TankSpot - Blogs - Afternoon Yak by Caulle

BNet Is Poorly Thought Out

Caulle — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 03:52:20 GMT

I havn't blogged in forever, but I felt this was probably warranted so that I could just rant on my own instead of cluttering up the forums.

This morning I got a txt from a friend asking me if I was on my warrior. My reply was "p_O No." Absolutely no one has my password right now, so I rushed to my computer fearing I had been hacked. As soon as my GMail notifier had signed up, there were two pop ups about new e-mails. One saying that I had changed my password. And another saying I had merged my account with another BNet account.

First thing I did was try to log onto my account from the main WoW site. This wasn't working because my account had been merged with a BNet account and it wanted that account information to log in. The e-mail about the BNet account wouldn't have worked about a password recovery because it was linked to "s***@live.cn" so I'd have to have access to that e-mail in order to change anything.

In other words, I was boned.

I logged onto my vent server right away and barged into a channel. One of the guys was an officer, and I asked if I was online. I had to sit there painfully listening to vent as my friends described the events as some guy on the other side of the world proceeded to empty out the guild bank. Being the GM, there was nothing they could do. All my characters were officers, and only the GM can gkick or demote an officer.

Soon after, the person threw GM at one of the other officers and logged my warrior off. The new GM quickly removed all my characters from the guild, but in the process he noticed that 2 of my 80's were missing. He also couldn't add them to his friends list, they were already gone. A short while later my warrior disappeared too.

I've had a few thoughts on today's adventure thus far:

First of all, I've been really angry/emo at the game lately. I hadn't been having much fun until recently, and it wasn't until it was all taken away that I realized how much it still means to me.

Secondly, the whole BNet system is poorly thought out. Normally if you get your account hacked and find out right away, you just do a PW retrieval, answer the secret question, and move on your merry way. Petition a GM, explain what happened, you'll have your gear back in no time. But the way the BNet system currently works, anyone who has your information can just take it away in a heartbeat and there is NOTHING you can do. Except Monday to Friday between 8am to 8pm Pacific. There is no security. It doesn't ask you to confirm your e-mail address from your Warcraft account. It doesn't ask your secret question. It doesn't even verify that the information from both accounts match!!!

And I know what everyone is thinking at this point. Did you run anti-virus? Do you use Firefox? How often do you scan your computer for malicious software? How often do you change your password? Do you have the Blizzard Authenticator? etc etc...

Years ago, when I was first exposed to the internet, I was a poor user. Most people were (and still are to an extent). But I've gotten smarter about browsing over the years. I don't use an anti-virus software because I havn't had one in 6+ years. I already used Firefox so I just assumed I was protected.

And the Blizz Authenticator? This is the part that kills me the most. I have it. I downloaded it 3 months ago for my iPhone. I booted that thing up the second it finished downloading, and it wanted my BNet account so I said "Eff this" and pretty much forgot about it. Big mistake.

So lesson learned, but what a crappy way to learn it.

Pro tip: Use the authenticator and merge your account to Bnet.

Back to the Basics

Caulle — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:22:48 GMT

I haven't blogged in quite some time, over a month now, so I think I'm about due.

I've been having a lot of fun in LK so far, despite some of the standard stresses that accompany leading a raid. Leading the raid is, well, it's still the same old Chaos. I missed it like hell, and we're back to doing what we do best: raiding.

We didn't push people to go crazy and cap out at 80 within the first week. The leveling grind tends to kill some people but I don't really have much sympathy for them, more so because I made the mistake of leveling my DK first and had to jump back onto my Warrior days after 80, and my warrior still hit 80 before some people did on their mains. We had one guy who would log on vent and ask if anyone wanted to group up to quest. The answer was always a resounding silence because he was still working his way through Howling Fjord and everyone else was already up to Storm Peaks. It's one thing to have a group quest you need help with, but no one is going to drop what they're doing completely to run this guy through all his quests because he hates leveling alone. He took a bit longer than the rest of us, but still managed to hit 80 by the time we started Naxx25.

Naxx 25 the first week went well. I had tickets to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on our second raid day (which was utterly fantastic and amazing, and I'm definitely making a point to go next year again) so I missed out. I was a bit worried because we got stuck on Thaddius the first night. A few DPS consistently ended up dead early on, and we were hitting the enrage timer every single attempt so I was really surprised when I got home and found out they managed to kill Thaddius and clear everything else up to KT. KT was organized for the following monday, and despite an extra raid day everyone showed up and we nailed him in only 2 attempts.

The following week we managed to fully clear Naxx in one night, and get our first Malygos kill the next night.

Our raid success aside, we're still plagued by the same problems as always. We run pretty much a skeleton crew, meaning we have the bare minimum to cover what we need with no spares. Our guild has always operated like this. We've always had a very difficult time managing more than 25 players because someone always gets pissed off that they don't get a main spot and they quit. Even if they go to a much lesser progressed raid on the server that's a full dungeon tier behind, if it means getting a full time spot they'd take it. This is the kind of raid environment my server has. People don't care how good your raid is, they just want the full time spot. Then you look at guilds who were able to maintain a 30+ crew for the demands of Sunwell stacking, and its because that guild was likely the best on the server and people were willing to log on each night and wait for a raid spot if it meant raiding with the best. But again, my server just doesn't have that mentality. Epics in general > higher item level epics.

Thankfully, the content is easy enough now that I'm not worried about running with less than 25 people. We got the majority of The Dedicated Few completed over the holidays because we rand with so few people, and overall didn't have any problems.

I think our problems are going to start popping up more when Ulduar comes out because we will likely need to do a little recruiting. Right now recruitment has been very difficult. There has been nothing to attract people to our guild over the other 10+ guilds that are killing KT in Naxx25. Why go with us when you could go with one of them? We managed to pick up the Enhancement Shaman we were missing, and while she has a few things to work on, she certainly puts out numbers and was 3rd on Patchwerk for us. We have others needing to pick up numbers sadly as I beat out 2 DPS in the same fight. Again, another major concern of mine for when we start our 3 drake Sartharion attempts next week. We managed 2 Drakes this week in only a few attempts, but we only killed the first drake moments before the next one arrived. We used Drakes 1 and 3, so we need to cut our first drake kill time by almost half to be able to manage 3.

Ulduar is a ways off thankfully, but it doesn't mean that I don't think about it at least a couple of times per week, and think about things that we could improve now before 3.1. I think this is largely why we are pushing achievements because we need to challenge ourselves right now. And being "that guild" that is pro enough to get the achievements done is incentive to join us over the other guilds on the server.

We'll see in time. New year, we just had 2 weeks off. I'm going to give them a week to get back into the raiding groove before I start looking seriously at numbers and performance.

The Death Knight Experience Is Over

Caulle — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:07:44 GMT

/played
3 days, 4 hours, some odd minutes. I dinged 80 sometime Sunday around supper. The Death Knight leveling experience was great. I leveled as Blood which has so much self healing that I had virtually no downtime. I solo'd every single group quest up to 80 that I came across (except the Overlord in HFP) without much difficulty.

Then I hit 80 and started doing dungeons with the other 80 DK from the guild. I don't have the gear to tank currently so I've been working on that. One thing I've noticed is how incredibly irritating other Death Knights are to group with. Aside from the fact that they also roll on your loot, they seem to think Death Grip is the be all end all solution to everything, and it's okay to drop DnD before the tank gets to the group and pull aggro because "that's what Icebound Fortitude" is for. Just because you can write your name in the snow, doesn't mean you should be doing it every 5 minutes. So the DK novelty has started to wear off already.

Then I started looking at tanking from a practical stand point and that's when the novelty really started to wear off. The rotations are very restrictive compared to the new warrior rotations which are much more reactionary and fun to play. If you mess up your warrior rotation, it's easy to just wait a second and resume. If you mess up your DK rotation, you pretty much have to wait 10 seconds for the runes to reset to get back into a proper groove. There's also a lot of utility they don't have that a warrior does have, and the big one for me is a warrior to apply sunders for the raid.

And let's not forget glorious 3.0. Right up until then I was prepared to main switch. When 3.0 hit and I started tanking with the new changes it was like falling in love all over again with my warrior.

So the name in the snow thing, 3.0 changes, and all the comparisons to my warrior just made me madder than a yak in heat. And that's when I made an official decision last night to go back to my warrior full time.

Ding. Welcome to Borean Tundra and level 71. /crytime At least work is slow right now, so it shouldn't be more than a week for me to cap.

The Main Game

Caulle — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:25:45 GMT

In less than 40 hours I will be on my way home from my local EB store with my midnight launch copy of Wrath. I'm not looking forward to standing outside at the strip mall in 0C (32F) degree weather, but this is why Canadians invented toques. And there's a Tim Horton's 100 feet away from the EB. Score.

But even though I've got less than 40 hours to go, I still don't know what my main will be for Wrath. I played a DK extensively in beta and I enjoyed them immensely. I enjoyed them so much I actually never bothered to play my warrior on beta, and I had decided I was going to reroll DK for Wrath as a Frost tank.

So back on live I started preparing. I gathered up ALL the materials to get to 375 Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Cooking. I gathered a crap ton of items needed for quest turn ins, BOE upgrade items, consumables for power leveling... I was so prepared. It took a collective 3 bank alts, plus 2 full tabs of my bank alt's guild bank to house this metric fuck ton of stuff.

Then 3.0 hit. I looked through the prot talents, and while they all looked good on the surface, in action they were amazing. I've never had so much fun tanking as my warrior before. So here I am now, less than 40 hours until midnight launch, and I have no idea what class will be my main.

