Forgive Me For I Have Sinned..
Sep 3rd
It’s been 9 days since I last postedi, and I haven’t exactly had writer’s block, I’ve had plenty to blog about, a list of topics ready to be written. I’d planned to do a little post about how I was enjoying levelling my Mage upto 60 to get the Tome of Polymorph Piggy, and how I started levelling my Druid upto 70, so that I could get the epic flight form quest done to make mine and Dan’s Raven Lord runs a lot easier, and that I’d rediscovered how awesome Druid healing was, I even had a little bit of link love for some newly discovered blogs. All of the passion for these subjects came and went, I was either too busy getting things done, levelling said alts, seeing friends, reading, (whatever it is I do outside of blogging), or I simply wasn’t in the mood to write, which admittedly made up a large part of it, and I guess it still does, which is why I’m rambling a bit now.
The thing is, a friend of mine moved his Paladin over to Terenas a while back, where my Alliance alts live, and while helping him with group quests I logged into Soupdragon, my Night Elf Death Knight, because I figured a plate class would be easier to murderise elites than a Hunter who I haven’t played in months, and playing her reminded me of how much I loved the character, and the fact that I still needed to gear her up and improve my playstyle a little.
Now he’s got himself to 80, we’re doing a few heroics to gear him up, and in the meantime, I might be gearing myself up a little too. I already had a Ghoulslicer sitting in my bank, so when I got a Black Icicle I decided it was time to try out Frost dps (I’ve almost always been Unholy), and honestly, it’s taken me a few days to get the hang of it and really get used to it, for a while it felt weird as I’d been Unholy for so long, but I’m really starting to enjoy it now and finding it to be a much better spec for my dps as well. I find Frost has a fair few more buttons to play with, for single target, and for AoE. I guess it’s also important to note that I’ve never really been a big fan of Blood, it’s great for soloing things but I find it a little too “spammy” for my preferences. Frost is perfect, really, and I’m trying to get my hands on another Black Icicle – though if I got my hands on a decent 2hander upgrade I wouldn’t say no to going Unholy again.
I’m sitting on about 4.7k gearscore at the moment, and I’m pulling off anywhere between about 5k-7k dps depending on which boss and the group setup, which I think is perfectly fine for the first few bosses in ICC 10 but I’m not even going to try until I’ve finished my BiS heroic gear set, which also seems to include 3 crafted pieces (chest, wrist, boots) for a total of 8,000g, and 2 parts of tier 10 – the Sanctified legs I paid a guy in Vault 5,000g for because I really badly wanted them, luckily he was happy to trade for the gold, the shoulders I earned through many weeklies and a few random heroics (well, I say that, I’ll have them by Sunday).
I have had some really awesome pugs in this battlegroup, and on this server, which sucks a bit that it’s not going to be my main server because it is my favourite of the 3 I play on, but everybody I’ll be playing with in Cataclysm wants to stay on Vashj so I’ll be keeping my Alliance alts there, definitely. There was the Icecrown geared Warrior tank who kept apologising whenever anybody died, despite it not being his fault, more likely the healer’s who seemed to have a problem with dispelling. We stuck with him for another random because he was pretty cool, but after he called my friend “palladin,” he wanted to leave and reform, so we did. There have been many pugs where the group have complimented each other, stuck together after wipes and had a bit of a laugh while we waited for new members, people making mistakes and not being berated for it, and it’s just been a pleasure, a real breath of fresh air to get away from “omg noobs!”
Mind you, I’ve also had a couple of terrible pugs, giving me people to add to my ignore list, though by this point I think my Rogue had around 10-15 people on hers. One where the tank was so terrible that I decided to gather myself a tank gear set when I finish my dps gear set, just because I know I can do much better than they did. It was the kind of tank who ignored patrols, let people die a lot, stood around staring at the next pull, just jumping around for no real reason except perhaps to see their Night Elf twizzle in the air.. I don’t mind people who are clearly new to tanking, but I tanked more of that instance than they did. Another in which the tank insulted my friend, the Mage, and the healer for not being good enough. They kept dying, and doing around 2k dps, in Halls of Lightning heroic, each with about 3k gearscore, honestly they were doing good with what they had. I was in a particularly bad mood and really laid into the guy, I hate egotistical twats who treat other people unnecessarily nastily. After I was finished with him, he shutup and carried on, until the healer, a Paladin, struggled to heal Loken because they kept being one shot by the Lightning Nova. The tank left with a “omg you fucking noobs” and the Mage got in his much better geared friend and we got it down. The other one that stuck in my mind was more of a case of I’d had a terrifically bad few days, and the guy wearing heroic Dawnbreaker’s taking the normal Forge of Souls boots (which I’d greeded on hoping to win them to replace my blue ones, but didn’t want to need on them because I thought it was rude for the Death Knight to take Shield Block boots for their offspec.. well yeah you can see where I’m going with this), the guy took them. I asked why, he said “cause I can”, I said “a little dickish”, he said “good job I’m a dick” and left. I was not a happy panda, so it’s a damn good job I’d pugged with some lovely people earlier on, and the following heroic wasn’t quite so bad, else I’d have ended the night with a really bad taste in my mouth.
