What's my Main Again?

On the Verge post

2010-10-12T14:14:00.002-04:00

Its been... awhile. I find myself posting today primarily because I was fiddling around on my old computer (the computer I blogged on) because my new computer flatlined last week due to the power supply kicking the bucket. So here I am waiting for the new supply to come in which should be today (in fact the UPS truck just pulled up), and I figured I'd throw down a blog post for old times sake. A lot has happened since my last post from clearing ICC on 25 and working on heroics, to switching my main raiding toon to my hunter. Getting the server first kill of Halion the day after the patch (since our realm was down) and lots of guild drama ebbing and flowing.

I lost my job in July and am planning on moving out to California at the end of this month where the job market in my field is much more friendly. (if anyone needs an Electronic Engineer tech, or RF Tech in the northern LA region let me know!)

Its been almost a week since I played wow due to my computer dying and this one just being painful to play on after you get used to a 24 inch monitor at full resolution and graphics. But now I'm on the verge of getting my computer back, while on the verge of the new patch, while on the verge of moving, and the verge of getting ready for a new expansion! I'm a vergin... er wait that doesn't sound right.

One of the things I've discovered with wrath raiding is that I never really enjoyed doing 25 man's. My current guild is a 25 man raiding guild and I raid because currently that is what is challenging and the most rewarding. In cataclysm 25's won't feel necessary... and neither will putting up with the drama of being an officer and raid leader in a 25 man guild.

So a few months ago I told my Guild Leader and long time friend that I'll be leaving Serendipity come Cataclysm... or a least SD won't be my main focus when it comes to raiding. Instead I'll be joining a small 10 man focused guild consisting of RL friends and people who I have played wow with since BC. I'm tired of dealing with loot drama, explaining every fight, dealing with poor performance and an inflexible raid schedule. This is my chance to play with friends and do the challenging content, so I'm getting my cake and eating it too.

To me Serendipity gave up too much of what it was in order to do 25 man raiding in a still casual setting. You end up with your ranks over flowing with people you don't know and can't depend on while ultimately some of the better players leave for top tier guilds. Don't get me wrong, we are 9th or 10th on the server which is impressive for the kind of guild Serendipity is... but it was mostly on the backs of the officers and raid core. We'll talk in officer chat about how many people we are carrying this week... and its mostly in jest... but there is a lot of truth behind it. What could we do if everyone actually pulled their own weight?

Anyway B2 is primarily the person putting together the new guild. Kobeck, Blanda, and a few others I may have mentioned on this blog will be there and I'm really excited to see what happens in a guild where everyone is equally talented and motivated.

The new patch today brings with it all the talent changes for cataclysm... and so with it I have to relearn all 10 of my 80's which is actually really exciting to me. Of course... I still have no idea what I'm going to level. With so many choices and now so many changes its hard to narrow it down to what I will enjoy most in Cata. PvD once asked me which toon I would level again in cata... and the truth is with all of the changes... I would want to level them all again. I've thought/am thinking about transferring an 80 to another server with a bunch of heirlooms and gold so that I can level some horde toons with support. Who knows... by the time the next expansion roles around I may be sitting on 20 85's one of each class on each faction.

As it stands now... I'm between my Hunter, Druid, DK, Warrior, or Paladin... on who to level first. I've got some time to figure it out but for now I'm going to go install my new power supply and get working on dl the new patch.

Maybe I'll talk to you all again... maybe not. I never really intended to quit blogging in the first place it just sort of happened. I'm also not about to proclaim that this is a me coming back to blogging... but you never know.

BTW

2010-05-07T11:16:00.002-04:00

I'm the warrior sitting down btw...

I'll get a real post up at another time... right now I'm off to work on building my new computer! New computer! Skyru the Kingslayer! Life is good.

Stress and Relaxation?

2010-04-20T17:44:00.000-04:00

I’ve been finding it hard to blog lately. I’ve also been finding it hard to do a lot of things I’m used to. Guild leadership has really started taking its toll lately. When I became an officer, 2 others were promoted with me. Since that time 3 officers have retired one of which left the server. We lost one recruitment officer… and 2 raid leaders.

That leaves me as the sole raid leader. That means I have to organize and set up groups for 2-3 ICC 10 groups during the week and organize/lead the ICC 25 raids on the weekends. Four nights of progression raiding. Four nights of logging on to find: people not showing up, people signing up at the last second, having to tell extra people they aren’t needed, and having to balance out multiple raid, raid ID’s that run over multiple nights.

On top of that I’m expected to lead Tuesday night raid(s) as well for ToC, VoA, and the weekly raid. Tuesday night I’ve been able to get out of a lot lately due to the fact that my mother in-law is currently staying at my house (cuz that doesn’t add stress) and I told my wife and mother in-law that I was committing to wed/thurs, sat/sun for raid progression.

** Quick time out from the bitching… I really want to thank my wife for being understanding of my play time and hobby when it comes to raiding. We’ve come a long way from her nearly leaving me over my raiding habbits… to her tolerating me being a raid leader in the same guild I nearly lost her over. I love you so much!**

Dealing with people you just don’t like…

In addition to the stress of raiding is the stress of dealing people that I frankly, just can’t stand. There are 2 people in the guild currently that I honestly don’t think anyone likes. People that half the guild has on ignore and some who are flat out refusing to raid with these people. The thing is… they aren’t exactly breaking any rules. They are just annoying! They rub people the wrong way and their play style/attitude is non-conducive to bringing people together.

Every officer is at the point where we are vying for the job of G-kicking the person… but how can we? How do we kick someone who isn’t directly violating any of our rules just because we don’t like them? How does that portray our guild to outside players? Would that hurt the view of new recruits coming in? On the other hand it’s like a poisonous wound that is just slowly spreading through the guild. Is it better to cut off the arm if we can’t draw the poison? Rather than infect the entire guild?

There is also a growing complaint on the guild forums about raid’s getting delayed or people wanting to know days in advance if they have a spot or not… Our guild doesn’t run with constant set groups specifically because of the fact that we have a large number of unreliable people. These people are nice and fun to hang out with… and do a good job when they show up… but they don’t always show. I’m stuck setting up raid groups the day of the event due to the fact that I never know exactly who will show up till that day!

The ironic thing is a lot of the people who are demanding to know in advance… are the same people who cause us to have the problem in the first place.

Where’d my fun go?

Do to the stress of being an officer I find myself staying away from group activities in which I may have any kind of responsibility. I used to join pug raids all the time before becoming an officer… now a days I just can’t. I don’t run heroics for the same reason. That means most of my alts that still need emblems are stuck progression wise… I haven’t tanked anything on my DK for weeks. It almost seems like it is just PvE content in general I just can’t do anymore.

The only thing I find motivation and joy in is PvP. I love doing BG’s on my warrior because it is fun to steamroll stuff in the awesome gear that my warrior has… but to what end? The only progression my warrior has there is from arena. I’m only doing that once or twice a week if I’m lucky. Next to my warrior my paladin is in best shape and I absolutely love playing a holy paladin… but healing in a bg is so much fun when you do it with friends that you can support and don’t… suck. Kobeck is in much the same situation… which leaves him on his druid and me on my paladin both healing which is just weird and ineffective.

I do PvP on my hunter and rogue from time to time… but honestly that just kind of gets boring after awhile. Sometimes I’ll hop on my mage… but I’m terrible TERRIBLE as frost and just get frustrated. So I swapped my druid to balance and have been doing bg’s on him lately. My druid barely has any pve resto gear… yet alone PvP gear… so playing balance is like going into a tank fight with a rubber band as my only weapon. It is so laughably bad that it is fun. I’m getting the old feel back from BC and I’m brutally effective in the back of a demo in strand of the ancients…. But otherwise I die a lot and get to the point where I just need a break.

And so… without any other alts to really level… I take a break. We got Netflix and with the PS3 disc thingy I get to just plop down and throw on an action movie.

I’m starting to see why Nikkyo really just logs on these days to join raid and then log off. I still really like playing but most of the things I love to do have been jaded by having the responsibility of being a raid leader and officer. There really isn’t anyone else in the guild who I would trust to become an officer. I mean I trust Kobeck, Blanda and B2 with everything… but they are smarter than me and wouldn’t want the responsibility of becoming an officer. They’d rather just bitch to me… right guys? :P

Curinir who was one of the raid leaders… quit the guild and swapped servers to play with an old guild mate of ours… who plays in the alt guild of Elitest Jerks. He has been raving lately about how different things are and how great it is to be able to just log on and raid without any responsibility… and if you don’t do your job you don’t get invited back. So yeah… that isn’t demoralizing or anything. /envy

So yeah… when stress starts interrupting the relaxation of your hobby… what do you do?

Its been quite the journey

2010-03-30T22:28:00.002-04:00

Well first off, a week and a half ago my DK hit lvl 80. Not only did I fail in posting about it… I wasn’t paying attention when I hit 80 so all I have is a crappy screenshot. This makes my 10^th 80, one of every class in the game. I started this blog June of 2009 with 4 lvl 80’s. Mid June my mage hit 80 and since then I have gotten another 5 characters to 80.

I’ve healed at 80 with all 4 classes, tanked with 3 and dpsed with all of them to some extent.

Who I’ve been playing

Skyru- Obviously I’m raid leading and tanking on Skyru in ICC. We are working on Sindrigosa on 10 man (grumble 2% wipe) and all of the end wing bosses on 25 man. Progress is going slower than I would like but we are still moving forward. Last week we had an impressive one shot on fester, rotface, and blood council in addition to the first wing. BQL down to 16% before the enrage… our issue is keeping people alive during the blood whirl. There are always vampires that have to bite someone during the first whirl and it leads to people dying from too much damage or a vampire getting MC’d.

When I’m not raiding I’ve been doing a lot of pvp. I’m sitting at 1183 resilience and 35k health in my arms spec. Kobeck’s druid and my warrior stopped our games this week at 1337 because well… we are leet. My 3’s team finally got together this past weekend and we went from 1300- 1653. We peaked at around 1683 but started to get sloppy because… well it was 5 am at the time and I was half asleep. Hopefully this week we can push to 1800!

Llina- About a month ago I was digging through my bags and found that I had quite a bit of healing gear… in fact my healing gear was on average of better quality than my tanking gear. So I decided to respect holy with the intention of becoming a pvp holy paladin. Since then my paladin has become my go to character when healing is needed. I run a straight pvp spec for bg’s arena and heroics… but switch off to a pure holy (bubbledin) build when it comes to raiding. So far I’ve healed ToC 25 and the first 4 bosses in ICC 10 as well as VoA 10/25.

I’m embarrassingly still using a

blue shield out of a heroic but other than that my gear is a spattering of pvp and pve raid gear. As a result my mana regen is absolutely terrible and I’m only at around 24k mana unbuffed meaning that in a raid environment I have issues keeping up holy light spam. I’m still struggling to find that balance between overkill and not enough.

Skylu- The big news obviously is hitting 80. I leveled entirely as a tank from the second I left the starting area. Obviously I had dual spec so had a straight damage spec for questing… but I was always tanking when it came to instancing. You may remember that I decided to create this dk in the first place because as my horde dk was nearing 80… the thought of going through the gearing process completely unaided just seemed brutal. My biggest regret was leaving kobeck’s warlock.

Well that problem was solved when Kobeck transferred his warlock named kobeck and did a faction transfer… with the new name Kurses. Together we finished out our grind to 80. After hitting 80 I threw together some crafted bits of gear along with some boe drops I had been collecting from heroics on other toons and when all was said and done Skylu was sitting at right around 24k health while defense capped. It also helped that luck was on my side and

the defense trinket off of loken actually dropped when I was on a tanking toon!

I had enough emblems that I picked up the 245 sigil right off the bat. I’m dual wield frost and so far have gotten 2 nice slow tanking weapons, one off of the first boss in H UK and an axe off of the second boss in H Occ. The biggest shock I got was when I queued for a random heroic, with 27k health, and got Heroic Forge of Souls. I waited a minute or two for people to start complaining… but it never came. So I started pulling. We had excellent dps and even with my terrible threat output we got through the run in under 20 mins without a single wipe. I got a complement from the healer for doing an excellent job with such a low gear score. I’m more convinced than ever that the key to tanking 90% of the time is self confidence. I knew my abilities, I knew the pulls inside and out, the only thing I didn’t know is if the group was with me. Thankfully they were.

Latest Patch

I have to say I’m loving the new battleground system. I’m a very indecisive person… as are some of the people I run bg’s with. So being able to let fate decide for us makes me a very happy person. The one thing I have noticed is that wow this brings out a lot of people who you normally wouldn’t see in pvp. I’m not complaining… after all a pve geared warlock with 20k health drops very quickly when my warrior crits their face for 8k. But it does bring about issues that come about when you look at the disparity in skill and gear level. Sure going 19-0 kills in a 5 min EotS is fun… but so is having an epic battle for 10 mins fighting over a single node.

In arena the quick insta gib matches can be fun… but the fight Kobeck and my holy pally had last night vs a druid and hunter was just epic. Kobeck did 1.1 million damage throughout the match and they far out geared us (lich king 25 weapons). We won thanks to a target swap from the hunter to the druid with a hammer of justice, followed by a strangulate and both of us going all out.

Can’t say I’m upset about the warrior changes… 12k revenge crits and the 3% stam increase puts me at over 47k unbuffed. I did 3700 dps on rotface and I’m definitely having a lot less troubles keeping agro on trash pulls.

I haven’t turned in all my battleground tokens yet… 10 characters takes a long time… I know for a fact my druid has 100 AV and WSG tokens alone. So I just turned it in on the toons I am actively working on.

Oh and on a side note… the most terrifying team I’ve seen in 3’s so far… a Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman, and Moonkin. Just… ow. We fought that team 3 times… insane burst damage, heroism, 3 different forms of CC, starfall, treants, 3 classes that can emergency heal, 2 knock backs, and a disarm from the priest? How do you beat that? I went from 100% to dead in 4 seconds flat at 1193 resilience. All while my healer was feared, hexed, or cycloned. /cry

Till I'm killed or you find someone better

2010-03-16T17:50:00.004-04:00

Two weeks ago Thursday Nikkyo, our GL, asked if I would be willing to step forward and become a raid leader. My response was basically that if Nik and the other officers thought I was capable and able that I would take the job... till I'm killed or they found someone better.

So that Saturday before ICC 25 started Perp, OG and I were all promoted. Perp would be helping with recruitment, OG would be our public affairs person to the guild members, and I would be leading raids. The current officers that we have were spread pretty thin between real life and general stress. Thus the three of us were promoted to help share the load.

The other official raid leaders are Curinir (who is in the military and thus overseas every few months), Vei and me. Ethren and Nikk are sort of co guild leaders and often have to lead raid themselves. Vei is the paladin tank that I usually co-tank with in raid's. So while I'm happy to help out... I'm kind of sad that I won't be raiding with Vei and Curinir as much in 10's because I will be leading raids as well.

I used to work for the local county government in the Mosquito Control department. It was an interesting job and I worked first hand with an extremely intelligent Biologist. One of the things I at first hated about him is that, if I asked him a question, he would make me go look up the answer and tell him. After awhile though, I realized that he was helping me find solutions on my own. Sure he could have told me... but me researching the answer myself meant that I could do the same the next time.

Well during the last few weekend raids I've felt like I was there again. I would ask a question in officer chat about how we wanted to do something... and he would respond with "well you tell me?" This was infuriating at first because I didn't want to step outside of my comfort zone and make a mistake. I'm very good at following directions... but giving them and coordinating the run is a different matter.

I'm glad he is taking this approach though because I'm settling into my role and becoming more open with my thoughts and idea's. That Saturday raid saw our first downing of Festergut on 25, though I can't take credit for that... but the following day we actually had enough sign ups to run our second night of ICC 25 (amazing what pushing the start time back and hour can do). We did some learning attempts on Putricide, and then I directed them to blood princes. I explained the mechanics and we did a solid learning attempt. The next attempt we killed them.

This past week we added Dreamwalker to this list putting us at 8/12 with some very promising attempts on Blood Queen. Things are definitely progressing now that we are getting 2 ICC 25 man nights in and morale on the whole is going up.

Loot Drama

Our guild has a raider rank that with it comes priority on loot. What that currently means is that raiders can damn near roll on anything and win it over padawans (our raider in training) and members. Well the last few weeks we had raiders rolling on items they already had equipped and even some that were side grades. The outcry from both raiders and members was enough that things had to change.

With new blood comes new ideas. I proposed a loot change and initially the other 2 new officers readily agreed. Slowly the rest of the officers also agreed and in 2 weeks the new system will be fully in place.

Serendipity has never used a DKP system and a majority of guildies have been against using any such system for a long time. However, with the recent unrest a lot of people were starting to think DKP was the best way to go. Well my idea was simply..

BiS Priority

As part of the raider application process in SD every raider has to create a Best in slot list. This list as of current serves absolutely no point other than the fact that someone went to elitest jerks and copied one of their sheets. I thought it was about time we started using these lists for some good.

Thus when an item drops... everybody in the raid that can equip the item for mainspec can roll. Raiders, members, padawans it doesn't matter. However, if a raider rolls and that item is on their BiS list, they get priority on that piece of loot. This ensures that raiders are rolling of gear that they know they need. If no one rolls BiS then whoever had the highest roll wins the item.

One of the big issues we were having with signups is members saying "well what is there for me?" Essentially members were being asked to sign up and fill in but with virtually no shot at getting any loot. This gives them a chance, albeit not the greatest, to walk away with a very nice piece of gear. Raiders can still get gear that may be a temporary upgrade for them without losing the chance to win a BiS piece.

The raiders have another 2 weeks to finalize their lists before it becomes set in stone. Only a well written reason why an item must be changed will be excused. The system will be subjected to peer review (some of our members will be checking up on others for sure) and the penalty for trying to cheat the system is a demotion. All of the lists are kept on our forums and so the date stamp at the bottom of the post will let us know if something has been changed recently without authorization.

Finally our guild will be implementing a Matching system for crafted gear. Essentially if they provide half of the primordial saronites, then the guild will provide the other half from the stock we get out of ICC 25 drops.

I think the matching system is a good idea... even if I already slaved away to craft both BiS tanking pieces for my warrior.

Oh and on that note... my warrior has come a long way sitting now at 33k armor and 46k health unbuffed.

Quick Rant on ICC Buff

2010-03-04T17:56:00.002-05:00

So yeah... the ICC buff went live... and I can tell the difference. Last night we went into ICC 10 and One shot every boss from the citadel to the plagueworks and then Blood Princes. Sure we had killed them all before... even multiple times. But we had new people in this run who hadn't even seen these fights and we still one shot them.

I should be happy right?

Well I'm not. At least not entirely. How do I know it was us? How can I be sure that it was because of our improved coordination and execution. The gear we had worked hard on... or the skill of each of the players coming together in perfect harmony. Fact of the matter is I don't. We did the entire thing with a 5% buff to healing, damage, and hit points. Putricide went down in record time for us... was that because we were all dealing 5% more damage?

I scared the hell out of the healers on the initial pull on blood princes and dropped down below 5% health... would I have died without the extra stamina and healing? Or was it because I used every cd I had to stay alive and it was my skill as a tank? I'll never know.

Tonight we are working on BQL and probably VDW after... if we defeat the encounters.... did we really defeat it?

Revised Putricide Strat

2010-03-04T17:49:00.003-05:00

I am shamelessly reposting this from a post I wrote on my Guild's Forums under the same title. The pic is me getting my groove on in the abomination... and yes that is the raid UI that I use. Messy as hell I know... deal with it!

Last week while tanking putricide I decided to change up the traditional way of tanking the boss. Normally we start on the far left side (as facing where the boss initially is), then after the green ooze is down or while in the process of downing the green ooze the tank would move putricide to the far side of the room. This process would repeat until into phase 3.

While this strat works... it has some issues namely it is very movement intensive on the healers and dps who have to constantly switch sides of the room. To combat this, instead of moving the boss to the right side of the room (north) after the green ooze, everyone would instead move to the center of the room where there is a giant circle on the ground. The ranged dps and healers form a sort of semi circle around where the gas cloud spawns. This way the ranged dps can begin burning down the gas cloud while it is targeting. Whoever the gas cloud targets will then start kiting as normal around the room but since the healers are all in the center it makes it easier to keep up the targeted player. The melee dps can continue to attack the boss and then switch after the cloud targets someone.

After the Gas cloud is down everyone heads back to the left corner and continues to dps the boss till the green ooze spawns. This repeats through phase 2 and dps just has to be mindful of the transition into phase 3.

Phase 1 is really short and depending on the dps of the group it is beneficial to not move to the center until you push the boss past 80%. You should be able to kill the first green ooze and get the boss to 80% before he has a chance to summon the gas cloud. If you do this it will skip an ooze summon giving you extra time to dps the boss and it will pick up on the gas cloud on his next summon.

During Phase 3 we were letting the stacks build to 3 on the first tank before the second tank takes over. This way it isn't so healing intensive right off the bat. The tanks should also start using cd's after the second stack to reduce the tank damage. After both tanks get 3 stacks you should trade off at each additional stack after. If you manage to get to 5 stacks... you are probably going to wipe from the raid damage so saving dps cd's for phase 3 is very important. Heroism should be used when he gets into phase 3 if available.

Now for driving the abomination you should have a psuedo priority on what you should be doing throughout the fight. Your priority should look something like this...

- Eat ooze Pools
- Slow gas clouds and green oozes
- DPS gas clouds and green oozes
- Keep the sunder armor debuff on the boss
- DPS the boss

Basically as soon as a puddle spawns you should be moving to it to drink up the pool. If the boss is positioned near the pool you can still drink and dps on the boss at the same time because the 2 abilities do not share a global cd. Starting out, you should just finish drinking the last pool, as the green ooze begins to form. At this time don't wait... but run over to the mob and start using the sunder ability on him. Watch his cast bar and just before he finishes casting use the abomination slow ability on him and then continue to melee/sunder the ooze as it moves towards its target.

DPS on the oozes as the abomination really makes burning them down a lot easier for the raid dps. Generally speaking I can get the green ooze to 80% before the first dps even gets a hit on it. That is why this is a higher priority over debuffing the boss. You can ensure that the oozes die before it reaches its target which minimizes risk to the raid. If you are able too.. by all means try and keep the debuff but eating the ooze pools and dpsing the adds should be your highest priority. Its the dps' job to kill the boss after all.

With the strategy above for positioning the boss, you won't have to leave that half of the room to drink the ooze puddles. That means you should be close to where the gas cloud spawns and once again after all your slime pools are gone begin dpsing the gas cloud. The same tactic applies, wait for the gas cloud to almost finish the cast, and then slow the target. Ranged dps should already be attacking it as soon as they are able.

Other hints
-Rogues can vanish just before the tier gas for phase 2 and 3 to avoid getting hit.
-Mages can blink while rooted by the green ooze. This doesn't break the root but can get you 20 yards in a different direction giving extra time to kill the ooze.
-The warrior sunder armor and the abomination sunder ability count as the same thing. If you apply the sunder as a warrior you won't be able to apply the abomination debuff... but it still does the damage.
- The putricide tank can DPS the green ooze and gas cloud while it travels to its target to help get it down faster.

Well then... on with the show

2010-02-09T18:09:00.004-05:00

After posting my last entry I attempted to log into wow... only to find that the servers still aren't up from maintenance. So... guess I have time to blog then don't I?

During BC I really only had one main character that I played. Artorin was my first toon and I loved everything about playing a druid. I explored every facet from tanking to healing, from pvp to raiding. I never had more then 9 bag slots at any given time with the many different gear sets taking up the rest of my bag slots. Sure I could of put them in my bag... but seeing the gear kept me inspired to constantly explore the different aspects of playing my druid.

Of course all of that gear was then the very reason that I felt uninspired to level my druid when wotlk was about to be released. I had reached what I felt was the pinnacle of perfection in every role that I played and so replacing gear and relearning the class all over sent me looking for an alternative. Between that time and when I joined Serendipity again, I've explored all the different classes and played nearly every spec of every class in endgame content. I went through pvp and pve on all of them... some more successfully then others.

The thing is though... I haven't striven for perfection on any of them. Sure I play to win, to be better then average. But not once have I tried to reach the pinnacle of what a certain class or spec could do. Gear was always the issue holding me back. I love getting new gear don't get me wrong... but once I reach a certain point... I find getting more isn't going to help me succeed or fail. At that point I was relying on the rest of the group to keep up. Thus when raiding I never strove to get the "BIS" gear. If it came my way I took it... but I never stressed about it... or went out of my way to get the gear.

When I joined Serendipity... that mentality went out the window. Once more I feel the need to reach the pinnacle of perfection in every aspect of my character.

Maybe it is the fact that my warrior's name Skyru is my original gaming name...

Maybe it is the fact that as a tank, I fell the survival of the group rests on my giant plate shoulders.

Maybe it is because I've just about run out of alts so focusing on a single toon is the only solution.

Regardless of the reason the end result is the same.

I am a warrior. I am Vigilant. I am Chaos.

Whether facing the strongest beings in Azeroth exchanging blow for blow, or a dealer of thunder and death to all the Horde in my path... My name is Skyru, and I will be perfect.

Good news everyone!

2010-02-09T17:41:00.003-05:00

Killed Putricide on 10 man last thursday and killed blood princes last night. The MT pally that I usually OT for had a computer meltdown which left me main tanking everything while a ret pally tanked in his second spec. Despite the fact that the MT on putricide should be the better geared... I opted for letting the pally tank putricide since I had a lot of experience on driving the abomination. Took us 6 or 7 attempts but we got it.

As I mentioned before I run in group 2... but contrary to the name since I joined that team we have had guild firsts on rotface, putricide, and blood princes. The way things are looking this theme may continue so go us!

