Subtitle: The Most Excitement you can legally have in WoW
Took me a few days after that wipefest in Forge of Souls, but I got up the guts to heal a heroic again last night.
Obviously, I'm starting to "get it." No wipes. Not even really any deaths. Well, the warlock died once, but warlocks don't count. Besides, he got impaled on the last boss of Gundrak, and I wasn't quite ready for the OhMyGod Thatsalotta Damage time.
In some ways, I envy those who started the game back in "Vanilla WoW" (never did understand that term...) as healers. They've progressed through healing such epic instances as Wailing Caverns and Blackrock Depths, and by the time they got to heroics in Wrath, I can only assume they were pretty well experts at their trade. Me? Only healing I ever did was last summer on Ahune; a group of guildies got together, and I, in a half-drunken state, agreed to take my level 60-ish Byornfree, decked out in Feral spec and gear, in to heal the 80's as they killed the midsummer boss. Boy, was that a waste...but I got a pretty new ring for my troubles that I wasn't able to wear till recently.
Anyway, healing, I've found, is such a radically different way of playing the game than DPSing or tanking. DPSing from a range, which is how most of my 80's play, is...I'm not going to say easier, but it's definitely clearer as to what all is going on. The trick is to stand back away from the battle a bit, select targets intelligently, and then manage your spells/shots and cooldowns to maximize the damage you cause while regulating the threat you generate. Sounds complex...and it is...but it's absolutely not like healing. DPSing from melee distance, and tanking, are both very similar in that you're right up in the fray, selecting your targets intelligently, and smacking them in a certain way in order to either maximize your damage done or your threat, depending on which role you're playing. It also is complex...but absolutely not like healing.
Learning to heal involves stringing together a whole bunch of little panic attacks. At first, I was in the habit from long years of DPSing of watching the bad guys and where they were, but I also looked at the tank's health bar and pumped some spells in to keep him alive. Took me a little bit to figure out the proper order of spell pumping, of course. Once I figured it out, though, I had yet another lesson to learn: IGNORE THE BAD GUYS.
Now, that's hard to do after years of conditioning. I still find myself occasionally targetting a boss while headed in to that fight. But the problem is, different mobs and bosses do different types of damage. Some do lots of damage to the tank in large chunks. Some do gradual damage to the tanks that adds up to a lot. Some do damage to everybody in the group that has the healer facerolling the keyboard something serious. Some do random damage; you never know who's suddenly going to pop down to half health and then die, just like the warlock did last night...but as I said before, that was OK. It was just a warlock.
Keep in mind that a human being is like a lion in some ways. Specifically, I've heard the explanation of why they use a chair to "tame" a lion...and it makes sense. The lion sees four posts coming at it instead of one, and is unable to focus on all four at once. Truth? Dunno, but it does ring well. I know I sure can't focus on four things at once, much less five. So, as a healer, I've had to learn to constantly scan health bars, picking up any changes as quickly as possible and targetting for heals. At first, it was only four health bars I was worrying about, but then somebody along the way gave me the good advice: "Hey, dummy, you've got to heal yourself too." OK, that wasn't really a direct quote, but this is a family-friendly channel.
Oh, yeah...and then there's the mana issue. My gear being only fairly mediocre, my mana regeneration isn't what you'd call awesome. There's nothing like hitting the button to heal the tank and not seeing anything happen. Then..."Oh, hmm, I'm out of mana. Hope nobody dies while I remember where my potion button is." Add to that the evident, current desire by most tanks in the game to outrun their entire group (OK, I admit to doing that too while I'm on my tank) so that everybody in the group is managing spells and mana regen at a frenetic pace.
It's like the time at the West Point theater when I did lead spotlights for Chicago (the band). There's a certain point at which you really don't CARE what song they're playing any more; all you're trying, hoping, and praying to do is keep up with cues. At least there, everything was on a script, and MOST of the show went according to plan; while you're healing, there's no script. You can only run behind the tank, try to keep up, and focus on health bars. No looking at scenery. No looking at mobs. No wondering what the DPS is doing to get them down. Your entire GAME is a set of green bars.
And that's just party healing. Can't wait to try out raid healing, with 10 or even 25 bars!
Those of you who've Healed for a long time...my hat's off to you. And to every healer who's ever freaked out because my warlock used to hit his Life Tap button frequently and at irregular intervals...I'm so, so, so sorry. Let him die from now on. :-)
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Reputation, Schmeputation
Waaaayyyyy back when, when we had to walk to Orgrimmar in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, I had one character that I played. Just one. Malqueso. Didn't even have a bank alt yet. Weird to think back on this, but that's the way it was. He is a hunter, and there's a class-specific quest line ending in Sunken Temple that winds its way through Azshara. All you sourdoughs will know what I'm talking about...every class has class quests in ST...but n00bs probably don't do them often any more; who needs that level 52 garbage when you're headed toward level 80?
Anyway, I was one of the n00bs back then that didn't think that there might need to be an order to what I did. I'd mistakenly run north into Felwood at about level 25, died very quickly, and mentally written that zone off as "mean." It didn't occur to me that the furbolgs in Azshara MIGHT be creatures that I really shouldn't oughtta kill, no matter how much they wanted to attack me (instead, if you spend many hours in Felwood, the furbolgs in Azshara start to like you). And hey, I was pretty good at killing things back then, so kill the furbolgs I did while running around Azshara doing my quests.
Later I needed to get to Winterspring. Now, you know that any character other than a Death Knight has to run through Timbermaw Hold to get to Winterspring, right? I did that. The furbolgs still didn't like me much, and so kill them I did, all the way through. I think I was well beyond Hated by the time I was done clearing a path to the flight point up there.
Needless to say, when it came time to look at the cool rewards available through having, say, Exalted reputation with Timbermaw, I cried at the number of Bad Furbolgs (as opposed to the Good Furbolgs, of course) I had to kill to consider even getting close to Friendly. And it's not like you could go do something non-repetitive; you had to kill, and kill, and kill, and kill the same mobs, and then kill them some more. It was WoW's cure for insomnia.
But that was a long, long time ago. Now, we're all experts at gaining reputation...starting typically at neutral, then becoming friendly, honored, revered, and exalted, in that order. Some reps you can gain by wearing tabards through instances; some you have to do daily quests for, and others you can turn stuff in to obtain. In any event, each faction has a set of rewards for those they hold in high regard. And those rewards?
Often, largely useless.
This occurred to me last night. My druid alt became Exalted with Wyrmrest...the dragons...during an instance. Yay! So afterwards, off I went to the Wyrmrest Temple to see what cool stuff I could get...I remembered wanting the epic something, but couldn't recall exactly what.
Turns out...it was bracers. I already had bracers. They'd dropped last night, a much better set than the ones from Wyrmrest. Not the first time that's happened, either...every time I'm close to being ready to qualify for something, it seems like something drops that makes me not want what I just worked so hard to become qualified for. Granted, there's a new instance, ICC, where the reputation rewards are pretty high level compared to everything else, but I betcha when the next thing comes out those rep rewards will be as useless as Timbermaw rewards are now.
Reputation, schmeputation.
Anyway, I was one of the n00bs back then that didn't think that there might need to be an order to what I did. I'd mistakenly run north into Felwood at about level 25, died very quickly, and mentally written that zone off as "mean." It didn't occur to me that the furbolgs in Azshara MIGHT be creatures that I really shouldn't oughtta kill, no matter how much they wanted to attack me (instead, if you spend many hours in Felwood, the furbolgs in Azshara start to like you). And hey, I was pretty good at killing things back then, so kill the furbolgs I did while running around Azshara doing my quests.
Later I needed to get to Winterspring. Now, you know that any character other than a Death Knight has to run through Timbermaw Hold to get to Winterspring, right? I did that. The furbolgs still didn't like me much, and so kill them I did, all the way through. I think I was well beyond Hated by the time I was done clearing a path to the flight point up there.
Needless to say, when it came time to look at the cool rewards available through having, say, Exalted reputation with Timbermaw, I cried at the number of Bad Furbolgs (as opposed to the Good Furbolgs, of course) I had to kill to consider even getting close to Friendly. And it's not like you could go do something non-repetitive; you had to kill, and kill, and kill, and kill the same mobs, and then kill them some more. It was WoW's cure for insomnia.
But that was a long, long time ago. Now, we're all experts at gaining reputation...starting typically at neutral, then becoming friendly, honored, revered, and exalted, in that order. Some reps you can gain by wearing tabards through instances; some you have to do daily quests for, and others you can turn stuff in to obtain. In any event, each faction has a set of rewards for those they hold in high regard. And those rewards?
