Thursday, December 27, 2012

Wednesday (26 Dec) - More Domination Point

News from the Lao team:

12/21 - Not too much new on my end. I am kind of leveling Neekia, apparently I got annoyed with leveling Almond as a healer. Not that Kia is much better, Almond was slow but did not die on me. Other than that I just doing to the Domination dailys in hope to find out more about the story line. The GM of our guild might be starting a guild rbg, mainly because he wants to gear up his alts. He wants Lao to be shadow focused. Lao told him she is happy to use her off dps gear and do shadow but is leveling up her heal gear first.

12/24 - Speaking of Lao she has only two new Domination Point updates. Lao meet up with Theron in Silvermoon to assist him and what it boils down to is this. Theron is not happy, not happy enough that he is thinking about breaking off from the Horde if Hellscream keeps being an ass. He did not say it in so many words, but that is what it boils down to.

Also, Baine had Lao drink an experimental mind memory retrieval brew. She was not too excited about chugging down an experimental drink but trusted Baine not to give her anything harmful. In this she was able to see where the Mongu hid the Bell that Hellscream so badly wants.

This cinematic made Lao think.. Is Hellscream the one they have been waiting for the return of? They hid it in wait for their leader to return.. maybe it is Hellscream. Either way, Lao told Baine what she saw; what he does with the information is anyone's guess.

Oh, and Ding, 87, on Neekia.

12/26 - The Domination Point took a deadly turn in a way that cost Lao her life - twice. Lao, via a brew induced vision, saw the site of the Bell. While Hellscream sent out a hundred scouts to locate it, Vo'jin sent a letter to Lao saying the Alliance was also searching for the Bell.

Ishi laid claim to this prize of finding the resting place of the Bell. Lao was sent to assist Ishi in the Bells recovery. When Lao arrived she found the Alliance had arrived first. It seemed like a trap but orders were orders. Lao and Ishi were to recover the bell.

Once in the cave Lao had to watch her step. The red stone burst into lava sprouts and the blue-white stones could give a nasty case of frost bite. Also she had to be quick on her feet. Stay in the Sentinels sites and the arrows would take you out in two quick shots, she found. Ishi and Lao worked their way in, trying to get to Sarannha Skyglave, who had the Bell. Falling statues or caving in floors, the Bell had to be retrieved. Lao very quickly found out that her orc companion did not even try to gain aggro as she died under the onslaught of four elites. 

Death would not stop Lao, however. She worked her way back Ishi and they engaged Skyglave again, but she had already sent the Bell to Darnasas.

What the Alliance plans to do with the Bell, Lao does not know. At this point she is more concerned with Hellscream's reaction to it being in Alliance hands. If he does not kill her he might send her to the front lines of an Alliance invasion. Neither one is an appealing option.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

December Magic (26 Dec) - The Ascendance of Plumrosefist

December Magic (26 Dec) - The Ascendance of Plumrosefist

This is a capsule biography of Plumrosefist in words and pictures.

Plumrosefist, aka "Fist," was born in Eversong Woods, the starting zone for blood elves on the Eastern Continents, on September 27th, 2012. Fist made an impressive first appearance, going from level 1 to level 20 in a single day. As the Wild Family historian, the ageless Rheebah tracked Fist's progression in comparison with the rest of the family tree.


In her Initiates Garb
Fist is both nervous and excited to start her journey.

Donning her Heirlooms
Jocy and Mew deliver the Family heirloom gear to protect her and help speed her progress.

Fist surpasses Alliance cousin Rakta (12) and troll entrepreneur Hapless (16), who are both still learning the Neutral Auction House trade in Stranglethorn Vale.


Showing off her "City" Clothes
 Fist shows off her "city" clothes at level 20 in Silvermoon City. Jocy helped show her around. Fist already seems to like the city life.

On 30 Sep, 2012, Fist took time off to travel from Silvermoon City to Orgrimmar for Brewfest. She was wide eyed and loving every minute of it! Fist also made it to level 23 just playing all the games offered by Brewfest.

Fist passed Alliance cousin Chaitee (21).

Drinking Age
Fist got caught in the above picture drinking beer at level 20. Beer drinking age is level 21 in these parts, friend Lao was quick to point out. Fist was certainly keeping interesting company, as well, looking at those hard cases standing around her.

Fist kept up her swift progress, and Rheebah next caught up on her whereabouts on 3 Oct, 2012. Fist had already swept through Tranquillen and was on her way to The Undercity when she paused for the pic below.

Raven Lord Morning
 Fist's raven lord mount provided the only color on a grey, misty morning. At level 27, Fist had only begun to think about a future further than the next dawn or the next battle.

Fist saluted the settled Happy at level 23 and acknowledged Bean's level 25 contribution to the family's pvp heritage. Happy gave up the glories of the battlefield for the glory of making gold a long time ago. Bean belonged to a great period of pvp success as part of a troupe of bow wielding hunters.

Over the period of 4-8 Sep, 2012, Fist was a whirling dervish tearing through Hillsbrad Foothills, Arathi Highlands, the Hinterlands, and Desolace. Fist's mentor, Jocy (level 27) smiled in pride as Fist eclipsed her. Fist also waved past Bean's partner Shevils (level 30).

Fist was now level 40, having gained 13 levels in five days.

Fist was told that Desolace was a dusty, dead place, but she found it invigorating. New green life had begun to spread across that land.

Desolace Greens

More Desolace Greenery

No Changes Here
By now, most in the Wild family thought Fist would start slowing down. Instead, she doubled down. Over the course of two intense days (9-10 Sep) in Feralas and Tanaris, Fist went from level 40 to level 50.

Oddly enough, there was only one Wild family member in that level group. Shaman EZ (level 47) took a surly bow and retreated back into her self-imposed exile.

Fist wanted to show off a new mount and returned to Orgrimmar for a short - very short - stay. Here she is on her wolf mount.

Fist's New Mount
 Fist went from level 50 to 55 killing dinosaurs in Ungoro Crater, and reached level 60 in Winterfell, just as Wild had achieved that same milestone at Winterfell so long ago.

Winterfell
On 15 Oct, 2012 Fist entered the Outlands and the zone of Hellfire Peninsula. She stretched level 60 to level 64, passing Java (61), Mery (62), and Babe (63). Fist was a young woman, now. She showed off a more sophisticated wardrobe at Garador in the Outlands.

An Elegant Look
With the bevy of level 60s behind her now, Fist had no rivals between her and level 85. Well, except one.

Fist took some time out to re-evaluate her combat skills, and used them with deadly effect on the special beasts of Ernest Hemingway's great safari. It proved anti-climactic, however, as the once elite beasts had been neutered to normal size and proved no challenge at all. Fist cleared another hurdle, though, reaching level 70 on 20 Oct, 2012.

JB then joined Fist for a series of dungeon runs that brought her to level 71. They had such a good time they forgot to take photos. JB did dig up one picture, below. I always thought that JB was short, but Fist is even shorter!

Fist and JB Together
On 22 Oct Fist achieved a milestone of singular importance, but passed by without fanfare of any kind. Not even a single photo.

Quoted from the entry of 22 Oct: "Along about midnight she (Fist) reached level 73. Naithipe made a point to congratulate her daughter Fist. Naithipe doesn't generally talk about her own status or proficiencies, but this was a special case. Fist has now passed her mother (level 72). There is no one left ahead of her other than Wild, JB, and Philly. "

It was certainly a major event for the Wild Family, despite the two of them downplaying it. So an effort was made to dig into the archives to find a photo of the two together. One was found that was taken in Thrallmar in the Outlands. It's a good shot, one that the family thinks Fist and Naithipe are secretly pleased to have. Naithipe even allowed a less formal shot in the second pose.

Mother and Daughter Formal

Mother and Daughter Playful
Fist did not do all this by herself. She got additional help along the way. Lao did some dungeon runs with Fist in the spider dungeons. Sin also helped out, doing some of the "Halls" dungeons in the wee hours of the morning. With their help, Fist reached level 78 on 26 Oct, a six day march from level 70 to 78. So intent was Fist on impressing Lao and Sin (and not screwing up - much) she failed to take any pictures again!

