World of Warcraft General Discussion

The Game Room
6641

How have I been reading Ctrl+Alt+Del for years without noticing this mini-strip?

This one wins.
While the patch thingy didn’t give me any trouble at all yesterday, I was annoyed with the second day in a row of massive lag on Lightbringer. I was fooling with my human DK in WPL (finally dinged 60) and the lag was getting pretty bad both days. As in, summon mount, wait 4-5 seconds for the progress bar to even appear; similar problems in combat. Later in the day yesterday I was trying to play my draenei mage in STV. Same problems — 3-5 second delays when casting spells, and it was getting annoying wasting mana casting spells at mobs that were already dead but my Mac just hadn’t gotten the message yet. Interesting that “lag” seems to have very little relationship to “latency”, as my latency is always showing 15-20ms, regardless of how much/little lag I’m experiencing.

So I switched over to Cairne and played my belf 'lock, Hexpot, for a while. I was doing the quests around the harbor, killing Wretched Hooligans and Thugs and recovering the stolen Sin’dorei Armaments. I ended up teaming with a mage who was on the same quests. I was glad for the help; not so much for those particular quests, but for the followup quest to kill the boss at the top of the tower. I remembered trying to solo that quest on my (now-deleted) belf priest, and giving up because at that level (~10) the priest couldn’t handle three mobs at once. Not so much of a problem for a solo warlock, but having the mage along helped. And the mage appreciated my help, since she was only lvl 8.

Did the quest to obtain my voidwalker, and was surprised to see the custom art for the Quel’dorei Spirits I had to fight my way through to get to where I needed to be to summon/defeat the voidwalker. While those Quel’dorei Spirits looked a bit too cartoonish, it made me wish there was a little more physical difference between High Elves and Blood Elves elsewhere in the game. Just changing the eye color seems like a bit of laziness on Blizz’s part. I realize belves and helves are really the same race; I just think the high elves would benefit from different “idle” poses and faces. Leave the blood elves with their arrogant, angry faces and cocky poses. Give the high elves more proud/casual poses and friendly faces.

6642

Heh. I bought the box, and still had to spend an insane amount of time downloading patches.

6643

Oh yes, I’d forgotten about the hellish time-sink that was patching. Forcibly blocked it from my memory, one might say. But at least with the box, you’ve got a multi-gig headstart.

6644

Oh believe me, I would if I could. :smiley: Unfortunately I’m deaf so no cookie there. I do make up for it by researching like a mofo and checking with the RL to make sure that we’re on the same page as far as the strat of choice goes.

Our guild wiped on the Safety Dance repeatedly last night, even with the RL helping me stick flares in the safe spots – I think lag is getting most of us. On the last two runs, I had 75ms latency, most of my settings turned down (even though I’m on a core i7 rig), running between the stage and the flares which were about halfway out, potting if I got grazed, and I *still *died when I could have sworn that I was clear. :confused: We should be able to get him down next week, though.

6645

:smack: Congrats on having the, singular, legitimate excuse for never being on Vent. :smiley: And holy shit mad props to you for raiding without sound–I count on so many audio cues for raids (from bossmod alerts to a fellow tank telling me to taunt because they’ve got X stacks of whatever debuff) I don’t know how I’d make it without.

If not lag, it could be getting too close to the platform. You have to stay a little ways back, or you’ll get hit by his AOE even if you’re not actually on the platform. (It’s killed me before when I wasn’t careful.) If you have somebody running logs, it should be easy to see if that was the problem.

If running logs is new to you, here’s how to do it:

1.) Designate one person (somebody with a stable connection and computer) to run the combat log.
2.) At the beginning of the raid, they type **/combatlog **in their chat window. This will start outputting all of their combat log information to a text file.
3.) At the end of the raid, they type /combatlog again. (Be sure to do this before zoning out/hearthing/etc. or you’ll get garbage info from people in the vicinity but not in the raid.)
4.) Create an account at a site like World of Logs (my personal favorite) or WoW Web Stats if you don’t have one yet, make sure the person running logs has the account info, and have them upload the log to it.
5.) Share the URL with everyone who was in the raid (helps if you have a guild website and/or forum).

6646

Okay, what’s DXE or do I not need to know that yet?:wink:

Q

6647

Heh, thanks. It’s definitely a bit of a limitation – I generally don’t get to do the more coordination-intensive roles on first try, but it works for me. :slight_smile:

Oh, this is fantastic. I’ll definitely have to try that next week – trying to weed through the in-game combat log scroll is an exercise in futility. Is it possible to check the log mid-raid? Also, where does the file get saved to on your HD?

6648

Sort of off-topic:

Since Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) went “free to play” I decided to check it out.

Pre-impression: The DDO people could take a lesson or two (or three) from Blizzard on making it as easy as possible for people (customers) to “purchase” your product. Filled out a form with way too many fields, only to discover that the Account Name I chose (same name I use for WoW, for ease of remembering) “may already be in use”. (May? Either it is or it isn’t, dumbasses! And how many other people out there are likely to select “MisterRik” for their account name anyway?), which necessitated my reentering almost everything, including a 2-word captcha that kept showing what appeared to be completely made-up words. Repeat this four times until I came up with a name that wasn’t already maybe in use.

Downloaded game client overnight, installed today. Tried to login, but apparently I had forgotten the Account Name I chose yesterday. Could not find how to retrieve the Account Name. The verification e-mail with that information they claim was sent when I signed up apparently was not sent. Checked my spam folder and everything. Sigh. Attempt to re-signup with yet another Account Name. Oh, I need to use an e-mail address that isn’t already in use. Sigh. Setup new mailbox under my domain name, submit this new e-mail address on DDO signup form. Success. Immediately log into game before I forget Account Name again. Confirmation e-mail has still not arrived. Login successful, however.

First Impressions (qualifier: my Windows XP machine barely meets the minimum requirements for DDO.)

Character creation: Chose Paladin class, then a specific focus, the name of which I can’t now remember. Human. Female (actually, it defaulted to female; if there was a Sex selection option I didn’t see it.) Very nicely detailed appearance customization. Hair color, hair style, eyebrow shape, eye shape, eye color, nose shape, skin color, lip shape, lip color, facial scars/jewelry. Came up with a character whose appearance I really liked…

… only to find it didn’t really matter (from my perspective anyway) aside from hair color and style, because once I was in the game I couldn’t find any way to view my character from the front or side.

Also, my character’s body proportions were too true-to-life. Geez her ass looked huge, and her legs too short. And her arms too skinny. This is supposed to be a soldier?

In-game: Now I really see why Blizzard didn’t go for ultra-realism (aside from the considerations of rendering demands). DDO attempts to make everything look semi-realistic, which is fine, I guess, for the static parts of the scenery. Character and NPC movement looks horribly fake. Also, named NPCs in the same location shouldn’t look exactly alike, unless they’re supposed to be twins.

Movement: WASD, just like WoW’s default. No mouse movement by default (didn’t check if there was a setting to enable it). Didn’t like the implementation, though. One word: “oversteer”. I’d try to run a straight line, and try to make slight course corrections, and ended up zigzagging all over the place. The only apparent use for the mouse when moving is that if you want to go, say, down (like underwater), you hold the right button and tilt the camera so it’s pointing down, then press your Forward key. Awkward, for me anyway.

Combat: First off, there’s apparently no way to automatically sheathe your weapon when not in combat, so I was running around everywhere with my flaming sword in one hand and my shield on the other. I asked in general chat if there was a command to sheathe my weapon, and the only answer I got was to go to my character screen and unequip it. D’oh!

Extremely annoying fact: if you left-click, you swing your weapon, whether there’s anything there to hit or not. When there is actually something to hit, there’s no “auto-attack” by default. Okay, so I thought that maybe it was turn-based. So in my first combat I was down to 4/30 HP before I figured out that no, it’s not turn-based. I finally figured out it’s click-click-click-click-click, one swing of the weapon per click. Arg.

The User Interface: This just looked … primitive.

I may go back later and give it more time, but I think I’ll stick with WoW for NoW.

6649

Actually, you can just hold the button and it’ll swing swing swing away.

6650

So it’s TOTALLY a free to play site, not just a 10 day trial?

I think I’m gonna stay with my WoW anyway, but my son’s been wanting to do some MMORPG’in, so I thought I’d tell him about it.

Thanks

Q

6651

Talk a friend into letting you follow them around while they do their jousting dailies, and whack on the enemies. They don’t hit back, and they take ridiculous amounts of damage because they’re armored for jousters. If you can’t find a friend to help out (because it will be boring for them), just chase around existing combatants and beat on their opponents. They might look at you funny, but they usually don’t mind.

6652

Ha! That explains that. It happened to me a while back. I was utterly baffled at this random person attacking my jousting opponent. At the time, all I could think was that they thought they were helping me. Since they weren’t hurting me either, I didn’t say anything and just let them carry on.

