Friday, November 19, 2010

Wintergrasp Alone

11/19/2010

Though it's not mentioned in the patch notes here, Wintergrasp now has a new mechanic. Apparently, on some severely unbalanced servers *cough* Demon Soul *cough*, even a 20 stack of tenacity on Alliance players 24/7 is not enough to guarantee them a fair shot at getting VOA on a consistent basis. When they did manage to get it, it was usually very, very early in the morning.

Imagine my surprise when I decided to queue for an upcoming WG, I zoned in, and I was the ONLY person in the raid group for 20 minutes. I had a few fights with the apparently only Ally in the zone, a druid named Xime, and while his moonfire spamming killed me a couple times (me in my PvE gear at 29k health, him with 3 stacks of tenacity and 39k health), I did manage to get a few kills on him as well.

I had decided to stop trying to take the Broken Temple workshop and instead go for Sunken Temple, when it showed he was finally trying to attack Flamewatch Tower. Goodie for me! I had just gotten to lieutenant by doing a little npc kill farming, so I quickly rode back to Broken Temple, hopped in a siege engine, and putt-putted my way up to the south-west wall of the keep. Just then, another Horde joined the raid, and a matching Ally paladin named Jcr came over the wall and demolished my tank.

I tried taking a demolisher straight up from the Westspark workshop to the front gates, but with only about 2 minutes left when I got there, we didn't get the front wall taken down after dealing with the druid's patrolling siege engine.

It would have been epic, though!

So, Wintergrasp is now strictly enforced with balancing teams, as well as tenacity.
Ahh, I searched a little more, and found the source post.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

No more portals

11/16/2010

The portals to capitol cities in Shattrath and Dalaran will be disappearing in Cataclysm, which is a bummer. Back in vanilla WoW, for the month I played before BC came out, I HATED waiting around for boats or zeppelins to arrive, then waiting on board for the vehicle to start again, and finally arrive at their destination. As soon as I heard that I could set my hearth to Shattrath, I happily paid 5-10 gold apiece for all my toons to go there, just so I could quickly continent-hop at my convenience.

When WOTLK came out, it was even better! No longer did I have to run down from the Scryers tier to the portals, they were just around the corner from the inns.

I understand that it's an attempt to try to get more players to stay around the capitol cities, where they will be more likely to be available as crafters, teleporters, or general advice givers to new players. I just don't like it very much.

I'd like to see a continuation of the portal concept. What about being able to access a portal in capitol cities that allowed you to instantly warp to any inn that you had been to? Same concept as talking to flight masters, but due to the higher cost of magic or gnomish engineering mats, the cost would be greater than flying there. That way, new players could still get around at a decent rate, but richer, more experienced players didn't have to deal with a 10-15 minute flight to get to where they needed to turn in a quest.

WTF?

11/16/2010

As an altoholic and recipe hound, I have a lot of addons installed to make my life easier. CT-mod forms a great deal of my UI, Recount for my personal knowledge of how well I'm doing in groups, Omen threat meter to know when to back the fuck off on my DPS so the mob doesn't decide that I'm a tastier target than the tank.

However, Ackis Recipe List has recently made opening my profession books kinda....agonizing. With addons turned off, it's instant. With Ackis and ProfessionsBook turned on, it can take a few MINUTES to load my alchemy book when I'm trying to do my daily transmute.

I finally decided to find out what the problem was, and with a little googling, I determined that deleting my WTF and cache folders would probably be a good idea. I did it, and it made a world of difference.

So if you ever have a problem of lagging while checking your professions, try deleting the WTF and cache folders.

P.S. You might want to make a copy of the two folders on your desktop first, just in case.