Sometimes I think you want me to touch you.
How can I when you build the great wall around you? - Tori Amos, China
In a move that surprised everyone, Blizzard has announced that they are going to begin testing Cross Realm Zones in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. I love this idea like a big sloppy Dwarfling kiss, and given the subject of my last post, the timing of this announcement is particularly serendipitous.
I am a unrepentant Wrath Baby; I created my first character in the very twilight of the Burning Crusade expansion, mere months before Wrath of the Lich King went live. Because of this I have never experienced the Old World as the thriving, vibrant place that it was in Vanilla.
For me and thousands of other people who joined the game late, levelling in World of Warcraft is a solitary experience. The wilderness of Azeroth outside of the major cities is filled with bears and bandits and monsters of all types, but even on busy, highly populous servers, meeting another character is something of a rare occurrence. It's a lonely life, being a lowbie in Azeroth, but the new Cross Realm Zones aim to change that.
The way that Blizzard is trying to implement this is quite brilliant, if you ask me. Basically, certain realms will be linked together based on population, and each of those realms will share certain zones that are flagged as "Cross Realm". Using the Barrens as an example, a character on Sargeras would walk out of a realm-exclusive Orgrimmar into a Barrens shared by 5 other servers, and would see and interact with characters from all of those realms normally, just as if they were all on the same server. At the same time, Blizzard will have the ability to keep highly populated zones (Cities, to be sure) exclusive. This way Stormwind won't be crushed under the weight of thousands of people standing at the fountain oogling the fifteen thousand naked Night Elves dancing on the mailboxes.
I think this feature is fantastic. Not just a technically brilliant solution to make an older technology scale and adapt to the changing reality of the current, max-level focused state of the game, but also as a step to the ultimate goal of eliminating realms completely. I talked about this back in January, but the elimination of the barrier walls around the different realms is a very clever way for Blizzard to extend the life of the game. Right now, if Blizzard chooses to do so, the only realm-specific areas are the main cities, the Auction House and any zone that is going to be populated enough not to be a concern like the Cataclysm zones and the new Mists of Pandaria zones.
As a social, massively multiplayer game, it is always a little bit odd to run around the world outside of the two major faction cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and see, well, nothing. By repopulating the Old World, new players will finally get an experience that is close to what older players experienced when WoW was new and when having a maximum level character was rare: A world that is full of people to interact with.
It really doesn't matter that there are no group quests in the game any more, nor is there any real need to team up with people to defeat the quests that people are given. Having a lot of people busily running around doing there own thing is exciting. It adds an immense amount of flavour to the game.
Like the bustling sidewalks of downtown New York, it's all about vibrancy and life and activity; it's about the soul of this game, which is missing in the low level zones. Bringing that kind of life back to zones other than the cities is going to go a long way to help make new players—and old players who love lowibe alts like myself—remain excited about this game for years to come.
After all, it is World of Warcraft. Bravo, Blizzard. Well played.
Showing posts with label Look Mom It's A New Feature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Look Mom It's A New Feature. Show all posts
5.11.11
Images of Azeroth: 50,000 Words (Introduction)
November is National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo); a month where the English language (among others) is tortured, abused, slapped, tickled and polished by thousands of prospective novelists in mostly abortive attempts to write the Next Great Novel. The goal is ambitious: Write 50,000 words within the month of November.
I admire anyone who has the stones to attempt such a herculean task and am in bewildered awe of anyone who actually finishes it. Personally, I would love to attempt it; as with most anyone else on the Internet, I have an idea for a novel that has never seen the light of day. But if I am to be honest with myself, I don't think I would ever be able to properly dedicate myself to it and so it would end up being yet another project that I've taken on which never sees completion. I have enough of those already; anyone remember the Through Your Interface challenge?
However, Angelya over at Revive and Rejuvenate has come up with another Challenge that I, as a Photographer and self-styled Visual Artist, am very excited about. It's IntPiPoMo, or International Picture Posting Month. As a picture is worth 1,000 words, the goal for this challenge is to post 50 pictures during the month of November.
This is right up my alley.
So here we go. It's the 5th today, so I'll be posting 2 images per day for the remainder of November. But of course, it wouldn't be a true Battle Medic challenge if I didn't have some kind of unique spin on it. So rather than simply posting 50 different screenshots of our favourite virtual world, I will be posting 25 Images of Azeroth and 25 photographs or art projects that I have been working on personally (and no baby photos, sorry ladies). As well, I will be posting commentary and context with each image.
Look for the first post a little later today.
As well, on a personal note, I hope to get back to posting more regularly than I have been lately. Two posts a month on Battle Medic is unacceptable to me. I really appreciate those of you who have stuck around and kept checking the blog during this little unannounced and unexpected hiatus. Look for a lot of action here at Battle Medic over the next little while!
Images 1 and 2: Darkshore and Sturgeon Fog
Images 3 and 4: Grim Batol and Sunset in Copper
Images 5 and 6: Scoured Reaches and Pines #3
Images 7 and 8: Halls of Reflection and Sunset in Motion
Images 9 and 10: Stormwind After Deathwing and Of Light and Darkness
Images 11 and 12: Badlands Tree and Untitled Abstract
Images 13 and 14: The Greymane Wall and Grain
Images 15 and 16: Ahn'Qiraj and The Dock
Images 17 and 18: Atramedes and a Family Portrait
Images 19, 20 and 21: Dalaran, Pines #4 and Bonus Dwarfling Pic
Images 22 and 23: Ironforge Airfield and Pines #4 Source
Images 24 and 25: Gnomus Dramaticus and Tanya
I admire anyone who has the stones to attempt such a herculean task and am in bewildered awe of anyone who actually finishes it. Personally, I would love to attempt it; as with most anyone else on the Internet, I have an idea for a novel that has never seen the light of day. But if I am to be honest with myself, I don't think I would ever be able to properly dedicate myself to it and so it would end up being yet another project that I've taken on which never sees completion. I have enough of those already; anyone remember the Through Your Interface challenge?
However, Angelya over at Revive and Rejuvenate has come up with another Challenge that I, as a Photographer and self-styled Visual Artist, am very excited about. It's IntPiPoMo, or International Picture Posting Month. As a picture is worth 1,000 words, the goal for this challenge is to post 50 pictures during the month of November.
This is right up my alley.
So here we go. It's the 5th today, so I'll be posting 2 images per day for the remainder of November. But of course, it wouldn't be a true Battle Medic challenge if I didn't have some kind of unique spin on it. So rather than simply posting 50 different screenshots of our favourite virtual world, I will be posting 25 Images of Azeroth and 25 photographs or art projects that I have been working on personally (and no baby photos, sorry ladies). As well, I will be posting commentary and context with each image.
Look for the first post a little later today.
As well, on a personal note, I hope to get back to posting more regularly than I have been lately. Two posts a month on Battle Medic is unacceptable to me. I really appreciate those of you who have stuck around and kept checking the blog during this little unannounced and unexpected hiatus. Look for a lot of action here at Battle Medic over the next little while!
Images 1 and 2: Darkshore and Sturgeon Fog
Images 3 and 4: Grim Batol and Sunset in Copper
Images 5 and 6: Scoured Reaches and Pines #3
Images 7 and 8: Halls of Reflection and Sunset in Motion
Images 9 and 10: Stormwind After Deathwing and Of Light and Darkness
Images 11 and 12: Badlands Tree and Untitled Abstract
Images 13 and 14: The Greymane Wall and Grain
Images 15 and 16: Ahn'Qiraj and The Dock
Images 17 and 18: Atramedes and a Family Portrait
Images 19, 20 and 21: Dalaran, Pines #4 and Bonus Dwarfling Pic
Images 22 and 23: Ironforge Airfield and Pines #4 Source
Images 24 and 25: Gnomus Dramaticus and Tanya
19.3.11
Zero to Wealthy in 85 Easy Levels
These days is really easy to get a new Alt started, and there are various strategies on how to get a quick start in terms of money and gear. Just recently, Big Bear Butt posted a guide for getting a great head-start on money when starting up on a new server. Starting from nothing, on the other hand, is rarely done any longer.
Rades over at Orcish Army Knife took up this challenge recently, and has inspired me to do the same.
I chose to create my new money-grubbing alt on Azuremyst, Alliance side, so that I could hang out with the Eff the Ineffable folks while I was playing. Naturally, I rolled a Dwarf Paladin and named him Fannon. Finally, my blog title and preferred subject makes sense! Of course, I haven't started healing with him yet - in fact I'm levelling Protection - but he's the right name and right class, so I'll call that a win.
My goal for this character is to level to 85 on a new server with no money, no gear and no high-level characters to help him out. Any blog content that happens to get generated is simply a bonus.
Rades over at Orcish Army Knife took up this challenge recently, and has inspired me to do the same.
I chose to create my new money-grubbing alt on Azuremyst, Alliance side, so that I could hang out with the Eff the Ineffable folks while I was playing. Naturally, I rolled a Dwarf Paladin and named him Fannon. Finally, my blog title and preferred subject makes sense! Of course, I haven't started healing with him yet - in fact I'm levelling Protection - but he's the right name and right class, so I'll call that a win.
My goal for this character is to level to 85 on a new server with no money, no gear and no high-level characters to help him out. Any blog content that happens to get generated is simply a bonus.
The guild perks are going to mean that I will be getting some bonuses in terms of loot from mobs, but that's the only support I am going to accept from the guild. I joined only to have some awesome people to talk to. I've already had to turn down several very generous offers of startup cash from a very welcoming and kind-hearted bunch of people.
DAY ONE: 0g, Level 0
Bright-faced and with bushy beard, Fannon the second found himself in Anvilmar with lint in his pockets and little else.
In doing the initial quests and not spending money I was barely managing to keep a whole silver to my name. Blizzard seems to be very tight with giving out cash at the extreme low levels, and I was scrounging to even get money for my new abilities.
What really worked well for me is Copper Ore. Even though it seemed as if Dun Morogh was completely mined out, by the end of day one I had managed to get a couple of stacks of ore and managed to quickly sell them for about 5g each.
DAY ONE: 0g, Level 0
Bright-faced and with bushy beard, Fannon the second found himself in Anvilmar with lint in his pockets and little else.
In doing the initial quests and not spending money I was barely managing to keep a whole silver to my name. Blizzard seems to be very tight with giving out cash at the extreme low levels, and I was scrounging to even get money for my new abilities.
At level 5 I picked up Mining and Enchanting, figuring that the low level enchanting market - which did so well for Rades on Medivh - would earn me some easy cash disenchanting any green items that I could get from questing or snag from the auction house cheaply.
I managed to scrounge together 6 silver by putting off buying Holy Light and headed to the auction house to see if I could snag a green item or two to flip or disenchant for some easy startup cash. Six silver doesn't really buy much, even the really low level items, but amazingly I did manage to snag two green axes and disenchanted them into Lesser Magic Essences, which at the time were going for a really solid 1g99s each. Sadly, it seems that the low level enchanting mats market is not very strong on this realm, and not long after I posted those the market had crashed down to 40s, which while substantially less, still represented a very good profit.
What really worked well for me is Copper Ore. Even though it seemed as if Dun Morogh was completely mined out, by the end of day one I had managed to get a couple of stacks of ore and managed to quickly sell them for about 5g each.I took the profit that I had made and reinvested it in some more greens to disenchant and relisted the Lesser Magic Essences in stacks of 10, which seemed to be selling better than singles. Along with some more ore, I quit for the day with a healthy 6g6s and about 30g in potential sales sitting on the auction block.
As well, I was level 12 and completely finished with Dun Morogh. I decided that Fannon 2.0 would level through the new quests in Westfall, which I would begin on Day Two.
END OF DAY ONE: 6g6s, Level 12.
22.2.11
Paladin Basics: Judgements and Targeting
[PLEASE NOTE: This article has not been updated to reflect the 4.3 changes to Judgement and Seal of Insight. I will be updating it soon! ]
Welcome to Holy Paladin University with Professor Fannon. This recurring series of articles is going to focus on the How-To's and How-Not-To's of healing Paladin-style, from the basics to the advanced. In this introductory article I'm talkin' Judgments and how to hit the right internet dragon every time.
As a Holy Paladin one of the things you are going to be doing frequently is Judging. Judgement is an offensive spell that is extremely important to a healing Paladin as it gives us a lot of benefits over the incredibly meager damage that it does, and you should be casting whenever it is available as much as you possibly can. Reaching for the Judgement button is completely instinctual for me now. It's to the point where I need to ensure that on my other characters I put something in that keybind that needs to be cast a lot, because it's an entirely automatic reflex.
