Home of the Five Fingers of Fury

Coming to the end of my holidays and just hit level 64 on everyone so I went back to Exodar to train. Checking on my sales of BoE blue’s and purple’s I have collected across the leveling process I had enough to get all 5 characters their epic land mounts while leaving them about 50g each so now they are full pimping at epic speed + crusader aura, so much quicker to get around.

After the push for 2 weeks and not getting as leveled as I had hoped, I am a little burnt out and disillusioned with the game (getting my ass kicked in Ramparts repeatedly by Ormaar hasn’t helped either) so I’m going to take a small break to build up some rest xp and do some things I have been meaning to get back to (post to come). I’m also changing ISPs at some stage in the nexk week or so, depending on when they churn me, so since I can’t guarantee when I’ll lose connectivity or for how long I don’t want to be in a situation where it happens as I’m in a situation that will screw me over by getting disconnected.

Well, hit 58 last night so headed into outlands to set my hearthstone to Honour Hold, since I can use one of the mages to portal to any major Azeroth city as a flight hub for while I’m still questing there, and to pick up master leatherworking/skinning for Baanmee since with all the skinning I’m doing in Winterlands it seemed a waste of skillups as all the mobs are either yellow or orange con for skinning. Now, since I still have at least 2 levels of Azeroth questing, I should heat into Outlands with skinning around 330+ and get a good jump on maxing it from there.

I also got round to redoing my UI to a cleaner look and the main change there was moving from XPerls unitframe to Pitbulls. I’m not sure I’ll stay with it yet though, since I can’t seem to find a way to have them show the health of party members on the frame in text format even though it does for mana, so if it becomes too much of a hassle to keep track of exactly where everyone is at healthwise at any time then I may have to go back to Xperls.

Old UI

New UI

Well not really hard, just time consuming. I decided to do a reformat and reinstall of Vista, Visual Studio, WoW…you know, the important stuff ….and get round to swapping my macro’s around from being assist based to being focus based so I could also benefit from the new Picture in Picture functionality of Keyclone, which essentially lets you switch mains on the fly, but if you have an assist based system it becomes harder to swap things around.

For example, if I was using the following code
[code]
/assist Smara
/cast Lightning Bolt
[/code]
then if Smara dies I would need to have a second button to assist off a new character and on down the line. using a focus based system though I can have one macro that switches focus to the next character in line that’s not dead or under mind control AND have it happen on the same hotkey that I use to bring the new characters window to the fore as the new main. Means with having Baanmee there, if I’m quick enough to switch to him and closet gnome him to tanking gear I should be able to survive the end of the fight without a wipe if Smara dies (and will definatly be able to do so if I have Jhentar in replacing Ivana at times).

I probably won’t get too much benefit from this yet in instances but I can deifnatly see it being useful in arena’s in the future…for example I can go in with Baanmee appearing to be the tank and Smara the healer to totally screw with minds and hopefully have them waste some time trying to “take out the brain” before I switch to the real tank and hopefully turtle down.

In other news, I am currently at 56 with everyone and am on leave from work until the end of the month so the goal is to really push to 70 before then with the crew, am a little behind where I wanted to be (was hoping to be 58 by tonight) but I think it was worth it and just have to put in extra hours for the rest of the days. My plan was initially to go to outlands as soon as I hit 58, grind on orcs there to raise honour Hold faction and level to 60 before starting to grind Ramparts and Blood Furnce for gear/cash/faction then move to Coilfang around 64 and do the same thing, then Aurichi…basically try to level up to 70 without questing and maximizing my faction so when I hit 70 I could pump through all the quests for the extra faction and money to hopefully have enough for my epic birds fairly quickly.

Thinking about it though the last two days, I think I’ll stay in Azeroth until 60 since the xp bonuses that 2.3 brought in are only available in the old world so I save myself some leveling time there and then once I go to outlands I’ll do the quests rather than grind. I know, it’s not efficient but I figure if I’m only doing this for grinding instances (and badges eventually) then I’ll be spending more than enough time in the instances to make up for the lost money and leveling faster due to the xp bonus from completing a quest rather than grinding, eg if I can finish a kill quest on 5 chars and get 10k xp for doing so while the mobs I had to kill were giving 200xp then I have gotten the equivalent of 50 mob kills in about 1/100th the time it would take to kill them. Having the group will also allow me to do all those group and elite quests I missed out on previously which will also be extra cash so just seems to make sense to do it that way instead of grinding but will see.

