I arrive in Rut’theran village and am in awe at the lush visuals. Wow, what a change! Sure, I’ve just been questing in a typically grey area — don’t get me wrong, the palette fits the area, but grey is grey — so this place is particularly shiny. I’m a real sucker for lush, beautiful environments in games, so I find myself looking forward to a lot of it in Cataclysm! I finally grab my heirlooms from a Darnassian mail box, bust out a celebratory backflip and plough onward to Auberdine… or so I thought.
Auberdine has effectively been levelled, but it’s all good because there’s a new equivalent called Lor’danel. It’s like Auberdine, only better. Great! Apparently something is going on with the water elementals in the area, so you’re ordered to kill some. As well as that are a couple of old quests, revamped in such a way that there’s some sort of a link but they’re actually rather new. I guess this is to help Blizzard with ideas for the near-limitless amount of quests they’ve added in this expansion. Anyway, it was actually quite fun to revisit some old quests that actually aren’t old quests.
Remember those owlkin to the east of Auberdine? There’s only one left, and he’s sad. How about the notoriously hair-tearing sunken treasure quest? Replaced by a quest to mob and blow up hoards of murlocs as a robot. The buzzboxes are there, too, but they’re quite different now. Anyway, so I’m still in the northern-centre area of Darkshore and some themes begin to surface. The biggest one in the upper area is that trolls are attacking the night elves and have been looting the Tower of Althalaxx to boot. Lots of kill quests as a result of this, but not too many to make you sick of them. The biggest flaw with the troll quests is having to run through a whole bunch of mobs whose kill quest you’d cleared about 50 kills ago.
Other than trolls, the wildlife is becoming corrupted — yes, once again, something I have very little interest in but the night elves love to send me on errands for — and so are water elementals, which I suppose is somehow a separate theme. More towards the south are some very fun quests involving Twilight’s Hammer cultists attempting to summon old gods and their minions, along with a fairly long line in which Malfurion Stormrage — yes, he himself is here, although he’s strangely also in at least Darnassus at the same time — attempts to control a storm with the help of the local wildlife. Finally, there’s a short line involving Naga, where Queen Azshara herself makes an appearance.
By far the highlight of Darkshore, for me, was the legendary Absent Minded Prospector. If you’ve never played through Darkshore, this may be lost on you to some extent, but there are a few quests involving him and his gang this time, and each one of them is hilarious. Any quest line in which you build murlocs a new home is great in my book!
The environment itself is far more lush than it used to be, with ancients featuring heavily, along with generally brighter tones of green. Darkshore no longer lives up to its name for the most part, though the shape of the land is mostly the same.
Overall Darkshore is a fun area, particularly for those who remember how much it was not a fun area. Quests follow a logical pattern and none of them will have you spending far more time on it than it’s worth; and for that matter, none will ask you to go see Mr. Miles Away on the other side of the world. The storyline is mostly uninspired, but there are some gems that more than make up for that. Many of the quests also include a liberal helping of elven bigotry and hypocrisy, which is annoying or delectably sarcastic depending on how you look at it!
Other than Darkshore, I decided to try a run through Wailing Caverns. The only noticeable (and very nice) difference was that quests are all presented at the start of the instance. No trudging around the entire world before entering an instance queue!
Gallery’s up next, and it tells quite a story. Check it out!
Upon receiving my beta key, I excitedly went to install Cataclysm. Unfortunately I’m not at home right now, so this wasn’t on the most powerful computer in the world; nevertheless, I can’t not play now! After installing, the patcher had a lot of work to do, which resulted in us both being way too tired at 6:30AM to wait any longer. The next day I found that I couldn’t get online until the evening anyway, where everything was finally fixed. Party time!
I logged on the newly-copied Strobe and wondered what I was doing. Addons are currently disabled in Cataclysm, which pretty much leaves me doing nothing. I hadn’t copied any binds, either, so Strobe was about as useful as a Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish. Too much work and I’m too eager to have fun, so let’s make a worgen!
I decided on a mage. I’d been toying with the idea of playing a worgen mage come Cataclysm, so I figured this would be a good choice. I’d also had a lot of experience with mages in the past, so I wouldn’t be wasting my time learning an all-new class, and might appreciate some of the class differences in Cataclysm. I named him Trickle — partly because I thought it was a decent name, and partly because I just wanted to get on with it.
Lag! Latency is a fixed 300-600ms, but that’s to be expected of the beta. Surprisingly the servers are quite stable — I haven’t noticed any spikes — although I do get a “World server down” message every now and again. 300-600ms makes mages a little dull — hell, I stopped playing my old mage partly because of latency issues — but again, it’s beta, and the content is delicious!
Anyway, so I’m a worgen… or not. Actually, worgen start out as humans and are then tainted by a curse that turns them into worgen. You have no control over how your human form looks, though I assume it corresponds to how the worgen looks somehow. Nothing new to me here, as I’d already watched a video taking me through the worgen starting zone until the character transforms into a worgen. Still, the quests are pretty fun and the story is nice to follow. I decide to read all of the new quests in the expansion, so that I don’t have to waste my time doing so on release; strongly recommended if you enjoy the WoW lore!
Finally I’m done with the first area and am transported out with a nifty placeholder message instead of the would-be cut-scene. Unfortunate, but funny. So I’m a worgen now! And I’m locked up. Well that’s never good. I miraculously (drugs) retain my human mind and am accepted by those around me as a werewolf. This is undoubtedly much easier than it is to come out as a furry in real life. Anyway, it turns out that Sylvanas is attacking Gilneas for a reason that I’ve forgotten. Gilneans consider this a Bad Thing, and I can’t blame them.
After a couple of quests, The Cataclysm happens while I’m in some basement. It’s a strange experience: The Cataclysm splinters the entire world, yet our dog’s farts have more impact than the pathetic little vibration seen in-game. Leaving the basement reveals that much of Sylvanas’ army, along with the Gilnean people, have been swallowed up by the ocean. Onto an awkward lifeguard quest!
Somewhere around level 9, after seeing a pimped-in-heirlooms worgen, I decided I should have transferred a whole bunch of Heirlooms with Strobe. I set out to do just this with my rogue, Stapler, who I had no real intentions of playing, but who would serve as a decent pack mule to move some goodies over. Infuriatingly, worgen appear not to have a stable postal service for every area around level 9 and above, and I was left waiting to equip them until I was done with the whole area. Sure, I could have gone back to a previous area, but it was a fair assumption that a mail box wouldn’t be too far away, especially given the fairly recent retail patch which put them just about everywhere. How silly of me.
Attaining the big level 10 was something I’d been looking forward to a while. Woohoo, new talent system! I decide to choose fire, recalling how much I enjoyed it over frost in TBC. I would apparently receive pyroblast simply for choosing the spec, along with molten armour soon after. *Click*. Oh look, I have molten armour straight away! *Cast*. “Target is too low level”. Huh? It appears this is a bug; even now, I cannot use molten armour. Oh well, not exactly show-stopping — a druid later enlightened me that mangle doesn’t work, so I stopped whining.
The new talent system is great, in my opinion. The summary clearly states the general benefit of each spec without requiring further research, and the trees are beautifully concise. In WotLK — and even TBC to some extent — the trees were so long-winded that I often forgot which talents I’d taken. That’s just no fun. Blizzard has done great work to make Cataclysm more newbie-friendly, consequently adding a truckload of polish. The UI remains unfortunately basic, but many of the panes have been enhanced or overhauled. Stats no longer require 5000 hours in MATLAB to unravel, which means less time wasted looking at numbers when all you want to do is enjoy the game or roll on some loot.
On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire Gilneas area, with the exception of a few awkward quests which were most probably just not suited to the plethora of beta players constrained to so few servers. Problems usually involve too few spawns, especially in one case where there is a single spawn point and about five-thousand players crowded around it, or too many enemy spawns, where you can’t actually loot the damned item without the same spider you killed a few milliseconds ago spawning in your rectal passages. While there are many generic kill/find quests, they fit well into the flow and often complement other, more interesting quests. Stylistically, the place is spot-on with its intentionally drab and creepy structures and impossibly cosy interiors.
The last couple of quests (last quest?) found me battling to destroy a horde airship. I believe this is the same airship that horde use in ICC, as well as the one floating around Icecrown. A fairly standard but fun gauntlet affair, where the player must follow Lorna Crowley — a politically powerful Gilnean whom I know next to nothing about — and plant explosives, all the while holding off orcs. This had me perplexed at one point where Crowley orders me to “use the ropes” to get down to the deck, except there are none and I end up free-falling instead. Likely a beta thing.
Eventually it was time to go. A Captain Placeholder wannabe, positioned on a boat, notifies me that Gilneas, as an area, has yet to be completed by Blizzard, but we can go to Darnassus and continue questing in Darkshore (though there is no follow-on quest messiness, which I am quite grateful for). As this concludes Gilneas, it also concludes this post. Join me next time as I explore the new Darkshore!
Time for the screenshots! Most of these have been painstakingly captioned for your viewing pleasure, so do have a flick through!
So it would appear that I reactivated my WoW account and have been playing for a while. This means I’ll resume posting here, though I’m thinking of taking more of a general approach than simply that of addons. I’m also pretty uncertain about what I want to do with WoW at the moment.
The big news here is that I’ve attained a Cataclysm beta key! As such, I’ll be using this blog to share my experiences and adventures through the game. I’ll start with that in another post.
See you later!
I’ve been receiving a whole lot of e-mails recently telling me that users have signed up to this blog. Most, if not all of these, are just spam bots — which ironically can’t get any spam comments through due to Akismet. As a result, I decided to do some spring cleaning and delete all of these accounts. If by chance I deleted yours, do contact me by commenting on this post.
Thanks.
So I think it’s about time I updated this place! The quick and dirty of it is that I’ve quit WoW for the moment and so new posts regarding WoW will not be appearing any time soon.
