On days when I don't have anything else burning up the weblog, I'm gonna at least post a picture of the day. This is one of those...
Here's Tivara in Icecrown, Arthas' home turf. She's drawing in close on Orgrim's Hammer, the Horde base of military operations in the zone:
I loves me this game sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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