Heroics take 2

In the last few days I have used my fresh bear tank rather than my imba-geared tankadin together with four shamans in heroics. To my absolute surprise, this works better, even though there is a serious difference in gear.

Having the ability to hit everything around you with swipe on the move makes things like Culling of Stratholme much safer. Nothing is more annoying than missing one shaman being hit by a zombie and then drop out of /follow range due to being stunned. Spamming swipe does away with that problem.

The paladin works fine, but requires more attention than the druid. Having three buttons for boss tanking (mangle+maul, fairy fire and lacerate) and one button for aoe-trash tanking (swipe+maul) allows me to focus a bit more on what I am doing with the shamans. As a result their damage output improved to around 2k each. Not that much, granted, but enough to get solidly into the comfort zone in a heroic.

Today I missed doing CoS timed as narrow as it gets, less than a minute too slow. I had to drink a lot to keep the shaman's mana up. Taking a hint from this, I bought dual-spec for the last three and gave them a PvE dps spec rather than the vanilla PvP setup. Next to that, I set up a different gear set for PvE. Currently that changes just a couple of pieces: rings, one trinket, neck and the odd item here or there.

However - the difference in setup is clearly noticeable. I'll go and save up some badges now to get some more PvE gear and see how it goes.

The Headless Horseman Redux

Last year, I made a serious effort to get the horseman's mount. When Hallow's End was done, I had spent well over hundred tries by myself and a number with guild mates trying to get the mount. No Joy.

This year, I was determined to not waste any chances. I parked my level 80 boxing chars, the shamans and also the unused druids at the Scarlet Monastery. I bought my old level 70 cloth boxing team there to have summons. I was prepared to level my hunter's a bit further to 75 today if that had meant that they could summon.

But, all that setup was a waste of time.

Taking four of my shamans and my tankadin into the graveyard wing, I set my cap for the first daily farming session. But... the first shaman's summon already gave me what I wanted! =]

I used the other three summons and got a spellpower ring each time, as well as this year's horseman's blade. Then I took off to Dalaran. I found that when you mount up in the city proper, you are locked to landmount mode, but if you mount up on the landing pad or on the Violet Parlour's balcony, the mount goes into flying mode. Outside no-fly zones, the mount swaps modes as you land or take off. One difference between a normal land mount and the horseman's mount is that it doesn't stay vertical like normal mounts. Instead it will take a 90 degree angle relative to the ground, which can look a bit silly depending on where you stop. Excuse me now while I dance around the room celebrating. Time to cook!

Ehm, Lol?

[02/10/2009]
23:21 [Shabruno]: get a life >.> that mount + [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? bullshit
23:21 [Takano]: jealous? =]
23:21 [Shabruno]: Just a lil
23:21 [Shabruno]: But still, [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] is no life luck 'O.o
23:22 [Takano]: actually, I have that from level 60 raiding
23:22 [Shabruno]: Sure, and my name is napoleon
23:22 [Shabruno]: what ever, cya (:
23:22 [Shabruno]: gonna play on a not noob sever (:

And the guild news link from back in the day. I recustomized the char when that became available, but hey. =]

Some people...

Game Performance

For a good while now I was not really satisfied with the performance of WoW on my gaming computer. I have now made a few small changes that have significantly improved the performance of WoW on my machine to my great delight! I made three changes, two are setup and one is hardware.

First off, hardware. I spent 145 Euro on an OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB. What? It is a Solid State Drive, in a nutshell flash memory - like the card you put into your digital camera - working like a hard drive. The key selling point for those things is that unlike normal hard disks, they have no seek time. A normal hard disk needs to rotate the disk(s) and move the read/write head to the right place to access certain data. That can be very bad, if scattered, small amounts of data need to be read. Unfortunately, that happens very often in WoW where we all notice machine lag - in cities, where every players visible gear pieces need to be loaded.

SSD technologo is nothing new, but used to be quite expensive: 500-600 Euro for an affordable consumer model. There are still SSDs offered in retail for non-server use in this price range, and there are a bunch of things you don't really want to buy that are around 100 Euro. And then there is the OCZ Vertex and it's successor the Vertex Turbo. Unlike some of the budget SSDs - some also made by OCZ - it has a great controller and gives very respectable performance compared to the expensive options.

In lieu of any proper mounting kit for the 2.5" HDD form factor of the SDD I used cable ties to fix the small SDD to the chassis of my gaming rig as you can see in the picture above. When I originally bought the ThermalTake Armor case I was miffed that I had to either take one with a window or wait. Now I am quite happy to look at my little silent but effective new toy when I want. =]

WoW can be copied to and run from nearly any storage device - such as a USB stick or an iPod - I didn't just copy the entire client to the SSD. Instead I copied only the /data directory from the WoW directory to the SSD. That directory holds the by now about 13GB of game data files of WoW and that is where all the reading happens. All the other folders are for addons, settings, screenshots or whatnot, in essence things that change frequently and I left those on the raid hard disks.

Then I used Symlink to instruct Vista to redirect read and write access to the WoW-data directories for both WoW installations on my computer from the hard disk to the SSD. That's it.
Using Symlink is also a good idea when using regular hard disks if one is using move than one WoiW installation - for example for easier setting and/or addon management.

The third change I made was to disable Vista's Superfetch service. Superfetch is supposed to proactively load data from the hard disk to memory before a program actually asks for it. To do that it tries to predict what the running software will request. A nice idea, but not very useful for something kinda intricate like WoW's data files. WoW itself is also loading data proactively. It does load the next zone while you are approaching the zone boundary. I am no expert in either Superfetch or WoW's methods, but clearly disabling Superfetch significantly improved the performance of my system. I can only guess that having the hard disks of my raid array jump left and right to follow the predictions of Superfetch and WoW itself is the reason for this. To disable Superfetch, follow these instructions (enabling works the same way, just backwards).

Before these changes, I would often loose characters on /follow while flying at 280% speed in Northrend. In particular in busy areas or at zone borders. Thinking about the data reading that is going at the time, that makes sense. Today I flew all over Northrend and instead of having a fit I had a smooth flight with only one or two times that I had to renew follow due to phasing.

Likewise, before the changes I was suffering from massive machine lag when hearthing to Dalaran. There are just too many people with too many textures too load, damning me to sitting idle for two minutes or so before I can move smoothly - if at all since people come and go. Now, after waiting only a polite 2 seconds, I could move as if I was alone on the server. I chained up my shamans in a konga line, each following another and rode a couple of times all around Dalaran just after hearthing there and none of the /follow strains broke! Happy joy joy! =]

New status: Arena Fodder

After having a lot of fun in Alterac Valley and Wintergrasp my shamans now have all the PvP gear that does not require arena rating. I also collected enough emblems to purchase the [Totem of Hex] for all characters.

One thing that I totally missed was the awesomeness that is the [Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem]. Essentially, it allows a shaman to pop a 4k damage shield that lasts 15s with a 30s cooldown. When looking at incoming burst damage on a 20k health bar even with 800+ resilience, this is an immense help.

To celebrate the promotion from 'Hateful Farming Noob' to 'Arena Fodder', I took the girls to the hairdresser and told them to go wild. This monochrome look is the result. =]

My druid Ægis and the hunter group are slowly making their way up the level ladder. The Worgen were morphed from wolf-family to ornamental pets that can pretend to fight, but hey, there are many other pets out there.

Worg pack!

=]

Hateful Farming Noob

That's me in the last few days. I am splitting my solo play time between WG/AV on my five shamans to collect a starter set of ilvl 200/213 pvp epics and leveling my druid Ægis and the four hunters.

I do surprisingly ok in level 80 PVP, even though the level 70 resilience doesn't really cut it and things are a lot more bouncy now. Various knock backs and death grip have joined fear as multiboxer hazzard, not to mention retri-pallies who make their pretty lights while encased in their bubble.

I love that level 80 honor gear does not require badges from various battlegrounds, as I always disliked my negative impact with too many chars concentrated in one spot in the smaller battlegrounds. In AV, I go where needed and can play in a strategic fashion. WG is more hectic in this aspect, but being able to take out vehicles extremely fast is a big plus.

Tomorrow I will get the hateful pants. I worked around the ilvl 213 WG chestpiece for the hateful set. Bracers, belt and boots are next.