Catching Up in WoW

I've recently (last weekend) hit level 85 with my rogue in World of Warcraft. There's a special place in my heart for this rogue, as she was the original use of the name "Jiyambi" and was my first "main" in WoW. But at the moment, she's terribly far behind the other characters in my guild, and the task of catching up to them in order to be able to participate in current raids is somewhat daunting. I thought I'd share my philosophy on how to catch up quickly, in case anyone else is in a similar position to me.

Know Your Class

You can't find good gear until you understand what makes gear "good" in the first place. There are a lot of awesome sources out there for determining what kind of stats to look for for your class and spec, but my personal favorite is the Elitist Jerks forum. They typically have guides for each raiding spec as well as cutting edge research into what talents, glyphs, gear, and rotation to use. The information overload can sometimes be a bit daunting, however, and they usually only care about the very top level content. This means that if you're just gearing up for heroics, their advice won't always be applicable, but it will often be close enough.

If you want a simpler approach, just punch your class and spec into the item filters in WoWhead. This will give you the Wowhead developer's opinions on what the best stat weight is for you. For rogues, stats are very simple, and I've found Wowhead's suggestions agree pretty much exactly with the "equivalence points" assigned by the Elitist Jerks folks. However,  for classes with more complex stat needs, such as healers, your mileage may vary.

Know The Gear

Not surprisingly, in order to get good gear, you need to know what's out there. It would be really unfortunate to spend thousands of gold getting a cape crafted only to discover there is an awesome cape as a quest reward (incidentally, there IS an awesome cape as a quest reward for the Firelands quests).

One resource for finding gear, which can also be found on the Elitist Jerks website, or downloaded and run locally from your computer, is Rawr. Rawr is a simulator which actually tries to simulate combat based on whatever gear you feed into it, taking into account spec, rotation, glyphs, and even what buffs you usually have on, how long the fight is, or how much you have to move or switch targets. It's somewhat clunky, however, and takes up a lot of computer resources to run, making it difficult to run alongside WoW on older computers. It also is sometimes not actively maintained, depending on your class, so use it with caution. For my rogue, as gear for rogues is relatively simple, I primarily use Rawr to determine the best trinkets. Trinkets can't easily be ranked based on equivalence points alone, and simulators are great for finding out exactly how useful one might be.

Wowhead is definitely high up in the ranking for finding gear - it is a database, after all. You can use their pre-built stat weighting to look for gear or enter your own, and add filters for your class, armor type, and how the gear is acquired. In my recent gear quest, I used this tool almost exclusively. I found it to be far more transparent and much less buggy than Rawr, but again my class is very simple. For more complex classes such as healers, Rawr is nice since it takes your current gear into account when determining upgrades.

I kept track of all of the potential gear and it's stats in an Excel sheet. This is above and beyond what most people will want to do, but I'm an engineer. I love spreadsheets and I'm not afraid to admit it. Having everything in an excel sheet let me see at a glance what the stats were on the gear, helped me automatically calculate equivalence points, and reference a sheet with my current gear to determine the amount of an upgrade. Which brings me to my next point...

Know The Upgrade

So you know what it means for gear to be good and you know what good gear is out there and where to get it. The next question is what to do first. I organized my gear list by source. I had all the gear available in heroics into groups based on which heroic you could find it in. Similarly all the gear available by reputation was separated into groups. This let me pick which rep I wanted to grind first, and which heroics I was most interested in running. I also looked at what was available in justice points - these items would be pretty easy to come by, and it would be a shame to grind reputation for an item when you could get one of comparable quality (or better!) simply through justice points. For rogues, it's really easy to rate how big an upgrade something is because we have a value known as equivalence points - essentially, how much an item will contribute to our DPS. For other classes, though, upgrades are more qualitative, so you'll have to decide for yourself how to rate these.

Keep It Simple

Of course, all this might not be necessary for your situation. I enjoy creating spreadsheets and figuring out the exact most efficient use of my gear grinding time. But you may simply pop on once a week and run whatever dungeon you get in the random finder. If that's the case, here's my suggestions for you:

• Get the addon RatingBuster and turn on stat summaries. Every piece of gear you mouseover will now be compared to what you currently have. When a piece of gear drops in a dungeon, if the green numbers are for stats you like (see Know Your Class above), and they offset any red numbers, then it's an upgrade!
• Always wear a tabard for a rep you haven't maxed out yet. Max out the rep for your arcanum faction (look it up on Wowhead if you don't know which one you need) and Therazane first, as you will always need an arcanum and inscription (head and shoulder enchants). Get all your reps to at least friendly and carry the tabards around for those you haven't maxed yet so you can switch if you max one out. Each time you reach a new level, either look it up on Wowhead or just head to the vendor and use your RatingBuster addon to check for upgrades.
• When you are about to cap out on Justice or Valor points, head to the vendor and buy something that's an upgrade. At least at first there will be a LOT of things to upgrade. Try to find something not easily replaceable via rep or quest, but if you don't want to do a bunch of research, just replace the item that has the lowest ilevel in your current gear. These days it's somewhat of a waste to buy blue gear with your Justice points, so try to stay with purples.

Have Fun

As always, it's important that you have fun as you work on your gear. It's a game after all! If you absolutely can't stand a dungeon, DON'T RUN IT even if it happens to have good gear. Having good gear is not worth being unhappy while you are supposed to be having fun.

Cataclysm Zone Review: Southern Barrens (Horde)

 I recently decided to take a break from my frantic addon coding to make a video of the questing in the Southern Barrens. If people like this, I'll be making one or two more before Cata comes out, if I have time. I do plan to make more video guides of other types in the future, such as boss guides, and who knows what else!

This is a video review of the zone the Southern Barrens, Horde side. The videos will take you through the entire questing experience of the Southern Barrens, during which I discuss the general quality of the quests and touch on several of the most interesting stories that take place in this zone.



If you enjoyed the videos, help wow-pro gain publicity by rating them and subscribing to my YouTube channel!

Real ID on Forums Withdrawn!

I just wanted to update anyone reading this with the situation: Blizzard announced today that they are withdrawing the RealID forum integration - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1&pageNo=1

I am relieved beyond words. I felt such an overwhelming sense of betrayal through all this. I was terrified that I would have to look for a new MMO and lose some or all of the wonderful relationships I've built with my friends and guild mates over the years. I tried to play once or twice during the last few days but I couldn't stay online for more than a few minutes. I was distracted and upset throughout. Finally I feel like I can breathe again.

I am proud of Blizzard for listening to their community, but I still feel a twinge of doubt and distrust now when I think about them. I hope in time my belief in them can be restored - I have always felt in the past that Blizzard was above other gaming companies, that they had a better idea of what their gamers wanted. I sincerely hope that becomes true again in the future.

The RealID Scandal

I decided it was high time I post an opinion piece on the RealID situation currently rocking the MMO world. Keep in mind everything here is my opinion. I enjoy debates as long as they are civil so feel free to comment and disagree with me (or agree, of course!).

The Overview

Some are calling this the biggest PR disaster to hit the MMO industry. The amount of public outcry on this subject is unprecedented. The forum post discussing the issue has over 34,000 posts - that's over 1,800 pages of people, for the most part, decrying the new feature.

For those who have been hiding under a rock the last few weeks, here is a FAQ about RealID provided by Blizzard: http://us.battle.net/realid/faq.html - note that this FAQ does not yet seem to cover the forum change. Additionally WoW.com has continuing coverage of the issue and Blizzard's responses to it: http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/official-forum-changes-real-life-names-to-be-displayed/ and http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/blizzards-responses-on-the-real-id-situation/

If you don't want to read the articles, here is a brief overview of what's been happening:

Initial In-Game Implementation

First, Blizzard implemented a new stage of their Battle.net integration (this effects both WoW and Starcraft). In this new feature, you can add a friend as a "RealID" friend. This means the person can see your first and last name. Blizzard cautioned us that this feature is intended for people who know themselves in real life, but that it is ultimately up to the users how they use it.

This original implementation created a minor stink because your friends' friends (who are not necessarily people you know) are able to see your real name. They are not informed of what character belongs to that name, but the inability to block this feature resulted in many players not using the RealID system. But, at this point the system was completely optional and had very little effect on gameplay.

Addon Security Vulnerability

However, after the system had been around for a few weeks, it was soon discovered that addons were able to exploit a security vulnerability in the system and display your real name to anyone and everyone (Reference: http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/security-flaw-allows-addons-to-expose-full-real-life-names-witho/).

The Big One - Forums Use RealID

Shortly after that fiasco, Blizzard dropped what some are calling the biggest PR disaster ever to hit the MMO world - The WoW official forums will, in the future, display your RealID name. There is no way to opt out of this service: if you want to post in the forums, your real first and last name will be shown.

Let me do my best to make this abundantly clear. By "Official Forums" Blizzard includes not the normal QQ my class is broken lol Blizz noob posts. It includes (but is not limited to):

• Suggestion Forums, where players have an outlet to suggest ideas for the game
• Guild Recruitment Forums, without which a guild would be at a significant disadvantage in recruitment
• Tech Support Forums, where users can report problems and request technical help.

Relevance - Can They Find You?

Before I discuss the consequences of this change, I want to put to rest some arguments about whether this all even matters. The first is the belief that no one will be able to find you just given your name. I'd like to share a story with you folks that puts that belief resoundingly in it's place - as a naive fantasy.

First of all, you can hear the story from those involved here: http://seewhatyoudidthere.com/2010/07/07/realid-changes-the-very-real-ease-of-stalking-in-the-internet-age/

In the huge forum thread I sited at the beginning of the article, one user decided he would support his argument that no one can find someone based only on their name by actually posting his name. Within 20 minutes the blogger in the above article found him and called him at work. He talked to the exposed user and confirmed that he knew not only his home address and home phone, but also:

• What the user did for the 4th of July
• The color of his bedroom walls
• The name of his dog
• The names of his parents

Luckily for the user, the blogger is a nice guy. He helped the user regain some privacy by improving his settings on various websites, and the user of course immediately removed his name from the forum post.

You may believe that most of this information must be from Twitter or Facebook. But you can just as easily find phone numbers and addresses from public phone books and census data. Think also about employer websites which may list your work information. And keep in mind that this user did not have a particularly unique name in any way. Just because your name is common, do not believe you are somehow protected.

