Making Christmas

This morning I woke up to find that Christmas Time had come to Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I'm so excited! I absolutely love Christmas, it's one of my favorite holidays. I hadn't even considered that we might get seasonal decorations and limited time crafting from our little mobile game.

Everyone was sent a Santa Hat to help get you in the spirit, and you can find that in your mailbox after you log in. The event only lasts through Christmas, so if there are decorations or outfit pieces that you want, you will want to get busy collecting Candy Canes and completing special Timed Goals. If you want that adorable top you'll want to craft a Jingle Fence, for example.

Candy Canes are a crafting material, like cotton or wood, and similarly you won't be able to just go pick them from a tree. You can get Candy Canes from completely Timed Goals, as a bonus reward when you do favors for your animal friends, and from the Shovelstrike Quarry.

To find what you can craft with your Candy Canes, look in the Special - Limited Time category of your crafting menu. It's the fancy seal with a leaf in it, where you could find the KK Slider or Tom Nook chairs to use your Leaf Tickets on. Take note that some of your Timed Goals that award Candy Canes are to craft these special holiday items. You have to spend candy to make candy, or something like that.

That Snowman decoration is calling my name and it's going to set me back 300 Candy Canes, so it's time to go help some more of my animal friends. Happy Holidays from my camp to yours.

Caff Goes Pocket Camping

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was released yesterday, and I have been playing a lot. I'm sure the shine will wear off eventually and I'll just play when I'm bored instead of making time to sit down and fish or run errands for my animal friends, but for now I am hooked.

If you are just getting started Isabelle will guide you through making contacts with campers and learning how to do tasks for them to raise their friendship level. She'll teach you about getting fruit from trees, fishing, catching bugs, and how to build furniture, but there are a few little details that she'll leave out.

You are going to want to make some friends, either by sharing friend codes or by befriending players who you'll find around the map, because asking friends for help is the only way you can access the Shovelstrike Quarry without spending 20 of your precious Leaf Tickets. While you will be able to acquire Leaf Tickets as you level, they aren't so plentiful as to waste on the chance to earn a few Bells unless you plan to spend a lot of actual money to buy more in the cash store. When you go to the Quarry you'll see a button that allows you to ask your friends for help, once at least 5 people say yes you'll be able to go in and smack some rocks to find treasures that Lloyd will give you bells for.

You'll want to make sure you check your friend list periodically to see if other people are asking for help. If someone wants to access the Quarry you'll see a shovel next to their name. When you help people you'll be rewarded with Bells in the mail later, so even if you wouldn't help your friend just to be nice you can do it to help yourself get a new pair of shoes. (Be nice and help your friends, this whole game is about being nice.)

Which brings me to what I love the most about ACPC is that it is joyful. So far none of the animals are being grumpy at me, instead every thing is a chance for happiness. When you catch a bug or a fish near another player's NPC or one of the animals they get so excited and applaud your success. It brings me a little bit of joy every time. When you build a new amenity the campers hanging out at your place will come celebrate the new building.

You will run into inventory problems fairly quickly if you're in the habit of collecting every fruit, bug, shell and fish that you see. So far it seems that you can build infinite furniture, but the stuff you collect to give to your animal friends has a low cap. Two bits of good news here, the first being that you will gain more inventory space as you level and the second is that you can sell your excess stuff for Bells. I'd advise holding onto any rare items you come across because the payoff for turning it in as a quest will be greater than just selling it, but the more common items just use your judgement. Depending on how much space you have available keeping 5 to 10 of a fish can have a great pay off so that you aren't trying to find squid all of a sudden when multiple animals desire 3 at a time. Just keep fishing and collecting and the game will tell you when you run out of space. Sell a few items or list them in your Market Box for other players to purchase, and you'll be good to go. Don't let it get you down.

There is a lot more to the game than I am covering here, this isn't in depth by any means, I just wanted to gush a bit about how much fun I'm having with the new Animal Crossing Pocket Camp game. I am having so much fun. Now I have to go, I just saw a tip on twitter that you can shake non-fruit trees and sometimes Bells fall out. I'm going to go check it out while I wait for my next set of quests to come up. I'm saving up to build a massive Tree House for all the cuties at my camp; I hope to see you there.

Flying Off The Handle

Today a post came out on Polygon and the only thing I've seen come up much on Twitter is item #4, that flying isn't coming back anytime soon if at all in the World of Warcraft. I've have read my twitter timeline, there's been a lot of unhappy sentiment, a fair amount of commiseration, and very little discussion.

I have no interest in discussing the matter, so I can't really blame anyone. I've seen exactly one person come into a conversation and have the opinion that not flying is the best thing and it should stay that way (a week or two ago). Two people started talking around me, seeming to try and persuade each other of their points of view. I told them I didn't care why they thought not-flying was great, it's not great to me.

Perhaps on the far end of the RAWR spectrum is Ember. I think she makes very good points. Beware there will be F-bombs ahoy, she is well and truly angry. The points still stand though, and I don't think she's wrong to be angry about being told flying won't come back.

