Quiet weekend in WoW, with lots of rugby on instead... Aside from the wild excitement of creeping up to 350 leatherworking, allowing me to make riding crops if I just spend another seventeen years grinding the insane components needed, the highlight was probably a quick zap through the Auchendai Crypts. Remember I mentioned our guild's mandatory "wipe on the first encounter or two"? We continued this policy quite magnificently...
Priest: "Watch out if they summon a Possessor. Those things are nasty, have to be taken down quickly."
First group, a Posessor is summoned, takes control of our tank who mows through our cloth wearers, much death ensues.
Us: "We should watch out for those Posessors. They're nasty, take them down quickly..."
After that, everything went rather nicely, including the loot; few greens for me, and useful things for our group from both bosses, including a ring from the final chap I had a roll on, but lost; not that I was too distraught, it was only a very slight improvement on a green ring I'd picked up from the auction house.
Monday, 12 March 2007
Friday, 9 March 2007
Roads of battle, paths of victory
Doubtless you're all on the edge of your seats, so just to let you know... the final honour point calculations came in, and yes, I got that Grand Marshal's Slicer with a whole 52 points to spare.
I'd rather been hoping for the Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, to hold aloft the sword from the bosom of the waters of Loch Modan, and that merely drawing it would smite any opponent who dared glance in my direction. As it turned out, the quartermaster handed it over with barely a second glance, muttering something about it being the 73rd that day, and combat continued much as before, apart from each swing dealing an extra 17 to 23 points of damage. Perhaps I'd built it up a little too much... Still, on the plus side, the ludicrously oversized blade is longer than my legs, so when wandering around with it strapped to my belt I plough furrows in the earth, which should be of considerable benefit to any agrarian communities in the zones where I quest. Provided they're not quest objectives, that is, otherwise the improved crop yield may be offset slightly by the wholesale slaughter with added "ploughshares into swords"-type irony...
I'd rather been hoping for the Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, to hold aloft the sword from the bosom of the waters of Loch Modan, and that merely drawing it would smite any opponent who dared glance in my direction. As it turned out, the quartermaster handed it over with barely a second glance, muttering something about it being the 73rd that day, and combat continued much as before, apart from each swing dealing an extra 17 to 23 points of damage. Perhaps I'd built it up a little too much... Still, on the plus side, the ludicrously oversized blade is longer than my legs, so when wandering around with it strapped to my belt I plough furrows in the earth, which should be of considerable benefit to any agrarian communities in the zones where I quest. Provided they're not quest objectives, that is, otherwise the improved crop yield may be offset slightly by the wholesale slaughter with added "ploughshares into swords"-type irony...
Thursday, 8 March 2007
Too Much of Nothing
My first day of level 70-ness didn't get off to a great start, with the new 2.10 patch proving somewhat troublesome (the downloader managed to get about a megabyte at a time before going off in a sulk and having to be restarted), and when it finally did finish installing, the servers were all down. Still, they were back up before too long, so it was on with the evening's main task: getting the last 1,000 or so honour points for a big ol' sword. A couple of Warsongs and an Alterac later, a couple of guildmates suggested a run to the Steamvaults, which sounded like fun, so off we went.
Our group was two Druids (one feral, tanking, one boomkin), a Mage, a Priest, and me, the Rogue. After the obligatory early wipe (I think it's the law that within the first five fights, you have to have a bad pull with extra fear-into-another-group) we kicked arse and took names, only didn't have a pen or paper for the name taking part, and there wasn't another death along the way. No problem with Druid tanking after their changes in 2.10 (even with an aggro-happy Mage and Rogue doing their best to make his life difficult). A couple of the group got bits of the Karazhan key, and I got the Helm of the Claw (with meta socket) from a quest in there (not so useful at the moment, as I don't meet any of the meta-gem-requirements, but hey, it's another hat for the collection. An astonishingly ugly hat, but a hat nonetheless), so not a bad run all told.
As for loot... take a guess. Yes, I'm afraid it's another loot whine, as to add to my single, solitary, somewhat lonely looking trash green item from runs through the Slave Pens and the Underbog, I got... nothing. Well... I sort of won a shard, but let the enchanter keep it (as I'm buttering him up for a nice enchantment on my Grand Marshal's Slicer, once I actually get it). But no blues for me, and indeed no blues for anyone in the party, as the only potentially useful items were for a healer, and our Priest was already decked out in better stuff. Still, I'm fine with that. Really. Totally fine. Absolutely happy, yes siree, I don't need any of this 'loot' stuff, nope, not me, it's friendship and exploration that's important, yes, who cares about loot, certainly not me, no no no, why do you keep going on about loot? Eh? Eh? I've told you! It's not important! Stop talking about it! Stop it! LA LA LA LA LA I'M NOT READING THE LOOT TABLES OF BOSSES TO FIND OUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE DROPPED LA LA LA LA LA LA.
*Ahem*. Sorry about that. Anyway, it really is good to see these instances regardless of loot, and at a touch over two hours, it's a good size. Indeed, getting out in good time meant I could fit a few more battlegrounds in, so I'm fervently hoping the estimated honour for yesterday isn't too inaccurate as I ought to finally qualify for that Slicer! Not that I care about it, you understand, I only PvP for the challenge, and the cameraderie, and... oh, wait, I've done that rant already.
Our group was two Druids (one feral, tanking, one boomkin), a Mage, a Priest, and me, the Rogue. After the obligatory early wipe (I think it's the law that within the first five fights, you have to have a bad pull with extra fear-into-another-group) we kicked arse and took names, only didn't have a pen or paper for the name taking part, and there wasn't another death along the way. No problem with Druid tanking after their changes in 2.10 (even with an aggro-happy Mage and Rogue doing their best to make his life difficult). A couple of the group got bits of the Karazhan key, and I got the Helm of the Claw (with meta socket) from a quest in there (not so useful at the moment, as I don't meet any of the meta-gem-requirements, but hey, it's another hat for the collection. An astonishingly ugly hat, but a hat nonetheless), so not a bad run all told.
As for loot... take a guess. Yes, I'm afraid it's another loot whine, as to add to my single, solitary, somewhat lonely looking trash green item from runs through the Slave Pens and the Underbog, I got... nothing. Well... I sort of won a shard, but let the enchanter keep it (as I'm buttering him up for a nice enchantment on my Grand Marshal's Slicer, once I actually get it). But no blues for me, and indeed no blues for anyone in the party, as the only potentially useful items were for a healer, and our Priest was already decked out in better stuff. Still, I'm fine with that. Really. Totally fine. Absolutely happy, yes siree, I don't need any of this 'loot' stuff, nope, not me, it's friendship and exploration that's important, yes, who cares about loot, certainly not me, no no no, why do you keep going on about loot? Eh? Eh? I've told you! It's not important! Stop talking about it! Stop it! LA LA LA LA LA I'M NOT READING THE LOOT TABLES OF BOSSES TO FIND OUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE DROPPED LA LA LA LA LA LA.
*Ahem*. Sorry about that. Anyway, it really is good to see these instances regardless of loot, and at a touch over two hours, it's a good size. Indeed, getting out in good time meant I could fit a few more battlegrounds in, so I'm fervently hoping the estimated honour for yesterday isn't too inaccurate as I ought to finally qualify for that Slicer! Not that I care about it, you understand, I only PvP for the challenge, and the cameraderie, and... oh, wait, I've done that rant already.
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
Sittin' on Top of the World
Well, that's level 70 reached. I was wandering around the Blade's Edge Mountains, but had reached that slightly annoying point where there are a few quests to complete in disparate locations. Previously I've been fairly methodical about clearing zones as much as possible before moving on to the next, but being 85% of the way to level 70 I thought "sod it" and headed up to Netherstorm. Sure enough, a quick wander around Area 52 netted a stack o' quests, all within a short ride, and a short while later the death of some Blood Elf captain netted that last little sliver of XP.
Tuesday, 6 March 2007
Boots of Draenic Leather
I was working on my leatherworking last night, and using a combination of accumulated items in the bank, a few auction house purchases and a rampage through Nagrand denuding it of much of its native wildlife, I managed to increase my leatherworking skill by a massive seven or eight points. Woo! It's now 341, allowing me to craft a couple of bits of armour that might have been briefly useful several levels ago, some nice leg armour kits with expensive components, and bongo drums, presumably for tapping out some crazy jazz rhythms. That's insane, daddy-o!
Crafting has something of a split personality. On the one hand, it seems set up such that you only need a small number of crafters. At the very, very least, a crafter needs to make one item per point of crafting skill, so to hit the maximum crafting skill of 375, they'll likely have made 400+ items; outside an Alchemist drinking his own potions, that's far more than the crafter themselves will need. Furthermore, the sheer quantity of raw materials required to make those items needs one person to spend a lot of time and effort (or money) acquiring materials, or, more ideally, several people gathering resources to supply one crafter.
On the other hand, however, everyone is given an incentive to craft, with most professions now having either bind on pickup recipes (i.e. only the person who crafted the item can use it), or items requiring a certain crafting skill to use (in much the same way that most engineering items always needed a certain engineering skill to use, so e.g. drums require a certain leatherworking skill).
So you have your eye on the bind on pickup Trousers of Splendidness, and you're crafting away working on improving your skill to get to the required level for them, and you think "well, I might as well help my buddies out" (or perhaps "muahahahaha, I'll make me some money by selling stuff"). And that's a bit of a problem for tailors, leatherworkers and blacksmiths. Everyone is bombarded with quest rewards as they adventure around the world, which tends to be enough to give a fairly decent outfit. On top of that, there's the items randomly dropped by mobs (quite where wolves keep those greatswords, shields and cuirasses is a constant source of mystery); if they're not directly useful, they can always be traded around a guild, or put up for sale at the auction house. These drops can be *anything*; a Cheesemongers Hatstand of the Wombat? Absolutely! An Undercoated Wardrobe of the Herring-pickler? You bet! (OK, I exaggerate slightly. But the items cover the whole level range of the game, for every possible type of weapon/armour, and with a wide variety of possibly bonuses). In contrast, within a range of ten levels or so there'll probably be... one set of crafted armour that may be vaguely applicable to your class. If you're lucky. Granted, the crafted item is available then and there (presuming the crafter has the raw materials), but with an active guild and/or auction house there's almost always a superior alternative (usually a range of them depending on which stats you prefer).
To an extent, this is offset by other things the crafter can produce, like a tailor's bags or a leatherworker's armour kits, so now and again you can increase your skill while making these useful items. But inevitably (for leatherworking at least, I'm guessing it's similar for others) there comes a point where, in order to increase your skill, you need to make more useless armour and dump it on the auction house for less than the raw materials would fetch (as you're competing with every other leatherworker dumping the same useless armour), or send it off for disenchantment. Which is all the more galling when you could've used the same components to make a couple of stamina giving armour patches that people really would find useful, but wouldn't have increased your skill.
At the very least, it would be nice if there were some more generally useful items that could be used to skill up, but it doesn't seem like it would take a giant leap to make the armour crafting system more useful. The Wild Leather items, for example; when made, they have a random enchantment (... of the Monkey, Tiger, Wolf etc.) This makes them even more staggeringly useless than the rest of the armour that you can craft (remember, random loot = bad), unless you get lucky and happen to get a useful stat combination. However, if you could *control* what enchantment they were assigned (start with ten pieces of thick leather, and say add elemental fire and a feather for ... of the Monkey, elemental earth and a pearl for ... of the Tiger, whatever), all of a sudden you've got more choice with what you can make. Having gem slots in crafted items is a step in the right direction, but they only turn up on some of the higher level Rare pieces. Ah well. In the meantime, I'm off to some dungeons to try and get some Stylin' Hat patterns to add to my headwear collection.
Crafting has something of a split personality. On the one hand, it seems set up such that you only need a small number of crafters. At the very, very least, a crafter needs to make one item per point of crafting skill, so to hit the maximum crafting skill of 375, they'll likely have made 400+ items; outside an Alchemist drinking his own potions, that's far more than the crafter themselves will need. Furthermore, the sheer quantity of raw materials required to make those items needs one person to spend a lot of time and effort (or money) acquiring materials, or, more ideally, several people gathering resources to supply one crafter.
On the other hand, however, everyone is given an incentive to craft, with most professions now having either bind on pickup recipes (i.e. only the person who crafted the item can use it), or items requiring a certain crafting skill to use (in much the same way that most engineering items always needed a certain engineering skill to use, so e.g. drums require a certain leatherworking skill).