Keeping this short because I need to run a heroic on my shaman to get the last primordial saronite I need to make the 264 tanking boots. I feel bad about the lack of posts lately but I'll try to do something about that. Its a weird transition worrying about the progression of one toon instead of all of them. You would think it would be easier but for me it isn't.

Big Blag Update

2010-01-28T17:21:00.003-05:00

Its been weeks since my last post... and it isn't because I've lost interest in wow... or blogging. I started this blog as a place to write down my thoughts and ideas. To share them with the world (or no one). I think the reason for this was because I didn't have anywhere else to voice my opinions and thoughts. In some part now being in a guild has diminished that need. Being a part of the guild I am means once again having forums to talk to other players in the guild. I can talk about last nights raid or talk about specs and gear.

As a result a lot of my writing time has gone into the guild forums instead of my own outlet. In addition actually having a main character to focus my energies means I'm constantly planning things out. When I get home I want to spend my time doing the things I plan instead of talking about them. So as a result blogging gets put aside. I feel bad because for some strange reason a few people enjoy reading my blog and there has been quite the void in content since joining serendipity.

Anyway I have some time now with no distractions so here we go with what I've been up to.

Raiding

Well this one should be obvious. With new content, I'm kept quite busy raiding both 10 and 25 man's on my warrior. The last few weeks we have had enough people to run 3 10 man's. Two of the 10 man groups have been doing very well. Group 1 and group 2 (the group I'm in) have cleared up to putricide and have pushed him into phase 3 a few times. Group 3 hasn't has quite as much luck and generally doesn't make it past saurfang. You can tell there is an overflow where the majority of raiders are in group 1 and 2 and the less dedicated (and a few raiders here and there) form group 3.

Well this week they decided to mix up the groups a bit. We have a had some new recruits and a lot of signups for the 10 man and so instead of 2 strong groups and 1 meh group... we ended up with 3... meh groups. I was in group 3 but only by name because the core raiders had been scattered quite a bit but the result wasn't that everyone did great! Instead all the groups managed to do was clear the first wing. I think one of the groups MIGHT have gotten fester down... our group wiped at 1% after 5 attempts.

What really bothered me is that the week before we one shotted everything right up to putricide. We were excited because group 2 was doing awesome and really had a good flow going. In fact we were working on an actual name to call ourselves instead of just group 2.

Serendipity's 25 man progression is doing ok. We finally downed rotface on 25 man after 25 wipes spread over 4 nights (different weeks). My warrior has picked up quite a few upgrades but still no freaking shield! I'm sitting at 42.4k unbuffed and 27k armor. I've lost quite a bit of expertise and gained a crap ton of hit rating (at 10% as a draenei)

Alts

I've only mildly been working on the rest of my 80's. I run the daily heroic on the classes I feel like playing which generally includes my prot pally because getting groups is easy... and my mage because I went back to fire to screw around in heroics and OMG is it fun. Living bomb 2 or 3 things run in and dragon's breath, flamestrike, blast wave (glyphed so no knockback), flamestrike and usually they are dead by then. If not I blizzard and spam pyro on the poor left over mobs.

I still haven't run a single heroic or raid on my priest at all since ICC came out... since my druid hit 80 I haven't had the burning desire to play her and I feel kind of bad. The rest of my dps I kinda have to be in the mood to play.

The biggest reason I have been running the daily heroic though is because of the primordial saronite. I've sold a bunch of these so far which have funded my druids epic flying and lead me to my new special project... which is...

Leveling!

The one class I do not have a level 80 of is a death knight. But I've come close. In fact my horde DK Guine is lvl 77... but as I was approaching lvl 80 I realized how hard it was going to be to gear up a tank without support. I hadn't bothered to level any professions and the thought of grinding reps and dailies.... I just didn't want to do it.

I still want a lvl 80 DK though... so my baby lvl 26 priest Skylu was murdered... and arose a DK taking up my 10th character slot on durotan. I kept the appearance and race the same, a female Night Elf, and even named her skylu (which btw means if any of your friends had that toon when you deleted the old one... the new character will show up on the friends list).

This isn't my first attempt to level a DK on durotan and my last attempt capped out at 74. This time though... I'm giving myself incentive. I already had every BoA item from leveling my warrior so bam! Shoulder, Chest, 2h axe, 2 1h swords, and the haste trinket instantly arrive in my Dk's mailbox along with 4k gold and 20 frostweave bags. This toon is living the high life. I went ahead and picked up dual specs at 58 so that I can tank and dps while leveling. She had a stack full of glyphs and gear before leaving the starting zone. I picked up the skeletal gryphon on my way to honor hold and immediately learned flying and the gryphon at 60.

As soon as she hits 70 she will have epic flying and the tome of coldweather flying so that I can zoom around northrend questing. As it stands right now she is lvl 66 and has tanked everything up to her lvl as far as outland instances go. I skipped over questing in zangar entirely because I hate that zone and will hit 68 shortly while questing in Nagrand.

When I'm not tweaking my warrior (btw I picked up power aura's and I love it), or running heroics on my 80's... I'm leveling skylu to 80.

(oh also my shaman got the Challenger title from last season's arena!)

Guilded review: one Week

2010-01-11T17:24:00.003-05:00

In the past week since joining Serendipity I've been in several raids from Naxx 10/25 (our weekly quest), ToC 25, Ony 25 and Icc 10/25. In that time I've gotten way more loot then I feel I rightfully deserve. My warrior went from sitting at around 34k health unbuffed to now over 40k. Overall I've dropped about 1% avoidance but the tradeoff is more then worth it. Sadly I'm still sitting on 2 pieces that are ilvl 200. A tanking cloak from Naxx 10 which will be replaced soon with the emblem of frost cloak, and the crest of lorderon or whatever out of CoS heroic. I've had that goofy shield forever and will be glad to be rid of it though I'll have to wait for the weekly reset for a shot a good replacement.

The highlight for me was on saturday night when we went into ICC 25. I had worked really hard during the week to pick up as many upgrades as I could and it paid off being able to tank in ICC 25. Our guild currently has a bunch of tanks well geared so for 25's one or two of us are going DPS. One of our protadins went retribution for the night which left me Nikkyo and another prot warrior as the tanks. Marrowgar is the only boss I've done on 25 before and I had only ever tanked him on 10 man so this was quite the big step for me. About halfway through the fight the other warrior tank died. Nikkyo and I popped cooldowns while the other tank was battle rezzed and joined back in. Marrowgar was a one shot and low and be hold he dropped the sweet tanking legs which I was lucky enough to win the roll on.

Of course here is where the slight guilt kicks in. This was the first progression raid that I had been on with them and getting loot over the other tanks didn't really feel right to me. Anyway we moved on to LDW whom I've only ever killed on 10 man and it certainly wasn't as a tank. In fact my previous raid group was horribly stuck on this fight and the raid leader refused to listen to suggestions. Serendipity also had not downed LDW on 25 man. This fight places a lot of focus on the tanks so I was really nervous as we initiated the pull. Things were really hectic especially on my side. I for the most part kept my head straight but the other side lost a few dps and ultimately when she transitioned into phase 2... something I've never even seen on 25... we just couldn't get it together and wiped.

Our second attempt went better all around... except I screwed up horribly several times letting 2 or 3 of my melee dps die to the adds before I had solid aggro. We got the transition into phase 2 again but we ended up hitting her enrage. Finally on our 3rd attempt everything clicked and we got into phase 2 without too many people dying... then everything went to hell. I'm not sure what happened but people started dying off left and right including all of our healers. One of our ele shamans started chain healing her little heart out and it was just enough to kill LDW.... with all of 6 raid members left standing... 3 of which were us tanks. She dropped I want to say a tanking ring? and some other crap. I passed on the ring even though it would be an upgrade simply because I knew I was close to getting the rep ring.

The airship battle is just as easy in 25 as it was in 10 except they have 4 cannons! I got to be on the away team and actually use my rocket pack for what it is intended for. I was also on cannon duty which was an interesting and awesome strategy then the way my other raid group did things. When the cannon froze up I just jumped over and taunted MR fancy pants while the melee kicked the crap out of the mage. Then we all jumped back and I hopped into my cannon. The dodge trinket dropped which went to our bear tank Nikkyo.

Saurfang was interesting. Especially since... well we didn't know that 5 adds spawned instead of 4. We did all of this set up and planning and then BAM 5 adds. Surprise? We spent 4 attempts with me tanking. Ultimately though me and the other war tank were tied on avoidance, the pally tank who was dpsing had higher then both of us so he switched back to prot. Apparently the other warrior sucks at dps so I switched to the good old arms spec and pulled out my Awesome (read terrible) dps gear!

The next attempt I had my buddy Curinir whispering telling me how he and the other officers were impressed with how much dps I did in my offspec. I'm thinking cool! But then... see I was in a heroic earlier and my recount bugged out and still wasn't functioning during raid. So I had no clue how I was doing compared to what I normally do... or compared to the rest of the raid. Anyway this next attempt went a little better and finally the attempt after that we killed the damn orc. I was able to look at the logs on World of Logs and find out I did around 4700 dps. Not great... but not terrible considering I don't have a single piece of gear over 219 (except for the 232 ony helm)

We got 2 war/sham/whogivesafuck? tokens one of which went to the other warrior and the other went to the shammy. So every tank got atleast something from the run which was pretty sweet. At this point I noticed that I needed 15 rep... 15... to get the friendly ring. So I asked if we could go kill SOMETHING in the next wing. There were a few people who needed >100 rep so we died to the steamvaults a bit before killing the trash I needed for my ring :D

The rest of the weekend I've spent running heroics to work on my arms set a bit. Working on my dps set is gonna continue to be my focus for awhile then I'll get back to the rest of my alts!

Turning over an old leaf

2010-01-05T17:31:00.002-05:00

Yesterday while I was at work towards the end of the day I was reading Zan’s blog and it got me thinking. In my little guild I’m comfortable. I’m the master of all the classes I play and there is no one above me… or at least that’s how I feel. I’ve talked before about how being challenged and grouping in pugs is a good way to improving as a player. Well I came to realize that I’m not really following my own advice. Sure I run with a semi pug raid every week… but with the classes I bring I’m generally on top. Again, no real room to grow.

This also got me thinking about my wife, brother and sister. Sure I play a warlock like my wife… I know the proper specs and rotations and what to do to reach the max damage. The problem is though my wife and I generally speak a different language. We think and process information differently so it is hard for me to explain things to her and it is hard for her to express her questions for me to answer. Our guild is isolated so she doesn’t have any influence beyond me on what to do to become a better player.

Also when it comes to raiding the group that I run with is solo progression based. This is fine for me… but my wife and family don’t have all the core skills for this kind of raiding. They also won’t learn any of them outside of actually raiding for themselves. I don’t have the stomach or patience to try and put together a run with 5 pugs on old content that people are expecting to get carried through (the pugs not my family).

Well the solution that I came up with is fairly obvious. I talked to my wife and we decided that we would try and get back into my old guild Serendipity. It seems odd to reapply to a guild that you left because you couldn’t focus on raiding… because you want to focus on raiding… but that is what it came down to. I still have a lot of friends and people I miss playing with in the guild and a lot of the issues that I had with the rules and leadership have been changed. I talked to Curinir one of the officers and a friend whom with I still play and raid. He in turn talked to one of the officers and the GL Nikkyo who is also one of my friends.

I got on vent with them and we chatted a bit mostly about what toon I wanted to play as my main. I told them that I really wanted to raid tank again and wanted to play my warrior. As luck would have it that is one of the things they are a little low on. Not so much tanks in general as they have quite a few but not any really reliable warrior tanks. I told them that I wanted to bring the rest of my family and Kobeck because I thought it would be a better environment for everyone. Kobeck recently had a bit of falling out and quit 25 man raiding with the tempest group but still does 10 mans with them. I’m hoping that joining a progressing guild would rekindle that fire. Not to mention that during my course of conversation I learned that Blanda and b2 recently joined.

The wife and I transferred to serendipity, but my brother and Kobeck are still a little hesitant. I understand completely and am not going to push the issue. Hopefully they will decide to join us because I think it is the best move for all of us.

Last night turned out to be a raid night for them and they were heading into ToC 25 and possibly ToGC 25 after. At first my wife didn’t want me to go because we had spent a lot of time just talking and getting set up in the new guild that we didn’t have time to do anything together… or eat dinner really. I threw some chicken on the grill and we managed to finish eating and got our daughter to bed just before raid time. She said it was fine that I could go <3>

Off we went to ToC 25. There was a little confusion on gormak with the impale stacks but we got him without issue and likewise the worms dropped easily. We lost 3 or 4 people to one of the worms and then icehowl came out. I got agro took one hit, got healed, and then took 2 hits with in .3 seconds and was dead. Ow. Now my warrior isn’t the greatest geared… but man that was embarrassing. Nikkyo was quick with the bearform and taunted. I got a battle rez and spent the rest of the fight keeping sunder up and cursing at myself. Next up we had jarraxus. All I can say is… NEED MORE RAGE. I was rage starved nearly the entire fight. I even missed one or two fireballs because I simply didn’t have the rage to interrupt. I stopped using demo shout and thunderclap HOPING to take more damage.

Faction champions came up and were marked up. Next thing I knew nikkyo pulled without explaining to me what I was supposed to be doing. So I charged in and just started annoying everything I could. Taunting the melee, silencing the casters, intervening focused raid members, stunning, charging, fearing and all around being as big of a douche as I could to the hordies. In the end we won and what would you know it? Satrinasubertrinketofstamina dropped. I went from having no decent stamina trinkets… to picking up the emblem of frost trinket and getting satrina’s trinket. I’ll miss the 3% avoidance I lost but I’m loving the fact that my warrior sits at 37.5k unbuffed. Twin valks was boring. Anub was a pita… I really screwed up on the first attempt. Me and the other offtank had a lot of miss communication going on and quite a bit of cross taunting. We were doing ok but Nikk got too far away from the healers after anub came out and he went down. Second attempt went off without a hitch though. Well except for the DK offtank death gripping my mob off the ice patch where it promptly borrowed >.<

Raid was supposed to go to 11 and so we had about 20 minutes worth of attempts on TogC. All I can say is Holy Shit. I most certainly do NOT have the gear for that fight. 38k impales???? WTF??? OW. With all 4 of his snobold stacks up I took a 28k hit through my freaking shield wall. One attempt I lived for awhile with last stand up… then I died and nikkyo popped his survival instinct thingy… 88k health…

I also learned that I’m having some pretty bad threat issues. Really thinking I need to put another point in bladed to teeth (or whatever its called) I have 2 points in that so that I could have a point in imp spell reflect which is nice for some fights. Really wish I didn’t have to glyph in order to have semi decent cool downs because I really could use the threat. I know threat will come with gear and it doesn’t help that I dropped down to 198 hit with all of the upgrades. Overall it was a pretty eye opening experience on what I need to do to improve and things could have gone far worse considering that was my first time in a 25 man on my warrior.

Oops I did it again

2009-12-28T10:51:00.003-05:00

Is it just me or did Freya get kinda hot over the course of the expansion?

When I first fired up WoW I knew exactly what class I wanted to play. I wanted to be a druid. I wanted to be the class in the game that could do everything. Artorin was my main from the moment I started playing right up to the end of Burning Crusade. During this time I came to realize that while druids could indeed do everything... there were some classes that just did it better and that I enjoyed playing more.

The result of course was my druid being on the back burner and only now, more then a year later, he has finally hit level 80. Being able to find groups quickly as a healer is what really drove me to finish off those last few levels. I really enjoy healing and the changes that I originally protested (mainly nourish) I've come to love. Yesterday my druid hit 80 around 5:00 PM. I then spent the next 7 hours going from regular runs to heroic runs. I leveled entirely in my BC epics from tier 4 and 5 content and only at 80 started replacing gear. All I have left to replace is a trinket and my gear will be all 200 up. He has the emblem of triumph idol and enough emblems to pick up the tier 9 shoulders.

I'm kinda sad now though... I like being able to say I have 8 80's! For some reason 9 80's just doesn't have the same ring :(

Now to level my deathtard to 80... I still have a good 7 days left of my holiday it could happen!

A tale of two pugs

2009-12-27T12:38:00.002-05:00

It is no surprise I'm sure that I am still running heroics like crazy trying to gear up. Like all of you I've experienced absolutely terrible players and incredibly skilled players. Then there are simply the uninformed.

What I present to you today is the tale of a dungeon experience I had while on my druid Artorin. The last few days I've been trying to queue atleast once for the dungeon daily on my now 78 druid. The 2 emblems of triumph and 33k xp is nothing to sneeze at when you are working your way to 80. Artorin is still very well geared from Burning Crusade and going as a tree I find I have a lot of time to sit and observe what other players are doing.

In this case we had Ezili and Vaeled (names changed slightly since). Ezili was from another server and was our protection paladin tank. She used blessing of wisdom and seal of wisdom, as well as having 70 points in the protection tree. Vaeled was of course... a death knight from my very own server. He was an unholy speced DK who put 15 points into blood instead of shadow, skipped out of necrosis and didn't have gargolye talented. He also had 3 unspent talent points and never once summoned his ghoul.

I first mentioned something to the DK who was actively using death and decay before the mobs got to the tank in addition to not using pestilience... at all (except I saw him use it once on a single target pull). I asked him if he realized he had 3 unspent talent points. His response was "yeh lol I lvled so fast i didn't have time"....

You didn't have time to push a button 3 times to alocate 3 talent points??? Seriously? Oh yes... he was serious. He also linked the damage meter after nearly every pull when I commented that the tank was beating all of them in dps. He also took more damage during the brann bronzebeard fight then the tank did by standing in the fire whenever humanly possible. Which of course he said was because it was normal and that I would heal him...

On the flip side of this terribad DK was our tank the protection paladin. Before one of the pulls I mentioned to her that she should try blessing of sanctuary and seal of vengeance, then use divine plea before pulls to keep up her mana. What happened next? She listened! She had to dig through her spell book a bit to find the abilities I mentioned but find them she did. Before the end of the instance she was doing 400 more dps, totally destroying all the rest of the group, and had no mana issues while having 10% more str, stam, and 3% damage reduction.

After we killed the last boss she thanked me for giving her advice. She told me that it was another group that pointed out that she should be using seal and blessing of wisdom... probably because she was drinking between pulls and slowing them down. After about 30 mins of talking I told her that she queue for another dungeon and I would go a long so that we could continue talking. She queued us up... and we got halls of stone again... this time though she never had any mana issues or threat issues. She was also a little easier to heal, which isn't saying much because she was damn easy to heal in the first place. I never dipped below 80% mana on any of the trash pulls and proudly refused some mana biscuits from the mage.

During this second run she hit 80 and we began talking about gear options and getting ready for heroics. All in all we spent about 3 hours doing dungeon runs and talking. I gave her my e-mail address so that she could ask questions since we were on different servers. I really hope she doesn't get discouraged while gearing up for heroics because despite her lack of knowledge she was a very skilled player. I gave her the link to maintankadin and I hope she takes a look or at least keeps in contact with me.

It is truly rare these days to find someone willing to listen to advice and learn. I'm proud to have been able to help someone. But the real pride lies on the person who is able to listen and take advice instead of wallowing in self ignorance.

Gear sort of does matter...

2009-12-17T18:18:00.005-05:00

Gevlon over at Greedy Goblin has been on a crusade recently against the belief that you need x gear for x content. Don't get me wrong I certainly agree that skill>gear but I've also seen my share of cock blocks when it comes to raiding to understand that being undergeared is a problem.

He is forging a raiding guild based off the mild success he had with his Blue Ulduar run where he geared up his hardcore raiding buddies with item level 200 or lower blue gear. They managed to clear all of Ulduar with this gear and now he believes that he can clear all content both 10 and 25 normal modes with this kind of gear. Frankly I think he will fail miserably.

Beating Ulduar 10 that was designed to be beaten by people coming out of Naxx 10 in heroic gear that is of = stat level with epic gear from Naxx 10... doesn't make me believe he is somehow going to be able to beat content tuned to 213 (uld 25) 219 (ToC 10) and 226 (ToC 25). I'm sure he will fail and then blame it on the other raiders not pulling through. After all nothing can be his fault right?

Now the meat of this post is about Wednesday night. I was on my warrior tank and had just finished doing the random heroic when kobeck logged on to his druid Averlexis. We chatted a bit and decided to screw around farming for the Battered Hilt from Pit of Saron trash. We picked up Phired on his DK and after clearing the trash out I suggested we should knock out the weekly raid. Our servers weekly raid happened to be Sartharion. Well were jokingly going to try and 3 man Sarth but I realized we only had about 21 mins till our 10 man ICC raid was supposed to start.

So we grabbed Errweyho, one of the healers in our 25's, who brought his rogue. So here we were 4 alts getting ready to tackle Sartharion and his evil drake minions.

The trash packs were pretty tough with one tank one healer and 2 dps but we managed to pull through and one by one the other drakes fell.

We cleared all the trash and drakes without a single death and stood face to face with Sartharion herself. The fight was on and it was a truly epic fight. Dodging flame walls left and right, picking up adds, and doing as much damage as we could and then at 20% everything went to hell. Phired went down pulling the adds off of Kobeck and I managed to pick them up after just long enough for Errweyho to finish him off.

Now here is where the gear comes in... don't get me wrong I really enjoyed this fight and it was a real challenge. But the fact of the matter is... we were able to pull this off because of gear. While these are our alts they are fairly well geared in uld 10-toc 10 gear. Each with several pieces of tier 9. Errweyho and phired both pulled off over 5k dps on Sarth putting our overall raid dps at around 12k.

You have to remember that this content was tier 7 content. Designed with 2 tanks 5 dps at around 1500 each and 3 healers. Of course you didn't need that exact comp but the fact remains that our 2 dps equaled the 5-6 dps that were required. Tanks at that level were lucky to have 33k hps fully buffed and that is what my warrior sits on without buffs. Kobeck had the mana regen and spell power to heal all 4 of us through the incoming add damage and random fire ball strikes.

Was this an awesome accomplishment? To me it was... but it wasn't as hard as it seems. Could we have pulled this same feat off a year ago? I very highly doubt it.

Nonetheless it was great fun and maybe next time we will try it with just 3 :D

Raiding ICC as frost?

2009-12-17T17:59:00.002-05:00

I’ve been raiding as arcane since my mage first hit 80 and I really do enjoy the spec. However, I seem to be having issues keeping up in ICC. From what I can tell the issue is largely due to the fights requiring a lot of target switching and movement. The combination leads to an unfriendly environment to a spec that is entirely based on cd management. Both arcane and ttw/fireball specs way heavily on the fact that the target you are attacking will be slowed. Generally this is the case as every tank has a attack speed debuff that is applied to the target.

But what happens when you switch targets?

Marrowhatshisface does an ability called stormpike graveyard which impales 1 target in 10 and 2 targets in 25. The impales have 38k health in 10 man and need to be burned down as the person gripped takes a lot of damage. This forces me to interrupt my arcane rotation to attack and break out the person rooted. If they are near by this is as easy as targeting and going on with my next nuke… but often you have to move to get in range of the target since not everyone groups up after the whirlwind. The impale also will not have any slowing effects on it so I lose 12% base damage right from the start. Additionally this can mess with using cd’s and lead to you critting the impale that has 4k health left with an 18k arcane blast wasting damage.

Lady deathwhisper is even worse… because generally as ranged dps you are working on burning down the mana shield… and the boss isn’t being tanked which means no slowing effect and 12% less damage. Saurfang for the most part isn’t a big deal as the adds are generally being slowed by some kind of kiting effect… but all of these things makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be better served raiding as frost for these fights.

Last night after ICC we went to knock out sartharion who we had for the weekly raid thing. I decided to go as frost and managed to pull 6.2k dps largely without breaking a sweat. As arcane for the entire night I couldn’t break 5k dps. This is extremely frustrating because I did more dps in ToC then in ICC. Now I know that on sarth I can do over 6k easily on sarth as arcane… but the fact that I did over 6k as frost… really makes me think that using frost in ICC may not be a bad idea.

I mean with frost TTW is going to be up nearly 100% of the time as frostbolt slows… so every time I target switch I won’t lose 12%. I can fight the entirety of Deathwhisper with that 12% increased damage that I would be missing as fire or arcane. On Saurfang… well I could drop the frostbolt glyph for ice barrier and my frostbolt would make an AMAZING kiting tool. Heck the 20% healing reduction may be helpful too if mortal strike debuffs fall off. For all these fights ice barrier would help ease the healing load on me because I'm usually the squishiest member of the raid.

I also bring replenishment so our SV hunter can go MM and a nice 5% crit buff which would help other casters in addition to our frost DK. I mean I know in a 25 man environment I would be crazy not to go arcane… but in our 10 mans… if frost is around 10% less damage then arcane… but arcane relies on a 12% buff that isn’t there… does that mean frost comes out ahead?

What do you all think? Am I crazy? I think I’m gonna try it next week and see how things go. Oh and 23k deep freeze crits are pretty cool.

Big update and Halls of SUCKSTOBEAWARRIOR

2009-12-16T18:05:00.002-05:00

First I want to apologize for my lack of posts lately. See I love blogging… but I love WoW more then blogging. So when I get home and sit at my computer I want to play more then blog. Before 3.3 it wasn’t such a huge deal… but now? I have SOOO much I want to do that finding time to actually blog is a bit hard.

I did have a few posts that I started writing but some events in game made that irrelevant. Like I had a post about how my arena team was at 1700 and we were going to push to 1800 the night before the patch… only one of our teammate had finals so it never happened. In fact in the week since the patch I’ve only done a hand full of bg’s and no arena. Well obviously if I haven’t been doing PvP I’ve been doing PvE.

The new LFG tool may be my most favorite feature added to WoW. Now I’ll admit that the queue time for dps can be a bit of a pain, but it still beats spending 20 mins in lfg channel and having to coordinate getting a group together. I mean heck… you don’t have to ask your guild for help now! For some that may be an issue… but for me it’s a sigh of relief. I don’t feel burdened to help gear everyone else up when I have my own toons to gear up.