I also decided to get her a few of the easier achievements, like ‘the Explorer’, and ‘Ambassador’, it gives me something to do and gets Soup a couple of titles that aren’t ‘the Patient’, which I really don’t think suits her. The reason I’m spending so much time and effort on her? No, I haven’t rerolled again, it’s just that all my Priest really has to do at the moment is grind and PvP which aren’t particularly exciting activities to me, I mean, once in a while I don’t mind, but every day, every week and it becomes a chore, so I thought I’d play my Death Knight a little, to give me something to do in the meantime while I’m not reading, or watching anime.
And here’s the link love I mentioned.
The past few weeks I’m come across a few blogs who I added to my reader, and I feel they’re well worth sharing, check them out and go and say hello!
- though I’m ecstatic that my last post seems to have been so useful for a fair few of you! [↩]
The Art Of Gold Making: Setting Up Shop
Aug 25th
Okay guys, so you may have read my last gold post and thought, “That’s great and all, Jae, but, where exactly do you expect us to start? What are the most helpful mods? Any quick tips? What are the best professions to use?” Well, don’t worry, I didn’t intend to leave it there. I was in the same position as those of you who are just starting out at some point, not knowing where to start, and I fully intend to help you get to a point where you are able to make enough income to play comfortably, how much you end up making purely depends on how much time and effort you put into it. You can spend an hour here or there and make enough to cover raiding costs, and then some.
I think it’s best if I start from the beginning. If you’re looking for professions, the best ones will be any that you can use to craft things. That would be: Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, Enchanting, Inscription, Engineering. Gathering professions are a nice bonus if you want them. Personally, I like having them, but they aren’t the best way to make gold strictly speaking. However, I really believe it’s down to personal preference. Every profession has its’ own way to make a bit of gold so choose whichever you prefer and I’ll cover how to use them effectively in a later post.
Bank Alts
The first thing I do, regardless of my level, on any server, is to create a bank alt. I give it a name that I might give a character (rather than Jaedialt, or Wgrtdf) or perhaps recycle an alt I don’t play anymore, run it to the nearest city (or maybe I’ll create a Blood Elf and make my way to Undercity or Orgrimmar. I personally think that Undercity is the best for Horde bank alting, and Ironforge for Alliance), and leave it near the auction house. I make sure it has some gold, buy all of the bank slots, and fill them and every bag slot with either 20 slot or 16 slot bags, depending on how much gold I have and then log out.
This character is there to enable you to mail any useful items you might want to keep or sell to stop your bags from clogging up too much while you’re questing or grinding. You can always return the mail later on if need be. If you have a lot of auctions, you might even consider putting a guild together purely so you can have access to the guild bank to store anything you don’t have space for, you can let your friends join to use the guild tag, or keep it purely for guild bank purposes. My personal guild bank currently has 4 tabs, and I’m considering buying a 5th. The extra space is just too awesome.
Auction Mods
After your space is set up and ready to use, you may want to look into getting a few mods. They aren’t a necessity, of course, but they do make auctioning a lot simpler, and make it a bit easier to contend with the people who seem to sit there doing their auctions all day, and all night.
Personally, I like to use Postal, Auctioneer, QuickAuctions, Market Watcher, Auction Profit, and Skillet on my crafting characters. I only use these mods (except for Postal, which is useful anyway) on my bank alt as it saves memory on the characters that don’t need them.
Very often, I will have a few hundred mails in my mailbox. You’re only able to open 50 every minute, and Postal really helps with that. With its’ ‘Open All’ function, you can leave it to open those 50 mails while you alt tab or read a book for the minute. It has a countdown as well on the mail symbol so if you choose to watch the mailbox, you’re able to see when it’s ready to be refreshed. Emptying the mailbox is possibly the most tedious part of doing your auctions, thanks to Postal, it’s just a tiny bit less tedious.
