I’ve spent the vast majority of my WoW experience doing PvE.  To be completely honest, I’ve never really liked PvP.  For those of you who are Blizz fans, it all started in D2.  I was a huge Diablo fan, but PvP just escaped me.  I had a whole pile of 90’s and did maybe a billion solo hell Baal runs, so I knew what I was doing - I just didn’t enjoy all the crud that comes with PvP.

It takes a certain mentality to really enjoy killing people.  Mobs are one thing, fighting another human being is quite another.  Maybe I’m just not the ruthless type.  Although you would think if you can learn how to do one really well, then why would the other be tough?  Well, I finally decided that it was a huge hole in my game and it had to be fixed.  Oh, and it was making Gavin mad that I sucked at it.

So for those of you who are pros at PvP this may be a little boring and you might want to move on to another post.  But we all had to start somewhere with everything and you might actually find a bit of humor here if you can cast your mind back to when you were just beginning your PvP experience.  Plus, you might actually be able to help those people who are just starting out by adding comments on the beginner bits instead of doing what most good PvPer’s do - laugh at people.

That one thing - the punk factor, kept me out of PvP.  I simply hate being laughed at, spit on, and all of the other ego trip idiot things people do when they win.  More than likely they are losers who never won at anything else in their lives so they feel some uncontrollable urge to rub it in when they actually succeed at something.

As a result, PvP can be pretty intimidating at first.  So these observations may be just the boost you need to get started if you’ve been putting it off and “concentrating” on your raiding or leveling.  Well don’t wait any longer, you’ve got to just jump into the fray and take your lumps as a rookie.

Right off the bat, understand that you’re going to have to grow a little thicker skin to be able to swallow PvP, especially at first.  The jerk factor doesn’t stop with the guys on the other side.  You’re going to be the victim of a fair amount of ridicule from members of your own teams as well.  Which is a real shame.  No one actually knows how to play team sports any more.

So you’re really going into Battlegrounds and world raids with a bunch of individuals doing their own thing.  Because of that, sometimes you’re going to lose even though you could have won, and all those individuals are going to blame each other, and you, and your mom, and your sister and anyone, in fact, but themselves.  If they are so smart, why aren’t they organizing pre-mades?  Oh well, you just have to live with it.

You’re also going to feel virtually naked your first few Battlegrounds.  So much of the success quotient in PvP is in your gear.  And you’re not going to have the right kind of gear until you’ve done your share of PvP, so it’s a circular referrence.  How do you get a LOT better in PvP situations?  Get good PvP gear.  How do you get good PvP gear?  Play a lot of PvP.  So you can see you have to go through the rookie blues for a while until you can start collecting some honor gear.

That was the whole point for me in starting my PvP grind - to grab at least the full current set of gear before the WotLK debut.  And I figured it sure wouldn’t hurt me to get a few hundred battlegrounds under my belt to try to get up to speed on the whole concept.  So I hopped in about 50 games last week as a trial by fire.

Despite getting whacked a good number of times by players who simply had more skill and a lot better gear, it’s really not too bad after about the 20th game.  It took me about 5 games to even have an idea what was happening, and then another 5 to figure out what maybe I should be doing besides just tagging along and killing what I could and trying not to just be dumb.  So after 10 games I felt better.

Then I could really try to participate and help do my part to win the matches.  Easier said than done.  My first 20 games on my hunter went really badly because I am simply the wrong spec and forgot to take that into account before I went in.

My Shadow Priest did a whole lot better, even though he just hit 70 and has virtually nothing but crafted gear from tailoring.  I made sure to do a little more research and respec to a PvP friendly build as well.  So I did the full holiday weekend of EOTS games, about 20 in WSG, and a few AB just to check it out.  The encouraging part?  If you’re pretty good at PvE, you can figure out the PvP stuff faster than it looks like those first few games.

You learn pretty quickly which classes are going to give you fits, and you can either avoid them or just know you’re probably about to take a beating.  But that also means that there are some classes you will normally best if you play your cards right and you’ll know how to spot them and hunt them down to take them right out of the fight.

The biggest difference between PvE and PvP is really just the speed of the game.  PvP is really a case of Fast and Furious.  But after a while you will feel yourself getting a LOT quicker with not only your spells and skills, but just moving around the battle fields.  As you process information faster and learn to spot certain things it makes a big difference in how well you will do.

But the real point I wanted to make here (after a little rambling) was that maybe the one thing that will give you some sense of pride as you begin the PvP gear grind is to be a team player.  As I mentioned before, you’re going to be playing with a lot of punks, but that doesn’t excuse you from doing the right thing.  You can often be more valuable to the entire battle not just by whacking people but by doing other, more subtle, things that will not show up in the end-of-battle list of kills and damage/healing done.

Just a “for instance,” as a shadow priest.  Since the SP is not a big killer with a gob of life I can’t really mount a 1 man assault on a captured tower and wait for reinforcements.  But I did find that I could slow down about 4 enemy players chasing a flag carrier.  In that way, just the two of us could do something faster than if we had grouped up five guys to try to take and control the mid field.  When the flag gets picked up, there will often be a big chase scene, and most of the time no one will stop to gank the little SP running along with the group.  So I had the freedom to dot, flay and get some blackouts in on several enemy players, basically letting my flag guy get out scot free.

Now, realize that once the flag got out of reach I was dead meat.  But that’s sometimes the whole point of being a team player.  Go ahead and mount that 2 man assault you know is going to fail if it will buy your team time to grab some other tower.  Run away from situations when you’re going to die anyway and try to get that one druid to chase you to give your group an advantage.  Look for any way you can to create annoyances for the other team and give your team the best shot at winning - even if it means not scoring any personal points in the game.  Take one for the team in other words.  Sometimes you will help more by taking a death and occupying a few enemy toons until reinforcements arrive than if you waited for help first.  While you are waiting they might have time to get a zerg up for one of your towers.

