Nekomimi Mode

World of Warcraft there are several battlegrounds (or bg’s as the locals call them). They are cross realm instances (meaning they cover a huge amount of people) where players of both factions (Horde/Alliance) do battle. Every player you “kill” gives you honor points (usually which you can save up and buy stuff with. Horde almost always win… Not sure why, but lately I’ve been taking screenshots and I have a theory:

See the patten? The Alliance is inherantly lazy. The first screenshot I came in late at the last flag capture - still managed to get 23 hk’s (honorable kill), and come in pretty high in damage done.

Today was the Starcraft and Warcraft 3 world championship. Starcraft was the WCG invitational featuring two Korean guys at their peak. It was really fascinating and fast paced. These guys were going at about 300+ clicks per minute.

The Warcraft 3 event was between a Korean and Norwegian player - really amazing matches as well.

I met a really cute model at the NVidia booth - and got a signed autograph - I’ll scan it in later.

Copied Momopi (lvl 70 Druid) and Verit (lvl 70 Warlock) to the event realm to play WoW 3 in Northrend. It was cool to be able to level again, on the other hand there wasn’t much to see at all. Also - you can’t fly in Northrend yet either.

Shirts. I got a ton of shirts - a Warlock shirt, Druid shirt, Blood Elf shirt, Lich King Shirt, NVidia shirt, WoW TCG shirt, and Blizzcon shirt.

Tomorrow I head home - to rest from the convention itself :).

Blizzcon is pretty fun. Its not as large as Anime Expo - even though its held in the same venue (Anahiem Convention Center) its still a lot of fun.

Interesting tidbits about WoW 3.x:

New Zone Northrend:

For those of you who haven’t played Warcraft 3 - this is where Arthas lives.

Level cap was raised to 80 - its something like 841,000+ exp from 70 to 71. Should take two weeks to get both of my Lvl 70’s to lvl 80.

There’s a new hero class - the Death Knight. The Death Knight is like a warrior, but with wildly different stats. You won’t be able to use him either - until you reach lvl 80 and complete a quest line - not at all unlike the warlock mount quest (their words!). Once completed you get a Death Knight - that starts at lvl 60 - not lvl 1.

Fun pictures:

Warlock figure - which will be availble later this year wearing Tier 5 armor.

Cute Blood Elf figure - also availble later this year.

Night Elf Druid statue. Interesting story about this - when I first visited Blizzard’s office this statue was in the net-ops room.

Wrath of the Lich King poster/logo.

Concept art for Northrend instance.

Bad news: You can’t get this scene on a poster yet. Good news: You can get this on a mouse pad. I picked that up :).

There weren’t too many people dressed up, but these two were. On the left - a warlock in tier 5 armor and on the left a Druid in the same tier armor.

Inside all the lights were off - makes us geeks look better? Anyhow after I asked if I could take their picture I asked if they were twins - and they are :).

Wouldn’t be a convention if there wasn’t at least one catgirl - yes this wasn’t taken at Anime Expo the previous year…

I admit it - I have bought at least two player guides for WoW. Neither of these are illegal, or even associated with gold selling or farming. They are basically big PDF files that guide you through their topic in question. One I feel pretty good about, the next not so much (it’s still good info). Here’s a quick review so you can decide whether these are worth it or not.

The first is the Alliance 1-70 guide by Brian Kopp. I’m not an affiliate so you can consider this review somewhat unbiased.

The short: If you’re new to the game it’s pretty nice - almost essential. Especially if you don’t have friends to level with.

Basically what the guide does is it helps you be in the right places at the right time, and preempt any items you’ll need for future quests to save time. You won’t actually hit lvl 60 in 5 days, but you will beat people - even veterans - to lvl 60. My played time on my warlock was 8 played days (which works out to a month or so of on and off playing). Time to 70 was 19 played days. You won’t find yourself needing this guide at all for 60-70 unfortunately since the quests in outlands are much more linear. What surprised me however is that the time it takes to go from 1-60 is about the same time it takes to go from 60-70.

The guide does have a lot of typos and missing info, so be prepared to cross reference everything on Thottbot. One nice thing about this is the PDF he gives you basically has links to all the items, and quests in thottbot so you won’t have to go very far.

Don’t want to pay for the guide, but want to level fast? Here’s the secret: don’t screw around - always be working on a quest. Does it work? I think so - one of the players I met early on and in the guild was higher level than me. Well he hit lvl 70 a few weeks ago, and I already have another character that is 4 levels away from 70 - so yeah it works.

The second is Luke Brown’s Cash Creating Guide for WoW. Once again I’m not affiliate of his so I get nothing for the link.

The short: The first half is somewhat useless as it covers old world drops - which I’ve found that while they still sell in the WoW AH - they aren’t worth grinding for - especially if your at lvl 70. The exceptions being mageweave cloth, runecloth, and rugged leather. Soloing instances may get you a lot of money, but I think the daily quests and grinding might be more worthwhile.

The second half is much more useful since it covers WoW expansion drops. I have noticed it needs to be updated somewhat as the game mechanics have shifted - as well as the prices. The guide - which I read end to end - keeps referring to the expansion and how the market is going to change as everyone levels to 70. I think everyone who has a lvl 60 character has leveled to 70 and is pretty focused on what end-game content they have access to at this point.

Want to know the deep dark secret to making insane amounts of money in WoW? Whatever trade craft you picked - find what sells, and grind for it. Also - find and sell lots of motes - which everyone can pick up. I’d also add (which the guide does not really cover) with the daily quests in patch 2.1.x - do those - you’ll pick up an easy 100-150g a day between the quest rewards and drops you pick up.

To be fair the guide does go into detail where various high priced items drop, and where to pick them up without facing a whole lot of other players. Example: motes drop very frequently in the elemental plain - however everyone knows this so its probably the most farmed location in the game. What you may not know is that those motes drop plenty of places elsewhere (I actually did know that prior to reading this…).

It wouldn’t be a good post without a catgirl of some kind:

Some news: I hope to get some new glasses on Monday, and I found my camera battery/charger :). Hopefully the weather is nice enough to get some riding in.

Now on to the guild Company of Heroes on the realm Staghelm. I was originally going to post something on their forums, however I never gained access (more on this later). Company of Heroes is the first guild I belonged to in WoW, however I left the other day largely because I wanted to progress my character and wanted to support my friends. I actually really like everyone in the guild itself, and I hope in the future I can help them progress as well - they have lots of really good players.

I like playing World of Warcraft for the most part. You meet nice people, do fun things etc. One aspect of the game that is troubling however is that if you want to play around in dungeons (instances) you need to be part if a guild. The reason for this is many of these instances require a bit of organization. If you want to experience a Raid instance it takes a lot more organized guild with higher level characters. There are tools inside the game to look for people to group with to run through these instances, but in general the level of organization is not there to do this. Level 70 dungeons especially are tough enough that you have to be on your toes at all times to complete them. I can’t imagine what level 70 raids are like.

Guilds generally help solve this problem. However thinking back there were only 2-3 dungeons I went to because a guild member invited me. Every other dungeon I had been to however was organized by two of my co-workers (Sorien and Fugliest). For the most part this is still true :).

More recently however the only lvl 70 logged in Company of Heroes were Sorien and I. Its actually impossible to progress when the rest of the guild is Level 60 or less in a lot of cases. I enjoy running through some of the older dungeons - especially since I haven’t been to a lot of them, but I know that is going to get old eventually. Also if you are a Level 60 running older dungeons is the slowest way to progress - so it seemed kind of counter productive.

So I left - I’m now part of a guild called DragonLance. One thing I’ve noticed is I actually get requests from other guild members to go dungeons - and some high end ones :). I hope it pans out - I think if it doesn’t I might look for something else to do, maybe level a new character or something.

More on the forum - so yes I planned to post a note like this on Company of Heroes forum. I signed up about a month ago (I think)? But no-one has validated or approved my account. Kind of a bad sign if you are trying to gauge guild activity.

I hate to over-do it on Warcraft stuff, but we managed to pull off the Dreadsteed of Xoroth quest :). Its basically the "Epic Mount" in the game - mainly a lot faster than the regular mount.

Couple of things that made it easier were that we were all high level. I was the lowest level in the group - 62. Its a Level 55-60 dungeon/quest. Others were 65-68. Special thanks to my guild "Company of Heroes" it wouldn’t have been possible without the best tank, healers and dps classes in the game :).

Managed to get my character up to lvl 60 Saturday morning :). Also the weather was so nice I got in a bunch of riding. I would have taken pictures, but I seem to have lost the charger for my camera… Hopefully it turns up.

I really like this new Wallpaper from Blizzard. To me its the ideal image of what a Warlock in the game would look like.

trying to complete this quest where you have to kill several of a certain type of pirate. Most of these guys were 1 or 2 levels above me which meant that I often attracted more than I could reasonably deal without dying. So at one point there were 5 of them attacking me. Just before I was dead my voidwalker got back on his hate list (agro), I healed and wiped the rest of them out :). (click the picture to see the full screen version)

I didn’t know this but you can go fishing in WoW :).