Mists of Pandaria: Day One

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Two miracles happened today when logged into WoW (thus ending my approx 6 month hiatus). One: My user interface didn’t explode and utterly break as expected. Aside from a few errors and missing elements (my holy bar had vanished…), I didn’t have to do much of anything other than download an updated copy of my addons (against my better judgement I used an addon updater because I am lazy). Two: There were no server problems or queues on Proudmoore when I had logged in during prime time on release day. I downloaded the updated last night, logged in when I got home from work this evening, played, logged out when I was done. No queue, no serious lag, no server crashing. I’m not sure if that means anything anymore, but release days have traditionally been somewhat of a nightmare for past expansions.

I am half way through level 85. I did one of the starting dungeons shortly after logging in, leveled in Jade Forest and did the other starting dungeon. Had an absolute blast playing with friends again, which is really what much of the game is about for me; Good times all around. Jade Forest is a gorgeous zone by the way, hard to imagine that a game approaching it’s 8th year can look this good! Not planning on rushing to level 90 to raid as I did with past expansions. I think that I am looking forward to taking my time for once and not rushing through everything to stay on level with everyone else. Also, I don’t think I can really commit to a hardcore or even just a 2 to 3 night a week raid schedule anymore. I would love to raid again with a regular group at some point though.

Totally forgot how to play my paladin which was interesting considering that I was invinited into an instance right off the bat. Yay muscle memory! Also, I may actually go tankadin again this expansion but we’ll see.

On The Raid Finder

image_34Two weeks of Dragon Soul runs since returning to WoW after a two month Skyrim/whatever break and I manage to snag 5/5 pieces of Tier 13. Nice. This almost makes up for 6 years of bad rolls. Also, if you were in that one run with me where I broke the one item per run rule and won two of the armor tokens, I’m sorry :(, trigger happy.

I like the raid finder; It’s simple to use and gets people who wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to raid (or like myself, don’t have the time to participate in a regular schedule and don’t want to sit in LFG all night), into the new content with minimal hassle and server drama.

BlizzCon 2011 Photos (Better Late Than Never)

And I post this two months or so later. Oh well. Long story short, BlizzCon, our self anniversary gift to each other was fun. So fun that we both started up WoW again after a 4 month absence, then kind of stopped playing again when Skyrim came out a month later. I kind of haven’t logged in for patch 4.3 yet and I swear that I will one day if I can make it past the pile of games yet to be played. Speaking of which, it’s probably already too late to buy it but the Humble Indie Bundle #4 is a fantastic deal.

I think I like the idea of playing WoW on a more casual basis. Should I decide to log on consistently, it would be nice to raid again at some point, though I am not sure that I am interested in another fixed weekly raiding schedule. I’ll give Looking For Raid a try at some point. By the way, the cross-server Real ID friends dungeon running thing is a great feature. Being able to instance with my friends is again is pretty sweet, huzzah.

So the con: We ended up watching quite a few of the StarCraft 2 matches more than any other particular activity at the convention. Being able to attend the GSL finals was a real treat by the way ( both the main hall ad the RTS stages were packed). I really really wanted to stay until the end but since I was falling asleep in my chair, we ditched out at around midnight.

Here are a couple of photos. I suck at taking pictures by the way :/.

BlizzCon 2011: Ticket Success

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Success! It looks like we are actually going be able to go this year! I was number 700 in queue, a marked improvement over last year’s position at 5k. The maximum number of tickets allowed per transaction was reduced from 5 to 4 this year, which probably helped a little bit as well as the Internet Gods being extraordinarily kind to me this morning. Also, I am sure that having literally only Google Chrome open with absolutely no one else and no other application sucking bandwidth out of the networked helped as well. We were all on Vent and WoW when tickets went on sale last year.

I really wish that the ticket price wouldn’t keep creeping up, but whatever. Looking forward to meeting up with folks and what not in late October :D.

Non-WoW MMO’s

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I’m getting the WoW itch (and the blog itch) again. I haven’t been playing all that much for the past month or so, in lieu of other game releases, real life business and the like. In fact, we just got around to finally running Zul’Aman tonight (one of my absolute favorite raid instances back in the day, glad it’s back in the game).