A Holy Paladin using Seal of Insight casting Judgement on a target provides a lot of different benefits:
At a minimum, a Holy Paladin should be casting this spell once per minute, simply for the extra haste from Judgements of the Pure. However, in the Cataclysm healing environment, the mana return mechanisms are far more important and makes casting Judgement as often as possible critical. Frequent Judging will help you have enough mana to heal longer fights and be more effective.
HITTING THE RIGHT TARGET
But in an era of Crowd Control, how do you make sure that you're hitting the right target? How do you ensure that you're not going to get that nasty internet dragon munching on your face?
Welcome to Holy Paladin University with Professor Fannon. This recurring series of articles is going to focus on the How-To's and How-Not-To's of healing Paladin-style, from the basics to the advanced. In this introductory article I'm talkin' Judgments and how to hit the right internet dragon every time.
As a Holy Paladin one of the things you are going to be doing frequently is Judging. Judgement is an offensive spell that is extremely important to a healing Paladin as it gives us a lot of benefits over the incredibly meager damage that it does, and you should be casting whenever it is available as much as you possibly can. Reaching for the Judgement button is completely instinctual for me now. It's to the point where I need to ensure that on my other characters I put something in that keybind that needs to be cast a lot, because it's an entirely automatic reflex.A Holy Paladin using Seal of Insight casting Judgement on a target provides a lot of different benefits:
- Causes a small amount of damage to the target
- Automatically returns 15% of base mana (For me it's about 3400 at the moment)
- Counts as a melee attack, sometimes returning 4% base mana via Seal of Insight
- Gives Judgements of the Pure, providing a 9% Haste buff for 1 minute
At a minimum, a Holy Paladin should be casting this spell once per minute, simply for the extra haste from Judgements of the Pure. However, in the Cataclysm healing environment, the mana return mechanisms are far more important and makes casting Judgement as often as possible critical. Frequent Judging will help you have enough mana to heal longer fights and be more effective.
HITTING THE RIGHT TARGET
But in an era of Crowd Control, how do you make sure that you're hitting the right target? How do you ensure that you're not going to get that nasty internet dragon munching on your face?
The trick to healing and Judging seamlessly is target selection, or rather, the lack thereof. Normally, a healer is going to be rapidly targeting friendly players while casting heals. If you then press Judgement (or any other attack) without first selecting a hostile target, the game will automatically target whichever mob is closest to you. There is nothing worse that hitting the Judgement button and having the game select the wrong target, breaking Crowd Control or causing you to get aggro. It's vitally important to make sure that you're Judging the right target. Luckily, there is a very simple way to do this that doesn't require any add-ons or effort.
Focus
The easiest way to solve this problem is to use the Focus feature of the default user interface. Focus allows you to 'tag' a mob or party member that you want to keep an eye on. In the default UI, focusing on a target will give you another, movable unit frame with your Focus Target in it. You can use this to keep an eye on your Focus Target's health, use it to quickly switch targets and many other things, but the real power of this feature comes from how it can be used in macros.
For Judgement, this is the macro that I use:
#showtooltip
/cast [exists,harm][@focustarget,exists,help][] Judgement
This macro will cast Judgement on your Focus Target's target if you have a focus, and on your current target if you don't. This allows you to use it in groups or soloing without changing anything.
For both raiding and dungeons, the best thing to focus on is the Tank. By always targeting the Tank's target while grouped, it is almost guaranteed that you will always be Judging the target that the Tank has the best threat on, and you will almost never break a Crowd Controlled mob early. The best habit to get into is at the beginning of any dungeon or raid to set your Focus Target on the Tank and be content that each Judgement that you cast will hit the proper target.
This system can be used for all of your offensive spells by altering the macro for each spell.
To set a Focus Target, select what you want to focus and type /focus or right click on the unit frame and select Set Focus. For more information on Focus and some of it's uses, check out Wowpedia's article: http://www.wowpedia.org/Focus_target
I have found that using Focus in this way is the simplest method of making sure that your Judgements hit the appropriate target. What method, if any, do you use to make sure that you're not Judging the wrong target? Do you use add-ons? Or is it something that you haven't worried about?
Focus
 |
| The default Focus Frame. Hi Mack. |
For Judgement, this is the macro that I use:
#showtooltip
/cast [exists,harm][@focustarget,exists,help][] Judgement
This macro will cast Judgement on your Focus Target's target if you have a focus, and on your current target if you don't. This allows you to use it in groups or soloing without changing anything.
