Engineer Trinkets = PvP hAxXoRz!

Engineer Trinkets = PvP hAxXoRz!

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So here I am, reading up on the WoW forums in regards to the upcoming PvP arena system. For those of you living under rocks, it goes a little something like this: You form a mini PvP guild of you and your pals. You get a separate little charter, and put 'me and Toby and Sally are going to zomgwtfpwn the 3v3 bracket' on there. You register it, and you have your own Arena Party. You can be in the same guild, or separate guilds, whatever. It's just for the sake of the new Burning Crusade PvP Arena tussles.

	Jack and coke FTW!

Fights inside the Arena (be they 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3) earn you "honor tokens" which can then be redeemed for PvP Gear. I'm pretty sure that they've done away with titles like 'High Warlord' and the like at this point. The expansion is trying to cut down on the brutal honor grind, and it’s inherently flawed decay system. According to the new system, you could conceivably play one match per day and still potentially earn the highest ranking PvP loots. Obviously, it would take three decades or so at that rate, but the mechanic is in place. Since you’re earning actual tokens that go in your bank instead of accruing some obscure stat on your character page, it’s possible to earn them over time without fear of losing your spot in line to do something silly like eat or use the bathroom. No longer will something trivial like having both of your legs mangled in a freak forklift accident down at the docks endanger your pursuit of that axe with 3 extra agility on it! After months of painful physical therapy you can jump right in where you left off!

Of course, it must suck for those who have already ground out "High Warlord" or "Defender of the Queen's Jewels" (or whatever they call it on the Alliance side) over the course of the last 8 months while losing their jobs, girlfriends, and complexion... but hey, tough break! Don't worry about me, I've never made it above rank 5, so the gaping hole in my soul labelled "PvP" isn't really that gaping after all. Thanks for your concern, but I think I'll learn to survive somehow.

Where was I? Oh yeah… Arena matches! So here comes the Arena System, designed to counteract all that jazz, while still providing “meaningful PvP” for those too lazy to leave capitol cities. Like I said, I was reading the forums about the whole thing, when this gem fell into my lap:



Hmmmm....

You'll need to give me a second to digest that crumb, because it seems a little odd. Here on live we have a battlegrounds system, and yet ... I don't remember there being a need for "every player (to) have to be Engineering to be competitive :-/ "

Last time I checked, engineering trinkets REPLACE other trinkets... I have yet to see the recipe that allows me to craft a Gnomish Third Trinket Slot. In fact, except for spell reflectors, just about every trinket you can craft is pretty much a waste of a slot. Plus, warriors are getting a new skill at 64 that allows them to reflect any spell, so the issue of having the 'shadow reflector *or* flame reflector' on becomes moot... well, for warriors anyway.

I'd much rather have a Hand of Justice or a Zandalarian Hero Charm equipped, and those are from ZG and under. Are you trying to tell me there are no better trinkets in AQ40 or BWL (Naxx?!) that you would rather equip some stupid net-shooting crap trinket that might backfire instead? Hot damn, stop the presses! You got netted "a few times over the weekend"!??!! I smell an X-SPLOIT!

I leveled engineering up to 300 one day without ever leaving Ogrimmar, just because I got sick of having only one hearthstone. At 300 I earned the right to make some stupid Gadgetzan teleporter that has a 4 hour (!) cooldown. Half the time it drops me to my death outside of town, or gives me some debuff that disallows warlock summons for two hours. I carry jumper cables as a joke, because when was the last time the raid wiped, but the main tank lived? I have a bunch of stupid trinkets in my bank, but they're honestly just a waste of bag space (in my backpacks or in the bank).

I'm sorry but this theory just doesn't hold water.

Here's an idea to make it a 'truly level' playing ground: let's ban all professions, instead of just engineering. Blacksmiths are able to craft some rare Bind on Craft chestpieces and weapons, so in order to compete with that, everyone would need to be also need to be blacksmiths. Oh, wait.... Enchanters can put fancy stats on weapons, but I guess you can pay an enchanter to do your weapon, too... But what if your weapon is better than mine? What if your guild is more organized than mine, and you've seen higher content? We wouldn't want anyone to actually have to go and play the game to become competitive, would we?

	Not crafted by Engineering, but totally overpowered anyway.

Let's have Arena matches be fought stark naked... no weapons or trinkets to 'unbalance' the playing field. And let's make entering the Arena impossible with a keyboard attached to your PC. Some people use those fruity Z-Boards or whatever, and that might create an unfair playing field. Let's make everyone use standard two button scroll wheel mice, and force them to click on every spell button they want to use. Oh, wait...crap. That won't work either, because a mage can still shoot frost spells and stuff while the warriors are running around swinging their naked fists... Hmmm... OH! I got it! Each team enters the arena, and the members of each team /roll 100. That would leave it completely up to chance, and give everyone an equal opportunity to earn honor tokens, no matter what silly profession they've been grinding!

Hooray!



Win-Win FTW!

[continue...]

13 WoW Addons I Use and Love

Being as how the patch broke everything, and we’re all back to square one, I figured it might be a good time to share with you guys a few WoW addons I use that I simply can’t live without. A couple of them have similar addons that offer the same functionality, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll just show the ones I use specifically, how I use(d) them, and why. I’m not going to bother with things like CTRaid or SCT. Anyone who doesn’t already have those don’t know how addons work yet. We’ll let them get those and come back to the article later. I also tend to type (and think) in a pretty haphazard fashion, so don’t get upset if an ‘important’ one is listed before or after a silly one. I originally started writing this article the day after the 2.0 patch dropped, and was going to list the mods I hoped were updated soon, and why… to give you guys an idea for ones to keep your eyes on if you had never seen or used them in the past.

The patch has been out for a while and a bunch of these have in fact been updated, and a few have been replaced with something newer or better since the patch.