On 28 Oct Fist reached level 80: "It was a little serendipitous, then, that Fist found herself heading for the Nessingway Base Camp in Sholozar Basin for her next stop. The Nessingway Camp is where Wild made it to level 80. Along about midnight on Sunday, Fist also made level 80."

Fist at Level 80
Fist left Northrend behind her and started her march through Mount Hyjal in the Cataclysm. She pounded through Mount Hyjal and then went directly to the higher level Twilight Highlands. It took Fist a week to reach level 85, on 4 Nov. I have a feeling it took Wild, JB, and Philly a whole lot longer than that to reach that point in their lives.

Fist could have taken a break at that point. She certainly deserved it. However, at 11pm on the night she reached level 85, she was headed for Pandaria.

Flight Path Pandaria Style
Pandaria was a whole 'nother level of challenge for Fist. She got some help from Happy to get her gear upgraded, now that she was level 85 and had to give up her heirloom gear. She finally reached level 86 on 11 Nov, a journey of seven days to gain a single level.

A Lovely Land
It was a bit scary that Fist was now the highest ranking member of the Wild Family. Wild took that in stride, though. It was time to pass the baton on to a younger generation.

The road to level 90 took a few days longer. In fact, it took 26 days until Fist finally reached the new maximum level of 90, on 7 December, 2012. That averages out to almost a week per level, which, all things considered, was not bad at all. Her entire journey from level 1 to level 90 took 71 days. Another way to look at it is that each level took an average of 19 hours to complete.

These days Fist mostly spends her time farming her pretty little plot of land in Halfhill. And fishing. She's happy, and as yet has not been bitten by the raiding bug. She gets regular encouragement from Wild's raiding guild, but so far has graciously declined their invitations. She is always and remains Naithipe's daughter, though. The ambition may be slumbering in a very deep pool, but it's there. One day it may waken.

A Farmer's Life

Deep Pools

Monday, December 24, 2012

Weekend (23 Dec) - Wildshard Goes for a Stroll

Weekend (23 Dec) - Wildshard Goes for a Stroll

It appears that Wild might be starting to get bored with his hammock. He went to the trouble of straightening out his user interface so that he could at least defend himself in moonkin spec and addded access to a few healing spells. Wild had been accumulating windsong cloth and was well along with his Tailoring profession, but was frustrated that he couldn't make the high end cloth, imperial silk. Only one piece can be made per day. Wild had the recipe, but imperial silk can only be made in the Silken Fields of the Valley of the Four Moons.

For want of any better idea, Wild decided he would go to the Silken Fields without bothering to level up first. Phfft! he said, when it was brought to his attention that it was a crazy idea. Wild wondered briefly when he'd started saying Phfft! Hmm, Wild thought Lao might be the culprit. Anyway, Wild brushed aside all the worry warts and entered the portal from Org to Honeydew Village in the Jade forest.

From Honeydew Village, Wild knew he needed to go south for awhile, a path previously trod by only Fist in the Wild Family. Wild had one advantage over Fist - at least Wild remembered he could use a ground mount to get around. Wild still snickers when he thinks about Fist wandering the Jade Forest on foot. The woodland track Wild would have to follow was thick with hostile mobs, but they were only levels 85-86 and even Wild's modest gear should be enough to handle them. He did handle them, for the most part. The problem came when Wild approached the first collection of hostiles at the helicopter landing area. Wild wasn't doing the quests, and the landing area was occupied by the hostile Alliance. Had he done the quests, the landing area would have been cleared and safe. Wild managed to finesse his way around that obstacle, killing a few hostiles on the fringes, and moved on.

Wild was feeling pretty smug about his progress - that is, until he started getting into the area near Grookin Hill. This large village was another place that is friendly to the horde only after a series of quests to befriend the people there. They were nastily hostile to Wild, and he had to make his way literally through a war zone. Wild managed to reach the outskirts of the village, but he was in combat almost full time, and stealth wasn't very effective as the hostiles were too numerous. Hemmed in by hostiles and the terrain, Wild couldn't see a way around the village, and decided to rush it head on. Bad decision. All Wild succeeded in doing was getting to the center of the crowded village and then dying there. It took two suicide runs to find a safe spot where Wild could regain his health.

Wild had gone into the river south of Grookin Hill to escape pursuit, and that gave Wild an idea. The river source near Grookin Hill wound southeast to the sea, but a tributary off that river turned south and then west into the Valley of the Four Moons. Could Wild swim it in fish form?

The answer was yes. Wild got to see a view of the land few bother with - the bottom of the river. The river was deep enough that only twice was Wild forced out of fish form, and then only for a short walk. The few hostiles in the water paid Wild no mind. The river has a series of waterfalls, a couple of them quite magnificent, and it was great fun leaping from those high peaks and splashing into the ponds far below.

Just before the river turned directly west toward the Stormstout Brewery and then to the sea, a very small stream peeled of to the north. The stream was narrow and shallow, but still had enough depth for Wild to remain in fish form, but not deep enough for him to stay fully submerged in some parts. Wild has the glyph which gives his fish form an "orca" look and it was cool seeing the black and white orca skimming up the river with his dorsal fin above the water. As Wild closed in on his destination, he did have to get out of the water once. It was another waterfall, only this time Wild was at the bottom of the falls, not at the top. Wild had to kill some hostile birds to get to the top of the falls, and then in was a matter calling his raven lord mount and riding up the road to the town of Halfhill.

Wild had reached his destination. Wild also located the nearby Silken Fields and crafted his first imperial silk. Despite the odd looks Wild gets from the level 90 crowd that hangs out there, Wild likes it at Halfhill, and just might stay on at the inn for awhile. Wild wonders where he might find a hammock.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Saturday (15 Dec) - Dominance Offensive

Saturday (15 Dec) - Dominance Offensive

The Dominance Offensive is a special set of twelve interconnected quest chains that became available with the last patch. The Priest Lao has been recruited for this dangerous expedition. This is Lao's story:

With the patch that showed up less then a month ago there opened up a new area of exploration, or, as it turned out, exploitation. Lao woke up at the Shrine of theTwo Moons in Pandaria to find a message waiting for her: Get to the Krasarang Wilds and meet with Hellscream. Now. Garrosh Hellscream is the leader of the Horde.

Not that she would ever say this out loud, but Lao is not a big fan of Hellscream. She usually tries to stay off his radar when she can, but the missive was not one to be ignored. Lao went.

When she arrived she found Hellscream with the crew that Lao had landed in Pandaria with. More like crashed in Pandaria, but what's one wrecked Zeppelin or two. The Horde are claiming the lands in the southern area of Krasarang Wilds before the Alliance can take a foothold.

At this point Vol'jin (the Troll Leader under the command of Hellscream) showed up, demanding to know what was going on. In a sneering and condescending voice, Hellscream told him. Hellscream wanted the resources of the Wilds and he wanted to show the Pandarens his might by crushing the Alliance, thinking this would make them side with the Horde.

"It won't work, mon." Vol'jin said. "You will just drive them away with your bloodthirst."

Hellscream sneered back, "This is why Thrall did not leave you in charge. You are weak and don't have what it takes to lead. But I have a job for you, if you want to see what is going on, scout out this cave and report back."

This is where things started to get interesting. Not trusting Hellscream, and wanting to get away from him, Lao joined Vol'jin in the a cave and discovered there was a way to amass an army of "made" creatures of hate. Vol'jin was appalled, but a trusted ally of Hellscream who joined us was not, this is exactly what Hellscream wanted. In the ensuing fight Vol'jin was gravely injured but alive and Hellscream's ally was killed.

Swearing a blood oath to Vol'jin, Lao went back to report to Hellscream, claiming that Vol'jin was dead. Vol'jin tasked Lao to keep close and gather data. She would find allies along the way, but be wary.

What Hellscream has told any of the other leaders, Lao does not know. But, while out at Domination Point, she received a summons from Vol'jin. Flying to him she found him still gravely injured but being tended to by Stromstout. Vol'jin felt that his people were under attack, and to go find Thrall.

