Fear and Vengeance

The first incarnation of what could become a pair of legendary rogue daggers is pretty easy to obtain. The two parts of the quest line that are potentially the most difficult are: finding a dragon soul raid group that has killed the first 3 bosses and will let you pickpocket the fourth after the trash is cleared, and getting together and subsequently parting with the non-negotiable 10k gold required to complete the second quest.

The pickpocketing itself is very easy and rumors of a 15 minute wait between rogues is greatly exaggerated. A rogue can pull the boss, vanish, and proceed to pickpocket a freshly respawned quest item with no waiting (unless your vanish was on cooldown for some reason).

Many groups have been charging rogues admission to come in and pickpocket. Certainly a good option for anyone who isn't part of a sufficiently progressed dragon soul raid group, and also doesn't know anyone that is. It's really no trouble at all to bring in a rogue with a mass summon while the group takes a short break they would have likely taken anyway.

Oh, and most importantly, remember to turn in your pickpocket quest before you leave the instance and pick up the next quest. If you don't you'll have to find another raid instance to enter just to turn it in.

So now you're no longer at the mercy of a raid group, you've spent your 10k, it's time for the fun part. These quests are a lot of fun, almost worth the 10k just to play the rogue minigames. The first "warmup" quest is to infiltrate Ravenholdt Manor without being detected.

I won't spoil any of the fun, but there is a new stealth mechanic for these quests where you have to evade mobs with heightened senses. There will be a large red circle around your feet showing how close you can get before being detected. There isn't any wrong way to sneak around the mobs so long as you get past them, and if you screw up a few times you get ported back to the beginning to try again, no penalty.

You'll be using pretty much every ability in your rogue bag of tricks to complete these stealth quests: you can sap a mob so you can walk through it, you can distract mobs so you can walk behind them, vanish or cloak of shadows will both remove your red circle temporarily so that you can sneak around as if the mobs didn't have heightened senses, and if you are specced into subtlety you can shadowstep behind mobs and continue undetected.

The manor is easy to sneak into, I got it first try without any prior knowledge. The real fun is on the next quest where you need to sneak deep into Gilneas. It is pretty much a trial and error process of finding a path through that works best for you. There are a lot of pats walking all over the place and there are very narrow corridors through which to sneak between mobs. A lot of time is spent sitting in a safe spot and watching for where to make your next move.

You'll be happy to know that when you make it to Creed you don't have to sneak through all the mobs again if you fail to kill him. You get to run right back to your corpse and try again. Rumor has it that even if you leave the area to do something else you can fly back to Creed directly on your mount.

Both of my rogues specs are subtlety; I have a leveling/survivability spec and a raiding/damage spec. I of course did all these quests in my sneakier survivability spec with shorter utility cooldowns and more self healing. Since my damage was pretty low as a result I had to go the route of using blind (preferably glyphed to remove dots) to reset his enrage timer between damage bursts. Assassination and especially combat rogues will have an easier time of beating the two minute enrage timer, but they can only use blind once during the fight to reset the timer.

The fight is mostly move out of circles and avoid his frontal cone breath attack while beating the crap out of him and interrupting his one other spell which hurts a lot and drains energy. You'll also be using damage reduction cooldowns and stuns as often as possible to reduce your damage taken and get in some more powerful attacks from behind (unless you are combat and face roll him from the front).

If there is someone else attacking Creed when you get there, rumor has it you will get credit for the kill just for being there and get ported back to the NPC to complete the quest. So you have the choice of helping to kill Creed and perhaps annoy the rogue wanting to solo him, sit back and watch potentially never getting a chance to try Creed yourself, or fly away and come back later to do it yourself. I'd say if you get put in that position, you should just help kill him and get your daggers.

Bye Bye Resto, Hello Pandas?

I finally did it, I can no longer queue in the dungeon/raid finder with all the checkboxes checked anymore. I dropped my resto spec and teased my hybrid feral spec into a dedicated tanking spec and a dedicated DPS spec.

I never really cared for druid healing once I had tasted shaman healing, but I kept it around anyway because sometimes you just need a healer. I have a couple hundred achievement points on my druid just because I tagged along with group looking for a healer. I can also attribute a large chunk of justice/valor points to my resto spec since I find healing 5-mans to be more fun than tanking or DPSing. Something about the deciding who lives and who dies...

So for the first time since I started playing I actually have a proper DPS spec and a few more quality of life talents in my tanking spec. Well my tanking spec mainly just got the one talent that extends my pulverize buff, and I splurged and stuck a point in stampede. I'm still getting used to the longer pulverize, but it certainly seems to make my tanking rotation less of a lacerate frenzy. Other than that not too exciting on the tanking front; I only moved 3 points.

I moved 9 points to create my feral DPS/PVP spec of doom. Yeah that doesn't sound too exciting either when you think about classes that actually have different trees. I've not really had a chance to DPS yet, but blood in the water is quite nice and I can't wait to get the two piece bonus to enhance it further; I'll be like a subtlety rogue or something. I also really like pouncing and ravaging in combat. Strangely enough what I am most looking forward to is using tranquility to save the day now that I have 50% of my agility as intellect. Hmm... I might even be able to rez more than one person without drinking.

That should be a whole different topic... why are rez's stupid expensive? Classes with a rez still use mass rez on 1-2 people just because it is more efficient.

Transmogrification Woes

Finding the perfect combination of items for your toon isn't easy. You have to use wowhead, the model viewer, or some other tool to browse through hundreds of possibilities, determine if you can actually get the items and where they can be found.

Best case scenario you can craft the item you want, buy it outright from a vendor, solo some old dungeon boss a few times till it drops, or do a few quests to earn it as a reward.

Of course not all items are that easy to get, you'll undoubtedly find some items that drop in raids. Even if you can solo the raid you have to wait a week between attempts. More than likely you'll need to find other people interested in running the raid with you, and that isn't always easy.

Then the absolute worst case scenario are items that are just world or trash drops. Those greens that have a one in a hundred chance of dropping off of mobs of a certain level. I want three of those for my shaman right now and I must say AOE clearing an old vanilla dungeon repeatedly is quite boring.

Of course there is always the auction house, but these hard to find greens are just as rare on the auction house and it certainly isn't worth buying an item on a different realm and spending 25$ to realm transfer it to yourself. I did start to consider it until I realized I had all 10 slots filled.

So I check the auction house every time I am nearby now, and I farm for a while when I can stomach it. It seems the most efficient way to go about transmogrification is to come up with the items you want on as many toons as possible in hopes that some of the farming can be done in parallel. Still I've been doing one at a time, it takes a couple hours to come up with a good looking set.

Paid Profession Change

I've got a realm full of alts with maxed professions, as I am sure many others do. This gets to be a source of some anxiety when a new expansion rolls around. I really like this class and this one, but I'd really need to level this profession. What can you do when your favorite alts don't correspond to your favorite professions?

Retraining a profession from scratch is pretty much the only option, but with all the rare pattern drops and whatnot, it really isn't an option. Plus it is much more enjoyable, and perhaps faster as well, to just keep you professions as is and spend the time to level an alt through new content than it is to grind old content and/or pay dearly for all the mats to relearn a profession.

So I had this brilliant idea that there should be a bind on account tome that you can purchase for gold (or possibly even real money in the blizzard store) that would allow you to record all of your patterns and skill points for a given profession (dropping the profession in the process) and relearning the profession on another toon by using the tome (in the process destroying it).

This would make it possible to move professions around your account quite easily (or at least one realm as BoA items currently work). Spend a decent sum of gold or a few bucks and you'll have your professions exactly as you'd like. I'd certainly shell out the gold/cash for that.

5 Most Annoying Warcraft "Bugs"

Repairing With Guild Bank

You can only use guild funds to repair if your repair bill is less than or equal to the guild funds available. If your repair bill is higher you either need to pay for it all yourself, or manually repair items one by one to bring your total repair cost down below your available guild funds. Obviously you should be hit the repair with guild funds button and use all of your available funds and have the rest come out of your own pocket if needed.

Switching Enemy Targets Quickly

Often times there is need to flip quickly to a second target and interrupt, crowd control, or even just changing targets because you've just killed your current one. With the introduction of the spells/abilities on your action bars being cast/used on mouse down hitting a hotkey for your interrupt and clicking an enemy at the same time (the click on the enemy slightly before the hotkey) you end up wasting the interrupt on your previous target. Why? Your target doesn't change until you let go of the mouse button.

Spell/Ability Highlighting With Macros

Update: Turns out the highlighting issue was addressed in 4.3 and now works, but I still get to complain about macros not working for special proc'ed abilities.

With Cataclysm came the action bar enhancement that highlights proc enhanced abilities by putting a shiny golden yellow border around them. This feature doesn't work for spells or abilities in macros. Pretty annoying to miss out on a really helpful UI feature just because you can't efficiently play your class without macros. To add insult to injury Some of the procs that enhance abilities also change the name of the ability making macroing the ability exceedingly difficult. For example, hunters can't macro throwing a trap without doing research on the new name of the trap ability when being thrown. Similarly for cats, they cannot macro feral charge with ravage without using the modified spell name "Ravage!".

Can't Use Alt-F4 as a Hotkey

The function keys, specifically F1-F5 are so handy to bind to spells/abilities due to their proximity to WASD, the default movement keys. Of course with the best of intentions I stick only abilities that I would never use my self targeting alt modifier on the F4 key, but once in a while I slip up and boom I have to log back in mid dungeon. Alt-F4 may be a windows shortcut, but the warcraft client can choose to ignore that event and remain running if it were programmed to do so, and it should be.

Can't Transmogrify Directly From Void Storage

This was actually addressed in a blue post recently and said to be a "feature", but it's still damn annoying. The whole point of void storage is to save old gear for sentimental reasons, this is also most likely the gear you are going to use for transmogrification. So every time I get a gear upgrade I have to take the item I want to copy out of void storage, do my transmogrification and put it back. If the additional gold cost is important, then just charge more for the transmogrification when using an item in void storage as a template, but don't make the process annoying.

