If you use macros for your characters you might want to check out World of Macros. The author is collecting macros for all the classes and arranging them by class and by build type. So if you only want the macros for your Shadow Priest just click the right category and there you are.

Worth a look: Wow Macros

I guess Zygor and Dugi have a bit of a situation going. I only found out about it today, and no, I haven’t been paying attention. I’ll just make a couple of points and throw up a link and that’ll be about it. For now, anyway.

As an aside: I’ve been using Zygor’s guide for awhile and I like it. It’s updated contantly, especially when new patches are launched. IMO it’s pretty good stuff and you can see more remarks on my Zygor Review page.

I haven’t looked at Dugi’s leveling guide at all, so I can’t remark as to how it stands up to Zygors.

There was some back and forth between the two guide groups and Zygor has a response on his public forum here.

Happy New Year
to all of You and Yours

Regardless of race or faction affiliation or the quality of your gear!

The new tier 10 armor sets. This might be enough to make me pass on any gear rolls in the new 3.3 raids (assuming I could actually get into them in the first place.)

The t10 rogue set, noooooo…..

• Paladins now wear dresses.
• The Tauren and the Humans have merged (hunter armor) or maybe those are gloves?
• Warriors, DKs, Priests, and ‘Locks are Ok, at least by comparison to the others.

So here they are, in all their, ahem, glory.

I think Bliz needs to look into Aion’s armor remodeling system.

I’m spending a lot of time in Aion right now, but once the novelty wears off I’ll spend more time in WoW. Each game does some things better than the other and I find both to be fun. Heck, I still like City of Heroes. Nope, I’m not quitting WoW, I’ll be playing that game for a while still.

But it sure is cool that WoW might finally have some competition.

Aion’s winning acolades for the best MMO of the year. Well, since all the others were, in one way or another, severely broken that’s not necessarily saying much. Or maybe what it says is that it’s damn hard to create a viable, fun MMO that appeals to more than a select few.

Aion does a lot of things right. It’s graphically gorgeous and runs well on my meager machine. (I really need to get a better video card. )

So… my thoughts, in no particular order…

The lag? Aion’s laggy at times, but no more than Dalaran. My machine runs it well enough to be playable, but WoW is definitely smoother. More horsepower would be nice. Some people with nicer machines report 80 FPS.

The character generation system just pwns all others. Even the one in City of Heroes, though that one does a better job on costumes. Choose from a bunch of hair styles and basic faces (yawn) and then tweak the face to your heart’s content. The same with body design. You can make a small headed, thick thighed WoW Human or a delicate Elf Prinecess. No tails, though… so Draenei are out, but you can make some strange looking types. Pretty, ugly, tiny, huge, tall, short, fat, thin, whatever, it’s all there.

While there’s only the one set of clothes at the start you can see how your character will look in starter gear, undies, and high level gear.

You get to pick from either of two races with no real racial differences, Elyos and Asmodian. Light and dark side, or Pigeons and Furbacks. Four starting classes branch of into eight at level 10.

• Warrior becomes Templar (tank) or Gladiator (off tank and/or melee DPS)
• Mage becomes Sorcerer (ranged DPS bolt lobber) or Spiritmaster (much like a Hunter or Warlock.)
• Priest becomes Cleric (main healer) or Chanter (light heals, buffs, some DPS)
• Scout becomes Assassin (melee DPS) or Ranger (Ranged DPS, Hunter w/o pet)

More Customizing

WoW has more character customization with the talent trees, but Aion has some. Characters gain stigmas starting at level 20 and these add various abilities. Stigmas have to be installed at a Stigma Master, but they can also be removed and reused.

Eavery piece or armor and weaponry also has sockets for manastones. These stones work very much like gems in WoW and add a bit to various stats, such as crit rating, hit points, mana pool, etc.

Backstory

The backstory is more or less this – Once upon a time the world was nice and all races were one. The gods above created a protector race, the Balaur, to make sure things stayed that way. But the Balaur got smart, realized the other races were tasty and best used as snacks or slaves, and so decided to conquer everything.

Once thing led to another (major war) and there was a major cataclysm that literally split the world into two halves. One side is continually sunlight and that’s the Elyos side. The other is continually dark and that Asmodians have that area. The Balaur inhabit the Abyss, a void between the two areas.

After the Cataclysm both sides lost touch with each other, and with the Balaur, and developed their owns ways. Fairly recently each has discovered the other, but things didn’t go well and there is now perpetual war. Furback and Pigeons forever at each other’s throats, when they’re not taking fighting the Balaur.

