Return To Azeroth

Grinding The Shattered World

2011-05-31T18:49:00.000+01:00

And so we finally get to the home straight of the epic grind from 54 to 85, the much awaited Cataclysm content.

Ok to be fair I'd already done 2 or so levels worth on Hjaern the death knight so it was reasonably familiar to begin with. First stop Hyjal, lots of quests, lots of gathering (that's still a great XP earner) and remarkably not too many deaths.

A small tip I picked up a long time ago when leveling a lowbie alt was: do all the easy nearby quests for a bit - when you start having to run too far, switch to a similar zone. This works great with combos like Teldrassil/Elwyn or Borean/Howling Fjord. So I worked through Hyjal for a bit a then wandered off to Vash'jir then back to Hyjal (sure I've got no attention span).

It's super easy after that, go to Deepholm at 82, Uldum at 83 and Twilight Highlands at 84... and you want HOW MUCH XP? Yes the grind to 85 was miserable from 84 but it came eventually.

Well I'm a couple of months behind updating the progress here if I'm perfectly honest, Gwen's actually been raiding for about 8 or 9 weeks now and the last 4 of them I've been raid leading (read more at http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2011/05/editorial-jumping-into-the-deep-end-with-raid-leading/). Now sat at 4/12 10 man normal it's very slow progress but we're getting there.

Now I've gotten the grinding tale out the way maybe we can get on with something slightly more druidy, or raidy or ranty... who knows?

The Grind: 68-80 When it all slows down

2011-05-26T23:30:00.000+01:00

Yarg, power leveling though Northrend is not fast at all. 68 to 70 was fairly nice, just get to Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, grab quests, complete quests, hand in quests and repeat - throw in some gathering and it soon passes.

It's when you get to 70 that things really start to slow up. From 70-72 I practically stopped questing altogether, maxed out my herbs and mining, picked up epic flight form and gathered my way through 2 levels. Wow that's tedious! Just keep going round Scholazar Basin and Wintergrasp (assuming there's no battles on), dive in, collect and run. It is as fast as questing with epic flight form and much much much more profitable.

At 73 I left gathering as a full time job and went back to questing roughly in the order of Dragonblight, Zul Drak the Scholazar.

Finally Icecrown, which is always quite fun anyway, it must be said the downhill slide to 80 was much nicer than the early to mid 70's, just knowing the end was in sight.

All I can say in summary is - power leveling though Northrend? Never ever ever again!

Next time: Cata leveling, learning to heal and gearing to raid.

The Grind: 54-68. Of Yeti death and moo

2011-04-14T17:55:00.000+01:00

At last the final bell tolls, and for once it doesn't go “mong!” it goes “ding!”. That's right after many hours of sweat, tears, coffee, flower picking, mining, being ganked and mostly being lord high executioner to a million unsuspecting mobs – Gwen has made it to the lofty heights of level 85.

It took longer than hoped but possibly less time than expected. In this post I'm going to give a (brief) breakdown of how I got there as fast as my dainty little hooves could manage.

So in the last post I said I'd got to 64, well lets rewind a bit and see where we come from historically. I'd always like the idea of druids but never really pushed one very far, so back in the day when I discovered that actually healing was really cool I had a little druid sitting around the level 28-ish mark, respecced resto and hit up the all new dungeon finder tool with massive aplomb. And that was that I basically levelled to 54 in dungeons, the healing was a piece of cake – most of the Scarlet Monastery runs involved dropping rejuv and alt-tabbing to read stuff on the internets. Once in a while someone would do something interesting like pull half the wing at once which took a bit more effort and used up about half the mana pool.

By 54 I'd burned out and was sick and tired of running Blackrock Depths over and over again. So Gwen was shelved for ages until the request for a healer was raised. At this point I was back in there like a shot! A few more BRD runs (now dual specced into balance as well so could sign up for two roles) and a bit of Winterspring Yeti slaughter and it was off to outlands.

I hated Hellfire Peninsula the first time I went there and I hate it now and every other time I've been there in between. So as soon as 60 rolled around it was straight off to Zangarmarsh where it's soggy underfoot and the weird flying things go “eep” when lazerchicken lets loose some pewpew. There's good XP in that there marsh, also good herbalism which, having got flight form, was becoming an increasingly viable XP grinding method.

