Tunnels of Doom

I made it to level 80 last week on my Mage, though that feat owes more to some early-Saturday insomnia (I was up before four in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep despite having to work at 7:30) which allowed me to get a solid four hours straight of just grinding as much XP as I could get. My experience with the Wrath leveling content, aside from the dungeons which I’ll talk about later, was pretty similar on both the Warrior and the Mage: The early levels—up through about 73—were handled pretty smoothly by the starting zones and the secondary zones are all interesting but the progression seems to really slow down as both Dragonblight (done with the Warrior) and Grizzly Hills (the Mage) involve a lot of travel from quest hub to activity destination and back and forth. And then at about 75.5 or 76 there’s this kind of dead zone where the only real level-specific questing is in Sholazar Basin, which I did as the Warrior but couldn’t seem to get interested in a second time around. I ended up doing comparatively low-level stuff in Zul’Drak until I finally got to 77 at which point I hightailed it to Storm Peaks, ran through the K3-to-Temple of Storms via the vyrkul chain and then sort of ran out of quests and decided to finish it up in Icecrown.

I have to say that upon a second visit I think Blizzard really killed it in Icecrown. The questing there is simply phenomenal with so many different lore pieces clashing, the multi-faceted conflict that exists there with shaky alliances, enemy-of-my-enemies, mortal foes, conflicting motivations, outstanding NPC characterizations and plenty of variety to the quests, the mobs and the stories. I love a lot of what they did in Cataclysm and while the early levels of the new Undead progression are some of the strongest in the game I think if I had to pick a single favorite zone to quest in, I’d have to say Icecrown. My one complaint with it is that they seem to have packed too much questing into it for the level range it serves because while neither time did I devote the entire three levels from 77-80 to that zone, it seemed like by the time I leveled past it there was an awful lot of unfinished questing left over, and I had completed dozens of quests in there each time.

Oddly, when I hit 80 I had a strong desire to go into a holding pattern for a bit. My daily diet of one Lich King random dungeon had resulted in a lot of repeats so there were plenty of grey spots left on the list for Northrend Dungeonmaster. I wanted to get the dungeons via LFD since coordinating non-endgame dungeon runs with the guild is a hit-or-miss prospect most of the time, but from what I can tell the Wrath dungeons fall of LFD at level 81. This is especially a bummer for the Icecrown Citadel instances, which there are three that interconnect as sort of a quest chain, and while they don’t count for the achievement I did want to check them out anyway. At first my item level was too low because I had stopped really caring about gear toward the end and was just using whatever was easiest so I did a few quests in Hyjal and picked a couple bargains off the AH to stack up my level a bit and then I did the Specific Dungeons treatment.

The problem with that is you have to be patient while you’re waiting for an instance run on the one you’re looking for to open up so the queue times can be up to an hour or more, depending on how close you are to the achievement. Usually during this time I’d be questing but I didn’t want to do that in case I accidentally leveled up before I finished all the dungeons. Finding enough time to play so that I can reasonably wait out an hour queue and then have enough time to run the dungeon itself isn’t easy so once I got to this point I switched off to my training Warrior, the worgen, just when I only had a few minutes at a time to play.

While I didn’t quite make it to instancing level (that would be level 15) before the week was out, I did ding level 14 and got out of Gilneas’ starting zone, which I believe was an Alliance first for me. It’s very weird to play as an Alliance character after so long as being basically exclusively Horde. Every time the quest givers would say something disparaging about the Undead or Orcs I’d get all indignant, like “Hey! That’s my homies you’re talking about!” It’s a weird dynamic. I have, however, been pleasantly surprised that as yet there haven’t been any contiguous annoyances stemming from re-playing as a Warrior. Part of it may be that unlike the previous incarnation, Victory Rush allows the Warrior to now be less of a fight-stop-eat-fight proposition in leveling zones and that makes a huge difference in cutting out some of the annoyingly disjointed feeling flow to the early game.

I can’t say that so far I’m learning very much, but I have committed to Protection (it’s my only spec for the next 16 levels) to the extent that I’m not even questing in Battle stance so if I want to Charge, I’m going to need to write a macro to dance back into Battle, Charge, revert to Protection. Which reminds me, I need to do exactly that. At this stage the key difference is the lack of Charge and the heavy use of Shield Slam. I’ve been trying to work on some light tanking tactics as I kill mobs in the world zones but so far what those efforts have made me realize is that I need a better threat management AddOn.

On my Mage I’ve been using the ThreatPlates extension of TidyPlates, which uses the name plate as a graphical indicator of threat. In DPS mode, when you pull aggro on something it’s name plate gets all big and red and angry indicating, you know, stop melting that mob and run you idiot. That’s perfectly suitable when all you care about is a binary “Is this mob going to stomp on my skull right now or not?” But as a tank it’s not just a matter of “Do I have the threat here?” but also “How close am I to losing this aggro?” and “Which of my party members is most at risk right now?” Those are questions that, at least in my current configuration, ThreatPlates doesn’t seem to answer. I guess that means going back to Omen. The other related issue with ThreatPlates (which actually affects it in DPS mode, too) is that the plates are positioned over the unit’s head. For bosses that can sometimes be two, four or ten times taller than the player characters, seeing those name plates sometimes requires pulling the camera into an awkward angle. Mostly it’s no big deal with DPS, especially ranged, since you can often just zoom way out but with tanks you’re right on top of these models intentionally and having to worry about camera angles as well as all the other things tanks have to worry about at once, it’s just too much.

Mage Love

I’m a moron. There is plenty of evidence to support this (right here on this very site, too!) but the most recent example came from learning that up until just last week, I’ve been reading my Mage’s character sheet wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I’ve been very likely making poor, poor decisions about which gear to equip because I’ve been studying the wrong stat lines.

It turns out there are three distinct stat boxes that cover similar info: Basically the effectiveness of your in-combat performance. Many of the stats in each of these categories are the same, just applied to different sorts of actions: Hit, Haste, Critical, Penetration are all common. But the distinction is that one box covers melee attacks (swinging an equipped weapon), one covers ranged attacks (throwing or shooting with an item in the ranged slot) and spells. As a Mage, I literally never hit anything with my weapon. In fact, my weapon is just a stats booster and serves no mechanical function whatsoever (well, I like to think that I stop and lean up against the staff when I’m tired from lighting all those bad guys on fire). On rare occasions I’ll shoot things with my wand as a ranged attack, but that happens only when I’m silenced and for the most part the wand becomes another stat boosting item as well. So clearly the only box I should be caring about is the Spell stats.

Except I’m a moron, as I mentioned, and I’ve been evaluating the Melee box this whole time. The. Whole. Time. Levels one through eighty I’ve thought the effectiveness of my spells was being conveyed by a series of stats that actually have zero meaning to my character. I think in practice this has probably been most profoundly impacting when it comes to the critical strike rating: Crit for spells is calculated in part by your Intellect primary stat where as Melee uses a combination of Agility and (mostly) the specific crit bonuses you get for some items. I think the end result is that I simply tended to prefer crit-stacked gear over Int gear because it was the only thing that made my Melee crit adjust. For a spec that lives and dies by critical strikes, that meant it sometimes seemed like a big Intellect upgrade that maybe sacrificed some direct critical strike bonuses looked like a poorer quality item than it perhaps really was. This is especially true when you consider that Intellect modifies a lot more than just crit rating as well, it also increases the total mana available, and adds to spell power both of which are very important to Mages. As a result, usually you would always prefer Int to Crit on a piece of gear if all else was equal but I may not have been making that decision correctly until just recently when I realized the error.

At least I figured it out before I started trying to run heroics or anything.

On the upside, I’ve noticed that I’ve begun to regularly be tops on the DPS charts in 5-man dungeons pretty consistently. Oh, occasionally there will be some Hunter or Warlock who comes along and puts out stupid numbers, probably because they’re a fifth or sixth alt and have all the money in the world to buy level Epics. But for the most part I’ve been #1 or at worst #2 for several weeks now and in some cases I’ve been #1 with a freaking bullet, outpacing the damage output of even the runner up (often the tank with their freaky Vengenace-based damage output) by roughly 2:1. I’m sure it says something negative about my personality but I absolutely love it when tanks single me out and say, “Try to hold back a bit because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to keep up with you.”

Dungeoneering

As I was queuing up for the last of the Northrend Dungeonmaster instances I ended up running a couple of high-level Wrath dungeons that I’m likely only to do a handful of times (if I ever return to them) such as The Oculus, Halls of Lightning and Utgarde Pinnacle. I will say that the whole Brann Bronzebeard appearance in Halls of Origination makes a lot more sense once you’ve done the Ulduar quests (and, while I didn’t finish the entire quest chain, the sequence that introduces him in Grizzly Hills helps clarify things a bit as well). I’ve actually done Utgarde Pinnacle a few times with my Warrior for various guild reasons (plus world events) so it wasn’t new to me except for the whole at-level thing. That was one of the instances where I was—ahem—on fire with the DPS output. Of course, doing that means sometimes pulling aggro but whether it was because I had enough Cataclysm greens to make me better geared than most epic-level Mages would have been in end-game Wrath or because I was just hitting my crits like a fiend, it didn’t even matter that I was getting threat because I was burning same-level elites down before they could even reach me after peeling off the tank. Like I said, it probably speaks negative volumes about me, but I loved that I felt like in that moment I could have two-manned the whole thing with just a healer to back me up (that’s actually not true, I’m sure the bosses would have stomped me alone, but it didn’t stop me from feeling that smug at the time).

One other instance I got to try once was Trial of the Champion, a sort of arena-like 5-man instance with epic level loot. It’s kind of a fun deal with several different phases although I thought they didn’t do a very good job in-game of explaining how the first phase where you have to grab a special vehicle-like mount and a specific weapon worked ahead of time. Fortunately I had some patient and helpful random party members but once it got going I thought it was pretty great. I’d actually have been inclined to run that one more than once on purpose if the loot wasn’t trash compared to the stuff you can get easily from regular Cataclysm questing.

In this episode of Wowphiles podcast they discuss a sequence in which a person playing a DPS Warrior selects Need on a tanking chest piece that drops during a PUG and is subsequently kicked for not yielding it to the tank. Now, I don’t exactly agree with the hosts of the show because even a couple of episodes later they have yet to prove that the offending player was simply being gold-greedy. From my perspective I don’t like the idea that if I’m DPSing random instances on my Warrior to farm rep, JP/Valor and tanking gear because I want to eventually transition into Protection spec, I should have to be ready, willing and able to provide a conclusive argument that I do have intentions of using (as opposed to selling) a valuable drop that’s only suitable for an off-spec.

Now, a later episode presented a listener workaround that I like which was that anytime you select “Need” on an item it converts any item won in that fashion into a Bind on Pickup which would prevent the scenario from even arising. I have no problem with this solution but until Blizzard makes it happen, I’m faced with the unpleasant reality that my intended method for gearing up a Cataclysm tank—which certainly may have been flawed at base to begin with—is liable to result in etiquette breaches.

The whole train of thought got me to sit down and evaluate my respective gear sets for both Warrior specs and I realized that because of my procrastination on learning to tank I’ve gotten  to where my Fury equipment set outpaces my Protection set by quite a bit. I got annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a decision then and there which was that I wouldn’t use Fury spec unless specifically requested by some guild members looking for an 85 DPS. At the base of it, I need to start thinking of myself as a Protection tank, not a Fury Warrior who has tanking aspirations.

As a down side, I’m still stuck without any real tanking experience and therefore mostly unable to run dungeons with that toon, so I took the semi-drastic step of rolling a new Warrior. I went ahead with the Alliance tank, a Worgen, mostly because I did want to see the Gilneas starting zone play out but also because I figured as long as I was going to do LFD more or less exclusively I wouldn’t really have to worry too much about the typical ancillary concerns for leveling a toon, especially because I really don’t care what level this Warrior is or achieves, I’m only playing him so long as I have some learning to do when it comes to the Prot spec and Warrior tanking. Once I have the fundamentals down I’m likely to work with guild members on 85 dungeons so I can get comfortable with the broader toolset. The ultimate goal is getting back to where I can run random normals.

I made it to about level 8 on the Worgen so I still have a bit before I even select a talent tree and qualify for LFD. As predicted there is a fairly strong sense of chagrin as I play the new character. The feeling of “been-there-done-that” is pleasantly absent probably because of the new race and starting zone but also because it’s been a long, long time since I was a low-level Warrior and they’ve changed the talents around enough that the progression is also fresh. Instead I can’t shake the feeling that there are no immediate in-game rewards for playing as this toon: Everything I’m doing is to get Paul better at this as opposed to getting the characters better and that’s a unique, non-quantifiable progression. It’s necessary, I think that much is clear now, but it doesn’t make it less annoying.

Mind The Grind/Dungeoneering

I spent most of the week on the Mage, leveling up just into 76 on Sunday evening. I lingered in Grizzly Hills as I did so, both because I really liked the limited questing I did there as I passed through with my Warrior (the quest chains there are really, really good) but also not in small part because I simply cannot listen to Totems of the Grizzlemaw enough, especially the enrapturing Nyckelharpa solo about two minutes into it and then of course the startlingly beautiful climax of the song once the string accompaniment kicks in… gorgeous.

Some of my leveling happened through LFD queuing in which I was just able to squeak out the Outland Dungeonmaster achievement before I leveled past 75 and could no longer queue for the final instance, which in this case was The Arcatraz. As for the final couple dungeons, I thought that Shadow Labs was pretty mediocre, like all the Auchidoun instances in my opinion. Although I felt like 75 was a bit pushing it as something that can be queued: I ran it with a bunch of high-60s players and it was a little rough for the level 67 tank to keep up with my DPS, even though I was holding back quite a lot. Without really trying and keeping my output pretty well throttled to avoid pulling too much aggro I easily doubled the #2 DPS in terms of overall damage output and there were a couple of cases where I practically tanked portions of the instance just by CC and kiting adds. We did wipe a couple of times because I think the lower level players started to rely on me being able to faceroll the whole thing… I can handle some 72 elites if they don’t hit too hard and there aren’t any trash adds to contend with but if the tank and healer both go down, there’s a limit to what I can do. I can’t say for sure if the tank was over-pulling and expecting me to make up for it by burning the mobs before either he or the healer got overwhelmed, but it felt like it at times.

The Arcatraz I thought was actually pretty strong, at least as good as The Botanica, and I liked the final boss fight with the weirdo lunatic releasing all the most dangerous imprisoned beasties. I laughed out loud when the gnome popped out and the guy was like, “What? That’s not a dangerous creature!” I was overpowered for that dungeon, too, but it felt less like a mistake that I was able to get in than Shadow Labs did.

I also did quite a bit of Wrath dungeon running, including several takes on Drak’Tharon Keep—one in which I was able to see the end of Cleansing Drak’Tharon, something I missed going through as the Warrior because I wasn’t doing instances. I love this questline. As some folks on Wowhead pointed out, it’s not the only time in the game that you end up working for someone less than honorable but usually in the other quest chains it’s pretty clear when you’re getting duped. Drakuru, on the other hand, is more like what I’d expect a truly powerful villain to be: He’s more charming than evil and he plays things close enough to the vest that you don’t really start asking questions until it’s far, far too late. In fact after finally clearing out of Grizzly Hills I intended to go to Sholazar Basin but I detoured into Zul’Drak because I wanted to see how the second part of the Drakuru chain plays out.

I also did a couple of runs of The Violet Hold, which is by far my favorite Wrath dungeon so far. It’s very similar to The Black Morass Caverns of Time instance I talked about last week in that it doesn’t have a maze element or even a geographic progression: The entire instance takes place in what I suppose could be called a literal dungeon albeit a “good” dungeon that contains the magical beasts imprisoned by the Kirin Tor in Dalaran. The blue dragonflight are attempting to infiltrate so they spawn 18 portals on a series of timers and two bosses randomly spawn at set intervals. I say randomly because there are actually six potential boss encounters but you only get two per run and then the final encounter is always Cyanigosa.

I know some people grumble that when they’re trying to farm the instance for a specific drop they have to contend with two layers of RNG (will the boss with the loot table I need spawn at all, and then will he drop the item I want) but whatever. I like the fact that it isn’t the same every single time and as far as I’m concerned, farming mid-level range instances (it’s a 75-77 dungeon) for items is kind of silly anyway since soon enough you’ll land in Icecrown Citadel and you can get the best Wrath gear available in there.

I’m hoping that by the time I hit 77 (ideally by mid-week), things will start to pick up in terms of leveling speed because I can go into Storm Peaks which is a completely new zone to me so hopefully the questing progression will be as smooth as Icecrown was when I rolled through it on my Warrior. It’s felt like the last couple of weeks have been sort of defining the term “grind” but it was sort of startling to realize that I’m now within reach of Cataclysm content on my “alt.” I mean, theoretically I could hit up Vashj’ir or Mount Hyjal in less than two levels. Consider that I rolled this Mage the week of January 3rd, which means that it has taken me no more than nine weeks to do what it took well over five months to do the first time around—and to really make the comparison accurate, if you check the play times of both runs toward Cataclysm content I’d put money down that hours spent on the Warrior to this same point on the level scale outpace the Mage by 3:1.

Mage Love

A few distinct pleasures I found while playing this past week, unique to playing as a Mage:

• My Mystic Frostwoven Robe (pictured in this week’s post image), which is by far my favorite piece of gear I’ve obtained for this toon. I also went to the trouble of hiring a Tailor to craft me Mystic Frostwoven Wristwraps as well, just so I could get the set bonus and justify keeping the robe for a bit longer after I picked up a drop that was technically superior when the bonus was lost. The wrist piece cost me almost 100g for the mats (far above what it’s actually worth on the AH, although there were none to be had) but was totally worth it to appease my vanity. It just looks so cool; exactly the kind of thing I imagine my character would wear.
• Having the Portal: Dalaran spell at last, I’ve finally found the distinct joy in providing transport services to other players. I know it’s a supply/demand thing: The time saved in getting quickly to a place that would otherwise drain close to 30 minutes in travel time is worth a relative pittance, but the tips people are willing to give for what amounts to 2-3 minutes of my time and maybe 32 silver in reagents blows my mind. I got 15g one time and 10g another just for teleporting to Orgrimmar and opening a portal to Stonard. That’s 25g for the price of two Runes of Teleportation, two Runes of Portals and the casting time for six spells. Exalted discount on each reagent makes them 8s and 16s each, the cast time for all the spells is 10 seconds. 48 silver, one minute of casting and maybe two minutes total in flight time from deep in The Drag to The Valley of Strength to stand next to the other players. Three minutes for 24.5 gold? Even if you round the travel time up to five minutes and add the time to stop at the reagent vendor for replacement Runes, I think that mage transport is perhaps the most efficient ways to earn gold in the entire game. Plus, teleportation is arguably the best non-combat class perk I can think of in terms of time and money savings. Have I mentioned that I haven’t used a flight path since I got the spells? It’s so ridiculous I almost expect it to get nerfed any second.
• I found a new mini-combo to boost DoT DPS which I wish I’d been using previously: The Living Bomb DoT can be spread to mobs near your target with Impact/Fire Blast. That might seem obvious but I’d been relying on Living Bomb for my Combustion combo and presuming that Impact was for spreading Combustion. But Combustion is a hard spell to make happen a lot of times and I didn’t bother to check where else the Impact Dot-spreading effect might come in handy. So now I drop Living Bomb on one mob in a tank’s pull, drop Blast Wave or Flamestrike on the group which more often than not procs Impact/Fire Blast and I just hit the Living Bomb with that and presto, all the mobs in the group now have a free Living Bomb debuff applied. It’s really helpful whenever tanks pull trash packs that feature more than one elite, and it seems like most Wrath dungeons eschew the common “one elite, several normals per pack” that was common in BC instances, preferring to group two or three (or four) elites together.
• Had a weird experience when going through The Nexus early in the week where some lippy Paladin started demanding “Mage Food” which I presumed meant he wanted me to drop a Ritual of Refreshment, something I couldn’t do at the time. He berated me for a while until I finally game him a stack of Mana Lollipops to shut him up. Of course, he proceeded to whine that it wasn’t the food he was after (as if I controlled it somehow, since the food scales with your level) and then trash-talked the tank for the next 15 minutes (he was healing) until we all got sick of him and kicked him for being a douchebag. The whole thing got me thinking about how Mages are strange creatures in WoW: They provide a unique support role in that they have hardly any buffing spells but they provide things like Refreshment tables and teleportation services and Slow Fall which are all non-combat supports. It’s like “Hey guys, I’m here to help. Well, until the fireworks start. At that point, y’all just better step out of my way and let me do my thang.”
  The “thang” in this case being “blowing up monsters.”

