tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68408157786978386672024-02-09T05:27:13.789+11:00Aspect of the Capricious<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=AawQvD8L_h4">Less singing, more sailing!</a>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-48304398260066282832008-08-22T02:24:00.000+10:002008-08-22T02:29:39.064+10:00Is There Someone Else Up There We Can Talk To?<p>(The Battle for Alterac Valley has begun!)</p>
<p>(The valiant Alliance forces ride south to Frostwolf Keep.)</p>
<p>"Hello!"</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>"HELLO!"</p>
<p>"... hello? Who is it?"</p>
<p>"It is King Bronzebeard, and these are my officers of
Stormpike. Whose keep is this?"</p>
<p>"This is the keep of my master General Drek'Thar."</p>
<p>"Go
and tell your master that we have been charged by Blue with a sacred
quest. If he will give us food and rested XP for the night,
he
can join us in our quest for the Honor Token."</p>
<p>"Well, I'll ask heem, but I don't think he'll be very keen.
Uh, he's already got one, you see."</p>
<p>"... What?" "He says they've already got one!"
"... Are you <span style="font-style: italic;">sure</span>
he's got one?"</p>
<p>"Oh yes, it's-a very nice! (I told them we already
got one!) (<span style="font-style: italic;">sniggers</span>)"</p>
<p>"Well... erm... can we come up and have a look?"</p>
<p>"Of course not! You are Dwarvish-types!"</p>
<p>"Well what are you, then?"</p>
<p>"I'm an Orc! Why do you think I have this <span style="font-style: italic;">outrageous</span> accent
you silly king?!"</p>
<p>"What are you doing in Alterac?"</p>
<p>"Mind your own business!"</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>"If you will not show us the token, we shall take your keep by
force!"</p>
<p>"Youuuu
don't frighten us you Dwarvish barstools! Go and boil your
bottoms you hairy subterranean wombats! I blow my nose at you
so-called Magni King; you and all your silly Stormpike hhhhhhofficers!"</p>
<p>/target King Magni Bronzebeard</p>
<p>/rasp</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>"What a strange person..."</p>
<p>"Now look here, my good man..."</p>
<p>"I
don' wanna talk to you no more you... empty-headed animal food-trough
water! I /fart in your general direction! Your
captain is a
hamster, and your daughter smells of elderberries!"</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>"Is there someone else up there we could talk to?"</p>
<p>"Uh, no; now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!"</p>
<p>"Now, this is your last chance. I've been more than
reasonable..."</p>
<p>[Orcish] "Fetch the Tauren."</p>
<p>[Orcish] "Huh? More work?"</p>
<p>[Orcish] "Fetch the Tauren!"</p>
<p>"...if you do not agree to my commands, then I shall..."</p>
<p>(Boing!) /moo</p>
<p>"AMAN'THUL!"</p>
<p>(Sound of a Tauren landing on a heavily laden gnome, quite
possibly causing severe bodily injuries.)</p>
<p>"Right."</p>
<p>/sheathe</p>
<p>/charge</p>
<p>(Sound of Blizzards, Rain of Fire, Frost Traps, Snake Traps,
Consecrates and lots and lots of belligerent orcs chopping up the
Alliance offensive as it pours into the narrow path into the keep.)</p>
<p>"A.F.K! They're turtling!"</p>
<hr />
<p>This really happened the other day. Granted, it may
not be <span style="font-style: italic;">exactly</span>
word-for-word correct, but that was the general gist of it.</p>
<p>Every
AV game I've played has been about the offense. We rush to
Vanndar, they rush to Drek'Thar; whoever kills 'em first wins.
But the other day was the first time I'd ever seen the Horde
turtle.</p>
<p>To be honest, the offensive games are a bit boring.
We take some ground, we lose a little, we take some back...
the
majority of the fighting basically boils down to running into the fray
and trying not to die really, really fast to AoE.</p>
<p>This time, I
randomly decided to go on defense (I tend to split it 70/30, with the
70 being me going on offense.) A scant few followed me in to
the
keep, and I dutifully set my trap and flare down and waited.
As
time went on and the Alliance forces began engaging the Horde
stragglers, taking graveyards on the way, more and more Horde started
coming to my side of the battlements.</p>
<p>By the time our last tower
outside the keep fell, I'd say about 25% of our forces were on defense
inside the keep itself, with most of the others fighting scattered
battles outside.</p>
<p>Wave after wave came at us. Rogues kept sneaking
past and trying to cap the relief hut, or take out the two towers
either side of the gate, but we kept pushing them back out.
Eventually, they forced almost the entire Horde army inside
the
gates.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/stripe-fwk-gate.jpg" /></p>
<p>For
a while, it was nail-bitingly close. I don't think we were
more
than 40 or 50 reinforcements ahead of the Alliance. And then
the
worst happened.</p>
<p>They summoned Ivus.</p>
<p>Now, I don't play a lot
of AV. I've certainly never seen the elemental dudes spawned.
So I was under the somewhat erroneous impression that Ivus
was <span style="font-style: italic;">our</span>
guy. I rode out to see him flatten the Alliance forces.</p>
<p>"Oh
crap. Giant, angry tree. Run away. Very
fast.
Entire Alliance army behind him. He has a 3-stack
of
Lifebloom. We're boned."</p>
<p>But someone had a plan. Not,
on face value, a very good plan. "Kite him to Drek!"
This,
to me, seemed like a fairly iffy plan; wasn't that what the Alliance
was <span style="font-style: italic;">trying</span>
to do?</p>
<p>But
kite him they did, with the sea of red text charging behind him.
I put down a Frost Trap; I really can't say whether it helped
or
not.</p>
<p>Into Drek's room he went.</p>
<p>And then the Alliance made a horrific mistake.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/stripe-ivus-lol.jpg" /></p>
<p>I don't know <span style="font-style: italic;">what</span>
happened, but from where I was standing, it looked like they waltzed
into Drek's chamber and started breaking out the celebratory crackers
and cheese, patting themselves on the backs for a job well done.</p>
<p>They didn't appear to notice the Horde forces <span style="font-style: italic;">standing in the middle of the
room turning their healers into smears on the wall.</span>
They just stood there while we tore them apart. And
with their healers toast, we turned on Ivus.</p>
<p>Incidentally, Drek makes an awesome tank for a Shammy.</p>
<p>And Ivus went down. All that effort, and we just
creamed him.</p>
<p>At
this point, the Alliance went limp. I killed a priest outside
the
keep who just stood there and took it. I think I might have
gotten a point in 1H Sword skill.</p>
<p>Then we rode out of the keep, took back our graveyard
thankyouverymuch, and won by a fairly considerable margin.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/080822-av-reinf.jpg" /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a rel="lightbox" href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/080822-av-score.png"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/080822-av-score-tn.png" /></a></p>
<p>It was the damn longest AV I've ever been in, but it was an
absolute blast.</p>
<p>And you know what made it all the sweeter?</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a rel="lightbox" href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/080822-after-av.jpg"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/080822-after-av-tn.jpg" /></a></p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-27276260719188784932008-08-17T01:35:00.000+10:002008-08-17T01:36:04.264+10:00Beta Impressions: Welcome to Northrend<p>No, I'm not going to be posting about the beta exclusively
from now on. This is just a result of nothing of interest [1]
happening on live this last week and a bit, while lots of interesting
things happened in the beta.</p>
<p>I've decided not to post much in the way of concrete details
on the beta content. I want to keep this blog relatively
spoiler-free; to the extent that instead of describing the details of a
quest or NPC conversation, I'll probably just mention the general
concept and move on. Maybe the odd landscape screenshot or
the like, but nothing really spoilery.</p>
<p>One aspect of that are the letters from Northrend; they let me
poke fun at the beta content without having to explicitly talk about it.</p>
<p>So, impressions of entering Northrend for the first time; what
can you expect on day one?
</p>
<h4>Crash, Bang, Boom!</h4>
<p>Hopefully what you do <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span>
experience are error dialogs telling you that the data files are
corrupted, that they cannot be repaired, and you have to sit through an
hour and a half install again.</p>
<p>For the eighth time.</p>
<p>Because that's how many times I've had to reinstall Wrath so
far; that's not even counting the times that I tried to install and had
it fail. I don't know what Blizz has done to their installer,
but it's garbage at the moment. It looks like it's not
bothering to validate that the files it installs are actually valid; so
when you get to the latest patch an hour later, you find that a random
file's been corrupted and you have to reinstall.</p>
<p>(Incidentally, that's what Its' "fainting" problem was a
symptom of.)</p>
<p>For now, I appear to have a reasonably stable install, which
is nice.</p>
<h4>Welcome to Northrend, Here's Your Axe</h4>
<p>The first time you step into Outland, there's a real sense
that you're not in Azeroth any more. Outland is weird and
alien; that made it exciting the first time, but nowadays the only
Outland zone I still really like is Nagrand, which is ironically the
most "normal" zone there is.</p>
<p>Northrend is completely different. It doesn't feel
out of place in Azeroth; Blizzard could have shoved it in next to any
existing Azeroth zones, and it would have fit right in. The
difference is that the Northrend zones feel more... polished.
More epic. Bigger and better.</p>
<p>Outland's zones were, I think, better designed, but suffered
from a very alien art direction. Northrend is even more
well-designed in comparison to Outland, but returns to a more classic
Warcraft art style.</p>
<p>It also, as I said, feels more epic. For example,
the first time I flew from Orgrimmar to Warsong Hold, I had to wonder
whether the hold had been built into the side of a massive canyon...
only to realise I was just in an utterly <span
style="font-style: italic;">colossal </span>building.
There's also the conversations with the NPCs themselves.
As your character "grows up," you are very much a nobody.
You're not a big hero like Jaina or Thrall. You're
just a freelance warrior among the multitudes.</p>
<p>But there are times in Northrend where the NPCs stop and say
"wow; I can't believe you really did that. You're awesome!"
When you have the leader for the Horde forces in Northrend
praise you for your efforts, organise an honour guard for you
and give you one of his wolf mounts to get you to the front lines, you
start to feel like an actual <span style="font-style: italic;">somebody</span>.</p>
<p>And it's bloody fantastic.</p>
<h4>"I seek the holy grail!"</h4>
<p>Quests are also much better in Wrath than in either vanilla or
BC. Sure, there's still the "kill N of X, Y and Z," "gather Q
of J" and even a few dreaded "escort M back to N" quests in there.
But they feel more polished. I'm yet to come across
a quest where I groaned and felt like putting off doing it because I
could see it being a real pain.</p>
<p>Take the kill quests for example: normally you get something
along the following lines:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Deathstalker Biggles wants
you to kill 5 Fluffy Penguins, 6 Harmless Penguins and 14 Baby Seals.</p>
<p>But now, most of the quests look like this:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Deathstalker Biggles wants
you to kill 20 Fuzzy Defenceless Critters.</p>
<p>There's still a number of the "old style" there, but they tend
to be much easier to accomplish, and won't see you running around half
the zone trying to find the type of mob that, inexplicably, only spawns
about 5% of the time.</p>
<p>And then there are the vehicle quests. I've seen a
number of people complaining that the addition of vehicles is going to
turn WoW into a glorified online Halo clone, but it's simply not true.
Do you know what the first "vehicle" I encountered was?</p>
<p>A horse.</p>
<p>Seriously; there's a quest to steal yourself a horsie.
You go up to it, and it has the "enter vehicle" cursor on it.
You click on it, and your character jumps on (quite
literally,
I might add; you don't just appear on its back in a puff of smoke) and
you ride off with it.</p>
<p>Really, the vehicle system is just a way for Blizzard to make
it so that you can hop on or into some other object in the world, be it
a mount, a vehicle or a structure, and use special abilities that apply
to just that object.</p>
<p>And unlike the bombing quests from BC, each of the vehicle
quests thus far has been different. I've ridden on the back
of
a stolen horse, driven around a field of battle on a tank, flown on a
wyrm, and manned a static gun emplacement.</p>
<p>I also want to go out on a tangent briefly in order to
highlight a
moment from Wrath. This has <span
style="font-style: italic;">very</span> light spoilers
in it, so I'm hiding it in a little spoiler box. If you want
to see it, click in the box (you'll need JavaScript enabled) or simply
disable styling on this page.</p>
<div class="spoiler">
<noscript><p class="spoiler-message">The following content
contains spoilers and
has been hidden. To view it, enable JavaScript or disable styles for
this
page.</p></noscript>
<p>You're down on the beach near a small outpost with a scant few
tents. A much larger outpost lies just up the coast, shrouded
in mist. The place looks completely abandoned, and you're
told that it was attacked by some nameless force. The Tuskarr
near one tent seems reluctant to name the attackers, apparently out of
fear that invoking their name will summon them.</p>
<p>You are tasked with getting back some of his possessions, as
well as the standard death and destruction that goes with attempting to
recover any outpost.</p>
<p>But before you go, they tell you to be careful: they've
already sent a number of people into the mist... and none have returned.</p>
<p>So I'm standing there, thinking that this is just a load of
rubbish. Thanks to my goggles with built-in zoom feature, as
well as Eagle Eye, I know the place is deserted. Maybe
there's some sort of debuff for entering the mist?</p>
<p>Ah, who cares?! I run forward, figuring on just
running around to grab the quest items and...</p>
<p>...and then my vision narrows, the corners of the screen
whiten out, and the NPCs disappear from sight. Everything
goes slightly foggy and then I see... something moving in the mist.
What the...</p>
<p>I back out of the mist; the NPCs return, and whatever was in
the mist disappears. OK, so Blizz is trying to mess with me,
are they?</p>
<p>I head back into the mist, and carefully make my way in to
meet the enemy...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I have to say that whilst not the most original idea ever, the
execution of this particular enemy species is <span
style="font-style: italic;">exceptionally</span> well
done; especially with the spooky atmosphere!</p>
</div>
<p>So those of you out there who love questing, I think you're
going to be very happy with Wrath.</p>
<h4>Lowbie Tanking Ninja Turtle</h4>
<p>Another thing I can't help but have noticed are the changes to
Hunter pets. I won't go into excruciating detail on these
right now, but I wanted to get this out:</p>
<p>My turtle is not only usable, but arguably a <span
style="font-style: italic;">better</span> levelling
pet than my cat.</p>
<p>Here's the thing: back in vanilla and BC, turtles sucked.
Yes, they had excellent mitigation, but that couldn't offset
their laughable damage output and threat generation. They
basically couldn't hold aggro off a baby kitten.</p>
<p>They couldn't tank in instances, they couldn't out-dps a fairy
with a slightly damp tissue, and no one ever seemed to sell food they
would eat.</p>
<p>Which is probably why Bisque ended up falling about 20 levels
behind.</p>
<p>However, with the changes to Hunter pets in Wrath, Bisque is
now a better levelling pet than Tiddles for one simple reason:</p>
<p>I can't pull aggro off him.</p>
<p>And he's <span style="font-style: italic;">two
levels below me.</span></p>
<p>Tiddles' threat generation is more or less on-par with what he
currently does, maybe a bit higher. But Bisque's is through
the roof. Unless Wrath has bugged out and re-enabled Cower
again (oh, how I hate that) or I've started going all-out before
he got the first hit in, it's really hard for me to pull aggro.
The little guy just keeps on truckin'!</p>
<p>And he's got a lot of awesome toys now: a taunt, intercept and
of course his shield. Tiddles still blows Bisque out of the
water in terms of damage output, but Bisque can now actually hold a
mob's attention.</p>
<p>As I said, Tiddles is still pretty much still Tiddles.</p>
<p>There have been a few major changes to my Dragonhawk, Smaug.
He now has a focus dump, so he does decent DPS.
Fire Breath still makes me a little nervous in crowded areas,
but he seems to make a pretty decent levelling pet.</p>
<h4>Replacing Skill With Button-Mashing</h4>
<p>And then there's the Steady Shot change. Let me just
say first off that it <span style="font-style: italic;">had</span>
to be made. Hunters were penalised more than any other class
based on their network latency. But manually weaving my shots
was part of what made being a Hunter exciting for me; knowing that
I had to actually get my timing right to maximise my DPS.</p>
<p>And before you say it, <span style="font-style: italic;">no</span>
a macro would not have worked just as well. Using a macro led
to a 10% <span style="font-style: italic;">loss</span>
in DPS; please leave your raving zealotry at the door.</p>
<p>But with this change, Hunter DPS really does just boil down to
"mash X until it's dead." I know Blizzard isn't finished with
our class yet, but I really hope they come up with some way of
complicating our DPS that doesn't depend on network conditions or some
other factor outside our control.</p>
<p></p>
<p>On the whole, Wrath looks to be shaping up really nicely.
Blizzard are clearly raising their own bar on this one,
improving (even if in just a small way) on pretty much every aspect of
the game.</p>
<p>Also, if you have any questions about Wrath, feel free to ask
them, and I'll do my best to answer them.</p>
<hr />
<p>[1] I didn't think a Kara run that got called on
Moroes, a Gruul's run I didn't go on and farming Mudfish for a few
hours qualified as "interesting." :P</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-27169666426599550772008-08-14T01:28:00.000+10:002008-08-14T01:29:37.325+10:00Northrend Letters (Part I)<div style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"
class="page">
<div class="letter">
<p class="not-indented" style="margin-bottom: 2em;">Dear
mum and dad,</p>
<p>Well, I seem to have landed up in the
less-entirely-hospitable-than-I-would-have-liked continent of
Northrend. You see, I was approached by some representatives
of our mighty Warchief Thrall, who asked me if I would be willing to
participate in a little scouting "expedition."</p>
<p>The
first warning sign should have been the way they said "expedition,"
complete with air-quotes. They do not appear terribly
accustomed to
subterfuge. In any event, they made their case and I agreed.</p>
<p>Also,
they gave me sandwiches. Really nice ones with pork and just
enough
gravy so's you can taste it, but not so much that the bread goes all
soggy.</p>
<p>The zeppelin ride over was largely uneventful, apart from
when a gang of pirates attempted to board us. This did not
go so well
for them considering that we were in a zeppelin and they in a boat.
But I must give the Bloodsail Buccaneers credit for
enthusiasm, if not for deductive reasoning.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"
class="page">
<div class="letter">
<p>After several hours of flying north, we arrived at the
Forsaken port of Vengeance Landing in the Howling Fjord. Various
persons had
informed me that this place represented the first look at the
Forsaken's own style of architecture, and thus was an
important milestone in their cultural development.</p>
<p>However, I cannot help but think that they did not design
their buildings with conventional properties such as structural
integrity or aesthetics in mind. It appears they designed
each structure to provide the maximal electrical conductivity. One
cannot walk from one end of the settlement to the other without having
to comb one's hair.</p>
<p>Upon arriving, I noted that Tiddles' fur was standing on-end.
At first, I surmised that he must have detected the odiferous
scent of cheese nearby, for you surely remember Tiddles'... aversion to
cheese.</p>
<p>I changed my theory when his tail
spontaneously caught fire. He now refuses to go anywhere near
the town lest he combust again.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"
class="page">
<div class="letter">
<p>Sadly,
I am yet to go out into the wilds and assess the situation here.
There appears to be a problem of some kind whereby any time I
attempt to walk south of Vengeance Landing, I suddenly pass out and
wake up later back at the town.</p>
<p>Last time it happened, I woke up with a damn pencil stuck up
my nose! Personally, I suspect those bloody apothecaries; they're
always
up to no good.</p>
<p>In
any event, I shall make sure to write to you both again when I have
more to say. If the fainting issue cannot be adequately
resolved,
I shall likely go to Borean Tundra and try my luck there. </p>
<p>Your now and, for the foreseeable future, present son.</p>
<p style="text-align: right; margin-top: 2em;">Itsnoteasy.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p><small>Paper texture courtesy of <a
href="http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-high-res-grungy-paper-textures/">BittBox</a>.</small></p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-77501756956674214942008-08-08T15:10:00.000+10:002008-08-08T15:15:15.206+10:00The Advantages of Being an Addon Developer<p style="text-align: center;"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/beta-invite.png" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/beta-char-copy.jpg" /></p>
<p>Please don't hate me...</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-79788729419669148252008-08-06T21:59:00.000+10:002008-08-06T22:02:51.510+10:00Laggramas<p>Big
Bear Butt <a title="Big Bear Butt's post on being bored in BC"
href="http://thebigbearbutt.com/2008/08/04/are-you-really-bored/">recently
posted</a>
about how there's an awful lot of content out there in vanilla WoW that
most players haven't seen before. Every time I log on, I see
people complaining about how they're bored, and that Blizzard needs to
hurry up with Wrath because there's nothing to do.</p><p>To
paraphrase BBB: rubbish.</p><p>A
few weeks back, as I said previously, I joined OathBound.
Within
60 seconds of being invited in, I was asked if I wanted to come to ZG.
Yes, Zul'Gurub; the guild was having a fun-run. ZG
was one
of the few raid instances I'd done back in vanilla WoW, so it wasn't
like I hadn't done a few full clears. And it's not like
there's
much of anything you can get from ZG that's still useful at 70.</p><p>But
I went along, and I had a blast. I can't describe how good it
felt to not just one-shot Bloodlord Mandokir, but to completely destroy
him. Fighting Hakkar again was great fun, and I even got to
kill
Gahz'ranka, who I had never seen before.</p><p>The week
after, the
guild was in Molten Core. We only got as far as Baron Geddon
before calling it, but again it was just so enjoyable to run around
tearing these once-feared bosses to ribbons. I remember
having to
decurse the Lucifron fight on my druid. On dialup.
Without
Decursive. Needless to say, it's a hell of a lot more
entertaining when you're just in charge of bringing the pew-pew.</p><p>And
this week, the guild headed over to the Dread Citadel itself.
Unfortunately, it didn't go so well. The major
issue seemed to be a lack of people. With no upgrades for
them, most didn't seem interested in coming.</p><p>I
was absent for an entirely different reason: I'd reached my broadband
quota a few days earlier, and was speed-capped. Which means
that
while I can do just fine on a Kara run, I was disconnected inside
Naxxramas within 10 seconds; instantly if someone entered combat.</p><p>I'd
really love to see Naxx. And BWL. And AQ.
All the
places and fights I never got to see back before BC. I
suppose I
find it hard to understand how someone can invest time into this game
and not want to see and do as much as they can.</p><p>Sure,
there's no
upgrades to be had from MC or Naxx. But those pieces of gear
that
drop out of BT or Sunwell; the ones you covet so much... WotLK is going
to make those obsolete. You'll be back at the bottom of the
food chain again. If all you get out of playing WoW is better
gear, then you'll have nothing to show for all that effort.</p><p>On
the other hand, I'm coming away with something worth far more;
something you won't find on any loot table: memories and fun.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-34153224617779973782008-08-03T02:20:00.000+10:002008-08-03T02:21:33.504+10:00I Think I'll Go For a Walk<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A">You're
not fooling anybody</a>.</p>
<p>So, I was just standing there when a spaceship full of Fire
Bears flew
down and abducted the 'e' key from my keyboard. Unable to
form a
complete, correctly-spelled sentence, I was left unable to blog until I
was able to order a replacement in from Norway (where they grow
keyboard keys in large underground caves.)</p>
<p>What are you looking at me like that for? Don't you
trust me? <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl1UvbGkQAs">Would I
lie to you</a>?</p>
<p>Ok, yes, I would. Great big whoppers, at that.
But at least you can always <span
style="font-style: italic;">tell</span> when I'm
making stuff up!</p>
<p>Not at all suddenly changing the subject:</p>
<p>Two
weeks ago, I finally changed guilds. The old guild,
<Fury>
was more or less a social levelling guild that had kinda fallen apart
as the higher-level members started moving over to raiding guilds.
I'd stayed there because I wasn't sure whether I was going to
be
transferring Its to another server soon or not. In the end, I
decided to stay and applied to <OathBound>.</p>
<p>A few days of waiting, a few quick questions online, and I had
a new tag.</p>
<p>A
week ago, I got in to my first Karazhan run. As in, ever.
Despite getting my first toon to 70 within a few weeks of
BC's
launch, I never ended up raiding for a variety of reasons. It
was
a huge thrill to head in there for the first time and see all these
bosses that I'd read about and seen in videos.</p>
<p>And I only died a few times!</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/stripe-maiden-of-burnies.jpg" /></p>
<p>It
was quite fun; even when we got to Opera and the rest of the group said
we were going to do the "hunter thing" as a form of "initiation."
Luckily, the event was Big Bad Wolf, so I didn't die and I
got to
laugh at their failed attempt to get me killed.</p>
<p>As for the
bosses, we managed to two shot Big Bad Wolf (on the first
attempt, the order of Little Red Ridinghooding went Main Tank, Off
Tank, Main Healer, Other Healer, One Of The Tanks Again which made
things somewhat unstable.) We had to take four tries at Aran
[1] before he went down, and a bad infernal drop combined with
marginally
inaccurate positioning caused us to wipe once on Prince.
Aside
from the optional bosses (which we didn't end up having time for,) we
one-shot everything else.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/stripe-evil-floaty-masonary.jpg" /></p>
<p>Oh yeah, and this dropped:</p>
<table
onclick="window.open('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28581','_blank');"
style="cursor: pointer; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/INV_Weapon_Rifle_23.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt28581" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b class="q4">Wolfslayer
Sniper Rifle</b><br />
Binds when picked up
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Ranged</td>
<th>Gun</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>149 - 278 Damage</td>
<th>Speed 2.70</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
(79.1 damage per second)<br />
+15 Agility<!--e--><br />
Durability 90 / 90<br />
Requires Level 70</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q2">Equip:
Increases attack power by 32.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The other hunter was a troll, and was holding out for a bow,
so I ended up getting it. I'm still adjusting to the change
in
weapon speeds; I went from a 1.74s shot rotation to a ~2.0s shot
rotation, so I still hit Steady Shot slightly too early some times.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/stripe-its-with-wsr.jpg" /></p>
<p>One other final bit of gloating, though: I went in to Kara
with one purple (<a class="epic"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32474">[Surestrike
Goggles v2.0]</a>,) two greens (<a class="uncommon"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29776">[Core of Ar'kelos]</a>
and <a class="uncommon"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31527">[Leafbeard Ring]</a>)
and with the rest of my gear being blue. The rest of the
party were in, more or less, Kara or higher epics.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/first-kara-meters.png"
class="decoration"
title="And I still do the most damage; go me!" /></p>
<p>(In the interests of full disclosure, those meters are from
Curator on.)</p>
<p>Damage meters aren't everything; but to get up there on my
first run with "crappy" blues... I'm a happy little hunter.</p>
<p></p>
<p>(Incidentally,
there was going to be a funny picture of Its posing with the Wolfslayer
Sniper Rifle, and Tiddles thinking about how Its is probably just
compensating for something... except WoW Model Viewer doesn't seem to
like my new machine. You'll just have to imagine it on your
own.)</p>
<hr />
<ol>
<li>
<p>And <em>no</em>, I didn't move during flame
wreath! ... I just got caught in the blizzard repeatedly...</p>
</li>
</ol>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-4700690413721503532008-07-19T12:00:00.000+10:002008-07-19T12:00:01.001+10:00Its' Baseless Speculation Time!<p>So, you might have noticed a little bit of hubub in the last
day or so when Blizzard lifted the NDA, kicked off the open beta of
WotLK, and information started pouring out.</p>
<p>Happily, we've finally gotten a look at what new talents and
abilities Hunters will have come WotLK. Since it seems to be
the "hip" thing to be doing right now, here's my take on some of the
changes:</p>
<h4>Being Talented</h4>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_KillCommand.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Master's Call [NYI]</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 1/1</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>7% of base mana</td>
<th>40 yd range</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Instant cast</td>
<th>1 min cooldown</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">Your pet
attempts to remove all stun and movement impairing effects on the
target, and cause them to be immune to all effects for 4 sec.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This apparently is replacing Animal Handler. For the
life of me, I <span style="font-style: italic;">cannot</span>
see how Blizzard is going to rationalise this. I mean, it's
cool and all, but how exactly does an animal make someone <span
style="font-style: italic;">immune</span> to movement
impairing effects?</p>
<p align="center"><img
style="width: 220px; height: 245px;"
alt="Believe it or not, Tiddles is actually not at all qualified to perform amputations..."
class="decoration"
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/tiddles-with-saw-opt.png" /></p>
<p>Perhaps it's best not to ask...</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_CobraStrikes.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Cobra Strikes</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 3/3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">You have a 60%
chance when you critically hit with Arcane Shot, Steady Shot or Kill
Shot to cause your pet's next 3 special attacks to critically hit.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>I find this interesting since it basically increases your
pet's ability to keep Frenzy up (heck; maybe we could drop another
point from it!) But by itself, it's not <span
style="font-style: italic;">that</span> incredible.
That's why I want to pair it with:</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_SurvivalInstincts.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Invigoration</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 2/2</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">When your pet
scores a critical hit with a special ability, you instantly regenerate
2% mana.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Let's do a little light theorycrafting. Currently, I
have ~20% crit, and an attack speed of 1.74 seconds.
Averaging that out, that means I'm hitting a target ~1.15
times a second with a 1:1 rotation. Taking a 20% crit rate,
that's 0.23 crits per
second. Which is 0.14 Cobra Strike procs per second.
Now, let's assume that Cobra Strikes doesn't proc again until
our
pet has gotten his three specials off. We'll also assume we
have a focus dump, and that we can supply him with enough focus to keep
using it.</p>
<p>Combined with 2/2 Invigoration, three crits per Cobra Strikes
proc, 0.14 procs per second and a base of 6200 mana, that's:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">~0.14 procs per second × 3
crits per proc × (2% of 6200 mana) per crit = ~51 mana per
second</p>
<p>That's about <span style="font-weight: bold;">256
MP5</span>.
You'd need to be able to supply
your pet with 17 focus per second; according to Cheeky's spreadsheet,
I'm currently at 24 focus per second.
What's interesting is that also according to Cheeky's, I use
69
mana per second during my 1:1 rotation, which is about 347 MP5.
Let's switch on Viper, which gives me (in the average case) 87
MP5. That means if I got just 4 MP5 from other sources, I'd
never
actually run out of mana...</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_Pet_WindSerpent.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Beast Mastery [NYI]</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 1/1</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">You master the
art of Beast Training, teaching you the ability to tame Exotic pets and
increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points by 5.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This, right here, is huge. Let's deal with the
second half first.</p>
<blockquote>... increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points
by 5.</blockquote>
<p>For those that aren't aware, loyalty and the Training Point
system is being thrown out for a simpler talent-like system.
Starting at level 20, pets will get one Skill Point every
four levels to spend in their talent tree (each pet family has access
to one of the three pet talent trees that will be available.)
That makes for a total of 16 points at level 80 (not 15 as
most people seem to think; they're forgetting the point you get at
level 80.)</p>
<p>This means that BM hunters will have access to <span
style="font-style: italic;">21</span> points.
But there obviously has to be somewhere to spend those
points. Additionally, I don't think Blizzard will have the
talent trees set up in such a way that allows BM hunters to completely
max their pet out, so we can probably assume that pet talent trees will
have at least 26, maybe 31 points you can potentially spend in them.
The only question now is whether this will allow BM hunters
to "back-fill" their pets' talents, or go deeper into the tree into
some 21-point über talents.</p>
<p>The other half is also really interesting. As you
should be aware, there are various beasts that are simply not tameable
by hunters. For example, there is no tameable basilisk or
mana wyrm in the game, despite these being beasts.</p>
<p>Some have speculated that this will allow hunters to tame <span
style="font-style: italic;">any</span> mob categorised
as a "beast," but I don't think that's likely. For example,
Marsh Walkers are beasts. Now, having one of those as a pet
would be so far off the "awesome scale" that we'd have to get a rocket
scientist in to figure out where the needle went, but I really doubt
Blizzard would allow it.</p>
<p>Also, notice how "Exotic" is capitalised; that makes it a
proper noun which suggests that instead of the current "Tameable/Not
Tameable" status of beasts, it'll become "Tameable/Not Tameable/Exotic."</p>
<p>None the less, whether or not this is as awesome as it sounds
depends entirely on what pets Blizzard makes Exotic. Remember
that in the new system, every pet will have access to a particular
talent tree <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span>
a family-unique ability. Some ideas that spring to mind:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?npcs&filter=cr=34;crs=0;crv=2285">Basilisks</a>:
tanking tree, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=35313">Hypnotic
Gaze</a> ability. Depending on how long the gaze
ability works, you could even make Basilisks utility pets, and have
them as a form of temporary, emergency CC.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?npcs&filter=cr=34;crs=0;crv=90">Hyppogryphs</a>:
dps tree, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=11019">Wing
Flap</a> ability, or maybe <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=5708">Swoop</a>.
And tanks think wind serpents are bad! These could
actually be pretty horrible (for the opposing team) in PvP; you could
use them to knock players away from yourself if they get too close (or
to throw defenders off the cliff at the Lumber Mill or the bridge in
AV...) Or if they had swoop, it'd give BM hunters a
semi-frequent spell interrupt. </p>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?npcs&filter=cr=34;crs=0;crv=2210">Mana
Wyrms</a>: utility tree, <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=37176">Mana Burn</a>
ability. Yes, a mana-drain pet. Just imagine the
QQing that would result from caster arena teams...</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>There actually aren't that many pet families that aren't
already tameable and aren't obviously ridiculous. But who
knows; maybe there'll be some utterly awesome pets in Northrend that
only BM hunters can tame!</p>
<p>(Of course, it could also be pointless where all the Exotic
pets are inferior to regular pets in every respect, but let's not be <span
style="font-style: italic;">too</span> negative!)</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_ZenArchery.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Careful Aim</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 3/3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">Increases your
ranged attack power by an amount equal to 100% of your total Intellect.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>That's pretty interesting; being in the second tier of
Marksmanship, it'll allow hunters to stack a bit more Intellect.
The problem is that in terms of stats, Intellect "costs"
twice as
much as Attack Power. For example, for any gem that gives you
+8
Intellect, you could have gotten a gem of the same quality with +16
Attack Power. Still, even if you don't stack more Intellect,
it's
an extra few hundred AP.</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_Pathfinding.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt34026" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Improved Tracking [NYI]</b></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Rank 5/5</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">Increases all
damage done to targets that are being tracked 5%.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This is exactly eight kinds of awesome. That's how
many things we can track. It basically boils down to a flat
5% increase in all damage on everything except things that are
invisible (which we can't really shoot anyway,) and unclassified things
like bugs.</p>
<p>Even better, it's a <span style="font-style: italic;">first
tier</span> talent in Survival. I'm seriously
considering dropping Aimed Shot and Rapid Killing to get this puppy...</p>
<p>There are more talents than the above, but they're the ones
that interest me as a BM-centric hunter. If you want to play
around with them, MMO Champion have a <a
href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?hunter">hunter
talent calculator</a>.</p>
<h4>L33t Pet Skillz</h4>
<p>As I said before, pets are now moving on to a talent-like
system. In addition to the three talent trees (DPS, tanking
and "utility,") there is also going to be one family-specific ability
for each family. Thanks to <a
href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/">Wowhead's WotLK subsite</a>,
I've managed to put together a list of all known family-specific pet
abilities:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52399">Bad
Attitude</a> - there's
no apparent limit to the number of times this can happen, so I suspect
this is going to work as reactive damage. Combined with
Crocolisk's +10% bonus to armor, could Blizz be intending them to be
the AoE tanking pet?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=50285">Dust
Cloud</a>
- This looks to be a pretty powerful debuff, exclusive to Tallstriders.
