Tuesday, 10 June 2014

Born To Be Wild



Azeroth Choppers, 8 Episodes of utter garbage. The kind of nonsense Television that the USA revels in. Pimp my Motorbike would have niche viewing figures in single digits in the UK and I expect that the rest of Europe is equally interested.

The concept was to design, and assemble two motorbikes that are Warcraft themed, one for the Horde and one for the Alliance. For the sting in the tail there was going to be a worldwide vote and the winning Chopper will appear in the game.

Now here is were everything gets a little murky and if anything Blizzard have deliberately muddied the waters. Is the vote on the best looking Chopper, or is it this contest between Horde and Alliance? Does everybody get the Chopper, or just characters of the winning faction?

In my opinion the best Chopper is the Horde but I have only Alliance characters, for which team do I vote. Worldwide the Alliance heavily outnumbers the Horde, so how can the Horde ever win if this is a faction competition?

As everybody knows who has ever played the game, that Blizzard loves Horde. It is a minority mindset, we are less in numbers but stronger in adversity. It was laughed at when the teams were first announced that  Horde Warchief Metzen was going to represent the Alliance, whilst the gravelly voiced "For the Horde" Samwise Didier was going to represent the Horde.

This was one vote that was always going to be as democratic as a North Korean Election. Everybody knew the result without watching Episode 8. The result was so rigged that nobody even commented on the Horde winning. It was a 100% turnout and the Horde received 100% of the vote. There was however one dissenter, but he is not the messiah he is a very naughty boy and will be punished accordingly.

It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)


Now that Valor capping is not very difficult to achieve, my free time as turned to trying to please Wrathion in the hope that he gives me more Cloaks of Awesomeness. The downside is that I am spending time doing things I don't really want to do, with people I don't want to be with.

It is easy to think back at the time on the Wrathion Questline as being nothing more than the collection of Sigils, Secrets and Titan Runestones. The reality is that there are side roads that we would like to forget and I don't just mean having to PvP in the two new Battlegrounds, neither of which do it for me.

One such side road is the quests surrounding the Isle of Thunder, Spirit of the Storm Lord:

"Progress through the Isle of Thunder until you unlock the final courtyard. Obtain a Tempered Lightning Lance by thrusting the lance into Storm Lord Nalak and surviving long enough to siphon his power."

Forging the Lance is a fun little scenario which is far from straightforward but is rewarding in it's level of difficulty. The part where you are required to upset a World Boss and expect to live is a little bit more tricky. First time through I was on a Hunter, which just like most activities in the game they are able to solo without any difficulty. The key is being able to drop threat, so that is excellent for Hunters and Rogues, but not so good for Elemental Shaman. I tried a few tricks that are posted on the forum, but I am guessing that Blizzard fixed them some time ago.

I asked an eminent Shaman in my Guild and I expected some smart answer about casting this spell here and running over to here, then waving your pants above your head and then hand in the quest. The answer was very different, "Hang on I will log onto my Tank". I waited for awhile, my knight in shining armour soloed a world boss, and I ran away like a big girl's blouse, waved my pants above my head and then handed the quest in.

It is hardly fair that some classes can solo and other need to get a mate to help them (Thanks Elogis).

I have often stated that it is not wise to do LFR's at the weekend, but when there is nothing else to do, and you just need to kill one boss for part of the Quest chain, you think how bad can this be. The answer is worse than you can imagine. I was up to the quest Fear Itself:

"Defeat the Sha of Fear in the Terrace of Endless Spring and acquire the Chimera of Fear."

I normally like ToES it is a Raid which requires moving about 50 paces, down some stairs, and up some stairs and defeat four bosses in about 20 minutes. It's not the most taxing of instances and in particular the first boss encounter is a council style fight. I have done this fight many times and I attack the boss with the dwindling health bar. Icy Veins in it's guide states:

The strategy for this phase can be summarised relatively easily.
While this list is rather comprehensive, we will go into some more details in the sections below.
We remind you that once the first boss is killed, the other two will be healed to full health. Therefore, there is no reason to try to cleave or multi DoT the bosses.

Notice that it does not advocate which boss to kill first and it comes with a reminder that when the first boss is killed the other two will be healed to full health. This is not the Fallen Protectors (He, She and It) were they need to all die at the same time, but it does require some organisation or at the very least some communication.

The LFR that I got lumbered in did less damage than when the Raid was current content, coupled with an inability to hit the same target. The see-saw action of the Raid resulted in a kill time of over 10 minutes.

The elemental Protectors that appear on the stairs and will divide if not killed in time, kept dividing, and the Sha of Fear also took over 10 minutes to complete. Very painful indeed, but good practice to hone your rotation.

Living Doll


Goodbye Flashheart. Rest in Peace.