And more than anything, just realize that you’re going to win some, and you’re certainly going to lose some.  You can’t let it make you mad or yell at the other folks in the group.  You’re going to get into those games that are pre-mades for the other faction and you’ll be toast from the start.  When the other team is REALLY a team, you’re going to have a hard time winning as a PUG cluster.

But maybe the best example of how satisfying it can be was an epic comeback I was privileged to be a part of in one EOTS round.  When the bubble dropped, there were only 6 of us in the game.  It was a rout from the very beginning.  At one point, we were down 1,200 to 150.  Then the team numbers rounded out and at full strength, we charged back for the win by just 50 points.  It was one of the most satisfying victories I’ve ever had playing WoW.  Just as good as the first instance Boss drop and definitely as good as that first Gruul or Vashj kill.

Now I can begin to see why people do a lot of PvP.  It can be really fun.  Sure, there is a grind involved - it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t difficult in a lot of ways.  So I look forward to having my first full set of PvP gear here in the next few weeks, and seeing just how different it is on the other side of the pile of purples than it was when I started.  I plan on keeping the old gear as a reference point and running a few games with the old gear and then the full set of new gear just to see how big a difference it makes with the same skill set.  Should be a fascinating journey as well.

So, all you folks that have been lolly-gagging around doing all PvE, it’s time to hop into some battlegrounds and get your feet seriously wet.  Or, you can follow me straight off into the deep end.  I guarantee, it won’t be long before you will start to Dominate!

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25 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

You already know how to play the game.  But you know you could get better.  You picked the PvP server on purpose to give yourself a challenge.  But it’s starting to get old.  I seems like everywhere you go you’re getting sand kicked in your face.  You win some, you lose some, and sometimes - you just get pwnd.

You think it might be just the fact that they have you out-geared.  But then another dude comes along and whips the guy who just ate your lunch, and made it look easy.  You know there’s a secret to it, but you’ve just never figured out what it is.

Well we’re about to tell you a little secret we use to Dominate every area of the game.

Being a great player is all about reaction times. Now, there is something to be said for being proactive, but there are just so many situations that require you to SEE what’s happening in the game and then USE the right spell or action.  When you get so fast you can respond to everything going on around you and have time to spare - that’s when you start making them react to you, and that’s when you begin to dominate.  Sure, you have to know WHAT to do and WHEN to do it, but you have to think fast, recognize fast, and cast fast.

When you get so fast you are waiting on the global cooldown for your next THREE spells, now we’re talking being ahead of the competition.  That’s when you can just yawn while you rip someone’s head off.

Rookie professional athletes talk about having to get used to the “speed of the game.”  Pros are just bigger, better, stronger, and way faster.  But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with being a 100 pound WoW weakling forever.

Now, there is something to the gear issue.  You really WILL get your head knocked off in arena matches if you have vastly inferior gear.  Which brings up an interesting point: how do you get the gear to dominate if you can’t dominate enough to get the gear?

You Need An Edge

A little boost so that you’re not stuck grinding it out in the battlegrounds forever for season 1 welfare epix.  And even though we’re talking about PvP a lot here, it will make an even bigger difference in PvE.  You’ll be the first person people come to to start their groups.  The MVP of your raid and guild.

One of the best ways to get your speed kicked into warp gear is to use macros.  Have you ever looked at the poor schmucks on the forums trying to find a macro?  Unless you’re a whiz at that sort of thing, writing your own toon specific macros is probably going to end in frustration.  It did for me.  There are just way too many variables to give you a set of macros you can put on your 1-9 keys that will cover every situation.

But there is another way, and it’s simpler, easier, and far superior to macros and mods alone.  The Fang gaming pad can put you in the driver’s seat, and turbocharge your play speed.

We process things in the game visually.  We can’t really smell the ganker coming over the hill behind us, and unless you dropped serious bucks on sound cards and headphones you won’t hear them either.  So we rely on what we can see.

The best way to improve your reaction times is practice.  See what your opponent is doing and then counter that move.  It all starts when you’re a poor little level 1 lowbie.  You learn to react to a limited number of things mobs throw at you.  By the time you reach 70 you have a pretty good feel for what to do in a lot of situations, but you’ve just run out of simple ways of using what you know.

That’s where the Fang will become your best friend.  With this little weapon, you can put every single skill in your book at your fingertips.  After just a few hours practicing, your fingers will be hitting all the right keys so much faster than before it will amaze you.

The Fang has 36 programmable keys that you can hotkey to the action bars in WoW.  It also has the traditional movement keys right in the center including the strafe functions, but with bigger, better feeling buttons that really make moving better than it’s ever been.

How does it help?  You’ve probably heard some jerk elitist dork say “get rid of all that clutter on your screen, learn 2 play!”  I guarantee you there was a time (like 3 years ago) when he didn’t play without looking either.  So don’t listen to the turds.  Get you a mod like bartender and put ALL of your spells out where you can see them and then link them to the fang and your 1-0 keys - then get ready to rumble!

Next, just go out and work through some tough situations.  Do things that you have found difficult in the past.  Fight elite mobs, take on 5 mobs, go to a heroic instance, do some battlegrounds - in other words, Practice!

You will find that you will naturally group together certain types of actions on the fang in little clusters.  Now your right thumb becomes a lethal weapon against rogues - your pinky dots folks to death, and your middle finger?  Well you’re starting to see the point.

With the right tool and a little practice, your game will make a quantum leap in speed.  You will be able to see not only what the game is about to do to you, but make the keystroke NOW!  You’ll already have your counter spell in motion and the offensive spell ready before they knew what hit them.

Now, you can choose to spend a couple of hundred hours learning to be the best macro programmer you can be, good luck with that.  For those of you who DO use power macros - imagine having 36 situation specific macros to use!  We’re not knocking macros, but they are only useful if you can trigger them easily.

There is simply no better way to trigger skills and macros faster and with fewer keystrokes than a Fang.

