For a bit of a break from the Outlands, I thought I’d take a look around the new Draenei area, and rolled up a hunter (I figured there might be one or two shaman around the place…) Thoroughly exploring the many and diverse range of character customisation options, after about a minute and a half I’d selected my desired facial hair/tendril style and was onto the tricky bit of new characters: the name.

It can take me hours to choose names. Obviously it can’t be blatantly ripped off from well known sources, as it shows a total lack of originality, will probably be changed for trademark/name policy violations, and, unless you’re the very first character crated on a new shard/server, it’ll be taken anyway, and the only thing worse than being Gandalf the Wizard is being G4nda1f the Wizard. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to come up with something totally original; of the (careful, this gets highly technical) “lots” of possible combinations of, say, up to 10 letters, most are eliminated as total gibberish (“Good day, sir, I go by the name of Qjsclfffns (pronounced ‘Throatwobbler-Mangrove’)”), and I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “once you have eliminated the unpronounceable, whatever remains, however unlikely, still gets a few hundred hits on Google”. As a thoroughly rigorous proof of this, I just poked random keys to come up with a couple of vaguely “fantasy sounding” names: “Arailla” gets 425 matches, Spanish holidays villas to the fore, and “Drablin” gets 91 (including, according to WarcraftRealms, a level 45 Dwarf hunter somewhere).

In searching for possible names, military codenames can be a fertile source of material, with the added bonus of a lot foreign names automatically sounding “cool”. Books and films, obviously, so long as you pick suitably obscure source material rather than being “Darth Voldermort”. Then there’s music; “Zoso” is taken from Led Zeppelin IV, and I’ve used it on and off for various game characters since 6th form (when it was mandatory to adorn your books and notes with biro/Tipp-Exed versions of your favourite band names/logos… wasn’t it?) Geographical locations are another option, as demonstrated by the Wombles, and they actually ended up giving me the inspiration for my Draenei; Tomsk the Womble being named after a Russian city, and the Draenei having a vaguely Russian accent, one swift browse of a list of Russian places later, and I was out and about on Azuremyst Island!

Anyone else have any good sources of names?

Despite a serious bank and inventory clearout a couple of weeks ago, I managed to get down to eight free slots out of about 150 last night, so it was back to Shattrath to haul another bin liner of stuff off to the nearest merchant. I obviously have a bit of a hat fetish, as a fair chunk of one bag was entirely headgear… A Helm of Fire I crafted (and keep around as proof that there was, briefly, a point in being an elemental leatherworker… plus for the Crazy World of Arthur Brown impersonations), a Crochet Hat for pretending to be Clint Eastwood, my old Ebon Mask that I wore ever since picking it up from the Sunken Temple, and then a nice selection of new Burning Crusade head adornment. It started with a Dreghood Cowl, which I decided would make me look like a fearsome ninja, rapidly replaced by a Dementia Hood for the same reason, then a quest gave me the Scout’s Hood using the same model which I slotted with a few gems, before deciding that the ninja look was somewhat spoiled by the giant pair of ears sticking out the side… so then it was a Sunroc Mask, returning to the stylish bandit look, before another quest gave Tim’s Trusty Helmet, with rather nice stats. Regrettably, as its description suggests, it’s not the most attractive of headgear, using the slightly ludicrous scrum cap model which would be fine if I was a back row forward, but not so suitable for a lethal assassin of the night, so that needed a quick disabling of the hat in the UI (I found a nifty plugin which adds checkboxes for hat/cape display on the main character screen, which saves a few clicks). Then, seeing as I was back in town to sort the bank out, I figured I might as well wander over to the auction house… and turned up a Ranger Hat of the Bandit. Style and stats? I could hardly say no, so now I’m quite happy wandering around smoking a cheroot and saying “my mule don’t like people laughing”, and a Stormwind merchant is going by the name of Johnny Nine Hats. No more hat purchases for me! Until next level, at least…

After a quiet weekend of watching rugby and winning a pub quiz (despite the music round consisting of clips played backwards, with the pitch shifted!), I was ready to tackle the Blood Furnace, and by happy coincidence just as I logged on four of my guild were looking for a final party member to head there. In we went, made a decent start (other than a slight accidental AoE pulling about three groups at once, but hey, it’s a guild tradition to wipe once or twice while warming up), and had just got our tactics sorted (sap one orc, sheep the other, banish the demon, then stand around for 45 seconds wondering which one to attack until the effects wear off) when… boom! The server went down for an hour and a half. Slightly annoying, really, but such is life.

Still, before the server crash, I did learn something new. Between coming back to WoW and the Burning Crusade, all my instance running was done with a small group of us, often on voice comms, and we got pretty efficient as a team, knowing each others capabilities. Now there are more opportunities to run instances with guild or pick-up groups, it can take a little while to sort out tactics and roles with different team compositions. Last night, strange symbols started appearing over the head of the mobs in the Furnace, skulls, diamonds, squares, moons… Checking with the group leader, it turns out these are raid target icons, or “lucky charms” (once again, I await the flurry of “DUH!”), which can be set by the party leader right-clicking their target. While not really necessary if you’re just blasting through a dungeon, they can be really useful if your group are towards the lower end of the level range and co-ordination is more important. Once the rogue has snuck around the back of a group, “sap cross, kill skull” is a lot easier than:
“I’m going to sap the orc“
“Which orc? There’s three of them…”
“Oh, yeah. The invoker!”
“There’s two of them…”
“Right. The invoker on the left, right?”
“Right?”
“Right”
“My right, or your right?”
“No, my left”
“Who’s on first?”
“Yes”
(etc.)

That blue eyeball-type icon thing over mobs heads means they can see through stealth.

I await the flurry of “well, DUH!” comments, but I only just found out. Gaining a few more levels and having some talent points to play with, I recently respecced to get Improved Sap, allowing me to bonk humanoids over the noggin then tiptoe off giggling without being detected. To get this, I also spent five points on Master of Deception, making me harder to detect in stealth. At least, that was the theory.

I’d seen the blue icon over the head of certain mobs (I think it was added in 2.03), but wasn’t sure what it was; checking with others in a party they couldn’t see it, so I presumed it was some mysterious addon I had that they didn’t. Without sap, I’d wait for the tank to pull and ambush mobs as they ran by, so stealth hadn’t been much of an issue, but puffed up with my new crowd controlling role I boldy strode (well, silently snuck) ahead of the party. “Don’t you worry your pretty little heads, I’ll take care of these nasty orc chaps!” Bonk! And off we went.

The second group, it started to go a bit wrong. Sneaking ahead, performing a couple of insulting emotes towards my intended victim, his dog gave a bit of a growl… and sank its fangs into my leg. Just a moment! I’m the Master of Deception! The Sultan of Subterfuge! I’m a Camden Leisure Pirate! How could this be? I probably don’t need to cover in over-much detail the failings of the “Lightly Armoured Rogue Being Set Upon By A Couple Of Dogs, Their Handlers, Some Of Their Friends, And Demon Who Happened To Be Wandering By” technique of pulling… but somehow we just about survived. And the following group, my effortless sapping once again worked. The group after that… dog bites rogue. It was a bit vexing; I was starting to conclude that instead of “Master of Deception”, I’d spent five talent points on “Blow Kazoo And Wave Banner Saying ‘I Am Here’ While In Stealth”. The fact that it was always blue-iconed mobs that saw me hadn’t quite clicked; fortunately, the feral druid creeping around in cat form noticed the correlation, and it finally dawned that (i) you only saw the blue floating icon while in stealth, and (ii) maybe it wasn’t such a good idea wandering up to those mobs and waving at them. It all went much more smoothly from there.