Bishamel has hit 18 and is paused there briefly while I do some other things. I’ll do a full update at 20. Suffice to say that prot paladinning is awesome, and holy crap does HoR do some serious damage at that level. I pull crap in the Ghostlands with it and it’s half dead almost immediately.

Mounts from Zul’Gurub

Valnoth confirmed yesterday that Zul’Gurub is gone as a raid instance in Cataclysm. This makes me sad – I love Zul’Gurub, and not just because of the mounts I can’t get to drop! – but if you want something from there, better get to farmin’. ZG’s lockout resets every 3 days, so you can be in there pretty often compared to other raids. Keep in mind it’s not just mounts – you’ll probably also want to get The Deadliest Catch by fishing up Gahz’ranka and Hero of the Zandalar Tribe by grinding to exalted with the Zandalar Tribe while you’re at it. (Full clears of Zul’Gurub – even ones where you don’t kill much of the trash – yield a few thousand rep. You’ll also want to kill trash for coins and bijous. Zandalar Tribe is super-easy to grind to exalted these days.)

So yeah, this is your last shot at the Swift Zulian Tiger (and its achievement) and the Swift Razzashi Raptor (also with an achievement). I ran a full solo clear last night. I’ve also decided to keep a small collection of Zul’Gurub weapons – so many of the items in there are absolutely awesome looking, and so many of the designs and models weren’t re-used (or were re-used in Outland).

Who’s ready to start farming?!

Builders League United

My guild, <Builders League United> (or BLU for short) has a few new people in it. It’s kind of comforting, having the general chatter of a small friendly guild again. If you’re interested in seeing what we’re about, and possibly raiding with a small-schedule 10-man Horde-side raiding guild in Cataclysm, I highly recommend checking our site, especially the BLU policies and "What is BLU?" pages. We totally have a bank tab and a tabard, just like those other guys in the Guild Recruitment channel.

Loopholes for silly pirates

So it turns out that those of us working on Insane in the Membrane and trying to grind up our goblin rep after sacrificing it in the name of pirate rep have a small loophole I just now got around to finding – we are not stuck solely freeing Knot Thimblejack or grinding on endless pirates and nomads. After some careful (fingers-crossed, bated breath) experimentation last night, I found that – barring the repeatable "reconciliation turn-in quests" that were made solely to raise goblin rep with one city and lower Bloodsail Buccaneer rep – it seems like as long as Booty Bay isn’t the primary rep recipient, you can safely do quests for Gadgetzan, Ratchet, and Everlook questgivers without lowering your pirate reputation (and earning spillover reputation with all the goblin cities, as well). The best part about this is that since I chose to get IitM on my death knight, he’s done basically none of the goblin quests scattered throughout old-world Azeroth. Time to see the sights before the sights go away, and work on my title!

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Mounts, loopholes, BLU, and a CYOA update

He’s a blood elf paladin. Hooray! Belfadin was the #1 vote (due in large part thanks to the campaigning efforts of Tart), and so I started with a different name and chopped off letters and rearranged them until I got this guy.

Currently, he’s rocking a fiery Bloodied Arcanite Reaper (HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO), and the PvP plate shoulders and PvE plate chest because, well, that’s what I had. He’s also got heirlooms ready for tanking or healing, should those be the path chosen for him at 10.

So now, I need 2 votes from you, while I rapidly grind through levels 1-10:

1. What spec should Bishamel take? I’m currently leaning towards Holy – it’s gotten a number of votes, healing is a role I’ve never really done past about 25 or so, and it’ll let me glom quick queue times post 15 – but I’ll go with the crowd.
2. What should his professions be? I’ve picked up Mining and Engineering just for fun, but I’ll go with the crowd on this one.

Vote fast – level 10 comes quickly!

EDIT: Closing the voting early on this one because I’m kind of eager to get back to it. Protection it is.

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CYOA: Another pretty face

A lot of people are in the beta. Not me, I’m part of the small unwashed masses deemed unworthy of a beta key.

Nope, I’m spending my time farming achievements and leveling alts.

