This is one of the least objectionable Moon Moon meme images.

Trigger warning: ableism discussion and terms.

The first Patch 5.4 notes and PTR came out this week and with it, all the fervor over our first real peek at the content that’s been talked up since Pandaria came out. People have been going gaga over set bonuses, new boss models, but what caught my eye was something way less exciting – a battle pet. Originally when I saw listed that there was a Moon Moon pet dragged out of the datamined content files, I thought it was just something stuck there that wouldn’t have anything meaningful around it.  Contrary to my belief,  Moon Moon is a pet dropping from a new Darkmoon Faire boss and will most definitely be in Patch 5.4. This has me pretty annoyed, if you could guess from the title of my blog post.

Moon Moon is a reference to this meme that got started on Tumblr. It is yet another meme that capitalizes on the mental differences of someone, with a host of veiled ableist insults and terminology. What is ableism? It’s specifically discriminatory actions and language towards someone’s physical or mental disabilities. Ableism usually and casually often occurs to making fun of people with learning disabilities or being on the autism spectrum (“spergin’” “retard/ed”), or for mental illness (“crazy”/”schizo”/”bipolar”/”hysterical”), and physical disabilities (“crip/cripple”, “spaz/spastic”, etc.) or using those terms against others as a negative.

Given that the person who started it all said that Moon Moon would be the “most retarded wolf”, it’s not surprising that everything else has followed suit. Memes, due to nerd culture in general, really like to constantly revolve around this sort of everyperson (or animal) that has speech impediments or some sort of mental “slowness.” It’s gotten so casual to the point that most people don’t realize that it IS insulting, but the reason these jokes proliferate is because denigrating people’s mental capacity has always been a trope for humor, because people consider themselves “better” than others for that reason. It’s hurtful, in short, but very few nerds really care.

Since Blizzard has a really inconsistent policy on including meme fodder in their game (Nom Nom Nom as a druid talent got scrapped, but we have this, plus look at how many Slapchop references there are), the fact that they felt it necessary to make a battle pet (as well as a raid boss, really) dedicated to a fairly recent,  insulting meme is frustrating to me. Meme culture is persistent but often long after it is actually funny, on top of the fact that a lot of them are generally offensive in some way. Did we need this? Not really. I’m sure this is considered by some to be a very petty gripe, but popular culture making its way into World of Warcraft doesn’t always mean it is good.

Last night, Blizzard dropped a big unannounced Patch 5.4 feature preview onto their blog – “flex” raiding. This raiding would be a new, fourth difficulty somewhere between LFR and normal-mode that would have it’s own ilvl. It is primarily to help those raiders that wish to do a level of content with pick-up groups as well as friends and family in a more casual, social environment. It would work with both friend groups and cross-realm lists, making it very inclusive for those of us who like to pull in people for raids from every corner of the globe. The premise of this works off the idea of scaling – similar to how rares and elites have been working since Patch 5.1. The minimum a group can have is 10 but will add health (and presumably damage) depending on how many people you have, up to 25 players. What also makes this convenient is that loot works exactly the same as LFR – it is awarded individually, based on loot specialization. This means, as promised, that there is no reason to not bring anyone you so choose, so long as you have a balanced role makeup. The devs seem adamant that they want this feature to be for everyone – no minimum ilvl requirement, and that every player should be able to come, rather than a specific class.

Blizzard making a move towards an inclusive social feature such as this is a big deal, especially to someone like me who only ever does raiding these days in a casual environment. My guild’s raid team is a very bare-bones 10-player raid that very frequently pulls in cross-realm players and cancels raids when we can’t scrape together 10 people for behind-the-curve content. The idea of being able to raid with anyone on current content and bringing a variable number of folks gives us way more freedom in terms of both difficulty of content (like raid meta achievements, which the blog said will be doable on Flex difficulty) and flexibility of raid filling. Giving the WoW audience even more reasons to pick and choose their raid experience as they see fit is always a move in the right direction.

Are there some drawbacks here? Absolutely. There’s the ilvl bloat we’re experiencing right now – we’re two content tiers in and we have many orders of ilvl gear that a potential casual player is looking at. Adding yet another swath of gear in between LFR and normal is only going to muddy this further. Will it give players more choices or is it going to just make attempting to figure out upgrade paths even more of a nightmare? There’s also the concern of this pulling even more skilled or socially-connected players away from the potential LFR pool. While random grouping methods have proliferated, I still feel that the subset of players that this is catering to might make them flee from the LFR queues. Lastly, the fact that all three have separate lockouts means there’s going to be some complaining of feeling like you “need” to do all three in order to obtain the best gear as fast as you can, especially if your guild is stuck behind a gear check.

Overall, though, I can’t help but seeing this as a future positive. My guild is even talking about this replacing LFR nights for us – we go in a big group of guildies and friends from other realms on a set night to help us get LFR gear for normal-mode raiding. If we get our own gear and perhaps tackle slightly harder content with only people we choose, this seems like an obvious choice. It cuts out the drawbacks from LFR and gives us more control over our raid experience, socially. We can invite cross-realm friends, do alt raids easier, and not have to cancel raid nights as much. I don’t think flex raiding is going to replace normal raid content for us, even though we only raid four hours a week. Are there guilds that could use this as a replacement for both LFR and normal modes? Absolutely. The idea that you can make that kind of choice now as a smaller, more casual or social guild is great!

I would even speculate that this tool might give rise to the pick-up raid group again on realms that might have lost out due to smaller, less experienced populations (so any place that wasn’t Mal’ganis, basically) – groups could form via Trade Chat again, and there’d be no loot disputes and would still only need a modicum of skill to participate, as well as the variable size making things a lot easier.  People that have long complained about how LFR/LFG destroyed server communities might see a breath of life to local raiding again. Basically, I’m tentatively optimistic about this as I feel that this is one of the few features that’ve announced in Mists of Pandaria that caters directly to the kinds of things I like to do in-game for precisely the people I want to do it with.

