Well played, World of Warcraft software developers

World of Warcraft 5.3 just came out several days ago.  Yet already a lot has happened that needed to happen in response to that, and mostly it has.

Let me recount a few things that needed to happen and why, in order to show that Blizzard and its friendly cohorts, 3rd party addon developers (solo artists & teams) have already handled it, largely.

• Players with level 90 characters with great PvP gear expressed disappointment that "Resilience" statistic is gone from their gear, somewhat hitting them in the face with the 'nerf stick'.  But as quickly as this sentiment fermented, Blizzard was already doing interviews, selling the new flavor of PvP as more friendly to newcomers.  If that shortens times for BG wait queues, I think Blizzard can sell this change somewhat to most people by pointing that out soon, and later there will be more PvP players participating in BGs and they won't see what all the fuss was about in the first place! [So far I have only BGed in 5.3 on a single character who is well geared, well buffed, and I was seriously buffing teammates too but I felt the new BGs are great if that is you.]
• Half the WoW addons I use have already been updated to WoW 5.3.  Most of the biggies that are popular, "I gotta have this one" addons are updated for 5.3.
• Blizzard seems to have released at least 3 tiny little patches since 5.3 came out. Presumably, these address little issues since we are not in the midst of a "holiday" world event.
• Blizzard advised people in the in game login message to remember to fully reset their UIs and directed them to a place on the web they can get instructions for doing that if they forgot or never had to do it before.  Addons are disabled by default by a new version so getting this message at first login is actually not too late but just the right time.

I am so amazed this happened so quickly.

I chalk it up to those being involved being smart, deft, and diligent.  Clearly, there is a lot of talent brought to bear in the WoW community.  Plus, it looks like there is a routine now born of practice, experimentation, and knowing their counterparts; WoW game developers/management/support, WoW players, and WoW addon developers.

People will look at the stock price of Activision/Blizzard.  People will look at subscriber numbers.  People will look at waning this, waxing that, whining these and try to scry what the future brings from all those tea leaves.

To me though, the things I listed are the signs that Blizzard has conquered the technical complexities of its domain, the bedrock upon which everything else is built.  Everything matters.

Being on solid ground really helps a lot.  I'm keeping my eyes peeled this month for how they have gotten so good at this.  I feel sure there are good lessons to learn from such success.

Priest progressed at a prodigious pace

I had a priest mostly idle for a year on the same realm that The Instance podcast crew plays on, the AIE, guild.

I got a gumption to level it this weekend.  Last night, I managed to get it to reach level 40.

I have already gotten it its level rare WSG & Arathi Basin BG gear plus the level 40 WST epic bracers.   Not counting characters which I had the good fortune to have heirlooms on, this is the probably one of the best geared characters I have had at level 40.

Once the realm servers are back up tonight I will be buying my level 40 fast ground mount riding skill.

I am really looking forward to leveling this character to 60 as fast as I can.  There are some great level 60 epic cloth armor patterns out there.  The patterns usually run about 100g; not bad.  The reason they are so affordable is that they make BoP gear and the gear can only be equipped by priests.

That boils down to only priests who are tailors can use those patterns to make gear that can be equipped.

This will be my first time to be able to take advantage of those patterns.

This priest is a Shadow Priest (primary) and Discipline (secondary).  These days, two clothie specs I enjoy playing the most are Shadow Priest and Arcane Mage.  I usually pick tailoring+enchanting as my two professions for characters of these classes.

Ditto for warlock but I think my next warlock might be engineering+inscription, or something like that. By the way, never pick engineering for a main character.  Use it for alts that you level up after you already have a miner and a skinner character.

Otherwise, you are gold poor all the time and you will not skill up or level up.

Enchanting also goes extremely well with Inscription or Jewelcrafting.  The reason is both those crafting professions have some patterns available that make BoP blues for fairly easy mats.  Jewelcrafting, in particular is great for this.

