After pre-ordering Grand Theft Auto 4 back in August 2007, I now have my special edition in my hot little hands and from what I can see even from the contents of the pack it was worth it. I was going to put some photos up but the batteries in my camera are dead and I have none recharged so that will have to wait, if I get round to it. For now, it’s off to load it up, so if I’m not seen online or in WoW for a few weeks just look for me on Xbox Live!
Now that everyone has hit 70 I’ve been able to slow down a lot and get round to doing the things I need to get finished before I start the grinding seriously, so I spent most of the long weekend doing that, and then logging out and ignoring WoW for the rest of the day to hopefully recharge my energy for the next push.
The first thing I did was decide to get Nuaaki up to 300 herbalism so as to get past needing to herb in Azeroth and be able to pick flowers in Outland so as to avoid wasting all those nodes in instances and the ability to skin bog lords for motes of life that are needed for primal mooncloth. Overall it took me about 5 hours to get from 1 to 320 and I made about 150g from selling the herbs such as gromsblood, dreamfoil, etc so it was a very worthwhile exercise and I believe infinately easier than the mining skillup is going to be for Smara next weekend.
After that I spent a few hours a day on getting quests done to try and finish off all the zones and leave myself with just dailies and instances to try and cut down on the number of decisions about what to do each day when I log in. The first thing I did was finish off Netherstorm quests..well not entirely, I still have to kill Nexus-King Salhadar since he kicked my ass the first two times I did him. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was I was having but I think I was tanking him too close to the casters and they kept getting caught in the aoe/frost nova he has and then once I got knocked back it was hard to get back in range and taunt him off whoever he had agro on before they were dead, but I think I have ideas for him again after one or two more upgrades.
Thinking about that, and then the times I had trouble in ramparts, I have noticed I really have trouble in fights now where the mob does a knockback and agro-wipe since after they knockback Smara they will go after the closest character and that will invariably be a caster who then gets their ass handed to them before I can get Smara back in range for a righteous defender cast…I think I need to be thinking a little faster and maybe frost-nova and back out with them which means I will need to re-add secondary movement keys for the casters and bind frost nova to a hotkey so guess I’ll take that into account when I redo my UI and get instance macros done this weekend.
After finishing up Neterstorm I headed to Shadowmoon Valley and dropped 4500g on 5 flying mounts for everyone and started off questing there, with the goal to get all those quests finished this week in between GTA4 sessions. I got a fair few of the Wildhammer Hold quests done so now it’s just finish off the ones left there that I haven’t done before such as Path of Conquest and Truncheon’s line (basically the ones that need a group for) and move on up to the Aldor camp for their quest lines for extra Shat’tar and Aldor rep before I need to worry about instances and fel armaments for faction with the groups. After that I will only have the Og’rila, Skyguard and SSO daily quests to do which should be about 200g per character for ~90 minutes work a night, which will mean around 30 days for enough gold to buy epic flight and the CE hypogriphs for all 5 characters (though this excludes money made from each instance run), so thing are looking reasonably good if I can keep up the grind.
Looking at instances and loot drops today, I can’t really see the point to doing instances below CoT level now as none of them really have loot drops that will be an upgrade for any of my characters and don’t give faction unless on heroic so I think after I run them once or twice to finish off the quests associated with them I’ll just not worry unless they are the normal mode daily. Even de’ing the drops only gives me a small prismatic shard so I’d need to run the entire instance to get one large prismatic shard while I’d get that from de’ing a single boss drop in a CoT+ level instance for the same time investment so there isn’t even really an incentive to do the lower instances for those which is a shame as I actually like some of the lower instances, but sadly this isn’t about doing what I like it’s about doing what improves my characters in preperation for WotLK so that has to take precedent.
