During the Feast of Winter Veil Joaquime was going for the Merrymaker title, and to get that she needed to be able to brew herself some Hot Apple Cider.
The brewing required 325 in Cooking and my kittycat/merrymaker had been slacking in her domestic education - she had only about 55 in cooking! So she set out and consulted a How-To-guide for speedy cooking and off she went to Westfall to kill crawlers for meat and claws.
Among other things the crawlers drops small barnacled clams that(unsurprisingly) contains clam meat.
Now, back in the days of old, these small barnacled clams did not stack, and whenever you were killing crawlers or murlocs or nagas or anything fishy-like, your bags would fill up with these things and you would have to stop ever so often to open them all. If you were lucky, you got a small lustrous pearl that you could get a couple of silver for (or even a couple of gold when the jewelcrafting was invented).
Nowadays, these barnacled clams do stack, and they stack in stacks of 20, and - best of all - they auto-stack so when you loot a clam they will automatically end up in nifty little piles in your bags without you having to do anything about it.
So, after I had put a serious dent in the crawler population in Westfall and gotten enough clams and meats to get me safely to the mid-100's in cooking, I started opening the barnacled clams.
I was slightly miffed to find out that the clam meats did NOT auto-stack, so I had to manually pull them together into stacks after they had filled up all available bag space.
I was even more miffed to find that the clam meats only stacks in 10's!
Blizzard, come on! The hard crusty barnacled clams must surely take up loads more space than their raw jellyfishy innards. Why don't the clam meat stack in 20's?
And then, to make me even more aaargh-confused, after I had cooked all the clam meats and turned them into loads of delicious Boiled Clams, I found out - guess what?
Yep, the boiled versions do stack in 20's! Most logical!
But never mind, Joaq got through the stacking confusion and managed to skill up enough to brew herself some of that Hot Apple Cider, with which she celebrated her successful achievement:
Cheers!
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Mystery of Stacking
Friday, December 5, 2008
So where is that Naxxramas thingy anyways?
It just hit me, today. What have I done?! Was my brain on vacation yesterday? What the hell was I thinking?
I don’t like to raid lead. I am really bad at raid leading. I have sworn never to raid lead again.
So, given these circumstances, the smart thing to do would be to not scrounge up a team of bold adventurers to go exploring Naxxramas on Sunday the 7th, right?
It would probably be even smarter to not say, hey, no gear requirements, everyone is welcome as long as you are level 80!
Possibly the most unrivalled smartness of all would be not to explicitly ask the bold adventurers to refrain from reading up on the fights so we can wing it as we go along?
Well, I have never claimed to be smart, if someone thinks I am it’s at their own risk ;P
I guess I got carried away by the insane amount of fun I’ve been having doing all the Northrend dungeons.
Larue dinged 79 last night in an Oculus run. On the finish of that run she got her Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement, the proof that she has successfully beaten all of the Lich King dungeons on normal difficulty.
On every single first run I’ve been going in not knowing what to expect and I have been very reluctant to let anyone say anything about tactics before we have tried it ourselves first.
Sure, we have suffered a few wipes before we figured out what to do, and on a few occasions we have even left without having finished the run, admitting defeat temporarily.
Most of us have played this game for a long time and we have conditioned reflexes. Black spot forming on the floor (or black wall-to-wall carpeting spot like in the Halls of Stone)? Don’t stand in it! Something sparkly cast on me? Run away from the others, it will probably explode soon. For almost every boss, we have encountered something similar before, and if we didn’t nail it the first time now we did it on the second or third or another time.
But nail it we did, and in all the coming dungeons we will nail it again. Don’t ever doubt that.
And it’s a great feeling to trust in your guildies to react and to be able to play good. Sure, we all make mistakes and screw up sometimes, but hey, so what? It’s a lot of shit going down, red and green numbers flying all over, flashes and bursts and beams of many different colours all over the screen, its easy to miss that you suddenly sizzle a little extra because that pink magnifying glass-beam has started to burn you down like an ant before it is too late, at least if you have never encountered it before. We die, we run in, ress up, and throw ourselves back into battle again. We talk tactics and ideas and suggestion together, not “I read that you are supposed to do this when the boss does that.”