Often, largely useless.
This occurred to me last night. My druid alt became Exalted with Wyrmrest...the dragons...during an instance. Yay! So afterwards, off I went to the Wyrmrest Temple to see what cool stuff I could get...I remembered wanting the epic something, but couldn't recall exactly what.
Turns out...it was bracers. I already had bracers. They'd dropped last night, a much better set than the ones from Wyrmrest. Not the first time that's happened, either...every time I'm close to being ready to qualify for something, it seems like something drops that makes me not want what I just worked so hard to become qualified for. Granted, there's a new instance, ICC, where the reputation rewards are pretty high level compared to everything else, but I betcha when the next thing comes out those rep rewards will be as useless as Timbermaw rewards are now.
Reputation, schmeputation.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
That group thang
Subtitle: switching from solo to group work successfully
Ever said something that sounded cute, funny, whatever...at the time...to you, anyway...and realized later it was really a very stupid thing to say? Of course you have; I think we all have. Most of us don't do it quite as publicly as, say, the Dutch speed skating coach last night, but the fact is...well, let me switch to speaking only of me. I know that I typically don't try to sound cute, funny, or whatever when it's just me, so odds are, if I'm gonna say something really stupid, it'll be to or in front of other people.
Anyway, a few posts back I made a comment about druid DPS being...what did I say, now? Simple? Easy? Sounded cute at the time, it really did. But last night I got tired of my measly 800 DPS in groups and tried my own advice out...off I went to the web sites to see THE WAY to raise my DPS as a kitty cat. Unfortunately, there isn't THE WAY. There are about as many opinions on how to produce good DPS as a kitty as there are these days about health care in the U.S., and as in that other topic, many of the opinions are based on concepts which can only be loosely considered facts.
So, being a good experimentalist, I picked one and went off with a guild random run with my druid in DPS mode rather than healing mode. Incidentally, the one I picked had basically three different sequences, intended to be run one after another for the sake of cooldowns, and all starting with four Shreds followed by a finishing move. It was like memorizing dance steps...Button 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 6, repeat. Simplicity is nice sometimes.
A brief aside for those unfamiliar with druid cat DPS'ing...it's based on Energy, like a rogue (I guess; I've never played a rogue past level 14). Energy starts at 100 and each special ability costs some amount...some are small costs, in the 5 or 6 range, and others..specifically Shred...costs 70. The Energy comes back over time...refill takes several seconds...and if you're at 0, that means all you can do is try to nick 'em with your claws. The other part of the mechanic is combo points, which build up on a specific target at the rate of 1 or 2 for each special ability the druid uses and are spent by finishing moves that become more powerful or longer lasting when more combo points exist.
Incidentally, the druid DPS has another aspect...location. Some abilities only work behind the target, Shred being one of those. Tuck this away; it'll become important in a bit. But it's not a factor in mage DPS, or lock DPS, or hunter DPS.
Whew...that's the nutshell. Anyway, I learned the hard way that four shreds in a row...well, it doesn't work. For one thing, the math isn't right. Shred once, and you're down to 30 Energy. Shred again...oh, wait, you can't. So you swipe and swipe a couple of times waiting to get back up to 70 energy, and once you're there, Shred! But you are now down to about 4 or 5 Energy and must wait again. By the time I was getting to 4 combo points, what I was trying to kill had already been deaded by someone else.
Math sucks, sometimes. It's important to know, but man, sometimes the mathematical realities of what we're trying to do are hard to swallow. And speaking of mathematical realities, after respeccing and changing my action bar buttons all around for this new shiny sparkly spec, I improved my DPS by about 10. Woo hoo! At least it didn't decrease my DPS, right?
Important Lesson #1 is actually a repeat from a previous post, but more intense here. Blizz has changed druid cat mechanics several times over the past couple of years...some, apparently, significant changes. When looking online, you have to be careful to use current information. In the case of cat DPS, it's...hard. G'head, I dare you. Open another tab and Google for information. You'll see a ton of very conflicting stuff out there.
Important Lesson #2 is also fairly obvious in hindsight, but again, made more intense by this situation. What got you TO level 80, mostly solo for most of us, probably won't help you improve much when you're at 80 doing heroics and raids. In the case of druids, remember the positional thing? When you're soloing, any attack that only works from behind the mob only works once. After the first swing, the silly mobs usually turn around, dang them. There's a nice little pounce attack that stuns the mob so you actually get two swipes from behind, but it's still just two. So while climing to 80, I had pretty much ignored any attack that required me to be behind the thing I was trying to kill. Now, though, in heroics, those attacks deserve attention because there's usually a nice person wrapped in heavy metal making what I'm trying to kill face him, and the Death From Behind approach works nicely.
Bottom line...once you hit level 80, you're more of a n00b than you were at 79. Ain't that great?
In the end, I looked online at a guild page about druiding and decided to just be a copycat. There's a druid named Sounder in an allied guild who usually does OhMyGod DPS, and I read what he said as though it were an instruction manual. Next run...do as Sounder does...doubled my DPS. Thanks, Sounder!
And yes, I apologize to druids in general for making the inference that druid DPS mechanics are simple. They're not...you have to watch several buffs/debuffs in addition to combo points and Energy, all at the same time while trying to follow mobs around as they move. It's actually quite complex.
And fun.
I'm definitely going to do it more.
Ever said something that sounded cute, funny, whatever...at the time...to you, anyway...and realized later it was really a very stupid thing to say? Of course you have; I think we all have. Most of us don't do it quite as publicly as, say, the Dutch speed skating coach last night, but the fact is...well, let me switch to speaking only of me. I know that I typically don't try to sound cute, funny, or whatever when it's just me, so odds are, if I'm gonna say something really stupid, it'll be to or in front of other people.
Anyway, a few posts back I made a comment about druid DPS being...what did I say, now? Simple? Easy? Sounded cute at the time, it really did. But last night I got tired of my measly 800 DPS in groups and tried my own advice out...off I went to the web sites to see THE WAY to raise my DPS as a kitty cat. Unfortunately, there isn't THE WAY. There are about as many opinions on how to produce good DPS as a kitty as there are these days about health care in the U.S., and as in that other topic, many of the opinions are based on concepts which can only be loosely considered facts.
So, being a good experimentalist, I picked one and went off with a guild random run with my druid in DPS mode rather than healing mode. Incidentally, the one I picked had basically three different sequences, intended to be run one after another for the sake of cooldowns, and all starting with four Shreds followed by a finishing move. It was like memorizing dance steps...Button 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 6, repeat. Simplicity is nice sometimes.
A brief aside for those unfamiliar with druid cat DPS'ing...it's based on Energy, like a rogue (I guess; I've never played a rogue past level 14). Energy starts at 100 and each special ability costs some amount...some are small costs, in the 5 or 6 range, and others..specifically Shred...costs 70. The Energy comes back over time...refill takes several seconds...and if you're at 0, that means all you can do is try to nick 'em with your claws. The other part of the mechanic is combo points, which build up on a specific target at the rate of 1 or 2 for each special ability the druid uses and are spent by finishing moves that become more powerful or longer lasting when more combo points exist.
Incidentally, the druid DPS has another aspect...location. Some abilities only work behind the target, Shred being one of those. Tuck this away; it'll become important in a bit. But it's not a factor in mage DPS, or lock DPS, or hunter DPS.
Whew...that's the nutshell. Anyway, I learned the hard way that four shreds in a row...well, it doesn't work. For one thing, the math isn't right. Shred once, and you're down to 30 Energy. Shred again...oh, wait, you can't. So you swipe and swipe a couple of times waiting to get back up to 70 energy, and once you're there, Shred! But you are now down to about 4 or 5 Energy and must wait again. By the time I was getting to 4 combo points, what I was trying to kill had already been deaded by someone else.
Math sucks, sometimes. It's important to know, but man, sometimes the mathematical realities of what we're trying to do are hard to swallow. And speaking of mathematical realities, after respeccing and changing my action bar buttons all around for this new shiny sparkly spec, I improved my DPS by about 10. Woo hoo! At least it didn't decrease my DPS, right?
Important Lesson #1 is actually a repeat from a previous post, but more intense here. Blizz has changed druid cat mechanics several times over the past couple of years...some, apparently, significant changes. When looking online, you have to be careful to use current information. In the case of cat DPS, it's...hard. G'head, I dare you. Open another tab and Google for information. You'll see a ton of very conflicting stuff out there.
