Deathknightus Interruptus

Whether it's illness, tiredness, horse race meets or internet/patchnight troubles, sometimes getting playing time can be a pain in the posterior.

Still, levelling the gathering skills is going okay. I hate it, with a very great passion, but it's going okay. Skinning isn't too much of an issue... although I have a bad tendency to end up in a new area, kill the first thing, and get 'You need skinning 240' in big red letters. Check the skinning skill... 239. Scream imprecations at the monitor, head back to the flight path.

Mining, on the other hand... we hates it, yes we do.

The disease spreads

Left Ebon Hold... epic storyline and quest line, I must say, seriously excellent... and headed to the draenai area, as I love doing that area. The damnable summon of the felguard at the Nax monument is broken, though, which is annoying.

I continue to enjoy the DK. It's a spectacular looking class to play, the mechanism is interestingly complex, and it's new, which is never a bad thing.

The only problem is levelling the tradeskills.

Damn their eyes.

AddOns that we all need.

Combat Addons

* PartyBars - An ultra lightweight addon that makes it far easier to buff and heal in groups.

* FocusFrame - Blizzard has a focus frame, but this one shows buff timers.

* VisualHeal - adds a casting frame to show the expected result of a healing spell.

Questing and Gear

* MapNotes - keep notes on the map

* RatingBuster - tells you how much attack power your agi and str is worth.

Tradeskills

* Auctionator - An auction house addon that is really lighweight and helpful.

* Gatherer - Only if you really get into farming herbs or minerals.

* WowEcon - displays auction and vendor pricing as well as disenchanting info

Addons that I look for-

* A heads up display addon that puts my health, mana, runes, and spells I need to re-apply in the center of the screen.

* A latency predictor that shows us when it should be safe to try cast a next spell.

Rubber arm twisting performed here

The time that will tell turned out to be about three hours. With the greatest thanks to Fahdge and Shamandrel, shiny copies of WotLK (in virtual form, that is) were dropped onto our machine and duly installed.

Deathknights are the shizznizz, if rather fiddly to play. We likes them, yes we does, *gollum*.

More news after we actually get out of Ebon Hold.

To expand, or not to expand...

We're facing a dilemma. There is opportunity (after some effort) to get the expansion and all of the ensuing joys... Northrend, Deathknight tastiness, etc etc.

However, this comes with potential penalties... the download, the cost, the potential issues, and of course the lag, bugginess and overpopulation of the oversubscribed areas.

We made the assumption that the digital download would take a while to kick in. As non-americans, this meant we had an excuse to not play the new areas, allowing for them to clear out a bit and for problems to be resolved before we stepped foot in the new content.

Now, however, the flimsy excuse has departed, testing our strength of will. Can we resist?

Time will tell.

The beat goes on.

By all accounts there's a big world event on at the moment. Attacks on capital cities, Thrall fighting someone in the arena, etc etc. The final push before WotLK, I guess.

We did Steamvaults last night, which actually ended up being harder than Shadowlabs... mostly due to some horrible AoE effect that the various Bog Lords had. No real problem, and no wipes, just made me press more heal buttons than normal :P

Still, the aggro handling seems to be better. Other than the 'lock trying to grab it all the time, that is :P

Triumphal return!

So, Shadow Labs. We tried it a while ago, flush with the innocence of 70-instancing youth, and armed witha Leeroying paladin pug. It didn't go well.

We have returned and vanquished, however. Dunno if it was our vastly improved gear, or the nerfing reputedly done to the various bosses, or both, but it really wasn't too much of a problem. Couple of hairy moments, and a couple of deaths... oh, and one wipe, when a pull went badly. Still, for our first 'real' keyed instance, it was damn good.

Couple of things we need to work on though. DPS need to let the tank grab a little more aggro (the aggro mechanic seems a little more fragile in there) before kicking in, and I need better gear before we climb much higher. Generally, though, we seem pretty competent.

The very last minute end game.

Under New Management carved new ground this weekend. Beinga alt-oholic casuals it has taken us a long time to start attemting the proper end game.

Nonetheless, we got it into our heads to try and get Karazhan attunement this weekend. Which involves running Shadow Labyrinth to get the first key fragment. Which needs a key to enter. Which is found in a chest behind the final boss of Sethekk Halls.

Both of which we did.

We still need the second and third key fragments. Which are found in the Steamvault and the Arcatraz respectively. As a guild we have done the Steamvault, but the Arcatraz is another keyed instance (and thus, extra hard) - requiring items from bosses in the Botanica and the Mechanar. Two instances that, prior to the gearup offered by the Scourge Invasion, were seemingly off limits to our guild.

Then, we need to take the restored key into the Black Morass where Medivh gives us the Masters Key in exchange. Karazhan attunement FTW!

--

Heres where it gets cute. The quest to get the keys is given by a mage called Khadgar - who was Medivh's apprentice. Medivh gave him a key to Karazhan, but Khadgar broke it into 3 pieces, that he directs the player to collect. Khadgar cannot reactivate the restored key, so he sends the player to the Caverns of Time to travel to Medivh in the past where the player trades the restored key for Medivhs own key. Medivh - in the past - restores the key, which he then gives to his apprentice; Khadgar. Who breaks the key and loses the 3 fragments.

Tirion Fordring

Lord Tirion Fordring was governor of Hearthglen, father of Taelan Fordring and founder of the Order of the Silver Hand. He was exiled by Uther Lightbringer for showing mercy to an Orc Shaman during events that unfold shortly after the Warcraft III storyline arc begins.

Do his quests and *know* his story because he is going to have a major influence on the Deathknight lore.

Golf

WOW is golf. Yes I know it sounds wierd but they are actualy simmilar in a lot of ways. 

1. In golf even when you play with other players it's a personal thing. You against the course. Much the same is true of WOW even in a party it's about your personl performance. You against the MOB/Boss.
2. There are vast amounts of strange and arcane golf equipment to help improve your game. Well I don't think I need to elaborate on this one to much.
3. Then there is the 19th hole. Where after a round of golf you go to go over the current and past games with a your friends. Getting tips or may be a little ribbing. Plus there are number golf magazines with info on the afor mentioned equipment. Now what you may ask is the WOW analoge. Well that is actualy easy. It's the Forums. 
4. As rumour has it golf is only realy understood by those that play and once you start you are hooked. Deffinatly the same thing with WOW.

I know this comparison falls down a bit when you get to PVP but then... 

nothings Perfect.

Casual Epix and the End Game.

It is important to understand that World of Warcraft is divided into two basic phases - The level grind, and The End Game.

The level grind contitues the bulk of the game for casual players. It starts when your character is level 1, and ends when your character reaches the max level (70 at the moment, and 80 for Wrath characters) and completes the available world quests.

The End Game is a confusing place for casual players who spend much of their time questing and levelling. Its not entirely obvious what to do when the quests run out. The end game si about gear progression. Not character progression. The gold standard of gear progression are the sets of gear available to raids. Raid gear is ranked into tiers according to which raid dungeons the gear drops in, and the general expectaion (and balancing) of each progressive dungeon is that, in order to survive in the raid instance that drops Tier X+1 gear, most of the raid members need to be equipped in Tier X gear.

WoW Classic's endgame - at level 60 - was: Run Stratholme, Scholomance and Lower Blackrock Spire in 5 man groups to get Dungeon set 1. Quests in the above dungeons, and Dire Maul, would upgrade this to Dungeon Set 2 which was the original Tier 0 gear. UBRS was run to attain Tier 1. Molten Core Tier 2, and Naxxramus was the source of Tier 3 gear.

Then Burning Crusade came out, and by level 64, most of the tier 3 epic items had been replaced by green drops from Outlands quests. The burn. The terrible burn.

Burning Crusades end game - consists of a Tier 3.5 set of items available from Heroic Dungeons, and then an amount of 10 to 25 man raid content yielding Tier 4 items from raiding Kharazan through to Tier 6 from Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau.

In Burning Crusade there are also what are called "welfare epics". Which are called welfare because casual players can get them without comitting to a raid schedule. Welfare Epics are obtianed via crafting, PvP and doing heroic dungeons and are usually rated in terms of the equivalent Tier of raid gear. For example, the Engineering crafted epic helms are regarded as being T4 or even T6 equivalent

For a casual player, finding out how to progress through the welfare epics gives a lot of motivation to play an end game otherwise entirely targetted at hardcore gamers.

Report from the front lines

It's been two and a half weeks now since the last Armory update came through. With the loss of the Horseman, and the reduction of the invasion pressure... well, we're holding the line against boredom, but just barely.

Bad attempt at military-related humor aside... there's a question that every casual player needs to ask himself, and that's the question of alts.

One definitely needs a main. With achievement chasing, rep grinds, instance-dropped recipies and so on, one needs to assign a 'favourite' character that will get the majority of the attention. The big factor here is tradeskills, and the Bind-on-pickup rewards that only the holder of the tradeskill has access to.

For the hard-core raider, this is less of an issue. The gear from raiding is going to be better, and one can assume a friendly guild that will assist the raider in the initial gearing up process. Outside of raids, though, tradeskill gear can often be amongst the best one has access to, and this makes tradeskills even more tempting. Over and above that are tradeskills like enchanting and inscripting, which allow you to optimise or improve your gear even further.

This does lead to the temptation of two tradeskills, in the hope that an extra slot or two might get even further optimised. Unfortunately, tradeskills need a range of reagents, and this is where alts come in.

The first question is: Alt or Auction House. Are you willing to level a second toon for the express purpose of grinding for your main, or are you instead willing to drop gold into the vagaries of the AH?

For me personally, as a healer-specced class, grinding gold for the AH is less of an option... I need to use an Alt anyway (or continually respec), so I might as well make the Alt feed my tradeskill needs directly. This does, annoyingly, take time away from the various things the main needs to do, but I guess I can console myself with the knowlege that the tasty new purples the main will eventually make will certainly make the main's grinds a bit easier :D

Feel the burn!

So, Headless Horseman. Yeah, that was fun. We ran HH every night (well, might have missed one), pugging to fill in the shortfall at first.

Well, we stopped pugging when the mount dropped. The reason was that the Pug got the mount.

Guess what didn't drop again. Arrrrrrrghargharghargh@#($&@#($&#@!

Yep... two weeks of four to five attempts at the Horseman a night, and not one mount. Vast numbers of rings, enough of those sugar rush sweets to make an entire school district suffer from severe diabetes, but no mount. We only just managed to get everyone a squashling for the achievement. I hate that pug so very very much right now.

The invasion event, on the other hand, was brilliant, especially when I discovered that the purples one could buy with the necrotic runes could be disenchanted. I have some 50-odd void crystals now. Tasty! :D

The ending of the halloween event, and the steady dropoff in interest of the invasion event, has led us to a new casual-guild-specific quandary... what to do now? See, as a casual guild, our biggest problem is that we tend to only have four people online at any one point. This makes a serious instance run at our level difficult.

We're restricted to:

• Pre-BC instances, for rep and/or achievements and/or the fun of it. We're now all sick of Dire Maul and Stratholme.
• Grinding for various bits and pieces. Primals, leather and herbs seem to be our primary needs, with metals for all those future Death Knights lurking on the distant horizon.
• Low-level BC instances are an option... problem is, most of them are pointless. Limited to no rep grinds, and crappy loot... honestly, been there, done that. For actual productivity, we need either 70 instances or Heroics, and that needs a 5th person. I suppose we could Pug, but the last time we did that we ended up looking really stupid.
• Other questing, like dailies. Also, a really great cure for insomnia.

Yep... not a clue what to do.