Thrall and Lao traveled to the Echo Islands, the home of trolls, and found it under marshal law, by order of Hellscream. The orcs there even attacked Thrall. Lao was not pleased. Thrall and Lao took back the Echo Islands from Hellscream. Lao was sent back to Domination Point, while Thrall thought what to do.

Meanwhile, Hellscream commissioned the Bloodelves, lead by Theron, to find out the secrets of the Ancient Mongu race that once ruled Pandaria. In their digs they uncovered a story of a Bell. The Bell gives the Mongu more hate and anger, and also makes them better fighters. Hellscream wants this Bell, and sent Theron's people after it into areas they were unprepared for, costing them lives. Theron is not happy with Hellscream and, when Theron questioned Hellsream's orders, Hellscream was not happy with Theron, either. Lao cannot tell where Theron's loyalties lay. Is he playing along with Hellscream, like Lao, or is he in support of his activities?

Lao has received missives from Vol'jin, each time getting paranoid that this might be found out. Vol'jin knows about Hellscream's search for the Bell. Baine, the leader of the Taurens, has been keeping close to Hellscream and reporting back to Vol'jin, but Hellscream does not trust Baine, so who knows how open Hellscream will be.

So far Vol'jin has Thrall and Baine on his side. Lao is not sure where Theron stand. As for the goblins, they are pretty mercenary, so they could fall either way, but in the end they will fall probably to the side they see keeping their skins alive. Sylvanas has yet to enter the picture.

Lao is returning to Domination Point daily. She's playing the good loyal Bloodelf, but is also keeping an eye out for further orders from Vol'jin.

More to follow, Lao is sure . . .

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Monday (10 Dec) - Battle Net Error #112 You're Files May Be Corrupted

Monday (10 Dec) - Battle Net Error #112 You're Files May Be Corrupted

When I logged in this morning (Monday), the Blizzard Launcher had an update to run. It was a small one, and should have taken less than a minute to load. Something went wrong, however, and the installation failed in a weird way - the download stream apparently got choked off and died before it was completed. So, I restarted the launcher and got an error message that the installation file might be corrupt. I then deleted the suspected corrupt file and ran the launcher again. This time the install ran with no problem and I was able to login - well, not exactly. I got a Battle Net error message stating that I was about to be forced into the Battlenet Support website, where all problems go to fester. I had visions of being forced to reinstall the game for the second time in the same month.

Deciding to ignore Blizzard's dire warnings, I ran the launcher for the fourth time, and logged successfully all the way into the game. I think Blizzard is just playing with my head.

The Tuesday maintenance is a long one this week - 1am to 11am. There are a number of hotfixes going in, some of which reduce some pvp stats. It's mostly just bug cleanup, though.

Fist is going to be taking it easy over the holidays. There is a lot of real life activity that is cutting down game time. Wild's raiding guild, MM2, will be disappointed, but Fist will not be joining them any time soon. In addition, Fist just hasn't felt the call to take the step up into dungeons or raiding. She may very well become a full time farmer with the Tiller's faction for awhile, and work on her Dailies now that she is level 90. In addition, Fist will feature prominently in the year end review coming up, and that takes time to research and prepare.

Fist's mother, Naithipe, has been asked by the Wild Family to consider leveling again. Naithipe is a Blacksmith, and the family would benefit from building up and maximizing that skill. Naithipe is considering entering into the PvP challenge, even knowing that it would bring her out into the open. By now, though, Naithipe has to believe that her true identity is pretty much an open secret. A Death Knight pvper is not exactly unique, and the birth of her daughter has altered her harsh outlook on life to a considerable degree. That said, Naithipe has no reason to change her "straight at you, kill or be killed" approach to pvp, or life, for that matter. Whether she will be able to adjust from her very solitary lifestyle to a more open one ... well, time will tell.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Friday (7 Dec) - Wild Family Has a level 90

On Friday night at 11:20pm, Plumrosefist, ie Fist, became the first member of the Wild family to reach level 90. It is also the first time anyone other than Wildshard had been the first to reach the latest max level. She also broke tradition by wrapping things up before the bell tolled Midnight. All of the previous max level achievements occurred in the wee hours of the morning.

Fist was still a good bit away when she got in game Friday, still only 57% of the way to level 90. She already had it in her mind that she was going for it, however.

As usual, her quest clues had petered out at one point and Fist decided she'd hoof it along the Great Wall to get to a new quest area. Patterned after the Great Wall of China, it was as tall as it was massive. It was a long, long, ground mount run to it's far end, and when she finally got to where she needed to get off the Wall, there was no way down. Undeterred, Fist climbed out on the outer structure of the Wall, tight roped her way around a small ledge (it was a very long fall if she slipped, and I had no idea how to retrieve the body if she did fall), and jumped down to a lower rampart. There was no way down from that rampart, either, since the single door would not open for her.

Fist studied her options, and then jumped from the rampart down onto some rocks. Two long falls, and she survived them both. From there she found another camp with quests to get her going again.

Her last big xp quest got her to 100% on the xp bar, but she was still short a few points to actually level. She was wrapping up a long chain. Each of the final quests sent Fist off to talk to someone, and gave very little xp, so Fist was literally having to creep up to her goal. It took the third little quest to finally take her over the top.

Bd and Lady Hunter were both in game, and enthusiastically congratulated Fist. We got to talking about old times and how both Wild and Bd were terrorized by Lady Hunter when she ran raids. She enjoyed the teasing, I'm sure. They're eager to get Fist into their dungeon runs and bring her up to raid ready status. Fist will still take her time. I'm still not sure just what Fist will be doing from here on out.

There'll be time enough for all that. Fist is just going to enjoy being a level 90.


Fist at the Great Wall

Fist After Second Jump

Did It Make It? 01

Did I Make It? 02

Did I Make It? 03

Did I Make It? 04

I MADE IT! 05



Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Monday (3 Dec)- Pandaren Toys

Monday (3 Dec)- Pandaren Toys

Note - Oops, This should have been posted before the Auction House Post

Pandaria is crazy for toys. "Use" toys on trinkets are kind of cool, and Fist has several that she keeps around for no reason but to have fun with them. Then there are toys that are ... just toys. Here is a random sampling of toys that Fist has. She has Silversage Incense when she wants to meditate around a smelly stick of burning incense. Then there's the Golden Banana, which can be thrown at any person. It just sort of lays there, though. The coolest so far is the Hozen Idol. Target a critter and activate the idol - a yellow beam lances out to the critter for a few seconds - and then BOOM! the critter explodes. That's so much fun they had to put a 20 minute cooldown on it.

On Monday night I got back to back screen lockouts - after playing almost two hours straight - while Fist was actively battling mountain rams up in the mountains. How Fist managed not to die either time during the reboots amazed me. After the second crash I got another idea. I've wondered if there is a program running in the background that is setting it off, but I can't check on that since the game takes up the whole screen. Well, duh, why not run the game in a window instead of full screen?

When I play WoW, I want as much visual real estate as possible, so I always play in full screen mode. For trouble shooting, though, running WoW in a window allows me to have task manager running next to it so I can see what background programs are running, and I can see what activity is going on the next time the screen lockup occurs. I played for another hour with the game in windowed mode. There was no lockup. That doesn't tell me much, yet, but I am going to keep running in windowed mode.

Fist came across some additional quest hubs in Kun-Lai Summit that kept her busy Monday night. Fist has stayed away from dungeon runs because of the screen lockups. I don't like the idea of having my screen freeze in a dungeon in the middle of a boss fight, or having the other four players have to sit through a long wait for Fist to get back in game or find a replacement.

Fist did find enough to do, though, to DING! to level 89.

Tuesday (5 Dec) - The Neutral Auction House

Tuesday (5 Dec) - The Neutral Auction House

Happy had his alliance counterpart, Lost, do some house cleaning recently. To Happy, "housecleaning" means sending him stuff across the Neutral AH for Happy to sell or use. Lost grumbles that she never gets anything back from those exchanges. That's not entirely true, but with most the alliance side of the family on semi-retirement, they don't need much gold.

