Generally in the World of Warcrack certain aspects of the game get all the glory. Everyone talks about leveling, questing, raiding, or pPvP. (Player versus Player- when you kill other players as opposed to computer generated elements. I might make a short post later about PvP since I have few things to say.) These are all very important, don’t get me wrong, but very few people really extol the joys of professions in WoW.

Professions are split into two types: primary and secondary.

Secondary professions are professions that everyone can do after they reach the right level. They are generally handy skills that make the game easier in general.

First Aid teaches players to make bandages from cloth found from killing mobs to use to heal themselves. This is useful when a non-healing class is soloing or if the player cares enough about their own survivability to fill their green bar when running with groups. It is a great profession to have and is very easy to level.  Sadly, some players don’t have this profession because they believe the healer will heal them… Suckers!

Fishing is pretty much what it sounds like. It allows players to pull fish out of bodies of water. This is useful in conjunction with cooking.  Most people HATE leveling fishing. Some people find it relaxing to stand on a shore for hours throwing a fake bobber into water and wait to catch a fake fish. For this reason, fishing can make pretty decent gold.

Cooking allows the player to cook fake food from fake materials. This an incredibly useful skill since often the food often provides bonuses for the players that eat them. Leveling cooking can be a bit of a pain in the ass since you need various meat for different animals and the meat doesn’t always drop and sometimes the only creatures who drop meat are in East Jesus Nowhere. Cooking also provides feasts which are platters of food that an entire party can eat and get the bonuses which help the group win.

Archeology is a new profession with Cataclysm. I haven’t gotten to play with it much but I get the general idea. Basically, you go to various special places in the world and dig up things. After you get enough of these things you combine them into an item. These items vary in levels of awesome from crappy dice to pets and mounts. Most people bad mouth archeology but I think its fun.

The primary professions differ from secondary professions in that you can only pick two. There are two different types of primary professions, crafting and gathering, and you can pick any combination of professions. Since there are so many and I like to make my stupid drawings I am only going to cover five professions today.

Crafting professions:

Blacksmithing: Blacksmithing uses metals and a bunch of other random crap to make plate (think jousting) armor or weapons. There are several classes that use plate armor and some blacksmiths can make some pretty great gear. It seems like a noble profession, I just don’t have any characters that wear plate so it is one of the few professions I have never leveled. I know it is a huge pain to level and very expensive. It also seems that you level the profession for hope of getting three things that are awesome while ignoring the rest of it.

Leatherworking: Leatherworkers use the skins skinners produce and turn them into gear and items that add bonuses to gear. Leatherworkers make both leather gear and mail gear. I don’t quite understand how leather becomes mail but I have never asked. It is easier to level up than blacksmithing with about the same rewards.

Tailoring: Tailors make cloth armor. They use the cloth that mobs drop to turn into pretty pretty dresses and bags to carry your crap. This sounds like an easy profession to level but  the materials need to create some of these items are hard to get or expensive to buy.

Engineering: One of my favorite profession is engineering. Engineering uses metals and a ton of other crap to make gizmos. Some of these thingies are useful items like goggles or teleporters. You can use engineering to make vehicles. My favorite, though, is engineers make explosives. When you level this profession you can make exploding sheep. Also, when you use the items you make with engineering, there is always a terrible chance of something going horribly wrong. Many things carry the caveat of “or it could explode” in their item description. What is not to love?

Jewelcrafting:  Jewelcrafters make jewelry and cut gems found in mining nodes into items that add bonuses into gear. Jewelcrafting has the potiential for making a ton of money. Different gem cuts do different things and therefore are desired by different people. Certain cuts are also worth more than others. It is a very useful profession to have and can save a lot of gold.

There are a few more crafting professions and all the gathering professions yet to cover but I think this ramble has gone on entirely long enough.  I will return Saturday with further discussions and terrible drawings!

Oh yeah… HI CAL

So I was going to write a really cool post today. I really was. Then I spent TWO FREAKING HOURS in wal-mart so I am reposting something I wrote for my guild’s forums last night.

So a lot of us have started running 84-85 dungeons and heroics and some of us has had our teeth kicked in a bit by the new game. That is what this is, a new game, so we all have to learn to adjust. The healers are having a hard time. Druids are having big issues. Priests are having big issues. Pallys are freaking fabulous.
We all need to learn how to play with these new circumstances. In Wrath, I could heal an entire heroic without ever drinking and I could even do damage while healing. Dps could stand in poison, fire, whirlwind, or anything else and we would be pretty much okay. Lifesaving cooldowns were for suckas. In Wrath if you attempted to crowd control, people laughed at you. Cataclysm changed this completely. The healers just do not have the capability to heal through everything anymore. This means other players have to start learning to take responsibility for their own health at times and use any abilities to either mitigate damage or crowd control. Also, if you can cleanse, decurse, remove magic or poison, or whatever, please do that for your healer. That mana adds up and its a HUGE help
A good example of what I am talking about is the first boss in H Shadowfang Keep, he has an ability that takes everyone to 1hp and every heal a healer has to throw on a dps is a heal that can’t go on the tank. Simple things like bandaging or using lifeblood if you are an herbalist helps. If your healer is a druid, using a damage mitigation ability so their hots have time to tick helps big time. This simple stuff can be the difference between a win and a wipe.
Now on the flip side all of us healers have to go out and do our homework. I learned in a glorious fashion that my old habits just didn’t work. I went and did some research on tree druiding at 85 and learned some pretty important stuff. My style and spec had to change. This research has not made me epic pally healer, I still think trees were nerfed a bit too much, but I noticed a huge difference in healing. I am more than willing to type up what I found and link it if there is interest. My point is, though, all of us have to go look. There might not be a lot out there but things like Elitist Jerks are helpful. Everyone, no matter the role, has to learn to be level 85.
One last thing to this wall of text and then I will stop. We need to realize right now that this content is new and we are all relearning our classes so we need to not be assholes to one another. Somethings are universal like standing in fire and might deserve a little scorn but somethings are people trying to learn their stuff. Have patience and keep your criticism constructive. Also, and I am guilty of this too, go look up strats.

Okay, okay, I know my last two blogs have been utter crap. I know it. The good news is that I got my druid to 85 last night (I got the main character that I play to the maximum level that can be achieved) so the caffeine fueled insanity will slow down a bit and I can go back to concentrating on crazy stuff like writing and work and eating.   At some point I am going to realize Christmas is coming up, I am excited for that panic to hit me.  Anyway, it is my sincere intent to craft a better quality blog for you today.

I think it is important to understand the four different roles that characters can play in the World of Warcrack. Time for one of my awesome rundowns.

Tanks:

These are the guys that stand in front of the group and get hit by shit.  Their main jobs are to make sure everything keeps hitting them and staying alive. It sounds simple enough but the problem is that they have to play with other people called dps (more on them next) and dps often feel the need to be dipshits and piss off the monsters and make them hit them instead of the tanks.  This means that often tanks have to go chasing after monsters to save someone’s ass.

Now good tanks use spells and abilities to keep themselves alive because they care about not getting yelled at by their healers. Bad tanks don’t use these abilities and die. They generally blame everyone else including God for their own stupidity.

Classes that play tanks: Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Death Knights (generally poorly)

Melee DPS:

These guys hit shit. Basically their job is to stand behind the monsters and stab, beat, bludgeon, or slice them to death. It sounds very simple but there are many many ways to screw this up.  I don’t have much experience with melee since I feel that hitting shit is weird but I can tell from the many fails that melee has caused that this is far more difficult than it seems.

I know that if you don’t know what you are doing you can do too little damage and make everything more difficult on everyone else. I know that if you do too much damage you can make the monster hit you instead of the tank, pissing off both the tank AND the healer.  I know that all melee classes have abilities that make fights easier by interrupting or stunning the monsters and sometimes players don’t use these abilities and piss everyone off.

Since melee stand behind the boss (big bad monster or mob) and stab them in the butt, they are often damaged by attacks the boss casts in the area close to them. These attacks are often announced and completely avoidable. Most of the time melee dps chooses to stand in them anyway. Healers and tanks LOVE this.

Classes that can melee dps: Warrior, Paladins, Druids, Shaman, Rogues, and Death Knights (generally badly)

Ranged Dps:

There are two sub classes of ranged DPS; hunters and casters.

Hunters are different from the other ranged dps because they don’t cast magic, they shoot shit. They have pets and traps that either burn things, freeze things, or release a bunch of snakes. They have an ability that makes them play dead.

The rest of the ranged dps cast magic spells to damage mobs. In theory they are supposed to stand away from the monsters and cast spells so they cause damage without taking much damage in return. This is a great theory that doesn’t often happen.  Casters are some of the worst about stealing monsters off the tanks. Their spells often make either big numbers when they single target or many numbers when they cast spells that hit many targets (aoe or area of effect spells) so sometimes its hard to resist the temptation to keep seeing those numbers.

Ranged DPS classes: Hunters, Mages, Shaman, Warlocks, Druids, and Priests

Healers:

Healers are the players that attempt to keep other players’ health bars full. We call it “fill the green bars.” Healers are the biggest prima donnas in the game. We have a tendency to get bitchier than even the tanks.  There are reasons for this but still we can be cranky assholes.

One thing that makes us cranky is when someone dies and they blame us like when a dps stands in a pool of poison that is also on fire while getting hit by 15 mobs that they pulled because they did not wait for the tank to pick them up and they still think we should heal them through it.

We also have a tendency to develop god complexes. (Tanks have this issue too.) I think its because if we are going to get blamed when everything goes wrong, we think its our fault when things go right too. This is normally only slightly true.  We also play a major part in who lives and who dies. Sometimes I can heal that jackwagon who is standing in the flaming poison but I choose not to because I believe in Darwinism.

Like the other three types, there are bad healers. Bad healers are a terrible terrible thing. Healing takes a while to figure out, so in the beginning of something new they have to figure stuff out just like everyone else.  Its a learning curve. The problem is that some healers learning curve is a straight line.  When you have a bad healer it is just best to drink potions and hope for the best.

Healing Classes: Priests, Paladins, Druids, and Shaman.

We are into the afternoon of day three of the release of the xpac. I had planned to do little but play the WoW and level but, like it normally does, life had other plans.  I have gotten to play a far amount and I have noticed some really awesome stuff. I started leveling in the underwater zone of Vashj’ir. I hate nagas (scaly underwater snake people) and I hate murlocs but I went there anyway. It was freaking epic.

You get on a boat from Stormwind, the human capital city, and start to sail out there with characters like Budd who has been in the game before as a mildly retarded troll hunter. The scenery is stunning and you can really see how much work Blizzard put into recreating Azeroth. Then, suddenly, a kraken, but only one of them. This starts one of the many epic cuts scenes that have been added into this zone. Basically, your character gets mostly drown, saved by a shaman, and hauled into the remains of a boat.  From there you quest around to get things like under water breathing and a seahorse mount.

Vashj’ir is massive and full of quests, though I could not find the 160 I needed for the achievement.  One thing I really liked is how the quests moved you naturally through the zone. In the past, a player had to spend time searching for the next quest hub and it got intensely annoying. In Vashj’ir, for the most part, there were quests that moved you from one hub to another. Sometimes you even got to ride on a submarine.

Another thing I liked is that there are portals to the various far flung parts of the new xpac centrally located in Stormwind. It is a major pain in the ass to travel from one place in east jesus nowhere to another place in west jesus nowhere.  Blizzard decided not to torture the players with that and fixed it for us.

I have liked the instances I have done so far. They are interesting and not overly long. All of the bosses and most of the trash has something unique about them that presents a bit of a challenge. I really like this departure from the old idiot style dungeons that we had in Wrath of the Lich King. Cata is really starting to feel like a return to the ideas of orginal WoW and the Burning Crusade. The only annoying thing is that a player has to physically visit an instance before they can queue for it in the dungeon finder.  It is annoying but I understand why the developers did it because it forces players to atleast visit all the zones while they are leveling.

Another really awesome thing about this xpac is that Blizzard really worked with the phasing concept that they began in the later zones in Wrath.  Phasing is when you complete a quest and the world changes. It was always kind of anti-climatic to do all these quests and have nothing change in the world around you. They really fixed this with Cata. The players can really interact with the world around them.

I will write more later. Back to leveling!

So this morning at 2am Central time Cataclysm is supposed to come live. It is 2:24 am and I have yet to be able to log in. Honestly, I am not surprised. I think between installing an entirely new game and all the technical stuff that required combined with dipshits like me constantly pressing the connect button and overloading the servers that it will be atleast 3 am before I log on to the servers to get to play. I’m really not that concerned. In fact, after I get done writing this post, I will probably check to see if I can log on again and if I can’t log on, I will nap.

I didn’t go nearly as insane as other people with their prep work for the release of the xpac. I think I was actually quite zen about the entire thing. I made me and my boyfriend some flasks (fake things that give your character more power in game, think of it as WoW Viagra) and emptied my bags. Other people went insane.

I know people who made lists and maps and charts. I know people who figured out the best way to get materials to level their professions as high as they could. One of my favorite aspects of the game is professions and I have been freakishly excited because picking flowers and mining gives experience points. Still, I am not going to rush to get my character’s professions maxed out the first night. I will get the stuff I need while I level. See how zen I am!

Now one of my guild’s jokes is my farming abilities. Whenever anyone needs something, especially herbs, they come to me because I am insane. I would hazard to say that since Tina left our server that when I am motivated I am Durotan’s best flower picker. Now I know its a silly thing to be proud of and it is Durotan and saying you are the best of anything on Durotan is kind of like saying you are the smartest person on a short bus, but let me have my one distinction. We all need to be good at something and my think is mindlessly picking digital flowers in a digital world to make digital Viagra.  You really should not judge me.

I had planned on taking a nap from 10pm to 1 am but I watch “Ninja Assassin” instead. I know people who have stocked up on Mountain Dew and caffeine pills and probably black tar heroin. I thought about Mountain Dew but I decided coffee and naps would have to work for me. As much as I like the idea of staying up for three days straight tweaking out and playing Warcraft, I know realistically I am just not that hardcore. I like sleep. I like sleep a lot. I am also reading a really good book. Besides, whats the fun in a game if you are hallucinating while playing it. Okay I do know some people who love to play video games while tripping balls, but I am not one of them. I am also not going to get an ego boost from being one of the first in my guild to get to 85.

This blog is crap. Its 2:46 am on release day. What the frel did you expect? Happy hunting people and I will give you more lucid updates later.

So I got the suggestion to write at least a few of my blogs this month about WoW for people who don’t play WoW. Once upon a time, when Tina only had one child, she and I considered writing a noobs guide to warcraft. We had a few epic coffee fueled working sessions at the Ihop but the idea never fully panned out.  I think it is an idea worth revisiting and I am going to make some starts on it this month. I still want to do the illustrations.

Anyway, my last blog gave the readers an idea of the different lands of World of Warcraft. I think I should explain the different races available for WoW players.

Factions: There are two different “factions” that you have to chose from first, Alliance and Horde.

Alliance are the prettier races. Horde players look at Alliance players much like normal people look at the hardcore Twilight fans. And yes, some alliance races do sparkle.

Alliance Races:

Humans: They are, well, human. They have a racial (a racial is a perk given to each race for being that race) that helps them gain reputation faster than other races. (Rep is your standing with different groups within the game, gaining rep gives you rewards and also acts as an effective time sink and outlet for anal retentive tendencies.) Human males tend to look a bit ridiculous but they can have some awesome mustaches. Human females have huge boobs and tiny butts. I fail to find much remarkable about humans except that human females have a god awful dance. The Macarena should have been left in the last century. Their home city is Stormwind.

