Been a while

It's been a little while since my last post, and a few things have happened.

First off Congratulations to Redbeard (Quint) for just about reacing level 58 and hitting the first expansion! Exciting times!



Secondly, as per usual with my indecisiveness I am back at playing my death knight and he's now level 70 and patiently waiting my wife's mage to catch up a bit. He's got maxed out blacksmithing and is pimping a full level 70 cobalt armor set and an axe of frozen death. It's cool to have "crafted by *insertyournamehere*" on just about every piece of armor you've got.

My decision this time was well warranted. I believe the ammount of cooldows you can pop and being a blood spec DK tank with an inexperienced healer makes the healer's job a little bit easier because you can regenerate your own health fairly easily to assist the healing.

And this is shallow, but I like fast. The main reason I still use my paladin half as much as I do is because he's got an epic flyer and crusader aura. It's just more convienient to zip from mining node to node and collect ore much quicker than it would be with a non epic on my DK (up to 2,300 gold towards the 5k it will be for epic flying, however).

I love the death knight talent entitled "On a Pale Horse" that increases mounted movement speed by 20%. And the unholy presence that lets a deathknight move considerably faster on the ground as well is quite nice. I imagine once I get the money saved for epic flying on my dk, the paladin will be shelved.

In past MMOs I have also seemed to gravitate towards characters that get around faster. In Lineage 2 I played the rogue archetype which gets bonus movement speed (faster if you eventually be come the ranger specialization). And in that game you spend most of the game running and running and running (no flight paths or when I played, no mounts of any kind. Good Lord that game was terrible.)

And in Vanguard I played a halfling bard. Just for fun I decided to link a video demonstrating just HOW FAST a bard could move in that game. Although the character in this video is human, it's still good. Just imagine a halfling moving that fast. I swear it was like the cartoon legs you'd see on Wiley Coyote. ZOOOOOoooooom!

Another terrible game, but man was it fun to zip around the world like that.



Back to the WoW discussion though, as both my wife and Quint near crossing the level barrier to entering the dark portal, I'm curious to see what the continued game play will bring.

Will Quint drop the old world quest and rejoice in the new found xp and sweet sweet gear of the outlands?

*POW!!*

Will my wife actually begin to quest instead of contsant dungeon grinds?

*ZING!*

Will I flip flop my choice of tanks again? (gimme a break, we're not even 80 yet or raiding!)

*OOF!*

Stay tuned right here until next week. Same time, same place...

When hopefully we'll hear a post from Quint about his impressions of the difference in game design he can notice in moving from Azeroth to Outlands.

nana nana nana nana~ Con-Text!

Class Pride

During one of my lunch breaks last week I happened to stumble on a thread on the official WoW forums talking about things that make players who play warrior proud. It struck me as interesting. Why? Because in all my experience playing I had not really felt that since playing my rogue.

And to be honest, I did feel that at bit while playing my warrior.

Quintalan (Redbeard) can attest to my recent (more like constant) internal battle between playing my death knight or warrior. Both are fun. I LOVE the tanking style and flexibility of the warrior. I also think they have the strongest tool set of the tanks.

On the other hand, the death knights do decent damage and and pretty fun to play too. It's nice to have an AOE to throw down and lock aggro in with blood boil.

So what's holding me back from playing my warrior you ask?

Tauren. Yup, they may look cool and have the best racials for a PVE warrior, but I can't help it. I just don't like Taurens. Here's the thing: When playing a Tauren the rest of the world is smaller. Having to dismount every stinking time I want to enter a building, or ride the elevator in UC is such a pain. However, being so large is nice because your weapons are HUGE! Rawr! Right? But being a Tauren player they just appear normal size in relation to your own character. Big...normal size deal.

The main thing that really bugs me playing a Tauren is this: When you zoom your camera in all the way you end up focusing where the height of a normal player would stand. So what this does is offset the camera lower than your character's head. Which means if your fighting anything smaller than your character you have to pivot the camera to the side or up enough to see what's going on. That aggravates the hell out of me for some reason. And playing a Tauren pretty much means EVERYTHING is smaller than your character.

Yesterday was the Day of the Dead event in Warcraft, and one of the nifty things you could do was get a 12 hour costume buff that turned you into an undead guy / girl in a tuxedo. This gave me a chance to realize that I actually REALLY liked the animations of the sword & board undead. You could easily spot the difference from a dodge or parry to a block, and the animations actually looked like you're doing the actions. What I mean is, when you block an attack you actually raise your shield and block the attack, or you raise your weapon and parry the attack. Maybe at this point I just don't care for cows enough that I didn't notice those types of animations before on my Tauren.

So getting back to the first thing I posted about, I would like to sum it all up with the following snippet from Achtung Panzercow.

"I am the Warrior.

When you see me, I will, most likely, not be attired formally. I will be encased in my steel. It will be dirty, bloody, and battered. I do not have a quick tongue or eloquent speech. I know nothing of the manners of the King’s court, or the ettiquette of the formal ball.

I am known by many names. Tank. Meatshield. Fighter. Brawler. Corpse.

I am the Warrior.

I have not the capability, nor the inclination, to hide. I cannot strike from stealth with devastating blows, then fade into the darkness. I cannot incinerate a foe from twenty paces away. I cannot deal death from a distance, safe from the return attacks of my enemy. In order to kill, I must close with the enemy. I see his eyes. I smell his breath. I taste his fear. And he tastes mine.

I cannot bend Nature to do my bidding. I cannot tap into the Nether and force it to do what I command. I cannot study the arcane and master it to my control. I command nought but my mind, my body, and my will. It is by those, and those alone, that I stand or fall.

I have no friends on my journey. No walkers of the void, summoned from the Nether as servants and bodyguards. No loyal beasts of the plains or woods, to defend me and comfort me in my pain. My sole companion is my weapon. I must care for it better than any hunter has ever cared for his beast. I must master it more than any warlock has ever mastered his demon. Without me, it is useless. Without it, I am nothing.

I cannot heal. I cannot shield. I cannot call upon the gods and see my prayers answered. I call to the spirits of my ancestors in the heat of battle, and they are silent. My only ability to protect is to offer myself, my blood and bone and sinew, as a sacrifice. To draw the attacks of our foes. To take the blows that would kill a lesser being, and continue to fight on.

I cannot kill with the speed and grace of the rogue, the suddenness and shock of the hunter, or the flamboyance and power of the mage. When I kill, it is a slow business. Slow and bloody for all concerned, myself included. I fight on, pummeled and battered so that my companions may receive the glory of the kill and the wreaths of victory. If I die and they yet live, it is an expected sacrifice.

I come in all races, all sizes. I fight under a thousand flags, on a million battlefields. I am dismissed by the highborn, scorned by the noble, lectured by the priest, and forgotten by the peasant. Until the time when the trumpets of battle sound, and those who would destroy them come forth. And then the cry goes up…”Where, oh where, is the Warrior?”

Pray to your gods that I continue to answer that call.

Few do answer the call. Fewer still survive. It is a long and hard road, this way of the Warrior. Along it lie pain, and fear, and death. Scant rewards and scanter gratitude. At the end, for most, is an anonymous grave on some windblown battlefield. If they are lucky.

And yet, I fight on. I do not even know why. Perhaps for glory, perhaps for fame, perhaps for money, perhaps for my country, perhaps for my family. Perhaps it is simply all I know how to do. But fight I will. Whether you appreciate it or not. Whether you even notice it or not. I will be out there, on the battle lines. Fighting. Killing. Dying.

I am the Warrior.

Death is my business.

Be it yours…or mine."

So I'm going back to my roots. My real roots. Undead warrior. My first character was an Undead warrior and I never got him past level 34 after re-rolling to a rogue.

