You know how Alchemy has specializations, right? Potion, Elixer, Transmutation - when performing the Alchemy of their chosen specialization, Alchemists have the possibility of creating extras!

Two mana potions for the price of one! Or, more impressively, two Earthstorm Diamonds for the price of one!

Regardless of my current bordering-on-psychotic-hatred of the current proc rate, I do think that specializations are a good thing for Professions in World of Warcraft.

I’d LOVE to see Cooking Specializations.

Oh, sure, you could go with the obvious. Meat versus Fish, extra procs just like Alchemy. Maybe you could give some uber healing recipe for the fish-chefs, and a super-melee recipe for the meat-chefs.

But that’s all so very ho-hum. Boring. Predictable, even.

I submit to you that we can do better! We are the Warcrafters! We demand creativity! We will not settle for a tired, recolored, repeat of the same old thing we’ve been looking at for ages! (*coff*ArmorRecolors*coff*)

No!

And in that spirit, I bring to you…Condiment Specialization.

You - the proud, the brave, the saucier - you have eschewed the obvious and more celebrated route of cookery. Instead of cooking the main dish - painstakingly breading every Golden Fish Stick, lovingly spicing every Hot Talbuk Steak, and agonizingly de-clawing hundreds of Spicy Crawdads.

No.

No, instead, you take those marvels of modern cuisine and make them better!

You thought that Hot Talbuk Steak was spicy before, wait until you add a little Harpy Hot-Mustard Heartburn! Guaranteed to add an extra +3 to your melee hit, as soon as you stop crying from the pain.

Your Golden Fish Sticks a little limp and unappetizing? Add a little Chimera Ketchup to give you an extra +2 MP5!

And let us not forget our beloved tanks. One can only eat so many Spicy Crawdads before getting bored with them. Why not add a healthy dollop of Goblin Guacamole Gas Gust! You’ll get a bonus to your dodge, although we do recommend turning the mob and tanking facing the raid, to keep from applying a rather nasty debuff to your compatriots.

Join the few, the proud, the Condiment Specialization Chefs! Augment existing foods with exciting spices and sauces!

I’ll tell you where!

Ego has been detained by “Work”. Said entity has been demanding much more of her time lately and sadly, the Ego Corp has not yet formulated a successful strategy for removing this burden from Ego’s shoulders.

Another raid upon the “Work” creature is tentatively scheduled to occur in the next few days. Hopefully soon after you readers will again be able to read the exploits of Tayt.

Until then.

Who are you? You have most likely been here before. Read an article or two. More likely than not came here for insight on the priest class or perhaps it was mere chance, a mis-click from another blog you read.

I, unlike Ego, tend to be a lurker. I hide and read, rarely posting anything anyway (as my dearth of posts here likely shows) but tend to read just about anything I can get my hands on when the topic interests me.

Is that you? Let us know! Take this as an invitation to, maybe just this once or maybe again after many times, sign in, leave a comment, say hello or tell us a story.

We are glad we have your eyes and ears. Glad you stop and visit and very glad those visits are enjoyable to you!

~EgoCorp

How do I get to Ironforge from Darnassus? Why can’t I mind control this npc? How did I get flagged for pvp? This trainer won’t teach me anymore, where do I continue to train first aid? Why did my first pet have bite but my new one has screech?

I know we have all seen these questions in general chat. Sometimes it’s a very simple thing that someone is looking for, knows they must be close and are simply frustrated. More often than not the question can be answered by reading quest text, looking at a talent tooltip, checking your character pane or perhaps checking the zone maps (when they fill in).

However, some of these questions do not have simple answers. And if you are like me, you like to be able to find the answers yourself, but when you are new its hard to know where to look. So where do you look?

**Before this post got too carried away and became a novel I decided it would be a series of posts. Later I will escalate the types of sites for the more power oriented. For now, the simple stuff.**

Since the inception of the MMO genre there have been sites dedicated to collecting and holding such info. While these typically have followed the pattern of being fan created then being comerciallized and eventually falling out of general use due to overflow of adds and mal-ware *cough* allakaz *cough*…ahem, in recent years there have been a few that have seemed to be able to avoid this pattern to an extent.

