Mystic Worlds

RP in MMORPG: Lovin’ Azeroth Advisor

My recent find of Living Sims (LS), an actual interior design magazine for The Sims, got me thinking about what makes the role-playing in a game come alive for me.  Clearly, this group of artists and TS fans takes that game very seriously.  I personally haven’t felt like that about a game in several years. Perhaps I won’t ever feel like that about a game again.  That’s a sad thought.

Back in my days of playing Asheron’s Call 2, I felt that way – inspired by the character I played to do something that reached beyond the confines of AC2’s virtual space.  I wrote many role-playing short stories, wrote a monthly column on Warcry and built picture journals that I shared online with other gaming enthusiasts.  Even though I haven’t been inspired at an RP level since AC2, my excitement about gaming and whatever fun I’m having, turns into lots of blog posts and photo albums.

Encouraged by the helpfulness of LS – yes, I took away some design tips for when I start playing The Sims 3, I decided to check out Azeroth Advisor for World of Warcraft.  If you’re not familiar with Azeroth Advisor, it’s an add-on developed by Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios that sends you a regularly scheduled and personalized newsletter for your WOW character.

Inside your personalized Azeroth Advisor newsletter:

• Zones & instances for your experience level
• Harvesting zones for your profession level
• New spells, abilities and talents
• Tips for using class defining abilities
• Unique gear upgrades you should consider
• Bits of lore and fluff about your class
• Notable lore characters of the same class
• Grouping etiquette and tips
• Comparison of your base stats vs. other players

Color me Purple

The next workshop in the screenwriting series I’m attending this summer starts this week.  I’m eager to be underway again.  I’m also looking forward to receiving feedback on the edits I’ve made since the last course.  Still multi-boxing my trio in World of Warcraft, I really wanted to reach level 40 before the long evenings of writing begin again and I did.

Two things come with hitting level 40 that I was excited about reaching.  First is access to a faster ground mount, which is very beneficial since I’m zigzagging zones a lot more.  Three linked characters means that I finish the quests I’m interested in doing in an area very quickly.  I can even do more of the collection quests, something you typically skip when multi-boxing, since getting 10 pig ears across three characters can be tedious.  However, with higher level Holy Nova x2 and Arcane Explosion, I’m finding that doing them for quests intended for my level is easier.  Plus there are some zones that I just like – the view, ambiance and the mobs.  After I’ve completed the quests on my list, I sometimes linger and AOE grind.  The coastline of Stranglethorn Vale would be one of the places that I find rather soothing in WOW.

I just started messing with using the trio to AOE.  Having never played a mid level Mage before, I started by doing what I recall seeing other Mages do – freeze mobs in place then Blizzard them dead with the Priests bubbling and healing.  Recently, it dawned on me that just running the trio in together and letting them do Holy Nova and Arcane Explosion was MUCH FASTER.  When Holy Nova was a talent in the Holy tree it was very inefficient as a damage spell because the mana consumption was so high.  One or two uses and you were dry.  Many Priests purchased the spell but down ranked it to level 1, and only used it as a means of breaking rogue stealth in PVP.  Now that it’s a purchased spell, it does nice damage and consumes less mana. 

Trio Stylin' and Mounted

My multi-box trio is about to hit level 40.  It’s happened very quickly in my opinion.  So much so, that I stopped trying to complete each zone.  I started skipping around to the quests I remembered liking most and have only farmed mobs here and there for crafting materials.  My Warlock does tailoring for the trio to fill in their gaps in gear.  When I needed silk to make them all new boots and sashes, it was easier to have the trio farm the cloth so they’d get XP for the effort as well as the materials.  I like seeing big fat ogres go boom, as they drop with an earth rumbling thud at my feet.

Scarlet Monastery (SM) is one of my favorite instances.  For me, it was the first of the lowbie instances you run multiple times for the rewards – gear for yourself, cloth for crafting or to sell, sellable Bind-on-Equip items for the Auction House and vendor trash (gold).  It’s the first introduction to what end gaming raid feels like in World of Warcraft.  It’s the first time I recall needing to know the intricacies of each instance wing.  It’s the first piece of instanced content that has an attunement of sorts – you need to loot the Scarlet key from the box in Doan’s Chamber, to gain entry into the Cathedral and Armory wings.   And it was the first time as a Warlock, I was told to cast certain de-buffs (Recklessness) on the mobs to prevent them from running away and returning with additional combatants.   The instances before SM were pretty much spank-n-tank.  SM is the one I recall waking me up to how instanced content, as well as the coordination and planning required, manifested itself in WOW.