Is it just me or does the 60 to 90 day mark seem to be the make or break point for most new MMORPGs? That span of time seems to be the period in which most of the converts either get bored of or burned out on the new game and start trickling back to old WoW habits. Though, if you truly do play that MMO consistently for about a month or so, that’s actually not a bad value in terms of time:money. A month of solid play isn’t bad for $60, considering how most games nowadays are at about 10 hours of gameplay if you are lucky, some significantly less (or more if you count multiplayer I guess).

The market is pretty saturated with fantasy MMOs to say the least. Do we really need more of them? I would absolutely love a good future themed game (with relatively fast paced action). Word is that Blizzard’s next-gem MMO, “Titan” will be sci-fi themed. If there is a game that I will consider replacing my WoW habit with, it would probably be that. And honestly, Blizzard is probably the only company that’s going to outdo Blizzard. That’s my 2 coppers on other MMOs for the time being.

Also, on an unrelated WoW note: I am kind of a backseat tank ?_?; Not in group of course because that’s fucking rude. Most of my in-head and whisper conversations to certain people have been inane concerns about the current PuG tank, how they fail at threat generation, fail at marking, etc. Though in my defense, we really do have horrible luck with PuG tanks. Properly marking mobs and assigning targets is a lost art apparently. I should learn to tank again, it would make our queue times shorter.

KeiUI 4.0 Info & Download Link

A couple of people have requested my UI setup, so here you all go; Many apologies for the uuuh delay lol. A full description of KeUI is included in this post. This interface has been exclusively designed for and used on a 1920×1080 windowed setup. It should however, still work properly with any windowed 16:9 ratio screen resolution.
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As a word of warning, I don’t play anything else other than Keiya most of the time so my interface is very retribution paladin centric (though I am looking into more class generic addons to replace things like Holytrinity and clcret). If anyone else uses a Logitech G13 and is interested in how I bind everything in accordance with my G13 profile, the keybindings configuration files are included within the WTF folder.

Installation Instructions
I sanitized all of the addon profiles as best as I could. After a fresh install, the correct profiles for each mod should load without having to fuss around with Reflux. If you want to use your Config.wtf file, just make sure to set the following values:

SET gxResolution “1920×1080″”
SET gxWindow “1”
SET uiScale “0.76999998092651”

Aside from that, setup is standard fair. I have included general instructions below; If you need more assistance, Tankspot has one of the better guides that I have seen in regards to uploading, downloading and configuring custom UI setups.

  1. Please please please make sure to backup your original Interface, WTF and Fonts folders. Both are located within your World of Warcraft root directory. Either rename both of these folders to something like, WTF_OLD or create a new folder and move them into it.
  2. Download the .zip file attached to this article and extract it into your World of Warcraft directory. The .zip file should contain three folders: Interface, WTF and Fonts.
  3. The following folders within the WTF folder will need to be renamed: YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME, YOUR_SERVER_NAME and YOUR_CHARACTER_NAME to your login name, server name and character name respectively.
  4. Login to WoW. At the character selection screen click on the “Addon” button located on the lower left. Click the checkbox at the top labeled, “Load out of date addons.” All of the major addons included within my UI compilation should be fairly recent, but I can’t guarantee how often this .zip file will be updated.
  5. Load your character and enjoy.

List of addons
The list of visible addons are included below.

  • Bartender 4
  • Chocolate Bar
  • ClassTimer
  • CLCRet
  • HolyTrinity
  • MikScrollingBattleText
  • Omen
  • OmniCC
  • oRA3
  • Pitbull4
  • Prat 3.0
  • Recount
  • SexyMap
  • SimpleTankFrames
  • TidyPlates
  • XPBarNone

If anyone has a request or configuration question, I would be happy to address them in this thread or via email when I have time.

