WoWDecrypted

not quite dead

2010-10-18T18:39:00.002+11:00

Obviously I haven't updated this recently. That doesn't mean I've stopped playing WoW or even contemplating updating this place though. The release of the pre-Cata 4.01 patch is probably the most recent event for me - I should get back and revise my hunter pet information since a whole lot of changes have been made.

The other thing I've been doing in game has been Recruit-a-Friend and now dual-boxing. I now get to be a poor-ish player on two toons instead of one - but I'm having a blast doing so!

If anyone wants to chase me down I'm most often on Dath'Remar, Moon Guard, or Nessingwary servers.

I'm also still playing AION whenever the mood strikes me and have maintained my Eve accounts.

More updates "soon".

Disbelieving Suspenders

2010-03-24T17:48:00.003+11:00

One of the key things in role-play and indeed any storytelling is maintaining the audience's "suspension of disbelief". This is perhaps all the more difficult when you yourself are part of the "audience". Suspension of disbelief is where an audience is willing to overlook certain aspects in order to be entertained. We as players of online computer games overlook many obviously unrealistic things in order to immerse ourselves in the story. Some of these are limitations with computer gaming - non-realistic graphics and sound, clunky keyboard/mouse interface etc. Others are inherent in the genre of fantasy - elves, trolls, dragons not being things we can experience in our real lives.

As players of an online fantasy game, we willingly suspend our disbelief in these things to take part in an enjoyable experience. Familiarity with other fantasy stories and movies means that we are unsurprised at non-human races, that dragons exist and can fly, or that magic has practical applications. All these are accepted as part of the new "world" we are involved in.

Where things break down however is the introduction of something well beyond our newly accepted framework. Instanced dungeons is one of the main "belief suspenders" in WoW and similar games.

How do you rationalise the "fact" that Ragefire Chasm and Stockades, instanced dungeons in the main Horde and Alliance capitals, are STILL full of hostiles, more than 5 years after WoW's release? Surely someone would have cleared them out by now?
How can my rogue claim to have cleared the place, and have an achievement to prove it, yet your priest also make the same statement, at a different time?

As you can see, issues like these can make or break your immersion into the story. There are a fair number of these issues imposed on us because of the nature of online computer gaming.

(not finished, but published so I embarrass myself into working on it later!)

Musings on morality

2010-02-04T22:00:00.002+11:00

This post is a part of my preliminary thinking for the backgrounds of my newest roleplay characters. A long term friend and officer on my Dath'Remar guild has convinced me to join his roleplay guild over on Moon Guard, so I've erased several alts on unused servers and created:

Cryptbred, a gnome male Deathknight,

Satrith, a gnome female Warlock,

Helacea, a draenei female Hunter.

Don't worry about their gear or levels; I've barely started working on any of that.

The guild The Tainted Legion has several members with well developed RP that I'm only starting to get my head around. The legion itself is pro-Alliance, but more willing to "do what must be done". It has a high number of deathknights and warlocks in its ranks, as well as disillusioned or fallen paladins. I had chosen my characters based most on what I enjoy playing rather than what would fit the guild but it looks like they will fit in easily. It will be a challenge to create distinct personalities for each that don't rely on too many clichés.

Concepts of good and evil, honour, loyalty, duty, pride, regret, remorse, vengeance and others are all things to think about. Warlocks and deathknights use powers that are viewed as evil by most. Some warlocks are described as mages that were lured to the "dark" side by easy power. Deathknights were once significant heroes of their faction that fell in battles against the scrounge and were raised as minions of Arthas. Though now supposedly free-willed, their skills and powers are definitely of darker aspect. It would be fairly far-fetched to portray either class as a do-gooder. The best most can do is to minimise the harm done.

Cryptbred and Satrith are both gnomes, sometimes described as lacking understanding of good or evil. Most gnomes are not deliberately harmful to others but can be blindly focussed on their goals and cause destruction as a side effect of seeking what they want. In Crypt's case, hes been recently freed of evil control and is likely still seriously confused.

I will continue posting later but will publish as is to spur further ideas. feel free to comment!

Faster?

2009-12-20T13:38:00.003+11:00

There are several theories out there about the best method for faster levelling. One theory is that killing "hard" monsters at or just above your level earns more experience per hour than killing easier ones a couple of levels below. I set out to test this theory recently on a couple of lower level alts. The results are inconclusive.

My testing was done on a level 25 warrior and 26 priest. Both were fully rested and have unexceptional gear. No heirloom items were used.

The warrior started out killing the level 20-22 humans at Durnholde keep. Syndicate Watchman for example. These guys showed up as green difficulty. After 30 minutes of slaughter, he'd gained about 12,000 exp. Unfortunately my noob warrior skills got him killed 3 times. The corpse runs were relatively short so should not impact too much on the end result.

After repairs and handing in relevant quests, the now level 26 warrior moved on to killing the farmers and townsmen over at Hillsbrad Fields. These guys are anywhere from 22-28 and the ones I was mostly killing were about level 26. After another 30 minutes of slaughter, this time with no deaths, he'd gained about 11,800 exp.

The easier kills earned slightly more exp, even with the unfortunate character deaths. Both grinding areas are fairly densely populated so there was little time between encounters.

I killed lots of the same farmers with the priest a little later. She kills things slower since there was a lot of drinking between battles. The kills were rated as green or yellow. I didn't record the starting values for experience so I'm not sure just how much she gained in the 30 minute test but it felt like a similar amount to the warrior.
The priest tried to move on to killing the tougher guys in the azurelode mines. The high density of mobs and the fact that they flee when low in health made this really tough. No deaths were suffered but the rate of kills was very much slower. I feel the warrior may make better headway in this area.

The numbers don't really come out clearly in favour of any strategy being superior. There may be a slight edge to killing the easier mobs since the higher number of kills offsets the lower experience per kill. I didn't test the effects of questing on the rate of gain. Again there is probably a slight edge to quickly completing the easier quests. Though its satisfying to kill orange and red mobs its just not efficient.

Farming?

2009-11-30T20:34:00.002+11:00

So, the harvest festival was pathetic. Pilgrim's Bounty more than makes up for it. I was busy with real life stuff until the last few days of this festival so just used it as an opportunity to level up cooking skill on all my main alts. Each of them are now at around 300 skill thanks to a single run of the dailies and associated cooking recipies. This one event has improved the tradeskills of my little army more than I have in the last year of mucking about!

The Pilgrim's Paunch achievement made me chuckle. Aside from the obvious greed stuffing your face at each cities' tables, nearly every recipe for these foods contained lots of honey. Very likely you WOULD become obese eating that much sweet and fatty food!

I've spent a fair bit of time recently playing Aion. My guys are all still relatively low level so haven't yet experienced the massive grind that others have complained about. Since I don't really care about levelling, a long grind for each level wont affect me much so long as there are still things to amuse myself along the way.
Tradeskills are one area thats annoying me though. Its a horrid time and money sink with little to show for it as yet. Standard crafted items are generally as good or slightly better than drops at the same level, and the rare special items are significantly better but the process to get there is hideously expensive. Crafting also involves a lot of different materials. Just the basic stuff I'm doing at the moment has mostly filled my limited bag space. Its much worse in this respect than the crafting in WoW.

Many of the people who started blogging about Aion at or before release seem to have dropped out, even though the game is barely 2 months old in the west. It hasn't grabbed my attention the way WoW did but so far is significantly better than the free-to-play games I listed in my earlier post. I've actually found that playing Aion has revitalised my Wow experience. At this stage I'm enjoying both!

Ravasaur!

2009-11-01T13:07:00.009+11:00

My three highest Horde characters have recently been working on their Ravasaur mounts. Here is a selection of screenshots.

First, Cryptography, a rogue, is considering a career change to hunter.

My Ravasaur pet was about 16 at the time. He grows a little more!

That shot was taken just before handing in the final quest. He's now a mount as shown below. My friend Nybor is there as well with her very young hatchling for comparison.

Kytlin is an orc hunter. She came across a heart-rending scene in Ungoro:

Two orphaned Ravasaurs standing by the corpses of their parents crying piteously. Bite marks on the adults probably came from one of the giant T-rexes that patrol the crater. Kytlin enticed the twin ravasaurs with tidbits of food then took them to Tanaris for a proper feed.

Bug Eggs are great for the growing Dino! They also wanted slabs of dinosaur flesh and crunchy bits from the silithids in Un'goro. They even wanted to dress up like the adult raptors and demanded feathers from the biggest birds in the area, Tanaris Searing Rocs. Some time later, they traveled to the goblin city of Gadgetzan.

Cryptoknight, an undead Deathknight also has a ravasaur pet but he's camera shy. All ravasaurs are now on day 20 and can be handed in for the mount training. A 20-day grind for each but well worth it. I just wish we could keep the pet as well as the mount!

Non-Warcraft Adventures

2009-08-20T18:45:00.002+10:00

World of Warcraft is the game that occupies most of my online time but is far from the only game I play. I have a lot of older PC games that I play when I'm not feeling particularly social. One example is X2:the threat, a space sim I picked up at the bargain bin recently for $3 or so. Pretty cool title.

I also dabble in a number of other MMO games. Even before I took up Wow, I was and continue to play Eve online. This well established space game is pretty awesome. Its not one for the faint-hearted though, as the PvP can be pretty full on even in the "safe" zones, and the cost of death is much steeper than in most games. Eve is great fun when you get yourself into a decent corporation. Solo play is fine too but it can be hard and lonely. Most of the web reviews for this game are many years out of date; the game is much more stable and polished now than it was back near release. I maintain three active subscriptions to this game even though I'm currently not playing it a lot.

As a person with a pre-order in for AION, I was able to play in its latest closed Beta this last weekend. The visuals in this game are absolutely beautiful! Gameplay seems ok too, though at barely level 13 I've hardly touched the surface. AION features flying characters once you ascend at level 10. This adds another interesting aspect to fights and travel. My little taste in the beta has got me hungry to try more though I doubt it will steal me away from wow for too long.

I've also investigated a number of the free-to-play MMO's. A long time ago when my PC was old and pathetic, I played Runescape. People seem to hate this game and taunt anyone who plays. I re-activated my account about 6 months ago just to see how it was going. Its visuals have improved somewhat but its gameplay has all the annoying features that made me leave ages ago. I guess there's still some appeal to people since the server was quite busy and the price is right but I doubt I'll be back.

Another free to play game is Archlord. This game has been out for a few years now. It got mostly terrible reviews in the gaming press. I think it's been judged harshly. Its graphics and music are pretty good. It features PvP very heavily, with siege combat and control of castles by guilds being a big part of end-game. My rampant alt-itis is a big problem here since I never spend enough time on any one toon to progress very far. Archlord suffers from having poorly translated quests and lore. I couldn't make any sense at all of the storyline on the game's main page and quest text in-game is hardly better. The rewards from questing seemed fairly poor too compared to what I'd obtain from drops. The resulting grind-fest was tedious at best. Once a character gained some AOE abilities, usually around level 14, things went along better. WoW is leagues ahead of this game but if "free" is your price limit, its decent enough.

Also out in "open beta" now for a long while is 2Moons. This game is a fair bit more polished than Archlord is but also seems to be a grind-fest. Quests, while at least readable, aren't terribly engaging. All of the available character types seem viable and mostly fun to play. Graphics and audio are pretty nice, perhaps better than Wow in some ways but movement can sometimes be jerky and there doesn't seem to be any jump/swim third dimension.
I haven't played either this or Archlord consistently enough to be a member of a decent guild so a lot of the social aspects I've encountered so far have been negative ones. A lot of selfish dickwads on these free games. There was some licensing issue with 2moons and it seems that this is now restricted to North American players only, but since my account was created before the lockdown it still works fine.

The most recent free game I've tried has been Runes of Magic. This game is often described as a WOW clone. It certainly does have a lot of similarities but here are enough points of difference to make it interesting in its own right. Its a very polished game compared to others I've seen. I love the dual-class mechanism where you can access some of the secondary class's skills while in a different primary class, eg priest healing while a warrior. Quests, audio and visual, as well as game community seem generally better than the other games I've listed here. I've linked to the US site, but there's one for Europe as well on different servers. The micro payment options for this game are its weak point however. They are much more blatant about it, sending regular in-game announcements of "special" offers. It looks like spending some RL cash will be necessary to go far in this game. Other free-to-play games make items available for purchase that make life a lot easier but RoM seems to be making lots of "must have" items as part of their payment system - and they are hideously expensive. The player imbalance that results from this is a very undesirable aspect in gameplay. The game itself is the best of the free ones I've sampled here but this blatant cash grab is a real turn-off, to the point where I'm reluctant to play any further.

Pet choice for the levelling hunter

2009-07-14T23:45:00.006+10:00

Here I am expanding on what was an already long comment on Mania's latest RFC: whats-the-weakest-leveling-pet. I am slowly in the process of revising my own pet reviews and this RFC is something I feel fully qualified to comment on.

My original comment is number 59 on Mania's site. I've reposted it here and expanded some.

****
Back in October last year I wrote a review of every pet family available to low level hunters. Blizzard have made several changes to pets since I last updated my post but it is still broadly relevant now.

The reviews are at: http://wowdecrypted.blogspot.com/2008/10/hunter-pet-reviews-pre-wrath-patch.html

The main changes since then have been the change to +5/+5/+5 to family stats, adding thunderstomp as a talent for all tenacity pets and tweaks to furious howl and rake.

Mania specifically asked – “For this post, I am mostly interested in levelling and questing before level 40 (although I would love to hear your thoughts on higher levels as well). That’s pre-exotics, and also pre-Thunderstomp for the Tenacity pets.”

Pets get their first talent point at level 20. The first few points make little difference to pet usability, its only when a bunch of talents stack up that it is really noticeable – usually around level 40. The biggest factor then in the lower levels is the pet’s family skill.

Diet can be removed as a factor in pet choice by use of the minor Glyph of Mend Pet. Spam mend pet a few times out of combat and your pet is happy again.

So, what factors make a good family skill for use by a low level “noob” hunter?
– aids in threat management.
– has a short cool-down or longer uptime.
– ease of use.

So, in the 3.1 environment:-

Poor: (5 families)

Bats – Sonic Blast
- 2 second stun and small damage on 20 yard range, long cooldown. Sometimes seems to stutter.

Birds of Prey – Snatch
- limited single target/ humanoid only effect on long cooldown.

Moths – Serenity Dust
- Heal over Time and 10% attack power boost on long cooldown. If left on autocast its often too little too late. Tied to a macro its much more useful. The healing is at best 20% of the pets health for most of the level ranges considered here. Rated poor because its tricky to use well.

Tallstriders – Dust Cloud
- Causes all attackers within 10 yards to miss one attack. 8 second duration, 40 sec cooldown. Hardly worth the effort. What I hadn't considered here is the AOE threat generation. In my testing last year I found they couldn't hold aggro very well on a single target compared to others in the same talent tree.

Crabs – Pin
- a 4-second channelled pin that does little damage on a longish cooldown. This skill is never available when you need it and it's channelled nature makes it more difficult to use successfully. Like most of the immobilise moves, it gets better when tied to a macro.

OK: (7 Families)

Dragonhawks – Fire Breath
- smallish direct damage and 2-sec DoT on fast 10-sec cooldown. The problem with this skill is its 20 yard range - the pet has a tendency to "stutter" into range before it eventually gets its attack off.

Ravagers – Ravage
- decent damage attack, with a 2-second stun. The long 40 sec cooldown is the main issue here. Like other stuns, its better bound to a macro.

Spiders – Web
- 40 second cooldown, 4 second immobilise. Its a bit better than bat's Sonic Blast, simply because its more likely to fire off at a useful time and lasts longer. Much better when bound to a macro.

Wind Serpents – Lightning Breath
- 20-yard range, 10 sec cooldown smallish nature damage attack. The 20-yard range and stutter effect are the problem here.

Boars – Gore
- decent damage, 10 sec cooldown melee attack. Its special bonus is tied to successful use of the charge talent, so should go off about every 2nd fight. Rated as OK simply because other pet's specials don't require talents to be effective.

Turtles – Shell Shield
- 12 seconds per minute of 50% damage reduction. Its pretty nice in an emergency, but on too long a cooldown for general use, plus it doesn't help retain aggro.

Raptors – Savage Rend (Demoted from "good" for this revised post!)
- 1 minute cooldown medium damage + medium damage DoT. Its extra damage boost only comes into play when the pet gets a crit hit using this ability. Low level hunters will not see the benefit from this.

Good: (8 Families)

Serpents – Poison Spit
- 30 yard range, 10 sec medium-high nature damage DoT (8 seconds uptime). It also has a slowing effect on casting times. This ability is great. The 30-yard range means the pet gets off its first shot at the same range the hunter does most times. It has a short cooldown and is effectively up 80% of the time. The anti-caster effect is an added bonus.

Carrion Birds – Demoralizing Screech
- 10-sec cooldown AOE Attack Power debuff (that generates threat) to all in melee, with 100% uptime AND a single target medium-damage attack (also generating threat), thats also available widely at any level you like? Sign me up!

Cats – Rake
- 10 sec cooldown, low damage, low DoT melee attack that has almost 100% uptime. Easy to use, decent ability that can occasionally be paired with a successful Prowl.

Hyenas – Tendon Rip
- 20 sec cooldown low-medium damage melee attack with a 6-second slow. Like all disabling moves, this would be better on a macro but even autocast the combination of duration and cooldown means its ready to go when needed most fights. The damage it does is a nice threat boost too.

Raptors – Savage Rend (moved to OK section for this revised post)

Wolves – Furious Howl
- 40 sec cooldown, 20sec duration Attack Power boost for both pet and hunter. For most fights this is a better than 50% uptime DPS boost that is fairly easy to manage. This skill was reworked somewhere between 3.0.3 and 3.1. It is a much better levelling skill than when initially reviewed.

Bears – Swipe
- 5 second cooldown (!) AOE melee damage. Uncomplicated and deadly. It appears that the front-facing limitation has been removed in a recent patch. One of the best skills available for a levelling pet.

Crocolisks – Bad Attitude
- 2 minute cooldown, 45 sec uptime melee AOE medium-high reactive damage. This skill is interesting. Every attacker that hits the pet takes damage. Every single attack, for 45 seconds. Great for AOE aggro generation and generates significant damage in the right circumstances. Probably better taken off autocast and tied to one of the hunter's attack buttons so its not triggered too early.

Scorpids – Scorpid Poison
- 10 second cooldown medium-low DoT nature damage with 100% uptime. Simple to use. Rarely resisted. Sustained aggro generation.

Not available to low levels: (12 Families)

Chimaeras – Froststorm Breath
Nether Rays – Nether Shock
Silithids – Venom Web Spray
Sporebats – Spore Cloud
Core Hounds – Lava Breath
Devilsaurs – Monstrous Bite
Spirit Beasts – Spirit Strike
Wasps – Sting
Gorillas – Pummel *lowest level gorilla is level 32.
Rhinos – Stampede
Warp Stalkers – Warp
Worms – Acid Spit

By the time a hunter can get one of these pets, they and the pet have significant talent points to spend. Individual family skills make less difference in most cases than appropriate talent choices. The exotic pet families usually combine skills that are similar to others reviewed above. Also by this stage, most hunters have learned a thing or two about playing their class, further smoothing out the rough edges in family skill differences.

