Then again...

So here we are, on the eve of the first really big patch since Lich King (533 Mb big), and...I'm not up for it, I find. There are so many changes both deep and wide that seem likely to have such large consequences for my play, and I simply don't feel up to keeping track of them all. Some of the changes are good, some just mystify me, more than a few genuinely annoy me—I think Blizzard is making some parts of the game too blandly easy, while others seem to be getting unreasonably hard. How much of that is pure update overload, I couldn't say, really; I know that everyone's got a finite capacity to absorb major changes in existing tasks, and this is mine.

So I'm going on vacation.

For how long, I couldn't say. I've got some preexisting problems with WoW as it is, mostly stemming from having a machine that's way on the low end of their design range and neither being able to nor really wanting to replace it. (I like my MacBook. It is good for me. And I like being happy with my tools. Needless dissatisfaction and unhappiness are luxuries I choose not to indulge in right now.)

I don't want to say anything much yea or nay about planned posts I haven't gotten to yet. I'd like to. We'll see how it goes.

I should say that I am not stomping off in tears and huffs. WoW has been really really good for me through these four years. It's brought me friends and acquaintances, and given me a ton of wonderful adventure, drama, tragedy, comedy, the whole deal. I feel like someone stepping away from a great meal, just plain full up and not needing seconds or dessert right now. I'll see what comes next after this all digests some. :)

Meanwhile, a month later...

Well, there went March. It was a busy, happy month for me, just in ways that got in the way of blogging here. April should be a month of more activity here.

The biggest thing is improvement in my health. "Health" is a pretty tangled for me, with fixed and variable chronic health problems, acute crises driven by purely internal stuff (auto-immune reactions and like that), chronic and acute environmental complications, and on and on. Four years ago I fell into into a deep valley of not-so-hotness, kind of like a volcanic caldera. I am now climbing out the far end of it, with a virtuous cycle of reinforcements between exercise, diet, environmental hardships passing, and other stuff. I have more energy and physical ability to do (among others) housework backlogged for years, and getting that done opens up more opportunities to do new things I've been wanting to, and it just really is very satisfying.

(It's not all biscuits and gravy, of course. There are nasty down stretches and sundry complications. It's just that the overall trend is very clearly up.)

One of the best parts of the above is that I've been able to resume work on writing projects long stalled out. At the top of the list is a book on playing "outsider" heroes in the pulp '20s and 30s—women, people of color, political and other ideologues, etc. I had to shelve this two years back, and it hurt a lot, and I spent a lot of time wondering if I'd really ever be able to do it. Well, turns out I can. But to do that, I had a lot to do in March, building the infrastructure of schedules and review checkpoints, getting my suite of writing and data-keeping tools in order, assembling playtesters to evaluate advice and mechanics...well, a bunch.

The key point here is that I did get it done. :) Work's now underway within what's providing as sound a framework as I hoped for.

At the same time all of that was going on, several of my guildmates hit points of transition and reflection, and for several weeks there was a lot of uncertainty about who'd be doing what. It settled out happily for each of them, I think. Lots of them are now on what might be extended leave from WoW, with just a few of us remaining activity. I respect my friends' judgment a lot, and it seems to me like everyone's making good, sensible decisions likely to lead to their greater well-being, and that's a very happy thing to have reason to think about people you like. It just means that we won't, right now, being doing the "gang of us" team-ups for 5- and 10-person challenges the way we thought we would.

(Side note: I'm fascinated to see that there's a really big noticeable wave of leave-taking right now. Several big-name bloggers have gone on indefinite leave, and I hear from friends in more dedicated raiding guilds that they have a lot of players doing that too. The conventional wisdom blames it on the initial Lich King content being too easy for the relatively hard-core players, but I have the theory that most of it would be happening even if there were a bunch of harder challenges available right now. People can't assimilate changes indefinitely without it taking some toll. A recurring from those returning from hiatus is that they have a firmer sense of what's happening now in the game, what the possibilities before them now are, and what they want to try next. Sort of a mental palate clearing.)

I dithered around a while, and decided that, no, I don't want to take a WoW vacation myself. But neither was I getting very far as a semi-soloing tank—at the raiding level, which Spiderheart's at the lower edge of now, there don't need to be as many tanks as a fraction of a group's composition, and the folks I do pick-up and scheduled runs with already have a solid cohort of experienced tanks. So I've re-specced to give Spider a nice solid dps build, since dpsers (and healers) are more in demand to fill in raid gaps than tanks are.

Coming up in April, more regular posting, therefore, of my three usual kinds: reports on things accomplished (or at least bravely attempted), random tourism, and occasional essay pieces. I actually have added in WoW posting to my to-do app, because the nudging will do me good.

Looking forward to writing at you more this month!

About my posting absence

When health allows, I write tabletop roleplaying games. In recent years, health hasn't allowed much. But it is now, and so I'm really in the swing of firing up a project I had to shelve a couple of years ago. There's sooo much to do as I get underway. For the moment, it's eating up pretty much all of my available writing/blogging time. But I will be back with new tales to tell and pictures to show, in the next couple weeks.

Hunter Armor Sets

Eep. Two weeks since last post. Two busy happy weeks for me, which I'l write up soon, just ones that have distracted me from blogging.

To tide you over, check out this delightful guide to hunter armor sets from the beginning of WoW to the upcoming next patch.

Watching the PTR Go By

Yeah, as most WoW players know by now, the public test realms are active and people are poking at the material lined up for patch 3.1. (We're currently at 3.0.8, for the rest of you; Blizzard's practice is that .0, .1, .2, and so on are the substantial ones, with new dungeons and stuff.) I'm letting them pass by, as part of my philosophy of focusing on what's most rewarding to me. Others can hassle the technical problems, the sheer volume of participants, and the ongoing changes; I'll pay attention, some, as we get close to a release date.

If you want to see PTR fun (and it can be a lot of fun), go check out Eleanor Holmes or someone. I'll be here chuggin' along.

Single-Character Play

Something unexpected has come up in my WoW play since I went on hiatus from <Archon>: I've become more of a single-character than I have ever been before. (There is one category of exception, which I'll write about in another post.) This intrigues me enough that I'm going to write a post about it.

There's an interesting conjunction of factors. I have a character class that I like as much as liked hunters before the current wave of tweakings: the combination of melee and magic, the horror-rich background, the way cool abilities, it's just great. Furthermore, it gave me the chance to bring back a favorite old character in a way that makes complete sense for the world and gives me plenty of roleplaying opportunities whenever I feel like it.

Socially, I have a best-of-both-worlds environment. I have a small guild—six members right now, and it seems unlikely that we'd ever get beyond eight or perhaps ten or so. But I also have a couple channels' worth of overlapping friends, some going back three years and more now in real time, and one of the current incarnations of Earthen Ring's amazingly strong and productive cross-guild not-necessarily-raiding kind-of-an-alliance. For instance: random pick-up groups will not in general be glad to take level 75 tanks to, say, the Halls of Stone. But groups who include people who know me, or just who've seen me around in chat and have a sense of my style, will. And do. (Tanking Halls of Stone at 75 is some tough but fun work, lemme tell ya.)

So there's a combo of factors at work:

• Performance. Death knights can do a whole lot, and I like watching Spiderheart in action, and I'm with people willing to help me do my best playing her.

• Comfort. I just plain feel safer and more relaxed where I am. I am at, as nearly as I know, no risk of insult or recrimination for advancing faster than anyone else. There's a large continent who are already at 80 and thoroughly entrenched in the existing raiding, so I don't threaten anyone's need to be at the top—I'm not going to be at the top anytime soon, so I don't court a repetition of the emotional trouble that made maxing out Tivara turn so bad. But then people I am advancing with don't feel threatened by my progress in that way, either. They aren't worrying if I get to 75 while their character's at 73, or whatever. They're happy that I'm happy, and when our paths cross, we collaborate.

The biggest single gain for me out of all this is, slightly to my surprise, reputation. Here comes the primer for my non-WoW-playing readers.

• Reputation. Once your character makes contact with any member of a faction, they have a reputation with that group. The spectrum runs from Hated, to Hostile, to Unfriendly, to Neutral, to Friendly, to Honored, to Revered, to Exalted. You earn reputation points by performing quests for the faction, and for killing their enemies. The rewards for these range from a single point (for killing trivial enemies) up to thousands (for completing the final steps in long quest chains and killing major bosses). Going up, it takes 3,000 points to go from just barely neutral to friendly status, 6,000 to go from friendly to honored, 12,000 to go from honored to revered, and 21,000 to go from revered to exalted. Going down, it takes 3,000 points to get from neutral to unfriendly, another 3,000 to get from unfriendly to hostile, and 36,000 to max out hostility. (You won't often want to do that, but it can come up.)

Some reputations stand alone: the Argent Dawn doesn't care what others think of a character, and vice versa. Others come in pairs: the Steamwheedle Cartel cares very much what the Bloodsail Buccaneers think of your character, and vice versa, and your character loses as much (or more) rep with one as they gain with the other.

Why bother? Well, several reasons.

First of all, some factions (by no means all) have rewards at various levels. Every one of your faction's base groups gives a price break with rising rep rank. Arms and armor, recipes for different kinds of crafting, consumables like potions and foods with special restorative abilities, even pets (this one's going to be mine for Spiderheart in just a few days) are scattered all through the lists of rep-based rewards. Honored rep with various factions lets you buy keys to get into related dungeons' heroic mode.

Then there are other rewards for some. Notice that in the screenshots below, it's "Ambassador Spiderheart". That's because she has exalted status with all five of the Alliance's core groups: the humans of Stormwind, the dwarves of Ironforge, the elves of Darnassus, the gnomes of the Gnomeregan Exiles, and the draenei of the Exodar. When she's exalted with the furbolg of Timbermaw Hold, the Kalu'ak, and the Sporeggar, she'll have the option of displaying the title "Diplomat Spiderheart" instead.

(Note to my knowledgeable readers: these screenshots were taken early on the 9th, when I started writing this. Now, as I finish it up, it's the morning of the 12th, and I've made progress on several.)

Rep grinding is just what it sounds like: performing a set of tasks repeatedly. Sometimes it's a daily quest, like the one I wrote about where Spiderheart has to help a confused sea lion bull find his way to true love with an equally perplexed sea lion cow. Sometimes it's a task that can be performed as often as you can get it done; Spiderheart is in the midst of earning the trust of the Timbermaw Hold furbolg by bringing them ceremonial feathers taken from the bodies of enemy tribes' members, with 300 rep for each set of 5 feathers.

Some go fast—it can take just a few days' dedicated effort to get to exalted with a faction like Stormwind or Orgrimmar, because many, many quests give rep with them and a high-level character can recapitulate philogeny, I mean, start with the level 1-10 quests and go from there, and zoom. Some are, by design, slow—I may be at the Wintersaber Trainers one for weeks or months yet.

They all take time, though. And what I'm really liking most, I think, about the single-character play is making all this progress on goals I've always been interested in, but always distracted away from. I have, for instance, never had a character get to revered with Timbermaw Hold before. But Spider has, and exalted isn't that far away. This is fun.

You know how you can tell you weren't just being a drama queen?

When one of the developers apologizes for having nerfed Beast Mastery too far, and promises adjustments between now and the release of the next raid content.

I may still be overreacting in some ways, but it's nice to have the vindication.

For now, not a hunter or a raiding blog

It's a very good thing that I have some characters I like to play and some people I like to play with, because the more I look at the informed folks' experiences with hunters after the 3.0.8 patch, the more it looks like what I was doing with Tivara simply isn't viable anymore.

First, links.

• Big Red Kitty with early data on Survival/Beast Mastery comparison
• Big Red Kitty with follow-up
• Aspect of the Hare on Marksmanship experience
• Amava Knows Aggro on post-patch Beast Mastery experience
• Amava Knows Aggro on early Survival experience

And it goes and goes like that. I'm not bothering with Elitist Jerks links, since I find their forum culture toxic. Out in that portion of the real world which includes people playing and writing in ways I find interesting, there's a genuine consensus: Beast Mastery will no longer allow a raiding hunter to do an impressive amount of damage. Raiding is very much a game of parts, in which each participant needs to do the handful of things they do particular well, and do them reliably, so that the whole is an assemblage of really good parts. For hunters, that's putting out a lot of damage in short order.

{Edit and Update: Pike, of Aspect of the Hare, says in comments: "At this point I have respec'd to Beast Mastery, for me the DPS gain from going to MM was very minimal. Though MM was fun because you had to press a bunch of buttons, but in the end it got too distracting." So that's one voice back in the BM direction. Thank you for commenting, Pike, much appreciated.}

Unfortunately, the options for hunters doing that now all look really unappealing to me.