I”ll definitely be back to MMORPGs somewhere down the line, but I’m not sure it’ll be WoW. Right now, I don’t really have that much time to play a game requiring dedication anywhere near the level of WoW — just thinking of doing those damned dailies makes me feel sick again — but situations change. Will I continue this blog if I do get stuck into another game? I’m not sure, it was meant to be a blog about addons in WoW, but I suppose I might adapt it to some other game or just create a new one when or if that time comes.
In case anyone is interested, at the moment I’m spending most of my time on studies, with the occasional game of League of Legends which a couple of old BRS guildies happen to play.
Posting comments here alerts me, so I will be back to reply should anyone need a hand with an addon or something, but obviously I won’t be trying any new addons.
I’ve done it! I’ve finally done it! I’ve successfully enjoyed a PuG! I shall explain my success in a single word: roleplay. Roleplay the hell out of it. Unless they play along, completely ignore the comments of your group. Just amuse yourself.
If you’re lucky, you might even find a group who engages themselves in your roleplaying, like I did to some extent.
Meathook didn't really understand the whole affair.
Patch day is just about upon us, so I thought it would be the ideal time to write a little overview of how to make a smooth transition with your addons into the new patch without having to worry too much about the game being playable.
Firstly, let’s deal with a couple of common misconceptions. The TOC version number means very little. WoW tries to match this number with that of its own current interface version number, and if the two aren’t equal, reports that the addon is out of date and refuses to load it — thus the actual functionality of the addon is not even evaluated. Some people wrote software to deal with this issue by going through your addons and updating the version number, however this is considered bad practice and is wholly unnecessary. You can get around it by simply checking the “Load out of date Addons” box under your Addons menu on the character select screen. Et voilà, the majority of your addons are probably working just fine now, without updating them.
The magical checkbox
This leads me to my next point. Many addons simply don’t need to be updated if they already work fine. I’ve been using some since 2.x without any issue whatsoever! The hell of a new major patch usually only holds true for those who don’t know about the “load out of date” checkbox. That said, there are cases in which addons will just break. These may slightly change functionality or completely destroy the addon as a whole.
My suggestion to anyone reading this and waiting for their server to pop back up is to go through their addon list and look for updates. Contradictory? A little, but updated addons usually mean updated feature sets and potentially performance improvements. If there’s no reason for you not to grab an updated version, then go ahead. Of course, if you’ve made changes to the code of an addon, you’ll definitely want to hold back on doing this.
Before updating any addons, I strongly recommend making a full backup. This means grabbing the existing following directories and copying them to another folder or archiving them in some other way (zip, tar, etc.):
Interface
WTF
Fonts
This will save not only all of your addons, but also any graphical modifications — such as tooltip border changes — settings and fonts. I would recommend doing this whenever you’re going to be doing some major updating or interface lifting.
If an addon hasn’t been updated in quite some time, there’s a better chance that it might need one on patch day. If you’re shopping around to update your addons anyway, you may as well start from the oldest. To get a quick idea of the last time you updated an addon, open up your file manager and sort by the “modified” tab.
Sorting by last modified
Finally, be sure to update addons like DBM and BigWigs. I usually opt for alpha versions for some time straight after a patch as I feel there’s more chance of having current encounter details, which is far more vital to me than a couple of bugs.
And so ends this short overview. Good luck!
Since we’re all hunting turkeys at the moment, I decided to craft a macro to make it a little easier. Run around spamming this macro to mark every turkey in the area. Behold, and do make sure you can mark things before starting.
/tar Wild Turkey
/run if not GetRaidTargetIndex("target") and not UnitIsDead("target") and UnitName("target") == "Wild Turkey" then if turkey == nil or turkey == 0 then turkey = 8 end SetRaidTarget("target", turkey); turkey = turkey -1 end;
Power Auras Classic is a brilliant addon which allows the user to display textured and stylised alerts based on certain conditions. For example, you might wish to display an obvious warning when you lack a buff, when you gain one, when your enemy has (or has not) a debuff applied, when something comes off cooldown, etc. The possibilities really are endless. Because of its flexibility, however, it presents a rather steeper learning curve than most addons. Setting up new power auras isn’t quite a hard task, but it can be a daunting one. That’s why I’m writing this guide.
First off, grab your copy of the addon here. Install as usual, enter the game and type /powa to open the configuration menu. The options are detailed below.
Honestly, I dislike ads as much as the next guy. I had no plans to integrate ads on this blog until I realised just how much of my time it takes to write these posts. In addition, I’m currently a full-time student who could use any extra pocket money available, so ads became a no-brainer. Don’t get me wrong, the earnings from these ads are very low, but I believe the gain for the small differences it makes to visitors is worth it.
I just wanted to mention this as I haven’t really addressed it before. Apologies if the ads are in the way, but I’ve tried not to overdo it and keep them somewhat integrated in the layout. Hopefully the Infolinks won’t detract too much, but do feel free to give me some feedback on this. I’m giving them a bit of a trial.