Trials of Turing

Hidden treats in 3.02

2008-10-20T12:00:00.002-04:00

I think most hunters understand the big changes in the patch. I am just starting this thread in case others have seen the following undocumented issues and want to discuss or add on to these. I noticed after the patch that the following "features" became defaults.

Auto-Targeting Madness
Many people run addons of various kinds. When a big patch drops, its advisable to delete/rename the WTF and Interface folders and start anew with loading the addons. What I found was that there are new default combat options that change the targeting behavior for hunters. The new behavior is that if you happen to spam an attack button (in the hunter's case a macro or just steady shot)... you will find that when your target dies, you will auto-target the next closest. This might be a CC target, or a linked mob. Personally, I inadvertantly pulled one of the elite dancing groups in Kara due to this behavior. Thankfully we were a very good group and handled it well. I got to wear my huntard duncecap that night.

For melee DPS and tanks, I can see this default being an advantage, as it allows them to quickly switch in crowded conditions. However, having the exceptional range of Hunters, we will often just pickup completely random stuff we have no intention of targetting. This is actually made worse by the fact that our autoshots will just "go off" now since they are not linked to the steady cast bars (I will discuss this next).

I need to test this fully, but apparently there are two options in the combat interface to make this work like pre-3.02. Hit escape to goto the game menu, then select Interface config, and choose the combat tab. Turn OFF "Attack on Assist" and turn ON "Stop casting when switching targets". One of the WoW forum posts indicates this MAY hobble DPS a bit, as it causes the autoshot to delay when switching targets. Personally, I prefer peace of mind that I am not going to bring an instance down on my group.

Stopcasting Macros
Pull shot macros and stopcasting: Do you have a macro that does something like this to pull into a trap?

/cast Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

Did you notice that it keeps shooting anyway? Did you break your own trap yet? I did. In 3.02 Hunters got the amazing ability to autoshoot AND use special shots without clipping. How did Blizz implement this? Internally, they have separate casting bars. So, you now have to shutdown BOTH castbars with two stop casts:

/cast Distracting Shot
/stopcasting
/stopcasting

A note here for other situations when you need to stop casting... If you happen to occasionally use ESC to stop cast... there are some situations where you may have to hit ESC at least twice and maybe three times to stop. Why? Because cast shots trigger the autoshot to restart automatically. What happens is the first ESC stops autoshot, the second stops the cast shot, and if you cast shot happens to go off, you have to hit ESC again to cancel Auto the last time. Probably best to just create a stop cast macro like our healer friends use.

Misdirection Changes
A minor note on misdirect: Do NOT use distracting shot with misdirect. I personally missed this in the patch notes and my BIG threat pull macro used distract. Distract is now a PERSONAL threat enhancer and does NOT transfer threat through the MD. ONLY DAMAGE transfers to MD!!

Hope this helps.

Apathy of the Lich King

2008-08-26T11:51:00.004-04:00

It seems you cannot click one WoW blog link these days without having to deal with Wrath of the Lich King dogma. I understand why. Most players have seen everything and done it all since the original beta of WoW. Unfortunately, I haven't been that lucky. I am still on my original main, and am slowly crawling through BC content. I didn't even join WoW in time to see any of the original end-game content like Molten Core and all those.

So, I try to avoid Wrath if I can. Originally, WoWInsider was my favorite site for all that is WoW. I cannot read it anymore, just too much Wrath. Even BRK, who once disdained the Beta has gone almost completely Wrath. I can forgive him though because he puts up movies about purely hunterly things. Aside from watching that Rhino cavort about, I try to stay completely devoid of Wrath content.

Much of my excitement about Wrath will be when its launched. While many may actually already bored of the expansion by the time its released, for me it will actually be new. I know I will probably not see Illidan and definately won't see Sunwell before the launch, but even that content is entirely new for me.

I don't plan on rolling a Death Kah-nig-git. My hunter will be just fine. For once... maybe... just maybe, Hunters will be RARE! At least, I hope with all those DK tanks wandering about, maybe Hunters might get some love in the LFG channels. I wonder what disparaging nickname Death Knights will get? We Hunters got Huntards, Pallies got Retardins, looks like a pattern, but one that doesn't fit the Death Knight. Perhaps we'll see something like DorkKnights? It will happen, because every monkey and its uncle will roll one.