Sure, you can do without it.  You can figure out how to to toggle 4 actions bars worth of buttons with four different keystroke modifiers and just use your right hand to click 2 or three buttons, but WHY?  That’s like walking around the block to get to the store across the street.

The easier you make it on yourself, the faster you will play.  Make it easy on yourself to Dominate and grab a Fang.

Use it for a month and you’ll never be able to live without it.  How much will that set you back?  About 30 cents an hour - and forever after that it’s absolutely free.  So what do you think?  Is it worth three dimes to absolutely spank everything in sight for an hour?  You’ll never miss a few bucks, but once you play with a Fang we guarantee you’ll know what you’ve been missing.

All you have to do is click the picture to check one out or grab one right away.  It’s time for you to Dominate.

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31 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In a word, “bad.”  These guys are tough, strong, plate wearing, killing machines.  It’s almost unfair to every other class in the game.  You could think of them as Warlock/Mage/Warrior/Rogues.  Warcraft’s first hero class is simply Dominating.

Lawbringer and I both got our beta keys the other night and began our run through the beta.  Now, no WotLK run would be quite the same without at least giving all the other classes a shot.  The new talent tabs are just too tempting and we certainly want to keep everyone up to date on how the traditional classes will fare - but playing a Death Knight is awesome.

Let me just say Blizzard did not disappoint, especially in the starting area.  For those of you who have strong moral biases, you might find the quest line dialogue a bit dark and disturbing at first.  Aligning yourself with the most evil guy in the game, Arthas, and some of the quest objectives are pretty grim.  But there is a bit of redemption in the end.

I don’t want to give too much away, but if you can get past the basic premise of slaughtering people without qualm for a couple of hours, you’re going to have a ton of fun with your first Death Knight.

Let’s start with the bits that relate to game mechanics before we get to the DK’s themselves.  Blizzard did some things with the starting area that are really brilliant.  The quest lines are linked very well, and guide you through the starting zone in a very linear fashion.  You don’t have to run all over the place, so your first three levels go very fast.  You can reasonably do 55-57 in under 3 hours even your first time through.

As you begin, you notice a few things different about quest mechanics for the DK.  Quest tools are quite often placed on a special action bar that takes a little getting used to.  When you do the mount quest, there is a special button you need to press to turn in the quest, which can be confusing for about 15 seconds while you wonder what in the heck you have to do to get the yellow turn in question mark from the NPC.  But once you get conditioned to pay attention to these special action buttons, it actually makes it easier than ever to figure out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

Next, you get to do a whole pile of really nifty quest types.  You loot, kill, strafe, bomb, cannoneer, hide in two different costumes, pillage, crush and steal your way through a wide variety of things that are just plain fun.  Yes, the text is evil and a bit disturbing at times, but the chains are anything but dull.

The biggest change is that all of the quest loops are instanced.  It’s a little hard to describe.  Think of the DK starting area as five different zones, even though they are all in the same place.  Once you complete the first set of quests, everything in the zone changes for you.  The mobs are different, the NPC’s have moved, and the action shifts to the new quest line - but only for you and everyone else who is in that set of quests.  It’s fabulous.  You don’t have to run to a completely new area to do new content, the content just changes depending on your progression.

It’s wierd at first, since the zone chat will have people asking about the first quest line while you are in the exact same spot working on something completely different and you can’t see them even though they may be only a few yards away.  But it’s nice that there aren’t a half a billion other DK’s competing for the same mobs and NPC’s since they can be seperated into five different instances of the same area.

By instancing the quest lines, Blizz solved the problem of congestion, as well as making the story line much more engaging.  There is a terrific flow to the story and it will make the question of “why are we all going to Northrend?” make a lot more sense.

As for the DK, I really don’t even know where to start.  There’s enough new information in just a few hours of play to do 20 articles about these dudes.  And so much of the initial experience raises even more questions than answers about how they fit into the overall scheme of PvE, PVP, and raiding.  But I’ll give you some sweet little observations this time around.

DK’s operate on the Runic Power system instead of mana, rage or energy.  But Runic Power works a bit like all of them.  Like rage, you gain runic power by mele strikes.  Like mana, you use runic power to cast some spells, although certain spells generate runic power.  It is actually difficult to run out of runic power if you are fighting pretty regularly.  That’s where the DK class has an advantage over all the other systems.

If you are low on RP, you aren’t in trouble, and you don’t have to stop using spells.  You can just cast a few spells, which do damage to mobs and even healing to yourself to get more runic power and then it’s back to busting heads.  It’s a little like life tap for a lock, except you gain power without losing anything in the process.  Talk about a dominating advantage.  It’s hard to say anything but WOW once you see it in action for yourself.  You begin to feel invincible.

But runes go beyond the power bar.  You also have two each of blood, frost and unholy runes as well as a fourth proc rune called a death rune.  These runes are seperate from the power system and have a more traditional cooldown system.  Talents in all three trees buff these runes with things like instant cooldowns on critical strikes and other things that will take a lot more play to figure out completely, but I don’t think it will be ferociously complex.

As for the other little tidbits that are completly unique to the DK’s, the starting city is a huge floating ziggurat above the far eastern borders of the Eastern PLagulands, and it is really super cool.  Check out our shot of the Ebon Hold below.

To get you geared and talented up before you leave the starting area, most of the quests have a nice blue item and bonus talent points as rewards.  By the time you finish the starting area, you have a complete set of blues and 49 talent points in your tree of choice, as well as four runeforge spells to put on your weapon/weapons.

It’s too early for me to tell just how well a DK will tank and DPS.  I can see them being very hard to defeat in arenas, but I can’t see them being a true MT based on what we see from the talent trees alone.  I’m not so sure they will be able to out-DPS a well geared lock or mage, and even though many of their diseases heal them, they may still need a healer from time to time.  It’s just too early to tell.

