zeroinitiate - A World of WarCraft Rogue Blog

Real ID. When Blizzard announced that it was implementing it back in the day I thought it was pretty cool. I’d be able to communicate with my real-life friends across factions, realms and even games. It sounded like a convenient way to keep in touch.

Then the patch arrives and here comes the implementation. Frankly, I don’t like it. It just feels wrong to see my real name displayed in-game like that. Sure, my real-life friends know who I am and my online persona is not too different from how I actually am but that isn’t the issue. There’s a reason why we have avatars and usernames. We don’t want everyone to know who we are. We want to play the game and interact with other people yet still remain hidden under the anonymity of our toons.

By revealing that they want to implement the Real ID system to the forums as well, Blizzard is effectively removing our choice to be anonymous. You want to post? Then you have to identify who you are. It’s going to be an effective way to remove trolling, sure, but it’s also going to kill their forums. It’s not worth revealing who you are just to ask where Mankrik’s wife is or how to tank properly.

Now, I don’t post in the forums very often. In fact, I rarely visit it. My reasons are purely circumstantial; at work, where I am most likely to view it, our corporate firewall is blocking it. At home, I’d rather play the game than go to the forums. In short, this issue doesn’t affect me directly. This leads us to the simple solution: if you don’t want your real name displayed in the forums, then don’t post there. It’s as easy as that. Yet here we are, raising a collective voice.

I’m going to end this with a question. What if Blizzard/Activision goes further? For example, what if they automatically create forum accounts with your Real ID readily available and they modify the ToS so that it’s mandatory, something you have to agree to in order to play their games? I know I’m creating a possible worst case scenario here but it’s a thought. I’ve been a fan of Blizzard for a long time now but this whole mess makes me think that it’s having an identity crisis wherein it wants to be the Facebook of gaming.

I tried the Remote Auction House app on my iPod Touch back when it was in beta and I’m happy to say that it works really well. The interface is intuitive and well-designed, making it easy to navigate. With a little patience, you can find what you’re looking for and get to where you want to go without consulting a manual. Getting into the actual AH action is a breeze as well. Buying, selling and re-selling are all easy to do.

For me, the simplest way to judge it was to ask this question: was I able to make money from it? The answer is yes, I was. By playing around with the app I made about 200 gold in two days. It’s not much, but for someone who hardly makes any money from the AH, it was a lot. Is it worth paying the extra money for? It depends.

Let me try to answer that by telling you what I like about it. First of all, let me mention that I don’t spend a lot of time with the in-game AH. On Sin, I buy flasks and whatever gems are needed for the JC daily from it. That’s it. Second, the things I should be selling are scattered on different toons. My mage usually has some leftover enchanting materials that can be sold, my bank alt has extra stuff that fits that bill too, etc. The point here is that I’m usually too lazy to swap back and forth to find what I need. The Remote Auction House makes that part easy. Just select a toon and his or her inventory will open just like that. You can then select whatever you want to sell, make competitive price adjustments and post away. Plus, there’s the added benefit of being able to do so at any time of the day, as long as you have an Internet connection. It’s one hell of a way to waste time. Instead of playing that game on your iPhone, load up the RAH and make your posts. I like to think of it as a very productive way to waste your time.

On another hand, I can’t imagine anyone who spends serious time in the AH needing the app. They’ve already got the in-game one working for them so having a mobile version of it is likely unnecessary.

Blizzard opened Ruby Sanctum this week so it’s time for another strategy guide. Let’s focus on the final boss of the raid, Halion.

Phase 1

Like any dragon boss, Halion has a cleave and a tail swipe so you want to stand on the side of one of his hind legs and DPS from there. He will put a debuff on a random raid member called Fiery Combustion. The best way to handle it is to run and head for the outer wall, then wait for someone to dispel it from you (you can use Cloak of Shadows to remove it yourself). The reason behind this is because there’s a secondary effect that you don’t want to spread to the raid. Running to the outside wall minimizes the chances of doing that. Watch out for Meteor Strike as well. There’s a visual effect that looks like a ripple of fire that indicates where it’s going to drop. Avoid it, then stay out of the fire that spreads from it.

At 75% HP, he’ll go to phase 2.

Phase 2

Welcome to the Twilight Phase. Give your tanks a couple of seconds to pick him up (Tricks if it’s up, of course), then DPS the boss. The debuff to watch out for here is Soul Consumption. The same strategy applies; if you get it, run to the outside wall, have it dispelled (again, Cloak works), then resume DPSing.

The second thing to watch out for here is that there are two orbs orbiting the outside wall. At some point you’ll get a warning, followed by the appearance of a purple beam connecting the two orbs. This is the Twilight Cutter. Regardless of how might think of the color purple, this beam will kill you if you stand in it.

At 50% HP, Halion moves to phase 3.

Phase 3

There are now two versions of Halion, one in the physical realm (phase 1) and another in the twilight realm (phase 2). Your raid leader will you which phase to go to but the point here is that both versions have to have the same amount of HP as much as possible. So if physical Halion is at 48% HP, twilight Halion has to be the same or very close to it. Otherwise, he’ll regenerate. He retains his abilities in both phases, so aside from watching his health, both groups have to deal with the debuffs, the meteors and the cutters.

We usually start with Sethekk Halls. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it’s a port away from Magister’s Terrace. I like to think that we start there to build into a progression of sorts, like we’re starting from the easiest then moving on to the hardest. It’s not actually the case though. You’ll see.

Anyway, on to Sethekk. We can sneak past everything until we get to the first boss, who we learned we had to kill if we wanted to make our journey back convenient. Once he’s down, we then proceed to the second boss, which is actually the mount dropper. Cow will summon him, we kill him, hope he drops something, then move on to the last boss and kill him too. Once all of them are down a door on the right will open, leading to the a spot near the entrance. Note that it will only open if all bosses have been dealt with.

We then fly back to Shattrath and port to Magister’s Terrace. Again, sneaking our way is the key here. Once we get to the first boss, we clear the room first before we engage him. When he’s down, it’s a short trip to the second boss, which is again easily dispatched. A couple of sneaky steps later we’re on to Delrissa. For this fight we make sure that our cooldowns are available so we can AOE all of them. There’s a chance that they’ll let a Fear out, ruining the AOE and possibly causing aggro to the surrounding mobs so it’s better to be prepared. Then it’s on to Prince Kael’Thas himself, who usually drops nothing. Hey, he might drop the mini-pet or the mount so he’s slightly more rewarding than the other bosses.

We then pick up a flight to Silvermoon, head to the Mage trainer and take the port to Blasted Lands. From there, we run up to Karazhan. There, we switch to a raid group and clear all the mobs prior to Attumen. We found out recently that we don’t need a tank for him so we just two-man him and hope he drops something. Once that’s done, we head to ZG for the final stop of the run.

I’m at the point where I’m passive about getting a Lich King kill. I mean, sure if we have the group for it then I’ll give it a shot, but I’m not going to force circumstances just to get a raid going. Thankfully, the decision to do so isn’t up to me most of the time but that’s my stand on it. With that said, I run into a completely different problem.

I don’t have anything left to do.

So, time to find things to occupy my time with. Oh, I know I can always switch to an alt and do something with that, but the thought of gearing a toon from scratch the way I did it with Sin is daunting and time-consuming so I’m veering away from that with this post. The question here is this: what can I do with my main?

The answer came from a guildmate: mount runs. Now, I know there are other answers too, such as achievements, getting the Loremaster title or something similar, etc. I just prefer mount runs because they’re not anal with the details; run an instance that drops a mount, kill the boss, rinse and repeat. The best part? As a rogue, I can sneak my way past through most of the mobs.

My partner in crime is the above-mentioned guildmate: Cowtastrophy. She’s a druid, so her cat form stealth matches perfectly with my own. She gets detected more often than I do because of the sneak levels but she makes up for it by healing my sorry ass so it’s all good.

Now, we’ve gone through these runs often enough to have very, very low expectations of them. It’s like, got nothing better to do? Let’s do a mount run. The enthusiasm comes from the fact that it gives us something to do, not from the hope that a mount will actually drop. It beats standing around in Dalaran all day, watching everyone else’s gearscore progress while your own stagnates.

Okay, at this point I think it’s fair to say that we’re being bombarded with Cataclysm information. You’ll notice that I haven’t been writing about it. It’s by choice. I tend to ignore previews because of the fact that they’re temporary. I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is going to make it in the final product and I don’t want to spend the time and energy involved in keeping up with every little update. I also don’t want to deal with the eventual disappointment if something I’m looking forward to gets cut in the end. Just take a look at what they’re removing now and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, this is something I do for all games, not just WoW. I’ve been there before, folks. I’ve felt the anticipation, the excitement—then the game comes out and all you have a shell of what it was in the previews. So no, I don’t want to go through that. I’m going to get Cataclysm when it comes out whether it’s good or not. We probably all will.

I’ll tell you where it came from instead. I blame Arcanum. I’m a Fallout fanboy. Fallout 1 and 2 are two of my favorite games and I used to spend hours talking about them back in college with another friend of mine. Arcanum was created by the same guys so I saw every preview I could, bought every magazine that featured it. This was before Gametrailers, folks, so online preview videos were virtually unheard of. If you wanted information about a game, your best bet was to buy a magazine that covered it.

Then the game finally came out and it all went downhill. The real-time combat was too fast and awkward. The turn-based combat looked downright silly albeit more rewarding. The whole magic versus technology bit that they were trying to pull off came out half-assed. It was just a train wreck compared to Fallout. I hated it when it was released. I eventually played it after a few months when all my expectations were dead and it was only then that I appreciated it. I’ve been very wary of previews since.

So, going back to Cataclysm, if I find something interesting then I’ll write about it. For now, please don’t count on me covering previews and anything related to them.

I contacted Blizzard support via email and was asked three questions to verify my account. I was unable to answer all of them. One question involved providing my vanilla WoW serial number, something that I no longer thanks to Typhoon Ketsana. The rep told me to email Account Services directly and provide a government-issued ID plus a scanned printout of a document they provided in the link. I submitted what was required two days later. After nearly three days, I got a response that Blizz has removed my authenticator and I was able to login.

It was a long and arduous process. I still can’t get over the fact that the one thing that was protecting my account also prevented me from accessing it. Overall, I was unable to play the game for about a week.

Pardon the short update. Real life is getting in the way again. If you want to hear about the new talent previews, WoW.com has those covered. I was supposed to write a post about gear stagnation but this week’s heroic drops have managed to shut me up. Imagine that?

I broke my iPod last week. I was installing an update for an app. It prompted to reboot. When I did, it gave me the recovery screen, the one that told me that I should plug it to iTunes. I slept it off since it was late in the day. When I woke up, I plugged it in and got no change in the error. It was then that I knew that I was in trouble. My authenticator was in my iPod. If I didn’t get it to work, I wouldn’t be able to play WoW.

So I hauled my ass off to work, figuring that I’ll try to resolve the problem there. iTunes needed to download the recovery software needed to restore my iPod back to factory settings so that was the first thing that I tried. I then found out that our corporate firewall blocked iTunes from doing so so I had to try something else. How about a manual download of the recovery software, I thought. So I did, downloading the latest version for my iPod Touch. I went back to iTunes, tried to load it and it gave me another error. A little digging revealed that it was caused by a digital signature issue that Apple stopped using. Which meant I was stuck.

It time to think out of the box. What could I do to force my device to load the restore software? I already had it so I figured there must be some other app out there that would do it. I found two other things but they also failed miserably. I was a little tired at that point. If I gave up on the problem, I was looking at the possibility of bringing it to a service center then waiting at least a week before I could get it back. It wasn’t a prospect that I was looking forward to.

I don’t know what led me to it, but I eventually found out that my iPod Touch wasn’t a 3G model. It’s a 3rd gen device, sure, but it was only 2G. I had been using the wrong restore software all along. I then downloaded the correct one, went back to iTunes. This time, there was no digital signature error because Apple was still using it for this version of the software. After a few minutes, my iPod was restored. From the start of the repair process to the end of it, I spent 6 hours fixing it. It took forever, but you’re looking at someone who had zero knowledge when it comes to fixing iPods so I just took it for what it was.

When I got home that day I installed my apps and songs. It was then that I found out that my authenticator was out of sync so I still couldn’t log in. I informed the officers in my guild and filed a ticket with Blizzard to sort things out. I just found it incredibly ironic that the very thing that was securing my account was also preventing me from accessing it.

After playing around with all the talent trees, my DK finally settled on using Unholy as his DPS spec. I finally understood the rotation and, quite frankly, Glyph of Disease is simply a great glyph to have for people like me who have trouble maintaining diseases. I also switched my tanking spec to Blood since that’s going to be the spec of choice come Cataclysm. It’s working well so far.

I recently ran into this random heroic where I was tanking and our healer was a paladin. I died on the second pull, with the healer saying something like “OMG, you died so fast. I actually have to heal you.” Maybe he’s been running random groups with better geared tanks but that comment just pissed me off. Sure, my tanking gear isn’t great by any means but it’s good enough to run heroic 5-mans. There’s also the fact that he signed up as a healer. At the very least, he should be doing his job. He proved himself to be an ass by leaving the group after we pulled the first boss. Note that I’m saying after, meaning we haven’t wiped yet. Considering this was Utgarde Keep, you’d think he’d have the decency to stay and finish at least that. Anyway, end of rant.

TL;DR: Pally douchebag healer ruined heroic UK random run.

And by doing that, I just realized I’m on Reddit too often.

It sucks when everybody’s a Kingslayer and Sin’s not. Sometimes I wonder what I’m lacking that’s preventing me from killing the guy. It would be nice if I could score some heroic gear. Then again, when Ruby Sanctum hits the whole new loot table is going to come into play. I’m already wondering what the drops will be.

I have 3 alts that are above 60: a mage, a pally and a druid. I’ve been thinking about which one I should focus on and finally settled on the druid. The reason behind this is because it’s simply the class closest to being a rogue. I tried running a random with him and ended up really bad on trash pulls simply because I didn’t have an AOE attack. I managed to make up for it on the boss fights though so that’s a good thing. I’m just going to have to see if I can stick it out and actually get a third toon to 80.

That’s it for random musings. Raiding has plateaued for Sin so there really isn’t an update to post in that area. And lately I haven’t been the type to raid with more than one toon. The time constraints is really the killing factor.

Blood Queen Lana’thel is a straightforward fight. You have three debuffs to watch out for, two of which you’ve probably seen before.

The first debuff is called Essence of the Blood Queen, AKA the vampire bite. It usually goes to the second player in her threat table but I’ve seen it go to someone else so don’t quote me on that. The queen will bite someone in the raid and give him or her this debuff. Assuming it goes to you, you will have sixty seconds of pure DPS bliss: damage is increased by 100% and cause no threat for 60 seconds. Of course, it’s still a debuff, so here’s the catch: once that minute is over, you will receive Frenzied Bloodthirst. Your action bar will be replaced by a single button. Find another DPSer, target him or her, then hit the button. This will make you bite that person, dropping Frenzied Bloodthirst and bringing back Essence of the Blood Queen. Your bite target will also have Essence. You and your victims will eventually pass this to the rest of the raid. If you don’t bite someone, you’ll get MCed.

The second debuff is Pact of the Darkfallen. This one draws a red line that connects certain members of the raid, causing damage during its duration. Close the gap to get rid of it. The final debuff is Swarming Shadows. It’s like Jaraxxus’ fire debuff except it’s purple. You can use Cloak of Shadows to remove it even before it drops a trail. Otherwise, you’ll leave a trail of fire while it’s on you so run but try to keep your movement as tight as possible so you don’t end up making a mess in the room.

At some point during the fight she’ll go up in the air. You’ll get feared while she AOEs the raid. There’s little that you can do at this point except to hit Cloak of Shadows and hope you time it right. Once she lands, it’s back to her old cycle, minus the bite.

The gimmick of the fight, DPS-wise anyway, is managing the bite. If it doesn’t go to DPS, or to DPS ASAP, she’ll still be alive by the time everyone gets bitten.