The question that remains in my mind is this – was this the big feature that Ghostcrawler had been teasing at for so long? Is it one of many things that Patch 5.4 promises? I’m excited if this is just the start of a laundry list of things that might improve our quality of (raiding) life in WoW in the future.

As for you guys, are you hyped about this possible addition? Does it affect you at all? Let me know in the comments.

• Levels 1-10
• Levels 11-20
• Levels 21-30

Spells

Welcome to the 30-40 bracket, where all the mage spells you start to get tend to be less about your primary use nukes and cooldowns, but rather what I like to call “quality of life” spells. Things that make your time spent as a mage relaxing, enjoyable and frankly, kick ass over other classes. You got a taste of this when you got your Teleport spells last bracket, but now that you’ve come this far, prepare for the magical equivalent of riding around in a Bentley, waving over your shoulder at the warlocks and rogues crying on the side of the road. (Okay, maybe not like that, but come on, we’re pretty awesome.)

At 32 you get Slow Fall, which may seem like an unusual and frankly unnecessary spell, but as any veteran mage can tell you, will literally save your life. If you are a mage that spends any amount of time exploring the world or going into battlegrounds, the ability to descend gracefully and not hit the ground with a caster-shaped crater (preferably while popping off several instant cast spells) is beyond useful. Slow Fall does just that – it slows your falling speed. You float off at a diagonal towards the ground until you land on something solid. This spell can be cast on other party members or yourself, as well as used while mounted. Just make sure you are targeting the right person.

Molten Armor (level 34)  is the first time in leveling that you get one of your class-specific armors.  Much like a warlock’s armor or a paladin’s aura, an armor defines certain benefits and defenses. Molten Armor grants you extra critical strike chance and reduces your chance to be hit. Fire mages will value this more than arcane mages later on in the game, but for right now it is your only armor and you should wear it!

At level 36 you get your third installment of spec-specific spells. Arcane gets Slow. This is one of the spec’s few CC-like abilities. It slows one target’s movement by 50% (25% if it is against another player) and their casting speed by 25%. Now, if you use Glyph of Slow, all of your Arcane Blasts apply the Slow effect and you don’t need to cast it separately. But it might still be useful for having on your bars if you do any soloing or PVP.

Fire gets Critical Mass, which is a passive effect that multiplies the critical strike chance of your main Fire-specific spells. It’s one of the indications that Fire prefers crit overall as a stat. Your fire spells will start to rely pretty heavily on crit at the endgame to do respectable damage.

Icy Veins is what Frost gets, which is one of your major cooldowns. It is a 20% increase in spell haste and reduces pushback to your spells by 100%. This is like a little Time Warp all for yourself and should be used often, particularly during big fights.

Now for the moment I’m sure you’ve been waiting for – the ability to conjure food. That’s right, at level 38, you gain Conjure Refreshment. This is your ticket to reducing incoming costs for your budget and never needing to grocery shop ever again. Granted, conjured food is slightly behind the best available food for your level but if you forget to buy things like I do, it will work in a pinch. As well as being good for returning mana and health, this food turns into a new kind of sweet treat as you level up. (Right now, your conjured food is cookies! Yum!) Other players will love your food too – so much in fact that they will ask you for it four pulls into a dungeon. *facepalm*

I want this one!

Gear

Matching colors and items! How novel! That is what you can expect during this portion of leveling – many quests in zones help itemize you sensibly as well and look snappy.  You’ll starting seeing more choices in head-gear as well as all your slots. Darkcleric’s Veil/Veil of Aerie Peak is a great blue quest reward from a quest in the Hinterlands (and it looks like a face mask, so cool.) Whitemane’s Embroidered Chapeau is also a classy choice for a head slot!

The only problems I really ran into with gear in this bracket was between some overlapping quest items or slots covered by dungeon drops having wildly different stat allocations. One example of this was two questions offering me two belt choices – one had +11 INT, one had +8 STA, +4 INT, and gave me a bunch of hit. Which seems like the better choice? Lots of intellect is great, but so is hit? This sort of stuff can get really confusing. Typically, even though HIT is my best stat for not missing on mobs, more INT should win out. It just is a flat DPS boost no matter how you slice it. A good way of determining which piece of gear is better when it has identical kinds of stats on it is which has more if you added all the “numbers” up. Hit is better than crit, haste is better than crit in a lot of ways.

Still, always prioritize for intellect if you can. If you get some gear that has spirit on it, don’t fret. While spirit does zippo for mages, if it also has intellect on it, it is an upgrade. As more gear becomes diversified for healers versus casters, it’ll be considered better if you let healers in your group roll over you on spirit items, but for now, anything that has more intellect should be something you pick. Intellect/stamina gear is fairly plentiful from quests, however. Secondary stats like haste are starting to become more plentiful, especially if you do dungeons. Now that you might be seeing this, let’s explain what haste actually does.

Haste is what speeds up your casting. It sounds simple but it can mean a few things – casting faster means technically more DPS. It also means you run out of mana faster, as you have less time to regen while casting. It also can speed up ticks of some DoTs and reduce your global cooldown by a small margin. Haste also only goes so far, especially when you get to the level where Heroism/Time Warp/Bloodlust is concerned. You can only speed up your casts down to 1 second. Under one second and you will be effectively locked out by the global cooldown between all your spells. That is what most casters that are working around a lot of the time when they talk about racials, cooldowns in regards to a “haste cap.” Early haste gains in leveling tend to be talented or profession cooldowns like Lifeblood.

Helpful Tips:

1. Making food for healers in low-level dungeons or in battlegrounds now is considered polite and generous
2. Slow Fall, Blinking as well as Ice Block can save your butt if you jump or fall off something high.
3. At level 40, you can buy your 100% speed ground mount training.