Relevance - Safety

The above story is a cautionary tale but has a relatively happy ending. However, that's not always the case. In the following article, we see the other side of that coin: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101031-Counter-Strike-Knife-Fight-Leads-to-Real-Life-Stabbing

In this story, a user upset over losing a knife fight in Counter-Strike planned and plotted for seven months. He then drove to the knife fight winner's house, rang the doorbell, and stabbed the winner in the chest with a real, honest to goodness knife. The second gamer was extremely lucky - the knife barely missed his heart and he survived.

This occurred in a game where death is a momentary inconvenience. In WoW, our characters represent hundreds of hours of invested time. Ninja'd loot, for one example, is a far more serious event than killing someone in Counter-Strike. Would you like to make it one step easier for angry psychopaths to find you via your guild recruitment post using your real name? I know I would not.

Relevance - Reputation

Safety isn't the only reason that a user might wish to remain anonymous. Though it may seem foreign to many of us, some people could be harmed via WoW in a completely different manner - through their reputation. Sadly, not all successful businesses, law firms, hospitals, universities, or other "prestigious" organizations view gaming with a tolerant eye. Being a gamer openly can hurt your chances of receiving a job and can make it harder for you to be taken seriously in your chosen field. I'm not going to go into this too much, but even if this doesn't effect you please consider the people that it does effect.

The Issues - Tech Support is Optional?

Now that we've determined that revealing first and last names is indeed a relevant concern, lets talk about what that means in this situation.

The most glaring and obvious issue, to me, is the tech support forums. If a user wants to report a tech support problem, he or she has no choice but to reveal their first and last name for anyone and everyone on the internet to see. Now, you might say, you can just call Blizzard or leave an in game ticket if you want to contact them. I beg to differ. I have had three friends hacked in the last month and another two had their accounts locked out (it turns out completely unjustly). In order to talk to someone on the phone they had to wait at least 45 minutes, often much longer. In game ticket queues can take days. And even when one of those methods result in an actual conversation with a Blizzard employee, things are seldom immediately resolved (a good friend still has not received his hundreds of emblems of triumph lost to the hacker). In this situation it's important that every tech support avenue be used and fully open to users.

I maintain, therefore, that it is completely unacceptable to require this blatant disregard for user privacy if a user wishes to post in the tech support forums.

The Issues - The Morality of Intimidating the Trolls

One of Blizzard's officially stated motives is that they hope to use this new feature to reduce trolling on the forums. Now, I don't like forum trolls and I would love to see less of them around. But I think the real logic behind this "encouragement" for us to act more appropriately needs to be examined.

Clearly, the way they hope to accomplish this is that, with the knowledge that their real name will be posted with their comments, users will think twice about making rude posts. But what will cause them to think twice? Will they reflect whether or not this will be a suitable way to treat other human beings? Not likely. The fact is Blizzard is hoping that user will be motivated by fear: Fear that any negativity generated by the post will cross over to the "real world" to haunt them. If all they were going for is accountability, a simple unchangeable gamer handle would suffice - the fact that it must be your real name means they want this to cross over to your life outside WoW. As I've shown in the two examples above, this is not an unreasonable fear. The fact that Blizzard is utilizing this fear to accomplish it's goals, however noble those goals may be, is disturbing.

And the sad thing is, this is very unlikely to actually stop trolling. People who troll will still find ways to troll, whether they do so with disregard to their in game or real life reputation, or whether they use false names, trial accounts, or other ways. In addition, the possibility of character assassination (there is nothing to stop you from purposely listing the name of an enemy as your account name) has been introduced as well.

I maintain that Blizzard's use of fear to attempt to intimidate users into good behavior is both ineffective and reprehensible.

The Issues - Discrimination

Possibly the most important (and most easily overlooked) issue present in this brouhaha is the unequal effect the change will have on minorities, particularly women and gay gamers. It is pretty unarguable that a very significant portion of WoW's player base is extremely homo-phobic. Women gamers, while becoming more and more common, are still often treated with disrespect or with inappropriate stalker-like behavior. It will be pretty easy to determine whether a user is male or female based on name alone. Additionally, users with names from other nationalities could also be threatened. We can agree, then, that revealing the first and last names to these threatened groups would be highly undesirable and could cause emotional distress, stalking, or even violence.

Many people are simply saying, as a response to those uncomfortable with this feature, "Just don't post!". Even without the tech support issues discussed above, we need to examine how this threat, both emotional and physical, is unequally effecting the player base. Consider, for example, a cis ("normal" sexuality), white male when compared with a female, a male with "alternative" sexuality, or another minority group. Do you honestly believe this new "feature" will be affecting them equally? Is it fair to say to the more threatened, less comfortable group, "just don't use this feature"? Is it fair to deny them this privilege?

Here is an artical from another woman gamer discussing this issue: http://www.spiderfarmer.com/2010/07/07/blizzards-burqa/

I maintain that by revealing real names for all forum posts, Blizzard is driving away minority groups and allowing those in the majority more access to privileges, in this case the forums.

How can I help?

If you are as angry as I am about this, send complaints to Blizzard's privacy email: privacy@blizzard.com

And to the ESRB: privacy@esrb.org

The more outraged voices they hear, the more likely they are to make a change! 

Closing

I'd like to include a few succinct comments from WoW.com's threads to close. One user said:

They told us it was by invite only, then they displayed our friends of friends.
They told us it was secure, but addons have already found vulnerabilities in their security.
They told us it was optional, but now if we want to post on the official forums, it's required.

Finally, another user summed up the whole mess: "RealID: So optional, it's mandatory!"