What pets would I recommend? Probably Bear and Carrion Bird for most playstyles. Both are AOE, but only in melee range. Serpents are awesome if you are regularly going against humanoids. Thunderstomp for tenacity pets, available at the earliest at level 44, is an awesome addition. Ferocity pets become essentially unkillable once they get bloodthirsty by the mid-30's.

Hunter Pet Reviews -Revised Edition 3.X

2009-06-10T18:13:00.005+10:00

I had a partially complete review of all pet families as a draft post. I referred to it in a couple of other places but since its now superseded by the release of wow 4.0.X I've trashed it and will just post this place-holder. I intend to put up a review in the revised world but this is likely to only get done well after Cataclysm is released, so sometime after December 2010.

Hunter testing methodology

2009-06-09T17:28:00.003+10:00

I've been playing some of my hunters again recently with a view to updating my Hunter Pet Reviews for the current state of play.

My highest hunter is at 56 or 57 now and will probably comfortably level into Outlands during this process. Most of the other hunter alts are still languishing back in the mid 20's or early 30's so are much the same as they were when the original tests were done last year.

A hunter and pet in the 20's is a vastly different experience to a hunter in the higher levels. The hunter's own talents are only just developing and the pets are barely started. I have kept a very similar talent set for each hunter and pet for these tests. Hunters spend the first 15 or so points in Marksman to get the Go For The Throat talent, then switch to Beastmaster for their remaining talents. Pet talents are first a movement option: Dash/dive or charge, then points in cobra reflexes. With so few talent points there is little difference between talent trees.

On my higher level hunter I have roughly followed a MM/BM hybrid levelling spec, somewhat similar to one that Pike posted over on her blog. For the pet talents, I have continued a mostly dps-focussed build on Cunning and Ferocity families and a tanking/survivability build on Tenacity families. Where possible I have grabbed the Thunderstomp talent.

All talent choices for hunter and pet are loosely based around benefiting a "levelling" play style. I hate downtime. I hate micromanagement. Talents such as bloodthirsty are essential to this play style.

Cower is removed from autocasting. I wish I could just unlearn it completely! Growl, the family focus dump and special ability are all on autocast. Prowl is the notable exception; it's off autocast and is manually used when I remember to do so.

I use recount to track damage. I have Omen running to help manage aggro but am not carefully watching these while fighting. My testing is purely for PvE levelling. A typical test will start with a tame of a fresh pet. I will spam mend pet and/or feed the pet until it is happy then set its talents. Once ready, I clear the recount meters then go farm some mobs.

Testing starts with attacking single mobs that are around or just above the pet's new level. If the pet is the full 5 levels below me, I'll also ease back on my hunter's DPS. I repeat single mob fights until around 10,000 damage has been done (50k for the higher level hunter - its about 20 kills for each stage of the test). During this time I evaluate subjectively how well the pet holds aggro and watch for the effects of its family skills. Hunter shot rotation is some variant of serpent sting as opener, then arcane/auto with multishot where possible. I try to avoid aggroing multiple mobs during this stage but it does not invalidate the test if adds join in. Mend pet is used whenever needed. Aspect of the hawk is up for as long as possible, then aspect of the viper is used to regenerate mana. Hunter and pet keep moving and killing almost continually, fighting one mob at a time without much downtime.

Once the 10,000 damage threshold is reached, I pause for a bit and take a look at recount. If the pet's family skill is a DPS based one, I note the percentage of the pet's DPS this represents. Overall, for a BM/MM hybrid, the pet gets 30-55% of total dps for this type of fighting, probably averaging out at about 40%. Some family special skills get about 10-15% of the pet's damage.

After a brief rest and refit, I will switch to grinding on multiple targets. The pet will be sent in to attack a mob. Serpent sting will be applied, then I'll target another mob and send in the pet again. Dash/Dive is great for this as it allows the pet to pick up small groups of targets very quickly. Targets are again chosen based on the pet's level rather than the hunter. If the targets are lower than the pet, I'll grab bunches of 5 or so. Higher level targets are gathered in smaller groups, or staggered in waves but the pet is taking on at least 2 at a time. Mend pet is used where needed, often when the pet still has higher health than in single target fights. Shot rotation for the hunter is mostly about keeping serpent sting up on the multiple targets and burning down the most-damaged target quickly. Pet families with an AOE aggro skill are awesome for this kind of fight, but some pet target swapping is often needed to manage aggro on groups. Careful use of traps and AOE shots are added in where possible. Aspect of the viper is sometimes used to reduce hunter threat output, though it has to be balanced against the massive drop in DPS it causes.

Again, a further 10,000 damage is recorded in recount. The counters are not reset between these parts of the test. It is rare for me to lose aggro in fights of less than 4 targets but a string of crits and some healing can cause problems with larger groups. Few pets can survive groups of 6 or more at once unless the targets are quite low level.

After both sets of testing, a BM/MM build usually has the pet doing around 50% of total damage. This is usually higher than after the single target tests, mostly due to use of Viper to manage aggro. Similar percentages seem to apply even after volley is added into the shot rotation on the higher level hunter, though this is one of the things I'm testing in this current round.

A third round of testing is performed for those pets with non-dps based family skills. Those pets with snare-type abilities are usually tested against humanoid targets that flee. The snare is manually triggered, not autocast. Caster-debuff skills are tested against caster mobs. Hard to manage family skills like dust cloud are tested manually against suitable targets (groups of melee in this case). Recount is usually left running but it is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of the skill in terms of damage done.

Sometimes I will do some "extreme" testing on particularly promising pets, where they try taking on multiple mobs significantly above their level, or we will take on elites of similar level. Very few pets should take on elites more than a level or two above them in a solo hunter/pet scenario.

Pet looks, animations and sounds are observed throughout this process. These evaluations are going to be entirely subjective and will be mentioned only where they are particularly noticeable.

At this stage, only the same pet families as evaluated last time will be done. I still do not have the 51-point BM talent to tame exotics and most of the outland only pets will still be out of reach by the end of this test. I intend to test all other families with a lower level and higher level hunter.

Selected Viewings

2009-05-13T15:08:00.003+10:00

Somewhere, off the chain of blogs and their reading lists, I followed a link to some of the warcraft machinima videos on youtube. I watched that one, then several more, then heaps of them. There are a wide variety of quality and styles amongst them.
Here are just some of the ones I liked.

First, some Weird Al songs done with warcraft scenes:

Amish Paradise

Ugly Girl

Then some of Nyhm's works:

Hard Like Heroic

Ni Hao (A Gold Farmers Story)

Just Loot It!

Nyhm has several others, look for more by phrog801.

One of his regular collaborators is "Summergale", the female vocalist in many of Nhym's movies. A very popular work is:

Ulduar

Ulduar was a collaboration between Summergale and Cranius on vocals, and machinima creation by Legs. Also worth a look are LegsMachinima's other movies.

Cranius has put out a few of his own vids. A few use other people's music, some are his own creations. These are some of the best:

Big Blue Dress

Highwayman

Darrowshire

The Lament of Captain Placeholder

Probably the most technically polished of the vids is Percula's

The Craft of War: Blind

This is more of a movie than a music video like most of the others. "Blind" has generated nearly 5000 comments on youtube so is obviously very popular.

There are heaps more out there. A fair few are basically raw in-game footage, but others are well crafted stories or videos like the ones I've linked here.

What are some of your favourites?

Stupid Mistakes

2009-04-14T12:49:00.003+10:00

You might have noticed that I've not posted in a while. Real Life has severely hampered my game and blogging time recently. Things are still madly busy but at least I get to log in again now.

My last post here was about missing the target of getting my epic flyer within a month. Well, just after that post I re-invested about half my net worth back into the auction house. Then I got side-swiped by real life and didn't visit my VeCo characters for ages.... so long in fact that about 2,500g of auction materials and sales messages have expired from my banker's mailbox!

Ooops!

(The mail hasn't just expired from the auction house, its also expired from my mailbox, so is gone completely. About 2500g gone forever just because RL snuck up on me!)

Ah well. I've already started rebuilding funds but of course it will take some time to fully recover.

28 days later

2009-03-09T14:20:00.003+11:00

Abject Failure.

On the 7th of feb I was chatting to Ahami on VeCo about our blogs and what I should do next. I had my freshly rolled Deathknight with a small starter fund and a beginning enchanting skill. The challenge was set: make enough gold for epic flyer within a month.

Easy!

Well, maybe not.

I also ran the same challenge on my other new DK on Cael as well, but with less funds, and less effort. Both characters started the challenge at level 58, fresh from the newbie zone.

On VeCo, I invested heavily into improving the enchanting skill. I hit around 200 in the first few days but also spent a lot of the starting money in levelling up instead of reinvesting into the market. It took several bidding/disenchanting/selling cycles to get back to the starting point. By about mid-month I was edging above 1000g and starting to realise that I may not meet the target!

Over on Cael I farmed some low level instances (stockades, Deadmines) several times to get starting materials, as well as buying stuff from the auction house. With less money to start with, I concentrated on re-investing what I had. By mid month I was barely at 200 skill and 500g. I had put a lot less effort into it though.

On both servers I tried to log in to process auctions every 48 hours but often missed it. At the end of the month on Cael I had about 1500g in cash and ~700g in pending auctions. On VeCo, I had a little over 3000g in cash, ~900g in unsold auctions and maybe ~400g more in unprocessed materials. This was well short of the ~6500g target.

On both servers there were some mitigating factors. On Cael I invested about 200g into the guild I joined. I also levelled enchanting by enchanting most items in the guild bank, instead of trying to sell the enchants or placing them on vellums for sale. On VeCo, I yet again splurged the 100g to start a guild bank for some randoms who got me to sign the charter. Of course, the guild was disbanded a matter of days later when the GM lost enthusiasm! I've been foolish enough to do this several times now... maybe one day I'll learn!

Also on VeCo, I spent some of the time farming leather and cloth, which I passed off to my friends there to help level their trade skills. In return I got bags and a certain amount of green items. From a purely financial outlook I should have just sold the materials, but the social benefits will more than recoup any loss in the longer term.

Ah well. Both DK's are now level 60 with minimal playtime. They are both continuing to reinvest in the enchanting materials market and over time it is paying off.

Wow Self Improvement

2009-02-19T22:29:00.003+11:00

I had a party written post here but was rudely interrupted by work. It got autosaved as a draft but appeared to nuke my blog... it just showed a blank page!

Luckily all is well now.

I've posted here several entries that show ways to make gold. You have to read through my walls of text to find it but there are specific details in there showing what I did on several servers. Some of the same posts could serve as walkthroughs for new players, particularly the hunter and druid ones.

The main tips posted in "Cure the Cash Flow Blues" are the core truth to self-sufficiency in money. They are such simple concepts that I am astonished that players late in the game have any difficulty with funding essentials. A high level character just has so much greater earning capacity than any of my lowbie alts! I can well understand that a genuinely new player will struggle early on but someone who has played for sixty or seventy levels should surely know something about the game.

One of the things that I offer to members of my guild is loans for mounts. The introduction of the cheaper level 30 mounts has reduced the need for these. Level 30 mounts are cheaper and easier for most people to obtain than the old level 40 ones were. Partly this is due to there being a lot more gold around than there was.

Guildies looking for a loan have to convince me that:
1: they really NEED the item/mount they are borrowing money for.
2: they have made a decent attempt to get there on their own.
3: they have the capacity to repay the loan in reasonable time.
4: that they aren't likely to just take the money and run!

Back before Blizzard introduced the guild bank, most donated funds were intermixed with my own personal funds. Nowadays the money pools are quite separate. Though as guildmaster I have unlimited access to the guild bank funds, all mount loans have continued to come from my own pocket. I choose to do this because the fairly high risk of non-secured loans means I will take more care in assessing the loan than I might if it was "just" guild money.

That first point above, NEED vs WANT, is probably the key.
The first mount makes a massive difference to a character's ability to get around and get things done. The basic flying mount in Outland is similarly a "NEEDED" boost. More recently a few have had loans for cold weather flying in Northrend, also a "NEED".

Warlocks or pallies asking for a mount loan at 30 get laughed at. People looking to upgrade their 60% mount to an epic 100% mount at 60 generally fall into the "WANT" category and will most likely be denied, as will those asking for ~5,000g for their epic flyer. People wanting loans to buy epic weapons, or anyone who thinks they can "twink" their main at my expense generally get a lecture!

If you can't convince me that what you want is a "NEED" and not just a want, then you had better do what one guy did recently: secure your loan.
A guy just new to the guild wanted a significant loan for northrend flying.
Normally, someone who had been in the guild for only a day or so would be told a blunt "NO WAY!" but this guy was sensible. We discussed all the points above:
1: NR flying meets my "Need" criteria for most people. (Yes)
2: He wasn't asking for the whole lot, but had been caught short. His reasons for that were reasonable, but not great. (Maybe)
3: He had some ability to repay via trade skills but suggested questing was his primary income. (Maybe)

At this point, I would have turned him down except that his answer to point 4: above was a winner.
4: will he take the money and run? No, because he secured his loan with a number of level 80 epic items worth far in excess of the loan amount. He was quite rightly concerned that _I_ might be the one doing a runner!

This particular loan was repaid in a short period of time in instalments and he got his items back as COD mail messages for the final payments.

Another guildie has been trying to convince me to loan him funds. He's been around for quite a long time and otherwise would get a loan, except at the moment he fails miserably on point 3: repayment. I have pointed him to my blog in the hope he will read the other messages here and do something about his economic situation. (If you are reading this, fellow guildie, the post isn't entirely directed at YOU, since there have been many others fitting the same criteria!)

This goes a lot further though than just money.
WoW is a game that is both easy, yet complex. Most classes are tuned so that they can be levelled up even if played poorly. Crap gear choices hardly matter in the lower levels. Awful talent choices are barely noticable until the mid 30's or even higher. Poor group skills are able to be overcome by getting runthroughs, or simply leveling outside of instances/group quests.
Most players seem willing to listen to advice or do a bit of research on how to better their play. There are a significant number however who are willfully ignorant.
Maybe I'm just getting less tolerant of newbies as my time in game increases but some of thses are examples of the ignorant:

The warlock who stands in melee right next to the tank, frequently casting drain soul instead of using DOTS. When queried on this, he said he likes using "both kinds of attacks" (melee and spell), and needs to drain soul for healthstones.

The SV or MM spec hunter who refused to use a pet at all becasue it was "insignificant DPS".

All those characters who need-roll on loot that is inapropriate for their class, or those need-rolling on gear for their alts.

PUGgers, or guildies, that AFK in the middle of an instance without explanation, or leave whenever they feel like it. (yes, RL happens. if you really have to go, just say so; dont leave the rest of us hanging!)

The player (usually DPS classes) that aggro extra mobs before the tank gets a shot... and that then winge when the healer lets them die!

The people that complain they have no quests left to do. There are well over 3,000 quests available to each faction and only about 800 are needed to get you to maximum level. If you really have finished an area, move on to another location. Mostly you just need to look harder in the zone you are in. Use the wow website zone guide as a starting point.

Ah well. This post is turning into a rant when it wasn't really meant to. The point is, there are many many places to turn to for information if you only had the motivation to look!

What a DK can do for you

2009-02-15T11:47:00.003+11:00

The wonderful folk at Blizzard have now allowed the creation of Death Knights on any realm, so long as you have a character somewhere that is at least level 55. Apart from DK's being a fun class to play, this opens up a host of ways to make money on a new realm.

Each time I've completed the DK starter zone, I have had a starter fund of about 25g. Its not much, but its a lot better than the handful of silver a level 5 character would have when reaching the big city for the first time. It is more than enough to start searching the auction house for bargains.

Death knights start the game with no trade skills except first aid. The old standby gathering professions mining, skinning and herbalism will need to be levelled up from scratch, but it is insanely easy to farm the newbie areas on your epic mount. Even the low level materials can fetch a decent sum on the auction house. Dual gathering works well as always.

The one massive advantage that a newly minted DK has over any other starter class is of course that it is high level and well equipped at the start. They make brilliant farming characters, easily able to run through any lower level instance. Unholy spec seems to be the easiest here, with better AOE abilities. Blood spec makes a decent alternative that is able to self-heal even when swarmed by half an instance's monsters. Frost spec is viable also but not quite as good as the other two in a farming role.

At level 58 or so, probably the best instance for farming would be Scarlet Monastary. Lots of silk cloth, reasonable quantities of green items and heaps of vendor gray make this definately worth your time. Shadowfang keep is another smallish instance that is worth farming, particularly if you have skinning as a profession. Lots of the BOE blues in SFK are valuable for sale to twinks.

The instances inside Orgrimmar and Stormwind, Ragefire Chasm and The Stockades respectively, are worth considering. RFC is much better in this regard, dropping a large ammount of linen cloth and loads of low level greens. Stocks drops linen and wool cloth in decent ammounts but has a very poor rate of green drops. The main reason for quickly farming either of these instances is their proximity to the vendors and auction house!

Death Knights are a boon to anyone starting fresh on a new realm even if the DK itself is not your primary character. I almost miss starting things "the hard way".

Reflections on my pixelated fixations.

2009-01-08T20:04:00.007+11:00

According to my account information, Azeroth has been my part time home for three years now. I had heard of World of Warcraft ages before, probably sometime around release date but had resisted the temptation to join. It was only after watching a friend play and later sharing his account for a bit that I signed up myself. Initial dreams of levelling up to join my friend and his guildmates soon fell by the wayside as I dabbled in altitis, falling further behind as those more focused players forged ahead towards 60. I was not new to Azeroth exactly, having played Warcraft 1, 2 and 3, as well as most of their expansions. Blizzards other games, Diablo and Starcraft also got regular workouts. The 3-d "Roleplaying" world in an MMO was different to the strategy games I had mostly played before. I loved the game!

My first character was an undead warlock on my friends account. I managed to level him up to about 15 or so in the relatively rare times I got to play. I had fun but probably made every rookie mistake in the book. When I got my own account started, I made an effort to re-create the same character. He still exists, gathering dust along with all his guildmates on one of the US servers, since there were no Oceanics available back then. I ended up inheriting the guildmaster position as most former members transferred off or quit the game. My friend had moved on to another guild to try raiding but found the time difference too difficult. He and some others had also started alts on Alliance on one of the first Oceanic servers. Of course I followed as well, generating one alt of each class and of each race/gender combination. Nearly all of these characters made it to the low 20's before abandonment. I continued creating characters on every oceanic server as they opened up "reserving" my spot. Each of these got levelled up to at least the early teens as well. Before long I had over 20 characters to manage.

My friend fairly abruptly quit the game about June 2006, and most of the other friends and guildmates I had made had dispersed all over the place. Another RL colleague had level 60's on another server, so I played there for a little bit and continued to shuffle between all the various alts for a few months. One evening I was mucking about on Dath'Remar, on an under-used Rogue I'd created some weeks earlier, when the Tirisfal Glades newbie chat was reasonably active.

Someone was moaning about how he couldn't get into a guild, since they were all full of transferred level 60 raiders who were not interested in lowbie scrubs. Several others piped up in agreement. I offered the obvious solution: Make one yourselves! There was a bit of discussion back and forth, mostly about how it was too expensive so I offered to raise the funds myself. 10 silver is a large amount to an unassisted lowbie newb like myself, so I actually spent a couple of hours grinding and _vendoring_ linen cloth and the like to scrounge the cash. By this time, the newbie crowd was all around level 10.

