WAAAGH!!!!!!

From my previous post, Fedaykin98 asked "Also, would you mind doing a post where you elaborate on your interest in WAR? I'd love to hear more about what attracts you to that game."

This post will ramble a bit, because I'm just going to list them as I think of them.

Note: In any podcasts I link, they will refer to factions as "Realms" (this is leftover from DAoC with the three realms of Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard). This sounds confusing to my ears since when I think of "realm" I think of servers. Just trying to clarify for others who may think like I do.

As far as PvE goes, the thing I'm most looking forward to is the Tome of Knowledge. I linked it in my previous post, but for those who can't go to Curse due to things like work firewalls, I'll detail a bit about it.

The tome will be filled out as you explore and kill stuff. Click on a friendly NPC? Get an entry on it's race. Find a particularly important NPC (such as Tyrion or Teclis of the High Elves or Grimgor Ironhide, the Orc)? Get an entry into your Tome on said person. As you kill mobs of a certain type, you will get bonuses such as a little XP, details on that critter, trophies based on them (kill enough wolves and you could get a wolf skull would be a possible example), or maybe even a bonus when fighting those types of mobs. Finally, as you complete quests and such you'll get entries into your tome, detailing the rise of your character through his or her story. Additionally, the Tome of Knowledge will also have some details on your PvP exploits, but that's a bit less clear.

As clearly detailed by my points above concerning important NPCs is that I love the setting of Warhammer. A few years back I tried getting into playing the Warhammer tabletop game, but I just couldn't. As an ex-military guy, trained in unit tactics, old military concepts like having units in tight formations just seemed stupid to me, especially since many sides had artillery that could be devastating to units setup like this. But I never disliked nor stopped liking the setting. (Interesting side note: While I'm not overly fond of the setting for Warhammer 40,000, I find the mechanics of that tabletop game much more sensible, with units able to spread out.) So being given a chance to play in the Warhammer world in a form that is not directly controlling huge armies appeals to me quite a lot.

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Another huge addition that WAR will add (compared to WoW at least) is an effective way for tanks to play in PvP. This takes two forms: Enemy-based collision detection and PvP taunts which don't directly control the enemy. As comes to no regular reader's surprise, I like tanking. But in WoW PvP you can't tank. Against a rogue or a warrior? He'll just run through you and behind you. What good does a shield do you back there? And stopping people on bridges? Only if you have CC available?

Well in WAR they will have collision detection, so you can actually impede your enemies progress by standing in their way. If you find a chokepoint, you can place a tank there and he can hold the point using a mix of knockbacks and collision detection while others support him and blast from behind him. Thankfully the collision detection only works on your enemies, so your allies can run through each other and you without being slowed down.

As far as PvP taunts go, these are brilliant! It will probably vary from class to class, but the general idea is that it's a buff or debuff that makes all attacks on non-tanks much less powerful. Because of this you have two options: Attack the non-tanks weakly, or attack the tanks at full strength, despite their strong armor. Sure you can choose to ignore them, but that will make things take much longer. It's a taunt that doesn't directly control the enemy, but gives too powerful an effect to ignore.

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As far as PvP goes, as I touched on in my previous post, everything you do matters. Even some little quest where you kill the infamous ten rats will award victory points towards capture of enemy territory. This is detailed in these two podcasts. Unlike WoW, which is an almost eternally unchanging world, what you do has an impact. It will only be a temporary impact, but the impact is there none-the-less.

Let's consider a raid in WoW attack some opposing faction's town. You go in, kill all the guards and populace and keep on, until you get thrown out. Within 5 minutes all the NPCs will be back like nothing ever happened. While I expect a similar thing in WAR for quest-hubs, your actions will help your faction wrest control of an area from your opponent. There will most likely still be a major quest-hub available in that zone, but I would guess that it opens up new quests to the faction that just gained control of said zone, while giving the "old" controllers of the zone an ability to wrest back into control their zone.

Also, as far a quests themselves go, Mythic is making some pretty sensible changes or adding some new cool stuff. For the knitty gritty details check out this podcast. I'll touch on the really cool changes here.

First is the change to kill collector quests aka go kill ten rats (again... oh god again...). Previously, you would need to have the quest before you could actually count the rats as dead. So lets say your wandering through some sewer and you come across a guy surrounded by rats... in fact just to get to the point where you could see the guy, you had to kill a dozen rats, and to get to him you need to kill a dozen more. So you fight through this horde of rats and you stand before him, drenched in rat blood, bits of rat strewn about, and a rat impaled on your sword. It's pretty damn obvious you've been killing rats. So you talk to him and he says "I hate rats. They stole my food. Can you kill those dirty rats for me?" At this point you look at him and say "And what in the seven hells have I been doing for the last few minutes?" Of course that doesn't count because you didn't know you needed to kill rats. So you go out and kill more rats, this time it counts, only to get back and realize that you missed one part of the quest: He wants his food back. Yeah you killed 10 rats but none of them had his food, so you go out and kill more rats until you finally get it, then go back to him.
Well all that is in the past with WAR. Every time you kill a mob, it is marked down in a database (probably related to the tracking of what you kill for the Tome of Knowledge). If you encounter someone who wants you to kill mobs, when you get the quest you will receive credit for what you've already killed. Alright, same situation... you're in the sewers and you find this quest guy. You fight your way through the rats, and he says "I hate rats. They stole my food." and the game checks this database and sees that you've killed ten rats, so the guy then says "Glad to see you've been killing them. So you don't have my food... they must have eaten it. Thanks for trying." and he hands you a reward. Simply put, now the game tracks what you've killed and no more worrying about some stupid drop rate on some random body part that proves you killed a certain mob type.

