Redo moar!

Both of your humble hosts happened to get the chance to run the new Onyxia 10-man over the weekend. I have to say, it was good fun. But more to the point, it was a good fight.

I did the old version of Ony once - at 80, with a Death Knight guildie. It wasn't what I would call fun.

No, it was just a long flight to Dustwallow for a sightseeing trip. The only bit of skill I was required to display was to feign death during the whelp phase just so that it would be easier for the DK to get them all rounded up. In the end, I can't say I really got the chance to experience the flow of the fight, or the quirks of the encounter. The drops were pretty much useless too. In the end, I left content to have seen a raid that I'd not been to, but I was very much aware of how pointless it was two expansions past it's prime.

But now Onyxia has been reworked, bumped up to a relevant difficulty, and having done both, I would rather wipe three or four times on the new than roflstomp the old.

On the same weekend I decided to put in a little bit of work on my Argent Dawn rep. I ran Stratholm live and dead, did the Scholomance key quest (finally) and cleared that joint, all in a few hours. I got about 8k rep with the mess of scourgestones I picked up, got my axes and daggers skills up to 400, farmed 20-someodd stacks of runecloth, and decided that they really need to redo some more classic instances.

I remember doing Scholomance and Stratholme when they were relevant, and they were hard work, long nights, and they were a lot better at the time. A 45-minute Baron run used to be a big deal, and you needed your four most skilled friends to do it. I soloed it in about 25 minutes without really trying to hurry.

Rivendare deserves better than that.

Between outright rewrites and heroic mode switches there is ample opportunity to offer current versions alongside a full progression of leveling dungeons for developing players. The hew and cry against actually getting a broad swath of rewrites - because the proletariat prefers new content to kvetch about (ToC) to old content to kvetch about (Ony) - but it would be nice if at least a few more iconic runs would be added to the heroic version list that has been announced for Cataclysm (Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, for the record).

One upon a time I was actually resistant to the idea of buffing the old stuff on the grounds that as a casual raider it would be unlikely that I would get a chance to do a lot of these things in a version that required a large group, but just might be able to get them in eventually if I only need a couple of friends to get them done. I've come around, though, to the lucid side of the argument. First of all, you actually get to run stuff that's at-level difficulty and more importantly at-level loot, even though it takes more people, and second, it's just a whole lot more fun to run something that isn't a total joke.

And aren't we supposed to be having fun here?

Besides, I can now make all sorts of lewd jokes about my pair of dragon sacks.

150% less fun

So, I really don't like 25-man raids at all.

I really like 10-man raids a lot.

And no, it's not only because I have to maintain 300 interpersonal connections when I am actually only capable of handling 0.03.

At the most superficial level, 25's tend to be rough on my computer. It's an aging Macbook Pro that was hot stuff three years ago, but can't be asked to cope with that much on-screen insanity. The GPU tends to give up the ghost in any given bossfight, with my framerate approaching and often dropping below one-per-second. The strobing, jerky experience is difficult to play through.

Twenty five people is also just too many people in one space for enjoyable or effective communication. There is too much being said in raid chat, there is too much vent chatter, too many people stepping on each other's questions, to the point that only but shutting out some of that flow makes following any of it possible, which usually means that I basically can't follow chat, so I miss little things here and there.

But most of all, I just feel like I am not really a factor in a 25-man raid. When we're running a 10-man raid, any person who dies, or any person who goes off and gets it all wrong is a tangible loss, while it often seems to be the case that the raid can go on without you in the larger runs, especially when you're just a mid-table dps'er - just staying out of the fire and watching cooldowns as the screen stutters by around you.

I feel more involved and valuable in a 10-man raid, and I feel like an anonymous cog in 25's. I find that the interpersonal interaction in the smaller format is more complete and compelling (especially with the light and familiar atmosphere we maintain in our guild). I also never found the encounters in 10's to be any less difficult or interesting - if anything, some seem harder.

All of which makes me often regret that my guild has a definite and bullheaded prejudice for 25's. I know that there are always going to be downsides to 10-man runs, a lot more people who miss a run now and then, and that we are stuck in a weird numeric purgatory where we have too many people for 10's and not enough for 25's and a shift one way or the other will in effect cure the problem, but that will do little to change my underlying preference - I like 10's, I have more fun in 10's, but if everyone around me had their way, we wouldn't do them at all.

Raid Math

Not what you think, either. This isn't about TPS reports or anything like that. It's about people.

In any given group of people, it's useful to think of the number of person-person interactions that are possible. If there's two people, you've got one interaction (or two, if you worry about directionality - either "Phil and I get along" or "I think Phil is okay AND Phil thinks I'm a tool"). If there are three people, you get three connections. However, with four people there are six connections, and with five people there are 10. You can calculate this number (which is referred to as the "choose" or "combination" operation in most combinatorics, and can actually be computed with google) as N!/(2*(N-2)!). The important part of this function is that it scales fairly rapidly.

Why the math? Simple. In a 5 person group, there are 10 interpersonal connections. In a 10 person group, there's 45. That's a fair amount, it's easy to see why there's more raid drama in 10-mans. In a 25 person grouping, there are 300 interpersonal pairings. Three hundred different chances for two people to just hit it off wrong and step on each other by accident, causing drama. A 40 person raid has 780 connections.

That's just a first approximation, too. In 25-person groups and higher, you can't really ignore the weird group dynamics that emerge with 3- and 4- person groupings. Everybody gets along fine normally, but when you put these 5 people in a group together, someone else starts getting pissy. Because, you know, those 5 together end up talking politics or start calling things "gay" or doing other random behaviors that annoy the crap out of me, even though I could group with any two of them individually and be just fine.

What's even worse is that group stability goes up with raid size. That is to say, if you're in a crappy 5 person pug, you can drop group. If you find four other like-minded people, you can run a lot of regular instances. But in order to field an actual 25 person raid, your choices of raid partners are going to be very limited. A raid leader simply cannot afford to pick and choose people based on interpersonal relationships - if you bring in one new person, you can't make sure 24 other people like them first.

There's really only one answer to this - professionalism. To succeed in a 5 person group, you just have to be a decent player and be pretty social. To succeed in 25 person raids takes an entirely different set of social skills, the ability to work with people you don't particularly like.

Dang, this game gets more and more like a job every day.

The fine line between lazy and indifferent

I have never completed a holiday meta-achievement.

I've never actually tried to complete a holiday meta-achievement.

I say this because last night I decided to buy the pink elephant pet instead of saving my tokens for the items required to get the Disturbing the Peace or Brew of the Month achievements and I'm waffling on buying the gnome-o-vision goggles with the tokens I get going forward, if I bother to get any more tokens going forward. Would I really rather have those silly toys than the violet protodrake?

Yeah, probably.

So, why do I consistently choose not to put the effort into holidays, even though the reward is so substantial - that super-fast dragon would be a great thing to have, and holidays are probably my only means of achieving one. Still, I don't bother.

Why not?

Is it that the reward isn't that big of a deal? I can make the argument that farming on a 310% mount would be an exercise in frustration - my current fast flying mount is already slightly faster than the client's ability to detect and post node blips on the mini-map, often popping them on the map slightly behind me and forcing me to circle back to them. An even faster mount might well miss nodes altogether.

I can also argue that flight speed isn't really that big of a deal - I have fast flight on Barls and my druid flies at the revised quicker base flight speed and I really don't feel like the difference is enough to compel me to save for fast flight on the druid, not as a priority anyway, perhaps as a luxury post-80 if I do an argent tournament grind for gear and wind up with a gold surplus.

I can claim that the reason I don't bother is because it would be too crushing if, due to circumstance or incompetence I was unable to finish one of the holidays deep into the chain and had to wait an extra year on account of one missing achievement and am therefore guarding myself against such immense frustration and despair.

Or, maybe I'm just lazy.

Sure, holidays are casual-friendly, but they're not exactly casual. To complete a holiday with limited playtime you are required, during many of them, to completely devote your playtime to that holiday, often for the duration of the holiday. Holidays are in a lot of ways worse than daily quests - you have to do them, you have to focus on them, and you have the added weight not only of determinism but also of urgency - if you miss a day, if you miss an achievement, you pay a 12-month penalty.

Holidays also often require a level of PvP play that many like myself, who simply do not enjoy that part of the game, are turned off by. The need to fight into and through enemy cities is an unfair requirement for the achievements as they really punish the casual or fringe player who cannot accomplish these tasks alone and might not have access to the large groups needed to push forward with these events.

Trying to do What A Longs, Strange Trip takes guts if you really care about the attempt and you are not gifted with above-average playtime. More fortitude than I have, apparently.

In the end, I'm just too afraid to fail at it to try to do it.

You will all be very cute as gnomes.

Love lurks in Blackrock Mountain

Our favorite snarkey dwarf has found the dwarfette of his dreams.

Heeding the call to save Brewfest, because saving Brewfest is very important to, well, dwarfs, Barley liberated an otherwise unassuming mug from Direbrew, only to discover that like Aladin with his lamp that mug had the power to make his dreams come true.

Turns out, that well-worn mug calls forth a dark and curvy lass who not only hands out beer in limitless quantity, but also smacks around your adversaries and is, as mentioned, a dark and curvy dwarf lass.

There have been proposals, dowries discussed, mugs tossed back and about. It's both cute and disturbing at the same time.

Beats the questionable relationship that Barley's original incarnation had with her mechanostrider...

How much is 2 agility worth?

Status report: Kranthis kicks butt. I'm still in love with druiding. Keeping on with the Battleground Honor Grind to pick up some Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide gear. Got the hat last night. So far, I put a shifting twilight opal in it, since I need a red and two blues to activate my metagem, and this will serve both purposes AND get me the socket bonus (6 crit, wheee!).

The question is, should I get a shifting dreadstone? I just recently got Djargenstad up to 450 alchemy, and he's been cranking out a few dreadstones a day (he's transmute spec). So I have the raw gems, and tomorrow Thrinwizzle will once again have 4 JC tokens and could learn the cut.

On the other hand, I could sell those dreadstones for a cool 200g on the AH. That's a LOT of money. And the dreadstone upgrade is 2 agi and 3 stam over the twilight opal (which cost like 10g on the AH as I was too lazy to switch over to Thrinwizzle to cut one for free).

So there's the opportunity cost - I could be richer. If I was richer, I could buy epic flight for Djargenstad (meh, no big deal I suppose) or buy up some really spendy stuff on the AH for some of my characters, or go mount-crazy or something. For now, I'm selling the dreadstones, especially because while the hat is very good, it's nowhere near best-in-slot. I could probably replace it on a ulduar-10 run, if I ever (a) get back into raiding and (b) get to tank ulduar on Kranthis. Between now and then, I've already got the gear to comfortably tank most heroics, and the dreadstone upgrade won't push me over the edge of any thresholds anyway.

Anyone want to buy some dreadstones?

