Scott Thoughts

Level 80 Recap for 2009

2010-01-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

Last year, Dougal, Velocity and Khitsune all made level 80... but I never got around to posting an update, so here it is.

When I switched Dougal to BM, I originally had been thinking it would be neat to have a (solo PVE) hunter without a tenacity pet, I guess mainly to see if it could work. I tried speccing a silithid to fill the role of tank, and things went well enough until I started solo'ing Stratholme; I was repeating the 45 minute Baron run in hopes of getting Rivendare's Deathcharger, and so I wanted to be able to take down as many mobs as possible in one go... well, my silithid and SB were fine for maybe 5-10 mobs, but that was about it, unless I was being super careful. So I finally decided to give in to tradition and get myself a tenacity pet.

Enter Tremor the cthulhoid nightmare worm from Northrend - as an exotic he fit with the rest of Dougal's stable of uber-animals since I'd dropped Frenzy the purple hyena (SB, chimaera and silithid), and not having tried a worm before it was a nice opportunity to acquire one.

Returned to Strat for more grinding and sure enough, I was now able to solo twice as many mobs as before thanks to the worm's toughness and especially thanks to its thunderstomp... lesson learned! After that, the Baron runs went a lot faster, and within a few days I had myself a nice new skeletal nightmare steed to complete Dougal's Tim Burtonesque spook theme.

Velocity was upgraded to dual spec when patch 3.3 introduced the new spirit beast Arcturis, and I got him last month. Velocity has since leveled Cloud up to 80; I speced him to be as close to tenacity as a ferocity pet can get (charge and boar's swiftness are fine but I refuse to get him dash, just seems goofy to have it on something that big).

When trying to decide on a good lore backdrop for Cloud, I checked out Native American mythology and found an interesting bit pertaining to bears - in some NI cultures it was believed that when a bear hibernates, its spirit leaves its body to wander the woods during the winter months... so I decided Cloud was an unusually curious and precocious bear who lost track of time and wandered too far - by the time Spring came, he had forgotten where his body was, and it died before he could find his way back to it, leaving him stuck in spirit form, wandering mournfully until he was taken in by a kindly night elf with an affinity for spirit beings...

Velocity's other notable achievement was to acquire a pet voidwalker - during a hiatus in Dalaran she gradually located the various tomes of arcane magic tucked away in bookshelves around the city, and from their pages, pieced together the incantation that would teleport her to the study of Archmage Vargoth, who rewarded her with a Kirin Tor Familiar.

The Familiar is quite large for a noncombat pet, and IMO looks pretty cool alongside her frosty themed gorilla Wendigo...

Nowadays Velocity is staying at Brunnildar Village doing the daily for Reins of the White Polar Bear - after trying this for the better part of a year I have a lifetime supply of yeti cheese and snowballs but no reins. Try, try again...

Last but certainly not least we have Khitsune; I have spent more time on her than any other single character, and as a result she ended up with some pretty decent gear and achievements; after making exalted with Argent Crusade she received the epic chest gear, a pony for her Argent squire, and gained access to the heirloom vendor at the Argent Tournament, and after some rep grinding in Stratholme (having a portable bank came in handy there!) she pushed her rep with Argent dawn up to exalted as well, gaining her the Argent Champion title.

She also made exalted with Oracles, gaining herself an epic grinding trinket (she no longer runs out of mana unless I try really hard to make it happen), and as a final bonus she was lucky enough to get the Reins of the Green Proto-Drake on the second try!

Since then I have been continuing to do the Argent dailies with Khitsune when I can get around to it; my hope is to build up enough badges to equip a new generation of toons with self-scaling twink gear when Cataclysm comes out; currently I've reserved names for a goblin hunter and a tauren paladin.

Taming The Beast

2010-01-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Early last month patch 3.3 hit, and with it came the latest spirit beast Arcturis. Since Worba, Khitsune and Dougal all had a spirit beast, I set up my two remaining high level hunters Bofors and Velocity with dual spec and sent them down to Grizzly Hills to camp the latest ghostly critter; this took just about every last copper on their respective servers, but as with the previous spirit beasts I didn't want to pass on the opportunity only to stumble across the thing when I was unprepared (e.g. forced to choose between abandoning a valued pet or taking the risk of popping over to the stables and back only to find another hunter taming it, or of discovering it on a non-hunter, etc etc - a lot of my decisions are motivated more by what I'm afraid of missing out on that by what I'm most keenly interested in accomplishing...).

As it happened, Velocity saw him first, and happily returned to her Storm Peaks dailies with her new pet druid... which left Bofors with dual SV/BM spec, but no beastmastery pets to show for it - something had to be done. Even though I'd originally done it this way just to maximize my odds, that second spec was burning a hole in my pocket... so I sat down and gave it some thought.

Hmm, what exotic pet A) do I not yet have on any toon, and B) would look good standing next to a red themed dwarf... and I realized nothing made so much sense as a red core hound. On any other race, the core hound is shorter than its master and loses the full impact of its original looming perspective... but on a dwarf, now that's another matter!

That being decided I started researching how the heck I was going to get one of these bad boys - I already knew they were found only in dungeons, but that was about it; some time later I determined they could be found in 1) Molten Core, an old world raid instance and 2) UBRS as a dungeon boss. The green version of course was super easy to obtain out in Shadowmoon Valley, but I just wasn't able to get that interested in the green look, when the red one would go with Bofors so much better... same deal with the fluffy white "Omen" version.

Having already spent a good chunk of time aimlessly wandering around the various Blackrock instances picking up vanity pets, doing odd achievements and quests, I was already pretty familiar with the area, and at level 75 was able to solo it without any trouble - and best of all I didn't need to be grouped with anyone to get in, like I did for MC (of course, it takes about 30-40m to get to The Beast in UBRS, whereas the core hounds in MC can be reached in perhaps a couple minutes from the videos I've seen, but for me being able to do it totally solo is preferable).

Now began about two weeks of fumbling, stumbling and armor repairs as I repeatedly tried and failed - I quickly discovered that solo killing The Beast with a placeholder pet is quite a lot different than trying to make it all the way through a 15-20 second tame (uninterrupted) with him. I knew to keep my back to a wall so as to avoid the big knockbacks, and I knew to hop the line of bonfires if my FD got resisted, and I only ever saw him cast fear once... but no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get more than halfway through the tame before being interrupted.

At one point in sheer desperation, I got a paladin to help me with heals... unfortunately that did more harm than good - his heals would aggro the monster and break the tame as surely as a knockdown... and for some reason crossing the bonfire line did not pry it off my unfortunate helper either... I paid the fellow 50 gold for his time and armor repairs, and decided to take a break from the tame attempts. I realized that building up aggro first with a placeholder pet would have enabled me to hold aggro through a few heals, but the larger problem of how to make it through the full tame cast without interruption remained, and I didn't want to make another person wait while I tried to figure it out with trial and error.

A few days later after making lvl 76, I decided to have another try - but this time I had an idea. From reading Krush tame posts I saw it was possible to use The Beast Within to fend off interrupts during a tame, and I was itchin' to try it in UBRS. I knew it required careful macro setup, and would still be no piece of cake - The Beast seems to have 2 different attacks with knockback effects, each (seemingly) on its own 10 sec CD... and with Bestial Wrath/TBW now on a 10 second duration instead of the old 15 second, the margin for error would be nill, but still - better than nothing. I am nothing if not persistent...

I loaded up once more on Imperial Manta Steak, scrolls of Stamina, speed potions and all the +haste/+sta gear in my bank (one of the rare times it pays to be a packrat!), a stack of crystal restores from Ye Olde Ungoro Crator, and headed out. I had a little over 15k health, and about 10-11% haste, both of which were a little below recommended minimums on Thottbot/Wowhead/etc, but were the best I could do after nearly bankrupting myself on that dual spec...

Finally, the day before Christmas, with The Better Half angrily waiting for me to finish my gift wrapping and head out for the evening church service, I made my way back to the The Beast's lair with my placeholder pet... fail. FD'd, ran back out, tamed a scorpid, back in before the instance timer reset and tried again... closer but was still fumbling with the new macro, and failed again - my new approach was to wait for a knockdown, and then trigger my macro - with haste gear, buffs, potion and trinket I had my total tame cast down to about 15 seconds, which meant I had to time it so that those last 5 seconds after TBW ended, fell somewhere between The Beast's knockbacks.

Ran outside, grabbed a red worg, back in and tried one more time... pulled with scorpid sting... waited for the first knockdown... slammed down my macro button, and crossed my fingers... at about second 8 he tried the next knockdown, but that sweet, sweet talent kept my channel bar going even though poor Bofors was being smacked around like a well loved chewtoy... TBW ended and now the home stretch... never has 5 seconds seemed so long... finally, with my HP bar all but empty and my toon lit up with fire DoTs like a BBQ chicken leg sauteed in cheap vodka and the next knockback probably 1 second away, came that wonderful blue flash of completion - SUCCESS!

Never having tried King Krush, this was the only tame that I really had to work for - in the past, the only difficulty I encountered during tames was self inflicted e.g. not bothering to clear nearby trash before blindly attempting to tame some rare spawn... and now that I've got him, I have to say I value Magma even above my spirit beasts. It's without a doubt one of my biggest solo achievements - nice to know that some rewards still require major effort!

When Cataclysm comes out, I'm sure red core hounds will become available out in the wild, to every level 60 Tom, Dick and Harry... but for now at least, Bofors has one very cool "trophy" pet to take into battle... and even when Cataclysm hits, how many red core hounds will display "(BOSS)/skull" on mouseover? :)

WoW Profiles - Worba at 80

2009-09-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

Spec: Beast Master
Profs: Skinning/leatherworking
Achievements: Headless Horseman Mount, Exalted with Cenarion Circle, Cenarion Expedition and Thunder Bluff, Brazier of Dancing Flames, Ice Mammoth mount, tamed Sapphire Hive Queen and Skoll.
Pets: Turtle ("Brick"), Wasp ("Kali"), Spirit Beast ("Fenris") and Devilsaur ("Diablo")
Themes: Red/orange/fiery, spiky/toothy
Comments:
Worba is the second character I ever rolled, way back in the misty pre-dawn era of WoW, and was capped at 60 well before BC came out. Most of that was spent solo'ing, and he has had a number of different pets at different times including Takk the Leaper (back when he had a faster run speed than other pets) and Spiteflayer (back when he had a faster attack speed than other pets)... but probably the part that stood out most most among that time was his guild membership.

I don't normally do PuGs let alone raids, as the only time I generally can expect to play without interruption is late at night - the "standard" raid start time of 6pm PST (9pm for me) means that even if everyone shows up on time and is ready to go immediately, you aren't going to be logging off until midnight (earliest), and often will be at it till 1am or 2am.

But back then I hadn't found this out yet, so I went along for a bunch of AQ raids, and with a good deal of solo grinding Cenarion Circle rep on the side, was eventually able to make exalted and score a set of epic hunter gear - I held onto the AQ set all the way into WotLK (and even then, it's worth noting that the +3% pet dmg set bonus is the one thing I've yet seen that can boost "vehicle" mounts in Northrend...).

Shortly thereafter, BC came out, the level cap went up to 70, everyone else in the guild outleveled me, and after a while of feeling lame for not keeping up, finally opted to leave The Wanderers - on good terms though, and I'd definitely recommend them to anyone looking for a solid Horde guild on Uther.

One thing notably absent from this toon is a backstory or pretty much any sort of RP material; I've always thought of Worba as the proto-typical orc, big, burly, rude, crude, etc - and of course most in his element when taming or directing big, nasty beasts.

His time in BC was pretty unexceptional; I replaced all of his former pets, slowly gathered the materials for a suit of epic dragonscale chainmail, and finally just before WotLK came out, managed to craft him a Khorium Destroyer on my protection warrior.

The turtle was the first pet I really took to - after trying many others, I found the shell shield, orc racial and general tenacity/beastmaster setup to be a "keeper"; there is really nothing else that tough, and it makes solo'ing heavy elites a pleasure. The name "Brick" seemed fitting.

The devilsaur came next; I chose a red model who I named "Diablo", after a character from the old "Primal Rage" game for the Playstation. Although devilsaurs had some initial problems with their post-tame walk animation, that was eventually fixed... and their growth from Monstrous Bite plus Bestial Wrath is something to see.

When WotLK opened up, Worba was the first of my toons to check it out; by then he was a little overdressed for solo'ing, and I plodded from lvl 70-72 trying and mostly failing to find something interesting to do... was just getting ready to put Worb back in hibernation when I read on Petopia of a certain unique level 78 wasp that was due to become untamable in a few weeks.

So I decided to pull out all the stops and try to make 78 beforehand - squeezing in as much WoW time as I could manage, staying up a couple hours later every night and otherwise fusing myself to the PC, I was able to just pull it off - as it happened I tamed the Hive Queen at about 1am, the morning of the patch that made her untamable! I named her "Kali", after the Indian death goddess - I wanted something epic, matriarchal and ideally which also said something about the big orange bug's 6 cleaver/stabber appendages, and this seemed to fit the bill nicely.

After that, finding myself now at lvl 78, I slowed down a bit and decided Worba would look good atop an Ice Mammoth, so (at a much more leisurely pace) I began doing dailies for the Sons of Hodir; this took me to 80, and also netted me a nice belt, and a lifetime supply of shoulder inscriptions...

Around that time, they came out with the Argent Tournament, and I headed over for some jousting; the epic rifle looked nice, and also it was an opportunity to improve some of his "old world" reps - back when Worba was doing all of his quests for Orgrimmar, Dark Spear etc, you got just 100 rep per quest, causing him to be way behind most of my other characters in reputation. To date Worb has made "champion" with all factions save the blood elves - he's also made exalted with TB, in order to get access to a kodo mount, although he quit riding it and the mammoth once the Halloween event opened - but I get ahead of myself...

Meanwhile patch 3.2 came out and kicked off a new tradition of releasing a new spirit beast with each patch - and Skoll the electrified wolf was added to the game. Having already tamed Loque and Gondria on other hunters I decided to go after Skoll with Worba. This was not something I decided lightly, as Uther is one of the oldest servers and so the competition was going to be fierce.

But I rolled up my sleeves and did what I always do when trying for the rare tames - patrol the spawn areas, log off, and try again later in between playing other toons - I make a point of not sitting around "camping" as it's incredibly boring, except when other players come along and try to harass you and start a "turf war", and then all sorts of magical stupidity ensues.

Sure enough, there were plenty of other hunters flying around or just squatting on the spawn points like deranged shotgun slingin' gold prospectors all giving eachother the stink eye...

After a few weeks of fruitless fly-bys, I took a break from the "Skoll Patrol", and just spent some time solo'ing Steamvaults with my trusty turtle, to bring my rep to exalted with Cenarion Expedition, and claim the Guardian of Cenarius achievement - a nice way of leveraging my old pre-TBC gains with Cenarion Circle into a nifty new title.

Right around that time they dropped the price of epic mounts by way of subjecting them to reputation discount, and I was just able to afford an armored wyvern, and all of its associated costs.

Outfitted with a much faster means of getting around, I returned to Storm Peaks and resumed my flyovers in search of the elusive Skoll - at 280% speed I could now check all of his spawn points without it seeming to take forever.

Finally in mid Sept, about a month and a half after 3.2 came out, I got lucky and spotted the crackling canine in Bor's Breath - would have mistaken him for a Stormcrest Eaglet on my beast tracking if my targeting macro hadn't dutifully chimed a warning (I don't use NPC_Scan or anything like it - although undeniably useful for this sort of thing, I feel it cheapens the game a bit too much for my taste). Landed, dismissed my placeholder Jormungar, dropped a freeze trap and tamed without any of the crazed panicking that characterized my last spirit beast tame, and Skoll was mine. Just like that.

After a good deal of thought I finally decided to name him Fenris, after the "Doomsday Wolf" prophesied to kill Odin at Ragnarok (and also not incidentally the sire of the original Skoll in Nordic myth). Nowadays I focus mostly just on Brick, Kali and Fenris - I miss playing Diablo but find I have trouble keeping my interest when playing more than 2 pets of the same family (and that's pushing it).

More recently, I decided to do the Halloween Event with Worba. While I was only realistically hoping to get the DPS ring, the thought was in the back of my mind that of all my level 75-80 toons, Worba was the only one without a "special" flying mount (my night elves ride a Cenarion Griffin and a Netherdrake, my blood elf rides a Green Proto-Drake, and my dwarf rides a Turbocharged Gyrocopter), and so I figured if the Reins of the Headless Horseman were to drop (ha ha, as if), it would be Worba who I'd most want to be playing.

Last year and the year before I'd done the event many times on several different toons, but never once saw the reins drop, so this was really just a pipe dream...

Anyway, so Worb finds a group, and using his wasp Kali actually manages to do some good DPS, vying for top spot the whole way through and doing something like 2/3 more DPS than I ever managed vs target dummies (this actually put him a smidge higher than the best my (much better geared) MM hunter has ever managed (I'm still not clear on how that happened but am guessing it's probably a combination of trinket procs, crits and "reactionary moves"), and things are going along well - and the DPS ring drops. No one else wants it so I scoop it up and think "at least I'll have something to show for it now". Broom drops like 3 times but I lose the roll on all of them, and I shrug - this looks familiar...

Then a few kills later, the reins drop. Everyone rolls need except the warrior who already has them... dazed, I go ahead and select "need" as well, fully prepared to lose the roll as I pretty much always have in the past, when trying for anything I really really wanted... and lo and behold... I won! Two of the others offered to buy it from me, paying as much as 1500g, but I politely declined - I wouldn't have sold it for any amount. After all, aside from being one of the coolest (if not THE coolest) mount in the game so far, just about anything you could buy with cash would be eclipsed by starter greens as soon as the next expansion hit, whereas this mount not only flies but scales with your riding skill.

With the acquisition of this fiery green horse, and the electrified blue wolf, it seems Worba's beast taming skills have advanced to the point of affecting spirit entities with only the most tenuous connection to the animal world...

So feeling pretty lightheaded, I keep on mostly just because I owed it to the other group members to stay and help with the rest of their daily summons... a few more brooms drop but now I figure it would be churlish of me to even try for them, so I pass... well next thing I know, the Baleful Horseman's Blade drops, and you guessed it... I won that too. There was a shocked silence, and one of the other players quietly disconnected. I suppose I can't blame him.

Needless to say, that more than makes up for all of the missed rolls on past loot. I guess sometimes things just go your way...