The more I think about it, the closer I get to a definitive plan. Right now, I'm going to hop on my Deathknight (Steag) and power level him to 70. Still not 100% sure after that, but I will likely keep leveling him right up to 80. The goal is basically to keep both my tanks semi-equally geared. Thanks to the 10 man counterparts to the 25 mans, that's entirely possible. Another reason for the DK right now is because we are sans Enhancement Shaman and I can cover one of their muchly needed buffs.

Of course, who knows what'll happen. I might change my mind tomorrow morning, and then again while waiting in line at EB, and perhaps once more on the drive home. I'm so hopeless.

I'm about to be in ur base...

Caulle — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:55:09 GMT

invading ur countries.

I live in Canada, and am currently engaged to some yankee boy I met through Warcraft. Go figure. We filed paperwork back in May to bring me over, and after 5 long agonizing months of waiting the paperwork finally came back approved today.

I still have to wait on my package to arrive in the mail and go through some interviews in Montreal, but I could be on the road as early as January to move all my junk out there.

Plus I also got paid today. I believe I shall now go do a small victory dance, and then gank the last piece of pie in the fridge.

Wrath Plans

Caulle — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:01:33 GMT

Was playing lots of Fable 2 last week, now into Fallout 3 this week, and I can't wait for Wrath in 2 weeks. Well, aside from the fact that my store that's having the midnight opening is in a strip mall which means standing outside at 11:00. Not to mention we got 2 inches of snow the other day already and it looks like we're headed towards another snow filled winter again this year. Crytime.

I'm wicked excited for Wrath. The Warhammer novelty is fading. The PVP is great, but I was always a PVE'er at heart, and the PVE sucks. It's boring, stiff, and unresponsive. Tanking in that game is about as fun as tanking in 2.4. It's not that tanking in 2.4 is bad, it's that tanking in 3.0 is 10x more fun. I'll still keep my account active and play from time to time because my fiancee isn't picking up Wrath (he loathes Warcraft. Don't ask.) and it gives us something to do until my paperwork clears and I can move.

Wrath plans are changing fortunately/unfortunately. I had decided I didn't want to get stuck in a loop of raiding again and being locked down for 4 nights/week. With the announcement of the 10man pairings to go with each 25man, the idea of raiding 2 nights/week to clear the 10mans seemed ideal. That was until one of the guys who quit around the time the guild was falling apart suggested we try to do 25mans 2 nights/week. The suggestion was very appealing.

10 mans are great and all. But I've never really felt a challenge in them except on our first few Bear Attempt runs. The 25 mans are where the real sense of pride and accomplishment lies. Right now we're trying to see how many people are coming back. We've lost A LOT of players due to the guild collapse, and a few of them are less than impressed with me. Though really, we're way overdue for spring cleaning and I wouldn't want half of them back anyway.

So we'll see. We've got too many people for one 10 man as it stands, but not enough for 2 10mans yet. I don't know how I feel about having to do another recruitment drive. I think all our healers are gone at this point except one confirmation. Meh, I'm leaving it up to the other guy this time around. He made the offer to run the 25s, he can knock himself out. Of course I'll still do all the out of raid stuff because I enjoy it for some reason.

Phenomenal

Caulle — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:09:29 GMT

is the only word I can think of to describe the warrior changes in 3.0.

I never got around to playing my warrior in beta much. I spent all my time on my Death Knight, then the next thing I knew I was on vacation for 2 weeks, and then Warhammer came out. I've been keeping up with the changes, so I pretty much knew what was coming, I just didn't know what the changes would be like live in game.

Dear god. I really think Blizzard nailed it on the head. I've had an insane amount of fun this week running around with friends, helping them score some achievements. I don't think I've ever had this much fun before playing my warrior before.

I never really thought a tank needed to be DPS in order to be fun. It's the role that makes tanking fun.

I take it back. DPS is also pretty fucking fun too.

One Year

Caulle — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:24:31 GMT

Hey look at that. I went to start a blog this morning and noticed on the left that my join date was October 2007. A whole year trolling TankSpot. ^_^

Anywho, it's been a while since I actually did a blog here. September has been busy for me. I finished work for my uncle at the end of August, then spent 2 weeks in Seattle, and have since spent as much time as possible playing Warhammer Online. Okay and now you're pretty much up to date!

Ah yes, Warhammer. It's been quite amazing so far to say the least. Head start went off without a hitch. Servers were very stable, and the only downtime was a few hours the night of the 17th to prepare for Live. I loved what they did off the bat. They put very small population caps on all the servers to encourage people to fill up the other servers. It worked. We had originally planned to roll on Skull Throne, but there were 30 min queues al day during the CE Head Start so we moved over to Red Eye Mountain which had no queues. Of course, we do have queues currently, but I'd say a good 30% of all the servers have queues right now on a normal night. The

Mythic's response to many issues has also been quite swift. There was an issue causing people to crash to the Desktop while trying to zone into the Capitol Cities which was already hotfixed. Almost 5000 accounts have been banned for gold selling as well. In fact, Mythic prepared an entire team before launch specifically to combat and deal with gold selling in the game. It's always entertaining to know when they've banned a bunch of accounts as usually there's a server wide pop up message talking about some heretics had been fed to the lions and would no longer plague the lands, or some such other flavour text.