Dwarfs: Stoutly built, booze guzzling, treasure hunting residents of Ironforge. They are pretty much like every dwarf character you have ever seen, in other words, epic.  I am very partial to dwarfs because they have so much character and the females have some hips and ass to match their massive boobs. The males dance a Russian like dance and the females River Dance. Dwarfs are the adventurers in the game, always getting in trouble and digging up something new somewhere random. One of their racial traits is treasure finding.

Gnomes: Pint sized packages of awesome. Gnomes are the cute race of the game. They have tiny bodies and huge heads and hands and they look like babies being tossed around when they jump. They are the builders and engineers for the Alliance. They have a racial that allows them to escape from traps and they booty dance. What else could you want? Gnomes used to be refugees in Ironforge since their home city got taken over by crazed robots, irradiated gnomes, and troggs but with the Shattering they started to take back their own home city of Gnomergan.

Draenei: They are the “space goats.” They are the ones that crashed into Azeroth with their ship that became their home city of Exodar. The male draenei dance is one of the most awesome in the game. Youtube it sometime. They have horns and hooves but still manage to look hot. Their racial is an added chance to hit their opponents with their attacks and a heal over time which is only mildly effective.

Night Elves: My least favorite race in the Alliance and the race I am forced to play for now. As of right now, only night elves can be druids. (I will explain classes in a later post.) Night elves are tree dwelling pretty hippies. They make their home in Darnassus. Many lonely teenage boys play night elf females so they have mental images for later in the night. The females have a really slutty dance and the males dance like Micheal Jackson. The males are also pretty with broad shoulders and itty bitty tiny hips. They wear loin cloths for the love of god. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish male night elves from female night elves when they are in robes. Their main racial is that they turn into wisps when they die. Basically, when a night elf dies they turn into a little glowing ball instead of a ghost and move faster back to their bodies. You know your race is lame when your biggest racial trait is anticipating your death.

Worgens: Worgens are a race of werewolves that are coming to the Alliance with the Cataclysm. They are the alliance’s “monster” race. They can also be druids! They have some really cool lore and I haven’t seen their dances yet so lets just say that I will post more on them later in the month.

Horde: This is the faction without all the pretty races. Until the release of the Burning Crusade and the appearance of blood elves they lacked a truly typically aesthetically pleasing class so Horde players generally considered themselves as more serious players and superior to those stupid pretty Alliance player who only play so they can dress up all sparkly. They did have less obnoxious fifteen year old players because of the more monstrous look of the races but then blood elves came out and some of our twits hopped factions to the Horde.  My knowledge of the horde is going to be underwhelming since they are not my main faction.

Orcs: They are big, green, muscular and scary as hell. The race’s lore is central to the game and is pretty freaking cool. Their leader was Thrall who is one of the biggest bad asses in the game. Orgrimmar is their home city that they share with the trolls.  The males are majorly impressive and the females are god awful ugly.

Taurens: These are the cow people of the Horde. Their culture is modeled after nomadic cultures. Their home city is Thunderbluff and they were the more humorous race for the Horde. Both males and females have awkward but epic dances. They aren’t monstrous like the orcs, they just aren’t wet dream material like some of the Alliance races.

Trolls: These are a tall lanky race with tusks and three toes. Their culture is very Caribbean. The males’ dance is based on capoeira which is a martial art form. They share the same lands as the orcs.

Blood Elves: These are the pretty, evil assholes. They were added to the game with the Burning Crusade. Everything about the blood elves is pretty. Silvermoon City is the blood elves home city and it is decorated like a opium den/ whorehouse. The most awesome thing about the blood elves is the male dance. Blizzard gave them the Napoleon Dynamite dance. Also, the game itself makes fun of how pretty the males are. Blizz knew what they were creating and decided to have some fun with it.

Goblins: These guys are coming in Cataclysm. They are short, green, brilliant mayhem makers. They are masters at blowing shit up and making deals. Think of them like explosive toting Ferengi. I have yet to find something that isn’t cool about the goblins.

