Peter's Blog

On paternity leave so lots of time to play World of Warcraft. Dwarf Paladin up to 13. Went into IronForge, my first city, which was an experience in itself. There was a bank where you can leave things to make space in your inventory. I went to the auction house and bought myself a mace which is twice as powerful as the hammer I had before. Apparently another player had made it. I found a place where I could buy the skill to use axes but since I didn't have an axe and the axes were expensive I left it. Interesting that I can buy such skills though.

This morning the realm server was down again so I decided to try a different realm as a different type of character. I chose a human mage this time as I wanted to see what ranged attacks were like. It was interesting that it started off in a different area of the land, not the frozen wastes that the dwarf starts from but a leafy meadowy place. It was full of low level people trying to level up quick. One told me how he was missing his character on the other server.

Playing as mage was very easy. He has a flame thrower (literally) which has quite a range. It is easy to lurk on the edge of an enemy village and fire at one baddie. They come running towards you and you can single them out for attack and finish them off. The problem I have with the paladin is that he has to draw individuals out into melee and this can be difficult to do without attracting two or more baddies and getting a good kicking. I'm going to have to see if my paladin can buy any ranged attack skills, even just a throwing axe, something to draw enemies out before bopping them with the big mace.

I got to level four in less than an hour. It was slightly boring it was that easy. I even got an extra pouch to carry six extra objects, something my dwarf could really do with (more carrying capacity means you can loot more and sell more goodies).

Moral: playing as a mage is better than a paladin.

Been taking many photo's with the Nikon D80. It is a very good camera. I've only just had to recharge it since my daughter was born on wednesday morning, five days of intensive photography, mostly flash, maybe two hundred photos. Twice as many daughters to take photos of!

What makes it so good is the speed that you can frame a photo with the zoom and take the photo. It focuses in low-light situations where my old canon would have given up. I don't think the Canon could have caught this:

Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/pinkblob

Spent some time going through my spell book. This revealed a number of things:

Dwarves have a +5 gun specialisation which is good unless you are a dwarf paladin who can't use guns. A waste of a racial specialisation. For a while I was confused about why I have this in the spell book but cannot use guns and I think this explains it. There is no sign that my paladin can buy extra training for ranged weapons (guns, axes, spells etc).

To use skills like cooking, mining, smelting, fishing, engineering you have to open your spell book and click on the skill! Must have missed this in skimming the manual but it makes a BIG difference. Discovered I had the skill to make dynamite! All the rock I have been mining and selling can be made into dynamite which is a ranged weapon! I've spent some time doing mining and engineering and have a nice supply of dynamite and copper bombs. This looks like a whole new aspect of the game, gathering materials, making powerful weapons and either using them of auctioning them. Instead of questing/fighting you can set up a business making and selling goodies.

I also made myself some shot thinking I could sell it but for some reason it cannot be sold and I cannot use it as I can't use guns. Maybe I can auction it or create another character and pass it on. Left it in my bank vault pending inspiration. Update: it can be auctioned. It is not a big seller like guns which you can sell as many as you make but it can be offloaded.

World of Warcraft is definitely addictive and time consuming.

Servers down for maintenance all day and now cannot play, stuck on 'Retrieving Character List'. Argh, withdrawl pains. What else is there to do???

The most recent quests I have been on have been of the 'get twelve lots of rats ears' variety. So I go off killing rats and only about one in five them appear to have ears, and then only one ear at that??? Means I have to kill sixty of the things to complete the quest which is getting pretty tedious.

My plan for using copper bombs to draw out individuals for slaughter works when I get tired of waiting for them to appear on the periphery. At these higher levels there seem to be fewer people around willing to do group raids: maybe at level 14 the players are thinning out?

Had my first flight on a griffin: much better than walking, the lands are huge and there is a lot of too-and-fro to IronForge and back.

Just hope the quests get more interesting.

Enhanced my engineering skill in World of Warcraft enough to make a boomstick, some kind of gun. My character cannot use guns so decided to auction it. Sold it for five silver coins, a profit of about three after buying some of the parts needed. This encouraged me to make a couple more along with some gun sights. Also auctioning some copper bombs and bits and pieces I have found but cannot use. I've already sold another gun. I've never sold anything on ebay, it's good playing virtual entrepreneur, it will either prove my feeling that I am not a natural salesman or persuade me that if I put my old junk on ebay I have little to lose. Update: bombs don't sell well in auctions. Only engineers can use them and since they can make them themselves they don't need to buy them.

For what it's worth, I would imagine the miner/engineer trades I chose would be a better match for a class that can fire guns (hunter?). Miner/blacksmith would be better for paladin as I could make big hammers and maces AND use them.

I would be playing it now only I haven't installed the latest 600M (mandatory) patch on my laptop and I haven't been spending enough time in the same room as my other half.

I can easily do two or three two hour WoW sessions a day. Because there are so many different aspects to the game (questing, exploring, trading, grinding) and because it is basically free form (wander about, if something proves too hard then do something else) it takes much longer to get bored than other games I have played.

Ongoing World of Warcraft notes/tips:

• I'm making nice profits from making and selling guns. Some other things such as sniper scopes don't sell well, maybe because people don't really look for them.
• To use the engineering skill to make more sophisticated/lethal/profitable items you need to gain engineering experience. I find I have to keep buying training for new items and making them just for the experience: if you keep making the same easy items your experience stops going up. I make them and then either sell them or keep them in the bank in case they are useful later (just what is a copper modulator?).
• Can't wait to make an exploding mechanical sheep!!!
• I made two dummy targets. I think these are a kind of decoy to drop when you are running away from a group of monsters. I haven't tried them out yet, they are not that easy to build and I don't want to waste them.
• don't speed read. Spent an hour killing birds for flight feathers before realising I was supposed to be getting light leather.
• by all accounts, skinning is quite a lucrative profession. It is easy to find dead animals to skin (or make your own dead animals, just take a living one and kill it) and the leather is in demand for bags (which are expensive to buy) as well as guns and goggles. It is hard to find leather for sale anywhere except auctions (where it is quite expensive) and a stall at the darkwind faire (where it was cheap but the darkwind faire disappeared the next day).
• When selling through auction, enter a buy-out price. Most of my stuff is sold for the buy-out price. Maybe I price them too low but I still make a profit and I do sell them. In fact, often the same person will buy more than one of my rough boomsticks so maybe there is some profiteering going on. I don't care much, as long as I am not left with unsold stuff which I have to offload at a loss.I have a feeling that WoW purchasers like to get things instantly and no buy-out price is a disincentive.
• When buying through auction, it doesn't hurt to make a bid. You may save compared to the buy-out price, especially if the auction doesn't have much longer to run. I got myself a nice two-handed axe this way. Better still, do your bidding at off-peak times. Incidently, I sold the two-handed mace I bought a while back for about what I bought it for. It served me well. It wasn't soul-bound so I was able to sell it, soul-bound is bad.
• I like the way you cannot tell precisely when an auction will end. No chance of being outbid by one copper in the last second.
• use the alt key to cast a spell on yourself without having to click on your character to select it as the target.
• use left click with shift if you have a pile of, say, 20 copper bars and want to put just 10 in the bank. Same to buy more than one item from a vendor.
• read the tips that appear on the loading screen. The tips in WoW are generally useful and don't state the obvious.
• you can only have one blessing (I think it is) at a time. Be warned before buying extra blessings. I had a rank 2 blessing that improved my armour but still bought a rank 1 blessing that deals 5 damage every time I get hit. I think I should have saved my money and concentrated on the armour blessing. I'm not sure of the advantage of extra armour compared to extra damage dealt when hit. Fighting is a matter your own health lasting longer than your enemies. You having better armour means he does you less damage. Him being hurt when he hits you means that you take relatively less damage compared to him. I think this applies to however many baddies are attacking you and whether mele or ranged attacks. At the end of the day, I'd rather not be taking any damage: it takes you closer to zero and even if you don't die you are left vulnerable.
• Some of the baddies are attractive looking females and it is weird killing them with a big axe (I'm not a misogynist psycho).
• went to stormwind city. Very detailed but gave me motion sickness unlike anywhere else in the game. Outside stormwind was a noobie area with low level monsters. Could take out three at once with no probs.
• flying on griffins is cool. Can still look around and see yourself from below/ahead. The sun glints from my axe (which just happens to be the title of my new album). Fly over weird unexplored areas full of unimaginably difficult (level ???) beasties.

Interesting tip: setting this in the registry

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks = 1

causes Windows 2000 and later to automatically kill any tasks that haven't shut down after 30 seconds. No more getting into work in the morning to find your pc has been on all night because some stupid app refused to die.

Remember to save those vital Word documents.

