Because screenies might be interesting – here are some recent achieves, and some which while recent are for really bloody old content. Finally huh.
If nothing else, getting achievements means I am doing something sort of productive in wow. Not majorly productive – like gearing, or getting a something really rare; but I am getting somewhere.
I’ve only done a handful of heroic scenarios and the Dark Heart was pretty tough all told. I joined the team and found that it needed all my concentration to keep alive and swinging. Yes, heroic scenarios are actually challenging. That is good. Bring them on.
My alts are getting to the levels where I can start gathering some of the fun things, like the treasures of Pandaria and the rare kills. That aspect is more enjoyable to me that the leveling process. 
There are a set of gathering achievements in Pandaria which are based upon finding low and high quality items which appear randomly throughout the zones. These are generally the domain of the folks who love achievements like “The Loremaster”, which is to date one of the best titles I think there is in the game and which is also actually achievable without a world ending amount of hard grinding. These collection set is Bounty of Pandaria, Finders Keepers, Lost and Found, One Man’s Trash, Riches of Pandaria, and finally Is Another Man’s Treasure (wowhead has a good guide on this). The end goal for all of them is the in-game title “the Relic Hunter“. Another great title, more so because I think the number of players who have it will be rare (around 5%) but also because it demonstrates that the player is dedicated and probably slightly insane.
As of this post I have all those achievements done except “Is Another Man’s Treasure”, which requires the player to find 20x of the special BoA or exceedingly rare items which spawn randomly in the game world. At the moment I am up to 18 of 20 items. So close, which makes it frustrating and rewarding when I get each of the last ones.
Aside – I almost never actually do this type of completionist / gathering / farming / achievement stuff, but I love this type of thing when it gives quasi-tangible rewards. In this case a title, the gold from the low quality items, and the Bind to Account items from the good rares.I am going to pass the BoA items down to my alts, and also hang onto some of them on my Death Knight main as they are actually still oddly and slightly handy.
It feels like this set of “quest chains” were well designed and have tangible rewards directly related to the effort.
There are approx 5-7 more items I could find to get up to the 20 rares found which are needed, but they are the rare of the rare, and often very highly desired. That means farmers, campers, and lots of competition all the time. Even in the short time I’ve been watching some of them I’ve seen regular character also flying past in patterns very similar to mine.
On two occasions I got to an item with a few seconds of somebody arriving, and in one case was beaten to an item by the skin of my teeth.
I am enjoying the challenge immensely.
I am also considering trying to get more than one of some items on my account by farming them with alts as well. The Mining Pick is an example where it gives a +10 to mining skill when carried.
A character wielding two rare weapons might be a tad selfish for all the other Relic Hunters, and a character with two of the same rare can look darn good. A great RP set should try to make others jealous.
Happy Hunting, TyphoonAndrew Continue reading
Meow. My toon was alive while dead. And I’ve lost my box. Even if you understand it, its probably not funny.
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.
Its been a busy few weeks, where I’ve not been able to do much in terms of solid play. Instead I’ve scattered around with getting some odd Achievements. Here are the screenies for Attention to Detail in Scholo (pick the right wizard chic), Over 9000 (getting too many achievement points), and Time Flies (healthy guild rep on my alt druid).
Happy hunting, TyphoonAndrew
I love a good 25 man roflstomp run, and also can’t help but share my ingloriously poor UI layout. In the screenie below you can see why. I can hardly see much of the screen without my own UI elements getting clogged, and then the amount of malarky in the floor and flying through the air has my character somewhere in the middle of the red fire, green fire, blue beam, and near the grey/blue crystal. I think.
This is the twin consorts in Throne of Thunder, or the fight I like to call “Wheeeee, chase the girly swirly fire, opsie! Anyone got a rez, lol”.
LFR, Love it. I could probably remove the dps meter, and I should move some of the non-essential buttons on the middle bottom to the right, after moving the stuff on the lower right to some sort of radial menu. But it is LFR and doing 80-90k dps is fine in there.
A little while ago the Insidious Guild on Nagrand got THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE (yes, has to be written in caps, its the ultimate). That means 250 Guild Challenges. Sheesh the boy and girls in Insidious are a busy bunch of achievement junkies players.
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:
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
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.
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.
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 shots taken while I wander aimlessly through Pandaria.
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"
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.
I found wowbash a little while ago, and this example is incredible. WowBash is worth the look.
Education of the Trade channel
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)
Q. What happens when your mates group with you in WoW?
A. All sorts of stupidity, see screen shots below after the fold.
TyphoonAndrew's - Eye of the Storm 