Though really, Mythic's other answer to gold selling was similar to WoW's answer with the daily quests: give a little more gold back to the community. A major complaint of mine back during closed beta was the money flow. I often struggled to buy my new abilities each level because I had no money. Money definitely isn't an issue anymore. All abilities had their gold cost reduced slightly, and I had my mount money (15G) by the time I hit Rank 12.

The other nice thing about having a good money supply is that I don't worry about dropping 30 silver to pick up Siege weapons from the Quartermaster. Last night my guild did our first Keep Siege, and it was wicked fun.

Okay, brief (aka long) explanation of how the game world is laid out: Warhammer works in pairings. High Elves vs Dark Elves, Empire vs Chaos and Dwarves vs Greenskins. Each of these pairings is one giant zone. Each zone is then broken down into 4 Tiers, and each Tier has a northern and southern section of the map. The Tiers represent every 10 levels or so for your character. You may enter lower level tiers on a higher level character, but if you flag up you are turned into a chicken with about 200 hitpoints. Within each tier there is a large section of the map dedicated to RvR, and you are auto-flagged upon entering. Each of the the RVR zones have control points. In Tier 1 you get 4 control points. In Tier 2 there are 4 control points and 2 Keeps. In Tier 3 there are 4 control points, and 2 Keeps, but the keeps now have an inner and outer wall. I'm not sure about Tier 4 just yet, but at Rank 40 and with many many people you can embark on City warfare and assault the opposing Realm's capitol. A full assault on a Rank 5 city and killing their leader will knock the city down to Rank 1.

Okay, now that the terminology is out of the way... Last night while questing in the T3 Chaos zone, Order decided to capture all the control points and we decided to defend our keep. They never mounted an assault on the keep so we decided to take theirs. Attacking a keep can last as long as 15 minutes, or 2 hours, depending on the size of your Warband (raid), the rank of your players, and how many of the opposing realm decide to defend.

Off we went to their keep with about a dozen people in our warband. We managed to break through the first 2 doors, but our efforts proved futile. In order to claim a keep you need to kill the Keep Lord and his 4 Champion buddies. The Lord is a level 32 boss, and I was the highest ranked tank at 25. Couple that with about 6 more Order inside healing the NPC's and tearing us a new one.

After almost 2 hours and our second failed attempt we were debating on bothering again when we noticed a second full warband headed to the keep. Zerg it down? Yes please. The doors had respawned which we stormed and knocked down quickly (players can also attack them to speed the process), and then flooded the main room of the keep to take out the Keep Lord. Even with the 40+ of us there or so, it still took a few minutes to down the NPC's while dealing with the Order running amuck. Oh, and killing a Keep Lord is a Public Quest so he dropped 8 loot bags.

Because our City is at Rank 3, we have access to the Bosses of the City who hand out quests to kill Keep Lords. Completing and turning in these quests adds to your city ranking. We then flew to the Greenskin zone to take out another Order controlled keep, and at that point Destruction completely controlled all the Tier 3 zones so we called it a night.

Everyone had an immensely fun time last night even if it slowed down our leveling and Renown ranking progress. But nobody cared because it was fun, and it was the first time in a long time I've really done something together with my guild and enjoyed it.

This of course leads into my current dilemma. I'm having so much damn fun in Warhammer, what do I do about Lich King? I had already planned to re-roll Death Knight, and have already farmed up all the mats to power level Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Cooking to 375. As far as PVP goes Warhammer is superior to Warcraft in almost every way in my opinion, but it feels very lacking PVE wise. Tanking does not feel fluid in Warhammer. There's something almost euphoric about Warcraft when you really nail your rotations and everything feels "right". Warhammer has been clunky thus far, at least I find the Chosen style of play to be. More on this later however.

In the meantime, if you're thinking about Warhammer to tide yourself over for a while, we're Destruction side on Red Eye Mountain. Look for Steag in game.

Warhammer CE Head Start

Caulle — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:02:41 GMT

Waagh time. The head start for the Collector's Edition of Warhammer started today. Pre-orders get in on the action Tuesday, and the game goes live Thursday.

If you picked up the game and don't have any plans to roll with friends, feel free to look me up on Red Eye Mountain on Steag.

Waaagh

Caulle — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:54:38 GMT

Yesterday, Mythic Entertainment finally lifted the NDA on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I was lucky enough to get an invite into the closed beta back in May out of over 800,000 applicants. I can start off by saying "WOW" and I will now elaborate in a really, really, really, long blog, and it's probably spoiler heavy if you were planning to experience the game vanilla. You were warned...

First of all, a small story. My fiancee is an avid MMO player. He's been playing them a good 10 years and he's pretty much tried them all. He's also a huge snob when it comes to them, and any imperfections he'll bitch about worse than a woman. He also loathes Warcraft. (Don't even get me started on that one. He didn't always hate it.) That aside, he got into closed beta last week as they invited all the CE pre-orders in. So far all he's had to say is "Wow" and "This is probably the best MMO I've ever played. I'm highly impressed."

