Freezing Arrow and Me

In December, two of my favorite bloggers wrote about their experience playing with Freezing Arrow. In short, neither Big Red Kitty nor Chain Trap like it much. I like it more than them, and I think I can explain why.

But first, I do have to agree with those who say that crowd control is in general not much wanted in the current endgame. There's a brutal simplicity to the heroic instances and the raids I've done so far (Archavon, Saltharion, and the first three wings of Naxxramas): tanks use a lot of AOE, and damage-dealers go for single-target or AOE as their specialties may be. There's more room for mages' polymorph and paladins' repentance to make a difference than any trapping hunters can bring to bear.

Nonetheless, there are some places where it's handy, and times—helping gear up guildmates who aren't yet powerful enough for AOE tanking to do it all, for instance, and when Tivara's out questing on her own.

Freezing Arrow can be used two different ways. If your hunter shoots it so that it lands near a target, it'll freeze the target immediately and rouse all the target's neighbors to hostile action, just as if they were pulled by anything else. But hunters can also put down a freezing trap a bit farther away. And this is what I do with it. I'm not pulling with the trap, I'm putting it down so as to catch someone at the back of a bunch, or off to one side of it.

Used this way, the freezing trap behaves like any other. The trap goes down, but nobody's yet pulled, and the regular countdown applies. I wait for at least 10 seconds, so that Tivara can put her next trap down before the first one wears off, and then pull. Voila, freezing fun at a distance.

A Quick Personal Note

So, I found out why I've been feeling uninterested in posting much in recent weeks. The full story is long and dull, but it boils down to "my perpetually disfunctional immune system has been busy clearing out old crud". Turns out I'm losing weight again. This is great, but it also means that my body has to fight through the junk that was floating around in my blood or wherever back when the fat that's now being burned was laid down. It's like when you want to do some gardening but have to deal with the remains of the bodies you buried out back years ago. Um, you do have that problem with gardening, right?

Anyway, in the midst of it all, this kind of detoxification leaves me often distracted and otherwise not well suited to writing. But the rush of finding that I'm actually losing weight I've been wanting to take off has me feeling like writing again. I'm going to see if I can manage something each day, to avoid more long silence.

Some Catching Up: DEHTA

Connectivity failures keep me from playing tonight; I might as well work through some of the picture archive. You'll notice from Tivara's look and gear that this was some weeks back. This stuff really has been piling up.

DEHTA

Back in original WoW, characters at about level 30 could venture into the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale. They would encounter warring tribes of trolls (some with undead minions), pirates, and various other challenges, and also dwarvish big game hunter Hemet Nesingwary. He and his hunting party have the character kill 10 of this and 10 of that, working their way up to the named elite individuals who dominate various animal packs—the tiger Sin'dall, the raptor Tethis, and so on. Most folks I know did them most of the time because it was good experience, and handy rewards for some classes.

Come the Burning Crusade he turned up in Nagrand, leaving his son in charge of the camp back in Azeroth. Same setup, but this time 30 of this and 30 of that, and accompanying jokes among players about how this was going to rival Draenor's shattering for population catastrophe.

Yes, he's in Northrend now. But before travelers like Tivara have a chance to cross his path in the Sholazar Basin, they spend some time in the Borean Tundra, and they run into these folks:

Lathorius is here leading Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals. They have a statue of Nesingwary in the habitat nature intended for him, burning in the Twisted Nether.

Quests for DEHTA are fun and varied. You put down deranged assistant hunters, destroy their traps, and also rescue trapped baby mammoths:

When freed, each one rears up and trumpets some appreciation, which feels remarkably good:

Finally you get to hunt down and dispose of Nesingwary's crazy agents in the Borean Tundra, complete with mammoth riding to trample some of them. There's humor in this, of course, but not a lot of mockery—the victims of the hunt are shown as genuinely suffering, the druids trying to help them seriously focused on doing what good they can and keeping others from doing more harm.

When I first read about these quests, I dread yet another oh-so-clever fannish bashing of anyone so stupid as to actually care about the well-being of animals. I got something a lot better than that, and am happy.

More Loot Boasting

Sorry for the ongoing neglect; it's stomach trouble time here at Chez Mri. But I am getting in some play and I'm getting some goodies.

Tivara now has the Accursed Bow of the Elite, thanks to our first guild victory over Instructor Razuvious in Naxxramas. Yes. This bow's focal point is a demonic skull with glowing eyes and an impaling claw coming out the top of its head. Where did my old hard rock albums get to, anyway *rummage*...

And she made the Nerubian Reinforced Quiver, thanks to getting honored with the Ebon Blade after a bunch of fun quests in Icerown. It's got 28 slots for arrows, which is absolutely wonderful when doing a run of heroic instances or raiding, and it nicely keeps up that "I am being possessed by an album cover of the late '70s" vibe:

And yes, that's Sagarmatha in Naxxramas. He hit level 80 and gets to come join the fun. :)

What Has Tivara Got? (Flying Dept.)

She's got a red drake from the appreciative Wyrmrest Accord, with whom she's now exalted:

I make absolutely no bones about the extent to which this is an occasion for pure glee for me. Flying around on a dragon is such an iconic sort of thing. I never stuck at one character long enough to do the long grind required for the cool mounts in Burning Crusade, and felt bugged by my failure that regard. This is yet another milestone in my march to do this time the things I did not last time.

And it's so cool.

Addon Happiness: Light-Weight, Focused Info

Like a lot of WoW players, I like having more information than the basic user interface provides on display for my immediate referral. But the added graphical detail and other rich goodness in Wrath of the Lich King taxes the resources of my computer, which is really right near the low end of acceptable capability to run the game at all. So I'd settled in to mostly doing with out, and mostly doing just fine with it—we're talking here much more about convenience than necessity.

On the other hand, what's wrong with convenience as a concern? It is, after all, a game. At this point, enter my friend Bryant Durrell with advice of the sort he's been dispensing as long as I've known him.

The Foundation. It turns out that there's now a library of programming goodies called LibDataBroker, that provides a very light-weight, focused, efficient way for addons to pass information around. Using them is a two-step deal: you get the addons that gather the info you're interested in, and a display addon that lets you see what you've got. If you ever used something like Titan Panel or FuBar, you know the drill; it's just that the Data Broker apps do it more compactly.

Where They Hang Out. Seems like WoW Interface has the big listing—nearly a hundred of them at the moment, between display and data addons.

What I've Got. Bryant suggested Fortress, and it's suiting me fine. There are others, and none of them shrieked "Beware!", but I like the way Fortress works.

The first thing I wanted was a simple DPS meter. I've been using Recount, but realized that it was probably contributing to my lag problems. (The non-technical version: WoW makes a huge amount of data available to players and their software. Actually gathering and using it, however, requires extra packets zinging around. And when your system's having trouble keeping up with the stock stuff—the images and sounds, and the data necessary for play at all—this can be a trouble-making burden. I wanted to see if I could shuck most of that load without losing info on my own characters' performance.) And sure enough there are several. As with display addons, I started with Bryant's recommendation, StatBlock DPS, and it's also serving me as well as any of the alternatives.

Here it is in action, as Tivara and Sagarmatha about their Sons of Hodir daily quests:

That, friends and readers, is about as minimal as it gets. But y'know what? It's what I want. It's enough for me to judge the performance of the moment.

In addition, I'm using StatBlock Coords for coordinates:

And also StatBlock Money and StatBlock Ammo to track just what you'd think with each:

Youll notice that while I have DPS and coordinates showing as simple white text with transparent background, money and ammo are in bordered and shaded little frames. Each of these frames is movable and adjustable. That's part of what the display addons like Fortress do—they offer control over the display in a variety of ways:

There are option in there I'm probably never going to use, but I like knowing that I could adjust them if I wanted to.

Data Broker and Other Addons. If you peer at the screenshot just above, you'll notice that Fortress has entries for Omen and oRA2. If I enable them in Fortress, I get more lil' individual buttons that give me pop-up access to configuration options, just like with Titan Panel or FuBar. LibDataBroker (LDB) support is something that's apparently easy for addon authors to include, a lot are, so that a Data Broker display addon can handle a whole lot of stuff.

Yes, But So What? A more responsive system, that's what! Dropping Recount, HavocCoords, and a few other odds and ends in favor of these has cut my load time for Dalaran in just about exactly half, and I've picked up 5-8 frames per second in boss fights in heroic instances and raids. I am noticeably better protected from timeouts caused by network lag.

This makes me both a happier player, and a better one. If you'd like to be fooling around with addons but don't have the capacity (or interest) to handle a high resource look, check out the Data Broker world.

Pet Reflections, 12 December 08

As you can tell from my posts and tags, I've been through a lot of pets with Tivara. Along the way I've learned some things about my own preferences, and confirmed some things I already knew.

Size and Position. I get easily annoyed when I have to turn my viewpoint or otherwise maneuver to get around a pet, to loot or reach a mailbox or what have you. I've long known that wide-wingspan flying pets just didn't work happily for me. I find that very large creatures like devilsaurs just really don't cut it either. I want my pets lower than me, and not very huge in any dimension.

Damage Dealing. Tivara is Archon's best-geared and most experienced-at-80 hunter. So weird to say that. But anyway, since I'm there, I'm trying to make the most of it, paying much more attention than usual to nuances of Tivara's spec and gear, and also thinking more about just what her pets bring to an outing. As nearly as I can make out, the top dps honors go to devilsaurs and cats right now, and since devilsaurs end up annoying me, Invictus is there to help Tivara bring down as much pain as possible. When he's up to 80, Ørlög will probably get some vacation time with Invictus as my primary all-around utility pet.

(The upcoming changes to hunter abilities and spells, including the large reduction in Volley damage, will undoubtedly affect how I go about endgame farming for leather, meat, and such. Will Sagarmatha at 80 feel like a big farming gain over single-target pets like Invictus? I don't know, and there's no point in guessing. I'll find out when the patch actually arrives.)

Tempering the Exotic. I find, somewhat to my surprise, that overly exotic creatures seem not to work as well for me in the long run. The pets I'm happiest watching in action are the ones that are exotic versions of real creatures, pretty much. No cat actually looks like Invictus, no gorilla like Sagarmatha, but they could, kinda sorta. There's something about the bond to reality that makes the fantasy work better for me.

Oh, and one other note:

Make Mine Bows. Guns often look neat and have good bonuses in WoW, but the firing noise just plain bugs me in short order. So does the silence that comes if I turn off local noises. So I'm happy to once again have a really good bow for Tivara.

This may sound grumpy, but the end result isn't. I'm tooling around with weaponry and pets that perform well and that I find fun to watch, reliably. So it adds up to cool-for-me play.

What I'm Playing, 12 December 08

Just because I can, a little gallery of what my characters look like at the login screen at the moment.

First of all, here's Tivara with her currently active pets. Sagarmatha the gorilla is getting some vacation time while I level up Invictus for use as another option in instances and raids. With Ørlög (and showing off the Crimson Steel fist weapon again):

And with Invictus:

And I've got two death knights going. Mortwight belongs to Archon just like Tivara; Bruic plays with the Southern Wardens:

Sheer Unadulterated Loot Boasting

Tonight my guildmate Morrid and Tivara went with a group of folks in another guild I've gotten to know recently, taking on the black dragon Saltharion and his minions in the Obsidian Sanctum. We beat him. I have the Crimson Steel fist weapon to show for it, too:

Death Knight, Part 4

And here I am again, tidying up some loose ends of posting.

• Death Knight, Part 3
• Death Knight, Part 2
• Death Knight, Part 1

All right, to recapitulate: the novice death knight is now free of the Lich King's control and part of the new-found undead resistance effort calling itself the Ebon Blade. One last thing remains: to take a letter from Tirion Fordring, the paladin who forced Arthas to flee, introducing the bearer and the Ebon Blade to the leader of one's faction - Thrall for the Horde, Varian Wrynn for the Alliance. I'll get a picture of the Alliance-side version sometime. For now, here's what happens when a newly freed death knight enters Orgrimmar and makes his way to Thrall's throne room:

And now the death knight is at liberty. What comes next? Oh, I'll cover that in due season. :)

Huntard Corner: Misdirection While Soloing

If you've got a hunter of level 60 or above, presumably you know about Misdirection. It's that great spell that routes the threat your hunter's next three attacks generate onto the target of the spell. Tanks like it because it helps them build the aggro that much faster; you like it because it lets you open with some nice damage-dealing instead of worrying about ramping up your damage (and therefore threat) gradually.

But don't forget its value when soloing! There are times when it's very easy to pull aggro from your pet—say, when you're leveling up a new pet. Misdirection is a very valuable addition to your arsenal of aggro-shiting techniques, along with Intimidation, Aspect of the Beast, and so on.

Sorry for Quiet, More Posting Soon

I had a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving visit with Mom this year. I've also been making some changes in my workflow that are giving me extra productive time and, er, well, I've been busy with stuff. And also playing WoW, of course. But I've scheduled some time to catch up on the blog on the weekend and next week—I know folks like reading it, and I like writing it and find the work involved in doing it very satisfying.

In the meantime, here's the orreries used by the iron giant Lokem in the Halls of Lightning:

Ding!

Level 80 spoken here. :)