OMG We Did It!

One small step for my personal PvP experience, nothing at all of interest to the WoW world (except for the people we beat).
That's right. 1500 rating achieved.



It took some work. What's crazy is, this is on my druid.
At the time we achieved this my druid was really abyssmally geared. 1250 heals, 260 resilience and about 8.5k health (wearing 2 PvP epics, and 4 PvP blues).

Thanks Damah and Stupidcow for taking it this far, let's try to hit 2200! (yeah right).

[Notwow] Quest for Progress

Has anyone played Progress Quest? It's a little single-player RPG that takes the grinding out of RPGs. Which means that it just runs in the background spouting random RPG-related text to the GUI, with the net effect of looking like Kingdom of Loathing played by a bot.



You start it, it runs. It quests for you, kills stuff, empties bags, buys new gear, and you can watch those little Progress bars... progress. Slowly. And after a while, very slowly. And while this is doubtlessly more interesting than whatever work you're meant to be doing, homework you're procrastinating about, or blog you're trying to read, it's still a bit single-minded (GRIND GRIND GRIND!).

I'm thinking we can do better than this. Hereby introducing Quest for Progress. The non-interactive RPG of the future. It's so futuristic there won't even be a QFP1, but we'll move straight to QFP2. There will be a single player option that can start as soon as your computer loads, and a MMONIRPG (massively multiplayer online non-interactive role-playing game), with over 2 people per server!

This game will be so awesome that if you close it and then load it again later it will extrapolate what would've happened while it was off. No more losing game-time when a tornado takes out some pylons!

Further features (which in fact may or may not be implemented):
- no more spending ages deciding on a class, they're all the same anyway so QFP has the option of assigning you one automatically (defaults to "Village Idiot")
- no more spending ages deciding on a name, QFP has the option of assigning you one automatically (also defaults to "Village Idiot")
- the same goes for race, except that "Village Idiot" is not a race
- better quests: escorts, debaucherie, highland games, marry an heiress, earn a Darwin award, engage in massive public quests
- more realism: QFP will occasionally create an alt for you, and level that one instead (defaults to "other Village Idiot")
- PvP: QFP will include player-versus-player combat (well, QFP-versus-QFP combat)
- NPCs will have names, they may not be very good names, but they will exist
- trophies: QFP will randomly award you completely meaningless things for doing stuff you had no hand in doing (we're basing this on a beaureaucratic model). Other QFP 'players' may or may not view these.
- new hairstyles!
- new dances!
- destructible buildings (actually, no, that won't be happening)
- realm versus realm combat (also a nono, sorry)
- bugs!
- false promises!
- ambiguity!
- lag! (although not sure how we'll do this)
- free beer on fridays! (we are, in fact, working on this. But only on fridays)
- salvation and forgiveness for your sins! (QFP creators hereby forgive you for all sins committed before last summer)
- the wrong release date (next week, honest)
- colons in future titles, because more colon makes everything better!
- and many other things we'll add when we see that they work for other companies (currently considering Google ads)

Quest for Progress 2: we hope you'll join us
Your village called, they want their idiot back

EDIT (not really):
Our lawyers have forced us to add the following disclaimer:
Things QFP might not have (read: probably won't):
- monsters
- graphics
- spells
- items
- a way to install it
- features

