Quick Rant on ICC Buff

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?

Been Hunting

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

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.

LFM Must be Geared

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

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

Bring back that epic feeling.

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

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

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

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!

I cursed myself...

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.

Mmm Tears

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.