Friday, 6 June 2014

See The Light


As a Blogger, I want people to come and read what I write. After all I don't get paid for writing, and I don't use adverts on the site. What you really want is to strike a chord with other people, help other people and hopefully publish something that is readable and enjoyable to other people. The best thing is when people take the time to leave a comment. Readers comments provide extra material for Bloggers, and at the moment we certainly need some additional stimulus (of a legal kind).

Yesterday I wrote about Spirits of Harmony and how I believe they should have been Bind on Account from the start of the expansion, after Blizzard hinted that the next expansion will remove the soulbound status on these crafting materials.

Balkoth in the comment section wrote about the design philosophy of Blizzard and how they want Alts to be fully rounded characters that are not fed by a well geared Main. My argument with quoting Blizzard design philosophy is that Blizzard sways in the breeze depending on what those magical stats reveal. It can be argued that Balkoth is absolutely right and that crafting restriction were placed behind Reputation vendors in Mists of Pandaria all the way up to patch 5.3 when Blizzard realised that nobody was playing alts and this was having a detrimental effect on the game and so they made Reputation gains easier, setup farming orders for reputation and in 5.4 gave us Loot Island so all our characters could easily achieve iLevel around 500 and with some work iLevel 540.

Blizzard design philosophy does not sway gently in the breeze, it swings wildly in a hurricane and will deviate from one stance to the polar opposite, before eventually settling at a more moderate position in the middle. At present I have no idea what stance Blizzard are taking on Alts, Crafting and Reputation, but I sense a move towards self-sufficiency based on extra professions being available through garrisons, and with NPC's doing a proportions of our material gathering.

Balkoth did raise an interesting point about selling Spirits of Harmony, I had stated that my gathering alts could not use Spirits of Harmony and neither could they post them or stick them on the Auction House, but they can trade them. This caused a light bulb moment.



In the back of my mind I remember a vendor trading Spirits of Harmony, so a quick Google search on "Spirits of Harmony Vendor" gave the answers that the Alliance and Horde each have a vendor at the Shrine of Seven Stars/Two Moons.


My new best friend is Krystel who is even called <Spirit of Harmony Vendor>. The problem with vendors is WoW is that you visit them on your first arrival to a new place and unless they sell something really useful or they are conveniently located for selling vendor trash then you will never look again.

At the time Spirits of Harmony was hugely important in the game, and if anything I was farming them at the Sunsong Ranch not selling them. Now thanks to Balkoth I will be trading my huge stash for a variety of reasons.


Some of these items I still have a huge stockpile like the Inscription Inks and the Enchanting materials and the Pandaria Herbs.

Ironpaw Tokens I have been using to buy the much sort after food types, but Golden Lotus is probably a better money maker.

Black Trillium Ore will allow me to do something with the huge imbalance of White Trillium ore that I have in my banks.

Kyparite only had a short window in this expansion. Prismatic Scale is a fairly useless material that I trade daily for Magnificent Hide, it expands faster in the bag than weeds in my garden.

Now that I no longer require prospecting, my stash of Serpent's Eye has dried up, so this will be a good alternative.

This one vendor solves so many problems in the game, and it is typical of the complexity of this game that we don't always know what is in front of us.

Thursday, 5 June 2014

Unchained Melody



World of Warcraft is a market leader in MMO's, it achieved this status by Blizzard borrowing the best bits from rivals, adding an existing story and giving the whole thing a lot of polish to make sure it worked well.

WoW is now often copied by other MMO's so much so that, when discussing LotRO with a work colleague (A game that I have never played) it became obvious that we shared a common language and that WoW and LotRO shared common mechanics. One of the biggest failings of WoW is thought to be crafting, which lacks any kind of interest besides carrying huge quantities of raw materials and then pressing a button, wait five seconds and then the finished good jumps into your bag. Nearly ever new game is described as having a better more interesting crafting game than WoW.

Cooldowns were introduced to slowdown the manufacturing process so that the Auction House would not be flooded with end game gear, gems, enchants, glyphs and potions. The following is a list of materials that have been used as a bottleneck:
  1. Motes/Primals
  2. Crystalized/Eternals
  3. Nether Vortex
  4. Void Crystal
  5. Frozen Orb
  6. Runed Orb
  7. Crusader Orb
  8. Primordial Saronite
  9. Volatiles
  10. Chaos Orb
  11. Living Ember
  12. Essence of Destruction
  13. Motes/Spirit of Harmony
  14. Blood Spirit
This list is far from exhaustive and it is not a surprise that we have seen changes in design from one expansion to another, but there is differences in how difficult the different professions are. Jewelcrafting as been a popular money maker due to most the sought after products being very simple to create. Tailors during WotLK were required to make cloth in the correct location and only one at a time, a practice that was re-introduced for the Silk Fields. This is an interesting idea but in practice it is a horrible design with daily trips needed to make 1/12th of a Tailoring bag..

Many of the crafting materials were only available from Raids, which meant that the materials were scarce and very expensive, with components costing more than the end product.

