Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 9

Kurn / / blogging

I’m pretty annoyed. I did this whole video about my old guild and our BC raiding and then talked about what I knew about Sunwell Plateau… and the sound completely bugged out. Every half second, the sound on my voiceover would blip out for a tiny fraction of time, but it sounds awful. I’m going to probably keep the raw footage and then try to do a voiceover. We’ll see if I have time this week. That said, the Montreal Canadiens lost to the Carolina Hurricanes last Friday night, so I suddenly have more time on my hands. ;)

Topic 1: Bored now

I am so bored with WoW right now that I’m not even logging in for crafting orders. And I love crafting things! What is keeping you playing right now?

Topic 2: Storytime with Kurn

Video coming Soon, but I’m still pissed off that my audio was all whacked out. I need to troubleshoot that and then redo a voiceover. Grr. Argh.

Topic 3: Favourite Race, Favourite Class

Tell me about your favourite race in WoW and why it’s that race.

Then tell me about your favourite class in WoW and why it’s that class.

And tell me if you have any race/class combos that you adore.

Male night elf hunter for me, for Kurn.

Female human paladin for me, for Madrana.

And then I am a sucker for male dwarves and their emotes and their casts. I have a lot of male dwarves. They may be my favourite race to play. But never for a hunter. I do not mind them as pallies, though! The Baby Paladin was a dwarf ’till like, Wrath content? I think? It’s been a while.

I’m especially interested to know if anyone really favours the newer races and classes and why!

And, as always, what do you want to hear me talk about next week, either on this blog or in Storytime with Kurn?

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 8

Kurn / / blogging, general, ramblings

Brace yourselves — I actually opened WoW for more than auction stuff this week! hahaha!

I’d been watching a video a few weeks ago about rare titles, and that video basically got me thinking about titles, and it also encouraged me to watch a video series about this one guy Barny on a Classic server and the title Scarab Lord.

Scarab Lord is a wild title. The things necessary to get the title are absolutely bonkers.

So I visited Silithus (old world version) on Kurn and recorded a little video which is the first of a series in which I tell a story or two. Or three. It’ll be called Storytime with Kurn. And so my first stories have to do with Scarab Lord and the Brood of Nozdormu and such.

I may rerecord it because I think I rambled too much, so I need to rewatch it before I post it anywhere, and then potentially rerecord it, but expect it this week at my YouTube channel!

ETA: Here’s the link, I didn’t rerecord it:

Let me know what zones/dungeons/etc you want to hear my stories about. Anything from Vanilla to Cataclysm is valid.

Haven’t done much else and don’t have a lot of thoughts today, but let me know what stories you want to hear, go subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I’ll do what I can to get stories up weekly-ish. :)

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 7

Kurn / / apotheosis, general, raiding, ramblings

Once again, didn’t do much to do with WoW this week. Part of it is the hockey playoffs. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, is still in the Stanley Cup playoffs as I write this. They may be eliminated Monday night, or they may move on to the third (of four) rounds. Who knows? It’s been a weird playoffs.

The other part is a lack of motivation. I feel like there’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get anything in terms of gear, so I’m just… not doing a lot? Maybe?

Still, as usual, I have things to say. :) (And I’ll note I started this entry on Sunday even though as I finish it, it’s now Monday. But I have Monday off for Victoria Day so I’m still going to pretend it’s Sunday.)

Topic 1: The Old Days

I had a former guildie, Aaza (hi Aaza!), comment on my last post. She’d wanted to know if I had a copy of our Illidan kill. That kill happened in, uh, like August or September of 2008. And I had it! I didn’t realize it was set to unlisted, so I set it to public and linked to it. (Thanks to Dayden for frapsing it and putting together the video!)

That someone, from that old version of Apotheosis, wanted to see our Illidan kill, was kind of interesting to me. I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. Not nostalgic enough to do all of that GMing/raiding/etc again, mind you! But nostalgic enough to feel as though some of the memories my guild and I had made together really meant something to people at the time. So to have Aaza pop in and be like “hi!!!” was really lovely, because it sort of validated that I hadn’t wasted my time back in Burning Crusade. (Or in Cata, for that matter.)

Topic 2: I miss… something

Growing up, I read. I read, I played video games, I called local bulletin board systems… and, of course, being a teenage girl, I talked on the phone a lot. But I never really had much interest in joining a sports team. I didn’t really feel the need. I got a lot of my social needs met just by hanging out with friends and stuff, and then dating, later on.

But the school I’d gone to for eleven years of my life (grades 1-11!) had taught me a lot about teamwork and leadership. We were separated into different houses (yes, like Hogwart’s — and, btw, fuck JK Rowling for being a transphobic piece of shit!), and so we were forced to participate in teams to do with the houses for various things. Two of my closest friends from school weren’t in my grade. They were in the grade below me — and both were on my house. And we’re still close to this day. One of them is my RL Friend the Resto Druid I have mentioned dozens of times on this very blog!

So when I joined Fated Heroes in, oh boy, like late 2005… I was kind of all-in. It was the first time I’d really been part of a team. And, naturally, I wanted to be helpful. Back then, I was in learning mode. I wanted to know everything about how the game worked. Absolutely everything. I think I reached my peak knowledge of the game in Wrath, when I learned about parry thrashes.

We lost my brother to a rival guild, who was already actively raiding, while Fated Heroes was… fated to stand around a lot. ;) But I worked hard to bring information to the guild, put up a forum for us, dropped info for attunements, T0 gear drops, etc. And we slowly but surely got to the point where we raided. We never had 40 people in a raid (well, maybe once, but that wasn’t even all our guild) and we didn’t clear MC or kill Ony (do not get me started on the warrior who claimed to me he had like 3000 defense when, in fact, that was how much ARMOR he had), but we cleared all of ZG, including Jindo the Hexxar and such. And we did spawn Majordomo Executus in MC. And we did get Ony down to like, 20ish percent. It was just a rough time to get everyone used to raiding on these days at these times when most people had only joined for fun. Still, I pushed as much as I could. I got so many people attuned to everything way back then.