WoW Profiles - Bofors at 78

2009-07-27T06:36:00.001-07:00

Spec: Survival / BM
Profs: Mining/Engineering
Achievements: Tamed The Beast from UBRS at 76, exalted with Stormwind, Ironforge, Exodar, Gnomeregan and Darnassus, Magical Crawdad.
Pets: Core Hound ("Magma"), Hyena (“Red”), crab (“Vise”) and spider (“Slag”)
Themes: Alan Quatermain, tinker, red/orange, fire
Comments:
Years ago, having recently finished playing a 1-70 marathon session with Velocity the night elf and looking to start a new hunter, I decided this time I'd try a dwarf – I was looking forward to playing a hunter who even the youngest/shortest pet would look “large” next to!

I drew a lot of inspiration from the character of Hemet Nesingwary – the idea of a larger than life Big Game Hunter of Legend seemed to have a lot of potential; something with a vague 19th/early 20th century feel. Along those lines I named him “Bofors”, which was the name of the Swedish manufacturer of the famous “Bofors Gun” back in the WWI-WWII period.

For professions, I went with mining/engineering; being mostly a solo player, I wanted access to superior (or at least decent) firearms that didn't require quests, dungeons, PVP etc. I figured the dwarf’s extensive experience with field stripping firearms plus a somewhat eccentric nature would have produced an inclination to explore the mechanical mysteries and create contraptions that would aid him “on the hunt” or provide amusement and “lift morale at camp”.

Further in keeping with his image as a jungle explorer, I decided he should ride an elephant rather than the standard dwarven ram – by now I’d become determined to get my characters cross faction mounts, a precious source of motivation during the otherwise very bleak and repetitive old world areas (back when Bofors was leveling, you still needed to make lvl 40 just to attain regular riding skill).

So this shaped his itinerary up through level 40; I methodically went around doing every Alliance faction quest I could find, and finally by I think level 37 had reached exalted with everyone except Gnomeregan – this had made for a spectacularly dull run since most of the time it meant he was doing gray quests... but having a purple elekk mount to ride at lvl 40 was a bright spot at the end of the tunnel, and made for a nice pick-me-up when I finally "arrived" at lvl 40...

Then patch 3.0 came out; all of a sudden hunters and their pets received a sweeping upgrade, and there were new specs and pets to try, so I planned out a major revamp for Bofors; previously he'd been an uninteresting mish-mash of MM and SV, so after some thought I decided on a full survival spec, and some pets that would (hopefully) help keep enemies at range while I pounded them with explosive shot, steady, auto and whatever else I could throw at them; this looked like a setup that would capitalize on a good chunk of the new 3.0 goodies.

First off I tamed a Scarlet Hound at the Scarlet Monastery, who I named “Red” – for Bofors I wanted pet names that were simple, preferably monosyllabic. This was a gruff outdoorsman after all and not someone who'd be seen running about with a cat named "Silvermyst"! I'd always thought the red hyenas were cool looking but not enough to justify the bother of taming something that was just a stripped down wolf - but with the addition of Tendon Rip that became another story.

A crab seemed the perfect choice for a tenacity pet, with its new Pin ability combined with the innate toughness that would hopefully see it through a few applications of Misdirection - and next to a dwarf, it would still look respectably large. I took a trip to the shores of Durotar and tamed a red crab, which I named “Vise” (it was nice for once to watch a new tame grow instead of shrink).

I now had myself a tenacity and ferocity pet, and did some leveling with them – the new arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and I found myself enjoying this character once more, and before long I was high enough level to tame the last pet on my wishlist; a lava spider from Searing Gorge.

Like the scarlet hyena, the lava spider was an interesting looking beast that I hadn't quite been able to justify taming on account of its lack of special ability, and like the hyena, this creature became a much more attractive choice in 3.0, now that it had Web to tie enemies up. “Slag” proved to be a nice addition and to complete the ruddy colored theme I sent Bofors to the new barbershop to become a redhead...

By the time I made 60, I’d raised my Gnomeregan rep to exalted as well, and decided that his epic mount would be the culmination of his years as an engineer – the venerable elekk was put out to pasture (savannah?) and replaced with a clockwork ostrich, aka mechanostrider. Back then, mechanostriders could only be ridden by gnomes and dwarves, so it seemed a nice fit and helped keep things interesting as I zoomed around Outlands on my new whirring, clanking mount.

While the quest rewards in Outlands were certainly very nice (getting Hemet's Elekk Gun at lvl 65 was cool but shortly to be replaced by a Northrend green), it was the new skill 301-375 engineering recipes that really stood out for me, and I made sure to take periodic detours from my questing to farm engineering mats and keep his skills up; having engineering had pretty much always ensured I had a rifle that was at least adequate, but now I was getting access to some really nice stuff – the adamantite shell machine for one gave me a way of producing ammo whose DPS was just shy of the sort not normally available until level 75, but which I could use from level 62 thanks to engineering.

In addition there were the teleportation trinkets which let me hop back and forth more or less freely between Old World and Outland along with the occasional amusing side effect… I also got the epic chainmail goggles which he still uses a dozen levels later, and last but not least a turbo-gyrocopter.

At level 68 I moved Bofors over to Northrend; as with Outland, nice quest rewards, awesome engineering recipes – flexweave underlay lets you avoid having to keep a parachute cloak in your bags, the hand mounted pyro rocket in addition to having a cool looking effect actually does a decent amount of DPS and CD is (just) short enough to make it a factor in regular combat… but the hands down coolest item (so far!) is the Mark S Boomstick, which I’ve been using from level 73 - engineer only, and slightly better than the rep reward firearms not available until lvl 78.

Long ago I’d gotten Bofors’ fishing skill up to 229 or so before giving up on it – back then a failed attempt simply resulted in the annoying “Your Fish Got Away” message… and no chance of skillup, e.g. you either stayed in the same low level fishing area from 1-375, or else you advanced as skill permitted, with frequent, wasted casts (i.e. a lot more time spent).

Recently however Blizzard had overhauled the fishing process to A) allow at least a minimal chance of success in any area even for skill 1 and B) failed casts now result in an 18 cp junk item – but remain eligible for skillup. So I decided to give this another try; I've wanted a Magical Crawdad for some time, and thinking one would look nice alongside Bofors’ red crab, I sent him back to Terrokar Forest to try his luck at the Highland Fishing Schools.

Having found a likely looking area, I settled in expecting a long wait for my number to come up; according to wowhead, you first had to get Mr. Pinchy, which was rare to begin with, but then once received you had to hope that one of his three wishes returned the vanity pet.

On the last cast of my first Highland school, the Mr Pinchy achievement suddenly flashed on my screen (!), and slightly dumbstruck I right clicked on the icon… to find a Magical Crawdad in my inventory (!!). Feeling a bit dizzy, I happily made my way back to Northrend… while I've certainly done plenty of long (sometimes fruitless) grinds, things like this definitely restore one's faith that the odds do tend to balance themselves out... sooner or later. Nice!

This now meant I had one very cool vanity pet to go with my crab, and a couple of comparatively boring ones to go with my hyena and spider. A trip to Blackrock Spire and a bit of puttering in the workshop fixed that - now I had a color changing worg pup to accompany Red, and a smoke belching robot to accent Slag's fiery nature (and his master's engineering skill); although I don't usually put this much work into getting vanity pets, I felt Bofors could use a little spicing up to offset his lack of flashy Northrend combat pets (and as with combat pets, vanity pets look bigger next to a dwarf as well - always a plus!).

But the most noteworthy outcome of Bofors' time in the Blackrock dungeons (if not his entire career...) was his new core hound, aka The Beast. Taming this creature was quite the adventure and which will be covered in a separate post, but suffice to say I couldn't be happier to have him - and it's always nice to have at least one "trophy pet" on your hunter!

WoW Profiles - Khitsune at 76

2009-07-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Level: 76
Spec: (Spec 1) Marksman / (Spec 2) Beastmaster
Profs: Inscription/Herbalism
Achievements: Flame Keeper, Sea Turtle Mount, Exalted with Kalu'ak, Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Silvermoon, and Thunderbluff, tamed Loque'nahak and Aotona.
Pets: Boar ("Tanuki"), spider ("Jorogumo"), wolf ("Kabuki"), spirit beast ("Raiju")
Theme: Shinto, trickster
Comments:
Khitsune has made the past 5 levels mostly in Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills, those being zones I haven’t frequented as much previously – while I like Borean Tundra and Dragonblight, I have to say HF and GH seem to have a more uniform/distinctive feel to them, with all the focus on the native Vyrkul and related lore.

At level 74 she replaced her moth with a fiery Vargul Blighthound, named “Kabuki”, after the animal’s vague resemblance to the traditional costume worn in these performances; he is a trickster spirit who has befriended Khitsune and the others, finding them quite amusing. I’ve been planning on doing this ever since my moth’s “summoning animation” green glow was removed and leaving it a comparatively drab creature; going from a moth to a wolf actually isn’t a huge shift in tactics, since both are ferocity pets who use a combat buff; obviously the moth will be a bit more of a tank while the wolf is for DPS, but this is not a big deal given that I have a tenacity pet for the tough fights.

After that, the Midsummer Fire Festival got underway, and I decided to get Khit a Spirit of Summer to go with her new wolf… by the time I’d achieved that I’d gotten to thinking it might be nice to have the title, too… and so I went whole hog and did everything. Although I’ve dabbled in previous Midsummer events, this is the first time I “did it all”.

I made sure to keep up with the Midsummer dailies, finding that like riding a bicycle, torch juggling skills always come back…

The bonfires were time consuming but not difficult thanks to epic land mount + humanoid tracking + aspect of the beast + small amount of luck; I got the Outland bonfires out of the way first so as to avoid getting barnstormed by players on epic flyers, and then slowly worked my way through the Old World bonfires, stopping along the way to grab flames from the enemy capitals.

Darnassus and Stormwind went the smoothest with only one death each, while Exodar and Ironforge required a bit of “corpse hopping” to pull it off, due to their more difficult city layout/bonfire placement.

Stormwind was the only city where I encountered any real resistance from enemy players, and even there I was able to grab the flame before they and the guards took me out – after that, I returned to find 2-3 players camping my corpse, but I managed to “outfox” them by simply resurrecting at the bottom of the canal behind them, and used my turtle mount and Kalu’ak fishing pole to submarine my way out to the docks - a quick hop overland past a few guards and then from there along the coast to Westfall safely underwater once more – while I haven’t had many opportunities to use my turtle and fishing pole since I got them back at lvl 71, they came in very handy here.

Total gear repair bill from city deaths: a few silver, as I was wearing lvl 10 vendor chainmail…

The Dalaran juggling achievement was do-able with 15 torches and a hotkey, although it took a couple tries and left me feeling like a human jackhammer.

The hardest part of the Ahune event was simply finding a group; the actual fight proved to be a total breeze thanks to the level 80s (and I’m glad I did it this year because Blizzard has announced plans to bump Ahune up to 80 for next Summer), netting me an achievement, a Tabard of Summer Flames, and a bunch of burning blossoms.

And finally after three days’ work, I had my title! (I must say I think the fire theme and Midsummer outfit ties in pretty well with Khit’s supernatural/fey/fox nature but maybe that’s just me)

The event had netted me perhaps 300-400 gold and about a level of exp; after some more time in Grizzly Hills I made level 76 and started thinking about getting some new pets.

First off I traveled to the Argent Vanguard at Icecrown, and replaced my red spider with a Carrion Fleshstripper; this spider model is extremely cool looking and not commonly seen (can’t recall ever seeing another player with one in fact), so it was a sweet upgrade – gave it the same name of “Jorogumo” and it was ready to go; I figured this would represent “Jo Jo” maturing into a more demonic spider form…

Next up I decided to go after Loque’nahak; of all my hunters in the end game, Khit seemed like the best fit for this particular pet, and so I went about getting her dual spec and setting up a BM51 offspec – this kind of wreaked havoc on my macros and took some major getting used to, but after a little while I’d adjusted everything to work and was ready to head over to Scholazar Basin.

The thing I found about dual spec with BM51, is that you have to swap pets at a stablemaster immediately after switching specs – and reserving each pet for use with just one spec. Otherwise, your pet’s talents keep getting reset every time you switch specs, which gets old real fast.

Over in Scholazar, it took me some two days or so of herb gathering before I finally located the elusive prowler, during which time I kept a placeholder rhino pet and got Khit’s inscription raised by some 30-40 points or so (that place has a ton of resources); I’d also stumbled across Aotona and parked her in my stables – she should work well as a dedicated cunning pet for BM spec.

When I found Loque, I had to move pretty quick as I was being trailed by a swarm of angry giant wasps, and ended up wasting my freeze trap on one before I FD’ed… but happily after that the tame went pretty smoothly and I had my very own Ghostsaber 2.0 (he did take off a chunk of my HP, but fortunately his DPS seemed to taper off once I was down to 30-40%); while I subsequently tamed Gondria on my BM nelf hunter, I have to say that I think Loque looks cooler – among other things Loque has an (almost) unique look reserved just for himself and a cat goddess… whilst Gondria actually uses a “standard” cat model + ghost overlay effect (check out the undead gryphon riders in SE dragonblight and you’ll see what I mean).

After some research I named him “Raiju”, which is the name of the pet/sidekick belonging to the Shinto thunder god Raiden; the classic description of this creature fits spirit beasts to a “T” (“Its body is composed of either lightning or fire and may be in the shape of a cat, tanuki, monkey, or weasel”), and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was in fact part of the inspiration for spirit beasts. I decided that Raiju would have been sent as a reward for the “Faithful pursuit of good deeds beyond the terms of the heavenly sentence” and a general mark of favor from his master Raiden, who perhaps also felt his pet was spending too much time sleeping and needed some exercise.

WoW Profiles - Dougal at 77

2009-07-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

Level: 77
Spec: Beastmaster (“Shooty”)
Profs: Mining/Herbalism
Achievements: Exalted with Kurenai and Cenarion Expedition, Cenarion War Hippogryph, tamed Nuramoc and Gondria
Pets: Chimaera (“Nightmare”), silithid (“Lurk”), hyena (“Frenzy”), spirit beast ("Aurora")
Theme: Purple, creepy
Comments:
As planned, Dougal leveled from 74-77 mostly in Zul'Drak and so now he's about 1/3 of the way through honored with Argent Crusade, and on track for getting a Zombie Sweeper Shotgun by 80; in the meantime he has the K3 Pachyderm Prevention Device from Storm Peaks, which is just way-cool looking in addition to having respectable DPS (even if it looks a bit like a super soaker...).

To help with the firepower, at 77 Dougal finished off 3/3 Improved Arcane Shot, which works well with Ferocious Inspiration (combined total of +24% dmg with arcane shot) and helps to achieve my overall goal of making him more of a "shooty" BM spec; although I wanted to take it earlier, things like Careful Aim and Mortal Shots seemed to provide a more reliable DPS boost, so it had to be pushed back until now.

More notably though as of level 77 he gets access to Cold Weather Flying, and so finally he can ride that pretty Cenarion War Hippogryph I’d worked so hard on acquiring back in his early Northrend career. This makes him only my second character able to fly in Northrend, and the first to do so with an epic mount - after all this time immersed in WotLK lvl 68-76, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to jet around at top speed, bypassing pesky ground mobs and otherwise feeling like Snoopy on his flying doghouse... although sk 225 flying mounts will soon enjoy a very nice boost with upcoming patch 3.2 (60% to 150%), there's still no substitute for the 280% full monty (not counting the achievement or PVP mounts, anyway).

Then last but certainly not least there is Gondria...

I have to say, when the spirit beasts first came out I wasn't too crazy about taming them; I thought they were just a little "too hip" and anyways, I figured, once you're a 51 pt BM spec, doesn't every pet become a "super pet",for the most part? But over time I got to thinking "what if I ran across Loque or Gondria and actually had the opportunity to tame it - would I still feel so blase about it, and if not, would I be willing to dismiss my current pet… or what if I just ran into it on a non-hunter (d’oh)?" While the majority of my high level toons are still in the 67-75 bracket, sooner or later I knew I'd be spending more time in Zul'Drak and Scholazar, and it would be just my luck to skip those tames only to run into Loque on my warrior or something.

So I decided to make spirit beasts the new priority - after managing to get Loque for Khitsune, I now had to get Dougal up to 77 and then see if I could track down the other “glowie kitteh”...I thought Gondria would work pretty well on Dougal - being a BM spec he wouldn't need to worry about fancy dual spec arrangements like Khit did, and a spirit beast ought to fit in reasonably well with his travelling menagerie of purplish nightmare beasts, so off I went on my new epic flyer to see if I could pull it off...

Got her on my first run.

I complain about my luck sometimes but things like this remind me that I really have no right to - having just got done taming a "placeholder pet" and setting up a "Gondria macro", I was flying around at mach 1, enjoying my new epic mount and thinking "well, I'll probably get to know this area pretty well by the time I see that cat", and all of a sudden up comes the raid warning and my adrenaline pegs the gauges.

Now, while I think I did a not-terrible job of taming Loque (got him on first try, no deaths or retries), it was another story with Gondria - instead of say, using my placeholder bear to clear the nearby mobs, I hurriedly abandoned him and proceeded to try taming Gondria right on the spot, tunnel vision raging... well, as it happened the nearby mobs displayed truly amazing timing, appearing from nowhere to trip my freeze trap a millisecond or so before Gondria got around to putting her dainty paws on it (spirit beasts hit hard, fyi), and then breaking out to pop me below zero HP when my tame bar was down to 0.001% or 0.002%. If there had been another hunter there, the only thing preventing him from swiping the tame would be if he was laughing too hard to work his keyboard.

Finally on like my 3rd or so corpse run I cooled off enough to form a semi-coherent strategy, and this time dragged her over to a quiet corner where I was able to complete the tame with Gondria frozen and sans interruptions...

Moral of story: if you're trying to tame a rare, do yourself the favor of taking the extra 10-20 seconds to scope out the local situation and make a plan, rather than allowing panic to set the agenda ("oh noes the competition must be RIGHT. ON. MY. HEELS"), because honestly you are going to be wasting much more time on corpse runs if you don't - this much I know.

Still - got her. After some research I decided to name her “Aurora”; since I’d been unable to come up with a decent name that fit with the theme of his other pets, and this seemed appropriate for a glowing spirit creature from an arctic land.

So, yay - now I can get back to playing all my toons with no worries of spirit beasts and bad timing... at least until they add the electrified wolf in 3.2...

Mend Pet SPCA Charity Drive

2009-07-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

I sometimes get so caught up in the phenomenon of World of Warcraft that I miss the things that actually... matter.

I'm referring to the place called "Real Life", whose troubles seem so far away when we're off slaying gnolls, doing dailies and otherwise running about with our virtual beast companions (well if you're a hunter fan like myself anyway - it's one of the 3 most popular classes in the game, about even with paladins and behind death knights).

