Peter's Blog

• More grinding/questing in Badlands. The grinding aspect meant killing anything that got in my way for the experience points. Only got two green drops but they were actually useful to me for a change:
  • a plan to make green iron shoulder armour: this was only fractionally tougher than the armour I had but I made myself some of these anyway 1) for the experience and 2) because they coordinate nicely with my green iron chest plate and helmet I need some red accessories.
  • some level 40 plate armour boots. Not often I get something for higher level players and I will definitely be slipping these on and wriggling my toes when I get to level 40. I will be upgrading to as much plate armour as possible (as long as it doesn't cramp my style).
• Thinking about my fighting again, I realised that I was too wrapped up with the double damage that judging the Seal of Command does when the target is stunned: I was waiting a minute for stun to recharge when I could have simply judged it twice every eight seconds! The downside of this plan is that it is not as mana efficient but it does finish the enemies off faster which is never a bad thing. Judging the Seal of Command a lot does not seem to effect it's crit rate, it still gets the big thumps in. A stun and judge can finish off a level 38 monster with 20% health, saving ten or more seconds fighting. If I'm lucky then even if the initial judge doesn't do it, my man will get a fatal blow in before the stun has finished. Sometimes the stun or judge crit's and there is a blow of 450 holy damage which is a bit rough on the victim.
• I decided to train myself up in Flash of Light healing which I have ignored up till now. These healing spells are quicker to cast than Holy Light (1.5 vs 2.5 seconds) but give far less health (70 vs 350). However for an equivalent amount of healing they use half the mana. I have been using it to give myself small topups, only using Holy Light if I need 50% or more. My main blessing is now Blessing of Wisdom which gives me a dribble of 20 mana every five seconds. Mana is very precious, when I run out of mana in a fight I can't hit as hard and I can't heal myself. I've even had occasions where I've only had enough mana for a Flash of Light and I was very grateful for it. The main annoyance with blessings is that they only last five minutes and I always forget to refresh them.
• I'm thinking about altering my key assignments to make it easier to put my fingers in fighting mode. For historical reasons my fighting keys are 4, 5, 7 and 8. It would be better to put these together, maybe 1, 2, 3, 4 so I can find them quickly, especially for those times when it gets dark while I am playing and I cannot get up to switch the light on (waste of playing time). A few times now I have got up after a two hour session and find I have had my legs crossed for some time and one of my legs has gone to sleep. I've nearly fallen over.

This is a summary of all my World of Warcraft noob tips, based on playing my characters.

I'm primarily a solo player so there aren't any raiding tips and the PvP tips are mainly aimed at avoiding it.

If any of this seems noobie and obvious then that's great, you are definitely not a noob and can save your precious time by going elsewhere. If you don't know what a noob is then you had better read on.

General

• If someone tells you they have a spell that will raise you ten levels then ignore them, they are trying to con you.
• If you are about to start a major trip against lots of monsters with big loot, make sure there is space in your inventory! You don't want to be deciding what to destroy when deep in the enemy lair.
• If you are wondering why some characters have a cool glow on their weapons it is because the weapons have been enchanted. An enchant may, for example, permanently increase the amount of damage the weapons does. If you want this then either talk to an enchanter or become one yourself. Some enchanters will enchant weapons for free if you supply the materials as it helps them increase their enchanting skill without the hastle/expense of getting the materials.
• If you have a locked box that needs opening either:
  • ask a rogue player to open it
  • ask a blacksmith to open it with a skeleton key. If they try the key and it says 'failed attempt' then try a few more times. If the key is not suitable for the lock the game will tell you that you don't have the skill.
    • A silver key is good for a bronze locked box
    • A gold key is good for an iron or steel locked box
  • an enginner might be able to blow it open with a seaforium charge but don't quote me
• If you see someone dealing with an animal, don't always assume they are trying to kill it. It may be a hunter trying to train it and they will be very annoyed if you intervene and kill it. You can tell if the player is a hunter but there's no sign of a pet and there are little hearts flying around.
• The European servers are often down for maintenance every other Wednesday morning so you get at least six hours break a fortnight.
• You can only play if your copy of the game has the latest patch installed. The patch will download automatically when you start the game but it can be very slow, it can take all night to download a major patch. If you are installing the game from CD, it is quite likely that you won't be playing till the next day.
• Microsoft's slogan for Windows Vista is "The Wow Starts Now". This has nothing to do with World of Warcraft which runs fine on Windows XP. The hardware requirements of the game are not high and it will run on a laptop.
• You can install the game on as many pc's as you like. However you can only log in on your account on one pc at a time so if you want to play as two characters at the same time you will need to open two accounts. All the game information like the state of your characters, the layout of your action bars and keyboard bindings is stored on the server and will be the same on each pc you play on.
• The combat log is very useful for analysing how effectively you are fighting. It will tell you how much damage each of your effects is doing, what damage you are taking and how good your armour is. If someone whispers you while the combat log is open the chat tab will flash.
• Want cheap bank space? Create a new character, move him to the nearest bank, mail him some stuff that needs storing and let him hold it in his bank account. It costs 30 copper to send mail so you need to plan carefully here. You can call the character Natt West or Lloyd Teasby (geddit?).
• Mining farming spots:
  • Copper: Dun Murogh (sp?), Loch Modan
  • Tin: Loch Modan
  • Iron: Arathi, Badlands
  • Mithril: Arathi, Badlands
  • Truesilver: Badlands
  • Thorium: Winterspring (many rich veins)

