Wrathion Story part 2 done!

Those pesky pvp battles were an absolute pain, and now my DK is thankfully back to grinding drops from raid bosses and farming mats to get further through the quest chain.

Generally I hated the pvp battlegrounds. Almost all the fights demonstrated that an organised group will crush a typical pvp set of random players. The battlegrounds where we died constantly were blisteringly frustrating.

The battlegrounds were a core of us followed some simple strategies were good, and generally we either won or came very close to winning.

I learnt:

• Any group is stuffed without a healer, and protecting the healer is actually fun. A particular Paladin teamed up with myself and another Death Knight and we roflstomped almost everyone for 2-3 minutes at a time before the Orb debuff made us crushable. As a set of three we moved through that Battleground together and it worked really well. Later it was a Druid who help me steamroll through the squishies are part of the fighting team.
• Stay as a group. i.e. when 3-4 players stayed in the middle of the Orb Arena (not its real name) we smashed the others. Especially when we had two players with Orbs.
• Fight within the game’s ideal zone. i.e. on the flags, carts, or in the center of the arena where you get the most points.
• Personal cooldowns are not for emergencies, they are for every second in the game. A moment spent in combat without them is pointless.
• Not that I intended to, but a particular Shadow Priest and Warlock on Horde are probably writing blog posts about how much Death Knights are broken and overpowered in PvP. I think I killed these particular two characters

Related articles

• Wrathion’s PvP Battleground Quests (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• Tests from Wrathion (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)

Tests from Wrathion

Now that I’ve done the Test of Valor (yay, finally) I’m at the part in the epic quest chain to kill a special commander, and win two pvp battlegrounds.

I’m not keen to do the PvP part as I do not understand anything about the two games, and this late in the expansion I can imagine that random teams will not like a scrub. Tough luck for them though, blame Blizzard folks, the Epic quest chain is making me hurt your PvP fun. As such I’ve started collecting the ~458 pvp gear, so I don’t get roflstomped straight away and I won’t be a useless scarecrow for the team I join.

Getting a started Pvp set is cheap if you know the patterns (10-15 ore per item, + gems and enchants) or very expensive if you want to buy your way through the sets. I either crafted the items, or had them crafted except for one item. So an almost full kit out was around 2000g with gems and enchantments, with most of that cost coming from the gear I purchased and the gems/enchants. The 458 gear is a long way from the beautiful Conquest items that I can see the vendor selling (/drool). For a full gear-set 2k is cheap as chips. If only beginning PvE gear was so cheap; nice that there is a lower barrier to entry for PvP.

I’ve also purchased a pvp neck and ring with Honor, and using a few one handed LFR 483s to go Dual Wield Frost for the pvp battles. I;m not expecting to get top charts for Dps, and did not want to affect my main hand 2H dps weapon by reforging away to the “wrong” starts for PvE.

So far the biggest problem is bag space. A Dps, Tank, and now PvP-Dps set takes up a lot of space. I wonder if PvP-Blood is still fun and frustrating for the enemy? Coming to a battleground near you, Mortigen the scrub DK.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew

Achievement bounty

I’ve been getting the odd and strange achievements recently, and instead of sliding them by there are screenshots.

Firstly here are some shots from the Blacksmith quest-line to use the Thunder Forge, then onto some random shots from doing daily quests, the 5000 quest achievement, and also getting Mortigen’s Black Prince reputation to Exalted. Then another for looting 50k gold.

Standing atop the Thunder Forge

Mortigen staring at the forge itself after clearing up the Mogu hanging around the entryway. This forge really deserves more attention, it is beautiful.

The Achievement for Pay to Slay, which I don’t understand the meme for.

And the Achievement for 5000 Daily Quests. Jesus that is a lot of regular activity.

And I am also now Exalted with Black Prince.

And then “Got my mind on the Money”, to loot 50k gold.

Screenies – Mortigen the unwilling farmer

I didn’t think I’d do Farmville in wow, but I am and its ok because the ends justify the task. That said, Mort (and I) is not naturally inclined to farming.

I spend a lot of time farming in mid-air dangling from those plants. You’d think it was fun.

Screenie – new (old) Helm and Shoulders

Here is a now old screenie of the Helm and Shoulders Mort is using, before transmog turned them into the DK plate set.

Just a few random screenshots from leveling…

Just a few shots taken while I wander aimlessly through Pandaria.

Getting 4 folk ready then one piking seems to be the pattern at the moment, such is life.

A minute later I had to jump of this sucker and had my first death in Mists of Pandaria. Killed by a bell. Heroic.

Just casually chatting with my Dragon friend on how special I am. Its great to know that you’re appreciated. Does the big toothy lizard know I make a habit of killing dragons? Guess not.

One of the hundreds of places which scream out for screenshots in the game. By any game’s standards the Mists expac is divine for those who like detailed and busy images.

Screenshots and Tin Foil Hats

Interesting article out there which indicates that the wow screenshots contain some traceable information about the user and server where they are taken. Darn tricksy.

As a first statement I am mad that a screenshot gives away some of my information. The account information should not be freely displayed, even if it is obfuscated by some form of clever image stenography. The fact it contains an account ID and not an internal unknown reference ID linked to the account ID makes me think that this was developed assuming security through obscurity.

Before I go all Tin-Foil-Hat it is worth noting that no hack has been linked to this. The ways to socially hack an account are enhanced by this type of information if used correctly, but this is not a shattering break by itself.

Apparently, each character has a different set of these repeatable patterns, which contain account and realm information, and it looks like if they are scanned by software that recognizes them, they can reveal our character’s account name/id, the time of the screenshot and the the full information of the realm, including its IP address (think “private servers”).

…and…
The secret watermark which is being intentionally embedded inside WoW generated screenshots below top quality, DOES NOT CONTAIN the account password, the IP address of the user or any personal information like name/surname etc. It does contain the account ID, a timestamp and the IP address of the current realm. It can be used by hackers to link alt. characters to accounts and target specific spam or scam attacks, and it can be used by Blizzard to track down private WoW servers.

One of the folks in the thread even supplied a more normalised version of the watermark, so that we can “see” what it kind of looks like.

Machine generated and readable, but not consumable by humans visually, except maybe as a tease for a person addicted to the magic eye pattern puzzles.

What does this mean for ordinary players?

Each screenie you place online has these details in it, and that means the good guys (Blizzard) and the bad guys (who knows) have access to whatever is in there. Blizzard might be using it to track the other bad guys, private servers and the like. Essentially it is unknown. Geekosystem have a useful pragmatic post on this too which was a good balance between panic and meh.

What can you do?

It appears a solution at the moment is to set the JPG quality to 10 and WoW skips the watermark function by default. Try this command:

/console SET screenshotQuality "10"

So do not panic, but take whatever measures you feel are needed to protect your own information. I’m going to see what effect down-sampling and reformatting the images has, as I suspect that the data may be eroded by multiple edits in lossy formats.

Are other companies doing this, or going to in an effort to protect their IP?

Probably. In fact it is likely already present in some other Blizzard/Activision apps. Now that Blizzard have done it we may seem more out there too.

Education of trade and whisper…

I found wowbash a little while ago, and this example is incredible. WowBash is worth the look.

Education of the Trade channel

S&M in SM calls to you (send me screenshots)

What started as Gnomer’s quest for ink, will be rail-roaded by me into a slightly bent set of screenshots; and I welcome and and all screenshots.

S&M in SM, with staples and maces. I’m smiling menacingly just thinking about it. C’mon its a seriously marvelous idea.

The Task: Send me (via email) a screenshot of S&M activity in SM.
The Deadline: lets say a few weeks, because I’m not in a mad crazy rush.
The Prize: Nothing yet, but if I can get something worth while it might happen. No promises.

Heh, in a place that drops Brass Knuckles, it has to be odd.
(edited for bad typos)

Random Screenshots

Q. What happens when your mates group with you in WoW?

A. All sorts of stupidity, see screen shots below after the fold.