But what makes hunters so popular? For some it's the mechanics of the class; which shots are best for what situation and in what order... but for myself and I suspect plenty others, it's the animals - virtual, yes, and rather too big, spikey and all around deadly to want to encounter IRL under any circumstances... but even as virtual animals, hunter pets do resonate somewhat with a love for animals in the world at large.

It doesn't matter if you're on an RP server or not; personally my interest in roleplaying extends no farther than dreaming up a character background (which never gets shared except here!) - I play PVE servers all the way, and while I try not to sound unintelligent I am guilty of occasionally using things like "lol j/k :)" etc, sorry to say. Nonetheless, I still feel attached to my hunter pets on some level.

And that's because I love animals IRL - my personal weapon of choice is the cat, but pretty much anything that A) won't eat me and B) can show happiness and affection is cool in my book. Always have, always will - and that's why it burns me up when I hear about animal abuse or neglect.

So, when I found out about Brajana's Mend Pet SPCA Charity Drive, I decided I had to get off my tail and help out somehow. Having recently already committed to $18/mo over at www.aspca.org, I didn't have the means to make a financial contribution so I decided to do the next best thing and try to help get the word out. Took me a couple weeks to get around to doing this (sorry!), but there's still a week or so before 7/31 to head over to Mend Pet; please check out Brajana's charity drive and help in any way you can.

Also a big thank you to Mania at Petopia for making us aware of this - and sorry it took me so long to get on the ball. ;)

WoW Profiles - Velocity at 75

2009-07-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

Level: 75
Spec: SV/MM Hybrid
Profs: Mining/Skinning
Achievements: Exalted with Netherwing, Sha'tari Skyguard, Ogri'la, Darnassus and Ironforge, tamed Garwal and Aotona.
Pets: Cat ("Boo"), gorilla ("Wendigo"), bird of prey ("Voodoo")
Theme: Ghostly, cold, pale
Comments:
Originally hailing from the Nordrassil server and named Nightbreeze, I rolled Velocity back in the early days of the BC expansion when I'd just discovered the ghost saber and really really wanted a hunter that would "look good" with a ghostly cat - for those who joined the game more recently, back in those days something like a transparent snow leopard was a big deal, and was the first time I had a pet that felt "special".

When I created Velocity, I decided this character would actually be "part ghost", with ragged white hair and far away demeanor being partly connected to the ethereal realms; how she came to be this way is unknown as her earlier memories are obscured by amnesia - all she knows is that she was awoken in a graveyard by the murmurs of the dead below, and that ever since she has had a connection to the other side. It was for this reason ghostly creatures relate to her more strongly and thus she was able to befriend a ghost saber who I named "Boo".

I pretty much played her exclusively from lvl 1-70, psyched to have such a "cool" pet. Her spec wasn't very good - for the sake of trying something different I set her up with a "kiting spec", which is to say a muddle of talents from all 3 trees, basically whatever seemed like it would help a hunter to kite effectively (Improved Concussive Shot, Improved Aspect of Cheetah, Trap Mastery etc); that was way back when I was first learning about kiting and thought it actually merited a whole spec (hint: it doesn't). But, having a neat looking pet and a way of taking down super-tough mobs was all the excitement I needed at the time.

Back then, the Ahn-Qiraj event timer had been accidentally reset by the launch of the Burning Crusade release; this meant you could do the repeatable Ahn-Qiraj War Effort quests, which was a nice focus for a new hunter and also a good way of getting rep for a riding ram; by that time I had gotten tired of default racial mounts and was looking for something a little more individualized. By doing my leather, ore and cooking turn-ins exclusively at Ironforge, and doing as many Ironforge quests as possible, I had the rep for a riding ram well before level 40... my RP backdrop was that the dwarves accorded her a great respect for being part ghost, being a culture practicing ancestor worship.

Shortly afterward she tamed Uhk'loc in Ungoro crater - again back in those days a white furred/blue skinned gorilla was almost unheard of, and I would get a lot of questions about him. I named him "Wendigo", for the northern beast spirit; I decided he would actually have come from the icy steeps of Dun Morogh, responding to her ghostly nature and establishing himself as her protector.

From there it was a fairly uneventful trek to lvl 70, at which point I settled in to work on the Skyguard and Ogri'la dailies; after a bunch of that plus the cap level gold reward from finishing pretty much every non-instance quest in Outland, I had enough for an epic flying mount and added Netherwing dailies to my schedule... finally after maybe 2-3 weeks all told I had my epic crossbow, epic trinket, and netherwing drake mount.

After that, she went on hiatus until WotLK came out, at which time I dusted her off and did the Argent Crusade events until she had a full set of epic chainmail, Argent War Horn, tabard, and a haunted memento, leaving her in pretty good shape to start questing in Northrend - the memento was an especially nice fit with Velocity's ghostly RP background.

It was also around that time that I decided to move her from Nordrassil to the new Latin server Quel'Thalas, as part of a merge with my Alliance toons from the overcrowded Uther server; during the server transfer I was forced to change her name as Nightbreeze was already taken on the new location, so after a very long and frustrating process of trial and error I finally went with "Velocity"; about the only cool sounding hunter name I could find that wasn't already taken - apparently either the new Hispanic players were very creative or else a lot of other people'd had the same idea as me about jumping on the free transfer. Still, not such a bad deal - I find I like the new name just as much if not more, and anyway after the transfer I was able to roll a nelf druid back on Nordrassil named Nightbreeze, which made for some amusing conversations with my friends there... I actually do intend to go back and level that toon someday, if I can find the time.

The new quests in Northrend proved to be pretty cool, although sadly the epic Crystalline Crossbow I'd worked so hard to obtain back in Outland was replaced almost immediately by a Northrend green quest item; DPS and armor points receiving the traditional "new expansion" boost that we saw with the BC expansion...

I've also changed her talent spec a number of times; since I already have "purist" hunters devoted primarily to each of the different talent trees, I knew I wanted some kind of hybrid, but it seemed nothing was working very well for her... finally I found something that seemed promising - 0/25/41 with Concussive Barrage 2/2 (I try to time Multi-shot to go off right around when my pet is about to lose aggro, for the auto-daze effect), Black Arrow and as much +dmg% talents as I could fit. Still making last minute tweaks but so far, so good.

Next thing to do was try and find a third pet; Velocity had "just" two pets, and I try to have at least 3 on all hunters, preferably 1 from each family; for Velocity it's been tough finding pets that fit her theme - and so I had to spend some time window shopping at Petopia before I finally decided on Aotona; here was a cunning family pet, of a species I hadn't tamed before (bird of prey), with both unique looks and sounds... and his coloration was at least kinda sorta compatible with a white haired night elf, so I spent a long time gathering ore in Scholazar Basin - but after a week or so of fruitless effort I gave up...

But then I was lucky enough to catch wind of the Garwal tame bug over at Petopia's; Mania has the full scoop if you haven't heard of it already, but basically there is a wolf boss at the end of a Howling Fjord quest chain who morphs into a werewolf once you get him down to 50% hp, and it just so happens that if you are taming him, and your tame completes right at the exact instant he makes that change, then instead of a tamed wolf - you have a tamed worgen. The trick was to get him down to like 55% or so HP, hit him with Wyvern Sting and time your tame so that he wakes up and starts taking DoT damage as the tame is finishing.

Having focused on Borean Tundra with Velocity, the Garwal quest chain happily remained available to her, and having 41 pts in SV she had wyvern sting, so I headed over to try my hand at this very tricky tame; although it took me some 30-40 tries I finally managed to nail the tame-timer just right, and voila I had myself a tamed worgen - how cool is that?? Of course, seeing this as a "bit too much of a good thing", Blizzard nerfed it the next day - no more taming Garwal, and existing tames lost their pet spells and talents and otherwise became somewhat buggy, so I opted to leave mine in the stable as a collector's item - recently however Blizzard replaced tamed worgen with the generic lvl 68 Northrend wolf and so I finally released Maul back to the wild.

While I was initially kind of mad about Blizzard's decision along with many, many others, this was largely down to the way they held off making any comments or updates until the player community had been begging all day for a blue post, at which time some rather flimsy justifications were tepidly offered up (among other things they never adequately explained why tamed spirit guides were allowed to be kept or how a worgen was any less appropriate for a hunter pet than the slime-a-dile aka "Spirit of Koosu" - I especially liked the one about how they set its pet family to null because they "didn't think a werewolf belonged to any pet family - nope, just can't find a plausible fit"); but that aside I recognized in the end it's their decision to make and did my best to let it go and move on; I was still glad to have been able to participate in the "event", and I'm certainly not going to harbor any bad feelings toward players who tamed ghost wolves, slimes, hydras etc.

Feeling sort of "blah" and trying to get back into the mood, I decided to head back to Scholazar Basin and give Aotona one more try... and lo and behold, there he was! The tame went quite smoothly; apparently he has a fear ability but luckily he wasted that on my placeholder croc pet before I abandoned it and got my freeze trap off - getting feared across the Wild Growth Mangal would not have been fun... and getting him at 75 was nice, as he'll be an active part of my quests and grinds for that many more levels than if I'd waited to do this as a bored level 80...

I named the huge, colorful bird "Voodoo", to at least give it a modicum of tie-in with the other pets - this, I decided, was the familiar and soul vessel of the scheming pirate captain "Fast Jack” - a man of minor magical skill but of great cunning and ambition, who tricked the dark god Davey Jones into granting him much greater magical ability in exchange for his soul... which was already safely stashed away in another body. Said creditor sent his be-tentacled agents after the doublecrossing captain, but Jack managed to stay one step ahead... for a while. When Davey's "boys" caught up, his body was taken down to the dark place beneath the waves... but his parrot got away and while Davey knows Jack’s soul remains up there, somewhere... he's still not quite sure where exactly.

Velocity was able to suss out Voodoo's true nature with her ghostly affinities, and as a condition of her silence, the giant magical parrot has agreed to accompany her on her adventures... and has come to appreciate the "safety in numbers" of being with her - or perhaps he just thinks Velocity could make a handy soul vessel someday…

WoW Profiles - Khitsune at 71

2009-06-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

Level: 71
Spec: Marksman
Profs: Inscription/Herbalism
Achievements: Sea Turtle Mount, Exalted with Kalu’ak, Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Silvermoon, and Thunderbluff.
Pets: Boar (“Tanuki”), spider (“Jorogumo”), moth (“Konpaku”)
Theme: Shinto, trickster
Comments:
Not having played a blood elf before, I decided to roll a hunter with an anime theme – originally this toon was named Kyuketsuki, which meant “vampire” in Japanese, and I’d planned on setting her up with a bat (Ressan), a spider (Zarakh), a zombie bear and a wolf mount… and I’d went with tailoring/enchanting.

Getting the rep for the wolf mount required doing a ton of Horde quests including many that were gray, and necessitated raising all of the horde factions since a good chunk of the rep needed to make exalted with any of them comes from the “spillover” rep you get for doing quests for the others, so by the time she reached level 40, she had made exalted with Org, and was already there with UC and well into revered with the others.

However by then I had realized that I just wasn’t that enthused about her pets or for that matter her theme; I’m not a roleplayer but I still like to have a nice, coherent mini-theme somewhere in the back of my head when playing a character – and this character just hadn’t gelled for me. So I decided she needed an overhaul; I knew I still wanted something anime-ish for her, so I went with a Shinto theme this time – instead of a vampire, she would be the closest thing the Japanese had to an elf; a fox spirit. Called Kitsune (“kits-NEH”), these beings were foxes that could assume other shapes, including a humanoid appearance, which they invariably would use for the purpose of playing tricks on humans… one paid name change and haircut later and she had her new identity – now to find some new pets to go with it.

I tried to think of a tenacity pet that would work well with a marksman build while also having some potential for a Shinto background, and the armored blue agamar from RFK seemed to fit the bill, so I tamed one of those. None of my hunters had a boar, and the initial aggro burst seemed to work well with an MM spec (a crab would’ve been even better but I already had one on my dwarf); I named him “Tanuki”, which is the Japanese word for a badger spirit. Also known for being shape changing tricksters as well as gluttons, I thought this would be a pretty good fit for the boar with his playful hops and wiggles.

Next I decided on a spider – in my experience their web is second to none for keeping a mob tied up while you unload burst dps, so I picked up the red spindly rare from Duskwood and named her “Jorogumo” (“Jo Jo” for short) – this was the word for (wait for it!) a spider spirit. In addition to being shape changers they tended to be evil and so while they too enjoyed playing tricks on people, their tricks tended to be more harmful if not fatal.

My last choice was a moth – from my research I’d learned the Japanese along with many other cultures considered moths and butterflies symbols of reincarnation and in particular to be the forms that restless spirits sometimes took when visiting the world of the living. I tamed a Vicious Teromoth from Terrokar Forest, which at the time still kept its summoning animation (it made a “splat!” sound whenever you called it, and had a creepy green glow), and called it “Konpaku”, which basically meant “soul” in Japanese; now I had a pet from each family, complete with RP backdrop.

To tie it all together I decided that Jorogumo had pushed Khitsune and Tanuki into playing a trick on a crazy old Shinto monk who thought he was on a quest to right 1000 wrongs… normally Khit and Tanuki would not have dared pester a holy man, but they did not want to be seen to back down from a challenge and so they went along with it – unfortunately the prank went wrong and resulted in the old monk’s death, and so the three were rounded up by angels and brought to trial before the goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who decided to send the monk back to complete his quest as a giant moth, and sentenced Khit, Jo Jo and Tanuki to accompany and aid him in this pursuit as his faithful servants – or face expulsion to hell. Furthermore she took away their powers of shape changing and thereby locking them into the forms they’d held during their last, ill-fated prank.

The tricksters chose the option that avoided eternal torment and did their best to serve their sentence. Omikami put Khit in charge, she being smarter than Tanuki and if not good, then at least not evil like Jo Jo.

Eventually the sentence was served out, and Konpaku returned to heaven (not incidentally this was right about the time when Blizzard removed pets’ summoning animation, including Konpaku’s cool greenish glow…); however over the course of their sometimes humorous journeys aiding the Don Quixote-like Konpaku, a curious thing had happened to the three spirits – they had each developed a conscience, and doing good deeds now seemed the natural thing, try as they might to return to their old ways (a particularly sad realization for Jo Jo), so they just continued on with helping those in need and doing the things adventurers do.

With a little more work I was able to get her to exalted with the rest of the Horde factions, bought an epic skeletal warhorse, kodo and raptor, and went about setting up a macro to /castrandom a colorful mount whenever she needed to travel – I decided these creatures would either be mythical Shinto fauna (kodo), things she had a spiritual commonality with (warhorse) or simply just something that looked cool and let her ride it on account of her smelling more like an animal than a humanoid (raptor).

In addition to the new pets and mounts, I decided to get new professions as she couldn’t use 90% of the stuff she made with tailoring and enchanting was taking forever to go up (in addition to not seeming very useful to a mid-lvl hunter); both skills have worked out well for me on various other chars, but they just didn’t seem a good fit for this one, so I dropped them and went with herbalism/inscription.

Perhaps even more than providing raw mats for inscription, herbalism proved a boon in that it gave Khit Lifeblood, which was great for helping her to survive while channeling a point blank volley from the middle of a crowd of angry mobs; otherwise I can’t say the new profs have been terribly exciting – inscription costs a fortune in vellum, way more than just plunking down the occasional 5-10 gold for a new glyph (I’ve somewhat offset her costs with sale of practice glyphs but only partially, as glyphs appear to be a buyer’s market on her server)… it’s too bad they don’t have a selection of “BoP” glyphs that only inscriptionists can use – something like that would certainly make the profession a more attractive choice…

And last but not least I went with a new spec as well – previously she had used a nondescript BM spec, and despite a lot of misgivings about holding agro, decided to switch to the marksman tree – however with some careful planning and macro setup the new spec proved quite effective; I spent the rest of the time up to 68 in Nagrand looking for tough bosses to fight (she was able to solo the Windroc Matriarch, Cho’war the Pillager, Gurok the Usurper, the Master Planner, Banthar, Bach’lor and Tusker at level 66-67). Her dps is really head and shoulders over most of my other hunters, all else being equal, and while she inevitably will pull agro off her pet, they normally are able to keep the target tied up long enough for Khit to burn it down before it gets to her.

I also had been working on her fishing skill – previously I hadn’t been able to muster the patience to get this past 300 or so on any of my characters, but with a recent patch they replaced the “Your fish got away” message with a successful cast that returned a 6 cp junk item; now every cast counts as a potential skill up in any area, so no more “doing time” in Org, TB or SW trying to raise fishing skill enough to qualify for the areas you’d prefer to be casting in, and so by the time I made 68 and went to Northrend, she had 350 fishing and it made sense to work on Kalu’ak rep.

After a few quick upgrades, I spent the next few levels doing Kalu’ak dailies until finally Khit had attained exalted, and started using the epic +30 skill fishing pole; once that was done I settled in for a long grind fishing Northrend pools, and after 30 skillups or so was lucky enough to fish a sea turtle mount from one of the pools in Dragonblight, thus enabling her (with the Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole equipped) to zip around at +60% speed underwater with unlimited water breathing – and thanks to the accessibility of the Kalu’ak dailies, Khit can use this from level 71-80 instead of just sitting on her turtle’s back like a fixture outside the AH (as tends to happen with people who wait till 80 to go after it) – nice!

Being exalted with the Kalu’ak also got her some other benefits – right off she picked up the vanity pet Pengu, who looks cool and fits right in with her Shinto-y entourage, and once she makes it up to the lvl 76-78 area she’ll have access to some nice blue chainmail and weapons.

At 74 I plan to fill Konpaku’s spot with a Vargul Blighthound named “Kabuki”, which will give me back a ferocity pet – it was kind of disappointing when Blizzard took away her moth’s glow effect but I’ll be just as happy with her new fiery wolf spirit, and then at 76 I’m hoping to replace Jo Jo’s red model with a bonespider from IceCrown; same name just a different look. After that I’m thinking about maybe picking up dual spec and spending time in Scholazar basin, where I might try to tame Loque (since none of my other hunters have him and he would seem a good fit for her spiritual/ghostly theme) and perhaps a white gorilla (who look somewhat like the white monkeys indigenous to the mountains of Japan, and which would give her another spell interrupt).

