I haven’t been blogging much over the last few weeks because I haven’t really been playing all that much. I’m still enjoying the game, and arenas in particular, but for me MMOs are first and foremost about the people.
And, well, there aren’t any left.
I don’t have a single serious arena team across my characters right now, and while I don’t mind messing around with new comps, at some point it’s a bit frustrating when your teammates don’t have the same expectations that you do. Recently I seem to end every session yelling at somebody or rage logging, and it’s not what I signed up for.
I don’t quite have the energy to server transfer and try and find more serious partners; the timezone (and accent!) makes it difficult enough, and awful rogues are twelve for ten cents anyway.
I don’t mean to complain; I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Torchlight and Borderlands, and what I’ve played so far of Dragon Age has been breathtaking. But there’s nothing out there quite like wow arenas, and I miss it a lot.
Stay in touch, everybody :>
chronic World of Warcraft
For some reason I only play classes that can be dwarves, even though only one of my characters is actually a dwarf. Thankfully I can now correct this gross oversight.
Upon reflection, that might be a coincidence.
Mu linked me to this AJ thread which details how you can click on another character as you log in and for the duration of your session you’ll be using that second character’s model. Since you choose the character you can customize exactly how they look, and unlike MPQ hacking it won’t affect other players with the same race.
Of course it’s temporary, client-side only, and it will revert if you get polymorphed or shift forms. Still, it’s a lot of fun to see how you’d look as another race. I’ve come to the conclusion that every class is improved significantly by using the male undead animations.
I was trying to convince Keys that it’s great operant conditioning for priests, since failure to Shadow Word: Death an incoming polymorph will result in you becoming a fat dwarf again. A fate worse than death! Unfortunately, SW:D breaks poly a split second after it hits, so you lose the form regardless.
In other news, they’re still trying to kill prot paladins:
- Sacred Shield: The damage absorption effect from this ability now triggers only once every 30 seconds.
- Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.
That should probably do it.
chronic World of Warcraft
In a move that surprises exactly nobody, the vanish fix as originally described isn’t going to go live, but maybe someday they’ll think of something. Mmhmm.
Since Azuba has been away from wow for the last few weeks while he studies for his finals, my rogue has been team hopping around helping people gear up and trying new comps. I’ve played most of the “viable” rogue comps now, and it’s been fun learning the pros and cons of each one, even if some of my partners have been enormously mediocre. I know nobody cares about 2s any more, but I think MP rogue + IS resto druid is one of the best comps you can play right now.
(but maybe that’s just me, I always did love outlast and ridic cc chains)
My priest has caught up on gear, and is now sitting at around 1050 resil and 2700 sp with 2/5 relentless and the t1 wep + oh. Still a few deadly pieces to replace, but at least now when I die I feel like it’s my own fault and not my gear!
The thing I love most about priests is the fact that sometimes you’re at 30% health with no hots and casting mind blast is still the right decision. You have a lot of choices to make at every stage of the match, though the flipside of that is you can get punished pretty badly for making the wrong ones.
Speaking of bad choices: rogue/dk/disc. What a spectacularly shit comp that is. Let me know if anyone has a serious non-cleave 3v3 opening for a rogue :3
chronic Priest, Rogue
There was a sneaky MLG invitational I only just heard about – it was played online, and there’s some big names in the roster. Reckoning’s very own elite RMP (Jordons!) even makes an appearance with a nail-biting series versus Billian.
The VODs are already up on Gotfrag.com if you want to have a look.”
chronic Arena mlg
I got my priest the 1h weapon this week, which was something like +400 spell power over the heirloom staff I was using previously. Of course, since the heirloom staff was Headmaster’s Charge, this is a huge downgrade in the visual department, but you can’t have everything! Now I just need to replace his s4 wand, and he has a full set of serviceable pvp gear, even if the set pieces are still mostly i213.
It’s actually surprisingly painless to gear up a character from zero; especially with the surplus honor you get from levelling in Alterac Valley. The tier 1 weapons are placed such that you can get them without a serious gear investment, which is good, since that’s the earliest pvp weapon you can get these days. Wintergrasp commendations being BoA mean that you can put your alts to good use farming honor for the characters you’re actively gearing.
On my rogue, I tried the 44/2/25 MP build that everyone’s talking about, but I really can’t stand the poison application and burst damage of running DP/WP. I can see how it might work in a cleave like RRP or RDKP where you’re mostly training a single target, but even in 2s when I was jousting with another rogue the entire match, my DP stacks would fall off way too often.
chronic Arena