Happy Year Exchange!

I hope everybody will enter 2011 in the best possibe way, and may the new year be good to you all!

Also, if you do intend to set off some fireworks....

"If it goes wrong, you can always try with your other hand next year!"

Please be careful with yourself and those around you (and send a thought to all those poor pets)!

Wowzers - statcounter through the roof!

With the post about where you can find the dungeon locations in Cataclysm my blog took a quantum leap in number of readers. In just a few days I had 180.000 people come to my blog to check out where the dungeon entrances were, and currently my little blog has had a total of 307.770 views (yes I am looking at the stats page now, so much fun those things).

With another post about the faction vendors in Cata I managed to keep some people interested and even got a link mention at WoWinsider in the priest column (thanks Dawn!). So instead of having about 300 visitors per day I now seem to have about 4000 visitors per day.

I feel like I have to adjust my writing to this somehow and have to perform to a higher standard. Then again this should still be my little corner and I should just write what I feel like writing since that's the stuff that will probably come out best. Over time I have gone from trying to post on a schedule, to posting when I actually feel like I have something to say. For me this works, so I think I'll just keep that going.

I would like to thank all the people who visited my little corner in the blogosphere and a special thanks to those who left comments. It is great to see the numbers, it is even greater to read the appreciation that people have for what I've been doing.

Tthe information is out there, somewhere

I am currently working on a guide to the Volcanic Stone Drake (the one you get for all the heroic achievements), and I hope to be able to post something about that soon.

So while I got no mentions on some of the high end blogs like A High Latency Life did (grats River!), I do seem to have taken a little leap into acknowledgement and boy does it feel good.

And oh...to the commenter who asked whether I was male or female...wouldn't it just be fun if I let you all guess for a little bit longer?

Mounts in Cataclysm

If you're a mount collector like I am, you'll be all excited about the new mounts that can be gotten in Cata. I've been researching on how to get all these mounts and I figured I would put it all neatly together so that whoever's looking won't have to do the research again.

Abyssal Seahorse
The easiest to get new mount. This mount is given to you fairly at the start of the Vashj'ir quests to move around easier through the sea. I think it's actually quite a pretty mount, though the movement (it moves its bum from left to right) is a bit odd.

This mount is given to you as a reward for the quest The Abyssal Ride.

Camels

The Tan and Brown camels are purchasable once you reach exalted Ramkahen faction.

The grey camel is different.

From the comments on wowhead:

Scattered around Uldum are small click-able camel statues called "Mysterious Camel Figurine". If you click on one you will get teleported to the Steam Pools, which, if you havent gone exploring yet, are located on a plateau in the south eastern part of Feralas. Once you swim out of the water you will see lots of docile, but kill-able (wont fight back) camels that don't drop anything. You will also see Dormus.

You will get a debuff that is called "Dormus rage" which says bad things will happen in 20 mins if you don't kill Dormus.

Hes got about 250khp and was super super easy to kill as a heroic geared 85 MM hunter. I kept heals rolling on my pet but i never saw my pets hp move. Just move out of the things he spits at you.

Dormus has a chance to drop the Reins of the Grey Riding Camel, but as of this post the drop rate is unclear.

As soon as I find one of these Mysterious Camel Figurines I will try to make a screenshot and update this post with it.

Dark Phoenix

This mount is rewarded to the guild for Guild Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. which requires that your guild kills all the raid bosses currently in the game. It will be a while before we see any of these mounts around, unless you're on the same server as guilds like Paragon of course.

To get guild credits for a raid or dungeon at least 80% of your group/raid has to be from the same guild. So 4/5 - 8/10 - 20/25.


Drake of the South Wind

This mount is an extremely rare drop from Al'Akir. Raid boss in Throne of the Tides raid.

Drake of the North Wind

This drops from Altarius, Dragonkin boss in Vortex Pinnacle. The droprate is comparable to the other rare mounts, like rivendare's charger.

Drake of the East Wind

This drake is a reward for Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. Unlike for the Dark Phoenix, these achievements do not have to be completed while in a guild group.


Drake of the West Wind

This drake can be gotten from the Tol Barad dailies, for 150 Commendations. Tol Barad is like a mix between Wintergrasp and the Argent Tournament.

Fossilized Raptor

This mount can be found with Archaeology. An extremely rare find, but rather funky to look at. 