Important Lesson #2 is also fairly obvious in hindsight, but again, made more intense by this situation. What got you TO level 80, mostly solo for most of us, probably won't help you improve much when you're at 80 doing heroics and raids. In the case of druids, remember the positional thing? When you're soloing, any attack that only works from behind the mob only works once. After the first swing, the silly mobs usually turn around, dang them. There's a nice little pounce attack that stuns the mob so you actually get two swipes from behind, but it's still just two. So while climing to 80, I had pretty much ignored any attack that required me to be behind the thing I was trying to kill. Now, though, in heroics, those attacks deserve attention because there's usually a nice person wrapped in heavy metal making what I'm trying to kill face him, and the Death From Behind approach works nicely.
Bottom line...once you hit level 80, you're more of a n00b than you were at 79. Ain't that great?
In the end, I looked online at a guild page about druiding and decided to just be a copycat. There's a druid named Sounder in an allied guild who usually does OhMyGod DPS, and I read what he said as though it were an instruction manual. Next run...do as Sounder does...doubled my DPS. Thanks, Sounder!
And yes, I apologize to druids in general for making the inference that druid DPS mechanics are simple. They're not...you have to watch several buffs/debuffs in addition to combo points and Energy, all at the same time while trying to follow mobs around as they move. It's actually quite complex.
And fun.
I'm definitely going to do it more.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
My geometry teacher was wrong!
Subtitle: Sometimes your gear really isn't good enough.
One of those vivid memories from high school involves my intense hatred for doing proofs in geometry class. That was when you learned the if-then stuff...if A AND B is true, then C is true, etc. How many of you noble readers remember your high school geometry class? How many of you are sitting in that class right now reading this blog? The cynical educator in me says most of you are, or would be if you were in high school. The statistician in me says there's a finite but greater than zero chance that some of you are doing that. The realist in me says there's probably only two of you reading this blog, and you're close friends and family who would still read it even if I wrote about purple pansies for the remainder of the post today.
*ahem* Anyway, one of the...oh, what did we call them? Theorems? Axioms? Something like that. One of those...things...from geometry class that we used to prove stuff was the rule of contrapositive. Goes kinda like this: if you can say that "if A is true, then B is true" then you can also say that "if B is not true, then A is not true." See? Pretty simple stuff, really...swap A and B around and negate both, and you still have a truthdom...or whatever we called it. Plus, it sounds really cool to me to go around using words like "contrapositive," which is probably why I remember it after all these deca...er, years.
I'm sure you're wondering by this point how this applies to WoW. Yes, there really is a connection. With the new Dungeon queueing option, it won't let you queue if your gear isn't up to snuff. Prior to level 80, you can't queue for heroics at all. At 80, if your gear is craptastic, you can only queue for some heroics. Others open up with better gear scores, to the point where my mage and my tank can queue for any instance in the game. Granted, usually we all just choose "Random" and then it picks one for us...theoretically, one that we'd qualify for if we were trying to queue for it specifically.
So..."If your gear isn't good enough, then you can't queue for an instance" is an obvious statement. Contrapositive..."If you CAN queue for an instance, then your gear IS good enough"...must be true. Right?
Yeah. Right. Mmm hmm. So, last night, a buddy and I decided we were gonna run a random heroic, me on my fairly new healer. My healer has a fair to middlin' gear score, in the mid-3000's, which is good enough for many heroics but NOT good enough for the three new ones...Forge of Youregonnadie, Pit of Thisreallysucks, and Halls of Craptonofdamage. But sure 'nuff, we queued up, and pop! Right into the Forge.
My buddy, Ermakk the Shaman, did a great job supporting me through, even taking a break from his 5K DPS to help me heal, but that last boss in Forge of Souls is just plain mean. Even my brother, one of the l33t (hmm, did I spell that right?) healers of the guild, has troubles with The Boss With Three Faces. I got two tries in before it was obvious that my gear just plain wasn't good enough, so I bowed out, they found somebody with better gear, and I went off to do some other heroic.
So...lessons learned:
One of those vivid memories from high school involves my intense hatred for doing proofs in geometry class. That was when you learned the if-then stuff...if A AND B is true, then C is true, etc. How many of you noble readers remember your high school geometry class? How many of you are sitting in that class right now reading this blog? The cynical educator in me says most of you are, or would be if you were in high school. The statistician in me says there's a finite but greater than zero chance that some of you are doing that. The realist in me says there's probably only two of you reading this blog, and you're close friends and family who would still read it even if I wrote about purple pansies for the remainder of the post today.
*ahem* Anyway, one of the...oh, what did we call them? Theorems? Axioms? Something like that. One of those...things...from geometry class that we used to prove stuff was the rule of contrapositive. Goes kinda like this: if you can say that "if A is true, then B is true" then you can also say that "if B is not true, then A is not true." See? Pretty simple stuff, really...swap A and B around and negate both, and you still have a truthdom...or whatever we called it. Plus, it sounds really cool to me to go around using words like "contrapositive," which is probably why I remember it after all these deca...er, years.
I'm sure you're wondering by this point how this applies to WoW. Yes, there really is a connection. With the new Dungeon queueing option, it won't let you queue if your gear isn't up to snuff. Prior to level 80, you can't queue for heroics at all. At 80, if your gear is craptastic, you can only queue for some heroics. Others open up with better gear scores, to the point where my mage and my tank can queue for any instance in the game. Granted, usually we all just choose "Random" and then it picks one for us...theoretically, one that we'd qualify for if we were trying to queue for it specifically.
So..."If your gear isn't good enough, then you can't queue for an instance" is an obvious statement. Contrapositive..."If you CAN queue for an instance, then your gear IS good enough"...must be true. Right?
Yeah. Right. Mmm hmm. So, last night, a buddy and I decided we were gonna run a random heroic, me on my fairly new healer. My healer has a fair to middlin' gear score, in the mid-3000's, which is good enough for many heroics but NOT good enough for the three new ones...Forge of Youregonnadie, Pit of Thisreallysucks, and Halls of Craptonofdamage. But sure 'nuff, we queued up, and pop! Right into the Forge.
My buddy, Ermakk the Shaman, did a great job supporting me through, even taking a break from his 5K DPS to help me heal, but that last boss in Forge of Souls is just plain mean. Even my brother, one of the l33t (hmm, did I spell that right?) healers of the guild, has troubles with The Boss With Three Faces. I got two tries in before it was obvious that my gear just plain wasn't good enough, so I bowed out, they found somebody with better gear, and I went off to do some other heroic.
So...lessons learned:
- The contrapositive isn't always true.
- Geometry teachers lie sometimes
- If you think your gear isn't good enough, it probably isn't.
- Don't hang around if you're put into a spot you can't manage as a healer or a tank...you'll just cost others gold.
*sigh* Till tomorrow, then. Hope the server resets OK. If not, I'll just go pick purple pansies.
Monday, February 22, 2010
wtb [Extra Hours In The Day] pst with price
I really need more time in the day. Maybe not so much during the weeks, but all this alting takes time on the weekends.
Up till recently, I've been heavily focused on the utility basis for alting. That's just a fancy way of saying I've been ignoring my alts once they hit 450 in their professions, of course. Malqueso, my noble hunter usedtabe-main, hadn't seen the inside of an instance in a long, long time, and Jurith, my warlock, had only been in enough heroics to get enough Ebon Blade rep to get the soul shard bag pattern. Both were clocking right along at a less than magnificent 700-ish DPS rate, and frankly I wasn't really inclined to take them in and suffer the embarrassment of being out-DPS'ed by the tank and sometimes even the healer.
Granted, their gear was pretty awful. Still is. Malqueso was still using the epic trinket you got from Exalted rep with Sha'tari Skyguard...you know, back in Burning Crusade, when flying mounts were new and sparkly. Part of the reason I hadn't worked on them was how much effort it takes to look up upgrades to be gotten from quests and then go do the requisite quest chains. I'm...um...well, honestly, I'm a bit lazy when it comes to that. I've already done the work to get one toon up to a gear score in the 5500 range, and (insert QQ QQ here). Discovered by accident that there's a Wyrmrest quest for a trinket that's better than the Skyguard one, so that one went bye-bye this weekend, but that's just serendipity.