1. Outfitter
I hate the world when outfitter doesn’t work. There are alternatives (itemrack, wardrobe), but outfitter does what I need when I need it. Those things basically amount to: 1) making custom armor or weapon sets that can be popped off and on with a single click (‘put on all my FR gear’ / ‘swap my Tank gear for DPS’), and 2) being able to bind a macro to that function (/outfitter wear FR). Outfitter also handles a few bonus features as well. Standing with your bank window open, you can ‘deposit (or withdraw) all my FR gear into (or out of) the bank’. You can see at a glance which full sets you have on you (red = item missing, blue means it’s in the bank (when you have the bank window open), yellow means all pieces are present and accounted for. You can specify ‘I want to put my FR gear on when I hit F10’ (in case you prefer keybindings to macros). You can make a ‘mounted’ set (carrot on a stick, riding boots and gloves) that pops on when you mount and pop off when you dismount. You can set your seal of the dawn to pop on the instant you cross into the plaguelands. You can make a +Spirit set that will pop on when eating or drinking, and pop off when done, etc etc etc… Outfitter rules. Get it.

2. Equip Compare / Link Wrangler
Equip Compare is short, sweet, simple. The kind of addon I use everyday, and should ‘just be a part of the default UI’. You click an item link, it brings up the item’s window. You hold down control, and it shows the same item you’re wearing. Looking at a link for shoulders? Hold down control, and it will show you the shoulders you’re wearing. Simple. By default it shows the window all the time, but you can run a slash command to make it only show when you have control down. Works in the AH, chat links, vendors, whatever. Easy. I recently found Link Wrangler, which can do the same thing, but in a somewhat more clunky way. LW allows you to click a chat link, and then click a little arrow in that frame to pop out a comparison window (i think holding control is just cleaner and easier), but LW has one important extra feature... you can click up to 5 chat links and have all their windows on your screen at once... no more bullshit trying to compare two items and opening and closing and remembering stats. Just open them both and look at them.

3. Telo's Quickloot
Loot a corpse. The loot window appears wherever your mouse cursor is. Easy. Like I said, these aren’t going to all be earth shattering addons. Just ones that I use and can’t live without.

4. Clique
Click casting love for healers. Click on the actual item unit frames to cast heals. I touched on this one with my N52 article a while back. Basically, I use a few key mouse button modifiers (Ctrl, Alt) to cast healing spells and buffs. My druid is my only healer class, and so far (level 32) it’s worked beautifully. The interface is built into the spell book, you just open a tab, and start Alt or Ctrl Clicking stuff in your spell book and it adds the spell in there. Each new rank of spell learned requires a remapping of the old spell ‘out’ and the new spell ‘in’, but it’s a minor inconvenience for the ease of use I get.
Alt+LC = Rejuvenation
Alt+RC = Regrowth
Ctrl+LC = Healing Touch Rank X
Ctrl+RC = Healing Touch Rank Max
Alt+MC = MotW
Ctrl+MC = Thorns
(LC, MC, RC = left, middle, right click)

5. Buffalo
Draggable, scalable, highly configurable buff & debuff icons. I used to swear by Satrina’s Buff Frames, but she has discontinued her mods and stopped playing. After a little digging, I came up with this alternative. Buffalo uses the default little square icons (not some big fruity bar system like CTBuff uses), and can display the timers as “3min” or “3:12” etc. I can choose how the rows populate (left to right, up to down, vice versa, etc), how many columns there are, how big the icons are, how far apart they are from each other, blah blah blah. It has three separate ‘zones’ for buffs, debuffs, and weapon enhancements (mana oil, poisons, whatever), and those zones can be put anywhere. I put the buffs below my own Unit Frame, my debuffs over by the minimap, and weapons a bit off to the side by my right action bars. Hooray.

6. ChatMOD
In addition to Satrina’s Buff Frames, I used to use her Chat Frame Extender. It did a few neat tricks to your chat window. It put the ‘text entry’ window at the top (if you desire), which I like since my chat window is at the bottom of my screen. Allows you to set different font sizes besides the 3 choices blizz gives. Allows you to use the arrow keys to move around in whatever you’re typing (without holding down Alt). Disable chat fade, yadda yadda. I recently came across ChatMOD, which does all of this, and a few more nifty tricks. ChatMOD colors party (and combat) chat based on classes (warrior's names are brown, etc), and even colors the dots on BG maps. You can specify certain words to be highlighted, and it will pop up like a raid warning on your screen whenever that word is mentioned. Say you want to do crusader enchants (or are looking for one). Create a 'crusader' highlight entry, and whenever anyone says it, it will pop up on your screen, and be highlited in chat. Anyone saying 'invite' in chat can have the word "invite" clicked to be invited to your party. URLs pasted in chat can be clicked to open in a text box that can then be copied and pasted into a webbrowser.

7. CTViewport & CTMail
Clumped into one entry, since they’re both part of the CT package. I said I wouldn’t mention CTRaid, but these two often get looked over. CTMail allows you to send up to 21 mails at a time. It’s great for cleaning out your bags after a grind session. Have an alt that holds all your runecloth? Send him 8 stacks at once. Just open the mail window, click the Mass Mail tab, fill in the name, and Alt click anything in your bag to add it to the queue. Once ready just hit send, and it will take care of the rest quickly and easily (while you stand at the mailbox… you obviously need to be in proximity of it still). No picture, since it's really self explanitory.

CTViewport allows you to resize the actual viewing window of the game itself. Like you can play on a 1280x1024 monitor, and be playing fullscreen, but cut the ‘viewport’ window down. At first I thought this was the stupidest addon ever made… why would I want to block off parts of my screen? Then I realized that I was making my chat windows have black backgrounds etc anyway, and was getting frustrated with having shit in the way all the time. I’ve basically cut the bottom third of my monitor off, and love it. Let me be clear: my bags, action bar, all that crap is still down there, but no graphics are happening behind them. This one is very user specific. You’ll love it or hate it. I used to think it was dumb, now I use it all the time. In the picture there I've drawn hot pink lines to show where my screen is cropped to (no there aren't actually hot pink lines on my screen). It just eliminates a bunch of overlay, and allows the part of the screen i'm focusing on to be uncluttered with chat windows etc.