Averaged out, it works out to be a 12% reduction in chance to
hit.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=35298">Gore</a>
- Now exclusive to Boars. Sorry, Ravagers...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53589">Nether
Shock</a>
- Can you say "tactical deprivation of heals in arena?" Sure,
I
knew you could. At least now Nether Rays are useful!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53548">Pin</a>
- Well, it's
got a crab for an icon, so I assume this is what crabs are getting.
It's interesting; a combined root and dot that also roots the
pet. This could make for an interesting tanking ability for
saving squishies and stopping runners.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53562">Ravage</a>
- Being able to stun with your Ravager would be great for saving
squishies or just legging it. Sadly, this also means that
Ravagers lose Gore. But then, I've never been fond of the
Spiky
Nightmare Clowns, so I'm not terribly fussed.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53582">Savage
Rend</a>
- One of my mum's hunters has a pet raptor. Named "Wally."
I just can't stop laughing at the thought of something being
torn
apart by a vicious raptor named <span
style="font-style: italic;">Wally</span>. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52018">Serenity
Dust</a> - Something to note about this one. It says
"moth" in the tooltip. We can't <span
style="font-style: italic;">tame</span> moths.
Well, I guess come WotLK we <span
style="font-style: italic;">will</span>
be able to tame them (although whether they'll be "Exotic" or not
remains to be seen.) Aside from that, it's a pretty amazing
buff; +10%
AP and a 2415 HoT once every 2 minutes. I'm not sure where
this will
place moths in terms of being a tanking/grinding/raiding pet though.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53543">Snatch</a>
- First of all, I can see this <span
style="font-style: italic;">really</span>
annoying rogues. This is a good thing. This is for
owls, so this should make Tux (and <a
href="http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/">Pike</a>)
happy. Owls get this in exchange for losing Screech; though
you
can sort of think of this as a single-target version of screech...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53568">Sonic
Blast</a> -
Basically Ravage, except it does slightly less damage, it does nature
damage instead of (presumably) physical damage, and it's icon is a bat
as opposed to a gaping, blood-soaked maw. Since there aren't
any hedgehogs in WoW, I suppose this must be for bats.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53598">Spore
Cloud</a> - Only
does 6 DPS, but I suspect the 700 armor reduction is more the point.
It's also fairly obvious that this is for Spore Bats; this
will make
them pretty damned effective against casters.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53533">Swipe</a>
- Aside from being <span style="font-style: italic;">another</span>
ability starting with "s," this is the family ability for Bears.
They're like baby durids! </p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53575">Tendon
Rip</a>
- Pretty simple snare; likely to be popular in PvP since the pet could
potentially keep it up 30% of the time. Pity it's only
available
on Hyenas...</p>
</li>
<li><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=4167">Web</a>
- How I shot web? Spider is shot web!</li>
</ul>
<p>If I haven't mentioned a pet family, it's because it's ability
is already in-game. It looks like we're going to have <span
style="font-style: italic;">way</span> more choices
for viable pets come WotLK. It's also worth mentioning
that <span style="font-style: italic;">every</span>
pet has either <a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=23099">Dash</a>
or <a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=23145">Dive</a>,
as well as one of <a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52474">Bite</a>,
<a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52472">Claw</a>
or <a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52475">Smack</a>.</p>
<p>That said, Wowhead has a number of other pet abilities in
their WotLK database that aren't family-exclusive:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53490">Bullheaded</a>
- After having Tiddles get netted by those bloody Sunfury Archers, I
say: <span style="font-style: italic;">bring it on!</span></p>
</li>
<li><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53434">Call
of the Wild</a> - Sadly, nothing to do with making the target run
around trying to find a bathroom...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=54044">Carrion
Feeder</a> - Man, and I thought Cannibalise was nasty...
I mean, the health is one thing, but regenerating <span
style="font-style: italic;">happiness?!</span>
Just imagine this in PvP, though...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=7371">Charge</a>
- Strangely, what used to be the defining ability of boars is now
available to Cats, Hyenas, Raptors, Tallstriders and Wolves... but not
boars. Poor piggies are being hit with the nerf bat pretty
hard
lately...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53448">Dying
Bite</a> - This is the <span style="font-style: italic;">last
thing</span> you need to be worried about if you've killed my pet.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=54046">Heart
of the Phoenix</a> - One thing <a
href="http://www.bigredkitty.net/">BRK</a>
has advocated before is putting points into Improved Revive Pet for
high-end raiding, since losing your pet early in the fight translates
to a 30% drop in DPS. This may make that unnecessary.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53476">Intervene</a>
- I'm sorry; I just can't take this ability seriously when it's using a
picture of a <span style="font-style: italic;">turtle</span>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53478">Last
Stand</a> - Remember when BRK had that big thing about <a
href="http://www.bigredkitty.net/2008/06/30/weekend-update/">not
needing tanks come WotLK</a>? Yeah, I'm beginning to
think he might have been right. All hail the Panzer Turtle!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53426">Lick
Your Wounds</a> - This + Mend Pet + Moth = Invincipet!
(Yes, I realise it's channelled; I just wanted to say
"Invincipet.")</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53401">Rabid</a>
- The only way this could be cooler was if it actually turned your pet
into a <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=c12MyFnWOMs">Rabbid</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53480">Roar
of Fortitude</a> - A nice little buff for the melee peeps.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53517">Roar
of Recovery</a> - ... Are we even going to <span
style="font-style: italic;">need</span> mana pots come
WotLK?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=52825">Swoop</a>
- this one's for carrion birds and "undefined." More
un-announced pet families, methinks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53477">Taunt</a>
- Wow; snap aggro for pets. Very nice.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53508">Wolverine
Bite</a> - What's odd is that it only has one rank, and it's
available at level 30.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>We're Gonna Have To Find More Action Slots...</h4>
<p>You may have noticed, while reading about the Hunter talents,
that two abilities are mentioned several times:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53321">Bear
Trap</a> - So a combination of Freezing Trap and Immolation Trap.
Plus, it's got an awesome name: <span
style="font-style: italic;">Bear Trap</span>.
As <a href="http://forthus.blogspot.com/">Forthus</a>
suggested, disarming a Bear Trap should trigger every Bear Traps in a
40 yard radius.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53351">Kill
Shot</a>
- For comparison, under normal circumstances, this does less damage
(both over time and per mana) than Arcane Shot, on the same cooldown.
Against <span style="font-style: italic;">wounded</span>
targets, it does <span style="font-style: italic;">way</span>
more damage and becomes incredibly mana-efficient. Awesome.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>So
that's about it for mechanical changes to our class thus far.
That said, there might still be a few surprises down the line
for
us considering that Hunters were one of the last classes to be worked
on. Only time will tell, but right now things are looking
pretty
good.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-51561964842445714462008-07-16T15:19:00.002+10:002008-07-16T17:44:58.993+10:00Fur Is Not Chainmail<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update</span>:
a few minutes after
publishing this, I found a pretty nasty mistake in the spreadsheet's
workings. Basically, I was taking the difference between the
base
armor/resistance mitigation and the full mitigation in the wrong place,
throwing the results way off. I've re-written my conclusions
appropriately. This is why one shouldn't be theorycrafting at
6AM, even when suffering from extreme insomnia.</p>
<p>There's
a serious problem with pet talent calculators. Something I'd
half-expected <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?pet">Wowhead</a>
to get right, but apparently not.</p>
<p>The
problem is that while they go to all that trouble to give you a pretty
talent window with shiny icons, and making sure you don't spend more
points than you have...</p>
<p>...none of them tell you what the talents <span
style="font-style: italic;">do</span>.</p>
<p>Oh sure, they'll tell you that Rank 10 of Great Stamina gives
your pet an additional 40 stamina.</p>
<p>Great. Fantastic.</p>
<p>So?</p>
<p>It's
a bit like going into a quaint little bakery in a small town, and
asking of the proprietor the contents of his pies. He then
launches into an in-depth exposition on the low-level chemical
composition of the pies, what particular local supplier he purchased
the meat from, etc.</p>
<p>And then you say, "that's all well and good, but what do they
taste like?"</p>
<p>The baker replies: "I have no idea."</p>
<p>This is not, on the whole, desperately helpful.</p>
<p>This
looks like a job for theorycrafting! After a number of hours
of
fiddling randomly with a spreadsheet, as well as referring to <a
href="http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/">Petopia</a>
[1], I came up with the <a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/PetCalculator.ods">Pet
Calculator</a>. This should work in pretty much
everything except Microsoft Office; if you're using that, you might
want to try the <a
href="http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp">OpenDocument
Format plugin</a>. If there's demand, I'll try to rig
up something for the Excel users, but without a copy of Excel, there's
only so much I can do.</p>
<p>Before
I go further, I just want to point out that the working in this
spreadsheet could be, and the first time I published this <span
style="font-style: italic;">was</span>,
wrong. That said, I've now double-checked it a few more
times,
gone over my reasoning again, and can't see anything obviously wrong
with it. If you <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span>
find something wrong or just suspicious, please let me know.</p>
<p>Usage is pretty simple: on the first sheet, you plug in the
various bits of information it demands of you like so:</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/petcalc-input-opt.png" /></p>
<p>These
are the details for Tiddles and myself. You just need to edit
the
non-bold cells to match you and your pet's stats. Once you've
told the spreadsheet all this, it will update the output section with
the results.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/petcalc-output-opt.png" /></p>
<p>The
first two, "Pet Health" and "Pet Armor" should be pretty close to
what's reported in-game. I've seen a few points difference
here
and there, but it's possible that it's just rounding differences.</p>
<p>"Effective Health" is talking about how much <span
style="font-style: italic;">actual</span> damage your
pet can take, after taking armor and magical resistances into account,
before going to the big stable in the sky.</p>
<p>"Absorption
contribution" tells you how much of that effective health each of the
Greater Stamina, Natural Armor and Resistance pet talents are
responsible for. For stamina, this is just done by applying
all
the various modifiers to the stamina granted by Great Stamina and then
converting it into health.</p>
<p>Armor
and magical resistance is a little trickier: these are computed by
working out the effective health (including base armor, armor and
resistance from the hunter, etc.) followed by the effective health
assuming we <span style="font-style: italic;">didn't</span>
have
any points in Natural Armor of one of the resistance talents.
We
subtract the latter from the former, and this gives us the extra
absorption spending those points give us. It's important to
do it
like this because the benefit provided by armor and resistances aren't
linear; computing them by themselves would give an inflated result.</p>
<p>Finally, "Absorption per point" just takes the
absorption contribution and divides through by the number of training
points you spent on that talent. In this case, we can see
that
magical resistances are <span style="font-style: italic;">incredibly</span>
point-efficient compared to stamina and armor, by a full order of
magnitude in the case of the former.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/petcalc-150tp-opt.png" /></p>
<p>This lets you play around with theoretical set-ups; for
example, investing 150 TP into Greater Stamina will give you just over
half the absorption that those same points in Natural Armor would have
given you. But of course, that's only in the case of physical
damage.</p>
<p>Magical Resistance is also interesting. Rank 5 of
any magical
resistance will give you almost four times the absorption of stamina,
at just under half the point cost.</p>
<p>That said, the resistance
talents seem to give the biggest bang for the buck. Taking a
Sporebat as an example, max ranks of Stamina and Armor only provide 5%
and 8% of the final absorption respectively. That said, with
rank 11 of Great Stamina, max rank Magical Resistance provides a
whopping 30% of the final absorption.</p>
<p>Now, generalisations are <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span>
bad, and you should take your own circumstances into account, but it
seems that in general:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Natural
Armor is better mitigation for the points than Great Stamina is,
assuming you're only interested in physical damage. That
said,
since the amount of absorption armor gives is relative to the amount of
health you have, Great Stamina actually <span
style="font-style: italic;">increases</span> the
effectiveness of Natural Armor. Might be interesting to set
up a graph of the two...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>That said, choosing to put points in one or the other <span
style="font-style: italic;">exclusively</span>,
Stamina and Armor end up being about the same effective health for
physical damage, but with Stamina also boosting your effective health
against magical damage.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Irrespective of that, Magical Resistance blows them both
out of the water and
into orbit.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>So
there you go. Plug your pet and yourself in and see what
happens.
If you're looking to max out your pet's health, and just want
numbers to plug into the pet training window without having to read all
of that pesky text; assuming a baseline pet (like a Sporebat) with
max-rank Bite or Claw, Rank 2 Avoidance and Rank 1 Cobra Reflexes plus
15 TP spent on a family-specific talent (leaving 266 TP to play with):</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Rank 11 Great Stamina and Rank 5 Natural Armor seems to
give the best physical absorption.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Rank 9 Great Stamina and Rank 5 Magical Resistance seems
to give the best magical absorption.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>If you want a bit of both, you'll just have to decide for
yourself.</p>
<p>Again, if you spot anything wrong with this post or the
spreadsheet, let me know.</p>
<hr />
<ol>
<li>
<p>Some
have claimed that Wowhead's introduction of pet comparison tables, pet
talent calculators, etc. have made Petopia obsolete. This is
complete rubbish; where, pray tell is Wowhead's detailed tables of base
pet statistics, or their pages on the formulae underpinning hunter pet
health and armor?</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong: the new Wowhead stuff is <span
style="font-style: italic;">very</span>
cool. They've got the best pet talent calculator I've seen,
and
the tables are much easier to use than static ones on Petopia.
But Petopia is still t3h awesome.</p>
</li>
</ol>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-6499420304350701832008-07-15T02:01:00.001+10:002008-07-15T02:19:54.707+10:00My You Eye<p>Originally, I was going to do this post using an <span
style="font-style: italic;">awesome</span> interactive
SVG that you could zoom in on, and you could mouse-over any UI element
to see a tooltip of what it was, why it was there, and a link to
download it.</p>
<p>Except that, despite being a <span
style="font-weight: bold;"><span
style="font-style: italic;">seven year old standard</span></span>,
IE still doesn't support it. Instead they'd rather support
their proprietary WPF format, which is almost the same thing.
I hate Microsoft so very much at times.</p>
<p>For the love of all that's good and fuzzy, <span
style="font-style: italic;">please</span> stop using
IE. You're making the web developers cry.</p>
<p>Anyway, enough politics. Here's my UI in all its
needlessly complicated glory; note that if you see a little
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> WowAce
icon, it
means that
addon can be updated with the <a href="http://www.wowace.com/wau/">WowAce
Updater</a> (which, rather depressingly, requires Internet
Explorer to install <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Talk:WowAceUpdater#Installing_WAU_without_IE">unless
you want to be tricksy</a>, but... no, not going off on a
tangent!)
On
to the UI!</p>
<p align="center"><img
alt="Here's a relatively low-resolution shot of my UI, for reference."
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ui-overlays-550.jpg" /></p>
<p align="center">Or you can view a <a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ui-overlays-960.jpg">960
x 600 version</a> (192 kB)
or <a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ui-overlays-1920.jpg">1920
x
1200 version</a> (967 kB).</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>This is my <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5467-Outfitter.html">Outfitter</a>
bar. It lists various outfits that I can switch between by
clicking on the appropriate icon. Shown on the bar at the
moment
are two primary sets: "Birthday suit" and Normal. The
remaining
icons are for "accessory sets" which simply change certain slots and
don't define a complete set. These are my fishing, grinding,
max-dps, fire festival, parachute and raiding sets.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is the quest tracker provided by QuestsFu, which is
part of
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=4571">
FuBar
3.0</a>.
I hate this quest. <span
style="font-style: italic;">So</span>
very much. It takes hours upon hours to complete, and you get
a
stupid rejuvenation potion for your trouble. Why do I even
bother
with that thing?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is a neat addon called
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=6406">Nudge</a>.
Basically, if
I'm out of range it's red, if I'm in range it's blue
and if I'm in melee range it's green. I've made it
exceedingly
wide so that I can always catch the colour in my peripheral vision.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>These
are my item cooldowns, provided by
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/CooldownTimers2">Cooldown
Timers 2</a>. These
bars
aren't in this spot any more; they're over by #5; I just haven't taken
a new screenshot since then.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/ElkBuffBars">Elkano's
BuffBars</a>.
What's cool about this is that, although you can't see it
here,
you can filter different buffs/debuffs into different groups.
Each group can then either be free-floating, or anchored to
another group. Above the list of buffs is a (presently) empty
Paladin block that shows up all the various Paladin auras, blessings
and seals.</p>
<p>Let this be a lesson in always making sure you make
changes in the right profile, or your hunter will end up with a
Paladin-centric buff display. Oh well.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Again, this is Cooldown Timers 2, this time showing my
ability cooldowns.
Of course, the main point of this is to show how long until
your
traps are ready (which you can't see here since I didn't drop one.)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This
message is generated by
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span>
TopScore Fu. The addon keeps track of
your highest damage (and/or healing) records with individual abilities
and overall, with and without crits. But it also does
something <span style="font-style: italic;">way</span>
cooler: it can be configured to take a screenshot when you get a new
record.</p>
<p>Why
is this so awesome? Because you'll end up with a massive
collection of screenshots documenting your character's progress in the
game. It's awesome to be able to go back years and reminisce.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Here be
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Quartz">Quartz</a>.
