Farm raid

Continuing on in Hillsbrad, I headed on over to the farms to take out some farmers. Who do the Alliance think they are? We can't have them farming that land, it's just not right. Well that quest went pretty easily, up until a couple level 33 Alliance showed up, a hunter and a shaman. Now I was only level 25, and they were chasing down two Hordies, both around my level, a warlock and something else (don't know because he died before I had a chance to check). Well it's my duty to avenge my fallen comrade, right? I ran in, rooted the hunter and his pet, taking out some of the shaman's totems at the same time, and proceeded to blast away at the hunter. It's pretty annoying having half your spells resisted, but me and the warlock managed to take down that hunter before the shaman finished us off. By the time I had made my way back and rezzed they were gone, and I was done with the quest anyway, so I headed back and was once again screwed by drop rates.

I needed to collect mountain lion blood for some experiment for one of the Forsaken in Tarren Mill, so I set out killing as many mountain lions as I could. After about 10 of them I got one vial of blood...and I needed 10, so I knew it would be a long grind. Well after about 10 more mountain lions I had 5 blood, so the drop rate was getting better...but not for long. There just happened to be a few other Horde on the same quest, at least that's what I'm assuming, but I never actually saw any of them, just the corpses of the lions they had killed, so I was stuck hunting down any lion I could find, and they weren't easy to come by. Took me a while, but I did it and turned in the quest.

I think I'll save the rest of Hillsbrad for later, right now I'm going to be heading over to Ashenvale to do some questing over there as I will be outleveling some of the quests there and I want to get the easy XP. Needless to say, I spent the rest of my play time travelling, stopping at the trainers to learn my new skills and turning in various quests that went to NPC's in the main cities. I also figured it was a good idea to learn the teleport spells for each major city, so now I have all but Thunderbluff, and I will get that next time I'm there. I forgot about mages being able to port themselves, this will save a lot of travel time and I won't have to worry too much about where I set my hearthstone. I then flew to Ashenvale and decided to call it a night. I find more than an hour or two at a time is plenty for me, unless I'm doing somethine specific, but just questing can get tiresome and I find after an hour I'm usually antsy to do something else. I'm really looking forward to future mage adventures, this class is very fun to play.

Good old days

Didn't get to play at all yesterday, had some RL aggro come up that needed my attention, but now that I'm questing in Hillsbrad again I got to thinking of the old days, before TBC, even before BG's, when Hillsbrad was one of the most contested zones in the game. Being on the Alliance side of things up until now I was only ever able to see it from that perspective. I remember flying into this zone, before continuous flight paths were implemented, landing with the intent of continuing on to the next flight path, only to find that the flight master was dead and there were dead bodies scattered all over the area.

The main goal of the Horde always seemed to be taking over the inn and camping out in there, and there was one time that I remember that they accomplished this, and we had a hell of a time getting them out. The tough thing about this situation is the only way you can really get them out is to kill them all at once and then stay inside so that they can't just rez inside again. The problem with this is the setup of the inn, with only one entrance they can just blast you if you come through one by one, so you have to zerg the place and hope you can overwhelm them. If they are able to hold you off, the ones you killed will rez back inside and you will have to start over from scratch. The only other defense was to wait until they got bored and left on their own.

Hillsbrad wasn't like STV, with the extent of PVP being random ganking across the map. Raids on Southshore and Tarren Mill were organized and fun to be a part of, even if you weren't really high enough level to do much good. This was really the first battleground, and is actually more realistic than how the BG's are now. No tower capping or silly objectives, this was flat out war, trying to take out a town full of enemies, showing no mercy. This is how I imagined a Warcraft MMO when I first started, basically instead of commanding all the units in your army, this time you are one of those units, but you have a lot more control over how that particular unit contributes to the outcome of the battle. I guess that sort of game wouldn't have gotten as big of a following though, and I'm not sure how they would implement the other aspects of the Warcraft RTS games, such as gathering resources and constructing buildings.

Now I find that I miss the raiding PVP aspect of Hillsbrad. Oh sure, every so often there will be a raid on Tarren Mill for old times sake, but it's not the regular thing it once was, and with so many PVP options right now that net you rewards, I don't think it will ever be the same.

It's been a while since I quested in Hillsbrad, and I noticed this to be the case as soon as went to turn in my quests at Tarren Mill. I kept seeing the defense channel announcing that we were under attack but when I got there I expected to see the town wiped out with a bunch of Alliance running around killing the lowbies and basically wreaking havoc. Instead, I found two Alliance sneaking around the town, avoiding the guards and killing someone every so often, not really causing too much trouble, and then a few Horde 70's rode in and put an end to them. Very anti-climactic from what I remember it being, but when you can earn honor and badges from other forms of PVP which will get you some good items, the drive isn't there anymore to raid towns in normal zones. I suppose it's nice to not worry so much about being ganked in the middle of your own town, but it always made for some fun surprises any time you ended up there. Seeing a raid of enemies try to charge into your town and watching another raid of your own faction holding them off was what I looked forward to every time I found myself in Hillsbrad. Now it's just a regular zone where the Alliance and Horde towns just happen to be pretty close to each other.

I'm excited to see the new PVP zone in the expansion and how that will play out. So far the world PVP stuff hasn't been that popular, but with new seige weapons and buildings you can destroy I think it might be a change of pace that everyone needs.

Redemption

I guess Blizzard saw my last post, because when I went back this weekend to get the last three mana gems I needed I only had to kill five mobs to get them. I continued on toward Hillsbrad, stopping off in a tunnel to kill some wolfmen on the way, but that didn't take too long and I headed out again along the path. On the way I talked to a guard at the tower just past the border and promised to take his message to Tarren Mill. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and I made it to town without any trouble. From this point on most of the quests I will be doing I have never done before, so I'm pretty excited.

After updating the citizens of Tarren Mill on everything going on in the rest of the world, they told me about some quests they wanted me to do for them, and since they were offering some pretty good rewards I agreed to help them out. First up was dealing with the Syndicate in Durnholde Keep. They had captured two orcs and were holding them captive so it was up to me to save them, and then kill a bunch more of them for good measure to let them know they should never do that again. I was also asked to collect some items off the bears and spiders wandering around in the hills, so I made a point to gather those too as they were on the way. I made it to Durnholde and killed everything in my path, making my way up the hill to save the first captive, then back down and to the sunken area to save the second. Each captive had a ball and chain around his leg, but luckily the jailers that had the keys were close by and while they put up a little bit of a fight, I showed them a few fireballs and picked up the keys from their charred remains.

After leaving Durnholde I made my way back to Tarren Mill to tell them the good news, and on my way I killed more bears, many more actually because for some reason not very many of them had tongues, which leads me to conclude there is some inbreeding going on. After finding enough normal bears to kill I ran back into town, not knowing there was an high level Alliance rogue on the loose wreaking havoc on the townsfolk. I managed to get stabbed in the back a few times until he was chased off, only to be replaced by another high level Alliance bastard, this time a priest. He was mean and threw a Shadow Word: Pain on me and just watched me die to it. He was eventually chased off too and I was finally able to meet back up with the quest givers and turn those in for some sweet rewards. Now they're asking me to go kill some farmers, which sounds like fun, but I'll be saving that for next time. Dealing with the Syndicate was enough for one day, I'll get my revenge on the Alliance when I am rested up again.

Overall a pretty productive weekend for how little play time I have been getting recently, and after tonight those Alliance farmers should be burnt to a crisp as well.

