I used to maintain the FAQ for alt.games.warcraft and am hosting the last version I published. It is included at the end of this page.
The new maintainer, Christian Stauffer, will be publishing current copies here.
Past versions of the faq can be found here:| 2006-01-06 (last version posted by Mel) |
| 2006-01-06 - 2006-10-30 (zipped archive) |
| 2006-12-08 (current version) |
I am no longer maintaining the FAQ for alt.games.warcraft. If you are interested in maintaining it, please get in touch with me in a.g.w or use the contact address published on my homepage.
| Urbin | (60) | Dwarven Hunter | (PvE) | @dunmorogh.de |
| Sunh | (60) | Nightelven Priest | (PvE) | @dunmorogh.de |
| Juran | (30) | Nightelven Druid | (PvE) | @dunmorogh.de |
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alt.games.warcraft FAQ Urbin, 2006-12-08
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FAQ MAINTAINER WANTED
---------------------
I am no longer maintaining this faq due to time reasons. For the time
being I will still host it and will keep the link to it in my signature
but am looking for a new maintainer.
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Maintainer
----------
This FAQ is maintained by Urbin. It is posted to alt.games.warcraft
on a (more or less) bi-weekly basis. It can also be found at
www.ursbeeli.ch/wow/agw_faq.txt
Submissions to the faq
----------------------
If you want to submit additions to the faq please post them on a.g.w with
a subject that starts with [+FAQ]. If you believe a post should be added
please follow up to it and add [+FAQ] to the header of your follow up.
Due to spam problems I do not want to add a valid e-mail address to it
yet but I will try to think of a web-form solution for the future (though
may be the far future).
Disclaimer
----------
The answers below are real answers to real questions posted in a.g.w.
There is no quality control at the moment. So if the answer isn't good
enough, re-ask or post corrections using the [+FAQ] tag.
If one of your posts has been added to the faq and you want it to be
removed, just post a note with the [+FAQ] tag on a.g.w.
Credits
-------
Credits go to Mel (Xaexa, flirty-sulky Undead Mage on Kirin Tor RP PVE
(FR)) who started collecting posts and assembled them into a faq. She
maintained it until 2006-01-20. She temporarily left on 2006-02-06 for a
while but happily is back again.
Further credits go to all posters of a.g.w contributing both to the faq
and a lively newsgroup. Where possible I will attribute the people whose
posts I have used in the faq.
To do
-----
- compile new mount rule questions
- compile new PvP honour/reward system questions
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Table of content
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0 About the group
0.1 Topicality
0.2 Is guild recruitment appropriate here?
1 Information
1.1 Information on quests, NPCs, items, etc
1.2 Where can I get addons
1.3 Where can I get patches
1.4 Other external resources
1.5 Common acronyms for places names
1.6 WoW terms explained
1.7 Talent planning
2 User Interface (UI)
2.1 Joining a chat from another zone (broken since patch 1.9)
2.2 How does enchanting work?
2.3 Autobuffing Mod?
2.4 How do I use my wand ????
2.5 Chat types (/s /p /g...)
2.6 Auction House
2.7 Auctioneer and its limitations
2.8 Quest, mob and profession colours
2.9 Mail storage
2.10 Cross faction communication
2.11 Clicking shortcuts
2.12 Turning off the LFG channel
3 Class questions
3.1 How do I get new abilities to train my pet?
3.2 Warlock leveling build suggestion
3.3 Shadow priest leveling build suggestion
3.4 Rogue talents
3.5 Various hunter pet questions
3.6 Trading aggro using Feign Death
3.7 Warlock pets
3.8 Paladin levelling build suggestion
3.9 Warrior levelling build suggestion
4 Game mechanics
4.1 +damage on spells (inaccurate since patch 1.9)
4.2 Learning pvp
4.3 Kiting
4.4 Threat, aggro, tanking and pulling
4.5 Stopping runners (using hamstring)
4.6 Dying in instances and instance respawn
4.7 Crowd control (CC)
4.8 Leveling up fishing
4.9 Professions and skills
4.10 Aggro debunked
4.11 Achieving the 45 minute baron run
4.12 Looting
4.13 Weapon speed
4.14 Stacking of enchantments
4.15 Aggro calculation
5 Game world
5.1 Endgame and High Level Instances
5.2 Getting ready for end game instances
5.3 Instances linked to professions
5.4 Stratholme rovers
5.5 Sets
6 Technical & Customer support
6.1 Moving characters between accounts
6.2 lag (lengthy)
6.3 Difference between lag and latency (very brief :-)
6.4 Taking screenshots
6.5 Running WoW on Gentoo Linux
6.6 Channels stopped working
6.7 I deleted the background downloader
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======================================================================
0 About the group
======================================================================
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0.1 Topicality
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As the name of the group implies alt.games.warcraft is the appropriate
place to ask about any of the Warcraft games, although most traffic
nowadays concerns World of Warcraft.
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0.2 Is guild recruitment appropriate here?
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From: burnsdavidj
Before commiting a faux pas, just wondering if this group has any norms
around guild recruitment here? The WoW FAQ posted here occasionally
(which is quite helpful actually) doesn't have much to say on the
matter IIRC.
At the very least the response to this post should establish a usenet
best practice for alt.games.warcraft. ;)
From: Steve Kaye
Personally, I don't have a problem with it. I do think that it is
kinda pointless though. People on this news group are a very small
subset of the player base and some are US based and some are EU based.
All in all you'll be very lucky to find a lot of people reading the
group who are on your server and your faction.
A better place would probably be your server's section in the WoW
forums. (or isn't there also a guild recruitment forum)
From: PV
Don't do it. Guild recruitment is by definition realm specific, and
this group is about warcraft in general. Chances are good that there
are no unguilded people on your server who read here. And why would you
want to send out a recruitment message here anyway? That should happen
in-game, or at worst on the official realm forums. *
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======================================================================
1 Information
======================================================================
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1.1 Information on quests, NPCs, items, etc
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Check out the following sites for very specific information and
spoilers:
http://www.thottbot.com
http://wow.allakhazam.com
http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/
http://wow-loot.com/
For German speakers there is another useful site (apart from listing game
items and quests it also shows both the German and English names for
entries):
http://www.blasc.de
Another handy site for German speakers is the WoW route planner found
at:
http://www.wow-routenplaner.de/
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1.2 Where can I get addons
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Check out the following sites
http://www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php
http://ui.worldofwar.net
http://www.wowinterface.com
http://www.ctmod.net/news.ct
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1.3 Where can I get patches
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Apart from using the official Blizzard patch download, many sites list
the patches as single files instead of the bit-torrent based approach
Blizzard uses.
These sites have listed patches for download in the past:
http://guildcurse2.free.fr/wowpatch/
http://de.wowguru.com/patches/
http://www.fileplanet.com/100462/0/section/Patches
http://worldofwarcraft.filefront.com/files/World_of_Warcraft/Official_Releases/Patches;5994
http://www.gamershell.com/patch_download_archive_W.html?orderby=name
This site carries only the deDE patches:
http://www.4players.de/4players.php/spielinfo/PC-CDROM/1873/World_of_WarCraft.html
http://wowsource.4players.de/index.html
Here's the wowwiki page with almost hourly updated lists of patch mirrors
with the patches:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors
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1.4 Other external links
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http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/ Official US site
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/ Official EU english site
http://www.wow-europe.com/de/ Official EU german site
http://www.wow-europe.com/fr/ Official EU french site
http://www.wowwiki.com/
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1.5 common acronyms for place names (UBRS? TB?...)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
TB Thunder Bluff
ORG Orgrimmar (Ogremart) *note the "r"; ORgrimmar and not Ogrimmar
XR Crossroads
UC Undercity
TM Tarren Mill
IF Ironforge
SW Stormwind
SS Southshore
BB Booty Bay
AH Auction House
BG Battle Ground
STV Stranglethorn Vale
WS Winterspring
BL Blasted Lands
EPL Eastern Plaguelands
WPL Western Plaguelands
MDN Maraudon
RFC Ragefire Chasm
RFD Razorfen Downs
RFK Razorfen Kraul
WC Wailing Caverns
SM Scarlet Monastery
SFK Shadowfang Keep
BFD Blackfathom Deep
ZF Zul'Farak (also ZUL)
UDM Uldaman
ST Sunken Temple
DM Deadmines (if you are low lvl)
DM Dire Maul (for high level) (DB on german servers)
often east/west/north added on at the end
VC Deadmines (refers to end boss VanCleef, to distinguish it from
Dire Mail)
BRD Blackrock Depths (BRT on german servers)
LBRS/UBRS Lower/Upper Blackrock Spire
MC Molten Core (40 person raid instance)
BWL Blackwing Lair
ZG Zul'Gurub (20 person raid instance)
AQ Ahn'Quiraj (a 20 and 40 person raid instance)
AQ20 The 20 person raid instance part of AQ
AQ40 The 40 person raid instance part of AQ
AB Arathi Basin battlegrounds
AV Alterac Valley battlegrounds
WSG Warsong Gulch battlegrounds
You can also find a list and further links under the following link:
https://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-newcomers-en&t=19725&p=1&tmp=1#post19725
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1.6 WoW terms explained
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Extracted from posts by: mikel, Catriona, Chris Stauffer/Wildcard, Mel
Brian, Marshall, Thomas J. Boschloo, Erick Pelden, Veldron.
"Ganking" is a term used to describe a high level player killing another
player a long way below their level
"Griefing" is trying to ruin the game experience of others.
Ganking is a special case of griefing.
"Mob" is usually said to derive from Mobile, from far more ancient games
(MUDs, specifically). The canonical usage is for a single creature in the
game world.
"Kiting" refers to a technique where you "kite" the mob behind you, while
he can't hit you but still gets damage (due to DoT for example). Check
out 4.3 for more information on kiting. It also explains "reverse
kiting".
"DoT" Damage over time. Usually a spell or special attack that deals out
a certain amount of damage over a certain time.
"HoT" Heal over time. A spell that restores a certain amount of health
over a certain time.
"AoE" Area of Effect. Spells that affect all players/NPCs/mobs in a
certain area, not just the target. (Used for healing and damage).
"AFK" Away from keyboard
"DND" Do not disturb
"OOM" Out of mana
"MT" Main tank
"DPS" Damage per second
"Zerg" is a mass rush with overwhelming numbers. The phrase derived from
Starcraft- one of the playable alien races were the 'zergs', and a
favorite player tactic was to quickly amass large quantities of the
lesser zerg types and rush their opponent's base before they had a chance
to build up their strength.
"PvP" Player vs Player. One of the server types, open warfare once you
leave your starting area.
"PvE" Player vs Environment. One of the server types (officially called
"Normal" by Blizzard), truce (you must activate your PvP flag for a member
of the opposing faction to be able to attack you)
"RP" Roleplaying. An addition to the two server types listed above
(->RP-PvP, RP-Normal/RP-PvE). These servers have roleplaying rules (no
sms, stricter name chart etc... many complaints that these rules are
not enforced by Blizzard)
"Main" Typically the character a player plays most often. Sometimes also
referring to the first character played, before starting -> "Alts".
"Alt" Further characters being played by the same player beside his/her
main character.
"Twink" In this context it would be someone either with a more powerful
other char and/or friends who were higher level. Basically the char in
question has gear that he really shouldn't have in a natural setting
(e.g. you see level 19 guys running around with the highest level
enchants and such).
"PUG" Pick Up Group. A group of random players, picked up spontaneously.
"Squishy" Player classes that are easily squashed by a monster because
they can't wear heavy armoer (cloth wearers like priests and mages).
Squishies are usually characters that can't take a lot of up close
fighting damage. These are usually cloth armor wearers like priests and
mages. They are easy to squish with your weapon opposed to a fighter
type wearing lots of plate armor.
"PST" (please send tell). Used as a synonym for "/w me" meaning that
another player should whisper to you.
You can also find a list and further links under the following link:
https://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-newcomers-en&t=19725&p=1&tmp=1#post19725
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
1.7 Talent planning
----------------------------------------------------------------------
There are various talent calculators available, the official ones
provided by Blizzard (link thanks to Erick Pelden) and various inofficial
ones (provided by Moif Murphy, nvrsbr)
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/index.html
http://www.wow-europe.com/de/info/basics/talents/index.html
http://www.wow-europe.com/fr/info/basics/talents/index.html
http://talentcalculator.merciless-gilde.com/
http://www.wowhead.com/talent/
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======================================================================
2 User Interface (UI)
======================================================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.1 Joining a chat from another zone (broken since patch 1.9)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This has become obsoleted with patch 1.11 that introduced the global LFG
channel (refer to 2.12) for more information.
The following solution seems to no longer work since patch 1.9
Anyway, the trick is as follows:
- leave the chat zone that you want to join (ie if it's Orgrimmar, leave
Orgrimmar first, go to UC or elsewhere)
- Remember the *exact* name of the channel you want to join, it shows
when you enter or leave the zone
- Hovering the chat frame will make tabs visible, by default general and
combat
- Right clicking the general tab gives you a menu, somewhere in there is
Join Channel (do not use /join blabla this will not work)
- Enter the name of the channel -> eg: LookingForGroup - Orgrimmar
- it will show a message in your chatlog stating Joined [X.
LookingForGroup - Orgrimmar]
- The channel will show in your chatlog, use /X to chat in it
More chat info here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Chat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.2 How does enchanting work?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Open a trade window with the enchanter, and put the item to be enchanted
in the "Will Not Be Traded" slot at the bottom.
If the item is soulbound, it will go in that slot automatically, because
soulbound items cannot be traded.
If the item isn't soulbound, for example if you just bought it at the
auction house and you haven't actually equipped it yet, you must be
carefulto put it in that trade slot.
Belts, helmets, shoulders, pants, and jewelry cannot be enchanted;
all other armor pieces can be, as well as all weapons. (one enchant or
improvement per armor/weapon)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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2.3 Autobuffing Mod?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Updated by Marco Dieckhoff:
Q: Is there an addon that can auto-cast my 5 min buffs on the shaman ?
A: Yes-no, there _was_. Funnily enough, it was called "AutoBuff".
Blizzard disable movement hooking for addons in 1.10, this is
now considered cheating.
There is an addon "SmartBuff", that reminds you when you or
party/raid members need to be buffed, and can buff everything by
repeated keypresses on a definable key.
To which Andreas added:
Meanwhile, AutoBuff, da man, the Original Gangsta, is back in business.
It's hooked the scroll wheel of the mouse, which is easy enough to flick
absent-mindedly every 5 minutes, but now it also buffs when you change
targets. It's not the same as a timer, I know, but I guarantee you'll
change your target enough that it works out the same as actually being
fully automatic.
http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=1475
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2.4 How do I use my wand ????
----------------------------------------------------------------------
First equip the wand then go to your spell book and the find shoot button
(in general) to use the wand hit shoot to stop wand either move or rehit
button.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.5 Chat types (/s /p /g...)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Some channels are sticky, i.e. when you next press Enter or '/' you will
speak in that channel. Others are not, i.e. they will not change the
current sticky channel
/s say, it appears in white for people who are within a certain range
plus (unless disabled in the ui options) appears in a comic type
speech bubble above your head (sticky)
/y yell, appears in red for everybody in a wide zone (I think ?)
use sparringly, most find this highly annoying (exceptions :
RP servers with an RP use)
/w whisper, needs a name (/w Urbin wanna join my group)
whispers somebody, only that person can hear you, appears in
magenta. use 'r' to respond and TAB to cycle through history
of whisperers
/t tell, afaik the same as /w *somebody correct me if i'm wrong*
/g Guild, goes to all your guild, in light green (sticky)
/o Officer, goes to all officers of your guild, in dark green
/p Party, Everything written after /p appears to your party only
in blue (sticky)
/raid Raid, goes to the whole raid group, in orange (sticky?)
And there are also the public channels:(default numbers, these may
change after leaving or adding private channels)
/1 General channel
/2 Trade channel (only in some cities)
/3 Local defense channel
/4 Looking for group channel
You can link items into all private channels and /2 (also works for other
channels but non-clickable) by shift-left clicking it. You can also add
the name of a quest into the channel by shift left clicking it.
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2.6 Auction House
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Catriona R
> If i sell a item or put a item up for sale on a auction , will the
> money just land in my pocket or do i have to go back to the actual
> auction house in that location that i put the item up for sale.
It'll come in your mail, so you can get it from any mailbox in the world
once the auction ends. You still have to return to an auction house to
check the progress of the auction (if anyone has placed a bid on it for
example), but the final results will always be in your mailbox.
> If it does not sell , do they charge a fee?
Sort of; they charge a fee to list the item, which you get back if it
sells and don't if it doesn't, but you won't get charged an additional
fee. The auction houses also take a small percentage of the sale price of
an item when it sells; it doesn't affect lower priced sales very much but
when you get into prices of many gold you'll often find yourself losing a
fair amount in taxes.
Gleamed form posts of: Firian, C F, Paul - Catskills & Scarlet Crusade
The Auction Houses of each faction are linked. There are nine of them
in total:
Ironforge - Stormwind - Darnassus
Gadgetzan - Booty Bay - Everlook
Ogrimmar - Thunder Bluff - Undercity
Simon Nejman explaining AH fees (Horde & Alliance, Goblins charge more):
DH> As long as we're at it, what determines the deposit? Percentage?
Vendor price and listing time.
I just experimented a bit with some items. I this chart I have the
vendor price, and the AH deposits at 2, 8 and 24 hour listings (prices
are in silver - eg. 200,00 = 2 gold):
Vendor 2h 8h 24h
200,00 10,00 40,00 120,00
52,00 2,60 10,40 31,20
42,50 2,12 8,48 25,44
30,00 1,50 6,00 18,00
22,50 1,12 4,48 13,44
It should now be easy to see that the AH takes a fixed percentage of
the vendor price in listing deposit.
2 hours = 5%
8 hours = 20%
24 hours = 60%
The deposit fee is refunded to you if your sale is succesful. If you
retract the auction or if your item does not sell, the AH keeps the
deposit fee. In case of a succesful sale, the AH takes a percentage cut
of the price your item sold for (x% for the faction AH, 20% for the
neutral AH). The breakdown of the fees and cuts is listed in the mail
you get delivering your money.
Complementing the information above from information found at WoWWiki
(http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Auction_House)
Faction AH Neutral AH
Deposit 2 hours 5% 25% of vendor price
Deposit 8 hours 20% 100% of vendor price
Deposit 24 hours 60% 300% of vendor price
Fee if sold 5% 15% of price sold for
The deposit is payable when you list an item, if it is sold, this
amount is returned to you. The fee is payable when an item sells
(deducted automatically from your price).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.7 Auctioneer and its limitations (lengthy)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Assembled from various articles by Chris Stauffer/Wildcard.
Additions by chocolatemal & Chizel
Disenchanting value by Nabuu & Catriona R
[Chizel]Auctioneer can be gotten from www.auctioneeraddon.com (the
version on curse is out of date).
I second that. Auctioneer is nice to see what items sell for to vendors,
but that's it. And it's nice to see what an item can go for when it isn't
listed in the AH. (Correction pointed out by PhilHibbs: Vendor prices are
a function of the "Informant" mod, which may come bundled with Auctioneer
depending on what bundle you downloaded.)
But:
- It can't show what an item sells for. It only shows what an item is
listed for. If I wanted to be a smartass I could point out that the
prices which Auctioneer collects are those of items that haven't been
sold (yet), which means they are either too high (for buyouts) or
too low (for actual bids, because it could as well be that those bids
are increased before the item actually sold). One could say that
auctioneer is only listing wrong prices.
- Prices change a lot. Even when scanning the AH regularly, I never put
an item in the AH without checking what the items that are right now
listed go for. Why should I put my green item to a buyout of 5g, when
the same item is there for 4g50?
Why Auctioneer *cannot* tell you buyout prices:
Auctioneer, when scanning the AH, can't see more than you can.
It can see what items are there, what minimum bids they have, what
current bids (if any) they have, and what buyout.
It CAN'T tell you what an item actually sold for.
How the AH suggests prices without Auctioneer:
WoW suggests prices that are based on the vendor price. It doesn't take
a genious to find out that they can't be any realistic in an open
economy.
The vendor price for a golden pearl (level ~ 45 green item) is about
50s if I remember correctly. It sells for about 20g, because it is
quite hard to come by. A stack of 10 rugged leather (level 50 white
item) has a vendor price of 5x10 = 50s. You can be very happy if you
can sell it for 1g (at the moment you can get more, because of the war
efforts, but that's only a temporary effect). Because there are tons of
it. WoW would of course suggest the same minimum bid and buyout for
those two things, although the golden perl will sell for 20g and the
stack of leather may barely sell for 1g.
Why the prices by Auctioneer can be off:
Example? I'm currently levelling a warlock and twinking him with
cheap stuff from the AH. Some smart guy listed a level 25 pair of
green leggings for 3g. Noone will buy this. He'll list it again
for 2g. Noone will buy it. He'll list it again for 1g. Someone
may buy it now. If you scanned all these 3 auctions, you have an
average price of (3 + 2 + 1) / 3g = 2g. But the item didn't go
for 2g, it went for 1g (if it even has been sold). Maybe even
for less, because it hasn't been bought out, but someone placed
a bid on it - let's say 50s. So, even though the item has been
sold for 50s, auctioneer thinks a buyout of 2g would be great.
Nothing against auctioneer, it's a handy tool, but as long as
you trust it with your eyes shut, it isn't too much of a
benefit.
How to set AH prices based on existing listings:
Before you put an item to an auction, have a look at what prices others
sell it at the moment.
Let me give you one more example. We have an item (A).
This item is found 5x at the AH:
- (A), 50s bid, 1g buyout
- (A), 60s bid, 1g20 buyout
- (A), 70s bid, 1g40 buyout
- (A), 80s bid, 1g60 buyout
- (A), 90s bid, 1g80 buyout
When I look at this, I'd say this item sells for 90s-1.1g. The prices
above 1.40g are fantasy prices, they won't sell. I would list my item
for 90s bid and 90s buyout, which means it will most likely sell for
90s.
If you scan the AH with auctioneer, it will tell you the average bid is
70s, the average buyout is 1g40. If you put your item to the AH now,
auctioneer will suggest something like 65s bid, 1g30 buyout.
If we now look at the AH again:
- (A), 50s bid, 1g buyout
- (A), 60s bid, 1g20 buyout
- (A), 65s bid, 1g30 buyout <- your item
- (A), 70s bid, 1g40 buyout
- (A), 80s bid, 1g60 buyout
- (A), 90s bid, 1g80 buyout
Now, I want to buy item (A). I wouldn't take your auction, there are 2
that are cheaper. As long as you price an item in the medium scale,
it's quite unlikely you'll sell it.
[ch]Looking at your example above, I'd have to say that how you price
your auction depends very much on what is being sold, and when.
If your list is of stacks of healing potions, and there are only 5, and
it's about 5pm server time and the evening population is ramping up...
those stacks will be gone within an hour and you can safely sell your
stack at 99s bid, 1g99s buyout and be pretty sure it will sell shortly
despite being more expensive than the others.
If your list is of some green armor, then you'd be lucky to get a sale
at all and would be wise to sell at less than the lowest prices in the
list (or just vendor it if you can't get more than a 50% markup).
Disenchanting value
> > I see the "value of disenchanting" that item. Why would I want to
> > disenchant it, and why would that give it additional value?
>
> That's a function of Auctioneer. The basic idea is to give you a way
> to decide whether to auction the item as is, or disenchant it for
> materials and sell the materials. (Correction by PhilHibbs: "Value of
> disenchanting" is also not Auctioneer, but another mod called
> "Enchantrix" which also may come bundled with Auctioneer.)
Keep in mind that Auctioneer tells you the AVERAGE disenchant value.
Many items disenchant into items randomly selected from a table and
maybe you'll get really good disenchants, and maybe you'll get really
cheap stuff. And, of course, Auctioneer can't know what people will
bid in the future, only what they've bid in the past. Still, it all
works out on average, but just keep all that in mind.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.8 Quest, mob and profession colours
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The same colour codes are used to indicate difficulty and/or chance
of gaining skill/XP. These colour codes are used for mobs, quests and
professions.
From: flame_thrower (quoting Burt Johnson for 'Red')
Grey - no or minimal xp from doing the quest - none from kills is a fair
guess
Green - should be easy
Yellow - Now or in the next two levels or known as "just right"
Orange - you can try but you are more likely to succeed in a group
Red - try this if you really want to die a lot
though keep in mind if it has (complete) on it you may just be able
to walk to somebody without anything else and get some xp.
From: Brian
Each quest has a level associated with it. Various mods can uncover these
levels for you, but it's not neccesary. Basically, the quests are rated
the same way mobs are.
Yellow is +/- 2 levels from your current.
Orange is +3 or +4.
Red is +5 or more.
Green is -3 to -X (the number of levels below you that a quest goes from
green to gray varies as you level. At level 10, it's only down to -5
or -6. At level 60, it can be as low as -12 and still be green).
Gray is everything else.
From: Sprite/Sue
I'm finding at level 45 the colour guidance is of no use.
Yellow quest - killing green mobs?
Red quest - killing 3 yellow mobs?
From: Chris Stauffer/Wildcard with comments by Brian
In addition, some quests have little tags next to them:
- [Elite]: You will have to kill one or more elite mobs. Elite mobs have
a lot more health, they dish out more damage and have more
special abilities than normal mobs. It may be possible you
can do this quest while it is at your level, but you'll have
to be good.
[Brian]For elite quests, you'll pretty much need to either
find a group or wait until the quest has gone green.
- [Dungeon]: You will have to go to an instance to complete this quest.
Instances are special (instanced) areas, filled with elite
mobs and with bosses. Forget to even try this alone when
the quest is for your level (= yellow), you'll need a team
of at least 4 people of appropriate level
- [PvP]: You will have to kill mobs/NPCs that will flag you for PvP and
alarm the enemy faction in their LocalDefense channels
- [Raid]: [Brian] This indicates that the quest can be completed by a group
of more than 5 people (and, in most cases, will require a large
number of people. 20-40.)
From: Christian Stauffer/Wildcard
The colors do have the "same" meaning everywhere you meet them. In the
context of recipes:
- Grey: If you make this item / perform this action (skin the beast, melt
ore), you won't get a level up of this skill
- Green: You may get a level up
- Yellow: It's quite likely you'll get a level up
- Orange: It's very likely you'll get a level up
- Red: You can't craft this item / perform the action yet
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.9 Mail storage
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mel
I have managed to avoid the last two bank slots by careful use of mailbox
storage.
If you have a lot of stuff that you need regularily, but have no place at
the bank, mail it to an alt. The alt must hit "return" without collecting
the mail. This sends it back to your main, where your main can pick it up
at any mail box at any time. Your main shouldn't open the message until
the contents is needed.
I keep stuff such as spare cloth for bandages, potions, leather that I
want to hand in for the war effort but don't have a full stack yet, fish
in small quantities etc in the mailbox. I also keep all my presents
(flowers, rings etc) so that I can get them quickly from nearly anywhere
without cluttering up my bank (the bank is for soulbound (mostly dresses)
and quest items) and odd things I have found but don't yet know what to
do with (mojo potion?), raw stuff to be cooked later (I'd rather
send the whole lot off in one go to my chef than by bits 'n pieces),
fishing bait & baubles that sort of stuff.
Just remember to not open the mail until you need the object, that way
you can keep it for a month in the mailbox. and if you only needed 2 of a
stack of 5, send the rest back to your alt, rince & repeat.
I felt so stupid when I realised I could do this, after throwing away a
couple of quest rewards because I simply didn't want to spend those 50
gold on the extra bag slot at the bank... and because the delay of
logging of, logging mule, sending, waiting 1 h etc was to much of a
hassle.
A follow up from: Burt Johnson, Mel and Nabuu
> > [Burt Johnson] Why not just create 9 alts? Each has a free bank
> > slot plus personal holding bag, and each first additional bank slot
> > is cheap (10 sp IIRC)
> [Mel] The delay in sending stuff; and the fact that mailboxes are at
> a lot more places than banks.
[Nabuu] While this is true, remember (Burt!) that mailbox storage
requires "churning" every 29 days. Stuff can stay and rot in the bank
for eons.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.10 Cross faction communication
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Alastair" wondered:
There is something I have been wondering for a while is there a mod that
can translate the opposite factions common speak into something even
remotely understandable (if it is of course at all possible)?
The reason I ask this, is that the word 'bur' continually seems to pop-up
in speech bubbles of the opposite faction, which got me to thinking if
someone has actually ever sat down and with a friend tried to do a
translation and adapt it into a mod or not?
Would this be considered a form of cheating, knowing what the opposite
faction is saying?
Jack D answered:
Check this site, contains everything you ever wanted to know about
common translation:
http://projectazeroth.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.11 Clicking shortcuts
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Information posted by: Brian Tkatch, Devast8or, ScratchMonkey
Various click-short cuts to make dealing with items easier exist in the
game:
Right-clicking
- At the bank, this moves an item from your bags to the bank and vice
versa.
- With an open trade window, it moves an item from your bags to the
trade window and vice versa
- At a mailbox, it moves an item from/to the letter (also works with
CT_MailMod
- With a vendor, it buys/sells items
Shift-right-click
- Works when looting, fishing, opening chests, picking herbs, mining a
node, skinning.
- It eliminates the need to click on each item in the loot window.
- Walk up to a mineral node, flower, chest, body etc and
shift-right-click and the gathering will start and the items will be
transferred to your bag with no further interaction. (For minerals,
repeat until the node goes inactive and disappears.)
Alt-click
- Puts up an item on the AH (need to be checked)
Alt-right-click
- With Auctioneer searches the AH for the item you clicked on (removing
the specifications such as "of the monkey"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2.12 Turning off the LFG channel
----------------------------------------------------------------------
As of patch 1.11 all "LookingForGroup" (LFG) channels of each zone have
been merged into one global LFG channel. While this enables people to
grind somewhere in the world while putting together a group to visit some
instance, unfortunately this channel is often being abused for either
asking (more or less) silly questions or even outright spamming.
Various solutions have been suggested to deal with this:
- Turn off the LFG channel completely. Usually this is done with
/leave 4 (or whatever channel number your LFG channel has)
- As an option, the LFG channel can be joined if you need it by
using /join LookingForGroup (or its corresponding name in your
UI language)
- Another option is to stay joined to the LFG channel but to not
display it in your current chat (using the context menu to untick
the channel)
- Taking this option a step further is the creation of a new chat-
tab that only contains the LFG channel, disabling it for the general
chat tab
- Many people suggested disabling LFG in the general chat (with or
without a seperate tab) in combination with the addon CallToArms (CTA)
which allows filtering, searching and specific announcments of grouping
needs.
Before patch 1.9 it had been possible to join the LFG channels of other
zones. Refer to 2.1 for more information to this obsoleted problem.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
======================================================================
3 Class questions
======================================================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.1 How do I get new abilities to train my pet?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Firstly, the Hunter needs to learn the abilities themselved. Passive
abilities such as extra armour and health are bought from the Pet Trainer
who is normally stood near the Hunter Trainer. Growl is also bought from
the Pet Trainer. The other active abilities such as Cower and Dash need
to be learned from other beasts.
To learn an ability from a beast you need to stable your current pet and
go and tame the beast in question. When the beast is tamed it should have
the ability in the pet bar - if it hasn't then you got the wrong beast
and you need to find another. You should now fight alongside the
temporary pet whilst it uses the ability until you get the message that
you have learned the ability. This means that you can't stand at full
range and fire your weapon whilst the pet tanks. You need to be close to
the pet so it is probably best to melee alongside it.
Some good resources for selecting beasts to tame to learn new abilities
are:
http://www.goodintentionsguild.info
http://www.bookofwarcraft.com
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net
When you have learned the abilities they become available in the Beast
Training window and you can now teach your pet providing it has enough
training points available.
One really important thing that no-one has mentioned so far is that
your pet can only have four active abilities. Passive abilities like
natural armor, great stamina, or resistances are unlimited, but things
like growl, bite, claw, charge etc. you can only teach four of. You can
have the skills erased by a hunter trainer, but the cost for doing this
escalates like talent resetting does.
See 3.5 for more hunter and pet related questions
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.2 Warlock leveling build suggestion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'll start off with the Warlock one. There are a lot of possibilities to
play the Warlock, but this is how I'd level him now, as this focus on
reducing your downtime and lets you get accustomed to some typical
Warlock tricks early in the game.
L10-14-> Demonic Embrace 5/5
L15-19-> Improved Corruption 5/5
L20-24-> Improved Drain Life 5/5
L25-29-> Fel Concentration 5/5
L30-31-> Nightfall 2/2
L32-33-> Improved Life Tap 2/2
L34-> Grim Reach 1/2
L35-> Siphon Life 1/1
L36-> Grim Reach 2/2
L37-39-> Suppression 2/5
L40-44-> Shadow Mastery 5/5
L45-49-> Improved Shadow Bolt 5/5
L50-54-> Bane 5/5
L55-> Shadowburn 1/1
L56-59-> Devastation 5/5
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.3 Shadow priest leveling build suggestion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shadow Priest leveling talents I use for my priest. Found on the WoW
forums. A level 60 priest might be able to comment on those.
L10-14-> Spirit Tap (5/5)
L15-16-> Imp SW:P (2/2)
L17-19-> Blackout (3/5)
L20-> Mindflay (1/1)
L21-22-> Blackout (5/5)
L23-24-> Shadow Focus (2/5)
L25-27-> Shadow Reach (3/3)
L28-29-> Shadow Focus (4/5)
L30-34-> Shadow Weaving (5/5)
L35-38-> Darkness (4/5)
L39-> Vampiric Embrace (1/1)
L40-> Shadowform (1/1)
L41-> Darkness (5/5)
L42-43-> Imp Psychic Scream (2/2)
L44-> Silence (1/1)
L45-49-> Unbreakable Will (5/5)
L50-54-> Wand Spec (5/5)
L54-59-> Mental Agility (5/5)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.4 Rogue talents
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Summaries of typical rogue builds posted by Brian
20/31/0 - Sword/Combat
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/rogues/talents.html?30530310500000000230550100050150031000000000000000000
Pros: Maximum sustained damage potential, easy to play.
Cons: No Improved crowd control, fewer dirty tricks, hard to
stunlock.
21/8/22 - CB/Prep (Daggers)
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/rogues/talents.html?30532110500010003203000000000000000050055003003100000
Pros: Best utility, good boosts to Backstab/Ambush, Improved Sap for
Instance-running.
Cons: Lower total dps than other builds.
30/8/13 - Dagger/Raid spec
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/rogues/talents.html?30532310502010503203000000000000000050050003000000000
Pros: Very high dps for raids, while keeping high burst damage for
PvP
Cons: Loses Improved Sap, requires a very good tank.
(Can also be done 31/8/12, for Vigor. But this is generally only
useful if you also have 5/8 Nightslayer, for 120 total Energy)
There are other variations, but these three are the most often seen,
and generally the most effective.
Discussion of the Sword/Combat build suggeste above:
From: Brian, Catriona, David Carson
> > > > 20/31/0 - Sword/Combat
> > > > http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/rogues/talents.html?30530310500000000230550100050150031000000000000000000
> > >
> > > [Catriona] Ah, nice to see a "standard" version of that one; I
> > > use my own variation which is similar but I think suits my
> > > playstyle better (5 points MoD, maxed lightning reflexes, dropped
> > > riposte, adrenaline rish and imp SnD) - useful to know I'm only a
> > > little off what's considered as good, as it mostly came from tips
> > > from friends and my own feelings on what I wanted.
> >
> > [Brian] My current build has 5/5 MoD as well, and 5/5 Reflexes.
> > But you have to take Riposte. It's far and away the best
> > damage/energy skill in the book. And it's totally worth it for the
> > laugh value of getting revenge on all those mobs that disarmed you
> > over the levels. Pull out that weapon-chained off-hand when you
> > head down to BRD, and just laugh. "No weapon for you! HA!"
>
> [Catriona] Hmm, Riposte strikes me as a PVP thing more than anything
> else, so a total waste of talent points to me. I don't want to have
> to lose the useful talents I have for something I'd never use - even
> if I happen to be fighting something that's possible to disarm I have
> to wait for my massive 8% chance at a parry to happen, which isn't
> going to be often given that I keep mobs stunned half the time and
> dodge a lot of the rest of the time.. Not worth it.
> > [Brian] Adrenaline Rush = "I win button". 'Nuff said.
>
> [Catriona] Hmm, again it looks pointless. Faster energy regen for
> only 15 seconds? Total waste of points IMHO. If it was unlimited
> energy maybe, but it'd have to be 30 seconds not 15.
[David Carson] Double energy for 15 seconds = 150 extra energy = almost
4 extra sinister strikes = 2000 damage or more for an endgame rogue.
Unlimited energy for 30 seconds would be 30 extra attacks, say 25
sinister strikes and 5 5-point eviscerates.. a little overpowered! :-)
> [Catriona] I don't like getting skills with cooldowns when I could
> have ones that benefit me 100% of the time. My only exception to that
> is Blade Flurry which I simply love, but the cooldown isn't a problem
> there as when I'm soloing I aim to only rarely have to fight more
> than one mob at a time anyway!
[David Carson] Yeah, cooldown skills are love 'em or hate 'em things.
You need to try to find a balance between using them too often so
they're not ready when you hit an emergency, and not using them often
enough so the talent points are a bit wasted.
> > [Brian] Imp SnD is more of an end-game thing. You can totally
> > leave it off if you want. But it's the only finisher that scales
> > with weapon damage. So when you start getting your hands on purple
> > weapons, it's worth more to pop SnD than Evisc.
>
> [Catriona] Already use SnD all the time in instances, but the talent
> for it looks a waste of points. Extra time, when I always have
> several seconds extra after the mob's dead anyway. If it made it
> faster still I'd get it, but not for extended time, when it's easy to
> just hit the button again. Especially when it (and kidney shot on
> non-immune mobs) is about the only finisher I can use in instances if
> I don't want to pull aggro.
>
> Of the talents you mention it's the only one I'd consider getting,
> and may well drop Imp Eviscerate for it sometime (given how useless
> Eviscerate is once you have a half-decent sword - I can do almost as
> much damage with a sinister strike crit as a 5-point eviscerate hit
> does...), but it's not enough of an improvement for me to bother
> spending 5g on - I'll wait till we get a talent points refund for
> changes I think! (Hopefully 1.11, given that we have a "rogue
> concerns" thread on the official forums now)
> > [Brain] You can either max Lightning Reflexes, or Off-hand spec.
> > It's a minor point either way, but that particular incarnation of
> > the build is tuned for absolute max dps. And again, it scales with
> > the quality of your gear. With lesser gear, it might be better to
> > take Reflexes.
>
> [Catriona] I have them both maxed, and can't see myself changing that
> - far too useful to me to drop either :-) My offhand sword isn't the
> best (using Hanzo still, need to either run UBRS enough times for
> Dal'Rend to drop or run 5-man Scholo enough to get Mirah's Song from
> the quest chain), but the talents in it are still useful to me, while
> I like my dodge chance a lot when soloing - when I had it drop down
> to 24% it hurt badly! Up to 28% now, aiming for over 30% though, then
> it'll be very nice :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.5 Various hunter pet questions
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Questions asked by Burt Johnson, ScratchMonkey
Answers by John Gordon, Paul Vader, Vere, Urs Beeli (Urbin), Phil Hibbs,
Valjean
BJ> How do pets learn new skills from wild animals?
They don't, directly. *You* can learn new skills by taming a new pet
and fighting alongside him for a while. Then you abandon the new pet,
retrieve your old one out of the stable, and teach him the new skill.
Not all pets can learn all skills and you need training points (TP)
which your pet gains once it's loyal to you and while it levels up.
You can respec pet skills similar to respeccing your own talents -
against cost - at the pet trainer.
See also FAQ question 3.1.
A good method on how to safely tame pets:
If you are looking to get new tamed pets for skills, a good method,
once you have the ice trap, is to lay a trap at your feet and use
concussive shot on the thing you want to tame at max range, immediately
switch to taming, it will come at you slowly because of the concussive,
get caught in the trap at your feet and you can sometimes train without
being hit at all.
BJ> That explains something else I was wondering about. I got a message
BJ> saying I had learned 'claw'. I did a 'P' to bring up my spell book,
BJ> but didn't find it.
Use your 'train pet' skill, you should see it in the list of things you
can teach it.
BJ> I realized after posting this that I had not trained my pet growl.
BJ> Once he got growl, that helped. How do I put it on autocast though?
In your spell book there is a pet tab (Shift-P I think), drag the growl
ability onto your pet bar and make sure it's in the left most slot.
Right click on the ability in the pet bar to toggle auto-cast (funny
border or not). Same for other active talents you learn.
It's also worth mentioning that a pet tries to "cast" it's abilities
from left to right on its action bar. However, it is not, by default,
"smart" enough to conserve focus to make sure that, say, Growl gets
cast every time it's up. Since Growl has a smaller focus cost (15)
than Claw (25) or Bite (35), you can ensure it gets cast every possible
time by putting Growl furthest left on the pet's action bar. If Claw
is furthest left, the pet will rarely cast anything else, and only Bite
(if it is trained in that skill too) once at the very beginning of the
fight.
SM>> My hardest problem was figuring out how to give him his talent
SM>> points. I finally found the "train pet" icon forgotten in my spell
SM>> book, and bumped up everything I could give him, and I've still got
SM>> loads of points left over for my next pet. (I'm now at 21.)
BJ> I blew it big time on those points. I thought they were per pet. I
BJ> gave 4 pts to a crab I knew I wouldn't be keeping. Then when I
BJ> traded him in for a bear, I found I only had 2 pts available. :-(
No, you did not. The number of training points depend on the pet level and
the loyalty. At loyalty 6 your pet has "5*pet level" TP. If you tame a new
pet, its loyalty will be 1, often you even have negative TP on a new pet
(especially if it already knows a skill) before it gains loyalty.
You do not need to "save" training points for your next pet. The training
points belong to the pet, not you. So you get 5*lvl of the pet for each pet
(assuming it has loyalty 6, otherwise the number may be smaller to start
with).
BJ> When I eat, I get the bubbly effect for the duration of my eating, and
BJ> am healing for that time. If I move, the effect is done and the food
BJ> is lost.
BJ>
BJ> When I feed my pet, I only see the bubbly for maybe a second. Is
BJ> that the only period he has to stay still? Can we move right after
BJ> that and still have the full effect?
BJ>
BJ> He seems to keep healing, and only becomes happy after a delay of a
BJ> few seconds. I think that is a fixed delay and does not require
BJ> standing still, based on a couple crude tests. Is that right?
Check the combat log or target your pet. If it is targeted you will see
that it has a "feeding buff" (looks like a biscuit) indicating that it
is eating and gaining happiness.
The usual rate is 35 happiness per tick. If your pet progresses through
the levels it may decrease to 17, that is an indication to upgrade the
food you're feeding it. Either cook the raw meat, it gives more
happiness, or become a big spender and buy meat from vendors. While
fishing and killing beasts is a good source of food for your pet it
also means you need several spaces in your bags for pet food. I changed
that around level 30 and vendor off the odd meat whenever I meet a
vendor. Instead I make sure I stack up 60pcs of the highest quality
meat me and my pet can eat. It's a small money drain but ensures I heal
fast and my pet becomes happy quickly. Plus, I have the FeedPetButton
addon which is much easier to use if you only rely on one type of food
(though I think there is another one that handles various meat/fish
types in prioritised order).
Moving does not stop your pet feeding, but combat will. So make sure to
not send your pet on another mob before the feeding buff has expired
and/or it has become green/happy again.
BJ> I dismissed my pet, and tried to tame a bear. Got a message "already
BJ> have too many pets" as the bear started tearing me limb from limb...
BJ> How can I just release him and tell him to find his way back to the
BJ> ocean to live on his own again?
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to do that too;
dismiss is a spell available in the spell screen, while "Abandon" is
only in the right click menu, I believe.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.6 Trading aggro using Feign Death
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Babe Bridou"
One thing to note: if/when you are level 30, you have one of the most
powerful skills in the game: feign death. Feign death resets all hate
you have built on all mobs around and puts you out of combat (but if
your pet is in combat, you will come back in combat immediately).
Think about it that way (sorry, a bit of theorycraft, I'll use "" for
the threat numbers and assume these are damage figures):
1) See an elite mob
2) Send pet (dash to do it faster)
3) Start casting aimed shot. Your pet has aggro during this time, he
builds like "100" threat.
4) You shoot your aimed shot. Your threat becomes "1000". You gain
aggro, the mob rushes to you. Meanwhile the pet reaches "150"
threat.
5) Immediately follow the aimed shot with a multishot. Your threat
becomes "1500". The monster is now at melee range. Your pet reaches
"200" threat.
6) Feign death. Your threat becomes "0". Your pet reaches "250" threat
and regains aggro.
7) move back and autoshoot. The pet's threat is "300" now, you reach
"150".
8) pet is at "350", you are at "300".
9) pet is at "400", you are at "450". You gain aggro. mob enters melee
range. You stop attacking.
10) pet is at "450", you use disengage and your threat is lowered to
"400". Pet gains aggro.
11) you move back, pet reaches "500".
12) you start casting aimed shot. pet reaches "550". You are still at
"400".
13) your aim shot fires. You are now at "1400" threat. You gain aggro.
Pet reaches "600".
14) you follow with multishot. You are now at "1900" threat. Mob enters
melee range. disable pet attack (put him on passive).
15) you cast "scatter shot". You are now at "2000" threat. move back,
send pet
16) chances are feign death cooldown is finished. Feign death. You are
now at "0" threat. Pet is at "650".
17) autoshot till mob dies.
At step 16, you have dealt "3750" threat, and your pet did only "650".
And yet you didn't get hit once...
As you can see, with this tactic, you can dish out huge damage on mobs
and prevent it from hitting your pet too much. If you add a freezing
trap inside this routine, it becomes practically a "god mode"... All
this while keeping your character brutal as a ranged damage dealer in
parties and instances.
With Beast mastery, you want to dish threat progressively and stay
around the threat values of your pet, possibly a bit higher, and
halfway into the fight, use all the damage you can in a burst, and
follow immediately with a feign death to reset it. It's much easier
indeed.
Beast mastery is the best talent tree to solo, but don't think other
hunters don't have any tools there: they can still kill elites of
higher level than them, possibly without taking a single hit nor
healing their pet ;)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.7 Warlock pets
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Vader responds to a question by Jeff Gentry (quoted text):
> - Voidwalker annoys me, he's always getting in my field of vision and
> makes it hard to see things, click on things, etc
This is indeed a problem. All of the demons seem to have 'personal
space' issues at times.
> As far as I've been able to tell - his fire bolt, phase shift and
> fire shield are all determined by him as to when to cast. He shifts
> after combat, shields me when I get hit and launches fire bolts at
> his usual clip in combat.
You can set this up yourself. The pet control bar has a bunch of
buttons for the pet's abilities. Right-clicking (I think, I do this so
automatically I'm not sure) on one of those buttons puts it in and out
of 'autocast' which basically means the pet itself determines when to
use that ability. Skills on manual are triggered only when you want
them to happen.
> comfortable with him. Sacrifice & Consume shadows ... these look
> like I need to physically trigger them (which makes a lot of sense
> with sacrifice, but it'd be nice if he was smart enough to do the
> latter).
I have no idea whether sacrifice will work if you put it on autocast -
I need to try that! Consume shadows you probably don't want on
autocast. it only works out of combat, where you could just as easily
heal them yourself, and it sucks up a lot of the void's mana, which you
CAN'T replenish yourself. I hardly ever use it myself.
> Now Torment ... is that something he just handles on his own?
You really want torment to be on autocast - it's the void's reason for
being. the group taunt you should leave on manual.
> I've not really used the Succubus. Right now I only have the lash of
> pain & soothing kiss for her. It looks like LoP is automatically
> done, but what about SK? Is that something I have to trigger? And
> likewise, when she gets Seduction how does that work?
Soothing kiss is almost completely worthless. It's the equivalent of
the hunter pet's cower talent, only it doesn't seem to actually work.
Once your succubus has seduce, you'll generally want it on manual.
Select a target first, and when you select the skill the succubus will
seduce that hostile, which gives you 19 seconds or so, at the expense
of losing use of the succubus for attacks.
And bootl3g gives a summary of warlock pets:
Each of the warlock pets serves a distinct purpose, so it depends on
which situation you are in to use them.
The imp is primarily for use when in parties since his bloodpact gives
your party a stamina puff. If you put him on passive mode he will stay
phase shifted and wont take any damage when you fight, but his ranged
attack is a nice bonus to help out a tank in an instance. The downside
to the imp is he has very low health and if fighting mobs with AoE
attacks or poisons he dies very easily if he's not phase-shifted.
The voidwalker is your tank pet. He's primarily for use soloing or when
you are in a party and you need to be able to off-tank a mob. The
void's primary ability is an aoe taunt which keeps mobs off of you. If
you keep him on defensive stance he will cast his taunt ability own his
own when its ready. The other thing the void is good for is the void
sacrifice, since it gives you a free shield it is perfect for
situations when you have cast rain of fire or hellfire.
The succubus is your heavy dps/pvp pet and she is also used for crowd
control when you are fighting groups of humanoid mobs. The full effect
of the succubus isnt gained until you gain the seduce ability which
works almost as well as sheep or sap against humanoid mobs. Seduce is
basically a charm spell that prevents any seduced humanoid from making
any actions as long as they are seduced and they take no damage. A good
thing to do solo is seduce the mob which gives you plenty of time to
cast a shadow bolt or soul fire then re-seduce them. In a party let
them know which mob you are seducing and it will effective remove that
mob from combat as long as they arent attacked just like a sheep or
sap. Since she cant take as much damage as the void, the soothing kiss
ability is used to get mobs off of her when she has aggro, its best to
cast this on your own and only use it if you have another party member
to pick up the aggro otherwise the mob will stop attacking her and
attack you. She will cast seduce on her own in defensive stance, but
its best to actively target the mob you want to keep seduced and cast
it for her..
The felhunter is your anti-caster pet. Its personally my favorite and
the one I use most of the time when I'm just running around in the
world. He does decent melee damage has decent health (more than
succbus but less than void). His primary abilties though are spelllock
and dispel magic. Either of these can be triggered by you or if you
have him on defensive stance he will cast them on his own when they can
be used. His devour magic ability can also be used on friendly targets
to get rid of debuffs and dot effects. A good thing to do is make a
macro that target's yourself and then casts devour magic so when you
have the fel out you can dispel yourself. Added bonuses of the fel
hunter include his ability to heal himself each time he devours a
magical ability adn his tainted blood ability which lowers an enemies'
attack power when he bites them, it stacks up to five times.The fel
with cast all of his abilities on his own in defensive or aggressive
stance. The fel hunter has very high resistance to magic and if you are
a master demonologist he increases all of your resistances to magic as
well. With 5 points in this talent at level 60 you gain +60 resists to
all schools of magic just rfor having this pet out.
The infernal is primarily a pvp pet. He does heavy damage and can take
more damage than the other pets. When you summon him he drops out of
the sky and hits with an aoe effect that stuns all enemies in a certain
radius and well as htis them with minor damage. The infernal also has a
constant minor aoe aura that damages anyone close to him. The downside
to the infernal is that you only maintain control of him for 5 min when
you summon him and after that he has a chance to break free at which
time he will attack you. He can be re-enslaved or banished though, but
outside of pvp he really isnt that practically since he can break
control at anytime and attack you.
The final pet is the doomguard. He really isnt very practical for a
number of reasons. The reagent required to summon him costs 1g, you
also need a full party to summon him which works just like you were
summons another player, i.e. your party members have to click on the
summoning portal. (Party members will often screw the summons up and
waste your reagent since you cant move while you are summoning and the
re-cast is on a 1 hour cooldown) The downside to summoning the
doomguard is that when he is summoned, a random party member is
sacrificed to complete the summoning, meaning a random person in your
party dies and then he spawns. The random person can include you as
well. The doomguard once summoned isnt under your control and must be
immediately enslaved or he will attack you.
If you manage to enslave him, he does have a few powerful abilities. He
hits fairly hard in melee (500ish damage) he can also cast warstomp
which is an aoe stun just like the tauren racial ability, he can cast
rain of fire just like the warlock spell, and he has a really nasty
curse debuff.
The only really beneficial use of a doomguard outside of pvp fun is to
summon him when you are about to fight boss mobs. Unless its been
nerfed, his debuff curse (cant recall the exact abilities of it but its
a very nasty debuff) can be cast on most of the boss mobs in the game.
Its a strong enough cruse that its actually worth doing especially on
outdoor raid bosses.
Sorry kinda long winded but that sums it up. :)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.8 Paladin levelling build suggestion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Fugwump proposed a pally leveling build:
> What is the best build for the paladin I mainly solo with a few
> instance runs if a quest calls for it.
You can try and be as strong as possible, or you can try and have alot
of mana and be more efficient. For solo play and a few instances you
might as well be as strong as possible, you will need it!
You could try
Imp Blessing of Might - 5/5
Parry - 5/5
Seal of Command - 1/1
Divine Strength - 5/5
Spiritual Focus - 5/5
Consecration - 1/1
Healing Light - 3/3
Conviction - 5/5
Persuit of Justice - 2/2
Vindiction - 3/3
Two Handed Weapons - 3/3
Eye for an Eye - 2/2
Now you have a few options, you can go for 1 in Divine Intellect and
then get Illumination and Divine Favor, then fill out Divine Intellect
which is what I did (well I have a few in Vengance), or you can fill
out Vengance and get Repentance and have 5 points left.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3.9 Warrior levelling build suggestion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Doc answered Brians question on a warrior levelling build:
> So, I know that I want to be Arms spec eventually. Sweeping Strikes
> is just too much fun, even if they do keep nerfing it. But I keep
> hearing that Fury is all that and a bag of chips, for leveling. So
> I'm looking for some feedback.
>
> I'm not looking for full 51-point talent specs at this point. Those I
> can mostly figure out myself. I'm specifically asking about which
> tree is better for early investments.
>
> Here's the options I'm thinking about right now:
>
> Dump 5 into Fury for crits, then start building Arms to MS.
> Go straight into Arms and get MS right at 40.
> Go heavy into Fury, and count on respeccing into MS after 40.
>
> No matter what, I'm probably looking at either 31/20 or 31/5/15 for
> level 60. And then something like 11/5/35 when I finish all the
> outdoor quests I want to finish and start thinking seriously about
> instances. I'm just stuck trying to decide how to get there.
Here's how I went for levelling up. After that I went full-on Prot.
Arms 31
Deflection 5
Improved Rend 3
Tactical Mastery 5
Anger Management 1
Deep Wounds 3
2-Handed Weapon Spec 5
Impale 2
Sweeping Strikes 1
Polearm Specialization 5
Mortal Strike 1
Fury 15
Cruelty 5
Unbridled Wrath 5
Piercing Howl 1
Imp Battle Shout 5
Protection 5
Anticipation 5
I agonized a bit over the Fury talents, but in the end the job got
done.
IIRC, I went cruelty then deflection, imp rend (that was fairly useful
early on), anticipation, unbridled wrath, tac mastery, umm.. forget:)
then respec at 40 for MS. I want tac mastery 'cause after doing the
berserk stance quest I wanted to mess around with stance-dancing. I
grew out of that eventually
----------------------------------------------------------------------
======================================================================
4 Game mechanics
======================================================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.1 +damage on spells (inaccurate since patch 1.9)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The following description is no longer completely accurate as the
treatment of +damage/+heal has changed with patch 1.9.
The amount of damage actually added, depends on the casting time (or wand
speed). To get the max +dmg added you need a spell that lasts 3.5 seconds
to casts. All shorter spells receive a percentage of that, depending on
the casting length, which is always a minimum of 1.5 seconds (even
instants are rounded up to the global cooldown for calculating the added
damage).
Talents that increase school damage are applied after the +dmg is added,
so some nice +dmg equipment can definitely make a difference.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.2 learning pvp
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Frankly dueling over and over is the #1, 100% guaranteed way to improve
your chops.
So duel everyone you see in town. Ask them how they beat you and what you
can do to beat them. Talk with them about what their build is and ask
others playing your class how they bulit theirs. I'm referring to talent
builds here.
Also, go to the battlegrounds and run through threre over and over. The
learning curve is steeper to become a good PvPer in BG because the real
way to be good at all types of PvP is to know your enemy, and only
through dueling are you going to get the kind of in-depth understanding
of what each class is capable of. BG is just chaos most of the time at
the low end.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.3 Kiting
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Christian Stauffer/Wildcard
It's a general expression describing a technique, not a spell. The
idea is to "kite" the mob behind you, while he can't hit you but still
gets damage.
Warlocks are great for kiting, because of their DOTs (damage over time
spells). They can cast 4 DOTS on a mob, and then run away, "kiting" the
mob behind them. With a bit of luck, the mob won't catch and hit them,
but suffer from the damage over time spells.
From: Simon Nejmann
On the other hand, take mages - they use cloth armor and can't really
take many hits, also their spells get interrupted if they get damaged.
They either kill by unleashing enough damage that their opponent fall
over before it reaches them, or they kite it.
Take a look at their Frostbolt spell:
Frostbolt (Rank 1)
25 Mana 30 yd range
1.5 sec cast
Launches a bolt of frost at the enemy, causing 18 to 20 Frost damage
and slowing movement speed to 60% of normal for 5 sec.
As you can see, they can shoot one, run away, shoot another, and so on
because of the movement slowing effect the mob will never reach them
(the slowing effect lasts longer as the spell rank goes up - 9 secs at
the top).
From: Thomas Jespersen and stush
In general kiting is damaging a mob while keeping out of range of their
attack. Often it means you can run faster than the mob (either through
slowing the mob or/and speeding yourself.) It can also mean taking
advantage of pathing however most game companies consider this an
exploit.
From: Thomas Jespersen and stush
It is commonly called "fear kiting" or "reverse kiting" when a priest
or a warlock fears a target so they can never hit the caster but still
are dealt damage (DoT, Wand, Smite, whatever)
From: Greg (on the origins of the term)
Have you ever flown a kite? Sometimes you run ahead and pull the kite
along behind you, occassionally turning around to look at it. Kiting a
mob is the same thing, except when you turn around you nuke it instead
of just looking at it. :)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.4 Threat, aggro, tanking and pulling
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From feides, Chris Stauffer, David Carson:
If you want to know in-depth how taunts and aggro work, check this thread,
it's brilliant:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-dungeons&t=311610&p=1&tmp=1#post311610
Taunts give you the mobs attention for the given time (2s single target
/6s AoE taunt), after that (if neither you nor the other player
performed any action) it will turn back to the other player.
Short summary:
- You need 10% more threat than the player who currently has aggro to take
over the mob
- Taunt sets you on exactly the same amount of threat as the other player
(the one who has aggro) has, and sticks the mob on you for 2/6s
Conclusion: If both players don't do anything, the mob will go back to
the first one after the taunt. The tank has to generate those extra 10%
threat to keep the mob stickied.
I was thinking that when the taunt hit, warrior and previous target are
now both at 100%, and that when the taunt debuff expired, the target
would stick on the warrior unless the previous target pushed up to
110%. Seems from their experiements that it is the opposite - it is the
warrior who must push up to 110% to prevent a switch back.
(or, in situations that I'm likely to experience, as a rogue, it's my
job to feint or vanish to get below 90.9090909%)
From: Feides, Chris Stauffer/Wildcard
> I usually use up every drop of rage
First fault imho. I *try* to keep at least a few rage spare for those
moments.
> so when aggro is stolen I taunt back and unless the other player
> gives it back back (stops attacking) its difficult to hit that 10%
> barrier.
True. Although a mob that turns to some overnuking mage for example is
usually (when talking about packs of normal elite mobs) not a big
problem. When I see that, and the mob is already "low" on health (<50%)
and being attacked by all damage dealers, I ignore it and focuse on the
remaining mobs - which gives me a few seconds to build threat on them
and ensures that they won't leave me.
> Now I have no rage and upwards of 8 seconds for next taunt healing
> goes through the roof and the healers threat goes with it.
> Challenging shout (last resort) is there or mocking blow, the first
> is on a 10 min timer and the 2nd is not 100% reliable like taunt.
I'm not too familiar with warrior skills, to be honest. I would in such
a situation spam swipe (similar to cleave). If swipe crits (quite
likely, because it affects 3 targets and has a chance to crit per
target) I get back 5 rage.
In general, tanking is like a downward spiral - when you loose
attention, you loose rage. No rage = no way to gain aggro. So the best
thing is to not loose aggro.
> I guess what I am saying is if you steal aggro from the MT stop
> attacking.
Yep.
From: Babe Bridou, Nathan Engle, Brian, Burt Engle, Paul Vader:
(deep quoting removed, individual contributions grouped using "...")
"I used to attack using charge. Recently I have been using the gun,
and later crossbow to pull them. Initially the main reason was to
raise the skill in those two range weapons. Once they were both
maxed out, I found I like using them in any situation with a lot of
opponents in an area -- the red bandana class of opponents being my
prime example the last few days."
"All non-warrior classes absolutely LOATHE charge. In any instance,
it's an absolutely beautiful way to get your whole group killed, when
you aggro the half a dozen hostiles that you didn't notice. I will do
anything, including pulling with my warlock (but hey, we're all crazy
anyway) to make it difficult for warriors to start the battle with a
charge. Most warriors know it's something you only use sparingly, and
if they haven't gotten it out of their system by scarlet monastery,
they're hopeless.
In a group, the best warrior technique is what I call the 'batter up'
method. the warrior stands midway between the hostile and the puller,
and intercepts them as they go by with taunts etc. I call it this
because one of the stances a warrior uses has them holding their
sword not unlike a baseball bat."
