Some thoughts on TotalBiscuit's cancer

John Bain AKA TotalBiscuit

It's strange that YouTube, as impersonal as it is seems to be, creates what ends up feeling like an intimate relationship with the hosts whose channels I watch. I feel as if I am a part of a family and that these family members come over and hang out with me while I watch TV... only it's them on the TV.

That's what makes today's announcement so hard. John Bain, who is known to the PC video gaming world as reviewer and commentator, TotalBiscuit, developed cancer a while back and it took the wind out of his sails for a while, but he went into remission. Today, we learned that it's back and the form of cancer he has now has a 2-3 year life expectancy and is inoperable.

An Open Letter to Blizzard: Add a Battle.net Authenticator Option

Recently Blizzard (vendor of World of Warcraft as well as the upcoming Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 titles) has switched over to their networked gaming platform Battle.net to manage all accounts for their games. In doing this, they've also pushed out an authenticator that's much like many high tech employees use to work from home. These little gadgets have a secret formula that they use to produce the next number in a sequence every time you press the button. Battle.net knows this sequence, and can verify your identity by making sure that the code you enter is the next (or nearly next, just to allow for mistakes) number.

Recently WoW.com has been suggesting that Blizzard might be on the edge of making these mandatory for the game. I understand this move, but there are two primary reasons people don't agree with it, and that it may well hurt WoW. First I'll cover those reasons and then I'll discuss the ways to work around them without giving up on account security.

(more...)

Occulus and How WoW Can Make Vehicles Fun

World of Warcraft's Occulus is a beautiful instance. It's wide open to the sky, designed in 3 dimensions and otherwise breaks the mold that much of WoW's 5-man instance stable has set. And yet, it's widely considered to be a failure. I recently read one blog post about this that made some excellent points about why it was a failure. I'd like to analyze that a bit deeper and then discuss what I think the future of vehicles could be (yes, I think they have a promising future in 5-man instances and even raids).

Occulus often starts this way: 5 people zone in. 2-4 of them immediately drop group and port out. Why? Because they've done this before and they know that on average, even if they know what to do, they'll probably die at least once trying to finish the final encounter because someone won't. You see, having to get to know new abilities is a pain, but it's a one-time pain. Once you know what to do, you're all set. The problem is that you run a high probability of getting people who don't know what they're doing. They won't be like the warlock who's inexplicably doing half the dps they should be. They'll fail utterly to execute their role because they don't know what it is.

So, how do you fix that? There are three ways:

1. Vehicles have no abilities and role is easy to understand (e.g. you're in a chopper... drive away from the boss until it fades)
2. Vehicles have very simple abilities and are used only for a small part of the fight (think DTK final fight, but even slightly simpler and only once per fight).
3. Vehicles are an optional element of the fight (e.g. one player must get on a giant and use a complicated set of abilities during a boss fight). This is the Wintergrasp model.
   

Players will appreciate these roles for vehicles because it doesn't violate the value proposition of having learned to play their class. Right now, lots of players are gun-shy of vehicles because of Occulus, but if they continue to be as fun and optional as Wintergrasp or as intermittent as DTK, I think that it will be a fun and enjoyable part of the game.

3 or 5-manning Blackrock Depths (BRD) Post 3.3

A long time ago, my World of Warcraft guild, Saturnalia, leveled 3 characters by doing dungeons together at appropriate level. I don't know if we were the first to 3-man all of the old world dungeons at appropriate levels, but we had a blast. I originally posted a guide to Blackrock Depths for other 3-man groups, but now it seems appropriate to update this for the post-3.3 era of the random dungeon finder. I'll keep all of the 3-manning notes just in case you want to try it, but this guide should now be even more helpful to those who want to do BRD as a random dungeon.

 

Read on for the full guide...