Since this was an alt on a server I was unlikely to visit again soon, I offered to general chat the funds to get that guild started, and were there members willing to sign up? Sure enough one chap called Stickykey volunteered to be guildmaster and there were enough people around to get the charter signed in short order. Several names were discussed before my suggestion was picked as the most likely. Thus was Crimson Legion born.

Guild mastery changed hands several times between Stickykey and myself that evening as we established ranks and set up guild powers. Stickykey had never had access to the guild controls before so basically palmed the role over to me to set up. Ranks established, guild powers loosely defined and about 30 people recruited, I logged for the night.

I forget the exact sequence of events, but Stickykey was going away for a while so I was going to be "temporary" guildmaster. The new guild kept gathering members rapidly and there were enough sensible people in officer positions to keep it running smoothly even when I also didn't log in for a few days early in the piece. We had over 100 members in the first few days then recruitment started to die off a bit as we left the newbie areas. Some players and myself created extra alts and returned to the newbie zones for more recruiting, though even in these early days we did NOT spam the chat channels .... we just offered assistance or grouped up with people and recruited from there.

By the first weekend it was clear the guild needed some structure and basic rules. There had been some silly behaviour and some people left because of it. I searched the web for free forum hosts and found one that looked vaguely suitable. We had a competition to design a guild tabard, and a donation drive to raise funds for it. As usual, I was spending too much time on alts and my main was falling behind the other members as they rushed into the 20's and 30's. We even recruited a few higher levels, most of whom left fairly soon after for late game guilds.

After some discussion on our forums, a revised rank structure was put in place. I organised a few guild wide events that drew reasonable participation levels. Raiding against the Night Elves became a fairly regular event, often involving other guilds as well. Our core leadership group settled in to their positions and we kept a lookout for more talent to join us. Stickykey made a few brief visits but was missing most of the time without much explanation.

By December, we had grown to nearly 300 members and our highest were nearing the level cap at 60. Everyone was eagerly awaiting the release of The Burning Crusade. My stable of alts had grown yet again and I had got most of them on Dath to around level 20. Crypt was nearly 40 and looking forward to his mount.

We lost a few members to raiding just before TBC release, then quite a lot more in about February as people hit 70 and wanted to raid then. A core group of officers moved out and formed a splinter guild only for higher levels. I transferred guild leadership temporarily to Xera, an officer and founding member, who was leaving that night to join a raid guild. Xera then transferred guildmastery back to my alt Decrypted. Cryptography joined the new splinter guild.

Over the next few days I found the demands of actively participating in two guilds to be too much hassle. The leadership team of the new guild were taking it in a direction I didn't feel comfortable with and I missed out on lots of things in Crimson Legion while mucking about on Crypt, so in a short time I quit and rejoined CL.

The splinter guild lasted about 2 months before internal drama, and possibly bank thefts, caused it to almost disintegrate. A few refugees returned to Crimson Legion, others moved on to other guilds and a handful persevered. Eventually the remaining guildmaster quit, handing control over to the bank alt of one of my officers. There are still 6 members listed on the armory website but these are dead accounts or otherwise inactive.

We periodically go through cycles where members leave, convince others to go with them and start a fresh guild. More often, a member will quit to start a guild with their school friends. Nearly all of these attempts are unsuccessful and a lot return to the CL family.

One recent exception has been Poshmina and her guild. Posh was in CL for only a month or two but was a very talkative and active member when she was here. She left, poaching a number of our members and has gone on to establish what looks to be a very successful guild. They had 275 members when I last looked, including a higher proportion of max level characters than we maintain. I wish them every success!

People come and go all the time, but the essential core of the guild has remained strong. We hit 500 members about 6 months after handing in the charter, despite semi-regular purges of inactive members. I have mentioned in another post that there are limitations imposed by the game that have caused us to keep below the magic 500 from then on. We hit that limit again just last night so we are due for a purge again.

About the time of our first anniversary, an interesting bug manifested itself. Some officers were playing around abusing the demote and remove powers, then re inviting or promoting the victims. Somehow this bugged out and Mannak got guildmaster rank alongside Decrypted. Now, Mannak is a nice enough guy but he should have been about rank 4 or 5 at the time, not a higher officer and certainly not co-GM! Some people made accusations of hacking but I seriously doubt it. It was interesting trying to fix this... he couldn't gquit, becasue the guildmaster powers couldn't be passed on. I couldn't demote him back to his normal rank, because of course he was the same rank as me. Eventually I petitioned it and a Bliz Gamesmaster sorted it all out. I took the opportunity to have Cryptography re-instated as guildmaster and Decrypted gladly stepped down from the hot-seat.

In August 2008 I took an overseas holiday. Before I left I transferred guild master rank to Sebra, one of the rank 1 officers. I think she did an excellent job looking after the place but she was in a hurry to transfer it back once I returned. Any of my top level officers could have held the spot while I was away, but I know Sebra through work which would make sorting out any issues easier. Everything went smoothly except for the guild bank bug that I posted about in another message.

Crimson Legion celebrated its 2nd birthday in October 2008. We have maintained membership of around 400-500 members throughout our existence and are reasonably free of guild drama.
A solid core leadership group have kept it alive and thriving. I am intensely proud of their efforts. World of Warcraft is still a very interesting place to be and I have no intention of leaving any time soon.

Thank you to my guild members for making it a place I'm happy to return to.

Trade skill synchronicity

2008-12-16T22:43:00.005+11:00

One advantage of rampant altitis is having most trade skills covered. This enables efficient use of almost any materials and much less wastage while levelling up.

My highest level characters are generally equipped as gatherers. They farm materials while I level up and mail them on to the trade skill alt. Crafted materials are made up and then either mailed to the banker alts, or passed on to another alt for more crafting.

Cryptography my "main" rogue is a skinner and leather worker. I've kept up the skinning but LW has lagged behind. Occasionally I'll make a bit of effort to get it going again but usually find some other distraction. Mostly the leathers are sold on the markets. I have considered dropping LW on several occasions but have resisted so far.

My new Death knight Cryptoknight is a herbalist and enchanter. This is my main farming character at the moment since AOE farming of low level areas is supremely awesome. He uses the enchanting almost exclusively for disenchanting of BoP items in instances. Herbalism is still quite low but is progressing and every one of the mats found is passed on to another alt for use. Excess enchanting mats are passed on to the banker for resale.

Mortified is my primary bank alt. She's now a level 35 mage, so has increased her maximum trade skills to 300. Enchanting is the main priority at the moment. She disenchants almost everything that gets sent to her from other characters and sources hundreds of items each auction session. She is also an accomplished tailor. Both tailoring and enchanting were level capped at 225 for a long time but now have room for expansion. Tailoring provides gear for my cloth wearing alts and also supplies market and disenchanting opportunities. Eventually I'll have to get her out and questing for more levels to keep up.

Afterdeath is a lowbie priest. She was originally herbalism and alchemy but has dropped herbalism in favour of inscription. Eventually I'll have to get some her some levels but for now I am well below the level cap on either trade. Herbs are supplied by Cryptoknight then used in either inscription or herbalism. Inscription is starting to supply decent glyphs for my alt army or for guild use but is also making lots of weapon and armour vellums for my enchanters. I do not use a lot of potions on any alt and those that I do use are higher skill ones.

Rigormortis my warlock blacksmith and miner has been transferred off the server. He is now the highest level alt on his new realm and may end up dropping the blacksmith in favour of enchanting or something. He used to supply reasonable green and blue items to my lower level alts, or supplies for disenchanting. Mining of course is always financially rewarding in the AH.

Decrypted is a miner/blacksmith. Both of these have been neglected since Rig did most of the work. He's also a warrior and probably the least likely alt to be properly played any time soon. When I originally planned out the trades, he was going to be an armour smith to complement Rig's Sword smithing. Not sure which way he will go though I do have three plate-wearers now.

Ashnazg my Paladin is also a neglected character. Mining and jewelcraft are his token efforts. One day I might actually spend some time getting this guy levelled up since AOE farming is so fun on the Death knight! When and if I do, Ash will add further to his current trade skills.

Methane my druid gets an occasional workout. He is purely a gathering character with skinning and mining as professions. Most of his output has been passed on to my lesser leveled alts. I chose to make him a dual gatherer becasue druids are so versatile. Stealth in cat form, travel form, swimming form and flight forms all make for a character that can get to places easily.

Insolence is a blood elf warlock. I originally had jewelcraft and mining but dropped jewlcraft for herbalism a while before wrath was released. Now that Cryptoknight has much better herbalism I am considering going back to jewelcraft! Either way, she is my primary non-enchanter bank alt and doesnt get much sun at the moment. Jewelcraft generated a lot of enchanting materials but there are many other low level jewelcrafters producing rings and necklaces so theres not a lot of profit at the low end.

Cyanade the shaman is a skinner and leatherworker. For a long time I was passing scraps to her from Crypto's lower level adventures, so her leatherworking skill isnt too bad for the amount of play she gets! Back in the day I had planned that my two leatherworkers would specialise in one of the three types but that is still a long way off if it ever happens!

Last but definately not least is Kytlin, a hunter just barely short of level 50. Mining and engineering are her professions. Both are lagging behind where they should be, mostly becasue being a hunter is so much fun I forget to mine! Engineering so far has just been a massive gold and materials sink with very little to show for it. I have the gnomish remote control trinket that is supposed to be good on mechanicals... but I cant even remeber trying it out!

Anyway, the synchronicity part of this is the several chains of supply that I can have between my characters.
A fair few quests require crafted items. In theory, my alt army has been able to supply most of these... but in practice, the AH has been too tempting. Alchemy, Blacksmithing and Engineering crafted goods are the ones most often needed in quests. Be aware that the quest rewards are often worth a lot less than the cost of the crafted items!

Most craft skills can make objects that fuel the enchantment market. A large proportion of tradeskill gear gets consumed this way. If you are not an enchanter, be sure to price your junk greens on the AH at a price that is attractive for disenchantment. Blue gear is rarely worthwhile either to craft for sale, or for disenchantment.

My current best chain of recycled crafts is this: Herbalist farms herbs. Inscriber mills them for ink, then makes weapon or armor vellum. Enchanter uses farmed enchanting mats to place enchantments on the vellums, which then are passed on to other alts for use or resale. If everything works out I could get 4-5 skillpoints on three characters from the same stack of herbs!

So much to do in so little time!

2008-12-05T14:13:00.002+11:00

So its several weeks since Wrath was released and the queues have died down. At most times of the day its possible to log in without waiting though most of the realms I check are "full". My main problem now is that I have too many things I want to do yet limited playtime available.

On VeCo, I have just last night levelled my hunter to 30 and got his mounts. My time on VeCo has been fairly short since my last blog post. Each visit I would work on the auction house for a while, then march out and work on my hunter. He has been using three of his 5 pets in rotation. Bear, Carrion Bird and Cat have seen the most action. Of the three, probably the Carrion Bird is the most generally useful. The bear is a great little tank but the limitations on positioning with Swipe make him a bit hard to use effectively. Cats as usual are awesome single target tanks. Without any form of AOE, they require frequent retargetting to handle groups. Both Bear and Cat could regularly handle 1-3 same-level mobs without too much trouble. Bear has slightly better survivability and cat kills quicker but otherwise theres not much difference.

My Carrion Bird however was significantly easier to use than either of the others. Screech will hold the attention of any additional mobs long enough to allow the primary target to be burnt down. If you can wait long enough for two screeches to go off before using mend pet there should be no problems with aggro. Earlier casting of mend pet would sometimes cause problems.

Changeabull and Replaceabull, my druid and shammy alts have mostly remained in town. Changeabull is at level 18, fully rested, so should get level 20 and cat form the next time I actually make use of him. Poor Replaceabull is still level 6 and hasnt been touched for months. He might end up becomming a true bank alt for the others.

VeCo mercantile activity has been going quite well. On each of the 5-6 times I've logged in, I've hit the AH pretty hard. Traceabull scans the whole auction house to set baseline values then uses auctioneer's scan ability to find loads of disenchantable items.

On any particular scan, Trace will find upwards of 500 auctions to buyout or bid on, just for disenchantable objects below skill level 225. The buyouts are immediately disenchanted and then relisted. Quite a few of the bids are outbid by other people but even so I can expect another 200+ items to arrive in the mailbox over the next 48 hours. All these will be disenchanted and relisted as I find them.

At this time I am being fairly indiscriminate on what materials I'll try to sell. Any object that can be disenchanted with the current maximum 225 skill is fair game. Often I have won auctions on ridiculously low bid prices, even when the buyout was set well above average. Even some blue items have fallen into my hands in this manner.

The resulting shards, dusts, essences etc are relisted on the auction house. In most cases, a greater essence sells for less than its component parts, so I break them apart and sell the lesser essences. I still sell some as greater essence though as it seems not everyone is aware they can be split in this way!

Another thing I do to increase sales is set stack sizes to less than 10 or 20.
Many things I sell in groups of 2 or 3 or 5. Shards I usually sell individually. Mostly this is because the enchants that require these materials use small quantities, but it is also because some people cannot do the maths to see that my prices are actually a bit higher than the average!
When listing my auctions, I will sometimes buyout my competitiors if they are sufficiently undercutting for me to relist and still make a profit. I also look to see opportunities to bid cheaply on otherwise overpriced materials.

So, does all this market stuff make any money? Hell yes!

I have repeated this cycle about 5 times since my last post. In the initial round I invested just under 200g into materials, out of a net worth of about 350g at the time.
Last night's scan saw me invest about 700g in new materials. I have about another 700g worth of unsold auctions and about 1400g in cash. Total net worth would be edging close to 3,000g, nearly all earned within the safety of capital cities. Time spent on purely AH related stuff would be no more than 4 hours in that period.

Wrath of the impatient player

2008-11-17T14:56:00.002+11:00

Its YOUR fault. Yes, you over there. You and your 1500 mates ahead of me in the queue. I cant play on my main realm, nor my secondary realm. All those Death Knights are spoiling my fun.

Ah well.
Luckily, I play on several realms, some of which are in the US time zones as well as the oceanic ones. There is no way I'm waiting through an hour long queue when my playtime is at best 2 hours. I have lowbie hunters and druids with lots of rested exp to use up, and some decent funds to invest in the market.

So that's what I've been doing since wrath hit the servers. VeCo at 4am server time is without a queue. There are 15000+ items on the auction house and my enchanter alt is currently maxed at 225 skill. That is a fair amount of enchanting materials available. I invested about 200g in bids and buyouts on green items, disenchanted the lot and put the resulting materials up on the market. Nearly all of that stock sold first time through and I've re-invested the money into more raw materials. I will continue to reinvest into enchanting materials for a while yet. I am also aiming to get my hunter/enchanter to level 35 fairly quickly to improve his disenchanting abilities. If I am fast enough, that will enable me to capitalise on the crop of deathknights needing level 60+ enchantments.

I've been online enough to have seen several realm-first level 80 achievements, as well as those maxing various profession skills. I would expect that nearly all realm-firsts for classess will be done by the next weekend at the latest.

My hunter is going reasonably well. I've grabbed a bear pet for him to level up with and also to evaluate some of the criticisms people have had with swipe. Mania on her maniasarcania blog has asked for comments on bears performance. Bears are single target tanks with some AoE ability to help control adds. They are not really suitable for true AoE and volley pulls. This is reflected in the comments on the thread. The main difficulty is positioning the mobs all in the front aspect so the swipe can hit all of them. Volley is only available at level 40 and above so switching to a gorilla or croc then would make sense.

Hunter Pet reviews -pre wrath patch 3.x

2008-10-24T18:34:00.017+11:00

[last update 15 Dec 2008]

*****
Forthcomming PTR 3.0.8 patch includes nerfing for scorpid poison and cat rake as well as several other hunter nerfs. Volley will be reduced by 30%. I suspect that this will actually help gorillas (and carrion birds and crocs and bears as well) maintain aggro on groups.

I'll revise the below pet families once the changes hit live servers.
*****
Note for patch 3.0.3:
Some exotic pets got a boost in overall DPS. This should make 51-point Beastmaster specialists happy, since their special benefit is now more on a par with the other tree's 51 point talent. The difference however should be minor, enough so that even BM specialists do not need to take exotics to be viable.

Cat's Rake ability has been weakened somewhat. I'll have to retest and compare them with raptors. *done*

The cost for pet specials has been reduced to 20 (from 25) focus. This should help autocasting priority so they go off more frequently when cooldowns are up.
*****

There are a great many changes in the way pets work in the new expansion. Inspired by the fine work done by Znodis at The Mystic Hunter I've attempted to do a quick PvE focused guide to pet choices.

More than at any time in wow history, all pet families are now viable as levelling pets. They can also probably all serve well enough in PvP, Arena and as tanks in instances. Properly specced Tenacity pets can even tank heroic instances, as evidenced by the competition going on now at Big Red Rhino

My reviews were done on various hunters in the level 20 to 30 range. They all spent the first 12 talent points in marksmanship, to get the go for the throat talent, then moved over to beastmastery. None of these hunter alts has particularly spectacular gear for their level. I used aspect of the hawk for most fights, switching to viper when low on mana.

Pets get a talent point at level 20, 24 and 28. Nearly all pets were freshly tamed wild ones, so started out up to 5 levels below the hunter. I spent talent points in dash/dive or charge, then the next in cobra reflexes. Some hunters had bought the glyphs for mend pet and serpent sting, both a minor boost to overall longevity in the field.

None of the Outland only, Northrend only, or exotic pets were able to be tested due to using low level hunters. These reviews are only of families available to hunters as they level up. Nearly all families are accessible by the mid 20's, so there's plenty on offer.

Cunning
The pets in the Cunning families are not always first choices for a levelling pet. They are mainly aimed at PvP and utility in groups but can still serve admirably as a general use companion.

Bats: Tested Vampiric Mistbat*
When testing Dragonhawks on a level 21 hunter, I also grabbed a bat from the same area then levelled them up to 20. Bats are ok as pets and their stun effect will be useful in PvP, but like other disabling effects its on a too-long cooldown to be useful as a general use pet. Little Vlad, my bat, would tank several similar level mobs easily enough but struggled against tougher opponents. This was one of the last pets I tested so perhaps rushed a bit. Bats are decent but not great pets for levelling.

Birds of Prey: Tested Strigid Hunter.
Blizzard stole my screech AOE effect from this pet. Snatch has plenty of potential in PvP but I'm not yet convinced of its effects in PvE. This pet has barely left the stables since patch, so this test is not yet complete.

Chimaeras: Exotic, Untested.

Dragonhawks: Tested *
All the lower level Dragonhawks used to be the weaker "caster" pets pre patch. That has thankfully been fixed in the 3.x world. Their flame breath attack has been nerfed back to being a single target effect rather than a short range AOE. Unfortunately they also seem to suffer the range attack bug that some other pets now seem cured of - they "stutter" forward until in range of their breath. Once in melee they are ok, autocasting breath fairly reliably but the initial attack is annoying. Overall, the Dragonhawk did rather well as a levelling pet. He made short work of Luzran and Knucklehead, then burnt down several adds that had joined in all without much trouble. Quite a likeable pet, despite its flaws.

Nether Rays: Outland only, Untested.

Ravagers: Tested Ravager Specimen.
A ravager makes a decent enough pet. I like the various animations, especially swim. Easy diet, strong dps. The special attack is a 2 second stun but on a longish 40 sec cooldown so doesn't see much usefulness in PvE. Might be better bound on a macro. The ravager has most definitely fallen from its perch as the favourite raiding pet.