On Wednesday morning, Hap and Rakta happily got some game time in at Booty Bay in Stranglethorn Vale, manning the Neutral AH at separate locations. Weekday mornings are best for the transactions, since that is when the fewest people are likely to be using the AH. So, it was pretty surprising to find that the area where one of the Auctioneers hawked his wares, there were four other players hanging around. They hung around, and they hung around ...

Hap is a little new at the process (due to a certain death in the family no one speaks of), so he was going by the books - no transactions if there are other possible buyers around. Rakta is the vet, and she decided to do some testing to see if it was possible to get some business done without losing stuff to buyers stalking the AH for bargains.

Rakta's first surprise was that the neutral AH was empty! There was not one single thing for sale. That was a first, never seen before situation. Just to make sure the AH was functioning, Rakta posted a cheap recipe to see what happened. It posted and appeared in the AH. Ok, so it seems to be working.

The only player hanging around that Rakta took particular note of was a low level alliance with a "bank-like" name was standing right next the Auctioneer and had the Auctioneer targeted. His nameplate said he was "Away" but that did not mean he wasn't watching. Rakta monitored the player for five minutes, but no transactions appeared on AH. Thinking that the ally was watching Rakta, Rakta left the area. Hap, all by himself at the other location, monitored the AH instead of Rakta. Still, no transactions were being made. For all the players about, none of them seemed to be using the neutral AH.

Rakta returned, and tried slipping in a few things, to see what would happen. Hap saw them pop up on the AH and bought them as he was supposed to. No other player jumped in to try and buy the items, which Rakta posts for a single silver piece each to minimize the high cost of transactions charged by the neutral AH.

For the next fifteen minutes Rakta posted items and Hap bought them, moving many stacks of mats between the alliance side to the horde side. The two of them could have been all alone in the world. When the two finished up their business and left, the neutral AH was again empty.

The experiment with a Windowed WoW setup (instead of full screen) has been working well. There were no screen lockups Tuesday night, and Fist was pretty busy, mostly on the Townlong Steppes, where there is a war going on. Fist seems to have picked up a good quest thread, and has been happily bulling her way through them. I'm using about 90% of the screen for WoW and I can't tell any difference in response between windowed and full screen. In fact, logging in and screen swapping seem to work even faster in windowed mode.

Another side benefit of all the scrubbing, deleting, and reinstalling I've done, is that it gives me a chance to standardize a user interface that all of the toons can use. The UIs for each have been built as needed at the time, and don't follow any common template. I will keep the number of addons to those I feel are essential, but I'm not overly worried about the addons anymore. I don't think they were the problem. Fist will be the guinea pig, of course, since she gets the most game time and needs to be the best prepared.

The use of the default game UI was an interesting experiment in itself. I learned that it's workable, when necessary, but comes up well short of what addons can provide. I would not want to use it in a raid, for example, with the expanded number of spells and abilities I would need to have ready access to, versus just questing. The default UI did have one unexpected benefit - without my 3x3 grid of spells (the default UI spells are in one long line) I was pretty much forced to memorize what spell was assigned to what button since I did not have the visual 3x3 array as a crutch to look at. I'm not quite sure whether I will incorporate that into the standard UI, though. I do intend to try to keep the clean look that the default UI enforces. I really do like the way it looks.

Fist's efforts in Townlong Steppes got her to 30% of the way to level 90.

She was also excited to learn she had reached Exalted status with her first Pandaren faction, the Forest Hozen. She was very disappointed, though, to learn it was an empty honor. The Forest Hozen faction does not have any special rewards.

Raiding Update - Fist spoke with MM2 guild leader and raid leader, Bd, Tuesday night. The guild has one raid group that is pretty stable. They have one boss on farm, Bd said, but no other bosses down. They also have a weekly Looking For Raid (LFR) event that pulls in 10-15 players to help improve gear for real raiding. In addition, the guild has two contests coming up - one is a competition in doing Scenarios, and the other is an ambitious pet battle contest. Fist will look into the LFR once she hits level 90, but will probably need to do her dungeon runs to get her gear level high enough for the LFR. Lao caught Wild in game on Wednesday morning and .. well, she wasn't exactly impressed with Wild's gear, calling it "oh so last expansion."  Lao was more than half right, since Wild's gear score is only i422, but Wild had to point out that ALL of his gear is Pandaria level. And it's not that pvp stuff, either. So there.

For all the work Fist has been doing, her gear level is not all that much better than Wild's. Fist's equipped gear level is i426. She's being held back by an i384 trinket and an i399 cape. The cape may be taken care of shortly, but the trinket will continue to deflate her gear score until she can get something solid to replace it.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Weekend (2 Dec) - The Incursion Huntress

Weekend (2 Dec) - The Incursion Huntress

Fist was out and about for awhile on Saturday night. On Friday I got a screen lockout, the first since I did the PC scrub and the reinstall of WoW. Sigh. I was only using two addons, Auctioneer and Postal, and now they are both gone, too. It's likely a computer problem, though, having tried everything else.

Fist, it appears, has fallen into an in between position again. She has no quests and no clear idea where to head next. The last place she was dropped at was in the Valley of Eternal Blossoms. Fist took a ride with the flight master at Mogu'shan Palace, but it dumped her into an area of burning buildings with no one about - and no flight master, either. Apparently, Fist has missed a quest chain somewhere. A little frustrated, Fist hearthed to Honeydew and called it a night.

Before she left, Fist did have an interesting encounter in Four Winds (Thunderfoot Fields, I think) prior to the above. She was rescuing people, which entailed killing their captors first. In the middle of one such battle Fist was ganged up on by what she assumed was two more of the usual level 87/88 mobs she'd been slaughtering all evening. They weren't. They were level 90 pvp npcs, and they were elite. The name of the mob was "Incursion Huntress."

I looked it up in wowhead. It's an alliance npc, and they hang out in Krasarang Wilds, well south of where Fist was. All I can think of is that a player kited it over to where I was. Unfortunately, I didn't think to grab a screenshot. Fist made a fight of it, getting the elite to about 25% before Fist died.

Fist is 40% of the way to level 89.

Saturday - Got another scare on the computer late Saturday night. Fist was in Halfhill doing some farming - it's not quite as simple as Fist had thought - when an urgent message popped up on the screen. "Microsoft Security Essentials has detected viruses on your computer. Click ok to clean."

That was alarming. But, hmm, I have a virus checker, Avast. It didn't have any warnings to impart. I managed to do an online check to see what Microsoft Security Essentials was all about despite some intrusive attempts to take over my browser and force that click. The program in question is a valid Microsoft product, but it is a voluntary free download, not something installed by the operating system. I checked my system files and it isn't even installed on my computer.

There was no way I was going to click that button, but I also couldn't get it to go away. I could kill the browser, but when I opened it back up the message would be back. So I restarted the computer and it went away. I had Avast run a virus check just to be sure and it came up clean. I had read that Microsoft recently lost it's seal of approval for their virus checker. It wouldn't surprise me if that was an attempt to get me to install their virus checker, trying to convince me that I needed it to get rid of a virus. The good news is that Fist was in game for almost two hours with no screen lockout.

However, Fist spent more time than she wanted doing little more than looking for something to do. It's really weird, but she has been forced to start flight path jumping to try and find quests to do. She finds pockets of three-five quests, but once they are done there are no suggestions leading to another set of quests, such as "take this chicken to Kentucky Fried and talk to Colonel Sanders." I'm used to having to delete quests from my quest book because all 25 quest slots are full. Not in Pandaria. Fist rarely has more than a dozen open quests, and way too often can count her open quests on one hand.

She called it a night in Kun-Lai Summit at a little out of the way place called The Grummle Baazar. There are three quests there, which is the sum total of her open quests.

Fist creeped along, increasing that 40% to 56% of the way to level 89.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Tuesday (28 Nov) - Stealth Patch 5.1

Tuesday (28 Nov) - Stealth Patch 5.1

Ok, so patch 5.1 didn't exactly sneak up on us, but nobody in the Wild family paid much attention to it. It arrived on Tuesday, a very small installation, and at first I thought it was a common place bug fix. It's actually a rather significant patch. Anyway, all the changes I found interesting can be read below - after Fist gets a word in.