I would promise a run down of the classes you can play in World of Warcraft on Tuesday but realistically it is the first day of the new xpac and I am pretty sure I will be too dazed to write much. I do promise one eventually though.

Decembers theme is going to be: Cataclysm, the newest expansion to World of Warcraft. It goes live December 7th and so much has happened that I should have plenty to talk about. This month should be a good month to write some blogs. If you read this blog and don’t play WoW, I promise I will try to bring some of my normal humor in explaining the geektastic stuff that goes on in the game so you can enjoy making fun of it as much as I do. A good way to get a good understanding of the game is to watch The Guild. I totally have a girl crush on Felicia Day and it is funny as hell.

Anyway today I am going to break down some common game things that are integral to understand this month’s spew of blogs. I will have these throughout the month I’m sure, and leave a comment if you need me to explain something that I have talked about.

The World of WoW:

Azeroth (the old world):

The original zones that started the game. There are two continents: Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Before Cataclysm these zones stayed predominately the same and everyone has quested the same quests for years. Aside from using major cities for basics like auction houses to sell our fake shit for fake currency to other players, mostly the old world was kind of abandoned.  You would create a character, level 1-58 through the old world as quickly as possible to move on to the next area. Well this changes with this xpac (expansion pack). (This is also known as Azeroth.)

Outlands:

This is the new parts of the world that came with the first xpac: The Burning Crusade (or BC). Blizzard (the company that produces Warcraft) linked the old world to another area through a magic portal. There is some pretty awesome lore involved with the dark portal but I am going to assume that if anyone cared about lore they would know about it. (Unless its a bit of lore I really really like, then I am going to write about it because this is my blog damnit.) This zone got you 58-68. They also added the home lands of the draenei and the blood elves. The draenei basically crashed their ship into Azeroth and took up residence. Think of them like Alf but they don’t eat cats. I don’t know much about the blood elves except they are pretty and evil. They can’t get power from nature like normal elves so they have to kill shit to get power. Like I said, pretty and evil. Never trust pretty people. The addition of the blood elves also brought an influx of fifteen year old boys to the Horde side. They were all on the Alliance side playing other pretty races.

Northrend:

This is the lands added on with Wrath of the Lich King or Wrath or WotLK. Its basically a big frozen island floating way up north that Arthas, the Lich King used to set up shop with his armies of undead and fun plague stuff. Wrath is steeped in awesome lore that I will probably explain at some point, just not today.  This is actually the xpac that got me interested in lore. I had refused to like lore before now because that would somehow make me too big of a geek. I love how well I can delude myself.  Anyway, as of right now Northrend is for leveling from 68-80. I am sure this will change in Cataclysm.

The Shattering:

Okay so in the World of Warcraft they have what they call dragon flights, which is basically just different colors of dragons. Each dragon flight is responsible for separate things about the world and they were supposedly meant to work together to care for Azeroth. Well the leader of the black dragon flight, who later became known as Deathwing, went bug fuck crazy and started tearing shit up. A lot of really dramatic things happen and the other dragon flights are finally able to subdue Deathwing and he goes to the elemental plane. He hangs out quietly for a very long time and people kind of go about their lives. Well, because he is a dragon and evil, he gets some followers to start putting him back together. (Watch the cinematic, I will link it at the end of this.) After he gets all metal plated, he bursts through the elemental plane back onto Azeroth and breaks the entire freaking world.

This is where the World of Warcraft is currently today. Deathwing is back and has broke a ton of shit and changed the world forever in what Blizzard calls the Shattering. This is what I am going to be writing about in depth on Saturday before the release of Cataclysm. Cataclysm goes live on 12:01 am Pacific time December 7th, which means 2 am Tuesday morning Central time I am going to be up geekgasming. Next Monday millions of geeks across the country will be sleeping all day long so they can be up the very second the new xpac comes live. I am not ashamed that I will be one of them!

Cataclysm Cinematic