I don’t think they make every other class unnecessary by any means, but so many of their talents point to raid resistances, buffs and damage increases that I can certainly see a 5 man group wanting one DK from each tree for an instance run.  I’m sure the WoW comminuty and DYS will work out all the details for how the DK class really fits into the grand scheme of things soon - I mean, that’s our job right?

So even though I don’t have time, space or all the knowledge yet to tell you everything there is to know about playing a DK you can be certain that you will be impressed.  The starting zone is unique, the game mechanics smooth and entertaining, and the class is nearly ridiculously powered.  You get great gear and talents uber fast, and it doesn’t take forever to get ready to roll in outlands and beyond.

My advice, get WotLK the first day out and we’ll certainly get you ready ahead of time to go out on your deathcharger and Dominate!

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51 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Yesterday I started a little argument with one of our faithful readers and posters James M.  Don’t take it personally James, and I certainly appreciate your feedback, it makes me really research hard to back up my points.

The original statement I made is that most of your gear from tBC is already obsolete since WotLK will be out in a few months and you’ll be replacing almost all of your gear in a few levels anyway.  That certainly was the case in tBC, and I expected nothing different from the next expansion.

To make myself perfectly clear, I probably should restate the position a little more carefully (again, thanks to James).  It’s not that you will NEED to replace T5 gear with greens because the greens in the 71-73 zones are better, but you probably shouldn’t START trying to get geared up for the expansion if you aren’t already because the gear you will get in Northrend will be ALMOST as good anyway.  If you already have 4 out of five of your T5 set, and a guild running the right stuff to get the last bit, then go for it.  But if you have several toons at 70 that aren’t in high-end raid gear, now is certainly too late to worry about the grind of getting top end gear.

Now, Blizzard has certainly made every effort to make the gear from tBC raids more viable in WotLK than pre-BC gear was in tBC, but there is also a bigger difference between level 75 and level 70 toons and gear than there is between level 60 and 55.  The reason is that as you rise in levels, the gains from gear contribute a more significant percentage of your base skills than at lower levels.  I don’t have time in this article to go into a lot of detail on that, but every level gain is a more significant leap than the last one.  By the time you get to 75 you will be fighting mobs that will just be a LOT stronger and tougher.  Therefore, the gear has to scale faster to keep the game playable solo without having to go back and do 25 man raids from the previous patch.

Just so you all know I’m not pulling this idea out of some mental dork zone, let me give you a good example of what I mean.  The following picture is of the T5 hunter shoulders from the Rift Stalker set.  To get these shoulders you have to be able to go to Tempest Keep, a 25 man raid dungeon.  These are a 54%  drop and in a 25 man raid you can reasonably expect at least 3-5 folks to be rolling for these.  That reduces YOUR chance of getting the roll to below 10% per run, meaning you may need to make 5 full runs to have a reasonable shot at them.  Sound hard yet?

I would imagine that no more than 5% of the nearly 40,000 people who read DYS on a regular basis (or only about 2,000) have even sniffed the prospect of getting into a run on TK.  I would wager that the real number of people at DYS who have had a legitimate shot at these is in the low hundreds.  So saying that T5 will be ok until level 78 is making a HUGE assumption that there are just lots of people who have been able to build their complete T5 sets.  If you look at the guild progressions on any given server, there are normally less than 5 guilds from each faction that have even made it to TK even today.  That means it’s a pretty safe bet that only a few dozen guys on each server have completed even the T5 set, much less the T6 stuff.  It’s that rare.

(Uber Dominate Your Server congratulations to those of you who have completed full sets!  If you’re one of those guys you might pop your armory link into the comments)

Here they are:

Now, my original intent was to show that you will be able to get almost similar gear SOLO in Northrend fairly quickly and easily, so if you’re just beginning to collect T5 stuff, you probably just don’t have time and it might be a waste of time unless you already almost have all the set bits.

For one little quest in the Dragonblight zone at level 72 you can choose these green shoulders as a reward:

Ok, so no sockets, no intellect, and no hit rating, but if you CAN’T get your T5 shoulders before WotLK, these should do you just fine.  Going solo, the extra 19 stamina, 4 agility and 10 AP will almost make up for the loss of Intellect - especially for BM hunters.

Let’s look at a couple of others a little higher up the level ladder at level 73 and 74:

Besides that, these choices would also be a decent fit for a Shaman depending on spec.  If you have multiple toons, you probably have not had time to get a whole pile of epics for all of them.

Not good enough to show you what I mean yet?  Ok let’s try weapons, those are a different type of thing, so let’s stick with hunter weapons and look at some good bows from tBC compared to some simple solo quest rewards from WotLK.  I’m just going to assume you all know or can find out how difficult it is to get the epic bows I’m showing here, the greens and blues that follow each tBC bow is from WotLK level 75 or lower solo quest reward.

So I think you’re beginning to catch on to what I mean.  You can certainly go to Northrend in your T5 gear and not worry about having to completely replace everything in two or three levels, but if you’re not uber geared there’s no need to worry about it much.  In many cases, even good epic weapons will be replaced pretty quick.  Armor seems to have a bigger gap but there’s one more thing we haven’t talked about yet that may make the armor argument completely disappear.

We have not yet seen the gear drops for Northrend instances!  If they are as good as tBC instance drops, you may certainly expect to find gear that rivals T5 and T6 at level 72-73 Boss loot tables, we just don’t have a way of looking at those yet on wowhead.  I could probably have made even better cases for T5 armor vs. Northrend early instance drops if there was more information on WotLK items, but there simply is not enough to choose from as of yet.

One interesting thing about WotLK drops is that there are a lot of items that come with random enchantments.  Not that that is any different from the other two sections of the game so far, it’s just that we haven’t seen all the random enchantment drops yet so the names for all those possibilities don’t yet exist.  All of those Booger Beater Longbow (of the bandit, of the fletcher, of the whale and that sort of thing) all we have is the pre-name without all the suffixes yet.  The random chant stuff may be the best fit for many specialty builds.

