Deficiencies in the New Armory

As I've mentioned before, Blizzard has launched their new Armory pages. Overall, I think they did a great job. But as I'm playing more and more with it, I'm finding there's just certain things that are lacking.

I already spoke of a couple of these. I really think you should be able to schedule events and make announcements from outside of the game. It appears that you can accept scheduled events, but the creator can't change the status of each accepted person out of the game. I guess I'd just really like to be able to do some of these menial, mundane tasks outside of the game... while I'm waiting in line at the supermarket on my smart phone. Never would I do it at work or on company time... no.. never that.

With Cataclysm dropping and 95% of the stuff in our guild vault becoming obsolete, I realized today how nice it was to be able to see all of the stuff we have in our guild vault in armory. What? What was that you said? The non-beta Armory doesn't show the guild vault? Well... that's actually less helpful. Grr.

But luckily there's a great "new" service where you can sell all of your stuff on the AH outside of the game. Thanks to the Remote Auction House, for only $3 per month, I can easily clear out all of the old mats in the vault and replace them with new ones, right? Oh... Remote Auction House is only for players and your own personal banks. I see.

Well... hopefully that's the next evolution, right? Now that guilds have statistics, maybe they can become their own entities. Instead of JoeGuildVault selling all of their enchanting mats, the items can be posted straight from the guild vault with the proceeds going straight into the vault as well. Yes, I realize this would be a lot more programming on Blizzard's behalf, but it logically seems like the next step to me. Even if we can just get one more step of a toon that pays for the Remote Auction House to post things on the AH on behalf of the guild; that shouldn't take too much programming, right?

So, while there's a lot of hopes and dreams in this post, I guess the biggest thing is that you can no longer see the guild vault through armory; and honestly, that makes me sad.

Five Facts About Mages

Just a quick, fun link to pass along. Euripedes over at Critical QQ posted a funny (and true) post about Mages. Go over there and check it out.

Soldier in Pink Boxers

Picture dated May 11th. From FoxNews on May 22. Go check out the article.p.s. 3 posts in 1 day. I'm making up for lost time. lol.

Figure Prints - Lottery Gone

Just after Blizzcon last year, I decided that it would be really neat to have a Figure Print of Leiandra, my mage that I've used since I first started playing Wow back in June of 2005. I signed up for the lottery, and just last month, I won. But with it being Christmas and all, I couldn't justify spending the $125 when there's so many other things that I want/need to buy. Plus, December was kind of an odd time in "Leiandra's Life" (the toon, not me), since she was going through gear changes as she was approaching 80. And I didn't really want to have to make guildies go back to old instances just so I could complete a set to look cool.

Besides, I figured I could always enter the lottery again, and win the spot a second time in the future.

Well, Blizzard's Official World of Warcraft site has just announced that Figure Prints' production has finally caught up with demand (or maybe it's yet another sign of our weak economy), and you can now order a Figure Print without the lottery system. It'll still take at least a month for you to get your character, but that's better than waiting to win their lottery, and then waiting the month. So, when I finally decide that I can part with the$130 or so to have an out of game version of Leiandra, I no longer have to wait for it.

Now... if I can just get her posed on the Griffon like I saw at Blizzcon.

Death Knight Blog

So, you still have questions about Death Knights? Want to know what spec to have for leveling? For raiding? For PVP? Or how to get the jump on all the other Death Knights out there? Well, all of the subjects haven't been covered yet, but Skeleton Jack is a great resource for all things Death Knightly.

And Skeleton Jack knows his stuff. He's raided with a warrior and shaman. He's in the guild that's #2 on our server (which also includes taking down Kil'jaedon). There's a lot of great information already, and he just started blogging about a week ago. So... what are you still doing here? Go check out Skeleton Jack.

Newest Gold Spammer Antics in Wrath

This past weekend, I spent an evening running Steamvaults with my wife and a couple other friends. I was on my Shaman, so I was healing the run. Out of nowhere, I get a message from a level 1 toon. WIM initially blocks tells from level 1's, but I was curious as to who it was and what they said since the name was something that sounded legit.