The result is you can make shards shards fairly easily and cheaply, whereas other people cannot.  You need shards in order to do certain enchants.  Most of the time, weapon enchants require shards.  Cloak enchants also tend to require shards.  Some glove & boot enchants require them as well.

A few things make it really easy for me to level these days.

I have been playing WoW for a number of years.  So I am very familiar with it in general.  I know where to get patterns from, when/where to get my gear from battlegrounds (BGs), how to get crafting materials (mats), and generally what items are usually cheap or expensive in the auction house (AH).

I also know how to get well geared and then do BGs.  A lot of people dislike BGs because they get killed a lot.  I know of several ways to deal with this and come out feeling pretty good.

First, accept that you are going to get killed in the BG many times.  It is okay because everyone does.

Second, get those honor points!  The way to do that is for your team to win.  Killing a player here and there really gives very little honor.

Winning the match gives you and everyone else on your team a ton of honor points.  Plus, you finish the BG a little quicker if you win by actually getting the objective completed before winning because you were ahead when the clock ran out.

Third, learn to write WoW macros.  I am serious!  They are pretty easy to learn.  The most useful type of macro usually just has two lines in it.

The first line looks like this:   #showtooltip
The second line is something like the following:

/castsequence reset=/combat/target14 Shadow Word: Pain,Mind Flay,Mind Flay,Mind Flay

I use that one a lot on my Shadow Priest. For other classes, it will look like that but instead of Shadow Priest spells you will have other spells.

Macros are very worth learning to write and then spending time to write a few and drag them to your action bar.  If you are running out of space then a wonderful WoW addon named Button Forge is on Curse.  Button Forge lets you create action bar strips or grids.

You set them up and then drag your spell icons from spellbook or macro icons from the macro editor onto an action slot.

Macros free you from having to hit a lot of different keys every second or two.  You will only need to hit several different keys during a fight and can keep hitting the same one over and over most of the time.

I have another macro that I bind to a different key that has spells that take some cast time.  If I am on the run, I like to tap a key that applies dots and perhaps does some channeling.  If I am standing still for a bit, then I am more likely to want to rap a key to run a macro that does serious DPS but requires standing in once place for about a second or two per sell.

Hope this extemporaneous dump of info is a little helpful to someone out there.

Blizzard's 5.2 release made World of WarCraft pretty fun and I found that kitties are grrreat!

A good kitty may say his prayers each evening, and still wake up as a bear late at night

In WoW 5.x, at first, I bounced around from class to class, getting a feel for everything and not having an outsized love for anything.

Until I leveled a feral druid. It was okay, as any other class is these days, from level 1 to 30 or so.  But then, I got the ability to pick a second class.  Since Guardian (bear) uses roughly the same gear — identically, in my case, I adopted that as my 2nd specification.

Man, suddenly I was having some real fun!

Tank quits because he gets a drop or his mom calls him to lunch or bring in groceries?

No problem, I've got it, guys.  I switch from kitty to bear and we are good to go less than a minute after giving up on the tank.

Pretty soon, I am queuing as a bear tank instead of kitty DPS guy when I queue for a dungeon I know.

When I reached BC I started queuing as a bear tank pretty often.  WoLK; I leveled through it by bear tanking dungeons, pretty much.  Along the way of doing that, I really got to like the bear tank thing a lot.  I started loving it.

I PvP as what I feel like

My survivability in BGs seems slightly better as a bear than a kitty because either other teams zerg a lot or they just love to come over at pet furry things as a group.

When I battleground (BG) in Feral spec, I mostly tend to stay in kitty form; not religiously, though.  If someone on my team looks like they are close to death and I am in spell range but they will be dead before I can get over there, even in one of my animal forms, I will generally try to heal him with a HoT and perhaps a direct heal casting time spell before I shirt forms and 4-foot it over to the melee.

And if a bunch of guys gang up on me in kitty form, I will generally go bear form no matter what spec I am in because I do not like blood in my fur if it is my blood.

But in my Guardian specification, I am a liberated creature.  I have no bias toward any particular form.    I generally will unhesitatingly switch forms based on what I need to do, and what the other team is doing to me.

I do pay slight attention to what that will do to my current combo points, energy, and rage since I might see fit to use the momentum I have in those departments by lingering a couple seconds more.

Playing the animal crackers macro go-go

Most players in WoW seem to know nothing about WoW macros.  For most of the years I played WoW, that included me too.

However, this definitely changed for me a year or two ago when I finally "got" WoW macros learned.

The two main biases against macros seem to be: (a) no need for them if you "know your class" and, (b) they are "cheating".

On the second point, NO they are definitely NOT cheating.  WoW put Macros in the game for a reason. Macros let you make better use of your "limited" number of keys (well over 100) on your keyboard and action bar button slots [4 dozen built in and if you get ButtonForge or Bartender almost no limits] as well as your finite number of fingers (10, gotcha — check and mate).

What most players call "rotations" because they are cyclical attack strikes or healing/damage spell casts,  macro authors will probably just call sequences, particularly if they are computer programmers and already familiar with this term.

Macros in WoW typically start off with ah line like this:  #showtooltip
The second line will generally look something like this:

/castsequence reset=/combat/target25 Thrash,Swipe,Swipe,Swipe,Rake,Swipe,Rip

And that, just those two lines, would be a complete macro.

Line one is simple.  It is a directive that tells WoW that you have not picked an icon for this macro and so you want the game to display the icon for whatever command will execute the next time the button is pressed.  That is important when you use "/castsequence" because it ends with a list of abilities to use that are separated by commas.

The macro always starts with the first ability, and typically goes to the next one and the next one until it gets to the end of the list.  Then, it does the reasonable thing and "wraps around" to start at the beginning again.  Yes, the list is basically a cycle; goes around in a big circle.

Problem is, a lot of abilities work best shortly after another ability has been used, or actually even require another ability to be used shortly before them. This is particularly true with rogues and us feral kitties; combo points, remember?

Now, I just want to totally demystify that second line.

The "magic word," that is the command in the line is "/castsequence".

The "reset=" chunk there looks intimidating if not downright ugly until it is clearly explained.

The "/combat" part means, "Oh, yeah.  Reset to the start of the list of abilities if I drop out of combat."   This is important because when you get into combat anew you really want or sometimes even need the first ability listed to go first, or at least have some abilities in the list that need some other ability you put in ahead of it to actually happen … ahead of it.

The "/target" part means, "Oh, yeah.  Reset to the start of the list of abilities if I change my Target."  This is handy for most classes and vital for kitties and rogues.  We have a handful of spells that generate "combo points" and a handful of abilities that require one or more "combo points" be on our current target for them to work; "finishing moves" these latter things are called.

Including "/target" makes our macros work really well.  They are smart in just the right way for how our abilities are tricky to 'just work'.  Without this, you would have to tap a different key or click a different button each time you switched targets.

Hey, if I switch targets, I already did some extra work to do that.  I do not want to do extra extra work to make sure something happens, capiche?  WoW's macro designer understands, and that is why he included "/target" in the macro language.  The reasoning and effect are very similar to "/combat".  They are still two different conditions, though.  So be glade he/she did not try to combine them.

The number just rammed on the end of whatever black space trickles out after "reset="seems to me like it should have a delimiter, that is a punctuation mark before it.  However, the macro language designer/architect deemed that was not necessary.  The good thing about this decision is that it saves us an extra character in our macro.

Macros can only be 255 characters long (2^8, minus 1). Saving a character here and there is good.  When I was starting out, I used to put spaces after my commas in /castsequence but I know longer do that. I got tired of going back later and deleting them when I added more and more abilities into my list.

Macros work very well with Ferals and Guardians, as they do with most classes except perhaps Death Knights.  If you play a druid, a rogue, or any cloth-wearing caster character, I think you will find it super rewarding to learn as much about macros as I have taught you above.

By the way, the /castsequence above is not what I normally use.  I have my Thrash, Swipe, Swipe, Swipe thing in one macro and my other attacks in a different macro.