Photo courtesy of Wowpedia.org.

According to some sharp-eyed forum posters (The original thread got deleted. It was brought to my attention by @GontierWoW), as of 5.3, a red dragon by the name of Andrestrasz was quietly added to a small cave no one knows about on the backside of the Ahn’Qiraj outside zone. The cave used to be part of a larger abandoned Tauren-style farm on the coast before the Cataclysm changes, but now is the only thing that remains. So why was a level 5 red dragon, who for all intents and purposes seems to be asleep (with the occasional silent yawn) stuck into a locale in the ass-end of Silithus that no one goes to, let alone knows about? There’s been some early speculation and I’ve been racking my brain to come up with answers. Let’s run down some theories, far-fetched as they may be, for why that dragon might be there.

Andrestrasz is Rhea’s last egg, all grown up.

• This was my initial thought moreso than any other theory. The world seems to be populated with the other dragon involved in that questline, so why not Rhea’s kid too? What wouldn’t be explained though is why he’s big enough to be a full-grown dragon (even if he’s level 5) and why he’s all the way out here. 

He has to do with future legendary quests.

• Interesting for the same reason my initial theory, but possibly not the case for the same reasons I outlined. The legendary quest thus far has been restricted to Pandaria content, if not the main continent itself. Going to the back-end of Silithus makes no sense for this theory.

He’s a tribute to a player.

• All player tributes (usually who are deceased) have usually been in some way public – either as NPCs with flavor text, parts of questlines or with their own marker somewhere. A dragon with no notation or gossip option in a cave no one knows about would be kind of a terrible tribute. 

Andrestrasz might have something to do with Caelen and Ahn’Qiraj lore. 

• This is another theory I came up with – the last time red dragons had a presence at the ruins was during the time of the Scarab Gate. Caelestrasz was one of the protectors of Ahn’qiraj before the gates were opened but moved onto Cataclysm content, meeting his untimely death at the hands of Sinestra. Could Andre here be a replacement? That doesn’t explain why he’s not at the actual gates or inside the raids, however. 

If he’s not guarding Ahn’Qiraj, what is he guarding?

• The red dragonflight are historically known as guardians and protectors. What would a red dragon be guarding in an entirely empty cave (save for some skeletons)? There has never been anything in that cave whatsoever. It didn’t even have a name, unlike the weirdness with random Ortell’s Hideouts there’ve been.

All in all, this poses a significant mystery to those of us who have been puzzling and speculating about things for years. Players have also been trying to evoke a reaction out of the dragon or change, perhaps to chase some origin out of him. There’s no change to the dragon whatsoever if you are alive or a ghost. He does not react to the legendary rogue daggers, Dragonwrath (I tried this myself), Runesword of the Red, having a Crimson Whelp out, or Archmage Vargoth.

Perhaps he’s just an Easter Egg dropped there by Blizzard to reward explorers like myself, like another mob in the area. Maybe he’s integral in larger plans in the future, who knows! I just hope we find out before the curiosity eats me alive. The WoW world has felt mostly examined and solved for a while now and this introduces some un-datamined mystery back to the world.

Ghostcrawler as Reagan.

It wasn’t until I was having a Twitter conversation with Snack Road (isn’t that how a lot of my blog posts begin these days?) that I realized there’s shenanigans going on with gear progression. It was merely a joke about Republicans at the time, but the trickle-down theory seems to be in full effect in World of Warcraft, and has been going on for a while.

For those of you who weren’t very cognizant of the Reagan era in the United States, “trickle down” was two slightly different ideas about economics and marketing that could be summed up as “The wealth at the top will eventually benefit the bottom.” Economically speaking, making sure the wealthiest in our country were taken care of with tax breaks and benefits would eventually benefit the poorest of our country. As far as the marketing theory is concerned, it describes that many products will start out only available or affordable to the richest but eventually lower in price so that all can afford it. The backlash of this is that once the “lower classes” have consumed or popularized a product, it is no longer wanted by those in the elite.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

I feel like more than ever, Mists of Pandaria was a step backwards when it came to an even level of gear acquisition. One the major problems of this expansion was requiring both reputation and Valor Points for obtaining the first pieces of gear that was available to you once hitting 90. In the past, VP gear was not coupled with any reputation. It was a means of gear acquisition that anyone putting the time could benefit from. It started in Burning Crusade with badge gear – it was arguably some of the best pieces you could get unless you were chasing progression endgame and a lot of times, it was the best slot-filler or catch-up mechanism you could have asked for. In Cataclysm, it was so finely tuned to the point that most people I knew except at the very top of the raid game made use of regularly. It wasn’t until LFR being put in that we started to see a decay of that system – given that LFR was put in at the very end of the expansion, the effect wasn’t as immediate. What LFR was doing was not making yet another stepping stone in terms of a gear path, it was creating a ceiling of sorts, contextually. VP gear was locked behind reputation and valor points, valor points were made harder to acquire and capped. Each LFR having successively higher i-level requirements meant that in order to do LFR, considered the final or penultimate level of raiding you’d achieve as a slightly more casual raider meant that you had to gear chase a lot harder than before. While things like the wider choice of reputations, world bosses  and crafting has made it slightly easier, it still feels like the people at the top are benefiting the most from doing what they want to do, while the rest of the curve gets progressively less choices in the matter. Raiders who have the benefit of doing content quickly while relevant have access to the best gear, therefore not needing LFR at all. VP gear from reputation isn’t as necessary once the initial gearing hump of the first tier’s worth of content is over. These raiders are supplied they gear they need by skill alone perhaps, or eventually the content they are chewing through and their success is framed in such a way that other people can’t degrade it by being slower or caught up in circumstances beyond their control (bad loot streaks, raid team falling apart). You see this in not just how loot is obtained but in things like the Cutting Edge achievements. I felt the achievements were a vanity addition that suited the purpose to make top-end raiders happy for their accomplishments, and that’s not a bad thing. However, Blizzard’s design when it comes to gear paths is pretty textbook trickle down theory in a lot of ways and I’m not sure why. 