The other cool part is Public Quests. This is so cool it had half of a very long podcast dedicated to it. It's kinda like a group quest... only they are constantly going and you don't necessarily need to be in the group to participate. They are multi-staged, ending in a big battle where everyone in the area who participated get rewarded. In addition as you participate, even if you can't see these quests to the end, you still build up "Influence" (aka reputation) with a certain reward giver for that Public Quest, this way you can get rewards even if you don't have the time to stick around.
I'll use the example from the podcast for the Greenskins. The Greenskins see the Dwarfs hiding inside of some big fort type place. The Dwarfs know better than to come outside of it, so the Greenskins are left to try to figure out how to get them out. They try bashing the gates down, which doesn't work (duh... Dwarf craftsmanship is second to none), then along came this Giant being bothered by some squigs. So the Greenskins get an idea... first they get the giant drunk (a giant will work for anyone who gets them drinks). So the first job is to kill the squigs at it's feet, then get the Giant some booze and pour it down it's throat. Once the Giant is good and drunk you get a giant bomb and try to explain to the Giant to roll the bomb towards the gates. This doesn't work... the Giant's too drunk. So a clever Goblin shaman thinks up of an idea... he orders the Greenskins to paint a squig onto the bomb. Now, while the Giant doesn't know what a bomb is, he does recognize a squig. So they tell him to throw the "squig" at the door. This works and blows open the door, which makes the Dwarfs just pissed, and they all come rushing out in huge waves, which the Greenskins now need to fight. Wave after wave, until finally this big Dwarf hero comes out, and you fight and kill him, ending that cycle of the public quest. As you were fighting the big hero, the Dwarfs were closing their big gate you blew open, and the whole public quest starts over again. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Anyway, back to PvP having an impact (told you this would be rambling). The final huge goal of PvP is to take and pillage your enemy's capital. Again, while it's only temporary, it has a real impact. The people are forced to flee, those that remain can be killed, and it opens up tons of new things to do, like public quests, normal quests, instances and a bunch of other really cool things. They even talk about it a little on this podcast.

Another thing that I like about PvP for WAR is that there will be a lot of different Scenarios. Scenarios are WAR's version of Battlegrounds, instanced goal based combat which rewards the players inside and makes it roughly fair (equal players, close to similar levels, etc). Personally I'm expecting no less than one scenario, per tier, for the first three tiers and at least three scenarios on the final tier (one in the middle, one on each of the normally controlled zones, with possibly more available after a capital is captured). This means per battlefront I'm expecting a minimum of six, or eighteen total on release. This is a far cry from Blizzards depressing four BGs over the course of three years released and a previous four years of development. Now, I'm not expecting each Scenario to be unique, but to me, playing a game of capture the flag in different terrain would be enough. Being able to swap around to a different land type or something with a slightly different gimmick (such as one I've heard about has trolls in it, throwing rocks down at people) would be enough. Variety is the spice of life, and WoW is sorely lacking in this department.

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Next is how WAR will deal with healers. One of the longstanding complaints and requests for chang by many is that healing is boring and should be more reliant on doing damage. While I've long opposed this view, because I firmly believe that everyone has their own thing they enjoy doing, thus those who enjoy healing in it's current form in WoW should be allowed to continue doing this. You shouldn't go into WoW and completely alter healing, since that would leave those who enjoy and have invested time in those roles with something they may not want to do.

WAR on the other hand is giving the people who want more combative healers what they want, and is building it into the game from the ground up. Unlike WoW where every class has the ability to DPS, but it's separate from the role of healing, they are putting some synergy into the system. The simplified way of explaining it is that most of the support classes build up some sort of power through combat, which then improve the power and reduce the casting time. Yes it will be possible for these healers to not do any damage and just heal, but they will be very weak and unable to properly assist their allies without smashing faces or blasting foes.

I remember reading a post over at Warhammer Alliance where someone had played a Goblin Shaman. At first he just tried healing, only to find that his spells were weak and took long to cast (around five seconds). Then he started using his Shaman nukes, and noticed a bar filling up. His WAAAGH! bar, and when it got full it glowed as did his healing spells. He then noticed that his healing spells would take only about a second or two and were much more powerful, healing half or more of his allies health.

(EDIT: Found the link for the post on Goblin Shamans)

Other classes such as the Warrior Priest (Empire), and Disciple of Khaine (Dark Elf) use a similar system, while the Chaos Zealot and the High Elf Archmage use a system based around draining their enemies and using that power to heal their allies. The only class that doesn't seem to follow this system is the Dwarven Runepriest, which excel at pre-combat buffs, and in combat fighting power. I expect their in-combat heals to be equally effective all the time, but based on their descriptors I also expect their combat potential (both physical and magical) to be strong enough that it would be a folly to not wade into combat (but we shall see).

