"There is nothing to do in WoW."

The title is a complaint I often see when reading various forums (or even the Trade chat!). I even recall feeling like this in the past. Right now though, this couldn't be any further from how I feel! I feel like there is never enough time to do everything I want to do in-game, in fact.

So I wonder how much of this is a function of play time and how long you've played the game. Though I have a good amount of time to play on the weekends (generally), I rarely am able to do much during the week at this point. Are the people who are complaining of being bored able to put in a lot more hours and therefore burning through content faster?

I also missed the last two expansions (well over 4 years of time), and I imagine that some of the things on my To Do List would have been accomplished over that time period had I been playing the entire time. Are the people who are complaining of being bored those that have been playing continuously for long stretches of time?

I feel like a big part of my feeling like there is always something to do also stems from the fact that I enjoy PvPing. If I were just raiding, I'd complete the weekly run and then be done with PvE content for the week - there wouldn't really be a reason to continue to run the same content without a chance for gear. Granted, I try to hit the Conquest Point Cap every week to get gear (well, at this point I'm capped), but even after that is done with I still have the desire to play more games simply to increase my rating. Because there's no "end point" with Arena / RBG ratings, I have a larger time-sink available than those who just participate in PvE.

Still, I recognize there are some valid complaints about the direction Blizzard went with WoD. This video was pretty highly rated and does a good job explaining some of them:

Honestly, the Garrisons don't really bother me. They are a bit more isolated than capital cities, but I am rarely actually in mine. There is almost always something I need to be doing in-game, I never just sit around and twiddle my thumbs while waiting for queues.

I do think the mounts / rep-grinds this expansion are pretty underwhelming though ... I have barely spent any time purposefully grinding for rep with any WoD reps since my return; conversely, I have ground for mounts / reps in pre-WoD areas.

The Weekend Update

Despite having a 4-day weekend, I actually didn't have that much time to play this weekend. For some strange reason people get really excited about doing social events on long weekends. Weird.

Anyway, some quick updates!

We tried some 3v3 arena last night and, despite making some early gains we ended up with a losing record overall. For whatever reason, 3s games rarely seem close / competitive. It seems like 75% of our games are over very quickly and are pretty one-sided, whether it's us doing the killing or getting killed. 2s, on the other hand, I'd say that about 90% of our games feel close and competitive, like either team could win; I'm not sure what the difference is.

One thing we definitely struggle with in 3s is when I get focused. As a feral druid, I'm somewhat of a glass cannon. Outside of bear form, I have a single defensive cooldown which reduces damage taken by 50% for 6 seconds. There are two charges and a charge regenerates every 2 minutes. Both of my CCs (cyclone, roots) have cast times. I have a stun on a 30 second cooldown.

As a comparison, hunters have 2 charges of Deterrence, which reduces damage by 30% and deflects all attacks, but renders the hunter unable to attack and, I believe, unable to be healed (which sounds bad, but if your healer is CCed you aren't getting heals anyway!). These regenerate every 3 minutes. In addition, they have an ability called Roar of Sacrifice which, when cast on a player, makes it so they cannot be critically hit for 12 seconds (they also cannot crit themselves). This is on a 1 minute cooldown. Add in the fact that hunters are ranged and so can try to kite when in danger (as opposed to feral druid, who has to stay in melee range to do any damage) and even use abilities like Disengage (which can cause players to be rooted, if you take a certain talent!) and they have even more damage reducing abilities. Freezing trap is an instant cast, though can be missed; do deal with this, some hunters take Binding Shot, which stuns the player if they move more than 5 yards from the tether. Otherwise, they generally take wyvern shot, another CC (1.5 cast time).

Rogues, as a second comparison, have evasion (1 minute cooldown, dodge increased by 100% for 10 seconds), cloak of shadows (1 minute cooldown, immune to spells for 5 seconds), vanish (disappear, breaking movement impairing effects, 2 minute cooldown), and preparation (resets the cooldown of the three previous skills, 5 minute cooldown). They also have a variety of CCs, including blind, kidney shot, sap, gouge, none of which have a cast-time.

None of this is to say that feral druids are helpless or bad. They are certainly in a good spot right now. I just feel like I have less tools to deal with being focused, and I end up getting flustered. It is definitely a weak spot in my game right now!

I actually had an invite to try healing in 3s from one of the hunters we had previously done 3s with, though he was going to play on his rogue. I accepted, because it's definitely something I'd like to try doing in the future. As we talked a little more about it, waiting for a second DPSer, we realized that my rating was about 300 higher than his. He then asked if I wanted to just try 2s, in which he was ~1850 ... feeling bad about saying no at this point, I said sure, but warned that I might not be very good since the majority of my experience is healing in RBGs. We played 3 games and lost all 3, though two of them were really close and could have gone either way. The second game was against a priest/lock combo and the priest spent half the time using Dominate Mind on me which was really annoying! Overall though, a positive experience, I think. We stopped after 3 because the rogue felt bad tanking my rating, ha.

We did pretty well in 2s overall, going 14-11. We ended on a nice little 3 game winning streak which was good, because we certainly had some frustrating games in the middle. In particular, we had one game against a Windwalker Monk (melee dps) and priest healer that ... I have no idea, still, how we lost. The priest was essentially oom for what seemed like forever, and even with all my cooldowns up I couldn't get him down ... and then we lost. Mind boggling. I think sometimes when we realize another healer is OOM, we get tunnel vision and stop playing the way that got us there in the first place. Too focused on trying to DPS down the healer, we stop CCing the DPS or switching when it's useful. We both ended with our rating over 2k and my partner got as high as 2030 (highest yet!).

I also spent some time leveling up my priest, who is now 96! I realized that there are potions you can buy in your garrison for just 100 resources, that increase the amount of experience you gain by 20%! That certainly helped.

This weekend, both my normal 2s partner and my wife will be out of town ... so this is what's on the agenda:

1) Level 100 on Crescendo. This should be pretty quick, I think. Couple hours, tops.

2) Rated Battlegrounds! Right now the cutoff for top 10% in RBGs is 1819, and my rating is currently 1788. I have had a really high success rate in RBGs recently it seems like, so I am hopeful this is pretty easy to get. Top 35% get the title Soldier of the Horde and top 10% get Defender of the Horde. Guardian of the Horde is top 3%, but requires 1950 ... not sure how reasonable that is, but we'll see!

3) Finishing up my quest to get 500 Gnome honorable kills in "world" pvp ... the title of Gnomebane awaits!

If I get all that done I might check out BRF or start working on Crescendo's pvp gear.

My newest garrison follower

Soooo ... that happened.

Last Friday I got an email that Blizzard had tried to re-subscribe to WoW for me, but that the Credit Card info had changed and they were unable to (this makes sense, we had to get new cards recently). I made a mental note to take care of it when I got home, and then promptly forgot about it.

Sunday, I logged into this:

Woops! Guess my sub lapsed ... but you can use gold to purchase a game-time token from the character screen. I hadn't really planned on using gold to pay for my sub until I felt like my Mage's garrison was running smoothly, but ... clicking that button seemed so much simpler than having to get up and find my wallet and then logging into their website. So I just clicked it! World of Warcraft is now Free To Play!

I feel like I had a busy weekend, but we still managed to get a good chunk of arena games in. Late Saturday night, one of the hunters we had previously played with was online so we did some 3s games. We started off 2-2, spurring some comments along the lines of, "I feel like we're just stuck around the same rating" which, at the time, was ~1850. Then we went on a nice little run, going 6-2 and getting our rating all the way up to 1950! Our MMR was well over 2k, around 2100 at this point. At this point it was after midnight and I was quite tired, but I figured I'd stay around for a few more games to see if we could break 2k. Being really tired and doing arenas doesn't quite mix well, and we ended on a losing streak, back down to around ~1915. Still, it was an overall positive experience.

We were able to do some 2s the next day, and those did not quite go the same way. We faced one comp in particular that just destroyed us - Mage and Feral druid. We usually do really well against double DPS, but this one we went 0-3 against!! Outside of that we had some pretty close games that we couldn't quite end up winning, though we did beat a hunter / druid team which was enjoyable. We ended up losing more games than we won and ended in the high 1900s. Perhaps the funniest game of the weekend was this one:

Forget double DPS ... double healer is in!

Not sure what happened there, I think one of the players had accidentally joined without switching back to his damage spec. They left as soon as I opened on the first player.

It's possible that I was rusty - I hadn't played in about a week and a half, and it had been even longer since we had done 2s (probably 2-3 weeks?). Still, I thought the more frenetic pace of 3s would lead to 2s being even easier for us to handle ... and at least on Sunday, that wasn't really the case.

The Pet Menagerie

I mentioned how fun the Pet Battle stuff was a while ago, and while it certainly was enjoyable to collect other pets, it kind of took a backseat to everything else I was doing. That probably would have remained the case for a long while had there not been a quest introduced in one of the recent patches that automatically leveled a pet up to level 25 for you. The important part to note about this quest is that you can do it once per character, not once per account. So when my Mage finally hit 100, I was able to level a second pet to 25.

With two level 25 pets, you can trap some of the pets in Draenor (even if you only challenge a single one, extra pets always come to the rescue). A third 20+ pet is enough to begin to do the daily quests in your garrison. There are two different daily quests:

1) One quest, which every character can do, requires you to defeat your garrison's Battle Pet Master. It provides 8 tokens that can be turned in for a variety of pet paraphernalia, including level-up tokens, something that changes your pet's quality to rare, and even dress up costumes.

2) The second quest can only be completed once per account. You must defeat Kura Thunderhoof in a pet battle, which is usually easier than the first quest I mentioned since her pets are only level 23. You are rewarded with 3 level-up tokens and a bag that might contain a rare pet, but usually just has some gold and pocket lint.

Having only 3 level 25 pets, the first quest is sometimes difficult because I can't select pets that have an attack advantage. I am working my way toward other level 25 pets though; the most efficient way to do this (long-term, at least ... certainly slower in the short term) is to spend 2 pet tokens on a bag that contains a level-up token (sometimes two!) for a random pet family rather than 3 tokens on a level-up token that works on any pet. This is slower because it spreads out your levels among a variety of different pets, but in the long run better because you're using your tokens more efficiently. It also saves the rewards from the second quest I mentioned in case you come across a level 1 pet you want to level up quickly (say, a drop from an old dungeon that can be sold for a good amount of money).

Interestingly enough, there are a multitude of Battle Pet Masters all over Draenor that you can fight every day. I stumbled across one while doing the Harrison Jones quests with my mage:

I have no idea how many there are, but if you did all of them every day you could very quickly level up a variety of different pets! And of course, one of the fun things about the menagerie in your garrison is that your own pets hang out there!

I really need to organize my bags

I made a comment the other day while in-game that my bags were too full and needed more room. The person I was talking to asked what was in them ... and that's a great question. At the time of that conversation, I took a screenshot:

Let's go over them bag by bag!

1. Originally this was meant to just house consumables. You can see a number of potions and some food in there, but the bottom row also has 3 reputation tokens for factions I've already reached exalted with. They're bind on account, so I shipped them off to my banker alt. There are two motes in there that I got while farming for MoP factions that ... I'm not really sure what I'm doing with them. I should probably just sell them in the AH. There are also a couple things in there related to world PvP (they don't work in BGs or Arenas) that I will never use and should just destroy (I had been holding onto them so when I looted them from my War Mill they didn't end up in a random spot).

2. All my follower upgrades that I've saved. The bottom two rows are the lower level - 9, 6, 3 - and the top two rows are the highest level - 45, 30, 15. Most of my followers at 675, and while there are some that could be leveled up, I am mostly just waiting to do so until it's actually necessary.

3. The top of this bag is meant to be overflow. You can see a variety of items here: the 20 stack of crates are from the Salvage Yard and I just need to go through and open them; there are a couple of PvP pieces from past seasons that I picked up with honor for Transmogs (they need to go into Void Storage); there's a bunch of vendor trash from mining; there are some of the daily pet reward tokens (the blue medal looking things); there is a stack of broken bones from Ashran; and a stack of 27 crates for the Barn.

4. This is my professions bag. At the time I had a crazy amount (for me, at least) of Primal Spirits from handing in excess ore to the ore trader.

5. Extra gear should go here. I have a number of PvE pieces as well as a secondary set of PvP gear for my off-spec (resto).

6. Originally the bottom of this bag just had a line of consumables to use on the Timeless Isle (farming rep for a Heavenly Golden Cloud Serpent). Since then, I've just started dumping stuff from Follower quests into there as well (some specific Follower Trait rerolls, some Halaa tokens, some Steamwheedle rep items).

7. This has a number of PvP items in the top of this bag as well as my normal hearthstone. The PvP items are: a gnome heart that lets you see Gnomes near you (killing 500 gives the title of Gnomebane), an item that allows you to collect Bloody Coins while on Timeless Isle, and an item that allows you to collect Bloody Coins in regular BGs. There are some more specific Follower Trait rerolls up here, too.

It's kind of sad that I have the largest bags possible and still no room. I definitely need to just organize better.

MOAR Fitness stuff!

This past weekend I ran a half marathon (13.1 miles). I have run full marathons twice before, so while I have run this distance in the past while training, this was the first actual race I have done at this length. Thinking about this a little more, I've actually only ever done races that were 5ks (3.1 miles) or marathons (26.2 miles), ha!

I hadn't run much over the winter, so we (my wife also ran in this race) started training about 8-9 weeks before the race. I always feel like the majority of my training is spent trying to build my endurance up to the necessary length, rather than being able to focus on speed work. Throughout most of my training I didn't have a time goal in mind - I just wanted to run, be comfortable, and finish. About 3 weeks before the race though, I started to notice my training runs were under the ten minute mile pace. Given my lack of focus on timing and lack of water/gels on my longer runs, I started to wonder if I could break 2 hours. A 2 hour half seems to be a pretty common goal for half marathons so in my head I made that my goal. I didn't really tell anyone because I wasn't sure it was possible and didn't want to disappoint myself if I had to tell 18 people that I failed.

Going into the race I thought I would miss it by about 3-4 minutes, which would have been about a ~9:30 pace. 2 hours is closer to a 9:10 pace (it's kind of crazy that just 4 minutes translates to a 20 second faster pace, isn't it?!). I figured having gels (basically easy to ingest carbs with some added sodium and electrolytes; who knows how effective they really are, but psychologically they help, if nothing else) and the frequent water/gatorade stops would be enough to allow me to push the pace.

We got up at 4:30 (UGH), and drove an hour to get to the race. It took us half an hour to get from the highway to the parking lot because of the crazy lines, and then we stood in line for the port-a-pots for another 20 minutes. So with just a few minutes before the race was supposed to start, we finally made it over toward the starting line. At this point, the street was packed. We tried to weave up closer to the start, but basically couldn't move through the mass of people. Most races try to arrange people so that those who are shooting for faster times are in front (that way once the race starts they aren't weaving through all the slower people); I don't know if it was because it was so busy, because people didn't pay attention to those signs, or because most people were too optimistic in their times, but we got up to the 2:40 sign and couldn't get any closer.

The race started, I started the MapMyRun app on my phone (so I could see my splits for the entire race), and then walked veeery slowly toward the starting line. I then spent the majority of the first mile trying to weave between people I was trying to pass. If memory serves me correctly, I hit the first mile at ~10:30, but then didn't see another time display until around mile 6. Every time I saw a timer I spent the next 4-5 minutes trying to do the math on my splits to see if I was going to make the 2 hour mark. I got a couple of donut holes at one of the first water stops (thanks Dunkin Donuts!). They're delicious! I used my first goo at mile 4.5, and by the time I hit mile 7 my thighs were already starting to burn. I guess my body wasn't used to that pace? I knew I could push through soreness, I just needed to not get any cramps. I used my second goo at mile 9, and as I started to get close to mile 12, I saw a big group of runners with several pacers in their midst. As I caught up to them, I could hear some of the pacers tell onlookers that this was the 2 hour pace group.

As we hit the 12 mile mark, I saw the third time display - 1:50:xx. I was going to do it. All I had to do was run a nice slow 10 minute mile and I would break 2 hours, especially considering I hadn't started right as the gun went off (each runner's personal race bib includes a chip that times you, so it doesn't start until you actually cross the starting line). The choice was: a nice easy last mile ... or kicking it in as fast as I could. I chose the latter:

Map my run splits

I crushed my last mile - 7:30 pace!! I also completely forgot I had MMR running on my phone until a bit after I had crossed, so the final mile time and distance aren't exactly accurate (nor is the first). Here is my official time / race splits:

Official results

Barely in the top half of my age group, but I was solidly in the top 25% overall. I passed 140 people over the last 3 miles, at a pace of 8:19! Overall my pace was ~8:41. I was really happy that I was able to break 2 hours (and pretty handily, too!), but many were my legs sore afterward. Still are, in fact!

It still seems kind of crazy to me that I didn't catch up to the 2 hour pace group until the last mile. It took me twelve miles to catch up to a group that I ended up beating fairly handily, time-wise. If I ran ~30 seconds faster per mile than they did, then they started 6 minutes before I did ... but my time at the first mile marker was only 10:30. So I'm not sure how that worked out. My next race is a 10 miler in June, and I haven't quite decided what to make my time goal yet!

Any suggestions?

Harrison Jones!

One of the additions in 6.1 was 6 daily quests that allow you to add a new follower - Harrison Jones. As you might have guessed from the name, the follower is a play on Indiana Jones and all the quests have that sort of treasure-hunting-mythical feel to them.

Jones is guaranteed to come with the Treasure Hunter trait, which doubles the amount of gold you can get from missions. He also has the Mentor trait, which essentially allows followers less than level 100 to function as though they were level 100. This is big for a couple of reasons:

1) Obviously this allows you to use lower level followers on higher level missions that they would otherwise not be able to help with
2) More importantly, it allows them to receive all of the experience from the higher level missions, as opposed to the normal 10% if they are below level.

#2 makes leveling new followers up to level 100 really fast. On Laktose, where all my followers are already 100, epic, most have maxed armor/weapon upgrades, and I don't have the inn, this isn't a big deal. On Piffle (my mage), where I just got the Inn to level 3 and am now recruiting a new follower every week (they start at 90), this is a big deal! I now have 3 new followers from the Inn on Piffle and this will allow me to get them up to speed in a fraction of the time, allowing them to do the worthwhile missions quicker. You can see this quest is level 100 and normally rewards 60 gold:

Jones alone bumps the reward to 120 ... but he also allows me to use Ruthia, who is only level 95, as if she were level 100. I ended up getting 180 gold from this quest!

The only slow / annoying part about these daily quests is that they are random - so despite trying to finish up Harrison Jones for over a week, it wasn't until Sunday that the quest I needed was selected. You can use the LFG tool to search for people who have the Jones quests in their garrison to speed the process along (the daily quest is the same for all servers, so there's no need to check multiple servers for a different quest).

Dynamic Duo

Friday night was incredibly productive from a PvP perspective. Saturday rolled around and I wasn't sure what to do. Venture into BRF (the other raid instance currently available, higher tier than Highmaul)? Level up my priest? Something else?

I decided to focus on leveling up alts, before I ventured into BRF. That way I could start making additional gold earlier on in the process; it's not as though I'm in a rush to complete BRF, either. Originally I had planned on focusing on my priest. Leveling him to 90 had gone pretty quickly with the benefit of heirloom gear and simply queueing for dungeons as a healer (goes faster than as dps). But I saw an interesting guide to making a solid amount of gold just from garrison quests the other day and decided to get my mage to 100 first.

As you may or may not remember, after I got my druid to 100, I quickly got my boosted mage to 96 in order to provide me with additional income (just doing the daily profession stuff, basically). Since then, he had leveled up to 98 just from getting experience from mining/herbing nodes in the garrison. I thought the last level and a half would go much quicker than they did ... it was a slightly painful process, to be honest (perhaps because his gear was so bad?). At any rate, a couple zones and dungeons later:

Ding!

Getting to level 100 allowed me to bump my garrison to level 3 immediately; I had actually just hit the cap on garrison materials, so it was nice being able to build/upgrade buildings immediately. He now has: Barracks and War Mill (large buildings; barracks for extra follower cap and war mill for the upgraded weapons/armor), Inn and Trading Post (medium buildings; inn to recruit gold followers and TP because ... I hadn't made one yet! It's confusing so far.), and Scribe's Quarter / Gem Boutique / Salvage yard (small buildings; inscription and jewelcrafting profession buildings and salvage yard for more money from follower missions).

After that I got my priest up to level 93, which unlocked the profession buildings for him, too! Hopefully he should be 100 before too long, maybe even before Season 1 of PvP finishes, and I can get him geared up with the catch-up mechanic.