Monthly Archives: September 2008

Playstyle

Shared Topic: What I Will Be Doing…

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…when Wrath of the Lich King hits.

This is this week’s Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth, a question posed by Dechion of Dechion’s Place.

What Will I Be Doing On Wrath Day?

…Trying to update my mods.

No, Seriously…

I actually hope to have my UI all fixed and ready to go, testing it on the 3.0 PTR and on Beta.

My basic plan will be:

Mr.Coffee9 Hours before Midnight Launch: Get six hours of sleep.

2 Hours before Midnight Launch: Drive to store, start queueing.

1am Wrath Day: Get home, start installing Wrath. Log on teamspeak to chat with guildies doing the same thing – or catch an extra hour’s nap, who knows :)

3am Wrath Day: Finish installing and patching. Have a coffee.

3:01am Wrath Day: Start playing! Head to Northrend. Train Grand Master tradeskills. Start questing on the paladin. Have a coffee and eat something for blood sugar. Try and force myself to keep the mage on follow to gather ore and herbs.

When Northrend starts crashing from load: Head back to Shattrath and do all the stuff I had saved up – level tradeskills as far past 375 as possible with TBC-level mats, for instance. Have more coffee.

When Northrend gets really bad: Get some sleep.

Repeat ad infinitum… or at least ad 80. ;-)

Playstyle, Wishlist

A Note of Dissonance

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Blizzard has tried hard to make so much of the game smooth and fun, cutting out factors other MMOs think necessary (like, say, corpse runs or XP loss on death) because they recognised they’re not fun.

Take tradeskills. For the most part, they’re streamlined and simple to execute – I have some issues with the amount of reward they offer, but there’s no “because we can” obstacles…

…except in Enchanting.

If I’m levelling up Alchemy on an alt, I can give her a couple of stacks of herbs, a stack of vials, and click one button. I walk away to get a coffee, I come back, I’ve got a stack of elixirs in my bag and 20 shiny new skill points.

Getting those skill points for an Enchanter? You have to execute your recipe individually each time – and if you’re grinding your skill up a bit, you’re probably re-enchanting the same item over and over with the most efficient recipe you’ve got. Each re-enchant requires an extra click to confirm that you really did mean to overwrite the last enchantment on the item, which is identical anyway. So your twenty skill points cost you forty mouse clicks instead of one, and a lot of boring staring at the screen. It’s as bad as fishing, and you don’t even get to get out and look at the scenery.

It’s only a minor niggle, and the world’s not gonna end if they don’t fix it – but it’s so jarring and tedious in an otherwise streamlined world.

Game Info

Inscription Still, Still Not In

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Inscription update for the day: it’s mostly still not implemented, so still no guide from me.

To be more accurate: a lot of recipes are now available from the trainer, from skill level 1 up to 400 at present. However, the materials for the recipes have not yet been tuned. Every glyph currently requires Moonglow Ink (made from Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Earthroot, or Mageroyal), one of each type of parchment (bought from Vendors), and one piece of Mageroyal. Obviously, 400-skill recipes aren’t going to require a level 10 herb, so clearly they’re placeholders until the correct list of mats is implemented. So, there’s no point in creating a powerlevelling guide just yet.

Update: Druid glyphs appear to have the correct mats requirements. However, it’s clear that Inscription is still very unfinished, and any powerlevelling guide would be premature and inaccurate.

Also, note that the Glyphs pane of the spellbook now has three slots for Major Glyphs and three for Minor Glyphs; it looks like the model of two Major, two Minor and two Lesser has been abandoned.

Off Topic

Keep It Clean, Mac Users

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Just an out-of-game tip for my fellow Mac-using WoW players:

After a few months of use, your WoW application folder will get cluttered with large, unnecessary files – remnants of old patches, mostly, which can safely be deleted.

If you’re looking to clear some hard drive space, this thread confirms that you can safely delete any old patch files with “a blue tornado icon or comet icon” except the Background Downloader and Blizzard Updater.

(These are generally files with names like “WoW-2.3.2.7741-to-2.3.3.7799-enUS-patch” or “WoW-2.4.2.8278-to-2.4.3.8606-enUS-downloader”, for instance.)

You can find these files in the base-level World of Warcraft directory.

You can also delete the /Patches subdirectory, although – as a blue poster points out – you might want to delete selectively if the downloader is pushing content in advance of an approaching patch.