Monthly Archives: November 2007

Game Info

2.3: Cooking Dailies (More Info)

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Well, so far we’ve seen a couple of the cooking dailies hit the live realms, and as the info I’d provided so far seems to be popular, here’s a bit more info:

The quests are given by The Rokk (<Master of Cooking>) in the Lower City, at around 61,16 coordinates. He gives a new one each day, which changes when the daily quests reset. Here are two known quests so far:

Revenge Is Tasty
Requires 1 Giant Kaliri Wing (drops off Monstrous Kaliri at Skettis, a quest item so you can’t farm for them in advance) and 3 Warp Burgers (made with 1 Warped Flesh each, which drop off Warp Stalkers in Terokkar at a 50% rate and Warp Chasers in Netherstorm at a 25% rate). Combine the Giant Kaliri Wing and the Warp Burgers in the cooking pot provided, and turn in the resulting Kaliri Stew.

Super Hot Stew
Requires 1 Crunchy Serpent and 2 Mok’Nathal Shortribs, which are made with meat from windserpents and raptors, respectively, in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Once you have the two components, go to Forge Camp: Terror in Blade’s Edge and kill yourself an Abyssal Flamebringer; stand over the body and use the provided cooking pot to combine the Crunchy Serpent and Mok’Nathal Shortribs into Demon-Broiled Surprise. Turn in the Surprise to complete the quest.

There are at least two more possibilities for the daily quest; I don’t have details on either of them yet. I’ll post again when I’ve seen them.

The cooking dailies require 275 cooking to complete; I haven’t yet checked to see if they also require level 70. The two quests listed above both require access to flying-mount-only areas (Skettis to get the Kaliri Wings, Blade’s Edge Plateau to kill the Abyssal Flamebringer), but a sub-70 character summoned to the area may be able to do them.

Game Info, Playstyle

2.3: Healers Get Some Loving

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With 2.3 scheduled to roll in a couple of days, one of the changes I’m eagerly anticipating is the revision of healer gear. Almost all healing gear is being modified to add spell damage as well, approximately equal to one-third of the item’s +heal value. As an example, Breastplate of the Lightbinder (a plate healing chestpiece with +88 healing) is being updated to add 30 spell damage in addition to the +heal.

This is a welcome change for almost every healer in the game; healers have long bemoaned their itemisation, and the frustration of one’s complete inability to quest and farm has led to a lot of healer burnout (which is bad for pretty much everyone, as high healer turnover harms raid groups and guilds alike).

This change, however, is going to make raiding life a lot more interesting, from two perspectives:

Paladins
Holy paladins can generate a pretty solid amount of DPS (stop laughing, I promise it’s true) with what’s known as the shockadin playstyle, relying on Holy Shock and Seal/Judgement of Righteousness to deliver a decent amount of holy spell damage (which has the advantage that Holy resistances are very rare, too). As an example, with about +750 spell damage on my DPS set, I can pull around 350 sustained DPS – which is far from great, but I’m specced for healing/offtanking. If I ditched the OT part of my spec and sacrificed a little bit of healing efficiency, I’d be looking at more like 450 DPS – considerably more against demons and undead. (In fact, I’m going to go test this on the PTR after I’ve written this post.) In comparison, in healing gear one’s DPS looks more like the 80-100 range.

However, raiding shockadins are so rare as to be all but non-existent; holy paladins on raids are pretty much always healers. At the moment, despite the fact that we wear plate and a goodly portion of our raid synergy (the seal/judgement mechanic) comes from melee, there’s zero incentive to get into close combat – the bonus of a judgement on the target is generally not worth the added healing load of an extra body in melee. So healadins sit back, the seals and judgement on their actionbars going virtually unused.

This may change in 2.3 – obviously, a healer paladin is still going to need to spend most of their time healing. However, the potential to actually deal some worthwhile damage while still in healing gear really suits the paladin’s nature as a hybrid; assigned to spot-healing (or a pull with lower healing needs)? Join in melee, put up judgement of light on the target, and half your healing work is done – you can whale away with seal/judgement of righteousness while your melee swings keep judgement of light active, and just throw some flashes of light to top people up. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen on every fight – or even most fights – but the fact that it’s at least a worthwhile option adds some much-needed versatility to a spec whose contribution to a raid consists of mashing two buttons.