I’ve gotten into a sort of rhythm as I hit the Wrath of the Lich King content with my Mage. I’ve started to get a touch impatient with the slowdown that happens in level advancement as you push through the expansion content, my estimation is that I feel comfortable with the idea that two hours or less of solid questing ought to reward me with a minimum of one ding, but as of the late 60s that’s just not the case. I started playing yesterday having just reached level 72 the last time I played (so my XP for that level was around 1%) and put in a solid two and a half hours at the end of which I was all of 75% of the way to level 73. The by product of this impatience is that I mostly have patience for leveling the Mage when I have a decent store of rested XP bonus but since I play a little bit on most nights the rested XP lasts maybe 30 minutes or so, sometimes less if I’m doing a dungeon or two.

Since I don’t really want to slowly eke out incremental gains, my new routine for most sessions has been to log into the Mage, run a Wrath random dungeon to earn the (paltry but still useful) Justice Point bonus and then if there is any rested XP left I’ll quest until it’s gone and then hit the auction house, repair shop, bank and log out. This almost never takes more than an hour, leaving me on many evenings with at least another half an hour or so to play at which point I’ll log in as the Warrior and immediately hit the regular random queue, hoping to get through it before my time runs out (DPS queues are long) and then I start doing dailies. I’m still grinding Dragonmaw rep so I’ll often head over to Twilight Highlands, make a mining run around the zone and then settle into the Dragonmaw dailies which I can now knock out in maybe 20 minutes. If I’m not in the mood for Dragonmaw I’ll head to Tol Barad not because I’m super into PvP but because I want the mount they sell for TB commendation points and you don’t even have to join the TB battle to earn them or the rep required. It takes me a bit longer to do the dailies there (mostly because you can’t use flying mounts in Tol Barad), but I can do four or five of them in 20-30 minutes. Usually by then I’m at least at the front of the queue if not already in a dungeon which I farm for the Justice Points and rep and then wrap up the dailies I was working on, do the fishing daily in Orgrimmar (at least; I still do the cooking daily sometimes but it depends on which one has come up), check the auction house, repair shop and bank and usually by then it’s getting close to bedtime.

Now that may sound fairly dull, maybe even rote. But considering how much time I’ve spent in-game floundering around trying to figure out what I should be doing, what I want to be doing and what is most beneficial to me to do, it’s actually nice to have a very clear-cut set of goals that I know very comfortably how to achieve and just be able to log in and work toward them. Plus, I know it won’t last long: I’m JP grinding on the Warrior so I can afford the last bit of XP-boosting heirloom gear for cloth wearers to hopefully get the Mage to max that much faster (I’m actually running out of time since I’m pretty certain the heirlooms no longer grant their bonuses after level 80; if I don’t earn the 2,175 JP before my Mage reaches the point where it’s not useful anymore I’ll get a leather/mail piece to help out my Shaman healer) but once the Mage is at end-game level I’m not going to want to run regular randoms as DPS on the Warrior any more and I’ll have no choice but to buckle down and learn (somehow or other) how to tank so I can switch my spec to Protection once and for all. Then that will also mean switching to Heroics because Valor Point gear is what I actually need to upgrade the Warrior’s pieces. Plus, I need the chaos orbs because I’m really hoping that between the Mage with Alchemy and the Warrior with Blacksmithing I’ll be able to make a nice chunk of change crafting Truegold armor since theoretically I won’t need to incur the cost of the Truegold directly.

It does bother me quite a bit that I’m still not completely convinced at the best way to get better at tanking. I’m delaying the inevitable quite consciously with this current routine: Probably a better use of my time right now would be to forget about the heirlooms and JP and Cata reps and focus on getting to the point where I can competently tank as a Warrior. It isn’t that I don’t need the rep and JP, but there is a more pressing need for tanks in instances via the LFD tool (hence the long queues for DPS), the guild needs tanks and I need to stop thinking of my Warrior as a DPSer since soon enough any instance I’d enter as a Fury Warrior I’ll be rolling into as a Fire Mage. Those are simply the circumstances, I just have to find a way to accept them.

Dungeoneering

I have to get something off my chest before I get into the various dungeons I ran over the past week. I cannot understand why, in Utgarde Keep, when entering the Dragonflayer Pens, at least half of all the tanks I’ve run the instance with (and it’s been at least six runs) charge in and pull more than one pair of Enslaved Proto-Drake and Proto-Drake Handler. I can’t stand it because it doesn’t seem to matter how good the tank is or how good the healer is but 100% of the time when that happens there has been a wipe. The most intensely aggravating part is that it always seems to happen at the exact same place: Right at the end of the Pens. There’s a EPD and Handler kind of off in the last pen on the left (though more in the middle than inside the pen as the previous two had been) and there’s another pair fairly close by in the middle of the room but a bit away from the door. The problem seems to be that the pull radius for the middle pair is either just shy of the radius of the last pair before the door or it may even overlap a little bit. So occasionally it may be accidental, but it really ought to be one of those things everyone knows to be careful of (like the crumbling span in the second wing of Grim Batol).

The mind-boggling part is that the whole issue is entirely avoidable because you can walk to the back of the second pen and go around the backside of the divider and come up behind the third pair, completely on the opposite side from the middle-of-the-room guys. The fact that this isn’t just The Way You Run UK makes me nuts.

Other instances I ran this past week:

• Azjol-Nerub: Bah. Kind of hate this dungeon. It was sort of interesting to do a guild run on the heroic version of it as 85s because the faceroll of it all eliminated a lot of the aspects that are just stupid about it at-level. In particular Hadronox is an annoying, overwrought fight and I don’t just say that because we wiped on him twice. I say that because any boss who has the strategy “Stand around and wait for him to kill his own adds” is a poorly designed boss.
• Utgarde Keep: Of course. As I mentioned above, there’s a part of this instance that makes me crazy but overall I like UK quite a bit. The final boss, Ingvar the Plunderer, is sort of cheap because he’s really like two bosses (he gets resurrected after you defeat him once) and neither of them are all that interesting but I like the look and feel of the rest of the instance. Naturally though, being the first and lowest-level dungeon in WotLK it comes up in the queue a lot. I’ll be happy to level past it just because I’m ready for some new blood.
• Nexus: Even more fun at-level than solo’d, and I quite liked it when I ran through with my Warrior. It helped that the group I got matched with was really pleasant and we all had a nice, quickly established chemistry as we knocked it out and I was kind of remorseful that I didn’t note any of their names or servers before I dropped party. I doubt I’d bother to create additional toons on their servers for the off-chance to play with them again, but it was one of those rare cases of PUG magic that seem so much more rare than the annoying, hair-pulling ones. Probability-defying is how I’d describe the discrepancy.
• Caverns of Time: The Black Morass: Kind of a cool, unique sort of dungeon that doesn’t really have a typical instance feel since there’s no linear progression and instead the mobs spawn on a timer with boss spawns at set intervals while you try to protect and NPC (Medivh). I really wouldn’t mind if Blizzard toyed with the structure and progression of the instances a bit more in this fashion. That actually may have been sort of what they had in mind with the new Sunken Temple but while this one worked pretty well, the same cannot be said for ST.
• Magister’s Terace: Finally polished this one off. I thought it was a solid instance all the way around, although I happen to like the style they chose for the Blood Elves’ architecture so it was aesthetically pleasing to me to begin with. As much as it annoys me how many Blood Elves are running around, I’m intrigued by their lore such that I wished as I was playing through this one that I understood a little more about what the heck was going on. In fact, I will say that the biggest flaw to me of using the LFD tool to experience all these dungeons is that you don’t get as much of the lore run-up to them as you would if you leveled around their physical location. Not that I think Blizzard always does a great job of explaining what the dungeons are or why you’re in there killing everything in sight, but it’s certainly better than the context-deprived nature of dropping into a dungeon out of nowhere lacking rhyme or reason.
• The Botanica and The Mechanar: Tempest Keep didn’t really impress me design-wise although I did kind of dig on the encounters throughout The Botanica. I liked the whole plants-run-amok vibe and it gave me extra chances to be awesome in the eyes of my group by casting Remove Curse on everyone. The Mechanar was okay I guess, but I felt like the semi-science fiction vibe has already been done with Gnomergeran (admittedly more steampunk than the Mechanar’s glowy purple meets THX-1138 thing but still) plus, while it didn’t matter at the time I know, it kinda sucks that The Nexus (and yes, even the Oculus) pull off the whole technology-but-really-magic thing far better in my opinion.

I still have two more Burning Crusade dungeons to finish, but I’ve been avoiding it because queuing for such a short list of specific dungeons makes for a very long wait. However, I have the opportunity to get the Outland Dungeonmaster achievement having done all the instances more or less at-level (I mean, technically Shadow Labyrinth and Shattered Halls go up to level 75 although I’m not sure how terribly challenging they’d be well into your 74th level wearing Wrath gear) so before I level past those I think it will be worth the wait to do those via LFD.

Introspection

One thing I’m noticing is that the routine described above speaks to a truth I didn’t really consider about having two mains or even just two toons at/toward max level. It’s that once you start dividing your attention in WoW, you lose a bit of a part of the game that I actually didn’t realize I’d miss very much: Loafing. When you have a single main and no serious push to bring up an alt, you can sometimes find yourself doing things for protracted periods of time that don’t necessarily have much or any impact on your current game goals. Sometimes this happens while you’re waiting for something “useful” to come about: You’re queued for a battleground or you’re waiting for your raid group to all stop farming the auction house so you run around farming low-level mats to sell on the auction house because they’re plentiful or you faceroll a ton of trash mobs that grant rep for some edge faction from BC or whatever just to slowly work your way up toward getting Exalted with as many factions as possible.

Other times you do things that seem to waste time not because it’s filling the gaps while you wait for anything in particular but just because the activity in itself is fun or interesting. You might solo low-level dungeons to earn achievements, you may fly around trying to take down any mob with a huge model (say, a Storm Giant), which is a personal favorite pastime of mine, or just fish while you watch TV or something. Whatever it is, it’s not part of the active pursuit of progression on the game but it can be pretty fun. When you have multiple characters though, there tends to always be something pressing to do: I’ve thought several times over the last week that it would be interesting to go around leveling Archaeology on my Warrior but then I realize that if I’m going to be grinding something I ought to be grinding levels on the Mage instead since the longer I procrastinate on hitting 85 the longer I have to keep my Fury spec at the ready in case some guildies want someone to round out a guild run.

Obviously it’s just a game and I should be doing whatever it is in that game that seems like the most fun, but I know at this point that I’m so close to finishing up this little alt project I just want to get it done. In the end I’ll be much happier, I know, having an 85 DPS and it’s possible then I’ll feel less compelled to be “working” on something with every available moment. Possible, but more likely is that I’ll find some new all-important project that will simply demand my time.

I spent an awful lot of time on my main two weeks ago, a phenomenon I associate with two things: One is that my guild began requesting that all characters identify the mains/alts they are associated with so people can start putting players together with their various toons and the other is the annual Love Is In The Air event.

On paper, the idea of associating the various alts with their mains in the guild makes a ton of sense. However, the unexpected side effect I found was that it allowed other guildies to send me requests for level 85 assistance while I was trying to work on leveling my Mage. The guild I’m in values helping each other out above pretty much everything else so when I’m asked to give an assist I try to be open to that unless there is some external factor like time that prevents it. So now that everyone knows my Mage is an alt for my Warrior, I found myself with less time for uninterrupted level grinding.

That may sound like a bigger complaint than it is, and while I do lament a bit that after weeks of earning double-digit level gains over the course of six or seven days I was only able to squeak out three during that week, focusing on my main did have some positive net effects.

The principal perk was that I finally got the chance to try my hand at tanking because some guild members needed a tank for non-heroic Halls of Origination. Fortunately I’m fairly familiar with that instance so I agreed to give it a go provided everyone there understood where I was at with the skill.

Let me tell you a few of my initial impressions from my first foray into tanking. The first is that tanking is very stressful. As a DPS you have basically two objectives: Put the hurt on and don’t die. When you’re tanking there is so much more going on at any given moment than even the most frenzied fights offer DPSers, it’s really easy to feel like you’re drowning, because it isn’t just “hold the aggro,” despite what it may appear from the outside. First of all there’s the threat, which is I’m sure something I’ll get better with in time so I wasn’t all that concerned with how well I was maintaining the aggro. I didn’t do very well, but it seemed like something that would eventually start to make sense, especially as I learn the rotations and abilities.

But once you scratch past that layer, you also have personal survival which I know is a healer concern primarily, but since as the tank you’re in charge of absorbing the blows you have to make sure you’re not making the healer’s job impossibly difficult. As such it seemed like the better I was at handling my own damage mitigation by watching for interrupts, making sure Spell Reflect was being used, popping Enraged Regeneration if it looked like I wasn’t going to get a heal exactly when I needed it and keeping an eye out for Last Stand necessity, the better I did overall. The thing is, DPS has to worry about survival as well but the difference is tanks are supposed to be getting hit so at some level you have to decide what is “good” damage to take and what is damage that needs to be avoided, interrupted or healed through.

A level above survival you also have group management. This is where I struggled the most I think. In one-on-one fights I did pretty well, but as soon as there was more than one mob in an area I found it frantic and frankly not all that fun to be trying to maintain threat across a group of enemies. This is where I definitely need to find some way to practice because I’m reasonably comfortable with my single-target threat maintenance abilities but I’m pretty terrible at target-switching and I had a lot of difficulty getting a handle on AoE threat generation.

I think crowd control is supposed to help with this a little bit but the other thing I struggled with was mob positioning, especially when it came to kiting casters away from CC’d mobs so AoE or errant clicks didn’t break the crowd control. I’m simply not sure how I’m supposed to convince casters to move toward me and go where I need them to be. Unlike melee mobs who keep moving toward you to continue hitting as long as you hold aggro, casters are more than happy to let you back away and of course that has two undesirable effects: The kiting fails as the mob stays right where they are and held aggro starts to fall off since backing out of your own attack range reduces the amount of threat you can generate as you spend time outside of melee range.

Overall it was an interesting learning experience and when it was over I decided to regroup a little and spend some additional time researching tanking strategies with a renewed perspective that came from having even a tiny bit of context to apply the lessons. The other thing I did was start to pay more attention to the tanks that ran the instances where I was filling the DPS role, principally during my Mage dungeon runs.

Then last week I actually did a LOT of dungeons because as I’ll talk about later the level grind through Outland was kind of dragging me down and I figured the dungeons at least were still really fun and, as a bonus, entirely new to me. Having that many LFD groups means you see a lot of various group compositions and a wide range of tanking styles and abilities. It seems to me that I can classify the tanks I’ve run with into three distinct groups and I should note ahead of time that these don’t seem to have anything to do with which class is being used, anecdotally it’s entirely dependent on player skill (though I would note that there seem to be a slightly larger number of Death Knights in the lower two categories and a fractionally larger number of Paladins in the top category, which could easily be accounted for by the simple number of tanking Paladins and the number of DKs in the game, many of whom probably queue as Tanks just to get into Dungeons faster).

• Fail Tanks
  These guys are just not good. They drop aggro on mobs and don’t pick it back up, they pull way more mobs than they can handle and they almost universally hope the healers can compensate for their tendency to quickly get in over their heads. It’s possible to make it through a dungeon with one of these players, but it’s an exercise in frustration and typically involves several wipes. Within this category there are two types of players: New tanks who are learning and perhaps unwisely choosing to learn via the dungeon tool (this may explain why it seems a lot of these guys are DKs and learning to tank in Burning Crusade dungeons) and players who think they are actually doing it right and spend most of the time blaming everyone else for their failings and ragequitting.
• Mediocre Tanks
  These are the kinds of tanks who can lead you through a dungeon and even keep the party from wiping but requires a lot more attention devotion from the DPS and healers to assist in drawing errant mobs back to the tank so he can pick them up again, target switching to avoid pulling threat off of single mobs, avoiding AoE spells at all costs and having healers pull out advanced techniques to keep them alive. These are the tanks that can shine when they have a stellar healer behind them or if the person they loose aggro to happens to be a plate-wearing Fury Warrior or something equally sturdy and melee-based. Most of the time it seems like people will tolerate these kinds of tanks with no real challenge to them which avoids unnecessary confrontation but dungeons tend to take at least 50% longer to complete with these kinds of tanks because there is no such thing as facerolling through an instance with one of these guys. Occasionally you will find a player who claims to be learning how to tank or is returning to it after a long absence who spends the run wringing their hands about being a Fail Tank when in fact they are a solid Mediocre and often just need to pay attention to a few details or in some cases need to do some additional research to learn the little tricks to some of the bosses (like turning Quagmirran toward the wall at the end of The Slave Pens).
• True Tanks
  These are the gems you get every so often who know the dungeon inside and out, expertly hold aggro on even the largest of pulls regardless of how much damage output the DPS is doing and even manage their own health to the extent that the healer is free to make sure DPS who stand too close to the fire don’t have to stop melting faces even for a moment to heal up. I know that this is entirely possible for tanks because I’ve run into several of them across the battlegroup and in a variety of dungeons. Running instances with this type of tank is exhilarating because everyone almost always has a great time, a quick run and there is scarcely ever any group friction. Obviously these are the elite tank players and I presume by definition they are going to be less common than middle-of-the-road tanks, but I’ve started to form the opinion that it doesn’t take some crazy inborn natural talent to elevate Mediocre Tanks to True Tanks, it simply requires practice, knowledge and the ability to assess what the rest of the group is capable of. My example of this is I ran through Hellfire Ramparts with a group who had a healer that was either very young or stoned or both but he was pretty miserable at maintaining his mana stores (which is a pretty key skill for heals) which meant that in any fight lasting longer than a few minutes the healer would go OOM and leave the rest of us to our own devices. The tank, a True Tank, quickly realized this and told the healer to try a bit harder to watch his mana count and then adjusted his own strategy to make smaller pulls so the healer could have more frequent breaks to recover some mana. The point is he made this determination within the first three fights and while he didn’t advertise what he was doing it was pretty clear we were going from fighting seven or eight mobs at once to three or four, which we were able to burn down while the healer still had a bit of mana to spare. The healer continued to jaw in party chat about what everyone else was doing to cause his mana loss, but it never became an issue that seriously threatened the group once the tank made the adjustment. That, to me, is a mark of a great tank.
  The one downside of True Tanks is, perhaps as an occupational hazard, they tend to be cowboys who rush into large pulls with cursory checks of healer and DPS mana, expecting everyone to be as adept as they are. For the most part this doesn’t cause problems (if the tank couldn’t handle it they wouldn’t be in this category) but occasionally it can result in partial wipes or healers going out of mana, which, even if the party survives is never a good thing.

Obviously at this point I could be considered nothing but a Fail Tank but the question becomes one of how to transition (as quickly as possible) from bad to better. Obviously practice is the key but the more I think about it the more I wonder if the wisdom of a thought I had a couple of weeks ago wasn’t somewhat overlooked at the time. In Miner Whiner Edition I talked briefly about leveling a new Warrior from the beginning, doing exclusively (or nearly so) LFD dungeons for XP and going Protection the whole way. I dismissed it at the time because the notion of leveling another Warrior wasn’t (and in many ways isn’t) terribly appealing.

But the more I think about it the more I wonder if, even if the process were a bit onerous, such an endeavor would be a really smart thing to do. Because as I analyze what it would take to be a decent tank I notice that part of the difference between me in Fury Warrior spec and me in Protection spec is simple familiarity with the core abilities. I can improve my DPS output as Fury by managing the Rage resource better, finding slight improvements to the situational rotations, learning the nuances of cooldown management and so forth. But these are the things a more advanced Fury Warrior thinks about, not “If Ability A and Ability B are both up, which do I use?” Because I already know the answer to that question from a Fury perspective in most situations. This is definitely not the case as a Protection spec and I think the game does a pretty good job of teaching you how to make those core decisions as you progress through a single spec. Trying to switch once you’ve rounded out your spellbook as much as it will go results in exactly the scenario I’m in now: Total options overload.

I had an idea that might make such a task more palatable, and there are some secondary notions that I’ve been mulling over as well. For example, once I finish leveling up my Mage I’m going to definitely cool it on the focused level grinding. I do have a few alts I’d like to work on, but I figure I can take a casual, easy approach to it, going through 150% rested XP at a time which means playing for about an hour or two once every week and a half. Practically for me that means spending two or three sessions a month on each alt which sounds about perfect to keep the novelty factor alive without getting bogged down in either end-game stuff on my dual mains (which is how I’ve begun to think of the Mage and the Warrior) or in the drudging sections of the level grind. I think both taking a more relaxed attitude (as opposed to the “I’ve got to hit 85 yesterday” approach I’ve taken with the Mage) and spreading the alt play across several toons will really help keep things fresh.

Of course that doesn’t really address the key issue which is that I don’t necessarily want to go through as a Warrior again. So my thought to deal with that was to make this training Warrior an Alliance character. Ideally what this would do would be to create a sense of freshness even within the familiarity of the class because all the quests, NPCs, capitol cities and player bases would be completely new. I’ve heard plenty of people say that you haven’t really experienced WoW until you’ve leveled through both factions but so far I haven’t had much luck in finding my groove on the Alliance side. I hope that between the new Cataclysm quest progressions and the dungeon training I won’t get hung up the way I have with previous Alliance alts.

There are some downfalls to this idea: Primarily there is the lack of the sugar daddy factor that I am certain has been a big facet to the ease of leveling on the Mage since you can’t mail large cash infusions to cross-faction alts. I’m also not positive if the heirloom items can be sent to alts on other factions although I’m less concerned in this case with rapid leveling since it’s a matter of practice and not advancement once I get to the point where I can use the LFD tool. Another minor bummer in this case would be that, as opposed to if I leveled a Horde Warrior, I’d lack access to an established Blacksmith/Miner. Granted, it probably wouldn’t make a ton of difference; it’s only a rare instance that I’ve regretted not having my Mage be a tailor who can make cloth armor, especially since so much of my gear has come from instance drops. Seeing as how I’d be spending most of my time on such a Warrior in dungeons, I ought to not have much concern for having decent equipment nor a ton of opportunity to mine for ore. When you consider the lack of extra cash for AH mining that makes blacksmithing kind of a non-starter anyway.

Regardless of faction I guess the other benefit of the training Warrior tactic is that I don’t have to feel any obligation to level it further than necessary to learn what I need to know. There wouldn’t be any pressure to carry on past a point where the returns begin to diminish since at that point I can switch over to my main orc Warrior.

One thing is for sure, I need to find some way to get some practice because I don’t want to subject my guildmates to more of my “tanking” until I can be at least fairly sure they won’t have to use phrases like “Well… it could have been worse. Maybe.”

Lovin’ Achievements

I mentioned above that I had to put in more time than I expected on my main also because I wanted to do the Love Is In The Air world event and you realistically can’t expect to do them all without being at least level 80 if not 85. Plus I think of the Warrior as my Achievement toon, so that’s where that comes from. Anyhow I thought the Love Is In The Air event as a whole was pretty enjoyable with a minimum of grinding or aggravation. I admit the Lovely Charm Bracelet creation process is a little less than obvious via the information available in-game and the I Pitied The Fool achievement seemed to cause a lot of frustration especially since the Love Fool object is fairly expensive.

Basically there are a handful of daily quests which reward you with Love Tokens at a rate of five per quest. One of the quests is really easy, it requires you to find ten players or NPCs nearby and use a benign quest item on them. Another is a fairly standard “kill 5 so-and-sos” type of quest requiring you to travel to Uldum. Assuming you accept the quest in Orgrimmar, the portal takes you a short flight away from the quest zone. Finally there is a daily quest per faction capitol city that asks you to give a Lovely Charm Bracelet to the race leader (Garrosh, Sylvanas, etc.) which is straightforward enough. However, in order to make a Lovely Charm Bracelet you have to collect 10 Lovely Charms which are randomly generated from defeated mobs that grant experience or honor provided you have a Lovely Charm Collector’s Kit in your inventory. Practically speaking that means you have to just go around and grind at-level mobs while you possess the Collector’s Kit until you get multiples of 10. I think there are four faction bosses you can exchange a Bracelet for 5 Tokens with but naturally that requires a bit of travel for those without ready access to portals or teleportation. All told you can earn 30 Tokens per day by doing the six dailies which brings me back to the Love Fool portion because you need four Fools at a cost of 10 Tokens each in order to earn the achievement which means it takes at least two days of daily grinding to buy what you absolutely need. The real issue is that the specifics for where exactly to place the item in order to fulfill the achievement requirements aren’t very clear so it’s pretty easy to accidentally waste a 10-Token Fool (by not being on the Blacksmith island in the Arathi Basin, for example) and I can see why that’s potentially frustrating. In my case I always play with a browser window open to Wowhead so I just used their handy event guide and didn’t run into any issues, but if guild and trade chat were any indication, that’s not a universal thing.

I will say that one thing I like about doing these world events is that they often have me doing things I might otherwise avoid, such as the Arathi Basin. It wasn’t the most exciting PvP event I’ve tried but it was interesting to have seen it and I’m not sure I ever would have gotten around to it had it not been for the world event achievement. They are a little stressful at times because I would hate to miss one lousy achievement or something and have to wait a whole year to try for the Violet Proto-Drake.

Alt Nation

I mentioned above that I have several alts I’m interested in working on once I finish with the Mage (and aside from any possible Warrior training alts). My main objective is to get some high level professions established and though I originally intended to use the professions as an opportunity to level a number of different classes I think that I may not ultimately have all that much interest in learning all the classes. For example, Druids just don’t interest me all that much, possibly because they’re so incredibly numerous (at least on my server—although I was surprised to see that according to this census site druids seem to be less popular than I would have guessed, based on the number of them I encounter in PUGs). I get that they’re one of the only classes that can serve in each possible role (more or less) making them incredibly versatile but to me they’re just sort of meh. It probably has a lot to do with the idea of morphing away from the the normal character model and into something generic which doesn’t reflect my gear all the time. I’m also very uninterested in Rogues although if you believe that WarcraftRealms site they would be the player’s choice for anyone who wanted to buck any trends: They appear to be the least played class of them all. Still, melee DPS is a been-there-done-that proposition for me.

Since I’m not necessarily trying to play all the classes or all the races or what have you, I figured I could pick a couple to be the core that I wanted to explore and then create Death Knights to cover the remaining professions since they don’t have to worry as much about hitting level caps before they can train further in their primaries.

• Troll Shaman
  I already had the Shaman from my first foray into the game but he’d languished along with most of the other alts from that era around level 6. Somewhere along the line I got the idea to make him a tailor because my Mage was accumulating vast quantities of low-level cloth that was no longer beneficial for leveling First Aid. Initially the Shaman was an Herbalist/Alchemist but by then the Mage was very far ahead of him in those professions so I switched to Tailoring and sent over all that cloth. I thought at first that the Shaman would just be the Tailor and nothing more until I realized that I didn’t really have a viable healer class in mind if I ever wanted to try that aspect of the game. My understanding is that Shamans aren’t the best choice for healing though they can certainly play that role but I figured if I was going to focus on having this Shaman character be a healer he’d need to avoid the same pitfall as my “tank” Warrior and practice as he leveled up. That meant making heavy use of the LFD tool which eliminated any gathering professions as serious second primary options. The more I thought about it the more I realized the obvious instance-farming professions were Tailoring and Enchanting. So the Shaman is/will be my Tailoring, Enchanting Healer.
• Blood Elf Paladin
  Talk about common: Combine the most popular Horde race with the most popular class in the game and you have this alt. Still, I’m interested in the Blood Elf lore so I’d like to level through the Silvermoon area at least once and having another plate-wearer will be a nice way to make use of all that Blacksmith leveling I did on the Warrior. This character is also my only female toon which is a bit atypical for me because I tend to play female characters a lot in games that allow for that sort of thing but I found the social aspect of WoW to be sort of awkward to navigate as a guy playing a female character in the past. I figure I can tolerate it on this one character especially since there’s no reason why I’d ever need to worry about a second tank/DPS class being a go-to character in any circumstance. As for professions I’m going to stick with Jewelcrafting since I’ll end up sending stuff over from the Warrior a lot anyway and the compliment to that would have to be Engineering.
• Tauren Hunter
  I’ve mentioned my Hunter previously, he’s a Skinner/Leatherworker and while I’m happy with my Mage as my choice for ranged DPS it’s been enjoyable enough that I don’t think doing another character with a similar role (but very different mechanics) would be too terrible. He’s already fairly well established in my stable of alts, being close to ready for LFD (I think he’s sitting at level 14) but I’ve specifically avoided putting to much time into him since at the moment it just feels like it would be time better spent on the Mage.

Conspicuously missing from the profession list there is Inscription which looks interesting but the thing is the more I thought about it the more I realized that there isn’t much reason to have an in-house Inscriptionist, especially since with the new glyph system you don’t ever need to acquire any one glyph more than once, even if you swap out an existing glyph from your profile. That means having one on hand would really only matter for those infrequent occasions where a specific glyph you want to use is very over-priced on the auction house and I figure if that isn’t what guild members are good for I don’t know what is. When I thought about this earlier I assumed I’d be skipping over Engineering but I’m pretty sure I’d be happier having an Engineer on  my alts list than an Inscriptionist, especially since I’d probably have to level the Paladin ahead of the others in order to stay on top of the demand and I don’t really want to have that kind of mandate hanging over these alts: They’re supposed to be breezy to level anyway. If I did decide to make a fourth alt to handle Inscription I’d simply make a Death Knight which I’ll probably do at some point anyway so it’s not a big deal either way.

Dungeoneering

I spent a ton of time in dungeons over the past two weeks because I had some time off of work and my parents were in town which meant there were more opportunities than usual to be reasonably sure that I could play uninterrupted for a bit (though surprisingly perhaps not all that much extra time to play; I’d say I averaged even slightly less play time over the last week than I normally do). Really when it comes to queuing for dungeons that’s what it comes down to, because I can play the game if my daughter is asleep but my wife is indisposed somewhere, I just have to be willing to drop what I’m doing and attend to my child if the need arises. I don’t usually feel all that comfortable bailing out in the midst of a PUG to go change a diaper or whatever so if I’m on point with my daughter I avoid dungeons. Having grandparents around makes that less of an issue.

Anyway I had two main objectives in running lots of dungeons: One was to save some of the drudgery of the 60-70 progression on my Mage since as much as I thought doing Blade’s Edge and Netherstorm would make Outland feel fresh and new, the truth is the questing in Burning Crusade just isn’t up to the level of Cataclysm or even Wrath of the Lich King. As such I queued a lot to avoid questing through a lot of very familiar zones like Zangarmarsh. Interestingly, I realized that while I love the Nagrand zone from an aesthetic and lore standpoint, the reason I skipped through it on my first visit to Outland was the same reason I glossed it over on this second pass: The questing in there is just not what I would hope for. The potential of the zone, in my opinion, is wasted. Having read Rise of the Horde I’d really have loved to see more use of Oshu’gun and some better backstory on the orc clans but instead we get Halaa which is kind of a mechanically flappy PvP area, lots and lot of ogres and ol’ Hemit Nesingwary and his endlessly grindy kill-fest quests. Yawn.

Unfortunately, with frequent queuing comes what amounts to XP farming runs on familiar dungeons. I think I ended up doing Hellfire Ramparts at least half a dozen times between levels 63 and 64 and I know I did Escape From Durnholde eight times while I was levels 67 and 68. Now, Hellfire Ramparts is an easily farmable dungeon so it wasn’t that bad: It goes quick, it’s straightforward and it has decent drops. Durnholde on the other hand is awesome from a lore perspective which means it’s teriffic… once. After that it’s got a lot to dislike between the two long travel sections (one auto-flight on a drake to begin the quest and one after you rescue Thrall on land mounts which, inexplicably, Thrall’s mount is not swift so you have to constantly stop and wait for him) and the bland human bosses (up until the end which is actually a pretty fun fight but doesn’t in itself make up for the tedium of the rest of the instance). Plus worst of all the drops in there are really pants such that after eight runs I don’t think I came away with a single blue item to show for all that time. Theoretically the final boss can drop Pauldrons of Sufferance, but I never saw them. Not that it matters, because I got something better.

The thing is, it isn’t that Outland is bad, but I can understand why in light of later expansion content Burning Crusade has gotten kind of a bum rap. Essentially Burning Crusade is an incremental step off of vanilla WoW which means that now especially that we’ve seen so many of the changes Blizzard has come up with through the years applied back to Azeroth through Cataclysm, Burning Crusade is now the last bastion of the old-style WoW with all the disjointed, unwelcoming quest progressions and semi-drab tank-and-spank boss encounters. Plus, the talent tree redesign implemented in 4.0.1 made the 60-70 path a big dead spot in character development. Somewhere in there I had the first level advancement that didn’t net me a single thing: No ability unlock, no new trainable skill, no talent point, nada. And many of the levels had nothing but a new teleport or portal unlock which isn’t exactly thrilling. Now, level 69 does unlock the final talent point in your primary tree (which in my case means access to Living Bomb, the final piece of the super combo I talked about last time) but that starts the push into the 70s which appear to have much more excitement in terms of new abilities and fun stuff.

The net result is that hitting level 60 now marks a period where I found myself not wanting to slow down and experience the content with wizened eyes (having more exposure now to the game lore and the significance of both the Burning Legion and Draenor/Outland as a whole) but rather to speed up and get through it as fast as possible. To this end I started bouncing between my Mage and my Warrior so I could take advantage of the daily random dungeon Justice Point bonus for doing Cataclysm randoms. The sole purpose for this was to earn enough JP to get my hands on this little number: Tattered Dreadmist Mantle. I suppose you could say this is the first heirloom item I actually earned, as the cloak I’ve been wearing on my Mage since early on was a gift of sorts from the guild advancement system (and a paltry sum of 1,200 gold) but between that item and these new shoulder pieces I have a +15% XP boost to all quest and mob kill experience, not to mention the additional 10% I get from Fast Track due to my guild affiliation which means at the moment all told I’m running at +25% XP.

The weird thing about the LFD tool is how I know it’s supposed to be random but luck of the draw being what it is I seem to do nothing but run the same dungeons over and over. Not only did I get stuck on HFR and Escape From Durnholde on the Mage but I can’t seem to get a Cataclysm random that isn’t either The Lost City of Tol’Vir or Halls of Origination. Now HoO is fine with me because there are seven bosses in there and with the 4.0.6 patch that means I get a minimum of 210 JP just for the bosses alone and 350 if that’s the one that pops up as my daily random. Tol’Vir is an okay dungeon and everything but after finishing it a dozen times or so without ever even seeing the Vortex Pinnacle or Blackrock Caverns, I have to wonder what the deal is.

WoW Bits

• One minor feature request that I think would be nice to add to the LFD tool—in addition to the level range indicators—is an estimated time rating. This could simply be an aggregate or average of all the runs done in that battle group in each instance which will obviously mean a pretty rough guess because I’ve had some dungeons that ought to take maybe twenty minutes last for over an hour due to wipes and queue times but I’m sure there are some elegant solutions (throwing out any data points where a mid-instance queue took place for example) and the idea would be to get a sense for what you’re in for especially if you’re using the LFD to collect dungeon completion achievements. The example I ran into was that the Magister’s Terrace is a sprawling instance but there was really no way for me to know this going in and I only had about 45 minutes to get it done when I started. Usually this would be plenty of time but between the sheer length and the fact that we had to queue for a tank after two or three bosses and tried to make do with a hunter’s tanking pet… well, I had to drop early which means I’ll have to try to do it again at a later time.
• I’ve been having an odd issue ever since patch 4.0.6 where my ESC key doesn’t always bring up the game menu. Usually it does, but randomly it will become non-responsive even if I’ve successfully accessed the menu that way earlier in the same session. This is sort of a bummer because I had gotten to where I knew the main keyboard shortcuts well enough that I had turned off the micro-bar in the UI but I have had to re-enable it because it’s pretty tough to log out if you can’t get to the main menu. I’ve looked around some on the support forums but haven’t seen anyone else reporting the same issue. I’m hesitant to file a ticket about it too because I know the first thing they’re going to say is “disable all your add-ons and try again.” I sometimes think the worst thing about add-ons is that they become tech support’s default skapegoat even if they’re unlikely to be causing the issue at hand.
• I’ve been reading through the Chronicles of War anthology which combines the Warcraft novels Rise of the Horde, The Last Guardian, Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal. I’m enjoying it very much and am just beginning the final novel in the collection which has caused me to start looking ahead at what my next Warcraft novel should be. It surprises me that while The Last Guardian does a fairly decent job of chronicling the First War (covered by Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans in the games) and Tides of Darkness/Beyond the Dark Portal are essentially direct novelizations of Warcraft II (including the expansion), thus recount the Second War; but as far as I can tell there are no analogues for Warcraft III/the Third War. It’s possible the Christie Golden novel Arthas details the events of The Frozen Throne which was the Warcraft III expansion and perhaps this is intentional since Warcraft III the PC game is still readily available at retailers and playable even now. Still, at this point I’m very interested in the game lore and backstory but I don’t have much desire to force my way through an RTS which is far from my genre of choice. I’ve toyed with the idea of picking up the game and burning through it in god mode (which is how I saw the story unfold in Starcraft… have I mentioned I’m really bad at RTS games and don’t particularly care for them?) just to witness the cutscenes and so forth. But I dunno, it feels a bit like that crosses a particular obsessive threshold (which I’m certain I’ve already cleared by a country mile): I’m not sure I want to be the guy who bought a game he didn’t like and didn’t really want to play just so he could experience the plot of it first hand.

Blood Bowling For Dollars

Since this Edition covers a two week period it’s maybe less surprising that I have other games to talk briefly about but still noteworthy. I had a chance a couple weekends back to play Blood Bowl again with Dr. Mac and I had a great time even if the game was awful. And when I say awful I mean well and truly the worst game of Blood Bowl I’ve ever played and possibly the worst game that has ever been played.

Blood Bowl is a game where you have to roll dice to be successful but in many ways the paradox is that you are most likely to be triumphant if you can find a way to avoid rolling as many dice as possible. I suppose then that probability being what it is, there are just going to be times when luck favors no one in a particular match and it’s just next to impossible to accomplish any key task. Then there are times like this game when on no less than four separate occasions (at least two each) there were clear opportunities for points to be scored and due to the abyssal failure of dice rolls that were well within the acceptable risk thresholds no points were ever scored. That’s right, we ended in an 0-0 tie.

I’m talking here about multiple end zone drops. Pushes with Sure Feet that failed and caused casualties. Strength 5 Break Tackle dodges that failed. Balls were thrown in from the sidelines a half dozen times it seemed. It was ugly, frustrating, painful, silly and a surprising amount of fun. Dr. Mac and I have known each other since grade school which is something over two decades so we have a lot of history, but playing Blood Bowl over Xbox Live was reminiscent of all those childhood sleepovers where we would get to giggling and being goofy until finally one parent or another would come in and admonish us for being up too late and keeping the whole house awake at the same time. Halfway through the match I heard what sounded like Dr. Mac’s wife whispering to him to try to keep it down lest he wake up his sleeping children. Half a country away I snickered through clenched teeth at how hilariously familiar it felt and tried not to wake up my own slumbering family.

Ultimately the match may have been a bust but it was as clear to me then as it has ever been why I love games and how fortunate I am to be living in a time where two grown men can spend a late night recapturing a small piece of their youth, 750 miles away.

The Brink Of…

Another game I had the opportunity to play was Pandemic using the On The Brink expansion I received as a gift during the holidays. The expansion to me is a pivotal part of the game because Pandemic itself became such a staple in my gaming circles that I got to where I almost didn’t want to play it anymore. One thing I like very much about what they did with the expansion is rather than make the game generally more complex and altering the overall feel of an individual session (which a lot of expansions seem to do; for an example of this see the Race For the Galaxy expansion The Gathering Storm) the designers instead focused on compartmentalized modifications to the core game that could be used individually or in tandem as desired. Some expansions fiddle with the core game mechanics, notably the victory conditions often get adjusted which is where I think a lot of the sea change comes from, but Pandemic with On The Brink is still Pandemic, it just has a bit more variety and some additional unpredictability.

