Blizzard announced that the PTR for patch 3.1.2 is available for character transfers AND premades.

Patch 3.1.2 Patch notes are at MMO-Champion.

The patch has the new equipment manager which supposedly has eliminated the bug that allowed too many unique equip gems in item sets.  The Argent Tounament mounts are getting new skins and the vendors will be selling the old ones for a Champion seal and some gold.

[rant]

A guild application from Bob is sitting in my inbox. To fill out our guild application Bob had to agree to our rules and have become familiar with our website which is plastered with the phrase “We are not a raiding guild, we are a social guild that also likes to raid.”

Seriously, how many?

Looking at Bob’s armory profile, he is dressed out in all purples from Heroic Naxx, Obsidian Sanctum, and even some Eye of Eternity. His character could fill a key position in our raids. But he seems a little more advanced than we are at the moment. His application says things like he enjoys raiding but wants a more casual atmosphere than the hard core raiding guilds have. He mentions that he cannot play the game on Saturdays because he has to work that night.

That’s cool, we’ve been looking for people to fill in only one one night. Plus we’ve been toying with the idea of adding another raid night so that more people can see the content and also to give us a little more time during one instnace reset cycle to clear all of the wings in Naxx.

We remind Bob that we are not a raiding guild and he still wants in, so we accept him.

We add a raid night so that Bob and everyone else has an extra night to raid.

Fast Forward a month. There has been no communication from Bob, at least to management. He shows up for raids, does his job. We progress through some more bosses and wings. Everything seems fine.

Now I have an e-mail from Bob sitting in my inbox saying that he doesn’t like the way we’ve organized the raid, our gear sucks, we always schedule things on nights that he can’t raid due to work, the only night he can raid on our current schedule is Saturday (Yes the same night he said he coudn’t raid). He’s very blunt that we are not up to his standards so he is going to /gquit to join a relatively more hard core raiding guild.

Why is it that when there are changes in people’s lives (ie a work schedule change) or they are not happy with the way things are going they won’t tell guild management until it’s too late? We try very hard to be open about our methods and goals. We try to be flexable with scheduling. But this kind of thing seems to happen fairly frequently.  Especially from people who were previously in a hard core raiding guild.

The people who run your guild or raid are not mindreaders.  They need feedback from you in a timely manner, not a Dear John letter when it’s too late.

“We are not a raiding guild! We are a social guild that likes to raid. There’s a big difference.” We say that a lot. We try to underline it, for a reason.

[/rant]

So you’ve collected your 25 Valiant seals and you’ve defeated the knight in the Valiant’s Challenge, congratulations you’re now a Champion of your racial home city! AND you have a cool new pet, you’re little squire who follows you around with your standard.

What now?

Once you’ve become a champion a whole new set of daily quests open up for you. Guess what?

They are pretty much the same as the Valiant quests, except the difficulty level has been upped just a little.  You can also begin questing as a Valiant for another city. But you can only be a valiant of one city at a time.  The good news is that some of those Valiant and Champion level quests overlap. So by completing the Champion quest you also complete the Valiant quest at the same time. It’s like getting twice the money for the same amount of effort.

You can get titles “of CITYNAME” if you are a champion of that city AND you are EXALTED with that city. So buying the reputation giving items from the quartermasters with the Champion’s Writs that you get for the Champion dailies is a great idea if you’re now exalted yet.

Once you a have the title for each of the five racial capital cities AND are exalted with the Argent Crusade you’ll receive another title “the Crusader.”

Argent Tournament: Jousting Strategies
Argent Tournament (Part 3)
Argent Tournament (Part 2)
Argent Tournament (Part 1)

In the PTR the jousting in the Argent Tournament was very difficult, but since it went live they’ve nerfed the NPC’s quite a bit making the jousts very winnable.  Here’s how I’ve been doing it. Hopefully it’ll work for you too.

1. Stack your shields to +3 BEFORE challenging an opponent. I don’t know how many times I’ve forgotten to do this.
2. Whenever the NPC opens the distance between you, wait until he’s in charge range and then charge. This should remove one shield from him.
3. Once you’ve charged, veer off to the side in a tight loop. When you’re at the apex of the loop do a shield breaker and then close the distance. This is tricky and you wont get one off every time. But when you do it’ll take another shield off your opponent.
4. If you’re behind don’t bother with charges, when your NPC opens the distance just do a shield breaker and then close the distance before he can charge you.  This will let you wail on him with one shield off and let you catch up.
5. Be very aware of your shields and keep them at +3 , the max. Some opponents can take your shields away very quickly and you need to put them back really fast or you will lose.

I thought that writing about the things that I am doing the most would be a better topic for the blog. So from now on the focuse of this blog will be about raiding casually and leading raids in casual guilds.  

I’ll still have the occasional post about tradeskils and whatever else I feel like posting. But the focus will be casual raids. More soon.

Blizzard put out a call for more testing of the Argent Tournament on the Test Realms.  To me that is a great thing.  Right now the Argent Tournament seems REALLY HARD! Too hard in my humble opinion. So hopefully a lot of people will tell them the same thing.

The problem seems to be with the reactivness of the NPC jousters if you have any kind of latency. Since the jousters are ont he server they play with near zero latency compared to the players who have to deal with all kinds of delays on the internet.

Hopefully they’ll find a solution because it’s very frustrating right now.

What if we had Healing Dummies? I’m not talking about the guy who bought his level 80 Night Elf Druid from e-Bay. That’s a topic for another post.

Healing Dummies?

Lets say that if you’re a healing class when you engage a training dummy it gives you 5, 10, 0r 25 targets in your UI, depending upon the difficulty setting of the dummy. Those targets represent the members of your group that you are going to heal over a period of time.  During that time those targets in your UI take damage just like they would in an instance, heroic instance, or raid. As they take damage you heal them. If you want to review what happend it could all be recored in your combat log for later analysis.

It should be pretty easy for Blizzard to come up with a damage schedule that the dummies would simulate. If they tossed in a little bit of randomness it would be better.  Something like this might be a better way for healers to measure their effectiveness than what we have now, which is almost nothing.

Happy Birthday Oelendra! I miss you.  

And Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone else.

aka What Happens in the Basin, Stays in the Basin!

The Sleepers are having another server wide party, this Saturday night at 7pm Perenolde server time (MDT).  Location is the River’s Heart in Sholazar Basin. These things are always a blast and people roll alts on Perenolde just to take part in them.

For more information see the Sleeper Cartel website.

After that the Epic Dolls are having their second annual Prom, 3/29/09 at 7pm Perenolde time (MDT) in Silvermoon City.

For more information see the Epic Dolls forums.

The new look

I decided to make some changes to the blog that reflect more closely what I’m doing in WOW today.  I don’t really play Stephenn anymore so the emphasis on Engineering isn’t there anymore.

Instead we have Healing and Inscription from Zala’jin, Magery and Tailoring from Roswynn, and other stuff from Gorrah and Sylvaen.  

I will probably write about the same kinds of things. The PTR, tradeskills, etc. I’m also pretty excited about the Argent Tournament. I hope you like the changes.