Why?

These people in Fated Heroes, they were my team. And if I knew one thing from my schooling, it was that the sum of the parts of a team are a greater force than the individual parts alone. I believed we could do anything we set our minds to doing.

That was really my first taste of real teamwork in an environment where I cared about the result. If my house lost at floor hockey to another house during 7:45am inter-house games at school, I honestly didn’t care. But if my guild didn’t get Venoxis down? I cared. If my guild didn’t get Lucifron down? I cared. If people in my guild didn’t loot their goddamn Core Hounds? I very much cared. ;)

So that’s the feeling I’m missing right now. I’m not super into any online communities right now. I’m not even really into any offline communities right now. I am missing a sense of belonging to a team. And I’m not sure where to get it.

And it always makes me think about WoW, because WoW is the place in my life where I have put everything I had into running good teams. Whether it was the guild as a whole, just the healers, just the hunters, whatever. I gave it my all.

I’m not saying I want to give my all to something, mind you. I don’t have the time or even the energy for that these days.

But I do miss something team-like.

Topic 3: Rabid end-stage capitalism will be the end of us all.

Between billionaires and AI, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only fucked, we’re super fucked.

Eat the rich. And if you can’t, tax them.

For the first time in my entire life, I have wanted to be offline more than online lately. And you have to understand something about me — I have been terminally online forever. For decades. I started using the Internet in 1994. That’s over 30 years ago. And while I’ve certainly managed to create, you know, a life for myself, I work in tech, and I work remotely, and I have done so for the last decade. (another 2 years spent in an office at a startup here in Montreal, so 12 years in tech.)

But the more I think about tech and the world and where it’s all going, the less I even want to sit down at my computer.

Who would have thought that AI (and the billionaires, let’s not forget those motherfuckers) would be the thing to push me away from online? Who would have thought that something I’d always enjoyed thinking about (in a very “someday in the future” sense) would come to be and be one of the worst blights on humanity?

Sometimes I do wish I could just live at my parents’ cottage for the rest of my days. Read. Canoe. Write. Even go swimming, occasionally, despite the fact that the lake is fed by mountain streams and is always bitterly cold.

And yet, we have to at least play along with the capitalism that is eating us all alive, because we have to do things like pay for rent. And food. And everything else that comes with being a human in the early 21st century.

It’s a major bummer.

What are your thoughts, gang? What’s on your mind?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 6

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

I did sweet fuck all this week in WoW.

And I didn’t really miss it.

I had a short work week, spent time with loved ones, friends, family, read a book and a half in the last week, watched four hockey games and that meant no real time for video games.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts on things. :)

Topic 1: The WoW Store

There’s a sale being advertised in the Blizzard launcher, for many (all?) of the Blizzard games. When you click on World of Warcraft, they are encouraging you to buy Midnight, but also a housing thing. “Cozy Treehouse Retreat Bundle”, which has some druid or panda themed housing stuff, including the externals. Only 7500 Hearthsteel!!! WHAT A DEAL, PEOPLE!!!! ahahaha. That is $92.50 CAD, and that’s before tax. That is more expensive than all but the epic version of the Midnight expansion.

But wait, there’s more! You can get a “Blooming Arboon” mount, either “Blossomback” or “Amberback” for $32 CAD apiece. (I’m guessing that’s about $25 USD.)

And if that’s not enough, they’re bribing you to buy a 6-month subscription ($97.99 CAD, pre-tax) in exchange for a flying mount in Retail and a pet in Classic. And if you buy a 12-month subscription ($195.98 CAD, pre-tax), you get an additional flying mount and ground mount in Retail and a flying mount in classic. Or some nonsense like that. You can read more about the offer here.

Why at least a six-month subscription? Because that’s like $100 (CAD, maybe 70-75 USD) in their pockets immediately. It’s a very nice revenue bump. And why does that matter? It matters because the Microsoft fiscal year ends at the end of June. So the revenue bump helps the bottom line now, right before the end of the fiscal year, and then since it’s for 6 months, any money from those WoW subscribers between now and November is sort of like the icing on the cake. So if they buy Hearthsteel, or if they buy a mount, or a pet, or a character boost, or whatever. It’s above and beyond what they anticipated from you just having an ongoing subscription.

Honestly, looking at the finance page at Yahoo about Microsoft makes me feel vaguely ill. Everything is basically in billions. The market value of Microsoft is approximately 4.1 trillion dollars.

And they couldn’t be bothered to fix the guild bank issues.

Or make sure a patch launches without game-breaking bugs.

Or ensure that textures persist in housing.

But they can take the time to come up with new art assets and sell them or bribe people into getting them, as long as they make a quick buck!

It’s pretty gross.

Topic 2: If I were rich…

If I were very, very independently wealthy, there are several things I’d want to do right off the bat, most of which is caring for my family and friends. You know, pay off my brother and sister-in-law’s mortgage. Pay for private school for their kids. That sort of thing.

But assuming I’d have a good chunk left over, I think I’d want to try to put together a small game dev company. Nothing huge, but a nice place to work, where everyone gets benefits, mostly flexible hours, work remotely, all that good stuff. I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head and I am not talented enough to code everything, nor do I have the time to code everything. Because it would be a lot.

And just looking at the Microsoft financials (even more info here), and knowing that they’re doing voluntary layoffs makes me feel even more ill. All of this means that they hope their numbers will go up.

We are in late-stage capitalism and the numbers cannot always go up.

I am tired of living in such a rabidly capitalist society, and I don’t even live in the USA (although anything they do affects us significantly). But in order to, you know, have a place to live, one needs to at least try to play the capitalism-numbers-go-up game. So if I could run a small game dev company, hire carefully, pay very well, and then get some kind of return because the games are good, then that would be awesome.

