Joel's Scattered Thoughts

Notes on things that interest me

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Overcoming the Fear of Tanking

Dec 17

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Spinks had a good post on  Overcoming the Fear of Tanking.  This is a great time time to learn how to tank or heal if you haven’t already.  Here’s why:

  1. Tank and healers are in demand! You will have as much opportunity to run instances as your little heart desires.
  2. Effort to find groups is pretty much nil. Click the Dungeon finder icon, sign up, keep busy with the usual stuff till your dungeon pops, run the dungeon and get a free port back to continue on your way.
  3. Tanking or healing lower level instances is easy. If you lack confidence, join the queue for specific dungeons 10 levels lower than you are.  Even if you screw up big-time, you’re still likely to keep your group alive.  Run instances progressing in difficulty till you reach instances at your current level and you’ll be more than ready for those.
  4. If you fail, you can try again. Sometimes you’ll just be off – DPS is AOE pulling every mob in an instance, the healer or tank is sleeping,  or you just can’t remember which button does what.  No big deal.  No-one in the group is likely to remember you tomorrow and finding another group is a cakewalk.  Analyze your mistakes, shake it off, do a few quests, and try again with a new group.

My current goal is to run my death knight through all regular Northrend instances, then move through the heroics.  By the time I finish that I’ll be more than ready to tank anything on him.  Depending on my level of enthusiasm, I’m thinking of doing the same thing healing on my shaman and tanking/healing on my druid.  My warrior and paladin have already done their tanking through instances and I’m not very interested in straight up DPS in a group.

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Dungeon Finder reactions from players

Dec 11

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I was shocked at the Dungeon Finder reactions from players.  Almost all the reactions I’ve seen so far have been positive.  You don’t see that too often when a new feature rolls out.

I’ve only run one random dungeon – I happened to be on my best geared toon and didn’t feel like switching so I gave it a shot.  We got heroic Utgarde Keep and we blew through it.  The only hitch was on the first boss when no-one freed the healer from her frost tomb.  Oops.

I now have four max-level tanking toons (though I haven’t properly geared my death knight and druid for tanking yet) and a max level healer.  If I wanted to I could run dungeons all day long thanks to this feature.  Unfortunately, I’m not really interested in running too many dungeons right now, so I’m not taking full advantage of it.  Christmas holidays are coming and maybe then I’ll be more into random runs.

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The disappearance of the bear

Oct 22

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Shifting Perspectives has a  fascinating look at The disappearance of the bear.  Allison Robert looks at 8 reasons why bears are the least popular tank class.  I’ve barely done any tanking on my druid as I’ve been more interested in leveling alts lately, but there are a lot of good points here.  I agree that the argument for playing as a druid of a different spec, particularly resto or boomkin is probably the biggest reason why we don’t see more bears.

I’m still planning to gear my druid up for tanking, but I think I’ll start looking more seriously into a resto spec.

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Losing Gear Progression in WoW

Oct 21

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Spinks has a post on Losing Gear Progression in WoW.  The part that interested me was when she says this about Ulduar: “There’s no benefit to going there either, you’d be better served for rewards in the newer easier instance.” This is something that really annoys me about WoW.

There are currently 13 heroic instances.  On my newly 80 alts it makes no sense to run any of those instances except for Trial of the Champion and maybe the daily.  I buy/craft/quest the gear I need to get up to acceptable levels, then run ToC as I have time.  If it’s a slow day, I might do the daily as well.  There may be an occasional upgrade from some of the other instances, but ToC is so much more bang for the buck that running anything else is mostly a waste.

What if when new patches bring new instances and new currencies, the old instances start dropping the new currencies as well?  The loot would still be better in the new instance but at least running the old instances would not be a complete waste of time.  It makes sad to see those old instances going to waste.  (I’m even sadder about not having heroic max level instances from BC and Classic, but that might be a little much to ask.)

Make running old instances rewarding!

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Big Bear Butt Blogger » Culture Shock

Oct 18

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I read the same post as Big Bear Butt Blogger » Culture Shock but I didn’t think about it as much as he did.   He’s right that the way you think about WoW makes a huge difference.  Is the goal a cooperative game or one where you reach your own level of excellence?  I wonder if the designers thought about that when they set up the game the way they did?

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Restoration Shaman Pawn Scale 3.2

Sep 16

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I got around to doing some healing on my shaman when I was pulled into a Trial of the Champion run.  That first run was just terrible as I really had no idea what I was doing.

A little later I found myself healing for an assault on the world dragons as an engineer hunted for the lifelike mechanical toad pattern. This time I wasn’t scrambling to figure out my gear and spec while a group waited, so it went much better.

Surprisingly, the clearest explanation of how to heal as a shaman is on Elitist Jerks: Shaman: Restoration.   I went for the Riptide – Lesser Healing Wave – Lesser Healing Wave setup.

Here’s the Pawn scale I used.  Note that the quotation marks may not come through in a copy/paste.