I'm very happy to discuss any of the points in the article with you. However, please be civil in any comments you make, or they will be deleted.

Patch 3.3.3 Goodies!

MMO Champion put up their summary of the PTR 3.3.3 patch notes today, and there are a lot of interesting things in there.

• [Frozen Orbs] may be less useless in the coming patch, as they will be used as currency, but to buy what, we don't know yet. There are some conjectures that things like [Frost Lotus] or even emblems may be purchasable in this manner. The bottom line is, HANG ON TO YOUR ORBS! I know some people have gotten in the habit of VENDORING these items because they sell so badly on the AH these days. Keep them, they may just be useful!
• Cooldowns will be removed for crafting [Titansteel Bars], [Moonshroud], [Spellweave] and [Ebonweave]. These items will probably be dropping drastically in price, so try to sell the ones you've got now.
• Some fun changes to battlegrounds on the way, including the random battleground feature. Marks will no longer be used to buy stuff, so use em up now! This is good news for me, since I will be farming my battleground mounts in the future!
• Deserter debuff buffed! I really hate this change. This means that, if a tank bails in HHoR and the group doesn't want to find another, everyone but one of you is out of luck for not 15, but now THIRTY minutes!
• Inability to need items clarified. I still call this bullshit, Blizz. If I'm on my tree and a cloth upgrade drops that no one else needs, I should be able to need it. I understand that the rules are in place to protect lower armor type wearers, but it seems ridiculous to force players to shard items that are huge upgrades. This system is clearly broken and needs to be fixed.
• Improvements on the vote to kick system. I like this.
• World event bosses added to dungeon finder! Yay!
• Quest tracking improvements. They seem useful.
• Various class changes, but none involving druids.

Overall I'm looking forward to 3.3.3. What about you folks?

New Toys

If you've been following me on Twitter, you already know of one of my new acquisitions from this weekend. I've added a second as well, and here are the pics for your enjoyment!

[Reins of the Raven Lord]

Spirit Coyote summoned from [Don Carlos' Famous Hat]

I love toys and collectibles, so this was awesome! I'm still going for several of the other rare mounts in the game, I'll post if I ever get one.

For those who don't know:

[Reins of the Raven Lord] is an extremely rare drop from Anzu, an optional boss who can only be summoned by a druid who has completed their epic flight form quest. The boss can be summoned in heroic Sethekk Halls. To access this instance, you must purchase the key, which requires honored with the Lower City. The instance can be solo'd by a bear tank in decent gear.

[Don Carlos' Famous Hat] is a 100% drop item from Don Carlos in heroic Old Hillsbrad Foothills. Though only one hat drops at a time, and it does save you to the instance, the hat can easily be farmed for everyone in your group by leaving the instance and reseting it. Don Carlos will reset. Note that HE WILL DESPAWN if you complete the instance events, so make sure you get your hats first if you plan to complete the instance. You must be honored with the Keepers of Time to purchase the key allowing access to heroic mode. Don Carlos was quite easy for me to solo as a tank in decent gear.

Paladin Power!

I just wanted to share the amazingly awesome event that happened to me and two friends last night. Two "real life" friends and I queued up for normal Forge of Souls. I was playing on Deedlet in her new healing spec, and my two friends were both recently 80 paladins, one a tank and the other ret.

The group we pugged into contained two other ret paladins. It was a group of all paladins! We completed the instance in good order and would have gone on for more if it wasn't so late. The whole time I was cracking up every time I glanced at Grid and saw all pink boxes.

In summary: Paladins rock.

Many Roles

Last time I talked about tanking with different classes. Today I'd like to talk about branching out in a different way: Trying out each possible talent tree for your characters.

On Honani, my main, I've filled every role a druid can fill. I've found that I dislike Boomkin, because I like to be up front and in the action when I DPS. I've healed extensively, and now I tank and kitty DPS as my main two specs. I feel like I have a very solid understanding of all that a druid can do, and I think it has greatly benefited my playstyle.

On Deedlet, my second level 80, I have both tanked and DPSd, and am now building a healing set. I want to try out that last talent tree just to see what it's like. Who knows, what if I really love healing as a paladin? And it seems a shame to have a level 80 character and not try out everything they have available.

On the other hand, during BC, I played a rogue named Jiyambi and never set foot outside of combat daggers spec. She's assassination now, but I've never ever seen the subtlety tree. If she ever gets to level 80, I hope to grab a duel spec and make a PvP spec just to try out that last tree.

Do you find it fun and interesting to try out many different options for your characters? Or do you pick one and stick with it? Have you ever been asked by your guild to change specs only to find that you really like your new one?

In other news, I am hoping to work on a new guide this weekend. We'll see if I manage to finish it!

Tanking: Druid vs Paladin

I've recently begun tanking on my paladin again, to take advantage of the daily frost badge random dungeon in hopes of purchasing some yummy [Primordial Saronite].

The first thing I noticed when switching to her is that her gear really, really sucks.

The second thing is that paladin tanking is a whole heck of a lot different from bear tanking.

Luckily I was with guild mates, so while it was still horribly embarrassing when mobs went running lose among the group, I at least didn't get yelled at and called a noob... well, they called me a noob, but I like to think it was lovingly.

