Category: ramblings

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 8

Kurn / / blogging, general, ramblings

Brace yourselves — I actually opened WoW for more than auction stuff this week! hahaha!

I’d been watching a video a few weeks ago about rare titles, and that video basically got me thinking about titles, and it also encouraged me to watch a video series about this one guy Barny on a Classic server and the title Scarab Lord.

Scarab Lord is a wild title. The things necessary to get the title are absolutely bonkers.

So I visited Silithus (old world version) on Kurn and recorded a little video which is the first of a series in which I tell a story or two. Or three. It’ll be called Storytime with Kurn. And so my first stories have to do with Scarab Lord and the Brood of Nozdormu and such.

I may rerecord it because I think I rambled too much, so I need to rewatch it before I post it anywhere, and then potentially rerecord it, but expect it this week at my YouTube channel!

Let me know what zones/dungeons/etc you want to hear my stories about. Anything from Vanilla to Cataclysm is valid.

Haven’t done much else and don’t have a lot of thoughts today, but let me know what stories you want to hear, go subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I’ll do what I can to get stories up weekly-ish. :)

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 7

Kurn / / apotheosis, general, raiding, ramblings

Once again, didn’t do much to do with WoW this week. Part of it is the hockey playoffs. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, is still in the Stanley Cup playoffs as I write this. They may be eliminated Monday night, or they may move on to the third (of four) rounds. Who knows? It’s been a weird playoffs.

The other part is a lack of motivation. I feel like there’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get anything in terms of gear, so I’m just… not doing a lot? Maybe?

Still, as usual, I have things to say. :) (And I’ll note I started this entry on Sunday even though as I finish it, it’s now Monday. But I have Monday off for Victoria Day so I’m still going to pretend it’s Sunday.)

Topic 1: The Old Days

I had a former guildie, Aaza (hi Aaza!), comment on my last post. She’d wanted to know if I had a copy of our Illidan kill. That kill happened in, uh, like August or September of 2008. And I had it! I didn’t realize it was set to unlisted, so I set it to public and linked to it. (Thanks to Dayden for frapsing it and putting together the video!)

That someone, from that old version of Apotheosis, wanted to see our Illidan kill, was kind of interesting to me. I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. Not nostalgic enough to do all of that GMing/raiding/etc again, mind you! But nostalgic enough to feel as though some of the memories my guild and I had made together really meant something to people at the time. So to have Aaza pop in and be like “hi!!!” was really lovely, because it sort of validated that I hadn’t wasted my time back in Burning Crusade. (Or in Cata, for that matter.)

Topic 2: I miss… something

Growing up, I read. I read, I played video games, I called local bulletin board systems… and, of course, being a teenage girl, I talked on the phone a lot. But I never really had much interest in joining a sports team. I didn’t really feel the need. I got a lot of my social needs met just by hanging out with friends and stuff, and then dating, later on.

But the school I’d gone to for eleven years of my life (grades 1-11!) had taught me a lot about teamwork and leadership. We were separated into different houses (yes, like Hogwart’s — and, btw, fuck JK Rowling for being a transphobic piece of shit!), and so we were forced to participate in teams to do with the houses for various things. Two of my closest friends from school weren’t in my grade. They were in the grade below me — and both were on my house. And we’re still close to this day. One of them is my RL Friend the Resto Druid I have mentioned dozens of times on this very blog!

So when I joined Fated Heroes in, oh boy, like late 2005… I was kind of all-in. It was the first time I’d really been part of a team. And, naturally, I wanted to be helpful. Back then, I was in learning mode. I wanted to know everything about how the game worked. Absolutely everything. I think I reached my peak knowledge of the game in Wrath, when I learned about parry thrashes.

We lost my brother to a rival guild, who was already actively raiding, while Fated Heroes was… fated to stand around a lot. ;) But I worked hard to bring information to the guild, put up a forum for us, dropped info for attunements, T0 gear drops, etc. And we slowly but surely got to the point where we raided. We never had 40 people in a raid (well, maybe once, but that wasn’t even all our guild) and we didn’t clear MC or kill Ony (do not get me started on the warrior who claimed to me he had like 3000 defense when, in fact, that was how much ARMOR he had), but we cleared all of ZG, including Jindo the Hexxar and such. And we did spawn Majordomo Executus in MC. And we did get Ony down to like, 20ish percent. It was just a rough time to get everyone used to raiding on these days at these times when most people had only joined for fun. Still, I pushed as much as I could. I got so many people attuned to everything way back then.

Why?

These people in Fated Heroes, they were my team. And if I knew one thing from my schooling, it was that the sum of the parts of a team are a greater force than the individual parts alone. I believed we could do anything we set our minds to doing.

That was really my first taste of real teamwork in an environment where I cared about the result. If my house lost at floor hockey to another house during 7:45am inter-house games at school, I honestly didn’t care. But if my guild didn’t get Venoxis down? I cared. If my guild didn’t get Lucifron down? I cared. If people in my guild didn’t loot their goddamn Core Hounds? I very much cared. ;)

So that’s the feeling I’m missing right now. I’m not super into any online communities right now. I’m not even really into any offline communities right now. I am missing a sense of belonging to a team. And I’m not sure where to get it.

And it always makes me think about WoW, because WoW is the place in my life where I have put everything I had into running good teams. Whether it was the guild as a whole, just the healers, just the hunters, whatever. I gave it my all.

I’m not saying I want to give my all to something, mind you. I don’t have the time or even the energy for that these days.

But I do miss something team-like.

Topic 3: Rabid end-stage capitalism will be the end of us all.

Between billionaires and AI, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only fucked, we’re super fucked.

Eat the rich. And if you can’t, tax them.

For the first time in my entire life, I have wanted to be offline more than online lately. And you have to understand something about me — I have been terminally online forever. For decades. I started using the Internet in 1994. That’s over 30 years ago. And while I’ve certainly managed to create, you know, a life for myself, I work in tech, and I work remotely, and I have done so for the last decade. (another 2 years spent in an office at a startup here in Montreal, so 12 years in tech.)

