Be Prepared for WotLK: Leveling

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is upon us, and for many it means leveling our character to the new level cap of 80. It's been ages since I've done any leveling, and just a week ago I took and leveled all my alts at least two levels, just to get a hang of leveling again.

So here's a quick post with some tips for leveling:

Spec and gear for the most damage

Forget healing. Concentrate on Damage!

You should be geared, and Your talent points should be distributed, to maximize you damage (and thus maximize your experience/hour for example).

For example, I will be very dark shadow priest as soon as the expansion launches, as shadow talents improve my damage output the most.

Get some questing addons

Two I use the most are:
LightHeaded
- Tips directly from Wowhead to aid your questing
QuestHelper
- Calculates the most efficient path to do the quests you have

And to take these two to a whole new level:
Cartographer 3.0
- Maps and notes
TomTom
- Waypoint arror deluxe

Don't forget to have fun

It's new expansion! so enjoy it, don't let it swoosh by too fast :)

Achievement Hunt: Two new videos

As I posted before, I'm heavily into the achievements. I love'em. Rigth now, they keep me busy and they keep me in the game until the expansion comes out. I should probably be leveling some of my Alts, but getting the next (and next, and next) achievement is just so addictive and fun!

I have noticed that some of the achievements are pretty hard or so into detail that they are pretty hard to do without guide, so I look up achievement info from Wowhead achievement pages.

The guides and instructions are great, but it's fun to show things on video as well, so I just posted two youtube videos showing how to do couple of the achievements I did yesterday. One being for the Quests and The Burning Crusade: Blade's Edge Bomberman and the other is The Lurker Above for Fishing (and Accomplished Angler).

Check them out if you need help on doing those:

WoW Achievement: The Lurker Above (Fishing)

WoW Achievement: Blade's Edge Bomberman

Do subscribe to my videos if you like, as I'm posting some WoW videos every now and then.

Quick note to other WoW fishing enthusiasts, if you haven't found El's Extreme Anglin' yet, go there now :) It's the best place for any kind of WoW Fishing info, and even that it's concentrated on fishing profession, it's one the best WoW sites in general because of the superb quality in all aspects.

Gone Fishing.

I didn't play WoW between the 2.4 patch and just-launched 3.0.2, and during those months several of my old WoW friends have moved on, and some of them I miss already. Happily, I'm in active guild (and they didn't kick me out or anything) and my friend list is not totally gray (everyone offline), so I won't turn too lonely in game :)

But that wasn't what I planned to write about as the new patch 3.0.2 brought a load of new features to the game, which will keep me busy too..

Hail to the WoW Achievements!

I had a post earlier this year about What kind of bartle player you are?. This of course refers to the Bartle Test, which categorizes players depending on what their interest in game is. I was somewhere along achiever-explorer-socializer-killer lines, in that order. And at least the achiever part is dead on..

With the new Achievements in 3.0.2, I started rethinking the whole thing, and realized that I must be quite a bit on the "achiever" side, as I immediately started checking the achievements and planning how I can start working my way towards the more difficult to reach achievements.

So I'm doing all kinds of odd things around Azeroth and Outlands, just to get achievement unlocked, couple of points and possibly a mount or title at some point. Some couldn't care less about the achievements, but for me, they're something to work towards, keep me busy and feel that I achieve something. Even that I don't actually achieve much, but anyway :)

At the moment, I'm concentrating on fishing - for those who know me in-game, no big surprise :) The Accomplished Angler achievement for title of "Salty" is what I work towards. The achievement requires a murloc-ton of running and fishing rare fish in hard to reach places, including raid instances SSC & ZG and opposing capital - Orgrimmar for me. Before I had no reason to go and bug Hordies in any way, but now I have a reason. Fish.

After I get the fishing achievements done as far as I can pre-expansion, I'll turn my eyes on Cooking and start pursuing the Hail to the Chef and title "Chef" to go with the "Salty" from fishing one.

