I would like to thank my family...

Wow... I went away for a few days to do house moving and came back to a link from BRK, a link from TeePee, who inspired me to write the lock leveling article in the first place and a whole bunch of nice comments. Thanks a bunch!

Looking back on it, it really does seem to favour the Affliction tree over the rest. I really want to try leveling as a Demonologist, but I guess the Affliction bug has bitten too hard. However, one thing I have noticed is that generally, it seems to level a lot like Hunters. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but since Mathe is also being leveled at the same time, I guess having Vis go Afflict would make more sense at the moment...

I am planning on a follow-on articles, mainly to take your toon from Lvl 18 to whenever is a good point to stop. But, I'm curious if it would be helpful?

In other news, there has been a whole bunch of leaks from the Wrath of the Lich King Friends and Family Alpha. I won't be repeating the info here (it's easy to find online anyway), but so far, there looks to be some neat additions to the talent trees.

One thing that is nice though is that having a level 55 character will unlock the death knight, who can be of any race! Guess the BECs will have a new sister come WotLK... :)

Another Patch

After the server maintenance, 2.4.2 was released. As always, the latest patch notes can be found here.

The nice thing about being in the low levels is that usually, the changes have little to no effect to you. But I like to keep abreast of them, just to know what is taking place.

The big one for me is the reduction in Cooldown times; from 23 hours to 20 hours, from 4 days to 3 days, 20 hours. This is a huge thing. I used to lose days to cooldowns (which was a pain when I was washing Shadowcloth). Basically, the old 4 day CD meant that you had to wash the cloth later and later each time. If you washed at 10pm this time. The next time, you could only do so at 10pm, at which time you were probably in the middle of something or another, so you do it at 11pm. The next round, this invariably gets pushed back again & so on, until it's not possible to catch it prior to bedtime... So you lose a day and wash at 10pm the next night. The cycle then starts again... :p With this slight reduction, at least I'll be able to get round this problem.

Other than that, no real huge buffs or nerfs that I can see... Since I haven't seen any beying for blood in blogs or forums yet, I guess that's true for now...

Ding Ding Ding

Since the last update, Sheanne crept past the 30 line whereas Vis has gotten to 39 before her rested XP ran out... Along the way, she had pretty much skipped all of Thousand Needles (except for that little bit required for her class quest). Frankly, I dislike the place. All those pillars meant that you generally had to navigate your toon around, whereas Desolace (which some really dislike), are nice and flat... Sure, the odd vulture or lizard might try to rip your head off, but that's life, eh? One nice thing about Desolace is that there aren't that many 'run back & forth' quests. You go somewhere, kill a bunch of guys, then move on. If you followed the entire series of quests in Barrens, you'll know what I mean.

After Desolace is a visit to everyone's favourite leveling ground in Stranglethorn Vale. With the enhanced leveling XP, it does make it possible to skip a large number of regions. Thus, to reduce the repetitiveness of leveling, I'm considering skipping STV for regions like Badlands and Arathi Highlands for some of the toons.

This is something to definitely consider for Mathe, as Badlands are a much better Mining spot than STV. But to miss out on the skins in STV... Decisions, decisions...

Children's Week

Finally done with Reservist and back to the normalcy of slacking at work... ;)

This grumpy fella here is the orphan you get to 'adopt' for Children's Week. You sort of have to bring him running around Azeroth, buy him an ice cream and bring him home to get your choice of pets (a rat, pig, or turtle) or 5g.

Well, I didn't really need the money so I got a small pet for all my toons.



Otherwise, my toons are slowly crawling to 40, with a SM run for each scheduled. Can't wait for them to get to 40, as this walking business is really starting to get old...

Busy Busy Busy...

Real life caught up to me in a big way this month, with the roll-out at work and going back to reservist for this week and the next... Still managed some WoW-time, but no blog time... :p

Of course, my PC imploded and while waiting for my WoW installation/patching to complete, I figure it's a good time to update some of the stuff that's happening...

Elainith and Kell both streamed past 30 and just a couple of nights ago, so did Tris. This meant the leopard travel form for her, so at least that's one more toon who don't have to slowly plod along...

For the others, SM beckons and while Vis totally lucked out on drops there, Mathe wasn't as impressed... Here's hoping it'll be good for the rest as well...

Pretty...

A run through Scarlet Monastary netted Vis some nice gear... While the rest of the instance was unkind, two visits to Doan had offered up Mantle of Doan, Robe of Doan and Hypnotic Blade! The best part was that again, Vis had nice matching clothes... Pretty nice...

But what's been making me pretty mad is that I would get 2-3 whispers every night selling gold or leveling services. I used to let these slide, but increasingly I would report spam them. It's getting to the point of EXTREME annoyance... It would be nice if there was a nice and easy way to catch these guys and perma-ban them before they even send their first whispers, but unfortunately, as long as there is a market for it, these jokers are going to be around... Which really begs the question, how much of a loser do you have to be to resort to these services? This is WoW... IT'S NOT EVEN REMOTELY HARD!!! But, we all know the answer, it's not that it's hard; it's that people are lazy... As long as there are people who access to more money than they have brains, and require instant gratification, not much we can do but just keep on right clicking and select 'Report Spam'. It doesn't help at all in the long run, but at least it makes you feel a little better... :p

Miss Bimbo Meets WoW

Horde players running through Ashenvale would know about the King of the Foulwead quest. It's a nice little quest, which can be solo'ed if you know the trick to it (I only found out after I got Xig to help though... :p). The nice thing though is that the quest item is not on the final boss, but in a basket which spawns on the ground after he dies. Now, anyone can loot that. So, I parked Vis, Mathe, and Elainith in the vicinity, used Kell to watch Xig go on a killing spree and after that had everyone loot the item and complete the quest.

But that's not the big thing about the quest. It's the quest reward. Of course, not too interesting for Vis, but for the rest? Well, the pic below of Elainith (the blue vest) and Kell (the blue undies) tell the story...


OK, we still can't buy breast augmentations for G, maybe WoW is leaving that for the next expansion...

2.4.1

No WoW since Patch 2.4.1 was released. Just a small patch to correct some errors... Frankly, it looks like mainly simple client side fixes, and I'm not sure why it requires an extended downtime... Guess other things needed to be fixed as well.

Guess Kell's assault on the Furborgs in Ashenvale will have to wait till tomorrow.

2.4 is a GO!

In case you haven't heard, 2.4 was released. The marquee item is of course, the release of Sunwell Plateau and the Shattered Sun Offensive which allows all to grind more rep for yet more loot.

Of course, for now, all this means little to me since we're still working our way out of the 20s (I mean, improved gains in weapon skill is great, but...), but it's good to see what else is waiting for me at the end of the road.

A complete list of the changes can be found here.

Some thoughts on the changes.

Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
Sounds good on paper, but from initial blue comments, you are going to need a bucket load of Spell Haste to achieve the 1 second GCD. Might make Spell Haste worth a second look for lock, though.

Resilience: Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.
Will severely nerf Mana Draining in Arena. Basically, at 70, every 39.4 Resilience will reduce your amount drained by 2%. With 'welfare epics' providing 300+ Resilience, you are looking at the reduction of upwards of 15% in mana drained.

A very dedicated team of Mana Drainers might still work, but I think the top teams would have moved on from this.

The Daily Quest limit has been increased to 25.
The thing with having so many alts is that I could barely finish the 10 quests on each character. However, for those who are more 'dedicated', and with the introduction of so many more daily quests, this makes perfect sense.

Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
??? Was there a point to only one point in IMP?

Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.
Useful for PvE at the high levels since there are so many demons in Outlands. In PvP, good against warlock pets. Not game-breakingly good, but better than nothing, I suppose...

Sap mechanic changed from “Incapacitate” to “Sap”. This will allow more humanoids that were previously immune to Sap to be vulnerable to Sap, but still immune to Gouge. Note that anything that removed Sap previously will still remove Sap after the change.
Nice buff for PvE Rogues... As if they needed any... But since I've a Rogue, goodie... :)

Ritual of Summoning can be used to summon players into instances if they meet the instance requirements.
Wow... This is BIG! Unfortunately, it'll bring back the Taxi days for locks... Just when I thought it's safe to remove the spell from my UI...

Diminishing returns on honor for kills is being eliminated.
Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use.
More Honour available NOW = more welfare epics faster! Whoppee...

Alterac Valley
Captain Balinda Stonehearth Stonehearth can no longer be interrupted, silenced, or have her spells slowed. In addition, her water elemental cannot be banished, and does increased damage.
Vanndar Stormpike and Captain Balinda Stonehearth have had their health totals reduced to match the health totals of Drek’Thar and Captain Galvangar...
Warmasters/marshals in Alterac Valley now increase each other’s maximum health and damage by 25%. This is a stacking effect.
Horde players will now start the battle closer to Drek’Thar and Frostwolf Keep.
There is now a Join as Party option
So Balinda is no longer a pushover (or so it seems...). The map is now equalised to what the Ally have been crying for so it remains to be seen if the Horde can up their game to match.

To allow pre-mades, means PUGging AV for honour will be tough. But get a good group together could mean oodles of honour in short work!

A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.
Depending on whether there is a CD for this, it'll help in getting rid of the huge stores of green gems you will accumulate via drops, mining & freebies from the Consortium.

Increased the skill up potential for most smelting recipes.
This will help in getting 60s to 300 Mining to transit to Outlands, which some reported having problems with. I might be ok, since my two miners will need to be mining overtime to meet the demands of Engineering, Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting...

Dungeon and Group Quest Experience: The amount of experience awarded for dungeon and 5-person group quests in Outland has been increased in almost all cases.
Not so much whooppee to faster leveling, but hopefully being able to hit 70 with even lesser quests completed. This leaves more quests for money grinding purposes...

Elemental creatures are no longer explicitly immune to poison and disease effects. Elementals with nature school immunities will still be immune to nature-based poisons, however.
Good for the Rogue & Hunter (Serpent Sting & Isis' Spit). Not huge, but nice.

Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped.
If the new badge loot doesn't inspire more Heroic farming, this should. Although, badges will also give you access to BT-level gems... Hmmm...

Loot dropped by Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker has been changed to Bind on Equip. In addition, the cash dropped by these bosses has been significantly increased.
This will probably just result in the higher-end guilds treating the two world bosses as money pinata.

Nether Vortex are no longer Bind on Pickup and can now be purchased from G’eras for 15 Badges of Justice!
This will now make available all those BT-level receipes to non-raiders. For my BS pally, if I stay ret, & grind Heroic Dungeons forever, Stormherald is a possibility...

The best part is that even if my druid or my pally is the only one who raids/run heroics, I can buy the Vortex and transfer it another toon.

Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Manna Biscuits at a time.
No more raiding the table!

Primal Nether are no longer Bind on Pickup!
This is nice only because it means even if only one of my toons go for heroics, the nether can be transferred to another who needs it for crafting purposes.

The Ratchet bank now has access to the Guild Vault.
Seeing the amount of time my toons spend in Barrens these days, this is a god-send. It was annoying that to get to the GB, I had to fly to TB or Org... :p

Splintertree Raiders will now respawn with Torek if Duriel Moonfire and her guards are killed while the Raiders are still alive.
Bah... They fixed this after I finished the quests... At least Tris will benefit...