Honor's Code

Welcome to Patch Day! It looks like a longer maintenance today (as expected) so if you need a suggestion passing the time, I'd start with reading up on the changes if you haven't already. I've got both a Protection and Retribution guide up on Blizzard Watch. After that, I'd recommend the Legion comics. They are well done, and the Madefire Motion Book editions bring them to life with music and movement. My favorite was  Fault Lines , but A Mountain Divided was solid as well. Highmountain: A Mountain Divided Nightborne: Twilight of Suramar Magni: Fault Lines I got pretty much everything done I wanted to last night before I logged off. I didn't make a huge amount of gold, but every little bit helps. I sent out the team on one last gold gathering mission. I'm assuming the rewards won't change for an active mission and I'll still get the gold for the last time. We'll see tonight. One mount I've been able to use in Beta that I'm goin...

Tonight is the last night before everything changes. I expect the servers will be somewhat unplayable tomorrow. The maintenance for these large patches often gets extended and then when the servers do come up, they can be a little unstable. In preparation, I've been working on liquidating my Garrisons on my 4 'mains' : Honors, Kishuf, Theogrun and Rophe. I'm keeping more Primal Spirits and Garrison Resources on Honors because I'm still trying to level up his Jewelcrafting. Thank you to everyone on Blade's Edge selling near vendor priced Blackrock Ore. It's making leveling his profession much easier. Blizzard Watch has a good guide on getting all the gold you can out of your Garrison before the patch. All 4 guys have dozens of Salvage Crates ready to go to unload all that sweet, sweet Transmog gear, but once again, having them scattered all over creation makes it more difficult. If I get a cool Plate item on my Tanaris toons, Honors on Blade's Edge ca...

My next task was to run Memtest86 and Check Disk. Both utilities reported no issues. That was the first bit of good news I had had from the computer in a while. At that point, the issue was narrowed down to either the video card or the motherboard. I ran down to a local 'chop shop' (that's what I call a store that sells computers and used computer parts). For $20, I was able to get both fans and a cheap video card (RADEON 4600 512MB). I replaced the rear exhaust fan, but had some trouble getting the case off to access the front fan. I left that for later and kept the case open with a regular desk fan blowing in it. I replaced the video card, fired her up and installed the drivers. Word came up without an issue. Okay. I tried GiMP. No problems. No crashes, no blue screens. That was already an improvement over what I had been getting. I took a deep breath and started testing my games. I started small with Hearthstone which should be less taxing on the video card than anyt...

I was merrily doing my Garrison chores one fine evening when the screen changed to this wonderful technicolor display. The sound froze and then the screen turned blue and filled with a bunch of computerese. I recognized from the file name that one of my ATI RADEON dlls was the culprit. I shut down and restarted and everything came up fine. I chalked it up to a glitch and after a few moments started up WoW again. When the blue screen returned, I knew I was in trouble. I dove into trying to figure out what was going on starting with the video card drivers. The card I have is a RADEON 6800 series and they stopped supporting it back in March, but I tried every driver available for it on the ATI website, even the beta ones. No driver I tried made any difference. My next thought was to see if maybe, somehow the video card had become loose in the PCIe slot. I didn't how that could happen, but at that point, my main goal was "what", not "how". As soon as I touche...

Thanks to a contest run by the good folks over at WoWhead, I am now in Legion Beta. This blog post is Spoiler Free. Legion goes live in 82 days. I leave for vacation in 79. If you are thinking, that's great, plenty of time to play, you'd be wrong. If I try to break out the laptop and fire up WoW during this vacation, Mrs. Hammer will ensure that the Happiest Place on Earth isn't so happy. My goal with Beta is to both enjoy the story and figure out where everything is. When it is live, I'll be going as fast as I can in order to catch up. It's hard enough securing a tank spot. There's two and only two per raid. Being behind won't help. Hello Beta Logging into Beta was a jarring experience. I've been using ElvUI or Spartan for so long, I had almost forgotten what the default UI looked like. Character copy isn’t implemented yet so you get a stock Level 100 of your chosen class. Sure, I can call him Honors Hammer and make him look like Honors Ham...

In April, I was perusing my Twitter feed when I saw an announcement from Matt Walsh aka Rhidach. Oh, while no one particularly cares about WoW right now, I suppose I should get around to noting I resigned from writing for Blizzard Watch. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 While I'm going to miss my column and writing about paladins, I don't play WoW anymore and at this point I'm not sure I will in the future. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Life has changed SO MUCH in the last year and I just don't have the time to pay the same attention to the game. I will miss it, though! — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Matt and his wife recently had a baby and I remember well from those days with both my baby Hammers that neither free time nor energy was in great abundance. I’ve wanted to write for  Blizzard Watch  for a long time, going back to their days before they were called Blizzard Watch. Once I heard about Matt stepping down, I contacte...

In early April, I talked about my experience with leveling a fresh toon in World of Warcraft as part of the Hearthstone promotion to get the new Lady Liadrin Paladin skin. The main issues I ran into were: combat was too short, other players were antisocial and heirlooms made dungeons not fun for anyone who lacked them. Rohan of Blessing of Kings had similar issues leveling for the promotion though he also had issues with the story in the low level zones. I didn't think that the Warcraft Development team would have time to address these concerns with Legion Alpha and now Beta taking up most of their efforts. They proved me wrong. The Devs started rolling out hotfixes to address some of the issues with the low level experience and one specifically to address what Rohan called the TTK (time to kill) issue. Due to the accumulated effect of years’ worth of max-level tuning adjustments, many classes were killing low-level enemies nearly instantaneously, even without heirloom gea...