Paladin

• For levelling PvE there are two strategies that can be followed:
  1. mainly retribution spec, two handed weapon, preferably a slow swinging high damage blue. This is combined with the Seal of Command for high damage.
  2. protection spec, fast one handed weapon, shield, Seal of Light, Blessing of Salvation, Reckoning, Holy Shield. With this spec you can take on at least four or five enemies at a time at your level in mele. Currently this is my preference, retribution is very mana intensive and you can only hit one enemy at a time. My recommendation would be to start off with retribution for the firepower until you get to around level 35 and then switch to the protection spec for the goodies that heal you while dealing damage to multiple attackers with much smaller cost in mana. Ok you don't kill individuals as quickly but it is great fun fighting three or four monsters at a time and finishing with half health left.
• One hand vs two handed conundrum:

  one hand

  best with protection spec

  • can hold a shield for about 40% more armour so you die less often
  • with a very fast one-handed weapon (less than two seconds per swing) the Seal of Light judged and Seal of Crusader you get healing with every hit so the more often you hit the more healing you get. This is the slowest way to kill anything but your health declines very slowly: this is the way to tackle multiple enemies, you prevail through attrition.
  • I didn't try this till level 60 where it works nicely but a slow one hander (2.5 sec swing) with a shield gives a nice compromise between killing speed (kill most non-elites up to level 60 in less than 30 seconds) and the amount of health and mana left after a fight (i.e. avoiding health/mana break downtime).
    • Seal of Crusader
    • Judge
    • Seal of Righteousness
  • At level 60 I am mainly using either a fast one-hander with multiple mobs or a slow one-hander for faster health/mana efficient kills. It is easy to switch one-handers and seals if you get adds in a fight or to despatch the last opponent quickly.
  • Sharpening Stones or Weightstones are useful for increasing your dps: 8 more damage on a weapon that hits every second means 8 more dps. 8 more damage on a weapon that hits every four seconds is two more dps so these stones on a two-hander are not so effective.

  two hand

  best with retribution spec

  • more power kills baddies faster
  • with Seal of Command can hit very hard
  • better for PvP

• It took me some time to realise that you can heal yourself in the Divine Protection Bubble. Fundamental Paladin tactic. You can also heal yourself after stunning an opponent. This way you can save your Divine Protection for emergencies. The Concentration Aura is reasonably effective if you are only fighting one enemy.
• The Blessing of Protection is almost as good as the Divine Protection/Divine Shield bubble but doesn't stop spells. However, against mele you can use it first and then use the Divine whatever a minute later when things are getting really desperate.
• Divine Shield, Divine Protection and Blessing of Protection have seperate cooldowns so in one long fight you can use all three, although you have to wait a minute between each one or you will get an 'Immune' message.
• If you feel like jumping off a cliff Divine Shield can be used to survive hitting the ground.
• The paladin gets a summon warhorse spell at level 40. Just go see a paladin trainer and buy the spell for 90 silver. There is no extra training to pay for, you automatically get 75/75 riding skill. If you like you can muy another mount (e.g. as a dwarf I could buy a ram) and use the free riding skill. The regular mounts take the same three seconds to summon, use up a bag slot but don't use any mana). At level 60 the paladin must run some unpopular high level dungeons to complete the epic horse quest. I saved up 600g to just buy one. My epic mount isn't as exclusive as the paladin mount and I can't call myself a real paladin so that's my credibility blown. Reader Sarah says that the Paladin epic mount quest isn't as difficult as some sites make out but I think it depends largely on whether you can get the groups together to do the raids.
• I took up mining and blacksmithing to complement my paladin mele skills. At player level 40 and blacksmith level 200 there is a quest that rewards you with an epic one-handed weapon which is ideal for a protection spec paladin. To get it you need 120 mithril bars and some other stuff, it's not a fighting quest but a farming and money making quest. The quest starts from 'Hank the Hammer' in the dwarf district of Stormwind.
• Paladin's can heal themselves but it is still worth learning first aid and using bandages because:
  • it saves mana. In a fight mana is everything, bandaging in the bubble will help conserve it.
  • it is quicker than eating food: eight seconds to bandage, twenty to eat.
  • instead of carrying around half a dozen different types of food, you only need one or two stacks of bandages.

