Thursday, January 31, 2013

Dangers of Association

One thing, oh wait, Hello Reader,

Anyways.

One thing that I've been meaning to talk about since the release of MoP was the amazing orchestral score and the various musical scores that have backed up and rich-ified the world of Pandas. If you listen to the Log in Screen track, "Heart of Pandaria", it tells a story. An undiscovered world, full of potential, then the dirty horde and alliance bring their war to its shores and within this mysterious world they uncover much more than they had asked for.

A point I had noticed within Cataclysm is that, a lot of the new musical sequences were found in the revamped old zones, and one thing that irked me was that most of the raids didn't have epic scores to accompany the epic battles we were fighting.

Blackwing Descent and Twilight Whatever Tower might as well have been silent. Firelands had ...some sound in the background. Dragon Soul did have some musical backing but this was swamped out by how stupid the instance was to begin with.

One raid that stood out was Throne of the Four Winds, it was a short track that repeated it self I believe every 75 seconds but it added a lot of character to an otherwise WASTED Uldum zone. The tune was that of wind gusts, momentum, and eastern things.

Mists have a lot of tracks that integrate the classic WoW themes and merged them with Asian, mainly Chinese inspired tunes, with reeds and gu zheng accompaniments.

What I"d like to see are scores that play out during raids as you are progressing towards different bosses, and also at different points of their HP. The music grows more epic in proportion as you are about to land the killing blow. Think of final fantasy fights, the music itself is just as memorable as the boss. This would make 1% kills or even 1% wipes even more memorable.

Now the dangers of association, ah. Think about doing GL Dailies. If you play with your sound turned on, I bet that with the mention of GL dailies, I bet you are absolutely sick of hearing that little erhu and pipa intro rift that slowly progresses into the main Vale theme.

This is the danger. Tying an otherwise okay musical piece to the most redundant, repetitive, and boring and also lame and I can go on forever, but essentially..to GL dailies. The long chain of OMFG there's more.

This piece always plays as we are flying to the initial quest givers, when are thoughts are still dark and murderous and once we accept the quests we go and churn out the quests and pretty much don't hear the rest of the music anymore. Go try it out.

The music itself again tells a great story: The vale is under attack by the Mogu. You start off with tension and danger, then a hint of the vale is layered in, then by the time you've killed off most of the first quest hub's requirements, the full theme of the vale comes through in all its glory.

So yeah, turn your sound on.

Turny the Tree Turned Into Woodwind Is Bad

Monday, January 28, 2013

Emergency Affliction

Hello Reader,

If you weren't already aware of my situation, I am technically in 2 guilds. One guild is 13/16 and the other one is 7/16. My druid heals for the former, and my warlock damages for the latter.

Anyways. We made our first steps into HoF, well, everyone else made their first steps, for a couple of us it was routine bug squishing as usual. I went in as Destruction and after a few pulls on Vizier Shells Attenuation Mind Control, I had to emergency hearth and re-spec to affliction just so he would die faster. I utilized the time when our PuG ninja-disconnected because we were wiping despite having been informed this was a new new group.

This was on the fly. I had to re-remember how to play affliction in five minutes and also download a dot-tracker for serious business dot tracking (and staring at the tiny icons below the boss's health bar isn't healthy).

I raised my dps about 12k using affliction, as destruction's weak point is not having anything to Havoc to.

Anyways, from what I remember, I had to keep my Haunt up, all dots rolling, refreshing them shortly before they dropped off and time my cooldowns for maximum uptime, also keeping in mind to refresh dots before the boss disappeared or stunned or whatever. We also had a rogue, so I didn't have to waste a global casting my curse. It seemed to work, and now I like affliction again despite having hoarded many many weapons for my Felguard.

Anyways, we downed the first boss and made some healthy attempts at Blade Lord. And that's it.

Truny the Ninja Hearther

Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Patch Stresses

Major patches always stress me out, and the upcoming changes in 5.2 are doing an especially great job at aggravating me.

How come? Well, with all the previews of upcoming changes, raids, and especially and most importantly: mounts and pets, I get quite stressed out of the fact that these will be either heavily camped and most likely I will not be the first person to obtain (or if ever) one of these new items.

This is also true with the new warlock epic quest, where it seems we have to loot some special tome. Seriously? It's based off a drop? You know how lucky I am with those? Where does it drop off of? I know it'll be heavily camped anywas!

Then we have new spectral porcupines, my hunter is already logged out permanently on where I think they will spawn so on the day of the patch I can log in, tame a spectral porcupine then never play my hunter again. Also, new devilsaur skins! See Puppy the white devilsaur above? He can finally fight alongside his long lost family!