Download

My Logitech G13 WoW Setup

I have my Logitech G13 broken down into three different states: M1 (default), M2 (red) and M3 (blue). By default the gamepad will always be in the M1 state. However, I have the Logteich software setup to allow me to momentarily shift into M2 and M3 while I have the two buttons below the thumbsticks pressed down. That way, I don’t have to manually press the M2 or M3 buttons at the top of the keypad to access any of the red or blue buttons. The colors by the way, correspond to the LCD backlight coloring for each state as well as my N52 setup. This is generally how I tried to organize each of the three states:

M1 (Default): Frequjently used items, combat abilities and regular shift modifiers (Shift, Control and Alt)
M1

M2 (Red): Blizzard interface elements such as the guild screen, map, professions as well as party targets (F1 through F5).
M2

M3 (Blue): Raid icons, auras, screenshotting, camera views and other stuff.
M3

The new gamepad software, version 6, will allow you to assign a button that will toggle you into any of the M states by right clicking on a button and going to Edit > Fuction. If you are using the old software, version 3.0.6, you will need to add a script  (included below). FYI: I have G23 assigned to M2 and G24 assigned to M3. If you prefer another configuration, that shouldn’t be too hard to change.

 

function OnEvent(event, arg, family)
if ( family == “lhc” ) then
if ( event == “G_PRESSED” ) then
if ( arg == 23 ) then
SetMKeyState(2, family);
end
if ( arg == 24 ) then
SetMKeyState(3, family);
end
elseif ( event == “G_RELEASED” ) then
if ( arg == 23 ) then
SetMKeyState(1, family);
end
if ( arg == 24 ) then
SetMKeyState(1, family);
end
end
end
end

 

Keys G9, G10 and G11 are where I naturally rest my ring, middle and index fingers. I tried to keep important abilities centralized around this area. It’s worth noting that, to avoid any possible EULA violations, I don’t use the G13 to script anything that couldn’t already be macro’d in game. I have quite a few items bound to awkward key combinations in game (Shift + Control + F1 to toggle Recount for example). Not so easy to press on a normal keyboard, trivial to bind on a gamepad. Also, I have jump, autorun and 4 or 5 other things bound to my mouse.

If anyone is interested, my configuration file is included in the zip file posted below. Beware, it’s highly customized to my awkward in-game keybindings…

WoW Update: Week in Review 1/23/11

Well actually, the past two weeks in review. With pictures even! Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to in WoW lately. Apparently my official Magmar duty is to ride the giant worm. We’ve started raiding again by the way. Fun times in Blackwing Descent.
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My equipped gear average is about 347 for my Retribution set and 343 for my offset, possibly a bit higher since the last time I have checked. I finally respec’d my offset to protection the rebuilt, gemmed and enchanted most of my tanking set, which is actually pretty decent at the moment. I reforged to meet the hit and expertise cap but, was I supposed to do that? That won’t make me too squishy will it? I mean, a bit of Dodge and Parry was sacrificed. The only thing that I really need to do now is to tank a couple of things and gather feedback. But really, I just wanted to have a viable offspec to fill in any tank shortages.
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Yay Skeletal Raptor mount! By the way, is there some sort of goat or player that I can sacrifice in order to make the epic troll sword proc on my archaeology screen? Just about everything else that I have wanted has already popped up. I can’t quite decide which profession is less interesting, archaeology or fishing and I feel compelled to do both.
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I didn’t realize this but, there’s a fun mounting bug in the Throne of Tides.
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WoW Hodgepodge: Defias, Deathwing & Top Hats

Hahahaha I found this gem off of WoWit today and thought that it was pretty funny. Garrosh may be a dick but Varian Wrynn kind of is one too. It is pretty interesting though how the front of Stormwind had been on fire for a good two months. Those construction workers sure don’t look like they are doing a whole. But on the other hand, it’s not as if Varian is going to pay them. Oh those silly Defias. I guess you shouldn’t stiff the bill We can’t judge him too harshy. I mean he is a single parent raising the one and only teenage character in the game lol.

Oh, I finally got that stupid Standing in the Fire achievement. Deathwing literally flew over me while I was doing the Ramkahen dailies in Uldum.
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I have been running heroics regularly for a while with marginal drop success. My luck has been somewhat better this week though: I finally managed to replace my cape as well as both of my trinkets. The axe that I wanted dropped off of the cache in heroic Throne of Tides but the DK tank won it. Bah, next time. The only plate items that seem to drop are for tanks and healers. QQ.

I started leveling my Worgen Druid. The Worgen starting area is quite nice, I was almost sad to have to move on. Looking forward to checking out the 1 through 60 zones and how they have changed. 60 to 80 will be a pain in the ass but by then I will have hopefully accumulated some of the guild heirlooms (close to guild level 10 at the moment). How can you not love a wolf with a top hat? So dapper.
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Oh: Leveling blacksmithing sucks.

