Note to self: Ark Inventory

Add On – Ark Inventory | The WoW Economist:

Ark Inventory is probably one of my favorite mods and becomes even more valuable over time as bag slots continue to grow and we’re allowed to carry, store or bank more items.

I usually don't use mods, as I'm casual enough a player that I hate to be bothered with each major client update to run back through them all. I have a macro for coords and have at it. This one looks good enough to try out, though. My bags, other than my solo bag (mats, alt equip) and instance bag (pots, drinks, bandages, food w/ bonuses) which get swapped when I'm swapping to a PUG from soloing or vice versa, are usually a complete mess, and having a rule-based bag set up sounds great.

Cross server PUGs

From A day in the life of cross-server PUGs � Welcome to Spinksville!:

So what happens if all the people who aren’t bothered are given an easier way to get to the group content that they want? (Remember, they don’t hate the server community, they just don’t care either way.) But server communities have been valuable for people. By running server-based PUGs, new players can mix with existing ones. It has been one of the standard ways that people find guilds (or guilds find people).

Even as a part-timer, I've got to say I've enjoyed the community created by PUGs.

I waited for weeks to get into the Caverns of Time to finish up a rep-based armor set, and finally gave it up. Turns out there was another fellow on my server essentially doing the same thing. We both kept ending up in the same groups, doing quick runs we'd already done in the hope of convincing them to go CoT afterwards.

And yes, PUGs do, as Spinks points out, encourage guild formation. I've run with several good tanks and healz whose playstyle showed, well, showed they were at the very least extremely mature 15 year-olds. When I was considering running raids, these were the guilds I researched online. And after noticing some quiet folk -- not folk I'd necessarily want to play with on a regular basis, as they after would whine like crud at the 15 year-olds who weren't so mature (often the Warlock. I don't know why, Warlocks, but the young folk IRL flock your way), but good, solid, get the job done folks -- running with great gear, I started noticing that their guilds were the first to finish server-wide accomplishments. Opening gates, bringing down bosses first, etc.

To lose that sense of community would be to further commoditize players in a way that might work short-term, but I believe would get rid of the hard-core folk who drive game adoption.

There's an easy compromise, and I'd imagine Blizzard's already given it some serious consideration -- ensure that as few servers as possible are represented in any PUG, and reuse those server combinations. If I need two more to run CoT, then pull them both from the same server. Later, when others do the same thing, pull the extra folk from that sister server. And encourage server transfers at times between the two.

If Apple can Genius up decent playlists, Blizzard can algorithm cross-server groups.

Cataclysm reaction

Ah, Cataclysm. As we already saw a bit from MuShU's comment on my last post, the biggest deal to me is that vanilla Old World WoW is going away. Sure, we've had a few changes in the old world, like Dalaran leaving (you know, I don't think I've gone back since LK), but nothing nearly so extreme. WoW.com has a good video of the zone changes, and I'm a little embarrassed to say I was sad to see how Auberdine (and the rest of Darkshore and Ashenvale) are changing. Auberdine is where Jal usually logs off after some fishing to take a needed break (ie, when I suspend the account a few months). It's my resort town, dang it! (vacation snapshots from 2006, below)


But as far as the way the game operates, I was most interested in the worgen racial skills:

BlizzCon 2009: Live blogging the Cataclysm new starter zones:

Racials:
Two Forms, instant, 1.5 sec cooldown, Turn into your currently inactive form.
Darkflight, instant, 3 min cooldown, activates your true form increasing movement speed by 70% for 10 sec
Viciousness, passive, increases all damage done by 1%.
Flayer, passive, skinning skill increased by 15 and allows you to skin faster.

This is a druid's dream slate of racials. With the elf, I get shadowmeld, which is nice, and was much nicer when I could eat and drink invisibly while mostly soloing my way up to 70. The tauren's stomp is useful, though perhaps more in PvP.