Since I have been doing predominantly cameo photos with my Nikon D80 DSLR and I intend to do proper posed family portraits with it I decided I would like a decent flash gun to get better lighting. The built in flash is ok but typically the background of the subject is dark and the subject itself looks flat. The solution would be a flash gun, something that could bounce more powerful flash off the walls/ceiling for nice diffuse lighting.

I decided upon the Nikon SB600 SpeedLight since it would work best with the Nikon camera. Amongst it's many features are the following that are useful to me:

• The flash can be fully automatic and controlled by the camera using Nikons iTTL system.
• The flash can be rotated through 270 degrees and tilted through 90. You can put it on the camera, aim the camera down at sleeping baby and bounce the flash off the ceiling above you.
• It comes with a little stand so you can also set it up remotely. The camera's built in flash the provides direct lighting and the remote flash provides fill-in light.

Here is a photo using the built-in flash:

cute baby but flat. Mum is wearing a dark brown top.

Here is a photo using the SB600:

Is it the same baby? This one is three dimensional, she has a furrowed brow. The flash was mounted on the camera and bounced off the ceiling.

I got a good deal on the flash from Clifton Cameras for £175 (Jessops = £217.99). This price included the flash and these free goodies:

• a Nikon lens cleaning brush
• a wireless remote control for when I have to include myself in family portraits
• a CD on how to use my Nikon D70 which might help me with my D80
• a diffuser: expands to about a foot diameter, shiny one side, white the other. I'll have to figure out what to do with this e.g. how to hold it while taking photos.

The flash is quite big, and taking four aa batteries makes it heavy. Mounted on top of the camera it feels a bit fragile as if it would be too easy to snap it off. Also makes the camera top heavy. The whole setup seems rather delicate.

Using the P mode on the camera (semi automatic), when you take a snap the flash does a series of pre-flashes to test the lighting before taking the photo proper. The whole thing takes a couple of seconds which is annoying if the subject moves (the main reason I got the D80 was to be able to catch fast moving toddlers). In fully auto mode it doesn't do this for some reason. There is also a flash lock facility so I may be able to take one photo, lock the flash settings and take subsequent photo's instantly.

More examples:

Progressing in World of Warcraft, got to level 19, only 41 more levels to go. I've acrued over four gold so far and I can't find anything (weapons/armour) that are worth spending it on: I have pretty good weapons and armour for my level (it can deal with level 21 monsters). I made most of the money making guns (about ten deadly blunderbuses sold for 35 silver, over 30 profit each) after gathering copper in questing/grinding sessions.

Most of the quests I get involved in now I have to do alone as other people have other agendas. I have found that the best strategy is to search around the world for quests against baddies that are three or four levels below me. Against these I can take overt action (think Arnie in 'Commando'), fighting two or three at a time. I got tired of my former tactic of picking off individuals on the outskirts of a camp geurilla style: takes hours. I still accrue experience from killing monsters five levels below so I still earn the chance to level up. I could spend my time doing easy quests against vastly inferior monsters, I'd still get some experience from completing the quest but it would take much longer to level up and there are a finite number of quests to do.

Went in this morning to find the WoW version of Father Christmas. I did a little quest to get him five ginger bread biscuits and he gave me four bolts of cloth. Whoopee. All the gnomes have little father christmas outfits on and are riding around on reindeer. IronForge has christmas trees and decorations everywhere. Very festive.

More World of Warcraft:

I've been on a couple more raids. These have followed this pattern:

• I get an invitation to join a group. I accept. There are three or four others already in the group.
• Follow fellow raiders to some mine/castle I haven't been to before.
• Any enemy we come across is attacked by all members of the group. We are like army ants overpowering anything in their path. They don't stand a chance.
• progress through mine/castle overpowering enemies with our numbers.
• come across more powerful enemies. One or two raiders die in intense melee and rest are soon overpowered by enemies
• everone dies
• everyone runs back to bodies to ressurect, each is overpowered and dies
• repeat two or three more times
• people give up and leave the group
• I am left alone, trying to resurrect my body and get it back to safety

There isn't much talk, planning, strategy or loyalty. One raider left the group with a comment lamenting about f@£!ing noobs and I have to agree. It reminds me of football at primary school level where the kids follow the ball around like a little comet twisting around the pitch because nobody has told them about 4-4-2.

As paladin, my job is really to lurk at the back healing the warriors. I will try to do this more, less tanking more healing.

I did have one session with just one other bloke where we had much more success, we didn't get carried away running in gung-ho, blitzkreig style. We still had to give up but we parted on good terms.