Drop rates and revelations

One of the most annoying things I run into in this game is how bad some of the drop rates are. I'm not talking about epic drops from bosses in the end game raids, I mean how often certain quest items drop from mobs. I finally got to play a little yesterday and going through Silverpine on my way to Hillsbrad I had a couple quests to do that I though would be pretty quick. Well let's just say that by the time I had to log out I hadn't even finished the first one yet, and when I started I thought I had plenty of time to do both quests and run to Tarren Mill. The quest I'm referring to is one where you have to pick up linen cloth and mana gems from mages in southeast Silverpine, I believe it was called Ambermill. Needless to say, the cloth was dropping like usual, but after getting 3 of the 6 mana gems I needed they just pretty much stopped dropping. I think I killed a total of 30 or so mobs, and only had 3 gems to show for it. Now in some cases a 10% drop rate is pretty good, maybe when you're farming hard to get materials or trying for an epic boss drop. This drop rate is not good for quest items however, it's just plain annoying.

Anybody who has played Alliance knows about the two horrible Westfall quests, Westfall stew and goretusk liver pie. Westfall stew requires killing a few different mobs for the quest items, one of them being goretusks, and the other just requires some goretusk livers...also found on goretusks. Naturally we do these quests at the same time as it will save time, right? Well, after many times going through these quests (probably about 9 times or more) I'm going to say you're probably better off skipping these altogether. Maybe do Westfall stew since it's not as bad, but for some reason those goretusks never seem to have a liver. So if you finish Westfall stew and haven't collected enough livers yet, you may as well just give it up, you'll waste more time trying to finish it than the reward is worth. Actually, now that leveling is faster, there are many very long quests that you can feel free to skip if it's going to hinder your leveling as you will probably still outlevel a zone before you finish all the quests there.

I'm a little excited about what I will be doing next with my mage. I'm at the point where I will be going to zones and doing quests I've never done before as the furthest along Horde characters I've had didn't get to much higher level than my mage and they did zones in a different order. I don't think I've ever quested in Hillsbrad before as Horde, and anything past that will be a new experience, this is exactly why I can keep coming back to this game, I would have probably quit a long time ago if there wasn't so much you could do.

A few months ago I had 9 characters on Alliance, one of each class, all on the same server so they could support each other. Of those characters, 5 of them were over level 40, and I consider that beyond the point of deleting, I just can't justify deleting a character when they get past that point, it's too much play time wasted. The other 4 characters I played into their teens and some into their twenties, but I came to a point where I was dreading trying to level one up since I would be going through all the same stuff I've been through multiple times before. Seriously, if you dread logging on to a certain character, they don't deserve to be kept around, so I went on each of the lower level characters, sent their gold and anything else valuable to my keepers, and deleted them, a little bit of a waste, but I couldn't stand to see them sitting on that server never getting played. It isn't because I didn't enjoy playing their specific classes, it was just getting too monotonous with all the same content over and over, so I decided in order to play those last 4 classes I would roll Horde, and I have yet to regret that decision. I will always support the rolling of alts to keep boredom away, and starting a new class can be a new experience in itself, but sometimes doing all the same stuff as a different class just isn't enough, so if you're really looking for a way to spice up the game you have to try the other faction.

Happy Friday everybody!

More Anime

Haven't gotten much play time this week, so I'm going to add to my list of anime that I started in a post a while back. I would check out that list first as those are my favorites, this list will be more anime I liked but aren't quite up to par with the others. And without further ado, the list:

D. Gray Man (getting closer to being on my top list, series is still running though)
Darker Than Black
Paranoia Agent
Outlaw Star
Ninja Scroll (the series)
Basalisk
Law of Ueki
Hikaru No Go
Noein
Fushigi Yuugi
Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien
Wolf's Rain
Inuyasha
Blood+
Gundam Wing
Now and Then, Here and There
Tenjou Tenge
G Gundam

I know I'm leaving out some but I'll get to those some other time, and if you manage to get through both lists then you're pretty well versed in good anime, at least in my opinion. Feel free to make suggestions of what I might like too, I'm always looking for new shows to watch.

Surviving a PVP server

We talked last time about the mentality of PVP servers and how your faction may affect your gameplay, but there are other factors that play into this. One big factor is the faction ratio of your server, and this does not play out as simply as it would seem to. I'm not really sure how, but both my Horde and Alliance characters are on servers where their factions outnumber the opposing faction. Yes, there are servers where Horde outnumbers Alliance, but they are the minority, although I'm sure the addition of Blood Elves helped out. Now you may be thinking I got it made in the shade, because obviously if my faction has more than the other side I should have more reinforcements to call on if I get in trouble with PVP, and therefore would get ganked less.

Not quite.

See, I'm not too far in on my Horde server so I can't speak for them, but I do know that when I play on one of my Alliance characters the Horde tend to be more aggressive rather than less, despite being outnumbered. Not only that, but they also tend to travel in groups more often, whereas Alliance will travel around solo, making it easy for Horde groups to pick us off. I know some say Horde are usually better players, they are the ones that don't care about looking nice and pretty, they are more hardcore, whatever. I can't say one way or the other, but I do know that there are many hardcore players on both sides and I don't think you can play off this difference in PVP aggressiveness to skill level. What I think has happened is the Horde on Gorgonnash know they are outnumbered and they have adapted. They travel in groups both for offensive and defensive purposes. There may be more Alliance out there, but when they are all soloing you won't have much trouble as a group, they will most likely leave you alone if you outnumber them, and if you want to PVP you have the advantage almost every time. Either way you have a much better chance in PVP.

As far as survival on PVP realms goes, the most important thing is to always watch your back, and I mean always. This is the reason you can rotate your view with your mouse without turning your character with it. Most gankings come from behind, and they also usually come while you are fighting something else, so be sure to pan around every so often to make sure you don't have anyone sneaking around behind you waiting for you to become occupied. The next important thing to remember is to never trust the opposing faction, no matter what. Think a friendly wave means they're just saying hi? Think again. I can't count how many times I've gotten waved at running along the road, just to have them turn right around and stab me in the back. Sometimes it's more of a "hi, I'm going to kill you now." Once again, this lends itself to watching your back, make sure he's just running by you, and if he turns around and comes back you'll be ready for him.

I know a lot of you out there may have gone with a PVE server to avoid this stuff altogether, and that's fine if that's how you want to play, but there are some pretty simple ways to avoid PVP, even if you're on a PVP server. First, play a female character, most guys won't maliciously go after a female given the chance that it could actually be a female playing it, and if you throw them a /wave you're golden. Second is don't make eye contact. If you are going about your business and you see someone sneaking up on you, don't immediately turn around and face them thinking they will give up after losing the element of surprise. Let them do what they want to do, and if they do attack you, you'll be ready for it. Many players are looking for a challenge, not just someone to backstab, so if you show no interest in them or make them believe you are oblivious to them they might leave you alone, but if you face them it may look like you are challenging them. Third, if they /wave, you /wave back, and make sure you are targeting them so they see that you actually waved at them, it's just common courtesy. And last but not least, use your surroundings to your advantage. If you see them first but don't want to PVP and don't have stealth you can keep yourself out of sight by hiding behind trees rocks, hills, buildings, whatever you can find, just make sure that floating name above your head will be hidden too and you can either sneak away. I've managed to trail people through to quest objectives many times, let them do the work for me and get the quest done easily.

