Archive for the ‘Gavelier’ Category

Just for kicks, here’s the new Return to Graveyard button on the PTR. Why is Gav seeing it in Elwynn Forest of all places? The Horde.

I was on the PTR the other night and was just milling about after completing the first string of pre-Cataclysm events and noticed the Horde stalking around south of Goldshire in PvP mode. A number of us went forth and killed them, at which point they respawned and got killed again. And again.

So how did I die? Well, at one point we had them on the run, scattered and seemingly rattled. I opted to jump one I had cornered and – I thought – alone, but now I realize that I couldn’t have possibly telegraphed my attack any more then I did. I hopped off of my mount early, ran for a short to close the distance, judged and then cast my stun. It was at this point that every freaking Horde in the area came down on me. Once in one small area they were easily killed again, but I didn’t live. Dammit.

Oh well. I got a few kills, saved some people, was doing ok and then pulled a dumb-ass move to get killed. Typical Gav.

It’s the Brewfest! I stopped by the Brewfest outside of Ironforge with Gav this morning and did all of the available quests. They included catching Wolpertingers, slaying Pink Elekks, and racing Rams around to deliver beer. I also slayed Coren Direbrew, who was an absolute wuss. We showed up, the tank attacked him and we DPS’d him down. No big deal. The fun part was that I got Direbrew’s Remote. I immediately summoned my personal borer and went to the Grim Guzzler.

I’d never been there, so a couple of nice goblins got the band L80ETC to rock out for me.

That just made my morning.

We take a break from our PTR coverage to discuss what’s going with Gavelier on Live.

I’m not going to open this post with the trite pirate speak, but it is Pirates Day in Azeroth. You can speak to any commoner to get a pirate costume for a short while or speak to Dread Captain DeMeza in Booty Bay to get a 12 hour costume. Make sure you visit DeMeza to get your holiday achievement.

You may notice that I’m going ‘sword and board’ in the above pic, rather then wielding my usual Tyrannical Beheader. That’s obviously because I’d been off playing in a PvP scenario. This time, it was my first excursion into Warsong Gulch. That’s a cozy little battleground, ain’t it? I took my Dread Corsair  buff to the battleground (after waiting 9 minutes!) and had a great round. Sure it was mostly because my team was awesome and the horde seemingly gave up towards the end of the match, but I still had a good round.

I also (because we blitzed the hell out of the place) got a couple of achievements: Warsong Expedience and Warsong Perfection. I say the horde gave up at the end because after pitched fighting around the middle of the zone on our first two flag captures, they were nowhere to be seen on our third run. We all just tailed the flag carrier into our base without seeing a single hordie.  I never died, which was weird. I got hit hard a few times, but never enough to drop me below 50% health. I credit our healers (a couple of paladins and a priest) and my stocking up on resilience with stuff like my PvP armor and the flask I quaffed. I did crap damage but was in the middle of everything for 19 honorable kills. I was using my Seal of Justice, so that may have contributed to my low damage output (that and I don’t have a decent one-hander) Aw well.

I finally got a DPS meter onto the PTR to check Gav’s damage dealing capabilities, and the results were surprising. I had the exact same gear on both Gavs, and both had their main damage seals up (Seal of Command on live, Seal of Righteousness on the PTR) and Blessing of Kings on.  One difference is that on live BoK gives 10% stat boosts, but on PTR it’s 8%. Slight difference. The testing procedure was simply rampaging around the Cult of the Damned camp above the Argent Tournament grounds. Here’s what I found out.

It seems that the downtime on PTR spent waiting for holy power to gather so you can cast Templar’s Verdict or Divine Storm does hurt your DPS. You need to wait for Crusader’s Strike’s cooldown to end twice before you can get to your bread-and-butter attacks. Sure, you judge as well (which is helpful for ret pallys to close gaps), and ret pallys can occasionally mix in an exorcism but it still takes a while to gather full holy power, all the while the mob is pounding on you. You also need to judge when to use said holy power to heal. It’s an interesting dynamic, but it does hurt your DPS – but by how much?

Personally, in the above scenario, it hurt me to the tune of 8%. Eight percent less damage per second on the PTR. That hurts allot. I don’t know if other classes are suffering the same fate, but if they aren’t paladins are going to fall by the wayside as viable DPS.

I do want to point out that Blessing of Kings was buffing my strength and agility by 2% less the usual, so that accounts for some of it. Also, Seal of Righteousness just feels weaker then Seal of Command to me. It may just be me, but I’m worried. Despite any excuses, paladin DPS is down, and I don’t see an immediate cure.

Today I decided to test the new glyph mechanic on the PTR. First up Gav bought a new glyph (Templar’s Verdict) and some Vanishing Powder for erasing old glyphs. I opened the glyph screen as seen above.

Step one was erasing an old glyph. I no longer needed the Glyph of Consecration now that the changes to it’s cost have made it prohibitive for me to cast. So, I  shift-right clicked on the glyph.

Do I wish to erase it? Yes, yes I do. Of course, I can reapply it at any time in the future because it stays in my glyph spell book. Handy!

And there we go. A blank major glyph slot to put my Templar’s Verdict glyph into.

The system, as it stands, isn’t quite working. For example; I have the Glyph of Judgement as a major glyph from live, but here it’s  a prime glyph. I was able to leave my judgment glyph in it’s major slot and place a new one in a prime slot, effectively doubling it’s potency. This will obviously be fixed before the patch goes live, so I’m not too worried. This will make glyph management much easier in the future but I fear for those whose lively hood is based around glyph sales. Without the need to repurchase glyphs their sales will drop. Not that big a deal, I guess, but it’s something that’s I’ve thought about (mostly because of the money I – as a buyer – am  going to save in the deal). This seems to be a change for the better. Good going, Blizz!

I queued for a random heroic last night for the first time in I can’t tell you how long (wait a minute, yes I can – 16 days ago) and wound up in Hall of Stone. I dislike the Ulduar heroics for their difficulty. Aside from the Ice Crown Citadel heroics, they’re as hard as heroics come these days. In particular, I dislike the Tribunal of Ancients event in HoS. The mobs inevitably get loose from the tank in the chaos and attack me, attack the other DPS, attack the healer, and attack me (that’s worth mentioning twice). This time it was fairly straight forward, with us kicking the invaders asses left and right. Our party was doing massive damage (sorry, I didn’t have my DPS meter on so I don’t know exactly how much), but our resto druid was the big hero. Our timber-riffic healer kept everyone topped off with aplomb. After that, Sjonnir the Ironshaper was a breeze. No loot, but that’s no big deal. I got my gold and two frost emblems and that’s what I went for.

For those not yet privy, the 4.0.1 PTR servers are up and active. This means that you can go try out the new Cataclysm powers, specs and interface (yay!) but not the new beta-centric world changes, races and zones (boo!). In short, it’s the WoW you’re playing now but with new powers and a modified interface. I popped Gavelier in (known on the PTR as ‘Gavalier’ due to a naming conflict) and trained his ret spec as I’d decided I would while toying with Wowhead’s talent calculator. Or, I tried. You see, this PTR makes use of the new streaming feature. That, combined with the 16 GB download time meant that I hopped in before everything was loaded (I ought to be done downloading sometime in October, by the way). This meant that I didn’t actually have all the data I should have and the game glitched. Restart.

Back in, I got my spec set and was ready to test my powers on some hapless mobs in Storm Peaks when I realized I was missing some of my key new abilities. Stuff like my new main damage seal for one (that’s kinda important) and the new Word of Glory heal. Off to Dalaran, and then to Stormwind. Once in Dal I stood for about three minutes waiting for the portal to show up. Once it did I popped through and hopped on my Albino Drake atop the Mage’s Tower… and promptly fell about forty feet straight down. Ok, so no flying in the old world yet (yes, I know there’s a new ability that needs trained, but it wasn’t at the Dalaran flight trainer). It’s actually funny to see folks running around on their flying mounts, hopping up and down with them, vainly trying to get airborne. Anyway I got my new abilities and ‘ported back to the Argent Tournament grounds. Or I tried to. The game froze and I was back at the character select screen. I reselected Gav and sat at the finished loading screen for a few minutes before giving up. Restart.

I finally loaded up at the Tournament grounds and took a few dailies to practice my pummeling on the Cult of the Damned dudes. My first thought was that the game does an awesome job letting you know when a proc’d ability is available. For example, with Art of War my exorcism spell glows so I know to hit it. Very nice. Also, the new holy power mechanic kept my eyes off the battle more then I would have liked, keeping an eye on my new bar so I could know when to hit Divine Storm, Word of Glory or Templar’s Verdict. In all though, I seemed to be doing more damage then before. Of course, without a DPS meter it’s hard to tell for sure.

I hearthed back to Dalaran and took the portal back to Stormwind. Here’s a few more random pics I took while  n Goldshire.

The new stat window is great at telling you what you need to know without you having to do on-the-fly math or looking things up online. It will tell if you’re hit-capped for your level (and levels above you) for example.

Here’s the talent spec window. Nothing fancy but very functional.

I’ll have more tidbits as I continue to play.

Here’s Gav, practicing with the Drill Sargent for Operation: Gnomeregan. I completed the quest chain last night (along with seemingly a million other people) and had a good time. Some of it was funny (Mekgineer Thermaplugg was humorous with his rants) and the action was dynamic. At one point we were at the gate to Gnomeregan and… the quest bugged. High Tinker Mekkatorque froze and then disappeared, leaving us dozens of us without his buffs to deal with a mob of elite level 80s. First off, when the hell did they get there?! I also want to know how Thermaplugg – all level 28 of him – is ordering around and controlling them. They could kick his ass and take Gnomeregan for themselves. Oh well.

Well, on try #2 we made it into the city, where we fought. And fought. And fought some more. It was just numbing AoE mob grinding down there. Finally, after another humorous rant or two from Thermaplugg, we had to evacuate when he irradiated the city again, this time with 20x as much radiation as the last time. So, what? What did we accomplish? Did we just waste our time? Gah.

I did do one other thing last night. I picked up a Titanium Razerplate for my gear set to replace my Breastplate of the Imperial Joust. Now I just need to gem it up and enchant it.

I mentioned a while ago that Heroic Violet Hold is a breeze so long as Xevozz doesn’t show up. Well, in a recent PUG run, he poked his ugly head out. This was actually the first time I’d ever faced him, but I’d read up on what I was supposed to do so I wasn’t a liability. We whooped his ass and I got a new achievement, Lockdown. We proceeded to ice the rest of the run with little difficulty.

I guess when you way out-gear him and know his tricks, Xevozz isn’t such a pain in the ass as I thought.

It’s time for another Life of a Hero. Today I’m showing some minor mile markers from Gav’s 20s.

We pick up Gav’s adventures from my first foray into Duskwood.  The Nightwatch’s warning, the skeleton in the middle of the road… it was nerve wracking. I didn’t find out what it was all about though at the time.

I’ve arrived in the Wetlands! I like the Wetlands for what ever reason, so I’ll be sad to see it changed in Cataclysm.

Other then the addition of the Titan Panel add on, this pic show me back in Duskwood having my first encounter with Stitches.

I totally panicked, but he’s quick for such a massive beast. Of course, even if I didn’t panic, it wouldn’t have helped; I was no match.

And here’s a screen that allot of humans in their 20’s  can relate to. This actual encounter eventually spawned my favorite Gavelier’s World of Warcraft comic ever. I don’t think I’ll ever get back into making the comic again, but it’s still there… waiting…