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 How many of you have alts that you actively play on multiple servers?
How do you do it?
Right now, I have what I guess you’d consider two "mains:" my DK on Kael’thas, temporarily a human (seriously, the only redeeming feature of the entire race is the reputation boost), and my warlock on Feathermoon, who is now an orc under a different main. I also have a smattering of other alts here and there – a draenei shaman, a dwarf rogue, a human priest who I regret transferring, a gnome mage, a gnome warrior who I also regret transferring, and a dwarf paladin on Kael’thas, a blood elf hunter on Feathermoon, DKs scattered across different servers, and so on and so forth.
Each of the ones who’s actively played also has other people associated with it, and various… well, "responsibilities" is as good a good word as anything for it. My death knight is "responsible" for going insane right now. My warlock, I’m determined to get him to 80 before Cataclysm, but Cataclysm is virtually upon us and my warlock mojo comes and goes, plus he’s supposed to at least be chatting with the lovely Anarkali, so I guess that’s his "responsibility." My blood elf hunter is still in my old Horde guild on Feathermoon, unless they booted her anyway (the armory doesn’t say so, but it’s been a while since I logged into her). There’s another "responsibility:" I left them suddenly like a thief in the night, which wasn’t really fair to them. Especially since they weren’t the ones I was getting away from.
And then there’s my usual alt-itis. I’ve recently had the itch to roll a druid, despite all the other things I quote-unquote "need" to do in game. My shaman is making puppy eyes and asking to be leveled, and saying hey, maybe you’d like to go back to trying enhancement? And I’m pretty sure my warrior is going to get nuked and rerolled when Cataclysm rolls around, as will my hunter; I’ll need some worgen and goblin classes to level, after all.
I’m just really bad at making balances, I think. And there are many people on each server I have an alt on who’ve basically been asking "where are you?" so I feel guilty for spending time on one server or another. I think I’m starting to realize why I used to keep all my alt-eggs in one server-basket, and sometimes I just want to commit WoW amnesty: just start a new alt on a new server and just start all over. Sometimes I seriously think about mailing all my heirlooms and gold to a single toon and just nuking everyone and starting all over. (sheesh, I sound like Brigwyn and his alt deletions).
What advice do those of you who maintain multiple alts across multiple realms have for me?
 I’ve seen this come up a lot lately, usually in response to trying to figure out what to do with death knights during the Lady Deathwhisper fight, and so I thought maybe it’d be helpful (following up on my resolution to be more useful) to provide a guide to which of our powers do magic damage and which ones are all physical. Yes, much like enhancement shamans, we’re a delightful mix of both. The ratio of physical to magical varies by spec, though, as you’ll see.
What does this really mean, though? It means that most of the time, putting a DK on a physical immune or magical immune enemy is going to gimp their damage somewhat – some specs worse than others! You may be better off leaving them on the boss and leaving your more ‘pure’-type DPS to take care of the adds, in this case.
Common to all or multiple specs
- Physical
- Shadow
- Frost
- Other
- Pestilence: Non-damaging, but it is considered magical (and, fun fact, it can miss)
These are the spells you can look to see most DKs using in some capacity or another. All specs depend on Plague Strike and Icy Touch to at least apply the initial diseases; however, Icy Touch is considered magic, so magic-immune or frost-immune enemies can’t be hit with it, thus preventing them from getting Frost Fever. Rune Strike is most commonly only seen being used by tanks or solo DKs, but it could be useful knowledge, so it’s on the list. Necrosis and BCB can show up in a few different specs, so I included them here; they’re passive, though.
Blood spec
Blood is, in my opinion, the spec least likely to be bothered by a magic-immune enemy. Their damage will still be slightly gimped: Heart Strike will be doing less due to the lack of diseases – immunity to Icy Touch means no Frost Ever, after all – but at least Death Strike will be hitting at full power. Since the DK won’t be hitting with Death Coils, anyone rocking the Glyph of Death Strike (which I believe is standard for blood spec these days) should be hitting for max damage with that strike most of the time. If you have to put a death knight on magic-immune mobs (say, due to a low number of raiders to choose from), I’d choose a blood-spec DK over the others.