On Being 'Tarren Milled'

Murtaugh, his wife, and I play Horde on the Stormscale PvP server. (If you see Quintalan or Gdaan poking around somewhere, that's me.) When you reach your upper-teens/low-20s as a Blood Elf and you venture out to the Undercity, you're given the "Report to Tarren Mill" quest from the Sindorei representative to the Forsaken. Being a noob, my first thought was to take it easy and work my way through Silverpine Forest first, and then make my way to Tarren Mill once I'd gone up a few more levels.

(Now, in the sake of honesty, I do use Quest Tracker, and the arrows to Tarren Mill from the Undercity go through the Western Plaguelands. I did venture into there as a 25th level Paladin, and promptly found out why it was NOT a good idea to go that way. Like I said, I'm a noob.)

I finally ventured to Hillsbrad Foothills and Tarren Mill somewhere around 27-28th level, which was my first exposure to the Contested areas. Naturally, if you're traveling on foot/horseback from Silverpine Forest, you have to pass several Alliance controlled areas. I kept expecting Alliance players to see me and come streaming out from their base to lay some serious smackdown, but I arrived in Tarren Mill without incident.

Ah, I thought. That worked out well.

I got the flight point for Tarren Mill squared away and logged off, confident that I'd be ready the next night to handle some initial quests in the area.

Things started out well enough, but when I was turning in one of the first quests you get (basically killing some bears in the area), all of a sudden I heard a "zap" and the release spirit window popped up.

"What the..."

Then I saw them. There were several of them -at least 5- and they were all well above my character's level into the "??" range. All Alliance guys. (I say guys because the characters were all male- your guess is as good as mine as to what their real gender was.) They were all having a grand time zapping everyone in sight, jumping around, and in general looking like a bunch of punks who deserved a visit from Mr. T and his Night Elf Mohawk. Considering I'd seen the results of such destruction in The Ghostlands when everyone in Tranquillien was zapped by a couple of '??' Level Alliance guys, I knew what to expect.

Okay, I just need to wait and they'll split, then I can respawn and that'll be that.

Only it didn't work like that. I waited five minutes, thinking they were gone -well, I couldn't see them anymore- and respawned. Ten seconds later I was chewing on my lip, staring at the release spirit window again.

I'd been Tarren Milled.

Murtaugh, when he heard about my misadventure, laughed and informed me that was why he didn't typically go to Tarren Mill when he was leveling. "That happens all the time," he more-or-less said.

"Yeah," I said. "I noticed. Kind of like shooting fish in a barrel."

Obviously I wasn't worth it from an honor standpoint -I was way too low level for them to get any honor from it- it was pure maliciousness.

I came from that experience having learned two things: always watch your back, and Alliance people can be real dicks.

Since then, I've had some run-ins with Alliance people outside of Warsong Gulch -in Stranglethorn and Feralas, most notably- but in those cases the fights began with comparably leveled opponents. Sure, Murtaugh tagged along in Stranglethorn for protection in case a higher level "friend" of the Alliance opponent made an appearance (he did), but the fight was comparably even. It was remarkably 'jerk free', compared to Tarren Mill.

There was one time in Alterac where I was fighting some Syndicate personnel, and all of a sudden the dreaded '??' Level Alliance person suddenly entered my field of vision, circled me on his mount three times, paused, and then continued on. I got the distinct impression of "I'm going to let you live, buddy, but I could have had your ass whenever I wanted."

Gee, thanks for making my heart beat a little faster.

The uber-level Alliance person I encountered in Harathi while I was trying to complete a Strombrad quest wasn't so nice, however. He simply butchered me twice while he was apparently hunting for something. I grumbled, respawned, and got the hell out of dodge while I could.

Then there was the encounter I had today.

I was taking a late lunch and logged on to complete a few side quests. (Hey, 6000 XP is 6000 XP to a 50th Level Paladin.) Riding through the Hinterlands, I stopped at one of the troll areas (the one with the big Mayanesque pyramids) to go kill some spiders for an Apothecary in Tarren Mill. While I was there, I noticed a quest marker, so I ran up a pyramid and killed the three or four trolls at the top to find the quest hovering over another troll. Jumping down to where the troll was, I was about to talk to him when a flash of another monster caught my eye, popping up directly behind the quest NPC.

