I don’t know a single serious long-time WoW player who doesn’t have bank and bag space woes, at least on their main. That goes double if you’re a hybrid searching for bank space for your healing, tanking, dps, pvp, regen, stam, threat and resist sets.

And yet, and yet… only the most hard-hearted players are cruelly efficient enough to be able to delete or vendor everything they’re not actually using at their current level of progression. The rest of us, well - we hold onto our vanity pets and our tabards and our lovely dresses and our festival pantsuits and our armor from three tiers of progression ago that we just can’t bear to get rid of because it looks so cool or we sweated blood getting it.

Which is why Sailan has full 20-slot bags in her inventory, and 6×20 and 1×22 in the bank. Sigh.

In my case, the armor I can’t bear to ditch is my Tier 2 set, the Paladin’s Judgement Armor. That’s it at right, along with an amazingly matchy [Tabard of Flame], and the weapon is Nefarian’s mace, [Lok'amir il Romathis]. I don’t actually have a full set of T2 armor - we only ever got one Judgement chest drop, and there was another paladin ahead of me on DKP - but I was very lucky to get my guild’s only Lok’amir.

Judgement Armor may not be terribly well itemized - as an example, the shoulders feature Strength, Stamina, Spirit, Fire Resist, Spellpower and mp5 - but it’s so incredibly awesome-looking. Judgement is, I think, the absolute best of the pre-TBC armors. A few TBC sets come close - I’m a big fan of Mage season 1 and Warlock tier 6 in particular. (Okay, so I hate the Malefic helm, but the rest of it is great.)

So - what’s still sitting in your bank, too beloved to vendor or disenchant?

…when Wrath of the Lich King hits.

This is this week’s Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth, a question posed by Dechion of Dechion’s Place.

What Will I Be Doing On Wrath Day?

…Trying to update my mods.

No, Seriously…

I actually hope to have my UI all fixed and ready to go, testing it on the 3.0 PTR and on Beta.

My basic plan will be:

9 Hours before Midnight Launch: Get six hours of sleep.

2 Hours before Midnight Launch: Drive to store, start queueing.

1am Wrath Day: Get home, start installing Wrath. Log on teamspeak to chat with guildies doing the same thing - or catch an extra hour’s nap, who knows :)

3am Wrath Day: Finish installing and patching. Have a coffee.

3:01am Wrath Day: Start playing! Head to Northrend. Train Grand Master tradeskills. Start questing on the paladin. Have a coffee and eat something for blood sugar. Try and force myself to keep the mage on follow to gather ore and herbs.

When Northrend starts crashing from load: Head back to Shattrath and do all the stuff I had saved up - level tradeskills as far past 375 as possible with TBC-level mats, for instance. Have more coffee.

When Northrend gets really bad: Get some sleep.

Repeat ad infinitum… or at least ad 80. ;-)

Blizzard has tried hard to make so much of the game smooth and fun, cutting out factors other MMOs think necessary (like, say, corpse runs or XP loss on death) because they recognised they’re not fun.

Take tradeskills. For the most part, they’re streamlined and simple to execute - I have some issues with the amount of reward they offer, but there’s no “because we can” obstacles…

…except in Enchanting.

If I’m levelling up Alchemy on an alt, I can give her a couple of stacks of herbs, a stack of vials, and click one button. I walk away to get a coffee, I come back, I’ve got a stack of elixirs in my bag and 20 shiny new skill points.

Getting those skill points for an Enchanter? You have to execute your recipe individually each time - and if you’re grinding your skill up a bit, you’re probably re-enchanting the same item over and over with the most efficient recipe you’ve got. Each re-enchant requires an extra click to confirm that you really did mean to overwrite the last enchantment on the item, which is identical anyway. So your twenty skill points cost you forty mouse clicks instead of one, and a lot of boring staring at the screen. It’s as bad as fishing, and you don’t even get to get out and look at the scenery.

It’s only a minor niggle, and the world’s not gonna end if they don’t fix it - but it’s so jarring and tedious in an otherwise streamlined world.

Inscription update for the day: it’s mostly still not implemented, so still no guide from me.

To be more accurate: a lot of recipes are now available from the trainer, from skill level 1 up to 400 at present. However, the materials for the recipes have not yet been tuned. Every glyph currently requires Moonglow Ink (made from Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Earthroot, or Mageroyal), one of each type of parchment (bought from Vendors), and one piece of Mageroyal. Obviously, 400-skill recipes aren’t going to require a level 10 herb, so clearly they’re placeholders until the correct list of mats is implemented. So, there’s no point in creating a powerlevelling guide just yet.