Antiques and heirlooms

My improbable alt is close enough to Northrend now to smell the Valkyr. Poor bugger. I just inched past 67 and am itching to get that one more level so I can scamper off to the new content that still has some novelty value.

I say that, but in truth, this trip through outlands has been novel in some ways. The combination of early flight and heirloom items have rewritten the book on outland leveling. Gaining the ability to fly at 60 is simply a sea change in the way these levels are played. There is so much that flight offers in accessibility, pace, and safety while questing that it really does very often simply feel like cheating.

And the levels are just flying by. I managed to gain a whole level last night in about three hours, and that was playing at a casual pace without a lot of thought into efficiency. The grind is just not what it used to be.

But along the way, as I was flying past all of those mobs that used to be between the quest giver and the objective, all those critters you used to have to kill on the way there, and their experience points you will never get, I began to wonder - does flying make you level slower?

Now, I will admit, even if the answer was yes, I would still take flying. The quality of the experience of flying early makes the process of getting through these parts of the game you have already 'paid your dues' in so much more pleasant - you can cut to the chase, pick your battles, and all sorts of other idiotic cliches which, in the end, all boil down to this - it's just a better game to play.

But then, there's the heirlooms.

I have the heirlooms chest and shoulders for my druid. Actually, I have two sets of heirloom shirts and shoulders for my druid - the rogue leather for feralizing and the caster cloth for adventures in healing which never seem to come up. Together these items give me a boost of 20% to my experience gains - not quite as gaudy as refer-a-friend, but tangible.

But the question is, do the heirlooms compensate for the lost trash mob experience points that flight costs you?

I happen to have an excellent case for comparison - my death knight.

When I came back to WoW a few months into the LK run I initially rolled a death knight to try the new class and surgically reestablish relationships at my own pace. I played the corpse through outlands, but upon reaching 70, and having jumped in with a guild and gained aspirations, goals, and an appreciation for how over-run this game is with feckless death knights, I chose to return to my hunter roots and settled back into the comfort of my trusty main.

What this means, however, is that thanks to achievements and timing I can now compare the journey from 58 to 68 with some degree of relevance with and without flight and heirlooms, as well as relate these back to the original experience of the first trip through Burning Crusade.

What we find, when viewing the number of quests completed per zone according to achievement tracking is this:

	Hunter	DK	Druid
HFP	73	77	78
ZM	54	54	48
TF	48	7	2
Nag	61	52	19
BEM	25	5	1
NS	32	0	0
SMV	11	1	0

It turns out that the heirlooms do in fact make up for those extra trash kills almost exactly. When Caterwaul hits 68, she will have only slightly fewer total quests and only slightly fewer quests per zone than my death knight - so you can have your cake and eat it to. You can have the improved quality of life that flight brings and not have to make up the difference in experience points on the other side.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this trend holds up in Northrend.

Mostly, I'm just looking forward to Northrend.

Hold Those Gates!

I've been running some battlegrounds lately, on Kranthis, so I could get some honor. As it's been Strand of the Ancients weekend, I've been doing that. I'd done a lot of this on Mariwocket, so I was prepared (unlike Isle of Conquest, where all I do is run around like a crazy person until we win or lose - still working on strategy for that one).

Anyway. I've been in matches where we rolled to victory quickly and easily, and ones where we were crushed. A few were close contests. Every single one of them had something in common.

Purple and Red gates.

The second-tier gates from the front are key to successful defense in SotA. When the blue or green gates fall, if there's still tanks rolling along, it's not possible to get to the the guns at Purple and Red in time to mount a defense there. If, on the other hand, there are already gunners at those two gates, you've got a really good chance at blowing up that wave of tanks before they even fire on your gate. If you blow up that first wave of tanks completely, you've got the game half-won. If you beat up the second wave of tanks enough that they get blown up before taking Yellow, you've won.

So here's the basic defense strategy. At the start of the round, put one gunner on Red and one on Purple. Two on Blue and two on green, the rest go and fight on the beach. If you don't have a gun, focus on killing tanks - ignore enemy PCs except in defense of your graveyards.

If the tanks do the smart thing and focus on one side (people usually focus Blue, I have no idea why), then whoever is on Purple or Red (the side that's not being attacked) should mount up and make a break for the other gate, thus having 2 gunners on that gate. Protip: you can see the tanks on your tactical zone map (hit shift-M), so you know what to do Right Away. If, on the other hand, there's 2 tanks at each of Blue and Green, stay put, as in this case you can probably beat the incoming tanks with only one gun. Use the gun on the "outside" of the map, the one closer to the gate that's being attacked, and eventually someone will fall back and do support gunning. Sometimes it's easier to just put 2 people at Red and 2 at Purple, but this gives you 2 more people to push on the tanks with.

In either case, as soon as the first gate falls, the people manning that gate need to fall back to Yellow ASAP - this is the same problem as before, there need to be gunners at the gate beyond the ones being attacked so they can unload the max damage on the tanks that get through.

Again, if you're not on a gun, focus on the tanks. They need tanks to get through walls. They can do it by running seaforuim, but this is a desperation move, as it just takes too long. The only reason to attack a PC and not a vehicle (if, of course there's vehicles around) is in defense of the graveyards. Most of the time, they only send one or two people to cap the graveyards, good defense here will buy precious minutes without those four extra tanks.

The strategy for offense is just the opposite, of course. Focus all four beach tanks on either Blue or Green (mix it up each time), send three people to assure a graveyard (and tank shop capture), and drive your tanks hard. Remember that you can catapault shoot gates down, so get some damage on the gates before you get into ramming range.

