Picture Unrelated

My first coherent thought about 4.0.1 was that it had better be at least as fun as Spore, Command and Conquer 3, and all my old psd files combined, because it had to occupy the space formerly taken by them (my first incoherent thought read something closer to 'amigadamigadamigad').

This is sort of like asking a trip to Coldstone Creamery to be at least as fun as a root canal, but I wasn't in a great mood after about 9 hours of trying to convince my laptop to download the patch.

Particular appreciation must be had for Command and Conquer, which fought for its right to live right to the bloody end - crashing Control Panel every time I told it to uninstall, and then, when I decided to do things 'the old fashioned way', screaming that the Recycle Bin was several sizes too small for its hips.

I finally got in around 10PST, in time to watch the server toss everyone out again. God bless patch day!


Feral Droods

So far I've spent most of my time focused on pulling my main back into working order. All the alts are mostly getting ignored until next week, when the Hallow's End event starts, but until people simply stop showing up, my guild is keeping its regular raid schedule.

Our first raid night of the week was last night, which is a night the usual OT can't make. So I spent the majority of the night as a bear. 4.0.1 Bear feels a whole lot like 3.3.5 prot warrior. It's not necessarily hard, but it is more interesting than spamming two buttons for trash. Overall I liked the rotation, and was very pleased with 'Vengeance', the attack power buff given to tanks that scales with raid size. It solved a lot of the annoying threat capping problems.

I'm not really a theorycrafter, I just pull together information from all over. Some good resources to be had for kittybears:

Mew - Kitty simulator - Mew is a direct desendent of Toskk, maintained by the most wonderful Yawning. It's a bit more picky than Toskk was, but this is supposed to lead to more accurate data. I'm hoping it will eventually have the gear suggestion functionality that Toskk did.

BadKitty2.0 - Kitty timer - Finally appeared this morning! BadKitty is an absolute must for kitty druids. It takes all your significant data - combo points, energy, debuffs, buffs, cooldowns, procs, and places it in one spot, instead of all over the screen. The author is starting fresh, so this is essentially a new mod with the old goal. It is in alpha, which has cut down on some functionality and features - but I promise you having it will be better than not.

Kitty DPS FAQ - Again by Yawning. Updated daily as minipatches work out balance issues.

ThinkTank - ThinkTank is a great pooling of information for both your tank things and your dps things. In particular you may be interested in:
Bear FAQ, Glyph discussion, and Spec suggestions.

Feral DPS concerns - Official forum thread headed by Yawning, based on the wonderful number crunching he does. Very civil discussion about concerns with feral numbers looking forward.


THIS IS INSANE

It turns out to take roughly 20 minutes to completely destroy your rep with goblins. After that it takes about 4 hours to get honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers. Luckily, the statue that rests out in the middle of the bay allows you a brief respite to pretend you're Charlton Heston. Drop to your knees, inspect your reputation panel, and scream DAMN YOU. YOU BLEW IT UP. YOU BLEW IT ALL TO HELL.

If you're of the generation conceived, born, and raised in a Hot Topic, you may prefer to sing the entirety of 'Poor Jack'.

If you, too, want to make sure you can never fly out of Gadgetzan again, I highly suggest this very detailed guide by Fannin.

The next step after Bloodsail was wandering over to Dire Maul, as it would cover both Shen'dralar and goblins at the same time. What this lead me to discover is 'insane' doesn't really quite describe how I feel. 'Insanely Annoyed' is somewhat more accurate. Doing this with a partner (which I prefer, as the two of us seem to keep each other entertained instead of depressed), means roughly 400 runs of the instance for goblin rep, and 164 librams (of which there are three types that drop.... and are unique... and don't stack in a guild bank >:|). We worked at it for a few hours before we grew tired of the nonsense. It left me with about one bar through hated with goblins taken care of, and 12 librams that required a lot of running :|

Somehow, knowing that this portion of the Feat is the worst and it all gets better after this does not make me feel better about it. AT ALL.

Loremaster

It required a lot of flying in circles. Well. No. That's not true. It ended up in a lot of flying in circles because I can't follow simple directions or devise strategies. I'm one of those people who wastes time by doing one quest, turning it in, then going back and doing the other quest that was right next to it. I get better when it comes to quests I've done before, but as Loremaster implies I'm doing it because I didn't do them before... I was really all over the place.