Well, as I contain my curiousity and excitement for Wrath, I can concentrate on my slow endgame progression. I'm looking for Gruul group soon. I think I am ready for that raid.

Cheers,
T

Stuck in a Catch-22

2008-08-24T12:31:00.002-04:00

For those not familiar with Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22", the main idea of a Catch-22 is that in order to do one thing, you must complete something that requires the very thing you desire. A simple modern example of this is "You need experience to get a job, but you cannot get a job without experience." In the book, the main example of Catch-22 is more complex.

Anyhow, I feel I am in a Catch-22 myself in my raiding progression. I can't seem to get a decent DPS ranged weapon from Kara, and our Kara group doesn't seem to be progressing beyond Prince. Is this because we cannot get the gear from Kara to progress? This is my main conundrum with my characters progression right now. I am frustrated with my inability to get beyond the Valanos Longbow. It does not help that I am not particularly fond of bows. A dwarf should have a gun! I haven't even updated my banner... I am thusly ashamed of my bow wielding.

So, I am grinding honor until a suitable weapon drops. Surely the Merciless crossbow is more like a gun than a bow is, so it is my prize. There are some other suitable weapons:

Telescopic Sharprifle - Mechanar - This has just a touch less DPS than Valanos, but it has agility and AP, rather than just AP. Its also a bit slower, which makes a shot weave work just a tiny bit better.
Veteran Musket - Requires exalted Honor Hold rep. The problem with this is yet another Catch-22. You need sufficient DPS to run the heroics, but this weapon is what you need to get the DPS.
Steelhawk Crossbow - Good DPS, some hit and AP. This drops from Kara (att, and there are better ranged drops in Kara. However, I am not picky at this point.
Merciless Gladiator's Crossbow of the Phoenix - This is where I think I am going, plus it helps me learn how to PVP. 40 AV Marks and 27,000 honor. I have had the marks for awhile, but I need 13,000 more honor. Its a long road.
Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle - My dream gun at this point. This is another Kara drop. Been to see the wolf twice so far. No drops. In fact, I have seen Opera 4-5 times and never had a Hunter drop at all. Just bad luck I guess.
Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix - This is Prince's bow in Kara. As I have said, I am not fond of Bows. I guess I would not pass this up, but I might just wait for the "Chocobow" if I can get the Wolfslayer.

This is my biggest quest right now, just getting my DPS up and over to something better. I really need this to progress to Heroics and beyond. Otherwise, I am just letting down the team.

Cheers,
T

Goodbye... Hello

2008-07-30T10:51:00.004-04:00

Due to some personal matters and work commitments, I took a long break (7-8 months) from WoW. In some ways, those issues are now resolved, so I have begun to play again and finally made it to 70.

I am even in a Kara raiding group in my guild, and got my glove token last night. Seems like quite an accomplishment for only being back a couple weeks.

It looks like I have alot of work to do in order to get this little blog of mine back in shape. I'd prefer that I not be yet another loot blogger, but now I understand why so many WoW blogs have loot accomplishment posts: You simply are so happy to get a drop after so much raiding. It feels good to share your spoils of war.

Anyhow, cheers all.

My stab at Linux. Stab! Parry! Evade!

2007-11-14T12:53:00.000-05:00

Well, based on some experiences another WoW player has recently had with Linux (see here), I decided last weekend to try out Ubuntu 7.10 in a separate install on my drive. The experience was enlightening and completely frustrating. I had wanted this to work SO badly, but it fails on a very deep level that forced me to go back to the Windows of the XP. The story is long, but the summary is short. This is why I cannot do Linux (yet):

Video driver consistency with Linux is a huge issue. Either get in bed with proprietary drivers or stop complaining about them. AMD might be opening their driver, but this won't fix things for nVidia users. The AMD source isn't going to be any sort of immediate fix.
Related to video: Why does X behave so differently using two different minor version differences of a video driver. ATI 8.4.37 lets wine set gamma, but 8.4.42 doesn't? Maybe its a driver problem.
Linux audio is a nightmare. ALSA? OSS? Who gives a damn? Why the hell can't you play audio from multiple sources without understanding how low level audio configurations are put together between 2 legacy platforms? Soundpulse/eSound could conceivably fix all the problems that plague audio on Linux, but unless it just works, its not worth my time to solve all its problems.
Overall, Linux doesn't just work out of the box to do what you think it should. I could accept that I might need to put some extra effort into doing things. Sure, there should be a learning curve, but I should be able to configure one thing in one way and it should work all the time and never need to be changed. Tinkering with settings for 4 hours and restarting Wine/Cedega to test each iteration is a WASTE OF TIME.
In all fairness, maybe its my hardware. I did get things working, and they worked pretty well on their own. WoW worked, and it worked decently (especially under Cedega), but it didn't work well with other audio apps or Compiz. Compiz worked, but it took me several tries and various drivers to get it to work. Eventually, I abandoned it though, because Wine was not friendly with it.

I do plan on trying this again in the future. Maybe after I upgrade my box. Anyhow, here are some additional details on my adventure with Linux & WoW:

Installation was very smooth overall. Got some basic tools installed and was ready to start tweaking. This hit the first bit of fun: ATI drivers. I decided on the proprietary driver, since its supposed to be "the best". This caused all sorts of problems as things went along. Overall, it worked, but when you needed it most, it would not work as expected. I'll come back to that in a sec.

Next task, give me some Compiz candy. This installed fairly well and got some nice wobbly windows moving around. However, something was quite odd, OpenGL didn't want to work right. This was odd, since the Compiz effects were fine and dandy, but the OpenGL never detected right. Seems there are some library linking issues. Fixed this and everyone was happy. What next? WoW of course!

So, we find Wine, and even go for the latest repository versions we can find (use Wine's Ubuntu repository list). Installed and initializes fine, no problems. Based on some stuff we read, we find we can copy the whole WoW install from the XP install. Great, this goes in the right place and we are ready to rock. We modify the WoW WTF so that it will run as its supposed to. Lock and load, and its running pretty well. Well, except that the gamma is completely off and we can't see the screen. I launch the game anyway, and it seems to come up fine. However, it does not run as well as the XP version at the same graphic resolution (1600x1200). I exit, tweak back the settings on resolution and change the gamma. I start again, and the gamma is still the same. Discouragement rears its ugly head.

So, I read about Cedega, and I take the plunge, pop down by $15 and pull the download. It sets up pretty quickly and then I push WoW into the Cedega install. It starts great, the gamma is right! The graphics even look as good as XP for the most part (OpenGL is missing "something"), the resolution at 1600x1200 is still slow (9FPS in Shatt), so I bump down, tweak my UI layout and am good to play awhile. That is... until I decide to listen to music while I am playing. Thus the ugly Linux nightmare of OSS and ALSA appears to destroy my last vestiges of sanity.

"Soundpulse" you say? Yes, that might work. Install, read, configure, curse, read, install, configure, curse. This cycle continues until you realize "Why am I wasting my time trying to get this to work when it does work on something else?" And yes, I was wasting my time. Lots of it. Lots and lots of it. I am a tech head and I love this stuff. I eat tech problems and smile at their bitter aftertaste, but like eating too much spicy food, I had enough. I needed something sweet and light. XP, is a bit too sweet sometimes, but for now it works and that is good enough.

When I'm 65

2007-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

Sixty four has now passed to the land of 65. Probably time to cleanup my questlog for Zangarmarsh and move on up. Its always a bit fun hitting these odd levels, you do get the odd surprise, like: level 65 ammo which does +32 damage. With that and some agility/attack power shuffling, I hope to see some nice pops to the DPS. w00t!

Adding to the DPS end, we also found a nice blue gun at a reasonable price on AH [The Gunblade]. I think it just looks frickin' cool as well. Based on some of the other guns I have seen, this may last me to 70 unless I find a better blue.

Yeesh, and I say I am not a gear nut. Still mostly in greens though, I guess that makes me amateur hour.

Cheers.

Blood Furnace Snuffed Out

2007-10-17T23:59:00.000-04:00

Got lucky and into a nice little PuG tonite for Blood Furnace. This was probably one of the most unorganized groups I'd ever been involved in, but since we were all a bit overpowered for the dungeon, things went okay. Most of the time I had no idea what was happening, and since my hard drive crashed before the first boss, I was pretty much running around like a maniac the entire time (no marking, no communication, and only one trap request on the final boss). Seems like no one there knew what a good hunter looked like.

Even though I joined just as the PuG got to the first boss, I ended up topping my own Damage Meter. I am still not sure if it records everyone right, but as long as I am top, I know I am doing part of my job right. The funny thing about traps in PuG groups that don't mark is that 1) You never know if the trap will ever pop and 2) Someone will always break it. I think my new strategy will be: If the PuG don't mark, drop a freeze in front of the healer whenever possible and hope they don't move until it pops. Then, DPS away. Probably won't work, but I'll try it.