And that, my friends, is where you come in.

Taking a page from wow.com’s book, pick a race and class for me to level and I’ll blog about it because, hell, it could be fun. Here’s the conditions:

• No death knights (can’t roll a second one, anyway), warlocks, or shamans (I have both those classes at 74, and will scoot them to 80 in good time). Everything else is fair game.
• No Alliance toons. Just, no. However, I like all the Horde races, so orcs, trolls, blood elves, tauren, and Forsaken are all fair game.

Outside of that, suggest away. I’ve got heirlooms for just about any class, so there’s not one I’m going to shy away from leveling.

FINAL EDIT: Here’s the standings as of 7:45 PM EST Sunday. This is now the final tally, and it looks like I’ll be rolling a blood elf paladin…

• Forsaken rogue: 8
• Troll hunter: 1
• Blood elf priest: 2
• Tauren hunter: 1
• Blood elf hunter: 1
• Troll priest: 1
• Tauren druid: 2
• Blood elf paladin: 13
• Forsaken priest: 1
• Troll rogue: 2

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Choose your own adventure–actually, choose mine

While taking a brief break from World of Warcraft, I played quite a bit of Team Fortress 2. It’s always an entertaining break from the same old games – I like the concept of a class-based shooter, but I’m not into the gritty realness of a Battlefield or Modern Warfare, so TF2 it is. I also did a little bit of PvP on my warlock, and it occurred to me that there’s a lot of similarities between a class-based team FPS game and WoW battleground PvP.

Seriously, hear me out.

Lesson #1: Everyone has their own job

In TF2, I typically play the Heavy. Big, high-health, slow, and wields a friggin’ mini-gun. For a change of pace, I occasionally switch to the Scout – moves faster than anyone, has a variety of dirty tricks to stun people while on the move and harassing them with a multitude of small hits (sound familiar?) – or the Medic – his gun shoots medicine, don’t ask.

Heavies specialize in dealing massive damage; Medics specialize in healing; Scouts specializing in being really fast and capturing points. Everyone can do these things, but generally classes are good at certain things.

In WoW, you might be a rogue, sneaky with your stunlocks and the ability to make everyone in a 20-mile radius hate your guts for simply being in the same battleground. You might be a prot warrior, wading into combat and shrugging off damage like water off a murloc’s slimy fins. Me? I’m a death knight, and I’m going to go straight for the squishiest-looking caster, interrupt him eight ways from Sunday, and hopefully pummel him into the ground with this big ol’ axe. (I am Heavy Weapons Guy, and this… is my weapon.)

The first thing to accept about PvP is that everyone is good at something, but not everyone is good at everything. Not every class is fantastic at running flags, holding towers, or fighting in the middle of the road (though everyone always seems to be practicing that one). One of the keys to success is finding what you’re good at and doing it well, then learning to get passable at the things you’re not. I, for one, try to never get into a one-on-one fight with an arms warrior – on top of reducing my self-healing, they also deal massive damage with Bladestorms and Sweeping Strikes, and generally just turn me into a messy pulp. Give me a warlock, I’ll fight him instead.

Lesson #2: Stand on the dang point, mister

A Heavy on his own is easy pickings for a Sniper. They have extremely fat heads and they move very slowly, especially when firing. This is especially true for a Heavy away from his team, especially the loving embrace of a Medic’s Medigun, and when I can get ubercharged? That invincible 8 seconds is the pinnacle of damage-causing teamwork, and can usually clear a capture point or stop a team from moving their payload towards our base – at least for a little bit.

In WoW, especially in maps like WSG – where two people are usually the focal point of everyone’s attention at any time – or AV – where you might not see anyone for minutes at a time, depending on how spread out the fights are – it’s tempting to just go do your own thing. However, one thing you can’t forget is that you are there to do a job, whether it’s capturing flags or capturing towers, and if you’re not helping accomplish one of those goals, you’re not helping your team win. Furthermore, you’re away from teammates who are there to do their job, and who would help you, if you weren’t fighting in the middle of the road. Strength in numbers.