Forge of NEVER GONNA DROP YOUR LOOT

As I mentioned in my previous post one of my big goals was gearing up my lock and rogue. Well the process is going fairly well… though not as fast as I would like because everything I need on my lock… drops for my rogue and vice versa. I’m not even kidding either. I think I’ve ran forge of souls probably 17 times now… 6 of those of been on my lock. I’ve seen Seethe the awesome spell power sword drop 10 times out of 11 on my other toons. I’ve seen it once on my lock and some stupid mage rolled need and won even though he had a staff out of ToC 10 that was better.

Forge of souls seems to be the big place that I need to hit for gear. The dagger and sword that drop off the last boss are awesome for my rogue and lock, in addition the kick ass trinket from there would be great for my rogue and hunter. If I could get the damn axe to drop off the first boss for my shaman I would be in great shape… instead my rogue has 3 of them but only one dagger. So maybe I’m limiting myself a bit doing Forge of Souls every day on at least 2 toons… and I still have 3 that haven’t gone through the questline. I’ve seen the battered hilt drop once… and didn’t win the roll.

Halls of Sucks to be a Warrior Tank

Joining the random heroic as a tank is by far the fastest means of getting into a group. In fact if you have a tank friend… get them to go with you! I don’t have the lf many or lf pug achievements on my warrior simply because I’m always bringing at least one or 2 people along with us. For the most part the groups have been pretty solid… though there have been a few exceptions. I’ve managed to pick up quite a few pieces of gear and have been having a blast. Even when I have to tank Halls of SUCKSTOBEAWARRIORTANK.

I mean seriously… talk about an instance designed to be a pita… then multiply it by the fact that you only have 2 aoe threat moves on cd’s. Spamming demoralizing shout doesn’t help much to get threat… Add in some suicidal dps and you are in for a few wipes. I’ve found my best friends for these are rogues and hunters. A misdirect followed by volley or tricks of the trade fan of knives combo gives me a good threat lead and from there I can handle anything. It wouldn’t be so bad if they all spawned in the same place… tanking them in the corner insures they all get into melee range… eventually. I find myself waiting for 2 to get into range and using thunderclap and then praying I can hold off on using shockwave till everything is in range. Sometimes it works… other times the mage and hunter stand there and eat the healer. Mages are less of a problem because I can silence them with heroic throw… but double mage groups can kiss my big blue ass.

Iced Crown Citadel

In Ulduar we would get together at my house and play Ulduar shots... every time someone would ask which teleport to use... or we wiped we would take a shot. In ToC we played Marrus shots in honor of our raid leaders long winded explanations. So with the introduction of the new raid... I declare Iced Crown shots! Crown is my favorite whiskey by far plus it works for the name sake... now I just need to figure out something good to require taking shots.

On the raiding front our 10 man group cleared up to Saurfang and then got taken down by the bosses unique ability to disconnect two of our raid members at the beginning of every fight… We will get him for sure this week.

In 25’s we just managed to get to deathwhisper… and get overrun by adds nonstop. That fight is no joke and with the terrible mix of pugs we had last week… just wasn’t happening. Hopefully things will get better. No lie we had a mage doing 1700 dps that had a ton of pieces from ToC 25 and 10. Who needs torment the weak as a fire mage? Apparantly not this guy, but he was rocking 133% mana regen… We brought in my wife on her warlock after kicking this loser and after tweaking her addons so that she could.. ya know… actually move during the fight… we promptly kicked lord marrogawarawrs ass.

That about sums it up… I need to go home now (blogging at work=/= bad I swear!) and get this up asap.

Ready for Icecrown? I was born ready!

2009-12-04T18:05:00.002-05:00

Whether the patch comes out this week or next, I'm totally ready for Icecrown. Our 10 man group pretty much took this week off and I couldn't be happier to say goodbye to ToC. Still that won't stop me from raiding 25 tonight on my shaman as Enhancement.

I have to remember to include Flame shock in my rotation and pray to the loot gods that a nice slow onehanded weapon drops. Death's choice wouldn't hurt either... but if I do win the roll I would probably give it to Cassiana... since she has lost every roll since we started doing ToC. That of course brings up the whole morality of rolling on something with the intent to give it to someone else... but that's neither here nor there.

Hmm... third paragraph now and I've come to the realization that I don't have a point in writing any of this. I'm just really freaking excited about seeing Icecrown.

Lets see if I can organize this into a list of things I want to do once icecrown comes out.

1) Run the 5 man reg, and heroic on all 8 80's if for nothing else then to do the epic questline for a sweet 251 weapon... of which most of my toons are in dire need of.

2) Run the 5 man reg, and heroic another 5 million times on my rogue and warlock to get them caught up on gear and into the raid scene.

3) Run the 5 man heroic of every other instance because I'm masochistic and like pugging.

4) Run the 10 and 25 man raid on all who is currently capable (5/8 80's).

5) Get ready for the final Arena season and switch to one of my MS capable characters (rogue, warrior or hunter) for our serious 3's team.

6) Get poor old Artorin to 80 (semi motivated to do this before the patch)

7) Remind myself that I need to go to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Oh and saying hi to my family now and again.

8) ???

9) Uh... phat loots?

Did I mention I'm excited about patch 3.3?

Looooonnngggg Weekend

2009-11-30T17:12:00.002-05:00

Having a fairly normal 9-5 type job I had the luxury of having Thursday and Friday off giving me a nice long 4 day weekend. The RL stuff was pretty typical going to my Uncles for some turkey on Thursday and then going to my parents Saturday for some decorating of the Christmas tree. Ok... so my sister and mother mostly decorated... while the rest of us sat and watched... Star Trek.

Anyway the rest of my RL weekend was pretty uneventful which of course means I spent a lot of time on WoW. My wife found out one of her old high school friends plays WoW and so we both created characters on Nordrassil. Wilderness my brand new female Orc hunter is currently level 14 questing in the Ghostlands, because I've never leveled a blood elf but wanted to experience the lore rich zone. My wife also created a hunter... a male blood elf and the 2 of us together literally destroy everything before us. My wife has been spending more time playing her hunter then me but meh whatever playing a low level hunter is boring when I have an 80 hunter.

Speaking of which I had a lot of fun doing Arena on Arravis with Kobeck's druid Averlexis. We did most of our games last night bringing our rating from 500 something to 1100 which means that I can pick up the furious helm. Before the games I splurged and picked up the Furious legs with arena points and then bought the Furious Shoulders with emblems of Triumph that I had piling up. All in all I'm sitting on 596 resilience so I'm getting there. On the raiding front for Arravis I did Ony 10/25, and ToC 10 man. Still without a good 2h weapon... I swear the weapon upgrades I really need never drop.

Which of course leads to Saravid. I did a TON of raiding on my shaman. I ran VoA 10/25, ToC 10/25, Ony 10/25. So pretty much everything. I got a pair of legs out of ToC 25 for my enhancement set... but I can't really spare the hit to use them not to mention they have armor pen.... and would break my tier 8 bonus. So for now they are sitting in my bags. Most of the raids I ran as enhancement, but I did go as resto when I ran with Phired's guild (one of the regular tanks in or 25 man's) when we did ToC 10. Duo healing with a disc priest was a lot of fun and we cleared ToC without incident. Which was good considering they run starting at midnight... (east coast server west coast guild) and it was Sunday night.

My mage went through VoA 25 and ToGC 10. VoA was funny because the raid had 4 mages... and all 4 of us were at the top of the charts. Korolarn of course dropped nothing useable by us... but then the next 2 bosses all dropped tier gear that none of us needed. ToGC we ran Wednesday night and went through beasts and Jarraxus with only a little difficulty. That of course brought us up against faction champions for the second time. We didn't have any kind of solid strategy and the comp we were up against certainly didn't favor what we brought to the table. I still thought we did well though and on one attempt we killed off 2 of them before wiping. No upgrades dropped (sensing a trend?).

Well after we finished our last attempt on Faction Champs some people had to go and the rest of us swapped out some peeps to go run through ToC 10 reg. Cassi switched from her uber hunter to totally undergeared DK and I switched to my warrior. Hour later and we were done. I picked up a nice tanking neck but still no upgrades I really need... like a freaking shield to replace my crest of lordearon from CoS heroic. Anyway Sunday while I was doing Arena on Arravis I got a whisper from Curinir one of my old guildies and good friend. He was looking for a tank to finish up some of the later parts of Ulduar and wanted to know if I would be interested. I wasn't sure at the time but 2 hours later when the raid was about to go down I figured I had nothing better to do.

The Ulduar raid happened to be a Guild run for Serendipity... my old guild. The old guild leader (who put into place stupid rules leading to my leaving) had quit the game and now my friend and old druid mentor was the Guild Leader. I really had fun playing with some of my old guildies and hope that I can do more runs with them... while still being in a different guild. Anyway... we had Thorim, Hodir, and mimiron still up and they went down in that order. Thorim was a one shot... damn tanking in the arena as a warrior is freaking hectic. Hodir I went Arms and let Nikkyo the bear tank take Hodir. Took us 3 attempts before we got him due to people getting frozen. I wasn't one of them but I was curious and found out that if you are in the middle of bladestorm while the freezing thingy goes off that you won't get frozen.

Mimiron took a bunch of attempts, usually people (including myself, stupid shock blast) dying to stupid stuff. I was tanking the head during phase 3/4 and eating bomb bots om nom nom. With Mimiron dead... we headed to General Vezax. I LOVE the journey down to his room. Some of the people in the raid hadn't been this far in Ulduar... as we were headed down I announced that THIS is why ToC was such a disappointment to so many raiders. Icecrown better be worth the wait. But I digress, General Vezax is the furthest I have ever been in Ulduar before and have never killed him. On top of that I had never done the fight as a tank. So here I was getting ready to stand toe to toe with a boss that could easily kill me and the raid if I wasn't careful.

First attempt went pretty well all things considered and we got him down to 1 mil health. Ethren who is one of the best rogues I know in the game did an incredible job of interrupting of interrupting the flame thingy. I had 2 or 3 interrupts to his 20 and we only had one go off on an attempt because one of the mages was a little overzealous and pulled the boss out of range. I would use shield wall through the big shadowy thingy and run like a little girl when my cd's were er... on cd.

On our 4th attempt the big lobster finally died! I have to say that this is one of my favorite fights so far to tank. Having to watch everything and be ready to run for your life while still putting out as much threat as humanly possible combines all the elements that make a fight great. I was about to start using the 1h dps sword that I had gotten from Anuberak( that I use for PvP ) just to kick out extra threat.

Lanora did ToC 10 and VoA 10... and thats about it for raiding. Llina, Jadedfury, and Skillet got almost no attention. Perhaps when Icecrown comes out.

As an aside... how is it that most of my toons raiding the current tier only got one paragraph each... but I easily wrote 4 paragraphs on just Ulduar? A raid that offers absolutely nothing in terms of gear upgrades... but feels more exciting then ToC and Ony?

WotLK Super Bowl, and AACH!

2009-11-16T17:48:00.005-05:00

Can you feel it? The excitement in the air? Icecrown isn't far away. The culmination or super bowl if you will of the last year isn't far off and already blizzard has made some ground breaking changes. But before we get into that lets look and see what our lineup looks like.

Starting with our Veterans we have;

Arravis. Unfortunately Arravis has been on special teams all year. She has great talent and could easily become one of the best wide receivers but unfortunately the team simply has too many of them already. As a result Arravis only gets to come out for a few games here and there. Nonetheless Arravis has been on the team from the very start and always gives it her all.

Lanora. Starting quarterback all year (except for that broken rapture in the first few weeks of Ulduar) Lanora has been at the center for a long time. She can always be called upon in a pinch and is guaranteed to deliver. ToC has seen her in the tip top shape of her life and she is ready for the big game.

Of course then we have our draft picks;

Saravid. First round draft pick Saravid has brought the pain on offense and was the star of Ulduar as a wide receiver. Unfortunately though, just before ToC, drug testing detected some steroids and she was put on leave for the entire duration of the game. She recently has been getting some practice time in and may be starting as a running back for the big game... assuming she can stay off the roids.

Llina. One of the greatest linemen you ever heard of... wait... you mean you remember linemen? Well she has lined up to take a beating since late in the naxx game but linemen don't make a very big name for themselves. She is there in the background... er foreground whatever but perhaps not the biggest star.

We also had two drafts come in mid season;

Gandreolf. Blam! This guy came out of nowhere and really made a name for himself. Taking over where Saravid failed, Gandreolf has become the premier go to guy. He has had impeccable performance in ToC and is a shoe in for MVP in the big game. Of course the bigger the pride the greater the fall.

Skyru. Raw power are the best words to describe this behemoth. The defensive linebacker and offensive running back is the very definition of power and versatility. This guy has a lot to make up for coming in to the game late but has certainly done an amazing job so far. You can count on this guy being ready when the lines are formed at Icecrown superdome.

Standing on the sidelines... I mean behind the TV we have;

Jadedfury. This weekend warrior was (emphasis on the was) an incredible football player back in highschool. The years unfortunately haven't been kind to our wannabee athlete and she has really packed on the pounds. She is hopeful though, for Blizzard has announced an alternate root for her to get in shape for the superbowl and you can bet she will take advantage to seize her dream.

Skillet. Remember the Titans, The longest Yard, and that one Mark Wahlberg movie, Skillet has watched them all. Including a 15 minute instructional video. Sure she doesn't know a touchdown from a touchback but she is confident and ready to go! Again thanks to Blizzards alternate Advancement for the Aptitude Challenged, or AACH, Skillet can be ready to go.

AACH is a 2 week program created to quickly whip potential Icecrown ballers into shape. The first week consists of Running the regular 5 man icecrown warmup until you complete this once. Then you begin learning the Heroic 5 man Iecrown Workout which you can do once a day. Do the heroic work out and as many reps of the warmup as you can per day.

By the end of the 2 weeks you will have completed enough runs, as well as the epic questline to get your very own official shoulder pads, and you will be ready to compete in the Icecrown Super Bowl!

So how about you? Who is your superstar or record breaking rookie going to be? Are they experienced? Or will you have to take them through AACH?

And finally... in the spirit of Potts over at WTF I bring you

Do I win?

I'll take them myself, Cover me!

2009-11-11T18:20:00.003-05:00

Yeah OK the title has nothing to do with the following post... but I couldn't think of a title because I decided to try something new and wrote a post while at work. I had the post all set up but was missing the title... my daughter was watching Star Wars and Darth Vadar was in the fighter and had just said "I'll take them myself, Cover me!" so that is the title.

I was reading a post over at AA talking about why it is that Zan is into alts, I have to say that it mirrors my own reasons pretty closely. Zan mentioned and I’ve talked about before, the fact that playing multiple classes helps you as a leader. You know what kind of gear people need, what rotations they should be using or what unique abilities can help during a fight. For instance during Onyxia I taught one of our hunters to use Chimera shot to disarm the big adds. She didn’t even know that chimera shot could be used as a disarm!

The other thing Zan talked about was solo play when it comes to alts. Growing up I learned to entertain myself as a child… no get your head out of the gutter that’s not what I meant! I mean playing with… ok that doesn’t work either.

The point is growing up we had one computer. This meant single player games were all I grew up on. We also didn’t get games regularly which meant I had to find ways to replay games to make them entertaining. I’ve played the original half life from start to finish probably 30 times growing up and warcraft 2 was the same way not to mention starcraft.

I never had a strong enough internet connection to do much of anything online with any game. In fact it wasn’t until after I was married that I played my first MMO… Runescape. My brother got me into playing this game and as much as I made fun of him for it at the start… I really got into the game. I only really played one character in Runescape, but that was because I didn’t need to play anything else. There were no varying classes so I can learn everything… and I did exactly that. I was nearly 100 when I quit playing with many of the skills in the 90’s.

Even though Runescape was an MMO I played it nearly entirely solo. I played runescape for 2 years I think before starting to play Guild Wars. Guild Wars was cool because you could combine classes… but each class was still unique that I ended up buying extra slots so that I had one of all the 10 classes the game had to offer. I found during this process that I couldn’t focus on a single character because there was no real need to. You could complete the entire game without ever having to group with another human yet all of the content was group based.

I didn’t like how Guild Wars was instance based and really missed the open world environment of Runescape… but the graphical difference made it impossible to play any browser based game again. I also hated the fact that you couldn’t jump in either game…

My best friend got me into playing WoW and I rolled a druid… the class that could do everything. I discovered a community that didn’t exist in the other games and once I joined a raiding guild was hooked. Life at 70 though outside of raiding was pretty boring (wasn’t even daily quests at that point). The issue was that I had soloed my way mostly to 70 and now everything that was remotely challenging required groups. So when I felt like getting out on my own I turned to leveling up alts. Having an unguilded alt was a great way to escape from drama and just feel free of the burdens of the endgame.

I love soloing or at least attempting to solo group quests. Always have. It’s a challenge and you have to adapt and use abilities that you normally wouldn’t in order to survive. Can I solo this elite that I killed on my hunter solo on my priest? Ouch guess not! How bout on a mage?

I do the same thing even at 80 with various elites around icecrown. What is the hardest thing I can kill with the different classes? Pretty much all of them can kill the big monstrosity guy but so far only my paladin has been able to solo the riders.

Anyway enough rambling for now cya!

PSA

2009-11-07T11:16:00.004-05:00

Public Service Announcement: This Holiday season don't drink and raid. You just may end up dead.

Been Hunting

2009-11-02T18:18:00.002-05:00

This weekend saw the end of Hallow's end and the start of Day of the Dead in World of Warcraft. So for dancing with some chick in Dalaran I got to look like an undead mexican cowboy... thing. Ok. Cowgirl. Whatever. Anyway I was in Isle of Conquest when I noticed how my hunter was mounted with her gun.

Immediately I thought of this.

You wouldn't believe how long it took to find a cowboy picture with the gun resting across the lap. I mean you see it all the freaking time in movies but on the internet?

My wife insisted that I should use a cowgirl for the picture... we did a search for cowgirls and came up with some... lets say interesting pictures.

I got to the point where I was about to log on to wow and buy a bear mount so that I could use this picture

So yeah I've gotten back into my hunter over the weekend. And it sucks. I mean don't get me wrong. I love playing my hunter. In fact every time I play my hunter I remember why I love the hunter class and why it was my first toon to 80 in wotlk.

Why does it suck?

Because I don't get to raid on my hunter because we already have 2 hunters in our 10 man. Neither one of them have 80 alts, and our 25 man's aren't any better. My poor hunter never has had much luck when it comes to raiding. In the beginning of WotLK the guild I was in raided regularly... without me. Oh I did get in a few times towards the end of the night and get a few attempts in on harder bosses.

I only actually killed a handful of bosses in Naxx and went 2 months without seeing a single useable drop. I remember being on vent one night waiting to get into the naxx 10 group... and every. freaking. boss. dropped hunter loot. Who got it? The crappy hunter who couldn't even be bothered to enchant and gem his gear. We were supposed to switch out at 9:30... 11:30 rolls around and the #$*)*@$ finally switches. We get one attempt on a boss in and then they called it.

After that I started seeking raids on my own any time that I couldn't meet the guild's. The guild had a problem with anyone pugging anything... and I was further banned from raiding with them leading to me quitting the guild. I had leveled up my priest during that dry spell and when I moved to the new guild... I raided on my priest and my hunter was left out in the cold.

When 3.2 came out I got into my hunter again. Quickly picking up gear that was needed to flesh out my kit through ToC 5 runs. I even asked if I could bring my hunter to the 25 man's since we didn't have an MM hunter and the attack power buff was missing. Yeah... instead I raided on my mage and one of the regular hunters switched to MM.

Tw0 weeks ago I brushed off my hunter after almost 2 months and ran ToC 10 with Phired's guild. Phired is one of the tanks in our 25 man group and someone who Kobeck and I have been doing our 3's with. He has almost as many 80's as me!

Anyway it was a fun run for me and I picked up the Diplomat (gun in the top picture) as a reward. Finally this weekend I got around to gemming and enchanting said gun. In addition I picked up dual spec and dove straight into battlegrounds and arena. Getting dual spec on my hunter means that all 9 of my characters on Durotan have Dual Spec's... and all of them have at least some form of PvP spec. I also ran a pug ToC 10 and VoA 25.

BG's are insanely fun with my MM pvp spec and I ran quite a few with Kobeck's druid healing me. With a dedicated healer we went 10 or 11 bg's without dying once while I lead in HK's. I even got the Wrecking Ball achievement. Would be interesting to see my hunter become my main focus again... but I don't see that fully happening without raiding, which I can't really do with my current raid group.

Little fish in a big pond

2009-10-30T17:02:00.002-04:00

Two days ago a Real Life friend transferred his warlock to my server to join our Guild of real life friends. He transferred from a low pop server where he was in an average guild for that server. He was a big fish in that Guild and constantly sat at the top of the DPS.

I wasn't sure how good his DPS actually was but Wednesday night I put in the effort to get him an invite into our 10 man raid. I went on my priest to heal opening a dps slot for him to take. So how did he do with our experienced group? Around 3k dps which netted him dead last amongst the rest of the dps.

He was really excited and enjoyed running with a good group of skilled players and he picked up some nice upgrades to boot. In a few months I'm sure he will catch up to the rest of the group but it still brings up an interesting topic.

Can people grow at the top?

It takes a lot of time and effort to reach the pinnacle in any field and playing WoW is no difference. The warlock was a big fish in a little pond on his old server but here on mine he is just a little fish in a big pond. With a larger server comes more talented and skilled players not to mention that the economy on high pop servers is much more stable. He mentioned that epic gems on that server cost upwards of 1200g each where as on ours you won't see any over 200.

I wonder if he had stayed on his server would he have gotten better as a player? Without competition would he look into his own flaws and mistakes to try and improve them? I'm sure that some people have that internal motivation to constantly get better but it still begs the question of with a limited pool of additional resources (more people), do people reach a cap of what they are capable of?

The group I play with is a very skilled group of people. They are very intelligent and take raiding very seriously. I've grown pretty accustomed to them, yet I wonder if I would do better in an actual hardcore guild. I find myself slacking because my performance and gear is "good enough". I generally keep up regardless of not min maxing my gear as much as other raid members.

In a more hardcore guild I would be lower in the dps rankings and therefore have more incentive to min max my gear and focus on just one character. Unfortunately I don't have the dedication to be a part of a hardcore guild. Fortunately though I have a group that fits in very well with my skill level.

Last week we had a rogue with us that was only doing 2800 dps in mostly 232 gear. I was frustrated because the raid leader was still going after hardmodes in ToC even though it was obvious that this rogue was dragging us down. I said something out loud about it and my wife just stared at me.

"I do 2800 dps!" She said.

I had to stop and think about that one. While her gear isn't as high of quality as the rogue's she did have a point. The few times my wife has pugged she has commented on how she is always the highest in dps and yet when she runs with us she is lowest.

The rogue had a suboptimal spec and that was a big part of why his dps was low. Should I have said something? My past experiences with trying to help people improve their dps has left me wishing I would have just bit my tongue instead.

That rogue may have gone back to his guild and said OMG I just ran with the most awesomest people! Maybe it would even motivate him into getting better! Instead he got bitched out in our 25 man run by behindya who just recently started raiding again and destroyed pretty much everyone in dps.

Who is Garrosh?

2009-10-28T17:51:00.002-04:00

You first meet Garrosh Hellscream crying his eyes out by a bonfire in Nagrand. I spent hours killing hundreds of ogres, demons, and more ogres liberating the Maghar because Garrosh was too much of a pussy to do anything himself. Next we see Garrosh in Warsong Hold in Borean Tundra. Not only does the SOB not remember all the shit I did for him in Nagrand... he treats me like dirt and once again I have to save his brown ass from all the scourge in the area!

Maybe I'm missing something in between there but it seems like Garrosh stepped through the Dark Portal and completely lost his mind. He went from a sad pathetic orc to flat out attacking the king of Stormwind in the middle of Dalaran. The word is that in Cataclysm he is going to become Warchief of the horde taking over for Thrall.

Thrall: Do you wanna lead this horde?

Garrosh: Yes!

Thrall: Well... You can't... (shifty eyes)

Garrosh: Sure as hell do a better job then you.

(yes I shamelessly pulled that from a movie)

All of this makes me wonder though... from a lore standpoint what if Garrosh isn't really Garrosh? His father Grom was very easily manipulated by Mannaroth into drinking the pitlords blood. What if his son is just as susceptible to evil forces?

He was all fine in Nagrand and then BAM as soon as he goes through the Dark Portal gets mind controlled by an Old God. The Old God uses Garrosh to rekindle the conflict between the horde and alliance weakening them further so there is less of a challenge to Deathwing.

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

2009-10-27T17:30:00.002-04:00

Cuz 7 8 80's!

Yeah I know... its stupid. I haven't posted in over a week and its because I've been working on getting my Warlock to 80. Last night Skillet finally hit 80 at about 1 am. I don't remember what I was doing when I hit 80 and I didn't take a screen shot because I was half asleep.

I just remember going to Stormwind training my lvl 80 spells... casting demonic circle and teleporting. Then I logged off and went to sleep.

On the whole the last few weeks I've felt really off. I've been really tired during the day and busy at work so I haven't been keeping up on blogs and have lacked the motivation to post anything. I've been raiding and doing PvP when not leveling my warlock. I also managed to get the Halloween achievement for my warlock which was pretty cool.

I want to make another shift in raiding mains when Icecrown came out. The question is I don't know who I want to focus on... I'm having the same issue in pvp. Gear is much harder to make up for in PvP then it is in PvE. You can raid ToC in Naxx 10 gear but you can't hit Gladiator wearing lvl 78 frostsavage gear...