I'm more blah about the whole thing. I want to be able to fly. I enjoy it, I like being able to zip around look at things, look for things. I get lost on the ground, and I usually play short races so it's hard to see over rocks and such. Being able to fly up gives me perspective that I don't have otherwise. I did pet collecting and archaeology while I was leveling, as I passed through the areas. I don't do it at all now. Which is a shame. I actually kind of like archaeology, but I'm not going to spend ages wading back and through mobs to do it.

I'm not mad though. I thought that leveling without it was fine. There are plenty of ways to skip mobs and content without it, even before you get the robot in Gorgrond or Aviana's Feather. I figured out the bare minimum to open up level 2 garrisons, to speed my alt ways.

Honestly the only thing not flying means to me is that I play a little less. I don't know if I'd be more likely to level an alt if I could fly or not. I've done a few, most of them faired fine without flying. Mostly they leveled passively through XP missions and mining in the garrison, then brief bursts of questing.

I'm pretty sure I'd play my main more if I could fly. I'd be looking for treasures. I'd be looking for rare spawns. I'd be doing pet battle trainers and fishing up lunkers. Instead when it's not raid night I log in, do some treasure missions, open some salvage, hit the AH, and log out. Lately I've been working on the legendary quest on my paladin and I've been trying to spend a night a week on that.

Still I'm not mad. I'm just not playing as much, and I'm a little bummed.

To cheer us all up, let's look at this flying chocobo. Because yes, FFXIV is adding in flying now.
Welp.

Video captured from the Twitch broadcast on May 21, 2015 Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXI. The flying bits start around the 40 minute mark.

Bigger Is Better

My first time through the process of establishing my garrison I was quite unhappy with how long it took me. It seemed like I was doing something wrong. I really wasn't, but I could have done it faster if I had been less distracted. I've enjoyed wandering around and doing quests in a less than optimal fashion the first time though, but if I'm going to build more than one garrison, I cannot do the same on multiple characters.

Taking notes as I went along I have determined the bare minimum of quests that you need to do in order to unlock your level 2 garrison.

**Note, I have only done the horde quest lines. I have not leveled any alliance characters yet.**

The first step is of course to go through the Dark Portal and complete the Tanaan storyline. Make your way to Frostfire Ridge and establish your garrison. Do the quests presented in your garrison until you have rescued Olin. After assigning Olin his first mission you should get the quest to rally the Frostwolves in Wor'gol. From this point the following quests need to be completed.

Rally the Frostwolves (follow this chain through Moving In)
Gormaul Tower
These Colors Don't Run
Deeds Left Undone
(Honor Has Its Rewards can be skipped)
Great Balls of Fire
The Butcher of Bladespire (this kill rewarded me with quests for my primary professions)
To The Slaughter
Armed and Dangerous
Last Steps
Moving In
Save Wolf Home (continue this chain through Back to Bladespire Citadel)
Free our Brothers and Sisters
The Farseer
Pool of Visions
Back to Bladespire Citadel
(Ga'nars Vengence can be skipped)
Securing the South (continue chain through Strength of Our Bonds)
(We Be Needin Supplies and Ashran Appearance can be skipped)
They Who Held Fast
Of Fire and Thunder (might be optional)
Into the Boneslag
Moving Target
The Strength of Our Bonds
Where's My Wolf (and followup Enfilade)
Enfilade
The Master Siegesmith
Return to the Pack

After you go to your garrison and turn in Return to the Pack you should have the quest Bigger is Better from Gazlowe. BAM level 2 garrison and plans for all your level 1 profession buildings.

I've read that reaching level 93 will also trigger the ability to get the level 2 garrison. I completed all of these quests and was barely into level 91. These quests didn't take very long and I ended up building my garrison so quickly that I don't have the resources I need to build structures. Oops.

Doing the quests for your professions will open up that blueprint ahead of getting to the level 2 garrison, but I believe they only drop for production professions that you have (requiring a minimum of level 1 skill). So if you are a double gatherer, your choices are to level to 93 or do this quest chain.

A Bad Bad Thing

I've started gearing up my paladin that was boosted to 90. I actually really like tanking on her, because I love throwing my shield around. It's just fun. Throw shields and drop hammers. I love it. I am however not experienced in tanking at the level cap. Usually I just queue as DPS and go along for the ride, but last night I really wanted to finish a step in the legendary quest line, and I could not get a group. I hit that tank button and zoned in almost* completely unprepared to tank those bosses. When the raid was finished I had to tell someone about it, and Rades was there.

I thought my co-tank meant it was their first time tanking in Terrace of the Endless Spring, but in fact they had never before set foot in that raid on any character. Excitement!

I did know a little, so I was able to guide us through killing the trash before the first boss fight. Call them back to fight Tsulong when they were headed up the stairs. We both died to Lei Shi's enrage when she one shot us, but she was still defeated in one attempt. We didn't have a raid wipe until Sha of Fear and that was because I hadn't adequately expressed the importance of standing in the gold circle in front of Sha, which is the one tanking thing I knew going into the zone.