WoW Profiles - Dougal at 74

2009-06-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

Level: 74
Spec: Beastmaster (“Shooty”)
Profs: Mining/Herbalism
Achievements: Exalted with Kurenai and Cenarion Expedition, tamed Nuramoc
Pets: Chimaera (“Nightmare”), silithid (“Lurk”), hyena (“Frenzy”)
Theme: Purple, creepy
Comments:
For most of his career, Dougal was the hunter I played when I was either tired of playing all of my other hunters or when I wanted to try out some new idea re: places to level, or some new spec or pet or other idea I got from browsing Petopia… prior to WotLK I’d gone with a spec that I call the windserpent build, e.g. (lots of +crit) + (gftt) + (efficient pet focus dump), but it hadn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped; despite frequent lightning breaths his flying serpent just couldn’t seem to hold aggro long enough to let me enjoy all of the flashy proc icons lighting up my screen.

Then along came patch 3.0 which changed my pet’s lightning breath from a very-efficient focus dump, to a bite with special effects, and I finally had to send it back to the wild and go back to the drawing board… I’d had some good results from my other survival hunter re: using what I call “slowing pets”, and didn’t currently have anyone using a chimaera or silithid, so I decided to see what I could do with the beastmaster tree – and doing as much as I could to keep the emphasis on shooting over tanking.

First off I figured if I was going to pick up a chimaera that I might as well have a go at taming the coolest model out there – Nuramoc, of course. After some research and a lot of ore gathering in Netherstorm with my other night elf hunter (who had an epic flying mount, happily), I was able to track down the elusive flying purple chitinous two headed gribbly – hooray! It also likely helped that most of the other hunters had either tamed this beast by now or were too busy checking out Northrend to care…

Now that Nuramoc was a definite, purple would be the new unifying color for this hunter, and so I went ahead and tamed a purple hyena and a red/purple silithid, and completed the theme with a trip to the barbershop – Dougal’s race proving to be a nice bonus here as night elves are the only hunter race able to get purple hair!

Next thing to do was concoct some sort of RP mini-story for Dougal and his new pets. At one time it seems Dougal collected some debts for a merchant on the Goblin Market, who sold creatures he had extracted from people’s dreams and nightmares via magical dream catcher, and by way of reward for his efforts Dougal was allowed to choose three creatures from the merchant’s cages, which he of course tamed and took adventuring.

So now what to do? Since my new pets were a combined 11 levels behind me, it made sense to focus on kills over quests – unfortunately most of the rep grinds in Northrend entail doing daily quests and dungeons – you don’t have nearly the range of options for kill rep that you did back in the Old World or Outlands, especially in the lower levels… however, I did notice that the Cenarion Expedition had made a reappearance in Borean Tundra, and even had an old style kill rep repeatable with a buff, so I decided that faction would be his new goal.

The first step was to do the last few unfinished Cenarion Expedition quest chains back in Outlands, and then I got going with their quests in Borean Tundra – by the time those were done I had just managed to break revered and could now use Warden’s Arrows, which had 5 more dps than the standard ammo available from Northrend vendors, as well as a nifty arcanum for his helm; then it was time to settle in for the long trip to exalted.

After a few weeks of harvesting “Hemingwary Lackey Ears”, I finally got there – by now I was lvl 74 and my pets were caught up to me. I then drained my savings on that server to get Dougal epic riding skill and a coveted Cenarion War Hippogryph; he wouldn’t be able to use it in Northrend for another 3 levels of course, but in the meantime he can harvest ore and herbs in style back in Outland…

The new spec has been working out well – although sinking 51 pts into BM inevitably forces you to pass up a lot of the more shooty talents in the other trees, there are still a few handy bits to be had such as serpent’s swiftness (+20% increased rate of fire), improved aspect of the hawk (for another +21% increased rate of fire with glyph, that is proc-based), aspect mastery (+ap), and some dmg bonuses (+9% with arcane shot and another +5% overall dmg bonus thanks to focused fire and ferocious inspiration), and you can get very good value for spending the remaining points on the early MM talents – I’ve found with this spec that instead of holding back on my DPS to allow the pet to retain aggro, it works much better to actively try to grab aggro away from it – hard to do with a BM pet (another plus of the BM tree), but worthwhile as my pets’ slowing spells give me the time to burn the mob down before it reaches me and in turn saving me from having to spend the extra mana on heals.

Going forward I’m thinking of moving Dougal to Zul’Drak and focusing on Argent Crusade rep, since he is now the minimum level for that area, and they appear to have the best (?) ranged rep reward weapon (and if I’m very luck and persistent I might even run across Gondria…).

Hunters – WotLK Pets

2008-07-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to post something about hunters, but despite it being my favorite class in WoW, I couldn’t really think of an angle that interested me enough to actually do it. Then the other day I noticed the Wrath of the Lich King hunter pets preview over at Petopia, and realized I’d found something to talk about – hunter pets are going to be revolutionized in a few months.

So, what will happen to our pets in November? I highly recommend going to the source for the full details (especially since they are regularly posting new updates as changes occur in beta), but if you want a quick preview, here are the essentials that I’ve been able to glean from the excellent research done by Mania and friends:

Pet families. Pets are now grouped into 3 distinct families according to basic function – cunning, ferocious and tenacious. The cunning family seems to be more about having PVP utility skills, while the ferocious and tenacious families contain the DPS and tank pets respectively. Stats are now based off of family rather than pet species, and a pet’s family will also determine which talents it is eligible for (“caster” pets apparently still have lower stats but this is supposed to be fixed soon).
Pet talents. These are accumulated at the rate of 1 every 4 levels beginning at level 20, and the pet can only choose from the tree assigned to its family. Talents are how your pet will “grow into” his family’s role; although a Beast Master spec’s pets will remain superior as you’d expect, it will no longer be necessary for a hunter to take the BM spec just to have a pet that is capable of pulling its own weight.
Implications. This is huge: no more pet trainer (well that’s not quite true – they are still available if you want to respec your pet), no more taming pets just to learn their new skill, no more spending ridiculous amounts of time raising your pets’ loyalty levels… and your third stable slot pet can now be a “keeper”. Apparently the basic pet feeding/loyalty mechanism will remain but only for the purpose of retaining the “happy” damage bonus and preventing it from eventually running away due to neglect.
Pet skills – Blizzard finally will be delivering on their promise to assign a unique ability to every species, so folks who stuck it out with their spider or croc will finally be rewarded for their perseverance. In general pets who already had a special skill will keep it as-is; this is mainly for the pets who previously had been ignored.

Some other bits

New species – They’ve moved owls over into a species called birds of prey, which also includes hawks and eagles. These birds can disarm an enemy and belong to the cunning family, so it looks like they may be handy vs uber geared pvp meleers. Also and more dramatically they have made moths tameable – these are ferocity pets with a pretty cool looking turbo boost/recovery skill and I will definitely be taming one or two of these for my hunters.
Exotic pets – level 60 BM spec hunters will be able to tame “special” pets available to noone else. So far Mania has confirmed that devilsaurs belong to this group, and I have heard that chimaera may also be tameable … this is very cool and I can’t wait to learn more about this.

New roles (IMO)

AOE pets – for the solo hunters out there, there will be 7 pets with AOE type abilities, with pretty even representation from all families (recommend taking BM spec for the cunning/ferocity pets though);

Cunning – dragonhawks and sporebats
Ferocity – carrion birds and tallstriders
Tenacity – bears, gorillas and crocolisks

Tank pets – these pets have the toughness for heavy solo’ing but lack AOE and so their main value lies in their ability to offtank in groups (just be aware that when the tank is holding aggro, the guys with cats and scorpids are going to be laughing at you);

Tenacity – crabs, boars, turtles and warpstalkers

PVP pets – for those who prefer the arena and want something relevant to that environment, there will be 7 pets with PVP type abilities; most are from the cunning family but the other families do make a brief appearance;

Cunning – bats, birds of prey, ravagers, spiders and nether rays*
Ferocity – hyenas*
Tenacity – crabs*

*Some of these pets are equally useful for PVP and solo play – PVE’ers take note.

Raid pets – not much has changed here, although as the list of known “exotic” pets expands this may change (note that raid pets are also fine for solo’ing and share the popularity of DPS pets within groups);

Ferocity – devilsaurs and wolves
Tenacity – scorpids

DPS pets – these pets are best for getting into groups who are “LF1M DPS”, and are also nice for casual solo’ing (the single target DPS is great vs 1-2 mob fights, but they won’t do as well as AOE pets in the larger rumbles);

Cunning – serpents and wind serpents
Ferocity – cats, moths and raptors

Other thoughts

Charge. The charge skill is being moved from boars over to the pets in the ferocity family. Initially I was kind of annoyed at that, because after all it is the boar’s trademark move; when you see it you think of something big and heavy coming in like a meteor and stunning its target with the impact – not something light and agile like a kitty or buzzard (plus I went to all that trouble to tame a blue agamar – how could they do this to me!)…

However, on further reflection I think there is a good justification for giving it to ferocity pets; charge is one of- if not the best- skill for a MM spec’s pet, and so they wanted to give it to more species so that MM spec hunters could have something with both the opening threat spike of a boar and the longterm DPS to continue holding aggro through a long fight.

It will be nice to be able to change some of my hunters from BM to MM, but I’m going to miss having it on my dwarf’s boar – currently my only MM spec hunter. I still don’t think it should have been taken away from boars (why can’t they just share it with the ferocity pets? There’s no good reason why it can’t be a pet skill for one and a talent for the other), but at least they did give them a damage bonus to gore while dashing, which is better than nothing I guess.

Dash/dive. This is the only bit that I still have an issue with; apparently this can now be purchased with the pet’s first talent point (i.e. at lvl 20), at the current rank 3 strength – not only is this overpowered for a level 20 pet IMO (there’s a reason why it currently isn’t available until lvl 30-36), it will now be available to every species. That’s right, come November we will be seeing giant galapagos turtles, kodiak bears and other extremely ponderous things zipping around the battlefield at the same speed as hawks and cheetahs (faster even than a lvl 30 mount). It’s going to look ridiculous, and detract from the “feel” of the tenacity pets. Why not give them cybernetic jet boosters and gun pods while they’re at it? Maybe the ability to polymorph into humanoids for covert operations, like a terminator? The possibilities become endless when you ignore game atmosphere. Seriously though I could possibly see giving tenacity pets dash rank 1, at a higher level (like say 40 or 50), just to reflect the general uberness of the high level creature, but rank 3? I gotta say this one just seems dumb (and I’m saying this as one of the prime “beneficiaries”).

Know what they could have done that would keep it balanced and preserve the pets’ feel? A) Limit tenacity pets to dash rank 1 as above but also B) give them a high level version of barding that actually shows up on the model itself. That I think would make everyone happy, or as close to it as can be accomplished. But it’s something they would have to do now if ever, because if they wait and do it after every last Tom Dick and Harry have their superfast bears, turtles etc, the screams of dismay from players who prefer things that look goofy and contrary to the feel of the game will be deafening and unending. Sadly I have a feeling this brainless change is going to sail all the way to the end zone without challenge… and you just know that either they extend it to lock pets or provoke a lot of complaining from that class (and rightly so)… and then next thing you know warriors will be angrily wondering why they aren’t getting turbo movement too…

All in all though I’m psyched about the new pet changes, and plan to follow this closely at Petopia.

Acknowledgment

Once again I’d like to thank everyone at Petopia for providing such a huge wealth of information on the upcoming pet changes to us hunter addicts!

Denise Amber Lee

2008-07-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Primetime on ABC, and I'm still reeling. Tonight's story was on the kidnapping and murder of Denise Lee. By itself this certainly qualifies as an act of sheer, subhuman evil, but isn't what has me stunned; if it was, I'd be reduced to a gibbering heap anytime I flipped through the news. Such things sadden me, but sooner or later you either go nuts or deaden your emotional nerve endings.

Not this time. This was not "just another" fatality, in the sense that police weren't even notified until long afterward, and had little to work with beyond some very old DNA traces and maybe a suspicious number on the victim's calls list - here the poor woman was taken from her home by Michael King, right in front of her two little boys and just a little before her husband was back from work, and yet within a short time she managed to quietly dial 911 on the kidnapper's own cell phone... and was then able to keep the line open for 6 minutes while she kept him distracted by pleading for her life.

Now, I'm no expert on tracing calls but just speaking as an average joe, I'd have thought 6 minutes would be enough time to trace a call; I can recall a company I used to work for where people would occasionally dial 911 while attempting to place outbound calls (the kind of phone network where you dial "9" ahead of the number to indicate that it's outside the company) - they would usually realize their mistake and hang up while the number was still dialing - and not more than a couple minutes later a cruiser would be out front. That's all it took.

In fact it got so prevalent that the local PD threatened to start billing the company for each accidental 911 call, which is how I first learned of it - through a company wide memo telling everyone they'd better be careful how they dial their calls or be prepared to pony up the $100 fine themself.

Needless to say the experience gave me the sense that dialing 911 was a serious act that got results - fast. So when I learned on Primetime that police were unable to get the phone's location during that time, I was kind of blown away. But, they at least managed to determine who the phone belonged to, so it wasn't a total loss - and maybe cell phones are much harder to trace, let's give the police the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Well, they checked the guy's house - recently gone, TV still on, pieces of duct tape lying around with Denise's hair on them, but the trail has gone cold.

Then apparently King's running low on gas but doesn't want to stop at a gas station with a screaming woman in his car, so instead he drives to his cousin Harold Muxlow's house and asks - with Denise in the car screaming and trying to get out - if he can borrow a can of gas and a shovel, because his mower is stuck in a ditch and is out of gas. Think it can't get more insane? Denise managed to get out of the car, at which point Muxton saw she was tied up, she says "call the police!" and King shoves her back in the car and drives away - with his shovel and fresh gas.

So, not having done anything to stop a self-evident atrocity in progress, can Muxlow manage to even pick up his phone and call 911?

Almost - he later picks up his phone but instead of calling 911, this waste of oxygen calls... his daughter. Who urges him to you know, call the police and stuff... but he still won't do it... so finally it is his DAUGHTER who makes the (latest) call to 911. By that time this call will only be useful after the fact when the DA is building a case against the murderer.

After this, Primetime reported that 2 different witnesses saw Denise crying, screaming and struggling in the back of King's green Camaro as the murderous dimwit drove around looking for a place to kill the girl. Did either of them call 911? Follow the car? Anything? Well, one guy said he thought it was a "domestic dispute" and "didn't want to get involved", and the other said he had dialed 911 and was about to click send but changed his mind because King drove off in a different direction.

Finally someone (whose head was not shoved up their ass, for a refreshing change) saw King and Denise, and called 911. They played the audio of that call on Primetime, and my jaw just slowly settled down into my lap; here is the caller Jane Kowalski telling them she's next to a blue Camaro with a screaming girl in the back seat... the driver is reaching back and pushing her down... the girl's hand is violently smashing against the window from below... there are patrol cars all over that very area looking for a Camaro with a screaming girl in it... but the operator keeps asking her to repeat herself and is then making Kowalski hold so she can repeat her words to someone offline; when Kowalski states the camaro is about to make a turn and should she follow it, the operator pauses to relay that too... and the opportunity is lost as the caller becomes separated from the kidnapper's car in the traffic while awaiting word whether she should follow or not.

A perfectly reasonable question for the caller to ask; after all she is speaking to a police dispatcher and should be able to expect some lawful instruction, but simple as the question is "should I follow him?", the operator makes her repeat the question and then has to consult, again, with whoever it is in the background.

That was the last chance these fools got - Denise's body was found a couple days later less than three miles from where the last witness saw her struggling, kicking, screaming and thrashing in the back of the killer's camaro.

You see, while every other last bit of the description was an exact match to the kidnapper and his victim that police were actively searching that very area for, Jane Kowalski said the camaro was "blue", and so the police wrote it off presumably as some other kidnapping-in-progress rather than the one they were looking for.

The dispatcher didn't even notify local officers of the call - because (get ready for it) she thought the "other dispatcher" had done it (this would eventually be admitted to be "a missed opportunity" by the police chief). If you were still capable of feeling surprise or shock by now, this should cinch it.

Watching these events unfold was beyond surreal - excluding the efforts of Jane Kowalski and Muxlow's daughter Sabrina, this was such a mind bending series of fuckups it was like something out of Monty Python, except with a horribly real outcome - seeing the reactions of Denise's husband and her father, and seeing the two small boys who now have no mother, made it all too real, and it has chilled me straight through.

In the couple hours I've been writing this, the source of that chill has finally become clear - it's from the combination not only of inhuman evil, but also of the fabulous stupidity that made it possible for this murder to even happen at all - here is an evil shitbag with no brains who nonetheless blunders his oafish way through a kidnapping and murder, even having to make a stop in broad daylight to borrow the shovel and flashlight, and gas just to keep his car running, and yet everything just still seems to somehow go his way; at every turn, people get a new chance to foil the crime in progress, and yet they somehow keep dropping the ball until finally poor Denise's chances run out.

Michael King was apprehended a few hours after if was too late for Denise, but hopefully the DA at least will possess the basic competence that seems to have eluded the police dispatchers - serving justice on this filth is the one thing the government can still do right by Denise and her family.

Well, they did also pass the Denise Amber Lee act which apparently requires police dispatchers to have an IQ in the triple digits before they are allowed to answer emergency calls... but of course that isn't mandatory yet, due to "budgetary constraints"... but it's something I guess.

The police dispatchers still have their jobs... and so does the police chief who stonewalled and played down their role. I'm not always a big fan of the Mainstream Media, but this is one of those times when I find myself very grateful for their coverage; I respect police officers a great deal, and always try to give them the benefit of the doubt when any questions arise in the news about their performance or integrity, but as far as I'm concerned the dispatchers involved (the last 2 anyway) are a public danger and should not - ever - be manning another emergency line. And the police chief just came off as an evasive, oily fuck with no sense of accountability (apparently he only even admitted to the "missed opportunity" thing after it blew up in the papers). Denise's husband is going to be suing that department and I hope he wins enough to make the state sit up and take notice in the very direct and personal way that a financial loss will do.

Well, I hope anyone reading this will consider going over to Denise's website-in-memoriam to learn more, and hopefully the Denise Lee act will get enough support to become mandatory - I don't know what sort of internal environments and policies made it possible for this to happen but I sure hope it gets looked at and fixed before someone else is allowed to fall through the cracks.

Leveling Alts - Casual World Events

2008-07-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve raised some 20 or so characters on various servers, and played pretty much all of the game’s solo content… over, and over. And over. 3 have made it to 70 so far, and the rest are now mostly idling at levels ranging from the teens to the sixties.

My primary motivation in trying to level this crowd of alts has so far been mainly to grow characters into talent specs that I thought would be interesting, and then find out how the character “handles”, with the best gear I can lay hands on.

However, this has lost a lot of its luster.

The fact is I am actually pretty easily amused; it used to be pretty easy to find motivation from things like…

New classes. I’ve played everything short of druids and priests at this point.