Basically, if you want to avoid PVP on a PVP server, do all that you can to not provoke an attack. Of course these tactics only work on those who are debating whether to attack or not, but you will run into people who have their mind set on killing you and won't be deterred from that, so if you just happen to be questing in the same area or running the same path the main thing you want to do is avoid giving them any reason to attack you and then make sure they are well away from you before you forget about them. I know switching to a PVE server would be easier, but sometimes I actually do want to PVP and I want to leave that option open.

Horde mentality

I've played on a PVP server from the start and wouldn't change that given the chance. Sure there are those times when some douchebag makes your playing time hell for a while, corpse camping and such, but it doesn't happen very often and there are some ways you can deal with it. I'm not going into my PVP avoidance strategies now, but maybe in a later post.

What I want to talk about today is this certain mentality that goes along with playing Horde. Up until now I had only played Alliance characters up to a level where I'm seeing the opposing faction regularly and having to deal with the PVP aspect of being on a PVP server. Now that I'm questing in Ashenvale and Hillsbrad on my mage, I'm seeing a lot more Alliance running around and while my initial instincts are to leave them alone and they'll leave me alone, I'm finding it very difficult to do that. It seems there is a certain mentality that goes along with playing Horde, sort of a hunger for battle, and a need to attack any and all members of the Alliance. I'm finding more and more that I understand why most Horde will just attack on sight and do everything they can to make sure they win. I always hated getting attacked from behind when I was in the middle of taking out a mob, but I also know that while it may seem dishonorable, I also know that if you are considered at war with someone you don't play fair, you play to win.

Just the other day, as I was running across Ashenvale to get to Zoram'Gar Outpost, I saw a few Alliance pass me by. As I ran by each of them I found myself overwhelmed with the urge to blast them away, but being that they were all about 5 or 6 levels above me I decided it probably wasn't going to turn out well. The other thing I noticed myself thinking was what pansies these guys were being. I mean come on, you got some little Horde mage running across Ashenvale, a territory that was obviously infringed upon by those Orcs and their lumber camps, and you let this guy, who you outclass by at least 5 levels, run right by you. If the situation were switched you would be laying face down in the nice flora that Ashenvale tends to have a lot of, and in about five levels I will be doing just that. On any of my Alliance characters I would be the pansy, running by any Horde that doesn't provoke me without a second thought. But I was Horde this time, and Horde shows no mercy, I will tear you apart without a second thought if I have even the slightest chance of winning. I'm not saying I will be one of those guys that hunts low level players to mess with and then camps their bodies for 15 minutes, but just don't turn your back on me or you might find a fireball in your back.

It's funny how this game can change your mentality just by putting you on the other side and making you feel the part you are supposed to be playing. Even the way quests are described is very different and will influence your playstyle. If you don't like the fact that you have to kill animals for quests, you better roll Alliance because they are always concerned with that, but only do it because it's necessary and make sure you know they regret that it has to be done. As far as Horde go, they will kill as many beasts as it takes if they are considered a threat, and even more to prevent the threat from resurfacing. There was even a cool quest in Ashenvale when you invade an Alliance outpost along with 4 Horde NPCs and kill everything there. I don't remember anything like that for Alliance. Sure you attack Horde bases, but it's always because they are clear cutting the forest or stealing your supplies or something, never just because they are the enemy and should be killed. I'm finding I like Horde more every time I play, too bad my friends all wanted to play Alliance when I started out. I was gonna roll Horde from the start but my friends changed my mind, and it's too bad I didn't because this new experience I'm getting is much better than I thought it would be.

Venture Co. pwnd me

I thought I was getting the hang of my mage. I could solo pretty much any mob up to two or three levels above me, but this weekend I learned that soloing a single mob is much different than soloing multible mobs. What I worked on this weekend for the most part was Stonetalon, more specifically the Windshear Crag area with all the Venture Co. guys cutting down all the trees. There were a couple shredding machines I had to take down first, which turned out to be pretty easy to get because I got lucky on both and my initial frost bolts rooted them and I had no trouble burning them down from there, didn't even need to use frost nova.

Then it came time for me to journey to the top of the hill above the lake there and take out the main boss guy of this particular operation. I was a little surprised to see a level 27 hanging out with a bunch of level 20-21 mobs, but I was level 24 so I should have a good chance if I can pull him alone. Actually the problem started well before I even was able to get to the guy, as I had to clear the mobs on the way first, so I start on my way in and right off the bat I start having trouble because of LOS issues. It's one of those platform structures those guys always use, with lots of ramps and railings, and if the mob you're going after is up the ramp from you he is out of your sight range until you are at the top of the ramp. This really doesn't help a mage out at all since it also means you have to step into his aggro proximity before you can fire anything off at him. I managed it on a couple mobs, and then came to the next one, started it out just as I had the others, but this was one of those guys that summons a little robot guy as a pet and sends him at you. Now normally I can deal with this too, but when there's also a patrol that walks up when I've almost killed the first mob, and then that mob runs and is able to grab another before I can take him down, I tend to have some trouble. So if you haven't guessed already, I wasn't able to make it out of that situation alive, but the first mob did die, so when I rezzed I didn't have to deal with him again. And not only did I not have to deal with him, apparently someone else had come in while I was on my corpse run and killed all the mobs, including the quest mob I needed. Now it was just a waiting game, and the mobs were respawning pretty fast so I figured I'd get close to the quest mob, only kill the mobs that could potentially cause trouble when I pulled him and wait it out. Little did I know that this particular mob took about 4 times longer to respawn than the other mobs, meaning I literally had to kill everything else 4 times before this guy showed up again. Oh sure, I was getting some XP out of it, and the quest reward was an upgrade for my gear, so it wasn't all bad, but those robot summoning mobs are hard to contend with and half the time I was barely getting through those fights. Finally the quest mob spawned and I killed him, took his arm, and jumped off the platform into the water. I'm still not sure if completing this quest was worth it, but it pretty much got to the point that I was so far in I had to finish it off.

The rest of my time was spent killing a mob in a cave in Stonetalon, then turning in the quests before journeying to Ashenvale where I picked up both flight paths and killed some nagas. The rest of the Ashenvale quests I will be saving for later, because next time I'm on I will be making my way to Tarren Mill to get some quests done and probably get ganked a bunch. To finish off my play time I traveled to the Undercity, learned my new mage skills, completed a mage quest I had been putting off for about 10 levels, and then flew to the Sepulcher where I will pick up again next time to run down to Hillsbrad. All in all I think this weekend was fairly productive givent he amount of time I actually played, not to mention running all the way across Ashenvale for that Zoram'Gar flight path is pretty boring, but it has to be done and now I don't have to do it again...except on my other three horde characters. Ugh.

/train

I love this emote. When I first started playing and was grouping with my friend all the time we would use this all the time when running from place to place, with one of us autofollowing the other. That's one thing I miss about my little rogue, because gnomes have the best sound for this one. While most other races make the regular old "Woooo woooo" sound, the gnomes switch it up and go "Weeeeoooo weeeeeoooo!" Go ahead, try it out on your non-gnome character, then if you have a gnome try it on him, otherwise make one and try it, you can delete him afterwards. Now that my friend quit, I can't do that anymore, but I find other ways to implement this particular emote.