Alas, I fear I will never be independently wealthy to the point of doing so. But it’s nice to dream about.

Topic 3: Classic Dungeons

I think Strat UD is my favourite of the Classic dungeons, but BRD is a close second, followed by LBRS as a close third. Strat is my favourite because of my multiple failed (and some successful!) 45-minute Baron runs. I just know it so well and have so many great memories of being in there.

BRD might be closer to Stockholm Syndrome, given the number of times I’ve run Jailbreak or attuned someone to the core. But again, the memories made there are priceless to me.

LBRS is a freaking labyrinth until it clicks. And once it clicks, you’ll never get lost again. Or, at least I never did. It was one of my first runs with my guild at the time and I was level 52 (? Maybe 53?) and I was level-pulling everything around us. Whoopsiedoodle. :D But I always enjoyed it. There was a ton to explore, lots of rare drops, lots of bosses, lots of tier 0 pieces to be had.

What about you? What are your favourite Classic/Vanilla dungeons?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 5

Kurn / / blogging, classic, ramblings

Welcome to yet another Sunday Brain Dump!

Topic 1: Haven’t done much

I have to admit to not having done much in the last week. After many years of not watching hockey regularly, I’ve returned to it, and it’s the playoffs now. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, have played 7 games and have now won 4 (they won Game 7 against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Tampa) and are now moving on to the next round. So I haven’t done a whole lot in WoW. But I also don’t have a lot to do in WoW. Farming remains the constant chore, but it does sometimes feel like a chore. Maybe I’ll take month off or something. I feel like I need to find a goal in the game.

Topic 2: Classic Plus?

There’s a lot of talk about a Classic Plus mode — hints from Blizz, a possible announcement at BlizzCon, stuff like that. And there’s the final shutdown of Turtle WoW coming this month. I can understand, Blizzard/Microslop need to protect their trademarks and copyrighted material. But my understanding is that Turtle WoW was developing new CLASSIC content? Wow. That’s wild. And it’s SO COOL. Different zones, mobs, quests, loot? Incredible.

So is that what Blizzard’s potential Classic Plus mode will include?

I played a tiny bit of Season of Discovery and I … didn’t like it. Was it kind of neat to see new talents/spells/abilities on different classes and specs? Sure. But they were all a bit weird to me. A mage, healing? Very weird. And having some key abilities available at like, early levels? My nephew was a rogue who had shadowstep extremely early on. I don’t know if that’s the way to go, at least for me and my interest. Part of what I always enjoyed about levelling was the gaining power aspect. Getting talents at 10 and then building on that every single level, even if you didn’t get anything at the trainer, that was awesome. So it’s weird to me to see stuff showing up at the start.

But the idea of exploring new zones at like, 50-60? New quests? New gear? Maybe alternative dungeons or small raids? I’m not saying I would do a ton of that group content, but I’m saying it would interest me.

Topic 3: What happens after Naxxramas?

The question occurs to me that if Classic Plus exists, is Naxxramas still the endgame in Classic? I mean, you typically go Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxxramas, right? With things like ZG and AQ20 thrown in there for people who are maybe trying to gear up to get into something like Molten Core.

But what happens after Naxx? In a Classic Plus, that is? Do you get a Tier 4 that isn’t from Burning Crusade? Or a Tier 5? What about a Tier 6? Because the thing about Classic is that it does have a termination point. After Naxxramas, that was it. You headed to Outlands. Naxx released June 19, 2006 and patch 2.0.1 launched on December 5, 2006, followed quickly by Burning Crusade’s release on January 9, 2007.

So what do you do after Naxx? IS there something after Naxx in a Classic Plus world? I don’t play a ton of Classic these days, but I know that people were definitely raiding Naxx successfully, way more than originally. I’m sure that it having existed for 15+ years before people got into it in Classic servers really helped, as most of the challenges are solved. People know how to do 4 Horsemen. People know how to do Instructor Razuvious. There’s no mystery left. And raids and stuff have gotten harder since Naxx. Kael’thas and Vashj were hard compared to what we saw in Naxx (well, the Wrath version of Naxx at 80, anyway).

Another question: if there is something post-Naxx in a Classic Plus world, does that mean one has to go through MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx to get the gear required to go through whatever comes next? Or will they introduce a catch-up mechanic?

There’s an interesting site, The Classic Project, at wowclassic.plus. These people are not affiliated with Blizzard, but are taking surveys to see how people feel about various bits of change in a potential Classic Plus world. It’s kind of neat, just need to sign in with a Discord account and take the surveys if you like.

In one of the surveys about the world, it asks about attunements.

Should attunements be streamlined/made easier?

  • No, and if you touch the Onyxia attunement questline, I’ll lock you away with Marshal Windsor
  • Sure, cut out the aggressive travel sections, but keep the spirit of attunements intact
  • Yes, I’m tired of going to BRD or grinding righteous orbs just to enter a raid – cut it down and allow players to walk in easily.

 

I definitely voted no, because I will lock someone away with Marshal Windsor if I need to! I believe that attunements do a lot for bonding and team building.

Seriously, go do these surveys. I’m doing one right now and one of the questions is:

Should Damage/Heal over Time spells be able to crit baseline for all classes? The options are No, DoTs and HoTs shouldn’t crit, Yes, change it to allow them to crit, or Only if they make it a new talent that you can spec into.

And I instinctively went for the talent and then stopped, remembering one of the Blizz folks at a BlizzCon years and years ago saying that if you didn’t take a specific talent in one of the DPS warrior trees, you weren’t being creative or imaginative, you were just being a bad (whatever spec) DPS warrior. So while I don’t particularly like the idea of HoTs and DoTs critting for anyone, I don’t like the idea that you have to talent for it. If there’s an action someone can take in order to get their spells critting, and they don’t take it, that seems like a bad (class name here), right?

Basically, this survey is making me think a lot about what I want to see in a Classic Plus world.

What about you? Any interest in such a thing? What would it look like to you?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 4

Kurn / / blogging, midnight, patches, ramblings

Welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump — actually on a Sunday! :)

Topic 1: 12.0.5

Gonna be honest, I really don’t care much for this patch.

I tried the void assaults — boring.

I tried the ritual sites — less boring, but still boring.

Haven’t messed with Decimus’ stuff yet. In part, because I don’t have anything except maybe my bow that is already upgraded to 6/6 Hero.

Hide and Seek Decor Duels: apparently, Track Humanoid worked for this. Which is hilarious to me, as a hunter. But also, zero interest in this. (It was hotfixed.)

Fishing: Listen, I like fishing. I don’t know that I want to bother with spearfishing, etc. I’ll probably give it a try, though.

Marksmanship Hunter: I had to partly respec due to the partial refund of talent points I was given, but I didn’t take Explosive Shot. I should probably research things and respec appropriately, but I don’t know that I need Explosive Shot? Again?

Decor stuff/Housing: All I really care about at the moment is using Decor to make money, so most of this doesn’t affect me.

So… really, it’s all kind of meh to me at the moment.

Topic 2: Gold

When I hit about 1.7 million gold, I bought my next token, for about 235k gold. I’m now back up to 1.6 million and have used my token. I’m making decent money, but it’s not consistent. I need to look at making more cash more reliably. I’m way too reliant on concentration to make top-level potions and flasks at the moment. And I’m not using a lot of my other crafting professions to make good-quality gear, but I am getting recipes pretty regularly with moxie.

What stuff are you selling lately?

Topic 3: Bugs

Tell me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot.

That’s how it feels. Reading through the hotfix notes makes me chuckle and also just shake my head. How do these things get through whatever passes as “quality assurance” these days? Do they even have quality assurance at Blizzard presently? Because it really doesn’t feel like it. Like, what the hell is this patch note?

Valeera is no longer unwilling to attack Poison Dart Frog or Giant Cursed Bullfrog.

… why would she have been unwilling to attack the frogs? Why is she so poorly coded? Or what about this one?

Pandaren characters who boost during the intro sequence will now be able to port to their houses.

??? How on earth does a boost during the intro mean that they couldn’t port to their houses?

I know part of it is spaghetti code. This has got to be a vast codebase that dates all the way back to the early 2000s. I’m sure there’s still some code there that has been untouched since Alpha versions of Vanilla WoW. So I assume that’s part of it, right? But still, that’s where QA should come in.

I don’t develop software for the masses myself, although I do know how to program and read code in a variety of languages (PHP, JavaScript, Python). I have, however, spent the last decade of my life working for various SaaS companies (Software as a Service), so I see up close and personal how software is built. I know that the product team has to communicate their needs to the development team. The development team does the hard work of research and coding. Then, theoretically (although this does get skipped out on a lot), a quality assurance team tests the potential release for bugs, including regressions (which are bugs that were squashed previously, but can sometimes return for various reasons). Once internal testing is complete, you then get some public users to beta test it and development continues to fix any bugs the beta testers have found. Meanwhile, marketing is getting ready to push out a ton of, well, marketing about the latest and greatest, support is working on documentation and stuff to ensure people know how to make things work, and everything goes live when the new version goes live.

Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder wrote in 1871, “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

And it’s true. Sometimes you have to roll things back because something happened once everyone got access to something and something went horribly awry. Sometimes a bug that wasn’t part of testing anything shows up and you need to hotfix it. All of that is totally normal.

What I posit is not totally normal is the frequency with which these WoW bugs occur. Not only that, but the type of bugs that occur. If it has to do with the new content, QA didn’t do its job.

So the track humanoids issue in the Decor Duel? Bad QA.

The Pandarens boosting thing? That was assuredly not part of testing at all, which is why it’s having to be hotfixed. My theory on this is that when they introduced housing, something in it is tied to character creation. And character creation gets interfered with by boosting. Not only that, but Pandaren are special, because they are neutral until the end of their intro quests, right? So if this only happened to the Pandaren, we can make the following assumptions:

1) Housing relies on character creation to some extent, which makes sense — someone cannot have a home without a character.

2) So somewhere in character creation, they (now, or at least since housing was introduced at the tail-end of The War Within) tie … I don’t know, a housing and decor database to the character. So let’s say that as the character is created and various database tables are created, we now create a housing one and a decor one. (Again, this is a guess.)

3) At some point, long ago, they introduced character boosting. I believe you can create a new character who will automatically be the boosted level. So they had to interrupt character creation at a specific moment to prevent having to start out at a level 1 or whatever.

4) When creating housing, we can assume that the link has not been fully established for a character who is not one of the two factions, Alliance and Horde. We can assume that the boosting track goes down one path instead of reusing the original code, lest boosting not give you your boosted toon.

5) End result: Pandaren who are boosted, who (presumably) get their faction at a different point than fresh-rolled Pandaren, cannot port to their plot because something went wonky on character creation.

Again, that’s just my assumption. But we can see within that assumption where things went wrong. Based on those suppositions, I believe that whoever implemented housing at character creation did not think about boosted characters beyond a regular boosted character who starts out as a Horde or Alliance player. Most Pandaren (except maybe those who, like NeutralAgent on YouTube) choose a faction eventually. But it’s not immediate in most cases.

So while I will say that such use-cases are more difficult to think of, someone should be thinking about it.

And what really gets me about this is that so many of the players of this game could think of the use-cases that could break things. Like the Track Humanoids thing. Or could at least question whether or not character creation for a boosted Pandaren is similar enough to other characters. You know what I mean? Often, our knowledge of the game is just so deep and so broad that we can see these problems coming a mile away.

I think that’s part of the frustration players have with the game. If we could see something coming a mile away, why can’t the devs?

There are a couple of possibilities that come to mind, here.

The first is that the devs don’t have deep game knowledge. Seeing how much turnover (and how many have been laid off) means that people are relatively new to the codebase. And while we can probably assume that a certain percentage of Blizzard employees are fans of Blizzard’s games, they may not be assigned to work on the game they enjoy the most. So it’s entirely possible a large chunk of WoW people don’t have a ton of long-term game knowledge.

The other thing that comes to mind is that people are relying entirely too much on AI for coding. It is mandatory for Microsoft employees (which Blizzard employees are) to use AI. Mandatory. As in, you don’t use it, you’re likely going to be out of a job.

Do you think Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever “AI” model they use (probably Copilot) has any game knowledge whatsoever? Do you think that an AI model can truly wonder about the possibility that if someone is appearing as, I don’t know, a chair, their character would still show up as a humanoid? Do you think that an AI model can contemplate and reason through why Pandarens might have a problem with porting to their homes?

The answer is no. Even AI models that are trained on that codebase cannot necessarily make the links between seemingly disparate items the way a real human can. It may know the exact chance of looting a Skullflame Shield off a random mob in Silithus, but it cannot link these examples together on its own. It would need a real human being to force it to review the code for all these things and ask if there are differences, or to point out the differences, at which point the AI will undoubtedly say something like “great context, thanks!”

A third possibility comes to mind — it could well be both of these.

All right, enough ranting for me for now. What would you like to hear me ramble about next week? And what do you think about patch 12.0.5?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 3

Kurn / / blogging, midnight

Hey, hey, gang! Look! I actually had time on Sunday to post a Sunday Brain Dump! HOORAY!

Topic 1: Valeera — again

I had to do it. I had to download an addon to mute her stupid ass. It’s called Mute Valeera (Delves) by Italistqt. It’s phenomenal. I was halfway through my first delve after installing the addon and I was like… this is awfully quiet. AND IT WAS AMAZING. Here’s the link:

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mute-valeera-delves

Topic 2: 90 — again. Again.

I’ve really only been concerned about getting Kurn up to 90, which I did ages ago. For the other toons, I’ve been herbing and mining my way there, slowly but surely. And for the first time in a very long while, my second character to max level was not either my paladin or my shaman. For years, it was my pally — my raiding toon, Madrana. It hasn’t been her for a long time, though. The regular toon who usually makes it to max second is generally my shaman, who is both an herbalist and a miner. So I just go out on him and go to town farming.

But this time? This time it was my mage, who is a miner and a tailor. I’ve been farming mobs for Sunfire Silk and Arcanoweave and as I do so, all kinds of ores spawn, so I’ll take a break, let mobs respawn, mine a bit, then go back to it. So now my mage is 90. Hilarious. I am SO BAD at my mage. I still think I’m potentially worse at my shaman, though.

Anyway, the shaman is at like 87 now, but the druid just dinged 86! Beware, shammy! Druid’s gonna catch ya!

… and let us not forget that many of my toons have been 90 before. And 100. And 110. And 120. Like, yes, I know, we cannot be at level 300 or anything like that, that’s way too daunting for a fresh player on a new toon. But like, Kurn would be something like level 160 at this point. 90 in MoP, then figure 10 levels each for WoD, Legion, BfA (all of which happened), but then ALSO for SL, DF, TWW and now Midnight.

What’s kind of neat is the warband mentor thing, so like, my levelling is going to start skyrocketing soon, becaue for each toon you get to 90, the more bonus experience you get on your other warband toons.

Topic 3: Skinning

I can summon the Grand Beast in Voidstorm!

Hilariously, I still have some crappy RNG on the majestic skinning bits. Better than it was, but not great by any means. Still, I’m pleased to have that checked off and I can sell a couple Majestic Hides here and there.

Okay, that’s it for me for now. What are you up to? Do anything interesting this week? What do you want me to talk about next week?

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 2

Kurn / / gold, ramblings, skinning

Well, time got away from me and so here we are, again, on Monday, posting a Sunday Brain Dump. Whoops!

Topic 1: Valeera

I really didn’t think a delve companion could be more annoying than Brann. I really, truly did not think that was possible. AND YET… Not only do I not like her emotes, but she will occasionally (frequently?) run into a room to harvest a node of herbs or ore and PULL THE ROOM. Great. Thanks, Valeera. I was totally ready for that.

Then, because I have been playing this game off and on for 20+ years, I know how to pull mobs back so that we don’t get other mobs, like patrols or whatever. So I will often set my pet to passive, autoshot one mob and then take care of that large and ugly thing in a safe area. Valeera, on the other hand, does not like my pro strat and will leap into the fray, fighting the mob basically where they started. 🙄 This has, on more than one occasion, led to multiple mobs pulling. Thanks, Valeera. Super helpful. 😒

The other thing she does that drives me absolutely bananas is that she yells “STRIKE!” right after something dies. Strike? Strike what? What the hell, dude? Blizzard, tell me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot. 😟

And none of that even touches on the fact that she will occasionally just… not fight? She leaps in and out of the fray, seemingly randomly. She also breaks my traps EVERY CHANCE SHE GETS. She is the absolute worst and, I cannot believe I’m saying this, I wish I had Brann as a choice.

I will say this, she is not the worst healer. She’s not the best, but she’s not the worst. With my pet, Fluffy the Turtle as my tank, Kurn as DPS and Valeera as off-DPS/off-heals, I can do a fair amount. It’s just painful is all.

What do you hate most about Valeera?