Frost spec
Frost takes a pretty big hit if it runs up against a magic-immune enemy. No Icy Touch means no Icy Talons or Improved Icy Talons, a weaker Obliterate, and weaker Blood Strikes (because that attack really needed to be weaker…). No Frost damage at all means no Howling Blast and probably no Frost Strike. Don’t put Frost death knights on magic-immune enemies.
Unholy spec
- Shadow
- Corpse Explosion (yeah, it’s extremely uncommon, but I figured it was worth noting in case one of your DKs is an odd duck)
- Unholy Blight (talent)
- Nature (yeah, you read that right)
- Summon Gargoyle (technically, the Gargoyle can melee, but usually when this happens it’s a mistake – not something you want to happen)
- Physical & Shadow
- Scourge Strike: This is an odd cat as of 3.3; Scourge Strike’s initial damage is physical, but it follows immediately with shadow damage. It’s more physical damage than shadow, though.
- Other
- Ebon Plague: Ebon Plague, since it doesn’t do damage… I’m not sure. It’s classified in the Shadow school, however, so it seems probable that it’s Shadow. As it’s a disease, though, and not magic, Plague Strike will probably apply it — not that it’ll do a lot of good for that magic boost.
Unholy is probably second-worst-off behind Frost. Scourge Strike will be operating at half-efficiency, the Gargoyle will be useless unless you can maneuver it close enough to melee (which it’s really not that great at), and Unholy Blight depends on being able to hit with a Death Coil (which magic immunity guarantees won’t happen). I’m still not too sure about Ebon Plague, to be honest, but in the end it wouldn’t be too great even if it did get applied – it would only boost disease damage to a magic-immune enemy.
Reader advice
ik posted this below in the comments, and I think it pretty much sums up what I was trying to get at, but throws in some good advice as well.
When you say that Frost maybe takes the biggest hit from magic immune mobs, that might be true if you were using a normal rotation. But you won’t.
The obliterates and blood strikes hit for 25% less for Frost.
Scourge Strikes will hit for 75% less, and that’s without double dipping. Blood Strike hit for 37,5% less for Unholy
And that’s really all the spells you use on the magic immune mobs.
Unholy death knights might even want to change to using obliterate on the mobs (as there’s no diseases to remove), due to the massive damage reduction of Scourge Strike. But frost have talents/glyph that increases Obliterates damage, which makes it hit a lot harder for them, and Frost use dual wield, achieving more auto attack damage. And as far of "not being able to get Icy Talons", targeting another mob, hitting Icy Touch from a distance every 20 seconds isn’t that a big problem. And a windfury totem can replace it.
Tho ghouls help, but you don’t need to hit the same target as them. I guess a /petattack targetX macro, would work wonders. But assigning an Unholy Death Knight to kill magic immune mobs, is like taking away half their damage and all the utility of an unholy dk.
As far as what the Unholy Death Knight can do. If you want to help killing the adds, get a blood dps off spec, or even blood tanking spec would be better. Or just tell the raid leader that you simply won’t be on adds. And if he disagrees… well, then you can just equip Piccolo’s flaming flute, you’re not gonna be of much help anyways.
-ik
Unrelated note: how many times did I type "reoslutions" instead of resolutions? If you guessed 3, you’re a winner.
So the holiday lull is over and the new year begins. My real life resolutions for 2010 aren’t anything impressive, and I’ve been cheating on WoW with consoles so I could really use some goal setting… so let’s take a look at what I intend to get done in WoW this year.
- Finish Insane in the Membrane before Cataclysm – or at least the goblin and Shen’drelar portions. Ideally I’d like to have all of this done by the expansion, so I can march into Deepholm and prove that I really am insane – see, it says so right above my head… Barring that, I’d like to at least finish the Steamwheedle Cartel and Shen’drelar reputations. Feralas is marked for some pretty heavy changes, and as it’s the easiest source for both of those (or at least the best for this title), I’d like to get done with that place while I can. Goblin I can do – Shen’drelar will be hell on the pocketbook… I suck at making money. This also has a sub-resolution:
- Get my rogue to 60+. This is the only way I’m going to be able to pickpocket all those Heavy Junkboxes unless a miracle occurs. The problem is, I really don’t like playing my rogue, so I need to use my remaining month of recruit-a-friend time and power-level her.
