Mists of Pandaria: Stormstout Brewery

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Earlier this week a bunch of guildies went on the beta together and I joined them to explore a new dungeon in Mists of Pandaria: the Stormstout Brewery.
Apart from Asarenus, who hadn’t copied over his shaman yet and thus quickly made a new premade, we were all in our heroic Dragon Soul gear, so we were overgearing the place quite a bit and it was more of an exploring clear than a difficulty test.


The first boss is a duo of hozen (monkeymen), the second boss is a huge vermin that keeps spawning smaller ones, and the third boss is an “ale-mental”.
We did however wipe on the third boss because of his unique mechanics. We’re the type of people that don’t read the manual unless something has gone wrong, or at least in WoW we are. After our wipe we examined the dungeon journal and easily killed the boss on our second try.

Since on beta addons aren’t enabled yet, some people have trouble playing “unplugged”. I had to spend a few minutes mapping my keybinds, but I’m not really having major issues playing without addons. Stuff like a better rune tracker and blood shield tracker are nice to have, but certainly not essential. Playing without ThreatPlates made things feel like it was TBC again for a moment, heh.

All in all though I would say it’s a pretty fun, short instance. I like the beer/ale theme, and the vermin are still funny, too. And there’s party animals in there, can’t go wrong with that.


Hopefully, we’ll have a few more nights like these where we clear a raid early or something like that and we can head into the beta to do some testing. Temple of the Jade Serpent looks cool on the outside, i’d like to see the inside as well sometime.

Mists of Pandaria: The Jade Forest

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I did say I would be doing some beta testing yesterday. I did some quests on one of my premades, but then the explorer in me took over and I took a tour of the first zone, exploring the area a bit. I have to say, I really think the designers have outdone themselves again. The zone is one of the best jungles they’ve made so far, it breathes an Asian style (to the point of using a bit too many clichés perhaps, even) and everything feels very ‘alive’. Screenshots ahoy!

This is a Jinyu village. They are the fish people, as you may have guessed. They look like humanoid koi and they are competing for the title of “ugliest race”.
The models are great, but having a fishface is just really, really unfortunate if you want to be accepted in society.

You will see this bridge+pavilion scene a lot.

This is the gate to the temple.

And this is the Temple of the Jade Serpent itself.

This is the Arboretum outside of the temple area. Gotta love cherry blossoms! Hanami anyone?

Here’s a Hozu village .. they’re the monkeymen.

Random river with Jinyu boats.

Near the temple of the Jade Serpent are some statues of serpents. They look innocent at first, but when you get near the jade one, the sky turns to this:

Which I found to be rather unsettling. Sha influence perhaps? No idea. Maybe the quests will tell me more when I get to them.

Bloggers block & MoP plans

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lol 286k Blood Shield!
I am experiencing a bit of a bloggers block. Ironically, the issue is the same as with my previous blog: I stopped playing the class I was blogging about shortly after starting a blog. The difference this time is I spent money on hosting and a domain name.

I’m not sure what to do right now – it’s not that I have a huge readerbase like some of the more popular blogs, but still. I would like to (eventually) grow a bigger audience.
I could just switch my blogging focus but it seems kind of odd to blog about death knights under the banner of Mana Cake Musings.

I’m also not sure yet if I will continue to play my death knight in Mists of Pandaria. I most likely will, because she is my character with the most achievements right now and I’ve basicly stuck to her for two expansions now. I prefer the toolbox of a DK for tanking, and so far the druid changes look fun, but not groundbreaking enough to make me switch back to my druid. I have tasted the double resource system of a DK and never once had the feeling I wanted to go back to that annoyingly weird rage mechanic.

She’s also my most “themed” character. In the starting area, I brought death and destruction. Most (if not all) tier sets had skulls and necromancy written all over it. I ride a frostwyrm and a deathcharger on purpose, and I’m looking forward to contrast with the lush enviroments of Pandaria.

I will probably focus on beta testing this week – I’ve been putting it off all the time because Blizzard keeps inviting tons more people, but I really want to test these changes and help develop feedback.

