Dustwallow March – Screenshot time

Dustwallow Marsh is one of my favourite places. Apart from having some of the most amazing sunsets and sunrises, it manages to mix being creepy with a brush of beauty. It’s one of those zones which can change completely as the sun goes down. Blue skies become tinged with pink and then dissolve into blazing scarlet before dulling down to midnight only to repeat the whole cycle again the next day.

If Blizzard ever get around to giving us player housing, I’d definitely have a summer house here hidden away in the marsh. I can imagine lazy days sat on the porch eating crocolisk gumbo and exciting nights hunting the crocolisks. Have to hope that come Cataclysm they don’t just drown the marshes under seven foot of water but instead allow the sun to keep those skies aflame.

The road looks almost welcoming bathed in the late evening sun, inviting the unwary to venture into the Marsh.

Red sky at night..

Later now, the last traces of the sun bleeds into the sky. The light is falling and soon Dustwallow will be dark.

See the pretty lights gleaming in the blackness but follow them at your peril. Will-o’-the-wisp never brought good fortune to anyone.

So empty and alone

I play on a full server yet in the time its taken me to get from lv 1 to lv 37, I’ve seen around 10 people outside cities/battlegrounds and dungeons. The world seems completely empty, ok, there was your stereotypical lv 80 Orc rogue parked at Nesingwary’s but other than that Horde seem like a rare and exotic species. Whole zones are devoid of life, there is no one to hear the chirping of crickets or watch the fireflies swarm.

Yet the queues for the Dungeon Finder tool are almost non-existent even when you queue up as two dpsers. There are lots of people levelling but all in safe and confined spaces.  Now, I accept that people have the right to play the game anyway they choose but it just seems like such a waste to me. Blizzard created this amazing world and yet people are choosing to lock themselves away in instances.  Yes, it can be repetitive if you’ve levelled multiple characters but so is farming dungeons over and over again.  I admit I know half the quests off by heart already, especially in my favourite zones but that doesn’t make it boring. Instead its like curling up with a oft read and well loved book.

I think part of my problem with the dungeon finder for low levels is that we know the world is going to be altered, the other problem I have with it is the people but that’s another story. Old familiar places might be ripped apart by waves or dragged down into the deeps. Unfortunately for me, most of my favourite zones are coastal so I’m expecting a fair amount of change and since this is going to be the last character I level before the expansion I want to soak up as many memories as possible.

Blizzard are re-doing zones and quest chains but its highly unlikely that the instances themselves will change, possibly in level like Onxyia but I suspect that’s all. So whilst you have plenty of time to see the instances, the world as we know it will only exist for a short while longer. Besides questing with no one to gank is just miserable…. throw off the shackles of instance runs with 4 people you’ll never see again and come out into the sunshine of Azeroth.

Edit: I don’t think  playing Star Trek Online where everything is instanced and even when you’re in party, you don’t always end up in the same shard helped my feelings. You can’t just fly and fly and fly in STO without having to change zone. Exploring is really limited. Then you have a game like WoW where you could ride from Undercity to Booty Bay if you wanted to without hitting a loading screen, yet people are ignoring that massive world and huddling inside instances.

One troll and her dog

Meet Erizulie, troll hunter. She’s fond of bitter cactus cider, all sorts of animals except scorpids which are obviously some sort of demon in disguise and skinning things (particularly scorpids).

I also take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about Durotar. I’d forgotten how pretty the Valley of Trials can be. So she was created with two aims in mind. Firstly joining the awesomeness that is a guild called “Single Abstract Noun” and secondly leveling to lv 40ish.  Why lv 40? well because happily sitting in the shade of a certain keep is a dog called Spot.

The plan is simple as all plans should be. Reach a level to tame him, sneak into Theramore and steal their puppy from right out under their noses.

Now the hard part is going to be finding time to put this evil plan into action. My WoW time is a bit limited at the moment and when I am playing its mainly PvPing on my main or leveling my druid. However I’ve wanted that dog for a long time. I mean its obvious they callously stole it from Mulgore in the first place so its about time some nice troll came along and liberated it.

