Tunnels of Doom

It was a weird week in World of Warcraft for me, and one of the least weird things was running around all over the place on Sunday shapeshifted into a purple bunny.

LOL Healz

I did a lot of queuing with my Shaman and managed to get him up to level 26 by the end of the week though sadly the RNG managed to dump me into Stormwind Stockades something like five times, four of them in a row. It’s fairly impressive how different each run can be depending on the makeup of the party. For example we had one Warrior tank who was actually overpowered for the instance (level 30 I believe) and must have specific-queued for it so he could get some achievement or another, but at level 30 he was not quite soloing it which made the whole run a cakewalk for me since I basically kept Earth Shield up on him and /autofollow’d the rest of the way. It didn’t even matter what the DPS were doing since they were behind our level 30 tank in every category anyway.

But a couple of runs of the same dungeon later we had a Paladin tank who wasn’t familiar with it and pulled too much, lost aggro to the Hunter, kited the bosses around corners and out of my line of sight and generally wiped the party in spite of my best efforts to keep people alive. And by “best efforts,” I mean me casting four instances of Healing Surge, realizing it was hopeless and then spamming the party chat with my “Hope you like ghost running, chumps!” macro. As a matter of fact, the worst part about the Stockades (for Horde players) is that the stupid graveyard is way out in the middle of Elwynn Forest and since no one on Horde side spends much time in Stormwind it’s difficult to find your way back to the instance entrance to retrieve your corpse. It really only matters for the healers (of course) since once we’re in we can resurrect the rest of the party and naturally I was one of the n00bs who couldn’t figure out how to get back into the dungeon which meant about a twenty minute delay in getting back to the fighting, during which I endured a endless barrage of insults which were all less-than-clever variants of “You suck.” I didn’t feel it was necessary to point out more than once that if there hadn’t been some serious mistakes made in the first place, the run would not have been required.

The best run of the week was through Blackfathom Deeps, which is an instance I’m usually not crazy about but in this case it happened to land in that sweet spot for the whole party where it was challenging but not so much so that we were wiping more than a ragboy at a carwash. As long as everyone did their jobs we were fine—and you can interpret that to mean “as long as I kept the heals coming the bosses and trash would go down eventually.” Normally epically long dungeons irritate me (unless they’re awesome, like Stratholme) but in this case it was so much fun I didn’t mind and it was even in that terrific stage of level progression where, with the help of plentiful XP boosters, level ups come fast and furious. I dinged twice in the course of the run and I think if we’d cleared every last trash mob out I would have gotten a third level.

For a while there I was able to queue so quickly that I didn’t even have time to visit the trainer in between dungeons and went through a couple of instances without some spells I should have had. But, that was early in the week. By the time I hit level 25 the progression slowed and oddly so did the queues. I tend to log onto the Shaman after I’ve at least gotten my daily Heroic run done with the Mage which means often it’s toward the end of my play time and for various reasons it seemed that once I made it to level 25 I kept having to drop out of queues because something would come up and pull me away from the game, often because the 4-8 minutes I had gotten accustomed to waiting was stretching into 15-20 minutes. It’s interesting what a difference that makes in low-level dungeons: If you queue for under ten minutes and then drop into a relatively short instance like RFC or the Stockades, in ten more minutes you can be halfway done with the entire run and the whole process from entering the queue to collecting the final loot and teleporting out takes less than half an hour. On the other hand, a fifteen minute queue followed by even a medium-length instance (say, Shadowfang Keep) which takes 30-45 minutes since there are no skippable bosses easily doubles the time commitment to an hour. The main takeaway from this is that you can’t really be sure when you hit the “Enter Queue” button what you’re getting yourself into which is not really the case with the endgame dungeons (however, as I’ll discuss in a minute, those have their own variance potentials).

The main source of weirdness with the Shaman at this point is that I’ve been so focused on profession leveling that I keep outpacing my current game level. For instance, I’m running dungeons like Deadmines and Wailing Caverns which, when they drop cloth, has mobs dropping Linen Cloth while I’m needing Silk Cloth at least and can actually make use of Mageweave Cloth already. Most of my profession speed leveling has been done via farming with my 85 toons and copious use of the Guild Bank but now I’m wondering if my haste isn’t doing me a disservice because the whole point of choosing the dungeon-farmable professions was so I could do my own farming via the instances I was going to use for leveling. I keep hoping eventually I’ll catch up with myself, but now I’m wondering if that won’t really start happening until BC territory.

Oh, You Again

Since I’m trying to do What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been with my Warrior, I tend to switch over to him whenever it’s a World Event week. Last week was Noblegarden, WoW’s Easter equivalent, and I spent the majority of the early week running around early zones collecting a zillion eggs. The fear I always have with these events is that there will end up being that one achievement I can’t get that prevents me from scoring the Violet Proto-Drake. Since it’s annual for each event, the only option would be to wait a year to try again.

