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.

Boxing Update

What has happened since my last post?

Aquired 4x Titanium Spellshock Ring.
Bought 5x Tattered Dreadmist Mantle for 40 badges each.
Levelled 1x Shaman and 4x Druid from 60->75.5
Dual-speeced 1x Shaman resto and replaced Flame Shock with Earth Shield and Chain Lightning with Riptide, leaving the other elemental spells in place and sequence.
Bought 4x Protective Barricade of the Light for 35 badges each.
Bought 4x Hateful Gladiator's Mail Spaulders for 31600 honor each.

My short range goals are to get the 5th shaman to 80 and start WG/AV with the five shamans grinding for level 80 PvP gear. I plan to do 5v5 arena as before with four shamans and one other person sorting the healing.

80

After enjoying flying around in Northrend I set to the Sons of Hodir quest chain in Storm Peaks. After also doing the Frosthold and Earthen quests in western Storm Peaks, I started my work for the Argent Dawn. Then the Shadow Vault, the Fleshworks and the Death's Rise quests and....DING!

A bit of shoring up materials and then my first level 80 shaman weapons were sorted: [Titansteel Guardian]. Time for bed! =]

Finally!

After some questing in Sholazar and Zul'Drak my shaman group hit level 77. The first thing I did was jump back to Dalaran, and test /follow with epic flight speec in Northrend with one character. I was a bit worried that it might break and make epic flight for the group near-useless. It worked out fine! Yay! YEEEEHAAA!

So I dug into the purses of my various characters to shore up the next money for the other three shaman's flying pleasure. Fortunately enough, I am a compulsive miner and had been a busy bee. Yet, I still could only buy the epic flying skill and cold-weather flying for three of the four shaman. So I took all my fungible assets and chucked them at the auction house. At the end of the day I had enough liquidity to sort out the last shaman.

I spent 24800g on this yesterday, but flying around fast in Northrend with five characters at once is well worth it. Time to take the four shaman to Storm Peaks and do the Sons of Hodir quest chain! =]