Shout out to Ogmur of Lightbringer for being a good tank with a great attitude, and the rest of our raid for not calling us out on being total nubcakes. I'm sure at least a few of them had to have noticed our lack of skill/knowledge, but no one said anything. We just did our thing and had a good time.

Wrathion thinks I'm hot stuff now, and I'm not about to tell him otherwise. After all, I need my cloak to save me if Corv isn't there.

I feel less hesitant to tank again next time. This was a great experience and a boost for my self confidence. So often LFRs can be brutal and cruel, you hear horror stories of people never wanting to tank one again. It's not all doom and gloom though, sometimes you just get to have some fun.

*DBM is largely to credit for anything I did right as a tank in there.

Alphabets

We all knew that World of Warcraft was going to do SOMETHING to counter the launch of WildStar. When they started setting folks up with access to the alpha client yesterday it was hardly a surprise. Anyone who was honestly shocked hasn't been paying attention. It sounds like things are still quite rough, and it seems a bit late in development to only have one zone open, if that's true. To be honest though there were a lot of issues with the beta of WildStar only a couple months before launch, so I don't worry that WoD is going to be a mess at launch. It will be fine*.

I do not have access to the alpha, so I won't be talking about it here. If I got access tomorrow I still wouldn't be logging in though. There was a time when I would have hopped in to check out garrisons, but now I just don't have the time. Between playing WildStar and continuing to play Mists my gaming time is pretty much spoken for. If you are in the alpha playing around I hope that you have a great time, and that you help get all those bugs fixed so I can jump in and have a great experience this fall when it goes live. If you aren't in the alpha and want to be, then I'll cross my fingers for you.

Good luck, have fun, and all that jazz.

Just Outlands don't get all excited

*Fine as a relative term, it won't be perfect, because it never is. It will be fine though.

Garrisons!

Oh gosh, I am just so excited. I cannot wait to play around with garrisons. Yes that's a plural because if it's at all possible I will have garrisons going on every character I can. I imagine it will be much like my multiple farms where they don't all get upkept every day, but none will be completely abandoned. I do have to say I wish we had seen more of the horde artwork, but the alliance stuff is really looking nice. I enjoy this picture because even though it isn't the fanciest building you can see how the garrison feels like a place, there are other structures around it.

 Oh, that picture and many more can be found at the latest Artcraft blog here. A common question is where will you place your garrison, and I just don't know. I'll probably put it some place convenient to other places. I won't really know until we get out into Draenor though.

I was really excited when pet battles and the Tillers farm were announced and I was not disappointed. I hope my guts are right about garrisons too. I think it's going to be really cool!

A Look Back - How I Became a Fajita

So I guess this post has been a long time in coming. It's one that I've thought about several times, and one that I started a few times. I had been planning on writing it, but kids were interrupting me and then Stop wrote this and I don't know, it felt like it would be redundant.

I guess it's been several months now, so I can try again to write my own accounting of TTGF, the Fajitas* and how I found my in-game home.

Festival - Your Noodle Cart Making Friend

In case you missed it Pandaren Treasure Noodle Carts are the latest hot thing in World of Warcraft dining. It's great, they serve everyone the soup they need for raid buffs and are fun too.

There's quite a quest chain to go through to learn how to make them, but it's nothing compared to the complexity of creating the cart kits themselves. See to make a cart you need 6 different types of meals, and 5 of those meals require 4 different ingredients in the form of pepper or rice, vegetable, fish, and meat. So each time you want to make a cart you have to see if you have 5 of each kind of meal, if not check the ingredients for that meal and see if you have the 1 rice/pepper, 5 fish, 5 meat, and 25 vegetable required to make it. This is a lot of brain power if you aren't sitting around with 24 different kinds of materials in your bag while poking at your cooking interface.

In TTGF we have a pot luck kind of food thing going on. People dump mats into tab 3 of the guild bank and they're turned into the various foods required. Folks are more than happy to use their cooking tokens on ingredients for sale by Nam Ironpaw in Halfhill, but they need to know what to use them on. Even though our bank gets organized pretty regularly it's still difficult to tell what all is in there, and not all of those pieces are even used for the Treasure Noodle Carts.

Nobody Ever Eats the White Foods

Initially I just bugged Lyon about what we needed, because it was a hassle to figure out. Then I got off my duff and made a spreadsheet google doc that everyone could edit. It was still a pain to look up each ingredient and fill out the spreadsheet to see what was missing, but at least it had some math in there to automate things a little bit. As soon as I got that sorted out, I immediately went to Corveroth, our resident "there has to be a better way" guy, and asked if he could devise an addon to let us see information in game. Corv really stepped up to the plate and made this addon that I love called Festival.

What Festival does is look at your bags and guild bank to see what you have in the way of mats. It will show you how many treasure noodle carts you have already, how many of the dishes you have prepared that go into them, and also the individual mats needed to make those dishes.

