On faction transfers

I enjoyed being a troll, I may even roll another one but as the majority of my toons and my guildmates are alliance, I faction switched my DK. Everything went fairly smoothly but I spotted something unusual today.
There are a chain of quests in Icecrown to unlock the shadow vault as a base of operations and open up a load of Ebon Blade daily quests. I had already done this on the horde to the point where I was wearing the Ebon Blade tabard and gaining rep in instances. After the faction transfer I didn’t give it much thought and carried on gaining rep right up to Exalted. So I figured I would head over and see if there was anything of value at the quartermaster (there wasn’t, not now enchants are BoA) but the shadow vault had reset back to it’s hostile version.
I headed over to the airship and found I could pick up the starter quest again, got everything unlocked again and now have two of what should be a one shot quest reward item. It’s not going to break the game mind you but it’s a curious turn of events. Free gold for me I guess in doing the quest chain twice but somewhat of an annoyance, even if it was mildly amusing.

Oh right..

This thing is still on then?
Will probably sort out a decent post at some point but today I have been mostly farting about with Google Buzz, follow me ran93r[at]gmail.com unless you are selling cheap viagra or are in need of help releasing your prince’s funds, in which case you can feel free to die in a fire.

Home Alone!

I’m making the Culkin face as a mark of respect.
Missus has gone out, nipper conked out after running riot. I watched Stargate, smoked fags, shot a few things in the face (Borderlands) and now I’m going to hit the sack.

I’m kinda back playing World of Warcraft, mostly a little PvP here and there along with leveling the lock and DK. The DK I have managed to get his mining and smithing ready for Northrend after already mastering Inscription and Herbs. The state of the horde AH is fucking shocking though, I admit it, I’m an alli whore and I’m just taking a vacation on the ugly side but my god does their economy suck. It really wouldn’t take much for a goblin to go over there and clean up. I just wanted to buy some starter plate to be going on with and there wasn’t a damn thing, hell, the entire AH was devoid of anything interesting. So I took the plunge, dumped inscription and went about starting from scratch on mining/smithing so I could at least gear myself in the basics.
Tempted to roll a horde mage, great class and I love the gneum but trolls are just so fucking cool. Glad I already got the DK his venomhide Raving Sore!

State of the nation

Not been playing all that much WoW of late, you can see my last real post was a couple of months ago. After gearing the mage in PvP stuffs, I managed to get some gear for the huntard and some offspec kitty pewpews but that’s about it.
Fell in love with Fallout 3 all over again and dumped a bit of spare time into that but this week I have picked up Borderlands and the dirt cheap Torchlight.
Reason for coming to waste some time posting on here though is that Steam is b0rked, the forums are alight with tears and after four hours of trying I have only just managed to get to my games list, now to see if I can load something up.

Another respec

Mrs Gnome and I have been PvP’ing on our mages this week, geared as fresh 80’s with a smattering of spellweave so the honor rewards are fairly nice upgrades. I didn’t realise how good the gear available from Wintergrasp was, never really looked before as I have been gearing up my other toons through PvE.

Anyway, I had it in my head that my mage spec was pretty decent, slightly PvE but otherwise ok and I was sure I had picked up TtW in arcane. I hadn’t as it turns out, which was a bit of a head scratcher so I had to go and rectify that. 15g just to switch a few talents around but I’m happier for it I think, dumped a +hit talent and the replenish to grab TtW and also dumped some extra points in Imp Blizzard. Situational you might think but you can generally find me at the back of the pack fucking up everyone else’s day with Blizzard so I will see how that works out for me.

Also tightened up my glyph selection, not something I had cared about on the mage as there wasn’t a single glyph that really made a huge difference to the dicking around I usually got up to but I sorted myself out with the two minor warding glyphs and picked up the ice barrier major. My free major slot was a tough choice, an extra mirror image would have been fun but 30% extra protection on ice barrier isn’t to be sniffed at.

Windows Live ate my saves

I decided to spend my BillPoints on Broken Steel, probably the most interesting of the Fallout 3 DLC so far, not least because they have raised the level cap to 30. I had already hit the old cap but was nowhere close to completing the main quest line. What a fiasco it was just getting the content, the day I decided to grab it was the day Live was down for 24 hours and when it did come back up the marketplace was screwed, so 48 hours later and I finally grabbed it.

Dropped back into the game but nothing came up and I did give it ample time to realise it had new content, decided to do a Live update in-game. This was a mistake, the update looked like it worked but crashed at the arse end. The game runs but all my saves have gone, the new content is being discovered but the game hangs on exit.

All in all, quite an exercise in FAIL.
On the bright side, I get to play through it all again and play with some different perks but having to kill the game from the task manager every fucking time I want to exit is a giant ball ache.

To the skies!

When dailies first got added I had a quick look at Skettis to see what the Skyguard grind was like, there were only really a handful of quests that amounted to something like 1350 rep/day. Needless to say I couldn’t be bothered with that at the time.
Have been out on the Warrior though, after three days of dailies, mob killing, dust handing in and summoning the bone pile bosses I’m exalted. That was a surprise, neutral to exalted in three days work (and only really a few hours a day). Good job we get full rep for grey mobs.
I wasn’t really planning on getting the warrior an epic flying mount but how could I turn down a riding ray? 5k later and I have a nice flappy mount, go me!

The end of WAR

Firstly the lesson for the day.

It would seem that Recount is the only addon I’m running that provides the “Armory” texture. I quite like this texture and as most Ace based mods can happily chat to each other and pinch their resources, that texture is made available to them. For me this is my primary UI bars (AGUF) and my cast bar (Quartz). After a spakattack in Naxx last night I started turning mods off willy nilly in an attempt to settle down my shitty performance. Doing so really pissed off AGUF, without a texture to use it went nuts, threw errors, reset my profile and went back to looking like some fucking circus tent.
The lesson, um.. just leave recount on m’kay (I should have just settled for turning off the sync which is spammy)

Anyway, on to the post.
My month back in WAR is over, I haven’t played that much but I certainly enjoyed it more this time around. Despite really wanting to like Destruction, the Greenskin classes left a lot to be desired, the Witch Elf was fun though. The game itself is still very clunky and unresponsive. It’s, you know, ok, but it’s failings are pretty huge ones as far as playability goes.

The RvR is a lot of fun but the unresponsive nature of the game makes it a very spammy affair where pushing buttons is more important than outskilling your opponent but even as a Witch Hunter, quite a frail class, I went up against a horde of new choppas and managed quite well.

The problem is that when you press a key to activate a skill, there is a delay between that action and what your character does. In some cases this is reflected in the cast bar but not always. I’m used to a little cast bar lag, in WoW for example I can happily predict that a spell will be going off after the cast time, cast bar display notwithstanding. I have been playing that solid for five years mind you so I should know damn well the cast times of everything. WAR operates a little differently, at least as far as I could tell, with the castbar ruling over when your action took place. It wasn’t so much a case of client>server lag as it was just shitty mechanics.

It’s a nice setting, the classes are fun, the RvR is fun, the music is great, greenskins are just hilarious but Herders and Shaman are pretty poor to play, the crafting is awful and there are server merges every five minutes but as I said, I did enjoy playing it again.

I might go back there at some point but I’m starting to consider having another look at LotRO as my next diversion. In the meantime, back to chuffing Walrus dailies.

Window cleaning

Today I have been mostly pacing around waiting for things to finish installing, so I can install something else.
I’m sure it’s been close to five years since I originally installed XP on this box and it’s been wearing me down lately, having done everything I could to smarten it up, it was just tired. So first thing this morning I backed up my funderbird mail, firefox settings, ftp settings and deleted the entire partition. Huzzah!
I have pretty much everything else on a separate drive anyway so it’s only the OS cruft that needed nuking from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure?).

I have managed to get my list of installed apps down to a bare minimum, over the last few years my development routine has been whittled down to a couple of Adobe apps and a copy of Notepad++. My start menu used to span three columns (and this is at 1856×1392), now it’s a third of the screen height and I have everything I need on here. I was thoroughly pleased to discover that WAR didn’t need the registry to survive, I didn’t fancy having to repatch that beast. At the moment I’m waiting for The Witcher to finish patching itself back up to the enhanced edition, and this time I swear I’m going to get past chapter two before being distracted by something shiny.

I didn’t bother to back up all my Steam apps, I haven’t played HL2 or its episodes for a good while, audiosurf was a passing fancy and SiN Episodes was nowhere near as charming as it’s Q2 engine powered parent. I’m probably going to regrab TF2 tonight though, I be on dat kryptonite, straight up on dat kryptonite!

Testing out this site theme until I can pull my finger out and create one of my very own, don’t hold your breath though, I have stuff to kill.