That way, I do not have the former depleting the combo points my latter need at certain points.  You have to be careful about that or you will find that suddenly one of your favorite buttons is not doing anything anymore and you have to hit another one to "re-prime it" so to speak.

Part of the reason I feel extremely confident when I go tanking a dungeon or hopping into a battleground, even on a character not to mention class I have not played in a long time, is that I have these macros set up for my standard attacks.

I read that I may learn what others know

There are some great blog posts — nay,  entire blogs — out there with a wealth of information about this class or spec and that.

One I recently stumbled over is this MOP guide for Feral Druids by The Fluid Druid.  If you play one then you should check it out.

If you have a druid and read this post, I hope it has helped you!

No dilly of doing dailies

I am a little frustrated by how many days I get few if any dailies done on my WoW characters.

Dailies are a great source of XP, gold, cooking recipes, cooking/fishing skill, guild reputation, and faction reputation.

I have a bunch of characters.  While some of these characters have maxed out their profession skill, city reputation, and learned all the cooking daily supply vendors' recipes, none of them have maxed the gamut of faction reputations that can be achieved by running dailies.

I do have an addon named Factionizer and another named Overachiever which let me keep track of my reputation and achievements.

So far I lack an addon that keeps track of my daily quests run/outstanding for the current day on my current and overall characters.

Has anyone seen a good addon that does this which is up to date and is pretty lightweight?

To boldly go where I do not go very much

Getting in a rut, doing things your 'usual' way, tends to create dark corners in your skill areas.  You end up missing some successes and a lot of opportunities.  The worst thing is, you never even know they exist.

A couple of months ago, I decided to take the opportunity afforded by Blizzard to create an 11th character that arrived with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion set for World of Warcraft. [Great news for players who have 11 characters on a realm: Altoholic addon added support this week for an 11th column in its characters Grid view!]

I have been a WoW user/player for quite a while.  Most of my high level characters (80+) are casters; particularly cloth-wearing casters — warlocks, mages, and priests.  Along with those I have a fair number of hunters too.

So the vast majority of my characters are used for fighting other characters at range, not up close and personal.  I do have a  level 85 rogue, a level 85 paladin (tank and DPS specs), and a level 85 enhancement shaman.

In the back of my mind, I was kind of bothered by the fact that my exploration of the classes in the game was therefore kind of incomplete.

So I decided to create a 'kitty' (feral druid) buttressed by my oldest, most seasoned characters on my original realm.

That kitty is now level 60 now.  For the 2nd or 3rd time since I created it, its XP (experience) and thus level has been frozen.

At level 60-84, freezing XP seems to result in your efforts to queue for a BG futile, as you basically sit in the queue forever most days you try to do a BG.  That problem goes away the moment you unfreeze your XP.

However, getting into dungeons is no problem at all when you have your XP frozen.

Tanks get into dungeons really, really quickly.  For some reason, probably because they have to know the dungeon layout pretty well in order to be the de facto point man and generally need to know a little about the bosses and various fights' mechanics, there has always been a shortage of tanks for as long as I have been playing WoW.

My kitty has been getting most of my gameplay in 2013.  This week, most of my time spent on this character has been in 'tank' (guardian) spec; especially in dungeons.  I have been getting into dungeons really quickly.  Being able to get into dungeons fast has helped me improve my gear very swiftly.

I heard somewhere that tanking as a druid, which means in bear form with the bear spec, is difficult.  For me, so far it has not been difficult.

On this druid, I have employed my fairly decent skill at writing WoW macros to reduce the need for my fingers to fly all over the keyboard.  From the start, I took advantage of this to create DPS attack macros.   When I dinged 30 and bought Guardian spec, I wrote some macros which I keep updating so that I can tank pretty easily too.

This works very well.  I have also started using a very handy web site as a resource; Maps For Tanks, in order to get acquainted quickly with a dungeon I want to tank next.

That, combined with a little study of Dungeon Journal that is built into the game, the Atlas addon, and perhaps watching a YouTube video with a run through of the dungeon, gives me high confidence that things will go smoothly and quickly.  Tanks that get lost or die a lot are, somewhat fairly, called "fail tanks".  Knowing what you face and where to run to next after each fight makes the whole run very fun.

Consequently, I am getting familiar with dungeons much more quickly and in more depth than I did before.  Since Cataclysm came out a couple of years ago, you gain XP so quickly [unless you freeze it] that you generally just see each dungeon a time or two until you reach level 80.

Since I am currently frozen at level 60 and not have excellent sets of gear tuned for each druid form; kitty, bear, and caster — I am going to try something I have done little to none of in the game.  That is, I plan to do some raiding of dungeons designed for the character's own level.

Intrinsically, I want to explore the content of these dungeons and face their challenges full on.  Extrinsically, I want the battle pets that you can win as a reward in them.  There are a bunch of new combat pets that you can only get as drops in raids.

Also, I feel like the experience of running dungeons in a party as opposed to solo, or simply questing alone and doing some battlegrounds, is really enriching.  You are part of a team.  You pick things up about the environment better.  You can complete the runs faster.

So that is my game plan at the moment; to boldly go where I have gone little, if ever, before.

Star Wars The Old Republic: what went wrong?

A well known computer gaming company, Bioware, attempted to produce a video game set in the universe of the Star Wars science fiction fantasy saga.  However, the game failed to catch on and from what I have been reading the team who created it and, in the case of an on going game would be expected to maintain it, has largely moved on instead of being retained.

Here is an article from Forbes about Five Lessons Learned as SWTOR Surrenders.

Apparently, from reading the article cited and looking at screenshots in it and elsewhere on the web, the game tried to outdo Blizzard's WoW by adding lots of glitz; cut scenes, video presentations conveying the backstory, etc.

But a lot of the glitzy stuff did not really make the game more fun, it sounds like.  The screen, I notice, looks really fancy and slick.  However, SWTOR left out some important things that World of Warcraft has always had going for it.

WoW supports addons to let developers customize specific aspects of the game's presentation/interaction and really, I think, add a lot more handy information in it.  There are entire web sites that explain in a wiki based format the stuff that is in the game, the stuff you do in the game, and so on.  It is actually pretty complex in terms of the number of details that are out there.

So these addons sort of soften the blow of not having as much information as you would like available to you.

If Blizzard took upon itself to provide every panache then it would be hard to ever finish anything, and the game would be huge with each person finding much to it that they felt was unnecessary.  The game would be huge, and a lot of that extra stuff would be regarded by bloat by people even if there was disagreement about what was bloat and what was impossible to do without.

SWTOR does not provide the ability to customize the game with community written addons.  Right there, that should be a warning that something which matters a lot in many ways is missing.

WoW also provides the ability to write macros.  Anybody can write a macro.  They allow a user to specify more than one action that might be performed when a user presses a certain key or clicks a certain button on the screen, sort of.

I say sort of because, c'mon, Blizzard is not going to provide a way to kill every monster in shooting range by pressing one key one time.  In fact, Blizzard bans that sort of thing both explicitly with rules that they keep presenting to their users pretty frequently, as well as making the game program itself just scoff at the notion that a whole symphony of character actions should take place with one key press or button click.

That being said, Blizzard makes macros powerful enough to be far from pointless in the game.  For one thing in some ver special cases, two actions can be performed in response to one action taken by the user.  They are not very consequential results but beats having to do it as discrete things.

The bulk of macro actions in battles serve one of the two following purposes.  The game can be offered choices based on the target and other circumstances and take different actions based on the context at the moment.

That is pretty handy.  Aside from not needing to move your fingers to a different place to do the different actions, you do not run out of keys on your keyboard and buttons on your screen.  There are finite limits to a computer user interface.

The other thing is that Blizzard will gladly allow you to tell the game to preform different actions each time you press a given key.  So, if you want to do a series of attacks when the key is pressed repeatedly, then cast a heal on yourself, and then do it all again over and over — you can do so.

Blizzard is not against simplifying game play.

The gist in part of what they absolutely do not want is to have the game botted (controlled as if by a virtual robotic player) to the point where the user can just walk away and check back later to find out how much gold the game made for him while he was gone, how much stuff the game killed for him, how much material the game farmed for him and then sold or crafted into stuff that could be sold.

The other part is they do not want people charging money to in effect be your virtual bot or gopher or whatever.  Allowing some people to do that would eventually wring all of the fun out of the game for everyone else.  Some guy would spend $50,000 to become uber powerful in the game and then act as a gatekeeper for other people to be able to have fun, or something crazy like that.  Plus, it would start getting regulated as if the things inside the game were real, which they are not.

But SWTOR does not provide a WoW like macro facility either.  There is just a small selection of buttons on the screen and you click them with your mouse or hit keys to make them take actions.  It is pretty simplistic compared to WoW which has a much richer way to interact with the game.

It seems like what SWTOR provided was a lot of eye candy.  WoW is successful because it provides opportunity and a bit of a demand to think.  In its own way, SWTOR probably did too but I think ultimately it was not engaging enough and people grew weary of it.

The article also indicates SWTOR took $400 million to develop. That is a lot of money.  It is just a computer game.  Ultimately, it just did not generate enough to recoup its costs and cover its ongoing overhead.

Blizzard was fortunate and intelligent in that there is not a lot of intellectual property in terms of the story that they have to pay license fees for.  Blizzard basically made up the WoW story from scratch by being or hiring very good story tellers.

Now that Star Wars is part of Disney, they own a lot of intellectual property encompassing stories, music, video, and so forth.  No doubt they can try something like this again, fixing some mistakes made in SWTOR.  Eventually, I think they will get it right and I do believe they actually will have another go at it.

Things did go wrong but in a game, that happens every now and then.  You just try to do better in the next round.  In this case, the game sort of failed because maybe it just was not fun enough.  All the work was supposed to create something that was fun entertainment, not just look good.

According to a forum post for SWTOR three months ago, the SWTOR game did not fail.  So time will tell what all this really means.

Not to fret, you will get that battle pet

I started playing with the new "battle pet" feature in WoW at about the same time as most other people — about as soon as it was introduced a couple of months back.

At first, I really struggled with getting high quality pets.  I also found it very hard to level them up quickly.  This is largely by design, I think.

Also likely by design, it turns out that it is a temporary setback.  Things get easier as you go along.

Once you have a lot of battle pets, you can employ them in various clever ways to speed up the acquisition process, as well as leveling up your pets.

This past week, my evenings were a lot more rewarding than usual.  I got some great battle pets; many of them of 'rare' (the best) quality:  Spawn of Onyxia, Stunted Shardhorn, etc.  I cannot remember exactly how many I got but it seems like it was a couple dozen new ones this week.

I also managed to speed up the leveling process of my battle pets quite a bit with a tip from a new friend in the game that took me under their wing for a bit after dinnertime one night, and explained their technique to get battle pets to jump up maybe as much as 5 levels in several minutes.  Normally, that could take half an hour.

Basically, you team them up with a pair of your most powerful or at least much more powerful battle pets.  When I say powerful, at the very least I am talking about how high their level is.

I tried that out and it works great.

Battle pets range in levels from 1 to 25.  You take a level 1 pet and a couple level 25 pets and go to a zone where the battle pets are say, 10 or 15.  Your level 1 pet just has to survive a single round and you pull them out immediately, and finish the fight with one or both of your level 25 characters.

Bang, instead of your character going from level 1 to 2 it goes from level 1 to 5.  Repeat the process, and it will likely gain another level or two in one fight!

Another lucky break I caught was receiving some flawless stones which allow you to convert battle pets of lower quality into a rare quality one.  I used those and they helped quite a bit.

Now, all of these new and improved pets are grist for the mill in obtaining and speed leveling more pets.

I am far from an expert but at least now I have not just the basics of the whole thing down, but also have got the process slightly refined.