“to” is a preposition. “cuss” is a verb.

First Karazhan raid with the guild where All I Need To Do Is Turn Up and omg I have to hurriedly install Ventrilo while we all gather at the meeting stone! I have feared this for ages, mainly given the attitude of people through the medium of text, but it turns out there was no reason to, at least not in this case. I was expecting “fucking fucking fucking” but actually got the politest and, hell, I’m just going to say it, cutest voices ever to be transmitted over an intertext near me, aaaw, just wanted to hug them! And only had to say “Do you wanna just back off the mic a little bit?” once! Powdor had a theory that the censored language is probably due to the possible fact that the parents of these kids being within earshot and, to be honest, I’m all for that. Keep it clean, keep ‘em keen.

You’d have to look hard to find a greater supporter of the vocal cuss than me (read up on some selected works of Lenny Bruce for example, that’s where I’m sitting) but it takes on an extra layer of slovenliness when placed in text. And to hear them screamed into a microphone when you’re trying to concentrate killing something? Not for me. This is where it gets weird. To swear like crazy at your monitor when too many mobs pull, a Hordie won’t leave you alone, a tree or some other environmental item blocks your view… whatever, is a reflex thing. The same goes for shouting it into a microphone, and yet to take that reflex and type it out takes a whole other level of energy. I don’t doubt that a certain amount of cusswork was going on behind the scenes but the thing is, none of this was being done while pressing the button that turns the microphone on. I think Powdor was right.

First Karazhan raid with a new guild and omg who’s at the top of the damage meters? Yeah. Reco’nise. And the chance to get a nice “in action” shot framed by some lovely books… I’m there. Incidentally, does it look like I’m being completely irresponsible with aggro on the auld Omen there? Well, not quite. A few people in the party didn’t have the latest version and we witnessed a large number of awry-aggro wipes.

lather, rinse, repeat. lather, rinse repeat. as needed.

I’m troubled by the enchant options for spell-casters that are given to carrying a staff. See, the Spellpower enchant appears, to all intents and purposes, like it’s just for the one-hand weapons while your two-hand options are sadly limited. My question is this: The Enchant Weapon: Spellpower doesn’t make any mention of how many hands you need to hold it, does it apply to both? Does this mean I have to settle for a single-handed weapon? Not that it’s anything more than a moot point because I’m never going to actually use it.

So with this in mind, I put myself in the LFG group for doing some Caverns of Time instances, just a little bit of reputation needed to buy that snazzy-looking Continuum Blade, ready to be paired off with the Star-Heart Lamp from Black Morass. Dressed for success, right? But no! Not even shown on the loot table in Cartographer for Morass, Bloodfire Greatstaff drops! It’s a little bit of +crit shaved off as compared to The Bringer of Death, but with greater stamina and intellect thrown in to make it a more than worthwhile trade-off. And, having not liked the look of Bringer ever since I bought it from the auction house (as much as it looks kinda warlocky), it wins like a million times. Loving it loving it loving it. Sod the Blade and Lamp!

Given that my main rep-grinding companion was a good friend from The Last Guild who was wanting the Hourglass, we then proceeded to run the instance a further x times (lost count) and sadly, he didn’t see the same joy as me. We went through a different tank and/or healer on each run and, being the only skinner on each occasion, I also managed to end the day with five stacks of Knothide Leather to throw at the auction masses.

Surely I can get a bunch of spell damage stapled to it, we casters aren’t known for dual-wielding and we’re not allowed to enchant the fancy off-hand… things. I got the mats all ready to go!

oh, to be a scryer.

As has been said about a week ago, I’ve started plugging away at Alysha again. Being a Scryer and with very little playtime attention it’s not much of a surprise to learn that she’s just hit exalted with her chosen faction. Anj, being Aldor, has /played time for level 70 that far surpasses all the time spent between 1 and 69 and is still struggling to get through revered. That’s the dictionary definition of “imba” right there.