Now what I do is search for people to follow, just to mess with them. They might be running around one of the main cities, maybe they're traveling between zones, or just going to do their next quest, but I'll /follow them and hit the emote a couple times and see what they do. I love watching their reactions. Most stop for a few seconds, maybe turn around, but ultimately they'll keep going without saying a word. Some of them don't seem to care and just go about their business, but the best is when they actually say something to you. I dunno, some people are just set off by the smallest things, and I've gotten quite a few angry whispers from the ones I do this to, and it's pretty funny. Is it really worth getting mad about? I could see getting mad if I was slowing your progress or otherwise hindering you in some way, but I never do it more than a few times before continuing on my way. I just think it's funny watching people get all worked up about something so trivial.

Speaking of trivial things, why do we all find it necessary to jump all the time while we're running around? Don't tell me you don't do this, because everyone does. It's even part of the reason I love playing night elves, they do a flip half the time. I really didn't like the blood elf spin when I first started one though, made me feel like a pansy, but now I'm used to it so it isn't so bad. Still makes you look like a pansy though. I remember when I got my first mount and proceeded to jump around in circles in front of my friend for I don't know how long. It just seems like the norm in MMO's is if there's a jump function, we use it, and we use it a ridiculous amount. I played City of Heroes when it first came out (only for the free trial month though, lost interest after that) and the same thing was going on, except the people that could fly. So why do we do this? I don't know. It's not like it serves any purpose, I think we just like clicking and hitting keys instead of just running, and it's one of the things you can do that won't really have an affect but gives you something to do. Ever bored on the computer and just sit on the desktop and highlight crap over and over? Well jumping around like an idiot is the MMO version of that.

LFG time

How many of you actually use the LFG tool? Before they added it in all we had was a chat channel which at first went with the zone you were in, but now it is server wide and really annoying to be in. I know the reason they made a tool was to make it easier on us, but is it really? Sure it was annoying standing around in Ironforge trying to find an instance group and having to filter through all the spam and everyone else also looking for groups, but it was still pretty easy. Now we still have the channel, and it's still annoying, but I think the LFG tool is too hard for some people to use. It seems like every time I actually try to use it I find nobody else looking to do the instance I want, sometimes there are one or two people in there, but the majority of the time it's empty. I think the reason for this is that we were used to the old way of just spamming LFG a bunch of times and hoping for people that wanted to join you.

Now at first I thought it would only be a matter of time before people started getting the hang of using the LFG tool, but while there are more people using it, the majority seem to be spamming in the LFG channel still. I think the only way to get the LFG tool to function as it was meant to would be to take away the LFG channel altogether, forcing everyone to use the tool. This would pose the problem of making many players angry though. People don't want to be forced to use this tool when they already know and use the chat channel, they're already set in their ways and I'm sure someone on each server would create a LFG chat channel on their own and it wouldn't change anything except that the new channel is player created rather than part of the game.

You're probably wondering where I'm going with this, and at first I wasn't sure either, but I think my point is that people need to start trusting the LFG tool that we have been given. The few times it actually worked for me were great. I could see levels and classes of other people that wanted to do the same instance without having the manually check their info, and there was no sifting through LFG and trade spamming to find what I was looking for. I really do think the use of this tool would make putting together a PUG much easier. I'm always whispered asking to heal instances when I'm on my priest, and I'm sure if everyone who wanted to do that particular instance were queued up for it in the LFG tool it would be easier to find the class you are looking for that actually wants to go, without having to look up every priest on a the moment and asking them one by one.

Moral of the story is everyone use the LFG tool as your primary mode of finding a group, then if you don't find what you need you can resort to the LFG chat, not the other way around. This will make finding groups faster and easier for everyone, and it will keep you sane.

Travel time

You know what the worst part of playing a low level alt is? It's not going through the same content, that can sometimes be fun trying to figure out strategies to get through difficult areas with a different class. It's not that you're low level and don't have access to many areas of the game. No, it's much more fundamental than that. It's the fact that you no longer have a mount, or any way to get yourself around in the world faster than if you just run. I really believe this is the biggest time sink in the game. The Barrens itself is a huge zone, and while it does have multiple flight paths for Horde, it still requires lots of running around to get all the quests done.

I was playing yesterday, had a few quests to turn in at Thunderbluff, and let me tell you, that place sucks to run around. All that running across bridges to the different rises, I seriously spent half an hour in there just turning in two quests and learning new spells. At least the other big cities are set up fairly well, the common setup being a central area and then areas along the perimeter which tends to be where you learn your skills and abilities, and you can run around the perimeter to get to each of these if you wish. Thunderbluff on the other hand has no way of running around the perimeter, meaning if you're on one of those outer rises and want to get to the next one over, you can't just run straight there, you have to run across the bridge to the central area, then find the bridge to the next rise you want to get to, sometimes requiring you to climb the tower in the middle to get to the tier you want to be on. Even Undercity is better than that, and that place requires you to run around and find elevators just to get in.

The crappy thing now is that I already have mounts for all the characters that have some sort of travel form before getting a mount (hunter, shaman, druid). I think the only one left would be my mage, and Blink isn't really that much better than just running.

I find the best way to do any traveling is to use downtime where you don't really have enough time to play WoW, but you still don't need to be anywhere quite yet. Like say you get home from work but are going to dinner in 15 minutes. If I know I have to travel somewhere with a character I do it during that time, or at least use it to get me closer to where I need to be so when I actually want to sit down and play I don't have to deal with traveling first. The easiest way is when you just need to fly across the continent for something, because you can log in, hit up the flight master and get going, and you can do other stuff while flying too so you just come back later and find yourself where you wanted to be. If you can remember way back when, the flight paths didn't flow into each other. If you wanted to get to Loch Modan from Redridge you had to fly to Stormwind, get dropped off, then fly to Ironforge and get dropped off, then fly to Loch Modan, meaning you had to be there to talk to each flight master on the way. It was such a pain. But now they are connected and it is much better, only thing I would still want to change is have an option to cut your flight off early. Maybe you realized you had to stop at one of the earlier stops but you were already flying at that point, happens to me sometimes, and then I have to get to the end of the flight and backtrack. It really makes you think hard before you start flying because you don't want to waste your time like that.

One thing I never understood was the whole autorunning naked thing. I think the whole point is you take off your gear and turn on autorun and just aim yourself where you need to go and do something else while you wait. While I can understand the thought process, it doesn't really work that way all the time. I don't know how many times I'll see somebody set on autorun, and you can tell because they ran into a wall or rock or tree and are still doing the running motion. Also, if you run into a bunch of mobs and get killed you're gonna have to run back to your corpse. In both of these examples you'd still have to be paying attention, which sorta defeats the purpose, because I think the whole point is that you can do something else in the meantime. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like no matter what you still have to pay attention when you're running somewhere, and I'd rather just run myself and probably get there faster than turning on autorun and and coming back 10 minutes later to find out you only made it a tenth of the way there before you got stuck on a tree.

My Playstyle

I like to think of my playstyle as almost casual but not quite. I think the best way to describe it would be I'm a binge player. You know those people who say they aren't alcoholics because they don't drink every day, but then when they do drink they get plastered every time? Well thats how I play WoW. Let's take this past couple weeks for example. I think I played once or twice last week for an hour or two each time, but the week before there were 4 or 5 days in there that I played for over 3 hours. I guess the main reason for this is that I never really have a set schedule that I can plan on, most of my activities are last minute ideas, and I would feel lame telling someone I would rather play a videogame than do something fun IRL. Not to say if you have a scheduled raid or something you should bail on them, but I haven't gotten to that point in the game yet and don't really plan on it anytime soon, nobody in the game counts on me for anything and that seems to work well for me.

