Invisibility Incoming

No not the mage skill but rather the ability to "Appear Off-Line" in Battle.net. Awesome stuff Blizzard but why has it taken this long?

Anyway rather than regurgitate Blizzards words, I'll simply quote the text:
In the coming months, we're planning an update to Battle.net that will give you more control over your online presence when playing Blizzard games. Soon, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III players will be able to select "Appear Offline" as one of their Battle.net social-status options (along with Available, Busy, and Away) for those times when they want to wander Azeroth by their lonesome, dominate the galaxy in radio silence, or slay demons in solitude. When you choose this option as your status, all of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as “Offline” in their friends list whenever you’re logged into a game.
The “Appear Offline” status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game. For Diablo III, we expect to add the feature in a patch after 1.0.5. For World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, we expect to add the option sometime after the release of each game’s upcoming expansion.
Thanks for your continued feedback, and we’ll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead.

HC Madness World Last?

I am please to report that the valiant Exhumed raid team got Heroic Madness of Deathwing down on September 24th 2012.

Yes, that's right the day BEFORE the expansion, 40 minutes to be exact). While the team last night did the dirty deed, the whole raid team deserve full credit and those that were not there last night will be sent off to repeat the kill later but for now we have new lands to explore.

The team that has brought us here are:

• Tanks: Acheronos, Brimar, Maxizilian
• Healers: Elysha, Evlyxx, Lifeshifter, Seleigh.
• Melee: Funforhire, Jehst, Kojiro, Pewpewboom.
• Ranged: Baniza, Emalie, Gasp, Hellsmiss, Sophina, Zuf.

There are also some players that have been able to step in from the shadows during the past few months and I'm hoping to see more of them in our Pandacraft campaigns.

After the gremlins ate my screenshots or I was sooo excited I was pressing the wrong button, Elysha saved the day with the image so a special thank you to Elysha.

Blizzard, we have a problem!

When conflicting demands occur I look for ways to provide a win-win situation. I only wish Blizzard would do the same when it comes to their midnight launches on a Monday night/Tuesday morning and allowing retailers to sell boxed copies of the game prior to the launch date.

Let me explain the issue. I'm a bit (OK maybe a lot) of a WoW fan, I like to be there first when the big in game stuff happens, I may not kill the big bads in world first or server first time-scales but I like to get my ass in the door of the new content when it happens. Blizzard loves faithful players like me.

Because of my love of the games, I buy the Collector's Edition too, not because I want the pet (or the mount in Pandacraft) but I like the big box on my shelf, the artwork book and the soundtrack and the DVD too. Therefore when they announced the launch and the CE I pre-ordered the boxed version on the day. I was, what we English call "keen as Mustard". I wasn't able to get what I wanted digitally direct from Blizzard.

My usual game provider, ShopTo.net, are great at getting games to their customers the day before big releases (I think Pandacraft qualifies as a big release) and for Cataclysm they had dispatched my boxed CE on Friday December 3rd 2010 and it arrived late-afternoon on Monday 6th December 2010. Awesome! Fast forward to 2012 and they didn't dispatch my order last Friday, I have been checking all weekend and my pre-order is still that a pre-oder. No dispatch time or anything. This morning I checked expecting to see that it was dispatched already and it wasn't. It is now 15 hours before the midnight launch I want to be experiencing so I call ShopTo, they advise they have not been allowed to dispatch until today which means I will get my pre-ordered boxed Collector's Edition "sometime tomorrow" Which most likely means late afternoon tomorrow.


This means this WoW fanboi will have missed the midnight launch excitement, leveling through content with my friends (who all slacked and bought the digital copy) and all the fun that goes with it.

I'm not a happy, in fact you could say I'm a sad panda, heck I can't be a sad panda cos I have no panda!

There is a solution for me though, I can buy the digital verion and then upgrade my account. Great! Except that my £60/€70/$80 Collector's Edition will now cost me an extra £30/€35/$40. Sure there is a chance that I will get a replacement key for a standard account when I upgrade, but I have an account I don't need a 2nd key. 

