for service and content updates.

With Blizzard and World of Warcraft we’re not in that situation. We pay a monthly fee for access to the game, services, features and content. We’ve seen “micro”-transactions in the form of character recustomization, server transfers, faction and race changes and those are priced to be cost-prohibitive to prevent abuse and to otherwise instill value on the decisions made by a player when creating their character(s).

Yet these features are priced where they are because there are enough players out there willing to pay for the features offered. This brings us back to the $10 tag on the vanity pets, there will be enough people willing to pay that much for a vanity “look at me!” pet. If the price had been set at $5 I’d probably have splurged for both my wife’s account and my account, but $10 is just too high.

What confuses me the most, however, is the decision to set aside 50% of the proceeds from sales of the Pandaren to the Make-A-Wish Foundation for the remainder of this year. It’s very noble for Blizzard to give money to this charity, but why not send 100% of the proceeds? Obviously the idea is to tug on the hearts of players to feel like they’re doing the right thing and get something out of it for themselves.

I challenge Blizzard to rethink this stance and send 100% of the proceeds to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It would send a clear message to everyone that their pet store isn’t merely a money grab. I would fully stand behind the pet store if they donated all proceeds (from mini KT as well) to charity, but as it currently stands I am very weary over the store.

We’re slowly inching towards a slippery slope where Blizzard might offer features and/or mechanics as a microtransaction. Before I get blasted for suggesting that microtransactions may become prevalent, you have to realize that Blizzard has 180′d on a lot of things that they said they would never do. It isn’t completely crazy to think that at some point in the future content may be dangled in front of us for a fee. You have to understand who is at the helm of Activision-Blizzard and the things that he brings to the table.

“We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.” That is a direct quote from CEO Bobby Kotick, aka Darth Kotex according to @MrGrimme.Unfortunately it is out of context so I’ll copy the full quote:

“I don’t think it is specific to video games. I think that if you look at how much volatility there is in the economy and, dependent upon your view about macroeconomic picture and I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

“I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”

On one hand you have to hand it to him, Activision has definitely succeeded in a volatile market that we are in today. He has been able to acquire wildly successful IPs that have kept the rest of Activision afloat. Had it not been for Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and Blizzard’s IPs Activision would be a sinking ship. The culture he has developed has probably been a motivating factor in some of Blizzard’s decisions, and I am worried that we’ll continue to see more pressure on Blizzard to generate extra revenue to justify Kotick’s culture of fear.

We do live in a free market afterall and our vote of support or disapproval comes with our wallets. Currently there are no guns pointed at our heads forcing us to spend money on vanity pets that we don’t need and have no impact on the game. Hopefully the day of fees for content will never come to fruition, and I trust Morhaime to protect Blizzard’s values and beliefs. Yet I am worried that one day Morhaime will step down and with that the company that I love will be destroyed by Darth Kotex.

Direction

I usually try to avoid meta-topics when it comes to WoW mainly because I generally don’t have the first hand experience to base my opinions on, but occasionally a topic will crop up where even my outsider perspective is worthy to share. Tonight I’ll attempt to share my feelings and speculation on the direction Blizzard is heading with WoW.

First and foremost let me state that I am not a progression raider. Hell, I rarely raid period. I have very limited experience with end-game content, not because I can’t hack it, it’s just that I don’t have the time to dedicate to progression raiding. So take my opinions as an outsider looking in, although I’m not trying to discredit my opinions as I feel they are valid.

Okay, now that that is out-of-the-way, let’s get on with it.

Wrath of the Lich King has served as a monumental sandbox for Blizzard to try out new ideas with end-game content. From loot systems to “hard modes” each content patch has brought a new idea to the table. Some ideas, such as hard mode, have been extremely successful and well-received, while others such as Trial of the Crusader have lots of folks scratching their heads.

While hard mode has been wildly successful, it’s starting to cause problems with how the end-game systems have played out. Blizz has accelerated the iLvl tiers for these modes to make them worth doing for the hardcore raiders while keeping the normal modes accessible for the larger population of WoW.

With each major content patch it seems the gap between normal and hard mode grows larger and larger. As this gap grows larger, it puts many “middle-road” progression raid teams in a hard position where normal mode isn’t challenging enough and hard mode is just too punishing. In this situation morale and motivation suffers from raiders burning out on running the same “faceroll” content and can’t find the motivation to keep throwing themselves at a brick wall.

This problem wasn’t quite as prevalent in Ulduar because there were a number of encounters with a variable difficulty to them which were controlled and triggered by in-game mechanics. With the introduction of an UI toggle progression raiding will be either “faceroll” or “brickwall.” To me this is a shame and seems like a step backwards from evolving and interesting gameplay mechanics.