Topic 2: Gear

Look, I’m glad that we have other ways beyond raiding or even doing dungeons (and mythic dungeons) to get gear. I’m really glad. My characters have traditionally lagged wayyyyy behind in gear. The whole Adventurer to Veteran to Champion to Hero thing is stupid though. IMHO. I miss when you got a piece of gear and it was good and you were like “nice!” and would try to get another piece of gear. Now it’s like “okay, I got a Champion piece so I may as well upgrade it because who knows when I’ll get a Hero piece” and like… what? Really? This is, to be fair, my first real go-around with this. I never really got anything higher than Champion (and on Kurn, at that, no one else) in past expansions. Like I said, I’m glad that we can get good gear from things other than raiding, other than dungeons, etc. But dear God, sometimes I miss the very simple “kill boss, hope item drops, hope the hunter doesn’t ninja it, yay got the item” routine of getting gear.

Also, I am so not into the modifiers that were used at some point, like heroic, but I know things got even weirder somewhere in there, with like half-step upgrades and stuff?

What’s your favourite way to get loot?

Topic 3: Bad Guesses

So when the expansion started, I looked at the skinning tree and thought that the diffuser skill would be useful. After all, motes of everything are used in basically everything, so I thought that was the wise way to go.

In fact, I did not realize just how abundant the motes would be. I enjoy throwing diffusers on virtually everything I skin, but this is not the way to get the big bucks in skinning. I am finally getting close to maxing out the Talented Tracker section. I can make four of the lures and usually end up fishing for all the fish almost every day, and then I go spawn the majestic beasts and often get absolutely zero majestic items for my trouble. Next week, I’ll be able create the Grand Beast Lure, so that’ll be fun.

But it got me thinking about how good I am at predicting some things in-game and how bad I am at predicting others. Many moons ago, there were these green gems, I think it was Talasites, and in a forthcoming patch, a new cut was going to be released with stam and resilience (for PVP) and I was like “OMG, this will make a FORTUNE!”

Reader, it did not, in fact, make a fortune. 😢

I was, however, pretty good at predicting things like nerfs and buffs and stuff when it came to raid encounters.

Honestly, I would take the inverse these days, and I would rather be able to properly predict what’s going to make money versus the meta-like things in the game. 😅

What about you, are you good or bad at predicting in-game things?

And that’s it for Brain Dump 2. Anything you folks want me to discuss next week? Let me know!

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 1

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, midnight, professions, ramblings

Hey there, folks! Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in this very galaxy, I used to do answers to search terms here on my blog. I’d look up the search terms that brought people here and I’d answer them as best I could.

I don’t have those kinds of analytics these days, but I do still have a blog and a brain, so I thought I’d use the combination to brain dump on 3-5 topics every Sunday. (Who me? Starting on Monday? Yes.)

So here, for your reading enjoyment, is Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 1!

Topic 1: Patron Orders in Midnight

I recently hit the 1.5 million gold mark on my bank toon. Most of my characters have somewhere between 1500 and 2000 gold on them, and if it’s over that, I send the money to my bank toon. (Gone are my days of trusting anything remotely related to a “bank” to hold my cash.) When I think about what I’ve done in order to get that much money (half a million profit in three weeks), a lot of it comes down to fulfilling Patron Orders on my various toons. I have like 7 characters I regularly do orders on, plus a couple others I’m pulling into the rotation.

Here’s what I do, pretty much every day, on all of them:

I log in, check the orders and then do them in this priority sequence:

– Are all the materials provided? Do it if I know the recipe, regardless of the payment.

– If not all of the materials are provided and I know the recipe and I have the materials on-hand, do I get 2 points of knowledge? If so, do it. If not, do I get 1 point of knowledge? Check to see if other orders will reward me 2 points of knowledge instead of 1. If they don’t, then fulfill the order.

– I also prioritize first-time crafts, assuming I have the materials or they are easily obtained.

– Unless the order gives 2 points of knowledge and a nice reward, I don’t fulfill it if it requires using more than 200 concentration to get to max quality. (a rune, a thing to help craft that goes for a thousand or so gold, etc)

– After all the orders for that character’s professions are done, I send everything that’s not soulbound, in terms of rewards, to my bank toon.

I then rinse and repeat for virtually all my characters.

By the end of 15-20 minutes, I have probably gained 1-4 points of knowledge for each character, I have gained a few trade goods (ore, herbs, leather, scales, rarer trade goods too), and each character probably has earned 30-60 moxie. Most importantly, most of my characters probably have at least 800 concentration.

It is okay not to fulfill a wildly expensive order, even if it’s a first craft, even if it’s got a nice reward, if it’s going to cost you 5k to get the materials. Don’t sweat it.

* Fun fact: if you get a max-level vial as a saved reagent while crafting something alchemical, you can probably just sell that sucker by itself for a stupid amount of gold.

Topic 2: Tuesday Prep

On Monday evenings and Tuesday afternoons, I start crafting for reset day in North America. Tuesday nights are huge for selling of consumables. I will typically do the following, especially since most of my characters will have most of their concentration:

– Flask-specced alchemist (Madrana): Will craft once or twice to get 2-4 flasks (pre-multicraft). Multicraft is, of course, the way to make money on max-level flasks. Nocturnal Lotuses are still outrageously expensive, so I save them up throughout the week from farming and can sell a couple of extras for over 2000 gold each on Tuesdays.

– Potion-specced alchemist: Will craft 3-4 times to get 15-20 max-ranked potions. We’re talking mana potions, potions of recklessness and Light’s Potential, whatever I really have mats for without buying anything. Again, multicraft is excellent here.

– Enchanter: will craft 2-3 times to get some max-level Oil of Dawn or Thalassian Phoenix Oil.

If I’m feeling extra motivated, I’ll cook a bunch of food of Kurn, too, like Royal Roast or Impossibly Royal Roast.

Last Tuesday, I made over 50k in the span of like 2 hours while all this stuff sold.

Topic 3: Cleansing

I went Timewalking to heal Cataclysm dungeons this past week. Here’s a couple of videos.

Bar none, the thing I hate most about it, apart from running with randos whom I despise within three seconds of the start of the run, is that Cleanse is on an 8-second cooldown.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WE HAD TO CLEANSE/DISPELL/ETC IN CATACLYSM??? It was a freaking lot more than every EIGHT SECONDS. I know, I can hear you now, prioritize, Kurn! Yeah, well I was trained for like 7 years to cleanse all the things as soon as I could unless it was……. whatever that damn warlock debuff was. Oh, right, UNSTABLE AFFLICTION. I need to be able to cleanse all the things. I was GOOD at it. And having an 8-second cooldown on CLEANSE drives me absolutely crazy.

And there you have it, folks, my first Sunday (Monday, in this case) Brain Dump.

What do you want to hear about next week?

Preparing for Midnight

Kurn / / expansions, facepalm, midnight, professions

I’ve been rereading some of my old posts, from before The War Within launched. Man, I was so excited. I’m looking forward to Midnight, but I’m not as excited as I was for TWW. Gosh, I wonder if that has anything to do with the Great Blizzard Bank Heist? Nahhhhhhhhhh… 😂

That said, I have always done better with that whole “preparation” thing if I forced myself to write stuff down or blog about it. Like there were several times in the past where I would wonder about X or Y and would pose that as a question to myself in a blog post and then test it out or look it up. And so that’s sort of where we’re at today.

Professions

All right. Looking back at my prep for The War Within, I was, shall we say, a little overzealous and perhaps more than a little ambitious.

This time, it’s a little less so. I think.

Maybe.

First of all, even though I rolled a goblin shaman for TWW (for the discounts), I hardly touched that character. She’s still 73. So whatever. I’m not dealing with her. So the Baby Shaman is out.

This brings me down to 10 characters. This is still a Lot, but I don’t plan to level most of them until way later. The primary reason I have them is because I want all the professions, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

I do, in fact, have them all covered, Herbalism and Mining (x4), Alchemy (x3), Inscription (x2), then Skinning, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Tailoring, Enchanting and Engineering (all x1). Plus Kurn regularly levels up Cooking and Fishing. My shaman can also fish since he’s generally out in the world, collecting All the Herbs and Ores, so why not also fish as needed?

So why the focus on professions? Well, last time around, it was because of Profession Accessories and Profession Equipment. So that’s still a valid reason. With all my toons, I can make virtually any base-level equipment or accessory for any other profession. Here’s a spreadsheet showing what can make what for whom.

(The spreadsheet did not take an inconsequential amount of time. Eesh. But I know I’ll be referring to it come Thursday night!)

The other reason, of course, is Decor.

Listen, I’m not a huge Housing person. It’s fine. I just don’t care that much. It’s almost like pet battling — I don’t participate, but I sure as heck will use other people’s interest in it to make gold. The difference is I have a house and I have decorated a tiny bit, but I don’t ever pet battle or level pets or any of that. I will farm a rare pet, but I don’t do anything else.

Anyway, I’m doing quite a bit more with regards to Decor.

Many of my characters have had their professions for years. Decades, even. Madrana has never dropped Alchemy (from her day 1 in Vanilla) and has never dropped Jewelcrafting (from the first day of Burning Crusade — I spent wayyyyyyyy too long suffering in Exodar to ever drop it). Kurn is the same with Leatherworking, but Skinning has been a yo-yo affair with mining, or it used to be. I think it was when you could level via picking herbs and mining (Cataclysm?) that I got my shaman going with Herbalism and Mining and endeavoured to keep Kurn a Skinner. Anyway, despite some of that longevity on some of my older characters, some of my characters have either new professions or only have professions for a specific expansion or two.

Let’s look at my warlock. My warlock has Classic through War Within Engineering (barring Shadowlands, which I did not play). This is because, when I boosted him, you still had to go through all the hundreds of levels from 1 in Classic up through whatever in other expansions. You could do it through just using Ghost Iron Ore, but I was also levelling Blacksmithing on him. So it was worth it to farm the old school mats. Which meant a lot of farming.

But I don’t like playing a warlock very much, so I dropped Blacksmithing and picked up Mining on him, so I can level by gathering without doing too much incinerating or whatever I’m supposed to be doing.

As a result, my grandbaby paladin (so not Madrana, not the paladin on Skywall, but the one I rolled in Pandaria remix) has Mining and Blacksmithing. But he’s a new character. Well, new-ish.

So he doesn’t have Classic Blacksmithing. Or Outland. Northrend. Etc. Or he didn’t. He does now. (And I’m working through Battle for Azeroth now, while still doing secrets of Blacksmithing for Legion…?)

Why on earth am I levelling Blacksmithing? For Decor. Every single main profession has at least a couple of Decor items they can craft in each expansion. Vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, etc, etc, etc.

But because this character did not get to level Blacksmithing outside of Dragonflight and TWW, I’m having to go back, because I want the ability to craft virtually every piece of craftable Decor. (I put my foot down at levelling all my professions in Shadowlands. At least for now.)

The rush on Decor in this pre-patch period has astonished me. Not only have so many people pre-purchased the expansion, but they are dropping serious amounts of gold on Decor.

In the last two weeks, I’ve made almost 260k gold. Some of that is old-school mats (I’ll get to those in a sec!), but a lot of it is just simple crafts from various expansions. I sold some Suramar Fences today. I sold something from Classic Blacksmithing the other day. Every single day, I sell something. Here’s what I’ve been selling.TSM Ledger, showing 9049 items sold, 259,837 gold total.

So that is almost 260k in 14 days and while I do check my auctions a couple times a day, they generally just go, eventually. (You will see some old school stuff in there. Like I said, we’ll talk about that in a sec.)

Ultimately, my goals are as follows:

  • level Blacksmithing (and Inscription) to the point where I can get Decor recipes for those two in the vast majority of WoW expansions prior to early access (BS is almost done, working harder on Inscription)
  • be able to craft profession equipment and accessories fast for me, my alts and, of course, Ye Olde Auction House
  • make money in the expansion with profession equipment/accessories and Decor

Old School Stuff: Money & Nostalgia

Folks.

Levelling crafting professions in Burning Crusade is, no shit, my hand to God, the fucking worst. I remember it not being great, but oh my god, trying to power-level Blacksmithing through Burning Crusade content nearly caused me to throw my computer out the window.

There’s just like a sort of dead zone in the middle of it where nothing was orange to me and I didn’t have the rep (THE REP!) to buy certain recipes that would get me through it. I ended up running MAGISTER’S TERRACE multiple times to try to get a drop from Kael! It was awful.

The ignonimy of not having the rep was insulting. INSULTING. Madrana is so far into Exalted with all of those factions, any of them would fall over themselves trying to give her the recipes.

Eventually I ended up getting Friendly with the Scryers and bought a limited-number recipe in Zangarmarsh and it worked out, but…

… I had to sit there on Elemental Plateau and farm Motes of Fire.

Friends, I have spent a lot of time in my life on Elemental Plateau, farming Motes of Fire, Motes of Air, fishing up Motes of Water, but holy crap, when Primal Fire is 700-800g EACH, you gotta do what you gotta do. (Fun fact: transmuting Air to Fire is a possibility, but it still has a once per day cooldown! The expansion came out over 19 years ago and that transmute still has a cooldown!?)

I made it out of Burning Crusade content on the grandbaby paladin in the end, swearing I never want to set foot there again, although I need to do so for my scribe, now.

But as if that weren’t bad enough, after Burning Crusade comes Wrath!

Folks, Cobalt deposits feel like they hardly exist. At all. I’d go farming for an hour and come back with like, 30 Cobalt. 30! And I’m flying around the starting zones and Zul’Drak and and and nothing. I can only assume other people have the same bright idea I do.

I finally, finally managed to get out of Wrath and things were way better for Cata and Pandaria.

The Zandalari Warbringers and Zandalari Warscouts are godsends for all kinds of materials from that era. They’re all one-shottable by me in my crappy gear and all I do is turn on RareScanner and it makes the noise and there we go, I kill the things. Can’t complain about those mobs at all. It’s fun to camp them or fly around from spawn to spawn and see if I can kill multiples in a row.

Draenor, OTOH, is a piece of shit. Actually, so is Legion. But Draenor requires me to build a whole other garrison and then have secrets of blacksmithing to do this nonsense to buy the stuff. That’s a major pain. (I am not looking forward to Inscription here.)

But Legion! LEGION! Just to get to level 80 Blacksmithing, I had to learn Demonsteel! And what a pain in the ass that was! I even had to do a dungeon I’d literally never done before! Super rude. And of course, when I’m one point away from 80 (which is when I can learn the Decor patterns), I had to go through thirty crafts of Demonsteel Bars. Do you know what that is? That’s 30 Leystone Ore and 60 Felslate Ore!

Anyway, while it was a lot easier to get from point A to point B without crafting 10834 greens without getting a single skill point, it was gated in other ways. I don’t mind the talents for Dragonflight, The War Within and Midnight. That’s an interesting way to gate things off. But oh man, it’s been a rough few days for my poor grandbaby paladin.

All of that said, go farm Motes of Fire in Burning Crusade content. They are worth a fortune right now.

Also, it’s very helpful to have to be in older zones because you can collect a crapton of lumber. Do it on a druid if you can. Flight form FTW.

In terms of nostalgia, it was interesting. I know Nagrand like the back of my hand. I know most of Outlands really well. Same with Wrath content. (I did spend a bit of my mining time just keeping an eye out for a certain proto-drake.) But as I moved into Draenor and Legion, I moved from rock-solid knowledge of things to wondering wtf was going on. How did I get a garrison? Where are my trainers? What FREAKING PORTAL do I even take out of Stormwind?!

And then I’d come across a spot where I remember farming for leather, or doing laps for herbs and ore. I’d remember chasing that damn moose all over the place. I’d smile as I remembered collecting large groups of basilisks and AOEing them down on my hunter and then skinning them all.

It’s been an interesting, if unintended, trip down memory lane over the last week or so.

Oh.

And this is possibly the most hilarious thing of them all. While I was levelling the grandbaby pally’s Classic Blacksmithing (it was a slog, but it wasn’t too bad), I found myself needing to learn how to smelt Dark Iron Ore. And in order to smelt one bar, you need eight ore. So I went to BRD, I went to Searing Gorge, and I went to Molten Core.

Now, I didn’t want to kill any bosses in MC so I could reset the instance.

Got past Lucifron and Magmadar (and got some ore from behind the doggy), crept past Gehennas and Garr and into Geddon’s chamber. Geddon has quite the quick patrol, so I mined some ore here, ran over there, and then made the mistake of hitting Blade of Justice which leaves a Consecration on the ground behind it. I don’t even know what talent does that, but I was like, okay, yeah, I should have 8 seconds before Geddon comes up this hill in his patrol.

Friends, does this Consecration last the 8 seconds I’m used to?

No.

It burns, BURNS, with righteousness, for like 13 seconds.

Geddon got the last tick of it and I was trying to bubble/hearth, but I have some damn thing that reflects damage on me and Geddon died.

I sighed and rolled my eyes and said, out loud to myself, hah, watch him drop the bindings.

Bindings of the Windseeker? SERIOUSLY?

AND THEN HE DID.

(Garr did not, when I went back to kill him.)

I have spent enough time in Molten Core in my life that I have seen a lot of shit happen. I’ve seen a warrior challenging shout all the Rag adds and fall through the floor, killing himself and the adds. I’ve seen what’s out the window. Like I know the instance, okay?

I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever seen either of the bindings drop.

Wild. Just wild. This game, dumb as it sometimes, never fails to amaze me. Whether it’s ludicrous prices on Primal Fires, dead spots in levelling professions, the worst-ever RNG, the most random of drops, I am always legitimately amazed by this game on a regular basis.

What are your plans for Midnight? Or what’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen in the game? Let me know down below.