Serpents: Tested Deviate Viper.
The serpent special attack poison spit is quite a useful one. With a 10 sec cooldown, its ready to go frequently during fights. It is both a DoT and an anti-caster debuff. It seems that the run-back-to range behaviour that these guys used to have before the patch has gone. A serpent with Dash is a really nice companion.

Silithids: Exotic, Untested.

Spiders: Tested Wildthorn Stalker.
I grabbed a random spider while travelling through Ashenvale. Pre-patch, a spider was a barely adequate pet. Now they are pretty handy creatures to have at your side. Mine easily tanked two mobs 4 levels above it with only mend pet to keep it going. The 40 second cooldown on its web ability is a bit long for levelling use, but if bound to a macro rather than autocast is a handy trick for preventing fleeing mobs. It will be extremely useful in PvP as well.

Spore Bats: Outland only, Untested.

Wind Serpents: Tested Deviate Stinglash.
Once the premier raiding pet for well geared hunters with lots of crit %, Wind serpents have never been one of my favourites. The 10sec cooldown on their lightning breath means its available often in a fight... but its rather underwhelming. Serpent's poison spit is faster, does more damage, shoots further and has a nice debuff that LBr lacks. They seem to have had the annoying run-to-range bug mostly fixed which is nice. The little winged snakes tank reasonably well and have some really nice skins but I'd prefer some other pet. Raiders might still be interested if LB scales with ranged attack power, but poison spit doesn't. I have no data either way as yet.

Ferocity
The ferocity families generally offer skills aimed at increasing damage. They generally lack the pure toughness and survivability of the tenacity pets but make up for it by killing things quickly. Raiders will favour Ferocity pets when they are not expected to tank. A ferocity pet will likely prove to be a good choice for a general use companion.

Carrion Birds: Tested Swoop.
Screech pre-patch was one of the best skills for hunters taking on multiple opponents. It is pretty much unchanged in 3.02, remaining single target damage, and multiple target debuff. I've only briefly tested my original pet, a Swoop from Mulgore, but it looks like it holds up fairly well. Carrion birds were lesser cousins to Owls pre-patch but now have come to the fore as levelling pets.

Cats: Tested Ghost Saber, and several others. (re-tested for 3.0.3)
Cats were third on the DPS totem pole pre patch. Testing by other hunter bloggers indicates they may now be top, at least until the exotics get their buff in a forthcoming patch. (* implemented in 3.0.3). Regardless, cats are an awesome pet. They come in a huge variety of skins to chose from at every level range making them readily accessible. Prowl, though it will be turned off most of the time, makes a nice addition on the occasions it can be used. Rake, the main family skill, is on a short timer, does reasonable damage and is a DoT. It is listed as bleed damage, so some monsters will be immune. Overall, cats still make great pets.
The slight reduction in damage on rake that was introduced in 3.0.3 makes little difference. Rake still contributes roughly 14% of the cats damage output vs 3% for raptor's Savage rend.

Core Hounds: Exotic, Untested.

Devilsaurs: Exotic, Untested.

Hyenas: Tested Hecklefang Stalker. *Updated*
Hyenas are ferocity pets with utility in pvp. Tendon Rip is one of the disabling moves with the shortest cooldown of the lot at 20 seconds. It is also a slight DoT but it is mostly its slowing effect that makes it nice. Hyenas also have a fairly extensive series of animations and interesting sound effects. A better than average pet for levelling.

Moths: Tested Vale Moth.
Moths are a curious inclusion in the ferocity tree. Their family special "Serenity Dust" is both an attack power buff and a minor heal to the pet, helping it fight and survive longer. It is on a longish 1-minute cooldown so isn't as useful as it could be for a levelling pet but does help in most fights. The only currently tameable moth for low level characters is the dirty white one in Azuremyst isle, past a bunch of high level guards making it a hard tame for horde players. It might just be worth the trip though; in my fairly limited testing, the little flying bug tanks like a champ and the self-heal keeps it going longer than otherwise. It also goes quite well with one of the moth small pets as a companion.

Raptors: Tested Deviate Slayer. (re-tested vs cat in 3.0.3 patch)
Raptors are yet again second string cats. Savage rend is a slightly more powerful version of cat's Rake, but its on a way too long cooldown of 1 minute. This makes it useful in most fights if you are pulling one at a time but not so good if you have a bunch at once, or chain fights really closely. A fierce raptor is a fine companion to have at your side. Mine helped me mostly-clear wailing caverns solo at level 23 - but frankly wasn't as good as the trash pet cat I took in originally.
The retest at patch 3.0.3 indicates that the long cooldown on rend is really hurting. Savage rend represented only 3-4% of the raptor's total damage output. Cats are still much better.

Spirit Beasts Exotic, Untested.

Tallstriders: Tested Fleeting Plainstrider.
Tallstriders need some love. Their Dust Cloud skill has some possibilities as an AOE grinding skill but has too limited an effect and a stupidly long cooldown. If left on autocast, it will be used at the start of a fight, before you've gathered a bunch of mobs and its special effect will be wasted. As a member of the ferocity family, a tallstrider does decent damage and its talent tree has some excellent abilities but then again, so does every other ferocity pet. There are far better choices. Almost any other pet is a better choice!

Wasps: Outland only, Untested. (The ones in Azeroth are all untameable at this time).
Rumour has it that wasps suffer slightly lessened damage per second than other similar pets. This is believed to be a bug!

Wolves: To be tested*
I had a brief test of an Ashenvale wolf at the time I tested spider. They did ok, but their family skill is mainly a group oriented ability. For a levelling pet, they are like a slightly buffed tallstrider.

Tenacity
The tenacity family mostly have skills that improve their ability to tank... by increasing damage, by debuffing enemies, or by protecting themselves. Tenacity pets at higher levels have talents that make them viable tanks or off-tanks for parties in instances, something that is beyond the reach of most other families. They also make good choices for solo play but are perhaps less useful in PvP.

Bears: Tested Ashenvale Bear and similar.
Bears are great pets. Charge makes them fast enough to get to the enemy and their family skill, Swipe, is a fast, damaging, MULTI TARGET attack. Bears are great for the kind of limited AOE grinding that most levelling as a hunter seems to consist of. They are tough as nails and hold the attention of a small group through any mend pets needed. The charge animation on a low-level bear looks like an attack wombat on a skateboard! There are a fair variety of looks to chose from and they are reasonably well animated. Overall, a great pet choice.

Boars: Tested Corrupted Mottled Boar, and others. (Bugfix to gore in patch 3.0.3. Needs retesting)
Several patches ago, Boars were THE premier levelling pet. Their gore and charge abilities made for the single best threat generation in the game. That has all changed now though. All Tenacity pets can get charge and gore has been somewhat nerfed. Gore is still a pretty good skill with a shortish cooldown but there are better tenacity pets to look at. Still a good choice for pet.

Crabs: Tested Encrusted Surf Crawler. *Updated*
Crabs get Pin for their family skill. Its a 4-second immobilise (not stun) and channelled DoT on a sadly long 40-second cooldown. I feel this is of more use on a pvp cunning pet than a tenacity tank and the cooldown is far too long for general use. Like the other tenacity families, a crab does fine but lacks that extra something to make it a great pet.

Crocolisks: tested Deviate Crocolisk.
Bad attitude has potential as an AOE grinding skill. It is a bit like Druid's thorns spell, in that its reactive damage to any attacker. It has a long 2 min cooldown but also lasts for 45 seconds so should last through most fights and be ready to go again when you pull the next bunch. Crocolisks have an incredibly annoying breathing sound and somewhat dubious animation which probably put me off this pet too quickly. I'll have to test again more thoroughly... with sound off!

Gorillas: To be tested* (Note: the lowest level Gorilla is level 32, a bit high for this project.)
I've grabbed a gorilla on my level 43 hunter. Even unfed, poorly talented and with only leather gear on the hunter, this guy is dynamite. Thunderstomp is absolutely brilliant for AoE work. The combination of TS, volley and aspect of the viper makes levelling and farming activities so easy! This guy is quite clearly the best available pet for levelling. I'll be going back and continuing to work on this, with a properly equipped hunter and a tanking focussed pet talent tree.

Rhinos: Exotic, Northrend only, Untested.

Scorpids: Tested Silithid Creeper. *Updated*
(Patch 3.0.3 reduced the damage of the scorpid poison skill, but also reduced the focus cost of the ability. This may make this pet more viable)
As a tenacity pet, Scorpids are nice hardy little tanks, able to take on several mobs around their level at once. Scorpid poison is a decent enough skill with a short cooldown. The problem for lowbie hunters is that its competing for focus with the claw skill. This means that it often fails to go off at all, or gets only one or two in a stack. Turning off claw allows full 5-stacks to build up quickly, but it decreases your dps.

Turtles: Tested Oasis Snapjaw. *Updated*
Shell Shield is the defining ability of Turtles. It's 50% damage reduction for 12 seconds every 1 minute. This could potentially be the strongest pure tanking pet in the game, great for taking on tough elites, or perhaps tanking in heroics. However, in the lower levels he's just slow and boring. I might re-test this family on my highest hunter to see if one with a bunch more talent points is better.

Warp Stalkers: Outland only, Untested.

Worms: Exotic, Untested.

A Hunter's Dilemma

2008-10-18T15:26:00.002+11:00

Patch 3.0.2 opens up lots of possibilities for hunters, even lowbie ones like most of mine. There aren't too many talent changes at the lower end of things so most of mine have spent the first 12 points in marksman to get Go for the Throat, then moved over to beastmastery for their remaining points. Where the pets are high enough, I've spent points in dash/dive and cobra reflexes. Only a couple are high enough to get tier two stuff yet.

The simple choice available of course is to spend money on new stable slots. Almost all my characters had bought the original two stable slots and now hunters have to cough up 200g more for the new two slots. This hasn't been an issue on my main realms where a lazy 200g is easy to come by. The dilemma then arises in what pets to take to fill the slots. Most of my hunters had two pets already. I want to have at least one member of each talent tree, Tenacity, Ferocity and Cunning. None of my hunters are high enough yet to take exotic pets. Most have a cat pet already, then either a boar or a bird. So far, cats are still great pets. My carrion birds are still nice but I'm not sure I like what they have done to my owls and boars.

I'd like to have 2 ferocity and 2 cunning pets on each hunter, with a tenacity pet to take up he 5th slot. Most of my existing pets are ferocity. I grabbed a WC snake last night to start testing cunning pets.... so far its not bad!
Of tenacity pets, I like the AOE of bears and gorillas. I might give scorpids another try too, I quite liked them pre patch. The other accessible families aren't too interesting.

I guess I'll just have to trial them all in various situations to see how they play. I'm not fond of turtles, bats, moths, but the rest are ok for aesthetics. I'll also try out all the exotics once my main hunter gets high enough.

The other dilemma that arises is of course what to do with temporary pets. Not all pet families will have an attractive skin near my level. Some pets will only be found deep in dungeons, and I'd need a temporary pet to find my way to them. Just last night I grabbed a Barrens cat from just outside crossroads as a temp pet to get inside Wailing Caverns. That young lioness served me well battling hordes of raptors and blob creatures until we got deep into the caverns. Ahead I saw a likely specimen, a purple and blue viper. I fed cat one last hunk of meat, gave her an affectionate pat and thankyou, then released her. She had been my companion for only half an hour or so, and was just a sandy coloured cat like thousands of others, yet I was growing attached to her already. A pat and a feed are barely acceptable thanks for saving my hide so often!

The Claytons blog entry.

2008-10-15T14:41:00.003+11:00

Wow patch 3.02 is downloading on my laptop now. There are a lot of things to look into once I'm finally able to log back in. First off I think I'll look at my lowbie hunters, or maybe my soon to be sacrificed 50's warlock. I think I'm more excited by the many game mechanics changes than I am about the impending release of Wrath and the new continent. Once wrath hits and the servers are a bit more stable, I think I'll start levelling Crypt again... but mostly in outland, not in Northrend!

Leaving the experince bar behind with a bang.

2008-09-29T12:42:00.003+10:00

With a little help from several guildies I'd spent several play sessions this last week grinding down that elusive experience bar. Last weekend I got involved in a couple of kills on the Brewfest boss in BRD. No drops of note and I got lots of snide remarks since I was level 68 vs the rest of the team of geared level 70's. Thanks ever so much Bliz, your changes to Brewfest this year really suck.

I returned to Nagrand and completed a bunch of quests leaving mostly the group quests only, then grouped up with guild members and ex-guildies to complete them. Durn the Hungerer hits very hard and smashed through a hunter "tank" and myself without trouble. I came back again later with a pally and we 3-manned him fairly easily. The same group finished off Tusker on the way past, neatly finishing off the Nessingwary series. Somewhere amongst this I dinged 69.

My pally friend and I continued on to Shadowmoon Valley, where I had never been before. He died attempting the stupid jump-a-tron quest in Nagrand on the way past. I picked up a flightpoint in Terrokar and the ones in SMV.

Our friend Uvuros bit the dust easily before we headed over to Black Temple.

Here I was treated to the most awesome display of AOE grinding I've seen. My friend is a 70 pally, in post-kara HEALING gear. He would run in and gather up 10-15 of the level 67-70 humanoid mobs that are on both sides of the entryway to Black temple and then AOE them to death. I was picking up around 500 exp per kill. That is around 7k exp per pull for me at level 69. Lucky my bags were almost empty! We also managed to pull several of the elite dragonkin while doing this; they went down almost as easily as the lower mobs! We would average 2 pulls per side before we would go catch the respawns on the other ramp. Once we got greedy and pulled about 30 mobs at once, but they managed to break his tank. I lasted, oh, half a nanosecond once he was down! The piles of corpses after each pull were amazing.

Doomwalker rained on our parade somewhat. Our accidental deaths earlier had applied a debuff that meant if we got close to doomwalker, his aura of death would instantly kill us. We kept out of range to continue grinding. I had gained almost 50% of level 69 just hanging on my pally friend's coat-tails before he got an invite to a raid and left me to my own amusements. I believe this was the fastest session of levelling I have had since before level 20!

After returning to Nagrand to hand in quests I was about 80% of the way through to level 70. I flew to Blades Edge Mountains and rode over the bridge into Area 52 and Netherstorm. A little bit of grinding and the completion of a handful of quests saw my experince bar creep up to within 4,000 points of levelling. Apparently my guild had plans to celebrate with me as I hit 70, so I hearthed to Shattrath to wait.

By Sunday afternoon I'd been playing alts for a while. Someone talked me into a runthrough of SM and since I needed lots of silk for my alts I agreed. I logged in to Crypt again and headed to Undercity. I got there just in time to help defend against a fairly large Allied raid. They had initial success in invading the bank and auction house areas before meeting fairly stiff resistance. The main group of allies got bogged down here near the auctioneers but some other groups broke off and ran riot through parts of UC's shopping areas. PvP madness ensued, and this time I survived well enough to inflict a bunch of kills. A mage and priest got caught in an alcove near the sewers entrance. Both fell to my blade flurry attack. A warrior got knifed in the back while busy fighting the lag monster and a druid engaged in a game of cat and mouse that ended up with another kitty corpse in the sewers.

Stragglers were still hiding out in various locations around UC even 20 minutes after the main raid was over. Several more scalps were added to my collection. PVP is a lot more fun when you don't die almost instantly!

After all that fun I took my guildmate for a quick run through SM-Cath and then SM-Lib. I farmed up a lot of silk for my alts and my guildmate got some new gear, though got growled at for rolling need on cloth gear he didn't actually need.

Later, after a break for dinner,I returned to the game. I took Cryptography to Org to bank and auction some stuff and do the Brewfest quests one last time. I arrived in time to "fight" the Dark Iron dwarves and then completed both the barrel race and barking quests while drunk. The Dark Iron invaders came back for some more while I was checking out the vendors, so I got completely smashed again fighting them off. It was then that I made possibly the biggest mistake of my whole adventuring career.

While "completely smashed", I went to the nearest quest giver to hand in for my brewfest tokens reward. However, I went to the wrong questgiver and actually ended up handing in Corens Dire Brew instead. Sure, I got a hefty sampling of tokens for this, but I also got some 15,000 exp.... which, if you've actually read this great wall of text, you will notice had the immediate effect of giving Crypt a nice golden glow and a chiming gong sound effect. Yes folks, after 38 days, 11 hours, 28 minutes and about 15 seconds, Cryptography made it to level 70. Hooray! I'm sure he had a good time of it, but he was too drunk to remember and couldn't see clearly enough to take a screenshot. He's also disappointed many guildmates who were organising some sort of special event. It wont be quite the same any more.

What does a newly minted level 70 do?

Smart ones probably start to do something about their crappy gear. Crypt is in quest greens for the most part. A few items might even be pre-outland actually. He's not set foot inside any of the outland instances nor a battleground since level 19. Decent quality items need gems and enchants. I have no decent gear, hence no need (yet) for either of these.

No, I've done nothing about the gear.

Smart level 70's grind out the last bits of their trade skills. As a skinner, Crypt had an easy time maximising that particular trade skill. First aid was also maximised very early on in Outlands. Fishing, cooking and leatherwork have languished behind since about level 45 or so. I do intend to max them all out, but am in no particular hurry to do so.

No, I havent improved any of my trade skills.

Smart level 70's start down various instance attunement quests, or faction grinds. Crypt has casually worked on Thrallmar and Mag'har rep while levelling up. Hes also dabbled with the Consortium and Cenarion Expedition. Progress for most of these now requires instance runs, which he hasn't yet done.

Nope, not done much here either.

Other smart level 70's go get their flying mount. My army of bank alts have been working hard on this for months. They gathered their resources and mailed a chunk of change over to Crypt, who accepted the Shatt flightmaster's quest and flew to Shadowmoon Village. Once I found the flight trainer and mount vendor I had the hard decisions to make: Do I shell out for just basic flyer at 800g + 100g mount, or go full out and pay the extra 5000g + 200g mount for the epic flyer, especially as patch day and wrath release are possibly going to reduce these costs?

Noooooo!

Continuing the long tradition of blowing money on fast mounts and loose women, Cryptography bought out the whole damn dealership.

800g for artisan riding skill (basic flyer)
5000g for master riding skill (epic flyer) (or is it the other way round? )

100g for tawny windrider
100g for green windrider
100g for blue windrider

200g for Swift Purple windrider
200g for Swift Red windrider
200g for Swift Green windrider
200g for Swift Yellow windrider.

Yes, that's 6900 gold. Every single copper of it is worth it though. Flying is AWESOME.

I now have 10 bag slots dedicated to mounts. Roll on patch day and the new way of handling mounts! I have three different random mount selection macros for Crypt. One for the epic riding mounts, one for the basic flyers and the other for the shiny new epic flyers.

After flying round for a bit, my friend and I made a start on the Netherwing quest chain. The first few steps were pretty easy and we both got up to the group quest to kill Zuluhed the wacked. We tried for a while to get a group going but to no avail. Then my pally friend showed up, and another rogue in our guild wanted a go at it. Pally supertank, 2 rogues and a holy priest downed that sucker twice (since one party member didn't have the quest!), then a bit later we downed him again for a mage in an allied guild.

