Khoa has decided to come back and play with me again, and he’s made a night elf druid on Argent Dawn so that he can tank for me — he’s saving his next prot paladin for leveling in Cataclysm. Wanting to heal but not being able to decide what to make, I’ve made a draenei priest (because after thinking about it, I want to wait until paladins have Crusader Strike at a low level before making my next one, and I thought the priest preview was really quite boring) to experience first-hand the freedom having the Celestial Steed affords my alts. This character does not need to worry about grinding faction rep. She can level at whatever pace I wish, she can do quests, run instances, maybe even PvP. She’s level 7, and it feels great so far. I have every intention of leveling as a mix of discipline and holy, though a part of me REALLY wants to see what the sparklepony looks like in Shadow Form.

Kaprika’s doing pretty well too, she’s 49 and only needs about 200 more quests to reach Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms. I zoomed through the 40’s the weekend before last when I tried to do all of the quests for Maraudon and Zul’Farrak before the LFG system wouldn’t let me queue for them any more. It’s my goal to NOT have to solo my way through instances for the purposes of questing once I’m 80, but rather do them in a group at something resembling a proper level. So far I’ve been successful, but a new challenge is looming. I’m working my way through some gray quests in STV at the moment, but as soon as I hit 50, I’m going to have to go find all of the quests for Sunken Temple, and pick up most of the ones for BRD (and start doing the long prerequisite quest chains for the rest) and start preparing for all of the end-game 5-mans, which should take me quite a while. LBRS? UBRS? Scholo? Strat? Dire Maul? I’ve got a full plate, and I haven’t even started THINKING about doing Kalimdor yet. I’m sure I’m going to have to take some side trips to do Outland instance quests once I’m in the low 60’s so that I won’t outlevel those as well, but the vanilla endgame 5-mans are going to keep me quite busy.

I’ve been spending a great deal of the rest of my time playing other games, though my Raptr tracker over on the side doesn’t always pick them up properly. I’m almost past the third gym in Pokemon SoulSilver (I realize I made the same mistake I made last time I played — YES Gastly is immune to Normal, but I can’t teach it any attacks that will hit a Normal type at this point in the game either), my Modo hit level 110 in Jade Dynasty today (thanks to today’s double EXP event), and I spent a good chunk of the weekend getting acquainted with Plants vs Zombies. Yes, I know, late to the party, but in the end the music video convinced me to play. I get frustrated easily when games get difficult in later levels, but combining my observation skills with Khoa’s strategy gets us through an awful lot of tricky stages. It can be fun trying to interpret his vague gestures and “over there!” into what he is actually trying to communicate to me. It makes me wish there were a 2-player co-op mode, with one person to put down new plants and the other person to click on all the suns and coins and stuff. That would be really fun ^_^

Also, I am amused by the fact that the Gender Guesser thinks I write like a European man.

So quite a while ago, there were pictures and videos that had recently been datamined of an absolutely beautiful flying mount on mmo-champion. It used the same model as the Lich King’s undead, bat-winged horse, except that instead of being all dead and dark and evil-looking, it was made out of stars, just like Algalon.

Remembering all of the mounts I’ve seen in the past, I thought to myself “oh man, that’s beautiful! It’s too beautiful, in fact. Blizzard reserves amazing mounts like that for the hardcore players to work for. I don’t even know how to get one and I already know that I’m never going to be able to.” Mounts like the aforementioned Invincible, the Azure Drake, pretty much every variety of Proto-drake, the phoenix A’lar, and we mustn’t forget the various armored netherdrakes that you can only get if you’re something like the top 5% Arena teams in each season.

It has been drilled into me thus far that awesome-looking mounts are things that I CANNOT HAVE. Well, not without putting a stupid amount of work into the game. Raiding the same place for hours several times a week for months? Sorry, I tried endgame raiding in BC and I realized it wasn’t for me. I resented having obligations in a game. The more like a job the game becomes, the less I WANT to play it. And also, I suck at PvP and I rarely play a character for long enough to do all of the holiday achievements for that protodrake.

