Victory Through Firepower

The big priority of Red Harvest as a guild is to do fun stuff. Recently joined-up friends transferred over some existing characters, and we've been helping fill out their gear, quests, and so on. Today three of us (Spiderheart; 78 death knight; Jaldorn, 77 shaman; Akaa, 73 holy paladin) took Radovan (63 rogue) through Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace.

Now, I write about Akaa from time to time. Her player has this feature: she is really at her best when she feels excited and challenged. It's tedium that drives her quality of play down. She's been reading Banana Shoulders (and incorporating advice in e-mail from Elle, for which much thanks), and poking at advice and accounts of play, and she really wanted to try pushing it a bit.

So we pushed it.

This is all the enemies in the room with the switch that unleashes Broggok, the big floating eye boss in Blood Furnace. Other roundups I didn't get good screenshots of included sets like "everyone in that big platform in Ramparts before the paths to the last two bosses". The only one we really had trouble with was "everyone in the curving hallway with fel orc transformation booths"; the stuns + the silences added up to significant trouble, and Jaldorn saved the day with timely self-rez and healing. Apart from that, more or less everything fell without a lot of fuss, but with enough workout for Akaa that she felt it was really worth the effort to come along.

That was so much fun. I was already looking forward to taking part in Jaldorn's long-held goal of working through all the Outland instances, but now I'm doing so even more.

A Spiderheart Miscellany

I've got posts in progress, including some notes on my first experience with death knight tanking. (Short form: wow, went great; death knight tanking is more fun for me than warrior tanking.) Unfortunately I've also got the Martian death flu again. So for the moment, here's a grab bag of screenshots.

The war of chickens! Akaa has the pet chicken you can earn with some amusing effort in Westfall; Spider's got the mechanical chicken that's a token of thanks from the gnome whose wandering robots one rescues in Tanaris, Feralas, and the Hinterlands. Unfortunately, no showdown of nature versus art seems impending:

I got some pictures of Tivara and the Kalu'aks' mighty turtle ferries a while back, but happened on this angle just the other day, as Spider was returning from a quest on the sea floor in the Dragonblight:

Sean, I have not forgotten the World in WoW series, I've just been sick, busy, or sick and busy so much. But it is coming, because I'd like to write a bit about the overall situation as far as gods and titans goes so as to have a proper context for writing about Dragonblight questing. It involves the dragonflights a lot, and the more one knows of the lore, the more fun they are. In the meantime, here's a fun moment. Quests in Darkshore and the Wetlands have Alliance characters helping out at dwarf-run excavations and gathering up pieces of fossils and relics. Then one puts them together, and a manifestation of the titans shows up to tell everyone to knock it off and get the hell off the titans' lawn:

The above moment came about because I thought it would be fun to build up Spider's reputation with lots of people. So does the one below. WoW players have pretty well all seen this, but for those of you who use me as your surrogate...

Uldaman is another dwarvish dig site, in the Badlands region in the center of the Eastern Kingdoms. As with several other such sites, the Ironforge dwarves exploring it ran into troggs from below and hostile Dark Iron dwarves from above, and the quests for Alliance characters involve a lot of "please help finish this bit of exploration" requests. There's a spot where the adventurers put together a broken staff and use it to open up a magically sealed chamber, and it is a good swipe:

As noted previously, the death knights are undead, just now free-souled rather than bound to the Lich King. So they have a lot of cool abilities. A friend pointed out to me recently that I'm seldom so happy in WoW play than when I can transgress a normal limit on characters' interactions with the world. Take the Path of Frost, which lets characters and their party mates walk, run, and even ride across water. Here's Spider escorting a guildmate of level 20 or so from Menethil Harbor to Southshore, bypassing the higher level critters of the Arathi Highlands:

This is the best shot I've yet gotten of the Acherus Deathcharger, death knights' standard mount. The skin peeling back to reveal glowing bones first appeared on warlocks' dreadsteeds, and I've not yet gotten tired of it:

Dating services! Who knew that one would have to provide dating services? So here's the story. The kalu'ak (the walrus people seen in some previous posts) have an ongoing concern for the health of the ecosystem they live in. Sensible folks. There's a community of sea lions on islands off the Howling Fjord's west coast, with bulls on the south side of a strait and cows to the north, and the community's bull leader dead at the hands of rampaging buccaneers. Now the bulls are muddled and don't know how to get to the cows. There's a daily quest to gather up enough of their favorite fish to lure a bull across the strait. And when it works? Twue wuv!

Kalu'ak elsewhere, in the Dragonblight, are engaged in a pitched struggle with the wolverine-like wolvar. It's an interesting situation. The kalu'ak leader frankly blames the Horde and Alliance for the mess, their expanding settlements pressing the wolvar into crowded conditions that make them more irritable and violence. And the kalu'ak elders think the wolvar are as fundamentally entitled to good lives on the land as themselves. So there's a daily quest to round up wolvar pups so that they won't get slaughtered in the battles—the elders of the kalu'ak realize the risks of going too far in battle and wish to have the wolvar's future in hand before any grand struggle.

Wolvar pups are really, really cute. You can see Spider's shoulder at right for a sense of scale:

And finally, some more heroism. There's an Alliance settlement at Wintergarde, on the eastern side of the Dragonblight. Recently the Scourge started hitting it with a very great deal of force, directed from the floating necropolis of Naxxramas. I'll have more to say and show about that pleasingly epic set of adventures later. This is just a great moment from one of them, using a griffon supplied by the soldiers of Wintergarde Keep to pull out trapped villagers from among the incoming hordes of undead:

Hoping to do more substantial posting this week, as I de-stress on various fronts. Enjoy, in the meantime!

Son of the Scarlet Monastery

I heard from several folks, here and in e-mail or IM, who didn't actually know you could pull off getting the whole Scarlet Cathedral with one pull. Well, yeah. This evening Spiderheart went back with Akaa and two friends of ours with new characters in the upper 20s, and did it repeatedly.

Spiderheart is currently frost-specced, so she has lots of spells to reduce damage, the chance of her being stunned, and like that. I turn on these things while charging straight at Morgaine, then spread plagues in all directions, and just sort of go to town. Akaa, being a holy paladin, keeps Spiderheart healed up and flying right.

In the wake of the patch, scattered thoughts

• Persistent bugs and why I'm bugged. I know enough about large project management to know that there's no simple fungibility of effort and assets, no way to just say, "Bob, stop working on the next arena graphics and go fix the Cower problem." I also know that it's folly to commit to public dates when you're trying to fix something that could be making weird cascading problems, as when the cross-continent boats were making servers crash; I'm quite willing to believe that some bugs persist because they are genuinely hard to fix.

But I still wish there were some public discussion on Blizzard's part, at least acknowledging the existence of the persistent bugs and talking a little about what the fixes will involve. Blizzard needs someone to be the Speaker to Howling Mobs on matters like this, and really could afford to hire that someone.

In the wee hours this morning, I decided that I'm not being altogether irrational about this, for a simple reason: synergy. Abilities, talents, gear, and all the rest are supposed to interact—that's what drives tactical and strategic planning in World of Warcraft. So when one part is persistently out of whack, there's reason to worry about that throwing off anything interacting with it. Bad data's infectious, Dad used to say.

Yeah, I know I keep picking at this. I still don't feel entirely confident I've framed my deepest underlying concerns properly, either in my own mind or out here in text.

• The fun of not losing things. I've touched on this one before, I know: I hate it when I no longer get to use things that have been handy, and the irrelevancy of trapping at the high end is an ongoing disappointment. So far, at least—up to level 68, where she is now—I haven't had to do that with Spiderheart and her death knight abilities. Something new comes into the mix every few levels, most recently the very handy Anti-Magic Shell, but nothing falls out of use. I don't mind retiring an old spell or ability in favor of a more comprehensive one, like paladins going from separate spells to cleanse disease and cure poison to one that does both. But it's a disappointment to just have something no longer matter.

• Teamwork. A paladin and a death knight do not form an unstoppable combo. However, anyone wishing to stop them had better be prepared to work pretty hard at it.

To think that I saw it on Azuremyst

Each playable race in WoW has its own mount: elephant-like elekks for the draenei, tigers for night elves, horses for humans, mechanical ostrich-like things called mechanostriders for the gnomes; massive rhino-like kodo for the tauren, raptors for trolls, living running birds called hawkstriders for blood elves, worgs for orcs, skeletal undead mounts for the undead Forsaken. It's always been the case that some mounts are available to others but not all, with constraints based on size. Lots of races can use tigers and horses, but only dwarves can join gnomes on mechanostriders.

Until today, that is.

In patch 3.0.8, the racial limits on mounts were removed. Now, it's still not super-easy to get another race's mount, because your character has to have a very high reputation with them. Not everyone wants to take the time to do the quests and gathering this requires. My friend who plays Tivara's questing partner Nyo, on the other hand, likes that sort of thing a lot, and uses it to break up the routine of leveling up. Her draenei paladin Akaa is indeed exalted with all five Alliance races, giving her the Ambassador title, and letting her be the first non-gnome I saw on a mechanostrider: