Get your Turkey Lurkey Achievement

Few people know the utility of the /who command. If you type /who c-"Rogue" r-"Gnome", you'll list all the gnome rogues in the game. You can only do it for the faction you're playing, but it's not too hard to roll a horde alt and type /who c-"Rogue" r-"Troll", and get a name and current zone, which will significantly ease the search.

Of course for me, Phil was kind enough to roll a screenful of horde alts to get turkified.

How To: Joust in the Argent Tournament

There's a lot of reasons to joust in the Argent Tournament. Maybe you're working on the Crusader title. Maybe you just want some quick and easy gold. Personally, I'm doing it for those two reasons, plus the tokens. I'd like to get the 75-pet achievement on Jillathee for no reason other than "because it's there", and the 5 easy pets from the Tourney are 5 more pets I don't have to buy in the Auction House.

Additionally, you might find yourself thinking about rolling up a Dwarf Shaman, Worgen Druid, or Goblin Rogue in cataclysm. While we've been told that the current crop of heirlooms probably won't work from 80-85, they should still work from 1-80, and 20% more XP plus a few slots that are always pretty well-equipped is totally worth the effort. Anyway.

Not everybody is all that good at Jousting. I see a lot of people get defeated in the ring, or hear them complain about how hard / boring it is. I've gotten it pretty much down to a science, so I want to offer a few suggestions and observations. These apply to both the Champion and Valiant jousts, and to a lesser extent the Commanders joust (because they now behave exactly like champions, although they're considerably more annoying because of adds).

First of all, you should make sure you can see target-of-target frames. This isn't on by default in the standard UI and to be honest I don't even know how to turn it on in the default UI, since I've been running with replacement unit frames since WAY back in the day (discord unit frames, FTW!). Anyway, your opponent will periodically detarget you and run off in a somewhat-random direction. If you have target-of-target frames, you'll notice this right away, and the key to a successful joust is just that - noticing when your opponent detargets you.

I also want to make another observation. It is possible to win this joust by doing nothing but thrusting and keeping your shields up. If you follow the opponent while he detargets you and runs away, you will stay under his charge/shieldbreaker range, and he'll just go back to hitting you again after a while. But because he has the same HP as you and hits just as hard, those periods of inactivity on his part means that if you just spam thrust and follow him around (and remember to refresh defend before it falls off), you can win with no risk. The problem is that this technique requires five and a half minutes, or thereabouts, to pull off. You can go much faster.

The key to fast jousting is to keep your opponent at one or two levels of defense.

There are a few techniques to help with this, some are easier than others. I generally go all-out, and now that I've gotten it all down to a science it works fine. I started with the only-shieldbreaker technique, moved to the only-charge technique, and then went to the shieldbreaker-and-charge technique.

1. Before challenging someone, get a little behind them, and face into the ring. When you challenge them, they immediately put up shields and run into the ring. If you're sitting behind them, you can charge them as soon as they run far enough away. I just spam 3 until I start charging them.
2. While you're fighting, stay close to the opponent. If you're too far away from the opponent, they will try to shield-break and charge you. Because they're an NPC mob, they don't have a GCD. Which means that they can shield-break and charge in pretty short order, although shield-break has a cast time (as it does for you), so it's possible to move back under minimum range for shieldbreaking before they cast it. If you don't stay close to them, though, you'll find yourself down two shields - one lost to shield-breaker and one to charge. That puts you in a tricky position, you have to shield up as quickly as possible.
3. Generally, I try to slowly walk backwards while fighting. This keeps weirdnesses from happening where the opponent goes a little too far through you and hits you without you being able to hit them, and also makes life easier when they drop target. And trust me, there's all kinds of weird lag and positional issues in jousting. It just doesn't behave predictably.
   
4. When the opponent drops target and runs off, you have four options, in increasing order of risk but also payoff:
   1. Just stay on top of him, and keep thrusting. This is the 5-minute plan. It's also a lot less dirty than it sounds.
      
   2. Toss a shield-breaker as soon as he's out of range, then quickly move back into range and keep thrusting. If you're lucky, you'll get a few hits in before he ups his shield again, and you'll be ahead in the damage race.
   3. Charge as soon as he's out of range, and quickly recover back in and keep thrusting. Charge hits harder than shield-breaker, and this gets you into thrust range faster, so you can usually hit a few more times this way.
   4. Charge as soon as he's out of range, and as you run through him in the post-charge sprint, try to quickly turn around and toss a shield-breaker. This is the hardest trick to manage, but if you pull it off, you'll reduce his shields by 2 levels per cycle, and he only can recover 1 shield per cycle. Which means that if you're doing it right, you'll have him stuck at more or less 1 shield permanently, and the joust will be over before you know it.
5. The trick to this is your quick reactions. No matter which path you take, you have to make sure you get under the minimum range for shield-breaker before than your opponent can cast his shield-breaker. It's tricky, but totally doable, if you're fast on the ball. If you don't do this, you'll get shield-broken and charged, and be unable to recover.
6. The whole time, keep an eye on your defend timer. There's nothing worse than starting out really strongly but losing your entire 3-stack of defend because you didn't need to refresh it because you weren't getting hit.
   

And that's it, really. The whole thing comes down to watching for the opponent to detarget you and deciding what to do when he does. Valiants and Champions behave identically in this respect. The only difference is that Valiants start with a 2-stack of shields instead of a 3-stack, and that Valiants seem to wait longer between refreshing their shields.

All you have to do is remember to keep your shields at an equal or higher level than the other guy. Sometimes for me, this means ignoring a charge opportunity. If I flubbed a pass and ended up at 1 shield, I'll spend the next pass making sure I'm back up to 3 before I do any more charging.

Good luck and happy jousting!

The hall of mirrors

So, I appreciate that teh badge system gives a schmuck like me access to good gear through the entire run of the LK expansion, I really do.

I appreaciate that the new epic weapon questline will give me a poker that I probably don't deserve with mind-blowing stats, I really do.

But I don't appreciate the fact that the ultimate outcome of all of this has been to remove individuality from the game. We all look the same, we all have the same stuff, and I miss recognizing my friends from accross Stormwind.

It reminds me of a day when I was a bit frustrated with my community on SwC back in the wanning days of vanilla. That server was never particularly successful in progression and people generally had only a handful of endgame items, if any, and generally we all were a bit distinctive in whatever mishmash of late-50s swag we chose to wear. Anyway, on the hunt for a new group of people to play with for reasons I cannot recall now, I rolled an alt on an older, more established, high population realm. The first thing I noticed while standing around outside the Ironforge bank was that everyone had really good gear, tier 0.5, tier 1 mostly. The second thing I noticed was that everone looked exactly the same as every other member of their class. It was disjointed and unpleasant to watch. I went back to SwC and just dealt with the juvenile shenanigans.

