Dual spec action bar glitch November 29, 2009
Posted by KC in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Around level 55, I dual-specced my druid, Onashne, as resto/balance. While resto was my “main spec,” I was mainly just using it in battlegrounds, and I did my questing as boomkin.
This meant that, until the low-70s and battleground leveling, I was dinging each level in my balance spec, and training, then switching to resto and training, then going back to questing.
Well, today I learned that there is a slight glitch to leveling with a dual spec: Your action bars are only updated in the spec you train in. So if, for example, you are training in balance, then your balance spec action bars are updated to reflect new spell ranks, but your resto bars are not.
So I’ve been using Rank 8 of Regrowth and Rejuvination, Rank 3 of Tranquility, Rank 1 of Lifebloom, etc. since about the mid-50s.
Which makes me even more proud of this, from the Alterac Valley where I dinged 80 last week:
That paladin at No. 8 on healing was a monster, though; I may have topped heals but he was our MVP.
Anyway, the lesson is: Check your spell ranks in your action bar if you dual spec. Because you could be even MORE AWESOME if you’re using your max-rank spells.
I’m back November 28, 2009
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No, I didn’t finish NaNoWriMo — and with just under 20,000 words to go, I am not going to. Between some guild stuff that needs to be taken care of, the Pilgrim’s Bounty holiday and Onashne hitting 80 (as well as mostly-awesome real life stuff, like a brand new cousin), I got sidetracked and NaNo was what suffered, since I was stuck at a plot hole anyway.
I probably could catch up, if I wanted to spend the next three days holed up and writing, but I don’t really want to write 6,600 words a day, so I’m bowing out.
Which means that I will be back over here shortly (celebrating my sister’s birthday tomorrow).
In the meantime, I finally made a WoW.com profile, but I can’t figure out how to add people. Or even find people. I think you’re all rogues IRL. My user name over there is Ahami. Anyone want to be my WoW.com e-friend?
And question #2: If you do not host your WoW screenshots on WordPress, what do you use? I was thinking about starting a Flickr account just for WoW (one for my screenshots, and then one for the guild), but … it’s Flickr, guys. Are there alternatives that aren’t Photobucket? Or all full of whitespace that looks like the 1990s?
I might just start a photo blog for the guild on WordPress, but it’d be nice if people could add their own stuff so I don’t have to.
NaNoWriMo hiatus November 12, 2009
Posted by KC in Uncategorized.3 comments
I probably should have mentioned this 11 days ago. On hiatus for November, then back to updating.
State of the WoW October 19, 2009
Posted by KC in Uncategorized.5 comments
I passed the “This is an awesome idea” stage on Operation Mining With Onashne to the “Oh Lord, why didn’t I let Crypt talk me out of this” stage. (Please leave all “I told yous” in the comments.)
Luckily, that was about 10 minutes before I hit 245 and could start grabbing Small Thorium Veins, plus I went on the Auction House for the first time since, like, April to sell the stacks and stacks of Mithril I mined, so now I’m back to “This is awesome!”
***
I have a confession: I really hate the epic flying windriders. It’s not so much the windriders themselves — I love those flying scorpolion things — but the hideous, hideous armor they wear. I was on a flight path the other day and forgot I wasn’t just Shift+N flying my stupid purple windrider (it was very late and I was hitting money buckets for Hallow’s End) and I got all excited that the armor glitched out. I was in the middle of hoping it was permanent when I remembered that I was just on the path between Swamprat Post and Zabra’Jin.
Ahami is well on her way to 50 mounts and the Albino Drake. She has 38, and I am just a couple of WSG marks from 39. All I need to do is buy the rest of the flyers in Shadowmoon Valley and either get exalted with the Mag’har or start doing the Argent Tournament again.
I’m going to start doing the Argent Tournament on Ideale and Onashne, though, since they can actually use the nice epic weapons that can be bought there (WHERE IS MY MP5 MACE, BLIZZ?), and I want to get the hippogryph for Ide (trolls + hippogryphs just are weird, sorry). And I’ve been working inexorably toward Loremaster on Ahami, and still need many quests in Nagrand. So I don’t know.
Option B is just to park her in Coldarra and do the Wyrmrest Accord dailies between Warsong Gulch battles. I’m almost exalted with the Kirin Tor (useless) and have two stacks worth — TWO STACKS WORTH — of Northern Spices, every single cooking recipe, and another 40ish Dalaran Cooking Awards. So I don’t need to be cooking anymore, and then I can get a fancy red dragon from WA instead.
I wish the rep tabards worked in battlegrounds.