The main bar is the cast bar (with the red area denoting what
my
current latency to the server is,) the red "blip" above that is my GCD
timer, and the white bar above <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span>
is my autoshot timer.</p>
<p>And
before anyone mentions it, yes the cast bar was pasted in from another
screenshot, since you'd be surprised how hard it is to get <em>all</em>
of this crap on-screen at once...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This
is <a href="http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/4803/">Kharthus'
Hunter Timers</a> [1]. This shows the duration of
things. The real draw card for this is that it shows you how
long
you have left on your traps before they disappear, and how long until a
trap's effect wears off.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>My primary unit frames are taken care of with
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/PitBull">PitBull</a>.
The middle two are fairly obvious: myself and my target.
To the left is my pet and my pet's target, above that is my
focus
and my focus' target and to the right is my target's target and
target's target's target. Above and to the right, which isn't
visible in this shot, is the unit under my mouse cursor, and their
target.</p>
<p>What is this <em>excessive</em> of which you
speak?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>My
party and raid frames are done with
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Grid">Grid</a>.
I used to have
larger
frames until I realised that I didn't really need them. In
this
particular case, I've got Grid along with Grid Mana Bars. The
little red dot in the upper-left corner of K's frame denotes that he
has aggro. Since he has a rage bar, this is a <span
style="font-style: italic;">good thing</span>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The experience bar (or in this case, reputation bar) is
courtesy of Trinity XP (part of <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7810-TrinityBars2.0.html">Trinity
Bars 2</a>.)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The
bottom area of the screen is carved out and given a little sprucing up
thanks to <a href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/SunnArt">Sunn
Art</a>. Specifically, I'm using the Tribal
texture
(which is part of the base Sunn Art package, although there are a
number of additional art packs.) I love this texture because
of
the gilded golden border at the top which is <span
style="font-style: italic;">just right</span> for
fitting my XP/reputation bar into it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As
far as I'm aware, all of the various chat modifications I have are done
by
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Chatter">Chatter</a>.
Except for blacking out the names: that's done in
an
image editor. :P</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Mah pet bar, thanks to Trinity Bars 2.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Mah
main action bar, again thanks to Trinity Bars 2. This is more
complex than it first appears. If you look carefully at the
letters on the buttons, you'll see they read:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">1, 2, 3, 4, R, F, V, C,
X, Z, -, =</p>
<p>Now,
imagine you've got your fingers resting on the normal WASD movement
keys. Ignoring the last two, look at where those keys are:
they're the keys that wrap around the movement keys. This
means I
can hit any action on that bar (except for food and drink) without
moving my left hand.</p>
<p>But there's more: there's a second, separate
set of actions bound to those keys plus the Ctrl modifier. If
you
count the pet bar (which is bound to Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z]) I can hit any
one of 30 actions without moving my hand <span
style="font-style: italic;">at all</span>.</p>
<p>What's more, most of those actions are themselves macros
that have different behaviours. For example, 2 is a
macro that fires Serpent Sting normally, or Scorpid Sting if I hold
down Alt. F doubles as both regular Arcane Shot and my
pull-shot. I think the only one that <span
style="font-style: italic;">isn't</span> a macro of
some kind is Multishot, and that's only because I've never needed
Tranquilizing Shot, nor do I have any macro slots left...</p>
<p>And people wonder how I run circles around them while
smacking
them with instant shots and stings while micromanaging my pet...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This here be
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=4571">FuBar
3.0</a>. The modules (all of which are, as far as I
know, available on the WowAce Updater) you can see,
from left to right, are:</p>
<ul>
<li>MoneyDetailFu — tracks where my money is coming from
and where it's going.</li>
<li>MoneyFu — tracks how much money I have on each and all
of my toons.</li>
<li>Omen — surely you know what this is, right?</li>
<li>Grid — just another way to access Grid's configuration.</li>
<li>Cooldown Timers 2 — one of the <span
style="font-style: italic;">few</span> ways to access
CDT's configuration.</li>
<li>Visual Themes — ditto.</li>
<li>Skinner — as above.</li>
<li>ToFu — actually redundant with Quartz, shows how long
left on a flight. A.k.a. the "can I make a coffee in time"
timer.</li>
<li>LocationFu — GPS for WoW.</li>
<li>DurabilityFu — now you have <span
style="font-style: italic;">no excuse</span> to turn
up with damaged gear. Well, except for the "I'm a dipstick"
one.</li>
<li>AmmoFu — can haz boolets?</li>
<li>SpeedFu — surprisingly, this actually has a legitimate
use: working out if your flying mount is level or not!</li>
<li>GarbageFu — firstly, it shows a list of all vendor
trash in my bags when moused over, as well as their individual and
total value. But that's not the best part: if I Shift+Click
on the icon, it will drop the contents of the <span
style="font-style: italic;">least valuable</span>
inventory slot. This way, you can minimise your losses when
you run out of bag space.</li>
<li>SunnArt — see #13.</li>
<li>FishingBuddyFu — honestly don't use this much, since
typing <code>/fb</code> is faster, and the rest of Fishing
Buddy is mostly automatic.</li>
<li>DPS — don't really use this either since I have #26...</li>
<li>TopScoreFu — see #7.</li>
<li>QuestFu — see #2.</li>
<li>BagFu — tells me how many slots I have left before I
have to drop my partial stack of Malfunctioning Basilisk Livers.
The horror!</li>
<li>RestFu — shows rested XP on my army of alts.</li>
<li>ExperienceFu — good for estimating how long until I
level on an alt. Also used for figuring out how long the
elves around the mana-forge have been studiously <span
style="font-style: italic;">not</span> dropping those
bloody plans. Stingy bastards...</li>
<li>Elkano's BuffBars — configuration for #5.</li>
<li>ClearFont2 — basically does a bunch of font
substitution jiggery-pokery to make text in-game nicer to read.</li>
<li>ClockFu — lets me know how long ago I was supposed to
have gone to bed. Bad Its!</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<p>A miscellaneous bank of buttons controlled by Trinity Bars
2. Mostly contains food, random quest items, macros, etc.
The lower nine buttons are bound the numeric pad.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Mah minimap. It was repositioned and resized
using <a href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/SimpleMinimap">simpleMinimap</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The mini menu bar, again from Trinity Bars 2.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What a surprise: more Trinity Bars 2! This set
of three columns map to my <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_G15">Logitech G15</a>'s
G keys. The original, blue-backlit one, not the "I'm going to
have to kill someone for this" crappy orange version.
Specifically, each column is a different mode's worth of G
keys. The actual binding itself and stylish red border
showing the active mode are done using <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8393-ItsG15Binder.html">Its'
G15 Binder</a>.</p>
<p>Modes 1 and 2 contains various things that doesn't
actually get used all that often and mode 2 is the one I'm generally
in. Specifically, since G13-G18 can be reached with my pinky
finger without having to move my left hand too much, it tends to
contain the most oft-used things. Most notable are my "God
Mode" macro on G13, bandages on G16, my Zapthrottle Mote Extractor on
G17 and my I Has Macro Lol macro on G18.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It's <span style="font-style: italic;">another</span>
Trinity Bars 2 button! This is my "panic" button; it's bound
to numpad 0, which is nice and big, and very easy to hit with my right
thumb.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is in two parts. The upper row of buttons
are my "quick" buttons. Various things that I need quick
access to, but don't want to hit by mistake. From left to
right, they are my mount macro, my pet control macro (combining Mend
Pet, Call Pet and Revive Pet,) my gadget macro, my über trap macro and
my powerup macro.</p>
<p>The bottom row is basically the "stance" bar from Trinity
Bars 2 that depends on my class. For my hunter it's aspects,
for a paladin it's auras and for a druid it's forms. It's not
actually bound to anything for Its, but for non-pet classes, this bar
takes over the Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z] bindings.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Amazingly, these two buttons <span
style="font-style: italic;">aren't</span> from Trinity
Bars 2! In fact, it's <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info3909-TrinketMenu.html">TrinketMenu</a>.
If I mouse
over the buttons, I can switch out trinkets with the left and right
mouse buttons. The buttons are also bound to Shift+5 and
Ctrl+5, which activates the trinket in that slot.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Well, that didn't last long: it's back to Trinity!
The left one is a pop-up bar; mouse over the hammer, and a
vertical bar of professions shows up. Saves a hell of a lot
of space, that's for sure. Other uses include Paladin seals,
or Shammy totems. The bag button, unsurprisingly, opens my
bags.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Here's
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Recount">Recount</a>.
Look at those numbers.
Beautiful, aren't they?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span>
<a href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Omen">Omen</a>.
If you don't have this, and you <span
style="font-style: italic;">ever</span> group with
other people, you should hang your head in shame.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>And now for the other things you <span
style="font-style: italic;">can't</span> see.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/ArkInventory">ArkInventory</a>:
this thing is a God-send. Here's a
screenie so you know what I'm yammering on about:</p>
<p align="center"><a rel="lightbox"
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/arkinv-586.jpg"><img
class="decoration"
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/arkinv-440.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Basically, it pools all your storage into a single bag.
You then create a bunch of groups. To each group
you assign one or more categories or rules. AI (ArkInventory,
not Artificial Intelligence) will then sort your items into those
groups for you.</p>
<p>Take that screenshot for example. I can find
anything in my bags very quickly because things are always grouped
together logically.</p>
<p>That said, AI is not for the faint of heart.
It's <span style="font-style: italic;">incredibly</span>
time consuming to configure, and has a bad habit of not only getting
confused about where a particular item is supposed to go (sometimes
requiring you to either hand-edit or nuke your configuration to fix
it.) It's also one of the AddOns that can reportedly
cause the "block too big" <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=12787.0">memory
errors</a> that <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span>
bring WoW to a screaming (followed by flaming and violently exploding)
halt. Usually six seconds after you start a boss fight in an
instance.</p>
<p>I've found that using <code>/reloadui</code>
after each boss mitigates that.</p>
<p>So yes, it's finicky, and makes WoW somewhat unstable,
but that just gives you an idea of how unbelievably useful it is.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8378-BeastTraining.html">Beast
Training</a>: basically an improved beast training
window that looks less like a trainer's list of skills and more like a
talent window.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info4088-Bookworm.html">Bookworm</a>:
records any book (or plaque) that you read, and
where you read it. You can then go back and read them later
on. Gotta read 'em all!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Cartographer">Cartographer</a>:
replaces the standard WoW map.
Among other things, it allows you to scale it, move it, show
unexplored areas, add notes, make it transparent, and more.
When combined with
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span>
Cartographer_Data,
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span>
Cartographer_Herbalism
and
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span>
Cartographer_Mining, it'll give you map locations for pretty much
every herb and mineral node in the game. Just like Gatherer,
except without the annoying "having to find everything" step.</p>
<p>However, also combine this with
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=10992.0">Routes</a>,
and you can build
up optimised mining/herbing routes for farming runs.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Clique">Clique</a>:
I'm still adjusting to using this, but I use it on
my healery-type characters. It lets me, for example,
Shift+Click on someone to cast a full heal, Ctrl+Click to cast a HoT,
or Ctrl+Right Click to dispell. Pretty damn nifty.
That said, I do think I prefer mouse-over healing more (ie:
set up your healing spells to cast at your mouse over target) since it
allows me to not only heal people via unit frames, but I can also just
point at them in the game world to heal them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info6887-DoubleWide.html">DoubleWide</a>:
because the normal cramped quest log is not
fun.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=4392">EquipCompare</a>:
when you mouse over something that's
equippable, it shows the tooltip for what you <span
style="font-style: italic;">currently</span> have
equipped next to it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info6439-ExpressMail.html">ExpressMail</a>:
shift-click on a mail to loot an attached
item. Damn I love this thing. Tekkub rules.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/GemHelper">GemHelper</a>:
used on Por; lets you filter your gem list
based on colour, stats, quality, etc.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> GemList:
one of those interactive "whisper me to search
for gems" dealies. That said, it doesn't look like it's
maintained any more, so you might want to try
<span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=6642.0">CraftList2</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/IHML">I Has Macro Lol</a>:
basically, this addon rewrites a
particular macro slot depending on where you are. This is
hugely useful for daily quests. By dragging the IHML macro to
an action button (M2G18 in my case,) I can push that to take readings
in the Spirit Fields, drop bombs in Skettis, phase shift in BEM, or
plant the banner on IoQD.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Its' Happy Snaps: this basically takes a screenshot every
10% of a level, or when you ding a new level. I wrote it so
that I'd have a more complete history of my alts levelling up.
It's not published anywhere, but let me know if you're
interested and I'll toss it up somewhere.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7017-LightHeaded.html">LightHeaded</a>:
basically, it's Wowhead's quest database, but
accessible in-game. Useful when you're on one of those quests
with really vague and obtuse instructions. Or, you know, ones
where the directions are just <span style="font-style: italic;">outright
wrong</span>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/MobHealth">MobHealth</a>:
because knowledge is power. Or
something.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info9094-OPie.html">OPie</a>:
this is a new addition to my UI.
Basically, I have it set up like so: I push a key
combination, and a ring of actions shows up around my cursor.
I flick my mouse towards the action I want, let go of the key
binding, and OPie executes that action. As an example, I used
to use the numpad for switching aspects which was a bad idea because it
requires me to remove my hand from the mouse to do it. Now, I
have them arranged in a ring bound to Ctrl+E, so I don't need to move
my hands. I'm still getting used to it, but it's very
promising at this point.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/PallyPower">PallyPower</a>:
obviously not visible in the screenshot for
obvious reasons, this lets you track and manage Pally blessings.
Por would have gone mad if not for this.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7296-Pawn.html">Pawn</a>:
see <a
href="http://aspectofthecapricious.blogspot.com/2008/06/because-thinking-is-hard.html">my
post on Pawn</a> for more info.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/3538/">PetEmote</a>:
because pets is peoples too. Note that you'll probably want
to re-write most of the emotes, since they're apparently translated
into English and as a result, most of them sound... wrong.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/RatingBuster">RatingBuster</a>:
summarises the difference between the item
you're looking at and what you've got equipped.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Skinner">Skinner</a>:
no, not the principal. It's what gives
windows in WoW that nifty black gradient look.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/TourGuide">TourGuide</a>:
I have four 70s, two per faction.
I've done, basically, every soloable quest in the game.
Repeatedly. Levelling up is honestly nothing more
than a chore for me because I've done it all before.
TourGuide is fantastic because it boils levelling up down to
a list of "go here, do this" instructions that you can follow while
more or less unconscious. 'Tis brillig.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/VisualHeal">VisualHeal</a>:
a little bar that shows incoming heals on you
and whoever you're casting a heal on; also shows what their estimated
health will be when the heal completes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span class="wowace-icon"> </span> <a
href="http://www.wowace.com/wiki/VisualThemes">VisualThemes</a>:
makes stuff in WoW go whoosh. Is
pretty.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Well, that's most of them. Yes, I said "most" as in
"there are more." But that should cover all the ones that are
actually useful to other people.</p>
<hr />
<ol>
<li>
<p>I realise that it's actually called "Kharthus's Hunter
Timers," but I refuse to type such blatantly awful grammar.
Oh <span style="font-style: italic;">damnit</span>!</p>
</li>
</ol>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-34224239119948080682008-07-10T12:13:00.001+10:002008-07-10T12:13:57.674+10:00It's a Pity Enchants Don't Stack<p style="float: right;"><object class="image"
data="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/500-icy-enchant-opt.svg"
type="image/svg+xml" height="230" width="240"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/500-icy-enchant-opt.png" /></object></p>
<p>Admittedly, it <span style="font-style: italic;">would</span>
be a tad overpowered. I mean, that crappy pair of white
bracers I have would make excellent T7 tanking gear with all the bonus
stamina it'd have...</p>
<p>So in 24 hours, Porphyrria went from 65 enchanting to 250.
She'd been soloing lowbie instances for a while, and DE-ing
the drops, so she had tons of dusts and essences to play with.
That said, about half of the skillups came from buying stuff
off the AH. Farming for enchanting mats becomes progressively
less feasible the higher you get. Not simply because the
instances get harder, but because the drops get fewer and far between
in longer and more complex instances.</p>
<p>I tried running ZF for some mats the other day, and spent 70%
of my time chasing after casters. In ZF, they have this nasty
habit of running away at low health, <span
style="font-style: italic;">but not coming back</span>.
They just stay wandering around at extreme range,
occasionally casting at you. I once spent 20 minutes
searching for one mob that had glitched up to a high bit of static
geometry. Since it wouldn't come back like most mobs do when
they flee, even if it couldn't see me, it took another 5 minutes to
kill it. I couldn't really move on until I did because the
damn thing was keeping me stuck in combat.</p>
<p>In the end, it was easier to simply buy the mats off the AH,
or buy appropriately-levelled green gear off the AH and DE that.</p>
<p>As it stands, I need to get Por another 50 points in
Enchanting before she can DE the massive stockpile of ilvl 115+ greens
I have. That's a problem because those 50 points require 400
Dream Dust (oh, and 10 Greater Nether Essence.)</p>
<p>This is either going to take an awful lot of dungeon runs, or
a colossal number of monies.</p>
<p>That said, one good thing has come out of all this.
If you've ever tried to powerlevel enchanting, you know how
much of a pain it is.</p>
<p>Move to left side of screen, click "Enchant," move to right
side of screen, click item, move to top centre of screen, click "Yes."
Repeat until suicidal.</p>
<p>See, enchanters can't just queue up a dozen enchants, click
"Make" and then go off and craft a cup of coffee or a sandwich.