Heck, when the expansion is out, I might even try to shoot for the Realm First! Grand Master Angler, but I think it might be really hard and would need me to get the game as soon as possible.

That pretty much describes the game experience for me, there's always something to look forward to. At some point I might (again) get bored, and take a break, but I don't see why I wouldn't keep playing/returning to WoW every now and then. When the expansion is launched and level cap is opened, the leveling start again and the brand new gear will be there to be looted - so again, there will be something to look forward to.

So WoW is quite a bit about achieving and pursuing something. And at the same time exploring things you've not seen or experienced before. But one can't deny the social aspect of the game, the friends you have in the game can also be the reason you keep returning to the game.

Perhaps that's what has made WoW so popular - something for everyone.

Back in WoW: 3.0.2 Patch is Here.

Those darn Wrath of the Lich King ads and the Blizzcon news I ran into. It's been 7 months since I started the break from WoW. But I couldn't resist too long.

I'm back in WoW.

Yes, I resurrected my account and installed the game to my repaired laptop. So I enter the game just when 3.0.2 patch enters the realms, so I handily avoided everything between 2.4 and 3.0. And a month before the new expansion. Just in time to get myself ready for the level 70-80 grind (Bye bye Holy Priest for a while, welcome the good'ol Shadow!).

There's loads of info about the new patch and such around, here's the one for Priests: Patch 3.0.2 Priest Survival Guide by Dwarfpriest.com. btw, I was so glad that the dwarfpriest blog/site was still around, and bigger than it was when I last visited, helped me a lot to read all that info while waiting for the patch downloads after install. So with such quality info I'll probably survive my comeback.

Anyway, I picked up the little things from 3.0.2 patch notes. And it's the little things that matter the most :)

Macros and key bindings are now saved server-side so there is no longer a need to reconfigure them when logging in using another computer.

- So good! I wish this had been around already, so I wouldn't need to reset every macro I ever had. But for the future, very nice.

Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player’s inventory and reappear in the appropriate tab under the pet tab under Character Info. Say goodbye to your vanity pets and mounts taking up bag and bank slots!

Lost pets and mounts (one time quest rewards) can be recovered by visiting a stablemaster.

- YES! at least 10 or 20 slots freed from bank and bags. So good.
- And if the other one means that I can get the pets and mounts I had to delete to free some space in bank, it gets even better.

There was also some info/news about Badges of Justice and Battleground Marks being stored in the new "Wallet", freeing even more space in the bank - but I didn't find this from patch notes.

Of course there's a whole lot of class changes, new talents trees, addon problems/downloads/installs and all that which makes your and my head hurt.

But I don't stress about that right now, I have to learn the game again. It took a while to remember how to move the toon like I did 7 months ago with the camera/mouse (mouse right-button pressed worked). But I figured it out, so maybe I'll survive. And I got Pitbull unit frames and Clique setup already, so maybe even some healing when I get into the game after patch is out in EU servers.

But before that I'll be attending the preview of all previews today, Max Payne the Movie.

Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

I'm not an expert on fitting internet spaceships and there's plenty of suggestions around forums and net how to fit basically any ship at any point of EVE Online.

However, I'll write up some basic info about fitting your ship, as I was pretty overwhelmed when I first opened up the in-game market to take a look what is available.

You're fitting you ship for a purpose: to maximize cargospace, make the ship faster, be able to mine ore, be able to do damage to opposing ship, etc. And most of the time it comes down to...

STAYING ALIVE

1. Be able to sustain more damage than the other fellow can.
2. Be able to do more damage than the other fellow can.
3. Be able to evade hostile contact or break that contact.

A Comprehensive New Player Guide to Tanking

SHIP FITTING RESOURCES

To start this, to try different fittings for your ship, you don't want to spend ISK to see it won't fit or just isn't what you wanted. Luckily there's an excellent tool for this, called Eve Fit Tool (EFT). Download the tool and try it out.