PS: don’t forget about our guild birthday!

Mists of Pandaria: The Wandering Isle

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This weekend I got my Mists of Pandaria beta invite, along with 300000 other people. I was at a LAN party, so I didn’t play all that much WoW, but I did manage to finish the starting area for pandaren. I will probably do so again a few times in the course of the beta, but here’s my thoughts on it so far.

Vuuk, panda mage

The first thing that stands out when making a character is of course the new character creation screen. The game walks you through a few screens, like race&class selection, face&hair, etc. You get a preview of the options you select, too. Since this is a mage blog I figured I’d start off with a panda mage.

As I said, I wasn’t the only one that got into beta that weekend … I got put on Hamuul, a Korean server, which was Medium population at the time.

The scenery of Pandaria is a vivid display of colors and the world design feels very much like that of an old Chinese painting. This shot has some classic elements in it, like the mountains & waterfall, or the river & bridge.


As expected the panda model is quite detailed due to the bone system they’ve talked about before, and the facial expressions. A lot of cool animations are reserved for the monk, but that is not to say casting doesn’t look at least a bit like you’re practicing kung fu.

Vuuk, kung fu master

In any case, it was time to go questing. The overall feeling of the questlines is that of an old kungfu movie stuck on repeat: you have to master x and then defeat y. They mostly revolve around two prominent figures, but also to introduce you to some pandaren culture.


Some quests have you awaken the elemental spirits, which look to be one of the more detailed new mobs in my opinion. I wonder if we’ll see them re-used as “general elemental” models, but I hope not. They should remain unique to these spirits in particular.

As usual the area is full of references too. There are cursed pools that change you into animals when you run into them, which made me think of Ranma ½.

Some quests are hilarious … like when you’re working for a farmer and you meet the virmen. These new kobold-type mobs are a sort of mutated bunny with a huge head.

There’s also some Chinese dragons involved:

As well as hot air balloons.

You meet both the Alliance and Horde on the Wandering Isle, and eventually you have to make a choice. Overall I enjoyed the starting area, and leveling went quite fast despite the crowd and the occassional fighting for respawns of questmobs. My next playthrough I will try a monk, which looks to be a rather interesting class too. More on that in a later post!

Player-run events

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These days, you often see people complaining the community aspect of WoW is being diminished by the rise of LFD and LFR.

There is probably a degree of truth in that, but rather than bring you a rant of doom, I shall give you hope instead. You see I learned of a world RP-PvP event this weekend on Defias Brotherhood. I might not be able to make this one in particular because I will be at a LAN party, and thus I may be caught up in something else at the time of the event.

But I have attended other ones in the past (think Vanilla WoW) and the forum threads prove they are still happening now. I think these events are a great example of player-run stuff the community can provide.

Instead of Blizzard going “well you can PvP in this zone”, players just construct a story themselves and decide on a place.

This particular one was the Battle for Thandol Span (on Defias Brotherhood).

As you can see, the race-specific guilds lined up their troops nicely, ready to move out. The numbers were quite similar for Alliance, so a great turn-out overall.

Here’s another, more recent one – this is the Horde RP guild my mage was in (on The Sha’tar). We were having an expedition in Northrend, and an Alliance guild had come to attack our settlement [they had notified us in advance of course, Out of Character].
So we prepared for battle.

Or what about this? A bifactional event for uh, Pilgrim’s Bounty I think … where we all got together and prepared a huge feast. This is also on The Sha’tar.

I don’t know if this also happens on non-RP servers? In any case, all these events are great examples of inter-guild interaction without any incentive or involvement on Blizzard’s side, purely community-driven.

RL report: flashcard follow-up

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You may remember my previous post in which I explained I was trying out a flashcard/SRS system on my Android to (re)learn kanji.

I think I managed to maintain that for a week or so before I called it. I don’t think the system in itself is bad, but it didn’t seem to work for me.