Getting back on the Warrior was kind of weird at first because I keep running around in semi-decked out tanking gear most of which is middling quality at best for a guy who has been level 85 for most of five months. I say I’m a tank but I only tank on low-level instances with guildies and the challenge there is minimal plus it does nothing to help my gear. So I’m running around getting these eggs, feeling like it’s maybe pointless because who cares about a weenie non-tank even if he has a really sweet dragon to ride on. Then I start getting hit up by not just one but several random guild members who all want something from me because I’m a Blacksmith.

Now the first guy was very annoying in that he wanted me to drop everything I was doing and get him this blacksmithing stuff, not the least of which is the Elementium Earthguard, a shield it took me weeks to make for myself. I tell him I may be willing to do it for him but I’d have to run some heroics to get the Chaos Orbs because I don’t have any on hand. He keeps wanting to buy them off the AH for me and I can’t seem to make people understand that they’re BoP, visible to professionals who can use them only. No one else can even roll on them. No one seems to accept this. Anyway, he asks when I can run a heroic. I tell him I was thinking about trying one that weekend but he’ll have to wait at least until that evening because I don’t have time to run one just then. He keeps badgering me about it asking for times and schedules and everything until I finally make him some PvP plate just to shut him up (using my own mats of course) and log off out of frustration.

Later I find out that he was kicked out of the guild for driving everyone nuts with his begging for loot from all the professionals. Naturally I felt pretty good about having wasted mats on a loser like that. Then just as I’m licking my wounds I get two other people in the guild asking me for the same exact types of items. I tell them the same thing: I’ll try a heroic soonish but I need to make sure I get Noblegarden done. They’re not convinced and try to talk me into changing my plans, or, (sigh) buying Chaos Orbs themselves. I even get the guilt trip from one of them because he bought some mats sight unseen that I offered to use from my own reserves and he comes back with “Well great. Now I just spent all that gold on these for nothing.” Gee. Sorry for trying to be helpful buddy. I assure him if it means that much I’ll take the mats off his hands if—and only if—I get the orb and can make him what he wants.

So at last I decide to bite the bullet and run a heroic. Oh. My. Word. It was such an ordeal. It was one of those runs where nothing goes smoothly, the tank ragequits several times, we wipe on easy bosses because people don’t know the fight, the healer disconnects in the middle of a trash pull and we all have to pop every cooldown in the book to barely squeak out alive and on and on. It took forever. It was barely any fun. But I got the Chaos Orb.

Naturally, the very last thing in the world I wanted to do with it was just give it to some random guild dweeb. So I kept it. Mercifully it took me so long to get the thing that the people had mostly stopped asking about it by that point but I did have one of them ask about some swords I made for him so I hope he got the other gear he wanted in a different way but, man. I remember why I don’t like heroics with the Warrior. Melee DPS is blah and in heroics doubly so.

In between all this I was still collecting egg after egg and getting really sick of it until finally I had all the achievements for Noblegarden except this one: Shake Your Bunny-Maker. Now, most of them weren’t too tough but by the end of the week I had spent a couple of hours each at the Alliance camp in Tol Barad (which is where I got the other achievements earlier where you had to find specific classes or races), in Dalaran and doing flyovers of low-level Alliance zones (risking PvP death, by the way) and I still couldn’t find a stupid female Gnome. I know a lot of other Horde players on my server had trouble with the female Dwarf, too, but I lucked into that one since some kind soul parked a level 85 female Dwarf Hunter on top of the fountain in Razor Hill just so people could put bunny ears on her and get their achievements that way. A welcome gesture by a Hordie with an Ally alt, for sure, but not as helpful to me since I actually saw several Dwarves during my scavenger hunt but no stupid Gnomes. I’m sure if it had been a Gnome in RH the Dwarves would have been scarce because that’s the way it goes. But these are the kinds of achievements I forsee being my downfall in my quest for that stupid Proto-Drake.

I just hope I’ll find the time to keep trying later in the week.

All told, it was an eventful week. It started off by me queuing into heroic Stonecore with the Mage for the first time and at first it looked like it was going to be One Of Those Runs because we wiped on Corborus due to the fact that I didn’t know I was supposed to AoE the little crystals he spits. We did take him down on the second try only to have the party wipe again just inside Corborus’ tunnel on the Crystalspawn Giants because… well, I’m not really sure because I was still back on Corborus’ corpse trying to decide if there was any way I could work around the Bind on Pickup aspect of Phosphorescent Ring so I could mail it to my Warrior, who I believe is wearing a couple of twigs of Peacebloom twisted together in his ring slot. By the time I got to the scene of the crime, Marg Helgenberger was already there, making darkly ironic quips through artificially inflated, oh-so-shiny lips and all I could do was pop Invisibility and wait for Roger Daltrey.

I fully expected the tank and everyone to ragequit after that but surprisingly we carried on and headed down to fight Slabhide who is notorious in regular Stonecore for being a) a really boring fight and b) having middling loot. On heroic Slabhide isn’t that much more exciting but when we brought him down suddenly Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake popped up and my breath caught. This thing has a ludicrously low drop rate (~0.9%) and, well, I know I haven’t been playing for that long compared to people who have been in since launch (or before) but the truth is it was really starting to weigh heavily on my conscious that I didn’t have a cooler mount than the janky Swift Purple Wind Rider that any Tom, Dick or Garrosh can pick up for a few gold at Wind Riderz R’ Us. It didn’t seem possible that a gift like this would land in my lap so I hit “Need” without thinking about it.

This was immediately followed by a sharp stab of guilt as I wondered if it etiquette dictated that these kinds of drops were “Greed” only or something. Fortunately my panic was short-lived as I saw everyone else in the party select “Need” as well, at which point my heart sank. Nuffle has never been kind to me and the odds of even seeing this drop were incredibly low, to think that I might actually have a chance to…

I actually didn’t even get to finish my lamentation before I saw the magical words: “You have received Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake.” I was so stunned I didn’t even think to check to see what my roll had been (it wasn’t 100 because I would have gotten the achievement). I do know that the tank rolled a 1, because he was so bitter about it. He had us in stitches complaining that there ought to be a new achievement that popped up whenever you rolled a 1 on a “Need” roll for an epic loot item. He even had a great name for it: Epic Fail. I thought it was winning, but it was easy to be amused because I got the drake.

And oh how sweet she is.

It Has How Many Buttons?

The other exciting event was that my Razer Naga MMO mouse finally arrived (sort 0f) via UPS. Actually, for the second time in as many years I managed to deliver something ordered online to the wrong address: In both cases to addresses that I lived at previously. At least I don’t move very far so since our old apartment is only about ten minutes up the road I was able to drive over and knock on the door and implore a kind but bewildered old stranger to give me back my package.

My original intent behind the purchase was to have the 12 grid buttons act as Yet Another Hotbar. In reality the grid actually mimics either the number row on the keyboard or the number pad on the right side of an extended keyboard which is not exactly what I thought it would be but the mouse is phenomenal for other reasons.

For one thing the feel of the mouse is spectacular, and Razer’s worksmanship is top notch. There is an intentional slope from the right side to the left on the top surface which both permits the button grid enough room for the buttons to be a comfortable size (I was a little afraid they might be too small for my clumsy thumb) as well as forcing that thumb to over in a relaxed position over the pad. The scroll wheel has a great soft click to it and the left and right mouse buttons are snappy and responsive. There are two rocker-type buttons along the top ridge of the left click button which I like because they work better when mapped to zoom-in, zoom-out than the mouse wheel and that frees the wheel to hold a primary nuke spam macro (which I am totally going to use as soon as I have enough time in-game to fiddle with the macro editor instead of, you know, playing the game).

The 5600dpi laser is comically overpowered as the mouse is so responsive at the highest setting it takes the sort of slow precision usually reserved for disarming unstable explosive devices to click on anything smaller than 600×600 pixels, but at about 60% the mouse is manageable but wildly responsive (so much so that I get kind of sad when I have to use my laptop’s built in mouse or a standard USB cheapo) which makes mouselooking as natural as glancing over your shoulder.

Now, as for that button grid, the other down side is that the included Naga WoW Add-on is not compatible with my hotbar manager of choice, Bartender 4. My only option was to disable Bartender and I was reluctant to do that which meant the custom mapping wasn’t going to work very well. So what I ended up doing was adding a previously neglected vertical hotbar and assigning what had previously been awkward two-modifier hotkeys to it to do things that wear out my fingers otherwise but are now as easy as my primary spells mapped to 1, 2, 3, etc. Basically I have Alt-Shift-NumpadN mapped to my mounts, fishing skill, archaeology’s Survey and other non-combat-critical spells, menus and abilities that make life in Azeroth easier and quicker without having to re-learn how to play all over (again).

So far I’m very happy with the purchase and my next step is that on my Paladin alt (where I haven’t set up a Bartender profile) I plan to actually try disabling the Bartender and using the Razer AddOn to see how it works.

For I Will Fear No Heals

The other round of excitement was that I finally hit level 15 on the Shaman and grew sufficient stones to try my hand at an instance in the healer role. It was a bit of a rocky start as we entered Ragefire Chasm and I fumbled with the base mechanics of selecting friendly units as opposed to enemies and let the tank die during an early pull. There was some talk that I may have fallen asleep but I assure you it was false and I was awake and alert the whole time, just woefully inept. I did explain that it was my first healing run and they calmly re-adjusted their expectations and things went much smoother after that. It helps a lot that the low-level instances are really quite easy to do and often there is not much healing to be done anyway (especially for certain tanks with self-healing abilities).

As usual with alts a lot of my early problems seem to revolve around a tendency I have to skim ability descriptions and miss key facets of them which causes confusion when things don’t behave like I expect them to. Exhibit A in the case of the Shaman is Earth Shield which my brief glace over indicated was some kind of pushback mitigation effect: Nice but sort of situationally useful. Turns out at low levels it’s a core healing ability since, when cast on the tank, it does a lot of the healing for you which leaves you free to pick up the loot off the dead bodies since the party will never, ever, ever wait for you to loot corpses before executing the next pull but will totally blame you for any kind of wipe or death incurred as a result of you filling your pockets instead of facilitating the Rogue’s utter insistence to stand in the frakking fire for the whole fight.

By the way, did I mention I now understand why all those healers I’ve grouped with over the last several months were so touchy and defensive?

For something that I thought was going to be utterly boring I’m surprised to find myself really enjoying playing a healer. My strategy to level exclusively through instances is working pretty well so far (it really helps that I have a 35% XP boost from my heirloom set and my guild has the Fast Track perk which means I’m earning 45% extra XP all the time) especially since it means I rarely have to wander far from the profession vendors and trainers. Occasionally it has been tempting to go farm mats, especially for Tailoring but I figured I have level 85s who can use their swift flying mounts to do that even better and faster so at one point I sent my Mage over into the Redridge mountains to blow up gnolls and pick up green items to disenchant plus cloth to send over to assist with the Tailoring grind. I almost felt bad for the gnolls though since they kept respawning and it took barely a flick of my wrist to light them on fire; it was taking more time to loot their corpses than to create the corpses to begin with. The respawn rate made it seem like they just kept sending more and more soldiers after me in utter futility and I felt like I needed to track down their leader and have a friendly chat with him:

Mage: Hey, you know, I can do this all day. It’s not even denting my mana pool.
Gnoll Tribe Leader: Grah! We will never surrender!
Mage: Hey, is that garment you’re wearing made of… wool?

For a bit there I was questioning whether it was really such a great idea for me to be doing Tailoring on the Shaman since it almost seemed like Leatherworking would have been a better choice owing to the fact that I actually wear leather armor. I knew it was weird when I started actually wearing some of the cloth armor I was making because stat-wise cloth tends to be heavier on the healer-friendly Intellect and Spirit than leather which I presume is often laden with Agility because that stat benefits Hunters, Rogues and DPS Shaman who all wear leather. But as I’ve gone on I’ve realized that Tailoring was the right way to go because it ties nicely into Enchanting, giving me a steady supply of level-appropriate greens to disenchant for dust and shards. I have been a bit annoyed to discover that later Tailoring recipes call for specific mats that are outside the purview of collecting cloth off dead dungeon denizens (like leather which is required for a lot of useful Tailored items in the Expert level) which has made me consider adding another alt to my growing rotation (my Skinning/Leatherworking Hunter). However, it’s starting to feel like I’m a player (playa?—I’m not certain of the parlance) whose gotten himself in over his head trying to juggle too many booty calls at once and is now afraid they’re all going to find out about each other at once and form some kind of lynch mob. Only in my case it’s not a matter of anyone finding anything out but of my brain exploding from trying to remember the mechanics of five or six classes at once and it’s not a lynch mob but an angry wife who will call Blizzard and tell them to put me on the account blacklist because I’m getting twitchy if I don’t log in for longer than 24 hours and attend to my menagerie of alts.

Um. What was I talking about?

Right. Professions.

Professions

The other minor accomplishment on the professions front was that I finally worked my Paladin over to Silvermoon City and found the trainer for Inscription so I could mill some of the herbs I’d been sending in bulk from my World Explorer farming runs. Incidentally, I did finish up that achievement early in the week since I only had a handful of zones left to go. It was kind of nice to at last get a title on the Mage but it seemed very overshadowed in significance to the drake acquisition. Anyway, i suppose I should have realized that low-level Inscriptioning was more about creating meh scrolls than awesome glyphs but I don’t have any toons at the moment who are really dying for glyphs so it’s not much of a problem yet. The bigger issue is going to be finding the motivation to level the Paladin sufficiently to get to that stage since thus far (ahem—I guess it is only level 5) she’s kind of a snoozefest. Incidentally, when my yet-unnamed band puts out it’s first album, it will be titled “She’s Kind of a Snoozefest.” Part of me wonders if I wouldn’t be more inclined to get further with the professions I’ve marked out for her if I did them on a Death Knight which at least could avoid a lot of the early grinding to the dungeon queue stage and just profession level to a pretty advanced stage without having to do any level grinding at all. It’s worth considering especially since I’m already sick of watching that grinchy little elf do her stupid spin jump. What is that? There is no practical reason to ever spin on your vertical axis when you jump in the air unless you’re engaged in an Olympic competition of some sort. And even then, it’s only worth—what?—half a point?

I do need to make a decision though because what typically stops me from making progress and/or doing things in the right way is my disdain for re-doing work that I’ve already done (like farming the same number of Peaceblooms for ink milling). Granted I need to go farm more low-level herbs anyway since I didn’t have as many as I thought but still. The point being that before I go ahead and add Jewelcrafting to the Paladin I need to decide once and for all if she’s going to be a legitimate alt or someone I abandon because it turns out I didn’t really want to be tied down to a family after all and my wanderlust has gotten the better of me, resulting in several decades of tragic, drug-fueled consequences and material for a half dozen heartbroken country and/or rebellious riot grrl albums.

What? Oh, no. Never mind that. I was thinking of a different interaction. In this case I’d just mail all her bank slots to a different toon and delete her. But I would write a heartbroken riot grrl album about it, because that sounds pretty awesome to me.

I can summarize last week with the following three phrases: World Explorer effort; Dungeon queues; Alt mania.