Rifts exist on both Ely and Asmo sides which give limited access to the other side. This results, naturally, in a certain amount of gankage. A few of one side pop through the rift, kill a few opponent (or try to,) word gets out, and they’re hunted down.

The Abyss

The Anyss is an open PvP area, but there plenty of mobs to grind, quests to do, resources to gather and so on. It’s a good place to level, as well. A little like Stranglethorn Vale in WoW. You don’t have to spend much time there, but you might want to.

There are a series of fortresses and artifacts that each side can control, to the benefit of that side. There’s also a nifty series of training quests (and a training instance) which clearly explains how that works. I’d love to see that in WoW for the BGs and some of the raids.

All servers are PvP servers, though there’s no real PvP game until 25. After that the game is set up for group PvP and big fortress battles. Most of the PvP happens in the Abyss which is inaccessible until level 25.

Instances

At this time I’ve only been in the one instance, the Training Grounds, which is a training instance for a fortress battle. Go in, clear mobs around the fortress, grab an artifact, kill the force field generator, knock down the gate door (with siege engines,) and kill the boss. Sometimes the boss even drops a piece of decent loot.

Crafting and Gathering

Aion has six crafts: Alchemy (potions, scrolls, manastones, mage weapons,) Armorsmithing (chain and plate armor,) Tailoring (cloth and leather armor,) Weaponssmithing (take a guess,) Cooking (yum!) and Handicrafting (accessories and bows.)

Crafting isn’t done just anywhere. You actually have to go to the crafting area and make the items on the forge, loom, whatever. You can grab work orders from the trainer to work up your skill. At 99, 199, 299, and 399 you pay him a great chunk of money (Kinah) to advance to the next level.

Work orders give you several items to create. When done you hand them in to the trainer and receive some item, generally a crafting mat, but it might be a recipe. Also, you gain XP for each item that you craft, if it isn’t too low level for you.

At least in the mid 20s (where I am) the stuff you craft is every bit as nice as anything you’ll find off a mob or on the broker (Auction House.)

There are two gathering skills which allow characters to gather anything gatherable, generally herbs, ores, and Aether. Like WoW you need to work your skill up to gather stuff.

Prices, Broker, Kinah

There’s only one coin, the Kinah, and it’s both pretty easy to gain and pretty easy to spend. Vendor junk sells for enough to keep you in decent goodies, nice gear (found) sells for quite a bit, and nice crafted gear sell for a lot.

Not only can you buy gear, but you can buy consumables, accessories, clothes, and more. Youi’ll also spend an arm and a leg to get your crafting skill raised.

There is a broker, which everyone calls the “auction house,” but since there is no bidding it isn’t an auction house. Something is put up for sale at one price and you buy it or pass. Youre also limited to ten items posted at a time.

A neat feature is the private store. Going AFK for a few? Set up a store with the items you want to sell at the prices you choose. Set up the store anywhere. Even in a PvP zone in the middle of a war, not that that’s recommended…

Issues?

Very few. There’s some griping about too few quests and too much grinding, especially at later levels. If you like to grind, then you’re ok. Still, there are a lot of quests so it’s not nearly 100% grind. Plus, mobs drop enough loot to take away some of the pain.

Solo PvP is, well, about like it is in WoW. Mismatched. But then, the game is designed around group PvP, which actually seems to work well.

You do need halfway decent hardware to run the game, but if it runs WoW well then it should run Aion just fine. With a hot machine Aion will be gorgeous.

Lag. Well, that really is more of a routing issue than your individual machine. It’s much better than in beta, but it still happens and rubberbanding pops up at times. Jumping off hills can be entertaining as you bounce back up the hill a couple of times.

Summary

There are a lot of other cool bits, too. All in all it’s a solid game, very stable (as stable as any other MMO) and surprisingly bug free.

I’ll be blogging about it at my little Aion blog and this site will be going back to WoW (and I’ll be posting more than every other month.)

I’ve posted an article the the GotWarcraft blog on the Top Three Rogue PvP Tips.

1 -  Know how to re-stealth

If you can’t re-stealth in combat, you are drastically reducing your survivability. The main techniques for acheiving this are to

1. blind and wait to leave combat
2. gouge/kidney shot your oppenent and run out
3. get your oppenent crippled and sprint away
4. vanish

Here’s the rest: Top 3 Rogue PvP Tips

Say what?

A friend and I are putting together a new blog, Orc and Gnome, which we hope will have an interesting feel to it. Over there we’ve written up a couple of posts on the patch (see below.) I’m the Orc, he’s the Gnome.