Crypto is now flying around as a stealthed Fel Orc, poisoning peons and stealing netherwing eggs at every opportunity. Looks like I will be on a grind of daily quests for reputation for some time. Netherwing eggs seem to be fairly rare, or perhaps just over farmed, so they will not provide a massive shortcut for reputation gains. While doing these quests, I have assisted several other guildies to get started. Most of them don't have the epic flight skill yet so get stuck just after killing Zuluhed.

I also plan on starting the Shattari skyguard grind, and more cenarion expedition grinding, for their epic mounts as well as the dragon. I will very likely buy all the different varieties - I collect mounts!

On the way I'll look at getting some decent gear but am not looking to spend too much on that since more greens in Wrath will likely be sufficient... and if not, a few extra levels then back into the dungeons should make it even easier.

Mercentile Madness - Roundup.

2008-09-19T17:07:00.006+10:00

Its about two months since my last post in this series. In that time, I've had precious little chance to work on my two "Newbie" servers.

I did manage to catch up with Ideale/Ahami on VeCo and had some fun showing off the scenery in southern Tanaris. Traceabull my hunter was only level 22 or so and proved to be an absolute magnet for aggro in Tanaris. One thing I did notice is that hunters have a large advantage vs almost any other class when fighting much higher level monsters. Spellcasters find it nearly impossible to fight anyone 5 levels above them due to their primary attacks being resisted nearly all the time. I took a 29 warlock with some guildies into SM recently and could barely contribute at all due to this. Previous adventures with my rogue have shown that his melee attacks are also heavily penalised against higher level monsters, to the point where he would be lucky to hit for 5-6 damage each attack. Hunter's melee and special shots seem to suffer from this reduction also... but not so their white-damage autoshots. Traceabull was hitting the level 45-50 mobs in southern Tanaris for reasonably respectable 30-40 hits a shot, about what he does on same-level targets. These guys are 20 levels above him! This may partly explain why hunters are so good at taking on mobs a couple of levels above their own whereas other classes are not so lucky. Even warlocks in the mid-20's struggle more than hunters do.

After the sight-seeing trip was done, we hearthed out. I met up with Ideale's druid alt and her housemate's priest, to whom I gave some enchants with the crappy mats I had available. Hopefully they made a bit of difference. I do have better enchants available if you want, ladies... just give me a chance to scrounge some mats.

Ideale was a "bad friend" and hadn't supplied a wand, so when one turned up later while I was questing I gave that to the priest as well. The two girls were busy finishing off their quests and I was off elsewhere doing my own for a bit too, though we remained in a party to facilitate chat for a while longer. I burned through the rest of my rested experience then switched over to Changeabull my druid for a bit.

Changeabull had a fairly full quest log so spent some time handing in. Once that was manageable again, he visited the auction house. Between the two characters I now have quite an inventory of stuff for sale though little spare cash on hand. Much of the money I do make is spent on obtaining cheap items for disenchantment. Some of this is still being absorbed leveling enchanting on Traceabull; he's nearly maxed it for his current level. Any of the lower level materials are returned for auction and are starting to generate decent funds.

Over a couple of days I spent several hours trawling through the AH, finding cheap stuff and disenchanting it, then using or reselling the materials. I also spent about 150 gold in market manipulation.

There was a mid level enchanting material that was in quite large supply. I bought out virtually the entire stock, leaving only a handful of very overpriced suppliers in the market. I actually then consumed probably 80% of that stock levelling up enchanting. The remaining materials were then listed back on the AH at a price higher than average but still undercutting the market. Since this was still the weekend peak, most of my stock has since moved at those inflated prices and I've made nearly all my money back using only 20% of the stock! I do have some more of the same material, since several people tried to undercut my inflated price, but I've bought them out and re-listed.

There is a second, quite expensive, enchanting material that I now have significant stock in. It has not been as successful an investment and I had several 48-hour auctions expire. Luckily I need these to continue levelling my skill anyway so it won't matter much.

I also sacrificed an unused hunter alt on a "normal" US server. I found some random guy in razor hill and gave him all my stuff before suiciding that character. I then returned to VeCo and saw the birth of "Replaceabull", a Tauren shammy. He's had a little help from his bigger brothers and is motoring along nicely at level 6.

I've also found some time to visit Cael. I got distracted by my alts on the horde side when I should have been looking after the alliance guys. Nevertheless, I've managed to boost both warlock and hunter to level 21 and have done some more market and enchanting work. Unfortunately, the friends from Dath who were playing here have more or less abandoned their characters so some of my motivation to continue has gone. I am still feeling uneasy having both Horde and Alliance on the same server... its just wrong. Anyway, once I've done a few more market scans here and rebuilt my prices, I'll hit that auction house fairly hard while casually levelling the characters.

On Dath, most of my time has been spent in various instances. I've managed about 10 levels on some of my lower alts but have done little work on Crypt, despite a fair bit of encouragement from friends and guildies. I've been very busy with work so by the time I get on wow I'm interested in instant gratification that I can get by quickly levelling an alt.

I did take Crypto in as tank to Scholomance with two level 60-ish shammies from my guild and a warlock and hunter from the LFG channel. We did mostly ok. One wipe happened early when our healer went afk (unavoidably) and was then feared right into the middle of the room pulling a truckload of mobs. We wiped again later when I made a spectacularly bad pull that somehow managed to drag two extra groups of mobs, who then aggroed a few more on their way over to beat me into a pulp. We had several more individual party deaths when I either lost aggro, or didn't gain it in the first place - rogues are not designed to tank! Once people got used to the unusual group composition though, things went well. I also ran Crypt through RFC dragging along a level 11 guildie. A full clear in 20 minutes isn't bad! (Yes, this completely goes against my "runthus are evil" policy, but he'd already been in with an unsuccessful group earlier so I took pity on him.)

Instance roles

2008-09-17T14:52:00.004+10:00

Just thought I'd put down some ideas for tactics in small groups and low level instance running. This isn't the complete guide, just various tips and tricks.
The same roles are mostly valid in higher level instances but class specialisation has a noticeable effect; no more rogue tanks in higher instances please!

In any group there are certain roles to be filled. These can be filled by various classes at times, but obviously some classes suit a role better than others.

The Roles:

The TANK

A tank is the character doing the up close and personal melee combat with the monsters (MOB, NPC). Their role is mostly to soak up damage and prevent the mob from attacking other group members. Other aspects of this role are preventing spell casting and preventing fleeing. Damage dealing is NOT the primary requirement here, but is important in "holding aggro".

Warriors and Paladins are the tank of choice due to much better armour than other classes. Bearform Druids get boosted armour and abilities to handle this role well. Rogues, Hunters and Shamans can tank lower level instances if there isn't someone else available. No spell casting cloth wearer should ever be the primary tank. Warlock and Hunter pets can tank to some extent but have real aggro management problems.

The OFF-TANK
Similar to the TANK above, the OFF-TANK is a secondary Tank. They have a more specialised role in groups. The off-tank's job is to manage any ADDs (additional monsters) or mobs that break away from the main tank. Spell caster interruption and flee prevention are high priorities here. A general awareness of the combat zone is needed. The Off-Tank must be alert for ADDs or re spawns, capturing their attention and either managing it or drawing them to the main tank.

Almost any non- cloth wearer can be a suitable off-tank in lower level instances. In larger groups it is a warrior, druid or pally that takes this on; in smaller groups Rogues or shammys work well. Hunter pets are often acceptable off-tanks and some of the hunter and mage abilities are useful for mob management.

The PULLER

This is a role where a solo player moves away from the group and attacks the next mob to bring them back to the main group. It generally requires some form of ranged attack, so almost any class can do it.
Pulling is an art form; do it wrong and you will draw far too much aggro and wipe out your group. Done well and just the selected mobs are drawn away from their friends and onto the party's main tank.

The outright best class for pulling is the Hunter. Hunters have a number of abilities that make them great pullers, the main one being the Feign Death ability. At least one of their attacks is a slowing/stunning missile shot and they can place traps and their pet in the way of any incoming mob. They can also then feign death to pass the pulled mob over to the main tank. A failed pull done properly will kill only the hunter and not wipe the whole party.

The next best pullers are probably whoever is the main tank. There are a couple of special varieties of the pull though:

The sheep pull :- a mage uses the pollymorph spell to "sheep" one of a group of monsters. The rest of the mobs then charge straight for the mage. It is the job of the tank to get aggro off the mage really quickly.

The SAP pull:- a stealthed rogue uses SAP or another stunning attack to take out one of a group of enemies.

The DPS

Damage Per Second. People with this role have one main function: making mobs dead really quick. The trick to this is that you don't want to just spam your most devastating attacks, since you will draw more aggro from the mobs and possibly take them off the tank and onto yourself. This is bad... healers are mostly too busy looking after the designated tank and healing everyone just isn't efficient. DPS classes that pull off the main tank too often wont be invited back!

The stand-out classes here are Rogue and Mage. Both have awesome damage dealing abilities... but as noted that can also be a problem. If you moderate your damage output so that you are running at about 80% of max you should be ok. Other good classes are cat-form Druid, shadow spec priests, Shammy, Hunter, some warlock pets and warlocks.

DOTS
Damage over Time (spells). Mostly this is the domain of the priest and the warlock, but other classes have some skills in this area. Damage over time effects are useful for weakening enemies and killing off fleeing mobs.
Can generally be used on multiple mobs at once without pulling them off the tank or off-tank. Be aware that most of these effects will break crowd control.

The Crowdie
Crowd control is an ability that only some classes are good at. It involves assisting the off-tanks in removing any ADDS or just handling the extra mobs above and beyond what the main tank can handle. Rogue sap and gouge abilities, Druid root spell, mage freeze and sheep as well as various hamstring attacks are all aspects of this role. Hunters have traps that can immobilise or slow mobs as well. They get much better at higher levels but are initially quite limited. Priest and warlock FEAR abilities are also useful but run the risk of causing more problems!

The Buffer
Most spell caster classes have some role to play here. Apply bonus effects on other party members outside of combat. Remember to boost pets if applicable. Some pets buff as well.. warlock imp most noticeably.

The Healbot
Not the most glamorous of roles perhaps, but essential none the less. Priests, druids, shammys and paladins are just about the only real contenders here, though anyone with first-aid skill can assist. Without your healers, a group will die often and quickly. Another aspect of healing is of course resurrection. Warlocks have an interesting role to play here, in that they can create stones for healing and soul-storing, as well as having the abilities to drain life to keep themselves alive.
When healing, look after the main tank as much as possible and only assist others if the tank is managing well. Also note that your highest level spells are not always the most efficient.

Finding an Upside to Downtime.

2008-09-09T23:11:00.002+10:00

Tuesday night usually means a shutdown of the WoW servers. Sure enough, they are down tonight for about 6 hours or so. I only managed to get on for about 45 minutes before they went down, so I spent that time scouring the Auction House for bargains on VeCo.

Tonight's findings were a mixed bag of stuff. I listed most of my existing stock just to clear my bags. A generic search for bargains via Auctioneer turned up the usual selection of buyouts and short term bids, most of which I have left in my mailbox for now. Several tasty items were snapped up and mailed to my hunter for disenchanting. The other items should likely at least triple the money invested but there wasn't really anything especially exciting amongst it. I had a small win with some linen cloth, in that several stacks that I snapped up cheaply were resold more or less instantly - always a nice bonus.

After the basic scan was completed, I spent about 20 minutes pouring over the weapons and armor sections looking for low-priced items. Mostly these will be disenchanted and any materials not needed for levelling up will be re-listed. Enchanting materials are handy for investments, since they do not cost anything to list on the AH. Not all materials sell particularly well, but since there's no list cost you can just re-list until a buyer is found.

The advantage to doing auction scanning immediately before the shutdown is that I am guaranteed of being high bidder on almost all of the shorter-duration auctions. My mailbox should be fairly bloated next time I log in.

This is only the second time I've logged in to VeCo since my trip. Before I left I basically shut down my auction house activity and its taking me some time to ramp back up on all three servers. It's not uncommon for me to be running 200+ auctions on a server when concentrating on questing. If I focus on trade, that number can be around 1000 active auctions. A lot of money can be made in small value high volume stuff... like the linen cloth earlier. At this stage on VeCo, my bank balance isn't large enough to look into rare or epic item trades - and quite frankly I'm not online often enough to really take advantage anyway. The time difference is also a problem, since I'm usually only on in the early hours of the morning. It's not bad for snapping up late - night bargains but customers are few and far between!

Anyway, sniping the auctions should net me about 150 or so items that can be resold. Probably 80% of them will sell at first listing, all for nice profits. That money will be re-invested in more stock. If I get time this week I may repeat this process twice more before the weekend and have a nice supply of gear to sell during the weekend peak.

What little actual playtime I've had recently has been spent with my guild on Dath. We had a guild run into Zul'Gurub on Monday. We roped in a few PUGgers but the majority were guildies - something that's quite rare for us. ZG is an old-school 20-man raid instance aimed at level 60's . Well skilled and well geared level 70's can do it in groups of 5 or so. My guildies are generally neither well geared nor experienced raiders so we had a number of casualties along the way. It was hardly the neatest run ever, but Hakkar the soulflayer and his minions died messily on our swords and good fun was had by all.

I am keen to hit up all the old-school instances and raids before they become even more irrelevant with the release of Wrath.

Wageslave

2008-09-05T22:24:00.003+10:00

Again not too much to say. Work has been hell, and will be for probably another couple of weeks. With what little gaming time I've been getting I've nibbled away at my main projects:

I got both my main and alt Alliance characters to 21 on Cael. I invested a fair bit of my gold back into the market, mostly getting enchanting materials to skill-up. These two guys are doing ok money wise but not as well as the ones on VeCo.

I took a brief moment to log into my guys on VeCo.. and lucky I did, because I'd forgotten I had some outstanding auctions before I went overseas. I had a number of items in my mailbox with only 1-2 days left on the mail duration. I fired off a few emails and scanned the AH but haven't really spent any time there.

Most of my time has been spent on Dath. I was inspired for a few sessions to work on levelling my rogue Crypt. I managed about 3/4 of a level before getting distracted again. Somehow I ended up on a guild run into SM that was massively overpowered. We cleared Lib, Arms and Cath in well under an hour. I ended up swapping out for my hunter, who is at least more level-appropriate for SM. Was mostly pointless for me but was fun and we geared up a couple of lower level guildies.

Since then, I've been tinkering with my hunter. I've had a couple of lower level instance runs with other guildies and spent quite a bit of time helping a friend learn her hunter alt. She's just hit 24 and gained beast lore, so I took her "shopping" for skills. Like many newbie hunters, she'd let her pet languish with the lower levels of bite and growl etc. I'm fairly sure she's got the hang of it now though. The learning of skills from wild beasts is one thing I will miss once Wrath gets here.

The adventure continues...

2008-08-27T18:00:00.003+10:00

Not a lot to say this time. I'm getting back into wow, mostly playing my "Main" on Dath, pushing slowly to level 70. I'm at 68 and a third or so now. Tuesday shutdown (last night my time) was annoying, I ended up playing an alt on 2moons instead.

Tonight I might meet up with a guildmate and run through RFC on one of my lower level alts.

We had an interesting bug occur with our guild bank the other day. I went on holidays and transferred guild leadership over to my friend for the duration. When she transferred it back, all the items in the guild bank "vanished". The armory logs didn't show any withdrawals and we had no idea who "stole" our stuff so I petitioned it. The first gamesmaster to talk to me tried the standard Blizzard line of "its a UI issue", but since it was affecting everyone in the guild the same it couldn't possibly be MY UI causing the problem! Eventually the petition was escalated to 2nd level support and they have reset our bank. All our gear is there again, Yay.

This is not the first guild related bug we have come across. We hit 500 members for a period a couple of months back. The guild listing can only contain 500 names but you can still add more members. This shouldn't be a problem, since we rarely have more than 25-30 people online at any time and that is a long way below the 500 limit. However, we found that above 500 members total, new members would not show up at all, in online or offline listings. This made keeping track of members more difficult, especially as our lowest rank has no speech powers!

I spoke to several GM's on this issue but there was no resolution. They suggested posting on the official forums where similar issues have apparently occurred... but I couldnt find an appropriate place in the few minutes I spent looking! We have purged inactive members and are now keeping below 500 simply because its more difficult to manage when we go over that number.

Reality Bites

2008-08-24T13:13:00.003+10:00

As you may have noticed, I have not posted in some time. I've had a very busy time at work and then an overseas holiday. Now that I'm back home I'm looking forward to more WoW and more writing. I've just now got to update my computer, the games I play and all the wow mods I use!

15 thousand Kodo - What a load of dung!

2008-07-25T20:58:00.002+10:00

I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks at work. It has not been a fun time at all. So, here's the Wow-itized version of why I haven't been posting recently.

I work for a number of Guilds, mostly as stable master and chief herdsman. If there's anything related to mounts or pets, I'm the guy to come see. Each Guild is run slightly differently with different objectives set by the guildmaster and officers. Each guild has certain guidelines and rules set by Bliz that we all must obey but there still remains a fair bit of autonomy in each guild. I get to spend roughly one day each week working at each guild HQ.

Some time ago, Bliz decided to issue a subsidised mount to guildmembers. The current batch of mounts are old and are due to be retired. Normally, we would have a small number of mounts delivered at any one time. We would have plenty of time to train up the new mounts, kit them out in guild livery, round up the old mounts and collect old equipment for return. Guild members would be given a bit of training on how to use their new mount and say a final goodbye to their old one.

This time round has been a comedy of errors. Bliz spent so long renegotiating the contracts with the suppliers that the oldest batch of mounts are now long past their use-by dates. Some of these poor arthritic old creatures are limping along on two legs, or are half-blind. Most guild members look after their mounts and equipment fairly well, but even with careful tending these older ones are slowly dying. These mounts are kept long past the end of the lease term, but Bliz is still billing each guild member, in some cases for a nearly dead mount!

The contracts were signed so late that instead of one smaller batch every six months or so, we are now getting about 40% of the total herd turned over at once. Bliz has made a bulk deal with a knackery, so ALL older mounts must be rounded up and returned. The deliveries of new mounts and the return of old ones was initially scheduled to take place in only 5 days- about a quarter of the time allocated for previous changeovers. Various stuff ups at the supply and delivery stages means that less than a third of the mounts have actually arrived.

Since each guild is different, each mount needs a certain amount of re-training. This can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a day or so for each mount, though several can be being worked on at once. A bit of work also has to be done removing any customised equipment off the old mounts, often moving it to the new ones before handing them over to the guild members. The new owner also needs at least a bit of training in handling the new mount.

Guildmembers were offered a choice between a grey kodo or a green raptor. Most had had a kodo previously and selected the same again. The trouble is, the supplier has used a different training method on the kodo. Kodo's trained in the older method were supposed to be available also but this has not yet happened. The new training means I have a lot of extra training to do to integrate "new" kodos into our existing herd. It seems the new training method really breaks the spirits of the new mounts and they must be extensively encouraged to play along nicely with the rest. At any moment they can turn around and savagely break things.

Adding Raptors to the herd is also somewhat problematic. The raptors themselves are great, sleek, obedient beasts, but they have different feeding and housing requirements, and the riders also need lots of training. Each raptor requires roughly twice the work that a generic kodo does. As far as I know, no raptors have yet been delivered, since a different supplier and delivery company were used. A fair number of additional raptors are expected.