LFR was supposed to be the great liberator of the masses, but I feel that it’s striated people wanting to make the jump from starting-out gearwise to anything above it. Is this to preserve the value of upper-level gear? In short, raiders that were normal or heroic progressed were seemingly disgruntled from having to share the same base gear pool outside of the content before LFR was introduced. The whole notion of people getting epics without having to set foot in a raid seemed terrible, except to the people who actually were going to make use of it. With the advent of LFR, the gear pool that was shared was largely obliterated, became more gated in Mists and now has forked fairly divergently – those wanting to obtain gear at the highest levels will have to participate completely in it. This isn’t even trickle-down, like before, where raiders were turning their nose up at badge/VP gear, but a fairly inventive shut-out for all but a few opportunities. In order to do LFR, you never need higher than LFR gear, if you want to do normals, you do not “need” higher than normal gear to do it, roughly speaking. This preserves the sanctity of those chasing higher levels of content, in both gear and accomplishment, while giving people that would ordinarily benefit from structures that “spilled over” for high-end raiders something else to acquire. And in a lot of ways, I can even feel myself going, “Well, if you want to do Z content, why do you need X gear?” It’s a very ingrained way of thinking about content striated by acquisition and elitism. So in this fashion, whenever Blizzard purposefully “outmodes” gear i-levels or content, it is satisfying the high-end by making it unwanted by them (giving them new, better!) and satisfies those down at the bottom by giving them what was once a popular commodity.

Of course, this analogy falls apart a little given some of the choices we have in the game now, a couple of content patches in. It is possible to get a 522 ilvl 2-set just via world bosses, or Shado-Pan Offensive rep gear from doing LFR. All that being said, there’s still fairly apparent places where the trickle down is becoming more and more apparent as time goes on. The most notable of these is crafted gear. It used to be the most sought-after for many classes, but the rise and fall of difficulty in terms of obtaining it has been most curious. The first thrust of good craftable gear was some of the tailoring gear – sets that lasted from Karazhan to Black Temple if you played your cards right. The patterns were learnable fairly quickly but making the gear was lengthy and grindy. There weren’t caps on how many pieces of cloth you could make a day but the materials were fairly hard to farm, so it took awhile to gain them. By the end of that expansion, it was to the system of crafting materials AND patterns dropping in the appropriate raids. This system lasted all the way to the beginning of Cataclysm, but what Wrath had introduced was eventually making the material needed for making the recipes purchasable with a currency. Cataclysm made the materials and patterns easily obtainable via the crafting professions but capped the materials significantly. Still, this meant that all you needed to get really solid crafted gear was time or currency. The efficacy of this gear started slipping behind though as people rapidly outpaced the ilvls over the course of the expansion. Mists is where the trickling was really brought to bear – not only did you have the basic level of epic patterns locked behind reps, but more to the point, the highest level of craftables were only able to be made with materials obtained from disenchanting epic gear (with a small chance of dropping from bosses)  of current content. So, basically, if you want gear that is on par with the highest level raids, you have to basically wait for either your raid team (if you have one) or someone else’s raid team to have a piece of gear they can shard. If you’re not a part of an established raid team, in essence you’re looking for another raid team’s cast-offs in order to make yourself better gear. The argument is that if you’re not part of an established raid team that’s doing the content, then why do you need the crafted gear at all? For some people, it could easily be BIS for a time, other people it is simply more of the gear chase but with a lot more restricted paths or options. The only time people outside of the “system” really benefit from crafted gear though is when they are in a situation where their environment is already raining down epics – meaning the highest tier of raiders on their servers are past the gearing curve and are sharding everything or enough people have entered the current content to create somewhat of a competitive market. If that’s not the very pinnacle of this theory, then I don’t know what is.

Still, all of this raises a lot more questions than answers, and I know that I’m glossing over a lot of situations in order to make a point about the theory. Is Blizzard merely acting in accordance to what the audience wants, or is it a more strident hand in directing the gear path for all “levels” of players? Since they are the ones responsible for the structures we have to move through to obtain gear, I can presume that this was done purposefully. The “No Elevators To Everest” seems to belie a developer belief (especially since many of the older ones are returning the fold) that everyone has to really struggle to get what they want, and some people are going to hit a ceiling of skill or success just due to their position and no further. While the parlance has dropped out  some, the idea of “welfare” epics couldn’t be more true now with the advent of LFR, but gamifying this so that no one ever really needs it anymore is an interesting mesh of Reagan-era social policies and Skinner Box perfection. There’s always going to be a subset of people that need enough gear to see the lower-bar content, but not more than that. If someone wants gear beyond that point badly enough, they have to go through great lengths to get it in order to not upset the overflow from the top. The idea that the developers are really giving us so many choices to be powerful but keeping the real power fairly divided and unobtainable seems to be what’s really at play here. Do I mind it terribly, from a personal standpoint? In some ways, yes. I might be casual but the practises of a game company to enforce power progression along lines that have typically caused strife elsewhere doesn’t seem to be the smartest move in the long run. Treating your broadest base and separating it further and further from the middle does little to make anyone feel good, but I suppose Blizzard has worked in enough distractions that no great portion falls through the cracks. Still, this is all something to think about going ahead. Are there iterations down the road that will even further divide the haves from the have-nots? Will desired/vogue gear be overturned even faster? Who knows, but I have seen the problems thus far and I’m not sure I like the direction Blizzard is taking us.

The Azerothian dream is not that every person must be level with every other person. The Azerothian dream is that every person must be free to become whatever God Blizzard intends they should become.

—–

For Snack Road’s thoughts on a similar topic of gearing, check his post!

