...and a Happy New Year, I Guess

wake me up for 6.1

I've had a bit of a falling out with Warcraft lately. My guild isn't too healthy and I've been occupied with other hobbies, so there isn't much of a drive to write about WoW stuff.

I know I won't stop playing WoW. I've taken several not insignificant breaks from the game before - the majority of them being due to guild complications - and I kind of feel like one might be coming up soon because of this situation.

I really won't know for sure what's going on with my guild until after the new year, since our last raid days of the year fell right on top of the holidays, along with a large chunk of people just not playing due to other holiday obligations. If I take a break, it would become a chore to write about WoW when I'm not currently interested in it. I personally enjoy writing, though. I don't feel like I want to stop writing just because I'm temporarily disenchanted with the game. This leaves me wondering what I should do.

A Very Merry Winter's Veil

I've been a lot busier than I normally am during the end of December. I was unable to make a Caturday post last Saturday, and I won't be able to update according to schedule probably until after the new year. A lot of birthdays also came around this time of year and there is just quite the handful of things to take care of. My guild has seen better days, and with the holidays falling on scheduled raid days and our GM going on Christmas vacation, we'll be falling behind these next two weeks.

This post is obviously a cop-out, as I'll also be busy later on today and haven't come up with a post topic yet. I'm sorry, here is a cat playing with string and winking at you.

For-Everbloom

Everbloom is one of the new dungeons in Warlords of Draenor. It's an outpost where the Kirin Tor attempted to make a magical link between Azeroth and Draenor, which failed horribly because it was right in the middle of a sacred botani land. Because of that, it became overrun with plant monsters and vines that mind controlled the Kirin Tor and also a lot of other creatures, which we now kill for loot.

I think Everbloom is a pretty cool dungeon in concept. It tricks you because it's very pretty, while under the surface it's actually full of horrifying plant monsters that subjugate unwilling animals and people. The thing is, Everbloom is one dungeon where I never seem to get a group who knows anything about it. Think of this guide as a public service announcement...

UPDATE: With 6.1, the shortcuts in Everbloom have been patched to be unusable. I'm leaving the details on how these shortcuts were utilized in the post for posterity to retain the history of the instance for future generations to enjoy.

Rep Grinds - Better With Friends!

I'm kind of into farming reptuations

With Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard wanted to move away from the reputation grinds gated behind dailies. You were only able to raise your reputation with a faction a certain amount per day, as there wasn't anything else you could do. No repeated turn ins, no farmable mobs, just dailies. A few reputations were farmed with mobs of course, like Black Prince rep and Emperor Shaohao (which wasn't added until later). They added a few other things, like championing a faction to give you bonus rep when doing a random dungeon, but for the most part you could only do a little bit a day.

Minion Swarms - Call an Exterminator Today!

So, I've been really into my garrison and, particularly, very interested in my followers. I've already discussed why I find them so entertaining, if you'd like to take a look here. In short, I enjoy the idea of putting together a good team full of various ability counters and traits, along with leveling them all up to epic and gearing them to be a formidable force to destroy my enemies.

As such, I've been timing my availability around being able to do the most amount of missions. I won't start long missions until I will be gone for awhile or asleep and I'm using garrison resources pretty liberally to put followers on every mission possible, even when the resource to experience gain ratio is pretty bad. I've been putting a lot of effort into leveling these guys and getting them to epic quality. However, I've come across a particular issue each time one of them becomes epic quality.

Caturday - Technically Every Day

I have a few posts in the works,

uh oh, this better be good

but today is Caturday!

Here are a few pics from across the net of our fuzzy friend, the cat.

Prove It

During Mists, we saw the introduction of the proving grounds. At the time, it was just a way to show off and get some extra achievement points, as it had no actual purpose. In Warlords, they made passing silver proving grounds required to queue for heroic dungeons.

Before we even had it implemented in action, I saw a lot of praise for this decision.

"Oh, this will keep out bad players!"

Not exactly.

Simcraft Is a Tool, Not a Farseer

Simulationcraft is an amazing tool when used properly, but a large number of people don't seem to understand that it's not an infallible truth. I love what you are able to use simcraft for - stat weights and other research - but the general playerbase tends to look at simcraft charts and, basically, lose their minds.