This made me incredibly sad. I looked at that video and thought “Oh my god. I WANT that mount. Too bad it’ll probably drop from some boss they haven’t announced yet, that you can only even attempt to fight if you don’t wipe a single time on hardmode ICC or something, and even then it’ll be a low droprate and when it drops, there will be ONE that everyone has to fight over. There will literally be ONE person with that mount on the entire server and everyone will be jealous whenever he walks by.” It made me really sad that I would never be able to have such an awesome mount for myself, because Blizzard loves to save the best stuff for the hardcore players.

So what was announced this morning? That they would be selling the mount on the Blizzard Store for $25. And personally, I am overjoyed. I find that I have become a casual WoW player who spends too many hours at work earning a living to do any activity “hardcore”. $25 is nothing. I also don’t understand people who say “everyone’s going to have one! It’s not as special!” Personally, I don’t think the number of people who have one makes the mount’s graphics any less sparkly. I don’t see how those two things are related to each other at all.

I have nothing against microtransactions, as long as they are handled the way Blizzard is handling them, and exclusively make them vanity items. Give me minipets, mounts, hell even fashion clothing. As long as you don’t have anything in the cash shop that will give players who spend money an advantage over those who don’t.

As soon as virtual items are sold directly to players for cash, the company that makes them is encouraged to find ways to encourage players to purchase as many of them as possible. If they are vanity items whose only purpose is to look awesome, the best way to encourage players to buy them is to make them look as awesome as possible. You’re not going to buy something for the sole purpose of looking awesome if it doesn’t look AWESOME. Everybody wins.

However, as soon as you put items on the cash shop that have an effect in-game that doesn’t involve looking awesome, the game designers will begin designing the game with that in mind. If they sell experience boosts? The standard experience gain rate will feel sluggish, such that you need to buy more experience from the cash shop to feel like you’re progressing at a good pace. If they sell consumable items that boost your stats? They’ll balance all of the mobs assuming you have those buffs, so that monsters your own level will be more of a struggle to defeat without them. If they sell skill resets? They’ll make the skill system as unforgiving as possible, so that you’re forced to either pay out the nose or plan out your build meticulously beforehand and hope you don’t misclick somewhere. And don’t get me started on games that sell gear on their cash shops, with the issue of either making said gear better than anything else in the game so that if you buy it, there’s no point in actually playing, or making it less good, such that you’re replacing an item you bought using real cash with an item that you found in-game.

As long as Blizzard keeps their word and continues ONLY selling vanity items, I don’t see what the problem is. Their artists worked hard making this beautiful mount, it’s only right that the money they earn from selling it encourages them to spend more of their budget making amazingly beautiful items like these that aren’t required for gameplay whatsoever. If you don’t like the item, you don’t have to buy it, simple as that. Its presence on the store isn’t going to impact your ability to play the game. And it’s not like Blizzard hasn’t already had mounts that you could buy with real money — the difference here is that you’re not spending $700 to get it off of eBay.

How many times today have I had to tell people, it’s not a limited availability item! I think it’s silly that people were waiting in a queue at the store because they were selling them so fast. Nowhere in the announcement did they say that they would only sell a limited number of them. The description at the store doesn’t say it’s limited. Only a single page somewhere in the queue says it’s limited. I’m sure it’s a requirement of their store, that they don’t have a way to set an item to unlimited, they’re required to fill in a field for “amount available” and they set it to some arbitrary number (perhaps the maximum number possible in the system). Yes, the number was going down. That doesn’t mean they’re going to run out. Show me an official blue post that says there are only a limited number of them and I’ll believe you.

I came home and lazily read some blog posts, messed around in Jade Dynasty for a bit, and then remembered the mount and went to go buy it. I didn’t have to wait in any queue, and there was no mention of it being a limited-availability item. People can be so silly sometimes. I’m showing my support for this idea with my wallet, in hopes that this money will be used to create more incredibly awesome-looking mounts in the future that I don’t have to be a hardcore player with really lucky dice to ever get. I truly don’t understand why people are so upset about this.

Best of all, it applies to all characters I already have and any I’ll make in the future. I won’t ever have to worry about grinding for reputation on my draenei alts to avoid riding a stupid elekk, because I will have a winged horse made of stars to ride instead. Rather fitting for a race of holy beings from outer space, no?

