It’s funny how some small disaster can lead to neat discoveries.  I wore out my Kinesis Freestyle2 keyboard.  Yup, literally wore it out . . . well, the left half of it, anyway.  I poured half a cup of sweetened coffee on the right half.  Ouch.  So for a week and a half I used something else.  One temporary replacement was a mini usb keyboard.  Boy did that suck.  Truly.  I was back to being a noob player with reduced dps.  Yeah, having the right keyboard is definitely key.  But . . . the silver lining . . .

Did you know . . . you can bind shift-space bar?  Yup.  As of yesterday I have an easy mount-up and ride/fly key combo.  I have a ButtonForge button set to shift-space bar and I drag onto that button whichever mount I will need . . . or whichever macro I need (no you will NOT dismount me in flight).  Beauty!  No more trying to find the right mount each time I want to mount up.  Will you be spending time flying someone around in Draenor?  Drag the Sandstone Drake onto the button.  Have stables in your garrison and want to do some quick mining/herbing?  One of the panther mounts is just the thing.  I love it when I find a method that’s both efficient and elegant.

The Draenor expansion is full of awesome stuff. I’m going to list a few here and add to it as more occur to me.

If you are new to Draenor you might as well work toward flight as you level. Go to Wowhead and bookmark the flying progress tool.  As you work through each region, finish the requirements for Draenor flight.  When you get to Tanaan you’ll be most of the way through the required achievements.

Sergeant Crowler in your garrison sells a potion of accelerated learning.  It costs 100 garrison resources and increases your xp for one hour.  If you’re in a hurry to level it’s a must purchase.

Make sure you have Handinotes and Handinotes:Draenor addons loaded so all the treasures show on the map.  Collect them as you go.  You will need the garrison resources.

You can equip three warforge crafted items at level 91.  Watch the auction house and get the best buys you can. If the stats aren’t perfect you can buy items that reroll the stats to those more favorable to your build.  If you are an alchemist you can make a 620 trinket.  You need the stone for some of the alchemy transmutes and this stone does not count toward your warforge crafted limit of three.

There are a plethora of followers in Draenor.

• Collect Fen Tao (standing next to the town hall steps in Stormshield) when you fly there to do the quest line that gets you Delvar (bodyguard follower).
• Get Romuul (jewelcrafting), Rulkan (quest line, blacksmithing) and Shelly Hamby (quest line, leatherworking) while you’re running Shadowmoon Valley.
• There are two followers in Gorgrond that aren’t apparent, Blook (beat him up) and Tormmok (protect him).  Look them up for the coordinates.  They’re both down by Bastion Rise.  There are a couple others you’ll get when you quest through.
• In Talador pick up Ahm (inscription), Pleasurebot 5000 (tailoring) and Ilona (bodyguard).  Choose the artillery outpost ability in Talador and bomb the npcs for an easy peasy win for Ilona.  Artillery is the best choice here because you’ll use it in Tanaan . . . a lot.  Save yourself 5000g by choosing artillery the first time.  Yup, been there.
• In Spires of Arak get Leorajh (bodyguard).  The other followers here are questline.    Make sure you read the linked follower guide and watch vids on how to get Leorajh.  Without flying he’s a bit difficult to get to.
• In Nagrand get Lantresor (quest line, mining follower) and Abu’gar (collect scattered parts).

This is a bit of a repeat but . . . if you are a blacksmith or will have a blacksmithing hut, make sure you get Rulkan in Shadowmoon Valley (Alliance, Horde has a similar follower).  As a follower assigned to the blacksmithing hut, she provides a 4 hour buff that protects your armor and provides a elemental to fight with you which, other than bodyguards, makes her the best follower in the game.

In Spires of Arak get the Peon Mining Pick. If you have mining it cuts mining time in half. It stacks with the Preserved Mining Pick Lunarfall Excavation buff and reduces your Lunarfall Excavation node mining time to half a second (this is for everyone, not just toons with mining profession).  With the mining pick in your bag and the mining pick buff onboard, it takes longer to loot than to mine.  Sweet!  Oh, and Miner’s Coffee stacks.  The funniest in-game thing at the moment is male Panda monk on three stacks of miner’s coffee.  OMGosh.  And if you’re efficient you can complete the mine in the three minute limit of miner’s coffee.  If you can’t due to goren infestation, the stack renews to the full three minutes when a new miner’s coffee is added so don’t start with a stack of five or you won’t have room to add one.

In Nagrand get Gorepetal’s Gentle Grasp.  It cuts gathering time in the garden in half for everyone. If the toon has the herbalism profession it cuts gathering to half a second Draenor wide.  This and the Peon Mining Pick don’t have to be equipped but they do need to be in your bag to provide the buff.  Gorepetal doesn’t show up on the map if you’re running NPCScan (addon) until you’re right up against the cave.

Buff tents are a new thing in Draenor.  They provide a 10% stats buff like the rested bonus you get from staying in an inn and the effect stacks with other buffs.  The tents are made by the leatherworking follower (Shelly Hamby from Shadowmoon Valley for Alliance) assigned to the leatherworking hut.  They only stack to five though there are so many varieties of tents you could fill a bag with the variety available.  They are account bound and can be sent cross server/faction.  They can be used by level one toons.  The buff drops off in dungeons and raids and if you logout.  It doesn’t stick like most other buffs.

Bodyguards!  Let’s hear it for bodyguards!  Once you have a level 2 barracks you can assign a bodyguard to your barracks from the architect’s table.  Pick up the bodyguard at the steps to the barracks.  If you kill off your bodyguard you can unassign that one and assign another.  The steward in the barracks sells a device that let’s you micro-size your bodyguard.  The need for this will become clear once you start running with a bodyguard.  Tormmok is enormous and Leorajh is only a little bit smaller.  Oh, and get the addon BodyguardAway so you don’t get the annoying window up every time you accidentally click your bodyguard.  One more thing on bodyguards.  Their strength/survivability/damage/heals is dependent on your item level.  You can take a level 94 bodyguard and s/he will do impressive things if your gear score is nice and high.  If your gear score sucks, taking a 675 geared bodyguard is going to do you no good.  Their effectiveness scales to your gear, not theirs.

Crafts and crafting . . . There are three methods of updating your armor in Draenor.  For crafted items you can purchase the first upgrade pat from the trainer in your profession hut.  The first three crafted upgrades require Savage Blood which is gotten from a level 3 barn.  Until you’ve got your gear completely through the first three upgrades a barn is a must.  Each upgrade takes 15 savage blood.  Suck it up, build the barn . . . after you do Oralius’s quest (inn or tavern) and get the crystal.  This is the on-steroids version of the Crystal of Insanity we all sought on Timeless isle.  So, build the inn first, watch for Oralius, run Blackrock Spire (dungeon), get the crystal and replace the inn with the barn.  All the other inn quests require Silver on the Proving Ground.  That’s great stuff for later but to start . . . you just need the crystal and the quest and dungeon for that item don’t require heroic.

The second upgrade for crafted items requires a pattern purchased from the daily trader.  Herb trader has alchemy and inscription pats.  Ore trader has blacksmithing and engineering pats.  Leather trader has leatherworking pats. Fur trader has tailoring pats.  Dust trader has enchanting pats.   The traders are on a five day cycle, herb-ore-dust-fur-leather.  Excess raw mats can be traded to the traders for primal spirits and the traders will all have a handover quest for 25 primal at a cut rate.  So if you’re a leatherworker and have collected stacks of ore and herbs and dust (from DEing your gear) visit the right trader and swap it for primals to boost your production of your profession’s soulbound mat.  Sweet!

Garrisons!  There’s so much going on here there’s no way I can adequately cover it all.  The internet is a great resource and wowhead rocks.  You can visit another person’s garrison to use their huts or the daily trader.  Go to the dungeon eyeball, click premade groups, custom groups and type in the search box.  You can find someone with an enchanting studio and disenchant all  your soulbound gear for the mats (once you join the group click your picture and view leader’s garrison) or use their enchanting follower’s enchant effect on your weapon.  When you’re done visiting you’ll want to leave group, then click your pic and view your garrison.  If you don’t you’ll get chucked out way past the Bling rock and have to hoof it back.

I think etiquette and technique are what separate a socially acceptable and effective hunter from a huntard, a player so oblivious to the responsibilities, possibilities and opportunities of the class they’re an annoyance to all who encounter them, a stain upon all hunters who have a clue.

Part of the reason there are so many huntards is because the class is so easy to play. And because leveling and staying alive as a hunter requires little thought of effort, many who play this class don’t take advantage of some of the best features.

Are the bad guys bypassing your pet and coming to whack on you? Set your pet to tank. You didn’t know you could set your pet to act as a tank, increasing his threat and armor? Yup, you surely can. A hunter has the ability to change a pet’s aspect. A pet on tank with a good heal rotation (you did know hunters can heal their pets, right?) and crafty use of the few DoT spells left to them after the last expansion can solo most anything if they don’t overpull.

Sites like Noxxic and IcyVeins will give you a suggested rotation but to perfect the art of kill-it-quick you must practice and be observant. And watch out for that Barrage spell. If you don’t keep your range in mind you’re going to pull the whole neighborhood. Sometimes that can be a good thing . . .

In the world of WoW, once you get a toon to 90 you’re doing the same thing every day with few breaks in the routine.  Day in and day out, it’s daily creation, farming, 20 rares on Timeless. When you have seven 90s, things get stale and boring REALLY fast.  In short order it becomes mind numbing.

I happened to be online when a close friend popped in . . . to do her daily creations and farming, of course.  She told me about a group from our guild who had started a horde guild and were playing horde toons on another server.  My immediate thought was . . . ooo!  Guildees playing somewhere else?  As horde?  Ooo!  A new place to use all that heirloom equipment I bought to level my alliance toons!

My friend said she had started a single toon there and was lamenting the lack of bag space and the difficulties involved in soloing without support.  That’s something I hadn’t run into very often as I had leveled most of my toons nearly simultaneously and their professions supported one another.  So . . . what if I tried to duplicate that in a much tighter group . . . something with fewer than 9 toons?

So, I’ve started five horde toons; troll druid (herbalism/inscription), orc mage (tailoring/enchanting), tauren monk (skinning/alchemist), tauren paladin (blacksmithing/mining) and goblin rogue (engineering/jewelcrafting).  I’ve covered all professions with the exception of leatherworking which was not fun to level.  I’ve done it once and would like to never have to repeat it.  Never fear, I have a plan . . .

Once I get this stable of toons to 60 I will start a death knight.  I will start leatherworking and skinning on that toon and, once the DK is 60, I will use the account upgrade instant 90 buff to level the toon AND the profession.  Problem solved.

So let’s see how well 10 professions can be crammed into five toons . . . and how well only three doing gathering can support all.

And the palette cleanser bit?  I was happy to do my farming and daily creation because I had something else to look forward to when I was finished.  Go me!

I had an epiphany not too long ago on offering suggestions for corrections in WoW, DugiGuides (this one was depressingly abusive) and Zygor.  I’m sure every player has ridden this curve.  In the beginning we’re invested in being part of the community and we point out the problem assuming someone’s going to fix that flaw.  The next time around, same thing.  We see the thing we saw before, remind whoever is responsible for the fix and move on.  By the third time around we’re thinking WTF?  Can’t anybody fix this?  Doesn’t anyone care enough to fix it?  Pretty soon we’re confident no one’s going to do anything about it.  It doesn’t matter if the fix is large or small, insignificant or would improve the experience for those who come after, it’s going to stay wrong for all of eternity.

This passive action by managers, supervisors and software engineers gives the impression that the player’s help in improving the gaming experience is unwanted.  And it guarantees the reduction of ALL feedback.  And disappearing feedback is indicative of player ennui.  Ouch.

I’m pretty typical.  Once I noticed nothing was fixed after I took the time to report problems I stopped giving feedback completely, even on support tickets (“Please take the time to tell us how we did”  Really?  Not likely.)  This is the normal bleed over effect.  And yes, that spider is still stuck between the bulwark and the tower in Redridge Mountains.  It’s been stuck there for over a year.  Am I going to point it out again?  Honestly, what do you think.

I tried a Draenai today and deleted the character at level 7. Tried a night elf something-or-other and deleted her at level 5. I didn’t like the sounds, the atmosphere, the attitude . . . but mostly I’m totally clueless. If it’s not fun, why bother? I’m having loads of fun with my gnome. I started a mage. She’s pretty hard to keep alive. I’ll keep her a while. At some point I have to learn how to quest without the support of a pet.

My first character is a gnome warlock and my current biggest problem in playing, other than general blindness (includes colorblindness), is how to target more quickly and accurately. Because I’m colorblind I often can’t see the cues that signal what is targeted which can lead to the wrong thing being spelled or pulling things in I didn’t mean to target followed by frantic casting to stay alive.

At this point I’ve got a bunch of new spells to learn. I’ve done some changes that are making my fighting more effective. I use immolate (second spell I got), then while they’re running at me I use the life-force draw. That gets them to me so I don’t end up having to loot a corpse in the middle of bad guys. With my pet set to not engage until the target hits me (or him), the pet steps in, whacks him and turns him away from me. I then hit the blow ’em up spell, then if they aren’t already dead I do the life-draw again and the blow ’em up again. It works great even on tough things. We (pet and I) did the group quest giant gnoll on our own using this technique and it worked awesomely well on the first try, no death involved. I occasionally lose my pet but it’s always when I draw from a spot too close to another bad guy who jump in to “help” and I can usually finish them off and not die, then regen my pet and go after another. If I get low on health I make sure I move to where I can regen without being in hostile territory so my regen is less risky.

Learning, still learning.

My son sent me disks for WoW and I spent two days installing them.  Now it’s doing an optimization update download, it’s about 30% done on my 2.5mb connection and it’s been at it since 7:30 this morning. It’s a DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS update. At this rate, there’s no way I’ll be ready to play by tonight. And the total bitch is, it’s taking up so much bandwidth I can’t play EQ or watch Netflix or a movie on Amazon. I’m up and about doing other things and my wrist is hurting like mad as a result. I cannot just sit, I have to do SOMETHING.

Not life and death, but mega frustrating. I’m eating HD Mint Chip ice cream in self defense. Pathetic.