Thursday, August 27, 2009

WOW Lore Links

There's a huge back story to the WOW game. You can read some excerpts from various Blizzard novels here.

Here is the Warcraft Encyclopedia.

WOW Insider has a weekly column called Know Your Lore. Head to their website and search on "know your lore" to see the columns to date.

There is a website devoted to WOW lore. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have much up but perhaps it will start being populated by more than forums, photos and news tidbits soon.

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Guildwatch At Last

I was beginning to worry that Guildwatch Wednesday wasn't going to happen this week, not after all the excitement of last week's BlizzCon. But there is always drama with the guilds, never fear. This week we have a new player who used a guild to Level to 80, dumped the guild, then was back shortly asking to be reinstated. Somehow this didn't happen as his former guildies actually remembered the insult. There are ninjas, as usual, and lots of raiding and recruiting, although none on the Solo MMO Player's realm.

And this week Drunken Alliance on Thunderlord has made their own rap dance video. They are recruiting "in case you want to be a backup dancer in the next video."


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Introduction to Hiring a Craftsman

WOW Insider has written a guide to hiring folks to make something for your character. Learning how to interact successfully with other players is a necessary skill.

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Choosing Between Aldor and Scryer (Burning Crusade)

During the Burning Crusade characters have to choose between various factions, each of which has their own rewards such as unique recipes, etc. Aldor and Scryer are the most important factions and I've started to compile information about them as well as any other faction info I can find. The most linked-to comparison between rewards you get from Aldor versus Scryer is the one on WOWwiki.

WOW Insider wrote two articles about choosing between Aldor and Scryer. Here they are below. Note that the second link is mostly comments asking folks what they choose and why.

Ten Ton Hammer has a great comparison.

Here is a list of all the faction recipes. Not searchable but organized by type of recipe (leatherworking, enchanting, engineering, etc.).

Another gear list.

Here is a shorter comparison.

A guide.

A detailed Alliance guide in several parts. Sorry, they didn't do a Horde guide.

Aldor and Scryer are not the only factions in the Burning Crusade. Here is a list of factions and rewards compiled from various sources before the Burning Crusade came out.

Another list that describes the factions in general. WARNING: The Solo MMO Player doesn't think all this information is correct.

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The Great Gear Myth Explodes

We've been noticing a lot of gear misunderstanding on The Solo MMO Player's realm and elsewhere. Folks advertise for PUGs which want only players with absolutely the best gear. Folks sneer at the Solo MMO Player's gear, at Big Bear Butt's gear, at the gear of anyone who doesn't have absolutly top-of-the-line equipment. Is everyone who plays WOW turning into a twink? Do folks assume if you don't have the best gear you aren't committed to putting in enough hours in the game to get the gear? Is everyone looking for a character geared in such a way that any instance with them will be a piece of cake? Or is gear misunderstood on a fundamental level?

Gear's certainly important--don't get me wrong. The game revolves around getting better gear as you progress through the levels since better gear aids your gameplay. It does not replace your gameplay however, and "better" gear can be hard to determine. You can't just say that blue gear is better than green. It isn't always. As you already know, the perfect wand for a level 30 priest isn't the perfect wand for a level 30 warlock. Or even for a level 35 priest! Things change. Good gear becomes less good. What is good for my character isn't good for yours. How do you decide the best gear for your current situation? How do you even know what gear you can use?

First, know what gear your character can use and what, if anything, they can make. To do that, research your character class and profession. I like to start at WOW Wiki's descriptions of classes and professions. Taking the druids as an example of a class, you see that they can only use cloth and leather armor, and are able to use daggers, staffs, maces and pole arms . So if you come across a nice shield while playing as a druid, the only thing you can do is sell it or give it away to a friend or a guild bank. You can't use it yourself. That assumes that our hypothetical shield is not Bind on Pickup (BOP) which means once you touch it, it is yours whether you can use it or not. No one else can use it. When it comes to choosing a profession, figure out what you can make and who can use it. There's no sense in becoming an engineer if you can't sell or use the stuff you make and only a limited range of your alts (if any) can use it either.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Class
http://www.wowwiki.com/Professions

That is the first step: know yourself and what gear you can use or make.