6653

Never mind. (Been writing that a LOT lately) :wink:

So I’m gonna go check it out, but I’m not expecting much. Ad banners at the top of the screen?

Q

6654

Same problem as Mister Rik and the same reaction too: Who else is gona name their character “Wolkenlaufer”?

I got out.

Q

ETA: Do you think they somehow got a list of player names off Blizz and Turbine doesn’t want any connection with Blizz (even the same user name) so they show that message?

6655

I whacked on a Grove Walker for a good hour or so. Soooooo boring. A dwarf paladin did land nearby - I guess it’s not every day you see a female tauren having a fist fight with a tree! Three points total in two different weapons.

Had to stop because I’m brewing tonight, and I don’t want to afk only to come back and find a tree killed me. :smack:

6656

You can play 100% free. They make their money via “microtransactions”. For example, playing for free, you can have a total of two characters. Want more? Purchase additional character slots! You can play as a human, halfling, elf, or dwarf for free. Or you can pay to play as a warforged (sort of a magical “robot”) or a drow (“dark elf”). Then there are various other things in the game you can pay to access.

Nah, I doubt it.

6657

It’s always nice to get validation.

Last time I tried healing with my tree was regular Azjol-Nerub a few days ago. It had been a while since I last healed an instance (Hellfire Ramparts, in fact, and that’s an easy instance) and I’m running with Grid+Clique instead of Healbot now, so I was a little unprepared. I, uh, directly caused the first two wipes. Trying to heal in DPS gear will do that. I’m not sure what happened the next three wipes, because as far as I could tell I was healing like I should, but the tank (a Druid bear) simply could not stay alive long enough to even reach the first boss. Since I screwed up the first couple of tries, we all thought it was just me being a crap healer, me included. So, you know, bummed about that.

Tonight I was dicking around in Zul’Drak trying to hit level 76 when someone put out a call for Amphitheater of Anguish. Turned out they had three Hunters already and needed a tank or healer. I told them I could do either, and we waited to see who we got. Fifth person was a Warrior, so I treed up…and we proceeded to completely whomp the bosses, with me doing healing like a tree is damn well supposed to. The only death was a Hunter who got a little too close to the final boss.

I know the Amphitheater isn’t as hard as an instance, but it was still really nice to know that no, I don’t actually suck as a healer. Maybe I was just having an off night when we tried AN, or maybe it wasn’t all my fault after all. But I was thinking of switching off to Moonkin/Bear once I hit 80, but now I think I’ll hang onto the Tree, at least for the time being.

Edit: The only skill upgrade I get at 76 is freaking Cower? Come on!

6658

Just levelled da Wolk’ to 55, and decided to see what was available to up his equipment a little.

Well, when I looked at swords and armor , even though it would have increased armor, crit strike (and some other stuff- can’t remember now), it would have DECREASED strength, agility and stamina.

Somehow that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I guess there must be secret “formula” that Blizz uses to figure that out, but my question is: is it a good rule of thumb, that if I see anything redded out, to stay away from buying it?

Also, we’re spending a lot of time in Winterspring looking for those relics, so at some point, do I need to buy some winter stuff, so he don’t freeze to death?

Thanks

Q

ETA: Oh yeah, we did buy three flasks of major healing potion! :wink:

6659

super not major.

And oh boy, did we goof up in Everlook!

All I wanted to do was click on the guy 'cause I didn’t remember if I had the FP?

Well! He and this lion lookin’ thing came after us and beat the livin’ shit out of me before I knew what was happening. That green bar just went ZOOP!, and I was a goner.

Turned out the dragons were on the other side of the compound, and I was just sleepy enough not to realize it, so I rezzed and ran back to Everlook but couldn’t find anyone to fix Wolkie. I know there’s gotta be someone there, right - and I just couldn’t find him?

So we hearthed back to SH with 10% up on level 56.

Oh, and we did manage to kill High Chief Winterspring and the Sham that hangs with him.

Took 'em both on, had to drink some super healing potion once, used that CD button (which takes a 5 min cool down) and the thunderclap and the shouts and wiped 'em both out, so the night wasn’t a complete loss. :wink:

Thanks

Q

Q

6660

OK, I guess I am totally weird for actually using all my weapon types every level and leveling each of them up as I go? Or I should amend I normally, do, this is the first toon I have had that I havent done that … as I am pushing to get to 80 and I am not grouping or raiding [in general, I think I have done 2 pugs so far]