Peter's Blog

In Search of a Heavy Hide

Spent nearly 2/3 of level 30 killing raptors in Arathi in order to gather the leather for a pair of Barbaric Bracers, a blue albeit mediocre. These would give Maezyn a completly barbaric look worthy of a screenshoot.

She did loops around refuge point killing the level 30-31 raptors quite easily in order to gather more leather and in the hope that a 'Heavy Hide' would drop to make the bracers. Occasionally she would run into level 33-34 spiders or tougher raptors and here I got into the habit of not Serpent Stinging them in order to give me the option of Scattershotting if Beefy lost agro, which he did on these higher level mobs. I could have scorpid stung these to reduce the damage to Beefy but I think the mana is better spent on Mend Pet. Now and then I ran into level 38's which I ran away from with all speed. Fighting one of these is a kiting exercise, there is no way Maezyn could keep agro off her. I didn't try any more kiting and I really should, if only to drag them into refuge point to see the NPCs do something.

She dinged 31 and put the talent point into Improved Stings.

Still needing a Heavy Hide, I went back to Southshore and back to the Yeti cave but there were no yeti there, not even dead ones: another skinner was at work. Decided to warp back to Darkshire and try Stranglethorn. Killed tigers and panthers and the first crocolisk I killed dropped a Heavy Hide. I had all I needed to make the bracers.. except salt to cure the Heavy Hides. There are no tradesmen in northern STV that sell salt so it's another long trip just to make the bracers.

I find that I am enjoying just grinding for experience and leather, quests are not such a priority and farming for the mats to make something nice is a useful motivator. Level 30 seemed to go past very quickly and I only did one quest. The thirties are to me the most tedious levels as the experience demands start to bite and there is a lot of running around to do with no mount (nine levels to go to the Elekk!!!).

Emailing Alts

I've done a couple of things to speed up the process of emailing alts:

• I finally discovered that by adding my alt's names to the friends lists I don't have to type out their full names every time, the names will autocomplete. It doesn't help having three alts with names that start with 'mae' though.
• Installed ct_mailmod. This adds a couple of features, most notably for me the ability to send a few items to an alt in one go. It doesn't work happily with tbags as items moved to the mail slots are still shown in the bag with no indication that they are in transit so one has to be careful when sending eight identical pairs bracers for disenchanting. The mail mod sends each item in a separate mail, slightly sluggishly, but it saves you having to type the target name out each time.

I mentioned last week how I'd signed up for one of the site5 750g hosting packages and also enquired whether my company could use a similar account for remote backup. Since the latter made me aware of the limitations of the 750g account I decided to cancel my personal account under their 60 day guarantee.

They didn't quibble, they asked me to confirm that I had nothing that needed backing up and cancelled the account, refunding my money.

In all the times I've had to deal with them site5 has always given me great service.

Since I have been enjoying using Aptana for Rails development I dicided I wanted to try it's mother project Eclipse for some embedded C work. I downloaded Eclipse as a huge zip file which I unzipped in a directory called c:\eclipse since Vista wouldn't let me put it in c:\Program Files.

I couldn't find any easy installation instructions so I tried running the executable c:\eclipse\eclipse.exe and was told it couldn't find the file c:\eclipse\jre\bin\javaw.exe. I poked around and found a java runtime environment in my aptana install, again in a jre subdirectory. I thought about copying this to the eclipse subdirectory but was shocked to see that it is 80M! A profligate waste of disk space if ever I saw one.

Instead of copying I decided to exploit a new Vista feature: junctions. These are roughly equivalent to unix symbolic links although they aren't exactly the same as Windows has to do everything differently.

I wanted an easy way to create junctions so I downloaded this command line tool from those corporate sellouts at sysinternals. Like all the other sysinternals tools I have used, this was incredibly simple and Just Worked.

C:\eclipse>junction jre "\Program Files\Aptana\Aptana IDE Beta\jre"

Junction v1.05 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com

Created: C:\eclipse\jre
Targetted at: C:\Program Files\Aptana\Aptana IDE Beta\jre

C:\eclipse>

This created a junction called jre in the eclipse directory that pointed to the jre directory in the aptana directory. I tried the eclipse.exe file again and now I was up and running: with the junction eclipse thinks it has it's own copy of the java runtimes to play with but in reality it is using the Aptana copy.