Anyway, I went out and did spec and spell rotation research...twice. Learned that for a destruction-specced warlock, I was using entirely the wrong set of spells AND talents, and for my hunter, I was just using stuff in the wrong way. Respecced my warlock to take a better destruction build based on a couple of different websites...www.wowwiki.com is usually my first glance, but I always look at others too...and was pleased. Jurith's DPS doubled in one day, going up to the 1500-1600 range. While that's still pretty puny by today's seriously-overgeared-in-heroics standards, it's not a bad improvement for a respec and a change in rotation. Turns out it's best to start boss fights with Curse of Doom (who'd'a thunk that spell had a use outside of Karazhan?), then immolate, conflag, toss in a chaos bolt, finish out the immolate's timer with incinerate, and repeat.
See, this is where my leveling prowess with my lock had done me wrong. Shadow bolt is one of the first spells you get when you're running around outside the Undercity hitting demon dogs for a few dozen damage points at a time. Growing up, Jurith had seen the "Improved Shadow Bolt" talent and thought, "Ooh, that sounds like fun!" Shadow bolt had, thus, always been on my cast bar and had been a staple of my rotation. Wrong. The first spells you get aren't always your most powerful ones, it seems. Come to think of it, they're pretty much never your most powerful ones...my main, a mage, almost never uses fireball any more, and...the list goes on.
The hunter, meanwhile, didn't get a respec. Frankly, I can't respec him. He was the first toon I discovered Talents on. To call him the FIRST toon would be inaccurate; I still have a level 1 undead warrior out there on some server somewhere that heard, "run down the hill and talk to that guy" and ran all the way out of the starting area. At level one, I couldn't keep him alive long enough to get back into the safety of the starting zone, so...well, yeah. *singing* I'm the captain of the failboat....
*ahem* Anyway, Malqueso was really my first toon to make it to 10, that vaunted level where you first get to look at the Talents page and wonder, "What the heck is this stuff?" I presume...I hope, anyway...that I'm not the only person to just look at the first line of options, pick the one corresponding to the ability I use the most at that level, and clicky on it. Then, next level, more clicky based on what you're using currently. At some point (with Malqueso it was level 60) everybody realizes, "Hey, I need to be choosing talents based on what I need in the future," but that nuance is lost at first, and deserves its own blog post to boot.
At that point, most people, I'd suspect, run away to respec. I didn't. Malqueso, or MQ as we lovingly call him in my guild ("lovingly" might be a stretch, but hey, it's my blog, OK?) is specced as I wanted him, and nothing but a clean wipe by Blizz has gotten me to change that. That's happened twice to my recollection, and I remember those vividly mostly due to the panic that came out of me being in a raid realizing I was Talentless. "Um...break for a sec...I have no Talent" is embarrassing to say over Raid chat, by the way. Trust me, I know.
So...back to my original point...I haven't respecced MQ. Can't. I even took him into the Valley of Honor this weekend, with a web site of a Marksman Hunter raid DPS spec pulled up, and couldn't bring myself to erase his talents. Silly? Yes. But there it is. I even still have EVERY spell he's ever learned tied onto the toolbars. Still, by switching around his shots according to the shot rotation prescriptions I read (Serpent Sting, Wyvern Sting, then a couple other shots, then repeat Wyvern Sting...and don't forget Kill Shot when up!), I got his DPS up to about 1.5K. With that, I'm not going to win many DPS awards, but at least I'm not going to piss the random party members off enough to be Kicked...or even worse, ridiculed.
And so, the weekend closed with me now having a viable tank, a viable healer, an awesome DPS, and a couple of viable DPS alts. Not bad, for one weekend, even if I didn't get a chance to do my daily make-the-Frenzyheart-love-me quests.
More on the silly rep game later, though. When I have time.
Up till recently, I've been heavily focused on the utility basis for alting. That's just a fancy way of saying I've been ignoring my alts once they hit 450 in their professions, of course. Malqueso, my noble hunter usedtabe-main, hadn't seen the inside of an instance in a long, long time, and Jurith, my warlock, had only been in enough heroics to get enough Ebon Blade rep to get the soul shard bag pattern. Both were clocking right along at a less than magnificent 700-ish DPS rate, and frankly I wasn't really inclined to take them in and suffer the embarrassment of being out-DPS'ed by the tank and sometimes even the healer.
Granted, their gear was pretty awful. Still is. Malqueso was still using the epic trinket you got from Exalted rep with Sha'tari Skyguard...you know, back in Burning Crusade, when flying mounts were new and sparkly. Part of the reason I hadn't worked on them was how much effort it takes to look up upgrades to be gotten from quests and then go do the requisite quest chains. I'm...um...well, honestly, I'm a bit lazy when it comes to that. I've already done the work to get one toon up to a gear score in the 5500 range, and (insert QQ QQ here). Discovered by accident that there's a Wyrmrest quest for a trinket that's better than the Skyguard one, so that one went bye-bye this weekend, but that's just serendipity.
Anyway, I went out and did spec and spell rotation research...twice. Learned that for a destruction-specced warlock, I was using entirely the wrong set of spells AND talents, and for my hunter, I was just using stuff in the wrong way. Respecced my warlock to take a better destruction build based on a couple of different websites...www.wowwiki.com is usually my first glance, but I always look at others too...and was pleased. Jurith's DPS doubled in one day, going up to the 1500-1600 range. While that's still pretty puny by today's seriously-overgeared-in-heroics standards, it's not a bad improvement for a respec and a change in rotation. Turns out it's best to start boss fights with Curse of Doom (who'd'a thunk that spell had a use outside of Karazhan?), then immolate, conflag, toss in a chaos bolt, finish out the immolate's timer with incinerate, and repeat.
See, this is where my leveling prowess with my lock had done me wrong. Shadow bolt is one of the first spells you get when you're running around outside the Undercity hitting demon dogs for a few dozen damage points at a time. Growing up, Jurith had seen the "Improved Shadow Bolt" talent and thought, "Ooh, that sounds like fun!" Shadow bolt had, thus, always been on my cast bar and had been a staple of my rotation. Wrong. The first spells you get aren't always your most powerful ones, it seems. Come to think of it, they're pretty much never your most powerful ones...my main, a mage, almost never uses fireball any more, and...the list goes on.
The hunter, meanwhile, didn't get a respec. Frankly, I can't respec him. He was the first toon I discovered Talents on. To call him the FIRST toon would be inaccurate; I still have a level 1 undead warrior out there on some server somewhere that heard, "run down the hill and talk to that guy" and ran all the way out of the starting area. At level one, I couldn't keep him alive long enough to get back into the safety of the starting zone, so...well, yeah. *singing* I'm the captain of the failboat....
*ahem* Anyway, Malqueso was really my first toon to make it to 10, that vaunted level where you first get to look at the Talents page and wonder, "What the heck is this stuff?" I presume...I hope, anyway...that I'm not the only person to just look at the first line of options, pick the one corresponding to the ability I use the most at that level, and clicky on it. Then, next level, more clicky based on what you're using currently. At some point (with Malqueso it was level 60) everybody realizes, "Hey, I need to be choosing talents based on what I need in the future," but that nuance is lost at first, and deserves its own blog post to boot.
At that point, most people, I'd suspect, run away to respec. I didn't. Malqueso, or MQ as we lovingly call him in my guild ("lovingly" might be a stretch, but hey, it's my blog, OK?) is specced as I wanted him, and nothing but a clean wipe by Blizz has gotten me to change that. That's happened twice to my recollection, and I remember those vividly mostly due to the panic that came out of me being in a raid realizing I was Talentless. "Um...break for a sec...I have no Talent" is embarrassing to say over Raid chat, by the way. Trust me, I know.
So...back to my original point...I haven't respecced MQ. Can't. I even took him into the Valley of Honor this weekend, with a web site of a Marksman Hunter raid DPS spec pulled up, and couldn't bring myself to erase his talents. Silly? Yes. But there it is. I even still have EVERY spell he's ever learned tied onto the toolbars. Still, by switching around his shots according to the shot rotation prescriptions I read (Serpent Sting, Wyvern Sting, then a couple other shots, then repeat Wyvern Sting...and don't forget Kill Shot when up!), I got his DPS up to about 1.5K. With that, I'm not going to win many DPS awards, but at least I'm not going to piss the random party members off enough to be Kicked...or even worse, ridiculed.
And so, the weekend closed with me now having a viable tank, a viable healer, an awesome DPS, and a couple of viable DPS alts. Not bad, for one weekend, even if I didn't get a chance to do my daily make-the-Frenzyheart-love-me quests.
More on the silly rep game later, though. When I have time.
Friday, February 19, 2010
A gem by any other name...
...is probably useless to me.
Subtitle: what stats do I choose?
Welcome to one of the most confusing topics in WoW: stats. I also call it those pesky numbers that show up on your character sheet. To be honest, I didn't understand them at all when I started playing. To be even more honest, I really can't say I understand them much better now.
One thing I do know for certain, though...as soon as I get to understanding them fairly well, Blizz will most likely change them again. Though...honestly, it's less a problem that they'll change the stats themselves (though I have read they're making significant changes to all in the next expansion) and more that they keep "tweaking" the abilities that rely on those stats.
The basic stats...the ones on the left side of the character sheet, by default...are fairly easy to understand. Strength makes physical attacks hit harder. Agility makes ranged attacks hit harder, though I haven't quite figured out why yet, and increases armor. Intellect increases the mana pool. All these, of course, may be appended with, "and other stuff"...int, for example, also increases the chance to crit with spells, and if you're a mage it might increase your spell power too. With the right Talents, anyway...but more on Talents sometime in a later post.
The web gets...tangleder...with the consideration of secondary stats. For example, there's spell power, which affects the amount of damage each spell cast will do, spell penetration, crit chance, defense, dodge, parry, shield block...the list goes on. Blizz has promised to simplify these in the upcoming expansion, and that sounds nice, but it really means that what you read here and on other sites will become fairly useless when that expansion comes out, just the same as what you read on some sites is already useless.
Nice tangled web there, indeed, with many stats affecting one or more other stats, talents that increase or decrease the effect of certain stats, and the effectiveness of stats being dependent not only on level but also on class. For example, we know that each point in Agility converts to 1 points in Attack power. For, um, druids. For hunters, it's 1 for 2. Or at least it used to be. I think.
So...I wasn't a math major. Physics, yes, so I can tell you all about how fast a ball is going to smack you in the face when thrown at a certain angle and velocity. Yes, physics uses a lot of math, but it's not because it's particularly fun; it's just that's how the real world is described. The fact that it's also how the world of Warcraft is described doesn't make doing the math any more enticing to me either...nor, for that matter, does the fact that I have a job and a fiancee and still need time to shower, eat, use the toilet, etc., and I refuse to do all those at the same time. Let's face it, you could make an entire high school level math class out of the math required to figure WoW out.
Ultimately, what you're trying to do with stats is get "bang" for your "buck"...for lack of any better terms, anyway. On my mage, ferinstance, I really couldn't care less whether I'm getting a Sparkling, a Balanced, an Opaque, or a Fritzing cut of a gem, bearing more attack power, crit, agility, or ice cream. What I care about is which gem will increase the damage I do...specifically, the DPS number that shows up in the logs...the most. Which talent? Which gear? God Bless the folks with the time, the math skillz, and/or the single character focus to actually calculate and understand this stuff. I don't have any of the three.
Which brings me to my main point...learn to enjoy reading. Much of the stuff out there is absolutely full of wisdom. I learned this early on, when I discovered BigRedKitty, before there was a BigRedKitty.com, and started reading his stuff and srsly improved my huntard's DPS. With my mage, I was doing everything I knew and still holding a solid 7/10 spot on raid DPS meters till I read a bit and learned a couple of things: "Oh, Icy Veins! And...what do you mean spirit is good for arcane mages?"
With EVERY alt, in EVERY role, it takes time to gear up and gem up and enchant up and basically get everything working the way it should. You've got the talents and gear you use to get to max level...and, frankly, for the past several trips to 80 I've adopted a "get there as fast as I can" mantra. But as soon as that Level 80 achievement dings, I stop playing that character for a day or two, long enough to go out and read up on how to do what I want to do.
That said, be careful. There's a lot of bad/old information out there, and there are a lot of people whose opinions are so strong they sound like facts. Ferinstance, I started at 80 DK'ing by reading a site that told me all about how to tank with my death knight. I did what it was saying, and...failed, in quite an epic manner. So I read more, and found out that the info on the first site was there from before Blizz "fixed" the death knight tanking.
Once you read up, gear up, gem up, drink up, etc., go do it. One caveat...no matter what you do, you're going to suck at it at first. Take slow(ish) steps. For instance, I was sorely tempted to go tank the weekly raid quest into Ulduar with my newly minted death knight tank...it was, after all, just the second boss in Ulduar, and quite easy, right? But I didn't have the experience, or the health, or the overall gear score to have made it a good experience. Remember, it takes time to learn to play your character, which is probably the most valid argument against the extreme altism I've been practicing. Ah, well...I get bored easily, and it's my $15 a month so I'll play it how I wanna. So there!
*ahem* Tantrum over.
Continue learning, too. Going back to my death knight tank, I was doing OK with tanking groups, but when it came to single targets like bosses I was failing miserably by losing aggro every single time. Started looking at why, and realized that my AoE attacks were doing OK, but when I started doing single target stuff...you know, whackety whackety...it was more a case of whiffity whiffity. Meanwhile, the noble DPS in the party, knowing what they were doing, was solidly smacking the boss around, causing me to lose aggro. Thus, my revelation...it's not enough as a tank to be defense capped! You must also be hit capped! And THEN, and only then, you can work on health! Seems pretty obvious now when I say it like that...even to me. You didn't see me smack my own forehead when I re-read this paragraph, in fact, but I did. However, I have to admit that it really didn't occur to me at first.
So...what IS the hit cap for a death knight, I asked? Depends, was the answer I got. Lots of stuff out there...I'm not going to pretend to answer this question authoritatively. Like I said, lots of people out there smarter than me on numbers. But I got it up to 280-ish, and all seems much hunkier-dorier. I'm still not going to tank the Lich King anytime soon on this alt, but I'm much more comfortable going into random heroics.
I guess, if I had to sum up today's blog, it would be that it's OK to be a n00b if you're an altoholic. Accept that fact, shake hands with it, lrn2Google, and start learning. Then keep learning. That really, to me, is why I'm an altoholic in the first place.
Oh, and I'll take that pretty blue gem over there. Yes, the one that's Sparkling. I guess.
Subtitle: what stats do I choose?
Welcome to one of the most confusing topics in WoW: stats. I also call it those pesky numbers that show up on your character sheet. To be honest, I didn't understand them at all when I started playing. To be even more honest, I really can't say I understand them much better now.
One thing I do know for certain, though...as soon as I get to understanding them fairly well, Blizz will most likely change them again. Though...honestly, it's less a problem that they'll change the stats themselves (though I have read they're making significant changes to all in the next expansion) and more that they keep "tweaking" the abilities that rely on those stats.
The basic stats...the ones on the left side of the character sheet, by default...are fairly easy to understand. Strength makes physical attacks hit harder. Agility makes ranged attacks hit harder, though I haven't quite figured out why yet, and increases armor. Intellect increases the mana pool. All these, of course, may be appended with, "and other stuff"...int, for example, also increases the chance to crit with spells, and if you're a mage it might increase your spell power too. With the right Talents, anyway...but more on Talents sometime in a later post.
The web gets...tangleder...with the consideration of secondary stats. For example, there's spell power, which affects the amount of damage each spell cast will do, spell penetration, crit chance, defense, dodge, parry, shield block...the list goes on. Blizz has promised to simplify these in the upcoming expansion, and that sounds nice, but it really means that what you read here and on other sites will become fairly useless when that expansion comes out, just the same as what you read on some sites is already useless.
Nice tangled web there, indeed, with many stats affecting one or more other stats, talents that increase or decrease the effect of certain stats, and the effectiveness of stats being dependent not only on level but also on class. For example, we know that each point in Agility converts to 1 points in Attack power. For, um, druids. For hunters, it's 1 for 2. Or at least it used to be. I think.
So...I wasn't a math major. Physics, yes, so I can tell you all about how fast a ball is going to smack you in the face when thrown at a certain angle and velocity. Yes, physics uses a lot of math, but it's not because it's particularly fun; it's just that's how the real world is described. The fact that it's also how the world of Warcraft is described doesn't make doing the math any more enticing to me either...nor, for that matter, does the fact that I have a job and a fiancee and still need time to shower, eat, use the toilet, etc., and I refuse to do all those at the same time. Let's face it, you could make an entire high school level math class out of the math required to figure WoW out.
