Project Lore

Oh, one of the joys of being a girl. I know it's a stereotype, but I can't help it. I love pretty clothes. And shoes. Bring that to the World of Warcraft, and I am quickly becoming a whore to collecting gear that serves little purpose other than looking good. Combine that with Equipment Manager, and you've got your own little closet of premade WoW outfits at your disposal.

I just recently discovered the joys of Equipment Manager. It's been out for a while now, since Patch 3.1.2. But since I was not duel specced, I thought I had no use for managing different gear sets. Oh man, was I wrong.

As bloggers have lamented in the past, gear in WoW isn't always the most fashion-forward. So if you're concerned about looking cool while hanging around Dalaran, why not change that? As long as you're not in a situation that you need your stats, I'd say vanity gear is the way to go.

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Band-Aid Fix For Lag Kills PvP Zone For all intents and purposes, Patch v3.1.2 was designed as a clean-up to Secrets of Ulduar.  The minor content patch added a few features that were meant for Ulduar's patch, including the swanky Equipment Manager, further "fixes" for Wintergrasp and general tweaks to the massive amount of changes v3.1 brought us.  Unfortunately the Band-Aid (TM) patch tore the wound open. It took Blizzard a little while to admit it, but v3.1.2 completely broke Wintergrasp on many servers.  If you don't happen to be on one of the affected servers then you missed out on some serious Honor.  The issue is that the Wintergrasp timer is royally screwed, which caused the battle to restart ~5-10 minutes after it had completed.  I managed to score a few Wintergrasp Achievements during my struggle to complete my daily fishing quest. I was also rewarded with a handful of marks and a token amount of Honor for my anglin' expedition.  It's unknown what caused the error, but Blizzard has disabled the PvP zone until it can be rectified. Thankfully, the Wintergrasp bug seems to be the only lingering issue, but it wasn't the only one for Magtheridon (US).  As with most patch days, my ancient server struggled to re-open in a timely fashion.  It was then plagued by login and world server issues, a problem that delayed last night's raid for more than an hour.  During the wait I tried to busy myself with Terminator Salvation.  It just wasn't my night, the action title fails to install from the DVD.  Sigh.  In the end my night of gaming was worth the wait.  By the evening's culmination I had scored a shiny new dagger to replace my dull Maexxna's Fang redux.  Score. How were your servers?  Any login problems?  Did you get a chance to soak up Wintergrasp wins, honor and tokens?  Exactly how bad is Terminator Salvation?

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The new patch, 3.1.2, is now live on all realms. We have been covering what would be in this patch for awhile, and it's great to see some of our long-lost favorite features implemented, like the equipment manager. Check out the full patch notes. Here are my selected highlights from the new patch: Equipment Manager- When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank). I'm not quite sold on the equipment manager. I use Outfitter for all of my gear management and it's very robust. It automagically equips my lance when I enter the Argent Tournament grounds and puts on my PvP gear when I enter a battleground, arena, or Wintergrasp. I can also throw all my PvP gear in the bank when I'm going to raid for bag space and integrates beautifully with Fishingbuddy. The Blizzard implementation of interface components are generally not as good as player-developed addons (as evidenced as Omen versus in-game threat manager as well as all the interface mods from everything from the auction house to unit frames). We'll see how much this breaks Outfitter and whether it will replace it for most players. New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion's Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply). Not only does this mean new, pretty mounts, but also that there are 5 more mounts, and cheap mounts at that! Five Champion's Seals is nothing, and 500g minus the 20% exalted discount is a mere 400g per mount. I might start seriously trying for that dragonhawk mount. Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator's gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level. Thank god! If only they implemented this on Oculus and the Eye of Eternity, then I would be perfectly happy with vehicle combat. Vehicles don't get tenacity, and this makes my average 7-8 tenacity buff in Wintergrasp pointless for actually doing objectives relevant to victory. Now that vehicles scale up with gear, there is a better incentive for getting gear for Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients. All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper's Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate. There are a few reasons why this is a good idea. First off, it should be noted that the honor rewarded from Wintergrasp on a whole has been nerfed to try to encourage people to do other battlegrounds. On the flip side, they changed the dailies to weeklies with much more honor and Stone Keeper's Shards. This means that there is less of an incentive to play Wintergrasp at every moments it's up, and instead encourages players to play it a few times per week. Hopefully this decreases the plague of Wintergrasp lag. Additionally, they won't take up one of the 25 daily quests you can do every day, meaning that overall the amount of gold and whatnot I can get each week has increased! What changes are you excited about?

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The many of you looking forward to the Dual Spec feature coming in Patch v3.1 will be slightly annoyed to hear that the supporting Equipment Manager feature has been cut from the patch.  According to Bornakk - in an odd April Fools RPing thread - the feature has a few "issues" that still need to be banged out before it will meet Blizzard's quality standards.  I haven't played on the PTR enough to know exactly what the issues could be, but it seems that we will be using ItemRack (remember Outfitter has ceased development due to the UI Policy changes) for awhile longer.  Per Blizzard's mantra, it'll be ready soon, which this time means "some time after patch 3.1."  Speaking of patch 3.1, that leviathan of an update will likely be going live in late April. The slashing of material isn't that big of a deal, as the Equipment Manager is still coming, but more of a sign of how huge Ulduar's patch is going to be.  Perhaps more was bitten off than the company could chew.  At the same time, I would much rather Blizzard cut these "lesser" content additions rather than delaying the entire patch.  For the Equipment Manager, we have had several third-party addons to choose from since WoW launched back in 2004.  Granted, the more robust the default UI is, the better.  It is much easier if we can spend the least amount of time, memory and processing power on addons as possible. In the meantime, time to prepare for Ulduar, grind up 1000 spare gold, sharpen those daggers for the Argent Tournament and attempt to down the second Old God.  One more after Yogg-Saron and I can be labeled as an Old God Serial Killer by the FBI.  Sweet, a title to strive for!  What do you multi-speccers use for gear swapping at the moment?  Anyone come across Equipment Manager issues?

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