Grandstanding for 1 min

Kleps recently made a big post about why people blog, or why he blogs, or something. I think Penny-Arcade summed it up a lot more succinctly recently, seen here. We like to talk about WoW, for whatever reason, and while that's allegedly what the forums are for, those are more about whining, usually stupidly.

One of the most annoying things about the forums is the whole 'bandwagon' phenomenon. Someone says something dumb and a bunch of people repeat it as though it were true until the end of time.

One example is 'Arena is ruining PvE because blizzard balances everything around arena!' This particular attitude is annoying enough that it gets it's own post. See, this breaks down in a lot of places.

1) Blizzard has always balanced the game around PvP as well as PvE, this was true before arenas came along.

2) Up until WotLK started, there really hadn't been any case of this being true. Challenge anyone to name a change from Season 1's start till 3.0 that was made to improve arena balance and negatively affected raiding balance and... no one has ever been able to give an answer. Some try to say 'what about illumination?!' and conveniently forget that every healer was crying for illumination nerfs because paladins didn't run oom in karazhan. Some people point out stuff like reducing Cyclone's range, or nerfing Hand of Freedom, and that's assinine because those spells weren't being used in PvE (back then Cyclone even had DRs in PvE).

3) Since WotLK started, there have been some, ah, emergency nerfs to get pvp under control. Conflagrate and Arcane Barrage mainly. Most of the nerfs, like to rogues or DK cooldowns, were compensated at the same time with pve buffs, making them actually stronger in pve. I acknowledge that there have been a few times where nerfs to PvP meant undeserved nerfs to PvE since LK shipped though.

4) There have been lots of times where raiding balance has had a negative effect on pvp balance. Probably a lot more than the other way around, frankly. Lifebloom's HoT wasn't nerfed until 3.0 simply because blizzard was afraid of costing resto druids their pve viability. DKs similarly should have had their damage reduced a while ago. Divine Plea started out as overpowered as it was for holy because paladins complained that they couldn't use it at all in raids. Ret paladin damage has similarly been an issue, with exorcism going live as usable in pvp because it was needed in raids.


I just wish people would accept the fact that the game has both pvp and pve, and that you're going to see changes to game balance made for the sake of both. Sometimes, though not often, they're going to negatively affect each other. Usually, the 2 are well separated, and I expect most of the issues pvp nerfs have recently caused will be rectified in an upcoming patch (there is plenty of wiggle room in destro talents to make up the lost damage elsewhere, like empowered imp or pyroclasm).

But what it comes down to, in my opinion, is that when you demand the game be balanced totally around raiding because pvp isn't important (or vice versa) you're just being selfish. Both sides of the game are important to people, both are important to the game, and despite what idiots say, they can co-exist just fine.

-Iapetes

How to Buy an Enchant

So you've been kicked from a heroic and yelled at to "enchant ur gear nub." We can help. We meaning your local enchanters. Here are the steps to a smooth transaction. If you're not a people person, see Alternate Guide A.

How to Buy an Enchant

1) Figure out which enchant you want. This may be several enchants based on cost or availability of mats. For example, while there are better enchants, greater savagery is somewhat cheap and a good choice for leveling weapons. Or maybe you're a lowbie in which case I have to point you in another direction: see Alternate Guide B. If you're just looking for a glow, look up beastslaying, it's cheap and gives a nice red glow. There are several ranks with higher ones giving more visible glows. Alternatively if you want blue go for Striking, it gives +X to your weapon's damage and again, is more visible at higher ranks.

2) Look up the materials. I use www.wowhead.com.

3) Get the materials. There are several ways to do this.
3a) Buy them directly from the AH or trade channel.
3b) Hire an enchanter to DE some items for you. With luck you'll get what you need. Don't forget to tip.

4) Find an enchanter. Rather than a generic "LF enchanter" instead say "LF enchanter for [enchant]." If you're looking for many enchants, try something like "lf high level enchanter to link book." Then you can search through all the enchants they can do.
4a) Check your realm forum for a list of crafters. There will often be a list of people with the rarest enchants.

5) Figure out where to meet and agree on which enchants you're getting.

6) Hand over mats. Some enchanters prefer one set at a time, I do. It allows the enchanter to easily tell if you're given the right mats.

7) Put the item to be enchanted it "will not be traded."

