But I like the Sons of Hodir!

One small tidbit of news from Blizzcon that really caught my attention was this: While explaining the new Path of the Titans feature that's planned for Cataclysm, it was specifically mentioned that this addition wouldn't be "grindy" like the Sons of Hodir. This surprised me in so far as it implies that people think working for the Sons of Hodir isn't fun. I'm currently making my way to exalted with them for the fourth time and thoroughly enjoying it.

Maybe I'm strange but I actually quite like doing dailies. Not for gold, mind you... but then I haven't been short on cash since I bought epic flying for the third time back in BC. However, as a general rule I like the comforting sense of routine that dailies provide, and as a means to gain reputation they feel more natural than anything else.

For example I like the championing system as it was introduced in WOTLK, but in all honesty I don't think it makes much sense. Do the Kirin Tor really care that much if I smack around some random vyrkul in Utgarde Keep just because I wear their tabard while I'm doing it? Sorry, but I'm not quite buying it. Levelling reputation by killing hostile mobs à la Timbermaw makes more sense, but it's still kind of dull - surely killing things can't be the only thing those furbolgs care about? Finally, doing nothing but item hand-ins like you had to do to get exalted with the Aldor and Scryers just reduces reputation to another thing that can be bought with gold.

Now, daily quests - I think those make perfect sense. I can easily picture King Jokkum thinking: "Man, that little tauren has come to polish Hodir's helm again? She really seems to be devoted to helping us out, I'm growing more fond of her every day!"

My problem with most of the Northrend daily quests has been that they are all over the place. I'm not sure why Blizzard decided to go that way; after all the Isle of Quel'Danas showed how hugely popular a centralised quest hub with lots of convenient dailies nearby can be. And yet if you want to raise your reputation with the Wyrmrest Accord for example, all you can do is get two dailies in Coldarra and then fly across half the continent for one more at Wyrmrest temple. The Argent Tournament has been a bit better in that regard, but it still requires you to fly all over Icecrown and the sword-fetching quest in one of the more southern zones of Northrend is a major pain in the arse.

So for all the daily quests that Blizzard implemented in WOTLK, the Sons of Hodir offer the only daily quest hub as I think it should be: By the point where you're revered with them you can get a total of six dailies from them which are all very conveniently close together and never require you to travel very far. They are also varied enough and don't require you to kill too many mobs to feel hugely "grindy", not to me anyway.

Plus, I think the Sons as a faction are just plain fun. Call me juvenile, but I giggled when I first noticed just how much cheap innuendo they've got going on in their daily quest titles. It's almost as if the whole thing is a parody of a reputation grind - I mean, there isn't even any pretense that you're doing anything relevant or important. It's pure sucking-up, be it by polishing their furniture or showing off your manliness (/giggle) by single-handedly slaying a wild wyrm. I'm not saying all factions should be silly like that, but as it is I consider it a pleasant change of pace from saving the world in three different ways before breakfast.

Finally, I wrote in the past about how I miss attunements in WOTLK, and the Sons of Hodir provide the closest thing to an attunement that I could find in Northrend: A pretty long and epic quest chain that changes the world around you and allows for some personal progress for your character. It's just a shame that this personal progress doesn't consist of anything truly impressive, like access to a new raid instance - instead you just get permission to buy a bunch of shoulder enchants which you wouldn't have otherwise (unless you're an inscriber). Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but yeah... shoulder enchants? I find it funny that getting my shoulders enchanted requires more effort than getting into Ulduar.

Speaking of Ulduar, I think it's a huge shame that the Sons of Hodir weren't used for some kind of Ulduar attunenement or even just a quest, as the setup was pretty much perfect. At the end of their regular quests as it is - SPOILER - you get Thorim to challenge Loken, but he loses the fight and gets captured and dragged into Ulduar. The Sons then ask you to kill Loken and cut out his filthy tongue, but once you've done that it just stops. I always found that odd, don't they care about where Thorim has gone? Or their "father" Hodir for that matter? It would have made perfect sense to continue this story with a quest that asks you to go to Ulduar and find both Thorim and Hodir. What a wasted opportunity. If anything I want more content along the lines of the Sons of Hodir, not less!

