Peter's Blog

Maezyn

Maezyn went out to tame a plague swine for some next rank gore and charge and somehow ended up in Winterspring taming Rak'shiri:

Maez and Blue

Fate drew me to Winterspring as I fancied taming a good looking cat and Rak'shiri happened to be there. I didn't really want to tame a level 57 and have to level it up to 60 but he was so good looking that I couldn't just kill him.

Back to questing in Hellfire and by the time Maezyn was half way to level 61 Blue, as I renamed him, had dinged 60! He was on the olf Azeroth experience quotas and not Maez' hellfire quotas so it wasn't so bad.

He came with Dash 3 and I had to tame a Winterspring Owl to get claw and he still doesn't have bite but he looks good.

I resolved my issues with Ubuntu hardy heron. Extensive googling revealed I was pretty much alone in my misery so I fixed it the Windows way, with a clean install. To be more accurate, I installed Xubuntu rather than Ubuntu and I'm glad I did. The difference is that I am using xfce rather than gnome and so I'm missing a lot of gee whiz features but, oddly enough, I've never found anything extra in gnome that I can't live without. Gnome development seems to be going in the direction of dumbing it down to make Windows converts feel at ease and all the brilliant new features of gnome are cunningly hidden in case Windows folk turn them on by mistake and their brains explode from the amazement and confusion.

I reinstalled as follows:

• backed up my xorg.conf in case I broke my carefully crafted X setup.
• backed up assorted irreplacable stuff in my home directory. How nice it is having a home directory, one place to store all my files.
• downloaded and blew xubuntu install cd
• swapped my primary and secondary monitor leads as I am sooo sick of my small secondary monitor being considered the primary monitor (despite my protests).
• booted cd
• selected install option
• cd booted and gaved me a totally orange desktop
• rebooted cd and pressed f4 for safe graphics mode
• ran install, carefully overwriting my old linux setup
• install complete.
• make sure the nvidia restricted (urgh nasty closed source) driver is installed.
• Most importantly, run

  sudo aptitude install nvidia-settings
  nvidia-settings
  

  to set up the multi-monitor. I've learn from my last install not to touch the main display control panel.

Um, that's it. It was easy and took maybe 30 minutes (which didn't include downloading the cd image).

Xubutu has a great advantage over ubuntu: a crisp blue theme instead of that brown!

One problem I am having with all the (x)ubuntu work: I have to type my password about 300 times a day, both for ssh and sudo and it is driving me MAD.

I resolved my issues with Ubuntu hardy heron. Extensive googling revealed I was pretty much alone in my misery so I fixed it the Windows way, with a clean install. To be more accurate, I installed Xubuntu rather than Ubuntu and I'm glad I did. The difference is that I am using xfce rather than gnome and so I'm missing a lot of gee whiz features but, oddly enough, I've never found anything extra in gnome that I can't live without. Gnome development seems to be going in the direction of dumbing it down to make Windows converts feel at ease and all the brilliant new features of gnome are cunningly hidden in case Windows folk turn them on by mistake and their brains explode from the amazement and confusion.

I reinstalled as follows:

• backed up my xorg.conf in case I broke my carefully crafted X setup.
• backed up assorted irreplacable stuff in my home directory. How nice it is having a home directory, one place to store all my files.
• downloaded and blew xubuntu install cd
• swapped my primary and secondary monitor leads as I am sooo sick of my small secondary monitor being considered the primary monitor (despite my protests).
• booted cd
• selected install option
• cd booted and gaved me a totally orange desktop
• rebooted cd and pressed f4 for safe graphics mode
• ran install, carefully overwriting my old linux setup
• install complete.
• make sure the nvidia restricted (urgh nasty closed source) driver is installed.
• Most importantly, run

  sudo aptitude install nvidia-settings
  nvidia-settings
  

  to set up the multi-monitor. I've learn from my last install not to touch the main display control panel.

Um, that's it. It was easy and took maybe 30 minutes (which didn't include downloading the cd image).

Xubutu has a great advantage over ubuntu: a crisp blue theme instead of that brown!

One problem I am having with all the (x)ubuntu work: I have to type my password about 300 times a day, both for ssh and sudo and it is driving me MAD.