What would be great is if Blizzard changed the system a bit and used one of the following solutions:

• Credit me with £30/€35/$40 worth of gametime when I upgrade to a CE account if I buy the standard edition from the Blizzard Store;
• Supply companies selling pre-orders of the game a code that they can pass onto their customers that allows 48 hours of upgrade to an account (not a subscription);

Either work for me and my situation and I'm not the only one suffering from this scenario I know as I have read forum  posts like http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5348735687.

This has put a real downer on the start of the expansion for me lets hope Blizz learns from the experience this time.

Can I Play With Madness?

Can I play with Madness?

Well the simple answer is yes! After the fine boys and girls of Exhumed finally got round to killing Spine of Deathwing on heroic Just goes to show what perseverance and some dedicated folks can do when they want to.

We had a few pulls of Madness and thought that we do still have a chance of killing him before mists lift on Panderia and we're aiming for a server last and heck if we go to the wire on Monday it could even be a world last in Cataclysm. 

We're still recruiting (see the panel on the right for our needs) and if things continue in Pandacraft as we have ended Cataclysm we're looking in real good shape, so if you're looking for a new home in a non-hardcore guild (no attendance requirements and upto 9 hours raiding a week over 2-3 nights), where you can have fun and kill heroic bosses, with no elitist douchebags we could be the guild for you!

Announcing: PeonQuestComplete

PeonQuestComplete is my contribution to the world of addons. It is a small addon to give audio cues on the following events:

• you complete a quest
• you complete an objective of a quest

Each of these events will cause a distinct sound to be played (only the 'highest ranked' of these sounds will play, of course).

I appreciate that this is nothing new, heck I got hooked on it initially with QuestHelper and more lately, Medley. With Blizzard killing off quest helper with the built in quest tracking on the map quest addons are really unecessary and sadly 5.0.4 broke Medley, which I only used a single feature off from a list of a dozen or so. So a piece of bloatware to replace it seemed excessive. Other addons were a bit too intrusive and the closest thing I found to what I wanted was Yoco's QuestSounds but that too was too much spam. So I decided to strip down Yoco's QuestSounds and make it what I wanted. 

Therefore, PeonQuestComplete is heavily based on Yoco's QuestSounds and the without that addon I would not have been able to complete my project. PeonQuestComplete does not have the objective completion (when you kill 1 of the 12 boars you need for the quest) feature as I find it annoying to be spammed audibly and in the chat window for each minor event when all I wanted was a simple audible alert that says "ready to work" when I have completed the each major objective and "job done" when the quest has been completed.

No chat spam when you kill a mob in one of the objectives

This is what PeonQuestComplete is, it is intentionally simple and I'm not intending to add any additional features. Potential changes would be extra soundsets, if I discover any that may be appropriate. Because of the simplicity of the addon there will be no graphical configuration.

Upon quest or objective completion a message in your chat window  (not a chat channel)

The sounds are sounds that are embedded in the game, they are not external sound files and therefore place no additional demand on your game experience. 

While there is no localization support, the addon should work in other languages as well, but the feedback messages will be printed in English and the commands are in English.

There are two known problems:

1. The sounds may not play the first time they should play (if they aren't cached yet).
2. For some quests the wrong 'rank' of sound may play (e.g. the objective complete sound when the quest complete sound should play).

These are minor annoyances caused by the way WoW works rather than the addon failing and therefore cannot be fixed

The configuration "menu"

As can be seen from the above image, there are very few configuration commands available via the "/pqc" command ("/peonquestcomplete" is an alias for "/pqc"). 