So you have your eye on the bind on pickup Trousers of Splendidness, and you're crafting away working on improving your skill to get to the required level for them, and you think "well, I might as well help my buddies out" (or perhaps "muahahahaha, I'll make me some money by selling stuff"). And that's a bit of a problem for tailors, leatherworkers and blacksmiths. Everyone is bombarded with quest rewards as they adventure around the world, which tends to be enough to give a fairly decent outfit. On top of that, there's the items randomly dropped by mobs (quite where wolves keep those greatswords, shields and cuirasses is a constant source of mystery); if they're not directly useful, they can always be traded around a guild, or put up for sale at the auction house. These drops can be *anything*; a Cheesemongers Hatstand of the Wombat? Absolutely! An Undercoated Wardrobe of the Herring-pickler? You bet! (OK, I exaggerate slightly. But the items cover the whole level range of the game, for every possible type of weapon/armour, and with a wide variety of possibly bonuses). In contrast, within a range of ten levels or so there'll probably be... one set of crafted armour that may be vaguely applicable to your class. If you're lucky. Granted, the crafted item is available then and there (presuming the crafter has the raw materials), but with an active guild and/or auction house there's almost always a superior alternative (usually a range of them depending on which stats you prefer).
To an extent, this is offset by other things the crafter can produce, like a tailor's bags or a leatherworker's armour kits, so now and again you can increase your skill while making these useful items. But inevitably (for leatherworking at least, I'm guessing it's similar for others) there comes a point where, in order to increase your skill, you need to make more useless armour and dump it on the auction house for less than the raw materials would fetch (as you're competing with every other leatherworker dumping the same useless armour), or send it off for disenchantment. Which is all the more galling when you could've used the same components to make a couple of stamina giving armour patches that people really would find useful, but wouldn't have increased your skill.
At the very least, it would be nice if there were some more generally useful items that could be used to skill up, but it doesn't seem like it would take a giant leap to make the armour crafting system more useful. The Wild Leather items, for example; when made, they have a random enchantment (... of the Monkey, Tiger, Wolf etc.) This makes them even more staggeringly useless than the rest of the armour that you can craft (remember, random loot = bad), unless you get lucky and happen to get a useful stat combination. However, if you could *control* what enchantment they were assigned (start with ten pieces of thick leather, and say add elemental fire and a feather for ... of the Monkey, elemental earth and a pearl for ... of the Tiger, whatever), all of a sudden you've got more choice with what you can make. Having gem slots in crafted items is a step in the right direction, but they only turn up on some of the higher level Rare pieces. Ah well. In the meantime, I'm off to some dungeons to try and get some Stylin' Hat patterns to add to my headwear collection.
Monday, 5 March 2007
Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
I haven't been paying much attention to jewels or enchantments on the road to level 70, as most items are replaced fairly regularly on the way, but now I'm nearly there I thought I'd have a quick browse of the auction house to see what sort of jewels might be affordable. I hit a bit of a snag, though; I believe the Auctioneer add-on puts me at a slight advantage over plain interface users, as it gives a "Gem" option to filter results, but even with that applied I was seeing over 850 items for sale, both cut and uncut gems. With the speed of auction house paging, that's not really a viable number of results to browse through, especially as you don't want to buy an item on page 1 and find the same thing for half the price on page 20. I ran a few searches for specific gems, but typing "Bright Blood Garnet", search, checking results, "Delicate Blood Garnet", search, etc., isn't much fun either. A cursory Google didn't really turn up any add-ons or similar to help (though it was very cursory, as I was busy typing "Solid Azure Moonstone", search, "Jagged Deep Peridot", search, for much of the day); anyone found a better way of doing it?
Thursday, 1 March 2007
The Warcraft Armory
Blizzard have just unleashed The Armory on an unsuspecting world, a searchable database of characters, guilds and arena teams. While much of the same information is available in-game using the "Inspect" option, The Armory also includes things like talents and trade skills (apparently... it seems to be a bit overloaded/flaky, so I haven't quite got a character sheet up yet). Reaction on the forums is mixed, strangely enough (I don't think you'll be stunned to learn that many posters consider it "an outrage"), but personally I think it looks great, and could be really useful for guilds.
(Incidentally, for those of you who may, perhaps, be at work, with, say, a firewall that blocks "Games" related web content... maybe the firewall rules haven't been updated to block The Armory yet. Not that I could possibly condone browsing it when you should be working, no.)
(Incidentally, for those of you who may, perhaps, be at work, with, say, a firewall that blocks "Games" related web content... maybe the firewall rules haven't been updated to block The Armory yet. Not that I could possibly condone browsing it when you should be working, no.)
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