Why is Warhammer good? Many many reasons. I'll start at the beginning and describe the game and the world as I leveled up and it evolved...

The first and pre-dominate class I have played in game was the Chosen. Of course, I totally picked that class based on looks alone. Is that not the most badassed looking tank you have ever seen? I see one of those run at me, and I am running in the opposite direction. I was hesitant to play a tank archetype in a PVP dominant game, but it's been incredibly fun so far as there are so many PVE elements mixed in.

I jumped into the first zone, and the first thing I noticed was how much of a war zone it felt like. There were NPC's *everywhere*. I think there were more NPC's in the first starter camp than there are in all of Shattrath. I exaggerate some obviously, but you get the picture.

Off I went to do a few quests. The map has a built in quest helper of sorts and it outlines in red the general area of your quest objective. AoC had a similar system, but it was pretty much Questing for Dummies where X literally marked the spot. It was nice to be guided in the right direction and explore things for myself instead of having my hand held.

Questing, and especially group questing, in the game is fantastic. Quest items are a 100% drop rate, and everyone in the group gets one. You don't even have to loot the body, it just auto-loots to your quest bag when the mob dies. Quest items you loot from the ground respawn quickly enough that you don't even realize it despawned for 3 seconds. Named quest mobs are also on a fairly quick timer as well. I don't think I've ever waited more than 5 minutes.

I left the first quest hub at about Rank 3 and headed out into some more open areas. I stumbled upon what are called "Public Quests". Dear sweet jesus. The Public Quest.

A public quest is pretty much just that. It is a designated area that has 3 stages and objectives for each stage. You don't need to be in a party either to contribute, but it is wise to join an Open Warband (more on Open Parties later). The first stage is untimed and will continue until completed. It usually involves simple things like killing 100 mobs in the area, or setting a bunch of cocoons on fire. Once that is complete you go into Stage 2 which is always timed. Stage 2 will usually (but not always) introduce Champions (Elites) so you will require tanks and healers if you're in a small Warband. When that is complete Stage 3 starts which is also timed. Stage 3 will have a Hero (super Elite) and may or may not also have Champions. Kill the Hero, get epics.

Epics? Oh yes. Epics. At the end of the PQ, a large chest drops with random number/quality of loot bags. Sometimes you get 5 green loot bags. Other times it's 1 blue, and a few green. There are also Epic loot bags and Golden loot bags which contain an epic and a green set item. Anyone who was in the zone at any given time during a PQ when it completes will get to roll (out of 1000) on the loot bags if they contributed enough. There are also bonus rolls awarded to people who contribute the most. If you remain in a PQ from start to finish, it's very easy to get a bonus roll of up to 400. The highest rollers get to reach into the chest and pull out a loot bag. You can only loot 1 item from the bag be it the quality item, or crafting materials, or simply cash.

Didn't win a loot bag? That's okay because you also gain Influence from PQ's. All PQ's are tied to a Chapter which advances the WAR story. Each Chapter has 3 ranks of Influence and you get free stuff for each rank. The first is usually a selection of potions. The second will be a new weapon or piece of armour. The last rank of influence will be also be a new weapon or piece of armour but a much higher quality. Once you hit Rank 11 and move into the Tier 2 zones, the last influence rank will start handing out blues.

*EDIT: Forgot Open Parties*
One of the nicest features is the Open Party system. Whenever you are running around solo there is an icon on your character frame you can click that'll bring up a panel with all the open parties in your area. It'll tell also tell you where/what the party is currently doing based on their location: PQ, PVE, RVR. It's an awesome way to meet people, and I've guilded up a few times randomly throughout the course of Beta because I was able to meet people I normally wouldn't have. Getting groups together isn't a chore, but rather fun and random.

My fiancee and I will start working on a PQ solo. Next thing you know some guy is running by the zone and decides to join our Open Party. So we work on it together, and then 2 more guys run by and join the party. We form up a Warband, and then next thing you know there are 10 of us all working together, and it's wickedfun.
End Edit.

After I finished up the Chapter 1 quests hubs I ventured into Chapter 2 where I met up with a pretty gross looking Marauder who wanted me to complete the Nordenwatch Scenario. Scenarios are basically Battlegrounds. Each pairing of races (Empire VS Chaos, Dwarf VS Greenskin, and High Elf VS Dark Elf) has their own unique scenario per Tier. Nordenwatch has 3 capture points. First team to 500 points wins the match. The more your team currently owns, the faster you accumulate points (think Arathi Basin). Killing players and capping control points nets you Renown. At the end of the scenario you get a chunk of Renown with the winning team obviously getting more.

