A little while ago, I polled my friends at Twitter (you can follow me at @halophoenix, by the way) to find out what the WoW players I know think are the easiest classes to level.

Old wisdom has always been that hunters and warlocks are the easiest to level because you almost had a second character there to help you in the form of a hunter’s pet or a warlock’s summon. I’ve played both classes and found them pretty easy to level, but my main is a hunter and the lock I play is pretty small, so I was curious what other people thought.

Are Death Knights the automatic winner because they start at 55, and the biggest help to leveling is getting rid of those 55 levels to grind? At the same time, retribution paladins have gotten a lot of dps love lately – are they easier to level? I’m playing a ret pally alt right now and she seems to blow through levels faster than I can get her gear for them. What about warriors? Has the nerf stick hit them so hard no one plays them anymore? And what happened to all of the rogues?

Well, the Twitterati came through in a big way. While no one really agreed on a specific class that’s definitely the easiest to level, some trends appeared. There was “easy classes” to level, and there were “unrewarding and completely too difficult” classes to level.

Among the winners? Shadow priests, retribution paladins (as expected), hunters of all specs (also expected), and one passionate vote for warlocks even though they had their hayday a few patches ago and no one seems to play them much anymore. My good friends @nanceinsnow and @transrelativity both weighed in in support of shdow priests, locks, and of course, hunters. (although nance’s dps output is making me want to change specs from BM to survival…) The trend seems to be that dps classes are the easiest, which makes sense – they’re designed for damage output, which makes questing and grinding that much faster. The only class to buck the trend were death knights (suggested by my guildmate Yoshi, who tanks with a 2-hander with style), which were easy not just because of their massive DPS but also because they start at 55, and sure enough – skipping 55 levels makes a difference.

Among the losers? Restoration druids, protection warriors and paladins, and elemental shaman. (unless you’re a multi-boxer and have enough of them to one-shot elites 5 levels above you!) The trend there isn’t so clear. I can understand why prot-spec’d anyone would be difficult to level: you’re specced for damage absorption, not output. Resto druids I can understand too – healing classes are designed for, well, healing. Elemental shamans I was confused by though.

One stand-out though: a good friend in my guild, @tongarityphoon pointed out that she thought holy priests were the easiest to level. I boggled; holy priests? Cloth-wearing healers? Easy to level? How could that possibly be? She insisted; it was the easiest class to level she’d ever played. I’m still skeptical: I might have to roll one to find out.

So what about you? What classes have you played that you found particularly easy to level? Does it matter where in the cycle of patches from launch it was? Rogues and enhancement shaman were in vogue about a year ago, as were warlocks; everyone was playing them. Then along came the nerf train and the new expansion and it seems like everyone who played a rogue now plays a death knight. Additionally, you can’t find someone to pick up all the caster plate that drops in Naxx to save your life.

Maybe it’s a function of which class is on top at the moment, but some classes are consistently easy to grind. Let us know your picks in the comments!

Talent Chic

Now that 3.0.2 is out and about, a lot of you are likely struggling to find a build that works for you. Sure, the talent calculators have been out and about for a while, but people are finally getting an opportunity to (outside of the beta, of course) test out the builds and the abilities and see if they’re yielding the results that everyone thought they would and see what kind of performance they get.

The trouble for those of us who have been dissapointed with the results or are looking for some guidance from folks who have more time, energy, and effort to put into theorycrafting than we do (or are just plain lazy), there’s TalentChic!

To get the most out of TalentChic, select your class from the menu on the left side, select the spec you want to go, and you’ll immediately be taken to the most popular talent builds for the various classes and specs in the game. The site pulls its information from the Armory, so you’re not necessarily seeing what’s best, just what’s most popular.

The most popular builds are at the top of the page and shown with the most stars, and you can click on any of the particular builds to go to the talent calculator and see how they play out and where everyone has been putting their talent points. You can also filter based on what you plan to do with the build – as in if you’re looking for a build that’s specifically good for PvP, PvE, questing, grinding, raiding, or more.

