Waiting on an Eclipse

I'm not locked out my Blog Anymore!

2012-01-13T21:37:00.001-08:00

That's pretty much it, maybe I'll make a real post someday.

Moving on

2011-09-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a death in my family so I was out of town all weekend and put no thought to what was going on with the game. Which I would have thought would help me make a decision that wasn't motivated by the frustration I was feeling last week. That failed, I am really more irritated than I was before

As I posted last week I am quitting wow. I will not be returning. My return back in January was based on a flawed premise, that I could come back and not do end game pve. That clearly doesn't work for me or I would keep playing. The pve does not need to be competitive like it was in Wrath, but it needs to exist and not be terrible.

Right now, I regret coming back at all. I spent money moving toons, time leveling them along with professions for nothing. I accomplished nothing. I didn't even get tier 11 cleared much less tier 12. I had some fun, but mostly wondered why we sucked when we used to be good. Then of course once we didn't suck we quit.

I doubt I will play an mmo again, I won't play one anytime soon. I'd like to work towards getting my bachelors. The kind of endgame pve that I would be interested in doesn't mesh with that, full time work and a family.

I'm not sure how to end this and not sound like a jerk, but when have I ever done that? I want say thanks to the guys I played with in case I don't get a chance to talk to you again. I hope nobody takes this as indictment of them or how they play. I should have known that it wasn't going to end well, that most of us have played this game too long. Good luck to you guys in stwor and try not to offend all the Star Wars nerds, they are more sensitive than regular nerds. That's all.

About the Reality of Quitting

2011-09-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'm back at the point I was in Wrath when I quit. I'm tired of doing nothing because people get bored and leave. There is talk about playing the new Star Wars mmo amongst the group. I just don't see it. It requires me to buy a new game and new operating system (no mac support). We are gong to end up on an east coast server raiding at 6:00 to 6:30 my time when 8:00 to 8:30 is what I really need. There is also the fact that we will at some point stop whatever progression we are at because people will get bored. Doesn't sound worth it to me. Maybe I'm just cranky, that's all.

About the possibility of Quitting

2011-09-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

To put it simply if there is no end game, no raiding, no rated battle grounds there is no reason to play. I haven't really blogged about the guild I am in, but I'm not nearly elite enough to get an invite to rated bgs. That doesn't bother me, they are pushing 2500 rating, I'm not that good. The bottom line is that I don't get to do them and druids that are not feral are pretty bad in arena. So pvp is dead for me at this point.

Despite the facr we are progressing we are when we raid we rarely do. We one or two shot (l2tank Beth Rob) three bosses in 90 minutes and quit because someone has to go. Then we don't raid again for a couple weeks. That isn't enough for me to justify the $14.99. Anything I do with alts is based around making life easier for me on my druid, if there is no endgame there is no point to leveling my alts.

Speaking of leveling alts must one dps in a low level random think he should pull? As long I have played I really don't have patience for people who are don't have a clue. Pulling mobs on your own as dps is stupid, I left my last three randoms after some moron starts pull stuff. In one a druid would take a pull off then go bear and pull his own set of mobs, on another a druid went pulled a pack while the tank was pulling one, I left both so I'm not sure how that went. Then there was the Mara with a prot paladin and resto shaman who were both dps. I have a headache.

Back to the topic, if we can't recruit and the 14 of us can't raid twice a week I'm done. Rated bg's will not happen, that's all.

10/2/11

2011-09-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

This is when my subscription runs out, I'll need something more to do than level alts and get pummeled in 2's to play beyond that. More later, that's all.

My Journey to my Burning Treant (Long Edition)

2011-08-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

The tier 12 two piece set bonus for balance druids summons a burning treant, which is everyone's dream come true. So naturally when I saw that it was within reach this week I did something I had yet to do the this expansion. Queue up for a random (alone), these have been out of style amongst those I raid with for a week or two.

I decided that regular randoms would be the way to go as I need dream shards and they would be easier to pug. I queued up for both damage and healing and to my surprise I was in Grim Batol as dps in about three minutes. It was going really quick and easy, I looked at the dps meters and was doing 20k to 30k on trash pulls while the other guys were doing 5k. I just figured they sucked and this was easy. Later I realized that I queued for a regular and not a heroic, which explained why it was so easy and the dps was lower.

Fresh off that success I did two heroics as a healer. I hadn't done a non-troll heroic since April and it was noticeably easier to heal. I did a couple of the Uldum ones, I don't remember what they are called. The first one went smooth other than the tank for getting to participate in one of the boss fights, we killed him anyway. The second has a couple of folks who like to afk and a tank who didn't notice, then he got mad and left. His replacement was adequate and we cleared the place fine.

I did two more heroics in the morning and which kinda of run together for me. I healed people, we won. Then in the afternoon I saw that I could get Satchel of Exotic Mysteries for healing a troll heroic. Things became a struggle here, the shadow priest in the group was pretty bad, and the overall dps was a bit low. We still made it through with only a couple of wipes.

At this point I only needed to one more for my gloves and set bonus. I really didn't feel like doing another one, I shouldn't have. I queued once more and got Stonecore, which I hate. The tank immediately left, to be replaced a minute later with a guy in mostly greens. After a couple of trash pulls I could tell where it was going and shut down WOW to go watch TV for a half hour or so. When I returned I was still in Stonecore and the game told me I need to leave the instance or I would get saved to a cleared one. I chose poorly (not to be saved) and requeued. I got the same group which had wiped their way through some trash with the same awful tank, I immediately dropped group and killed 15 more minutes.

I knew I should call it a night, but I had to queue again. I got an in progress Blackrock Caverns. The group seemed fine and we pulled to the next boss. I don't know the name of the boss I just know you need to move in and out of beams or adds turn into big scary guys. First attempt I failed to move in time as did one other person and we wiped. Second attempt I forgot to move out the second time and my add got scary. The tank never taunted him (don't know if can) I survived quite a while with thing on me but not long enough for us to get a kill. That was the end for me.

So Sunday night I logged on just before 11:00pm server time to give random heroic another try. Just after I queued I got whisper for the gm asking if I could heal Ragnaros, I said yes. This is the only fight in Firelands I haven't done any studying on and had know idea what happened in the fight. I jumped in vent and the fight was explained to me pretty quickly. I guess raid time was supposed to already be over or supposed to be ending any minute. In phase one it was my job to make sure the group was topped off for fire traps, which would kill people if I didn't. Phase two I need to stand in the green marker he put on the ground and move with the group when told. We would move to a point together and there was massive aoe damage to the group, then move back to our spots. Phase three had giant balls (for real) which would fixate on people and had to be kited and it with a dps spell before they hit you, if done wrong you would wipe the group.

The first attempt I burned through my mana pretty quickly as I wasn't in position and paranoid about letting people die. The other two healers stayed on the tanks and healed themselves. In phase two I moved to the wrong spot at one point, I tried to move to where I belonged which meant a quick run through fire, not a good idea. If I had understood the fight better, I would have waited five seconds and gone back to my spot alive. I got battlerezzed and got my mana back. We wiped in what appeared to be the transition from phase two to three. Which was the fault of the dps and not me, which was good for me.

The second attempt went more smoothly for me. By the end of phase one figured out how to best get my people topped off and still have mana left. Phase two I didn't get lost, or intentionally walk into fire. Phase 3 started and the giant ball fixated on my pretty quickly. No travel form allowed so ran until it got close and moonfired which sent it backwards. Now if I or anyone else sent one back towards people they would die. When the boss was at 13% (you only take him to 10%) two balls came at me and killed me. I don't know if they got knocked back at me or just both hated me, the important thing was the boss ran away and left loot. I also didn't pop heroism on accident at any point in the fight, just throwing that out there.

I don't know they how they do their loot but I wasn't going to roll on anything. They didn't use master loot one person rolled need on the tier 12 helm and someone greed an a nice caster weapon. Right after the I headed back to Stormwind and picked up my Obsidian Arborweave Gloves and my friend, who doesn't proc nearly enough. That's all.

Raiding Post!

2011-08-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

I never got to my what's wrong post as you may have noticed. Vacation and problems being solved eliminated the need. I think we are finally hitting our groove. I don't think we'll ever regain what we had in Wrath. That would require tanks to know about new fights before we try them, everyone making some kind of effort to cap their vp, and fire would need to be nerfed, among other things. Raiding twice a week would also help the cause. That's it, no more posts about fixing our raiding issues. We have been doing fine and I'm tired of posting about it. That's all.

More Research is Needed

2011-07-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

Well, last night went poorly. Time for me to figure out what has gone wrong. I'll keep you posted. That's all. I have been busy and am heading out of town, it's gonna be a while.

A Quick Post

2011-07-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's been a week and a half since my last blog post and as I predicted it has resulted in us being more successful. Some may point to six people switching toons and or roles, they are most certainly wrong. It's all about being insulted. We still have some things to work on, namely gearing up some people.

We have killed Shannox twice and killed Beth something once. We seem to have learned how to not stand in traps and not be between Rageface and crystal prism traps. The only issuse we had with the spider boss was she was consuming one of the little spiders when she came down for phase 2. They were spawning right before she came down as she was getting one even when they really far from her (which was fixed). The first attempt we were able to kill them all we killed her. Our last failed attempt I did 1 million more damage than I did on our kill, thanks for nothing Blizzard, no one looks at failed attempts when you have a kill. That's all.

We are doing that tall guy with the legs you drive tonight. Don't think I'll won't put another mean post on here if we fail. I'll name names. That's all, for reals.

Time to be the bad guy again

2011-07-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

I thought these posts were behind me, it's been quite a while since I have raided with people who gem spell pen or people who put +resist gems in their prismatic slots. Bad news is I need to, good news is I really excel at them, so here we go. The following is a message to the raid team I am part of. It will be filled the various insults and offensive language I never use, until now. The entire blog post could really be summed up by this, Hey guys why don't we try raiding without our heads up our asses? That would be your head NOT up your ass. It will be easier to do your job and probably be easier to breathe.

You are all big boys and girls so you can handle this, in fact you will soon remember this blog post as the beginning of us not sucking anymore. Remember when we used to be good, remember when we cleared heroic content? We went from being first five on 10 man achievements on our server to wiping for hours on bosses that aren't very hard. How did this happen? I'll start this with me.

As you may remember I quit last summer. I didn't come back until the end of January, six weeks after Cata came out. My plan was to be an alternate raider, while the raid team went on as did in Wrath. I thought I could go along for the ride, do decent dps avoid fire and do encounters the group had on farm. It's obvious that hasn't happened.

I never really got into any kind of dps rhythm, I never felt comfortable on the boss fights. I swapped between healing and dpsing, I raided once a week and my dps was not good. Even once I geared got my dps was still not up to par. My dps rotation changed from Wrath and I was so worried about boss mechanics I was screwing it up pretty much anytime a boss did anything special. When it wasn't I was forgetting to use Starsurge and letting my dots fall off. In wrath I didn't have starsurge and dots were something to cast when your were moving because their damage was fairly pitiful.

During my little break I took last week I realized that I wasn't having fun playing the level I was at in pve or pvp. I did some research and decided I would watch videos on raid encounters. I figured that if I knew the mechanics before I started I would be more comfortable. It paid off in the raids I did this week, I wasn't as good I as want to be but I was able to keep dots on three targets provided they were in range and keep my rotation going better than I have been.

We are better than the results we are getting, way better. So are you guys fine with this? Is wiping on bosses for hours what you were hoping for? My guess is you know what isn't working for you and you know why aren't playing at the level you were in Wrath. I have no desire to be hardcore or really care if we are clearing heroic raids, but wiping all night on bosses that pugs kill is ridiculous. So, lets all at together remove our heads from our asses (you should probably wash your hair) and start killing bosses again. That's all.

4.2!!!

2011-06-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

As you may have heard patch 4.2 is coming out tomorrow, which means among many things that a new tier of raiding and new arena / rated bg seasons are coming. I will not be around for this, until the weekend anyway. Went of out town last weekend and will be helping at my church's vacation bible school all week. Anyway this seemed like a good time to make a blog post about my various adventures and complaints.

We came up one boss short in pve, Nefarion. The fight itself is easy in my opinion, as long as you don't mess something up. Miss an interrupt or face a boss the wrong way and your probably dead. Getting phase 3 down has been tough because we tend to find a way to wipe before we get there. Patch 4.2 will nerf this and every other non heroic raid fight by a lot so we should get this next time we try.

Arenas have been up pretty good. I have played a two specs and a few comps, it would have been nice to play Lock, Shaman, Druid since it was apparently awesome, but that didn't work out. We ended up with balance druid, frost mage and holy paladin. I thought we did alright considering I'm not that good and they weren't that well geared. I did feel like I improved as the season went on, hopefully next season I'll "get it". Of course the changes being made to balance druids will require me to change how I play, which is fine. I wasn't real attached to sunfire spam.

Rated battlegrounds were the most fun thing I have done so far this expansion. Reminds me of the bgs teams I would play with back in vanilla wow. I ended up going 14-5 with 888 rating and around 2300 mmr. My frustration is not being able to play more games. I'm not sure what you do to get guild invites to rated bgs. I appear to be doing it wrong most of the time. This is in fact my inspriration for cancelling my account for a week or so. One night of being on for three hours while rbgs were going on and never getting in pissed me off. The theory with me is when I don't play for a bit I remember that how many raid bosses I kill, the gear I wear and such doesn't mean anything in real life isn't that big deal.

It worked for raiding, in the past not getting Nef before the 4.2 nerf would have really pissed me off. I may have drawn some pictures to show how not fail. Having people still unable to figure out how to avoid tornadoes in phase one on Al' akir would have caused my head to explode. Now I don't think it's a big deal that we'll kill Nef post nerf. If we were going to do Al' akir again I probably would draw some showing how to avoid the tornado with wind burst though (for fun mostly, I tempted to do it anyway).

Also, leveling enchanting from 375 to 425 is stupid and not fun. Leveling leatherworking from 375 to 425 is really easy (assuming you can skin). I hate Shadowmoon Valley, how long it takes to get to Dalaran, and frost dks. I'll be back Friday night, when mods will hopefully be fixed and being passed over for rbgs for 3 hours will be like wiping on raid boss for three hours, not my favorite, but not a big deal. That's all.

Giant Post of Genius

2011-05-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

So I pretty much haven't posted at all since the server and faction switch. I have been playing catch up since I got back and that has eaten my blog time. The thing is I want three 80+ alts for professions and to change the professions on my druid. Not wanting to spend $220 for transfers I only moved the druid and transfered my hunter. Here is a vague review of what I have been up to.

Raiding once a week I have been able to gear up well and are now two bosses from clearing all raid content in this tier. I have also successfully avoided caring about how quickly I get valor points. My only complaint is the horrid drop rate of leather with int on it.

I am back in my familiar role of healing if needed dps otherwise. I feel like I have a handle on healing, now that I think about about I haven't researched anything beyond on how to spec. Maybe I am doing it wrong, it hasn't been wrong enough to give us trouble so it must not be that wrong.

When it comes to dps, I feel like I'm not the powerhouse of incredible fury and dominance I once was. I mean, I used to make rogues cry, and reroll. Now I hope to not get 5th out of 5 dps. My gear isn't an issue, it is as good or better than the other folks in the group. I know I still haven't totally adjusted to the changes that have been made. I still occasionally forget to use Starsurge and to refresh my dots when I should. Maybe my dps is about where it should be, research might help with finding that out.

