Posts Tagged ‘Paladin’

Featured Addon: Snowfall Keypress

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

It may never have affected you, you might not even have realized it, but keybound abilities in World of Warcraft do not activate until you release the key. This is usually a millisecond difference in most situations, but there may be a time where your key release isn’t instantaneous and the ability will come late.

In your arena matches, that little amount of time could be too late. We’ve all had that moment where a heal just barely didn’t go off in time or a CC didn’t hit quite fast enough.

The addon Snowfall Keypress aims to fix this problem. It makes all of your hotkeys activate abilities on key press not key release. Even if you feel that the little amount of time between pressing and releasing a key will make no difference to you, I would encourage you to download this addon and try it out for a week. Really, what can it hurt?

Head over to the downloads section or to WoWInterface to download this addon.

Playing another character

I have been wanting to start playing another character for some time now. I don’t mean quit playing my disc priest, I just need another character to work on during the “filler” time between arena matches where I just play another game as of late.

I have been thinking of leveling my horde paladin on Dragonmaw and doing some PvE tanking on him. On the other hand, it is pretty late in the expansion and I haven’t taken raiding seriously since early WotLK. Not to mention that I haven’t been in a raiding guild in quite some time.

I think I might go back to my holy paladin and get some PvP gear and maybe find a decent team to PvP with. If I do, I’ll probably have to transfer due to the lack of talent on Dalvengyr.

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How Long Will You Play WoW?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

I’ve always wondered how long I would play World of Warcraft. From the first few moments that I played it, I know that it would hold my attention for a while. Nevertheless, I couldn’t have predicted that I would still be playing it 4-5 years later. I probably would have laughed at the notion at the time. The longest I had ever played a single game was only for a few months at the time. In fact, I have “quit” WoW multiple times (more like took a hiatus). The 4-5 years of playing might never have happened.

The first time that I quit, it was some time before TBC. The game had the honor system for the super hardcore and raiding for the hardcore. Obtaining R13 wasn’t an option due to the massive amount of time needed to reach that rank. Also, I wasn’t able to spend enough time playing while in college to raid and actually get gear. There came a point where I realized that my gear was as good as it possibly could be without me raiding. Since I did not have time to raid, and had no other options of getting gear, I decided to quit. I really still wanted to play WoW, but couldn’t justify playing and not getting anywhere. That all changed a couple months later when Blizzard announced most of TBC changes. It was like they had read my mind and I started playing again. Coincidentally, I started raiding shortly after the game became more casual.

I played through much of TBC before taking another hiatus from WoW, this time for completely different reasons. It was during season 4 and I was playing my paladin. Our main focus was 3’s and our team makeup was Disc Priest, Ret Paladin, Ret Paladin. If you can remember season 4, you will see where our difficulties came from. The lack of a healing debuff or any real interrupts during a season where drain teams and double healers ruled the arenas left a sour taste in our mouths. At the time, ret paladin damage was lackluster at best. I had a lot more fun healing through hours in Zul’Aman with my guild than I did playing PvP. This was a low point in the history of paladins and I was tired of not having a good comp to play in arenas, so I quit again.

During this time, I ran a Counter Strike: Source server that grew to be one of the most popular servers in the world (top 100 out of 30000+ tracked servers). It was all a lot of fun, but ultimately I still wanted to play WoW, just didn’t enjoy it the way that it was. Yet again, Blizzard made changes that drew me back to the game. I have taken breaks from playing many times. Each varied from a couple weeks to a few months and had various other reasons (too busy, gone a lot, trying AoC, other MMOs, etc). Some of those times I was sure that I wouldn’t play again. Each time I was wrong.

So that brings me to to my original question. How long will I play WoW? I don’t think this question can really be answered. Whether another MMO steals my interest or if I just get tired after 5 years, I couldn’t say. Ultimately I’ll at least quit by the time the servers are shut off (which judging by the fact that Everquest is still going, could be another decade or so). Whether I play that long or not depends on if I continue to have fun playing a great game with friends.

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Confessions of a Bad Player

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

The inside truth as to what really goes through a bad player’s mind.

Confessions of a Bad Player

  1. Yes, my capslock is broken - I really need everyone to know that it is broken, so I will say anything that comes to my mind. HEY IT IS RAINING HERE.
  2. I need a summon from the mage and a food table from the warlock - How can you blame me? I don’t see how anyone can keep those two classes straight.
  3. When I’m casting pyroblast, you can’t expect me to move – My DPS is so important to this group that I need healers to focus on me.
  4. Honestly, I really don’t know how to spec. I think I’ll just put 1 point in everything. – That’s the strategy that everyone goes for anyway.
  5. I gladly gem my gear with green TBC gems. - Anything else is just too expensive. Hey, it isn’t the gear that makes the player.
  6. Pots make up for skill. – I’m new to this class, and the game, but I brought some flasks with me so prepare yourself to be blown away.
  7. I take PvP so seriously that nobody else is worthy to play on my team. – Sure, I might be at the bottom of the KB, HK, and Damage meters, but that’s because everyone else sucks so bad that I just stopped caring.
  8. Epic ground mounts are too expensive. – I really don’t have the time to play this game if it is that hardcore. Plus, they aren’t THAT much faster.
  9. I regularly Divine Storm thin air. – I’m actually just checking for “rouges”.
  10. I can’t kill anything because my class is gimp. – Blizzard hates me.

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Current and Future Battlegrounds

Monday, October 12th, 2009

The State of Battlegrounds

I was grinding some honor this weekend so I can switch out my trinkets with a Medallion of the Horde and a Battlemaster’s trinket. The PvP daily for Sunday was Alterac Valley. I tried multiple times during the day to complete the daily, but every AV that I was in turned into a turtle with Alliance winning. I gave up after multiple games and tried playing some WSG and AB to get the marks that I need for turn-ins. We lost so horribly in both, that I gave up all together. The honor grind is bad enough without the current problems with BGs. This made me think about the current state of battlegrounds and how they can be improved.

I guess it isn’t really a matter of winning or losing. Sure, winning games technically makes your honor grind 1/3 of what it would be if you lost every game. I wasn’t in a preform, so I wasn’t going in *expecting* to win every game. The problem was that I had to wait 12 minutes for a que to pop and then we not only lost, but we dragged the loss out. The last WSG that I tried, the alliance had a Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, and a geared Prot Warrior. This would take a decent group of people to kill them, let alone a team of random scrubs. After a ton of turtling and losing the game because time ran out, it really got me thinking about the current state of battlegrounds and where it could go in the future.

Battlegrounds have come a long way

If you were around when battlegrounds were first introduced, you can remember having to run all the way to Ashenvale to play them (a particularly time consuming task for Alliance when the closest port was Darnassus). Those were the days that premades reigned supreme. If you were unlucky enough to play against one, your team didn’t stand a chance. At the time, many players were complaining about battlegrounds and how it took away from World PvP. Compared to today’s battlegrounds, those starting WSG matches did not even compare to how easy/fast/convenient battlegrounds are today. Whether you think that is a good thing or not.

Before arenas, battlegrounds were the only way for a player to get good PvP gear outside of raiding. It was for hardcore players only, nobody got GM without having 2-3 friends play on their account while they worked/slept/ate. For many people, it was a turn off because of the sheer amount of time required to get anywhere.

Cut ahead to today where battleground honor grinds is THE way for casuals to get gear. The current system is great because it opens up the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The downside is that it opens the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The same upside to the system is the same thing as it’s main downfall.

With all the improvements, I will outline some problems that I currently see and outlooks on fixing them.