The information is good, and I used it to help validate my selections for my ret pally and my BM hunter. Again, the service doesn’t tell you whether or not the build is good – just whether or not it’s popular; and it’s fair to mention that just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it worth doing – so take all of the builds with a grain of salt; maybe the most popular ones aren’t the ones for you, but they’re great starting off points where you can make your own choices. Enjoy!

Now the fine folks at WoWhead have released something I’ve been dying for for a long time now, an easy way to compare two items that isn’t somewhat busted like Blizzard’s own “Find an Upgrade” feature on the Armory is. WoWhead’s Item Comparison Tool allows you to distinctly compare two items, multiple items, or even item sets against one another to see which is superior in the areas that matter to you.

See above? That’s where I’m comparing the Season 2 hunter PVP set against the Tier 4 hunter PvE set to see the differences. The tool couldn’t be easier to use – simply click to add an item and type in the name of the item or the item set to add it to the tool and get instant results. Never again will you have to go wondering if a specific item is an upgrade or not…unless that is, unless you’re in-game and have to make a snap decision once it’s dropped. Roll on it and decide later, I say! It’d be cool though if a tool like this came in the form of an add-on (are you listening, add-on developers?)!

Thanks much to one of my favorite WoW bloggers, Big Red Kitty for breaking the story!

First, dear John, I will be a massive killjoy and explain something massively basic to you – any “scientific excursion” should be led by someone with, at least, a basic understanding of the terrain he or she excurses into. You exhibit all the signs of someone who is – at best – innocently unfamiliar, at worst, unscientifically indifferent to the world you pertain to be taking this excursion into.

How do I know? Well, for starters, let’s look at your … gasp[1] …  Level 20 Hunter “Gonzorina”. You see, Earthen Ring is a so-called RP server, a place people converge to Roleplay. Your excursion, the setup, its premise, its participants, even your character’s name are essentially contrary to the RP element of the server and, in the case of your guild and character name, violate Blizzard’s RP policy. I am sure HST takes a massive left spin in his grave over your naming yourself a “Gonzo” something, but unlike him Blizzard can act. In fact, me being a massive Killjoy Cow, I’ll make sure to log on and report your name and guild name as well as names like “Mynameisman” right then, and there, for said violations. Or Mr. Bainbridge’s character names, Sciencemag, Computabull, and Price. I bow before your understanding of RP and WoW-RP in particular. I am massively interested to hear all I can about this “convergence” of your “Computabull” Level 30 Elemental-specced Tauren Shaman. Or your Level 20 Hunter, another fine example of your understanding of the environment and theorycraft behind it.

Let’s be clear on this… I am no rabid RPer. I usually don’t get my virtual panties into painful wads over naming convention breaches. But I do, call it a weakness, get annoyed at “scientific” excursions exhibiting massive, even dangerous, flaws like yours. This alone could – and should – call your understanding of the Virtual Ecosystem you claim to be familiar enough to lead through, into question, but it gets better.

One of my absolute favorites in your sessions is the “Anti-capitalist, pro-environmental values in the picture of a priest fighting a deforestation machine.” The priest shown is a Blood Elf, who – according to lore – couldn’t give less of a flying gnome about “anti-capitalism” or “pro-environmentalism”. Oh, you don’t care about lore? Get your pixelated behinds off that RP server, pronto.

Another one is almost as funny – your “undisclosed Alliance location”  which you will attack (iow, grief) after the “sessions” are concluded. I just hope you have a good RP backgrounder for this one, because it’ll be hell to explain why a bunch of Level 5s got two-shot by the spawned guards in Sentinel Hill (yes, it’s kind of dumb to discuss the “undisclosed” location on the same page…). Crushing blows are teh suxz0rz.

In short, this “conference” is ill-conceived. Not something I’d have expected from someone with a nsf.gov email address, and definitely not something that will yield any true scientific results. “It appears,” to quote a guildmate of mine, “to be a boneheaded attempt at starting a guild.” Is it? I don’t know, but Mr. Bainbridge and Mr. Bohannon don’t particularly exhibit an understanding of the very Virtual Ecosystem they’re taking their conference into.