I don't really have any 'techniques' to share because I'm inept, but the process also becomes very intuitive once Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are out of the way. The game clearly tells you what you need to complete, and once you enable low level quest tracking, it shows you where. If you're a few quests short, WowHead's comments section on each achievement always has someone who suggests 'Look and make sure you did X'.

But, in any case, I finished out Outland. What remains is a handful of quests in Northrend, which I think could be done in an evening. We'll see.


Long, Strange Trip

I've been working harder on this than Insane. Fishing is actually not that bad a hobby, as it's not very demanding. Streaming the latest episode of Caprica in the background helps it, a lot.

For the 10 man ICC hardmode group I ran (until this week when such things would have hindered the 25 man raid a bit >>), I brought fish feasts, figuring it was the best way to ensure that people would stuff buff food in their faces (had I been rich, in retrospect, I'd probably have brought flasks for everyone too :P). I would fish in Wintergrasp while 25 man raids were being built, as it was a decent place to pick up all the fish I needed.

This teaches you, very quickly, to rotate your camera view to watch behind you, rather in front of you. No one is going to land in the water on your fishing bobber, swim to you, and attack you. Many people are very happy to land behind you in hopes of giving you a firm ass kicking.

This is a habit I brought with me as I fished out in the old world. It wasn't really a requirement, and last night was really annoying - anytime the earth quaked I got a strobe effect as the camera bounced above and below the water line.

What this resulted in was, as my death knight was fishing out in Arathi, a wee 36 blood elf snuck behind me across very difficult terrain to get to the Keep. I didn't do anything about it. I was very perplexed as I watched him clamber over rocks, at first thinking he was trying to sneak up on me, but he made no hostile moves. Then I faced my camera forward and realized he was trying to avoid my line of sight on the more obvious route of the road. Not quite as clever as he thought it was, but I gave him points for effort and let him go on his way.

More seriously, I've pushed 3 characters to 325 cooking skill since I started the project two weeks ago. The longest stretch of it really is between 225 and 300, which is to be expected. The guide I'm using has me doing this out in the middle of the Bay of Storms in Azshara, however, so I'm enjoying my last few times in the zone before it's handed over to the Horde. My fourth character is right at 225 and ready to spend her hour or so in Azshara, but she's also my AH alt so I have to time it so I don't leave her with full bags in the middle of no where :P

It takes roughly 950 successful casts to gain enough skill to support leveling to 325 cooking. If you're stupid your first time doing it like me, you'll fish in the wrong spot for half an hour and get your 1000 fish achievement.

Not Quite a Tearful Goodbye

Remember that today, Blizzard finally officially announced that Zul'Gurub's rare drop Tiger and Raptor mounts, as well as Raptor pet, are being removed. This has been suspected for some time now but is finally official.

If you're interested at all, you're probably already farming the mounts on lockout. Best of luck to you. If you're interested in the pet, WowHead says it's a 1% drop rate, and I guess I believe it. My farming partner and I smacked all the raptors up on three resets while going in for mounts, and had two hatchlings drop. Be advised that ZG is an old instance with oooooold trash mechanics. The trash will respawn even with Bloodlord defeated. You can farm the hatchling even if you've already cleared it.

You might also consider that, since ZG is changing, you may not be able to gain rep with the corresponding faction anymore. Perhaps save your bijous and try to finish that off, in case it becomes a feat of strength. If not, hey, you're a rep close to exalted!

WHALPS

Since we're here! Also keep in mind that certain pets are somewhat unaccounted for.

You're encouraged to get your Emerald, Crimson, and Azure whelps before the Cataclysm as well. The mobs that dropped them previously are missing on the beta.




Screenshots of the week

Weekly Screenshots

As promised, I remembered to upload them. Happy WoWin's!

The Long Term

It was probably a disappointment to you, but not a surprise, that 4.0.1 did not launch this week. Or maybe I'm the only one that felt WotLK had outstayed it's welcome around the time it became clear that to gain the most advantage, I had to run ToGC four times a week.

Just the same, the pre-expansion lull has always been a cool place to be. Everything's new at the same time it's old. If your guild is still raiding, you'll be limited to one ICC lockout a week, which may result in more free time for yourself.