- Finish The Loremaster on my warlock. This is the title I originally wanted for him back when he was a little Forsaken warlock. Then he was a gnome warlock on Kael’thas and I’m sorry, I just can’t play gnomes. Now he’s an orc warlock back on Feathermoon and is only a few levels higher than he was at the end of Wrath. He’s halfway done with basically all of Loremaster, barring Northrend, so I guess I should also add:
Finally (FINALLY) finish Higher Learning. Do you know how close I am to this? I need one book. One. It is never there. I have seen its joke replacements for the last four months. I WILL FINISH THIS ACHIEVEMENT THIS YEAR. Finished on January 18, 2010.- Get my warlock to 80 before Cataclysm. That way I can ignore him until it’s almost time for the expansion after that. Ha ha, I kid.
- Get my Violet Proto-Drake. As it stands, I’ll get this during the Midsummer Fire Festival – assuming I don’t get boned by the RNG again during Valentine’s Day. The Midsummer Fire Festival is the only event I’m not at least 33-50% done with, because it was the only holiday that passed during the time that I quit playing WoW. I’ve been cleaning up so far, and I’ve got no reason to stop. Hot Pink Drake of Speed, here I come!
- Level a druid, paladin, or shaman to 80. Really, just level anything to 80. I’m pretty sure I’m the last remaining person in World of Warcraft with one level 80 character. And I’ve really had the urge to level a kitty druid lately… and I do have the leather heirlooms for it… I’ve just been trying to hold off on it until I finish leveling my rogue, and I was also kind of waiting until troll and worgen druids were available. However, I’m bad at not giving in to temptation.
So yeah, that’s it. There’s my list. It’s a short list of resolutions (spoiler: I typed "reoslutions" again), but it should be enough to keep me occupied.
Especially Insane in the Membrane, which some days feels so overwhelming that I start to think maybe Battlemaster would’ve been a better idea.
Oh wait! I forgot one!
- Post informative stuff about Death Knights again. The death knight blogosphere shrank about as fast as it grew, didn’t it? And my old guides could really use a good revamp. So yeah, I figure 2010 is a good time for me to get back into posting about the art of death knighting again.
So what are your goals for the year?
 Here, fresh from drawing my name in the Blog Azeroth Kris Kringle post exchange, is Leafy himself, who brings us a bit of good family fun and British humour from across the pond (WoW-themed, of course). At least, that’s what he assures me it is, and as he’s got a fantastic accent, I’m inclined to believe him. And so, without further ado.
We join the Christmas pantomime* The Stoppable Farce in mid flow…
Enter stage left Stop Stoppingtonforce, the affable Death Knight, and his Vanity Pet Cat. He’s carrying Haris Pilton’s Hole on the end of a large weapon slung over his shoulder.
Stop: Oh, puss, oh, sweet charming puss, with three main animations and no visible purpose, shall we ever reach Dalaran and find the streets paved with gold?
Puss: *does a cute idle animation and fails to respond*
Stop: oh, Pussy, I do love you so, but you are completely useless… Wait, what’s that ahead?
Enter stage right, two large, angry looking mobs (crowds, not quest cannon fodder…), gesticulating at each other on the road ahead. As the cacophony begins to wind down, we realise both groups are shouting insults at each other; more – it’s the same insult!
All: "You’re ruining the game! You’re ruining the game!"
Puss chases an invisible butterfly, while Stop looks on in horror.
Four individuals step forward, two from each side. They are all played by over-weight, middle-aged men in drag, with excessive make-up and bad wigs. Both pairs of outfits are identical, with slightly different colouring. Let’s call then, randomly (ahem) Casuals One and Two and Raiders One and Two.