[1] Level 20 can be, easily, reached within 5 hours /played. Anyone claiming to know anything about any ecosysstem after spending five hours in it (and having been exposed to less than ten percent of its extent) needs a serious scientific attitude re-adjustment.

Here’s a snippet:

There’s two catches though: 1) specializing in a Hero Class is like specializing in a profession – you’re stuck with it forever, and 2) you won?t immediately have access to all hero skills. Think of it as starting a new class – you start off with a couple of base abilities, you get a few more from class quests, and the rest come from your class trainer. The same applies to hero classes; picking a Hero Class will start you off with two new hero skills, and the rest will come from hero class training (called “hero talents”) and hero quests. Here’s the interesting part: hero talents uses Hero Points, rather than currency or regular talent points. Blizzard hasn’t finalized how Hero Points will be earned, but they will most likely be obtained through a combination of experience/honor, and unique items that give you one or more hero points when used. Most likely those items will be given as both quest rewards, and drops off legendary mobs like Illidan and outdoor raid bosses (emphasizing the “heroism”).

It sounds like it will lock you into one role pretty hard and also perpetuate the boring (to me at leats) Raid-or-Die paradigm. Yay? Click through to see the big list of what spec becomes which Hero class.

Click here for my profile.

The Armory lists every character and shows their equipped gear, profession evls, guild and guild roster. It shows your reputations with every faction, your talent build, your skills and your PvP record. It shows everything about you, except maybe what’s in your bags.

The first and most obvious question is: why? Services that do this have been around from the start (RPQoutfitter, for example) but they have all been opt-in services. Blizzard gives us no choice. We can’t opt-out of this. Everyone now knows that I have been ignoring my Sporeggar rep and that my gear is pretty crappy.

I expect the forum trolls to start using Armory to attack anyone they disagree with any second now.

How do you feel about this? Excited? Annoyed? Couldn’t care less?

The events in the book centre on one man’s quest to make virtual item trading his primary source of income. As such, they take place over the course of a single financial year, more or less. During this time Julian kept a blog. This blog forms the core of the book, with much of the rest of the content a sort of commentary on the blog entries, as well as a number of interviews (both traditional and basic chat logs).

I’m not sure if I enjoyed the content of the book as much as I enjoyed actually reading a whole book rendered within a virtual world — it’s hard to separate the two parts of the experience. As far as the core of the story goes, the book only reinforces the idea that you can only make significant amounts of money in a virtual world by breaking the rules, partially because of the economic effects of those who are willing to break the rules. There’s also some discussion on the nature of work and play, which I can’t say I warmed to greatly. However, the nature of the book itself, available in a virtual edition and based on blog entries, gives you some hope for the future of both publishing and commerce.

You can join Second Life here. If you want to buy the book in-game, you’ll need a credit card (or possibly PayPal, ick), you’ll need to purchase 750 Linden Dollars (less than US$3), and you’ll need to go to the shop referenced in the New World Notes article.

You can read a log from the author’s virtual book signing and discussion that was held in Second Life in the July ‘06 archive of my Second Life weblog.

Rockwell references aside, this slightly paranoid online survey might be worth a few minutes of your morning. What’s the point? I’ll let the surveyor explain …

“I’m conducting an investigation into surveillance within massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft and SecondLife. The questionnaire will take between 2 and 20 minutes to complete depending on how much information you’re willing to supply. I’m interested in stories and observations so feel free to ramble.” *

There you have it. Interested? Go answer the MMO Surveillance Questionnaire.

To me, this doesn’t seem to be so much of an issue for WoW as it might be for a game like Second Life. Gnomes are pretty industrious, but none of us are actually inventing in-game devices that monitor or record the activities of other players. The mechanics of the game just don’t allow it.

And yet, if you knew that Blizzard was actively monitoring your online behavior, taking note of your habits and logging your chat, how would that make you feel?

Lineage and Lineage II are the only current competitors to WoW, but even they are showing weakness in the face of WoW’s amazing growth. Browse around and take a look at all the different way the subscriber data has been sliced and presented.

But remember….If you destroy your costly 9800 Pro or your now worthless Rage 128 because of a bug in this program or your careless utilisation of it, you’re on your own!