It was a bit funny actually that we never wiped on a boss, but somehow wiped on a really weird pull. It sucks majorly when the 2 hunters in the group are left feigning only to realize there is no one to pick up the aggro. "This is gonna hurt," was all I could say. I still am not sure if the best plan of attack is to just beat the living crap outta everything. Ah well.

I'm going to try and run the Furnace at least a couple more times before I decide I know it well enough to run other guildies through.

Awesome Hunter Macros

2007-10-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

It took me awhile to find the meaty goodness of macros. Mostly, this was an issue in finding good macros, but eventually I found a nice collection of a few. Most of these are from an interesting Hunter blog called Someone Wowing. They are sort of lost amidst this guys obsession with tracking the stats of every possible pet in the game. However, they are pretty much excellent macros:

The Pet "AutoAttack" Macro

#showtooltip Hunter's Mark
/target [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists]
/petattack [harm,nomodifier]
/cast [harm] Hunter's Mark

Action: Target an enemy from either mouse over, current target or pet target. If no modifier (control, shift, alt) is used, then pet will attack. Cast hunter's mark on this target. So, if you only want to cast mark, hold down control while clicking this macro button.

Essentially, this is a generic pet attack/mark macro that is suitable for generic grinding. The mouse over use is optional and may not be suitable for everyone's play style.

One comment to be noted here: This and many of my macros utilize "mouseover" type targeting. This can take some getting used to, but allows for some really dynamic targeting abilities. If you find you do a lot of work in cramped spaces, this is not for you, and you should remove the mouseover from the macro.

Casting a Sting

#showtooltip [target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists][target=mouseover,harm] Scorpid Sting; Scorpid Sting
/target [target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists][target=mouseover,harm]
/cast [harm] Scorpid Sting

Action: Like the previous macro, this targets based on available enemies in either your pet or your own target and casts the selected Sting. Note that this will not shoot a mouse over target unless you do not have a target selected or your pet is not targeting. The tooltip here is designed to show if the targeted mob is in range.

Arcane Shot Advanced

#showtooltip [target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists][target=mouseover,harm] Arcane Shot; Arcane Shot
/target [target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists][target=mouseover,harm]
/cast [harm] Arcane Shot

Action: Like the sting, this is an advanced targeting macro that allows for mouse over targeting. The general shot action is the same as the sting shot.

Quick Stun a Running Mob

#showtooltip [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists] Concussive Shot; Concussive Shot
/cast [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists] Concussive Shot

Action: Unlike the sting and arcane shots, this one will target first on a mouse over. This allows a quick off shot to a running or aggro'ing mob when you need your auto shot to continue on a main.

Quick Distracting Shots

#showtooltip [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists] Distracting Shot; Distracting Shot
/cast [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists] Distracting Shot

Action: Like the concussive shot this allows a mouse over distracting shot. I find this is really nice for instances. I can target the skull mob and still pull my blue square to the trap with this off shot.

A side note: If you have a Pally tank that uses avenging shield, this won't help you much. You'll need to target that mob and hit it hard to pull them to a trap. I tend to drop the trap and backup so the trap is in my dead zone and then try to aggro the mob off with distract and a few other shots. That way, I don't accidentally melee hit the mob and break my own trap. Ahh... the challenges of Pally tanking.

Simple Pull Shot

#show Auto Shot
/cast Arcane Shot(Rank 1)
/stopcasting

Action: This is a really simple ping hit to try and pull a mob with as little aggro as possible. Some like to use a sting, but this will pop the shot and instantly stop. You will often find with this shot in groups that you will be able to limit the mobs you pull pretty easily.

Mouse action Intimidation

#showtooltip Intimidation
/target [target=mouseover,harm][target=target,harm][target=pettarget,exists]
/petattack [combat,nomodifier]
/cast [combat,nomodifier] Intimidation
/stopmacro [combat,nomodifier]
/script CameraZoomIn(2)

Action: I would have to say that this and the mend pet macros are among my favorite and most used. When this is mapped to a scroll wheel event, the action works as follows: If you are in combat, the scroll wheel will cast intimidation on your mouse over, selected target or pet target (in order of preference) and direct the pet to attack the mob (if no modifier). Otherwise, it works like the normal camera zoom. If you are in combat, and need to zoom, just use a modifier key (Ctrl/Alt/Shift) and the zoom works fine.

