A good time to return

If the banter around flex raids is true, then patch 5.4 will be a good time for players to return to WoW, particularly if they are members of a guild like ours.

I know, that sounds like a recruitment post. It’s not especially one, but more players and characters are welcome.

What I mean is our guild is one which has a very dedicated raid team who sometimes used to have trouble with numbers. We now also have slightly more darn good raiders than we can fit in an ideal x10 man composition, and an additional growing number of more casual members who love to raid but also play wow in a less serious way. Or they might play hard, but less often.

For us (and potentially a large number of other guilds) Flex-Raids that means we are in an ideal spot. Whichever way we go in terms of using the flex systems, it can only be to our advantage. That said we (the officers) haven’t chatted through the implications as yet, but I fairly confident that we’ll get to a good place with a minimum of fuss.

Now all I need is to get through the 11x remaining kills of Lei-Shen for the uber-rare widgets of awesome, so I can catch up on the legendary quest chain. Fun times ahead watching folks stand in the bad.

drool … Armored Bloodwing mount

What a nice evil looking Bat! The new store purchasable mount is god damned evil looking, and a pleasure to behold. Blizzard store link for those who can’t wait and have $25 they can spend without regard for charity or child support.

I want this mount.

Ref from MMO Champion: Armored Bloodwing – Items – World of Warcraft. Video after the break.

Have we lost Titan? End of days…

I both loathe and desire the Blizzard fan-base, as they make threads like this – where Titan is announced as delayed…(snarky-warning)

“only reason i got bizzcon tickets was to see titan info. guess its time to double the price and ebay em, really a shame”

You paid a huge amount of cash to attend the hopeful launch of a game which we know almost nothing about.

Impressions of new content for patch 5.3

I played the new content released in the WoW patch 5.3 last night, and here are a few observations (also here is Wowheads guide – which is darn handy).

Overall: Great to see new lore. Excited to have two new scenarios, specific quests to advance the story, and an experience across both the old world and Pandaria. Great too that the legendary quest keeps rolling, and I cannot wait (but will take months and months) to get the high level cloak.

Whatever comes in 5.4 will hopefully still value that cloak’s ilevel 600. Otherwise it seems a short term reward. Or imagine what the next jump after 600 will be, and how that will devalue all other gear for the patch.

But … no way in hell I’m doing the “gather 150×4 materials” every bloody week. I started the quest yesterday, and it took hours and hours to progress through it. I’ve got around 450 of the 600 drops needed, and I’m already really bored with doing the same four tasks:

1. Kill mobs in one of the four areas, infrequently opening boxes too. At the moment I can kill and loot mobs faster than I can sneak past mobs to loot boxes. Druids however can loot the boxes in bird form and snaffle them quickly.
2. Kill one of the special bosses which randomly spawn. After death they drop a better amount of each material, but they also can now (hotfix 223 May) be tagged to the alt faction and also take a bit of time to kill. That change at least means it is faster to gather the mats.
3. Escort a caravan, so that it arrives safely and hope than a faction opponent does not dps it dead. The caravans as so easy to kill its a joke. Trust me – I took revenge on a horde group by nuking their caravan.
4. Find the random exploded boxes. Periodically somewhere on the map a lot of boxes spawn all spread out. Run around looting them for 1 or 2 mats per box.

Dull, dull, double-dull is all I can say about this weekly quest.

I’ve already read comments from other players saying they’ll do this quest twice and then never again. My advice is to do this now while people still want the pet and the few other odd rewards so that you gain the advantage of big groups killing those NPCs. It is a blisteringly stupid move to create such a grind.

But apparently it is great for alts, as they can gear up this way? FFS no. Each weekly grants a 489 item when better rewards are in the new heroic scenarios, but only if you have also looted one of the special drops too. Derp.

Otherwise the scenarios and new quests are great. Fast, easy on normal, and fun to blow through. I get the impression that after a few times I’ll recognise all the lore elements and begin to get tired of them, but for now it is something new to play through. My last task is to get the end of the “help the lost old hermit” chain, for the boots, and then that will be all the lore done. A few nights and the content is “encountered”.

Regardless, I hope you’re liking it. TyphoonAndrew.