Auctioneer has many useful features. One of its’ main uses is of course scanning the auction house, if you scan regularly enoughi you will be given an average market price for each item. These average prices are particularly useful when working out how much an item should go for if it’s perhaps too low, or too high, or if there isn’t any of that item up at the time. BeanCounter can be used to search for an item to see your sale history. It can tell you your past sales and buyouts, which you might find useful. This guide will help you to use Auctioneer to check for items selling below the vendor price, and also for items that may be worth buying to resell.
I like to use QuickAuctions3 as well as Auctioneer. Once you’ve set it up, adding different groups and price settings for each of your regular auctions, you can basically use the ‘post’ and ‘cancel’ buttons, and the most work you end up doing is waiting for the mailbox to refresh. The ‘cancel’ button cancels any of the items you’ve added to QA3′s groups which have been undercut, so that you can put them back up as the lowest priced auction. This is particularly great if you’re in the glyph market, but don’t knock it for any others you might dip your toes into. Follow this guide to help you set it up.
AuctionPrice tells you how much gold your current auctions are in total. Of course, if everytime I put up auctions they sold I’d be very very rich ingame, but it’s nice to see roughly how much gold is sitting there, this is purely there for my own curiosity and isn’t really important.
Market Watcher as well is nice to scan for particular items and watch the market trends. I tend to watch for raw materials, mostly uncut gems, cloth, herbs, Frozen Orbs. Anything you might buy a lot of is useful to keep an eye on.
Skillet is basically a change to the default crafting UI. I’m not a huge fan of the way Skillet itself looks, but it’s very useful if you’re crafting a few things. I only really use it on my Inscriptor and my Jewelcrafter, as it allows me to queue up whatever I want to craft, and then make it, which is nice when I’m checking which gems I’m low on, or which glyphs are selling well at that point in time.
Aphroditi’s guide to the auction house, and more auction tips are very decent posts which have been very helpful to me in setting up Auctioneer and Market Watcher, I recommend you take a look.
Starter Cash
We all need to start somewhere, and there are many different ways you can get yourself a bit of starter cash. It all depends on how you’d rather spend your time doing so. If you want to, you can start off by using the vendor and resale options of Auctioneer, but if not, here are a few more options.
Vendor Items
One of the often overlooked methods of gaining a bit of gold, though it’s something people have been doing for years, is to buy vendor items, and resell them on the auction house. A lot of people don’t want to go trekking around looking for everything they need or want, and will pay a little extra to buy them from the auction house instead, saving them a bit of time. My favourite post detailing which vendor items to grab, along with maps for where to find them all, is this one. It is well detailed and easy to follow. People are willing to pay as much as 60g for certain patterns. Take the cooking recipes from the wandering caravan in Desolace, it’s a pain to find, and when you do the recipes are all ‘rare spawn’, only costing a few silver to buy. Don’t forget vendor pets – if you are able to grab pets from the other faction to sell on your faction’s auction house that’s brilliant, if not, don’t worry, same faction pets will sell as wellii.
Questing
Personally, I like to complete quests. You can gain a fair amount of gold from completing your Northrend questsiii, and if you have more than one character at max level and a lot of patience, that’s a few thousand gold you can get, guaranteed. While you do those, you can work on opening up a few daily quests, Sons of Hodir and the Argent Tournament ones especially. If you enjoy, or at least can tolerate, questing for money, 25 daily quests per day will get you a few hundred gold per character, it all depends on how much time and patience you have to spare. Don’t forget the weekly raid and Wintergrasp quests, not only do these give a fair bit of gold, but the emblems and honour they give are useful for gold makers (see below).
Gathering Professions
If you use gathering professions, be sure to pick up any materials you see while you’re flying around, even if you don’t have any crafting professions yet, selling these raw can get you a bit of starter gold, or perhaps you’d prefer to save them to use to level your professions or craft into things that will make a little more gold than the raw materials themselves. If you happen to be a miner, Titansteel bars are still profitable as well.
Random Dungeons and PvP
Another reasonable way to get some starter gold is to do a few random dungeons. The first one you do each day at level 80 will give you 2 Emblem of Frost and 26g, after that they grant 2 Emblem of Triumph and 13g. Remember to check the average price of Dream Shards on your server in order to know which blues are worth disenchanting, and which are worth greeding. A lot of the things you’ll pick up while doing the dungeons can sell, and if you don’t need the gear, you can turn 20 Emblem of Triumph into 20 Emblem of Heroism and then into Cardinal Rubies/Majestic Zircons/King’s Ambers. These you can either sell raw for around 100-130g each, or cut them and sell them for a little more. 10,000 honour can be traded in for gems as well. If you have any spare Stone Keeper’s Shards that you don’t need, make sure you turn them into honour (30 shards = 2,000 honour, and the tokens you get are BoA so you can send any from your alts to your main and vice versa), and of course you can do random battlegrounds too, you’re able to queue from anywhere in Azeroth, so perhaps grind a little while you queue (this also counts for random dungeons).
