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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World of Huntercraft - or, Why WoW Needs Henchmen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henchmen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One can dream anyway.
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Expandable Posts - None Too Soon

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

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

10,000 BC - Eh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we’ll see.
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