But the more I think about tech and the world and where it’s all going, the less I even want to sit down at my computer.

Who would have thought that AI (and the billionaires, let’s not forget those motherfuckers) would be the thing to push me away from online? Who would have thought that something I’d always enjoyed thinking about (in a very “someday in the future” sense) would come to be and be one of the worst blights on humanity?

Sometimes I do wish I could just live at my parents’ cottage for the rest of my days. Read. Canoe. Write. Even go swimming, occasionally, despite the fact that the lake is fed by mountain streams and is always bitterly cold.

And yet, we have to at least play along with the capitalism that is eating us all alive, because we have to do things like pay for rent. And food. And everything else that comes with being a human in the early 21st century.

It’s a major bummer.

What are your thoughts, gang? What’s on your mind?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 6

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

I did sweet fuck all this week in WoW.

And I didn’t really miss it.

I had a short work week, spent time with loved ones, friends, family, read a book and a half in the last week, watched four hockey games and that meant no real time for video games.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts on things. :)

Topic 1: The WoW Store

There’s a sale being advertised in the Blizzard launcher, for many (all?) of the Blizzard games. When you click on World of Warcraft, they are encouraging you to buy Midnight, but also a housing thing. “Cozy Treehouse Retreat Bundle”, which has some druid or panda themed housing stuff, including the externals. Only 7500 Hearthsteel!!! WHAT A DEAL, PEOPLE!!!! ahahaha. That is $92.50 CAD, and that’s before tax. That is more expensive than all but the epic version of the Midnight expansion.

But wait, there’s more! You can get a “Blooming Arboon” mount, either “Blossomback” or “Amberback” for $32 CAD apiece. (I’m guessing that’s about $25 USD.)

And if that’s not enough, they’re bribing you to buy a 6-month subscription ($97.99 CAD, pre-tax) in exchange for a flying mount in Retail and a pet in Classic. And if you buy a 12-month subscription ($195.98 CAD, pre-tax), you get an additional flying mount and ground mount in Retail and a flying mount in classic. Or some nonsense like that. You can read more about the offer here.

Why at least a six-month subscription? Because that’s like $100 (CAD, maybe 70-75 USD) in their pockets immediately. It’s a very nice revenue bump. And why does that matter? It matters because the Microsoft fiscal year ends at the end of June. So the revenue bump helps the bottom line now, right before the end of the fiscal year, and then since it’s for 6 months, any money from those WoW subscribers between now and November is sort of like the icing on the cake. So if they buy Hearthsteel, or if they buy a mount, or a pet, or a character boost, or whatever. It’s above and beyond what they anticipated from you just having an ongoing subscription.

Honestly, looking at the finance page at Yahoo about Microsoft makes me feel vaguely ill. Everything is basically in billions. The market value of Microsoft is approximately 4.1 trillion dollars.

And they couldn’t be bothered to fix the guild bank issues.

Or make sure a patch launches without game-breaking bugs.

Or ensure that textures persist in housing.

But they can take the time to come up with new art assets and sell them or bribe people into getting them, as long as they make a quick buck!

It’s pretty gross.

Topic 2: If I were rich…

If I were very, very independently wealthy, there are several things I’d want to do right off the bat, most of which is caring for my family and friends. You know, pay off my brother and sister-in-law’s mortgage. Pay for private school for their kids. That sort of thing.

But assuming I’d have a good chunk left over, I think I’d want to try to put together a small game dev company. Nothing huge, but a nice place to work, where everyone gets benefits, mostly flexible hours, work remotely, all that good stuff. I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head and I am not talented enough to code everything, nor do I have the time to code everything. Because it would be a lot.

And just looking at the Microsoft financials (even more info here), and knowing that they’re doing voluntary layoffs makes me feel even more ill. All of this means that they hope their numbers will go up.

We are in late-stage capitalism and the numbers cannot always go up.

I am tired of living in such a rabidly capitalist society, and I don’t even live in the USA (although anything they do affects us significantly). But in order to, you know, have a place to live, one needs to at least try to play the capitalism-numbers-go-up game. So if I could run a small game dev company, hire carefully, pay very well, and then get some kind of return because the games are good, then that would be awesome.

Alas, I fear I will never be independently wealthy to the point of doing so. But it’s nice to dream about.

Topic 3: Classic Dungeons

I think Strat UD is my favourite of the Classic dungeons, but BRD is a close second, followed by LBRS as a close third. Strat is my favourite because of my multiple failed (and some successful!) 45-minute Baron runs. I just know it so well and have so many great memories of being in there.

BRD might be closer to Stockholm Syndrome, given the number of times I’ve run Jailbreak or attuned someone to the core. But again, the memories made there are priceless to me.

LBRS is a freaking labyrinth until it clicks. And once it clicks, you’ll never get lost again. Or, at least I never did. It was one of my first runs with my guild at the time and I was level 52 (? Maybe 53?) and I was level-pulling everything around us. Whoopsiedoodle. :D But I always enjoyed it. There was a ton to explore, lots of rare drops, lots of bosses, lots of tier 0 pieces to be had.

What about you? What are your favourite Classic/Vanilla dungeons?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 5

Kurn / / blogging, classic, ramblings

Welcome to yet another Sunday Brain Dump!

Topic 1: Haven’t done much

I have to admit to not having done much in the last week. After many years of not watching hockey regularly, I’ve returned to it, and it’s the playoffs now. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, have played 7 games and have now won 4 (they won Game 7 against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Tampa) and are now moving on to the next round. So I haven’t done a whole lot in WoW. But I also don’t have a lot to do in WoW. Farming remains the constant chore, but it does sometimes feel like a chore. Maybe I’ll take month off or something. I feel like I need to find a goal in the game.