 

Random dungeons in WoW

World of Warcraft's 3.3. patch added a new feature called random dungeons. This allows characters of abotu level 14 and higher to place themselves in a queue for a dungeon. When you do this, you'll be in queue with everyone else in your battlegroup (a related set of realms that typically only saw each other in PvP battlegrounds and Arenas). If you're doing random dungeons, here are some tips:

• At low levels, make sure you loot the last boss. The reward is apparently on a boss, not given automatically. I lost out due to this.
• If you don't zone in automatically, you can click the "transport to dungeon" or whatever it's called button after the party is formed.
• Don't sign up as leader unless you're familiar with the dungeon and willing to walk people through it
• The penalty for leaving is just a 15 minute time-out. If you get a really bad group, just bow out politely.
• The new zone map is awesome. Use it.
• This will probably be the new way to power-level, since it gets you tons of dungeons faster than you could run to them.
• If you die, you have to run back in. Make sure you know the layout outside the dungeon before going in.
• If there is an option to disenchant, don't hesitate to use it. It's the same priority as "greed." Of course, check sell price for the item first. Greed might be better.
• If someone wants to leave the group, don't get upset. They're automatically replaced.
• If someone is linkdead, give them some time (e.g. a few minutes) and then initiate a group-kick vote.
• When new people come in to an existing group, ask if they need an escort. Don't assume they know the way to where you are in the dungeon.
  

It's a lot of fun at lower levels. At high levels, it finally makes pugging worth doing for me. I never wanted to pug before, but I think that's because there was so much emphasis on not pugging for players who were good. Now the good and the bad all want to get the rewards from random dungeons, so you're more likely to get an evenly mixed group.

First Flight in Dragonblight

World of Warcraft is a beautiful game, but sometimes the grind-heavy aspects of the game make it easy to forget that. Today I took my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine for a spin for the first time (my engineer finally got around to making one), and I decided to Fraps up a movie of the experience. The music is by Celestial Aeon Project, from their albums Aeon 2 and Mind's Eye, both of which are distributed under a Creative Commons license at Jamendo.com.

Get that Candy: World of Warcraft Halloween Quests

This article was written on my old blog in 2008, and may be slightly out of step with the 2009 event, but should still prove a useful reference

If you're playing WoW, and and not getting the Hallow's End (Halloween) event candy from the various inns around Azeroth and Outland, you really should! Not only is the candy really nice for stackable stat buffs (defense, hit rating (which includes spell and melee hit now), and two kinds of spellpower), but it also gives experience for every inn you get candy from. Here's how I went about collecting them all. (more...)

Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online

Turbine has two MMOs out that I've tried recently. One is Dungeons & Dragons Online. What I've been playing is the DDO Unlimited beta, which will launch a new free-to-play service on top of their existing MMO starting in early September. Frankly, I'm disappointed in this. Its flaws are legion, and it really doesn't add anything new to the MMO gaming experience that I feel I need. However, as a break from WoW, I was going to give it a shot... until something fun happened.

While testing DDO Unlimted, the downloader started queuing a beta for the next Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) update. I tried it out and liked it enough to start playing the live version, and I haven't looked back at WoW or DDO since (slight lie, I logged into DDO last night to wave goodbye as they prepared to take the beta servers down for the last time before launch).

What follows are my experiences with both games.

First off: DDO. What I like about this game doesn't outweigh what I dislike, but there are plenty of items in both categories. Its faith to the core D&D 3.5 (or is it 3.0?) rules is fairly good. Of course, a video game has different pacing and needs, and that shows. There are more way-points in the leveling experience and feats have been broken up to give you more progression and less waiting for some future level when you'll get to be useful.

What I really liked was the instancing. Nearly every quest involves an instance, even if it's just a single room house where you'll defend boxes from kobolds. This makes questing much less contentious, but for me it also reduced the amount of social play I felt I needed to engage in. I don't mind leveling solo, but if you do, this might be a small minus. Then again, joining groups to run instances is really easy.

Repair and general selling of loot was easy, but I'll touch more on this in the negatives. PvP areas are clearly marked, which was nice. And one of the most important things: the starting area quests were very nice and smooth introductions to the game mechanics and encounter models. I really appreciated that. Interestingly, this is also something that LOTRO gets right, and which WoW really just doesn't.

Obviously, the game is now free, which is a big benefit. You do not need to buy anything with real-world money, but I plunked down $6 to see what it would get me. The dungeons you can buy are very detailed and large, but the thing that bothered me is that their store has almost no indication of how many players you should have for each add-on adventure pack. The correct answer turns out to be "a full group" in every example I saw, so be aware that adventure packs aren't solo content (unless you're out-leveling them).