For both raiding and dungeons, the best thing to focus on is the Tank. By always targeting the Tank's target while grouped, it is almost guaranteed that you will always be Judging the target that the Tank has the best threat on, and you will almost never break a Crowd Controlled mob early. The best habit to get into is at the beginning of any dungeon or raid to set your Focus Target on the Tank and be content that each Judgement that you cast will hit the proper target.
This system can be used for all of your offensive spells by altering the macro for each spell.
To set a Focus Target, select what you want to focus and type /focus or right click on the unit frame and select Set Focus. For more information on Focus and some of it's uses, check out Wowpedia's article: http://www.wowpedia.org/Focus_target
I have found that using Focus in this way is the simplest method of making sure that your Judgements hit the appropriate target. What method, if any, do you use to make sure that you're not Judging the wrong target? Do you use add-ons? Or is it something that you haven't worried about?
19.1.11
This Week In Raiding: Magmaw, Omnotron and Maloriak.
Welcome to the first post of This Week In Raiding; a (hopefully) weekly feature discussing the raiding encounters that my guild tackled this week, the lessons learned from them, as well as any news or thoughts on raiding in general. I am hopeful that this feature will be full of a lot of useful information and general thoughts from my perspective on raiding, with less focus on "Oooo, look who we killed this week" and pretty kill shots.
That being said, that's totally what the first post is going to be.
This Sunday was the first raid for our new raiding group led by Xzidor and Oath. Our first target was Blackwing Descent. Our guild had downed Magmaw last week with a different group, so this was the first time seeing this boss for a few of the raiders, and the first time that this group with these Raid Leaders fought together.
Magmaw went down after a few attempts with very little trouble. Our only real issues were coordination and getting people to move at the right time in the right places. We again used a one tank strategy that allows the healers to pretty much stand still and focus on their jobs without worrying about the Pillars of Flame. Next week on TWIR, I'll detail our Magmaw strategy in more detail.
On we went to the Omnotron Defense Council. This was the first time that a lot of us, including myself, had seen this fight, and it showed. We had a lot of issues trying to get everything under control. There were lots of mistakes all around, but everyone kept plugging away and we eventually had a couple of very good attempts. We even tried having our Resto Shaman solo the bosses for a while, but decided that probably wasn't going to work out so well. Things got much better once the Holy Paladin (that would be me) stopped running around the room with Magmatron's giant laser beam on him, wiping half of the raid. The biggest problem was with the blobs of poisoned poop that Toxitron spawns, which gave most of our raid fits while trying to avoid them.
We reconvened on Monday night, but started an hour late due to the fact that I was running incredibly late getting home from work. This raid group has a hard time cap and stops the raids at 10pm server time, meaning we only had an hour and a half to get whatever progression we could before the reset on Tuesday morning. Luckily, they only called me a few nasty names in raid chat before we were off and running.
It's amazing what a difference a day makes. Knowing we had limited time we quickly called for resets as soon as we ran into a major problem, so we managed to get quite a few attempts in a short amount of time. A lot of the mechanics that we were having so much difficulty with the day before worked themselves out very quickly. Target switches were crisp and quick, AOE damage from shields was minimal and Poison Protocol was less of an issue with the slimes going down quickly and people actually managing to avoid them long enough for the DPS to burn them down. Within an hour of starting we had our kill. I was very proud of our Raid Group when those pesky golems finally toppled over.
With only about 30 minutes left until our time ran out we moved on to Maloriak. If you have never done this fight, it's a complex encounter with adds and a spread-out/collapse mechanic that is on a semi-random pattern. So there is a lot of movement and a lot of
SHADOWGARDE NEEDS HEALERS
I'm very glad that my guild waited for me on Monday night, as I would have regretted missing the raid, especially since we got Omnotron down (still no loot-love for my Holy spec yet, though). However, it should never have happened... I should have been benched and replaced by another healer so as to give the raid more time to have better chance at moving our progression further forward. The sad truth is that as of right now we have very few raid-ready healers and need to recruit more.
If you are on the Sargeras-US server and are looking for a good, yet casual raiding guild, send me an email at symbology AT rocketmail.com or apply at Shadowgarde.net.
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