Quick hiatus to administer exams

Why, oh why does year-end grading torment me so?

Remind me never to give the class the option to turn in assignments "on your own schedule" at any point in the semester. They do not take advantage of the situation. Rather, they only take advantage of the situation. /sigh It's been a couple of fun days of grading. With an exam given today and another Thursday, Jal's going to have to wait.

Amazing how many WoW bloggers and players have some foot in academia. One of our most active guildies is an interim principal, and Spinks apparently is doing graduate work (Lissanna too?).

The good news is that I should have a AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Quad-Core waiting on me once I'm done. The MacBook, he tries, but he's really not up to serious WOWing (says the guy who was playing on an iBook and Mac Mini G4 not two or three years ago). I've thought back to the times I've been really impressed with WoW's scenery, and they're when I played in Auberdine at a LAN bar nearly five years ago, another "bar" almost four years ago in Winterspring, and when I got a new computer and flew through Nagrand, what, a year and a half ago?

Hardware really makes the game.

Eclipse and reconfiguring action bars

As any astute/obsessive screenshot studier can tell, after years of 2 is Starfire, 3 is Wrath, 4 is Healing Touch, and 5 is Moonfire, I've finally given in and changed. I've slowly been moving stuff around, adding Starfall, Insect Swarm, and Forces of Nature to the main action bar, and occasionally now swapping Travel Form (great for PvE escapes) with Moonbeam or whatever it is that silences folk. The new Eclipse dynamic plus the addition of Hurricane, Innervate, and Moonbeam to my situational rotation finally required an Action Bar rethink.

The Main action bar now has Starsurge at 2. Though the mouseover doesn't say what the dmg is, it's a lot. I haven't bothered with mathes, but I use Starsurge whenever it hits cooldown. It's my lead pulling shot the way Starfire used to be. Starfire used to be the choice because it had greater range than Wrath and because its slow casting speed didn't matter for the first shot. Now Starsurge's cooldown plus insane damage says it's the new "2".

3 stays Wrath. I wish I could force Eclipse to start off going Lunar, as I still want to smash 3 after 2, but for me, Starsurge seems to always give me 15 towards Lunar the first time through. Perhaps I should swap Starfire and Wrath so that 3 is Starfire, but I also like knowing 3 represents Wrath's speed. Anyhow....

Note: Actually 3 and 5 are macros that proc my spellpower trinkets and then cast Wrath or Starfire. This is an absolute must, folks. Macro-ing trinkets is the easiest dps upgrade there is.

4 is now Moonfire, which throws me off a little. I accidentally hit 5 off and on for a few hours. The muscle memory is scary. But the move down makes it easier to think of [towards] Solar at 5, [towards] Lunar at 3, with both dancing around 4 as it fades.

5 is, duh, Starfire. I hate having three keys spent where I used to have two for the same purposes, but I'm getting used to it. It has pushed me to reconfigure more keys, however (see below).

I'm debating permanently swapping 8 from travel form to moonbeam (?), and have tried it out a few times, as silencing folk looks cool and has its practical side. I just use travel form so often -- running from the bank to AH, eg -- that it's hard to take off of the main bar.

Before now I, admittedly, moused everything else. I had a few more bars set up, like Shift-4 for when I needed to go healz for an extended period of time (see? Healing touch was 4 on my main bar, originally, and Shift-4 is a bar full o' healing), but I've broken down and set up my Num Pad for the left action bar above the main. It's mostly in order of the picture, above. Heals are 4-6 to keep with the 4 theme. 1-3 are aggressive. 0 is to pop Tranquility in a 5-man emergency, which happens more than I'd like. (Anyone notice that they were doing more off-healing right before Cat? I'm thinking lots of Priests were alts.) + is to take a healing pot.

I'm eying the Razer Naga to make this all even easier, moving those num pad selections to the right hand, keeping the movement, esp strafing, easier to reach with the left. I might eventually end up swapping the main action bar to the mouse instead. Can't tell what would be best.

So my only "heady" point here is to say to people who think real-world cash doesn't influence virtual world performance, even beyond the ability to buy the game and expansions, beyond buying net access, and beyond the computer's hardware so that you can see more than 14 fps, we can drill all the way down to a $70 mouse allowing you to access more spells quickly and efficiently. It's a one-dollar one-vote system for everything past Angband, I think.

Ding! 81

Welp, even a part-timer levels up pretty quickly in Cat. I'm on 81, though I saw worgen druids at 81 before I dinged, which is just painful to think about. I've been running with Jal off and on since, what, March 2005? Sheesh. And somebody else had caught up with all I've done in about 32 hours. It's painful seeing how quickly your virtual work is made obsolete.

So far, the game is fine, but painfully more of the same as before. Kill X of Y then report back to (x,y). Read backstory if you really want, wash, rinse, repeat. Five years in, Blizzard could be figuring out better ways to tell stories. The full motion video (though rendered in-game) continues to be used a bit (see below), but overall the game mechanics simply haven't changed enough.



Now just as BC wowed me with its scenery, both Hyjal and Vashj'ir are visually impressive. I was planning on upgrading my PC's hardware to get a decent GTA IV experience already and look forward to seeing the improvement for WoW. I'm saving Vashj'ir until I have better gear before playing much more. That said, all the crabs sitting around have gotten me about 50 points of skinning in no time flat.

The new level feedback is both neat and n00bish.



Yes, I realize I have a new talent point. Yes, I know I should check a trainer for new skills. Got it. Still, it's an extra layer of professionalism that makes the game feel a little more polished, even if Cindermaul requires a logout, cache deletion, and restart to clear and going back to grab Finkle's Skinner causes a hard lock.