Two videos concerning the healers:
Podcast (watch around the middle)
Youtube video

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One of the last things I can think of that I really like about WAR is it's simplicity of class design. While yes there are twenty-four individual classes (four for each race) each one falls into a different role for each race. There is one tanking class, one healing/support class, one melee DPS class and one ranged DPS. There is no need to balance each class against all the others, merely balance them within their role. And while there will be variable ways to play and customize a given class within it's role (detailed here, here, and here) there is one core concept a class is built around.

One of the biggest flaws in WoW, I believe is each class has too much flexibility. No class has one defined role (beyond what players assign), but then each class needs each tree to be balanced against other trees, but also need to consider how those changes will affect the other trees in that class, not to mention how those changes will effect PvP and PvE. Good lord that was a run-on sentence. But I wanted put it all in one thought to emphasize how much is needed to be done per class.

To hell with all that rubbish! Each class in WAR only needs to be compared to the other classes of the same archetype in WAR. Each class only needs to be compared to 5 other classes and balanced as such because they will be very different than the other roles as they should be!


Well that covers everything that really stands out in my mind. Hope you've enjoyed it.

Why do you fight?

So as of late I've been in a funk. Got my Druid to the late 40s, but it's been a long time since anyone's done an arena match, which slowed down my desire to level the job. Since then I've been watching and reading a lot of the information on Warhammer Online (WAR) and it's got me really jonesing to play it.

This has gotten me thinking about why I suddenly lack such a strong enthusiasm to level up my druid for PvP, but really want to PvP in WAR. They are both just PvP, right? Not really, at least for me. For me, it's a matter of why do I fight?

In WoW, one PvPs to get gear, so you can PvP more (either more easily or at higher ranks in Arena if that's your cup of tea). There are two types of players that this model of PvP really appeals to:

• The Loot as Reward playerbase. You do PvP, you get epics. In fact it is one of the most surefire ways to gear yourself up. There may be some luck involved but you know by a certain time frame you will be decked out in all Season 1 epics, ignoring the potential gear from doing Arenas.
  
• The "I just like to PvP" playerbase. These are the players for whom fighting human opponents is the ultimate thrill and is where it's at. As detailed in Rohan's post here, the gear is merely there as a reward for the LaR players. For those who just like to PvP, you get gear to equalize everything else, and leave only skill and personal choices (like class and talent builds) to differentiate the great from the good. Challenging people and fighting in an arena match or in battlegrounds is the fun itself.

Now, for players of these types, WoW gives them everything they want, and plans on expanding that with the release of WotLK and the implementation of Lake Wintergrasp.

But that's not enough for me. I need a reason to fight beyond just fighting and beyond better gear. Let's take raiding for example. I go into Karazhan, and lead my guild on a merry killing spree through the whole thing. We get loot and kill more and get loot, but why? Ah, there's a good "why" here. I kill and get loot to see more.

As of right now I've beaten about 10 bosses more than I ever figured I'd see in this expansion. Going in, I decided I wouldn't worry about leaving my guild and joining a big raiding guild. I was fine with seeing what ever it is I could see. If I never stepped foot in Kara, so be it. The fact that my guild was able to push through Karazhan, and will some day probably move onto Zul'Aman and possibly 25-man raids is just gravy.

Anyway, watching the information on WAR, like how all the scenarios (the WAR equivalent of Battlegrounds) and quests and everything will add to the war effort of trying to capture the next zone, which all leads up to making an attack on your opponent's city. Realizing that things inside BGs and the like can have an amazing effect on the game at large makes all my efforts grinding honor and the like seem hollow and pointless.

So at this point I'm at a dividing point. Either way, it'll just be a time filler until WAR comes out. Either I continue to PvP in WoW as filler, or I work on playing DAoC and PvP there. Now, DAoC may be somewhat outdated, but conceptually it has the closest to what I want in PvP. The (so-called) RvR has fighting over keeps and relics and stuff. I haven't decided which way I'll go, but I'm thinking about both.

Anyway, whatever I decide, it's just a matter of time until I can play WAR and get what I really want. (Oh yeah, and the Tome of Knowledge looks ridiculously delicious.)

So as a final question to any of my readers, why do you fight? For gear? For the thrill of battle? To see more? Just to be with friends? There is no right or wrong answer, just different ones.

Why I dislike RMT and in-game currency farmers

I apologize for disallowing comments on this one. I don't want to start any hoopla about it. Real-Money-Trading and in-game currency farmers are probably one of the top 5 hot button subjects for MMO players. Just go over to Tobold's and do a search for RMT related articles (BTW, Tobold's is a great blog and was one of the primary inspirations to start my own). In the end, this post is merely me venting my opinions for people to read if they want.

I've been steadily playing MMOs for approximately 4 years now. I had played them prior to this, but at the time I was in the Army, and was unable to get good long-term internet access (I would end up playing EQ for a couple months at a time before I would stop playing due to moving or going on a field exercise or something). Shortly after I left the Army, Final Fantasy XI was released, and thanks to the prompting of the artists of the webcomics MacHall and Real Life, I started playing and joined their Linkshell, Shirtninjas.