So, the delivery of new kodo has been a shambles. Instead of all new kodo arriving at once, several deliveries of one or two kodo at a time are being made. I was at one of my guilds when the first batch of two arrived. It was such a cantankerous beast that it took about 7 hours of individual training to settle down enough to put into the paddock with some of our existing herd. I didn't even get a chance to start on the second one. Other stable masters have reported that not only are they only half-trained, but that in some circumstances can break down. I suspect this will mean yet more training will have to occur on each mount, but worse, these feral new kodo may have passed on their bad habits to existing mounts.

Today was the last day of the original scheduled delivery period. That, and the return date, have been extended... but not by enough. Basically, there is 5-6 weeks worth of work involved for a smooth transition, which could be done in about 4 if rushed. I think we are being allowed only 2 weeks to do the lot, and as I said, less than a third of the mounts have arrived. One message from Bliz today seems to demand that old mounts MUST be returned ON TIME, even if a new mount has not arrived or been trained for use yet. There will be a lot of very pissed off guild members if they are without mounts, possibly for weeks at a time!

I work for a very large organisation. Individuals within that are often talented, dedicated people. Most of my fellow stable masters are highly skilled, efficient and dedicated practitioners of their art. We are copping a lot of heat from frustrated guildmembers exasperated at the long delays and excessive pressure from Bliz to basically achieve the impossible.

What a load of kodo dung.

Bliz, you suck!

Ride 'Em Cowboy!

2008-07-17T20:41:00.003+10:00

Methane, my mid-30's tauren Druid on Dath, picked up his Kodo mounts the other night. I hadn't had a kodo on any of my other characters yet. Riding around on these guys is like steering a minibus or a monster truck!

The normal walk animation on a kodo has a definite side-to-side swaying motion. This looks ridiculously funny when combined with various strafe and jumping motions. Performing a full 360 degree turn after jumping off the lifts at Thunder Bluff was rather amusing too. I am reminded of the line from "hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy" where the Vogon starships "hung in the sky like bricks don't."

Mercantile Madness - The Enchanted Auctionhouse

2008-07-14T17:33:00.004+10:00

I've been playing my two "main" alts on VeCo and Cael in roughly equal amounts over the last week. My Tauren hunter is now level 21, with cat and carrion bird pets keeping mostly up-to-date. On Cael, my warlock is now 19 and a bar or so off 20. I want to hit the BG's a bit before he dings. The bank alts are both level 12 or 13 and are getting desperate to see some scenery other than the path between mailbox and Auction House.

The economy on each server is quite different. VeCo Horde is an old, established realm with lots of level 70's. There are also a lot of lower level alts, but apparently few genuine newbies. This means prices tend to be higher, but more stable.

Cael on the other hand is a newish server. I think it opened around Christmas time, originally only for transfers. I created my first horde alt there about a day after it opened to new characters. Of course, my alliance characters are brand new. The server is frequently at "full" or "locked" status so is plenty busy! The Alliance auction house often has over 22,000 (500 "pages") of listings, roughly double VeCo and Dath figures. There seem to be lots of genuine newbies. This means that there are lots of really dodgy prices for items on the auction house and a whole lot of undercutting going on.

At about level 15 on both servers, my "main" abandoned one of the gathering professions to take up enchanting. The Tauren hunter is now skinning/enchanting and the Gnome warlock is mining/enchanting. The bank alts remain skinning/mining.

I invested nearly all my money back into the auction house on both servers, looking for cheap items for disenchanting. Fifty gold sure buys a lot of crappy greens! I was specifically looking for items who's bid or buyout price was no more than 3/4 of auctioneer's lowest disenchantment value. There were relatively few bargains to be had in immediate buyouts but a lot of items had really low bid values. The mailbox on both bankers nearly exploded with the number of incoming messages.

After I cleared the mailbox of all the "outbid on..." messages, I collected and forwarded all the disenchantable items through to my mains. Disenchanting by itself is not sufficient to level enchanting skill, so I had to use some of the resulting materials. Any remaining materials were sent back to be auctioned. Since I have been adventuring with these two mains and still sending back all the stuff I gather while travelling I'm not really sure how much of their money has been due to disenchanting only.

I also got sick of running out of bag space and have blown large amounts of cash on netherweave 16-slot bags. I think all 3 slots on the hunters and 4 slots on the others are now full of netherweave bags. If not, I'll be getting the last ones soon. On VeCo I was lucky enough to meet up with a guy who gave me a 50 gold donation after I farmed up a bunch of leather for him. On Cael, a nice girl gave me a 14 slot bag, which I have since returned after my upgrade.

These two gifts sort of invalidate my experiment in self-sufficiency but then again, WoW is a social game and using social contacts to help advance is almost a necessity . In both cases the value of the gift is fairly trivial compared to my net-worth at the time anyway.

Despite the gold-sink that is 7* netherweave bags and levelling enchanting to at least 75, both sets of alts have net worth of about 175g as of last night. VeCo is slightly easier to manage due to stable pricing.

Lots of money has come from reselling vendor recipes. Some came from the mining of copper and a bit of tin but this is less now on both servers since I've been concentrating on other things. Selling enchanting materials is starting to build up but I still need to use some of these myself to level up. A relatively small proportion of my income has come from buying and reselling stuff in the auction house.

At this stage I look to be on target to get my level 30 mounts as soon as they become available. If Bliz does not introduce those, then level 40 is looking good as well, with money to spare!

The family that kills together stays together.

2008-07-12T17:19:00.005+10:00

With a title like that, this post should be about guilds... but it isn't, its a lore session.

Azeroth has been the home of civilised cultures for at least 12,000 years. At that time, the Night Elves had a thriving if decadent civilisation centred around the Well of Eternity. This magical lake changed the primitive humanoids into the forms we know today and also bestowed immortality. There is some debate that the elves are descended from trolls, who had several powerful empires established even before the rise of the elves.

Over time, the noble classes of the Night Elves studied the energies of the well. One group, favourites of the queen Azshara, became known as the Highborne. Their dabbling in arcane magic eventually attracted the attentions of the great titan Sargeras. The arrogant Highborne were easily corrupted and used the Well to open a portal for the burning legion to invade.

The war of the Ancients was triggered. The non-highborne Night Elves were eventually victorious under the leadership of Tyrande Whisperwind, Malfurion Stormrage, and Illidan Stormrage. Some few of the Highborne regretted assiting the Burning Legion and escaped Azshara's capital before its destruction along with the Well of Eternity. These were later exiled by the Night Elves for continuing to practice arcane magics.

A number of Highborne still loyal to the burning legion survived the destruction of the Well of Eternity and were trapped in the sunken ruins of Azshara's capital. Cursed creatures, these Highborne that survived became the Naga and were lead by Lady Vashj, Azshara's former handmaiden.

The exiled Highborne moved to the new continent of Lordaeron and established the kingdom of Quel'Thalas. They called themselves High Elves and continued practicing arcane magics.

Some very few Highborne survived the war of the ancients and were not part of any other group. Some of these have survived through to the present.

After the destruction of Quel'Thalas by the scrouge only a few years ago, the surviving high elves renamed themselves Blood Elves and joined with the horde.

The Elven family tree looks something like this:


Trolls
   |
Night Elves
   |
Highborne
       |
    |------------------------|
High Elves                   Naga
  |
Blood Elves

References:
Mostly from articles on World of Warcraft encyclopedia

More Mercantile Madness

2008-07-11T20:59:00.003+10:00

On VeCo, my bank alt has more than doubled his money and is now well over 50g. He's running a little low on stock though since my hunter hasn't been out and about gathering stuff and I don't yet know the market well enough to be heavily investing back into the market. I've made a few contacts with various people in /trade who may supply their unwanted "crap"... some of this can be turned into gold!

On Cael, my friends and I did a bit of cross faction trading. We bought a bunch of items available only to one faction and flipped them over to the other via the neutral AH. I have an alt permanently sat at Booty Bay for this now. So far, we turned a 1-g investment into about 40g, with more items still in stock. This was quite good, but not as good as we'd hoped.

On the solo front, my bank alt there has turned ~2g of investments into well over 50g without really trying much. Cael server is full of very low level characters so competition is fierce in the kind of stuff I'm shifting. Profits havent been as great as I would have hoped on lots of what my characters can farm.

Again, personal networks are shaping up. I have met a newbie tailor who will probably help my enchanter level up when I supply cloth to help their tailoring.

I am playing my Warlock there most as that realm's Main. He is now mining/enchanting since hes high enough now that greens are a regular drop. Mining still supplies a regular income but its merchandise and auctioneering that builds my funds mostly.

At the higher end, my banker on Dath has flipped another 500g or so of stock into 1200 or so in gold. One more week should build my funds sufficent to get Crypt his epic flyer as soon as he hits 70. I do farm a bit on this realm but most income still comes from playing the auctions.

There are some truely unethical sellers out there. I got burnt a bit a few weeks ago buying rune thread off the AH. I got it confused with one of the tailor only blue level items... instead, its a vendor supplied item, that nearly every tailoring and general goods vendor has in unlimited quantity. I did manage to re-list it and get most of my money back over time.
On one of the servers, some devious person is trying to sell vendor bought water for upwards of 6g each, when a 5-stack costs only about 20 copper. I got a small level of satisfaction by listing a bunch of single items at just under a g each.... and all of them were bought out by the "evil seller"to protect his inflated prices!

Market PvP... truely more ruthless than any BG!

Instance Runthrus - The worst thing you can do for a friend.

2008-07-10T09:13:00.003+10:00

Taking your low level friends through an instanced dungeon with your high level character is just about the worst thing you can do to "help" them! Its generally quick and easy and they get good gear from it as well as reasonable exp but is still evil.

Catching a ride on your coat-tails means that the newbie is getting good gear without having to work for it. This spoils their sense of achievement, not only for the dungeon concerned, but their questing/levelling until their gear again falls behind. Levelling becomes too easy and becomes boring quickly.

It teaches them nothing about how to play their character. Most runthrus just involve the newbie looting the corpses of the slain - there's nothing educational in that! Lazy, ignorant newbies get themselves into higher level dungeons with no idea how group play works. They become a liability that no-one wants to group with.

It builds the expectation that you will always be available to help them out. More runthrus, free stuff, mount money... the expectation never ends. Giving in to any of this just feeds more begging behavior. Stop the rot at the start and don't do it!

All this of course mostly applies to someone's first character. Runthrus for alt characters are less evil though some of the problems remain. Of course its almost necessary for Twinks to receive runthrus - but twinks are their own brand of evil anyway.

What sort of things can you do to help newbies without spoiling them? Well, I suggest doing things that remove some of the frustrations of low level play.

Give your newbie a set of 8 or 10- slot bags. Bag space limits really suck. Dont give out higher than 12-slot bags though, thats making things too easy.

Clothies could be given a wand. Priests especially suffer from crap DPS in the early levels. A wand, plus instructions on how to use it, are a great help.

Its generally not worthwhile giving gear or enchants to those below level 20, since they will outgrow anything too quickly. Twinks can damn well pay for anything they want!

The best thing you can do for your newbie friend is advice. Wow is a reasonably complex game with a lot to learn. Genuine newbies are likely overwhelmed by it all.

NEVER give money to lowbies.

Remember, runthrus are a disservice to the newbie and the whole wow community. Stop the rot!

Hate, aggro, threat - Managing NPC hostility

2008-07-08T10:12:00.003+10:00

An understanding of "aggro" in World Of Warcraft is key to your success against computer controlled opponents. When you understand how mobs react you are able to control the fights to ensure victory.

First, what is "aggro"? The terms hate, threat and aggro are often used interchangeably. They all mean essentially the same thing: how annoyed the mob is at you. This is a measurable, numeric value. The higher it is, the more that mob hates you.

Each term overlaps the others but there are certain loose definitions:

Hate: The numeric value measuring how much a particular mob "hates" you. Each mob keeps a separate value for each combatant in range. These values go up or down as the fight progresses depending on the actions of each combatant. Hate values on each mob are tracked separately.

Threat: The value added to a mob's hate list for each action performed in combat. Each attack adds threat, some special abilities remove threat. Tracked independently by each mob.

Aggro: Loosely defined as being the focus of attention from a mob. "Holding aggro" means you are the one who the mob hates the most and will be attacked by it if possible.

Aggro radius: An area about each mob where it can detect and react to hostile combatants. The aggro radius around individual mobs can interact with other mobs of similar type to cause a chain reaction of hate activation.

In general, actions done by a combatant cause threat to one or more mobs, increasing their hate levels towards that combatant. NPC's can have threat and hate towards each other as well as towards players, if the npcs are of hostile factions. Some actions cause hate to all mobs in range, others only to the mob affected by the action.

On to some examples. A young Cryptography, neophyte undead rogue, is standing safely out of range of a single skeletal soldier near the Agamand Mills. Crypto is well beyond the skeleton's aggro radius, so it does not yet know he exists. As Crypto walks towards the skeleton, he crosses the edge of the aggro radius. Immediately, the skeletal soldier is now aware of Crypto and starts rushing towards him. Crypto now "holds aggro" from that skeleton. Being a cowardly soul, Crypto immediately runs away. The skeleton pursues Crypto for quite a distance before breaking off and returning to its starting location. Crypto caused no threat from any attacks, but, since he was the only one on the skeleton's hate list, he "held aggro".

Some little time later, Crypto returns to face the skeleton. He now knows roughly how close he can get before triggering its aggro radius, so stays carefully outside that range. With careful manoeuvring, he can be in range to attack with his bow but still be outside the aggro radius. He sees an opportunity and shoots the skeleton! Instantly, Skelly-boy is made aware of Crypto's presence - an arrow in the ribs being a rather pointed indicator of something being wrong - and rushes over to chastise the young rogue! After a few exchanges of blows, Crypto is taking the worst of it and runs away again. This time, Crypto made several threat-generating attacks on the skeleton but since he was again the only one on the threat list he still "held aggro" and thus the mob's undivided attention.

Deciding the skeleton is too tough to tackle alone, Crypto teams up with another neophyte undead. Mortified is a young mage, barely out of the academy. She's brash and impulsive, supremely confidant in her abilities but aware of the limitations of wearing cloth armour. The plan is discussed beforehand and Crypt will attempt to "pull" the skeleton with his bow before Mortified opens up with her fireball. A few quick shots should smash the nasty skeleton!

Crypto again walks up to just outside the skelly's aggro radius. Mortified is standing some ways back. Crypto fires his bow and the skeleton rushes towards him waving the large axe vigorously. Mortified starts casting fireball, which completes and zooms off to splash explosively against the skeleton's chest just as it reaches Crypto and takes its first swing. Immediately, the skeleton roars and rushes over to Mortified, smashing her to the ground in a few swings of his axe despite Crypto's best efforts with his dagger in its back! When Mortified is dead, the skeleton turns its fury on Cryptography, who almost manages to kill it before also falling to its attacks.

What happened here is that Mortified's potent fireball attack mean that she overtook Crypto on the skeleton's hate list. Mobs attack the one they hate the most... which was the tissue-paper clad mage. Crypt's attacks with bow and dagger did not generate sufficient threat to retake aggro before the mage died. Mortified "stole aggro" and died because of it. Next (and only) target on the mobs hate list was Crypto, so once Mort died, Crypt was targeted and killed.

A little later, after respawning and healing up, Crypt and Mort wish to try again. This time, Mortified will wait a bit before opening up with her fireball. Hopefully Crypt will survive long enough in his better armour to finish off the skeleton.

Using more or less the same tactics as last time, Crypto gets just within bow range before attacking. Mortified is somewhat further back but waits before casting. The skeleton, arrow bouncing loosely in its ribs, charges at Cryptography. When it gets close enough, Crypt stabs it several times with his dagger and manages to take only a few blows from the creature's axe before the first of Mortified's fireballs crash into it. This time, the skeleton goes down! Crypt is in fairly good shape and Mortified is completely untouched. Victory and loot is theirs!

This time round, Crypto built up a reasonable amount of hate before Mort' s high-threat fireballs kicked in. By waiting a few seconds before opening up with her attacks, Crypto was able to "hold aggro" throughout the fight and his much better armour meant that they both survived long enough to finish off the skeleton.

(I will post this now but plan on editing it later.. got to do some work!)

Training weapons is not such a drag.

2008-07-06T20:45:00.005+10:00

(Edit for Wrath of the Lich King: These guys seem to no longer give weapon skill training.)

Something I discovered during a bugged event in Stormwind about 3 years ago is also of value currently to anyone above about level 55.

In Blasted Lands, in the area around the dark portal, are several "Servant of ..." creatures. They are the objects of a quest in the zone that I've never bothered with. They are interesting however in that WITHOUT the quest, they are essentially immortal. Below 5% health, they go transparent. You cannot bring them below 1%, since you are supposed to shatter a crystal... but you can't do it if not on the quest.

This is useful because you can stand there bashing on them with a variety of weapons and get skillups. Some classes may even be able to AFK the whole fight while training!

Wowhead links are:

Servant of Allistarj
Servant of Grol
Servant of Razelikh
Servant of Sevine

Mercentile madness

2008-07-06T01:21:00.003+10:00

My druid Changeabull on VeCo now has 25g at level 11. Mostly this is due to flipping vendor recipes on the AH for stupid mark-ups. When I last played him, Ideale and Ahami took him on a bit of a tour around the world. I grabbed flightpoints at a bunch of places on the way, but also stopped off at the vendors.

Simple stuff like the two cooking recipes for the low level fish cost almost nothing to buy but can be sold for 1 or more gold. Grab a couple, put one or two up on the AH at a time and watch the money roll in.

Talent Choices

2008-07-04T22:44:00.003+10:00

At level 10 your character gets to select their first talent point. Each level from then on gives you another point. Talents provide boosts to your existing abilities or add in new ones and can play a very significant part in your overall development.

Each character class has three skill trees to select from. In general it is best to concentrate in one particular tree rather than selecting from all of them. As you reach the highest levels in the game you may be able to open up a second tree.

There are heaps of websites that give suggested talent builds for max-level characters. There are also some that tell you where to pick talents as you level. Everyone seems to have their own opinion as to what talents are best. Personally I look for the following when selecting talents for levelling:

A boost to main attack damage, hit, or critical rating.
Reduction in cost or speed of main attack.
Reduction in mana/energy/rage cost for commonly used abilities.
Increased health/mana regeneration

I also look for talents that increase movement speed early in the talent trees. I hate slow walking!

All of these help you to kill stuff more quickly, with less downtime between fights. This will mean that you can complete quests and level more quickly.

Losing one's Cool factor.

2008-07-03T11:12:00.002+10:00

So, there I was on my freshly rolled gnome warlock doing the newbie quests. A rather rude gentleman thought I was stealing his kills and told me to "Pee off!". At first I didn't even notice, since I was busy clearing trash mobs out of the way so I could get to the ones I needed. When I checked my chat log however I saw the little note. I went back and confronted the little dweeb about this and his only response was even ruder.

What can one do about tactless little shits on a PvE realm? Not a lot really. You can /ignore them. You can retaliate in kind with pointless verbal abuse. You can tag every mob in the area so they get no kills. You can attempt to drag a train of mobs into conflict with them so they die..... or you can note that they have their /pvp flag set on at level 5!

I shamefully admit to trying all of the above, mostly without success. Mr stunted personality seems to have a fairly thick skin to go alongside his thick skull.

But Wait! I have higher level horde characters not too far away and bonehead is flagged. Hmm.

