druid, screenshots

Top Secret Project #314159: A Confession

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That’s me.

Tamaryn, kittycat, druid.

Yes, I can hear you, screaming at your computer monitor, “Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute!”

“Didn’t you roll a horde druid that you got to level ten?”

Yes, yes I did. Then I decided to reroll as an Alliance druid because I wanted to play with my guild.

“You actually got a non-hunter character to level 20?”

Hey, this is my second non-hunter to get to level 20, thankyouverymuch. I have a 21 mage.

“So you decided to make a feral druid?”

Actually no, all my talent points thus far have gone into the Balance tree. The picture shows me in Cat Form cause I just got it and thought it looked fun.

“So you’re gonna level Moonkin?”

Yup, I figured it was the best bet if I wanted to be able to solo decently efficiently while still having a strong mana pool for times when I’d want to jump into a healing role. Endgame I think I’m gonna either stay moonkin, or more likely, switch to tree, because I really want to give healing a serious try.

“Wait… did you just say… endgame…?”

Yes. Yes I did. I’m being serious when I say I’m leveling this character. And thus far this is the only non-hunter class that has been able to hold my interest for a decent amount of time.

Here’s the deal, basically I decided that I wanted to try playing a “hybrid” class that would allow me to heal, or, with the proper reshuffling of gear and talent points– tank, for my guild. That gave me two options: paladin and druid. In the end it came down to whether I wanted a reliable rez or whether I wanted to be able to turn into stuff, and being able to turn into stuff won out. (Not to mention I have a horribly hard time trying to get into paladins. I just can’t do it… I don’t know why!)

How am I liking the class so far? To be honest I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s fun to be able to cast at stuff and then when you’re running low on mana, switch to bear or cat and start swiping at things. It’s fun to be able to run around and give people buffs (hunter pets are always buffed. Always.) Perhaps one of my favorite things is that it’s an all new challenge for me. Running into quests that are orange or red to me with one of my hunters is challenging and it’s fun to take on that challenge; but trying to do the same with my druid is even more challenging, partially because I’m still learning about the class. I felt so proud of myself today trying to complete some collect-the-mushrooms quest in a cave in Darkshore. There was one last mushroom that I had to get that was surrounded by three guys all at my level, one of which healed. I popped an armor elixir, cast Regrowth on myself, hopped into Bear Form and ran into the fray. A healing potion, a couple healing spells, and a whole lotta Mauling and Swiping later, I’d finished the quest and was /dancing all over the cave.

That’s really the beauty of the class so far– you can change your style of play based on what you feel like doing. Feel like casting? You can. Feel like tanking? You can. Feel like being a rogue? You can. Feel like healing? Yep, you can do that too. Granted, this does leave out “feel like being a hunter?”, which is my favorite type of character, but hey… nobody’s perfect. And running around in Cat Form sorta feels like a perpetual Eyes of the Beast.

I have no idea how much longer I’ll be able to feel like a true hybrid before I realize that my feral skills are falling farther and farther behind because I’m spec’ing and gearing myself up like a mage, but in the meantime, it’s fun. There is a “MoonkinForLife” in my guild who told me he leveled up to 30 with no problems using Cat Form, even as Balance, so that’s encouraging.

Oh and for the record, I still like hunters the best and this is always gonna be a hunter blog. =P My hunterness, I feel, extends beyond the game whereas donning the druid costume for a couple hours does not.

That said, I’m having Writer’s Block lately. Ask me hunter questions so I can answer them. Dooooo iiiiiiit!

endgame, screenshots

Easing into Endgame

8 Comments

World of Warcraft is an interesting creature.

It is, of course, an MMORPG– “Massively Multiplayer” being the first two words in that acronym. And yet if you want, you can go through much of the game without really dealing with too many people. That’s what I did. Oh sure, there’s other people you can interact with and there’s a living breathing economy, much like on Neopets which is what I played pre-WoW. But you can level to 70 basically without any outside help.

When I was level 19 or 20 or so, I did Deadmines because somebody told me I should. It was my first ever instance, people were impatient with me (to be fair I was the worst hunter of all time at this point– pet on aggressive and immolation trap for the win) and the whole experience really left a negative impression on me and after that, with the exception of a few run-throughs by higher-level friends, I hardly did any instancing at all until I hit Outlands.