Ultimately, what you're trying to do with stats is get "bang" for your "buck"...for lack of any better terms, anyway. On my mage, ferinstance, I really couldn't care less whether I'm getting a Sparkling, a Balanced, an Opaque, or a Fritzing cut of a gem, bearing more attack power, crit, agility, or ice cream. What I care about is which gem will increase the damage I do...specifically, the DPS number that shows up in the logs...the most. Which talent? Which gear? God Bless the folks with the time, the math skillz, and/or the single character focus to actually calculate and understand this stuff. I don't have any of the three.
Which brings me to my main point...learn to enjoy reading. Much of the stuff out there is absolutely full of wisdom. I learned this early on, when I discovered BigRedKitty, before there was a BigRedKitty.com, and started reading his stuff and srsly improved my huntard's DPS. With my mage, I was doing everything I knew and still holding a solid 7/10 spot on raid DPS meters till I read a bit and learned a couple of things: "Oh, Icy Veins! And...what do you mean spirit is good for arcane mages?"
With EVERY alt, in EVERY role, it takes time to gear up and gem up and enchant up and basically get everything working the way it should. You've got the talents and gear you use to get to max level...and, frankly, for the past several trips to 80 I've adopted a "get there as fast as I can" mantra. But as soon as that Level 80 achievement dings, I stop playing that character for a day or two, long enough to go out and read up on how to do what I want to do.
That said, be careful. There's a lot of bad/old information out there, and there are a lot of people whose opinions are so strong they sound like facts. Ferinstance, I started at 80 DK'ing by reading a site that told me all about how to tank with my death knight. I did what it was saying, and...failed, in quite an epic manner. So I read more, and found out that the info on the first site was there from before Blizz "fixed" the death knight tanking.
Once you read up, gear up, gem up, drink up, etc., go do it. One caveat...no matter what you do, you're going to suck at it at first. Take slow(ish) steps. For instance, I was sorely tempted to go tank the weekly raid quest into Ulduar with my newly minted death knight tank...it was, after all, just the second boss in Ulduar, and quite easy, right? But I didn't have the experience, or the health, or the overall gear score to have made it a good experience. Remember, it takes time to learn to play your character, which is probably the most valid argument against the extreme altism I've been practicing. Ah, well...I get bored easily, and it's my $15 a month so I'll play it how I wanna. So there!
*ahem* Tantrum over.
Continue learning, too. Going back to my death knight tank, I was doing OK with tanking groups, but when it came to single targets like bosses I was failing miserably by losing aggro every single time. Started looking at why, and realized that my AoE attacks were doing OK, but when I started doing single target stuff...you know, whackety whackety...it was more a case of whiffity whiffity. Meanwhile, the noble DPS in the party, knowing what they were doing, was solidly smacking the boss around, causing me to lose aggro. Thus, my revelation...it's not enough as a tank to be defense capped! You must also be hit capped! And THEN, and only then, you can work on health! Seems pretty obvious now when I say it like that...even to me. You didn't see me smack my own forehead when I re-read this paragraph, in fact, but I did. However, I have to admit that it really didn't occur to me at first.
So...what IS the hit cap for a death knight, I asked? Depends, was the answer I got. Lots of stuff out there...I'm not going to pretend to answer this question authoritatively. Like I said, lots of people out there smarter than me on numbers. But I got it up to 280-ish, and all seems much hunkier-dorier. I'm still not going to tank the Lich King anytime soon on this alt, but I'm much more comfortable going into random heroics.
I guess, if I had to sum up today's blog, it would be that it's OK to be a n00b if you're an altoholic. Accept that fact, shake hands with it, lrn2Google, and start learning. Then keep learning. That really, to me, is why I'm an altoholic in the first place.
Oh, and I'll take that pretty blue gem over there. Yes, the one that's Sparkling. I guess.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Let the Alting Begin
At a certain point...I don't remember exactly when...I got tired of paying exorbitant fees for enchants to my gear. My logic at that time went something like this...if I create another character who's an enchanter, I can provide my own enchants for myself and make lots of gold at the same time! This was, by the way, back in the days when you didn't get a mount till level 40, and it cost 100 gold, minus a 10% discount for being Honored, minus a 10% discount if you were a Sergeant, which was really tough to get at level 40. So, call it 100 minus 10%. Anyway, 90 gold was a LOT of gold. A hella lot, in fact, without daily quests to grind. But I'd pretty much already come to terms with the fact that leatherworking was never going to make me rich (though I had discovered the green armor trick, which made a few gold in the day).
So, I created a warlock (still couldn't get past the mindset that I kill stuff at range hiding behind a pet) who would be my enchanter. What to pick as my second profession? Tailoring, of course...no gathering profession is required for enchanting, since the main ingredient for enchants is gotten through disenchanting stuff, and cloth drops off of just about every humanoid, and hey, the stuff you make through tailoring can be disenchanted for more raw materials for enchanting. It's, like, a win-win, or at least an almost win-almost win, situation!
The part about enchanting my own stuff didn't come true till fairly recently, of course, and the part about making lots of gold with enchanting never really did come true, probably because everybody else on the server at that time was thinking, "Hey, if I create an enchanter, I can make lots of gold!" One of the most important rules I've learned for making gold without grinding dailies is that you have to do what everybody else isn't doing. If you've ever tried to skill up an alt's professions, you know what I mean. The lesser raw materials will go from super cheap to super expensive and back within a couple days' time, just based on who's doing what. Some degree of price manipulation is possible, and I've made plenty of gold buying stuff cheap and selling it right away at a moderate price. Really, though, where you're going to make gold at the Auction House is in looking at whatever else nobody is putting up for auction and being the sole supplier for that time. For example, I've sold stacks of fel iron, the old cruddy stuff from Burning Crusade, for 30-40 gold just because nobody else was selling it...usually, on my server, that stuff will barely fetch 10-20 gold a stack.
But I get ahead of myself.
An altoholic was born.
Most of my alts are for utility, but some I've really gotten into. For example, the 'lock is fundamentally the same type of character as the hunter, but the mechanics are different in lots of ways, presenting challenges that were really quite enjoyable. The choice of pets was fun at first, at least till I realized that, up until the last expansion, it really was a Best Practice for locks to run with voidwalker (I couldn't do the felguard, since I chose destro) when alone, or imp when in a group, and succubus on very rare occasions when the group wanted crappy crowd control. Note that the reason for my caveat was that one of the last patches was supposed to have made the "other" lock pets more useful. I don't believe 'em. Then again, I rarely bring my lock out any more, so what do I know?
Utility, though, was the name of the game (heh...and you thought the name of the game was WoW). I was really into raiding, but potions were eating up my budget, so I made an herbalist/alchemist. As I still hadn't gotten the whole branch-out-into-other-roles thing, I made this alt a mage. Then I created a miner/blacksmith, not that I needed a blacksmith, but because the only other blacksmith of note in the guild had just converted to jewelcrafting instead. He was a warrior, because...well, warriors are blacksmiths, right? And blacksmiths are warriors. Everybody who's done role playing for any length of time knows that. It wasn't till I got him pretty far up in skill that I realized how insanely expensive it was to skill up a blacksmith. And while all my characters have started out kinda boring to level, the warrior has stayed at 10.5 on the 1 to 10 scale of Boringness, but I kept him anyway.
There I was...one main, three alts plus a bank alt (for the uninitiated, a bank alt is a character, usually kept at level 1, whose purpose is to run between the mailbox, the bank, and the auction house, and keep/store/sell all the crap that the other characters get/make/earn). Of course, I'd also created a druid, despite the fact that I had absolutely no fun running Mulgore, but he was stuck fairly permanently, it appeared, at level 13. I'd also noticed how cool engineering could be...hey, a box of arrows, how clever! Keep in mind that at this point arrows would only stack in 200's, and a quiver could hold just about enough arrows to, if you started full, get you through a raiding night with a few left over, barely escaping the embarrassment that was being The Hunter Without Ammo, so a case of arrows was really a pretty cool thing. I started a rogue miner/engineer...but got bored with her too, so she was looking at being permanently at 14. Till I deleted her, anyway, to make room for...my DK!
This got me along pretty well until Wrath hit. Death Knights! Woo hoo! OK, I'll admit it, I made a death knight the same night that everybody ELSE on the server also made a death knight. We all fought over the same stupid quest mobs till I got tired of it and went back to leveling to 80. Didn't touch my DK again for months.