For one thing, I seem to be terrible at remembering characters through purely visual stimulus. I had this at university as well, when I was cramming characters for my Japanese or classical Chinese. I just had to write them down a lot. In the flashcard system, I found myself choosing the “Again” or “Hard” option often because I could not remember even part of the kanji, which left me with more and more kanji to review each day.

Part of this may also have to do with the deck I chose – I went for the Heisig list of characters. Heisig wrote several books on remembering the kanji and attached a ‘story’ to the characters to be able to recall the different components. We came up with several of these silly mnemonic stories too at university and that works to an extent, but perhaps only if you come up with them yourself with friends. In any case, the stories were not included on the flashcards so I was lacking some context.

I could also have used a bit more aid with the readings. Just giving me about eight different ways of reading a character is nice, but again largely irrelevant without context.
However if you tell me 月 means “moon” and is pronounced tsuki when you mean moon, but gatsu when you use it in a compound to denote a month, that’s far more useful.

I think what I’ll do instead is search for my own notes from university and make my own AnkiDroid deck based upon those. And perhaps actually write out some characters when I have time.

On a slightly related note I have this habit of noticing things in WoW that are related to what I studied. A guild called Tsundere [Japanese behavior concept], Wei Wu Wei [Chinese Daoist concept], Samsara [East-Asian rebirth concept], Sun Tzu [Wade-Giles transcription of Sun Zi, Chinese philosopher]… someone named Arhat [Buddhist enlightenment concept], etc.

One of my guildies had a gnome called Chomsky [reference to Noam Chomsky, linguist]. I suppose the same goes for all Dutch names, but I feel more compelled to contact the people behind the previously mentioned names to find out more about them. Have you ever noticed guild or character names that you thought relatively few people would understand?

Assorted notes

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Immortalis Epic Birthday Party

On April 30th, Immortalis will celebrate their 3rd birthday.

You are all invited to come party with us. Bring an Ogre Suit and fireworks if possible, if not – just roll an alt on EU-The Sha’tar, Alliance side and come watch the massive fireworks and ogre invasion in Stormwind. Our previous birthday video made it to Wowinsider so that gives you an idea about what to expect.

The party starts at 20:00 server time (UCT+1).

Mists of Pandaria Beta

The NDA for the super-secret (not really) press event about MoP will be lifted soon, which will bring us a ton of information probably.
More importantly, I’m hoping it will also mean we get (the first wave of?) MoP beta invites. I bought the annual pass so I am bound to get one, eventually. I am planning to blog about that a bit, of course.

Priest re-roll project

Meanwhile my RAF priest project has come to an end. I have succesfully established a base of characters on Defias Brotherhood. One of the priests is now 85 and getting geared for PvP (3.3k resi and counting, woo!). I am working on her Tailoring/Enchanting in between BG queues. The other priest is 79 and will be a crafting profession mule (Jewelcrafting/Alchemy). A third character got the granted levels that come with leveling through RAF – a goblin DK that is now 79 as well. She will be my gathering profession mule (Herbalism/Mining).

More importantly I am quite enjoying the PvP healing role. Sure, things can get a bit frustrating if four DPS decide to sit on you in a BG. especially in a random BG where friendly DPS don’t always try to peel off you. I cried tears of joy the first time I successfully fakecasted a DK and proceeded to cast a big heal right in his face, though.

Ironman Challenge comment

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Iron Man challenge, and I feel I need to comment on this because I am in two minds about it myself – though I am gravitating to one particular opinion.

In favor of player-induced challenges

On one side, I like how players are creating their own challenges and fun in the game, and how they involve the community into it. Proof is in this very post: it creates extra content to talk and blog about, both from the contestants and from others to voice their opinion on the matter.

It feels similar to gold-making adventures where players set themselves a goal: I want to earn this much in this time frame, and I will blog on how I achieve it. Certainly, an Iron Man challenge will provide some interesting situations to blog about.

Against exercises in boredom

But … I cannot shake the feeling that I would be SO. FREAKIN. BORED. were I to participate in this challenge myself.
I mean … I just leveled through RAF because I didn’t have heirlooms on said server and I didn’t want to quest through with just questing gear. (Some of) these people are specificly avoiding everything with stats on it. Avoiding talent points means you miss out on all the fun spells and are stuck with that basic, shit spell you are happy to throw off your skillbar at lv 10 and never see again.

Not to mention some of the rules are also hard not to break. Specificly, if you want to be able to say “I never died” and know what quests to avoid to achieve this, shit can still hit the fan.
I know I’ve had multiple, invisible, invulnerable and untargetable creatures [e.g. bugged mobs] kill me on my way to 85. Or bad respawns of quest mobs, etc. If you are on a PvP server and you do not get killed a single time on your way to 85, you either play on a very deserted server at 4AM or you are one very lucky bastard.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I cannot see the fun in purposefully gimping yourself. It’s like saying “hey, I’m gonna drive home today but never go past 5km/h and never shift out of first gear” or “I’m gonna climb these stairs backwards, blindfolded and with a tuna on my head”.

But as I said in the first part of this post .. if you think that’s fun, then by all means go for it. Blog about it. Make a contest about it.
Especially if you’re doing the tuna one.

Meme the Sixth: Screenshot Challenge

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Rioriel from Postcards From Azeroth tagged me in Gnomeaggedon’s Screenshot Challenge so here we are.

I don’t have six subfolders – I’ve lost my WoW install far too many times for that. I have one subfolder now, to gather my 2011 screenshots in. So I guess I’ll take the sixth screenshot from there.

It’s my warrior alt I play once every blue moon, questing in Mount Hyjal. I was on the quest where you take control over this communication device where a holographic image of yourself appears while you’re giving orders to the ogres. I thought it looked pretty nice so I took the shot.

I’m wearing our guild tabard, with some of the tanking heirlooms, in case anyone was wondering. My only problem with this is I have to tag six other bloggers … most of the people in my blogroll have already been tagged.

I’ll get back to you on this .. hopefully.

Voice chat barrier: I was shy, so what

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Does your guild use voice chat? Mine does. Our GM rents a Ventrilo server, commonly referred to as “Vent” because four letters are easier to remember than more than four, basicly.
It is mandatory to listen in on Vent when raiding. It is mandatory for key roles to speak on Vent (tankswaps for example). Since I tank for my guild, I speak on Vent. These days, I am on vent almost always when playing, be it for heroics, random BGs, or raiding. It feels like the first thing I want to do when grouping up.

Not so when I first started out in the guild. This was back in Burning Crusade, and frankly I was terrified of speaking on Vent. It’s hard to explain why exactly, but I seemed to have some sort of mental barrier that needed to be shattered. I would listen in, and I would reply in partychat. I know I’m definitely not the only one that has this feeling.

There is one person that got me to talk on Vent. He was a friendly, talkative guildie that I would regularly group with. He thought typing while gaming was annoying, so he talked on Vent.
Fair enough, I thought – but I’m still not talking. I’m fine with typing, thank you very much.

“No problem, Az” he’d always say (my druid main in TBC was Azretha), “just join me anyway and I’ll talk. You can type.” And so we had this odd situation where I’d be typing, and he’d be talking. Eventually, I gathered the courage to occassionaly greet my friend with a “hello” before the switch in my head snapped back to Type Mode. And my friend would respond. Suprised and happy that he had heard my voice. And we’d continue like we usually would.

I think what won me over eventually was his friendliness, combined with just getting comfortable with the concept of voice chat.

These days I’m still not as loud and talkative as other members in the guild, but I speak. Full sentences, explanations. Some uhms and aaahs thrown in while my brain throws everything through the Dutch-to-English translator. I talk during raids, I call out stuff during arena. And every now and then, I talk to a friend that is in the same situation as I was in TBC – he only talks to a few people on Vent, and shuts down when others join the conversation.

Anyone have similar experiences with voicechat? What program does your guild use? Ventrilo? Teamspeak? Mumble? Skype? The in-game voicechat o.O ?