Great, I grumbled, another troll I missed.

I didn't need this; I only had about 20 minutes left to play and I wanted to be in and out quickly. Without much thought, I clicked and sent Quintalan to go slice and dice.

Then I noticed the '??' Level marker.

Oh crap. I am so dead. I actually got in a hit or two before I yanked Quintalan off of the female Night Elf (either Night Elf or Human, I can't remember) and waited for the end. I was about to get Tarren Milled again.

A piece of action popped up in my screen. "XXX says we are NOT going there."

I swallowed, pushing my heart back into my chest from where it had been lodged in my throat. I quickly typed out "mistake" and pressed Enter.

A further piece of action popped up. "XXX smiles."

And that was that.

There really isn't any moral to the story, outside of the obvious: don't let your initial impressions color your perceptions for the rest of the game. Not all of the people on your side are fantastic people, like the Horde person who decided to start a fight with some Alliance people in Booty Bay when I was wandering through (you're making the rest of us look bad, buddy; take it outside of those neutral cities), but neither is the other side composed of Grade A jerkoffs, either.

Some Tuesday Ponderings

This is what happens when you wake up early and don't feel quite well enough to go run on an elliptical machine for 1/2 hour.

• Who'd have thought that the Arathi Highlands would be more deadly to a 45th Level Blood Elf Paladin than Loch Modan? I was attempting to finish a quest involving the Syndicate when I was relentlessly tormented by ?? level Night Elf Hunter apparently working on a similar quest. After getting zapped twice, I said to hell with this and decided to hunt for the Flight Point in the Badlands. That, of course, meant that I'd be passing through Alliance controlled Loch Modan. Naturally, nothing happened to me while I explored the entire area. Go figure.
• PvP has a lot in common with Laser Tag. Of course, the two PvP areas I played in were either Capture and Hold (Arathi) or Capture the Flag (Warsong Gulch), but the emotions and intensity are similar to those bouts of Laser Tag I played as a teen way too many years ago.
• What works in PvE/solo questing does not work in PvP. There are some commands you simply aren't going to use too much because they take too much time in a PvP environment. Exorcism vs. Holy Shock; hmm, instant vs. having to wait it out? In PvP, if you wait you'll probably end up being zapped by a random Hunter's shot.
• If you're a Paladin in a group with a Mage and a Shaman, you're the tank by default. Doesn't matter if you don't have a tank spec, someone's got to go into the front line and absorb damage. And it ain't gonna be the Mage.
• A Mage, a Priest and a Warlock get in a fight with some bad dudes. Who gets to play "damage magnet?" I figure it has to be Warlock as they have a minion already, the Mage can launch broad ranged attacks from distance, and you don't want your Rez/Healer meal ticket to bite it.
• One of these days I'm going to try to make a dash to Light's Hope Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands so I can get the flight point there. It will be nice to take a flight from Silvermoon all the way to the Badlands without having to jump through hoops getting to the Undercity first.

Tradeskills

So I made a real effort this last weekend to push my death knight's tradeskills ahead.

First off, let me say that one major drawback to playing a death knight is the fact that you don't have a chance to level any profession as you go. You are suddenly thrust into the world at level 58 and have a lot of making up to do as far as your main professions go.

So here we go...

Cooking is at 322 (I know, right?) Cooking? Who levels cooking? I never have. Which is exactly why I wanted to this time around. I'm up to the point of cooking up any strange critters I find in outlands. That's right. If it's dead and has meat it's goin in the fryin' pan.

Fishing is at 128. I haven't spent too much time on this, but this is another skill I have never bothered to level before. It's still kind of boring, but at least there's achievements now. Hey, I caught Old Crafty, have you?

First aid is up to outlands coth drops. Nothing special here.

Mining is at 160. Also nothing special here. I chose not to mine nodes on this caracter, instead using my level 80 pally to crusade aura around mining the necessary materials for blacksmithing.