Special mounts. Plan on getting a cross-race mount for the alt by running around finishing entire regions’ worth of quests for rep gain, to add a bit of flare to the lvl 40+ experience.

Pokemon. More of my toons are hunters than any other single class, and it can be fun to “shop” for new/interesting beasts over at Petopia, and then level up the hunter alt to find and tame them.

Dustwallow Marsh content. The new quests in DW marsh help make the trip from L33-41 more interesting (although they don’t give much rep so if you’re working on a cross-race mount you may want to skip these).

Trade skills. Research trade skills really closely and plan an alt’s questing/farming/etc around that, to pick up cool new items I’de never bothered with previously (or hadn’t gotten around to learning early enough to benefit from).

Twinking. No description needed for this one – this has produced mixed results for me, helping with some alts (like tanks and shaman) while making others boring as hell.

Rep grinding. I’ve made it to anywhere from honored to exalted with most of the factions currently available, and am currently grinding SSO with my lvl 70s when I get around to it. This however only really becomes practical in the Outlands since the BC expansion, since the old lvl 50-60 factions just don’t increase fast enough to give you anything worthwhile by the time you are high enough for Outlands.

Outlands rewards. The fresh burst of high quality gear available at lvl 58 used to be a big incentive; by the time you finish the quests in Hellfire Peninsula most if not all of your old pre-BC gear (pretty much regardless of quality) will be replaced by sweet new upgrades.

Patch items. The new armor made available in patch 2.4 for level 70s is still kind of a nice incentive… once the character finally makes level 70.

All of the above got me a long ways – you can almost hear the jaws dropping into laps when other players ask me how many characters I play, and see my reply – but lately I’ve been finding there seems to be only one reliable draw for me, and that is world events.

Once upon a time, I used to loathe world events – patches always seemed to take longer when they were being loaded, world server restarts seemed a lot more prevalent, and they just seemed… silly. Back then of course we had 30-45 minute login queues, which made me a lot more irritable and prone to view things like this in a negative light.

Yet almost inevitably when a new world event launches now, I’m over at wowwiki doing my research and seeing what alt I want to send after which reward, what dungeon to make sure and visit for the special boss, etc.

It’s also helped a lot that the more recent world events have included some decent (i.e. combat-relevant) rewards, but honestly I’m so bored with everything else in WoW that even the chance of obtaining a “blue” non-combat pet is usually a big incentive for me.

Which brings me finally to the point of this post – why do world events have to always be tied to holidays? Does it really have to be a semi-monthly thing that is more about world travel than fighting? Fun as that is, how about something a bit more regular and integrated with existing areas/quests/factions?

There is a ton of game content in the pre-Outlands areas, but it’s all been played so many times that the thought of collecting 8 more boar tusks for some crappy piece of +spi gear just makes me bleak.

So, why not design an occasional event that is based in these areas but involves new NPCs involved in special, limited time activities? This should be a no-brainer – all over the world you have scheming factions like the Dark Iron Dwarves, Stranglethorn pirates, etc hoping to put a dent in the established world order – well, just build something out of those conflicts, with a few “hook” NPCs scattered around the capitals or whatever to alert players to the new quests/grinds.

It wouldn’t need to be anything too crazy; even perhaps a dozen events that repeat at random intervals would be a nice boost to flagging interest in leveling yet another alt. It's not even unprecedented - think of the Shattrath cooking daily quest as a mini-example.

I know this would not be “easy” to develop, but it needn’t be as sweeping as the holiday events either – all that’s really needed is enough exp to get you perhaps 2-3 levels of exp and some rewards – greens are fine so long as they have intelligently allocated stats (i.e. like they did with BC items and rewards in the new DW Marsh quests) and not garbage like most of the pre-BC rewards are (“w00t! Another reward with +2 stamina and +9 spirit! Yeah baby!!”) - if I wanted something that lame I could just buy it from weapon/armor vendors...

Of course, long before Blizzard even thinks about anything like this, they will roll out Wrath of the Lich King, and figure they’ve solved the alt-leveling problem by simply diverting players into unlocking heroic classes (which begin life at lvl 40).

Which won’t solve anything; all that will do is kick the can further down the road, unless they intend heroic classes to actually replace all of the pre-existing ones… otherwise, if you think leveling an alt from 1-70 sucks, just think how much fun it will be to do it from 1-80...

0-400 In 3 Days (Midsummer Redux)

2008-06-30T09:11:00.001-07:00

After a lot of trekking and juggling, I recently obtained a fire pet of one kind or another for two of my level 70s, and attempted to go back to my daily grinding and put the Midsummer Bonfires event out of my mind... but the more I tried, the more I got to thinking about the Midsummer cloth gear.

As I already have too much of that kind of thing cluttering up the bank vaults on my high level characters, I got to thinking about my fire mage – collecting dust at lvl 5 since he did the Halloween events, the Midsummer outfit seemed perfect for him.

So, off he went. I needed an intimidating 400 blossoms to purchase the robes, shoulders and boots, so I determined to complete every honor/desecration within reach; this resulted in yet more time spent running about the game world, interrupted by the occasional round of daily torch tossing and juggling…

By now I can do the tossing in my sleep, and the juggling is nearly as easy save for the occasional lag spike forcing me to restart (it also helps that there is usually no more than 1 other player trying the juggling at any given time). However, I discovered that for a lowbie, the damage from missing a torch is negligible, which was a nice bonus. So that netted me around 40-50 blossoms, counting the “intro” quests.

This time around I remembered to buy a handful of flowers early on with my spare 2 blossoms (good for nothing else), and held onto them while I ran about looking for bonfires to pee on.

By now, Horde PVPers finally were beginning to take notice of us flagged bonfire runners, and I actually had my one and only death due to enemy player when I blundered into a ?? level tauren druid who promptly rooted and zapped me after extinguishing their bonfires in Thousand Needles.

Later in Ratchet while flagged and returning from another desecration, I passed a blood elf couple. Remembering my midsummer flowers, I dumped them all over the girl and then ran to the flight master while her rogue boyfriend attempted to give chase – sadly for him, I hopped a flight to Stone Talon before he could get in a backstab. Ah, petty satisfactions…

By the time I’d finished all of the locations in Eastern Kingdoms, I had just enough for the robes and shoulders, and so I was able to do the Western Kingdoms “in style”; Kalimdor seemed to take for freakin’ ever, but finally I wrapped that up too, and the boots were mine.

By now, I had gone from lvl 5 to 12, and had every flight path unlocked save Winterspring and Thalanaar, which were just too far out of the way to bother with. I also had about 1g, which was enough for all of my training with plenty to spare… and of course now I can stand around and dance with my hands and feet on fire while wearing my “Lookit-me-I’m-special” midsummer outfit that is already subpar for lvl 12 gear...

It was fun though, and the flight paths should be a nice bonus with this toon’s future leveling (and with getting him a Spirit of Summer at next year’s Fire Festival!).

World of Warcraft - Midsummer Fire Festival

2008-06-25T14:13:00.001-07:00

Having repeatedly failed to work up the motivation to acquire the willowisp pet at previous Midsummer events, I was determined to hit the ground running this year – especially since I was looking forward to solo’ing some level 50-60 instances with my level 70 toons.

But I was in for a surprise when I went and checked the wowwiki event guide; the event designers were one step ahead of me and re-arranged this year’s event to both make the Spirit of Summer available to (potentially) everyone BUT with the condition that you still have to work for it – regardless of your level.

Which was kind of irksome (What? No free ride for bored level 70’s?), until I noticed they had added a new “pet” as an alternative – a stationary summonable brazier that emits a dancing female draenei, for all those who didn’t want to be seen going around with a glowing ball.

For myself, I determined to get both; the Spirit of Summer would be kind of neat for my night elf hunter, whose look and pets were intended to suggest a slightly ghostly nature, and the Brazier would be just the thing for my rude, crude orc hunter.

After completing some brief and forgettable intro quests that netted me maybe 20-30 of the 350 burning blossoms needed to purchase my Spirit of Summer aka Captured Flame, it boiled down to this –

1) The maypole now gives you a +exp buff, and has a pretty cool spinning weapon animation to try and make it user friendly to people who otherwise would not want to be seen dancing around a pole…

2) 3 dailies that net you 20 blossoms total, and

3) A heckuva lot of traveling around the game world, clicking on friendly bonfires for 5 blossoms and enemy ones for 10 (non-repeatable)

4) Sneaking into enemy capitals and shutting down their fires (non-repeatable)

5) A special boss called Ahune that can be summoned in the Underbog a la the Headless Horseman from the Halloween event (can be summoned once per day per player)

As far as the dailies go. The torch tossing is essentially a game of whackamole that is fairly easy once you hotkey your torch. Even if you fail, you can restart instantly, so it’s not too bad. This quest is worth 5 blossoms.

The torch catching event is quite a bit harder IMO; the trick is to turn up your spell detail setting to max so you can see the shadow under your torch, and then follow it around (actually you need to stay slightly ahead of it but that’s the gist) until you’ve racked up 10 catches. This also gets you 5 blossoms.

This one took a lot more time to get the hang of, and even once I got so that I could complete it reasonably reliably, it was still a pain and I decided ultimately to abandon it; maybe if they’d suppressed the torches of other players from your screen (the way they hide the fishing lines of other players) to reduce torch clutter, or given the maypole a heal effect to reduce downtime resulting from missed catches (a missed catch results in an explosion that eats a chunk of your hp), or even just raised the blossom reward, but as it stands this was just too much bother. Too bad, because it was one of the cooler looking events…

Then there is the “Striking Back” daily, which as far as I can see entails summoning and killing a very easy non-elite mob – being level 70 both of my hunters were tasked with killing a level 63 rock giant in Hellfire Peninsula, but lower level characters presumably are given correspondingly lower level targets somewhere else (?). This ridiculously easy task gets you 10 blossoms if you feel like schlepping it out to Hellfire Peninsula. I did it once and then decided to skip it – just too frickin’ boring to justify the trip.

Boredom was not wholly avoidable however – if you don’t plan on limiting yourself to the miniscule 20 blossoms a day from the above quests, you need to travel around the world “honoring” friendly bonfires and “desecrating” enemy ones, both in Outlands and back on Azeroth; honoring the friendly bonfires is essentially the same as visiting the elders during the Chinese New Year event, and each one gives you 5 blossoms if you can survive the monotony.

Desecrating enemy bonfires is a bit more interesting and goes a long way toward breaking up the tedium of doing the "honoring" quests (this is where the bulk of my blossoms came from); you shut down the enemy fire, located near an enemy town, receive 10 blossoms, and become pvp flagged. In short, if you are willing to deal with a pvp flag, you can triple your blossoms earnings.

Even for someone like myself, who only plays on pve servers and assiduously avoids all pvp, this was too much to pass up, and so I did it… on “wimpy” mode – I switched out most of my normal gear for a variety of non-combat pieces gleaned from previous world events, to avoid armor repairs should I get one shotted by an actual pvp player, stayed on aspect of the beast to give the slip to enemy hunters, and used my humanoid tracking to try and avoid unwanted company.

This all proved to be paranoid overkill; I suspect that either not many pvp’ers have noticed all the new targets running around their zones this early in the event, or else we just aren’t worth their time. Either way, I managed to shut off a ton of enemy bonfires without attracting barely any notice (it was surprisingly easy to do in Outlands with my night elf, who had a netherdrake)…

There was one humorous exception; when I was desecrating the Alliance bonfire outside Southshore, a pair of level 40s decided to take a shot at my naked orc; it was kind of funny to watch him quietly beating them to death with his bare hands, while their spells bounced off harmlessly… after that I left my weapons equipped in case any other low level morons decided to get friendly, but no such luck.

Just as well though – I don’t need to be getting a swelled head from joke encounters like that. Ganking pugnacious lowbies might be satisfying until you hang around a little too long and run into their level 70 alt…

Anyway, over the course of a few days I managed to earn enough blossoms to accomplish both objectives, and am now taking a breather. As usual when working my ass off for something with no actual combat relevance, achieving my end goal has resulted in conflicted feelings – on the one hand, I feel like “Hells YEAH! The grind is over and I got the blue whatsit! Woohoo!”, but on the other hand I’m like “Sooo… how many hours did I just spend on getting something that does nothing to improve my game beyond looking cool…?”. Well, so it goes I guess.

Bonus tips: two seemingly useless blossom rewards, the Handful of Summer Blossoms, and the Fiery Festival Brew, are actually nice little tools for sassing enemy players you run across while traveling between bonfires; feel like getting fresh with a passing gnome girl? Sprinkle a cloud of flowers over her and watch her stand there nonplused. Got /mooned and /spit on again by a dwarf with a name like "Ipwnulawlzorz"? Belch a cloud of stanky napalm all over him and see if he can top that. At just 2 blossoms for a stack of 5, these will go along way toward enlivening your bonfire trips and making it a more memorable experience.

I am planning on trying Ahune this coming weekend with my night elf, should be interesting. Otherwise I’ve thought about trying the capital bonfires quests, but I’m just not sure it’s worth it; even for me, I think the frivolity level may be too high – I’m willing to put up with a lot for the sake of getting a different looking mount or non-combat pet, but I tend to draw the line at stuff that occupies an actual weapon or armor slot, like the Midsummer crown. I know that no one actually wears these things into instances and such, but frankly I'm too lazy to go to that much effort for something that will spend 99% of its time in the bank, so the crown is probably out for me.

On the whole I felt this year's version of the Midsummer event was an improvement over last year but still not as good as events like Winterfest, Brewfest or the Halloween event - the bonfires while interesting are not fantastically imaginative and there is no real overarching backdrop to it (and no, the twilight cult events are just too forgettable/un-integrated to count as a backdrop); in short the Midsummer Fire Festival is reasonably entertaining but just got no soul, dig? Unlike the more successful events this one isn't really tied back to anything much in the real world. When you do Winterfest, it's overlaid by the pleasant sense that Christmas is approaching (if in a PC, gamer-friendly format); when you do the Halloween event, you're feeling some small nostalgia for childhood recollections of spooky stories and telephone poles strung with toilet paper; even the Chinese New Year event while not terribly familiar to most (Western) cultures, still is (overall) fairly interesting and has a coherent feel to it even if your only exposure to the Chinese culture is restricted to Kung Fu flicks... but with Midsummer Fire Festival, it just feels more generic.

Next year I'm hoping they'll re-evaluate this event and tie it into actual summertime activities people can relate to (no the maypole doesn't count - even for a Wicca practitioner, there should be a lot more than just that one thing); one idea would be to integrate beach events - you could have horde/alliance "commoners" appearing on beach areas near oceans and lakes, including quest givers and various other special events, where the idea is to give people incentives to hang around and participate in scheduled events.

For example:

1) Muscle beach. /flex or /flirt at admiring NPC beachgoers and receive small buffs, like the Winterfest mistletoe event

2) Surfing. Receive a daily timed surfboard and swim out to “turbulent water” spots; these pop you up on top of your board and let you move at high speed for a short distance before you sink back down – each time a turbulent water node is touched, it disappears and a new one appears nearby, allow you to zip from one to the next without sinking, if you’re fast enough (and which will look sort of like actual surfing). Hitting enough of these within the time frame completes the quest.

3) Meanies. Every hour or so, a designated gang of gate crashers shows up and tries to ruin everyone’s fun – it could be murlocs, pirates, naga etc all bent on putting out local bonfires. These bonfires are only targetable by npcs during the scheduled event (i.e. opposing faction cannot interfere, although they can score points the rest of the time by doing it). If players prevent them from extinguishing all of the bonfires, a mini-boss emerges from the water and wreaks havoc.

4) Bullies. You can go to an enemy faction beach spot, and click on scattered lumps of sand to kick it at NPC beachgoers or enemy players – hitting an enemy NPC beachgoer sends the target running away and performing the /cry emote – both will earn you some points, apply a small buff to yourself and a small debuff to the target, and flag you for /pvp; obviously you get more for hitting an enemy player.

5) Hungry crowd. Another daily event involves manning the grills and producing enough burgers and dogs to feed a large demanding crowd of NPCs . Kind of like the bandage quest; as nearby patrons get hungrier they start to grow and turn red, so as the food items finish cooking you throw them at the hungriest to make them go away; any that stay unfed for too long begin eating the other patrons.

6) Fishing. You fish for special catches, buy special bait with earned event points, which lets you get cooler catches etc all the way up to some kind of noncombat pet. You also may be able to reel in a giant murloc that attacks everyone in sight.

For now though I'm mostly just looking forward to the next Brewfest – looks like there may now be an easier way of getting a Kodo than doing pvp or hitting exalted with Thunderbluff…

Guide to Aldor vs. Scryer 101

2008-06-04T09:14:00.001-07:00

There are about 1,000,053 or so posts on this, however the ones I’ve seen either leave it at saying “they’re both good”, or else run-on with an exhaustive and fairly inconclusive breakdown, so I’m posting this in an attempt at creating the 1,000,054^th in a hopefully more brief and usable format.

I’ll provide the material differences below but the short version is this: Scryer is the one to go with outside of a niche market; Aldor can be a good choice for resto specs and for sword-using meleers (who prefer solo play and are willing to do a sick amount of rep grinding), but otherwise Scryer is the overall better choice; they have something for everyone and are better for anyone with crit based talents or spells.

Let’s take a look at the breakdown between rewards; this is all based on my personal recollections and research I've done over at wowwiki, so feel free to post a comment if you think of something I missed.

Shoulder Inscriptions:

(Aldor) Dodge, healing, spell dmg/heal or attack power at honored vs (Scryer) defense, mp5, crit or spell crit at honored; at exalted each side gets improved inscriptions that mostly combine the effects of both sides however each side retains a slight edge with their “original” stat bonuses.
Commentary: this right here is why I generally prefer Scryer; +dmg, +ap and +heal are pretty common among the Outlands drops and (especially) quest rewards, while bonuses to crit (especially spell crit) are less so, and casters can never get enough +mp5 regardless of spec.

Gear:

(Aldor) Blue mage’s robes vs (Scryer) nothing at honored
(Scryer) Blue rogue/feral druid leggings at revered, no Aldor equivalent
(Aldor) Blue mage’s staff vs (Scryer) blue healer’s staff at revered
(Aldor) Blue rogue/hunter’s ring vs (Scryer) blue caster trinket at revered
(Aldor) Blue tank breastplate vs (Scryer) blue fury warrior gauntlets at revered
(Aldor) Epic 1h sword (+hit, +ap) vs (Scryer) epic dagger (+agi, +sta) at exalted. This is one of the few epic weapons available through solo grinding and stands out among them as the only non-dagger that I can recall.
(Aldor) Epic caster necklace vs (Scryer) epic mage ring at exalted
Commentary: About the same overall, although as mentioned Aldor does have the epic sword which makes it one of the few factions to give epic weapons (that you can earn outside instances and doing pvp) and unique among those as being the only one to give something besides a dagger, which is handy if you actually want something cool looking for your main hander (note that dual wielding chars who choose Aldor for the sword as a main hander can pair it up with the epic Consortium dagger, though they will spend most if not all of their time from 60-70 rep farming...)

Leatherworking:

(Aldor) Tank’s armor kit – 8 def, vs (Scryer) caster’s armor kit – 3 mp5
(Aldor) Blue leather and chainmail w/fire resist vs (Scryer) blue leather and chainmail w/arcane resist; all have gem sockets
Commentary: the armor kits are both decent, however as more chars have mana bars than not, again Scryer is overall the better choice. In re: armor, these are only really desirable if you need +resist more than any other stat, or if you desperately need 1-2 more gem sockets for meta requirements, otherwise the armor isn’t much to speak of.

Blacksmithing:

(Aldor) Blue platemail w/fire resist vs (Scryer) blue armor w/arcane resist; as above all of these have gem sockets
Commentary: as above re: resistances and sockets – neither side is great for blacksmiths.

Alchemy:

(Aldor) Nothing vs (Scryer) +fire dmg potion
Commentary: A nice extra for fire mages, chalk up another slight advantage to Scryer.

Tailoring:

(Aldor) Blue cloth armor w/fire resist (no gems), vs (Scryer) no armor
(Aldor) Healer’s armor kit – heal/dmg/sta vs (Scryer) mage’s armor kit (+more dmg/sta)
Commentary: the armor kits are both nice depending on your class, though obviously healers benefit more from the aldor kit while every other mana using class would want the Scryer one. Although Aldor is the only one that gets cloth armor, these are only useful if you need +fire resist more than any other stat, and since they have no sockets there is no meta utility, so I don’t really consider this noteworthy.

Jewelcrafting:

(Aldor) Yellow (+6 spell crit) and purple cuts (healer stats) vs (Scryer) red (+7 spell dmg) and green (mage stats) cuts; note these are all green quality gem cuts.
(Aldor) Blue shadow resist necklace vs (Scryer) nature resist necklace; both have 10 charges of AOE effect for helping party members.
Commentary: Nothing really great here either way, though as usual Aldor is a little better for healers.

L70 S2 PVP Sets – Finally Some PVE Love

2008-05-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

Having finally gotten my shaman to 70 as a mostly solo/PVE player, I noticed a recent addition that apparently arrived in patch 2.4 along with the other goodies – blue PVP armor sets being sold for cheap by Outland quartermasters.

“Cheap” as in, not much gold and none of those everpresent PVP tokens/marks/goobers/wingdings required. What’s the catch? The pieces are spread across the basic faction quartermasters (Thrallmar/Honor Hold, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, The Sha’tar and Keepers of Time), and you need honored standing to purchase them.

This isn’t a big deal, for the most part – you can make that rep with Thrallmar/HH just by doing the quests in Hellfire Peninsula, and Cenarion Expedition, The Sha’tar and Lower City should all be well into friendly by now if you've quested in Zangarmarsh, Terrokar Forest and Nagrand - and can be raised the rest of the way with repeatables or the few odds and ends you may have overlooked on your way through while grinding to 70 (also note: you can get about 1.7k rep with Lower City from the Children's Week event, if it happens to be around that time of year). This means that for the average solo player, Keepers of Time is really the only one you will have to spend any length of time grinding for (maybe 10-15 runs on normal mode based on a quick read of wowwiki).

Shaman are lucky, being one of the classes that get multiple sets to choose from, so I’ll be going with 4 pieces of seer’s mail for my elemental shaman, with shoulders of seer’s ringmail; having 4 of a kind gets me the highest set bonus for seer’s mail, meaning I can leave shoulders to be the "odd man out" without really losing anything (ringmail and seer’s mail are fairly close in stats), and it best of all it saves me having to worry about KoT rep (not so lucky with my hunters though, who have only one set and therefore have to deal with the KoT rep if they want the chest piece) .

While these pieces are PVP gear, they are still better for PVE than anything available from the basic (non-instance/raid) quests (once you load them up with gems, armor kits and enchantments) - including nearly all of the stuff at the Shattered Sun Offensive quartermaster if you happen to be an elemental spec shaman, so it’s a nice tip of the hat to those of us who prefer solo grinding, even though the obvious intention here is to give non-PVP’ers an incentive to try PVP.

I think Blizzard finally realized that for a lot of gamers, PVP just seems like more trouble than it’s worth – formerly with PVP there really was no “dipping your toe in the water”, “messing around”, or “trying it out”; in the immortal words of Yoda, “There is no try, only do”. Pretty much the instant you enter an arena, agree to a duel, or turn on your /pvp flag, things get ugly fast, as you try to flail your way through a fight in PVE gear.

Prior to patch 2.4, end game PVP seemed like kind of a catch 22 to “outsiders” like myself; you couldn’t really succeed at PVP until you had at least decent PVP gear, but you couldn’t get decent PVP gear until you succeeded at PVP. Or so it seemed anyway, and so I was content to stick with solo/PVE content.

I recently finished grinding LC rep on my elemental shammy and one of my hunters, so for now I'll be working on gems and armor kits - once that's all set though, who knows. I might just have a go at a battleground.

Good job, Blizzard.

The Mist: A Cthulhoid Extravaganza

2008-05-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

I never read the novella, and first heard of the movie when I was googling for info on Cloverfield a few months back; it was one of a number that Cloverfield got compared to by viewers, with mixed reactions. It wasn’t enough to motivate me to see it at the time however, and I promptly forgot about The Mist until it showed up in our Blockbuster mail rentals a few days ago.

Although I doubt there are many people who have not yet seen it that would still be interested, I’ll throw in the mandatory disclaimer: this is full of spoilers. That said I can’t say I’d recommend this to everyone, so reading this may be preferable – for now I’ll just say that the movie is well done, but has 1-2 parts that may be a bit much even for regular horror fans...

This was a very creepy movie. I don’t like everything that I’ve seen/read from Stephen King, but he is undeniably a master of character development and of getting under the viewer’s skin, and both effects were in full throttle throughout this flick’s 2 hrs 5 minutes.

The movie’s namesake shows up rather quickly and without a lot of advance warning – you get introduced to the main character David Drayton and watch some brief character development before the cast is assembled in a supercenter (kind of a colossal general store a la Walmart), where they will be spending most of the movie trying to hold it together and keep the creepies out.

As it happens a nearby military base has been conducting experiments on ways to view and interact with other dimensions, and (surprise!) Something Went Wrong ™ (and in fine Evil Government tradition the experiments of course have to be conducted at a base near a population center).

We don’t know what exactly happened there, but it seems likely that the base wasn’t overrun all at once; among the supercenter’s refugees are 3 soldiers who had originally planned on stopping just to pick up supplies and leave town before the mist overtook them, so there was probably some initial attempts at a holding action.

The mist turns out to contain a variety of invariably nasty things; basically a collection of weird super-predators from beyond, who are mostly confounded by the tall sheets of plate glass separating them from the folks huddled inside the supercenter, only accidentally getting inside once.

Early on, the citizens learn that no one survives for more than a few seconds outside or near open doors (well almost no one – in a miraculous stroke of serendipity one woman manages to walk home and reach safety though we only learn she made it at the end of the movie), so everyone cringes together watching the mist through the windows, slowly going to pieces.

A little after darkfall, a swarm of massive dragonfly/wasp things dot the glass, attracted to the lights inside. By itself this isn’t a problem, except that these huge bugs are being hunted by man-sized pterodactyl flyers which end up cracking and then breaking the glass as they fly down to snatch their prey, and soon both species get their first taste of human.

Although most survive to see morning, this event accelerates the crowd’s descent into collective madness and causes them to merge around the town’s crazy woman Mrs. Carmody in a scenario reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Mrs. Carmody interprets the Mist as the biblical Armageddon, and doesn’t have to work very hard to sell the idea to her terrified co-refugees.

One thing I do want to say on this – a lot of the reviews I’ve read of this movie are careful to mention that the reviewers found the people scarier than the monsters. Come on. I know it’s cool to do the I’ve seen the enemy and it is US thing, but seriously, while I do agree it would be quite alarming to be stuck amidst a mob of desperate hysterical people like this, I have to say I’d take the lot of them over a nest of tentacles wetly splitting open to reveal hissing, vertical mouths lined with fangs, and I suspect most anyone else would too were they faced with the situation. I mean there’s a reason why these people are sticking together and not running outside to escape eachother and take their chances with the monsters – it’s because the monsters are frickin’ scary, and not merely in a metaphorical sense.

Anyway, before long the scared mob has turned angry and begins arranging human sacrifices under Carmody’s direction, in an effort to appease the things in the mist (never mind that this is set in Maine where most if not all of the people in the store would be familiar with the idea that leaving food outside just attracts large predators).

As a result Drayton finally feels compelled to lead the last few Independent Thinkers away from the frothing herd in a last dash for safety, killing Mrs. Carmody and losing a few of their own to outside critters in the process, and ultimately making a triumphant drive by the storefront windows in the hero’s Range Rover as the others look on in slack jawed despair like so many cavemen whose last carefully hoarded ember has extinguished in the rain.

We get to see the state of the countryside in the mist’s aftermath – giant spiders have everything webbed and cocooned, including Drayton’s wife who he left at home in the beginning of the movie. Strange hoots and grunts sound in the mist, and at one point a towering six legged thing slowly stomps past, not noticing their tiny car below.

This is the point where I’m told the novella ended at – a scene of uncertainty amidst sprawling tragedy, ruin, desolation and general monstrosity. Unfortunately screenwriter/director Frank Darabont chose to extend it a few scenes farther, following Drayton’s rover until it runs out of gas – he and his passengers then agree that he should mercy kill them with the remaining four bullets in his revolver.

Including his young son, who has just awoken from a shock induced nap.

This accomplished, Drayton has no bullet left for himself and must nerve himself up to leave the car and wait for the nearest creepy-crawly to make a lunch out of him.

It is not to be however, as the US military chooses that moment to make a grand entrance with tank treads rolling and flamethrowers blazing – too late for Drayton’s son and fellow travelers though, in a parting attempt at Hitchcockian irony. Or something.

This is what I was getting at when I said not everyone is going to be glad they saw this movie; it wasn’t that the director chose to sacrifice a small child for gruesome effect – after all this is a “horror” film, not merely a “thriller”, and so this scene is therefore not (quite) out of bounds even if it is a tasteless kidney punch.

There were two material reasons why I hated this ending. Number one, it makes the last two hours of grueling struggle for survival seem almost silly when the military can abruptly show up, fan away the mist and casually wipe out all the baddies that previously had seemed so hopelessly insurmountable – you can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic blaring away in the background as the Good Guys arrive and save the day in true B movie fashion.

Number two and even more importantly though – to end the movie with the military so supremely dominant is to all but deny the possibility of a sequel, at least one with anything approaching the same level of epic scale; if the army can smush these bugs so easily, then no critters will be left for a sequel save those that managed to find a basement or abandoned warehouse to hide in, which is still creepy but not the kind of pervasive miasma of dread that is the brand of The Mist.

This by the way gets at one of my pet peeves with Hollywood; the sense that movies must start in the here and now, and must end there as well, or as near as possible - you just can't burden the viewer with either the sense that the movie's events might have sweeping and long term effects (too scary even for a horror movie I guess), or with having to pick up part 2 where the story left off at the end of part 1. In the novella, the world (seemingly) ended, and stayed that way - in the movie, we just had a Close Call.

Although the talk of dimensions and the mist’s origins were very brief and vague, they (along with the mostly unique and slimy appearance of the monsters of course) did a great deal to support the sense that this movie was a kind of Cthulhoid feature – literally small town folk being menaced by extra-dimensional horrors. I don’t know why but I find those sort of movies strangely appealing, and so The Mist was a bit of a treat for me even while I was pretty much constantly wincing in anticipation of the next critter pounce; so it was that much more annoying to me to have the door slammed on the idea at the end – particularly after the book itself apparently did such a good job of setting the stage for further adventures.

Personally I would have liked to know more about the nature of the experiments that opened the portal onto the other dimension, and even a bit about what was on the other side; I pictured a crazy jungle world of titanic proportion (hence all the mist flowing through - I'm picturing something like the jungle in King Kong 2005 but on steroids), teeming with all manner of nasty flora and fauna struggling to eat and not be eaten.

The sequel practically writes itself; Drayton's crew could pick up a lone survivor who turns out to be one of the scientists from the base, a ghost of a woman stricken by her conscience and who convinces them their only hope is to help her get to the heart of the dragon’s lair and close the portal. It would give us a look at the aftermath at the base, and a chance to see more critters – maybe some new ones… not to mention the portal itself, sure to be a pretty dramatic sight.

The scientist could be a "xenobiologist" whose job was to study and catalogue the different life forms on the other side of the portal; maybe she was married to one of the other scientists on the team, and had misgivings about the whole idea but ultimately went along with it. Her survival in the aftermath could then have come from a combination of insights into how to evade the critters by staying in their "blind spots" and perhaps some bits of sophisticated lab tech she was able to grab on the way out (whose batteries would now be very low on juice), and so she would be a source of specialized info on the gribblies in the mist, which would provide Drayton with the tools to take a more aggressive role in Mist 2, as well as providing some info for the audience's morbid curiosity; what exactly are all these freaky claws, fangs, tentacles, toxins and other random appendages etc evolved in response to? If they're going to go to so much trouble to make these critters original why not share some of the details with the viewers?

The idea of following a horror movie with a horror/thriller is not without precedent - think about the Aliens series. Alien is indisputably a horror flick first and a sci-fi flick second, while the two elements are more evenly balanced in Aliens. Similarly you could have The Mist with the ending from the novella, followed by something with more allowances made in the plot to give a look at "ground zero" and the other dimension.

But no. All that potential gets tossed aside in favor of a Really Clever Twist to ring in the credits. The other 95% of the movie was good, but this was one time when a movie suffered from a lack of cut scenes, as though the Director decided he was going to show those know-nothings in marketing and swap in the “director’s cut” for mass release at the last second. Or maybe everyone on set thought it was a good idea to tack on the new ending.

Which is a scary thought.

No Country For Old Men – A Dust Bowl Odyssey

2008-04-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

Not being a fantasy or sci-fi movie, I wasn’t going to post my thoughts about this flick. The fact that I initially hated it also played its part. But like it or not, this movie stays with you - it is one of those “different” sort of flicks that "get you thinkin".

And I figured that in itself is a kind of recommendation regardless of my initial reaction; is the movie you “liked” but forgot about a week or two after seeing it really better than one you “hated” but were still thinking about months later (when I say “thinking about” I mean something more than just feeling grossed out)?

SPOILER WARNING. If you ever plan on seeing this movie – STOP HERE. This movie’s effect hinges a great deal on surprise and you won’t enjoy it half as much if you know it in advance.

NCFOM is set in the Western US of 1980, its plot is unaccompanied by soundtrack, and follows a quietly rambling pace – punctuated by moments of extreme violence until its “conclusion”. I put quotes around that last because the movie doesn’t really end so much as the camera turns off (one of those).

I group this type of movie under what I call the “dust bowl” genre, for lack of a better term; cast in the West (often with little or no soundtrack), usually having a sense of general emptiness, quiet or desolation, it has some very basic character motivations occasionally contrasted with quirky or sometimes psychopathic behavior, and it falls in with the likes of The Hitcher, Wild At Heart, The Last Great Picture Show, Natural Born Killers, My Own Private Idaho, Into the Wild, and probably many more that I could have included but can’t think of at the moment.

There seems to be something about the West that lends itself to the offbeat modern story; full of big open spaces, its wildness and isolation bespeak a kind of mystery – even moreso now in the modern age than it was back in the days of the "wild west", as trends roll in from the coasts and acquire a distinctly Western twist before blending into the general stew of tidepool cultures where you never know quite what to expect, and the term “local” becomes meaningless. This to me is a kind of modern "magic", and is therefore partly what I meant when I said that NCFOM “grew on” me, because it made me realize that in this sense, “dust bowl’ movies actually are cousins to the fantasy genre I'm so fond of.

The first thing that hit me when I watched the movie was the thought that Javier Bardem looked a lot like Martin Landau in his earlier days, and I couldn’t shake the impression throughout the movie that the main character was being stalked by the commander of Space 1999. Since then I managed to get some side by side photos and I guess now they look more like distant cousins to me than twins…

By the way, no I’m not that old that I was an actual fan of Space 1999; I knew about it mostly because I grew up surrounded by my dad’s sprawling collection of sci-fi paraphernalia (issues of Starlog, Cinefantastique, etc). Just for the record.

But as usual I digress.

The thing most responsible for my original dislike of the movie was the sense that everything was hopeless, and that in such an environment Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh appeared as a kind of omnipotent force in a world consisting purely of killers and the waiting-to-be-killed.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if John Ryder from The Hitcher had gone on to become a part time contract killer instead of being ventilated by a shotgun, this is probably the film for you. For my part, I thought I might have been the kind of person who would want to see that kind of movie, until I saw NCFOM.

Chigurh for his part seemed like a murderous Forest Gump, or maybe a cross between Forest and the Terminator. Quiet, plodding, inexorable, deadly (and sometimes plain annoying), he was always turning up in the shadows and committing random ultraviolence before disappearing again, accompanied by his “captive bolt pistol” (I had no idea what this was until I looked it up on wiki) and what looks like a semi-automatic shotgun with silencer (which unfortunately kind of underscored the Space 1999 thing for me, as it looked and sounded like a “pew pew” style raygun).

He is like a supernatural entity, even being described as “a ghost” by rival operator Carson Wells. Generally he stayed on Moss’ trail by way of the transponder hidden in the suitcase, so they explained that much, but how did he manage to track down Wells? Pure luck? I mean nowadays you can use the internet as an excuse for supposedly finding a person’s most hidden information in half an hour, but this was set in 1980.

And for what it’s worth, why was he apprehended at the beginning of the movie, other than for a cheap excuse to show his badass credentials by way of him breaking out of a police station? At least when the Terminator did his police station scene he actually had a recognizable motive...

Chigurh isn’t totally untouchable – if only to carefully demonstrate otherwise to the critics, they have the protagonist Llewelyn Moss put a round in his leg at one point (leading of course to the over-the-top drugstore scene), and Chigurh gets his arm mangled in a random (as in “Pulp Fiction” random) car accident near the end of the movie, but those are in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, and all in all I had a hard time finding Anton Chigurh very believable.