I would also say that I'm the definition of a solo player. This mentality was probably brought over from my Diablo 2 days, that game was definitely geared more towards playing solo all the time unless you needed help. When I first got the game I didn't even have an internet connection, and thats how I learned to play, then I finally got hooked up and while playing in a group was fun, I was more comfortable on my own. Now I've moved on to a much bigger game in WoW, where the servers are filled with people and I'm just a drop in the bucket. I had a friend I played with all the time on my first character and we had a great time grouping up and helping each other with quests and such, but I didn't really make too many other friends in the game. At the time my brother and one of his friends also played on that server, so it seemed I had a pretty good group of people I could call upon for my grouping needs. I guess I should have known they would burn out on it, there was a good three months somewhere in there that I wasn't sure if I was going to continue playing. I came back, they didn't, and that left me alone on my server with very few connections, and my guild /gkicked me after the first month of inactivity so I was pretty bummed.

At that point I believe I decided to start my first alt. My rogue was level 58 or so and I just couldn't make that final push to 60 yet, so I made a druid and set out on a new adventure. I was actually able to convince my friend to roll a warrior for a while to run alongside my druid, but he stopped around level 35 and hasn't played since. He has since discovered Call of Duty 4 and I can't get him to come back. Now with my lack of in-game friends I had a couple options. I could try to make some friends, offer to group with people, maybe even try to make an impression and get a guild invite where I could once again be part of a community. The problem with this option was I didn't think it would be fair to a guild if I joined, only to play a few hours a week on average, usually with not enough time to do much more than knock out a few quests and then log, so I decided I wouldn't go searching for a guild, but if a casual guild were to offer to take me in I wouldn't pass it up.

Upon finding out how much I liked playing my druid, I couldn't help but wonder if playing another class would broaden my horizons even more, and my altism continues to this day. Now I really had to think out how I was going to play the game, because in order to stay motivated I had to switch between alts fairly regularly, but it's hard to keep friends in the game when you switch between characters so often and your play time is so erratic. It would be a little weird if I found someone I liked to group with and they tell me "oh by the way, I randomly play different characters at irregular times, if you want to keep in touch here are the names of my alts..." I probably wouldn't bother with them if that was the case, but if they want to add me to their friends I won't stop them, they just won't see me very often.

So I guess I'm a binge soloer when it comes to my playstyle, and since I have no characters in the end game I have no problem with that for now. I do like to hear about how great the social aspect of the game is, and I think it's great that people are able to make friends and what it does to their playing experience, but I don't think I can commit to anything like that. Maybe that's why I started this blog, to have some sort of community for WoW, even if it's not actually in-game.

More Maging

The crappy thing about being in the lower levels is that the amount of rested XP bonus you can accumulate is capped at a I believe 1.5 levels, and you can fly through that in no time when you're in the mid 20's. I love leveling fast, but once I finish off my rested XP bonus I switch to a different character, pretty much trying to be as efficient as I can in my leveling. The problem is I'm not getting a lot of play time on each character before I switch to another when I'm at a low level, so that when I come back I have to spend time relearning how to play that class since I never really had enough time to get in the groove the last time I used that character. I guess I can't complain about it though, being able to stick a character in the inn for a month and then have 5 levels worth of rested bonus wouldn't be very fair to those that don't use alts or play so often they rarely see the rested bonus at all.

I'm progressing pretty well on the mage, now questing in Stonetalon, will be moving on to Ashenvale pretty soon. Actually I had a lot of trouble with this cave full of kobolds in Stonetalon, the problem being some of them had earthshock, which dealt a lot of damage and interrupted whatever spell I was casting at the time. The only way to deal with these guys was to root them, then back away pretty far to get out of range of the shock and start casting again. It got pretty annoying in the cave since it was pretty cramped and the mobs were all close together so backing away wasn't alway safe, but I made it with no deaths and got that quest out of the way. I was also having a little trouble with the Venture Co. mobs, mostly because there were so many rocks and trees around the area that I could pull one and another one that I couldn't see before would come with it. It's not easy being a squishy.

I guess I need to decide what character to use next. I still haven't started my paladin yet, but I'm not all that excited about him, I like to solo a lot and pallies seem to be one of the worst solo classes as they don't kill things very fast, not even when you spec retribution. I think I might go back to either my druid or my priest and quest on further into Outland since it will introduce me to some new scenery. I also haven't touched my shaman in a while, but she's just gonna have to wait until I'm ready for her again, maybe when my Outland characters run out of their rested bonus.

I guess that's all for this weekend's WoW activities, lots of crazy RL stuff happened and I had very little play time to work with, hopefully that will change this week.

Blastola Cola

Mad props to anyone who knows what game that title references to, used to play it on an old IBM 286 with a monochrome monitor (that's right, 6MHz of raw processing power).

It's Friday so I'm gonna keep this pretty short. Been playing the mage lately and having a blast. I remember starting a human mage a while ago, got to around the mid-20's and got tired of him, I just didn't think he had enough firepower and the mobs seemed really hard to kill. Now I'm level 22 on my undead mage, still running around the Barrens doing some quests that are about my level and having no problem with them at all. Sure I can't take on a bunch of mobs at once, but if that situation comes up I know just how to escape them. I even found myself in situations where I would have a patrolling mob show up in the middle of a fight and had no problem finishing off the first mob then blowing a way the pat. I don't know whether it was experience I got with the first mage, other alts expanding my overall knowledge, or what I've read online (or maybe all of the above), but I'm really having fun as a mage. Being able to see a mob at less than 50% health before he even gets to you, then rooting it and blasting it the rest of the way down is great, and with how little damage you take in doing this it makes it easy to deal with surprise situations that may arise.

I'm not really sure when I'm going to see the difference between Horde and Alliance, but I haven't found it yet. I guess until you get into the higher levels you're gonna still have a lot of morons running around, especially in the Barrens. What I really want to get exposed to is the advantage Horde always seems to have over Alliance. That's right, I'm talking about the ability to coordinate in groups and help each other out. This may not apply everywhere, but from what I've seen and heard, Horde usually outclasses Alliance when it comes to this. I almost never saw a solo Horde player running around STV, and if I did I usually didn't provoke him because I knew he would have backup there in no time. I guess I'll have to wait and see how it goes, but for now I'm just having fun blowing up mobs on my own.

I hate Vista updates

Yes, I have PC running Vista, and every time I update it something gets messed up that used to work fine before. This last update just pissed me off though. I like to be able to play WoW and watch TV at the same time, or at least have the TV on in the background while I play. Well that's hard to do with a PC because you have to set up your computer station with easy access to a TV, and my house isn't really set up for that, so I went bought a new laptop about 8 months ago that I had custom made from one of those PC builder sites. Decided against one of the prebuilt systems like the Dell or Sony computers, they tend to have some of what I want plus a bunch of extra crap that I don't need, which isn't optional so you pay for the whole package, and the upgrade options are very limited. Well I'm against paying for stuff that I don't need and will never use just to get some of the setup I want and then have to buy more upgrades separately that may or may not work well with the system. I find that those premade PC's are very hard to upgrade as they don't always accept the additions.

Back to the rant about the update. We all know Vista has a lot of problems, but I can deal with it for the most part, and since they keep providing us with updates those problems should start going away right? Well to play WoW I decided to get a separate mouse, that laptop touch pad just doesn't cut it for games (I play TFC2 sometimes as well, and blew through Portal in no time). When I first plugged in the mouse I figured I'd have to install the drivers for it, but as soon as I plugged it in to the USB port the computer detected it an installed in automatically. Sweet. So I messed with the settings a little, comes up as a generic mouse instead of the exact model, but didn't have any reason to change that as it was working fine. It also has extra buttons for forward, back, and switching between open programs (sort of like alt+Tab). For WoW I set up the back button as autorun and the forward button to jump (I hate NumLock for autorun, and being able to run and jump from just the mouse is nice for those long runs).

I just keep getting off topic don't I? Now that I've talked about my mouse setup you can probably guess what the last update did. That's right. My mouse totally stopped working. When I plugged it in it was no longer detected as a mouse but was now a game controller device. I guess I can see if this will work, so I let Vista try to install in automatically. No dice. OK, guess I have to install the drivers for it, so I rummage through all my system setup discs and find the CD for the mouse driver, pop it in and start the setup. It's installing, then when it finishes a message pops up "oh wait, this driver isn't Vista compatible." Once again Vista screws me over. Ugh, time to look for drivers online, and to make sure they work with Vista, and by this time it is already way past my bedtime but I'm so heated over this thing that I have to solve it or I won't be able to sleep as I will still be thinking about it. Finally I find a driver and install it, no errors this time, but when it's all done the mouse still isn't working. Alright, it didn't tell me to restart, but I will anyway just because sometimes that's what you need to do before the changes take effect. Bingo! Mouse works as soon as Vista is done starting up and I'm back in business...after about an hour of troubleshooting. Change some of the settings back to what I like, then get to bed.

But wait! the story isn't over yet. Now up until this point I haven't played WoW with the new settings, so next day I open up WoW, and wouldn't you know it? My key mappings aren't working anymore. This mouse driver has some kind of game settings so you can change the sensitivity if you like it different when you are playing games than when you are just on the desktop. That's cool I guess, but these game settings just screwed me over again, and I don't have a clue what these different options are gonna do so I open up the help file to see if I can find a quick answer. Of course not, the help file is terrible and doesn't help at all. Guess I'll have to figure this out on my own. After about 30 more minutes of alt+Tabbing back and forth between WoW and the mouse settings, manually setting up the mouse game settings to recognize WoW as a game and checking and unchecking various boxes that didn't explain very well what they were for, I finally got the game to recognize the buttons.

I don't even want to think about what I would have gone through if I had a PC and no touch pad to use as a backup mouse. I've done it before, and let me tell you, trying to remember all the keyboard shortcuts to navigate around without a mouse, while trying to solve a ridiculous problem, is probably one of the worst experiences I've ever had with computer troubleshooting. Moral of the story is don't let Vista use it's generic drivers for anything as they might stop working after one of these updates. It may be more work, but install the specific drivers for your device no matter what Vista tells you.

Addon n00b

Actually I never even looked into addons until over a year into playing. I had always checked out the database sites and seen people putting map coordinates up to help others find their way around, but they also usually had maps that showed locations so it didn't seem like I needed to bother with anything like that. At the time I didn't know just how many addons there were or what they all did, I had just never looked into it. Then I'm not really sure what happened, but for some reason I checked out an addon website and looked through a bunch of the stuff they had on there. It was really cool. Aside from getting map coordinates, I could also get info on mobs, see where certain items drop, view what is equipped on all of my characters at once, and many other helpful tools could be at my disposal if only I had looked into it earlier. I guess up until that point I had thought stuff like that was sort of considered cheating and would take away from the game, and now that I think about it I'm actually glad I didn't use addons until I had learned the game on my own first. I don't think I would have gotten the same experience if I had been able to find everything right off the bat, hell, I didn't even discover Thottbot for the first few months, and I had a lot of fun exploring and discovering things on my own before then.

Well at this point I still don't use any UI mods and I've never used Vent or any other form of verbal communication (don't have a mic anyway), I just don't think I need anything like that for what I do in the game. I haven't found the default UI to be lacking in any way for what I need to use it for, and I also don't feel like learning a new setup anyway, mine is just fine. As for other addons, the only ones I really use would be MobInfo, AlphaMap, and sometimes AtlasLoot if I am looking to farm gear for one of my alts from an instance. Oh sure I have other addons installed, but I don't use them for the most part, they're just convenient to have should the situation ever arise that I would need to use it. All these addons are from the Cosmos downloader, and they've done pretty well at keeping the stuff up to date after new patches come out. I know I've heard a lot of people say they use Curse, but I'm not really sure what the difference is, I might have to do a little research on that.

I'm thinking about getting a quest helper addon. I've heard of addons that map out quests for you, show you where to go on the map, even group quests together that should be done at the same time and search the databases for info on quest strategies. Sounds like a very useful tool, and since pretty much all of my play time is done questing I think an addon like this would be invaluable to me.

Other than that I'm sort of looking for suggestions on good addons to use. I'm not really planning on getting a new UI, and since I don't raid I don't really have any use for addons that have to do with raiding, but I would like a quest helper addon, and if anybody could help me get some info on whether I should switch over to Curse or not I would appreciate it, because now that I actually try to view their site I find that it's blocked by the filters at work. Maybe I'm just destined to be an addon n00b.

I'm ashamed, but not really

I was one of those PVP douchebags that I always complain about, and while I feel bad for the guy I massacred, I can't say it wasn't fun. I like to think that this was probably some horde guy who was playing an alt but does that same thing to others on his main, makes me feel better about it. Lets get to the story, shall we?

I was learning my pet skills the other day, and while I know I don't need to, I went around the world learning all the lower ranks of the skills as well. I don't know, for some reason I like to fully complete everything so while I could have just gotten the highest ranks of each skill, I had to backtrack and get the lower ranks. One of the mobs I had to tame and learn a skill from was in southern Darkshore, right near the border to Ashenvale, so I tamed that moonstalker, I believe I learned cower from him, then proceeded to Astranaar since I needed to fly to Feralas next to finish up my quests there. Well imagine my surprise when I got to the flight path and I had apparently never been to Stonetalon or Desolace with my hunter, therefore missing the flight paths. Not only that, but apparently if you don't have those flight paths you can't fly directly to Feralas, it makes you go through Darkshore first.

Well I made a decision, and that was to get those flight paths, and now that I have a mount it shouldn't take too long, right? Well I went through the cave to get to Stonetalon and was making my way up to the peak when I see a little horde priest killing deer just south of the peak. I think he was around level 26, and here I come, a level 50 hunter on my way to get a flight path I should have gotten a long time ago. Well, I ran past him, not really sure if I wanted to take him out yet, but once I got around the bend I decided, why the hell not? Besides, he's killing all the wildlife, and I'm a night elf, I can't allow that. But seriously, I've been ganked so many times, I gotta get some payback somehow. So I turned around, snuck up on him behind a hill, set my cat on stealth and sent her in. The little hordie had no idea what hit him, and I barely got two shots in before he was dead, pretty much maimed by my cat. I guess I was a little bit of a dick about it, running past him, probably making him think I was one of those nice guys that won't pick on you, but when you play on a PVP server, sometimes you just have to take some cheap shots to make up for all the ones that were taken against you.

I made it to the flight path, then ran to Desolace to get that one and flew the rest of the way to Feralas. Now that I've seen the other side of PVP ganking I guess I can't hold it against those hordies that have done the same thing to me so many times before. This is not to say I will be on of those guys who gets to level 70 only to hang out in STV all day killing all the n00bs, but if I run by a member of the opposing faction and see an opportunity to take him out, I probably won't just leave them be anymore. Sorry guys, it's just revenge, nothing personal.