Hopefully Blizzard rethinks making hard modes a UI toggle and brings back variable triggered hard modes ala Ulduar, but otherwise I think they’re on the right track. Changes such as top-level head/shoulder enchants becoming BoA are a godsend to those of us with alts at max-level without the time nor drive to grind out reputations.

There’s also the plan to allow BoA items to be transferrable cross-faction which will help some folks out, but I’m holding out for cross-realm BoA transfers to become available. My character slots are 100% horde on Cenarius and I don’t plan on creating an Alliance alt on Cenarius unless they increase the character limit per realm. (Pretty please Blizz!)

Yet I forsee one more aspect that Blizzard could continue to make the game more rewarding for the time invested: BoA emblems. Currently this would be difficult to implement since emblems are currency, but I see an easy work-around that currently exists in the game that could be modified to allow for this. Create a new BoA item that can be purchased by emblems and then be redeemed for emblems via a vendor.

You can already purchase BoA items that can be redeemed for honor, so it shouldn’t be difficult to expand this idea for emblems. This would make life much easier for those of us with multiple max-level toons, but don’t have the time to gear each toon up.

One could argue that you should have to invest that time on gearing up alts, but let’s think of the benefits of allowing BoA emblems. Raid teams wouldn’t be burdened with gearing up other people’s alts and should the need arise for toon swapping, toons being swapped in would be on average better geared.

Then there’s the issue of tanks and/or healers that have DPS alts that have all their BiS equipment, but are constantly called upon on their mains to run something. Now instead of feeling like they’re wasting their time and not getting anything out of running the same content, they can still gear up that DPS alt.

I can only think of one downside to this system: lack of familiarity with your alt geared through BoA emblems when running high level content. Even then, the downside isn’t that big, especially if you are consistently running high level content, it wouldn’t take much time to acclimate.

So are there any other possible downsides to allowing BoA emblems? There might be, but I honestly can’t think of any others and whatever downsides there might be are greatly outweighed by the benefits of such a system. Perhaps even the downside I did present could be dealt with only making base level emblems BoA and not the current tier of emblems.

Either way, I hope Blizzard is thinking about this and decides to implement it. It sure would make my life trying to gear up my DK for tanking a lot easier

Metamorphosis

As so many times before my blog went through another hiatus, but this time it has come out on the other end on a completely different blogging service. Farewell LiveJournal, you’ve served me well, but this mistress named WordPress is better … in every single possible way. From widgets to easily accessible stat tracking WordPress offers everything that I didn’t realize that I wanted and couldn’t get from LiveJournal.

This move might be just the motivation or change that I’ve been needing to become a regular blogger. So far I’m loving all of the utility that WordPress offers at my fingertips. Better yet I didn’t have to leave my 162 blog posts from LiveJournal behind dating back to 2004 when I started my LJ blog for Final Fantasy XI.

Over the next few weeks I may not post new blogs regularly as I’ll be trying to go back through my archives and get them categorized and possibly tagged. If you’re a newer viewer/reader of my blog, you might get a kick out of digging through my archives. There are plenty of n00b moments in there as I was going through my oldest of entries.

Overall the theme of my blog will remain the same: random gaming and life. I have no ambition to turn this blog into a repository of theory-crafting or change into a RP blog (I’m definitely not a RPer). If you enjoy reading about the exploits of -semi-hardcore gamer hopefully this blog will be fun for you. If not that’s fine, it’s a personal diary of sorts for me to reflect upon. Which gives me an idea or theme that I might blog about: reflecting on old entries and how they contrast to my current life, in-game and out.

Adieu~!

Denial

Icecrown Citadel has hit the PTRs and my former policy of not “spoiling” content by trying it out on the PTR has been cracked. If it weren’t for the fact that I cannot connect to the PvE test realm that policy would be shattered thrice-fold. Maybe it’s a sign from Blizzard to remain faithful to my policy of not spoiling content, but I want in! I want to run through the 5 man dungeon and experience the lore NOW, not later. It’s like a carrot hung from a stick in front of me.

If the connectivity issue continues I may just “fall back” onto my policy, but that doesn’t change how anxious I am to experience this content. It sounds absolutely amazing and shows that Blizzard is balancing their gameplay experience between small group and raid content … finally. I love the idea of a small insurgence team that seems to hold some bearing on the raid content even if to what extent is still unknown. Toss in the fact we’ll be assisting (or be assisted by) a major lore character as well as taking part in an epic 5-man quest storyline and patch 3.3 is shaping up to be the best content patch released ever.