And this is where it started to get interesting, because this is where our guild really started to grow and we started to do stuff together. Our little Karazhan group that we have now has been running stuff together since Hellfire Ramparts– heck, a few of us have been running together since Zul’Farrak. But for the most part, we went through Outlands together, running instances as we encountered them and sort of learning together. This has culminated in what I think is a very solid group of people who know how to work efficiently as a team.

So you’d think the level 70 endgame would be a breeze right?

Well, it takes a lot of work that really hadn’t occurred to me beforehand, simply because I’ve never played an MMO with situations like this before. Karazhan is a ten-man raid that takes quite some time to do if you’re still learning it. So it’s a pretty big time commitment. And it’s really hard to sync up the schedules of so many different people, most of whom have school or work or even the military going on in their real lives. And it just so happens that as a guild officer, I am now in charge of trying to plan this and get it together, and keep everybody happy.

It’s a little bit stressful and it pushes me out of my comfort zone, and I have to admit it had me worried for a while. Had WoW finally turned into a job? Was I breaking my own “it’s a game” rule by continuing to play?

But I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided– WoW isn’t just any ol’ game. It is an MMORPG as I said at the beginning of my post. It has plenty of solo content, but if you want to really, truly unlock the “massively multiplayer” portion of it, it’s going to take some work because other people are involved, not just you. But that, I think, is part of what makes endgame so rewarding.

It’s not everybody’s thing, and that’s quite okay. In fact, as I even told my boyfriend the other day… “Sometimes I catch myself wishing that I could just go back to when all I had to worry about was how many kobolds I had left to kill.” But in the end, as much as I do truly love the solo content of the game and the leveling (hence all the alts), I also love running instances and raids with my friends. And to experience that, you’ve got to be willing to put in a little effort… more than you might initially expect.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’ve been a little scarce these past couple of weeks. Because I had to take a little break to sort of define the game in my head and decide if the sudden new “work” aspect of the game that jumped on me without warning was justified. I’ve decided it is.

As is running into Orgrimmar with a couple buddies when you’re bored, just to see if you can actually hit Thrall once before dying:

I think I got in a single Arcane Shot. It was epic.

amusing anecdotes, blogs

Geek is the New Black

12 Comments

Now I’m not one to hide my nerdiness and all-out geek pride.

But on the other hand, it’s not something I bring up with a whole lot of people. Largely I think it’s just because I assume that not very many people can relate to me if all I ever do is talk about Linux and video games. In order to get to know people, I sort of subconsciously stay on their level of interests, which I’m pretty sure in most cases is not mine.

But I sort of got tired of it today. Tired of beating around the bush. Tired of going “Um, er, ah…” when people ask me what my hobbies are or what I do in my spare time and I wonder what sort of blank stares I’d get if I told the whole truth.

Somebody asked me today what I’m doing tomorrow. I said “Raiding Karazhan with my guildies in World of Warcraft.” “Oh… okay,” was the semi-stunned response. It was all slightly awkward but I felt good. I’d unabashedly outed myself and it was nice.

In the breakroom at work today somebody came in and sat down across the table from me. We sat there munching on donuts and he asked me what I did last night. I said “I played video games.” “Ooh, what games?” “World of Warcraft.” “Ah yes,” he said. He’d never played it but he knew a lot about it. We talked about XBox 360 games and Starcraft 2 for a while before he finished his donut and made his exit.

Not long after he left, two other people came in. One was a departmental manager and the other guy was someone who started working there not long after I did. They had McDonalds and they came in and sat down at the table and set up their food. Then the manager turned to the other guy and said simply: “I’m telling ya, mining, herbalism, and an epic flying mount, and you’ll be set for life.”

The other guy replied, “Well, I’ve just got mining to supplement my engineering. I finally learned how to make the +10 damage scope for myself yesterday!”

The engineer, as it turns out, began playing five months ago or so and is a level 65 hunter.

I told him if he made Goblin Jumper Cables, people would love him if he feigned death in an instance and could then rez the healer. He was pretty impressed with this idea.

He said he was trying to work on gaining rep with a lot of factions so he would have kind of a headstart when he got to level 70. I told him to start working on his Cenarion Expedition rep so he could nab Glyph of Ferocity.