Wowhead is likely the most well known and is a site that I easily hit on a (nearly) daily basis. I play with specs for whatever class I am researching using their talent tool (which to me seems faster than the one provided by Blizz) or check for item drops. One great boon we have from Wowhead is the provided code for hover-over tooltips of items and spells.

Likely my personal favorite as a repository for all things WoW, including lore behind most anything there is lore provided for, is WowWiki. Researching an instance in preparation for tanking it the first time? WowWiki is the tool you want. Not always needing a walk through guide for the instance, it is always helpful to know what tricks the trash mobs have up their respective sleeves .

Last but not least in this list of the simple stuff is one that is fairly new, WoWDB. Here we have a site that is hosted by the addon site (goodness there is another topic waiting right there) Curse Gaming. And while I would like to go into a little more detail on it, the links over at wowdb are currently down or at least for me all seem to be redirecting to the front page.

In conclusion, you can either go here, here or here to find out where murloc eyes come from…or the EgoCorp will simply tell you they come from Aensu’s pants.

Well, the warlock has been semi-shelved again and again I have picked up a toon that is a class/spec combination I have attempted to play a few times in the past. This go round I have little choice but to stick with it. Also, as I started said character from scratch just last Thursday and with a whopping amount of help (read that as ‘he did most of the work’) from Aensu, said character is now level 48.

That’s right. From diapers to level 48 in 8 days.

I imagine that over the course of the next few weeks I shall choose to share my insights and convoluted thoughts on this class (yes I am purposefully keeping it a mystery for the time being). For this weeks post I shall simply leave a thank you to Vonya.

Thank you for keeping this site going strong, thank you for pushing the rest of the EgoCorp to keep blogging with you and thank you for the new avatars and sidebar images.

As a side note I think my avatar looks like Might Guy in the “Nice Guy” pose. I should totally have a word bubble so with “Yosh!” in it.

I once had a Hispanic friend who was a bit of a ladies’ man. They loved him - thought he was funny, charming, and debonair. Most of all, they always lauded over his hair. Oh how the women-folk would go on and on about his thick lustrous wavy black locks.

But had they known what I knew, I think they would have stayed away from him. You see, my friend Valdez had a secret. That fancy head of hair had been attained through preternatural means. At one time, he had almost no hair and it was obvious it bothered him greatly. He had tried all the “natural” remedies. Sought medical advice, tried every anti-balding solution on the market.

Eventually, he gave in and turned to the dark side. He visited a Voodoo priestess.

She gave him a precise list of ingredients to procure in order to cast the spell to restore his hair.

As these stories always go, shortcuts in the recipe were taken. My friend did not want to kill the yearling cockerel with his own hands and strip the meat from the bones. Instead, he stopped at the local fast food restaurant and picked up some fried chicken. He didn’t want to shear the wool from a newborn sheep, and instead chose to purchase a cashmere sweater. The list of unfortunate substitutions was long.

In the end, I suppose you could say he was lucky. He got what the spell promised - a full head of thick, gorgeous hair, if a little on the greasy side.

The Voodoo priestess, however, was covered from head to toe in a thick black goo that no amount of washings and soap could remove.

… (wait for iiiit) …

Tragically, it was a spill over from the hex on Valdez.

It has come to our attention that one of the members of Aetherial Circle, Kelektra has been bearnapped!

The onus for this crime has been laid upon the doorstep of EgoCorp, and we wish to set those allegations to rest.

Although EgoCorp did indeed embark upon a partnership with Kelektra (affectionately known as ‘Kel’) for mutual benefit in Magister’s Terrace, it is folly to assume that her current disappearance is in any way related to our business relationship.

We, here at EgoCorp, find the disappearance of Kelektra to be highly suspicious, possibly implemented in order to keep our organization from conducting further business with the highly skilled druid and other members of the Aetherial Circle Umbrella corporation. We have unconfirmed rumors that BRKWWA, when confronted with news of EgoCorp’s intent to conduct future business with Kelektra, grew wrathful and hotly denied any such possibility. “She is my precious!” he was quoted as saying.

Please remember, these rumors are not yet confirmed - we simply wish for our audience and stockholders to be as informed as possible in this time of flux and crisis.