I'm rather fond of setting myself a few long term goals in order to fill that free time. This isn't to say that you must play WoW because you can, only that if you choose to, you may find it rewarding to work to something that takes a good deal of time.

A long term goal doesn't have to make sense. A guildie of mine has determined she would like to hold 300k gold before Cataclysm hits, and hinted that she'd like to be gold capped on all her alts. We asked her why, and there really wasn't a better explanation than 'because'. It's more a case of 'why not', rather than 'why'. After all, would you really mind having 300k gold? Probably not, even though nothing you'll ever encounter will require it (not to mention, the only thing that could come close to that in value - Ashes of A'lar - she already has :P).

Really I wasn't in a place to criticize because I was farming Escape from Durnholde for Keepers of Time rep at the time this conversation happened, and that's probably infinitely stupider than working towards 300k gold.



Two weeks ago I managed to finally get every class to 80 before the expansion hit. What I gained from this was a deep understanding of why it's impossible to find raiding mages on my server (somehow they made a staple of every fantasy game so tragically boring that arguing over your tax return with the IRS would be more rewarding).

And now that I've had a chance to breathe and relish my victory over spamming arcane blast, it's time to grab myself a few new goals for the game ahead. I don't really have a timetable for these, but I think they'd be cool to have. But I have ordered them from what I'd most like to 'I'm ok with not getting carpal tunnel'.

- A Long, Strange Trip - for my Alt Army
- Ashes of A'lar - for my main
- Dark Phoenix...and her babyyy - for my main
- Bane of the Fallen King - for my main
- Justicar - for my main
- Insane - for my main
- Loremaster - for my main

All of which I'd like to give their own post when the time comes.

Brewmaster
Today I was going to talk a bit about gaining Long, Strange Trip on multiple alts. Again, I don't really have a reason, other than I don't actually see many people on purple protodrakes, so it's something a bit unique for the alts.

Hitting 80 when I did meant I could immediately set my focus on Brewmaster.

When my main did the event two years ago it required roughly 300-500 tokens to complete, depending on whether or not you wanted to keep the clothing items or the pet when you were done.

In patch 3.3 the title was changed, so it no longer required buying the clothing (or even buying the dozen or so kinds of alcohol to try!). I had no idea this had happened when I brought my alts to the event with five days left, and expected to have to return next year. With the changes, it only requires 202 tokens to get the achievement. 200 for the Brew of the Year Club, and 2 to change your mount into a ram (or presumably kodo, for horde).

Additionally, doing all the one-time quests will net you several tokens. And the daily to defeat the Direbrews drops a quest item on the ground that persists for about 15 minutes, meaning you can do the event on one character, and then log on to the others to reap the rewards.

What this meant was I shoved 7 characters through to Brewmaster in 2-3 days (the other 3 already had it), dependent on whether or not I accidentally clicked something that would dismount me during ram racing, not that that happened or anything >>

It's too late to do Brewfest on your own alts this year, but I assure you it's little more than a speedbump should you try it next year. However, ram racing dailies get really annoying around the 5th time you do them in a single day.

Merrymaker
I had been ignoring holiday events while I leveled them. I'd given up on the idea last year thanks to the most heinous requirement (behind Hard Knocks) - you need 325 cooking skill to finish Winter's Veil. If you're a raider, you should really already have this. But why would you ever do this on an alt?

So now that I'm trying again, I'm starting in on this one early. I decided to repeat my main's example, and leveling cooking alongside fishing. No matter what I do, there's going to be farming, and fishing at least doesn't require you move often to retrieve different animals. There are simple guides available via a google search to do this (like El's Extreme Anglin', the one I've been using - but remember to click responsibly for account security :3).

Fishing does get annoying very fast. My paladin is sitting at about 262 skill at the moment and skillups are coming about every 2-3 minutes. But it has the added benefit of not requiring much attention. A second window open to watch South Park episodes has provided much entertainment. It seems, just fishing in between other things I do, I can probably get one character a week to 325. Can probably cut it down a bit if I fish on weekends as well. I'll let you know in a few weeks how it's working out :3

Screenshots of the week
Appear to have not been uploaded to my file server (d'oh!). I will post them later tonight.

Happy WoWins'!

This blog has no real defined purpose beyond simply existing, but will become active with the launch of 4.0.1.

Happy trails 'til then.