Druid Main

Your Website Sucks, Blizzard

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Blizzard, I’m pissed off.

I’m not pissed off about game mechanics or class balance or anything that’s actually in the game itself. I’m pissed off about the World of Warcraft website and how badly you neglect it. Sure on the outside it looks like a nice website with lots of nifty features, but it’s truly a piece of shit.

The Knowledge Center

Did you know it existed? Probably not. The only way you can find it is through Google or clicking on a misleading “Support Articles” link in tiny dark brown font on the bottom of the dark brown page. There’s also a link under the tiny “Support” in the upper right corner on the top gray bar. You’ll be taken to an intro page where you can select the game you want “support” for and you’re presented with a homepage full of links to outdated, duplicated, neglected articles. It’s not a “Knowledge Center” but rather a collection of piss-poor excuses for knowledgeable articles.

Outdated information is everywhere. Nothing has been updated for what seems like years.
Most of the articles are vague or give unclear directions for troubleshooting.
There are up to eight duplicates of the same article, each more badly-written than the next.
Typos. Everywhere. Fucking spellcheck, you dumbasses.
It’s incredibly hard to find in the first place if you don’t know that it already exists. See the Twitter conversation on the right.
It’s also incredibly hard to use and isn’t search-friendly in the slightest.
Dead links to non-Blizzard websites abound because no one has maintained them or provided a feedback feature.

If we the players can’t figure out exactly what kind of names are banned or exactly what to do when troubleshooting, what happens? We go to the forums to get help. Where do the folks on the forums get their experience? Not the Knowledge Center.

Here’s a recurring problem we have in the Newbie forum. Folks on trial accounts have questions about the trial account restrictions such as limitations on chat channels, trading, grouping, etc. I’m happy to answer those questions. But wait, Blizzard changed the restrictions on trial accounts when they started the “Starter edition” shitstorm and they didn’t announce the changes. Now I’m telling new players incorrect information and it pisses me off to no end. I don’t like misleading people. I don’t like making mistakes because someone else fucked up and gave me the wrong information.

This a link to the “Starter Edition FAQ” on the Knowledge Base:
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20590

Normally I would just tell you to search for it using the search box, but searching for “starter edition,” “starter edition faq,” and “starter account restrictions” turns up nothing. I’m not surprised.

Below is my revised version of the beginning of the page (click to view full size):

The amount of pain, confusion and bickering in the Newbie forum caused by this one shit-tastic article is astounding. The correct restrictions on the trial accounts aren’t listed, so Cerylia (another Newbie forum regular) and I resorted to creating a trial account and experimenting with chat/trade/group settings to see what the actual restrictions are now.

That’s pathetic. We shouldn’t have to guess and fool around with account settings like this in order to learn something that we can pass on to the new players. We should be able to link to an article and say:

Here’s a Blizzard support article detailing the trial account restrictions. Feel free to post back here if there’s anything you don’t understand! :)

<link goes here>

Instead we get folks who don’t understand the restrictions or think they’ve found a bug because the ones listed in the article aren’t accurate. Conflicting information abounds, and a while ago we had a serious issue in several threads over whether or not trial accounts were in the exp-off battlegrounds at level 20. After consulting many player-generated resources and folks on Twitter experimenting with accounts, we figured out that yes, trial accounts are in the twink 20-24 bracket. Is that basic information listed anywhere by Blizzard? No. That was a week long “I’m sorry, we have no fucking clue because Blizzard never told us” stint of threads.

Worse even are the disillusioned players that think your fucked up marketing team was telling the truth when it made “free to play to level 20!” banners everywhere. No, it’s not free to play. It’s a trial account without the time limit. And yet they continue to make “suggestion” threads every day suggesting that you remove the account restrictions or try to balance the game for the wannabe posers trying to twink at level 20 on a trial account. Do we have an article we can direct them to read that explains why the account restrictions are in place? No.

Can you tell how frustrating this is? And that’s just from one article. I can’t imagine how annoying it is to post in the Technical Support or Customer Support forums and not be able to link to an actual Blizzard resource on things that should be answered by you, Blizzard. Account settings and restrictions. Client troubleshooting basics. Port forwarding for multiple security programs with screenshots updated to a version from the last five years. Fucking basic information isn’t there and there’s a gaping hole in our usable resources.

Lack of Moderator/Blue Support

We were rejoicing tonight. Why? Because holy shit, a blue poster made a post in our forum about a subject that we struggle with on a daily basis: recruitment threads. We have something solid that we can link when people try to snark “Oh well I’m not recruiting for a guild but I’m recruiting charter signatures, so I can post here” after we tell them that recruitment in all forms is banned in our beloved forum.That’s truly, honestly sad. You know what I would love? For a moderator to use their lovely blue font to put up a list of guidelines that are specific to each forum. Something simple…

Game suggestions belong in the General forum. ~~Free to Play~~ Trial accounts cannot post in the General forum. Please take the hint.
Recruitment in all forms is banned here. Take it to your server or the guild recruitment forums.

Or at least update the “Welcome: Please Read!” sticky with guidelines that are specific to each forum so we can link to something relevant instead of a copy/paste job by the mods. I’m really tired of the trial account “suggestion” threads that devolve into Veterans vs Trials bickering matches on a daily basis. It’s not fun. I post there to help newbies, not put up with dumbasses who think they’re entitled to whine for free features without paying for the game. A blue post saying “Cut it out” would help immensely.

This forum is all about helping new players. That’s why a handful of regulars post every day, rain or shine, maintenance or not. We truly love teaching players how to play this awesome game but the forum and website neglect makes it very difficult. We’re just players – we can’t build the website for you, Blizzard, but some of us would LOVE to take it off your hands because you’re doing a shit job of maintaining it.There’s no sense of community between the moderators and the forums with less traffic. I think I can count the number of blue posts the Newbie forum (both the old website and new one) has had on one hand. There aren’t any fun “What was your first character?” or “How do your name your alts?” kind of threads here. I know that I harp on the rules and “No off-topic shit in my kitchen” more than anyone else, but it’s somewhat sad to feel so little love from the Blizzard employees. Am I fishing for more blue posts for the sake of blue posts? No. Would it be nice to see Crithto, who I know is a frequent moderator in our forum, or other blues pop in and say ahoy or offer up some advice or clarification on game issues (especially account issues, since we have no accurate resources HINT HINT)? Yeah, I think it would. Some sense of camaraderie or connection would be sweet. Hell, even a “thanks for helping newbies” might be nice.

Most of the time you guys are very fast to nix threads and lock necroposts. When you folks are on your A-game, the regulars take notice. It’s awesome. I’ll give you that and I’m very grateful for your speed. Keep it up.

Lack of Stickies

Because the Knowledge Center articles suck so hard, we’ve resorted to making our own informational articles. There are some freaking amazing threads that would make great stickies in our humble Newbie forum. They’ve been reported for stickying and bumped many times, but for some reason the moderators aren’t listening or even reading the threads so they fall to the bottom of the forum and aren’t referenced often. Anyone that glances at those threads would know immediately that they’re great potential resources that Blizzard doesn’t cover (especially the Expansion Upgrade List) so why don’t the mods sticky them? I don’t mean that every guide should be auto-stickied, but guides that are created to address repeated questions should be stickied.

Some of the class forums have few or no stickies because their guides are floating freely with high-rated posts that the moderators don’t seem to give a shit about. Are you kidding me? That’s the first place you go to look for leveling guides or end-game help. If your resources are at the bottom of the pile, they’re useless. The community is neglected and our hard work on writing those guides is all for naught if people can’t find them.

You Want Feedback?

You made a nice website, then you didn’t maintain it and now it’s out of date and shitty. The blues are out of touch with the readers in the lesser-traveled forums. In an effort to help other players in multiple forums, folks have written fantastic guides that are unfortunately neglected and left to rot on the bottom of the lake like the Knowledge Center. I love posting and I’m going to continue posting to help out new players, but for fuck’s sake help out the community and finish what you started.

Newbie Tavern: Void and Arcanass

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:22:00 +0000

It had been quiet all day at the tavern. As the night dragged on, everyone was restless. The guards had gone to bed and the few folks left were either bored or nodding off.

“We haven’t had any midnight excitement for a while, have we?” Ice announced to the mostly empty room. She shuffled a deck of cards.

Xunn, a Tauren paladin, polished a glass behind the counter. “What do you mean by midnight excitement?” he asked. “Is there a show?” He wasn’t a class trainer like the others, but no one argued with the size of his biceps or his skill in pouring drinks.

“Normally odd things don’t happen here,” Cerylia explained. She pulled up a chair at the table and winked at Ice, who slid cards in her direction. “That crowd is best saved for the general bar scene. However we tend to meet strange people here after midnight.” The Farstrider took up her cards and furrowed her brow.

“Why haven’t I heard of this before?” Xunn said, watching the women play. “I haven’t been here that long but I would think I’ve seen everything by now.”

“By da time da dust clear in da morning, dere gone, da bar is straightened up, and no one else has a clue what happened,” Jilixx replied, watching her cobra slither up and down the empty bar counter. “Ice has a wicked tendency ta start fights, but no one sees da bodies she leave behind.”

“You leave bodies behind? What on earth is she talking about?” the Tauren asked, bewildered. He gawked at Ice, who casually took a sip of wine.

The claw tattoos on the Kaldorei’s face curved when she grinned. “What? It’s not like I truly kill them. I just have a silver tongue.”

“Silver tongue indeed,” Cerylia remarked, rolling her eyes. “How many times have I had to bail you out of a bar fight?”

Ice hesitated, looked down at her wine glass, and smiled. “Several? I can make it up to you, you know.” She waggled her long wispy brows and blew Cerylia a kiss.

The Sin’dorei woman laughed. “Like you made it up to those Sentinels you were getting cozy with earlier? I think I’ll pass.”

Suddenly a warlock and mage burst into the bar.

“HELLO LITTLE ONES. WE ARE HERE!” the pair announced. Fire danced at their fingertips, but the flames faded once they realized the bar was nearly empty.

“Can I help you, friends?” Xunn asked. “The tavern is empty at this time of night.”

“So two idiots walk into a bar,” Ice mumbled behind her cards. Cerylia giggled.

“Where are all the newbies?” the warlock asked. She was a blonde human with a confused expression, though her Forsaken counterpart looked angry. His head was tilted at a strange angle and one eye rolled back in his head.

“They’ve mostly gone home or retired for the night,” Xunn replied. “You’re welcome to pull up a chair and have a --”

“WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?!” the mage shouted at Cerylia. “DO NOT LAUGH AT ME.” His head tilted the other direction. Jilixx’s cobra hissed at the sudden yelling.

Ice’s back was turned to the man and she silently mouthed “dumbass” to Cerylia. Choking back a giggle fit, the huntress looked up from her cards and replied, “Wasn’t laughing at you, sorry.” She kicked Ice under the table. The druid winced when the hard boot connected with her shin.

“Um, we have a show for the newbies about Horde and Alliance combat in the upper ranks,” the warlock said to Xunn, smiling. “My name is Void, and this is my partner Arcanass.”

Ice snorted, prompting Jilixx and Cerylia to start giggling. The druid turned around to address the newcomers. “Upper ranks? Why are you two here then?” She motioned to the door. “The casters and fel-tainted creatures in another bar down the way would be more interested.”

“Not ta mention da warlords and marshals in de lounges would be happy ta see a show,” Jilixx added.

“No no no,” said Arcanass, his other eye rolling forward normally. “We’re here to teach newbies how to engage each other at high ranking combat. You wouldn’t get it since you obviously aren’t ranked.”

Xunn gave a great belly laugh and put away the glass he was cleaning. “Neither are you two. Not a badge or commendation in sight. The season started weeks ago so either you’re either brand new to the gladiator ring or you have no clue what you’re doing.”

“I’d wager both,” Ice remarked. “And it would seem we have a midnight show tonight.”

“Yes, we’re a show!” Void said, clapping excitedly.

“You’re blonde, aren’t you?” the Kaldorei deadpanned.

“Yes, why?” the woman replied, twirling a lock of her golden hair.

Ice looked sideways at Cerylia and quirked a brow. “Void of all thought,” she snickered. Cerylia kicked her under the table again.

“I’m obviously good so I don’t need to prove anything to you!” the mage shrieked. His neck made a horrendous cracking sound and one of his eyes rolled in its socket. Jilixx’s cobra hissed again and flattened its hood.

“If ya’ll ah so damn good at spells and such,” Jilixx challenged, “den ya could hit dat bug on de raftahs up dere wit ya eyes closed.” She pointed at a moth fluttering around on the ceiling at the back of the tavern. The tavern had a high ceiling and the moth was thirty feet off the ground.

Ice pulled a gold coin from the chest area of her robe and rolled it on her fingers. “This is yours if you can do it.”

“Sure, I can do that!” Void chirped. She put her hand over her eyes and started forming a fireball in her other hand.

“Oh no no, you’re probably peeking through your fingers,” Xunn said. He pointed at the warlock and a sharp, bright light shot across the room.

“AGH MY EYES!” the woman screamed. “YOU BLINDED ME!”

“It’s temporary. Now hit the moth,” the Tauren chuckled.

Void created a small fireball and drew her arm back, then took aim. All she could see was a white light and her stance was crooked. She threw the fireball with all her might towards the moth.

Unfortunately her aim was as bad as her stance. The fireball was deflected off a lower rafter and flew toward Ice’s table. Cerylia kicked her chair backwards just in time but Ice didn’t move. In a snap her skin and robe turned to solid bark and the fireball fizzed out on contact. The gold coin she had been holding fell on the table.

Xunn removed the blinding spell and Void bounced on her heels. “Did I hit it?” she asked.

“No…no you didn’t,” Cerylia said, gawking at the druid. “Ice, are you okay?”

“Dis ain’t gonna end well. Bodies on da floor,” Jilixx said. “An’ dat’s a druid trick. Barky skin can protect dem druids from heat.”

Ice exhaled and relaxed. The bark faded and she rolled her shoulders to shake off the stiff feeling. “Yes, I’m fine.” She turned to the warlock, who looked as surprised as Cerylia. “Your aim is shit. You’re not a ranking officer or gladiator.”

Arcanass twitched his fingers and cackled. “I don’t have to prove anything! I am a gladiator by default! FOR SYLVANAS!” He threw an ice lance at the moth, but missed by several feet. Instead he managed to hit a hanging lamp, which fell to the floor and shattered.

Cerylia sighed. “The guards are going to be here in the morning to make you pay for that.”

“I am only replying to newbies who seek assistance,” Arcanass said. His eye rolled backwards again.

Jilixx looked around the bar, confused. “But…dere aren’t any newbies here now. Just us.”

“I am only replying to newbies who seek assistance,” Arcanass repeated, staring with one eye off into the distance. The troll shrugged.

Void finally spoke up about her pitch. “I’m still good! I promise! I just can’t go to the other bars because I haven’t paid up my tabs.”

“So enlist in the Alliance forces or join the gladiator ranks this season and get paid so you can go where you belong,” Cerylia said. “Your little show doesn’t belong here.”

“NEWBIES THAT SEEK ASSISTANCE!” the Forsaken blurted out to no one in particular. He was still just standing there staring off into space. Everyone gave him a weird look for a few seconds then continued the conversation.

“Fine. I don’t care. I’ll be back tomorrow,” Void wailed. She stomped out of the tavern in a huff, leaving her companion standing in the middle of the room.

“Hey! Take yah friend wit yah! We don’ want him!” Jilixx called after her. There was no response.

Xunn picked up another glass and addressed his own reflection. “Midnight excitement indeed. What are we going to do with him now?”

“I PROVE NOTHING TO YOU!” Arcanass screamed. He threw his arms up and cast Blink while one of his eyes was still rolled back into his head. The lack of depth perception caused him to teleport into a wall with a loud thud. He hit the ground and fell silent.

“At least he’ll shut up for the night,” Ice commented, yawning. She looked down at her cards and nudged the coin on the table next to the deck. “Any aces?”

Cerylia fanned her cards and shook her head. “Go fish.”

Newbie Tavern Recruitment

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:25:00 +0000

Allow me to preface these shenanigans with an explanation. I post regularly in the New Player Help & Guides forum and we have a lot of stereotypical threads. We laugh, we give advice, and we have an interesting group dynamic. Between writing my serious pieces of fiction I started a comical, non-factual series of shorts based on the threads in the forum. This is the first one.

Enjoy!

Two ogre guards sat under an awning outside a tavern, sipping lemonades in the summer heat. They were enthralled with the tiny umbrellas that accompanied their drinks, which were provided free of charge from the tavern in exchange for their somewhat intimidating presence.

“What color yours, Crith?” one asked the other. He held up his own umbrella. “Pink!”

“Got green!” Crith replied, fishing the umbrella out of his drink. “Pink is nice, Drok.”

“Pink is girl color,” Drok said gaily, spinning the stick between his fat fingers, “but Drok like pink anyway.”

“Pink?” a harsh voice spat. “If you know anything, gold is where it’s at.” A Forsaken man in a flawless tuxedo stood before the guards, leaning on a diamond-tipped cane. A pumpkin covered his head, but the cynical face carved into the gourd moved as he spoke.

“Mister Harlan!” the guards said in unison. They nearly dropped their umbrellas.

“Uh,” stammered Drok, “We n-not see you there. T-Tavern welcome y-you.” He pushed the door open for the well-known patron.

“Enjoy your umbrellas,” Harlan said over his shoulder in a voice that sounded like a corpse being dragged down a gravel road.

Despite the scorching temperatures outside, the tavern was very cool. It was a common refuge for class trainers and combat veterans trying to escape the heat and relax at the end of the day. Cold beverages flowed and banter between the regulars ensued. Trainees regularly stopped in to ask questions and seek advice from the seasoned crowd.

Not everything was peaceful though.

“It’s not allowed here. Take it elsewhere.” A Kaldorei woman in a dark green leather robe was staring daggers over the rim of a wine glass at a blonde human holding a flyer. A thick book was sitting on her table and she looked like she was going to throw it if the conversation continued.

“I’m not allowed anywhere else!” the human pleaded, waving the flyer. “I have to come here!” He didn’t notice Harlan standing right behind him.

“What brings you here?” the Forsaken asked, standing a little too close. The man whirled around and nearly fell backwards when he saw the pumpkin staring at him.

“I, um… I’m here to put up a flyer advertising my guild,” he muttered, clutching the paper tightly. He pointed at the druid. “But that thing won’t let me!”

The druid scowled and sipped her wine. “Dumbass.”

“Ah, I see,” Harlan said, placing a bony hand on the man’s shoulder. “That would be Miss Icedragon. She’s no threat unless you’re a Darnassian Sentinel or Cerylia over there.” He nodded toward a pair of Sin’dorei sitting dangerously close to one another in a booth.

At the mention of her name, the flame-haired Farstrider looked up from nuzzling her strapping, well-muscled escort. Her green eyes flickered when she blinked. “What?”

“Nothing, sweetheart,” Ice snickered. “Go back to your luscious companion.”

Cerylia stuck her tongue out at the druid and resumed stroking her Death Knight’s dark red hair. He grinned happily and never said a word.

“Now then,” Harlan continued, leaning on his cane, “we have rules here that everyone must follow. Read them. Follow them. It’s a simple system that even an incoherent fleshling like you can comprehend.” He turned the man toward a large poster tacked on the wall next to the door. The rules were written by multiple people in different handwriting, but one thing was written in large red letters at the top: No recruitment allowed.

“I know, but I’m not allowed into the other bars where recruitment is permitted!” the man protested, waving the flyer. “How else am I expected to recruit?!”

“Ya not gonna, mon,” a troll huntress answered from the bar. A cobra was coiled around her shoulders, hissing. “Ya can eitha leave of ya own acco’d or widdout da use of ya own legs. Choice is yahs.” She stroked the serpent lovingly and smiled, showing her tusks.

While the man was fussing, Harlan pocketed something and took a measured step back. “Incoming.”

“I’m not leaving!” the man yelled. “Not until you people – ACK!” He was cut short as one of the ogres stomped inside.

“NO RECRUIT ALLOWED! BAD BOY! YOU LEAVE NOW!” Drok bellowed. He grabbed the trespasser by the collar of his shirt and dragged him outside, narrowly missing the well-dressed Forsaken. Laughter echoed in the tavern and another round of drinks was poured. The flyer fluttered to the floor.

Harlan picked up the wrinkled paper and turned it over. The parchment suddenly burst into flames and fell to the floor in ashes.

“Clevah trick,” the huntress observed. “Don’ suppose he’ll be needin’ it.”

“Not where he’s heading, Jilixx,” Harlan replied. “It was drawn in a horrendous color anyway.”

The pumpkin smirked as the Forsaken walked up the stairs to the upper level, where he reclined in his reserved chair overlooking the bar. He pulled a gold coin from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers, clicking against exposed bone.

“Gold is where it’s at.”

Lazy Twinking on a Fat Polo Horse

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:48:00 +0000

My rogue Lupor recently hit 70 and cleared Outland. Onward to Northrend, right? NO. DON’T MAKE ME GO BACK THERE. I abhor questing in Northrend for some unknown reason and I’m still burned out on the dungeons from chain-running heroics in Wrath of the Lich King. This leaves PvP as the only option for leveling. Well, I’m a rogue so I can stealth and run away from things and stun people. I’ll give it a shot.

After losing several games, I was in stitches from laughing. This was fun. And not just fun, but amusing despite the losses. I could actually kill people sometimes when they’re already at half health and not paying attention. Alright so I sucked but it was still fun. I could get some experience, learn how to play my rogue in a new setting, and best of all I wasn’t in Northrend.

I noticed how slowly I was gaining experience and started thinking about my gear. I figured that I was going to be in this bracket for a while so I should probably look at some PvP gear to help things along. Resilience was introduced in Burning Crusade, so the level 70 PvP gear would have some and give me an edge over folks in quest rewards.

After poking Cynwise and Psynister on Twitter for advice, I headed to the honor vendor to pick out some toys. Pretty soon everything except heirloom armor and trinkets was epic PvP gear (it’s surprisingly easy to afford, even after a handful of losses). Figuring out weapons took a little while but I settled on two swords since Lupor is Combat, which I later found out isn’t really a PvP spec. At least now if anyone inspected me it would look like I had a clue what I was doing.

Shiny gear deserves shiny enchants!
Holy shit, that’s expensive.
Um, hooray for cheaper alternatives!

Twinking is the WoW equivalent of polo. If you can afford it, you do it and you kick ass and look awesome with your fancy horses. For those that don’t feel like putting in the effort, we go riding in on the fat pony, swinging blindly at anything that moves. As a rogue with a sub-par spec, half-assed enchants, and very little experience I’m not going to steamroll anyone while riding my fat pony onto the field, but damn will I have fun in every game I play. Winning or losing doesn’t really matter if I’m having a good time.

Each time I hit the graveyard I can usually figure out what I should have done differently or at least who murdered me. Disarm melee with big weapons. Find adorable healers (see right) and guard them like hell. Figure out the abbreviations for Alterac Valley and mess with Horde by randomly sapping people then ducking away. Pick out non-PvP folks based on their health pools and devour them.

Lupor is level 77 now, doing a couple instances so she can equip the crafted blue PvP set at 78. I’m learning how to handle more classes now and I think this critter has a shot at some PvP at the level cap with guildies.

I still run from Horde on my druid though.

Nutshell Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 01:35:00 +0000

Our beloved game has a lot of stats and some very intricate formulas. Spirit increases mana regeneration, attack power modifies physical damage, parry does…something. It’s enough to drive you mad if you weren’t a nerd in school.

Fortunately you don’t have to learn all of the stats all at once if you only focus on the ones that are important for your spec or class. Unfortunately for druids that means a lot of studying anyway.

This post isn’t a complete guide to every single stat, but more of an explanation about why or why not druids like certain stats along with a primer on what the stats actually do. As the title suggests, everything is in a nutshell. If you want to learn about stat weights, check out guides for your spec on the druid forums.

Druid Icon Key

Bears especially like this stat.
Cubs (leveling bears) like it too.

Cats especially like this stat.
Kittens (leveling cats) like it too.

Moonkin especially like this stat.
Hatchlings (leveling Moonkin) like it too.

Trees especially like this stat.
Sprouts (leveling trees) like it too.

No druids like this stat at all.
Avoid it at all costs!

All druids like this stat to some extent.
Om nom nom.

Base Stats (intellect, spirit, agility, strength, stamina)

Intellect increases your mana pool, boosts your spell critical strike chance, and increases your spellpower. If you don’t have mana, you don’t want intellect. As you level up, more of your gear will have intellect on it so you won’t worry about the size of your mana pool as much.

Spirit increases your mana regeneration. Only healers can use spirit to regenerate mana in combat, so it’s useless for everyone else. However Moonkin have a talent at level 19 called [Balance of Power] that converts any spirit on their gear into hit rating, so spirit isn’t entirely useless for them. Shadow priests and elemental shamans have a similar talent. This lets healers and their caster counterparts share gear more easily. Sharing is caring!

Agility gives cats and bears a lot of attack power, increases melee critical strike chance, and gives bears a boosted chance to dodge incoming attacks. What’s not to love about such a wonderful stat? Think of it as a stat that sharpens your claws. If you have mana, you want to avoid this entirely.

Strength isn’t a druid stat. It gives half of the attack power that agility does for bears and cats, so it’s nothing spectacular. You won’t even see it on leather gear other than random green drops, it’s just that un-druidic. Strength is for the folks that wear plate. You can get away with some at low levels, but replace those pieces quickly.