Anyway... that's all for now. I'll try and get some info up maybe on the spec choices I've made as far as pvp goes. Still finding it hard to concentrate on raiding these days... though Saturday night we did get a 10 man Ulduar group together to take out the last few bosses. We had a less then ideal group and some people who have never been there... but I got to tank Mimiron on my warrior! That really is the highlight of my raiding these last few weeks...

/cast [modifier:shift] macro; post

2009-10-16T17:12:00.006-04:00

One of the issues I've always had with WoW was getting keybindings set up in a natural feeling way. When I first started playing and really only had my druid to focus on it was easy to keybind everything I needed. However, I didn't continue to just focus on my druid and I soon realized that trying to set up intuitive keybindings for every toon I had was an impossible task.

I spent a long time pushing the wrong button and eventually gave up. I did a lot of clicking which was fine for long casts like starfire or fireball. Short casts were assigned to 1-6 for easy accessibility. Ultimately though I never felt that this system was effective and I searched for a method to condense all the buttons I needed to press into easy to reach locations. Early on I had set my F keys to raid marking so that was out of the question.

I finally found a solution in a rather strange place. I was reading a post on Resto4life about setting up a gaming keypad that she had purchased when I picked up on this awesome macro.

/cast [modifier:(key)] (spell 2); (spell 1)

The modifier key that you select can really be anything but coming from a FPS backround shift seemed like the perfect button. Shift is a very natural button to anyone who has played FPS or just in general types using the home row. So with this macro I can use 6 keybindings to activate 12 abilities.

So for example here is Lanora my priest's 1-6 bar.

From left to right you have Shadow Word:Death, Flash Heal, Penance, Greater Heal, Renew and Power Word:Shield. Now when I hold shift I have...

Now from left to right we have Shoot, Binding Heal, Penance, Prayer of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and Power Word:Shield.

Pretty cool eh? If you notice I kind of have a system to the set up. Flash of heal and binding heal are both 1.5 sec casts that heal for around the same on the target. Greater heal and Prayer of Healing are priests big slow spells for single target and AoE. Renew and Prayer of Mending are both instant cast spells.

Now I usually have un macro-ed buttons for spec specific spells such as Penance. If I were speced holy that is where Circle of Healing would go. I also usually don't have anything majorly important in one slots so that I can move other spells (such as mass dispel/fight specific items).

How to make it!

So if you don't already use this macro... hopefully now you will want to and are wondering how it works? Well lets break it down.

/cast [modifier:shift]

This is the guts of the macro. As you can see I chose Shift as the button I want to press in order to activate the second ability. You can use ctrl or alt or just about anything to activate the secondary ability but I don't recommend using alt. Using alt can be risky because if you use your F buttons for anything it increases the chance of you hitting say alt+F4 and closing WoW.

/cast [modifier:shift] secondspell; firstspell

Now we add our abilities to the macro. Secondspell is whatever spell you want to be active when you hold the shift button, and the first spell would be whatever spell you want active without the shift being held. It is also essential to seperate them with a semi-colon and space.

Now I like to be able to see the tooltips of the spells on my bar so we want to add this to our macro.

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:shift] secondspell; first spell

So our finished product will look like this...

Tips and Tricks

Just a few things to note you can add additional modifiers to the same macro. A good example is for paladin's judgement spells. You have 3 of them so why not condense them into one spell? This is what that would look like.

/cast [modifier:shift] Judgement of Wisdom; [modifier:alt] Judgement of Justice; Judgement of Light

So with this you typically will judge Light. Holding shift will judge wisdom and holding alt will judge Justice.

Finally, I like to macro spells with cooldowns to be the secondary spell and the main nuke I am using becomes the primary. The downside is that you won't be able to see the CD on that ability. But there is a solution to that! You already know what the primary spell is so we can set the tooltip to show the secondary all the time. So for instance my warlock has a macro that looks like this...

#showtooltip Chaos Bolt
/cast [modifier:shift] Chaos Bolt; Incinerate

Somethings that are nice to set up as shift macro's are Power Word:Fortitude, and Prayer of Fortitude. This way you can click for a single buff or shift click to buff the raid. You can also condense your mount selection by having your preferred ground mount, and your preferred flying mount macro-ed together.

Well that is all for now I hope this serves as a good break from my ranty posts lately!

Edit: Apparently Kobeck decided to correct me! You can shorten Modifier in the macro down to Mod and call it good.

(Bastard)

LFM Must be Geared

2009-10-13T17:26:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure how it is on your realm but this is something that I hear in LFG channel all the time. It is also the phrase I hate the most because it is totally meaningless. Somehow in the course of the WotLK expansion the term "geared" has become a measuring stick of a player. But what is considered geared... and why is it important?

I remember during towards the end of BC I was pretty heavy into pvp on my druid. One evening though I decided to join a pug of Kara as a healer. The group had zoned in and without even fully buffing the tank started pulling without saying a word. Well the end result of a complete lack of communication is a wipe which is exactly what happened.

I then was kicked from the group. Totally confused I whisper the leader and asked why I was kicked. He replied that I had under 1400 healing power and that I didn't have enough gear. Well this boggled my mind because I looked at my character sheet and it said I had 1600. Then I remembered that I had logged out in my pvp gear which had significantly less healing power. When I told the leader that he must have been looking at my pvp gear and that my pve gear is what I was wearing... he pretty much called me a liar and put me on ignore.

To compound the issue

For the most part BC was you needed x healing or x + damage, hps, attack power whatever. Now though people are using mods that calculate the value of the gear you are wearing. However this doesn't even begin to go into whether you have chosen the proper gear only the item level and the quality of gems and enchants. You could be wearing spell power plate gear as a prot pally and have spell penetration gems... gearscore mods and sites wouldn't know the difference.

Sometimes people make poor choices just because the item has a higher ilvl. Take for instance the melee dps trinket out of Regular ToC Victor's call , this trinket has a ton of expertise that unless you actually need the expertise... is a step down from even the Mirror of Truth.

None of these even matter if the person doesn't know how to play their class. You can have the best gear in the world but still die in the fire if you aren't paying attention, or have a terrible spec and spell rotation.

One of the mages that runs with our raid group consistently does around 1k to 2k dps less then my mage. His gearscore according to wow-heroes is 200 pts higher then mine.

This weekend our 25 man run was a little light on healers for our Saturday night clean up of TotC and Ony. Earlier that night one of my Guildies let me know that he had the night off and was looking for something to do. So when the time came and I saw we needed healers I let the raid leader know that he was available.

The RL response?

"He is a little undergeared, most of his gear is from Naxx."

.....

To which I ever so politely reminded my RL... that the very priest I was playing was still in half Naxx 10 gear and was in FULL ilvl 200 gear when we started doing TotC!

I've been raiding with them on my priest every other week alternating between my priest and mage depending on what was needed. Our first clears of TotC 10 was with my priest in one piece of ilvl 219 gear from ToC 5. My priest still has 5 pieces I think of ilvl 200 gear and has healed up to Jaraxxus on TotGC (heroic 10)

And they are trying to tell me that the paladin who has cleared half of Ulduar with us before isn't allowed to go because his gear was low??

With my flawless and impeccable logic they finally invited my guildie into the group. How did he match up next to the almost full ilvl 245 geared holy pally?

He out healed her. Not by a lot... but considering the gear difference enough to make my point damnit.

I'm sick of everyone putting so much focus into gear.

Last week we only had 9 people for 10 man TotC... so we brought one of the RL's mother along on her mage... who did 900 dps. We one shotted every boss in TotC, VoA, and 2 shotted Ony.

/sigh

Waiting... I hate waiting

2009-10-12T17:57:00.002-04:00

What am I waiting for?

Patch 3.3

Does anyone else feel like it is almost pointless to do PvE right now? Yeah I probably won't stop raiding right now... but it all feels so dull and pointless in the shadow of Icecrown.

I really want to play my rogue. I do. I just can't seem to get into her though. It isn't because of the play style. It isn't because I don't know what I'm doing. I just can't make myself run through all the current content... just to have it all replaced the day 3.3 comes out.

I don't want to run heroics 5 million times. I don't want to run with the bad pugs trying to farm ToC 5. I don't want to spend thousands of gold on outdated BoE epics... not when in a month or two I can farm easy content to get ilvl 232 gear.

It is one thing to raid current content on my characters who are already geared for that content. Getting upgrades now that I won't replace till Icecrown 10 man is fine.

But farming heroics to run Naxx, to run Ulduar, to run TotC.... I can't bring myself to do that for the 7th time.

I really do want to play my rogue though.

So I've been doing PvP. My rogue is Dual Spec with PvE Mutilate and PvP Mut/Prep.

And I'm still waiting. Waiting for my arena points from the week before. Waiting for BG queues and WG to reset. Waiting for towers to cap and walls to come down.

Did I mention I hate waiting?

I did 2700 dps in VoA the other day... what are the chances I can convince a TotC 10 pug that I can keep up while in 2/3 blue gear?

/sigh

July 2008

2009-10-12T17:36:00.003-04:00

I found a few interesting photo's from my old collection that I took of a few of my characters at the login screen. At this point I had been playing for around 1.5 years. I'm pretty bad about taking screenshots and I can't find anything prior to June 2007. So for nostalgia sake here we go.

This is of my rogue in July of 2008

Now taken at my log in screen today here is Jadedfury

Hippy mage Gandreolf at age 44 (really needed to lay off the peacebloom)

And now at 80 with Jetpack shoulders

My priest was 56 at the time and she would hit 70 a month and a half later, making her my last 70 before WotLK was released.

My how times have changed. Is it just me or has the textures on the faces improved a bit over the years? The hair looks a tad darker and features more pronounced. I haven't changed the appearance of either of them since creation. No not even for the stupid achievement.

Anyway in case you were curious here is the earliest picture I could find. It is of my paladin in her 20's. I used to have a really terrible router and would disconnect all the time. Often I would get some interesting pictures between the time where I disconnected and the client finally realized it wasn't talking to the host.

Most of my early screenshots consisted of these types of events or really stunning locations that made me stop and admire the world.

Ask me anything!

2009-10-08T18:27:00.002-04:00

So I finally got around to setting up an e-mail address specifically for the blog! This means that any questions or thoughts that you want to ask, but maybe don't want to leave as a comment, you can e-mail directly to me! Since I obviously have no life (playing wow and all) you can be sure that I will take the time to answer all of your requests Soon(TM).

Really though a lot of the time I don't really know what to post on my blog because I'm not sure what people are interested in reading. I have a ton of knowledge in a great many area's of the game but I don't want to just spew it out onto the blog. This hopefully lets my readers (all 5 of you) ask questions they may otherwise be afraid too or give me criticism on what I can do better as a blogger.

Anyway feel free to e-mail me at WMMA@att.net
I included the address on the sidebar for future references.

So... ya... I'm going to need you to come in Saturday

2009-10-07T18:24:00.003-04:00

I'm not dead... I've just been busy. I can usually get a post up at the very least on Friday... but I've been working Saturdays and taking naps when I get home during the week. Of course that is mostly due to going to bed too late playing wow... but w/e.

That is one of the bad things about PvP... it caters to that "just one more round!" mentality that makes WoW so addictive to me. I've certainly been doing a lot of PvP on my non raid nights between arena on my shaman... and grinding out that bloody terrible level 73-76 grind on my warlock.

Skillet has been my latest obsession so far this week. Warlocks are so uber when it comes to PvP and even being terribly geared and at the low end of the bracket, I'm still holding my own. I've certainly noticed a trend lately. There are much more lower level players in this bracket then when there was when my Druid first started leveling through PvP.

I wonder if this is just a trend with the 73 to 76 range. Are people that bored of the early wotlk zones? I mean I am because I've done them 7 times... but perhaps I'm not the only one sick of them. BC had a good amount of mix in the zones, at 66 you could be questing in Nagrand, Blades Edge mountain, or Terrokar Forrest.

The other aspect is that perhaps once people get to 77... they like me, start preparing for 80. At 77 I'm grinding out quests for my head enchant faction, as well as the everlasting Sons of Hodir grind. Level 80 dungeons open up so that people can get their 80 friends to run with them through easy content and start gearing up. Heck you can get into ToC at level 75!

Most of the BG's are unaffected by this shift in players... with the HUGE exception being AV. The horde seem to have a huge advantage in AV because.... well Balinda doesn't one shot your tanks with a crit or crushing blow. Not having a 79 tank with decent gear means serious trouble... especially when Galv can just fear THE ENTIRE group out of the room. I have a feeling AV will adapt to become an eternal turtle with people defending the towers to the bitter end... abandoning the prospect of killing the bosses.

Unless of course that miracle 79 warrior tank comes a long who knows how to use Beserker Rage. But I'm not holding my breathe.

P.S. Oh and bonus to anyone who can tell me where that screenshot was taken.

Tetris: Patchwerk Remix

2009-09-28T17:32:00.002-04:00

So Tobold had a post talking about the shifting of Raid's from a single difficulty to having multiple difficulties so that more people can experience the encounters. I do agree to a point. The problem with having all of these versions of the same instance... is that hardcore players have to run ALL versions of these instances.

If I want to do the hard versions... I have to run both the regular for gear, and then the hard version of THE EXACT SAME INSTANCE. While having heroic versions is nice for the challenge... it isn't exactly the same as having challenging new encounters. Having a boss deal more damage and have more hps and maybe one new mechanic isn't very exciting. Or is it?

Well I know in the case of Crusader Coliseum it isn't very exciting. I was thinking though... what if Blizzard designed an encounter that progressively got harder? My unlikely to be implemented idea is that you take a relatively simple fight like say Patchwerk, you take the fight and add a twist to it.

You start off fighting Patchwerk and then after 3 minutes another patchwerk spawns. This patchwerk though has 10% (maybe 20% would be better) more health and does 10/20% more damage. You have another 3 minutes to kill this Patchwerk before the next comes out. Essentially each patchwerk becomes a level and every 3 minutes whether you killed him or not the next level starts. This simply continues till the raid wipes.

At that point the raid zones back in and a chest is there with rewards equal to the level of challenge they completed. You get one emblem of whatever for each patchwerk dead and then say after 5 you get an additional whateverlvl of gear. At lvl 10 you get a tier piece and every level after that you get an additional tier piece and so on and so forth. At level 10 the raid would have been fighting for 30 minutes straight and would have to kill a version of patchwerk dealing twice the damage and having twice the health.

With this type of encounter anyone can experience a challenge equal to their ability/gear level. You still get a reward no matter how far you get and the further you get the greater the reward.

The fight doesn't have to be patchwerk but I chose him because it is a good benchmark for dps yet still requires 2 solid tanks and good healing. You would have to find a good balance between the right number of dps and healers to get as far as you can before your healers run out of mana, the tanks get one shot, or you don't have enough dps to kill the current before the next comes out and you get overwhelmed.

The hardcore Guilds can compete to get to the highest level and would give them something to constantly challenge their abilities. Put the whole thing on a one attempt per week deal to where everyone gets an equal number of attempts to get the furthest.

Anyway what do you think of the idea? Is it stupid? What boss would be a better fit to challenge the whole raid since dps have the easy job? What kind of reward scaling would be appropriate?

80 Baby! FoKing a!

2009-09-28T17:27:00.002-04:00

So ya... my rogue hit 80 last night. I got Fan of Knives. Its fun. Did a little pvp with Kobeck's druid. We got our asses handed to us. Ran Brewfest. Got the Barman's Shanker 2.0. So yes. Now I can stab people with a beer bottle.

Oh and FoKing is awesome!

Da PvP

2009-09-24T17:49:00.004-04:00

So I was PvPing on my druid the other day and we had just won AV... and the strangest thing happened. I had just died and resurrected and was looking at the leader boards... when all of a sudden my character started moving.

My druid switched into cat form apparently summoned one of my pets, the spirit of competition, and proceeded to start attacking a horde player. Don't believe me? Look at the screen shot! I couldn't move or do anything but continued to go through a pretty solid cat rotation on the player with faerie fire and keeping up bleeds.

Anyway this doesn't have any real relation to what I wanted to talk about aside from the fact that it was an interesting unexplainable event and involved pvp.

I've largely ignored PvP thus far in WotLK mostly because there has been so much to do in PvE and I've largely enjoyed raiding and instancing. Things are starting to change though...

Gearing up has become easier then ever and part of the challenge of theorycrafting and researching upgrades has dissipated when you can just go into a single instance and get all of your gear. Not to mention for the most part all of my 80's at the moment are pretty much finished when it comes to gear. No none of them have all best in slot but they have enough gear to perform in the raid environment that I would play them in. Essentially every character is Ulduar ready. Half of them are ToC ready/geared.

So I've been working on my rogue and druid getting them to 80. I realized that my rogue was 76 after making my post bitching about not having anywhere to quest... and so headed to Sholazar. Now she is 77 and there is a good chance that she may hit 80 by the end of the weekend.

All of this including the malaise I talked about over the current raid content has pushed my interest more into PvP. I spent a lot of time doing BG's and Arena's at 70 on my druid when I stopped raiding, so this transition isn't new for me. With PvE being either dull or seemingly pointless PvP is where the challenge is so that is where I am heading.

Last night after running Coren 15 times Kobeck, Phired and I decided to put together a 3v3 arena team. I decided to go on my shaman and Phired went on his lock. Kobeck decided to stay on his DK so we went as a 3 dps team, ele shaman/frost DK/destruct lock. I'm sure this isn't the greatest comp but it was still fun! We lost our first 9 matches in a row... I'll admit it was mostly my fault. I'm rusty in playing my shaman and had just switched my enhance offspec to pvp elemental spec. I picked up the stoneclaw glyph (which is totally awesome), thunderstorm glyph, and glyph of hex... I think was the third one.

We did 26 total matches last night and won 9 of them. Certainly not the greatest but it was a ton of fun and we started getting into the groove of things towards the end. One of the huge problems for me is while my shaman has insane gear... most of it is PvE gear. I had a grand total of 100 resilience, kobeck had 400, and Phired on his lock put us all to shame with 800. So it is my mission over the next few weeks to get into more bg's and get practice being an uber ele shaman in pvp.

In other words I need to get better at running away.

Oh btw... our teams name is Taunt on Cooldown in homage of Katmandue.

Bring back that epic feeling.

2009-09-23T18:13:00.004-04:00

I transferred all of my screen shots to another computer after my Desktop was hacked and I had to reformat. Today I took a stroll down memory lane looking for screen shots from BC raid's that I had done.

See the recent raid instance Trial of the Crusader has me feeling a little burned. Not really burned out, just burned. I suppose I had high hopes for the instance. Sure I knew it was going to be in one room... and that there wouldn't be any trash... but I had hoped that the fights would seem epic. I don't feel that way.

The regular Trial of the Crusader isn't as difficult as I had hoped and the fact that it is 5 bosses in a round room just leaves me saying that's it? It was 5 weeks before we killed the last boss... but only because they didn't release the entire instance at once. Last night we cleared it in under an hour.

When I was in a raiding guild... I used to take screen shots of first boss kills. You can see Serendipity's first Alar kill above. It took us 3 weeks of 3 hour raid nights to finally down her (him?) That night we continued on to kill Void Reaver and that other chick, all three were guild first kills. It was one truly epic night. It was also my last night of 25 man raiding for BC.

I think part of the problem now is that patch 3.2 came a little too quickly for me. We were just starting to work on General Vezax, now though it seems I'll never see Yogg. Our raid leader is only interested in raiding progression which means we are doing ToC and ToGC (Heroic). I don't really mind clearing ToC... but then we go back in for the heroic mode... and its the same thing!

Ok sure the fights are harder and some have gimmicks to make it more challenging... but the fact remains that we are just killing the same bosses we already killed the day before. The first time through ToC was fun... we killed the twin valk's and fell through the floor and killed Anub. You know what Tirion Fordring had to say?

"Oh now that you did the regular come back and do the Trial of the Grand Crusader."

What?

Wait...

Now that we found out about the Lich King's plot to undermine (pun intended) the tournament and kill off the champions... you are going to rebuild the floor, revive the bosses, and let the Lich King do it all again? Just now its harder? Any immersion I had in the tournament was gone when I talked to Tirion after killing Anub.

I liked the way that Ulduar did hardmodes... yes it was gimmicky having to destroy the heart for heartbreaker, and yes Hodir was just DPS faster... but having a big red button that says do not push? I'm sorry but that's just awesome. Proving how awesome you are killing Yogg without any of the watchers? That is epic.

Raiding is about taking down the big evil bad guys that are threatening to destroy everything you love... not glorified loot pinata's captured by the argent dawn. Where is the sense of danger? I love the movie Gladiator... one of my favorite scenes is when they first fight in the Coliseum. It is him and a few other Gladiators in the middle of the arena with the crowd roaring. The main character says.

"What ever comes out of these gates, we have a better chance to survive if we work together."

Why can't ToC have this sense of danger and surprise? I know that Gormakk is going to come charging out... Jaraxxus you see getting summoned in which takes a good 40 seconds. The rest of the fights you engage on your own terms.

There is no surprise, no threat of danger. I don't feel like an epic gladiator or champion. I feel like this is me and a buddy outside tossing a baseball around instead of the World Series. Killing everything in a round room and then coming and doing the same fights again... that is not epic.

Dear lord let Icecrown come soon... Give me my grand battle against unbeatable odds... not some beasts that you "captured". Not some Demon that a dumbass gnome summoned in. Faction Champions? Ok well that fight is atleast fun... but Twin Valk's? I saw the damn things shackled outside of the tournament! I'm glad they find time to rebuild the floor every week...

I've been contemplating about quitting raiding till Icecrown comes out. I don't want to get completely burned out and wiping to Jarraxus on heroic just doesn't have the same appeal to me as wiping on General Vezax.

Adding a Challenge to Leveling

2009-09-22T17:39:00.003-04:00

I was reading a post from Tobold today and after thinking about that and talking to my wife a bit, I noticed a trend in WotLK. I mentioned earlier how I'm a bit burned out playing my rogue through the same zones I've done multiple times before. The same can apply to my Warlock and to a lesser extent my druid. I'm mostly leveling my druid through PvP and healing the occasional instance.

Thinking back, when leveling most of my characters, I've hit this road block around 74-75 every time except for on my hunter who was my first character to 80. Why? Well Blizzard had a great idea about adding in multiple leveling paths in WotLK. You had two starting zones, Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, which if you did only one could get you from 68 to 71/72 or from 70 to 73.

From there you head into Dragonblight. Dragonblight is interesting because it takes quest lines from both zones and streamlines them into an obvious progression through the next two zones. You start in the Walrus people harbor thing which connects the two zones, which leads you to stars rest, which leads you to Wintergarde keep. Which then sends you to grizzly hills which sends you to Zul'Drak. Now you can of course choose not to follow the quest lines exactly. You can spend as much time in any of the zones that you want or even head back to the starting zone that you skipped over. In fact I did that on my hunter, starting in howling fjord and then going to Borean Tundra.

In Dragonblight I did the Wintergarde and Wrathgate quest lines and the goblin quest hub to the north of the zone. After that I was 76 and headed to Sholazar.

My other Characters however, would go through dragonblight/grizzly hills or Dragonblight/Zuldrak and lastly even grizzly hills/Zuldrak. But it was always these same zones. With the same quests. And absolutely zero challenge. My challenge came in soloing as many of the group quests as possible but even then, there are only around 3 or 4 of these per zone.

Blah Blah Blah

Ok I have a point in all of this. You see WotLK has a natural progression that gets really old really fast. After you have done the quests the first time there is nothing new to gain from doing them again aside from experience. There are two starting zones and two 80 zones and one that you can't start till 76. Not being able to start Storm Peaks and Icecrown made a lot of sense.... when you couldn't fly before 77. Sholazar being a lvl 76-78 zone never made any sense to me though. You don't need a flying mount for any of the quests (save a few in the northern part) and you can easily access the zone from the south.

In Vanilla WoW you often times would end up accepting quests that were designed for 4+ levels higher then you. Those quests were designated in red text. In WotLK I can't think of one quest you can pick up that is red. All of the quests are gated for the appropriate level... which effectively means you can't skip ahead of your level to quest.

My friend Kobeck is leveling a Warlock horde side and he remarked that he always seems to be stuck with red and orange quests. You know what? He is never without a challenge as a result of this. Why can't we do the same thing in WotLK? I've done every quest in Northrend at least once, so there is no challenge in the actual quest... why can't I try these quests at a lower level?

Gasp??? You mean I might miss an orange mob? Oh no! That mob won't die in 3 casts! You mean I have to attack a mob from stealth instead of just running up to it and stabbing it in the eye???

Tobold sort of said that he thought experience gain for taking on tougher challenges should be rewarded. I agree. But you know what? I don't care about leveling faster I just want to have a little bit of a challenge. So let me do the quests earlier and keep the experience the same and we will call it even.

I think you should be able to take Sholazar quests at 74, Stormpeaks at 76, and Icecrown can stay the same... maybe that way I will actually get to do some of the Icecrown quests while leveling instead of hitting 80 doing Sons of Hodir dailies...

Mutilating Leveling

2009-09-18T17:39:00.003-04:00

I'm in love with the idea of having a level 80 rogue. The subtlety and deadliness all wrapped up in a dual wielding fury that is the rogue class is just awesome. So why don't I have an 80 rogue yet? Well... they conflict with my play style or at least with how I want to play the game.

When I'm leveling any character I enjoy a mix of questing, grinding and especially instancing. Rogues are pretty powerful at soloing and have many tools to help survive and avoid damage. My favorite by far of all the specs is Assassination. I love mutilate and everything about the spec. So naturally I want to level Mut spec.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that WotLK instance involve Aoeing through the trash as fast as possible to get to the bosses. Rogues have one of the best AoE's in the game called Fan of Knives. Great right? Except... you don't get the awesome aoe ability till level 80. That means while every other dps in the game is aoeing.... I'm sitting there stabbing a trash mob in the ass.

My single target dps is pretty strong and on boss fights I'm usually top 1 or 2 in dps... but the rest of the time I feel like I'm wasting my energy(no pun intended). I'm running around like crazy busting my ass to kill stuff, while the rest of the group is aoeing and sipping tea.

Its infuriating to me. It shouldn't be I know... but you see... I have this epeen... and I like for my epeen to be bigger then the other epeens around me. My epeen doesn't feel very big when every one else around me is aoeing and I can't.

So switch to Combat.

Ok yes... I can do that. In fact for around half of my time between 70 and 75 I've played as combat. In instances is fun being able to pop blade flurry and see my dps fly up. I'm never topped when I play as Combat. Can't lose right?

Well sure that covers instances... but questing as combat is SO FREAKING BORING! My ring finger is going to fall off from pushing sinister strike TWENTY BILLION TIMES.

No. I simply can't stand questing and soloing as combat. If I wanted to stand in somethings face and beat on it I would just stay on my warrior.

So now you see my problem. I want to solo and quest as mutilate but I can't stand instancing without an aoe. I'm kinda meh about combat in instances but can't stand questing.

Maybe the answer is dual spec... but I don't really see the value in this because once I get to 80 I will be mutilate spec and will stay that way. With FoK I'll never have any need to be combat again. Especially since they are nerfing throwing specialization.

My plan

Well I am speced Mutilate and I don't want to go combat again... this means I'll likely be staying out of instances till 80. This means the last 4.5 levels I need are going to be BRUTALLY slow because I can only do the same quests so many times before I need to take a break and do an instance. At this point I don't think there is a quest in Northrend I haven't done at least twice now so I'm finding this level range to be extremely difficult. I have both my rogue and druid at 75 and I simply can't find the will to quest at all.

I'm so sick of seeing Zul Drak, Grizzly Hills, and Dragonblight that leveling in those zones seriously makes me want to vomit.

TL:DR Give rogues FoK earlier so we don't have to be a liability in the days where everything is aoe snoozed through.

Loot Drama brought to you by Paint

2009-09-15T18:29:00.007-04:00

First I have to say I apologize for not posting lately. I was sick all last week and my brain had been turned into goo. I had zero inspiration to write about anything at all. That means today's post has a little bit more work into it. Last week my friend Blanda told me she found blog and that she was offended that she wasn't mentioned in it. Well I told her I was sick and didn't feel like writing anything but when I did she would be mentioned.

I'm not entirely sure that this is exactly how she wanted to be mentioned... but that's how the world is. Anyway Friday night I mustered enough strength to get online and raid. We killed the first 3 bosses in ToC 25 and had a few attempts on twin Valk's.

I was pretty darn sick and other then some screen shots of the damage meter (of which I kicked ass) I failed to capture any of the events. So I'm recreating the events as I saw them. Just to warn you... I have zero artistic ability. Say hello to twin Valk's.
I say attempts because... well we died and they lived. So we headed to VoA to ROFLSTOMP those guys and then called it a night. Saturday night we headed in for our regularly scheduled program... er I mean raid.
Twin Valk's is one of my favorite fights because I can abuse the mechanics of the fight to get obscenely high on the damage meters. I broke over 10k at one point and averaged out at 8k dps for the fight. This was done on my mage speced arcane with Incanter's Absorption talented.

Anyway we ultimately killed the twins after 4 or attempts or so.
It was a good feeling to have down the boss and some mage dps chest thingy dropped. I won the roll with a 100. It is an upgrade... but it has a ton of hit rating on it. I'm already at 17.2% hit rating... which considering I'm alliance and usually have a pocket shadow priest means I'm 4% over the hit cap. Even more so if you consider the hit talents in arcane (of which I speced out of before raid)

I don't try to stack hit rating... just every upgrade that I get seems to have it which leaves me way over the cap with the new chest. But this isn't about the chest... its about this.
Yep the epic dagger of awesomeness dropped. Perfect for a mutilate combat rogue! Hey look at that we have a Mut speced rogue who always raids with us and would love to have it! Oh... but there is that other rogue... who is sword spec combat but sure would love to get his hands on it too. This little rogue is also speced into throwing specialization which almost single handedly is the reason we were able to do champions.

But the little rogue has only been with us for two weeks. Well the rolls come out and our mutilate rogue rolls an 18. The combat rogue rolls a 38 and looks like he is going to take it. The paladin master looter (always in his bubble) is counting down when out of no where Cassiana one of our hunters rolls a 98!
Now Cassiana didn't really want the weapon... she was trying to make a point... I think. She rolled on it because a DK rolled on an agility ring the week before. A week later that same DK was not even wearing the ring he won over the hunters and rogues. She made an offhanded comment about oh well I can use it eventually or something.

Ok I'll admit I was sick I wasn't fully paying attention and I didn't think it would be a big deal. I didn't honestly expect Cassi to keep the dagger and she didn't. She gave it to the next highest rogue which was the gnome rogue. We made 2 attempts on anub when our mut rogue Behindya dropped out of raid without saying a word. I knew he was upset because in his mind it should have been an offspec roll for the combat rogue who was currently using two swords. Maybe he was right I don't know.

I do know that the end result over all of this was a lot of drama. Blanda and behindya are in a relationship and him quitting put her in an uncomfortable situation of still being in raid. Blanda, behindya, cassiana the raid leaders and I are all friends in the game... but this whole thing just blew up in our faces.

Blanda didn't know what to do... should she quit too? Should Behindya (ok I'm calling him b2 its easier and what I'm used to calling him). Should B2 have quit? No I don't think so but he generally has a short fuse and has been frustrated in raid lately. The dagger incident just set him off I think.

Through the backlash of all this the other rogue who got the dagger also quit. Well he took his name off the invite list which with our group is pretty much the same thing.

The sad thing is that I don't see how this could be avoided. I mean Cassi could have given the dagger secretly to b2 but that wouldn't have been right or fair. She could have kept it herself (which blanda and b2 said they would have preferred to the other rogue). Would things have transpired the same way had she not have rolled? I'm not sure but I know she blames herself for the drama surrounding the issue.

Since we aren't a guild run we can't set in dkp or anything of the sort... fair looting is one of the reasons we do as well as we do. But was this looting fair? We have had issues before like a resto druid winning a one handed melee dps mace over a DK on an offspec roll. Or a druid winning a cloth chest over the other cloth wearers.

Oh well that is all for now... I'm sorry if this wasn't what you were looking for Blanda but I love you anyway!

Quick tip for Snobolds

2009-09-08T17:57:00.002-04:00

So those of you who have done Trial of the Crusader know of the royal PITA that the Snobolds on Gormok are. For hunters and melee dps they aren't much of a bother... but for casters and especially healers they can be a disaster.

Snobolds will stun and kick the target it is on. The kick leaves a 6 second lock out on that school of spells which can leave a healer unable to heal or a spell caster unable to do damage. But here is a tip. Snobolds are fairly stupid and will interrupt whatever spell is being cast when its kick CD is up. This means that you can get them to lock out a school you don't need.

For instance, a fire mage can switch to frost bolt when it gets a snobold on him and then use fireball after the frost bolt is interrupted. On my priest I use shadow spells for the kick so that I can continue to heal with a snobold on me. There is still a good chance of getting interrupted if you don't pay attention to the kick CD but using the lock out of your other spells is a good indication of when you need to fake them out.

Also you can attack the snobold that is on you with spells such as shadow word pain or living bomb or any other spell that doesn't have to be casted on a target in front of you.

Anyway that's all for now! Hope you had a good weekend.

Death of A Nub

2009-09-03T18:03:00.007-04:00

Tuesday night saw Durotan on extended maintenance. By the time the realm did come up, it was 15 minutes before our scheduled raid time. There wasn't enough people on to raid so instead we hit up the heroic daily. The daily was Drak Tharon. We had Marrus tanking, Cassiana and Dahunterss for ranged dps, I brought Skyru my warrior for Arms dps and Selgar came as a Ret Paladin.

One tank and four dps... Well Selgar would through some flash of lights around and an occasional holy light and we still breezed through the heroic without a single death. Was a lot of fun using bandages, gift of the Narru and Enraged Regen to stay alive.

Anyway we finished the run and there wasn't quite enough for ToC but we figured we could kill off the new boss in VoA. We had control but the battle was in 20 minutes... which we of course lost. So that pretty much ended our shot at raiding for the night and we branched off to do other stuff.

Last night though we pulled together a 10 man by pulling in a few extra's from our normal 25 man runs. We were short a healer so I got drafted on Lanora. The last few times I ran ToC it was with Plus also healing and I struggled at times with Mana. Since then though I picked up the trinket from reg 5 ToC which virtually solved my mana problems on its own. Disc priests thrive on Int so having another 80 int and a chance to restore mana is awesome.

The first 4 bosses were 1 shots though Northrend beasts got a little sloppy when half our dps and both other healers died to one of the worms when it wasn't turned away. This left me to heal through Icehowl which was the most fun I had all night! We lost a few people during the Champions as well... I spent almost half the fight silenced and locked out of my spells thanks to the enemy Felhunter and Mage.

Twin Valk's went off without a hitch and we picked up the Salt and Pepper achievement.

They dropped Enlightenment which I won on my priest! So nice to have a staff again! If you haven't done ToC and don't happen to know what happens after you start the event after Twin Valks... well too bad I'm going to ruin it for you!

We got buffed up and Marrus started explaining what he knew about the fight.... all I heard was blah blah blah permafrost blah blah blah spikes blah blah blah 30% blah blah blah don't heal too much. What can I say? I had more important things to think about I just got an epic staff!

Well we killed a bunch of bugs and then some bigger bugs and the boss did stuff and we stood on ice patches... and the boss went to hide underground and these big spike thingies came up and a few people died. Some soulstones and battle rezes were used and things were going ok till Marrus decided to chase a bug over the spikes.... and he dieded.

Offtank picked up a nubby and we brought him down to 30% where everyone got all glowy and started dying. I got yelled at to heal but not to heal but heal more but not too much! Well people died and we wiped. What we learned was standing on the icy thingies is good because when a nubby goes underground he shoots spikes up that will kill you but if you stand on ice it just goes SHLBOOOM and looks really cool but doesn't kill you. He also puts a hunters mark on someone and chases them and its that persons job to lead him to the next ice patch.

Well the next fight ended with the picture at the top of the post. I spent most of the last 30% of a nubs health shielding people and trying very hard not to heal too much. It was a fun fight but not as hard as I was hoping for a last boss. He dropped the very awesome looking blades for fordragonerdude or something like that, which Cassiana picked up... I swear every boss dropped hunter loot last night.

We were gonna start the heroic version right after... but I was like HOLD UP I GOTS TO HOOK UP MAH STAFF!!!

So the raid leader called for a 5 min break... which turned into a 20 minute break and I switched to my mage to check the mats, then to my pally to transmute an epic gem to send to my shaman, who I switched to in order to cut 2 Runed Cardinal rubies to send to my priest. Then switched to my sugar daddy warrior to buy the abyss cystals I needed to send to my mage to enchant a weapon vellum and send it to my priest!

I got back on Lanora gemmed and enchanted my staff and then got the summon... and then one of the mages had to go run something with his guild or some crap. BOOOOO!!!!

We had Wintergrasp though at that point so instead killed the big fire guy and his gay roommates. I'm not sure what that fight was all about he did a lot of yelling and throwing fire and this sexy spin thing where he vomited fire on us... and then fell over dead. Of course he dropped more hunter loot the tier 9 helm and some warrior crap of which no one could use. I think we were supposed to use 2 tanks for that fight? But instead we just used one... and then he single tanked Emalon and Arch.

We ended the night running Old Kingdoms heroic for the daily and I snapped one last picture of mine and Cassi' new weapons!

Tanks are made for brick walls

2009-09-02T20:09:00.003-04:00

Gevlon over at Greedy Goblin made an interesting post today talking about running into brick walls when raiding. In a nut shell his view is that good players will see the problem and if its the mistake on their part, subtly fix the issue. Where as poor players will simply not see it at all, and if someone tells them they are the problem, they break down and get defensive.

I... actually mostly agree with him... which is a weird spot for me to be in. I usually see his views as too extreme and out of touch but I see these brick walls first hand way too often. In fact people not taking criticism properly is something I've posted on before.

Something Gevlon said in particular stuck out:

I hated the "attempts of the shake of it", trying one more time although I'm 100% sure that we'll wipe again and I can't do anything about it. I can't interrupt for the rogue, I can't kite for the hunter and I know that they will mess it up again. Why bother?

Though I assume he meant "attempts for the sake of it".

I've mentioned Katmandue before and months later he is still part of our 25 man raids. Now recently we have been doing ToC 25 on Friday nights then heading to Ulduar on Saturday. When we were focusing on Ulduar I used to bring my Shaman every time and on fights like Auriaya... it came down to me breaking the fear and interrupting the shadow blast... thing.

Why did this fall on me? Well because our Warrior tank Katmandue was incapable of breaking the fear and interrupting it himself. So instead of relying on the person who SHOULD be interrupting... it fell on me with my ranged interrupt and occasionally a rogue who cloaked before the fear.

A few weeks ago I took the weekend off from raiding. What do you think happened when the raid group got to Auriaya? They died. A lot. In fact they couldn't down a boss that we had on farm since the 4th week of Ulduar.

Fast forward to last weekend. I've been trying to get my warrior into Ulduar since my friend Kobeck decided he wanted to switch mains months ago. Unfortunately he kept coming on his DK to tank and I kept dpsing. Two weeks ago was his last week of raiding... because college is starting up for him and apparantly Quantum Physics is hard or something. Friday we did our normal killing of the first 2 bosses in ToC and then slammed our head against the champions (Kat isn't the only moron keeping us down on that fight).

Saturday we headed into Ulduar... only Kat was on vacation for the week. I took the opportunity and ran with it. Bringing in Skyru my Draenei Warrior. Except for Ignis, (where someone pulled aggro and dumped a scorch on half the raid) the fights up to Auriaya were one shots. My moment to prove how bad Kat really was had come! Auriaya went flawlessly... well up until people decided to not move out of the void zone. But Auriaya never got a single cast of her shadowy thingy off! In fact she didn't even budge from her initial tanking spot (usually she moves all over the place and it is hard for people to stay in front) except for when I was repositioning her after void zones.

Now while this wasn't exactly a brick wall... but this was something that should never have been an issue with our group but always was because we have a truly terrible tank. I fear though the group is a little too "social" to dump Kat. He also never listens to advice that some of the other warriors have tried to give him. The raid leaders played with Kat in Everquest long before the release of WoW... looks like we may be stuck with him.

When we get stuck on fights like the champions... I feel like Gevlon because I know that every attempt is going to end in a wipe because some people just can't pull their shit together.

Pro Professions!

2009-09-01T17:58:00.005-04:00

One of my goals when it came to playing WoW was to be self sufficient. Being able to craft what ever I needed or farm the materials I required was something I wanted to be able to do. Essentially cutting out the middle man that is the auction house. In reality though this is a costly endeavor but my OCD prevents me from saying no! My profession list is as follows

Arravis-

Primary Engineering 450/Mining 450
Secondary First Aid 450/Cooking 435ish

Artorin-

Primary Leather Working 443ish/Skinning 450
First Aid 400ish

Gandreolf-

Primary Enchanting 450/Tailoring 450

Lanora-

Primary Inscription 445ish/Herbalism 450

Llina-

Primary Alchemy 450/Herbalism 450

Saravid-

Primary Jewel Crafting 450/Mining 450
Secondary Fishing 400ish/Cooking 450

Skyru-

Primary Blacksmith 444ish/Mining 450
Secondary First Aid 450

The two characters that are left out of this list are Jadedfury and Skillet because sadly I lost all desire to level up their professions. I think they are both dual gatherer herbalism and skinning. I wonder if my lack of a crafting profession is why I find it hard to level their trade skills?

Jadedfury has 400 ish first aid but I haven't spent the time to level up skillets when it fell behind in the early 20's.

I have epic flying on two of my characters, Arravis and Llina. They have epic flying because they are my primary gatherers when it comes to materials. During BC I made a choice between my Artorin who was my main and Arravis. In the end it made more sense to give epic flying to a pure gatherer as opposed to Artorin who gathered by killing stuff. I'm looking foward to the next time I can afford epic flying because that means I can give it to who I really want too.

Interestingly enough the two characters that have ideal raiding professions are my Mage Gandreolf and my Warrior Skyru. All the rest have atleast one suboptimal profession when it comes to raiding. I'm really glad that Blizzard added bonuses to both gathering and crafting professions but I hope they make strides to improve gathering bonuses.

The crit bonus from skinning is about the only universally useful profession bonus from a gathering professions. Sure the stamina boost from mining is great for tanks but less then stellar when you compare it to the bonuses from the crafting professions.

Normalizing profession bonuses is something I am completely OK with. Having all crafting professions on my characters is something I can never afford to do. Especially since I don't have a dedicated main to focus on.

Ode to Min Maxing

2009-08-28T18:08:00.003-04:00

I love min maxing. I love playing a character at the peak of its performance. I love adapting to different fights. What is bringing about all this love? Why dual specs of course!

Well yes I've talked about my shaman before and how I dislike resto as an offspec. I could even bring up my druid who I respeced almost daily during BC... but this isn't about Hybrids!

This is about dual spec on my mage. I love it. Totally. What? Pointless you say? Waste of money?

No my mage isn't speced dps/tank or dps/heal or dps/pvp. My mage is speced arcane and fire PvE raid spec dps. I do this because it gives me a choice. It gives me the chance to tune my spec around the fights at hand.

Now yes Fire typically comes out on top when it comes to most fights. But there are several fights where arcane comes out on top and this will be even more true once 3.2.2 comes out.

Arcane is better for movement fights and fights that required controlled burst damage. I also use it on fights that I can abuse Shield procs for Incanters Absorption.

I'll use Arcane on fights like XT reg, Ignis (Flame Jets and breaking golems with Abarr), Iron Council (Spell stealing runemaster shields and standing in deathrunes mmmmmm) Thorim and Faction Champions.

Fire I use on pretty much everything else. I really prefer arcane over fire but I can't stand being a liability in raids because my spec suffers on certain fights. So instead I get the best of both worlds.

Future of the Guild in Cataclysm

2009-08-26T18:19:00.003-04:00

So PvD has a great post about talking about the supposed end of Solo play in the next expansion. (You can find the original post here) I posted my comment about the amount of content that will be available for solo play... but the question arose of how this will impact smaller guilds and Raid Alliances.

I participate in what can best be described as a Raid Alliance, though in reality it is more of a glorified pug. Marrus is the guild leader and raid leader for the Guild The Tempest. The Tempest however is a small family and close friends guild. In fact its just like my guild Shadow of Teldrassil. I created SoT as a place to call home where friends can come and be themselves. Most of the members don't raid but some occasionally do join me. I however, raid with The Tempest quite regularly.

During the week we get 10 man runs together with 5 Tempest members, me and 4 others. Kobeck was one of the other 4 but due to College load he is taking a break from organized WoW. My wife also occasionally comes as does Codoy and Caspien when they are on and we need people. But for the most part the other 4 people are totally random.

Ok so that was a wall of text to basically say this... I play in a small guild where in the new system I would be the top contributor to the guild leveling system. In fact I would wager that my 6 80's would contribute 1-6 in that list. But if the system takes in account the top 20 players then the other members who aren't as active or don't raid won't contribute as much.

It is unclear as to how this will affect the guild progress as a whole. I also wonder about The Tempest. Even though as a gathered force we are clearing new raid content, no single guild can take all the credit for it. Also one of the perks mentioned is increased gold and a raid resurrect. How will these work if not everyone in the raid is a member of the same guild?

Of course the obvious solution would be to merge guilds but that may not really be an option. Though we get a long together great in raids and could also in a guild, I cannot say the same for the members of their guild I haven't met, as well as the members of mine who haven't met them. I don't want to destroy the family atmosphere in either one of the guilds just so we can be viable as a raiding guild.

This is still all a long way off but it is tickling in the back of my mind every time I log on.

You too Mootoo? + Character update

2009-08-26T17:48:00.003-04:00

Say hello to Mootoo. Mootoo is my now level 10 Tauren druid. I've created many horde characters before and none have gotten past level 12. I'm hoping this one will be different as I'm playing on a server that my friend Kobeck has joined. His sister plays on that server and he created an Undead Warlock. My wife has also created a horde toon, a hunter. Blood Elf of course.

I'm going to level primarily as Feral but will likely try and get dual specs at 40. Hopefully my experience with the AH will grant me 1k gold by then. He currently has 10g thanks to signing a guild charter.

[Trade:Thunderbluff] Mootoo: Professional Guild Charter signer lf Guild Charters to sign!

With Cataclysm coming in about a year from now (my guess) I figure that this is my chance to see all the horde zones before they all change. This is on Ravenholdt an RpPvP server so will let me level on a pvp server something I've always wanted to do... don't think I will be doing a lot of RP but ya never know.

I like doing character updates because it lets me mark my progress through the game and lets me look back for nostalgia reasons. I try not to do them too often until things have changed significantly. So here is my last update lets see what has changed! As before new changes will be in red.

Durotan Server US

Ardarin - 70 Human Death Knight Blood Tank spec. Mostly to prove that you don't need to be "Frost Spec" to tank. Dead. This toon was deleted to make room for Skylu a lvl 21 priest who will get little play time. Was created to play with my wife but unless I get a drive to level her... you won't hear about her.

Artorin - 72 Night Elf Druid. Feral Druid. I respeced him Resto and since 3.2 came out he has been leveling entirely through PvP. He is now level 74 and with 14.5k hps and 427 resilience is damn near impossible to kill. Even though I'm facing enemies 5 levels higher then me I can only be killed by 2-3 targets if not more. AV seems to give the most xp and even with the level 80's I'm consistently at the top 3 in healing if not first.

Arravis - 80 Night Elf Hunter. Marksman Well with the trial of the champion I've picked up a few pieces of gear to replace what blues I had in addition to the new gun. My Zuldrak wolf also hit level 80 and has been renamed Marrus (who is the MT of our raids nothing like messing with peoples addons)

Gandreolf - 80 Human Mage. Arcane Spec Has actually become my pseudo raiding main at the moment. He has been through all the new Trial of the Crusader 10 man fights and has also gained Dual Spec and is Arcane/TtW fire.

Jadedfury - 71 Human Rogue. Combat Spec Not much has changed other then being 73 now... this is the toon I really want to be level 80 but for some reason have a hard time playing.

Lanora - 80 Draenei Priest. Holy Spec So yeah... back to Disc spec again and has seen some raid action due to having our tolerance for sucky healers reach its max. We have been lucky on healers in the next few weeks, however, so she hasn't gotten to raid since the second week ToC 10 was out.

Llina - 80 Human Paladin. Protection Spec Yep... still Protection... not much has changed except for some Naxx 10 raiding here and there... I swear that place will never drop tier gear any of my characters need... Ok so... literally nothing has changed since this last update... other then I ran H ToC 5 man twice and a Drak tharon heroic once....

Saravid - 80 Draenei Shaman. Elemental Main / Enhancement Secondary. So... my shaman hasn't seen much love lately. I haven't been farming heroics or running ToC because she doesn't need anything. Also because of group makeup lately my mage has been in a better place for dps.

Skillet - 34 Gnome Warlock. Affliction Spec Um so ya... this toon is lvl 69 atm. We used RaF grant a level to get her to 60 and then I caught up to my wife's DK to play with her. Slowly leveling to 70 but enjoying the end bracket pvp while I can.

Skyru - 75 Draenei Warrior. Protection Main / Arms Secondary Well I've posted that this toon has since hit 80. I really love playing my warrior but our raid leader won't let me tank till I grow up. Well he is sitting at 30k hps and 50% something avoidance as well as being hit capped and expertise capped. Maybe I can convince them to let me into Uld 10 tonight!

Cataclysm buwahha???

2009-08-23T11:30:00.004-04:00

Ok.... so I like the whole concept of Cataclysm. The world being reborn after a massive disaster feels like the things we are doing in the game actually mean something. So there were some demons at ironforge for BC... and some undead attacking SW harbor. We pushed them back. They gave up, and life went on as normal. Finally though an attack where things don't go back to normal.

I'm ok with the cross realm lfg... even if I think virtually no one will use it. I'm ok with worgen and goblins and all of the new race/class combination's. I'm iffy on the reusing of dungeons and content but I think if it is done right... that I'll be ok with that.

For the most part the new changes in the expansion look pretty good and I can see working. At least if they are done right. There is one... tiny little thing... I don't get at all.

Itemization

(pulled from mmo-champion on the blizzcon panels)
In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, there are plans to streamline the statistics found on items. We want to remove all unnecessary stats, make all existing stats understandable, and make all "core" stats more appealing. Here are some examples of such plans.

MP5: This will be removed from items and replaced with Spirit. All healers will be given a meditation-like ability.
Spell Power: Spell Power is being removed from items as well. Don't panic, we'll be improving Intellect so that it provides mana and Spell Power.
Attack Power: We're removing Attack Power from items as well. Instead, we're allowing Agility to provide the necessary Attack Power for leather and mail wearers. Strength will provide the appropriate amount of Attack Power for plate wearers. This means leather and mail items will no longer be desirable for plate wearers.
Defense: The Defense statistic is also being removed from items so that players no longer have to worry about juggling around "the cap." Tanks will receive the necessary anti-crit from talents, like Survival of the Fittest.
Armor Penetration: This ability is too confusing and "mathy." It is being replaced with Mastery, a stat that makes you better at what you do. More on that later!
Haste: Will also increase the rate at which you gain energy, runes, and focus. Retribution paladins and Enhancement shaman will have a talent that allows them to take advantage of this benefit.
Block: Block Value is being removed. Blocking will now always mitigate a percentage of damage.
Stamina: Players will notice more Stamina on gear as Defense, Spell Power, Attack Power and Armor Penetration are removed.

OMG I JUST GOT THE LEGENDARY DEFIAS CHEST PIECE OF THE BOAR!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously??? WTF??? The current stats were too complicated? For who? The super casuals who don't raid? Why do they need really good gear in the first place? You can kill anything in northrend butt ass naked. It sure as hell isn't too complicated for me. Having varying stats on gear and having to make... OMG A CHOICE is one of the things I really enjoy about the endgame.

I mean its simple... the hardcore raiders and theory crafters love putting in the time and effort to figure this stuff out. You need a certain amount of armor pen before it starts beating out your other primary stat... and sometimes can be worse if you don't have all the armor debuffs required. Why is this a bad mechanic? I ask again... who is it too mathy for? The answer has to be the scrubs and the developers. Is it too hard for them to balance the game? Well they are removing the need to balance anything ever... and at the same time making the game extremely dull.

I understand the removal of MP5 and switching to spirit... even if I think the reasoning is thin. What I don't understand is removing spell power and attack power from the game. So now everyone gets to be like ret paladins and warriors.... start stacking that base stat! Oh all those GEM CHOICES forget those... casters don't need any red gem sockets ever again because all you need is loads of intellect.

I've gotten the sense that they have been making the game easier... but this truly is dumbing down the game. OMG THAT NEW CHEST PIECE HAS 5 MORE INTELLECT WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Whoever thought... that those of the boar type armor pieces would become best in slot itemization? How does any of this remotely make sense??? If these changes really do go live like this... I think it will be time for me to find another game. Because... I quit runescape for a reason damnit and it wasn't just so I could have shinier graphics.

I cursed myself...

2009-08-14T17:09:00.002-04:00

Well you've seen me talk about hybrid dps and how I can never go an entire raid without healing once... well now that is all I'm doing... I mentioned Katmandue before, talking about our 25 mans and how there were a few similar people. One of those people was a healer that regularly ran in our 10 man runs. He is a holy priest and a good guy... but the poor guy is playing WoW on a laptop with icepacks under it to keep it cool.

As a result he gets lag spikes and sometimes can't see the fire he is standing in and well... he dies... A LOT. If there was some figure for the person who died the most number of times in our raid... he would be #1 hands down. This wasn't a big deal at all during Naxx and was tolerable during Ulduar, though a number of fights we struggled on for a long time due to healing. The straw that broke the camels back was the new 10 man raid.

We attempted the CoT 10 raid the same day it came out... we wiped a lot but hey, it was a new instance and most people were getting used to mods and what not. For the most part our failing was due to poor coordination. Anyway later in the week we made some serious attempts on it. Ok... lets face it we spent the entire night wiping on it. This was Sunday I believe... Friday night we downed them on 25 man but for some reason on Sunday we just couldn't manage.

It was all too apparent that our problem was healing. I came into the raid on my priest because we are low on healers. Now my priest is from my 10 man Naxx era and is completely geared in ilvl 200 gear and has nothing above or below that. Compared to the holy priest Plus... who has mostly ilvl 226 and nothing under 213. Well... I beat him in healing(and had less overhealing). My priest is also Discipline... and I beat him in healing. Heck on one attempt I nearly solo healed Icehowl but got frozen followed by the wall pound thing and just couldn't keep myself up but Icehowl was down to half health. That proved to be our best attempt and the only other that got to Icehowl... ended by Plus not moving out of the way of the charge.

Needless to say... a lot of us were pretty livid about the whole night. Everyone pretty much decided that Plus had to go... I really feel for raid leaders that tell someone that they are getting replaced. In fact from what I hear he begged for another week to improve and I really feel bad about the whole thing.

Ultimately this means that I'm stuck healing full time on my priest. We pugged 2 healers last night (holy pally and priest) and one shotted the first encounter, and then 4 shotted the second boss. I beat the other holy priest again... which is really weird but the holy pally beat me.

I still feel bad even if the right decision was made.

Sneak Peek Under the Coliseum

2009-08-14T00:11:00.008-04:00

So we were running ToC the other day for the umpteenth time when my friend Kobeck some how got displaced under the arena. Now if you don't already know... here is a little spoiler. When you fight Anuberak... you fight him under the Arena. So in fact these are some snapshots of what that area will look like courtesy of Kobeck.

Goal Oriented Altoholism

2009-08-08T12:19:00.003-04:00

Sid posted a comment on one of my previous posts asking how I manage so many characters. Well part of why I have so many characters is because I have ADHD which means I have problems focusing on one thing for any extended period of time. This started with my druid where initially I leveled as Feral. I tanked for a long time before I got to the point where I was bored. So I respeced resto and then balance. By the end of BC I had gear sets for all three trees and specs for both PvE and PvP.

I got to a point though where there just wasn't much I could do on Artorin... so I started leveling alts. My hunter Arravis was next due too the speed and awesome fun I was having leveling. I saw a paladin tanking in shadowlabs that pretty much used no CC. BWUAH? U CAN DU THAT?? So I leveled a paladin to tank and got into healing and retribution at the same time. I had a tank, dps, and everything else in my druid... but I still wanted a dedicated healer. Thus Lanora my priest was promptly leveled to 70 about 2 months before WotLK was released.

There are a lot of people who don't really get into Alts and really I don't blame them. For me though, leveling alts is born out of my desire to be self sufficient and know... well everything! Learning to play a new class is a reward all of its own, and I don't mean just playing a toon to 20. For me everything starts falling into place at level 60.

For me, leveling all of my characters is born out of setting lots of little goals for myself. What started out as having a dedicated healer, tank, and dps turned into picking one of every class and finding a spec and play style that I enjoy. What started out as having an alchemist at 70 to support my druids consumable addiction turned into being completely self sufficient with professions.

What do you choose and why?

So you have one level 80.... and you are kinda getting bored with him... after all you can only do the same daily 500000 times and all the raids have lockouts. Well the obvious choices are, play less, or roll an alt! If you still really enjoy the game and are comfortable with the amount of time you play then the second option is the best choice. But what do you choose?

From my observations playing an alt works best when that character is born out of either necessity or mirroring.

Necessity may not be the best word, because what I mean by it is that often times you pick a class to perform a role that you cannot. Or maybe not can't perform... but it doesn't feel comfortable. This could be you rolling a priest to heal or warrior to tank or a mage to dps. Whatever void you have at 80 this character is meant to fill. This is also more challenging because it is typically a complete breakaway from what you are used too.

Mirroring is referring to a class that plays very similarly to your main character. This is for instance a ret pally rolling an enhancement shaman or feral druid rolling a rogue. The advantages of this are that there is very little learning that needs to be done. You already feel comfortable in the role at 80 and picking a class that is similar will help you get into that class much more quickly.

Whatever you choose it needs to be a class that you are comfortable with, otherwise you will never enjoy leveling that class. Often times you can tweak this with different specs. There are preferred leveling specs for all classes but you don't have to follow them! If you find another spec feels more natural don't be afraid to level with that suboptimal build. I assure you that you will have more fun leveling with a natural spec then with one that you are using because that's what people told you to use.

Ok I got my class now what?

Well now I have my new class... but where do I go and what do I do? The answer to this again has two variables. Do you want to level for speed or for adventure?

If your new toon was born out of necessity (in other words you want this toon to play at 8o) then your choice is likely going to be leveling for speed. You want to get a level 80 as soon as possible and there are many ways to do so.

RaF (Recruit a Friend). Ideally you would... ya know... have a friend? But if you don't consider spending a little extra cash. With triple experienced + any bonuses from BoA gear this is by far the fastest way to 80. Albeit this is also an expensive choice.
BoA (Bind on Account) gear. Which I sort of mentioned above. With this you are looking at getting to 80 with 90-80% less time played.
Find a leveling guide. This will be in the form of a quest guide that is hopefully easy to follow. There are a number of free ones out there on the internet but don't be afraid to support someone's excellent writing by buying one.
Use Quest Helper or Carbonite. Head on over to curse.com and pick up one of these if you are unfamiliar with the quests. This will literally point you in the direction of the quest you are working on. While I never use them my wife and brother do.

Now remember that the above is written with the sole purpose of getting to 80 NOW. If that doesn't sound like you then don't worry this next part is! Remember that feeling of awe and wonder at the game when you first started playing? Well guess what? It is still out there if you let it! Even if you started playing in Vanilla WoW there are likely many zones you skipped over while leveling. If you started playing more recently then likely you skipped over 70% of the early content in the game!

Pick a new starting zone. Even if you are still rolling the same race as your main, head over to another zone and start from the very first quest. You will feel a little lost at first but if you read over the quests as you are doing them, you will find a lot of the quests actually have a point!
Pick an alternate leveling path. Whatever zones you did on your main... skip them. Go to a zone you've never been to. Especially now with getting mounts much earlier even the more barren zones (pun intended) become more condensed. If there is a zone that doesn't seem like you can find any quests for, look it up on wowhead. There is a chance there is a hidden quest hub or some poor goblin injured in a cave that needs your help.
Explore the lvl 60 zones. If you are like me and started after Burning Crusade was released then there is a good chance you barely scratched the surface of these zones. Winterspring, Eastern Plaguelands, and Silithid. Check out these zones, they have a number of great quest lines that you can easily have skipped over. Ever wonder where Tirion Fordring came from? Go check out his quest line in Eastern Plaguelands.

I've left a lot of the above open because... well it is supposed to be an adventure! Read quests, take your time, and enjoy being immersed in the game. Believe it or not there is no right or wrong way to level! I've used RaF and BoA items and even very briefly had quest helper installed. I've also read every quest in Duskwood and Ashenvale, and gone places just to see what was there. Do what feels right and comfortable with you and don't let anyone tell you differently.

How do I handle multiple toons?

Well there are two mods that I can recommend. The first is Altoholic. This mod will tell you everything from whether your other toons have mail and when your profession cds are coming up, to comparing items in the auction house to another characters gear. You can see all of your characters professions to see what materials are needed or even if the recipe you just got can be learned.

I personally don't use Altoholic because I find managing everything to be half the challenge. However, the other mod I do use and will recommend is Arkinventory. I cannot recommend this mod enough. On the surface this is a bag mod that puts all of your bags into one giant one. But it does so much more then that. You can set up Arkinventory to sort your gear into virtual bags for you! It has many default setups such as sorting out consumables, trash, boe gear, bop gear, and profession supplies, but you can also customize the bags in countless ways.

Where Arkinventory really comes in handy for alts is that by hovering over any item in the game, it will tell you how many of that item is on what character. You can also look at the bags, bank, and guild bank of your other toons as it caches the data while you play.

I'm sure there are plenty of other Mods out there but I try to run with as few as possible.

Hybrid vs Pure dps

2009-08-05T17:32:00.002-04:00

I know this topic has been argued into the ground... but after reading Player VS Developer's post something jumped out at me. Blizzard agrees with him that Pure dps should be higher by nature then that of Hybrid dps. To a point I do as well... but then I got to thinking.

The argument is that because hybrids have the ability to heal or tank, in addition to dps, that they shouldn't be able to do as much damage as those who are pure. Pure dps refers to Hunters, Warlocks, Mages, and Rogues. Hybrids refer too... well everyone else.

There are 2 points that I want to present.

Pure DPS are less limited by threat due to having Threat Dumps.
Hybrids CANNOT dps while healing.

Threat Dumps refer to Feign Death(hunters), Soul Shatter (warlocks), Invisibility (mages), and Vanish (rogue). Pure classes have the ability that, if they pull threat, they can get rid of that extra threat and not get eaten by the boss. Now all dps (except hunters) have threat reduction talents so that they can deal more damage without pulling aggro. The difference though is that when a hybrid pulls aggro... they have no option but to stand there and get squished.

Priests come closest to having a threat dump in fade... but that threat gets returned to the priest once fade wears off. Additionally that talent is more to compensate for healing priests being extra squishy compared to other healers.

I'm usually second in dps in our 10 mans and top 5 in 25 mans on my shaman. Yay for me right? Well on fights like Hodir I'm constantly riding the threat line of our tanks. This means that if I'm not careful I will pull aggro and die. This means sometimes I actually have to stop dpsing to let the tank build up. The pure dps... just reaches the threat cap and pops their respective abilities and go right back at it.

What happens in the above scenario when the tank dies? Or in our case gets flash frozen and bubbles /glare. Well MR. Hodir comes over and smacks me with his big giant mace and then turns around to go after the rogue. The rogue says LOLVANISH and Hodir goes to find someone else.

For the record... being able to heal isn't going to save you from a boss one shot... nor is throwing on a shield or switching to bear form. If you pull aggro as a Hybrid you are left to the mercy of the tanks taunts (though I did survive a melee hit from Archavon once).

The second point is really the one I've been thinking of a lot lately. You see I've talked about it before, and while yes being able to spot heal can save an encounter... so can some extra dps. Blizzard says that because we have the ability to heal, that we should be lower then pure classes in terms of damage. Why? My role in a group is DPS the fact that I can heal alone IS a dps decrease.

When I have to stop and heal myself, or a tank, or that dps who wouldn't get out of the fire, I'm losing dps. The time it takes for me to cast a lesser healing wave is the same amount of time that I could have been casting a lightning bolt. The last time I can ever remember going an entire fight without casting a single heal is Patchwerk. Every other fight I've done there are times where I have had to stop and heal "someone". That ability to heal costs me damage.

Don't get me wrong... I love playing a hybrid... but there are times I wish I could just straight dps through a fight... just to see what my actual potential is. I may never catch the rogue in our group in damage... but I hope that it isn't because of some "5%" difference inherently between us. There have been a number of times where I have been low on damage... only to flip to the heal meters to see the missing dps in hps.

I'm very competitive... to the point where I want to start bringing my hunter into raids just so I can focus on one job... Killing stuff.

Plans for 3.2

2009-08-04T17:36:00.003-04:00

So... as everyone knows the patch is coming out today. I'm not entirely sure that I was ready for it... but it is here nonetheless. Patches like this really make my life difficult. Introducing new content and easier methods to progress my characters isn't going to lessen my playtime anytime soon. I mean sure... if I had one alt that I could now gear up to be on par with my main... I could plan everything out perfectly.

The problem though is that I have 6 characters at 80... and I want to play ALL OF THEM. On top of that I still want to level my rogue, druid and warlock! This patch helps with all of them but perhaps too much...

But I digress... here are my plans for the next few weeks.

Upgrade my shaman with all epic gems. I've got a bunch of titanium stored up on top of my paladins transmutes, emblems of heroism, and honor on various characters. The honor especially I think will be a big source for most of the gems since I pvp occasionally but never really seek rewards. I've been saving JC tokens but I still need a bunch more to get all the patterns I need.

I think I'm going to offer prospect services for a fee of say 5g a stack of titanium... and use the titanium powder to shorten the time it will take to get the patterns I want.
Finish gearing my hunter and warrior to start Ulduar. Assuming of course that we are still going to do Uld 25 runs, I've been working on getting my hunter caught up. Our raid group doesn't have any MM hunters, enhance shamans, or blood dks so there is a 10% attack power increase that they don't have. I'm hoping I can bring in my hunter since one of the previous hunters, switched to her paladin.

I've also been trying to get my warrior ready to tank Uld 10 on nights where Kobeck can't show up and also because the armor pen would be huge for our hunters and rogues.
Level Artorin through PvP. About 2 weeks ago I respeced my druid Artorin PvP resto and have been having so much fun! Artorin is currently level 72 but, thanks to all the lvl 70 pvp gear, he is sitting at 12.5k hps and 361 resilience. This makes him fairly hard to kill even for level 79 twinks that I run into. I don't feel like I'm gimping the team either seeing as how I usually come in the top 3 for heals and my druid makes an excellent flag runner.

With the new patch allowing experience gains in BG's I'm really looking forward to leveling him entirely through BG experience. Likely I will switch to balance or feral as I progress in levels and my level doesn't put me at a disadvantage. Isle of Conquest here I come!
Get everyone flying! I never bothered to get flying on my rogue but now, with the addition of the cold weather flying tome and reduced cost, I plan on getting her flying as soon as possible! That also goes for my warlock who is sitting at 63. All said and done I need another 4200g or so before all of my toons can fly.
Make more gold... Since this is really required for all of the above... I'm really going to have to focus on churning out some gold. Historically I'm pretty good at doing so... but I find making gold in the long run to be very boring. I have a lot of tools at my disposal... since I have every profession in the game at 440 or above. Making gold though requires a lot of motivation on my part because there are so many things I'd much rather be doing.

What are your plans for the patch? (And yes this was written while waiting for the realms to come back online....)

Progress in Ulduar.

2009-08-04T17:18:00.008-04:00

It has been awhile since I've updated but a quite a bit has been going on. I'm not going to go into too much detail because... well like I said its been awhile and a lot has been going on...

My 10 man group finally downed Mimiron last night and I'm really glad we did since the new patch came out today! As an elemental shaman I was assigned to tank the head during phase 3 and 4... and I found out last night during our kill that grounding totem works!

Being able to shave off 9k damage every 15 seconds helped a lot when 2 of our healers died to the laser barrage thing. I mostly just healed myself for the last 30 seconds of the fight trying to give our lone remaining resto druid a chance to keep everyone else alive. I have to give props to Zolair he did a great job keeping up the raid.

I didn't take any pictures of the kill... because well... I didn't even think about it I was so excited to finally have him down. What I did take screen shots of though... was the trip down to see General Vezax. I knew there was little chance of us killing him but just the high spirits of the group and the awesome visuals of the trip down really put me in a good mood last night.

Anyway here are some screenshots of the journey down... I hope to get back in there when I'm on my own to really take every inch of the place in.

A letter for home.

2009-07-26T14:13:00.003-04:00

I was happily questing on my Rogue Jadedfury today. Started working on the quests from Stars Rest in Dragonblight and was really having fun stealthing from target to target assassinating them before they could even mutter a sound! I received the quest The focus on the beach and made my way to the beach to find the captain.

(From Jadedfury's perspective)

I found Captain Emmy Malin outside of the Focusing Ring. With flashing blades she quickly met her end and I rifled through her corpse for the quest items I needed. That is when I found a letter. The letter had dried tear stains on it, and you can tell from the handwriting that it was written in a hurry. I opened the letter and as I read the words written on the parchment, my stomach tightened and my knees felt weak. The words forever ingrained in my memory went like this;

"Father,

I'm sorry for disappearing on you. If you're reading this letter, then I'm dead.

I've been forced to work for Malygos's armies under threat that our family would be killed if I didn't. I feel so ashamed.

If there's anything that you can do to fight them, don't worry about me. I have them fooled and I'm sabotaging them from the inside.

I love you, Daddy!

Em"

I took the ring and used it on the focus as I was instructed to do. I then brought the ring, and the letter back to Commander Saia Azuresteel. Upon reading the letter she tried to console me... telling me that I wouldn't be implicated. Implicated? I had just murdered an Archmage's daughter. If that wasn't enough, she had been trying to help us. Sabotaging Malygos's plans at her own peril. She wasn't found out by him, no. Instead I ended her life in search of information. I sure hope it was worth the cost.

As if my guilt wasn't deep enough. Archmage Malin sent me a letter thanking me. THANKING ME for retrieving the letter. This is what the letter he sent said;

Dear Jadedfury,

Commander Azuresteel's personal courier saw to it that I received my daughter's letter. The courier also told me it was you who found it.

I just want to thank you for seeing to it that the letter got to me. I know that times must be tough for all of you brave souls who are daring to fight in Northrend.

Rest assured that I will avenge Emmy. The Blue Dragonflight will suffer for what they did to my little girl!

With the utmost respect and gratitude,

Archmage Malin

Would he think differently if he knew that it was I who killed her?

==========================

The sad thing is... this isn't the first time I've done the quest... but this was the first time I read the quest text. There are many quests out there that play on your heartstrings. There are some that make you question morality. This quest was different. I was doing what I was told to do, and without questioning I murdered an ally. This wasn't throwing off the balance by working for a satyr, or accidentally eating an amberseed. There was no question in my mind that I was doing the right thing by killing this servant of Malygos. One letter later... and I'm questioning all my actions.

I know that it is just a game, but it makes me wonder how many more double agents were killed by my hand? How many would be heroes were just in the wrong place at the wrong time? How many daughters and sons had I killed? Many times I skip through the quest texts and objectives just focusing on finishing the objectives as quick as possible. Every once in awhile... a quest like this will stop me in my tracks.

"You're right."

2009-07-24T17:11:00.002-04:00

I've been hearing those words from my wife a lot lately since she has started playing WoW. The funny thing though she is very stubborn about everything I tell her. She resists my advice most of the time and tries to counter with her own arguments. I try not to force my advice on her or tell her "ur doin it wrong", instead I try to put my ideas in such a way that I don't come off judgmental.

Being married this is a trick every guy needs to pick up and master. Anyway despite the fact that she will beat me if she reads this I'm going to post my top 5 instances of "You're right" since my wife has started playing WoW.

Getting the level 30 mount! Shortly before hitting 30 I was telling my wife that things will get a lot easier with the mount because you don't have to run everywhere. She told me that she liked walking everywhere and didn't need a mount because walking was fine. It wasn't long after hitting 30 that she admitted that having a mount was sooo much better then walking and she didn't know how she traveled without one.
AoE is fun! This took awhile to sink in. Once I got her to hotkey rain of fire though she was looking for things to AoE and we did quite a bit of leveling with my warrior and her warlock.
Epic mounts are too fast! Yes she actually told me this when she first got her dreadsteed. Once she got out of the city and into the country side with no lag she quickly understand why I was pushing for her to get it. Her DK is speced unholy specifically for the On a Pale Horse talent.
Fireball does more damage. She has been leveling a mage lately and was complaining that she was having to eat after every fight. I asked her what spell she was using and she said Fireball because... well it does more damage. I told her to put what talent points she had into frost and start spamming frostbolt. I'll let you guess what she said after that.
I like my cast sequence. My wife plays a destruction warlock and for the longest time I could not find the glyph of Conflagate on the auction house. When I did finally find it I told her she should lead off with immolate then conflag, followed by chaos bolt and incinerate. She had been using immolate, chaos bolt, incinerate and conflag when immolate was about to expire... which was fine without the glyph. Once she got the new rotation down she was so excited! She had been having trouble pulling aggro off her voidwalker and the daze effect following conflag along with the haste meant she could kill things before they got to her.

A good week

2009-07-20T17:57:00.008-04:00

It has been a week since I last wrote anything which I kind of feel bad about... but I've been busy in WoW. As you can see from the left I pushed hard this past week and got my warrior to 80... and if you look closely in the backround you can see my wife on her warlock hitting 80! Big grats to her on her first level 80! And grats to me on my 6th... and apparently having no life...

But I digress. We both hit 80 on Friday turning in argent tournament dailies (ok it was planned a bit) but before I could do so much as put a talent point in I had to switch over to Saravid for Ulduar 25.

Our Rogue Behindya (nicknamed B2) had already run VoA in order to get enough conquest badges to pick up his helm and complete the 4piece bonus. So we were one dps short for VoA but had everyone we needed for Ulduar.... so I suggested to bring my wife in!

That's why I love this group. As serious as we are when it comes to raiding, they can be laid back enough to literally take a warlock who just hit 80 not 10 minutes prior into VoA. She did manage to dps above the tank and also did really good at switching targets during Emalon. We had a good time and she thanked everyone and left the group.

We then killed everything in Uld 25 up to the watchers including a first kill of Iron Council. That fight lasted 13 minutes! The most exciting thing for me... is that I had enough conquest badges to pick up the tier 8.5 chest! Which means NO MORE FUGLY PANTS. Ok well they are still fugly... but I can't see them under the 8.5 robe!

Saturday I took my warrior, along with my wife and some other friends and we headed into Naxx 10. I was up late after raid Friday night gemming and enchanting my crafted gear in order to hit the defense cap and have a respectable amount of HP's for Naxx. I weighed in at just under 25k HPs. We cleared spider wing with a little difficulty starting out. We wiped a few times on Anub'rekan but one shotted the next 2 bosses. We headed to Military next and had a little trouble on Instructor. We were a little low on heals and dps but managed by switching some people around. Gothik was a one shot but by the time we got to 4H a few people had to go and we called it there.

Was really different tanking on my Warrior then tanking on my Paladin. I have to say I felt like I had to work much harder to keep threat especially in trash pulls. I'm using a 15/3/53 build but am glyphed for cd's with blocking/sheildwall/last stand. Perhaps its mainly a gear issue at this point and things will get easier... I certainly liked having all of the cd's though and they saved me a few times on trash (I was solo tanking the trash).

After Naxx, the family went out to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It was a pretty good movie but I have to say I don't like where they deviated from the book at some points.... I don't want to talk about it too much because I'm sure many people haven't seen it yet. After the movie we grabbed some grub and got home with enough time for me to log on and head back into Uld25.

With just the watchers left we headed for Hodir. There are so many more NPC's on 25 man then 10! Ok I guess its just double the amount... but still. I think it took us 3 or 4 attempts including one that went right up to the enrage. I'm glad I can say that when I died... it was because the Hodir smacked me in the face because either the MT would die... or bubble out of an flash freeze and I happened to be next on threat. Damn you pure dps and your threat dumps!

Anyway he died and I'm both sad and glad that I purchased the chest the day before. I was sad because the Tier Token for Shamans dropped... but was glad because half the raid needed the token. We had 6 shamans, 3 hunters, and 2 warriors... I'm going to hold out on Thorim on 10 man giving me my shoulder piece to complete my 4 piece bonus. The stats don't really make a huge difference but OMG that 4 piece bonus is awesome. Awesomeness covered in awesome. Maybe then I can beat B2 in dps!

Nerf Rogues.

Sign of a Good Player, Taking Criticism.

2009-07-13T17:02:00.004-04:00

The difference between being a good player or a bad player is knowing when you are right or wrong. What I mean by this is that to become a good player, you need to accept that you won't always be right. On your realm, there is a player that is better geared, more skilled, and more advanced then you are. Its a fact. On any realm there can only be 10 people that are the best of their class and chances are you aren't one of those people.