I upgraded my home desktop to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) as soon as it came out last week. I used the feature in the Upgrade Manager which told me the new version was available so doing the actual upgrade was fairly idiot proof.

Since then Firefox (version 3 beta) has been broken, the menu's don't work, I click on them and nothing happens, as if they were disabled. Also the user interface locks up after five to ten minutes of doing anything. When it happens again the menu's die, the mouse moves about and some of the panel widgets work but essentially it is useless. Ctrl-alt-backspace fortunately works so I can reboot the desktop and start again.

World of Warcraft is the only thing that works for any period of time ( ). Apart from that the system is useless and I've had to use Windows.

I've googled and found other people complaining about 8.04 but they appear to have kernel lockups which would be much more dire.

It's a pity as I had been enjoying using a linux desktop. The only thing that didn't work before was my printer and I hadn't put any effort into fixing that.

I had already upgraded my Mythical Convergence Box to Xubuntu 8.04 which is Ubuntu with a lean mean xfce user interface rather than gnome. Xfce gives a passable Windowsy level of functionality. That box is running just fine and now reacts to the Hauppauge Remote Control. Unfortunately 8.04 has a newer version of mythtv so if I rolled my desktop back to the previous version (gutsy gibbbon) I wouldn't be able to use a gutsy mythtv frontend with the hardy backend and I don't want to roll the myth box back.

When gnome is working on Hardy it has changed it's behaviour somewhat. The application menu works in a contrary way such that the menu is only there while your mouse button is down so you press your mouse down to open it, find your menu item while holding the button down and then release to activate. I can see that this needs just a mouse down and up rather than two clicks but it's annoyingly different, especially as I can't find a way to turn it off.

Gnome also has interesting behaviour when moving windows around in that it tries to guess where you are dragging it to and how big the window will be. I can drag a maximised app from one screen to another and even though the screens are different sizes I get the result I want. I think this may actually be useful once I learn to predict what it is going to do.

Conclusion: I wish I'd waited for 8.0.5 I may go back to gutsy on the desktop and live without the myth frontend for a while. I don't want to go back to windows.

Maesyn

Maesyn did some Redridge Mountains and Wetlands and rose three levels to 25. Cat form is fun. The Ravage ability is kinda useful, prowl up behind something and stab between shoulderblades for a bit of damage and a combo point, it does mean one is a bit quicker to having enough points for a decent combo move. However, the prowling means I have to slow from +30% move speed to something roughly equal to normal move speed and that slows things down, and it's annoying when trying to get behind someone that's pacing too and fro.

The Rake bleed DoT is nice and possibly a better opening move.

Pookypoo

Pook was scheduled to do more in the Bone Wastes of Terokkar but I had found that boring with Maevyn so I sent pook to Blade's Edge Mountains where he did some of the last stuff that Maevyn did. He did a good quest to go into a bird camp and up a tree to read a book, very challenging but fun. I like fighting bird men, or any humanoids for that matter because I can use the 'Repentance' retribution stun talent, giving him two stuns a minute or one per fight. I like to finish fights with a stun/judge seal of command/crusader strike combo if possible.

Other than that his fighting has come down to spamming Judgements of Commands whenever the cooldown is up. He has talents to make this mana efficient, it kills a level 66 in two or three judgements and he has to drink every three fights or so. The fights aren't the long autoattack protection affairs and I'm learning to live with the mana breaks. Moral: if in doubt take a mana break. Half health+mana = add in the next fight

Pook is a third of the way to level 66.

Maexyn

Maexyn is becoming the most formidable character. I found that in the late thirties she can start a fight with an equal level mob, DoT it up and leave it fighting the voidwalker, then she can deliberately DoT up a distant bystander mob and drain tank it. Two monsters just for fun. Unfortunately it is also taxing on her health/mana and she cannot sustain it without drinking but she is certainly in the beastmaster realms of dealing with multiple opponents.

I found that the 'Grim Reach' talent for increased range can be used to pull casters at least six yards which can help avoid big fights (e.g. troll camps in STV). DoT a caster at maximum range and it will run to you to get into it's own casting range. Voidwalker on passive helps avoid a fracas too.