Hunter

• The fundamentals of playing a hunter are being able to control the pet. The idea of the Hunter/Pet partnership is that while the pet fights a monster the monster is too busy to attack you and you are free to shoot at it. The pet is tough and can take damage, you are weak but can deal damage. The skill in playing a hunter involves making sure the pet gets the attention from the monsters and that they don't come running to you. If they do reach you then you will find your melee skills aren't really strong enough to deal with them. If, for example, one monster is fighting you and another is fighting your pet it is much easier to shoot the monster that's on your pet so the pet is free to help you.
• Beast Mastery is generally accepted as the best tree for solo levelling, Marksmanship is better for pvp or end-game raiding. This page has an excellent table of where to spend your talent points at each level.
• I'm not sure there is much to choose between guns, bows or crossbows as weapons unless you are a dwarf, for example, and have the +5 racial skill bonus for guns. What is more important is the firing rate:
  • a high firing rate (e.g. every 1.8 seconds) means that each arrow deals less damage but you fire more arrows and get the same average damage or dps. Because each arrow deals less damage you are less likely to draw agro from the victim. If the victim is a caster then a high hit rate is more likely to interrupt any spells they are casting.
  • a low firing rate (e.g. every 2.8 seconds) means that your ammo will last much longer (over 50% longer) and that each hit will cause more damage. If the hit crits then the burst damage from that hit will be proportionally higher.
  • A simple solution: carry two weapons, high and low firing rate. If one is a gun and the other a bow then you are twice as likely to find a suitable ammo vendor (nobody sells arrows to alliance in Thousand Needles).
• Hunters have problems with inventory space as they have to carry ammo, pet food and because they kill so quickly that they get lots of loot. The hunter is born with a six slot ammo pouch or quiver (which can be upgraded to one with more slots) but you don't have to use it, you can swap it for a normal bag. This has advantages and disadvantages:
  • ammo bags and quivers give a faster firing rate and so more dps, maybe 10% more
  • ammo bags can only hold bullets and quivers can only hold arrows which restricts you even more
  • normal bags can hold either and as you use up your ammo you get more space for carrying loot
  • moral: use normal bag for grinding, ammo bag/quiver for optimum dps such as when raiding/pvp
• There are various species of beasts that can be tamed and each have different talents. Some talents can be learned from one species and tought to another but there are limitations in what talents a species can learn: bears cannot learn 'Gore' for example.
• The topic of best pet is hotly debated but overall a boar is probably best as it is a good tank and only boars can have the 'Charge' talent that enables them to charge the enemy, stunning it for a second and generating huge agro. This is a time saver as you don't have to wait long for the boar to reach the target. For more dps I have heard that a ravager is best as it has the 'Gore' ability. I use a boar for a tank and a Ghost Sabre for dps, although to be honest there isn't much in it. All the beasts in the same species will have the same attributes: every cat is the same as every other. There is an elite tiger in Stranglthorn Vale, King Bangalash, that has a unique attack speed talent but the 2.1 patch will make that available to all pets. The only real difference between the animals in a species are what it looks like.
• My hunter is also a fisherman and the fish makes great pet food, especially when cooked (cooking can make it four times more nutritious). Boars and Bears eat anything, Cats like fish and meat. Some of the more fussy animals may eat only meat for example.
• The pet gets its own toolbar to control it. Some of the abilities on this toobar can be performed automatically by the pet. If you right click one of the actions the icon may flash around its edges and this means the pet is on automatic. With some talents such as 'Claw' this may cause the pet to use up its 'focus' very quickly which means it won't be able to do anothing more than basic fighting until it regeneres more. 'Bite' is more efficient than 'Claw' and is better suited to be automated. 'Growl' is essential to have the pet attract and hold agro and life is a lot easier if this is done automatically.

Dwarf

• Dwarves have a natural racial advantage to using guns. If you choose to be a Dwarf Paladin like me then you are wasting this ability as paladins cannot use guns. You will see the gun advantage in you spell book but it is totally wasted. However, dwarf hunters can make use of this skill and the treasure tracking ability complements the hunters other tracking abilities.
• Activating the Dwarfs Stoneform spell seems to break things like stun effects and can help when running away from a fight. As you start to run you invariably get hit by something that slows your movement speed. Throw down stoneform and you're away. It's probably more useful for this than the 10% armour boost it gives. A good companion for this is a swig of swiftness potion, a 50% speed boost for 15 seconds. Stoneform is also good for curing diseases, poison or whatever you may be sufferring from (not curses though).
• Dwarves are resistant to frost spells. If an enemy is lobbing fireballs and frost at you, use the Fire Aura and let your natural resistance handle the frost.

PvP (and how to avoid it)

• If players names above their heads are

  magenta

  they are safe.

  green

  they are PvP enabled but they are on your side

  red

  they are PvP enabled and they are your enemy but you if you are not PvP you are still safe as they cannot attack you. If you attack them your PvP will be turned on and they can fight. Sometimes friendly players will have pets with red names. I don't know why this is but the pets never seem to attack.

  yellow

  they are neutral

• Be careful what faction another player plays for. When I first got my resurrection spell I tried it out on a corpse I found outside Ironforge. Turns out this was a dead Horde and all I achieved was to activate my PvP flag, making me vulnerable to attack. It is possible that a Horde could have an Alliance mate who will try to trick you into going PvP and make you ripe for ganking (i.e. killing). This way they 1) help each other earn honor points 2) can boast about pwning you.
• If a horde member spits on you ignore them. Imagine how damp his keyboard is.

User Interface

• shift-b opens or closes all bags
• shift-click on a stack of items allows you to say how many items you want to move from the stack.
• press left and right mouse buttons together to run.
• middle-click mouse to toggle auto-run
• the options include a setting where you can right click on something in the world to automatically run up to it and interact with it
  • when running up to a monster, for me the monster always takes two steps through me and fights from behind. When I fight back the game says 'You are facing the wrong way'. Make sure your man is positioned right or he will stand there being beaten
  • when you right click on ore when mining, be careful that there is ore still there. When the last of the ore disappears it is highly entertaining when you right click on the empty space and take a step off a steep cliff. Something similar can happen when fishing except you fall into a lake.
• You can press tab to select a nearby monster and T to start fighting with it. However T toggles so if you are not careful your man will stop fighting and stand there like a lemon.
• If you click on another player and right click on their picture you can choose the 'inspect' option and admire the details of their armour, weapons and suchlike. Be careful to click 'Inspect' and not 'Invite'.