Then on the other hand you have his quarry Lleweyln, someone else who inspires mixed feelings – initially I kind of rooted for him as the “everyman”, but he was just so clueless about the danger he was exposing his girlfriend to, as well as several innocent bystanders who got (fatally) caught in the middle of things as he attempted to escape with the money, that by the time the Mexican Mob caught up with him I had become sort of indifferent to his fate.

Not to say Moss wasn’t believable – after all who wouldn’t want to keep $2 million he found lying around, and be spooked into making some stupid choices in the process of trying to do so? I’ve got no problem with greed being a primary motive; my indifference stemmed more from the way Moss’ character developed along lines similar to those in The Sopranos, i.e. kind of a clever, brutal animal who did what he felt he had to to get by, with no real aspirations to be a better man. If anything Moss was a little too believable, much as I hate to say it (yeah I know, there’s no pleasing me).

Tommy Lee Jones. After his initial voiceover, I kept waiting for this mild, unassuming but weathered lawman to do something extraordinary, maybe even make a difference of some kind… but no. His character Sheriff Bell makes one bright deduction about the timing of Chigurh’s escape early on, and then spends the rest of film stumbling along in the assassin’s wake, mouthing twangy western jargon and ultimately deciding to retire and dwell upon his dreams and their deeper meanings at the very end. One more person who just cannot manage to slow down much less thwart the progress of Anton the Unstoppable.

Those are all the things I didn’t like about the movie, however the film certainly has its good qualities too. Superbly acted, cast and filmed, it hooks you and reels you into its quiet, dusty atmosphere, and you’re never checking your watch even if you can’t manage to like any of the characters much, because you’re too busy feeling like you’re there, and taking it all in.

More than that, in a weird sort of way NCFOM cleanses the palate of the more typical good-guy-wins action/thriller movies, by showing you what happens if things don’t go in the hero’s favor every step of the way, something worth seeing once in a while if only to refresh your sense of danger and to let you go back to enjoying the “Die-Even-Harder-With-A-Vengeance-Yet-Again” movies (the sort of flicks that I normally want to enjoy).

And as with all “dust bowl” flicks, it’s an example of a plotline whose outcome you really can’t anticipate until you get there; here the “protagonist” and “antagonist” clash and rebound off eachother in a fast moving tangle of events that keep you guessing throughout and thereby transfixed.

If I would have changed anything it probably would have been to shine a bit more light on Chigurh’s more mundane motivations – after all the fact he is even nominally working for money despite being a compulsive psychopath indicates the existence of a more human (if not likable) side to his nature, and I think showing it a bit would have fleshed out his character more; why does he want money? Just to pay for food and gas? Or does he have a mortgage to pay, an ex to support or maybe a heroin addiction to feed (etc)?

The other change I’d have made is more of a “neatness” thing than something which would have made the film better per se; I’m talking about Sheriff Bell and his seemingly incidental role in the movie. He really does nothing more than provide random commentary, yet he is exactly the sort of unlikely hero that normally comes through in the end. Watching the movie closely you sort of get the sense that the book’s author Cormac McCarthy may have originally intended something like this for Bell, but dropped the idea midway through in favor of something more ambiguous and “real”.

That said, I think Bell could have at least taken out Chigurh toward the end (which could have been a very cool fight/shootout after all the buildup to it), even if it was too late to save Moss or his wife, without ruining the movie – after all, the “good guy” won in Pulp Fiction and at least arguably made it a better movie by doing so, so I don’t think the negative ending in NCFOM is so much essential to its being “good” as much as to its being its own quirky self – for better or worse.

In the end I’d have to say for all my disappointment in the villain’s unstoppableness, the hero’s animal baseness and the sheriff's cluelessness, the storyline, casting and cinematography are nonetheless very well done, the tempo is great and it gets you thinking. It just takes a while for it all to sink in.

Go rent it.

Shaman – Not So Bad, Actually

2008-04-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Despite getting a bad rap shaman are a pretty good class in my experience.

Although my favorite class remains the hunter, shaman are the next best thing in my book; many deride them for being the proverbial “jack of all trades and master of none”, however this view misses the point of what shaman are all about – shaman are properly viewed as the sum of their parts rather than through the exclusive prism of how they rate on the damage/heal meters.

In other words, the same title “Jack of all trades/master of none” can actually be a strength, if you know how to play your class.

Most classes are optimized heavily toward offense or defense and do great when the fight is on their terms but things tend to get ugly fast when it’s not; and yet when players die, it’s not usually so much that they got flattened by an infinitely superior mob(s) but rather for lack of just a bit more adaptibility to changing circumstances.

If you’ve ever solo’ed as a warrior, think how many near-wins could have been won if someone had tossed you even a single, mediocre heal when you were getting low on HP, or times you’ve played a paladin and wished for a bit more DPS to take out the squishy NPC casters before they all unloaded their heavy spells on you – just a little augmentation in your area of relative weakness would often have made the difference.

These are just general examples – I know full well that creative people can somewhat offset these weaknesses with various specialized trinkets, epic gear and the like however the basic fact remains most classes are deliberately designed to have greater strengths matched by greater weaknesses.

That’s where shaman excel – they may lack the legendary DPS of a fire mage or the tanking strength of a protection warrior, but they also lack the offsetting weaknesses of those classes too (flimsy cloth armor, no heals or etc), and so you will always have options – solo, or in groups/raids where the party needs to adapt quickly to tricky bosses and so forth (i.e. “ok its mega-shield is down for another 10 seconds, everyone switch to DPS! Oops picked up an add, need some more healing!” etc).

The shaman has something in his bag of tools for pretty much any circumstance be it combat or something more obscure like water breathing, water walking, far sight, reincarnation, faster hearth cooldown etc, and this is why I like “shammies”; more options = more interesting to play (which is also a big reason why I like hunters so much, and from what I’ve seen druids also can be very flexible, though I’ve never rolled one).

I’ve been playing my elemental spec shammy for several years now, off and on; the greater part of my experience has been in solo play although I’ve done my share of grouping and raiding as well. I’ve witnessed many different changes to our spec trees, and I’ve learned a few things during that time – through a lot of trial and error which I’m hoping I can spare a few others from. This is by no means a comprehensive list but hopefully it will give you some ideas with your own shaman.

1) Stats. The basics are +spell crit, +INT and +STA, but as with any caster, +mp5 and +spell dmg/healing are also important; if you're gearing up from the auction house you might consider putting sorceror or elder aspect gear on half your slots and invoker on the other half - the main problem here is that no aspect is a perfect fit, since invoker is the only one to provide +spell crit, and that lacks any +STA; the solution in most cases is to seek out quest gear that gives more optimal stat combinations.

2) Elemental Mastery. You should get this talent the minute you hit lvl 40, and hold it back for the multi-mob fights to guarantee an auto-crit chain lightning (followed by a magma totem now that you have a lock on the aggro); this big damage burst greatly weakens most normal mobs and is pivotal to not only surviving multi-mob fights but doing it in style.

3) Weapons. 1h and shield is what you want to use if you’re solo’ing - enhancement shammies are really the only ones who can get mileage out of a 2 hander. Remember your spells are your primary offense not your weapons. For grouping, keep a +spell crit staff in your back pack if you have one, but even then be ready to switch back to 1h/shield if you pick up aggro.

4) Healing. Elemental spec shammies are no more of a main healer than they are of a main tank, i.e. they do it well enough to keep themself propped up when solo’ing, or in a 2 or 3 man quest maybe, but when it comes to full 5 man instance groups you need resto spec to function as a shaman main healer; the elemental shaman always works fine as an assistant healer (you can never have too much healing, and their chain heals are a nice way of keeping everyone topped off), but that’s the extent of it (I once tried doing scholo pre-BC as an elemental main healer and we got flattened just a few steps inside the door).

5) Kiting. Kiting in WoW, if you didn’t know this already, means shooting the mob from a distance while keeping far enough away to avoid getting hit. Although I don’t see this tactic used a lot, the elemental shaman is actually quite good at this, thanks to his frost shock, and the extended range and reduced cooldown on his lightning bolts – you simply alternate 1-2 lightning bolts, frost shock, run away a bit and then repeat as needed. Having the minor speed enchantment on your boots makes this quite a bit easier and will result in several extra bolts over the course of a fight – highly recommend getting this enchantment ASAP and renewing it every time you upgrade your footgear.

6) Totems. Most of these are fairly self explanatory and don’t need special comment, but there are a few I think are noteworthy.

a. Grounding totem. Stops a nasty damage spell every 15 seconds (if you are good about renewing it); kind of high maintenance but well worth it anytime you’re fighting caster or caster-like mobs as it goes a ways toward neutralizing their heightened offense and is key to winning a spell war.

b. Tremor totem. Breaks fear, sleep and charm; you don’t need this terribly often, but when you do need it, you need it, so keep it hotkeyed somewhere close by and remember to use it, because it changes fear using mobs from being difficult to easy.

c. Windwall totem. Kind of an obscure totem, but it will greatly increase your survival rate against archer/marksman types if you remember to use it.

d. Tranquil Air Totem. If you're in a group, and the tanks have less than a perfect lock on aggro, stand way back and drop one of these - and encourage the other casters to stand near you as it lowers threat by 20% for everyone in a 20 yard radius.

7) In melee. Make sure all four of your totems are down at the start of any serious fight; since patch 2.4 these have reduced cooldown and so you can now get a full set planted pretty quickly. Once that’s out of the way I pretty much just use shocks when they're up, and lightning bolts when they're on cooldown – any melee hits I throw are purely incidental.

8) Eject. If things go pear shaped and you need to bail quickly, drop an earthbind totem, switch to ghost wolf form for a faster getaway (they accelerated cast time on GW from 3 seconds to 2 seconds in patch 2.4, which is a big help), and run like hell. As long as the enemies don’t have any nasty slow/root effects this should get you clear.

9) Scryer/Aldor. Don't make the mistake I did of choosing Aldor, and then having to work your way over to Scryer with basilisk eye farming; Scryer is the one to go with for the simple reason that they get the +spell crit shoulder enchantment (Inscription of the Orb) at honored; no matter how good your gear is, it's always nice to have a little more +spell crit.

10) Cool spells at level 62-68+. These are just the "new" spells, to give you an idea of what to expect. I'm holding off talking about the L70 spell as I haven't gotten that far yet.

a. Water Shield (L62). Lasts 10 minutes, passively increases your mana regeneration between fights and actively increases it by a chunk when you get hit. Has to be renewed after 3 hits, but if you stay on top of it you will usually have more mana than you know what to do with. I keep this going at all times.

b. Wrath of Air Totem (L64). Increases spell damage, great if you're going full offense and don't need a grounding totem or tranquil air totem.

c. Earth Elemental Totem (L66). Like having the ability to summon a voidwalker every 20 minutes, these are reasonably tough, and great at taking and holding aggro if you have a ton of mobs on you or just need a tank for something nasty that's immune to kiting.

c. Fire Elemental Totem (L68). This is what you use if you get attacked by a group of casters, or just want some extra dps.

That’s about all I can think of; if any other shaman players happen to read this and want to offer suggestions of their own in the comments I’d be happy to see how other people play the class.

World of Huntercraft - or, Why WoW Needs Henchmen

2008-03-26T09:07:00.001-07:00

This goes out to all the World of Warcraft players out there who prefer doing their own thing but still wish they had the support to handle tougher areas and quests... in other words people like myself who want to have their cake and eat it.

Personally I mostly do solo/PVE gaming; it’s not so much that my (uninterrupted) wow-time is limited; it is kinda, but I could still group a lot more than I do – it’s more that my negative group experiences far outweigh the positive ones. Whether it’s the time spent recruiting enough people for an instance, mediating the bickering over loot distribution, armor repair bills from too many wipes (ok that sounds wrong – a “wipe” in WoW is when a bunch of players’ in-game characters all get overrun and killed, just ya know, for the record and stuff), or even just tough instance runs that end in someone switching to his level 70 alt and running everyone through on EZ mode, I’ve just grown a bit weary of grouping.

Of all the classes in WoW, hunters seem to best suit this play style, and I know from sites like Petopia that I’m definitely not an isolated case here – not positive which class in WoW is THE most popular but if it’s not hunters then I’d be surprised if they were lower than 2nd or 3rd place.

Some people play them for the RP element, or because they are animal lovers, or because they like having tracking, or because they like "collecting" cool pets (guilty), or because “pet casters” have kind of a “cruise control” element in the form of a fast healing, semi-autonomous bodyguard, but I think the deeper attraction of the class is that it’s really a miniature group all on its own.

The hunter relegates tanking to his pet, and handles the long range support (DPS and healing). This by itself is nothing that warlocks don’t also have; “locks” are after all the other pet caster class in the game, and certainly don’t lack for killpower. And it isn’t that I haven’t tried the other classes either; other than priests and druids I have characters belonging to at least 1 of every class in the game, ranging in level from low 40s up to lvl 70. I still play them from time to time, but I have trouble maintaining as much interest in them - meanwhile I have something like 6-7 hunters.

The stuff that most distinguishes hunters from locks is their ability to fine tune their pets according to their needs rather than being restricted to a few rigid choices (to be fair to locks it could also be argued that their pets are lower maintenance, which can mean everything or nothing depending on how you feel about pet maintenance); it goes beyond just the simple mechanics of having a “main” unit and a subservient “tank” unit for hunters; their pets have a wide range of species to choose from, each with its own little innate differences (stats, pet skills, etc) as well as a number of different models and skins, some of which being “rare” and therefore something of a collector’s item.

The whole process of taming, training and caring for your pet is really almost a meta-game in itself, you get to name your pet, and you can even keep a spare pet in the stable for times when you want a different skillset or even just a change of pace.

This all combines to add a whole new dimension to your character, and this brings me to the other half of this post’s title.

Henchmen.

I'm not really predisposed to playing a shooty type with an animal friend per se; what I'm really after is being able to form a group of my own, where everyone does exactly what I want, doesn't argue with me or log off in the middle of an instance because they have to do their homework, their wife is yelling at them to get off the 'puter, etc.

I would be psyched to play a mage - with a warrior "pet" out in front holding aggro, or for that matter to play a warrior with a priest in tow to keep me healed and pop off the occasional damage spell or etc.

This goes back to the Rexxar mini-game that came with Warcraft III all those years ago, when we got a little preview of the upcoming MMORPG as well as a look at the “original” hunter. Rexxar not only had two different pets (Misha the bear and whatever his boar was called), but also a couple of companions in the form of Chen the drunken panda guy and Rokhan the troll shaman, and I think there may have been a couple times when you could even hire 2-3 mercenaries to further bulk out your numbers. That game was a blast and remains one of my all time faves, and most recently I’ve gotten to thinking “what if they had a new WoW server built along those lines – same WoW world, same WoW quests, same basic WoW game engine in fact but with the ability to acquire NPC companions?”

It would work something like this: you roll a character to be your “main” exactly as you would now, except that you can now acquire up to 2 followers.

Each time you gain a follower, a new “pet bar” appears in the lower left part of your screen; these are the same things you see now on hunters and warlocks when they summon a pet, with the basic commands and up to 4 “custom” skills that you can configure as needed and these followers would behave in much the same manner is hunter or lock pets in that they could be commanded/summoned/dismissed as needed.

Standardly, these would take the form of humanoid mercenaries, essentially mimicking the existing PC classes but in a much more simplified state; you would get to customize them about as much as hunters do now with their pets, maybe a bit more but not to the point that actual player characters would be outclassed – a PC warrior would still tank better than a henchman “fighter”, etc. Furthermore henchmen despite being less powerful 1v1 than a PC class, would still consume an equal share of XP - ; much as I like my idea I do recognize there should be some compensation for people who just don’t feel like managing the extra bodies, i.e. people who just play their “main” will level that much faster by comparison.

In a few cases more specialized pets could occupy one or both henchmen slots; hunters could fill them with animals in much the same way they do now with their single slot, and warlocks would have some ability to gain demonic minions. You could do similar things with other classes, i.e. druids might have access to forest humanoids such as dryads, furbolg and so forth. Henchmen would consume either food (for critter followers) or coins (for the humanoid kind), and the degree to which they are compensated would impact their happiness icon in the same manner as with current hunter pets.

Of course this would not be simple despite having most of the basic mechanics in place; hunters and locks would both need to be retuned to reflect the fact that their pets are no longer a unique item but rather just a different twist on a (now) common theme, and instances would have to be re-tailored to allow for henchmen; I would make followers count as players for purpose of maximum group size, and have two versions of every instance, much like the normal/heroic modes of BC instances – you’d have your basic 6 man instance which could be handled by two players accompanied by a full retinue of 2 henchmen each, or a tougher party formed of all “mains”. Or if you just wanted to grind “yard trash” or a few early/mini-bosses you could go it yourself with your two henchmen.

Then there would be the heroic mode which would be designed for 15 slots, i.e. 5 actual players with maximum allotment of henchmen or as before less henchmen and more “mains” to form a tougher group.

Another benefit of henchmen in instances is that if someone has to bail suddenly, another player can potentially replace him by summoning a henchman (e.g. let's say you have a group of 3 players accompanied by 3 henchmen, which could mean that one of the players has a henchman "unsummoned"; if a player leaves, that henchman can be brought forward to fill the spot and the group can continue without having to put everything on hold and spend the next hour or two trying to recruit a replacement player).

I don't want to oversimplify the very complex process of tuning dungeons for the right difficulty/payoff ratio but I do think this could work; after all they already laid the groundwork in Rexxar.

All this being said, it will never happen – not in World of Warcraft anyway. The game is too successful and too well established for their parent companies/shareholders/etc to even think about allowing such a radical tweak.

But the radical new thing that scares the established industry leaders can also be just the new angle a young up and comer needs to wedge their way into that same industry and attract enough business to fuel its own MMORPG. It wouldn’t have to take much away from WoW to do it – World of Warcraft already has so many subscribers it could split off enough customers to spawn a few different MMORPGs and still remain easily on top, and that would be fine with me; more than likely I’d just end up playing both games rather than choose between them.

One can dream anyway.

Expandable Posts - None Too Soon

2008-03-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

A big thank you to Beta Blogger For Dummies for helping this definite dummy out - I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to put my run-on posts behind manageable summaries; the first place I checked was this Blogger help post, and it was too vague on exactly where to put what in the HTML, but luckily I followed a link at the bottom over to Beta Blogger, who did a great job of filling in the gaps for me.

My one remaining gripe is that now I get the "Continue reading" link at the end of every post whether there is more to read or not. Still a huge improvement from the previous look though...

10,000 BC - Eh.