Okay, I’ll admit, any and all Arcane Tomes and Sunfury Signets that Anj came across on her many travels were posted straight across to Alysha but, honestly, I swear Anj could go from hated to exalted with Scryers within a few weeks. In return, for the quest rewards that give the choice, Alysha has been selecting the Aldor packages to help her night elf half-sister out a bit. That’s just basic manners.

So now Aly’s got some shiny Runic Spellthread stitched into her pants and a fancy trinket to replace the very old and awe-inspiringly useless (at least for a warlock) Power Infused Mushroom. Quite why I even equipped that in the first place is, frankly, mind-boggling. A nice boost to spell damage overall, particularly after a first warlock trip to Magister’s Terrace ended disastrously with several wipes between the penultimate boss and final mobs just before Kael’Thas. My weak DPS killed us all!

Next up, no slacking on the Quel’Danas dailies and, with hard work and dedication, that Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen will be mine! We will go to the ball!

Later edit: Okay, yeah, okay, yeah, the +10% reputation gain for humans takes some of the credit but still, seriously, if you’re scryer and have been for more than a month, what the hell is wrong with you? ;)

it’s our party and we’ll cry if we want to…

Sunday 25th May, officially one whole year after handing in the completed guild application form for Avenging Angels, a suitable enough day to throw up our collective hands and say “Look, this raiding guild thing, it’s not working is it?”. Not exactly the traditional birthday celebration technique.

Raid disappointments notwithstanding, the blame lays squarely at the feet of my basic inability to run a raiding guild. At the start, all I wanted was a chance for me and my friends to chat while playing solo without having to be in some kind of mad intercontinental party. That’s pretty easy to manage, all you have to do is log in! Anything outside that I have no sort of experience about. At all. It’s a pretty good sign if your best efforts can’t even fill up a ten-man (or woman) group for Karazhan. We used GroupCalendar, raid times were posted on there with the chance for others to sign up and yet every raid that was planned either had to gather PUGs or not happen at all. What more should I do, short of asking every guild member individually and maybe perhaps getting them dressed in the morning too? See, I’m not the guild-running type.

Leadership has been passed to my bank character and the guild is going to lay dormant for a while, maybe perhaps kick it off again with the release of Lich King. In the meantime, I’m going to go somewhere else for a bit and be able to just do stuff without the fiddly organisation stuff beforehand. Give me a raid time and I’ll show up. Easy peasy.

bellen!

Today is BELLEN! day.

i stand outside this woman’s work.

Having spent some time recently in the midsts of discussion about the employment-like monotony of the daily quests, I found myself sitting by the monument in Quel’Danas today, halfway through the available quests in the area and enjoying a Warp Burger in-game and a coffee and a smoke in Real Life when it struck me, oh my god, this is a lunch break! Hey, maybe this stuff is like having a job after all!

Well, okay, so I think it is like work, albeit still a hell of a lot more fun than any job I’ve ever had, doing my duty for my people and kicking demon bottoms after clocking in. It was quite a cute moment, so I made it last a few minutes longer. I set about drinking a Purified Draenic Water, gave kitty a treat of Kibler’s Bits and watched the world go by before getting up and going back to work. Because you know these demons flat-out refuse to kill themselves. I know, I’ve tried asking them.

Aaaw, it was one of my many special WoW moments and recommend that everybody take some time out from the daily grind to maybe find a park bench and just enjoy life. It’s not all war, war, war! (Some of it is craft, craft, craft).

i could make a thousand easy.

Alysha’s been sitting around with not much to do recently, partially because of Anj dominating the limelight with her better gear and stuff, but mainly because I found the change to a Affliction/Destruction spec to be just plain boring. So now she’s back to being a walking study of Demonology (with the instant-cast Corruption from the first tier of Affliction and up to Shadowburn in Destruction), it’s time to dust down the robes and get out into the world. Shadowburn is a fun spell, although I’m wondering if it’s worth trading the points from Destruction for the unlikely chance of having drain spells interrupted and Nightfall. We’ll see.