Que Times

Depending on where you play and which faction you play as, these problems might not be existent or as noticeable. As it currently stands for my battlegroup, during peak hours of the day, a horde player can expect to wait in the que for 10+ minutes before playing anything other than AV. This has been a problem for a while. There does not seem to be enough horde players queuing for anything other than AV. I can see merging of battlegroups to fix the long que times, but this will bring up other issues such as lag and overpopulation of battlegroups.

The solution for this problem is a complicated one. It isn’t necessarily a problem with how queues work, it is more a problem of players not wanting to play battlegrounds. Blizzard needs to simultaneously keep working on the queues and somehow make Battlegrounds more worthwhile to those who take it seriously. With the announcement of rated battlegrounds, I can see an opportunity to take battlegrounds where they should be: A place for casuals to play PvP but yet not interfere with more serious PvPers.

Bad Players

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like the quality of the playerbase seems to be declining. It used to be a fairly rare occurrence that I would find a truly bad player and have a good laugh about it with my guildies. Now it is such a common occurrence that we don’t really even point them out anymore. We all know who I’m talking about; It is the warrior with spirit gear, or the hunter with the spec that looks like he closed his eyes and clicked wildly, or even the player who has decent gear/spec and still can’t seem to break 1000 dps. There is always the independent player who never seems to want to contribute to the team and the loner who tries to contribute but wants to do so by himself.

When you get stuck on a team with a bunch of bad players, it is frustrating. We’ve all been there. You are grinding out 62000 honor for your next Relentless offpiece and there are multiple people in the group who are going for their first deadly piece. In WSG, your team can’t seem to kill the FC who has one healer on him because everyone is just that bad. Frustrating to say the least.

Luckily, this problem should be solved with rated battlegrounds. Hopefully the low geared players will stay at lower ranks and will not end up playing the higher geared and skilled players. The change to battlegrounds in TBC where gear affected who you played against was a step in the right direction. Moving to rated battlegrounds is another great step.

Away from Keyboard

Over the history of battlegrounds, AFK’ing has been a problem. There have been many improvements to players combating AFK players in battlegrounds. We have the deserter debuff and AFK flagging as a result to the number of complaints there were of players in the AV grind. It seems like Blizzard has run out of solutions for this.

The first problem with the current system is that it takes too much effort from players to police the AFKers. You don’t always notice that player who AFKed in a spot that looks like they are participating. I am usually too into the fight and don’t want to take the time to look around for AFK players. The bright side is that if someone notices an AFKer and points them out, it is not hard to get them reported.

The second problem with the current system is that it doesn’t have very steep of a penalty. If a player is reported AFK over multiple battlegrounds and keeps doing that, then Blizzard will investigate and might ban their account for a short period of time. Really, that is no deterrence for the problem. The player still ends up taking up a slot for the remainder of the battleground match and in some matches can make a difference.

I think that the current measures would be adequate if two things were to happen: Battleground honor grinds need to be either shorter or more fun and the penalty needs to be steeper. If a players grind of 370000+ honor that it takes to get the season’s off pieces was more variant, I think people would AFK less. Also, if reported players had 1 minute to get into combat otherwise they would be removed from the battleground and given a 30 minute deserter debuff, that would stop many of the players who use a bot to AFK.

Future of Battlegrounds

I think anyone can get excited for the changes that are planned for battlegrounds in Cataclysm. I plan on being there and experiencing it all. For right now, we can just play together and make the best of the current system. So if you play on the Reckoning battlegroup and see me on my character Ferngully, be sure to give me a shout out (or a friendly /wave as I kill you if you are Alliance).

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Welcome to k3b1

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Change to k3b1

We have switched gears on k3b1.com. There have been a lot of followers of our past endeavors. Many of you will remember Exigo, ESP, PC Gaming and further back to the classic k3b1 forums (if you don’t, i’ll be glad to tell you the stories). Today we are transforming k3b1 into a WoW blog. I will tell you why, but first let me share a little about who we are:

About Us and Our Condensed WoW Story

k3b1 stems from our names “Kent” and “Blake”. We coined that term many years ago when we first started programming games and making websites (dope fish + star wars). We are brothers who live in North Dakota.

We started playing WoW in early 2005. Over the years we have leveled many characters and made a lot of friends as well as some enemies. During this time we have logged over 600 days playtime combined. We have grown to know the intricacies of the game and the classes. We have spent time focused on PvE as well as PvP, have leveled both Horde and Alliance characters, and have led large raiding guilds as well as been members in them.

In vanilla WoW, we played a Warrior and Paladin on Hellscream US. We did not have the time to push for R13, so we did not have top of the line PvP gear. Even though we were undergeared, we beat many of our opponents by using game mechanics alone. I am reminded of Darafeln standing outside of IF and nobody would duel him because he just beat another 60 with his “lightsaber” (enchanted training stick). Because of the multiple hour que’s to log into Hellscream, we transferred to Dalvengyr in the first ever PvE to PvP transfers. Towards the end of vanilla, we got into raiding. Starting with MC and later going to ZG and AQ 20/40.

In BC, we kept our characters and started focusing on raiding. After leaving our guild over differences in opinions, we started our own guild and cleared Kara/Gruul and started on TK and SSC. At this point in time, the Dalvengyr population was very casual. It was extremely difficult to constantly get 25 people online for raids and there was a very small player pool to recruit from. We decided that we could have a lot more fun on a well populated and established realm. We decided to reroll.

We both started Blood Elf Paladins on Dragonmaw US. We played these characters until the end of S4 and decided to reroll again on Dalvengyr before WotLK came out (Dalvengyr had been selected as a “recommended” realm and the population bloomed). Darafeln started leveling a Shaman and I started leveling another Warrior. Before WotLK, I switched to leveling my 56 Paladin (which I had leveled in the Kara/Gruul days) due to the huge ret buffs before WotLK.

WotLK came out and we hit 80 on Shaman/Paladin. Our small guild cleared Naxx within a couple months and most of us were soon bored with Naxx. Darafeln then leveled a Rogue and some on his Paladin where as I leveled my warrior to 80. We started getting into PvP again and focused on Shaman/Warrior comp in S5/6. During this time we did a little Ulduar raiding but nothing major. As you may know, Shaman/Warrior is one of the worst comps during those seasons and we decided that we wanted to reroll a good PvP comp.

We convinced our friend to roll a Mage and I rolled a Priest. We were going to run a RMP comp in 3’s. We hit 80, transferred off of Dalvengyr back to Dragonmaw and faction changed to Horde to play with a bunch of old friends. We started the comp a couple months ago and thats when we decided to start this blog.

Our current main characters are:

Ferngully (Undead Priest, Dragonmaw US)

Ballsagna (Blood Elf Rogue, Dragonmaw US)

Our other 80’s include:

Blatzkowitz (Human Warrior, Dalvengyr US)

Macabuwia (Draenei Shaman, Dalvengyr US)

Contiguous (Dwarf Paladin, Dalvengyr US)

And other various characters 60+

Why the change

We have played WoW for almost 5 years. I know there are new players out there who are trying to pick up every new tidbit they can and also veterans who enjoy discussing WoW. This blog is the place for that. We want to share our knowledge with the WoW community; New players will find this blog both helpful and encouraging. We were all new at one time.

Another side to this is if you are a veteran player and really enjoy discussing the latest patch notes, class balance, BG’s, raids, etc. we love to discuss it also. We spend hours in vent some days discussing talent builds, glyphs, strategies, etc. We are looking to help out newer players while trying to get some good discussions going. Hopefully we make some friends along the way.

Welcome to k3b1

We have another site (www.doodadnox.com) where you can freely host your gaming screenshots without all the clutter and advertisements of larger image hosts. Feel free to check it out and sign up for an account to start sharing your screenshots today.

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