So if you don’t like the armor comparisons above (I admit I wish I had more to choose from but it made the point anyway - triple stat greens are not really going to happen) just wait until you see the boss drops from the first few Northrend instances.  If a couple of level 73 greens have decent stats you can bet that the blues from Boss drops will be even sweeter.

The whole point of the original discussion with James was not to bust your hump to try to finish up tBC raids for gear (and certainly not for rep) since you will be able to find comparable gear in WotLK relatively easily and quickly, and you are certainly going to want to save the rep grind for the new factions unless you are REALLY close to hitting exhalted with someone.  It may not always be BETTER than tBC epics, but it will be close, and for leveling that’s good enough.

Besides, just like we’ve been saying all along with tBC, the really fun stuff will be the NEXT end-game content, so go quick to 80 and then start collecting your gear for the serious raids at the end of the WotLK.  If you think the T5 and T6 stuff is good, you will be beside yourself looking at T7 and T8.  When that stuff starts popping up we’ll certainly let you know.

The nice thing is that you’re not going to have to wait long for a final verdict on this topic.  Gavin and I both got our Beta keys last night, so we’re about to find out how fast we both replace all our gear during testing.  We’ll be sure to keep you posted about our progress.

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46 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I like a good laugh.  We all know that there are times during the grind of the time-sink that is playing WoW that frustration sets in.  Despite all the nerfs and buffs to leveling it still takes a while.  So it’s nice that the folks at Blizzard have a good sense of humor in designing certain quests to give you a decent chuckle from time to time.

Actually, a lot of the quests and NPC’s have names that invoke something from pop culture.  These are good for a snicker or two.  There’s Spraggle Frock in Un’Goro, Haris Pilton in Shattrath, and quests like ‘Message in a Battle’ that always make me grin a bit.  But there are two quests in Outlands that really take the cake.

The first one is in Hellfire Peninsula.  Foreman Razzlecraz just outside of Thrallmar has this little chain quest with the task “Shizz Work.”  You’ve helped him get parts for his broken down shredder in the quest “Outland Sucks!”  Which is a little funny to me since by the time Gavin and I were getting to this chain Outland was sucking wind a bit already.

So, once you bring Razzlecraz his shredder bits, he claims that one of his felhound pets ate his key.  In his own words:

I finally got my shredder working but I seem to have lost the keys. I keep a pack of felhounds to protect my camp. They don’t do a very good job and they like to bite me a lot. They also like shiny things. I think this one felhound I have may have eaten my shredder keys. I’ll pay you if you’ll take my felhound on a walk. Kill some hellboars and let him eat. He’ll do his business. When he’s done, see if you can’t find the keys in his “leavings.’

This is a prime example of why you should read the quest text.  Pretty funny so far, but the sheer ickiness of this quest only gets better.  So you go start whacking hellboars nearby.  When you kill one, you blow this whistle and the felhound goes to “work.”  There’s this horrid ’splut’ when the felhound eats the pig, and then a big steamy felhound fart and PLOP!.  Now you’ve got a nice big pile of poo to root through.

What’s worse is that now all quest items sparkle.  Sparkling, fresh felhound mess!  Digging through this juicy treasure chest is no picnic either.  It yields a couple of things you really wouldn’t want to find - like gnawed bones and acidic slime.  You even get the “Stanky” debuff from the adventure (I’m not making this up) which you can see below.

In the second shot you can see that the debuff even occupies the “Dummy” slot, meaning it does nothing, but you might be a little dumb for rooting through demon poop.  The only thing it really does is give you a green “stank” aura.

If you have a mod that shows spell casts on your screen you will also notice that Blizz is very thorough when they do anything.   When the felhound drops his load, the spell he casts to make it happen is called “Create Poodad,”  here’s a pic of this wonderful talent - too bad they don’t give out cards for vanity spells like this at Blizzcon eh?

The next bit of fecal fun comes in Nagrand.  Elementalist Lo’Ap wants you to root through piles of poo to find digested Caracoli beans.  While I was working on this quest I came across a pile of poo that was quite different from the rest - see for yourself:

How did THAT get there?  I don’t see how any of the Talbuks in the area could do the deed up in that bush, but there it was - a curly, sparkling load of Talbuk treasure.  At least we can assume that these piles are not as fresh as the Shizz Work turds, since there is no stanky debuff after sorting through them.

Once you get all the beans you need from the curly-que poo, you get a stack of Nagrand Cherries.  Lo’Ap responds like this:

Please do not wash yourself in the sacred waters of the Throne.

<Elementalist Lo’ap holds a prepared caracoli tablet up.>

You place this under your tongue and allow it ample time to dissolve. Once it has dissolved, you will be able to breathe water as if it were air.

I have to eat these?  He knows where they’ve been!  These guys are just sick.  Actually there is something like this in real life.  If you’ve seen the movie “The Bucket List,” you know that one of the big jokes in the movie is that Jack Nicholson’s character likes a certain kind of coffee called Kopi Luwak.  The reason it is the “rarest beverage on the planet,” is that the people who make it get the coffee beans from the dung of the Asian Palm Civet, a cat sized mammal.  Again - I’m not making this stuff up, people really drink this stuff.  You can see the Wiki for yourself here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak

So in WoW instead of making coffee from our latrine beans, we get some sort of timed release, under the tongue tablet that lets us breath under water - you think it’s from the gas?  Before Blizz made all the quest objects sparkle for us, the Rare Bean quest was actually a little difficult.  One comment at thottbot read something like “so now I have to find these piles of crap that are the exact same color as the background, just what I needed to make my day - a quest to find camo poo.”

I know this wasn’t a big tip that you can use, but it might serve as a nice little reminder that there are a lot of silly and whimsical (ok - sometimes doodie jokes) fun things in WoW.  So take your time and enjoy a laugh or too, even if it means sorting a little poo.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

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11 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

There is a real void in the marketplace for high quality gaming headsets.  You can count the number of decent sets on one hand.  You can find great audio headsets in the hundreds.  You can get single ear headsets with terrific microphones all over the place as well.  We’re not sure why it’s so hard to find a headset with 5.1 stereo sound AND a good noise canceling mic at the same time, but that’s just the way it is right now.