We have to do them one at a bloody time, repeatedly telling
the game that, yes, we really <span
style="font-style: italic;">do</span> want to enchant
that. YA RLY!</p>
<p>But I've found a way around it.</p>
<p>Macro the first: "Craft-It™"</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>/click
CraftCreateButton</code></p>
<p>Macro the second: "Yes, Damnit™"</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>/click
StaticPopup1Button1</code></p>
<p>Here's how you use them: put them both on buttons next to each
other. Open up the enchanting window, pick an enchant.
Now, enchant an item in your inventory. I'm not
100% on this one, so make sure you're enchanting an item that's already
enchanted; if it's not, enchant it once then do it again.
Click "Yes" when the dialog asks you.</p>
<p>Now, if you want to <span style="font-style: italic;">repeat</span>
the enchant on the same item, press the first macro followed
immediately by the second. No need to pause or anything; drum
your fingers across if you like. The game will dutifully
repeat the enchantment you have selected on the last item you
enchanted, and dismiss the confirmation dialog without ever actually
showing it.</p>
<p>Now, you could <span style="font-style: italic;">probably</span>
combine those two macros together by pasting the contents of the second
macro <span style="font-style: italic;">after</span>
the contents of the first macro. The only reason I've used
two macros up there is because that's what I tested with, and didn't
think of combining them until two paragraphs ago.</p>
<p>When you've got to do 20 Greater Defense to Cloak enchants in
a row, those macros are a God-send.</p>
<p></p>
<p>P.S. This is my first attempt at using an SVG image.
There's a fallback for people using antiquated software
created back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Ansett was still in
the air (I'm
looking at <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>,
Internet Explorer!) Let me know if there are any issues.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-54552503210042928332008-07-07T23:24:00.000+10:002008-07-07T23:25:18.442+10:00Of Badgers, Gear and Catch 22s<table
onclick="window.open('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29434','_blank');"
style="cursor: pointer;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/badger-56.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt29434" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b class="q4">Badger of Justice</b><br />
Binds when picked up<br />
Requires Level 70</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>I has sum.</p>
<p>OK, not really. But it's the funniest typo I've had
thus far!</p>
<p>With the exception of <span style="font-style: italic;">one
gear slot</span>, I've now got the best gear I've been able to
track down without having set foot in a heroic or raid, and without
PvPing. Apart from my Beast Lord Handguards which dropped a
few hours ago, everything has been enchanted and gemmed as best I can
afford.</p>
<p>Aside from killing Ikiss another half a billion times to get <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27925">that bloody ring
to drop</a>, the next step in gear progression is going to
have to be Kara or Heroics.</p>
<p>According to <a
href="http://www.warcrafter.net/sandbox/84405">this
Warcrafter profile</a>, once I slap some gems and an enchant onto
me gloves, I'll have 1434 RAP, 142 Hit Rating and 22.12%
chance to crit.</p>
<p>This is a little depressing given that I've seen people saying
that in order to start Kara, you need ~1600 RAP, 142 Hit Rating and 25%
crit.</p>
<p>This plays into my next bit of news: I've done my first ever
Heroic instance run. I was somewhat surprised that I got into
the group as easily as I did. You see, every other time I've
ever tried to get into an Heroic group, I've been turned away because I
wasn't covered from head to toe in epics. I once asked
someone
what they considered "sufficient" gear, and the reply I got was "T5/6."</p>
<p>This one didn't
even <span style="font-style: italic;">ask</span>
what my gear was like; the leader only seemed to want to know whether I
had the key and if I could trap. Lucky for me, that's a "yes"
on both counts.</p>
<p>When I got there, I noticed that everyone else in the group
was in full epics. Not PvP epics, either: <span
style="font-style: italic;">proper</span> Kara/ZA [1]
epics.
All I had in the way of consumables were some Warp Burgers
and
Kibler's Bits [2].</p>
<p>I expected to come dead last after the healer on the damage
meters.</p>
<p>Funny thing happened, though.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/heroic-log.png" /></p>
<p>I came second, and not by a huge margin. In case
you're
wondering, K is a mage, M is the pally tank, L is the pally healer, and
E is the rogue. No, I have no idea why E is where she is.
E had purples from Kara, ZA and even Gruul's.</p>
<p>But what really made me happy was that I was able to keep pace
with an epiced-out mage with my (relatively speaking) crummy dungeon
and quest
blues. I had to play to my limit: I blew my trinkets as often
as I could, misdirecting on to the tank so I could open up sooner and
harder... but I still did it.</p>
<p>The mage actually complimented me after the run on my
performance, which was nice.</p>
<p>But really, the thing that this has hammered home for me is
how unreasonable many groups seem to be these days. I've been
told that to do heroics, I need to be able to output over 700 dps.
In that run, I think I was sitting pretty much dead on 600
most of the time, and yet no one complained that I was being a burden,
and the damage meters certainly don't suggest that.</p>
<p>But
if they expect people to have full epics to do heroics... how does one
get these epics in the first place? And don't say '"PvP;"
resilience is wasted item budget in PvE, never mind the fact that S2
wasn't available for honour back when BC first came out.</p>
<p>And as I walked off to plonk my four shiny new Badgers of
Justice into the bank, it reminded me of the SM:Lib run I did with a
friend a few months ago. She was at the low-end of the level
spectrum, I was almost at the top. We went in there duo and
cleared the whole instance. I've had people insist to me that
you cannot duo SM:Lib with just a warlock and a paladin. But
we did. And it was great fun, because we had to actually work
hard to reach the end and down Doan. We even had to use <span
style="font-style: italic;">strategy</span>.</p>
<p>It feels like people just don't want to try any more.
They don't want to risk having to make an effort in anything.
In order to begin attempting content, you apparently have to
already out-gear it.</p>
<p>And it makes me a sad panda.</p>
<hr />
<p>[1]
Someone is bound to eventually take offence at that remark,
so
allow me to qualify thusly: PvP doesn't count because I don't like PvP.
PvP and I have this little arrangement: it stays safely
corralled
in BGs and PvP realms, and in turn I refrain from whining endlessly
about people who seem to believe AFKing through a few hundred BGs makes
them a good player.</p>
<p>[2] It goes without saying I also had bandages as
well as health and mana pots. But really, you don't think
that little of me, do you?</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-41546212924510321512008-07-03T16:16:00.000+10:002008-07-03T16:18:16.404+10:00Whizzo Quality Assortment<p>Granted, this post doesn't have anything to do with chocolate,
and the term "quality" isn't really applicable... but at least the
"assortment" part is accurate! Aspect of the Capricious: now
with 33% accuracy!</p>
<p>Warning: long, rambling, disjointed post ahead.
Hmm... I should probably just put that at the top of the
blog...</p>
<hr />
<p>So, <a href="http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/">Diablo
III</a>'s in the works. I probably wouldn't
even have started playing WoW if I hadn't looked at it and thought
"hey, this is kinda like Diablo II."</p>
<p>For me, Diablo was always a better multiplayer game than WoW
has ever, or <span style="font-style: italic;">will ever</span>
be for one simple reason: people. Y'see, WoW is filled with
people ranging from the petty and stupid to outright immoral and evil.
Finding someone who is intelligent and nice is like shootin'
at some food and up from the ground gettin' bubblin' crude: cause for
making a long-running TV series.</p>
<p>But Diablo was different because you could play it on a local
network. So all of the multiplayer Diablo games I
played were with my family. My mum, my brother and myself
would all fire up D2 and go around smashing stuff up; it was fantastic.
I'm really, <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span>
looking forward to doing that again.</p>
<hr />
<p>Well, it took them <span style="font-style: italic;">three
months</span> to change the labels and ship them over, but
Australia finally has Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I just want to
make clear that the <span style="font-style: italic;">only</span>
reason I preordered it was that I was planning on getting it at some
point, and they were giving away a free Classic Controller with
preorders.</p>
<p>Honestly, I can't see what all the fuss is about.
Having played almost to the end, it's a very... underwhelming
game. I think the problem, in part, is that the game, the
developers and the fans take it all far too seriously. If you
think I'm joking, you should see the intro sequence. The
music alone is more at home in something like Ben Hur than a cartoony
fighting game.</p>
<p>Then there's the controls: it has way too many.
Every character has something like <span
style="font-style: italic;">thirteen</span> different
attacks. Not with combos like Mortal Kombat or Street
Fighter: just using the face buttons and sticks. It doesn't
help that while special attacks using the right stick allow you to
change direction when attacking, normal attacks don't. So
half the time, I end up attacking in the wrong direction.</p>
<p>It doesn't help that the game's difficulty curve is
implemented not by making the game more challenging, but by simply
making it more <span style="font-style: italic;">unfair</span>.
There's a miniboss that repeatedly crops up that you <span
style="font-style: italic;">cannot</span> attack
without being hit yourself. It has five times your reach, and
no one seems to be able to move fast enough to hit and run.
There are sections of the game where I gave up on tactics and
just ran up and mashed buttons until I either ran out of lives, or the
thing died.</p>
<p>There's a "guard" defense, but that basically disappears after
you take a single hit. Only one character (Marth) can parry,
but half the time I can't get it to go off properly.</p>
<p>But the worst part of all is that despite all the noise made
about Sonic being in Brawl... you don't get access to him until during
the cutscene before the final boss. "Sonic joins the Brawl...
really !@#$ing late."</p>
<hr />
<p>So I'm getting ready to transfer Its to a new server.
I'm pretty nervous about it; mostly because I've made a few
friends on Hyjal that I'd really prefer not to leave behind.
That said, it's not every day you're told "come over; we'll
get you geared up and raiding." Well, OK, <span
style="font-style: italic;">I</span> don't hear that
every day. It's especially good to hear when you've been
wanting to get into raiding for a while, but never seem to be able to
find the right guild.</p>
<p>I'm leaving Porphyrria and my other characters behind, so I'm
presently trying to grind up some money to leave behind; I want to get
Por her epic flyer, and have 2k gold that I can split between her and
Its.</p>
<hr />
<p>I dropped Mining on Por and picked up Enchanting on the idea
that this would let me disenchant all those daily quest greens that I
just cannot sell. Plus, Its is a miner, so having two seemed
redundant.</p>
<p>Of course, since Its is leaving, he's taking with him both
Por's source of gems and ore, <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span>
her source of daily quest greens.</p>
<p>Hmm. I might not have thought this through
properly... I've now got enough raw enchanting mats farmed
from low-level instances to get Por up the first leg of
enchanting (she only needs ~225 to DE Burning Crusade greens,) but I'm
wondering if I should drop it and re-level mining.</p>
<hr />
<p>The problem with Its' new fire festival digs is that, well...
he looks ridiculous in them, frankly. So I kinda sorta went
and got them for Por as well.</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/por-dancing.jpg"
rel="lightbox"
title="Can you handle the hotness? Get it? Hotness?"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/por-dancing-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>No brazier or pet, sadly. It seems a bit stupid that
she now has 150 blossoms and nothing to spend them on.
Hopefully
the next time Blizzard revamps the holiday, they'll add a few more
mid-range rewards.</p>
<p>On the subject, I need to see if I can find an Ahune group for
Its today to give him one more shot at Ahune and his pet scorchling.</p>
<hr />
<p>I was really excited when I found out about the Blizzard
Authenticator. I was considerably less enthusiastic when I
discovered that Blizzard won't ship them outside the US or Europe.
Which means that Aussies, Kiwis and Kanucks are screwed.
I suspect that <a
href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/35-Super-Smash-Bros-Brawl">Ben
Croshaw may have been right</a>.</p>
<p>I can only hope that one day I'll get to make a game that
everyone is really, <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span>
anxious to play... and then deliberately make it unavailable in the US
for six months. You know, because I'm vindictive.</p>
<hr />
<p>The UI post is probably going to be delayed somewhat.
I discovered that I could rig up a really nifty picture of my
UI with interactive rollovers using SVG. Except that <a
href="http://www.inkscape.org/">Inkscape</a> keeps
crashing. Which is slowing progress just slightly.
And then there's the whole "Internet Explorer doesn't support
SVG" issue. That said, it seems that only 30% of my readers
are using IE, whilst the rest of you are using <a
href="http://www.mozilla.com/products/firefox/"><span
style="font-style: italic;">real</span></a> <a
href="http://www.opera.com/">web</a> <a
href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">browsers</a> that
actually support a <span style="font-style: italic;">seven
year old standard</span>.</p>
<p>Can you tell I hate IE with the fury of a billion angry
weasels?</p>
<hr />
<p>I usually try to post on Wednesdays and "the weekend" where
"the weekend" qualifies as any point between 00:00 on Saturday to 04:00
on Monday. I missed yesterday because I was kind of not
entirely sane. See, where I live it sometimes gets windy.
Very windy. "Why is someone knocking on the door at
3am... oh wait, that's just the windows shaking" windy.
Stupid meteorology kept me up all night. It kept
coming in bursts every 2 or so minutes... so every time I'd be falling
asleep, someone would shake the house violently.</p>
<p>It calmed down later in the day, and I decided to get some
rest... about five minutes before it started again.</p>
<p>I was not exactly in the right frame of mind for writing
coherently.</p>
<hr />
<p>I need a new pair of headphones. The trouble is that
they sell them in those "so hard to open you need a bansaw" plastic
cocoons, so you can't try them on. My old pair was fairly
serviceable, except that after wearing them for a while, they made my
ears feel like they were bleeding. I'd really rather not
repeat the experience, but I can't try any of them on, so I have no
idea how they'll feel.</p>
<p>I'd preferably like a pair with big cushiony ear bits that <span
style="font-style: italic;">surround</span> my ears
instead of resting <span style="font-style: italic;">on</span>
them, with a mic, that's USB. I'm still looking...</p>
<hr />
<p>I've had an idea for a post on trapping. I've read a
lot of posts about <a
href="http://www.bigredkitty.net/2007/05/17/chain-trapping-tutorial/">trapping</a>
<a
href="http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/2008/04/hunter-kindergarten-chain-trapping-101.html">technique</a>,
but none on "how to do CC in Shadow Labyrinth with three hunters."</p>
<p>Let me tell you: it's harder than it looks.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-7824798354961852422008-06-28T12:00:00.000+10:002008-06-28T12:13:26.981+10:00Rock, Plastic, Hackers<p>I
can only imagine that the account stealing lowlives are, at this very
moment, looking for new avenues of immoral revenue generation.</p>
<p>For
those who don't know (all three of you,) Blizzard just announced that
it's introducing a new security token for protecting WoW accounts.
Curse has <a
href="http://www.curse.com/articles/details/11162/">some
details</a>, and you can read <a
href="http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=24660&rhtml=true">Blizzard's
page on the authenticator</a>.
Rather than simply re-hash what's on those pages, I'm going
to go
a little into why this is likely going to more-or-less eliminate
account stealing, and how it all works.</p>
<img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/mechanochest-1-opt.png"
style="float: right;" class="decoration" />
<h4>In The Beginning, There Was "super_funny.jpg.exe"</h4>
<p>Firstly,
how do people's
accounts get stolen in the first place? There's a few ways to
do
it; the most direct is to get a keylogger or other malware on to a
user's machine. This software will then either record the
user's
keystrokes, or simply sniff WoW's memory to get your username and
password. No, copy and pasting it from a file won't help.
Neither will checking "remember account name."</p>
<p>Another way
is to simply guess the password. If you can find out
someone's
account name, you can make a few educated guesses on their password.
People have a nasty habit of chosing amazingly easy-to-guess
passwords like "1234567" or "qwerty" or even, I kid you not,
"password." If you are one of these people, <span
style="font-style: italic;">change it <span
style="font-weight: bold;">now</span></span><span
style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">!</span></p>
<p>Before we get on to how the authenticator works, let's take a
little side trip.</p>
<img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/mechanochest-2-opt.png"
style="clear: right; float: left;" class="decoration" />
<h4 style="clear: right;">Deterministic Capriciousness</h4>
<p>Computers
can't do random. They just can't. A computer has
the
imagination of a lump of concrete. Any time you see a
computer
come up with a "random" number, what it's actually doing is generating
a <span style="font-style: italic;">pseudo-random number</span>.
In other words, <span style="font-style: italic;">fake</span>
random.</p>
<p>The way it does this is that it starts with a <span
style="font-style: italic;">seed</span>.
It can be whatever you want, really. Typically,
it's either
zero (not good) or the date and time the computer/program started
(better.) Then you ask for a random number. The
program
does a bunch of (waggles fingers around) <span
style="font-style: italic;">things</span> to the
number. The result is your random number.</p>
<p>When you ask for another random number, it does those same
things to the last number it gave you, which gives you the next one.</p>
<p>Now,
what's interesting is that if you know the seed, and the algorithm
being used, you can exactly reproduce the entire sequence of random
numbers.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Aside time: lots of computer
games use this to good effect. For example, when you started
a multiplayer DOOM match, all of the players' computers would be
synchronised to the same random seed. This meant that when a
"random" decision was needed, <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span>
of the computers would make the exact same decision every time!</p>
<img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/mechanochest-3-opt.png"
style="clear: left; float: right;" class="decoration" />
<h4 style="clear: left;">If It's Good Enough for Banks,
It's Probably Good Enough for
a Computer Game</h4>
<p>So why did I drag you through that? Because that's
basically how the authenticator works. Blizzard gives you a
little plastic token with four things: a button, a small screen, a
serial number and a random seed. To associate your token with
your WoW account, you tell Blizzard the account name and the serial
number.</p>
<p>What's important is that <span style="font-style: italic;">only</span>
Blizzard knows what seed your token is using. So when you go
to log in, and they tell you to "press the button and type in what
number the token shows," they are the <span
style="font-style: italic;">only</span> ones who know
if it's right.</p>
<p>So let's say someone's managed to get a keylogger on to your
machine. They get your account name, they get your password,
and they get a token number. But that number is <span
style="font-style: italic;">useless</span> to them,
because each number is only valid <span style="font-style: italic;">exactly
once</span>. Once that code has been used, it isn't
used again.</p>
<p>So even if they get your account name and password, they <span
style="font-style: italic;">still</span> can't get in!</p>
<p>Same thing with attempting to brute-force your password.