Sheesh, okay! I've still got 400 in front of me in Proudmoore. Sign off already! Good thing half the server lives in Aussieland -- or is it morning there already?

Gear inflation. Goodbye purple, hello green.

It surprised me in BC, but by LK I'd gotten used to it. And it's happening again. All the virtual rewards from those hours you played are gone in just a few minutes playing Cat. My Blood Boil Lancet that I'd used as a near end-game weapon is gone. The Wrathful Gladiator's Cloak I picked up with honor points I didn't realize I had right before Cat went live is doomed. It's just a matter of time.

Spinks beat me to it a bit, but the green drops aren't always bad either:

One thing I have noticed though is that random green drops in Vash’jir look to be better quality than similar green quest rewards. (For example, I picked up a level 79 dagger with 963 spellpower on it – that’s a similar item level (283) to the caster drops from heroic 25 man Lich King. Level 79.)

I'm mostly running Hyjal, but it's true. I mentioned in April 2009 that I rarely find drops that instantly replace something I'm using (they usually go to the AH for me; Spinks say she automatically DEs), and have a green drop already in there from Cat.

I can't decide if Blizzard is virtually bribing us to buy or if this is actually a way LK-only players could be kept separate from Catters. I used to be sure it was the former, and now I'm not as sure. I'm confident more are interested in the first, though.

Anyhow, here are some pix of the greens with comparisons with my current gear that I either took or considered as quest rewards (or got as a drop) that have likely already hit the gear rotation. Admittedly, some of my gear is crud (this is when I remind you that I'm a "part-time" player), but it's interesting to see. You'll probably have to click them to read some, as Blogger will miniaturize the shots to fit. I mean, seriously, +260 spellpower out of the gate? Sheesh. I ran Heroic Azjol-Nerub while playing just for fun and, boy, I'm already nearly an end gamer for LK.

(Note: I didn't get them all. For whatever reason, taking a screenshot (there's no screenshot key on my MacBook's keyboard, and I haven't remapped for when I'm playing away from my KVM) only comes out about 40-50% of the time.)









Btw, don't forget to pay for Illustrious skinning (any skinning trainer, afaict), first aid, etc.

Has anyone else noticed the reroute landing page for the Armory is pretty facebooky now?

Cataclysm Starts

Welp, I didn't make it out like I'd planned at midnight, but did log in quickly at 7am EST to see what's still a steady stream of folk taking off from Moonglade over to Mount Hyjal (I believe). And Blizzard wasn't lying. I can't fly in the old world, though it's neat seeing everybody who is.

People start riding Arorus around 0:40.

I wonder if anybody's level 85 yet. ;^)

Cat -- Where do I start?

In the interest of serving part-timers like myself, who haven't beta'd or know where they're going on Tuesday...

First off, most say to buy Old World Flying from Bralla Cloudwing in Stormwind first. The comments there on WowHead suggest 250g is the gold sink.

You've then got two choices of where to start, apparently. First, it sounded like Vashj'ir would be an interesting place to start, as I ultimately enjoyed the Indian-themed demons from BC. But then it turns out the entire zone is under water and that you end up riding seahorses or something, nearly or more wack than the Draenai spaceship storyline I'm still essentially ignoring.

The other choice is Mount Hyjal, which is even better because you're apparently helping save Nordrassil, the other world tree.

The Mount Hyjal quest line is also easy to access. You click on one of the help wanted boards in SW or IF or Darn and are told to go all the way to Moonglade. That's tough for druids to pull off, right?

Mount Hyjal is one of the two 80-82 level-up zones in Cataclysm. Breadcrumbs come from Stormwind and Orgrimmar from the Hero's Call and Warchief's Command billboards, which send players to Moonglade. There, the breadcrumb As Hyjal Burns directs players to the zone, where the chain proper starts underneath Nordrassil, the world tree, with Inciting the Elements and The Earth Rises.

That should last us a while.

Restokin talks raid gear

Gosh, I hate betas. I wish there was some way to test expansion betas kinda like they test new cars, with lots of stuff so that nobody can really tell what the testers are driving. As I've lamented before, by virtue of not beta testing, I'm weeks behind on learning what to do once Cat hits. Someone was asking an honest question about Cat via Proudmoore's capital Trade channel a week or so ago and one of the unhelpful answers was, "That's what playing the beta is for." /sigh



Anyway, it looks like Lissanna at Restokin is helping make up for my lack o' beta:

So, my guild officers asked everyone to look into what their pre-raid gear options are. So, I spent several hours one day looking at all the instance drops, reputation items, and badge rewards. I thought that I would post it here on my blog for other people to benefit from, rather than only posting it on my guild forums. Since moonkin & resto share caster leather gear, I’m including both in this gear list.

Below she lists the gear that makes the GS cut and the sources for each, as well as another page on faction rewards. Honestly, though, in RP-land, nobody should know this stuff yet. Like Spinks said recently, iirc, it's not like I want to RP, but I would prefer a little consistency in the game, whether that's timeline (the post I'm talking about concentrated on how new starting zones act like LK events, etc, hadn't yet happened, even if you were running back to do low level quests with your main) or other players' knowledge.

So these guides are still not as good as having already scoped everything out, but a great benefit over starting from scratch. Seems like I just did this for LK, but there you go.

At times, it feels like theorycrafting gets in the way of playing the game. Oh well. Thanks for the info and work, Lissanna!