8) Put some gold in the currency area. Some enchanters will give a price in advance, others expect tips, and some work for free with mats, most often if they're leveling up. How much? It depends. Start at 10g if you're above level 70 and work up from there if the enchant is rare or if the enchanter had to travel or wait a long time. If you're a lowbie, don't worry so much; don't bankrupt yourself, but if a tip would bankrupt you, maybe you need to shift priorities. If you're a twink, tip well; if the enchanter is going to sell his soul to help you in your quest to ruin the game for new players the least you can do is make him rich.

9) Thank the enchanter.

Why did I make this?
Well to start off, I'm an enchanter. I like to help people, but it's asking a lot when someone sends a vague tell like "what enchants do you have for a rogue?" The problem here is that I don't know what sort of budget you have: like I said there are basically two tiers of WotLK enchants: good but cheap and great but bye bye gold. I don't know what enchants are best for rogues and even if I did, I might not have the best, so I offer what I can. I've run into people who give nothing, not even a thank you. I've run into people who know what they want, but it's a terrible idea (most of the battlemaster enchants I've done have been for hunters) due to effectiveness or cost.

Long story short: I've had preventable bad experiences as an enchanter. Not to lay it all on the enchanter: Enchanters, you can now link your books in trade, so save everyone's time and don't say "enchanter lf work" when you could say "[skill] enchanter lf work [book]"

Alternative Guide A
Look on the AH for a scroll which has your desired enchant. It will have a name like Scroll of [enchant name].

Alternative Guide B
Rather than using my time and your gold: find someone to do it for free. Who would give out free enchants? Lowbie enchanters. Hang out in a main city and you might find someone screaming his poor lungs out looking for someone to enchant. He's trying to level and wants to avoid wasting mats. He gets a skillup, you get an enchant, everyone wins. Well, except me, I get more competition. :P

Good luck and have fun with your glowy new weapon!

Do all paladins have this problem?

I recently started playing D&D with a few friends. We all play WoW as well at various levels, so as a joke we all made equivalent characters in DandD. I made my paladin.

Tonight our DM had us running through WC. Yea, we're taking the joke far. We got here by running from Crossroads to attack furbolgs who turned out to be diseased. I suspected it was the Plague, but the DM keeps saying nothing is undead. Maybe it's the Flood. Anyway...

We're in WC and we got attacked by crocolisks. We engage them. Meanwhile slime monsters drop in far behind us and start launching ranged attacks. The result was an obnoxiously long fight because most of our damage is melee and my only ranged 'attack' is a taunt of sorts (divine challenge). Due to my race (Eladrin) I can teleport, but it's the same distance as my running. The result is that to engage the far away enemies I have to run, very slowly. I never actually got to them. Afterward I thought of making by teleport longer range so it would be usable as a distance closer.

Is this a universal rule that paladins never can get into melee range?

Noblegarden: First Impressions

First off, some info about the eggs, this will help explain the results I've seen so far. There are a certain number of spawn locations for eggs, something like 30. At any time there are a certain number of eggs up, around 5. So what do we get from this?

1) Eggs respawn in a set location. In other words, stand somewhere long enough and you'll get an egg.
2) Eggs respawn as fast as they are picked up. In other words, your best friend is someone who picked an egg at the other side of the town. Or, the faster you pick, the faster they can be picked.
3) These come together to mean this: If every spot is camped the eggs will be picked almost instantly, leading to the maximum possible eggs/second in the area.

Hunting is discouraged. Camping means faster eggs for everyone. Hunting means lots of travel time and longer delays between picks. After all, only with perfect timing will an egg pop up right as you run there, whereas with standing, you're always there.

People seem to have realized this and the result is a lot of people camping a spot or two. It's very efficient. It's also boring and looks weird.

It's not all bad though. While there are random achievements, none of the meta is random. If you get nothing you need from eggs, you need hundreds of chocolates to buy the items used for the parts of the meta. But that is doable. Perhaps three hours? It's a grind, but at least it is doable. In practice it's likely to be faster since a rare egg drop means 25-100 fewer eggs to farm.

Perhaps that is bad. What does it indicate of the influence of the Love is in the Air fiasco that I can see a holiday as an improvement because it is boring, but at least it's not random?

So there we go: Noblegarden, it's boring but it won't screw you out of the drake. Good luck with Children's Week!