We've seen these simcraft results pop up every time there's a new raid tier or general class rebalance. Here's one of the more recent ones, they are just more or less bar graphs showing everyone's theoretical max DPS. They are put together with each dps class in the most possible similar standards - in a no adds, patchwerk type fight - and with various bars for the same class depending on variations of specs, like fury with either one-handers or two-handers.

Addon Highlights - Master Plan

Addon Highlights are back! I originally stopped writing these due to the upcoming expansion release, not wanting to suggest any addons that would end up being abandoned or non-functioning after WoD release. Now that addon developers are on track, it's time to start it up again!

Today's feature is my favorite new garrison related addon, Master Plan.

Edited to note: Master Plan has changed a lot since I wrote this. It's being constantly updated, which is great! But that means it doesn't quite look or operate the exact same as when this post was written.

World of Clash of Clans - Now on Android!

put your follower tokens into the loot slot machine!

I've noticed a lot of discussion about follower missions being uninteresting. The whole process is reminiscent of a time-gated mobile app game that doesn't actually require you to "play" or interact with the process in any way other than setting it into motion.

While I can see where they are coming from with their opinion, I think that one of the biggest things keeping people from enjoying the aspect of follower missions is that they aren't looking at it from within the game.

What I mean from this is people are looking at follower missions as a drag and drop UI function that spits out gold and loot rather than what it represents.

A Healer's Best Friend

As I've mentioned before, I play a balance druid - and have for quite awhile. From the release of the dungeon finder tool until a bit before patch 6.0.2, I used my offspec to tank and get instant queues, but I decided to switch things up this time around, so my dedicated Warlords offspec is restoration.

It's more convenient - I can use all the same gear and consumables - but I also have to remember what mana is and get used to remembering to carry water. On that note, though, there is an amazing item that I just can't get over how good it is.

Meowlords of Draenor

Wow, I did not update at all after Warlords came out. That launch was something else, but writing about it seemed redundant. It's not something I'd like to relive in writing.

I've been having a blast, to be sure, and there is plenty to write about. Unfortunately, I've been sick and writing a blog post is the last thing on my mind. I keep trying to go back to it, but for now I've been hiding in bed with a roll of toilet paper and my cat. I'll reevaluate my schedule and get back on track in a jiffy, but for now, have this.

meow am cat

All Aboard the Hype Train!

Warlords of Draenor is coming out TONIGHT!

unless you're in any of those last three places, sorry

The Hype Train is reaching its destination!

CHOO CHOO

Friday and Saturday's updates are up in the air for now. I have no idea how I'll react mentally to such a huge influx of new content after our year long drought.

See you in Draenor!

Goodbye Pandaria, Hello Draenor!

farewell, pandaland

Warlords of Draenor comes out in just a few days! With its release comes the end of Mists of Pandaria (finally), our fourth expansion to World of Warcraft.

Mists came out on a Tuesday, September 25, 2012. Mists will have lasted two years, one month, and 18 days once Warlords is released this Thursday.

While two years in itself isn't super crazy long for an expansion in WoW, the fact that its final content patch, 5.4.0, lasted for a year, two months, and two days is a little dizzying. However, they did a pretty decent job keeping that last patch relevant for a long time - by adding heirloom weapons off of the last boss, and subsequently removing their drop chance with the release of Warlords, they created an incentive to continue to do the content up until the very last few days.

And Suddenly Caturday!

Hey! I know I haven't updated in quite awhile. Life was taking me on a bit of a ride and I missed a day, then I felt bad... then I missed another day, and I missed so many days that I was avoiding updating because I was upset that I had broken my consistent schedule.

toona and fish were not ready for caturday

Well, I'm fixing that today, and keeping true to my schedule - since it's Saturday, it's time for some cats!

Addon Highlights: A PSA

Now that 6.0.2 has been out for awhile, most addons will work properly and should continue to work properly after Warlords release. If you use addons, it's important to remember to update your addons correctly and to try not to go into Warlords using out of date ones, as addons can cause really weird things to happen to your game. Not just limited to LUA errors, addons can cause disconnects, inability to use skills on your hotbars, and I've recently had an error where my bags didn't update while I was filling them up.

dun dun dunnnn

The Homestretch

We're closing in on Warlords with only about three weeks left. While still awhile away, I forgot to keep count since back when we were in the ~40 day range, so it snuck up a bit on me. The pre-patch helped me find a stop to get off of the Hype Train for awhile, but a little more than a week of 6.0.2 and I'm back to the jitters when I think about how excited I am for November 13th.