I’ve found that the best way to spruce up my World of Warcraft experience sometimes is to do something radically different, just as an experiment. Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to roleplay again, despite the fact that I ran screaming from that particular community some years ago. Things Alliance-side on my RP server tend to be extremely insular and filled with the same people that I didn’t want to deal with. On the recommendation of my friend Mainfloortank, I decided to roll a fresh new toon on Wyrmrest Accord. Not only that, but Horde! There’s nothing like rolling on a faction you’re largely still new to and as a role you’re fairly unfamiliar with (tank) to get the old creative juices pumping. It’s been a pretty weird experience so far – Wyrmrest Accord is stuffed to the gills with roleplayers. I’m serious, they are everywhere. I’ve been so used to the RP only happening in a major city and only holding specific events, but you can go most places in the world on Wyrmrest Accord and find people tucked away chatting with eachother.

This has been mostly daunting to me, as one can expect. It’s one thing to wander around Silvermoon City with an RP flag, it’s another thing to actually roleplay. Coming new to a server, new to a faction, new to this race’s lore means you have to hit the ground running when it comes to developing a story for yourself. I made sure to note that I was returning to RP so people might go easy on me. I picked a fairly open character concept that allowed for some confusion regarding lore or world events. My warrior is a discharged Shattered Sun Offensive soldier that’s been wiling away the years in Quel’danas and only recently got shuffled back to the mainland. She’s missed a lot about what happened to the Horde, or even her fellow blood elves. She’s got a military lean to her sensibilities and her language, but for the most part, I’m still working out how she moves and acts. The weirdest part of it is just getting used to other people again.

Before our guild went completely social, we actually used to RP a lot. But a lot of us got out of it due to burn out with our particular server’s community of godmodding, creepy or just straight up annoying individuals. RP flags become less and less about finding good hooks and more just to lampoon people with bad writing or erroneous synonyms for eyes. (Because forbid you describe your eyeballs with the proper term. It’s not orbs, they are not hues!) So trying to completely get out of the Stadtler and Waldorf mindset when it comes to roleplayers and actually doing some roleplaying has been a bit of a challenge for me. Do I still screenshot really bad flags for my own private collection? Absolutely. Do I tell people who try to ERP with me or are otherwise gross in /say to tone it down? You betcha. (Because that shit is creepy, okay) Getting into character and not breaking constantly just because someone has bad punctuation or wants to tell me their life story immediately at the bar is tricky, but I’m really trying hard. Meeting a group of friends who absolutely take this a lot more seriously than I do has helped some with rolling with the punches and sticking to my blood elf’s story. It’s fairly essential to the experience that you at least take it a bit seriously, which in turn is why I think some role-players get so defensive of their craft, even when it’s not fair to other people. They spent a ton of time writing that terrible profile that makes them the children of Arthas and Illidan and by golly, they still walk around Silvermoon City with a smile on their face.

So you could say that playing a fictional character in a video game has given me some insights into how to properly interact with other real people better. Sometimes you’re not going to be surrounded by people who agree with you and you have to roll with it.

That being said, the particular intricacies of social interaction in WoW outside of my guild is still daunting to me. Being outside my little safe space of a guild has been a bit more of a shock than I was expecting. I met a pretty nice RP guild the first night I RPed and ICly/OOCly joined the guild immediately. Despite making some fast friends, I still had to contend with was, for all intents and purposes, a guild full of people who are not really as invested in minding what they say. Several casual misogynist jokes about hookers, prom queens floated by. I joined voice chat and had to contend with homophobic/ableist slurs. This is how the other half lives. It made me uncomfortable to the point where I talked to one of the officers and while they did enact a more stringent language policy at their latest guild meeting, I still had to leave. It felt so weird – are my values such a sticking point that I have to walk away from an RP guild that my vacation RP alt is sitting in? And with a lot of debate with myself, that answer is yes. It sucks but despite meeting people I genuinely liked and wanted to create stories with, I had to not be in a guild with the rest of the people there. But overall, it was more fair for me to leave than expect an entire guild to bend to my standards. I bucked up, talked with the officer who had recruited me and went looking for another guild. I’m in a new guild now and while they are not RP per se, they have language policies that a lot more in line with mine. It means that I can relax and not feel weird or awkward. It just makes me a tiny bit chagrined that I carry a concern so large like this that it informs all of my choices no matter where I go – it seems despite rolling an alt to “escape” and do something different means that I still miss how things are back “home” a lot.

This experience so far has been fun but seemingly like anything else I do and relate to this blog, it always seem to come with a lesson attached. I still have a long ways to go with learning how to be a bit more understanding of other’s time spent in-game, but definitely see why I don’t always mesh well with other WoW players. However, it is good to always take them as well as myself seriously. Both are worthy of respect, after all.

I apologize in advance if this post is slightly disjointed, but some of these feelings are tiny butterflies that I’m trying to catch in a net in order to classify them properly.

I think most of you remember a post that I wrote last year about my experiences with being stalked in and out of World of Warcraft. It was easily one of my most popular posts, largely due to the fact that it was a story that pretty much resonated with a great deal of my audience. I think a lot of people have felt at least a brush of that kind of problem, as scary and alienating as it is. Seeing someone talk about it brings us all together because we suddenly don’t feel alone.

May 26th (as far as I can reckon via my Twitter history) is when I had to call the cops the last time. I was so tired and anxious of this process of dealing with the endless harassment and had a panic attack and called the cops. What good I thought it would do me, I didn’t know. I just wanted to feel in control again. I went through the same dance – telling the cop my story, having him not really grasp Internet harassment. But he gave me hope when he said he could get me in touch with a department that dealt with cybercrime in my city. And that’s what I needed to hear (I ended up never getting ahold of them, mysteriously.) What I wanted was just a shot at potentially fixing this situation.

Then something strange happened.