Second Impressions
It's a matter of how many people are around. During the weekend it was terrible because there were far too many people. Now on a weekday afternoon there aren't a ton of people around. In Bloodhoof I estimate 10-15 people. That's enough to keep eggs picked up and spawning, but it's not too much so that it becomes faster to camp. Basically you don't want so many people that every egg can be watched. This means that people have to run around to get all the eggs. When this happens it's actually a good bit of fun.

Don't forget to get the daily before you start picking up eggs. I keep getting it after I've already picked up 15 or so eggs.

Overall it's a decent event, it's just not so good when there are tons of people. With this in mind, Blizzard should have expanded the area (this risks putting people into aggro range of hostile mobs, though it seems to be a 18+ event anyway) or added more towns, perhaps by adding the starting zone itself or the cities. Imagine an egg hunt in Orgrimmar! Or even better, add 'super eggs' to Wintergrasp with double the chocolate and a higher chance of rare drops.

I recently had a nice pay it forward moment. While on my way around southern Kalimdor to plant flowers I remembered I needed to drop by Un'Goro for the egg playing. I did a /who and sent a tell to an 80 to see if he could help me. He said he could and after a quick plant in Tanaris I was in flight. While there we helped each other with the blushing bride achievement since I completed the tuxedo and got the dress this afternoon. In thousand needles someone was looking for a rabbiting wand, so I invited him and he joined us. The end result was a few more achievements for me and I got to help some people too. That made me feel good.

Why Blog?

Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn wrote another lovely post about blogging. This one specifically, as I took from it, was about the recent push to improve blogs. In all honesty I stopped reading once it got practical: about actually improving it. I am not a practical person. Instead I cared about the start, asking why you want to improve/change?

Well why would you work to improve your blog? Obvious answers are things like making it more useful or informative. They eventually come around to more readers or happier readers (keeping the ones you have). Why more readers? I see a few reasons.

A bigger audience means more people to influence. This is important if you're in the propaganda business, or any other form of mass manipulation such as advertising. More and better are nearly the same thing.

If you're looking for profit, a bigger audience means more ad revenue.

These are fairly straightforward and predictable. How about someone effectively trying to confirm their existence? More readers mean more people who by their reading are confirming existence. Or maybe a sort of virtual popularity contest. Being popular makes people feel better, ignoring the massive pressure that can come with it. I realize these sound a little pitiful, like lonely people making websites just so someone with realize they exist. It's not exactly like that. The online world is a bit like a city: you're surrounded by people, but also potentially alone and completely ignored. This is not a comfortable state for most people; to be ignored and by inaction have their existence denied. They seek confirmation that they exist. Online people may do the same. Writing and being read means that you are not alone in the giant city.

So yes, back to my point. We improve because it is increased fulfillment of the original purpose of the blog. If you write a blog to inform people of the dangers of say, land shark attacks in apartments, and no one read or learned from it, you'd be failing. Improving the blog to get people to read and learn would mean fulfilling the original goal of informing and presumably protecting people from the dangers of land sharks. Along the same line, if you wrote a blog to be noticed, improvement would mean making it and you more noticeable or if it was to spread your views on feral druids, improvement would mean making more people share your views.

So why do I want to improve my blog? I used to write on the official forums for WoW, but I stopped making many threads or even responding much. I felt like I had something worth saying (don't we all think that? Our egos are ridiculous) and it was getting lost. It was also frustrating to try to write something good and end up with responses of nothing but tl;dr and flaming. I suppose it's a bit of that confirmation of existence thing, not wanting to see a thread drop down ten pages in an hour due to spam. It would be cool if Blizzard noticed and was influenced by what I write, but let's face it, that's not a realistic assumption. In the meantime I can write what I think, record my experiences, and maybe learn something from the process. Improving that means writing more clearly and perhaps more often, though no more often than I have something to say.

This is madness

My rogue is level 57 and her hearthstone is still set to Sunstrider Isle. I intend to not change it until 80. The only except is if I take so long that another expansion comes out. In that case, whatever is the new level cap.

I may be the only person who was glad to no longer get hearthed when ungrouped in an instance.

Ulduar and Excessive Awesome

Tonight I did Ulduar for my second time and my firs time in a fresh instance. It was a lot of fun.

Flame Leviathan
I was on a motorcycle for this fight.

The gauntlet was the most fun I've ever had on trash. That's not saying much. The gauntlet was more fun than most boss fights I've done. It's a frantic mess with fires everywhere and smoke and motorcycles zooming all around.