( Pawn: v1: “Resto EJ (3.2)”: Intellect=1.1, CritRating=0.8, HasteRating=0.45, SpellPower=1, Mp5=1.3, GemQualityLevel=81 )

I found that Power Auras Classic was extremely useful, especially as a reminder to keep buffs up as an inexperienced healer. (See this NoStockUI post for more)

Sadly, Power Auras strings are quite long, so I’m just going to put up the one I used for Earthshield on Focus:

gcd:bofalse; b:nu0.1843137254902; anim1:nu1; ignoreResting:botrue; optunitn:bofalse; ignoremaj:botrue; stacksLower:nu0; target:bofalse; icon:stInterface\Icons\Spell_Nature_SkinofEarth; size:nu0.5; torsion:nu1; r:nu0.39607843137255; y:nu30; x:nu0; customname:st; groupany:botrue; timerduration:nu0; unitn:st; bufftype:nu1; stacks:nu0; focus:botrue; raid:bofalse; texture:nu42; alpha:nu0.75; aurastext:st; symetrie:nu0; soundfile:st; owntex:bofalse; duration:nu0; mine:botrue; multiids:st; inVehicle:bofalse; speed:nu1; sound:nu0; stacksOperator:st>=; realaura:nu1; threshold:nu50; exact:bofalse; textaura:bofalse; wowtex:botrue; groupOrSelf:bofalse; customsound:st; combat:nu0; InactiveDueToState:botrue; id:nu1; aurastextfont:nu1; HideRequest:bofalse; Active:bofalse; spec2:botrue; customtex:bofalse; isSecondary:bofalse; g:nu0.25882352941176; thresholdinvert:bofalse; tooltipCheck:st; stance:nu10; anim2:nu0; buffname:stEarth Shield; Showing:bofalse; spec1:bofalse; begin:nu0; off:bofalse; party:bofalse; texmode:nu1; inverse:botrue; ismounted:bofalse; targetfriend:bofalse; randomcolor:bofalse; isinraid:bofalse; finish:nu1; timer.a:nu1; timer.dual:bofalse; timer.cents:botrue; timer.HideLeadingZeros:bofalse; timer.id:nu1; timer.y:nu0; timer.h:nu1; timer.Transparent:bofalse; timer.HideRequest:botrue; timer.Showing:bofalse; timer.x:nu0; timer.enabled:bofalse

I didn’t mind healing on my shaman, but I’m still not up for much group play right now so I’ll probably stick to a nice solo enhancement build  as primary spec.


Tauren Shaman by ~DavidRapozaArt on deviantART

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Blizzard loves and/or hates Alts.

Aug 30

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

Kinless has a good post on  Blizzard loves and/or hates Alts. « Kinless Chronicles.  It does seem a little odd that with all the effort Blizzard has gone to to promote alts, they have refused thus far to provide any extra character slots.

I really enjoy playing my alts.  So far I only have four 80s, with a smattering of 70s and a mage I’ve been running low level dungeons on as part of a group.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I have seven or eight 80s by the time Cataclysm comes out.  At this point, my extra character is an alliance toon I use for cross-faction shopping, but I would prefer not to delete him.  One of these days I was also hoping to transfer and level my first character, a priest.  I would really  love to have at least one slot per class.

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Druid Ding 80

Jul 25

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druid_80 After a long stretch I finally got my druid up to 80.  For a while there I thought I was going to be leveling him just through the daily fishing quests, but I ended up doing a good chunk of Northrend after all.  I finished off in Sholazar Basin which I had never completed before, so that was a nice change.

Now, to decide if I want to level my hunter, warlock, or death knight next. 

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Death Knight Leveling Builds (58-68)

Jul 20

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I’m almost done getting my druid to level cap, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll start leveling my death knight.  It’s been long enough since I’ve been through Outlands that it might be more interesting than running through Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord yet again.  If I decide to start leveling a death knight, this looks like a good resource Death Knight Leveling Builds (58-68) – Patch 3.1 | gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight.

One of the things that I like about the leveling game is that I can play when I want to and stop when I want to.  If I get bored or distracted it’s not a big deal to hearth and start again another day.  With endgame stuff, you can’t do that.  Hearthing out of a raid or instance because you’re bored is out of the question if you want to do anything with these people again.  Skipping a day of dailies cannot be made up and extends the grind to reach whatever reward you’re grinding for.  It’s been fun to just play and enjoy myself – if I happen to get another toon to level cap before the next expansion that’s great, if not I have a couple toons at cap ready to go.

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UI design and add-ons for leveling

Jul 15

Posted by Joel in World Of Warcraft | No Comments

I found that that post: UI design and add-ons for leveling | No Stock UI has a lot of good generalized tips for laying out your UI in a non-raid situation.   Apart from spending time fishing, most of my recent WoW play has been leveling characters so this is good stuff to think about. I would like to get a few more toons to level cap as there have been rumors of a new expansion coming out in the not-too distant future.    I’m not sure what I’ll do with a bunch of max-level characters but they do provide me with a variety of gameplay options.

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Some thoughts on Leveling a Warrior Tank

Jun 8

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Tanking for Dummies points to Some thoughts on Leveling a Warrior Tank. There’s a lot of level-specific advice for leveling a warrior there. If I leveled a warrior again this would be one of my primary resources.

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