Anyone who’s had any experience roleplaying in WoW have seen them. As labeled by my guild, they are the werewolf vampire dragon blood elf shaman warlocks who always seem to be hanging around in Silvermoon or Goldshire in skimpy outfits.

Sadly, it’s these people who give the real roleplayers a bad name, which in turn frustrates us. Because not only do we have to deal with these people, but also the RP griefers, the god moders, and the out-in-the-open ERPs. (I have no problem with erotic roleplayers in general but for pete sake, keep it to whispers. There are little children playing this game too.)

Having said that, I should tell you that I roleplay Saraku as a dragon. As mentioned above, this is generally a big no-no. However, I seemed to have pulled it off successfully, at least according to the people I have asked.

The biggest rule to remember when roleplaying in WoW is: Keep within the confines of the game. Let me go into more detail of how I did it with Saraku.

He’s a netherdrake.

Netherdrakes are seen most often in the game as mounts, working in close association with adventurers to fly them to remote places. It’s gotten to the point where it’s not even unusual to see them. They are not above getting down and dirty to get the job done. I’m not saying that other dragons are uppity, but in general they are more worried about the larger picture. I believe it’s still possible to roleplay another type of dragon but if I had to choose one that would make the most sense as an adventurer, it would be netherdrakes.

He’s not a dragon of uber pwnage.

When Saraku is in human form, he’s confined to the same restrictions that any other player character would be. He can’t breathe fire or tear a man apart with his bare hands or shoot lasers from his eyes. For fighting purposes, he is just another blood elf. He can be bruised, beaten, slashed, and killed just like anyone else of his class and level.

Saraku is also a young dragon who’s very naive. Having been raised as a slave, with all his needs taken care of by his slavers, all he really needed to know was how to fly them around when needed. Once he became Niqora’s charge, she took over feeding and taking care of him. In dragon form, he wouldn’t even know how to hunt, much less how to fight anything.

He can’t change on a whim.

At this point, he can’t change in while in Azeroth at all. To neatly explain away why, I decided that he needs certain energies in order to be a dragon. In this case, he needs either the nether energies in the Outlands, or the auroras in Northrend. Of course once Cataclysm comes out, I’ll most likely have to find a reason for him to now be able to fly in Azeroth.

He also can’t change into a dragon to rip things to shreds. For one thing, the change between the two forms leaves him vulnerable so it would not be a good idea to shift in the middle of a fight. Also, by the time he got to the Outlands, his blood elf form was stronger and more experienced at fighting than his dragon form. At this point in his life, he is comfortable in the blood elf skin and will probably not attempt to change back for a while.

He has a reason to be in humanoid form.

Why take the form of a less powerful species when you can just scorch your enemies in one pass? Saraku has two reasons. For one, he greatly admires Niqora, who freed him from slavery in Shadowmoon Valley. She has been the only real friend he has had, and his inspiration to see what it’s like to be a humanoid. In addition, he became intensely curious about life as a humanoid and what Azeroth was like. He has a wanderlust just as she does and since the only way he could see Azeroth was to become a humanoid…well, the result is obvious.

More recently, he has also thought of returning to his birthplace in the Netherwing Ledge and freeing some of his kind who are still slaves there. He could not accomplish this as a dragon, as I doubt the Dragonmaw orc disguise would work that well. Hence just another reason to be a blood elf.

He’s no one important.

There are other dragons in the game who can change into humanoids so Saraku is not an unusual case. And he is not the Commander of the Netherwing flight, or the bastard son of Alexstrasza and the Lich King (I don’t know how that would be possible even, nevermind make him a netherdrake). In essence, he’s merely another adventurer on a mission to help fix some problems in the world. He has realized, through Niqora and his own work, that you don’t have to be someone special to make a difference.

I did research before creating him.

You don’t have to be a lore nerd in order to come up with a decent background for your character but you do have to know something about where they come from. For example, when deciding his name, I did some searching and discovered that netherdrakes often end their names in “-aku” or “-us”. After some playing around with different letters and sounds, I came up with Saraku, which I think rolls nicely off the tongue and sounds natural. If I had went with a red dragon-type name, the character wouldn’t have made any sense.

I have to admit that I’m not the one who came up with the basic idea in the first place. While I was playing Niqo, I would imagine Saraku’s personality and the conversations the two of them would have as they flew around the Outlands. I had wanted to roleplay him in dragon form as a companion of Niqo’s (like how I roleplay with my pets) but I never seemed to find the opportunity to. Then one day a guild mate mentioned how an alt they had rolled was a nether drake in disguise and I said “BRILLIANT!” and then asked if I could steal the idea for Saraku.