As for the new dinosaur mounts, I need to know EXACTLY where the mobs are RIGHT NOW so I can go camp them right now! Then again someone with the "insane" title is probably going to be there first, and we all know who that is. Despite the rares seemingly spawning ALL around Pandaria they will somehow manage to get all 5 at the same time T_T. Being employed sucks (to a very limited extent). Do these rare elites require a group to take down? What are their abilities? I need to know NOW so I can plan accordingly!

Then again I can just wait to do everything in 2016 when no one cares anymore.

Turny the Stressed

Monday, January 21, 2013

Elder Charms of Give Me More Gold

Yeah two posts in one day, that's right!

Turny the Angry Tree had a healthy stock of lesser charms of good fortune saved up since he had been doing dailies since the 3rd day of release. It was shortly before Christmas that his stash had ran out and I was faced with a dilemma.

I have three level 90's. Two of which are fairly active, and my hunter.. who has lots of potential but unfortunately the player behind the screen does not have enough time to commit to him.

Truny the Angry Warlock on the other hand was lucky enough to be re-instated to become The Main again so she was still receiving a steady flow of charms from finishing off Klaxxi and Dominance Offensive. However, now that those are done, I think I do a grand total of one or two dailies on the warlock so she only has about four weeks of lesser tokens left.

At the bare minimum I will maintain my druid and hunter's stock at exactly 90 so every week they can use their tokens to roll on non-existant sha-weapons and medium existant sha of fear loot.

Lei Shi

Lei Shi is the source of everyone's rage and fury. But why? How can such a cute, scared little water elemental bring about such despair? It's because Lei Shi drops all the fucking important items for my characters. Count it, tier shoulders, caster staff, and the non-existant gun. The ONLY worthy gun in the game at the moment, discounting the bow from MV.

Whatever the hell we do with our lesser charms to consume them, have all been consumed on Lei Shi (except my Warlock, who was lucky enough to get the Sha Touched caster sword of Tsulong for free).

Last week was a lucky week for my druid, having received NOTHING in regular raiding or LFR, he finished his 4P T14 healing set, and got extra tier gloves and I believe shoulders and helm for an off-set AND a sha-touched staff all in one go. And I only spent 1 token after receiving tier-shoulders, it bought me the staff. Huh.

I have given up on getting the mace off Empress, as it is too painful to do LFR, and really...I don't need THAT much spirit.

My warlock was also lucky, she got tier shoulders off Lei Shi last week for free, thus saving a token for me to use on real Elegon for a small chance at his awesome mount!

My hunter has many sad. I have a feeling that unless they put in a VENDOR bow/gun that I can buy with VP I will never see anything beyond a rare quality weapon. Then again my hunter has no purpose this expansion anyways.

So in conclusion, Lei Shi can suck it since I am done with her now, let's see those nipples shimmer lightly now!

Turny the Say Wha?

Maximizing Your Destruction

Wow hello friends it's been quite a long while since my last update!

A short debrief in the real life world. I am in the second module of my professional accounting designation program and thus haven't been doing much but pet battles and levelling pets and well, the usual.

Let's start off with a rant, I don't believe there would be a legitimate Kluptomania post without some sort of rant embedded within the walls of text.

Pet Battles: Singing Cricket

As most OCD achievement hunters are, the oh so time consuming but relatively simple goal of levelling 75 pets to level 25 was one of the "things" I had been working on passively.

I like this achievement in that it allowed me to utilize two strong pets to essentially "carry" a low level through ALL of the trainers. Yes, even the earth Pandaren spirit is totally duo-able if you open up with a Darkmoon Rabbit.

Having found the "right" pet for each trainer, I would try to tag in a level 22 pet for free exp, then as time went on I'd use lower and lower levels, all the way down to 5 sometimes if they're contribution was not needed and won't die in one round.

Anyways, the reward at the end of the rainbow wasn't even that important anymore but when the achievement eventually popped, I was rewarded with a Singing Cricket.

If you look at its max stats, 1546 HP and 273/273 atk and speed. It's not even that great! What the hell? It's color isn't even unique! And it doesn't even SING (for the Empresss)!

Could the pet for this achievement not have been something a bit cooler? Who the hell wants another grasshopper who doesn't even have a unique move-set? I mean, all it would take to make this "worthwhile" is to add a pair of sunglasses or goggles to the cricket and make it super cute! Right?

Trolling PVP Pet Battles

This is an activity in which I am guilty for. I mean, my trolling teams win 75% of the time, but their entire purpose is to give someone the gift of frustration. Be it queuing 3 pets with reflect, 3 undead pets, or 3 pets with multiple stuns and traps. So annoying and stunful.