Maybe it was me actually following through on a threat publicly of calling the cops (to the point where I had adrenaline fatigue later), but the harassment stopped. Flat out stopped; not a trickle and then tailing off, but like nothing at all. It’s like he never existed after that. Of course, he’d taken breaks before so the first week I was relieved for the “break” but was waiting for the shoe to drop again. Then another week. And another. Several more. Suddenly it had been a month and nothing. “Maybe he died.” I thought to myself. Maybe he did. I still don’t know. Maybe he got helped or was finally jailed or who knows.

After 3 or so months went by, I started to feel like I could let out the breath I had been hanging onto since four years prior. It felt like sunlight was suddenly creeping into the dark corners of my life. The looming shadow that had always been lurking in the back of my mind was dissipating. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I had spent so many years at this point backed into a tiny ball of hiding my feelings and feeling scared from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed that I almost had no idea how to function as a human being. It felt like I was a rusty robot that had subsisted on anger and terror.

The problem on top of all this was that being stalked was that it had just already compounded a life spent being dominated by anxiety. Working through this, finally getting to the end of it meant that I had to dig a lot deeper under the daily survival mechanism and open up the Pandora’s Box that was the rest of my life. I had spent so long bailing out my little boat of all the water rushing in, that now I had to learn how to steer it. I will say the last year or so of therapy has been some of the weirdest, hardest work I’ve done. I had to unravel a lot of truths about myself in relationship to my anxiety, my sexual assault as a teen, as well as my complicated relationship with my family. The upside of this was that I felt like I was starting to build something on top of a foundation, rather than repairing everything continually being torn down.

One day I woke up and realized I wasn’t scared anymore. Well, sure, I still had to deal with anxiety, but the war was over. I could go home.

Today I woke up and felt awesome. But I have been feeling like that for a while. Even the days I don’t feel so great (and there are a lot of those), I still feel ten times better than I did then. My bad days now are better than of my best days back then. While I’ve been sluggish on writing a lot, the fact that I’m doing art, keeping my house clean and taking care of my new pet cat means that I’m less of a robot these days and more of a typical human being. I don’t get panic attacks when my Twitter mentions columns fills up with replies. I don’t feel scared about talking about where I live or what I like to do with new people. I cleared out most of my blog’s banlist and blocked terms. I only have a fleeting twinge of weirdness when I see certain words or think about certain things. It feels like the high tide of my own enjoyment is at acceptable levels for me to go out sailing again.

I think today is a good day to toggle “victim” over to “survivor” because I beat this, I survived this. Not just being stalked, but the second darkest period of my life, all things considered. I was in a bad place a couple of years ago and it only now it feels like I can go forward.

Thank you all for reading, and enjoy the rest of your day.

- Nico

aka Apple Cider Mage

You can click on this to see it full sized.

Blizzcon 2013 – the social event of the real life Warcraft community is finally happening again. For those of us lucky enough to get tickets, it represents nervousness, excitement and anticipation! I myself did manage to get tickets for this year’s con again and it will be my fifth year attending. However, due to real life circumstances, I find myself needing a little bit more funding than previous years. Therefore I am offering to do badge art for other attendees who want something unique and commemorative for their voyage.

Note: I cannot afford to do printing/laminating of these myself. All sales will include a .JPG and .PSD that is at print-quality resolution. These will fit in the badge laminate that Blizzcon uses for their badges.

Price List:

• Basic: This is just your character’s portrait with no armor. Includes character name (or other), server information and faction background - $10.00
• Frill: Includes a head frill such as small decoration (eyepatches, orbs, etc.)  - $15.00
• Shoulders: Includes shoulder armor. – $20.00*
• Advanced: Includes anything else you could possibly fit on there. – Negotiable

*Some shoulder armor might require more time.

If you are interested in purchasing one of these badges, email veryapplecider@gmail.com with the following information:

• Name
• Type of Badge you are interested in
• Link to appropriate character’s armory or a clear screenshot (this is probably better if the Armory makes your character hard to see)
• Character details you want included

I will e-mail you back to discuss particulars and send you my Paypal information. I require people to pay upfront; if I cannot do your art, I will return your money. Turnaround time for badges should be 4-5 days but I will e-mail you if something comes up. If I get a lot of requests, I will work in a queue in order of who paid first.

If you don’t want a badge and just want to donate to getting my butt to Blizzcon, I also have a Paypal donation button on the sidebar of my blog!

Hope to hear from you soon!

(Font provided for the badges is League Gothic, open source font from League of Moveable Type.)

The new warchief of the Horde, Sassy Hardwrench!

One of the questions on everyone’s mind is who will be ascending to the title of Warchief after Garrosh bites the dust in 5.4. According to my sources deep inside Blizzard, apparently this will be none other than the wonderful Sassy Hardwrench. Miss Hardwrench, not content for being someone’s assistant and being passed over for leader of the Goblins, is a larger part of the raid on Orgrimmar than players may expect.

“We felt that the Horde, as well as the other leaders of Azeroth had too few women in charge and we felt that this was a pretty grievous error on our part. The idea of having the second most recognizable leadership of the Horde be Sassy seemed like a natural choice,” said a person who does not look like or sound like Dave Kosak in any way, shape or form. Other Blizzard story developers declined to comment on the record but it seemed to be like a unanimous decision.

But how will Sassy take over an entire population of orcs? Isn’t she busy running her weapons depot in Stranglethorn? Apparently her good looks, charm and even suspected romance with an unnamed (as of yet) lady orc warrior help win her the hearts of the people.

“There’s some gaps in our representation and we feel that Sassy is a perfect in-road towards showing more kinds of characters in the future.”

Good on ya, Blizzard!

