Randomize

Hunters and Old Spice

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 19:19:00 +0000

"Hello, hunters, look at your pet, now back to me, now back at your pet, now back to me. Sadly, it isn’t me, but if it weren't a tenacity pet, it could dps like me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re at the Maelstrom with the devilsaur your pet could dps like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an epic gun with two rare vanity pets. Look again, the vanity pets are now hardmode raid mounts. Anything is possible when your pet dpses like And A Dinosaur and not a tenacity pet. I’m on a shark." - DeathPaladin, WoW.com commenter

Warrior: 1-10

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:40:00 +0000

As you can see, I reached level 10 on my Warrior today. Between raids, life's distractions and forum browsing/raging (see "Blizz, I Am Disappoint") I was able to make the first milestone.

Leveling a Warrior is a very strange experience. My Death Knight makes me no stranger to melee classes, but even still, Warriors are vastly different than what I'm used to. Taking damage is weird, waiting for the swing timer even weirder. Instant strikes, oh how I miss you.

More details beyond the jump, as well as my talent spec and more Warrior goodness.

I've never leveled a Tauren before. Mulgore is a very peaceful, interesting zone, a welcome break from the annoying color palette of Durotar, the depressing yet satisfactorily haunting Tirisfal and the flamboyant Eversong. Plainstriders, Gnolls, Harpies and cats are the prey, unlike the humanoids in other zones. I really appreciate the peaceful environment. However, the Warrior class doesn't lend well to that.

I discovered in the first five levels in Red Cloud Mesa (possibly the largest 1-5 zone in the game, very long runs from A to B) that I will get hit - a lot. The mail armor I picked up doesn't necessarily prevent that, and I'll probably take a lot of damage. This motivated me to pick up First Aid and Cooking. I'm a veteran of both skills, having picked up every achievement related to them on my main character. But when starting this character, I wanted to make a clean break from my other characters. With the exception of the Heirloom weapon, shoulders and chest (yeah yeah I'm a cheater, sue me), I won't be giving Rilost any assistance. With that in mind, I also chose to pick up Mining and Skinning, so I can make my own profits.

With all that in tow, I headed back to Bloodhoof Village and hit level 6. I learned a nifty ability called Victory Rush - and this ability has become my favorite of any ability belonging to any class. The 20 second window after killing a mob that you are allowed to use the spell gives the warrior class a very fast paced soloing routine. I kill one mob, and quickly run over to the next one to whack it with Victory Rush and a Rend. The speed makes the process quicker, and it also makes it very difficult to get bored of. I continued killing mobs for so long at one point that I did not even notice I had already completed my quest in the process. The path to level 10 was a quick one thanks in sole part to Victory Rush and the fast pace it brought with it.

Now that I've hit level 10, I hit some blogs and looked around for some advice. I looked over at WoW.com again and read a few of Matthew Rossi's pieces on Warriors - the guy has leveled three of them to 80 (no, I don't understand it either) so I'd expect he is knowledgeable. I read through his descriptions of the three specs, and the one that appealed to me was Arms.

Arms, he describes, is "about style, about finesse, about perfect control of your weapon, and about taking advantage of openings for huge, devastating blows that get around normal conventions and defense." Not only does this match the kind of playstyle I enjoy, but it fits my warrior's backstory more than Fury. A calm Tauren trying to earn his place in the world isn't going to be a screaming barbarian killing everything that moves. He's going to be a master of his blade that is slow to anger and quick to act. Sounds like Arms to me!

So, a quick recap: I'm going to get hit a lot as I level to 80, so First Aid and Cooking are a must. Victory Rush makes the pace incredibly fast and makes the levels fly by. My spec of choice will be Arms, where I can deal massive amounts of damage by taking advantage of procs and bleeds.

Looking forward to the next 70 levels!

Blizzard, I Am Disappoint

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:21:00 +0000

Warrior: Creation

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:05:00 +0000

I have begun the quest to 80 on a new character.

This is Rilost, the Tauren Warrior. Even though I don't intend to RP with him, having a backstory makes the leveling go a lot smoother. Rilost's parents were killed by centaur years ago, when Cairne first allied with the orcs. He has now become of age, and seeks to earn his place in the world anew, without letting his past hinder him.

Mage: The 1-80 Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:25:00 +0000

I started my mage some time last year on a whim. These things happen quite often; I get in moods where I don't feel like being productive, so I start a new character just to have fun in the starting zones. Almost as often, these characters crawl their way up into the mid-30s and 40s where they lie stagnant for a long, long time. Well, my mage was able to burst through the 30s and 40s with the advent of the Dungeon Finder, and quickly hit 58. From there, it was a couple of weeks until 80.

Because my mage is already 80, I can't document the 1-80 experience as I go. Instead, I will try my best to give an overview of the experience as a whole, and what I learned about being a mage during this time.

From level 1, I knew that being a mage was going to require loads of patience. Patience is one of the things I don't possess in spades, so it was certainly painful. I would often joke to my friends that I felt Irish - drink, fight, drink, fight, drink, fight, catch the leprechaun - er, gnome - drink, fight... Endless drinking. It got worse once I was able to conjure water. The problem I discovered was that for five levels, your conjured water is lesser than purchased water! Very cruel. I didn't discover this, however, until my 30s. So for 20 levels or so I was drinking inferior water, and thus my downtime was much higher than my uptime.

Thankfully I noticed the discrepancy somewhere along the line. About at the same point, when my downtime vastly decreased, I noticed my second problem. I was taking a LOT of damage. And I mean a lot. I was eating more than drinking. So I decided to hit the web - and what I found was a little surprising. My philosophy when it comes to leveling is "kill it quick and move on", so I was attracted to the Fire tree. That's right, I leveled into my 30s as a Fire Mage.

The internet saved me. I found a very useful Mage leveling guide from the brilliant Christian Belt over at WoW.com. In the comments and the articles I discovered that the general consensus was to level as a Frost Mage. Slightly baffled, as Frost looked at first glance to be a PvP oriented spec, I decided to give it a whirl. And what I discovered was an almost complete lack of downtime. I was really impressed, and that's when the mage class became one of my favorites. Frostbite procs and giant Frostbolt crits were very, very satisfying. I blasted through the 50s and 60s, but slowed down in the 70s due to the Northrend blues. Snow? Really? Come on, Blizz. It's ok for a little while but after six zones of it I'm bored.

The only expanse where I had real trouble was the 40s. Sure, in my Frosty days I could quest very easily, but as the Old World is very outdated I had a lack of good zones to turn to. So I had to use the Dungeon Finder to some degree. And while I wasn't very keen on the prospect, it did get me to the 50s and eventually Outland.

Dungeon Finder experiences are very varied. You can get a very, very good group with nice people, or a horrible group with everyone calling everyone else horrible. Most groups I encountered were, unfortunately, the latter. One group that I still remember vividly was for Cathedral. There was a Warrior who signed up for Tank, but was mostly DPS specced. He told us that he was new to tanking and to bear with him. Thankfully, the healer was very good and was fine with it. So we move along, and the other mage in the group starts complaining that he's pulling aggro. So the tank says sorry, and that he'll pull less. So he pulls less. Then the mage complains that it's going so slowly. So the tank, clearly agitated, pulls most of the mobs in the Cathedral. The healer, a really, really good druid, is able to keep everyone except the other mage alive. The warrior is close to dropping though, so I run in, Frost Nova, Blink out, and start Blizzarding the mobs down. This was my first experience with massive AoE pulls, and seeing so many Frostbite procs and crits on my screen was VERY rewarding. The dead mage left the group, but everyone else survived and we four manned the rest of it.

What I Learned About Being a Mage

I learned that being a mage means:

Doing whatever it takes to survive
Being impossible to hit with melee attacks
Getting huge crits that make warlocks cry
Using Mana Gems as potions, rather than in place of a drink
Using lots of AoE spells

I also learned that being a mage does not mean:

Dying
Using your conjured water 100% of the time
Spamming Ice Lance
Trying to solo 5-man quests

All in all, leveling a mage was a very fun and rewarding experience. In my next Mage column, I'll describe the steps I took to get to where I am today - that is, just shy of ICC10 level.

Long days and pleasant nights,
Doublethink

Randomize

noreply@blogger.com (Doublethink) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:02:00 +0000

Welcome to Randomize.

If you're searching for information, there's a good chance you won't find it here. Randomize is not a wealth of World of Warcraft knowledge on all topics just waiting to be tapped; rather, Randomize is a depository for opinions, thoughts and experiences. Don't expect to see "Top Ten Ways to Maximize Your Hunter DPS" here; expect to see "Five Things That Happened to My Hunter". Don't look for "Best In Slot Mage Trinkets" here; look for "Fun Ways to Blow Up Warlocks".

That's not to say you won't see ANY articles on playing classes. My goal in starting this blog is to document the experience of starting a new class, leveling that class to the cap, and then discovering how that class is played. My sources in this endeavor will be very limited; I have in-game resources and WoW blogs. This excludes the forums and ElitistJerks. It's somewhat of an experiment, part curiosity and part examination of the WoW community. We often get a lot of flak as being a very angry, viral community; I want to prove that wrong.

So while you may see posts like "Arcane for Mages", what you won't see in there is "If you don't pick up Arcane Empowerment, delete your character because you are scrub noob who needs to learn to play." You'd see more along the lines of what drove me to go Arcane spec, what I like about the spec, what the spec does differently, and how much my performance has changed.

With all of that said, allow me to outline a more detailed roadmap for the future of this experiment.

Going Forward

As of writing, I have four level capped characters: a Blood Elf Death Knight, a Blood Elf Paladin, an Undead Warlock, and an Undead Mage. The first three have been capped for some time, while my mage only reached level 80 a few months ago. Looking at their Armories will show that I don't play them very much, with the exception of Nazgûl, my Death Knight.

My plan for the blog is this: I intend to (1) gear my mage further and experiment with different talent specs, (2) continue to level my 66 Troll Shaman, and (3) create and level a Tauren Warrior. Along the way, I will document their progress and share experiences, insights and thoughts on the process. In a much less analytical, and more free-spirited fun way, of course.

Now this isn't to say that my other three characters will be ignored and not ever mentioned on this blog. Short posts about experiences I encounter while playing them will crop up from time to time. But my primary focus will be on leveling and gearing the three aforementioned classes I have little to no experience with.

So, without further ado, let's Randomize.

Long days and pleasant nights,
Doublethink

The name of the blog is a reference to the "Randomize" buttons on the Create Character screen.