Grinding
If you really want to, there are plenty of good grinding spots, you just have to find the best ones. I find the Fire and Air Elementals on the Elemental Plateau in Nagrand are brilliant, on my server I could sell Motes of Fire for about 6g each, and Primal Air is still going for about 60g each, it’s useful for a few enchants, Cat’s Swiftness is still the best raiding enchant for a lot of physical classes without Engineering. Check other economy blogs for posts giving tips on the best places to farm.
Selling Professions
Finally, while you’re idling in cities chatting to people, reading blog posts, or whatever you do while you idle, remember to offer your professions in trade. Usually a crafting fee will be about 10g per craft, I stick to this for epic gem cuts, however, certain crafts might get you a bit more, so for some professions you might find it a little better to ask for tips, because some people might tip for a little more than you might be expecting. You will get people tipping 5g, but it seems to be quite rare, and therefore worth trusting in people’s generosity. For example, I have the Blood Draining recipe and I tend to get tips of anywhere between 50-250g for it because it’s fairly rare, or at least difficult to find people who actually respond. I still sometimes get 100g tips for crafting the Death Chill Cloak, for which I’d probably ask for about 15g if I put a fee on it. Just make sure you’re polite, people are less likely to tip if you refuse to pop to Orgrimmar/Ironforge (you can politely say that you’re waiting for somebody in Dalaran), if you’re rude and demanding, chances are they won’t be so generous. If they try to trade you without tipping, gently remind them, sometimes they forget, sometimes they’re just testing their luck, most often they will apologise and give you a little gold for your help.
Stay tuned for whenever I get off my arse to write another one!
- every 12 hours is ideal, but whenever you get chance works, you can do a quick scan with the double arrow but if your PC can’t quite take it, the longer scan does the same job, just might need 10 minutes of AFK time [↩]
- Stormspire Netherstorm, Shimmering Flats Thousand Needles, Org, Eversong Woods, UC, TB, Darn, SW, Elwynn Forest, Exodar, Dun Morogh, Tournament [↩]
- Grizzly Hills, Zul’Drak, Scholazar Basin, Storm Peaks, Icecrown [↩]
The Ampitheater of Anguish
Aug 23rd
A friend of mine ingame, Candy, got his Paladin to 75. It was always his pride and joy, after the amount of time he put into it in vanilla, I really can’t blame him! He asked me, “What level can I do the Ring of Blood thingy?” I said 75, and off we went a little bit later. Of course I took Soupdragon, mostly because it’s much easier to be smacked in the face and Death Strike than to remember a class I haven’t played in a while. While I was waiting, I noticed a couple of players had wiped on the last bit of the Ampitheater quests and the mammoth was just standing there, obviously bugged. They seemed to be struggling so I decided I’d let them sort it out, tag it, and I’d tank it for them, however, the Warlock jumped in the mammoth and stupidly I attacked the other guy.. and tagged it. It was a bit of a mess, we all died, ran back over, I hopped into their group, helped kill it then got on with helping Candy, who was pretty damn happy to get a new hitty stick.
A little before that, while I was flying around on my Gryphon (this is important, I’ve played as Horde for so long the default Gryphon mounts Alliance get are, to me, gorgeous and I’m so jealous!), I noticed something I’d never stopped to be able to notice before. In the Ampitheater of Anguish, and I guess you’ve all seen this, but I’m an unobservant doofus sometimes, there is an audience. Walking around the audience is a Goblin vendor who sells snacks and occasionally lobs a bag of peanuts at one of the spectators! I thought this was excellent, and I wish I’d noticed it all of those times I’d been here before.
Shared Items & Feedback
Aug 22nd
Today I’d like to talk about link love. Well, less ‘talk about it’, because I don’t need to tell you why it’s nice, but just to let you guys know that incase you weren’t aware – I am giving it out a lot even when I don’t post.
See, a few months back I was having trouble with my reader. Certain blogs literally wouldn’t update and that was driving me insane, so, I asked in Single Abstract Noun which readers people were using and Erc ordered me to try out Feedly, which I believe is a Google Chrome extension. It’s supposed to be the magazine style feed reader, though I like the lists. I have it set up to show blog names and article titles, if an article says in the title, for example, ‘Cataclysm’, then I can quite easily skip past it and read something without Cataclysm spoilers and I love it for that.