Log out, log in as my horde hunter. She's stationed at Undercity, not too far away from the dwarf lands.... except I hadnt yet picked up the flightpoints on the way. Ah well, I'll walk and get them on the way.
Sephulchure, check.
Taren Mill, check.
Hammerfall, check. Of course, mobs in Arathi are much tougher than my poor hunter, especially the elites! Naked travel makes this a little less expensive than otherwise.

Travel through the wetlands was mostly uneventful. I was joined along the way by a similar level mage from my horde guild. We got past the first dwarf guard in the tunnels, but the second one got us both. On resurection, we were joined by a mid-30's orc hunter. He could handle the level 30 guards without much trouble! We ran through the remaining sections of tunnel and on into Dun Morogh past the guards. Track humanoids helped us avoid the majority of trouble on the way south of Khanoros and into the newbie zone.

The main gate to the newbie zone is guarded by 4 level 65 guards. They can and will aggro on a low level horde from quite a way inside the tunnel. Death by guard swiftly follows! One death is usually enough to get past them however. On into newbie territory we go!

I came here looking to find one particular idiot. Despite a long search, both in the newbie area and the obvious places near Khanoros, I failed to find him. We did however find a couple of other newbies who were foolishly flagged. These were promptly munched on by the Orc's pet.

The newbie area soon lost any attraction so we ran back past the guards (dying again) and on to khanoros. We pointlessly killed several of the quest mobs.. the ones not protected by more level 65 guards that is! Most of the newbies in this area were smart enough not to put their pvp flag on so we were just mucking about killing mobs mostly. One lucky level 9 warlock took out my fellow guildmate when he was weakend by resurection sickness. He then died several times at the Orc's hands. I dont think I got a single kill, and no trace was found of my boneheaded "victim", despite me logging back on the gnome and having a quick scout around!

A completely wasted hour that could have been better spent with a quick /ignore and getting on with the job! I still had fun though so I guess it was worth it!

Out with the old, in with the new Part 3.

2008-07-01T23:04:00.002+10:00

My three little projects are going swimmingly so far.

On Dath, my bank alt invested somewhere between 500 and 700 gold on the auction house. A fair bit of that came back to me when I was outbid but I also won a lot of auctions really cheaply. Nearly all that stock was then re-listed for the peak weekend period. My mailbox was flooded with "Auction successful" messages with lots of clinky coinage attached. Not all auctions had sold or expired when I last checked. Still, a net gain of about 800g for a bit over an hour's trawling the AH is pretty fine going!

On Caelestrasz, my new Draeni hunter is busy collecting pet skills on teldrassil. He's got a few more mail messages with gold but I havent looked at them to see how much. I expect he will be at around 5g + bandit mask when I check him next. At some stage I have to check my horde guys there as well and move one to the neutral auction house ready to assist with cross faction transfers.

I have had one setback however, in that my auctioneer data files filled up with stuff from too many realms. I've had to turf away all data and will be rebuilding it for just the 4 main realms I'm currently playing. Other alts will have to manage without it! This isn't such a bad thing anyway, some of the Dath data in particular was corrupt and dodgy. Consider it spring cleaning!

My third little project got somewhat sidetracked, but the details on that can wait for another post. Tauren hunter and druid are both mostly done with Mulgore and are venturing out to the big wide world. Each had moderate success in the market place and have net worth about 10g each, with a bit more on the AH still to come. Things are looking up!

Out with the old, in with the new part 2.

2008-06-30T16:25:00.003+10:00

This one should be a lot briefer than the other post!

I mentioned that I rolled a Draenei Hunter on the alliance side of a server where I have existing Horde. This server has a few of my friends from Dath'Remar who are already semi-established.
Draenei males are new to me. They DO look awkward and hugely top-heavy. Looks aside, they are perfectly capable as hunters. I rushed through the first 5 levels in about 45 minutes, slightly slower than the average because of lots of chatting.

I had finished with the newbie zone and was attempting the fishing quest in Azuremyst Island when my friend showed up. Her character is a level 23 paladin, also a Draenei. We were members of a party and the level difference is quite large, so the exp I got per kill was dramatically less than if solo. Having my own personal defender however made rushing through the early quests very easy. Since the majority of my exp was coming from questing, I pushed through lots of the Azuremyst stuff very quickly. Progress seemed to follow along about the same as it has when I've done the quests solo. I hit level 10 at a very fast 3 and a half hours then completed the taming quests solo.

My pally friend was joined by our other hunter friend and they both farmed the blood elf bandit for his mask for a while. I attempted to re-tame the cat from the last stage of the hunter quest, but it timed out and he despawned. As a replacement I grabbed the nearest cat. Not quite as successful as the Tauren from yesterday. With my new pet in tow I rushed through the furbolg related quests up north, spending about 20 minutes killing every Murloc in sight, even long after the quest was completed. I renamed the cat "Purrgatory". He dinged several times chasing the fishmen.

Once done with quests on Azuremyst, I headed over to Teldrasill to get skills and grab a owl pet. I ran out of time so have logged out in the inn at Dolannar. Since this guy had assistance from my friend, I didn't work as hard on self-funding as I normally would. I got a 2g starter fund, with which I bought 3* 8 -slot bags and upgraded my sword. I bought cooking, fishing, first-aid skills, and have again gone with skinning and mining as gathering skills. One annoyance is that the skinning trainer will not talk to you until after you complete the first of the furbolg quests.

Anyway, a quick visit to the AH selling my paltry collection of leather and ores got me about 3g, of which 2g was mailed back to my friend to repay the "loan".

Somewhat redeming myself for earlier foolishness (check the comments), I was walking back to town when I was rudely attacked from behind. My new pet went nuts and I lucked out on the loot: [blood elf bandit mask] This adds to the 2-3 others that my friends have already farmed. We will be looking to flip these over to the horde auction house if they sell for lots more there than on Alliance.

These two new projects have cost me 4 alts on other servers.
RIP
Aula, 22 Human Warlock (f)
Larceny, 15 Gnome Rogue (m)
Leaflitter, 16 ish Night Elf Hunter (m)
Acrinomy, 16 Orc Warlock (f) (yes her name was a spelling error!)

Out with the old, in with the new.

2008-06-29T13:04:00.003+10:00

This weekend was the first time in a while that I have had a decent chunk of time to actually play Wow. I spent quite a lot of time on my bank alt on Dath'Remar, buying and selling stuff on the auction house. On the theory that money in my bags is idle money, I've re-invested about 700 gold in speculative items. There are now about 300 separate auctions up with my name on them. I had quite a few sales while I was still putting items up so my balance only decreased by about 200g in the process. When I next log on I expect to see several pages of "auction successful" mail and a much healthier bank balance.

One bad thing is that I seem to be stuck with several mail and plate items above level 60. My banker is an enchanter, but not yet high enough to disenchant these items. Unfortunately, quest rewards at the 60+ level seem to give better gear than random greens, so they rarely sell. Mail and plate are particularly nasty, since they cost a fortune in AH fees for every listing. Not quite sure what I'll do with these yet.

With the rest of my time I started two new projects. Friends and guild members on Dath’Remar have created alliance alts on another server. I already have several alts on that server's Horde. It's been an unwritten rule that I won't play both factions on a single server, even when the game will allow it. I've now broken that rule. It's a "normal" pve realm, so it IS possible to play both sides on the one server. I've created a male Draenei hunter, and have a remaining character slot for another bank alt, probably a NE druid.

On another server, I deleted an unused alt and created both Tauren Hunter and Tauren Druid. I don’t think I've ever had Tauren Hunters before. I spent several hours working on these guys and have kept rough notes on their economic progress. Part of the reason for creating these was to demonstrate clearly how taking two gathering professions at the very start can cure your money blues. I followed most of my own tips from my earlier post: Cure the Cash Flow Blues

First, I generated both characters at the login screen. I chose Druid for their flexibility and hunter for ease of use and farming ability. I'm not sure I'll ever work on these guys enough to get them very high level so they have to be useful in the lower levels. It helps that I like both classes a lot!

First character to start was the hunter. Its been a while since I've rolled a Tauren, so I sat through the intro movie. Essentially, the Tauren owe their continued existence to Thrall and the Orcs. We are supposed to hate the centaur. That's OK.. Centaur are humanoids and drop lots of cloth and coin.. I'll have no trouble farming them and will be doing something for our tribes!

The first few quests in the Tauren starter area are all about proving your worth to the tribe. One quest chain continues all the way until about level 12. Hunters make short work of the early quests, often killing the monsters before they get close and since most are neutral you can always engage at maximum range. Bag space is however at a premium. Sell the useless bread and water you start with, it’s unnecessary and wastes space you need for questing.

My hunter had reached level 2 before completing even one quest, and was less than a bar from level 3 by the time I'd got back to town. I sold all the junk I had scavenged and bought the first few skills from the trainer. Still too little money left over to buy another bag. Off I go to complete more quests. Again these early quests are easy since all the monsters are non hostile until you engage them. They were substantially tougher though and my axe was deployed a lot more. Hunters really suck in melee, but at this level there's almost no choice.

By the time I hit level 4, I was quite a distance from the village and bag space became a problem. I needed 4 of the available 16 bag slots for quest items so I tried to keep only stackable items in the other slots. I had to throw away several grey items before Ii managed to kill Sharptusk, grab his head and hearth back to town. Ding level 5, and still not enough money to buy a bag. Oh well, off I go to Bloodhoof village for the next stage. Elapsed time to level 5: 39 minutes and change.

I kill a few wolves that were close to the road on the way to Bloodhoof. This plus travel experience lets me ding level 6 at about the same time as I pick up the quests in town. I see that the fire festival is set up to the south east, so I go over there and restart the fire and collect a few more fire festival quests. The next series of Bloodhoof quests all involve hunting animals for their parts, so off I go killing tallstriders, wolves and cats. Bag space here is at an absolute premium. I think 10 of 16 slots were needed for quests in this area, so I had to stagger them somewhat. Quests to the south of Bloodhoof all completed, I returned to town, trained up and found that I had a little extra cash left over.

In my other post I’ve suggested skinning and mining or herbalism as good combinations for moneymaking. Both herbalism and mining are not good for hunters, since they interfere with your tracking abilities. There is a skinning trainer in Bloodhoof , and cooking, first aid and fishing trainers, but for mining I needed to go to Thunder bluff. I bought both the skinning knife and mining pick in preparation. Training complete, I activated the "rite of vision" quest and followed my ghostly wolf guide up to the mountain cave west of TB.

I spent quite a lot of time killing the harpies near the cave. One type is a caster and is easy to fight as a hunter since they stay at range. The other types are melee but not too hard to kill. I had only one close call where I was attacked by a patrolling wolf while fighting two harpies. The Tauren racial thunderstomp ability saved my behind then.

Once I'd collected enough claws and linen from the harpies, It was off to kill Dwarves further south. The quest goal here is to collect "broken tools"... but the little guys only dropped "mining pick". The first time I did this zone this was confusing! You have to collect the 5 mining picks then travel to Thunder bluff and "break" them at the forge there in the city.

By the time I had made it to TB for the first time, I had hit level 8 and was really struggling with both lousy hunter melee skills and no bag space. I sold off all the grey items, broke the dwarven tools and visited the auction house.

After going AFK for 10 minutes while auctioneer scanned the entire auction house I came back to sell my extra white gear. I had several stacks of leather and ruined leather, as well as linen and some meat to sell. Leather seemed reasonably priced, so I listed mine. Ruined leather is almost worthless but the AH average was still better than just vendoring it, so I listed those as well. Linen cloth is often a great seller, since everyone needs first aid skill, and it’s used for newbie tailoring as well. On to the AH went my stacks.

When I tried to list my spare wolf meat, I noticed a problem. Auctioneer was telling me that each piece was worth ~700 gold and that I couldn't match the lowest price. WTF? lobwbie meat, that you can get for free killing level 5 wolves at 700g? No way. It usually sells for a handful of silver each at best. What had happened is that someone has tried manipulating prices. They listed several items at 700g, and then listed most of their stock at a "more reasonable" 2-3 gold a stack, hoping to fool people into buying it at the inflated price. This would still be many 100's of percent higher than the usual price.

I put my few pieces of meat on the AH at about 3s each. With the last of my remaining silver I attempted to find under priced items on the AH that I could bid on or buy out and resell. There was only one item I could afford, a crunchy spider leg. I bought it, but then couldn't afford to list it.... and I'd also forgotten to buy the mining skill. Stupid!

I ended up vendoring the mining pick and one piece of spider meat to afford the mining skill, then off I went to continue questing. I headed south along the mountain ranges, killing the last few cougars needed then headed off to Bloodhoof. On the way I saw Mazzaranache respawn. I am tempted to go pick him up once I hit 10! Back in Bloodhoof I finally scrounged the cash for the mining pick a second time and handed in as many quests as I could. The nearest quest remaining was the level 6 one to kill bristlebacks to the west of Bloodhoof. It was close to the mountains where I had seen some copper mines so I went off collecting first.

I mined several nodes of copper then headed into the bristleback's cave. Careful targeting made the kills quite easy, especially the casters. Lots of cloth, some coin, and even a couple of chests made the loot pile up rapidly. Deep inside the cave were the poachers, the last guys I needed for the quest. These were also quite easy since they are hunter types and stay at range as well. I cleared the whole cave, looted the chest, mined the three copper nodes and was about to hearth back to town when I realised that it was still on cooldown. Damn, I'll have to fight my way back out. Here is where I made my biggest mistake of the night.

On the way back out, I found a patrolling bristleback entering a previously cleared area. I needed to get past him, so I engaged. Just as I finished him off, another respawned right next to me and attacked, right in melee range. This fight took a lot longer... too long in fact, because two more ranged guys had also repopped further up the corridor and were hammering me with arrows. Even a health potion wasn’t enough to save me, trapped between fresh respawns behind and ahead.

I made it to almost level 10 before my first visit to the spirit healer. With just a little more care this could have been avoided. Ah well.. I ended up in town without having to use the hearthstone cooldown so its not all bad. Resurrection sickness wasn't an issue for a below level 10 character but the cost of repairs was a concern. I hadn't repaired at all up to this point as I was replacing crap grey gear with more crap grey all the time.

Hand in all the quests and I dinged level 10. Yahoo! Elapsed /played was a shade over 4 hours of which maybe half an hour was stuffing about in town or AFK eating dinner.

Level 10 for a hunter is the most exciting time... you get the three-part taming the beast quest line that ends in you getting your first pet! Hooray!

The quest for Tauren involves capturing in order:

An Adult Plainstrider (tallstrider)
A Prarie Stalker (a wolf)
then a Swoop (carrion bird)

I had the fire festival buff on while I did these quests which nearly resulted in some dead animals. Each time they were hitting me they were taking some fire damage. The wolf was down to about 5% health at the end, but thankfully survived just long enough!

Each of these creatures are quite close to Bloodhoof Village making this a fairly painless exercise for Tauren compared to other races. The plainstrider is neutral so is even easier than otherwise.
When I completed each stage I dismissed the temporary pet just before engaging the next one. The plainstrider reverted to neutral while I was on the bridge just north of Bloodhoof, then fled off south to his home. The wolf and the swoop were both found in the same area, so when I released the wolf he immediately engaged me. Ungrateful wretch! Luckily he dropped a claw I needed and some leather.

Swoops, in the wild, have a knockback caster interupt ability "swoop". This seems to be supressed when using the taming rod during the taming quest. Its back in action again when you release the bird however! I intended training the exact same swoop used in part three of the quest as my first real pet. This proved much more challenging than I expected though, since he managed to get off the swoop ability twice during the taming, forcing a restart both times. Each taming attempt used up mana and I had to wait a few seconds to get enough for the final tame. Also, the fire festival buff was still going and the poor swoop was taking damage each time he hit me. When the third taming attempt finally succeeeded, I was at about 7% health, almost no mana and my new pet was down to under 20% health as well.

Welcome Accipter, my first pet. I wonder if I'm unique in taming one of the EXACT beasts used in the taming quests as the first ever "real" pet? Anyway, he was initially very unhappy with me and since I hadn't yet completed the final stage of the training quest, I couldnt feed him! Off I went immediately to Thunder Bluff for training!

During all this time, not one of my auctions had sold and I had not yet been lucky enough to find a new bag, nor had I had the spare cash to buy a new one. Bag space was still very limited! With hearthstone, skinning knife, mining pick, fishing rod, a stack of bandages, a stack of healing pots as permanent items, as well as partial stacks of leather, copper, linen etc as tradeable items there wasnt much left in the old backpack. I had been keeping a stack of meat aside for pet feeding but mush have vendored it somewhere along the way since I had only once bit of meat on hand for feeding Accipter. He was momentarily less annoyed but soon reverted to unhappy. Now I have a pissed off pet and no food!

The solution presented itself in the form of fishing from the lake in TB... however I hadn't yet leveled fishing skill, so nearly all of the attempts were unsuccessful. I even bought a lure for the rod which helped a bit. At least I got enough fish to bring Accipter to happy state before I returned to adventure. We killed the harpies just north west of TB for a quest, and spotted and killed the ghostwolf for his hide. Accipter dinged several times and I hit level 11 before returning to town and retiring for the night.

I relogged in as my brand new druid and rushed through the initial quests. He dinged level 5 in 42 minutes, but he also found 2 bags, one off the very first kill! He made it to level 6 and Bloodhoof village in under an hour before I logged him out and quit wow for the evening.

Now for the good bit:
Just now I logged in again to my hunter to check his auctions. Last night he had 2 silver and change. This morning, he's got 2 pages of "Auction successful" mail messages and a much healthier bank balance of 6g, 75s with about 20 more unsold auctions waiting.

Best sellers were stacks of copper bars, at about 3g, leather at 1.5g for several stacks, and linen making up most of the rest. I also had a single silver bar and 2 malachite from chests that sold as well.

6g is more than sufficient to pay all the training costs up to level 20. I'll be able to buy at least 8-slot bags for both characters, but will look into 10 or 12 slotters first. The most cost -effective ones tend to be the 16-slot netherweave bags, since there are lots of "lazy" high level tailors making them but they are out of my price range for now.

Sometimes, Karma bites

2008-06-28T00:14:00.002+10:00

A repost of something I wrote on our guild forums, mostly to keep MW amused with her recent PvP forum drama.

***
So there I was, minding my own business in Tanaris. I was peacefully riding along avoiding the local wildlife when a flagged Nightelf hunter rode up beside me and started making rude gestures. I tactfully ignored him and rode on.
He followed, making ever more persistent attempts to annoy me. I stopped for a bit and looked at him. I rode around him in circles. I even lowered myself to his level and taunted him. I had him follow me for a bit, and then I circled once more and gave out one final taunt....... and then Bleedingclaw ran over the top of him, killing in 2 shots. I barely had time to get an attack in!

I was 56 Rogue. Bleedingclaw is a post-kara 70 Shamman. The poor fool nightelf was a 56 hunter.

Ok, so sure there was elements of schoolyard bullying "(I'll get my big brother to bash you up!)" and I could have taken him easily enough alone but it was just so funny to mislead him into a suicidal attack.

A lesson for all you pvpers out there: Sometimes, your victim will pull a bait and switch and you will bite off far more than you can chew. In this case, BC, Donkey and I were grouped together to do some exploring along the coast of tanaris and I had gone on ahead due to slower mount. BC was following along about 30 seconds behind. All I had to do was delay long enough for the cavalry to arrive.