Of hunters and helmets

Is it me or are there a lot more people that hide their character's helmets than there are people who show them? Especially if it's a "pretty" character? (Think female, elf, female elf.) Now, part of me understands that, especially when it comes to head pieces that completely hide your face and hair, therefore making everyone who wears them look exactly the same. Some helms are also just plain hideous. I displayed my Forgotten Shadow Hood on my priest for quite a while, but eventually even I got tired of all the S&M jokes.

Still, as a general rule I like to see my characters' heads covered in armour, because it simply makes sense. As a tank my paladin gets hit on the head so much, it would be downright silly for her to show off her flowing tresses instead of focusing on preventing major brain injuries. I'm not much of a roleplayer, but this is just something that tickles me. I also always make sure to cover any bare midriffs on my ladies with a tabard (unless they are casters, then that thin layer of cloth isn't going to make much of a difference anyway).

Over time, my favourite character to get new helms for has become my hunter. While levelling she wore a wide variety of hats, ranging from mail circlets to rogue-ish leather masks to furry wolf hats, but nothing particularly memorable. Once she hit seventy she soon settled for a nice blue quality helmet that looked like it was made of feathers, which didn't make much sense but I liked the look of it anyway.


I think it might have been the Earthwarden's Coif from the Steamvault quest, but I'm not entirely sure. I believe there was another blue helm that used the same model, I just can't remember what it was.

Then, it might even have been on my very first Karazhan run with this character, I got lucky and ended up getting the tier four helm from Prince Malchezaar. I was so excited! Looking at it from a profile view it looked really sleek...


... but looking at it from the front it looked really dorky.


Either way I was very happy with my new metal bucket with horns, it felt like a great status symbol for a character that was only an alt, as well as adding something sufficiently fierce to my tauren hunter's look. In raids people told me to please hide my helm more than once, complaining that its ugliness offended their eyeballs. I laughed at them and was only reassured in my conviction that an ugly helmet was something cool to show off.

My tier four lasted me for quite a while, until one day I happened to be present when the Coif of the Jungle Stalker dropped off Hex Lord Malacrass in Zul'Aman. I had seen it drop before while on my priest and had more than once declared it the ugliest helm that I had ever seen. This wasn't helped by the fact that for the longest time I couldn't actually make out what it was supposed to look like. I used to call it the "face mask", based on my perception that it looked like some troll had torn off someone else's face and then pasted it onto a mask.

But... it had great stats! What to do? Of course I rolled need and won. Funnily enough it turned out that this was actually the first helm that I had ever seen that actually looked better on a female tauren than on anyone else. Flat blood elf and orc faces distorted the image way too much, but placed on my hunter's long snout I could finally make out what it was supposed to be: a bird's beak! I displayed it quite proudly from then on and it lasted me all the way to eighty.


Some time after I hit eighty I got a new blue helm of utterly nondescript shape. I mean... it really just looked like a helm made of leather! How boring! I felt seriously uncomfortable with my hunter being reduced to running around with something that unexciting, considering the standards she had become used to.

Imagine my delight when I started to grind reputation with the Oracles and discovered that one of their reputation rewards was the so-called Toothslice helm. It had horns! And randomly pasted-on jaws! Finally I got comments from other people about my odd choice of helm again, which eventually led to it being dubbed the "goat helm". I consider it fortunate that I didn't run into any boring-looking upgrades for a long time.


When the looks of the tier eight armour models were first discovered, a video was posted on youtube that showed a selection of different characters walking around wearing the full sets. For some reason female tauren hunter was one of the combinations of choice, and I remember looking at it and thinking how awesome yet hilarious the helm in particular looked, what with the ginormous horns on top of the already existing ones. Too bad my hunter was unlikely to ever get any tier eight, what with being a relatively rarely played alt...

Enter the emblem changes. Hurrah! And while I still run a lot less instances on my hunter than on my other characters (simply because as a dps she's not in that much demand), I finally managed to accumulate the fifty-eight emblems of conquest to buy her a Conqueror's Scourgestalker Headpiece today. I cannot express how good it feels to be wearing a metal bucket with horns again. The fact that this also means having a meta gem again for the first time since Karazhan is only a nice bonus.