Leveling to 80 took a little bit of effort...not huge; leveling has never been really difficult in WoW. But it still took time, so I was pretty busy getting my hunter, my lock, and my mage up to 80. By this point, I'd pretty much decided that the mage would replace the hunter as my "main," a term that is pretty useless outside of raiding. But my hunter hadn't gotten to raid much, there being a bunch of hunters in the group, and I'd discovered that playing an arcane mage is fun! Not easy, really; it's one of the more challenging class/spec combinations to get right, but despite that, or more because of it, it's an awful lot of fun.
About that time my druid was brought back from the discard pile. The new profession, inscription, was looking to be quite a moneymaker (boy, was I wrong) and tauren druids are natural herbalists anyway, so he trained inscription and leveled all the way up to 80. I admit, the druid became more fun to play once he got the ability to change from a bear to a kitty to a bird and back; I'd say he's probably been the easiest character to play, with relative straightforward mechanics. Bear tanking: hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Cat DPSing: make 'em bleed, then hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Tree healing: HoT, HoT, HoT!
There. That's my guide to druiding. Please send me all the dollars it's worth, kthxbai.
Finally went back to my DK. Note that DKs are handicapped by their late start. At 58, leaving the starting area, you have zero profession skill points, very little experience with the character's mechanics, some blue armor that's really not worth much of a crap, and the ability to "discover" entire regions by flying directly into them, much like in this real life thing that we're playing WoW to avoid. You have enough Talent points to fill up an entire section of the talent tree, yet nobody at the time knew what any of the sections did. The logic went something like this...use blood for DPS and frost for tanking. Unless you use unholy for DPS. Took Blizz a few patches to tweak the skills right (hey, you didn't really believe that was what beta testing was for, did you?) and the "experts" a while longer to really come to any type of consensus on what the different trees did. There's still sites out there that show you talent builds with talents in the wrong spot on the tree, in fact. But...more on my DK experiences later.
Professions for my DK were a pretty obvious choice. At the time, she was pretty much just a fun character to play around with, and DKs are known for being tough little cookies, so I figured a gatherer was a great choice...mining and skinning. Only problem with that was that I had to zone hop for a while, searching for both animals to skin and mining nodes to...um, mine...that weren't too high for my puny skill level, since THAT had to start at 1 (thank you, Blizz!). Most DKs I knew went straight for 80 and then worried about professions, but I figured if I was gonna have to level up in Outlands, might as well skin the animals I killed and mine the nodes I went by right then. Glad I did, in fact.
That left me with one little problem...two, actually. Specifically, engineering and jewelcrafting. I'd noticed that jewelcrafting was the enchanting of the new world; lots and lots of gold being made. I also got tired of buying jewels, and had two miners to provide ore and jewels anyway, so I made a priestess who would be my engineer and jewelcrafter.
So...now I have a hunter skinner/leatherworker, a mage herbalist/alchemist, a druid herbalist/inscriber, a warlock tailor/enchanter, a warrior miner/blacksmith, a priest jewelcrafter/engineer, a death knight skinner/miner, and a priest auction house mule. Five of them are 80's already, with two others on the way, and no real skill in playing/gearing any of them. That story comes later.
So, I created a warlock (still couldn't get past the mindset that I kill stuff at range hiding behind a pet) who would be my enchanter. What to pick as my second profession? Tailoring, of course...no gathering profession is required for enchanting, since the main ingredient for enchants is gotten through disenchanting stuff, and cloth drops off of just about every humanoid, and hey, the stuff you make through tailoring can be disenchanted for more raw materials for enchanting. It's, like, a win-win, or at least an almost win-almost win, situation!
The part about enchanting my own stuff didn't come true till fairly recently, of course, and the part about making lots of gold with enchanting never really did come true, probably because everybody else on the server at that time was thinking, "Hey, if I create an enchanter, I can make lots of gold!" One of the most important rules I've learned for making gold without grinding dailies is that you have to do what everybody else isn't doing. If you've ever tried to skill up an alt's professions, you know what I mean. The lesser raw materials will go from super cheap to super expensive and back within a couple days' time, just based on who's doing what. Some degree of price manipulation is possible, and I've made plenty of gold buying stuff cheap and selling it right away at a moderate price. Really, though, where you're going to make gold at the Auction House is in looking at whatever else nobody is putting up for auction and being the sole supplier for that time. For example, I've sold stacks of fel iron, the old cruddy stuff from Burning Crusade, for 30-40 gold just because nobody else was selling it...usually, on my server, that stuff will barely fetch 10-20 gold a stack.
But I get ahead of myself.
An altoholic was born.
Most of my alts are for utility, but some I've really gotten into. For example, the 'lock is fundamentally the same type of character as the hunter, but the mechanics are different in lots of ways, presenting challenges that were really quite enjoyable. The choice of pets was fun at first, at least till I realized that, up until the last expansion, it really was a Best Practice for locks to run with voidwalker (I couldn't do the felguard, since I chose destro) when alone, or imp when in a group, and succubus on very rare occasions when the group wanted crappy crowd control. Note that the reason for my caveat was that one of the last patches was supposed to have made the "other" lock pets more useful. I don't believe 'em. Then again, I rarely bring my lock out any more, so what do I know?
Utility, though, was the name of the game (heh...and you thought the name of the game was WoW). I was really into raiding, but potions were eating up my budget, so I made an herbalist/alchemist. As I still hadn't gotten the whole branch-out-into-other-roles thing, I made this alt a mage. Then I created a miner/blacksmith, not that I needed a blacksmith, but because the only other blacksmith of note in the guild had just converted to jewelcrafting instead. He was a warrior, because...well, warriors are blacksmiths, right? And blacksmiths are warriors. Everybody who's done role playing for any length of time knows that. It wasn't till I got him pretty far up in skill that I realized how insanely expensive it was to skill up a blacksmith. And while all my characters have started out kinda boring to level, the warrior has stayed at 10.5 on the 1 to 10 scale of Boringness, but I kept him anyway.
There I was...one main, three alts plus a bank alt (for the uninitiated, a bank alt is a character, usually kept at level 1, whose purpose is to run between the mailbox, the bank, and the auction house, and keep/store/sell all the crap that the other characters get/make/earn). Of course, I'd also created a druid, despite the fact that I had absolutely no fun running Mulgore, but he was stuck fairly permanently, it appeared, at level 13. I'd also noticed how cool engineering could be...hey, a box of arrows, how clever! Keep in mind that at this point arrows would only stack in 200's, and a quiver could hold just about enough arrows to, if you started full, get you through a raiding night with a few left over, barely escaping the embarrassment that was being The Hunter Without Ammo, so a case of arrows was really a pretty cool thing. I started a rogue miner/engineer...but got bored with her too, so she was looking at being permanently at 14. Till I deleted her, anyway, to make room for...my DK!
This got me along pretty well until Wrath hit. Death Knights! Woo hoo! OK, I'll admit it, I made a death knight the same night that everybody ELSE on the server also made a death knight. We all fought over the same stupid quest mobs till I got tired of it and went back to leveling to 80. Didn't touch my DK again for months.
Leveling to 80 took a little bit of effort...not huge; leveling has never been really difficult in WoW. But it still took time, so I was pretty busy getting my hunter, my lock, and my mage up to 80. By this point, I'd pretty much decided that the mage would replace the hunter as my "main," a term that is pretty useless outside of raiding. But my hunter hadn't gotten to raid much, there being a bunch of hunters in the group, and I'd discovered that playing an arcane mage is fun! Not easy, really; it's one of the more challenging class/spec combinations to get right, but despite that, or more because of it, it's an awful lot of fun.
About that time my druid was brought back from the discard pile. The new profession, inscription, was looking to be quite a moneymaker (boy, was I wrong) and tauren druids are natural herbalists anyway, so he trained inscription and leveled all the way up to 80. I admit, the druid became more fun to play once he got the ability to change from a bear to a kitty to a bird and back; I'd say he's probably been the easiest character to play, with relative straightforward mechanics. Bear tanking: hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Cat DPSing: make 'em bleed, then hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Tree healing: HoT, HoT, HoT!
There. That's my guide to druiding. Please send me all the dollars it's worth, kthxbai.
Finally went back to my DK. Note that DKs are handicapped by their late start. At 58, leaving the starting area, you have zero profession skill points, very little experience with the character's mechanics, some blue armor that's really not worth much of a crap, and the ability to "discover" entire regions by flying directly into them, much like in this real life thing that we're playing WoW to avoid. You have enough Talent points to fill up an entire section of the talent tree, yet nobody at the time knew what any of the sections did. The logic went something like this...use blood for DPS and frost for tanking. Unless you use unholy for DPS. Took Blizz a few patches to tweak the skills right (hey, you didn't really believe that was what beta testing was for, did you?) and the "experts" a while longer to really come to any type of consensus on what the different trees did. There's still sites out there that show you talent builds with talents in the wrong spot on the tree, in fact. But...more on my DK experiences later.