World Explorer Effort

Since I’ve decided that the Mage is my main, I figured that I wanted at least a few of the achievements I had been pretty happy about getting on the Warrior, most notably among them the World Explorer achievement for uncovering all of the world map. I did it organically with the Warrior, uncovering lots of the zones on foot as I quested through them and then later after I was past level 60 I did the entirety of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor the hard way: On land mount. It was pre-Cataclysm so it was the only option. But it took forever.

Getting this achievement with a flying mount is decidedly less satisfying although so much less annoying that I wouldn’t ever want to do it the old way again. Even now it’s aggravating to traverse the whole zone and realize as you get to the last uncharted segment that there is actually this one little spot way back on the other side of the zone that you missed and have to spend all of two minutes flying back over there to get it. When I did this on foot, those two minutes were something like 15-20.

But don’t let me fool you into thinking it’s going 10 times quicker this time around. If it had simply been a matter of getting the achievement(s), I probably would have procrastinated on the whole scene for a while longer. However, I had a couple of projects I wanted to work on that happened to fall in line with flying around the game world for days on end. One was that I wanted to collect a stack (20 each) of every gatherable herb in the game. There is no achievement for this, which is probably part of why I wanted to do it, and no real practical reason to do it either since the effort put into such an endeavor would mean I’d be so reluctant to actually use those herbs for anything that if the need arose for any of them, I’d end up going out and re-farming the mats. Still, it’s the kind of insane self-set goal that predates official achievements and the kind of thing that I used to do all the time in video games so I liked the randomness of it so much that it simply had to be done.

In a related self-assignment I did some research and decided I wanted to try and collect all the Alchemy recipes in the game. Now many of them are random world drops which means in some cases heavy farming of particular mobs and that’s not really intriguing to me right now. But there are a bunch that are sold by vendors scattered around Azeroth and Outland which I figured would be easy enough to work on while I did the Explorer thing. It actually turns out that this isn’t as simple as it sounds because there are only a rare few vendors who always offer unique recipes for sale. Some of them (like this one jerk in Feralas) do sell the recipes but do so on a mysterious internal cooldown so basically you have to just keep checking back with them to see if they have the one copy at that particular moment. It seems like many of the non-trainer recipes have been culled from the game at this point but of those that remain a remarkable number of them—especially from Burning Crusade and beyond—are faction recipes which mean you have to rep grind with the faction to get to some specific level before the vendor will sell you the item. Now eventually I’d like to work on reputation with all the older factions but right now it’s more pertinent to focus on Cataclysm factions which offer me more than just novelty low-level recipes and vanity items.

The other reason for exploring the world was so I could get started with Archaeology because I’m foolish enough to tempt the RNG deity to try to get the Recipe: Vial of the Sands. It’s such a ridiculous thing: You have to build Archaeology up until you can create Canopic Jars, which are randomly generated  from creating Tol’Vir artifacts (along with six other possible common items and six rares… I can’t find any numbers for this but if you figure the seven commons make up 94% of the creates and the rares are 1% each that gives you about a 13% chance of getting the Jar). Then the jar itself drops the recipe only 3% of the time at which point you still have to collect the mats to make the Vial itself: No mere trifle since it involves 12 of the one-per-day Truegold plus eight vendor-sold Sands of Time which run (base amount) 3,000g each and a Pyrium-Laced Crystalline Vial going for 5,000g. That’s not even counting the easy part, which is 16 material-intensive Flasks and eight Deepstone Oil.

But, oh, what that foolishness can bring.

So the plan was, fly around, uncover the map, gather herbs, pick up recipes where possible and hit all the Archaeology dig sites. Oh, and stay in the queue as much as possible. By the end of the week I’d finished Northrend, Outland and Kalimdor and had a load of herbs and about 100 skill points in Archaeology. I also picked up a few of the missing Alchemy recipes but not as many as I’d hoped. Still, pretty good I felt for a week’s work.

Dungeon Queues

I’ve been focusing on Heroic dungeons now that I’m building my confidence in them. At the end of the week I only had The Stonecore, The Vortex Pinacle and The Deadmines left to run through which has awarded me some good reputation and Valor points (arguably the whole point of Heroics) but I’ve been disappointed in the drops so far. I did get Blinders of the Follower on my first trip through Shadowfang Keep which was a minor upgrade to my Helm of the Typhonic Beast which I had picked up in Halls of Origination on regular. It even has the same model so it was literally just a small stats boost (and a bit of a money sink since I had to re-buy the faction enchant from Hyjal and pick up new gems for the sockets).

I actually don’t mind so much that the drops have been weak because I like I said, it’s all VP for core upgrades now but I do wish that Throne of the Tides would come up more often because it’s the only place to get a non-raid drop ranged slot item (a wand in the case of a Mage) that isn’t total pants. Even the alternate dungeon drop from Grim Batol (which at least has a non-Heroic 85 variant) isn’t really good for Mages since it’s heavy on Spirit and Mastery, neither of which are that great for me. There is one in Deadmines I could use, but that hasn’t even come up yet. I could live with no drops for two weeks as long as when I do queue into The Deadmines or TotT I get a chance to roll on an upgrade. I’m sick of my wand being my last ucommon holdout. Bleh.