And now it's snuck back up on us. Sure, BC had some homogenation. Lots of people wore the honor-bought arena gear toward the end, and most people had stuff from Kara, but not everyone, and BC gear was so visually varried that even with mostly the same gear, the off-set pieces left you looking just different enough to be "you" instead of "them."

Apparently, people didn't like looking different. They complained about "looking like clowns" in BC gear and LK stuff all sort of goes together. It goes together too well. Even before the simplification of aquisition that came with the first round of badge changes people looked pretty much the same, all browns and greys, but now, it's like that server I joined for an evening back in vanilla. Every hunter has teh same shoulders.

Except me. I won't buy the t9s, even though I have the badges. I want to find my toon in a crowd.

A very important point.

Oculus. Not Occulus.

Quel'delar in Thirteen Easy Steps

Well, really fourteen steps. But I didn't want to discourage you. Patch 3.3 will contain, in addition to a legendary 2H DPS axe that will send your hard-mode 25 raiders into raptures, a Very nice DPS weapon for everybody else. Weighing in at iLevel 251, the reward for this quest chain beats out all the gear you can get in 5-man content anywhere, most of the gear you can get in earlier tiers (hard-mode 25-man ToC gives iLevel 258 rewards), and is on par with drops from the 10-man version of Icecrown Citadel. It's a really good weapon to work for, especially since it can be gotten by new raiders. If you're gearing up your DPSer, it's worth picking up.

Who can use Quel'delar? Any class, really. It is a DPS weapon, although tanking Death Knights and healers can probably use it as well, as the stats on it align pretty well with what death knights and healers want as well (except for a lack of MP5 on the caster weapon). There are rewards at the end of the chain that look like this:

Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful - 2H strength sword. Warriors, Death Knights, Paladins, etc.
Quel'Delar, Ferocity of the Scorned - 2H agi sword. Who uses these? Maybe a hunter?
Quel'Delar, Cunning of the Shadows - 1H sword, mostly for Rogues, although hunters might use one if they've got a good OH.
Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind - Caster sword (warlocks, mages)
Cudgel of Furious Justice - 1H DPS mace. Probably mostly for enhance shaman.
Hammer of Purified Flame - Mace caster (priest, shaman, paladin) reward.
Lightborn Spire - The feral druid reward.

How do you get Quel'delar? First, you have to get a battered hilt. That drops in the new 5-man instances in 3.3. It drops from trash mobs, and we don't really know the drop rate yet, but it is not BoP at this point. Meaning, worst-case you can buy one (or send it to a friend as a gift). Once you have the hilt, it's just a matter of running some errands, some of which require you to beat the new 5-man content (like you weren't going to do that anyway). The whole chain is as follows:

1. The Battered Hilt - Just turn in the hilt.
   
2. What The Dragons Know Go talk to some guy.
   
3. The Sunreaver Plan Kill some dude in the underbelly. Loot.
   
4. A Suitable Disguise Go talk to some other guy.
   
5. A Meeting With The Magister You guessed it - talk to some other guy.
   
6. Return To Caladis Brightspear Yet again. Talk to some guy.
   
7. Reforging The Sword Here's where it gets interesting. You have to go into the Pit of Saron, get 5 groundspawn drops (which also drop from trash), and then get a quest item off of a boss. It seems like you can get the infused saronite solo if you want - just use the normal mode instance, get the two near the door that aren't guarded, reset and repeat. You still need help killing the boss, though. Note that this doesn't require a heroic run.
   
8. Tempering The Blade Run the forge of souls, and there's a crucible to temper the blade after the last boss. Again - not heroic.
   
9. The Halls Of Reflection Go to the Halls of Reflection with four friends, fight the Spirit of your Sword (of course, ignoring Uther Lightbringer's advice to go home and have a sandwich instead of proceeding).
   
10. Journey To The Sunwell Go talk to some dude. In this case, the dude outside the Sunwell, so he lets you in.
    
11. Thalorien Dawnseeker This is the dude at the Sunwell. Talk to him.
    
12. The Purification of Quel'Delar Stick your sword in the Sunwell. Party down.
    
13. A Victory For The Silver Covenant Pick your prize! There's actually two versions of this quest, I don't know how people end up getting the Sword version or the Mace version, I imagine that mace-users (priests, shaman, druid) get the mace-quest.

And there we have it. It's a lot of walking and talking, but there's some dungeoneering in there. Still, with four solid friends, you should be able to do this in an evening, once you get your hilt. It's currently unclear whether you'll need to run those instances multiple times if there are several people in the party on the same step, or if you can double-dip. Time will tell.

FecesQuest

By my count, someone questing from 1 to 80 in the World of Warcraft encounters fecal-related questing five times. There's that time in the Hellfire Peninsula where you're trying to get a felhound to poop out the keys he ate, the time in Nagrand where you're looking for partially-digested fruit, the quest in Borean Tundra where the wolves all ate some microfilm you need, the quest in the Howling Fjord where you just want the poop, and of course, the king of them all - the Amberseed quest.

If you weren't paying attention to the quest text, in the Amberseed quest chain, you start by finding a bucket of amberseeds that looks tasty, so you eat them. You find out that you just ate an entire harvest's worth of amberseeds, and it's likely that you'll die soon (or at least pauperize the population of the Grizzly Hills), if you don't do something quick. You search for medicine, and after taking it, poop out the seeds. The really exciting thing? The quest NPC tells his sidekick that he has to go BACK out to the outhouse and "recover" the seeds. Which then go back into the bucket, for the next unwary traveler to eat. There should be a caution sign on them.

So, as we start speculating about the nature of the next expansion, the question that's foremost in my mind is: what kind of crap will we be digging around in, collecting, or producing from levels 80 to 85? Any thoughts?

Two little unforeseen consequences of 3.3

So in 3.3, there's this new system in place for people to go to do random heroic dungeons. The random heroic dungeon system is going to make both Proof of Demise and Timear Foresees unachievable - those NPCs will be giving out weekly raid quests instead of daily dungeon quests, and the rewards from the daily dungeon quests will instead be just given to you as part of the random dungeon system - the first random dungeon you do each day rewards you two frost emblems, and every dungeon thereafter rewards you one or two bonus triumph badges.

Word is, the achievement will be transformed into a feat of strength, but if you're a completionist, it's time to start crunching on the daily dungeon quests. Good luck, since with twelve different bosses to choose from, good old' Archmage Land-o-Lakes might not even offer that one last quest you need by the time 3.3 comes out. Me, I don't mind too much - I like achievements (even more these days with Jill), but not so much that I get upset over things like that.

The other consequence is a funny secondary effect. According to all reports from the PTR, using the heroic random dungeon tool you could run heroics all day. That gives you a flow of something like, say, seven or eight triumph badges per hour if you've got a good group and chain-run the heroics. You can get kitted out in full t9 in something like 30 hours of chain heroics. That's a lot of running still, but you could start up the moment you turn 80, and be done with your gearup pretty quickly - a weekend of pizza, mountain dew, and a vacationing spouse for example.

