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!

Buzzing with excitement

Uncle Vinny is buzzing with excitement! You know why? Behold, my new protection pally spec, which I’ll be able to play with tonight after work:

Hit me again, harder!

Some of you may quibble: “But Uncle Vinny! Shouldn’t you take those 2 points out of Sacred Duty, and put them in Guarded By the Light?” Others of you may wonder: “Isn’t he forgetting that everyone wants to be a Ret pally, now that they’re the new uber-DPS class?!” The rest of you may simply cry for the wasted hours of my swiftly waning youth.

But you’re all wrong! Wrong, wrong wrong with a capital R! Mwa ha hahaahahaaaa!

World of Workcraft

What do my WoW characters do when they’re sick of killing dragons? Pay 15g a month to play World of Workcraft, of course, where they can file memos, answer phone calls, and try to get an epic paycheck drop off my boss.

Enjoy!

Warcraft multiboxing

A while ago I promised you a trip into the darkest, nerdiest underbrush: a post about my forays into the world of WoW multiboxing. Are you excited? Good.

A few weekends ago I picked up a few trial World of Warcraft discs for $2 each, and created two new characters on them. Then, using some helpful advice from the forums at Dual-boxing.com and a $20 program called Keyclone, I was well on my way to having 3 toons questing and leveling together.

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop, so you can see what I’m talking about:

I made a paladin named Quinz, and two mages named Brooklyn and Brronx. If I was a crazy person and I wanted to level all of these characters to 70, I would have made two more mages named Manhattan and Staten, but… this was just an experiment to see what it’s like to play with multiple characters. Here’s a shot of my gals in combat:

Paladins are tough, low-damage characters; mages are fragile, high-damage characters. Together they make a pretty good team. The mages follow the paladin around, and attack whatever she tells them to; she can heal if someone gets damaged, and at higher levels she can resurrect a teammate if something goes wrong.

Setting up the macros and Keyclone took about an hour, and getting my head around basic combat took another hour. Macros and a few addons can make accepting quests slightly more convenient, but maintaining 3 toons gets to be pretty tedious. By far the most daunting aspect of the whole thing is managing three inventories and clicking on three screens for all the little tasks that can’t be macro’d. Since the mages were on trial accounts, they couldn’t trade, mail or use the Auction House, so there was some tedium after I hit level 6 and realized they didn’t have enough money to train their new skills… grinding copper by killing Frostmane Geomancers is not very efficient, even if you have a lot of firepower!

But by the time they were level 8, I was definitely getting the hang of things. Dual frostbolts to pull, two fireballs and fire blasts… BOOM! Mobs were usually dead by the time they got to Quinz. Brooklyn or Brronx died once or twice, but mostly it was pretty easy to stay out of trouble. Reacting to trouble is the hard part, so that’s where I started looking for a challenge.

At level 11, I went down to Westfall, a zone you usually don’t enter until you’re a little higher up, and decided to try the Forgotten Heirloom quest. The YouTube video below shows my 4 attempts to get this right. The pocketwatch is in a house guarded by a level 15 bad guy and his level 12 buddy. Three level 11 characters can definitely handle them, but it was pretty fun getting my combat skills up to snuff:

So… the pros and cons of multiboxing:

PRO

1. WoW is already like cocaine, and multiboxing is like crack. All of the nerdy joy of leveling, killing stuff, keeping things organized, figuring out puzzles, wandering around and exploring things is multiplied several times.
2. See #1.
3. See #1 again.

CON

1. “Oh my god, as if there wasn’t enough evidence that I need a girlfriend…”
2. Remember how the first 10 levels go kinda slow, and there are a ton of stupid little bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through? Multiply that by 3.
3. Getting things set up again after a character dies is a hassle. It’s almost easier if everyone dies, so you don’t have one or two standing around waiting and vulnerable. This is one reason why heading into the battlegrounds with 3-5 toons just seems ridiculous… my hat is off to anyone who figures that out.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the video!

Reporting on the battlegrounds

I just had a little pipe dream about fun stats that Blizzard could post about battlegrounds, presumably at the conclusion of the fight. Here’s an Alterac Valley example:

Drek’Thar is dead, the Allies win!

(results for Horde, Alliance)

# of toons reported AFK:(6, 4)

# of toons under 70: (8, 2)

% of toons with fully enchanted gear: (30, 40)

% of toons with no empty gem slots: (40, 47)

Average ilevel of gear: (Blue 112, Blue 106)

Average AV reputation: (Revered 45%, Revered 94%)

# of tower/GY caps interrupted: (34, 46)

Healing:DPS ratio: (1:3, 1:2.5)

Obviously Blizzard has their own reasons for not wanting to publish this data… people get mad when they always seem to face mismatched opponents! But still, it’s fun to ponder what the results might look like. For example, what would be a good way to report gear ilevel? It’s a pretty confusing system… a green “115″ item is much worse than a blue “115″ but it’s not clear by how much… it would be nice if they’d fix that somehow.

Mkay, back to work.

LOS! LOS!

At least one person has told me that he enjoys reading my byzantine World of Warcraft posts, even though he doesn’t know anything about the game, so here I go with another one…

As some of you ducklings might recall, I took Viv (my priest) to another server back in October in order to more deeply sample the rich life-affirming ore that is a slot in a semi-serious raiding guild. For several months we had our way with various pixellated monsters, obtained fabulous pixellate prizes and generally had a grand ol’ non-pixellated time. Sadly, that guild went up in smoke (fuller history here), and I was suddenly popped out of my thrice-weekly raids, my late-night mining circuits, my purposeless Auction House scanning, etc. What to do?! Join another guild? Raid more? Raid less? PvP?

The answer turned out to be: “Get a job!” The meltdown happened about the time I was due to start my new job, so I just let ol’ Viv collect dust while I went about rejoining life in the salt mine. (Oh, and somewhere in there I bought an xbox 360, which I’m guessing you’ll hear more about later.) Just a few weeks ago some old friends encouraged me to move her back to my old server so we could hang out. “No raiding!”, I vowed. “Sure, whatever!” they winked. The name “Viv” was already taken on Dethecus, sadly, but now she has a new name: Puttanesca. Saucy, no?

We now have a sketchily-balanced 3v3 arena team, and today we went 7-3 — a huge improvement over last week’s horrifying 2-8. The difference in my play this week is twofold:

* I respecced away from heavy Discipline to a more traditional healing Disc/Holy build; if I really worked at it I think I would be a better arena priest with Pain Suppression, but let’s be honest: I’m an old dog, and PS is a new trick. Plus, I just like pumping out big heals more than I like extra survivability. Her resilience is almost 400 now, so she’s pretty tough.

* The title of this post, “LOS! LOS!”.  I’m really trying to learn to think more about Line of Sight while playing, especially when my thick head figures out that there are hunters shooting at me. “Hey, this would be a good time to hide!” I think… Today we got placed a lot in the Blade’s Edge arena (the one with the bridge), so instead of going up top to get slaughtered like usual, we hung around at the bottom with the big helpful pillars. That worked pretty well…

Anyhoo, it’s nice to hang out with friends again, and gathering arena points is always a joy. Puttanesca picked up some Season 2 shoulders last week, so now she looks pretty goddam badass:

Badass for a sweet-tempered girl dwarf, that is. 

I’m still alive! Really.

I have been a negligent blogger, my ducklings, but soon I’ll be back among you, filling up your time with chaff.

I just moved to a new apartment (I have a W/D and dishwasher now, plus a view!), and my internet is down for the next week while Speakeasy twiddles their thumbs. After that happens, I’ll be back to mainlining my Google Reader, etc.

I just committed to running the Hopvine trivia nights once per month, can you believe it?! After all my complaints about how hard it was to write all those questions, I agreed to split the position. My first gig will be April 8th… please come watch if you like trivia! This time my questions will be broken into theme groups; that’ll make it easier to write ‘em. Plus I’m thinking of handing out sheets of paper with visual questions. FUN, eh!

One more thing: I oscillate between wishing Hillary Clinton would just drop out and then not minding that she doesn’t. Today I’m not worrying; I think the party will heal up just fine, and Obama will win easily in November. But you know me: I’m Mr. Rose Colored Glasses.

Oh, wait, one more thing: I’m moving my priest back to Dethecus from Lethon; now that the “new” guild is dead, she’s just sitting there doing nothing. So I’ll go back to hanging out with some old friends, doing arenas, etc… but NO RAIDING. It’s amazing how much time it frees up when I don’t raid.

Vinny out!

Mana or mana?

Quick question for my fellow nerds: How do you pronounce ‘mana’?

My impression is that the old-school D&D people say ‘mana’ with an ah sound like in father, and people who are relatively newer to such geekery say ‘mana’ with a dumb ol’ American æ sound as in pat or manageable. The old-school way sounds more sophisticated, but I can’t bring myself to switch.

This is prompted by news that people geekier than I are buying and selling real-life “mana” potions, which got me to wondering… how would I say this if I was to (Thrall forbid) actually order these over the phone?

Things that collapse

Ducklings!

I logged on this afternoon to hear strange rumors in guild chat about our guild leader quitting the game. “Whaaat?”, spake I, bewildered. Only on Thursday we were very close to completing an amazing run through some difficult bosses in TK and SSC… how could we be in such dire straits on Saturday? Logged on later that night to find that it was all true: Our guild leader had sharded her gear due to unspecified “Real Life” issues and her boyfriend (also a guild officer) was quitting the game, too. The other officer didn’t feel like continuing without his friends, so the guild would be disbanding.

DISBANDING?! Do you know, humble reader, how difficult it is to get 25 people to accomplish anything simultaneously in a video game?! If you’re still reading this without having died of a heart attack, you surely don’t. All my WoW-knowledgable readers… I killed them with paragraph #1.

I’m guildless, and my Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday nights are now completely free and blemishless. Surely this will revive my dating life, whee.

Excuse me a sec, I need to start drinking a liter of water to counteract the booze. Ah, much better.

So tonight, after muddling through some confusing, aimless and solution-free guild chat banter, I went out for drinks with a friend. We talked politics and WoW, coming to a few not-so-surprising conclusions:

• It’s unlikely that voters would ever have responded well to John Edward’s news that his wife has terminal cancer. Although it’s potentially a heroic underdog story where good triumphs over despair, in real life this is not a winning electoral arc. Bartenders with degrees in Communication Theory can tell you that was a loser, and that dropping out post-diagnosis was the only logical choice. Whatever sympathy one might have for Edwards — and we swim in those waters — is sucked down the drainspout of cold reality of the nature of the American electorate.
• Pear martinis — they can be good!
• Success at the 25-man level in Warcraft is an utter crapshoot. Skill, organization and gear — all are difficult to crystallize. When it all comes together, it can be fantastically fun, but you never know when it’s all going to collapse.
• “Mike Huckabee” — goddam but that’s funnier to say drunk than sober.
• Mitt Romney is certainly more likely to win the Republican nomination than anyone else. Republican voters aren’t crazy enough to vote for someone so clearly doomed at a national level (Huckles) nor can they conscience voting for someone they can’t stand (McCain) because of past betrayals. Giuliani has a barely plausible recovery strategy(2nd in Florida, stupid media bump), but only because the whole field is in such appalling disarray.
• The Hillary vs McCain race is the least interesting of the bunch. For fun, juiciness and excitement all us kids are clamoring for Huckabee vs Obama, ‘tho we expect to have our pony-wishes punished pretty dam’ hard behind the woodshed any minute now.

The new strategy — forged on the anvil of the hydroxyl group — is to reroll Horde toons on some barren unwelcoming server, wherein I fulfill my cradle-born dream of playing a tauren resto druid with the fabled and dizzying +5% stamina racial bonus. Fear my warstomp, puny Alliance!