Monday, July 12, 2010

Level 47 almost 48 and some observations

I didn’t play World of Warcraft  a whole lot this weekend but I completed a bunch of quests in the Badlands and I picked up a piece of Heirloom gear (Tattered Dreadmist Chest) which gives an XP bump so I plowed through a few levels.  That brings me to some observations I have about World of Warcraft, things that have been rattling around in my head since I started playing back in 2006 or so, but they were brought to the front by the comparison of how much easier leveling is with the right gear:

1.  Murlocs suck.  They hit way to hard for just being walking frogs, they are way too aggressive, there are too many of them, they swarm and they make annoying noises.

2.  Gear is important.  When I started playing I had no support system in game so I was using what i picked up off drops.  I died a lot.  Finally I got invited to a guild by someone I had partied up with for a quest who was impressed by the fact that despite that I was undergeared and dying a lot I maintained a good attitude.  She explained stats and gear types to me and gave me a little gold.  After that life was much simpler.  A lot of people will say never visit the Auction House to buy gear.  They are frankly retards.  The money you save by not buying good gear you spend on repairs and wasted time because you aren’t getting stats bonuses.

2a.  Be nice to the noobs, they don’t know any better.  It costs you nothing to answer a question.  If you have some gear that you can’t use it can make a big difference to them and so can a gold piece or 2.  (On the other hand I don’t give anything to the people who sit in Stormwind begging for gold)

3.  Get a mount.  When I started you had to be level 40 and it cost over 100 gold to get a mount.  Now it’s level 20 and costs 4 gold.  It’s the best purchase you can make.  Cuts down on so much wasted time.

4.  Get off the mount.  Once you have the mount get off it occasionally.  Its so easy to just run past mobs now that a lot of XP is lost as well as some pretty good drops.  Especially in Stranglethorn Vale and Tanaris.

5.  Until you are at least level 60 Skinning and Herbalism are the way to go profession wise.  Both items sell well in the Auction House,  most people don’t skin so you get their kills too (they are doing your work for you), and both give nice little abilities.  Master of Anatomy for skinning, which gives you a better chance of getting a critical hit, and Lifeblood for herbalism, which lets you heal your self, even while in combat, that comes in handy if you are like me and you solo most of the time.

5a.  Get the biggest bags you can as soon as you can.  Leather and herbs can eat up a lot of bag space and you don’t want to be throwing money away.

6.  Stranglethorn Vale is an ATM.  Every mob in that zone is worth money and it is a big quest hub.  I picked up 40 heavy leather the other day just off kills other people left behind, add in my own kills and I made about 100 gold.

7.  Use the in game alarm.  Remember World of Warcraft is a game not real life get out and do some other stuff too.

7a.  The alarm is part of the UI.  I like the basic UI for the most part but there are two add-ons that you need.  A coordinates display and auctioneer.  Most quest guides give directions by coordinates and auctioneer keeps your prices competitive so you don’t end up with a lot of unsold overpriced stuff or sell it for too little.

Now that I have shared my WoW wisdom I am going to make a real life observation;  Jesse Kornbluth is an idiot.

But then I never thought I'd see the day when "To Kill A Mockingbird" --- a novel that has inspired readers for half a century --- would be derided as a book about "the limitations of liberalism" (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in The New Yorker, of all places) and "a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past" with a hero who's "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" (by Allen Barra, in the Wall Street Journal)

I didn’t read the Barra article, but the Gladwell article is hardly derogatory.  It just points out the weakness of the attitude that allowed segregation to persist for as long as it did. 

We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

You can understand that and still see Atticus Finch as trying to do the right thing but being a prisoner of his time and place.  That isn’t derogatory.  It’s realistic.

No comments: