A Weekend in the Bitter Cold

74.previewSo yeah, guess what I did this weekend? Hint: Lots of WoW and not much else lol. I hit level 72 on Saturday morning, level 73 on Saturday evening and level 74 early last night in Dragonblight. At the moment I am approximately 40% into my current level. My “goal” is 75 tonight, but I doubt I will reach it; Since the weekend is over I can’t play all day and night.

The queues on Proudmoore are horrible. During our peak, it is at around 2,000. On Friday when I logged on it was at 700, which is a 20 to 30 minute wait. When the queue was down to less than a minute left, my cable went out for 5 minutes. By the time I was able to log back in, the queue was over 1,500. Goddamm it. If the queue is horrid when I get off work tonight, I guess I will have a 1 to 2 hour chance to attend to a few hobbies that I have been neglecting…

So Dragonblight: This is a large zone with a crapton of quests. Many of the quests are very cool from a lore standpoint. Make sure to complete all of the non-group chains starting at Wintergarde Keep, otherwise the awesome chain won’t unlock. The zone itself though is kind of annoying because there are about 20 quest hubs, spread out all over the map. Each with maybe 3 quests. I am at 109/115 quests completed in Dragonblight. 6 more then I can move on to Grizzly Hills.

So far I’ve run Utgarde Keep, The Nexus and Azjol’Nerub. Hopefully I’ll get to try out a few more new instances tonight. I’ve replaced a couple of my Burning Crusade retribution items with quest and instance blues. Any quest greens or green drops get disenchanted for the sake of profession skilling. I am noticing that many of the items have Haste and Armor Penetration, I need to catch up on my theory crafting one of these days. New items that I have added to my DPS set:

  1. Chiseled Stalagmite Pauldrons
  2. Shroud of Fluid Strikes
  3. Wrynn’s Legplates of Carnage
  4. Greaves of the Traitor
  5. Executioner’s Band
  6. Medallion of Heroism
  7. First Mate’s Pocketwatch
I miss being a protection spec tank, but I don’t think that I’m going to spec back until I am 80 and needed for tanking heroics. These are a little out of order:
Arrow surfin’ Howlin Fjord. I like this zone, it’s very dramatic looking. Quite a sight when you first hop off of the boat!
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Azjol Nerub
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That burning patch of forest outside one of the alliance towns in HF
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Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight. The aurora borealis is purdy
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The Nexus
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Northrend: Day One

Ding-71Ding 71!I hope everyone is having fun in Northrend, I know I am! :). I’ll sort through my screenshots from release day and post a couple below a cut, picture blog style after work.

The sever queue was at around 700 as of 6:30pm last night. It took a half hour to log on. Other than that bit, I was honestly impressed: In contrast to what was posted earlier, neither the world nor the instance server crashed at all. Hell, the game wasn’t even laggy at any point during prime time which is just astounding for Proudmoore. So my hats off to you Blizzard: Whatever it is that you did to the servers during the long ass maintenance on Tuesday obviously did good.

The new areas look really nice. WoW is almost exactly four years old and it still looks good, that is quite an achievement. The graphical improvement isn’t a huge jump, it’s more subtle and it’s for the most part, in the new areas. For example: Compare, the textures and shadowing from Valiance Keep to the old world cities like Stormwind; Particularly the difference in the wood and stone detailing at different zoom ranges.

Coriel’s has a great idea, I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this last night: I am going to turn Instant Quest Text off to force myself to actually read everything. I tried doing that last night but still ended up skimming most everything, it’s really hard to not rush. I want to get to 80 as fast as possible, but I also want to enjoy questing.

Anyway, leveling takes quite a bit longer, naturally. I hit level 71 at 12:30am last night (technically this morning). Dinging 71 was my goal for the evening; I was pretty sure that I wasn’t to make it because it was already late but ummm…chose to stay up a little longer. Just one more quest! Sleeping is overrated.

I should have paid more attention to the new item models instead of disenchanting them immediately without at least an armory preview. I already chanted two pieces of gear using the new recipes. I shouldn’t have done that. Tonight I am going to skill whatever I can off of my Burning Crusade shard stash. Leveling Blacksmithing will have to wait until I get ore from my hunter.