P.S. I hate Warsong Gulch. So. Much. I would hate it only slightly less if we could just cap one flag per battle, but someone went and taught Alliance how to play and they just outplay us 90 percent of the time. Even when we’re working well as a team and actually grabbing the flag and making efforts to get ours back/defend/etc. they still destroy us.
But seriously, as capture the flag goes, Eye of the Storm is actually fun. Running back and forth, not so much. Capping towers and holding the middle and doing all kinds of things with the flag just being the little pwn sprinkles in the awesome AB-like cake is so much cooler. I don’t even like Warsong Gulch when we win; I love the Eye even when we lose.
***
Inspired by Gnomeageddon, I hopped on Kamai for the first time in nearly a year. I don’t know how to fire mage anymore, and I really don’t even care. I may switch to arcane. I may just turn her into my new bank alt and then clear my old one (who was rerolled as an actual to-play toon on Dath’Remar) for a free slot, and then just battleground with her when I feel like damage dealing but not huntering. I don’t know if it’s the changes to the class in the past 9-10 months or the fact that I walked away for so long, but I spent two hours just not having fun the other day. She wasn’t dull enough to give up on, but I think she is pretty much going to stay a “once every six months” alt.
I’ve been tempted once again to try a warlock. It’d be different. I could level entirely through the battlegrounds and just quest for fun. I deleted crazy Malisya a long time ago — I just did not mesh with her personality, the names of her minions annoyed me, and I needed a slot for something. I forget what. They need to up slots per server.
I have a gnomelock, but I really only log on to her to troll Alliance Trade and chat with a couple of my pals on that side. I can’t decide what race and gender to roll my newlock.
Oh well, I have set the requirement that Onashne and Ideale must have maxed their new professions, and that Onashne must have 450 first aid and cooking and Ideale must get Saffron and Custard to 80 before I can play a new toon. So I have time.
I’m also considering transferring Gabi to Dath’Remar. That would give me a toon outside the starter zone there, and it would give me room for Unnamed Goblin Priest on VeCo.
***
And that’s about it, really. No cat stories to speak of lately, except my neighbor’s cat is a sweetheart, and often walks me from the backyard to my door when I get home after work. And my cats HATE HIM. Every time he does it, the two of them sit all crouched at the door, hissing at him through the crack underneath, for the next half hour. It’s hilarious, and reminds me of a radiator.
Because it needs saying October 16, 2009
Posted by KC in Battlegrounds.add a comment
Warsong Gulch has an objective. That objective is to capture the flag.
If you are farming HKs in the middle, you are doing it wrong.
If you are not actively trying to either protect the flag carrier or attack the other team’s flag carrier, you are doing it wrong.
If you grab the flag and then drop it and run away midfield, you are doing it wrong.
If you grab the flag and then run away from/LOS your healers, while fighting six people, you are doing it wrong.
If your DK flag carrier with nearly 40K health takes the deserter buff because you are running around like idiots, you are doing it wrong.
So how do you do it right?
1. If you are a healer, heal the flag carrier. The only time you should NOT be healing the flag carrier is if there are at least three healers in the battleground and one or two are already on the flag carrier. If the flag carrier is covered, follow the people going to retrieve your flag and heal them as they attack the other team’s flag carrier. DO NOT heal the people farming HKs in the middle. Those people deserve to die.
2. Everyone else, you have two goals: Protect your flag, and protect your flag carrier. That means when the other side has your flag, go after it. I don’t care if it’s in their keep. Go after it anyway. I don’t care if you’re the only one and it’s a suicide run. If you are going after their flag carrier, that will keep them busier protecting their flag carrier and make it harder for them to actively kill your flag carrier.
3. If you are protecting your flag carrier, focus fire. The longer people are up, the longer they can damage the flag carrier. Kill their healers first, if they have them, and then kill the DPS. Start with the rogues and mages, those s.o.b.s are annoying. You focus fire — everyone attacking the same target at the same time — to take them down as quickly as possible. Another option is what some in-game friends of mine call the Melting Pot — get everyone bunched up and then spam the heck out of AOE.
If you are not doing one of those things, you are doing it wrong. (Unless you’re the flag carrier, and then I <3 you and you can have my Earth Shields. As long as you aren’t some mage in greens with 9K health or something, anyway.)
Oh, and P.S. to the Alliance DK from yesterday’s BGs: When shamans are in Ghost Wolf form, Chains of Ice does not do anything. Spamming it just makes you look stupid.
Big news for shamans! October 15, 2009
Posted by KC in Shaman.add a comment
Our spell Reincarnation may get 10 minutes knocked off the cooldown in the next patch. Time to celebrate!
I suppose more is too much to ask, since we got a new sound effect for Riptide last patch.
(Seriously, though, I am very happy with how resto shamans work and I am glad they’re not ruining it for everyone. So even if other classes get cool new toys and we don’t, at least we’re not getting nerfed!)
Great Profession Shuffle deja vu October 9, 2009
Posted by KC in Professions.5 comments
Chatted a bit with my guild this morning, and I think this route may be the one I go, unless one of you wondiferous people can talk me out of it.
Ideale is currently a miner/jewelcrafter, and Onashne is a skinner/leatherworker. On the surface, this makes sense.
However, Ideale is usually the character I grab if I feel like gathering meat or just mindlessly killing stuff. Thus, she would be an excellent choice as a skinner, because she is most often in the position of having stuff to skin. Throw in that she’s a hunter, and the extra crit would be quite nice. But leveling mining again … ugh.
Onashne, on the other hand, is a resto druid. Sure, her secondary spec is boomkin, but while both are quite good for killing lots of stuff fast, I just prefer DPSing stuff on my hunter. I don’t know boomkin quite as well, I get lonely if I’m just out killing stuff alone without my pet (shut up, they do so have personalities) and even with Innervate, I still get a lot of downtime sometimes.
In PVP, I am almost always a healer; while I enjoy boomkinning also, I like the green bar whack-a-mole game and Wild Growth gives me the same warm squishy feeling that Riptide does and spamming Moonfire does not. Crit is not as useful for a tree as a little extra stamina would be.
But Onashne is also a tauren, and should be opposed to the whole diggin’ in the Earthmother thing, right? And I already mentioned the leveling mining again bit. As a druid, though, she’s also opposed to the whole killing a lot of animals needlessly thing, and she personally is of the mind that one should leave the hunting to the hunters.
Really, she’s a problem child.
Ahami is an herbalist. She likes picking flowers. She does not like digging in the dirt, and while she agrees with skinning in theory (as opposed to letting it go to waste), she prefers killing dirty Alliance (no offense, Alliance people) to innocent animals. So, for RP reasons, she is not included in the Great Profession Shuffle.
These are my only three toons in Northrend, and are likely to remain so until goblins are available, so they are my only options if I want to be able to use my crafting professions without an outpouring of gold. I might get my miner/skinner DK there someday, but given that E. will not quest unless I do and we have maybe an hour or two every couple of weeks that seem to sync up, that will probably be in 2012, right before the world ends.
And future goblin priest (I still haven’t picked a name for the little bastard; I considered Frollo, but FGP seems more smuggler-y and bribe-takingish than all creepy and lecherous) is going to be an alchemist and engineer, since those are the two professions I have wanted from the get go and keep failing to level alts with.
What to do?
EDIT TO CLARIFY: I got kind of rambly and pointless there. Sorry. The possible switch would be Ideale dropping mining for skinning, and Onashne dropping skinning for mining. Nothing else.
EDIT II: RETURN OF EDIT: So while I was sleeping, the best solution came to me. Onashne could mine stuff that’s above the ground because it could technically be considered gifts from the Earthmother, right? As long as she’s not doing the dwarf things and excavating giant holes, then she should be A-OK.
So I’m doing it.
New-to-me blog October 5, 2009
Posted by KC in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I am not quite back yet. I am percolating a few entries — I think I want to write a few basic BG strategy guides that no one will read, just to keep from wanting to strangle people through the Internet, but I’m not quite sure how to tackle them in a way that hasn’t been done yet, without lots and lots of maps … and Photoshop is very distracting to me. I usually end up playing around with fonts and photos and stuff for hours and completely forgetting why I opened it up.
…
OK, anyway. I don’t usually do this, but The Flag is Noob Bait almost made me weep tears of salty joy. I’m not gonna lie, I am glad I am not on the same battlegroup as Gnomegeddon, because I would probably just squee and /cheer as he killed me if I ever saw him in a battleground, that’s how excited I am to see another PVP fan who doesn’t just farm HKs in the middle of Warsong Gulch.
So if you haven’t checked out Armageddon’s Coming, I highly recommend it. … Which is funnier, because he probably has 18 times the readership I do. But check it out anyway!
Hmm. I should level my magey.
Blog hiatus September 16, 2009
Posted by KC in Uncategorized.2 comments
This seems like a natural time for a blog hiatus, as I have been mad busy the last week and will be mad busy the next week and a half. I barely have time to play! (And so I do want to use my little bit of free time for that instead of blogging.)
I will be back in, say, two weeks?
