Of bucket lists and the NGE. . . er . .WoW Cataclysm

I have an alt, an Orc Hunter whose doing "Extreme ^2 Soloing" *

That had some people wondering if I was doing a bucket list.

Frankly no. We honestly have no idea as to when Cataclysm will hit, (smart money is November. but then Smart money has an IQ of 0 to start with.)

We really have no idea how much content they have already set up that is ready to hit the servers, literally for all we know we may log in tomorrow on the beta and see patch notes that reads "final release candidate for Cataclysm is now live, final versions of everything from level 1 to level 85 is now available for testing, Cataclysm now available for preorder! Cataclysm will launch in 30 days! " and depending on how much Time I divert to "working" on the cataclysm beta as to how far down a given bucket list I end up going.

To be fair I don't think that will happen. I kind of figure on it taking them another 2 months to roll things out to the beta servers and one final moth to nail them down, so 10-20 10 at the earliest (who knows though they may go for 10-10-10 just to make it three perfect 10s!. . . nah)

Me? I just intend to have fun working my main, leveling my alts, and having fun in the process.

*Extreme Soloing is simply going solo into dungeons to see how far you can progress, but you can use items you earned from Puging, PvPing, raiding, Heirlooms or hand me downs, Extreme^2 soloing is doing all of the content solo, and that means no Sanctified Ahn'Kahar Blood Hunter's Battlegear unless I can earn it by going solo, no hand me downs, and no Heirlooms.

The Rate of Fire Guide to Leveling guides

Chapter 1: why are some leveling guides so bad?

There’s a number of reasons.

Lets take the talent tree for starters.

1) the guide was written by someone who at level 80 (or whatever level he was at) looked back at the build he came up with along the way and Figured that well he made it to 80 with that build so It must have been good

2) the leveling guide was made before whichever patch rendered obsolete the build he used.

3) its not really a bad build but it was built with a specific pet in mind (for example there are things I would have done differently in my build if I had a Bear Boar Spider or any of a dozen other pets instead of Purrball (My Cat)

4) Gear that is available to you as you level up will also have some impact on how he levels. “Ok its got better Armor than what I have now and its 5-10 levels higher but the stats are different. . . (say + ag but a hit to stamina int or agility for example) but because of gear he got his hands on things might be a bit different from what you use. Especially if He went with say Leather crafting while you went with Engineer Inscribing JC or alchemy for example

5) And this is a bigger one than people realize... the build is a “what I would do now if I had only known back then” build. . . . Only She (or he) forgot (a)that for most of the early game the zone design is completely different from the expansion zones so what works there is not as workable in the endgame. They try to convert the current endgame “PvE” and explain how it will work at lower levels when all too often it just does not apply and (b) they did not actualy level with that talentbuild

6) Flavor of the month builds will have your head spinning at times. Lets face it a lot of those flavors are endgame flavors to start with, are more Raid or Group oriented, or were tweaked with whatever they currently used in mind (or worse are “PvP oriented” or what have you.

7) what works for him probably will not work for you. Lets face it my build as I level up is pure beast. The way Purrball and I work is that Purrball goes in and dines on a selection of fine NPCs while doing everything she can to keep them PTHO at her (Including pure damage) while I plink away with my gun (yes I have a gun, I am an engineer, I prefer to make my own ammo and right now I’m not up to crafting arrows yet(grumbles)
If I had a bear out though my build would probably be More MM because from everything I have seen bears have few problems with keeping npcs glued on them. Which incidentaly brings me to my final category

8) the person who wrote a given build never actually LEVELED that build. With dual specking you can (as soon as you have the cash) plug in any talent build you want in your second slot (heck with respecting you could do it anyway) and the odds are they are at least 10 discarded builds themselves from the build they actually leveled up on.

Now lets move on to the next big problem area the leveling guides have

“The Fastest Path to Level XXX is as follows” (and then a list of zones to hit and/or quests to take or skip)

Oy vey!

Lets be blunt here, there’s going to be a lot of difference in how you will level through those zones and how everyone else has or will level through those zones.

1) Time commitment. If player A can put in 4-8 hours a day and player B can put in 2-4 hours Player B on a per hour played basis will be able to burn through the zones with a slight bump all the way along the way in part because he will be earning more of his XP while in “Bonus time” than player A. this will tend to keep him slightly ahead of the leveling curve for each zone and also slightly ahead of what the mobs can do to him and he can do in return to the mobs just because he has that slight XP edge.

2) Population differences. Lets face it if your lucky(or unlucky take you pick) to be able to start on a new server, or on a high pop server, or on a older server where most of the player base is in the endgame, then at the very least, the competition for mobs to kill will be different, the demand for Raw mats will be different, heck even the gear on the rest of the party in a given PUGs will be different because of the ratio of twinkled alts to untwined newbie’s will be completely different.

3) Tweaks and changes made by the developers. This will probably come as a surprise to you but the Developers also read some of those guides out there and have gone back and modified quest rewards(XP Faction gains and so on) Mob spawn rates and so on. In Fact were about to hit an expansion that’s sounds like its going to throw all of those current “where when how“ leveling guides in the trash bin faster than the shredders can shred them.

