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Platefail 2

unnecessarynavel WTF is this? This right here, in the red circle? “That is a female gnome’s navel.” Yes, but why is it there? Why on Azeroth is a female death knight’s outfit midriff-baring? This is a male tauren death knight, and his stomach is perfectly covered. Every other class manages to start with a shirt, so this is not a problem. Why did someone think it was proper to have bare midriff armor for female death knights? Rule 36 aside, is our need to make all women sexual objects so severe that it applies to gnome death knights?

: Zubon

Also, a gnome’s two-handed sword clips pretty badly. She should be leaving a furrow in the ground behind her when she runs.

What I’ve Been Doing Since 70

Cooking and fishing dailies organize my life. I want those last recipes that The Rokk is hiding. His first quest gave me Delicious Chocolate Cake. Given repeats, it looks like it will take me a couple of weeks to earn the four daily cooking/fishing achievements, but I am in no rush since I want other toys from them.

Start in Dalaran, pick up those two, head to Shattrath, pick up those two, pick up any Outland dailies near my questing path. Fish and farm what I need, maybe explore a bit or do a random quest. That takes me back to Shattrath, which takes me to Stormwind, which takes me to Borean Tundra to get what I need for the Dalaran dailies. I notice that Vegetable Soup is half meat; these people learned to cook from hobbits. While I am there, hit a few !s and ?s, which could take a few minutes or a few hours depending on how much I get into it. Hearth back to Dalaran, all set.

One of my ! pursuits led me to the murloc quest chain in the Borean Tundra. That was fun. Continue reading What I’ve Been Doing Since 70

PvP Quote of the Day

Muckbeast says,

In the real world, I am not in constant risk of some dickhead driving by and blowing up my house for kicks.

: Zubon

Update: I’m adding to this one because people have already managed to piss me off. The basic inability to tell the difference between freakishly unlikely threats and ones that happen every few minutes is a regular part of my work, and it kills people every day because they are worrying about the 0.01% chance while doing things that put themselves at greater risk for a 5% chance. People worry about swine flu while it is apparently less severe than the normal flu that kills thousands of people each year. The disasters you hear about on the news are news because they are odd and unlikely. I have this huge list of things that people do or avoid doing in perverse defiance of all probability because one risk sounds scarier while the other quietly kills lots of people.

If you live in Iraq, yes, worry about your house blowing up. Do you know several people in your country who have had their houses intentionally blown up in the past few years? Have you personally been ganked in-game for no apparent reason several times in an hour? Please try to understand that “1 in a million” is a smaller chance than “1 in ten.”

Frantic 2

Since I enjoyed the first one so much, I should mention that Frantic has a sequel, which is also the current card challenge. I have yet to decide if I like it as much as the original. There is more there, but adding achievements and such makes it feel less pure.

: Zubon

Full disclosure: if you use one of those links and sign up at Kongregate, I get some kind of points that do nothing but put a number by my name. But, you know.

Canceled and Coasting

Joining a PvP server was a mistake. I should have found a different friend to join. Making the server PvP seems to have three effects:

  1. Level 80s can gank with impunity. Once I hit 80, I still expect the difference in equipment tiers to make playing at peak times unpleasant rather than more exciting.
  2. People can shoot you in the back while you PvE.
  3. You can perpetuate the cycle from 1 and 2.

It was a trivial annoyance in the original zones, but as the population gets more concentrated in the expansion packs, it becomes more frequent. In the long run, I am not going to want to be on this server, and I am certainly not going to want to be here when the expansion hits and everyone is in the same zone. Paying to move the Paladin could be an option, but I want neither to abandon the alts nor to effectively re-buy the game several times to move them all.

So here I am. I made a mistake in listening to a friend, and I am not willing to pay $100 (or whatever) to correct a game error. I might come back, but the Blizzard account maintenance page is incredibly patronizing, and I don’t really want to deal with those people again. I mean, this is a less annoying version of the screen Blizzard requires you to go through to exit. But there are still neat things to see, so I am going to keep looking around. And, for some reason, doing some grindy things because that is apparently just what we MMO players do.

: Zubon

Visiting the Rest of Outland at 70

I finished out level 70 in Shadowmoon Valley. This is exactly what you want a Hell dimension to look like. The place is covered with lava flows, demons, cultists, and all the fun you might expect where horrors rule. A never-ending supply of Infernals falls from the sky at the bases.

