Bee Pit Golden Rule

Murloc Parliament is having a “Bee Pit Bingo” . For my version, I decided on the Golden Rule version – this one, you fill in everything YOU’VE ever done, to see if you deserve a trip to the bee pit.

 

By my count I can get Bingo about 97 ways.

 

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The Top Things I Will Do If I Become A Boss

Years ago I stumbled across the Evil Overlord List – the 100 things to do if ever becoming an evil overlord. High on the list is “Shooting is not too good for my enemies”, but my personal favorite has always been #34, “I will not turn into a snake. It never helps”.

Anyway it’s been percolating in my mind a bit, the WoW equivalent – while many of the items on the Evil Overlord List are applicable, there’s all those things that cross my mind as I’m battling my way through a heroic. So without further ado, here they are.

1. My hundreds of minions will not be spread out in easily-defeated, maximally spaced groups. They will be in two large packs: one near the front door, one right in front of my own chambers.

2. My citadel will have a butler who answers the door whenever someone comes to visit. If he does not report back in two minutes, the front hall room will seal itself and fill with lava.

3. My minions will be carefully trained to ignore growling bears, taunting paladins, and mocking warriors; instead they will focus on priests, mages, and other squishy people.

4. No matter how awesome it sounds, I will never shout out my attack name as I use it

5. Any “friends” and “allies” in my stronghold will be monitored closely. Should a party of adventures begin to attack them, the room will seal. And fill with lava.

6. Any graveyard within 100 miles of my stronghold will be dug up, the bodies burned, and turned into quaint condominiums at affordable prices. This should discourage adventures; those lazy jerks hate long corpse runs.

7. I will not carry any item that I am not actively using. Defense plate when I’m clearly an arcane mage? Caster offhands when I carry a two handed sword and smite people with it? No point in encouraging attackers with the promise of phat lootz.

8. My strongest protection will be my castle environs, not my minions. Walls of killer fog, dangerous globs of moving goo, and cunningly arrayed vertical layouts will feature heavily into the details. To say nothing of the lava.

9. I will not exchange my life, body, soul or free will for power. In the long run, it’s a bad investment.

10. I will not agree to become a minion for another boss. Although it’s nice not to have to do everything yourself, they tend to regard you as disposable.

11. My epic speech to adventurers who dare to challenge me will not include any of the following phrases: “It was only a setback!”, “You dare challenge me?”, “Puny mortals!”, “You are not worthy!”, or “Fools!”

12. Likewise, my epic speech will actually be along the lines of, “Welcome to my castle! As I begin pontificating, let me point out that you are on a very narrow bridge over lava!” and then push the button that drops them into the lava.

13. Finally, I will invest in a hat with a glowing yellow exclamation point over it, a box of cast-off clothes from Goodwill, and a list of dull tasks that the adventurers can perform for me. If I offer an old shoe and 97 copper, I can probably get them to attack my enemies instead of me.

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No Ping, No Ding

Only made four levels on the noobs yesterday, even with triple XP. I thought I’d take a post and explain a few points about Recruit-a-Friend leveling with regards to established paired players, but first, our story:

Over lunch we made two levels in Darkshire killing some skeletons. Reversion works really close to the house so we can get forty minutes of playtime in if I’ve got lunch ready to go when he gets home. Usually we run an instance; right now, it’s easy to get a level or two on our RAF noobies. Run around, nom some food, ding. It’s that easy.

About four o’clock in the afternoon the power went out for a second. It does that around here kind of a lot. One of the many reasons that the power company may be my most despised utility. They have to beat out the internet provider and that’s a daily competition. Whose commercials do I hear more on the radio that day? Do I have to call up and yell at the internet guys that no, we don’t have cable tv, we don’t want cable tv, I don’t care if it’s only $5 more, go away and die. Or… do we get stupid unexplained power outages.

I get up, check all the parts of our network, turn my computer back on (I know, I need a UPS. Bleah) and wait… there’s a blinking yellow light on the new Airport Express that runs the gaming rigs’ half of the network. Ugh. I find the tool I want on Reversion’s Mac (we’re a mixed marriage; Catholic Mac fan to Presbyterian Windows user) and try restoring settings. It doesn’t work, I decide I’ll leave it and just play with the Nomster. She’s cuter anyway.

Reversion gets home, we set the network back up. He logs into WoW as I try to figure out why my machine isn’t getting a connection. I plug some  cables back into the switch. The network goes down.

We spend the next hour or more trying to figure out why, now, we can’t see the devices we could see before. Finally in the midst of brainstorming, Reversion looks at the switch… where I’ve plugged both ends of one cable in. Making a loop. This is a Bad Thing. I know it’s a Bad Thing. I have a masters degree in Computer Science. In grad school, I was a systems admin for our department. Go ahead, point and laugh.