On Tuesday night Fist DINGED! to level 88. The quests have been mostly a blur, but individually, as Fist has done them, she has to appreciate the effort to make them entertaining. It's pretty obvious her pace has slowed, though. Fist never comes back to town with all her bags full anymore. Full bags were the norm prior to Pandaria.

She has been spending time in Halfhill at the market. She has been growing vegetables, but has been limited by her level, since the daily farming quests are for level 90s. Fist also discovered Sungshin Ironpaw, who carries almost all of the cooking materials needed to get from skill 1 to skill 525. Any character can do this, provided a level 85 plus character is available to buy the mats from Sungshin. Fist was at skill 380. She could have leveled to 525 in under ten minutes, except that she was short on one ingredient the trainer doesn't provide - golden carp. Those can be fished in any Pandaren waters. Fist meandered down to the river that runs next to Halfhill and fished all the carp she needed in about a half hour. Sungshin offers a series of quests to continue improving Fist's cooking skills.

Patch 5-1 News -

It's called the Pandaren Campaign. There are new daily quests and, based on what I'm reading, a series of quests involving battles with enemy npcs and opposite faction players. For pvpers it sounds like a lot of fun! For the HOrde, Ongrom Black Tooth is the point of contact. For the Alliance, it's Proveditor Grantley. Most of the action occurs in Krasarang Wilds and Vale of the eternal Blossoms. I assume it's level 90 action.

Level 90 players can now upgrade gear to higher ilevels (up to 8 higher ilevels) using justice and valor points.

There is now a "Brawler's Guild"where players can compete in one-on-one PVE combat with npc competitors. Members of the Brawler's Guild can actually watch other players compete. There are rewards.

TIME ZONE Standardization: Blizzard has adopted a single time zone for most events. For example, sunrise in a realm will occur at 5:30am PST whether you are east coast or west coast; ie, if you play on the east coast sunrise is now at 8:30am, not 5:30am EST. This applies to ALL realms except Oceanic. No change for us in PST, but a realms on east coast times will have to get used to sunset coming at 9:30pm, and daily quest/profession reset at 6am.

There are a ton of class changes as Blizzard does it's tweaking. The awsome healing of Mistweaver monks has a lot of fiddling. Can't tell if the end result is better or worse. Same for Fist in Windwalker spec. Too many changes to know what the overall effect will be.

Pandarn weapon enchants have been overhauled. For some time now weapon enchants have been proc-based. Meaning the enchant kicks in periodically for a limited time based on a formula vs being always on. Apparently there were many problems associated with these enchants, and the fix is to invent an entirely new system for these two enchants. It's called Real Procs-per-minute (Real PPM). I quote: "Regardless of how you’re attacking or healing, slow or fast, with DoTs or direct heals, whatever, you can expect to get the same proc frequency, on average. Dual wielding doubles the proc frequency. Haste increases the proc rate as well." Each enchant has a standardized proc rate, which is what they will tinker with when making adjustments.

There is a couple of PAGES having to do with Pet Battles. Sorry, I haven't even turned that on yet.

PVP Power have been changed: "PvP Power will now only increase the healing of dedicated healing specializations, and will now only increase the damage of dedicated damage or tanking specializations.The amount of PvP Power on weapons has been increased.Arena matches now have a 25 minute time limit (was 45 minutes)."

Lots of tweaks and fiddling with dungeons, raids, et al.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Weekend (25 Nov) - Guild Master for a ... Moment

Weekend (25 Nov) - Guild Master for a ... Moment

The initial number of bank slots available to a guild is six. However, with the right guild reputation, it's possible to add more. Happy looked into this, as he is struggling to find room for all of his stock. Happy found that there is a guild perk available that grants a guild a 7th bank slot. When Happy went to the guild vendor to buy it, however, Happy was turned down. Happy is the guild master. But, the guild master must also have reached at least Friendly reputation with the guild to qualify for purchase. When Happy made The Undercity his permanent home, there was no such thing as guild reputation. Happy never thought he'd need it, either.

Well, maybe it would be a good thing for Happy to get out and see a little of the world, and earn some guild rep in the process. Getting from Neutral to Friendly shouldn't take all that long. "That's gold a wasting!" Happy cried out. Happy would not leave his beloved Auction House.

A compromise was reached. Fist has Exalted rep with the guild. Happy grudgingly agreed to pass guild leadership to Fist. Fist headed over to the Guild Vendor and asked for her 7th bank slot. "Where's the gold?" the vendor growled. Gold?

Given a nudge by Philly, Happy reluctantly turned over TEN THOUSAND GOLD to Fist. Hmm, thought Fist. I'm the guild master! I've got 10k gold in my pocket! Who needs a 7th slot? It was tempting, but Fist finally, as grudgingly as Happy had given it to her, paid the vendor and created the guild's 7th bank slot.

Fist thought about keeping the title. Happy then explained the responsibilities, and told Fist the guild was all hers if she wanted the headaches. Having heard what her mother had to deal with, she decided she wanted no part of that. Fist returned guild leadership to Happy.

Saturday - Fist discovered that she had missed a quest at Grookin Village in Jade Forest. That quest started a chain that kept Fist busy for awhile, with two cut scenes and a visit by a nasty monster that might be the equivalent of Wrath's Ragnaros. Just a taste of what's to come in the raids, I guess. Fist's quest lines had been rather disjointed lately, but completing that series of quests seemed to get things back on track. She is back in the Four Winds, now, with the npc Li Li trotting along with Fist. Li Li is a happy young lady who always has something positive to say about whatever Fist is doing. Fist will be a little sad when her quests are over with.

On the not so good side, there were two screen locks in the hour Fist was in game. I was playing without any addons at all. None. It's not the addons. Which means it's probably a computer problem. Or an installation problem. Gah, I don't want to have to reinstall WoW. But I think that has got to be the next step.

Sunday - On Sunday I did a complete system check of my computer and WoW. I uninstalled World of Warcraft, and followed Blizzard's directions to totally obliterate every file on the computer associated with WoW. I felt like a rogue on a quest to assassinate all of the parties of a conspiracy to keep me away from the game. I deleted the recycle bin to destroy all remaining evidence of WoW.  I ran a chkdsk, which is a pre-operating system check of the file system. That took hours. I defragmented the hard drive. And did about ten other things having to do with ensuring the proper operation of the system. Everything checked out.

It took about two hours to reinstall World of Warcraft. Fist logged in to a clean install of WoW. Some settings are kept on the Blizzard side, and Fist was happy to see that the keybinding settings and location of spells and abilities on the button bars were still in place. Everything else was like a new game. No addons were installed.

Fist spent about three hours total on Sunday night in Pandaria. There were no screen locks. That is encouraging, but I'm not declaring victory yet.

Fist, of course, just wants to get out there are get things done. She made decent, if slow, progress. Fist has discovered Halfhill, a town in the Four Winds where the Tillers faction makes their home. This is a new feature of Pandaria, where faction rep is gained by working a garden. Fist has only just started, but she kind of liked it. Fist received gardening tools, and planted her first four plots. Gardening requires tilling the soil, planting seeds, weeding, watering, and harvesting. The harvesting part has a growing period built in, so plants can't be harvested immediately. Fist will find out on Monday if she can harvest her crop.

Fist is now 66% of the way to level 88.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Thanksgiving (22 Nov) - Happy's Crazy Idea

Thanksgiving (22 Nov) - Happy's Crazy Idea

A few nights ago Happy and Lao (with input from Sis, Cerulean, Almond, et al) were talking about the poor state of enchanting materials. So many items have become nearly worthless since Mists of Pandaria. This is Happy's fourth expansion, and it is by far the worst in terms of lost value of mats from the previous expansion. Mats that were hit especially hard were dream shards and cosmic essences. Despite a value that has gone down to near zero, sales are infinitesimal. Happy doesn't like losing money, and worse, he doesn't like carrying stock that isn't going to make him any money.

