• Allaryin – 70 dwarf hunter (52/8/1)
• Chokuretsu – 71 gnome warlock (0/54/8)
• Kikichikki – 70 draenei priest (0/61/0)
• Juvu – 70 orc death knight (55/0/5)

Most of the reason I don’t have anyone in the mid-high 70′s yet is because of time spent getting Choku and Juvu up to speed.

Choku was 67 when the expansion came out, so after a very bad Utgarde Keep attempt, I took her back to Netherstorm until 68, when I moved to Borean Tundra – which is completely soloable in crummy outland greens. Choku is planned to be my main in Wrath (just as Kiki was my main for most of BC, and Al was my main in classic). I dropped tailoring for inscription and am slowly leveling that up, just buying flowers whenever I feel the urge. I won’t obsess about inscription until Choku’s approaching 80.

Juvu is my big experiment in death knights… and in high level horde content… and in playing on a different server without my normal support structure (created on Terenas and then payed-transfered to Malfurion to join coworkers). On the road from 55 to 70, he’s respecced 5 times now, and I’ve got some very strong opinions on what works for “low” level solo grinding as a DK. /played from rolling char to dinging 70 = 32 hours (spread out over 14 days RL time, so mostly unrested).

Kiki hasn’t done anything since the expansion landed. I’m waiting for dual specs to start leveling her – It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in any serious face melting

Al… has gone fishing, and exploring, and pet collecting. The only quests I’ve done with him so far have been the gem perfection quest, Dalaran cooking dailies and stuff for Kalu’ak rep. I think this is Al’s new calling in life. I’ve become so rusty at grouping with a hunter that I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that he’ll never really group again.

The remainder of the reason why I haven’t done any Dragonblight quests yet is because I’m doing the recruit-a-friend thing with a new account for my wife. At the end of our first 1-hour play session, we were level 8. After our second, we were lvl 12. If she retains sufficient interest to play a few hours a week for the duration of the bonus xp period, I fully expect that I’ll finally have lvl 60′s in every class as a result

The reason I’ve not written anything in over a month should be fairly obvious. Mind, it wasn’t all WoW. Leading up to Wrath’s release, I passed the time by playing a good bit of EVE (and have since canceled my account again).

I’m planning on writing some reviews of the viability of the new hunter pets in a pve solo environment as well as a few posts on death knight specs and spell rotations. I’ve also got a big technical (very unrelated) post in the works that might be out this weekend, we’ll see.

I did it right this time. Kiki spent the vast majority of her post-newbie levels as a holy/discipline hybrid build and eventually ended up at 28/33/0. Smite and mana efficiency FTW.

I also planned ahead. Not only did I have 5 pieces of lvl 70 eq waiting for me (including the Primal Mooncloth set). Not only did I have enough money saved up to buy my flying mount, but I actually “camped the chicken spawn”. I hit level 70 less than 30 yards from the riding trainer in Wildhammer, bought my chicken, and flew away.

Kiki currently has 6741 hp, 9266 mana, just shy of 1250 bonus healing and 154 mp5 while casting (354 while not casting). She has over 400 int and spirit. Her /played is just over 10 days.

boring history

(Seriously, I’m about to ramble for a few hours… Hey, I said this took 12 years…)

I’ve always enjoyed healing in RPG’s, and I like to think that I’ve gotten fairly good at it over the years. I play clerics and druids in pen and paper RPG’s. I cried like a baby when Aeris died – and not just because I was emotionally involved in the story (which I was), but also because she was my healer. My first MUD character became a priest on September 10th, 1996.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about healing in games that I enjoy so much, but I like it more than summoning (a close second – playing healers who can summon makes me giddy). I’m pretty sure my original obsession with clerics was strictly the result of numberchasing munchkinitis. In AD&D, clerics felt like the most flexible class to me. They could heal, they could smite, they could summon at very low levels, they had good hp and could wear heavy armour and hit things with big hammers. My online handle “Allaryin” comes from my first successful D&D character, a chaotic good dwarven cleric of Tempus – the Forgotten Realms god of war.

However, in subsequent games, I recanted this position. Somewhere along the line, the idea of being able to do anything and everything at any time started losing its appeal. I became less interested in whacking things with hammers and calling down fire to consume my enemies whole… and more interested in passively altering events. Why wield the hammer yourself when the fighter can do a better job at it – especially with my help keeping him alive?

Future incarnations of Allaryin stopped following warrior gods like Tempus and started following Lathander the god of light and creation… and eventually evolved into followers of Ilmater the martyr’s god. I became obsessed with keeping my party members standing, even if it meant they had to find another priest to raise me when I fell.

When ’96 rolled around and I was introduced to muds, it was a happy coincidence that the guys who kickstarted the addiction were a knight and a priest. I quickly gravitated toward the priest’s guild and when the time came, chose to play as a priest of Morike, the game world’s goddess of healing. Though I eventually played almost every other class in the game, I always came back to Morike. If I logged into the mud right now, Allaryin would still be there, a very dusty and unplayed but still very fervent follower of the light.

Fast forward to March of 2004, FFXI hit my PS2 and I was all ready to reinvent Allaryin again as a Tarutaru white mage, but the game’s user interface had other plans. I was unable to figure out how to choose a name of my own, and after several attempts finally gave up and decided to use the random generator. Kikichikki was born.

Kiki was also doomed to failure by a game that made solo play absolutely impossible, especially for the entirely defensive white mage class. I don’t think I ever hit level 21, but I hit level 20 about 50 times… having not quite mastered the fine art of controlling aggro in order to avoid getting killed in groups.

Kiki saw a brief reincarnation as an Agatean Pishite on the Discworld mud that lasted a few months before real life conspired to prevent me from playing. When I returned, the character had been wiped for inactivity

In early 2006, Kiki’s next stop was City of Heroes. I rolled the character four or five times but never really got into it – however, when City of Villains came out, I rolled Columns, a Necromancy/Poison mastermind who spent most of his time keeping people alive (or reanimating them as the case may be).

When World of Warcraft launched, I was unimpressed with my options for healers. During the open beta, I determined that paladins, druids, and shamans were too confusing and priests were too squishy. Summoning was where it was at, and a few months later when I was finally bullied into opening an account, I rolled Allaryin as a dwarven hunter.

In the intervening years, I have tried leveling healers several times, but the closest I ever got was a 40 paladin (who isn’t even healer spec any more). Priests were always squishy, I hit level 15-20 with several attempts but always gave up at my inability to solo with the class – but I had always tried to level as a shadow priest since that’s what common convention states is the best build for soloing.

shadow is overrated

I repeat. Shadow is overrated.

I originally (like 2 months ago when the topic was fresher on my mind) meant for this to be a separate rant, but as I never wrote it I may as well go into the subject briefly here.

Again, this time with feeling. Shadow is overrated.

Maybe I’m just complete noobsauce, but I just couldn’t make a shadow priest work. I’ve got a level 50 warlock, which you’d think would be comparable. But it isn’t. In World of Warcraft, playing a low level shadow priest is more like playing a melee hunter. Just because the game lets you spec for stupid doesn’t mean it actually works.

I’m not saying that the shadow talent tree is worthless. I’m not saying that high level shadow priests aren’t amazing and viable in groups. Nor am I saying that shadow priests can’t be obnoxiously effective in PvP, and I am certainly not suggesting anyone try to solo to 70 w/o picking up any offensive talents.

I am saying that shadow priests are pointless in low level (<50 or so) PvE solo content. I am saying that the holy and discipline talent trees have much better options for solo players at lower levels.

When Kiki was in her early 40′s, I figured I’d give shadow another chance. I had been a holy smite build until this point and had intentionally waited to respec shadow until I could buy enough talents to make it worthwhile. I advanced two levels as a shadow priest before giving up in disgust.

What is wrong with shadow priests? Let me count the ways.

At level 10, a priest is highly squishy. They’re going to be healing themselves a lot – their fights take longer since they do less damage and they’ve got less defense (not getting the first rank of their personal armour spell until level 12).

Going immediately into either of the available shadow talents means delaying or neglecting Healing Focus (2 points for 70% resistance to interruption while healing). Time wasted trying to heal through interruptions means a corpse run.

Waiting until level 12 to take your first shadow talent point means you can’t get Mind Flay (the first really useful shadow talent) until 22.

Everyone talks up Spirit Tap (increased mana regen for 15s after a kill) but water really is very cheap and low level priests really shouldn’t be using mana to kill things anyway. Wand DPS is much more reliable and even outperforms smite at low levels. Lowbie priests should never run out of mana since they’ve offloaded their spells to before the mob closed into melee and are spending the rest of their time in combat wanding and regenning for the next fight.