Symbiosis: Not Just a Failed Mastery Bonus

I read this proposed 5.0 ability and I got hair in my mouth I grinned so wide. Feast your eyes upon this if you've not seen it yet.

Symbiosis - Required Level 87
30 yd range - 4% of base mana - Instant cast

Creates a symbiotic link which grants the Druid one ability belonging to the target's class, varying by the Druid's specialization.

In exchange, grants the target one Druid ability based on their class and combat role.

Lasts 1 hour and persists through death.

Holy crap indeed. No druid in their right mind can resist being excited about this news. Well maybe some of those "caster" druids. Us ferals have a long history of begging, borrowing and stealing abilities from other classes (warriors and rogues come first to mind). What ability screams druid louder than the ability to mimic another class at will.

Of course the first question I asked is what abilities will we get to mimic and what abilities will be we sharing. Well there was also the question of are these the real abilities or a neutered version on a long cooldown. Perhaps we will only get to mimic some of the longer cooldowns of other classes or only some utility abilities. I'm leaning toward utility abilities because utility and druids are like this [crosses fingers]. I'm thinking it will be abilties somewhere between a 20 second and 3 minute cooldown to avoid screwing up druid rotations too badly.

The one preexisting game mechanic that comes to mind when talking about mimicking class abilities is Hex Lord Malacrass's siphon soul ability in Zul'Aman. What works for a boss doesn't necessarily work for a player so I'm not so sure we can glean much from this boss encounter besides some neat things to think about.

I know what I would like to borrow from other classes though. I'd love to nab death grip from death knights for tanking. Antimagic shield could be cool, or some blood worms to follow me around. All of the DK utility I can think of centers around survivability so I'm really not sure if they will pick one ability that all specs will share or provide different ones.

Of course I want to borrow misdirect from hunters. I don't want anything else from them. Maybe a trap, but not really. Most of their utility abilities are ranged weapon or ranged DPS specific. Maybe casters would have more interest in leeching off their resident hunter.

I'll want to borrow avenging wrath from paladins, pink bar gives you wings. Again that is like the only ability I can think of that would interest me. Hammer/fist of justice perhaps. Blizzard sure has their work cut out for them on flushing out this new druid ability.

Mages are full of cool utility. I'd be happy with blink, ice block, frost nova, polymorph, invisibility, spellsteal, mirrored kitties! So many choices.

Stealing leap of faith from priests would be totally awesome. Think of the trouble I could cause combining that ability with feral charge. Although a fear or a mind control would also be pretty cool.

I'm not sure what if anything a druid, feral in particular, can hope to gain from a rogue. We have a rogue, it's called cat form. I guess we could nab cloak of shadows or vanish. Ok I changed my mind I also want evasion. I almost want this new druid ability to give me a random class ability so I can grab one and try again if I get one I don't want right then.

Shaman are a toughie, most of their utility is in the form of totems. I guess it isn't out of the question for a druid channeling a shaman to drop a totem. A tremor totem would be really nice. Perhaps some of their shields or weapon enhancements.

Hmm... warlock. A teleport could be neat. Fear, a curse perhaps. I don't really associate my warlock with utility. Warlocks mostly just hurt stuff.

I'm going to steal directly from the Hex Lord for warriors, I want: heroic leap, mortal strike or spell reflection. It will be very interesting to see what Blizzard comes up with for the actual list.

Of course those ideas are all very selfish, everyone else will want to know what ability druids will be sharing with them in return. I'd imagine barkskin, or innervate, perhaps a HoT. Hard to say as so much of druid utility is forms that other classes won't have. I wonder if it will be of any use for a druid to share abilities with another druid.

Druids, Paladins, Priests and Warriors are Main Material

Neat graph today over at MMO-Champion showing the ratio of different classes at different levels of valor points. Basically what classes are raiding and how often compared to others.

What is interesting is that you can infer which classes people generally use as alts and which classes people generally use as their "mains". Druids, paladins, priests and warriors all trend upwards and have a larger representation at higher valor point levels. Death knights, hunters, mages and rogues all trend downwards although mages stay more constant.

Warlocks and shaman are oddballs in that their representation fluctuates rather than trending up or down. I found shaman particularly interesting because they peak in the mid range of valor points. That is interesting because my shaman is my second raiding toon, but I don't put as much effort in valor point wise as I do on my main. The shaman representation peaking in the mid range indicates to me than many other use their shaman as a secondary raiding toon that they don't play as much as their mains.

My theory on warlocks that peak at 25k valor is that they are also secondary raiding toons for people, but there are also more warlock alts hanging around.

The only other interesting data points I gleaned were that hunters drop off fast, like falling off a cliff fast, and that mages fall off, but not very much at all. My take on this is that hunters are the most popular alt class and mages are appealing to casuals. I earned some warlock points there calling mages casuals. I didn't exactly say that, but what I am getting at is that mages appeal to people playing alts, playing casually as mains, secondary raiding toons and hardcore raiding mains almost equally as much. Not sure what that means, but it is interesting.

What we can take away from all this is that if you are starting a new toon, pick one of the big four: druid, paladin, priest and/or warrior.