Category: World of Warcraft

There is still limited functionality available in the free version, and many players

may opt to pay the monthly fee since there is a significant amount of utility

available in this tool.

The Remote Auction House beta has ended, so sadly we all have to pay for it now if we

want to retain the same functionality as we had during the beta. The monthly fee for

unfettered access to the remote AH is $2.99 USD per month.

There is still limited functionality available in the free version, and many players

may opt to pay the monthly fee since there is a significant amount of utility

available in this tool.

For more details on the functions available and the difference between the free

version and subscription version head over to my Remote Auction House Guide. You can

also get details here about the iPhone version and take a look at the UI in action.

The Remote Auction House beta has ended, so sadly we all have to pay for it now if we

want to retain the same functionality as we had during the beta. The monthly fee for

unfettered access to the remote AH is $2.99 USD per month.

For more details on the functions available and the difference between the free

version and subscription version head over to my Remote Auction House Guide. You can

also get details here about the iPhone version and take a look at the UI in action. 

Blizzard is giving 10 player groups (or guilds) the opportunity to prove their

worthiness to be Cataclysm beta testers. I don’t have any tips on how to up your

chances of getting in other than to say that it’s best to be eloquent and concise.

Blizzard will want beta testers that are more than window dressing, so they’ll be

looking for individuals that can express their thoughts in a clean manner that could

hopefully translate into useful beta feedback.

Getting into the Cataclysm beta won’t be easy. Pretty much all 11 million WoW players

worldwide would jump at the chance to participate in the testing of the new

expansion. This could be your ticket in!

Blizzard is giving 10 player groups (or guilds) the opportunity to prove their

worthiness to be Cataclysm beta testers. I don’t have any tips on how to up your

chances of getting in other than to say that it’s best to be eloquent and concise.

Blizzard will want beta testers that are more than window dressing, so they’ll be

looking for individuals that can express their thoughts in a clean manner that could

hopefully translate into useful beta feedback.

Getting into the Cataclysm beta won’t be easy. Pretty much all 11 million WoW players

worldwide would jump at the chance to participate in the testing of the new

expansion. This could be your ticket in! 

Now, you’re reading OverAchiever because you’re a dedicated achievement hunter or enormously entertained by the people who are — and I think you know what this is like. There’s almost a sense of hostile guilt as you look at the stuff you don’t have, because those unfinished percentages taunt you. Sometimes it’s not your fault. Sometimes, however, you just need to get off your arse.

There are a few achievements in every expansion that manage to get away from us. I’m not talking about stuff that we shouldn’t reasonably expect to get (your completion percentage on dungeon and raid achievements will inevitably nosedive if you can’t make raids anymore), but there’s always some stuff that people feel they should have gotten or worked at for ages that never turned up.

These are three achievements — easy, medium, and hard — that players often put on the back burner while occupied with other pursuits. Two of them just got a lot easier — or at least faster — to do after patch 5.0.4, and all three will get more inconvenient when Mists of Pandaria hits.

Oh, and for pet collectors, we have some welcome news inside about Tol Barad.

Medium
I actually started writing this article because I still have a few achievements left to go on Glory of the Cataclysm Hero, and this is a really good time to knock them off. A lot of specs have just gotten serious buffs in advance of Mists, and I’ve noticed higher overall DPS in my 5-mans since the patch hit. (I will admit this is possibly just a matter of luck, as I’ve also heard from players on specs that haven’t fared quite so well.)

Easy
The Baradin’s Wardens (Alliance) or Hellscream’s Reach (Horde) reputation grind is a little monotonous but still extremely easy as long as you’re willing to keep at it. For the PvP-phobics among us, it also doesn’t require you to kill any of your fellow players, although it has to be said that you’ll benefit from those who do (you moral lightweight, you).

I trust we all know about the daily quests on the peninsula, but 250 reputation with your faction is also awarded for each win in Tol Barad for which you’re present, and winning grants you access to additional dailies on the island. You’ll only get six if you check just the once, but assuming you win again, a different NPC may spawn with three other quests. In total, there are 12 potential dailies you can get in Tol Barad itself, assuming you get lucky with quest giver spawns. However, if you don’t, or if your faction isn’t that great about winning Tol Barad, just keep chugging away on the peninsula quests.

This is an especially good time to knock off the Tol Barad reputation grind, since the number of dailies you can do in a given day is no longer restricted.

What do you get for all your hard work? In addition the reputation achievements linked above and another notch toward exalted, finishing the Baradin’s Wardens/Hellscream’s Reach reputation grinds will give you access to a tabard, pet, and two mounts.

Oh, and as an aside for pet collectors: The once-elusive Fox Kit can now be purchased from your Told Barad quartermaster as well! You’ll have to be exalted in order to get it, and the cost is a jaw-dropping 200 Tol Barad commendations (as expensive as the drake mount), but it’ll keep you from having to run around the peninsula killing foxes in the hope that they’ll drop a kid of theirs.

If you’re not running with a guild group, you’ll be at the mercy of puggers’ moods, but it’s been rare for me to get a negative reaction while asking a group if they’re interested in going for an achievement. It turns out that a lot of players are reasonably close to the meta and keen on doing achievements even during a PUG. Go ahead and ask. The worst that can happen is that they’ll say no and spend the rest of the run silently judging you, being significantly harsher in their assessment of your performance than they would have been otherwise, and you spend the rest of the day in a total funk.

No, seriously — ask.
What do you get for all your hard work? The Reins of the Volcanic Stone Drake and the happy knowledge that you’ll never have to coordinate I Hate That Song in a PUG ever again. 

Mists of Pandaria has brought a lot of awesome stuff to hunters: minimum range finally dead and buried, the awesomeness that is Stampede, improved self-heals, better burst for all specs, and very clever new rare pet tracking challenges. It has also brought us so many flipping buttons to press when DPSing that we need a third hand to keep up with it all.

There are also a lot of opportunities for the unwitting hunter to piss off the tank. That may be all good fun and games when you’re running in a guild group, but when you’re running Dungeon Finder you do not want to piss off the tank: she has all the power. You annoy her enough and she’ll initiate a vote kick. No one else wants to be on the tank’s bad side so they’ll vote to boot your sorry ass. But not until the tank calls you names until you cry like a sissy little elf.

While the hunter changes in Mists have been overwhelmingly positive, they’ve also introduced new ways for hunters to make mistakes. Sell wow gold And I’m not just talking about mistakes that affect the hunter — like the tragedy of rolling an elf back when you didn’t know any better — I’m talking about mistakes that hurt your group.

Here’s what to look out for in Mists.

Stampede: turn all the growls off
On a very closely related note, Stampede pets can and will Growl as well, which will also piss off the tank. In some ways this is even worse than having your pet Growl, because rather than just calling you names and yelling at you to turn Growl off, the tank is going to blame Stampede. She will never again want any hunter anywhere using Stampede, thinking it pulls aggro — when in fact it was your fault, not our awesome burst DPS ability’s. And all of us are going to hate you for it.

Turn growl off
Seriously, turn your pet’s Growl off. Right not. Hop in the game, turn off growl, then come back and finish this article. I’ll wait.

Okay, whatever, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Where our pet’s Growl used to just generate threat, it now acts as a taunt, automatically pulling mob aggro off the tank. It doesn’t work on raid bosses, but on trash it is going to piss off your tanks something fierce. And for the record, when they yell at you about it, they are right. They have the full support of Frostheim to call you names and compare you to an elf.

Growl is no longer something you can leave on just in case you get a tank that isn’t doing his job. In a 5-man environment, it is instead a tool you can use to pull mobs off the healer in a pinch situation (if the mobs are on a DPSer, just leave ’em there).