And here we are at Blacksmiting: 350!!! With the majority of the materials farmed by myself in one weekend.

Oy! That's a lot of mining.

In fact, to advance this far I've used roughly:
133 Rough Stone
190 Copper Bar
24 Coarse Stone
5 Silver Bar
120 Bronze Bar
150 Heavy Stone
5 Gold Bar
230 Iron Bar
35 Green Dye
50 Steel Bar
5 Truesilver Bar
60 Solid Stones
150 Mageweave Cloth
320 Mithril Bar
20 Dense Stone
430 Thorium Bar
10 Star Ruby
155 Fel Iron Bar
10 Netherweave Cloth
70 Adamantite Bar

I'm up to the point now, however, that I'll be needing cobalt bars from northrend to advance. And I'm not going to bother with that until I'm level 65 and can advance to the next tier of skill level for Blacksmithing.

Which finally brings me to my point of this all. After having spent all the time I did finding all those materials to level a tradeskill it really did feel more like a job IRL. /rant Especially when you get to the point of not having any new recipies to learn, you only need two more points until you advance to the next tier of materials, and the only current thing you can make is of the yellow skill level so you farm up enough materials to make 8 of said yellow items and get ONE POINT!!! SERIOUSLY? WHO THE HELL THOUGHT THIS UP!! /end rant

Blizzard should make leveling tradeskills in the old world easier. Smithing up to about the point of using mithril bars went pretty quick and easy. Then you get to the point where you need a boat load of materials just to get one point. For instance to make the Thorium helmet you need like 16 Thorium bars and a star ruby. The going rate for those materials on the auction house is roughly 50 gold. 50 Gold for just one point in your chosen profession?! Hence the reason I farmed most everything I needed.

Seriously Blizz, just reduce the number of bars needed per recipie towards the later end of tradeskills in vanilla wow.

PUG Life

Alright... I'll start this off by saying I'm a tank. Pretty much what ever class I'm playing I seem to gravitate towards the tank role.

I realize that by not being in a guild currently I have to suffer the fate of finding pick up groups (pug) to run dungeons my level. Why must the random pug always be such a headache?

Group composition:


Level 70 Warrior - Protection Tank Spec (myself)
Level 70 Deathknight - Blood DPS spec
Level 70 Shaman - Enhancement DPS spec
Level 70 Mage - Arcane (I think?) DPS spec
Level 70 Druid- Restoration Healing Spec


Dungeon:

Utgarde Keep


Here I am. My first Northred dungeon on my warrior. I have high hopes for this run. I remember back to a few weeks ago I did one night of Outlands dungeon runs with a group similarly composed to my current one and we did very well.


First few pulls went ok. I noticed the mage pulling aggro a bit so I placed Vigalance http://thottbot.com/ta148 on the mage which took care of that.


The run generally went pretty smoothly up to the first boss. The one pull where you get two spell casters and two melee mobs to fight was rough. The shaman died and reincarnated himself and the death knight died also. I felt bad for letting this happen and apologized to them.


We killed the first boss successfuly, though losing the deathknight again.


On our way up to the second boss I started feeling more comfortable with the rotation of using my abilities again and started watching my group members. They were attacking who ever was closest to them with out a care in the world.


Trying to maintain aggro on all of the mobs in the pack pulls was a complete mess by the end of the run with the each of the three dps picking their own mob to try to kill.


I'm pretty sure I know how to aoe tank. Charge in, thunderclap, back pedal a bit to group up mobs and unleash a shockwave followed by a demoralizing shout, and then a succession of tab targeting to apply devastate and cleave when rage allows.


I was like a mad man trying to maintain aggro on all of the seperate targets at once.







Now two realizations hit me here:


1) Why oh why can't PUGs assist the tank?


I think I know. Paladins and DeathKnight tanks have lovely lovely AOEs that give them great front loaded threat on the various targets. So much so that you can just, that's right.... set it and forget it. As having played both a level 80 Paladin and Deathknight as tank specs I cannot recall having to worry about group pulls pretty much ever.