Professions for my DK were a pretty obvious choice. At the time, she was pretty much just a fun character to play around with, and DKs are known for being tough little cookies, so I figured a gatherer was a great choice...mining and skinning. Only problem with that was that I had to zone hop for a while, searching for both animals to skin and mining nodes to...um, mine...that weren't too high for my puny skill level, since THAT had to start at 1 (thank you, Blizz!). Most DKs I knew went straight for 80 and then worried about professions, but I figured if I was gonna have to level up in Outlands, might as well skin the animals I killed and mine the nodes I went by right then. Glad I did, in fact.
That left me with one little problem...two, actually. Specifically, engineering and jewelcrafting. I'd noticed that jewelcrafting was the enchanting of the new world; lots and lots of gold being made. I also got tired of buying jewels, and had two miners to provide ore and jewels anyway, so I made a priestess who would be my engineer and jewelcrafter.
So...now I have a hunter skinner/leatherworker, a mage herbalist/alchemist, a druid herbalist/inscriber, a warlock tailor/enchanter, a warrior miner/blacksmith, a priest jewelcrafter/engineer, a death knight skinner/miner, and a priest auction house mule. Five of them are 80's already, with two others on the way, and no real skill in playing/gearing any of them. That story comes later.
The Start
So, I play WoW. There, it's out. By day, I wear a suit and make decisions affecting the academic futures of hundreds of college students, but by night I log in and...well, kill stuff. There's more to it than that, of course, but "I kill stuff" is pretty much the core.
I've been playing for some time. No, I'm not quite nerdy enough to be able to claim to have played since Beta...did they actually HAVE a Beta?...but I started my life on Shadow Council, one of the older servers on the game, back when there were very few 60's around. I remember, in fact, the first time I saw a 60...the guild was getting ready to run Wailing Caverns, and a 60 orc shaman came running past us. We all were speechlessly in awe.
Anyway, this blog is here for a couple of reasons. First, I'm addicted to creative writing, and this is certainly going to be creative. Second, there were a lot of things I and we decided on just...well, because...and I'm wanting to capture that for anybody else who's curious.
First decision...Horde or Alliance? At the time, I had no idea what that meant. I suspect few really do at first. The group I was in, that ended up being the mighty Chaotic Onslaught guild, had been playing D&D via e-mail and tabletop for quite a long time, and so we wanted an RP experience yet we didn't want to be like everybody else, plus there were probably other reasons that I really can't remember now, but we ended up a group of orcs and trolls in Durotar. I ended up as the group's hunter because of how much I liked the ranger class in...that other game. I'd just had a really bad series of experiences at tabletop gaming, and was rather fed up with the cheesiness some people bring to the rolling of the d20's, so in a fit of...um, something...I named my orc hunter Malqueso, which is sort of Spanishy for "bad cheese." It's gotten me giggles ever since, so it really was a brilliant move.
Speaking of brilliant moves, I was really proud of my first pet, a boar. Had no idea how the pet skills worked, or even that there WERE type-specific skills for pets, or that boars made particularly good tanking pets. I was really amused by the fact that I could rename my pet, and then disappointed when I found out I couldn't rename it again. As for combat, all I really knew was that holding the Ctrl key and pressing 1 made the boar attack whatever I was attacking, and then I could shoot it without it coming after me for a while, and that was a Good thing. Then the group...we weren't a guild yet, because 10 gold was an awful lot of money...got together once in Razor Hill...you know, that little outpost in the center of Durotar that's needed a flight path forever and a day. The rather short conversation went something like this: "Dude, you have a pig." Hmm...out went the pig, to be replaced by a scorpid named Fluffy.
Somebody...don't remember who, might've been the manual...introduced me to something called professions. What would Malqueso do, I pondered. At the time, I really didn't know that Blizz had designed the professions choices for hunters particularly poorly and made nearly a set requirement that hunters go engineering. Instead, engineering seemed...gimmicky. And useless. But leatherworking meant he could make his own armor, which seemed a grand idea at the time (remember, I hadn't discovered the Auction House yet either, nor did I know what a Raid was or that the armor there would make anything a LW could make seem silly). Of course, a LW without skinning was as useless as a hunter without arrows...more on that later...so, my choices were made, and off I went for several months of srs adventuring, learning awesome acronyms like WC (Wailing Caverns), SM (Scarlet Monastery, not that other one), and ST (The Temple of Atal'Hakkar...didn't say they all made sense).
Incidentally, Malqueso is still a skinner/leatherworker to this day. I wanted, later, to switch him to engineering, but by that point I'd already gotten several epic LW patterns that I just didn't want to give up. Plus, he had drums, which were the coolest thing Blizz ever gave leatherworkers (at least till they nerfed them).
Months and months of play later, well after BC had come out, I realized all the other character slots could be put to good use. Thus began my altoholism.
I've been playing for some time. No, I'm not quite nerdy enough to be able to claim to have played since Beta...did they actually HAVE a Beta?...but I started my life on Shadow Council, one of the older servers on the game, back when there were very few 60's around. I remember, in fact, the first time I saw a 60...the guild was getting ready to run Wailing Caverns, and a 60 orc shaman came running past us. We all were speechlessly in awe.
Anyway, this blog is here for a couple of reasons. First, I'm addicted to creative writing, and this is certainly going to be creative. Second, there were a lot of things I and we decided on just...well, because...and I'm wanting to capture that for anybody else who's curious.
First decision...Horde or Alliance? At the time, I had no idea what that meant. I suspect few really do at first. The group I was in, that ended up being the mighty Chaotic Onslaught guild, had been playing D&D via e-mail and tabletop for quite a long time, and so we wanted an RP experience yet we didn't want to be like everybody else, plus there were probably other reasons that I really can't remember now, but we ended up a group of orcs and trolls in Durotar. I ended up as the group's hunter because of how much I liked the ranger class in...that other game. I'd just had a really bad series of experiences at tabletop gaming, and was rather fed up with the cheesiness some people bring to the rolling of the d20's, so in a fit of...um, something...I named my orc hunter Malqueso, which is sort of Spanishy for "bad cheese." It's gotten me giggles ever since, so it really was a brilliant move.
Speaking of brilliant moves, I was really proud of my first pet, a boar. Had no idea how the pet skills worked, or even that there WERE type-specific skills for pets, or that boars made particularly good tanking pets. I was really amused by the fact that I could rename my pet, and then disappointed when I found out I couldn't rename it again. As for combat, all I really knew was that holding the Ctrl key and pressing 1 made the boar attack whatever I was attacking, and then I could shoot it without it coming after me for a while, and that was a Good thing. Then the group...we weren't a guild yet, because 10 gold was an awful lot of money...got together once in Razor Hill...you know, that little outpost in the center of Durotar that's needed a flight path forever and a day. The rather short conversation went something like this: "Dude, you have a pig." Hmm...out went the pig, to be replaced by a scorpid named Fluffy.
Somebody...don't remember who, might've been the manual...introduced me to something called professions. What would Malqueso do, I pondered. At the time, I really didn't know that Blizz had designed the professions choices for hunters particularly poorly and made nearly a set requirement that hunters go engineering. Instead, engineering seemed...gimmicky. And useless. But leatherworking meant he could make his own armor, which seemed a grand idea at the time (remember, I hadn't discovered the Auction House yet either, nor did I know what a Raid was or that the armor there would make anything a LW could make seem silly). Of course, a LW without skinning was as useless as a hunter without arrows...more on that later...so, my choices were made, and off I went for several months of srs adventuring, learning awesome acronyms like WC (Wailing Caverns), SM (Scarlet Monastery, not that other one), and ST (The Temple of Atal'Hakkar...didn't say they all made sense).
Incidentally, Malqueso is still a skinner/leatherworker to this day. I wanted, later, to switch him to engineering, but by that point I'd already gotten several epic LW patterns that I just didn't want to give up. Plus, he had drums, which were the coolest thing Blizz ever gave leatherworkers (at least till they nerfed them).
Months and months of play later, well after BC had come out, I realized all the other character slots could be put to good use. Thus began my altoholism.
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