(Pictures below)

Fresh off the boat :). Well sort of, I think I’m actually running out of the keep.
VK

Flight from Amber Point. /shrug I like dragons 😛
Dragon

Inside of Talramas, the crashed necropolis dead north in BT
Talramas

Did an Uthgrade Keep run with guildmates. I should have  taken a better screenshot. I kind of got a pic of the ass end of the neat looking fire thing.
UK

Howling Fjord just outside of the Utgarde Keep entrance. Sad story: I was summoned to UK so I had no clue where hell I was. Rather than finding the turtles I hearthed back to Shatt, ported to SW, then took the boat back to BT because I am a noob.
HF

Status: Out For Delivery

Posterity

Expect many WoW posts and very little of anything else for the next couple of months for obvious reasons. I need to remember to turn the music back on while leveling the new content. I’ve had it off for a long ass time and don’t want to miss the new soundtrack.

I cleared out Keiya’s inventory space, fixed her addons, added in the experience bar and parked her at Stormwind Harbor. If anyone else is looking for a good customizable experience bar mod, XPBarNone works very well (pic). Curse all of you people who got their game early and have no work/school. QQ me.

I finally respec’d both my hunter and my cat. I went with the cookie cutter 51/10/0 BM build. I am really liking the pet talent trees because it makes so much sense versus having to wander around taming random animals. I took the Beast Mastery talent after all for the extra skill points. I might tame a Core Hound or aDevilsaur at some point; I really want one but I honestly cannot stand the stomping sound.

One of the reasons why I am looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King is because of the Lore. The Burning Crusade was an absolute blast, but aside from Illidan and a few other things, it was a little out there in terms of the Warcraft continuum (spacegoats!). Anyway, I am going to take my time reading all of the quest text (especially since I wasn’t in beta and thus haven’t done any of them). I have a bad TL;DR habit.

Preparing for the Expansion

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Yay, happy birthday to me :D. Two days to go until Wrath of the Lich King arrives, so excited! I need to re-enable the experience bar on my UI and redownload questing mods. I spent so much time focusing on the grouping and raiding aspect of my interface that I completely forgot that I would be leveling to 80.

The incremental world events leading up to the expansion release date are fun. I logged on after work yesterday and there were a crap ton of people waiting next to the King in Stormwind Harbor. The scourge invasion began sometime during my raid; I did manage to catch it later in the evening while I was putzing around on my banker and on my lowbie horde alt.

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Oh hey you know what? I haven’t actually logged on my poor hunter Doombeard in several weeks. I haven’t even finished up the last inch of mining, researched a new talent spec, fixed his user interface or anything. I guess I should do that this weekend (after I beat Fallout 3). I really do intend on leveling him to 80 sooner than two months before the third WoW expansion pack hits…

We did the Black Temple for our last Burning Crusade guild raid. There was sufficient tankage so I stayed Retribution (I don’t plan on specing back to prot until 80. Being melee apparently means that you die a lot lol. Four bosses down that event, fun!

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Also did a Molten Core achievement run last night. Seeing Ragnaros for the very first time way back in the vanilla WoW days will always be one of my favorite WoW memories. I mean he’s huge…and he’s on fire. It was still early so we ran over to AQ40 and zerged it up to Twin Emperors. If there’s interest tonight, we’ll do BWL.

WoW Update: Echoes of Doom

_original_0The image is for future reference and because I forgot to upload a screenshot relevant to this post: Ret gear unbuffed.

I really want to love the exotic pets, but they are all super annoying. Holy frijole and I thought that the crocodile hiss was bad. Please Blizzard, please hotfix the stomping, the roaring, and the constant flaming sound that the MC Core Hounds make when you stand next to them. My hunter Doombeard will most likely just stick with his cat Cheesecake.

The server went to shit over the weekend, the instancing server specifically. The realm as a whole suffered from occasional lag spikes, but I wasn’t getting constantly booted off so it wasn’t all that bad. It took us around twenty minutes to zone into any raid instance on Friday. Once the raid ID was created, it was fine for the most part.

Saturday on the other hand: We had a full raid for the Black Temple but had to cancel, after humping the raid swirly with several other groups for two hours (Bejewled FTW). There were approximately 30 people total across all of the BC raid instances that event, but a crapton of people in the 5-man dungeons, Scarlet Monastery in particular for the Headless Horseman. Did the seasonal events and achievements break something? Next time: Reserve an instance ahead of time.

So raiding: If you have ever wanted to run any of the higher end 25-man raiding instances, now is the time. Super nerf. On Sunday I joined as a guest on a Mount Hyjal run. One shotted Rage Winterchill and Kaz’Rogal, wiped twice on Antheron; Not sure what happened after, I had to leave raid to sleep (work FTL). I picked up the pink toilet brush, which of course drops after I spec retribution and after it becomes fairly useless…

I did a lot of Halloween questing over the weekend. I finally finished off The Power of Pine quest, which was the last thing that I needed for the title. Recall that the collect 20 flimsy mask achievement is being removed as a title requirement, being nearly impossible to achieve and all. To my understanding, this will happen in patch 3.0.3, which should go live during the event.

Oh hey the honor points aren’t going to be reset. Well then, in that case I am saving them for level 80.

Keiya’s UI: Post 3.0 Apocalypse Edition

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Designed for 1650×1080 widescreen windowed. Ugh it took hours to reconfigure everything to my anal UI needs. I am using WowMatrix to update my mods since WoW Ace Updater has been discontinued (the Curse client is crap). My old interface had two button bars, each with 3 rows of 12 buttons (72 total). I downsized it a bit so that there is one button bar with 3 rows of 20 buttons (60 total).

Instead of having FuBar run the entire bottom length of my screen, I shrunk it down to match the width of my buttons. There are actually two FuBars: the other one spans the top and is only visible on mouse over. Any non-essential plugin has been moved up top.

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The chat log will automatically fade after 30 seconds of no activity. The combat log is tabbed; I used to have it on the right side of my buttons, but since I have SCT setup to display everything that I would need to stare at in combat, there’s no use having it permanently visible. Instead, Omen and Recount are located on the far right. Recount is hot-keyed and Omen automatically pops-up in combat.

My raid UI is still messy, but what can you do? I’m not willing to sacrifice visibility for minimalism. I need to move the MT target list somewhere else. I am still missing BigBrother, which hasn’t been updated in 3 weeks and Cartographer, which wasn’t functioning well the last time I had checked. Here is a full list:

Bar mods

  • AutoBar: The upper right set of circular buttons are from AutoBar. This mod automatically sorts and displays things like consumables, oils, etc. For example, I have an AutoBar button for food consumables. When I mouse over it, all food items will be displayed. That way, I don’t have to place them all on my bars.
  • Bartender4: Allows you to completely customize your action bars in almost every sense. Location, size, spacing, number of buttons, keybindings, whatever.
  • ButtonFacade: Using this to replace CyCircled. Allows you to customize the appearance of your action bars. Compatible with Bartender4, AutoBar, and a bunch of other things.
  • eePanels2: Allows you to create background panels to place UI elements on. The transparent gray rectangle under the center button chunk is an eePanel.

Visible functionality mods

  • FuBar: The black bar on the bottom with my gold, the time, etc.
  • Quartz: A modular casting bar addon. Allows you to customize the appearance, size, and location of the cast bars.
  • TipTac: Using this to replace TinyTip. Allows you to customize the tooltips.
  • X-Perl Unit Frames: My unitframe mod of choice. This is being used for the player, target, party, and raid frames.
  • ClassTimer: The timers above the player and target nameplates on the raid screenshot are from this mod. ClassTimer tracks all of the buffs that I cast on myself as well as debuffs on my target. It makes it easier to keep track of when I need to recast a seal or rejudge an enemy.
  • Recount: Damage, healing and performance meter. I’ve tried most of them and Recount, in my opinion is the most comprehensive and easy to use. It does though require more resources than most other mods…
  • Omen: Threat meter.

Hidden

  • ArkInventory: This is the mod that I use for inventory management, it will automatically sort all of your crap into categories based off of user set preferences. For example, I have a section for healing gear, a section for consumables, and a section for quest items, etc. It also allows for inventory searches. Some people hate it, some like it.
  • Clique: Click casting. Example: I have Cleanse bound to my right mouse button and X-Perl set to highlight all dispellable debuffs. That way, all I have to do is right click on the raid and party portraits to cleanse, versus actually targeting them.

Raid tools

  • PallyPower: Paladin buff manager. This mod also allows you to assign buffs to other paladins in the raid who have PallyPower.
  • oRA2: I’m not happy with the way the main tank targets are being displayed, but since I can’t get the oRA2 configuration menu to display, I can’t change anything.

Retribution Gear: 3.0.2 Update

KeiyaRet This sucks, all of my mods broke. ALL of them (Outfitter and bartender retained their settings luckily). Anyway, since we were all given a free respec on Tuesday, I went 0/5/56 Retribution. That is to my understanding, the standard retribution spec for 3.0.2 give or take 1 or 2 points. I need to enjoy being retribution while it’s still imba (all of the talents are balanced to 80, not 70) and before/if it gets nerfed into the ground.

I was doing my dailies on belf island and made a point of ganking every single flagged horde (not in guard range) that caught my eye. Do you know how long it has been since I have been able to flat out gank someone? A shadow priest and a rogue died; they each died in like, 5 seconds flat. I can pretty much kill almost anybody within the time frame of one stun, as well as heal myself for a 4k average non-crit Holy Light. I almost never go OOM to boot. I wonder if that is OP….lol

This is my updated retribution have and need list. None of my shit is gemmed or chanted. I have a shitton of Dawnstones, but zero others. I’m going to be cheap and socket greens for the red and blue slots; Little point in spending hundreds of gold on gems for crap retribution gear at this point in the game. If the socket bonus strength, I went ahead and gemmed for the bonus. Otherwise, I just straight up red gemmed most everything else.


Items That I Have
The green items are pieces that I have equipped in the armory now. The yellow items are pieces that are in the bank. Last night I was being lazy and used the Outfitter gear optimizer for strength to build my gearset (my bank is such a trash hole now, I can’t find anything).

Need to Pickup
The orange items I effectively have and just need to swap tokens for (T4 tokens, rep, etc). The red items are pieces that I need to buy with badges. I have 209 badges to spend: 60*3 + 20 = 200. 9 badges leftover.

I have my shopping list ready for tonight, lol…

A is for Apathy

It has been a slow couple of weeks in general, gaming wise. There’s not really a whole lot to write about until the patch/expansion comes out and the non-WoW games that I am waiting for are released. Speaking of patches, popular rumor is that it’s coming out tomorrow (has it been confirmed? I’ve been too busy to track that).

We Finally got the bear mount out of the fourth chest in Zul’Aman. It’s too bad that we don’t have any time to farm them for everybody. In fact, tonight is most likely our last chance. Since we are all getting a free respec, I’m thinking that it might be lolret time, hells yeah! Meh, at least until I am needed to respec back into protection again. I am itching to play with my ret set, which still needs to be chanted and gemmed. Details details…

Did I mention exactly how much I am looking forward to having bag space again?

WTB Kodo

I’ve been farming Coren with guild members for the Kodo mount nightly with no such luck (for anyone). WTB KODO GODDAMMIT. On the other hand, I scooped up that tanking trinket and that DPS trinket (both equivalent to the badge items). I can cross the AP trinket off of the list ofret things that I want pre-expansion. You know, my hunter needs that too. I should take him in for free epics.

In order to get the Brewmaster title, there are nine achievements that need to be completed. Unfortunately though, five of them are only doable during Brewfest. Since the achievements aren’t on live yet, they will have to wait until next year. These are the achievements that can be done, or at least started.

  • Direbrewfest: Kill Coren Direbrew. Get a group, go to BRD, use the weird thing to the right when you zone in to port to Coren. You can grab the quest in the instance.

  • Disturbing the Peace: While wearing 3 pieces of Brewfest clothing, get completely smashed and dance in Dalaran. The Brewfest items are purchasable with tokens.

  • Have Keg, Will Travel: Obtain a brewfest mount. If you didn’t get the mount last year, good f’in luck getting one to drop off of Coren 🙁

  • Does Your Wolpertinger Linger?: Obtain a Wolpertinger pet. If you didn’t get one from last year, they are purchasable at the festival for 45 silver.

  • Brew of the Year: Sample 12 beers featured in the Brew of the Month club. The brew of month club membership form is purchasable for 200 Brewfest tokens.

Oh, the Brewfest hats by the way are one of the only hats wearable by extremely low level characters. If I recall correctly, they don’t have level restrictions. Nothing says “banker” like a level 1 pimped out near the mailbox in every vanity item possible.

WoW Update: 9/22/2008

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Small update; Been busy. Oh hey, I had completely missed the fact that Brewfest started over the weekend (September 20th through October 4th). Every inch of my soul loathes Blackrock Depths, but there’s a seasonal boss there that drops things so I might get in on some instance farming and do that, if other people are available.

  • We were four minutes off from getting the fourth chest in Zul’Aman last week. So close! Someone will get the bear mount next week, before it falls off of the face of Azeroth! Oh, I also finally got Mojo, the much coveted pet frog after around 50 Hex Sticks…
  • I pre-ordered my Wrath of the Lich King Collector’s Edition off of Amazon first thing Tuesday morning. I think both Gamestop and Amazon have stopped pre-orders on it. I need to find room to place all of these ginormous game boxes.
  • Let’s recap my pre-expansion check list: [✓] Level Doombeard to 70, [✓] Get Mojo before ZA goes out of style,  [  ] Skill mining to 375: Almost, [  ] 5k gold: err…
  • PopCap + WoW = This. Hah, I am so installing this addon.
  • Still undecided on what to do with my badges. I am leaning towards throwing caution to the wind and blowing them all on shiny DPS gear, knowing that it may very well be replaced with the first green drop that I encounter….

I think I’ll download the test client and try out a few builds on the PTRs this week.