I call him Excelsior, Destroyer of Worlds. Soon we shall take to the skies, my friend.

So a number of weeks ago, I realized Pokemon Soul Silver was out, and heard that it had a neat little pack-in thing called a Pokewalker that worked much like the old pikachu-style tomagotchi, except that this one wasn’t a separate purchase and you could transfer ANY of your pokemon to it. I had been excited when I heard that this game was going to come out (I’ve always been a fan of pokemon) but I hadn’t looked into it for a while, so I wasn’t sure what the release date was. As soon as I heard it was out, I went off to the gamestop at the mall that saturday and bought myself a copy.

As I was walking out of the mall towards the parking lot, I ripped open the shiny silver foil-covered box to take out the pokewalker, so that I could start messing around with it. I ripped out the plastic tab to turn it on, and poked at the buttons, but all it would do it give me a sad face. When I got back to the car, I looked through the huge separate pokewalker instruction manual included in the box. It told me that I must “reach a certain point in the story” before I can use it. Well damn. Fine, I’ll just go home and figure out where I put my DS and eventually I’ll unlock it and be able to gather points whenever I walk into the kitchen at work to get more tea.

I’ve been playing the game casually for a few weeks, grabbing 15 minutes while my pasta’s cooking for dinner, playing for a half hour or so before bed because playing my DS under the covers with the lights off makes me extremely sleepy. Over many years, I discovered that reading a book before bed does not help me sleep, because I get drawn into the storyline and I want to stay up later so that I can finish it. There have been many times I’ve stayed up until four or even five in the morning reading because I just couldn’t put the book down. When I read books, I tend to read an entire book in an afternoon. I do not read parts of a book a little at a time. If a book is not interesting enough to me that I want to read it all in one sitting, I simply stop reading it. Portable video games, on the other hand, are different. I can usually only play them for 15-20 minutes before I can barely keep my eyes open.

So I just beat the second gym leader, that egg I’ve been carrying around has hatched, and I really started wondering — when was I going to unlock the Pokewalker? I was assuming that since it had a “certain point in the story” requirement that at some point, that at some point an NPC would give me a pokewalker in game and explain how to use it, and then I’d be able to connect. Since game spoilers are a non-issue for me (c’mon, I played through this game before several times back in the late 90’s) I did a google search to find out how much farther I’d have to play before unlocking it.

After several unsuccessful attempts on sites that gave me more information about using the Pokewalker without actually answering my question, I found a few questions from other people — and it turns out that “a specific part of the story” simply means “whenever you have more than one Pokemon and one of them is in your PC”. The game never does inform you that you unlocked the ability to do this, it simply expects you to notice that there’s a new option on the load saved game screen.

Personally, I NEVER read the lower options there. I know what they say, because they’ve been the same for EVER. There’s the biggest menu option at the top, it gives details about my saved game, I can select it to load said saved game. Below that is a New Game option, and below that is some kind of “connect with your friends to get something!” option that I don’t care about because I don’t know anybody else iRL who actually plays.

But when you’ve unlocked the Pokewalker, this main menu turns into a scrolling menu, but it still appears to have three options. Now the third option is “Connect to Pokewalker” and you have to scroll the page down to see the fourth option that used to be the third one. I never read these options because I know what they say, they never change, and I had been assuming that the ability to connect to the pokewalker would be inside the game itself, not at the load game screen. Maybe that was a silly assumption. I just don’t think this was handled very well at all.

Now that I’ve unlocked it and transferred a pokemon to it (my Sentret named Ootachi, so named because I had originally played Gold and Silver in Japanese and I think some of their Japanese names are cooler than the American ones) and it’s really quite cool to mess around with now. I usually have a few dozen Watts saved up whenever I check on it during break.

It costs 10 Watts to search the grass for pokemon. You play a little minigame with four bushes, one of them will get a little exclamation mark and you have to select it before it goes away. A couple of correct clicks will put your pokemon in battle against another one. Each pokemon has 4 HP. You can attack for 1 damage (crit for 2), evade (which will cause you to take no damage and “reflect” damage back at your attacker if the enemy attacks you — but it appears that if the enemy also evades, it will escape) or throw a pokeball to try and capture it (though if capturing fails, the wild pokemon will escape rather than give you another chance).

So far I’ve only seen Pidgeys and NidoranFs, and captured one of each, though the device can carry up to three captured pokemon at a time, at which point you need to decide to replace one of the ones you’ve already captured if you try to catch a new one. When transferring my pokemon to the device in the first place, it gave me two options of routes to send it on, either a grassy field or a forest. There are different pokemon on each route, and I hear that I can unlock different routes as I progress through the game, in order to catch more rare pokemon.

I looked up more info on it last night, and it appears that each of these routes has three different sets of Pokemon, and you need to take more steps in order to unlock the more rare ones. It resets the number of steps at midnight every night, and in my very easiest route, it requires 5,000 steps to unlock the highest tier of pokemon (which includes things like Doduo and Kangaskhan). I was browsing the listings for the higher level pokemon, and some of these routes require upwards of 9,000 or even 10,000 steps.

This has the very powerful effect of convincing me to get more exercise so that I can be rewarded with rare pokemon, because as hard as I’ve tried, I have not been able to get a single step by holding the device in my hand and shaking it. It’s very specific about what inputs it accepts, and the manual informs me that it might not record steps correctly in a wide variety of situations, such as if you’re running or jogging instead of walking, or if you’re wearing soft slippers instead of regular shoes.

I like that this device is NOT a tomagotchi or anything of that nature. It does not require you to feed or clean up after or even play with your pokemon. The device barely even knows the pokemon’s name and species, and doesn’t care about its stats in the slightest. It is simply a pedometer with a fun little pokemon-catching minigame attached to it. I find that I have little patience with things like tomagotchi (and to be honest, Farmville and its ilk on Facebook) because I cannot choose when to play with them. I do something now, then I can do nothing — until four hours from now, when I need to do something or I get penalized for not doing it. I don’t find these things fun. What if I don’t FEEL like doing that at that time? What if it isn’t convenient for me? Being required to do things at certain times just makes a game feel like a chore.

I’m having a lot of fun with the game so far, because it offers the right mix of nostalgia and improvements. I have a couple of old strategy guides for the original Gold and Silver sitting around on my bookshelf from when I played the originals years ago, and I’m using them to remind me of what pokemon are on which routes at what times of day, and to remind me of what pokemon the next gym leader has.

Usually when I play Pokemon, I use one of two strategies:

1. Attempt to keep a single, well-rounded and balanced team. This results in my team of six pokemon being very high-level because 100% of the EXP I’m getting is being funneled into the same pokemon. One downside of this is that I am forced to use pokemon I capture at the beginning of the game, because it would take too long to level any new ones up to match my current ones. Another downside is that I often find myself in gym leader fights where half of my pokemon are quite weak against the opponents they’re facing, so if the gym leader gets a lucky strike, I could be out of luck.

2. Attempt to catch everything I can and keep them all around the same level so that I can pick and choose which pokemon to use in the next fight. The obvious downside to this is that wild pokemon give so little experience that they might as well not give any at all, and with the number of trainer battles being so limited, I just end up with a whole lot of pokemon that are too low level for me to do anything with them. It works great for the first two gym leaders, but then after that my collection of pokemon grows so large that it becomes too much work to grind mindlessly on wild pokemon for hours (often when they have annoying abilities that cause status effects) and I end up giving up not very far into the game.

So this time around, I’m using a new, third strategy:

3. Catch everything I can, but after each gym battle, reorganize my team based on which gym leader I’m fighting next, still trying to keep a variety of types. Prioritize anything that has defenses against that type of attacks, and then anything that has attacks that that type is weak against. If I don’t have six of those, I try to fill out the rest of my team with anything else that isn’t weak against that type, especially if it’s good against the gym leader following the next one. This way, all of my available trainer battle EXP is funneled into the pokemon that will be most useful to me in my next challenge. If any pokemon aren’t ever good against a gym leader, then they’ll be sitting in the PC for a good long time, until I feel bored enough to try to build up my pokedex stats.

So far, this has been working quite well for me.

I was chatting with Khoa about it last night, and he was complaining that 5,000 steps is a really long way. I told him that it isn’t very far at all, it’s only like a 1-2 miles depending on your stride length, in fact he could probably rack up that number of steps walking between his classes at school. Then it hit me — he walks a lot more than I do on a daily basis, since he has classes to walk between and I’m sitting here at my desk at work, the only walking I do is from my desk to the kitchen to get more tea occasionally. I should probably let HIM carry the pokewalker, huh? I’m trying that out today to see how well it works.

If I had been a Fan of Bones on Facebook, I would have removed that Fan status tonight and commented as to why. I find that I never did mark myself as a fan of the show, so I’ll have to do so here. To avoid being overly specific, I shall merely say that it shattered the illusion of a good story, leaving behind the cold reality that I logically know is at the root of every TV romance but am able to fool myself into forgetting most of the time: television executives who string us along for as long as they can without advancing the story, because their studies show that ratings drop after they give us what they’ve been hinting at all this time.

Tonight’s episode retconned the earliest part of the series in a bad way, made me realize how much I missed a main character that they more or less killed off in a later season, and gave me the exact situation I wanted to happen right before they made a character that I’ve idolized for years act like a complete idiot and yank that sweet, sweet conclusion right from under my nose. I consider the show to have jumped the shark, I am going to try my best to pretend that the last five minutes of the episode never happened and that the show ended here. I’m certainly not watching any more episodes. Those heartless television executives have gone too far. I’ll stick with my stories that actually have endings, thank you very much.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll go back to your regularly scheduled WoW rantings.

I got to 40, and actually I’m pretty close to 44 now. As soon as I hit 40, I equipped those plate random dungeon shoulders I’ve been saving up since Scarlet Monastery, and suddenly I was a bucket with legs. Seriously, I never realized how much of a gnome’s body is made up of her head until I got a plate-wearing gnome. But I’m not the only one with plate armor, since my progress towards Loremaster (393/700 for Eastern Kingdoms tonight) unlocked exalted with Stormwind shortly after, so I’ve been riding around on a snazzy Palomino.

I realized that Easter was coming up about an hour before the event started on my current server, so since it was Saturday, I stayed up considerably past midnight to get all of my egg-collecting-related achievements. I’ve been reading a lot of posts about “where to stand to be able to camp the most egg spawns” but to me, that goes against the whole spirit of the holiday. You’re supposed to be hunting for the eggs, not sitting there passively waiting for them to appear in the bush you’re standing next to.

There are a few reasons why reason Noblegarden is my favorite WoW holiday. The main one being that the achievements are actually fun to get, and don’t require randomness to succeed. The holiday gives me an item that lets me run twice as fast as I normally can, and the eggs are brightly colored and hidden in really crazy places that you never notice at first, and spotting new ones that I didn’t know were there before makes me feel awesomely observant, like I’ve got eyes like an eagle every time I spot that egg perching on top of a signpost when everybody else is trying so hard to search the ground.

For me, Noblegarden isn’t about finding a good egg camping spot. It’s about finding a path around the town that leads me past as many egg spawn nodes as possible, sprinting around and snapping them up when nobody else is around. There are at least 8 eggs between the moonwell and the back end of the graveyard in Dolanaar that nobody ever checks. They’re not letting me put the eggs on my action bar this year, so instead of opening them between nodes as I run around, I have to stop every couple of circuits to open them all because they don’t stack and my bags start to fill up.

It took me a couple of hours to get all of the eggs I needed, and a good portion of that was because I had forgotten that there was a second achievement to eat 100 eggs that I didn’t see on the list until I’d completed the one to eat 25 eggs, and I decided that I might as well travel ’round the world to the other towns to get my Spring Fling achievement. Any other holiday-related items that I didn’t find in boxes, I saved up more chocolates to purchase before eating the rest. At the end of the first night, I only had a few of the more time-consuming achievements left to complete.

The other main reason I love Noblegarden is that it’s actually possible to complete the whole thing as a low-level character. There aren’t any arbitrary achievements included whose only purpose is to prevent sub-80 characters from unlocking the title. Like hiding one of the Lunar Festival elders in a level 80 heroic dungeon, or making one of the Valentine’s achievements basically “step inside Naxxramas”. No, as a level 42 it wasn’t too difficult for me to dodge the dinosaurs in Un’Goro to plant a flower in Silithus, and ask in Un’Goro general chat on my way back down if anybody needed to do the Hot Springs achievement.

The most difficult one ended up being finding all of the different racial females, but despite being level 42, I queued up for some battlegrounds for some “swap my weapon out for a bouquet of flowers during combat” kind of fun. This battlegroup is apparently horrendously outnumbered in this level bracket, so winning wasn’t really a possibility, and nobody really cared that I was spending my time running around checking out all of the enemies to see if any of them were girls. I managed to get the orc, troll and blood elf on the first night I tried for this achievement. On the second night, I literally only needed undead and tauren to get my title, but after three battlegrounds, I was only able to find the undead before it started to get really late and I needed to get to sleep. Tonight, however, I lucked out and one of the cat-form druids I desperately spammed my flowers on was actually a girl (no way to know unless they shift out, so just /use and hope) and I had my title! W00t!

So, the news on everyone’s mind this week is the flurry of new Cataclysm information we’ve been getting in a steady trickle. I’ve been mentally prioritizing the announced Cataclysm class changes:

• Shaman: I love most of the changes here, from enhancement having a low-level weapon strike to resto having a tranquility-like AoE heal to elemental getting a channeled AoE earthquake. However, I find myself somewhat wary of the complete removal of all dispel capabilities from non-resto shamans (curse removal is a strange thing for the DPS specs to keep, since that was originally given to ONLY resto shamans as a talent). They’re going to have to do a lot to the low-level game to keep this from being so annoying. However, with the announcements so far, Dwarf Shaman is most likely to be my main in Cataclysm.
• Warrior: Meh. I like the changes to the rage system and the removal of next swing attacks, but I’m rather glad that I’m playing a warrior right now. The changes don’t seem THAT interesting to me.
• Priest: Meh. I don’t really find myself that excited about playing a priest, I used to dream of a day when Holy would be a viable DPS spec, but with the death knight triple tanking tree experiment failing, the hope of any spec having multiple roles is gone, and I’ve pretty much given up now. Also, “Life Grip” is a really bad idea.
• Warlock: I’m really looking forward to the new soul shard mechanics the same way I was before. The newly announced changes don’t make me anticipate playing a warlock as one of my major alts any more or any less. I’m sure they’re all very exciting to people whose mains are already warlocks.
• Death Knight: I’m loving the changes to the rune system, and completely agree with Blizzard’s reasoning behind it. I loved playing my death knight, but combat always felt so hectic to me, like I was constantly pressing buttons and the game never let me have a moment of rest — I had to spend every global cooldown deciding what button I was going to press next, and it became too stressful after a while. The announcement today really made me realize that, and I don’t think I’d be able to play a DK at the moment now that I’m conscious of the situation. The Death Knight alt will now definitely be postponed until Cataclysm.
• Rogue: I do really like the proposed changes that will allow me to use up combo points that I had stacked on a dead enemy to heal myself after combat. Also, I’m really quite interested in seeing what the Combat tree looks like after all of the passive bonuses are removed. I’m actually rather surprised that the unique mastery bonus for Combat wasn’t faster energy regeneration.

Mainly, a part of me really likes how they’re shifting the idea of talent specs more into being like sub-classes than trees you can pick and choose from. Giving each tree a specific role does make them a lot easier to understand and balance, and it effectively means that the game has 30 different classes to choose from with the ability to switch subclasses on the fly to another one with the same basic theme.

However, the other part of me is saddened by the loss of what could have been something great — the concept that someday, all trees can be used for everything if specced just right. The crazy idea that we could have creative builds where restoration druids deal damage over time, opposed to Balance’s focus on direct damage and heals. Where enhancement shamans could spec to dual-wield healing weapons and cast healing spells while meleeing, using their maelstrom weapon procs for instant heals. Where holy priests could deal effective damage through Holy Fire and Smite, Shadow Priests could use their vampiric touch to heal their party effectively, where protection warriors could cause some serious injuries by slamming their enemies with their shields, even when they’re not tanking.

Those dreams are dead now, but maybe they never had a chance of happening in the first place. At least new and shiny things are taking their place in Cataclysm.