Making Money

• If you are selling things to vendors and all the slots for selling become full you may still be able to click on items to sell them. I haven't checked this myself, I used to think you had to wait an hour for all the items to disappear from the Buy Back tab but I have since been corrected on that.
• The Auction House is a good place to sell things. It is worth checking to see what the going rate is first as some things are on offer for such inflated prices that it is easy to undercut and still make money. Some people undervalue their wares through ignorance: if most people are selling something for five gold but one person has it on sale for one gold then put it up for 4 gold 50: the cheap one will sell quick but then yours will be cheapest (or even buy the cheap one and sell it on for a quick 3 gold 50 profit).
• When you buy something from an auction you will receive it in the mail. it doesn't just appear in your bag, look for a mail box. The same applies if the Auction Item doesn't sell, it is returned in the mail.
• If you make a bid for something in an auction you have to pay the money up front. It will be mailed back to you if you are outbid. You don't lose anything.
• Remember: it isn't ebay:
  • What you buy is exactly what it says.
  • Everyone has to pay up front
  • The exact time when an auction will end is kept secret so you cannot be outbid by one penny in the last second
  • You pay in WoW money so don't give anyone your credit card details
• Some people put a buyout price of 99 gold for something worth one gold. This just makes you look greedy. You may as well leave the buyout price blank, nobody will ever just throw 99 gold at you, you're only likely to gain if they click the buyout button instead of bid.
• I always put things on auction for 24 hours. The deposit is higher so you lose more money if the item does not sell but more people will see it in 24 hours. If you only want something up for eight hours, don't put it on sale at 11pm unless you think your fellow insomniacs will be unable to resist (e.g. sleep potion).
• The value of something is reflected in the colour of it's name:

  Grey

  probably only worth selling to vendors. It depends on how much space you have in your bags but you might not want to bother picking these up.

  White

  may sell in the Auction House, best to check if anyone else is selling them.

  Green

  desirable and good to auction. Not guaranteed to sell.

  Blue

  very desirable, good for ten gold but don't get greedy

  Magenta

  utterly desirable, be greedy, prices start at 100 gold.

• Generally the loot is better from humanoid monsters than beasts. You do occasionally get good things from beasts but normally grotty body parts to sell to vendors. Humanoids give you cash and linen/wool/silk/mageweave but not body parts (except for the occasional decapitation). The cloths sell nicely in the auction house or you can make bandages.
• There are some scams regarding Cash on Delivery mail items so if someone mails you something be careful that you are sure what it is before you pay up. The email may try to mislead you into thinking you are buying twenty of something when in fact there is only one. Someone sent me an unsolicited ring for 15g Cash on Delivery. If I had pressed the wrong button I would have been down 15g. Press the 'Return' button!
• Keep your eyes open for easy money making opportunities. If most people are selling something for over 10 gold and you see one on sale for seven gold, think about buying the cheap one and instantly selling it on for 9 gold 50. Be sure to know your market though, it helps if you know what the item is used for and who is buying it. Does a particular profession need masses of this item for some reason? You don't want to be snapping up something that nobody wants. Better still is to do this with something that you can use yourself should you be unable to sell it, maybe something that you are toying with buying anyway.
• Keep an eye on the rare weapons that are available. People will often sell these maybe 10g less than what they could get for them. Easiest way to earn 10g but try to understand the market. Polearms are cheaper than other blue weapons because they are not as popular: don't expect two-handed sword prices for polearms.
• Another moneymaking tip: if you are an enchanter (or have an alt who is one) you can buy up cheap green items, disenchant them and sell the disenchanted stuff for more than the greens cost. Try the Auctioneer and Enchantrix add-on's from here which will give you some idea of how much an item is worth if it is disenchanted. As a rule of thumb, if weapons or armour would cost you twenty silver or less, you will make money by disenchanting them and selling the produce.

Professions

• My take on the professions:

  Herbalism

  profitable, best combined with Alchemy

  Mining

  ok if combined with engineering and blacksmithing. Metals sell for silly money on my realm.

  Skinning

  easy to get lots of skins but market may become saturated

  Alchemy

  this seems to be quite lucrative: everyone wants those potions

  Enchanting

  apparently this is very expensive to get to a high level because you need to disenchant mildly valuble items to get your raw materials. It may be best to level up with a cheaper profession and then switch to this when you are regularly raiding stuff that can be disenchanted. I managed to get an alt to level 75 enchanting with a 2g startup fund, just by disenchanting cheap green items and auctioning the produce. At around level 55 switch to enchanting bracers using strange dust.

  Blacksmithing

  I find this good for a paladin as I can use what I make. At Armoursmith level (260) you can make yourself nice blue armour items.

  • warning with the Burning Crusade expansion you do not need to do the armoursmithing quests which involve gathering over 200 bars of mithril. Just talk to the armoursmith when you get to player level 40 and blacksmithing 215 or thereabouts. Becoming an armoursmith only means that you can make nice armour for yourself: it's bind on pickup and you cannot sell it. You may still want to go on the quest for the epic hammer, for this will need 120 mithril bars and it will also give you three lots of plans. For the next stage you need over 100 more mithril and you'll get three lots of plans and a trinket that will temporarily boost your armour. My advise is to save your mithril.
  • The blacksmith levelling 260-295 is a grind: you make more money selling the materials than the items you can make from them. Use the money to buy the stuff the other blacksmiths are offloading. Levelling from 260-300 involves making lots of Imperial Plate Armour: the amount of thorium needed to make this was more than halved when the Burning Crusade was brought out so it's about 12 thorium for Bracers and 18 thorium for boots. While the bracers are only good for vendoring there is good money to be made from auctioning the higher level items: from 295-300 I made five Imperial Plate Helms which I sold for 100g.

  Engineering

  most of the things you make are useless gimmicks. I found the explosives fairly pathetic but I abandoned this at level 170. I don't miss any of my engineering skills. If you are a hunter and want nice guns then this may be for you. My hunter is a herbalist/alchemist.

  Tailoring

  I think this is so-so, make bags and cloth armour, bags can sell for good money in auction.

  Leatherworking

  all the free lederhosen you want.

  Jewelcrafting

  don't know anything about this but my guess is that the high level players will come by the gems more easily and can use them in their socketed items. It may be a profession to switch to when you are over level 60 but that is just my guess. Jewelcrafters are knocking out cheap rings with vague descriptions as to what they do.

• Secondary Professions

  First Aid

  useful for bandaging and saves on healing potions and mana.