Second, there's a post with all ships setup threads in the forums for your pleasure or even more in the Battleclinic.com's Ship loadouts tool, so you don't need to figure out it yourself. I know I was flying my first frigates without knowing why I fitted it like I did, I just followed guidance :)

SHIP FITTING BASICS

You should also pay attention to the bonuses your ship has, and fit it accordingly (most of the time) - ship type's bonuses are listed in the description part of the ship info. For example, if the ship has bonuses for cargo space or mining yield, it's not probably the best mission runner for you, but it will be great miner instead. Or if the ship has bonuses for small hybrid turret damage, you are very likely to have the best results using those small hybrid turrets. There are exceptions of cource, especially later in the game and PvP, but I don't know anything about that yet, so just believe me: take the benefit of the ship bonuses.

When fitting the ship, you'll bump into cpu and power capacity, which different item modules eat away (some more, some less, some nothing). The cpu and power capacity of the ship increases with your electronics and engineering skills - which is why they were mentioned as one of the "core skills" in the Skill Training installment of Eve Kick-Start. So keep in mind that it's not just the getting the skill to get into a ship. It's also about flying it well and there's quite many skills which help you fly any ship better.

Other than that, it's all about figuring out what you want and then getting the best tools (you can afford) for the job. When looking and comparing the different kind of modules of the same type, keep an eye on the Meta Level of the item. Meta Level is a quick indicator of how good the item is, higher being better. For more detailed comparison, take a look at item info (that blue 'i') - go to the variations tab - and at the bottom of the window you'll see button to 'compare' - Click, and you can easily see the attributes of the different variations.

EARLY FRIGATES

When you're starting out, you're initial ships will be frigates. Your edge flying a frigate is speed. So take an advantage of that and improve it even further. By doing this, level 1 missions will be a breeze.

Look for ship fittings which includes Afterburner I & Nanofiber Internal Structure - These increase you speed - most level 1 mission foes will never catch you or even hit you. Fit your ship with long-ranged weaponry and look for more range from ammunition. For example, In my Tristan (Gallente Frigate II), I used this setup:

[Tristan, Newbie Edition]
Nanofiber Internal Structure I
Nanofiber Internal Structure I
Shield Power Relay I

Small Shield Booster I
1MN Afterburner I
Cap Recharger I

150mm Railgun I, Tungsten Charge S
150mm Railgun I, Tungsten Charge S
Standard Missile Launcher I, Flameburst Light Missile
[empty high slot]

Hobgoblin I x1

It was easy to fit with new character (Electronics 2 and Engineering 2 I think). The setup takes benefit of the speed. And Tungsten charges in the Small Railgun Is increase the optimal range to over 16 kilometers, where most level 1 mission enemies can't even shoot! And when they do, Small Shield Booster I was a plenty to deal with it. And with one missile slot empty it handled level 1 missions very nicely.

OK, there's a small introduction to ship fittings and early frigates. But you'll be quickly going for destroyers or cruisers, especially if you chose military career - and to get ready for that and everything else you want to know, read up from forums Ships and Modules Resource Thread in the forums. And keep in mind the forums Ultimate New Player Guide Collection.

Fly Safe! Always have a skill in training, Keep your clone up to date and Insure your ship.

Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

Continuing the EVE Kick-Start series (previous parts covered Character Creation and Skill Training)

After creating your character, and it's the first time you're playing EVE Online - do the tutorial. Seriously, do it. You gain basic knowledge of the game AND get a lot of useful equipment, including ships.

Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

So do the tutorial, and do the 2 part mission you get from the agent during/after the tutorial. After this the agent adds an Event-Agent to your People & Places (menu there on the left which you should be familiar after tutorial).

Go to the station the agent is, and do the 10 part mission from the Event-Agent after the 2 part tutorial mission. This will net you about 500000 ISK, implants, basic skill books and on top of that you'll get your first new ship (as a side note, that ship you'll get will be superb for early mining, which is a great way to get money in Eve).

After doing the 10 mission arc, you can do whatever you want. That's Eve - a sandbox.