I’m thinking about dropping blacksmithing as a skill from Smara and taking mining at the moment with him. I can’t currently see a benefit to blacksmithing for BoP items, and as I already have Jhentar up to 360 blacksmithing it just makes sense to me to drop it with the benefits of doing so being
The one thing that I will be doing though as I level mining up on Smara will be to make sure I keep enough mats in the bank as I go so I have all the mats ready to level him to 375 in about 3 hours in the situation that blacksmithing BoP’s become worthwhile enough for tanking that it makes sense for him to have it.
Well, I was off work sick the last two days and decided to take the time to get the last 3 levels I needed to hit 70. Managed to do it around 7:30 last night and immediately created a 5v5 team for them and played my 10 games, just managing to sneak them in before the points rollover. I went 0-11 and dropped to around 1380 rating but still ended up with 308 points for the effort. I learnt a bit about the arenas and can’t see myself really spending any time to get better in them with my current group as I don’t think I have the dps yet to have a chance even if I do so for now it’s just get in and get my games and points for the week and ignore the arena until the next week. The current goal I have for them is only to get around 4k points for main weapon and off-hand for each char anyway, so hopefully I can stay around the 250 points a week mark and have season 4 not start until I get the points, though worst comes to worst I’d be happy just getting even 2.3k points to get the main-hand weapons as they are still the best item I’d see in quite a while and will make the most impact as a long-term upgrade to each character compared to any one peice of armour.
Now I start the grind of finishing off leveling my tradeskills, have to start herbalism (though hoping it will only take a day or so to get to 300ish) and get mining, jewelcrafting, engineering and blacksmithing all up past 125 though the last three of those will be done in conjunction with the leveling of mining (ie won’t leave a farming location until I get all the mats I need for the three tradeskills from those nodes) so while the mats farming will take longer it means the skills leveling will be quicker and less expensive than AH’ing what I need.
After that I have to start grinding out the instances to gear up to start heroics, then grinding those for gear, faction and badges with the ultimate goal being to have all characters speced out in the sunwell vendor loot (or equiv/better from drops/crafted) before WotLK drops. I’m going on the assumption of a november release for it (though have heard little voices saying january) and an average of 3 badges per heroic and 2 hours per heroic as a conservative estimate, which means I should average about 10 badges per day if I include more runs on weekends or the dailies, so I’d be looking at 100 days of grinding to get 1k badges per character. If I get into heroics by the end of july I’d be on track then to hit my goal by november and be fully geared to push through WotLK at a good clip without worrying about upgrades until around level 76 (if I can use BC and T3 as an indicator) so I think that’s fairly doable depending on getting into the heroics when I plan and not getting burnt out on them once there.
The other advantage I can see to the instance grind now is that I’ll see quite a few khorium and adamantite nodes in them as I go that I won’t have to worry about competition or ninja’s so that will speed up the post 300 tradeskilling, the BoE drops will be able to be spread to who needs them or sold with funds going into the guild bank to help with the 28k cost of 5 x Epic Flying + CE mounts and my collection of large prismatic shard will keep me in enchants quite easily as any boss drops that can’t be used will be able to be de’d straight away. The only concern I have about any item right now is the whitemend pants recipe since it drops off fire bitch in Botanica and don’t think that is a fight that a multi-boxer can do (or at least my group couldn’t do it) so I might have to run some instances of it in a PuG with Calliori to try to get it.
One of the really big things I have never seen mentioned regarding multiboxing, and one that made me really happy as it took me by surprise, is just how many quests you can do as a matter of course that you may have skipped over when solo leveling purely because the time investment to find a group to do them is too significant. Over the last week or so I’ve done maybe 10 quest lines that I have never done before for just that reason, such as the Altuis quest line in Nagrand or the 2 gnome fel reaver quests near area 52 (and damn, Fel Reaver, but with a heart was one of the most intense fights I’ve done yet…finished it with everyone on around 10% mana and 15-20% health then followed up with Manaforge Ara that was just as intense but with a timer on it too) which has led to me getting gear I have never had before, and it being some of the best available at the time or currently outside instance loot, but more importantly it has led to storylines and plot development that I’d never seen or heard of before and that has added more to the enjoyment of the game now than any peice of loot could.
As an example, last night I found a group of 3 quest-givers just near the bridge to Manaforge Ara that I’d never seen before because I’d never been there before while solo. One of them is a draenai named Kaylan who is trying to resurect fallen comrades but failing, and once you finish the quest he wants you to return a message to an aldor questgiver in area52 that he is no longer a member of the aldor, that the light has failed him. Now that was cool because it gives some indication that even in a world filled with abilities such as resurection, people can lose their way and their faith and so it made me start to wonder if it would be possible for things to happen in the future to other characters in the game…it opened up possibilities that while they may never happen always leave the seeds of doubt in your mind. The kicker to this was that a quest line flowing off from that has you questing along to complete a key for a teleportation device to send you to the lair of a demon that’s off in the twisting nether and typicially inaccessible to you apart from this teleport. Once you get to the final quest you find the demon, and Kaylan has completed his turn away from the light and is now a demonic henchman for the demon you are after. That to me is a great reason to play the game and do the quests but it makes me sad that in all the time I’ve been playing the game, I have never seen it until now and gets me wondering how many others have also missed out on such great little side-items in our rush to level and stay insulated (either as soloers or multi-boxers).
Having said that, my hypocrisy will show through once WotLK drops and I rush to make my team the first to level 80….
Well not much been happening overall since the last post, world keeps turning kinda thing.
Apart from going on a swingy as hell breakeven stretch for the last 5k hands in limit there’s not much on the poker front and I’ve just been grinding away at quests in WoW. I’ve just about finished Nagrand now, hit 66 last night and only really have about 2 more hours worth of questing there to go…mainly rescuing Corki for the third time, killing the Usurper, bringing peace between the Kurenai and the Ogres and starting on the Forge Camp questline.
On a fun note, I tried Durn last night when I hit 66 and got so owned. I’ve been killing the mountain gronn’s up around the northern part of Nagrand without a hassle and looked at Durn just being another 67 elite the same as them so I took the quest for him, buffed up fully and went in search. I cleared the elekk around Tuskgor’s area and waited for Durn, as he arrived I dropped totems, spread out and moved Smara forward to engage, this is where my plan fell apart. He hit me almost right away with a few 1k hits so I had to heal and that gave agro to Calliori who got like 2 shot by him, and it was downhill from there. Think I’ll wait a few more levels and some gear before I try again but he really should be doable soon, the 118k hp estimate that mobhealth gave for him means it will be a reasonable length fight too, even at 2k group dps it means around 60 second fight.
I’m hoping to hit 67 by friday night/saturday morning and 70 before the 29th, which should be doable as we have a long weekend the weekend before that and will likely take monday off as well..the main reason for this is that I really want to hit 70 with the group before GTA4 is in my hands on the tuesday so guess I’ll be pushing myself this week.
On a slightly sadder note, I think my new 9600GT is dying. I’m getting massive graphical tearing and artifacting while playing WoW now and sometime it will just black screen on me until I hit the reset button on the comp. It’s not affecting anything else, itunes keeps playing on the pc etc, I just can’t see anything as it puts the monitors out of sync. I’ll be taking it back to the markets on saturday and trying to get them to let me just pay the difference for a 9800 if they have any (or just a straight swap for something else) rather than warranting it but if I have to I will, thankfully I have a spare 7800GTX that I hadn’t put back in the SLI machine still sitting on my desk. I also think I need to fire up some other game on the pc like HL2 and see if I get the same problems, just to be sure it is the card.
I took the time today to go and create some sig file images for all the guys and girls, not sure if I’ll actually use them anywhere but here but they do give me a good quick indicator of what I need to work on upgrading if I’m bored at work and want to plan out some upgrade paths without access to the game. Anyway, here they are, let’s see if they are any good
So as I said in my last WoW post, I was getting a little burnt out and needed to get back to something and that something was poker, and I’m glad I have.
I stopped playing at the start of the year after an horendous november and december that saw me having 1 winning day for the 2 months. I decided after I got home from visiting my folks that I’d take time out to go back over hand histories, rewatch some training videos and replays of hands I had played, check my stats and reread a couple of books. After going over my stats and checking hand histories, along with PokerEV graphs, it seemed that pretty much I was just behind on luck where none of my draws were hitting or I was getting rivered by hands like J2 making 2 pair against KK etc rather than a lot of bad play.
Yes there was some donkage in there but mostly it was just short-term variance that was compounded by me not playing enough hours to counteract it, so I’d get behind on a couple of tables and then have something come up that I had to do to help my folks out, or go somewhere etc that meant I had to leave the tables without having a chance to recover as I got into a better flow on the tables and started getting reads on players. I have a major leak in my game where I will quite often get stuck on at least 2 tables making light call-downs for information in situations hwere I may just be good and then over the next few hours get myself back up into the black for the night, so if I get to a point where I can’t spend at least 4 or 5 hours straight on the tables I will likely end up stuck and that was what happened.
Anyway, had some other stuff going on with poker so I decided to spend time playing WoW while that was sorted and to also help clear my mind of poker since I knew when I was ready to play again I’d feel it. Friday came last week and my desire to play WoW disappeared and my mind was telling me I had to install my room clients and pokertracker and pokeroffice and get into the game, so I did. I spent about 3 hours playing at PokerStars before bed and was doing ok but a little tired so I logged….30 minutes in bed and I just had to open up PokerStars again and get back to it so I did…..7 hours later, at 11am, I fell back into bed having played 2200 hands of 6-max limit with a win-rate of 10bb/100….ship it.
Last 3 days since then I have played another 2000 hands and my winrate is down to about 7.8bb/100 with a total of 348BB won since I restarted saturday morning. I’m sure this is just some positive variance kicking in but I also know I am playing better, making better reads and more importabtly, better laydowns. I’m also actually practising table-selection now rather than just taking what is available, ie I’ll wait for a seat at a table with 68% players per flop than just sit at the first one open, even if it’s only 28% players per flop, and I think this has been the major factor to my crushing it…I am playing the tables with the worst players on them, the ones that are playing any two cards (and given I have people in PokerTracker now that have 80% VP$IP over 250+ hands I know it’s not an anomoly), and so I can just wait for decent hands and value-bet them to hell. This is also allowing me to move my game away from where it used to be and open it up a bit from TAG to SLAG, getting a feel for playing a slightly wider range than I used to and learning to understand where something like JQo is behind to someone even if it was ahead of their range preflop…I have moved from 20/9 previously to 32/12 player now, and yes I still have to lower my VP$IP (need to stop playing so much from the blinds even when getting a good price, along with Axs from before the CO) and up my pfr (this is still low because of the players I’m facing, there is no point raising something like JQs/55/etc from any position when you are getting 4+ players per flop that won’t fold…would rather leave that for hands I’d usually 3-bet).
I’m going to try to keep this up for the rest of the month and am trying to play 30k hands this month just to force myself back into the game, and also to make sure I stay around long enough to recover my initial donk-offs. The only thing that might cause me to stop playing before finishing 1k hands on a night would be if I get majorly ahead and then start donking off like I noticed I was doing last night. After about 200 hands I was 70bb up for the night yet after I finished I was only 26bb up and looking through PokerTracker showed me why, I started losing focus and calling down stupid things where I knew I was beat and by what just because “I’m way up for the night, will only cost me 1bb to see”…essentially the same thoughts that go through my head at the start of the night, and also by calling down ultra-light against the donks because bottom pair is often good against them. Maybe I need to just start beleiving them when they lead out and then reraise me on a board of 252 for instance.
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.
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.
WoW NewsTweets
Aw, Isn't It Cute?
Plenty of Pets
WoW's 5th Anniversary
Auchenai Crypts
Got My Mind On My Money