Speaking as a healadin, thumbs up.

Off-Healers
Many raids have one or more off-healers – people who can heal if needed, but are far better suited to pewpewing away. Shadow priests, elemental shammies and boomkin are the classic examples (since holy shockadins just don’t tend to raid, and ret pallies/feral druids/enhancement shammies have totally different gear needs for their roles). Using these people to best advantage tends to be a dilemma for heal leads and raid leaders: what happens when you have a target who needs a bit of healing, but not much? Why, you put an off-healer on the job. But what do they do in between, or after the healing? They pewpew half-heartedly while stuck in heal gear.

The High King Maulgar fight is a perfect example, for those of you familiar with Gruul’s Lair. The offtank for Blindeye needs some healing, but not that much, and not for long; Blindeye is the first kill target, and doesn’t do much damage even while he’s up. An off-healer would be perfect for healing the Blindeye offtank, but what gear should they wear? If they wear healing gear, they’ve got all the DPS ability of a bag of wet feathers and they may as well AFK for a coffee once their heal target’s done tanking Blindeye. If they wear DPS gear, they’ve got sod-all in the way of mana efficiency and conservation for healing (since healing and DPS mana regen/conservation mechanics tend to be different for most classes), so by the time they’re done healing they’re low on mana, and there’s nothing sadder than seeing a shadowpriest resorting to wanding.

2.3 fixes this kind of dilemma. You put your offhealers in healing gear, and they’ve got the mana longevity and efficiency to finish their healing duties with a goodly amount of mana left – and then they can turn to pewpewing and still do 60-75% of the damage they’d do in full DPS gear. (Of course, this assumes that your offhealer is nearly as well-geared for healing as they are for DPS, but in my experience that’s generally true.) Suddenly, your hybrids really are hybrids, able to do more than one job reasonably effectively, rather than people who can do more than one job – but only one at a time.

Speaking as a healer lead, thumbs up.

Wishlist

Feature Wishlist: Selective Tracking

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Many professions and classes give some tracking ability: paladins can sense undead, warlocks can sense demons, hunters can track just about everything, miners can find ore nodes, and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-or-nothing deal, and that’s never made sense to me – from a gameworld logic point of view, and from a usability point of view. If you can track big ogrey footprints and little goblin footprints with your ‘track humanoids’ ability, why can’t you choose to ignore the goblins and only locate the ogres?

And from a usability perspective, nothing’s more frustrating when you’re on a farming round than having your minimap cluttered with dots for things you don’t care about. Ask any herbalist how much fun it is(n’t), scouring Zangarmarsh for felweed only to be constantly stymied by little yellow dots for glowcap all over the place.

Media

WoW Comic Upcoming!

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I’m not sure how I missed the news of this until now, but DC Comics has teamed up with Blizzard to publish an ongoing WoW comic. The first story arc is a twelve-parter, although I’m not sure if it’s continuing to a new story or ends a limited run there. The first six pages are available for preview here.

More news as it comes to hand; I’ll try and pick up the first issue when it’s released on Nov 14th, and give it a bit of a review. It’s definitely got potential, though – I think WoW lends itself very well to comics, much more so than the novel lines. It’s such a visual setting that it’s hard to do it justice in prose (especially given the nature and typical quality of tie-in genre fiction), whereas a comic is somehow cooler.

Game Info

A quick look at guild banks.

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Coming up in 2.3, there’s a new guild bank feature. It’s accessible from any bank and easily seen – it looks like a huge vault door in the bank. A few folks from our guild have been playing on the test realm to get some early experience with Zul’Aman (the new 10-man post-Karazhan raid), and while I was there I figured I’d check out the guild bank. I know a few of my friends are Guild Leaders of their respective guilds, so this might be of interest.

A guild bank doesn’t have bag slots like a player bank, but it does have the option to buy multiple tabs – up to six, at present. The prices on the test realm are punitive for more than a few tabs: the first tab is 1 gold, the second is 10g, the third is 100g, the fourth is 1,000g, the fifth is 5,000g and the sixth is 10,000g. I can’t imagine many guilds will be buying the last two tabs, not when you can still run regular banker alts to hide less-relevant items.

This is the guild bank interface after buying two bank tabs. The tabs are the ? buttons down the right hand side; the + button below the ?s is used to buy new tabs and I assume only the guild leader can see it.