Related articles

• WoW p5.3 this week, highlights include (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• WoW patch 5.3 review (dendory.net)
• wow Loot Specialization Menu (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• Redemption (qelric.wordpress.com)

Pet Battles and HearthStone are distractions

I think Pet Battles and HearthStone are distractions. Darn good, but distractions. I’d try and play these games on my iphone or ipad, but can’t take it seriously while actually in World of Warcraft.

I will certainly try HearthStone when it is live, and perhaps when this expansion is ending I’ll try a pet battle too.

I have a fair pool of pets all of whom are level one and never been used. It seems a waste in a way to have some rare stuff but never use them in game. Alas time online actually playing my main is rare enough for me, so spending that time swapping cards or poking pets is not justified.

But on a portable device while I wait for a late trains or have a quick lunch? Ohhhh yeah, I’ve got time for that. I know HearthStone is going to be delivered to portable devices, and I’d think that Pet battles could be valuable there too.

Is LFR progress?

It is funny to think that LFR can grant players “progress”.

Strict progression is typically for normal and especially for hard-mode guilds, who are focused not only the hardest content, but also getting through the hardest content faster than their peers. Server rankings, kill times/strats, and sometimes even achievement points are ranked against each other to see who is first, and who is the best. LFR however is generally accepted as being easy, or scrub mode.

I ran a lot of LFR this week and was able to kill each boss in the current tier in LFR raids. It took more than the four nominal run through, as sometimes I joined mid way through, or the groups disbanded amid the raid.

That does not at all mean though that LFR does not have a place in terms of “progress”. Perhaps it is just progress for me, but I think there is merit in the system.

Hearthstone looks interesting

The new thing from Blizzard is a digital card game named Hearthstone. I think it is great to see effort by Blizzard to expand their breadth of game styles into new areas. These type of games do attract players with different needs and this is especially attractive as it is both free to play, and will run on many platforms including the iPad. This is a good strategy in my opinion for diverging their interests, which on the whole will help keep the company stronger (as long as it is a good game).

Be warned the promo video does not demonstrate the gameplay, for that check out the main website or the MMO Champion link below.

SC2 Heart of the Swarm Cinematic

Its a darn cool cinematic. Plenty of zerg, plenty of humans, cannon, zerg rushes, and the fall of a colony world. I might dabble in this methinks.

WoW players raise $2.3 mil for Sandy Relief

Warcraft players raised $2.3 Million for Sandy relief through puchased of entirely option in-game widgets and toys. At last a feelgood aspect of MMO games, instead of a typical angry rant. 2.3m for any charity effort is bloody nice work, and not bad considering we’re a bunch of no-life basement dwellers; with violent tendencies.

Kind of makes you feel good. See we do have souls. Kek.

World of Warcraft Players Raise $2.3 Million for Sandy | Geekosystem.

How wealthy are your characters?

The findings of a wow wealth survey were published by Golden Crusade recently, and it indicates some interesting things about how much gold players in wow have. It also has some stats on how many of the respondents did some of the nefarious activities like botting, buying gold, item duplication, and some other deeds not well likes by the terms of service.

Essentially there are some very rich players in game, but the typical player is not even close to as wealthy as the raw average might indicate (i.e. median value is far lower than the average gold amount).

In summary:

The World of Warcraft Wealth Survey 2012 ran Sunday, October 28th, 2012 through Saturday, November 10th, 2012 and collected 11,344 usable results. Given these results the study found:

The average player gold is 302,593

Median player gold was 80,000 gold

81.63% of players are below average

If you’re feeling the pinch of being constantly using all the gold that you generate then I’d say you’re not alone. Most players are in a similar situation, where they are gradually building wealth, rather than hyper-building wealth quickly.

81% of players (not characters) are under the average of 300k total, and that 39% of players were under 50k. I know many players who are happy with 15k.

I sit typically in the middle of that range, where I think 30-40k total is not enough to have flexibility should I need it, but over 100K is far more gold than I think is needed for my typical game-play.

Funny that the numbers line up a little isn’t it. Would I like more gold? Sure, but I know I’d spend it right back down to the level I have now, as amassing a huge amount of gold does not offer a radically different play experience from what I am enjoying now. I have a repair mount, two legendary items, 4x character with epic flying, and all sorts of minor toys and purchased and craftable gear.

A large bank-roll is a good and worthy challenge for players, but essentially I do not know of anything which requires 500,000g to complete.

The survey findings are worth reviewing. Happy Killing.