Monthly Archives: January 2008

Game Info

The Mighty Tabard Collection

20 Comments

Everyone has their little foibles, right?

Well, apparently I’m addicted to tabards. Some time before TBC was released, I realised I had almost every tabard in the game (available to my faction, obviously). What a worthy goal it would be to fill out that collection, I thought.

I’ve always been a bit of a reputation junkie; this just sealed the deal. I’m still missing a few of the tabards, but let’s take a bit of a tour through the wardrobe:

Tabard of the Argent Dawn Tabard of the Protector

Left: Tabard of the Argent Dawn, awarded during the Scourge Invasion when Naxxramas was introduced in patch 1.11. Right: Tabard of the Protector, awarded during the opening of the Dark Portal at the launch of The Burning Crusade. As you can see, they’re identical, except that the Tabard of the Protector has a Use: effect on a 5-minute cooldown that looks like a Holy Nova. Neither tabard is available now.

Private's Tabard Knight's Colors Stormpike Battle Tabard

Left: Private’s Tabard, purchasable under the old honor system at Private rank, or now for 3 AB Marks of Honor and 3 WSG Marks of Honor. Centre: Knight’s Colors, purchasable under the old honor system at Knight rank, or now for 20 AV Marks, 20 AB Marks and 20 WSG Marks. Right: Stormpike Battle Tabard, previously purchasable at Exalted Stormpike reputation (the Alliance faction in Alteract Valley), now purchasable with 60 AV Marks of Honor.

Tabard of Frost Tabard of Flame

Left: Tabard of Frost, purchasable from Upper Deck Entertainment with points obtained from buying packs of the WoW Trading Card Game. Right: Tabard of Flame, obtained via a rare “loot card” in the WoW Trading Card Game. In both cases you get a special code from UDE, the publisher of the game. You redeem the code and get an in-game code, which you take to Landro Longshot (a goblin in Booty Bay); he gives you your reward.

Green Trophy Tabard of the Illidari Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade

Left: Green Trophy Tabard of the Illidari, a quest reward from Battle of the Crimson Watch (a fun group quest in Shadowmoon Valley). Right: Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade, a random drop off Scarlet Trainees in Scarlet Monastery, the non-elite who run in to be AoEd to death after you kill Herod in the Armory wing.

Cenarion Expedition Tabard Consortium Tabard Honor Hold Tabard

Cenarion Expedition Tabard, Consortium Tabard, and Honor Hold Tabard respectively: all attainable at Exalted with the relevant faction.

Kurenai Tabard Lower City Tabard Ogri'la Tabard

Kurenai Tabard, Lower City Tabard, and Ogri’la Tabard respectively: all attainable at Exalted with the relevant faction.

Scryers Tabard Sha'tar Tabard

Scryers Tabard and Sha’tar Tabard respectively: both attainable at Exalted with the relevant faction.

Skyguard Tabard Sporeggar Tabard

Skyguard Tabard and Sporeggar Tabard respectively: both attainable at Exalted with the relevant faction.

Update: 24 Sept 08

Keepers of Time Tabard Tabard of Summer Skies Competitor's Tabard

Left: Keepers of Time Tabard, attainable at Exalted with Keepers of Time. Center: Tabard of Summer Skies, a reward from this quest to kill Lord Ahune, a seasonal boss during the Midsummer Fire Festival. Right: Competitor’s Tabard, a reward for competing in a Battleground during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Tabards I Haven’t Got (Yet)

  • Arathor Battle Tabard: requires Exalted with the Alliance AB faction. Such a grind. Ugh.
  • Silverwing Battle Tabard: requires 60 WSG Honor tokens. I just haven’t got around to this one yet.
  • Tabard of Brilliance (white), Tabard of Fury (yellow), Tabard of Nature (green), Tabard of the Arcane (purple), Tabard of the Defender (orange), and Tabard of the Void (black). All are purchased using UDE points from the WoW card game. They have the same design as the Tabards of Flame and Frost (above), just in different colours. Tthey’re being implemented in stages; as of September 08, the Tabards of Brilliance and the Defender aren’t in-game yet.
  • Purple Trophy Tabard of the Illidari: One of two random quest rewards, the other being the Green variant listed above. You can only get one of the two, so I can never get this.
  • Tabard of Summer Flames: One of two rewards from a one-off quest during the Midsummer Fire Festival. You can only choose one tabard each year, so I have to wait til next year for this.
  • Aldor Tabard: I’m a Scryer, so I can’t get the Aldor tabard without doing a very long handin grind to abandon my Scryer standing. I already did that once in reverse, from Revered Aldor (for Jewelcrafting recipes) to Exalted Scryers (for Jewelcrafting recipes and the shoulder enchants).
  • Tabard of Stormwind: Not in game yet.
  • Tabard of the Hand: a Draenei-only tabard; part of the quest reward from the final quest on Bloodmyst Isle, which is not available to non-Draenei.
  • Blood Knight Tabard: part of the reward for the level 60 epic mount quest for blood elf paladins. Obviously, I am not a blood elf, so no dice.
  • Any of the seven Horde-specific factional tabards (Defilers [AB], Warsong [WSG], Frostwolf [AV], Mag’har [equivalent of Kurenai], Thrallmar [equivalent of Honor Hold], Scout [equivalent of Private], and Stone Guard [equivalent of Knight]).