Warriors can get this too, but it requires a bit more work because you have to make sure you position your shockwave to hit all the targets. Now being lower level I realize I don't have all the tools in my back of tricks yet to help assist grouping the targets up, but ARGH was this frustrating.


2) Perhaps leveling my DeathKnight alt (once the wife catches up) will actually prove less frustrating that the constant struggle I would face in my current predicament of haivng to find PUGs.

Why, then, does playing my deathknight feel like cheating somehow?

Hypothetical Question Time

The other day when I was putzing around and completing a few quests around Thousand Needles, Murtaugh and I were keeping a running conversation going. (He was over in one of the higher level areas; more than high enough to be instant death for a 31st level Paladin.) Anyway, during the course of the conversation he asked me whether I'd be playing the Horde if he and Missy weren't already playing that faction when they invited me to join. I rather quickly tossed back the reply that I'd probably be playing an Elf of some sort, whether Horde or Alliance, and gave as my reasoning that I've played enough Humans in my past that I'd like to try something different.

After his query fermented in my brain for a while, I thought it deserved a better answer than that.

Of course, the flippant answer would be that I wouldn't be playing WoW at all; I had no real desire to go play an MMO before being invited to do so. The 'why' of that is simple: MMOs are not what I typically play when I play computer games; I'm much more in the mold of the turn based strategy player. Civ is probably my favorite game, but the Total War series is also damn good. The old Master of Orion was great, and it sounds like Galactic Civilizations II is following in the same vein. Sure, I'd played computer RPGs before, but not MMOs.

Now, putting all that aside for a moment, what would I play if I decided to try out WoW on my own? My RPG history suggests a Human Priest or a Human Warrior, but in reality I'd kind of tired on playing Humans. The natural extensions of a D&D player interested in fighting would be Dwarven or Orc Warrior, but I wanted something different. The Elves of both sides are appealing to me, mainly because they're different from Humans but not too different to play well. (Yes, I slip into FTF RPG mode when I consider characters to play; kind of hard to disassociate myself from something I've been playing since 1980 or so.) The thing about Elves is that, well, they're popular. Blame the Lord of the Rings movies, the Cult of Drizzt, all sorts of generic fantasy worlds, or even D&D, but Elves are hot. For a guy who prides himself on marching to the beat of a different drummer, following the pack wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

Two things made me stick to my guns: just because everybody else does it doesn't mean that I shouldn't, and in an MMO you can make your own path. Do your own thing, don't be an ass, and you'll be fine.

Now, the question becomes Horde or Alliance? If I'd have just seen pictures of the races and made decisions that way, I'd probably have chosen Alliance. Come on, I'm programmed just like everybody else to think that the side where Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Gnomes are on is the "good guys" side. When Murtaugh and his wife invited me to join, however, I took the time to read a bit of the history of the races. Blizzard did a great job of making the backstories neutral enough to keep it from being slanted toward one faction. There were enough bad and good deeds all the way around that kept one particular faction from being easily defined as "the good guys". Digging down, you find the stereotypes of the Horde races don't fit; sure, they don't like the Alliance, but that by itself doesn't make them evil. (Okay, the Forsaken don't help themselves much with their tendencies toward eradicating Humans, I'll grant you that, but given the Scarlet Brotherhood you can understand the source of their dislike.) In fact, I find the Native American slant that Blizzard built into the Tauren fascinating. It's perfect in it's own way, taking what would be a stereotypical Minotaur and turning it into something else.

I guess the answer to the faction question isn't simple; I still might have chosen Alliance, but I'm comfortable with the Horde. Except for the Forsaken; even the rest of the Blood Elf NPCs seem to be a bit, um, uncertain about their erstwhile allies, but they play nice for the time being. The Horde seems to be a good fit for me right now, and I'm fine with playing it. While I might try an Alliance character later for comparison, I'm fine with playing Horde at the moment.