I thought I understood paladin tanking pretty well. 9-6-9-6-9, right? I even had a fancy addon to help me fail less. And my original tanking experience was on my pally. But I've found that transferring from druid AoE tanking (which uses all of one button) to pally AoE tanking (in which you actually have to target different mobs and build threat on them) is a big jump. And pretty much every trash pull is an AoE pull these days.

The main tank in my guild has a level 80 tank of every tanking class, and plays each regularly. How he manages to switch seemlessly from one to another is beyond my comprehension. I will say that, as a main spec healer, playing tanks has brought me some very useful insight into the tools available to those I heal.

What about you folks? Do you play a tank? More than one? If so, do you find it challenging to switch between them?

Tree Changes in 3.3

I'm going to take a moment to talk about some upcoming changes for tree healing. So for you readers who don't play trees, just bear with me for a bit.

Blizzard is really keeping trees guessing about the next patch. There are several very big changes in store for us.


Gift of the Earthmother Nerfed

First, Gift of the Earthmother will be changing. The current PTR build reads thusly: "Increases your total spell haste by 10%." This is a huge nerf from the effective 30% haste that Gift of the Earthmother is currently worth for instant cast spells. Now, this is the PTR and things are subject to change. A recent update to the PTR shows Blizzard is toying with the possibility of an additional 10% GCD reduction for only Lifebloom. This would still be a pretty bad nerf considering the heaviest used spell in PvE these days is Rejuvenation, but it would be a bit better and may encourage more Lifebloom use. All in all, this change seems to indicate that we will need to stack more haste after 3.3.


Rejuvenation Nerf Reversed

In a recent post post, Ghostcrawler indicated that Rejuvenation will be returning to it's 15 second duration. The spell scheduled to be nerfed, but Blizzard felt like hitting druids with two hard nerfs back to back was too much, so they are reversing this decision in favor of the Gift of the Earthmother nerf. What does this mean for druids? Well, it means that the new glyph may be a more viable option. Which brings me to...


New Tree Glyph: Rapid Rejuvenation

Patch 3.3 will introduce a new tree glyph: [Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation]. This glyph will cause our haste to make our Rejuvenation tick faster. This means more HPS, but it also means we will have to refresh our Rejuvenation more often. I think the choice of whether to pick this up or not depends largely on the individual druid. I mainly heal 10-mans, and I'm usually raid healing, which means blanketing the entire raid with Rejuvenation. Usually it's fairly easy to keep HoTs up on everyone, especially if I don't have to worry about the tanks. With the return to an 18 second duration, I am definitely going to pick up this glyph and try it out.



Tell me trees - what are your thoughts on these changes? Will you be picking up the new glyph?

A Return to Blogging

Hello blog readers!

I have been away from my blog for a while now. This has been due to starting my graduate program. Now that things have settled down and I have classwork under control, I am returning to my blog.

I'll kick off my return by announcing an update that should be done this weekend to my Tree Healing Guide. I'll be completely changing the gearing section - instead of a big, unwieldly, and often out of date list, we'll have several links to useful tools such as Rawr, MaxDPS, and WoWhead. I will explain how to use these tools to choose the best gear for your tree, based on your current gear and your personal healing style. This is *much* more useful than a static list, because a static list does not reflect the various differences in healing style and the current stats on your gear.

Additionally, this weekend I will be getting together (online) with Jame from to set up a new release of his leveling addon. This will fix the issue of the addon reading as "out of date" and generally clean up the addon work in progress page over on WoW-Pro.

I'm hoping to start work on a guide for the next major holiday (the WoW equivalent of Thanksgiving) soon.

I'm going to try to post at least a "food for thought" post every few days over here. Hope you all enjoy!

My UI, Part 1

Hi folks!

Have a bit of a content dry spell, so I thought I'd go over some of the addons I use. Most of these are useful for all classes and roles, but some are specific to healers or to classes I play. I'll note when this is the case.

Arkinventory
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com

This is one of the most valuable addons I have. Arkinventory is a bag addon which displays all of your bags in one big inventory screen. But it does a heck of a lot more than that too. Other features include:

• Automatic and completely customizable sorting to keep your inventory neat and organized
• Can be applied to bank and guild bank if you choose.
• Memory of bank and guild bank while away from them
• Memory of alternate characters' bags, banks, and guild bank

I can't recommend this addon enough, it's one of the few that I just don't think I could play without.

Auctioneer
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com

Auctioneer is pretty well known, so I'm not going to go into details here. This addon is essential if you want to make money using the auction house, even if it's just to sell stuff you find. A quick 2 minute scan once a week keep your database updated so you know the market price for any item you might find, and know how much to sell it for. For those who want the more advanced functionality, this suite of addons allows you to be a predator on the auction house, finding deals and selling them for awesome profit.

AutoProfit
Download from: WoWInterface.com

AutoProfit is a very small, lightweight, unobtrusive addon that just makes your life easier. It allows you to sell all the gray items in your inventory with the click of one button, or better yet, automatically when you talk to a vendor. It also allows for exception rules, for the jungle hats and pimp canes you want to save!

BigWigs
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com
Alternatives: Deadly Boss Mods

BigWigs is one of two mainstream "boss mods" - mods that warn you about important events in boss fights or time enemy abilities. These mods are vital for any raid leader, and even for the raiders themselves. I prefer Bigwigs to DBM, simply because it's been overall more accurate and less buggy for me, but there isn't a big difference. A note from a healer's perspective though: Sometimes all those bars on the screen conflict with my HoT timers. I usually take BigWigs to task and only keep the most vital timers up.