Prior to this time, RMT was a minor problem. Most of it was done via services like eBay, and the like, done from person to person. Approximately a year or a little more prior to the U.S. release of FFXI, IGE came into existence. I would imagine a few other companies of a similar nature also appeared along with it, but IGE is the big name on the block. The result of IGE and other RMT companies effects on MMOs is already very well known. The market for hiring and employing (even if only by "Contract" which many RMT companies use to get around direct legal action for "employing" those who break the EULA) in-game currency farmers (ICF). Here's where my first issue lies:

1) ICFs will monopolize single high-value targets or reduce the availability of targets high-value farming areas: The impact of this one has gone down greatly since WoW and the Burning Crusade was released, but it's still there.

First I'll touch on the second portion, since that applies to WoW much more than the other. Let's use the Elemental Plateau as an example. Most folks at 70 know of the Elemental Plateau in Nagrand. It's a place where Elementals of the four prime elements appear, and is intended to be a good place to hunt motes of the appropriate element. The problem is that each of the Elementals appear in fairly limited quantities and their spawn rate is intentionally limited (as opposed to a dynamic spawn rate, which I will detail later). I would be willing to bet that on every server at least one person up on the Elemental Plateau is an ICF. For every ICF up there, that means one less "real person" is able use the Plateau to farm.

One thing that Blizzard added in The Burning Crusade that lowered the impact of ICFs upon farming is Dynamic Spawning. Dynamic Spawning works as such: The more players in a given area, killing mobs will increase the spawn rate for those mobs. This is limited in who it works on, but for the mobs that are effected by it, it strongly decreases the impact that ICFs have upon player farming.

The other point is one that, essentially, does not exist in WoW, but does exist in previous MMOs. There were things called "Named Monsters" or NMs. The WoW equivalent are Rare monsters. The primary difference is that the rewards from NMs were easily much better than equal level gear, and in some later cases the best available anywhere. This was fine as a design not taking into account ICFs, but with their introduction they were, in many cases, able to claim a virtual monopoly on NMs, forcing players from either using them to make money themselves or farm the items directly, thus bypassing the need to save up large amounts of money to buy the item.

Either way, ICFs make life a lot harder for people who honestly are trying to make money.

Now, onto the second point. This was not obvious at first. In fact, it didn't really become obvious until the first "Christmas sale" by companies like IGE. As I mentioned in the previous post, at winter vacation time there is usually a surplus of people getting money and RMT companies lowering prices. This leads to a flood of money going from RMT bank characters who hold onto huge amounts of money to the economies on the servers they are on.

I'm no economist, but I'm able to figure out what that means. Let's say at Christmas, 5,000,000g enters the economy of each server. This is not so far fetched, since (doing a bit of searching) shows that current gold prices are around $250-500 for 5,000g. After the holiday price drop, we can estimate the max cost for 5,000g at $300 (and probably less), and I could easily see someone purchasing one or two of those with Holiday gift money. While a portion of this will be siphoned out through the act of buying an epic flyer, anyone who does the Netherwing faction quests will negate this loss by at least two-fifths, meaning that still a large amount of money is suddenly entering the economy.

So what's does it matter if a lot of money is entering the economy over a short period of time? Well, I'll use a Wikipedia article to sum it up, "Mainstream economists overwhelmingly agree that high rates of inflation are caused by high rates of growth of the money supply." Simply put, it will likely cause strong inflation. The average price on things bought from the AH will rise by a noticeable amount, and those who do not RMT will suffer because of it. So here's the core problem:

2) RMT companies do not consider what impact their selling of in-game currency will have on the economies of the game servers. When someone buys their money, they expect it promptly, and RMTs usually deliver it as such. While I would imagine that, generally, business remains predictable, during key periods such as Christmas, the demand for RMT goes up, and the response has a noticable impact.

Money floods the economy as hundreds and possibly thousands of people per server order and are given money. This impacts their buying habits at the AH (much more willing to pay whatever it takes to get what they need since they have money to burn), and as a consequence impacts how other people price what they sell and how much they are willing to pay for stuff (also willing to pay more).

In a simplified way of saying it, a sharp increase in the total value of money in the economy will cause temporary inflation. Over the course of a year, RMTs will use IMFs to siphon small amounts of money out of the economy. Since more money is entering the economy as this happens (and probably more money is entering it than leaving it), it doesn't have a noticeable impact on the server's overall economy. Then at the end of the year, much in-game currency is bought at once, causing the hoarded money to flood into the economy, raising general prices on the AH. While over time this inflation spreads money out amongst everyone (higher prices at the AH mean eventually everyone gets more money), the more immediate effect is newbie players on older servers are essentially cut off from buying things they cannot produce, either for wearing or for crafting (e.g. leather needed for crafting guns for engineering).

Now, this problem has been somewhat mitigated on WoW, due to the prevalence of Auctioneer. Since Auctioneer tracks previous sales, it won't cause a single person selling very high to skew it's numbers. On the other hand in other games that don't have things like Auctioneer, such as FFXI, it has a strong impact. I've seen many times, right after Christmas, the prices soar very noticeably.

Final point:
3) RMTs don't care how the money they acquire is gotten.