Mouse action Mend Pet

#showtooltip Mend Pet
/cast [combat,nomodifier][nocombat,modifier] Mend Pet
/stopmacro [combat,nomodifier][nocombat,modifier]
/script CameraZoomOut(2)

Action: Like the intimidation macro, this will cast a mend on your pet with the mouse wheel scroll (I use down scroll). This only executes in combat, but use a modifier key and it will cast out of combat.

Pet Queuing

/cast [nocombat,target=mouseover] Hunter's Mark
/target [nocombat,target=mouseover]
/petattack [target=mouseover]
/petattack

Action: I haven't had alot of practice in using this macro, and its really specific to grinding mobs, as you can only use it when your pet is in defensive or aggressive stance. In passive, this will not work, so instances and raiding are probably out. The idea for this macro is that it will add the target under the mouse to the next combat position in the pet's combat queue. In passive mode, the pet will only attack its current target, but this will add additional targets in defensive mode. I map this to my middle button to allow my pet to queue up additional targets.

Protected Bestial Wrath

#showtooltip Bestial Wrath
/cast [combat][modifier] Bestial Wrath

Action: Of course, this is only really useful for BM hunters, but this is designed to prevent Wrath from being cast accidentally out of combat. You can still force it to cast by using a modifier key, but it will normally only case in combat. I have found this a bit irritating in PvP combat, as I sometimes want to kick off Wrath before a fear is dropped. Use with your own discretion.

I do have a couple more, but I need to recover them after my last drive crash. The remaining ones are all pretty generic (mount and bandage related), so I will post them separately later.

Hope you find these useful. Cheers.

Back in the Saddle

2007-10-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

The drive is installed, and after several hours of formatting, installing, patching, and more installing my system is back and running. It was nice to get back online after a week off, but I definitely learned I probably spend too much time in the game. So, time to rearrange priorities a bit and dedicate specific nights to a bit of play and specific nights for family and "other stuff".

Anyhow, I'm trying out a new brand of hard drive now. I've had Seagate's and Western Digitals and Maxtor was the name of the recently dead one. Hitachi is the new sheriff in town, and doubling up from 250GB to 500GB will be a welcome improvement. The original Maxtor looks to be completely gone. I suspect that the power supply had something to do with the death of Maxtor, as the existing supply one couldn't give enough juice to spin up the Hitachi. Hrm... I guess 230W is not enough for a modern system, better double that as well.

When you install WoW mods, you never really realize how much tweaking goes into each little install and adjustment. That is, until you have to reinstall them all from scratch. Looks like the WTF folder is going into my backup policy. I must have spent close to 2 hours so far and half that was on Pitbull alone. I really enjoy the setup Pitbull can provide, but it needs some sort of standard layouts package or something, cause otherwise you have to configure every detail of every frame.

Well, enough of the ranting, on to bigger and better things. Cheers...

Off the Beaten Track: Elite Mounts

2007-10-10T14:15:00.000-04:00

When you get to level 40, the mount is most of your purpose for reaching this level. I'd guess that most players plan for the mount cost and have alot of gold ready to put down on the skill and the mount. This doesn't seem to be the case for many at 60. I for one, was so focused on just getting to 60 that I pretty much tossed the elite mount idea right outta my head.

Well, I'm at 64 now and have debated whether getting the elite mount is worth all that gold. Its really the skill that I need, so that when the flying mount comes calling, I will be ready. Otherwise, we must compound both the 60 and the 70 riding skills together when we get to 70. Since 70 will also likely require a set of shiny new gear, its probably best to look at getting at least the riding skill upgrade sooner rather than later.

So, I have a pretty nice cache of about 400G ready for the skill. Once I am sure I can keep my cash flow going after the purchase, I will drop down the cash and get a screenshot of my new mount.

I'm Down. I'm Really Down. Soo Down

2007-10-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

Sunday night, I get in an instance group. Got a tank right away from the guild, thanks Emries.

Need a healer. Find a pally willing to respec holy. Wow! Major thanks. Grab a couple more for some DPS and extra help and we're off to the Blood Furnaces.

Woot! I am so hyped, second instance in a day. I seem to have so many problems getting it PuGs as a hunter. Got some good advice from a guildie, but that is off this topic for now.