The down sides, however, are the reasons I won't be playing DDO when it launches, so let's talk about those. First off, one major issue I have with all non-WoW MMOs I've tried is that WoW spoiled me with add-ons. Users can re-write the UI from the ground up, adding new functionality that's as complex as they want to code. In DDO, that's simply not the case, and I found myself wanting things like a mod that would select what to sell to a vendor, manage bars for me in a better way, etc. This hurts most of all when you deal with the auction house. Auctioneer is the single most game-changing mod in WoW (with questhelper coming a close second), and you just don't realize how much it's come to mean until you don't have it. But, these are things I expect to run into in other games, and I don't hold it against DDO too much that it's not WoW. (Note: Turbine claims that a mod-authoring system for LOTRO is in the works, just not launched yet, but it's not clear what this means for other games of theirs.)

Serious DDO issues exist on their own terms, however. There are three classes of vendor loot. One class you can simply sell to any vendor. One class are items that would be useful to players (gear, scrolls, etc.) and will sell just find to normal vendors, but you get more money selling them to vendors that would sell that kind of item... but, you can't sell it to them if they already have too many of that item. This gets annoying, and eventually I just started selling all such items to regular vendors, taking a huge cash inflow hit. The third type of item are useless to vendors, but have special NPCs you can turn them in to for different kinds of loot depending on the NPC. Nice idea, poor execution. There are a dozen of these NPCs, and you have to go around to each of them every time your bags fill up to sell off the piles and piles of crap you have accumulated. Not fun, Turbine; not fun at all. This could be fixed in one quick move: simply add an NPC that will take all of this sort of item that you have, all at once, and return to you the appropriate loot rewards. This would speed the after-instancing bookkeeping tremendously and improve the game for me by a lot.

Second up is the difficulty of dungeons. I ran into some that I could not conquer until I out-leveled them, even on solo mode. Some, which had no solo mode, were trivially soloed before I was of appropriate level. In one or two cases there are warnings (most of these are actually trivial) but in most cases, it's not clear to me how we're supposed to know which dungeons are reasonable. My sense is that the game is just not tuned for solo play at all, which is fine, but they should either fix that or slap more warnings on dungeons to indicate that solo play isn't really an option (Lightfoot dungeon in the Marketplace, I'm looking at you!) This also gives the impression that they've not done a lot of thinking about balancing the leveling content out to ensure a smooth leveling experience. My caveat, here, his that I only got to level 5, so it may get better or not.

OK, so to sum up: DDO Unlimited is uneven, but certainly for a free game, I think it's worth the price (essentially the download time). Try it out, but don't be shocked if 10-15 dollars per month starts to sound good after you do.

LOTRO is another thing entirely. When I first moved from EverQuest (EQ) to WoW, I found that the game felt very much like an "answer" to EQ. In other words, it did most of the same things, but where EQ did something annoying, WoW addressed it. Corpse runs were much more pleasant, the UI was much more configurable, questing was worth doing, instances made quest mob-camping mostly a thing of the past, etc. The game was clearly designed by people who played EQ and understood it enough for their game to be a rebuttal.

So, enter LOTRO. This game feels like a rebuttal to WoW, but in some ways it fails and in some ways it succeeds brilliantly. One of the first things you'll notice, but won't get a good sense of for a bit is that the overall feel of the graphics and the aesthetic sense that the game has, is very, very different from either EQ or WoW. It's a much less explicitly fantastic feel, and really doesn't seem like a fantasy game at all until you see a ghost or some other fantastic creature at later levels. Sure, it's low-tech looking, but even the orcs aren't really all that strange looking. They just look like ragged humans unless you zoom in. Elves have pointed ears and dwarves and hobbits are short... but that's not much in the way of fantasy flavor. In a strange way, this makes the fantasy "pop" all the more. When you see someone throw a lightning bolt or wield a flaming sword it really makes you sit up and take notice.

The next thing you'll notice is that inventory management is fairly klunky. Yeah, that doesn't really get any better, and the UI needs serious attention. There's issues of what right-clicking means. If you're interacting with your bags, it means "use or equip," but if you're looking at your items through a vendor, it means "sell" and if you're looking at the contents of a container, it means "take." This leads, all too often, to wearing or eating something that you meant to store in your vault (bank) or sell. There's also the bags... no search, very inspecific looking icons... color borders for item quality are too small and hard to distinguish... The game really needs an inventory management overhaul that resembles WoW with ARKInventory or one of the similar bag mods.