Class strategies

I've read a lot of strategies for different classes on what kind of attack patterns to use in different situations, from instances to PVP to plain old PVE. At this point it seems to be much simpler than what strategies to use for each class, more like what strategies to use for each role. While each DPS class has different skill sets to use, they are usually similar in what sorts of skills work best, and a lot of the time they will have skills that serve the same function but are just called something different.

Lets take a hunter and a rogue for example. Both are pure DPS classes, but very different in playstyle as the hunter stays at range and the rogue gets up close and personal. Now the rogue has a finishing move called slice and dice, increasing his attack speed for a period of time, and what does the hunter have? Not exactly the same, but there is a talent called improved aspect of the hawk, giving you a chance on hit to increase attack speed for a period of time while aspect of the hawk is active. Why are these skills important? Because they are great skills in instances and raids. An increase in attack speed is an increase of the same amount in DPS, meaning for that 10 or 15 seconds you're doing more damage and therefore bringing down the mob faster, but as far as when these skills should be utilized it is the same for both classes. They are best in instances because those fights take long enough that you can get the full benefit from them, whereas in PVE and PVP you want to do as much damage as possible over a short period of time, in which case you use your burst damage skills, of which both classes also have.

So while I can understand trying to find the rotation of skills to use that will maximize your potential, if you are just looking for which skills that you should be using in the first place you don't have to get so class specific, just look at what you have at your disposal. Obviously a tank will have ways to bump up their threat, and these should be used only when they need to be, as they usually just waste rage or mana that you could be using on other skills if you overuse them. A warrior should use taunt when he loses aggro, not to keep aggro as the skill does nothing when you are already the focus of the mob, same with a bear druid using growl. Likewise with DPS classes there are times to use a DOT and times to use burst damage. Like rogues should be using rupture instead of eviscerate in an instance, but the opposite is true of PVE where the fights don't last long enough for rupture to do as much damage as it can. Healers are very situational, but you basically want to get the most healing done for the least mana cost, which usually means the big healing spells that take a long time to cast. Sure in emergency situations a fast healing spell can be used, but the big heals get you more bang for your buck, and guess what, all the healers have at least one of each of these types of spells.

So for anyone that thinks they are clueless about what skills to use in different situations, don't waste your time going through endless strategies and builds trying to find the best one, because chances are there will end up being one better. Not saying you shouldn't check out some strategies to get an idea, but don't be lead around blindly by them. I think macros are great, but if you just copy someone else's spell rotation macro to use you aren't really learning anything, and when put in a situation where that macro doesn't work you don't want to be caught looking like a deer in the headlights. Figure out what sorts of skills tend to be the best and go from there. There really is no right answer, but there are wrong ones, and those are more important to know. Same goes for talent trees, you can use others as references, but you should be the one who ultimately decides which talents to put your points into. Don't be a tool.

The Barrens Sucks

Logged onto my mage yesterday and found myself at Crossroads in the Barrens. Lucky for me he's level 21 already so I'm only gonna do a few quests there before moving on to Stonetalon, just for a little extra XP before I go. I really hate the Barrens though, it's such a big zone for characters to run around without mounts, and everything is so spread out that it's not easy to find multiple quests to do in a circuit before going back to turn them in. Because of this I decided to pick and choose some quests to do that will get me to good XP but with minimal time wasted running. Well, no matter what I'm gonna have to get those quests out of the way, so next time I'm on I'll do that and hopefully hit level 22 before heading over to Stonetalon. I didn't get to play very long yesterday, RL called and I did some other fun stuff instead.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of the whole mage thing. I managed to kill three mobs at once, each two levels below me. I hit one with an ice bolt, then fire bolt, then fire blast, then rooted them all, which killed the first target. Ran a little distance away and fire bolted the second mob, followed by another fire blast and then wanded him to death (had to save mana for the last one). Last one got rooted again, then fire bolted, then ice bolted and fire blasted and then a few wand hits and he was done. I was sort of surprised at how well I did, but I've been reading some strategies about mages and what spells are good for which situations and then put those skills to some use. Actually, thinking back on it I should have sheeped one of the mobs, but turns out I didn't really need to, although I probably could have managed to take them out with a lot less damage taken if I had.

I think the thing I like the most about mages is how fast you can take down a mob. With melee attacks you take a bunch of swings, each one slowly chewing away at the mob's health, but with a mage you cast two spells and the mob has less than half of his health remaining. It's a little ridiculous sometimes, and then if you happen to crit you can sometimes kill a mob with just two spells. I'm becoming a big fan of the ice tree, keeping mobs at a distance and blasting away while they can't do anything to me. It's a lot different trying to keep mobs at range when you don't have a pet, and being the squishiest of squishies you can't take very many hits before you're in trouble.

I think as I play further with each class it helps me understand them better and if I ever get to the endgame stuff again I will have a pretty good advantage as far as not only know what I can do, but what my entire party can contribute. I've found a lot of people don't know more than a few skills that their other party mates can use, and I always hated when someone would try to tell me how to play my class when they didn't have the first clue about what they were talking about. I try to let people play the way they want and trust they know what they're doing until they prove otherwise, at which point I might give them pointers, but never be mean about it, that just discourages them and makes the resent you, and will probably make your party do worse rather than better.

The other thing I learn as I play further on my alts is how much I regret rolling a rogue as my first character. I enjoyed playing him of course, but that was before I knew better. Now I don't think I can bring myself to use him because I like pretty much every other class so much more (besides maybe the warrior). So any rogues out there that have tried other classes and still love their rogue, more power to you, but I don't think I will be joining the ranks again any time soon.

Say the magic word

No, I suppose it isn't that type of wand, but it seems many people are confused as to when to use your wand and when to just say no. I have a shadow priest at level 63 and always upgrade my wand when I get the chance, but I never go out of my way to find a better one, they are usually quest rewards or random drops. I wouldn't recommend shopping for a wand until you hit the level cap, and then you really only need to buy one for the stats as the damage it produces probably won't help you out much compared to your spells. This isn't to say there aren't situations in which using your wand is a good idea, but there is no need to maximize your wand DPS.

As I said, there are situations where it is a good idea to use your wand, the big one being mana conservation, mainly while soloing. On my shadow priest I use this spell rotation for most one on one mob fights: power word: shield, shadow word: pain to pull, mind blast, starshards, then wand to death, or on harder mobs I throw in a vampiric touch before I start wanding for an extra DOT plus mana regen. Any shadow priests reading this might be asking where the mind flay is in that spell rotation, and while mind flay is good to use to burn down the mob faster, it also uses up more mana, and when I solo I don't want to ever have to eat or drink. That's right, I do carry some water in case I get adds or pull more than one mob and have to use more mana, but I can go all day if I get one mob pulls. In my opinion the extra time it takes to kill a mob by using the wand comes out to less downtime than having to replenish your mana after a couple fights. Sure spirit tap helps you out in getting some mana back, but not enough to be completely full before every fight if you're using too much mana each time.

Another big factor that plays into soloing is keeping your health up. For shadow priests it's sort of annoying switching out of shadow form every time you want to heal yourself. This is why I love power word: shield and imp pw:s. With the spell rotation stated above, even though I could find rotation that will DPS much faster if I wanted, mobs rarely break my shield, and even if they do they only get one or two hits in before they're dead.