I played with my parents and since I had shown them the original game quite some time ago I didn’t get all crazy with bio-terrorists and virulent strains but focused instead on using the new role cards which I think are the best new additions in the whole of the set. I concede that having all the extra roles means a greater chance of getting a combination that works against the group ( our configuration was Archivist, Troubleshooter and Operations Expert which made mobility and research challenging) but at least with more options it makes it less likely the game will be won or lost based on whether or not you pulled the Dispatcher and Researcher together.

I went with an easier 4-Epidemic setup because I know from experience that having newer players start with more challenging levels results in either the veterans pretty much dictating the entire game (“Okay, now on your turn you should fly to Jakarta via shuttle, treat one disease, discard your Jakarta card to fly anywhere and end up in Paris where you need to build a research station and bam, you’re done.” “Uh, okay.”) although I concede that part of that phenomenon could be very readily attributed to the fact that historically in all my games we’ve played with our hands face up. Anyway, we ended up taking the victory though it was getting kind of ugly toward the end which typically means we won just in time.

I’ve been thinking a bit about what has made my leveling experience so much faster with my Mage than it was with the Warrior, because I did some rough math and came up with an estimate that I’ve been leveling 66% faster this second time around. That’s such a significant change, I had to know what might be the cause.

It might be easy to chalk it up to changes in the game this time around, and the +15% XP bonus I get between the Fast Track guild perk and my heirloom cloak certainly have a significant impact. But theoretically those should only be accounting for a 15% increase in leveling speed. Then again it could be attributed to the fact that there are new resources available to me this time around: If nothing else I have never needed to stop and spend time gold farming so I could afford the next ability at the trainer or so I could replace a piece of 10-level-old gear that I wasn’t getting as a quest reward or world drop since I have my sugar daddy main who can spare more gold than I’d ever reasonably need at these levels (and who I have send comparatively high level equipment to auction so the Mage can keep the profits). I also have taken advantage of the Random Dungeon tool to queue for dungeons on a regular basis which has kept me from having to sport very many greens without wasting a lot of time in the LFG channel trying to find a healer or whatever we used to do. But even those perks don’t seem to account for the fact that I’m leveling so much faster this time out.

Before I tell you what I think the biggest reason has been, I have to stop for a minute and call attention to the fact that one aspect that cannot be ignored or overlooked is the changes Blizzard has made to the questing progression in the game. And as part of a community that spends a lot of time griping about things Blizzard does, I want to be clear that this is pure praise: Questing in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms is wonderful. And I don’t just mean it’s wonderful compared to the dismal, cluttered grind that it once was, I mean wonderful on its own merits. Everything from the improved starting zone experience to the way quest chains end with useful rewards to the more consolidated quest hubs to the fact that they comprise the single-player component of the game now to great effect and on through the much wider variety of quest objectives, interesting game mechanics and the occasional entertaining cutscene it’s all so, so much better. But by far my favorite thing about the new questing in Cataclysm is the way it flows organically from level-appropriate zone to level-appropriate zone so you shouldn’t see as much of the “What zone should I level in at XX?” spam in Trade Chat anymore. And! At any point you can always hit up the Warchief’s Board and find a low-XP quest guiding you to an appropriate zone, even if you somehow managed to miss the transition quest in a particular zone you were working in. This is all huge in making leveling a swift process because it takes a lot of the guesswork and wasted time out of it where before it wasn’t always clear when it was time to move on and where you ought go when you did. Huge, huge kudos to Blizzard for their stellar work in this area, as it’s clearly had a big effect.

But I really think that the two largest factors for my blistering pace with this alt has been my focus and my efforts to reduce travel time. At no point have I allowed myself to succumb for long to the myriad distractions that this game offers, going off on side ventures to look for a rare recipe I read about on Thottbot, making extended mat gathering runs, getting lost in Orgrimmar trying to find a profession trainer instead of asking a guard for directions or working on silly achievements when there is XP to be earned. Granted the first time through was a learning experience and I don’t mean to imply I regret how I did it before, just that the meandering pace of leveling my main can be directly attributed to, well, meandering. But the other big component has been controlling my travel time. I admit that my new class makes a lot of this much more possible, as does the lowering of the entry bar to mounted travel (to level 20 from 40 if I’m not mistaken). I mean, hitting level 24 and training to teleport to all the capitol cities was a revelation. I actually wish it hadn’t taken me nearly five levels to figure out that once I could teleport to Undercity, it was completely redundant to leave my Hearthstone set there. The correct way to handle it was to set my Hearth at the closest location to my current quest hub so I could bounce quickly between the two. I also avoided the one-quest-at-a-time trap and gathered all the quests I could, fulfilling their requirements in as much of a loop as they allowed and turned them in in batches.

I’ve been devising other travel-saving techniques as well: With my Warrior I crisscrossed Azeroth, questing in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms in roughly equal amounts. But I’ve scarcely set foot in Kalimdor this time around other than a handful of teleports to Orgrimmar to follow a Mage-specific quest or two. There just isn’t any need for me to waste the time and resources when there are plenty of zones in EK for me to gain XP. I also try to keep my travel time in-city to a minimum: In the Undercity my class and profession trainers are all spread out around the whole place requiring a lot of running back and forth. But Brill is a very short paid flight away and over there all my primary professions and class trainers are right next to the Bat Handler so once I do my business with the Auction House and the Bank, I jump on a bat and fly just outside the city walls to get my training done before I head back into the field. I’ve even started taking advantage of the portal in Undercity to The Blasted Lands, which was put there as part of the Burning Crusade expansion but happens to help me because that’s been a questing zone for me this past week. It’s not meant to get me anywhere other than The Dark Portal but it beats ‘porting to Stonard and riding my horse South for five minutes when I could jump right into a quest objective instead.

Again, Blizzard has done a lot to facilitate some of this, between adding copious amounts of Flight Masters (in practically every spot you find two NPCs to rub together), lowering the entry point for mounted travel and providing extra alternate travel mechanisms. But between their efforts and mine, this has been a breezy trip through the lower levels.

Stay Frosty?

Okay so I respec’ed my Mage’s primary talent tree from Frost into Arcane. That might sound like I had either decided I disliked the Frost tree or I saw something about Arcane that really intrigued me. Neither is actually true—although I did like what I was reading about Arcane’s DPS potential—the real impetus came from the fact that I love playing as a Fire Mage so stinking much. Maybe that sounds funny, but it was like this: Once I dual-specced as Fire I wholly abandoned Frost and it felt like a waste that I had a whole talent tree I couldn’t even be bothered to pour my newly acquired points into as I leveled. I suppose it came down to the fact that having a very crowd-control-y suite of abilities to lock enemies down while I beat them down certainly felt safer than tossing fireballs at them and hoping to burn them down before they reach me and start testing just how squishy I really am wearing robes as my protective gear. But safe was also sort of bland.

Let me try an analogy to explain why the Fire spec is so exciting to me: If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering maybe you can relate to the way you sometimes build a deck with this one really killer combo in it, but perhaps it’s very specific so it isn’t easy to get out. Or maybe it relies on a restricted card that you can only have one of so the odds of it coming together just so are fairly small but you enjoy the deck anyway because the anticipation of “Is this the match where I obliterate them with the force of my awesome combo?” is enough to keep you playing for the satisfaction of waiting for the stars to align. And often in Magic you build your deck in such a way that even if the Ultimate Combo doesn’t pan out, you can do some very cool stuff with smaller subsets of it, occurring often enough to remind you why your patience will eventually be rewarded.

In the Fire spec there is this sequence that is similar to that. It starts with the basic nuke spells: Fireball and Scorch (or Frostfire Bolt if you prefer) which you apply as much critical strike chance to as possible because, properly specced, crits do two things: One, they always apply a short-lived Damage Over Time effect and two, they have a chance to activate an instant version of a long-cast, high-damage spell called Pyroblast. The thing about Pyroblast (the instant cast version distinguished from the normal by an exclamation mark) is that it also applies a slow Damage Over Time debuff (damage is applied every 3 seconds for a 12 second duration) to the target such that if you crit a target and the crit procs Pyroblast!, you’re going to have two DoTs ticking on the enemy right off the bat. This is where the combo starts to get really interesting because later in the talent tree you unlock an ability called Combustion.

At first, Combustion’s description sounds weird and confusing, almost unhelpful. What this long-cooldown ability does in essence is apply a decent amount of burst damage on its own when cast but more interestingly it takes any currently ticking DoTs on the target and combines them together into a new Damage Over Time debuff that deals the per-second amount of the original debuffs’ damage over 10 seconds. So let’s say you cast Fireball and it crits, applying a four second, 100 damage DoT to the target (25 dps) but it also procs Pyroblast! which then applies a 12 second, 1,200 damage DoT (100 dps). At this point you hit Combustion which deals X damage but then applies a new DoT for 125 dps over 10 seconds (1,250 damage). Note that this is a new DoT, so any damage incurred on the original debuffs ticking down isn’t taken away meaning if you cast Pyroblast! one second after Fireball procced it and waited two more seconds before casting Combustion you’d get three of Fireball’s ticks (75 damage) plus one of Pyroblast!’s ticks (400 damage, remember it deals its damage in three-second increments) and then the entirety of Combustion’s damage for a grand total of 1,725 damage over the course of 13 seconds or 133 dps in DoTs alone (not counting the burst damage done by all three spells).

Want it even cooler? Later still in the tree you get Living Bomb, a 12 second DoT ability that has an instant cast time which adds even more DoTs to Combustion’s pain-bringing. Plus there is an ability called Critical Mass which improves Pyroblast to make targets extra vulnerable to spell damage. The coup de grace then comes from a final talent tree ability called Impact which procs 10% of the time from any damaging spell and gives the Fire Blast (another instant cast) the ability to spread DoT debuffs from one target onto others that are adjacent. The idea for the full Impact-Combustion combo then is: Living Bomb sets off a long-duration DoT, then the nuke spell (e.g. Fireball) crits, proccing Pyroblast! which applies the third DoT and lowers the target’s resistance to spell damage at which point Combustion is kicked off instituting a massive DoT debuff. From there either Combustion itself procs Impact or you cast an AoE (probably Flamestrike, which can be improved to be instant cast) across several nearby adds or mobs to give Impact a high chance of proccing and you drop the Impact on the target, stunning them and spreading Combustion’s manic debuff to anyone standing in range. Then you break out the hot dogs and have a nice ol’ fashioned weenie roast on their smoldering corpses.

Dungeoneering

For good or ill I’ve made it to the level where Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire open up for my Mage in the Duneon Finder which means if I want to do a full random queue I’m liable to end up stuck in BRD for the next hour and a half minimum. As I said when I soloed it with the Warrior, it’s sprawling and frequently confusing although at least when done at-level it isn’t quite as much of a farm fest: You end up having to kill all the mobs anyway to advance so you get plenty of keys, plus it does help to have someone familiar with the instance run through it in a way that resembles order. Even still, it’s a long, long grind compared to other dungeons which, don’t get me wrong, can be a very good thing. But when you’re queuing with the mindset of “I have an hour and a half to play, including queue time,” getting stuck in BRD can be a big bummer since it means you probably won’t see the end of the run (and are likely to leave the group abandoned right near the end).

I’ve also gotten to the point where the instances are getting harder and can no longer reasonably be mashed through merely on the strength of the Tank’s AoE and some judicious healz. As such PUG quality is starting to become an issue and I’ve had a couple of rough instances over the weekend. Curiously they both came in Blackrock Spire though I don’t think that was really a key factor. In the first example the tank was another one of those cowboys, pulling every mob in the room with reckless abandon and worrying mostly about driving his DPS through the roof. Honestly it didn’t affect me all that much since he was at least maintaining the aggro but he was moving so fast that he wasn’t even looting corpses (a big part of the reason I run dungeons is to farm BoE greens to sell for a few gold each on the AH) and he certainly wasn’t stopping to let the casters replenish their mana. But I was figuring by and large it was his funeral, the one thing that had me kind of annoyed with him was that he kept kiting the mob groups around corners so he broke line of sight for me a lot. Again though, not really a huge problem for me just sort of annoying.

The healer, on the other hand, must have been grinding his teeth for the bulk of the instance because LOS matters for healers as well and having no mana means not being able to keep this cowboy alive. At one point we wiped and the tank made the mistake of saying something fairly innocent like “Come on healer, don’t let me die.” In my opinion the healer rightfully flipped his lid. The resulting discussion was not suitable for a family website but can be summarized as follows:

“You can’t be seriously blaming me for that wipe. You’ve been pulling more trash than you can reasonably handle for the whole run, kiting out of my LOS and being willfully ignorant of my mana. /ragequit”

After he left there was a short pause and the tank said, “He seemed mad.”

I briefly considered pointing out that the healer had a very strong argument there but instead I tried to keep the peace since we were very close to finishing. I ran back to the door before the room we’d wiped in and watched him charge in, not even waiting for the other two DPS or a new healer to drop in out of the queue. As he kited the angry mob of mobs back toward me so we could both die again, I quietly left on my own.

The other thing about hitting the mid-to-late fifties was that we’re starting to see Death Knights now. Incidentally this lead to the other bad run in which an Unholy DK queued in the tank role and tried to run us through BRS. I’m not terribly familiar with DKs but my understanding is that the tanking spec for them is Blood not Unholy. I’m typically willing to give people the benefit of the doubt but it was pretty clear early on that this guy was not going to be able to hold aggro to save his life. Incidentally the three DPS in that run were all Mages (one of each spec, which I thought was kind of funny) and, well, let’s just say if you’re tanking for Mages, you need to be able to pull threat back in a hurry and it was clear this guy couldn’t. We wiped twice before we realized what the problem was.

Usually when people initiate kick requests I decline. People can be pretty short fused about booting party members: I’ve seen guys get a kick request for having low DPS after someone posts their Recount data in party chat. That’s pretty tacky in my opinion, especially in low level dungeons where there is hardly a DPS target necessary to finish them. I tend to decline kick requests for this reason: I’m happier to give people the benefit of the doubt and other than extended AFKs I don’t typically think performance—being as it is so incredibly subjective—is a good reason to dismiss someone most of the time. On the other hand, this is my time we’re talking about and people who threaten to waste it because they advertise that they are able to perform some vital function when in fact they are not capable of that, well, that’s the difference between performance as a measure and performance as a binary operator.

The formula I use is this: If it seems reasonable to expect that we can complete the dungeon at hand with the current party, then I decline any kick actions. If we’re just going to spend the next half hour wiping and eventually all quitting and firing up the queue cooldown, someone has to go, even if it’s me.

Off-Planet

At the tail end of the week I pushed through to level 59 and headed through the Dark Portal to Outland. Which means that give or take I’ve now brought my alt up to the point I was with my Warrior some three months ago when this WoW resurgence began. I’m a tiny bit nervous that this could be the point where I start getting bored since I so recently worked through this content for the first time and I’ve noted that there is a big lull in the Mage training progression at this stage: I learned Arcane Brilliance at level 58, the next spell I learn doesn’t unlock until level 68 (unless you count the teleport and portal spells to Shattrath, which I kind of don’t). Now, there are some very cool things coming up in the Wrath levels like Spellsteal and Invisibility, but Burning Crusade for Mages seems kind of like a snoozefest. Right now I’m mostly focused on getting my flying mount though because I know that makes a lot of the more frustrating parts of the game nearly infinitely easier. I also know that I’m not likely to be hampered by trying to earn any achievements or do any completionist stuff in Outland as I did (or thought I would do) with the Warrior. One thing I’m very interested to do is explore the zones I skipped previously, Blade’s Edge Mountains and Netherstorm. I’m also excited to use the Dungeon Finder tool to see all the instances I missed because I didn’t take advantage of the Dungeon Finder.

Actually, I want to take a step back for a moment and just remark on the beauty that is the Dungeon Finder for a moment. Okay, yeah, I know it isn’t perfect and I know that it’s pretty dependent on there being a sufficient number of tanks and healers available. But as a solution for the problem of how difficult it can be to organize dungeon runs without such a tool, it’s absolutely brilliant and a huge part of the reason why I’m having fun leveling another character right now. Every time I’ve gotten a little sick of the questing grind through a dull zone like the Burning Steppes the elixir that cures my woes has been a dungeon run with no crazy traveling, no excessive waiting around while someone spams LFG chat looking for a healer and—this point can’t be overstated in my opinion—no reliance on bored high level characters running you through, eliminating both the challenge and the fun of doing the instances as they were meant to be done.

Anyway, the one thing I’m hoping doesn’t become a problem is that there are a lot of non-dungeon (and therefore non-Dungeon Finder) group quests in Burning Crusade, many of which have really valuable quest rewards. Ideally I’ll call on some kindly guild members to help me out for a few minutes so I can clear those parts but if not I may have to skip over some of the items I want and hope I get some lucky drops in the dungeons.

WoW Bits

• I actually didn’t play very much at all over the past week: We were out of town for the weekend so Friday night was a bust both for WoW and for Blood Bowl which I’m still trying to coordinate with Dr. Mac. Saturday night I didn’t miss it as I was busy having a wonderful date with my wife but even Sunday night I didn’t get much time in because I was cleaning up and doing laundry from our time away. The only reason I was able to make it the seven or eight levels that I progressed was because I scarcely even logged onto my main, spending all my available time working on the Mage. I think I may have spent half an hour doing dailies one morning before work but honestly at this point I’m pretty focused on just pushing the Mage up to 85 and I’ll worry about how to handle the Warrior when that’s all done.
• I want to talk about AddOns for a minute because for as much as they can drive me batty, I’m a constant UI tinkerer but I also like to try to keep the number of AddOns I run to a minimum, installing only those that I really use and find useful. Primarily the ones I wouldn’t want to play without include Bartender, ArkInventory, Titan Panel and Auctioneer. I also have Recount but I don’t know that I find it utterly indispensable, though it is nice to see how well I’m doing as a DPSer especially when I’m trying to get better. I haven’t quite figured out how to manage threat monitors: Omen is what I’ve typically used but I don’t need yet another non-game engine graph to keep an eye on. I’ve been trying out Tidy Plates with the Threat Plates module but I’m not quite used to it enough yet to fully ditch Omen. There are a few others like Arky and Gatherer for professions (though I use Gatherer differently than most in that I don’t import the community data, preferring to have it only act as a marker for where I myself have found gathering nodes previously) but I could easily take or leave them.
  The one that kind of baffles me is Deadly Boss Mods, which I finally installed but have yet to activate. Now I’ve been reluctant to install it because while everyone and their cat seems to think it’s essential, I’ve yet to see a really good demonstration or even explanation as to what it does and what it’s good for. The best anyone seems willing to say is that it provides boss-specific timers, I guess letting you know when a boss is going to move into a certain phase of a fight? It’s possible that with my extremely limited raid experience I’m just not used to epic boss encounters and I don’t realize how much effort it would be to keep all those fights in your head. But so far I have yet to encounter any bosses, even in the Heroic Cataclysm dungeon I ran, where I felt that what was missing was a timer telling me when something specific was about to happen. Mostly it seems like the bosses are good enough at broadcasting what they’re going to do that as long as you pay a reasonable amount of attention you can prepare yourself for what’s coming.
  I guess the only example I can think where it might be useful would be the Ozruk fight in Stonecore: If there was something that popped up and said “Run, fool! Here comes Shatter!” that could be useful but it’s not like I don’t watch Ozruk’s casting bar like a hawk anyway and still manage to get caught in that blast. I suppose I’ll have to enable it and see for myself but I’m worried a bit that I’ll hate it and from what I can tell when you start getting into the higher level content and running heroics and raids, the expectation from everyone is that you are in fact running DBM. I’ve even seen raiding guilds who require that applicants prove they use the AddOn as part of their qualifications. Can it really be that effective and powerful? And if it is, how does it affect the enjoyment of the game?
• I’m starting to consider a possible computer purchase for the first time (for myself) in something like 10 years. I’ve been using either work-supplied hardware since then (not really counting the Mac mini I bought for my wife and I to share five or six years back). The last computer I bought for myself was a Dell that came with Red Hat Linux pre-installed back in 2000 or 2001 which was also intended to be used almost exclusively for work and educational purposes. So it’s been a long time since I’ve entertained the thought of buying or building a PC. But I have several reasons for thinking about this, the primary one being that I’m so wholly reliant on my work-supplied machine that it would be fairly catastrophic if I ever got laid off and had to turn it back in to it’s rightful owners. The reason I’m thinking desktop PC is because while I’m pretty adamant that my work provide me with a laptop if they have any inclination of me working outside of an office environment, I don’t necessarily need the additional expense or portability for my home computing tasks. And while I vastly prefer OS X to Windows, Apple’s desktops don’t really do much for me, not to mention whatever I got would have to have affordability as a primary consideration.
  Basically what I’m looking for is something that has a big hard drive to hold all my media, can be always on so I can implement a sound backup strategy and can run iTunes so I can sync my phone/iPod. As secondary features I’d like it to be able to run some lower-end games (or be upgradable enough to do so at some juncture) and access the VPN at work in case my laptop ever died while I was working from home so I wouldn’t have to suddenly race into the office.
  The biggest issue I have at the moment is that I haven’t purchased any hardware in so long I don’t have anything to build from, not even a monitor. It looks like I can pick up something I’ll be able to live with plus a display for around $500-600, maybe earmarking a bit of money for a video card upgrade in the semi-near future. Compared to even the low-end Mac mini that starts at $700 sans monitor that’s not too bad at all. The question really is though, how long is it going to take me to re-download the digitally-purchased Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm? Ouch.