In the message, I was asked if I wanted to trade my shaman for a 70 rogue with S1/S2 and T4/T5 gear.

Well gee... I thought the gold spammers were bad, but now this? He didn't even validate the tell (as WIM requests you to do if you're a level 1 toon).

Let me first say that this is totally against the EULA. You cannot trade accounts.

But it got me thinking about their marketing strategy. The Gold Spammer of old at least had a product that appeals to everyone. Even if you don't want to buy it with real money, everyone in the game has a need for money. Some might have enough where they don't need any more, but they still need to have some.

If you're targeting specific classes, you've just dropped your supply by a great deal. Over-simplifying the numbers, you are now only dealing with about 1/9th of the population. And you're making a pretty big assumption that that's the only level 70 that that account has. And you have to find somebody that isn't happy with their class and now wants a rogue (in this case). Wow... Talk about a market niche.

Now, far be it from me to tell somebody how to do marketing for their business. Maybe it was some random kid sending out a ton of whispers. (But again... I would think they would have validated the WIM message so it would get through to me?) It would certainly seem that if you were advertising your web site or service of trading toons, you'd want to do so to a much bigger audience. Who knows? Maybe spell out your web site name in IF using dead gnomes. Oh wait... the Gold Spammers already did that.

Then again... maybe this was just some random person looking for a shaman to trade for.

Rawr The Program

So, I really can't believe that I haven't blogged about this before. I feel like I've let down the druid, mage, and many other communities. The information is certainly out there, but why haven't I told you guys about it? Selfish? No. Forgetful? Maybe. But the truth is that I thought I had already blogged about this.

What am I going on about? Today I'm talking about Rawr. Rawr is a program that was originally developed to help Druids figure out gear upgrades for Bear and Cat forms. I know it's been around for at least two years, but know exactly how long. There's been many changes (it's now in Beta 15), and it's come a long way from just supporting Druids. It now supports the following classes/roles:

• Bear
• Cat
• DPSWarrior
• Healadin
• HolyPriest
• Mage
• Moonkin
• ProtWarrior
• RestoSham
• Retribution
• Tankadin
• Tree
• Warlock

Phew! That's a lot of gear lists. I tend to lean more on Rawr than say MaxDPS.com since the Rawr suggestions seem to make more sense. The MaxDPS will give you the items that will give you the highest DPS, but it doesn't take into consideration survivability. What good is a dead mage? You got it... good for nothing. Also, it doesn't take into consideration your mana pool. So, what good is a mage without mana? So, Rawr takes into consideration dps and total damage possible. Overall, seems like an excellent guide for those classes to figure out gear.

Likewise, for tanking, you can see how each item stacks up in different areas. For tanks, it's not just how much stamina you have. So, Rawr breaks it down into Mitigation, Survival, and Threat. All of which are important to tanks.

You can also enter all the gear you currently have, and it will optimize it for you. Results may vary. Most of the time it seems to give good suggestions. There's some gear choices that are debatable, but aren't they all?

Now this program is essentially for level 70 toons. You can change your specs and the gear will adjust accordingly as well. If you're looking for gear lists of any of the above classes, go check it out. It's a great program.

The New Guy

Due to various issues (some real life, some other reasons), we've had a few key tanks leave the guild recently. I think we spent about 2 days recouping and running ZA instead, but then we bounced right back up and killed Kaz'rogal on our first attempt on Tuesday night.

So, with the departures, there's obviously some holes that we had to fill. We did it with a few people respecing, a few people shuffling around, and some new recruits as well.

Not to single him out per se, but one of the new guild members was a little... shall I say... overly excited about raiding with us. His first night on a trial run, it seemed to be great. Enough so that we invited him in to the guild as an Initiate. The next night, things got a little more out of control with him. I think he annoyed about 1/2 the guild, and our guild members aren't shy about voicing it either. He ended up apologizing at the end of the night for his actions.

I don't bring this up to discuss drama or belittle him. It's obviously import to not only make a good impression on a new guild, but also to fit in. And if you find you don't fit in, then make the necessary changes or leave the guild. It's much easier to change yourself than it is to change 24 (at least) other people in the guild, especially if you're the new guy.