Then my break was over.

I foresee some more fun chats between the two of us in the future.

Apparently I was underestimating the world’s geek level. And I’m glad to say so.

On a completely different note, my boyfriend, Mr. Pike (though he prefers to be called “LS”), the infamous warlock who little level six Tawyn trekked across the world to find, started his own blog a little while ago and now feels he has enough content to warrant some visits. So go on, head over to Wearing Black in the Back and read what he has to say about roleplaying (both in and out of WoW), warlockery, and a variety of other goodies.

*pushes you over*

Uncategorized

I live! I promise!

7 Comments

Huge apologies for the lack of meaningful posts recently, and my lack of presence in the WoW blogging community in general. Basically I’ve had a lot of stuff going on lately both in-game and in-real-life, and on top of that, I’ve hit a bad case of… maybe not writer’s block so much as “Editor’s Block”. I have probably five or six posts I’ve written on various subjects in the past couple of weeks that are “in queue” but have not been published because I’m unsatisfied with them, and I’m having troubles trying to fix them so that I am satisfied with them. So they don’t get published. I’d like to get them all out there someday, though.

In the meantime, rest assured knowing that all is well in Pike’s WarcraftLand. I’ve been logged into Tawyn a lot, doing Kara and various heroics and rep/gold farming. A lot of my alts are sadly being neglected, though, in favor of a… Top Secret Project which will reveal itself later. Whether or not the Top Secret Project goes as far as I want it to, I can’t say, but this particular one has gone farther than most of my others, so… we shall see.

guides, hunter kindergarten, movies

Hunter Kindergarten: Chain-Trapping 101

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I’m enjoying this movie thing so much that I decided to make my very first real instructional movie:

Tawyn and Tux show you the basics on how to chain-trap in an instance.

I noticed something though. Something that didn’t even occur to me until afterwards when I was watching the finished product.

…I kept using certain pronouns.

…like “we”… and “us”…

…is it a hunter thing, or is this what happens when you read too much BRK? Have I been permanently transformed? Am I doomed to refer to myself in the plural form from here on out? WHAT SORT OF MONSTER HAS BEEN UNLEASHED?

/cough

Enjoy the movie, hopefully it’s helpful to some of you =D And I promise I’ll start posting some non-movie stuff again too.

And yes, I know I have a dorky voice.

guides, how-tos

How to: Make a World of Warcraft Movie

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Loronar asked me to write up a little tutorial on how to make a WoW movie.

Sure thing!

This is going to be super basic. No need to download too many fancy programs. This means you won’t be able to do too much fancy stuff with your movies, but you WILL be able to make a basic movie and add your own sound and that type of thing.

This tutorial is written for Windows XP because it’s what most people use and because sadly, there does not seem to be a good solid program yet for Linux that works well with WoW/Wine. I’ve looked. I imagine they’ll have one out probably in the next couple of years but until then, I use Windows for my movie-making needs. (I imagine the tutorial for Vista would be similar– but I’ve never used Vista so I can’t say.)

How to Make a World of Warcraft Movie:

1.) Download Fraps. Fraps is the only program I’ve found thus far that works as well as it does. There are other free, open source programs out there which I’d rather be using but most of them are still sort of “in beta” and do not work with WoW, at least not as well as you need it to. So for now there is really one thing you can use to record a movie if you are on Windows, and that is Fraps.

You will need to pay a one-time fee of about $35 to unlock the full program (being able to record more than 30 seconds at a time). If you don’t feel like paying a fee I’m sure there’s other ways to “acquire” the full version. But you didn’t hear that from me. =P Myself, I just coughed up the money.

Basically after you pay you’ll be able to access a “members only” section of the site, and download a full version.

2.) Install Fraps. Straightforward enough.

3.) Open Fraps. You have some options in here you can play with. The options are pretty self-explanatory. I myself left pretty much everything at default, although I did disable sound recording so I could record my own sound (also because it saves a little disk space). On the subject of disk space, the movies you are going to be recording will be huge initially, so make sure you have a lot of hard drive space available.

4.) Minimize Fraps and boot up World of Warcraft. You will notice you have a number in the upper left corner of your screen. This is not going to go away so long as you have Fraps running. It displays your Frames-per-second. If the numbers are yellow, it means you are not recording, if they’re red, it means that you are. The numbers will not show up on your finished movie, so don’t worry. Now let’s say you just want to record a test movie to make sure everything’s working right. Press F9. It’ll probably open one of your bags, but wait, it also makes Fraps start recording! See, the little number in the corner turned red. And if you have a computer that boasts pretty good but not excellent stats, as mine does, you will probably notice that your game is slightly choppier now. You will lose some FPS while Fraps does its thing, but unless your computer is really outdated the game should still be playable, if a little bit choppier.

5.) You can run around for a bit, shoot some stuff, whatever you want to record. Then press F9 again to stop recording. The number will turn yellow again and your game will probably get a lot smoother. And your bag will either open or close again. (You can go into the options and set the default recording key to something else if you don’t want it to also open your bags. Or you can just do what I do and open your bag before you record, so it closes it when you start.)

6.) You now have a movie in your Fraps folder, which by default is C:/Fraps. But you’re not finished yet because maybe you want to add music– not to mention the movie is way too big to upload to YouTube right now. Fortunately, Windows comes with something called Windows Movie Maker. Just go into your Start Menu and find it, it’s not in any subfolders or anything.

7.) Open Windows Movie Maker. You have a sidebar that gives you some options, you want to click on “Import Video” and navigate to your Fraps folder and import your movie. Now it’s going to show little thumbnails of parts of your movie in the main area. Drag each of these parts, in order, down to the timeline at the bottom and arrange them one after the other. You can press play to preview your movie and make sure you got all your thumbnails in there (one time I forgot and finished/uploaded an entire movie before I realized that a portion of it was missing– do not let this happen to you! =P)

8.) So you have what we in the industry call “picture lock”. (Look Mom, I’m using my degree!) This means that the picture part of your movie is all finished and you just need to add sound. Go back to the sidebar and click on “Import Audio or Music”. Now you can navigate to maybe some music you want to add, or some narration that you made, and import it in. It’s going to show up with all your movie thumbnails. You can drag it down to the bottom section of the timeline and move it around so it starts and ends when you want it to. You can also trim your song if maybe it’s too long, you do that by finding the end that you want to clip, waiting until it turns into a little double-headed red arrow, and then dragging it down so it matches up in length with your movie. If you have more than one sound file you’d like to use, you can upload more than one and put one right after the other.


9.) Now I should warn you– chances are your audio clip is going to be very very loud by default. To fix this, click on your audio, go into the “Clip” menu at the top of the program, go into Audio, go into Volume, and set it so it’s a lot lower. (You can also fade your audio in and out and a few other basic things here.)

10.) Alright, you can play your movie back and if everything looks good, head over to “Save to my computer” on the sidebar. It will give you some options about what to name your movie, where to save it, what size you want it to be, etc. If you want to make a fairly-decent-sized movie you can upload to YouTube or Blogger, I recommend saving the movie as “Other Settings: High Quality Video (Large)”. Eventually it will get to a part where it has to process your movie; depending on how long your movie is this will take ten or fifteen minutes or so.

11.) After processing you’ve got a nice little WoW movie sitting on your desktop (or wherever you decided to save it)! Congrats! You can now upload it to YouTube, Blogger, or something similar– be aware that the uploading process for both of these also takes ten or fifteen minutes or so.

And there you have it, that’s how you make a WoW movie with minimum amounts of fuss. Have fun filming!

movies, trapping

Traptacular Trapathon

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When you are chain-trapping, possibly your two most important assets are: firstly, making sure your trap cooldown is up before you first pull, and secondly, distance. Putting distance between yourself and your trap helps more than I think many people realize; it can give you up to some ten seconds of extra time if you concussive shot/wing clip your mob, and still a lot of extra time even if you don’t.

I have a lot of hunters who will ask me how I can keep something trapped for so long, and those are my secrets. Starting off with no trap cooldown, and then maintaining distance. If you lose distance, you can still regain it later to maintain your edge– it’s difficult but can be done.

