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Many people have given up raiding and gearing up as most gear will be quickly outdated in the early zones of Draenor.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.