I think I need a new hobby.

Meta, Playstyle

Blog Azeroth Shared Topics: #1

4 Comments

Explanation: over at Blog Azeroth, I suggested a semi-regular feature where one person suggests a topic and anyone who feels inspired can respond. This seemed to go down well, so I proposed the first topic, and here we are.

Q: What do you enjoy about the class you play the most?

For me, obviously, the class in question is paladin. I can summarise its biggest appeal in one word: survivability.

Playing a paladin has made me lazy. I think nothing of running into the middle of half a dozen mobs, slapping down a consecrate, and swinging-and-judging my way to victory. And I finish the fight on 90% health and 80% mana. In contrast, my other level 70 is a mage, and something of a glass cannon to boot. (Well, glass peashooter, really; she doesn’t have the gear to be called a cannon.) She has a lot of punch, but I have to be so careful about how and where she fights, or she just falls over like a limp noodle. And then I load the paladin back up again, and suddenly I don’t care that the mobs are trying to kick me in the face.

Admittedly, it takes me a lot longer to kill anything, but I can live with that, you know.

Now, all of that is applicable to any pally, but I’m not just a pally, I’m a healer. Truth be told, all the other healing classes have their appeal to me in TBC endgame – holy priest finally looks like fun, ditto resto shammies and druids – but I really enjoy pally healing. I like being able to pump out big heals in a really focused way – and it keeps me away from the dreaded whack-a-mole game of raid healing.

That said, I do lament the obstacles to multi-target healing on a pally – no area heals and no HoTs means that it boils down to “spam FoL on anyone in range”. But again, I’ll take the survivability of a paladin over the raid-healing ability of a priest or shammy any day; it takes a lot more to one-shot me than it does my lesser-armored brethren. (And sistren.)

Also, pallies have fantastic spell effects. I mean, those blessings are swank. It almost makes up for the armor design.

Almost.

Meta

New links page

Leave a comment

My blogroll has already started getting out of hand, and that’s without linking any of the recent discoveries I’ve made.

So, the new Links page is the place to go for a comprehensive* collection of links. The sidebar blogroll is liable to focus specifically on blogs likely to be of interest to my readers.

Which doesn’t mean that the blogs on the Links page aren’t interesting. On the contrary, I’ve found some fantastic blogs – particularly through the Blog Azeroth forums – and my feed reader is exploding with delight.

* – for varying values of ‘comprehensive’. Right now, it’s more ‘this space reserved for future content’, but the links will appear, I promise.

Game Info

Theorycrafting: Divine Illumination

2 Comments

In the comments on my Holy Paladin introduction post, where I discussed various talent specs for a holy pally, Raquel disagreed with my decision to leave Divine Illumination out of the “bare minimum” spec. Now, I’ve been thinking about picking DI back up again, so let’s take a bit of a look at it.

Divine Illumination is the end talent of the Holy tree for paladins, not to be confused with Illumination or Divine Intervention (which is the usual ability indicated by the ‘DI’ abbreviation). Divine Illumination “reduces the mana cost of all spells by 50% for 15 seconds”, and is on a 3 minute cooldown. (Note that this effect does not apply to Lay on Hands; you still drain all your mana when you blow LoH regardless of this spell.)

Now, the actual mana savings of Divine Illumination are really dependent on your own casting rotation, and the situations under which you’re healing. Obviously, you’re going to get a lot more use out of it in fights where you’re frantically chain-casting your biggest heals just to keep the tank up than you are when you’re leisurely throwing Flash of Lights in a controlled environment.

That said, let’s do a bit of hypothetical numbercrunching. I’ll use my own spell rotation for this, which tends to be approximately three Flash of Lights and then a Holy Light – on average, that is; obviously it’s situational, but over the course of most (progression and newly-on-farm) fights I throw about 25% Holy Lights, 75% Flash of Lights.

Now, again, assume a chain-casting situation, which means that during the 15 seconds Divine Illumination is up, I’m going to wind up throwing 2 Holy Lights and about 6 Flash of Lights – theoretically 7 Flash of Lights, but there’s always a bit of latency (especially for us Aussie players), having to move around, whatever.

So, 2x Holy Lights = 1680 mana and 6x Flash of Lights = 1080 mana, for a total of 2760 mana used in that fifteen seconds. A 50% savings is 1380 mana – in other words, Divine Illumination saves me 1380 mana every 3 minutes, or 460 mana per minute (on average). That’s an equivalent of 38.3 mp5, which is pretty huge for one talent point.

Obviously, that’s not the same as mp5; it’s a mana savings, not a mana return, which means that – just like mana return on crit heals – if you’re not casting, you’re not getting the benefit of this talent. And, like other cooldowns, if you don’t use it, you don’t get the benefit, either. Use it every time it’s up, unless it’s a spiky-damage fight where you know you’ll be throwing out a string of big heals before the cooldown will be up again.