Evening’s pretty much shot but we log on for 45 minutes, get two levels, pick up some flight points, and chat a little with folks that are on in SAN. It’s really cool saying Hi to people you know from blogs. Way more fun leveling up over there.

Anyway. The actual content of this post is about RaF leveling in pairs. First, a warning. Please don’t get your girlfriend an RaF account and nag her into playing WoW with you. Leveling goes too darn fast. She’s likely to end up with a level 60 character she has no idea how to play, a whirlwind trip across half of Azeroth, and a bad taste in her mouth. Honestly the best approach there is to let her develop an interest in the game and then use RaF to power level a character she wants to play, if you’re determined to use RaF at all.

Ok, that out of the way, RaF is great for pairs who play together and want to power level some alts. Decide who gets the new account and who is the ‘veteran’ player. The Veteran will get the loot (sweet rocket ride) so you may have to do this twice to make sure nobody gets left out 😉 Anyway the Veteran emails an invitation to the other member of the pair, who clicks the link in the email to create a linked account.

You can have this linked account on the same Battle.net account as your real WoW account. You just have to be on a separate Battle.net account from the Veteran account.

Now, this new account is a trial account. It can’t level past 20, or trade, or join a guild, or whisper people, or invite to groups. Thank your friendly neighborhood gold sellers for this one. If you are doing this to get the mount, what you do next is buy two game time cards or time card codes – these you can buy from Blizzard’s online store – activate your account as a real account, and apply the time cards. Now you have an active account with three months of playtime on it. When you add the first month of playtime, the Veteran account receives one month free playtime. When you add the second month, the Veteran gets the rocket mount.

The rocket can only go to one character on the Veteran account. You select which from the RaF website showing what rewards you’ve received, and the character gets the rocket in in-game mail.

A note about upgrading from a trial account to a real one: the leveling restriction is removed right away but the other restrictions may take a while. I upgraded mine around noon Saturday and did not get an email saying that the upgrade was complete until late Sunday. Meanwhile, I’d dinged 25 and was seriously hurting for cash.

Thanks to triple XP leveling speed, you need to train all the darn time and you have to do so little questing, you just don’t have money.  For this reason you might want to make the new characters on a server where you have friends or other characters who can loan you cash. Don’t bother taking gather skills and trying to mine your way to gold; you level way too fast for that. Fortunately we had a hundred gold or so on Argent Dawn already thanks to our previous time in SAN.

More RAF details: you have to be grouped together to get the bonus XP, and fairly close . Watch carefully, you don’t want to miss any of that precious precious XP! Pick up the “Kill Ten X” quests and not so much the “Bring me 18 tongues” quests. Takes too long. Plan ahead and pick up quests for instances, then run the instance and do all the quests. You’ll probably only go once before it’s not worth it for XP.  We did Stockades with the full set of 6 quests. By the time we could even get the Wetlands quest, some of them were green. Between running Stocks and turning in, we got four levels.

Strategize: once per hour each of you can summon the other to where you are. Set your hearthstones in different locations and use it as a quick travel method. (One at the trainer, one at the quest hub works nicely). Train every fourth level, or you’ll be running back to the trainer all the time. And look for quests that reward gear…

The newbie character can grant levels to a character on the veteran account, one level per every two that the newbie has. So if the newbie runs a character up to 60, he can grant 30 levels to a veteran character. To do this you have to be in the same location so it’s same server only.

You also gain a little more reputation than otherwise, I think it’s 10% extra. Just FYI.

So why would you want to do this? There’s the mount, of course. There’s having some level 60 characters fast – nice for figuring out if you actually like a playstyle, since many characters don’t really handle like they will at endgame until at least 40 if not 60. If you want a stable of alts on another server, this works well.

Cost: $20 for the new account plus $30 game time if you’re doing the two months = $50. If you’re paying for the veteran account from the same budget, subtract the $15 of free time the veteran receives = $35.  Any characters you transfer off of the newbie account are $25. I’ll probably just abandon mine  and we’ll RaF again so I can get a mount and permanent characters.

So far: our characters are level 34 and our /played time is something like 16 hours, and that includes leaving WoW logged in and walking away.

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Raiding the workforce

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Side Effects May Include…

In Oculus tonight I was healing in caster form and noticed that I was getting a weird visual effect…

It’s triggered when Althor’s Abacus heals someone. To put it bluntly, my boobs start glowing.

Where exactly am I keeping this thing?

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More Keyword Search Advice

Dear person who came here looking for advice about “healer looking for tank and love”:

I feel your pain. Who among us has not known what it’s like to sit wondering whether your match will ever appear? And then the “Dungeon Ready” notice flashes up and your heart leaps, hoping this time  – maybe – you’ll find The One.

Good news! Blizzard wants to help even more than it already has with the LFD tool and is introducingBattle.Net Matchmaking. I’d say you should check it out, it might just be what you’re looking for.