Leaving behind the squeaky things in the Marsh it was off to cull things that stampeded lots and generally made some variant of the word “moo” when they spoke. Yup, good old Nagrand. Again, lots and lots of herbs, plenty of quests and a plethora of mobs to fry. After that a quick tour of Blades Edge Mountains took me to 67, and Shadow Moon Valley (where nothing goes moo and everything is green) to 68.

Outland was a breeze and for the most part quite enjoyable (except HFP that is). In the next post we hit Northrend where suddenly everything gets very very slow indeed.

A Cataclysmic Return

2011-02-02T22:18:00.000Z

Well here we are again, after yet another 11 month hiatus we have yet another Return to Azeroth. So where on Earth/Azeroth have I been? Well, being a father mainly. I must confess I also lost interest in Wrath of the Lich King after dragging my sorry dead cow ass up to 80. I think it all began with my first foray into WotLK heroics. I cranked up a bit of gear and ran through a few with my friends who were working on [Glory of the Hero] had already elevated themselves into the glorious realms of Kingslayer-dom. That having gone pretty well I pottered into the LFD tool and signed up for a random heroic, got a nice group, had a nice time and got helped through by some kind people. Great! Another! Againagainagain! Second group, we hadn't even begun when I got a “Lol DK ur GS sux, leave nao, my 78 shaman has better gear than u”... oh dear, what could I do except leave the group – I really didn't want this imbecile ruining my run by continually spamming recount data inevitably showing my dps somewhere between the tank and the healer (if I was lucky)...

So I sulked off, completely demoralised and spent the closing days of Wrath with a Herding Cats offshoot called Knew The Risks (KTR) on EU-Argent Dawn where we ran dungeons starting at the beginning using only DPS... as was rightly said – we knew the risks! It was fun and it also let me explore making some hefty gold which was something I'd only ever intended on doing.

With the launch of Cataclysm, I've gotten really really excited again. The old world (that's right kids, that's all there was when I started playing this game, actually can't remember the date now but I think it was just after patch 1.10) is amazingly redesigned, and you can fly in it... that does spoil my old hobby of climbing things that were never intended to be climbed: remember Ironforge Airport, ooh it was cool trying to get there wasn't it? Pah, that's nothing... get there and now climb the tallest part of the wall leading up to the mountain peak – THAT's climbing! I think my computer may have eaten the screenshots, maybe they're on photobucket, I will have a look and post them later if they turn up somewhere.

Anyway, that digression aside, old world flying is awesome for power levelling professions (more on that in a later post), particularly if you have some form of epic flyer.

I started into Cataclysm pretty fast with Hjaern my DK, and jumped in on the Herding Cats Sunday evening dungeon progression runs. As usual however family stuff meant missing a couple of runs and I found myself a very easily obtainable couple of levels behind. Well that wasn't much of an issue but then I got a /t from our raid leader asking whether she could make a “PITA request”... oh dear – what's it going to be?

Basically the group was still down a healer but all the DPS and tank spots were filled, did I have one somewhere I'd be willing to transfer? Well poor little Gwenddydd was still skulking at 54 on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel (A) so that meant: Faction Change, Server Change, Power Level, Gear Up... What the hell! Lets do it!

Faction change was easy peasy and went through almost instantly. Server change was pretty straight forwards apart form the fact my idiot bank (you know who you are!) decided to flag my card as potentially fraudulent because I'd tried to make 2 payments to the same website, I only discovered this in Tesco's the next evening while trying to buy baby food... grrrr. Well long story (and several angry phone calls) short, it eventually went through ok.

So, 31 levels, a hell of a lot of profession points to get and obviously gear to obtain when I get there it's a big challenge. Ten days in to the process (and not that much effort as yet) she's sitting pretty (as pretty as anyone who was a Night Elf and is now Tauren can be) at level 64 (level a day so far – not too bad – could be better) with some much better profession scores and a good deal more cash. I'm going to be upping the tempo a bit now I think as there's still a way to go and powering through Northrend might be interesting.

I'm going to save some of the levelling tactics for later posts but with a helpful guild behind me and Northrend rapidly looming into vision I'm hopeful of getting Gwen healing guild runs very very soon. Watch this space.

PuGtastic or PuGtarded?

2010-03-17T20:38:00.000Z

Just a short post accompanied by some almost irrelevant pictures this evening. I wanted to post on an interesting topic that seems to have caused massive debate since it's conception - the Looking For Group (LFG) tool.