On playability, I just want to make some high level negative notes before I get into what I like:

• There's too much travel at low levels when you don't have a mount. They need to cut this down or increase run speed (playing a hunter helps, but not a lot).
• On a related point, decreasing the milestone (hearthstone in WoW terms) cooldown would help a great deal.
• The Auction house needs to provide some pricing stats in the post window.
• The Auction house should also not default the price of a stack of items based on the previous stack price, but on the previous per-item price. I really hurt myself selling a stack of 20+ silver bars for the same price I'd just listed 3.
• Quest tracking is black magic to me. Improvements that would help are: pinning a goal should extend to followups; removing a quest from the tracker should pull in another quest to replace it; there should be a "reset tracker" option; "cancel" is a bad label for "abandon quest."

So, it sounds like I hate it. Not so. This is a really good game, and the real win is in the details. Creatures that "threaten" to attack make gathering skills much more reasonable, and I actually don't mind going around gathering up ore or wood in this game. Also, the trade skill animations are amazing. WoW's animations always seemed a bit cheesy, but now I'd have a really hard time not simply laughing at them. When you make leather from hides, you actually whip out a stretching frame and scrape down the hide. It's stunningly detailed! They do need better descriptions of how the professions map to individual skills (e.g. if you're an "explorer" that just gives you a pre-set group of three skills).

The built-in quest tracker with location info is nice, though I always have a hard time figuring out when and under what circumstances it doesn't have location info (which seems to sometimes be associated with quest targets being indoors).

However, the real item that will retain my interest is the class mechanics. I've played four classes now up to at least the teens, and I'm thrilled with all of their mechanics. Each class has some way to "build up" to more complex skills, much like rogues in WoW, and each of them does so in a different way. There are also equivalents of "talents" from WoW, but instead of getting them based on your level alone, you actually have to use the appropriate skills in order to "earn" or "unlock" access to each trait before you can go to a bard to allocate your traits. This gives you a chance to start doing something new, but to slowly become better at it as both you and your character get used to the new role.

On that point, most classes can do more than one thing. My rune-keeper is either a healer or a nuker, and can switch with minimal difficultly between the two on an encounter-by-encounter basis. The same is true for most other classes, though the healer/nuker roles of the rune-keeper are probably the most extreme difference in play style.

I find the solo game to be fun in LOTRO, but escort quests are fundamentally a harder thing than in many other games, since the NPCs are much weaker and seem to attract agro easier than in WoW, for example. However, the death mechanic is quite forgiving of small mistakes and the quests are nicely varied. It can be hard to tell what quests are intended for groups (I know there's an indication somewhere, but I can never find it), which is one down-side.

There are also quest chains that follow you from character creation through to the end-game, which I find very appealing. This allows a character to pursue their epic quest line, but at the same time pick up other quests along the way to level appropriately.

The stunning part of the game, though, are the roleplaying (RP) touches. If you're someone who likes to RP in other MMOs, you're going to love LOTRO. There are a dizzying array of non-combat clothing options and dyes. There are personal housing options that you can customize to death and lots and lots of emotes, even making WoW look rather sad. During the current summer, there are even dance-emote-related quests where you have to dance with an NPC in order to gain access to new emotes. LOTRO doesn't require using its RP features, but if that's your thing I can't recommend the game highly enough!

So overall, I'd suggest LOTRO over DDO Unlimited, but both are decent games at a minimum. If you're a WoW player who is burned out and looking for something else to do until the next expansion comes out, like myself, then I recommend checking out LOTRO. It's a really reasonable stop-gap.

However, the lack of a mod-authoring system (for now) makes the games feel slightly more clunky than I think they need to, so I'll likely go back to WoW when the expansion comes out... or so I think now. We'll see how I feel when I'm higher level.

Felicia Day Bringing the Funny: Do You Wanna Date My Avatar

In a music video send-up of online sex-chat ("cybor") done in collaboration with Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon (the writers/authors of Dollhouse's DVD-only Epitaph One, co-collaborators on Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog and much other goodness) Felicia Day's video and single based on characters from The Guild has been released. Of course, its title had to have more parenthetical than actual title: (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar (feat. Felicia Day).

What can one say about a video like this... it's at once silly, iconic, funny, sad, accurate, even a bit sexy which is something Day's signature confused shyness has always held back. Overall, it's a knockout performance both in video and audio for Day. There's far too little of the other characters, though Vork and Zaboo have a nice, but all to brief duo. I got the impression that Robin Thorsen and Amy Okuda were not entirely sold on the idea of a video. Hopefully if this does well, we'll see more of them in upcoming efforts. Who knows, maybe there'll even be a The Guild album!

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: Worgen and Goblins?

MMO-Champion's data-mined image of the Goblin and Worgen masks.

Yet more news pours forth from Blizzard's best marketing outlet: datafile updates. In this week's data-leak extravaganza two new masks for the Halloween event were put into the datafiles. For those who don't know, every Halloween, World of Warcraft holds an in-game event known as Hallow's End. One of the items that players can randomly get from participating is a mask that they can place over their faces in order to disguise themselves as another race (the masks look like masks, they don't transform your character or anything). These come in flavors of each of the playable races, one male and one female. In the recent update, two new races were added: Goblin and Worgen (werewolves). I've touched on the reasons that Goblins will likely be a playable race in a previous post on Cataclysm. However, Worgen are a bit of a surprise.

If true, this would throw current speculation about factions into question. If Goblins were going to be the only new race, then it was clear that they would be able to choose which side they'd play on. However, with two races, they could choose a faction for each race or proceed with two neutral races. There's no way to be sure, so we'll just have to await the Blizzcon announcement.

A Worgen as they appeared in the original game. Image from WoWWiki

Again, for those who don't know: Worgen are imports to Azeroth from another world, summoned to Azeroth by a mage who wished to use them as an army to fight the undead Scourge. It's not clear what their society is like or if more of them are coming to Azeroth. They cannot transform into humans by default, though some were cursed with such transformation by Arugal, the mage who summoned them. Their natural form is that of a large, humanoid wolf with a muscled, but gangly appearance. In the masks that have been datamined, it's clear that Blizzard has come up with a much softer appearance for the female version. So far, only male Worgen have appeared in Azeroth.

One other hint that suggests that Worgen are being added as a playable race would be the interview given by one of Blizzard's designers, in which he said that prior experience had shown that players need to be eased into new races and given an attachment to them in the game before they appear. Note that Worgen appeared in Northrend for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for what appeared to be a throw-away return of the arch-mage Arugal as a servant of the Lich King. Certainly if they were being "seeded" as a playable race, then this sub-plot makes more sense.

Starting Off With World of Warcraft Lore

Recently someone asked me how they would get started learning about the story behind World of Warcraft. It's a good question, and one I'd like to preserve the answer to for others.

First off, the basic answer is W0Wwiki. This site is the one, comprehensive resource for everything related to the story parts of WoW. When it comes to gear or specific quests, it's often not the first place you want to look, but lore is WoWwiki's thing.

For some excellent entry points to WoWwiki, try:

• History of Warcraft (published in-game in various books found throughout the world)
  
• History of the Horde
• House of Wrynn
• Azeroth (one of the two worlds where the story thus far has taken place)
• The Third War
• And the heavy hitters: Sargeras, Azshara, Malfurion Stormrage. The Dragon Aspects, The Titans

As you can see, the story is huge, and once you have a taste for it, there are books and comics that take off from there and tell several stories that parallel the in-game events.

Enjoy!

World of Warcraft: Lokholar the Ice Lord

A few weeks ago, I was involved in an Alterac Valley (AV) battleground in which Lokholar the Ice Lord was summoned. This doesn't happen very often, and I think it may be the first time I've seen it (though some of the multi-hour AVs I took part in back in the early days are a blur to me, now). Sadly, while this almost caused us to win on reinforcements, the Alliance used the cover of confusion to go kill our general while this was going on. But it was down to the wire, and a real blast.

If you want to know how to summon Lokholar in AV, bring 150 blood (looted from Alliance players and NPCs) to Primalist Thurloga back in your base. Once you turn in the quest, have 9 other players ready to assist you. Ride out with her to Galv's side of the Field of Strife and help her summon. Once he appears, he'll be fairly weak and will need you to kill Alliance players nearby. When you do this, he gets stronger and will eventually be nearly unstoppable.

Ideally, you will do this only in an AV where there's a turtle on the Alliance side, and everyone is fighting north of Icewing Bunker. In this case, as soon as he's summoned you want to pull your forces back to the Field of Strife and just make sure to snare or kill anyone trying to run past Galv. Lok will take care of the rest...

Himalountain of the Undercity

It took far too long, but I finally got the "of the Undercity" title for my Paladin. Why was this important to me? Well, the pragmatic reason is that gathering reputation and tokens from the Argent Tournament will be valuable when the 3.2 patch lands and Blizzard expands the Argent Tournament tasks and rewards. But the real reason for this effort was the purely roleplaying-oriented joy of having a screenshot of my paladin on top of a skeletal warhorse with the "of the Undercity" title hovering over his head... it's just a delicious irony that I couldn't avoid.

Anyway, here's the screenshot. I'll probably be backing off a bit on the Tournament for a while, and focus on PvP when I'm on. The arena has been calling to be lately, and I'm working on switching my gear over to dps from healing (my teammates just love me, I'm sure ;)

Wrong Again: The WoW Arena

Long ago I swore I'd hate World of Warcraft Player vs Player (PvP) combat. Then I discovered battlegrounds. They're fast, fun and a great group activity. I was hooked.

Years later I'm doing the arena for the first time, and though I still feel that tactical play is not as fulfilling as strategic play, I was wrong about the arenas having no appeal for me.

Blizzard did a great job putting this together, and the only complaint I have is that your first day will suck, as the system callibrates your level of skill and gear. Once again, WoW is a better game than I gave it credit for.

World of Warcraft Mod Review; Carbonite

From Aaron's Gaming Blog

World of Warcraft is the only MMO I know of that provides tools for overriding the entire user interface. This has lead to a profusion of "mods" that are unlike those for most games. Many games will let you write content such as levels. Of course, in an MMO that's not practical. In EverQuest, you could replace the user interface specification, but that only let you move elements around or re-skin them. In WoW, for example, there's a number of mods that help manage quests in a variety of ways. Some are simple. Some are rather gigantic. The most sweeping that I've seen to date is called Carbonite.

Originally a for-pay mod, recent changes in Blizzard's policies resulted in Carbonite becoming free to download in full. The mod provides most of the features that I used to get from QuestHelper, Cartographer and SimpleMinimap, but it does quite a lot more in some areas. The features I've been using include:

• A re-vamped quest tracking UI
• Guides to most quest locations
• Auto-rescaling minimap that shows quest destination and current location
• Waypoint arrow showing direction of next objective
  
• A trailing line on the minimap that shows you where you've been
• Google Maps-like world map (like Cartographer 3)
• Integration with Atlas for instance mapping
• Detached and freely movable minimap button bar

These are just some of the things it can do, and I'm still learning to use the mod. It's very slick, and really feels like something that's being done professionally. However, there are some problems.

For starters, the UI configuration is a mess. Learning how to lock any given window is an adventure, because it's different for each. The main configuration menu is a maze of options, and it's not always obvious what's being referred to. For example, "minimap" sometimes refers to their replacement minimap and sometimes refers to the classic minimap which can be optionally embedded in theirs or left as a stand-alone along side Carbonite.

Outside of configuration, gathering is difficult with Carbonite at first. You really have to get used to the rescaling of the minimap and learn to control it. I've also had some problems with importing my various gathering node maps into it, although the options are there. After a night of frustration, though, my miner was back to top form and mining away, though still populating some nodes in Icecrown that had gone away.

One really positive thing about Carbonite: footprint. I saved about 30MB of overhead going from Cartographer/SimpleMinimap/QuestHelper to Carbonite.

Overall, I'd say this mod is worth the pain of transition from something else, but it's a huge time sink to adapt. I'd suggest that you try it out at a time when you're not being asked to lead a raid or otherwise rely heavily on your UI for anything important.

Legends of Zork: Kingdom of Loathing with better art?

I've been playing Legends of Zork this weekend (Deepone is my level 3 character) and it feels an awful lot like Kingdom of Loathing without as many puns or beer jokes. Still, it has fun art, a really interesting skill mechanic and plenty of time sinks. Good gaming all around.

If you're interested in trying it, I'd suggest that you pay close attention to the following details:

• Your "Attitude Stance" is tied to your skills, and you only get one talent point per level, so select skills that match the stance you use (you select this when you start and can change it at the character screen by clicking on your character's name).
• Skill points can be spent at a base by clicking on "Skill Training." Notice that some advanced skills have perquisites from other areas of the skill tree. This means you need to plan out your skill buys early.
• Focus on magic or physical combat at first. Don't try to be good at both (buy spells or weapons/armor, not both). I tried the other way around and learned not to.
• If you find you're taking 3+ hit points of damage in a single fight around levels 1-10, you need to get more defense.
• Any time you get a card, make sure you equip it the next time you're in town by clicking the "Cards" link.

Have fun, and I'll see you in the game.

Repost: World of Warcraft: Guide to Leveling Skinning to 350 for Wrath

This article originally appeared on the old essays site, but has been re-posted here, as I think it's still relevant and useful.

Last night, my hunter dropped enchanting and switched to skinning in order to help level his leatherworking through Wrath of the Lich King. I figured I'd just do some of the skinning required and then get back to it later in the week, but it was so fast that I finished it all in two hours. Here's how I did it. (note: I'm Horde, but at the end I give some notes for Alliance players to use this guide also)

Before you start

First of all, this is a guide for a level 70+. While you could start this at nearly any level, some of it really does require that you be at least 65, and better to be 70 since there are level 60 dungeons involved that you'll need to solo.

Also, I'm horde, so your mileage may vary if you're alliance, though you could go to all of these areas (it's just less convenient). To prepare, you really do want to be bount in Shattrath or Dalaran (unless you're a mage and can easily flit around from city to city).

Near Undercity and SFK

OK, so to start, get the training for apprentice skinning and get yourself to Brill, outside of Undercity. Kill the dogs and bats around that area until you get to 50. The trainer is between Brill and Undercity, on the road that leads to the Bulwark. Go train at 50 and go back to the dogs until you start skipping skillups (this is the pattern throughout: you go to an area until you need to train or you start getting less frequent skillups). At around 90-100 skill, you'll want to move on to Silverpine Forest to the southwest. Go all the way past the Sepulcher to the werewolves and wolves between the Greymane Wall and Pyrewood Village. These can all be skinned, and if it's night Pyrewood village is full of mobs that can be skinned (during the day, they're human). Once you get to 105, dash up to Shadowfang Keep and slaughter everything until you get to 150.

RFK and Feralas

Welcome to your next training level. Go train in Orgrimmar and then fly to Camp Taurajo and run south to the entrace of Razorfen Kraul. Enter the dungeon and take your first right and then a left off the ledge. You should be able to pass most or all of the Quillboar, but kill them if you have to, then get down into the area with the boars. Kill all of the boars and skin them. it's a long path that turns left at the end. Once you've wiped them out, leave the instance and reset it (right click on your unit frame and select "Reset all instances") and then do it one more time. You should be at or near 225 by now, so leave the instance and head to Feralas on foot (through Thousand Needles). Don't bother flying.

Go to Camp Mojache if you need to sell/mail items off. If you have not yet hit 225 skinning, then you can kill a few wolves and bears near the Thousand Needles border. These should be at the limit of your skinning ability. Once you hit 224, train in Mojache and continue to skin the bears and wolves near the camp until you start to green out. At that point, go sell to free up inventory and then on to the Dire Maul area to the west and then travel south to find the Hippogryphs. Skin these until you start to green out and then head into Dire Maul to the north.

Outside of Dire Maul, kill and skin the patrols of dogs until you hit 290 (you should already be quite close to this) and then go into the northern most entrance from the large courtyard. This takes you directly into Dire Maul North. If you take the western of the two doors along the north wall you will come in directly above a pit area with a boss and several packs of non-elite dogs. You will have to kill the packs of dogs in groups since they all come when one is pulled. If you're not an AoE class, this might take some time, but you'll get through it. Kill them and skin them until you hit 300.

Outland: All Hellfire, All the Time

Now that you've hit 300, go to Outland and train in Thrallmar, sell whatever you need to and leave Thrallmar and go east to the hellboars outside. The red-skinned hellboars are skinnable at your level. Skin them until you start to green out (which happens quite fast) and then go to Razorthorn Trail which is at the very southern edge of the rampart wall that divides the zone down the middle. There are ravagers in this area which you can kill and skin until you hit 350. You just want to march up and down the path. I ended up killing ravagers on one side going up and on the other side going back down, which worked out well, since anyone who was leveling in the area could keep to the other side and not be bothered by me.

Grand Master training

Now you're able to train Grand Master Skinning in Dalaran or Vengence Landing to begin in Northrend. Welcome to the two-hour 350 mark! From here, if you're level 70 you can just skin as you level. If you're 80 already, then you'll have to wait for my Wrath skinning guide...

For the Alliance

Alliance characters can probably substitute Loch Modan for Silverpine Forest and then go to SFK after. Everything else pretty much maps to the Alliance except for where they train in Feralas.