At any rate... Chick GM wrote a great post about it about a month ago. So, if you're that guy (or gal) in a new guild, you should definitely read the post. (Click here to read the post.) And there's even a lot of important things to read even if you've been in your guild for awhile.

For those that don't normally click links, here's her bullet points:

• Avoid making it the "Me Show"
• Know your Leaders
• Do your homework
• Mind the feedback
• Make a friend

But seriously... go read the post.

Wow Web Stats

I'll admit it: I'm a numbers guy. It's part of my nature at this point. After years of creating and analyzing reports, I don't think I could help it if I tried. So rather than shun this fact, I embrace it wholeheartedly. But being that I create reports for upper management, I'm also aware of the necessity to keep report meaningful.

That said, I have to go on record and say that I kind of hate in-game damage meters. It's like you're seeing one small piece of this really huge pie. Hey! That rogue did the most damage; he must be the best. It's like only looking at the revenue of a company's profit and loss statements. Oh great! This company is making millions of dollars! Of course, they're spending billions, so they're really deep in the hole, but who cares, right?

Enter Wow Web Stats. This tool gives an amazingly detailed and useful tool in analyzing your raid or group. You can sort the stats in many different ways. You can see individual players and down to the level of each spell. How much does that Fireball crit for in one night? How is the healer's HPS? Who over-healed the most? Which mage was removing more curses? The stats just go on and on. It really provides more of a true picture than just who was the top 3 on the meters.

It's really quite easy to set up and do. You simply type /combatlog while in game. (Note: each time you want a new combat log, you have to manually delete the old one.) Wow will tell you where the combat log is being generated. (Wow folder/logs if I remember correctly.) Once you're finished, you can type /combatlog again, and then get to work creating your report. You can even have multiple people gathering data and combine it in one report for increased accuracy. All the details of what to do and how to create the report can be found over at the WWS site. You can also see an example of how a report looks.

Just a really amazing tool to help you see the big picture.

TBC Reputation Calculator

WoW Insider pointed out a great site that shows how you can progress in reputation for each of the Burning Crusade factions. It also tells you how many of each instance/quest turn in/kill you need to progress to the next level. Check it out over at http://reputation.mygamesonline.org/.

Edit: Apparently the popularity of this site was too overwhelming for the traffic limit. Hopefully you can visit it at the beginning of the month when the server will once again allow traffic to the page. :)

New Item Links

After much struggling with other possible solutions that didn't work out, I had to give credit where credit was due. I recently stumbled across Armory Musing... and found that he too was on Blogger and he had mouse-over item stats (something that I thought was really cool and was trying to figure out without having to write all the data myself). Furthermore, he even explained how to link items such as [Etermium Runed Blade] on a post here. So a big shout out and Thank You to Okoloth.

More Zul'Aman

If you head on over to the Warcry network, they have some more details from E3 about the next new instance of Zul'Aman. The article goes into more details, but there will be Bear, Lynx, Eagle, and Dragonhawk boss. Much like Zul'Gurub, you can access any of these bosses from the beginning. Each of these four bosses should take about 45 minutes to an hour for a good group, and then the last 2 encounters must be done at once.

There will be no reputation associated with Zul'Aman, but the faster you finish the bosses, the better loot you get. Blizzard also sees this becoming somewhat of a competitive sport. Also on loot, they're going to move more towards logical loot. Basically... "players can expect creatures to drop things that one would expect. If that bad guy is holding a big, shiny axe, then odds are his loot is a big shiny axe." Makes sense, but not really earth shattering to me. Who doesn't look at loot tables? lol.

Voice Chat is once again confirmed for patch 2.2. That was also confirmed on the PTR forums as well. One thing that might be fun is that Blizzard would eventually like to be able to put in voice fonts (distortion that makes the user's voice sound a bit like the creature they're playing). That could be neat, but I've kinda grown accustomed to most of the voices in my guild... that might be a pain to get used to the "new" voices.

Last thing: Guild banks will be coming the future. The GM will be able to set permissions on each bag so that different ranks in the guild will be able to access different levels of bags. Just helps assure that the new guy doesn't steal all the BOE purples you've got laying around.