I’m not a big forum guy. I was once, back in the wild days of my virtual youth, but now I mostly visit via external link for some amusement. Because honestly all online forums can be distilled into the following essence: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Theory and overreaction to the inconsequential. If you view them as comical, they have some entertainment value inherent but if you take them seriously for even one microsecond, you will find yourself either being a jerk because you are largely anonymous and have an audience or you will begin to care deeply and be emotionally impacted by something that doesn’t mean diddly  to your life at any level you care to examine it. So it goes with WoW forums.

However, the current inconsequential that is being overreacted to is worthy of at least a little side discussion is the notion of difficulty in Cataclysm heroics. I had a discussion late last week over Ventrilo with a guildmate about a lot of the people crying over how difficult heroic dungeons are now and clearly he fell on the side of “Why would you play a game that was so easy anyone could do it?” But as we talked and as I reflected on it afterward, I realized there was a not-necessarily-clear-cut discussion happening behind he scenes of his rhetorical question.

The interesting thing is that within the community there are basically two standpoints: One is that Cata heroics are punishing to the point of removing the fun from the game and people are liable to quit playing if Blizzard doesn’t tone down their stance that heroic instances ought to be a challenge. The other is that these are supposed to be tough: They’re called “heroics” for a reason and should require something akin to heroism to complete; if the toughest challenge in the game was no challenge at all, players would get bored and be liable to quit playing. Now obviously the sticking point is where the line on challenge blurs into frustration, but what occurred to me was that if you step back you can see where this issue of achievable versus accessible has been plaguing video game designers for years.

Consider for a moment the games from earlier eras:  Defender, Donkey Kong, Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts, Punch-Out, Nethack, Myst, etc. Many games in the industry’s halcyon days were not just challenging, in some cases they were brutally punishing. Some of that came from the arcade mindset where, for profitability reasons, games needed to be attractive and addictive but also practically sadistic so as to elicit the continual feeding of coins into the receptacle. But even early home games often had very little concern for allowing players to “experience” the entirety of the game if their skill did not permit it (as an historical aside, check out this developer standards document I found for the Atari 2600 while doing some research). Now contrast that with today’s games and ask yourself how often successful games are un-conquerable for even the most moderate player in some fashion or another. The evidence seems to suggest that games have gotten easier and easier as designers have begun not to program challenging diversionary obstacles but rather interactive spectacles that they don’t want to go to waste. If you expect a million kids to come back and buy your sequel in a couple of years, you’d better find some way to make sure they reach the end of the first game.

And for the most part, this is fine with the vast majority of players because by definition most players fall into the middling area in terms of skill. Often the potential detraction is sidestepped by providing selectable difficulty settings which allows the unwashed masses to play “dumbed-down” versions of the game while those who consider themselves elite can still access a greater challenge at their leisure. But note that this doesn’t really apply in the MMO space where World of Warcraft makes its home because for balance reasons it would be impractical (though not impossible) to have several versions of the game, each tuned to a specific type of player.

Except, when you think about it, that’s exactly what heroic dungeons are in WoW: The selectable difficulty switch. If you think about it, you can access all the gameplay content that heroic dungeons contain by simply running them on normal mode. No one that I’ve heard is complaining that normal Cataclysm dungeons are too difficult, so in essence what it seems to me is that the backlash is coming from people who might—as an example—play Call of Duty on Veteran difficulty and cry in the forums that the game is impossible.

I had an opportunity over the weekend to play through my first heroic dungeon and I can confidently report that yes, they are in fact very challenging. I did Lost City of the Tol’Vir with three guildmates and a guy who used to be in the guild (but left to start his own) until about halfway through the third boss when the ex-guildie left and we replaced him with a random LFM guy who turned out to be very cool and also very good so it was a really pleasant run all told. But even with partial ventrilo communication and a positive, “we-can-do-this” vibe from the de facto party leader, we wiped a lot. I think the trick was that we were all patient and relaxed because we were doing it as a guild and didn’t worry about it too much if someone’s DPS was below 3,000 or if the healer ran out of mana. As long as we were doing a little better each try or at least that we could identify where we had made the mistake we didn’t get too frustrated and no one was tempted to ragequit.

I don’t think I’d have any interest in doing the PUG random queue for heroics at this point because I know the issues that we avoided by having friendly guildmembers running would be rampant otherwise, but I do know that I had an incredible amount of fun. And most pertinently, the sense of satisfaction when we finally dropped Siamat was pronounced as an effect of the whole run being pretty difficult. I think all this means that Blizzard has the heroic dungeons pretty much exactly where they need to be: I barely qualified gear-wise to enter a heroic dungeon and even with the sqeaky wheel that was me and my comical efforts at melee DPS we managed to make it through with some perseverance.

So far Blizzard seems to be reacting with some level of surprise at the outcry and I’m intrigued that they haven’t seemed to yet reply with “It’s hard mode. It’s supposed to be hard. Last time out hard mode was a little on the flimsy side, sorry if you thought that was going to be the norm.” Instead they’ve over-explained with treatise on game design and balancing theory which frankly sounds kind of condescending to my ears, moreso than just saying they intend for heroics to kick your butt and pointing out that if you don’t like getting your butt kicked, they are, in fact, entirely optional.

Dungeoneering

Aside from heroic Lost City of the Tol’Vir, I actually ran a lot of dungeons over the last week, primarily because I spent the vast majority of my WoW time on my Mage and I’ve gotten to the level where the available dungeons are ones that I never did at-level with my Warrior because I was in questing exclusivity mode during those levels. I’m talking about Dire Maul, Stratholme, Scholomance, the latter sections of Scarlet Monastery, etc. I can say with a little more confidence now that Scholomance is one of my favorite dungeons in the game (that I’ve tried) and certainly my favorite from vanilla WoW. Maybe it’s the sort of Harry Potter vibe or whatever but the whole evil magic school thing is very cool to me and I like that it’s not ridiculously confusing just to navigate (I’m looking at you, Maraudon) plus it’s packed with bosses (13 of them I believe) so it’s straightforward without being dull (cough new Sunken Temple cough).

And how can I say it’s my favorite in vanilla WoW, you ask? Well, you’re looking at the owner of the achievement Classic Dungeonmaster, as I finally took the time to solo Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire with my Warrior. I really wasn’t much of a fan of either: BRS has a lot of the twisty navigation issues that drive me kind of nutty about WoW instances (and the 2D maps don’t help enough) while BRD was just long considering it required farming in-instance trash mobs for relatively rare drops to complete some of the progression and I just felt it was blah as a solo endeavor. I will say that going through some dungeons at-level with the Mage changed my opinion on them (Dire Maul, for example, isn’t as bad as I thought—especially when the Dungeon Finder tool takes out the annoyance of navigating the poorly mapped Feralas outdoor area). Maybe I’ll appreciate them more if I hit them up with the Mage in a group, I dunno.

The interesting thing about running dungeons with the Mage is that so far I have yet to meet a deliberate tank in these classic instances. Every single one has been a real cowboy, barely stopping to loot corpses before pulling the next three groups of mobs and just expecting the healer to keep them alive and the DPS to be on his or her hip at all times. I assume a lot of it is that for experienced players they’ve been through all these dungeons a zillion and a half times so it’s either a farming run or they just want to knock it out, take the loot and XP and keep grinding; the motivation to stop and read the quest text or get a sense of the area lore just isn’t there. And in a way that’s fine since I know that I’ve been taking a lot of shortcuts with this alt in terms of power leveling. By and large I leave my measured pace, lore-examining play for the Warrior since he’s got nothing but time up there at level 85. But from a play perspective I know that some of these cowboy tanks can get a little overzealous to the extent that our tank in Scholomance wiped the party in the room with all the zombies because he pulled too many for us to AoE down and overwhelmed the healer. There was a momentary heated exchange in which the healer, a DPS and the tank debated the merits of aggressive pulling but it proved to be academic since that room is the last one that’s really crowded and the rest of the instance is pretty much boss rooms with minimal trash mobs/adds.

Mage Love

At the end of the week I finished in the high 40s with my Mage, which is significant over last week because other than one night running BRS and BRD with the Warrior (actually the whole thing started by finishing up the Lunar Festival quests/achievements since a couple of the Elders are down in those dungeons and I ran them while getting the Elders because I figured I was already there) and another which included the heroic Tol’Vir run it was all Mage all the time this week. Most of the questing was limited to the Eastern and Western Plaguelands with, as I said, a lot of Dungeon queuing in between.

For a while I wondered what the point of questing even was since you can control the rep gains through tabards in instances, you get much better equipment and even the non-usable gear you collect tends to be BoE that can lead to some nice auction house scores for better cash flow. But I did a little rough comparison and realized quickly that the XP gains in dungeons are okay, but nothing compared to the blistering leveling pace you can sustain through even an hour of concentrated questing. Some of it depends on the quest hub and the types of quests you’re doing but I was averaging 1.75 (or so) levels per hour through the Eastern Plaguelands with my heirloom cloak, plus the guild XP boost and the zone-specific buff from the caravan.

Have I mentioned how much I love playing this character? There is an element of sadness to the preference I’ve been giving this guy over my main because I invested so much time and energy into maxing out that Warrior both in the leveling portion as well as ancillary aspects like achievement hunting, profession grinding, reputation gains and on and on. But then I spend some time playing as the Mage and I get ridiculously excited reading lunatic theorycrafting stuff like this breakdown of how to maximize Fire DPS and it softens the blow. I doubt some of the more esoteric achievements will ever really be a priority for me with this semi-alt (things like world event achievements are probably going to remain exclusive to the Warrior) but I really want to hurry the Mage along to level 85 because it sticks in my craw every time I have call to DPS for the guild in high level instances: I know I need to commit to gearing the Warrior for tanking but right now I need to work on the skill behind it and frankly there isn’t always a demand for a tank within the guild since there are several good ones already who are online far more often than I am. Typically guild groups are looking for healers first, DPS second and tanks last. With each passing level on the Mage I become more fully convinced that this is my primary DPS destiny which in turn strengthens my resolve to leave the Warrior’s primary function as a tank but until I get the practice in there and have a viable high-level DPS alternative, I’m stuck splitting the difference on the Warrior to the detriment of the groups I join.

If there was one complaint I had about leveling the Mage it would be that I don’t feel as though I necessarily chose the right professions for this toon. I’m an Herbalist/Alchemist which is okay I guess but I feel in a lot of ways that, having done the search-gathering/crafting combo of Mining and Blacksmithing on my Warrior this is exactly the same with all the good and substantial bad that comes along with it. The problem is I don’t want anything to slow me down in my relentless pursuit of level advancement. At this point I’ve gotten both professions up to around 250 so switching professions would mean going back to low-level zones and re-doing a lot of work I’ve already done to get up to speed. I suppose if I were to decide to try to do the Loremaster achievements at any point I could engage a do-over at that point without much risk of wasting time, I just know that these sorts of distractions and side sojourns were what crippled my leveling rate with the Warrior and made it ultimately hard to max out at all.

I know what I would do if I could do it over again: Tailoring and Enchanting. Neither requires a specific gathering profession to feed it and while I originally thought Tailoring would be dull, it turns out that it’s always nice to be able to make your own armor. The question is whether I’m better off riding out the quasi-painful gather/craft grind so at least I have a top level herbalist in my stable and someone who can transmute (which will be great for the Blacksmith eventually) or if I should take the time out to reset and let some other alt be the shmuck to grind teh herbs (as they say). I mean, for reals: Goldthorn. Am I right? Impossible to find and sells for 200+ gold per stack. It would be better if someone just punched me in the mouth.

WoW Bits

• So the heroic dungeon wasn’t my only first this week, I also had my first shot at raiding with a guild run on Baradin Hold. Let me back up a bit and explain that Baradin Hold is kind of unique in that it’s a raid that becomes available to whichever faction currently holds Tol Barad. It’s a really small instance right now with only a few mobs and one boss. It looks really cool but there isn’t much to it which is why the guild master wanted to start there. Of course, you do have to hold TB to access it and by the time we had most of a raid team together it was almost time for the PvP battle to start. So a ton of us from the guild queued for the battle to make sure we could actually do the raid without getting locked out. I will say this: PvP with a lot of people on both sides is vastly more enjoyable than low-population PvP battles. I actually had an incredibly good time (and did pretty well for once): The frenzy of spell effects and the pseudo-controlled chaos of the bigger clashes was quite epic and while I’m sure it was a massive fluke I actually got a number of performance-based achievements during the fight including 100 Honorable Kills, Towers of Power and Tol Barad All-Star. The best news was that we did in fact hold onto Tol Barad and after the fight we assembled our raid group and tried our hand at Argaloth.
  Well, we didn’t do very well which is ultimately why we split the raid into two five-man dungeon groups and went into heroic mode because the guild master decided the reason we were dying with Argaloth at maybe 75% health was we weren’t doing enough DPS because we were undergeared. I’m not sure I completely agreed with his assessment: I will grant that we probably could have been doing a lot more damage output but we really only tried the fight three or four times before giving in and we were still improving with each attempt so I didn’t see any reason to call it quits right then. Somehow or other he got into his head that all six DPSers needed to be doing about 10K in order to have a shot at it whereas I was thinking the problem was it took us at least two fights just to figure out how to have the healers deal with Consuming Darkness. Anyway, decision made and we broke off which worked out because ultimately it lead to the very enjoyable heroic run that I talked about before.
• The other thing I did with the Warrior was finally max out Blacksmithing, although I confess that after all those farming runs last week I sat at 523 and just couldn’t bear to go out and try to find 20 more Volatile Fires so I broke down and bought the 24 Elementium Bars and 10 VFs necessary and just took a net loss of 150 or so gold on the sale of two Bloodied Pyrium Shoulders so I could say I did it. Of course now I theoretically have the ability to craft some really great stuff for myself, except the mats are beastly to obtain and even just getting the plans from that ponce Kuldar requires more farming. The one bright spot is that I came out of the heroic dungeon with a Chaos Orb so in theory the hardest mats to get fro crafted epics is at least 1/3 of the way finished.
• I came out of my Scarlet Monastery with the semi-famous Whitemane’s Chapeau (“I lewt teh hat“) and promptly had to toggle the “show helm” option because while it may be best in slot for my level, it is so dog ugly compared to the rest of my fairly cool-looking gear I just couldn’t stand it. It occurred to me that it would be a nice feature if they allowed players to toggle visibility on all their secondary gear slots, including tabards. I’m rocking the Silvermoon City tabard right now, which is a fairly decent looking tabard, but it’s kind of gaudy against the rich purple of my Robes of the Lich. As with any WoW-fashion conscious player, I tolerate it for the sake of the game mechanics, but I’ll be happy to finish the Exalted on that faction and turn to something with a more complimentary color palate.
  Oh my gosh. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME?
• I should update a little on the status of the control scheme adjustment experiment: It turns out I’m getting much more used to mouselooking although I think the thing that really helped me the most was a sort of training wheels approach I used with my Mage. Since I didn’t really have enough ability slots to justify mapping interrupts to Q and E (at the time), I moved the left and right turn to those keys (instead of the usual A and D) and mapped A and D to left and right strafe, respectively. Then I turned on mouselook so I could theoretically still keyboard turn but I was equipped for mouselooking. It had the intended effect in that I found myself relying less and less on the keys to turn and now for the most part I forget that’s an option. I contribute a small portion of my accidental Tol Barad success to my improved control scheme and I think by and large it’s been a positive adjustment. I do still struggle with the Command-Click when I’m on the laptop controls, but I’ve gotten into the habit of playing at a desk with a connected mouse whenever I’m going to be doing anything significant like running a dungeon or doing some power leveling. It’s gotten to where I tend to play with a connected mouse anytime I’m doing anything more intense than wandering from bank to auction house, profession leveling or doing Orgrimmar dailies. And it works out because usually those are the later evening sessions after the family has gone to bed.

I complained previously about the taxing grind that is Blacksmithing in World of Warcraft. Well, it turns out it’s so much worse than I thought. Originally I estimated that once I leveled Blacksmithing out of the range of Obsidium-required items I’d be in better shape to race toward 525 because, among other things, Elementium was the primary ore available in the zones I was spending time in such as Twilight Highlands and Uldum. I figured I’d be tooling around the Twilight Citadel which has a heavy concentration of Elementium Veins quite a bit because it’s right near the Dragonmaw dailies area and yeah it takes 15-20 bars at two ore each to knock out Redsteel Helms and Elementium Rods but that’s not really that much worse than the zillion Mithril I had to farm to get out of the low 300 range, right?

Hmph.

So here’s reality: Farming Elementium veins isn’t like farming Mithril or Tin in comparatively low-level zones. Up until now I’ve only been competing for the nodes against people’s alts and new players all of whom typically have more than one or two options for farming locations (Copper miners have at least seven or eight good choices, Mithril farmers can choose from five or six solid locales) so now I’m experiencing mat farming at end-game levels for the first time and pickings can be very slim. It’s one thing when you collect a node here or there while you’re in an area doing something else (questing, for example) and it feels like you’re making progress on a number of fronts. It’s another thing altogether when you spend 30-45 minutes of dedicated farming and only come up with enough raw materials to maybe squeak together two stacks (a stack being 20 most of the time) of useable mats. Did I mention that most single skill point crafted items take either three-fourths or an entire stack to create? Each? Doing the math that way, you can basically break down your time per skill point. I did two farming runs earlier in the week and I was actually interested in how I did, efficiency-wise so I timed myself and used this formula to come up with a skill per hour rating: mats/hour / mats/skillup. Basically on one run I got 103 Elementium ore in 30 minutes which makes my mats/hour about 206. Determining mats/skillup isn’t easy because (especially at this level) there aren’t very many plans that don’t call for a number of different mats, but for the sake of simplicity I can ignore the requirements for things like Volatile <Element>s and focus on Elementium which, in the best case scenario, requires 15 bars—made at two ore per bar—to make an item that grants one skill point. So as a starting point we could say mats/skillup is 30. That puts the skill/hour rating at 6.9. Ideally.

Now the wrinkle, which I didn’t realize or consider until it became plain what was happening: Once you hit a skill of 510, guaranteed skillups—that is, items you create which grant a skill point each and every time as opposed to those which merely have a chance to grant a point—stop costing all or most of a stack of Elementium Bars and begin to cost fewer bars but also require those Volatile <Element>s in stacks of 10. Volatile Fire, for example, drops at a 10% rate from regular Elementium Veins and at 20% from Rich Elementium Veins. In the three primary mining zones there are 1,467 Elementium Veins listed on Wowhead, and 1,328 Rich Elementium Veins. If 10% of the regular and 20% of the Rich give Volatile Fires, that means 403 of those will grant you that drop at a 14% rate. I’m not sure if the drop rates on Wowhead include multiples from a specific item (as in, does a “drop” mean the node had any number of the item or is it including nodes that contain two or three Volatile Fires as two or three drops?) but let’s assume it counts any number as a single drop. You need ten of them per crafted item and if even ten percent of the time you get at least two in a node that means, on average, you get enough mats for one skill up roughly every 75-80 nodes. 75 nodes will net you at least 150 ore, probably more like 200 so we’re talking an hour of work, or, in terms of the skill/hour rating: 1.