There are certainly a big pile of products out there that CLAIM to be both of these things, but you know someone is lying to you  if they are trying to tell you that their headphones have great sound and uber features for $29.95, that’s ridiculous.  I guess some companies have not quite figured out that lying to their customers just doesn’t = win in the long run.

If you’re cheap, just stop reading this right now.  Stick with your Wal-Mart Logitech earbuds and forget you ever saw this post.  (Logitech makes great mice, but the headphones - not so much).  I’m not cheap, and I’ll tell you why.

There are certain things you should spend really good money on.  We (should) spend 25% of our lives in bed sleeping, you should spend some serious dough on a really good bed.  You spend a good majority of your time wearing shoes, those should be very comfortable and high quality (this applies to all clothing really, but especially to shoes in my book).  Life is too short to eat yucky food, and so forth.  So I typically default to “you get what you pay for.”  Spend a little more on most things and you will be much happier with the results.

I mean, how many times have you gone to a restaurant like Village Inn or some huge chain thing and gotten horrid food with really bad service?  Go down the street to the more expensive place and the food will be spectacular and the waitress will be awesome - it’s worth it to me.

It’s the same thing for me with headphones.  If I’m going to be wearing something for 8 hours every night they are going to have to be comfortable and sound good.  And since I use Skype and Vent a lot the mic needs to be out of the way and work well.

I’ve had headphones that sound great but hurt my ears.  Microphone booms that rub on my face and I can’t get into a position that feels right where people can still hear me.  Comfortable headphones with crummy quality sound, headphones with bad connectors, you name it.  There was always something majorly wrong with every single combo headset I ever used or reviewed.

I finally had enough with all of it and went on a major search for a real quality gaming headset.  I even looked at aviation headsets, although the sound quality and connection to computer seemed iffy on those (as well as costing up to $750.00) .  I just wanted something good, and I wasn’t too worried about what it cost.

Some of the gaming headsets seemed a bit gadgety to me.  The rumble feature doesn’t seem to be as important as really clear sound and comfort.  So I looked at the offerings from one of the most trusted names in quality audio headphones - Sennheiser.

Sennheiser has always been a good choice for the audiophile.  Not the very best, but certainly always mentioned with the best.  It’s hard to beat Sennheiser for quality as well.  Everything they make is solid, both in performance and construction.

Enter the PC 350 gaming Headset.  These babies were only recently released, or I would have been using them for months already.  From the moment you pull them out of the box, you can just tell you’re ears are going to thank you for them.

Everything about the PC 350’s is just right.  They are probably the most comfortable headphones you will ever own at this price, and you can wear them forever.  The sound is great, even if you have to tweak your levels a bit through your sound card interface.  Some reviewers have complained about the bass level, but honestly, when have ANY headphones been able to really thump?  If you have a decent sound card you can add some nice sounding bass boost to the sound and I actually had to turn the bass boost down for the PC 350’s.  In other words, they can handle whatever you throw at them.

The mic is out of the way, doesn’t pick up ambient sounds, and yet still gives great voice clarity in every situation I’ve used it.  It’s not all up in my face either (you can tell I have personal space issues).  In other words, everything about these headphones is what you’ve always wanted. I mean, the cord is even 9 feet long!  The picture above does not do them nearly enough justice.

These are going to set you back a bit more than $150.00, but when you are ready for a serious upgrade in your sound and voice environment, go grab a set of PC 350’s, you’ll never settle for a lesser gaming headpiece again.  All you need to do is click the picture to get your own pair from Amazon.

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23 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I got an email from Blizzard last night. At first, I thought maybe it was my beta invite - but no such luck.  It was news about a new program that can really help you level if you use the Lawbringer rules.

Now It seems that Blizz gets it from both directions from a lot of players.  New players say the game is too hard at times, experts hammer them when they nerf things.  It seems like every decision they make is met with some controversy.  It’s not going to be any different with this one.

A few days ago I told you about the two rules I run with: never quest out of rest and always run in a party of two.  Well, the new recruit a friend system is really going to make rule number two very attractive to a lot of folks, and probably draw the ire of many power players.

Here’s how it works: you refer someone to play WoW and when they activate their new account they insert a code that links their account to yours.  The two accounts stay linked for up to 90 days and if you also play with the toons of the friend you referred you get some BIG buffs to your leveling.  Take a look at these!

• When in a party with your friend you both get TRIPLE experience
• For every two levels your friend gains, they can give one of your alts a free level
• You and your friend can summon each other from anywhere in Azeroth

Now, if triple experience doesn’t get you fired up I don’t know what will.  There are a couple of other nifty little things that might be of interest to you as well:

• When your friend pays for 60 days play time, you get an exclusive Zhevra mount (Epic Speed) at level 60
• When your friend buys their first 30 days of game time you get 30 days free.

So for those of you who already run in a team this could be a real bonus.  It certainly will blow all of the arguments for going solo out of the water.  And before you say - “well, yeah, if you can get somebody else to play,” think about it really hard.

Gavin and I already own three accounts each.  But this buff is so good, we may very well just have to have one of us start a new account to take advantage of this little deal.  For all of you couples and buddies that already play, you might consider doing the same thing.

In 90 days you could probably get 2 or 3 toons each to 70 using these experience buffs and summoning skill.  Since you get 30 days free when you buy 60 days, your total out of pocket cost is $40 for the TBC key and $15 for the 60 days play time since you get $15 free on your main account.  So for $55 bucks you can get the better buffs than any set of epic in the game as far as leveling is concerned, and a vanity epic land mount to boot.