My First Sticky. Woot!

So, I'm sure there's very few people that care beside me, but I got my first (and probably only) sticky on the official Bronzebeard Wow forums. It's for a crafting post. Our old sticky on the BB forums wasn't being updated, so I started my own about a month ago. If you care, it can be found here. Thanks for any and all that requested it to be stickied even though I didn't mention it on this blog. heh.

Zul'Aman, Voice-Chat, and Guild Banks

Wow Insider just got a sneak preview of Zul'Aman from E3. Basically, it's a 10-man instance that's probably on the level of UBRS was, but with an outdoor feel like Zul'Gurub. In fact, much like Zul'Gurub, you pretty much need to kill the "lesser" bosses before you have to kill Zul'jin (think Hakkar).

But really exciting part for me is that before Zul'Aman, there will be a minor patch (or two) that will include Voice Chat and Guild Banks. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak work pretty well from my point of view, so that's not a huge benefit for the Voice Chat. There is something that's added to the interface to show you who is talking; that will be nice. And maybe more importantly, nobody has to say, "Who's not on Vent?" lol.

I'm mostly excited about the Guild Bank. I'm not even really sure why. Is it that it will be the only bank that you can actually store money? Maybe. I guess I've always been disappointed about what guilds are in Wow. This at least brings a little bit of something official to guilds. Where up to this point, it's been somebody's spare toon that's acted as a guild bank, there will now be something official. Will it keep people from leaving guilds? Absolutely not, but I still just like the idea. This wasn't available at launch for Everquest 2 either, but when I logged in for 10 free days about a year ago, it was neat to see all the things my now defunct guild had amassed.

So, no more having to wait for that guild bank person to be online. Have the guild pick up your repairs. Oh, and no more having to alt-tab to see who's speaking.

Deadly Boss Mods

After being gone for all of the Karazhan for my guild for this past week, we tried to do The Curator for a second (or maybe third, I'm not sure) time this week. Those of you that aren't familiar with this fight should head on over to BossKillers and read up on him a bit as I won't be explaining him here. Unfortunately, we did not kill him. I don't think it's gear or group composition, it's just our current inexperience. Plus, when our MH only has enough time to give it two tries, it kinda limits us. I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to down him this week.

But the main point of this post is less on a specific boss and more on a specific mod. I imagine that most people are pretty aware of CT_mod and the closely linked CT_RA (Raid Assist). There's a lot of great UI augmentations that CT provides. For now, go check out their site if you want more information on it. What I'm going to focus on is the Deadly Boss Mods.

Technically speaking, this is a compilation mod. There is a GUI mod and an API mod that is kinda the base of the mod. They also control which mods are loaded. You only load the mods you're using. Furthermore, if you aren't in any of the raids or battlegrounds, none of the other mods will be loaded. Makes it nice that it's not taxing on your system at all. Also, this is pretty much for raids only. It does not contain anything for the 5-man instances or even anything like UBRS. But it's your traditional raid places: Onyxia, ZG, Naxx, Serpenshire, Karazhan, etc.

So what does this mod do? I'm not an expert, and I'm sure I don't know a lot of the additional functionality of this mod, but what I've seen is impressive. It creates timer bars to let you know when things are going to happen. For example, during the Curator, the timer bar tells you how long until his next evocate, and then also give another bar when he's evocating to let you know when it will be finished. Another example is during the Maiden of Virtue, it estimates how long until the next Holy Fire and Repentance. For Moroes, it lets you know when he's going to vanish. For the Oz event, it lets you know when each new mob will enter the fight. The timer bars are just really, really cool.

CT_RA has a feature that sounds a bell and gives a warning message when you pull agro off of the tank. I'm pretty sure this is only when you pull the target off of the MT. Deadly Boss Mods seem to go a step further. First of all, you don't have to (or can't) set an MT for your raid. DBM seems to scan all targets and all of the edges glow red when you pull agro. There's also a message of who you pulled. It just seems to really give me that sense of urgency when I pull something.