  Cooking

  as a paladin with self-healing spells and bandages I find I pick up more than enough food to top up my health after a big fight and I don't need to cook any more. As a Hunter I find the cooked food is better for feeding the pet, it allows you to turn unpalatable meat into something the pet will enjoy and that is more nutricious. Some cooked foods give extra buffs like fifteen minutes of +spirit and +stamina. Yum yum.

  Fishing

  for a long time I thought this was very boring and only for people who enjoyed staring at the screen without blinking. Then I tried it properly with my Hunter and found myself enjoying it. It's a nice way to get free stuff. The fish can be fed to your pet or can be used in your alchemy potions (e.g. Oily Blackmouth fish are used in underwater breathing potion). You sometimes fish up treasure boxes with goodies in. The secret in fishing is to do a ten minute session when you are in the mood. Also keep a look out for schools of fish and floating debris: fishing these is more rewarding. From level 1 to 100 you go up a skill level whenever you catch a fish so in ten minutes you can go up twenty levels.

Groups

• use /p to talk to your party
• use /g to talk to your guild
• use /s to say something to the people around you if you can't easily click on whoever it is you want to talk to.
• use /r to reply to whoever has spoken to you. However, sometimes it seems to reply to someone who whispered you an hour ago, not to the guy who just joined your party. To avoid embarrassment, be specific.
• use /rw for a 'raid warning': puts a big message in the middle of the screen of your party members.
• a group made up of random passers by is known as a PuG or Picked up group. They can and will:
  • hearth out when they have what they want
  • kick you out a group in a dungeon and not help you
  • suddenly decide to have their tea and go afk.
  • fight like noobs.
  • accuse you of being a noob
• if you invite someone to a group, take time to tell them what you are planning to do and what you need. This can save time spent looking at each other, waiting for the other guy to do something.
• loot grabbing protocol: I think the first time anyone joins a group they tend to breech protocols that they are unaware of. What normally happens is that the looting system is set up by the group leader such that items that are looted from bodies that are of green quality or better are 'rolled for': a dice will appear on screen with two buttons, 'need' and 'greed'. If you 'need' an item because it is suitable for your character and will be of big help to you then press the 'need' button. If you only want the item to sell then press the 'greed' button. Press the X in the corner to pass it up completely. The game will decide randomly who gets the item with players who chose 'need' getting priority. There are other kinds of looting rules in the game: look for the tag 'Master Loot: uncommon' in the chat box when you join the group and be wary of a group leader who chooses anything different.
• treasure chests are not covered by these rules: if someone spots a treasure chest they are free to open it and take all the loot themselves. This is considered a social faux pas and the culprit will be labelled a 'ninja'. Normally the group members will use the /roll command to decide who should open the treasure chest.

Chat

• If you see items mentioned in chat in square brackets:
  WTS [Pants of Might] /w me
  you can click on the item name to see a description of it. Normally it is for a level 63 and of no interest. A full translation of that message is "I would like to sell my Pants of Might. If you happen to be interested, please use the chat facility to whisper me for more information".
• If you are composing a message you can shift-click on an item to put a link to its description in your message. You have to remember to open your bags before you start typing as shift-B will just type a capital B.
• If someone talks in chat, you can click on their name and reply or ignore them (if they are advertising wowgold).
• If the wowgold whispers annoy you then, er, tough. You might try /dnd for "do not disturb" but this will hide all messages. You can ignore the wowgolder but within five minutes they will be back with a different character on a new account.
• Use:

  /1

  to talk on the general channel and ask silly questions

  /2

  to talk on the trade channel and advertise your wares

  /3

  to tell everyone you've seen a horde and you think people might care

• WoW chat crib sheet:
  • ty: thank you for that buff/helping kill that monster
  • np: no problem
  • yw: you're welcome
  • lol: that was highly amusing
  • mob: aka monster, enemy, baddie, creep, thing
  • add: you are happily fighting a monster/enemy/baddie/creep/thing when an additional monster wants to join in.
  • zomg pwned: Sir I bow down to your superior playing skills, even though I am only 12.
  • WTB: Want to buy
  • WTS: Want to sell
  • WTF: not what you'd think
  • noob: you've only been playing for three weeks, I've been playing for four.
  • Gank: to kill a lower level player because
    1. you can
    2. it will spoil their day.
  • teh: I'm a rebel and an anarchist and spelling words correctly just isn't for me
  • nerf pallys: I cannot beat the average paladin player so I implore the games creators to handicap them in some highly frustrating way. Do they really need weapons?
  • imba: class skills are imbalanced (sic) so nerf pallys.
  • dude ur a noob: I am a moron and struggle to form sentences.

Web Sites

• WoW Wiki A WoW encyclopedia
• ThottBot a database of all items in the game and comments about how people have pwned other people with them. lol.
• Paladin Guide a detailed analysis of Paladin Play. Interesting use of Judgement of Light and Judgement of Wisdom in a raid.
• Jame's Levelling Guide a cheatsheet/walkthrough to save you the trouble of finding your way around yourself: except it only starts at level 30.
• Geld's Revised Paladin Guide: How to be a paladin. The link is to a google search because it is a forum posting and the link there is ridiculously long.
• Paladin AoE Strategy: how to fight five monsters at a time.
• I have inspired a Mage to start blogging. Read about it here. Find the answer to the age old mystery of why heterosexual men play as female characters.
• The Ardent Defender, a blog by reader/commenter Urban.
• Hunter Guide a wiki that collates hunter related forum postings.

• More grinding in Badlands. Finished a quest or two.
• As I entered Badlands I sampled the elite 36 dwarfs outside Uldaman. When fighting one he did a runner and drew a second into the fight. A hunter helped me just after I had done a lay-on-hands so I don't know if I would have prevailed solo but it would have been close. The experience dissuaded me from trying more.
• Got to level 39. Decided to invest talent point in 'Vindication' which gives a 'chance' of reducing an opponents strength by 5%. Although the description doesn't quantify the chance it seems to happen reasonably often, maybe every three or four monsters I notice that they have the icon on them.
• Further grinding, looking for ogres to kill for scrap metal. The quest says you should head for ones in the west. Tackled these, they are level 40+. I killed a couple and then got cocky, tried to clear four that were standing around a treasure chest. First one was no problem but with the second I attracted the attention of a mage ogre who kept lobbing fireballs at me. It turned into a long struggle, I killed the first and the mage was suffering but I had to do a runner. I ran and ran but wherever I went there were buzzards, coyotes and lions, I couldn't stop to replenish health and mana. I survived like this for a couple of minutes, I think my investment in 8% speed boost helped with this. Then I died. Despite levelling up this cast a downer on the session.
• Back to Ironforge, visited class trainer and there are no new things to learn at level 39, I have to wait for all the level 40 goodies.
• Insomnia leads to a nocturnal grinding trip to Coldridge Valley, easier than Badlands but lots of Iron and Mithril ore about.
• Full bags, back to Ironforge, make some things with the iron to level up to 180. No decent new training available till 195. Plate armour at 215, that's a lot of iron I need to level up and it's about two gold for twenty in the auction house. I could afford to just buy it but I'm too mean. I have already recouped the money I spent on my big mace (Thornstone Sledgehammer, highly recommended).
• Back to Badlands. I attack easier ogres (level 35-36) and find that they have the scrap metal that I am seeking. Soon have all the scrap metal. The quest reward is an amazingly good shield, 1400 armour, when I equip it my armour is 3400. However it puts me back in the one handed vs two handed quandry: to be tough with a feeble one handed weapon or to be soft with a thumping two hander. At level 40 I can buy Wirt's Third Leg (!) which is (effectively) a one handed mace and I can do some experiments. The leg is a 30dps weapon: will 30dps + 3400 armour + whatever improvement plate gives me be better than 2000 + plate + 37dps? The solution may be simple: use both, whichever is most effective in the circumstances. Two hander to quickly dispatch a single opponent, one hand plus shield when being hammered by many. This sounds easy but Seal of Command is not as effective with a fast one handed weapon so I would need to switch fighting technique which will stretch my tiny brain, addled as it is by lack of sleep. I am finding that use of Seals is very important: when I run out of mana and am just swinging the mace, the rate at which the enemys health declines falls significantly.
• Three dark iron dwarfs roaming across the desert, two 38's and a 37, I cannot resist attacking them. I got them but it took a lay-on-hands so I couldn't do it again for another hour.
• I've done all the quests in Badlands apart from the ones involving Uldaman. I think I would prefer to wait to level 40 and the plate armour before I go there. Since I didn't finish Dead Mines and didn't attempt Stormwind Stockade I really ought to give this one a go.
• 26000 experience points out of 85000 required for level 40. Without rest bonus or quest bonuses, that's 295 monsters to kill.

Choice 1:

• Buy Windowblinds for $20
• Install Google Desktop for free

Choice 2:

• Buy Windows Vista Upgrade for £100
• Struggle all weekend with compatibility problems

Choice 1 gives me a transluscent UI, desktop search and I can keep the pinball game I never play.

Choice 2 gives me less time to play World of Warcraft.

To be honest I have stopped using Google Desktop Sidebar: it kept making itself six inches wide whenever the pc booted and I was tired of resizing it.

Then again, maybe an OS upgrade will stop SVCHOST.EXE crashing every time I shutdown? The PC is about two months old now, that's how long it takes a Windows install to degrade.

I used to be open minded about operating systems but then reality set in.

NB I will inevitably cave and get Vista. Could the Multimedia TV stuff actually work? Streaming to an XBOX 360 sounds cool.

• Did very focused grinding, desperate to get to level 40. Was mainly in Stranglehorn Vale, killing anything that moved, especially higher level stuff as that gave more experience. The level 38 elite crocolisks were good for over 400 experience points without rest bonus although in the time it took to kill them I could probably have killed two 36's. I have pretty much perfected my stun/judge seal of command/heal self trick and I am using Divine Protection much less. If the stun isn't resisted then the trick works, I do it when I have 50% health so there is plenty of time to Divine Protect if things get desperate.
• Interesting to compare difficulty of monsters: level 41 gorillas are definitely easier than level 41 basilisks which are just tougher. Highest levels I was killing were 42's, I didn't find many 43's to try.
• Got to level 40.
  • Got my horse and it is very nice, much faster travelling, should reduce commuting time. I was running around Arathi Heights farming iron ore and it is much more efficient. I got cocky in the badlands and was running through buzzards when one managed to dismount me and I had to kill it. Turns out that monsters can dismount me if I get too close so I have to be careful. Horse needed no quest, just 90 silver for the training from the paladin trainer in Ironforge.
  • Increased ranks in Consecration, Seal of Command, Devotion Aura (permanent armour boost), Stun is now five seconds over four.
  • Trained in plate armour and put on my plate boots.
  • Put another talent point in Vindication.
  • Bought a level 40 one-handed mace (Heaven's Light) and am levelling my one-handed mace skill up. I am going to compare one hand + shield against two handed and no shield. With shield I have 3400 armour and I haven't got all plate armour yet. I tackled two 37's and a 34 using the mace without needing Divine Protection but I ran out of mana due to excessive Consecration (Consecration hurts all baddies near me, it's the only thing I have to handle multiple attackers). One hand gives big hits, it does kill but not quite as quick as two-handed. The one handed mace I got has a fairly slow swing speed (2.7 seconds) so is probably still ok with the Seal of Command so that is how I am using it.

Life begins at forty.

• Spent time levelling up blacksmithing. Bought some iron, farmed some, quested a bit. Got it up to 200.
• Another backlash, I feel over saturated, I need a break. I'll probably be back questing tomorrow morning, wait and see.

I am about to embark on some more web development so it's framework decision time again. It's a year since I dabbled with Turbogears and Django and they both seem to have had extensive development done since then. However, since a year has passed I am basically at the start of the learning curve again.

I still have bad memories about Turbogears, specifically the mess that seems to be the link between mod_python and the application itself, i.e. cherrypy and hacky glue scripts. I was left in the situation where I could only run one app on my server because the glue didn't permit any more.

I looked at Django again and I spent some time fiddling about trying to set it up on my site5 hosting. This involved scanning through umpteen forum postings, emailing site5 tech support (I am now trusted to run compilers and bash so my account is pretty powerful) but the fcgi link was refusing to work and I was frustrated about Django not appearing to generate log files or if it did, not telling me where it put them.

On a whim I bought a book about Ruby on Rails which is a similar kind of framework but is based on the Ruby language instead of python. I wanted a good book as I am tired of using tutorials and google searches to learn these things. Since someone is being paid to write the book they can take the time to explain things in more detail and express themselves better. I think there are books under development for the python frameworks but not a nice printed second edition that I can order from Amazon and be reading the next day.

I've never got into ruby before, I read a description of it by it's author/designer years ago and he came across to me as arrogant in the way that he was criticising python. It may just be a cultural thing, the guy is japanese. By contrast Guido von Rossam, the designer of python is one of those guys like John Carmack or Linus Torvolds who don't need to be arrogant, from the way they write you know they are smart.

Without ever having written a line of it, Ruby seems to me more perl derivative than anything else, like php but better designed. This may just be the use of sigils: $blah. However in Ruby the sigils seems to be useful in telling you the scope of the variable whereas in php they appear to serve no purpose except to tell the interpreter that an identifier is not a literal string and forgetting it normally leads to obscure bugs.

Ruby on Rails was the In Thing in 2006, so important that web hosting companies advertised support for it, it wasn't something that just happened to work if you messed about long enough. Rails is more mainstream. Ruby offers similar productivity improvements to Python, being essentially a typeless language you are freer to express yourself than in languages like Java or C# where the language keeps slapping your wrists with type checking. The frameworks for these languages are also pretty overbearing, Java frameworks apparently want you to define everything in XML, that odd designed-by-commitee compromise between awkward for humans to read and inefficient for computers to parse. Life is too short.

The book is 'Agile Web Development with Rails' 2nd edition and so is reasonably up to date. It is one of those bible books that become de facto for a particular platform, being co-authored by the guy that designed Rails. The book is very descriptive, walking you through development, it is not structured like a reference but the index looks very comprehensive which is useful when you don't have google. What I have read so far has been very interesting, the book is readable and Rails looks very well designed.

I cannot give a point by point comparison with the other frameworks yet but one example of nice design is the use of what they call 'migrations'. Suppose you want to add a new column to a table: you write a migration which is the code that adds the new column and another function to undo it. Each migration gets a number. You can then use the framework to update the database schema through however many migrations to get it to the version that you want. If you need to you can roll back the migrations to undo your changes. Get the migrations working in your development database and then apply them to the production database. Compare this to Django and Turbogears a year ago where if you wanted to add a column to your database you had to update the databases (development and production) and the code individually by hand (these two only had support for creating tables from table definitions, they didn't automate support changing table definitions).

I haven't got into the template language yet but it appears to be simply ruby embedded in html, no crippled little embedded languages. I haven't tried the Rails templates, I have no idea how it copes with the ability to have a 'master' template to layout all your pages with 'sub-templates' to modify the template according to each page.

Something nice that I haven't tried yet is 'InstantRails': a 50m download that you unzip, run and get a full development environment including Ruby, Rails, Apache and Mysql. It manages this without setting all these apps up so your pc.

If LAMP means Linux, Apache, Mysql and Php, is this 'LAMR' ?

• I did play this morning: what else to do? Just some grinding in Badlands.
• Using one-handed mace I can tackle pairs of level 39's pretty easily, I don't worry much about being 100% health before tackling the next one. It's a bit slower than the two-hand but no biggie. In a typical fight repeatedly judging the Seal of Command does a fair amount of the damage and this is irrespective of the weapon I am holding while I wait for it to recharge.
• I bought a counterweight in the Auction House for about ten silver to speed up the swing of the two hander. It sped it up by 0.1 s and has made no noticable difference (but most of these power-ups seem to make no noticable difference). Someone else wanted a gold or two for the plans to make these counterweights: think I'll pass on that one.
• Found obvious solution for when I run out of mana during a fight: buy mana pots in the auction house and have a supply. I have always relied on drops for these but they don't come quickly enough. Greater mana pots aren't too costly and I can use them in the middle of a fight without stopping. I definitely saw my man do a whirling crit attack while holding a mana pot rather than a mace.
• Blacksmithing is now 217. Trained to make myself some Mithral gloves which were about double the armour value of my previous pair. My total armour when using a shield is now over 4000.
• Must remember to visit class trainer and buy fire resistance aura. I think this will be a more effective defence against certain spell-casters: would you want to tackle a flame thrower dressed in a tin can? Or a mithral can for than matter.
• Am getting into the habit of judging Seal of Justice on humanoids to stop them running when they are low on health. I start the fight with it rather than try to get it in just before they run. It's annoying to have to chase them to finish them off and worse when they run towards another enemy.
• I abandoned my guild. There were only ever about ten of them on-line at most and there wasn't much going on. I am now guild less. Someone called me a noob and I think this may be why, or it might be because I was heading to the Darkmoon Faire while it was still being erected. I might start up a level 40 dwarf paladin guild and call it the 'noobs'. We can argue about one-handed vs two-handed strategy as we grind, e.g.:

     [me] 1
     [guildie] no 2
     [me] no 1
     [guildie] 2
     etc
  

  (which is actually quite scintillating for guild chat).

Following the Ruby on Rails book, the change on page 71 that adds a new migration gives this error:

C:\InstantRails\rails_apps\depot>rake db:migrate
(in C:/InstantRails/rails_apps/depot)
== AddPrice: migrating ========================================================
-- add_column(:products, :price, :decimal, {:precision=>8, :scale=>2, :default=>
0})
rake aborted!
You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occured while evaluating nil.[]

InstantRails 1.4 includes version 1.1.6 of Ruby on Rails. It is possible to upgrade InstantRails to rhe latest version of rails (1.2.1 as I write) by opening a console and chanting:

gem update rails --include-dependencies
gem cleanup

You are supposed to then upgrade your app with:

rake rails:update

but this didn't work for me. My app had the old rails version embedded into environment.rb. I changed this to 1.2.1 but then the web app just served up empty pages.

I admitted defeat, deleted my application and started again from scratch. It worked this time.

InstantRails is looking good, just like it says, Rails Instantly.

• More grinding/questing in the Badlands. I like Badlands, it's not too far from Ironforge (short flight, short ride), there's reasonable amounts of iron and mithril and some nice drops. It is a pain getting around because of all the wildlife but killing it helps with the experience points. By comparison I am tired of Stranglehorn Vale, it takes far too long to fly there and more time is wasted getting from booty bay to whereever I need to be. Another grinding option is Southshore/Arathi Heights but I've done all the good quests up there.
• Arrived yesterday and found a level 36 'War Golem' walking across the desert. Huh? Anyway I killed it, as you do, and it gave me two green drops which I sold in the Auction House. Nice.
• There are three dwarfs that walk across the desert and last time I attacked them I did well. I tried again but this time I messed up, I didn't attack the magic man but a sidekick, leaving the magic man free to caste protection bubbles over the other guys. It turned into a right mess and I was lucky that someone came along and helped me. I saw the same three guys later on and decided to prove myself. Attacked the magic man first and this time I was under control, no protection bubbles. Someone still came along to help and we prevailed, even with a coyote joining the fight. And I got a blue drop from the magic man! No use to me but it sold in the Auction House in about three minutes. As is normal in these situations I am wondering if I should have sold it for more.
• I saw a nice lump of iron ore with a lioness nearby so I attacked the lioness. Was fighting when some buzzard thing joined the fight. "Ok you, just wait a minute, I'm busy" I was thinking when suddenly I was dead. What? Turns out the buzzard thing was a level ??? elite buzzard I hadn't seen in that area before. Gank.
• Saw a brown coyote amongst the grey coyotes, a level 38 with a name, Barnaby or something. Odd I thought so I killed it, as you do, and got two green drops. Odd things happening in Badlands.
• There is a level 43 boss Ogre who roams about with some other ogres. I have figured out that he seems to lag behind his guards with just one little ogre beside him (where little means only eight feet tall). I decided to attack him and sure enough, the guard ogres are too far away to help him. I almost prevailed but I tried my stun/health trick when the little ogre started beating on me and interrupted the health spell and I died. I could have divine protected or even laid on hands but it was preoccupied with the stun. I didn't see him again but I'll definitely have another go. I'll be attacking those guys whenever I see them.
• If you are fighting and some guy rides past on a horse and lets you die I think I can now see the other perspective: it is hassle having to stop the horse, dismount and join the fight. It takes a keypress and a click and it interrupts your flow, life is too short (and the amount of your life you can spent playing WoW is even shorter).
• I have now collected masses of iron but the high level things I can make with the blacksmithing are either steel or mithral. To make steel items I have to buy coal to combine with the iron. The coal is five silver a piece so to make, say, a steel chestplate I have to invest 50 silver. I'll have to give this a try but I've not been having a lot of success selling the things I have been making in the Auction House lately. It is hard to judge what value other people put on these things. It may be best to concentrate on selling things that require rare gems to make since anyone can knock out the bog standard things that need only iron and stone so these won't be in demand. With all the mining I have been doing I have a nice supply of gems.
• In mining I'm level 230 or thereabouts: I had to train up to expert or whatever it is as I was capped at 225. Now my level will continue increasing, even though I cannot mine truesilver till I'm 235 (and I find somewhere with truesilver ore).
• With all the grinding I have been doing I was purpetually running out of inventory space and my bank is always full so I bit the bullet and spent ten gold on another bank slot and two gold on a fourteen slot bag. At least now while I am grinding I can just shift-right-click and pick up everything, I don't have to cherry pick. Even the grottiest animal parts from Badlands sell for a few silver.
• Those plans for a couterweight are still in the Auction House for eight gold buyout: ridiculous.
• I have a theory that since I got the riding skill for free with my Summon Warhorse paladin training I could just buy a normal Dwarf mount for nine gold and ride that. The mount is a big ram thing with horns. The only advantage of this I can think of would be that it wouldn't take mana and three seconds of my time to mount it but that's not worth nine gold to me. The warhorse looks better. If I were exulted with the gnomes I could ride a mechanostrider which may be worth it for joke value but apparently it is major hassle to become exulted, you have to kiss a lot of gnomish arse.