Now just like there are times to use wands, there are also times when using a wand is not a good idea. This would be instances and PVP, where you want to kill your opponent fast, and who cares about what your mana looks like when you do. As far as shadow priests go, in an instance you want to keep up your DOTs and shadow damage debuffs and burn down the mobs as fast as you can without taking aggro from the tank, oh and keep up your vampiric spells to make the party love you. You don't really care as much about mana conservation because chances are you're not the only one who is going to need to drink after a fight, and since you'll have downtime anyway you may as well not worry about it. Power word: shield really isn't going to help you out, the mobs hit way too hard, and it causes so much threat there really isn't any point in using it except in extreme cases. If you're building up too much threat it's a good idea to stop spamming mind blast and mind flay for little while, but don't use your wand, just stop and get that threat down as fast as you can so you can start casting again, except don't let your debuffs run out with this break in casting, those should stay on at all times, especially if you have a warlock in the group, his shadow spells are doing more damage too.

On to PVP. Well, unless you can take out another player with a couple spells, fear kiting is the way to go. Load him up with DOTs, put up your shield, blast him a few times, but if your shield goes down you better be ready to fear them and get your distance so you can put your shield up again before they come back, which is why it's nice to have DOTs ticking while they run around helplessly. We also get a nice silence spell to use against casters in the shadow tree, especially useful against mages as they are pretty much useless without their spells. And never use your wand. Wands are part of the global cooldown, meaning you can wand away, but when you want to cast something else you have to stop wanding and let those 1.5 seconds finish before you can do anything again, and by then you could be dead, plus the wand doesn't do significant DPS compared to what you could be doing, and you have to be facing your enemy, which is hard to do against those melee classes that like to jump around you like idiots (rogues, I'm looking at you).

The moral of the story? Well it's a different story for mages, but for priests and warlocks I give wands the OK for soloing, or even group questing if you want (unless you're showing off how fast you can burn down a mob), but for instancing and PVP you carry the wand solely for the stats.

I thought I had it all figured out

I logged on with the intention of bringing my hunter up to date on all the skills I need for my pets. I already have the current levels of claw and bite, but for my cat I need to learn dash, prowl, and cower, or my wolf I need furious howl, and shell shield for my turtle. I decided I may as well just learn all the abilities they can have, then pick and choose which to teach them later. So I hop on with Petopia open in the background and set out to learn all my skills. Do any of you see the problem with this? I have three pets, which means one I'm using, and two in stable slots, but that also means I can't tame anything else because in order to do so you need to have your current pet stabled, which I can't do because my slots are already full. Well crap, I guess I didn't plan that out very well, so I had to get rid of one of my pets, which kinda sucks, but I can't keep going without learning the pet skills I'll need, so I decided to get rid of my wolf. While I really wanted to try out furious howl, I think the wolf is the least specialized of my pets and is the easiest to get rid of for that reason. The cat is a DPS machine, and the turtle I plan on turning into an awesome tank, so I guess I can wait on my all purpose pet until later.

Well I spent a ridiculous amount of time travelling the world looking for the mobs I needed to tame the learn the skills I wanted. Finally I was able to get everything I listed above up to the skill level I am able to learn at this point, so I headed on over to Feralas to finish up my quests there. I killed some more yetis and skinned them, then went up north and put together a staff in the ruins that was apparently very important, and managed to save a lost night elf girl from those same ruins. Ran back and turned in the quests and I was finished with that place. The thing about Feralas is it's a cool zone in that the scenery is nice, with lots of green, and seems to be sort of a forgotten area by both factions, with not much in terms of settlement. The thing I don't like about Feralas is where the Alliance settlements are located. It's bad enough that Feathermoon is so far from most of the quests you get, but you have to cross all that water to get there. Swimming takes a long time, but waiting for the ship could take even longer, and since the ship decides to go all the way around the island for some reason, it isn't even all that fast. Luckily a lot of the quests sort of follow a progression from one area to another so that you can do a bunch of them without going back and forth for follow ups, so they made up for it, sort of.

After turning everything in I flew over to Tanaris and logged. The annoying thing yesterday was that I kept disconnecting for no good reason, and I'm not sure if it was the recent patch or my computer or what. Sometimes I forget to turn off my downloads and it really makes me lag, but rarely does it cause me to disconnect. I would log on, run around for a minute or two, and notice the mobs were either standing still or not there altogether, then it would disconnect. I would reconnect, and I was able to log on just fine, but then the same thing would happen when I got back on. Really weird stuff, maybe it was just the server, but I didn't really notice anyone else having problems, plus they usually complain in general chat about stuff like that. Maybe they were just playing an April fool's joke on me. I would totally roll a Bard, and that Molten Core game looks awesome. Actually with that whole bard nonsense I hope that's a precursor to some big news about the expansion being released soon. Another hero class maybe? More alts for me! I can only hope. I'd even be happy if they just told us the release date.

Who's reading this?

I've been watching my web tracker and taking note of what searches turn up my site, and it turns out the search I see the most has nothing to do with WoW. I get at least one hit from the search "progressive wow girl" and at first I wasn't sure what they were looking for. Was there a girl out there that just happened to use the same blog title? Well that's not the case by a long shot. The search is actually people trying to find out about the girl from the Progressive Insurance commercial, the one where she explains something about the insurance and the guy says "wow" and she says "wow! I know, I say it louder." Now I've seen the commercial, but can't remember ever the girl being exceptionally good looking, at least not good looking enough to warrant a google search to find out more about her, but apparently there are some out there that think she is and don't pay attention to the excerpts Google puts up from the sites it finds, because reading what they have from mine makes it obvious that it isn't what they are searching for. Well now that I've posted about this I'll probably be getting more hits like that, oh well, if this is what you're searching for then you came to the wrong site.

As far as my escapades in WoW, I managed to make it to level 50 last night on my hunter. Too bad ever since I bought my mount I haven't had enough money to buy all my new skills each level, so I've been having to pick and choose the ones I think are the most important. I could do some money transferring from my other characters, but I like them to be independent as much as possible, plus I know I'll earn enough money eventually. This saw me leaving the Hinterlands and I will be finishing up Feralas next. While I was able to tame the pets I wanted, I am going to have to go through some work to get them up to speed, since neither of them start out with many skills, and the important ones I want them to have I need to learn from other mobs first. Maybe next time I'm on I'll travel around expanding my beast training knowledge so I can make these pets viable to run with. Who knew hunters had to go through all this trouble?

As I get close to catching up with my rested XP I come once again upon the dilemma of which character to play next. At this point I'm thinking of picking up my undead mage and putting in some horde time. I decided to go frost on this guy, at least for leveling, as I find it's easier for me to keep mobs at a distance and maybe take a little longer killing them rather than try to blast them before they can get to me. I would also like to have a little better chance of surviving any attempted ganks that come my way. You may ask, why pick undead for your mage? Well the answer is pretty simple, and while the racial abilities are good, the main reason I picked undead is from the experiences I had with undead mages as an alliance character. Seemed like every time I came up against one of these guys it was no contest, they took me out in a couple shots and I would barely have time to move. The first time I ever went to WPL on my rogue, before the expansion, I was trying to do the cauldron quests and there were two level 60 undead mages wreaking havoc on that zone. They seemed to just travel from one farm to the other and kill any alliance they found, and while we would send for help from other 60s, no one could really stop them. It was then that I decided if I was going to make a mage it would undead and I would have a blast in PVP with him. Right now he's only level 21 though, so I need to do some leveling before blasting n00bs to oblivion.