I do love playing him though. He’s so naive and literal minded that I can usually make my guildmates laugh with his antics. So far I’ve had no one grieve me over the fact that he’s a dragon. So I’m assuming that I’ve successfully created a character that side-steps the whole “werewolf vampire dragon blood elf shaman warlocks” taboo.

And no, he does not turn back into a dragon to do the nasty. Anyone on a RP server will know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, read this from Rotten Apples (NSFW).

Does anyone have any comments/tips/rants about this post? Please post them, I want to hear your views.

I’ve tried to explain the strategy that I use (and I can’t remember exactly where I found it) but it appears to be a bit confusing since I can’t show them what I mean.

So my solution was to create a video of Niqora using the technique on two different opponents. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get the jist of what I’m doing but it’s there just in case you do.

Here’s an explanation of the technique:

1. Get your shields (Defend) up to 3 stacks right before you challenge the opponent.
2. Once he takes off, spam Charge. You’ll automatically charge him when he’s far enough away. This will remove one of his shields.
3. You’ll keep charging past him and what you want to do is to make a loop back around so you end up standing right in front of him. While you make the loop, spam Shield Breaker. This may take a couple tries to get right and sometimes it doesn’t even work. But if it does work, your opponent will lose another shield and he won’t be able to get a Charge/Shield Breaker off on you.
4. Once you are within melee range again after completeing the loop, spam Thrust while making sure that you have 3 shields up. I always press Defend once during the melee part even if I still have 3 stacks of shields up. This way I know they won’t expire unexpectedly.
5. Once your opponent starts to walk away from you again, start spamming Charge and repeat the process over again.

A higher quality version of this video is available on Xfire.

Here are two other explanations of the same strategy in case mine isn’t clear enough:

• Raiding, casually – Argent Tournament: Jousting Strategies
• Zanderfin’s Wow “Casual” Raiding – Argent Tournament: Jousting Strategy Complete

And of course questions/comments are always welcome. I hope this helps some people out when they’re doing their jousting.

I was playing around with the pet talent calculator and ended up with a build for Niqora’s warp stalker Grakoth. If I had to pick one great thing about Grakoth (and warp stalkers in general) is his Warp ability. It instantly teleports him to the mob, costs no focus and has a 15 second cooldown. It’s up for practically every fight and saves me having to wait for him to run over to the mob. It’s perfect for someone like me who does a lot of farming, soloing, dailies, etc.

So about the talent build. When I created it, I kept Warp in mind, as well as wanting Grakoth to keep aggro, stay alive, and maybe do a little DPS on the side. I used Big Red Rhino’s talent review and builds as a guide, making some adjustments for a warp stalker and the fact that Grakoth is only level 70.

Tier 1: The first 3 points went into Great Stamina for the health boost. I ignored Charge because of Warp and Natural Armor was put on the backburner due to it being useful but I think the points are better spent elsewhere. The next 2 points were put in Cobra Reflexes. Previous theory-crafting (not mine, I can’t remember where I saw it) concluded that Cobra Reflexes increased DPS because more attacks means more crits.

Tier 2: 3 points into Spiked Collar because hey, more damage is good. Boar’s Speed was ignored because again…Warp. I put 2 points into Blood of the Rhino for the extra boost it will give to Mend Pet. When I’m doing dailies, I sometimes find that Mend Pet does just a little less healing than I need to negate the damage Grakoth is taking.

Tier 3: More threat helps him keep aggro, hence the 2 points in Guard Dog. Intervene was ignored because I solo mostly and ahem…he’s got Warp. Lionhearted would probably be more useful in PvP so I passed on it. 3 points were put in Avoidance because of the reduced AOE damage and it leads to Last Stand.

Tier 4: No points here. Great Resistance is more for instances and PvP. I was considering Grace of the Mantis but somehow it didn’t seem worth it. A small percentage to reduce the mob’s melee crits…I believe the points could be better spent elsewhere.

Tier 5: Taunt was taking to help Grakoth keep aggro. Last Stand is good for some temporary hit points, say for taking on 3 or 4 mobs at a time.

One of my options is to take the 3 points of of Spiked Collar and put 2 into Natural Armor and 1 into Pet Barding. But my way of thinking is the faster the enemy goes down, the less damage Grakoth has to take. So for now at least I’m willing to sacrifice some armor for the DPS.

There you have it! My patches are finally getting close to being done and I’m going to head off to download some addon updates so I can get right down to playing once everything’s ready. I welcome any opinions and suggestions on this build.