A quick trek through the new Heroics:

• Shadowfang Keep: I like the non-heroic version okay but I realized this time through that SFK is too cramped for my liking. All the narrow corridors keep me from zooming out to a comfortable level and as a result I struggle with the camera which affects my DPS. Heroic felt very similar to the regular with more health on everyone and a few mandatory interrupts thrown in. Mostly I felt it was memorable for the loot drop I received.
• Grim Batol: Still one of my favorite dungeons even after I’ve run it dozens of times on two different toons. Heroic bosses in GB are much more exciting than on regular: Forgemaster Throngus’ sheild weapon select is brutal as opposed to merely annoying and the tension trying to get both Faceless Guardians down after Erudax casts Shadow Gale is great fun. Too bad this is the only Heroic at the moment that has zero best 5-man drops for my class.
• Lost City of Tol’Vir: The more I run this instance the less I really enjoy it. To me it just doesn’t have the same dynamic flavor of Grim Batol or even Halls of Origination. It’s not terrible, it’s just “meh” which I think I could find it easier to forgive if parts of it didn’t feel so arbitrarily extended. For example, the Lockmaw and Augh fight seems very out of place in the context of the rest of the run so it’s like they just tossed a random crocolisk boss in for no real reason. The High Prohpet Barim fight likewise seems faked with the shadow realm intermission and then there’s Siamat who you can’t even really fight until you’ve hacked through a few trash adds before the battle even really commences. Plus the trash packs are all yawn-inducing and there’s not enough interesting lore to even make it worthwhile from a role-playing standpoint. All in all, I kind of curl my lip when it comes up in the queue.

Alt Mania

I remembered this week as I began work on a small cross section of alts what had really prompted me to begin in earnest with the Mage. I mean, I could easily have just bucked the expectations and focused on being a really good Fury Warrior but in addition to wanting something new and a ranged DPS I also wanted the two new profession slots. Because there is nothing as great as being your own stable of professionals, and I mean that sincerely.

Currently I’m working on my Troll Restoration Shaman who I intend to be my healer alt, a Blood Elf Paladin and my oft-neglected Tauren Hunter. The Shaman is an Enchanter/Tailor which I figured would work because I intend to level him from 15 on almost exclusively through the Dungeon Finder because I have very little interest in loping around and questing through Kalimdor on both the Hunter and the Shaman at the same time. The Hunter has long been a Skinner/Leatherworker and I do want to do a questing run through Kalimdor with him because I did almost exclusively Eastern Kingdoms as I was going 1-60 on the Mage. That kind of leaves the Paladin out in the cold, although I do know that her professional destiny is Inscription and Jewelcrafting, mostly because it gives me something to do with all those herbs I picked and I have a 525 miner that can feed mats for JC, something that will save me a lot of gold in the long run. I may decide to make her a healer/tank just so I can do the queue thing quickly with her as well because ideally I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time at once on any of these characters. I did also roll a Death Knight because there is some appeal to starting at level 55 and just doing expansion content but I’m giving the Pally a shot. If she gets on my nerves (and so far she shows signs that she may) I’d consider switching.

By the end of the week I was up to level 14 with the Shaman but paused in leveling to get my rested XP built back up and because I found a system for leveling Enchanting and Tailoring fairly quickly. Sadly I do need to build my actual level at some point or the trainer stops letting me advance but I hope that I’ll be able to handle the heals well enough to not get booted out of any instances and I can ride that train to quick queue times up the ladder. So far I’m liking the Shaman pretty well, I do wish though that I’d rolled him as an Orc instead. The Trolls are just so silly looking to me. It would probably take a lot for me to seriously consider doing a race change on the toon but if it turned out I really liked healing and ended up getting him pretty high up level wise, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of the question. In fact, if I hadn’t chosen such a Troll-y sounding name to begin with I might be more inclined to do it; as it is I’d probably want to also do a name change and the grand total for paid services that amount to not just vanity but digital vanity is $35. That’s an awful lot of real money to spend on something fake.

Despite my assumption that ploughing through the last two levels to 85 was not possible in a week, I managed to cap the Saturday after my last post on the Mage thanks in part to hammering on the dungeon queue while my rested XP was as high as possible and then spending the rest of my time blasting through parts of Deepholm and Twilight Highlands just trying to get as much progress as possible each night before I had to turn in.

The only minor pause in my finish-line-in-sight sprint was a brief sojourn into Outland to grab the Transmutation Master quest and the recipe to make Primal Might. I had a lot of the mats to make four of those ridiculous things but even with that being the case I still spent almost 700 gold on additiona

l mats plus I had to run around in a specific location in Nagrand to farm Motes of Air since there weren’t enough of them or the ridiculously overpriced Primal Airs on the auction house to fill in the gaps. Actually, considering what a pain it is to get the mats to make even one Primal Air, I guess I understand why they go for something like 250g. Anyway, I was getting close to maxing out Alchemy at the time and since I was chomping at the bit to make some Truegold I wanted to be sure to give myself every chance to put my 24-hour cooldowns to good use when I started transmuting. I’ve read that the chance to proc a Transmutation Mastery (which gives you a small chance to get extra whatevers when you transmute something) on Truegold is really small, something like 1%. But I figure if that’s the difference between making 100 Truegold in 100 days and making 105 Truegold in that same time, it’s still worth it. Heck, one Truegold on the AH will pay for the mats I used to get Transmutation Master so in theory the first time it procs, I’ve broken even.