I can happily say I was dead excited about the new LFG tool - cross realm groups, teleport to dungeon, random dungeon selector and reasonably intelligent group selecting. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: people. I don't wish this to be a whining post full of QQ so I'll cut straight to my point: different battlegroups are very VERY different. I play on two separate realms, Aeia and Gwen on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel and Ebitha on EU-The Venture Co. Go look up the battlegroups yourself... Now while no-one is free from what we once dubbed "The Pugtard Effect" I have found the chain running instances on Aeia and Gwen so much more pleasant than poor little Ebitha, to the extent that I had to change realm within 5 minutes of starting another WC run the other day. Lolboi's I can deal with, downright unpleasant human beings are another matter. Endless, endless lines such as "Teh Ghey", "WTF Tank, Ebay?", "gogogogogogogo" etc slowly wear you down - and you can guarantee they are the one's who'll ninja something. If it's not that it's some 12 year old in heirlooms - the following is pretty much and exact conversation I had in /p with a warrior tank in RFC (lets face it we were level 15) while playing Romm as a healer.

PuGtard: *Links Recount Data* Lol I win!!1
Me: Nice heirlooms
PuGtard: I'm not wearing heirlooms
Me: ...
PuGtard: I has more DPS tahn you cos, maybe you suck?
Me: Or maybe because I was your healer? Or were you too busy being uberpro to notice that.
PuGtard: *homophobic remark*
Me: [link to heirloom]
Me: [link to another heirloom]
PuGtard has left the group

To be honest he was lucky to just be humiliated and not reported but I'm not in the business of reporting people unless they are complete bastards or gold spammers.

TVC itself is a nice server, the others in the group seem to be otherwise - I'm hoping this isn't going to hamper progress for Ebitha. I'll end this rant with a pic of Ebitha in full pewpew mode in Wailing Caverns.

Classic Raider: AQ40

2010-03-15T11:33:00.001Z

What a busy weekend! I will confess my game time has been pretty low due to an excess of spring sunshine but that hasn't stopped a me cranking up a few bits and bobs. Thanks to a very friendly guild on EU-Steamwheedle Cartel called <Sixty>, Aeia had a fun friday night in the generally forgotten Temple of Ahn'Qiraj (AQ40). More after the break.

<Sixty> are a friendly bunch who are followers of the "Old World" or Vanilla WoW as it's known. They cap their xp gain at level 60 and raid through all the (remaining) old world instances. I'm not going to discuss the relative merits/cons of doing this here - they're having fun - good for them. Nor am I going to discuss the fact that their open invites every weekend for anyone over level 60 to join their raids usually means a bunch of level 80's making mincemeat of the instance in very short order. The guys leading the raids are pleasant, really know the instance and alway explain fights before enguaging. It's still possible to die in there - take C'Thun - his pewpew lAz0rbeemz (ahem) are still deadly - you still have to run in circles!

One of the fun parts of AQ40 has to be collecting the mounts. I only managed to pick up the Blue Qiraji Resonating Crystal for my mad chittering insectoid mount... just a shame you can only use it inside the instance.

The Twin Emporers provided the usual confusion and we ended up with them being way too close for quite a while - with superior dps though we could pretty much grind through the heals.

C'Thun is still an amazingly fun fight even when your top dps is averaging about 7k. I was lucky enough to end up in his stomach during phase 2 along with 2 others, sad to relate I was so busy blasting the hell out of the tendrils I failed to take any pics so here's one of the old god after the "NUKE" command was given.

So what did Aeia gain from the night's entertainment - a lot of fun! I love old world raids (MC is a little dull it's got to be said) and with the Cataclysm approaching it's probably sensible to check them all out - they may not be around much longer. So I walked away happy with 2 Nexus Crystals, a new mount I can't use anywhere except back inside the instance, satisfaction of seeing another part of the game I'd missed so far and of course 1 step closer to the Classic Raider meta-achievement. Only AQ20 and Blackwing Lair left to go now.

Meet the family

2010-03-05T11:58:00.004Z

What's going on here? Why is that elf staring at Rag? Where's Romm? Where have I been? In other words... WTF?

Ok confession to make - I've been slack at updating the blog, I'm not going to make any excuses - I'm just slack. Although it has given me a couple of months to address my return to Azeroth and where I have been going with it. After all this was an experiment in rejoining the World of Warcraft after a break.

Well I have been playing plenty in the last couple of months and we shall have a look at where we're going with it all after the break. WARNING: Girlie elves a plenty will follow... don't say I didn't warn you!

So where's Romm? He's parked at the moment. After a few Rage Fire Chasm healing missions I got a little frustrated knowing full well I had a higher level resto druid parked elsewhere. So me being me I went back to her.

Meet Gwenddydd, she was level 30 when I picked her back up and specced fully resto. So I hit the all new Looking For Group utility and went healing mad. Oh those heady days of continual Scarlet Monestary runs!

One very noticable point was that speccing in Resto at that level made healing so ridiculously easy - I forever had to plead with tanks to pull groups of five at least otherwise there was almost no point in me being there - especially those darn paladin tanks with their self-healing nonsense.

Gwen is now level 47 and currently getting a little fed up of running Zul'Farrak, but notice the lovely set pieces Jinxed Hoodoo Kilt and Jinxed Hoodoo Skin. Not long now though until she turns into a tree.

Gwen has also just dual specced to Balance so much Boomkin fun has also been had (though at the moment it seems to involve spamming hurricane lots).

So how on Azeroth does this tie in with the picture of Rag?

Meet Aeia (and Errol). Aeia was my first ever alt after getting very bored leveling a warrior at about level 38. Interestingly she never overtook the warrior but made it up to 70 in good time. The problem with having a top level tank is your dps alt never gets a look in.

Anyway, running around Stormwind one evening someone was asking for more folks for a Molten Core run - I love MC and asked if I could bring Aeia along a whirlwind 85 minute MC clear later - I was in love with her again.

She's currently level 73, dual specced Beast Mastery for solo leveling and Marksmanship for instancing.

So last but by no means least we have the new kid on the block - I've always wanted a mage and here she is, just hit level 15 and doing a bit of Rage Fire Chasm, my little frost mage Ebitha. There's not a lot to tell about her at the moment as she's just getting started.

So there we have it - three characters ranged nicely across the levels so plenty of things to talk about I hope. Hopefully at some point I should be getting some guest posts up here too and the fun that is RtA will be revived once more.

I'll leave you with a pic of the ol' firelord going down (again).

Romm's Progress

2009-12-17T12:02:00.001Z

I have been concentrating so hard on writing about addons for World of Warcraft here that I've completely neglected to report on Romm's progress through Azeroth. He's obviously been pretty busy leveling up and getting his trade skill's sorted out. I'm going to talk about trade skills in a later post, this topic is a going to be a bit fluffier today - hooray!

After the jump, a few experiences of a Bovine Druid who only seems to come out after dark.

Of course my first port of call was the guild, , run by and containing only old friends. Not quite the ethos of an online community I know but to be fair we all belong to other guilds on other characters too - this one's just for us. It was nice to be back in the guild and get the fairly standard response: "Moo", a good respectable Herd that one.

Remember me talking about spamming the life out of Wrath well finally I've gotten to add Entangling Roots and Moonfire to my spell rotation which certainly makes solo questing a bit easier now. Of course the major events in a young druid's progress always involve shapeshifting. I will confess at this point that yes I have leveled a druid a little way before - level 30 to be precise. So I know exactly where I am aiming with this character and that is a restoration build primarily (I love healing - sorry, but that's the way it is). Anyway back to shapeshifting. I went and picked up Bear Form at about level 11, had a quick check on the damage meters and realised I was still getting a higher dps (damage per second) by using spells. That being said - it doesn't stop the new(ish) bear graphics kicking some serious donkey!

Being slightly allergic to tanking these days due to my first and long-term character being a protection warrior I don't think "RAWR"-form is going to get much of a look in. Plus I've never been one for leveling on the easiest build, except perhaps BM Hunters... lets not go there.

So we've been to Moonglade, Thunderbluff (threw a snowball at Cairne Bloodhoof for the achievement) and Orgrimmar. So far so fun! Now we're in to the long haul that is questing in the Barrens having just dinged level 13 and wandered over to the Crossroads. Of course, hope is on the horizon to quash that low-level questing burn-out and that is the new Dungeon-Finder tool. I'll certainly be devoting at least one post to this in the near future. As soon as I hit level 15 and can actually use the damn thing I'll be perma-queued for healing duties!

One thing I've not discovered yet is whether you can now queue for instances that used to pain a royal pain to get to depending on your faction. For example, am I as Horde now going to be able to queue for Dead Mines runs in my late teens and not worry about getting there becase of the new instance porting? Are those smelly Alliance peoples going to be crashing around in Rage Fire Chasm? Who knows? I certainly don't yet but I'll be sure to be watching out for it.

Coming up next, some talk about trades and skills. Once that's done we should be ready to hit some instances! I'll leave you with this picture which should serve as a warning to all about using cheap airlines. Why oh why does it take so long to get a zeppelin to Orgrimmar?

WoW Addons: Part 2

2009-12-15T09:30:00.002Z

So yesterday we took a look at the new improvements to the core UI in World of Warcraft from patch 3.3. I realise there's a whole heap of things I didn't mention and screenshots I didn't use for example the new quest log panel which now has move of the look of Bayi's Extended QuestLog had when I used to use that. Also there's quest colouring for difficulty ranges (this option is turned off by default - you can find it in the interface options menu).

Let's have a look today at some nice little addons to make our lives in WoW much easier. Now addon configuration can be a complete pain in the proverbials, especially if you are in the habit of getting a bit carried away. My advice is first go and get the Curse Client then think long and hard about which aspects of the UI you'd like to improve.

In the true parent style of "do what I say not what I do" (hell I need the practice with the first one on it's way) after the jump we'll leap into installing addons with reckless abandon.

One of my major issues yesterday was the unit frames, this is mainly due to what I'm used to and I would recommend any new player steer away from installing a unit frames addon until they are certain they want to get rid of the traditional World of Warcraft UI. Why? Because it takes a long, long time to get set up nicely. As can be seen from the next screenshot, mine has never been set up nicely and given my level of patience with these things - probably never will. Another parental word of wisdom there :P

So the screen we are seeing here is the Pitbull3 configuration screen in raid mode. Yeah I know the concept of screen real-estate is not something that has ever bothered me much. Across the top we can see 4 frames for player, player target, target's target and target's target's target. Why? Well in a group fight it's handy to see who is having their head pulled off at the time. There are also solo and party setup screens. The party screen has nice frames for party targets and pets (and even pet targets if anyone actually cares what they are doing).

"Wah my brain!" - it's ok, lets leave that be now. Once you're done, you should have some nice tidy frames in solo mode that look like this next picture. Conveniently combining cast bar, hp bar, mana bar, XP bar etc etc etc all neatly together not scattered around the screen in random crap places.

Lets move on to the next sore point: Bags! I believe yesterday's post on the subject went "moan moan complain whine" and quite rightly too. Once you start getting bigger bags and 7 bank slots everything will suddenly become an incredible mess. I have always sworn by Bagnon for merging all bags into one frame. Bagnon has a lot of other very useful features like searching and so on but to be honest I never ever use them - I just want to get rid of all those bag frames. Bagnon does this nicely for inventory and bank slots.

The last of my Must Have's is Auctioneer, because I'm lazy. That's right, pure lazy. A lot of people have gotten themselve very excited, enthusiastic, obsessed and eventually (like me) bored to tears with Warcraft econmics. I'm not an economist or a stock trader (otherwise I'd be playing EVE) I just want to sell whatever random rubbish I pickup out there in Azeroth at something akin to current market prices - and I'm more than happy to let someone else worry about what they are. To this end Auctioneer is your best friend. It's appraiser panel will give you a nice estimate on what price you should be selling for and will also list all other current listings of this item. Also if you scan the Auction House regularly enough and get a good database of prices, it will tell you whether that [zomg epix] you are about to buyout for 1500g is above or below market price and by what percentage.

And uploading that last image has just reminded me of a new addition to the Warcraft tooltip frame in the auction house. We now seem to have an equipment comparison frame which also informs you of your dps change and stat changes - rather handy if not completely informative. Now if only that worked in bags and on drop frames as well.

I have three or four small addons left to add here and I will let you get on with your day. The first has to be Recount which is a very nice and (I'm told by people I trust more than myself) quite acurate damage meter.

To be fair it's so much more than a damage meter, it will give you everyone's dps, HoT uptime, damage received, heals received and probably what they had for breakfast. So why would a noob druid cow be installing this so early on - well I like to keep my eyes on my dps so I know I'm doing ok with my spell rotations. Also, later on when I start healing around some instances - I'd like to know how I'm doing, how much overheal I'm throwing about and how much time I'm wasting keeping the hunter alive (I have a hunter, I'm allowed to say that).

On which note, we'll add HoTCandy

Ahhh, no not that one, Romm seems to have gotten into my uploader again... HoTCandy, despite it's name which could imply Blood Elf Cheerleaders is actually a set of unit frames for monitoring HoT decay times. It works straight out of the bag and configures itself for which ever character class you are using. Neat.

The last two addons I'm adding for now are Decursive which is a nifty addon for instancing which let's you as a decurser/curer/dispeller keep an eye on who's been afflicted by what. It also provides a sweet little set of micro-unit frames which are clickable to cure (rather than rumaging through your entire Raid UI to find the poor sod).

Secondly I'm adding Gatherer which will record herb and mineral node information not only from your own gathering exploits but also those of your guild-mates. These nodes are viewable by little icons on the world map.

Well, I'm off to see how Romm's fishing is going - if we have to eat roast [Tangled Fishing Line] for one more night I may go potty.

WoW Addons: Part 1

2009-12-14T12:12:00.005Z

No posts this weekend as it has been pretty busy, however as promised here is the first in what I've decided to make a two part posting about addons for the World of Warcraft.

Now I have alway been a complete addict when it comes to addons in the past to the point that I actually couldn't have named every single one I was using and to be totally honest probably didn't even make use of about 25% of those I actually had installed anyway. With my lovely new installation I dumped my /interface directory and headed over to the Curse Downloader Client. But more on what I actually installed later on in part 2, this post is all about what Blizzard have actually done to the interface attempting to catch up with some of the more successful addons.

After the jump we'll have a look at a breakdown of some addons and the updates Blizzard have made to the UI and discuss whether the standard UI meets up to the addon.

Questing and Cartography:

For a start, take a peek at the map pictured above, it's far more quest oriented. When leveling I was a keen devotee of QuestHelper for it's map guidance. The new map frame does pretty much what QuestHelper did in that it shows you where to find quest mobs and where to hand in. Also there's an all new objectives panel on the right hand side of the game screen. Add to that the new tooltip information I'm pretty much ruling out the reinstallation of QuestHelper for the time being as the only additional functionality I remember off hand from it that is missing in the new objectives tracking and map is it's pathing (remember those crawling ant lines across your map?) - I never really used that much anyway.

The other addon that I will not be bothering with for the time being (the jury is still out) is Cartographer as I'm keen on giving this new map a proper run for it's money. I get the feeling that a full screen map is going to irritate the hell out of me before too long but then I vaguely remember that even that is now configurable in the new UI. No doubt I will be posting further on cartography as in a world the size of Azeroth (not forgetting Outlands) mapping is of vital importance.

Baggage:

Oh dear, the bag frames have definitly not improved. I'm ready in a bit of a pickle with even a selection of small bags of 6 and 8 slots. Given that I've already been promised 4 [Netherweave Bags] by a friend I think this is something that will need addressing toot-sweet.

Money:
I will be installing Auctioneer, no questions, I'm not even going to visit the Thunderbluff Auction House to see what the UI looks like, Auctioneer is great full stop. Although an interesting point to note is that the vendor pricing of items now appears in tooltips. This is insanely useful, especially later in the game where grey items such as [The Stoppable Force] have vendor buy prices in excess of 2g.

Combat:
I'm not a huge combat addon user, I don't even make use of macros for my rotations I prefer the button mash and challenge of getting it right the human way. Having said which I've always been a fan of Scrolling Combat Text (SCT) for a slightly more detailed in game description of what is happening in a fight. For the sake of research I'm going to go with the default for a little longer as it's showing damage and heals (with big "in your face" numbers for crits).

Unit Frames:
Ok, I cannot handle the standard unit frames, they're just too artsy and contain too little information for the space they take up. Besides I like to have "target's target" and so on when I'm grouped so the verdict is "It's gotta go!".

Threat:
It's interesting, as seen in the picture above, that there is some interesting threat-meter type thing in the offing with the core UI. I have yet to investigate this fully and no doubt as soon as I install a new unit-frames addon it will bork the whole thing, I'm going to hold off installing anything like Omen until this has been investigated fully and the first time I get my head pulled off in an instance for being over-zealous with my [Rejuvination] spam.

There's a whole pile of other addons I'm sure will follow in due course, particularly some druid specific ones for healing and decursing (yep I'm on the hard hard resto track). Next post (coming soon) will have a look back at this post and show the results of installing UI addons to change soe of the things we've been moaning about here. So for now I'll leave you with a pic of Romm's first (and probably last) bath.

Moo!