There are other ways to aquire Renown. World RVR. Each Tier of each zone has a major RVR objective with at least 4 capture points. Tier 2 Zones start to have keeps for Siege warfare. Once your Realm turns a point over to your side you have 3 minutes to hold it while some NPCs and a Champion spawn to defend it. Once those guys spawn, the point can not be turned for 15 minutes even if your defenders are killed.

Each Realm will have a Warcamp right on the Outskirts to the RVR section of the zone. The Warcamp will contain quests out in the PVE zones, but also quests in the RVR zones to control points (note: you get quest completion so long as your Realm owns the point. You don't need to be present when it turns), and kill players. These quests not only give experience, but Renown points as well.

Is Renown worth it? Oh hell yes. At Renown Rank 2 (RR2) you get a full set of green gear from a vendor. RR4 has another set of gear, and RR6 has another full set of gear waiting for you when you hit Rank 10. The gear is amazing, and are likely huge upgrades if you can afford to buy them right away when you are level appropriate.

Ah yes, money. Money is a bit of an issue in the game at low levels. From Rank 1 to Rank 10, you will likely end up spending every brass you earn just training up your new abilities. If you have to choose between buying new gear, and buying new abilities, get the abilities. Thankfully money scales up very quickly in the Tier 2 zones. According to my roommate it also scales very quickly through RvR. He RVR'd non-stop in the Tier 1 EvC zone from 8-11 and said he had over 2 gold at that point in time which is very good.

But back to RvR, and to talk about my Chosen a little more.

Let's start with archetypes. The game runs off the 4 basic archetypes: Tank, Melee dps, Ranged dps, and Healer. There are variations to talent trees which focus on different paths, but ultimately you are your archetype. If you don't like healing, then don't roll a Shaman. If you want to see big DPS numbers on your screen, then don't roll a Chosen. It's that simple. These archetypes play out this way in RvR the same way as they would in PVE. Tanks really do tank to an extent.

I spend most of my time grouped with my fiancee's Disciple of Khaine. He heals, I tank, we both DPS. At rank 7 I get taunt which works in RVR. It doesn't force the player to target me, but it does give me a 30% damage increase on them. They now have a choice to make. They can ignore the tank with a small damage increase and keep attacking my healer, or they can turn and attack me 3 times to get rid of the debuff. The DoK only has maybe 1600 hitpoints at Rank 15, and I've got almost 3000, 60% damage mitigation, and another 20% mitigation to all spells. So they keep attacking the DoK. However I have also placed Guard on my DoK.

Guard is obtained at Rank 10. When placed on an ally, it splits ALL their damage taken evenly between the two of us whenever they are within 10 yards of me. It also splits hate as well. So now the DoK is taking twice as long to kill. Have a large group of buddies to protect? That's fine, I also learned Hold the Line at Rank 10.

Hold the Line is basically a Shield Wall that drains your Action Points to 0 over about 10 seconds. It applies to yourself, and all your friends in a cone area behind you. That Nordenwatch scenario I mentioned? One of the key choke points of that map is a bridge that leads to the central capture point. WAR has a form of player collision. It's a much smaller radius around players compared to AoC. You can clip through at the sides, but you can't run right through another player. 2 Chosen standing on that bridge standing side by side blowing Hold the Line. It's beautiful.

Okay, it's almost lunch time so time to start wrapping this up. If you made it this far, wow.

WAR, simply put, is amazing. However I also think that Wrath will be amazing. At the very least I would recommend people to not be so judgemental about new upcoming MMOs and at the very least *try* the game before you judge it. Last night I did a run through The Nexus with 3 friends who are in beta. We grabbed a pug and invited him to vent. He saw people in the "WAR Beta" channel on my vent server and asked if that was Warhammer beta. We said yes, and he immediately scoffed and said "War beta? More like scrubs beta." Speaking of scrubs, he was a terrible tank.

Should you get Warhammer? Maybe. At the very least put a $5 deposit down on a pre-order so you get a key for Open Beta and take the game for a test drive. It's not going to be a WoW killer as some people are painting it as. Calm down. It takes a lot to topple 10 million active subscribers over night.

Conclusion

Caulle — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:04:25 GMT

Okay, so, current update with my Warcraft guild. Long story short I have GM back, everyone quit, and we're taking a nice break until Wrath.

So how it all amazingly went down...

The raid has continued to take one step forward and 10 steps back each week. At least 1-2 people were quitting weekly for various reasons. They had become a revolving door raid instead of a family. Perhaps I shouldn't hold onto nostalgia, but at the same time that's what our edge was, and that's what made us an awesome guild.

Last week, one of the Xfer warriors decided to Xfer back to his friends server one night and left a post on the forums. Down one tank to 3. The same day Pathis finally decided he had had enough and also quit. Down to 2 tanks, and with Pathis' leaving that also meant the entire tank corps inside of about 2 months had quit for various reasons.

Arguing continued on the forums where a flame war erupted on a few people. One player made a post how they were also done raiding, and frankly pointed out why the raid was failing. The acting GM deleted his post and immediately Gkicked him and all his alts. More arguing and finger pointing continued over the course of the weekend.

Monday I wrote a lengthy PM to the acting GM. Several people thought it wasn't my place to do so, but on the other hand I co-led a successful raid for 3 years. I'd like to think I know a little something about running a raid, and I wanted to help.

I explained to him why I felt the raid was failing, and that yet again the raid was being forced with another rebuilding phase. It's 3rd rebuild in a matter of months. He contacted me on AIM that morning and we had a lengthy conversation. During that time he admitted to me he never wanted to lead the raid at all. He just wanted to keep raiding, and only stepped up because if he hadn't then no one else would have. This only caused him to get more and more bitter (as happened with the previous acting GM). When the amount of work that is required to run a raid is thrown onto a player who doesn't want to lead the raid in the first place, well they're going to crash pretty quickly. And that's pretty much what has happened to all the acting GM's since I had to stop raiding for work.

So, a letter was posted on the forums about the cessation of operations. Most of the replies were just sad face emotes. A few were bitter comments from recent Xfers. I told one of them to cry more because there was always a risk when you Xfer servers. Given the state of guilds trying to progress as a whole right now through sunwell, joining a guild that killed Kalecgoes 2 months ago and has made 0 progress on Brutallus probably isn't the best guild to join. Do your homework first.

Later that night I got GM back, and logged off for the night. Then the drama started...

I didn't think of the Gbank or how the ranks were set up, but I certainly did in the morning when I noticed one of the admin had taken out all the epic gems from the bank. Now, he *was* the raid gem cutter at the time, so maybe he was just cutting gems. Wanting to be on the safe side I demoted him and his "girlfriend" so they couldn't withdraw from that tab anymore.

Later on in the afternoon the Xfer went on a pretty big rant about me in gchat. I had a friend immediately log on and remove him from guild. About 4 people followed suit. 2 were Xfers, and the other 2 were the admin that I had demoted earlier. GG, there go the epic gems. He had also taken all the sulfuron ingots, and some scraps from Naxxramas the night before with the gems.

Throughout the day, a few more people left, and all the vets that had quit came back when they found out I had GM again. It's funny though, but out of 25+ people that were in the raid, only about 7 quit total, and that only left *maybe* another 7 in guild. It was really obvious how much the raid had been completely relying on another guild to provide raiders.

And thus the "new and improved" revolving door Chaos died and was reborn as it's old family again. A dozen of us were online that night and guild chat was active and lively. I spent about an hour fishing off the dock of Stormwind getting my skill up and reading guild chat, and it was pretty awesome to say the least.

Long story, but I think it needed to be said as I've blogged a fair amount about my guild. It's trials and tribulations. Many lessons learned through out my 3 years running a raid and guild. I don't really regret much, and I havn't lost anything either. Really all I did gain was some of the best friends I've ever had in my entire life, and a fiancee.

Not quite sure how I feel about that last one. He's such a sucker.

The leadership portion of my blog will continue into Wrath, but we're on break for now. In the meantime, I think I've got something wicked cool lined up for my blog, I just need to stop being lazy and do it.

That Other MMO

Caulle — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:25:29 GMT

I havn't blogged anything positive in a while, at least I don't feel I have. I've mostly QQ'd about dealing with my Warcraft raid over the past few months and I can't stand it when people complain to me so why should I complain to you? So onto more positive things.

I'm playing Age of Conan quite a bit. I'm only level 64 and enjoying the change from WoW. Weeknights I spend about 2 hours online. It's not much, but it's enough to gain a level with my fiancee when we go AE grinding. Barbarian + Bear Shaman = Good times.

I'm really digging the crafting system for some reason too. I think it's largely because getting *most* materials for my armoursmithing is cake. Being in a guild in this game is vital, just absolutely vital to your gaming experience.

I guilded up with some guys early on, but none of my friends did. I told them to submit applications, but they were lazy about the entire thing. So while I'm running around in my guild city zone tapping 100% nodes everywhere, they were doing nothing but complaining about how every copper node, or ash tree they found was at 20%. Everytime they bitched, I told them to guild up and stop complaining. It's been going on like this for about 2 weeks. Finally Sunday I had had enough and I told them they had to guild up or stop complaining because I was tried of hearing it.

The GM is a nice guy, but very very slow when it comes to guild management (an issue for another time), so after a couple of hours they finally got invites and made their first trip to Poitain.

"Oh my god, this copper node is at 100%."
"Holy crap! I didn't think a 100% Ash Tree existed!"

The sad truth of my dumbass friends. I'm pretty sure they just completely didn't believe me when I told them resources were typically always at 100% in the guild zone. So they've got their materials now, and I don't have to listen to the Q's. Every one wins.

While some materials are very easy to gather, even easier in a guild zone, others are very difficult and frustrating. Silk and leather for example. Both seem to have a very low drop rate (though a friend informed me that Cannibal Cave is actually very good for silk) around 5-10% tops. The drop rate might not bother me so much if I was getting 2-3 pieces when it does drop, but it still leads to about double the time needed. I could QQ about this a bit more I suppose, but I really can't. My close friends have dumped most of their leather onto me for crafting so I can level it up quickly. Meanwhile I supplied them with a ton of spare metal/wood/stone I had from leveling my gathering quests. Go go 226 pieces of copper before I found Tin. The Tin dropped from a bear. /facepalm

More on Conan later, including perhaps some Barbarian guides for DW DPS.

Game Over

Caulle — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:03:47 GMT

I've almost completely phased myself out of the raid. I'm at the point right now where I really don't care to go back, and even if they asked me to log on and help I'd be much more likely to just come up with some excuse as to why I can't. The raid has changed drastically in the past 2 months. It's not even a shadow of it's former self. They might as well just rename the guild to something else because it is not .

After another long disappointing week for the guys running the raid right now, a meeting was held on Monday in vent to discuss the situation. When I logged on to listen in the first thing I noticed was that there were only about 15 people in the channel. That's not a very good turn up for something announced days earlier and no where did I see in the post on the forums any sort of notice about people who wouldn't be attending.

The next thing I noticed was how petty, greedy, and annoying the raiders have become.

So to set the scene... I last raided with them 2 weeks ago. I decided to open up the guild bank for repairs for the night as an incentive to be focused. It failed of course, and at the end of the night I turned it off again except I forgot to disable it for the Officer rank. During the course of the meeting it was brought up that officers had been using the gbank for repairs for 2 weeks and how unfair it was. The officers were getting yelled at during the meeting for something that was my fault so I had to interject.

"Oh man, I am really sorry guys. That was entirely my fault. I must have forgotten to disable it for the officer rank. We can comp you guys this week for the accident so that everyone gets equal treatment."

My problem with the complaint went two fold. For starters, officers getting gbank repairs was something that went noticed immediately on Day One, but it took them two weeks to actually say anything to me. The worst part was how much people were dwelling on something as trivial as a couple gold in game even after an explanation, apology, and offer to compensate was given. The subject came up at least another 2 times during the meeting, and once the person talked over Pathis who was trying to ask an important question about recruitment.

At that point I just thought "Man, this is stupid. Why do I even bother?" and I left the channel and went back to enjoying myself in Age of Conan. I don't care how buggy the game is, or how frustrating the little things can be. The important thing for me is that I'm having fun.

So I'm completely done with my WoW raid right now though I still feel bad for a few people, namely Pathis. Despite the fact that I think he's a big cry baby sometimes, he's easily the best warrior I have ever worked with. He did an amazing job filling in for me when I had work scheduling problems, and even broke my TPS record one week (until I reclaimed the title). He's one of our top DPS in the raid and consistently performs 150% all the time. But the best part was how even though he had no responsibilities like an officer, he took it upon himself to head up recruiting when the first wave quit. The raid would have already been dead by now if not for him. Here's to hoping he gets that computer upgrade soon and stops complaining about AoC.

My Top 10 WoW Moments

Caulle — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:15:21 GMT

I'm going to jump on this train today... They're probably not in order.

10 - "Vanilla frosties make my nipples hard." Followed quickly on vent with "OMG Caulle that was a mistell!" Best boss mistell ever.

9 - 16 hour Arathi Basin PVP-a-thons on the weekend pre-TBC.

8 - C'Thun first kill.

7 - Killing Illidan and beating the progression gap for the first time.

6 - Echoes Eternal (my guild before we formed the raiding guild) race around the world. No trinkets. No enchants. No epic mounts. The Dark Portal to Menethil to Darnassus to Silithus and 30 minutes of non-stop taunting and laughing on vent.

5 - My first gryphon flight.

4 - The click. You approach a new boss, you have your strategy, but nothing works and nothing goes as planned. 90%, 88%, 85%, 85%, 85%, 85%. You're stuck, and it feels like you're smashing your head into a wall. Then out of the blue one day you pull off a 20% wipe and in that instant you know that it has clicked and it is the most amazing moment of clarity. You know the raid finally understands the fight and how to get the job done.

3 - Solo tanking Firemaw from 50% to dead because all the OT's exploded.

2 - Patchwerk first kill. Our first boss kill without the raid leader, who had temporarily quit the game because he thought he was too hard. Cry baby.

1 - Meeting my fiancee.

@adrenalize

Caulle — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:55:57 GMT

Surprisingly enough, the LCBO (liquor stores in Ontraio) had Magners on hand. I was picking up Limoncello and Strongbow on Saturday and noticed it. I grabbed a couple of pints and my thoughts...

It's very nice. Crisp, refreshing, light... Perfect in the summer. However, I'm still a sucker for Strongbow because I really really enjoy the dryness of it.

The alc./vol % is a bit lower than Strongbow at 4.5% which is nice considering I have a tendency to just swig them back quickly on the excuse that "I'm thirsty". I have a feeling I'll be drinking equal amounts of both this summer.

Thanks for the suggestion!