Considering that if you were to buy a level 70 with zero gear it would set you back about $500, and powerleveling will cost you about $350 to 70 (if you even trust those things) and just buying one or two thousand gold would cost you more than $55 bucks it sounds like a bargain to me.  I am in no way advocating those things, I discourage them strongly, but in the current market place being able to buy triple experience and 35 free levels for just $55 bucks sounds like a deal.

You see, Blizz wants people to actually enjoy the new content in WotLK, so they have made a way for you to level to 70 as easily as possible.  Especially if it gives new players a serious buff to leveling, then it’s a good move so that more people will be ready to go when the next xpac goes live than were ready for tBC.  So they nerfed XP from 30-60 and now this.  Plus, since Death Knights will start at level 55, it only makes sense to make leveling for any other class easier as well (although I assume this will still be in effect for DK’s when WotLK comes out - talk about getting to end game fast!)

So go get your mom, your brother, your granny an account and double box it if you have to to make this work for you.  You can’t make leveling any easier than this friends.  Refer yourself - and Dominate.

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36 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

There are times when I am a little bit reluctant to give away one of my best-kept secrets.  I’m certainly not the only one who uses what I’m about to show you, but it makes making gold so foolproof, that somehow it hurts my feelings just a bit to tell 40,000 people about it!  Oh well, you can see how dedicated I am to giving you the very best tidbits without holding anything back for myself.

If you’ve been reading DYS for any length of time you’ll know I’m a big AH power broker.  I typically run hundreds of auctions each week and virtually all of my gold comes from being a merchant (not a farmer).  I don’t do dailies except for rep situations, and I can easily afford anything I could ever want.

What I am about to show you is a big part of that process.  There was a time when this was a lot more guess work and expertise, but this little mod has just blown the doors off of making money from trade skills.

Once upon a time, you had to just know a LOT about how each profession worked, and which recipes were good for what.  You needed to know the cost of all the mats for about a dozen recipes in each profession; which things you could vendor, which to DE, what went on the AH - it was enough to drive you pretty batty.

I’ve done articles here at DYS about bags, using DE to make big gold, some rare recipes - in other words, a little bit of all of this.  Well, that was back in the stone ages as far as I am concerned now.  I found a mod that does everything I ever wanted and even a bit more when it comes to trade skills: Lil’Sparky’s Workshop.

Lil’Sparky’s is gold just waiting to be made.  And for some crazy reason this mod has been around for about a year but only around 3,000 people have downloaded the thing.  That is insanity to me.  More than 15,000 folks have looked at it and had no clue how much gold it was worth to them.  Here’s hoping you are smarter than that.  Take my word for it and go grab Lil’Sparky’s right this second.

You can download the latest version here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7663-LilSparkysWorkshop.html

Now, what this mod is going to do is tell you what every single recipe you know is worth to vendors, the AH and for DE.  That covers every way you can possibly make money from a crafted item.  You have to use a few other mods to make Lil’Sparky’s do this, just read the requirements in the download screen (I recommend AADV, Informant and ATSW)

Once LS (Lil’SParky’s) is up and running (and assuming you have plenty of AADV data to work with) all you do is open up your profession screen and you are going to see a wealth of new information.

I’m not going to walk you through every single thing in LS, because frankly that would take a fairly long guide, and I figure you’re all big enough to figure it out for yourself.  But the screenshot above illustrates a couple of things I do want to point out.

Whenever you see numbers in bold, bright letters, that means there is money to be made on that item.  On the top you see we can expect to get 116 gold if we sell Soulcloth Gloves at the AH (the little “a” next to 116 means ‘auction,’ a “d” means ‘disenchant,’ and “v” is ‘vendor’).  The number to the right means we can purchase ALL of the mats to make Soulcloth Gloves either at AH or vendors for just 54gold 44 silver - a profit of  61gold 56 silver - so I just pop over to the AH and start buying up everything I can find for these little gems, knowing I will make a hefty profit in no time flat, plus get a few skill-ups to boot!

Even better is the second example.  Remember one thing kids if you hear nothing else in this post:

ENCHANTING WILL MAKE YOU MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER PROFESSION PERIOD!

Now we have a mod to help us make even more money from enchanting than ever before possible.  I don’t even have to wait for bottom scanner to pick things up for DE, I can just craft them with the info from LS!  I see here I can make Netherweave Belts for just 7g 19s and then turn right around and DE them and sell the those mats for 21g 11s on average.  Holy cow, that’s about a 200% profit!  I don’t know about the Ah on your server, but I can probably buy 100 stacks of Netherweave at any given time.  That’s a lot of Netherweave Belts - and a LOT of gold about to go in my pocket.

Without LS I would never really know which recipes I can do this with so easily.  Now it’s right in front of me every time I open a trade skill window on ANY of my toons.  Not only that, I can save recipes like this on one toon and it will give me a shopping list like this:

As you can see the shopping list tells me how many of each item I have on alts, in banks, and inventories on all my toons on the server.  Then it will list which things I need to purchase from vendors - it will even auto-buy the exact amount of vendor items I need with the push of a single button at the trade merchants.  Getting excited about this yet?

This shopping list will appear on my banking toon when I log in - my goodness; am I in gold heaven or what?  So I just log all of my toons, pop in a queue for all of the best recipes for each profession, log the banker and go on a serious shopping spree.  As long as I buy the mats for each thing in the queue for at, or below 100% of ah market value, I win big.

Then I just mail all that stuff to the trade skill toons, make everything, send it back to the bank or enchanter for DE, and it’s CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING.

Don’t waste another minute - go get this mod and start Dominating with crafted items right away.

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28 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Wrath of the Lich King will be introducing a new profession to the game upon release that stands to have a very large impact upon the game economy.  There is currently little in the way of comprehensive information available about Inscription but what little we do know puts you in a position to exploit the changes that Inscription implementation will have on the game as a whole.

So what do we know about Inscription?

