Author: wrathofkublakhan

This Crazy Druid

wrathofkublakhan10 Comments

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Mark Twain

This Crazy Druid

It is so backwards that I love it. I’m leveling in healing spec. Being mid-115, I know that my legendary pieces will not work and I might have to go Balance, but we’ll see.

If it is one mob, I just kill him. I prefer to pull three to five at once. Mushroom down, tag with sunfire the aoe one, entangling roots which triggers Sephuz’s Secret for the haste boost. And then kill them down. I’ll break out of Balance Affinity reluctantly to heal myself up sometimes. The roots hold them pretty well for a bit.

I have died once. I was collecting cage keys to free some falcons and a rogue dragged a bunch of mobs over to me and vanished. It was deliberate and caught me off guard and I died instead of running for safety.

I can’t guess at the hours played but I will say this: I have never, even once, gotten a priest or mage buff. Not in town, not in action. I’ve been alone in areas but usually there are players running by or around. Not one buff from my comrades.

Fun stuff, I’m glad to be leveling again!

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BfA – Fun

wrathofkublakhan18 Comments

“What fresh hell is this?”
Dorothy Parker

BfA – Fun

Is everyone as tired as I am?

Along side all of the good stuff, one of my favorite memories will be the hundreds of players porting into Uldum and watching them all fly off on the oh-so-many different mounts. Loved it. I stood and watched it for a while.

Wowhead said 11 – 12 hours to get to level 120 for a typical player. Baloney! I played for five hours and am at 112. Glad to have Goblin Glider Kits, to be sure.

Have fun, play safe, drink water (the water will force you to take breaks!).

Peace.

 

Pragmatic Leveling in BfA

wrathofkublakhan6 Comments

“There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.”
Steven Wright

Pragmatic Leveling in BfA

Candidly, I probably won’t do anything on this list. Consider me a reporter rather than a zeolot.

Let’s list up the “leveling things” for BfA.

  • Rested XP. If you have more that one character, visit him or her once so that they can start building up the Rested bonus.
  • Profession Trainers. I think that we’ll need to see the trainers for our professions before we can start getting points. Ask a guard, they are sure to be in your new BfA capital. Expect the Fishing Trainer to be much farther away.
  • Addon. The leveling addon is Azeroth Auto Pilot. It promises to:
    • Skip cutscenes
    • Hotkey quest-items
    • Where to go with a Big Arrow
    • What to do: Quest Objectives window
    • Asks if you want to do group quests
    • Auto takes flightpaths for a quest
    • Auto talk to NPC
    • Auto pickup and handin quests
    • Shows button for quests with usable items

    There is an appeal in burning through content until 120 and then after doing some WQs to power up, go back and finish the zones with little struggle over the mobs.

  • Zone Order. If you are “geared” to begin, do the harder zones first. Drustvar then Tiragarde Sound then Stormsong Valley. If you are not geared, reverse that. While we do have zone scaling, Drustvar will be more compact with more mobs.
  • Rares. The thought is to not do them while leveling. A rare drops gear at your level and 120 gear will be much more valuable to you.
  • Mining and Herbing. Always worth the stop, a little xp and skill points along the way.
  • Making Gold.
    • The Scrapper is going to change the dynamic of our economy. Loot armor or weapons that you don’t want, the Scrapper will return to you crafting materials. If the looted armor was made of metal, you will get ore; if it was made of leather, then you will get leather. The question is: how much loose gear will be dropping as we quest and how much loose gear will be dropping once we are past the questing experience?
    • I think that it will be noticeable when shopping for materials in the AH the difference between the dedicated gatherers and the scrappers. It should keep the over all prices lower.
    • These first few weeks the cost of materials will rocket high. At the end of the day, feel free to put your goodies on the AH.
    • The alternate tactic is to point your goal to the day that the raids and mythic plus and the pvp season begins and then start selling your consumable wares.
  • War Mode. Turn it on. Chances are that you won’t see an enemy player in your questing zones for days, the bonus xp should be worth it. When you start to see enemy players or feel like you hate it; turn it off.
  • Hearthstone. I’m guessing that it will be best to set it at the first Inn you see during the Intro quests into the islands, that will probably be the best bet for now. I’d keep my Dalaran stone in my bags, for sure.

That’s the list! Chances are very good that I’ll not be very pragmatic and mount up and ride and ride until I see something that I like and quest there for a while. I hope to have random fun.

Did I miss anything obvious?

Mount Macro:

#showtooltip Azure Water Strider
/cast Pretty Draenor Pearl
/cast Everlasting Alliance Firework
/cast Bubble Wand
/cast Prismatic Bauble
/rfp
/cast Azure Water Strider

Play safe. Be nice.

The Devil’s Dictionary and WoW

wrathofkublakhan6 Comments

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.
Ambrose Beirce

The Devil’s Dictionary and WoW

Ambrose Beirce was a newspaper writer in the 1880s. Sometimes in his columns he would write a funny definition for a word. In 1901, all of the definitions were collected into what was called The Devil’s Dictionary. If you are interested, you can read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

I thought that it would be fun to pull some of the words that we use in the World of Warcraft and post them. I hope that you find it as fun as I do.

ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

CONGRATULATION, n. The civility of envy.

ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.

FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships. It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees on vacant lots in London—”Rubbish may be shot here.”

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.

HIPPOGRIFF, n. An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, a one-quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises

KILL, v.t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

PANTALOONS, n. A nether habiliment of the adult civilized male. The garment is tubular and unprovided with hinges at the points of flexion. Supposed to have been invented by a humorist. Called “trousers” by the enlightened and “pants” by the unworthy.

Okay, that’s enough for now. These things need to be enjoyed in small doses.

Legion Ends

wrathofkublakhan2 Comments

“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”
Lyndon B. Johnson

Legion (Loose) Ends

Like everyone else, I’m clearing my bags and ready to go see a new land.

Trying for things is part of the fun. I did not get my 1000 pvp battle wins. That’s okay. I don’t beat myself up about it.

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I came way too late to the gold rush party. I didn’t think that I’d hit five or six million this late in the expansion, everyone was off parachuting into Fortnight. But, I’m pleased I made it up to 4.7 million. I’ll get that Auction House mount someday!

legionend

The Highmountain Paragon mount still is hiding from me. The RNG frustration is astounding because I played the crap out of the Emissary quests.

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Remember the wee bit of embarrassment of the achievement for catching 10,000 fish? How could anyone spend so much time on something so mindless? In that, I am very glad that there is no achievement for plucking Starlight Rose!

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Finally, here is the current Achievement Pane which has now the BfA stuff in it. I really did play a lot and got my money’s worth out of Legion.

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Let’s hope for an immersive Battle for Azeroth.

BfA: Beginning Gathering

wrathofkublakhan14 Comments

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

BfA: Gathering Professions

Many in our guild will be using Gathermate2 and it’s companion Gathermate_Sharing. This should peg the nodes down on our mini-map and steer us in a good direction.

I expect us to use these addons for only a month or two until we learn the best places to go for herbing, mining and fishing. This does not work for skinning.

We are a big fan of WoW-Professions Farm Guides. This site will show us the best places to get all gathering materials including different kinds of meats, cloth, leather, herbs and ores. This site has not been updated for BfA yet but I have faith, I’ve used this site for years.

In all, I enjoy the collective data gathering from our guild with that addon. It feels like we are supporting each other. As I recall, there are addons for Tom Tom that will draw paths for you on the map but I never found that very fun.

Does your guild do things like this at the beginning of an expansion?

 

Oh My Elune

wrathofkublakhan7 Comments

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
John Muir

Oh My Elune

I asked the question in a comment to Gnomecore’s excellent blog and decided to bring it up front. I’m not enough of a lore guy to understand but where is Elune?

I thought that Tyrande was as powerful as the other big guys. Those other big guys did some mighty big magic in the three parts of the pre-patch build up to BfA. Especially with the middle event in Darnassus, I’d have thought there would be something but maybe I missed it? What is the deal here, where is Elune?

I have to laugh a little bit, all of the guys who write the guides have to go back. Resto-Druid got some buffs that might be significant. I know that most guides were telling us to skip Photosynthesis. But now …

Restoration

  • Photosynthesis now increases rate of all HoTs by 20% (was 15%).
  • Photosynthesis haste effect now affects Efflorescence.
  • Cultivation healing reduced by 17%.
  • Rejuvenation healing increased by 6%.

 

Over at Diary of a Guild Leader is a fine tutorial on Navigating the New Guild Management Panel. I see that it got some fixes today too, hot fixes!

Social

  • Fixed a bug preventing Guild ranks with invite permissions from properly inviting.
  • Fixed a bug that caused Guild and officer note updates to be delayed if the member was offline.
  • Fixed multiple bugs that caused some players to be unexpectedly removed from General and Trade chat channels.

It is a new interface and many in my guild were confused and pressing me to do invites and (almost) accusing me of changing permissions. It wasn’t my fault!

I think with that fine tutorial and the hot fixes that I might be less confused now.

I’m really ready for the new expansion. Logging into Legion isn’t a whole lot of fun and a bit dreary. It’ll be here soon enough.

uulna4