I’ve also created Tattiebogle the Undead Priest with some strange ideas about RP in mind. A Tattiebogle is both a scarecrow and one of the most amazing sounding words ever created. Operation save Spot is however the main focus of the time I (fingers crossed) will be spending on Argent Dawn.

Now I’ve blogged about them, I’m going to have to find the time to level them. I hope.

Stitches – 101 things to see and do

Too many quests in Warcraft are the generic fetch X, kill Y or go to Z. Little to no real explanation is offered and we as the perpetrators of countless awful acts rarely see any negative effects as the result of our actions. We just slaughter our way through the world, picking up gold and second hand cloths without a care in the world.

The chain which leads to Stitches the Abomination being let loose on the good people of Darkshire is a step beyond that. First of all, we are trying to help a community under siege rather than just committing random acts of violence. Running errands, catching proven murderers (Stalvan) and making a stand against the wandering dead. Ok, our motives probably aren’t 100 percent pure. No reward, no dead ogres, worgen (wonder if when they become a playable race, we’ll still be able to skin all the NPC ones) or undead. For once, we are fighting the good fight and yet in our naivety we manage to cause even more chaos.

Darkshire, he hungers!

Then once he is lumbering towards the town, you get the build up. The Watchers running out to try and block his path (of course they die pathetically) and the people of Darkshire panicking as yet another evil heads towards them.

I think this is definitely a contender for my favourite quest chain in-game and well worth doing, if only to watch the ensuing havoc. A word of warning though, stay clear of the road if you’re low level whilst he’s rampaging towards town. 12k health is a lot for lv 20s to cut through and he hits like a truck.

At least he died with his boots on!

Today’s screenshots are slightly morbid and gloomy.He might have died with his boots on but with that gear, its pretty poor play that anything in Darkshore could kill him at all.

and

Sometimes yelling “You no take candle” turns out to be a huge mistake.

At least they didn't take the candle!

Tansy’s guide to Battlegrounds 101

Warning: This is a bit of an angry post.

So you hit level 10 and want a break from questing. The Dungeon finder tool isn’t yet open to you but the PvP tab is flashing brightly enticing you to click it. (I can’t help wondering why Blizzard sees fit to let people loose in WSG that it doesn’t consider fit for the Deadmines..)

Now at lv 10, the only option available to you is Warsong Gulch, fondly known to most people as WSG. It’s your basic game of capture the flag with the lumberjacking Horde on side and the treehugging Alliance on the other. Before you queue up, You’ll want to collect the daily PvP quest. Between levels 10 and 19, it will always be for Warsong Gulch but as you level and more Battlegrounds become available it will be random (at 80 “random” usually translates into Isle of Conquest for me).

An Alliance/Horde  Battlemaster in each of the capital cities offers the daily PvP quest.

These Battlemasters can usually be found hanging out close to the warrior trainers but if you ask one of the friendly neighbourhood guards in any city, they will direct you to the nearest one.

On to the important bits and pieces. In no particular order:

1. The Flags are the most important bit. Not those pretty little houses dotted around the map, not the fences and certainly not that nice stretch of open ground in the middle.
2. I can not stress this enough, but don’t ever enter a battleground with res sickness. Especially if said res sickness has more than 6 minutes remaining. (Yes, I’ve had the pleasure of PvPing with people who are res sick in battlegrounds – no, it didn’t make me like them.)
3. Try and make the best possible mileage out of the gear you have. Armour patches, cheap enchants, health and mana pots, all of these can make a bit of difference towards your enjoyment of the game. In terms of importance, I would probably value stamina enchants and run speed on boots over the rest. Run speed because you will be doing a lot of running in this bracket. Chasing after people, running away from a zerg, both go better with a slight speed advantage. The stamina ones for obvious reasons, people with low health die really fast and are far more likely to be targeted by people out for an opportune kill than the guy with twice as much. Visit the AH and check for greens/blues of your level and then search for any enchants to go on your new items. Auction Houses can be found in all the major cities.
4. Level first aid. Yes, even if you are a class with healing spells. There are plenty of times when you want your mana for more important things like keeping the guy with the flag alive, or bursting down the person carrying your flag off. Remember you can also bandage other people.
5. If you have healing spells regardless of spec, you could every so often use them on the person with the flag. This is better than just standing there doing nothing as they run past you chased by a sea of red.
6. The aim of the game is keep your flag (blue if you’re alliance and red if you’re horde) safe in your base and bring the opposing team’s flag to yours. A type of flag mating ritual if you will. There is no point telling the person holding the enemy flag to cap if your flag is currently on the other side of the map being held hostage. Pressing “M” brings up the map and a few seconds after the flags are picked up, they turn up on the map so its easy to check their whereabouts. The game also kindly announces when a flag is picked up and by whom, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that your flag just waltzed off in the company of an Orc, two Trolls and a Bloodelf wearing a lovely red dress (although by this point in the proceedings you can’t really blame the flag, I’d have gone with them too).
7. Ideally, wait til you are the higher end of the bracket before joining a battleground. Whilst I’ve seen a lv 10 manage to saunter from one end to the other and back carrying a flag, this is exceedingly rare. At lv 10 you are more likely to spend most of the game being pursued by lv 17-19s from the opposing team, failing this you will be dead. Battlegrounding is a group activity and even though its unlikely you’ll ever see that pissed off druid from another server again, in a competitive and team driven sport its only fair to consider the people you’re playing with. I enter a battleground to win and due to the nature of the game, I expect everyone else want roughly the same thing. Yes, the games where you over come ridiculous odds (like 80 percent of the team being below lv 12) to triumph are exciting and fun, but I’d prefer a semi level playing field please. Besides my nerves can’t take all that excitement every game.
8. When someone else kills the enemy flag carrier next to you, or entirely by accident you manage to target the right person… click on the flag. They don’t return themselves unfortunately.
9. If all you are going to do is whine and bitch in chat about how unfair it is that the other side outgear/outplay you, shut up and ideally go away.
10. If you are a caster who isn’t a mage, bring your own drinks. You can’t guarantee there will be a mage and since getting water out of a strange mage is well nigh impossible until they get those table things at 70? you need to be prepared.
11. Did I mention the fact that its about flags, not houses, trees or shredders?

In short, having more than 200 health helps. Wearing all greys is a bad thing (what on earth have you been doing with the quest rewards?). So is being res sick although I admit to a hatred of res sickness in general. Hunter’s dpsing with aspect of the cheetah gives the class a bad name and they can’t really take much more bad press. Oh and … telling the only person healing they suck because you died when you had less than 200 maximum health, all greys and res sickness is asking for abuse.

Get their flag –  stop them stealing yours – mate flags –  receive honour + rep and repeat. How difficult is that?

I realise this might seem overly simplistic, but my recent experience of the 10-19 bracket has had me bouncing off the walls. So to Mr Hunter who claimed “Alliance always lose because no one heals” even though the few of us with healing spells were healing our collective asses off (doing more than double the Horde healers), Mr Nay saying Warrior who claimed “Having a lead of one isn’t enough, we always lose” (when there is only 2 minutes left) and the rest of you whiny pathetic people who run around like headless chickens letting a minority carry you, this post is for you. Oh and don’t get me started on people who enter and stand there surrounded by chaos going “LOL ALLIANCE SUX“. I’ve seen more dubious spellings of Alliance in the last few days than I thought were possible.

Now that’s out of my system, I’m off to try running the Deadmines with a bunch of hopefully completely different randoms.

P.s I’m usually helpful and all sweetness and light to people but this rabble pushed me a touch too far. I also realise the Horde can be just as bad, after all they managed to lose some games to the teams described above but… an exercise in frustration barely covers it.

Mark of the Wild

First, the Gnomeling has re-enabled WoW. It turns out he couldn’t stand watching me PvP alone any longer, which is rather sweet. Especially since the final straw was when my priest got smothered by 90 percent of the opposing team in Arathi Basin and died rather fast. I’m really not sure what difference his presence would have made.

So we have finally got around to making our two little druids (his 4th and my 3rd). Which brings me to the rant bit. So you make your brand new character and start running around whatever flavour start zone goes with your race but nothing attacks you unless you smack it first. Perhaps fair enough for the first few quests, break new players in gently, but quest after quest, still facing yellow mobs seems a little unfair. I remember the days (you know the ones, when warlocks had to climb mountains barefoot in search of elusive soulshards and ret paladins were rare and fabled beasties that everyone had a story about, but no one had actually seen one) when that spider cave on Teldrassil was a dark and dangerous place. Each and every step inside had to be tentative, drop your guard once and flock of spiders would leap on your face. Now you can saunter through the place, hands in pockets whistling and they don’t even stop and look at you.

Having battled your way through a horde of green hairy limbs, you came to face with Mummy Spider. Big teeth, bad attitude… not any more. Now she’s more than happy to stand by whilst evil little elves make off with her eggs.

A candidate for Azeroth's worst Mother competition?

Now I don’t particularly like whining about how much harder the game used to be or how Blizzard have sold out to Casuals (a favourite refrain of some of my ex-guildmates) but I do think this creates a bit of a false impression. When the majority of mobs make a beeline for you, all teeth and claws, having this sense of kindergarten til lv 5 seems a bit too much. Githylss should be vile and nasty and fond of biting your face off, after all she’s a mother being robbed of her children, not to mention a rather large spider and the first challenge nightelves  face. Once you leave the safety of whichever start zone your new character calls home, the world becomes a much scarier place. Maybe our training leads should come off a little sooner.

TLDR version of above: Make Githylss vile again. Mobs with names should make you tremble as you sneak closer, not giggle as you waltz past.

The second thing which has been annoying me recently is heirlooms. Now I somewhat naively assumed that everyone would have heirlooms (well not everyone but certainly the majority) and that idea has swiftly been proved false. We entered WSG at lv 16 for some fun and much to our surprise discovered we had by far the most health. In some cases twice as much and that was without needing to go bear. Now, I’m against a two tier system. It hardly seems fair that just because this isn’t my first character, I can have far better second hand gear in a competitive PvP environment. After all, its not like I farmed the gear on the character who is wearing it, a la lv 80s. If Blizzard had wanted to give an experience boost to people rolling through content on alts, they could have just made that aspect of the heirloom gear into something like an armour patch which you could buff onto a character. So yes you would  level faster but the playing field isn’t so screwed in other ways.

Leading on from that is my third annoyance of the week. People who enter battlegrounds at lv 10, particularly those with sub 250 health. Apart from getting in the way, they don’t usually bring anything to the battle. Well, apart from being cannon fodder of course. I wish Blizzard had increased the number of battleground brackets, so that it went 10-14 and 15-19, 20-24, 25-29 etc. The difference between a lv 10 and a lv 19, especially when the latter is wearing heirloom gear and the former isn’t, is just too big.

Butter wouldn't melt in our mouths

My heirloom gear looks better than his, although I have to admit I don’t look particularly druidic or at one with nature.

My take on the stat changes

I read through Blizzard’s post on the forth coming stat changes  with interest. However, I’ve ended up with more questions than answers floating around my head.

Stamina - Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

From a PvE perspective, great. No more forcing your little mages to wear PvP gear when you are learning fights like Freya +3 or indeed anything where the raid takes massive amounts of damage. Although it does also allow fights to continue that trend of having huge bursts of damage every so often on all the raid members as the instance designers could safely assume everyone would have high hit points. That would probably also fit in with their stated intent for healing to require more teamwork/co-ordination as you could have plenty of fights in which the raid gets hit really hard every so often and then need healing up fairly fast.

As for PvP, already I’ve seen several  melee posting their complaints about this proposed change but in pure PvP gear, I’ve already seen casters running around with 30k plus health so I’m not convinced it will be a huge issue. Although from the perspective of say a rogue who has 39k health but no way of recovering that health, fighting a priest who also has 39k health but heals might seem a little unfair. After all, all casters have either shields (mages/priests/warlocks with the right pet out) or heals of a sort (warlocks, priests/druids) which compensated a bit for the lower health pools.

Spirit - Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.

I like the idea that gear with spirit on it will be purely healing gear but I’m a bit more iffy on the other changes. Since we are all moving to using spirit, and Blizzard have stated many times they want people to move away from the spam heal fest healing currently is, I would have thought the five second rule would have been staying around. After all it rewards people who take breaks from healing. As for Kings not buffing Spirit, I’m a little curious about that too. Surely Spirit is a primary stat if all healers have to rely on it for regen.. Does it also mean that Divine Spirit is a thing of the past? Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, one less thing to have to buff and all that. But from the sound of it, regen is going to be limited purely to your gear/talents? and I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Can we expect no flasks to buff it either? Yes, it would allow Blizzard to control it a bit better in the sense that all healers, regardless of raid makeup would have similar regen but it surely takes way some of the fun from deciding what kind of healer you want to be.

Intellect - Intellect will now grant Spell Power (more on this below). Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.

Guessing this to stop it scaling out of control. If we have 30k mana pools now, imagine what another five levels and lots of new shiny gear would do it. Also massive mana pools would make it harder to make healers manage their resources better.

Haste - Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you “do stuff” more often.

Interesting how they leave out rage.. think it will be interesting to see how and if they deal with warriors. One thing that is bugging me slightly is the disparity between roles that seems to be emerging from all the blue posts at the moment. They want to make resources easier for melee to manage yet even though half the time you can’t find healers for instances, they want to make healing more frustrating in terms of having to stop casting, stare at the scenery (these new instances better look prettier than Vanilla’s Molten Core) and worry about your mana.

Mastery - This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It’s directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.

I really really hope they don’t screw this one up for priests. If the Holy mastery for spending the vast majority of your points in Holy is awesome, please don’t make us spend points in Disc to get regen like we have been doing since the dawn of Vanilla.

Armor - The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

Not sure about this. Yes as a priest I have low armour but I have shields and plethora of heals to compensate. Why should my little dress that only covers half of me provide a similar amount of protection to the warrior over there covered in plate? Does this mean Inner Fire is biting the dust? Unless its intended that we are all going to be tanking stuff in the new raid content, I’m just not sure I see the point of this and even then… One of the selling points to me when I first started playing was the fact that all the classes were different, but we seem to be getting closer and closer together.

Defense - Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

I hope there will be changes made to defensive stance then as its the only (I think) one of those which comes with penalties.

The rest of the thread can be found here.

Marching on with the To-do lists

So I finally stopped procrastinating, got off the Stormwind fountain and tackled my to-do list.

• Get Peddlefoot – Not once, not twice but three little cupids farmed this year. Yay!
• Remember how much time I’ve spent trying to get Peddlefoot over the last three/four years and curse the Gods of RNG (its perfectly safe to do so when not raiding and by the time I start again, they will have forgotten.. distracted by tears about epics and pets that drop from holiday bosses).
• Achieve 55,000 hks on my priest. The end goal is 100,000 hks so I have a way to go but doing 46k at once seems a bit too much at once. Its a bit of a misnomer really though since out of all the hks my priest currently has, she’s probably inflicted damage to around 10k or so which makes them somewhat less than honourable. – This was surprisingly easy. For once PvPing in Misery turned out to be a rather pleasurable experience.
• Complete 10 quests in Kalimdor to get me a little closer to my goal of Loremaster. - Done. I tackled Desolace and in between taking screenshots and swimming I’m that bit closer to my goal. 38 quests to go in fact.
• Reach lv 49 on my little Tauren druid. Hip hooray for holiday stuff that gives experience for doing very little. - Hooray for “Love is in the Air”, Briarrose the 1st is level 50.
• Reach lv 73 on my slightly less little Night Elf Druid. - So you can’t win them all. I’m still less than half way through 72 on Briarrose the 2nd.

Having been fairly successful on February’s goals, its now time to set March’s.

• 57k hks on Erinys. Thats a little under 3k which shouldn’t present too much of a problem. Hopefully I’m erring on the cautious side.
• Get the PvP Horsie.
• Farm at least 15 seals.
• Make it to Honoured with the Netherwing. The joys of swapping main for an expansion
• Reach Revered with Ogri’la.
• Struggle to halfway through honoured with the Winterspring Trainers. Oh how I wish they had changed this quest chain to be more like the Horde version they finally got around to adding.
• 10 quests to closer to Loremaster, I’m currently at 38 remaining.
• Get Briarrose the 2nd that elusive lv 73.