Wow – Draenor Pathfinder

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Death Knight ready for Draenor

After leveling in Pandaria, you’ll want to go to Draenor. If, like me, you have a pretty much full set of Heirlooms, level to 91 before you go so you’ll take advantage of your heirlooms. When switching campaigns, they need one more level to catch up. But with the XP boost they give, putting on a level or 2 is easy. I only did about 1/2 of Pandaria and it was mostly to get the gear styles for transmog.  So I took a Death Knight at 91 to Draenor, and he did fine in terms of survivability. But, it’s a drag to not fly.

 

 

I built my Garrison and using the Wow-Pro guides was able to finish Shadowmoon Valley. But then Legion went on sale and I went for it.

Draenor Pathfinder

Well, why not get flight? It’s called Draenor Pathfinder. Account wide flight in Draenor from the git-go for all your toons. But’s gonna be much easier to get it with a Demon Hunter, isn’t it. I had started a Demon Hunter and they are Over Powered Killing machines. I had one that I’m leveling in Azuna, but it seemed best to build a second one and leave right away for Draenor.

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Demon Hunter

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Wow – You are Still Not Prepared!

To send email across Realms, that is.

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So with patch 7.3.0 – Shadows of Argus – , they have added the recognition that you have characters on other realms when you send email. But you can’t actually send email to those realms. Sigh. “You are not prepared!” as the old quote goes.

 

 

Sending to other realms gets you “You can’t send to that Realm” and of course if you try to send cross faction you still get “Target is unfriendly”.

Someday we can hope for cross realm, in-account at least, mail.

Addons are Trashed – most of them

In other news most of my addons don’t work.

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I was disappointed that BankItems failed. Ark Inventory replaces all inventory displays and I don’t like that much. Gatherer failed, but GatherMate2 works apparently. But of course I lost all the data from Gatherer. At least TomTom and SellJunk works. And there’s an update for Wow-Pro so it works too.

At least I’m prepared to do some leveling with Wow-Pro.

:ww

University Tuition Should Be Free

Let’s run the numbers. For a private University- Such as Harvard.

The Endowment is about $40 Billion and the Operating Budget is a little over $4 Billion.

So what does it cost to go to Harvard?

So, based on the student population and the expenses per student, the students only contribute about 10% of the annual budget of the University. So it could easily be FREE to go to this University and the University would not go broke. After all, they are making more then 6% on their huge endowment, which is more than  $2 BILLION with a B every year in income on their endowment. On which they pay no taxes. Yep. Universities pay no taxes. So what about the students in “Professional Programs”? Well those folks “Live at Home” and their expenses are paid by their employers, right? No? Shame on them.

Other private institutions and I dare say, state institutions are in a similar situation. So why is college tuition going up? Why are these institutions hoarding their endowments rather than making college affordable? Why is Yale running an expensive golf course at government expense – that is, not paying taxes on it?

Pick the college that you are interested in and Google it for yourself.

University should be free for everyone in the US – Tuition and Reasonable on-campus expenses should be paid. The Rip-Off business of College Loans should Go Out of Business and all student debt should be forgiven. Colleges are in the business of selling mortgages on the futures of our young people and we as a society should stop it.

That’s my 2 cents.

:ww

World of Warcraft – Leveling These Days

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Ok – So what now?

So just how do you level these days?

I’m back to Wow after playing back in 2011 – 2013, so a lot of things have changed. As I mentioned in my last Wow post about Economics, the leveling experience is different in many ways. When I restarted in the May 2017, I had some characters up to 85 or so, both Horde and Alliance, and some saved gold. My goal was to build a realm of about a dozen Alliance toons starting with a DK that was already 85, a Hunter in low 80’s and a few other lower level toons. I’m an Altaholic so I try to play all the classes and many of the races.

Here are some tips that I’ve learned about how best to level.

(1) Take advantage of Heirlooms. With a 10% Exp boost for each piece and the power they give, they are worth the gold, even if you need to use a Wow Token to get and upgrade them. I splurged and have both Agility and Intellect Mail as well as Plate and Cloth sets. 32 Total, all upgraded to Level 100. Sure I could get 3 more for the side car mount that comes with the Achievement at 35, but I don’t have any more toons lower than level 20, so everybody already rides. Honored rep with your guild allows you to buy helms and legs, so that can be four pieces of armor. At 10% XP boost per piece that’s 40% XP boost per kill or quest – I think. At least I’m leveling a lot faster than otherwise. I’m leaving areas about half way through as I quest. The heirloom weapons are very powerful too. So that’s a minimum of five heirlooms per spec type. But there’s a lot of overlap. Druids and Shaman can both use the Mace with Intellect or Agility for example.

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MMO Economic Comparisons

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GW2 Trading Post Graph

After playing World of Warcraft back in 2011-2013, then Tera and Guild Wars 2, I’m back playing Wow again. I’ve been watching two things:

 

  1. How to level up most efficiently.
  2. How to make enough gold to progress in the game.

There have been a few changes in Wow since I played it, or at least there appear to be. And this note looks at those changes in the economics by comparing Wow with the other two games I’ve been playing.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that changes in a game that are made to allow folks to level up faster greatly affect the economy, or can. And in some cases they can basically wreck the economy for some groups of players.

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How to Install Aion in May 2018

This post is back-dated to keep it off the front page.

In May of 2018, there are were problems installing Aion from NCSoft.

A couple of days ago, I tried a clean install on another computer and got the same error. When you try to “report the error” you get another error, probably because the Launcher / Updater can’t reach the web page to report the error. Woops.

Update: I just completed a clean install and it worked without error. Looks like they fixed the problem I saw two days ago.

So here are the steps to install Aion from NCSoft from scratch, and how to get around this problem if you encounter it. We can hope that they fix the install soon so that this error is not encountered. I mention “Aion from NCSoft” since there are private servers out there. I’ve tried one of them, but I’m not suggesting you install Aion from a private server.

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WoW – Crafting and Transmog

As some toons reached about 70, I created Cloth and Mail armor with crafting. There are several problems to be solved:

  • Which recipes are easy to craft, since this armor has a limited lifetime?
  • Can we see the armor first?
  • How can we make a list of ingredients to farm?

It turns out that the Wow crafting panel has a search feature, and if you choose “unlearned” then you can search for recipes that you don’t know.

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Wardrobe vs Transmog etc.

Let’s compare the “Cosmetic Look” features of Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, as well as the banking, battle and party loot features and see what that can tell us about game philosophy.

Starting with Wow, let’s look at Transmogrification.

Cloth Chest Account Wide List
Transmog Station in Orgrmmar
Cost for a Complete Look
Hide Some Items Like This
Hiding Helm Shoulder Cloak is Free

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Wow – Yep, I really do need a guide

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I admit, I need a guide to level.

Ok, I admit it. I need a guide to level up. I used to use Xellerated guides – which cost actual money. But after all these years, they are gone or changed their name. And there are lots of guides in the Curse catalog. I did a little looking and chose this one: Wow Pro Guide. This one looks like it has lots of other features – profession leveling, achievements, etc. – that I’ll look into, but I got going right away with the leveling guide and with TomTom which it requires, it works very nicely.

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Wow – Time to Re-Up

It’s been a while since I’ve played anything but the “Starter” which I check out every few months. But I’ve decided to Re-Up my subscription and get back into it. After all, with no upgrade I can go as far as Warlords now. My highest toon is 87, so there’s a long way to climb to hit the top of Warlords.

Things have changed, mostly for the better.

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