Cartographer
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com
Alternatives: Atlas

Cartographer is a very heavy, large, map addon. It has maps for all zones and instances in the game, even those which Blizzard does not provide maps for. It supports sharing of guild member positions if those members also have Cartographer, and is pretty customizable.

Chinchilla
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com
Alternatives: Sexymap, SimpleMinimap

Chinchilla is a mini map addon that allows the mini map to be moved and customized. I used to use Simplminimap, but as far as I know it is no longer being updated. I tried Sexymap, but it was too extravagant for me. So far I have been very satisfied with Chinchilla - it does what it needs to do, and does it simply and well.

ClassTimer
Download from: Curse.com, WoWInterface.com

It took me a long time to find an addon that did exactly this, and not more or less. ClassTimer is exactly what I was looking for as a tree healer. It provides big bars showing how much longer your buffs have on them, is pretty customizable, and has the ability to track buffs on you, your target, your focus, or even all of them on one bar.

Unfortunately there are some serious problems with this addon at the moment that have me searching for an alternative. First, the all in one bar is very glitchy and often the buffs just don't show up. Second, as of patch 3.1, the buffs that other people put on the target ALSO show up. So I see the Lifebloom of every tree in the raid, not just my own, and no distinction between them. This really kills the usefulness of the addon. If anyone knows of a good replacement, please let me know!



That's it for addons for now. I'll do more posts like this in the future, if it seems people like them!

Midsummer Fire Festival Guide

Wow, it's been a while since my last post. But I'm all moved and settled in, so you should hear more from me soon! Now, on to the important business...

I've just completed a Tour-Guide only guide for the Midsummer Festival, for Horde characters. This guide will get you every blossom possible, and all the achievements for the festival. It's the most efficient path that I could find. The guide itself is based on one Xicon posted to WoWhead, which I have permission to use. I used most of his work, though I modified and added a few things. Unfortunately, most of the steps do not auto-complete - the fire quests don't touch the quest log, so you can't program that into Tour Guide :(

This holiday was both easy and difficult to complete. There wasn't anything complicated, but a few of the capitol city fires (Stormwind in particular) were a pain. I can't even imagine what it would be like without stealth, or on a PvP server.

Overall it was still pretty fun, and the quests are worth a ton of money or XP.

Click here for the download!
*Note that you need to have Tour Guide and TomTom installed for it to work.*

NOW INCLUDES NORTHREND FIRES!

A "paper" version of the Midsummer guide may be forthcoming, if it seems useful.

Borean Tundra plus Pictures

Hey folks, I'm still going to be pretty inactive for a few more weeks, but I have an update for you!

Deedlet has finished her tour of Borean Tundra and there is an updated leveling addon file. It's not perfect because I got lazy with coords towards the end, but it's definitely usable. Download it here.

I also have been taking a fair amount of screenshots lately, and I wanted to share them with you. Enjoy!

Deedlet surveys the land after completing her questing in Borean Tundra
Honani and her new pet, a Sprite Darter.

A victorious "retro raid" poses for a shot with Kael'thas' remains

Honani the Critter Gitter!

Fishing in Howling Fjord. I'm seldom online around sunset, and I thought this was especially pretty.

Ulduar - Thoughts from a Tree

Fianna had it's first real success in Ulduar this week. The previous weeks since the new raid has been out, we were only able to down Flame Leviathan. This week we brought down XT-002, Razorscale, and Ignis. We probably would have gotten Kologarn had we a little more time, but as always our guild has a strict end time and we called it before we beat him.

My overall impression of Ulduar is somewhat mixed. At first I felt like the place was just too hard, but I'm actually leaning toward the oposite now. This content is supposed to keep us occupied until the next major content patch, but our guild burned through three new bosses this week, and actually one shot or two shot all three. Kologarn was the only one that really gave us trouble, and mostly that was because we were just doing it wrong to start out. I hope the rest of the content is interesting enough to last. Then again, there are lots of hard modes to try if we get bored with the normal content.

Flame LeviathanFor this fight, I usually pair with our elemental shaman, Mirna, and drive a demolisher. This is pretty fun, though I would like to try each of the other vehicles eventually. Overall the Flame Leviathan encounter is pretty fun - but I have a feeling the trash clear is going to get really old really fast. Because of the trash, this first encounter takes quite a lot longer than the next few we tried. Still, I think it is an interesting break from typical boss fights and I applaud Blizard for trying something new.

Needless to say, I have no healer-specific thoughts for this fight.

Drops:

• [Ironsoul] - Congrats to our main tank Nodonn!
• [Lifespark Visage] - Congrats to our boomkin, Shapa!
• [Energy Siphon] - So, this really dropped last week, but I wanted to say how excited I am that I got it, because mana is a bitch in Ulduar!

XT-002 Deconstructor

XT is the next one we went after, and I'm sorry to say I spent almost the entire fight with my face in the dirt. I got myself killed by a light bomb pretty much right off the bat. However, we were running with three healers. We learned due to this mishap that we indeed can (and therefor should) run that fight with only two healers. With the wonderful new convenience of duel spec, it's easy to do this. Not only will that make the fight shorter, it will actually make healing easier anyway because more DPS means more chances to skip "Tantrums" - because it's possible to DPS XT fast enough that he goes back into his open heart phase before doing a tantrum.