Who cares if you’re not capping the flag? You can still go slow down the people who are. Pester them with ranged attacks, stun them, slow them, do whatever you can to attain team glory. That’s really what it’s all about: teamwork. Not personal glory. Things like massive numbers of honorable kills will come in time!

Lesson #3: You’re going to die a lot – learn something from it

It’s just a matter of life: you’re going to die. A lot. This one’s universal across TF2 or WoW or nearly any multiplayer game, in fact – especially when you’re new, but even at all levels of skill, you will die a lot, and people will probably call you a n00b. Stop and think, though: do you really care about earning the respect of the kind of person who feels the need to belittle new or unskilled players? Help them learn. Don’t be that guy yelling across battleground chat about how much your team sucks. As Dusk said:

Less Talk More Fight

Enough is enough. BG chat is for calling incoming, not telling some guy from Suramar he’s a scrub because he didn’t heal you exactly when you wanted to be healed.

It’s far too easy to trash talk your own team when there’s almost no chance you’ll ever see them again (1.12 damn near ruined bgs), but god, enough.
It’s a video game, calm down and look at what you’re typing. What are you getting so upset over? It’s a video game.
It’s not worth it, whatever it is, whatever he said, whatever he did, who cares?
Do you care?
Stop for a moment here, please, take a very deep breath and ask yourself "why do i care?"

When you engage in a fruitless, useless and ultimately retarded flame war over something you will not remember in one hour, you are:
*Distracting your entire team
*Obscuring vital information, like where the hell the flag is or how many people are coming to the LM
*Removing yourself, your flame war opponent, and anyone who responds on any point, from your side. When you are typing, you are doing nothing useful.

Nobody is ever impressed with tough talk on the internet.
Nobody.
Speaking of which:

First complains, least skilled. No exceptions.

The first person to say "you guys all suck" when you are losing is the worst player on your team.
No exceptions.

So with that out of the way, the only thing to get over is dying. If you’re coming from PvE (in WoW) or a game where you’re used to thrashing the AI (say, going from Half-Life 2 to TF2), you’re going to die. A lot. But take heart! In both games, basically all it costs you is a respawn timer. No repair bill, no corpse run. The important thing is to learn from your death. During the 30 seconds you’re down waiting on the Spirit Healer to rez you, think to yourself: what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? Sometimes there’s nothing you could do – you simply get rolled over by an entire team from the other side because everyone else is fighting in the road.

Sometimes, though, there’s a lesson there. Maybe you need to put your Frost Nova in a more easily reachable position so you can quickly Blink away from a frozen opponent and rain arcane death down upon them. Maybe you need to pace out your Strangulates and not use them on less-useful spells. Maybe you need to not use your trinket on the first stun the rogue puts down, because he’s just going to apply another. Things like that!

You’re going to die a lot. Learn from it. Don’t let it get you down.

(EDIT) Lesson #4, courtesy of nagrarok

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Taking Battleground PvP Lessons from Team Fortress 2

With this change, Cataclysm is so purchased. (via mmo-c, mostly posted so I can say "hey, look at me, I’m still alive")

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As if I needed more motivation for Cataclysm

Which puts me in a bit of a bind, since technically I’m still an officer member of a 25-man raiding guild on the Alliance side on my Death Knight, but I can’t raid 25s because they’re on the weekend, I can’t really raid 10s for two more weeks because I’m going to be working basically until raid start time (and after that I’m going to want to fall over dead into bed, and the raids are a bit too late for that), and frankly the idea of logging in to throw myself at Arthas in 10s during the week kind of makes me want to not log in at all.

Hence why I put myself as tentative for the next two weeks of raids. I even feel bad about doing that; Caffeine has had a bit of a top-level shakeup lately, and I can’t help but feel I’m somewhat abandoning the new GM and other officers… but I can’t even bring myself to log in.