Topic 2: Classic Plus?

There’s a lot of talk about a Classic Plus mode — hints from Blizz, a possible announcement at BlizzCon, stuff like that. And there’s the final shutdown of Turtle WoW coming this month. I can understand, Blizzard/Microslop need to protect their trademarks and copyrighted material. But my understanding is that Turtle WoW was developing new CLASSIC content? Wow. That’s wild. And it’s SO COOL. Different zones, mobs, quests, loot? Incredible.

So is that what Blizzard’s potential Classic Plus mode will include?

I played a tiny bit of Season of Discovery and I … didn’t like it. Was it kind of neat to see new talents/spells/abilities on different classes and specs? Sure. But they were all a bit weird to me. A mage, healing? Very weird. And having some key abilities available at like, early levels? My nephew was a rogue who had shadowstep extremely early on. I don’t know if that’s the way to go, at least for me and my interest. Part of what I always enjoyed about levelling was the gaining power aspect. Getting talents at 10 and then building on that every single level, even if you didn’t get anything at the trainer, that was awesome. So it’s weird to me to see stuff showing up at the start.

But the idea of exploring new zones at like, 50-60? New quests? New gear? Maybe alternative dungeons or small raids? I’m not saying I would do a ton of that group content, but I’m saying it would interest me.

Topic 3: What happens after Naxxramas?

The question occurs to me that if Classic Plus exists, is Naxxramas still the endgame in Classic? I mean, you typically go Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxxramas, right? With things like ZG and AQ20 thrown in there for people who are maybe trying to gear up to get into something like Molten Core.

But what happens after Naxx? In a Classic Plus, that is? Do you get a Tier 4 that isn’t from Burning Crusade? Or a Tier 5? What about a Tier 6? Because the thing about Classic is that it does have a termination point. After Naxxramas, that was it. You headed to Outlands. Naxx released June 19, 2006 and patch 2.0.1 launched on December 5, 2006, followed quickly by Burning Crusade’s release on January 9, 2007.

So what do you do after Naxx? IS there something after Naxx in a Classic Plus world? I don’t play a ton of Classic these days, but I know that people were definitely raiding Naxx successfully, way more than originally. I’m sure that it having existed for 15+ years before people got into it in Classic servers really helped, as most of the challenges are solved. People know how to do 4 Horsemen. People know how to do Instructor Razuvious. There’s no mystery left. And raids and stuff have gotten harder since Naxx. Kael’thas and Vashj were hard compared to what we saw in Naxx (well, the Wrath version of Naxx at 80, anyway).

Another question: if there is something post-Naxx in a Classic Plus world, does that mean one has to go through MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx to get the gear required to go through whatever comes next? Or will they introduce a catch-up mechanic?

There’s an interesting site, The Classic Project, at wowclassic.plus. These people are not affiliated with Blizzard, but are taking surveys to see how people feel about various bits of change in a potential Classic Plus world. It’s kind of neat, just need to sign in with a Discord account and take the surveys if you like.

In one of the surveys about the world, it asks about attunements.

Should attunements be streamlined/made easier?

  • No, and if you touch the Onyxia attunement questline, I’ll lock you away with Marshal Windsor
  • Sure, cut out the aggressive travel sections, but keep the spirit of attunements intact
  • Yes, I’m tired of going to BRD or grinding righteous orbs just to enter a raid – cut it down and allow players to walk in easily.

 

I definitely voted no, because I will lock someone away with Marshal Windsor if I need to! I believe that attunements do a lot for bonding and team building.

Seriously, go do these surveys. I’m doing one right now and one of the questions is:

Should Damage/Heal over Time spells be able to crit baseline for all classes? The options are No, DoTs and HoTs shouldn’t crit, Yes, change it to allow them to crit, or Only if they make it a new talent that you can spec into.

And I instinctively went for the talent and then stopped, remembering one of the Blizz folks at a BlizzCon years and years ago saying that if you didn’t take a specific talent in one of the DPS warrior trees, you weren’t being creative or imaginative, you were just being a bad (whatever spec) DPS warrior. So while I don’t particularly like the idea of HoTs and DoTs critting for anyone, I don’t like the idea that you have to talent for it. If there’s an action someone can take in order to get their spells critting, and they don’t take it, that seems like a bad (class name here), right?

Basically, this survey is making me think a lot about what I want to see in a Classic Plus world.

What about you? Any interest in such a thing? What would it look like to you?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 4

Kurn / / blogging, midnight, patches, ramblings

Welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump — actually on a Sunday! :)

Topic 1: 12.0.5

Gonna be honest, I really don’t care much for this patch.

I tried the void assaults — boring.

I tried the ritual sites — less boring, but still boring.

Haven’t messed with Decimus’ stuff yet. In part, because I don’t have anything except maybe my bow that is already upgraded to 6/6 Hero.

Hide and Seek Decor Duels: apparently, Track Humanoid worked for this. Which is hilarious to me, as a hunter. But also, zero interest in this. (It was hotfixed.)

Fishing: Listen, I like fishing. I don’t know that I want to bother with spearfishing, etc. I’ll probably give it a try, though.

Marksmanship Hunter: I had to partly respec due to the partial refund of talent points I was given, but I didn’t take Explosive Shot. I should probably research things and respec appropriately, but I don’t know that I need Explosive Shot? Again?

Decor stuff/Housing: All I really care about at the moment is using Decor to make money, so most of this doesn’t affect me.

So… really, it’s all kind of meh to me at the moment.

Topic 2: Gold

When I hit about 1.7 million gold, I bought my next token, for about 235k gold. I’m now back up to 1.6 million and have used my token. I’m making decent money, but it’s not consistent. I need to look at making more cash more reliably. I’m way too reliant on concentration to make top-level potions and flasks at the moment. And I’m not using a lot of my other crafting professions to make good-quality gear, but I am getting recipes pretty regularly with moxie.

