Skip to main content

Ding!


So my WoW warrior finally dinged 80 yesterday. I started preparing for this great event two weeks ago by buying good blue and epic tanking gear whenever I found some for a reasonable price. If there were none available I gathered the mats and paid someone 30g to craft it. Mind you, this character is on a new server so I didn't have a 50K honeypot to lick out. But I managed to make about 5000 gold on this new server while levelling from level 51 to 80 just by shifting some items. Plenty enough gold to get a nice starting set so I can get started. Before I put on the gear I had 19.311 hp and 508 defense. After I put it all on, gemmed it and gave it some basic enchanments I had 24.000 hp and 540 defense. Just enough to start heroics! And an hour after I dinged I finished my first heroic, The Violet Hold. There's still a lot of improvements to be made to my warriors gear but if there wasn't there wouldn't be any fun in doing heroics!


The last five levels were fun. I started to enjoy the random dungeon finder more and more. I ended up doing nothing but instances to get the last five levels. As a tank the queue times are near instant and with the added XP bonus it's a decent way to level. One random instance a day would ensure I always had full rested XP and the first day extra bonus. The quality of the pugs themselves vary greatly and that does cause a major difference in levelling speed. One moment you'll have a group which clears the instance as smooth as a knife cuts through butter. And the next one you might wipe after two minutes. If that happens there's usually only a very small chance to successfully complete an instance. Leaving the instance gives you a thirty minutes debuff which disables you to join a new instance during that period of time.

Instead of leaving the instance you can try to remove the bad apples. You do need the majority of the votes to do this and sadly it seemed that some players just don't want to kick anyone at all. Trying to kick a DPS who does a fifth of the tanks damage and is too low for this instance? Kick failed. Trying to kick that druid healer who is healing in feral gear with a feral talent spec with less mana than his hunter friend? Failed as his hunter guildie would never kick him after which I just left them and too the penalty. Trying to kick that AFK lock? Fail, "you cannot kick this player for another fifteen minutes. That last message makes no sense at all to me. If someone is kicked there's a very good reason that he is kicked. So why can we not kick him again? It just ends with the player being kicked after fifteen minutes anyway, two minutes before the end boss.

What's up next? I'll spend some time tanking heroics and improving my gear. The new epics I gather will get a nice new enchantment. And after that? I'm not sure yet. Once I have everything I need from the heroics there's little use to continue playing. So I assume that I'll just go and do something else. In the meantime though, I've got a cutesy little warrior who's screaming for new gear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome back

Seeing my World of Warcraft account getting hacked wasn't much fun but it does have one positive side. Since I had to pay €15 to get my deleted items back I decided to log in a few times this month and see what changed. I haven't played WoW since April this year so there's quite a bit of new content to go through. And of course I wanted to say hello again to all the friends I haven't spoken to in months. As I logged in I was quickly greeted by some of my guild members. Time is never standing still so I wasn't surprised to see that my guild looks nothing like it did half a year ago. Roughly half of the people I enjoyed chatting and playing with had all decided to join a guild that was more to their liking. Only the officer team seems to be relatively intact. The player gap has been filled in with lots of new players but it doesn't feel like the same guild. I had a chat with the old officers and my friends from ancient times. In this short time I even got a few...
3 comments
Read more

Circumventing the Steam Regional lockin for Europeans

Thiefsie at rps.com found a nice way to get the steam games in pounds. I tested it and it works! 1) Put ?cc=uk after a title. You'll now see the prices in pound. 2) Change your country to United Kingdom. That's it, you can now buy the game in pounds. Possible to save quite some money this way. Left 4 dead 2 costs €37.49 compared to the us £22.5(~€24.5). And the THQ complete pack costs €49.99 as compared to £26.49 (~€29.2). As always with these things: use at your own risk. It's probably not going to last very long.
2 comments
Read more

EvoLisa - My own version

It's an old idea by now, can we recreate the Mona Lisa with fifty polygons by using random changes? The idea and original implementation by Roger Johansson can be found here . So, how does it work? You start with an source image. Then you create an empty image. We keep on doing small changes to this image. In my case this is one of these changes: Recolor our polygon Change the position of one of the polygon points Add or remove a new point to our polygon Add or remove a new polygon Switch two polygons After each action, we take a look and check if the newly changed image looks more like the original image by comparing each pixel. If it is, we continue using this one. If it's not, we discard the changes. Looks like a fun project! So I built my own version from scratch eight years ago, reusing some of the same ideas. Here's my result using the Mona Lisa: Mona Lisa with 50 polygons: You can see that it's the Mona Lisa but the details around the eyes and mou...
1 comment
Read more