There are two solutions: the first is to make sure that every single pet in your active stable of 5 pets all have Growl turned off before it is dismissed. The easier solution is just to make sure you use the Glyph of Stampede. That way all of your pets will be clones of the pet you have out, and if your active pet has Growl turned off, so will all the Stampede pets.

And since you can never actually see your Stampede pets in the melee throng behind the boss, who cares if they all look the same?

Beware Barrage
When it comes to AoEing packs of mobs down, Barrage is an incredibly satisfying and effective level 90 talent choice. However, it also has a high chance of pulling in neighboring packs of mobs. While the ability itself has a 40 yard range, it seems that when it comes to the AoE spray Barrage is willing to go far, far beyond the 40 yards to pull distant mobs when you least want them. Then the tank yells at you until you cry.

To use Barrage in 5-mans you have to be very careful about your positioning. This often involves actually moving past the group of mobs and turning around to fire back the way you came. If you’re very familiar with the dungeon you’ll learn when you can safely fire and exactly how you have to position yourself.

Alternatively, you can go the safe route and use Glaive Toss for your AoE pulls.

Beware Powershot
Very bluntly, Powershot is not an ability to use in 5-mans. wow gold for sale The knockback component is specifically designed to piss off tanks as you shove their tanking targets out of their range just as they trigger their expensive abilities … every pull.

If you use Powershot in Dungeon Finder groups the tank will tell you to stop. If you don’t stop then the tank will yell at you until you cry.

Of course in addition to all these new dangers of Mists of Pandaria ways to piss off your tank, you still don’t want to do any of the normal stuff that pisses tanks off — like only hitting Feign Death after you’ve pulled aggro. 

As we’re all grinding out our reputation with each faction, last week’s Addon Spotlight took on reputation addons to try to make this experience easier and hopefully less frustrating! This week we’re examining some other addons that help with some new features brought in in Mists. As ever,  Sell wow gold your feedback and addon suggestions are much appreciated, and if you think there’s a type of addon I should be featuring, drop me a line!

Lately we’ve been talking a lot about addons for features that have been implemented in Mists, and today is no different. However, we are going to be shying away from re-treading old ground, and moving into some new areas. If you’re looking for pet battle addons, there have been three posts about them recently, two from Addon Spotlight, and one other.

And in exciting news, we can announce that Reader UI of the Week is making a return! Send me your UIs, and we’ll get to posting!

Tillers Addons

Last week’s Addon Spotlight on reputation addons included the amazing Factionizer, which monitors reputation with all factions. Factionizer works fantastically well for the Tillers too, showing rep not only for the overall faction but also for each individual NPC with whom you earn reputation in the hunt for your WoW BFF. I’ve not met all my potential BFFs just yet, but Factionizer seems to show the BFF-style rep in the same fashion as the usual rep, i.e. it’s listed as running from Friendly to Exalted rather than from Stranger to Best Friend. Nonetheless, the numbers seem accurate.

If you don’t want to use Factionizer, there are other options, one of which performs the same role as Factionizer, but exclusively for the Tillers. It’s called Tiller Tracker, and keeps track of your daily Tillers’ food quests by “keeping track of what quests have been completed that day, how many dishes need to be cooked, and what materials are required”. It requires a broker like TitanPanel, ChocolateBar, FuBar, or something along those lines.

My one criticism of this little addon is that when I moused over the tracker button in my TitanPanel, and took the screenshot above, I didn’t have a single “A Dish for…” quest in my log. I’d love for it to scan my quest log and ascertain what I need from there, then display only that information rather than what’s shown. It’s a very minor quibble indeed, though, and if you want to just deal with the Tillers cooking dailies rather than installing the heavier duty Factionizer, it’s a brilliant choice! Edit: It appears that from SmaugsLair’s comment below, this complaint is unjustified as they don’t appear in your log! I take it all back, then.