8. Perl Classic Unit Frames
OMG. LOVE. I LOVE THESE THINGS. They’re very configurable, without being ‘too configurable’. I used to use Discord Unit Frames, and they were too much. I didn’t want something that complicated. Don’t get me wrong… I love Discord, and used to use it’s Frame Modifier (dfm) heavily, but I just didn’t want to rebuild my unit frames from scratch after every patch. Perl gives nice, clear frames that are easy to read, support Clique, support target of target for every party member, color code by class, can include pets in the same frame as their owners, blah blah blah. Right now there’s a bug where you can’t right click on someone’s frame and choose to duel them, but dueling is for fags with little e-peens anyway, and you could always just target someone and “/duel” if you’re feeling inadequate.

9. Omni CC
Puts an actual number on your skills. How long till you can vanish? In combat you aren’t going to want to stand still and hover your mouse over some stupid icon to see how long the tooltip says you have to wait. You can just look at the fucking button and see it’s up in 12 seconds. Why this isn’t in the default UI absolutely blows my fucking mind.

10. Flexbar / Bongos
I used to use Flexbar, and feel like it still deserves a loving paragraph here, but have since moved onto Bongos. Flexbar is Very Complicated. Not for the faint of heart. No UI. You need to read the fucking manual. Once you get the idea, it’s lovely. I had Backstab buttons that disappeared when I didn’t have enough energy, and were grayed out when I wasn’t behind my opponent. I had little clumps of extra buttons in the bottom corners of my screen full of stupid emote macros on the left side, and tradeskill icons on the right. I had a clump in the bottom middle of my screen that contained all my “in combat weapon switch macros”. I could edit the Saved Variables files in my sleep for when I rolled new toons (I just dragged over an old toon’s settings and created new entries for the new guy). It’s not easy. It’s very powerful.

Now I use Bongos, though. It would have taken 30 minutes to rebuild my Flexbar UI from scratch. I rebuilt it using Bongos in about five minutes during a BRD run. Some of the functionality is gone (my magical disappearing backstab button), but the ease of use makes up for it and then some. Like I said, Flexbar is complicated. Once you learn it (and I did), you can do crazy shit with it, but Bongos is just very drag and drop, and slide and scale, and ta-daa! Bongos also eliminates much of the UI clutter crap that I had to rely on Discord Frame Modifiers to squash… things like the griffons and stone textures on the main Action Bar, and those 3 ‘stance’ buttons for my warrior and the ‘stealth’ button for my rogue.

A picture for this is hard to do, so here's a big fucking JPEG of my entire UI. All my side, action, and little 'clump of button in the corner' bars were done using Bongos.

11. OneBag / vBagnon
I used to use AllinOneInventory. Loved it. It hasn’t been properly updated. The TOCs have been updated, but the functionality is fucked, right-clicking an item in your bag produces an error, sooo… yeah. Anyway, I was freaking out having all these little tiny bags to deal with again, and Bagnon was the first ‘one big bag’ to come along after the patch. I jumped on it, and wasn’t pleased.
Bagnon does some shit where it only shows the items that are in your bags, and not the empty slots. That’s great for a minimalist, but it fucks up my spatial representation of my bag that I had grown accustomed to. Each time I took something out, or put something into my bag, everything would shift left or right one slot, and everything just became a big fucking mess. I arrange my bags in a way where quest items are in the bottom left corner, armor in the bottom middle, hearthstone and poisons or pots in the bottom right and a big empty chunk of space in the top half of the bag that fills up as I loot crap and quest around. Bagnon allows you to ‘show’ the empty slots, but it does so in the most unintuitive way possible. A bunch of ‘empty’ slots all clumped to together that shrink as you get items (making everything shift around). It’s hard to explain, it just drove me nuts. OneBag is the first one I’ve come across that uses AIOI’s old style, and I use it now. OneBag has some issues (itg starts getting really ugly as you scale it down), but a few good features too. I like it.

12. KLH Threat Meter (sometimes called KTM)
This one gets kind of “poo-poo”-ed by some guilds, but should be used by anyone not familiar with how threat works, and why they keep dying by pulling aggro. It’s pretty transparent… you (and everyone in the party or raid) install it, and you can see where you are in the threat index for any given mob you’re fighting. During stage one in Onyxia, it’s possible to know precisely when you need to lay off a bit and let the tank get a few sunders in before you throw another hit on her etc. Simple, easy, everyone needs to have it or it’s pointless.

13. PoisonMaster / Poison Pouch
Rogue only. These get lumped together since they work together to make poisons easier to manage. PoisonMaster is a window that pops up at the poison vendor. You say ‘I like to have 60 flash powder and 20 of each type of poison in my bags at all times’. Go to the poison vendor and hit ‘buy’. It buys all the crap. If you have 10 deadly poison already, it will buy enough to make ten more, to bring you up to your desired 20 limit. Then hit ‘make’. It makes it all.

Poison pouch is a simple icon on your minimap that you can click to drop a list down of posions (or sharpening stones, or whatever). Left clicking applies the poison you clicked on to the main hand, right clicking puts it on the off hand. Simple.



Anyway… these are just 13 of the many that I like. These are the ones I kept checking on after the patch to see when they’d be updated. I’m already starting to think of ones I should have included in the list and didn’t, but this article needs to end somewhere. Some things like Auctioneer and Gatherer haven't been updated yet. Before the patch, I had over 100 folders inside my Addons folder. Some were only for my rogue (CCWatch, PoisonMaster and PoisonPouch), some were only for my warrior (tauntbuddy), and I’m sure some of them weren’t even turned on anymore, but were just taking up space. It’s good to ‘force a reformat’ every once in a while, but it makes me cranky when the UI I’m used to is pulled out of under my feet. It’s frustrating when things like EquipCompare and OmniCC aren’t just built into the framework from the gate. I feel like I’m back on an NT 4.0 workstation, and I have to do everything ‘the old way’ again.

Anyway. Check em out, see which ones you like. I have no interest whatsoever in helping you make them work, or trying to figure out how to do certain things with them. Learn them yourself. Fell free to post any extras you know or use in the comments, but i'm pretty well squared away at this point

[continue...]

Solo Guide to Obtaining the Best 2h Axe in the Game!

Two Handed Axe. 3.5 second Weapon Speed. A whopping 157 top end damage! Pure, unadulterated bliss in the form of 37.3 DPS! This baby can be yours for a simple run thru the Scarlet Monastery Armory that pretty much any semi-coherent level 60 warrior or shaman with an even partially functioning frontal lobe and at least one spell bound to their action bar can solo. Okay, seriously... even if you had no buttons bound, and just ran in there autoswinging everything, it really shouldn't be that hard for a 60 to pull off.



Why do I have such a stiffy for this Radiant Shard in Waiting? Take a look at that proc!

Chance on hit: You attack all nearby enemies for 9 sec causing weapon damage plus an additional 5 every 3 sec.

Are you kidding me? ALL NEARBY ENEMIES? Whirlwind hits only four additional enemies, has a ten second cooldown, only works in berserker stance, and has a cost of what some might call “much rage”. This thing costs zero rage, works in any stance, and will hit as many enemies as you can get into melee range before it procs.

Twinking / Guild Noob runs in lowbie instances just became a whole lot easier. Okay, they weren’t really difficult before, but this thing kinda breaks up the monotony. I know I’m gonna catch flack for this one, but seriously… this thing has its applications, and deserves one slot in your 80 slot inventory. Some people still carry around that silly staff from Gnomeregan that lets you breathe underwater, this one beats that thing out in the ‘will come in handy some day’ category hands down. My friend, Mirun, was the first to turn me on to it, and I laughed and called him names on vent for it. I kept laughing at him in Wailing Caverns as he was running my druid thru there for Fang set pieces. I stopped laughing when we did a BRD Emperor Run on our 60s with no mage, he pulled this thing out, and pretty much destroyed the Lyceum single handedly. We now have a shaman in the guild with one, too, and when they both get spinning, cleaves flow non-stop. Don’t get confused. They aren’t wearing this thing all the time, but every once in a while it comes out, and when it does… it’s got to be seen to be appreciated.

A few simple things to note about this thing: It procs All Day Long. It procs procs, which then proc a proc. We’ve seen it go 4 times in a row, which can be a good thing, or a bad thing. That’s like 20 seconds of whirlwind vortex love (when it re-procs, the 9 second timer resets, so you don’t get a full 4x9 out of it), but sometimes you want to turn it off. You can’t. It’s good in situations where the priest will survive if left alone for a few seconds, or where there’s a spare lowbie tank to throw an emergency taunt if needed. Worst case scenario is that it just procs forever, and everyone just stands on top of you as you spin. As long as no one else is doing anything, you will gain aggro, and kill whatever is coming.

It isn’t a level 60 DPS machine, but it isn’t a level 12 item either. At level 42, it’s actually not as bad as it sounds. Skills like Mortal Strike and Overpower, which deal damage based on “weapon damage plus x” will take a hit, but skills like Execute, Sunder, Revenge, and Bloodthirst will be working the same as before (okay, Bloodthirst will probably hit for less since you’re likely nerfing your AttackPower by using this instead of your Untamed Blade or whatever). We joke about putting Crusader on it, but unless orbs start falling from the sky, it probably won’t happen.

	Your mission, should you decide to accept it…

This isn’t meant to be a full sales pitch, or even a full blown article. My submission day is Wednesday, but this one was just too good to pass up… the pictures (although grainy, sorry) pretty much speak for themselves. It’s just something to think about, or an easy little diversion to run when you’re bored and everyone else is offline.

-Iso

*Bonus Points for making a /yell “BLADES OF LIGHT!!!” macro to go off when it procs, lol.

[continue...]

Dual Boxing is so last year. Learn to 5 Box, or GTFO.

Ahh, dual boxing. The practice of playing a game on more than one computer simultaneously. It's hardly something new; people have been dragging a healing class around behind them on a 2nd account since the dawn of MMO's. You know it sucks trying to find a pocket priest or druid to follow you around like a puppy all day long just showering you with hitpoints, so why not just play an extra one yourself? It's not very difficult to reach over and hit 5 or whatever every once in a while for a heal, and there are plenty of tools available to make the job even easier. Plus, you get all the loot that drops between 'the two of you', and it's totally legit.

From what I understand, there are plenty of addons for WoW that do a check every 8 nanoseconds or whatever to make sure they are still executing a '/follow Fred'. Other tools like Whispercast can be used extensively. Whispercast allows you to send a whisper to a toon, and it makes a big button pop up on their screen, which they click to cast the spell. During raids, it's handy to be able to "/whisper BobTheDruid MOTW" and he doesn't need to even find me in the group listings. He just hits 'OK' and I get Mark of the Wild. The process cannot be automated to having him cast it for me, or else it becomes botting. As long as he is sitting there clicking YES then Blizzard is totally cool with it.

Another tool for running two toons is an app called Multiplicity.

I use remote desktop functionality on my home server. The server has no monitor, keyboard, or mouse; I dial into it using a program called Radmin that allows me to see the desktop of that box in a window on my main box. I can click the Start button, make folders on the desktop, whatever. Multiplicity takes it a step further in that if you have two monitors, each screen can be a different box, with the mouse sliding seamlessly from one screen to the next. One keyboard and mouse can control two different PCs... just slide the mouse off the edge of one screen onto the next one and hit the 5 key to heal on your priest, slide it back to Charge the next mob on your warrior... back and forth, rinse repeat. I have a buddy named Rorch that had a Rogue main and a Mage alt, and he used to use it. We'd usually take one or the other on a run, but sometimes we'd have an extra slot, and he'd just bring both. He kept it pretty simple (watching sheep, making water or whatever... tossing out a nuke once in a while), but only because playing a rogue is pretty non-stop.