Bucketheads of WoW, unite!

Trial of the Champion: The Grand Champions

A lot has been said about the lack of a consistent and logical story for Trial of the Champion, but the actual fights in the instance haven't been talked about that much from what I've seen. This is something I'd like to do today, at least about the first boss. I think the fight has got some interesting things going for it, even if there are also aspects of it that are quite annoying.

The intro definitely falls on the "annoying" side. You can shorten it ever so slightly by running in, starting it and then running out again, but in the end it's still too long. Having a bit of NPC chatter in places to make things seem more lively is alright, but endless lines of scrolling text alone don't make for a good story, even less so when it's preventing us from doing what we really want to do: getting in on the action to progress the story ourselves.

A lot of people were originally put off by the idea of having yet another boss fight involving vehicles, but I have to say that Trial really isn't that bad in that regard. The jousting kind of works - unlike in the Oculus, which requires people to learn how to handle one of three different vehicles on the fly, without necessarily knowing what the others do, everybody knows how to joust these days. The other day I took a friend to the coliseum whom I hadn't seen online on WoW in months, and even he knew how to joust. It's a phenomenon, and it's difficult to have completely missed out on it. But even if you have it's not a big deal, as one individual's jousting performance doesn't really matter in this fight. There is no real strategy to it, everybody just runs around, charging mobs and throwing shield breakers as they come off cooldown and whenever the mobs end up at the right distance. You could even say that Blizzard has gone too far into the other direction here and made a vehicle fight that's too easy, but in all honesty I prefer that over endless Oculus wipes caused by people not understanding the role of their drake.

And still it's not as if I never see people die during the jousting segment. Few people seem to be aware that if you dismount voluntarily, the NPCs will actually drop aggro and leave you alone, so you can go and grab a fresh mount at your leasure. Instead most people seem to cling to their mount until the bitter end even if it's already very low on health, and will then often get mauled after they get dismounted, as the champions continue to attack you mercilessly in that case.

But fear not, even if you die you can simply run back in as the encounter's in progress - and not just this one, it applies to the whole instance. I guess that it makes sense in a way, as I can think of few five-mans where you'll be blocked from running back and re-joining a fight. Most of the time it's just not feasible since the boss is a fairly long way into the instance. However, Trial's layout and the very short corpse-run pretty much encourage zerg tactics, and in all honesty that's not something I like as it encourages sloppy play and discourages teamwork. To use myself as an example, if losing players on the jousting phase was actually a problem, I would probably have made a point of educating more people about the benefits of grabbing a new mount before your current one dies. As it is, why bother? It's not as if someone dying and running back poses a problem for the party in any way, it's only the hapless victim that gets to rack up extra repair bills. Unfortunately my time is better spent just continuing my charges and shield breakers instead of typing out advice.

The transition from the jousting phase to the tank-and-spank ground phase is probably the most interesting bit of the encounter. A smart party will try to down the three champions relatively close together to make it easier for the tank to pick them up, and the tank's ability to quickly produce sufficient amounts of threat on all three of them is a harsh skill check that really seems to separate the mediocre tanks from the excellent ones.

Unfortunately, as soon as the game faces people with a challenge, they'll always find ways to overcome circumvent it. In this case that means that most pugs I've run with insist on running out and resetting as soon as the mounted phase ends, as this will make the champions line up and wait for you on the ground for your convenience. I always hate it when a group does that as it just feels like cheating (and means that the tank is admitting that they fail at picking up loose mobs).

The one thing I can say in those tanks' defense is that as it is, the threat mechanics of the transition seem a bit wonky. The theory I've seen proposed for this is that you keep your threat from phase one, during which everyone - including the healer - does crazy amounts of damage with their lances. This certainly would explain my observation that it's very hard to get aggro off whoever gets it initially without taunting. I've seen misdirections and other big threat moves be ignored completely - obviously they wouldn't make up for a difference of many thousands of damage done during jousting. This poses a problem in so far as it means that the only way to get aggro reliably at the start of the ground phase is to taunt, and if say, one mob is just out of range of your aoe taunt as you cast it or whatever, you can basically wipe up and try again. I would very much like it if Blizzard implemented a proper aggro reset at this point and in turn made it impossible to run out and reset. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Once on the ground the fight becomes a "simple" tank-and-spank, though the NPC's group composition makes a big difference in terms of difficulty. There is only one type of mob that can heal, the shaman, and you can be glad if you get him because the alternative consists of three hard-hitting pure damage dealers. The other night I was in a pug where we wiped on this part about a dozen times before giving up because the tank would always die before we could burn down the first opponent. At first we thought that we had just ended up with a bad healer and we went through several different ones, but it just didn't work, even though the tank was sensibly and well-geared and claimed to have tanked the instance with no problems before. In hindsight I think it had very much to do with the fact that the three champions we were facing were the warrior, the rogue and the mage, all of whom hit very hard, plus the mage has the ability to sheep any non-druid healer, which will quickly result in a wipe if it happens during the first phase of the fight while you have all three enemies pounding on your tank at once.

To give a simple run-down of the NPCs' different abilities:

The hunter is relatively harmless in terms of damage as long as the tank keeps aggro at all times. This can be tricky though since she likes to disengage, and the other mobs' abilities may force you to run around a lot, not always making it possible to immediately get into melee range with her again. If she starts shooting other party members you're in trouble, otherwise it's pretty safe to kill her last.

The mage does a fair amount of damage and can also be somewhat tricky to keep in melee range of the tank. If you want to move him you need to be able to interrupt or silence him somehow or need another smart group member to do it for you. As a clothie he's relatively easy to burn down and should be high on your kill order, if not necessarily first. The most dangerous thing he can do is sheep your healer early into the fight, unless they are a tree and immune to polymorph. If someone else in the party can dispel magic they have to be quick at it, paladins can bubble out of it once, an off-healer might throw a few life-saving heals on the tank in the meantime etc. Quick thinking is required and people mustn't be afraid of burning their cooldowns.

The rogue is a medium-sized nuisance most of the time, though she can become a real issue if you don't have anybody in your party who can cleanse poisons. They can stack up to tick for several thousands of damage per second on the tank, which doesn't make life easy for the healer, let me assure you. In addition she throws poison bottles on the ground which damage everyone who stands in them. Even if your party is reasonably skilled at moving out of the green goo they'll usually get a tick of damage or two and thus distract the healer's attention from keeping the tank alive. I would rate the rogue as a medium-priority target.

The shaman is the only one who can heal and the golden rule of "kill the healer first" generally works reasonably well, though it's also possible to focus on someone else first and leave him up until later, as he doesn't have many other annoying abilities beside the occasional heal.

The warrior is a scary killing machine and getting him down should be a fairly high priority. He does all the annoying things you'd expect from an arms warrior in PvP, like mortal strike and bladestorm, as well as an annoying knockback which can make it harder to keep aggro on the mage and hunter.

If you get them all down you'll be cheered at, fireworks will be set off, and you'll be rewarded with an epic item of high quality. If you're unlucky the fight will also bug out, which means that one of the champions goes back to full health and keeps fighting, resetting whenever you get them down yet again. This is one case where you pretty much have to walk out and reset.

In summary I think that this is actually one of the more interesting five-man boss fights currently in the game, though various bugs and the fact that graveyard zerging is encouraged detract somewhat from the fun.

On healing the Loken fight

Loken used to be one of my least favourite heroic bosses in WOTLK, right up there with Ley-Guardian Eregos of Oculus infamy. Even though I ran heroics as soon as I hit eighty on my first character, I was one of the last people in my guild to get the Timely Death achievement. Somehow this fight just turned every Halls of Lightning run into a nightmare. To this day I've never seen the "proper" strategy of running out of the lightning nova seen executed efficiently. Eventually I'd always be pressured into just healing through the damage as everyone stayed in (because "it's much easier that way" - yeah right, for everyone but me), people would die left and right, and only with some luck the tank and I would eventually finish the guy off after kiting him around the room for five minutes.

Lately however I've managed to overcome my fear of Halls of Lightning in general and Loken in specific. Today the instance was a "double daily" on my server and I ended up healing through it three times, once on my priest, once on my paladin and once on my druid. We never wiped, but it was certainly insightful.