Spent some time running scarlet monastary today for quest and then xp and drops, had some trouble with the start of the cathedral where I’d pull too many mobs or get a pather come at the wrong time and wiped 3 times before really getting settled…did teach me a valuable lesson though, get [ahnk]’s for my shaman or his self-res is uesless.

After clearing the cathedral I had managed to one-shot all 4 bosses and completed all the SM quests I had so I hearthed out to hand in quests and managed to hit 40. At this point I realized I now didn’t have to find my way from Stormwind to Exodar to buy my mounts the hard way, I ported Ivana to Exodar, grabbed Portal: Exodar, ported back to Stormwind where everyone was hanging out after handing in a quest to Maelin and then portaled them all to Exodar. Total time for this was under 5 minutes, as compared to a 7 minute flight to Menethil, then boat to Darkshore, then boat to Exodar…first goal for this group makeup was now acheived, shortened travel time to most places.

After training I went and checked the price for mounts + training and was 85g total for everyone but Smara who got 75 riding for 85s from the paladin trainer, so I transfered over 500g from my rogue (consider it an investment as she should get paid back 10x as much before WotLK release) and now have an elephant train behind me anywhere I go.

After this I ran back to SM but had made a bitch post about how much I hate having to try to take level 40 characters through the Bullwark to get ganked by the 50+ mobs there and gotten a fairly quick reply that I could just go west from Southshore and up through Trisfall. I decided to try it and was amazed that it worked, and that I had never tried it before. After playing from release I had never thought to do this since I figured that Trisfall was horde territory and would be guards and such around the place (especially since the in-game map shows that you have to go through Undercity to transition from one map to the next) but most of the NPC’s I went past were friendly and you totally bypass Undercity so guess this is my new route from now on…and definatly will be once I start boosting my planned druid team in SM. Anyway, ended up back at SM and just farmed it for a few runs till I got bored and headed back to questing since the library had turned mainly green to me and I had gotten the Aegis of the Scarlet Commander off Morgraine on the second run and three Whitemane’s Chapeau, only bad thing that almost kept me there was I got two Robe of Doan on my first two kills of him which I gave to one mage and priest and just couldn’t get the third to drop so my second mage now looks different. Overall though it was a profitable time in terms of upgrades for them, the Aegis I will likely now use until at least level 60 for instance, and good for teaching me how to use them as a team in instances so definatly worth the time for anyone multiboxing to take time to do the instance properly at least once or twice…as an example when I first started I couldn’t get to killing Doan without at least respawns up tot the cloister and was taking me about an hour to clear the cathedral but by the time I called it a day there I was killing Doan and exiting before repops and Cathedral was taking me under 30 minutes from the time I left the courtyard and opened the door to exiting the instance.

The team is now level 43 and pushing for 50 by the end of the coming long weekend so will be interesting to see how that goes.

Since I bought the new hardware I spoke about earlier I’ve had constant issues with the pc randomly rebooting, crashes within World of Warcraft (and that sucks when you have one instance out of five randomly crashing, especially if it’s the main), services and other parts of Vista halting or crashing and the reboots in one instance trashed my boot drive to force a reinstall. The only inidication of what it could be were the issues noticed and Prime95 having threads stop (almost instantly from starting with rounding turned on) due to hardware faults but with no help in diagnosing, but it at least helped me narrow things down to memory or the motherboard memory channels since the voltages for the psu were always fine and the cpu was fine as well.

Today I woke up a little later than I had hoped so decided rather than hopping into World of Warcraft I’d see if I could track it down. Started off by removing two sticks or ram and leaving two in channels 0,2 and testing in Prime95. Testing this way still showed a fault so I dropped down to one stick in channel 0 since I was still concerned that it could be the motherboard with issues, and that went fine so I put the other stick to the side and placed one of the other two sticks into channel 2. Testing in Prime95 with this set-up also went fine so I placed a third stick into the system in channel 1 and tested to again find no issues.

By now the system had been running stable under Prime95 with 3Gb for about an hour so I placed the fourth stick back into the system in channel 3, which it had never been in, and within 2 minutes of Prime95 running I had threads stopped due to hardware errors and about a minute later the machine rebooted itself….game, set, match, we have found the hardware fault so now it’s just a matter doing an RMA for the stick and get back up to full spec before I start trying to overclock, but at least now I shouldn’t have to worry about any crashes while playing.