To begin with, we know Inscription is a crafting style profession that is fueled by the gathering profession herbalism.  All inscriptions seem to be created by a mixture of inks and parchments; parchment is bought from a vendor while inks are created either directly from raw herbs, or from a pommace.

A pommace is created by the process of milling herbs; this works in a similar fashion to a jewelcrafter’s prospecting ability but renders down stacks of 5 herbs rather than ore.

Once an ink is made an inscriber can create a variety of items with them, all of which have the potential for resale. The first items that are created by an inscriber are scrolls such as a scroll of intellect.  Previously these were only found randomly throughout the world to give yourself temporary buffs to your raw stats but will now also be created by an inscriber.  By utilizing scrolls, a player can ensure they remain fully buffed even when soloing.

The second important creation from an inscriber is the combination of Bleached Parchment and Treated Vellum. These two items can be utilized by enchanters to store enchants within.  With an enchant stored within, an enchanter can then place the item on the auction house for use by others to use on their own equipment without needing to directly trade with an enchanter.

Finally an Inscriber can create Glyphs.  Each character in the game will be given 6 Glyph slots of varying power.  A Glyph will act to change the properties of certain spells either cosmetically or through significant increases in power; as such Glyphs will be in demand from all high level players capable of utilizing them.

Minor Glyphs will largely only be cosmetic changes to add more character to spells or slightly increase usability without any real change in a spells’ power; effects will include increasing the duration of buffs or changing of a spells’ graphics.

Lesser Glyphs provide small game play changes to a spell by reducing its costs or providing minor power boosts without massive changes to the ability; examples would be reducing the rage cost of debuffs or increasing the chance of certain attacks hitting.

Greater Glyphs will significantly improve the way in which an ability works and will be the most sought after glyphs.  An inscriber will get an additional Greater Glyph slot compared to other players as a profession advantage.  Examples of Greater Glyph effects will be to improve your spell damage or add secondary effects such as snares or knockback resistance to them.

So, how can you exploit this profession to the fullest?  The answer is simple; when inscription is implemented the demand for herbs is going to skyrocket.  Not only will people need low level herbs to raise their skill level in inscription, but in the long term, Inscription demand for herbs will continue to be high as other players demand Scrolls and Glyphs.

Those who are prepared will be able to stock up on a large variety of herbs and sell them for a fortune on release of the expansion; you won’t even need to be an herbalist to benefit.  Simply scour the auction house to build up a stockpile and seek to dominate the market.

(Keep in mind that the last time Lithanial gave a gold-making tip Lawbringer tested the information on several servers - and made more than 15,000 gold on one toon in less than two weeks.  You have several months before the xpac comes out, if I were you I would follow Lithanial’s advice and buy every herb you can get your hands on for the next couple of months.  The release of the expansion will mean massive profits as demand rises through the roof if you can control the supply of herbs of all levels to the ah!)

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30 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

From time to time I remember Benjamin Buford Blue (Bubba) from the movie “Forest Gump” as he went through all the dozens of ways you could cook shrimp.  It’s one of my all-time favorite movie bits.  While I can’t say that there are hundreds of things you can do with a bear flank, I do “know everything there is to know about cookin” them.

The reason I chose these as a tip is because these two recipes have a very different buff from most cooked foods until you get to the Outlands recipes.  The other reason is that it’s pretty easy to get the bear flanks, so these two recipes make sense for almost every class if stamina, spirit or just a little health regen is not your main concern.  Finally, these recipes were only added in patch 2.4 so many of you may not even know they exist.

There are two reasons for using food from cooking.  One is to regenerate health, although it’s often easier to simply buy food from vendors for that.  The other reason is for the buffs.  A hefty number of the cooking recipes give you a boost to stamina and spirit if you spend 10 seconds eating, but there are others that have different variations on the food buff theme.

Bear Burgers and Bear Kabobs are one of only a few old world recipes that give buffs that are different from stam/spirit.  And these two buffs can be pretty useful.  Combine that with the fact that neither of these recipes require a spice to make, and it’s a winner.

Now, some will argue that the best non SS food buff from old world foods is the recipe for greater Sagefish, Sagefish Delight.  The problem with this is that Raw Greater Sagefish are a pain in the butt to get since they can only be fished from schools.  But bear flanks drop from 11 different mobs in four different zones.

Combine these things with the other fact that bear flanks are normally available in fairly high quantities for really low prices on most servers and it’s certainly something you should consider picking up if you’ve leveled cooking - which I highly recommend.

Part of this phenomenon is because this recipe was only added in patch 2.4, so those guys already in Outlands tend to ignore them; as well as folks who are just rushing through on their way to Outlands.  The recipe was added to help you level cooking from 250-300 without having to fish or cook fish to do so.

I already did a series on fishing and cooking because it’s the best combo to speed up the leveling cooking process, but if you’re one of those people who just refuses to suffer the time sink of fishing you are going to need these recipes - and the nice thing is that the benefits are terrific in every direction.

Here’s what these two recipes look like from wowhead:

I had Lawbringer stir us up a batch of these things while we were leveling through the 50’s, and we still keep some around now that we’re in Outlands until he gets those killer fish recipes.  As a hunter, the +24 attack power is terrific, while Lawbringer’s Shadow Priest get a sweet little +14 to all spells.  That’s the equivalent of wearing another blue item with those stats for each of us.

You can purchase these new recipes in Felwood at the Alliance and Horde General Goods vendors in each faction base.  Malygor is the Alliance vendor and Bale is “FOR THE HORDE!” 

Kudos to Lawbringer for grabbing these and recognizing that they were new as we ran like mad through the Felwood segment.  We picked up enough flanks in Felwood, Winterspring and Western Plaguelands to last us quite some time, and we put that buff on every 15 minutes or so while questing.

All in all, it’s easy to get the mats for these, gives a nifty buff, and will help you non-fishing style folks gain a couple dozen points to your cooking skill = win.  Go Dominate, and may the bear never get YOU.

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5 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post