Marksmanship (and, to a lesser degree, Survival) specs rely more on shot rotation macro. For those of you playing along at home, that's a macro assigned to a key or button that, when pressed or triggered repeatedly, fires off a sequence of shots arranged so that cooldown times and synergistic effects add up to the biggest bang for the buck. Abstracting it out, a shot rotation macro might fire in turn special shot A, special shot B, special shot C, A again now that it's cooled down and ready for use again, B, B again, C now that it's cooled down, and then start the sequence over with A again. Comics fans can think of this as playing Silver Age Green Arrow.

The thing is, I don't like that kind of macro use. There are macros I like and use, to combine two or maybe three actions into one, or to assign the target of a spell based on the circumstances of the fight. (Whenever I play a healer, all my character's healing spells get a stock treatment: cast this heal on the target if it's friendly, on the target's target if the target is hostile, and on my character if I don't actually have a target right now.) The more complex ones feel to me like I'm playing at being a programmer in the days of time sharing and batch jobs rather than playing at being a character in a fantasy world—the degree of detachment from play bugs me. I'm just not tuned in if I'm not getting to make some choices in play, even at the cost of some efficiency. When it takes that much automation to do the job well, the job isn't worth doing, for me.

Survival has a different problem, in that its distinctive combinations of talents call for a fair degree of mobility in the midst of fights. I don't do mobility well. I can't reliably manage a bunch of the mouse-movement-and-shooting combos at all. My reflexes got set in an earlier videogaming day and have only decayed since then, and after a very long futile struggle to assimilate this stuff, I admitted that I was getting nowhere and that I should find my fun playing what I can do in my keyboard-centric sort of way. It's why, for instance, the Combat tree for rogues was such a delight for me: I didn't have to keep trying to stay behind targets all the time. Subtlety is, to my taste, a much cooler rogue tree and full of sneaking nastiness I love, but Combat's what I could actually take to a fight. Well, Survival's trap-dancing high-maneuverability approach is another one of those things I can't make work. I like the idea, and I love to watch a good Survival hunter in play. I just can't do it.

So there I am.

It's always possible I could hassle out something that wouldn't be too uncomfortable for me and not too unproductive for raiding. But...I'm not motivated to play that kind of compromise-hunting game right now. So until I see some reliable signs that hunter approaches that I actively like will work again, Tivara will be in raid retirement.

At the moment, as recent posts have indicated, I'm putting most time into my night elf death knight, Spiderheart. I think I'm going to start up a new alt or two to take advantage of Lunar Festival goodies, and let that do it for now. In a separate post I will comment on features of death knights that are making them remarkably rewarding for me. Spider's coming up on level 72 and my gang's really, really not rushing to endgame since we are confident that opportunities will be there when we get there. Lots of side questing, working on reputations, and stuff like that. When will I next raid? Dunno, to be honest. Sometime in February, I'd guess, but I have no idea, nor any urge to hazard a guess, not when the present moment is working so well with this character.

This concludes the whining portion of today's programming.

Taking it easy, not letting the sounds of my own wheels drive me crazy

I was chatting with a friend yesterday afternoon, and they pointed out that I usually do best with stressful stuff by just setting it all aside for a while, giving it time to settle down or clearly not settle down or do whatever it's going to regardless of my efforts. They're right. Anything that has me fretting as much as hunter and guild stuff have recently is, whatever else may be said of it, not working as a game.

While I was thinking over that, I read a typically smart post by my friend Adam, "Retro Raiding and the Calm Casual". The upshot of this particular post is that accepting his position well behind the cutting edge and not worrying about it has opened up a lot of fun for him. He's taken his druid Leafshine into Zul'Aman, which was still a very tough nut for his guild to crack pre-Lich King, and done some other retro-raiding sightseeing, and like that. Go see the details for yourself, if you wish; what matters here is that he feels at liberty now to move as he wishes, rather than according to any external timetable like that created by raiding needs.

That's resonating very deeply with me today.

