Redwolf's Journal (continued)

The announced release date for WoW: Mists of Pandaria. Hmm. Well, it's later than I would have guessed a year ago, but it seems fairly in-line with the things that have come up in the last six months. A month after GW2 releases and as some have pointed out, it slips in before the first wave of annual pass purchasers expires. Seems reasonable and predictable from a business perspective. If I'm surprised by anything, it's that we're hearing the date only two months out - and I'm only very minorly surprised at that. So... two months to "finish" anything in Cataclysm before driving ahead. Without a Ragnaros kill and some heroic Firelands raiding, that's probably not enough time to finish out Dragonwrath, though I'm not sure where we are on that precisely. I'd like to get a new shield (from Warmaster Blackhorn) and the 4-piece Protection bonus (probably a chest from Ultraxion), but neither of those things reaches "goal" level for me - ...

RL schedules have pushed raiding back to a later hour the last few weeks, but once everyone was present, we managed to hit the ground running last night. The zone debuff went from 25% to 30% and it was noticeable, with bosses in the first half of Dragon Soul proving... well... easy. Of course, Hagara's ice walls can still kill you if you run into where they're going. Ultraxion was a bit rough because some people died along the way, leaving us short on DPS and putting us right up against his enrage mechanic. He fell as we did, victory coming probably only because of our priest's Spirit of Redemption "resurrect." Blackhorn wasn't bad. Spine of Deathwing is still the hardest between coordination and damage, but we got that in our first go too. And so with several people who hadn't even seen the LFR version of Madness of Deathwing, we tried it and wiped once. I fear that might have been mostly my fault, though it was my first time tanking it in any form and...

So another part of my lack of drive in WoW has to do with gearing. Back when 4.3 was coming out, I went through and looked at what gear options there would be. And now... Well, I don't have them all, but I have filled all the slots where the valor point option gives primary defensive stats. I could be valor capping every week (as I was for a little while) to fill out all possible slots with 397 gear. I could be doing LFR to try for 384 tier pieces. But... why? I'm well over the threshold for starting in Dragon Soul, and that's the only place that might be at all challenging from a gear perspective. I'm better-geared than all but two or three guildmates as it is. While I try to be ahead as best I can in case I'm needed, if the guild isn't actively raiding then there's no need for cutting-edge, raid-level gear. And while I was really psyched about the paladin PVP set look, the available blue coloring isn't nearly as striking as the (requires arena rat...

I'm running out of "new" things to comment on about Cataclysm content, but there's still a few things... Potions It didn't sink in right away, but Cataclysm-level potions seem to only be available via Alchemy. Previously, you'd get some from quests or dropped off monsters, but in the level 80+ content, I haven't seen a single potion drop or reward. I guess that's a deliberate choice made to emphasize a profession a little more, but it seems strange. Then again, even healing 10k out of a health pool of 130+k is a smaller percentage than what I think we were seeing before, too. But I've managed to get some made for my main, at least. Tol Barad I'll always have mixed feelings about the PVP content, I suppose. Or, at least, I'll always have some negative and might have some positive. Tol Barad is reasonably pretty, if a little dark. I like that they split the battleground from a non-battleground area, so there are things to do there wi...

Professions Wow, I have picked a lot of herbs. @.@ My warlock was made primarily to try out the class and have someone to do inscription. Amusingly, after grinding his skill up to high-end Wrath levels, we had another player int he guild become active with their scribe - this story gets better later. I also took tailoring with him, because it didn't require specific gathering support and in the Burning Crusade era, bind-on-pickup tailored items were the way to go. So I've been leveling his inscription again, though the glyphs taper off. Cataclysm inscription seems to be more about making relics (which are more universal than they used to be) and off-hand items. I decided to drop his tailoring as it's not nearly so important or useful when I have another character that does it. Instead, I took up alchemy and leveled that up from zero. I was actually able to cap it before inscription, go figure, but both are maxxed out now. And the same player that became an active s...

Stood in Fire I was cheerfully taking care of some daily quests and had taken a portal to Uldum, then flitted over to the Ramkahen quest giver on my hippogryph when something happened. Mind you, this rough sequence of thoughts took place very, very quickly: - Okay, almost there... - Is that a beam of fire? Wait, why's there fire all around? - Was that a level-up fanfare? No, wait, that was an achievement. - Why am I dead all of a sudden? - Oh. OH! Deathwing made a pass at the zone and killed everyone. Well I didn't expect that in Uldum. - Awwwww. I don't even get to see him? I pan around and all I see are the flaming fields. Blacksmithing Blues And not rares, either. No, as I'm leveling up blacksmithing, I'm feeling increasingly disappointed with it. It's not even that it's bad per se, just bland. Every profession gets a self-buff of sorts. Gathering professions probably suffer a little in the long run due to having static benefits that don...

Uldum Neat little story about being captured on the way in, then there's a couple plotlines running. One is helping the Ramkahen secure and protect their lands. That's relatively typical fare, it feels like, though there are some interesting strategy quests where you give directions to a group in a vehicle-like interface. The other plotline involves Harrison Jones, with all the requisite Indiana Jones references and homages. Most of this, I loved. It also saw me to the first couple deaths I had by not being cautious enough in stealthing about with an item. What can I say, stealth is so foreign to a paladin I just don't know how to use it? Still, I really enjoyed all this after his brief appearances before. There were, however, some quests in the zone that got a little tedious. Kill X creatures or Collect X drops get a bit wearying, and the monotony of sand probably doesn't help. But the ruins were lovely, and there were a lot of quests that were more unique or fla...

A few days in, I have to hand it to Blizzard this time around. This has been the cleanest MMO/expansion launch I've seen. Not flawless, but I've not been stuck waiting in queues. I haven't seen any major delays. I haven't read about servers crashing. Granted, Blizzard has a lot of experience and a huge infrastructural lead on anyone else, but this is how you release new content and make a good impression. Guild Limits and Advancement Let's see... total rep from 0 to Exalted is 42,000. The official weekly limit is 3500 rep (3849 for a human character). So based on math alone, it looks like a 12-week journey to be Exalted with your guild, assuming you can continue to maximize that (which may not be accurate if you run out of quests after a week or two). Or just under 11 weeks for humans. I'm not sure what I think of that. On one hand, a three-month period of "getting into" a guild seems sort of reasonable. On the other hand, for those of us who h...

Acquisition Since I was working nights anyway, it seemed easier to swing by and pick up my copy around midnight on the way home. I showed up at about 11:50, and the line moved after the turn of the hour pretty quickly. Simple and easy. There were, perhaps, forty customers (give or take) present, including gabefinder who had been waiting since around 10. Even if I were home bored, I wouldn't have come that early. Then again, I didn't spring for a collector's edition either. Installation So, I got home with slightly less than an hour before Cataclysm content was due to go live. Plenty of time to get installed. And it was. I think the pre-expansion patch (which really contained a good bit of the data and was a download) took a lot longer. So far, so good. Go-live! 12:01 am, December 7th. Hmm. No, everything seems normal and "old." No worgen, no XP bar. While discussing this and after a couple logins, a server message came up announcing the new content was r...