Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

As I look forward to Wrath, I’m worried about having to PvP for PvE gear again.  I still use my PvP shield for tanking on my warrior despite having cleared Kara many, many times and having done a good chunk of ZA.  I’m bored with PvP and I really don’t plan on doing much of it come the expansion.  No incoming dramatic protest, I’ll just live with having sub-optimal gear if the optimal gear requires PvP to acquire.  If PvP becomes fun for me again, I’ll do it then. 

Steady shot had a post a while back on Choosing your pets for WOTLK. My hunter is probably going to stick with her cat. She’s had it since level 10 and I’m attached to it. The other option is the bear she tamed from Winterspring, but I haven’t really played with that yet. I’m not terribly excited about any of the exotic pets I’ve seen so far - we’ll see what happens when she gets to level cap.

Tobold talks about Games giving feedback. I would certainly like it if WoW had a better feedback mechanism. One of the things I find most difficult as a raid leader is tracking exactly where things went wrong. It’s not terribly skilled of me, but I’d like to have a quick way of seeing things such as “Pete had the holy fire debuff for 15 seconds then died”, “Cube number 4 was not clicked”, or “Sam pulled aggro”. Tobold’s idea of a replay tool is terrific, but maybe that all I need is a quick way of reviewing the combat log in game. Now to see if I can do something with invisible chat frames and such…

My shaman hit 70 today!  I started any number of shaman and didn’t get them up very high.  It’s a good feeling to finally get one up to 70.  I’m not sure if I’ll play him much between now and the expansion, but it’s been a fun trip. 

As Wrath approaches, I need to pick a good name for my death knight.  I have a lovely name picked out, but it has accents for every other letter.  Alternately I’ve taken the name of the Green Knight to match with my vaguely Arthurian naming scheme for my toons on this server.  My bank toons are named after politicians, so I’m surprised I have any money left. 

I have to agree with The Egotistical Priest’s What Ego’s Most Excited About in Wrath. 10 player raids for all content really appeals to me. I don’t like 25 player raids as that’s just too many people. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up running some 25s in Wrath, but I’m hoping there won’t be too many.

Now the reverse QQ about the zombie event is coming out on many blogs. This amuses me as well. “How dare people not enjoy the things I did! They should suck it up and enjoy it anyway!” Cue The Four Yorkshiremen

Starman makes some good points on the use of
Stats: Devil or Angel?. We always post WoW Web Stats for our raids. We have some new raiders joining us, so I need to make sure to emphasize the use of stats as a teaching tool rather than simply a race to the biggest numbers.

ThinkTank has a Druid Bear FAQ for 3.02/Wrath. It’s so nice to have all this information summed up concisely, especially given that I’m new to druid tanking. Now I need to dig up something similar for druid healing.

Warrior Best item point scale to use going into Wrath? looks like a good point scale for rating items in Pawn for Warriors.

Looks like something similar for paladin tanks.

I’ve missed having a Pawn Scale. Now I need something for a resto druid, tanking druid, and resto shaman.

I had a chance to play my shaman this weekend and got him a good chunk of the way through 67.  The changes to shamans in 3.02 are huge.  My enhancement shaman now feels like a real hybrid class rather than a self-healing rogue. 

The trickiest bit has been remembering to use all these fancy new abilities.  For example, I was fighting a weak elite, meant to hit chain lightning and brought out my spirit wolves instead.  That was a very happy surprise!  I’m going to try to solo a tougher elite next time I get on, just to get practice in burning through my cooldowns. 

Maelstrom weapon is a lot of fun - I love popping those instant heals if my health is down.  Water shield keeps my mana filled up.  I’m now doing roughly 50/50 physical and magical attacks as opposed to the pre-patch 80/20. 

I’m probably going to switch to resto when I hit 70 and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with that spec.   I think I’m ready to play a healer again. 

EDIT: I managed to trivially solo Torgos and Terokkarantula at 67. Windroc Matriarch was somewhat tougher but I got her down too.

Maintankadin has a nice straightforward list of Frequently *Answered* Questions 3.0.2 & Wrath. for paladin tanks. I’ll be looking at this a lot.

The latest event in World of Warcraft is a Zombie Invasion which fits beautifully with both Halloween and the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King. Anyone can become a zombie by fiddling with conspicuous crates or killing infected cockroaches. Once you’re a zombie, you can infect and attack other players regardless of faction. You can also attack and infect NPCs. This gets really annoying if you’re questing as instead of wanting 15 shiny objects quest givers want to eat your brains. I’m hoping that it only lasts for a day or two.

EDIT: After trying to get stuff done in capitals, particularly in Shat, the zombie plague is officially upgraded to a pain in the arse. Looks like I’ll be leveling my shaman the rest of the way to 70 since that doesn’t require going near a capital.

See Lume the Mad and Big Bear Butt’s perspectives for well worded arguments against the way the zombie plague has been implemented.

The quest to get the druid epic form is amazingly well done.  I wish there were a quest line like it for every class.  Apart from having to run Sethekk Halls, it’s a beautiful example of a quest line that proves that you know how to play your class.  Ideally I’d have it instanced so that you can’t get help from others (I had help with the essence quests).  Anyhow, thanks to a fine group of people, my druid finished his Sethekk Halls run and got his epic flight form.  (I couldn’t find my item to summon Anzu, hearthed out to go talk to the quest giver, and realized that it was in a bag I hadn’t opened.  Oops.) 

TankingTips.com has a good post on Maximizing DPS and Minimizing Damage Taken for Warriors. I’ve been in the top 3 overall DPS for our last two Kara runs (okay, so we swapped some other people in and I’m counting trash, but still). I’m looking forward to applying these tips.

"Think of the largest number you can think of, then multiply it by 8 - that’s how much RAM you should have."  — Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.

My computer and Jaimie’s have been getting terrible frame rates despite having upgraded our graphics cards earlier this year.  An NVidia 8600GT isn’t the fastest card out there, but it should be enough to handle World of Warcraft with low video settings.  I went home at lunch and upgraded our computers to 2 and 3 GB of RAM and we were getting decent to excellent frame rates.  Now to test things out in Shattrath at peak times.  The next upgrade will be a better motherboard/CPU and that’s a much bigger chunk of change. 

The amount of bile that some people are spewing at achievements amuses me. Now the PvPers, the raiders, the laid back players can have a fourth group at which to direct their hate. I have to say that Casual Raid Leader’s idea for filtering achievement announcements by level/category would be awfully nice. For example, I don’t care that you managed to Trick or Treat, but I would like to congratulate you for getting both the Hallowed Helm and the Sinister Squashling. Meanwhile if you hate achievements with a fiery passion, Banana Shoulders and WoWInsider show you how to hide them.

Lassirra of The Hunter’s Mark pointed out an intersting site, TalentChic. TalentChic lets you see what the most popular builds are for any given class/spec and lets you compare the differences between builds. I’m going to play around with this one. I think what I would like is a link from notable sites, e.g. Tankspot for warriors, describing why they like a particular build. That would probably require a lot of effort to do. It’s worth thinking about though.

ThinkTank has a post talking about Stupid bear tricks with swipe that take advantage of swipe’s infinite targets. Despite six or seven months of farming him, Moroes has yet to drop Mongoose. I may get Battlemaster on my Ring of Blood staff for fun in farming.

I’m using the stat values from this Elitist Jerks post for building a Pawn scale for druid DPS till someone theorycrafts something better. 

As I stated before, hit and expertise are the best stats till the cap (1.3 AEP), followed by agility and strenght (1 AEP) then Crit, AP (about 0.9-0.8 AEP) and finally haste and APR (0.7 AEP).