The way I've phrased this is fairly innocent sounding. As I mentioned back in December, it seemed like there had been a recent flood of WoW account hacking, along with the FFXI site hacking (inserting a trojan virus onto a few major FFXI sites which then downloaded itself onto anyone's computer that went to the site, leading to hacked accounts). While I can't back up with facts that these hacked accounts were used to fund RMT companies, the strong increase during this period (including at least 4 people in my guild) paints that picture to me.

But this point stands on it's own, even without the theory of RMTs using account hacking to acquire funds. The point is simply that I doubt companies like IGE don't ask where the money comes from. Even if they were to ask, there's no guarantee that it is "legit" (as much as that can be). They need to get the currency to their clientèle, so they make sure enough is available to meet the demand.

Again, I have no hard evidence of it, I firmly believe that many RMT companies use ill-gotten funds (ignoring the illegality of any RMT in games with EULA that ban it) to supply their customers.

Games like Second Life are less impacted, due to there being a legal method for transferring real money to in-game money and the other way around. For games like this, they were designed with RMTing in mind, thus they are not overly adversely impacted by them.

Sony also did something similar to this with the introduction of the Station Exchange servers, which allowed players to create or transfer characters to specific servers that "allowed" RMTing. And by "allow" I mean that SOE created their own RMT group and supplied all the funds and gear you could normally buy, but did it in-house and on servers separate from everyone else, again minimizing it's effect on the rest of the game.

While I dislike RMTs, games or servers designed with RMTing built in are perfectly acceptable (I won't play them, but that's beside the point). In the three ways I mentioned above, RMTs and ICFs have a profound impact on games that are not designed with RMTs in mind. While for a percent of the gaming population (I do not pretend to know how much) benefits from it, it comes at the expense of other's enjoyment. None of what we do in MMOs are on a "need" basis, so doing things that harm others enjoyment of the game in a way not part of the experience is not even close to acceptable to me.

Does this mean I'm famous?

Seems like I've managed to acquire the attention of a RMT company from the EU. Not going to name the company, and I'm deleting the posts as soon as I see them, but it seems interesting that I'm getting RMT ad spam in my comments.

As for my lack of posts as of late, I apologize. I've been working off-and-on on a post to continue my previous post, but in the end, I'm a gamer and when I'm at home I like to play WoW, not post about it.

As far as the game itself goes, my Druid is up to the mid 40s. Coming along nicely there. The guild lost a few members to some bigger raiding guilds as a few folks decided they wanted to raid a bit more quickly than we were. Luckily, about the same time, around half a dozen folks got keyed up for Kara and we've started helping them get geared up. We're also considering moving up to three nights a week for raiding. This is what I've been hoping for all along, and will allow us two nights for Kara and one night for new stuff (Zul'Aman or Gruul and beyond).

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to finish up my long post soon.

Be careful!

This one is important enough to justify it's own post. Last night when I got home, I noticed a post by one of the officers in my guild's officer forums mentioning that an unfortunate member of our guild got hacked, and all of his gear was either liquidated or transferred. So I login, to check on him and double check my own holdings (all secure on the home front). The guildmate isn't online, though he has reported his losses to a Blizzard GM, which means recovery is on the way, but due to the loss of materials he's not up for playing much at the moment. Understandable.

I went on to play around on my Hunter, then do HMT as I mentioned earlier. At some point during this, some guildies mentioned that their friends' accounts had also been hacked, and there were reports of it happening on other servers. The officers began talking about it, and one of them made the connection I hadn't: It's almost Christmas.

Now, for those of you who are new to MMOs or WoW, this may not mean the same thing as it does to some of us. Christmas (or whatever the appropriate gift-giving holiday for your religion/ethnicity is) means many things, and of them it means people getting large sums of money, and RMTs are taking advantage of that by lowering their prices through the floor.

While I have only circumstantial evidence, I've seen this happen before. Right around this time of year there's a large demand for in-game currency on the part of RMT companies, which means they are probably paying slightly above average for it. This means that whoever is getting it, is putting extra effort, including into the realm of hacking, to get that money.

I could go into a tirade about why RMTing is bad, I'm not going to do that here. This post is more of a warning, and I hope folks spread it around.

First things first, if you are using Internet Explorer... STOP. IE is more full of holes that swiss cheese. While I personally prefer Firefox, I won't tell people what to use, just go for a more secure browser. Many trojans download themselves through adds on sites, and IE does little to stop them.

Next find a good Spyware and Anti-Virus program, if you don't already have one. If you don't have one, you can pick a free Anti-Virus program from here, and I recommend for a Spyware Scanner using Lavasoft's Ad-Aware.

One of the more common methods to get past any security setups you have is to piggyback or be built into mods we download. The first thing to do is when you update your mods, do them all at once, and before activating WoW, run your virus scanner. If any snuck in, it very well might catch them. Also, I advise against using automated downloading programs such as WoWAceUpdater or CurseUpdater. Instead I suggest going the long way, and only getting mods directly from their source sites. This way you can decrease the chance of them being tampered with.

Finally, if you don't already, turn on the option on WoW to automatically fill in your login name. One of the most common methods of account hacking is keylogging. The less you type, the less information they can get from you. If you never type in your login name, all they will have is your password.

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Some of these steps (especially the ones concerning mods) may seem a bit extreme, but the potential losses you can incur from being hacked are very bad. Yes, you are highly likely to regain your lost gear and money, but you may not get back your reagents or crafting materials which could be hundreds of gold worth of loss. Even worse is that a good estimate of the time it will take for them to return your lost stuff is a week or two. That means you can't really do anything until then. I know I certainly don't want to spend two weeks sidelined, sitting out of raids and Arena, because some bozo decided my stockpile of gems would be a good money maker.

Going to be slow until January...

With (insert appropriate winter solstice holiday here) right around the corner, we are only getting minimal raids in, which is to be expected I would imagine. The earliest we might go back to two-nights-a-weekend for raids is the 29th and 30th of December (even that's iffy).

Anyway, this past Saturday 3 people were unable to raid, which led to postponing it until Sunday, so all we did was a minimum boss Prince run, with enough time at the end for a Nightbane kill. Prince netted one of our main healers her T4 helm (woo!) and Nightbane continued to be a stingy little *mumblemumble*. Of the 4 drops he's given us so far, all of them have been unneeded, and 3 were sharded, and the fourth was the Scaled Breastplate of Carnage, which was given to our Hunter only for her to test it out and find out it's worse than her current Thick Netherscale Breastplate.

Following up Kara, I was a stone's throw away from having 60 badges, so last night we hit up Heroic Mana-Tombs. I have to admit that Heroic Nexus-Prince Shaffar is easily the hardest heroic boss I've fought yet. We got him down, but it took three tries. On the upside I can now summon Yor, I picked up a good tanking sword, the Warp-Storm Warblade, for swapping in on damage intensive fights like Prince, and got enough badges for me to pick up my Girdle of the Protector, putting me at 3/8 BoJ items bought and 170 Badges spent.

Finally, I continue to work on my Druid. He's up to 17 at the current timeframe. In addition, since my Druid is a Leatherworker I've decided to level a Dwarven Hunter together with my Druid. This way I'll be providing armor for both characters. Part of the reason behind this decision is that I enjoy engineering, but one of the biggest things that bothered me about engineering on my Paladin was I couldn't use any of my guns. So I have an Dwarven Engineer Hunter, with his Prairie Wolf pet, McKinley, that I ran from Dun Morogh to Mulgore to get (but that's okay, he barks when I click him!). While I enjoy being a Druid and a Bear (rawr!) there's something really fun about having a pet wolf to sic on people and mobs. Hee hee hee!

Nightbane down, and I need better DPS gear...

This weekend my guild started out in Karazhan, clearing Moroes, Opera, Curator, Chess, Prince and Attumen (in that order). After we finished up Prince at 11 or 11:30, we figured we had enough time so we hopped down and kicked Attumen out of the way so we could access the repair guy.

The following night we re-entered Kara, starting off with facing off against Nightbane. Now, I realize it's possible for a Paladin tank to take on Nightbane, but I tried twice, and each time people died, even when we got him down to 50% (prior to the call for a wipe). Can it be done? Absolutely. Can I do it? Yes I can. But much like Maiden, having me do it is harder than it needs to be.

So Gurneyman, the warrior tank who has been gearing himself up, was called upon. He preformed more than admirably. His first try, we downed Nightbane with a minimal amount of deaths, and those only happened when Nightbane was in the air. After Nightbane, we went and downed Illhoof and Aran (first time for a guild-only run). Go us!

For me, during the Nightbane fight, since we already had 3 healers, I opted to try my hand at DPSing. In a dismal performance, I was only putting out 250 DPS during that fight. While I wasn't ideally geared for DPS (more tanking gear than necessary) it made me realize that I really need to do what I mentioned a few posts earlier, and wade into BGs to pick up the Gladiator's Aegis set.

Now, it was offered to me to join the Arena team I play with on my Mage. I considered, but hadn't decided. Last night I hit up Arathi Basin on my Paladin, trying out a few different specs.

First I went for a Prot/Holy build, with enough points in Prot to be able to tank if needed (33 for Holy Shield + Imp HS), while the rest in Holy. While I didn't mind healing, needing to stop and stand still while I healed, would lead to a dead Alix. It took my a while to figure out the right balance for Kaziel, but I've learned that unless the spell has an incredibly short casting time, or the enemy is running away, you don't want to stand still while casting a spell. On my Mage the only spell I normally stand still to cast rank 1 Frostbolt, which only takes 1 second. This is too short to normally interrupt and slows my target for 9 seconds, with a 15% chance to freeze them in place. For everything else, I use insta-casts. Having to stand still to heal my targets in PvP is a dangerous and painful gamble... one I would rather not take. In a way, this experience was very enlightening. It showed me that I'm not likely to enjoy playing as a Holy Paladin in PvP, so I've put Derras on hold, possibly indefinitely (If I level a Ret Paladin I want it to be a Blood Elf and not just for SoB).

