0-400 In 3 Days (Midsummer Redux)

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!).

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World of Warcraft - Midsummer Fire Festival

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…

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Guide to Aldor vs. Scryer 101

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.

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L70 S2 PVP Sets – Finally Some PVE Love

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.
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The Mist: A Cthulhoid Extravaganza

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.

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No Country For Old Men – A Dust Bowl Odyssey

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.

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Shaman – Not So Bad, Actually

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.

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