You're paying for two accounts every month. I'd imagine it gets expensive to build two boxes that can keep up with each other, buying an app or two to run the operation, and then just teaching yourself the mentality it takes to remember to keep an eye on both of 'em, and still be using each one effectively. Personally, I wouldn’t get much more complicated than a priest following around a warrior, but that’s just because I’m stupid*.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumble across an article on wowinsider.com about some fucking fruitbat doing it with 5 accounts at once over on the Magtheridon server. This guy apparently has a priest as his main (Xzin), and 4 mages (Azin, Bzin, Czin, and Dzin) that follow him around. They all look identical, and they all sport rank 13 gear. Look at the picture below, and tell me it doesn’t scream Shit Hot. Imagine seeing these clowns marching towards the little flag your little hunter is ‘defending’ in AB. I imagine it would go something like “Aspect of the Cheetah, Run Away’. Four bubbled mages casting back to back to back to back POM pyroblasts within a half second of each other every 3 minutes? Four sheep at your disposal? A priest on the main toon backing each of them up? Hot Damn.

Personally, I think the guy is crazy, but you gotta admit… you think you’re pretty good on your little mage or whatever? Let me put it this way:

You roll like this:

He rolls like this:

He apparently got the idea from someone in DAoC that called himself Team Wizzy. The Wizzy link will take you to where you can read all about Wizzy, and see Wizzy’s setup. The interviews you can dig up with Xzin are worth a read, but they don’t really go into his setup. He said he’s got 5 identically built machines so that one doesn’t run faster than the others. People have theorized he has a wirless keyboard linked up to 4 extra transcievers, or some custom USB love going on that links one setup to all five boxes. Whatever it is he’s got going, it seems to work.

He gets reported almost every day, but the GMs insist that ‘quin boxing’ is totally legit as long as there’s someone sitting there to push all the buttons to make it go. He even gets random tells from GMs that just want to line up to have his weiner in their mouths for a second.

	"Duel" boxing? "Trip" boxing? Aren't there some basic spelling or English comprehension tests involved to becoming a GM, seeing as how you'll spend the day representing Blizzard using chat? The full screenshot is a wonderful peek into a child's mind. At least the mystery to why my fucking GM tickets take so long to be replied to is solved.

When confronted with the inevitable ‘living in mom’s basement’ routine, he just responds with some fluff about ‘being in his early twenties and owning several businesses’. I’m sure it’s none of my business, and I guess if I owned a business and 5 boxed, I wouldn’t advertise which company it was, but the vagueness sounds pretty well honed. On the other hand, I’m sure he’s been asked the same question many times, and maybe just has a canned response for it by now.

At any rate, you have to respect the sheer determination to get something like this to work… some slob with five iMacs and a spindle of Cat-5 wouldn’t be able to do it, so he’s probably got a lot more know-how than a large portion of the subscriber base. He’s obviously not as smart as ME though (duh), but then again… who is?



* - Yeah, I lied about being stupid.

[edit: P.S. Sam Deathwalker (or something)]

[continue...]

High Warlord for a Day(‘s worth of PvPing)!

Just when I thought Blizzard’s implementation of PvP couldn’t get any lamer, they surprised me again with an ‘across the board’ nerfing of what it means to be High Warlord. Don’t get me wrong, nothing screams ‘I have no life’ like seeing that set of armor running around in WSG, or seeing the dipshits screaming in Ogrimmar’s yell channel on Wednesday morning begging for recognition once they finally ‘made it’. I’m not making that up. Some jackass named Shiniojio or something on Scilla was actually screaming LOOK AT ME in capslock in the yell channel a few weeks back. He even had a little band of cronies yelling stupid crap like ‘all hail the new high warlord’ or whatever. I felt a little ashamed for the guy, like I was staring at someone that just crapped themselves messily in public. I logged out. Way to go, dude. U R teh win. Not to belittle the huge sacrifices these brave souls made, but no longer will you be required to abandon your friends and family, keep an empty bottle by your desk,

	Loser.

or make the big switch to ‘diet’ Mountain Dew (it has more caffeine, apparently) in order to show how much of a loser you are to everyone on your server.

Forsaking sleep for a mere two days (zomg, that’s the same amount of days in a weekend!) will net you enough ‘honor’ to purchase High Warlord weapons, and a single day can score a piece of the epic armor.

Tokens are earned in the same fashion as before (3 marks of honor for a win, 1 for a loss), but a newly revamped raw statistic is accumlated as well. ‘Plain Old Honor’ is now calculated at the end of every day. High Warlord epic weapons can be had for 22500 honor and 20 Arathi Basin Honor Tokens. A piece of armor might be had for 10 tokens and 7000 honor. At the current rate, people ‘stuck in the grind’ can pull off about 9000 honor in a day of pugging. Premade groups 5 capping Arathi Basin can easily double that number without too much trouble. I’ve heard rumors that Blizzard is thinking of increasing the cost of items to keep them a little further out of reach, but really can’t imagine why. They’ve decided to just give the weapons away, and it isn’t a terribly big mystery (to me, at least) why they’ve decided to.

	Yes. Don’t bother. I know the HWL razor is ‘better’. But when you consider this has a 15% droprate off a 5-man mini-boss that a pug of 60s without vent downed on it’s very first attempt… hmm.

The big thing that no one seems to have figured out yet is that soon these weapons will be sub-par. Sure, Blizzard could just increase their stats to breathe a little longevity into them, but why bother? They’ve already got a bunch of new uber weapons planned for levels 61-70 that require running the hardest instances on ‘harder than hard difficulty’. Come expansion, there will be an option to set instances to ‘regular’ or ‘heroic’ difficulty before zoning in. It’s the exact same dungeon, with the exact same number and sets of mobs, and the exact same drops. What makes it Heroic? The mobs have more HP and hit harder. When you beat a dungeon on Heroic, you earn (surprise!) a new type of token. These special tokens are then redeemed for the uberest of uber weapons and armor.