Note: We forgot to take a picture of XT :(

Drops:

• [Gloves of Taut Grip] - Congrats to our honorary member, Kanomira!
• [Conductive Cord] - Congrats to Violetress, who was a great first time pug!

Razorscale
This boss was a lot of fun, and went really smoothly. In fact, I think we one-shot her tonight, though we did wipe on her about 15 times last night. Tonight it just clicked with the group make-up we had, and everything went right. I think three healers and 5 DPS works on this one, but if you can manage it you should probably go with 6 DPS since she does have an enrage timer that can be a problem if your DPS is not good enough. But if you can down XT, you can probably down her without too much trouble.

Tree healing for Razorscale was great. This fight, like many others in Ulduar, requires a lot of mobility, which made my healing buddy Celyanna, a holy paladin, very unhappy. There really isn't anything too challenging in this encounter as far as healing goes, as long as people follow one of the basic rules of raiding: Stay out of the fire!

Drops:

• [Breastplate of the Afterlife] - Congrats to Celynna on this excellent holy paladin piece!
• I don't recall what the second piece of gear was, but I think it went to our rogue PuG. His name was also really crazy and I'd have to check my friends list to find it, but he put out good DPS and was overall a valuable edition to the team, especially due to his previous experience in the dungeon.

Ignis the Furnace Master

I had so freaking much fun on this fight. Usually our guild runs with two boomkins in addition to me, and I think normally I won't have quite as much fun as I did tonight because of that. Tonight I was the only druid, and as such it was up to me to root the adds as our (awesome) pally tank kited them around. I stayed out of tree form and healed the pally tank and also spot healed the raid while the other two healers concentrated on the main tank. We didnt have a mage to break the adds, but our two elemental shamans did a great job with it. Really, I can't say enough how flawlessly this went. We one-shot this boss with most of us never having done the encounter before. And I got to feel really important :)

Drops:

• [Gloves of the Smoldering Touch] - These went to our rogue PuG again, whose name is hard to type.
• [Drape of Fuming Anger] - This actually went to off spec, and was picked up by Celynna. Yay for gearing up his ret set!

Kologarn

This fight really sucks. It sucks more when the tanks don't know they need to be swapping the boss back and forth and are eating 20k+ damage spikes. We cycled through three main tanks before we figured that out. Our last attempt was really good, and I'm convinced we could have downed this bad boy if we had more time.

Overall this was a great run and I had a blast. We got really lucky with PuGs, and our usual PuGs upped their game to make tonight a great success. I especially wanna give a shout out to Evilboo, a long time friend of a few folks in the guild who met up again for the first time in quite a while. We need to run together more often!

Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts for people in small guilds who are trying to organize raids, and some idea on how to make that work. But that's it for tonight folks, hope you all have as much fun raiding Ulduar as I have!

Making Money as a Lowbie

I'm once again working on speed testing one of Jame's guides, and as such I have handicapped myself by starting on a brand new server with a brand new character. I wanted to share some thoughts about how I've already made over 100 gold without doing a damn thing, and Mokrana is only level 21.

How? Well, first off I picked up skinning as a profession. This gets gold from nothing, basically. It takes pretty much zero extra time, and generates leather which can be sold. I also picked up herbalism, but I'm allowing it to fall behind and not going out of my way to pick up herbs. But I still got a bit of a boost from it.

I also am NOT doing first aid, because frankly as a class with a heal I see no point. Some people still level it, but never will on classes that can heal themselves. But this does mean I have a bit more cloth lying around.

Most importantly, I have an auctioneer alt. Some of you might think, well that's cheating, she spends time on that toon that isn't showing up on her main toon. But the reallity is that while my auctioneer may have a significant time clocked on her /played, I actually waste very little time on her. Here is how it usually goes:

1. Mokrana mails all her crap that could possibly make money to the auctioneer, including: Cloth, leather, herbs, other trade goods, food materials, and greens or other BoE gear. It helps if you have an idea of what makes good money (such as [Spider Silk])
2. I log into the auctioneer something like once a week, check the mail. My addon "Postal" opens everything automatically and puts it in my inventory.
3. I go to the auction house and hit my addon "Auctioneer"'s scan button, and leave the computer to go do something else for the 10-20 minutes the scan takes.
4. I come back and use the very very simple "Simple Auction" function of Auctioneer to quickly post any sellable items I may have. I check as I go briefly to make sure I'm not selling something for less than the vendor price. I could probably make more money if I spent some more time fiddling with prices, but honestly the point is to make the most money in the least possible time spent - we want to spend time on leveling, not making money!
5. I log out, then come back on in a few days and open the auctioneer's mailbox. Postal automatically transfers around 50 gold to my bags. If there are any unsold auctions, I either repost them (if I think they will sell) or just vendor the crap.

It's simple, fast, and most importantly, easy! With this, Mokrana already has 16 slot bags and enough money to get her mount at level 30. Remember, if you want to use this strategy, you'll need the addons Auctioneer and Postal. Both can be found at Curse.com.

Howling Fjord and Other News

Well, Deedlet has completed yet another chapter of her leveling journey. As you can tell by the title, I decided to skip the rest of Outland and travel to Northrend. I will go back and complete Outland sometime, and will write the addon version of those guides if need be, but right now I am very excited about Deedlet's progress and learning to tank, so I decided to head to Northrend for better gear.

In other news, I've been exploring Ulduar on my main character, Honani the tree druid. It looks to be a very fun raid, but so far it's really hard! Flame Leviathan is a joke, but our guild couldn't down XT-002 when we tried on Sunday. Granted we only did around 5 attempts before calling it, and only that one night, and we had some rather stupid PuGs with us. Darrgoe, I know you read this, you better not make us PuG a crappy tank next time! ;)

I've also purchased dual specs for both Deedlet and Honani. Deedlet has ret and prot, and Honani has tree and boomkin. So far I really like both of Deedlet's specs, but Honani is a kind of crappy lazer chicken. Hopefully my good friend Shapa can help her get better, he kicks butt!

Last but not least, I thought I'd make a little list of my goals and projects, like Jame did in his most recent blog post:

• Complete the gear update for my Tree guide (short term)
• Complete that GIMP guide - I know I'm taking forever at it! (short term)
• Speed test Jame's Horde Leveling Guide Chapter 1 (short term)
• Write my "retro raiding guide" (medium term)
• Get Deedlet to level 80, while testing the current guides (medium term)
• Write a fishing/cooking leveling guide (long term, if no one else does it!)
• Speed test the rest of Jame's Horde leveling guides (long term)
• Save for epic flyers for both Honani and Deedlet!

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of Deedlet in Howling Fjord, so you folks don't get one for this blog post. I'll make it up to you and include pictures of my Ulduar exploits next time!

Horde Leveling Addon - Hellfire Peninsula

Deedlet has officially completed the Hellfire Peninsula portion of Jame's leveling guide! As I went, I made a few revisions to the guide, but all were superficial - adding more arrows (to flight paths, for instance), breaking large steps into smaller ones to make things smoother.

Next stop, Zangarmarsh!

Also, I'm about half-way through the Barrens Guide with Mokrana, so an update on the speed testing will come soon. Unfortunately I'm not to happy with the results so far, but you'll have to wait for the details on that.

Big Update - Tree Guide

At long last, I've made a big update for my tree healing guide incorporating all the wonderful and useful comments the WoW-Pro users have given me over the past month or so. You can find the updated guide here.

In this update:

• Added more enchanting options, with the goal of easier access and cheaper alternatives in mind.
• Added a few pieces of gear that were suggested.
• Revised "Leveling as a Tree" section to describe the barkskin/hurricane strategy.
• Revised Nourish usage notes, the spell is actually pretty nice for quick spot healing or emergency heals - Regrowth should still be used when you have more time though.
• Added macros!
• Added innervate as a spell and usage notes
• Changed description for the Subtlety talent, to indicate it's use in PvP.
• Added Celestial Focus talent description
• Updated haste information for new data on GotEM.
• Added notes about HoTing before or after a pull.
• Updated one build to include Celestial Focus.
• Added note to Replenish - slated to effect Wild Growth as well in 3.1.0

Things not included:

• A bunch of extra shoulder enchants. Really, this would be like including all the low level other enchants. I threw the easier Sons of Hodir one up there, but I'm not going to include the others.

I'll be pretty busy in the next few weeks finishing up this term of college, so I may not be as active as I have been. Don't worry, I'll be back after finals!

Guild Upheval

Well, it's time to change the name of this blog. Yesterday, I finally decided to leave my guild, AEAE. A good friend of mine left with quite a few of his friends to start his own guild. While I did not choose to join him (his raid times just didn't work for me), I also decided to leave. Several of the folks who had been running Naxx10 with me are coming with me, and we are starting our own little guild.

I tried to minimize the drama of leaving and to make the transition as smooth as possible. While it came suddenly, at the same time this had been building for quite a while. I know I've vented a bit here with some of the frustrations I've experienced with the guild politics and tension AEAE. When Pat left the guild, and my raid group began talking about leaving as well, I reallized that it would probably be very good for me to leave as well. As I've also mentioned here, I'm incredibly busy this term with school and stressed out about grad school preparations. Getting out of that added stress of large guild drama should be a load off my back.

The Naxx group that broke off are planning on starting a little guild. One possible guild name we are looking at is Fianna:

"semi-independent warrior bands who lived apart from society in the forests as mercenaries, bandits and hunters, but could be called upon by kings in times of war"
-Wikipedia

I really like the imagery of this, and I hope it is the name chosen. However we are still looking at some others. While this is going to be a very small guild, and being GM would not be much of a stress, I'm planning on leaving that job to the couple who came up with the whole idea.

I'm hoping we can occasionally team up with some of our old guild mates for instance runs and the like. I plan to create a private channel and give it out to all my friends, so that we can stay connected and "PuG" from that channel rather from the general masses.

While I'm happy about being stress-free and excited about new possibilities with this new guild, I am also feeling rather down. I helped build AEAE from the ground up - I was in it since it's inception. It's a bit embarassing to admit it, but the feelings I have right now are a lot like breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend - even though it may be for the best, it can be really depressing and make you sad to think about all the memories you built together. Even if you broke up on good terms and will stay friends, something is still ending and it hurts.

My friend (who does not play) seemed shocked when I told him this story. He never suspected that WoW had drama. I laughed when he said that. Guilds have drama galore - as a guild leader you just have to try to minimize it and keep it between only those involved. Hopefully in a smaller guild where all are good friends and where I am not an officer, I will see less drama from now on!