The color coding is quite simple. The goal is always to make more noodle carts. So the first thing Festival does is see which of the meals you have the most of and divide that quantity by 5. It uses that as the target value because each recipe creates 5 of a meal. If the current plus creatable count for any other meal is greater than 80% of the target, the item is colored green. If that count is less than 20% of the target, it's colored red. Otherwise it's yellow.

Hey TTGF, we need Scallions.

So when you see a meal or ingredient showing green those are low priority for restocking. When you have several meals that are green and one that is red, the red one is where those cooking tokens should be spent. If everything is green it's time to make some noodle carts to clear out those mats filling up your bank.

Festival is installed like any other addon and will open a tab to the right of your guild bank automatically. You can also toggle it on and off with a small button on the upper right area of the guild bank. You can open Festival at any time using the slash commands /festival or /fest. You can see when the last scan was underneath Festival at the top, and the little yellow arrow in the upper right will quickly scan the whole guild bank again.

If you try Festival I'd love to hear what you think. I think it's fantastic. It has made Noodle Carting much easier to manage. You can download Festival from WowInterface.

Technicality

Okay, I guess it isn't a Punch Cannon, it's a Punch Tank that has a cannon also.

I present from the Art of World of Warcraft panel, the Heavy Mortar. I quote Eric Browning (Lead Prop Artist) who you can hear around the 5:27 mark of the panel video, if you have the virtual ticket.

It punches! It's a tank and it punches! Cause it's not enough to shoot somebody, you can punch 'em.

(It's a Punch Cannon)

My Button Done Got Pushed

Ok, I've just about had it. As a mother who stays home to take care of her kids while her husband goes to work, people being upset over Aggra's role in Warlords of Draenor is starting to piss me off. Yes she's fiction, but if she chose to stay at home and take care of her kids that doesn't make her less of a bad ass. It means she had a different plan for her life than you think you would have in her place.

I do like a lot of the discussion that I've seen. I think it could have been a great story if she did go with Thrall to Draenor, or even in his stead. I don't really like the idea of them carting a kid along with them, but parents do what they have to do, so it could work I suppose. I'd worry they were just setting us up to see the kid die to motivate our heroes, so that's my biggest reservation on that idea.

I'm not saying that you can't WANT Aggra to go back into battle. I'm most assuredly not saying that we don't need more bad ass women in the game, on the packaging, in the marketing, and wearing armor comparable to a male performing the same job.

What I'm saying is that when you start whining that she's being lessened as a person for staying back to take care of her kids, that her role as a stay at home parent hurts you? Well you know what? That hurts me, or at least makes me grumpy.

I think the off the cuff remarks made during the Blizzcon panel, referring to the "boys trip" and "end of the honeymoon" were unfortunate. I looked at my computer screen when he said that and thought "you Sir, are a dumb ass*" and also "wtf?" The idea that Thrall would just be done with his family and decide it was time for adventure is somewhat juvenile.

My point is, while you're pushing for Blizzard to see your point of view and what you'd like to see happen in the game, try and remember to consider that of others too. World of Warcraft is a big place, and there is a lot of room for a lot more women in it, and it's okay if some of them are just moms.

*In general I don't think he's a dumb ass, but that was how I felt at that moment when the words were said.

Why Time Travel Doesn't Matter

One of the things that kept being repeated over the course of Blizzcon was that the story of Warlords of Draenor will not focus on time travel. Time travel happens, but it's not THE story.

This seems to bother some folks, and this is my take on why it shouldn't.

Garrosh went back in time to rally the warlords to his cause, unite them into a war machine that could come kill all of us. Someone over there engages the Dark Portal that will allow that war machine to come into our present Azeroth and that sucks, so we have to go stop them. This involves us traveling back in time to stop them.

But several things are important:
Garrosh isn't changing our past, he's forging a new separate path from our past, parallel.
We don't go further back in time to stop him, we go to when he is as the portal opens.*
That past and our present are linked together in a way that makes them basically both our present.

If you look at Warlords of Draenor and slap different names on everything you could ignore the time travel component completely.

Garrosh went to planet Xenoth and amassed an army, teaching them how to make fantastic bombs and cannons that can punch you. Then someone opened a door to let punch cannons come attack us on Azeroth. We go to planet Xenoth and meet up with other folks who don't like Garrosh either, and they become our allies in the fight.

That's the same story, right? Just different names to the characters and places.

Time travel was used to explore the history of Draenei and Orcs in game, and let us play in their world pre-destruction. It lets them bring back old big bads that maybe they regret killing, and big heroes that we haven't played along side of.

I don't see why the actions that we take in Warlords are any less meaningful than any other expansion. We will win, because it's what we do, it is what we always do. It's not like it's predetermined that we'll win because obviously we're here so they didn't defeat us 30 years ago, because that isn't our past. For all intents and purposes it's just a different planet. It is a "What If" planet, but honestly the past aspect of it doesn't matter. It's just there for them to play around with the story.

And I believe that's what the devs meant by time travel not being the story...

*Ok, I'm not sure on that but it seems reasonable.

