New Blacksmith transmute in 5.4, old one is now pointless

The new transmute for Blacksmiths in patch 5.4 is the Balanced Trillium Ingot (BTI). This transmute basically renders the older Lightning Steel Ingot (LSI) introduced to craft the new weapons from ilevel 489 to 503 defunct. So thanks. BS was handed a transmute for vanity and downgrades on the patch content, and then given another.

Screw off developers, this seems like a very short and shitty merry-go-round of mindless transmutes with no forward planning. What ever happened to giving progression through a profession, where materials and patterns progress? A leads to B, then C, etc. In essence the Blacksmiths will drop any interest in LSI now and just wait for BTI. Silly.

Balanced Trillium Ingot is used for at the very least new Pants and Belt patterns for Blacksmiths and hopefully more items. If it is just for these two slots then I’ll probably pass on this new “feature”.

Given I launch snark at the devs, here is what I would have done in its place.

The Vale gets smashed!

New pics from wowhead’s digging on the ptr shows the Vale smashed up and broken. This is great. The baddies actually responded to us stuffing around on their doorsteps.

View all these and more on Wowhead

Mine Is Another Man’s Treasure

I’ve been hunting and completed the “Is Another Man’s Treasure” achievement, and now have my shiny new title, the Relic Hunter. It was a short but fun journey which leads me to ponder some of the other achievements and special things I might be able to do during down time.

My gathering has not stopped though.

So far my main has now got about 22 of the 25 or so items which you can find to get the achievement, which only requires 20. I plan to get the others slowly over time.

My alts are still gathering these too. I have two Jade Infused Blades and two Jinyu Staves, and will be working on a few more Pandaren Mining Picks, and hopefully at least two of the caster neck items. Each find is nice in terms of silly feedback reward, and also 300k experience to a leveling character. Not to be sniffed at.

WoW patch 5.4 looks good thus far

There is a stack of new material to read for patch 5.4, and what I’m reading at the moment makes me think that it will be a good patch. Why? Because a lot of the material is further along that what we saw with the early v5 patches, which means I think I am getting a better view of things to come.

Linkage of interest (spoilers and opinions follow):

• wowhead’s build highlights
• wowheads’s Tier Armor preview
• and current patch notes (yup, wowhead guys really do great summaries)

My highlights so far are:

• There are new temporary titles for the people completing the realm best challenge modes, and the character only has the title while they hold the record. To keep the title you need to keep the record. That is so darn cool! i.e. “Darkmaster” for Scholomance. What warlock does not want the title Darkmaster?
• DK have a change to Blood spec where Dancing Rune Weapon does not cost runic power anymore. Cool! I’m going to macro that puppy in now and use it all the time.
• Interesting that Fel Armor for Warlocks, Shadow for priests, and Moonkin form for Druids no longer reduces damage taken, from 15% to 0%. The Hunter talent was reduced from 15% to 10%. Why the difference? Do Hunters still need protection from standing in bad and raid damage, but the casters are meant to know better?
• Pvp Season 14 Armor for Warlocks is awesome looking. I want a t16 Warlock now.
• Pve T16 for Mages is very beautiful. The glasses are a little odd, but the overall effect is stunning.
• Flexible Raid will be interesting and I can see a huge potential for guilds to use this.
• The “virtual servers” acting as realm combinations is a new feature which is interesting. Does this mark the unavoidable merge of low pop realms? It depends on how it is added, and what the effect is. i.e. If I join a guild on a different server using this virtualisation and then that realm becomes high pop, do I get unjoined?
• The new solo content in the Proving Grounds is something I like to read about. Will the rewards be cosmetic (like Brawlers and Challenge modes) or gear-ups like Heroics and Scenarios?
• The Siege of Ogrimar / Garrosh encounter is going the way I didn’t like, but hey – can’t have it all. Garrosh is corrupted/empowered by Y’shaarj who is one of the old gods, and gains all sorts of boosts from it. Reading the summary thus far the end fight in SoO might feel similar to the end of Ulduar. Not a bad thing, I would have preferred that Garrosh was a nasty bastard without having him “corrupted”. Why must our evil villains be corrupted to be evil?
• Apparently support for dedicated sound hardware has been nurfed in WoW, and this makes the shitty chopping sound I’m getting since patch 5.3 make sense. I’ll have to research how to alter my sound config to not stutter now.
• We have new item levels as:
  • 521 for Raid finder, 527 for Flex raids, 541 for Normal raids, 547 for Thunderforged, 554 for Heroic raids, and 560 for Heroic Thunderforged gear.
  • That means that the Normal mode gear you might have now (522) will be upgraded slightly by Flex, no real upgrade except the Tier bonuses for LFR.
  • Unless you’ve also already upgraded your 522 to 530, and then even Flex offers nothing except Tier gear. The numbers seem well thought through.
• The Engineer’s SkyClaw mount might be in this patch.
• Blacksmiths get another new daily transmute – the Balanced Trillium Ingot. I’m still transmuting the other stuff. Hopefully this is a useful waste of Trillium bars.
• Les excited by a new Celestial Tournament, which will likely be the new daily quest hub. Probably also another bloody faction to grind up with. For pitty’s sake.

Lastly we have the Death Knight new Tier bonuses…

T16 PH – Death Knight DPS
2 pieces: Item – Death Knight T16 DPS 2P Bonus – Killing Machine and Sudden Doom grant 500 Haste or Mastery, whichever is highest, for ($hnd * 2 + 4) sec, stacking up to 10 times.
4 pieces: Item – Death Knight T16 DPS 4P Bonus – Death Coil increases the duration of Dark Transformation by 1.5 sec per cast. Pillar of Frost increases rune regeneration speed by 100% while active.