What stuff are you selling lately?

Topic 3: Bugs

Tell me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot.

That’s how it feels. Reading through the hotfix notes makes me chuckle and also just shake my head. How do these things get through whatever passes as “quality assurance” these days? Do they even have quality assurance at Blizzard presently? Because it really doesn’t feel like it. Like, what the hell is this patch note?

Valeera is no longer unwilling to attack Poison Dart Frog or Giant Cursed Bullfrog.

… why would she have been unwilling to attack the frogs? Why is she so poorly coded? Or what about this one?

Pandaren characters who boost during the intro sequence will now be able to port to their houses.

??? How on earth does a boost during the intro mean that they couldn’t port to their houses?

I know part of it is spaghetti code. This has got to be a vast codebase that dates all the way back to the early 2000s. I’m sure there’s still some code there that has been untouched since Alpha versions of Vanilla WoW. So I assume that’s part of it, right? But still, that’s where QA should come in.

I don’t develop software for the masses myself, although I do know how to program and read code in a variety of languages (PHP, JavaScript, Python). I have, however, spent the last decade of my life working for various SaaS companies (Software as a Service), so I see up close and personal how software is built. I know that the product team has to communicate their needs to the development team. The development team does the hard work of research and coding. Then, theoretically (although this does get skipped out on a lot), a quality assurance team tests the potential release for bugs, including regressions (which are bugs that were squashed previously, but can sometimes return for various reasons). Once internal testing is complete, you then get some public users to beta test it and development continues to fix any bugs the beta testers have found. Meanwhile, marketing is getting ready to push out a ton of, well, marketing about the latest and greatest, support is working on documentation and stuff to ensure people know how to make things work, and everything goes live when the new version goes live.

Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder wrote in 1871, “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

And it’s true. Sometimes you have to roll things back because something happened once everyone got access to something and something went horribly awry. Sometimes a bug that wasn’t part of testing anything shows up and you need to hotfix it. All of that is totally normal.

What I posit is not totally normal is the frequency with which these WoW bugs occur. Not only that, but the type of bugs that occur. If it has to do with the new content, QA didn’t do its job.

So the track humanoids issue in the Decor Duel? Bad QA.

The Pandarens boosting thing? That was assuredly not part of testing at all, which is why it’s having to be hotfixed. My theory on this is that when they introduced housing, something in it is tied to character creation. And character creation gets interfered with by boosting. Not only that, but Pandaren are special, because they are neutral until the end of their intro quests, right? So if this only happened to the Pandaren, we can make the following assumptions:

1) Housing relies on character creation to some extent, which makes sense — someone cannot have a home without a character.

2) So somewhere in character creation, they (now, or at least since housing was introduced at the tail-end of The War Within) tie … I don’t know, a housing and decor database to the character. So let’s say that as the character is created and various database tables are created, we now create a housing one and a decor one. (Again, this is a guess.)

3) At some point, long ago, they introduced character boosting. I believe you can create a new character who will automatically be the boosted level. So they had to interrupt character creation at a specific moment to prevent having to start out at a level 1 or whatever.

4) When creating housing, we can assume that the link has not been fully established for a character who is not one of the two factions, Alliance and Horde. We can assume that the boosting track goes down one path instead of reusing the original code, lest boosting not give you your boosted toon.

5) End result: Pandaren who are boosted, who (presumably) get their faction at a different point than fresh-rolled Pandaren, cannot port to their plot because something went wonky on character creation.

Again, that’s just my assumption. But we can see within that assumption where things went wrong. Based on those suppositions, I believe that whoever implemented housing at character creation did not think about boosted characters beyond a regular boosted character who starts out as a Horde or Alliance player. Most Pandaren (except maybe those who, like NeutralAgent on YouTube) choose a faction eventually. But it’s not immediate in most cases.

So while I will say that such use-cases are more difficult to think of, someone should be thinking about it.

And what really gets me about this is that so many of the players of this game could think of the use-cases that could break things. Like the Track Humanoids thing. Or could at least question whether or not character creation for a boosted Pandaren is similar enough to other characters. You know what I mean? Often, our knowledge of the game is just so deep and so broad that we can see these problems coming a mile away.

I think that’s part of the frustration players have with the game. If we could see something coming a mile away, why can’t the devs?

There are a couple of possibilities that come to mind, here.

The first is that the devs don’t have deep game knowledge. Seeing how much turnover (and how many have been laid off) means that people are relatively new to the codebase. And while we can probably assume that a certain percentage of Blizzard employees are fans of Blizzard’s games, they may not be assigned to work on the game they enjoy the most. So it’s entirely possible a large chunk of WoW people don’t have a ton of long-term game knowledge.

The other thing that comes to mind is that people are relying entirely too much on AI for coding. It is mandatory for Microsoft employees (which Blizzard employees are) to use AI. Mandatory. As in, you don’t use it, you’re likely going to be out of a job.

Do you think Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever “AI” model they use (probably Copilot) has any game knowledge whatsoever? Do you think that an AI model can truly wonder about the possibility that if someone is appearing as, I don’t know, a chair, their character would still show up as a humanoid? Do you think that an AI model can contemplate and reason through why Pandarens might have a problem with porting to their homes?

The answer is no. Even AI models that are trained on that codebase cannot necessarily make the links between seemingly disparate items the way a real human can. It may know the exact chance of looting a Skullflame Shield off a random mob in Silithus, but it cannot link these examples together on its own. It would need a real human being to force it to review the code for all these things and ask if there are differences, or to point out the differences, at which point the AI will undoubtedly say something like “great context, thanks!”

A third possibility comes to mind — it could well be both of these.

All right, enough ranting for me for now. What would you like to hear me ramble about next week? And what do you think about patch 12.0.5?

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 2

Kurn / / gold, ramblings, skinning

Well, time got away from me and so here we are, again, on Monday, posting a Sunday Brain Dump. Whoops!

Topic 1: Valeera

I really didn’t think a delve companion could be more annoying than Brann. I really, truly did not think that was possible. AND YET… Not only do I not like her emotes, but she will occasionally (frequently?) run into a room to harvest a node of herbs or ore and PULL THE ROOM. Great. Thanks, Valeera. I was totally ready for that.

Then, because I have been playing this game off and on for 20+ years, I know how to pull mobs back so that we don’t get other mobs, like patrols or whatever. So I will often set my pet to passive, autoshot one mob and then take care of that large and ugly thing in a safe area. Valeera, on the other hand, does not like my pro strat and will leap into the fray, fighting the mob basically where they started. 🙄 This has, on more than one occasion, led to multiple mobs pulling. Thanks, Valeera. Super helpful. 😒

The other thing she does that drives me absolutely bananas is that she yells “STRIKE!” right after something dies. Strike? Strike what? What the hell, dude? Blizzard, tell me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot. 😟

And none of that even touches on the fact that she will occasionally just… not fight? She leaps in and out of the fray, seemingly randomly. She also breaks my traps EVERY CHANCE SHE GETS. She is the absolute worst and, I cannot believe I’m saying this, I wish I had Brann as a choice.

I will say this, she is not the worst healer. She’s not the best, but she’s not the worst. With my pet, Fluffy the Turtle as my tank, Kurn as DPS and Valeera as off-DPS/off-heals, I can do a fair amount. It’s just painful is all.

What do you hate most about Valeera?

Topic 2: Gear

Look, I’m glad that we have other ways beyond raiding or even doing dungeons (and mythic dungeons) to get gear. I’m really glad. My characters have traditionally lagged wayyyyy behind in gear. The whole Adventurer to Veteran to Champion to Hero thing is stupid though. IMHO. I miss when you got a piece of gear and it was good and you were like “nice!” and would try to get another piece of gear. Now it’s like “okay, I got a Champion piece so I may as well upgrade it because who knows when I’ll get a Hero piece” and like… what? Really? This is, to be fair, my first real go-around with this. I never really got anything higher than Champion (and on Kurn, at that, no one else) in past expansions. Like I said, I’m glad that we can get good gear from things other than raiding, other than dungeons, etc. But dear God, sometimes I miss the very simple “kill boss, hope item drops, hope the hunter doesn’t ninja it, yay got the item” routine of getting gear.

Also, I am so not into the modifiers that were used at some point, like heroic, but I know things got even weirder somewhere in there, with like half-step upgrades and stuff?

What’s your favourite way to get loot?

Topic 3: Bad Guesses

So when the expansion started, I looked at the skinning tree and thought that the diffuser skill would be useful. After all, motes of everything are used in basically everything, so I thought that was the wise way to go.

In fact, I did not realize just how abundant the motes would be. I enjoy throwing diffusers on virtually everything I skin, but this is not the way to get the big bucks in skinning. I am finally getting close to maxing out the Talented Tracker section. I can make four of the lures and usually end up fishing for all the fish almost every day, and then I go spawn the majestic beasts and often get absolutely zero majestic items for my trouble. Next week, I’ll be able create the Grand Beast Lure, so that’ll be fun.

But it got me thinking about how good I am at predicting some things in-game and how bad I am at predicting others. Many moons ago, there were these green gems, I think it was Talasites, and in a forthcoming patch, a new cut was going to be released with stam and resilience (for PVP) and I was like “OMG, this will make a FORTUNE!”

Reader, it did not, in fact, make a fortune. 😢

I was, however, pretty good at predicting things like nerfs and buffs and stuff when it came to raid encounters.

Honestly, I would take the inverse these days, and I would rather be able to properly predict what’s going to make money versus the meta-like things in the game. 😅

What about you, are you good or bad at predicting in-game things?

And that’s it for Brain Dump 2. Anything you folks want me to discuss next week? Let me know!

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 1

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, midnight, professions, ramblings

Hey there, folks! Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in this very galaxy, I used to do answers to search terms here on my blog. I’d look up the search terms that brought people here and I’d answer them as best I could.

I don’t have those kinds of analytics these days, but I do still have a blog and a brain, so I thought I’d use the combination to brain dump on 3-5 topics every Sunday. (Who me? Starting on Monday? Yes.)

So here, for your reading enjoyment, is Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 1!

Topic 1: Patron Orders in Midnight

I recently hit the 1.5 million gold mark on my bank toon. Most of my characters have somewhere between 1500 and 2000 gold on them, and if it’s over that, I send the money to my bank toon. (Gone are my days of trusting anything remotely related to a “bank” to hold my cash.) When I think about what I’ve done in order to get that much money (half a million profit in three weeks), a lot of it comes down to fulfilling Patron Orders on my various toons. I have like 7 characters I regularly do orders on, plus a couple others I’m pulling into the rotation.

Here’s what I do, pretty much every day, on all of them:

I log in, check the orders and then do them in this priority sequence:

– Are all the materials provided? Do it if I know the recipe, regardless of the payment.

– If not all of the materials are provided and I know the recipe and I have the materials on-hand, do I get 2 points of knowledge? If so, do it. If not, do I get 1 point of knowledge? Check to see if other orders will reward me 2 points of knowledge instead of 1. If they don’t, then fulfill the order.

– I also prioritize first-time crafts, assuming I have the materials or they are easily obtained.

– Unless the order gives 2 points of knowledge and a nice reward, I don’t fulfill it if it requires using more than 200 concentration to get to max quality. (a rune, a thing to help craft that goes for a thousand or so gold, etc)

– After all the orders for that character’s professions are done, I send everything that’s not soulbound, in terms of rewards, to my bank toon.

I then rinse and repeat for virtually all my characters.

By the end of 15-20 minutes, I have probably gained 1-4 points of knowledge for each character, I have gained a few trade goods (ore, herbs, leather, scales, rarer trade goods too), and each character probably has earned 30-60 moxie. Most importantly, most of my characters probably have at least 800 concentration.

It is okay not to fulfill a wildly expensive order, even if it’s a first craft, even if it’s got a nice reward, if it’s going to cost you 5k to get the materials. Don’t sweat it.

* Fun fact: if you get a max-level vial as a saved reagent while crafting something alchemical, you can probably just sell that sucker by itself for a stupid amount of gold.

Topic 2: Tuesday Prep

On Monday evenings and Tuesday afternoons, I start crafting for reset day in North America. Tuesday nights are huge for selling of consumables. I will typically do the following, especially since most of my characters will have most of their concentration:

– Flask-specced alchemist (Madrana): Will craft once or twice to get 2-4 flasks (pre-multicraft). Multicraft is, of course, the way to make money on max-level flasks. Nocturnal Lotuses are still outrageously expensive, so I save them up throughout the week from farming and can sell a couple of extras for over 2000 gold each on Tuesdays.

– Potion-specced alchemist: Will craft 3-4 times to get 15-20 max-ranked potions. We’re talking mana potions, potions of recklessness and Light’s Potential, whatever I really have mats for without buying anything. Again, multicraft is excellent here.

– Enchanter: will craft 2-3 times to get some max-level Oil of Dawn or Thalassian Phoenix Oil.

If I’m feeling extra motivated, I’ll cook a bunch of food of Kurn, too, like Royal Roast or Impossibly Royal Roast.

Last Tuesday, I made over 50k in the span of like 2 hours while all this stuff sold.

Topic 3: Cleansing

I went Timewalking to heal Cataclysm dungeons this past week. Here’s a couple of videos.

Bar none, the thing I hate most about it, apart from running with randos whom I despise within three seconds of the start of the run, is that Cleanse is on an 8-second cooldown.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WE HAD TO CLEANSE/DISPELL/ETC IN CATACLYSM??? It was a freaking lot more than every EIGHT SECONDS. I know, I can hear you now, prioritize, Kurn! Yeah, well I was trained for like 7 years to cleanse all the things as soon as I could unless it was……. whatever that damn warlock debuff was. Oh, right, UNSTABLE AFFLICTION. I need to be able to cleanse all the things. I was GOOD at it. And having an 8-second cooldown on CLEANSE drives me absolutely crazy.

And there you have it, folks, my first Sunday (Monday, in this case) Brain Dump.

What do you want to hear about next week?

Howdy, Strangers

Kurn / / facepalm, midnight, ramblings

Well, it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted here. <brushes dust off of things> Pardon the mess, and the length of my absence.

I stopped playing WoW for about a year. About the guild bank stuff.

My views on playing WoW…

And then, after enough time had passed, I realized that I had unconsciously made some major changes to my views on WoW. (And yes, these are just my views.)

First, subscribing to the World of Warcraft, if it gives me enjoyment, is fine. This is especially true if I don’t give them any of my own money. I liken it to how I deal with Netflix. For years and years, Netflix was the one subscription I never went without. And then, they started making decisions that I didn’t like. They started cancelling shows I loved. As a direct result of that, I can (and do) go months and months without being subscribed. Then I resub for a month, maybe two, then I unsub again. I can absolutely treat WoW like that. And I have. When my game time ran out in late 2024, I let it go. At the time, I was fairly certain I never wanted to play the game again. (Do not get me started about the data loss; I am still very angry about it.) However, I found myself drawn back to content about WoW, particularly the Goldbound series by Pathalerix on YouTube.

The sheer joy that Pathalerix seems to have for playing the game was, well, infectious. I’m still mad. I’m still not going to trust Blizzard worth a damn. Microsoft can eat shit. (Or is that Microslop? hahaha) But why deprive myself of something I want to do when I don’t have to directly give them money and I can sustain myself on gold? And if I don’t want to do it any longer, I don’t have to. The fact that I no longer run a guild, no longer raid, etc, means that a WoW sub is no longer vital to me. It hasn’t been for a very long time. And so, I resubbed. I even started my own “locked” challenge. (I have exactly one episode up and then I have hours and hours and hours of footage that I have to edit and I hate editing sooooooo… Anyway. I’m sure I’ll get back to it eventually.)

Since resubbing, I’ve let the subscription lapse already. 😂 I wasn’t playing actively, so I just let the sub go. And then I resubbed a week or maybe two ago. Again, using gold/WoW tokens.

Second, I will admit I changed my mind and bought the base version of Midnight — again, with gold. I’m actually planning to upgrade to the top version with gold at some point over the next couple of weeks. It comes with 3-day early access to Midnight and a month of gametime, so I’ll probably do that to try to make tons of gold at the start of the expansion. After all, the more gold I make, the more I can do with it. I need about three tokens to purchase the upgrade. I would only need two tokens, but there’s that pesky sales tax in Canada and Quebec, so I do actually need three. And tokens are about 300k gold at the moment, so we’re looking at about 900,000 gold. I have that much, I just want to build up a bit more of a reserve before I blow that much cash.

Basically, as long as I can pay for things in gold, whatever. I will play if I want to. I will not play (and let my sub expire) if I don’t want to play or if I’m not having fun.

However, I will not trust these bastards. Nothing is forever. They clearly do not care about data integrity. So long as I accept that risk, so long as I understand that a failure can wipe out my whole account, so long as I don’t count on things remaning the same (in terms of my account and characters), I will enjoy what I do in the moment. Why? In part because I’m going to pay with gold. I won’t spend my own real money on this company. Or others in the Microsoft family. I don’t respect them, I don’t trust them, and they don’t respect me or the time and money I’ve given them over the years. So that’s it. It’s a transactional relationship we’ll have, with fake money (gold) paying the way for those transactions.

Speaking of Microsoft…

Oh, man, I am done with Microsoft products. Barring what I have to use for work 🤮 (and Minecraft, which I bought over a decade ago), I’m just SO done with that company’s products. And I stayed true to my word (no pun intended!) — last summer, I swapped over to Linux on my main desktop. (I have a MacBook laptop that’s mine and a work MacBook as well.) So to hell with Windows. I won’t ever own a Windows machine again. I’m enjoying Ubuntu (it’s actually Kubuntu, so Ubuntu with KDE) and I’m very comfortable with it as my main personal computer.

The only thing I miss about Windows is Adobe products. I love Photoshop. (I know, GIMP is available and an option.) And in order to actually edit things I need some kind of video editor like, you know Adobe Premiere. So editing is made more difficult by virtue of having to use my 4-year-old MacBook Pro to edit videos on my work setup versus doing it on my desktop. It doesn’t make it any easier to do a task I dislike in the first place.

Still, everything else is fine. Just about everything else I use works beautifully. Steam games run wonderfully. I truly can’t complain about switching to Linux. And it feels particularly good to have swapped away from Windows after decades (decades!) of being a Microsoft operating system user. I started out with like, DOS 5.0 in like 1990? 1991? I remember DOS 6.0 being a Big Deal. Here’s what my first PC looked like — 286, 1 meg of RAM, 40 meg hard drive. And a 2400 baud modem. 😂

So way to go, Microsoft. You drove away a user who had spent thirty-five years on your operating systems. Not just because of the Great Blizzard Bank Heist, but also because Windows 11 is a piece of AI slop, plus all the ads, plus the fact I can’t trust you, particularly after the Recall announcement.

So what now?

Well, I’m planning to play Midnight until I get bored. I was overly ambitious with The War Within when it came to professions. I did not do even 75% of what I had planned with my toons. So what I’m hoping to do.

Before the launch:

  • Level a couple toons to 80 (Madrana is 80 by virtue of the character boost with the purchase of Midnight)
  • Make another like 200k then buy 3 tokens for the upgrade
  • Poke a bit at the beta, see if I can make any quick, fun-sized videos

 

After the launch:

  • Bring toons to the new city (Silvermoon, IIRC?)
  • Get Kurn out into the world and sell leather and various drops immediately (may just DE greens and sell the dust)
  • Get my double-gatherer shaman out into the world and gather and sell stuff
  • Focus on getting all kinds of profession equipment/accessories craftable so I can sell them (and make them for my own toons)
  • Get Treatises discovered/learned for my scribe, although I may change my main scribe to be my druid rather than my evoker

 

So yeah, I think that’s what I’m aiming for. Oh, and like, juggling life and work and stuff too, of course. ;)

What about you? What are you up to?

Thoughts on “Meta” Specs & General Updates

Kurn / / classes, dps, dragonflight, expansions, healers, ramblings, tanks, the war within

My Updates

First up, updates. My mage and my warlock and my priest have all hit 70. It really was easy. I didn’t even have to do any of the pre-patch event to ding them. So I have 8 level 70s. And, once my timewalkers come over, I will have 10 level 70s. I feel like that’s probably 7 too many… But I am set to make some serious cash at the outset! I am very excited about this. More excited than the fact that Warband Banks work (although that is awesome), and more excited about it than the pre-patch event that I dipped a toe into today. Meh. I’m not all about cosmetic/transmog rewards, so I’ll probably just do things through once and be done with it. That gives me a bit of time to relax and not level something for a while.

Okay, enough of my updates. I wanted to talk about THE META. This is a good, old-fashioned Kurn rant, complete with examples to illustrate my points, so get yourself a drink of your choice and settle in for the next, uh, 1700 words and change. :)

The Meta

I don’t know if it’s because I started raiding when we were lucky to get 20 people into ZG for a couple of hours to kill Venoxis, or if it’s because we only ever hit up Molten Core with a full 40 people once (and once, we 27-manned Gehennas!), but I’ve never really understood the whole concept of what is the “best spec” at this time.

Okay, let me rephrase that — I’ve never really understood why people seem to care so much about what is “meta” and what isn’t.

When I started raiding, there wasn’t any room for this “optimization” nonsense. Three warlock curses up on a boss? HAH. We didn’t have three warlocks! We were lucky to have two warlocks on any given night in Vanilla and like 6 warriors who could hold aggro on Garr’s adds while the warlocks banished the other two. It was not a fun time, but we (usually) made it work. Because that’s all we had, you know? We didn’t have the luxury of saying “sorry, resto druid, we don’t have a spot for you because we have 8 priests healing”. We needed healers! We needed everything.

So when people talk about “the meta”, I want to acknowledge that yes, there are likely specs and classes that are performing really well right now. Heck, back in Burning Crusade, Beastmaster Hunters were all the rage. There was a single macro you could just hit over and over and over and over again and boom, you topped damage meters. On Gorefiend in Black Temple, I had to actually swap from my holy paladin to my hunter, Kurn, in order to not mess up the whole raid. I raided on a shitty laptop with an integrated graphics card and things did not cooperate with the encounter. I couldn’t function as a Vengeful Spirit quickly enough to take care of the shadowy constructs that would spawn, and if I was the FIRST person killed, then it was going to be a wipe. So I came in as Kurn (swapped to BM, even though my forever-Marks-heart broke at it) and would feign before every Shadow of Death cast, leaving me able to avoid dealing with constructs and death on that fight at all. And, because I think we had four BM hunters in the same group that night, I did quite well, considering all I had was crafted gear and a couple things from Karazhan.

“But Kurn,” you say, “switching to BM for Gorefiend is playing the meta!”

Kind of. The only reason I did it was because I was incredibly undergeared for T6 content on my hunter, having basically a couple pieces of the equivalent of T5 (from my Leatherworking) and some scattered epics from Karazhan. Had I thought I could keep up with my hunters in any other way, shape or form, I guarantee you I would have gone in as Marks. But the whole point of my swapping to my hunter was to not mess up the raid. So I pulled out all the stops and did everything my hunter possibly could do not to mess it up. In this sense, I played the meta to compensate for crap gear.

The way I see it, when we look at all things being even, I don’t particularly care about the meta and, I guess, that’s why I don’t understand why others care so much. Granted, I’ve never been in a guild that has pushed world firsts. I’ve never been much of a PVPer, so I don’t care if the combo of, for example, frost mage, holy pally, sub rogue, would suck in arenas, if I wanted to play with Majik and Fog.

But that’s the thing, right? Everything has to be even. So when we look at my guild’s first kill of Gorefiend, back in the day, my gear was not even, so I had to step it up with the spec to make sure we had enough DPS. (Not going to lie, the stacks of Ferocious Inspiration, my using a flask and food, etc, really helped.)

So what happens when things aren’t even? Let’s take, for example, Magister’s Terrace, again, back in Burning Crusade. At the end of the instance, you’re flying around the room, trying to kill Kael’Thas, but he’s throwing crap at you and you can hardly stand still. You’re dodging arcane spheres, phoenixes, flame strikes, all kinds of shit. How do you think that went for a holy paladin? Answer: badly.

I could reliably heal three of five people on the fight. Myself, my tank, and one DPS. That’s it. If we didn’t have healthstones from a warlock or didn’t have healing potions or didn’t have bubbles/ice blocks/etc, at least two people would die. And I was in full tier five gear. The gear should have been more than equal to the task. I daresay my skill was, too. But the fight was unfair for a holy paladin, because I had one instant-cast spell (holy shock) on a 15s cooldown. This was before beacon.

I had a priest alt at the time and did the instance in scattered blues and a couple of epics from Karazhan. Healed it without any issues. Like EZ MODE. Compared to my T5 paladin. That is ridiculous.

I did not let one challenging fight have me switch my raiding character, though. Were things harder to heal as a holy paladin than a holy priest? HELL YES. Did I care? No! Apart from dreading Shadow Labs (for Grandmaster Vorpil — the teleporting always screwed me up), and hating Magister’s Terrace, I could do anything any other healer did, barring a battle rez. (Okay, and healing while moving was hard even with Divine Favor and Holy Shock.) But my class and spec had so many benefits! Blessings of Might, Wisdom and Kings! Blessings of Sacrifice and Protection and Freedom! Crits returning 100% of mana cost! (I miss you, Illumination.) I loved the utility of my class. Hell, the very first time I killed the Lich King, both tanks had just eaten it, LK was at 11% (so 1% to go), and I bubbled and taunted the mofo and, yes, then died shortly afterwards when my bubble expired, but I bought the team an extra few seconds to DPS the crap out of him. And we won! And it was my Lay on Hands that crit Dayden as we took down Lady Vashj for the first time!

Show me a priest who can tank the Lich King for 10 seconds without dying. (I mean, apart from the priest who tanked Onyxia, who was shadow…)

The thing is, though, that even if all gear is equal and all instances are equally balanced for all specs of everything, the one thing that is never going to be equal is skill.

When doing most things in WoW, having skill that’s about average will still get you pretty far in the game. If your skill is higher than most people’s, it’ll get you further — mythic raids, high mythic key dungeons, that sort of thing. I still maintain that if your skill is high enough, you probably don’t need the added bonus that “the meta” will give you. If you can pull together your ideal group and it fits the meta, great! But if you pull together your friends and your classes and specs aren’t perfect, that’s okay too. Hell, I did the 45m Baron run in Strat UD in Vanilla in 39 minutes with 2 mages (one frost, one fire), a warlock (destro), a holy priest and myself as a Marks hunter. My CAT (that’s right, my CAT) tanked. No bear, no turtle. A cat. And we did it in 39 minutes. We used shacks and traps and then the mages and the warlock would go AOE down the towers while me and the priest drank. That was emphatically not the best group to do the Baron run with, most of us in a hybrid of T0, T0.5, ZG and possibly a tiny bit of AQ20 gear and a couple pieces of MC gear. We weren’t overgeared for the instance, though our gear was probably higher than some attempting the run. But our group composition was ridiculous. And we did it to see if we could. And we could!

I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is… think outside the box. Use your class and spec skills to their fullest extent. Did you know that you could cast Divine Intervention on a hunter pet? Well, you could. I can’t advise you do so, but you can definitely do it. Similarly, you could mind-control and sheep the same mob (or is it vice-versa?). Weird? Yes, definitely. But play around with your skills.

Dungeons and raids, even outdoor mobs, they’re all just puzzles. Can you brute strength your way through them? Absolutely. But can you sit there and be patient and do something you have absolutely no business doing just because you thought you’d try? Yes, you can.

Challenge Yourself

Coming this new expansion, that’s my challenge to you. Go do something really dumb on your favourite character. Try to solo something that is not typically soloable. Try to make creative use of your abilities to do something neat. Don’t break the game, don’t get caught making “creative use of game mechanics” to exploit anything. But go do something fun and stupid.

Example 1: I would take night elf hunters to Dire Maul East to kill Lethtendris with me as an application. They would need to make great use of feign death, shadowmeld, track demons, and would need great pet control. If we killed Lethtendris without too much trouble, you were in.

Example 2: I would take dwarf hunters (due to the lack of shadowmeld) to Winterspring and get them to kite… I think it was Azurous, to Everlook, whereupon the guards would help you beat him up. If they did it successfully within a certain number of attempts, they were in.

These are fun and stupid things that test your skill and your ability to think outside the box. Yes, this is a game about the holy trinity of tanks, healers and damage-dealers, but it’s also an open world. The world is yours to explore. Do so! :)

11.0 Patch Issues & Stuff

Kurn / / alchemy, healing, professions, ramblings, the war within

My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂

That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”

The bank is being used by another member of your Warband.

As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.

To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.

Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.

I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.

Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.

And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.

That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.

I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.

So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.

In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…

There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.

In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.

So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?