Her gear is pretty good but, it has to be said, only pretty good, the three pieces of the tailoring epic Shadow’s Embrace set being the obvious stand-outs, certainly enough to hold her own in a heroic instance even if she’ll probably not be among the top two damage-dealers (scraping into the top three purely on account of the tank and healer’s other responsibilites). But pfffpht! to that, the first order of business is to frantically start raising enough money to buy an epic flying mount. Having a main that zips about at top speed and then going back to first gear is a pain, taking to the skies for the first time back with Alysha I honestly thought for a few seconds that I’d been Frost Shocked by a passing shaman. I was like, omg? You know?

The good news is that I don’t have to spend that much time doing the dailies (except perhaps for the Shattered Sun Offensive ones because I want the rep) because I have a long string of regular quests to get through and, to be honest, have been very profitable. I wonder how well the business is for gold sellers these days, seriously, just shy of 1000g in two days (not even two days that have seen the vast majority of my waking hours playing either). It’s crazy money, certainly cooking on nothing less than gas, at this rate I think I’ll be in the saddle of a speedy boid within the week. Quite literally: The Woot!

if not, why not?

Tab-selecting, oh how I wish it worked sometimes, maybe a little more predictable in its operation and a little less… unpredictable. Skills, gear and organisation are all good things, but tab-selecting can be a raid killer!

So I had an idea for an add-on, but with no abilities to actually make it, it shall remain just an idea unless, of course, something like it already exists. I’ve had a brief scout around wow.curse.com but found nothing like it.

So here it is, and I’m choosing the name KillOrder, whereby the raid leader (or head-marking person) sets the kill order as they usually would, but then this order appears as a visual bar on the screen to all other party members. Then, tab-selecting cycles through the agreed order in turn, wheresoe’er they may be. All I’m saying here is that, as a ranged class, when a mob is surrounded by any number of melee-types, any other sort of targeting is both difficult and impossible.

Maybe it could also allow keys to be bound to individual symbols. I press “T” and I instantly target the mob I’m charged with the job of trapping, press it again and we go to the current kill priority.

To the clever peoples who can actually do this sort of thing, you’re welcome to my fantastic idea! :)

(picture by sota767 and shared under a Creative Commons license)

archive hour: the ui.

Having a levelling hunter at the same time as one that is all growed-up, I’ve been tripped up too many times by not having everything on the same button. I’m used to where things are so much that I still press 4 for Kill Command on every critical strike despite being about forty levels away from actually getting it for Joot.

So I’m popping this here, to be able to synchronise both hunter’s action bars. A few explanatory tooltips have been added in case of any perverse interest from the few people that swing by here. Hi y’alls! I love you!

Does anyone else like to see other people’s UI set-up? It’s like bookcases, I love looking at other people’s bookcases. Along with hundreds of other forms of storage, it’s a testament to the inherent uniqueness of everybody in a world that wants everybody to think everybody else is the same. Ahem. The main action bar bit at the bottom is SpartanUI, isn’t it beautiful? Yes it has flaws but, hey, beauty without flaws isn’t beauty!

how we gonna kick it? gonna kick it root-down.

Three resto druids keeping us all alive in Karazhan, not the most varied healing team you could possibly imagine but, like Sweetie-Pie by the Stone Alliance (and ev’rybody know they known for droppin’ science), they take the prize for the All-Before-Attumen Luckytime Summer Dance-Off!

Taking Moroes without a priest in the party was… an interesting experience. Being the only hunter as well, I impressed myself (even if it was only myself) with keeping the Blue Square trapped by running from the top to the bottom of the room and using Concussive Shot to help buy me some vital cooldown time. Go me, multitasking is all part of a hunter’s job!

archive hour: the macro list.

This seems as good a place as any to dump cut-and-pastes of all my macros should they ever get lost for whatever reason. They’ve all got short names because I prefer the macro text to fit neatly into the icon box rather than just two letters and a scruffy ellipsis. Dear visitor, copy these if you like, they work pretty okay for me.

AoE

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Volley; [modifier:alt] Flare; [modifier:ctrl] Flare; [modifier:shift] Volley

Eyes

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Eyes of the Beast; [modifier:alt] Eagle Eye; [modifier:ctrl] Tame Beast; [modifier:shift] Tame Beast

Fast

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier]Aspect of the Cheetah; [modifier:alt] Aspect of the Pack; [modifier:ctrl] Aspect of the Wild; [modifier:shift] Aspect of the Beast

Feed

/cast Feed Pet
/use Blackened Trout

Find

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Track Humanoids; [modifier:alt] Track Hidden; [modifier:ctrl] Track Beasts; [modifier:shift] Find Herbs

Hawk

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier]Aspect of the Hawk; [modifier:ctrl] Aspect of the Viper; [modifier:alt] Aspect of the Monkey; [modifier:shift] Aspect of the Hawk

Hide

#showtooltip
/cast Shadowmeld
/cast Prowl

iWin

#showtooltip
/cast Bestial Wrath
/cast Intimidation
/petattack

Pet1

#showtooltip
/petfollow
/cast Mend Pet
/cast Dash

Pet2

#showtooltip
/petattack
/cast Growl
/cast Intimidation
/cast Dash

Ride

#showtooltip hearthstone
/use [button:2, nomounted] Hearthstone
/dismount [mounted, nomodifier]
/use [button:1, nomounted, nomodifier] Cenarion War Hippogryph
/use [button:1, nomounted, modifier:alt] Reins of the Swift Stormsaber

Shot

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Distracting Shot; [modifier:alt] Tranquilizing Shot; [modifier:ctrl] Tranquilizing Shot; [modifier:shift] Disengage

Sting

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Serpent Sting; [modifier:alt] Viper Sting; [modifier:ctrl] Serpent Sting; [modifier:shift] Scorpid Sting

TLC

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Mend Pet; [modifier:alt] Call Pet; [modifier:ctrl] Revive Pet; [modifier:shift] Dismiss Pet

Trink

#showtooltip
/use 14

True, a lot of them are combining lesser-used spells into a single button with the use of modifiers and, if you’ve noticed that there’s some duplicated functions in there, well, that wildcard question mark icon isn’t the best looking one of the bunch… What’s that? My obsession for tidiness borders on the unwell? And how!

the elastic “instant cast”.

So the tooltip says “instant” but the cast bar says “I don’t think so”. What’s going on with the Patch 2.4.2 instant Scare Beast spell? Could it be true? Were Blizzard’s offices descended upon by thousands of teenage druids like some kind of nightmare, whiny-voiced remake of Assault on Precinct 13? The horror!

Mania’s Arcania helped a lot more than my own WoW forums search (which only seemed to come up with druid after druid saying “Haha! Huntards!”, aaaw! Did you write that?!) with the full story from Nathaera on the General Forums:

The change to the cast time was reverted to the 1.5 second cast time. The range is still 30 yards. Please note though that the tooltip still reads that it is instant cast, but this is a bug that will be fixed.

Oh well, it was a spell that I rarely used not becoming one that I might use less rarely. I still might target and kill any Tauren druids that cross my path for a few days anyway, just to let them know that cast time isn’t a massive problem. They send our spells to the hospital, we send them to the morgue. That’s how we roll. ;) Only joking. Or am I? :O

Animal terror aside, I finally got round to setting buttons for two pet control macros that I’ve been needing for a while after noticing that the little six-button cluster of keys around PgUp and PgDn were not really doing anything. Instance and raid situations a-go-go!

“Hay-ulp! The Healer has aggro! Kitty to teh rescuez!”

#showtooltip
/cast Growl
/cast Dash
/cast Intimidation
/petattack

“Hay-ulp! A boss is dealing out some mean AoE damage! Run away!”

#showtooltip
/cast Dash
/petfollow
/cast Mend Pet

I now have just two slots left for Anj-specific macros! Oh noes!