The 3.2 patch is live (or will be in a couple of hours.)

Lots of little changes. While there’s a lot of stuff there it doesn’t look like you’re have to rebuild your talents, unless you’re a Death Knight. DKs received a small nerf (much needed and yes, I play one) and they’re had enough talents moved and tweaked that a respec is necessary.

• The Orc on the 3.2 patch
• And the Gnome on the 3.2 patch, specifically some of the mage changes.

Massively has an interesting post:

There are always going to be times when, due to real life commitments, you can’t play your favourite MMO, whether it’s a month of exams or an important week at work…

The rest: The Daily Grind: How do you cope without your favourite MMO?

So the question is this: You’re not only cut off from WoW for a week (or month!) but you’re also cut off from the internet. No email, no twitter, no facebook, no illegal (or legal) torrent downloads, etc.

How would you cope?

The 3.1 patch introduced a bunch of new glyphs. I was looking for info on them and here are a couple of notes. 

• A few of the new glyphs are from the trainer, but most of  the new glyphs are found only through a Book of Glyph Mastery, not through any research procedure. edit: Also, you need to have 425 Inscription skill to use the book.
• The book is found as a world drop from any Northrend mob. Start the mass slaughter now.
• It’s a rare drop and is BoE, so can be traded or sold. Right now the going price for one is anywhere from 1-3k. Edit: Just checked Dark Iron. There the price is 4-5k each. Not worth it to me and I can easily afford it.
• Inscribers “read” the book and get a random glyph. So you may well pay 2,500 -4,500 for a book only to find a glyph that you can’t use and that won’t sell.
• These glyphs are going to be pretty rare for awhile and people who have them will be charging pretty high prices.

So there ya go. Happy hunting!

There was a comment, on the Raiding Rogues post, on the question of hit rating. I use ElitistJerks.com and ArenaJunkies.com for a lot of my info. I’ve also been using the Recount addon, which gives some interesting numbers for hits, misses, and so on.

Here’s the comment:

Hi, Just looking for sum answers to questions i have been asking myself but as yet have not found any answers. I am level 80 comat rogue with a hit of 294(need 315 apparently)but have not worn my Gloves of fast reactions, titainium chocker and titainium impact band because the blue items have all hit on them and changing them moves me away from the hit cap? Any suggestions? I guess what am asking is is it worth upgrading to items with better Agility and AP but loosing a lot of Hit?

So based on recount numbers… If you’re combat or using the above build, or something like it, then you should have the precision talent. With a PvP version I’m working with about 130 hit and, according to recount numbers, I’m not missing on any strikes fighting in the BGs or against level 80 mobs. Fighting raid bosses, and the raid boss target dummy in Org, with a 200 hit rating, the miss rate was around 15%.

How much Hit you need depends on what you’re fighting. Generally mobs require less Hit rating than players/elites which require less than raid bosses.

How much hit is needed? Here’s my qick and dirty answer, since you already have precision from the combat tree:

• When fighitng mobs, you’re good. Upgrade your gear.
• Same answer for PvP, though high end arenas might be different. PvP hit caps are a bit lower than for Raid Bosses.
• Raiding is more complicated and I’m not a raider. Not yet, anyway. Part of it depends on the raid buffs you have and the debuffs on the boss.

There’s a concept called Agility Equivalence Points (AEP) which tries to measure the value of various stats. These numbers will change depending on exactly what you’re fighting. For example, a PvP calculation involves stamina and resilience, while raiding doesn’t.

So a general AEP table, for raiding, looks like this (taken from ElitistJerks info

• Expertise rating: 2.6
• Hit rating: 2.4
• Agility: 2.2
• Haste: 2.1
• Crit rating: 1.7
• Strength: 1.1
• Attack Power: 1

Multiply the stat for your gear by the numbers above. For example…

1. Gloves of Fast Reactions : 66Ag, 64 Stm, 38 Crit, 49 haste, 110 AP
2. Dropping Stam, we have: (66 x 2.2) + (38 x 1.7) + (49 x 2.1) +  (110 x 1) = 424.27
3. Now do the same for your blue gear. The highest number gives the best DPS for raiding.

The point is that your better gear will provide enough extra DPS to more than make up for the lack of hit, so go for the upgrade.

For PvP Stamina and the Resilience stat are important, though I’ll go out on a limb and say that the importanceof Res is situational. Rogues die very quickly in PvP and Res doesn’t slow that down much.

Comments?