If not, my suggestion is to find the “love” part first and then make him tank for you. If he really loves you, he’ll re-roll a meat shield. And playing with the one you love is really the best part of WoW!

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Pop Quiz!

Dear DPSers: This is your midterm exam. All topics are open-book and may be answered as short essays or interpretive dance, your choice. Signed, Your Healer.

Question One:

Your party comes equipped with a tank. His job is to get the skeletons and dragons to hit him. This is because he has a shield, or shiny armor, or… really thick fur.  You, however, are wearing tissue paper (wet tissue paper, if you’re a mage). Even if you think it’s plate, it’s not, it’s just really shiny tissue paper.

Your job is to shoot things and make them die. Sometimes this makes them mad at you. Then they will come and hit you. I will try to keep you alive but it won’t work very well. At this point, there are three things you can do.

1. Stop hitting the dragon and hope it loses interest in you. This strategy obviously doesn’t work because no one ever tries it.

2. Keep hitting it and hope it dies before you do. This is the preferred behavior for mages and other suicidal maniacs.

3. Run screaming away from the tank while it tries to eat you. For best effect, bring it right over to me! After all, I am there to heal you, probably I’ll be even more able to do that at close range. And if not, maybe the mob will decide I taste better than you do.

Question Two:

Ooops! Now I’m dead. Assuming you notice this, Mr. Shadow Priest, what are you going to do?

1. Continue doing what you’re doing and hope they all die before you do

2. Try some of those weird spells from the “Holy” side of your book?

3. Hmm, what’s this “Shadowmeld” button do?

Question Three:

We survived! But I have no mana. What is the proper course of action?

1. Write a couple jokes in party chat while you wait for me to drink and then stand around waiting for me to heal you?

2. Same as above, except, since you’re a warlock, Life Tap as soon as I stand up?

3. Ask me for an innervate after I have finished eating and drinking?

4. Get bored and pull the next group?

Question Four:

Who can remove curses?

1. Druids and Priests

2. Druids and Mages

3. Druids, Priests, Shaman, and Paladins. This does not take any time at all in fights and if you ever have a curse on you after a fight, it means your healer sucks and should be booted.

Question Five: Why is my queue 30 minutes long? I want to go now!

1: It’s long because there are lots and lots of dps out there, and a lot fewer healers, and even fewer tanks.

2: It’s long because Blizzard hates me

3: It’s long because I have been a bad person and gotten on the ignore list of too many tanks

4. It’s long because sometimes tanks and healers get burned out and want to mindlessly dps things, or decided to go watch reruns of “Star Trek” instead.

Final Question, For Bonus Credit:

As a dps’er, the most important thing I bring to this pug is:

Gear?

Skill?

Situational Awareness, ie, noticing when I have aggro, taking the aggro’d mob back to the tank, picking up healing or tanking if the real healer/tank drops, knowledge of basic instance courtesy, and an understanding of what other classes can and cannot do?

The first two items directly affect your performance on meters. The third is unmeasurable, yet far more important. Your healer and tank may never say they notice, but they do; they always do. And it helps prevent tank burnout more than anything else out there since dual spec.

Reversion’s Bonus questions.
For extra credit answer the following multiple choice. Which answer best describes each of the following abilities.

Feign Death:
A: A great tool for role players for their little charades. Of no use to actual game play.
B: Skill that lets you get some rest and take a break from combat. Good for mana regeneration.
C: Useless skill that does nothing but lower your dps.
D: Skill to dump agro or get stuff off you. Not ever to be used in parties. After all it is the tanks fault you pulled agro, right? I mean blizzard gave that skill to you for… well no reason really, so please don’t use it. Ever.

Invisibility:
(See above)

Fade:
(See above)

Vanish:
(See above)

Army of the dead:
A: Really funny movie.
B: Great way to up your dps numbers at any time and any place.
C: Something tanks whine about when you use it at the wrong time and place. They are stupid liars so ignore them.
D: A great skill to relieve loneliness.

Frost Nova:
A: Freezes things near you and keeps them from moving away from that blizzard you are casting. That way I can build up lots and lots of agro with mobs that the tank may not be able to reach. Very handy for when your ghost needs to get out and some exercise.
B: Ability for keeping monsters from being able to get to the tank. This is useful because it allows the poor misunderstood monsters to take out their aggressing on any rogues, healers or mages that happen to be standing near them when you cast it.
C: None of the above
D: How can a nova be made of ice? Blizzard is stupid.

Final double extra credit question. Essay.
Someone has suggested you need to use a different skill, or update your spell ranks, or that you should be able to get a lot more than 1200 dps with all T9 gear. In 1000 words or less explain how they are clearly dumb, annoying, spamming you, making no sense, or could not possibly know anything about your class or gear. (hint ‘Huh?’ is an acceptable answer). For triple extra credit macro your answer to the number 1 key.

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