On my priest, the main thing that struck me was what an immense difference good gear makes on this fight. I remember when we did this with the whole party wearing mostly blue-quality items, the dps doing maybe one thousand damage per second each (if we were lucky) and me being expected to heal through three, four, five lightning novas without running out of mana (which I never really managed). These days, in Ulduar gear, everybody does two or three times that much damage, so Loken dies much more quickly, and my heals also hit for a ton more. I never had trouble topping everyone off after each nova, even though we never tried to avoid it.

The lesson I learned on my paladin was that the class of your healer doesn't really matter on this fight. I've noticed that holy paladins have a tendency to moan about their lack of a big aoe healing spell as if it was something hugely crippling. I've always had my doubts about this, considering that whenever we raid it's a holy paladin who tops the healing meters on nearly every fight. The experimental instance runs and Naxx raids that I did as holy myself only confirmed my suspicions that the class's aoe healing is really powerful anyway. Sure, every now and then there was an occasion where I thought that having something like circle of healing would be handy, but that's no different than me sometimes wishing that my priest had more heal-over-time spells or that my druid had prayer of mending. It's situational. Overall I did fine.

Especially in small group content like a five-man instance, beacon of light and the glyph of holy light are extremely powerful group healing tools. In the end I actually found healing the Loken fight on my paladin much easier than on any of my other characters, because you don't even have to do much thinking. On my priest I have to decide whether to cast prayer of healing first, or prayer of mending, or put a renew on myself first... whatever. On my paladin I just have to make sure that beacon of light stays on the tank and then I spam holy light bombs on whoever is lowest on health until the boss is dead. It's a no-brainer and it works, because if I get my self-buffs up at the start, a holy light only takes as long to cast as one of my priest's flash heals, while healing for much more than a priesty greater heal would do in a hundred years. Paladins lacking group healing power? Bah I say.

Finally on my druid, the lesson that got driven home was that gear really matters on this fight. Wait, didn't I say that already? Let's change it slightly to stamina matters. My druid's healing gear is actually pretty nice for someone who hit eighty only quite recently, but several pieces of it are cloth and thus low on stamina. We only managed to one-shot Loken due to the paladin tank's skill and burning of cooldowns, as I actually died on a nova early on. With buffs my little tree has about 17k health. That's fine for surviving a nova of 14.5k damage. It's not fine when you immediately get hit by arc lightning right afterwards for 2.5k damage. Splat. In hindsight I suspect that this was the reason for a lot of the wipes I experienced early on when both healer and dps only had about 16k health max. People would always go "oh, that's fine, his nova only hits for 14k" without taking into consideration any damage that could follow immediately afterwards. I don't think you can consider yourself safe to survive the nova with less than 18k health really, only if you get lucky with whom he targets with his random attacks.

In summary: Any healing class has the tools to heal through the aoe damage of the lightning nova. However, good gear makes a huge difference in the difficulty of this endeavour, and a healthy amount of stamina is pretty much required - I'd recommend at least 18k health buffed for everyone. Also, if anyone ever figures out a way to make a whole party of people run out of the nova properly, let me know. I'm still kind of intrigued by the idea.

So... Cataclysm is official.

I was quite excited already when so many details about the new expansion were leaked about a week ago, but I didn't really want to blog about it then and there because if it had all turned out to be a load of hogwash I would have felt quite silly for making a big deal out of it. And I did have my doubts, not so much because the leaked information sounded unbelievable, but because I didn't really want a lot of it to be true. I mean, Thrall abandoning the Horde? I'm glad that this one hasn't been confirmed as of yet as far as I'm aware. But also the destruction and revamping of so many low-level zones: I know they really show their age by now, but at the end of the day it's those very same zones that drew me into the World of Warcraft to begin with, you know? I don't want them to go away.

However, very much to Blizzard's credit, I have to say that the newly released trailer completely sold me on the concept. Seeing someone soar over the Barrens on a drake? Oooh. The bleak plains of Desolace turned into lush grassland? Beautiful. And the bits about the land being torn asunder actually look more like the creation of new mountains and canyons than turning every other zone into fire and brimstone as I had feared. Anyway, before I continue to ramble on too incoherently about random things that I liked about the trailer and the official website, let's break it down point by point as listed on Blizzard's site:

Two New Playable Races

The new races are the feature that has been semi-official for longer than any of the others and I loved it from moment I heard about it, even more so now that I found out that it was a conscious decision to include new races instead of another hero class. As I wrote only a few days ago, I never got into death knights and consider their high starting level a huge turn-off. Compare that to Burning Crusade, where the addition of draenei and blood elves made me level at least five (might have been more) characters of those races through the new starting zones. I like alts, I like diversity and I like the levelling experience. Thus: new races = win, at least for me.

As far as the races themselves go, I was actually pretty neutral towards both of them at first. Worgen sounded slightly cooler maybe, but I have a bit of a soft spot for goblins as well. After seeing the trailer however, I want to roll a goblin girl right now, they just look so cute! Worgen in dresses on the other hand look quite silly, no comparison to their feral NPC counterparts. Not that this will prevent me from making one just to check out their starting zone...

Level Cap Increased to 85

This one still has me a bit confused to be honest. Why only five new levels this time instead of ten? I think MMO-champion posted something about how Blizzard wants to make these five levels last longer to make each one feel more meaningful. Which, you know, would be a 180° turnaround from everything they've been doing in the past two years, where they've been striving to make levelling as quick as possible - because only the level cap matters. I wonder if that means that they'll also slow down the lower levels again? Personally I'd quite like that, especially if they are working on making all the levelling content more fun with the revamp anyway. Though the likely backlash from the player base for being "forced" to stay in low-level zones longer again makes this something that's unlikely to happen for real.

I'm also a bit confused about the implications for gear when there'll only be five new levels. As it was, ten levels seemed like a sensible time span to replace a full set of gear, even if it had been really good in the previous endgame. However, the thought of already ditching all my Icecrown epics after only five levels doesn't sit quite right with me. We'll see how that one works out.

I'm also intrigued by the new "path system" for character progression. We already have levels, we have talents, we have achievements... what could this be about? How else can you progress your character?

Classic Zones Remade

This is the big one for me. As I said above, initially I really didn't like the idea of losing some of my old favourite levelling zones. It's still a scary thought to be honest, though what was shown in the trailer has given me hope. The question remains just how much each zone will be changed in terms of quests and the like. Auberdine getting destroyed for example definitely opens up a lot of new quest options, but does it automatically make all the old ones irrelevant? Surely the night elves would still be concerned with corrupted wildlife and furbolgs, maybe even more so - are they affected by the same ancient evil that caused the cataclysm? I guess in my ideal world they'd add new quests while also incorporating some of the old ones in the new setting, maybe streamlining them somewhat in the process. The question would be how viable that would be, especially if we assume that the base levelling speed won't be changed - do people really need more quests that they'll just outlevel way too quickly anyway?

Another thing to consider is that it's unlikely that all zones will be affected by the destructive forces. Will Blizzard cop out and just leave them as they are, with NPCs appearing to be completely oblivious to what's going on around them? I hope not.

New High-Level Zones & More Raid Content than Ever Before

I feel a bit spoiled saying this, but this is a bit of a "duh", isn't it? That's kind of what you expect from an expansion! The confirmation that more difficult versions of raid encounters will be optional again doesn't have me particularly excited as I'm not a fan of achievement raiding at all, but it's clearly something that works so I didn't really expect it to go away.

New Race and Class Combinations

I actually don't have huge issues with any of them. Things like tauren paladins will certainly take some getting used to, but I think it makes perfect sense for the people of Azeroth to evolve some and learn new things over the course of several years. And none of the new combinations are completely "out there" as far as I'm concerned.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying out many of these new options, though the limited amount of character slots per realm will definitely end up being an issue for me. I can only hope that Blizzard will also add an option to get more than ten of those, even if it's a paid feature. I hate deleting alts that I invested time in.

Guild Advancement

Making guilds more meaningful is one of those things that I've seen people suggest quite often, but it never seemed to be a priority for Blizzard, plus there are a load of potential issues to consider: For example if someone joins a new guild, do they immediately benefit from guild "levels" (whatever they turn out to be exactly) or not? If guild-changing suddenly has more meaningful effects than losing a chat channel and the tag over your name that could be the source of a lot of new drama... but I'm confident in Blizzard's ability to avoid the worst pitfalls that are bound to crop up with such a new system.