I’m sure you’ve seen at least a handful of blogs that solely focus on how to make gold – they usually have some good tips to capitalize in various timely markets or are just too sketchy to really spend too much time on. I’ve always really avoided those places because while I like making gold, they always seemed to really require a whole lot of time and effort into making as much gold as possible. I feel that having tons of gold is great for the kind of large living like dropping hundreds of thousands on something dreamy, but the kinds of practices these blogs tout make having piles of gold as a sort of endgame in and of itself. What about the rest of us? While I like having enough gold to keep myself in the lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to, a lot of people either do not have time nor inclination to make more gold their goal. I’m not very aggressive or a genius-level market prognosticator.

And that in and of itself is why I called this the art of “gentle” goldmaking: it is making enough gold to comfortably get by without a ton of time spent on it or needing to know tons of math or analysis. More than that really, it is a simple set of tips that help you develop some good habits that will keep money coming your way regularly. All of this stuff is things I’ve picked up over time and are how I do business, and you might find all of this stuff  irrelevant.

Caveat to this advice: I have tried to make this as general as possible. Many servers have wildly different kinds of markets; some support a lot of people, some don’t. The best advice is just to try things out and see what works for you.

1. Get A Bank Alt

One of the easiest ways to get into the groove of making money is to devote one of your characters to this very process. I know that some people are altoholics like I am and might not have room, but having a dedicated bank alt is a real lifesaver. My bank alt is a level 17 that originally started out in Vanilla to be a toon I was going to level with an ex-boyfriend, but once we split, I parked her in Stormwind and cleaned out her bags and she’s been my banker ever since. Any alt can be used for this purpose but ones that either have less playtime than your other ones (so they can stay near an Auction House and mailbox) makes this way easier. If you have an engineer, you can even use the engineering AH in your faction’s Shrine in Pandaria.

The reason bank alts are so gosh darn handy is because storing most of your gold makes buying and selling things very easy, as well as helpful if you’re saving towards something. It also keeps everything you want to buy or sell in one place so you’re not searching all over. Over the years, my bank alt has gotten increasingly bigger bags and even a couple tabs of a bank guild, but that just comes with the territory if you start doing a high volume of auctioning. Mostly it’s just handy that whenever you are done for the day, or want to clear out your bags as you level, that you just send everything to your bank alt. Doing this really gets you into the habit of seeing everything as “sellable” and also frees you up to deal with it later.

The first thing I do whenever I log onto WoW is check my bank alt – whether it be an auction house scan (we’ll talk about that later), collecting gold out of the mail or sticking up some new things onto the AH.

2. Don’t Hoard and Don’t Vendor

Also known as my “sell everything that’s not nailed down” rule.

Here’s probably one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to drill into my guildmate’s heads! Many people I know really don’t want to put in the effort of sticking things up on the auction house so they just vendor them; you lose out on so much more gold this way. The other direction to go in is to save literally everything and overwhelm yourself with things you might not ever need.

Hoarding is a really terrible idea and even I have problems with it sometimes. It’s so easy to think, “Someone is going to need this” and stash it away, only to come back months later with things just hanging out in storage doing nothing. Get into the habit of sending all your stuff to your bank alt or putting it onto the Auction House unless you can honestly say it is earmarked for something specific you can think of. Alt’s engineering powerleveling? Yes, save that ore! Might need that cloth for a rainy day? Ugh, sell it! There’s always some value in putting something up now rather than saving for a nebulous future; very few things that are from a current expansion that sell for more over time. I know that the urge is strong to keep something to potentially use it and save yourself money but it’s often way cheaper to sell it while its price is still high and buy it down the road when it sells for a lot less. Clearing your bank and bags every so once in a while (like once a week or once a month) also gets you out of this cycle of keeping things around that you might never use and puts it into your pockets.

As for vendoring, I know a lot of people say, “Well it’s not going to really sell for much on the auction house, so why bother?” Well, vendoring it for 20s rather than selling it on the auction house for 5G makes no sense to me. And 1G is always more than 0G. Vendor grey items and select few white items, and try to sell everything else. The only time I out and out vendor something I was trying to sell on the AH were things that either a) dropped below vendor price b) really just didn’t sell after months and months of trying.

This idea that something has to sell “reasonably high” is another weird thing I see people talking about; it’s often a lot more profitable to sell a lot of little things for a little bit of money than selling one particular item for a lot of money. Why people don’t want to sell something for 20G boggles me –  that’s 20G more than you had before. It all adds up over time. Every little bit of gold helps.

3. Use Tools Available To You

This is one of the places where I feel a lot of of casual players get scared and shy away from the auction house “game” – the fact of the matter is AHing is really not very easy to do or intuitive unless you use add-ons. And who really wants to have add-ons for selling things? Whether you do or not is really up to personal choice, but I find that it has made it a lot easier to be slightly more competitive than not. It cuts down on the amount of time I spend doing things, allowing me very efficient.

AH Mods

A good auction house mod basically cuts through the pages of listings and organizes them in a way that’s very easy-to-read, and depending on what you use, makes comparing prices for buying and selling a snap. Some people like heavier AH mods that give you deep market history but those also tend to use a lot of resources, so what I use is Auctionator. It gives me lightweight Buy/Sell tabs, and only saves AH data for items I buy or sell unless I specifically tell it to scan the entire market. I tend to scan the market once a day and that seems to serve me well. A good routine for me is getting up in the morning with my coffee and scanning the AH and then getting into listing/checking all my auctions for the day.

See how easy that is to look at? It lets you set prices and stacks really fast and it lists them automagically one after the other. This makes adjusting what you are selling a breeze; buying is similar and you can even save shopping lists. But overall, just having that list makes buying the cheapest item very easy to see and it makes you sell things for what they should be selling at, not having to guess.

Organization Mods

A good AH mod is the baseline, but other things that help me get through the process of selling and buying are Postal (a very sturdy mailbox mod) and Altoholic (so I have item data for anything I have in my bags and what characters have what on them). These things are by no means necessary and just for my own purposes. But anything that saves me tons of right-clicking individual mails (I often have 300 auctions going) or wondering if my miner or my engineer has Ghost Iron bars is worth it.

Additional Information

Whether you’re hunting a specific item to buy or need to know what you should be selling items for, I cannot strongly recommend The Undermine Journal enough. It is a very handy WoW site to visit if you aren’t in-game, or even if you are! It lets you see what are top sellers/”hot” items for your server, and gives you consise graphs for best days and prices to sell things.

4. Make Professions Work For You

Do you have any professions on any of your toons? Professions are a pretty easy way to make gold, regardless of what you use them for. While some servers don’t have huge profits in top-end crafted items, selling raw materials from gathering professions or low level craftables works, even if they aren’t huge amounts of gold. I’ve made a bunch of gold on new servers that I have low level alts on just via mining or herbalism and selling whatever I collect. If you have more than one set of professions, you can even work in some synergy. Have an alchemist? Use a miner to farm up some Ghost Iron and transmute it into Trillium Bars. Gather herbs with an herbalist and send it to your scribe to mill – sell inks or glyphs.* A lot of times  people use their professions to help the toon they are attached to but never think about using them for more.

What I like to do is constantly send whatever I get on various characters to their “appropriate” crafters – all cloth goes to my tailor to be made into bolts and sell, or use for daily cooldowns. Ore gets send to jewelcrafter to get prospected, and so on. This is another one of those habits that getting into gets a process going and makes it all streamlined for you if you want to keep consistently making gold. Even just logging on and doing your daily cooldowns can net you cloth, gems, flasks or other things that you can turn around and put up on the Auction House.

*A couple of places where people really get super competitive are the cut gem and specific glyph markets. Tread here carefully and maybe opt to sell inks or uncut gems rather than selling in a heavily trafficked set of items that people make it hard to sell anything.

5. Diversify and Rotate Your Stock

This hinges on that whole “sell everything that’s not nailed down” principle. The easiest way to make sure you sell things is to sell a little bit of everything. A lot of gold making blogs talk about “breaking into a market” or dominating a particular item on your server. Myself? I just sell whatever is in my bags most of the time. I don’t usually stockpile a lot of any one item (we’ll talk about this in the Risk/Reward section) and I just sell one or two things unless I really want to put effort into it.

Mixing it up is basically how I keep myself interested and it also makes it less precarious, particularly if your server (like mine) has a lot of gold barons. Sometimes I sell cooking mats. Sometimes I sell legacy raid drops. Getting in and out of one particular thing that you sell and selling as many different things basically means one person can’t sink your whole operation and you reach many more buyers that way – whether they just need stuff for their raid that night, a particular item for their transmog set or crafting mats for their new alt.

Another way to diversify is to capitalize on short-term buying. This does require a little more effort but doing things like keeping track of holidays and selling items related to them for a short amount of time is a great way to flush your coffers for a week or two. I’m sure you know the great Small Egg debacles around Winter Veil! Again, this requires a little more time/awareness of events in the future, so I don’t suggest it if you just want to do stuff day-to-day.

6. Accept Risk and Yield Rewards

Any attempts to make gold in WoW, no matter how casual, basically is a small level of risk. Increasingly higher risks in-game require a lot more gold in case you fail. Keeping your risk low by selling only what you have and selling it at “safe prices” is a very guaranteed way of never losing any money. Occasionally you will see no one selling what items you have and you can easily attempt to fill that gap and sell for a higher price. This is still low risk, in that if you don’t sell anything, you only lost your fees. Sometimes I see a lot of an item being sold way less than what it usually goes for and I buy it up. Sometimes I manage to sell all of it for a much higher price and sometimes I don’t. This is where risk is really involved. If you want to play it safe, this is a great strategy. But if you feel comfortable with your gold, you can make even a little investment go a long way. Capping yourself (spend only 50 or 100G on buying up items)  is a great way to make a little more money. I’ve lost a bit of gold in some pretty foolish investments, but I still inject a little risk into my daily routine. It’s not re-selling engineering mounts for thousands of golds, but maybe it’s a battle pet for 10G more or a stack of herbs for way more later in the week. Try it!

7.  Patience and Care

I know this is one of the hardest AH rules to master, especially for us gentle auction house users. It is very easy to get discouraged or impatient if something doesn’t sell right away. It’s okay if you take it to the vendor and sell it off. But for me, sometimes it really is worth it if you know you can sell something. You might have to relist it every day for a month but when it finally sells, it makes you feel great. That’s the best part of auction house stuff, that feeling of victory when someone finally buys your items!

Caring about what you’re selling also helps out as well; it feels weird to suggest that, but if you like what you’re throwing up there, it makes the investment worth it. I got into the transmog game pretty early and put a lot more time into it than I really had into a lot of other things prior to. Sometimes you move up from just basic AHing when you find something you legitimately like collecting or watching people and that’s okay. Getting cool stuff to people for money is not a bad goal and it makes you feel like an expert after a while.

8. Tuesdays are Great Days

This is the only non-general rule I have, and I feel that it probably applies to most servers, if not all. A lot of people log on on Tuesdays, especially if your server supports a giant raiding community. Putting your stuff up on Tuesdays means a lot of people are going to be logging on, especially after server downtime, to buy stuff they need for the week. It’s also the time of the week when most of the “weekend warrior” farmer prices have gone back up and you can make a bit more gold with hardly any effort. I like to sell all of my cooking mats and flasks and things that people might need weekly on Tuesdays.

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These are just some of my rules for some of you who are looking to just make some gold and have no idea how. Let me know if these things work for you! Hopefully they will and you can buy cute outfits or maybe some new pets or even just manage to pay for your repairs. Like I said before, how much effort you want to put into this is up to you and if you don’t want to follow any of these rules, that’s okay too! But I’ve made a decent amount of gold over my time in WoW, even if it’s not the mega-millions of some people. And I’ve done it at my own pace and with a bare minimum of energy and cutthroat-ness.