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.