A Note of Dissonance

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.

Inscription Still, Still Not In

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.

Keep It Clean, Mac Users

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.

No Grind Too Great…

Original image from WoWheadI finally met my Waterloo, the grind that even I cannot contemplate.

I have a long and grindy history in Azeroth. I thought nothing of doing Revered with the Aldor and then Exalted with the Scryer (requiring a hefty amount of basilisk-killing in the middle) with my paladin because I wanted all the jewelcrafting recipes. I ground my Night Elf priest to Exalted Stormwind faction pre-60 and pre-easy-rep-gains because I wanted a horse. I have maxed-out fishing, for god’s sake.

I didn’t flinch at the idea of grinding my way to Exalted with the Consortium (before all the solo and 5-man Consortium content in patch 2.2, to boot) or the Kurenai. I have every Burning Crusade faction, bar Scale of the Sands and Ashtongue Deathsworn, at Exalted. I’ve just hit Exalted with Stormwind and Argent Dawn, and I’m a couple of days away with Darnassus, Exodar and Cenarion Circle — then comes Timbermaw and Frostspring Wintersaber factions.

But I have met my match: the rep grind that makes me shudder and think “oh god, no“. This terror: the rep grind to get Exalted with the Bloodsail Buccaneers for a swanky Admiral’s hat and parrot pet. This grind would necessitate killing 1,300 level 67 elite mobs (who drop zero loot – not even coins) just to get to Friendly with the damn Buccaneers… and then I’d have to grind my way back up from Hated with all the Steamwheedle factions just so as not to get ganked the minute I set foot in one of their towns.

No. Just no. I don’t care how cool the hat looks. HONEST.

Terrible Character Names I’ve Seen

Ubadkitty
Xygrlnxtdoor
Gankdalf
Ublinkudie
Ihealu (or any of the countless variations thereon)
Wontheal (now there’s a priest I want to run with, oh yes)
Damagecapz (yes, it’s a mage)
Hippycheeze
Missdameaner
Healzforgold
Chainhealz (no prizes for guessing which class this is)
Lovrgirl
Snipercon
Elitenemesis
Wykidd
Deadlynoob
Invmeplz
Lakersfan

In the good old days, all of these would have earnt the player a forced name change for contravening Blizzard’s naming policy. These days, all they earn is the scorn and derision of players around them…

Inscription Still Not In

I notice I’ve had a lot of hits today from Google searches for Inscription guides – presumably fuelled by today’s announcement that Inscription will be available pre-Wrath Day.

This is just a headsup for you visitors: I’m still planning to write a guide to levelling Inscription once all the information is available. Currently, Inscription still isn’t implemented in the Wrath beta, beyond some basic lowbie abilities (no Glyphs, just stat scrolls).

So, you’ll all be the first to know once I’ve got data to work with, but until then, no-one can give you a meaningful Inscription guide because the information is just not available yet. Watch this space!

That’s What Now! or, Things To Do In Azeroth When You’re Bored

Tiny Phoenix HatchlingI recently posted about my difficulty in finding things to amuse me in the pre-Wrath period: everything I could think of to do was either boring, or irrelevant in the face of the upcoming expack.

Well, here’s something that’s been occupying me for the last few days: catching up on Achievements, in advance!

I’m a completionist and an explorer at heart, which means the Achievements system is going to occupy a lot of my time during the lifespan of Wrath. However, there are a bunch of Achievements that I can easily work on before Wrath Day.

First, I logged into the Wrath beta to check out the Achievements panel and found all the pre-WotLK achievements I hadn’t yet completed. (Those of you without access to the beta can do the same thing by checking out the WoWHead Achievement list.) I broke these down into subsets:

  • Achievements I won’t get credit for until Wrath goes live: certain boss kills, a lot of PvP achievements, achievements like ’emote /love to one of every type of critter’, and so on. No point doing these in advance as I’d only have to redo them.
  • Achievements I can’t complete until a certain time of year: these are all the Achievements for seasonal events that I haven’t yet completed, from ‘get all three pets from Azeroth’s Children’s Week’ to ‘discover an Elegant Dress by opening eggs during Noblegarden’.
  • Achievements I can complete, but shouldn’t: yes, I can go and get 15 different non-combat pets right now, but I won’t have bag space for them until Wrath goes live with its new pet-and-mount storage system. I could do it now, but it’d be a lot smarter to wait.
  • Fast and easy achievements I can complete now: mostly finishing off map exploration, chasing down those pesky few unexplored subzones, and making sure Achievement-earning quest chains are finished off (for example, the Nesingwary quests, completing X many quests in a given Outland zone, etc).
  • More time-consuming achievements I can complete now: Can you say ‘rep grinds’? I knew you could! There are Achievements for gaining Exalted with specific factions and groups of factions, as well as getting a certain number of factions to Exalted overall.

And now I’ve been working on them. So far I’ve finished off a few of the individual general Achievements (like buying and equipping the “Gigantique” bag) and finished exploring every single Eastern Kingdoms zone. Now I’m working on factions, and I’ll break that up with some Kalimdor exploration.

None of it has any mechanical advantage, true. But it warms the cockles of my obsessive completionist heart to tick off all these little things I’d always meant to do but never had time to do – now I have time to do them, and a reason to boot.

(Tangentially, in one of my next few posts I’ll talk about some tips and tricks for levelling old-world factions, for those of you stranded in the doldrums of Revered reputation.)

Bear Mounts – Awesome at Any Price?

I started thinking about this after seeing yet another “WTS ZA Bear Run, 10K. PST!” in Trade channel tonight, and the resultant discussion of “I’d never buy one!” “Good for you!” “That’s such a ripoff!” “n00bs!” “Chuck Norris!” “Murlocs!” (It is Trade channel, after all.)

Zul’Aman bear mounts from the timed chests are, as most people know, no longer available once Wrath goes live, because they were intended to be a reward for completing a non-trivial challenge and doing the run at 80 will be far from challenging. Bear junkies will be able to get polar bear mounts from another source, but the Zul’Aman bear will remain a reward for those who got them at 70.

So, that’s got me thinking. My guild is doing Zul’Aman, but not all the time, and we haven’t conquered the timers yet – but we’re not far off. Do I want a bear mount? Yep. Do I want one enough to pay for it? ….I’m not sure.

How about you?

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