Edit: I forgot that in a comment, Tzia had asked me if Warp and Charge share a cooldown. As you can see, I didn’t take it here and a web search came up with nothing. Unless someone else knows, I’m going to guess that they don’t, because well…that wouldn’t make sense to me. Of course I could be wrong and the only sure way to know is to test it out in-game…which I may end up doing anyways.

Now, I knew for a long time was that all the mods were located in a directory under the WoW install directory. What I found out more recently so that all your mod and character settings are located in a different WoW directory. So all that you need to do is to keep those files the same across all your computers and everything will remain constant. Then I came up with a simple solution to this. (With screenshots!)

You need only two things:

1. A USB flash drive ( A 1GB one is plenty unless you have tons of mods [I have about 114 mods]. You can pick one up for about $20 or less.)
2. A synchronization program. I use SyncBack Freeware because it does the job and it’s free

This demonstration will be performed with SyncBack because it’s what I know.

The first step is of course to install SyncBack. You can install it on each computer if you like but I installed it directly on the USB drive for portability. You can do this one of two ways:

1. Install it directly on your USB drive. Make sure that the drive is plugged in and when it asks for the installation folder, browse to the USB.
2. Install it on your computer and then copy or cut the folder it creates to your USB.

Then rev that program up and go to create a new profile. You’ll want to select the synchronization type.

And give it a name.

Now you’ll see this screen.

Now you’ll need to select your source, which will be the location where your mods are installed (WoW Directory\Interface\Addons) where “WoW Directory” is where World of Warcraft is installed on the computer. In my case, it’s C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\.

Then select the destination, your USB drive. On this computer, my USB drive is assigned letter F and I created a folder called Addons to hold the addons.

Press “OK”. It’ll ask you if you want to run a simulation, that’s up to you. Then you can hit the “Run” button located at the bottom of the window and it will sync your mod files.

In this case, none of the files will be on your USB drive so it will copy all the files to there. The next time you run, however, it will check the file modification dates and which file is newest in either the source or the destination will replace the older file in the source or destination. Simply said, it makes sure that the files stay up to date.

To synchronize your mod and character settings, repeat the steps above. Only this time, choose your source as WoW Directory\WTF\Account\YOURUSERNAME where “YOURACCOUNTNAME” is a folder labelled with your account name in all caps. In my case, it’s C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\[account name removed for security reasons]. For the destination, select the USB drive as the destination again. In my example, my USB drive is assigned letter F and I created a folder named after my account name to hold these files.

In the case of Syncback, these profiles will only be stored on the computer that you created them on. So if you created them on your home computer and then plugged the USB drive into your work computer and started Syncback, no profiles will appear. The profiles are still on your home computer, you will just have to make ones for your work computer as well. In most cases, this is actually a good thing. With all four computers that I play WoW on, each one of them assigns a different letter to the USB drive. To summarize this, you will have to repeat the profile steps on each computer you play WoW on but once they are set up, they will remain there for good.

In order to keep all these files up-to-date, run these Syncback profiles before and after you play. A little bit of preparation means that you won’t have to worry about different settings and mods across different computers. If any of this needs any clarification, please comment below.

The only thing I have left to say is Happy questing to all!

Now let’s say you have your pet-to-be already picked out and you’re rarin’ to go. Oh, you actually don’t know what you want? Go to Petopia, now. Really, I mean it, go.

Anyways, so now you’ve chosen your pet. Basically you need to know three things to tame it: where it is, where you are, and how to get from where you are to where it is.

The first one’s pretty easy. On Petopia, Mania’s linked all the pet to Thottbot so you can see where they are found. Or if you wish, you could use WoWHead as well.

The second one’s easy as well. I should hope that you know where your character is but if you don’t, just press ‘M’ in-game to pop up the map and you’ll see the name of area that you’re in.

Now…the tricky part. You have to travel between where you are and where the pet is. Sometimes you don’t even have to leave the zone you’re in. Other times you have to travel across the world and into dangerous and unknown territories.

What I recommend is to get Cartographer. It’s a mod that does a whole bunch of things with the map but one feature in particular we need here: “foglight”. What Cartographer does is show the areas that you haven’t actually explored yet. The journey is a lot easier when you can see where roads and towns (or lack of them) are located. There are apparently other mods that do the same thing but I’ve never felt the urge to change from Cartographer and it’s the one that a lot of people swear by. I sure do.

A little tip when using Cartographer to figure out where you’re going: if you didn’t already know, you can right-click on your in-game map to zoom out and from there you can see a larger area. Same works with Cartographer. All you have to do is zoom out far enough to be able to zoom in (left click) to the zone you want to go to. I also use this to map the route I’ll be taking.