It gets worse. Aside from all this, the plans for these high-level items aren’t available directly from the profession trainer. Instead, they’re available from a “Metal Trader” in Dragonmaw Port who trades useful plans for freaking metal bars. That’s right, you have to sacrifice the very materials you need to make the items just for the privilege of making them in the first place. Most of the leveling plans cost a stack of Elementium Bars. At least the Elementium requirements for these items is less than a full stack (ten from 515-520 and then 12 from 520-525 in most cases). Plus you can theoretically close to double your output if you buy both plans per 5-level progression that require Volatile Fire and Volatile Water (the crafted items are more or less identical except for secondary stat and both mats have very similar drop rates) since they drop from the same nodes. That will set you back 80 Elementium Bars for all four plans, but it’s probably worth bumping the skill/hour up to 2 with regards to the V<E>s. But even with that you’re looking at roughly 200 Elementium Ore and 19 Volatile <Element> per hour and 22EO+16(plans)/10V<E> per skill which amounts to a combined 5.2/1.9 skill per hour rating.

Put simply, that’s a five hour grind for me to get the ten levels to max out Blacksmithing.

This is why people pay 15-20 gold each for these mats on the Auction House because as ridiculous as nearly 500 gold is for one skill point, if you can make half of it back by selling the item (Bloodied Pyrium Boots, for instance, are selling for close to 400 gold) and save yourself half an hour of farming in the process, it starts to not look so bad. Until you really add it up and note that your net loss for those points would be over 1,000 gold—assuming you were able to get the amount for each of them that you wanted. I don’t think I have the cash reserves to buy my way into 525 skill points but I have to admit I’m going to keep a close eye on the AH for super-bargains and anything that might shave some time off that grind. For a guy who only gets to play eight or nine hours per week, spending half of it flying around for relatively minimal gain sounds less than great.

Scroll of Lesser QQ

After last week’s DPS pity party I decided to focus a little on gearing up using what I had available to me. Typically I presume that as one levels up gear gets replaced so often as to make spending a lot of resources on enchants and gems kind of a fool’s errand. I suppose the exception would be Heirlooms but then you soulbind it (as opposed to the normal account binding they have which allows you to make it a hand-me-down to later alts) and that’s not ideal. Anyway, I hadn’t bothered much with decking out individual pieces prior to this but with the help of a friendly Enchanter guildmate and some Auction House trolling, I was able to beef up some of my stuff. I also reforged a couple of items and overall tried to do what I could to improve my dungeon performance. I still have about 50% greens and I know a big part of getting my numbers up is going to be replacing those, but meanwhile this was a step in the right direction.

The problem is that I have a number of spec-specific items where I found two items that were reasonably close in relative benefit but one was better for the tanking Protection spec and the other was better for the DPS Fury spec. I kept them both and I’m pretty diligent about maintaining two gear profiles so I can switch whenever I need to. However, as I’ve started getting some of the higher level gear (faction gear from higher reputation levels, dungeon drops, etc) I find that overall it tends to be better than either spec pieces I have so it becomes one of the utility pieces that sits in both profiles. When I go to reforge or enchant however I end up torn: Do I add Expertise or Mastery to help the Protection tanking spec? Or do I add Crit or Haste for the benefit of Fury’s DPS?

What this leads me to is a thought that I need to really focus on one role or the other. I think it’s okay to be adaptable and have the option to switch into my off-spec should circumstance demand it, but by and large I need to be gearing myself in one direction or the other and right now I’m trying to split the difference. It’s rapidly becoming a question of: To tank or not to tank? Here’s the key problem with not running dungeons with my Warrior on the way up to 85, because I never had to practice tanking as a low-level Warrior. Tanking on low-level dungeons, based on my evaluation from running through as a DPS with my Mage, is kind of air-quoted in that most low-level instances are faceroll-fests anyway. Yeah you can wipe in certain encounters if the tank loses threat badly and if your healer is pants you don’t stand much of a chance but there’s been very little CC necessary up through Blackfathom Deeps and it’s mostly been a matter of “tank pulls the mob, DPS facerolls and healer drains mana to keep everyone alive; drink and repeat.” I’m tempted—tempted, mind—to roll a new Warrior and level him as much through dungeons as possible, eschewing quest XP, just so I can learn Prot Warrior tanking in a sort of organic fashion. Unfortunately I don’t really want to level a new Warrior and certainly not before I’m done with my Mage leaving me with the following options: One is to suck it up and learn to tank via trial-by-fire by committing to my Protection spec and queuing for dungeons in the tank role, hoping I don’t get laughed off the server as the Worst Tank in the Game. Another is to try and find a mentor, perhaps some noble guild member with a similar schedule who is patient enough to work with me through my growing pains and can point out areas to work on or strategies to attempt. The third option is to just shrug off tanking and devote myself to melee DPS as a Fury Warrior and little else. This would be a marked change in approach to the game for me as this character since as I said before I always assumed that tanking would come eventually.

I’m not crazy about option three. I have a high-level character who is specced and class-capable of tanking, I ought to embrace that. DPS for the Warrior feels like a secondary consideration, something I can do and be middling at when I’m not focusing on my main mission. Option one is I guess my plan B. I do think before I did anything of that sort I’d have to run through all the 85 dungeons several times so I at least knew what was coming and could try to make up for my execution blunders somewhat with preparation and knowledge and ideally I’d go with a full compliment of friendly and patient guildies, especially at first. My hope is that I can feel out someone in the guild that has a strong familiarity with tanking and at least a passing comprehension of Warrior tanking to sort of guide me through.

Tome of Arcane Bullet Points

• I’m still leveling my Mage and having a lot of fun doing it. I find it a little comical that because I’m making judicious use of the Dungeon Finder, I have my 30s Mage decked out in nearly all higher end (for the level range) blue gear while my level 85 Warrior is still rocking about 25% greens. The progression has been remarkably quick and smooth which leads me to believe a couple of things: One is that Blizzard’s questing changes for Cataclysm have been great, and the other is that I must be getting a little better at the game overall. Now, the awesomeness of the questing from a lore perspective does kind of level off following the end of the Silverpine Forest chain; I’d say right around the time I reached Tarren Mill it was feeling more like what I remember from running my Warrior through that zone than anything else had. But there is still enough variance and cohesiveness to the way quest chains progress to keep it interesting and I know now that my strategy of queuing for dungeons as I work on quests is paying huge dividends not just in the sense of getting me better gear and lots of gold and XP but in that it breaks up the progression in a way that keeps all of it feeling fresh. Plus, as I said, I’m getting a little better because I remember spending an awful lot of time ghost running as my Warrior, and while I certainly die as the Mage, typically it comes from either party wipes (which are rarely Leroy Jenkins-type situations where you can pinpoint the fault of the wipe on one particular person or decision) or they come from failures at calculated risks. For example, I have a quest to kill an elite Yeti which is suggested for 3 players, although the mob’s level is five or six below my own. Sometimes 3-player recommended elite mobs that are five or six levels down are soloable, so I gave it a shot. Turns out this mob is no joke and he hits like a freight train so I had to run. But it was worth trying to see if I could burn him down on my own since there’s no group-quest finder in the game (yet). Compare this to the n00b deaths that I was becoming famous for as my Warrior such as wandering into a new zone without knowing what level it was and getting slaughtered by mobs that nearly doubled my level or suffering falling deaths because I was busy autorunning with my bag window open and missed the fact that there was a big gap in the bridge I thought was safe to cross.
• When I hit level 30 and opened up dual spec, I paused for a moment and did some research trying to figure out if Arcane or Fire was a better choice. I guess in Cataclysm Arcane has become the raider’s DPS spec du jour so I briefly considered going against my first instinct and doing that. But then I decided that it wasn’t as important that I do what seemed best at the time and did what sounded fun so I went Fire. At this point I’ve basically switched specs, too. I love the fact that while I was better at controlling enemies with Frost through freeze effects and such, I really don’t worry about it much as a Fire Mage since most enemies don’t even reach me by the time I’ve reduced them to ashes. DPS is still spotty sometimes, but I know now that’s due to player skill and not anything gear or spec wise: When I’m doing the Right Things I maintain at #1 or #2 on the DPS chart pretty consistently. I’d probably be even more prone to success if I learned how to target things better and I remembered to use battle elixirs (I’m an alchemist for heaven’s sake and I can’t remember to keep elixirs going).
• Of course the DPS numbers and charts really only apply to dungeons; out in the world I measure success more by how frequently I have to repair my armor and since I switched specs to Fire I’ve been pretty pleased that it’s a rare occurrence. One thing I’ve noticed that impacts my efficiency in dungeons that isn’t a problem when I’m solo questing though is that especially on these lower level dungeons the tanks tend to be pretty gung-ho about tearing through the levels and sometimes that can be a problem for my mana stores. I have one long-cooldown ability that can get me a lot of mana pretty quickly but aside from that I either need to use Cannibalism or drinks like Refreshing Spring Water. I have a lot of mana potions but those are more heat-of-the-moment kinds of things and they only really provide enough juice to restore my casting for another four or five spells at most. For the most part I don’t mind missing out on a few mob fights so I can sit and build up some mana reserves—four-man teams can usually hold out against an ordinary group of elites—it’s when the tank doesn’t pause for even a minute or two before a boss fight to let me get some mana back up that I get kind of annoyed. I understand the difficult jobs belong primarily to the healer and the tank, but those players need to remember that it doesn’t do either of them any favors if the damage dealers can’t deal said damage.
• I’ve been running random dungeons with the Mage because I missed a few lower-level specific ones that I’ll have to go back and solo if I care about the achievements so the thought I had originally about doing each one once went out the window. Besides, the Satchel of Helpful Goods you get from randoms has actually yielded some usable gear for me so it’s worth it to have that extra loot power, at least until one of the random enchantments is sort of best in class for me (Stamina and Intellect). Of course randoms being what they are, I ended up running The Scarlet Monastery a lot, which was okay because I like that dungeon pretty well although it really grates on my nerves that Arcanist Doan from The Library has both Polymorph and Silence. Plus he’s either immune to Counterspell or I just wanted to use it a lot more often than its cooldown allowed because a couple of times fighting him I spent half the fight Silenced and watched my fellow DPSers turn into sheep. I also ran Gnomergeran which is a goofy little instance especially with all the weird ninja shortcuts people have worked out over the years but I kind of liked it. I’m realizing now that soloing all these dungeons as the Warrior really doesn’t give a sense of what they play like since it’s one thing to pay attention to all the patrols and learn the boss fights and another to mash through just to stare at the pretty scenery.
• I also did some dungeon-diving as my Warrior, finally getting a chance to work through Grim Batol which I think so far is my favorite Cataclysm dungeon. I love the way you get a chance to soften up the mobs in the central hallway with the drake bombs and the Dragha Shadowburner and his funky Invocation of Flame ability was pretty memorable. Plus I thought that as far as main dungeon bosses go, Erudax was one of the better fights; some people in my party were grumbling about Shadow Gale and how you can’t always see where the center of it is (twice during our fight it was centered right underneath Erudax which I admit sort of masked it but on the other hand Erudax takes double damage when Shadow Gale is out so it was pretty convenient for me as a melee DPS). The adds coming in that try to pop open a drake egg were kind of a fun twist as well. All in all I’m excited to go back and try it again.
• After Grim Batol the group still had some time left so we decided to do Crucible of Carnage which is basically the WoW take on every Arena sequence from every fantasy RPG you’ve ever played, ever. But at least I got an achievement and a cool—if a bit heavy on the hot pink—sword out of the deal. Afterward the group disbanded as a few people had to log off for the night but one guy stuck around and helped me get the achievement for the other arenas located in Nagrand (Outland) and Zul’Drak (Northrend). I solo’d the one in Nagrand easily although I somehow managed to glitch the final boss so I ended up having to kill him three time before I was able to get the quest and finally after killing him the fourth time it let me count it as a success. We teamed up on the one in Northrend but I don’t think even that was necessary as I probably could have handled it alone. Still, together we made very short work of it. It’s stuff like this that makes me realize why the end game content is considered the “meat” of the game because the items you receive for these arena quests are very good and would have been really nice to have ten or fifteen levels ago. They’re nearly worthless to me now, of course, as they’re bind on pickup and maybe net a handful of gold selling them to a vendor, but it’s kind of nice to be cruising through the game the second time so I can take advantage of the lessons learned.
• All in all I didn’t play much this week because I ended up crashing early both Friday and Saturday nights which are usually the times when I clock the most consecutive hours. Note that when I say early I mean like out by 19:00 early. I did play some on Sunday evening but I was dozing off during a boss fight and figured I’d better call it a week.

Those who have suffered through my previous wall-of-texts about WoW may recall that I’m trying to make the transition from DPS-based Fury Warrior to Tanking Protection Warrior on my main. So far this has largely involved switching specs and abilities in my hotbars and sort of muddling through various daily quests with unfamiliar rotations while the increased stamina keeps me alive and I slowly wear down all the mobs I’m fighting. Note that for my dungeon runs I’ve been switching back to Fury and just going as a melee DPSer because we’ve had enough trouble as it is with wipes without having to subject everyone to my newbosity in a key role. Plus I’ve only been through one Cata dungeon from beginning to end and my perception is that a large part of being a good tank (at least for the kinds of farming runs that you do on normal dungeons) is preparation and knowing what to expect.

After a couple of weeks of this I’m more or less familiar with the base Protection abilities like Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, the Rend/Thunder Clap combo using Blood and Thunder, and so on. I still need to spend some more time learning a few rotational progressions for various circumstances (for example I always forget about Heavy Repercussions which gives a boost to Shield Slam whenever Shield Block is activated) but for the most part I’m getting comfortable with the spec. Admittedly, I still work mobs the way I always have in WoW, I just use different spells but for the most part it works just as well which I guess is what I was looking for from the first stage of my transition. I recognize that it takes me longer to drop individual mobs due to my decreased damage output but I notice that I die a little less often from pulling aggro on nearby secondary mobs due to a better survivability base versus multiple attackers.

But I was noticing (and this isn’t unique to Protection—I encountered this as Fury as well, I just didn’t worry about it as much because there seems to be fewer circumstantial rotations when you’re doing little more than hammering away at something) that I was having trouble reaching the keys I needed for various abilities as they extended past 5 and 6 on the keyboard, even with the Shift and Control modifiers. So the first thing I did was to dive into Bartender and start trying to fix some stuff but as I was doing so I happened across this post and the accompanying comments. The crux of it was that I was wasting a lot of valuable hotkeys by keyboard turning, not to mention making myself a target in PvP and generally being a flaming n00b. For the uninitiated, by default movement is controlled with W, A, S, D and left/right strafing is done via Q and E. The recommendation is that you should remap A and D to strafe and simply use the mouse to orient yourself using the right mouse button. This actually isn’t that much different, control-wsie, from FPS which use mouselook by default and, as any shooter enthusiast will tell you, the faster you can control your turns and field of vision, the better you’re going to be. So it makes sense.

At first I tried to unbind the tilde/backtick key from my stance toggle since I’ve pretty much decided at this point that stance-dancing is of no real interest to me and that key had previously been hotkeyed with modifiers to cycle the stances. Now on the exceptionally rare instance where I want to adjust my stance I simply click the button. However, I found that moving all my abilities over one key to the left did add a seventh readily-accessible key but it threw off my timing especially with the modifiers pretty badly. So instead I mapped that key to a couple of “save my bacon” type actions and stuck with the 1-6 range. However I did bump all my non-combat abilities, which I have in a vertical bar on the right of my UI, down to Alt-Shift modifiers so I could free up Alt and add a fourth action bar which gives me 24 realistically usable hotkeys when you factor in Ctrl, Shift and Alt. Then I went ahead and set my primary interrupts, Shield Bash and Spell Reflection to Q and E since the window to hit those is often pretty small I figured the closer they were to my fingers the better. Of course this mandated that I become a mouse-turner.

First, the good. I felt like moving everything away from 7 through equals made me less likely to pull my right hand away from the mouse and thus prohibit movement or targeting. It will take me a while to get used to Alt-Shift-2 to mount instead of Alt-2 but since it never happens at a critical moment it doesn’t matter and meanwhile I suddenly find myself using a lot more of the second-tier, situational abilities I avoided before because they were too far out of the way on my keyboard: Abilities like Shield Wall and Disarm, which can be extremely handy. Also I got much better about interrupting and even staying alive in tough situations because I did have better access to the interrupts and things like Enraged Regeneration and Last Stand which were now on tilde and not something nearly inaccessible like minus.

But—there’s always a but—it wasn’t a smooth transition. First of all, mouselooking, which I assumed would feel semi-natural since I’ve played plenty of games that have similar control schemes, was a really jarring change. Not only was I constantly hitting Shield Wall (for example) for no reason because I was instinctively looking to Q as a strafe, but I was hitting A and D still expecting to rotate the field of view and that wasn’t happening. I know that a big part of the problem is that I play exclusively on a laptop and while from time to time I plug in a mouse and even occasionally a full-sized keyboard to play, the majority of my time is spent using the built-in inputs on my MacBook Pro. Maybe it would be less of an issue for a PC laptop that includes multiple mouse buttons but right-click on a Mac laptop is Command-click and I found there was something incredibly awkward about having to hold down a modifier, the mouse button and whatever else I was doing just to control my direction.

Mostly the one-button paradigm Apple adheres to doesn’t bother me: I’m used to Command-clicking and it’s not noticeably more difficult in my typical tasks than right-clicking would be. Occasionally before in WoW I’d made an adjustment to reduce the number of right-clicks (like turning on auto-loot) but it wasn’t really a pressing issue. Now all of a sudden it was this big glaring hassle and my one-hour training session with this new control scheme was chock full of annoyance, mistakes and outright frustration. So much so that I questioned whether or not it was worth making the switch for what may have been moderate future gains. I mean, sure, flying was significantly easier and the occasional uninterrupted run around the map was easier but my reactions were really handicapped by a mental block I had against what felt like a whole new game whenever it mattered (i.e., combat).

My thought was that using an actual mouse as opposed to the built-in trackpad would be far, far easier to adjust to but since I only play with a separate mouse maybe a quarter of the time (part of why I like playing WoW is that I can multitask with it, such as when someone else is watching a program on TV I’m only marginally interested in or when there’s a sporting event I’m half-watching so I like the freedom of just plopping on the couch or wherever and playing a game), it’s hard to decide if it’s worth the pain most of the time for a boon some of the time. My initial thought was that I could set up two Bartender profiles: One for laptop-only mode and one for with-mouse mode. Unfortunately Bartender’s profiles only cover action bar keybindings, so unless I find an AddOn that allows for full control scheme profiles, I’m having to just deal with the awkwardness.