Anyway, being part of Google, it’s connected to Google Reader, so I was able to import my blog list from Bloglines (my old reader) and it seems to synchronise. Another feature it shares is ‘shared items’, which I started using to just bookmark posts I enjoyed to come back to for either the link love posts I used to do, or to add to my resources page later on. After a while, I realised I could link to this as a feed in my sidebar and I have done ever since.
Below my Twitter box, you should be able to see ‘Interesting Blog Posts’, which I have renamed, it used to be ‘Interesting Stuff’. and the feed link in the little orange icon should work, if not try clicking here. I share posts that I find interesting, useful, and funny, so take a look, they’re worth reading. You might find something new.
I’d also like to ask you while I’m doing a more generic blogging post what you guys think of the theme changes? Apart from, “Dear God, woman, stop changing your damn theme every 10 minutes!” Because trust me, I know, but I’ve gone back to the old theme that I quite liked, couldn’t find anything else I was 100% happy with. I like the header and the sidebar, I’m just not sure about the background. Anything you might change perhaps? Feedback/constructive criticism is appreciated.
Our Cataclysm Guild Plans
Aug 18th
First of all, I’m going to have to apologise for the mess.. again. Yes, seeing as I’m planning a new header, and that I’ve never been completely crazy about my current theme, I have decided to go with a new theme. I’ve found one which looks a lot tidier and should hopefully clean up my sidebar a bit (3 columns!), so I’ll get on with that soon along with a bunch of things I want to do in order to just tidy the place up, and hopefully this time I’ll stick with it, the theme isn’t too simple or too “complicated”, so I should hopefully be pretty happy with it, without wanted to fiddle with the CSS and then getting frustrated because I’m too bad at CSS. Anyway, back to the post.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, in fact I probably haven’t, but a few months ago we decided that the best way for us to enjoy the game was to make our own guild for Cataclysm. Especially when they announced the change to 25 man and 10 man raiding, one lockout per raid per week, we knew we’d be able to settle down with a few friends and raid some 10s. So, for months we tried to come up with a guild name, to no avail, everything one of us said we liked, another didn’t.
The plan almost fell apart, which probably would have led to me eventually quitting not too far into Cataclysm, until a few weeks ago when we went to have a bit of lunch before seeing a movie (Inception) at the cinema, we sat and discussed all sorts of Cataclysm based plans and decided in the end to stay on our current server (Vashj, PvP, EU). It’s not an ideal server, by any means, but we all have a bunch of alts here with different professions, and it would have been a lot of effort to move however many people decide to join come the expansion. Plus there are a few people who might be joining who wouldn’t have moved. Finally, we discussed the guild name again, and decided on ‘SlashPat’.
We won’t be doing any raiding until Cataclysm, perhaps a little in 4.0 before the expansion actually hits while we wait around but right now we don’t have the people, and aren’t really interested yet. We still need to sort the ranks out, and the guild websitei, but we are also going to be looking for a few social members. People who aren’t too interested in raiding, perhaps one or two that can fill in for people when they’re away but that’s something to sort another time, who would like somewhere relaxed to be while they play the game they want to play. It would be awfully nice to play Cataclysm with a social aspect to the guild, as well as the raiding aspect.
At the moment we only have 5 members, and we’re not exactly recruiting yet, we might still need one or two raiders as well, it depends on who decides they’re joining and who doesn’t, but if it sounds interesting, keep us in mind. We plan to have fun while we raid, and we’d also like to get the job done, do the hardmodes and achievements, so when we do start looking for raiding members, we want serious raiders who want to have a laugh, basically. Our social members, of course, don’t need to be serious raiders, just be friendly and a bit social!
- which I’m going to be dealing with. Dan’s asked for a simple guildomatic site though I wouldn’t mind using something else, something more customiseable, either way I have plenty of time to sort it and a lot of other things to do in the meantime [↩]
Time For RNG To Stop Hating Me
Aug 16th
And that’s a good start!
Thing I love the most about her? Turquoise tongue!!
I think I’ve spent an hour here and there in the past flying around but I’ve never solidly farmed it, when I woke up this morning around 6am and struggled to get back to sleep, I was in 2 minds over whether I should just get up and farm the Time Lost but alas, I was too comfy and went back to sleep after an hour or so. When I did get up, I headed straight for the Storm Peaks. Every once in a while I’d start flying around a bit but I mostly sat towards the top of Bor’s Breath, which is exactly where I was when my NPC Scan started flashing. I’d actually just popped downstairs to sort out the washing, so it had flown off a little by the time I saw it, but 310% mount + nobody around meant that I got lucky! Being a Shadow Priest helped immensely – I jumped off my mount, pressed Levitate, and Shadow Word Pain as fast as I could, shoved a couple of heals on myself and a shield and then kill and loot! It’s so gorgeous I can’t wait until it becomes a 310% mount in Cataclysmi so that I can actually properly use it! Squee!
I think the 3 or 4 hours I sat waiting for it before it spawned made up a little for the year and a half of zero tiger mount luck. I believe it’s time I had a little more luck with mount RNG, I’m trying to get my collection up a bit and I’m only 4 off the 100, and the past few months I’ve seen nothing. I’m aiming for the Dragonhawk next from the Champion’s Seals and I’m fairly regularly doing the Polar Bear daily, Baron runs, and fishing for the turtle, as well as ZG resets. Yeah, there are a lot more I’m after but if I listed them, that wouldn’t be particularly interesting to read, so I’ll spare you and just say how bloody ecstatic I am.
- because I already have a 310% mount [↩]
Lazy Sniper’s Blogaversary!
Aug 11th
My blogaversary was yesterday! I actually completely forgot, posted yesterday’s post, and then checked the date and remembered. It’s been one year since I made my first post and to be very honest, looking back at the first few months of my blog, I really cringe. I wanted to delete a lot of it but NDMiko and Cynwise told me I wasn’t allowed so it’s all there, in it’s cringeworthy form. I think around November/December I started to improve a little, but it was a very gradual improvement, which I’m not totally convinced is much better but apparently you guys like it so no worries!
My first post was about my Hunter soloing the raptor boss in Zul’gurub, which can be found here. Hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere. I originally wrote this on my free WordPress blog, which was ‘hunterstuff’, but fairly quickly moved to a hosted option. I’m glad I did in hindsight, I’ve really made some good use out of my hosting and had some fun playing with themes and plugins. I’ve always been very bad at keeping on top of these kinds of projects too, so I am incredibly surprised I’ve stuck with it for a whole year now without any real gaps in posting due to being bored of blogging.
If I’m honest, I doubt I’d have kept with it if it wasn’t for the amazing community WoW blogging has, through Blog Azeroth, Single Abstract Noun, Twitter, and of course just generally joining in with discussions on blogs themselves. There are some absolutely brilliant bloggers who I have followed almost religiously and hopefully learnt a lot about blogging from, and they’ve also kept me entertained when I needed it. The Twitter community is absolutely great, and I love you all to bits. I’m not going to mention names because I will forget people and there are way too many to list, so use your imaginations! You’re probably on the list.
I know Windsoar did a hire a muse theme for her 6 month blogaversary, and around Christmas both Tam and Syrana did a ‘share the blogging syphilis’. All of them were offering to give bloggers individual blog topics based on the blogger’s personality, likes, dislikes, and every time it was really fun! I’m pretty terrible of thinking of topics myself, however, if you’d like a topic, feel free to ask and I’ll flail at your blogs for a bit until I come up with something! Just leave a comment or contact me.
On a slightly less related note, I helped Vidyala by helping to judge her Paladin fashion contest. There were some excellent entries, and a couple that really made me laugh, so it was very difficult to judge, but it was worth it, I enjoyed it. As a thank you, she has drawn my Priest! I entirely did not expect this and it is stunning, I’ve always loved her artwork, so a huge thank you to Vidyala, I love it! We may see a new header here at some point in the future.
WTB Friendly Tanks
Aug 10th
The way I figure it, all tanks are dicks. That’s what my time on the Argent Dawn battlegroup is proving to me at least. Last night, the rest of the guild’s 80s were busy in the 3 Icecrown 5 mans on normal mode so I figured while I did a few quests to get some money and my Argent Crusade rep up a little I’d chain some randoms.
The first one I got was Drak’tharon Keep, I figured great! I have a quest here and King Dred drops a pretty nice trinket upgrade. I asked if we could break a few of the webs in the spider room so I could find the Troll for my quest, which surprisingly they did for me, that was nice, I picked up the next quest, and then the tank ran through the room saying, “skip”. Well, I need the emblems but I can’t solo it, so I ran through, killed some bats, realised I needed that boss for my quest but figured oh well I’ll get it next time, at least I was able to pick it up. Running past King Dred, “skip”, yeah okay now it’s just annoying, so from the whole instance I got 3 emblems. Whoopidoo, what’s the point in doing it as a random if that’s all you get?