So, he came up with an idea. Happy pitched it to Wild first, and Wild was, well, rather indifferent. It would mean getting out of his hammock and actually doing some work. Happy then thought of Sis. Sis is an enchanter. Maybe she would be interested.

There are many enchanting recipes that use cosmic essence and dream shards. Happy browsed the enchanting recipes on the AH and yes, there were some potential profit to be made making enchants using dirt cheap mats. Mats that Happy wants reduce the stock of. Happy is offering to send 12 stacks of greater cosmic, dream shards, and infinite dust (most enchants using the first two need infinite dust, too). Sis would have to do the work, but she could keep any and all profits. I don't think Sin's family has an enchanter, but if so, the same deal would apply.

Just let Happy know and he'll send over the mats.

Fist was in game Wednesday night for about an hour. She started in the Valley of the Four Winds. Her quest log is pretty full, but her usual high speed romp through them took a detour when many of those quests proved difficult. Difficult not in terms of dangerous mobs or anything, but finding the location, item, or person required. There are so many small villages in Pandaria! And each one has a few quests. Pandaria is a lot smaller than Fist thought it was, too. Just riding around looking for quest locations, Fist managed to wander into nearly every zone. In addition to the two zones Fist has been doing most of her questing in (Four Winds and Jade Forest) she also found herself in Kun-Lai Summit, Karasang Wilds, and Vale of the Eternal Blossoms. Not sure how Fist managed to arrive in Eternal Blossoms, as that is a level 90 pvp zone. At level 87, she decided it might be best to beat feet out of there. The only zones she has not been to are Townlong Steppes and Dread Wastes.

As for leveling, she is doing ok with her non-Dominos vanilla user interface. The one thing it doesn't provide is a percentage of experience. Fist had to calculate that herself: Hmm, 4,399,719 experience divided into 18,980,000 total experience equals, umm, let's see, ahh, here goes: 23% of the way to level 88. Or, in the ancient language of Bars, Fist is 4 1/2 bars (out of a max 20 bars) toward level 88. Been a long time since any Wild family member used bars to count experience. There were no screen lockouts, either.

Oh, in one quest that Fist was on, she found a gray item in a cave that was worth 100g! Saurok Stone Tablet has no use, but it's vendor value is 100 gold. It seems it can only be found in that cave, and only once per player. Still, a very nice bonus for Fist.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Tuesday (20 Nov) - Professional Zen Master

Tuesday (20 Nov) - Professional Zen Master

It's usually all about Fist in the Wild family these days. However, Wild did manage to sneak in a first for the family that Fist thought she would get. On Monday night Wild was clearing out his mailbox and discovered that Happy had sent him some of the new enchanting mats - spirit dust, mysterious essence, and ethereal shards. Seeing his new toys, Wild powered up his enchanting profession. Wild had rather lazily gotten his enchanting skill up to 540 (600 max) without too much effort. With the new mats from Happy, and several enchants that gave as much as 5 skills for one enchant, in a remarkably short time and at a pretty cheap price, Wild reached max skill 600 in enchanting. That earned him the title of Professional Zen Master. Wild now has all of the trainable enchants for Pandaria. What has been a continuing source of irritation, though, is that I can't find a complete list of enchants that do NOT come from a trainer, and where to get them from.

Fist has been working her butt off earning her leather working skills and still has a ways to go at skill 546. But she acknowledged Wild's accomplishments - she certainly wants to be on Wild's good side so she can get enchants for her gear.

Tuesday Project - I am getting a bit desperate to get these screen lockouts corrected. I have little faith in Blizzard's recommendations, which involves many hours of time spent deleting folders and testing the results, followed by a complete reinstall of WoW if that didn't work. I'm more than half convinced it will be for nothing, and the screen lockups would continue. I can't leave things are they are, though. I can't trust entering a dungeon or raid knowing that at any time my PC could freeze up.

So, Step 1 - I'm going to delete key folders to get a "clean" addon free setup. This will be done after the Tuesday maintenance.

Happy was the initial guinea pig for this, and when he saw what had been done to his Auction House he nearly cried. All of his buy and bid information, built up over many years, was gone. Happy will have to rebuild all that. Fortunately, he remembers what all of the common item pricing is so he should be fully back in business in no time. Even the resetting of pricing might be a good thing in the end. Pandaria has radically changed the value of things, so perhaps getting a fresh account sheet will do Happy some good. Happy doesn't use any addons except for the Auctioneer, and has never gotten a screen lock down in the bowels of the lightly populated Undercity, so that was no check.

Fist was then tossed into the ring to see how she fared. I can manage without addons for everything but the UI, for which I use the addon Dominos. However, in order to ensure that Dominos was not the culprit, Fist was forced to set up his UI using only the basic game defaults. I did manage to set up a basic DPS rotation and assigned keybindings for the number keys just as I do for Dominos. It's a little more awkward having a line of spells instead of the nice 3x3 square that mirrors the number keys, but ... Fist tested the thing first on a target dummy, and although it felt weird it was workable. She then made a short run outside one of the little towns in Pandaria. She killed a couple dozen panthers, collected some leather she could use, and declared she could manage it. I'm going to set up a few more keybindings (my twitch reflex kept going for keys that I hadn't set the bindings for, yet) and then attempt some quests. I'll see how long I can go before ... well, we'll just see.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Weekend (18 Nov) - The Clothes Horse

Weekend (18 Nov) - The Clothes Horse

Fist admits that she likes clothes. That passion has been easily fed by Pandaria, which offers a lot of different looks. Half the time she should be questing she is in Org sorting through every wearable item to see how it looks on her. Her questing in the Jade Forest has brought a new ensemble of gear called Deepwoods. Frankly, I think it's horrible looking. Fist would have to agree, but hey, it's a set! She couldn't let it go. She already has a dozen weapons of various sorts. Most of those have unique looks, though, so she feels justified keeping those.

The problem is finding room for everything. Happy choked on the cost, but he already had bought Fist the largest bag available (26 slots) to hold the THREE sets of gear that she carried around with her. She also has two bank slots (totaling 32 slots) for banked gear that is already full and overflowing. Fist almost bought two 22-slot bags on a whim, but at the last minute asked Happy to check prices. They were high. Too high. Plus, Wild can make those bags for even less - if Happy can get a break on the price of bolts of embersilk. So far Fist is holding off, but she wants those bags! Sigh.

Fist is also unhappy with her trinkets. Lao gave her a great, socketed trinket she is dying to use, but she has to get to level 87 first. Her other trinkets don't have much in the way of +agi, and she has made do with one trinket that has 406 mastery. Fist has another 406 crit trinket, but it doesn't seem better than the 167 agi trinket it would replace. Prices for the 512 agi trinkets have climbed and Happy won't release that kind of money to Fist. Happy could see visions of expensive clothing stores dancing in Fist's head.

Once she closed her closet doors, Fist graduated from the Pandaria zone of Jade Forest to the Valley of the Four Winds on Saturday night. The quest gear rose from the i372 older quests, to i384 level quests, and in the Four Winds has starting dropping i399 gear. Since Fist is in mostly i415 gear purchased from the auction House, she isn't keeping much of anything but trinkets from questing. She is certainly getting some interesting trinkets, though. The stats themselves are just ho hum, but it's the extras that get attention. Many of them have an "Equip" ability that summons a pet or has some silly feature put there just for fun. Fist loves them.

Fist's first impression of the Four Winds is that of a huge farm that has been allowed to be run over by varmits of every sort. The quests are clever and interesting, if nonsensical at times. Such as the quest where Fist collects a turnip, a bucket, and a third thing, and delivers them to a farm house by having a cow kick the items down a lane. Fist played "animal control" many times, rooting out various critters who'd gotten into the fields and gardens. I do think the varmits were a bit overdone, though. They are everywhere, larger ones and packs of smaller ones. There is no way to avoid them, so getting to quest areas means killing them in droves, which does slow things down.

Fist ran across an 85 elite varmit in a cave that gave Fist a pretty tough battle. It didn't hit very hard (it's really nasty weapon was a circular spray that Fist could avoid), but it had a ton of health and Fist figured it would be a long fight. Partway through the fight, though, an npc showed up and helped Fist burn it down. At times seems it seems as if the game is rigged against the elite mobs. Fist is still looking to tackle an elite in a fair fight.