PvP pet battles is quite time consuming, as I tend to fall into the "just one more battle" trap. I am currently at 146/250 wins for the next step of the achieve. (This was 145, as I like to do just 5 a day, but the last win was a test of another one of my trolly teams).

Maximizing Your Destruction Warlock

Ok now down to the nitty gritty.

Today I am going to talk about some of our nifty wifty spells in Destruction. Just a re-visit.

Havoc: Our spell duplicator.
Chaos Bolt: The truck.
Shadowburn: The new kill shot.
Fire and Brimstone (F&B): The OMG lots of fier!

From a logical bystander view, destruction is a fairly "simple" spec. The gist is, put on your dot, then spam incinerate until you have enough embers and use your embers on chaos bolt, or shadowburn.

In single target, you may time your demon soul cooldown and "build up" lots of chaos bolts, then attempt to build up embers for sub-20%. Or you might even use your demon soul cooldown to build up embers faster with a combination of incinerate/chaos bolt.

Ok, what happens now if you have two mobs? How do you maximize your damage? Remember, as a warlock or any dps spec your sole purpose is to maximize your damage in every given moment based on every given scenario of every fight.

So now, do you use havoc and split your chaos bolt into 2? Or do you wait until one mob is low enough health so you can duplicate three shadowburns onto the other mob? You have to have decided this on pull and plan your "spell schedule" accordingly. Perhaps they have enough health that you can actually split a chaos bolt AND build up enough embers and wait off the cooldown of havoc to split shadowburns 3 times.

Now think of this scenario with three, or four mobs. I don't tend to use Fire and Brimstone unless there are 10 or more mobs, as a F&B'd incinerate on all mobs will generate a full ember back. Then you can either havoc and chaos bolt some mobs, or havoc and shadowburn some low health mobs. You must decide this step before most of the adds reach 50% health because you, my friend, hit like a truck.

Rain of Fire. This is a high mana cost but essentially "maintenance free" spell that can generate extra embers and damage. I like to cast this when there's nothing else to do and my mana has regen'd to near 100%.

So yes, interesting things to think about the next time you are burning face with trucks.

Truny the Troll

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Year of the Pets

Blah blah blah new year blah blah.

There now that we've gotten that out of the way.

Christmas break was a very un-productive break for me, despite extensive feasting and partying my brain remained relatively idle for the dozen days or so that I had off. That was exactly as I had planned.

I didn't do much except for Pet Battles over the break. Yes, did you know I'm a collector of shit? No realy?

I got hooked on PVP battles for a bit, until I ended up fighting the same people over and over, and their teams just couldn't beat my "super annoying trolling team".

Pet Battles

My main team consists of:

Darkmoon Rabbit
Anubisath Idol
Mr. Bigglesworth

This is my annoying team. The DM Rabbit has a nice dodge and burrow and a bleed and is speedy as hell.

The Anubisath Idol is my reflector/tank, and Mr Bigglesworth's only purpose is to setup a Prowled Ice Tomb, which usually one shots anything.

My 2nd team that I like to troll with is my pure undead team.

Mr. Bigglesworth
Restless Shadeling - to counter flayer's/anubisaths
Scourged Whelp - to reduce heals and do party damage.

Well I bore of talking about pet battles.

Questing - Dominance Offensive

I kind of like the format of this type of story-driven questing, every few thousand rep you get a new snippet of the story, rather than just grinding to each rep tier for useless upgrades. The sad thing is Krasarang Wilds is so far away that I usually just ignore doing these dailies. Also, despite my warlock's questing powers, being able to pull 12+ mobs, actually aggroing 12+ mobs against my will is really annoying. Also, dailies are annoying in general, this will always be true.

2013 Goals

Easy. I've been running Tempest Keep and Onyxia's Lair weekly on three toons in hopes of obtaining the coveted mounts within each of these raids. My hunter is having the hardest time with Kael'thas without doing some fancy LOS dancing and pet juggling, but he's been getting the job done. It seems everywhere I go I am haunted by someone riding one of these mounts, taunting me. No seriously, everytime I'm out doing dailies I see someone different on an Onyxia mount or Ashes, so it must be ultra common and should drop anytime soon right?

I've given up on checking the various time-losts, with CRZ there is no way in hell that I can even SEE any of the rare mobs, let alone tag one. Speaking of which I have yet to see ANY rare mobs in CRZ zones....

This was a rather random useless post. I shall talk about something more productive this weekend.

Truny the Mountless.