The next one was Utgarde Keep, yay a nice quick, easy one. Can’t skip anything either. We zone in and the tank immediately says, “buff”, and after a few seconds, “buff priest”. This pushes my buttons. No hello, no please, and I’m pretty sure the Priest wasn’t called ‘priest’. Either way, we carry on, get to the room with the proto drakes, the tank skips a load pulls the pack at the end, I accidentally pull one more proto drake which is easily Tricksed onto him, and I believe the Priest’s Mind Sear pulled another pack, which of course wiped us. Then the Priest left. This is an attitude I never understood, the guy who causes the wipe always seems to blame anybody but themself, usually the tank or the healer. When you mess up, you recognise you’ve done so 9 times out of 10. Anyway, he was replaced by a Warlock who was fairly decent, but twice pulled things by accident and got us wiped. The tank felt it necessary at this point to say, “ebay lock” which was entirely pointless of course. Oh well, we finished and the Warlock ninjad the blue legs from the last boss (he had Tier 9), I didn’t quite get that either.
Then Utgarde Pinnacle popped up and as expected, the tank skipped all but 2 bosses. He was quite up himself, but nothing out of the ordinary to report, just the usual, “WTB DPS”, and “chop chop I don’t have time for this”.
I believe I then grouped up with a couple of guildies who had either come online or finished their instances. We queued up while I murdered some spiders and bats in Zul’drak, and luckily got Forge of Souls heroic! Great, I’d already done this one earlier as a specific, this gave me an extra chance for the trinket. We zoned in, killed a pack, and our healer left, we fairly quickly got a new healer, carried on, and everything was going just fine until I disconnected. My net went down. I knew my guildies weren’t about to vote kick me, but I didn’t want to hold them up, so I reset it, was offline for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, and came back online to an argument. Now, I’m not particularly fond of elitist bastards, especially when they’re being nasty to people I like. I came back online part way through something I think, but:
I did try to vote kick him but apparently the healer didn’t like this so we had to finish the instance with him and queued for one more, hoping to actually get lucky and have a nice tank. Might I add where he says “you dont know tactic”, we hadn’t even reached the first boss yet and did kill the adds and move out of the shit accordingly, whilst he was running the boss around the room in circles meaning it was pretty difficult for 2 of us to get any dps off on the boss for the first phase. At least after this little exchange he shutup and continued being punched in the face.
This time we got Azjol Nerub and the tank and healer didn’t seem too bad. We killed the first boss, and then the tank started asking me to reset the second boss. First off, I’m not comfortable with this method. I’m not hot on how to do it, and there is a risk of me fucking up and dying. I might have given it a go just to make the tank happy except he started being a bit bossy about it. The second he said, “just do it”, I decided no, I really won’t ‘just do it’. With a “fine”, he pulled the boss, we moved on, and around the part of the instance where you jump down the giant hole (which I always always angle my camera down to avoid water walking or path of frost death from the TotC 25 days), one of my guildies disconnected. Either the tank or healer tried to vote kick him but that didn’t pass. He didn’t come back so I guess his net went down. We had one wipe on Anub’erak because the healer and other dps was hit by pound, to which the tank replied, “you guys fail”. Then ran back in, killed it, and decided at this point that that was more than enough dickheads for one night.
I really hope the entire battlegroup isn’t like this, because gearing my Rogue is going to become quite a chore without guildies soon if this continues. Aside from all of this, I am enjoying it. I’m able to join in with guildies now we’re at the same level and play something new. It’s nice to be able to chill and take a break from grinding reputation and mounts for a bit. Oh, and a note, I don’t honestly think that all tanks are dicks, I think I’m damn unlucky, but I did grab your attention didn’t I?
The Rogue Finally Made It
Aug 8th
I started levelling my Rogue right near the beginning of SAN coming into existence, and yesterday afternoon she finally hit 80. It’s taken me a lot longer than previous characters because I’ve also been trying to complete a few goals on my Bucket List, which is going really well and there are only a couple of achievements left that I haven’t finished by now, and also because I did it without heirlooms which sucked a fair bit by the time she reached Outlands. She hit level 80 already with 42 Emblems of Triumph and has since taken part in a few heroic runs with the lovely people of Single Abstract Noun. It’s fun!
It’s taken me 3 days to get exalted with the Sons of Hodir, which I’m damn glad about because that’s a big grind I didn’t want to have to do. They really have increased the rate you gain reputation with them now. I’m also working on Ebon Blade and the Tournament dailies too. While reading around, trying to learn a few things about the Rogue class so that I’m not completely clueless, I found an awesome Rogue blog, PVE Rogues, which is full of helpful guides, it’s really helped me a lot.
Another thing, I don’t suppose you remember me wanting to see how much gold I could make while levelling a new character with no outside help? The idea that eventually failed because I couldn’t resist the lure of heirlooms and gold from my other characters but knew that starting on a new server would have got me nowhere. Well, this is basically the same thing. By the time I was level 77, I could afford Cold Weather and epic flying skill. Right now, I have around 14k gold. This has been with minor outside help from the SAN guild bank, but mostly from selling things on the auction house while I levelled. So there’s the result of that little experiment, you can quite easily make enough gold to get by while you level.
Gender Roles In Gaming
Aug 5th
This is a 2 part post. The first being over at my personal blog, the Rant Page. The second being a little less about gender roles in society, and more about how males and females are perceived in a gaming environment. As I said over there, this post has been a very long time coming. I believe I have been planning to write a post about gender since maybe May, perhaps even a little before that, and it was in fact listening to the Obscurecast that reminded me about it and finally made me decide to get my thoughts down. I’d like to thank Pewter, Gazimoff, and Stu for the inspiration.
The general consensus amongst and about gamers seems to be that games are for boys and girls don’t play games, but that’s just not the case. I guess most female WoW players, or indeed players of any online game, will experience “Omg you’re a girl?” at some point in their gaming experience, which to me has always felt strange, I mean, yes I am female, and last time I checked there are a lot of us around here. What’s so amazing about owning a pair of breasts? Even girls who perhaps don’t enjoy console games, or MMOs, can be found gaming these days, there are games such as the Sims and Farmville around that make gaming much more accessible for everybody.
In WoW, females are often treated differently to males, and there are different aspects of it. Sometimes they are treated with much more respect, given the benefit of the doubt for messing up, given gifts, easier guild access. I always hated guild applications that asked for real name or gender for this reason, and also the other reason, much more difficult guild access.
There is the belief amongst WoW players that “girls cause drama”, and on this basis, a lot of guilds will be very sparing with the amount of female players they accept. The trouble is, this creates a self fulfilling prophecy in that the majority of us don’t care for drama much at all and just want to play the game. I’ve been on the receiving end of sexist remarks ingame. In my TBC guild, if I tried to join in with guild chat, very often I was met with, “Get back in the kitchen lol,” which hey, they may have found funny, but I don’t. I’m a female, so therefore I can’t join in with stuff without being made to feel that I’m inadequate as a player. Of course, I don’t personally come across this too often, but some girls get it quite bad and that’s absolutely horrendous. A lot of the time, females are seen as lesser players which simply isn’t the case, there are some excellent female players in this game, it’s all down to the individual. There are some awful male players too.
I’ve seen this happen more publicly too. Comments in trade about girls not playing WoW, they’re all fat and ugly, and so on. People advertising for pugs either stating that they have a girl in the party, or requesting more girls for the party. There was a guild back in TBC on my server called <Sapped Girls Can’t Say No> which I found utterly disgusting, and I immediately reported the name – they didn’t last long thank God. The worst part about all of the derogatory things that happen, is that more often than not people laugh at them! Like women aren’t important, they’re just there for shits and giggles, and you know what, that actually hurts a bit.
The way in which gaming companies portray women and men doesn’t help very much either. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely against the skimpy armour they make women wear, the ass shots you see in a lot of console games, how butch and muscular they design their men, and the differences in strength, how weak and weepy they design their women, and how macho they design their men. None of this really helps matters. What the game needs is women who kick ass, and don’t seem to be there merely for sex appeal. I think the best female protagonists this game has to offer is Lady Sylvanas and Keristrasza. They kick ass, and they lead. Shame about the bikinis. These women show people that females are powerful, and aren’t to be messed with! Although, it’s a shame that often women feel that to stand up for their gender, they can’t be feminine, else they’ll only be mocked for being female, because that’s not true in the slightest. I can sit on the lawn in a skirt, reading Hitchhiker’s, and telling a man to go make me a sandwich if I want.
It would be nice to think that things are slowly improving, I mean, I notice a lot less “Omg you’re a girl” style comments these days, but I still see sexism popping up in guild chat. There are some real chauvinists in this game and it’s a shame I cleared my screenshot folder because I had a couple of excellent examples in there I’d taken for this post but cleared it to make space on my PC. I do think the gaming culture has come a long way, but there is still a little way to go to get things to be a lot more equal. Also, this image confuses me. I’m not sure whether it’s great for showing that girls are powerful too, or horrendous for basically being fanservice. I’m inclined to lean towards the latter, sadly.
Brew of the Year
Isle of Conquest Victory
A-bomb-inable
Stocking Up
40 Exalted Reputations
Toravon the Ice Watcher (10 player)
Koralon the Flame Watcher (25 player)
Champion of Ironforge
Nerf Gravity Bombs (10 player)
