To do:

I've been accomplishing quite a few things on my "things to get done before Cataclysm" list.

Kill all of the Alliance faction leaders and obtain a black warbear
Become a grand master in fishing
Become a grand master in cooking
Raise unarmed weapon skill to 400
Get the classic raider achievement completed
Get the classic dungeon master
Get the outlands dungeon master
Get the outlands raider achievement completed - need a bunch still

Get the Champion of the Frozen Wastes completed

Get the Glory of the Hero Completed

Do a successful OS 3D - had some very very close attempts

Obtain any color Protodrake

Get the of Orgrimmar title
Get the Orgrimmar tabbard
Kill the Lich King - Working on it though!
Find a guild to experience current raid content with
Get my exploration achievements done - so much stuff I missed out on exploring while leveing being a DK


So, what's on your to do list?

Brain... Hurts...

Today, Quintalan has met the enemy, and it is us.*

I had a bunch of good 5-man runs this morning, so when I took a late lunch I figured I'd squeeze in an extra 5-man PuG. Out pops Halls of Lightning, and I figure that'd work; it typically takes 1/2 hour to get the run in, and that'll fit perfectly into my lunchtime.

What I failed to accommodate for was a tank running absolutely wild. You know those entrance passages that have the General wandering around in them? He pulled. And pulled. And pulled. He almost literally pulled everything in that area -including the General- together at once.

I died. The mage died. We both ran back in to help finish the job before everyone else wiped.

We get to the second boss, and we lose the mage again. Because the tank keeps pushing forward, the healer and I can't rez the mage until there's a slight gap in the trash. We then proceed to have a full party wipe twice on said trash.

Somehow we survive the third boss, but then the mage, DK and I wipe twice on trash again. By this time, the mage had had it, and split. The replacement pops on in the middle of the fight and dies. He leaves. We get another replacement, who's spending the entire last part of the run saying stuff like "OMG!" in the party chat.

By this time I'm cursing heavily under my breath, but I want to finish this; we're so close. Then I get a glimpse of who the tank is: he starts talking about his World Cultures teacher, which means he's in high school, and he's probably on spring break.

/FACEPALM

We zap Loken, and I get the hell out of Dodge.

As I got up to get some ibuprofen, I kept thinking to myself, "Six Emblems of Triumph weren't worth this.**"



*Yes, I paraphrased the old Pogo comic strip.

**Four Badges from the run itself and two from the FLG tool.

News Flash

Quintalan learns to switch auras! Film at eleven!

Seriously, I never gave much thought to the aura I'm on when I was running an instance. Just turn on Retribution Aura and have at it. Okay, I've also been known to ignore the Crusader Aura that's been left on while flying around when the summons comes. And yeah, I occasionally forget to turn Crusader Aura on when flying.* (Stop laughing, Soul!)

But intentionally switching auras during an instance? Not on your life.

There were three pivotal moments for that in my aura education: taking out the Sons of Gruul; a forgettable Pit of Saron run; and perusing the details in the recount stats.

The sons of Gruul weren't an instance run. For those of you who quest, you already know that they're 5-man quests found in Blade's Edge in Outland, so why is this doing here? Because when I soloed those quests, I decided I needed more armor than what I was getting with all the buffs I was using, so I switched to Devotion Aura just prior to launching my attacks. Okay, my decision was also made in hindsight, because I felt that the first time I tried and failed to kill the first of the Sons of Gruul it was due to my taking too much damage. Since I wasn't about to simply replace my trusty old Sword of Justice (aka the tuning fork) that easily, I switched auras instead. That little boost seemed to do the trick as I was able to survive all of the encounters with the Sons of Gruul. Translation: even a Ret Pally can use Devotion Aura from time to time.

My second big learning came from a Pit of Saron run that didn't go quite so well. In that run we had one well geared tank who was taking a bunch of people new to the instance, and I was only on my second run at that. Well, we met Garfrost, and he had us for lunch. Twice. After that second wipe, I got tired of watching the frost stacks add up and switched on Frost Resistance Aura to help mitigate the frost damage. Between that and not having to run halfway across the area to find a boulder to break the contact for the frost debuff, we managed to survive that third time. (I believe the tank said "We have to find a boulder to break contact, don't scatter so broadly!" Hey, I was following the tank around. Me no dummy.)

That success with Garfrost gave me the insight that maybe it was better to switch auras more often, like when running up toward the final fight with Tyrannus. Or when the proto-drakes in Utgarde Keep start blasting fire.

My tweaking of the auras still bothered me, because I thought I was losing significant DPS just so I could mitigate the damage. On some of these high end instances my DPS count doesn't look very flattering, so I was wondering if I was hurting myself further in that area by switching out of Retribution Aura. Well, perusal of the recount data proved to me that I need not worry. Damage from Ret Aura was down in the pack after the Seals, Melee, and Divine Storm. With that knowledge in front of me, I felt better making smarter use of my Auras to help the team.

And besides, anything to help the healer works well with me.