Tradeskill Master: the Intro

I'm usually quite pleased by the WoW Insider's articles on addons. They tend to be informative and useful when I want to learn how to use a new one, but I was quite frustrated with a recent article on TradeSkill Master. I read and re-read the post but I just could not make the modules work the way I wanted them to, or the way that my husband who has much less tolerance for fiddly addons wanted them to. I ditched the article, went to google, the official TSM forums, youtube, and finally spent some time playing around on my own.

I can now help you get your feet wet with TradeSkill Master, if you would like. First of all if you do your own googling you may hear lots of talk about TradeSkill Master 2. It's still just TradeSkill Master at curse.com though. It is a 2.x file, but the name hasn't actually changed. Also, it's more convenient to refer to it as TSM, so that's what I'll be doing from here on out. By the way I think this is an extremely unattractive addon, but it's not being installed for its looks. It will take a few clicks to get set up, but I promise it isn't too bad for our purposes today.

All we are going to do is use TSM to see which items our profession can make that are profitable, and then if you're feeling adventurous we'll also use it to craft our items. (Warning: lots of screencaps)

Mists of Confusion

I was granted access to the Mists of Pandaria Beta yesterday. Once my kiddo was tucked away I'd managed to download 80% of the client and decided to go ahead and start poking around. I spent a decent amount of time looking at the female Pandaren character creation screen. I already knew she was going to be a red panda (because I wanted a tail) and I wanted to check out the new monk action, so then it was just playing with different choices for her face, hair, and coloration. (I found it strange that it had a field for choosing ears or hair color, when there was only one choice. Maybe that is something that will be changed in the future.) There are lots of fun options here.

Before I complain about anything let me just say that the Wandering Isle is incredibly beautiful and a pleasure to run through. I felt guilty about killing some of the wood sprites that were so cute, but I've been assured that as plants they will resprout and not to feel bad. I've really been taking my time as I work through quests, so I'm only level 6. I'm reading, wandering around, looking at things and just trying to savor it. I need to go turn up my music a bit next time I play, because it's really great too. Whether in Beta or once the game is live I hope that you will roll a Pandaren and go to the Wandering Isle yourself.

Still, I do have a complaint. There is one bit of questing that is still stuck in my craw. I've been working since last night to try and pin down my feelings. Early in your questing experience you meet Aysa Cloudsinger and then Ji Firepaw. Aysa is the sort of monk that I envision my own monk striving to be. She is graceful and poised, and a seems like a great role model. When I went to seek out Ji Firepaw I knew from my quest text that I was being sent to someone with a different temperament. I didn't expect that when I met him my first impression would be that he is a lecherous skeezeball. When I went to bed last night I had already decided that my panda would have to join the alliance, because I wanted no more to do with Ji Firepaw.

This morning when I woke up I thought that maybe I was overreacting. I hadn't heard anyone else talking about Ji in this way, though I haven't read too much about MoP since I wanted to experience it for myself. I started a new female monk and ran through those first few quests again. I was less completely horrified, but it still sat ill with me. I was having a hard time sorting out why though. So I took the next logical step and rolled a male. This time when I got to Ji Firepaw the quest text didn't bother me at all. When I took a look at the dialogue side by side, it became obvious to me why I found his talk with my female so disconcerting.

Can you read those messages? To the female he says, "You're some kind of gorgeous, aren't you?! I bet you can't keep the men off of you!" To the male he says, "You've got a strong look to you. I bet you're all the rage with the ladies!" At first blush these may not seem like they are very different, but there is an important distinction.

The male monk is told that because of his prowess he must be able to get all the attention he wants. The female monk is told that because of her looks she is probably being touched more than she wants. The man gets what he wants, the woman can't avoid what she doesn't want.

I am not capable of looking at this from another view point. I am a woman. I have been referred to as "little lady". I have been demeaned by men who did not view me as an equal, and this quest text rubs me all the wrong way. When I'm sent to work with him I'm told "Trust in his wisdom.", and I felt like he was leering at me. I did not feel greeted by an equal or by someone who would mentor me. I felt like I was greeted by someone who would take advantage of me if given the chance. I know that not every character in the game has to be likable, but this still seems incredibly wrong to me. I don't think it's the monk way to go about groping females that aren't interested in your roving hands, but that's exactly what was implied to my little level 3 monk. Am I wrong?

Anyway, that's two tiny sentences in one quest on a huge island that I've only started to explore. I hope that by the time I hit level 10-12 my character will have completely forgotten this. Maybe Ji will redeem himself? I don't know. I do know that it even if it meant never siding with the Houjin (or Horde), it certainly won't stop me from enjoying the rest of the Wandering Isle. I look forward to having time to log in again. There is so much of the island that I haven't had a chance to see yet.

Dig It

Oh Archaeology, you are a cruel mistress.

I powered through archaeology last night. I had happily made it up to the 300 skill level and was working through Outlands dig sites. The only two race's sites that you will find in Outlands are Orc and Draenei, so it's pretty quick to get your fragments for completions. It's really quite amazing how much easier it is to collect piles of fragments when you are only splitting your fragments between two races instead of four. Honestly if you just wanted to power level Archaeology I might recommend staying in Outlands from 300 to 525 no matter what your long term goals are. You will get 5 skill points per common solve no matter if you've previously solved it or not.

I was disappointed in the appearance of dig sites though. The Orc race only has one rare, and there are only 10 unique artifacts each for Orc and Draenei. Supposedly the code has been tweaked a little bit so that you are more likely to find dig sites for the races that you still need to collect rares for, but that must be such a tiny chance that it really isn't worth mentioning. I had solved all of the Orc artifacts, but only 6 Draenei commons, and neither or the two rares. I still had 3-4 Orc dig sites at a time at points. That was frustrating, so once I was able to reach 450 I kind of threw in the towel. I did manage to get one of the Draenei rares, but there is still one out there that has eluded me.

My pre-Outlands stockpile included almost 200 each of Troll, Night Elf, and Dwarf fragments as well as enough keystones to choke a goat (14 Dwarf, 25 Night Elf, 36 Troll). A solving I did go, a solving I did go, hi-ho the dairy-o, a solving I did go. Among many common artifacts I did find a pretty, but currently useless to me, dress and a statue, but alas no staff, or trinket. It should go without saying that I didn't find Zin'rokh either.

So now it's back to flying around the giant continents of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor again. Only now I have stuff scattered in ever more places, yay! Oh wait, not yay. I mean something that's more like the opposite of that. On the other hand I will now have a chance to collect a very spiffy ring, so I'll try and focus on the bright side.

Still, it did not take me very long, play time wise, to level archaeology to 525. It is worth it, in my opinion, to wait until you have 310% flying speed and also to be in a guild with the Bountiful Bags perk. After all the gathering that I've done lately in archaeology I have a suspicion about bountiful bags. I think that the proc will only affect the number of key stones that you get in a dig, not the number of fragments. That is how it seemed to feel, and it makes a certain sort of sense. The fragments are considered a currency by the game, not like the keystones that are items you collect. Does anyone know for certain how bountiful bags affects archaeology?

No matter how it works I'm into the long slog portion of digging now. I can choose which continent to work on, and then fly, dig, fly to my heart's discontent. There's no way of telling how long it will take for me to find what I'm looking for, but you can be certain that I will keep you up to date. I wonder if I will "finish" before they update archeology? I can't just sit around and wait, but it does seem like I'll be missing out if I continue to work on it now. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Check out Ask the Devs #7) It sounds like there are a lot of good things in the pipes, but you never know when the changes will come.

On Trolling and Trolls

The other night I finally convinced my husband to log on to the WoW and give the new/revamped Zuls a shot. He had of course done them into the ground back when they were relevant content, but he had only logged on for a matter of minutes since patch 4.1 went live so he had not done either in their current itteration.

Despite the fact that I have logged more hours recently he continues to out gear me, not by a lot, but by enough. He also just does better DPS. Whether that is from years playing the same class faithfully, or just because he kicks ass, doesn't matter. He always has and possibly always will continue to out DPS me for as long as we are both playing the game.

So the other night I get him to log and we hop in the random queue for Zul level heroics. I've still only successfully had one Zul'Aman run and it wasn't a successful timed run.  He had not even read the strats for any of the fights. It was quite the change for me to give him pertinent info, usually I'm getting the info from him. That part was kind of cool.

We had a mega geared death knight tank, and other than having an incredibly chatty mod that let us know every single ability that did or did not land, he was awesome. Then we had a healer and a mage that were hot to trot. They desperately wanted to complete a timed run and even the mage was shouting gogogo to the tank. I find that to be in terribly bad form. It's one thing for a healer to announce they have enough mana for pulls to continue, it's quite another for a DPS class to do everything short of actually start pulling groups themselves. Still, the DK seemed to be handling it okay, or at least he didn't complain in party chat about the two people cracking a whip on his ass that weren't even from his realm.

Things seemed to be going okay; we were downing bosses and not wiping, so I think that's a good run. As we leave the altar of the second boss and we're running down the ramp, I zone out of the instance. My first honest to goodness thought is that something has gone wrong or the tank has left the group and we all got booted for some reason. Then I realize my husband is confused, but not for the same reason I am, and he seems kind of mad. Turns out that I had been vote kicked. This has never happened before, it was a bit startling. I guess I thought maybe it would give you a message through the UI saying that you had been removed from the group by common consensus, not just poof you're out and feeling a little confused.

Watching my husband be pissed off for me was really sweet. I don't know that he has ever had much cause to "defend my honor" so to speak, but he took to it well. Of course the first thing he did was ask why I had been kicked. No one will even answer him until he keeps refusing to let them requeue. The group's first response was to try and kick him also, but of course they couldn't, so finally they had to answer him. The tank said that he had issued a vote kick because he kept getting whispers telling him to. I guess the healer/mage team (or trolls as we can call them) felt that my DPS wasn't high enough. So then my husband gets really mad because although my DPS wasn't top, it really wasn't that much worse than everyone else. And let's be fair here, someone always has to be at the bottom of the list. That's the nature of lists. If I had all the higher level gear and could pull higher DPS I wouldn't need to be queuing for the dungeon would I?

Sorry, I think I've gotten myself off topic a little bit.

Once the trolls see that he's not going to let go they try a new tactic. "Oh I'm sorry was he a friend of yours?" He informs them that actually "She is my wife" then the trolls realize their mistake, but they still seem to think that they can manage salvage the timed run and start asking the leader be passed to him so that he can reinvite me to the group. They are getting a little spaztastic and trying to get the tank to pass the lead and continue to pull at the same time. The tank finally has enough and tells them that if they wanted a timed run they should have gone with a guild group, and he leaves.

Once the tank leaves I give up on rejoining the group, because I don't want to wait through the queue again (we had a 35 minute wait to get a group the first time around). I go ahead and put the trolls on ignore. I honestly would have rejoined even after they kicked me, because I'm used to the game being full of dicks and I want new gear. The lead had been passed to one of the trolls so they give it to my husband and ask him to invite me back. He tells them that he can't because I have them on ignore, and all heck breaks loose. One of the trolls starts calling us both names saying you can't ignore cross-realm and I give my husband the obvious solution of ignoring him and telling him so in party chat. This leaves only the second troll to taunt him.

I can't believe where the last troll went. He/they got so spitting mad that they just could not contain the bile. They accused my husband of not knowing me at all. Then it was that we'd only ever talked on skype, and even that we'd probably met on World of Warcraft*, as if that would be a bad thing. I guess I should be impressed with how quickly the insults were coming, but maybe they were macro'd. My husband was considering a rebuttal when I reminded him not to feed the trolls. It's one thing to sit in the party and not let them continue, it's quite another to give them the satisfaction of learning anything more of our personal lives.

I finally convince my husband to log into WoW for the first time in a long while and all that happens is 35 minutes of archaeology boredom, and two more names on his ignore list. Thank you horrible troll puggers for making it just a little bit harder to convince him to log on next time.

What horrible (or awesome) pug experience have you had lately? How have your queue times been? We were logging on toward the end of the night so our queue may have been longer as a result, or it could be that the potential tanks have finished gearing up already and are tired of the dicks.

*For the record not only did we not meet on WoW, or online at all, I was the one that got him into the game.

Changes to Professions

There was a time when you needed to level your crafter up to 84 and complete a few introductory quests before you would have access to the highest level of patterns available in Cataclysm for a few of the crafting professions. With patch 4.1 that has changed, and now you can just waltz up to your local trainer and have access to those prized patterns. I don't think this is really a huge deal, and it really won't be affecting my play style at all.

The first thing to remember is that you cannot skill up past 450 until you've reached level 75. (I've hit this wall myself very recently.) So you will still have to level a character to 75 in order to get your skill level high enough to learn these. It's not like the "good old days" when you could have a true low level crafting alt. *drifts into happy memories of the level 1 disenchanting alts* So no matter how much of an auction house player someone wants to be they are going to have to spend time enough to get a character to 75, and really it's not that hard to go from there to 85 if you have half a mind to do it.

There's also the issue of the Chaos Orbs that you need for some recipes. Since Chaos Orbs are bind on pickup, at least for now, you are going to have to get that character up to level 85 and start running heroics. That's going to keep the casual crafter out of those markets.

For me I don't level a character in order to level a profession, I level a profession because I am leveling a character and it seems a waste not to. Since I would have gone through Twilight Highlands on my way to 85 anyway it just doesn't matter a whole lot. I'd say the only real change this has made for me is that I no longer have to take a portal to get to the patterns as I'm ready to buy them.

The change will save us all a few steps, and bring the crafting professions more in line with each other. They are still not equal in how to get your recipes, but this makes it closer. I'd say Inscription and Jewelcrafting are still far more difficult than the other professions when it comes to recipe collection. This is a move in the right direction though. It was kind of silly to penalize 4 of the craft markets with a higher leveling cap than the others.

What do you think? Is the change good or the right thing to do? Will it affect whether you choose to level a certain character to 85 or not?

Still Digging

I've been building rest state on my death knight, because you can never level fast enough. While doing that I've been multitasking by catching up on some recorded television and working on Archaeology.

Archaeology is both easier and harder than I remember on my rogue. I've been keeping track of my solves as I go along, though I won't know until later if that data is worth looking at. I thought it would be easier to focus on fossils than it is turning out to be. I remember when I first started Archaeology on my rogue that all I got was fossils. Some of my first solves were the fossil rares. I just had way more fossil dig sites, and therefore more fossil fragments, than any of the other races.

This time around I'm getting troll, troll, troll. I'm around skill level 160 and I've solved a troll and fossil rare. I have 17 night elf key stones, 15 troll, and 9 dwarf. If I am on Kalimdor then I hit my night elf cap fairly quickly and also get tons of troll sites, while in Eastern Kingdoms all four of my digsites are frequently down in Stranglethorn and usually all of them are troll. In all I've solved 9 fossils, 5 troll, 2 night elf, and 2 dwarf.

I've been at this for a couple of days and it feels like I'm getting no where. I know that realistically I will have tons of solves queued up once I finish Outlands. I'll have almost 200 of 3 races fragments, as well as enough keystones to choke a goat. It's just slow going and I'm not sure if I have the will power to stick with my plan. I still have 140 points to go. If I did not get any more rares in that time it would be 28 more solves to get to Outlands, and I've only done 19 so far and 2 of those rares gave triple the skill up points.

I suppose there's nothing for it but to get back to digging. Thursday night it's back to leveling my death knight for a bit. Hopefully I have a good bit of rest state built up at this point.

Plan of Attack

Now that my warlock has maxed out level, and flying skill, I'm taking on Archaeology. There are some cool rewards to be had, one that I want on 2 characters, and a couple I've still never found but that I want, and I'm curious if I can go about it in a smarter way the second time around.

My first stop was to check out the Wiki on Archaeology. They list all the artifacts you can discover, and the skill level that you need to have before you can start to work on them. Here is a better looking list of the rewards you can find from Archaeology from Wowpedia. The skill level required looks to be more accurate, so I'd go by that one. This is important, because I had read that you have a greater chance to discover a rare before you've completed all the common artifacts for that particular race. I have no proof that this is true, but it certainly seems like it when I look at the rares I've managed to complete on my rogue, and the ones that I have yet to see.

The fallacy in that article was that there is a system in place that keeps you from getting a duplicate common until you have solved all the available commons. If it was ever true, it does not appear to be true any longer. I gathered fragments without solving any artifacts until my skill was at 50. This is the highest you can go just from gathering.

Since my main interests are an elven trinket that the wiki thinks can be found with 225 skill (I suspect it's actually 450, many of their skill requirements are listed incorrectly), as well as a dwarf staff and troll sword that can only be found with 450 skill, I had intended to skill up as much as possible without solving artifacts from those races. The problem is that until you reach a skill of 300 you only have 4 races you can solve from. Which means trying to maximize the amount of solves done within the fossil group (the only one I don't care about) without wasting too many gathered artifact pieces along the way to 300.

I kept track of my solves of Fossils as I went along, which is why I know some of the Wiki information is currently wrong. You get 5 skill points with each common solve, I listed my resulting skill level after each solve.

1. Shard of Wood - 55
2. Black Trilobite - 60
3. Beautiful Preserved Fern - 65
4. Beautiful Preserved Fern - 70
5. Shard of Petrified Wood - 75
6. Twisted Ammonite Shell - 80
7. Strange Velvet Worm - still in progress

You can see that I've already had several duplicates. I suppose it's possible that they have changed which commons are available for a certain skill level, but it seems unlikely that you would only have 3 available in the level 50-75 bracket.

I'm still going to try and save as many of my Troll, Elf, and Dwarf fragments as I can until my skill level is higher, if for no other reason than to have them available once I am done with Outlands. I am not going to let them go over the 200 mark though. I'm only at a skill level of 80 and I have about 140 each of those three races. If I get up to 190 fragments I'll be doing a solve to clear some breathing room.

Oh, and one more thing, getting multiple keystones from Bountiful Bags proccing is a beautiful thing. I'm not sure that there is a best way to go about Archaeology, but I'm giving it my best shot. What tips or tricks have you found useful as you level Archaeology? Are you crazy enough to do it on more than one toon?

Still Undecided

I still haven't settled into a new routine since 4.1 hit. I really don't know what I want to do with myself. There are too many great options, and I just don't get enough time to play.

I've managed a guild run of ZA on my rogue. That was a lot of fun, because I never ran it back in the day. It was my first time to see any of the fights and even though we had to attempt some of the fights more than once it was a blast. No rogue gear dropped, but a quest I picked up in the dungeon gave me a good upgrade for my thrown weapon. Still no ZG run. I've only tried once and the group just didn't know anything about the instance so it took a long time to get to the first boss and after a couple of wipes they gave up. I just haven't had time to try since then.

Currently I've been trying to find time to get into ZG or ZA groups, but between being sick and having my birthday party I just haven't had large chunks of log in time. When I only have about an hour to play I log on my death knight instead, since you get quite a bit done in an hour when you're leveling.

Of all craziness I've been thinking about busting through that final level on my warlock and then starting to work on archaeology with her. I've almost completed all the archaeology stuff on my rogue, so it really seems silly to do it on another character. What's tempting me is the fact that my horde guild has the Bountiful Bags perk and my alliance one doesn't. I'm tremendously curious to see if it impacts the enjoyment of archaeology. That and I have 2 casters so I'd like another trinket. Yes I know that I must have some sort of brain damage if I'm considering leveling archaeology again. I might have to wait until I can get the highest speed of flying on that character, it does make it more bearable.

Meanwhile I've got my death knight's tradeskills stuck. I can't progress further until she levels to 75, so I've been trying to make that a priority at this point. I just keep getting distracted by mining nodes. Must Have Shinies!