Casual One: Them! They’re ruining the game! All that elitism and epeen!
Raider One: Them! They’re ruining the game with their sense of entitlement and welfare epics!
Raider One turns to look at the audience, cocks an eyebrow, and raises his skirt to reveal a large, comedy ePeen** below…
Casuals One and Two make comic expressions of shock. Suddenly, Casual Two turns as if hearing a distant voice.
Casual One: FTW! A healer! Now to chain random heroics and get my last piece of Tier 9!
Casual One fades away.
Raiders One and Two: They’re welfare Tier gear!
Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!
Raiders One and Two: Oh yes, they are!
Audience and Casual Two: Oh no they’re not!
(repeat until the audience show signs of suicidal boredom or playing Warhammer)
Then…
Raider Two fades away.
Stop (desperately): See, you are running 5 mans, too! Really, we’re all one big happy family!
Raider One: She’s just quit to play Dragon Age, you fool.
Casual Two: Oh no, she hasn’t!
Raider One punches Casual Two in the face, while Stop legs it away
After a few seconds, Stop crashes unexpectedly into the Narrator.
Stop: Oh, narrator, there you are. When can we expect Act Two to begin?
Narrator: Signs indicate that the door to Act Two will finally fall in 365 days.
Stop: Oh, bother.
To be continued… (possibly)
*Pantomime is (apparently) a very British Christmas theatre tradition, in which children’s fairy tales, or historical legends are played out with arch-villains, brave heroes (often played by very attractive young women playing handsome men – in tights), audience participation, and middle-aged men in extravagant and over-the-top drag making heavy sexual innuendo. This is, clearly, suitable Christmas entertainment for children and good, clean family fun. I have no idea why foreigners think Brits are sexually odd.
**Please find a way of making this acceptable to children while still being funny and lewd for adults. kthnxbai!
Ah, December – that time of the year where I typically let my blog posts trickle to a minimum. Not out of neglect for you, O dear reader, all 3 of you. No no – I simply find a lot of other things to do that happen to coincide with the holiday season, plus I spend a good deal of time out of town and not playing WoW.
I’ve been running PUGs, like everyone else, but to be honest I don’t even have a good story about those. Oh, there’s the one where our tank ninja-quit during the fourth wave in the Tribunal of Ages in Halls of Stone, and me and the fury warrior ran around like chickens with our heads cut off, keeping the billion dwarves off of our druid (who kept us all up!) and our elemental shaman (who knocked them all down). And then we went and punched Sjonnir in his ugly face to round out the night.
And yes, I’ll be finishing up Winter Veil. I only have 4 achievements until the title that I couldn’t finish last year, so this year, Merrymaker is mine!
However, I’ve also been playing other games. Gasp, shock! Blame the Polygamerous podcast (episode 3 just came out! Check it out here, it’s a good listen), but I periodically play other games now. Finally beat Persona 4, for instance, and a little Modern Warfare 2 and Zeno Clash (which wins hands-down for weirdest friggin’ game of the year). However, the game I can already tell is going to eat a lot of time now that I have it again is Mass Effect.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – the only people who can match and, in my opinion, far exceed Blizzard’s ability to create a fictional universe down to the niggling details that don’t affect gameplay are the fine folks at Bioware. I’d love to know how many of them are frustrated ex-tabletop GMs.  Mass Effect was one of my favorite Xbox 360 games, if not the favorite, back when I had a working Xbox 360. However, due to complications with the 360 itself, I never quite got to finish it… and so when I saw it was only $20 on Steam….
Well, Merry Christmas to me.
(Incidentally, if you’d like to be friends with me on Steam, here’s my profile.)
So that’s why you may not hear much here in December. Now you know!
Random dungeons: LFG works well now. It works scary well. It also has a sense of humor: my first instance after joining the queue for a random instance? Heroic Trial of Standing Around in One Room. Thanks, I wanted to go straight back here, how’d you know? (Still got two achievements out of the place.) Then there was Utgarde Pinnacle, which went well. Peaeye joined me and we ran a random heroic Azjol-Nerub in which a few more achievements I didn’t have got knocked out, then got my Looking for More.