[Notwow] Hobos, (vehicle) mechanics, and hubris

Laptop still broken.
Sort of.
Comes up with random memory failures.
Firefox thinks there's already a copy of Firefox running (which is not responding), and Firefox, being Firefox, thus won't let me start running a new window of Firefox. No Firefox isn't currently running.
The D-Link router at home gives me issues, and I can't 'apt-get' a new internet browser.
I suppose I should try to get ASUS to repair this thing, but there aren't any other verifiable problems with it now, so it probably won't register as broken. Sort of like when your car starts making a funny noise, it makes the noise when you start it, when you drive it, when you wait at red lights, and when you drive through red lights. After a while, it even starts making the noise when the engine isn't running, and, ever so faintly, you can hear the noise disturbing your dreams. Quietly but surely. Like a playground bully from many years ago. But as soon as you take the car to a mechanic it runs completely smoothly. In fact it runs smoother than you've ever heard (or not heard, as the case may be) it run before, since it's a 4th-hand Japanese import you bought from a crazy exchange student during the early 90s. Your mechanic gives you a long look, scratches his head (or her head, as the case may be), charges you $150 for wasting his (her) time and goes back inside after watching you drive off with your teeth tightly clenched. As soon as the door closes behind them, you know what happens? Yep. Your car, ever so gently, starts making that noise again. It gets louder. You know if it persists you will lose sleep, get divorced, and watch your teenaged daughter marry an in-bred hobo from the deep south (i.e. Hamilton) with barely enough intellect to fleece the ACC and WINZ out of sufficient money to finance a coup in Haiti (for reference, a level one troll rogue with Arcane Intellect has sufficient intellect to achieve this). Your grand kids will resemble cane toads going under the lawnmower. You consider going back to that mechanic, since you got a tax return of $263.37 yesterday (true story, the cheque is sitting on my desk, so will only take a day or two to find). But then you notice that even as you think of the mechanic the noise subsides and your petrol indicator has an evil gleam in its bulb. You surrender and drive home. The noise will slowly drive you mad, but if you lay off the coffee your blood pressure won't cause the arteries in your eyes to rupture.

The morale of the story? Buy a German car. They make the same noise, but it comes with a much angrier-sounding accent (people always tell me that when I speak to my parents on the phone it makes me sound angry, although this may just be the fact I'm calling home; I know my mother sounds angry fairly often, but this is because she IS angry). If you can't afford a German car, you now have a hobo-in-law who can teach you how to acquire one, at no additional charge (make sure your immune system can cope with tuberculosis, and be prepared to babysit the grandchildren on Friday nights).

The mechanic in the example above exhibits a fairly common quality (especially where technology is concerned). Think of it as the Midas Touch without the avarice, the anti-kaput, the borked-in-reverse. It's an aura of FIXED! whereby any problem of a particular type (such as car noises) immediately disappears when in close proximity to a particular person (such as a mechanic). Another example of this phenomenon is the photocopier at my work (I work at a library): it will jam, turn off all displays, shred unsaved printed e-tickets, decapitate the customer involved and trigger the fire alarms. Yet if I walk up to it it settles down, if I press a few buttons it starts printing again without fail, and if I croon to it, it plays Greensleeves (needless to say I like that photocopier a lot, I think that over the space of three and a half years it has earned me $4.25 in pay rises, while the computers guarantee my continued employment - although if I lose my job anytime soon just remember: HUBRIS IS A BAD THING).

Then there's the aura of FAIL (broken, borked, kaput, f**ked). Sort of like me and networks. For the life of me I can't set up a network between two objects (single exception: the photocopier at work).
Meellow and I can't get past 1500 rating, no matter what. An Enhancement Shaman will always appear to ruin our dreams.
Zorab will never type an accurately punctuated, formulated and spelled sentence into IRC (instead others will start writing baldly). Nor will he associate the text on a Magic card with what it does, and what he says out loud (Last Gasp does not draw you a card, nor is it legal in the format we're playing).

It is these facts of life you must get used to, and learn to deal with. If you don't want a hobo-in-law, become a mechanic. If you need to do photocopying at Avondale Library, get me to do it (come to me first, unless you have a spare neck). If you're sick of playing magic with rules-lawyers and pedantic nit-picks that take forever to end their turn (they've had a Mountain in their hand for the last three turns, and drawn nothing but land), go find Zorab and have a laugh. Some things you can't change, and some shouldn't be changed anyway.

In other news. Listen to yourself. Like this (courtesy of xkcd):



My only request: make this count for everything: forum posts, /trade chat, blog entries...

If this post wasted your time, I apologise. In future, I'll include adverts. And not just ones for German cars. But thank you for proof reading it.


[This space for hire]

[Insert clever title here]

If I take a look at the blogs I follow (half a dozen or so), it pretty quickly becomes obvious that in terms of most-recently-updated there is one conspicuously at the bottom of the list. Mine. /facepalm. That being said it's been an eventful week for me:

1) My laptop (one of those cute white Asus Eee things) has died. Something about memory errors and not being able to save stuff or access external data storage (so no backing up files). Fail. This means I’ve lost access to a bunch of stuff (like the internet from any point in the house), and also links to stuff I’ve recently viewed, and a couple of drafts of (let's be honest) drafts of articles.