Cataclysm (4.0.3) Smart Mount Macro

Edit 1/17/11: Here you all go, modified the previous macro to make better use of LUA logic. This one should be somewhat shorter than the one posted a week or so ago, allow for more random mounts  to be added before reaching the 255 character cap. Actually, I should have just searched WoWpedia before bothering to do all of this. I reinvented the wheel!

Anyway, I had trouble re-finding a smart mount macro that actually works in Vashj’ir. So as of 4.0.3a, this one will summon the appropriate mount type in all of the Vashj zones as well as everywhere else. The following macro will automatically summon a random mount of your choice depending n the zone that you are in. The number of mounts that you are able to randomly select is limited by the 255 character limit.

/run if not IsMounted() then g,f,s={g,g},{f,f},{s,s} t=(strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s or IsFlyableArea() and f or g CallCompanion(“MOUNT”,t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount

The bolded variables within the curly brackets need to be replaced with the numbers corresponding to your mounts; You will need to open up your mounts tab to find that. ‘g‘ is for ground, ‘f‘ is for flying and ‘s‘ is for swimming. Keep in mind that they are counted from left to right, top to bottom. Whenever you obtain a new mount, you will most likely need to update the maro since everything is going to be shifted over by one.

  • If you are swimming in Vashj’ir your swimming mount will be summoned. You must be swimming and not standing on the ocean floor.
  • If you are in Vashj’ir and NOT swimming (on the sandy beach for example), your flying mount will be summoned.
  • If you are in a flyable zone, your flying mount will be selected, if not you will summon your ground mount.
  • Pressing the macro while mounted will dismount you.

For example

/run if not IsMounted() then g,f,s={14},{31,8},{1} t=(strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s or IsFlyableArea() and f or g CallCompanion(“MOUNT”,t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount

The ground mount that I want to use, the Fossilized Raptor is located at position 14 (second mount on the second page of my mount tab). Since there are two flying mounts that I like, I want the macro to randomly choose one to summon when I am in a flyable zone. These mounts are the ugly purple drake and the bronze drake at positions 31 and 8 respectively. Additional mounts can be added with a comma separation.

Full explanation
For anyone who is interested in how things work, here is a somewhat verbose explanation as to how the macro and its individual parts work:

/run if not IsMounted() then g,f,s={g,g},{f,f},{s,s}
Only run this line if you are not mounted. If you are mounted, skip to the last nine and dismount. We are declaring three arrays: g, f and s for ground, flying and swimming respectively.

t=(strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s or IsFlyableArea() and f or g
This is the main logic chunk for the macro. If you look at the last line of the macro (well second to last), ‘t’ is being used to randomly summon a mount. The entire purpose of this line of code is to assign the correct array (‘g’, ‘f’ or ‘s’) to ‘t’ depending on where you are in the world.

LUA handles binary operators (AND, OR) a little differently. For AND operators: Instead of just returning a binary value (true/falso, 1/0) to an expression, WoW LUA will return the first argument if the first value is false and the second argument if the first argument is true. So for example let’s evaluate this statement: false and pie. Since the first argument is false (literally and figuratively), false is returned. Now evaluate this statement: true and cake. Since the first argument is true, cake is returned.

OR operators are handled in the opposite manner. If the first argument is true, the first argument is returned. If the first argument is false, the second argument is returned. So for example: false or pie. The first argument is false so pie is returned. Second example: true or cakes. Since the first argument is true, true is returned. So breaking this line down further:

(strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s
First argument: (strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming())
Second argument: s
Operator: AND

If you are swimming in a zone starting with the string “Vashj”, the first argument is true. Given what I have stated above regarding the AND operator, the value ‘s’ would be returned and your swimming mount would be summoned. If the first argument is false (you are not in Vashj’ir or not swimming), false would be returned and we would move on to the next statement below


(strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s or IsFlyableArea() and f
First argument: (strfind(GetMapInfo(),”Vashj”) and IsSwimming()) and s
Second argument: IsFlyableArea() and f
Operator: OR

If ‘s’ was returned we are done; your swimming mount has been summoned. If the first argument however is false, we move on to the second argument. If you are in a flyable area, ‘f’ is returned and your flying mount is summoned. If not your ground mount is summoned.

Hope that was clear enough.