Quick 'n' Dirty - V

Its been a while since I updated my blog, once again being swamped with work and preparations for my wedding. Particularly the latter needs a bit of work :p. We are also planning slowly our Honeymoon on New York City! Exciting times! I think we are both much more thrilled for the trip than the wedding itself. But hey, we are in this together :p

Nonetheless, I did spent some time in WoW the last couple of weeks. Escape managed to slay Northrend Beasts in heroic mode and now we set our sites on the next hard-mode. Otherwise I spent some time to set up an inscription busyness to complement my herbalist/alchemist DK, manly created to supply Lance with consumables. The scribe is on my GFs account and his sole purpose is to put in the AH the leftovers of the DK. And its been doing well, I have more or less managed to level up inscription to 330 with minimal expenses, funding myself from AH sales.

I've got myself a copy of Windows 7. Ok, either Win7 are a massive improvement to Vista or my Vista install was pretty knackered. I am seeing an increase in FPS of over 300% in areas like Icecrown with full settings. I am pretty sure Win7 are NOT supposed to be that good (or better) and the never-underestimated power of a clean install worked like a dream. But hey, can't complain :p.

My dear friend Thoryel called me one day and informed me about Torchlight. Sounds and looks very promising and I am sure I will put my hands to it when time allows. I am also excited about patch 3.3 lore-wise but I wont even begin to comment on the Tier10 robes and the recent LoH Forbearance `band-aid'. I will be patient to comment on the 'final' version of things.

/Lance

Lance, Daiske and a hot mid-summer's dream

Its been quite a few days since I blogged, manly because I was up to my neck - once again - with work. But... I also tried a little wow experiment. After 4 years (I am not sure how long its been, I feel I have been referring to those `4 years' for ages) I managed to put myself in a mental state to level an alt. Granted, its a death knight and it feels like I am cheating :p. However, bearing in mind the whole `slackness' of the summer-time, I felt its a good opportunity to level up Daiske, my human (yes I can be really boring..) death knight. And level up alchemy on the side, to have one more useful profession available to me, as Lance is a miner and an engineer (as is yours truly... the engineer part, not the miner...).

I must admit that death knights are fun to play and sure as hell are a quick level-up. I am half-way to 68 and my plan is to hit Borean Tundra once I become 68. Contrary to Lance's path, Daiske will enter Northrend in BT and maybe, just maybe go to Howling Fjord once I get a couple of levels. Truth be told, the whole experiment is primarily done for the herbs and the flasks. That is why I am eager to enter Northrend. On the other hand, I must admit that gearing up in a relaxed manner a character, often checking the Auction House, drooling over gear I have never looked at and feeling that itchy hand caressing my wallet is... refreshing (ok ok, I am just trying to sound poetic, don't laugh). Yes, levelling Daiske brought some nice memories of the past, when I was levelling Lance to 60. When gear was out of reach and raiders seemed like semi-gods. Now things are different. So, going back, even if its for a few precious `virtual' moments... its sure is refreshing. If Daiske hits 80 then the next bit will be to get my `pet' rogue levelled up. Now that will be truly hard...

Lance is there though, going to the guild's raids - which by the way have not suffered from attendance that much - definitely much less than last year. I am still doing those AT dailies for the gold and the tokens. After all, that AT tabard and the new Charger are essential for a true paladin...

P.S. I also got season tickets for my favorite football team - (soccer to my US friends) which might result in me loosing a couple of raids in the future. But at the end of the day skipping a few raids has always been the trick to the longevity of my playtime in Wow. I still enjoy it a lot and those precious breaks now and then - or slowdown of gaming pace to be precise - kept me going.

P.S. Holidays are coming... Swimming with the missus under the hot Hellenic (correct term for Greek) sun... who cares about Arthas...

Patch 3.2 review - Argent Tournament grounds

Patch 3.2 is in the PTR and I though it would be good to check up on a few of the changes so I can report them to those reading me but did not have yet a chance to be in the PTR. Most of the changes mentioned in Part 2 pf the Patch 3.2 review series are around the area of the Argent Tournament grounds. I anticipate quite a few changes further on and the plan is to report these in Part 3 of the PTR review. But lets look on what I found in the northern part of Icecrown...