Goblin Trike & Goblin Turbo-Trike

Gobline mounts and unfortunately only available to horde, but I guess they would give an arm and a leg to have a class with Running Wild.

Available in a slow and a superspeed version like all factions mounts, and in a variety of colours.


Golden King & Kor'Kron Annihilator

These are the mounts that are rewarded to your guild as a reward to reaching guild level 25. Your guild gains levels through questing, dungeons, raiding, pvp....basically through playing the game.

Upon reaching level 25 these mounts will become available at the guild reward vendor (or through the guild page). The mount costs 1500 gold.

When riding these mounts the banner will show your guild tabard design.

Mottled Drake

This drake can be gotten through a loot card. Can also be traded in game, aaaand I will likely never see it.

It is however tradeable in game so you might be able to find it for auction if, like me, you don't do trading cards.

If you do, good luck and I hope you find it!



Phosphorescent Stone Drake

I've seen this one fly around in Stormwind already and it's a fairly pretty drake.

This drake is a drop of the rare spawn Aeonaxx in Deepholm. Not as ridiculously rare as the Timelost, but this will probably be fairly heavily farmed.

It is adviced to bring at least a good 5man group to bring down this boss.



Sandstone Drake

The one I am currently working on. This is not just a mount, this will transform your character into the mount, and someone else can mount you. It can be gotten through alchemy but it requires quite a bit of effort.

- 11K worth of vendor items which can only be gotten if you have exalted Ramkahen
- A total of 24 flasks of 3 different types
- 12 truegold bars

And then of course you need 525 alchemy and archaeology above 450, since the recipe itself can only be found in Canopic Jar's which are with Tol'Vir artefacts. Unfortunately the Jars can also contain mummified brains (my first one did) so when you do finally manage to get this drake made you may congratulate yourself on the hard work done.

Afterwards the vial of the sands is sellable on the AH, so if you're not an alchemist you can still get this mount. Expect to pay quite a lot though, on my server they currently go for 80K.

Spectral Steed & Spectral Wolf

These mounts can be gotten through the Tol Barad dailies. The Alliance gets to ride the horse, and the horde the wolf.

The mounts cost 165 Tol Barad Commendations and require exalted reputation with Baradin Wardens or Hellscream's Reach.

Ultramarine Qiraji Battle Tank

I think this is the best looking bug mount so far, but you do have to work hard for it....or be incredibly lucky.

This mount can be gotten through archaeology from Tol'Vir artefacts. Tol'Vir artefacts come in one clump with Kalimdor digsites and I've read reports about having dug up 300 or more common artefacts before they got this one.

Once you do have this mount it is definitely worth showing off though!


Vitreous Stone Drake

One of the prettier stone drakes I think. It's a rare drop of Slabhide in Stonecore dungeon.

Volcanic Stone Drake

This mount is rewarded when you complete the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement.

I have plans to do a full guide to get this drake, like I did for the red proto drake in Wrath. But it's a long achievement and the list is quite a bit longer than it was in Wrath. I've seen them around already, and I can say they look gorgeous. Keep an eye out for the full guide, hopefully coming soon.

Paladin Mounts

Lastly I wanted to point out that the Dranei and the Tauren have gotten their own pally mounts now. The Dranei get a golden elekk and the tauren a golden kodo...I do wonder when the golden rams for dwarves will come though.

Holy Word Macro into Clique

I've been having the hardest time evah to get the holy words to work properly with clique. Either it tells me that the spell is not learned, or it will only heal my actualy target, and not on mouseover.

I googled and found a blog I had never been to before.

Murloc Parliament. 

This post made my day, finally I can actually use clique properly with this spell.

So first off a big THANK YOU to Zelmaru of Murloc Parliament, and second an explanation of how to make it work with clique.

1. Go to your spellbook. 
2. Click on the clique tab
3. Go to the 'Bind Other' button at the bottom
4. Chose 'Run custom macro' from the menu 
5. Copy/Paste the following into the macro box:
   /tar [@mouseover,exists]
   /click ActionButton4 LeftButton
   /targetlasttarget
6. Set it to a keybind with the 'Set Binding' button like you normally do in clique
7. Make sure that the original spell 'Holy Word: Chastise' is on your action bars at the button that you specified in the macro (in my example I have it on button 4 of the main action bar)
8. Enjoy!