2008-03-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

I saw this movie on opening night 3/7, after a Tivo preview piqued my appetite for fantasy drama. Any story set in the past gets an automatic mulligan from me; I’ll save the hows and whys of that for another post but for now suffice to say that 10,000 BC had a pretty easy sell with this viewer. Note if you haven’t guessed by now this is a definite SPOILER so stop here if you’re planning to see this.

It started off so-so; you had a tribe of dreadlock wearing mammoth hunters, with the (obligatory) black sheep D’Leh as the protagonist and the blue eyed foreigner Evolet as the love interest (a bit of borrowing there from Clan of the Cave Bear, but no big deal), and some basic caveman interaction overlaid with some mystical mumbo-jumbo from the tribe’s witch doctor.

As far as looks go, the dreads were okay – but I wasn’t thrilled with the neatly clipped mustaches and goatees; if you just took out the face paint these guys would have fit right in nowadays like a bunch of Gen Y Bohemians on the way to a rave. So, Hollywood strikes early. Meh.

Then along comes a band of horse riding, bronze(?) using slavers who capture most of the tribe and start marching them back into the great Beyond whence they came. D’Leh, his rival Ka’Ren, a boy named Baku and the tribe’s leader TicTic set off in pursuit, having been among the few to avoid capture, which takes them on a journey far beyond their accustomed homeland and incidentally following the footsteps of D’Leh’s long departed father.

Now the idea that the tribe’s chieftain/top warrior/etc TicTic would have simply been “missed” is a bit of a stretch to me; I’d expect slavers would normally take a few minutes to scope out a village before attacking it, and leave no hut un-checked. After all, every villager is cash in their wallet at the marketplace.

It would have been more believable as well as more interesting to me if D’Leh’s little group were initially captured along with the rest of the tribe, but later managed to escape and then tail the slave caravan.

But whatever. The early part of the trip down south was pretty cool, enlivened by the appearance of terror birds – giant flightless avians (Phorusrhacids according to wiki) that harrassed the slavers and would-be rescuers with enough horrific panache to do proud the raptors in Jurassic Park.

That was actually the high point of the movie for me; events happened quickly with a natural flow, the sense of terror drew me in, and the characters all behaved in a believable manner.

All too quickly, they passed beyond the territory of the giant birds, and the plot returned to its drifting, predictable pace.

Now entering into an area looking like North Africa, the rescuers team up with the warriors of several local villages – all of which apparently having been raided by the slavers not long before – and the resulting angry mob has just about caught up with the slavers when the dastardly villains slip away down a river on a flotilla of sailing ships.

It was only just barely believable that the slavers could hit all of these different villages with their considerable numbers of warriors, and that only with a stretch of faith; yeah they would have attacked by surprise and been aided by their superior mobility and weapons, but still… eh.

And then you have the whole saber-tooth spirit protector thing going on, by way of spooking the remaining Naku villagers into accepting D’Leh as their new leader. It would have been (a lot) more convincing to me if D’Leh’s group caught up with and joined a pre-formed Naku rescue party, where you would have common sense as justification and leave off with the Tarzan-ish prophecy thing.

But I guess someone was determined to find some excuse to shoehorn a friendly saber-tooth tiger in there somewhere, and this was as good a place as any. Honestly if you’re going to get that silly a tribe of pygmies with trained saber-tooth mounts would have been a lot cooler.

So anyways now you have this massive band of warriors all behind D’Leh as he leads them across the desert to the slavers’ final destination, which looks like the work site of a proto-Egyptian pyramid complex, complete with poncy long fingernailed high officials, death cults, soldiers, and of course lots and lots of slaves moving big stones around. There is one tantalizing reference to these people as having originated from a “sunken island”, but there is no elaboration.

Without a great deal of effort, D’Leh and his crew infiltrate the slave population and trigger a revolt (apparently the slave drivers here are unfamliar with the faces and numbers of the slaves on their respective work gangs), centering around the captive mammoths who D’Leh is able to stampede into oncoming soldiers, and culminating in the last stand outside the headquarters of the high priest where the ancient nasty threatens to have Evolet pulled apart by horses.

D’Leh’s solution? Impale the creep with a spear from 60-100 feet away, and grab the girl during the ensuing confusion. Of course. That would have been cool thirty years ago when I saw Conan, but somehow I felt just a bit robbed now; once again the movie sets up a major challenge which is overcome by the vehicle of B movie goofiness.

My version? Have D’Leh lose heart and back off, the enemy (of course) attacks the rebels as they are milling in disarray at the disheartening of their leader, when Baku and a few of D’Leh’s other friends dislodge the gold pyramid head piece to fall down on the crusty cackling fellow (instead of having it fall off uselessly like it did in the movie). More plausible? No, but cooler at least in that you have a bit poetic justice from an unlikely source.

Of course there has to be a rub; like Brutus from Popeye, the head slaver is smitten with Evolet, tries to carry her off on horseback and when that is foiled resorts to putting an arrow in her back just to be spiteful. But happily Evolet is resurrected by the magic of the tribe’s witch doctor from the beginning of the movie (remember her?), so D’Leh has the last laugh, and all is well.

My initial reaction as you may have guessed was mostly negative, but the more I’ve thought about it since, I’ve realized this actually could have worked – broken into a mini-series on the Sci-Fi or Discovery channel, you would have gotten to spend more time with the individual cultures and their idiosyncrasies (including not least of which the background of these presumed refugees from Atlantis), and where character development and plot would be less important.

They could still do something like this although I haven’t heard anything about it and from the kind of rating it’s gotten from critics it’s unlikely to happen.

But we’ll see.

Cloverfield - What the Hell Is It?

2008-03-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

Note: this post is my best attempt at making some sense of this movie and tying together as many loose ends as possible, by researching the internet and filling in blanks with my best guess, so for people like me who saw the movie and had a lot of questions, this might be your thing - for folks who haven't seen it yet and just want the general flavor, this is not a movie review.

I saw the "JJ Abrams Production" trailer last Fall, thought it was cool, and then forgot about it till shortly after the movie came out, when I overhead some people talking about it (full disclosure: the "people" I overheard were other World of Warcraft players) and remembered why it sounded familiar. After that I got completely caught up in the E-buzz, saw the movie, and then spent lots and lots of time playing the "game"; I googled like never before looking for images of the Cloverfield monster, the parasites, anything I could find on the movie.

Since then I've caught myself lying awake at night thinking about it, and decided enough is enough, so I'm going to put down my best shot at making sense of it all and tying it together in hopes of getting it out of my head:

Wild Cloverfield Speculations

Cloverfield Origin

First and foremost it should be kept in mind that the design of Cloverfield and his parasites emphasized form over substance, per their lead creature designer Neville Page (“make it cool first then justify it later”), and I think everything about the movie proceeds from there.

What we do know about Cloverfield is that he is a newborn baby, who had previously been in a gestative state at the bottom of the sea for “thousands and thousands of years”. His motivation for attacking Manhattan? He is confused, frightened, angry, and itchy.

Physiologically he is around 250 feet tall, bipedal with two long primary arms and a smaller pair of secondary arms tucked in around his lower abdomen, a nasty fishlike face with some kind of breathing bladder on the back of his head and a flattened tail which [may indicate] an evolution from something more fishlike/aquatic, according to Page.

So, was he terrestrial or extraterrestrial? While the designers were careful not to commit 100% either way, I’m betting on terrestrial; not only did Neville Page seem to lean heavily in this direction, the only comments even potentially suggesting otherwise are Matt Reeves’ references to the falling object at the end of the movie; I’m not sure what his intentions were in emphasizing that but don’t think he was suggesting some kind of an “alien crash landing” background as that would be inconsistent with the declaration that Clover had been in the ocean for “thousands and thousands of years”, above.

(That said, I wouldn’t put it past JJ to still go with the alien origin in Cloverfield 2, just to throw fans a curveball – that would be in keeping with his style in Lost).

However going with the terrestrial origin does raise more questions namely “when and where would the species first appear” and “how would it have lived”?

There are a few hints suggesting that cloverfields have always lived in (or under) the deep sea, suggesting something a bit like “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, where fantastic creatures have lived in deep places undiscovered for untold millennia.

Personally I favor something a little more integrated with the known world (not because it’s more plausible but because I think it’s cooler), so here’s my spin: going from the Hasbro toy model you can see that it has (almost) nothing in the way of really obvious tools for aquatic living; I see just the very traces of webbing between its fingers and toes, and no fins beyond the slight protrusions on the sides of its (not very long) tail – the one real exception here is the “breather bag” on the back of its head.

Since it wouldn’t be much of a swimmer, the best it could really hope for then in the way of catching a meal underwater would be to maybe dig a (really big) hole, cover itself up, and try to grab passing fish/sharks/whales/etc with its insanely long primary arms. Not very likely though – the creatures who do this kind of thing tend to be flattened for easier concealment e.g. crabs, rays, flounder etc, and not ginormous gangly upright things like Clover.

More likely then Clover belongs to a species of giant amphibians whose heyday was back in the age of the dinosaurs, when they would lurk just offshore and grab large prey that came too close to the water’s edge – there were lots of big things to eat back then, and Clover’s mantis/bat-like primary arms are among his most obviously specialized features so I can’t think of a better application for them than that. Being amphibious they could also make short dashes from the water if needed, like a massive crocodile.

This would explain them being 99% suited to hunting on or near land with the ability to hang out under water while sleeping, mating or otherwise waiting for the next meal to come walking by (which is also the only place something that large could exist for any real length of time, incidentally, without super-thick legs to support it – although there may be more to it than that). Being incredibly large and tough they probably were also capable of trudging along the ocean floor, and I imagine them making trips in this manner to the deepest parts of the ocean when spawning or in the final years of their life (returning to their instinctive spawning place).

So why weren’t any fossils found? Fossil locations are found in places where animals die, and something that large and tough probably couldn’t be killed by anything else, which would limit potential remains to the extreme ocean depths (any killed by their own species likewise would have been dragged far down for later consumption).

Slusho/Tagruato

Here is where we get into the pre-1/18 viral marketing. What was Slusho and what was its connection to Clover? At the Slusho site they relate the story of how the parent company CEO Ganu Yoshida discovered a fluid on the ocean floor that was “near frozen” and under “amazing pressure”; this stuff has all kinds of amazing properties most notably of making people ecstatically happy, and became the base ingredient for Slusho, called “Seabed’s Nectar”. This seems to have occurred in 1989, when “a brilliant young engineer named Ganu Yoshida was in search of an avenue to support his off-shore drilling revelations” and took over the ailing Tagruato Corporation, backed by a team of investors (the company is described as having its “main focus” on “deep sea Petroleum excavation”, but this sounds like an early sop to investors while Tagruato explored various profitable uses for Deepsea’s Nectar such as Slusho and biomedical applications, and ParafFUN wax which appears to be a kind of nectar/petroleum fusion).

The first such rig was Jimmu Station, built in Japan’s Inland Sea in 1991. Thirteen more have been built since, the latest being Chuai Station, located in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and going into operation in 2007.

Shortly afterward January 08 is a busy month; we learn that Seabed’s Nectar gains approval from the “AFA” (a sometime stand-in for the FDA), and that Ganu himself has come to New York to discuss the distribution of Slusho into the US via “pre-established public waterways”. Furthermore the Chuai Station is destroyed under mysterious circumstances that are blamed on a random eco-terrorist group, and tankers are going missing en route to New York (according to the translation of the Japanese report), and finally, early in the movie we learn on the news cast that the last one capsized in New York Harbor just prior to Cloverfield’s rampage.

Sifting through this jumble of info-bits you get the sense that Deepsea’s Nectar is a kind of super-enriched amniotic fluid (in particular note the comments re: its effects on puppies and kittens – “Kittens love Slusho! It reminds them of mother’s milk!”, and also the description of Ganu’s dream at Slusho wherein a whale (i.e. mommy-Cloverfield) tells him to drink the Deepsea’s Nectar and in doing so he himself grows to great size) secreted back in the age of the dinosaurs by a mommy-Cloverfield to contain her embryo(s). The extreme cold and pressure could have helped the stuff last over time, and there are also clues strongly suggesting it was covered over (“There are great reservoirs under the ocean floor that no one can get to due to obstruction by physical elements”), which would be necessary to protect it from hungry deep sea critters and which would in turn also necessitate active drilling to reach it.

Given that this was going on since 1989, it seems likely that many Cloverfield nests exist in our seas and oceans (it doesn’t say which rigs are devoted to petroleum and which to nectar, though we know Chuai and likely Jimmu at minimum are for nectar extraction), hidden beneath the seabed where they remained undetected until Ganu reached them with his advanced techniques and equipment (“This groundbreaking feat of industrial triumph allows for research and retrieval in areas previously unexplored by man”). However as Tagruato sought to increase production output, making “each [rig] more efficient and productive than the last”, it also caused more and more disturbance at the drill sites, finally resulting in sufficient commotion to awaken the nest’s occupant at the latest rig, Chuai Station.

From there, Clover destroyed the rig and followed the tankers that were carrying away its amniotic fluid to their destination in New York (presumably it was able to track the stuff thru the water by smell, the way a shark smells blood), where it threw a big tantrum on discovering that the Statue of Liberty was NOT Mommy (probably the last straw at that point).

Cloverfield Parasites

These are “parasites”, and therefore not some sort of offspring or otherwise related to Clover. They are eight legged, four eyed, chitinous things about the size of a dog, with a snout like an animal trap and the ability to survive long falls unhurt by folding up into a spindle. The best picture I’ve managed to find so far is a modelling clay sculpture here.

Shed by Clover as he makes his way about New York, they scuttle around and serve mainly to keep the sense of threat ever-present by denying humans any sanctuary; not only can they reach you wherever you hide, they can even get inside you by way of their peculiar saliva/venom, which is administered through a bite and can cause you to later explode if enough of the stuff gets into you (the brief view of the soldier on the gurney shows the end result to be the evacuation of the torso/abdominal area by the way and not an exploding head).

Now how exactly does that effect work? Is it some kind of gas or chemical reaction, and if so to what purpose – simply killing the victim, or is death the byproduct of making the victim easier to consume? Or is it some form of reproduction a la Aliens?

There is no definite answer to this since Marlena meets her end behind a tarp, however we can find some clues in the comments of Abrams and Page, where the parasites are described as flea-like and causing Clover skin irritation.

To succeed as a flea on something like a cloverfield, you would need a very specialized means of feeding off of it. After all if Clover’s hide can stop tank rounds, bombs and RPGs, you aren’t just going to be able to latch on and expect to get any blood or digestible material with a simple bite – you need something like the anti-coagulant of a flea or mosquito.

We know that the anti-coagulant of the above critters does indeed cause the itching described by Abrams, so proceeding on that assumption we could assume Marlena exploded due to a massive super-hemorrhage (I’m no medical student, but “hemorrhage” is described by www.thefreedictionary.com as “Excessive discharge of blood from the blood vessels; profuse bleeding”, which does seem to fit with the idea of an anti-coagulant – and you can’t get more “excessive” than what happened to poor Marlena). This theory is further supported by the fact she was bleeding from the eyes as well as the nose and mouth just prior to blowing up, and the only thing I know of that can cause that kind of bleeding is a massive increase in blood pressure.

So, adding all that together I think the parasite bite effect is most likely caused by a monster-strength anti-coagulant in the parasite’s saliva, and is not a means of reproduction.

But where would the parasites come from and why haven’t they been seen before – not even fossil remains? Well if you go with the idea of cloverfields as shoreside lurkers, then it follows that these bugs would be all over the place, so the only way to avoid fossil remains would be if their hardest parts were a kind of cartillage i.e. nothing hard enough to stay around long enough for fossilization. This would help explain why they were able to survive the 200+ foot fall from Clover’s back, as well as being in-line with Page’s comments on the parasites being “thin and vertical and light” AND for that matter would also explain why mere humans were able to squash them with clubs and axes.

I imagine the ones in the movie to have been trapped in the Deepsea’s Nectar, shed by Clover’s mom during the egg laying process the way fleas fall off animals every few seconds, and kept alive in a state of suspended animation by the same process that kept Clover alive all those years.

Cloverfield Resilience

How was Cloverfield able to survive hits from rockets, missiles, bombs, tank rounds and etc?

Being 250 feet tall, Clover has a lot of mass to absorb incoming damage. As far as I know this is way beyond the scale of anything we know today (the largest recorded whales were around 100 ft long, as were the largest recorded dinosaurs), and so the effects of conventional weaponry are a bit of an unknown here (and remember he is just a “baby” – an adult Cloverfield probably stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1000 feet).

We do know that the military succeeded in hurting Clover, from Abrams’ comments about the critter being maddened by the stinging of our shells and rockets, and from the way it briefly collapsed after being carpet bombed near the end – and yet it never seemed to actually show any signs of bleeding or long term debilitation.

I’m thinking that the lack of bleeding was due to a super-powerful blood coagulating ability, something that actually seeded wounds with stem cells rather than just lots of interlocking platelets (giving the sealed wound the appearance of whole flesh) and which might have evolved in response to the super-anticoagulant in the saliva of their parasites.

It would also be inherently tough from being adapted to surviving extreme ranges of pressure in its journeys about the ocean floor – yes some deep sea creatures are soft and flabby, but that doesn’t mean something else couldn’t adapt by being super tough. This could include a lack of any gas or air pockets within its body, which are the most vulnerable to decompression and are minimized or omitted entirely by things living at extreme depths. Lacking those cavities would make it that much more resistant to punctures and concussions.

But probably the single most dramatic defense Clover possesses is at the cellular level – more than likely the properties found in Deepsea’s Nectar (“accelerated cell growth, increased strength, increased soft muscle tissue growth, sharper eyesight [and] better digestion”) persist within the creature itself, making it incredibly strong and resilient even for its size (which could explain not only its resilience but also why it can remain out of water for long periods of time, and defy the normal laws of physics mandating thicker legs for large land creatures).

All that being said, I do think the military could have taken it out – given enough time. But Clover denied them that opportunity with its mobility and ability to destroy anything shooting at it before the incoming firepower could focus and wear down its defenses.

And that's it. Needless to say I loved the movie and do hope they come out with a sequel (Aladgyma?); it would be cool to see more Cloverfields emerging, or more of the original one, whatever. While I wouldn't object much to another Blair Witch/camcorder style angle, I kind of would prefer something a little more classical -- the schtick worked great for me in Cloverfield 1 but doing it repeatedly might get old.

And hopefully no more of the viral marketing either.

Hello There

2008-03-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is my first foray into blog writing; I figured this would be a good place to empty out my thoughts from time to time and free up head-space when I get stuck overprocessing things, and maybe even encounter other people with the same problem. Who knows.