The Possibility of Relaxing the Cross-Faction Restrictions

Before real ID and battle net, if you wanted to keep in contact with your friends, you had to add their characters' names to your friends list. Each time you made an alt, you whispered your friends to add you so you could talk, along with making sure to get a guild invite. It was unlikely that your friends were even on the other faction unless you met them in real life. It was difficult to make cross-faction friends through other mediums over the internet, especially since faction loyalty was much stronger during vanilla.

as demonstrated with cats

But real ID changed everything.

Should Your Guild Use "Personal Loot"?

With the overhaul to the raid difficulty system, we saw the added loot option of "personal loot". Personal loot is how loot is distributed in the LFR difficulty, and was the unchangeable loot distribution method of flex. Now that "flex" is no longer a difficulty but rather both normal and heroic modes are flexible, personal loot has become a choosable option, just like group loot or master loot.

First, a bit of explanation:

Loremaster

While I do have [The Loremaster], I'm not exactly an expert on the Warcraft universe. It surprises me, however, that there are so many people who have an express disinterest in the story behind the game. It seems unfathomable to me to be able to experience the game, in fact any game, with such a deep, detailed background without paying attention to lore. I never skipped cutscenes and I read all the dialogue in the old RPG console games I played - part of the entertainment factor was that the game was telling a story. Part of the appeal of video games as an activity is that it's a story where I am a direct participant.

The Bumpy Road of Blogging

After operating under the schedule and theme that I detailed several weeks ago, I've decided to make alterations once again. I enjoy writing advice posts, but my ability to give advice and write guides is artificially limited by what is already out there - when it comes to World of Warcraft, there are tens of thousands of other people constructing guides and sharing their knowledge with the playerbase. I feel like if I have something I'm interested in, I could make a post linking to a dozen other well written guides and call it a day.

or just link to wowhead and stop updating my blog, period

Caturday Abridged

Today's Caturday was a little hastily put together, but our star of the day is Toonaphish!

glorious sun shines upon him

On The Other Side

ugh these are all YOUR friends

I primarily play horde, but I've attempted to level alliance characters before. I never had one at max until Mists, which was encouraged by the [Double Agent] achievement.

Even though my brother and I started playing World of Warcraft at the same time, we started out playing opposite factions on different servers. I tried to level an alliance character on his server but only got to level 44 before completely losing interest.

"What's your played time?"

picture unrelated

Played time is a common comparison that World of Warcraft players often like to make. Some view it as a positive thing, a way to show how much time and dedication they've put into the game, while others seem to be embarrassed of their played time.

Threads pop up now and again, where invariably someone will say they are embarrassed of their 125 days and someone will respond to that person letting them know they have 300 days, someone nonchalantly says they've been playing for 800 days, so on and so forth. Some people seem to pretend to be embarrassed while others brag about played time that seems rather low.

Pet Battling: Getting Started

plus you can name all your pets after pokemon

While there is a little something for everyone in World of Warcraft, pet battling is something most people tend to either love or hate.

Maybe you dislike pet battling or actively avoid it, but would still like to collect pets and earn achievements - for example [Crazy for Cats] for "the Crazy Cat Lady/Man" title.

Maybe you're just at the end of your rope for things to do until Warlords of Draenor releases.

It's Not Saturday, it's Caturday!

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled Caturday! We have fluff and memes for you today plus a special feature of my favorite in-game cat pet!

as you can see, Toona is pumped for Caturday

"Experience"

I'm not here to say that I'm the best player around, I'm far from it - I'm pretty decent, but I make mistakes. I'd bet even raiders in cutting edge progression guilds do, too, just with much less frequency than your average player. I have a lot of practice raiding; I've been doing it for years. 

pictured: absolutely fantastic raiding skills

At the beginning of 5.2, the Throne of Thunder patch, I left my guild at the time because I was putting in far more effort than I was getting out of it. I'm not the best player in the world, but it felt like every night I was baby sitting. It felt more like I was carrying the raid rather than my guild members each exhibiting a relatively equal amount of skill and effort into our progression.

I had become so frustrated with my guild that I ended up taking a break altogether for a significant amount of months. When I came back, I knew I'd have trouble finding a new guild that was at my skill level and convincing them that I was worthwhile to bring when I hadn't done the raid on normal and was geared entirely from the previous tier.

Pascal: Origins

of course a master of the zergling rush

I've been playing video games since I was very young. I only played console games until my family got its first computer around when I was 11. The first notable games I played were Starcraft and Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I played other games, but RTS games were by far my favorite.

My brother owned Warcraft 3 but he insisted that I'd break it if I played it, so he never let me. I finally played it when I visited my family in Germany - my uncle specifically asked me if there were any games I'd like to play while I was visiting and I asked him for it. Once I got home, I secured myself a copy of it and played it for months.

When World of Warcraft first came out, I didn't even know it existed, but my brother got it a few months after its release. He no longer believed I would break his computer just by touching it and he more or less demanded that I come upstairs and play it.

Passing Time Before Warlords

yes please

There's a little more than a month until Warlords of Draenor release on November 13th. We will likely see patch 6.0 soon, most people assume approximately a month before release (taking bets on the 14th of October), but the prepatch only adds so much excitement until the actual expansion release.

Many people have given up raiding and gearing up as most gear will be quickly outdated in the early zones of Draenor. However, if you are in a progression guild, remember that a lot of current gear, as discussed earlier, will be useful for quite a few levels into 100, aiding in leveling. If you are shooting for 100 ASAP, getting more normal and heroic mode gear will be beneficial.

I keep feeling excited to play, logging in, and not being able to think of anything to do. Knowing most of your efforts will be pointless in just over a month makes it hard to find something to do in game. Like probably a lot of you, I can't figure out how to not play Warcraft, so I've composed a handy list of things to do while waiting for November 13th!

Crazy for Cats

Today is Caturday - but with a twist! I'm featuring [Crazy for Cats] the achievement that gives you the title "the Crazy Cat Lady/Man". Please read the entire guide before starting to plan out which cats you plan on shooting for as they are obtained through a myriad of methods - some of them very cheap and simple, some of them expensive, rare, or very involved.

but is she a crazy cat lady or a crazy cat-lady?

Legendary Legacies and Content Removal

As most of us know, Blizzard decided to remove the legendary cloak quest from the game as of Warlords of Draenor release. This was just one change of quite a few things, some of which were expected while others were a shock.

A recent blog post overviews each thing that is being changed and removed, while there are other posts clarifying these things in detail.

Not Everything Will Go Perfectly - and That's OK

A few days ago, I noticed that I hadn't killed Garrosh on flex mode. My guild is 11/14H and I've killed him on normal several times, so I thought it was silly that I hadn't killed him on flex.

I joined a group in oqueue for a flex Garrosh kill. The group was incredibly stacked and the fight went flawlessly, we one shot him with a few inconsequential deaths. That's when I got my first heirloom.

Pascal's Gold Making Guide for the Economically Challenged

for ACTUAL gold making advice, visit actual gold maker's sites

So, you want to make gold. You've read professional gold maker guides by wealthy individuals who are probably way smarter than you, but you're still poor. My friend, I am here for you. I, too, was once a common peasant scrounging under the bridges of Undercity looking for a way to make gold. Now, I'm at least upper middle class.

If you're anything like me, you've read dozens of guides on how to play the auction house and make gold. They tell you "Anyone can make tons of gold, easily!" Well sign me up, you say. Then you read the guide and you're like, what even is this?

are these even words?

Not Just a Corner Anymore

I've changed names from Pascal's Warcraft Corner and I've been working on pulling this blog together - I enjoy writing really anything about WoW, but I felt like it's a bit chaotic updating twice one week, then once every day another week with no real consistency to the posts' content. 

I've been working out a schedule and a direction to go. I originally wanted to see how interested I could stay in writing blog posts and continuing to update before I worried about how the blog looked and whether or not I had a fancy name or an identity.

After using my own post material as a point of study, I noted that my primary themes tend to be helping others to play to their fullest potential, and making sure that they have fun doing it.