"Actually, Charge is the best way for a warrior to begin *any*
fight, even in instances. Because they *need* that rage to get
initial aggro, and lock down the fight. A warrior that can't
Charge starts the fight with no rage, so he can't Shout, or
Thunderclap, or Sunder, or any of those fun things that keep the
mobs from trying to rape my priest."
"Ahem. While not just have them fire off a blood rage and drop a renew
on them? Charge isn't the only way to get rage."
"And it's quite ineffective when your warrior doesn't have *cough*
tactical mastery *cough*.
Outside of instances, when soloing, I pull with a throwing knife, hit
berzerker rage, bloodrage, take some hits and max my rage pool. As soon
as it's maxed, whether the mob is dead or not becomes irrelevant: I
just intercept another one. Every 20 seconds, it's the same routine:
intercept, sunder, bloodthirst, berserker rage, fill the blanks trying
to desperately use all my modifiers to get a max damage whirlwind, fail
to achieve it because oh wait intercept is ready: intercept, sunder,
bloodthirst, berserker rage. Rince and repeat. If you're losing life a
bit too much, just hit troll berserking, recklessness and bloodthirst
cleave cleave cleave cleave. If there is only one target, try to beat
the maximum possible amount of damage within a finite time like 3 or 4
seconds. When your sct has finished going mad, loot the corpses, get a
finger massage.
If there is some rage left, intercept. if there isn't any rage left,
watch your combat log, chances are that a nice four-digits execute crit
was lost in the middle of the heroic strike/bloodthirst/whirlwind/
flurry axe proc/+rage spam of your scrolling combat text.
In instances, I hit bloodrage, berserker rage switch to defensive
stance, pull, shield block, demoralizing shout, revenge/sunder as often
as I can, as many targets as I can, piercing howl whenever I can, too,
it gives me more time to taunt back the agroed ones - and hopefully
land a revenge on it right after."
"Charge is *essential* for creating that initial hate to get all the
mobs looking the right direction. Without that quick burst of rage,
the tank simply isn't going to be effective, and the fight isn't going
to be as clean.
Blood rage creates rage without the timing risk. If a warrior charges
too soon it can be very bad, but if he blood rages too soon it's no big
deal."
"The trick, however, is that tank != puller. This is what you
should be complaining about, not which skill they use to open the
fight."
"Personally I have nothing against the idea of having warrior using a
ranged weapon to perform a pull - I do it myself all the time. And
because I want mobs to be looking towards me as the life of the
party, I Say It With Dynamite or a bomb for a nice chunk of AoE and
maybe a stun effect thrown in as well."
"A good hunter can do crazy pulls. As I'm more a hunter than a warrior,
I'll always let a hunter have fun pulling, because that's what I prefer
doing when I solo: how to separate mobs, how to pull with eye of the
beast (excellent in Alterac Valley, by the way)
A good hunter pull can be a creative work requiring nothing but
finesse."
"The pattern I fell into fairly quickly was to stand by the warlock &
hunter and let them pick the target. Once a mob was in hand-to-hand
battle with a party member (usually the other warrior), I would then
charge."
"I have to say, you learn fast! I've been dealing with charging issues
in groups with my two main characters (a 42 and a 51) and never thought
to suggest this as an alternative. Thanks guys, you've been a huge
help!"
From: Simon Nejmann, Burt Johnson
> [Burt Johnson] I was there hitting on the ogres, but couldn't get
> enough rage to do much at all. Seemed all the hits were going
> to the 23 night-elf rogue, who was taking them without batting an eye.
[Simon Nejmann] Tanking is apparently not an easy thing.
If you run around in defensive stance with a sword and shield (standart
tanking setup), then you are never going to do more damage than neither
rogues nor mages, and you cannot rely on keeping the mobs on you
through pure damage.
There are several ways of generating aggro: Damage the mob, heal
somebody who is fighting the mob, debuff the mob, and use special aggro
moves.
You cannot heal so you have to focus on the other options. Of course,
auto attack should be going non-stop - the extra bits of aggro and rage
is good. But you should really be focusing on your debuffs and special
moves - the different shouts you have should be able to, more or less,
keep aggro on a few mobs against the healer. Then start throwing
Sunder Armor on the one the damage dealers focus on - for some reason
it _really_ pisses mobs off to get their armor stripped... This also
has the nice side effect of letting the rogues, hunters and others with
physical attacks do more damage.
If you have some extra rage, then you can throw in a few Heroic Strikes
- and if a mob goes for another member you can Taunt or Mocking Blow it
(remember to hit it with a Sunder or something after that or it runs
off again as soon as the taunt wears off).
Of course, if you have three damage dealers, four mobs, and everybody
is going after their own mob, then you are never going to keep aggro
off of your team - that is (one of the reasons) why groups should work
together and melt mobs one at a time. It is the tanks responsibility
to keep aggro, but a group of stupid people can make that job
impossible...
Anyway, that was a small tanking 101 from a priest - I bet there are
errors in there as well as a couple of glaring holes, but at least it
should cover the very basics. :)
From: Christian Stauffer/Wildcard The idea behind the whole aggro/tanking
thing is to mitigate as much damage as possible, so the healers mana
lasts as long as possible. That's where you are expected to step in.
As a warrior, you are expected to go defensive stance, grab a shield,
and try to keep the mobs attention. The minimum is that you keep the
mobs away from the healer(s). The optimum is that you keep all mobs
attention over the whole fight.
If you're interested in some basics about how a group should work
together, you may want to have a look at a little guide I wrote once:
http://www.wildcard7.com/_temp/groupcombat.pdf
From: Simon Nejmann (don't know who he was quoting)
> > If you run around in defensive stance with a sword and shield
> > (standart tanking setup), then you are never going to do more
> > damage than neither rogues nor mages, and you cannot rely on
> > keeping the mobs on you through pure damage.
>
> Actually, though I have defensive stance, I have never used it. I
> stay in the balanced stance.
>From the tooltip of defensive stance:
**
Decreases damage taken from all sources by 10%. Decreases damage
caused by 10%. Increases threat generated by 30%.
**
If you are doing serious tanking, has to keep aggro and take a beating,
then defensive stance is golden (should be obvious), and the shield
adds a lot to your armor class so you live longer.
But, of course, the loss of damage output makes it less ideal if you
just wanna cut through some easy mobs, so battle stance (or beserker
after level 30) + two-handed or dual wield there. :)
> My typical routine is 1) Assure that shout stays active. Throw it
> again if under 30 seconds remaining 2) Throw sunder armor once or
> twice 3) If going solo, throw hamstring. If in party, throw heroic
> strike
Well, it looks like you are on the right track then - though, when you
are fighting elites you may want to put on a few extra sunders (they
stack up to 5) depending on how long they survive.
> I haven't been using Taunt or Mock. Just got them a day or two ago. I
> should try them more. In most past parties, I was the one taking all
> the blows already -- and often dying as a result -- so it didn't seen
> useful.
They are more a sort of emergency skills. For example, if a mob breaks
off and starts beating up the healer, then taunt it off of him. But if
it breaks off and beats on the rogue, then you might just let it -
perhaps throw an extra sunder or two to get it off of him (at least at
your level).
> In this group there were no healers at all, and the team worked very
> well together. I am pretty sure the lvl 19 players were doing alts.
> They were much too coordinated to be on their first char. The lvl 23
> night-elf rogue was effectively the tank though -- right into the
> thick of things, taking most of the blows, and rarely dropping below
> 90% health.
Well, at your level warriors aren't all that much better at tanking and
mitigating damage. Also, the rogue being two levels higher helped him
take less damage too. In a situation like that I think the best you
could do was just kick back and focus on doing damage and not worry
about tanking. :)
Find more on aggro and threat under "4.10 Aggro debunked" and under
"4.15 Aggro calculation".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.5 Stopping runners (using hamstring)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
On the use of hamstring:
From: Marshall, Burt Johnson, Saucey, RogerM, mikel
> > [Saucey] Yes one of the uses is to stop people running away and
> > bringing back 3
>
> [Burt Johnson] At my level (18), they run away and later come back
> killable in a single blow. They really aren't any threat.
[Marshall] In many situations, they will come back with 3 or 4 buddies,
if you let them run off.
[RogerM] No, it's the fact that they can run to another mob and
activate it. That's the danger. It happens a lot. When my mage goes
into instances with others, I concentrate on CC - crowd control.
Sheeping, freezing, and using fire blast and Arcane Missiles to drop
runners before they can go for help.
[mikel] They can be. They may come back killable in one blow, but if
they are social and you are unlucky about where they run, they may
bring several friends with them. Hamstring significantly reduces the
chances of that happening.
On stopping runners using a gun:
From: Marshall, Burt Johnson
> [Burt] If I am only fighting one of them, I just shoot him in the
> back as he runs away. One shot (33-66 hit pts) and he is finished.
> Not much of a problem.
[Marshall] Your gun is a fairly good weapon at this point in your
career. As you get higher, mobs will have a lot more life, and your
popgun will be barely a pinprick in their butt as they run off to get
help.
On slowing down opponents:
From: Marshall, Mikel
[Marshall] There are *many* places in the game where controlling the
'runaway' speed of mobs is a life or death matter, par- ticularly in
instances of all kinds. Many wipes in instances could have been
prevented if the tank-warrior had been bright enough to cast a
hamstring on their mob before it ran off to get 5 more elite nasties
and bring them back to the party.
I've taken a warrior up to level 52, and use hamstring all the time.
You learn quickly which mobs will stay and fight to the death, and
which ones will bolt when their life gets low. Life is just so much
easier when you slow them down with hamstring before they go walkabout
on you.
Hamstring is also a warriors lone 'escape' skill, at least at lower
levels. If you're getting beat by a mob, hamstring it and run for the
hills. It'll give you a few seconds headstart, anyway.
[Mikel] When you start to do instance dungeons, hamstring becomes
important enough to verge on crucial in some circumstances. In an
instance, it is impossible to get away from a bad guy who has decided
to attack you unless he dies or you do; once they start chasing, they
never stop. And they are tougher than the bad guys outside instances,
and some of them do a lot more damage. Controlling runners (i.e.
Hamstring, for the warrior) becomes very important as one of the ways
you prevent your whole party from being wiped out.
And in Battlegrounds, hamstring is invaluable as one of the ways that
you limit the movement of your opponents. For example, Warsong Gulch,
the capture-the-flag game, is a lot about who can grab a flag and get
away versus who can stop it from happening. Charge+Hamstring has saved
the day many many times.
And in PVP in general, there are lots of opponents who want to be far
away from you when you want them really close. Hunters, for example,
never want to be anywhere near you, and you never want them anywhere
else. Again, Hamstring is your friend.
It's extremely, extremely useful, once you know when and why to use it.
In my case, it's important in enough situations that Charge+Hamstring
is basically a conditioned reflex when I am playing a warrior.
On runners and social mobs
From: Simon Nejmann
Go to Elwyn Forest, find 2 boars next to each others and attack one -
that one starts fighting back, the other doesn't care at all.
Now find 2 wolves and attack one - this time they will both attack you.
The wolves are social, the boars are not - the effect is that if a wolf
sees you fight another wolf, it will come help the first one. But if it
was a boar and a wolf, then the wolf would not help the boar.
Now add mobs that run at low health.
If a boar runs away at low health and bumps into 2 other boars, then
nothing happens. If a wolf does the same, you are suddently fighting
three...
Note that the mob being aggro (attacks on sight) or non-aggro (does
not) does not indicate if they are social or not. You can find mobs
that will attack you on sight, but who still does not help each others,
and vice versa.
Generally you can assume that mobs are social - most are.
When you start running instances, you will find out that there are
generally two things that kill groups - bad pulling (getting 2-3 groups
instead of 1), and runners who pull adds. Well, those two and then
stupid players... :)
Try to practice throwing a hamstring on the mob you are fighting just
before it starts running away - then go fight in Moonbroke again - you
should be able to see the difference then. :)
On the use of hamstring in PvP
From Hataurs:
In a PvP point of view, hamstring for a warrior is very useful against
many classes.
Rogue: they like to run around you in circles and backstab you and the
likes. Slow their run speed down, disarm them and keep hitting.
Mage: They freeze you, blink away... Your hamstring at the beginning of
the fight will give you the chance to catch up to them quicker and keep
them at melee range.
Hunter: They need range to take you down also, so your hamstring will
keep you at melee range. Though, hunters have many movement slowing
effects they can throw on you. Concussion shot and Wing Clip will have
you in deep trouble - especially at the earlier levels without
intercept.
Druid: Again hamstring is useful, makes it easier for you to be at
melee range. They can root you to the ground though and you'll be
stuck. Again, trouble without intercept at later levels. Pummel comes
in useful later to close down their healing line.
Warlocks hurt until you get intercept and berserker rage. Berserker
rage will stop them fearing you all the time for a little while; giving
you ample time to take their cloth arse down. Hamstring is useful again
to keep them close range. Pummel if you can in time on some of their
spells to close that line. But warlocks have many instant cast D.O.T
spells that mean trouble even after you have taken them down.
Shaman: Everyone says they are the gods, I say bah humbug. Keep them
close range, take down their healing. Destroy any earthbind totems they
lay and ignore the rest. Oh, and watch out for their reincarnation at
level 30+
Priest: Enough said
I'm alliance, so all I can say about Paladins is keep hitting them
hard. Take down their healing line with pummel. Keep hitting, they will
keep healing, you keep hitting. They'll heal again, you'll keep
hitting, and they'll run out of juice and realise they are dyeing, they
will heal again, they will shield and hearth out of there?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.6 Dying in instances and instance respawn
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From mikel:
Finally, if you go to the right spot, you will see the swirly white portal
that marks the entrance of the instance. When you go through that portal
(and not before) you are in the instance.
If you should happen to die inside the instance, then you will always
respawn as soon as your ghost runs back from the graveyard and passes
through the instance entrance (well, barring the effects of lag;
sometimes your ghost runs right through the portal with no apparent
effect for up to a few minutes, until the lag dissipates and you get
respawned).
Unlike the case where you die outside an instance, when your ghost
enters an instance, it will always respawn just inside the entrance.
Usually, this is not a problem, because your party will have cleared
out the mobs inside the instance. So normally, after a corpse run, you
can just run back to the place where you died, though you should be
careful to watch for roaming patrols.
(Unlike the mobs *inside* the instance, the mobs *outside* the instance
respawn fairly quickly.)
If you die enough times that there is significant respawn *inside* the
instance, that's a bad sign. By that point, you must have spent quite a
bit of time running the instance, but are not yet done. People's
equipment will be showing a lot of durability loss, especially if there
have been multiple wipes.
If it's taken long enough that full respawn is happening, then you are
basically going to have to clear everything all over again, but now
with equipment that is broken or getting ready to break, so it's likely
to be harder than before (not to mention that by this point people are
likely to be tired and frustrated).
Often, folks will have the impulse to just kill the few respawns and
run on through to where the party was before, but this may not always
be a good idea. If the mobs at the entrance are respawning, then the
ones farther in will soon be respawning, and there is a fair chance
that something will respawn behind you at an awkward moment.
I won't saw that respawn in the instance means you should abandon the
run; but it is one of those moments to pause for a bit and think about
your options.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.7 Crowd control (CC)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Christian Stauffer/Wildcard, addition by Paul Vader
There are several skills for this kind of stuff, commonly referred to
as "crowd control", here are all that I remember at the moment:
Druid: Hybernate: Sends a target to sleep, all damage taken will cause
it to break. Only usable on beasts and dragonkin.
Druid: Entangling roots: Roots the target in place and does damage. It
may break on damage. Only usable outdoors. The target can still attack
when in range (or with ranged attacks).
Priest: Shackle undead: Shackles an undead target, all damage taken
will cause it to break.
Mage: Polymorph: Polymorphs a target in a sheep. The sheep regenerates
extremely fast (so don't cast it on almost dead mobs). Breaks on
damage. Only usable on beasts and humanoids as far as I remember.
Warlock: Banish: Banishes a demon or elemental target, rendering it
unable to act, but also immune to any attacks.
[Paul Vader]Warlock succubus pet: Seduce
"Distracts" a demon or humanoid target for up to 20 seconds, rendering
it unable to move. Any damage snaps them out of it. Can be cast in
combat, and can be cast multiple times on the same target. Also,
possibly the most embarassing CC to have done on you in PvP combat. *
Rogue: Sap: Knocks a target for a certain time, any damage caused will
break it. Can only be done out of combat. Rogues with improved sap
won't break stealth (90% chance?) when sapping a mob. Only usable on
humanoids.
Hunter: Freeze trap: A mob that stumbles in the trap is frozen. Any
damage caused will break the effect. Traps can only be laid out of
combat. Works with all kinds of targets.
All real CC abilities (those who actually knock a mob out of combat and
not only immobilize it) can only be used on one mob per character. That
is, if you have 5 mages, you can get 5 mobs sheeped.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.8 Leveling up fishing
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Burt Johnson" asked
mobs, enchants, cooking, quests, etc all have color codes to let me know
which are appropriate for my level. Fishing doesn't appear to have the
same. Any way I can tell if I am at the "right place"?
I sent my 27 pally with 134 fishing to Booty Bay to fish while I was
cooking lunch. Lost about 40% of the fish, so I added a nightcrawler.
Losses dropped to about 10-15% or so.
That seemed to be telling me that I was in a level tough enough to fish
that it would raise my skill. Like an orange enchant for example. Yet
it took 3 to 4 fish for every skill level. I wanted to get to 150, and
it took roughly 60-70 casts (10% had no bite, 10% lost the fish, rest
put a fish in my bag) to do that.
Is the raising of fishing skill really that slow now that I finally
reached 150? I assumed I just had to hunt out harder areas, just like I
need harder enchants or cooking recipies.
A first answer by Fugwump:
Fishing is a bit different to anything else, you could get to level 300 by
fishing in Elywyn Forest if you wanted to (if you were level 35 and did the
fishing quest to get artisan fishing) and you would still level up at the
same rate as fishing in Booty bay, except in Elywyn after about level 50
fishing skill you wouldn't lose any fish, you still get non biters though.
Booty bay fishing is a bit high, bottom of STV is a 40+ zone really so the
fishing is scaled with that. Some of the highest level area's you could use
300 fishing + 20 pole + 2 enchant + 100 lure and you still have some that
get away. IIRC fishing at Steamweedle in Tanaris, a 40+ level place you
need 270-275 skill before you never lose a fish, when you get to that level
you get a skill up about every 12 fish you catch!
And a second answer by Vladesch:
Fishing is like training defense or weapon skills. You can train them all
fine in a lvl 1 area. Its purely a function of how many succesful fish you
get, what type of fish they are doesnt make any difference.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.9 Professions and skills
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Simon Nejmann gave information on how to advance through the skill leves for
the various professions:
There are three categories of professions:
Secondary (cooking, first aid, fishing).
Any old trainer can teach you the first two levels, you need a
book for the third, and complete a quest for the fourth.
Gathering (herbalism, mining, skinning)
These are easy - any old trainer can teach you all four levels.
Production (alchemy, blacksmithing, engineering, leatherworking,
tailoring)
You can find trainers for the first two levels in every capital (they
stand next to each other), in one capital you can find a third trainer
who can teach you the third level. The fourth level trainer is located
somewhere out in the wild. The one exception is enchanting, where the
third level trainer also runs around outside (and for extra giggles, the
fourth level trainer went and hid inside the Uldaman instance).
If ya want more info, go read this:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-professions&t=40&p=1&tmp=1#post40
Marshall added information on how to find the Expert Trainer for the
production professions:
Go to the Journeyman trainer, click on him to open up his screen, and read
the message at the top of that screen. When a trainer can no longer train
you anything, they always tell you who you have to go to for further
training.
Some guides on how to level up profession skills:
Devast8or:
I'm thinking of picking up tailoring for my pally who will soon be
retiring (so I can make some mooncloth). I've searched for a guide, but
the only one I've found was this one
http://www.xs4all.nl/~brt/wow/index.html, but it doesn't seem like the
best way to go (he's making a lot of gray vendor trash when he could
make greens and disenchant them, and he's skipping some recipes that
are either world drop or vendor bought. Not making the White Bandit
mask is definitely a bad move IMO).
So, my question is: Does anyone have or know of a list of items and at
what skill level they go yellow/green/gray? If I could get a list like
that I'll just figure things out for myself :)
C F:
http://atpb.myfreeforum.org/ftopic128.php
flame_thrower:
http://wow.toshimo.com/viewtopic.php?t=1590
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-professions&t=40&p=1&tmp=1#post40
http://www.streamload.com/bollwerk
Thomas Jespersen
http://tinyurl.com/fh7uc
(https://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-tradeskills-en&t=40545&p=1&tmp=1#post40545)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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4.10 Aggro debunked
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Asked for by ASKF, provided by Wildcard (Chris Stauffer)
(Copied from a Blizzard forum that no longer exists)
It's often said that we will never be able to work out the way threat
and hate lists and mobs' AI works, because it's too complicated and
unknowable, that we'll only ever have crude approximations and guesses.
I've conducted some decent, rigorous tests, and i have what i believe
is a good list of hate values and explanations of gaining and losing
aggro and the behaviour of taunt. I am also able to debunk a few myths
about how threat works.
1) Definitions
We define "aggro" to be who the mob is attacking. We define "threat" to
be a numeric value that each mob has towards each player on it's hate
list. Note, as we shall soon see, even for a normal mob, the target who
has aggro is not necessarily the player on it's threat list with the
most threat.
We define arbitratily that 1 point of unmodified damage gives 1 point
of threat.
2) How to gain aggro - the 10% barrier
Simply put, for a mob to change aggro to a new target, the new target
must have over 10% more threat than the mob's current target. E.g. mob
is attacking player x. x does 100 damage to mob, then stops. Player y
starts hitting the mob. The mob will start attacking y when y does over
110 damage.
Proof: this is easy to demonstrate. Get two players both doing
autoattack on a mob (not warriors of rogues; we'll see later they
complicate things). Have player 1 do a certain amount of damage, then
stop. Have player 2 keep attacking till he gets aggro. You have an
upper and lower bound on the threat required to get aggro - 1 attack
before he got aggro was not enough, but the attack that he got aggro
was at least enough. With low damage attacks (i.e. fists only), you
will get a very good value of 10%.
This is only a description of the normal mob targetting. Obviously
there are mobs who will attack secondary targets with special
abilities, ignoring their current threat / aggro.
3) Threat modifiers from Warrior Stances
In Battle Stance and Berserker Stance, all threat from a Warrior is
multiplied by 80%. In defensive stance, the multiplier is 130%. With
Defiance, it is 145%.
Proof: a simple modification of the above proof. Get a warrior to do,
say, 1000 damage in defensive stance, without defiance. Get a
non-warrior to take aggro with white damage. You will find it does not
happen before 1430 damage. The warrior's 1000 damage caused 1300 threat
in defensive stance, and the 10% barrier means you need more than 1430
to gain aggro.
4) Threat does not decay
Threat never, ever decays. Here is test data. Warrior does 83 damage on
mob in battle stance, gains aggro. From above, we know it will take
more than 83 * 0.8
* 1.1 = 73.04 threat to gain aggro. Warrior waits for 5 minutes getting
beat on. Then mage starts attacking slowly. Mage does 73 damage, but
does not gain aggro! Mage does another 2 damage, and does gain aggro.
From the warrior's initial hit to losing aggro, the time taken was 496
seconds.
As an upper bound, assume maximal threat decay. i.e. the mage only
needed 73.000000001 threat to gain aggro. Then the warrior's threat had
decayed to 66.36363636, from 66.4. This means he went down to 99.945%
threat in 496 seconds.
At this maximal rate of hate decay, the time taken for the warrior's
threat to decay to 90% of the original value would be 26.5 hours. In
fact, if a warrior logged in as soon as the server came online after
the weekly reset and hit a mob, his threat would not decay to 50%
before the server reset next week. I think this is enough to rule out
threat decay.
5) Threat values for some warrior abilities
the following list is not exhaustive, but includes all the major
tanking abilities.
Note: the following values are given in raw terms. In reality the
warrior must have either a 1.3 or 0.8 or 1.45 modifier on these,
depending on his stance and talents.
Note: * All abilities do not include threat generated by their damage.
This will be discussed more later.
Sunder: 260 (258.0 - 260. Heroic Strike*: 145 (143.9 - 148. Revenge*:
315 (313.9 - 318.3) Revenge Stun: 25 (23.4 - 29.1) Shield Bash*: 180
(175.4 - 180.3) Shield Slam*: ?? 250 (estimated from Cop's data. More
on that later) Shield Block: 0 (0 - 0. Can be higher - more on this
later) Thunder Clap*: 130 (126.9 - 134. Demo Shout: 43 (42.8 - 43.
6) Healing, "you gain x ___", etc
Each point of healing, when completely unmodified by talents, gives 0.5
threat. Replace the proof for (2) by the second person only healing.
Note: overhealing doesn't count, only the actual amount healed. This is
easy to demonstrate.
Abilities that put "you gain x mana" in the combat log give 0.5 threat
per point gained; life is the same. Examples would be drinking potions,
but not natural regen, or the Shaman's mana spring totem.
Abilities that put "you gain x rage" in the combat log give 5 threat
per point gained. However, this is not modified by warrior stance. Such
abilities include bloodrage, improved blocking talent, unbridled wrath,
and 5/8 Might.
Like healing, these only give threat if you are below the maximum.
7) Explaining Cop's 4.0 damage to heal ratio
Cop stated that in his tests, each point of damage by the warrior took
approximately 4 points of healing by the priest, for the priest to get
aggro. Here's how:
Warrior in defensive stance, with defiance: 1.45 multiplier Gaining
aggro from Warrior: 1.1 multiplier Priest with discipline: 80% threat
Healing: each point gives 0.5 threat
Together, 1.45 * 1.1 / 0.8 / 0.5 = 3.9875. Pretty darn close to 4.
Threat from pulling?
There is no threat associated with pulling. The smallest amouts of
threat we could generate drew aggro from a body pull, no matter how
long we waited after the pull. Pulling with damage did not effect the
results of tests such as in section (2) at all.
9) Taunt
The behaviour of taunt appears at first randomised or complicated. For
instance, if you taunt a mob off another player, then do nothing, the
mob will go back to the player as soon as the debuff wears off. It
appears to be giving temporary hate, then. The following experiment
disproves this: take any class, do 1000 damage or so to a mob, then
stop. Then have a warrior taunt the mob, taking no action until the
debuff has worn off. The mob will return to the original player. Now
have the warrior twiddle his thumbs, have a beer, read the paper, etc,
for as long as he likes (not too long or his buddy will probably die).
Then have the warrior deal white damage until he gains aggro. You will
find that in defensive stance with defiance, the first hit over 69
damage will score the warrior aggro. With battle stance, still only 125
damage is needed.
The behaviour of taunt is surprisingly simple, once you remember the
10% rule. It will give you exactly the threat of the player on top of
the threat list - but not the 10% needed for the mob to change aggro,
only a temporary aggro from the debuff! If you do nothing, you will
stay at 100% of the mob's old target's threat, and will lose aggro with
the taunt debuff. With a relatively small effort, you can gain aggro.
The behaviour can be described as "temporary aggro, permament threat".
It is easy to show that taunt does not give the warrior any constant
amount of threat. Have player 1 body pull a mob, but do no damage to
it. He now has 0 threat, but has aggro. Now have the warrior taunt, and
do nothing. After the 3 seconds, the warrior will lose aggro. He is now
on 0 threat, but does not have the more than 0 required to gain aggro,
by the 10% rule.
10) Implications
a) Regaining aggro. Considering the 10% rule, if you lose aggro
naturally, someone will have at least 110% of your current threat. To
regain it, you need 10% of that, or 121% of your current threat, at an
absolute minimum. So don't lose aggro, it's hard to get back! Not that
you didn't already know this, but still.
b) Taunt is potentially your highest threat move, because it gives
permanent threat. The longer other people have been beating on a mob
while you were not, the more threat you will gain by taunting. But from
the 10% rule, you will need to do a lot of work to get aggro if the mob
has been attacked for a decent amount of time without you.
c) Heroic Strike should not be used as a primary threat ability.
Suppose you are tanking a level 62 mob. Let's give him 8,000 ac raw,
and even assume he has 5 sunders stacked, for 5750 final ac, so he will
take 48.89% of damage. A 15% crit rate is balanced by the 10% penalty
to damage in defensive stance, and a 10% chance of a glancing blow
chance for 50% damage. Then you can expect the 138 damage from Heroic
Strike to contribute 67.5 damage on average, for a total of 212
unmodified threat. This is still only 82% of the threat a sunder would
give. Even with a 1.3 speed weapon, you will still do 94% the threat
of sunder per time interval.
Best practice is to spam sunder, and use HS in between to soak up
excess rage.
d) Revenge ftw. You can expect to do about 345 unmodified threat with
Revenge, including damage, against the mob in the example above, which
is exceptional for the low rage cost, even throwing in 10 for a shield
block. However, there is a rage cost of shield block, in that you will
block more attacks, so take less damage, so gain less rage from damage.
Two blocks for 180 damage and you can say goodbye to another 4 rage.
e) Demo Shout ftl. Demoralising shout does one sixth the threat of a
sunder. Even spammed in defensive stance with defiance, you're doing
no more threat than 42dps on each mob. Besides picking up whelps in
Onyxia and tanking panthers in the Panther boss encounter in ZG, i
can't see a compelling reason to use this.
f) Shield Slam ftl. Given the 6 second cooldown, there is no
improvement in threat per second by using shield slam. With shield
slam: 3 sunders and 1 shield slam every 6 seconds. About 212 threat per
second, unmodified. With the 30 rage from the shield slam you can cast
1 sunder and about 1.2 heroic strikes, assuming you have the talents
(which you would with any shield slam build), and are losing 3 rage per
Heroic Strike from lost white damage rage (i.e. assuming 90 modified
damage per hit). The 4 sunders and 1.2 heroic strikes every 6 seconds
gives about 215 threat per second.
The only improvement is if you are spamming both sunder and HS, and
want even more threat. Suppose we have a 2.0 speed weapon, HS spam and
sunder spam. That's about 280 unmodified tps. Changing one sunder for a
shield slam gives us 318 unmodified. However, the same effect would be
achieved by changing to a 1.4 speed weapon and casting HS more often.
And these values aren't taking into account autoattack damage, which
makes the margins comparatively smaller.
g) There's no amazing super secret randomised blizzard aggro algorithm.
The concepts are simple and the values can be fitted with nice numbers.
Even formulas for threat-reducing knockbacks can conceivably be worked
out, if threat values are carefully monitored.
Find more on aggro and threat under "4.4 Threat, aggro, tanking and
pulling" and under "4.15 Aggro calculation".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.11 Achieving the 45 minute baron run
----------------------------------------------------------------------
With patch 1.10 a new 45 minute baron run to achieve part of a tier 0.5
quest has been introduced. boot13g and Catriona R discussed how to get
it done (Quoted Text boot13g, repyl Catriona):
> I just completed the 45min run last night.
>
> The key to completing the run is the party has to know the route and not
> slow down the entire time. That means no looting and no opening boxes.
Yup, our logic on looting was to only loot bosses and everyone need/pass
except the enchanter who'd greed every time - sped things up a fair bit.
> You need to go in kill the baroness first, then the spider boss, then
> malakai and then goto the baron. Skip the magistrate and just go in the
> gate to fight the stitches monsters.
Hmm, that's our normal way of doing it, but for the speed run we did the
spider boss first then baroness (pulling her back into the cleared area
we'd made by getting the spider boss, to avoid problems with fearing), and
that also meant we avoided the trap, which is a very good way to waste a
lot of time.
> You'll need a lot of potions (healing/mana) and you'll definitely need
> two characters that can CC in the party (Mage, lock, rogue) since you
> wont be stopping to drink or eat. Also bring a bunch of heavy runecloth
> bandages since you can bandage after fights to save your healers' mana.
We never used CC - only one that works on undead is shackle and we had no
priest. Didn't slow us down; our only problems came with accidental pulls
of adds, which can be avoided with more care. Having two healers helped
with the mana problem a lot, as generally one would heal and the other
would drink (or in the case of the druid, switch to catform and dps where
suitable)
> When you get to the ziggurats (Sp?) i.e. the towers with the sub-bosses,
> after beating the boss send in two party members (a dps and a healer
> subclass like pally, shaman or druid) to clear the inside of the tower
> while the other three party members keep pulling mobs.
One can do it fine - before we started the leader asked me if I thought I
could manage, I said I'd try and it was pretty easy with a healing potion
to help. The one after baroness was a bit tricky, seeing as she kindly
used up most of my cooldowns when she MC'd me, but they're perfectly
soloable, and four is better than three for the next main pull.
> The key to beating this within the time limit is that there are two
> groups of mobs that you can avoid pulling and just run around them.
> Theres a group off near the fountain that after the Malakai boss that
> can be avoided and there is also a few gargoyles/ghouls that can be
> avoided. If you dont avoid these groups you most likely wont make it in
> time unless your party is just already heavily geared. (which would
> kinda defeat the point of the quest unless its just for fun)
Yeah that was our problem; that and aggroing groups that we should've
avoided - generally we'd only take out a group on one side of each
ziggurat; trouble was we'd then aggro the remaining group by accident
while passing by... but that's going to be a case of learning from
experience and being damn careful to give them a wide berth next time!
> If you dont make it into the gate where the stitched horrors are by the
> 14 min remaining mark you wont finish in time so just complete the run
> and start over.
Aha, thanks for the time tip, that's very worth knowing for next time - I
wasn't sure exactly how long we'd need :-)
And then boot13g followed up with an alternative way of doing things:
I'm sure there are others ways of doing this, we used the CC on the human
casters that are near the spider boss, outside the scond gate and the ones
near Malakai. Spelllock was also helpful to use of the fearing gargoyles
and the banshees.
Just to clarify the groups you need to avoid are the group thats off to
the right of the spider boss zigg, the group thats to the right of the
Baroness zigg (the ones near the blacksmithing plans) and the ghouls that
are along the left wall by the gate near the entrance to the area before
the baron's zigg. You also want to skip the magistrate.
When you clear the spider zigg make sure you hug the right side when
coming out, when you clear the baroness' zigg you want to hug the right
side when coming out. this will keep you from aggroing the mobs you
skipped.
I've been hearing there is a soulstone 'cheat' that makes this run easier.
(i.e. you can run past a bunch of mobs suicide, die then rezz with SS real
fast and enter the area with the stitches monsters. Supposedly this is
faster than fighting them all) But I havent tried it.
Also, we did loot some of the mobs (but skipped most of the trash mobs)
and we looted all the bosses, just greeded everything to save time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.12 Looting
----------------------------------------------------------------------
SCraig wondered:
I'm unclear about how the loot is divied up in a group quest. Sometimes
I get a message that my share of the money from a kill is X and other
times I don't. Sometimes the brown bag appears over a kill and I can
right click on it and get whatever is there and sometimes it isn't.
Then other times, some dice show up and we get to click on need or
greed which is probably the easiest to understand; it being a
hierarcy/dice role division of what I gather is rarer loot. But what
about the money and the common stuff. How is the division of that
determined?
Bart Rider responded:
In groups there are some loot policies you can set up. The default way
is, that one by one all players can loot a corpes. So if you are 3
chars in a group every third corpes is assigned to you and you can loot
it. For groups money is *always* shared between the living (means here
non-ghost) players. If players of a group are some distance away (they
dont appear on your minimap as dots) or have freed their spirits after
death, they do not participate in money sharing.
For the non-money loot in your corpes it is different. If the stuff is
written in white or grey font, its always yours to pick up. Green stuff
is shared again between the living players (can be changed in the loot
policies that sharing might begin with blue or even epic stuff). Here
the dice shows up, letting you choose between need or greed. After you
first looting your corpes it is free for all to loot, of course only,
if theres something left to pick.
Best to learn the loot policies, if you open a group with your friend
and then change them, kill some mobs, change them once more and so on.
Kareena complemented this:
I believe that money is divided equally with all players regardless of
the looting option - which are Group Loot, Round Robin, Need Before
Greed, and Free for All.
These options are set by the party leader and you can view the option
by right clicking your portrait when in a party. This is how you
change it too.
The most common one is Group Loot. This works by allowing each member
to take turns looting the mobs. It's only active when you are near
each other though, so if you are other sides of the map you can loot
all of your kills.
Round Robin works like Group loot, but you take turns no matter what.
Need Before Greed works out whether you can use the item before letting
you loot it. I.e. an axe drops, the priest never sees it, but the
warrior loots it.
Free For All is just that. Anything killed can be looted by anyone.
This tends to get used when low levellers are grouped with high levels
as they couldn't care less about the sword with +1 stamina.
All of these options will bring up the Need/Greed dice window depending
on the threshold set. This is usually at green. So if a green item
drops, you get a chance to roll (but not in Need Before Greed if you
can't use the item and another member can.). This can be changed to
blue, purple or higher, so if you don't care about green drops, set it
to blue and the person who loots will keep any greens.
A final looting option is Master Looter. This is where the only person
who can loot is the Party Leader. He then gets the option to dish out
the item to any party member. This is generally used when the items at
stake are worth a lot or you don't trust each other :) It is always
used in high end raids (MC,ZG,AQ etc) and is generally combined with a
DKP system (Lots of info on the web about this) It also works with the
threshold.
It is one of the fairest looting structures I have seen in an MMORPG
and tends to work well when people's greed does not force them to click
Need on everything!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.13 Weapon speed
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A discussion shedding some light on the topic of weapon speed, its influence
on special abilities and the consequence of the normalisation some patches
ago.
Conspiracy corrects stush replying to David Carson and Josh Carter:
stush wrote:
> David Carson wrote: Josh Carter wrote:
> > >
> > > Does the weapon speed really impact the effectiveness of the
> > > weapon.
> >
> > It CAN.
> >
> > Look at the dps of the weapon. This is how much damage it should do
> > if you just stand there swinging it. Obviously higher is always
> > better here.
> >
> > But weapon-using classes have various special abilities which do
> > damage based off the weapon's BASE damage, not its dps (damage
> > divided by speed).
> >
> > e.g. Rogues' Sinister Strike and Backstab, Warriors' Mortal Strike
> > and Overpower, Hunters' Aimed Shot and Multishot.. all of these
> > take a fixed amount of time to launch (instant for most of them),
> > and do damage based on the weapon's base damage range.
>
> This USED to be true. Last couple patches they have normalized rogue
> and hunter attacks. They are no longer based on base weapon damage.
It wasn't the weapon damage that was normalised, it was the attack
power bonus to weapon damage.
What used to happen was this. Say you had x amount of attack power that
added 100dps. That's 100 damage per second on to your weapon. Now, if
you had a weapon that was 1.3 speed, an instant attack would be weapon
damage
+130, 2.0 speed dagger gets +200. 4.0 speed axe would be weapon damage
+400. Now, what they have done, is that all weapons of a certain class
+get
a certain amount of damage based on attack power. Example: all daggers
are classed as 1.70 speed damage for attack power on instant damage.
Using this example, you can see that with the same attack power a 2.0
speed dagger would get the same 170 damage as a 1.3 speed dagger. Thus
the normalisation.
For classes that used instant attacks as their primary damage source,
rogues and mortal strike warriors mainly, you used to go for a really
slow weapon to maximise the attack power bonus. This made the blue 2.0
speed Barman's Shanker a more damaging dagger than the purple Gutgore
Ripper. Not a good thing when a Level 54 blue deals more damage than a
Level 60 epic.
So, since the normalisation patch, what you are looking for in a weapon
(if you use instant attacks) is the damage range. This is the part
where it says 180 - 243 damage, the higher those numbers (generally)
the better.
I hope this explained it a little bit, and I expect someone to rip it
to shreds - I've always had trouble trying to explain things.
David Carson follows up:
To extend: prior to that change, as your attack power trended upwards,
weapon speed dominated every other consideration. So it got more and
more important as player gear/power levels increased. That's how the
crappy blue with slooow speed outperformed the epic with moderate
speed.
Now: as your attack power trends upwards, weapon considerations
actually become less and less important. Only the damage range matters
and it becomes a smaller and smaller part of the total damage, swamped
by your normalized attack power contribution. Result: more flexibility
of weapon choices.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.14 Stacking of enchantments
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Firian answers a question by Trevor Wilson:
> I have a level 44/45 blue mace (cant remember name) but it has stuff on
> it already, 20 str + some resistances i think.
>
> If i pay to have say beastslayer stuff put on it, does it wipe the
> current wep bonus's?.
No, default weapon bonuses aren't overwritten by enchants. Only other
enchants get written over (and enchants include anything permanently added
to an item, such as armor kits, mithril spurs, or any "true" enchant).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.15 Aggro calculation
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Noble wanted to know:
I don't know how I came across it - could have been here - but in one
of the Blizzard forums there was a long post on precisely how aggro
worked. Rather than rely on hearsay, the poster and friends had
treated aggro as a reasearch project, and done experiments to find out
exactly what effects various stuff had.
Simon Nejmann's answer:
The original post has afaik been deleted - but it was copied and
archived here:
http://evilempireguild.org/guides/
-> "Threat Values and Formula" in the left menu.
Brian expanded Ivan Zuzak's answer:
IZ> try this: http://www.wowwiki.com/Aggro
If you click around a bit, wowwiki also has a copy of Kenco's original
post, which was also linked elsewhere in this thread.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Kencos_Research
Find more on aggro and threat under "4.4 Threat, aggro, tanking and
pulling" and under "4.10 Aggro debunked".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
======================================================================
5 Game world
======================================================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.1 Endgame and High Level Instances
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Based on a post by Chris Stauffer/Wildcard.
Additions and updates by Simon Nejmann,
The game currently has the following "epic", 40 man raid instances:
- Molten Core: Entrance located in Blackrock Mountain, attunement
required.
- Onyxia's Lair: Very short (only contains 4 warders and Onyxia
herself), entrance located in Dustwallow Marsh, key required
- Blackwing Lair: Entrance located in Blackrock Mountain, attunement
required
- Ahn'Qiraj (also known as "Temple of Ahn'Qiraj" or "AQ40"): Entrance
located in southern Silitus (western gate).
It also contains two 20 man raid instances:
- Zul'Gurub: Entrance located in Stranglethorn Vale.
- Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (also know as "AQ20"): Entrance located in
southern Silitus (eastern gate).
Those instances require lots of time, you can't do them in pickup groups, and
you won't master them in the first try.
[Update to 5 and 10 person instance by Simon Nejman]
Finally the game also features one 10 man raid instance and a number
of 5 man instances.
- Blackrock Spire: As the name implies, the entrance is in Blackrock
Mountain. Blackrock Spire is generally referred to as either Upper
Blackrock Spire (UBRS) or Lower Blackrock Spire (LBRS). They are
technically one instance, but they are normally treated as two
seperate ones, the seperator is a locked door in the first room that
leads to the "upper" part.
- UBRS: 10 man raid instance, key required. The key is aquired
through a quest in LBRS. UBRS contains only raid quests (it is
supposed to be 10 manned), and the end boss, General Drakkisath,
drops the tier0 chest piece.
- LBRS: 5 man instance, it can be raided (max 10 man) but LBRS
contains only non-raid quests and is supposed to be 5 manned.
- Blackrock Depths (BRD): 5 man instance located in Blackrock
Mountain.
- Dire Maul (DM): 5 man instance in Ferelas. Seperated into three
different instances with their own entrances (east, north and west -
though north and west are internally connected). North and west
require keys to enter, the key is aquired through a quest in east.
- DM-E contains mostly plants and satyrs.
- DM-W is mostly elementals and undeads.
- DM-N is ogres and is the location of the famous tribute runs.
- Stratholme: 5 man instance located in the north western part of
Eastern Plaguelands. The undead overrun and burning town of
Stratholme most of the place is overrun by undeads, and the ruler
of the undeads, Baron Rivendare, has set up throne in the east end
of the city (he drops the tier0 leg pieces), while the Scarlet
Crusade has entrenched itself in their stronghold in the western
part. Stratholme features two entrances - the unlocked main entrance
and the locked service entrance. The service entrance can be unlocked
with the "Key to the City" whic is dropped by Magistrate Barthilas
inside the entrance. The Scarlet stronghold is also locked, but can
be unlocked with "The Scarlet Key" from Scarlet Monastery.
- Scholomance: 5 man instance located in Western Plaguelands on the
island Caer Darrow. The outer door is locked and a quest-chain is
required to aquire the key - the quest starter is Apothecary Dithers
at the Bulwark (horde) or Alchemist Arbington at Chillwind Point
(alliance), in either case the start quest is called "Skeletal
Fragments". The end boss, Darkmaster Gandling, drops the tier0 head
pieces.
Note: All the doors I have have noted as locked can be lockpicked by a
rogue with 300 lockpicking (Im not sure how much is actually
required). The only exceptions are: Onyxia's Lair and the door to
UBRS.
The original post by Chris Stauffer has lots of notes about how long
the different instances take to complete, but most of the dungeons have
been changed more or less in 1.10, so I have no idea how precise the
numbers are now.
[Original post by Chris Stauffer]
And then there are the "normal" level 60 instances. I'd try to note
down the average time you can expect them to take with pickup groups:
- Dire Maul East: Up to 2h, 5 man limit. Location: Feralas
- Dire Maul West: Up to 3h, 5 man limit. Location: Feralas
- Dire Maul North: Up to 2h, 5 man limit. Location: Feralas
- Blackrock depths (BRD): Depending on what you want to do in there,
up to 4h (the instance is huge). You can do quite some quests in
chunks of 2h, and even a full first time run for the emperor can
be done within 3h. Raidable by 10 man (but it rarely happens,
because there's no cool loot in BRD). Location: Blackrock Mountain
(Searing George)
- Stratholme: Usually referred as Scarlet side (beating the crap
out of humans) and Undead side. Scarlet side with 5 people may
take about 2h, undead side maybe 3. A baron run (sneak in through
the back entrance and head for the baron, the end boss) can be
done in 1.5h with a good 5 man team. This place is often being
raided (up to 10 men), you shouldn't have a problem getting in
there. The baron drops the blue leg pieces of all classes.
Location: Eastern Plaguelands
- Scholomance: Same as Stratholme, Scholomance is being raided
(again by up to 10 men) a lot. The end boss drops the head pieces
of all classes. A full run with 10 people can be done in 2h (it
can of course be done faster, but I'm talking about PU groups),
if you want to quest in there (therefore 5 man) it can take 3h
or more. Location: Western Plaguelands
- Lower Blackrock Spire (LBRS): BRS is one instance, and contains
both a lower part, designed for 5 men, and an upper part,
designed for a 10-15 men raid group. The lower part can be done
by a great team in 1.5h, the average pickup team will need 2.5h
- 3.5h. LBRS can of course be raided by up to 15 people (it's
technically the same instance as UBRS), but it happens rarely.
Location: Blackrock Mountain (Searing George)
- Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS): To get into UBRS, you need a key
whose pieces are random boss drops in LBRS. A full run
(everything else doesn't make any sense) usually takes about
1.5 - 2h. The end boss drops the blue set chest pieces.
Location: Blackrock Mountain (Searing George)
[sn]Note; only one person in the raid needs the key - the door opens
when he walks near, and he can even up and leave the raid afterwards.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.2 Getting ready for end game instances
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This chapter covers the quest chains leading to the end game instances
of Onyxia (Ony), Molten Core (MC) and Black Wing Lair (BWL).
A web site covering these quests was supplied by "CH":
Quest chains (alliance biased) are listed on the left at
http://pc.gamespy.com/guides/wowat60/alliance/about.html
Some comments on Onyxia:
[Hornet] Dragonkin menace in Burning Steppes. This takes you to BRD and
seems to end. Go farm the miners outside BRD til the Crumpled note
drops and I think the rest is all continuous.
[Simon Nejmann] I know you are alliance, but for the sake of
completion: The horde chain starts in Kargath with the quest "Warlords
Command" - get it from the guy in the tower. Don't think there are any
prereqs.
[Vladesch] The onyxia quests starts at marshalls refuge burning
steppes, and you have to kill verious sypes of dragonkin.
About Molten Core, assuming that you have done the "Attuned for the core
quest in BRD":
[Hornet] You're ready to go, the only quest in there begins in Azshara,
there is an island in the SE with Hydraxian Waterlords who give you
several quests, and eventually an item needed to summon Majordomo(last
boss before Rag)
[Simon Nejmann] Take a look here - the bugger is hiding on a small
island in the middle on nowhere: http://www.thottbot.com/?m=134217
[Vladesch] Try duke hydraxis who is on an island NE of the tip of the
southern peninsula in azshara.
About Black Wing Lair:
[Hornet] Before your next UBRS run, clear the hall that leads to the
right outside the entrance and the courier at the end will drop the
item to start the quest, killing Drakk completes it. No quests that I'm
aware of in there.
[Vladesch] Yes, actually the quest for BWL is a lot shorter than
onyxia. It also requires a run through UBRS. It starts by killing a
quartermaster (IIRC) who drops an item which starts the quest. He
spawns east of the entrance to UBRS along with a couple of other 60
elites.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.3 Instances linked to professions
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Babe Bridou proposed a relationship between certain Instances and
professions. Many people followed his call for discussion, among others
Simon Nejmann, Brian, Brent Huiberts (Cybela), Fugwump, Marco Dieckhoff,
Yelps.
Mining, Blacksmithing & Blackrock Depths
You need to be at the dark forge in blackrock depths to be able to
smelt dark iron or forge similar items! You can also mine Dark Iron
inside this instance; some ore is also available outside of it, but the
supply is much less guaranteed...
Alchemy & Scholomance
You need the alchemy lab in Ras' room to be able to make Flasks (the
only other alchemy lab in the game is in Blackwing Lair, in the room
Firemaw patrols).
Probably the quest to get major mana pots and transmute water to air.
Major mana recipe isn't a quest--it drops off of Gandling.
Not only. You can buy it from Magus Frostwake, a ghost outside
Scholomance. You need to complete the quests from Scholomance to get
the trinket with which you can see the ghosts of Caer Darrow. Someone
said you can also do it with the priests Eye of Divinity.
There are the most powerful flasks, that require an Alchemy lab. You have
to bring the Philosophers Stone and the materials into the Alchemy lab to
make them.
Fishing & The Wailing Caverns
You can fish Deviate fish inside the Wailing Caverns (inside the cave,
not necessarily inside the instance), and you can sometimes get lucky
with deviate fish schools in the barrens' oases.
Enchanting & Uldaman
The enchant master trainer is inside the Uldaman instance.
Skinning & Blackrock Spire
The Beast in Blackrock Spire can be skinned for epic loot, etc...
Engineering & Gnomeregan
Tailor & Stratholme
Well, for one thing there's a lot of non-elite trash mobs, and they're
all humanoid, so Baron raids are about your best bet for Runecloth per
unit time.
Priest epic robe pattern drops Scarlet side. (Mage in LBRS, Warlock
from Gandling)
I thought about Stratholme, for the Runecloth and the truefaith
vestment pattern.
Tailoring & Dire Maul (East & North)
For me, the attractive instance for a tailor is Dire Maul East - so
much felcloth! Or Dire Maul North, with all the very interesting
patterns in Knot's Cache
Dire Maul came to mind at first, being the only "Felcloth" instance in
the game, and given the Tannin pattern for the Tribute.
Tailoring & Timbermaws
I'm thinking about Tailor as a "timbermaw" trade, mostly because one of
the contacts you can make there is simply the best tailor trainer in
the land...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.4 Stratholme rovers
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nate Engle shed some light on why it is so easy to wipe on the rovers
in Stratholme (UD side):
I would also add an observation about the bat rovers (also seems to
apply to ones the eyes summon and ones that are more sedentary) - very
simple observation, saves a lot of trouble if people heed it: if you
stun the bats (or silence or counter-spell them) they do an AoE fear.
It isn't a huge duration effect - basically just long enough for some
clever dick stun-locking rogue or hammer-of-justice casting paladin to
run out across a plaza and aggro 3 or 5 groups. And of course having
aggroed those mobs, do they have the good graces to stay over there and
vanish or just die so that they don't pull their little friends over to
the rest of the party? Oh no. Stupidity and misery both love company.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.5 Sets
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From U-Boat, 3phase, David Carson, Simon Nejmann
There are a few endgame sets of armour. These are the different 8 piece armor sets that are class specific.
I dunno where the term originated, but it is basically a way of saying
that set X is better than - or _follows_ - set Y
eg. you pretty much have to have equipment of tier X quality to be able
to handle the dungeon that drops tier X+1 stuff.
Tier 0 (What Blizzard call Dungeon Set 1)
This is the blue class set that comes from Scholomance, Stratholme,
Blackrock Spire, and Blackrock Depths - this is also the only class set
that doesn't have any class restrictions, eg. all casters can use
Dreadmist.
Paladins have the Lightforge set.
Shaman have the Elements set.
Warriors have the Valor set.
Warlocks have the Dreadmist set.
Tier 0.5 (What Blizzard call Dungeon Set 2)
These were introduced with patch 1.10 and Blizzard refers to them as
upgraded "Tier 0" sets. There are a series of quests available to
upgrade Tier 0 set items to Tier 0.5. These items are half blue, half
epic (purple).
Paladins have the Soulforge set.
Warriors have the Heroism set.
Warlocks have the Deathmist set.
Tier 1
These purple (epic) set pieces drop in the raid instance Molten Core.
This gear is entry level requirement for Blackwing Lair.
Paladins have the Lawbringer set.
Warriors have the Might set.
Warlocks have the Felheart set.
Tier 2
These purple (epic) set pieces drop in the raid instance Blackwing
Lair. Exceptions are the helms for the sets which drop from Onyxia and
the legs, which drop from Ragnaros in Molten Core.
Paladins have the Judgement set.
Warriors have the Wrath set.
Warlocks have the Nemesis set.
Tier 3
These will come from Naxrammas, the dungeon comming in 1.11. The info
regarding tier 3 is kinda shaky, given that the patch isn't out yet -
but Blizzard has revealed some things here and there. Read more at
http://www.whataboutpp.com/tier-3.php
Warlocks will have the Plagueheart set.
There are other sets out there too, but most of them don't really get a
tier number.
Zul'Gurub
The set from Zul'Gurub is more or less a sidegrade from the tier 1 set.
Warlocks have the Demoniac set.
Ahn'Qiraj
The set from Ahn'Qiraj 20 doesn't really fit the formula since it is
"only" a weapon, a cloak, and a ring.
Warlocks have the Implements of Unspoken Names set.
The set from Ahn'Qiraj 40 is a slight upgrade/borderline sidegrade from
tier 2, and as such doesn't get it's own tier number either.
Warlocks have the Doomcaller set.
There is also the PvP sets. However since none of them has anything to do
with dungeon progression none of them gets a tier number.
Lieutenant Commander/Champion set
You can buy blue boots and gloves at rank 7. 8 gives a blue chest and
leggings. 10 provides access to a blue helm and shoulder.
Field Marshal/Warlord set
At rank 12 you can buy epic gloves, leggings, and boots, and at 13 you
can get epic helm, shoulder, and chest items.
Arathi Basin set
The last class set is a three piece, reputation based set from Arathi
Basin.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
======================================================================
6 Technical & Customer support
======================================================================
----------------------------------------------------------------------
6.1 Moving characters between accounts
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Blizzard has said they intend to provide this in the future. No even
remote date has been given though. There will be a fee to do this, I
would imagine it will be a substantial one in the $50-$100 range but
that's just my guess. There will also be a limit on how often you can do
this. I wouldn't think it would be less than 1 per month and wouldn't be
surprised if it were 1 per 6 months but again, just my speculation on the
future based on the fact that they do want to limit it for justifiable
account cases and not for ebay sellers.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
6.2 lag (lengthy)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a short, edited version of a post about LAG by Rexxx
This is being written to help those that suffer from what they consider
to be 'lag'. I hope you find it useful, and if not, I apologize. I won't
be able to cover every detail of what you could do, but this should give
you many things to try, and just might clear up your connection a bit. It
was written because someone here asked for more info.. so I threw this
together.
What is lag?
------------------
Lag is a condition where your network connection causes the game to 'slow
down'. This could be only for a split second, or could be many hours. The
noticable symptom is 'jerkiness' while playing. If your screen 'jerks'
while you play, you may be experiencing lag. For instance, you start to
run, then, suddenly, you are back where you just were a second ago. This
is lag.
Unfortunately, the term 'lag' is commonly misused. Some people experience
'lag' and what they are really experiencing is either a CPU cycle
problem, or a video problem that does not directly effect their network
connection. Nowadays, however, it is common that ANYTHING that slows the
game down is considered lag. So, with that in mind, I will use the term
lag to mean ANYTHING that causes a game slowdown of some sort.
Spyware/Adware
------------------------
Spyware and Adware cause lag in multiple ways. One way they do this is by
sending information, over the internet, to their 'home sites' while you
are playing WoW. When they use bandwidth, it is less bandwidth for you.
Anti-Virus Software
----------------------------
The major players in the anti-virus software realm have learned over the
years how to play nice with most applications out there, so it is
unlikely that they cause you much grief while playing WoW. However, some
things to note are:
1. If your computer isn't as 'up to date' as a newer machine, then it
might not be bad to disable your anti-virus software while playing.
Just be absolutely certain to reenable it after you are done. And
always, always keep it up to date.
2. What time does your scan start? Once this scan starts, you will see a
slowdown of your machine that could be dramatic.
Memory
------------
Wow and Windows together eat memory like candy. If you have less than 1
gig of RAM (and I would recommend having at least 2 gigs), then it is
entirely possible that your memory is being used, and Windows has to
write to disk for extra 'memory'. Sure, the game has a minimum
requirement of 256Megs of RAM, but seriously, it won't run well on it. I
don't care WHAT anyone else tells you.
Hard Drive Speed
-------------------------
If your hard-drive is older, it is entirely possible that it is helping
to cause slowdown on your machine. The older your hard-drive, the slower
it will be.
System Drivers
----------------------
Make sure your drivers are all up to date. In fact, this should be the
first thing you do after cleaning up your spyware. Don't forget to update
DirectX as well.
Windows Updates
--------------------------
Update Windows. This is more important than most people realize.
Programs Running
---------------------------
If there are other programs running on your machine, stop them. You can
hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and go to the Task Manager to see what other
applications are running. When they use your network bandwidth, it's
less for WoW to use.
Network Hardware
--------------------------
Hubs: If you have more than two machines on your network, don't use them.
Switches: Good choice. Switches will send traffic only to the computers
it is destined for. Switches reduce 'junk' traffic on a network a lot.
Cables: While making your own cable isn't necessarily a bad thing, you
need to be sure to use good quality equipment for the cable, the ends,
and the tools used to make it work.
Cables run over 300 feet are problematic. Chances are you are
experiencing random disconnects and lag throughout your game.
Cables that run, or wrap around power cords or lighting fixtures
(florescent) are usually absorbing some noise. Seperate the cables from
power sources, and it may help clear up your connection.
Network Cards
---------------------
First, I will say that a good, name brand network card is better than a
'built in' network card any day (unless that built in card is a quality
brand). Update the network card driver, and a lot of lag could clear
right up.
One setting that CAN be important is the link speed of the card. If you
can set the link speed of the card, then try setting it.
Check this for every machine on your network, ESPECIALLY if you are
using a hub. Erroring network cards on your network can cause a LOT of
junk traffic on the network and cause lag for you in-game.
Other Machines
-----------------------
Do you have other machines on your network? If other users on your
network are downloading files, streaming video, etc, this can cause lag
for your game. However, things that people don't think of are:
Playstation, Xbox, Tivo, etc.
Video Settings
---------------------
I'm not going to go into great detail about this, but, change your video
settings in-game. Lower the resolution, turn off all of the effects, one
at a time, and see if they help. If you find that doing this helps, then
you will need to upgrade your video card to play at the higher
resolutions.
Wireless Networking
------------------------------
If you are using wireless network cards, and are using only an 802.11b
card, upgrade to 802.11g. It's faster.
Your ISP
------------
You can also contact your ISP to help you diagnose lag issues. They can
monitor your network bandwidth usage and tell you if your connection is
being saturated. In general, the typical tech support won't be much help,
but if you can get your call escalated, you may stumble on someone that
is really willing, and able, to help.
This is a short, edited version of a post about LAG by Rexxx
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
6.3 Difference between lag and latency (very brief :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mikel wrote
There is no lag bar. Lots of people make this mistake. The bar does not
measure lag. It measures latency, that is, the time it takes for the
client on your computer to get a response from the server. Lag is not
latency; latency is not lag. Lag can be related to latency, but doesn't
have to be.
Note by Urbin: You will note that Mikel makes a clear distinction between
lag and latency whereas Rexxx treats them both as one issue.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
6.4 Taking screenshots
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stinger wanted to know:
How do i use the screenshots i take?
Mel, Stavros Christoforou and PhilHibbs suggested the following:
Covershots is a great little program that converts all the tga files in a
folder into jpg.
http://www.faststone.org/download.htm works, I just tried it.
Irfanview is a very fast viewer/converter for Windows, gqview for linux, I
don't know on a mac, but I assume finder can view them (?)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
6.5 Running WoW on Gentoo Linux
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From Jeff (playing on Emerald Dream):
I have a Gentoo Linux FAQ set up over at the Gentoo forums. This guide
will help you get WoW up and running using wine + nVidia + OpenGL.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3143732.html#3143732
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6.6 Channels stopped working
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Brian Tkatch" had a problem and found the solution to it.
Problem
Last night i'm not sure what happened, but /1 and /2 stopped working.
Solution
Finally (found on blizzard's site). I tried /script
LeaveChannelByName("General")
then /join general. That basically did it for me.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread-search.aspx?ForumName=wow-tech-support&Author=Smidge&Cluster=Wow
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6.7 I deleted the background downloader
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If you deleted your background downloader, you can get it again from the
following link:
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/WoW/other/BGDL-1.10.zip
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