Other WoW Notes

• I intended to only work on my Dragonmaw reputation by doing the dailies there, but I went to clean up one quest turn-in from the end of my run to 85 and I ended up getting really sucked into the story of Twilight Highlands. Especially once you reach the Vermilion Redoubt and start questing on behalf of Alexstrasza and the red dragon aspect, it gets incredibly gripping. It’s fairly obvious what I’m loving most about this game by checking out my quest achievements and noting that I did the most lore-heavy (from a “fate of Azeroth/primary storyline” perspective) zones all the way through: Mount Hyjal, Deepholm, Twilight Highlands. I’m sure there are plenty of cool things happening in Vashj’ir and Uldum story-wise, but they feel very much like footnotes to the broader conflict, involving a lot fewer of the “big name” NPCs.
• The reputation dailies I mentioned above are actually not my favorite quests in the game by far, but I’m doing them semi-regularly because there are some true benefits to higher reputation with that faction. I tend to at least do Crushing the Wildhammer and Hook ‘Em High because they’re the easiest of the five and they can be done in the Verall River Delta right outside the encampment so they go quickly. By the way, if you happen to play the game (as a Horde character) and want a little help with Hook ‘Em High, which was a bit of a pain before I did this, I use the following macro to help grab the Gryphon Riders:
/tar Thundermar War Gryphon
/use Barbed Fleshhook
/tar Thundermar Gryphon Rider
• One thing about the cutscenes that I noted moreso in TH than in either Deepholm or Hyjal was that the animation limitations inherent in the game engine harken back to PS2-era in-engine cuts and not in a good way. For example, the confrontation between Deathwing and Alexstrasza should have been very, very epic and tense but because everything kind of hurked and jerked around and there wasn’t much in the way of specific pacing for the scene it lost a lot of the impact it could have had. I don’t often wish that WoW had a more modern engine because Blizzard is so very, very good at art design (a testament to how important artistry is over technology) but in the case of these cutscenes, I keep finding myself wishing it were practical for them to be fully rendered or presented even to the level of an Xbox (the original) game.
• I topped out Cooking with the help of the Orgrimmar dailies and made some significant gains in Blacksmithing. I feel pretty dumb but I didn’t realize there were certain Blacksmithing plans that awarded more than one skill point for each item made, specifically some of the higher mat-cost items. I was able to skip some of the Obsidium grind due to +5 beauties like the Fire-Etched Dagger. First Aid will come soon enough (I make as many bandages as I loot the cloth for so it’s just a matter of time/farming the right mobs) so I forsee that I’ll be max profession level in everything but Fishing and Archaeology by the end of the month.
• The quibbles I have with Cataclysm are very minor but another one I have is the relegation of earlier expansion hubs to “boondocks” status. My memory and understanding is that even when Wrath came out, Shattrath may have become a ghost town as players preferred Dalaran but it was still just as easy to get to Shat as it had ever been. With Cataclysm the many portals that connected Shattrath and Dalaran to the rest of Azeroth were removed to encourage players to roam the newly shattered continents of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. I get the rationale there but it does strike me as more than a little annoying that you can’t at least get back and forth from Shattrath and Dalaran to your faction’s captiol quickly; in both cases it takes a standard transport (zeppelin or portal in the Horde case) to the entry points for the older expansions and then a fairly lengthy flight to either sanctuary. I appreciate that they’ve added auction houses to both of the older expansion hubs but I’m not sure I understand why there isn’t at least a quick route to those sanctuaries. It would be pretty silly for them to be readily accessible if all the faction cities were still linked there via portal but since they shut those down I don’t see how making players fly across either Outlands or Northrend just to get to, say, the Dalaran fishing dailies, would really interfere with players experience of the new content.
• Perhaps the biggest project of the week aside from Twilight Highlands was running my mage up from level 13 to level 25. The new Undead starting quest progression that runs you through Tirisfal Glades, Silverpine Forest/Gilneas and Hillsbrad Foothills is superb and at least as engaging as anything Hyjal or Twilight Highlands presents, although perhaps less macro level lore-wise than those high XP zones. Still, working your way up to having Lady Sylvannas call you her most trusted soldier is pretty rewarding and the adjustments from vanilla to reflect the current state of the lore progression (Forsaken in a post-Lich King Azeroth, in this case) is fantastic.
• The Undead progression also includes what I consider to be the best quest in the game so far: Welcome to the Machine. The text of the quest is included in one of the comments in that Wowhead listing, but you almost need to experience it in order to appreciate it. A truly epic send-up of the game, player archetypes and pop culture that had me in stitches. Meta, scathing, satirical in the best possible sense, it comes out of nowhere and really hit pitch-perfect after the surprisingly emotional climax to the Silverpine/Gilneas chain.
• Because the regular questing has been so enjoyable I was afraid I would (once again) miss out on the dungeons as I ran up the level ladder but I found I’ve been able to make very good use of the Dungeon Finder tool especially if I set it up at the beginning of a session, select the next instance(s) I want to do and then just go about my questing business while it organizes the run in the background. So far I’ve been pretty lucky in that I managed to knock out Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep with decent groups this way and while there haven’t been a lot of super-awesome drops for a mage in any of them (note that I’m not farming them I’m just doing them once each as my level permits) I did get a decent robe from WC and a nice staff in SFK.
• Speaking of WC and SFK, two dischordant thoughts: I like how they managed to make SFK basically the same instance but they subtly altered the story within it; and, I always forget what an incredible pain in the neck WC is considering it’s such a low-level dungeon. The sprawling, twisting passages and goofy escort mechanic to open up the (incredibly disappointing) final boss all add up to one of my least favorite dungeons in the game. Not to mention the entrance to it is nearly as annoying as the Deadmines entrance (though not quite as bad as the Maraudon one in which I have gotten lost each and every time I’ve entered) and of course I forgot to turn in a quest at the end of it so I had to walk back over there, fight through the stupid entryway just to get 1200 XP or whatever. I suppose I could have re-queued for it but that would have meant running it again (I just wouldn’t feel right dropping the party right after joining and collecting my turn-in) and… no thanks.
• So far I’ve been able to balance the questing and hitting the dungeon finder so that I’ve progressed through both in tandem as opposed to focusing on one or the other but I’m starting to second-guess my leveling speed a bit. I’ve been making use of rested XP and I actually did find a way to get an XP-boosting heirloom cloak without killing myself trying to get Justice Points by taking advantage of a guild vendor (and dropping 1,200 gold) but I’m almost tearing through the levels too fast now, and I’m afraid I may start dropping dungeons off the dungeon finder tool list by leveling out of their range before I can get through them. I’m still trying to keep the quick progression going though because I think I’d rather miss a few dungeons (at least I’m doing a good amount of them this time around!) than slow to a crawl and lose interest in the mage whom I’m really enjoying. I count the fantastic work Blizzard has done re-vamping the core questing flow in the game as being a huge part of keeping my interest even though I quested through a lot of the Eastern Kingdoms/Lordaeron area with my Warrior too (it helps that practically none of the quests are the same) and I hate to say it but I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine getting up to 60 but I’m a little nervous about re-visiting Outland and it’s old-style questing for fear that I won’t find it as enjoyable. But I think if I stick with running dungeons as I progress it should be fine, not to mention that last time through BC I did pretty much skipped over big sections of Outland, doing only a bit of Nagrand and the Terokkar Forest and barely setting foot in Blade’s Edge Mountains or Netherstorm. Hopefully the novelty of the zones I skipped through (the same can be said for Wrath as I skipped over a lot of Storm Peaks, Crystalsong Forest and Howling Fjord) will be sufficient to keep me rolling.

Lastly, while I’m on the subject of dungeons, I had the opportunity over the long weekend to also do a few guild random dungeon runs on my main and ended up doing The Lost City of Tol’Vir (twice) and finishing the Halls of Origination. Tol’Vir is an interesting instance in that the first time I did it I had only one fellow guildie and the rest of the party were some very nice strangers all of whom were very, very good. We blew through the whole thing fairly quickly (although we did use a sort of cheat-y way to beat one of the bosses with an environmental gimmick that may or may not be a glitch) with nary a wipe and there wasn’t much discussion of what was happening, I was expected to just not stand in the fire and not pull aggro off the tank.

The second run was 4/5 guild members and one matched healer (granted, they were also very, very good at their role) and while we did pretty well, the tank carefully marked out all the targets, we discussed each boss strategy beforehand and yet we had a couple of wipes (one was on trash mobs in the marketplace where someone accidentally pulled aggro from some patrolling guys, another was as we re-entered from that wipe and someone forgot about a patrol we had skipped and inadvertently kited them all the way back to the entrance where several of us zoned into the middle of a big fracas) including one on the final boss (which was partly my fault for standing in the poo: The fight takes place on top of a central building and these swirling area affect things toss you around, or, in my case, off the top of the building and practically out of the instance altogether). I thought it was kind of strange that the better run of the two was the one that was decidedly less coordinated. However, I will say this much: I vastly prefer the coordinated approach to the run-n-gun just from a general enjoyment perspective. All in all Tol’Vir is what I’d call an average instance: Not really all that memorable visually—probably because it looks an awful lot like Uldum’s outdoors—and mechanically kind of forgettable but enjoyable enough to not be bummed out that it came up twice in a short period of time.

After the second stab at Tol’Vir, the group collected a new healer and re-queued which dropped us into Halls of Origination. I was pretty glad about that because I had been kind of disappointed we weren’t able to finish it a week or two ago and was hoping I’d have enough time to make it through the whole thing. It ended up being perfect timing as we wrapped the last boss just as my wife and daughter woke up from a nap. So far I think HoO is my favorite Cataclysm dungeon. The look of it is really cool, as I mentioned before and the final sequence of four bosses is a lot of fun. My favorite part though is the Vault of Lights leading into the Tomb of the Earthrager where you have a lot of trash mobs and four bosses separated by a very Indiana Jones-esque trapped floor. Now, granted, the floor is covered with a glass surface in the normal difficulty mode so it’s pure decoration but I’m excited to see what Heroic difficulty has in store for me; the differences between the two aren’t always obvious and it was cool to get a peek at what’s coming up next. Anyway, it’s a fun sequence and the next section just before the Earthrager was so funny: There’s these camels wandering around that you can hop onto and our tank was a druid in bear form. Comically she didn’t have to shapeshift out of the form to ride the camel so it was this hilarious bear-on-camel thing that had us all rolling.

In all the instances (both on my main as a Fury spec Warrior and my alt as a Frost Mage) I kind of struggled to keep my DPS up. On my main I know a big part of it is the skill I talked about above. I’m still getting used to mouselooking and while I noticed that I don’t look down at my keyboard all that much anymore, I do spend too much time staring at the cooldown timers instead of watching that I haven’t been standing where I ought not to. Plus I also know that I’m fairly undergeared for even these regular difficulty dungeons compared to other level 85s, which I tried to correct a bit after the fact by enchanting a few of my higher level (333ish) items that I assume I won’t be replacing right away. Still, as one guy in the first Tol’Vir runthrough noted, I’m sporting a lot of greens.

For the Mage, I’m not as clear what the problem is. My understanding was that Mages were pure DPS and maybe it’s that Frost is a better spec for leveling because it can handle solo mobs better through freezing effects but trades off some raw damage output in group situations, but I was significantly underperforming the other DPSers in SFK and WC, including Hunters that were a couple of levels below me. I wondered at one point if I was using too many long-casting time abilities like Arcane Blast instead of focusing on instant cast spells such as Arcane Missiles (when procced) and Cone of Cold. I still don’t know exactly what the issue is and unfortunately 4.0 changed so very much about talent trees and rotations and everything that finding information that isn’t specific to high level mages in Cataclysm has been kind of tough. The best I can see is that I should be using Frostbolt more than I am (and probably concentrating on it in the talent tree as well), avoiding Fireball (at least in this spec), popping Arcane Bolt when it comes up and making sure I’m more judicious with Cone of Cold. I did struggle a bit with mana maintenance during the SFK run which suggests I’m going to be in trouble when I dual-spec in a few levels to Fire since as near as I can tell it drains mana quickly, but mechanically I do appreciate already that it’s more obvious how to be effective as a mage than it ever was as a Warrior.

Lots of World of Warcraft to talk about, if you’re interested in hearing it (which I pretty much guarantee you’re not). So let me start with some highlights from the past week.

In what may be developing into a regular Saturday night dungeon-diving group, I joined many of the same guildies from last week to tackle Stonecore again and this time we blasted through it with very few problems. We did wipe once on the boss, High Priestess Azil, because she unexpectedly did one of her attacks three times in a row on our tank (which doesn’t just do tons of damage but also tosses the victim to another area of the combat zone, making the tank’s job much more difficult) but the second time through we nailed it. I had installed Recount during the week in anticipation of maybe doing some more dungeons as a damage dealer and I was pleased to see that despite my uncertainty I actually topped the DPS charts on a number of fights although it seemed to depend on whether or not I was able to get my rotation rolling if I fell in at #1 or #3. I wish there was a way (through glyphs or whatever) to increase the chance of Bloodthirst proccing Slam to something better than 33% but if there is, I haven’t found it. The combo of Sunder Armor 2x/Heroic Throw/Heroic Strike/Bloodthirst/Slam especially with the glyphs of Heroic Throw, Furious Sundering and Colossus Smash can be pretty intense but a fairly large part of it for maximum DPS depends on that final Slam getting procced because then I can drop Colossus Smash and, if it’s available, Recklessness which makes the Slam critically hit against a target with zero armor effect. I did worry some that I’d pull aggro with all those Sunder Armors but since Heroic Throw pops the last stack and I don’t think it applies as much threat as a regular Sunder (plus it’s on a different cooldown timer) I never found myself annoying the tank with it much.

Our trek through Stonecore went so smoothly we had plenty of time to do another dungeon so we re-queued without our tank (who had to attend to a personal errand for a bit) and found ourselves dropped back into Stonecore which we thought was kind of weird. It turns out that happened because in order for the Dungeon Tool to put a group into a dungeon, all party members have to have discovered the instance entryway and they all have to be at a level appropriate to the instance. Guess who only had two entrances located? Yeah, me. Sigh. But since we were just killing time waiting for our guild tank to return we went ahead with it anyway for a while with random tanks, both of whom were pretty rude and distasteful. On one hand, I get it, you join a group filled 4/5 with one particular guild and you presume they can work together reasonably well. Then you find yourself wiping and do some digging to find what they’re about and realize they’re a casual family guild and not a hardcore grinding guild, it probably feels like you got gypped. Personally I don’t care. I’m really starting to like the relaxed attitude of the guild I’m in and how friendly and patient they all are. Much of the effort they’re putting forth is meant to get one particular guild member to 85 and I think that’s one thing random dungeon queuers aren’t going to have much patience for. It doesn’t mean they have to be jerky about it, but I can sort of see where it would wear on their patience.

Eventually we gave up on Stonecore and spent a bit of time gathering dungeon entrance finds for me so we could do other instances. By then our guild tank was back and we decided to make a late run at Halls of Origination in Uldum. I know I kind of trashed on Uldum as being really dull visually but where the outside area is kind of meh, the inside of HoO is really quite stunning (check out this screenshot from the Chamber of Prophecy where you fight Temple Guardian Anhuur). I was having an absolute blast in there until it got too late and several of our group had to call it a night (I keep forgetting that most of the guild plays on the server in their own timezone, which is East Coast so however late it gets for me it’s at least three hours further for them). I do hope that this turns into a regular thing because I’m starting to really look forward to running dungeons on Saturday nights with a semi-regular group. And I’d love to see the end of HoO.

After the group disbanded for the evening I went around and collected the rest of my entrances, including Grim Batol and the Abyssal Maw in Vashj’ir. Hopefully next week will be a little more diverse although I wouldn’t mind if they skipped the random dungeon option altogether and went straight into Halls of Origination.

I also had a chance to try Tol Barad on the defending side which was nearly as much of a calamity as the attacking effort had been the previous week. Despite the disparity in the defending task, we managed to lose control largely because the Horde was so poorly represented. Other than myself (complete n00b futility incarnate) there were two other experienced PvPers and that’s it. We were also a little perplexed since I thought TB was supposed to only allow fairly equal numbers to duke it out but we were clearly outnumbered by at least two, but I think I counted as many as seven different players on the Alliance side. Being outnumbered more than 2-to-1 will net you a loss every time, no matter how much the odds are supposedly stacked in your favor.

I did learn a couple of things doing the battle though, among them is that Fear is really powerful in PvP and I need to be better about remembering which abilities I have that don’t come up much in PvE. In this case an Alliance mage kept casting Fear, DoT, Fear, DoT, etc until the three of us representing Horde were ghosts. All the while I was tasked with taking down their healers and I found it impossible because just as I’d get them down to Execute range the mage’s Fear would proc again and I’d involuntarily run away giving the healers opportunity to boost their HP back up. It took me nearly the entire match before I remembered I had Berzerker Rage sitting there unused which grants Warriors immunity to Fear. Sigh. I also realized that part of the skill I talked about needing to improve last week comes in the form of getting my fingers to “know” the ability keys so I can focus as I play on the screen and not constantly be looking down at my keyboard to locate which ability I should be using next. My PvE homework this week will be completing as many fights as I can without looking down so I can get used to everything. I figure that will also help me determine how to set up my hotkeys since if I catch myself looking that typically would be a good indication that the key is too far out of reach to be effective.

The good thing that came out of that battle was I got to chatting with another older player who gave me some PvP pointers and helped me out with some of the TB dailies. It was one of the few cold-start social interactions I’ve successfully had online and we ended up adding each other to the in-game friends list so I’ve talked to him a little since then and we agreed that when I get around to running through the Burning Crusade dungeons for the achievement (and because I really like seeing all the instance content) he wants to go with me using his druid alt that he’s trying to make into his main. I know it’s kind of stupid but considering I don’t ever really interact with people on that sort of casual basis that stems from shared interest (either online or in real life) it was hard not to be a little proud of myself for stepping outside my comfort zone. What’s weird is that I actually think I do a little better at casual social interaction in person than I do online, so despite being a huge nerd and spending tons of time here, I haven’t done the common geek thing and replaced social interactivity with virtual social connections, I’ve instead managed to somehow remain both a physical hermit as well as a cyber-hermit. And yes, I know I have issues.

Anyway, having done Tol Barad twice now, once from each side, and keeping in mind the info dropped from this Blizzard forum post, I can offer my own very uninformed opinion on the whole thing. First is that the complaints about the odds being too far stacked to the defenders are legitimate. Whether we were outnumbered 1.66:1 or 2.33:1, we should have been pretty handily trounced but in truth we came pretty dang close to winning even with a third of our team being basically clueless. That could be interpreted as saying two guys were nearly sufficient to defend Tol Barad against between 5 and 7. That shouldn’t be the case. I get that Blizzard wants defense to be the dominant position and I even concur with their rationale, but something is wrong when its that tough to capture the zone. As far as the graveyards are concerned I don’t know that it’s really a matter of defenders being able to access all areas of the zone (they absolutely need to be able to get where they’re needed or the balance will tip back the other directly quickly) but that attackers don’t have the option of adjusting their strategy on the fly. I guess they could do something where attackers had the option to respawn in the middle of the map with a penalty of something like 45 seconds of summoning sickness (or similar) which should be gone by the time they reached the next cap point that the defenders are inevitably trying to pick back up. But honestly I think the biggest change they need to make is to have the towers mean something. I know as a defender I had zero motivation to stop them from attacking the towers. Who cared? Either they finally finish the zerg circle closely enough that they win or they don’t, but 15 extra minutes one way or the other wasn’t going to matter. And anyway, we never had the manpower to do anything about it even if we wanted to. I imagine that even with more than three players the defenders would have that attitude.

The most common fix to TB that gets suggested is that if all three towers are down, the attackers only need to hold two of the three cap points to win. Personally I think this is a better solution than the one Blizzard plans to implement which is to make the capture timer move faster if the attackers have two points already under their control. To me all that does is make the second capture point the pivotal stand-off as opposed to the third. And meanwhile the towers are still novelties at best. I actually think a better compromise would be to have each downed tower increase the capture rate by a certain amount (say something like 10%) but decrease the amount of time it grants by a little (perhaps down to five or 10 minutes). So if you downed all three towers you’d get some extra time and a significantly faster capture rate. What this would do is encourage the assault and defense of the towers but not require it. It could even add a strategic element to the battle since if you have the defenders successfully shoring up two of the cap points but ignoring the towers you could send three very small contingents out to the towers to trigger the in-battle alerts letting the defense know there is a coordinated tower assault going on. The defenders then have to make a critical strategic decision: Risk the extra cap bonus going against them by ignoring the attack or reducing the forces in one or both capture points to investigate the tower assault. As it is, when I saw the towers being attacked in a coordinated fashion as a defender my initial thought was “good, now we have a better chance to recapture some of the points while they’re wasting their effort.”