They know that the high warlord set isn’t going to be the top of the pyramid for much longer, so they’ve decided to have a big ‘sale’, and it ends up coming out to about 99.9% off the sticker price for many of these items. I won’t try and pretend like Blizzard’s implementaion of PvP isn’t popular. I personally don’t like it. I roll toons on PvP servers because I love killing alliance that I pass by on the way to an instance, and because if I’m questing and I see “The Enemy” it should mean something. I think the Battlegrounds System is just retarded, though; I don’t want to play Unreal Tournament or Battlefield 1942 on a warrior or druid. For the thousands of people out there without jobs that were climbing the High Warlord Ladder, this must be the biggest breakthrough (or the biggest disappointment) to come out of Blizz in a while. They’re all guaranteed to have the gear very quickly as long as they continue to do what they were already doing anyway.

For those that just hit Warlord and were on the last leg, they must be pissed, because pretty soon every Tom, Dick, and Harry will have the same weapon they pissed away their lives for. For those sitting on the fence, this is the perfect reason to go ahead and run a bit of PvP to grab those weapons before the expansion. My friend Mirun already has a weapon and two pieces of armor on his druid, and he’s only level 55. He can’t even WEAR the gear for another five levels, but he claims just having them in his bags increases his attack power. He’s pulling a piece of armor each day, and apparently hasn’t showered in four days. Unemployment FTW!

At any rate… once the patch dropped, raiding became a distant dream for my short sighted nub guild (<3), so I got on my rogue and took at look at what I could do. I have no intention of getting the entire set, because… well, I have a job, and a girlfriend. I play pretty regularly on the weekends while she’s a work and I’m at home, but I’m not a huge fan of PvP anyway, and I still have a druid to level before January.

I’ve wanted a wolf on my undead since I had one way back in the original beta, but grinding to exalted rep in Ogrimmar as an undead means doing the Chen’s Empty Keg questline about 30,000 times, if not more. There’s a Black Epic Warwolf Mount thing that costs zero honor, but 30 of each type of token (Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley). I already had a few of each token sitting in my bank from before the patch, so I went ahead, bit the bullet, and began to run BGs until I had enough for the wolf (which I actually think is pretty cool looking… I never really liked the white AV one).

Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Since AV is the best battleground to run for pure honor points, but you still need AB tokens for stuff like gloves, what do you think people do now in AB games? Here’s a hint: losing gives you one token, but can be done in 4 minutes. Winning gives you 3, but usually takes about 30 minutes.

30 minutes total / 4 minutes per win for a 'fast' match = 7.5 tokens per 30 minutes if done right

Throwing a match can get you more than twice the amount of tokens. We mysteriously 5 capped an Alliance premade team in under 3 minutes with little to no resistance, and were high fiving each other in bg chat and vent, when we realized this Black Dragonflight team was just sitting in their base around a campfire. They wanted to lose, so they could get their stupid token and queue up again ASAP. Arathi Basin ‘reputation’ means NOTHING anymore, you can buy any item with enough tokens and honor. Honor itself is best farmed in AV speed matches, and they just needed a few AB tokens. We figured out their scheme after the one match, and actually tried doing it ourselves the next round. It worked flawlessly; we lost horribly in record time, grabbed our token, and queued up again. Then a funny thing happened in the next round… nobody capped anything for a good 4 minutes before we realized both teams were trying to lose. Hilarity Ensued, gg blizz on making PvP more engaging.

Anyway… aside from the mount (which replaced my Green Skeletal Warhorse that I just bought about 5 days before, grrr), there isn’t anything I’m dying to have. I guess with the honor I earned getting the rest of the tokens to get the mount, I’ll go ahead and buy the High Warlord Dagger… it’s too bad they don’t offer 18 slot bags, or that’s all I’d be buying. Things like bags and mounts will LAST until level 70. A weapon or helm is going to be a nexus crystal by level 63, and I’ve already got 14 of those in my bank. Can HWL gear even BE disenchanted, or is it like Thunderfury?

Rather than just bitch about it, let’s try and speculate, to see if anything can be done! (This is where the ‘point’ of the article comes in Ripperjack, listen up!)

First off, I agree with the removal of the required continuous grind for PvP rewards. Being able to say ‘Jesus Fucking Christ I am sick to fucking death of Arathi Basin, can I just run an instance and stab a mob in the face again for once?’ and having the answer be ‘yes’ is good. The honor decay and garbage system that was in place before had to go, and it did. Hooray. I do think the new prices for the HWL weaps are a bit low, but I’ve already pointed out why I think that is (the “their obsolescence is on the horizon, so why not” theory).

I think what needs to be done is to finally put a foot down, and penalize losers. This would completely solve the ‘let them 5 cap us’ scenario outlined above. Give two tokens to the winning team of a battleground, and none to the losers. This game favors “time sunk” over raw skill, but nowhere is it as clearly illustrated as in PvP. Imagine if everyone had the ‘let them win’ mentality in Molten Core. They would wipe over and over on the first Giant, and would never earn that Core Hound Tooth or whatever. Even the very first quests in the game could never be completed if you weren’t ‘good enough’ to kill your opponents (undead have to kill some skeletons, orcs kill some pigs… whatever). If you just sat down on the ground there would be no progress made. In PvP though, you would lose the match, but still earn a prize. Yes, progress would be slow, but it would be THERE. After losing 90 matches in PvP (thirty in each zone), you could march down to the quartermaster and rightfully claim your epic mount, even though you did NOTHING. Why not just have experience be a timed tick, so that people could AFK all the way to level 60 and beyond? Mmmm… no more twinks…

The last thing to do is to base rewards on actual win/loss records. Get an epic sword after a 10 game winning streak. AFKing out constitutes a loss. I think this is going to be how Arena Honor gets tallied, but don’t hold me to it. I know, I know… I can hear you complaining already. But, but… ! But Iso! What if my DSL craps out in a thunderstorm on the verge of winning? Don’t PvP during thunderstorms. But what if I’m on dialup and get owned? Yeah, and what if you had one leg and wanted to be an NFL kicker? But… what if I suck at PvP? Then you don’t deserve the High Warlord Gyroscopic Meat Cleaving Dildo of Shame and Incest. OKAY? You suck. Learn2Play, then come back and knock some heads. Having crap handed to you on a platter isn’t making you better. It’s this same ‘don’t make anyone feel bad’ mentality that’s ruining the school systems, and resulting in people complaining in chat about ‘loosing there flag’s becaus your 2 busy AFKing’.

