How do I love thee 4.0.1? Let me count the ways...

10/20/2010

Despite the Cog of Doom bug, and the inevitable addon disruption, I really, really like the new patch.

For a player who doesn't raid, and only does heroics, it allows you to get high level gear in a relatively short amount of time. 95 Frost Badges for a piece of gear? That took me over a month and a half to earn at 2 badges per day. When Brewfest rolled around, my toons doubled their earning power to 4 Frosties per day. Wahoo!!

I haven't even run any heroics yet, the only instance I've set foot in since the patch is the daily to kill the Headless Horseman, but according to MMO-Champion, the average amount of Justice Points you'd get per heroic is either 23, or 39, if you're adding together the Heroic dungeon and Heroic boss. Not sure.

You get 24 Justice Points for killing HH each day, and say if you got 23 JP for each random dungeon.....1100/23 = 47.8 heroics to earn enough JP to buy my ilvl 264 chest piece, which, you guessed it, took me over 47 days to earn previously.

I'm probably a bit OCD in that, if I can only do something once per day, I MUST do something once a day. Remember the Arcanite transmutes, where you could only transmute every 48 hours? Yeah, I had about 90 of them saved up before they changed it.

So, for a casual player like me, the changes with the patch allow me to run heroics til my eyes bleed if I really want a piece of gear, then just let my toon do nothing, and be free to go play my other toons without worrying about "missing out" on opportunities to get better stuff on my main.

I have to say though, it's gonna make me lazy. With the previous Triumph and Frost badge division, I would run heroics for Triumphs to get me to the 232-245 level of gear, while waiting for enough Frosties to slowly, agonizingly slowly, replace piece by piece of gear.

Now? My mage Banesidhe is in Frostsavage Battlegear, with the BOA chest and shoulders. I'll replace my level 187 pieces with level 251-264 pieces, or if some level 200 pieces drop, I'll go for them in the meantime. With heroics being tuned for Wrath talent trees, we are way OP for heroics nowadays, so I doubt my lower dps will really even raise an eyebrow, or get me kicked.

I'm a patient person, and I just don't see the point of spending 591 JP for XXX, or 935 JP for YYY, when I could run a few more heroics and get ZZZ for 1100 JP.

Update to Cog of Doom

10/18/2010

Just wanted to share this. A very enterprising person posted this in the Bug Report Blizzard forums. Link

Deyneth made up scripts for 2 macros, the first of which you'd use whenever there might be a possibility of freezing the game. I'd recommend turning off the tooltips whenever going into a random dungeon, like when zoning into the Oculus, your mouse naturally lands right on the entrance portal, causing the freeze-up. Also, definitely do it when going for the Headless Horseman. The first script will still allow you to interact with objects, it just won't pop up a tool tip description when you hover over them.

And, when the danger has passed, like after you've killed the HH, use the second to turn tooltips back on.

I've taken the liberty of posting the scripts here as well. Copy & paste into macros for your toons, and you shouldn't have any problems. /cheers for Deyneth!

Turn Off Tooltips

/script GameTooltip.Temphide = function() GameTooltip:Hide() end; GameTooltip:SetScript("OnShow", GameTooltip.Temphide);

Turn On Tooltips

/script GameTooltip:SetScript("OnShow", GameTooltip.Show);

Gold making with Hallow's End

10/18/2010

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about this. The wands you need for the Hallow's End Achievement The Masquerade are not limited duration. I had saved mine from last year, so immediately when the event started this year I was able to post "Selling wand charges for the Masquerade, X,X,X,X for 20g each."

I probably have about 5-10 wands on most of my 30 toons, and I've probably sold about 400 gold worth of charges so far, just in the course of continent hopping thru Dalaran while doing Hallow's End quests.

I'm not gold hungry, otherwise I could just stay in Dalaran and constantly spam trade with it. If you wanted to do so, the first few days would be your best market, as the demand will definitely wane.

The Cog of Doom!!!!!! ...... Or, how a mouse-over throws a wrench in the works

10/18/2010

Hallow's End is upon us, and I was looking forward to getting my Loot on with the Headless Horseman, especially since I only managed to do the event once with Bloodshrike last year.

Instead, I've only managed to become like Ichabod Crane, dumped unceremoniously from the instance when I zone in. When you get in the graveyard, directly in front of you is a pumpkin, which you almost are invariably already mousing over. Unfortunately......there seems to be a bug in the 4.01 patch, which will frequently cause WoW to freeze up when mousing over or clicking on almost anything that shows a cog. Mage tables, flags, anything of that sort can cause problems.

I had thought that some of my addons were causing the problem, as I noticed Deadly Boss Mods message load, then WoW immediately froze up. But after poking around the forums, it looks like it's on Blizz to fix it.