2) I procrastinated on a 3000 word essay on Euclid's Elements of Geometry. I thought it was due on Thursday, in reality it was due on Monday. I got an extension to Thursday (/win). Today is Thursday and I still haven't finished it... errr, started it (/golfclap).

3) I borrowed 2,200 gold from the guild bank and got myself Epic flying. And it's pretty damn epic, being able to cross any Outlands zone in 2 minutes. My reasoning for borrowing the gold, rather than earning it first: if I borrow the gold I have motive to pay it back, whereas if I save up the gold I'll keep thinking "meh, expansion soon, can't be bothered farming gold if I can't fly in Northrend anyway and the price might come down", and also doing the Outlands dailies is much faster when you can fly... faster. Also if I die today (e.g. suicide/homocide because of unfinished essays) I will have FLOWN (really, flown, that 60% stuff doesn't cut it). And now I can earn gold from the Swift Flight Form questline, to pay the guild back.

4) I spent $100 (NZ) on a pair of headphones. This was a big deal since previously I tended to spend about $10-$15 on headphones, barring my computer headset ($45). Will spending that much more make the 3.5mm headphone jack last longer (or rather, the bit of cable directly above the jack, which always seems to get damaged over time)? Probably not. Does anyone really care about my buying headphones? Probably not. But the Sennheiser PX100s fit very nicely into a case that the cable wraps around - meaning it doesn't magically get tangled in storage in a way that makes quantum-entanglement look like crochet - and THIS IS A GOOD THING (although I don't really get the analogy... quantum entanglement, crochet, wtf am I thinking?).

5) My credit card seems a bit messed up. After buying a bunch of things and making a large payment onto it all within the last week, my account shows zero activity since the 8th of September, which worries me slightly.

6) My Hunter got the S3 Chestpiece, which put him at 11k health until I came to my sense and swapped in some blue DPS rings. In terms of set gear he has 3x S2, 1x S4 and 1x S3. And a bunch of other S1-S3 gear in most of the remaining slots. Which isn't a big deal to most arena players, but it means I'm generally one of the best geared in BGs and is quite satisfying. And now I get to try to obtain all of that again on the druid, in the space of about 2 weeks (or whenever the content patch comes out and messes with the status quo).

7) I suffered through 2v2 again. By 'suffered' I mean that we played 10 games, going 4-1 for the first 5 and reaching a record rating of ... 1465 (/golfclap2) and then went 1-4 for the second lot of 5 (seemingly having jumped a bracket), so gained a total of about 3 rating points (/facepalm2). It appears that my druid (who has the grand sum of 7k hp, buffed, 8k if I swap in some tanking gear) and his Elemental Shaman partner are actually doing better than the significantly better-geared and much more viable hunter/druid combo. And while I play a mean drain game, we lose to enhancement shamans, a lot, like 80% of the time (on the plus side we win around 75%+ of our drain matchups, people in this bracket haven't heard of Scorpid Poison or Star's Tears). One memorable match we played Hunter/Druid (and by that I mean we played against it). My pet was killed twice, while the opposing Raptor remained untouched, but we still won - something about me resurrecting my pet twice, and managing to drink half a mana bar.

8) With the knowledge that Honour (yes, this is how you spell it, no matter what Blogger, Blizzard or anyone else thinks, 'honor' is for the uneducated :P), Marks and Arena Points will be wiped in the expansion, I cashed in all my marks on the druid and got the Guardians Kodohide Belt at about 2:30am this morning (yay for 4.5 hours sleep), which was a minor upgrade over my level 65 int/spirit/healing green. Now I just need to replace the level 66 green boots (I was using Heavy Clefthoof Boots socketed for 8 Resil, 12 Stam from my tanking set, but they've mysteriously disappeared from my inventory, and they're not in my bank either).

9) I think the current Brewfest is pretty cool. I have downed Coren Direbrew 18 times, with 7 Direbrew Hops, 5 Coins, 4 Stam trinkets, and 2 AP trinkets. And my Hunter has the Remote (slightly faster than flying to Kargath and riding to Blackrock Mountain and then winding our way to BRD... ever so slightly). These trinkets are stupidly easy to get (barring the really weird droprates) considering how good they are, and eventually everyone will end up with a full set long before they have their festive mount. Given the other stuff I have to do (farming honor, and gold) I'm not going to be participating in any of the other Brewfest stuff, especially since I spent way too much time on it last year (and got my faux-engineering goggles, I mean, how could I not? They're hunter loot, right?).