The world of PVP has been okay I guess. Rated battlegrounds are what I hoped for, I just haven't been able to many of them. The ones I have done have put my MMR over 2k, which would be bad if I went with a trade chat pug. Arenas are arenas, I feel confident in my healing abilities, but my efforts have basically been for points and with different comps every week. Which is fine, I should be able to do a steady 3's team next season. Regular bgs are to the point where 3 or 4 of us can smash folks and we win most of the time, which is nice.

As I said before I am trying to get my alts and professions in order. I hit level 85 Friday night on my hunter, mainly so the guild could get the Classy Draenei achievement. Level 84 is fine for farming leather and ore. I have my shaman at 44 and priest and 22, with all the heirlooms the hardest part leveling is keeping the professions. I went from level 15 to 21 on my priest doing three instances the other night.

My plan is to have leather working and enchanting on my druid. There is no real benefit to having jewel crafting on a main character and alchemy benefits other than the epic trinket aren't that great. If your raid group has one making a cauldron and guild perks you just end with a four hour flask instead of a two or three hour one.

Our raid group currently only has one enchanter and one another person has it on his alt tank. That has made for many vendored boss drops. Having leather working would enable to get those deelys for crafting instead of passing on them and I would be able me to make gear for my hunter and shaman. Of course this not only costs time but gold and there is legendary staff calling my name that will require much gold if I am to get it. I am not sure of what getting the staff entails but I know lots of gold is part of it.

Maybe I'll blog more often, or less, or the same, or something else, that's all.

AH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-04-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Where does the epic leather with intellect on it drop? It's not anywhere I have ever been. How do you kill 30+ bosses and never see it? You go with me, that is how. Random loot is not fun.

Moving Day

2011-03-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

After Thursday night's raid and the death of two overly talkative dragons we found out it was moving time. I had received a note in the mail a few days earlier about moving servers and possibly switching back to Alliance. Which made sense since I was finally going to get my alts the way I wanted them for the first time since Burning Crusade. It also made sense as Altar of Storms is a crappy server, I knew we were leaving after I got the message.

I had to pack all my stuff and any mats I would want for new alts in one characters inventory. If anyone out there knows why the number of bank slots you can get has not increased in seven years please let me know. I'm sure there is a logical reason we can't get more bank tabs but bag sizes keep growing. Anyway, lots of stuff, one guy. I also decided to revive my level 76 hunter, which has been napping for years now. He has 350 skinning and mining and was $30.00 cheaper to transfer.

I ran out of things to say about this, which means this blog post is over. That's all.

Time to Move

2011-03-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

Worst Post Ever (this year)

2011-03-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, it has been a while since I have posted. You probably noticed, sorry to any of you who have been staring at your computer for weeks eagerly anticipating a post. I put a picture of a pony on here to make up for it. Anyway, I have done many exciting things in the last month I remember some of it.

PVE

1. Finished every Cata heroic and screwed up quite a bit while doing so.
2. Killed some raid bosses

PVP

1. Learned that balance druids are still bad in arenas.
2. Learned that 2 vs 2 with a healer is never ending
3. Got purple gear.
4. Got Isle of Conquest twice in a row queueing for a random bg

Alts

1. Turned Homerjay into Greenlakini
2. Leveled mining on Greenlakini
3. Accidently unlearned mining when unlearning blacksmithing on Greenlakini
4. Died a little inside
5. Leveled mining and jewelcrafting on Greenlakini
6. Leveled Greenlakini to 82, Deadlakini to 84, and Magelakini to 59.

NCAA Bracket

1. Fail

Make a decent blog post

1. More Fail.

My PVP Cataclysm Goals

2011-02-23T21:59:00.000-08:00

1. Battleground Achievements

It would be nice to at least get the achievements I did before the achievement system was put in. I'm not sure how I got exalted with in AV only winning 11 times. I'm not worried about the ones that require luck or killing 10 people at every base, just the ones that actually help the team win.

2. Rated Battlegrounds

I'm hoping the guild will be able to put together a group that is able to compete at high level. What that means I 'm not sure yet. The main objective is really just to be doing these on a weekly basis at some point.

3. Arenas

I'm not sure what my goal is here. If something works out that is fun that's great. If it doesn't, I'd at least like to get some points if rated bgs aren't going on.

There you have it, three goals. Those might be the worst goals ever. That's all.

Life at Level 85

2011-02-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

Well it has been nearly two weeks since I hit 85 and it has been interesting. My idea of being casual is working well. I have been able to log in and find something to do without getting frustrated. With the exception of the stupid long by queues if you are in group of four or more for bgs.

PVE has gone better than expected as far what I have got done. While the content is harder getting gear was easier. In my first week I did five heroics in four days, and none since. Bad timing and not reading guild chat has cost me there. I made it into a raid last Thursday and got a weapon. The couple of bosses we did seemed fairly easy as far as the mechanics go.

The guild has only one boss down other than Tol Barad boss. The guild as a whole is more casual than it was in Wrath, which is bad timing. We should have been casual for the easy expansion. I don't have much to say other than that on the state of the guilds raiding. I only went on one raid and I was more worried about my rotation and where my innervate button went than what other people were doing.