Anyhow, instance run is going great. Tank is running first time, so our respec'd healadin is marking mobs. Tank is a pally too. Did I mention how hard it is to pull aggro off an Avenger's Shield? Yikes! Yet another topic to cover later.

So, we're cruising well through the instance, even if we are pulling two 59's with us. We get to the first boss room, and start clearing away the extra mobs and *BOOP* System freezes. Yikes! Okay, probably a video card hiccup or something. Its done this a couple times this week. Reset, hope the group does OK on the mobs and notices me in DC mode.

System starts to come up. POST is okay, but hard drive isn't recognized. Well, seen that before. This drive sometimes takes a reboot to spin up. I just reboot and it should spin up fine this time... again, not there.

Now I am thinking, "This sucks." I check the BIOS and the drive is just not there. So, I resign myself to the idea that my night is toast and start pulling the case apart.

Drive is completely dead, does not power or spin up. Lots of prodding and poking later and I realize the drive is completely gone. *cry* *weep*

Looks like I am offline until the pay drop this weekend. Good time to blog a little and spend time with Mrs. Turing for the week. I am sure she'll appreciate my misfortune.

Getting Started with Gems

2007-10-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

A few nights ago I was questing through Zangarmarsh, trying to level to the next step to 70, and a quest giver drops a socketed set of pants in my lap: [Expedition Forager Leggings].

While this is just a basic greeny, its my first socketed gear, so I become instantly confounded. What should I put in those tasty little sockets? Well, I started out writing a blog article on this, and actually found that there are two excellent articles on this already:

BigRedKitty has written a good article on basic hunter gems.
Lassirra at the Hunter's Mark has a more in-depth guide on all hunter related gems.

Hope this helps.

Off the Beaten Track: First shot at Grunter

2007-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Well, Saturday morning 12:30am, as expected Grunter is spawned in the Blasted Lands and ready for my taming skillz.

In short, it did not go well. First off, the concussive didn't seem to slow Grunter down. Then he resisted the trap. This revealed that Grunter has a kick back that I recall reading about, but did not expect so early in the tame. This flustered me quite a bit and after breaking my own trap at least once as well... Grunter eventually lay dead at my feet, caused by my own hands.

Next time (if there is one). I will remove my melee weapon, be a bit more careful with the traps, and remember to feign death (DOH!) if things are looking bad.

I must now go reconcile my sins and learn from my n00bishness. Perhaps I simply am not deserving of such a pet.

Off the Beaten Track: Grunter

2007-10-04T14:06:00.003-04:00

Occasionally as we are leveling and questing our way to 70, we get pulled from our goal by a distraction. I happen to have several of these and Grunter the Boar, of the Blasted Lands is one of them. I know that having a boar pet will be useful in my future life at 70, so I want a boar that is not only functional, but cool. Having rotting and open fleshwounds is not cool in Turing's book. Plus, he has a sensitive sense of smell, and Plagueboars reek to high heaven (haven't you noticed?). Anyhow, the highest level, coolest looking boar I know is Grunter, a level 50 elite rare boar that saunters around the Blasted Lands. Well, that's the rumor anyhow.

Grunter turns out to be one of those amazingly rare mobs. One that at most spawns once every 36-48 hours. Getting ahold of this bastard has been a major headache. So, I have formulated a strategy: Apparently the spawn time should reset when the server is reset, so a simple task is to determine the reset time and add the consensus spawn time to it. For Grunter, this seems to be 40 hours. So, after our rolling restart this morning, I should have Grunter by Saturday morning... or so my theory goes.

If this doesn't pan out, I am either going to get saddled with a Plagueboar or will go all the way back to Razorfen and tame one of those cool looking armored boars. That will be one heck of a pet level grind. I can only hope the pet level grinding improvements will be in the 2.3 patch instead of a later one. If not, I will get a ton of practice kiting (which I need anyway).

Addon Addiction: AuctioneerAdvanced Preview

2007-10-04T13:15:00.000-04:00

Turing makes the majority of his living prospecting the Auction House for disenchant items. As such, having an add on like Auctioneer is absolutely essential to ensuring his livelihood. In recent weeks, the Auctioneer development team has release a preview of AuctioneerAdvanced (AA). This new version adds some very powerful tools to aid auction prospectors in their search for bargain items. For Turing, this also includes a very important upgrade to Enchantrix, which has essentially been in limbo since BC went online and changed the 60+ DE formulas.

The Auctioneer tool tips are probably the most used function of the add on. While adding back the Enchantrix display is very welcome, additional data is now stored in AA that adds a huge change to auction data. The most useful change is the storage of auction prices over time. While this requires some scanning of auction prices, you can now see if an item is increasing or decreasing in price over the last 3-7 days. This helps to predict if demand is rising or falling for an item and allows more accurate timing of block auctions for high demand periods.

The core auction interface also adds a lot of new functionality. Under the covers, the auction scanning engine has been completely redesigned. Auction scans will no longer cause lag delays when data is refreshed. Additionally, scans can be run in the background, allowing the user to continue using the auction interfaces while the scan runs in the background.

The first major visible change that AA introduces is in the auction search function.

Listings are now internally compared for price lines and then buyout percentages for each auction are shown and colored for easy viewing. This allows auction users to easily determine which auctions are overpriced or under priced. Over time, the color display can indicate whether an item is increasing or decreasing over time. You can also break down prices into per unit for stacked items. This is essential for finding price breaks and fair pricing for stacks.

AA also introduces the appraiser add on. This is intended to be an improvement to the standard post auction platform. In one interface, the user can see the contents of their bags, perform scans on individual items and easily set auction stacking values for sale. When stacks are modified, the appraiser will batch all the appropriate auction groups and submit the auctions appropriately. No more manually breaking stacks to sell singles.

Two issues stand out in this interface that I am sure the AA dev team is probably still working on: 1) The pricing models require alot of auction data in order to become more accurate. They also do not hook into the standard Auction pricing. 2) You cannot currently sort the scanned auctions to find where price breaks occur for various stacks. For me, I have to still use the standard Auctioneer post interface to find these breaks.

There are also a few additional features that are big bonuses:

AuctioneerAdvanced uses less memory. I plan to test how much actual savings I can get.
Incremental scanning: Even if you don't run explicit scans, AA will store any searches or items specific scans in the scan database.
AA is configured via GUI menus, no more worries with command line config.

Some things that you must keep in mind in using AA:

It will not convert existing Auctioneer data, so you're starting from scratch.
Auctioneer and AA are actually separate entities. They work okay together, but keep separate data.
Most addons that need Auctioneer don't recognize AA yet. You may need to keep Auctioneer running to get pricing data for some recipe/item addons.
AA is currently Alpha/Gamma quality code. If it breaks, it may break badly.

Feel free to try out AuctioneerAdvanced and let me know what you think.

Turing /waves

2007-10-04T11:15:00.001-04:00

Hello, and welcome to the Trials of Turing. This is a journal of my trials as a new player of World of Warcraft as I trek my way to the 70th season (level) on my main hunter toon Turing. While I have only been playing on WoW since January, 2007. I have been involved in role-playing games on and off since I was 12, some 26 years by my count (you can do the math). I was inspired to create this site in part to the somewhat famous BigRedKitty blog. Mostly, as a way to distill his vast hunter knowledge into a means I can use for myself and hopefully make useful for other hunters in my guild.

In the WoW world, I started with a Prot Pally which I got to 30 and decided the class was not for me. The social expectations of other players on the Paladin class required more than I was prepared for after only playing a few weeks. "No, I cannot tank AND heal in instances as a level 30 paladin." A longtime friend of mine invited me to play on his RP server (Feathermoon), where I rolled a Dwarf Hunter named Turing. While I chose the name using the random roller, I later realized this is also the name of Alan Turing, probably the most prominent name in artificial intelligence, and a name I thought appropriate for a virtual character in a virtual world. I am sure Mr. Turing would probably disagree, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.

Leveling Turing has been a blast, and I have learned so much about the game as I have gone along. I now appreciate the different aspects of the game more and understand why I had problems with player expectations of my Paladin. I still get the same types of expectations for my hunter, but I can handle them much better. Anyhow, I hope this journal (yeah I hate calling em blogs) will be of some use to fellow hunters. I know much of the common hunter content available is tailored for end-gamers, so I hope I can try to fill in some of the lower gaps. I know my outlook on the finer aspects of the game is probably much different than the esteemed BRK. I am not as gear or stats centric, and am certainly not versed in Theorycrafting. However, I am an addon addict and will review addons in a variety of game aspects. I also am intrigued by the social aspects of online games, and will likely also review many of the "new" aspects of the game I encounter as I hit them.

Cheers.