Reputation, Reputation, Reputation

Reputation grinding. The harsh, ever-present, irrevocable fact of World of WarCraft. Without it, you'll fail. Without exalted with them or the other guys, you can't get the good enchants, can't get the cool mounts, can't get the kickass tabards, can't get the better gear.

Do I sound like I'm complaining? I'm not. In my opinion, it's a great way to filter out the less devoted and leave behind only the truly up-for-anything players. People complain about it, of course, but in all honesty, people complain about every aspect of the game. This class owns mine in PvP, there are too many ore/herb/mob farmers, reputation grinding takes too long and is boring. And of course, some people simply don't have the time or the capacity to do nothing but dailies and heroic runs day in and day out. But the somewhat unfortunate truth of this game is that you want get anywhere significant, you've got to make a time investment. This is The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where you can save and come back later. It is an MMORPG, one of the biggest and best in the world, and the name World of WarCraft makes the 'problem' self-evident. It is a world, and while you're logged off, or at work, or visiting relatives, the world is racing along without you.

Sorry. I don't mean to preach, and I certainly don't mean to sound as though I'm insulting people who have jobs and families. I'm simply trying to explain why it is that people who are used to playing solo games (again I use TES: Oblivion as an example) have such trouble adapting to the mindless repetitiveness of WoW. It is, in effect, a second world, and just like the real world, you have a job in it, you've got to earn money in it, and, of course, you need to maintain a good standing with people in it.

This whole lecture was brought on by nothing more deep and meaningful than myself practically ruining my server's Runecloth economy trying for the Ambassador and Crusader titles. Overnight, Runecloth became incredibly scarce. As a matter of fact, someone who was trying for exactly the same thing as me cussed me out continually for constantly getting the Buyout before he did at the Auction House. It was actually pretty funny.

But back to my main point. Before I got distracted by the philosophical ramifications of MMORPG's, I was talking about Reputation Grinding. It is dull, yes, but it can also be very satisfying. Seeing that little bar creep up and up as you turn in your dailies or Runecloth is, odd as it sounds, quite exciting. And the triumph of seeing that little green swirl around your character is incredible. I always felt a little disappointed that there weren't separate achievements for each Faction Capital. Just the green swirl by itself seems so underwhelming, I want to see golden flashy swirls and that, 'waaaashooong!' sound as I hit exalted. But all the same, I've hit exalted with every Alliance Capital except Gnomeregan, and that will change as soon as I become their Champion later this week and turn in my Champion's Writs. I'll be running around as Ambassador Peregrine while I do the Darnassus and Ironforge Valiant dailies, and after that, I think I'll finally have a title I'll be happy to keep up until Cataclysm at the very least: Crusader. A very fitting title for a Paladin, especially one of the Retribution persuasion, wouldn't you say?

Of course, there are other factions to reputation grind with, and they are a lot more fun and profitable than bankrupting yourself by buying every scrap of Runecloth you can lay hands on even if Auctioneer tells you its 317% the normal price. There are always dailies to do in Icecrown and The Storm Peaks that will give you reputation with Valiance Expedition, Knights of the Ebon Blade, and the Sons of Hodir, and who can resist doing dailies for our bestial/aquatic little friends in Scholazar Basin? As if that wasn't enough, just buying a Tabard and doing Heroics will get you a long way towards Exalted, and get you some nice gear, either from drops or badges, along the way.

Well, that's about it for my ramblings for today. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Trial of the Crusader 25-Man, and Lag Ho!

So, as I hope a lot of you have noticed (or perhaps not, based on your server) Blizzard is doing a fine job of pissing off every raider, instancer, and PvP'er in the game. Of course, they did that already, but that was just the idle hatred of someone hating the latest nerf given to his class, conveniently forgetting the various buffs he got in the same patch - it was rather akin to one hating one's government. This time, however, it's a bit more serious.


Helpful Terms

Lag Jump: When the game freezes for you momentarily, then speeds up three or four times as fast to display everything you missed while lagged out.
Disconnected: When you are exited from the game and returned to the login screen, with the message "Disconnected From Server" displayed.
Lag Spike: A sudden and unexplained increase in latency or response time.


Server-wide on Staghelm and, I'm informed, other servers as well, an epidemic of lag and disconnects has been hitting players. I've noticed myself that it happens much, much more frequently when one is in a raid or dungeon - for some reason, much more specifically, one boss fights. I did Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle yesterday, and I was fine during the trash. First boss fight: Disconnected. I'm able to log back on immediately, continue the fight with a few lag jumps, and finish up. The Animal Bosses had quite a few lag jumps and one lag spike, but no diconnects. Thankfully, Skadi was fine, if I'd disconnected in the middle of a freezing breath I don't know what I'd have done. King Ymiron disconnected immediately upon being engaged, and by the time I logged back in, Bane had owned me, so I missed out on that fight entirely.

I was pissed, of course, but at that point I was ready to chew out my internet provider. It was only later, during the guild's run of Trial of the Crusader (which was my first time through, by the way) that I realized the problem was more widespread.

We were taking on Faction Champions - a difficult fight, no matter your gear or strategy - when fully half the raid disconnected right as we downed a Shadow Priest. I was one of the lucky ones left behind to face the bosses with severely diminished raid numbers and ever-increasing latency. The results were fairly predictable.

I want to make one thing clear here. Patronus of Regnum is a stellar guild, and we always select our raiders with great care. This does not mean that we never wipe, but six wipes on Faction Champions later, I was fed up with the server. It didn't get any better - although we made it past Faction Champions finally, there were a few more disconnects at the Val'Kyr Sisters. Nothing disastrous, but then we come to Anub'Arak.

-sighs-

We had the strategy. We had the DPS. We had the heals. We had the experience. What we did not have, however, was the server's cooperation. Five wipes on Anub'Arak. Nothing new, right? We've all wiped on him before, of course. However, when every wipe is caused, not by faulty heals, not enough DPS, bad Ice pulls, but simply the fact that your healers lose track of the Tank's health because their lag is so extreme that he still shows as 100% even when he's at 10% - well, you begin to lose faith in this game. Every single wipe that night was caused by the simple, unavoidable fact that the lag spikes were sabotaging us, freezing the game and only resuming once the tank and half the raid were already dead. We DID, however, finally get him in the end.

So, what's going on, Blizzard? Why are your servers suddenly unable to take the strain of a simple raid? If anyone else knows anything about this, by all means, let me know.

A Day in the Life of a Peregrine

I decided that this time, I'd take you on a little tour of what my typical day of WoW involves. It's not very interesting for most of you, but I ran out of creative things to post, so here's a day's worth of filler.

It usually begins with me doing the Argent Tournament Dailies on my Death Knight, Frostblight. Once he's finished with his dailies, he may or may not do the Daily Heroic as well. I try to do it every day, but some days the guild isn't doing it and LFG is either empty or full of idiocy.

After Frostblight has finished up his few dailies, I switch over to Peregrine to do his Argent Tournament Dailies - both the Champion's dailies (I'm an Exalted Champion of Stormwind) and the Valiant's dailies for whichever capital city I'm working on at the moment. This usually takes the better part of an hour, and once I finish up, I head to LFG and find some heroics. Doesn't matter which one - Emblems of Conquest are all I'm after. If I can get the daily done at the same time, so much the better, but it doesn't reward me with Conquest.

After I've finished with the various runs and dailies for the day, I usually head to Wintergrasp for some quality Ore-farming and Horde-hunting. Yesterday I owned a Troll Priest six times consecutively before he gave up and left Wintergrasp entirely. It's not always me owning, though - I'm sure we've all had those parties of three or four ultra-geared Horde (or Alliance) Ruthless Gladiators hovering over Wintergrasp Fortress just WAITING for someone to land.

If there's time, I'll participate in the Wintergrasp Battle, and get those dailies done as well, and if it's a Tuesday, there are whole platoons of Raid Leaders forming up Vault of Archavon 25-Mans, so who am I to say no? Afterwards, if there's still time (and I still have the willpower to do even MORE Dailies) I'll head to Dun Niffelem and do the Sons of Hodir Dailies.

At this point my will is usually broken and I can't take another Daily, so I'll log onto one of my alts and do some questing, or I'll just quit the game entirely and do some 3D Animation.

And that, my friends, is a day in the life of a Peregrine.

80 Death Knight: Impressions

Yep, my Death Knight, Frostblight, has finally hit 80. He's specced as Frost/Unholy (mostly Unholy) as his dungeon spec, while straight Blood is his solo spec.

No sooner did I ding than I was invited to a Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep group. I figured, why not, and went along, despite the fact that I was decked out in some of the most badass looking Of The Wolf gear you've ever seen, with only a few blues and one crafted epic to snazz it up a little.

This was my first real dungeon experience with the Death Knight, and let me say, I was impressed. Of course I'm Ret-to-the-end, but I couldn't have picked a better alt. There is almost no dungeon situation that cannot be effectively controlled by the Death Knight, be they Blood or Unholy (I've never tried Frost, but just from my looking at it, it doesn't seem to have the same flexibility as the other two specs). I'll use the boss fights to provide examples.

For our first big baddie, we have Trollgore. He's a very basic tank and spank fight with almost no surprises, except for the odd add or two from upstairs. It just so happened in our case that we pulled him accidentally and ended up getting about 5 or 6 adds from upstairs. So, what's a Death Knight to do? Slap some Icebound Fortitude up in case of aggro, smack down some Death and Decay, and Pestilence + Blood Boil those trolls. Worked like a charm. Fight progressed as usual, threw in a Gargoyle at the end for some extra DPS.

Our next contender is Novos. This fight is really quite easy, if you know what's going to happen ahead of time. If you've never been in there and you don't know what's going on, it can seem incredibly chaotic. Now, Novos is a spellcaster enemy, and normally, a player who excels in a melee fight shouldn't be very good in caster fight, right? Apparently not. Mind Freeze and Strangulate the caster adds he summons, as well as Death Gripping if your tank is busy with another one. Throw down an Anti-Magic Zone if your melee is getting ripped open by Blizzard, or if its just you, Anti-Magic Shell. Easy Peazy.

King Dred, another tank and spank with a few fears and adds thrown in for good measure. No matter, simply D & D + Pestilence + Blood Boil and those adds are down quicker than you can say 'nerf'.

Lastly, the Prophet himself. It's very hard to draw class conclusions based on this fight, since more than half of it involves you as a Skeleton with Skeleton-specific abilities. I will note, however, that if you time it right, a D & D, along with fresh diseases, right before becoming said Skeleton really helps to keep the damage going.

So, from DTK, I can already draw the conclusion that the true strength of the Death Knight is his flexibility. He has tools for almost any given situation, and if a skilled player simply applies the proper ones, victory is sure to follow.

Settled for a Good UI

That's right folks, Peregrine's back, and he's ready to retnoob it to the max! I won't waste time with gushy hellos, so let's just jump right into my latest topic: Selecting a proper UI AddOn.


Helpful Terms:
UI - User Interface. Your buttons, action bars, character frames, and so on.
Curse - Probably the largest WoW AddOn website there is.
AddOn/Mod - A player-made download that you can insert into the Interface -> AddOns folder in your World of WarCraft folder. AddOns can be anything from Recount, which keeps track of how much Damage, Healing, DPS, and so forth you and your party members are doing, to Deadly Boss Mods, which provides warnings and hints when specific things are happening during boss fights.


Now, a lot of folks will just go with the default WoW Interface. This is fine, and I've found it to be among the most effective ways to play. Some people, however, either prefer a different setup, or just get bored with the same thing after a while.

I decided to have a look around on Curse and other AddOn websites. There were lots of mini-AddOns, of course - Add tabs to this window, put different buttons on this bar, and so forth. However, there was a disappointing lack of full UI overhaul Mods. I found three really great ones and finally settled for one of them.

Just a brief look:

This is the Warcrafty UI. Essentially, it makes your UI look like the Warcraft III UI. It was pretty fun for a few minutes, but I found that it cramped my screen beyond the limits of what was acceptable.


This one is called UltimateUI. It worked acceptably, but the balance on my screen felt wrong with everything at the bottom and almost nothing at the top. I do like the effect they've done to the Minimap, though.



This is the one I finally settled on. It's a combination of Bartender 4, which allows you to move custom Action Bars, scale them, and so forth as you please, and Diablo 3 Orbs, which as you can plainly see, inserts a Diablo 3-ish interface, complete with HP and Mana Orbs. I've also included Recount and Omen.

By the way, if anyone knows of any other 'UI Overhaul' AddOns, I would be delighted to hear about them.