Healing is not all the same, which I do not appreciate. My attempts to be more casual do not mesh well with the healing changes. Wrath of the LIch King taught me that I should heal all the time and that mana was infinite. Cataclysm is pretty much the opposite, thanks for nothing. I mean, I think it's a change for the better, but after two years of spam spam spam, is hard to change.

PVP hasn't gone as well, I'm behind the gearing curve and moonkins are still at a disadvantage against most. I'm optimistic that once I get some gear and some experience with my new abilities as well the ones other classes have gained I'll be fine. It doesn't look like there is a ton of interest in rated bgs right now. I'm torn on whether to pursue getting on an arena team, other than the one with Blue's level 80 priest. I haven't decided if arenas are something I want to spend my time doing seriously, but playing some games would greatly improve my pvp gear.

As far as alts go I always wanted two. Due to the faction change I ended up with just my death knight for Wrath. I have started leveling my stupid mage, which is stupid because it is a blood elf male. I'm too cheap to for a faction change, and the thing was already level 41 so no turning back. So I figure that I'll keep alchemy and jewelcrafting on my druid and enchanting on my dk. My mage has herbalism and inscriptions, once he level 83 or so I'll switch from herbalism to mining on the dk and I will be happy.

Also thought I should point out that my journey to Heroic Grim Batol had five wipes (or six) all of them were my fault, which is record for me, I think. That's all.

Level 85 Ganks my Gold

2011-02-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

So now that I'm level 85 I'm not nearly is wealthy as I used to be. Not being prepared at all for a new expansion and having jewelcrafting without mining doesn't help either. Thanks to my sons fever I had a bit of extra time to play and level yesterday. After which I started doing research, which I used to love, which now is fairly boring to me. It is far less boring than flying to quartermasters and seeing what gear to buy and much nicer than guessing wrong on how to gem.

After much flying and buying I got my item level high enough that I'm allowed in heroics, which I haven't had time to try yet. Then there is this thing called reforging that is new and exciting. This guy switches some stats around for you and takes your money. So I asked the internet what stats I need and I was pretty far below the hit cap. I then reforged every piece of gear I could to add spirit (spirit = hit for properly specced moonkins) or hit and got within .29 of the hit cap.

I cut a good chunk of mastery with a little haste and crit, which I am already questioning. I was at the hit cap for heroics, so my dps for those just took a major hit. What I get in return is increased dps against raid bosses and some mana regen. I'm not real sure how useful that is going to be since I'm not a part of raid group. It'll be great if I can pug that new Wintergrasp like boss, whoever that is.

I suppose heroics and getting smashed in bgs is in my immediate future, with guildmates as much as possible. I just need some mod so I can watch my dots and I need to figure out this wild mushroom thing. I have abandoned the healing gig for now. I'm much better at dps than I am at healing and it's confusing not looking like a giant walking owl or tree while I play. It throws me off, that's all.

My PVE Cataclysm Goals

2011-02-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

I thought I should have some kind of goals for this expansion, I did for the last one and they kind of worked out. I'm going to list the goals I had for Wrath and see how they compare to my goals now.

1. Complete every 10 man raid.

This goal is the same as it was for Wrath.

~~2. Progress at a better than average pace.~~

This one is out. I hope the guild moves at this pace, but for me personally it doesn't matter. I want to complete the content anything beyond that is great but not important. I don't have the time or drive anymore to worry about it. Doing hardmodes and getting raid achievements is something I would like to do but is not something I'm worried about.

So I only had two PVE goals for Wrath I have a couple more for Cata.

2. Quest achievements

I'd like to pick these up, I can fly anywhere and with questing improvements this doesn't sound horrible or painful. I have always enjoyed the story behind wow and doing the quests is a great way to be a part of it.

3. Level alts

This is something I hurried through in Wrath. I leveled my rogue to 80 and discovered I didn't want to pvp with him and never used him again. The only reason I leveled my dk was to have an alt for professions without paying $30.00 to switch the rogue to horde. I have made a night elf druid and worgen mage on a pve server just for leveling. I'll eventually make a goblin on aos so I can see those starting zones. I have no endgame plans with any of these, I doubt any of them would make it to 85, though I would like to have a third level 85 for professions.

So you can see I have gone a little casual. I still want to raid, it's the most fun thing you can do in this game in my opinion. It's just the not only thing anymore, that's all.

My Ears! (Off topic)

2011-02-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

People should not be allowed to play country music anywhere really, but really not at work where I cannot avoid it. After 3 days of it I become hostile and start making poorly thought out blog posts. They could have played the same five songs over and over again, they all sound the same. I don't want to party at your barn, I don't want to kick off my shoes, I don't care that your heart has been broken by some girl and I hope you tractor falls on you and crushes you. Why don't you try something new like wearing pants that leave something to the imagination or a new hat or dropping the fake accent.

I don't know about you but I feel better, until tomorrow unless I find a way to make that music go away. Turning it off when no one is looking and taping my ears shut isn't working. Well, I need to make dinner, that's all.

Blog Post

2011-01-27T21:18:00.000-08:00

Well, in my last post I was going to do something better than what I did. I'm not sure what exactly that was, which means I'm off to a bad start here as well. That's okay, because I say it is, mostly.

So I have done a couple of instances, hearing that crowd control would now be in vogue and not knowing anything about these places I have gone healer. It's a little unnerving having no idea what bosses do and not having real raid frames.

My first instance was with Honorshammer the retired blogger. He is a hunter now, which means he isn't really Honorshammer anymore, which does not really need to be said but I did anyway. After much flying around, getting the deserter buff because we ended up getting a Wrath heroic first, and watching tv, we did Blackrock something. It seemed pretty easy, Honors was the only who died and it was his fault. I got some new gear, it's blue colored rather than purple.

Then I tried Throne of Tides, the first boss was dead already. So they killed the first boss and the healer vanished, not a situation I like in a place I don't know. The instance went by quick and without a hitch. I healed a lot and turned a very tall tree at one point. I'll have to read the tooltip to find out exactly what's going on with that.

So far leveling is pretty great, not feeling any pressure to level is nice. I'm about one third of the way through level 82 and just hit 81 on my dk. I'm pondering switching my rogue to horde for amusement and professions, they want $30, no wonder I leveled a dk rather than transfer him before. I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing at level 85. As long as I'm going it alone, I'll stick with healing and gear that way. Raiding isn't on my radar at all right now. Which is fine, there is plenty to keep me entertained at 85, for a bit anyway. I'm also looking forward to leveling in the redone zones. I'm tired of this post, that's all.

Remember everyone, there are no subliminal messages or hints being dropped here. All my messages superliminal, in case you forgot.

Look at me, I'm a noob!!!

2011-01-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm playing again and I don't what I am doing or what is going on. From what I can tell a big dragon broke some stuff and has a bad attitude. That's pretty much all I know. I don't know any of the raid bosses or raids, or dungeons for that matter.

With my release from financial purgatory I decided it was time to play again. I haven't kept up on the game much in the last six months. So I asked the internet how to spec went for it. I didn't bother with glyphs or reading what my new abilities do. I'm not a hardcore player anymore, well, maybe a little I did some glyphing last night. I still have open slots though, so I'm still kind of keeping it noob. I mean I couldn't figure out why I was a troll when I logged in, eventually I discovered I had put on a costume back in September, which is pretty much all I did with that month of playtime that hacker paid for.

I'm feeling a little scatterbrain on this post right now. If I had any alcohol around I'm sure it would help with that, but I don't. So I took my druid to Hyjal and got to level 81 and rogues kept killing me, beacuse I'm a noob. If I was good they wouldn't have killed me, but that's how it goes. My Deathknight was in a shipwreck in the ocean, but survived. I got a seahorse, I didn't give him a name yet. SpongeBob had a seahorse named Mystery. I wonder if the place I am shipwrecked is near Bikini Bottom. It wasn't on my map.

I had thought about blogging about my plans for this expansion and how playing now fits into my life different and how that changes things. That probably would have been a better post. I guess we'll never know. That's all.

Here's a movie of cows mooing to make up for my subpar blog post.

I am Back

2011-01-22T15:31:00.001-08:00

While I'm bored

2010-10-31T17:39:00.000-07:00

It's me your favorite person ever, making a blog post. A couple of weeks ago I erased my hard drive (not on purpose). So while I'm reinstalling wow I thought I would type stuff on this blog.

I finally feel like playing again, not enough to pay money to play though. If someone would hack my account and pay for a month for me I would use it Speaking of that someone hacked my account in September. I got all my stuff back except my one handed weapons for my death knight. I could have sent an e-mail and asked for those back as well, but from what I understand weapons vendors will be selling better gear than what drops in ICC. I played one night and got bored and never logged back in.

Installing wow off of 5 cds is not going quickly. So it looks like 4.0 has made it to live servers, moonkin druids look pretty fancy from what I have read. I hope they have it working right as they won't put in any significant fixes until 5.0. I was Ron Burgundy for Halloween and I looked great. I should find out that I won the costume contest we had on Friday at work tomorrow. I'd better, I had a fake moustache duct taped to my face for nine hours.

This installer is taking forever. I really was hoping it would be done by now, not that I would play or anything. I just prefer efficient installations, but who doesn't? At this point I'm trying to make this my longest blog post about nothing. I think I'm doing pretty well, but mentioning that means this post is running out of steam. I did just put in install disk five, that exciting. Well it was, the moment has passed.

If I had any vent info I might login , but I don't anymore. Which is okay since no one would be on there anyway. Well, I think this has gone on long enough, that's all.

Balance

2010-07-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly two weeks since I quit, I feel like I'm in detox. I logged in to give Blue lead of the 2's team we had and I didn't like it. I liked saying hello to the guys and making a few sarcastic comments in guild chat, but I wanted to get offline as soon as possible.

I really hope to make wow a game I play casually at some point. I have tried to scale back how much I play in the past with limited success. I was playing a lot less when I quit than I used to, it still took up 95% of my kidless, wifeless free time. I have shows I recorded a year ago on my dvr, I never had time to watch them because of wow.

Getting home five minutes before a raid and needing to make dinner for my kids is not a relaxing and enjoyable thing. I was driven to keep doing it because I wanted achievements and a drake. I find it odd that players seem to think that purple gear is progression. Epic gear is hardly epic, everyone has it, I really think a chimp could get a full set.