Maybe they'll succeed. But even if they do, it
doesn't matter, because the chances of getting <span
style="font-style: italic;">both</span> the password <span
style="font-style: italic;">and</span> the token code
correct <span style="font-style: italic;">at the same time</span>
is infinitessimally small.</p>
<p>Does this replace a good password? No. For
optimal security, you need three forms of authentication:</p>
<ol>
<li>Something you know,</li>
<li>something you have and</li>
<li>something you are.</li>
</ol>
<p>The first is a password, the second is something like these
authenticator tokens, and the last is biometrics like fingerprints or
DNA. Blizzard isn't likely to implement the third, nor do I
think it's really appropriate or necessary.</p>
<img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/mechanochest-4-opt.png"
style="clear: right; float: left;" class="decoration" />
<h4 style="clear: right;">Just Five Easy Installments of <span
style="font-style: italic;">Your Soul</span></h4>
<p>So then there's the issue of cost. Some have balked
at having to pay US$6.50 for the token. RSA has a similar
product called SecurID where the hardware tokens costs around US$40
each (it's tricky to find exact pricing, mind you.) Blizzard
is offering this at a fraction of the cost. When you're
spending $25 a month to play, paying US$6.50 <span
style="font-style: italic;">once</span>
to secure your
account is not asking much at all. Keep in mind that this
would
have required extra infrastructure on Blizzard's end, which they
haven't charged you extra for.</p>
<p>Some have said that asking customers to pony up money
for it is wrong, and that they should just make the servers more
secure. The problem isn't that the servers aren't secure: I
have <span style="font-style: italic;">never</span>
heard of a case of Blizzard's servers being compromised. What
<span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> getting
compromised are people's accounts.</p>
<p>It's
that weak password. It's the software you run on your machine
without personally auditing it, or verifying the source. It's
the
emails you get from other compromised machines, spammers
and relatives filled to bursting with malicious images,
animations, scripts, the lot.</p>
<p>People who want to steal your account would be <span
style="font-style: italic;">insane</span>
to try and attack Blizzard when the end-user's machine typically has
all the security of a damp tissue in the middle of a typhoon.</p>
<p>And that's not something
Blizzard can "fix." It's something the <span
style="font-style: italic;">entire industry</span> has
been struggling with for decades. You know how they overcome
it? By using hardware
tokens and biometrics. Expecting Blizzard to secure a simple
two-factor system is like asking a hippopotamus to learn to
fly. It's just not physically possible.</p>
<p>Others have made objections along the lines of "Blizzard
should just allow third parties to produce these." Ok, fine;
user goes and buys a hardware token from "www.reallysafe.cn" and loses
their account two days later. Why? Because
"www.reallysafe.cn" was a front for gold-sellers, and since they sold
the tokens, they know what the random seed is. Whoops; there
goes your security. The fact is that unless Blizzard sells
them itself, it has no way of knowing whether the third parties are
trustworthy or not.</p>
<h4>I, For One, Welcome Our New Plastic Security Token
Overlords</h4>
<p>Long, rambling and somewhat disjointed story short:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">The new Blizzard
Authenticator is awesome, cheap, as secure as the best internet banking
sites, and it's about bloody time.</p>
<hr />
<p>Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. I just
happen to be a programmer, and have done several courses on the subject
at Uni; enough to know what's going on here.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-2801933590206655292008-06-27T20:23:00.001+10:002008-07-01T02:07:56.587+10:00Frosty the Seasonal Boss<p>Granted,
it doesn't really roll off the tongue. If he'd been 10+ man,
I
could have said "Frosty the Raid Boss" which would have been perfect.
Alas.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ahune-just-want-hugz-opt.jpg" /></p>
<p>Before we start, why do we want to kill <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=25740">Ahune</a>,
exactly? <a class="epic"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=35495">[The Frost Lord's
War Cloak]</a> is why; <a class="epic"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=35507">[Amulet of Bitter
Hatred]</a> too if you're doing him on Heroic.</p>
<p>So, you've got your gun/bow/crossbow/squirtgun, a bag
full of ammo/arrows/permanent dye and want to go bust up some giant
summonable frost lord. Good for you. What do you do?</p>
<p>Well, to summon Ahune you need to do one pre-quest in
normal-mode
Slave Pens. Just enter Slave Pens, and there will be an NPC
right inside the entrance. Grab the quest from her, and make
your way through the instance to the first open area. There,
you'll see the NPC to turn in the quest. Once done, the same
NPC will give you a daily quest to summon Ahune. The daily
quest itself is turned in at the big crystal just to the left of the
tunnel you entered through.</p>
<p>Remember that turning in the daily quest will <span
style="font-style: italic;">immediately</span> summon
Ahune; make sure your group is ready!</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/not-ready-yet-opt.jpg" /></p>
<p>Also, you should probably clear the area before summoning him.
Killing the groups on the right, left, the pat and the
makrura ahead should do it. Just don't stand behind Ahune, or
you'll pull the naga further on.</p>
<p>Ok,
you've summoned Mr. Ahune; what do you need to know?
Happily, everything you need to know can be condensed into
this list:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Ahune has two phases: "kill the adds" and "dps like a
caged, rabid grizzly bear."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Phase 1: ("kill the adds")</p>
</li>
<ol>
<li>
<p>In this phase, Ahune takes 75% less damage, so you
shouldn't be shooting at him unless there's nothing else to do.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Don't get within melee range of Ahune himself; he has a
mean right-hook.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Keep
Aspect of the Viper up. Don't be afraid to use "normal" ammo
for
this bit. DPS isn't the issue; it's keeping your mana and
cooldowns in reserve.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>At
the start of the phase, a large, rocky elemental will spawn.
Smaller elementals will continuously spawn throughout phase
1.
The big guy <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span>
be
dead by the time you reach phase 2—this shouldn't be a problem.
The little guys have about 1,500 hp on normal. Try
and burn
them down as they spawn.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Keep a close eye on your pet. The elemental
has
a stacking 100 dps dot that <span style="font-style: italic;">cannot
be removed</span>.
If it gets to three stacks, pull your pet out and let the dot
tick off. Mend pet does just over 150 hps, so three stacks
isn't
too bad, but from there it quickly becomes fatal. If it gets
above five, your pet is pretty much dead.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Keep an eye on your healer. When one of the
little adds goes after her (and they will,) nuke it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Once
the big guy is down, you might find yourself having trouble killing the
little adds that continue to spawn, on account of the melee destroying
them in the blink of an eye. If this is the case, you might
as well
autoshot Ahune. It won't do much, but it's better than
sitting
there twiddling your thumbs. Also, he's not immune to Serpent
Sting, for what that's worth. <span
style="font-style: italic;">/shrug</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Don't be afraid to set your pet to aggressive once the
big elemental is down.
Your pet will not aggro any of the nearby naga or slaves, and
it
allows you to perforate Ahune while your pet shreds adds that come
after you. Just remember to put him back on passive when you
go
to phase 2. If he keeps going after Ahune himself, back off a
bit
so he's out of your pet's aggro range. </p>
</li>
</ul>
<ol>
<ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha;">
</ol>
</ol>
<li>
<p>Phase 2: ("dps like he just insulted your mother")</p>
</li>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Swap in your best ammo.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Send your pet in to attack.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hit Aspect of the Hawk.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hunter's Mark the core.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If it's not on cooldown, and it increases your DPS, use
it. That means Bestial Wrath, trinket(s) and Blood Fury for
Orcs. If you don't have a Shammy and can handle it, Rapid
Fire too. A God Mode macro helps here.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>DPS the Frozen Core as hard as you can. Ahune
has no direct attacks in this phase, so threat isn't an issue.
(Don't forget about the spikes; see the general section.)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Phase
2 lasts about 30 seconds. Phase 1 lasts for over 2 minutes,
which
means that Bestial Wrath and most cooldowns will be ready to go by the
time phase 2 rolls around again. Don't equip
trinkets if you won't be able to use both in 30 seconds.
I personally only use one "On Use" trinket since I'd probably
forget to activate the other one.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<li>
<p>In general:</p>
</li>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Stay off the sheet ice on the ground. There's
a
random knock-down effect in place.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If
you see swirly effects near your feet, move. If you see ice
popping out of the ground near you, move faster. If you
don't, a
big spike will burst up below you, and throw you into the air.
This is true in <span style="font-style: italic;">both</span>
phases, so don't get too focused on DPS.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Due to the above, stay on the leftish side of the area,
so you don't get thrown into the water.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Once he's dead, make sure everyone loots the chest.
Until the chest despawns, you cannot re-summon Ahune.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You can attempt Ahune as many times as you like,
provided
someone in the group hasn't summoned him today.
</p>
</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>And that's basically it. Go in there, nuke him down,
and have fun. I've already gotten my cloak off him, but it's
such a fun fight that I'm looking forward to doing it some more before
the festival's over.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ahune-go-boom.jpg" /></p>
<p>That the pet schorchling looks awesome has <span
style="font-style: italic;">nothing</span> to do with
it. Nope.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-92225412770477234672008-06-26T00:34:00.001+10:002008-06-26T00:34:56.276+10:00Rumours of My Demise...<p>It's always struck me as something of an odd phrase.
Not "the rumours of my demise are incorrect," but "greatly
exaggerated." Which would be like: "the rumours of my demise
have been greatly exaggerated. I didn't explode in a ball of
fire; I actually choked to death on a rather
small piece of cheese."</p>
<p>Which means that anyone who uses the phrase must logically be
a <span style="font-style: italic;">zombie!</span></p>
<p>Where was I?</p>
<p>So I didn't post at all last week. Bad Its.
But, I have a pretty good reason for it. I wasn't
playing WoW. No, I haven't burned out. See, my
desktop has been getting less and less stable over the past
few months, and it came to a head a few weeks ago when I did an
Arcatraz run. My UI ran out of memory six seconds into the
Lady Delrissa fight, leaving me to auto shot the whole time.
And then, almost immediately after engaging the final event,
the machine rebooted. I got back just in time to watch the
last mini-boss go down.</p>
<p>I didn't feel it was fair to keep instancing when I couldn't
even stay up for more than 20 minutes at a time, so I stopped
instancing alltogether. I also stopped doing dailies when I
couldn't even make it up to Blade's Edge from Shattrath without having
to restart WoW.</p>
<p>So I didn't write anything last week because I honestly had
nothing to write about. Well, OK, I did, but I just didn't
feel like it.</p>
<p>But on Tuesday my new machine arrived! And yes, I
have shamed my ancestors and descendants for generations to come by
buying a Dell, but thus far it's working beautifully.</p>
<p>Plus, I now get to play WoW at 1920x1200 with everything maxed
at 60 fps on a <span style="font-style: italic;">24"</span>
monitor.</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/kalithresh-at-1920-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/kalithresh-at-1920-opt-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>It's quite fun.</p>
<p>So, with a non-crashy machine to play on, I've dived head-long
into the Midsummer Fire Festival. Over yesterday and today, I
took Its out to every bonfire, honouring/dousing as appropriate.
I also snuck him into each of the Alliance capital cities to
get my <a class="common"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23323">[Crown of the Fire
Festival]</a>.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/hot-hands-hot-hands-opt.jpg" /></p>
<p>If you're curious, Ironforge was the hardest, Darnassus was
second
(although the fire itself is just in Rut'Theran which is a complete
cakewalk to get to, there's a bonfire in Dolanaar which means going all
the way through Darnassus to get to it,) Stormwind a distant third with
the Exodar a <span style="font-style: italic;">complete
push-over</span>.
Seriously, it's no wonder the Blood Elves were able to
sabotage the
ship; they'd be more secure if they fired their security staff and
hired a
bunch of fuzzy baby hampsters!</p>
<p>It was actually really fun trying to get into the cities
without dying repeatedly. Stormwind was really entertaining;
I managed to find a way up on to the ramparts. From there, I
managed to get to the little back-alley between the main drag and the
bank without dying. Feigned to lose the guards, mounted up
again, and rode straight to the flame. By the time I got
there, the guards had given up on me!</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/im-on-ur-ramparts-bein-nekkid-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/im-on-ur-ramparts-bein-nekkid-opt-th.jpg" /></a><br />
<a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/quick-loot-it-loot-it-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/quick-loot-it-loot-it-opt-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>I felt sorry for the silly humans, so I did a dance for them.
Then this pally showed up. I think he wanted to
take a crack at me and<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">
steal me lucky charms</span> get some honor points.
Sadly for him, I'm an Engineer, so I hit my Gnomish Cloaking
Device, hopped into the canals and hearthed to Shattrath.</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/dancin-for-mr-pally-man-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/dancin-for-mr-pally-man-opt-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>Right now, I still need another 150 or so blossoms to get the
shoes; I've already grabbed the shoulders and robe. I've also
gotten myself a little pet dancing fire dranaei thingy:</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/i-look-hot-on-fire-ba-dum-tish-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/i-look-hot-on-fire-ba-dum-tish-opt-t.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>I also managed to get a group together tonight to get my first
stab at Ahune. I have to say that I can't remember having
this much fun in a boss fight... ever! It was hectic, lots of
movement, cool sound effects, and I got to DPS my little heart out.
I'll post some tips for Hunters wanting to take a shot at him
in a bit.</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ahune-just-want-hugz-opt.jpg"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/ahune-just-want-hugz-opt-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>
<p>The cape I wanted dropped first try... but the other hunter
won it. Story of Its' life, really. It seems like
awesome gear only ever drops if there's someone else in the group that
also wants it.</p>
<p>In other news, Its also finally got his <a class="rare"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27801">[Beast Lord Mantle]</a>.
After I don't know <span style="font-style: italic;">how
many</span> SV runs, the first time it dropped, the other hunter
won it (see, told you it was the story of his life!) However,
it dropped for the second time ever yesterday. And there was
another hunter. But this time, I won the roll!
Hooray for me!</p>
<p>I also finally got my pair of <a class="rare"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34666">[The Sunbreaker]</a>s
(shouldn't they be called "A Sunbreaker" if they're non-unique?)
enchanted with +20 agi, giving me a really nice pair of raiding weapons.</p>
<p>Now, if only I could find some Cobrahide Armor Kits on the
AH...</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-60013179851621929612008-06-14T17:55:00.001+10:002008-06-14T17:56:41.283+10:00Because Thinking is Hard<p>On the off chance that you haven't noticed, the Interwebs are
ablaze at the moment, with the release of several new features to <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/">Wowhead</a>.
OK, so maybe "ablaze" isn't the right word. Perhaps
"smouldering." Possibly even "smoking a bit, but not an
actual
fire
hazard per-se."</p>
<p>Anyway.</p>
<p>The feature that most people are yammering on about are item
scales. If you don't know what they are, these are basically
a scoring system for gear. You assign relative scores to
various attributes and bonus effects, and Wowhead will then compute
relative scores for different bits of gear. For example,
let's say I'm a very narrow-minded fire mage who earnestly believes
that every point of +spell damage is worth 10 +intellect, and that's
all there is to gearing.</p>
<p>Here's what <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=wt=51:23;wtv=10:1">the
Wowhead scale</a> would look like:</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-spell-and-int-scale-opt.png" /></p>
<p>And here's a snippet of how it would score some items:</p>
<p align="center"><a
href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-spell-and-int-scale-items-opt.png"
rel="lightbox"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-spell-and-int-scale-items-opt.png"
style="width: 50%; height: 50%;" /></a></p>
<p>As you can see, this is pretty useful for getting a rough idea
of how valuable a piece of gear is. You'll also notice that
since I did this search on "Armor" in general, it's not limited to
stuff Mages can actually wear. The scales can be used in
conjunction with the existing filters, so you could easily search on
gear usable by Mages that drops in heroic-mode instances and
is epic, or whatever you want.</p>
<p>However, item scales aren't new; they've been around for ages.
The first (at least, that I know of) was AEP or <a
href="http://www.wowwiki.com/AEP">Agility
Equivalence Points</a>. It was designed for rogues to
give them a
simple way to rate gear. There have been a few other point
systems dreamed up over the years (<a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info6419-TankPoints.html">TankPoints</a>
is one notable exception
in that, as far as I know, it actually does some theorycrafting on the
fly for you as opposed to simply summing attributes.)</p>
<p>But what's really got me excited is how well the new Wowhead
scales work with an old addon I've been using for ages: Pawn.</p>
<p>This addon basically does exactly the same thing that Wowhead
now does: you tell it the relative worth of different attributes and
bonus effects, and it will compute a score for each piece of gear you
look at. The great thing is that instead of having to fire up
a browser to check an item's score, Pawn will insert the score into the
item's tooltip.</p>
<p>The big problem with scales is coming up with them in the
first place. Take mages as an example. How much is
crit worth relative to spell damage? Relative to intellect?
Relative to strength? [1]</p>
<p>However, the fine, fine human beings at Wowhead have done most
of the work for us by coming up with default scales for every class and
spec. That's not to say they're perfect; but they <span
style="font-style: italic;">do</span> give us a
starting point. What's more, now that this exists in the main
stream, it's likely we'll see people posting "optimised" item scales
that we can use.</p>
<p>Let's say you've found an item scale that you like.
Like, say, our fire mage scale above. You'd rather
like to be able to use
that in-game. Well, OK; maybe not you <span
style="font-style: italic;">personally</span>, but
work with me here. This is long enough without trying to do
something actually useful.</p>
<p>First of all, grab <a
href="http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7296-Pawn.html">Pawn</a>
and install it.</p>
<p>Once you've done that, you can bring up the Pawn configuration
by typing <span style="font-family: monospace;">/pawn</span>.