The fight itself is less crazy, but just as much fun. As a motorcyclist I had to use a speed boost to get way ahead of the boss and drop tar where I thought he'd pass. Since I was new I tended to get hit by his frontal attack a bit too often. Still, it was a lot of fun. It took us two attempts. Overall I think he's pretty easy, though my guild had already killed him the week before, so it's not as if we were totally new.

Razorscale
We died on... it, a few times last night. It's a very fun fight. There are adds all over the place which the tanks have to pick up and DPS have to kill. Unfortunately for me consecration and divine storm seemed to put out more aggro than tanks could handle. Focusing more on one target didn't work much better. This surprised me since there is a significant body of evidence and even fake quotes which demonstrate that tank aggro in balanced around being disconnected.

Tonight I was ret again for the first few attempts. They were of variable quality. Overall there seemed to be issues with the fire being hot, which hopefully will be fixed sometime.

After a few attempts I was switched to prot. Switching bugged my talents, leaving me with part of my ret spec. Now my prot spec is a mess and my ret spec is incomplete, and also a mess. I still need new glyphs. I'm bad. :(

Tanking was a bit more stressful than ret, probably because when I tank I care more. Still, it was fun and I learned a bit more about the fight. The only annoyance was with divine plea: it refreshes when I attack, but sometimes I have no mobs. So, I'd steal one from the nearby DK now and then.

On our second to last attempt we had a very good attempt. Two deaths: a mage and resto shaman. It was after the wipe that we saw, if one of them had not died, we might have downed the dragon: less than 75k when we all died to the enrage. Final attempt was messier with more early deaths, and we still hit the enrage, but the boss was dead.

Excessive Awesome
When Razorscale died I felt something which I'd not felt in a long time: that weird rush when you pull your hair out and struggle and wipe and wipe and pay huge repairs and the boss dies and it just feels amazing. It's the feeling of beating a challenge, something which was lacking in Naxx.

I love Ulduar. My earlier fear has been removed. I look forward to dying and then making dead the whiniest robot ever.

The other excessive awesome was my tanking. Here's the situation: I wanted to switch my mainspec to ret, but hadn't had the chane. When Razorscale dropped a tanking belt I rolled need, but reconsidered due to my desire to move away from prot and some questions about my spec. Apparently I impressed the officers and the loot council voted for me to get the belt. This carried with it a pretty strong hint, nudge, and kick under the table that I should keep prot as my main. I guess I'm too good at things I don't want to do. No no, I'm not saying I don't want to tank, I'd just hoped to go ret and take all the DPS plate, but I crushed my own dreams.

In unrelated news my shaman has weird glyphs and a messed-up enhancement spec because I misread a talent and thought I'd be using lava burst as part of my rotation. Maybe I actually do, I wouldn't know, I'm even worse at my shaman than my paladin.

Spell Reflect Volleyball!

Here's the setup:
9 Prot warriors, a handful of magi, and a pair of healers.
Improved spell reflection: You can reflect spells directed at allies
Glyph of Spell Reflection: Reduces cooldown by one second.
The overall result is that with 9 warriors and a 9 second cooldown, any cast can be reflected permanently.
One mage per team is the server while the rest have the job of AoEing the warriors to ensure that they have enough rage. The healers keep the warriors from dying.
Players can only wear gear without stats.

How to play:
The mage casts a nuke at an enemy warrior. Someone on the other team must reflect it back. Then the first team must reflect it back. Generally speaking you score when the other team gets hit.

Scoring:
Use standard volleyball rules, but adapted for the situation. Getting hit by a spell is counted like the ball falling on your side of the net. Getting hit but resisting is counted as if the other team hit it last and it fell out of bounds.

Strategy:
Rage generation vs. healing and regen: The mage in charge of rage generation is on the same team as the warriors they are AoEing, though not the same party since he needs to be able to attack. He must balance his mana usage and the need for healing with the need to ensure enough rage for a reflect.
Proper rotation: If someone screws up the rotation, you might not have a reflect ready next time the spell comes around.

Optional rule to make it interesting:
In addition to spell reflect, the warriors may use charge (however they cannot have the talent to use it in combat) and shockwave. Charging will allow you to prevent reflects and generate extra rage, however if may also put you out of range to reflect and cannot be used constantly. To prevent a win by mass-charging, there is a limit of two charges per bounce. Shockwave, well that could knock out the entire other team if they're grouped up too much, but at the cost of rage and positioning.