Mists of Pandaria introduced two new concepts. The first was the soulbound Mote of Harmony which converted into the Spirit of Harmony and secondly the endgame daily cooldown. The cooldown system became obsolete in a matter of months, and whilst I applaud the efforts to make two pieces of raid gear available to all classes and specs, it was not current for long enough to be worth the effort.

Since the introduction of Motes during the Burning Crusade, every expansion has used some variation of this design. They have always been sought after and everybody has spent sometime farming these items from elementals, herbs and mining nodes. They have always been big sellers on the Auction House for those willing to put in the effort (setup a gold farming bot). Motes of Harmony was the solution to the problem (if there was a problem), by making them Soulbound. I and many others have always been against this game design, and my personal preference is Bind on Account (Bind to Battle.net account).

The current system creates far too much wastage in the game, with gathering characters amassing huge quantities of a worthless item and other characters being starved of them. I personally have gathered hundreds of Spirits and Thousands of Motes, which are stockpiled for the day that I can sent them to my Tailor so that I can make lots of Royal Satchels from Song of Harmony which uses:

5x Bolt of Windwool Cloth and 3x Spirit of Harmony

Any further usage for Spirit of Harmony was squeezed out with the introduction of the Raid crafting items like Blood Spirits around patch 5.2.

A post appearing in WoW Insider, suggests that Spirit of Harmony will become unbound with the introduction of the next expansion. This could and should have happened 9 months ago not in 6 months time. It just seems like Blizzard really do not understand the crafting side of the game. An influx of cheap cloth and Royal Satchels selling for half their current inflated price will make a lot of people happy as they gear towards the next expansion. Heaven knows we could use some cheering up.

Monday, 2 June 2014

Going In With My Eyes Open


Just in case you had forgotten that David Soul of Starsky and Hutch fame, also had a singing career to rival that of that of the Hoff.

Today I wanted to mention the graphical reworking of the Gnomes as announced on the 1 June. For some reason Gnomes seem to have a Marmite effect on people, love them or hate them they are in the game. We all know that they are really Hobbittses with shoes, but I am guessing the JRR Tolkien , machine will trample all over your belongings just for thinking about Bilbo Baggins and the rest of the Shire folk.

I have so far been more than a little impressed with the work that art team have put together with the upgrade of our very dated character models, but I feel compelled to shout and scream at the new Female Gnome models. The comments on the Battle net forum got me thinking that Blizzard have really screwed up on the Gnomes.

Before we venture into the problems lets first take a look at the picture below:

I am aware that all the models have been snapped in their underwear, but the problem with this picture is that Gnomes bear a passing resemblance to children. This is not an area that Blizzard want to be exploring and too be honest I find the picture very odd and slightly disturbing.

The next set of pictures are what I really want to complain about.


They all look the bloody same, and those eyes are just spooky weird. If I didn't know better I would say they were modelled on Gollum.

Wild staring eyes and weird looking children makeup, it is all very wrong indeed.

Just in the interest of science I went back and checked the other races that are finished and they are great, truly brilliant, but the Gnomes are an abomination. Love them or Hate them these new Gnome models are just plain wrong.

It's So Easy


The topic that will not go away, and this is post number four on the subject of the new Buffs. From my post on the 14th May, we have subsequently had three of the four buffs drop into the life environment. The one buff missing is the "Gaze of the Black Prince" but judging by the title of todays post you might already have an inkling as to my thoughts on the subject.

At present we have a number of buffs and the current effect on the is quite severe, the following is the ease of obtaining the valor cap on one or more characters. The cost of deed of valor is 3,000 Timeless coins so we can work everything else from that:

  • No buff - 3,000 Timeless coins = Deeds of Valor = 100 Valor
  • Valor of the Ancients 50% + Deeds of Valor = 150 Valor
  • Heart of Valorous 100% + Deeds of Valor = 200
  • Valor of the Ancients + Heart of Valorous + Deeds of Valor =250

4x Deeds of Valor + Valor of the Ancients + Heart of Valorous  or 12,000 Timeless coins = Valor cap for the week.

This quite frankly too damn easy, and we have moved from a situation were I rarely valor capped  but could earn 2,500 - 3,000 valor points on multiple characters in any given week to being able to Valor cap my entire army of alts in 10 minutes on reset day.

Alternative Chat stated, that Heart of Valorous was a 10 day buff and this was confirmed by WoW Insider, the consensus seem to think it is to combat Wildstar but in reality it means you can get all your WoW tasks done in a very short timeframe and then you are free to do whatever you like, even playing another rival game as long as you maintain that subscription fee. If it was meant as a sideswipe at Wildstar then the intention appears fairly lame and Blizzard need to grow up a little. Already we have witnessed several weeks of Blizzard showing what a little boys club they are running.

If you have the best product and the best customer service why do you need to steamroller the opposition, this is the games industry not an Election trail. Maybe the lack of any tangible expansion is starting to worry a few of the corporate suits at Blizzard HQ.