Once again, thank you soooo much Zelmaru, this has been an annoyance for a while now, and I cannot get my head around too many keybinds, hence using clique and keybinds, but this one was just bugging the hell out of me. 

Merry Christmas!

Hyperbole and a Half

There's a new one, go here!

Holy Priest Thoughts

So I went to read up on Holy today since I got confronted with the ugly truth of disc when we went into Tol Barad; Disc is not possible atm :(

I came to a couple of conclusions for myself, applying them to my healing style, and I figured I would throw them  out here. I have to warn you that they might seem completely random and incoherent though...


- Spirit is better regen than Int
- Int is throughput, regen, and crit

- Attempt to never overheal
- It is fine to let people drop to 50% of their hitpoints, in fact Test of Faith will give you more heals per mana once people are below 50% health.

- Binding Heal has the highest HPCT (Heal per cast time)
- Renew has the highest HPM (Heal per mana)

- Lightwell is ridiculously good, drill your raid to use it
- Divine Hymn early, fights can be long enough to use it again towards the end

- Use Shadowfiend early in the fight, and use it on cooldown afterwards

- Stat Importance: Int/Spirit > Haste till 12,5% raid buffed > Mastery > Crit

- Keep PoM on cooldown

- Gemming: Every gem should have int, but do follow socket bonuses

- Reforging: Reforge to spirit if you need it > reforge according to stat importance backwards (duh)

- Gear: items should always have spirit if in any way possible > Avoid crit where possible

- Spirit of Redemption: good for learning, not good for raiding (you're not supposed to be dead)

Faction Vendors in Cataclysm

Sort of like the Dungeon Entrances, it took me forever to find all the faction vendors. And when I had accidentally run into one, I couldn't find it back later...durrr.

Below an overview of where you can find them for every faction.

Clicking on a picture will bring you to a bigger version. 

Baradin's Wardens (Alliance - Tol Barad)

You can get to Tol Barad by taking the portal in Stormwind. This will put you in the alliance base camp, where you can also find the quartermaster. In the camp there is a portal back to SW as well.

The Earthen Ring

OMG BLIZZARD, you have outdone yourself in hiding the vendor!

Map:

My pointer is looking straight at the vendor. Now since this won't help you much...

Another picture and map shot.

If you swim to where my mousepointer is on the second map shot you can see the entrance as can be seen in the third screenshot. You go into that cave, and he is in there.

Handy is to turn finding the innkeeper on in your minimap. (and oh, no I had not finished questing there...the submarine bugged out on me).

Hellscream's Reach (Horde - Tol Barad)

Righto. Better be thankful for this one! The guards took me down in two shots after I attempted to run out and they didn't believe my shadowmeld.

I have him targeted in this screenshot. Couldn't get any closer, but you can find this guy in the horde camp. If it's like Alliance you should be able to take a portal from Org, and in the camp there is a portal back to Org.

Therazane

They didn't like me much here yet, but I managed to fly low enough to get a proper map shot. My mouse pointer is pointing at D'Lum the Therazane Quartermaster.

Dragonmaw Clan (Horde - Twilight Highlands)

This dude is in a town with the lovely name of BloodGulch...nomnom. Took screenshots from a bit further away, dying once to taking screenies was enough. It's the dude next to the dragon with the red targeting circle around him.

Guardians of Hyjal

This one is much easier to find. She's a tauren by the name of Provisioner Whitecloud, and she's in the main base.

Ramkahen

The map wowhead.com has for this one is actually accurate, but for completeness sake I've added my own screenshot. The guys is called Blacksmith Abasi.

Wildhammer Clan (Alliance - Twilight Highlands)


Craw MacGraw is standing in the door opening of one of the hovels.

PlayerScore

Last week I posted about an idea that I had been talking about with a guildie of mine. The idea of Peer Score was based on Gear Score, and naturally not flawless, but meant to rate players based on behaviour.

I had quite a few comments on this post, and one of the commenters pointed me in the direction of PlayerScore, which is now the new GearScore (I still think my name is cooler!).

But, I figured I would at least see what this addon does, and how it works and then report back to everybody who comes here. So I went ahead and downloaded the addon from Tentonhammer. (you can click the link will take you to the page where you can download, it will NOT start the download).

Immediately my AVG notifies me and asks if I really want to download and run this. I clicked yes, and hoped that it would not throw all my private information all over the net.

When installing it asks you to point to your World of Warcraft account directory. (you have to go a level deeper, but I didn't want to screenshot my account names).

After this there is a new icon in your icon tray in the bottom right (when you run windows) and from there you have a variety of options. I figured I would go with download ratings first and see what that would do exactly.

You can also start your client from this menu, and go to the PlayerScore Website. Though currently it just gives me an error message if I try to launch my game from here.

PlayerScore exists of two components. An addon part, that runs like any other addon you would normally use, and a downloader/uploader part that gathers information that other players have gathered. I can totally understand if some people would be a bit creeped out from the second part, but in their FAQ they claim you can also just run the addon yourself.

So, I now have it installed and after reading a pretty good FAQ  I feel I'm ready to try it out. I think at this stage of the game the whole gearscore part is completely useless since most of us will be wandering around in a nice combination of quests greens, and dungeon blues, but I'm gonna do some serious poking at the PlayerScore part.

I will, of course, report back in a couple of days with my findings. So stay posted!

Cataclysm Dungeon Locations - REPOST

I have posted this before, but I figured today would be a good day to post it again :)

To discover the dungeon entrance, you do need to know where they are...below the cut is a nice overview.

If you click on the images a larger version of the picture will appear. I have tried to take screenshots that show accurately where you need to be. 

You may notice that in a lot of the screenshots I have not discovered the entire map yet. While I was doing this I was discovering the instances myself so I could actually queue up for them through the random dungeon finder. 

Also, I'll only be going over the new dungeons. I would hope that you know where to find Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep. And if you don't, you shouldn't be trying them on heroic.

Blackrock Caverns (Level 80-81)

This instance is entered through the Blackrock Mountain. You can get there from Searing Gorge or from Burning Steppes. Several instances live in this mountain. To get to Blackrock Caverns you run around the circle until you find the broken gate. When you run into this hallway you will see some crates scattered around, you go to the right here, and the instance portal is right in front of you.

Throne of the Tides (Level 80-81)

Throne of the Tides is the one of two dungeons in the Abyssal Maw complex located in Vashj'ir. This dungeon has a pretty creative entrance. You get yourself to the Abyssal Breach and then get sucked down. Where you get dropped in a pool in front of the entrance.

The Stonecore (Level 81-85)

This instance is located in Deepholm. To get to Deepholm you take the quest to go through the Maelstrom. This quest is found in Stormwind. After you've entered Deepholm the dungeon entrance can be found on the west side of the temple, about 2/3 of the way up.

The Vortex Pinnacle (Level 81-85)

One of the Skywall instances in Uldum, and the entrance can be found on one of the floating spires. 

Grim Batol (Level 84-85)

Grim Batol is located in the west part of the Twilight Highlands.

Lost City of the Tol'vir (Level 84-85)
The entrance to this dungeon can be found in the south of the zone Uldum.

Halls of Origination (Level 85)
The other dungeon located in Uldum are the Halls of Origination (HoO). This dungeon can be found slightly east of The Lost City of Tol'vir.

Bestest Pet Evah!

Thror and I were doing Redridge quests and Darkflame bugged. He then started following me around like a little puppy, gently nibbling on me. Isn't he cute!

I think I'll keep him ^_^

Peer Score

Peer Score

Peer Score allows you to review your fellow players. Players who are running PS will be able to see this score on the player on mouseover behind the name.

Goal of this Addon

The game has seen a steadily growing number of uncaring, rude, mean, or simply bad players (unwilling to even learn). Peer Pressure is a means that may just stop these people from acting as if they are thabomb and by risking a bad review and risking no longer to be invited to raids on their realm they might just start behaving better.

Ideally Peer Score will become an indication of knowing what sort of person you’re inviting to your event, the way Gear Score has become the way to give an indication of the content this player has seen.

How it works

-          Every player starts with a score of 1000

•          You can ‘score’ 5 different players per day (it will take the server time and reset at midnight)
•           Scoring is done by right-clicking on a player portrait
•           You can then select the Peer Score node and click thumbs up, or thumbs down
•           You are not allowed to score fellow guildmembers
•           If you do not score 5 players that day, those turns are simply lost, not accumulated
•           One player can be scored a maximum of 5 times per day.
• 
  
•      At 1000 the number is white.
•      800 – 1000 yellow
•      600 – 800 orange 
•      Anything below 600 is red 
•      > 1001 is green

The Future

A number of safety checks have already been thought of in this addon to prevent dickheads from just downgrading decent players over and over. Because you can only score one player with one point per day, you would need a pretty big guild/friend group to decrease the score of a single player.