Bit More Blogging. Shock-n-Horror in WOW

The first Screenwriting Workshop has ended.  I now have a two week hiatus until the next workshop in the series begins.  I didn’t walk away with a completed script.  A flaw was revealed rather late in the game which necessitated a large plot change – meaning stop the presses, fix the plot and re-write.  Regardless, I’m still pleased with where I ended.

Summer is a little less hectic at work.  Not because the amount of work slows down but the amount of meetings drop off significantly as a result of people taking vacation.  This means you actually get to work during the workday.  *GASP*  As apposed to being in meetings all day and working during the late afternoon into early evening.  Have I mentioned recently how much I hate being in Corporate America?  Probably have, uh?

Feeling slightly less stressed at work means, I feel better at the end of the workday, which turns my heart and attention to gaming.  I’m still tickled by my little multi-boxing adventure.  I recently transferred my own level 70s to a fourth account so that I could start the process of learning to 4-box in a tank.  I had a level 43 Paladin sitting on Whisperwind to use for practice.  When I grabbed my level 70 characters, I was shocked and dismayed to find that when I’d grouped up all our max level characters and allowed my nephew to play the “monster account”, he’d changed professions but never leveled up what he’d selected.

Multi-Boxing WOW’s 5-Man Content

My tri-box leveling experiment in World of Warcraft has been moving along smoothly.  I have most of the kinks worked out for coordinating combat.  It’s less tool controlled and not as sophisticated as the setups I’ve read about on Dual-boxing.com.  Yet it works for me.  Now that I understand the underlying mechanics of multi-boxing, I might revisit my setup.

The quick nature of WOW combat hadn’t entered my mind when I decided to give multi-boxing a try.  It was comments from my previous posts on the subject made me nod my head in agreement – yes, WOW combat can be very fast, which makes multi-boxing more challenging.  Not paying attention when I was running the trio to Scarlet Monastery ended in a wipe.  I walked them right into a cluster of level 15 elite mobs that are on a parallel road to SM.  By the time I looked over and realized what I had done, I didn’t switch control off the dead main character in time to run away and save the other two.  Or the strange way Mind Flay sometimes gets cast on something other than the intended target, even though all the other attacks from the character just before Mind Flay in the macro landed on the right target.  This oddity with that one spell sometimes pulls adds that pound us into the dirt.  Yep, things can get out of control very quickly in WOW combat.

More Nits-n-Grits of Multi-Boxing WOW

As an addition to my earlier post on multi-boxing World of Warcraft, here are a few more details for a base setup.  Just some more technical items for people who’d like to give this a try.  I don’t have time to dress up the wording so excuse the direct approach of a bullet list.

Getting Started

• Choose your chars and their classes.  Decide which of them will be your main/leader.  That character is going to pull aggro so they need to be able to take a punch but that doesn’t mean for leveling purposes that it needs to be a real tank class.  Any class will do just understand they will get hit often and plan accordingly.
• Choose near identical names if you’re on a PVP server or will participate in Battlegrounds.  Sure, it may confuse you at times too in the beginning but it will make it much harder for opponents to identify who they want to focus fire down.  For that reason, I’m also keeping mine dressed the same since they can all wear cloth.  I haven’t done BGs yet but I plan to in the upper 30s.

I suggest using Keyclone to pass keys to all of your characters at a minimum.  However, there are many other great features you can use if you’re going to do this for several levels such as:

1. Defining do-not-pass keys – for me, these are activities reserved for the leader from whom all of my gaming encounters take place through.  Selecting combat targets, chatting with other players, opening mods, etc. are all mapped to keys that will not get passed to the passive/slave/following characters.
2. Establishing Override Settings – this is a keybind that pauses Keyclone.  I need this for chatting so that I’m not sending the stream of strokes to the others and macro work is done paused for the same reason.
3. Configuring the Maximizer – allows you to create a screen layout for your copies and say which character is loaded into which pane.  As far as I’m aware, you can’t do this unless you’ve created multiple copies of WOW as each one is mapped to a WOW.exe file. 
4. Using the Command Editor - You can go the additional route of mapping each to a character by providing the login name and you can use Keyclone to launch WOW, put characters in the correct pane and have the log-in name only, already sitting there.

Multi-Boxing World of Warcraft

What do you do when you’re re-subscribed to WOW to help a cousin, who also subscribed but hands you her account and bails?  Hmm, I have it, you multi-box.

I tiptoed my way through minor league multi-boxing last year.  It was during a time in WOW when I was getting very bored.  Having done it a tiny bit back then, I knew where to head for updated information on this eccentric approach to MMO gaming, Dual-boxing.com.

Reading through the forums, my eyes crossed at the setups people were talking about, even on the low-end and simple.  I didn’t want to download a bunch of stuff or mess with a lot of techno-geek strategies.  I decided that I’d macro my setup as much as possible so that I understood the core mechanics and use Keyclone for keystroke management like I had before.

I decided to do fresh characters for the experiment and roll on a PVE server.  No way in heck I wanted to attempt this bit of insanity while dealing with PVP.  Off to Whisperwind I went, where I had a mid level alchemist and tailor to help outfit my trio.  Hell no to grinding professions for the umpteenth time in WOW.  For some insane reason, dual boxing wasn't good enough.  I wanted to tri-box.  And if by some miracle I stuck with the characters, I could add two more from our stable of accounts and join the hardcore multi-boxers by 5-boxing my way through Blizzard's 5-man content.  I thought it would be a very cool way to see all the dungeons I'd previously missed AND the new ones from WotLK.

From Free Realms to World of Warcraft. How Many More?

I didn’t know there were adults left in the world that wanted to play World of Warcraft and hadn’t yet.  This weekend I learned that they exist.  One of my female cousins called me Saturday afternoon.  We’re not on phone call terms.  I see her at family outings and we chat but we’re not close.  Distance is the primary reason we’re not more like friends.  I grew up in New York City.  She grew up in Oregon.

She got my number from my mother after hearing somehow that I play games on the internet.  Come to find out that she plays The Sims and her recent foray in a massive title, Free Realms, piqued her interest to play another game she’s heard people discussing at work.  Now that she’d bought a new PC, she really wanted to give the “other” game a try.

I did my best to convince her that she should try Runes of Magic.  Warts and all, you can’t beat the value of it as a free-to-play MMO.  I suggested that she test drive that to know if she’d even like a traditional MMO, which Free Realms isn’t.  “No,” she replied, “I have my heart set on trying Worldcraft.”  Conversation freezes.  With an eyebrow raised to my hairline, I turn into the camera for a Ferris Bueller sidebar response with the audience, “Oohkay.”  She knew what she wanted.  Who am I to tell her otherwise? 

PVE + PVP + CC = Years of Tears

Wow, Blizzard is still finding new and exciting ways to nerf the Fear mechanic?  That saying about how "some things never change" certainly applies in this case.  Good Lord, why hasn't it been removed and replaced with something more palatable.  How long can you really have people crying over a crowd control mechanic before you just say...  I won't say what came to mind.  LOL

Should I be surprised that it’s been years of tears about a crowd control mechanic in World of Warcraft?  As someone who played a Warlock from BETA, to release and then as my main for three years before choosing another class, I’ve heard all there is to hear about Fear.  I played on a PVP server from day one and I’ve experienced more than I want to know about being stun-locked.  No one complains about these mechanics in a PVE context.  It’s all about how they play out in PVP that pisses players off. 

I was not a "lead with Fear and DOT until you die" sort of Warlock, unless I had no other option.  I played a Warlock back when they were a joke and the first thing dead on the field.  I stuck with it because casters with pets are my favorite class and the Warlock was fun to solo.  Playing with one doing PVE content was great.  Fighting one was annoying once they became a wee bit OP, if I wasn’t on my own Warlock at the time.  *Smile*

WAR Crafting: One Down. One to Go.

Last night I completed my  first Warhammer Online profession, Cultivating.  I could have been done last week.  I was sitting at 195 but didn’t bother growing the final five seeds needed to finish it out.  I’ve been a bit miffed at being stuck in the 130s in Apothecary due to a lack of the correct level of water.  As a result, finishing Cultivating felt rather pointless.  The deciding factor to finish it out was that my bank vault is completely full of herbs for Apothecary, so the seeds just had to go.  It was either grow them and hope they sprouted something that would add into one of the existing stacks of components, sell them on the AH for a pittance or simply chuck them.  I opted to finish it and and be done with it.  I feel confident that Mythic will get around to bolstering the deficient aspects of crafting and when they do, I'll already be set.

I was however, surprised not to see a Tome unlock?? I looked through the Tome three times but didn't see any sort of entry related to crafting.  I find that odd in a game that marks so many of your milestones including a laundry list of crazy and frivolous notations.  It's strange not to have one for the crafting professions.