It reminds me a lot of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Once you get to the original endgame in northwest Angmar, it looks much the same, down to the green flows of liquid in Carn Dum. This place could be the gate to Mordor, but the Black Temple serves much the same purpose. Also like the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ endgame, it slides quickly into group-based content. There is more than enough solo content to finish out 70, but not a lot more that was immediately apparent. I smashed things, dinged, and left the area with exploration achievement in-hand.

Netherstorm is exactly what you would want from a shattered Outland, with floating islands and strange energies. This makes Hellfire Peninsula perfect as the place where the two zones meet, with sundered lands, strange energies, and demons on the march. Continue reading Visiting the Rest of Outland at 70

Touring Nagrand

As a setting, this was my favorite zone in Outland. That feels wrong, because it is the least Outland-esque zone in the expansion pack, but it seems to have succeeded as a clasic WoW zone better than the classic WoW zones did. I see this as the target for re-made zones, a test run for how to do it if we had it to do over again.

I look at Nagrand and see the Serengeti. It is a lusher version of the Barrens, a zone I loved with its kodo and giraffes. You first meet a Nesingwary in the jungle, but he seems better placed here, like the Great White Hunter from some colonialist era adventure story. Of course there will be an elephant hunt.

But it remains Outland. It keeps touches that could mark it as Generic Fantasy Africa, but the Outland-specific earthmotes and Burning Legion camps are there. We have a giant crystal instead of volcanic activity. You could walk off the end of the world. And in this shattered dimension, anything fits, so the more out of place the better.

Continue reading Touring Nagrand

A Year and a Day

Today I will have written at Kill Ten Rats for a year and a day.  It is by far the longest I have ever solidly written for a blog, and I love every minute of it.  I was going to write out some huge what-I’ve-learned exposition, but I like bullet points.  We all like bullet points, right?

  • Never underestimate the power of the words “I think” or “in my opinion.”
  • Getting to know people in the industry is easier than you think, but it requires trust and patience (and sometimes travel).
  • We are not a news site, yet I feel sometimes the need to rush out “hot” posts.  I feel they are my worst ones.
  • Always give credit where it is due.  If another blog jogged your thought process give them a link.
  • I don’t think I could write my own blog.  I need the community and other active contributers here. My writing wouldn’t be anywhere as good as it is today without constantly reading Zubon’s posts.
  • Ethic should write more, especially about Fallen Earth. Otherwise put up a Twitter sidebar because you write there. :)
  • Our commentors are the best.  They are intelligent and keep us honest, especially Bonedead.
  • Write about what you love and want to share.  Don’t write for hits.
  • The best way of letting people know about your blog is to comment on others’.
  • Intelligent armchair quarterbacks are okay, but constructive player opinions and stories are best.  Unless you are a developer, you don’t need to give answers to problems you see.

–Ravious
wear sunscreen

Touring Terrokar Forest

I did not find myself thinking much with respect to this zone. I traveled here more than usual, with quests sending me around as I presumably missed the wave of perfect ordering. That led to running around the zone, into Shattrath, and occasionally elsewhere. Other times, I got to an area and stayed there a while. Instead of one big quest hub, quests were widely spread here, with one medium hub and chains all over.

My first thought upon entry was “the forest of parsley.” You start to ignore what the trees look like. About half way through, it converts to the land of the dead, and you spend your time in the south amongst the spirits. As a Paladin, I always approve of that. The difference between the two halves was so large that I forgot for a while that both were part of the same zone.

I just do not have many comments on the zone, despite doing every quest, getting a couple of levels, and getting the achievements. The many scattered quests, for several different groups and in many sub-zones, kept me from getting a single, overall impression. I think this worked better with the many small areas in the Hellfire Peninsula because they felt more tied together. Having fewer hubs helped unify the experience. It does, however, give you an idea of the many factions at work in the expansion pack, becoming a messy web in Shattrath and its larger zone.

There were a few new models, but the zone was dominated by humanoids, which are known quantities. The PvP quest for the zone has the unfortunate feature of shutting itself off for hours at a time after being done. Yes, that makes the reward more meaningful, but it also means that I could go through my entire play session without having a chance to affect it. I note that there is a four-winged instance in the zone. I heard people running Mana-Tombs (no, my Pally is not healing a PUG tonight, thanks), but otherwise good luck visiting the rest in a post-BC world.

: Zubon