Hey Blizz, do me a favor? Make people earn their gear? I’ll be AFKing in AV until then. Drop in and say hello, but don’t expect much more than a tap on the spacebar every 2 minutes or so while I’m watching TV. Just until my stupid guild gets all the weapons or whatever and we can get back to actually raiding.

[continue...]

Banned Camp

This probably isn’t even technically ‘News’ anymore, but the smug attitude that came with it was just too much to pass up. An endgame Horde guild on the Black Dragonflight realm was recently banned for cheating in AQ40. For the three of you out there that don’t know what that last sentence meant, An’Qiraj is a large, forty man raid instance in World of Warcraft. While it is not the current ‘last dungeon to conquer’ (Naxxramas), it’s second to last, and has some of the best raid loots in the game.

Now… let me get one thing out there in the open before this article goes any further. I honestly don’t care if you cheat, or hack, or do whatever. It’s your 15 bucks a month, and you can do with it as you please. Blizzard will never show up on your doorstep with lawyers and try to sue you for exploiting holes in their code. The worst you’ll see is a banning, big whoop-de-doo. I don’t really play battlegrounds, so I never feel the brunt of any PvP exploits people may have found, and PvE cheats don’t really have an impact on my playtime. Sure, you may be getting a huge sword for no work at all, and if you happen to use it to cut me in half while I’m running to meet up with my group, then I guess it has affected me… but it’s not like you’re swinging a weapon that isn’t available in the game. If you didn’t have it, Bob would have it, and he’d just be the one to chop me in half instead. That kind of stuff just happens on PvP servers, and I’m fully prepared to take the corpse run and move on with my life. I certainly don’t start flame wars on forums accusing everyone with a big sword of hacking or whatever.

	The shortest path from Point A to Point B is apparently wallhacks.

What cracks me up about this particular case is the overall ‘gloating over being caught’ that our friend “Kletus” is about to grace us with. His guild used a modified version of the AQ40 map, which allowed them to walk thru certain walls straight to C’thun (the final boss), kill him for best loots in the dungeon, and skip all the crap on the way. The way that WoW does data verification means that it checks to see if certain files are where they should be, not that they contain the exact info they should. By replacing a few key files, WoW sees the files are there, loads the zone, and allows the merry band to continue on their way.

Something that none of the general forum-flaming-public seems to have noticed is the fact that you still need to be able to kill the boss that you’re shortcutting to – something I certainly couldn’t do. Even if a red carpet to C’thun were laid out in front of every guild I’ve ever been in, we just wouldn’t have had the firepower or coordination to actually kill him. If the hack was ‘load the dungeon, and then just run around looting things’ then that would be pretty lame. This is all speculation, though, and beside the point.

The last thing to note is that the entire raid needed to be on the same page. It’s not like some raid leader loaded up HaXoRz, and no one else knew about it. It had to have been a premeditated, coordinated effort. Everyone needed to be walked thru how to ‘load the hack’ (it’s not just dropping a file in a folder, you need to actually fool the WoW installation into ‘patching’ itself). I’ve been the “IT Guy” for a guild or two, and know how retarded everyday people can be with simple tasks like registering for a forum account. Trying to get 40 people on the same page with modified map hacks must have been an entire can of worms unto itself. Not that they’re hard to FIND or anything… the latest WoW hacks are apparently conveniently served up on FileFront.

Just for argument's sake, try to imagine how you’d feel if you had any aprehension on the matter. Here you are, Fred the Honest Druid. All you want is to cast Healing Touch and Regrowth until your index finger bleeds. You’ve labored over your little toon from Zero to Sixty, from Twill Bracers to Cenarion Bracers to Dreamwalker Wristguards. From the lowly Wailing Caverns to Zul’Gurub and Ruins of An’Qiraj. Into the Molten Core, past Black Wing Lair, on and on you pushed, all the way to the Fabled Shores of End Game. You're finally in that AQ40 guild, one step from the ‘final dungeon’ (until expansion, but I digress). Thirty-five close guildmates have suddenly decided to cheat in the final stretch for easy loots. You feel pressured, and don't want to take the easy way out. This guild has proven that they can kill the last boss, they just don’t want to deal with the hassle of getting to him each week for his loots. In the end, you succumb to peer pressure and do it. Three weeks go by (three runs of the dungeon, it resets every seven days), and maybe you even feel like ‘it worked’. Then one day you log in to find that you just can’t log in… in fact, your entire guild has been permanently banned, and everyone on the server (and in the gaming news) knows about it.

I will put money down that people wept. Hot and salty god-damned tears of HEART WRENCHING SORROW for their lost toons. Not only the toons that actually went to AQ40, but also any level 40-ish alts on that same account that were putzing around in the Scarlet Monastery. I’ll bet desperate emo emails (emoiles?) were sent to Blizzard, angry accusations flew over ventrilo, a falling out of proportions that maybe only one or two actually imagined would ‘maybe’ happen.


Awesome.



Anyway, without further ado, I present to you Exhibit A: “Kletus”. Self-appointed Royal Justifier of the guild :

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kletus The patch we used was called 'Patch 5.mpq' not Patch 3, but nevertheless the outcome was basically the same. We used this cheat two or three times to make the headache of C'thun trash go away. And we only began using it after we had already "beaten the game." While most of us were aware of the possible consequences, we basically had to do it. Let me explain. Since the majority of our guild's equipment is beyond that offered in the temple of AQ, there is little incentive for our raiders to go there at all. Basically all we get from there is a nasty repair bill. The only loot worth anything drops off of the last boss, so naturally it came to the point where only a handful wanted to go to AQ because of the incredible cost of time and gold, with little reward. With this cheat, we could basically eliminate the repair bills, the grueling 4++ hour clear, and actually have the required raid online to kill C'Thun before people started getting sandy and logging out. So we hacked. We lost. Game over. It was a good run. Did we hack Naxx? Nope. Although we have been guilty of 'clever use of game mechanics'. We by chance discovered the 8/8 wrath bug on Patchwerk on our third or fourth kill and used that exploit the following week before it was hotfixed. Resetting the four horsemen isn't hard. Besides, it gives no advantage because you still have to wait for the dead to run back. Estimated total eBay value of banned accounts: $60,000+ Was it worth it in the end? Hell yes. Kletus {Overrated}

Congratulations, Kletus. I’m not sure what that last part is implying… that he could have sold those accounts on ebay for $60,000+, or that he actually did after being banned, or…? If he could have, but now can't because those accounts are banned, all the better. $60,000 worth of grinding up in smoke?