(photograph by Walmink and shared under a Creative Commons license)

demons and dragons lay dead in our wake, our greatest fear is yet to come…

There I was, idly dotting around Shadowmoon Valley clearing up a few Netherwing dailies when a polite request to help a level 67 warlock popped up on the general chat channel, nary a “plz” nor “plox” in sight. That sort of thing will get my attention because I’m a shameless grammar fascist (apparently) and so I asked for an invite before asking what quest it was. “Wanted: Uvuros, Scourge of Shadowmoon“. Okay, we can do that, we’ll need a healer though. My kitty can do the tanking but Mend Pet alone won’t be strong enough to keep her alive.

Before very long we had a level 70 healer invited and then came the bombshell, “You’ll pay for repairs if we wipe?”. *blink* *blink*. Amazingly, the warlock agreed and if it wasn’t for the fact that I was busy keeping control of my mount I would have chipped in with “Well, you don’t need to pay me for repairs because a single wipe isn’t going to be that great, perhaps, at most, half the reward of a single daily quest”. This was certainly what I was thinking.

The miserable skinflint! She left the party at our destination with a cry of “we got no chance”, but we managed to get a kindly pally who successfully kept my cat healed while me and the warlock took down Uvuros without a single problem. “No chance” indeed. Some of these kids nowadays need a good slap upside the head and a firm advice on how to belt up, no kiddin’. And just look how old they’re making me sound!

I bumped into the warlock again a little later on, while I was killing Felboars for the glands to poison orcs with. I helped her kill a bunch of them (she needed twenty of them dead) and then, because I was in the mood, sifted through The Sketh’lon Wreckage for some pages of a journal she needed too. ‘Twas my good deed for the day and not once did my dry-cleaning requirements worry me.

(You’ll notice this post assumes that the repair-shy player is a child when, okay, there’s nothing to suggest that this may actually be the case. However, using “kid” as a reference to maturity and responsibility rather than actual age, I think I’m on pretty safe ground. So there). :P

all sewn up…

SpartanUI, despite it’s unnecessarily unhelpful points, continues to stick around although it’s helped a lot by a couple of add-ons take the strain of the jobs that are sadly lacking. Namely Satrina Buff Frames and AzCastBar, they cheerfully make two of the features that Spartan boasts, oh, what’s the word, visible. When you’re fighting a raid boss, “At-a-glance” is your best friend!

And so, my personal buffs and debuffs are back at the top of the screen, getting in the way of no-one and squeezing a steady shot between auto shots now no longer requires the danger of “square eyes from sitting too close to the telly”.

And hurray! I finally saved up my hundred badges for a Scaled Drakeskin Chestguard! Trouble is, as compared to Hauberk of the War Bringer, it’s not quite the upgrade I expected. It turns out that the high-falutin’ reports from RatingBuster were not counting the gems. Hauberk has three sockets, Drakeskin just the one. Boo! Yes, it’s still an upgrade but is, at best, negilgible. The kind of upgrade that is worth the work put into gathering a hundred badges? Perhaps… not. Sometimes I make bad choices.

It looks better! So it was badges well spent then.

(photograph by The Adventures of Kristin & Adam and shared under a Creative Commons license)

the money-sink mount.

Finally saved up enough money to buy a Cenarion War Hippogryph and, yes, I’m very pleased with him even though, despite definitely having feet, he never seems to bother using them. Weird. I can imagine if I had wings my feet would get a lot less usage, but completely eschewing them would be madness. Am I looking at this in far too much detail?

Okay, so it’s not as fast as the Netherdrake but not as stupidly huge either, and a whole lot prettier. Besides the regular speed of 280% (+8% Animal Handler) makes it possible to fly to Firewing Point, circle around getting the hoity-toity blood elves all riled up and then zooming off, being chased by three or four shadow bolts. Provided you don’t get hindered by lag or maybe even a tree, they never can catch up with you, in fact a few right-angled turns are necessary in order to close the distance a little.

Getting a shadow bolt from Terokkar to Netherstorm shouldn’t be too much of a problem…

One question though, how come Horde are allowed to fly them as well? Psh! Something not quite right there.