The last thing I'll talk about for the raid portion is the distance meter. The Maiden has the Holy Wrath ability that can chain through players that are close enough together. The Curator has the Flares that players can chain their arcane damage to others. You want to keep a certain distance from other players, but how do you know how much? When DBM is loaded, there will appear a box right in the middle of your screen (yeah... hard to miss), that will tell you who is too close to you. For this reason alone, it's a good idea for all your raid members to have this mod. There's also some synchronization things that happen if multiple people have the mod, but it hasn't caught on much in my guild yet.

Finally for the battlegrounds. I don't spend too much time there myself, but there is a neat timer that tells you how long until the leading faction wins based on the number of resources they have and how many points they currently control. (Think AB on that one.) Not sure what it does for the other battlegrounds, but I'm sure they've included something.

Bottom line: It's a good, solid mod. It seems to be updated every few days, so you know that people are working to perfect it. I haven't seen any bugs yet, so that's refreshing. If you start using it and see other features that I missed, please let me know.

Tonight we'll start Karazhan over again since it reset. Let's see how far we can get this week. :)

Mmm (Mage Mods & Macros)

In case you didn't know, my main toon in WoW is a female mage named Leiandra. I spend most of my WoW time on her, so I have a hard time writing mods and macros for say a warrior. That said, I've run across a couple of things that I want to highlight. (I hope I didn't lose everyone, there may be a macro or two that would help the other classes as well.)

First I'll start with a few macros that may be useful to everyone. This first one was feature on a WoW Insider article named The Creamy GUI Center: Macro Mania. They've got suggestions for general macros, and also class specific macros. Seems like there's probably a little bit of something for everyone, so feel free to head on over there. For the mage types, they suggested the following macro for polymorphing:

#showtooltip Polymorph: Turtle
/focus [button:1,harm] target /cast [button:3, target=focus,harm] Polymorph: Turtle; [button:1] Polymorph: Turtle /stopmacro [button:1,button:3] /clearfocus [button:2]

I actually added the first line, but showing the tooltip seems to make it more finished in my opinion. Basically, this macro will polymoprh your target when you left-click the mouse on the hot-key (or press the appropriate hot key number) and set that target in memory (or "focus"). If you then middle-click that key, it will polymorph it again, and you don't even have to have it targeted. Right-clicking the hot key will clear the mob of your focus. Personally, I usually don't clear the focus, I just set it again with I polymorph the next target. If you don't have Polymorph: Turtle (don't worry, I don't either), you can set it to Polymorph: Pig or just plain Polymorph. Also, if you choose the "?" for the macro icon, it will attempt to recognize what spell your using. In this case, it will set it to the turtle polymorph.

The next suggestion is actually a combination of a mod and macros. It comes from the official forums, but I'll be darned if I can't find the post now. The post was basically the whole mage vs. warlock debate, which I am not getting into. One of the suggestions for the "decreased" damage for mages at higher level raids was that in testing mage damage at Blizzard HQ, there's no lag for them. Casts of 3 seconds always take 3 seconds. Now if you're red-barring, a cast of 3 seconds could probably take closer to 5 seconds. For sake of illustration, let's say it takes 6 seconds. Now as a mage, you're doing about 1/2 the damage since most of our spells are direct damage. With warlocks and their dots, the damage continues even through a lag may persist. Again, I'm not taking sides, just showing how this mod will help.

When you cast a spell, this is what happens: You press the button, and a message is sent to the server. After a certain amount of time, depending on your current connection speed, the server gets the message and starts casting. For illustration purposes, say it takes 0.5 seconds. After 3 seconds of casting your Improved Fireball, the server sends a message to your computer, there's another 0.5 seconds, and you can start casting again. That means that your 3 second cast has now become 4 seconds; or said another way, you're doing only 75% of the damage that you would be able to if there had been no lag. (All class can see this lag effect, just try to jump in the last milliseconds before you've finished summoning your mount. Most likely, you'll be mounted even though you canceled the summon with your jump.)

Solution: Enter Quartz. There's a lot of neat things with Quartz, but basically, it replaces your cast bar and gives you an estimate of when your spell will be finished. So, because you can't cast again until your computer gets the message that the spell is finished, you need to interrupt the cast when the bar gets just past the red mark, and then cast again. Yeah, you could jump, or slightly move, but a macro makes this so much easier.