I do plan to go back to Tol Barad soonish because I like the zone and I’m intrigued by the PvP aspect of the game, but I’m content to have it be a nice place to visit for the time being while I attend to some other things. Such as:

• Reputation grinding. My dungeon runs, as highly enjoyable as they have been, haven’t netted me much (any? I don’t recall for sure) usable loot so far. That will probably change as I do more, but in the meantime I’m using my off time to work on getting a number of guaranteed equipment upgrades even though that means I have to grind reputation with some Cataclysm factions. So far I’d been rep grinding via Tabard representation for Classic Horde factions like Darkspear and Undercity but I realized that was just so I could one day say “I’m Exalted with all the Horde factions!” But getting Exalted with things like Dragonmaw actually has tangible benefits as they offer some great high-level tanking boots, a helm and a head enchant. If I had more time off-game I’d dig through the loot tables and find which items I really want from each dungeon but for now I’ll have to be content with winging the instances and working my way toward rep gear.
• Profession leveling. I’m at 522/525 for cooking and I probably just need a couple more Cooking Awards to get the recipes I need to get the rest of the way there. Fishing is a slog, but I’m at 336/525 which is up considerably from a month ago and at least I plan to keep grinding the dailies which are easy and give one skill point per day with far less effort and boredom than sitting there casting over and over again for a skill up once every seven or eight casts. I’m maxed in First Aid and Mining which leaves Blacksmithing, stuck now at 477/525. I need to go back to Hyjal and do some Obsidium runs so I can get past the Folded Obsidium section of the skill advancement list but good gravy most items that guarantee a skill up take at least five FO which in turn take two Obsidium Ore each for a total of ten ore per skill point. For just the last three bumps until most of the items no longer guarantee the skill advance I’m looking at 30 ore. It doesn’t get a ton easier from there, since Elementium becomes the name of the game and it’s a 2 ore per bar kind of deal, but at least I’ve been saving it up as I tool around the 85 zones so I have a bunch of it stored in the bank. Still, my best recipe at 480 takes 15 of the dang things which means for the next 30 skill points I’ll need 450 Elementium Bars (900 ore!). Oh, and then I get to farm Volatile Fire and Volatile Water to get to the max. I suppose at the very least BS has netted me some really nice gains on the Auction House and soon enough I may be able to make my own awesome armor and weapons (including the Hardened Elementium/Truegold/Chaos Orb stuff although I don’t fancy trying to buy Truegold off the auction house anytime soon since it’s going for gross amounts; I hope a kindly guild alchemist will do it for me if I provide the not insubstantial materials to him/her).
• Heirloom acquisition. I’ll talk about my alts in a minute but suffice to say for now that I’m more motivated than ever to figure out how to get my mitts on some XP-boosting Heirloom items because the pre-60 travel situation is painful once you get used to a flying mount. I mean, really, really painful.
• Dungeon crawling. The point is made above I think at how much fun I’m having in the social realm and the game aspect doing level-appropriate dungeons. But I’m also having fun soloing older instances as well, last week I finished Scholomance, Stratholme, The Blood Furnace, The Nexus and Sunken Temple. I thought Scholomance was wonderful fun despite the annoyance of the physical-damage immune Shades which I had to kind of glitch around in order to kill. Stratholme was cool, too, but I was more than a bit annoyed at having to look up directions to the service entrance that permits access to the second wing of the instance. I was kind of surprised that I was able to solo The Nexus actually, since it’s only 13 or 14 levels below me, but I didn’t really have much trouble with it other than figuring out what needed to be done to unlock the final boss. As for the Sunken Temple, I can only say this: Having gone through parts of it earlier in my pre-Cata leveling, I know what a trial it used to be. Now that they re-designed it for Cataclysm I wish I could say they made a big improvement on it but I actually think its the first thing I’ve seen from the new expansion that they really got terribly wrong. At least before it was interesting and challenging, but now it’s so dull and straightforward that it has zero soul. I don’t know that they should have left it alone necessarily, but chopping it down to this forgettable little trifle was not the way to go.

Which leaves only my alts to talk about. While it may not seem like it, the above all didn’t take up very much of my WoW time last week. Most of what I did was log into and create some alts with the intent of finding what my next big leveling push was going to be. To that end I created an Undead Mage and a Goblin Warlock, as promised. I ran the mage up to level 13 and pretty much decided that he was going to be my next character. He’s not exactly the faceroller I expected him to be (not nearly as easy as the Hunter was/is) but he is a lot of fun and the redesigned Forsaken starting stuff is really top notch. I love how they’ve been able to move the lore forward while still keeping a lot of the feel of leveling a new Undead intact. And the subplot with Lilian Voss is paced in such a fantastic way. I hope she continues to return in the lore because she’s a great character.

I did log back into my Tauren as well, and recalled why he was the first alt to ever cross the level 10 threshold: He’s so much fun to play. I love the pet mechanic in WoW and while the cow-people vibe doesn’t do much for me, I have to admit that the Tauren/Hunter combo seems to really work well. I do intend to focus on the mage first but one thing I’m realizing about why so many people have a zillion alts is that it can be really useful to have alternate professions leveled on the same account. For example, my mage is an alchemist so if I ever did get to that stage of needed Truegold, if I had alchemy leveled I could send the mats to my alt and fire back some super cheap epic materials which helps not only with crafting dependent items but also for making huge profits. As of right now I’m considering the mage, the warrior and the hunter to be my principal characters so between the three of them I have Mining, Blacksmithing, Herbalism, Skinning and Leatherworking covered. I did also fiddle around a bit with the Goblin Warlock who I think could be fun but is a distant interest behind the other three. I think he’d be a good Jewelcrafting/Engineering candidate. I also have a couple of Trolls to cover the Shaman and Druid classes plus a Blood Elf Paladin since that’s the only Horde race that can even choose that class and finally an Undead Death Knight who may end up being my fourth in project ahead of even the Warlock in case I end up playing that long. One of those last guys would definitely have to end up being the group Inscriptionist/Enchanter. That leaves Tailoring out in the cold but making bags doesn’t seem terribly useful for an alt since you’d probably do that as a means of getting money for a main and I obviously went a different—some might say foolish—direction.

I recall that the mid-teens were a tough grind in my first level progression but I’m hoping Cataclysm’s improved questing system will make it easier. My principal strategy is to only log in now and again to quest so I can make sure I have plenty of rested XP gains as opposed to settling for the meager XP gains you get from normal mob takedowns. Other than that I intend to queue for random dungeons when they’re level appropriate so I can experience all of them as they were meant to be played (hopefully this will also keep my gear at a nice pace) and ideally I’ll figure out how to acquire that Heirloom gear I talked about earlier which will help speed things up as well. My next pre-paid card time runs out at the end of February and if my mage is level 35 by then I’ll consider my strategies to be working well.

After having played World of Warcraft, if you total each of my various resurgences into the game, for roughly six months, I finally have a max level character. I hit level 85 on the weekend that ended a sort of mandatory vacation from work (Yahoo! shuts down all but the most critical operations for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day) which wrapped up a pretty hefty sprint for XP during the break. Not that I spent the whole vacation playing WoW, but the lack of morning schedules allowed me some freedom to log on in the late evenings and play until early hours (around two or three) giving me the boost I needed to hit level 85.

A few notes about the leveling process through Cataclysm.

• As I suspected, Mount Hyjal was amazing. By far it has been the most enjoyable zone I’ve leveled through, full of awesome lore, a great set of questlines and a fabulous climactic sequence that addressed every single complaint I had about leveling in WoW up until that point. At no juncture did the zone derail me with a mandatory group quest, the phasing implementations were wonderfully realized and the sense of accomplishment even as a solo quester was significant. I’ve heard some complaints about the number of cutscenes in Cataclysm and maybe other zones are different (I’ve heard Uldum is very cutscene-heavy) but I thought they were just as fitting and engaging as the Wrathgate sequence and the quantity felt right to me.
• After Hyjal I headed to Deepholm which I think is so far my favorite zone from a visual perspective. It really looks slick which is pretty amazing considering it’s basically just a big cave. I churned through pretty much all the quests in that zone as well, although I found the rep grind toward the end to earn the audience with the Stonemother was kind of trying only because I think they had one too many Elemental Giants that you had to run around doing favors for. Overall, I thought the story was great and the whole progression was a ton of fun.
• Unfortunately I wasn’t quite as impressed with the higher level zones. I tried Uldum because I’m really interested in the Harrison Jones questline that includes an achievement but I found the place pretty stinking dull after the majestic beauty of Deepholm and the lore-tastic brilliance of Mount Hyjal. Maybe I’m just not a desert guy. Anyway, I finished much of my questing in Twilight Highlands which I admit has a very cool story unfolding but the place looks very similar to a lot of other zones in WoW and for that reason I had kind of a tough slog going from 84 to 85. I spent a long time on that level in large part because I kept finding myself easily distracted from questing due to a lack of persistent desire to hang around in Twilight Highlands and muck around with the Dragonmaw. Once I finally got close enough to dinging I buckled down and was starting to get into it but there’s kind of a pacing lull between where you establish the base in Dragonmaw Port and when you finally unlock the dailies in Bloodgulch.

Like I said, I did get a bit stuck on level 84 but interestingly what helped a lot was that I jumped into a Guild group and we took a run at Stonecore on Saturday. Now, I’ve been going back as part of my OCD fiddling that overtakes me a lot when I play the game and soloing old dungeons from vanilla WoW that I missed the first time through, so I’m not exactly unfamiliar with instances in the game. However, I haven’t actually tackled level-appropriate dungeons since my forst foray into the game way back when my wife was pregnant and I was around level 20-30. Back then I did a couple of pick-up group dungeons (I think this was pre-Dungeon Finder) for things like Wailing Caverns, Ragefire Chasm and Shadowfang Keep. But right before I quit playing the first time I had a miserable experience with some dungeon or other that wasn’t even a PUG but was a run that was handled through my guild at the time. In a way it kind of killed not just instancing for me but in a way it turned me off of the game as a whole for a while.

Now, soloing instances has its own particular brand of (smug) satisfaction. I mean, rationally one can realize that one-shotting elite mobs is no big deal provided they are two dozen levels below you, but on a visceral level it feels pretty great, especially if you went through the instance previously at a more level-appropriate time and found any of these guys to be challenging or downright aggravating. Going back and hitting them for 1.5x their max health in a single blow brings a nice “How ya like them apples?” kind of moment. But after our—ultimately failed, even—stab at Stonecore I realized that overcoming real obstacles is where the actual satisfaction lies.

It might sound weird to say that we overcame considering we never did finish the instance, but Stonecore features four bosses: The first is this giant ringworm thing, the second is a big stone dragon, the third is a giant rock elemental and the fourth is an evil priestess. We wiped a few times early in the dungeon as it took us all a bit to figure out our roles and get our ventrilo/communication down but then we burned through the first two bosses and everything in between pretty quickly. It was actually the third boss, Ozruk, that gave us the most trouble. He has one really significant attack in which he stomps his foot down and does AoE damage (and a ton of it) which also knocks back anyone who is too deep into it. The problem was that for a while a bunch of us were trying to jump over the expanding ring as it landed or time a jump so we would be in the air when it hit. Maybe it’s possible, I don’t actually know even now, but I can report that I never was able to avoid it that way. Instead I learned to watch Ozruk’s caster bar and when I saw “Shatter” come up, I headed for the hills. But even then it’s got a pretty short cast time so we’d all get caught in it some and the second problem was that we had avoided a bunch of mobs in the corridor leading up to Ozruk and with the knockback effect, I found myself pulling aggro on those mobs at least once. Naturally they didn’t really bother me (I was doing melee DPS so I was, how do  you say, expendable) but they went right for the healer. No healer, no party.

Which brings up another point: Of our five-man team we had me as the n00b and mostly useless DPS warrior (some might call me the weak link); additionally our healer was fairly low on the Cataclysm level range (maybe 82?) and new to Stonecore as well. I think it was actually her who had requested the run through the dungeon in the first place, possibly looking for some specific loot. I don’t have much of a frame of reference but I thought she did pretty admirably although after several of the party members finally gave up and went to bed following our fourth or fifth wipe on High Priestess Azil the remaining few seemed to attribute our wipes on her inexperience. So maybe she was struggling a bit with her role, I dunno, but the other party members were never really harsh about it, they were trying to be helpful and like I said, I attributed the fact that Ozruk killed us over and over to our misunderstanding of the Shatter mechanics (specifically my misunderstanding). I have heard it said in plenty of places that healing in Cataclysm is much, much harder than it was in Wrath of the Lich King so maybe our healer could have compensated for some of our stand-in-the-fire silliness if she was more experienced or perhaps better geared (I head her complain a number of times about running out of mana, I suppose beefing up her Intellect and/or Spirit may have helped and was probably what the other party members were suggesting after we called it quits). But I’m inclined to believe that the onus for our persistent wipes lies with us all especially since it wasn’t like the tank was the one dropping first due to healer fail, nor was the tank failing to hold aggro (you can’t even blame the adds that weren’t getting crowd controlled which was the case in the Azil fight). In most cases it was the DPS who were falling over because we couldn’t stop getting blasted by Shatter.

But I’ll say this: When we finally brought that guy down, it was awesome.

So even though we never got the boss down or the quests finished, I had so much fun. And of course it wasn’t like I didn’t get anything out of it: I went from 75% XP to about 94% by going through the instance and at that point it was so close within reach that it only took twenty minutes or so of mopping up some quests in Twilight Highlands to hit 85.

Immediately upon hitting 85 I had this “Now What?” moment where I kind of wondered what I was supposed to do. Rationally I know that a vast majority of the game occurs at max level as it opens up raiding, end-game dailies, certain PvP areas (like Tol Barad which I’ll get to in a minute) and of course all the little fiddly things I did all along the level grind to max like professions, reputations, vanity projects (mounts, pets, achievements) which now no longer interfere with a larger overall goal. But RPGs are so typically steeped in the XP grind that killing mobs and not getting anything other than the coin and loot they drop felt odd and almost unsatisfying.

I got over it pretty quickly as I realized that now I could no longer put it off and I was going to have to man up and learn how to tank. In a way I think I thought this point would never come so even though I dual specced the Protection tree on my Warrior and held onto the best shield and one-handed weapon I looted all through the progression, a part of me kind of figured I would be Fury spec forever. But since Fury is really only useful to anyone when you’re grinding levels, it was time to learn how to be a proper Warrior and switch to Protection. My initial impressions are that there is a lot to learn because while Arms Warriors and Fury Warriors have quite a bit of ability and strategy overlap, Protection’s action bars have very little in common with Fury’s. The amusing thing is that I initially tried my new abilities out on some of the random mobs around Garrosh’s Landing in Borean Tundra and I guess because I was so overpowered for them I barely got to do more than Parry/Revenge and the mobs would croak. So I guess I need to go find some Level 85 mobs to practice my rotations on. I figure once I get more comfortable bringing random trash mobs down as a Prot Warrior I can see about tanking some lower-level instances (I’m thinking something like The Nexus which I have a bunch of open quests in my logs for but which is rated for levels 71-73). I figure elites that are 10-15 levels below me ought to be just enough of a challenge to tank so that I get a feel for what I need to be doing without actually threatening to send a full 5-man party into the poor house with bad-tank-originated repair bills.

Of course all of this is also part of my preparations to start running Cataclysm dungeons as a tank because I really want to head back into Stonecore and eventually even some of the level 85 dungeons so I can begin grinding my way into some better gear, because I realized that without the carrot of level advancement over my head to make the game easier, it comes down to improving my stats with gear now. Well, that and skill. Improving my player skill is also pretty important as I discovered via the trainwreck that was Tol Barad.

So Tol Barad is the new Cataclysm PvP area, similar to Wintergrasp was in WotLK, and I decided to check it out. I never really messed around with Wintergrasp because I was trying to churn through the levels once I got high enough to participate although I did happen to be in the neighborhood once while it was going on and I joined the queue just for laughs. We ended up winning but I didn’t have anything useful to contribute so I feel like I kind of cheated to get that achievement. Anyway, I know a lot of people were really excited about Wintergrasp back at the Wrath launch so I thought TB might be similar. Well, I don’t think from where I’m sitting that Tol Barad has had quite the same warm welcome by the WoW community that WG had.

Basically you can read an account of the myriad gripes about Tol Barad here, but it amounts to this: Defending Tol Barad is too easy, attacking is too hard. Since each time the battle starts the winner of the previous battle is the defender, that means it doesn’t change hands very often. Now, Blizzard tried to “fix” it by changing the reward values. Apparently the original rewards were 180 Honor for both sides and 3 Tol Barad Commendations for the winner. I guess they thought the problem was that the attackers just weren’t trying hard enough so they bumped the honor award to 10x for the winners giving them 1,800 honor for winning if you were on the attacking side. But as many predicted this was stupid because the issue was merely that it was just too hard to win if you were attacking, not that there wasn’t enough incentive. So instead (and I don’t know how many realms did this, but I know it happened on my server) some people worked out a system where the factions agreed to throw the match each time they were on defense and allow it to always change hands, thus granting participants 1,800 honor every other battle. Now, the downside was that when the inevitable nerfbat came down (dropping the honor gain for attacking victory to 360 or 2x) whichever faction had last gained the 1,800 honor no longer had any incentive to continue honoring the arrangement. On my server the Horde (my faction) got the short end of that stick and once again we went for a couple of days unable to recapture Tol Barad. In fact as of this writing I still don’t know if we’ve ever gotten it back.

Now I never participated during the 1,800 back-and-forth, I came in after the reward was dropped to 360 so my experience was on offense and it was roughly as painful as most are suggesting. We’d work and work to capture two of the three points and leave defensive delegations behind in each and rush to grab the third only to find that before we even really reached the structure we needed to capture one of the other two had fallen back under Alliance control. A couple of people took down a tower at one point but since the towers only give more time to the match, it just meant more circling around, impotently trying to luck into getting all three points at the same time. Of course, for me, the bigger issue apart from the loss of the battle was how terribly I got waxed at PvP. I mean, at one point I got caught by a mage out in the open by myself and I… well, I was embarrassed at how little threat I posed to this guy compared to how much toasting he gave me. At one point I even kicked off Enraged Regeneration and tried to run back to the capture point where I thought I might be able to find some fellow Horde to give me an assist but of course I didn’t make it very far once he was dropping pain bolts onto my back. It was really sad.

So now I’m running around doing Tol Barad dailies, working on my professions, trying to figure out how I want to go about getting a newer, spiffier vanity mount, achievement hunting and practicing for some future tanking. And honestly it’s so much fun, possibly even better than before when there was always this looming leveling project over my head. Now that it’s over I find the game is really whatever I want it to be. As a result of that I thought I might take a break from the Warrior once I hit 85 and go work on an alt: I still want to get back to that Worgen healer I started and at this point I’m leaning toward my next Horde guy being a mage. But so far I’m still stuck on lots of these little 85 projects and I don’t want to stop.

Actually, mentioning alts reminded me that toward the end of level 84 on my main I started giving some serious thought to what I wanted my next serious alt push to be. I’m thinking that what I really want to do is focus on ranged DPS. I have a level 13 Tauren Hunter that I was enjoying quite a bit, and I can tell that having the pet act as a sort of tank while leveling would be really, really nice. But part of my issue is that I don’t really love Tauren. I saw that Cataclysm added the ability to be an Undead Hunter which sounds kind of sweet but that would mean starting over again. My other options are Warlock or Mage, both caster DPS with ranged abilities. On the surface Warlock seems like a good idea: It has kind of the hybrid effect between Hunter and Mage with spells and Minions that can act as mini-tanks but there is something appealing to me about the purity of DPS you get as a mage. Having moved a Hunter past level 13 I may grab one of each of the casters and do the level ten treatment on them just so I have a sense of what each is going to be like and make my decision from there. I will say this though, as much as I think the Horde is far, far cooler than the Alliance, I’m realizing that opinion is based principally on the Orcs and the Undead. Tauren are okay, not my favorite and I just don’t have any desire to play a Troll. And I’d happily make a Blood Elf but my goodness: I swear on my server the Horde is represented by Blood Elves at a ratio of something like 5:1. So. Many. Pointy. Ears. I refuse to play one just on the general principle.

Now, I’m not altogether opposed to making another Orc, but I’ve been there/done that with the Orc starting zone (twice actually, since despite my distaste for them, I went ahead and made a Troll Shaman back in the day when they shared the same starting zone as the Orcs) and I like the idea of my alts being distinct from my main. So I’m thinking either stick with the Tauren Hunter or go Undead with a Warlock or Mage. And yeah, I know there are Goblins, too, I just don’t know if I see myself as a Goblin kind of guy. I guess I could do a Goblin Warlock since it seems like the least likely choice and allow myself to be surprised if that’s who I end up wanting to play and let the most likely candidate remain the Undead Mage.

And of course I still have my Worgen healer, but that’s a different server and faction and it will end up being a full ground-up project since I won’t have the sugar daddy 85 to feed him Heirlooms or cash infusions.

Angry Birds

One other game I picked up over the holidays was the uber-popular Angry Birds. Okay, I get it. Great little game, super frustrating at times, profound sense of satisfaction when you finally solve a tough level. My one and only question is: Why in the world would anyone pay the $0.99 for the Eagle Eye tips when the Web exists? Ridiculous.