4) and this is a big one. . . He was in one of the two factions, your in annother. a number of zones are completly diferent in feel from one faction to another. heck if you started out as (for example) a Dwarf and he started off as a Night elf(or you did Orc and he did Blood elf) and you both stuck to "your" starting area untill around level 10-15 just the diference in the gear you can come out with between thoes two zones can make things easyer or harder. (never mind the diference to play that can happen just because of the starting racials)
　
Now for the final category as to why a given “leveling guide” might stink.

Age.

I’ve touched on this earlier but it bears repeating

The older a Leveling guide is the less relevant to the current game it is. Any Pre Wrath guide is worthless as it stands, come Cataclysm any leveling guide is probably going to be toast,

Lets be honest, every time they “balance” talents skills spells and abilities its with the endgame in mind, not the leveling game.

And were back!

The past few months have been a bit of a personal hiatus for reasons that I will not get into but for the Record Ike (the huricain) was part of the problem. . . about 10%

Expanding on a coment

Expanding on a coment I made on a blog found here, Go read it!

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/05/low-on-gold.html

He is clearly focused on makeing Gold. Which is fine, he has fun and thats what should come first (or a very close second) when playing any MMO, or paying for entertainment in general.

Hes also somewhat specialised in one way of makeing gold. It works for him and hes put a lot of work into it. But what works for him will not work for everyone.

For example, on my server trading seems to have a fairly narrow margin.

That and being somewhat newer its prices seem to be in downslide mode so the risk is a bit greater(that and the Trade skill aholics who were in at launch are leveling there third alt and some are setting up there alt spec alts). Thats not to say that there is not money to be made trading its just that from what I have seen there is not THAT mutch margin to be made on trades currently

That and I suspect that a lot of the people who read "WoW-econ" and "WoW gold" making blogs tend to be the kind of people who don’t have cash to start with.

Lets be honest here.

My focus is on how the hell do I up my DPS and deal with agro but I also think about trade skills.

I’ve been with MMO’s long enough to know that three things are true about how most people play.

1) There is what they "want" to do. Some want to get to the max gold, some want to be in the endgame raid guild some want to be the top PvPer on the server some want to max out all trade skills and some are happiest supporting there guild.

2) There is what they like to do. What they have fun doing. Often its what they are "addicted" to doing. One of my dear friends in EQ created alts just to get every racial trade skill in the game. Another in EVE runs over 10 accounts to mine(without using macros) using one orca 6-8 hulks and a hauler and 1-2 to fly shotgun(she loves frying canflipers and wanabee gankers who dont use ship scanners)

3) And there is what they are good at. For some people it may be something they don’t like to do. For others its something they enjoy(my friend in EVE online for example loves mining and mining missions, she runs missions until she finds one that has good ‘roids and then its time to haul out the rest of her one woman stip mining team.)

The ones for whom all three are one and the same are often the ones who are invariably in the top 5% of the server at doing exactly that.

Now for what I honestly feel is THE BEST advice I can give you.

Don’t worry about the parts that are not fun, Do what you feel is fun. After all unless you’re a masochist you should never EVER spend your R&R money doing something that you don’t have fun doing.

EVER*

*That is unless it leads to something more fun later . . . Movies that your SO loves to watch that get them in the mood for example!

　

　

why Rate of Fire?

Why “Rate of Fire?”

Its because of a line from Eric Flints 1632

“They had survived as long as they had because each and every one of them was a devote of the First Rule of Smooth Bore Battle:

Rate of fire. That was Moses and the profits as far as the Germans were concerned. Rate of Fire. Victory in battle went to who stood their ground and blasted away the most. Simple as that.”

To a degree Rate of fire can translate to what’s really important in MMO’s to classes like hunters, Damage Per Second.

And while a given Bow, Crossbow or Gun may have a lower rate of fire the basic idea is that you have to be able to maintain a maximized rate of fire so that your DPS is as close to maxed as possible. That means being able to fire off as fast as possible, being able to use the hunter special abilities as often as possible AND as fast as possible, and knowing when to multi shot and when to focus on taking down the main target. You can best optimize your rate of fire on your specials when you focus on gear selections where you go for Agility Int and spirit over something that say has better armor but worse stats or junk stats.(for example something that has + Str)

To me as a hunter that means that I am, de-facto, using a pet as my Armor. So the "armor score" on the armor really does not matter (which opens up a whole other can of worms. do you want a dps ferocity pet or a tanking tenacity pet or a cunning pet with a few special tricks up its sleeve)

That also means to me that I need to take Engineering as a profession in order to produce all the ammo I need(it also unfortunately means that I have to use a gun until I can get my skill up to 335 to make arrows) however past that point I do have to be flexible, If a gun or Bow Or Crossbow will do more DPS for me then that’s what I should be using.

Just some random observations on WoW

I find it amuseing that the latest WoW tiein, Mt Dews Gamefule, seems to have triped up on bandwidth already. Obviously They Were Not Prepaired!