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/stopcasting
/cast Frostbolt

Just replace all of your spells with this macro (change spell name, of course), and now you can actually cast 2 Fireballs in about 6 seconds (as compared to the 8 seconds before). This will work for a lot of classes, but it seems to be most helpful to the mage class.

p.s. Didn't run Kara this weekend due to too many people being out of town. So, sorry there's no links to phat lewt.

Free Manna Biscuits

I've read a number of different articles and posts lately that seem to show that there exists (or can exist) a very selfish attitude towards pick-up groups. There was a post on the WoW forums that basically said, why should I use my disenchanting ability for free in a PUG when I'm the only one that can use the materials? Rather selfish if you ask me. (You can dig it up by yourself if you're really interested in it.)

So, I got thinking of all the things I give away for free when I'm in a PUG. As a mage, I hand out Glacier Water to all the mana users. (I purchased the spell for about 100g IIRC.) I hand out Croissants to any who ask for it. (Got a drop for that spell.) I usually buff everyone with Arcane Brilliance at least once. (Takes a reagent, in case you didn't know.) And I'll provide a portal at the end of our voyage. (Another reagent.) As an enchanter, I'll volunteer to shard the item for whoever won the roll. (I don't ask for tips like the WoW forum poster may have eluded to.) If I liked the group, I may even let them use my disenchanting services after the run. (Tips are appreciated.)

Do I feel like I'm going the extra mile? No, not really. It's a small price to pay to help the group along. On my priest alt, back before TBC, I was in a PUG for Scholomance with my current guild leader, Thellonious (who I believe was playing his hunter at the time), and other random people including a mage. The mage was a recent 60 and hadn't completed his water quest in BRD. He was so embarrassed about his "crappy" water, that he handed out Enriched Manna Biscuits instead of his water. Those are like 60s per stack of 5, and he gave us each stacks of 20!

This brings me to my link. Tobold brings up a great article: How much do you owe a pick up group? He makes some awesome points about groups in Everquest vs. Wow. Overall... I want the group to succeed. But if it's taken me 2 hours to get to the first boss, I doubt I'm staying with them too much longer.

Armory Update

Sorry for missing yesterday's post. I was a bit under the weather. (Falling asleep during dinner and then crashing on the couch for 10 hours at 7 pm is not normal for me.) But I've made an almost full recovery and feeling about 98%. Anyway...

For those that haven't seen the Armory section that Blizzard has created, do yourself a favor and go check it out. For those that haven't seen it today, do yourself a favor and go check it out again. The Armory has had a few upgrades that seem to have gone into effect this morning. You can now mouse over your items to see a little arrow besides it. Mousing over that will provide a "Find an Upgrade". You can then click on that to see a list of Blizzard-provided upgrades to your gear. Not only that, but it will tell you where that item drops (quest, rep, name of boss, etc.) and the drop rate (high, low, etc). Mousing over the stats of the "new" item will give you a comparison to your item- how many stats you'll gain or lose. Also, clicking on an item itself will tell you if it is disenchantable, what it is likely to turn into (or the guaranteed on some items), and what skill level enchanting is needed to disenchant it. On crafted items, it will tell you the mats needed to make the item.

To me, this seems huge. Blizzard has never released official information of boss drops or where things drop. Now, if they could only get the speed of the website to compare to Allakhazam or Thottbot, maybe they could steal some of their traffic. heh.

Sigs and Charts and Graphs, oh my!

Okay, I decided that I was gonna update this blog about once a day, but I got so excited about this link that I had to share. Take a look at http://wow.tachyonsix.com/armory/. You can create custom sigs like the one here:And when I say "custom" I mean custom. You can change colors, stats you want to add, etc. And the best part: It's all pulled off the Armory so it will update automatically. Anyway, very, very cool.

They also have a ton of charts (okay, not really graphs) to help with some guild organization. The can see who's what level in tradeskills, where everyone is on rep for heroic keys, and where everyone is for reputation in general. Just some really neat things.