So occasionally you are going to run into people that are better players then yourself. Depending on how good you are determines the frequency of this occurring. The other factor is of course, your exposure to the community as a whole. If you never do anything in WoW but play by yourself.... you probably won't be reading this blog. Also if you are playing solo then your performance really doesn't matter and so you can ignore this post.

This post is about taking criticism. I don't mean the criticism from the "leet" players who just tell you that you suck and kick you from the group. What I'm talking about is when an experienced player pulls you aside and points out that you could be doing things differently. I've had this happen to me and I have done this with players that I encounter on my realm. The difference between a good player or a bad player is how you take this criticism.

The bad player will simply ignore this advice or get upset that this person is "judging" them. Perhaps he will reason or justify his choices in playing the way that he does. Often times they will attack the integrity of the person who is criticizing them. So they will continue to do whatever it was they were doing and perform subpar in groups. Other times it will push them away from raids or group content, or they will only do so in the confines of the guild they are in. Since the guild they are in caters to their poor performance and are often full of bad players, no one will call them out and they will never improve. Good players who happen to be in this guild will get shunned for giving criticism till they either quit the guild or sit in silence.

The good player listens to the criticism. Takes the other players words into consideration and then does research, either on his own, or on a community site to verify the advice. Based on this the good player decides to accept the advice and make the change, or reject the advice based on the evidence found in his research.

Very few people take criticism well. I for one, do not take it well. The difference between me and a bad player though, is that I do everything I can to not be wrong in the first place. I do my research on community sites and blogs as well as in game testing. I do this so that I can be beyond reproach. Am I perfect? No. But I want the person who criticizes me, to be one of the best players in the game.

So when someone comes to you with advice. Listen to them. Take what they say into consideration (make sure it makes sense). Go onto the community sites and blogs to see if the advice is valid for you. Back this research up with a little of your own, whether that is playing with spreadsheets or the target dummy. Finally make an educated choice to accept or reject the advice, and if you choose to accept, act upon the good criticism.

Learning and growing can improve your character just as much as that shiny new piece of gear.

Character Updates!

2009-07-09T08:56:00.001-04:00

Well enough time has passed that my old list of my characters needs a bit of updating. So lets see whats changed in that time shall we?

Durotan Server US

Ardarin - 68 Human Death Knight. Currently Blood DPS Currently level 70 and Blood Tank spec. Mostly to prove that you don't need to be "Frost Spec" to tank.

Artorin - 70 Night Elf Druid. Spec undecided Is now level 73 and running around as Feral. I got the drive to level my old main and have been having good fun being totally and completely overpowered.

Arravis - 80 Night Elf Hunter. Survival Spec Survival never really suited my playstyle well... so I switched to Marksman and have been having a blast with it. Leveling one of the red demonic wolf things from Zuldrak to replace my boring gray wolf.

Gandreolf - 78 Human Mage. Arcane Spec Well I've posted on him before and he is now level 80 woot! He is still Arcane spec and finally got his enchanting up to 450!

Jadedfury - 71 Human Rogue. Subtelty Spec I switched to Mutilate again... but I just hate that I have 0 aoe in groups where every other DPS can... so I am back to Combat again. Combat Daggers/fists to be precise.

Lanora - 80 Draenei Priest. Discipline Spec I love discipline... I really do but I switched to holy to heal a Naxx 10 group hoping that would get me back into my priest.... well it just made me realize how much more I like Discipline. I'm still holy but before I do anything else she will be back to discipline.

Saravid - 80 Draenei Shaman. Elemental Main / Restoration Secondary Well obviously the toon I've been raiding Ulduar with... but aside from that I switched my second spec to Enhancement to mess around with. I have quite a bit of gear that gets passed on to me so I decided why not? Enhancement is a lot of fun but I don't see it becoming my main spec anytime soon.

Skillet - 14 Gnome Warlock. Affliction Spec Well leveling with my wife and RAF my lock is up to 34 (I think) still affliction spec, though I'm considering picking a different one when they start getting new toys.

Skyru - 69 Draenei Warrior. Protection Main / Arms Secondary Currently level 75... but will soon be 80. Most certainly will be my next character to 80 and am considering making him my raiding main. The group that I run with has a ret pally, rogue, and 2 hunters... thats a ton of physical dps and we don't have a single warrior for Sunder Armor. I have consider the pros and cons... losing 280 spell power and 5% haste along with heroism may not be worth the boost to our physical damage group.

Ooooo pretty

2009-07-08T17:34:00.008-04:00

I'm not the greatest at taking screenshots in the world. This weekend though I finally saw something I've been looking forward too since I saw the release video for Ulduar. The train. When I saw the moving train in the video I knew that I had to see it first hand. Well Sunday saw our first attempts on Mimiron 10 man (after we wiped on the trash a few times) and I got to ride the train!

Our best attempt saw him into the last phase which I was pretty happy about. I have to say right now our biggest problem was getting our tank to survive the Plasma Blasts. Monday night they went back in (wife said no raiding for me QQ) but couldn't get past phase 2. People kept dying to the rockets... they were saying the ground effect wasn't showing up. Anyone else know if that is a typical bug? Anyway.... after the raid on Sunday I rode back and forth on the train a few times and took some pics.

I love the architecture in Ulduar especially like the pic below which is of the ceiling at the end of the platform. Its like all of Ulduar is one giant breathing living machine.So yeah... when you get to the end of the track, the train lifts up and rotates around which is pretty freaking awesome... only no one in our group knew that. We had a few people who were slow getting off the train miss the jump and fall to their deaths. Since the portal there isn't up till you engage Mimiron I volunteered to kill myself "in the name of science" and proceeded to chain lightning mimiron.

After thinking about it though I should have ran around and pushed the button to put him into hardmode... oh well maybe next time!

This last one you can see where the tunnel is kind of broken apart. I jumped off the train to see if the hole was really there... but alas it was just an invisible ground. I didn't die instantly but when I was repositioning I must have triggered something because I fell over dead. Still I thought this view was pretty cool looking.

Player Liability

2009-06-29T17:39:00.004-04:00

First let me say I r a bad blogger. Its been a week since my last post and though I have a list of excuses I'm not going to use any of them. My experiences over the last week, however, have lead me to the topic of Player Liability.

It is no news that there is an increasing amount of raid burnout in the last month or so. In fact I have been feeling a little bit of that myself when it comes to progressing in Ulduar. I've given this a lot of thought over the last week and I think the reason, at least for me, is that raiding relies heavily on good players. "Thank you Captain Obvious." I'm sure you are saying to yourself. In truth though I think we are facing similar events (or so I'm told) as to what happened after the release of Burning Crusade.

It is no secret that during the MC Vanilla WoW age, that you could very very easily carry bad players. I've heard stories of people just going afk on follow while watching a movie or eating dinner. Then the Golden Age of raiding came about in Burning Crusade. Kara didn't require 40 people to raid... it required 10. More then that though it required 10 skilled players. This meant that a lot of guilds had to "trim the fat" of their core raiding team and remove those players who weren't capable.

However, some guilds refused to do this. Over time they gradually lost more and more people because the bad players in the guild, who very well could be the social core of the guild, were still let into the early raids. Frustration ensues when the content became too difficult leading to the downfall of guilds.

Enter Wrath of the Lich King

The beginning of WotLK saw a similar move in player base, but for entirely different reasons. Many guilds lost members due to the content being so easy, that they lost the desire to raid entirely. Many guilds broke up in wake of this, those that didn't though supplemented their groups with new players who had the heart and desire to raid.

These new recruits may very well have been a mixed bag. You get some very good players in with some very bad players but since the difficulty scale in Naxx was much lower, it allowed the lesser skills to raid with the guild fairly successfully. I'm sure most of the officers knew who the lesser skilled players were but since the bosses were still dying, who cares? The fact that there is an achievement for running Naxx 10 with less then 9 players tells you that Naxx had an inherently low difficulty tune.

Then when everyone was comfortable in the guild... 3.1 was released. Ulduar is a fairly well tuned instance. Some bosses are much easier then others, but it is still a step up from Naxx. This especially holds true on 25 man. Here, unfortunately, is the rub. By 3.1 there is a good chance that some of your very dedicated and social members are deeply embedded into your raid group. Chances are if you didn't have strict standards on your 10 and 25 man Naxx raids... some of these are less then stellar players.

Player liability comes about when those raiders start posing a threat to the progress of the guild (or raid group in my situation). The leadership is afraid or unwilling to kick a member who has shown up ready and diligent for months of Naxx despite the fact that their poor performance is not only dragging down the raid, but also causing wipes.

Ala Katmandue

This isn't meant to be a slam against Kat... as a person. As a tank though... where do I begin? Katmandue is a warrior tank that has been with the raid group since well before I ever joined. When I joined they had been farming Naxx 25 for awhile. Kobeck and I showed that we knew what we were doing and were quickly adopted into their core raid group. You could tell during those raids that Katmandue was not the greatest tank. He had issues during more complicated fights and managing cooldowns effectively.

He was, however, geared out the ass by the time Ulduar came out. Ulduar really started to show the quality... or lack thereof... of a player he was. He had issues picking up trash on razorscale, or taunting at the right times leading to our tank dying. On ignis we wiped countless times because one of the adds he was supposed to be tanking decided the healers tasted better. He would taunt other tanks constructs and we had to overcompensate for his lacking by running with 3 offtanks for ignis.

Thankfully XT and Kologarn don't require much in the ways of an offtank, so those fights never gave us an issue. But Auriaya did. He would consistently fail to pick up the adds and generate enough threat so they could be burned quickly. As a result he was put on Auriaya where he never once would use thunderclap or demo shout for the debuff to reduce the damage... or even use cds at all for that matter. When he was placed on the 3rd and 4th kill target for the cats he would then use mocking blow on Auriaya (god knows why) which would cause her to turn just enough to cast her frontal aoe cone killing off one or 2 people in the process.

Burnout was definitely starting to take its turn on me. Even though half the raid was talking about him behind his back... no one would say anything to the leaders. Ok. I'll admit the one night I drank a little and started calling him out on stuff... which ultimately lead us to the events of this past weekend. The silence that was kept has been broken and while Katmandue isn't banned from raiding with us... he now knows without a doubt that he has a lot of work ahead of him. After some fruitless attempts on Hodir 25, a similar warning went out to everyone in the raid.

Concentrate and focus or gtfo.

So do you have any instances of Player Liability in your guild or raid group? One of the hardest things to do is to call someone out or to bring your frustrations to the raid leaders... but this is the most important thing you do. If someone isn't doing their job then you won't be the only one to feel this way. Often times you will lose more people by keeping that one liability in your raid group then sacrificing his feelings and letting him go.

Weekend Report

2009-06-22T17:15:00.008-04:00

Well my wife went to visit her mother this weekend across the country. So where did that leave me on the weekend? Yep you guessed it. Sitting in front of the computer getting my raid on. Friday night consisted mainly of my normal 25 man raiding team heading into Ulduar.

Funny how my last post was about to heal or not to heal... because, this week due to a few of our normal crew heading on vacation, I was stuck switching to my Resto heal and getting into the chain heal groove. We started with VoA quickly downing Emalon and Archavon which netted me tier 8.5 gloves.... the enhancement version... Ah well being the only shaman in the raid was worth something I guess.

From there we headed into Ulduar and downed FL without issue and moved onto XT.... where for the first time in I don't remember when we wiped. A little regrouping and we killed him to move on to Kologarn. Maybe it was the large number of new pugs that we had but things weren't going as smoothly as usual and we wiped on him once before running across his corpse. We doubled back and took out razorscale to end the night... knowing we just didn't have the right group to go forward.

Saturday saw my baby mages first trip into Naxx and not just Naxx but Naxx 25. So how does a brand spanking new level 80 mage with a few epics and a bunch of blues/greens? Well see for yourself.

Yep 3600 dps. (Ok I rounded up...) Patchwerk being the best choice for measuring DPS I chose him. We downed Spider, Plague, and Patch in construct before too many people had to go. I got a pair of boots and some emblems out of the deal so can't complain too much.

Finished out Saturday by heading back into Ulduar on Saravid. We again had some issues finding healers but at least downed Ignis and Auriya again. Really a slow week in Ulduar 25 which is kind of disappointing. I hope this isn't leading into some form of summer slump. We are headed back in to work on some watchers on 10 man tonight so, if nothing else, I have that.

Sunday was a rather interesting day to say the least. Around mid afternoon I got the itch to work on my DK a bit. So I was in lfg when a group advertised that they needed a dps for Naxx 10. I told them I could hop on my mage and did so. I grabbed the invite and headed to Naxx. The group seemed fairly balanced and geared sufficiently yet I got an ominous feeling when I zoned in and got the message that I would be saved to the instance. The leader hadn't mentioned this to me before hand but I figured my mage needed whatever could drop anyway so I stayed.

I wish I hadn't. Zoned in and got a summon to thaddius room. The guy explaining the fight sounded like he was on a voice modulation or something and it was extremely annoying. We started the fight and the first thing I noticed was the guy tanking Feugen standing right next to the stairs just barely in range to avoid the discharge. I yelled for him to move back on vent and he did so. Then the switch came.... or at least it was supposed too...

Our tank swapped over to the other side... but the tank from that side never arrived over at ours. I believe he got disconnected or something to that effect but Feugen quickly turned to begin killing the dps... including me leading quickly to a wipe. Then one by one people started leaving... and the disconnected tank couldn't log back on. Eventually everyone was gone and I gave up. Saved to an instance for absolutely nothing. Wonderful.

Despite the poor events that just occurred I once again was on my DK in lfg when I saw someone looking for an offtank for Naxx 10. Why not? I said and told them I could come on my paladin. Interestingly enough neither groups did a gear check but I was invited anyway. I've maintanked most of Naxx on my paladin but have yet to finish all of Naxx on her.

Anyway I switched over and got invited into the group. Which at the moment only had 5 people. I flew to dragonblight and was alt tabbed while they were getting people. At one point I looked and they had 8 people. Someone said we should just run with 8 for the achievement. I almost jokingly responded with "Ya we could do it! " and proceeded to alt tab again. Well about 30 seconds later I tabbed back in to not only find that everyone was in agreement... but that everyone was already zoned in but me.

I frantically threw my buffs up on myself and while the druid main tank was chain pulling, got the other blessings where they needed to be.

"This can't work... can it?" I was asking myself.

Everyone knew the fights and was geared appropriately... but no one was decked out in all naxx 25 or uld 25 gear could this really work? On top of that we weren't going to use vent because the leader said it was stupid and we didn't need it.

Well going from wiping on one boss on my mage with a full group to running Naxx with 8 people was quite the stretch. We not only cleared... but demolished Military wing. The highest dps topped out at around 3k with everyone else at around 2500 yet we still managed all the fights with little difficulty. We started working on Plague wing after that and even got the Safety Dance achievement on Heigan. Unfortunately the druid main tank had to go at that point. He gave me 2 stoneblood flasks (even though I had a bunch on me and was using them) and complemented me on what a great job I had done.

Well we were gonna get another dps but figured since Loatheb only took one tank anyway we would just continue on. And we did just that. The druid healer that we had switched to feral spec and dpsed that fight with our holy priest solo healing the 7 of us.

Energized then that we looked at what we had left. Construct needed atleast 2 tanks for Patch and Gluth but Spider only really needed a second tank for Anub. Well once again our priest showed his skill in solo healing Anub with the druid switching to bear form to pick up the add.

Due to only one healer we chose for me to kite the boss during the insect swarm, which I hadn't seen done since the first week in Naxx. This added a new and fun element and have to say worked out pretty darn well. Thus the first boss in spider went down and we moved onto the second. Well there was no way one healer could keep up 2 tanks and the raid for Faerlina. So the druid went back to Resto and we decided to just burn the adds and eat the enrage.

I have to say that was one of the most intense fights I have done in a long time. Using an ironsheild pot in the beginning and rotating CD's as much as possible really made for an intense battle. We proved too powerfull and she gave me her sword since no one else could use or wanted it.

We moved on to Maexxena who's enrage was easily managed by the use of CD's and that point we called it a night.

A lot of people are really against pugging because of the example of what happened to Gandreolf. Yet sometimes you find gems like the group I found with Llina.

To heal or not to heal..

2009-06-19T15:20:00.003-04:00

If you have read my blog at all (I know pretty dumb assumption) you will know that when it comes to progression raiding I mainly play on my Elemental shaman. No this isn't a post about whether I want to switch to resto full time or not.

This post is mostly about dps... more specifically hybrid dps. When you are a dps in a raid or what have you, your goal is to do as much damage as humanly possible without pulling aggro or dying. That's it. You aren't there to tank or look pretty or heal.... well that last part can be tricky. As a hunter/warrior/mage/warlock etc. all you can do is dish out damage.

What about hybrids though? Are you an Elemental shaman, Shadow priest, or Balance druid? How bout a ret pally, feral druid or enhancement shaman? Yes, you are there to kill stuff. The thing is... there are these other buttons that like... heal stuff. Am I supposed to be using those to you know... heal?

I find myself in raids a lot pondering these questions. I've been in fights where a well placed heal can save a tank, and in return, save the raid. But then I've also been in fights where there was a 1% wipe against an enrage timer, and a little extra dps would have killed the boss.

So where do you draw the line? When things go sour do you step up and try and heal? Or do you pray your healers can take care of things and focus on blowing stuff up. Personally I don't know the answer to this because it changes. Making the right choice between saving a tank or tossing out that extra lightning bolt is what separates a good hybrid dps from a great one.

I'm plagued with choices like this when I raid on my shaman. On some fights the line is gray for instance on Auriya on the pull the tanks take a TON of damage. They take a ton of damage from the 4 cat adds the faster they die the sooner they start taking less damage. So what do you do? You could heal the tank hoping the other dps can kill the adds fast enough or you yourself dps like crazy and try and burn the adds down and hope a healer doesn't slip.

In that situation there really is no 100% right answer and you have to play on the edge of your seat because often times the best choice is both. Tossing out a chain heal followed by a lava burst then getting that lesser healing wave off... it is intense but that is what raiding is about. Playing to the maximum of you and your classes ability.

Other hard choices occur when the boss is low on health, and half the heals and dps are dead. Do you heal hoping you don't run out of mana before the dps can pull off the kill? Or do you throw as much dps at the boss watching as one by one people fall off?

I'm a very competitive person by nature. I love being at or near the top of the damage meter. Often time sacrificing dps to throw out some heals goes off completely notice and likely you will not see any thanks. Yet knowing that you made the right choice and that choice secured victory is one of the greatest feelings you can have.

What choice do you make?

Why do hackers have to ruin all the fun?

2009-06-17T17:09:00.007-04:00

Last night I got together with Kobeck, my good friend irl, and some core members of the 25 man raid group, that we have been doing Ulduar with, to run 10 man ulduar. We started in VoA to destroy emalon which gave me the Tier 8 Enhancement Gloves.... too bad my spec is Elemental/Resto, being the only shaman though I got them anyhow. We killed Arch in under a minute and then headed to Ulduar.

We had attempted FL with 2 towers the week before but we had pugs and some bad communication, so this week we just decided to steamroll him. We went straight through XT and Kologarn after that and 2 shotted Auriaya for a 10 man first. We circled back to kill Ignis and Razorscale both of which were 1 shots. We start at 9:30 and it was nearing midnight which is when we usually end, but we decided we would go try and take out Iron council real quick.

After all the pace we had was really good and everyone was in really high spirits. We engage one of the giant thingy mahjigs guarding iron council and something happened.... ok I think it was my totems that were back a bit too far but we aggroed both of the giants and wiped soon after. Came back rebuffed and knocked over the giant (with me keeping an eye on my totems this time). During the fight though Kobeck, who was offtanking that night, got disconnected.

We were on vent waiting for him to get back when he says that his password doesn't seem to be working. As soon as he said that I had flash backs of when my account was hacked and the dread of the invalid password flashing across the screen.

I wheeled around just in time to notice Kobeck's character move ever so slightly. Then he ran left right turned around looking a little confused.... and started hearthing. I was 99% sure at this point that he was being hacked but I asked the fateful words anyway... I asked if he was logged in and he responded with no. "You are being hacked" I told him with a knot in my stomach.

The raid pretty much called it at that point and I quickly switched over to my Lanora my priest and Guild Leader of Shadow of Teldrassil. Kobeck is a really close friend of mine IRL so when left our last guild to start my own he was basically second in command. I quickly opened the guild control tab and demoted him down to the lowest rank that had no guild bank privileges.

Fortunately I managed to demote him before he had gotten to the bank (one of the hunters from raid was tracking his movements through dalaran.) I called him an ass and switched back to my Shaman who I had opened a ticket to a GM the instant I saw him hearthing.

It was really painful watching the hacker switch characters and move from the most valuable to the least from gold to gear to bank to badge items. I was offline when my account was hacked but several guild members at the time were on and I recall them talking about the hacker jumping though all of my characters. We relayed all of the information and movements to Kobeck over vent and you could hear the helplessness in his voice.

The ticket that I and several other raid members had put in said that they were currently experiencing high volume. So we waited. and waited. and waited. Around 1 am the status finally changed to you can expect to be serviced in approx 2 hours....

The other members gradually logged off as they had to work in the morning and what not. I stayed. Kobeck and I stayed on vent talking for the next 2 hours.... which turned into 3 hours... which finally changed the status to "Your ticket will be serviced soon." At this point it was 4 am. I had to be at work in 4 hours but I didn't care. The next hour and half waiting though proved a little too much and since I couldn't get out of work, (I don't think my friends wow account being hacked counts as a family emergency) I headed to bed for 2 hours of restless sleep.

I woke up this morning and Kobeck's DK was still under the control of the hacker. In fact the hacker was farming ore in Sholazar Basin with Kobeck's 450 mining and epic flying mount. I talked to Kobeck while at work through text messages and he did eventually regain control over his account. Hopefully he got rid of whatever he lost his account too.

And that's what worries me.... Kobeck is one of the very few people I know that is more intelligent then I am. He has a higher technical expertise when it comes to computers and he is very careful when it comes to the Internet and security. He thinks he may have picked up a script or something from the WoW official forums... makes me glad I really stay away from there.

Anyway hopefully within the next few days he will have the items and gold he lost fully restored and things can return a little bit back to normal.... but then nothing is really the same after you are hacked. You constantly live in fear regardless of how safe or protective you are.... that somehow everything you worked for can still be taken away.

So how did I spend 5 hours on my shaman while waiting in futility for the GM? (is futility a word? if not it should be) I worked on my fishing leveling from 278 fishing to 330 ish.

Character Spotlight Saravid

2009-06-16T17:47:00.006-04:00

Saravid right now I would have to say is as close to a main as I have. Simply because she is who I raid progression content on.

I really don't tend to take a lot of screenshots, though I really want to include more on the blog. Looking through my folder most of the screenshots of my shaman are in raids from behind with the UI up. So I took this one just for the blog :D

History

Well my shaman was created to play with my best friend who got me into the game in the first place. The objective was for her and I to level together and only together. Which worked out really well up until we hit level 14.... and for the next year she remained at that level.

In October after months of talking about WoW my brother decided he wanted to start playing. So through recruit a friend he began playing and created his first character, a human paladin. With him leveling as protection and me leveling as elemental we soon realized how powerful a combination this was.

We 2 manned a lot of instances on our way to outlands with Refer a Friend giving us a huge boost in leveling speed. Even after the release of WotLK, I played on my shaman whenever opportunity arose. When we finally got to northrend though things began to stall out. My brother was getting bored with questing because of the fact that my shaman was so powerful things would often die before he had a chance to hit them.

So I told him that he should go Retribution and he did. This presented its own problems in that things died so fast it was no longer fun for me either. Also at the same time my Priest had just hit 80 and I really was enjoying playing with her. Stuck between leveling and raiding I told my brother to go ahead and level without me.

Saravid stayed level 73 for about 2 months till I finally got the desire to level with her. Shaking off the rust proved extremely easy and getting Lava Burst at level 75 insured my love for my shaman. I worked on getting my JC up as well and started doing the JC dailies. In fact, I had done so many of them that when the time came to hit 80... I could think of no better place..

That same day my shaman was in heroics pulling 2k dps in H UP. After a few weeks of trying to get into raids as dps with my guild (I had been raiding on my priest as a healer), and them trying to take a hard stance on turning the guild into some sort of hardcore raiding guild, I felt it was time to leave the guild behind.

The fact that a few days before one of my friends got me to join the 25 man group that she had been running with helped in making this decision pretty easily. A few weeks later I formed Shadow of Teldrassil with some close friends and family. The guild isn't raiding quite yet but maybe someday. In the meanwhile I run 25 mans every week on my shaman and bring the elemental pain.

As an aside to this post. Due to the rarity of Shamans, and even more so, elemental shaman blogs I contemplated for a long time creating one just for that. However, I realized that my nature wouldn't allow me to focus on just one character for a very long period of time so a blog of this nature seemed better placed.

Ding makes 5

2009-06-15T18:32:00.007-04:00

So I was talking to one of the mages I raid with in 25 ulduar. We were talking about the lovely buff of focus magic, because he usually gives me the buff unless there are other mages. He has an elemental shaman as well and knows how often we crit and knows he can be guaranteed 100% up time on his end.

I told him I had a mage as well but he was only 78. Well... I got an itch to play him and he hit level 80 last night just before I went to bed. I was doing the quest to gather the fragments of Hodir's horn, as part of unlocking the dailies, and thankfully noticed the amount of XP I needed to level so was able to actually get some good screenshots.

I had a fairly good idea I would be hitting 80 over the weekend so earlier on Saturday I purchased the spellweave gloves for 165G (cheaper then the mats to make it) and bought more spellweave cloth to make the chest myself. Overall I spent around 400g. I also had the Chain of Latent Energies that I had won on my paladin in Naxx.

I've also been working on the Argent Tournament dailies since hitting 77 and reached champion level a few days ago. Today I will have enough tokens to pick up my chainsaw. Have I mentioned how much I love the Tournament? Finally while I was browsing the AH for an Offhand item I noticed that this book is now usable by people who don't have inscription. When I made this on my priest that wasn't the case but now I'm going to have to make one when I get on. The rest of the gear I'm going to have to probably get from running heroics, but considering that I was doing 1800 dps average on the training dummy last night I don't think that will be an issue.

Lastly I was doing this quest last night. I was wondering... if I was controlling him if I could see where he was.

That's when I noticed the epic offhand he was using....

Weekend of Raids

2009-06-15T17:48:00.011-04:00

This weekend I did an unusual amount of raiding for myself. Friday was pretty normal with going in to Ulduar 25 man with my regular group. The group I raid with isn't a guild run... or a guild alliance... its just a group of skilled players that raids together on a weekly basis... I have no clue what you would call that. But I digress.

Friday saw our normal clearing of the first few bosses in ulduar FL, Razor, XT, and Kolo. We also usually start with VoA if we have WG and so Emalon also went down. Was about a 2.5 hr raid in total I would say by the time we got everyone together.

This gave us Saturday to work on Auriaya. If you are familiar with Ulduar at all you will know why they say this fight is all about the pull but in case you don't here is why...

That is our DK tank dying in .42 seconds on the pull. In the end we switched to our MT paladin pulling while popping Divine Protection (bubblewall) while our ret pally hit Divine Sacrifice with Divine Shield for a 80% damage reduction. Even with all of that I would start out the figh spamming lesser healing wave on the tanks till the damage stabilized and I could go back to DPS.

We finished the fight by going to Ignis and smacking him down. We had killed him before, a few weeks back, but for some reason he has been giving us a lot of problems. Ok ok... I know the reason... we have a tank who is TERRIBLE at any fight that requires more then one brain cell. Basically he would lose adds to healer threat and not taunt for just long enough to lose 3-4 healers which would end the attempt.

We solved this by having our ret pally switch to protection and having 3 add tanks. Really sucks having to compensate so much for one persons short falls. Especially when that one person wins every. single. freaking. tank gear that drops and still sucks.

So here is the picture of the boss going down.

Because I took the screen shot so quick Recount hadn't refreshed here are the meters for the fight.

I included the healing meter too because I got stuck in the pot a lot and was spamming heals on myself (as anyone who heals should do). Usually I come out ahead of the other shaman in dps but I did over 100k healing during the fight which was time I wasn't dpsing.

Overall it is a fun fight though the flame jets can be very very annoying for casters.

As if that wasn't enough for one night... my friend whispered me and asked if I wanted to run Naxx 25 on my hunter with them. I said sure and switched over to my hunter and headed to Naxx. No sooner had I got there she informed me they already filled the slot even though they told her they would invite me.

....

Well I was itching to raid more anyway so I dropped myself in LFG for Naxx 10. Figured I could run for a bit and if my friend needed me and the group I was in wasn't going anywhere I could switch. After about 10 minutes I got a whisper and invite for a fresh Naxx 10 group.

Well cool I joined up got on vent and waited a bit for them to find the last healer. The leader of the group mentioned they could find a tank and he could switch to his priest. That's when I offered to switch to my paladin and tank. After all it is easy to find a dps. Well we found a dps before a healer so I switched to my paladin and he hopped on his priest.

We then proceeded to raid for the next 6 hours. We cleared construct first, then military, then plague. At that point I was exhausted and logged for the morning. Had some new people and some weak dps but in all it still went pretty smooth. I'm used to pugs having that slow pace especially when people come and go.

Gluth, 4H were both pretty interesting. We lost our main kiter after the first decimate. I ran to the back and began kiting and thanks to a hunter dropping frost trap was able to effectively do so till the next decimate. At that point I took over on gluth and he went to the back to pick up the adds. This proved enough to bring the big doggie down.

On 4H we lost our offtank healer to a meteor just as Baron went down. The offtank lived long enough for my healer to get there and take over while I went to the back. Only thing was that because the switch had happened not long before that my healer didn't let his stacks drop off and ended up dying when he got to 6. Thane died shortly thereafter and we headed to the back where the last healer was.

At this point I did what I could for healing spamming flash of light till my mana went dry popping divine plea and a mana pot. Just before the last horseman died the priest kicked the bucket leaving me, the other tank, and 2 dps alive. Was sloppy but worked. Guess thats why I love playing hybrids. Often times you can use all of your abilities to pull off a win where you should have wiped. Have any experiences like this?

Character Spotlight: Artorin

2009-06-12T17:20:00.002-04:00

Artorin was actually my first character ever created in WoW. His name came from an RP thing that my brother, sister, and wife did around Christmas before I started playing. The character that I had created for that was an older man that had magic abilities but rarely used them. So when creating my Druid I figured that he would follow in a similar fashion. Thus my druid was created with long white hair and an older appearing face.

History

When I first hit level 10 and discovered talent points, I put my initial points into balance because that was the only thing that seemed useful. Since you start out essentially as a caster reducing the cast time on wrath and stuff seemed like the smartest move. Then I hit level 20 and everything changed. Training cat form and looking down the talents I noticed that there was a talent that increased the run speed in cat form. That was it.

I immediately respeced into feral and leveled to 70 like that. Around the 50's Nikkyo who was my best friends boyfriend at the time joined up with me on his warrior to give me some pointers. His main was a feral druid and actually pointed out that my gear with int and spirit, regardless of being blue quality, was not as good as green armor with agility and stamina. With his advice I headed to outlands and began joining groups as bear tank.

When level 70 came I pretty much had it in mind that I wanted to raid and had spent lots of time on thottbot looking up armor upgrades through questing and what not. Also Polumaka (my friend) and I left our LOLZ guild to join Renevatio. Renevatio was a guild formed by burned out members from a PreBC raiding guild. They were talented, intelligent but burned out on raiding 5 nights a week chasing server firsts. I was about halfway through the attunement (I started at 68 thanks to being a druid w/ flight form) for Kara when I hit 70 and they were working on downing Curator. This was in July so around 5-6 months after BC was released.

At that time Kara was split up into 2 nights where we would clear as many of the early bosses the first and then work on the rest the second day. I started offtanking for them on the early nights till I slowly got geared up. Raiding for the first time was truly fascinating, every pull had to be carefully marked out and executed. CC was required and those trash mobs sure put a beating on you. I learned a lot from this crew of raiders and they instilled on me a lot of good habits that seem to be missing these days.

After we began clearing Kara regularly the leadership started to grow the ranks in hopes of running 25 mans. This is where things started to go down hill. With in short order we were running 2 10 man groups fairly regularly and eventually got enough to take on Gruul. Now there was an epic fight from my perspective. We spent 2 weeks on High King Maul... talk about a fight being dependent on the pull... and another 2 weeks after that to get Gruul. I still remember being the last of 3 tanks alive when the big ass guy finally fell over. Heart pounding, hands shaking, truly the last time I would feel those emotions on a boss kill.

Death of a Guild

A few weeks of farming gruul lead to attendance numbers dropping. Since we were getting ~20 members to show up, we decided to at least work on the trash in SSC and take some shots at lurker. Around this time I had serious questions about how much time I was spending on the game and decided it was best to cut back on raiding maybe entirely. Things had become stressful at home and telling my wife that I had to raid on certain nights so we couldn't do stuff... wasn't going over well.

Did I cause the downfall of the guild? I'll never fully know but after about a week or 2 of my announcement the Guild leader and his wife (really co leads) decided they were going to quit the game entirely and disband the guild. And so a few weeks later the guild bank and gold was distributed, the website and vent shut down, and Renevatio faded away into obscurity.

Before the Ren was completely shut down, one of the rogues nicknamed b2, told me he was starting a new guild and with the release of ZA would be focusing on 10 man. This is where things became problematic with my wife. I really wanted to help b2 and the new guild out and play as their main tank... but I had already told my wife that I was done with raiding.

Bad Choice...

I'm sorry to say that I made the wrong choice that day and chose to put the game and the guild over my wife. Tranquility was created and we began raiding again almost immediately. Zul'aman was a new raid with new challenges to experience and I enjoyed every second of it. We killed the bear boss our first night in and on our second try. The following week we got the eagle boss to around 20% and the week after he went down. The lynx boss.... ouch. He put an end to our good progress and the following week I chose to take a better geared warrior offtank over the lesser geared protection paladin. Turns out that decision would ultimately damn the guild.

The paladin's friend and GF happened to be 2 of our healers. So because I chose the warrior due to commanding shout and better gear over the paladin they quit the raid. Within a few days they all /gquit and progression stopped dead in its tracks. Without enough members to field a 10 man I should have just stopped raiding all together like I had said. But I couldn't...

Raiding was enough of a bug that I chose to, instead, join the guild that Nikkyo had went to after Ren broke up. Thus I joined the ranks of Serendipity, this time as a healer. Healing on my druid was new and exciting. I was also very good at it. Despite my lower gear I consistently began being in the top 2 healers for the 25 man runs. After a good solid month of raiding with them all hell broke loose.

Back but not the same.

On New Years Eve my wife told me she was moving out. I had put the game above my family and everything finally came crashing down. I hadn't noticed the depression she was in and while I noticed her turning to a friend I didn't see how far things were going. So I decided that it was time to quit WoW. Before logging off for the last time (or so I thought) I attended one last raid with the guild. We were going into Tempest Keep and making more attempts on Alar. That night we not only downed Alar for the first time as a guild but also took down Solorian and Void Reaver for guild firsts.

Still 10 months away from the next expansion this would turn out to be my crowning achievement in Burning Crusade with 4 bosses down in SSC and 3/4 in TK. My wife and I went through couples counseling and a few weeks after she moved out, came home. Things were still rocky between us but at least I didn't have any distractions. With a new outlook we overcame a lot of the problems we had and things began looking up. In fact she found out how annoyingly touchy feely I am when I don't have a habit to distract me :P

So around April or so with her permission I reactivated my account. I was still in the same guild and the people were still there but things were different. I was a raider before and getting into groups for heroics and what not was easy. Not anymore. I felt like an outsider and things were wearing on me. Since I wasn't raiding and just pugging everything I got to the point where I was just ready to quit the game. That's when Redd one of the warlock officers announced that she was going to start running Night Owl Kara runs.

Even though I had farmed Kara to death before and didn't need any gear I saw this as my opportunity. I was careful with the time I played and since these runs occurred late at night (starting at 12:30 am) I could raid and not ignore my family at the same time. Thus with my wife's permission I started raiding one night a week clearing kara and started making new friends in the guild. That was until the end of BC...

3.0 and the death of Night Owls

Night Owl runs were totally laid back and fun for everyone involved. This presented a problem though with the other officers. Eventually Redd stepped down as an officer to get away from all the drama but continued to lead raids. Things only worsened when we started to run ZA instead of Kara. The regularly scheduled raids had been having trouble getting enough sign ups while the Night Owl runs were typically overbooked. The officers viewed us as a threat to the guild and Redd, under lots of pressure, left Serendipity to help form a new guild.

In the wake of her leaving 80% of the Night Owl crew followed. I didn't. I had hoped that this all was because of the impending release of WotLK and that things would balance out at 80 with new content. Taking stock of Artorin I had full sets for balance, resto, feral dps, tanking, pvp resto, and pvp balance. All of it was epic and the pvp gear was mostly vengeful/brutal. With the expansion coming and vowing to make everything obsolete I decided that I didn't want Artorin to be my main character in WotLK.

At this point I had 4 level 70's; Artorin, Llina, Arravis, and Lanora. I remembered having the most fun leveling my hunter so in the last few weeks of BC I spent time getting Arravis her epic flyer and getting everything in order for WotLK.

Post WotLK Release

After the expansion Artorin was simply used for skinning and lw but I did this all carefully as to not to level past 70. I ran a bunch of alterac valleys till I was blue in the face but it wasn't until this week that I finally decided I was ready to work on him. So after getting 4 80's and a 78 my first ever character finally hit 71 and I have a feeling he will be getting a lot more attention.

Mmm Tears

2009-06-11T17:41:00.005-04:00

So in case you missed it, Blizzard announced they are lowering the requirements of mounts. The standard 60% speed mount will be available at lvl 20, the 100% epic mount will be available at lvl 40 and your standard flying mount will be available at level 60. The speed increase for the standard flyer is being increased from 60 to 150%. Epic flying and cold weather flying remain the same but this still has a huge impact on the leveling game.

While being bored at work I decided to assault my brain with some mindless dribble that is comments on wow.com posts. I was not disappointed.

Everything from demanding gold back, to blizzard is making the game too easy, to charging that the next step is giving mounts to level 1 characters or simply starting everyone at 80. Mmm drama. So what is my take on all of this? Well as an altaholic I should be thrilled right? Well to an extent I am... but since I only have one character that will fully benefit from these changes (and likely will be at least 30 by the time the change goes through) . Even though I have paid for epic ground training on all but one character, flying on 6 characters, and epic flying on 2, I don't feel slighted in the least.

There has been a lot of talk on blogs about how WoW is in decline and people are quitting WoW because it is too easy or because they don't want to level another alt. Well people don't think about all of the new players coming into the game. WoW's subscription numbers have been rising and you don't honestly think they are all level 80 now do you? I recently got my wife into playing and deleted my 22 warlock to create a druid to play with her. After leveling her to 48 I deleted the druid and remade a warlock.

The reason I mention this is because I noticed there were a lot of low characters running around. What I noticed was that there were a large number of characters in the low level zones. Sure maybe not as many as you would see in icecrown but still a decent amount. Also I'd say about 1/3 of the players we ran into were actually leveling their first characters. Indeed this trend followed into outlands where the instance groups typically only had one or two death knights.

These changes that Blizzard made help not only the new players progress faster but also get people leveling alts more. Ideally this mix will help train new players so that when they get to 80 they aren't entirely useless. Overall though this change doesn't affect the difficulty in the game. This change is purely in decreasing the time it takes to level by reducing travel time. There were a lot of complaints when the mount requirement was reduced from level 40 to 30. This turned out to be an awesome change because it made getting groups for instances like Scarlet monastery for alliance viable.

I remember the long hauls on foot to get all the way to scarlet monastery while the rest of the party sat around in battlegrounds or stormwind, because they didn't even have the flight plan for southshore, and it would take them too long to get there. Lowering the mount requirement made it easier to get people to make the journey to the stone. Now this change may make other instances more viable as well such as wailing caverns or shadowfang keep. Additionally I can relate recently to having to make the barrens run on my baby warlock for the succubus quest. On a mount that run would have taken half the time!

Does that decrease the difficulty of the quest? Because it took less time to run? Was it hard for me to auto run to the barrens for 20 minutes? NO! Having a mount at a lower level doesn't suddenly make the quests easier to actually do. The mobs are the same level, have the same abilities, and the same drop rate. This just makes it easier to get back to turn them in.

The faster new players can level through the content the sooner they will be there to heal/dps or tank for you. This is another reason why when you are in a group with a new player you should take a little time to explain what they are doing wrong in a way that doesn't cause them to quit. You don't want that noob dpsing in a heroic? Well maybe he wouldn't be a noob if you had showed him to use aspect of the hawk instead of aspect of the viper when you were with him on an alt.

5 Tips for those under 1500 DPS (Spec selection)

2009-06-09T17:43:00.004-04:00

Can't hit 1500 DPS as a level 80? Blaming this on the world or everyone else? Here are some friendly tips on how not to fail when it comes to Specing your character from a DPS standpoint.

The pic attached to this (if you can't see it clearly) is of my level 70 druid doing 1489 DPS on a target dummy in Darnassus. The fight was 3 minutes long and completely single target (except for the few seconds where my treants ran off to attack another dummy). If my druid at lvl 70 can do 1500 dps then there is no excuse for any class at 80 to not be able to do that.

The 71 Point Frost Mage

I used the frost mage as an example only because it is the one I have seen the most. This applies to every class in the game however. You will never ever get the most DPS out of a spec by just dumping 71 points into a single tree.
Look for talents that boost your damage in other trees.

Whether it is the aforementioned Frost Mage putting in enough points into Arcane to pick up Torment the Weak for an extra 12% damage on their primary nuke. Ret paladins pick up Divine Strength, elemental shamans pick up Thundering Strikes and the list goes on. Especially when it comes to pure dps classes (mage, hunter, warlock, rogue) there are many opportunities to pick up extra damage talents from other trees.
Pick up those +hit talents!

This applies mostly to spell casters (as some melee classes don't have +hit talents) but you have 17% miss as a caster and picking up talents that increase your hit goes a long way to increasing your dps. Early on it can be a struggle to get hit capped and any where you can pick up these talents will save a lot of headache.

Obviously if you are stuck with gear with so much hit rating that you are way over the hit cap then you may want to take talents out (or rethink your gear). Chances are though if you have this problem you don't need to read this list anyway...
Pick up raid utility when needed.

Now what do I mean by raid utility you ask? Well I'm glad you asked! (and even if you didn't I'm going to tell you anyway) Raid utility is any ability or talent that you can take that doesn't just enhance yourself... but also the party or raid. Whether it is Replenishment or + Hit buffs or anything that helps increase the group dps or survivability.

Now the when needed part really depends on if you are in a guild or not and how easily these buffs can be picked up. If you are in a guild you may be asked to spec a certain way to provide the buff for the group especially when it comes to replenishment. Some classes pick this up simply by picking up all of the damage buffs such as shadow priests and Ret paladins. Bottom line if you are in a guild and they ask you to pick it up then do so. If you aren't in a guild then pick it up if it is convenient but don't go out of your way if it means a large drop in your dps.
Don't pick PvP talents over Damage talents

Sure you may kill things fine in a pvp fight but this here is PvE! You won't be getting attacked or at least you shouldn't be getting attacked... ever! Your job is simply to do as much damage as humanly possible in as little time as possible for as long as possible. Picking up a talent that reduces the duration of stuns on you... isn't going to accomplish this. So as a general rule don't pick up anything that improves your survivability unless you have every single dps talent already picked up and can't do anything else with it.

Your survivability in a PvE environment depends on how fast you can kill the boss and that is it.

Graduation QQ

2009-06-05T22:38:00.004-04:00

My sister had her high school graduation today... big grats to her! Of course that means I had to go... but its friday! I have a group that I raid with friday and saturday nights starting at 9:30 PM. Her graduation started at 7 so I figured I should have enough time to go, watch her do her thing, then get home to get my raid on.

Murphy being the optimist he was... it was pouring rain driving to the fairgrounds. The rain had dissipated by the time we arrived but the fact that it had just down poured there for 30 minutes prior to us getting there meant the grass parking lot I had to park in was almost entirely flooded. So yay for walking to the arena in tons of mud! Anyway sitting on a tiny metal bench with my knees in the person in front of me and the person behind me with their knees in my back... really not comfortable at all. Hour and a half later they finally called her name up she got her fake diploma (they hand out the real ones after), and I excused myself to stretch my legs and get some fresh... humid... air. Half an hour later they do the whole pomp and circumstance thing and they all pile out of the arena.

After hunting down my sister and dragging her over to the family so they could do the whole picture thing and I could go home... we are informed there is a party for the family back at my parents house. So I'm home atm long enough to post this and let my feet dry out before I have to go over there and eat cake. Better be some damn good cake. Oh well hopefully I can do some raiding tomorrow.

P.S. On the way back from my parents we came up to an intersection with a turning lane that we turn left on. We get into the lane and are getting ready to make the turn when a black Trans AM puts its left turn signal on and cuts infront of us. Totally not a big deal right? Well... he then proceeds to turn too much and essentially runs over the median ( we were turning onto a devided 4 lane road). With his wheels split on either side of the median he finally jumps the curb.... into the wrong side of the road.

Now he is driving on the wrong side of the road (thank God it was at 12:30 AM) and almost runs into the curb again when the turning lane he was driving in at the time comes to an end. He avoids hitting it though and proceeds to come to the next division in the median where you would make a left hand turn from if you were actually going the right way... so he makes a U turn.... and is now driving straight at us....

My wife was driving so I told her to pull into the next parking lot which happened to be a bank, before this dumbass could kill us in a head on collision. I turn back and what do I see? The black Trans AM of death turning into the bank... fortunately he turned to the right and went around that way, while we flipped around the opposite direction and went through the drive through to get back to the main road.

.... and the best part? This happened right in front of a Police Station...

Quick Update

2009-06-05T07:44:00.002-04:00

So... I'm working on a guide to help new players who just hit 80 find their way into pulling their weight in groups. Since its my first guide though I want to take my time on making sure it is presentable and easy to read. I have ideas for other guides including using my 78 mage turning 80 as an example about how to hit 80 and be able to put out enough dps to go right into Naxx.

So my blog may be a little quiet while I work on those. Last night my warrior hit lvl 70 and put on the full set of Cobalt Tanking armor which brought me up to the defense cap and gave me a good boost in effective health (armor+hps). The major thing that I realized after was how much I took for granted the hit rating my old armor had... 5% chance to miss sucks. Anyway heading off to work now have a good day everyone.

Who I am and What I play

2009-06-03T17:42:00.002-04:00

This is going to be a short and quick post of who I am playing and what class and spec they are. I will go into more detail about why I chose what specs for each and go into more detail of the history of each but to save this from being a 20 page post this will do for now. For the most part I stick to Durotan US realm though have some projects on other servers.

Ardarin - 68 Human Death Knight. Currently Blood DPS

Artorin - 70 Night Elf Druid. Spec undecided

Arravis - 80 Night Elf Hunter. Survival Spec

Gandreolf - 78 Human Mage. Arcane Spec

Jadedfury - 71 Human Rogue. Subtelty Spec

Lanora - 80 Draenei Priest. Discipline Spec

Llina - 80 Human Paladin. Protection Spec

Saravid - 80 Draenei Shaman. Elemental Main / Restoration Secondary

Skillet - 14 Gnome Warlock. Affliction Spec

Skyru - 69 Draenei Warrior. Protection Main / Arms Secondary

What's with the name?

2009-06-03T17:20:00.002-04:00

When I first started playing WoW I rolled a druid named Artorin and leveled him to 70 (I started after BC came out). Artorin leveled as Feral and I started my raiding career as a Bear tank. The guild that I was in had just started raiding in Kara around the time I hit 70 and by the time I was geared up enough to off tank they had downed curator for the first time.

This was around August or September I believe and the guild that I was in was a small guild at the time. So we alternated players letting the lesser geared players clear the first half, while the better geared cleared the second half the next day. This worked well till we had enough players to have 2 10 mans. This of course led directly into trying to get enough members for 25 mans. I was part of our guilds first High King and Gruul guild but within a few weeks after that the Guild Leaders (husband and wife) got frustrated with the slow progress and decided to flat out quit the game.

In the wake of my first guild splitting apart I decided that I would try other things then just tanking. So I tried healing a bit. First as a feral spec with healing gear to eventually going full tree. I then became fascinated with being a balance druid and set off on the painful task of gathering spell damage gear since during this time spell damage and healing were entirely different stats. So for the next few months I switched back and forth between different specs whenever it struck my fancy and really enjoyed the variety that playing a hybrid gave me.

My search for knowledge led me to Blogs such as thebigbearbutt.com, graymatterwow.blogspot.com/, and Resto4life who has since given up blogging.

My main was undoubtledly Artorin during all of BC and it was simple to post on blogs going by my Druid's name. But then WotLK came out. I decided that I didn't want to level my druid first so choosing between my other 70's at the time (priest, paladin, hunter), I went with my hunter to level first to 80. Posting on Big Red Kitty and other sites left me questioning what name should I be using? After all Artorin is a druid and I was mainly playing a hunter at the time... but was the hunter my main?

To complicate things further I leveled my priest up shortly after and almost completely stopped playing my hunter. Then my shaman hit 80.... and then my paladin... each time my interest in the one before faded a little. So who am I? What class do I play? What is my main? All these questions drove me to creating this blog as a sanity check and a single identity. Though I play many classes I play them all as a unit. Not one being greater then the next or having alts for the sole purpose of grinding materials.

With my ADD (attention defecit disorder)being what it is I play the class I find interesting at the time. I LOVE maximizing every toons potential and playing to the best of my abilities. My abilities and love though can't be contained in a single class... so I must play them all.

Server Restart...

2009-06-02T22:30:00.002-04:00

So... 10:30 pm and the server restarts booo.

Oh well got Skyru my Warrior's Blacksmithing and Mining to 350 and proceeded to go to Howling Fjord with the wife and train. Hopefully I'll gather enough mats to make the tanking set for when I hit 70. More then likely though I'll hit 70 and just buy the mats from the AH. I mean Cobalt isn't expensive anymore is it?

Nvm Patch...

2009-06-02T18:06:00.003-04:00

Ok so forget playing right now... apparantly my computer didn't DL the patch properly so I have to wait on that.

Oh well gonna grab some food and watch a movie while it is doing its thing.

Welcome

2009-06-02T17:48:00.003-04:00

Well this is my first blog and first blog post ever. I have been reading a lot of blogs from various other World of Warcraft players over the last few years and have finally decided to jump into the blogosphere myself.

I enjoy the expansive world of Azeroth and even more playing the various classes that are currently in the game. As of this posting I have but one class not leveled to atleast 68 and that is a Warlock. Currently I have a Shaman, Paladin, Priest and Hunter at level 80 and between them can Tank/DPS/Heal.

I believe in Maximizing my characters for the role they will be playing. I usually raid atleast once a week on one of my 80's and since I do so with different classes and different perspectives. I'm hoping that readers will enjoy reading my take on different roles and focuses of fights, as well as tips and tricks that I find playing and researching the game.

As my wife will attest too I am not the greatest writer in the world, but hopefully writing this blog on a regular basis will help with that.

Anyway thats all for now I'm done creating this and now want to get some actual play time in. Till we meet again, good hunting.