There is some debate over drop rates of tomes and signets between the Eclipse and Black Temple camps in Shadowmoon Valley. Thus I am keeping a spreadsheet of the drop rates.

Toyota Tacoma ad series + World of Warcraft + college football game = awesome marketing.

Way to hit your demographic, Toyota!

I got to play with the voice chat in the PTR yesterday.

This feature will change WoW. Why?

First off, it is easy to enable - One check box. As soon as you enable it, a little speaker icon shows up under your placard when you are in a party. This means the party leader or raid leader can determine who has voice chat enabled and who doesn’t. Not on? Turn it on or leave.

You see, you don’t have to talk to make this useful. Listening is just as important. The group leader can mute other players, so only certain players can talk. This will improve voice discipline while on raids.

Next up, when someone does speak, there is a little window that pops up with their name, that you can place anywhere you like. So not only do you see the name of who is talking, but you can click it to target. “Heal me!” the off tank says. Click heal. Target focus back to main tank. That easy.

“Peel!” a mage yells. The paladin clicks, casts his spell to drain all threat, and goes back to the boss. Very nice.

Next up, they made voice activation actually work. I found that around 70% would eliminate breath pops but pick my sentences up fine. You can also push to talk, but why would you if the activation stuff works?

You also get a speaker next to your own placard when speaking, so you know the system is responding to your voice. A nice touch.

The speaker icon on the mini-map is a shortcut to the chat channels. You can form new channels with passwords and it appears that you can even voice chat in those channels, but I am not sure how that works.

All in all, everyone is going to know that my female toon is played by a male. Oh well

I cannot wait for 2.2. Thank you very, very much Blizzard. You rock!

Here is a video I made showing how I play WoW now, including an inset video of the keys being used as I play!

Watch

P.S. Sorry about the flickering, its some conflict between WoW and Snapz Pro

A guildmate told me about bongo and playing with the keyboard, since playing a shaman was driving me nuts clicking so many totems and spells. So I made a movie with the UI I decided on and I like it a lot!

Watch UI Movie

When fighting or caught by surprise, I am often zoomed in, or turned, and have to spend time trying to see what is going on. It turns out that there are macro commands for saving and restoring up to 4 views!

Caution: On my machine, saving a view crashes part of WoW, so make sure you have quit/relaunched before trying this to save your settings.

Set the camera angle you prefer with zoom, etc, then in the chat box type:

/script SaveView(%x); (Where '%x' is 1, 2, 3, or 4)

Then make a macro and enter:

/script SetView(%x); (Where '%x' is 1, 2, 3, or 4)

and put the macro on your toolbar. Change your camera around and click your macro!

Found on the WoW Wiki

How I use Omniweb on a second screen to look up WoW quests via Thottbot

Watch

Tonight was a good night in the World of Warcraft. I got two new chest pieces and this really nice dagger for killing a uber boss in Shadowmoon. Thanks to Nobunaga and Stormfist for letting me tag along. They were on the same stage as I was so we five manned the boss.

Picked up the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft tonight. Pre-ordered at 7pm, bought at midnight.

There were about 300 people wrapped around the mini-mall that Gamestop is in from 11pm on. It was 29 degrees and Crocs are very cold, even in socks. My toes are sicles

Am now installing the four CDs. I’ve already entered my code.

I hear people on the east coast are already 61. They were smart and had 25 quests ready to turn in for experience.