Or could you? You know what most badge vendors don't sell? Weapons. You can get all this ridiculously shiny iLevel 232 gear for your new alt, but still be rockin' whatever you scored off of the Amphitheater of Anguish* quests at level 75. Everybody gets a pretty significant chunk of their productivity from their weapon - upgrading your weapon is usually the biggest per-item gain you can make, from DPS to casters to tanks. And as a starter, if you're lucky, you'll get an iLevel 200 purple weapon to go with your stuff. That's if you manage to get dropped into the one random heroic that drops the weapon you need, and if you see it dropped.

What are your other options? You could spend a whole lot of gold on a BoE epic. This is a pretty decent option, but a lot of the BoE epics are still iLevel 200. My death knight is still rocking that titansteel destroyer, because despite lots of farming in Naxx, he kept losing rolls on the weapon upgrades he wanted (and got retired before I was raiding in Ulduar). Titansteel bars still aren't cheap, given the cooldown on making them, the demand for titanium across the board, and the demand for titansteel in high-level armor crafting (the crusader / runed orb recipes).

You could run the tournament, but going from start to getting a tourney weapon (another iLevel 200 choice) takes a while - after three days of novice and five days of aspirant, you can get a total of 22 crusader emblems on your first day of being a champion (10 from the one-time quest, 3 from the black knight chain, 5 from dailies, and 3 from H-ToC, assuming anyone will take your noob self to H-ToC, and assuming your noob self can actually beat everybody in there).

You could run H-ToC. There are good weapon drops in there for every class, although not optimal - offhanding the Black Knight's Rondel is a real option, but it's relatively slow for most specs. I'm assuming, given the item level on the drops in the new 5-man content, there will be options from that instance as well. Those are real options (again assuming you can get into them and actually down them, which you probably can even with a lousy weapon if the rest of your gear is kitted out), but it's not really possible to farm them using the Random Dungeon tool (since.. it's random), and that's the only situation in which you'll be able to run multiple heroics of the same sort every day. And let me tell you, I've never even seen Aledar's Battlestar. So good luck with that. There are no weapons at all in the loot table for regular ToC.

If you're a DPS spec, the new quested epic weapon from the 5-man content is probably your best bet. Everybody and their sister will be wielding a Quel'delar, I guess. Plus, according to the mmo-champion data, there are decent iLevel 219 weapons in the 5-man, nonheroic dungeon, so that's farmable. At iLevel 219, this is a good bet for the interim, but you'll definitely want to get working on a better weapon as soon as you can, however you can.

*: Yeah, I know. Amphitheater has an h in it in a weird place. The achievement text even has a typo in it, even if the quest text doesn't.

It's who you know

I thought I wasn't very good at druid healing last week.

This week I am reasonably confident.

Last week I did some pugs.

This week I ran instances with my friends. Turns out, my firends know how to play, but we knew that.

Sure, I have upgraded my gear a little since those iffy, unpleasant, fail-ridden regular ToC pug runs that left me questioning the effort I'd put into my druid, but even at that, the difference between healing that lot of wackaloons and healing my casually hardcore guildmates.

When I was pugging, my HoTs were almost useless - there was too much damage coming in to let those ticks do the job. I had to nourish spam everything and there just weren't enough swiftmends and nature's swiftness cooldowns available to get pas tthe damage spikes from the poor aggro management, and the tank didn't have nearly enough mitigation. Sure, I was only at 1100 +healing at the time and my HoTs weren't strong enough to do their job right, and my direct heals were still hitting weaker than I probably needed them to, but as a run that should have been giving me the chance to apply actual experience to all of the how-to info I'd picked up from the interwebs, it was downright discouraging. I wasn't able to use my HoTs correctly or effectively and I wound up healing like a paladin spamming Nourish in the place of Flash of Light. To be honest, I was feeling pretty bad.

But then, 400 +heal and four much better group members later, I was sitting in heroic Violet Hold wondering if the run was bugged because the tank pretty much only needed a rejuvenate ticking all the time with the occassional lifebloom chaser and wild growth took care of the majority of the party's woes. Sure, Nourish was there for spikey damage that came in once in a while, but for the most part, stacks of HoTs did the job just fine, and my mana pool certainly appreciated the break.

So, I took three vital lessons from these two very different nights.

1) Pugging still sucks. Sure, picking up an extra hand or two when you're working with your competent buddies is the only way you get to do runs some nights, but jumping into the shallow end of the WoW talent pool and taking whatever random assortment of failknights you get is a recipe for frustration and repair bills. I have always hated pugging. For the most part, hating pugging as a dps-only class is understandable. One thing I took away from my BC-era paladin pug healing was that being in one of the two pivot roles does reduce some of the frustration in pugs because you know that at least the tank or the healer is going to be able to pull his weight, but as the saying goes, you can't heal stupid. As much as I like the idea of the new cross-server LFG system coming in 3.3, and as optimistic as I try to be that the tool will mean easier, quicker group formation and more instancing, I temper that optimism with the knowledge that most puggers will still be the same old puggers who have made me cry so many times before. I think I need to stick to the rule that at least one other member of my group, preferably at least two needs to be a guildie or other competent friend, just so that there is some reasonable chance that I won't wind up beating my head on my lapdesk.

2) Druid healing really is different than paladin healing. Getting used to the idea that those HoTs will do the job, eventually, is a very hard bridge to cross. My previous healing life was all about whack-a-mole big heals. I didn't have a HoT, I didn't have a group heal. I smashed the health bars up, hit them hard and fast and when the AoE damage was coming through I had to always keep that one expendable party member mentality as the FoL cast bar just seemed to go slower and slower. Getting used to the sight of a health bar not moving when the spell goes off was a bridge to cross. It made me nervous. Sure, once you get rejuvenation and wild growth going with a decent bit of power behind them, the heals are coming and you're fine before you know it, but it's still a big shift in philosophy that I really was only able to make once I was playing with a group that had a tank who could keep aggro and pick up runners and dpsers who would get out of the fire. HoTs always work just fine alone when the damage stops. The trick is that you need the dps to be smart enough to stop the damage coming in.

3) Gear does matter. The more healing you do with every spell, and the more spells you can cast in a given fight, the more likely you are to keep the group standing. You need to know what you're doing, but part of that is knowing when you have the gear, and how to get it if you don't to meet the challenge in front of you. There is a nice feedback loop to grouping - you learn how to heal, but you also get drops that make healing easier in the first place. Eventually, you reach an altogether better place. It's frustrating getting there, but the difference you get with a few hundred spellpower and a little confidence gained in success is larger than the sum of its parts.

PvP as a Rogue

Jillathee is my new love and main. I really like playing a Rogue, it's a hoot. She's got lots of options, can pour out the DPS, and can solo around pretty well too. Plus, PvP is fun again. Who would have thought?

Mainly, I've been hitting the Battlegrounds, since I need a lot of PvP gear before I'm ready to face people in the arenas. I managed to snag a Black Knight's Rondel in H-ToC, and picked up the Dagger of the Rising Moon (for 25 tourney marks) as my offhand.

Here's my spec. (43/5/23) It's a variation on a pretty common PvP and arena build. I had tried running as shadowdance subtlety for a while, and it was really hard to pull off. I think it's a possible thing to do (shadowdance, spambush), but just that it's a pretty big adjustment for me. Too much to keep track of. This mutilate build is a bit easier. Most people put preparation in that build, which I think is key for arena. In the battlegrounds, it's just one more cooldown to watch and I had a hard time figuring the best time to use it, given the long (10 minute) cooldown on prep.

Basically, the build lets me destroy cloth- and leather-wearing characters, especially ones that aren't in PvP gear. The subtlety talents all speak directly towards getting around stealthily and swiftly in the BG and setting up the big opener. Then you bust out with something like Cheap Shot - Mutilate - Mutilate - Kidney Shot - Mutilate - Eviscerate (or Envenom if your enemy is plate or mail armor). It's a sad fact for eviscerate that with one or two stacks of deadly poison on the target, envenom hits as hard or harder, even on some leather-wearers. Then again, the points in improved eviscerate have to go somewhere.

There are definitely strategies to playing in PvP. It's not just nuke and blast. For example: against warlocks and priests, it's a good idea to pop cloak of shadows right before kidney shot wears off, since the odds are likely that you'll get an instant-cast fear (death coil, psychic scream) to the face right away. I'll post more of what I'm figuring out later.

Not all that Hardcore after all

I've been listening to a lot of complaints about two different upcoming changes in the 3.3 patch. First of all, they're changing the heroic system so that heroics drop emblems of Triumph instead of Conquest. Second, they're adding the ability to turn in 10 heavy borean leather for an arctic fur.

Certainly, blizzard is just handing out the epics for free now, right? Catering to the casuals? Right?

Wrong. If you had tried to gear up an alt in the game prior to patch 3.2, or if you had tried to raid at level 70 in the Burning Crusade, you might have a better appreciation for the new philosophy on heroic dungeon emblems. First of all, the gear you can buy with dungeon emblems is not bleeding-edge. In any given tier of content, there's the heroic-mode progression gear, the normal-mode progression gear, and then there's the heroic dungeon badge gear, and even then you can't get all of that gear. I can get 2t8 for my rogue with badges now, but not 4t8, and the offset gear that I can get with conquest emblems isn't as good as what I could get if I were running ulduar.

In the Burning Crusade days, you actually had to raid Karazhan to gear up for SSC and Magtheridon, and you had to farm that content to raid the t6 content, which needed to be pretty well farmed to make it in the sunwell. Not that I saw anywhere near all that stuff, of course. But heaven help you if you were late to the game - you'd have to find a guild that was raiding the content you could participate in, or if your guild lost some members it might have to downshift a tier for a while to get the new people up to speed.

This way, there's not only more demand for heroic dungeons (pugging that content was pretty hard in 3.1, since there were no rewards worth getting in heroics at that point for a well-geared character), there's also a clear path to getting into the top tier of content in a reasonable pace. You can't just start doing the top tier of progression the day after you hit 80, but you also don't have to spend months and months getting up to speed either. It's a good balance.

Just because you had to spend all your DKP on your t8, and I got two pieces because I pugged like crazy, doesn't make your t8 any less cool. You've had it for ages, odds are you probably already replaced it with some 245 level gear. Go you.

As for the leather thing - arctic fur is pretty hard to get. I get it in about 1 in 150 skins. But farming for arctic fur means that in most servers, regular borean leather sells for so cheap on the AH (due to the glut) that you can actually buy leather from the AH, make a leatherworking item, and vendor that item for a profit. That's pretty much the definition of glut. So this will stabilize the arctic fur and leather markets a little bit - fur will be a bit easier to get, but at costing 60 leathers per fur (10 heavy leather), it's still not simple.

I'm sure there are still people who will complain that a Scrub like myself has access to all that leet gear that they sweated over. But in the end, my having gear doesn't make your gear any less cool, unless you're the kind of elitist snob who only likes something that nobody else has. In which case, you've got bigger problems.

Bears and cats living together

So, I no longer have seperate feral specs for bear and cat. In the end, I decided having my resto secondary spec back for more pugging options was more important than the little bump in dps my cat form gets from having its own spec - especially given that even in my assorted low-end gear I was doubling the dps of the average regular mode pugger.

The bright side of this is that I can now perform three roles in the game with one toon - tanking, dps, and healing all with two specs and three sets of gear and some keybind tricks.

The keybind tricks are the cool thing, though.

One of the hardest parts of trying to regularly do both bear tanking and kitty dps on a single spec is finding places to put all of those buttons where they will be useful.

Generally, I like to have everything I normally do in the game jammed up on the left side of the keyboard, usually buttons 1-5, q, w, e, r, a, s, and d are my go-to keys, with less-used things scattered further afield. Either bear or cat can fit their most-used binds into this happy little group (playing a druid is starting to make my huntering feel like playing Chopin - I actually use 30+ binds on a semi-regular basis), but they can't both fit in there.

But they can.

The set of binds for the 1-5 keys is easy, changing forms automagically flips those, but I still need six or seven more buttons with two purposes in order to achieve full utility.

Enter macros.

Macros are a funny things. Theoretically they could be used to control or even automate almost any aspect of the UI, however, Blizzard has actively nullified much of the scripting engine's capabilities in an effort to resrain the extent to which people control or automate almost any aspect of the UI. To that extent, it always surprises me when I discover that something can still be done which allows for a degree of logical evaluation, as most of this was removed ages ago. Still, they did have the decency to leave stance conditionals in the active toolkit, and for that, my druid is very happy indeed.

A conditional is a modifier which allows you to state criteria under which a line of macro code will activate, or not activate, based on the outcome of a simple boolean check (i.e. true/false evaluation). In this case, we are looking at the stance conditional. A statement with this conditional looks like this:

/cast [stance:1] growl

This macro will cast growl if the toon is in stance index 1, which happens to be the bear form stance. The statment within the square brackets is the conditional modifier and depending on the outcome, it will or will not cast the spell that follows it.

So, with this macro, your druid will cast growl in bear form, but if you are in any other form, it will do nothing.

Doing nothing is useful. When your UI does nothing you don't get errors, you don't halt macros with additional statements, and you get to brag about being a coder. I pretty much got my day job knowing little more than that back in the heady days of the dot-com bubble, but that's a long story.

That one line of code alone is neat, but it doesn't really do anything for our bear/cat split personality. However, consider this macro:

/cast [stance:1] growl
/cast [stance:3] savage roar

Here we see how you get a set of useful dual-purpose buttons. By combining a bear-only spell on conditional with a cat-only spell on conditional, you can use one static keybind to cast either spell, and only cast the one which is appropriate to your current form. A half dozen or so macros like this will fill out the remainder of those vital keybinds off the first action bar and allow for a stance-based bar change in effect without the overhead and fiddling of an addon. very cool.

But the coolest part of this effort for me was the discovery of how intelligent the macro engine actually is with regards to stance conditionals. I had expected that despite having two effects tied to the buttons, I would only have either bear or cat spell icon images to work with, and would have to adjust to kitty spells under new art, but remarkably, this is not the case.

When creating macros, if you select the very first icon in the option stack, a red question mark icon, it engages in an intelligent tooltip swapping scheme. I already knew that this feature would flip the icon to display the next spell in a castsequence stack, so you knew what was coming in the chain, but what I didn't realize was that the behavior also extended to stances - it will display the tooltip of the first castable spell in the macro, which means that if you are in cat form and the first cast statement is a bear spell, it will check the next one and set the art accordingly - so, when you change forms, all of those macros we just made update their tooltips right away. You don't even have to learn to kittydps with new icons.

Macros are cool.

More offhand discussion, plus new simcraft features!

Earlier, I discussed my problems in selecting an off-hand weapon to complement my Tankard o' Terror.

Even earlier, I showed you all how to use SimulationCraft to augment your decision-making processes. Since we last examined simcraft, they've expanded some of the character definition functionality. Happily, they now integrate with wowhead profiles. This is very cool, because it allows you to create "what-if" setups to compare specs and gear.

So, I set up three different wowhead profiles - all based on Jillathee's combat spec and base gear (which wowhead can import directly from the armory), but one with the basic fang of truth offhand, one with a black knight's rondel offhand, and one with a dagger of the rising moon offhand. The new daggers are recent acquisitions, as I work on my mutilate gear (mostly for PvP). To be fair, I set all of the offhands to have the berserking enchant, although I only really have the Rondel thusly enchanted - I know I'll be using that dagger for a good long time, so it's worth it.

So now, I can just do this: ./simc wowhead=17750546 wowhead=17750747 wowhead=17750850

The numbers there in the wowhead=FOO line are the profile numbers for my wowhead profiles. That's all you've got to do, although as usual you can tweak the commandline parameters, by changing the raid buffs present, for example. The characters show up in the result data with the wowhead profile name, which is handy when figuring out what's going on for multiple people.

The real question, of course, is would more combat potency procs from a faster offhand be more important than the raw DPS value of the slower (but iLevel 219) rondel? The answer is: the Rondel is the winner. In every situation, the Rondel outperforms both the Fang of Truth and the (0.1 sec faster) Dagger of the Rising Moon. It's not a gigantic edge - about 100 DPS or so, but still, why throw away DPS?

Eulogy

This is a story. It's pretty true. Actually, it's truer than true - it's the true story as it should have happened.

Once upon a time, Steamwheedle Cartel opened her doors to the world of Warcraft. I was there; I had recently started playing (on Rexxar), and wanted to see if the RP server really had RP. At the time, I rp-walked through the rope lines at the stormwind bank.

Right around the time the server was started, The Hammer of Magni was founded. I'm not really sure what their original goals were, since I joined later. They had fun, did stuff, raided. Eventually the "hardcore raiders" decided that there was too much casualness going on, and they needed to have a "hardcore raiding guild". There was some drama, and in the split the guild Audentes Fortuna Iuvat was formed (latin for Fortune Favors the Bold, or so I'm told).

As an aside, remind me to figure out how to say "Three Latin Words" in latin. That's the name of my next guild.

Anyway, Audentes Fortuna Iuvat (henceforth AFI) did stuff, had fun, raided. Eventually, the "hardcore raiders" decided that AFI wasn't "hardcore enough", and there was drama. From the drama came Alkahest.

Which, as another aside, is a term that refers to the universal solvent in alchemy, and not alcohol (although they share common root terms).

Anyway, Alkahest did stuff, had fun, raided. Eventually the "hardcore raiders" decided that Alkahest wasn't "hardcore enough", and there was some drama. From the split came Maniacal. A term chosen, apparently, to convey the quality of the hardcorosity of this particular new guild.

Nothing gold can stay, right? Every time, the Hard Core of raiders departs, leaving the soggy shell behind to wallow along in confustication and bebotherment. Name changes are good, direction changes are good, I guess. The harder core keeps getting harder and harder, and the casuals get left behind.

Unfortunately for me (or fortunately, I suppose), I wasn't ever part of this Hard Core. I joined the Hammer of Magni after AFI left, eventually becoming the guild leader there. Instead of doing hardcore raiding, I did hardcore role-playing. Phil and I cooked up some awesome RP activities for in-game and out-of-game stuff, and we had a blast. Eventually I burned out on that and (lots of stuff happened, that I don't need to get into).

Coming back, I gravitated toward Alkahest as a raiding guild, because they seemed like a good bunch of people - focused without being too "hardcore". They got stuff done, downed bosses, and had fun. All of it with less drama than you'd think. But like I said (and Phil alluded to before me (and Robert Frost really said)), nothing gold can stay. People came and went, there was drama, and there was no making the 25s work anymore.

I think the thing that hurts the most is where the guild leader put this out there: Alkahest had a reputation for being a scrub guild that was a stepping stone to the real raiding guilds.

That's a reputation that I don't think matters, honestly. It's the kind of thing that the "hardcore" people say to congratulate themselves for being so "hardcore". It's a self-perpetuating story about how we're so awesome because they're so not awesome. It's the kind of thing children do on the playground. It hurts because I'm clearly a "scrub". I don't play every day, I don't have the best of the best gear, I have a lousy arena rating.

When I raid, I am in the raid 100%. I pay attention to the fire on the ground, to directions being given by the raidleader, and to the overall strategy we're trying to enact. I know what kind of gear and spec I need to squeeze the most from the tier I'm playing at. But I'm softcore. I'm a scrub. I don't count toward the future of raiding. At least, the vision of the future from this particular guild.

Of course, by this time I have already left the server, and the guild. The new guild leadership was leaning in this "hardcore" direction, they were pushing for things I could clearly see I wasn't interested in providing. It wasn't what I wanted, so I split. But I'm sure I would have been left behind in the chewy gooey Alkahest after the Hardest of the Hard Cores all left. Because I'm a scrub.

I have nothing against people who play a lot of WoW. I know why they do it. I see where people want to spend every night playing (and I play a lot of nights too). But I'm troubled by the Hardcore / Scrub dichotomy, I'm troubled by the clear in-group and out-group labeling that happened (and continues to happen), and I'm troubled by this apparent power of words over reason. Does changing a guildtag make the people in the guild better somehow?

I wish the people of Maniacal the best of luck. Some of them were and are still friends of mine (at least on facebook). But I can already tell you how it's going to go: the hard core will eventually tire of the chewy, scrubby hangers-on, and there will be a purge.

So, this is a eulogy - for the raiding guild I once new. Alkahest was a great place, for a time. It was peopled with great people. But it died.

Herding Cat

So, despite having had every intention of focusing on bearform, I have begun my druid's instancing career as a cat. It makes sense. The guild has an excellent tank and an excellent healer. We're running 5's for now, so the offtank slot I'm penciled-in to isn't needed yet, and most of the gear is more or less the same anyway, so right now, kitty dps is more useful to both me and my group than bearery. I still need to go learn to tank, but for now, I'm learning to scratch first.

It is very weird.

Keep in mind that I have been huntering for a really long time and raiding as one since the Burning Crusade, and other than a brief foray into whack-a-mole healing, it's the only thing I've ever done. There's been a lot of changes to huntering in that time, but in the end, you're still standing far away shooting things and just trying to stay out of the fire. Your abilities are nearly all cooldown-based and you have a lot of situational awareness thanks to your setback.

Catform is pretty much the opposite altogether. I have bleeds to track, CPs to track, different strikes to use in front of an enemy and behind an enemy and I'm right up in the melee mess with no clue what is going on outside of all those spell effect fireworks going off all over me. I have to move, I have to keep moving, I have to move again. It's crazy.

My first instance I facerolled my abilities and pulled down a gaudy 1.6k dps doing it. For wearing mostly blues and having no idea what I was doing, I should probably have been thankful for that. A lot of reading and a few flowcharts scribbled out later, and in almost the same gear, I hit 2.5k. Nothing being equal, it is still a big difference, but I still have a long way to go. I know how to manage my timers, but I need to get a feel for refreshing them efficiently, I need to get used to saving up cp's to renew rip at the right time and I need to be doing roar with more than 1 or 2 cp's more often. I need to find my rake key more often too and I need to stop trying to shred from the front of an opponent and I need to stop being in front of an opponent.

Getting to 80 doesn't teach you how to play at 80. pounce/manglespam/bite is not a raiding rotation. All of the confidence and skill I piled up getting here are gone, heck, with all of my keybind changes I might not even be able to solo all that well at the moment. Some people say the game starts at 80, more correct is that there is another game at 80.

But, there's hope for anyone willing to learn. The decision tree for feral sounds imposing the first time you look at it, but in play, it's quite manageable and requires no more spell timers than a marksman hunter uses. The buttontimers addon is a huge help, get it. I looked at FeralByNight, but I always hated priority queue managers on my hunter - once you learn your stack you soon learn when to ignore your stack and addons are only going to be a nuisance at that point.

Don't let me forget to cast fairy fire.

Remind me to Berserk on boss fights.

Get me some fat lewtz.

It'll be all right.

Tankard Woes

Wait, am I really complaining about having a weapon that looks like a beer mug and has DPS stats to burn? Did I just do that?

Well, kind of a little.

For the uninitiated, the Tankard o' Terror is a very nice 1H mace for several classes. It was a drop during Brewfest 09, and is BoE, so you can still get them from the auction house (on my realm, they're going for 1200g or so, which is a very reasonable price if you could use it). As an iLevel 226 mace, it's statted out pretty well. 2.6 speed, 171 DPS, with Agi, Crit, Haste and AP. For someone who is just fresh to 80, it's a ridiculously good BoE to pick up. Your other options include things like a Titansteel Bonecrusher, or an equivalent from the Argent Tournament. Any way you look at it, the iLevel 200 starter epics all have 143 DPS and are less-well itemized (the bonecrusher, for example, is a 2.5 speed weapon). You'll have to wait until ToC-10 or higher to even think about replacing this thing, and probably not even then. For 1,200g, to have that worry out of the way for months is worth it.

Here's the problem.

An enhance shaman or frost death knight could probably dual-wield these guys. But a rogue can't - it's way too slow for an OH for a combat rogue (and this is really just a combat weapon, since assassination rogues need daggers and subtlety rogues need to respec). A librarian's paper cutter or a fang of one thousand truths is a better offhand for a combat rogue. But those are not maces. As it happens, the choice for your offhand weapon to go with the Tankard is VERY limited. Here's the list. In that list, most of those maces aren't even available anymore (they're from old arena seasons), and some of them are terrible. You're left either trying to get an arena weapon (which I might eventually do, but it's a long slog to get arena-worthy on a new character), hoping for an ulduar-10 drop, or just sucking it up and equipping a non-mace offhand.

It's not the end of the world - a combat rogue primarily uses his offhand for Combat Potency procs (hence the need for speed) and for stats on the weapon. Since poison application was changed to a PPM system a little while back, offhand weapon speed doesn't actually affect your poison DPS. So for now, I've got a point in Close Quarters Combat and was using the paper cutter, but have also been experimenting with a Fang of Truth as well (which has better DPS stats and a higher pawn value according to my simcraft weights, but lower weapon DPS and is slower). This makes the combat spec kind of inelegant - that floating one point could go into close quarters combat or Endurance for a 2% stam buff, but you can't get any Hack and Slash points without pulling points from Weapon Expertise.

The real bummer is a more subtle motivational one. I'm not likely to ever see a good offhand mace. Period. But the escalation of armor penetration as a top-end stat means I'm likely to want a MH mace for a long time (especially once I start picking up t9 gear, even if there are other MH options at that point). So I'm going to be dealing with this problem forever - constantly hemming and hawing over whether I want a point in CQC, if I can afford the loss in expertise to get two points in hack and slash (offhand HnS procs will proc your MH mace strikes, I believe), and so on. I really like specs that are Elegant and Compact, and those floating points in the combat tree are like a little wiggle in my tooth that I have to keep tonguing.

Anyway. I'm doing good DPS and rogues are awesome. Trust me to find a way to QQ about that.

Cash Cows - er, Pandas?

Ten bucks for a minipet? Dang. And I thought race change was overpriced.

It was pretty much inevitable that they would start doing microtransactions for non-combat junk eventually - the trading card loot was like a primer on that - tabbards, mounts, pets, gimmicks, but ten bucks? seriously?

If they were just five bucks, i'd have bought both.

In the end, I really don't have a problem with microtransaction cosmetic bits of fluff like this, I just think the price points for them are really just a wee bit too high. I can't see myself spending that much for them. I'm sure thousands of people feel otherwise, and Blizzard will make a fortune from this and they will continue to drop little nuggets like this in the future, and they will also be over-priced, and unless it's a mechanical mount, I'm just not going to buy it.

Unless it's a mechanical mount.

Damn, I still want that rocket mount so bad.

Turns out, though, I might get a shot at a pink one.

I'll take it.

This Cat is for Fite (Cat DPS rotations and hints)

On a druid, Cat DPS is pretty complex. There are a lot of timers and abilities you need to watch in order to maximize your damage output. There's a lot of gearing and speccing issues to worry about too, but today I'm just posting about rotation.

First of all, I really recommend a good timer addon. I use both DoTimer and ButtonTimers. ButtonTimers is really easy to configure to watch the few important abilities you need watched, whereas DoTimer is more complex and more customizeable, but harder to make it do precisely what you need. So I use BT to watch the key buffs and debuffs for combat that I control on a sub 1-minute timescale, and use DoTimers to watch things like my Blessing of Might and Well fed buff (and my hearthstone cooldown and stuff).

Generally speaking, you need to do these things as a cat druid, assuming you can be behind your target:

• Make sure the Mangle Debuff is up. If there's a bear druid or an arms warrior, you can skip this, as bears love to Mangle, and arms guys get Trauma. Mangle has a lower damage per energy than shred, so you need to minimize Mangle uses. The glyph is good for this.
• Keep Savage Roar up on yourself. It doesn't necessarily have to be a 5-point roar, as the CP scaling is just duration. Put it up when you can, refresh it with whatever you've got in the CP pool at the time.
  
• Make sure there's a 4 or 5-cp rip going. It's better, clearly to get a 5-point rip, but if you're at 4 cps, you're likely to "waste" a CP by getting a 2-cp proc from a shred crit, so it's probably good to go on 4cp. Do not clip your rips. Which is to say, if there's time left on your rip, do something else.
• Put the Rake debuff up. Rake does a lot of damage per energy, as long as it gets to tick out. So again, don't clip your rake bleed with another rake.
• Ferocious Bite. If you've got 4-5 CPs, and there's time on Rip and Roar, it's time to bite. This comes up especially when you're using Tiger's Fury and Berserk. But watch your timers - if there's only 2 seconds left on Rip, it's better to just wait and pool energy and refresh rip.
• Shred. This is your combo-point builder. Talented, and with the mangle debuff up, it does considerably more damage per energy than Mangle.

That's your attack routine. But wait, there's more.

• Tiger's Fury on Cooldown. Clearly don't use it when you would waste the extra 60 energy, but you should almost never be in a situation where that happens. Hit TF every 60 seconds.
  
• Berserk on Cooldown. But not really. You might want to not berserk right away (let the tank establish threat), you might want to save berserk for the burn phase, if using it at fight start means you won't have it during heroism (although berserk and heroism don't actually stack all that well anyway). You also want to use TF right BEFORE you berserk, since you can't while you're berserked. This is also the time to pop any on-use trinkets you have.

A word on energy pooling: this is when you take some time off the spam and let your energy regenerate. Typically you've got enough GCDs to burn all your energy rather quickly. So it's okay if you sit and just do white attacks for a second or two, provided you don't cap your energy bar. This is advantageous when you can see that there's a rip about to expire and you're at 5cps, or that rake is about to fall off, or whatever. The real key to being an amazing Cat DPSer is lining up the rips and rakes so that there's a continuous line of bleed ticks on your target without overlapping those ticks with clipping.

A Deserter's Tale: Memories

Though her alabaster face betrayed no emotion, the young night elf's eyes flashed with mischievous glee as she busied herself with the grim task of stitching the burial shroud around the dwarf laid out on the blood-soaked table just outside of the Argent Coliseum.

Working methodically and with proficiency gained in excessive repetition she did allow the briefest of pauses to steal one last look at the deeply-chiseled face of the dwarf before tugging the canvas up and over his head. The face was still, she couldn't remember it ever being still before - couldn't recall the last time it wasn't busy in the act of providing a torrent of words, most of them crude or cynical or worse. It doesn't become him, she thought, dropping the cover over his head and proceeding to finish the task of stitching him inside the shroud.

Her grim task complete she called for the aspirants milling nearby to fetch the body, which they did, loading it into a cart before lifting the next one onto the table. The Tournament had been busy today, there were many corpses to tend to. As she waited for the dead-eyed youths to prepare her next customer she clutched her cloak tight against the Icecrown chill and watching the body of her only friend carried away, she thought of the first time they'd met.

---

Icecrown is cold. That was the first thing she'd realized as she stood, shivering outside of the Sergeant's tent.

"Who sent you?" he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"Archdruid Lilliandra, sir, I was told that your unit had need of one with my particular talents." the young elf replied meekly.

The pudgy human quartermaster squinted through drunken eyes as he took in the sight before him. The elf had a certain ridiculous quality to her, like a child in a grownup's clothes. Her slight frame and impish, motionless face juxtaposed on the bulky, battle scarred outlander's armor she wore made for an odd package.

"You the new medic?" he managed at last.

"If that is to be my task then I shall do my duty in that role." she replied sternly.

"From the looks of you, you might be used to a bit more action than you'll get here. This lot's more likely to drink themselves to death than get massacred by the Scourge."

"I am sure the Archdruid chose me for this posting with full confidence and purpose. I doubt my experience will be wasted and I doubt your assessment of the relative risks is entirely without grim understatement." the young druid noted the nearby stack of fresh nerubian corpses and the tattered walls of the palisade.

"Well, let's get you settled in, then. What's your name, elf?" the sergeant asked, wobbling to his feet and turning to lead her into the supply train's camp.

"What be all that caterwaullin' out there!" Came a gravelly shout from a neighboring tent before she could answer the question. "A dwarf can't get any sleep on this blasted glacier!"

---

The elf winced visibly as the valiants dropped the dwarf's body into the wagon. "I forget," she said nervously to a nearby squire, "that they don't feel anything anymore."

"Even the live ones don't feel much." the squire replied, his teeth chattering. "Not in this cold."

Nodding in agreement, she went back to her stitching, her nimble fingers had grown accustomed to such tasks - and to the cold - over the last year.

---

"Silithus, eh Caterwaul?" Barleystone asked as he dropped a bag of grain off of the back of the wagon. No one had bothered to learn her real name, the dwarf had taken care of that.

"Yes, and Outlands after that." the druid replied, watching him suspiciously as he hefted another bag of grain from their cargo.

"Yer not old enough to 'ave fought in three wars, lass." he huffed back at her.

"And despite your age, I have yet to see you fight in one." she quipped.

Life in the supply train had been quite different than what she had expected when she sailed for Northrend. The Crusade's disorganization and incoherence were a stark contrast to the purposefulness she had grown accustomed to among the Cenarian forces with which she had previously served. The war against Arthas was a frenetic, unfocused disaster with men and machines laying in heaps throughout the land. Its leaders were charismatic but not strategic and the army marched ahead on fervor rather than tactics.