Update: Druid glyphs appear to have the correct mats requirements. However, it’s clear that Inscription is still very unfinished, and any powerlevelling guide would be premature and inaccurate.

Also, note that the Glyphs pane of the spellbook now has three slots for Major Glyphs and three for Minor Glyphs; it looks like the model of two Major, two Minor and two Lesser has been abandoned.

Just an out-of-game tip for my fellow Mac-using WoW players:

After a few months of use, your WoW application folder will get cluttered with large, unnecessary files – remnants of old patches, mostly, which can safely be deleted.

If you’re looking to clear some hard drive space, this thread confirms that you can safely delete any old patch files with “a blue tornado icon or comet icon” except the Background Downloader and Blizzard Updater.

(These are generally files with names like “WoW-2.3.2.7741-to-2.3.3.7799-enUS-patch” or “WoW-2.4.2.8278-to-2.4.3.8606-enUS-downloader”, for instance.)

You can find these files in the base-level World of Warcraft directory.

You can also delete the /Patches subdirectory, although - as a blue poster points out - you might want to delete selectively if the downloader is pushing content in advance of an approaching patch.

Note: this post contains information on Wrath of the Lich King.

Discussion of the new Achievement system in WotLK has often referred to the fact that completing certain Achievements will grant their own rewards. Here’s a quick guide to the system as it stands at the moment.

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I finally met my Waterloo, the grind that even I cannot contemplate.

I have a long and grindy history in Azeroth. I thought nothing of doing Revered with the Aldor and then Exalted with the Scryer (requiring a hefty amount of basilisk-killing in the middle) with my paladin because I wanted all the jewelcrafting recipes. I ground my Night Elf priest to Exalted Stormwind faction pre-60 and pre-easy-rep-gains because I wanted a horse. I have maxed-out fishing, for god’s sake.

I didn’t flinch at the idea of grinding my way to Exalted with the Consortium (before all the solo and 5-man Consortium content in patch 2.2, to boot) or the Kurenai. I have every Burning Crusade faction, bar Scale of the Sands and Ashtongue Deathsworn, at Exalted. I’ve just hit Exalted with Stormwind and Argent Dawn, and I’m a couple of days away with Darnassus, Exodar and Cenarion Circle — then comes Timbermaw and Frostspring Wintersaber factions.

But I have met my match: the rep grind that makes me shudder and think “oh god, no“. This terror: the rep grind to get Exalted with the Bloodsail Buccaneers for a swanky Admiral’s hat and parrot pet. This grind would necessitate killing 1,300 level 67 elite mobs (who drop zero loot - not even coins) just to get to Friendly with the damn Buccaneers… and then I’d have to grind my way back up from Hated with all the Steamwheedle factions just so as not to get ganked the minute I set foot in one of their towns.

No. Just no. I don’t care how cool the hat looks. HONEST.

In a creative and entertaining riff on the Discovery Channel “Boom De Yadda” ad campaign, Ilcyra of US-Bladefist has created a video tribute to Azeroth (and Outland too).

Follow the link for “I Love the Whole World (of Warcraft)”!

(In other news, my family visitors have departed, so normal content will resume shortly.)

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Ubadkitty
Xygrlnxtdoor
Gankdalf
Ublinkudie
Ihealu (or any of the countless variations thereon)
Wontheal (now there’s a priest I want to run with, oh yes)
Damagecapz (yes, it’s a mage)
Hippycheeze
Missdameaner
Healzforgold
Chainhealz (no prizes for guessing which class this is)
Lovrgirl
Snipercon
Elitenemesis
Wykidd
Deadlynoob
Invmeplz
Lakersfan

In the good old days, all of these would have earnt the player a forced name change for contravening Blizzard’s naming policy. These days, all they earn is the scorn and derision of players around them…

I notice I’ve had a lot of hits today from Google searches for Inscription guides - presumably fuelled by today’s announcement that Inscription will be available pre-Wrath Day.

This is just a headsup for you visitors: I’m still planning to write a guide to levelling Inscription once all the information is available. Currently, Inscription still isn’t implemented in the Wrath beta, beyond some basic lowbie abilities (no Glyphs, just stat scrolls).

So, you’ll all be the first to know once I’ve got data to work with, but until then, no-one can give you a meaningful Inscription guide because the information is just not available yet. Watch this space!