That said, for progression fights where you’re chain-casting or close to it, Divine Illumination certainly looks like it’s worth the talent point – provided you remember to use it.

Meta, Playstyle

Recruitment! (I’m nothing if not an opportunist.)

Leave a comment

Since the new Blog Azeroth community is likely to bring a few readers from other servers around this way: my guild is currently recruiting!

We’re an Oceanic timezone guild on a medium-to-high-population US server – Proudmoore, one of the original launch servers – and we’re currently looking for a hunter, a warlock and a feral druid tank. We raid during Australian prime time (raids start between 1:00-1:30 a.m. Pacific time) and we do have a few American nightowls amongst our raiding crew.

Applicants welcome! Hit up the link above for more information, or drop me a line if you’re interested.

Okay, shameless ad over. On with the regular content!

Meta

WoW Blogger’s Forum

Leave a comment

I’m behind on my RSS feeds, so I espied this in Leafshine’s blog rather than the WoWInsider post everyone else seems to have stumbled across: Blog Azeroth, a forum for WoW bloggers to talk about, well, WoW and blogging. And WoW blogging.

Needless to say, WoW and blogging are two of my favourite things, so talking about WoW and blogging and WoW blogging is very appealing. I think the forums are going to turn out to be a great resource, from the looks of the discussions already happening, and I’m hoping to get to know a lot more of my fellow WoW bloggers.

Playstyle

Heroic loot imbalances

1 Comment

Now this is something that really bugs me. Heroic instances are a regular part of life for many (most?) level 70s; they’re the next step after gearing up at 70, and provide a good transition between standard instances and raids. There are heroic versions of every TBC dungeon, from Hellfire Ramparts through to Shattered Halls and Arcatraz.

Unfortunately, the loot is a little imbalanced. Heroic versions of pre-70 dungeons (ie Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbog, Mana-Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Old Hillsbrad, and Sethekk Halls) have all-new loot tables on every boss; the early bosses will drop a level 70 blue item (iLevel 115), with a chance to drop an epic gem, while the final boss will drop similar stuff and a nice Heroic-level epic (iLevel 110). (And every boss drops a Badge of Justice.)

Heroic versions of level 70 dungeons, however, are a bit different. (ie Shadow Labyrinth, Black Morass, Steamvault, Shattered Halls, Mechanar, Botanica and Arcatraz.) The final boss has the same sort of tasty loot tables as the final bosses in other Heroics, but the earlier bosses have exactly the same loot tables as they do in Normal-mode versions of the instance! The only difference is that they have a chance to drop an epic gem, and they drop a Badge of Justice.

This has always felt like a real gyp to me. Heroic dungeons are not easy until you’re fairly well geared, and when you’re running them to try and gear up (rather than just farming them for badges and nethers) it feels like a total ripoff to slog your ass off to a boss, often dealing with brutal trash on the way… only to get just the same junk you’d get from a Normal-mode run of the instance. It makes PuGs a particularly dicey proposition; if you’re not confident that your group is going to go the distance to the final boss, there’s almost no point in starting.

It’s not a huge deal, but I do hope that if Blizzard retains the Heroic-mode concept for WotLK, the Heroic versions of level 80 dungeons will have more generous loot tables.

Playstyle

Addons: Lightheaded and DoubleWide

Leave a comment

Okay, let’s look at a couple of nifty addons that add extra functionality to the quest log. I’m not going to discuss MonkeyQuest or addons like that here, because I don’t like or use them, but here are a couple of handy addons that will help you get more out of your questing.

LightHeaded
Download from WoWInterface here.

This handy addon shows quest information from WoWHead in-game, so you don’t have to alt-tab to a browser window when you get stuck – as happens so often.

Lightheaded Collapsed Lightheaded Collapsed

The left-hand image shows LightHeaded in its collapsed state; the little pullout tab on the right edge of the quest log is clickable to pop the LightHeaded panel out. The right-hand image shows the log with LightHeaded popped out; the panel shows the details of the quest, where it starts, and so on. (The quest giver names are clickable, which will show you the co-ordinates where the giver can usually be found. The coordinates are also clickable, which apparently adds them to map mods like Cartographer or TomTom as waypoints, although I haven’t tested that.)

Lightheaded quest details

You can page through the LightHeaded panel to see all the WoWhead comments for a given quest (or you can set them to all show on one page in the pane, and scroll down).

DoubleWide
Download from WoWInterface here.

DoubleWide in use

This addon does pretty much what the name suggests: it gives you a double-wide quest log. The picture above shows it all, really; the left-hand panel shows a list of your quests, the right-hand panel shows the quest description. Usual buttons at the bottom. A nice addon for people who have plenty of screen real estate and prefer to see more info at a glance.

LightHeaded and DoubleWide in use

And as you can see, LightHeaded and DoubleWide play nicely together; if you’ve got a widescreen monitor, this combo works well.