After that, I tried a more offensive build, emphasizing survivability and the type of gear I already have. While I did not suffer from the problem of holding still and being interrupted, I learned something else valuable: Without a good source of Damage Over Time or high burst damage, a class doesn't bring much to PvP. Since another class can come in and heal quickly, unless a class can constantly quickly sap another's health or blow them over in two to three hits, they will be taken out by others who can. While I do have access to a DoT (SoV), it is neither ranged, nor overly powerful. SoR's damage pales in comparison to the type of damage I need to put out. While I was able survive decently, my lack of good burst or DoT damage really diminished much value I could bring.

So I've moved back to my previous 0/45/16 build, and I'll just crappily PvP in that, maybe trying to heal. Not sure. After I get the Marks I need, I'll just throw myself time and time again into AV for the honor, since I know I can tank there and I'll do a damn good job at it too. Also, not going to join up for my Arena team on Alix. Just too much of an annoyance.

Finally, this cemented the previous move I was working on. I had been thinking before that I wouldn't like all the standing around healing and being vulnerable. On the other hand, I knew Druids excelled at HoTs, two of which are insta-cast (Rejuv and Lifebloom), along with another insta-cast that uses a HoT as "fuel" for it's heal (Swiftmend). This allows Druids to heal on-the-move, making them a painful class to oppose in PvP. Prior to my experience PvPing on Alix, I had already started working on Cielthan, a Night Elf Druid. In my spare time I will continue working on him, both as a means to further understand Feral Druids (how I plan to level) and to make a Resto Druid for PvP (planned level 70 build will be something like this).

I am a sad panda

So I was using my new toy, Warcrafter, to test out where I will stand with my Badge of Justice purchases. After doing some testing I am happy to announce that I do have enough avoidance, even prior to upgrading my shoulders, to equip Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian, Slikk's Cloak of Placation, the Girdle of the Protector, the Unwavering Leggards, the Sabatons of the Righteous Defender, and the Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx. That's six of the eight items I planned to buy with Badges of Justice. Unfortunately, taking those 6 items, even after I upgrade my shield and shoulders, I will still be just barely be remaining uncrushable.

While it's great that I can use those 6, that means even after I upgrade everything else, I'll still be using my Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden. I'd prefer to use the Bonefist for the great boost in STA and armor, but I just can't afford the loss in either Defense or Avoidance. And the fact that I don't have enough avoidance to put on the Brooch of Deftness is a bummer. I <3 Expertise.

BTW, here's my setup with my 6 BoJ purchases

The value of Honor/Arena gear for a PvE Paladin and "Goodbye, Seal of Vengeance"

About a month ago I mentioned I've taken up doing PvP on my Mage to help a friend. Since then it's caused an increased interest by certain members of the guild in PvP and arena. We even started a 3v3 and a 5v5 team. But we really lack one key thing: A dedicated healer. Both teams have a Paladin, a Shaman, and a Druid but all of them are offensive specs. No Holy or Resto specced players. So I rolled another Paladin and began leveling him up (35 currently). Still going to play my Mage, but also working on a Holy Paladin (leveling as Ret to get some experience in that tree since I've never been above 16 points in it).

But I digress, my point is that since I've got a Paladin-in-planning for Arena I've been looking at the Arena sets. The Gladiator's Vindication and Redemption sets are pretty obvious to which spec they "belong". But then there's the Gladiator's Aegis set. This set's name would imply that it's built for Protection, but the problem with that is that not many protection talents beyond the 4th tier are really made for PvP. The best PvP Protection build I could go for was this, and without enemy collision mapping protection does little good in PvP.

While I still don't think the Aegis set has a lot of value in PvP (anymore at least with the change that added spell damage to +healing), for a Protection Paladin that doesn't need to tank the boss in a PvE encounter (Maiden, Aran and Nightbane come to mind), the Aegis set has around the same amount of spell damage as the equivilent quality tanking set, along with a fair amount of +crit which would allow for respectable damage output in a raid scenario.

One thing that's lacking from PvE itemization is a straight spell damage plate set. Now I understand why there isn't one: There has yet to be implemented a purely magical DPS tree for a plate wearer. The closest you get is a Protection Paladin, but he needs more defensive stats, so they aren't going to waste good itemization on a very small portion of the playerbase.

It's my opinion that when a Protection Paladin doesn't need to heal or tank, having the Aegis set is their best option for DPS, since it plays to their strong points (1H, access to +spell damage gear). If I wasn't already working on 2 PvP characters at the moment I'd probably throw Alix into BGs full strength to start getting this gear. Maybe even do Arenas for S2 or S3 pieces.

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Now, onto Seal of Vengeance. I love Seal of Vengeance. In terms of damage output (and thus threat output) from the Seal itself and the Judgement, it's second to none. In addition, since it's a DoT and not direct damage, if you're fighting a mob that moves away occasionally (such as a Charge, or Moroes's Vanish) it will continue to tick. Problem is that despite it's strengths which are very powerful, it has some very bad weaknesses. For the sake of any comparisons, I will use Seal of Righteousness, since that's the other "Main" spelldamage seal.

1. Ramp-up time: While SoV does put out more damage than SoR, it takes time to get there. With my current 2.7 speed weapon, average time for Holy Vengeance to stack up to five is 13.5 seconds, assuming each hit procs SoV. This ramp-up time is really bad since it means that your DPS need to wait even longer for you to generate enough threat for them to start to kill.
2. Holy Vengeance falling off the mob: Despite increasing the duration of Holy Vengeance by three seconds in 2.3, Holy Vengeance still has a chance to run it's duration without being refreshed. Which means in addition to losing damage just because you have to start over, it will be another 13.5 seconds before your running at full speed again. The fact that Holy Vengeance can fall off ties to my next point...
3. Weapon speed and Procs Per Minute (PPM): Seal of Vengeance is on a 20 PPM system. This means that you will average no more than 20 procs of SoV per minute no matter how often you swing. This also means that in order to effectively get Holy Vengeance to a stack of five quickly and to keep it up you need a weapon of 2.5 speed or slower. Unfortunately with the exception of the Gavel of Unearthed Secrets, every spell damage weapon has a speed of 1.6 or 1.8. Without another high spell damage slow one-hander, eventually SoR will surpass SoV in damage output.
4. Judgement of Vengeance isn't able to be used as a lead-in: Since JoV relies on at least one Holy Vengeance effect up on the mob, you can't use it to generate a quick amount of threat at the start of the fight. This means that your spell rotation needs to look like this: SoR > Judgement > SoV (for 7-9 seconds) > SotC > Judgement > SoV > Judgement > SoV, etc. While it's not too hard to do, it's thinking needed to be done in addition to the about dozen other things that need to be tracked as well. I just don't need all that, not to mention that in an emergency situation ("ZOMGZ! got too close to the mobs and pulled and now I need to pick them all up and save !") I'm probably not thinking about how JoV won't generate any threat for me without Holy Vengance on the mob. I'm just trying to get threat quickly and I waste a Judgement and then I'm in an even worse situation.

Considering all the problems with SoV, despite the benefits it gives me right now, in the long run the best option for me is SoR. This also means that once I reach 107.7% avoidance, I can upgrade to the new BoJ libram (not that I think I'll reach that level any time soon...). With this perspective, I'm (sadly) going to retire SoV for most situations, and do a bit of shopping around for weapons again (now Exalted with Honor Hold). If I find a weapon that suits me better than the Gavel, I'll upgrade to it, at least until I can get my hands on the Amani Punisher or one of the 25-man weapons.

Making money

First off is a reply to a question asked by Honorshammer and Galo concerning how I actually got up the 5,000 gold necessary for my epic flight skill. First thing I cannot emphasize enough is to be very very careful with your expenditures. Simply put, if you don't need it, don't buy it. When you boil it down, the only things we need to spend money on are elixirs/flasks/foods for raids (even in 5-mans you can get by without food), repair bills, gems/enchants, and flying places. Everything else is extraneous. Giving some money to your alt to help him along? Nope. Buying that recipe that's up on the AH? Nope. About the only exception towards this line of thought is if you know the purchase will have direct and fairly immediate monetary returns. For example, purchasing a rare recipe that you know you can make and will sell well. This is obviously a good investment and even if it takes Primal Nethers will pay off in the long run (my guild leader can make Felsteel Longblades and does this).

Now as for what I specifically did, I will admit that I kinda cheated. As a Jewelcrafter I'm sitting on a goldmine. I refer not to prospecting ore for jewels. While I found in general I could make some decent money with that at first, as the value of certain jewels dropped and the price of ore generally remained the same, the average value of prospecting went down. Too much of a gamble hoping for a high value gem like a Living Ruby or a Star of Elune instead of a low value gem like a Talasite. I found it better to go with the sure profit of 25g per stack of Adamantite Ore. No, what I refer to for JC being a goldmine is cutting of gems. Easiest way I've found to do this is to get Auctioneer, do a quick scan of the AH, and then go though your gem list looking for gems that have "No competition". Make sure not to pick gems with Spell Penetration, Resilience, or any blue colored gems with anything other than STA. After that buy some uncut gems of the type that have "No competition" and cut them and sell them back at 5-10g more than you bought the uncut version for. If you're cutting a Meta Gem, go for 10-20g more. The obvious downsides are that it requires you to have JC and do some prior investments both in money and reputation grinding (if you can access the Consortium Vendor in Kara and are Revered with them you can get the Design: Bracing Earthstorm Diamond, which sells very well due to it's relative rarity), but after you get enough designs for gems you can basically make almost endless money with no effort on your part.

The other big thing a Protection Paladin can do is AOE grinding. If you haven't already go grind your rep with Sporeggar up to Honored for the shield (also a good way to make money for Herbalists if you kill Fungal Giants) then go to one of the many places mentioned over at Maintankadin forums for AOE grinding (I find I like the Demon Hunter Supplicants for the Scryer tokens). What I've found best is using Retribution Aura, Blessing of Sanctuary, Judgement of Light, and Seal of Wisdom. Those, combined with the shield brings down even the largest crowds quickly. A fast attack weapon is also advisable. If you happen to have a high level tailor and enchanter, send any Netherweave to them and have them make Netherweave Bracers to make and disenchant. You can sell the mats for way more than you would sell the straight Netherweave.

Even then, it's a slow process. I've been working on getting the 5,000g for around 8 months or so. Unless you get super lucky with a epic quality BoE drop or recipe to sell on the AH for a grand or more it's just a matter of plugging away at it a little bit at a time.