If you're not on a tank, attack the PCs who are attacking your tanks. Snares are your friend, as the tanks roll at running speed. This means that any melee person will be in trouble if you just back them off a little bit. Casters have to run up, cast, mount, run up, etc. Disrupt that. Hunters (in my experience) are the biggest danger to tanks, although so are well-geared melee characters with sprints and snare-breaks. If you're one of those characters, kill tanks on defense rather than driving them - let the poor Mage do the tank driving.

So that's the long story. But the short story is simple: gunners at red and purple at round start = win (or tie at least if the horde does the same thing). This is something I absolutely LOVE about SotA, since I'm often the only gunner in the secondary line. Quick movement and keeping an eye on which gate is likely to break down means I can often sway the outcome of a whole match by my very own self. Even better, of course, when everybody uses this strategy.

PvP as a Warlock

Last night, I was PvPing for honor on my Druid. Turns out that PvP is still a good way to gear up your beartank, even with resilience being a pretty worthless stat, the high threat and stamina on battleground-honor purchasable gear is great. Especially compared to what you can get running heroics. I chatted with this warlock who I noticed was using Drain Life as her primary spell. But there's only so much you can do in whispers during a battle. So here we go.

Well, I'm in no way a PvP expert. You could say I'm a total loser - my arena rating is crappy. If, however, you're brand-new to PvP on the Warlock, you're even worse off than I. I managed to scrape together a full set of honor-costing gear through excessive battleground usage last season, thinking maybe I could team up with a disc priest or something. Didn't pan out (too many other things to do with my time, frankly), but I did get a feel for battleground PvP using Warlocks. Here's some tips.

You might want to respec. A thousand gold for a dual-spec isn't all that much (you can make it back in a day of doing quests you skipped in your push to 80, or dailies or whatever), and what are you, a Pure DPS Maven, going to do with that dual spec anyway? I prefer something like this destruction spec, but you could probably pull it off with demonology out of the box or a modified affliction spec. Soul Link is the key here - if you can get that, you're on the right track. Other damage reduction and pushback-protection powers are key. The destruction spec has a great amount of delicious burst in it - hit them hard with immolate, chaos bolt, conflagrate. Bam. Or save your chaos bolt for the priest bubbles and whatnot. If you spec affliction, just run around dotting EVERYBODY, don't hang around for the killshot (you probably won't get it, but you will annoy the crap out of a lot of people).

Petwise, you've got some good options nowadays. Personally, I prefer the Voidwalker in battlegrounds. My reasoning is that I'd rather have his shield (which you can pop while stunned, and no longer kills the VW) than the other, more offensive powers. That said, the felhunter is a very close second - having a dispel and interrupt available (again, off your personal GCD since it's the pet's ability) is pretty awesome too. Some people like succubus for the seduce, but personally I never have time to seduce people in battlegrounds. I'm too busy nuking their faces off. Any way you do it, learn to macro your pets. You should be using spell lock actively, not leaving it on passive for your felhunter to spam at the least opportune moment. Likewise, either put your pet on passive (so he doesn't wander off) or aggressive (so he starts hitting that rogue as soon as he detects it). Defensive pet = fail, and learn to pull him back. The amount of DPS your pvp pet does is relatively low, especially compared to the opportunity cost of not having your pet's defensive abilities on tap.

Remember to fear people. You can drop the fearbomb if nobody is hitting you (or if you've talented for instant howl of terror, or pop a voidwalker shield), which can be very amusing, but I tend to reserve fears for just gaining a little casting space. Lots of ways to break fear these days, so cast fear, and if you actually get it off and it lands, immediately start casting immolate->conflag (for the daze effect).

Keep some frostweave nets handy, or whatever other profession PvP boosters you've got. Nets are great - they last long enough for you to get away or get off a few good spells. Boom. If you're destro spec and have decent PvE gear, you'll burn people down FAST.

Use demonic teleport. I keep it macro'd to my PvP trinket, so with one press I can activate my trinket (to clear stuns and whatever) and teleport away. Dropping a circle takes very little time, and even if I'm assaulting a flag or tower or whatever, I'll take the time to drop the circle on the way in, so I can warp out when things look bad. On defense, it's even better, drop it in a useful location (remember that you don't need LoS to the circle to warp to it). Just don't, you know, stand on it while you're fighting. Then it's worthless.

Learn what the PvP gear looks like on the opposition, and RUN AWAY. No matter how great your gear is, if you face someone 1v1 who has 5/5 deadly gladiator gear and 700 resilience, your only hope is that they ignore you as they run past. Resilience matters a LOT. When you get some, you'll notice. I used to fear PvE rogues in battlegrounds, but nowadays I'm usually pretty good at killing them before they kill me, just because they do so little damage between my (glyphed) soul link and high resilience gear.

That last bit is more like tactics. And tactics are for another post. Hope this helps, mystery Warlock friend!

Howto: get to 80 the second time

(and the third and the fourth). As of this writing, I have four level 80 characters and a level 70 one that I leveled pre-LK. I know what it's like out there in altland, and I've got some advice for everybody. I can get from 1-60 in something like 6 days /played, and be in northrend before I'm at 9 days /played. Plenty of people go faster, but people also go far more slowly.

This advice doesn't apply to your first character. Slow down, enjoy yourself. You'll never go this way again, because next time you'll be in a hurry. If you hack the RAF magic, you don't need all of this advice, but it's still useful.

DO: Get a leveling guide. I use Brian Kopp's. There are free ones too, but this is really worth the money. I've used it for a while now (although I didn't get the northrend updates, I mainly use it for the 1-60 grind, since that's so complicated right now). Personally, I print out a few pages at a time and run through the list in order. It's hugely useful, and very satisfying when you get to cross things off a list.

DO: Take some time off occasionally. Remind your guildmates that you still exist by running instances or raids with your main. Surface from the complete and total immersion in the quest XP gravy train. Heck, it builds rest XP.

DON'T: Do instances. Waste of time, you get more XP/hour questing. Sure, there might be some exciting piece of gear you want. Skip it. You'll get better as a random green "of the Foobar" in three levels, which is like later this evening, dude.

DON'T: Do group quests that require a group. See above - I give most group-3 quests one try, if it works, great. If not, move on. The advanced hyperspeed leveling plan means no particular quest is mandatory.

EXCEPTION: if there's a weapon as a quest reward (not a drop), and that weapon is a significant upgrade - make the attempt. I find while leveling that armor comes and goes, but most good weapons last about 5-10 levels. But see the next rule.

DO: Get some heirlooms. The XP bonus from the shoulders and hat are pretty huge, and stack with the rested bonus. If you can get a weapon that scales to your level, you're golden. At any given level, there's probably a better weapon, especially since at the mid-high levels the better enchants and scopes add a lot, and you can't really enchant heirlooms. However, it's still totally worth getting the heirloom weapon. Otherwise you'll probably have to spend a LOT of gold on midlevel BoE weapons. That's another option, too. I've found that while armor is a nice plus, you really notice when your weapon gets outdated, and a new one adds new life to your play (even for spellcasters).

DON'T: Do it the hard way. That means leveling with a healing spec or whatever. If you're a druid, level feral. If you're a shaman, go enhance. Each and every class has a talent spec that makes leveling easier. Don't level destruction as a warlock. Corollary to the rule: don't just pick an endgame spec and fill it out. Respeccing is cheap, plan on doing it several times as you level. For example, my advice to warlocks is to get fel concentration ASAP, then Fel Brutality, then back up to Siphon Life, but as soon as you hit 50, respec for Felguard and rebuild your affliction tree up to fel concentration again.

DON'T: Level tradeskills. Plenty of time for running around at 80. Yeah, you'll pass a lot of herb/ore/leather, but it's a lot faster this way. The only exception to that is skinning - it's easy to keep skinning up to date. But Herbalism and Mining are pretty hard to keep updated as you advance, at least until Outlands, and you'll spend a lot of time wandering around, looking for thorium sooner or later. Best do that at 80 when the eastern plaguelands mobs are less of a challenge. And if you're trying to level a crafting tradeskill, don't do that either, except maybe if you've got a TON of money to waste at the auction house and are trying to make one of the mid-level BoPs for yourself.

DO: Maximize rest XP. You get a level and a half of it at any time. That goes away really quickly at lower levels, and I don't worry about that too much. But it regenerates relatively quickly for its utility. Try and do all of the 60-80 push on rest XP. This means parking in an inn and waiting for a few days. Sure, go and get some work done on your main. Go farm Relics of Ulduar or whatever so you can send them to your shiny new alt when you get to 80.

DO: Get the Auctioneer addon. It tells you how much quest rewards vendor for. Always pick the most expensive quest reward - the difference can double your quest income. This adds up very fast over time.

DO: Get some runecloth or frostweave bags. Runecloth bags don't bind, so you can send them from alt to alt. Frostweave bags are much bigger, but bind and tend to be more spendy. Your call on that one, but every alt should have a set of four new bags in the mail as soon as they leave the starting zone.

DON'T: Go to the trainer every level. Generally speaking, you get new skills on even levels from 1-60. There are some levels where you don't get anything useful. Check Wowhead - go to database - spells - class skills and look at your class (sort by level). Anything interesting? Go train. But only train when your hearthstone is cooled down. You can keep leveling without those new skills for another half hour (after all, you got this far without them). Going to train means you wander around in a capital city for a while, you wander over to the Auction House.... and then there goes an hour.

DON'T: Go to the auction house. Period. There's only two reasons to get a BoE from the AH. One is, you don't have an heirloom weapon and you're desperately in need of an upgrade (my rogue leveled with a Krol Blade that I got on the cheap from my vigilant AH watching). Two is, you're almost 80 (or whatever the level cap is when you're reading this) and there's some good BoE stuff that will actually last you to 80. If you have a lot of green BoEs in your bags, send them to be disenchanted - 99% of greens are worth more disenchanted than sold on the AH. If you find some interesting blue or purple BoEs, save them for a later alt or give them to your guild. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but odds are against you finding any.

DON'T: Grind mobs. If you're out of quests in an area and don't know where to go, consult your leveling guide. There's probably a quest out there that will reward you for grinding mobs - most quests are worth about 20 unrested at-level mob kills. So if you get a quest that requires you to kill 20 mobs, you're doubling your XP rate.

And the final rule:

DO: Keep your eyes on the prize. This is the meta rule. Why did you get off of the quest gravy train? To go .... take orphans for a walk? They'll be back next year. To go .... work on some faction reputation? You probably don't need the item that much, and if you do, you can come back at 80. To go .... run some instances to clear out the last quests in a zone? Odds are, you're already high enough level to go to the next zone in the progression. Just delete those quests for now, and come back later when you're working on Loremaster.

Follow your leveling guide, skip ahead in it when you can (since the guide assumes no heirlooms and no rest XP), and keep pounding on the leveling train. Quest quest quest. That is all.

Somebody stop me!

I have not been doing a very good job of alting, which should come as no surprise. I've gained four levels, sure, but half of that was a night of dungeon runs, and lately all I have done with the druid was work on my herbalism skill, which is still a good clip from Outlands level.

I would classify my latest alt attempt as a qualified failure thus far.

Which makes the fact that I am actively working toward expensive and time-consuming upgrades for the character to have a healing spec and outfit as an alternative leveling strategy all the more foolish.

But that's what I am doing.

The thought process went something like this - I've run through all of these Outland quests several times before, dungeon leveling is more interesting, battleground leveling is a possibility, and it is always easier to find a group as a healer than as a dpser.

Plus, healing has novelty value, as does battleground leveling.

Both of these things being, of course, tasks that I have generally avoided.

I hate battlegrounds. I have always hated battlegrounds. Do I seriously expect that I will spend an appreciable number of hours or levels in them?

And I dropped the account that had my healadin on it ages ago precisely because healing was such an attention-demanding role that put demands on my time and attention that I considered excessive and unenjoyable.

Yet, here I am, not only working on an alt that exists precisely to give me tank and healing options, but also plotting the use of battlegrounds as a novelty approach to leveling.

Plotting is perhaps too weak of a term, given the fact that I not only ready and willing to part with the price of a dual-spec, which goes against my tightwad nature, but also redirecting Barley's activities exclusively toward farming the currency required to get the druid a second set of heirloom items - for a caster set - which is especially nutty given that I have emptied-out Barls' emblem and seal caches and am starting from nearly nothing.

And the truth is, I probably will have few, if any opportunities to heal dungeons at less than maximum level anyway. I am reluctant to pug, there are almost no guildies in this level range, and I still hate battlegrounds. All said, I will probably still wind up getting the vast majority of the experience on this character, assuming I manage to develop this character at all, questing as feral.

So here I am, still sucking at alts, aware that the non-dps roles are probably not right for me, and with a mountain to climb to get geared and a mountain of gold to drop to get there.

Not only do I suck at playing alts, I suck at managing them too.

Druid... tank?

Kranthis is rollin' on. Pretty soon, he'll be level 80. But what should I do to gear him for beartanking? Things have changed a LOT since burning crusade, and there's not a ton of information out there about beartanking. So here's what I'm thinking. I hope people chime in to correct me if I'm wrong about this.

1. You don't need Defense at all anymore. You're uncrittable from talents. Plus, defense only gives you dodge + miss, and you don't get block/parry out out of it, so it's not all that hot as a defensive stat.
2. Resilience damage reduction only works on PC opponents, not NPC ones. So no stacking resilience. As an aside, most of my tank gear in BC had resilience, because it was a "cheaper" way to get to uncrittable than via defense.
3. Strength is mostly a threat stat - you get 2 AP per strength point, and between heart of the wild and blessing of kings, you get considerably more than 2 AP per point of strength on your gear. However, savage defense improves based on your AP, so some strength can be thought of as mitigation.
   
4. Agility is both a threat and tanking stat. Agility improves your dodge directly (at a very favorable ratio), and increases your melee crit chance, leading to more savage defense procs. Agility does not, however, improve your AP whilst in bearform. Similarly, Dodge and Crit serve as tanking and tanking/threat stats, but typically less efficiently than Agility.
   
5. Stamina is of course, lots of HP. Shake that big bear butt.
6. Hit and Expertise are threat stats. I can never keep straight how white and yellow melee attacks work on the roll table - is it single roll or double roll? Does improving your hit rating also improve the number of crits you get?
7. Armor is delicious mitigation, but isn't multiplied like it used to be. Green armor values don't get multiplied, nor do armor on things like trinkets. I'm not sure if weapon armor values get multiplied or not anymore.

So, you mainly pick up DPS-statted rogue armor, with lots of AP and Agility and enough Hit and Expertise that you won't miss too often with your mangles and mauls and whatnot. Get high-stam gear in your ring/neck/back/trinket slots, possibly with defense on it (for the dodge/miss) or even better with agi or str (need some threat stats).

For my starter weapon, I'm looking at a Silvery Sylvan Stave or a Titansteel Destroyer. The sylvan stave has clearly better tanking stats on it, but the Destroyer is really easy to get - I even have some of the materials in the bank and Thrinwizzle can make it. Just need to transmute 4 more titansteel bars or something. The stave, on the other hand, is something like two weeks or more away from achievable, since I haven't even finished the valiant chain yet, let alone started collecting champion seals.

How does all that sound?

Ten things I learned on my way to becoming a chef

When I logged on last night all that stood between me and wrapping up Hail to the Chef was an infused mushroom meatloaf. A quick trip to the sewers, and one Dalaran cooking award later I was dashing off to buy and cook that last recipe to nudge past the finish line (Blackened Worg Steak for those of you playing the home game).

You will all, from this day forward, refer to me only as "Cookie."

While my reasons for wanting this title enough to churn all of those cooking dailies were well-covered in a previous ramble, I did think it was worthwhile to revisit the topic in another way, that is to share some lessons learned about cooking, the people who play this game around me, and perhaps even myself. So without further delay, I present the ten things I learned on my way to becoming a chef.

1. The best places to get the meat you need for the cooking dailies are The rhino herds in the middle of Storm Peaks, obviously for the rhino meat, and the gorillas in eastern Sholazar, who turn out to be chilled meat vending machines. Sadly, I only discovered the prolific rate of return from the apes a week ago - previously I'd been getting by mostly on the odd extra pieces I'd get while farming mammoth meat for buff food or just stashing away anything I'd wind up with in my usual travels. If you're just lazy, chilled meat is fairly cheap, which means it's easy to get, so quit being so lazy.