Anyway, I have put some thought into how I would return if I did. I have my doubts about returning to my guild. I do not see how I could possibly come back and not end up raiding seriously again. I like them, I like raiding, they will be raiding. I hate raids and such not working because I cannot or do not want to go.

I have Nintendo Wii and bought Super Mario Bros Wii a couple of months ago. I play it when I feel like it and when I don't, I don't. There is no push to play everyday for my two badges or daily battleground. I spent every night this last week volunteering at church. Mario was just fine with me not playing Monday through Thursday.

I would love to play wow the same way. Cataclysm looks pretty awesome for this. Going back to 31 talent points and having a level 10 character have the feel of the spec you choose is genius. I could see myself leveling different toons and doing the occasional random/raid on my druid. Perfect for passing the time on the weekend. If I could do that there would be some balance that has been lacking.

Can I resist being asked to join a raid or the urge to run a random everyday? I have real trouble not helping people if I can. I have got myself into plenty trouble helping someone when I should have logged an hour earlier. This post seems more disjointed than usual, I should take a writing class, or maybe some adderall. That's all.

I'm Gone

2010-07-08T18:31:00.000-07:00

I have been searching and searching for a reason for a bit now. I thought my new position at work would do it but my gm is too crafty for that. Thanks to Activision and Facebook I have it. I'm not going to get into it, that's covered just about everywhere you read about this game. I'm out.

I don't want to play anymore, I'm tired playing a video game on a schedule. I want to play when I feel like it, not be tied in to certain days or times. I don't want to play a game where a work meeting stops a raid for nine other people. I don't want to spend all my free time playing at the beginning of Catacylsm nor do I want to be way behind if I play at my desired pace.

I cannot play this game I want and fit in my life the way I want it to. I will be unhappy with how my character is progressing or be playing more than I want. There is no middle ground for me. I'm not ruling out a return at some point. I may be back to check out Cataclysm after a few months away, but it's time to for me to go.

I'll miss all my guild mates except a couple I don't like. I'd like to thank Boston for all the hard work he has put in Devolve and for putting up with me. I'd also like to thank Ferth who won't read this but I never would lasted in this game without him. I would also like to say to all of you who ninja looted things from me, bailed on Heroes Inc after you geared up, and to those of you thought anal jokes were funny in trade, that I hate you. That's all.

Adult ADD

2010-07-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

If I had the power to rename my guild that would be it. If you had been there for our attempts at Ruby Sanctum, I think you'd be on board. So you think I'm throwing my guild under the bus of failure, no silly rabbit, no.

It seems if there is more than two things to pay attention to it's going to be trouble. Every fight we have come up against that is high in coordination and paying attention we struggle with. DPS tests are easy, fights that require tons of healing are no problem, fights were people have to watch for debuffs or notice giant meteors over their heads are going to take a while.

I'm sure you're wondering what a pinnacle of perfection like myself is doing in such a guild. I fit in just fine. I am completely incapable of listening through an explanation of a new fight. Can't do it, after about thirty seconds my mind is elsewhere. I watched a kill video hoping it would compensate for that for rs, it didn't. From now on I'm going to try reading about the fight before doing it. I used to this for bc, but most of wotlk has been so easy that I got out of the habit.

Next I have these people I call children. They love asking me questions while I'm raiding. The very first time I got a debuff you need to run from the group with my six year old son asked me if I could clean my dishes from dinner. I turned to him and let him know his request was ill timed and otherwise unwelcome. I then put a giant ring of death on our group and we died.

I have a solution, it's called adderall. This will help everyone calm down and pay attention. Our guild leader being in Canada should have no problem getting enough for all of us in the states. Soon we'll be killing every raid boss in sight, even those where we can't just stare at our raid frames or mash our buttons faster for max dps. That's all, and you like it.

Time for a Change

2010-06-27T19:26:00.000-07:00

I have been silent for a while, mostly due to lack of things going on. Raids still happen about as often as they are canceled, the 5's team I'm on can't seem to get our paladin to log on once a week for games. Which is all that is holding us back from picking a 1800+ rating. When things are this slow I'm just not inspired to write anything.

In real life things are going on. I have got a new position at work, which requires major training. It will have a pay raise (needed badly) and overtime for the taking (needed badly). This should be the official death of my 6:00pm local time raiding career, not to say I'll never make a raid but the days are numbered.

So I need Boston to convince everyone to raid at 8 pst (11 server). Come on guys I have done two expansions raiding at a time that is rough on me. It's time rest of you stepped up raided at an ideal time for me. I'll either find a new guild, quit the game, or I may stick around in Devolve and quit raiding. Plenty of people play late and there are going to be rated bgs and arenas to be played. They only thing I know for sure is come Cataclysm I can't raid at 6:00pm (or 6:30), that's all.

Random Thoughts

2010-06-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

I feel like I should post something, it's been a while. I'm not really inspired at the moment, so I thought I'd just post random thoughts.