*I have my excuses when farming for ore; Crusader Aura plus an epic mount mean that I zip by ore so fast it will occasionally not register in the searching. I've learned to leave Crusader Aura off when farming for Titanium.

Getting your money's worth

This is an interesting thing to think about (for me at least).

What qualifications must be me in order for you, as a player, to feel satisfied that your monthly subscription fee is justified.

I've looked at this a number of ways over the last few years of playing MMOs.

First is the the money to time ratio. For $15 you could go to the theaters and enjoy a new release and get entertainment for the next two hours (or less, you cheap Hollywood bastards). Or, for the same $15, you could go out to lunch twice.

For the same $15 though, you could enjoy as much time as you want in your favorite MMO. It's a flat rate. The only expense beyond the monthly fee is time. As with most things, you get better results when you invest more time towards it.

However, a subscription based MMO is a hobby, and a somewhat cheap one when you compare costs of other hobbies.

For instance, I recently stopped playing MMOs and thought it would be great to get into one of my childhood hobbies of building model airplanes. That hobby has come a long way in the last few years with the implementation of airbrush kits and thousands of paint colors and the sheer sophisticaion of the actual kits now days. When I was kid, I was lucky if the out come generally LOOKED like a plane. Now, however, the kits are engineered exactly to scale and whole websites are devoted to listing what is incorrect in each different release from manufacturers.

The point is, the expense of this hobby, if you feel the need to do things the "right" way, is rather costly. I probably invensted a good four or five hundred dollars in paints, materials, tools, and kits. I'm very glad I did though, becuase now I have another hobby that I actually find quite relaxing (or maybe it's just the glue). Do I feel my amateur attempts at building models is worth the money invested? Yep. Becuase I accomplished what I wanted to. I built a few models, got the tools I needed to do things properly, and enjoyed my time doing so. And I will continue to enjoy my time in the future, because I'm set up propperly to do so.

Now lets apply this to my MMO of choice. I got my model (character) built (leveled), I got my tools (gear), and I got all my painting done (properly specc'd and geared for content), and now I want to put that final coating of polish on (ZOMG, icc25 purples) before I slap it up on my display shelf (dalaran).

The problem, currently, is the shelf is falling apart(can't get enough people for 10 man runs), and the polish is wearing off (frustration).

So what do you do? Get some duct tape and get prop the shelf up on the wall and hope it doesn't fall over again and smash your models? Or, get a new shelf on a new wall and hope you picked a better spot this time...

Nothing to See Here

There's commercial during football season where a guy dressed as a ref compares the distance to first down. If the distance is a couple of inches away, it's "drama". A couple of feet away, and it's "change the channel."

"Drama."

"Change the channel."

I was thinking about that when I was reading Righteous Orbs today about Guild drama. When you join a group organized around a common goal, human nature will eventually cause some conflicts. In Tamarind's case, I'd followed the drama from his previous guild through his posts until his own entries came back to haunt him.

Tam's posts brought home the issues of blogging about guilds. Blogs are by nature public endeavors, and even though we very rarely get a comment from someone other than ourselves, you can't assume that nobody is watching. (On my personal blog, I've been constantly surprised by who stops by.)

Why bring this up? Well, my old guild consisted of myself, Soul, Soul's wife, one of Soul's coworkers, and one other guy who was on maybe once or twice. If that guild was Mayberry, my current guild is more like Chicago; the 180+ members listing is inflated by alts, but even if there were three alts per person the guild would have roughly 60 members. Sure, it isn't the size of some of the huge guilds out there, but it's far larger than what I'm used to seeing. When you're walking through Dalaran on an evening, the crowd size actually helps you become anonymous; Quintalan is just another Blood Elf out for an evening stroll between the JC house and the Sunreavers pavilion. Nothing to see here, move along. In a moderately sized guild, however, there you are. You might as well be Norm walking into Cheers.

Even if the guildies don't know about this blog, you can't assume that will stay that way in the future. Guild business (and any guild drama) ought to remain in the guild, and airing dirty laundry in public like this does no good. What's good for Tamarind is good for him, and that's fine as far as it goes, but I'm not Tam. I try to keep my observations about WoW based on things that happened out there in the public realm, so if you're looking for guild drama, you won't find it here.

That said, I will post one item that happened shortly after I joined the guild. I was on early in the morning and I had just finished my Jewelcrafting Daily. Even that early in the morning, Dalaran was busy and Gen Chat was crazy. I was just hitting the logoff button to switch to my bank alt when I saw a "do a /who Grey Death Legion" scroll by in the chat.

Wait.... what?

Before the screen could disappear on me, I saw the following exchange:

"what's a grey death legion?"
"a guild that won't let you cuss in gchat"

My first thought was to log back in as Quint and say something, but the sleepy logical part of my brain caught up with me and overruled that idea. There's no sense in wrestling with a pig in Gen Chat, and people believe what they want to believe. Besides, if that's the worst thing that someone can say about my guild, then things are in fairly good shape.