She is now level 40 and has the 'Dark Pact' talent which means she can sip on her pet's mana, should she feel the need. This is very nice and I see long grinding sessions ahead. She can use the voidwalker's mana and I'm not sure what problem that causes the voidwalker? I still haven't tried the imp which I think can regenerate mana quickly but I'm not sure if this would make up for the beating maex would get without having a voidwalker about. I'd rather use Maexyn's life for converting into mana than have it beaten out of her.

She got the Felsteed training and hence very cheap riding training and immediately bought a Blue Mechanostrider:

Maex at 40

The felsteed seems tall and sleek with a gnome on it, I like the fiery hooves but it's too elegant for her style: it would suit Maezyn more. I might set up a castsequence macro to toggle between felsteed and mechanostrider. Her epic will definitely be a mechanostrider.

Maevyn

The price of Earthstorm Diamonds has gone up. For the cost of three transmute cooldowns and about 20g of materials Maevyn can make a diamond and sell it for 130g. That's a good 30g a day for a transmute, about 10g more per day than selling primal waters (which are ingredients in the diamonds).

Maexyn

It was Maexyn's turn for a push so she spent level 36 doing the second tier quests in Stranglethorn, then spent level 37 in the Alterac Mountains. The ruins of Alterac were soloable as the ogres in the town are no longer elite. They were levels 38-39 but no problem.

I had some excitement when she was attacked by a level 39 elite ogre. She drained life while the voidwalker tanked, then as the voidwalker was about to die she sacrificed it and continued draining from within the voidwalker bubble. She did it, she killed it and it wasn't all that close: she didn't need pots or healthstone. I don't know if it was a nerfed elite ogre but it was tougher than the non-elites. It is Maexyn's first notable elite kill and it didn't even take that long, about a minute (two lots of DoT's).

I realised that Maexyn is coming into her own. She can handle pairs of mobs easily now, DoT up the first then DoT and drain the second and the first is normally dead before the second. While she was waiting for a quest target mob to respawn she did laps of his house grinding on level 39-40 syndicate guys. When the guy appeared he was level 40 and went down no probs.

I used the voidwalker for this grinding. The slightly increased speed in killing things with the Succubus doesn't make up for the hammering Maexyn gets and I always get into health/mana management difficulties. Grinding with the voidwalker, she can go for hours without needing refreshments. She was achieving hunter-like ruthlessness, maybe better: it was the voidwalkers health that was dropping after a few fights, not Maexyn's. The felhunter has it's spell lock now and it works perfectly against healers. I still haven't tried the imp, maybe at level 40 when she can tap it's mana.

At level 38 she went to Stormwind and got a lot of useful next ranks to her core grinding skills (drain life/drain soul) so she will be even more ruthless, or use a lot more mana, time will tell.

Photo Album

Now I have a half decent picture facility I can show some pictures (remember to click on them). These are the Eonar crowd, i.e. my active characters:

Pook at 65

Maev and Blink

Maex at 36

Maes at 22

Maez at 60

60?

Yes, Maezyn stormed two levels of Hellfire in half a day. Rest Bonus ftw. Now she has her Epic Elekk and is finally hearthed in Shattrath. Now she has some Outlands gear she's going back to Azeroth for Eastern Plaguelands and Silithus although she needs 400,000 experience for level 61 compared to 170,000 for 60 so it will take a while.

I was a bit bothered that Maezyn's non-beastmastery would make her struggle more than Maevyn did but no, she rocked the demons. Silencing Shot is a very useful thing.

Plans

From now on my character rotation will be something like:

• run pook for a couple of hours, till a natural milestone occurs
• run maex for a level or so
• run Maezyn for a couple of hours
• run Maesyn for a level or so

avoiding rest bonus unless it's for a special project. I don't want to play pook and meaz for a whole Outlands level at a time, I would prefer to run a different character each day I play.

Up till now to put pictures in this blog I have had to:

• go into an image editor to resize the file to suit the blog (about 450-500 pixels wide).
• fire up an sftp program to upload the file to /var/www/PetersBlogger/public/images
• add a tag such as

  [/images/TheNewPicture.jpg]
  

  to the wilki.

It was a bit laborious, especially the SFTP bit which is why I didn't do it very often.

I've now added better support for pictures to PetersBlogger. Here is an example:

Girls Aloud

if you click on this you should be treated to a larger version of the image, thanks to lightbox a javascript library.

PetersBlogger now supports a database of pictures so I can add a new picture, give it a name and upload it through the administration pages. The code uses the name as a caption under the photo and as alt text. I can use the name directly in my wilki text to choose which pictures to display.

The database of pictures is handled by the attachmentfu rails plugin. This article gives the steps required to get attachmentfu up and running.

The setup automatically handles resizing images to three sizes: thumbnail for listing in my picture admin page, a version that is no more than 500 pixels in either dimension for showing in the blog and a version that is no more than 800x600 for showing zoomed when you click on a picture. Attachmentfu has the sense to keep the aspect ratio correct automatically so I don't have to worry about portrait/landscape. I had to hack the imagescience library that does the resizing as it was hard-wired to save jpegs using JPEG_QUALITYSUPERB mode so the blog-sized images were taking up 150k. I changed this to JPEG_QUALITYAVERAGE and the size dropped to 15k or so, but it was a bit noisy so I've settled on JPEG_QUALITYGOOD and 38k images. You are on broadband?

I was slightly worried about how to change pictures, i.e. to upload a different version of a picture to replace an existing one, since the attachmentfu article I mentioned does not cover this. The answer is to use the exact same view code in the 'edit' page as in the 'new' page. Combined with rails scaffold code it Just Works! It even handles deleting the three old pictures and creating the new files.

My main motivation for doing this was so I can do it on the websites I host for other people and make it easier for them to upload pictures. PetersCMS is still in the planning stages but one problem has been cracked.

Pookypoo

I set about my plan. t took a lot more than two hours and pook goes through water, food and pots like a mad thing but pook is 65 and has the Skyforged Great Axe:

and the blooming model clips on his cape Still its a lovely looking thing. I ran him to Nagrand to try grinding the motes of air for it himself but the whirlwind things were level 66 and much too tough so he just quested in Terokkar and Maevyn bought six primal airs for a ripoff price but after all this time blacksmithing has come up with something worthwhile.

It's a BoP so Maexyn couldn't put a glow on it

I've respecced him again. The retribution spec I had him on before was a boilerplate on from wowwiki, I've tweeked it to my taste, e.g. Spiritual Focus (less chance of healing interruption) rather than Improved Seal of Righteousness (Seal of Command ftw) and no points in Improved Blessing of Might since I have Blessing of Wisdom up most of the time.

He fell off the Aldor lift but I had the presence of mind to bubble and he lived! Pally reflexes are coming back.

Maexyn

I threw caution to the wind and blew Maexyn's silk stocks on a tailoring levelling splurge and got it up to 180. I had been saving the silk for first aid and I'm still not sure that was the right decision. She still can't make anything useful for herself apart from disenchanting materials.

I also found some economical enchants and was able to get her enchanting up to a respectable 230 (no uldaman trips ). The best enchant I found was the minor speed boost on boots. According to thottbot it is only an 8% speed boost but I found it to be noticable, it took the edge of the sluggish 'run' speed.

I ran her around the swamp of sorrows for a bit. The mobs there are now 35-37 and she struggled a bit, needing lots of health/mana breaks. I decided it was because I had been neglecting demon training so I took her back to Stormwind and got all available training on all four pets (imp/voidwalker/succubus/fel hunter). There was lots there, including a new rank of lash-of-pain for the Succubus.

I then decided to take her to upper Stranglethorn Vale as I thought it would be a lot easier and it definitely was, she was ruthless. She got into a full-on farming groove and was pretty efficient at it too. When the mobs are higher level they need two or three drain lifes to kill them and this eats into the mana reserves. Lower level mobs need as little as one drain life before shifting to drain soul and this can be sustained for many kills.

I read a tip about always using lowest rank drain soul simply to exploit the mana it gives back on death but I found that if the DoT's run out this can mean that the mob takes a ridiculously long time to die, especially if it is a runner. I switched back to rank 2 drain soul and this didn't hurt efficiency as I didn't need to spend mana on a debilitating final drain life that I'd interrupt with a drain soul, I could use just the drain soul to take it out.

I used the Fel Hunter a bit against the STV Medicine men as it is supposed to be good against casters. However, it didn't have it's spell interrupting talent, only a buff eating talent so it wasn't great. I'm not sure if the buff eating talent did anything, the new patch 2.4 combat log generates a ridiculous amount of information and I couldn't find it mentioned amongst all the noise (apparently it is only there to announce to the world that a nearby hunter has laid a trap). The Fel Hunter was ok but against these mobs it didn't really matter which demon I used. I still haven't tried the Imp, someone left a comment here about using the imp as a mana tank but Maex doesn't get the spell for grabbing the Demon's mana till level 40.

She dinged 36 so I trained everything, including demons, and also gave her a respec. I moved her points out of Nightfall, since I never used it, and put then into a more powerful Curse of Agony which is a mainstay. She rarely uses shadowbolt, affliction ftw.

Maesyn

Maesyn tackled Wetlands, simple gnoll-killing quests. She tackled it in Caster/Cat/Bear form, mainly pulling gnolls from the camps as caster, then killing them as cat. Those camps are a bit volatile so she trod carefully. I'm still a bit disappointed by the Bear's tanking capabilities, it struggles with two mobs. I've put heal buttons on the Bears action bars and they work nicely, they automatically switch it to caster. I have the same three heal buttons on the Caster, Bear and Cat action bars.

Maesyn dinged 22 and got the Cat's backstab ability, she can prowl up behind something and open a fight with a 220% damage hit. Sounds like fun. Got feral charge fot the bear too but haven't tried it yet. I don't know if charging, changing to cat and then backstabbing is viable, whether the cat has enough energy after a switch. Must give that one a go.

Pookypoo

Since I respecced him retribution a week or two ago I haven't run pooky but since none of the girls had 100% rest bonus I decided to take him for a spin as I was curious to see whether recent patches had made him viable. Back to Terokkar forest and my paladin skills were very rusty, I had even forgotten about the bubble.

He needed mana breaks every three fights which was still very annoying. However, once I got used to him again, the fights didn't take an unbearably long time. His attack vector evolved into:

• Judgement of crusader
• Seal of Command
• Spam Crusader Strike

The Crusader Strikes were ok, although they often seemed to miss, especially when they would have ended a fight. They usefully kept the Judgement of Crusader active so I didn't have to worry about refreshing it all the time.

Once the mobs were down to 30-40% health I found a very nice combo to take them out:

• Stun
• Judgement of Crusader
• Crusader Strike
• Hammer of Wrath

This was normally curtains, especially if Hammer of Wrath critted for 1500 (Maezyn was getting 1400 Aimed Shot crits at level 53 so I'm not impressed). If it wasn't curtains the mob had so little health that I only had to wait 3.5 seconds for the next two-handed swing, although that did seem like an eternity.

I'm going to have to try some mana-efficiency with him:

• run with Blessing of Wisdom rather than Blessing of Might.
• make up for BoM with buff foods, (cooked by Maevyn: why level more than one cooking alt?).
• after a fight use bandages to heal: faster than eating and uses no mana.

I bought Pook some new boots and got Maexyn to enchant them with the minor speed boost. Again it made a not-totally-negigible difference, running around is 8% less tedious.

Pooky is 2.5 hours from level 65 and I'm going to go for it. Here's my latest project:

• buy him a two-handed axe and get the skill up to optimum (about 20 ticks)
• drop his crappy armoursmith specialisation (that cost me two hundred bars of thorium grrr) and take up Master Axesmith (which will cost 50g but it's 100g from level 66).
• farm Motes of Air in Nagrand until I scream.
• buy Primal Air's in Auction House
• get him to level 65.
• make him a Skyforged Great Axe for about 10% more dps and a healthy chunk of crit and attack power. Follow the link and look at that thing, it's a must have.

I found a site that uses the armory and the WoW models to generate pictures of your characters. This, should it work, is how pooky is looking:

He got a plate lupine helm in a quest, it has lots of crit but is the most stupid looking thing because it doesn't cover his beard. This picture should update as he gears up, so keep looking for the Skyforged Axe to appear! The model for Maezyn has her horns all wrong but I guess its primary purpose is for posing with your epix.

Conclusion

Four characters and I love them all. I won't be able to get them all to 70 before the level cap is raised to 80. Will I ever get them all to the cap? Five level 80's! How to pay for five epic fliers? Can I do it? Stay tuned...