You can see the tabs for the logs at the bottom of the window; unfortunately I couldn’t check out the features as clicking on either log tab immediately disconnects you from the server. Thumbs up Blizz! (Yes, okay, it’s a test server for a reason. I’m sure it won’t go live with that issue.)

I haven’t actually tried out the withdraw/deposit buttons down the bottom right; I think they’re for putting money into the bank and taking it out again.

And here we have the ugly side of guild banks. Here is the bank in use: it’s a HUGE MESS. From a usability perspective this is terrible; it means every guildie has to mouse over every single slot and check the tooltip to see what an item is. A text list in the forums is WAY easier to deal with for users (although much more of a hassle for administrators); at least then only the banker has to know what’s what, and generally will be more familiar with the items they’re holding than an average guildie.

Seriously, Blizzard, I know you’re invested in giving people interfaces full of pretty icons and no text labels, but that only works with inventories where you’re only managing 10-30 items with wildly different icons. For guild banks, with hundreds of items? Wrong design paradigm. Learn to love text labels, or better yet, text-based lists.

Until then, I long for the day someone releases a Guild Bank addon that redraws the guild bank as an operating-system-file-browser style of interface, with small icons and text labels next to them.

And on a less whingy note, here’s the interface for setting bank access permissions, based on guild rank. It’s basically fine, although I’d be happier with an option to allow people to withdraw unlimited stacks a day (eg. for officers moving things around).

I’ll be interested to see how much of this makes it into live realms without tweaking. I can’t believe Blizzard – who are normally so good with usability issues – thought that guild bank interface was a good idea.

Meta

I’m Shutting Up Now!

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I just wanted to say two last things before I sign off for the day:

* Sorry for the spam, and I hope it hasn’t cluttered your RSS feeds too much. Those daily quest guides were a wall of information, and putting it all in one big post would have probably choked poor WordPress.

* I’d like to pimp Girls Don’t Game, a new(ish) video- and computer-gaming blog started by a friend of mine, Monique, and a friend of hers, Dana. So far, it’s shaping up to be an interesting and insightful collection of reviews and commentary, and it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on if you’re interested in computer gaming. And if you’re not interested in computer gaming, why are you reading this blog? :)

Game Info

A Guide to Daily Quests: New in 2.3

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Patch 2.3 has not yet been released, but it’s going to include a number of new daily quests. Here’s a brief introduction to them:

Instance Dailies

From the 2.3 Patch Notes:
New daily quests are available in the Lower City for 5 man heroic and non-heroic dungeons (Once at a time, a bit like battleground weekends, each day you will get quests for a different dungeons). The following non-heroic dungeons are concerned: Shattered Halls, Steamvault, Shadow Labyrinth, Black Morass, Botanica, Mechanar, and Arcatraz. All dungeons will get quests in Heroic mode. If you’re getting the non-heroic and the heroic quest on the same day for the same dungeon, you can complete both by running it in heroic mode once. Non heroic quests will reward you with a Ethereum Prison Key (various reputation), gold, and reputation with the Consortium. Heroic quests will give you 2 Badges of Justice, gold, and reputation with the Consortium

As an example, I’m looking on the test realm right now. The quest givers are two Ethereal NPCs in the Lower City, one aligned with the Consortium – Wind Trader Zhareem and Nether-Stalker Mah’duun. (They can be found by looking for a blue ! on the minimap – another new feature in 2.3.) The normal-mode daily quest today is for Steamvaults, and requires you to kill 14 Coilfang Myrmidons – reward: 16 gold and an Ethereum Prison Key. Today’s heroic-mode daily is for Heroic Old Hillsbrad, for the Epoch Hunter’s Head – reward: 24 gold and 2 Badges of Justice.

Battleground Dailies
Each day you can do one daily quest to win a battleground; the reward is 12 gold and 419 honor. The questgiver is in Lower City; I don’t know if there are also questgivers in other cities, or if it can be done before level 70. The problem with this quest, of course, is that it requires you to win a battleground, which is a problem in battlegroups where one faction dominates.

Cooking Dailies
I’ve been wondering how these are going to work, so here we go! The quest giver is a goblin called The Rokk <Master of Cooking> in the Lower City. Today he’s asking you to cook “Demon Broiled Surprise”.

“I want you to take my beloved cooking pot and head out to Blade’s Edge. Throw in some shortribs and crunchy serpent – already cooked for extra flavor – and broil it over an abyssal’s corpse, the only thing hot enough to do the trick.”

Rewards: 7.5 gold and either a Barrel of Fish (flavour text: “A warning label reads: Do Not Shoot”) or a Crate of Meat (flavour text: “Mostly meat and whatever else was sitting around.”) Both items are white-quality and BoP; they contain a few high-level cooking mats (scarce fish, useful meats, etc) and also have a chance to contain a new cooking recipe.

Game Info

A Guide to Daily Quests III: Blade’s Edge

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3. Blade’s Edge Quests
These give Ogri’la and Sha’tari Skyguard reputation. At Honored Skyguard you can catch a free flight straight from Skettis to Ogri’la, and vice-versa. These quests give you monetary rewards and Apexis Shards, which are used to power some quest items, buy rewards from the rep vendor (including health and mana pots that work in the Blade’s Edge plateaux and Gruul’s Lair) and buy flasks from the crystalforges in Forge Camp: Wrath and Bashir’s Landing. These flasks can be used in Gruul’s Lair, and are very useful for it. In the early days of these dailies you will be scrounging for Apexis Shards (which also drop off mobs killed in the area); after a few weeks, you’ll have more than you know what to do with.

3.1 Precursors:
These are the worst precursors of the lot, because they include 5x 5-man quests. Most of them can be 3- or 4-manned, but the second-last quest absolutely requires 5 people to summon the boss.

They begin with a quest from an ogre in Lower City (below the Scryer bank) to speak to Mog’dorg the Wizened, at the Circle of Blood in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Mog’dorg will give you 3x 5-man quests to kill gronns and loot items from them.

Continue reading A Guide to Daily Quests III: Blade’s Edge →

Game Info

A Guide to Daily Quests II: Skettis

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2. Skettis Quests
These give Sha’tari Skyguard reputation. At Honored Skyguard you can catch a free flight straight from Skettis to Ogri’la, and vice-versa.

2.1 Precursor:
There is a quest-giver (Yuula) next to the griffon master in Shattrath City. She gives a quest to go and kill 20 ogres in the Barrier Hills, which are very close to Shattrath – just behind (NNW of) Aldor Rise. This is a fairly trivial quest; the ogres are easy pickings, although beware of some pathing elite ogres, and an elite gronn in one of the huts. After this, her follow-up quest sends you to Black Wind Landing, the Sha’tari camp at Skettis. Quickest way of getting there: griff to Allerian Stronghold and then fly SSE up into the mountains, if you’re Alliance. If you’re Horde, flying direct is quicker if you have an epic mount; otherwise, fly to Stonebreaker and head in from there.

2.2 Quest Details:
There are two daily quests available at Skettis. They give monetary rewards, and the escort quest also gives you 2 unstable mana pots or 2 volatile health pots.

Continue reading A Guide to Daily Quests II: Skettis →

Game Info

A Guide to Daily Quests I: Introduction

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I originally wrote this guide for my guild forums; I’m reposting it here as it may be of use.

This guide is going to be full of old news to most of you, but I’m sure there are some folks who haven’t yet started on the dailies, and it’s my hope this will be of some use to them.

1. What is a Daily Quest?
A daily quest is, as the name suggests, a repeatable quest that can be done once a day. It usually has a non-repeatable precursor, and a decent cash payoff; dailies were brought in by the devs to help with providing a gold supply outside of farming, to reduce the demand for gold sellers’ services.

You can only do 10 daily quests per day, so if you have access to more than 10 quests, you have to choose which ones you want to do. Most daily quests give faction rewards as well as gold, and you can continue doing the dailies indefinitely even after you get Exalted with the relevant faction(s).

There are, so far, three types of daily quest: Skettis quests, Ogri’la quests and Netherwing quests, if one categorises them by quest location/faction. The devs have said there will be more types in future, including a cooking daily. (!) These should be coming in patch 2.3.

Note that for all daily quests currently in the game, you need a flying mount to access the areas involved, and the quests requires level 70. A level 70 without a griff could probably be summoned around by a party with a warlock, though.

[Quick links: Dailies I: Intro, Dailies II: Skettis, Dailies III: Blade’s Edge, Dailies IV: Netherwing]