This weekend, for instance, I:

• went to a used bookstore (and bought $36 worth of paperbacks)
• played Persona 3 Portable, Dragon Quest IX, and Team Fortress 2
• watched Warehouse 13 (thank God it’s back)
• thought about logging into WoW, then didn’t

I didn’t really get that end-of-expansion burnout thing at the end of TBC, but by God, I’m feeling it now.

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A touch of burnout

I feel certain a few accounts will be canceled (as I’ve seen a number of people say they’ll do), and voting with your wallet is perfectly acceptable. I want to say that I think the forums will also be a deserted wasteland and everyone will flock somewhere else, like maybe the Wowhead forums, but I don’t think for a second that will actually happen. The forums will still be populated by vast quantities of people who just don’t care about it enough to not post. However, it won’t have some of the valuable stuff that is there, and we’ll probably end up looking elsewhere for it.

As for me, I’ll probably be staying off the forums regardless. I rarely needed to post there before (and mostly in Technical Support when I did), and I don’t see much changing in Cataclysm. Unless, of course, this thing where I crash every time I log out (or get disconnected!) doesn’t have a solution by then.

TL;DR: I can’t say I’m happy with their decision, and while it doesn’t affect me because I choose to not post on the forums, it will probably affect others negatively and I understand why they’d choose to boycott it as they see fit.

Other views: Pewter, Miss Medicina, Chas, Ratshag, Byaghro, Myze. Comments are off in case this non-post somehow gets linked from wow.com and their Troll Squad arrives again.

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Weighing in on the forum Real ID issue

I was going to write an actual post about numbers and the top 5 specs for each class from data mined from the top 20 PvE guilds in the world, but instead, I’m going to just put this all down so I don’t have to type it over and over and over again.

But I have to hand out my email!

Once. From the Real ID FAQ, yes, you have to hand out your email to someone you know in order for them to real-ID-friend you. (There really needs to be a convenient way to verb that.) Furthermore, it’s not automatic friending, so if you see a name you don’t recognize trying to friend you? Deny the request. The other person is never notified of that. Got an asshole ex trying to friend you on Real ID? Deny the request. Got someone trying to friend you that you just plain don’t want to know the identity of all your alts? Deny the request. If someone puts in an incorrect email address, or their request is declined, the requester is never notified. If you have a friend who constantly has keyloggers or has been hacked or what-have-you, don’t give that person your email address to begin with. Or make them give you their email address. It’s common sense. Why don’t more people have it?

But then my email address is saved in their client forever and ever!

Incorrect. From the Real ID FAQ, mutual Real ID friends (and their Real ID friends) will see your first and last name, as well as what character you’re on, what zone you’re in, and the special Real ID stuff like status messages and presence. It explicitly states in the FAQ that your Battle.net email address is not displayed in the Real ID friends list.

But you said friends of friends! HAX OMG

Shut the hell up. From the Real ID FAQ (do you see a trend yet?), yes, when you click on a friend, you can see the names of their friends, so if you have mutual acquaintances, you can quickly friend them. However, since your battle.net email is never displayed in the Real ID friends list, you don’t know your friend-of-friend’s email, and they don’t know yours. You don’t have to hand out your email, they don’t get to know your email, and it’s easy to make friends. If you don’t know who this person is who’s trying to friend you? Deny the request.

But what if they harass me?!

I bet you see where this is going. From the Real ID FAQ, not only can you contact a GM – just like if any other player was harassing you – you can block individuals from communicating with you anywhere on battle.net.

But even after you assuaged all my fears, I still don’t want to use it!

Fine.

Don’t.

What, do you think there’s more to it than that? If you don’t want to use Real ID, don’t approve any Real ID friend requests. If you opt in then later decide you want to opt out, remove all Real ID friends from your lists. Friendship is a two-way street on Real ID (unlike WoW in general), and if you remove someone, they don’t see you anymore.

Guess where I got that information?

If all else fails, you can turn on Parental Controls. They’ll be updated to disallow Real ID.

The TL;DR Version

• People you are Real ID friends with do see your first and last name (the ones set up as your primary contact in battle.net).
• People you are Real ID friends with do see your character, realm, and zone.
• People you are Real ID friends with do see what game you are playing – WoW and Starcraft II support Real ID right now. You can safely assume Diablo III will as well.
• People who you would like to be Real ID friends do need your email address once, or you will need theirs once.
• People you are Real ID friends with do not see your email address in their friends list, nor do you see theirs.
• Friends of people you are Real ID friends with do not see your email address in their friends-of-friends list, nor do you see theirs.
• Read the FAQ before you start freaking out next time, internet.

Worst case scenario: someone finds out your real name, and it turns out it’s your boss, and he notices both of you are signed on during work. Whoops!

Let’s stop the pointless panic and the rumormongering, folks. Let’s save the panic for actual crisis scenarios, when things are actually wrong, and stop the "ZOMG HORRIBLE IDEA" righteous indignation over Real ID.

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Real ID: here’s some info, now stop with the righteous indignation

Damn it, DeathwBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

(Inspired by Frost is the NBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, where you can learn how to turn your Horn of Winter into a vuvuzela.)

BZZZZZZZ well, my friends.

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BZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Yeah, I’m going to pick on warriors. I’ve been running instances from the teens up through the high 20s on Rhododendron and Brynhild, and while occasionally you’ll get something like Softi’s hunter with a growling, aggressive pet, or someone DPSing in Ragefire Chasm in bearform (because they don’t have cat yet, and evidently missed that part of the pesky tooltip for Maul (Rank 1) that says it causes high amounts of threat), the biggest issue I’ve had has been with warriors. Absolutely. Idiotic. Warriors.

Our latest shining winner, Darca of Drak’thul, ended up in a Stockades run with us after one of our DPS unexpectedly had to go, shortly before fighting Bazil. No, not Basil, Bazil. (Side note: Stocks sucks as Horde. The only thing I get out of it? Lots of wool.) Shoulda known something was up when as soon as she zoned in, she ran directly to the first mob in front of her, hit it with her sword, and Thunderstomped. Pardon me… what? Feral Faerie Fire, Growl, quit stealin’ mah mobs.

So we got to the three-way room before Bazil, and I couldn’t remember if it was him or Dextren Ward that has the fear (spoiler: it’s Dextren), so we went to clear the side rooms. I had no more than turned my fat furry bear ass to face the room before Darca … once again pulled. The entire room. My only response was "you know you’re not the tank, right?" No response. Once again, I grabbed threat back, we beat up all the inmates, we beat up Bazil Thredd, and we got our goodie bag. Our mage goes, "Requeue?" To which I have no objections; I figure if Darca keeps misbehaving, we can always boot her.

Unrelated: I wonder if the Alliance are ever confused about why their prison riot started? One minute they’re having a prison riot, next thing you know, a bunch of Horde warriors teleport in, smack down all the prisoners, and teleport out.

Also unrelated: I have to give credit to the Defias Convicts, for having the balls to backhand a bear.

We requeue, and huzzah, Stockades! Because the RNG has a horrible sense of humor. Darca immediately pulls; we finish and I say politely, "Darca, please let me pull."

Darca promptly runs into the room to our left, aggros everything in the room, and dies.

Then spirit rezzes outside.

And hearths to Tarren Mill.

So we four-man the rest of Stocks, with me periodically checking if we can boot Darca (I could’ve sworn they got rid of the minimum time to kick; if it was in the patch notes, it’s a lie), and manage to finish before the cooldown because this time we just went straight to Bazil Thredd. Beat him down, requeued, and… Darca picks no role.

Requeue. Darca picks no role. Requeue. Darca picks no role.

Vote to Kick Darca? You can’t kick people after the instance is over. What kind of idiocy is that?

So you might be asking, "what’s so unique about this story?" Nothing. If I had 50g for every arms or fury warrior wielding sword-and-board and trying to tank an instance when they queued as DPS, I’d have two damned mammoths. Does anyone have any idea why this happens? What is it about this particular class that seems to be attracting all the derp derp derp members of WoW society?

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What is it with warriors?