Elites, they aint so tough after all.

2008-06-27T21:01:00.003+10:00

One great thing that the Burning Crusade expansion gives to solo explorers, is an opportunity to get into areas that would have previously been almost inaccessible. A higher level 60's character can get past level 60 elites without too much difficulty.

On my travels as a young adventurer, I came across several areas which were protected by ?? level elite monsters. If I got too close, they came running out and ripped me to shreds in seconds.
Now that I'm level 67, I've come back for revenge... and to take a look around.

A fellow guildmember and I hit up three of these areas the other night. She's a level 69 priest who has done an excellent job of keeping my undead ass intact in numerous previous adventures.

Our evening's entertainment started at Undercity, where we grouped up and headed via bat to Taren Mill. Off the west coast of Hilsbarad is a nasty place called Purgation Isle, infested with undead monks, priests and paladins. When I swam past the isle at about level 18 I was more interested in dodging the tribes of murlocs (yes more murlocs) on shore and didnt even see the nasty elite dive into the waters and rip me to shreds. This time I was ready for them!

After obliterating the murlocs, I dived in and swam accross to the island. My friend was showing off and used levitate to keep her dainty undead feet above water. On shore I imediately stealthed up and ambushed the first opponent. Level 58-60 elites tend not to last too long against two high-60's in a bad mood!

We fought our way up the island to the top. I wont spoil it other than to say its worth a look but nothing particularly awesome. There was a nice mineral node at the top and my friend fell off the edge of the island while trying to reach a herb node. Lots of dead elites on the way up that had started to respawn as we made our way back down.

We rode back to Taren Mill via the edge of Southshore, just to keep the natives restless. From there it was a bat to Undercity, then the Zeppelin to Orgrimmar. In Org we took the wyvern down to brackenwall village in Dustwallow marsh for our second island adventure. Always keeping an eye out for mercantile opportunities, I bought several of the first aid books from the vendor in Brackenwall and mailed them to my bank alt. Mounting up on our rusty steeds my companion and I headed off to the east cost just north of Theramore Isle.

Ah, Theramore. This brings back memories....
Theramore Isle contains an ally base, but more importantly, is the home of one of Azeroth's most prominent magicians, the lovely Jaina Proudmore. Rumour swirls around about her past relationships with both Thrall and Kael'thas Sunstrider, also key players in modern events. Our guild took the time to visit Theramore once... but the guards, and Jaina herself, were less than pleased to see us. We only wanted to say hello. The bouncers wouldnt let us in, so we ...ahem... persuaded them to lie down quietly. Jaina was entertaining guests at the top of her tower. Someone in the raid group got a bit too close and she cracked a hissy-fit of epic proportions. All I remember was the flashing lights and the scorching warmth before I was visiting the lovely spirit healer. I was soon joined by the rest of our raid group, including a good half-dozen level 70's. Even the guards had recovered before we got back to our corpses and a few of us suffered further casualties at their hands before we took the better part of valor and buggered off into the sunset!

... Ah, where was I? Oh yes. Dustwallow. Off the east coast are a chain of islands. When I was here last time, they were occupied by mostly turtles and (more!) murlocs. This time, some Venture Co divers had moved in scavenging off the shipwrecks. The island to the furthest east is called Alcaz island. This is a thinly veiled reference to Alcatraz, but like the real world Island, most of the excitement was over by the time I'm able to visit.

At the docks, we were greeted by a couple of fierce elite hydra. Their skins were added to my collection and we moved inland. We encountered the naga guards, also elites, and made short work of them. From a vantage point half way up a hill, we could see the southern lighthouse, but it appeared unoccupied. Suddenly, a great flying shape swooped past us..... a firemane Dragon. We prepared for battle on its return but unfortunately were unable to engage... its all roar and no bite.

Further inland there are a number of former prison barracks. These were empty of anything interesting, but still guarded by lots of Naga. On a hilltop was one of the swirling pink portals such as are used to get into Naxx, but no indication what to do to activate them. Two interesting things were found nearer a set of barracks buildings however. Dr Weavil has left a flying machine here under guard of two tough bodyguards. These were the first elites that were even slightly challenging but we disposed of them easily enough. Beside the flyer was a ramp descending into a sewer pit. It looked somewhat ruined but was still guarded by lots of Naga elites, so we investigated. Inside, through an underwater passage, we found the Naga lord. Wowhead tells us that we are several patches too late to find the true king of Stormwind, imprisoned here by the Defias. Oh well, We'd have just killed him anyway!

It was getting quite late, so my companion and I rushed back to the flightmaster at Brackenwall and flew off to Shadowprey Village in Desolace, since she didn't have the FP in Ferelas. A quick mounted tour past Dire Maul and collecting the flight point in Ferelas's horde base ended up with us on the docks at the western shore, just short of the Ally contrlled Feathermoon stronghold on its Island. We boarded the boat, resisted temptation to kill the level 40-ish human pally that was also aboard. Our true destination wasnt the ally base at all, but a narrow canyon on the eastern side of the "isle of Dread" to the south.

I jumped ship as it sped past the northern shores, but my friend got stuck somehow. Eventually she was able to disembark as well and we headed south. My last visit here was when I was in the high level 40's and the scary Chimaeroks easily saw through my stealth, making short work of me. This time was different! There are several varieties of chimaerok on the island. All are level 60ish elites and moderately tough. At 67 with crap gear, I would strugle to kill one solo, but with lots of lovely healing it was fairly easy. Their daddy however is NO pushover. He looks just the same as the others but is a hell of a lot tougher. I had found his info on wowhead before we got there so wasnt expecting to win this fight. We got him down to only 95% before my healer was almost out of mana. I hit vanish to avoid death but was finished off by his AOE while my healer managed to run out of range. We will be back, with ranged DPS and a real tank to take him down!

We killed the naga in the cave at the north end of the island, then desecrated the festival fire outside of feathermoon before I hearthed and logged for the evening. Lots of fun.

Revenge - a dish best served grey

2008-06-26T17:50:00.003+10:00

Murlocs. The mere mention of the word is enough to bring nightmares to the most stalwart adventurer. Creepy scaly fish-men from the deeps, Murlocs are appearing on many of Azeroth's coastlines, noisily devouring the local population. The ones along the coast of Tirisfal Glades are particularly nasty.
Long before they have a chance to learn even basic combat techniques, neophyte Forsaken are pitted against the schools of fish-men. An individual murloc isnt a great threat, certainly not much more than other hostiles in the area. What makes them different is they have lots of friends, are grouped close together, and flee when badly wounded. A solo undead can soon find themself fighting against overwhelming odds. Hamstrung, dazed and dazzled by ligntning, many a young forsaken has met an early demise.

Such was the fate of several of my early characters. I HATE murlocs more than anything else in the game. I've got much better at avoiding creatures like the murlocs as I've learned the game but I still take a deal of pleasure returning and smashing swarms of them into pulp!

Almost every time I revisit Undercity, I'll take a short detour north or north west to the Tirisfal shoreline and hunt me a school of murloc! I can safely stand in the middle of a whole village full of them, ignoring their attacks, before unleashing my pet, raining down fiery destruction, or simply pulverising them one at a time with my fishing rod. Revenge Is mine MUHAHAHHAHA!

Look for "I am Murloc" on youtube.
heres one link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOpdyytB3OY

Altitis - the many of me

2008-06-25T17:12:00.004+10:00

I posted over on MW's blog wowkittycollector listing all my Alternate characters.

***
I have reached the game cap of 50 alts. It wont let me create any more.

My alts are as follows:

Druid : 4
Hunter : 11
Mage : 5
Paladin : 2
Priest : 5
Rogue : 4
Shaman : 3
Warlock : 13
Warrior : 3

They average just a shade under level 20.

My highest is Cryptography, an undead rogue on Dath'remar.

Next highest are a warlock, hunter and two druids, followed by a bunch of warlocks and hunters. I cant seem to get into my pallies, warriors or shammies, though mages and priests are ok.

Yes, I suck at levelling... maybe the above would explain why!

***

Now, that's a ridiculous amount of alts. There's no way I can give more than a few of them the attention they really need. So, why so many?

Well, I've tried to cover at least one of every class, on each of Horde and Alliance. I've also attempted to have at least one of every race and gender. I think I missed male Draenei but I have all the others.

On Dath'Remar, an oceanic PvE server where most of my time is spent, I have the allowed 10 characters, all on horde. I have a character there doing every one of the available professions. Some have specialisations in mind, so there are a few duplicates. I will have to drop some profession to cover the new runes skill coming in Wrath.

I have two other servers with loads of alts, both PvP. One has horde characters and the other a swag of alliance. Again they have the full spread of available professions.

My alt armies serve two other purposes. I have at least one alt on every oceanic server. Essentially this reserves my place there since Blizz sometimes locks the creation of new characters when a realm gets full. Of course, now that I have reached the game limit of 50 alts total this serves no real purpose. My alt army also spreads, thinly, onto each type of server. So, there are alts on each of "normal", "rp", "pvp" and "rp-pvp" servers.

As if that isn't enough alts, I also play three other MMO's and have almost maxed out the number of alts available in those games as well. That's about another thirty characters. Only a few have repeated names.

I guess the only real reason for so many alts is that I just like trying out new things. I'm not particularly interested in powering through a game to the end. Gear and loads of money aren't my thing either, though some of each helps a lot!

In later posts I intend giving some tips on managing swarms of alts for those of you with a little more focus than I!

Cure the Cash Flow Blues

2008-06-24T19:38:00.003+10:00

So many people seem to struggle to make enough money in warcraft. Here are some tips to make it a lot easier.

1: Buy the biggest bags you can afford and upgrade them when you can. Bigger bags means you can carry more stuff and spend more time in the field.

2: As soon as you can afford it after level 5, get trained in at least one gathering skill, preferably two. Gathering skills that work well for novices are probably skinning and one of mining or herbalism. Remember to buy the equipment needed as well. Enchanting is a good gathering skill for more experienced players, when used for its Disenchant ability. In a pinch, Jewelcrafting's Prospect ability can be considered a gathering skill, but requires a supply of ores.

3: Take the items you gather and sell them on the auction house. Ores can be sold, as can bars. Just check to see which has the higher going rate. Herbs and leathers sell fairly well, though unprocessed hides tend not to be so successful. Befriend a leatherworker and pay them to process them for you.

4: Never throw away loot. Take any of the grey equipment and sell to the vendors. Any cloth that you aren't using yourself should be kept and sold on the auction house. White and Green quality items can be used or sold on the auction house. Bind on pickup items can be disenchanted. Blue bind on equip items should be sold on the auction house or directly on /trade channel in cities.

5: Know the value of items. Websites like Thottbot often have average values for items but each server is different. Make sure you check the auction house or ask in /trade before selling or auctioning white or better items.

6: Install an auction house mod to assist in pricing. Auctioneer is one of the best: http://www.auctioneeraddon.com/ Auctioneer requires a daily 10 minute scan of the auction house to get full pricing details. You should do this for at least a week then keep it up to date by a complete scan every few days from then on.

7: Take some note of the deposit costs to list items on the auction house. Plate and Mail items are often quite expensive to list so be sure you set a price that will sell. Also be sure to put both a bid and a buyout price on items, since lazy people will hit buyout to get the item instantly rather than wait for the auction to expire. Items without buyouts often do not sell.

8: Take advantage of people's laziness. Many vendors around the world have recipes for sale. Some are limited run items on a timer. Nearly all of these can be bought and resold on the auction house for at least 300% profit. Be careful not to flood the market with any one item.

9: Resist the temptation to buy anything except bigger bags from the auction house. The gear you get from quest rewards and instance dungeons is more than adequate to level up in. Don't waste money on getting low level items enchanted either. You will soon outgrow the item.

10: Create a second character that is to act as your bank and salesperson. Give them a starting fund and mail all your saleable items to them. Run them up to the nearest capital city and let them log out next to the mailbox. This means your main character has less downtime between trips. Postage is very cheap, a handful of copper per transaction.

Using these tips it is easily possible to have the gold needed for your mounts at 30 and 60. The same strategies will serve you well all the way till level 80, where you can change your professions to do crafting if you wish.

What future Azeroth?

2008-06-23T22:07:00.004+10:00

One of the things about the lore of Azeroth that struck me is the relative weakness of both Alliance and Horde. They each had four races, now expanded to five. Both sides appear politically fragmented as well as geographically isolated.

On the Alliance side, you have the Dwarven capital of Ironforge. The dwarves seem to be the most stable and secure of the alliance races but are not without troubles. The influx of gnomish refugees puts pressure on the resources of the city. Political pressure to help the gnomes recapture Gnomergan adds extra strain. The main weakness of the dwarves is the relatively low population and low birth-rates.
The other clans of dwarves around Azeroth are frequently opposed to the Ironforge clans.

The Gnomes were never great fighters. The loss of their home city basically wiped out the gnomes as a military force. Their magical and engineering skills are very valuable in support of the dwarves so they still have a large role to play.

The Night Elves lost virtually all their territories in the last war against the burning legion. They lost a significant proportion of their population and their world-tree was destroyed. Perhaps the greatest sacrifice was the loss of their immortality, though it appears that elves have long mortal lifespans in any case. The misguided raising of the new world tree Teldrassil has exposed various political factions within the formerly unified Night Elf ranks. Tyrande, possibly the greatest single individual on Azeroth, sorely misses the support of her lover Malfurion. 10,000 years of wise leadership may have left her unable to be flexible enough in the changing environment of today.

The Humans have the potential to be the strongest grouping amongst the Alliance. They still have significant populations in several areas of Azeroth. Their military, magical and technical abilities are still significant even after decades of war. Their great weakness however lies in the many factions that are vying for power. Stormwind is "ruled" by a figurehead king, a ten year old boy. His immediate advisers are representing several different factions, and one indeed is not even human at all. There are great problems in the lands claimed by Stormwind and they simply do not have the manpower to address all threats at once. There are many hidden groups within Stormwind, each working on their own goals.

There are also the remnants of other human nations. Dalaran has completely isolated itself in a glowing pink dome. Gilean (sp?) has walled itself off to avoid contact with the scourge to its immediate north but there are dark rumours that things behind the wall are not well either. Stormwind is left without external allies, other than the dwarves.

The newest members of the Alliance, the alien Draenei, are the survivors of a crashed starship, who themselves are the remnant survivors of the wars on Draenor. Powerful as some individuals are, the Draenei add fairly insignificantly to the overall strength of the Alliance.

Leadership amongst the Alliance is not clear. Each major grouping has its own agenda, sometimes at cross-purposes.

The Horde. No longer as tainted by demonic possession and other fell influences, the Horde is nevertheless still plagued by internal problems. Each faction within the horde is relatively low population. Most have significant internal problems as well.

One huge benefit the Horde has is the overall leadership of Thrall. Each of the other factional leaders seem content to follow Thrall's lead in matters so far. This gives the Horde a much clearer sense of direction and purpose than the Alliance.

The Orcs, Thrall's own people, are almost certainly the single strongest Horde faction. However, they are essentially a refugee population, the remnants of the great orcish armies trapped on Azeroth after the closing of the portal. Thrall's entire population was once kept in internment camps under the guard of human forces. They have had an amazing journey over the last decade but have not had significant time to repopulate, and Durotar is hardly the most fertile realm.
Though Thrall's leadership is essentially undisputed, there are many factions amongst his people, some of whom are particularly corrupt. The influence of the burning legion is an ever-present threat.

The Darkspear Trolls, like the gnomes on the Alliance side, are a small refugee population. Almost wiped out, they have lost their homeland several times and have recently lost control of their adopted home, Echo Islands. They are almost completely dependant on their orcish allies for continued survival.
Many other troll tribes survive. Most of these are completely hostile to both Horde and Alliance. Trolls as a whole are an unruly mob and must provide Thrall with plenty of headaches.

Thrall's other close allies are the Tauren. Cairne and his people follow Thrall and the orcs out of gratitude for their rescue from almost certain extinction at the hands of the centaurs. Their homeland of Mulgore is now fairly secure and their culture has started to rebuild. Cairne's rule is not unopposed however, and several other factions exist under the surface. Several tribes of Tauren do not follow Cairne's rule at all and indeed are bitterly opposed to the Horde. Cairne is also now very old so possibly may not remain unchallenged for much longer. His sons are not held in nearly the same respect as he is, so succession is not clear.

The undead Forsaken are the last of the original Horde races to join. Undead creatures, these monstrosities are not a true race at all. Their very nature acts to destroy life around them. As Arthas/Ner'zul's strength diminished under Illidan's assault late in the last war, significant numbers of former Scourge found themselves with free will again. Sylvannus, already a commander under the scourge, took command of most of these free-willed undead and retook the old capital of Lordaeron as her new seat. Revenge seems to drive the undead. They assist the horde only as much as necessary, spending most of their energies focussed on ways to destroy the lichking. Of the original horde races, the Forsaken are clearly the most evil, willing to go to any lengths to get what they want. It is uncelar if they are able to "reproduce" as such, either by freeing other scourge, or infecting untainted humans with plague. Sylvannus seems to have the undivided loyalty of her people, lacking the factional squabbles that other races have. She does however have a tiger by the tail, in the form of Varimathras, a formerly high ranking member of the burning legion. Loyalty is something unknown to these creatures but Sylvannus knows this.

The latest race to join the horde, the Blood Elves, are even less trusted and reliable than the wilful Forsaken. Originally, the High elves were members of the Alliance. Due to various twists of fate and the racism of noteable human commanders, The remaining former High elves approached the Forsaken for assistance. Renamed Blood Elves in honor of the fallen, these elves are the most power hungry, egotistical, maniplative of creatures. The loss of the magical energies of the Sunwell is cripling to the remaining elves. They are absolutely driven by the need to regain a source of magical energy. Recent events have lead to the realisation that they have been completely betrayed by their leader Kael'thelas and some Blood elves have sought redemption by aproaching the Naru in Shattrath. Hopefully this may lift the blood elves from an otherwise very steep decent into depravity and evil.

Overall, the horde has significantly less military strength than the alliance, but is a lot more organised. Both sides have almost overwhelming internal and external threats, yet are preparing to fight against the burning legion once again.

WoW Decrypted, another WoW blog

2008-06-23T13:57:00.004+10:00

What a time for writers block to strike... the very start of my very first post on a new blog!
I guess its because I haven't really defined yet what I want this blog to be about. There are a great many blogs about World of Warcraft already. Finding an area not already done to death could prove a challenge.

I've been playing World of Warcraft online for over three years now and one thing I've noticed in that time is that my play style is very different to most others. I have an alt addiction, but that's not unique. I spend inordinate amounts of time chatting with my guildmates, often never leaving the town or city. That's also not unique. Lots of my time is spent exploring the lore and the places in the game but again that's not unique. What might be unique though is that I prioritise all these well above actually levelling my characters. I've been playing my highest level character for somewhat over 35 days elapsed /played and still haven't hit level 70.

Many people try to convince me to rush my guys to the max level but I have resisted so far. Very much its the journey and not the destination that keeps me playing. The world in WoW is huge and there is so much to see. Even if I stay focussed and work fairly hard on any one character, the quests in a particular zone do not completely explore the terrain. To find stuff you need to be poking around the edges, looking in every nook and cranny.

Some of the things I want to talk about:

Exploration
Warcraft Lore
Altitis
Newbie advice
Guilds
Fun things to do
Making money in Wow