Another great Tiller addon is Vlud’s Tiller Gifts, which adds to the standard tooltip illustrating which items are gifts for the various Tiller characters. It’s so simple, and just adds a little more information on the tooltip that makes it far easier for you to get a gift or two for your chosen future BFFs.
Addon Spotlight Dealing with new Mists features
Vlud’s Tiller Gifts works on every source of tiller items, and also, as you can see from the toolip, shows your current standing with the relevant tiller, and the percentage of your progression through that reputation level. Simple but effective!

Another simple but effective Tiller addon is Delete Tiller Items. This, as we say here in the UK thanks to a lengthy and successful advertizing campaign from a wood-stain brand, does exactly what it says on the tin. As the description says, it allows you to get rid of the Dented Shovel, Rusty Watering Can and Vintage Bug Sprayer hanging out in your bag with one of two slash commands, /deletetilleritems or /dti, once you’re done with your farming for the day.

Order of the Cloud Serpent

There’s only one addon I could find for the Cloud Serpent folk, and that addon is Cloud Serpent. Now, this requires the fabulously popular navigation addon TomTom to work. But once you have TomTom up and running, Cloud Serpent senses whenever you enter the Windward Isle, and adds the waypoints for every single Onyx Egg into your TomTom system. What does this all mean? Well, when you enter the zone, you will have an in-game navigation system pointing you to every single egg. You can check out the video below to see it in action!

Monk Addons

Yes, monks count as a new feature for the purpose of this column! I’m not looking, here, at general addons which monks can use, which, of course, are very plentiful indeed. I thought I’d have a look into some monk-specific addons to show you all, and didn’t find very many, so as ever if you have a great monk-specific addon, do share!

Addon Spotlight Tillers, Cloud Serpents and Monks

So you can see from the screenshot above how it works, it logs the gift quests for you, and maintains a record of the ingredients you need for each dish. It will also remember what you’ve got in your bags, and if you look at the very top of the screenshot it will display your preferred item for easy record-keeping without having to keep checking the tooltip! You can also lock the tooltip open by clicking either the bar icon or the minimap icon.

First up is Monk Timers, which is a cooldown and buff monitoring system designed specifically for monks. While its roles could be carried out with a combination of various other addons, if you want something lightweight and monk-specific, this addon used precious little memory and worked well for my baby monk’s very low requirements for its services!
Addon Spotlight Tillers, Cloud Serpents and Monks
You can see it in action above, I chose to use an image from the creator’s site rather than one of my own as it just shows so much more of what this addon can do. The stagger bar for brewmasters is particularly good, and you can see the other cooldown timers as well. I have to say I found the combined chi/mana bar for mistweavers rather tricky to see in a hurry, but others may not share this opinion, or maybe it was just my color settings!

If you’re not using the standard UI, this addon is also compatible with popular skinning addons Masque aka Buttonfacade, and rActionButtonStyler, meaning that it can be styled to suit most UIs.

Another addon to consider for tanking monks is BrewmasterTao, which eschews the cooldown monitoring and such to simply focus on creating a bar that allows monks to easily monitor their stagger and the internal cooldown of Power Strikes. Their bar changes colour depending on whether your stagger is light, moderate or heavy, and new features are under development — this, like the other monk addons, is still in its infancy!

Next is a mistweaver-specific healing addon. While you can, of course, use addons such as healbot, grid and clique, VuhDo and so on for your mistweaving ways, the creator of MistWeaver has designed something specifically for the monk healers out there. If you check out the screenshot below, wow gold for sale from the developer’s page, you can see the different buttons relating to the different elements of mistweaver healing, and what I think is a good way to monitor resources and replenish them with mana tea as well as thunder focus tea adjacent to the bar. Clicking the chi bar uses your Chi Brew. It also separates out the renewing mist buttons into their own area, as you can see below.
Addon Spotlight Tillers, Cloud Serpents and Monks
My only criticism of this addon is that it didn’t seem to want to let me remap they key bindings, so I had to use the pre-set ones for my meager allotment of healing spells. I would prefer more customization, but for now this is a great little addon for monk healers who want something more tailored to their class than the standard-issue healing addons.