Then Pea and I decided to do the new Icecrown instances; it’s not random, but we still wanted to see it. Picked up Nighthawque and, well, there’s our DPS. Tank and a healer joined in (the healer, amusingly, was the only one not from our server – and he was from Alexstrasza, where I once had a toon, once upon a time). We completed the Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron, and while I’m sure I’ll be sick of them eventually, I absolutely loved them. They were different, they were actually challenging since none of us knew any of the mechanics, and Bronjahm is a treat to fight. Sadly we didn’t make it past the Halls of Reflection; we wiped on Falric when he had virtually no health, and never managed to do that well again (it was about 2:30AM server time, so I’m going to blame it on that).
UI redesign: I spent a couple hours last night redoing parts of my UI from the ground up. Several of my addons were unnecessary or could be rolled into smaller, more efficient versions. Just for comparison, here’s what my UI looked like prior to yesterday (click to embiggen):
Several new addons later, I got something I like. I’m still fiddling with the precise layout, but at least I know I like all of the addons themselves – except maybe Magic Runes. I may switch back to SimpleRune or its successor. And I’m not a big fan of TidyPlates – I find that in groups of enemies they tend to completely overlap, making targeting an enormous pain in the ass. Here’s what it looked like, from the beginning of the evening until near the end (again, click to embiggen):
  
  
  
Since I know someone’s going to ask – the thin white circle you see around me in several of the combat pics is from Power Auras (specifically, that one’s letting me know that Unbreakable Armor is ready for use).
 That, if I decide to do it, will come tomorrow. I’d have to find something different to say from what I’ve already said, though. The problem is that patch day and my weekly real-life gaming night fall on the same day, so by the time I got home last night, the instances were mostly smoothed out in my battlegroup… but I got to spend my time sitting in front of the gates to ICC, waiting on a tank and a healer to miraculously log on to go with the three DPS we got together in a hurry.
There’s just been a lot of stuff to deal with lately (though not stemming from the patch – frost death knights saw virtually no changes of note in this patch, which is just fine and dandy with yours truly), and it hasn’t been the best of times, but I’m hoping tonight fixes that. We’ll see. If I can’t get into ICC, maybe I can at least PUG a little bit with the new LFG mechanism (which Anea sums up nicely here with her in-game experiences, so I don’t have to). If anyone on Rampage runs into Rajaat, give me a wave.
Also: boy, that Core Hound Pup is cute! Lil’ K.T. has himself some competition for the spot of my favorite pet.
Tonight will also probably be when I redo my UI from the ground up. I mentioned on Twitter that a few things were non-negotiable. Those things are, in no particular order:
- A rune timer of some kind. I’m currently using SimpleRune because it lives up to its name.
- Unit frames. Currently I use Grid, but full-fledged raid frames are largely overkill for what I do. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Shadowed Unit Frames, and may give it a try. (Users of SUF are welcome to convince me. )
- A configurable bar mod. Currently rocking Dominos. My primary reason for this is a bar layout that matches my n52te. I’m not totally committed to this, but I like to at least have 14 keys, with the ability to page to 14 different keys by holding alt, and as just about any bar mod will do that… (Also, you can tell how old the screenshot in that post is because it still shows Unholy Blight as a clickable, actually-useful spell. Ah, those were the days.)
- I put the bar mod down as non-negotiable, but honestly, I dunno. If I could find a 14-button bar mod with paging on keypress and a few additional slots to the side for things I am lazy about, like mounts and Path of Frost, that might be sufficient. I might not need all the extra jazz that Dominos comes with.
- Quartz. More for my caster alts than my main.
- Jamba, but only until February, when my recruit-a-friend runs out again. I loooove Jamba.
- RatingBuster, because I hate crunching math on the fly.
