WoW Profiles - Dougal at 74

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…). Continue reading

Hunters – WotLK Pets

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!

Continue reading

Denise Amber Lee

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. Continue reading

Leveling Alts - Casual World Events

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...

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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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