(Hell, I can rip loose a good stream of profanity quite easily, but I have no problems whatsoever working with a group that frowns on that.)

My UI

I haven't posted this yet, so I thought I would mention my user interface.

Addons I use:

• AtlasLoot - Lets me see who drops what gear as well as crafted gear and the materials to make them
• Chatter - Chat window mods that make it much smoother and look better
• Dominos - Get rid of the ugly standard wow hotbars and lets you gain more screen real estate
  
• MikScrollingBattleText - I like this one better than the build in version of this
• Omen
• PitBull Unit frames - clean looking and very customizable.
• Recount
• SexyCooldown - seen just above my hot bars, it gives a nice indication how long until skills are usable again
• Threat Plates - turns name plates green, and shrinks the size of them when I have aggro, and when I don't have aggro, it makes them large and red. Great mod for a tank to yank back a runner (this is an option for Tidy Plates)
  
• Tidy Plates - Cleaner looking name plates
  

Basic layout


UI in action:

Fun and Excitement with Questing

I was catching up on Darth Solo's posts on WoW Alone when he commented in this post about how he couldn't stand questing in the Old World (Classic WoW's locations), and how much better Outland and Northrend are by comparison. That got me to thinking about my own questing experiences; while I can see Darth's point, there are plenty of quirks out there that balance out the questing throughout the WoW environment.

It's no secret that I'm a bit of a quest whore -as Souldat calls me- and I've an ultimate goal of having Quintalan reach that Seeker achievement. I'm roughly 600-650 quests away from Loremaster, and from there only about 100 or so to reach 3000 and the Seeker. For my alts, I'm not planning on being so thorough; there's no need, really, with the exception of the class specific quests. (By comparison, an achievement such as Explorer on a PvE server isn't nearly as impressive as on a PvP server; there aren't many Alliance gankers you have to worry about when exploring on a PvE server.) Nevertheless, there are some major differences in how the quests were designed to push a character along in Classic WoW vs. the two expansions.

Blizzard designed the quests in Classic WoW to push a player from region to region when the appropriate quests opened up. This is still used in BC and Northrend, but instead of viewing each expansion continent as a whole, Blizzard focused more on individual regions. You can see that in the quest achievements themselves; in the Old World, the quest achievements are for each continent, not for completing quests in a given region. BC and WotLK have achievements for clearing each region which add up to the Loremaster meta-achievement.

It seems that in the Old World there were more options for leveling in a specific range, say for the 20s: you could go to Hillsbrad, Thousand Needles, Ashenvale, Duskwood, Stonetalon, Wetlands or even Stranglethorn if you're feeling brave. The breadth of locations to work with means that you can work on your questing as, say, a Tauren and never have to visit the Eastern Kingdoms at all. Blizzard seems to have compensated for this by putting in these oddball quests that have you traipsing back and forth between two continents just to talk to different specific people, who then tell you to go hunt for stuff in an instance. For example, you're in Arathi and you stumble on the quest chain that leads you to Tarren Mill, the Undercity, Senjin Village, Zul'Farrak, and lord knows where else. It's clever on the face of it, but without flying mounts you have to make more connections than trying to get from Atlanta to Anchorage on Jet Blue. The travel time gets to be tedious, and you often start to wonder whether the quest chain is worth it.

Outlands quests narrowed the scope to a more manageable level -and the addition of flying mounts helped tremendously- but there still is a maddening tendency to insert cross region dependencies on some quest chains. This wouldn't be that big of an issue unless you're trying to reach the Loremaster of Outland achievement, where you find you're perpetually short of quests in a region (Nagrand and Hellfire Peninsula are two big offenders) until you come across a quest in Shadowmoon Valley that sends you to those regions.

With Wrath of the Lich King, the quests evolved further. The maturing ability of Blizzard to mix in an overarcing quest chain with the more narrowly focused ones really kept the pace brisk. That was most felt in Dragonblight (Wrathgate), The Storm Peaks (Thorim and Brann Bronzebeard), and Icecrown (Argent Crusade and Knights of the Ebon Blade). Blizzard's fancy phasing tech has a tremendous impact here as well; no more equivalents of killing Dar'khon and then finding him respawn a few minutes later. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Necromancer?" (Apologies to King Henry II for that little quip.)

I must admit that the phasing technology has me biased toward the Northrend quests; I found them much more interesting than some of the grinding you feel like you're doing on the other regions. Ironically enough, I like the Outland quests the least. Perhaps it's because the changes were half baked, but I often felt like I spent hours hunting around Outland for an individual quest that would put me over the top for an achievement, and I would spend an equal amount of time perusing thottbot and wowwiki as well.

Classic WoW has a bizarre sort of appeal to me. It was by design big and broad, and the concept of trying to check out everything is a daunting task. The things that Blizzard put in place for Classic WoW may have made sense when they designed it, but the creakiness of the Old World is pretty apparent these days. Yes, I hope that Cataclysm will bring a Northrend style focus to old Azeroth, but I've a certain amount of fondness for the meandering (and maddening) nature of some of the Old World questing.