I’ve discovered I’m really into this whole “movie” thing (I guess my filmmaking degree is coming out here?) so I’d like to show Tux in his motion picture debut in “Trapathon: Tawyn Gets Bored”. Basically when I get bored farming Scryer signets, I’ll go trap a mob and see how long I can keep him trapped while I burn down the other guys. This is mostly a “just for fun” movie as opposed to an “instructional” movie because I figured BRK already has his fantastic chain-trapping how-tos— so this is mostly to show that keeping your distance = endless chain-trapping, even if you don’t have any points in Survival:

Music: Beatnick vs. Loituma – Leva’s Breaks/Caramell – Caramelldansen (Speedycake Remix)

(Yes, this is the type of stuff I listen to when I play WoW. No wonder I’m so upbeat and postive about the game all the time, right? =P)

Another important thing to keep in mind when you’re trapping is to make sure that you are inbetween your trap and the mob you are trapping. Sounds obvious right? Well sometimes it’s easy to forget and move yourself so you have a better shot at whatever you are shooting at the moment. Always be aware of your surroundings so you can adjust yourself if need be– for example, you’ll notice at around 3:50 that I saw my hapless Trap Victim was running towards me and not the trap– so I had to quickly move myself so he would run into my trap instead.

So there we have it: Start with your next trap ready, maintain distance, and keep the trap between you and your mob. With those three things you can trap indefinitely, at least until you decide to pull five mobs at once =P And even then you can regain your trapping rhythm and continue trapping indefinitely… well… until the wrong mob runs into your trap anyway.

I enjoy making these movies but I sort of feel like most of the instructional stuff has already been covered by BRK and others such as The Hunter’s Mark. But if you’ve got anything in particular that you’d like to see, let me know and I’d be glad to see what I can whip up! (Oh, and also, let me know if you’ve got a good solid place where I can host bigger sizes of these movies).

karazhan, movies

Hey There Little Red Riding Hood

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We went to Karazhan yesterday. At first we were kind of nervous because a lot of the people who went this time had never gone before, and could probably still be considered a little undergeared.

But I guess we shouldn’t have worried:

Attumen: One-shotted
Moroes: Two-shotted
Maiden: One-shotted
Opera – Big Bad Wolf: One-shotted
Curator: One-shotted
Chess: Free badges!

So at this point, having completely demolished the first half of Karzhan, we were all feeling really high off of our successes. All you other bosses, bring it on! We were on fire.

…soon to be literally.

We had two wipes on Illhoof before deciding to skip him. This was rather hilarious actually, somebody cried out “If you run far enough away he resets!” so off about half of us went, running throughout the entire tower with millions of little imps following us as one by one Illhoof plucked people away from their flight and sacrificed them. Pretty soon we were down to only me left, so I feigned death– I don’t know if that’s what got me out of it or not but I do know that by the time he finally reset I had 40 HP left and was the only one still alive.

With that guy out of the question, we headed over to Shade of Aran. It was all sort of Leeroy Jenkins-ish: After an initial mishap where three people got too close and started the event with the rest of us still standing outside the closed doors (the panicky screams over Ventrilo were priceless), we all gathered together and had the two people who had done it before spend about ten minutes explaining the nuances of the fight to us in detail, we ran in, and… we blew up. At that point, the paladin was soulstoned but was literally laying at Aran’s feet, it was super late, and everything decided to respawn, so we called it for the night.

Still, I gotta say it was a very successful night overall. I think the fact that we’ve got the first half of that place “on farm” isn’t too bad for a scrappy group of roleplayers who have never stepped foot inside before until a few weeks ago. Oh, and no hunter loot, though our healers (and to a lesser extent, the rogue) really hit the jackpot. As I often say though– I’m here for the fun. The loot is just the gravy. Also I think I did really well this time (that’s the link to the anonymous WWS report– I’m Thetys, Locke is Snooper, and Jitte the Mysterious Rogue is, I’m pretty sure, Moroes’ garrote. No idea why it’s showing up as a player.)

I was feeling kind of bad the last Karazhan run because I wasn’t anywhere near the top and I sort of started to worry that I was “losing my touch” and not pulling my weight. So it was nice to do so much better this time. I was even tops on Curator! All the tips people started giving me musta helped. Oh and I was wearing my hunter shirt. Maybe that worked too. +100 Agi, +100 Ranged Attack Power, +100 doing-well-in-a-video-game.

/nods

…hey, you didn’t think I’d letcha go without a movie, now did ya?

This is the Big Bad Wolf version of the Opera Event. It’s basically a tank ‘n spank with one little gimmick: Big Bad Wolf randomly turns people into Little Red Riding Hood and you have to run around in circles while he chases you, because you’re silenced and can’t do much of anything except run. Now as a wise man once said, if you Feign Death, he loses aggro on you and you don’t have to worry about it (except for the fact that you are still slienced and can’t do anything). Fortunately, my Feign Death, well… worked. =P

Music: The Revs – Turning Japanese

And yes, bad, bad, naughty hunter at about 1:20, pulling aggro like that. Now in my defense, Omen failed to give me any sort of flashy advance warning like it usually does… but still. Bad hunter.

/sits in corner

alterac valley, battlegrounds, pvp

Once Upon an Alterac Valley

8 Comments

A small sample of my thoughts from yesterday, after trying out the New AV on both Tawyn and Lunapike:

“So lemme get this straight… on my Alliance character’s battlegroup, Alliance has apparently collectively decided that “Zerg Drek” is the new key to victory, leading to games that are a mere ten minutes long which usually end in an Alliance victory…

…and on my Horde character’s battlegroup, Alliance still sucks at AV.

…this is the happiest day of my life *tears of joy*”

Momentary euphoria aside, the lag is horrendous on Bloodlust right now. I have never seen battleground lag that bad. In one game I was kicked off the server right as the “All in” call was given for Drek, I couldn’t connect for about ten or fifteen minutes, and when I finally managed to get in… I was in the same spot I’d been when I disconnected and Alliance won about ten seconds later. Took 15 minutes to kill Drek even with the Relief Hut. DoTs became the key to victory for most people, because they would at least keep ticking when you couldn’t move or cast spells or attack anything. People were joking that Horde had decided to revolt and use an “Alliance lag mod”, though I think things were just as bad for the poor Hordies.

The face of AV really has changed though, it seems, in Tawyn’s battlegroup anyway. Ever since the last time they changed AV, Horde has completely and thoroughly dominated AV in our battlegroup. But now… well, I played probably eight games or so yesterday, and six were wins (and I sort of think the other two would have been wins if it weren’t for the lag– in both cases, we had Drek down to about 30% health, or less). No more people spending the entire battleground arguing about what “surefire strategy” was the one that worked. No more 45-minute long painful battles of being killed over and over as you watched the Alliance reinforcements dwindle to zero while Horde still had 497 or something. Nope. Completely different.

Now the second I get into a AV, battleground chat has typically been taken over by one or two people saying “Rush to Relief Hut, take towers as you go, capture the Relief Hut, and kill Drek. Do not stop to fight Horde.” over and over. And there are no questions. No arguments (other than from the occasional person who is perhaps playing AV for the first time since the new patch). Everybody sticks to the plan. Nobody takes Iceblood Graveyard (which is still a surreal concept to me. No… Iceblood…?) Nobody even thinks about Galv. A couple people take towers along the way but for the most part you get some 35 people at Frostwolf Relief Hut and then four minutes later you’ve got 35 people in Drek’s fort. It seems as though the Horde has a similar strategy going on; there were many games where I never saw even a single Horde player and the BG announcements made it clear that they were busy doing the exact same thing we were: rushing to the end to see who could kill the boss first. And it most cases, it was Alliance who managed to pull it off.

In some ways, this is all really very ridiculous. I remember saying rather incredulously on Vent after a couple games: “I only have 3 honorable kills but over 1000 honor” and then the similarly incredulous replies from my guildies (which resulted in everybody going to try AV themselves, and getting the same result as I had). To me, it seems as though the new “Horse Race AV” (as I’ve heard a few people call it now) has sort of defeated the entire purpose of PvP. I can’t help but wonder how long this is going to last.

So it’s a bittersweet victory; yes, we win now, yes, I’m getting tons of marks and honor, but the victory is meaningless and hollow.

At least there are still epic battles on my hordie’s battlegroup. The Horse Race mentality has not spread there (yet, anyway) and Horde still wins by 400 reinforcements after super long matches. Victories take longer but it’s much more fun. (Oh, and no lag.)

How has everybody else’s AV changed? Or has it for you?

Everyday I'm Huntering