2. When fishing in Wintergrasp, which is, by the way, the best place for fish feast fixins, I went with the lake overlooking the waterfall into Dragonblight. It's not that the fishing is any better, but rather that if I got jumped by some rude Hordie I could just jump off the falls and use a last-minute parachute to land safely down the cliff side, and was rarely ever pursued after doing so. If you do it right, it's just like an action movie, except that in an action movie, the hero usually doesn't run away screaming "not in the face!"

3. Baby Spicing raid bosses with fiddly hit boxes makes raid leaders mad.

4. Subsequently Baby Spicing your raid leader is probably not the best idea.

5. There's a stove in the Legerdemain Inn. It's easier to get to than the one in the Alliance inn and with fewer people milling about usually a little less laggy. The Legerdemain and the Cheese shop across the street will also almost always have enough wine glasses for the cheese daily, if not in one pass, just stand around a few minutes and get them on the second pass. The bigger question, though, is why that dwarf in the skinning shop wants wine in the first place. He's a dwarf, he should be asking for beer and sausage. I do not trust that dwarf. I suspect he is an elf in disguise. I am waiting for just the right time to yank off his beard and expose the impostor. Real dwarfs do not appreciate being the subject of some elf's alternative lifestyle. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

6. Cooking in a video game is a lot easier to clean up than cooking in real life. Not that I would know, I pretty much only use paper plates so I don't have to clean up after cooking. Not that microwaving hot dogs is really cooking.

7. When you're doing The Rokk's cooking dailies for the BC drop recipes, the Crate of Meat has a better chance to drop Kibbler's Bits and the Chocolate Cake, but the Barrel of Fish has a better chance to drop Stormchops, but the Spicy Hot Talbuk only drops from the meat box and the Broiled Bloodfin and Skullfish Soup only come from the bucket of fish, so just alternating until you have everything you need from one or the other is a good way to go. I got the Spiritual Soup quest almost every day. Given that Shattrath is essentially deserted now I wonder why the little goblin still thinks he needs to cook so much food, and if that ogre will ever manage to chop through that piece of meat he's been hacking at for two years. Either ogre strength is highly exaggerated or he's half-assing his job.

8. You don't need the hat to be a chef. You do probably need a hairnet. Unless you're bald. Tauren need a body stocking. No, not one of THOSE body stockings. That mental image will haunt me for a long time.

9. The stormchops buff and penguin flocks is an experience no one should ever miss - especially when you didn't bother reading what stormchops does before eating it (for the Tastes Like Chicken achievement) and then riding out to an iceberg full of penguins to wrap up the Critter Gitter task. Wondering why I was suddenly going all Emperor Palpatine on all of those little birds, then doing it on purpose for entirely too long after I realized what was going on just made it all the more fun.

10. The nastiest, most cut-throat and unbelievably rude ninja bullsh*t in this game is gathering ground spawns for the Dalaran cooking dailies. People will suckerpunch old ladies to get that mustard plant and the fact that you got there first, are standing right next to the thing in some back corner of town where you wouldn't possibly be for any reason other than to pick up the spawn that you're standing right next to and just taking too long to reach over to your trackpad and find the arrow to click because you use a laptop and don't even own a mouse and are therefore way too slow to do things like pick up groundspawns means that at least once a day some sociopathic little felon will dash in and steal your wine jug, so you have to wait for another one to pop up. Seriously, I complain a lot that the people who play warcraft are the lowest form of human life and that things like trade chat and pugging are gateways to the darkest recesses of human inhumanity, but stealing someones ground spawn, when another will pop up two feet away in like 15 seconds is just low. I hate you people. You may not share my Delicious Chocolate Cake.

Status isn't Quo

So, I've been taking some time off from WoW lately. I've had way too many things going on in the Bright World to be able to devote any real effort to the game. By the time I got home from work, I was so worn out all I could do was stare dumbly at the Big Blue Box as it delivered unto me episodes of Bones and The Mighty Boosh. But last night I got back into it.

You know something? Raiding is hard work. I've got real respect for those folks who go out there and rip up progression content. The guild last night was doing the 10-man Trial of the Crusader stuff. Northrend beasts and all that jazz. I took one look at the strategy guides, threw my hands up, and logged into Kranthis instead. "I'm available if you need me" was my mantra - knowing full well that 16 people had signed up for the 10-man raid.

Don't get me wrong, raiding is a ton of fun, even when you wipe a lot (at least as long as the drama stays mainly to a minimum). But it's way too much work for me and good ol' mushbrain right now.

Anyway, on the plus side I got to play with my Druid for a while. I really love being a feral druid, levels 77-79 have been soooo much better than 70-77 (when I was trying to level balance). Feral is where it's at. You've got good stealth and don't have to change forms once you break stealth, do huge damage, take little damage, and don't need to manage mana. Why oh why did I ever try to level balance? Plus, all this running around in the Storm Peaks (finished the Sons of Hodir chain last night) meant I ended up swimming in herbs. I found about three stacks of icethorn and two of lichbloom just going from quest to quest.

I love my druid.

My only real complaint is about the new catform skins. I object to the necklace and wristband look. It's way too hip for my 10,000 year old elf dude to wear a necklace and a wristband. Why can't we just go for the naked cat like travelform? I'd spend gold on a minor glyph that made the travelform cat my catform cat. Easy-peasy.

This is fun?

It's been a long time since I last gave PvP a whirl - the last time I subjected myself to that soul-crushing horror was way back in the foggy days of Burning Crusade when I was honor farming to get some bracers and a belt to get geared-up for heroics and Karazhan - so running six battlegrounds last night was not the sort of thing I would have done unless pressed to do so by extraordinary demands.

Apparently, I can't be a Chef unless I am willing to be humiliated in a three-hour tour of pointlessness.

I began the night in good spirits and with no great expectations and a fistfull of Great Feasts. I was just going to pop into the BG's, drop the food, run around, not care too much, and just get through it, just a bit of casual PvP to get my achievement, a diversion, some novelty, a spot of fun.

Yeah, right.

Alliance is jammed-up with some of the worst PvPers, slow learners and rude twits I have ever had the misfortune of interacting with. While the general population of WoW is, as I have discovered, on par the lowest form of human life, at least the Horde players can execute a strategy and coordinate their actions. Alliance is so bad that we don't even sit there screaming conflicting instructions at each other any more like we used to. No, there was really no one talking in the BG chat at all in any of the battlegrounds I was in last night, except one bright bulb who decided to lambaste his teammates for overlooking him in the pre-match buffing with a string of anti-Semitic remarks.

Heck, it might even be an improvement, really, because getting 5-capped in AB is bad enough, but getting 5-capped in AB while three guys who had spent the whole game solo assaulting the farm in uncoordinated waves bicker over which objective everyone should now zerg is really just a whole lot worse.

I was 0-6 on the night - including such ignominies as an 0-3 WSG, an AB 5-cap loss and an EotS loss where we started the match with a 13-to-1 numeric advantage. Maybe it was just a bad night, maybe I am just so bad at PvP that my very presence makes the rest of the team stupid somehow, but I rather suspect that the fact that I was the only one trying to kill the tree druid who was healing the two plate-wearers assaulting the stables and never getting below 50% health suggests that it was not, in fact, me.

Alliance sucks at PvP. Some things just never change.

With any luck I will never have to set foot in another battleground again.

Clever readers will recognize that the Dinner Impossible achievement only requires five runs to complete - turns out of can't tell the difference between Strand of the Ancients and Isle of Conquest. Now that I've run them both, I still can't really tell - one had a castle and the horde tore us up and the other had a castle and the horde tore us up. Either way, I'm glad I had a couple of extra feasts on me.

I'd like to think that things like this build character, but in the end, they really don't.

Can I get a resilience gem for my hair net?

So, I'm within spitting distance of the Chef meta-achievement.

"Spitting distance" probably isn't the best term to use in food preparation.

This does come as some small surprise to me. I have been slowly but surely building toward the thing for a while now, doing my cooking dailies, purchasing recipes with my tokens, and all that, but until this weekend it seemed like a very distant, long-term objective.

That is, until I got the cake recipe.

For the longest time I had been laboring under the assumption that two things would be conspiring to push my ability to get this reward back into the new year - first, that I needed to buy the hat and second, that I might need that long to get the cake recipe.

The other reward recipes had been a fairly short wait. I probably only had to do the Outland cooking dailies a dozen times to get all but the cake, and with said cake recipe dropping from the Dalaran quest as well, and under the assumption that I needed over a hundred more cooking awards, I have not bothered to run The Rok's errands for a month or so.

Truth be told, I will admit that I want to finish this meta. While I have been entirely indifferent to my other titles, and have not bothered to display them, this might actually be one that I wear. It's not that I have some great fondness for the cooking mini-game (prior to LK and my desire to produce my own buff food so as not to be a leech off Eric's Northern Spice stockpile I never got cooking about the twenty points or so that I got in the newbie zones just playing around with the concept), and I don't really see Barls as some accomplished RP chef, but there is just something slightly surreal about the thing, something gloriously pointless about having gone through the trouble for something that is an accomplishment which requires almost no fighting of monsters, almost no great deeds, almost no effort at all - just a little time and a lot of repetition. Chef isn't an accomplishment so much as it is a warning, a flag that say that you are the kind of player who can get lost in WoW's roach motel of repetitive grinds, that you are the kind of player who would dedicate hours and hours (but only in 15-minute bursts) to an achievement with no useful outcome, but are still sufficiently adept at being a slack-ass that something that took real effort like Bloodsail Admiral or Diplomat was just not going to happen. It is, in a nutshell, exactly who I am in this game - a completely addicted timesinker with minimal aspirations and no focus.

Chef Barley - says it all.

Getting that aforementioned cake recipe, though, spurred me into action on this process, and encouraged me to actually go and read the requirements again, and when I did, it took me a while to believe that the hat was not a part of it. I checked and double checked several times, in fact, astonished.

Suddenly, an achievement that I had penciled in for January was potentially going to be wrapped up this week.

I only have a couple of steps left, I need purchase two or three more recipes and cook up a few straggling dishes, and I need to go dig those Great Feasts out of the bank I'd onto while skill grinding .

Which means, of course, that I have to go and run a bunch of battlegrounds in order to offer Great Feasts in order to get credit for the Dinner Impossible.

Uh oh.

PvP.

All of which means that for any of you Hordies in the Stormstrike battle group who have been waiting for a chance to laugh at me while I keyboard-turn, you might want to pop into a few random battlegrounds over the next few nights. I'll be the hunter standing over the tray of food looking lost and waiting to be ganked.

Which is to say, I'll be an Alliance toon in PvP.