(more…)

As the expansion gets ever closer we are seeing tidbits of info. Some go through the trouble of data mining each small patch to look for any minuscule amount of information as can be found. We here at Ego are willing to even go above and beyond that! Ego has sent me personally to dig through trash and hide in air ducts just to secure world first knowledge pertaining to changes in the game and the ramifications those changes can have. Here, for you readers, is the first taste of those efforts.

The Housewife Class

Housewives are the masters of their domains. You can rest assured, while having one in the group that not a single strand of a raid member’s hair will be out of place! They are ready and willing to clean that smudge from your chin with a smidge of spittle on a ready napkin. Much like racial buffs, every Housewife receives a +10 skill bonus to cooking, and are capable of discovering recipes as they spend more time cooking! They bring powerful group buffs, such as the Reassurance Aura (5% Stamina and Spirit increase to group members).

In addition, it turns out that Chastise was originally a housewife spell, but they cannibalized it for a priest racial when the class was scrapped.

The original text copied from in game group chat:

Vonya: For a short period, they toyed with the idea of having a Housewife class - someone who would furiously scrub the enemies with harsh scouring powder, bake cookies to buff the raid with Sugar Rush or apply a debuff of Oh My God Is That A Dead Beaver In My Soup, and give an AOE bonus of Babysitting to all gnomes in the raid.

But they abandoned it after they realized that nobody wanted to do the daily quests of The Dishes and Taking Out The Trash in order to be eligible to raid.

Sad, really.

Aensu: That class still has a few diehard proponents though…but all they can do now days is head for goldshire to roleplay waitresses, and dream.

My intention on posting this is for the replies to be similar confessions of either ignorance (I did not know it worked that way, I swear!) or simply forget mistakes (mine will be the example there…trust me) or what have you. Shall we begin?

*Red faced and all* So we are going to run Uldaman once more to complete the gems of power quest. While waiting for my group mates to finish their preperations, I decided to see if I could solo Revelosh. It took me a few tries, some learning and tactics (kill the little healer first and fast, use War Stomp to interupt his heal, then focus on the boss next he hits harder than the other melee mob you get) and those learning trips meant some deaths. (druids still cannot vanish). We clear Uldaman and much fun is had by all. The consensus after is to move to ZA and since its moderately late we decide to just kill and not worry so much about quests.

The juicy part…

We have no trouble at all through the instance, even clearing the graveyard in one continuous pull (Vonyas mana regen stacked with an innervate is something to behold). Now we come to the temple. And maybe when the mobs at the bottom spawn I get a little cockey and pull ahead of time. And maybe we get them ALL and barely survive due to expert playing of my three comrades. And maybe we med up and the second waves of mobs spawn. And maybe I pull again…and again get them all. Only this time all does not go smoothly and we have a wipe fairly fast.

*sigh* Nope, that is not all. In fact it is not even the reason for the red face (hard to believe, I know).

We run back and head back to the temple. We finish clearing the trash between us and the bosses (lost our shot at finishing that quest, QQ). Bosses down and I charge in with a “but they aren’t even elite!” feeling in my head. And I die. FAST.

*Musters confidence*……..*Prepares admission* I never repaired from playing around in Uldaman…Who knows just how long gear had been breaking. I died so fast on the non-elites because my armor was at a grand total of 2% (per DurabilityFu). Needless to say that when I told the group a great many good deep laughs were at by everyone…well, everyone else at least.

Oh yes, it’s that good.

Posting a moral at the end as instructed by Vonya. No matter how long you have been playing and no matter how skilled you may be you, too can be a noob. Or Only you can prevent noob-fires.

Well friends, it has been some weeks since the inaugural (no I did not misspell Arugal just there) Warlock leveling post. I am sure some of you have noticed Zasp has been trying to steal my thunder by writing on the topic of leveling a combat rogue. Well I won’t have it. Or I tried not to have it. He was to be tied up, set on fire, followed up with being kicked and stuffed into a closet. But, what can I say, he is a rogue and seems to have vanished from my local vicinity for the time being.

Back on topic! Shall we? Yes!

As we learned together in the aforementioned previous post, leveling with an affliction build is a breeze!. But guess what, once you reach the summit, its not all down hill for a warlock. There are other options friends, yes there are and today I intend to address that which I feel is not only most viable but most fun to boot (in this case the usage of that phrase does not mean “to kick” but feel free to give a Rocket Kick, its fun).

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