Stamina gives you more health. As you level higher, stamina will start appearing on all of your gear along with other more specific stats like agility or intellect. Bears focus on it more than others do because they have to take a lot of damage and need the extra health to help soften the blow. More stamina means a larger ass for tanking.

Offensive Stats (attack power, spellpower)

Attack power isn’t found on actual gear most of the time, but it still exists. Each of your melee abilities will hit a target for a percentage of your attack power. The higher your attack power, the higher the hit. Agility gives us lots of attack power, which is why feral druids love agility so much. This only works on physical damage, so casters need not apply.

Spellpower is only found on high level weapons, but some lower level trinkets increase spellpower and you’ll see it referenced here and there. Each of your spells will heal/damage the target for a percentage of your spellpower. The more spellpower you have, the more powerful your spells will be. That’s the main reason casters adore intellect. It only applies to spells though, so melee and hunters don’t use it.

Secondary Stats (dodge, parry, critical strike, haste, mastery)

Dodge is a bit self-explanatory. It increases your chance to dodge incoming attacks, but only incoming melee attacks. Because it allows you to avoid damage and only tanks should be on the front lines taking damage in the first place, it’s a bear-only stat. Despite their large butts, bears are surprisingly nimble. Dodge is found in a rating (an integer) on your gear, but converts into a percentage on your character sheet. You can take that percentage as “you will dodge X percent of all incoming attacks”

Parry is somewhat like dodge. You essentially raise your weapon to parry an incoming attack. It’s an avoidance stat for tanks to reduce the amount of damage they take. Unfortunately druids don’t have thumbs so we can’t parry. This is for those strength-stacking plate tanks that use large ridiculous weapons instead of paws. There isn’t any leather gear with parry on it for the most part, and it appears on strength gear and stuff meant for those other tanks.

Critical strike is one of those “you see it everywhere on almost everything” stats. You also start seeing it at fairly low levels as the first green secondary stat on gear. A critical strike is an doubled output from an ability. Your spell hits for 100 damage? It crits for around 200 damage! By default everything has a chance to crit, but the critical strike rating on your gear will increase that chance. It applies to everything from melee hits to heals and damaging spells. Bear in mind that it takes a lot of crit rating to increase your crit chance though, so you have to stack a lot of it to see any major gains.

Haste is another stat that you’ll see in lots of places and on almost everyone’s gear. Haste makes everything faster. Spell casts take less time, your paws move faster, and everything is speedy. Like crit rating, you have to stack a lot of it to see any major gains. Blue leveling gear sometimes has it if it doesn’t have crit rating. Because they need to cast quickly to get the heals out, trees really like haste.

Mastery is an odd stat. It doesn’t appear anywhere until you reach level 80, and it doesn’t give the same effect for everyone. What mastery does depends on your talent tree, and a description of your mastery is on the talent tree summary. Whether a druid loves mastery depends on what their mastery does, and this changes from patch to patch. It’s not bad though, but you’ll want to consult the druid forum for specifics.

Stats with Caps (hit rating, expertise)

Hit rating makes you hit things more often by reducing your chance to miss entirely. Kitties and Moonkin cause lots of damage and they want the high accuracy. Missed spells/swings are missed damage output, which means less shin-nomming and face-nuking. Heals never miss, so trees don’t need it. Bears don’t really care about it because they’re not as concerned with their damage output as much as they are with using their faces as shields. This stat becomes important at end-game, so it’s not that important while leveling. Moonkin get a lot of their hit rating from converted spirit already so they don’t need that much actual hit rating.

Expertise reduces the chance that a mob will dodge or parry your melee attacks. Moonkin and trees don’t care about it. You don’t see it often while you’re leveling, but it’s rather nice for kitties. A mob cannot parry you if you attack it from behind (it can still dodge though), which is why melee critters need to be behind mobs and bosses whenever possible. It takes some expertise to make you dodge-proof, but it takes a lot more expertise to make you parry-proof…so much that it’s nearly impossible to do without fudging the rest of your gear. Some bears like a little expertise but kitties like it much more. Like hit rating, it doesn’t matter much while you’re leveling.

Acorns and Nutshells

Feral critters like agility and attack power.
Caster critters like intellect, spirit and spellpower.
Bears like stamina more than other critters do. They also love dodge.
Parry and strength are bad!
Haste and crit are good.
Mastery is odd but rather nice at later levels.
Hit and expertise are nice, but not required until the level cap.

Did I screw anything up here? Wording unclear, bad, or incoherent? Email me or post a comment and I’ll fix any errors as soon as I can!

Mod Madness Returns!

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Ahoy.

My name is Ice.

And of course I’m still addicted to AddOns. What did you expect?

While I was on a break from blogging and playing around in Cataclysm, I gutted my interface and rebuilt it. Some of it looks like my last rendition, some of it is gone, and some of it is new. If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ve probably seen some screenies, but here’s the master screenshot for this post:

Can you tell it’s a druid interface?

The Skeleton

Viewport: SunnArt

This creates the top and bottom sections of artwork, which push the viewing area of my screen upward. None of my vision is blocked because the screen is moved instead of covered. I figured out how to create my own skin for SunnArt and spliced two of the pre-existing skins together to make the one shown above.

Actionbars: Macaroon (button skins via ButtonFacade)

Everyone knows this is my favorite actionbar AddOn. The main 3x6 block of buttons has Ctrl and Alt modifiers, so I have a lot of buttons to use. The 6x1 row under the minimap has six pages, which I flip through using the + and – keys. The 6x1 bar varies a bit between pet/non-pet classes but everything else is the same for all characters.

Unit Frames: Shadowed Unit Frames (suf)

They’re so simple, so easy to move, and so incredibly customizable that I squee’d when I settled on the current setup. You can move bars of buffs, change colors on everything, and make every unit frame the size you want. So much rectangular love. The party/raid frames can be set to fade when the unit is out of range (shown in the screenshot above) and I really love that it can apply the same effect to the target frame (lower right corner of screenie).

Minimap: SexyMap

Oh yes, it’s so sexy I can’t take my eyes off it. I don’t think I can handle the default minimap anymore.

Chat: Chatter

It hides the stupid chat buttons and lets me resize the chat box more easily. That’s really all I use it for, but it does a lot of other little nifty things to the chat box that I wish were built into the default. Prat annoyed me, so Chatter is my favorite.

Combat Mods

Damage Meter: Recount

I haven’t looked much at Skada, but I’m curious about it. I’ve just always used Recount because it’s easy to use and set up.

Threat Alert: I don’t use one

Maybe I’m just weird, but I never looked at the Omen window when I had it enabled and the sounds were often lost in the sounds of combat, so I removed it. Instead I use Threatplates (see below) to see who has how much aggro on what mob. The health bars are in my face, so why not put the threat in my face as well? I like the “Losing Threat” words and such that are built into the Blizzard UI too. They’re noticeable and generally startle me when I see them, so I can snap aggro back easily.

Nameplates: Tidyplates (and plugin Threatplates)

Rather than having to look between Omen’s window, the target frame, and the rest of the game world, I put the threat and target frame into the game world. I adore these nameplate mods because I can see combo points, health/casting bars, an aggro line (long line = I have more aggro), the name of who has aggro on the mob, and to top it all off…it changes colors! I’m a color-oriented creature and this really helps when tanking.

Cooldowns: CoolLine

You can’t see it in the screenshot above, but it’s a bar with time increments. As a cooldown ticks, its icon slides across the bar from left to right. When the cooldown is up, the icon slides off the bar, gets really huge, then fades away. It’s positioned right under Ice’s feet near the middle of the screen so it’s very visible in combat.

Casting Bar: Quartz

Between the latency estimate and the ability to move/skin the casting bars, how could you not love this mod? I especially love that it puts a shield around the spell’s icon if the spell being cast cannot be interrupted. It makes interrupts easy to spot on bosses. My casting bars sit under CoolLine, just above the minimap.

Ice’s Toybox

TinyPad (sticky notes)

I plug this on the forums every chance I get. It’s invaluable and has saved me over ten bucks on sticky notes. It’s like having Notepad or Text Edit within WoW. I take dictation on boss strategies, make to-do lists, scribble down RP/blog ideas, record Vent information…everything that would normally be on a sticky note on my computer desk is in TinyPad. The best part? It’s saved across multiple characters! So I can make a shopping list on Ice, log onto my bank warlock, and pull up what I need to buy at the auction house.

Titan Panel (info bar)

Like TinyPad, it saves space and keeps me sane. I can see little things like gold and durability at a glance. No more guessing what my coordinates are! No more opening the backpack to track currency! I can keep my minimap clean and see the time in the upper right corner! You get the idea.

Align (graph paper)

Maybe it’s because I’m an engineering student, but I have a love affair with graph paper. The grids, the lines, so perfectly matched together…it sends my heart a-flutter. Align puts a graph paper grid over your entire screen, allowing you to line up parts of your interface perfectly. It also puts bright red lines bisecting the screen so you can tell where the center is located and split your screen into four “quadrants” if you want. You can adjust the size of the grid too.

oGlow (icon glows)

Like I’ve said before, I’m a color-oriented creature. When I put colors on everything, I really do mean everything. Since sifting through bags can be a nuisance, this mod puts a neon border around items that are green quality or better. Now I can spot the greens from the grays and the blues from the purples. White and gray items aren’t outlined, so it’s mostly important things like gear that are highlighted. This is really handy on my enchanter when I mass produce things to disenchant.

NPCScan and NPCScan_Overlay

When hunting rare spawns, you need this mod. Period. It’ll give you a heart attack when you finally spot the rare spawn in question, but it gets your blood pumping to hit the Frost Trap and Tame Beast keybinds faster. Though looking up spawn points and coordinates is annoying, so why not add COLORFUL THINGS to the minimap and world map instead? The overlay plugin does that perfectly. Instead of looking at coordinates, you’ll see the spawn zones in neon colors on your minimap and world map. Missing a rare because you’re 20 yards too far west is just embarassing. Never again with the overlay!

Interfaces by Class and Race

While the skeleton of my UI is nearly identical for every character, the artwork is completely different. I go out of my way to design something unique for each of my active characters.

Icedragon, the Night Elf Druid

The screenshot at the top of this post isn’t what Icedragon actually uses…

Yes, I have nude Kaldorei women on my UI. I think they’re gorgeous and I’ve been known to gawk at them on a regular basis. I can’t find the original link to the deviantart page that had the one on the right, but I definitely make no claims to the two images I used as being my own.

The screenie on the left shows TinyPad. The one on the right shows CoolLine (green) and Quartz (under it). There’s also a nameplate from a corehound that was shoved off the top of the screen but you can see part of it.

Arrowhoof, the Tauren Hunter

I went with a journal theme for Arrow, based on his upcoming stories. Like Ice, he has two versions of artwork. See if you can spot the difference.

I exchanged the picture of Thunder Bluff for a beautiful Tauren huntress, by this frisket17 on deviantart. The signed name has significance in a later story, so shush about it for now ;)

My two favorite pets are on either side of the UI (Petunia the tallstrider and Loque the spirit leopard). They transition into drawings on the parchment, but the upper portion overlaps the game world for a neat effect. His buttons have a different skin and slightly different positioning to allow for a permanent pet bar. You can see the NPCScan Overlay on the miniature world map in the second screenshot (he was tracking Karoma).

Frigida, the Night Elf Mage

Unfortunately I’m not that pleased with how this skin turned out and plan on redoing it, but here it is for now. Sorry, no sexy artwork here!

I took a bold move and built up behind the focus and pet frames on either side of the minimap, and I don’t think it turned out well. It feels too blocky to me. Regardless, she has the same button setup as Arrow but with a blue tint. The minimap has a rune texture that rotates as she changes direction, and with the overlapping on the purple rune art in the viewport skin it makes a trippy effect. There’s a fire rune on the left and a frost rune on the right.

Dawnhoof, the Tauren Paladin

Screwlewse gave me the idea for this one on Twitter. The background texture is yellow metal, not unlike the plate heirlooms. There are tribal designs etched into the metal, like I imagine a Tauren paladin would do to his own armor. There’s a sun and wing behind the chat box, a lion in the group area, and a phoenix under the player/target frames. I’m actually quite pleased with how this one turned out and playing with the textures was fun.

Lupor, the Worgen Rogue

If this doesn’t scream “rogue” then I don’t know what does. Credit for inspiration goes to Rith of Polka DoTs and HoT Chocolate.

After some reading about Worgen lore, I found their racial crest. It looks very Victorian to me, so I used it behind the chat box. Rith suggested a dagger/rose combination somewhere, so I lined it up with the target frame in the lower right. The background is wispy smoke, which looks rogue-like (Vanish anyone?), and I combed through the Blizzard fan art pages before finding the adorable puppy worgen picture. I couldn’t not use it, it was too cute. It also adds some levity to an otherwise dark interface. The minimap also spins based on how Lupor turns (like Frigida’s map), which looks incredibly creepy over the snarling worgen eyes.

What About You?

What does your UI look like? Do you use artwork like I do? Is everything flying across the screen or can you barely see anything most of the time? Is there an awesome AddOn that I’m missing? Drop me a line via email or in the comments! I’m always curious to see what other folks use.

Retro Raids: Class is in Session

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:37:00 +0000

A lot of the advice for raiding can be summed up on the little strips of paper inside fortune cookies. “Don’t stand in the fire.” “Bring consumables.” “Avoid as much damage as possible.” “Keep an eye on your threat.”

It seems simple enough, but where do we practice or learn these things? How do we know where to run? What does it mean to avoid damage on each encounter? Do you really need four eyes to watch threat while playing?

We’re supposed to learn these things in dungeons, but unfortunately random PUG groups aren’t forgiving of screw-ups and you need to know these things before you start raiding. So where can you go to learn to raid without wiping a raid?

A raid where wiping doesn’t matter!

“Ice, that sounds stupid.” Yes, yes it does. Allow me to explain what I’ve been doing.

Despite loathing it during Burning Crusade, I love Karazhan and run it semi-regularly, at least to hit up Attumen the Huntsman to see if he’ll drop his horse for me (no luck so far, old bastard). I’m able to solo the entire raid except for Netherspite, so sometimes I’ll keep going and kill an afternoon by raking in gold and netherweave and getting high off nostalgia.

Recently I met a critter named Screwlewse through Twitter, and he rerolled his warlock on Durotan to join the Amicus Fidelis family with a bunch of other tweeps and bloggers. He’s what you’d call a Cata baby – he started playing pretty much right when Cataclysm came out.

So I brought him into Karazhan for fits and giggles. Long story short, he loves the old raids as much as I do so we kept running them, and he’s developed a raiding mindset as a result.

What is a raiding mindset?

This is just my interpretation, but a raiding mindset is being able to think on your feet and interpret/react to things quickly. Fire? Move out of it. Dying? Use a small self-healing ability to ease up on the healer’s burden. Be a team player. You don’t just do your job. You do it well.

You don’t have to be told how to do every single little thing on every single fight other than major mechanics that are boss-specific, like the beams on Netherspite in Karazhan or the static triangle thing on Assad in Vortex Pinnacle. You can figure out how a wipe went wrong and whether or not it was your fault or if you contributed to it.

Raiders know what I’m talking about here, and forgive me if I can’t quite put it into words. It’s hard to describe.

How do you get these skills?

Through practice! Screw has been roasted, burned, thrown into the air, gnawed on by silithids, poisoned, cursed, and victimized by almost every raid mechanic out there. But has he wiped any raids because of it? No, unless you count killing me as wiping a raid (my ursine ass is not big enough to be considered a raid).

Normally it’s just the two of us. I tank as a bear and he throws around spells as a destruction warlock. We have no healer. That’s right, no healer. All of my healing comes from the feral talent [Leader of the Pack] and Screw has to make do on his own. Bandages, healthstones, [Drain Life], and whatever else warlocks do to keep themselves going. He’s a pretty hard critter to kill now.

It helps that we have large health pools compared to the content we’re doing, but that doesn’t always work out. Sometimes I’ll switch to resto and Screw himself will tank, but that’s not too common.

I don’t care if I die in these retro raids. When we do hit the floor, it’s often while laughing madly at something. Making a mistake doesn’t carry the same weight here as it does when you’re in the “big kid” raiding.

It’s like learning how to drive. Bumping a cone is funny. Bumping a Mercedes is not.

Skills by Raid

For the most part, we do anything below Tier 6. If we can find it, we’ll throw ourselves at it and see what happens. These are just my scribbled notes regarding the various raids we’ve done. The fights are a LOT more fun if you have no clue what the boss does before you start. Figuring it out as you go is half the fun in here. Our mantra was “Kill it before it does something.”

Molten Core
Other than navigating, this place is easy. Pulling 25 core hounds at once isn’t as scary as it sounds, but they’ll definitely give you hell if your timing is off. It’s a nice raid to show someone because it’s huge, it’s scary, and it’s exciting.

Majordomo Executus is the only tricky fight. Kill his healers first because trying to burn him down isn’t a pleasant experience.
Tier 1 gear drops here! Collect the sets to look badass. Druids, that’s the Cenarion set.

Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj
If you’re short on time, this is the raid to do. There are six bosses but you can skip three and still finish it. This is the smaller raid, and the mounts don’t drop here.

Kurinnaxx forces you to watch out for little sand dunes that drop your hit rating temporarily. He also stacks a Mortal Strike debuff that reduces the tank’s healing.
General Rajaxx hits like a truck but the waves of mini bosses aren’t bad. Say ahoy to knockbacks! Once you down him, pick a path to the left or right out of his room. Right is easier, left has more bosses.
Buru will teach you how to kite and DPS things strategically. You have to kill his eggs when he’s on top of them otherwise the fight will be miserable.
Ayamiss is fun for ranged, but nearly impossible for melee. Enjoy the adds!
Ossirian is brute-forceable, but much faster if you trigger the shiny pyramids when Ossirian’s buff is up. Just avoid the tornadoes!

Temple of Ahn’Qiraj
I think this is one of my favorite raids. The four silithid mounts drop here and the trash is easy. Several things knockback or punt people into the ceiling, so be careful you don’t get stuck somewhere. Grab some level 85 friends or guildmates for this one because two-manning it is very hard. Oh, and who doesn’t love the creepy C’thun whispers?

Prophet Skeram will Mind Control your friends. It’s painful but amusing if you can DPS hard enough. He splits into three copies, which is very disorienting the first time you see it during a fight.
Viscidus is impossible without a lot of frost-based abilities. Bring a mage if you can, otherwise skip him. If you can do him, he’ll school you on watching where you stand.
The Bug Trio will give you a hysterical show. They Fear, they heal, they drop aggro constantly. It’s like a comedy of errors with no real rhyme or reason so don’t expect to learn much from them.
Stick close in the gauntlet or the bugs will pile up quickly.
Twin Emperors are harder than C’thun himself, but you’ll need a caster to tank one of them and a real tank (or pseudo-melee tank) to grab the other.
Don’t die while inside C’thun. You can’t get back out (or if you can, we couldn’t figure it out).

Blackwing Lair
We did this with several guildies and a level 58 priestess (we pretended we were all elite bodyguards protecting her) and cleared everything without a problem. Our group plowed through everything so I don’t really have good learning notes for this one. Maybe one of the commenters has something to add here. We did manage to kill Nefarian’s adds in the shape of a llama or gazelle thing!

Karazhan
Like I said before, I love this place. The bosses themselves are easy to solo, so bringing a buddy is cake. Just make sure you go down the hall with the courtesans and listen to their conversations before you aggro them. A few of them have done freaky things with imps…

Moroes has the first “NPC’s as classes” fight that I can recall. You’ll figure out who is who very fast, and while Moroes is Vanished it’s a rather awkward moment.

“Where did he go?”
“Wait for it.”
“But what – OH GOD I’M BLEEDING!”

Romulo and Julianne in the Opera will reflect the core hounds of Molten Core in terms of killing things at the same time. Little Red Riding Hood is a “drop everything and run” experience.
Chess sucks if you’re bad at playing chess. It might take a few tries, and we had to switch pieces constantly to keep the king alive and focus fire down on the opposing warlord. We also had a UI glitch where the pet bars weren’t showing up properly.
Netherspite is impossible without at least three people to cover each beam. This is the epitome of a “watch your stacks” fight. You’ll learn to move quickly.
Prince requires raiding newbs to watch their range carefully. Your health will drop, you’ll shat brix, and then you’ll be fine. If someone isn’t used to seeing their health plummet, this will make them get over it. It’s more fun if you don’t warn them about the fire to see how they react.

Gruul’s Lair
This is another good quickie but requires a little more muscle. I hated this place in Burning Crusade but it’s a lot of fun now. The corpse run is tedious though.

The first “boss” actually has five bosses, each as a different class. It’s like an overblown version of the Bug Trio from AQ. There’s a whirlwind, polymorph, Fear, heals, knockbacks, and summoned demons. Your kill order will make or break this fight, and we used Screw’s voidwalker as a second tank here. We also had a rogue guildie join us.
Gruul himself is easy. Just stay away from each other and DPS hard.

Tempest Keep
Everything is so pretty and shiny and beautiful until you reach the bosses. I actually solo’d Al’ar myself (30 minute fight from hell), then later that evening brought in Screw and Platapoke (the rogue from Gruul’s Lair) for the other bosses. We couldn’t kill Kael’thas, though we’d like to give him another shot.

Void Reaver kept Screw constantly on the move, so casters will have to figure out how to DPS while running. As usual we had no healer, so Plat and I had to DPS the boss before the bubble bomb things killed us.
High Astromancer Solarian was hilarious. The trash before her was actually difficult because the mobs chain Mind Control people, but the boss herself has two stages. Melee will blow each other up if they’re not careful and the adds should appear self-explanatory. Pay attention to your proximity to others.

Serpentshrine Cavern
Where do I start. It was late in the evening, I was with Screw and Lifestruck (paladin guildie), and we hit up SSC in hopes of breezing through it. Boy were we wrong. This place is a wet nightmare. Like Kael’thas, we weren’t able to kill Lady Vashj due to difficulty and the late hour.

Hydross the water elemental is strange. I don’t have any notes on him, so just kill him quickly. He does a stacking debuff on the tanks so I switched off with Life a couple times. It was messy and uncoordinated.
The Lurker Below is a clusterfucked fight if ever I saw one. Kill adds, avoid a rotating AoE ability, and for the love of Elune stay out of the water. Your ability to DPS while moving/swimming and being knocked back will kick in here.
Leotheras the Blind is a cakewalk. We actually pulled him with two packs of trash and didn’t realize a boss was in the middle of it. Sorry bro.
Fathom-Lord Karathress makes up for Leo’s sissy-ness. He kicked our butts multiple times. We had to avoid a waterspout, constantly kill totems that popped up, and kill his adds all while killing him. If you’re solo healing, watch your mana and how you’re healing. Damage comes in spikes.
Tidewalker is a boss with easy adds and periodic “stop” moments. His murlocs were easily nixed, but the bubble-stop-it’s-hammer-time pauses were jarring, especially for Screw since he’s a caster. Self-healing is important.

Note the stellar DPS shown on Recount. We got her to 93 stacks of her buff before I finally died. At this point we were laughing pretty hard. To put it in perspective, you’re not supposed to let her get more than two stacks of her debuff because that was enough to wipe a raid back in Burning Crusade.

What do you remember from these old raids? Have you taught people in retro raids, or have you been taught in one? Does your guild run them regularly?

Guess Who’s Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:35:00 +0000

I’ve missed blogging and I’ve had the itch to write somewhere other than the Newbie Forum lately, so I’m back on Druid Main to pick up where I left off: RP stories, druids, interfaces/macros, and shenanigans. My goal is to have a post up every week, but that might change over the course of the year with college classes and such.

I will be posting RP stories again. Maybe not in a timely manner, but they’ll be popping up. Both Alliance and Horde storylines will spawn, introducing some characters that folks haven’t met yet.

I’ve been out of the loop for a long while, so if you’re a blogger that isn’t in my list or wants to be on my blogroll, email me! Or tweet me (@DruidMain). Come say ahoy at least.

So, did anyone miss me?

Community Grab-Bag and a Temporary Farewell

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:24:00 +0000

I’m taking a break from WoW for a little while to work on some larger writing pieces, schoolwork, and Pokemon.

Yes, I’m a Pokemon fan and have been for years. With the new versions coming out on March 6th I’ve rekindled my flame for the series and need some time off WoW. It’s not permanent and I will be back, but I do not know when…maybe a month from now, maybe longer. I figured I should dump all of my collected link love into a “final” post.

4.0.6 Patch News

Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket has an overview of the upcoming patch changes. Lissanna of Restokin has a similar overview with an updated healing guide.

New blogger Katarnas over at Resto Is Epic also has some great commentary on the patch changes.

I Still Dislike Wrath Babies

I knew my last post was going to pluck some nerves regarding players in Wrath transitioning to Cata, but Poneria of Fel Concentration has a brilliant response that combines fishing and politics. If you read my post, go read hers for another perspective.

Casual Raiding Information

Murloc Parliament posted another part of the Casual Raider’s Handbook series. The latest post outlines gearing up for casual players.

Night Elf Roleplaying

Draccus Moonsayer is the new Kaldorei on the branch. Go say Ishnu-alah to a budding writer with a pretty good style and give him some feedback if you can.

As for me, I’ll still be on Twitter (@DruidMain) and playing WoW a little bit, but the blog will be pretty much inactive. The only major writing I’ll do is for my fiction and on the Newbie forum.

Why I Dislike Wrath Babies in Heroics

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:20:00 +0000

I’m going to be blunt. I detest running random dungeons now because a lot of the players I meet tend to be Wrath babies. There are two schools of thought as to what constitutes a Wrath baby. One reflects a player who started the game in Wrath of the Lich King and “grew up” in a world of chain-pulling and infinite mana. If you started playing WoW in Wrath, then you’re a Wrath baby. I’m a BC baby myself. This isn’t what I’m here to discuss.

During Wrath, players developed a certain mindset and sense of entitlement, some with a touch of arrogance, because the content in Wrath was relatively easy compared to other expansions. A Wrath baby in the the other sense is a player who hasn’t changed since the Wrath way of doing things. I’m openly voicing my disdain for current Wrath babies, or players who haven’t changed into Cata babies to get with the program and adapt to the new content. They’re dragging down my dungeon groups to the point that I don’t want to queue for randoms without a guild group anymore.

“Ice, what a mean thing to say!” Bullcrap, I’m sick of holding hands through dungeons, teaching and re-teaching people how to do their job when they should have learned it by now.

These are heroics. At the level cap. You’ve had how long to figure out your class? How many resources are available to you at the tip of a search engine? I see far too many excuses from Wrath babies that think they can get away with poor performance and coordination.

Guess what: you can’t, and no one is there to carry you.

The main issue is the learning curve. Cataclysm is like a kick in the teeth compared to Wrath in terms of difficulty. We all have to do more practicing and fine-tuning before we get it right, and that’s to be expected. I have gold for repairs, extra consumables, and a second playlist in case of wipes on a bad spot in a dungeon. Personally I like tossing ideas around in a group to figure out how to orchestrate a pull. It’s interesting compared to the “brute force” method of Wrath.

But at the same time, the bar isn’t set that high. You can clear anything you want as long as you work with your group, learn from the screw-ups, and bring as much kickassery to the table as possible.

That’s where things fall apart.

Teamwork and Basic Coordination

Wrath babies don’t have it. They were raised under the impression that they can do whatever the hell they want in a group and everyone else will pick up the slack. And for a couple years, you could. In Wrath heroics, the DPS could pull a pack and do perfectly fine with one or two mobs. The healers would heal them because they had nothing else to do. Tanks didn’t take that much damage in the first place.

Fast forward to Deathwing’s reign and the DPS that pranced around merrily in Gundrak are kissing the floor in Vortex Pinnacle. The healers can’t spare mana anymore because they’re healing the tanks. Either the DPS get back in line and work with the flow of aggro, or they stop running instances. No one wants to put up with “that guy” anymore because they become a severe hindrance instead of a small distraction.

Should you break CC if you’re not the tank? No, of course not. You’ll start with aggro and interfere with what the tank is doing. So why the hell do people do this repeatedly? It floors me.

Tanks that charge into groups without using any crowd control are another issue. Yes, you have gear from heroics. Good job! No, you cannot handle that many mobs when your healer isn’t as well-geared or doesn’t have any mana. Remember the old adage “Healer mana = tank health” from the old days? We don’t stop to drink just to watch the character animation.

The healers aren’t off the hook either. Use your defensive cooldowns. I get that you’re not in tree form anymore, but for Elune’s sake use Barkskin or Shadowmeld or Warstomp if mobs are up in your face. You have a large toolbox of spells that aren’t just heals, so USE THEM. Don’t just stand there looking pitiful and delicious to mobs when you could be doing something.

It’s basic. You should have learned this in dungeon groups before. Hell even if you had a leveling partner you should have learned a thing or two when working with someone else. There are quests that make you work in groups, and several of the new Cata quests teach you things like moving out of the fire, always be casting, etc.

What About Newbies?

“Ice, what about newbies? They don’t know a lot of things!”

Newbies aren’t in heroics.

I’m fine with newbies when they’re in normal instances. Some people prefer questing all the way to the level cap, which isn’t a bad thing. You’re new to the dungeon? Use your map and ask questions if you don’t understand a mob pack or boss strategy. Communicate with your group. For the most part the newbies I meet are open to learning how things work, and some are even nervous about their performance. I’m a regular poster in the Newbie forum and it’s satisfying to help someone out.

The difference? Newbies want to learn. They don’t make excuses. A newbie will say “I need clarification on how this works” instead of a cocky “lol CC is for pussies.” A newbie doesn’t have a pre-defined mentality about groups that needs to be broken and rebuilt from the ground up. You could argue that 1-80 instances are mostly facerolls with little strategy needed, but that’s why we have normal Cataclysm instances. They’re a bit harder and you haven’t been facerolling for years before you reach the level 81+ dungeons.

Once you get to heroics, you better damn well know what you’re doing and what tricks your class has at its disposal. You’ve had 85 levels and various normal dungeons to learn this. No one is going to hold your hand and tell you you’re doing a good job when you’re the ball and chain strapped to the healer’s ankle.

Raiding Did This!

My magic 8 ball is showing me the flame emails now. “Wrath babies had it easy in raids!” and “They’re all noobs and casuals!” flying into my inbox.

No, this has nothing to do with raids. It’s about what happens in five-mans, dungeons, one-tank-one-healer-three-DPS groups, as a result of the Wrath way of conducting instances. You can make your own blog or email post about the raids and argue it until you’re blue in the face, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I don’t give a crap that you raided Naxx at level 60. Good job and grats, I guess. I hadn’t discovered the game back then, and I don’t think it’s fair to take that stance when talking about veterans versus other players. It honestly doesn’t matter what you’ve cleared, when you downed a boss, or how many teeth you had when you cleared it. When the expansions roll over, everyone has to adapt with it. Roll with the punches. Whatever you want to call it.

The idea that a guild needs a main tank (like, main tank) is dead. It doesn’t work anymore.
The idea that you can take undergeared people because they have heroism and other group abilities is dead. It doesn’t work anymore.
The idea that brute force works all the time is dead. It doesn’t work anymore.

Conclusion and Closing Thoughts

Am I saying that people who started playing in Wrath are stupid? No, that would be ignorant. Am I saying that you need to have raided Karazhan back when it had an attunement quest? No, because that has nothing to do with current instances. Players are a product of their environment, and the environment has changed. The players need to change too.

Each expansion is different. Players need to learn how to deal with the new content, and not just on a gameplay mechanics level. In Wrath you could pretty much work independently of your group and your combined brawn would power through mobs and bosses. Now you need more brains and less brawn, which is where players of ye olde thought process are throwing wrenches into the wheels of coordinated groups. That is why I dislike Wrath babies.

Leveling Benchmarks

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Wow, three weeks since my last post. Sorry guys, but with the new semester starting and recent writer’s block I’ve been putting Druid Main on the back burner. However things have calmed down so it’s time to knock off this blogging rust.

My druid is my main. She will always be my main. However I do have alts and I do dabble here and there from time to time, but I have trouble keeping up with professions, spells, and other important things that come with leveling. What should my rogue have by now? Did I really forget my mage’s mount for three levels? When do I need to start farming wool for First Aid? Having heirlooms doesn’t make it any easier because I zip past levels so quickly that I forget things more often.

Using my trusty TinyPad (seriously I love this AddOn), I’ve taken some notes based on what I’ve screwed up and figured out.

Professions

Take your level and multiply it by five. That’s where your professions should be at most. So a level 10 character caps out at 50 skill points, which is pretty good. As long as you’re in that general area (give or take 10 skill points) then your professions won’t fall behind. The pattern breaks around late Outland but until then it’s a good rule of thumb. I keep the minimap tracking turned on to Profession Trainers at all times so I can run around a city and spot the trainers easily, which reminds me to work on professions regularly.

First Aid and Mining Cheat Sheets

This has screwed me up on almost every single alt. When do I use what cloth? Should I work on tin or iron now?

First Aid [profession skill = cloth = character level]

1-80 = Linen Cloth = level 1-16
81-150 = Wool Cloth = level 16-30)
151-210 = Silk Cloth = level 30-42)
211-260 = Mageweave Cloth = level 42-52
261-300 = Runecloth = level 52-60
301-350 = Netherweave Cloth = level 61-70
351-425 = Frostweave Cloth = level 70-80
426-525 = Embersilk Cloth = level 81-85

Some ores are rare spawns from other ore nodes, so they’re not easy to farm. I’m also not including when to smelt your ore, so this is just a list of what to look for in various zones as you level up. The skill levels are based on when the next ore becomes available.

Mining [profession skill = ore = character level]

1-65 = Copper = level 1-13
66-125 = Tin (Silver @ 75) = level 13-25
126-175 = Iron (Gold @ 155) = level 25-35
176-230 = Mithril (Truesilver @ 205) = level 35-46
231-275 = Small Thorium (Rich Thorium @ 255) = level 46-55*
276-325 = Fel Iron = level 55-65
326-350 = Adamantite = level 65-70
351-375 = Cobalt (Northrend) or Rich Adamantite (Outland) = level 70-75
376-400 = Rich Cobalt = level 75-80**
401-425 = Saronite = level 75-80
426-450 = Obsidium (Cataclysm) or Rich Saronite (Northrend) = level 80-82
451-475 = Rich Obsidium (Cataclysm) or Titanium/Pure Saronite (Northrend) = level 82-85
476-500 = Elementium = level 84-85
501-525 = Rich Elementium = level 84-85

*You can’t go to Outland before level 58, so you’ll probably do Thorium for another few levels.
**This is where the “multiply your level by five” rule breaks.

Mounts and Druid Forms

Level 8 = Cat Form
Level 15 = Bear Form
Level 16 = Aquatic/Travel Forms
Level 20 = first land mount for everyone except Worgen!
Level 29 = Moonkin Form (balance talents)
Level 40 = epic land mount for everyone except Worgen!
Level 60 = Flight Form (go buy Azeroth Flying too!)
Level 69 = Tree of Life Form (restoration talents)
Level 70 = Swift Flight Form (requires epic flying training first)

Smart Pulling 101: Priority and Crowd Control

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Gone are the days of running headlong into camps of mobs without talking to your groupmates and expecting to live through a pull. If you’re going to make it in this post-Shattering world, you need to learn how to mark a pull and make the most of your brightly-colored tools.

The Pull

Let’s make a really ugly, horrendous hypothetical pull. Two casters and four melee. One of the casters is a healer, and the other is a mage with a huge damage output. Among the four melee are a rogue and three warriors.

Who do you kill first? Who do you take out of the fight?

The Priority

For pretty much any pull, you should follow the High Kill Order. It’s also known as the “Things That Suck to Tank” order.

Healers > Summoners > Gimmicks > Mages/Warlocks > Rogues > Warriors

Gimmicks are mobs that do odd things like mind control, put people to sleep, or some large area of effect move. Some dungeons have gimmicks that buff other mobs as well. Generally anything with a mana bar should die first.

For the hypothetical pull, you should kill the healer, then the mage, then the four melee if you have no crowd control. Wait – you have crowd control, you say? Well let’s use it!

Kill or CC?

This will depend largely on your group composition and personal preference. I’ve seen a few different ways to do ugly pulls:

CC the lesser mobs and focus on the big mobs
CC the big mobs and focus on the lesser mobs
CC all big mobs except for one, and burn it down with the lesser mobs

I normally do the third option, depending on how much CC I actually have at my disposal in the party and how bad the pull looks. The first option is usually reserved for easy trash pulls where CC is nice but not required and the mobs aren’t terrible.

The main rule is that if you have it, you should use it. There’s never a reason to not use some form of crowd control. Unless you’d be CCing every mob in the pull…then that’s just awkward.

Raid Icons…

You can play the game in any language, but the pretty, colorful icons are fairly universal. In general, this is what they mean:

Skull = kill this first
Cross = kill this second
Star = rogue Sap
Square = hunter Freezing Trap
Moon = mage Polymorph or a druid Hibernate
Triangle/Circle/Diamond = other crowd control like warlock Banish or priest Shackle Undead

When you’re assigning icons, always specify what they mean. Skull/Cross are universal but since we went an entire expansion without crowd control, a lot of people don’t know or remember what the others mean. Also some tanks might mark a Star for the rogue Sap, while others use the Circle, etc. Communicate with your group so everyone understands the pull.

You can put a raid icon into chat as a little picture by putting squiggly brackets around the icon’s name. For example, {skull} will come out as in chat. It’s handy for getting people’s attention on what they need to do if they’re CCing a mob.

Mark only what needs to be marked. Do not mark every mob in a pull unless you’re really going to CC every mob in the pull except one or two. Too many icons makes them lose their value and become redundant.

…and Macros!

To mark a mob, you can target it and right-click its portrait, then select Raid Icon and choose from the dropdown menu. You can also use macros to make marking faster. And you know me, I love macros for absolutely everything.

/script SetRaidTarget("target", #);

/script SetRaidTarget("mouseover", #);

The first will put the specified mark on your target. The second will put it on your mouseover target. Replace the # with the corresponding icon you want to use.

Star
Circle
Diamond
Triangle
Moon
Square
Cross
Skull
No icon (will remove the target’s icon)

But instead of making 9 separate icon macros, you can do what I did and go into the Keybindings menu and scroll down until you find the bind options for the raid icons. Since there are 9 options, I decided to use my NumPad 1-9 keys. They’re out of the way of my spells and such (so I don’t mark by accident) but clustered nicely so I can use them in a pinch.