Caturday, Spending All Week With Mew!

Caturday was a little late today for me, but nevertheless the best day of the week. We have some beautiful features from my own cats and some funny internet cats. 

laundry baskets are like improved boxes

Thanks as always for checking out my blog - I'm working on a schedule and I've been tidying up the place. At this point we're looking at maybe three posts a week aside from Caturday, and I'm looking to try writing about other games every now and then as well. Enjoy!

The End is Nigh!

If you have doomsday prophecys for your class or spec for warlords release, you're not alone - all I have heard from friends and guildmates has been that their class is going to be useless come the expac.

Our tanks are not looking favorably at the tank squish and jokingly - or maybe not jokingly - said that tanks would be unecessary in warlords and raid groups would just be dps ping ponging aggro back and forth with a few healers.

I Am Heroic - and You Can Too!

I've always felt like I couldn't call myself either hardcore or casual. While I leaned over toward the hardcore side of the fence, I've only ever been in guilds that raided two to three nights a week. I never really felt it was fair to call myself hardcore when other guilds were putting 4-5 nights a week - back in Vanilla sometimes more than 40 hours - into their progression efforts. 

Even so, from Vanilla up until a few tiers into WotLK, the two guilds I had been in were consistently well within the top five guilds on the server progression-wise, even with only raiding about 10-15 hours a week. Since then, the guild I was in had become worse and eventually disbanded, and with my real life getting more serious, I accepted my fate to be in the bottom rung of progression raiders - no hope of competing in the progression race and high possibility of not even clearing content before it was outdated. If I thought I had felt casual before, now I really felt it.

Regarding Tank Concerns - Then and Now

June 5, 2006 - i.e., ancient history

World of Warcraft has changed fundamentally over the years. There are a lot of different players all with different ideas about how the game should be played, some more vocal than others. 

Certain behaviors and attitudes I think are completely justified, but perhaps just not everyone feels the same way about them. Some others are remnants of ancient history and are no longer applicable to the game the way that it is today, while others are simply perpetrated by players who may be jaded or stuck up. 

Something that I find to be very interesting is how players ten years later are viewing the mechanic of threat, and how some tanks in particular view themselves. Omen used to be a required raiding addon to join even lower end raiding guilds, while nowadays it tends to be merely suggested, if even mentioned. Threat is a mechanic that has changed dramatically since the original incarnation of the game, and I believe some people haven't updated their outlook on it.

Something Old and Something New, Something Green and Something Blue

they also came with mounts I'll never own

Currently on beta, it's possible to create level 100 characters for testing. They of course come equipped with gear - the lowest ilvl piece sits at 586 and the highest piece is 603, some items seem to be quest rewards with no level requirement, some of the pieces have a level 98 requirement, with an average ilvl of 591. 

If you've been raiding siege of orgrimmar for the last year, you'll notice how close that is in level to current gear. In fact, a fully upgraded piece of heroic warforged gear is 588. There are people who are a few points short of 590 on live, right this moment. On beta after completing a few quests on my copied level 90, I saw that the initial reward items really weren't even close to upgrades. What I'm getting at is, it looks like a lot of us may be using most of our current gear further into Draenor than we may have expected.

How to Learn How to Learn to Play

World of Warcraft is remarkably popular. It's actually pretty surprising sometimes when I search for something without using any warcraft terms and I find exactly what I'm looking for. I mean, searching "auctioneer" brings up the Warcraft mod before it brings up anything about actual auctions.

So many people use Google to find answers to their Warcraft questions that sometimes it knows what I'm looking for and puts it in an information box at the top of the screen. Heck, there are more results for "World of Warcraft" than there are for "kittens".

combine searches for best results

Among all the websites, news articles, and forum posts, you'll find a lot of websites that just aren't that great. There are sites that try to tell you what gear you should get, how you should gem and enchant, or how to play your class - but can be incomplete, outdated, or just plain incorrect. There are guides and resources available that are very useful, while there are other websites that are entirely unreliable.

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.

10 years 10 questions!

Today I'll be answering Alternative Chat's 10 years 10 questions! I submitted them to hopefully make some history in her podcast, but it was also a good excuse to make a blog post.