First and foremost, the Coliseum is finished. The building is a cross-shaped structure with an arena-type circular peripteral where I presume lots of fighting resulting in blood and gore will take place. Sunreaver and Silver Covenant forces guard the place all around, along with the Argent Crusade Peacekeepers. On the sides we can find the portals to (I presume) the 5 & 10/25 man raid instances.

View of the Coliseum from the west	Birds eye view of the Coliseum arena
North-east side	Closer west view
Entrance to east portal	North side portal

At the Argent Pavilion at the west the quest givers have increased. Now, along the old ones handing in quests like Threat from Above there are three more, along with a new vendor with a Greek-sounding name, Dame Evniki Kapsalis(!!). The vendor has among other things the new Argent Crusade tabard and the new Argent Charger. The charges is safe to presume that its the same mount that Justical Mariel Truehart has, right at then entrance of the Pavilion. Crusader Silverdawn, High Crusader Adelard and Crusader Rhydalla hand in quests that reward once again money and Champion's seals.

The new quest givers	The new AC quartermaster
New AC quests - I	New AC quests - II
New AC quests - III	New AC quests - IV
The old quest-givers remain	The Argent Charger

Interestingly enough, once I went out of the Pavilion I faced some quite important placeholders... It seems Highlord Tirion Fordring, King Varian and Jana Proudmore, along with Thrall and their
personal guards are present on the grounds. I am most intrigued by their simultaneous presence and I wonder what lore implications we are going to see from now on. Also, the placeholders kind of hint new avatars. But we will see for that...

Fordring and Co. placeholders

The aforementioned quest givers hand in quests that direct us to one of the new quest hubs, Hrothgar's Landing. As we approach a vision type mist effect appears, similar to the ones in Borean Tundra's coast. I wont bore you with the details of the quests, I am sure others will :). The other hub is Deathspeaker's Watch, on the west of the Argent Pavilion.

Hrothgar's Landing

Deathspeaker's Watch

Hope the pictures give you an insight of the current changes in the environment and the related quests etc. More updates 'soon' :)

A week with 3.1

One week after the introduction of patch 3.1 and a day before the imminent - and usual - nerfs/modifications of 3.1.1, I though its best to wrap-up my experiences with the content of the patch up to now.

Solo game


Dual specs

The dual specs feature was one of the most anticipated things in the game. With a hit of a button it is now possible to switch spec (and gear if you use an add-on like Outfitter). It can even be macro-ed and here is what I use for it:

#showtooltip [spec:1] Holy Shock; [spec:2] Crusader Strike
/usetalents [spec:1] 2; [spec:2] 1

where 'Holy Shock' and 'Crusader Strike' are the spell names of the icons you want to appear on the macro-ed shortcut. Careful on the spelling, some of mine did not work properly. Also, remember to put it on 'both' bar sets (spec1+2).

The newest Outfitter available from Curse (contrary to old reports that it would be discontinued) allows switching of gear set. Right-click your gear-set, go to Script and choose Primary or Secondary talents. Make sure that you have un-ticked the Disable Automatic Switching from the options tab.

To put it simply, its a joy to farm/grind as retry. Mucho fun amigo.


The Argent Tournament

...is in town and players get the chance to do some fun dailies gaining gold and reputation with the Silver Covenant as well as to collect badges for Tournament-related faction rewards. The most notable of the latter in my humble opinion are the main faction tabards (yay! Stormwind Tabard ftw!). The dailies revolve mostly around jousting with npcs - something which once you get the hang of it is quite fun. The rest of the quests are of the usual kill/collect pattern. On top of that, there is a `lore' chain quest which eventually leads to an achievement.

There are three levels of quest, the Aspirant, the Valiant (check?) and the Champion. Progression from each is done by collecting badges from the dailies and hand them in (15, 25 badges for the first two levels). Once you become a champion you can collect champion badges. You get 10 as a bonus once you reach that level and - as with the Aspirant and Valiant levels - 5 per day if you do all dailies. Note, the latter may require a group quest for killing Chillmaw. Lance became a Champion of Stormwind over the weekend and now collects badges for that lovely Stormwind Tabard.


Raiding

Now, when it comes to raiding, there are quite a few interesting stuff. Ulduar seems to be fairly more difficult than Naxx and Co. and the challenge starts to show as guilds try to go deeper in the instance. Its been quite some time since a raid required proper positioning, synchronization, synergy among classes and some thought on how to tackle things. I am not sure on how long it will remain a challenge but we must bear in mind that almost all kills are on `easy-mode', perhaps with the exception of some kills like the ones from Inner Sanctum . You will find lots of guides on the bosses so I wont bore you with such details.

What I do know though is that Escape managed to tackle 6/14 in the first raid week with our three-day raiding scheme, acquiring some good `ranked kills and achievements' in the process. We are fairly proud of this and confident that we can start saving time and seeing new bosses as we venture deeper in Ulduar.

I wont even comment on Emalon the Storm Watcher, I hardly noticed he is there when we got him...

On top of that Lance is once step closer to getting Val'anyr Hammer of the Ancient King, since our priest officer (the prime recipient as per guilds decision) was away. So that means I am 59 fragments away :p. Still, big thanx got to my guildmates for their trust. Hope I am and will be making up for it.

So overall a very good week for us. Can't wait from more fun in the Tournament and in Ulduar. Fun... yes, we kinda missed that in-game the last few weeks...

Waiting for the patch...

Its a rather boring time in the World of Warcraft these days. Not much to do, people are stalling, waiting for the new patch. Not much action taking place. As the content has been exhausted by most the only thing left to do is maybe some achievements. But even those are hard to do, due to the whole situation of people being `relaxed' and raids often being under-maned. It seems (and it has been observed before) people loose their focus before major content additions. And its reasonable to some extent.

So, a few days more it seems, maybe a couple of weeks. I plan on parking Lance to Stormwind Cathedral. And then rush out to:

1. Get a free respec: I plan on reshuffling my Holy spec, resulting into a pure PvE spec with absolutely no 'damage talents', a true raid servant. And my second spec as retribution for truly selfish and take-no-prisoners fooling around. So that's sorted. Do not ask me about talent options, I often choose the most prevailing specs, so I'll have to dig-up through the usual references there
2. Sort Gear-switching: ...with a new gear-switching add on. Blizzard's equipment manager has been pushed back, I am unsure of the state of Outfitter after then patch introduction so... we will all need to sort out our spec switching with something new it seems.
3. Content: Go to the Argent Tournament area and start exploring, questing and... reputation grinding :p. In the process get some gold on the side for that Lancey-Davidson... Then start reviewing the changes here and there, starting from the new engineering changes.

Then, depending on the people around we might venture into Ulduar for a ten-man suicide mission, waiting for the next day and our scheduled run...

Its been a hard day's night...

...and I've been crawling uptomyneckin work (concatenated to fit with the Beatles tune...)

Nonetheless I had some time to download the PTR, had been proactive in copying Lance to Brill PvP and have been patient with the frequent crashes. Not sure how is the PTR for you guys in the US, but back here in EU the crashes are as frequent as hell.

But I had some time to look around the dual-specs thingy, the switching, the gear manager and flew over the Argent Tournament `hotspot'. The spec-switching, bar & glyph switching seem well handled, simple and quite solid. Apparently there is an option for using a talent template prior to saving the talent tree and that can be activated in the general options.

I was positively impressed with the Argent Tournament area. Secluded, right up to the end/edge of the worlds. Reminded me of Mos Eisley for some reason...go figure... Still, the `Argent' term seems confusing. Is this held from the Argent Crusade? What is it, the Olympics of Wow? Will dig a bit over things during the weekend as we have a 3-day weekend here (next Monday is Pure Monday) and I will stick my head out of the work-swamp. I am interested on what `lore' justification Blizzard will come up with for such a competitive festivity...

On another note, various data-mined rewards appeared in mmo-champion. One thing caught my eye, mentioned in the past hen WotLK was introduced. The Stormwind Tabard. Now Lance can wear his homeland's colours around.

Nothing much to add, work has been hectic and I got to go back. Will be back tonight for that screenshot meme, as per Sucidal Zebra's command :)