There are three "sound sets" built in that you can choose between and you can switch between these via:

• /pqc set peon
• /pqc set peasant
• /pqc set mix

The 'peon' set is the default sound set because that is the one I like best. You can test the sounds that will play by running the "/pqc test" command:

To play the "queste complete" sound:

• /pqc test objective
• /pqc test 1

To play the "objective complete" sound:

• /pqc test objective
• /pqc test 2

The addon is available through WoWInterface and Curse, the download links are below:

Download from WoWInterface.com
Download from Curse

If you like the addon, tell your friends and get them to download it, if you find bugs, please contact me.

Discipline in 5.0.4

5.0.4 was now 2 weeks ago and so far I have been incredibly quiet about it. The reason for this has been many but now I'm pleased to say I'm breaking my silence.

My initial reaction was one of sheer horror, as a Disc Priest I felt incredibly weak straight away. My heals were amazing but my mana regen was completely inadequate. The first thing I did was to remove Flash Heal out my arsenal as even out of combat I couldn't chain cast it for more than 30 seconds before I was out of mana. Seems Disc Priests need to stack spirit as a primary stat once more. The cost of PW:Shield is also ridiculously high and that combined with the nerf to Rapture is a major problem too. It does seem that Disc is  meant to rely on Divine Aegis and the Spirit Shell shield for our absorbs rather than PW:Shield.

The Alt Factory: Strigimaga

Primary role: Damage dealer
Birth Date: April 20th 2008

Rolled initially as a PVP 19 twink to relieve the boredom in the early days of Wrath. This didn't last too long as I tired of pugging BGs solo even with the ability to one shot folks 9 levels below me because it felt like shooting fish in a barrel.

The name Strigimaga was one that I actually did a lot of searching for and is a very old name for a witch. The full text that drew me to the name is below, and was taken from the book: Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany by Sigrid Brauner:

In Roman folklore, the striga (derived from Latin strix, or “screech owl”) was a birdlike female spirit of the night who was believed to render men impotent and to feed children poisonous milk. Clerical writers used the term in the Middle Ages to describe the night-flying spirits of folk belief. But as in the cases of Hexe, lamia, and Unbulde, a term originally used to describe a mythical female spirit was redefined after 1450 to apply to the real-life modern witch.

Though less common than other terms for witches, striga inspired several etymologies and variations that tied it to modern witchcraft. The Inquisitor Bernhard of Como (Tractatus de strigiis, 1508) derives the term from the mythological underworld river Styx - because witches, he says, are from hell - and from the Greek word stigitos (“sadness”) - because witches, through their harmful sorcery, bring sadness. The Roman Dominican Sylvester Prierias (De mirandic sirigimagarum, 1521) changes the term striga into strigimaga in order to emphasize the harmful sorcery of witches. The Italian Inquisitor Arnaldus Alberunus (Tractatus de agnoscendis assertionibus catholicis, et bereticis, 1540) claims that witches are called strigae because they communicate at night by screaming like screech owls. Through such imaginative derivations and word combinations, sixteenth-century writers tailored the term striga to fit the new concept of the modern witch, adding connotations of harmful sorcery and diabolical dealings to the term while fortifying its traditional association with night flying..

Because of the gear being BiS at 19 and enchanted to the max I was able to level up fast and hit Outland still in mostly the same gear I was  PVPing in. Outland quest rewards fixed that though and I powered through the BC content and then ground my way to 74 as I levelled up my engineering grinding the mechs in the Steam Pools in Borean Tundra hoping to get the Jeeves pattern before hitting the usual quest/instance trail.

During the latter half of 2010 I changed my 2nd main from my mage, Valdarian, to Strigimaga as I was bored of the ways of the arcane mage 1 button spam in ICC raids (i was raiding with the lovely folks of All About Beer). Strig had a busy start to Cataclysm as I continued to raid with All About Beer through T11 but within 2 weeks of Firelands content coming out most of the guys in AAB stopped playing and my working schedule changed at this time as well so my alt raiding dried up until the Raid Finder. I'm looking forward to Mists and picking up the raiding on with a lock again because it was so much fun and the 5.0.4 changes will make that even better.