That’s basically it. I do have some utility stuff (Auctioneer for bank alt, for instance), but a lot of my addons have been replaced by built-in features – for instance, from what I tried last night, I don’t think I’ll need to be toting around Cartographer or QuestHelper anymore; I could truthfully do away with Outfitter at this point; and LightHeaded’s built in features have been replaced by having a second monitor. I also have Buffalo3 but I don’t find it very useful. I also have some features I’ve lost that I’d like to get back – for example, a movable minimap like SexyMap or Carbonite’s map.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with a guildie whose Scion had $500 $2800 worth of damage done to its bumper by hitting a raccoon… only to be informed he needed to get his car def capped if it couldn’t even tank a raccoon.
The Sidhe Devils Night Crew is a bit wacky.
Borrowed from Bible of Dreams:
- Get into LFG and finish the 5-mans, straight off the bat. I was blathering Ratshag’s ear off again this morning on IM about how there’s 1, maybe 2 drops in all of the first two instances for me… and then I can replace damn near most of my gear in heroic Halls of Reflection. (Plus I kinda wanna see Uther.) In fact, "PUG randomly and constantly" is on my list of things to do because I need – need – to get rid of this crappy mix of T7, T7.25, and T8 that I’m sporting. Ugh. Just… ugh.
- Figure out where the hilt for Quel’Delar drops, and get started on it. Papa wants a brand new legendary (as in its place in the lore, not its gear level – don’t be overly literal) sword to dual-wield with his beer mug.
- Log onto my rogue and enjoy the 70% walk speed stealth! And, maybe level her or something.
- Wish that "bind on account" actually meant "binds to battle.net account" and not "binds to WoW account" because I would really like to send my paladin some heirlooms suited for following my rogue around healing her, but unfortunately that won’t happen. One step at a time, I guess. (Cross-faction BOA! Woooooo~)
- Keep working on Insane in the Membrane, since I’ve been slacking lately, kinda. (As far as I’m concerned, leveling my rogue is working on Insane in the Membrane. Those junkboxes won’t pickpocket themselves.)
So what are you going to do first when the patch drops?
You know what’s not a good idea? Changing your laptop’s OS before leaving on vacation and thinking, "eh, WoW works fine under Wine, I don’t have to worry about silly things like testing. And this OS seems to be running fine – I can’t think why I’d need to bring my flash drive to install a replacement." So yeah, after posting about how awesome the rep gain bonus for the holiday was, and how I was planning to take advantage of it, and after in my head planning out a series of nice relaxing Dire Maul runs while my turkey digested… well, let’s just say none of that happened.
Spoiler alert for anyone thinking about it: Acer Aspire One AOD-150 + Kubuntu + Wine + WoW = a non-working WoW setup.
Wednesday night, after fiddling with it and failing pretty much all day, I gave in and finally bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium at the reduced education cost – it had been previously running the Windows 7 RC, it needed a legitimate OS anyhow. By midday Thursday I was reinstalling Windows onto my netbook using my mom’s new $700 Pentax camera, plus the 16 GB SDHC card from my DSi, as a cobbled-together USB drive. Oh, and I booted the Win7 DVD using UNetbootin, because my setup wasn’t epic enough yet.
So after maybe an hour or so, I had a fully-functioning netbook with its own proper OS again, and it would’ve been entirely capable of running WoW had I remembered to evacuate my WoW setup from Kubuntu. Whoops.
Oh, hey, no biggie, I’ll watch Persona: Trinity Soul instead. … Wait, you mean I left that on the Kubuntu drive as well? Damn it! Oh well, I can just download them from home.
Wait, what do you mean it’s going to take a bajillion hours to download from home? Oh hell, now I have to find new things to do. Good thing I planned for this eventuality and brought Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 home with me. So I spent pretty much the rest of my vacation playing those two, as indicated on my Backloggery.
Which led to me and Cas discussing Persona 4 on Twitter and concluding that even though she has the best followup in the game, Chie Satonaka cannot Galactic Punt Ameno-sagiri.
No matter what the picture that goes with this post may tell you.
Hope everyone had a good, or at least tolerable, holiday, and it’s good to be back.
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How many of you have alts that you actively play on multiple servers?