2009-12-11T09:07:00.005Z

Meet Romm, he's part Cow.

So just at the point last night when I though I was going to have to write another blog post about how unpredictable the Blizzard Downloader was in its speed, the damn thing sped up (unpredictably) and completed the patch.

It's the last time I'm going to mention this as I think it's possibly time to "Leave it Be" but checking chat logs with friends from yesterday I inserted that first Vanilla WoW disk at 11.21am and I'm pretty sure I was logged in at about 8.20pm. I still have trouble imagining what it must be like for a first time user to actually have the patience to install a game for 9 hours.

So what's new for me? Pretty much every damn thing! I thought the whole process had gone wrong again and was on the verge of going straight back to Blizz and cancelling when I realised the message on the login screen was about Battle.Net - so that had to be changed, accounts merged etc.

Read more on the first tentative bovine steps of rebirth after the break.

The initial joy of reinstallation though was great as I was treated again to the opening cinematic of those hideously talented people at Blizzard. A quick character creation later - I had already decided on a Tauren Druid before starting, but this post is not about him so much as me - and we're off on sweeping shots of Thunderbluff and the grassy savanah of Mulgore.

Sadly I cannot say the fiirst moment was as awe-inspiring as the first similar shot I experienced through Teldrassil all those years ago when I made my first ever character - but hey I've seen these shots a million times before now so no real surprise there I guess.

Anyway, on with the game. Oh those noob quests you gotta love 'em. "Kill 10 of these" (only 10 - I'm sure it used to be more). "Get me 7 of these" (again - only 7?)... whoa there's like a 100% drop rate. Interesting point - the collection quests at the early stages now seem to have 100% drop rates of quest items - now you have no real complaints from me there as I loathe collection quests from mobs almost as much as I loathe escort quests but I seem to remember that first level "ding" coming whilst still thumping <boars|plainstriders|nightstalkers*> (*delete as necessary) not when handing the quest back in again. So in making the first quest more accessible we've actually lost XP gain from mobs - interesting.

Having said this though the low-level mana and health regeneration seems to be so obscenely high that sitting on your tail spamming Wrath is a fair tactic at this stage of the game

Well I'm going to leave you now with some evidence of Wrath-spam, next time we'll talk about all those addons I used to use and which one's are now redundant since the Blizzard UI team got busy.

A bad start

2009-12-10T13:11:00.000Z

I believe that is what they call a bad start. But more on that in a while.

As a brief explanation as to what the hell is going on around here I should explain where this blog is going. Some months ago now I decided that the time had come to deactivate my World of Warcraft account. I'd been bored of all my characters for who knows how long, I had three in the mid-70's and had no inclination to see any of them through to 80 let alone start raiding with them afterwards. Suddenly a few gazillion alts started appearing in a vague attempt at regaining some interest - but alas to no avail. Interest waned, I moved house and found myself very busy and then, to cap it all off, back on tour so cancelled my subscription.

Well I'm back from tour and happily settled in front of my trusty old computer merrily tapping away at a new website commision and having a good ol' chat with some of some very close friends who are also ex-guildmates from EU-The Venture Co. As usual the pressure mounts and not for the first time in my life I find myself crumbling - ok! ok! I'll come back, but there has to be something else, a reason. Well here it is. This blog will follow my return to the World of Warcraft bare hours after the release of patch 3.3.0.

I ain't gonna be charging around Icecrown anytime soon that's for sure so don't get too excited. Instead, it's going to be a fresh start. I'm not going to remove the old characters but I'll be creating a new main, not sure where or what just yet, and progressing through the game right from the start (again!). How could I not with all the new and exciting things in the patch notes?

A bad start? Glad you asked! I got all set up last night and after a tedious amount of time downloading the new patch (during which time I learnt how to do port forwarding on my router - quite handy) I couldn't resist a quick login before crawling off to bed. What do you know - the pesky thing's only gone and got corrupted... tried all the repair options etc etc etc and to cut a long story short I've been re-installing all morning. We are now 7% into Wrath of the Lich King install then I think it might be time to "Run Away and Hide(tm)" while downloading the patch... grrr.

I'm approaching it with excitement and trying not to have any expectations - though it had better be worth it after all this faffing about. Makes me wonder what new players must think when presented with a several hour install followed by a massive patch download - I can't say I'd be too impressed.

More soon, look out for the inevitable noobzone screenshots from wherever I choose to get born this time.