10) Hunters in Wrath are going to be awesome. Hunter pets in Wrath are going to be awesome. I've said this before? Well, repeating it doesn't make it any less true ^_^.
BRK has shown that a Gorilla is an awesome AOE tank with Thunderstomp, if you haven’t seen his latest movie, check it out here. Note that the cooldown on Volley has been removed, AND that you can use Autoshot while channelling it (…wow…, and also wtf?). Combined with Explosive Trap this should allow Hunters to push out some mean AOE DPS, and with a Gorilla all you need is a healer (or a nice T5 set bonus). Awesome, or awesome? I haven’t yet decided.
Given the Guard Dog talents, you no longer need to find your Gorilla Fungus to eat, and apparently they can now also eat bread (possibly even Manna Biscuits, but I’m not sure on that). And whereas before, you had to go out and tame a new pet to learn higher ranks of pet skills, they now learn them automatically.
Given the very high damage that Thunderstomp deals at the moment, I expect a nerf to be forthcoming, but it should still be the best AOE tanking skill. The other good AOE tanking pets are the Bear with Swipe and the Crocolisk with Bad Attitude (which has been changed to have quite a long cooldown). All of these should be able to hold threat through Mend Pet aggro, and probably any other incoming heals – at least at melee range.
And although you’d be missing out on Blood of the Rhino and Spirit Bond plus the various other BM-based pet improvements, you can get any of these pets as Marksman or Survival (Explosive Shot, anyone?). But how do these compare to the Exotic Tenacity pets, which should, strictly speaking, be better than their non-exotic equivalents (otherwise Beast Mastery becomes a 51 point vanity talent)? And the reality is that neither the Rhino nor the Worm are particularly dominating in terms of AOE threat (and if they don’t do AOE threat, then heals will draw aggro on any additional mobs, not fun when soloing and definitely not fun in a party where you pet is tanking). Stampede does some AOE threat (through damage), but not a lot and it has a very long cooldown (for the purposes of tanking) – although it’s still a cool talent in PvP, I can’t wait to use it in Alterac Valley on the Stormpike Bridge, or in Iceblood Tower *evil grin*. Acid Spit is probably the highest threat single-target pet skill there is, but unless you macro it to hit adds (and the cooldown is a bit long to rely on it) it won’t hold threat through heals. I really think that the Exotic tenacity pets should not be outclassed in their main roles (i.e. tanks) by apes from the southern jungles of the Old World. Someone please mention this to the devs.
Overall, however, pet (and Hunter) changes in Wrath of the Lich King are nuts (oh right, repeating myself again). Expect people to QQ when we solo every 2 man quest Northrend has to throw at us (and possibly a lot of the 3 mans as well, and some of the easier bosses in Kara). We might even be able to take on Hogger in Nightmare difficulty (although chances are that a Lightning Enchanted Multishot Hogger will blow up Gorillas pretty fast). On that note, what happened to Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2?

11) This one goes up to 11. And it's almost 11 now and this as-yet unwritten essay is due at 5. /Facepalm.


PS: I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information or links on this page, so if anything is wrong, please let me know.

[Hunter] I love Beastmastery

Beastmastery is awesome.
I respec'd a few nights ago from 11/41/9 to 41/20/0 to do triple DPS arena. And it's so much more fun being able to just blow up clothies, and rogues, and I believe one warrior as well. And the games were short, none of this "how do I drain a Druid with 600mp5" crap.
Then I spent time running around Legion Hold killing stuff for the sheer fun of blowing it up before it got to me (and additionally Intimidation offers another way of allowing pet to hold threat, in addition to Feign Death and Misdirection).

Then I did some 2v2 arena, and in the lower brackets it's not too bad. Given the massive burst and cc immunity of BIG RED KITTY it gives you a bit more staying power against double dps, and the drain component still seems to be enough to beat healers since I keep my Scorpid pet. And now I only need to respec my druid if I want to maximise performance in raids on all my characters, and solo play is sooooo much more enjoyable (imo) as BM (you can still crit stuff to death in 2-3 shots, but those shots occur 20% faster).

Off course 51/10/0 is even better than 41/20/0. Mmmm.

And one day I might be able to tame my feral druid and have the best of both worlds. /dream on.

So yeah.

Beastmastery is awesome.

I hate assignments.