The second step is cheating by using all the game resources available to you. Become familiar with the blogs and websites that talk about the characters you like to play. Often the writer will post about their gear choices and how well they worked out. Take advantage of their knowledge in choosing your own gear. The drawback to this approach is that your playing style may not be exactly the same and the writer may not know what they are talking about. Probably the best places to look at the websites focused on one class as many folks contribute information. This site, for example, has a feral dps druids gear methodology. To search for other class gear listings use the upper left hand corner search box and type "gear" and your class. Whatever I've found and saved on Blog will show up.
http://druid.wikispaces.com/ToskksDPSGearMethod

Here a hunter talks about item level and using iLevel to choose the best gear to play as a hunter. Note that this information is now visible in Blizzard's normal UI but that wasn't always the case. The followup article in the second link below which gives examples.
http://www.wow.com/2009/06/11/scattered-shots-what-you-see-is-not-always-what-you-get/

http://www.brigwyn.com/2009/06/15/so-lets-talk-more-about-upgrades/

Now how do you choose exactly what sword out of hundreds that you want given your class/profession/level? There are a lot of tools available to help you sort through gear. Knowing what they are and how to use them is the third step in managing gear. First and foremost of all the resources is the Armory which is Blizzard's database of all the stuff in the game. You can look up anything here.
http://www.wowarmory.com/

However, the Armory is limited to What and Where information. It does not tell you what gear is best for you. It just describes the gear and where it can be found or bought. There are many websites that take the Armory information and make it more useful for the player looking at gear.

The Popularity Contest for Gear
Interested in the most popular gear sets? Armory Data Mining is for you. Most high levels and classes are listed on the right hand side. Click and look. This is a popularity contest, though. Do you really want to use the gear that 3,000 teenagers on your realm choose because it looks sick? Or because they read about it on a website? Besides, Zardoz started pulling this together with the higher levels and if you have a fairly new character, your information's not here yet.
http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/

GEAR COMPARISON WEBSITES
There are many sites that compare gear. Let's start with Gear Wishlist. Plug in your character and realm information and it'll recommend what gear you should look for. The gear recommendations are based on gear rankings pulled together from many sources. It's useful, but doesn't take the nuiances of your character and playing style into consideration. The list you'll get is fairly comprehensive and is divided into chest, back, fingers, etc. The drawbacks of using this site is that you may be given ten blue items without any way to tell which might be the very best and sometimes there is no location information. If it is a quest item, you are not told which quest so you'll have to look that up elsewhere. However, move your mouse over an item and a little window with details about it pops into view.
http://gear-wishlist.appspot.com/

Lootzoor is one of the sources Gear Wishlist uses for its ranking. It gives you gear options for each slot. Whether you use Gear Wishlist or Lootzor is probably personal preference although Gear Wishlist may have a better ranking as it draws from multiple sources. Then again, maybe not.
http://www.lootzor.com/

Quick Armory works the same way as Gear Wishlist. Plug in a character's name and realm and you'll see the current gear for that character. This is useful when you want to check out the gear of that mage that is knocking off everything in sight. It's great for looking up someone's stats. Note the new bar chart ranking added to the results. The Solo MMO Player thinks this might be buggy so don't depend on it exclusively.
http://www.quickarmory.com/
Quick Armory differs from Gear Wishlist in that it has has Quick Armory Stats (next link below) to compare gear you are curious about. Again, this doesn't take one's playing style into consideration which is important if the gear you are comparing is very close statistically.
http://www.epgpweb.com/help/gearpoints

WOWhead's Item Comparison does the same thing as Quick Armory's quick armory stats page. It doesn't look quite as detailed as Quick Armory's Stats but it has a nice description of how to use the comparison tool that makes sense to the casual user.
http://www.wowhead.com/?compare

There are other databases which relate to gear but don't rate it for you. Want to see what loot is available for your class? Click on one of the icons at the top of the page to get started. The downside of using this database is that this is out of date as it is current as of patch 3.0 and we are on patch 3.2.2 now.
http://www.wow-loot.com/

There are addons that judge in-game players and their gear like the addon NVgearscore. Use them at your own risk. After all, you often haven't a clue if the person you are scanning actually knows how to play the game. They look great but their gear might be inappropriate for their character and playing style, or they may not know how to use it. Don't you remember the old "don't judge a book by its cover" saying? It didn't get to be a cliche by being untrue.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/nvgearscore.aspx


PAWN and RAWR
These two are addons for comparing gear specifically for your own character. They take information from your character and its tree and evaluate and compare gear that will work for you. The Solo MMO Player chooses his gear based on PAWN. Many folks don't want to clutter up their UI with addons that have to be maintained and reloaded after every big patch, but the Solo MMO Player finds PAWN worth all the trouble. It is based on statistics for the various classes, which means I am constantly scouring the World Wide Web for scale tags, which is what PAWN calls those stats. (All those I've found are posted somewhere on the Solo MMO Player blog. Search on scale tags in the upper left hand corner's search box to see what I have gathered.) Here's a bit about how PAWN works.
http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/05/compare-gear-easily-with-pawn/

You can download Pawn at Curse.com. Note the link to the unofficial Pawn forums where you can grab scale tags to plug into your calculations.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/pawn.aspx

The ReadMe information for PAWN is spelled out here.
http://worldofwarcraft.filefront.com/file/Pawn%3B83933

Here's a detail explanation of how to use it with screen shots. Click on the tiny thumbnails to get a better view.
http://flameshock.blogspot.com/2008/07/softcore-pawn-how-to-use-loot-ranking.html

Here is the Pawn forum.
http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewforum.php?f=1

Here's information about installing the addon and where the documentation lies.
http://pawnmod.trenchrats.com/viewtopic.php?t=2

How do you install PAWN?
just like every other addon: exit your WoW, and copy the PAWN-folders into your Interface\Addon-Directory. (e.g. D:\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\)
be sure you got TWO new directories:
- VgerCore
- PAWN
now restart WoW again.

More about installing all addons and how to check for errors.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/pawn.aspx



Now for RAWR. Here is the RAWR site. The second link is to the Druid WIki with further RAWF information. RAWR started out being just for druids so it is a particularly good tool for the druids.
http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr

http://druid.wikispaces.com/Rawr

Here's a review by Big Bear Butt Blogger, who has used RAWR for a long time. Make sure you read through the comments as some folks believe it overstates usefulness of some items or is less useful for some classes.
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/06/12/as-long-as-im-repeating-myself/

Other addons--Tank Points is another gear comparison addon with the guide to using it in the link below. The drawback to this addon is it seems slanted towards tanks and death knights. It is not as popular as PAWN and RAWR.
http://deathknight.info/2009/06/gravitys-guide-to-using-tank-points/


GEAR TIP
WOW Insider documents a tip they apparently have mentioned in their podcasts--as of Patch 3.1, when you are in your character screen you can hold down Alt and see all the gear in your bag that sits in that slot. Details here.
http://www.wow.com/2009/05/26/tip-show-possible-slot-gear-on-character-screen/


CONCLUSION
I hope all this information helps you evaluate and assess your own gear and that you might be able to get in the game. Use these tools and you can decide for yourself just how valid The Great Gear Myth is.

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The Great Gear Myth

If you read a bunch of WOW blogs like I do, you will have realized that common topics sweep the internets like cold germs get passed around. One week everyone will be talking about bag addons, the next they will be talking about account security.
The last two weeks it is been The Great Gear Myth. A lot of folks have noticed the obsession with high level gear in WOW. We're not talking the twinks who are focused solely on looking good in gear that is very high level; we are talking about experienced players turned down for raids because they don't have the perfect gear. We are talking about huge numbers of low level players appearing on the Solo MMO Player's realm decked out in gear that is way way above their ability to obtain on their own. We are talking about PUG groups that only want folks decked out in epic gear to go with them. We are talking about guilds set up to benefit the officers and their friends who get the first pick of all raid loot. We are talking about focus on gear that seems all out of proportion to what it buys a player.
The Savage Coast lays out the debate the best.
http://thesavagecoast.blogspot.com/2009/08/gear-or-player.html

UPDATE WOW Insider does a good job summarizing the gear myth, even though they are late to the party.
http://www.wow.com/2009/09/02/yogg-saron-in-blues/#continued

Ailis is also late to the party but sincere in busting the Great Gear Myth.
http://ailisinhunterland.com/2009/11/my-lovehate-relationship-with-gear/

Tank Like a Girl is watching what the gear obsession is and isn't doing in her guild.
Pwnwear agrees with the above, along with links to earlier articles he's written about the issue. I include this article because it links to interviews with famous guilds that you might enjoy. The second link is a further article on this issue.
http://pwnwear.com/2009/08/28/what-gear-is-required-for-a-raid/

Naissa's Rage is mad about the gear myth.  (I suspect some of the anger is directed to a bossy know-it-all in the raid Naissa just did.)
http://www.naissasrage.com/777/that-gear-thing-again/

I expect you can guess that here at the Solo MMO Player we are a bit contemptuous of players who have the best gear and don't have a clue how to play the game. Solo players run into many situations where the gear that they get from a quest or instance isn't as good as what they already have. If this happens a lot, one becomes less focused on gear as a way to get through the game and starts to experiment with what skills one has and coming up with strategies to use subpar gear successfully. You end up as a better player if you don't depend on fancy high level gear exclusively.

So what's a regular player to do? Good gear helps as does a good guild but if you don't have either laying around your realm, you have to learn your own abilities and study the instances and raids and quests that you plan to attempt.

Still, gear is important. I think the myth has arisen because so much is given as reward in the game and because the right gear really helps a weak player. A solo player without a guild or easy access to great gear needs tools to manage and evaluate gear. I'm pulling together an article about gear and gear tools to help players who need better tools to see just what gear they can get by with so they don't buy into the myth and spend all their time looking for purples when green or blue gear will do.

Otherwise the search for the best gear will continue to warp the game experience for many players and the Great Gear Myth will never die.
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