Double Awesome.

Regardless of the whole ebay implications, my favorite part has to be the following :

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kletus Was it worth it in the end? Hell yes.

Translation: Did we get caught cheating and get our entire guild banned from the game? Totally! DooD, we Rool!

	Click me for Mad Korean DM “Teleport Hack” Love Scenes

Hate to burst your bubble, but getting banned isn’t exactly an accomplishment. It's hardly a "World First". While more ‘mundane’ activities like rapid fire spamming guild invites to everyone on the server (causing the server to crash), might net you a 3 hour suspension, actively replacing map files or using teleport exploits are a pretty sure-fire method. If he means ‘was it worth it that everyone is suddenly writing articles about us’ then hooray! You win! Too bad everything I’ve read pretty much ends up with the writer going on about how stupid you were. Attention is attention, though. If you got banned for hacking Ragefire Chasm (the first instance, runnable at level 8) then it would be funny, but I just don’t understand the need to do it at the end.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kletus While most of us were aware of the possible consequences, we basically had to do it. Since the majority of our guild's equipment is beyond that offered in the temple of AQ, there is little incentive for our raiders to go there at all.

	C'thun and babies don't mix

You HAD to do it? I love this part. What was the alternative? Not having “teh lootz”? You’re absolutely right, then. You had no choice. And yet... you say yourself you 'didn't even need' the loot. But Iso! What about the Noobs? They need C'thun gear, too! Awww, it's so cute! Did the wittle guiwd noobs get sweepy after a “grueling 4++ hours” in Naxx? Maybe you should have made them some warm milk and tucked them in for lullabies. I hear cocoa works great on the little ones when they get cranky. Besides, you know what they say: Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Give a guild noob wallhacks...

[continue...]

You just got Owned, Level 1 style!

Your build sucks, your interface sucks, the macros you write are stupid, and I would totally own you in a duel. I bet you'd just love to know who my main is, but I won’t even give you the pleasure of knowing. I don’t post on my main, because people like you would probably send me tells in game and otherwise harass me.

I doubt we even play on the same server together, but I bet you’d roll on ‘my’ server just the same. Create a character, log in, skip the intro, and add my main to your friends list; just so you could see when I log in and make pitiful attempts to ridicule me on my own home turf. Well too bad, buddy. Just suck it up, because it isn’t going to happen. I’m too smart for you, and plus I’m totally better at this game as well.

I love how you were asking in the Rogue forums about a good dagger to use with the hemorrage talent, LOL. Stupid Rogue. Everyone (including my main) knows that hemo builds are only good for slow swords or maces. It’s too bad you didn’t ask which fast fist weapon would be good, because then I could have really pwned you hard. My main isn’t even a Rogue, but everyone (except you, apparently LOL) knows that.

Then this other noob on some level 20 orc avatar is asking where to respec his talents. LOL, maybe in your main city, dumbo! Right next to the battlemaster, DUH! How you could even be level 20 and not know where the battlemasters are is just ridiculous. What have you been doing all this time? Questing? LOL u fukin carebear! Maybe you should roll on an RP server where you can pretend to care about Mankirk’s Wife ROFL. I had respecced twice by the time my main was 17… I had accidentally put a point into Impr--- wait! Not so fast! Ha Ha! I’m not revealing my identity that easily! I won’t even tell you what class I am or you’d probably start sending tells to every one of my fellow classmates trying to discover who I am!

Besides, the last thing I’d ever want in-game is a tell from someone with a name as stupid as yours… I’m not even going to spell it out here because it’s so LAME! My main’ s name is tastefully cool. Hardcore, but not ‘borderline gay’ / ‘trying too hard’… you know? It’s a fine line, but I walk it. Yeah, this alt is named “hjdshaskl” but that’s only because I was in such a rush to make this toon and totally own someone on the forums. I almost accidentally posted something on my main that first time, but thank god I hit the ‘preview thread’ button instead of the post one. I saw my main’s name hanging out there in the breeze and almost had a heart attack. That’s not a problem anymore, since I switched my forum avatar to this Level One Alt, and haven’t switched back since. I would have gone back and edited in something different if I had actually posted something on my main, but like I said… I had only hit ‘preview’. I still had time to make this guy as soon as I could to totally flame your stupid idea for a ‘new mage talent idea’. God! What do you think you are? Clever? Insightful? …A dev? Newflash! You’re none of these things, you're just STUPID, and (now) Totally Owned by a Level 1 Alt.

After reading your (stupid) mage talent idea, I ran a search for other posts by you, and read up on even more of your retarded ideas. Swapping trinkets out in battle? I was rolling on the floor with milk shooting out my nose in two white jet streams when I read that one. Can you spell ‘imba’? LOL, good luck there buddy, I’ll keep that thread open and refreshed in another window so when Blue craps all over you I can be the first to ROFL @ your sorry ass. What was another one…? Oh! Drinking in combat… OMG… here’s a little WoW history lesson for you: that used to be in the game, and they took it out. Here’s an idea: next time search Google before you submit another one of your stupid threads, or better yet, just don’t bother. I heard Alt+F4 is the keyboard shortcut to start a new thread in the forums LOLOLOL

Anyway, I got to go eat dinner, my Mo—girlfriend is calling me. She cooks and cleans for me, because she knows I work hard all day long on my main dragging my loser guild thru Naxx. It’s tough work, and my main can’t afford to be bothered during one of these runs. It’s a good thing no one knows who that is, thanks to my trusty Level One Alt!

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