Addon Highlights - Impending Warlords Edition

Warlords is around the corner - today marks exactly two months until its release. My biggest preoccupation in preparation for its release has been a focus on my addons. My goal is that before Warlords is live, we have a majority of working addons and I can do a complete wipe and refresh of my addons folder without outdated addons that can cause periodic lua errors or display bugs. 

This will be harder than it seems for me because there are addons that I have become so used to that are not part of the default UI, but haven't been updated in a year or more. Of course, we haven't had a content patch in a year, so it may just be that they authors are waiting until it's actually necessary to look at their projects. I know that before Mists came out, a vast majority of my preferred mods had been ready for compatibility with Mists days before - this was probably due in part to basically everyone having beta access, but hopefully our addon authors have the ability to tweak theirs for the upcoming expansion. I was able to use certain out of date addons reliably at Mists release but what I really want is to cut down my dependance on addons whose authors have stopped updating them, and hopefully cut down on addons that are not entirely necessary to begin with. 

Caturday, What a Day!

Welcome to Caturday! I have a picture of my youngest Fishcake looking very melancholy. Don't worry, though, it's just his face - he's actually as happy and spazzy as ever. We're pretty Fishie heavy today, but Toona makes an appearance as well, followed by some handsome internet cats. Enjoy! 

Class Swapping Dos and Don'ts

When expansions are on the horizon, we look at our favorite classes and at everything that will be changing about our game. A lot of people make decisions about whether they will be changing specs, changing classes, or whether they will be quitting or returning to the game. The difficult part about this is that we never really know how the game will be until we actually play it.

I'm not saying I'm not guilty of jumping to conclusions along with everyone else, but I try to take a step back and just relax. I'm used to my specc being revamped - balance has been mechanically overhauled every expansion since patch 1.12. The changes to talents in mists and removal of the use of a lot of my spells was dramatic. However, the ability pruning and some other coming warlords changes will be the biggest change I've dealt with in all these years so far. It's hard not to think about it, and it's hard not to be upset about it. I'm also not saying the disapproval and skepticism is not okay - it's just that we won't really know how things are going to go down until we experience it.

Valorous No More - Gold Is The Universal Currency in Warlords

original badge vendor

In Warlords of Draenor, we are seeing the removal of justice and valor points. The original incarnation of the valor system was first added in TBC. Instead of "points" you obtained badges of justice. It was originally described as a way to "eventually guarantee" that you would get some upgrades. You got badges from completing dungeons and a bit more from killing raid bosses, so even if you didn't get a piece of loot to drop for you from your raid, if you put enough effort farming badges you would definitely be able to get some kind of upgrade from the vendor.

Non-raiders, too, would be able to get raid quality gear from these vendors, as they could get badges from completing heroic daily quests. While TBC heroics were very difficult, they were scaled back in difficulty at several points throughout the expansion, especially notoriously difficult ones like The Arcatraz, Shadow Labyrinth, and The Shattered Halls. In addition to the introduction of arena and powerful pvp gear available there (referred to as "welfare epics" when used in PvE), this provided viable gearing options for people who were not interested in being raiders.

Caturday's Back!

I apologize for the lack of Caturday last week, I hadn't made any posts and felt guilty about supplementing my writer's block with cat pictures. I've assembled a handful of adorable kitties for you today, starting with my own gorgeous Toona. When the light shines into his eyes, they light up - they are basically pools of magic. Enjoy!

Niche Roles Gone For Good

I started out the game as a hunter. My role was purely dps, though we had other little niche functions - I actually pulled trash to the tank to keep pulls going quickly, I remember split pulling the fire elementals in the beginning of Molten Core, and bringing Baron Geddon into Garr's room with eyes of the beast.

"Pulling" was something I did on purpose, regularly, even in dungeons when I was with my guild or if I had to save a group from a tank who didn't know how to not pull the whole room. It was always fun in UBRS to pull General Drakkisath into The Beast's room and kite him around while the rest of the group killed his two adds - it made the fight a lot simpler and was well received by my group. This is a role I played that doesn't exist today, and probably a lot of people don't even remember it.