Except in the back. There was no fervor in the back. There were no champions of the light in the supply train. There were only professional soldiers, professional thieves, and professional scoundrels. Barleystone was easily all three.

"Well, at least ya finally wised up." he cracked, dropping another bag of grain on the roadside.

"I don't know what you mean by that." she replied.

"Ya got yerself off the front lines, got yerself a nice job back here, a pay packet, and a bit of perks. Good on ya lass, ya earned it, then."

"I didn't ask for this posting. I was placed here by the Archdruid." Caterwaul replied, increasingly concerned with why the dwarf was tossing most of their cargo, which they were supposed to deliver to the fighters at the Argent Stand, out of the wagon.

"The ye should thank 'er." he shot back, straightening his stiff back and turning to study the elf holding the reins. "She prolly saved yer life, after all."

The elf shook her head, dismissing his remark. It pained her that she had been left out of the main action of the war against Arthas and the Scourge. As futile and unfocused as the Crusade was, it was a cause which had to be fought, and a war that had to be won. She was frustrated and impotent driving wagons to and fro.

"On your guard!" she shouted at the dwarf, the snap of a twig in the roadside brush pulling her from her self-pity reverie. She crouched low behind the sidewall, ready to pounce. The dwarf did nothing.

"Don't worry yer pretty 'ead, then, it's just me mate." he said, and with that a shifty-eyed goblin materialized from the shadows, his head on a swivel, expecting trouble.

"You're late, Barls." the goblin hissed.

"You're still here." the dwarf shot back with a shrug. "What's the difference. Damn 'orses are laggards, this army needs rams I tell ya."

"This it?" the goblin interjected, dissappointedly sizing up the stack of grain sacks.

"That's what I got." the dwarf replied. "Maybe more next week. I got an army to feed, ya know."

"What's the army pay you for it?" the goblin asked, standing on his tip toes to take stock of the remaining foodstuffs in the wagon.

"I don't 'ave ta sell ye any of it, ya greasy bugger." Barleystone barked.

"But you will." The goblin said, and they both quickly broke into huge, knowing grins.

As the wagon got underway a few minutes later, a few sacks lighter still, Caterwaul sat fuming.

"I can't believe you're selling the army's supplies!"

"I kinna believe yer not." He replied.

"I should skin you where you sit."

"I'd make a fine 'at, ya know." the dwarf said with a leer.

Caterwaul simply roared in frustration and whipped the horses to go faster, an instruction they refused.

"Look, lass, no bugger buys food who isn't hungry."

She shot him a sideways glance, gritting her teeth.

"And no bugger sells it who is." he said, counting his gold.

---

Her stitching done for the day, Caterwaul rode on the back of the wagon as it drove up the hillside to one of the makeshift tombs scratched into the face of the glacier. The Tournament grounds stretching before her filled her with anger and that anger at least kept her warm.

---

"This is madness!" she said, incredulously.

"This is business." the dwarf replied, resigned.

The two sat on the hillside watching the work crews as they scurried about, busily constructing the Coliseum.

"Arthas sits a stone's throw away, amassing power. Our troops are dying all around us. The scourge grows daily. Yet here we are building a damned fair!"

"We're running short a supplies lass, we got ta do something."

"Maybe we wouldn't be running low on food if you weren't selling it all!" she shouted at him, pointing an accusing finger.

"A wee drop in a vast bucket, lass. Nothing compared ta the stores that Wrynn and Thrall 'ave at their beck and call."

"We shouldn't have to entertain them to get their help. This is a war for the very survival of Azeroth!"

"I don't see Staghelm sending much other'n idealistic kids up 'ere."

Caterwaul sank to her knees in the snow, her head hung in defeat.

"It is what it is, lass. It's the only chance we got. Nutters ain't gonna win this war. The light ain't dropping food and armor and soldiers out of the sky either. We weren't ready fer this, not fer a war this big, not fer a war against this kinna enemy. Wrynn and Thrall, Jaina and Garrosh and Rhonin they all got they're own problems and we're up 'ere keeping the scourge at least mainly up 'ere, fer now anyway. They're forgetting about this war getting ready for the next one. If the Crusade's gotta put on a little gnome and pony show ta get some attention so we don't get shoved off this iceberg in little boxes, well, that's what it is."

The wind ripped around them and the sun sank below the broken mountains to the west and neither of them said anything for a time. The dwarf eventually extended a rough, gloved hand and gave the elf a tweak to her nigh-frostbitten ear.

"Come on kid, I gotta line on some firewood we can appropriate."

"I hate this place." she muttered.

"If ya ever don't, I'll shoot ya." he replied, entirely in earnest.

---

The moon struggled to pierce the clouds over Icecrown as midnight came and went. At the edge of the graveyard a shadowy figure emerged from the shadows, a sleek, lustrous cat with flashing eyes which paused only long enough to magically reform as a slight elf maiden in tattered fur armor and a blood-stained Crusade tabbard.

"Why don't you go spend a little time by the fire, soldier." she called to the shivering orc standing guard over the dead. In Icecrown, you protected the living from the dead, rather than the other way around. "This bunch doesn't seem to be going anywhere tonight."

"Feh. Fine by me." he grunted and trudged off.

"Feckless to the last, those pitiful creatures." Caterwaul muttered to herself once the orc was out of earshot. Once certain no one remained to observe her, she gracefully shifted to the form of a mighty bear and set her shoulder to the door of the tomb, slowly wrestling it open.

"Yer late." the dwarf said, squeezing through the opening, pulling a line of rattling sacks behind him.

"You're still here." she replied, assuming elf form to help him gather together the repurposed burial shrouds filled with weapons and armor stripped from the bodies inside the tomb. By the morning it would be back in the racks of the Argent Vanguard, ready to hand out to the next wave of recruits.

"That." The dwarf replied, watching warily the foot of the hill for witnesses to their technically reprehensible, but entirely urgent method of resupply, "is the problem, isn't it?"

Bearly started

Remarkably, I now have two 80's.

I know, right!

Something about the druid just clicked. I don't know if it was just good timing (the hunter didn't have a lot to do at this point) or usefulness (having a tank or healer on-hand means almost never giving up on a run), or just something about druids that hooked me (feral face-eating plus stealth plus shadowmeld plus flight form gathering quests plus mailbox dancing, who could ask for more?), but something worked and I dove in with both feet and an arm or two, ground it out, and got to the boundary between leveling and the real game.

Of course, that means I have a lot of work to do.

Forget gear. Gear is easy, just run stuff, get badges, rinse, repeat.

No, the hard part is going to be figuring out how2bear. I've never tanked before, and it's a little intimidating. I've done dps to death, I've healed my way through the Outlands, but I've never, ever had a tank before, so I need to learn it all from scratch.

So, off we go on an exciting new career in WoW. If you have any advice, send it along. I'll let you know how it goes.