New PvP Zone & Rated Battlegrounds

I don't PvP much these days so I can't claim to care much about these features, however the mention of "new battlegrounds with rated team play" in the trailer has me intrigued. Could they actually be doing something to encourage team play in battlegrounds instead of mindless HK farming? A revolutionary idea!

Archaeology

Nobody really seems to know yet what exactly this will be about, but I have to say I really like the idea of a new secondary profession, simply because that means everyone will be able to get it - and, like the other secondary professions, it would most likely be somewhat optional. So nobody will have to worry about dropping any of their current professions just to pick up a new and insanely powerful primary profession like it happened with jewelcrafting and inscription.

Flying Mounts in Azeroth

Awesome. Not much more to say about that. Though, to quote the official FAQ: "We’re still determining whether there will be any restrictions on where you will be able to fly, at what level flying will become available, or whether you’ll need to do anything to unlock it." I do hope they come up with sensible restrictions for this, I don't think anyone would be impressed if we saw level ten characters soaring all over Kalimdor on their epic flyers.

A rogue quest

Having done maybe a bit too much badge farming on my level eighties in the past two weeks, I decided to just mess around on a really low-level alt today for a change. My choice eventually fell on a blood elf rogue in his early twenties, whom I hadn't played in many, many months, except to log on briefly and fiddle with his enchanting occasionally.

The first thing I did was go out and buy him a mount. I knew that they had made mount and riding training cheaper in the last patch but was still baffled when it ended up costing me less than five gold altogether. I'm not complaining though, while I find money-making easy these days, I still vividly remember my first character hitting forty, me being very much not able to afford my training at the time and being quite frustrated by that. Speed boosts for everyone, I say!

Also, no matter if it's black (a nice rogue-ish colour), a hawkstrider is still a supremely silly battle chicken and my rogue looks really naff riding it. Whatever gets the job done, I guess.

Anyway, I looked at my quest log and found a rogue quest called Deep Cover that sends you to the northern Barrens. I vaguely remembered attempting it before but then being forced to abandon and restart it for some reason after the elite mob at the end had kicked my leather-clad little arse. As I quickly found out, the quest does indeed lead on to Mission: Possible But Not Probable, which requires you to steal some stuff and kill a bunch of mobs including a named elite. I wasn't worried about that this time around however, because while I hadn't actually played my rogue in months, he had received a constant stream of random bind-on-equip gear that I had picked up while playing other characters and had as such become pretty well-geared for his level.

And indeed, I had no trouble taking down even multiple mobs at once, including the named elite. As I looted the quest item at the top of the tower I noticed that I got debuffed with something called Touch of Zanzil. "Cannot stealth or turn invisible"? Ouch, that's a pretty cruel debuff to put on a rogue. Considering that it comes from a class-specific quest however, I assumed that they specifically put that in to make a point and force players to hurry up and/or play in a way they aren't used to.

I fought my way out of the tower again to hand in the finished quest but had to realise that one of the objectives was still greyed out, namely the one to get "Silixiz's tower key". I re-read the quest description and targeted Foreman Silixiz. He was a corpse on the ground behind me. Wait, if I had just killed this guy, why didn't I have his key? Ah I get it, since it's a rogue quest I have to use pickpocket... fine, I'll just wait for him to respawn and then...

No. Hang on. Touch of Zanzil. Cannot stealth. I guess I'll have to wait for that to run out first. What was the duration of it again?

Seven. Days. I kid you not.

I think I spent a good minute just sitting there and staring at my screen in astonishment. Would Blizzard, who's made so much wonderful and well thought-out content for this game, really implement a quest with a mechanic this stupid? Because, you know, I can't finish it without stealthing, and I can't stealth without (presumeably) getting rid of the debuff by finishing the quest first. And the only alternative seems to be to spend seven days waiting for the debuff to run out before trying again. At level twenty-three.

Incredulous and convinced that I couldn't have been the first person to run into this problem and that there must be a better solution, I checked the wowhead comments for this quest and was delighted to be informed that the debuff was just an ordinary poison. A highlighted comment specifically pointed out that it could also be removed by the low-level first aid item called anti-venom.

Anti-venom? You mean that stuff that I used to create en masse when I was new because it seemed really useful and then I never used it? The same stuff that I stopped making because I never used it and I couldn't even sell it on the auction house? The very same stuff for which I don't have the materials lying around on any of my alts, despite of my exessive hoarding? /sigh

Still, I tried to look at it as a challenge. Creating three pieces of anti-venom only requires a single small venom sac, an item that drops quite commonly from low-level spiders. Well, usually anyway. So I made my way over to Stonetalon Mountains, suddenly feeling that I was on an epic quest to save my rogue's life from being ended (or at least ruined) by a deadly poison. As it goes with usually common drops they suddenly become increasingly rare when you need them, so I had to clear out Sishir Canyon three times before I got my first venom sac. Excitedly I crafted the anti-venom, used the first charge... but except for a sparkly little animation nothing happened. I was still indecently touched by Zanzil. Maybe anti-venom could be resisted or something? I tried again; still nothing. Hoping against hope that the third time would be the charm I used the last charge but it was also in vain. Only as I went back to wowhead to complain about the useless advice I had been given I noticed that there were already comments about this not working anymore, they just hadn't been highlighted yet. D'oh.

Anyway, at this point I finished a couple more easy quests in the area and then hearthed back to Orgrimmar. The first paladin I saw emerging from the auction house received a polite whisper from me, asking him to please remove the poison on me, which he did. But now that I finally could have gone back to finish the quest I didn't feel like it anymore.

I'm always wary when people talk about how much the old world needs a revamp because it's not streamlined enough - I do like having to take a bit of a detour now and then, it keeps things interesting. But unfinishable quests with seven-day-long debuffs that take away your class's defining abilities? Crap like that really does need to be fixed, man.

Ninja invites

Pugging etiquette is a fickle beast and I've seen many a discussion about it over the years. One of the subjects I've seen brought up reasonably often is that of "ninja invites", that is to say, inviting someone to your party without whispering them about it first. I never had particularly strong feelings on the matter but I agreed that it was kind of on the rude side and always made sure to talk to people first before actually sending a group invite their way.

Lately however I noticed that I stopped doing that and have become a ninja inviter myself. Why is that? I think there are mainly two reasons for it:

First and foremost, the current level of sophistication of the LFG tool. Back in BC you were only required to specify which instance you wanted to go to, not which role you wanted to play. You could add that information in a public note, but most people didn't. So randomly inviting that paladin on LFG to your party without even knowing whether he was a tank, healer or dps (and thus whether your party actually had a use for him) was not just a bit rude but also stupid.

Nowadays you can't select an instance on LFG without defining your role first, so all the information you could possibly need is already out there. And frankly, when I see that a healer is looking for a group for Utgarde Pinnacle, then whispering him first to ask whether he would like to heal that very same instance feels very redundant. Of course he'd like to do that, that's what it says right here!

Of course there can be exceptional cases where someone might end up sitting in LFG without actually wanting to go places; I know it has happened to me in the past: I enter the channel, quest for a bit while I wait for an invite, nothing happens and it gets late, and just as I want to log off someone suddenly wants to group with me. However, that's not them being rude for not asking whether I still fancy a party, that's me being oblivious to the time, and it's my responsibility to say: "Sorry, I forgot that I was still in LFG, I'm too tired to run an instance now."

The second reason I can't be bothered to whisper people anymore is simply how fast groups form these days, what with the renewed popularity of heroics. What I mean is, if I get lucky enough to spot a tank looking for a group for the same instance as me, I better grab them now. If I take the time to type out something along the lines of "Why hello there, dear chap, would you fancy tanking the heroic version of The Violet Hold for my party?" (I'm not a fan of people who'd sum up the same message in nothing but "VH?"), three other groups will likely have already thrown an invite his way.

If someone doesn't accept my group invite I'll still whisper them to ask what's up, but most of the time it's just a case of them being AFK for a minute. I think I have yet to encounter someone who actually rejects invites if they aren't preceded by a whisper about the matter, even though I remember hearing about this behaviour plenty of times in the past. I wonder if more people have changed their minds about the issue?