However, I highly recommend doing the 10 mission arcs for the other careers of your race as well (2 in addition to the one you already did). You can find them from the system list below.

TUTORIAL & 10 MISSION ARC SYSTEMS

Do the 2 part tutorial in each station, then start the 10 part mission from the Event-Agent.

Amarr: Conoban, Deepari, Pasha
Caldari: Jouvulen, Uitra, Todaki
Gallente: Trossere, Couster, Clellinon
Minmatar: Malukker, Hadaugago, Embod

To get to the system you want: Go to the star map (F10), Go to search window and type in the system name (or the start of it). Right-click, set destination.

The autopilot you're way there -or- do it manually 'warping to 0' to each gate waypoint, jump through, rinse and repeat until you arrive at the destination. Watch out for low-security systems, as you are more likely to get shot there, set you're autopilot accordingly (should as default avoid low-sec systems).

Like said, doing all the 10 part missions will net you a load of early ISK, equipment, implants and ships. After this I'd recommend you to at least some mining, as it is one of the best, if not *the* best way to make early money. Or try the missions, especially if you chose military career, but do buy some better equipment for your ships (or actually better ship even).

You'll also want to join a corporation at some point, there's a plenty of rookie friendly corporations out there, so just pick the one that looks to suit you're play style and future plans. You can find corporations using the corporation tap on the left menu (NeoGon they call it), and use the search or look at the adverts. You can also join the Recruitment channel if you want. Eve University is on of the best bets early on, as Eve Uni specializes in helping and training new players, so definately check them out.

As a last tip, or more of a reminder for new pilots: you're not safe anywhere in Eve. You can be shot at any point. You are *relatively* safe in high security systems (0.5 and above), but don't count on it, so...

Never Undock with Something You Cannot Afford To Lose

That ends this segment of Eve Kick-Start. Fly Safe, keep you're clone up-to-date and insure your ship :)

All Things Eve (Further Reading)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies

As I mentioned in the previous post about Creating a New Eve Character, I was once new to EVE Online as well and wanted to share the experiences I've had, and hopefully help the new players to get the most out of EVE.

Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies

As you may already know, skill training in Eve is time based. And you can train any skill you want (taken that you have the prerequisites for the more advanced skills). Thus, you're not tied to any "class" choice or anything like that. How fast you gain skillpoints, is based on the attributes of your character. After the skill is trained, you have that skill, and attributes won't affect how good you are using that skill.

Early on you might want to train some skills towards your early career (mining, industry, trade, etc.) or train up core skills - like engineering, electronic and mechanic - which any pilot needs as they boost the abilities of any ship you choose and enable you to fit the usual modules you need. Whatever you choose, train the ten core skills listed below.

If you like more in-depth info about the skills, look for that in the EVElopedia Skill Guide, Useful Thread on EVE Forums about Skill Training, or one of the short lists about those skills: EVE Skills Roadmap.

Below is a list I've compiled from several sources, including the wonderful New Players: Very First Steps -guide.

CORE SKILLS FOR ANY PILOT:

Train all these skills to level 3, before going for 4 and 5. The numbers behind the skills is my recommended order what to train to 4 and 5 first.

Engineering (4): maximize the power grid.
Electronics (1): maximize the CPU.
Energy Systems Operation (2): max the capacitor recharge rate.
Energy Management (3): maximize the capacitor capacity.
Shield Management (5): maximize shield capacity.
Shield Operation (8): maximize the shield recharge rate.
Mechanic (6): maximize hull strength.
Hull Upgrade (7): maximize armor strength.
Navigation (9): maximize armor strength.
Spaceship Command (10): maximize armor strength.

OTHER GENERALLY USEFUL SKILLS

Energy Grid Upgrades: reduce the CPU need of power modules.
Weapon upgrades: reduce the cpu needs of weapons
Control bursts: reduce the capacitor need of weapons

Summary - early on, concentrate on the core skills, and then go for the skills you need for the things you want to do and want for new ships, equipment or career.