Crowd Control by Class

Know your options! I have a page in TinyPad with this little cheat sheet. I’m only listing the main CC abilities, not shorter ones like fear or stun effects.

Rogue = [Sap] for humanoids, beasts, demons, dragonkin
- Cannot be used in combat, so use it before the pull starts
Druid = [Hibernate] for beasts, dragonkin
Priest = [Shackle Undead] for undead
Mage = [Polymorph] for beasts, humanoids
Warlock = [Banish] for demons, elementals

Doesn’t break on damage, so if the mob is in the middle of the fray it’s not detrimental

Warlock = [Fear] for anything

ONLY IF GLYPHED. If it’s not glyphed, it’s more likely to screw up a pull.

Warlock Succubus = [Seduction] for humanoids
Hunter = [Freezing Trap] for anything
- The hunter has to get aggro on it first, unless they use the Trap Launcher to freeze the mob on the spot
Shaman = [Hex] for beasts, humanoids
Shaman = [Bind Elemental] for elementals

Before people start emailing me: I know that priests can glyph their Psychic Scream like warlocks. But it only lasts 8 seconds, so it’s more of an emergency button than actual crowd control option, hence why it’s not in the list. Updated to add the warlock glyphed Fear note.

Warlock Meets Druid: Part 8 (final)

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:50:00 +0000

It has been a very long time since I posted for this story, but I finally have the last part done. If you’re new to the story or want to read the other parts from start to finish, visit the Best of Druid Main page and scroll down to the RP section. The part before this is here.

As always, comments and critique are welcome! This is the last chapter in this series, but it takes place just before Arthas is defeated (so it’s pre-Shattering/Deathwing).
===============================================

Ice took a powerful swipe across Nefaria’s face, but no blood was spilled.

Startled at the lack of pain, the warlock opened her eyes to find her face intact and without a scratch. The druid had ripped her mask off; it lay on the floor in several pieces.

“I’m not going to kill you,” the cat said bluntly, “for I have no reason.”

“But I couldn’t make the trade,” Nefaria replied in confusion, “so why not kill me? I’m apparently useless.”

“Not entirely,” Ice said, “but you’re no longer a member of the Defias, are you?”

The warlock looked down at the shreds of cloth on the floor as if a family heirloom had been shattered on the dusty stone. The Defias had been her life and home for the past five years. The idea of being detatched from her way of life was a hearbreaking feeling, even worse because the few people she could identify with had abandoned her readily. Suddenly her face fell and an overwhelming sense of loneliness seeped into her mind.

“No,” she answered slowly, “I guess I’m not. But what does that matter?”

“I don’t kill innocents, and petty thieves are a waste of my time,” the druid explained as she turned to leave. “Now go back to your family and don’t let me catch you with the Defias again.” One less Defias, and I didn’t have to kill—

“I have no family.” Nefaria’s whisper was barely audible, “The Defias killed them when they burned my home years ago. I was recruited to their ranks under the threat of being burned too.”

Right at the heartstrings, Elune damn.

“Well, if you’re not a member of the Defias, I doubt they’ll let you stay here,” the panther purred. After some deliberation she added, “But you could come with me, if you like. We’ll figure something out. And no, I won’t kill you.”

The woman glanced up and wiped away her tears. “Why? I’m terrified of you and you have no reason to want me.”

“The fear part can be remedied,” the druid chuckled, “and I never wanted to kill you in the first place. I’m not the violent type, but I can be persuasive otherwise. Besides, you have no other options unless you think being alone at night is a viable alternative.”

“You have a point,” Nefaria nodded, “and you seem to have more of a heart than Marisa Du’Paige.”

“I would think a rock has more of a heart than that harpy,” Ice snickered. And I’ll have the Militia on her ass by the end of the week now that I know where she is.

A shy smile spread across the human’s pale face. “I guess I’ll take you up on your offer. Just let me grab a few things before we go.” The feline nodded and watched as the woman rummaged through the dusty old trunk.

“Oh, I do have a question, and I hope you don’t mind,” Nefaria said timidly.

“Anyone with the nerve to ask a question deserves an answer.”

“What exactly are you?” she asked, dropping a few baubles into a cloth bag. “I can tell you’re not a human, but you can change into a bird and cat at will. I’ve only ever read about Night Elves being able to do that, but they’re a myth.”

“A myth?” Ice said, bewildered. “Since when is my race a myth?”

Nefaria almost closed her fingers in the trunk as she stood up. “Y-you mean…you’re a N-n-night Elf?” she stammered. “But the books…” her mind struggled to form a coherent sentence. “The books in the old town hall – there are only stories about Night Elves. I’ve read about them but I’ve certainly never met one.”

“History itself is a story,” the druid laughed. “I’m most assuredly real, and my people do exist though there aren’t many outside the military forces on this continent. It’s not surprising you’ve never met a Kaldorei.”

“A what?”

“I’ll explain on the way. I doubt you’ll be welcome here for much longer and we should leave before they come to collect your body.”

“Collect my body?” the warlock repeated as she stuffed a pair of gloves into her pack and pulled the drawstring closed. She stood and turned to face Ice, who tilted her head. “Oh right, they think you’re going to…kill me.” She swallowed hard at the thought. “Well, either you do it or Marisa will send someone to hunt me down.” She shifted her pack to her shoulder and looked uneasily down the hallway, as if expecting an assassin to appear.

“Well this won’t be the first time I’ve acted as a bodyguard,” Ice said, walking over to lean against Nefaria’s side. The furry touch was reassuring and the human relaxed a little. “Now then, how do we get out of here?”

“There’s an elevator in the main mine shaft that goes to the abandoned tavern, or we could go back the way we came,” Nefaria said, eyes still on the open door. “I could walk through relatively easily because I don’t think the news has hit the miners yet, but you’d stick out like a sore thumb. If only you could be invisible.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” the cat grinned toothily. She took a side step away from Nefaria and gradually faded from view in a shadow. Ice silently padded behind her, startling the warlock with a gentle nudge from behind.

Nefaria spun around but saw nothing there. “Wow, I never saw that coming,” she said to the empty room. “How did you do that?” Do her tricks never end?

“It’s a druidic skill, but one we share with rogues,” came the familiar voice from a new direction. “You lead the way and I’ll follow close behind.”

“How will I know you’re there?” The woman was wringing her hands nervously.

Poor thing, she’s not going to have an easy time with this. Ice put her muzzle on Nefaria’s arm and spoke, “You’ll feel me. I’ll always remain very close and if I do stray, I’ll come right back. Bear in mind I have to avoid disturbing everyone else. Relax and act normal.”

Gathering her nerves with a deep breath, the warlock started walking down the hallway. Her mind was spinning with fear…and excitement. What would happen if they were caught? What if she could really escape? What would it be like outside the Defias? She had never traveled outside Westfall before, and she was eager to explore past the farms.

Her thoughts were splintered by the ringing of metal picks on hard stone as they reached the main mine shaft. Ice had been bumping into her regularly as she walked, which was a comforting and strange sensation. Every few steps something furry would brush against her hand, but when she looked down there was nothing. Thankfully none of the brutes swinging tools noticed her gawking at the ground and she made her way across the open mine shaft without drawing any unwanted attention. She rounded the corner to the elevator when a rogue stepped in her path.

“Where’s your mask?” he demanded. It was one of the taskmasters under Marisa’s watch, evident by the blue trim on his leather. “You can’t leave without it.”

The color drained from the warlock’s face as she searched for a response. After a few tense moments she muttered, “It came off when I was outside. I’m going to go get it.” Just let me pass.

The taskmaster considered her response and stepped aside. “Alright, but don’t leave Moonbrook. You know the rules.” He yanked the lever to call the elevator for her and continued on his patrol of the mine shaft.

A sigh of relief would have escaped Nefaria’s lips had it not been for Ice bumping her leg, a sign she should keep walking. Instead she nodded at the taskmaster and slipped into the elevator, lingering before closing the door to make sure the druid had entered as well. The floor boards creaked loudly at bearing the invisible weight, causing the taskmaster to glare over his shoulder at the slight woman. Nefaria’s skin crawled under his gaze. It felt like the door couldn’t close fast enough.

“Nice excuse,” Ice remarked once the door closed. She remained hidden but sat down for the ride.

“I thought I’d buckle on the spot,” Nefaria replied. Without thinking, she reached out towards Ice’s voice and felt her fingers touch a soft ear. A low purr followed and the warlock noticed herself calming down.

“You did well, just try to relax. How much further?” the druid asked. The mine shaft was open space and easy. I just hope there aren’t close quarters up here.

“Not far but there are cobwebs on everything so be careful. You can’t teleport through walls, can you?” The pulleys and gears moving the elevator were grinding to a halt, screeching as the elevator stopped at the top floor.

“Unfortunately no, that’s a skill that mages and some warlocks have mastered,” the stealthed feline answered.

The human gawked. “Warlocks can teleport? How?” It would be handy right about now. I wonder what else a trained warlock can do?

“I have no idea,” Ice replied, trying to keep her voice low. “A trainer in Stormwind could probably explain it.” She nudged the warlock forward, ending the conversation.

Nefaria opened the rusty screen door and crossed the basement of the old tavern quickly, going up a few stairs before reaching the decrepit dining area. Chairs were overturned and gathering cobwebs, a couple of the tables were broken in half, presumably from a bar fight many years ago, and the shelves of liquor were lined with nothing but empty and shattered bottles. It was a depressing picture of age and neglect. Many times when she had passed through Nefaria wondered what the old building would have been like back in its heyday.

The mine shaft was easy to nagivate because miners constantly kicked up dirt and shuffled around, erasing Ice’s tracks. The tavern, however, hadn’t been touched in years and a thick layer of dust clung to every surface. To avoid leaving pawprints in the open, Ice jumped up on the bar and leapt between the broken tables and overturned chairs, using her tail to keep from falling. No one would look for large cat claws behind a broken bar stool or on a splintered tabletop. She managed to cross the room without making much noise and perched on a banister near the door.

Because she was across the room, Ice hadn’t bumped Nefaria since they exited the elevator. The warlock glanced over her shoulder and kept looking around the room warily, expecting to feel something furry at her fingertips. But the tavern was empty and she appeared to be alone. Where could she have gone between here and the elevator?

Fortunately Ice noticed her companion’s concerned expression and swished a cobweb with her tail, stirring up a small cloud of dust. She grinned when Nefaria saw it and nodded. The warlock composed herself and stepped outside, her fingers nervously twisting the hem of her cloak.

Moonbrook was eerily quiet. Nefaria had half-expected an ambush on the spot, but she walked swiftly toward the main road with her head down and cloak covering most of her face. Ice was at her side again, nudging her along when the air suddenly cooled. The dirt under their feet froze and a deep chill penetrated their bones. The druid struggled to keep going, but her breath was becoming visible in the cold air. Something was wrong.

A frostbolt came flying out from behind a barrel, striking Ice square in the shoulder. Her stealth broke as her leg went numb from the cold, but she grit her teeth and remained standing on three legs. Blood dripped where the shard made impact before dissolving.

“Thought you could get out alive so easily?” came a familiar voice. “No no no, we can’t have that. You’re either with us or against us.” Marisa Du’Paige appeared from the shadows, a Defias mage at her side.

Ice didn’t waste time and crouched, getting ready to lunge, but the mage thrust his hand out and sealed her paws to the ground with ice crystals. The growling druid pulled and twisted but couldn’t get free.

Nefaria, on the other hand, hadn’t moved. She just stared at Marisa with a blank expression. She was no longer fidgeting with the hem of her cloak.

“I’m leaving,” she said quietly. Ice stopped yanking at her paws momentarily.

Marisa smirked, motioning to the mage. The masked man drew up an icy ball of mana and launched it at the warlock’s chest, but it never hit the mark.

Fire moved from her fingertips, up her arms and down her legs, spreading across the frozen ground in a wide arc towards Marisa and the mage. Nefaria’s flames licked at their feet, their eyes wide in horror as they backpedaled in an effort to get away. Marisa tried to vanish but couldn’t get away from the strong heat. Her mage underling blinked around a corner and deserted his superior.

“You’ll never make it out there! You’re worthless!” the woman screamed as she ran away. The warlock looked emotionless as her flames danced over the dusty paths until the Defias disappeared into the darkness, leaving trails of scorched earth in their wake. Moonbrook fell silent once again.

The frozen shackles around Ice’s paws had kept her from being burned, but she was just as surprised as their attackers had been to see flames crawling across the ground.

“Are you finished?” she asked, not wanting to provoke another pyrotechnic outburst.

Nefaria looked at her and took a deep breath, then nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t know what was happening. Did I hurt you?”

She had no idea what she was doing…yet she did that. Stunned and confused, Ice just shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” She tried to take a step forward but collapsed, the flames having drawn her attention away from her own injury. “Okay maybe I’m not fine. My leg is numb,” she looked more closely before noticing the blood, “and apparently I’m bleeding.”

“Well at least the numbness is blocking any pain,” Nefaria said, trying to sound consoling. “Can you walk?”

“Not in this form,” Ice said. She shifted into an elf and the warlock cringed. Most of her arm was covered in blood, making for a gruesome sight, though as Nefaria had noted there wasn’t any pain because of the cold. “I can get to Sentinel Hill and work on healing this along the way.”

The druid noticed Nefaria’s uncomfortable expression. “Relax, I’ve been hit with worse and this will heal up easily. It’s just muscle.” She walked with her hurt arm opposite Nefaria so the woman wouldn’t have to see it.

“Sorry you were hurt.”

After a moment Ice replied, “Sorry about tonight.”

“It’s for the best, I suppose,” Nefaria said, finally having time to reflect on the past hours. She conjured a little ball of flame in her hand, watching it ebb and flow through her fingers. “I don’t belong in the Defias, though I don’t know where I belong or where I’m headed.”

The antlers on Ice’s cowl tilted to the side when she looked down at the human. “For now, you belong with me and we’re headed to Sentinel Hill,” she focused on the road ahead and added, “then probably to Stormwind to see about finding you a trainer.”

“A trainer? As in…a warlock trainer?” the woman asked, bewildered. The flame flickered.

“Your use of hellfire back there shows that you have a lot of potential and power, but you don’t know how to control or use it,” the druid explained while rubbing a healing spell into her arm. “I’m as far from a warlock trainer as you can get, so we’ll have to find someone who can help. One of the mages in that part of the city owes me a favor, and I’m sure he will know someone on the darker side of magic.”

T’was the Day After Cata…

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:09:00 +0000

…and I’m not leveling yet. Oh I have the account upgrade, the files are downloaded, and Ice’s bags are stocked with consumables for leveling. But I’m waiting a week because my friend Rith can’t play yet (she has finals – go Rith go!), and to cut down on the Twitter/Vent squee-ing I’m going to wait for her. It’s not fun for someone to read all the squee-ing and try to avoid spoilers when they can’t play, so for now I’m going to chill out. I have a little prot Tauren to level in the meantime so I’ll still have something to do.

Oh and RP. Lots and LOTS of RP will be up here during the holidays, so I’m not going to be as quiet around here. However my semester is winding down and I have one major final that’s a little worrisome, so I might be delayed in some RP posts.

Shattering Community Post

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:44:00 +0000

I feel like complete and utter dirt today, so I don’t have the will to post. Others do, however, and I’m going to be lazy and share the link love.

RestoDude and Restokin both have great druid guides for 4.0.3a.

Apple just got her Starcaller title, and being new to raiding doesn’t mean you can’t get awesome achievements. /envy!

Long-time Twitter buddy of mine Will has created a blog of his own (we’re good at peer pressure, yes we are). Go check it out and say hi.

AnnaBee is a Youtube critter that has LOTS of good info about Cataclysm for big and little druids. Also she has a nice voice. No seriously, I’ve watched every one of her videos and it never gets old. We don’t often find Youtube critters, so this one is very interesting and a change of pace from the usual RSS feed.

Miss Rith has been drawing pretty things. And by pretty things, I mean she has been ignoring my suggestions of doing stick people and actually drawing stuff that looks like art…which is probably a good thing, considering that I can’t draw.

There are new WoW forums and a new Newbie forum. If you can spare a moment to provide some answers or have a question you’d like to ask the veterans, pop over there. Other than being ugly and fixed-width, the forums aren’t that bad.

Huge Macaroon Setup Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:06:00 +0000

Because the lovely Miss Rith over at Polka DoTs and HoT Chocolate got fed up with Bartender, I kept nudging her to try Macaroon. To sweeten the deal, I told her I’d write her a setup guide if she tried it.

Well, she tried it. So now I have to hold up my end of the deal and write her a guide for it.

Here you go, Miss Rith.

Installation

This is the same for all AddOns. There’s a video guide from Ask Apadwe and my older guide still applies.

There are multiple parts to Macaroon. You’ll want to download the following components:

Macaroon (link) This is the base AddOn.
- This comes with Macaroon Profiles, so make sure that folder is in your AddOns folder as well. You’ll need it if you want to save a layout for use between characters or as a backup.
Macaroon Xtras (link) This gives you the bag and menu bars.
Macaroon Spell and Macro Binder (link) This lets you easily keybind macros and spells.
I don’t use this, but Macaroon Alerts (link) lets you move the alert and loot windows.

Right Out of the Box

It’s not that exciting once you install it. But we’ll make it exciting, I promise! To help, I have a cat.

Essentially you have two things showing: the menu bar and the bag bar. First we have to disable the Blizzard bars because they’re going to be in the way, and the whole point of this is so you don’t have to use them.

You can use “/mac menu” or you can left-click on the minimap button (it’s a red M).

Disable the Blizzard Main and Vehicle Bars by unchecking their boxes, then get into the configuration mode by either typing “/mac config” or right-clicking on the minimap icon and choosing “Bar Edit” mode. Nothing exciting happens until you mouse-over one of the bars and *gasp* IT TURNS BLUE! This means you’re in config mode, so right-click on either bar to get into the tools console.

The tools window is a complex-looking console, and right now it might be a little intimidating. Don’t touch anything yet (we don’t want to mess with the bag or menu bars for now) and just click on the “Create New Bar” button in the lower left corner. The text above it should turn from yellow to green, asking you what kind of bar you want to create. You already have a bag and menu bar, so let’s make a Standard Bar.

The text will go back to yellow and you’ll have a new bar listed called Bar 1. If you look below the console there should be a semi-transparent blue rectangle. That’s an actionbar. Now we get to do fun stuff to it!

Button Controls

The lower right part of the console is for adding and changing buttons. You can click on anything here and little arrows will pop up on the left and right, letting you change the values. The picture below has the buttons part selected.Curr State: If you have a shapeshift/stance bar or a bar with multiple pages, you can flip between them here. For example, if I wanted to change my Tree of Life bar without blowing my cooldown (or if I wasn’t resto at the moment) I could change the bar to be in the Tree of Life state while I’m configuring it. It’ll pop back to whatever state it was in previously when I leave config mode.

The padding speaks for itself. That’s how much padding you want between buttons in a row or column.

For now, we’ll leave those settings alone and give this little bar some buttons. Click on the right arrow until it has 12 buttons.Exactly, Macaroon Cat. Long lines are boring at both the supermarket and on your interface. You can change the number of columns on a bar to change how the buttons stack up. It works just like a multiplication table.

A 12 button line in 3 columns becomes a 3x4 rectangle. Likewise if we have 2 columns, we have a 2x6 rectangle.

Personally I use an 18 button actionbar that’s 3x6 for most of my spells and abilities, but you can have however many buttons you want.

Also if the number of columns = the number of buttons, it’ll be a regular line. If there’s only one column, then it’s a vertical line. You also might have noticed that if you don’t have a nice divisible number of buttons and columns (like a 3x4 block with only 10 buttons) the extra buttons will be centered on the top row. So whatever you do to the bar, it will still look centered and clean.

You can also change the number of columns in your bag and menu bars, just in case you want to change their look as well or need to make them fit into a certain space.

Visual Controls

There’s an actionbar with buttons on it, but it doesn’t look that great and Macaroon Cat doesn’t seem to be too enthused. Time to make it pretty. Note that all of this applies to your menu and bag bars too, so you can pretty them up.

Scale: changes the size of the bar, with 1.00 being the default size. Anything smaller gives you smaller buttons (all scaled down) and anything larger gives you larger buttons (again, all scaled up).

Alpha: transparency, with 100% being totally opaque (not see-through). Anything less makes it more transparent.

AlphaUp and AlphaUp Speed: how quickly the actionbar will pop into full alpha, if at all. You can use this so that a bar is faded out partially or entirely, then it goes into full alpha when something happens. For example, I have a bar with potions that’s semi-transparent when I’m not in combat, but it shows up fully when I’m in combat. You can change it to trigger on mouseover too.

Strata: If you have bars on top of one another, this dictates which will cover what. It’s like layers. I don’t overlap my bars so I don’t make use of this.

Autohide: Hides the bar when it’s not in use and doesn’t have any buttons (good for a vehicle or pet bar if you’re not a pet class).

Showgrid: Shows or hides empty buttons on the bar.

SnapTo and SnapTo Pad: If you have bars close to each other, you can make them snap together so they move as one bundle. I usually have my bag bar snapped onto the menu bar since they tend to move together when I’m configuring things. You can change the padding between the actionbars when they do snap.

Hidden: Hides or shows the actionbar (you won’t be able to access it outside of the config mode)

Dual Spec: Changes this actionbar when you switch specs in dual spec. If this is disabled, the bar won’t change regardless of your spec. Normally you’d only have this enabled on your main actionbar or actionbars since your bags and the menu bar don’t affect your spec.

Shape: Changes the shape of the bar.

Linear = lines with rows/columns
Circle = circle of buttons, where you can change their orientation and the arc of the circle. It also has presets for making arcs of buttons.
Circle + one = same as the circle, but with a lone button in the middle

Yes, Macaroon Cat. The bar can change with your shapeshifting, among other things.

Bar States

Because druids have the most shapeshift forms or stances of any class, we will have the most bar states. I’m sorry, that’s just how it is. You’ll have a state for each shapeshift form plus caster form, and you can opt to have a state for when you’re prowling. I use all of them because I cover all specs, but you can tailor this as you please.

I use the preset states to keep it relatively simple. There are three types of major states for a bar and eleven minor states. Think of them like conditions in a macro. “If X, then the bar does Y.”

Paged Bar: Like pages in a book, this gives an actionbar six pages that you can flip through using a keybind. You can change that keybind in the default Keybinding interface.
Stance: This is what we druids use. This will give you a state for each of your class’s stances based on what spells you have. Druids will have Cat, Bear, Tree of Life, Moonkin, Travel Form, Flight Form, and Aquatic Form. But you will only have access to the states you can shapeshift into. If you’re a level 15 druid, you will only have Cat and Bear states.
Pet: It will put your pet buttons onto this bar. To be able to see your pet’s minimum number of buttons, you need to have 10 buttons on this bar. More is cool, but fewer means you’ll be missing abilities.

The minor states give you a bar in the “background” that you can edit independently from the normal state. You can also have multiple states on one bar.

Prowl and Stealth: Druids use Prowl. Rogues use Stealth. Yes, there is a difference.
Vehicle: When you get into a vehicle, the bar will show those controls if you assign them here.
Possess: You’re forcibly shapeshifted (like the last boss in Drak’Tharon Keep, or if bitten on Blood Queen Lana’thel) this will show your “new” abilities if you assign them here.
Fishing: Shows when you have a fishing pole equipped.
Combat: Shows when you’re in combat.
Reaction: Changes if your target is hostile.
Group Bar: Changes if you’re in a party or in a raid.
Alt, Shift, Ctrl Key: Changes if you’re holding down one of those modifiers (no combos).

Druids will probably want the Stance and Prowl states enabled on their main actionbar. To cycle through the states on your actionbar in config mode, just left click it. The little title of the bar at the top will change to tell you what state you’re looking at currently. You have to manually add buttons to each bar state, because they act like individual “bars” just tucked onto one element.

So if you want all of your shapeshift states to have 12 buttons, you have to flip through the Curr State bit and add buttons to each of them. Tedious? Not really, since you just have to click the arrow to make/delete buttons. And they line up oh so nicely.

Meta Bar OptionsThese are mostly minor options that speak for themselves. You can hide the bar in combat, lock it so you can’t throw it across the screen by accident (or choose to have a key to let you move it outside of config mode), enable/disable spell tooltips on the bar, show enhanced tooltips when in config mode, and toggle spell outlining when things are activated.

The Spell Activation Glow is awesome, and it works with the new visual alerts Blizzard gave us. When you’re in Tree of Life form, Wrath and the other special tree spells light up like holiday lights. On my hunter, his Focus Fire gets shiny when his pet has 5 stacks of Frenzy. It’s very handy, but some people might not want it enabled.

Types of Buttons (Some Troubleshooting)

Macaroon is very sneaky with how it handles different things on the buttons. You see, there are actually three types of buttons: macro, action id, and pet id. When you’re changing out abilities and things on the bars, you might run into a problem where a button won’t “accept” what you’re trying to put in it. Fret not – we can fix that!

To go into button edit mode, type “/mac edit” or go to “Button Edit” from the minimap menu.

By default, every button is a macro. Macaroon auto-writes it and it doesn’t take up any space on your normal macro window, so don’t fret. When you click and drag your spells from the spellbook or items from your bags, they’ll go into the macro buttons with no issue. It’s simple.

When you click and drag macros from your actual macro window, they’ll go into action id buttons. These are created automatically, but unlike macro buttons they have unique numbers. Anything from 1-121 is part of the default UI (those are assigned to the default ugly bars). Anything at or above 222 is part of a vehicle bar on the default interface and won’t be nice when holding macros you create. For a vehicle bar or possession bar, you’d want to make sure the buttons (even when empty) have action id’s at or above 222.

The pet id is probably obvious: it holds abilities that would normally go on the default pet bar. They’re also numbered, but only go from 1 to 10. They can ONLY hold pet abilities, so you probably want a unique pet bar for your UI. When you make a pet bar, the buttons should automatically pop up with pet abilities in them if you’re a hunter or warlock or have a controllable pet out.

To change a button’s type, just left click it to cycle through pet/action/macro. To change the number of a pet or action button, right-click it and use the slider on the right side of the window to change the number.

You might have issues when moving written macros around with normal spells, so if a button is being stubborn, check what type of button it is. It should only take a few clicks to change.

Keybinding

You’ll never have an issue using this part of the mod. Seriously. Never. It’s so easy, so simple, so beautifully streamlined. To enter keybinding mode, type “/mac bind” or “Edit Binds” on the minimap menu.

To bind a button, just hover your cursor over it, press the key you want to bind, and that’s it. To clear a keybind, just press Esc when hovering over it. I’m not kidding, that’s all you do. You can bind multiple keys to a button, or if a bar has multiple states then one keybind can apply to multiple buttons.

For example, I have 1-5 bound on my main actionbar. So the first five keys when I hold down Ctrl, Alt, nothing, or shapeshift all have the 1-5 keybinds. It’s very nice and saves time instead of having to do every button in a bar’s states.

Things To Remember

If buttons are being stubborn, check the type and/or number.
You have to add buttons to each bar state individually, but it’s not hard.
Bar states can let you combine different types of bars into one.
Use columns to change shapes of linear bars.
Keybinding is easy.
Ice writes REALLY long, detailed AddOn posts.

Commence with questions, comments, critique! Did I forget anything? Was this useful?

Cataclysmic Mod Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:55:00 +0000

Ahoy.

My name is Ice.

And of course, I’m still addicted to AddOns.

Seriously, did you think a mere expansion patch would change my ways? HAH! Nothing shall foil my plot to take over my own computer screen with a grand interface! Now then, on to the good stuff. First, the master picture, taken out of combat and without a group.Click for a full-size image in a new window/tab. This applies to all images in this post.

Basic Visible Framework

Actionbars: Macaroon
I really love Macaroon because it’s so easy to bind keys and change buttons around. It’s really cleaned up from its 3.0 version and in general it’s more user-friendly. In total I have 18 buttons for each shapeshift form, plus 18 each when you hold down Ctrl and Alt. My vehicle/pet bar is hidden when I don’t have one active, and I have an extra little 6-button bar with pages. I just hit the + and – keys to flip through most of my non-combat stuff (gear sets, mounts, etc).

Minimap: SexyMap
There really aren’t words to describe how sexy this AddOn is. My map looks like a portal to the Emerald Dream. You can’t get much more druidic than that!

Chat frame: Chatter
Blizzard’s default chat frame royally sucks because it can’t fit into the far corner of the screen (it has a 10px buffer around it) and the buttons on the side irked me to no end. I use Chatter to shorten channel names, hide the buttons, and resize that frame itself.

Unit frames: Shadowed Unit Frames (suf)
I was an XPerl fangirl. I used it for three years, through BC and WotLK, but it just wasn’t working out between us. I wanted to change buff displays and move the party frames to fit my new UI in ways that XPerl just couldn’t do. So I switched to suf and haven’t looked back.

Viewport: SunnArt Viewport
Viewport mods are special. They push your screen up/down/sideways to change the resolution of your viewing area. This is so you can make a faux widescreen display and have more space to put AddOns and things without actually covering your viewable area on the screen. I love Sunn because of its art packages, plus you can create your own artwork to use. The leafy skin works perfectly on Ice’s interface.

Info bar: Titan Panel
FuBar died in 4.0, and its replacement Bazooka just sucked because you needed a converting mod to use the old mods from a dead mod, and it was too messy for me. So I reverted to my BC favorite Titan Panel. It’s actually a LibBroker display AddOn that lets other mods hook into it. For example, I have AtlasLoot. When it detects that I have Titan Panel too, it puts a little link to AtlasLoot’s window on the bar. Nifty, right? Omen and Recount can do the same thing. It takes some of the minimap button clutter off my “portal” and moves it up top and out of the way. There are also plugins that show your gold, currency, experience, professions, etc. It’s terribly useful.

That’s really all you can see in that picture since I keep so much hidden.

Hidden Things Everyone Uses

Combat statistics: Recount
I absolutely HATE having to deal with its window because it can’t fit anywhere easily on my setup. Plus when you scale the window size down, the font shrinks with it so it’s hard to read. I need a replacement or way to hide it unless I want to toggle it on to see it. Honestly if I wasn’t interested in seeing the statistics sometimes, I’d just uninstall it altogether.

Threat meter: Omen
Again, I dislike having it on my UI in the first place because it just can’t fit anywhere nicely, but at least it only shows when I’m in combat and actually need to watch threat.

Loot tables: AtlasLoot Enhanced
It’s not updated to show the new currency changes, so everything still shows in the old emblem costs. A new alpha version has the currency changes, but it doesn’t have the wishlist function.

Combat warnings: Deadly Boss Mods
Not much to say here. Everyone should use some form of combat warning AddOn so they don’t stand in bad crap or miss a transition on a fight.

Casting bars: Quartz
The default casting bar is just…ugly. Quartz shows a pretty bar that you can move around, reskin, and it shows the small window of latency where you can cast another spell before the first one finishes.

Ice’s Fun Toys

With all the boring things I use, I have pocketed a few nifty little do-dads.

Align puts a grid over your entire screen so you can line things up perfectly and have stuff nicely centered. It’s an OCD chick’s dream come true.

TinyPad is back in my interface as a little notebook of reminders. You can add/delete pages, link items and spells, and hide it when you’re not using it. If you use a LibBroker display AddOn like Titan Panel, it hooks in there with a little piece of paper. Mouse over it and you can see your pages (pictured).

CoolLine is a bar that moves cooldowns across it as they become usable. When the cooldown is up, the icon gets really big, then fades after a few seconds. Ice’s bar is horizontal and moves right to left with a green skin (looks like a vine), while Arrowhoof’s bar is vertical and moves bottom to top with a brown rough skin (pictured). It disappears from view when nothing is on cooldown.

NPCScan will alert me if there’s an Outland or Northrend rare spawn within targeting range. The only downside is that it won’t alert on a mob if you’ve seen it recently, so I have to clear my Cache folder if I’m hunting something specific. It also triggers a false alarm on hunter pets, so if I see a hunter with Skoll out, I won’t be able to use NPCScan to hunt Skoll in the wild later on.

When it alerts, it plays LOUD war drums, flashes red on the screen, and shows a little 3D model of the mob just above the minimap. It’s fantastic for hunters that are looking to tame rare spawns. I used it to get Gondria and Arcturis on Arrowhoof. As a plus, it also works when using Eagle Eye to see far away.

Rare Spawn Overlay is similar to NPCScan, but it puts a colored area on the map of a zone to show where rare spawns patrol or spawn. It’s color-coded for each spawn, so overlapping areas are easy to see.

TipTop lets me move where the default tooltip appears (like when mousing over a player). Since I have unit frames in the lower right corner, I moved it up a little. I also reskinned it so it fits with the rest of the interface. Overall it’s very user-friendly and easy to use right out of the box.

Awwwww! is a tongue-in-cheek AddOn. It plays one of the death sounds from Super Mario when I die, so instead of being frustrated I tend to snicker before releasing my spirit and running back. Come on, who doesn’t recognize and smile at the Super Mario sounds? Gotta love those polytones.

Hunter and Druid Interfaces

I’m getting intrepid for Cataclysm. Each of my active characters will have a slightly different interface. Most of it will be the same (unit frames, keybinds, etc) but little details will vary between classes. Here’s a comparison between Icedragon and Arrowhoof.
The main difference is that Arrowhoof always has a pet out so he needs the pet bar to be visible at all times. Icedragon uses a paged bar for her 6-button actionbar (I press + and – to flip through rows) while Arrowhoof uses a Ctrl and Alt paged bar that’s similar to the main actionbar. The bars around the minimap are switched around a bit.

The artwork is different too. Arrow has a Tauren theme while Ice is rather leafy. It’s a good way to get into the vibe of whatever class I’m playing…and an excuse to fiddle with pretty things :) Not sure what I’m going to do for my upcoming worgen or shaman or paladin. And if I pick up my priest/warlock pair I’ll have to do something special for them.

Turn of Events

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:19:00 +0000

I left Moon Guard. The jerks and dumbassery/bullying was getting to be too much, so I transferred Icedragon to Durotan after finding Cynwise’s guild through Twitter connections. So far they’re a very friendly bunch and I like their raiding atmosphere, so we’ll see how it goes. Right now they’re relaxed on the raiding front, which works for me because I have college work to do and WoW is winding down before the expansion.

Speaking of expansions, until Cataclysm drops I’ve been pretty bored. I gave up on getting the Kingslayer title due to lack of a competent raid leader (plus I got Nightfall on a random night, which sounds better than Kingslayer), so instead I’m filling out some easy achievements and stockpiling things before the world is destroyed. I’m also writing. A lot. The Warlock Meets Druid story might wind up having two final parts, depending on how the editing turns out.

Oh and Arrowhoof is fully fleshed out and will be a regular subject on Druid Main in Cataclysm. Think of him as comic relief from constant tree-hugging and paw-licking around here. No, I still have no idea how to play him…and that bumbling around will probably show in his stories :)

So what are you guys doing to avoid burnout before December 7th? Anything major? Last-minute grinding?

Still Here

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:48:00 +0000

Yes, I am still here. I’ll be posting this weekend. Things have been delayed by college, through I’ve been working on an interesting project about identity and online gaming for my English/thinking class.

Oh, and the Warlock Meets Druid story will go to beta readers in the somewhat near future ;)

BlizzCon: Day 2 (Class Q&A)

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Feedreaders need to click through to the blog to see it.

BlizzCon Day 2: Class Q&A

BlizzCon: Day 1 (Costume Contest!)

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:37:00 +0000

If you’re in a feed, you have to click through by the way.

BlizzCon Day 1: Costume, Dance, Song Contests

BlizzCon: Day 1 Live Raid

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 23:10:00 +0000

BlizzCon Day 1: Live Raid

BlizzCon: Day 1 Liveblog (part II)

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:36:00 +0000

BlizzCon Day 1: Quests and Lore

BlizzCon: Day 1 Liveblog

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:18:00 +0000

BlizzCon Day 1: Dungeons and Raids

Liveblogging BlizzCon 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Icedragon) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:54:00 +0000

Didn’t get a BlizzCon ticket? Can’t order the online internet stream? Fret not!

I’m liveblogging BlizzCon via Cover It Live again!

Liveblogging?

What is liveblogging, you ask? It’s where I blog…live. I ordered the BlizzCon online stream again and I’ll be posting updates, tidbits, and anything Warcraft-related as I watch. The Cover It Live client is embedded into a post and looks like a glorified instant messenger. People can send comments, vote on dynamic polls, and ask questions as I’m reporting on the BlizzCon events.

There will be a liveblog post for each day of BlizzCon. When the event closes, a transcript will be available immediately so you can see what you missed.

Guest Bloggers!

Apple of Azeroth Apple will be joining me on Friday, and Velidra of Emberstorm will be adding commentary on both days.

Are you a blogger that’s interested in liveblogging with us? Contact me via Twitter (@DruidMain) or email (icedragon [dot] wow [at] gmail [dot] com). You can pick and choose what events you comment on. Spread the fun around!

Schedule

The full BlizzCon schedule is here (all times are Pacific). We won’t be covering all of it, but we will cover a lot of the Warcraft panels/discussions.

Friday, October 22, 2010
- Dungeons and Raids @ 1:30pm-2:30pm (4:30pm-5:30pm Eastern)
- Quests and Lore @ 3:00pm-4:00pm (6:00pm-7:00pm Eastern)
- Live Raid @ 4:30pm-5:30pm (7:30pm-8:30pm Eastern)
  - Not 100% sure if we’ll have much to cover during the Live Raid, but it should be amusing anyway.
- Costume, Song, Dance Contests @ 6:00pm-8:30pm (9:30pm-11:30pm Eastern)
  - I have a raid to attend, but Apple and Velidra will be holding down the fort along with any other bloggers that want to join in.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
- Class Q&A @ 12:00pm-1:00pm (3:00pm-4:00pm Eastern)
- Open Q&A @ 1:30pm-2:30pm (4:30pm-5:30pm Eastern)

You ordered the stream too? Well chime in with us! It’ll be a bucket of fun.