So, high on this instance-running fun, I thought why not check out Naxx as well? The official guild runs weren’t supposed to start until mid-January after the holidays, why not use these weeks until then to do some exploring with like-minded guildies, and since I planned to be 80 by the weekend why not ask around and see if anyone else is available on Sunday evening?
The Northrend dungeons are fast to run through - no more 6-hour runs like BRD or even 3-hour runs like Shadow Labyrinth - and pretty easy on the gear-dependency. (But are they too easy, as the extensive QQ’s of the so-called top guilds seems to indicate? And, really, who cares about that hyped whining? I mean, you buy a game and then you use all short-cuts available to “win it”, and then you complain that there is nothing left for you to do? I wonder if all those “top guild” players always fast forward when they watch a movie, or if they always read the last pages of a book first.)
So, judging by the 5-mans, the 10-mans shouldn’t be that bad either (I hope). I have warned the people going with me that this will be a test run, an exploration run, a fun Indiana Jones-style “We’ll think of something” mission into the unknown and not to expect a full clear and that anything downed, even a trash mob, will be counted as a success!
I have faith in my guildies’ abilities to play good and save the day. I have less faith and more doubts about my own ability to lead them in any way, but as I started this, I’d better do my best to finish it as well.
Wish me luck.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Remind me again why I still play on pvp servers
Please. Do that. Tell me why I still have some chars on pvp servers, and please tell me why I still play them on occasion.
I logged in on Tesz the other day. Tesz, my level 36 troll mage that I have on the Laughing Skull (pvp) server. I hadn’t played her for some time and wanted to give my hunter Cuddling some rested bonus, so I popped in to Tesz.
She was in the inn in Tarren Mill. I checked her quest log and she had quite a few quests in the area. I’ve been peeking a little on Jame’s levelling guide and he lists a lot of quests in Hillsbrad, so I had been questing a bit there and was looking forward to doing some more.
She ran out of the inn and died. A ?? stealthed druid oneshotted her. Haha, how hilarious.
Well, the graveyard run is not long in Tarren Mill. I decided Hillsbrad would not be fun to quest in today after all, so after Tesz had ressed she started casting a teleport to Orgrimmar, and then she died again.
After having played on a sweet normal server for some months now my hard-earned reflexes like “when you know gankers are about, find a safe place to ress lest you get ganked again” seems to have been lost.
Yes, it was the same ?? druid again, some sad person with a Challenger title, that had stealthed up and oneshotted her, then he shifted into cheetah and ran away from the guards.
Elapsed time since log-in: About a minute. Number of deaths, gank-related: Two. Amount of affection felt towards pvp servers and gankers in general: Zero.
Third time up I ressed inside the inn and teleported away.
I was close to deleting the char and never look back but I decided to give it a last try, and flew off to Desolace instead, and after having completed a few quests without anyone bothering met here I headed off to Arathi Highlands, where I kept questing for yet a few hours.
In fact, that entire day I saw no Alliance chars at all save that sad druid in Tarren Mill and a lvl 31 warrior in Arathi who snuck away when he saw me and Tesz was just a few hundred xp’s away from 38 when I logged out.
And to remind myself: I play on these servers because I have some friends there, both real life and in-game ones, and although I still quest a lot by myself I don’t want to lose touch with them entirely.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Alliance suck at pvp!
Was doing some Arathi Basin runs, me and a few friends were playing for fun and for honor and for marks.
As we enter the bg and wait around Trollbane’s Hall for it to start, this druid yells out “If we can’t win, make sure we lose quickly!” Eh, say again?
Never mind, the bg begins and we race out to cap the nodes. We get two, the hordes get three and then four.
The yelling druid starts spamming bgchat – ok, let them win, lose quickly so we get our mark.
Eh, excuse me? Wouldn’t it be more useful to retake some nodes and win?
I suggest that if he wants to lose, why not get a group of likeminded people (you know there are more of this kind, we have all encountered them in the bg’s, the let-them-win-crowd) and go fight their bg’s sitting down unarmed. They would get their one mark in just a few minutes then.
This suggestion is not received favourably by Mr I-Want-To-Lose.
Me and my friends assault the farm, fight there for a few minutes, we die and run back but the hordes die too and we manage to claim the farm as ours.