There's also a button on your character sheet if you'd rather
use that. You'll get an initial "go read the documentation,"
message, but we can ignore that for now. Click on the
"Options" tab down the bottom.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-config-opt.png" /></p>
<p>A few notes on these options.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Show item
levels</span> will show an item's level in its tooltip.
This isn't the "required level;" an item's level determines
how much of each stat it gets. For example, weapons that drop
off heroic end-bosses are ilvl 105, whilst gear from those same bosses
are ilvl 110; Tier 4 is ilvl 120, except for stuff that drops off
Prince Malchezaar which is ilvl 125. That said, the <a
href="http://www.bigredkitty.net/2008/04/26/itemlevel-fever-dont-catch-it/">item
level is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span>
the be-all and end-all</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Show item IDs</span>
will tell you an item's unique identifier. For instance, my <a
class="epic" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32474">[Surestrike
Goggles v2.0]</a> have an itemid of 32474. Fun fact:
look at the URL for Wowhead's page on that item; the last part of the
URL is the itemid itself. This means you can always get an
itemid from an item's tooltip in-game, and then directly enter the
Wowhead URL for that item!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Show
inventory icons</span> displays the icon for an item above its
tooltip in some cases. Personally, I prefer it off, but turn
it on and see if you like it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Add a blank
line before values</span> does exactly what it says: it adds some
padding into the tooltip.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Align values
to the right edge of tooltip</span> also does what it says; with
this turned off, the scores are right next to the scale's name; this
makes them a little harder to find when you're scanning a tooltip, so I
prefer to have this checked.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Show (*) on
unrecognized stats</span> relates to things that Pawn doesn't
know how to score (for example: the minor run speed increase on some
meta gems.) If it finds something it doesn't understand, it
puts "(*)" next to the score. I turn the warning text off
because I'm well aware of what it means by now.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Digits of
precision</span> is useful if you have a lot of really close
scores. Personally, I leave this at 1 and try to engineer my
scales so that scores aren't so close together that I need to increase
the precision.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calculate
unenchanted values</span> will display an item's score as if it
wasn't enchanted. This is important because when you get a
new drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it? This levels
the playing field a bit.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calculate
enchanted values</span> will display an item's score including
its enchant. This is important because when you get a new
drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it? This lets you
know if the new drop is already better than what you have even before
enchanting.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Normalize
values</span> can be useful if your scores are all 6+ digits;
your scores will generally drop to very small numbers with this.
It doesn't change how they're computed, however; it's just
visual.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The rest you can leave or fiddle with, but they're the
important ones. So, with that done, let's look at porting a
scale from Wowhead to Pawn, shall we? Click on the "Scales"
tab. You should see the default Pawn scale; uncheck the "Show
this scale in tooltips" box down the bottom to hide it. Now,
click on the "New empty" button, set "Fire Mage" as the name and hit
enter.</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-mage-scale-opt.png" /></p>
<p>Now, let's get to work. The big list on the left
contains all the things Pawn knows about. When you click on
one, a description shows up on the right, along with a box for entering
its value. First of all, we'll click on Intellect, and set it
to "1."</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-mage-scale-int-opt.png" /></p>
<p>Next, scroll down the list to the "Spell stats"
section, and select "Spell damage." Set that to "10."</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-mage-scale-spelldamage-opt.png" /></p>
<p>That's it; we're done! Because we're a Fire Mage
(not really,) change the colour to a nice firey orange and click
"Close." Now, let's see if it's working...</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-mage-scale-tooltip-opt.png" /></p>
<p>Cool, huh? Note that it's not the same score as
Wowhead gives us, however. This is because Wowhead and Pawn
use different normalisation techniques for the scores. If you
go back to the options screen and check "Normalize values," this will
get the two close, but they still won't match.</p>
<p>So if they don't match, why is this useful? Well,
imagine you're in an instance and some <span
style="font-style: italic;">inconsiderate bastard</span>
starts looting corpses while you're still busy DPSing your little heart
out. The item pops up and... ooh, that might be useful.
But is it better than what you've got? Hmm, not as
much spell damage, but it does have a bit more crit...</p>
<p>In situations like these, you can look at the scores in the
tooltip to give you a quick indication of whether a piece of gear is
worth further investigation or not. Combined with an addon
that shows comparison tooltips, it can save you a lot of time better
spent causing things to violently explode.</p>
<p>Now, there are a few more caveats: Wowhead's system will
automatically fill gem slots with whatever gems give it the best result
(maybe; it's not documented anywhere, but that's what it <span
style="font-style: italic;">looks like</span> it
does.) Pawn doesn't do that; instead, it allows you to assign
a score to different coloured sockets. So what to do?</p>
<p>The trick here is to look up the gems you're likely to put in
those slots. Count up its stats, and work out what the gem's
score would be. It's important that you don't just look at
Wowhead's score for the gem, since this won't be directly compatible
with your Pawn scales. It's not that hard, though.
Take <a class="rare"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=24030">[Runed Living Ruby]</a>
as an example. We said that each point of spell damage was
worth "10" in our scale, so the gem itself is worth "90."
Assuming you intend to put those into your red gem slots,
plug in "90" as the value for red gem slots.</p>
<p>Meta gems are a complete pain in the rear end, but since
you're not likely to ever upgrade to a piece of stylish scalp-protector
without one (at least, not until WotLK,) once you're in gear that has
them, you can probably just ignore the meta gem value
(or give them some silly high value like 1000.)</p>
<p align="center"><img
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/pawn-comic.jpg"
class="decoration" /></p>
<p>There's another trick that might be of interest to the hunters
out there. You all know how weapon speed is basically <span
style="font-style: italic;">the</span> deciding factor
in ranged weapons, right? Well, Pawn supports a nifty little
trick that Wowhead doesn't.</p>
<p>First of all, you need to decide which direction you want to
go with weapon speed. Head down to the "Special weapon stats"
section, and select "Ranged: speed". If you're BM, enter a
big negative number (which will give higher scores to faster weapons;)
otherwise enter a positive number (which will favour slower weapons.)
This part will also sort of work with Wowhead. [2]</p>
<p>What you do then is scroll right down to the bottom and select
"Speed baseline" and enter your ideal weapon speed. In my
case, I set "Ranged: speed" to -500, and "Speed baseline" to 2.5.
This means that weapons faster than 2.5 will gain points, and
weapons slower than 2.5 will lose points. Nifty, eh?</p>
<p>One last final tip before I go: you might not be happy with
the scores. Specifically, if you don't normalise, you can end
up with big scores like 3890, and if you do normalise you end up with
tiny scores like 1.57. If you want something in the middle,
you can divide all the attribute values by a power of 10. So
instead of using "68" as a score, use "6.8" or ".68". Just
remember to do this to <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span>
of your values.</p>
<p>And that's really all there is to using Pawn. I <span
style="font-style: italic;">would</span> recommend
that you use as many scales as you have roles. For instance,
Druids should have a "Tank" scale, a "Kitteh DPS" scale, a "HPS" scale
and a "HPM" scale. This will let you quickly decide if any
particular piece of gear is an upgrade for one of your gear sets or not.</p>
<p>Does this mean you can rely entirely on Wowhead and Pawn for
gear choices? Don't talk crazy like that. Things
like this aren't a substitute for experience (or at least, really
complex theorycrafting,) but they do help you make quick "ballpark"
guesstimates.</p>
<p>P.S. If you didn't get the joke in the comic, that's
because you're pronouncing "pawn" and "porn" wrong. No, the
British pronunciation was in use first, ergo it wins.</p>
<hr />
<p>[1] Yeah, OK, that last one was a trick question.
:D</p>
<p>[2] "Sort of" because Wowhead seems to have hiccups
with negative scores.</p>
<p>Image of <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/swamibu/2072230496/">tasty
looking tempura prawns</a> © <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/swamibu/">Swamibu</a>,
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/myvirtuallady/1801864173/">the
not-real-at-all girl</a> who is actually <span
style="font-style: italic;">really</span> wearing a
bikini under those black bars © <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/myvirtuallady/">myvirtuallady</a>,
and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:StauntonPawn2.jpg">the
pawn</a> that I spent like 10 minutes cutting out is © <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bubba73">Jud McCranie</a>.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-57417372125475465662008-06-14T00:12:00.004+10:002008-06-14T00:22:12.042+10:00Wait, what?<p>Just a quicky: I found the following while wandering around the WotLK leaks wiki page for <a href="http://wotlkwiki.info/8471">uncategorised spells</a>.</p>
<blockquote>51663 Slap to the Face Delivers a face slap to all nearby players, stunning them. Targets affected by this ability can still communicate through the forums. Lasts until the next patch is released.</blockquote>
<p>For some reason, I have a funny feeling that's not going to make it live...</p>
<p>Ninja edit: there's something <em>absolutely hilarious</em> down the bottom of the page regarding Nesingwary. I decided not to post it here verbatim, as some might prefer not to see it. From what I can tell, it's apparently something you would get in the mail. Click the link above, head to the bottom, and have a look. I lol'ed.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-37173347614114824912008-06-11T18:29:00.000+10:002008-06-11T18:30:37.127+10:00Playing Catch Up<p>One of the biggest issues with pets is levelling.
Unlike Warlock pets which stay in perfect lock-step with
their master's level, hunter pets have their own independant level, and
gain XP independantly of the hunter.</p>
<p>Typically, this isn't a huge issue. However, if
you've got a pet that you haven't taken out grinding for a long time,
or are trying to bring up a low level pet you trained (perhaps for its
unique looks,) you're in for a <span style="font-style: italic;">long</span>
and painful grind.</p>
<p>The second oldest of my pets (in terms of how long I've had
him in my stables) is Bisque, my turtle. Sadly, turtles don't
make very good questing or grinding companions due to their sub-par
damage and, by extension, threat output. As a result, Bisque
has lagged pretty far behind my other pet, Tiddles.</p>
<p>However, I've been making an effort lately to bring the poor
thing up to level 70. The trick with this is that hunter pets
only gain XP on kills from which <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>
would also gain XP. That means that if you are level 70 and
your pet is at level 10, you have to kill mobs level 62+ or your pet
won't get any XP.</p>
<p>That said, some mobs are better to kill than others.
For my money, the best mobs to grind on when levelling up a
pet are these chaps and chapettes:</p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/firewing-warlock-map.jpg" /></p>
<p>The Firewing Warlocks are by far the best mobs to use for this
purpose once you're at level 70, for several reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>They're the right level: 62-63 for the most part, meaning
you should have no trouble dispatching them even when your pet isn't
really in a position to help.</li>
<li>They're all in pansy cloth armour, meaning you don't lose
too much damage against them.</li>
<li>They drop tons of stuff you can sell off; trash, rep
turn-ins and cloth by the truckload.</li>
</ol>
<p>But most importantly: they're casters. That means
that unless they're trying to escape you, they're just going to stand
there chucking shadowbolts at you. This means you don't have
to stuff about with kiting or traps or letting your pet tank.
Here's what I do when I'm grinding on them:</p>
<ol>
<li>Hunter's Mark him. Let him know that you're
coming for him, and that there's no escape. Running will only
make him die tired.</li>
<li>Send your pet in. Yeah, the poor thing's not
likely to do
much damage, depending on its level, but at least it won't be bored.</li>
<li>Wind up an Aimed Shot. Nothing says "so long, and
thanks for the XP" than an Aimed Shot crit to the face.</li>
<li>Just before Aimed Shot fires off, hit Arcane Shot.
They should both go off at the same time for that extra punch.</li>
<li>If you're lucky, you might have gotten a double crit, which
usually kills these guys outright. If not, just fall into a
normal 1:1 Steady:Auto rotation. The warlock should be dead
inside of four or five shots.</li>
</ol>
<p>The reason I send my pet in ahead of opening fire is that the
warlocks will typically start casting a Shadowbolt at my pet when they
see him. Bisque is more than capable of taking a few
shadowbolts,
and it means I get to work my shot rotation without any pesky pushback.</p>
<p>You also shouldn't have any problems with runners; they don't
tend to get very far once you're into your shot rotation.</p>
<p>And that's basically it. Just stay in the area
around the mana bomb, and grind on them until you're covered in Elf
blood from head-to-toe. Or your pet gets a level.
Or you get bored. Or your bags fill with so much
cloth that you have to go and unload. You know, whatever
suits you.</p>
<p>One last piece of advice: put together some grinding music.
Personally, I like stuff with a strong beat, stuff ripped
from
90's video games, and Yakety Sax. Seriously, that song makes <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=mxJi-si5FRY"><span style="font-style: italic;">anything</span></a> <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=JaWx5GCGiDE&feature=related">entertaining</a>
(warning: that second one is rated Very M for Lots of Blood.
Thou hast been warned.)</p>
<p>For reference, when I ground on these guys to get Bisque from
level 64 and a half to 65, I went through half a stack of water, ~1200
bullets and had the following in my bags afterwards:</p>
<ul>
<li>40 Netherweave Cloth,</li>
<li>75 Runecloth,</li>
<li>4 greens and a lockbox,</li>
<li>a smattering of various health and mana pots</li>
<li>70 Firewing Signets,</li>
<li>1 Arcane Tome and</li>
<li>~6 gold worth of vendor trash.</li>
</ul>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-40847910751724033162008-06-07T12:00:00.000+10:002008-06-07T12:20:18.641+10:00Looking For Macro<p>Every time I log on, I forget to do something really
important: put myself in LFG. It's just a pain in the bit
that I sit on to have to click through the drop boxes over and over and
over again. So I did what all good programmers do; I
jury-rigged a macro to do the work for me! [1]</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>/script local
a,b;a=SetLFGType;b=SetLookingForGroup a(1,2);b(1,2,7) a(2,2);b(2,2,9)
a(3,2);b(3,2,11)<br />
/script SetLFGComment "BM Hunter; I kill stuff dead."</code></p>
<p>Yes, it looks horrible, but it's not too obtuse.
Well, OK, it is, but at least there's a method to the madness!</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>/script local
a,b;a=SetLFGType;b=SetLookingForGroup</code></p>
<p>Programmers are lazy, and since "<span
style="font-family: monospace;">SetLFGType</span>" and
"<span style="font-family: monospace;">SetLookingForGroup</span>"
are kinda long to type, I just set up a shorter
name for them: "<span style="font-family: monospace;">a</span>"
and "<span style="font-family: monospace;">b</span>"
respectively.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>...
a(1,2);b(1,2,7) a(2,2);b(2,2,9) a(3,2);b(3,2,11)</code></p>
<p><img style="float: right;" class="decoration"
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/robot-hunter-opt.png" />
Here's how the LFG system works: the system gives each player
three "slots." For each of these slots, you specify the <span
style="font-style: italic;">type</span> of thing
you're looking for (dungeon group, raid group, battleground, etc.) and
the specific location (Mana Tombs, Karazhan, Warsong Gulch, etc.)</p>
<p>"<span style="font-family: monospace;">a(1,2)</span>"
is saying "set the first slot to look for a Dungeon group," while "<span
style="font-family: monospace;">b(1,2,7)</span>" says
"set
the first slot to look for a Dungeon group for Steamvaults."
Yes, the "<span style="font-family: monospace;">1,2</span>"
in the first call means the same as the "<span
style="font-family: monospace;">1,2</span>" in the
second. Don't ask me why it's repeated; as far as I can tell,
it just has to be.</p>
<p>So where did those numbers come from? Here's the
trick: open up the LFG window, and set it to look for a group.
Pull down the first drop down. It should have a
list like "None, Dungeon, Raid, ...". The first entry in this
list is "1", the second is "2" and so on. The same applies to
the second drop down.</p>
<p>Say you want to look for a group to run Zul'Aman; pull down
the category list, and count down to "Raid." Let's say it's
the third one down. Now pull down the second list and look
for "Zul'Aman." Suppose that it's ninth in the list.
Finally, we'll use the first LFG slot for this. The
code would be:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>a(1,3);b(1,3,9)</code></p>
<p>That's not too bad, right? In the example of my
macro, I'm looking for groups for Steamvault, Shattered Halls and The
Arcatraz.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>/script
SetLFGComment "BM Hunter; I kill stuff dead."</code></p>
<p>This one's pretty simple: it sets the LFG comment. I
like to make mine at least <span style="font-style: italic;">moderately</span>
amusing.</p>
<p>So that's it;
when I log in now, I can just hit that macro,
and it sets me up in LFG. And the next time some half-brained
level 12 idiot invites me to a group without saying a word so I can run
him through RFC, it only takes a second to fix it back up!</p>
<hr />
<p>[1] Dance, computer. Dance!</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-57001736281342389952008-06-04T12:00:00.001+10:002008-06-04T14:37:31.118+10:00I Want A Second Opinion!<p align="center"><a rel="lightbox" href="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/i-want-a-second-opinion-vertical.jpg"><img src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/i-want-a-second-opinion-thumb.jpg" /></a></p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-32761835655222252552008-06-01T22:17:00.000+10:002008-06-01T22:18:07.549+10:00My First Linkage<p>So what do I discover today while thumbing [1] through my
Google Reader?</p>
<p><a href="http://kestrelsaerie.us/2008/05/a-new-hunter-aspect-capricious-blog/">A
New Hunter Aspect: Capricious (Blog)</a>!</p>
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">Sniffle</span>.
My first [2] link from someone else's blog. And
from a well-known WoW blogger, to boot. There are many links
on the internet, but this one is mine. Alright, it's really
Kestrel's, but you get the idea.</p>
<p>And since Kestrel seemed to like the cartoons, I'll see about
posting a new one on Wednesday.</p>
<hr />
<p>[1] Not literally thumbing, you understand.
I personally use my index finger for scroll wheel spinning.
I just said that as a sort of metaphor-type thing.
Using the scroll wheel with your thumb would probably be
kinda awkward.</p>
<p>[2] Well, OK, to be fair it's technically the second
since BRK
linked here from the big "list of posts what are about the RoDB," but I
get my very own post with this one! I shall have to have it
framed.
Or maybe just starred.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-14832377878289752402008-05-31T23:02:00.004+10:002008-06-01T19:08:52.077+10:00Because Heaven Forbid We Should Use Them<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Warning</span>:
QQing ahead!</p>
<p>So I was flying around doing the <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=11880">Oggle The Special
Effects</a> daily in Nagrand when I was reminded of one of the
reasons Engineering sucks.</p>
<p>Oh, don't get me wrong; Engineering is great fun and very cool
in places... it's just that it's also got a few pretty serious problems.</p>
<p>Back to the daily; you've got to equip those silly goggle
thingamajigs (wow; the spell-checker didn't complain about that word...
but <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span>
complaining about "didn't") before you can see the... um... things you
have to take readings of. So you strap 'em on, find a
wandering ball of fire, go to take the readings...</p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 40px;">That
item is not ready yet.</p>
<p>I'm sorry, but who in Blizzard thought it was a clever idea to
put a 30 second cooldown on a freakin' quest item? I mean,
what's the point? All it does is make us stand there stupidly
for 30 seconds, re-organising our bags. I know the whole
point of WoW is to waste time, but this is just a little blatant.</p>
<p>But it's like this with any equippable item that has a "Use"
effect. You equip it, and it gets a 30 second cooldown
triggered on it. Now the <span style="font-style: italic;">reason</span>
it does this is to stop people from chaining trinkets endlessly.
Except, oh wait, you can't swap trinkets in combat anyway.</p>
<p>It's annoying when you're doing the Nagrand SSO daily, but
it's downright infuriating if you're an Engineer. Most of the
actually useful things Engineers can make are trinkets or bits of gear
with a Use effect. The thing is that part of Engineering's
charm is how specific some of these things are. For example:</p>
<table
onclick="window.open('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23824','_blank');"
style="cursor: pointer;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/INV_Gizmo_RocketBoot_01.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt23824" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b class="q3">Rocket Boots
Xtreme</b><br />
Binds when equipped
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Feet</td>
<th>Leather</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
196 Armor<!--e--><br />
Durability 50 / 50<br />
Requires Engineering (330)</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q2">Equip:
Increases attack power by 80.</span><br />
<span class="q2">Use: Engage the rocket
boots to
greatly increase your speed. They sometimes have some serious
backfire.... (5 Min Cooldown)</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Now who in their right mind is going to walk around with that
equipped? No one! It's too situational; it's not
until you're already in combat that you're likely to think "I really
wish I had those equipped so I could get some range." And
that's the problem right there. 90% of the Engineering gear
is <span style="font-style: italic;">incredibly</span>
situational. There's no way you know you're going to need it
ahead of time. It doesn't help that your regular gear for
those slots are so much more <span
style="font-style: italic;">generally</span> useful
that there's no good reason to even equip your Engineering toys.</p>
<p>One extreme example of this problem is my <a
class="uncommon" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=10518">[Parachute
Cloak]</a>. I've had people rag at me before for having
a cloak with such crappy stats on it before. But here's the
thing: if you're flying around the BEM plateaus and Rivendark decides
to start taking pot shots at you, there's no way you can equip and use
this thing before you hit the ground. Frankly, I use it so
often that every time I unequip it, I inevitably kill myself because I
dismounted half a mile up and it didn't cool down before I hit the
ground.</p>
<p><img class="decoration" style="float: left;"
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/sad-chicken-opt.png" />It's
the same for a lot of my gadgets; I've built some
trinkets and gear that I have <span style="font-style: italic;">never
used</span> despite carrying them around with me, simply because
I had no idea when I was going to need to use them.</p>
<p>And Engineering is the only profession affected like this.
Take Alchemy for example; imagine if you could only have one
kind of potion, elixir or flask "ready" at any given time, and you had
to wait 30 seconds to switch. And that's out of combat:
you're not allowed to switch once you're <span
style="font-style: italic;">in</span> combat.
Elune help you if you decided to ready your mana
pots earlier and you suddenly need a health pot!</p>
<p>What Blizzard should have done was make it so that equipping
any item with a "Use" effect activates a 30 second cooldown on <span
style="font-style: italic;">being able to change the item in
that slot</span>, and something similar with the item's cooldown:
you can't unequip it if it's cooling down. This would have
just as effectively prevented chain-using trinkets, and allowed
Engineers to actually make use of all their crazy toys. And
while they're at it, allow gear-swapping during combat, but disallow
unequipping. That prevents people from stripping their gear
to avoid durability penalties, while letting me throw on my <a
class="uncommon" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=10724">[Rocket
Boots]</a> at a moment's notice.</p>
<p
style="font-family: Courier New,Courier,monospace; font-size: 0.8em;"></qq></p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-45661035132298837392008-05-28T20:13:00.005+10:002008-06-01T19:05:58.816+10:00You Learn Something New Every Day<p>Being an engineer (the fictitious in-game type, not the "my
best friend is a slide
rule and I can recite Pi to thirty decimal places" type,) one of my
favourite, completely
unnecessary maneuvers is
to fly high above an enemy, dismount, and blast at them as I fall,
using my <a class="uncommon"
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=10518">[Parachute Cloak]</a>
to avoid falling damage. The only
issue with this is that my pet won't spawn until I physically hit the
ground, and even then I'm looking at about a second and a half before I
can control him.</p>
<p><img style="float: right;" class="decoration"
src="http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/oh-help-im-falling-aarrrgghh-opt.png" />
Let me set the scene: I'm flying back to Ruuan Weald
from
pilfering the etheral's mana cells for my sweet bag of goodies.
I'm pretty high up, and think "what the hell, let's see how
close
I can get to the flight master."</p>
<p>I wait until I'm nearly over
him, and dismount. So there I am,
plummeting towards the ground like a sumo wrestler dropped out of a
cargo plane, when the game starts to stutter. "Oh bugger;
it's
swapping! Damnit, pull!" I mash my "gadget" macro
to
activate the parachute. In my panic, I also accidentally hit
the
button next to it: my pet control macro, which casts Call Pet.
Imagine my surprise when Tiddles dutifully answers the call
and
pops up below me, chasing after me as I sail overhead.</p>
<p>Just when you think you know what you're doing, the game turns
around to remind you that you really don't.</p>
<p>You know, I completely missed the flight master, though.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-73891729338926824422008-05-24T20:51:00.000+10:002008-05-24T20:52:03.580+10:00The Pew-Pew Macro<p>So I sometimes have people ask me why I have so many damn macros and
addons. "I can play just fine without any!" they cry. I
know you can; back when WoW first came out, I didn't even know you <span style="font-style: italic;">could</span> make addons. Oh wait... when WoW first came out, you <span style="font-style: italic;">couldn't</span>.</p>
<p>That's beside the point; the important thing is that while you don't <span style="font-style: italic;">need</span>
addons or macros, they do help you play more effectively or
efficiently. Even really simple things can make the game a lot
more fun and/or less annoying.</p>
<p>I thought I might share one of my Hunter macros today. I don't
think it would be an understatement to say that this macro has not only
made grouping easier, but has saved both myself and my group a number
of times.</p>
<p>So, let's cut straight to the macro itself.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>#show [mod:alt]Parry;[mod:shift]Flare;Auto Shot<br />
/stopcasting [mod:alt]<br />
/stopattack<br />
/stopmacro [mod:alt]<br />
/startattack [nomod:shift]<br />
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]<br />
/stopmacro [target=focustarget,noexists]<br />
/target focustarget<br />
/petattack<br />
/startattack</code></p>
<p>The function of this macro is three-fold, depending on which
modifiers I'm holding down. For the purposes of this post, assume
the macro is bound to the '1' key. The macro's functions are:</p>
<ol>
<li>It turns auto shot on (1),</li>
<li>it stops me shooting (Alt+1) and</li>
<li>it makes both myself and my pet attack the target of my focus (Shift+1).</li>
</ol>
<p>"But," I hear you say, "I already have a button to turn auto shot on and off; it's called 'Auto Shot.'"</p>
<p>Aah, not quite. The regular auto shot button doesn't turn it on or off, it <span style="font-style: italic;">toggles</span>
it. It's an important distinction. With this macro, you can
spam 1 all you like to start auto shot up. But <span style="font-style: italic;">more importantly</span>, you can hit Alt+1 to not only turn auto shot off, but cancel whatever you may be casting at the time.</p>
<p>Imagine you're trying to pull a mob off someone that's pulled aggro
and draw them on to your trap. You're blasting away, trying to
generate threat, when the mob aggroes on you. It's sailing
towards you, and you need to stop shooting it or you'll break your own
trap. Without this macro, I would often toggle auto shot off and
then back on again by accident, or not cancel my steady shot in time.
With this macro, it's much harder to mess up.</p>
<p>You can also use it to do things like hit a mob in a Freezing Trap
with a Scorpid Sting without risk of breaking the trap itself (hit
Scorpid Sting followed immediately by Alt+1.)</p>
<p>The last function is basically building an assist-like command into
the button. The way I use this is to have the main assist (or
failing that, the tank) focused. This means I can instantly start
attacking their target, and sick my pet on it, by hitting Shift+1. This is actually harder to do than it sounds.</p>
<p>Y'see, WoW does a lot of things to "help" the player. For
instance, if you get within range of a mob, but don't have it
targetted, and hit an offensive spell, WoW will automatically target
the closest mob for you. Nifty, huh?</p>
<p>Umm, no. Not when the closest mob happens to be the one you <span style="font-style: italic;">right just five seconds ago</span>
trapped. Bam. Bye-bye trap, hello irate mob. You
would not believe how many times I nearly wiped groups while trying to
work the kinks out of this macro. "It's OK, I'm sure it's working
this ti... yeah, OK, I think I know what went wrong. Hang on..."</p>
<p>So, if that all sounds handy, you can copy and paste the macro code
into one of your character's macro slots, and off you go (make sure to
select the "?" icon.) If you'd rather know <span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> the macro works before using it, read on.</p>
<p>Let's pull this puppy apart to see how it works.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>#show [mod:alt]Parry;[mod:shift]Flare;Auto Shot</code></p>
<p>This line just controls what icon is shown for the macro. I
prefer to have each unique action have its own icon, as a kind of
visual reminder to myself that the modifier keys actually do something.
It will show the Parry icon for the "stop shooting" action, Flare
for "assist" and your gun's image for "start shooting."</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>
/stopcasting [mod:alt]<br />
/stopattack<br />
/stopmacro [mod:alt]</code></p>
<p>These three lines are how the "stop shooting" bit works. First of all, we use <code>/stopcasting</code> (if Alt is held down) to cancel the current cast. We then use <code>/stopattack</code>
to turn off Auto Shot irrespective of modifiers. Finally, if Alt
was being held down, we stop the macro (we've already done our job.)</p>
<p>But wait... why stop auto shot? Because we don't know if it's
already on or not. We explicitly turn it off here so that we know
what state it's in.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>
/startattack [nomod:shift]<br />
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]<br />
</code></p>
<p>Now, we do the "start shooting" part; we turn auto shot back on and
stop the macro if Shift wasn't being held down. One nice thing is
that this <code>/startattack</code> cancels out the previous <code>/stopattack</code>, so the auto shot timer won't reset if you spam this macro.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><code>
/stopmacro [target=focustarget,noexists]<br />
/target focustarget<br />
/petattack<br />
/startattack</code></p>
<p>Now for the "assist my focus" part. First of all, we stop the
macro if our focus doesn't have anything targeted. This
is what prevents WoW from simply finding and targeting some random mob
in front of us. We then manually switch our target to our focus'
target, send the pet in to attack, and turn on auto shot.</p>
<p>And that's all she wrote. Not <span style="font-style: italic;">too</span>
bad, huh? Admittedly, it took a bit of trial and error to get all
the commands in the right order, but at least I've already done that
part.</p>
<p>So there you have it: one instance where some macro magic can make life as a hunter a lot easier.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6840815778697838667.post-800136739270308552008-05-23T13:47:00.001+10:002008-05-23T13:51:32.880+10:00Hunters in WotLK: Addendum<p>What? No, I'm not obsessively refreshing the <a
href="http://wotlk.wikidot.com/">WotLK
leaks wiki</a>. I wouldn't do that? It's not
li...</p>
<p style="font-style: italic;">Oooh, ooh! Hunter
changes!</p>
<p>Oh stop looking at me like that. Like you're not
just filled with an ulcer-inducing, burning need to know what's going
to happen. It's why so many people waste their time with
rubbish like horoscopes and telephone psychics. Not that I
would...</p>
<p>Where was I? Oh yeah.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=14327">Scare
Beast</a>'s tooltip now shows the correct cast time.</li>
</ul>
<p>It's nice to know that Blizzard isn't afraid to <span
style="font-style: italic;">think big</span> with the
expansion. Maybe we can get the <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=34692">The Beast Within</a>
tooltip
<a href="#"
onmouseover="$WowheadPower.showTooltip(event, '<b>The Beast Within</b><br /><span class=\'q\'>When your pet is under the effects of Bestial Wrath, you also go into a rage causing 10% additional damage and reducing mana costs of all spells by 20% for 18 sec. While enraged, you do not feel pity or remorse or fear and you cannot be stopped unless killed.</span><br /><span class=\'q\'>This ability does not turn you into Superman, dipstick. No, you cannot run into the enemy flag room without backup with this. Try not to let the red food dye go to your head...</span>', 'ability_hunter_beastwithin')"
onmousemove="$WowheadPower.moveTooltip(event)"
onmouseout="$WowheadPower.hideTooltip();">ammended</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li>Damage caused by the pet ability <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=27050">Bite</a>
has been reduced,
it's Focus
cost has been reduced as well, and it's cooldown has been removed.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hmm... considering that this means that Bite can now be cast
~6.7 times faster, I'd call this a buff. What's interesting
is that this is the niche currently occupied by <a
href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=27049">Claw</a>.
Maybe
Blizzard got sick of Hunters complaining about how there are all these
pets running around focused like an orbital laser doing heart surgery
and no way of using it.</p>
<p>Note to self: complaining works! /thumbsup</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=27051">Screech</a>
renamed Demoralizing Screech.</li>
</ul>
<p>Again, another visionary change from our dark, blue masters.</p>
<ul>
<li>Furious Howl's buff range increased to 20 yards.</li>
</ul>
<p>Ok, this one is a bit... I'm not sure. Meh?
I mean, look at what Furious Howl does right now:</p>
<table
onclick="window.open('http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=24597','_blank');"
style="cursor: pointer;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Ability_Hunter_Pet_Wolf.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt24597" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Furious Howl</b></td>
<th><b class="q0">Rank 4</b></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
60 Focus
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Instant</td>
<th>10 sec cooldown</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">Party members
within 15 yards of the wolf receive an extra 45 to 57 damage to their
next Physical attack. Lasts 10 sec.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>So the only classes that benefit from this are melee classes
and hunters. What's the maximum range on an untalented hunter
again? 35 yards? I don't think Furious Howl was
ever really designed to buff the hunter; it's supposed to make the pet
bestest-buddies with the melee dpsers. But what boss is so
huge that they needed to increase the range to 20 yards to make sure
they got everyone?</p>
<p>Hmm...</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=26064">Shell
Shield</a> no longer reduces your turtle's attack speed.</li>
</ul>
<p>Yes! Buff turtles! I'm still waiting on
this, though:</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<div class="iconlarge"
style="background-image: url(http://itsnoteasy.hyjal.googlepages.com/Spell_Nature_SkinofEarth.jpg);">
<div class="tile"></div>
</div>
</td>
<td>
<div id="tt24597" class="tooltip"
style="float: left; padding-top: 1px;">
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Spiky Shell</b></td>
<th><b class="q0">Rank 1</b></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
40 Focus
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Instant</td>
<th>10 sec cooldown</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="q">The pet begins
blocking attacks with its shell, causing 25 physical damage to all
attackers. Lasts 10 sec.</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
<th style="background-position: right top;"></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="background-position: left bottom;"></th>
<th style="background-position: right bottom;"></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear: left;"></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=34120">Steady
Shot</a>'s bonus damage slightly reduced. Scaling
unchanged.</li>
</ul>
<p>Initially I thought this was a sucky change... and it still
is. But remember that Steady Shot actually scales with both
weapon damage and your RAP. Wouldn't it be nice if Steady
Shot was just as awesome at level 80, <span
style="font-style: italic;">but cost the same amount of mana</span>.
Maybe that's how Blizzard intends to "fix" Hunter mana issues.</p>
<p>Or maybe they're just dropping the effectiveness of Rank 1 so
they can charge us extra mana with Rank 2 to get back to where we were.
Accursed pessimism!</p>
<p>So yeah, no sign of talent trees or the like. I get
the impression that Blizz is probably busy tweaking the classes where
they know what they want to do. I don't think there's much
point in worrying about the lack of 51 point talents since it's still
early days.</p>
<p>On a side note, if Blizzard doesn't make a vanity pet of the
mobs on the bottom of <a title="Picture of NPC models from WotLK."
href="http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/1797/wotlkx4zzzld7.jpg">this
picture</a>, I'm going to be a <span
style="font-style: italic;">very</span> sad panda.</p>Itsnoteasyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00829531884546103310noreply@blogger.com0