One brief side note about Truegold, one thing I didn’t think through ahead of time was the need for all the mats to make the stuff. Granted, I now have an “in” on getting them made for free for the benefit of my Blacksmithing Warrior, but when you need 10 each of Volatile Water, Volatile Air, Volatile Fire and three Pyrium Bars, that gets either pricey or time-consuming quick. The other factor is that most of this is all intended to facilitate Blacksmithing the crafted epics for my Warrior, but not only do all of them require Truegold (and not just one) but they also need at least one Chaos Orb. And you can

only get those by being a maxed professional that uses Chaos Orbs (I think Tailors and Leatherworkers use them as well as Blacksmiths). Sadly that means I need to start running Heroics with my Warrior again.

In fact, it occurs to me that I need to establish some kind of schedule now to aid in getting the things done that I’d like to accomplish because while this time my dinging 85 wasn’t accompanied by the same sort of decision paralysis as when I reached that plateau with the Warrior, I did have a moment where I thought, “Oh great, now I’m never going to have time to do everything I want to do with two 85s.” I’m not exactly sure what such a schedule would look like, though I think at minimum I’d need to spend at least a bit of time attending to the Transmutation cooldown so at the very least I was using Transmute: Living Elements even if I didn’t have the mats to do a Truegold that day. I do have some issues with trying to get my hands on those Chaos Orbs, but I figure I can at least try to sell the Truegold cooldown if I don’t have the mats and default to Living Elements if all else fails.

And Now, A Few Notes About Leveling A Second Level Capped Toon

• So it made a bit more sense why I never got into The Vortex Pinnacle with my Warrior: Right now the only regular instances for level 85 characters are Grim Batol, The Lost City of Tol’vir and Halls of Origination. I guess Vortex Pinnacle, Stonecore, Abyssal Maw and Blackwing Caverns are all lower level dungeons that can’t be queued once you hit the cap. I could specifically request those instances still but I’d lose the gold and XP bonus for the first of the day. I did get to experience the ones I missed by queuing with the Mage, however.
• By far the most important thing I did with the Mage that I neglected to do with the Warrior was regularly group for instances throughout the leveling process. I did find out after the fact that you can actually turn off XP earning so those stages like late BC (level 70) and Wrath (level 80) where you blow by the previous end-game content if you leave experience on can be mitigated by stalling yourself out intentionally. That would probably have been a nice thing to know since I never really did much in the way of heroics on BC or Wrath and still have zero raiding experience. I’m not sure how well raiding old content works honestly since I doubt there are tons of groups to be found running Black Temple and to date there isn’t a Looking for Raid tool that I’m aware of. But at least I could have knocked out the heroics because finding challenges that can’t be overcome by grinding one more level is something you don’t really experience naturally until end-game. I think it forces a better understanding of the class you pick and that’s something that I would have preferred not to have to do trial-and-error at the endgame level.
• Oddly enough I ended up doing the same basic rotation for leveling from 80-85 that I did with the Warrior, which is to say Hyjal to Deepholm to Twilight Highlands. Vashj’ir is still just a creepy, creepy place for me and Uldum didn’t seem at the time to offer the same benefits from an Alchemical perspective. Because I was also injecting some dungeon runs and using a couple of XP boosters I was only able to actually finish Hyjal (on the Warrior I also completed Deepholm and nearly all of Twilight Highlands). I tried to do different questing paths by intention on the Mage and mostly succeeded but somehow from around level 78 on I had a hard time breaking the original mold I’d set.

What Is A Main?

So, some stuff happened between when I started writing this Edition up for last week and when it’s actually being finished. The upshot is that I played a lot of WoW last weekend due to being ill and basically incapable of anything else. Even with a WoW-a-thon, I didn’t play nearly as much as I would have had I been feeling well because a lot of time was spent sleeping or lying in abject misery on the floor of the bathroom. I won’t bore you with the details.

However, from a gaming perspective nearly every minute of the extra time I spent playing was logged on the Mage. And I have to say that at this point I have very little interest in playing the game as the Warrior which means practically speaking I’ve switched mains from the Warrior to the Mage. If you recall, I kind of expected this to happen because from the beginning the Mage game just felt so much more like what I wanted to be doing. I do like having the Warrior as an alt, and that’s really what he feels like: A tanking, blacksmithing, mining, bank alt. And I’m actually ecstatic to have two profession-capped 85s because the money-generating options alone are enough to make the time investment in capping two characters feel worthwhile (enough so that I admit to thinking, “If two is great, how awesome would three be?”) not to mention the outlet that having two dissimilar roles provides to prevent frustration or repetition from setting in.