Now let’s say you know the coordinates from Thottbot or WoWHead but you have no idea how to use them. There are many ways to utilize them but the simplist way would be to get Suki’s MiniMap Coords. It’s a tiny, tiny mod that displays your current coordinates on your minimap. That’s all. But now you have a reference as to where you are and where your pet will be and you can close that distance. And remember that those coordinates are for that zone only, not for the entire world of Azeroth.

Don’t want to download any mods? Well, MapWoW.com is at your disposal. It’s definitely not as helpful as the mods would be but if you’re able to wrap your brain around it and navigate while trying to run, it certainly is possible to use.

Oh, you have to run through an area you can’t possibly survive, like a town of the opposite faction or a zone that’s way too high level for you? All you have to do is die and stay dead. What you want to do is called ghost travelling or ghost walking or all sorts of other names. Basically you die and don’t resurrect. You then run as a ghost all the way to where you want to be (you can even travel on boats and zeppelins that you couldn’t before). Once you reach your intended zone, you have to find a graveyard that you can resurrect at. But before you do, log off and log back in again. This is crucial. Otherwise you’ll end up back to the zone you started in and will have to do it all over again. So once you’ve done that, you can talk to the spirit healer and ask to be alive again. You will appear in your body right in front of her. And then you can jaunt off after your pet, preferably after the resurrection sickness wears off.

Another thing I recommend doing is to read the comments on Thottbot or WoWHead for the pet, because sometimes they have tips or strategies for taming that particular beast.

If you’re taming a particularly difficult animal, see if you can get some Magic Dust if you’re Alliance or Slumber Sand if you’re Horde. They work miracles, I tell ya, and have saved my butt numerous times. Or of course use a frost trap if you have it.

Even if you don’t have any of these tricks, pulling the mob in with Concussive Shot will give you precious more seconds to complete the tame. (Thanks inaxdaze!)

Oh, one more thing…it might be a good idea to be Tracking Beasts when you go searching. Hey, it’s just an idea.

I wrote a post about my new blood elf hunter that tamed a ravager, a creature that can only be found on Azuremyst Isle at level 10. Here I’ve written a quick guide/summary of how I did it.

1. Get to Undercity. That involves going into the Sunfury Spire in Silvermoon City and using the Orb of Translocation inside the Inner Sanctum.
2. Take the zeppelin from Undercity to Orgrimmar. (If this is your first time doing it, it’s is located outside Undercity and the ruins on a hill to the north. It’s hard to miss. And make sure you take the right one.)
3. From Orgrimmar, you then need to make the long walk to the Crossroads in the Barrens. (I knew the way from my other horde characters.) To do that, go south from Orgrimmar to Razor Hill. Then go west into the Barrens. When you meet a road going north-south, you can either get the flight path at the Crossroads south down the road (and then head north back up the same road), or follow the north directly into Ashenvale. Here’s a map of the Barrens if that’s too confusing.
4. Then you have to walk north-west through Ashenvale and around the alliance town of Astranaar, following the road up into Darkshore. If you’re like me, you’ve probably already died at this point. No big deal, you’re suppose to anyways. What you are doing is called ghost travelling.
5. If you haven’t died yet, you will because you need to get to Auberdine, an Alliance town that has a ship dock. So die however you want, don’t resurrect, and then find the dock in Auberdine. The boat going to Azuremyst will be straight down the dock (there’s sign posts if you get confused). Jump on the boat and sail to Azuremyst.
6. Once you arrive, follow the road straight past the Exodar and keep running. There is a graveyard just off the right side of the road when it gets close to the Stillpine Hold mountains (map). Note: If you walked through the Exodar area, you will be flagged PVP automatically, even if you are on a normal server.
7. This is the important part of ghost travelling. You must log off and then log back on again. Otherwise you could end up at the closest graveyard to where you died. And that’s bad.
8. Resurrect at the healer. I find its best to put Tracking Humanoids on to see if anyone is around.
9. You are now ready to tame. If you’re looking for level 10 ravagers in particular, ravager specimens are located in this area. Once you are done, you can either hearthstone back or ghost travel again.

There are some people who do not want to pay the spirit healer. There is a way around this. While you are still alive, instead of running through Auberdine, you can swim from a far shore out to where the boat docks. Once there, drown yourself and ghost-walk up the dock until you get close to your body. Once the boat comes, jump onto it and resurrect yourself. Then you have a free ticket to Azuremyst without the hefty spirit healer cost.

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen, Aithne’s Guide to taming level 10 Ravagers. It’s not hard, just a looooooot of walking.

Of course you can also use this guide if you want to tame other animals that can only be found on Azuremyst/Bloodmyst Isles at low levels, such as nightstalkers, barber crawlers, greater timberstriders, and so forth. If it needs more information, please tell me by commenting below.