Fit started the evening 72% of the way to level 87. When the night ended Fist had DINGED! to level 87. Even better than reaching level 87, Fist finally got to equip and use her Ghost Iron Dragonling trinket that Lao got for her!

Fist has also continued to improve on her leather working skills. Her great need now is savage leather. Lao has provided some, picked up while pvping, I believe, which is much appreciated. Fist has farmed tons of it already, as well. She went to The Pale Roost in Deepholm. There are elite dragons there that are constantly spawning for a quest. Fist doesn't do the quest, she just kills the dragons for the savage leather.

Fist spent a very long time there, mostly by herself. There were two cross-realm players that showed up for awhile. One was a hunter, and Fist passed on skinning his kills at first, figuring he was a leather worker, too. But he didn't skin his kills, so Fist started skinning them. The other player was a mage. We talked a bit while working the dragons. He was after green gear drops he could disenchant for his enchanting profession. Those drops were fairly rare. I don't envy that poor mage leveling enchanting. What a pain. Fist did not interfere with their kills, but kept busy skinning the kills the other two got. Fist made satisfactory progress on her leather working, reaching skill 485. She's going to have to go back to the Pale Roost, though, as she still needs stacks and stacks of savage leather.

Fist did go back to the Pale Roost a third time on Sunday. When she was done with her farming and her leather working, her skill had risen to 546 (600 max). She is now farming for the Pandaria leather called sha-touched leather and exotic leather. Ironically, the leather gear she can craft now is the same i415 gear that she had been buying off the Auction House. At least she should get some of that gold back by selling her crafted items.

Oh, and unfortunately, the screen lockup is back, despite removing nearly every addon. It's very frustrating. For that hour or so on Sunday evening I used the backup computer. So far, no problems there, but I really dislike having to have both computers on all the time, and the backup PC is slower.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Monday Plus (14 Nov) - The Statue Monster

Monday Plus (14 Nov) - The Statue Monster

Fist portal hopped back to Org Monday. She was swamped with Pandaria leather crafting stuff and Mery was complaining about all the junk Fist was sending to her. Fist had to break the logjam with leveling her leather working skills, and rugged leather was still in short supply. Fist came upon an idea involving the Onyxia raid. The tunnel leading from the portal entrance to the dragon Onyxia is patrolled by four level 80 elite dragonkin. These special dragons yield 10-20 rugged leather with each kill. Fist, at level 86 and in Pandaren gear, was more than a match for them. Fist killed the four elites and reset the raid dungeon the max five times. When she was done she had more rugged leather than she needed. Oh, by the way, Mery was invited, too, so that Fist could turn the group of two into a raid. Mery never left Org, though, letting Fist have all the fun. Mery just wanted some bag space back.

Fist then ran into yet another obstacle. She had plenty of leather for the next round of crafting. But skill level 240-250 required another mat called fel scales. Not many beasts drop this mat, and those beasts were all in Outland's Blade's Edge. Since the scales cost more than 10g each on the AH, Fist went out to farm the Shard-Head boars that sometimes dropped them when skinned. It took awhile, but Fist finally got enough. More crafting, and now Fist is stuck looking for borean and heavy borean leather. Fist has raised her leather working skill to 385 now, ten skill points ahead of Mery. Mery is considering dropping her own leather working skills and is looking at what she might replace it with. JB, Philly, and Wild already cover most of the main professions: Wild (Tailoring, Enchanting), JB (Alchemy, Herbalism), and Philly (Inscription, Jewelcrafting). Naithipe is into Blacksmithing and Mining, but isn't much further along with those than Mery was at leatherworking. The only profession the family done little more than dabble in is Engineering, but that  doesn't much interest anyone. Well, Mery has plenty of time to think about it.

Thursday - Fist did little more than putter about for a couple of days, and then found some time on Thursday night to hammer out a few more quests. There were some interesting ones that required hunting down objects, which offered a change of pace from the usual kill quests.

The highlight, though, was the quest "Pei-Back." Pei-Zhi is a panda mystic who has been taken by the evil Shan Jitong. Fist is enlisted to rescue him. Shan Jitong is protected by a large stone statue monster, and Shan Jitong is immune to attack as long as the statue stands. Fist must kill the statue monster first. The statue monster is not elite, but it does have a huge amount of health, which it periodically regenerates. Additionally, Shan Jitong has a spell that separates Fist from her body, and Fist's spirit has to run back to her body. During the separation Fist is unable to attack the statue monster. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I made the quest a lot harder than it should have been. Fist not only had to return her spirit to her body, she was supposed to click on the body as well. That click allowed Fist to resume attacking the statue monster, and it also stopped the statue from regenerating health. Fist didn't know that. She wasn't used to seeing the hand-thingy visual (which is a Pandaria thing). Fist let the statue monster take the full amount of time for regeneration, waiting to attack again once the spell expired. The only thing going in Fist's favor, was that even with the full period of regeneration, Fist was doing enough damage to - slowly - reduce the statue's health. The statue hit pretty hard, though, and Fist took considerable damage. She had to use all her protection and healing abilities to stay alive, and she got the "Warning: Low Health!" so many times she shut it off. She was down under 15% at one point in the fight.

Slowly ... eventually ... at 20% health ... Fist killed the statue monster. That drew in Shan Jitong, with Fist very low on health. It didn't matter. Shan Jitong was now attackable, and he went down before Fist finished her first round of attacks.

So, Fist did most everything wrong on this fight - but that's what made it so much fun and challenging!

Fist is now 50% of the way to level 87.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Weekend (11 Nov) - Fist Fixes Things - She Hopes

Weekend (11 Nov) - Fist Fixes Things - She Hopes

This is mix and match of a few things.

MM2 Raiding Rules: Fist is a long way from becoming raid-ready. It doesn't hurt to review the requirements set by the guild, though, so that those requirements can be worked toward. The general rules of thumb for raiding haven't changed. This is more about expectations for gear, experience, etc in Mists of Pandaria.

MM2's Current Raid is Mogu'shan Vaults
Minimum gear ilevel - 455, for all specs (Fist is at i397)
Minimum DPS on raid target dummy - 43.5k DPS sustained
DPS only - Complete a Scenario without a tank or healer
Tanks - personal evaluation by the raid leader, no numbers given
Healers - personal evaluation by the raid leader, no numbers given

Before any of that raiding stuff, though, testing is needed to try to fix the screen lockups that are still occurring. In Pandaria, on Saturday, Fist didn't last five minutes before the screen froze. I opened a ticket with Blizzard. The GM, Ekield, sent me to an article about generic computer crash errors. Sigh.

And of course, their method of "fixing" a problem is as heavy handed as they come - delete game folders (cache, wtf, interface), update sound and video drivers, use selective startup to disable ALL programs except for Windows and WoW, and if those things don't work, delete and reinstall the game. In other words, the problem couldn't be Blizzard's fault - it's obviously something else. Anything else. Needless to say, Ekield got a pretty poor report card. Not that it will do any good. And of course again, the ticket is now considered "resolved" and they've washed their hands of the issue, despite the fact that the actual problem hasn't been resolved. I bet they don't even have a category called "fixed". 

I did check the video card drivers. The drivers are up to date. I then removed all addons except for Dominos, which manages buttons and bars. Fist played for about thirty minutes without a crash. I added Xperl, which aids targeting. It doesn't help that Fist is doing a quest string that is bugged. The advice on that issue is to abandon the quest, reload the UI, and take the quest again. Progress is very slow, having to reload several times for each step of the quest chain. Still no screen lock, though. 

Fist went back at it Sunday night. The lockups were back. After the second one, I removed Xperl. Fist then played for more than an hour and did not get any lockups. I'm pretty sure now that Xperl is the culprit. I'll start loading more addons slowly. Xperl is nice to have, but I can live without it.