Recommended order to train the core skills: Engineering, Energy Systems Operation, Energy Management, Electronics, Shield Management, Mechanic, Hull Upgrades, Shield Operation, Navigation & Spaceship Command. First take all to 3, then to 4 in this order and then to 5.

As a last tip for this entry, download EVEMon - Character Monitoring and Planning tool. In short, it's a tool for keeping track of your EVE Online character progression and planning your skill training in advance (and offline even). You can easily find the skills needed to fly the ship you want or equipment you want to fit and so on. In addition to this, it helps you schedule the skill training based on your play time. Even if you don't understand all this, just get EVEMon :)

All Things Eve (The Full Series)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character

I'm new to EVE Online. My character, Araihs Revlis, was born on 15th of September 2008, 14:01 game time. So that makes me 3 weeks old today. With my Eve newbie experiece, I'd like to share some tips that helped me during these first couple of weeks in Eve. Starting with character creation.

(This post was written in 2008 and the character creation has changed significantly since then. You can read up on Character Creation and Character Creator in EVElopedia.)

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character

As I first started Eve (with 14 day trial), I created a Gallente with industrial career and perception attribute at 3 (Gallente Intaki) - this made it hard (time consuming) to train and fly new ships. During the couple of days with the industrial character, I noticed that perception is quite important attribute in Eve. Attributes of the character affect how fast you gain skillpoints (different attributes for different skills), so having signicantly low attributes makes some skills take a longer time to train.

I researched a bit, and found several articles about creating optimal character for Eve, but several were concentrating on how much time it takes to train all possible skills in Eve, which is a bit too longterm for me, as I don't plan to fly every ship in Eve (and if I do, I'll create Alts to be honest). For those interested, optimal character build for training all possible skills in Eve promotes high perception and low charisma, as a lot of skills (ships for example) use perception and less use charisma (apart from Trade and Leadership).

But I wanted to create more balanced character. Thus, I re-rolled and created Araihs. I chose Gallente Jin-Mei, Saan Go Caste, as I didn't want to hinder any attribute. A simple guide: Tips for Eve Online Character Creation was the one I followed, and succeeded in creating balanced character which enables me to enjoy and follow whatever career I choose in Eve, without any skill training taking too long.

So here's a tip#1 for Eve newbie: Create a balanced character (all stats 7 or above), and with slightly higher perception and intelligence. With balanced character build in Eve, you can train any skill in reasonable time, which makes it easier (and fun) to try out all kinds of things when you're new and exploring all the possibilities in Eve and have all options open for the future. If you want to specialize at some point, you can for example create a high-perception character to train and fly ships and specialize in combat, but for your main character it's good to have all options open, at least that's how it is for me.

As for career and specialization, I would recommend any new Eve player to choose Military career and one of the specializations under it. Why? because Eve is about Internet Spaceships after all - and with Military career you have the prerequisites covered to train your race spesific Cruiser and Industrial from day 1 and fly better ships than that rookie frigate right from the start if you want (better Frigate or Destroyer). And you can equip all kinds of cool equipment without training any skills.

Even if you want to pursue Mining, Trading or Industrial career eventually, flying better ships makes the start more fun as you're training the skills you want. Of course, if you want to start as mining pilot for example, by all means go for it, but be ready to train those ship skills!

If you're undecided, all the starting attribute for any race and bloodline can be found from EVE[geek]. Be sure to bounce back and forth during the character creation, checking the attributes and the skills with the two tabs in bottom left to see how the choices affect starting attributes and what skills you'll be starting with the chosen starting career and specialization.

Now that we have character creation covered and to kick-start your Eve experience, dive in the game! Or read up a bit more - Guide & FAQ : New character creation from EVE Online forums.

One last thing - if you're the kind of player who likes to study and read as much as possible about the game you play or want to play (I'm like that), then you'll also want to checkout the Ultimate New Player Collection from EVE Online forums.

Do you have any tips on character creation? Please add your comments then :)

All Things Eve (The Full Series)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond