[WoW] Improving Patch Notes

The Godmother, in a recent post, discussed ways to improve World of Warcraft patch notes, in response to a tweet by Blizzard Community Manager @Rygarius. The problem is that a significant number of people don't read the patch notes, for many reasons: they might not even know they exist, they might not know where to find them, or perhaps they find them and see a huge wall of text and just "Nope" their way out of there. The problem goes beyond simple class changes like "Death Strike damage has been reduced by 5%"; things like that you could probably get »

[WoW] Field Photographer: Pandaria, Outland and Draenor

The final part! Part one: Eastern Kingdoms, and part two: Kalimdor and Northrend, were quite a bit longer than this one, since there's only ten pictures for these three maps combined. Seems a bit odd really that there aren't more Draenor locations in particular, given that the achievement itself is part of the expansion. At some point next week I might also write a brief post about how I edited the photos to make them more appealing (compare the Mount Neverest picture below with the unedited version, for example). Pandaria Mount Neverest Sunsong Ranch, looking not very sunny Turtle Beach »

[WoW] Field Photographer: Kalimdor and Northrend

Part two of the selfies from my Field Photographer achievement – see also part one: Eastern Kingdoms, and part three: Pandaria, Outland and Draenor. Kalimdor Caverns of Time Deathwing's Fall (yes I know it's not really in Kalimdor) Echo Isles Halls of Origination Moonglade Nordrassil Onyxia's Lair, handle it The Scarab Dais The Shaper's Terrace The Twin Colossals Northrend Daggercap Bay Dalaran Naxxramas The Frozen Throne, brah #gauntletbump Wintergrasp Fortress Wyrmrest Temple »

[WoW] Field Photographer: Eastern Kingdoms

The latest patch, 6.1, of World of Warcraft introduced the S.E.L.F.I.E. Camera, and a related achievement: Field Photographer, where you have to take a selfie in all the listed locations. I'd originally planned to do one post for each continent, but since they all have widely varying numbers of locations, I'm grouping them as Eastern Kingdoms Kalimdor and Northrend Pandaria, Outland and Draenor Here's Eastern Kingdoms, in alphabetical order. They've all been edited in Capture One 8. Enjoy! Blackrock Mountain Darkshire Deadmines Deeprun Tram Gurubashi Arena Hearthglen Janeiro's Point Karazhan Light's Hope Chapel Ravenholdt »

[WoW] Tracking Buff Power With WeakAuras2 Progress Bars

NOTE: this was written in 2015, so it's probably out of date now. Several classes in World of Warcraft have a buff or debuff they can apply, of which it would be useful to know the power. For example, fire mages have their Ignite debuff, which determines how much damage Combustion will do when cast, so it's important to keep track of the current Ignite damage in order to make best use of Combustion. Possibly there are dedicated addons for tracking this, but I'd already done some experimenting with WeakAuras2 anyway on my blood spec death knight, to track Blood »

[WoW] 10 Years, 10 Questions

This is in response to The Godmother’s post wherein she presents the 10 questions to World of Warcraft players. 1. Why did you start playing Warcraft? I’m honestly not sure any more, it’s been so long. I think it was mostly just idle curiosity, piqued after I saw an advert somewhere about the free trial, and simply wondering what all this MMO lark was all about. 2. What was the first ever character you rolled? Caerath, male human rogue, currently kitted out in some heirlooms but stuck at level 60 for the past 6 years or so. »

[WoW] Ups and downs of scaling

As suggested by a recent leak, the next World of Warcraft expansion may introduce level scaling, similar to how Guild Wars 2 does it. The basic idea is that when you enter a zone or instance, your level and gear are scaled down to the maximum for that place, making much more challenging than it’d otherwise be. Up There are a few positives to scaling, based on experience with the system in GW2. First off, it makes old content ‘relevant’ – raids, in particular, become much more interesting when they’re more or less the same difficulty as current content; »

[WoW] I transmogged my heirlooms

Heirlooms are pretty great if you just want to get from 1–90 as fast as possible. There are two problems with being decked out in a full set of standard heirlooms, though: You look like everyone else in them. And worse than that, I kinda think the heirlooms are ugly as hell. You make new tanks/healers nervous. You see, heirloom gear is kinda overpowered, and many folks let this go to their heads, assuming they can take on an entire dungeon by themselves. So they pull. And pull, and pull and pull and pull, usually before the tank »

[WoW] Walls of text

World of Warcraft is a complicated game. The Godmother’s recent post on the matter, and specifically on ways to improve the in-game ‘player education’ aspect of it, comes just as Bhagpuss published a post on a similar topic, that of how newbie-friendly the game is. Both posts shine a light on the unfortunate fact that honestly, WoW doesn’t do much within itself to guide new players, or veteral players facing new content. Sure, it’s improved over the years, and things like the new talents system mean fewer objectively bad decisions can be made out of understandable ignorance, »

[WoW] Guide: using Hugin for panoramic screenshots

Quick link: Hugin Panoramas are cool -- they show a much wider/taller view than it's possible to capture in one shot, and do so in a way that doesn't have the same weird rectilinear or fisheye distortion you get from regular wideangle or fisheye lenses. Here's an example of what I mean: If you actually go to the instance and stand in the same spot, you'll notice right away that the view isn't nearly as wide as this. Here's another example: Again, if you go here, you'll find that you can you can only see around one third of »