Running a Lot

Was in Darkshire and decided I felt like doing the long run down to Booty Bay, mainly to get it out of the way. It's a long run and running isn't my favourite part of the game. Once in Booty Bay I decided to get more running out of the way so I took the boat to Ratchet, ran through the Barrens to the flight point at the top of Thousand Needles, then down to Gadgetzan. These are two of the worst runs in the game without a mount out of the way. Once the flight point at gadget was clocked I went back to Simmering Flats to do all the quests there. It was a good grind, monsters in the range 30-35 and I got a good rhythm up.

I learnt not to Serpent Sting the orange and red mobs (34-35) so that I would have the option of Scattershotting them, although I'm starting to have doubts about the usefulness of Scattershot. It 'confuses' the target for four seconds but this is barely time to get to distance and re-engage the pet before the monster is back on Maezyn. I need to work on it.

I was grinding happily and ran into a level 37 rare spawn basilisk with Maezyn at level 31. I decided to take it on with a long kite. The territory at Simmering Flats is excellent for kiting, wide salt flats with little in the way. I got into a good kite, running with Aspect of the Cheetah and remembering to give it the occasional Serpent Sting and Concussive shot. The main problem I had was I ran out of mana and was having to wait to get enough mana for another shot. I kited the thing through the race guys in the centre of the track but they ignored me. At one stage Beefy regained agro and fought it to the death despite Mend Pet. The thing carried on after me for a couple more laps of the race track but eventually it got bored with chasing and went into evade mode. The fight lasted over five minutes and I only got it to about half health. I'm happy to have survived the fight even though I lost the pet. It would have been great to have killed it. I didn't see it again.

After I did the Simmering Flats quests I hearthed back to Darkshire and did a load of quests in nothern Strangethorn. I was hoping that Scattershot would be good for interrupting the Kurzon Medicine Men's heals but they gave me big trouble. In the end I decided the easiest tactic was to just burn them down with Arcane/Multi shot salvoes and just tolerating their 100% heals.

Now level 33.

Leather

The Simmering Flats mobs yielded about six stacks of leather. Maezyn had picked up a nice plan in Booty Bay for a Gem-studded Leather Belt which was interesting because it was a blue and had an on-use: once an hour it would give and instant heal for about 25% of Maez's total health. This was good enough to save her twice in STV. It's on a seperate timer to health and mana pots and being instant cast it is useful if she is being beaten on (unlike Gift of the Naaru).

Maezyn is 196 Leatherworking and 257 skinning: I'm still enjoying the skinning. Can I get it to 300 before level 40?

She has collected the turtle meat for the Artisan cookery quest but it seems to be restricted to level 35's so she will have to wait a bit longer before developing her cookery further. UPDATE: my memory failed me here, the turtle meat is for a quest in Hinterlands, not Artisan Cookery.

She had a big wool-bandage making session and has got her First Aid to 150. She bought the Expert First Aid book in Stromgarde Keep and I need to remember to visit a trainer to get the basic silk bandage training. She has the other two books to get to level 225. She never uses all the bandages she makes, I only bandage the pet occasionally after a fight to save mana on Mend Pet or on Maezyn in a really hectic fight but it is important to keep the first aid up to scratch as otherwise one is using sub-standard bandages.

Maezyn is now able to mail her linen and cloth drops to Maexyn for tailoring as Maezyn doesn't need them for bandages any more.

Warcraft Atlas

I tried the new Warcraft Atlas but it seems to be a good example of why flash shouldn't be the basis of a web site. It is slow to load and doesn't seem to do anything that could not have been done in static html. You seem to spent a lot of time waiting for decorative animations. Not what I want from a reference work.

One justification I have for not installing Vista on my home pc is that it is set up for raid 0 and I am not sure that Vista comes with safe drivers for the disk controller, given Vista's notorious lack of drivers. I admit I haven't done any research into this, otherwise my justification might vanish.

On a passing whim I decided to try booting a Knoppix 5.1 CD on it. As is usual with Knoppix it Just Worked ('Just' in the sense of 'merely', rather than 'a moment ago' as it takes a couple of minutes to Just Work). I was able to browse the Raided partition. It ran ok, if sluggishly and at some feeble display resolution: it didn't seem to know about 1920x1200 mode.

