When your Warcraft buddy needs an intervention…

… here are some tips that might help:

Nice poetic justice at the end.

Logging off WoW

Pindar logged out looking over the snowy hills of Dun Morogh. Venerable logged out kneeling in front of Uther’s Tomb. Viv/Puttanesca logged out sitting on an a floating island in Nagrand. Vindictia hellfired herself nearly to death and then jumped off the edge of the world.

I started the game around Christmas of 2005, and ended Jan 13, 2009, about 1100 days of my life. Here’s the /played time of my major characters:

Viv, 70 days, 19 hours
Pindar, 57 days, 3 hours
Vindictia, 11 days, 17 hours
Venerable, 8 days, 12 hours
Narrowa, 5 days, 3 hours
Veal, 4 days, 12 hours

Minor characters? Bank alts? Deleted toons I’ve since forgotten? Who knows how long I played them. But 157 days of play out of 1100 is not good, especially since 366 days should have been spent asleep… that brings us to 20% of my waking hours spent in a virtual world over 3 years. But ya know what’s worse? I didn’t play that much in 2008!

Anyway, it’s nice to be moving on!

Hole cards in hold’em and odds of winning

You know how I’m quitting WoW? And complaining that I never seem to sit down and read all the books I want to read? And how it’s great that I have all this free time now?

Based on data from here, I wasted time I could have been reading by making this chart:

Now, there are a ton of sites out there with stats on what different hands are worth, but I just couldn’t visualize the comparative value of the different hole cards. Should I bet? Fold? Raise? Etc. This doesn’t help much, ‘cuz I’m kind of a moron… but it’s a start.

It’s cool to see the “ridge” of pairs… pairs are pretty powerful, duh. And the chart makes it obvious that suited hole cards are worth quite  a bit more than unsuited. And you can see that the worst thing to be dealt is a 7-2; I didn’t know that.

Excel does a pretty nice job these days of making attractive graphs. It would be fun to play with it some more and flag just those combos that have odds >10%, or chart the disparity between the suited and unsuited combos, but this is probably as far as I’ll go.

Right? I mean, Hold’em’s not my new World of Warcraft, right? 

64, 70, 70, 70

I know you’ve been on the edge of your seat about how my World of Warcraft withdrawal process is going, so here’s an update. If reading self-absorbed video game blather bores you, look away! Quick!

Venerable (my paladin) hit 70 yesterday evening, and Vindictia (my warlock) hit 64 the day before. I’m still on the fence about whether I’ll hit 70 on all 4 of my characters, but it’s certainly doable. The amount of XP needed to go from 60 to 70 has been heavily nerfed, and the mobs in Outland got nerfed, too… the biggest obstacle to leveling is the swarms of horde Death Knights who were evidently born with murder on their mind. Warlocks are allegedly a strong pvp class, but I feel like a piece of soggy tissue-paper out there. I’ve had two very hard-won pvp victories, and dozens of abject failures.

Part of the problem, though, is that I respecced her from Affliction to Demonology, and then from there to Destruction. In each case, I went balls-to-the-wall, grabbing the 51 point talent in each tree, trying to get the feel for each as best I could. She’s been Affliction for virtually her entire career, and dallied briefly with Demonology in the mid-40s. I could go on about this, I guess, but it would bore even me. The upshot is that I love Affliction and I can’t stand the other trees. The only thing I miss from Demo is getting the occasional instant-cast demon… this can be handy once in a while. In Destruction, Conflagration is kind of fun as a concept, but with my weak +spell damage gear, there’s no real clear advantage to using it.

Affliction, however, is super cool. The 51-point talent (Haunt) is ridiculously overpowered. You do a 1.5-second cast up front, which damages the mob and starts an 12 second timer. Any DOT-damage you do to the mob will be returned to you as health at the end of the timer — it’s like an amped-up Deathcoil, but without a fear effect and you can use it on every single mob. A typical routine goes like this:

1. Start casting Haunt, and send in the Voidwalker.
2. Cast Siphon Life
3. Cast Immolate
4. Life Tap, maybe do a little wanding or Drain Life
5. By now, the mob might finally be mad enough that it drops aggro on the VW, but that’s about when Haunt expires, popping the warlock back to almost full health.

So now Vindictia can run around basically at full health and mana all the time, thanks to improved Life Tap and the mana-efficiency of Affliction talents. The only thing that’s annoying right now is that my Voidwalker seems to run out of mana a lot, but that’s probably my fault.

Now that a few days have gone by since WOTLK came out, the first wave of Death Knights have passed me by, which lessens the rate of getting killed by random horde jerks. Several people in the guild are approaching level 80, so my characters are feeling left in the dust. It’s fun to level my warlock, but reaching 70 isn’t much of an achievement anymore. Having four characters at 70 would be interesting/pathetic/etc, but… eh, I haven’t decided what I want to do either way.

Getting my paladin to 70 was an especially fun ride, because I played almost exclusively with my friend Iain, who was playing his elementalist shaman. We started playing together in the early 20s. Once I switched to protection spec at 35 or so, the symbiosis between the two classes started growing and only got better the further we leveled. With the recent changes to the talent trees, protection paladins are much easier and more fun to play; lots more instant-cast spells, better ways to hit multiple mobs, etc. Elementalist shamans have a ton of AOE power to dispense, so I can round up 5-10 mobs, hold aggro on all of them and survive their pitiful little attacks while he blasts ‘em all down. Lotsa fun!

Leveling with a friend is more efficient, but it’s also nicely social. Playing my warlock alone now is kinda boring. I guess she has demons to keep her company, but it’s not the same!

Sometime soon I’ll post some videos of my characters doing their thing. I know Steve has a love/hate relationship with gnomes, so I’ll be sure to include lots of shots of Pindar.

World of Warcraft expansion…out today!

…and I haven’t bought it yet! Last time this happened (Jan 16, 2007), I was waiting in line at 9:30pm for the midnight release, sped home, installed it, and stayed up for 4 or 5 hours playing until I fell asleep. This time I haven’t even made plans to buy it. In fact, I decided about a month ago that my days in the WoW are coming to an end.

I started playing around Christmas 2005. My little mage Pindar hit level 60 around June of 2006, and Viv hit 60 in December of that year.  Healing was way more interesting than shooting stuff, so she became my main character for the next year, including the few months where I was semi-serious and joined a raiding guild. After that guild blew up in early 2008, I focused more on PvP before getting interested in my paladin, hunter and warlock. My pally is almost level 70 now, and the warlock is almost 62. My account is paid through January 13th, 2009; I might have all 4 of the characters up to 70 by then, but if not, who cares?

At some point, you have to decide to get off the merry-go-round. For me, the expansion is a great stopping-point. Other people are all excited about the new stuff that’s coming out, and I’m positive I’d get excited about it too — the last one was way more fun than I expected — but I’d really rather do other stuff with my free time. As other people level from 70 up to 80, my poorly-geared little 70s will be even more out-of-it than they are now, so it will be easier to let them drift off into obscurity.

So, you can expect a few more WoW posts from me over the next two months, but they’ll be about the “letting go” process.  I could just stop playing today, but I think tapering off is more realistic… we’ll find out, eh!