On the same though you cannot score guildies to prevent a guild voting a member back up when they have been rated down by other players.

This isn’t something that will get rid of bad players, but it might be something that will get some players to think again when they want to behave arrogantly.

And who knows…maybe in the future we can get reviews on people who have reached 0 and ideally ban their accounts completely if they do turn out to be part of the group that is making the game less fun to play for everybody. After all, even the fastest way to reach 0 would still take 200 days in a row with 5 times a thumbs down.

Credits where Credits should go. 
I've been confronted with a lot of horrible pugs lately and when I was complaining to a guildie about it he said he wished there was more peer control. By talking to him and running this stuff past him the idea got more shape.

Would you use an addon like this? Are there things missing still before you would use it? What are possible issues you see when something like this would be used?

This dude deserves a lesson

....and I wish I could give it to him. But unfortunately nothing is done with this sort of stuff. These sort of idiots do ruin the fun for everbody though.

This tank was pulling at high speed, skipping ziggurats, telling me to shut up and dps more, etc. Arrogance was leaving a slimy trail behind him and then came this:

I have no idea, who the Agritas dude is, but boy was he a prick.

His guild 'Carried by Paramore' should be ashamed of having a player like this in it. And if this does happen to be the standard of that guild...well, I don't think I can advice anybody to join it.

Oh hey...his guild counts 10 people or so...how am I not surprised?

On the other hand, here is Lesrome. No heirloom items...of course he'll do less well than someone who's decked out in heirloom items and has 3 levels on him (ie me).

I seriously feel like crying at the state of the player base social side sometimes :(

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

All of a sudden I got quite busy with all sorts of stuff....and then bam there was a shattering. I had wanted to write about it...really, I did, but instead I got busy playing it. My nightelf mage is now level 34 already, and I have to say the quests have never been more fun.

Anyways, turkey day has been and I hope all of you out there who celebrated it had a good time! But I figured I would have to take the happy turkeys off the blog now. So instead a new seasonal game and a happy wacky santa at the top.

Also, while I was looking for funky pics I came across this site. When I was a small kid I used to love everything that had to do with coloring and artsy stuff and I wish that these sort of sites had been available to me back then. I swear my colouring books were full faster than my mom could find me a new different one.

Anyways, if any of you do feel the urge to take up your pens and go colouring (or get your kids to color them) I promise I will feature them here on the blog. Just leave me a comment and we'll get in touch on how to get the colouring to me.

For now....back to the mage!

I fail at NaBloPoMo

I thought I had it all planned out, one bug per day, how hard could it be...well, apparently quite hard if you forget to post them >_<

So yeah, while I have a list of things still, and more new ones to add now the world has been shattered, I haven't posted them...oh well.

A Bug A Day - More Sound Bugs

We were running Naxx today for our immortal. Unfortunately we didn't make it, someone's connection decided to kill us when we reached Heigan. But I did discover another interesting sound bug.

When you're standing at range and the fight is over. When you then move into melee range the last 3 to 5 seconds of the melee fighting sounds get replayed on the spot. Including death of the boss sounds.

I could post some screenshots, but unfortunately they don't show sound too much....

Why Does Blizzard Hate Healers?

I was going through my reader and came accross Larisa's post about Ghostcrawler blogging about healers. Naturally I ended up reading GCs blog post and I wanted to post a reaction. I had erased my comment about 10 times already when I realized that I might just need a bit more space than the tiny white box they give you to comment, so I figured I would just post a reacion on my own blog instead.

A Bug A Day - More Inspect Bugs

I was insepcting my guildie to see what her resto spec was on her druid and I got a rather interesting talent spec to see.

I then switched to inspect the holy pallie and got this:

They announced the inspect bugs to be gone, and granted I can actually inspect now, but it's not enormously useful if I get to see the wrong screen.

A Bug A Day - Do not go to Hangar!

The clicky portal to get on the zeppelin in Isle of Conquest is killing you nowadays. Gives rather funky screenshots, but I cannot advice to go there.