Not that burning things alive as a fire Mage has gotten anywhere close to repetitive. But I know that the Mage is my main primarily because when I log on to play, that’s who I want to work on, that’s who I want to progress more than any other toon in my character list. I can certainly see the rewards that could come from playing a tank and I’m intrigued by the sort of side game that healing seems to represent but my (ahem) burning passion for now is to kill things with fire and I get no end of joy in the execution of that desire. I am, mainly, a Pyromancer.

Please and Tank You

My one brief departure from the Mage was a guild run on Naxxramas which I filled in on my Warrior since they were looking for a second tank. In truth it was pretty silly to think the roles mattered anyway; I don’t think any of us could have necessarily soloed the place, but it could have been easily five-manned by even halfway competent level 85s (/me raises hand) with, perhaps, the exception of a boss fight or two. I actually didn’t get to see the Kel’Thuzad fight at the end (and missed the achievement) because I had to step away but up until I left I had an enjoyable enough time.

The interesting thing about doing a low-level 10-man instance is that it gave me a chance to sort of casually observe the difference between my own threat-generation ability and that of the main tank who was more of what I think of as a full-time tank. In short, I’m incapable of maintaining aggro off a decently skilled tank. I’m not sure what this indicates in terms of my ability to be effective as a tank in, say, 5-man dungeons—possibly nothing—but it did make my presence in the dungeon as the Warrior feel sort of incidental.

What the effort did provide me was a sort of unexpected thirst for some additional raiding. I mentioned above that I’d be interested in doing low-level raids at-level on an alt but I think I’d also be just as happy doing some casual raiding with the Mage in either old content or newer stuff. I need some additional gear before I’m Cataclysm-raiding ready (see below) but I feel like the longer-form, heavy group dynamic content is the pinnacle of PvE and that seems to be what I’m really looking for. My primary concern is time commitment: I certainly don’t have the capacity to do hardcore raiding (from what I can tell most hardcore raid teams do at least three nights a week, typically three or four hours per session) and even agreeing to a single late-night weekly raid session has potential to cause conflict but given an understanding enough group I could probably make that work for a while.

I Got the Gear / I’m Heroic

Other than my ranged weapon slot, which has been a difficult one to fill on both my 85 toons, I managed to replace all my Cataclysm questing greens with level 333 or better superior blues in the two weeks since I dinged. Some of them I picked up from the Justice Quartermaster, others I got off instance boss drops (because I’ve been running a ton of dungeons lately with the Mage) and I even managed to fill a couple of slots with epic purples through the reputation vendors in both Hyjal and Uldum.

Getting Revered with Ramkahen hasn’t been easy since unlike Hyjal the major quest chains in Uldum don’t all funnel reputation into the faction (I went ahead and finished the Harrison Jones questline anyway while I was waiting for dungeon queues because it was fun and I never did get around to it on the Warrior) and unlike Dragonmaw out in Twilight Highlands there aren’t many reputation dailies which means your best bet for faction grinding is wearing that hideous purple and gold tabard into all the dungeons. In fact, I’m still wearing that eyesore now because I want the purple sandals you get from that vendor at Exalted but I’m so ready to ditch that tabard for something a little less garish.

Anyway so I got my average item level up to 333+ and dipped a pinky toe into heroic dungeons. It’s funny how every time I try something new in this game I get all skittish at first and in a couple of weeks I’m spouting off like I know everything there is to know about it. But predictably I did very badly in my first heroic as the Mage: It ended up being Blackrock Caverns which I’m not that familiar with since I only ran it once or twice while leveling up and as a result I died a lot. I did have a guild member help me out a bit on ventrillo finally but it took quite a long time to make it through the whole thing. Note to self: When Rom’Ogg chains you, attack the chains.

It took me a few days to build up the courage to try again, this time without the aid of helpful guildies, and I got thrown into Throne of the Tides which is another instance I don’t have that much experience with (although I did have it come up in randoms a bit more than BRC). Fortunately in this case the rest of the group was very good and despite me flailing around a bit, as long as I kept up with the tank I was able to avoid embarrassing myself too badly. My next attempt ended up being Halls of Origination and my first thought was “Oh, finally—I know these fights!” Sadly my training did little to help me and I floundered again since for the most part the bosses have the same abilities they just execute things a bit differently (and have a ton more health).

So far I’ve enjoyed the heroics: I like feeling that thrill of the challenge. To contrast I ran HoO on regular the night before I did it on Heroic. I was pulling 12K DPS and the other party members said I was “carrying” them (one Hunter in the group could barely manage to maintain 3,000 DPS as a level 85 which I thought was odd). When I did the same dungeon on Heroic one of the other damage dealers happened to also be a fire Mage and he was dropping about 13K DPS on heroic level bosses while I was doing a bottom-of-the-stack 8,000 or so. Now some of that could have been gear (he was rocking at least partial Tier 11s) but I suspect there was at least equal amounts of talent involved in the difference as well. But the result of this humbling was that I vowed to become better and keep grinding those heroics for the Valor Points I now need to max out my gear as much as possible.