I am not a good pvp’er, I usually refer to myself as bait, cannon fodder, an otherwise useless distraction or something similar that indicates that my prime contribution to bg’ing is keeping the enemy occupied and not killing anyone else. That I am not good at it does not mean I won’t try to kill the enemy (and I do kill them! A lot of them!) and also not that I don’t find it fun in some way – I would never grind bg marks if I was bored to death by it, and with some friends it is actually mostly fun. (In small doses, mind you, not day-long bg grinds!)
Anyway, our claim provokes new outbursts from the same Mr I-am-only-here-for-marks – Wtf are you doing? Don’t retake the nodes!! It will only take longer to lose!!
We move on to the lumber mill and we manage to take that node as well. We now have three nodes and a good chance at winning if we keep them, but then the horde claims the farm back and the stables after that.
Actually, we are having quite fun pissing of the Loser Druid and keep advancing, retaking node after node only to lose it as we leave it undefended behind us.
Meanwhile, the I-Can’t-Be-Arsed-To-Actually-Fight Druid is dancing around in the fields, far away from any skirmishes and very far away from being any kind of useful contribution to the bg, whining in bgchat about how alliance always suck at pvp. I guess he is talking about himself.
(A quick peek at this player in the Armory later shows him dressed in full pvp honor epics, presumably gotten from losing a helluva lot of bg’s.)
And of course we lose the game. And we get our 1 Arathi Basin mark of Honor
I just don’t understand these people – how can you roll an Alliance char and go bg’ing with him/her, expecting to win without actually having to make an effort and then spend half the time whining that Alliance suck in bg’s? Well of course they do – News Flash! – it’s because there are people like you in it!
Go roll a Horde char then- cause everyone knows that all Horde always use voice chat comms and are really coordinated and prepared and, oh I almost forgot, they do not suck at pvp! It’s some magic ability that comes from playing Horde – master pvp’er!
Well, lately I have actually won most of my bg games, both on Vashj and Aerie Peak, so I guess the Alliance does not always suck. And maybe, just maybe, the people who think that Alliance do suck and keep screaming this in bgchat, and keep telling everyone to lose quickly, maybe they are the ones that suck, and not the rest of us that actually keep fighting. Ever stopped to think about that, have you? Didn’t think so.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Just the Bare Necessities?
So how did you spend the patch day?
I got my baby warrior Dizzie out of her hibernation, scuttled over to Theramore and cheered at the sight of so many new yellow exclamation marks! I love doing quests! Happy as a hobbit in a wine cellar she ran around exposing agitators – but wait? Why didn’t I get credit for exposing them? Got just 1/5 and I had killed/scared off more than that! Bugged q or what? *getting mad at Blizz for another patch day f-k-up!*
But wait again - *blush* - I realised I was in a raid group…was waiting for the other raiders to show up and we had already started invites… ah well, it was time for me to let my baby rest up a little more and get one of my big girls up to action again.
Wednesday is one of our usual Kara raid days and (despite it being patch day) we clung to tradition and went there to kill off some of the nasty denizens of that dreary cobwebbed place.
For some reason that I can’t recall at the moment I was there on my (usually) lethal feral druid Joaquime (think we were a little short of healers at the time as they were downloading the patch after work and I had offered to heal at the first bosses so we could get the raid started, but I am not sure…my memory is excellent, only very short…)
Anyways, the healers popped up after all and I shifted into bear for the those trash clears to the Huntsman. I haven’t been tanking in Kara for months and was a bit surprised to find that I could not pull aggro from the other tank, a warrior.
Our gm’s warrior has always been a bit tricky to pull aggro from but far from impssible, the other warrior I used to run with was way too easy to overaggro, all I used to do was hit the mob and it immediately switched its attention to me, didn’t even have to use growl or anything. (And before anyone starts yelling at me for pulling aggro off the other tank so the healers have to ping pong heal, I do it to get some extra nice rage going and then I don’t mind giving it back for the rest of the fight).
This one warrior, however, was impossible to peel. Even when I used growl which, if I recall correctly, is supposed to glue the mob’s attention to you for 6 seconds, all I got was a lousy blink of the mob’s target switching before he went back to hammering away on my plate-clad friend. Gah, I had to use enrage throughout that entire trash clear except when I was tanking a mob or two of my own.
Well, this warrior and also our gm’s warrior have been running thru Kara for many weeks now while I have been ambling along far behind on mostly my warlock Paynne or my priest Jools, so I guess I am pretty undergeared compared to them.
And some nice leather gear actually did drop during that run, [Edgewalker Longboots ] from Moreos and [Bracers of Maliciousness ] from the Maiden, both of which would have been a huge upgrade for my kitty cat, but they went to a hunter instead of me. (Actually, the Huntsman dropped the [Bracers of the White Stag] for me since noone else wanted them, could be useful if I ever respecc to Moonkin).
Well, they were more than huge upgrades for the hunter too so its not that I mind him getting them, and I guess I could have argued my case if I wanted them and I didn’t bother, but still…when is a bear a bear and when is she a cat? Is the bare necessities for the bear only and not for the cat?
I am feral specced, which happens to encompass both bear and cat shapes. I am not either-or, I am both. I tank when tanking is needed, I do pretty good dps when dps-ing is needed. Actually I heal when healing is needed too since was healing at the Maiden in my healing gear, my druid HoTs are pretty neat even in feral specc. And now that I think about it, I was actually blasting my way to the Maiden with starfires and moonfires and wrath’s, courtesy of the new +spell damage on the healing gear, otherwise the only way I would have killed any mob was if it had laughed itself to death at the pitiful spell damage I could do in my healing gear. Hmm, I guess this raid did get to see me shine in all my capabilities…=)
For those pulls and/or boss fights that don’t require two tanks I do immensly more dps in kitty shape that in bear, and if we have two tanks already I might stay in cat form for the whole run.
I don’t want to roll on healing or spell damage gear unless noone else needs it, but what about dps gear? The pure tanking items that drops in Kara that I can use are rare, and some of these my fellow tanks have their eyes set on too, so even if they drop I may not get them. Am I doomed to wait until all rogues/hunters/shamans have gotten their leather dps drops until I can get a shot at them? How am I ever gonna get into Zul’Aman if I can’t upgrade my gear? Am I whining about something that is not an issue really?
Well, I have found two ways to resolve this not-really-a-problem-but-could-be:
* I will check the Kara loot lists and actually do the maths for which items would be an upgrade for me, both in bear and in cat form
* I will keep going to Kara with my druid (well, with all of my attuned girls actually) and get me those nice [Badges of Justice ] for the sweet rewards
I won’t be imba geared in a week or even two with this strategy, but at least I have a plan. And then I will grab that aggro back from those plate-clad target dummies easier than…, than…ehh, well, easier than a very easy thing!
Raid evaluation
- The new ”change out of bearform if you accidentally press a spell that you can’t use in bearform”-ability. NOT a good thing to do while tanking (yeye I know I can disable it but you try to get me to do that in the heat of the battle).
+ We are going pretty well atm. Some new players with us, and only one stupid wipe. Runs still takes a little to long though, we should be able to clear Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden and Opera in less than 2 hours.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Nice and not so nice people
We have a sweet warrior in our guild who is the nicest player ever – he is cool, friendly, helpful and generelly so fun to be around that you sometimes wonder what dark schemes of world domination he is plotting just because your own jaded cynical mind can’t really believe that some people are just nice….
Anyways, this sweet guy tells me that one of his RL friends who joined our guild some weeks ago is going to transfer to another server to play with some other RL friends there, and he (the transferring friend) wanted him to come along.
Didn’t think to check it at the time, but later that evening (after our first kill ever of the skinny flaming dragon Nightbane! wohoo! /cheer! /party time!) I checked the guild roster, and - lo and behold! – the transferee-to-be was not in it. Added him to my friends list and – surprise, surprise! – player not found.
Checked the armory and no match was found for the [insert transferees name, class, race and level here].
So what gives? Banned account? (Don’t know if a ban actually makes your chars disappear from the guild roster and server). His parents got tired of him playing and made him erase his chars? (Yet another reason not to accept underage people in the guild). Someone hacked his acc and transferred his char from the PvP server we’re at to a PvE server so he can never come back, payed for the transfer with RL money and changed his name while he was at it, but left all his alts in place and gear intact? (Don’t laugh, there is a guy in our guild who actually claims this happened to him).
The now mysteriously missing player joined our guild some weeks ago at lvl 65 or so, he quickly levelled up his char to 70 and was pretty fun to play with. He got his Kara attunement done and wanted to go raiding with us. He has been telling me he has several other level 70’s on another server and has cleared Kara multiple times with them (oooo I am impressed! Why tell me? Put your money where your mouth is if you wanna have a shot at impressing me…)
This is the guy that was a little upset when he didn’t get invited to one of the raids in his first week as lvl 70 (I signed up in the calendar! Invite me!) and when he did get invited he won a roll for the T4 gloves over his RL friend, the sweet warrior. This is the guy that the day after (or even hours after) just folds his teepee and leaves. Without a word. Without saying goodbye. Just poof – gone.
We had a similar case some weeks ago, a player that had been with us for a long time but all that time secretly applying to other guilds (sometimes applying several times, changing his age from 15 to 19, not recognising the names of his alleged former gm’s, generally making himself look a fool). Well, secretly maybe isn’t the word for it since the guild application web sites generally are public, but secretly in the sense that he didn’t share with us that he considered us just a stepping stone for gearing up until a Better Guild would let him tag along.
The day after he got his T4 helm from our very first Prince kill he did like a rogue and vanished. Joined another guild because – guess what? – he wanted to play with his RL friends (you know, the ones that were a true PITA to play with before he was all epicced out). Well, nvm, good riddance.
/rant
WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? How can you discover at level 70 that oh, I want to play with my RL friends (hated their guts until now and wouldn’t ever want to be seen dead in their company before but now they are pretty ok, and btw the fact that I just got some nice epics is entirely coincidental and have no bearing on my decision at all – what do you mean those guilds wouldn’t accept me unless I had some raiding experience and good gear?)
Maybe ”RL friends” is a code phrase for ”people who won’t let me join their uber imba raids no matter how much I whine unless I am geared up and act like a total asshat first”?
I don’t mind players who want to progress more in raiding than what we can offer – we are not going to Gruul or any other raid instance yet – we do Kara, and only Kara, and maybe not even that somedays when we don’t have enough people online because they have other RL things to take care of. If you want more that is ok, you are not automatically an asshat just because you are not content with the way our raiding progresses or because you want to explore more.
You are an asshat when you won’t tell anyone about your concerns or your wishes and never care about the work other people put in to organize runs, you are an asshat when you see the other people you play with as just means to an end, as some in-game feature whose sole duty it is to help you get attuned, get geared up, get group and raid experienced so you can move up to the next tier of soulless in-game features who should help you get that next set of pretty purple outfits (and let’s not forget its also their duty to use their lvl 70’s to boost your alts thru all lower lvl instances for even more leet loot)
We juggle around to get a fun solid raid party going and you just want us to carry you through it? Well, think again…
Yes you were there to help make a successful raid that day, but just because you were there someone else weren’t. I haven’t raided with my darling druid tank Joaquime for a long time because we have many tanks in the guild atm. I want that staff from Illhoof for Joaquime almost as much as I want that staff from Curator for my warlock, but I go to the Illhoof fights with Paynne for now because we need her warlock powahs for that fight. My shadow priest Jools is just shedding her baby teeth in Kara and I won’t bring her to any of the later bosses until she’s geared up a little more. My precious rogue Tessy hasn’t even been to Kara yet beacuse we have had an abundance of melee so far.
But I don’t care about that (very much). I have fun raiding no matter which girl I play, we are getting a solid core of good fun players who value our way of doing things, even if it means that we wipe sometimes and don’t raid at all other times.
Just wish we wouldn’t have to suffer these other morons so frequently. Ah well, if wishes were gold all my girls would have epic flyers by now.
/rantoff
Nightbane raid evaluation
- Came to the raid with my warlock Paynne and a 28 slot soulshard bag that was - empty! Not a little empty, it was a lot empty, nada, totally devoid of anything resembling the pink crystals..*embarrassed just thinking about it* Major horde ganking outside as usual, had to sneak down into the cellars just to get me some shards.
+ Took us a few tries to master the fight, and I switched over to my priest Jools since her mana regen and vampiric embrace healing would help keep us all up – and we killed the ugly malnourished one!
Funniest thing in the raid: our gm and raid leader was going to summon Nightbane, however he tried to accomplish this by using his hearthstone instead of the urn! Wasting one of my shards as I had to run outside to summon him back! Tactics suggestions ensued, all on the lines of ”maybe the OT should try hs-ing, perhaps he’ll drag the skellys with him?”