I loved being among the first in Archon to 80, as I posted about at the time. Then guild bickering stole away a lot (though not all) of that pleasure, and chronic insomnia and health crud has kept me rattled and disoriented. One of the great pleasures, I've identified, in playing Spiderheart is that nobody I'm playing with cares in the slightest what pace of progress I set. My friends are happy when I'm happy, and enjoy teaming up when it's appropriate, and there just aren't egos or competition at stake. And I'm freed of the fun-sapping side of the impulse to advance because I can't be in the first wave with any of my alts—not without a time machine, at least, and I have none.

I've been playing this way this week already, but hadn't quite so consciously formulated it as an actual goal until today. So:

• Tivara is on the shelf for the moment, because I'm bothered by hunter stuff. I will let the theorycrafters sort out post-3.0.8 options and then see how I feel.

• Archon in on the shelf for now, because even where I feel I've genuinely mended fences, I can't stop the stuff rattling around unpleasantly in parts of my mind where memory does not care to pay attention to current judgments.

• Spiderheart goes front and center for now, because death knights have nearly everything I love about warriors, plus magic that doesn't require me to hassle mana, plus that great gothic ambience. Speaking of which:

That's Spiderheart in the middle, with a lich's cackling head over hers to show she's using the Lichborne talent to improve her defense and intimidate bystanders. The floor is angry red and the people are dark purple because Death & Decay is rotting the bodies and burning the souls out of everyone in the vicinity—that's what all those 155-hp ticks are from. Commander Mograine is face down on the floor facing her, just to her left; Whitemane's also on the floor back by the altar, hard to see in this picture.

It wasn't a single-pull clear of the Cathedral. I tried that and got close, but didn't quite make it. A level or few more, though, and it'll work.

• I'm thinking about a dual-gathering alt to support Spider financially; enchanting + tailoring is a very handy combo, but not cheap. I might do a night elf druid, which I've been vaguely talking about forever, or something else. We'll see. Something with stealth would be nice, and I'm not worried about leveling fast, given how lucrative mining is right from the outset.

I'm not committing myself in the long term to any general shift of priorities. This is what I'm doing right now to accommodate physical and mental stresses, mostly from illness and its side effects. This seems fun-maximizing right now, and there'll be time to consider what else might be fun right then when my situation changes, as inevitably well.

Now if you'll excuse me, Spiderheart has an appointment with mana-hogging members of the blue dragonflight. She doesn't touch the stuff herself, but allies do, and besides, it's just rude....

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.

Not just Huntard Corner: Wowhead and Reputation Grinding

This may be helpful to someone of any class, not hunters.

I've been doing the rep grind a lot this week with Spiderheart as I wait for Akaa to close the last few levels so that we can hit Northrend together, and because Akaa (as noted in a previous post) is way ahead of Spider there and gosh darn it I want funky mounts too. Now, I'd known in a vague sort of way that Wowhead will let you look at data collections, but never checked its rep listings.

Wow.

Take the one for Exodar reputation, which I've been on most lately. It shows all the quests that give Exodar reputation, which I wanted. But it also shows all the quests that give overall Alliance reputation, since that's added to all the groups within the overall category. With these reminders in hand, I could and did spend a few hours in Alterac Valley battlegrounds and save myself 30-odd stacks of runecloth turned in to the cloth quartermaster in the Exodar.

Gotta like that. I'll certainly be making more use of this in the future.

Some Raiding Dissatisfaction

I find that so far, I'm really enjoying the questing and instancing more than the raiding in Lich King. Specifically:

• Naxxramas is very obviously a place made to support a lot more mobs than it now has, and the huge emptiness is oddly disconcerting after a while. I'm not sure what I'd suggest filling up some of the empty space with, but something would be good.

• Onyxia's Lair was and is a one-boss event, with 3-4 "trash" mobs to deal with before her. I liked that and still do. But I don't like quite so many other one-boss raids showing up. I find that it takes me a little while to get fully warmed up and engaged in a raid, so that I'm seldom at my best when it comes to Archavon or Obsidian Sanctum.

• Yesterday I took Spiderheart with friends on achievement-driven runs to Ahn'Qiraj 20 (complete clear), AQ40 (partial), and Blackwing Lair (complete), and it really brought home how far tactics have been stripped out. I certainly don't miss all of the fiddly bits. But I do miss engaging off-tanking, tanking in which AOE attacks are not the obviously best choice pretty much all the time, and like that.

I've read that the developers are intending to add more complexity in the big fights in Ulduar. I hope it works out!

The Best Strategy Guide Ever

This is Sartharian of the Obsidian Sanctum (picture swiped from Wowwiki):

This is a fairly typical diagram from a raid strategy page (also from Wowwiki), showing how the main tank (green dot) is to position Sartharion (yellow ellipse) and where the meleers (purple dots) and ranged damage-dealers and healers (blue dots) should stand when lava waves (orange bars) come in from the left:

With that in mind...

Go look at this guide to the Sartharion fight.

Caution: Slippery When Wet

I've already mentioned the fun I have with death knights' spell Path of Frost, which lets them run and ride across water at full speed as long as they're not taking damage. I got to wondering...is the span from Rut'theran Village at the base of the new damaged world-tree Teldrassil to Darkshore on the Kalimdor mainland accessible via Path of Frost?

Yes. But it's close. Next time I'll use some kind of riding speed enhancement.

For my non-WoW-playing readers...if that yellow bar nearly depleted in the picture above had gotten all the way to zero, Spiderheart would have started taking drowning damage. That would have cancelled Path of Frost and slowed her progress even more. But as it is, a tick or two later, she crossed into the safely shallow waters around the spiky islands that dot the Darkshore coast, and from there on to the nearest harbor was safe travel.

Not a water sign, nor an earth sign, nor an air sign...

All death knights can summon ghouls. For those who lack the relevant talents in the Unholy tree, these are unnamed; they come in as "Risen Ghoul", last a couple minutes, and die. Unholy-specced death knights can make theirs last longer, or indeed permanently. (Well, until they get destroyed. Then it's time to summon a new one.) The names are chosen at random by matching A and B parts, and anyone traveling around death knights sees the patterns pretty quickly.

I do believe that there's a Firesign Theatre fan somewhere in Blizzard's staff, I must say:

Random Thoughts, and Tools

I'm more annoyed than I'd quite realized by some of the persistent bugs in hunters. It's not that any of them is critical in itself, but the fact they drag on and on without redress adds cumulative wear and tear to my play experience. Sure, I have a macro to fix the growl and prowl bug and it's on a button and I mash it...but missing it even occasionally means that my pet does worse than it should, for an unobvious reason. I can afford my repair bills, but the extra cost from volleys damaging Tivara's bow more than they should does eat up some coin. I mostly resent the frittered-away attention.

In happier news, I'm finding my iPod Touch very handy on several fronts. My computer's at the low end of viability for playing Lich King, and it helps when I can turn apps off so as to free resources. I can use Mobile Safari to hit Wowwiki and Wowhead's mobile site, the Google app to look up other stuff, play music (either iTunes or Pandora as I wish, and Sirius when their mobile app is out), consult Twitter when others are afk, and like that. So Safari, Mail, iTunes, and other apps can all go quit on the WoW machine. I've been writing this during raid pauses, and the boost is significant: my frame rate is significantly higher in visually busy moments. More fun for me, better for the raid.

GM's Island

There's a place within the game where GM characters hang out, that players can't or at least aren't supposed to be able to get to. The current one is in the northwest, in the vicinity of Teldrassil, and is apparently positioned in the midst of unmapped territory so that you can't get there without a terms-of-service-violating exploit. But before that one went in, there was a GM's island way in the south of Kalimdor, on an island south of the Tanaris desert zone. A couple years back, before Burning Crusade, it got freshened up for use as part of the long quest chain involved in getting the stuff to open the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Some of you no doubt saw it then, but I didn't.

This evening I was puttering around with Spiderheart, my night elf death knight, helping a friend leveling up her paladin. Suddenly she commented that I might very well be able to get to the old GM Island. I thought it over and decided she was probably right. Death knights get a spell called Path of Frost that lets them walk and ride across water at regular speed, and like all death knights, Spider's got a nice fast mount as default equipment. So I turned her mount's head south. She rode out of the safe shallows into the deep-sea area where fatigue starts accumulating. But she wasn't more than halfway to the threshold for drowning damage when she crossed into the shallows around what proved to be the northern half of a pair of islands:

The island is low and sandy, with flanking high ridges. In the interior are some buildings of gnomish design:

The islands aren't quite empty, though. There are pirates:

Between the islands there's a derrick of goblin design:

The south island has some goblin-style buildings:

And here's the view heading north, with the Tanaris mainland off in the distance:

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.

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: