Some Gals Play With Swords.

WTF Blizz! Ur Pwning My PvP Lootz!

Friday, June 4th, 2010

This falls in the category of ranting. I don’t yet have a ranting category, in fact this entire blog could qualify as one big rant sometimes, but occasionally I’m more ranty than others. Ranty? Rant’ish? Rant-like? Meh.

So here’s the problem: I need a wand and I can’t get one.

In fact the title for this post could be… “WTF Blizz! Ur Pwning My PvP Lootz! … AKA: Where is my wand!!?!?!?” but that would get a bit long.

Maybe Blizz doesn’t have a lot of people with a character like I have, so let me explain which character I’m having an issue with.

It’s my frost mage, Sarine. She is in DIRE (!!!!) need of a wand.

Here’s the catch – I ONLY do PvP with her. It’s a point of pride to say … ha! I’ve never stepped into a Northrend dungeon with her. Never gotten that badges/tokens/whatever achievement for looting one, and I sure as heck am not patient with her enough to queue with a ton of morons who won’t understand that I don’t care if my dps is low, I’m stacked with resilience baby and I’m only here to get my wand anyway so get over it or bring it on!

Well, technically I am patient, couldn’t you tell? But see they stole that whole dungeon queue thing from us pvp’rs anyway and didn’t bother to give us a title for entering queue with random people… oh gee, yeah cause it’s for grouping with 50 random players.. lol, that’s like.. what doing one AV and one of anything else? BG’s are the original pug.

Ok, so I’m going off on a tangent.. back to the topic at hand.

Total lack of pvp wands!!

What happened Blizz? Was there a wand-crafters strike? Did all the little gnomes decide to ask for minimum wage or something? Come on!!

It’s annoying. Really annoying if you want a good wand and only do PvP.

Let me show you why. There are 7 PvP wands available in the game currently – 2 sets of them, and yes for each caster there is one that is most appropriate for your class (sorta like choosing between tank plate, heal plate, and dps plate) so technically there are only 2 real options, one from each.

Here are the first 4:

Wrathful Gladiator’s Baton of Light
Wrathful Gladiator’s Piercing Touch
Wrathful Gladiator’s Touch of Defeat
Wrathful Gladiator’s Wand of Alacrity

Notice anything special about this wand? Yeah, requires Arena Team rating. Well gee, in order to rank well in arena you have to not die. In order to not die you need decent gear. In order to … you see where I’m going with this? So where is the wand a level down if this is what you get when you’re really good?

Oh here they are, in the next 3 wands:

Brutal Gladiator’s Baton of Light
Brutal Gladiator’s Piercing Touch
Brutal Gladiator’s Touch of Defeat

Did you catch it?

No? Look again at those three wands.

They’re arena wands from BURNING CRUSADE!!! For level 70’s!

That’s it. Those are your PvP wand choices.

So what’s a gal to do if she doesn’t want to do dungeons? Apparently grind rep with the Oracles. The only two wands that even come close to PvP style with stamina on them are both from the Oracles. Purifying Torch and Shinygem Rod.

What makes me a little nuts is that there would be a total of 29 wands available with the resilience stat on them if Blizz hadn’t gone nuts removing all the PvP weapons from the game (never did make any damn sense why they’d do that).

Of those 29, 1 is a quest reward from Hellfire Peninsula with a high end damage less than a quarter what the Brutal wands from Outlands can do. Thanks but no thanks. Other lvl 70 wands include the Vengeful and Merciless set ones. What really ticks me off is that Blizz removed 16 of the level 80 pvp wands that were in game leaving no transitional pvp wand between the Outland one and the lvl 80 Arena reward.

I don’t know what gauge they’re using to make these decisions, but it’s getting insanely annoying.

Cataclysm… you took my home!

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

Ok well not quite.

Fine fine, not at all. But I really really like Darkshore and Southshore!

According to the ongoing list of what’s changing in the new expansion, they’re both going to be destroyed when the oceans rise. :/

Well that just bites. I really like those places for questing. So I’m not at all bothered by them taking a wrecking ball to Azshara and making it the new Goblin homebase, nor does it bug me that they’re pretty much gonna blow up Stonetalon Mountains. I’m a little sad that Camp Taurajo is being razed by the Alliance that’ll be setting up camp in the south Barrens, and definitely bummed that Shimmering Flats will be a lake now, but …

I’m totally down about the destruction of Darkshore and Southshore. What’s gonna happen to the docks outside Darkshore?

Bleh, ok, so I was getting excited about this expansion, but now that I’m finding out what they’re planning to do… well, in part it’s starting to turn into a feeling of dread.

Lore Masters Go Social!

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

We have some cool news today from the Blizzard community team… there’s a new WoW forum added today that will be purely for discussion of lore.

To top it off, the forum will be watched over not only by normal moderators, but by the Blizz Creative Team involved in coming up with story etc…

For someone like me trying to learn about some lore, it’s awesome to see another avenue open up to find out information and discuss stuff.

Lately I’ve been reading the lore column on Wow.com and plan to pick up the books, but the new forum is going to be just one more fun place to look!

The End of the Stonemason

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

*sniff sniff* I feel like a dirtbag for using the dungeon finder now :/

Shadow Priesting… a New World

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

With some of the changes that came out in 3.3.3 I unexpected found myself with a useless dual-spec.

My healing spec was always holy/disc and my dps spec was disc/holy (I know, so adventurous right?). Well, Discipline is good for pvp and that’s a lot of my soloing with Everonna. Anyway, discipline dps was nerfed something serious, and I found myself with what are effectively 2 healing specs.

So I did something I thought I’d never do… I went Shadow.

First Shadowform!

First Shadowform!

I always considered Shadow totally pointless. I mean, if you want to play that way why not just make a warlock? I already have some locks, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out.

I WAS SOOOOOO WRONG.

Not to say that I know it all with Shadow Priesting, cause I’ve barely scratched the surface, but having played pretty much every class in the game at this point, I’ll say that I have NEVER seen a caster class that works like this.

Of course, that could be because I’m not exactly dressed the way a Shadow Priest should be… but who knows, maybe it’ll start a trend! I’m still wearing my holy gear since I don’t have another set of gear, so my mana regen is insane from my spirit, but I have no hit rating (cause heals don’t miss).

Soooo… I was reading on how to best gauge S.P. dps and the article said “Go to Ironforge, turn on recount, and cast spells nonstop at the heroic dummy for 5 minutes exactly.”

For anyone who has ever played a mage or a lock… you might get caught on the same phrase I did… 5 MINUTES?!?! 5 minutes of ‘nonstop’ spellcasting even on my frost mage (major mana efficient) ain’t gonna be a whole 5 minutes cause she’ll OOM for sure.

Decided to try it anyway.

So guess what… my Shadow Priest didn’t OOM after 5 minutes of nonstop casting. Not even close, I hadn’t even used any of her mana regen cooldown spells yet cause there was no worry of running out at all.

The combo of the healer gear with the insane amount of spirit, and the talents and spells for crazy Shadow Priest mana regen, created a sorta hybrid dps’r who apparently just never runs outta mana (but will miss sometimes). I wonder if the sustained dps that lasts… well, forever, is a tradeoff for missing. Who knows?

In the meantime I’m trying to figure out how this class works and I’ll be looking for drops that are more dps relevant, but I’m totally surprised at how different this spec is than what I imagined. It’s really nothing like a warlock at all!

Someone Got It Right!

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Gamers are taking over, and the world is becoming what we make it.

This article was written a few years ago, and I’d definitely say the person is right on with some trends in future changes already being seen today.

Trading For Honor

Friday, March 26th, 2010

So with major patch 3.3.3 battle tokens are gone.

THANK GOD!!!!!

Ok. Got that out. Moving on.

Commendation Exchange

Commendation Exchange

If you have existing tokens from a battleground you’ve done (check your character popup, tab currency) you’ll need to exchange them for a Commendation of Service (grants 185 honor points). The exchange rate is 1:1 and you cannot have more than 10 commendations in your bag at any one time.

This means you’ll need to exchange ten, then right click them in your bag to use them, then exchange 10 more. If you have a lot, this is mildly annoying.

The guy you need to talk to for the exchange is upstairs in the Stormwind Champion’s Hall (Old Town).

International Booty Call – Dates Announced

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Oh wait, they call it BlizzCon! Whoops :)

CONTENT OF THIS POST IS MASSIVELY 18+ SO DO NOT READ ON IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE OFFENDED OR EXPOSED TO SEXUAL DISCUSSION OR IMAGES.
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Submarines and LFR and Lakes .. oh my!

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Ok.. so I’m just a little bit more excited about Cataclysm that some of my relatives who play WoW. In fact, every day or two I check out the details on what is coming up. Here I want to talk about a couple of things I think are totally wild.

Submarines!

Submarine travel. Woot! That’s just totally awesome, and something only made possible by the water improvements we started getting with BC. Of course, they’re updating the entire landscape of Old Azeroth to match the visual quality of the later expansions.

WoW Submarine.

WoW Submarine.

Apparently those submarines are gonna be big. Like, big big. As in, the size of the Icecrown Gunships. I think it’s pretty awesome and a sign of world-opening possibilities to come when we’re able to play under water.

LFR… Woah.

This is big. Cross-realm 10-man raiding. Holy crap. The dungeon finder is the beginning of something new and huge in the World of Warcraft, but I think between the random battleground choice addition in patch 3.3.3 and the upcoming ability to do 10’s using the dungeon finder is going to be another big thing.

This has, of course, caused some issues to come up. There is the concern that putting 10’s in the dungeon finder is yet another slap in the face to 10-man raiding guilds which makes them of lesser importance than 25-man raiding guilds. There are a lot of people who really feel the 10-man raiding guild is closer knit than the notoriously strict and hardcore 25-man guilds. Of course, some of the feeling is that by saying all 10s are puggable is basically saying that 10-man guilds aren’t really relevant.

The other complaint is that the way they’re going to do it is going to be set up for 2-healer 10s. Now, personally, and having a healer class, I’m again irritated by this change which doesn’t take the healer views fully into consideration. I’m not the only one complaining. I’m also not the only one unhappy about how priests as healers have been scaling to the aoe damage based content relative to other types of healers.

On the flip side, and from the perspective of one of my dps characters, I can say that having easy access to 10s is awesome in terms of gear gathering.

Lakes Appear!

So Shimmering Flats is going to be a lake in Cataclysm. Yikes! Major landscape changes. Basically, the world is going to get flipped upside-down in comparison to what it’s like now.

I can live with that, it’s part of the story. What I started wondering is.. what happens to Loremaster when the world is massively changed? Totally not sure, but I’m going to work on the one character I really want to make sure gets that achievement just in case…

~Nicole

When Did This Happen To Fishing?

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

My unskilled fisherman is fishing in Northrend.

I apparently missed a memo on this whole fishing change. I’m sure it was thrown in among some patch notes with hundreds of lines of changes, but this is new to me.

I started out the day yesterday with about 60 in fishing on my Belf Death Knight, Ant. I did a little fishing in Azeroth because I really wanted the fish finding skill and was looking for the book. It didn’t take all that long and I got it.

I got some fishing training in Dalaran, and the lady also happened to have the daily quest available for me (even with my pitiful fishing skill). I decided to first head down through the magical gate to Crystalsong Forest and check out whether or not I could fish in Northrend.

Voila. A short time later I had fished up 3 stacks of Northrend level fish from the numerous (and quick respawning) pools that line the river in Crystalsong. No trash, no misses, no problem.

Ant Fishing for the Ghostfish.

Ant Fishing for the Ghostfish.

I had read something on El’s Extreme Anglin’ (THE site for WoW fishing, btw) that brought this to my attention, but I just couldn’t believe they had made it so that I could fish from any pool in the game with 1 point skill in fishing. Well, seeing is believing.

So I went back to Dalaran and got that quest. Flew over to the Basin for the Ghostfish quest, and decided to find out if I could actually fish in open water too, not just a pool of fish.

Guess seeing is believing on this one so I put in a screenshot of him fishing there. Feel free to zoom in on the text display showing his fishing going up to 198. Not only was I able to fish, I DID NOT just get gray trash (which is what I was expecting).

I threw out a bunch of casts, got about half trash half fish, and then decided to fish in a pool that spawned in the water. Pop, out came the ghostfish. So I don’t know, seems like it may be easier to get the Ghostfish out of a pool if you have low lvl fishing, but I also could have just had odd luck.

Anyhow, when I realized I could fish the pools in Northrend… I hopped on my DK, flew all over the place, got some achievements and had fun :) Of course, partly I was having fun as I realized how much money I would make in selling the Northrend pool fish I was using to level my fishing. :P