I think there used to be a way to hack together a Windows live CD. I'm don't know if it has been figured out for Vista but I'm not sure I care: a knoppix disk can reset passwords but a Vista disk is probably Hamstrung.

Enchanting

I decided to catch up on Maexyn's enchanting. She had a huge pile of greens Maezyn had sent her to disenchant and she ended up with five stacks of Soul Dust which was going for 7g a stack on the AH: kerching. I sold two but kept the rest as at higher levels it is good for a simple levelling enchant.

There were a couple of items that required level 100 enchanting to disenchant so I made the effort to get to level 100 by continually re-enchanting a bracer I had by I ran out of materials at level 99. That last one tick is proving elusive. Maezyn was making any kind of greens, even ones that didn't level her leatherworking (grey greens, if you see what I mean) but I kept getting soul dust

34

Maezyn carried on questing in Arathi and Hinterlands. She did ok and hit 34. I managed the Murloc's in Hinterlands better than before,clearing camps and getting treasure chests. I think this was through experience: clear as many non casters (oracles) as possible by pulling, then burn down the casters.

I finished off by killing turtles for meat and leather. I had plenty of turtle meat but I thought I needed it for the Artisan Cookery so I left it in the bank but the quest that needs it is in Hinterlands. I was killing the turtles in hinterlands just for the last five minutes worth of experience to level and they dropped the 10 pieces of meat in no time. Every other time I have done that quest I had been running up and down the river for ages trying to get the meat to drop, this time it was dropping two pieces at a time. Has someone been tweeking or was it my lucky day?

I'm doing some Embedded Systems work on a new project and rather than splurge £2500 on the Keil ARM development tools I'm trying to run with gnu gpp and various open source options. The Keil stuff is very nice and includes emulators, debuggers and suchlike but these aren't must-haves. Also the £2500 gives you a single developer license. With the gnu tools we will have much more development flexibility.

As a toolchain I'm using gnuarm and I'm also trying the freertos embedded operating system. I managed to put together something that builds with the ST STR7 Standard Library which is effectively a set of device drivers for the on-chip peripherals. Freertos comes with many permutations of Arm7 derivatives, target development boards and development environments but not one that suited my setup so I had to munge one together myself.

Aptana has given me a taste for Eclipse based systems so I'm trying Eclipse itself as a general purpose IDE. I installed a version of Eclipse tailored to C development (CDE) and soon got it to launch a make file and build my project. The IDE is able to parse most (not all) of the error output from the build tools and give me a list of errors I can click on to go to the source line... all good basic IDE stuff I had in Turbo C twenty years ago (argh is it that long?).

Having got my Embedded code compiled the next step is to download it to the microcontroller. To do this I need to knock up a ruby script to read an intel hex file and download it via rs232 to the bootstrap loader built into the microcontroller (damn cool modern microcontrollers). I have a Keil development board with a cool JTAG widget that plugs into the USB and is effectively an in-circuit emulator but cost under £200. Unfortunately it is locked to the Keil tools so I can't use it...

I managed to add an RDT perspective for developing Ruby applications to my Eclipse setup. This means I can run and debug my ruby scripts from within my C development environment.. totally cool.

I came a cross a weird problem with a non-obvious solution that I'll record here to help other unfortunates. When I tried to run my ruby script I was getting the error:

"the specified jre installation does not exist"

which had me puzzled as eclipse was running fine with the JRE I knew about.

On a hunch I went through the ruby runtime options and discovered I didn't have a ruby VM set up. I created one, pointed it at my ruby installation and, joy of joys, the problem went away and I can run ruby from within Eclipse.

Similarly the RI Ruby Documentation viewer kept timing out with a 'Invalid thread access' error until I went into the ruby settings and pointed the rdoc and ri handlers at the 'c:\ruby\bin\rdoc.bat' and 'c:\ruby\bin\ri.bat' files.

Eclipse bullet point review:

• lots of features/over overcomplex, whichever way you look at it
• menu's with so many options you have to search for what you want every time you open one.
• there isn't a simple 'run' button, you have a menu full of run options to choose from
• I like the way you can install plugins for new features and there are 973 to choose from. I've mentioned Subclipse before but I've now got plugins to play with regular expressions and 'Wicked Shell' which gives me an integrated line command prompt where I can also run my makefile and see all the output.
• Misleading error messages

There's a lot to learn here, lots of workarounds and things I am discovering.

Fun times.

Some Enchanted Evening

I ran Maezyn for a bit, heading for the escort quest in Arathi where you escort a druid lady through a camp. Oddly enough I wasn't offerred this quest but the one after it, the one where you have to kill the forgotten courier surrounded by four level 35's. Odd that the quest had gone missing from the quest chain. However I wasn't in the mood to find him and I'm a bit burnt out with Maezyn so I devoted some time to enchanting instead.

I looked at what weapons Pooky could make and I found some nice level 31 daggers with +12 attack power and were one-hand so Maezyn could wield a pair for +24 attack power! However the Mats required odd things like Elemental Earth, there was only one on the auction house and it was 99 silver. Instead Pooky put in bids for two daggers that were just over 1g each and ten minutes later they were in Maezyn's mailbox. I don't bid very often but these were on 'short', i.e. less than 30 minutes till the aution ended so it was worth a punt and I saved about 2g.

The weapon recipes pook had all needed odd ingredients that made making them a chore so I went back to plan A, buying cheapo greens on the AH. There were lots, some as cheap as 10 silver buyout so grabbed a load. I got Maexyn to 100 enchanting and she could disenchant the best greens that Maezyn can make and she now has mats to immediately get to 110 and tons more, including five stacks of Soul Dust.

I should do some research and see if there are any economical green weapon recipes pook can pick up that don't require elementals, gems or other odd things that need more than five minutes of farming.

Weapons Upgrades

I equipped Meazyn with a pair of Glinting Steel Daggers mainly for two x +12 Attack Power bonuses but also because her mele weapons were getting very low level. A nice sideeffect of using even level 31 daggers was their 1.5 sec swing speed: they could slash a level 31 murloc to pieces, they bordered on being viable weapons in themselves! The attack power added about 2 dps (ranged) which would be about a 5% improvement.

She's now level 35 and has donned a Swiftwind blue crossbow that I bought a couple of weeks back as it seemed cheap. This is a nice improvement over the level 30 green bow she has been using for ages: her ranged dps immediately went up by about 20% and the bow is fast too so will generate more crits and each hit is weaker and will draw less aggro. The one thing I don't like about fast weapons is that you use your arrows up so much faster, however I am an experienced enough hunter by now to remember to stock up on ammo whenever I pass a vendor.

Hum, a quick bit of research tells me that a faster weapon gets a better dps boost from fitting a scope so I may have to treat myself to one. When it comes to speed I'm not all that interested in shot rotations: clipping a fast-but-weedy autoshot in favour of an Arcane shot every now and then isn't the end of the world in a ten second grinding fight.

Desolace

Maezyn took the long run to Desolace for some questing as it is a good area for mid thirties quests. There are some easy grinding quests killing Centaurs and suchlike. The area is full of scorpids, Thunder Lizards and Kodo which are all good for leather: the higher level ones (level 37+) were dropping thick leather.

I was trying two new mods on BRK's recommendation: Omen threat meter and Mobinfo.

Omen threat meter makes efforts to warn when your threat is getting dangerously high by making the borders of the screen flash red. It seems to work well when comparing hunter and pet threat and I found myself better able to control the situation.

On my grinding I came across level 40 monsters, with Maezyn at level 35. I tackled them anyway. Armed with the threat meter I used a new tactic on red monsters: Hunter's Mark, Pet Attack, Serpent Sting and Autoshot. I didn't use Arcane Shot until the thing was at 20% health where I used an Arcane Shot/Multishot/Raptor Strike/Scattershot combo to finish them off. This worked and I didn't pull agro from whatever I was fighting when doing this. However, as I was in an area surrounded by similar high level mobs I kept pulling adds and this was hard to deal with as Freezing Traps and Scattershot get resisted. Died a few times. Killing mobs five levels higher takes longer without Arcane Shot but is still quicker than a paladin could do it.

Mobinfo gives extended information when you mouse over a mob such as how health and dps information, whether it is a runner and what you have looted from similar mobs in the past. By default the info tooltip follows the mouse cursor which is very invasive but there is an option to stop it doing this and you can park it where the standard monster information box appears.

Maezyn is now 36.