Blackout is even more useless at low level. 10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds with your shadow spells? There is only one direct damage shadow spell before Mind Flay, and it’s on an 8 second cooldown.

For the same five talent points that would have been wasted in regen you don’t need or stuns that you can’t depend on… you could have 70% resistance to interruption while healing AND one of:

• +15% wand dps (up to 25% after 2 more points).
• +15% healing over time from your renew spell (which should be your most commonly cast spell at this level).
• +3% crit from your holy spells (up to +5% after 2 more points, this includes heals and nukes).

Shadow damage can be mitigated. There is no such thing as holy resistance. Smite always works. And it’s not on a cooldown, so you can actually spam it.

Shadow priests’ damage output is highly equipment-dependent. To truly be worth the pain of playing a shadow priest, you need gobs of +shadow damage equipment. The soonest a character can be effectively loaded up with +shadow gear is level 40.

Shadowform requires level 40 at the absolute minimum. That’s if you completely ignore the other two talent trees…

Can’t cast holy spells while in shadowform. Since you still have access to discipline spells, this isn’t a huge nerf (unlike a druid’s specialized caster forms which pretty much limit you to nuking or healing)… but it is still inconvenient. If for whatever reason you do need to cast a holy spell while soloing in shadowform, switching back costs a huge amount of mana.

DoT’s don’t crit.

Shadow priests blow through mana like nothing I’ve ever seen before. With one’s primary sources of damage being a DoT and a channeled DoT, you waste a lot of mana. Shadow Word: Pain suffers from the same problem that all DoT’s have – it rarely has a chance to tick to conclusion. Likewise, with Mind Flay, any hit you take while channeling will reduce the damage/mana ratio of the spell dramatically.

When hunting trolls as a shadow priest in Arathi, Kiki had to stop and drink after every other kill, even with Spirit Tap. As a smite priest, both her dps and her mana efficiency were higher. She could take 3 or 4 mobs before resting.

After the failed adventures in shadowform, Kiki gave a heavy discipline build a whirl. It too was disappointingly less effective than the heavy holy build had been – but, while she did less damage and her heals were weaker… at least she was sturdier and had more mana to cast the weaker spells with.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that from a purely munchkin standpoint, shadow spec is not a good idea for solo PvE before level 50, and is just… well, unplayable before 40.

If you want to play a shadow priest, do yourself a favor and either always party or level a hybrid build of some sort or another and respec to shadow when you get to Outland.

Let the flames commence.

Oh wait, that’s right. You can’t do that in shadowform

(Yes, I know the pun was horrendous. I’m sorry. Kind of.)

I would like to take this moment to thank everyone who made this possible. Danny for farming about 2/3 of the runecloth necessary… Alterac Valley for giving me incidental gnome rep along the way… Patch 2.0.1 for finally upping the amount of rep per turnin… And all of the people who decided to sell their stacks of cloth below market value

I couldn’t have done it without you.

Ok, well, I could have, but it’d have taken me another 3 months

Now I only have to scrape together about 800g and I can swap my wimpy mounts out for my Stormpike goat and a riding chicken +1

update

Tony has just rubbed my face gently in the fact that patch 2.x changes to the honor system mean I could have gotten a mecha chicken w/o the rep grind. But… shrug.

I now get to scrape together 800g AND a handful more BG tokens and I’ll be able to swap out between three epic mounts

update

Whelp, phase one of the epic chickenage is complete.

Now to find the stomach to go back into BG’s. A quick check of my bags shows that I have 6 AB tokens, 4 AV tokens, and zero WSG tokens on hand. The black chicken requires I should scrounge up 30 of each…

This morning I came in and started opening packs between bugs. Some pretty cool stuff in there, the game looks interesting. We’ll probably play a few rounds on Monday if we can find the time.

In addition to the normal cards, there are three ultra-rare cards that have serial numbers on them that can be used to get a few cool little in-game toys. Apparently the odds of getting one of these cards are something like 1 in every 3 or 4 boxes of 24 packs.

I got the baby hippogryph pet. It’s ADORABLE, like a baby Toucan Sam with antlers. I’ve not scratched the card off yet, am still debating what to do with it. The cards are listing for $75-150 on ebay right now and there are a veritable ton of them for sale. I somehow doubt that mine’d sell if I posted it. And I’m not entirely sure I’d want to sell it for $100. But there’s also no way on earth that I’d pay $100 for it. So, dillema.

Also, unlike CoH/CoV’s in-game account ugprade type rewards, this reward (and all of WoW’s, actually) is a one time serial. You use it on one character and that’s it.

So, while I do have the little side-hobby of collecting mini-pets in the game, I rarely use them. I mean, I’ve probably broken out my worg puppy less than 10 times since I got him. I’ve not used my mechanical chicken in months, etc… So, who knows?

Anyhow.

A few days ago, I reactivated my CoH account and started playing around again. My new video card makes an enormous difference. Pocket D is just amazing with the effects and sewer maps have a lot more to them than I remembered.

Today the Good vs Evil bonuses went live for online purchase, and I acquired them ($10 for permanent upgrade to all chars – new and old – on the account). The Pocket D teleport ability is cool (just one more way to get around town) and the jumpjet is ok. I imagine it’ll be awesome on chars w/o a travel power (or those with super speed who have problems gaining altitude). Unfortunately, it also has a relatively long cooldown and a 30 sec duration before running out so is only good for one big jump or something.

I’ve not played with the new costume options yet, I don’t want to lose my current one.

The big news is that for the first time in AGES, I’ve earned a level (19) with Tetris. And it was a doozy.

See, last I’d played him, he contracted himself a case of the zombie plague. No actual turning into a zombie, that’d have potentially been cool. Nope. Disease gives you swarming flies around your body and a nasty permanent debuff to both your maximum health and endurance (and endurance regen).

Well, Tetris is a controller, specifically an illusionist. He uses high amounts of end to get his job done. In order to succeed in missions, he relies on invisibility and mind control and stuff. This costs lots of juice. When you have no juice… things suddenly become downright impossible.

So, it took me about an hour and 2 deaths to finally get cured of the disease.

Then the final mission in the story line has you putting an end to Dr. Vahlizok’s latest version of the plague by glowy hunting (something that invisible chars can – surprise – do with zero danger). I think the high level glowy hunt was my true reward for the nightmare that was the diseased portion of the mission.

The final glowy to be hunted (infected body to be incinerated) was in this enormous Frankensteinesque workshop. I tried to snap a picture but apparently it didn’t take. Also, when I turned in the mission to my contact, she said something about actually coming face to face with Dr Vahz. This thing, I did not notice. I’m kind of bummed, because I could have taken him. Zombies are notoriously weak vs invisibility and stuff. Oh well.

I've never actually played an archer before. Yup. Never. I've been playing the game off and on since shortly after v0.9.1 was released back in '96. I've played priests that have gotten to level 32 or so, I've gotten necromancers and elementalists into their 20's but have never managed to beat the water temple (location of the Snake from Beyond).

This char has been obscenely lucky. He found a pool on level 1 of the puppy cave and drank 4 times, receiving: teleportation control, poison resistance, the "lucky" intrinsic, and a wish. Yup. Level 1 char with a completely non-cheesed wish. So I've had the advantage of wearing seven league boots for the entire game.

Archer + running really fast = nothing got into melee with me until I hit around level 10.

I found a helm of teleportation somewhere around experience level 8, and accidentally robbed a ring shop at level 12 - earning myself a whole bunch of crud to offer my god AND a pair of rings of speed. Between the rings, talents, and my high dexterity, the char has 119 speed when unencumbered.

(10:36:37 AM) Betsy: i like how you "accidentally" robbed the ring store
(10:36:47 AM) Ammon: i DID
(10:36:51 AM) Ammon: i teleported by accident!
(10:36:59 AM) Betsy: well, nice work anyhow.
(10:37:17 AM) Ammon: my standard behavior in shops is to pick up everything and stack it in the corner
(10:37:23 AM) Ammon: gives the keeper more room to restock
(10:37:35 AM) Ammon: so i was walking to the corner when my teleport fired
(10:38:47 AM) Ammon: and i hit Z to cancel - which i forgot didn't cancel the teleport, it cancelled my choosing where to land

So, 20% faster than normal energy recharge plus boots that make walking only cost 500 energy (as opposed to 1000) plus teleportation plus archer class ability that reduces the cost of firing ranged weapons down to 800 and talents that reduce it to 640... he's a flying machine gun

Oh, and I got a ring of invisibility at level 15 and just picked up an adamantium tower shield (+11 DV) on the way in to kill the snake.

The scariest part of the whole experience of killing the snake - my guy can't swim. And the level is no-teleport... I took 80 damage crossing a whopping two squares of water. Thankfully, I've been able to hoard potions since I don't tend to get hit very often.

A bit of cleanup to ding 18 and a lot of running and teleportation later:

I got my first real 'honorable kill' worth real points (253) without any assistance. Lvl 60 undead mage was terrorizing newbies on the tram. I wasn't about to stand for that

Today was also the first time I actually got a decent way into Blackrock Depths, the precursor instance to Molten Core (big notorious 40 man raid instance of fire and ashes and people with no lives). In fact, I have a screenshot of myself dead at the MC entrance because I attempted to attune solo after my group wiped for the last time and it wouldn't let me step in because we weren't set as a raid... blah... blah...

It was a much more profitable run than yesterday's UD Strat marathon (did the place 3 times, didn't get anything I could use). I checked off two quests on my list, got a very minor upgrade to my quiver (13% -> 14% attack speed increase) and got several high money value toys to sell/repurpose.

All in all, that about consumed my morning (4 hours because our priest was too low level and kept dying) and it established me in high favor with the administration of my new guild - earning me a promotion

Update (Jan 24, '06)

I finally got around to posting my most recent batch of screenshots. At least, I've posted the 5 new shots that were sitting on Tarma (I probably have some on Rincewind that I'm neglecting). All of my posted WoW screenshots are available for browsing at http://atuin.simud.org/~ammon/wow - and are sorted in a rather stupid order that I don't feel like fixing any time soon. The pic of my prone corpse on the MC instance boundary is entitled "You must be in a raid".

Yesterday or the day before, I had sent in an application for a general linux sysadminly job to Mythic Entertainment (of DAoC fame). So between those two and my remaining application on campus and the possibility of working part time for an independent web developer here in town... I should hopefully be seeing employment come back my way rather soon... hopefully...

It took me just under 20 days and 7 hours to do it. During this time, I also managed to cap all 3 secondary skills and both of my professions. Fishing takes forever to train - I wound up getting my last 7 levels while waiting for a Sunken Temple group to form up. I have dragonscale leatherworking, but had spent a lot of time and effort on gnomish engineering before realizing (around level 55ish) that engr toys are all cloth with the rare leather item thrown in.

In addition to the abovementioned pants, my char is wearing black dragonscale shoulders, is shooting an endgame level crossbow, has a boneslicing hatchet in one hand (rather coveted endgame hunter weapon), and is otherwise in fairly uninspiring gear.

After the ding (which Tony stuck around to make sure happened tonight ), I helped somebody with a quest and finished a handfull more that I was almost done with. I went back to Ironforge, turned in yet another pile of runecloth bandages for the Ahn'Qiraj event, and blew 20g on my final round of skill upgrades before the expansion hits. And then I logged off.

Shrug. It happened. I'm gonna go tame myself one of them shiny bats from Zul'Gurub and make it impervious to fire. But otherwise, I don't have too many goals left in the game that aren't just gonna eventually resolve themselves. What will probably happen is that I will spend more time with my priest alt on Terenas (where family people all play).

I've given a bit more thought to the whole EQ2 thing and am pretty certain that I want my dwarf to become a guardian. He's halfway through the job upgrade quest, having hit lvl 9 this morning before my stomach rebelled on me.

Minor adventure:
Was simply grinding away at mobs in the forest ruins outside of Baubleshire (since my primary is a hobbit, alts just bum off of his house for storage when their vaults fill). At level 7, the dwarf could pretty much inflict a constant stream of death and carnage against mobs his size or smaller without stopping - because mini-dings are cool (every 10% of a level in EQ2, you're healed to full).

Well, very nearly approaching the boundary for level 8, a rabbid aggro badger (elite, honor, whatever EQ calls them) spawned behind me and proceeded to chew me into pieces. Surprisingly, I almost survived. Debt was only 2%, so no biggie, I came back, tried again, and did much worse that time around because I wasn't quite as prepared as I should have been.

Wander around for 10 minutes until I ding 8 and make my way back to find that nobody has killed the badger yet. Yar! Badger dies. Badger drops nice shield and Adept I book for lvl 12 Warrior skill. A sign? I think so. Fighter->Warrior->Guardian it is then

Will probably have enough xp to ding 11 shortly after switching to guardian, and Al will probably be able to find himself a decent enough supply of friends. If not, he will still tank like a Buick, and I don't mind Jeopau twinking him out a bit with some of his carpentry earnings if I need to squander some on happy armour...

Argh! Somebody play with me!