T16 PH – Death Knight Tank
2 pieces: Item – Death Knight T16 Blood 4P Bonus – Dancing Rune Weapon will reactivate all Frost and Unholy runes as Death Runes, and make your next 4 Death Strikes free.
4 pieces: Item – Death Knight T16 Blood 2P Bonus – Every 4 Heart Strikes, Rune Strikes, or Blood Boils will add one charge to your next Bone Shield.

For Blood I can see DRW being a bloody awesome Boom tool. It becomes a burst effect for either recovery or threat/dps. I really like that idea. The 4x set is also clever in terms of quality of life improvement where Tanks need to think about refreshing Bone Shield less.

For DPS the 4x set looks nice in terms of boosting dps on use, which is better than the current 4x set which I think is situationally great or average. Not sure on 2x set as yet.

I am Schrödinger’s cat (screenshot)

Meow. My toon was alive while dead. And I’ve lost my box. Even if you understand it, its probably not funny.

Rumour – Final stage Legendary, might not be a weapon…

The final stage reward for the legendary quest might not be a weapon, as hinted by Bashiok in this little thread. Yep, I know that is a rumour, but it raises that question of expectation on rewards for effort. Let the conjecture begin…

It could be that we have a choice of trinket, or any other gear-slot. Given how the rewards through the quests have allowed a choice on reward it makes sense that WoW could reward players with an option.

Would that suck? Kind of, but mostly not. It might fit well.

Kind of sucky as I think getting to THE LEGENDARY is the goal. By tradition in previous expansions these have been weapons, and Pandaria has gone the Gem, Gem Slot, enhancement, and now Cloak route. It is easily conceivable to not be a final weapon.

Take the lore into consideration for a sec too and ponder why Wrathion would give another person a great weapon in the first place. He’s a Black Dragon and they are an evil selfish kind of lot. I wouldn’t trust him to not give us a cursed weapon, and then giggle about it while he attempts to subvert things to his own agenda.

But what if the item was something which is not a fixed mechanical advantage at all?

• Imagine the final reward is a ilevel “high” widget, which always continues to scale to the level to your other highest gear +5. You’d want it, and you’d always want it. Legendary. It could take a trinket slot, add gob-smacking a mounts of two stats, and be done with it. eg. Haste & Mastery +nnnn, with a proc on cast or melee to look swirls and wonderful. I’d want that.
• A reward that allows the wearer to assume a constructed illusory appearance. Like your own little transmog illusion over the top of whatever you wear. No more transmog costs, just this widget in your bags. I’d want that too, especially if I could turn it on and off.

And so on with all sorts of blisteringly cool features which will cause every player to want this item on all their characters. And despite my previous rants about legendary being a little washed out, or the process being odd – that is what they are: something that all toons should desire.

Just a thought, TyphoonAndrew.

Loot Bragging from a while ago

I love and hate the loot system, and have days where it seems to be raining epics, and then weeks where I get nothing useful. I was going to pop another rant about how much it could be “fixed”, but instead here are a few screenshots of where I’ve made out OK.

Yeah you read that right. One shot the bosses and 3 bits of gear. Now granted a few I can’t use or already have, but three in one run is still lopsided in a great way.

And then who doesn’t like getting 50,000 valor points. I’d prefer 7x more Secrets of the Empire, but hey – have to keep running on that treadmill.

Related articles

• Shallow needs for loot (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)

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)

Blacksmithing the new Bars

The new Blacksmithing daily conversion grants a special BoP Lightning Steel Ingot bar, and also grants a chance to learn a pattern you don’t have. I really like this idea. Many of the BS patterns were expensive in mats and low use, but I like having the oddd chance to pick them up while creating a daily bar.

Even better was the fact that the pattern to learn it drops from a PvE kill (from Itoka) and has a small mini-quest to complete. This is spot on, and should be repeated for each tweak or enhancement to each profession. It is a way to bind players into the world.

As silly as it may sound too – these Lightning Steel Ingots are core materials for a set of ilevel 463 BoE items, which can be further enhanced to ilevel BoE 476.Yes, finally we have a way to craft 476 BoE items.

For my character who is still using a crappy upgraded blue weapon in my Tank set, it might be better. Sad, but hey – an upgrade is an upgrade. It will take 15x uses of the daily cooldown, so a fairly high investment in time.

Related articles

• Lightning Steel Ingots (ownedcore.com)

It’s quiet, too quiet…

I’ve been hiding from World of Warcraft recently due to work overload. A weekend of business report writing, amongst babysitting, and replacing a broken modem/router was enough to have me tuckered out. Then I had to work Sunday night. Blarrrg.

I have been sneaking in the odd TV fix though – I’ve added the Walking Dead to the mix of shows that I treat as a naughty secret from the rest of the family. When the house goes dark and the child is asleep the zombies come out. The Mrs and I watch Mad Men together and amid Don Drapers last escapade with a brunette with morals as poor as his own I started wondering how cool a cross-over would be.

The Walking Mad Men – a cool chic zombies, huffing cigarettes and booze between solid bites of brains and flesh (and because of rule 34, I found it already created online). Then Peggy and Dom brain storming how to really appeal and distract the undead, or perhaps how to make them eat the competition.

I can see Draper getting serious with a handgun and cleaning up his beloved city, if only due to his strong survivalist instincts, and loner tendencies.

Perhaps more sleep is needed. TyphoonAndrew.