The bugged series of quests all begin with "Scouting Report: " with additional titling for the specific quest. Each quest involves an npc who reports to Fist. There is a set piece for each quest, and Fist is then put literally into the shoes of the reporting npc. Fist plays the part of that npc and completes the scenario through some kind of action. It is an interesting process. I'd give 'em points for creativity, but it's badly designed. As mentioned, they tend to be buggy, requiring multiple attempts before successfully completing them. The view tends to be static, and in one of them I had to physically move around my user interface to expose things required - the scenario used a static set that I could not affect. Nice try, but they need to try harder to make these feel more like I'm actually there instead of a bystander, and give the npc/player more flexibility to interact with the environment.

I might have gotten more out of the lore of Pandaria while questing if Fist had entered Pandaria with lesser gear, so that quest rewards would be more meaningful, and the encounters would feel more dangerous. As it is, it's still fun seeing the new areas and puzzling out the quests, but I don't really feel engaged in the storyline.

Fist graduated to her third town in the Jaded Forest. This one is Dawn's Blossom, even bigger than the other two.

She DINGed! to level 86 with little fanfare and is now 8% of the way to level 87.

However, some fanfare would seem to be warranted. It is hard to imagine, but Fist has now eclipsed even Wild as the senior member of the Wild family. When Fist was born, that goal did not even seem possible.

Wild is happy for her and promises a ceremony. But more likely that toasting and honoring won't come until she reaches level 90.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Wednesday (7 Nov) - WoW's Patch 5.0.4 Debacle

Wednesday (7 Nov) - WoW's Patch 5.0.4 Debacle

I have been reporting an intermittent computer freeze problem while playing World of Warcraft. It has started to get worse.

Patch 5.0.4 was released on 28 August. Many players believe this patch is causing the problem.

I don't recall this problem cropping up before Patch 5.0.4. I did upgrade my video card on 3 September. The computer freezes I've been experiencing started on 20 October. Hard to know if there was any correlation or not.

Reading through the complaints on the Blizzard site, there does not seem to be any common cause and Blizzard has been completely silent, offering nothing but the usual checks (delete folders, update video card software, check for overheating, lowering the video settings, etc) that have already been tried and checked. Lots of folks have tried a lot of things, but not one person has reported a fix of any kind. If you are affected by it, there is no solution. Upgrading to Win8 didn't fix it, either, according to those who tried that.

These freezes only happen while in WoW. I tried swapping screens to see if the problem was in the monitor. The screen froze twice inside ten minutes of play. It's not the monitor.

I have not spent a lot of time in WoW using the older backup computer, but the time I have spent there, there have been no freezes. This computer still runs Win XP. Using the XP computer for WoW poses it's own issues. Everything else I do (the WoW blog, the novel, video stuff, etc) are all done on the Win7 machine. I have to switch the mouse and keyboard to use the XP machine for WoW (both are miniature versions because I just don't have the desk space for full sized for both computers). Yes, it's all doable, but very inconvenient.

Fist has been doing what she can, but is not getting a lot of game time. She did have a "how could I have done this?" moment, though. She has been complaining about not being able to use a flying mount. So she has been on foot all this time. Now, that should cause some head scratching. Unfortunately, Fist hasn't been one of those scratching her head. Fist's ground mount of preference is the Dark Phoenix. It is one of the few mounts that always appears to be flying, but when near the ground it "flies" at ground speed. It also has the odd restriction that it can't be used at all when flying is restricted. In other words, the Dark Phoenix can be used as a ground mount and a flying mount, but only if flying is allowed. Fist is not allowed to use a flying mount, yet, so her Dark Phoenix can't be used at all. Fist has her choice of dozens of other ground mounts, who don't have that restriction. It just never occurred to her. Fist pulled her Raven Lord mount out of the stable and is now traveling at mounted 220% speed, instead of the 108% speed she had artificially limited herself to before now. One really can't be any dumber than that.

On the positive side, Fist has settled into Grookin Village, a Hozen town of almost acceptable size for Fist to hang out in permanently. It has an inn, a mailbox, and a flight master that connects to Honeydew Village, which has a portal to Org. Now, if only she is given time to make further progress.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Monday (5 Nov) - Honeydew Village

Monday (5 Nov) - Honeydew Village

I get the "panda" thing, and am getting used to seeing the things running around. Not sure I'm ever going to call walking, talking pandas "cute" though. What does get on my nerve is how "cute" everything is "intended" to be in the panda world. "Honeydew Village?" Gag.

When Fist first entered Pandaria, she was on a zeppelin that had taken fire and was well on it's way to crashing and burning. She didn't have a lot of time to think, as she was rushed to a big .50 caliber type gun and told to strafe and kill anything and everything she could hit. Then it got worse, when the gun bucked, threw Fist off the zep and plunged her to her death. Upon resurrecting, she located a handy portal (in the middle of sparse forest) that returned her to the burning zep. After attempting, unsuccessfully, to save the zep, she was rushed back to the ground and into the battle that got her killed again (recounted in the previous post).

All of this summarization is for a reason. When Fist had to log out, she was no where safe, but had no idea where "safe" might be. So Fist hearthed to Org. When she wanted to return to Pandaria, she had to figure out how. That turned out to be a new portal located in the Valley of Honor in Org. Taking that portal sent her to Honeydew Village. Aha! Fist now had her safe haven.

Fist is 38% of the way to level 86.

Fist returned to Honeydew Village later in the day. With Fist's help, the horde was able to repulse the alliance forces that had controlled an airfield.  Once in charge of the airfield, the mostly insane horde commander, Nazgrim, had Fist criss-crossing the areas around the airfield and killing the local Pandaren creatures as well as the locals, called Hozen. The highlight was a one on one battle against a local level 84 elite, Dook Ooken, which Fist won handily. Killing Ooken sent the Hozen into a panic, petrified of the horde invaders.

Fist then encounters Loremaster Chu, a Pandaren mystic who takes Fist under his wing and introduces her to Pandaren ways. There is a series of mostly non-combat quests that does a good job of convincing Fist that cooperation is better than combat, and that Fist should try harder to understand the local hozen, instead of killing them. This Fist does, by saving some hozen and offering them food at one of the villages. Fist is now "in" with the hozen.

Fist is also now 54% of the way to level 86.

Editorial: I think Blizz has a made a mistake with the pacing of the expansion. I understand the reason for having players on foot instead of on flying mounts. Blizz spent a lot of money and energy creating Pandaria and they want us to see it. Even more important, from a bottom line perspective, is they want it to take time to complete. On a flying mount, things can be done ten times faster than on foot. So, I get it.

However, and this is a big however, quest hubs are so far apart that just getting back and forth takes up far more time than the quests themselves. Instead of providing quests that take time and effort and thought to complete, most of the time spent in game is just getting from one place to another. What is even more quizzical is that the roads and paths provided for traveling are not safe. It's not that players are entering zones way above their level, and getting waylaid by higher level creatures near the roads. That has always been the case. In the Jade Forest zone, all of the players are at minimum level 85, with creatures of like level. They are no danger to travelers, yet the hostile creatures crowd the roads and paths, forcing combat or at minimum slowing players down. It simply isn't necessary to make foot travel even more irritating than it already is. Regarding the distance between quest hubs, Fist could make Honeydew Village or the airfield her home base, which would put her a little closer to the current action. But, she would have to give up her home base in Orgrimmar, and be stuck in Pandaria. Honeydew Village is a village, and it does not have the kind of resources and access that Org does. I'm not even sure how to get back to Orgrimmar if Fist didn't have her hearth set there.

So, Fist is doing what she can. She got Wild to craft her a boot enchantment that increases her foot speed by 8%. Not great, but even a small improvement is better than none. Fist contemplated carrying around flasks that increase speed, but these are short duration flasks and not worth the bother. Fist has her own roll maneuver which bumps up her speed by 25%, but it, too, has limits. Also, and most irritating, is that the speed enchant and the roll do not stack, so her max burst speed is still 25%, not the 25+8 33% she thought she would get.

The bottom line is that Fist gets bored tracing and retracing covered ground and getting routinely interrupted while on supposedly safe roadways, and so she just hearths home to Org. Which is a large part of why her leveling has been so slow.

End Editorial.