The worgen get dps, the ability to, I assume, cheetah away indoors twice per cooldown (once with cat form, another with racial), and I'm as envious as I could be about the faster skinning and built-in Finkle's Skinner and a half. Lissanna adds that they'll be able to use their claws to skin. Even more useful than the Gnomish Army Knife Jal's carrying. Seriously, how often do I cook on the road? (For those out of the know, the army knife includes a firestarter as well as a skinning knife, "Gyromatic Micro-Adjuster, Arclight Spanner, Blacksmithing Hammer, and Mining Pick", and takes up one more space in your pack than wogen claws.)

So so far, so good on the cataclysm. Interesting Old World reuse, a new, interesting druid race, and what appears to be an honest attempt to expand lore, rather than tack onto it. I'm looking forward to CC more than I was to BC and LK. I wonder if my nvidia Mac mini will still be up to the task.

The Old World is New Again: Rumors, Rumors

I'm not sure why two blogs in my roll won't comment on the rumors about the next expansion. It's fun, yo.

So here we go: My favorite news from the World of Warcraft - Cataclysm rumors at MMO-Champion:

Classic Azeroth Revamp
A cataclysmic event caused by Deathwing and Azshara will change the face of Azeroth as we know it. Most of the new content for Cataclysm will take the form of a revamped Azeroth, taking advantage of newer additions to WoW such as phasing and daily quests.

If you've been reading a while, you might remember I mentioned criticizing the virtual ghettoizing in another blog, where you couldn't see nuttin' without the expansion, and asked (here on Panzerkin) for this style of Old World revamp to happen in LK (where we know it didn't happen). Here's a bit from those posts:

[From Curmudgeon Gamer]:

Blizzard needs to ensure that expansions are backwards compatible, not so much that expansionless folk like myself can go to the new lands, nor even that we should be provided access to the new trainers, etc, but players with expansions should continue to flow through old hotspots (possibly with new buildings in cities accessible only if you have the expansions, etc) so that the communities at least do not give the impression of being quite so perfectly cleaved.

[From Panzerkin]:

Instead, it created another system of virtual ghettos back in WoW's Old World. Endgames shifted. Years of development time for instances, etc, rendered worthless. Those new to WoW or who hadn't seen the OW end game had no real incentive to go back.

There were options. Create mobs that have a new attack type or one for which there was little resistance gear in the OW, kinda like fire resist was used in the original. Keep the progression of items natural, and ensure items (other than just epics) continue to have some important value in the future. Here, I'm thinking about something like the Illdari-Bane items -- perhaps there's a mob in the WotLK that can only be damaged by items that specifically harm demons by 150 or more points.

Glad to see that wasn't such a crazy idea after all. Looks like we might even get to fly in the Old World too.

This leads me to one question: What happens if you don't have the expansions? Can I still walk around the Old World? In fact, if, "Durotar is wrecked and apparently Orgrimmar could be destroyed. A new Orc city is rebuilt over the course of the expansion," and, assumedly, much of the 'make-up' content is hidden from newbies by flight, do I now actually have less available content in Azeroth than before the upcoming expansion? UO just recently got smart enough to give everyone access to every expansion for free. Let me tell you, when I played one month of UO two years after one month of UO, years after years of UO, one of the big reasons I didn't care to stick around even with the Kingdom Reborn interface is that I couldn't go anywhere new. I was still stuck on my Third Dawn era dungeons and content. Nice. Thanks for keeping me in the virtual ghetto.

But yeah, this sounds like fun. Assuming these rumors are true, IANAL, LMNOP, etc. ;^)

Maybe they shoulda left in "of Nature's Wrath"

Druid Q&A for Moonkin � Tastes Like Battle Chicken:

Ultimately however the problem we are trying to solve is that Wrath and Starfire are just too similar. In PvP you get a little bit of interest out of the fact that they are in different schools, but in PvE by the time talents are factored in, the two spells just become fairly quick (but not instant) nukes and it’s easy to math out which one to use and which one to ignore.

You know, I felt there was a pretty good distinction between the two brewing in BC. There were elementals that couldn't be hurt by Nature, and you had to go to Arcane. The gear was also occasionally geared (no pun intended) to one or the other.

Why not bring back a little of the "of Nature's Wrath" and "Arcane spellpower" (iirc)? Removing the spell type specific bonuses was an oversimplification that caused the nondifferentiation we're seeing in the interview, above.

Ding! 80

Well, I'm done. Leveled out. Been running the Sons of Hodir/Storm Peaks quests, and have waded through the solo portion of the giant Whatever it takes 40+ quests-long quest line. Not a bad run, overall, but Thor and Loki -- ur, I'm sorry, Thorim and Loken -- haven't really made me feel all that involved. What do I remember about the quests? Not a whole lot. Mostly that Thorim looked really bored on his throne, and that some Sons of Hodir daily quest names have pitifully unimaginative double entendres. Still, nice to see a plot arc continued in a quest line longer than two or three quests, and just interesting enough to be memorable.

The exciting part, of course, is that I can quit leveling and concentrate on gearing up and moving slowly towards raiding. Time to stop grabbing whatever the quest rewards are and actually pursue whatever gives me the best gear. And I don't think my lack of swift flight form will be such a pain now. Danged spell costs with the new level brought me back from nearly 1k gold to under 800. Man, I sound codgery.

So I'm not sure what comes next. I'll keep running Hodir rep to get the enchant, and will follow some combination of WoW.com and Laser Chicken's best balance gear lists for pre-raiding 80s. Then I'll run dungeons for gear, and try a few PUG raids, I suppose. Then hopefully I'll start raiding proper after finding a decent raiding guild. Lots of guilds are recruiting, it seems, but many are pre-80 chars, which seems strange. I've got two guildies doing the level-a-friend XP bonus thing, and have gotten from 40 to 60 in about the time I've gone from 78-80. Seems a few people are doing something similar and forming toon guilds to house them.

I'm rambling. Yay, 80. It's kinda like the NBA playoffs; I'm ready for the second season/game of WoW now.

Gearing for Naxx

Welp, I'm trying to spend some of 79 positioning myself for good entry raid gear. Thanks to WoW Insider/WoW.com's Dan O'Halloran's comment about Shifting Perspectives' gear at 80 list, I thought I was starting off well. Unfortunately I made two mistakes.

The first was to go for shoulders first, and to try for Shifting's best quest piece: "Mantle of the Flesh Giant, from the quest The Flesh Giant Champion in Icecrown". Decent questline, horribly quick XP, but it turns out that Mantle isn't even as good as one of their runner ups, "Purehorn Spaulders, a Leatherworking BoE," which not only gives more boomkin power, but is a leather item. So I dropped the fleshwerks quest line and off I went last night to start farming Hath'ar Skimmers.

The respawn rate was ridiculous, and I was able to put on some melee gear and the Staff of ye olde Sorrowful Chieftan and grab 30 Nerubian Chitin's in no time. I was helped by someone who didn't reply to /whispers who was whacking everything in sight, but didn't skin. I usually like to /whisper before I start vulturing all the leftovers, but after throwing a MotW and Thorns on the farmer, I gave up. It was a level 80 character, so I'm not sure what the angle was. Gold farming? No idea. The mobs did keep respawning so quickly that it supported four folks running around whacking things. You can just barely see my proverbial benefactor over Jal's left (your right) shoulder in the screengrab with the Spaulders.

And though the Spaulders look pretty kewl and all, this brings us to my second mistake: Not comparing the list to Laser Chickens. I completely missed his wrap up, and it's a very good one. For shoulders, I do have the best craftable from Shifting Perspectives, it appears, but I'm apparently looking for Mantle of the Eternal Sentinel, a BoE drop from Sartharion. That's a big difference. Still, Shifting's on the mark here.

Shifting might not be for other slots, though, compared to Chicken's more recent gear. Let's compare the "accessible" gear (so the best spellpower (oversimp, I know) from Chicken's list, with the best craftable for any drops, and from WoW.com's.

(This will have to be a two-parter; here's the Chicken list, and the Chicken List totals:)

Intellect 405
Stamina 541 (616)
Spirit 185
Armor 3087
Resilience rating 186
Critical strike rating 238
Haste rating 37
Spell power 673
+ two sockets

Set bonuses in parens.