1. When I out dps rogues they quit raiding

2. I don't like 2's, I need a healer and another dps, with me that's more than 2 people

3. I'm still bored by battlegrounds

4. It's hot outside and will be until October

5. Crappy tanks will lose aggro to healers dps in randoms and blame the healer.

6. Pvp offset gear dropping in voa is stupid

7. I like sandwiches

8. I'm not very good at feral dps

9. Everyone loves paladins

10. I need a sandwich

Ruby Sanctum 10 man Loot

2010-05-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

It looks like the loot table for Ruby Sanctum is set. There may be some changes and there should be. From my perspective it's a pretty big failure. You can see said failure at http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/cataclysm-screenshots-blue-posts/. As we know Blizzard is going to making loot the same for 10 and 25 mans in Cataclysm. It looks like who ever designed the loot table here hates that idea and wants to piss off ten man raiders one more time.

It was obvious that the loot tables for ICC 10 and 25 were designed thinking people would be running both. They left some holes in the ten man loot table and Ruby Sanctum seems like the perfect place to fill in some of the gaps. As far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason why the put the gear in that they did.

Five out of the eleven pieces have higher ilevel equivalents that can be crafted or purchased with badges. Just under half the loot table worse than what's currently available? People are paid for this, they get money to design this loot. I realize that a certain spec may get more benefit from one of these pieces than the 264 pieces but that isn't an excuse.

I now know I will be using a healing trinket the rest of this expansion. With zero viable trinkets available for the last two tiers through badges and zero viable trinkets available in TOC 10 and now Ruby Sanctum, I'm out of options. There is one good trinket in ICC 10 and you can't equip both the heroic and non heroic versions, ensuring you will have one crappy trinket if you don't run 25 man content. Of course as rare as trinket drops are 25 man raiders have two trinkets available in ICC 25 and now one in Ruby Sanctum, nice work.

Here's my list of what's missing in ICC. I'm sure my fellow ten man raiders out there can make even better lists if you thought about it.

1. No caster offhand without hit
2. No cloak, neck or ring with haste and spirit
3. No one hand caster weapons (equipable by me) without mp5 (other than LK) but two with it
4. No leather caster bracers or helm with haste
5. No cloak with haste and crit

None of these things drop in Ruby Sanctum, not one. They'd have to make a pretty big loot table to address everything they decided ten man raiders didn't need in ICC but it's pretty clear no effort was made to do so. As hard as it is to get a raid together these days one kill on regular and one on heroic is all I'll need of that place. That's all.

Still Fighting it

2010-05-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

You can count me into the burnt out club. I will not pay membership fee and won't allow hazing so you forget about it. We went from good to mediocre with our first kill of the Lich King. People have quit, some people have cut their raiding in half. Logging on twice a week to raid is burden they simply cannot handle. We are taking the very long approach to finishing Heroic ICC and I don't see it working.

It isn't something our guild leader can control. He can't make people care or want to play. It appears raiding whenever folks are in the mood and dragging this out forever is way more fun than just sucking it up and finishing it. We had our last raid canceled which could be seen as motivation for a rage post. That isn't a rage post.

The only thing I can control here is me. That and the thoughts of people who read this blog, you will somehow assist me in clearing heroic ICC, you will. . . Anyway I have to decide how much it means to me to do this stuff. I am only playing at this point to finish icc and ulduar hard modes. I'm not sure if that is going to happen or not at this point.

The first solution is to pay one of the top 25 man guilds to take me on a heroic icc 10 clear. I have 20,000 gold which should probably get the job done, I don't care if I get any gear. It's not like my gear isn't good enough for leveling. I don't want to spend the gold or get it that way, but I'm wouldn't be carried I can heal or dps those fights.

Second is something I can't control, it would be to find people in the guild or out if needed to finish. People who will sign up and play if they can. Not hoping that people who are tired of playing feel like coming. If these people aren't having fun playing and aren't motivated to finish then find people who are. I know that sounds mean to some of you out there, but I'm mean, right? I'm not saying doing this would be easy and without new and exciting problems. Just experiencing new folks learning Sindi and the Lich King was plenty of evidence for me. Honestly, we may not even be able to find enough people to do this if we tried.

With the ever growing buff in there it shouldn't be very hard for a geared group to handle this. Aside from learning the fights which hopefully would be minimal. A side note I find I hate the buff. Who cares what I do with my gems and enchants if my dps is being buffed 15%? The number I see when I dps is over inflated and means nothing really. It has sucked the fun out of min/maxing (whatever fun that was) and trying to improve my play to see better dps.

So, say all that to say I'm not sure what I am going to do. I don't see any of my "solutions" happening. I'll probably just log in for raids and hope I'm not missing out on something in real life to come home and not raid. I'll keep fighting the urge to give up as long is there is any hope. So this where I say our guild leader is doing a great job and I have no problem with him or anyone in the guild. I mean it by the way. This is just the way things are and I doubt anyone is loving it. We could get a full group and blast through some heroic content on Monday, or I could have a lot of time for Mario Brothers Wii. That's all.

Lich King Video

2010-05-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

This is the video from our second kill, had to split up the video (Youtube's fault). Full kill video without the cinematic. Songs are T.B.D White, Discussion Heropsychodreamer and Lakini's Juice, by Live.

My Offspec for Cataclysm

2010-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be a balance druid for Cataclysm. I put up with all the garbage they have slung my way for this long I'm not about to roll something else. I am however, open to a new offspec for my druid. We will have another druid in our group. Blueshield will be switching to Bluevine and he'll be tanking. I asked him what he was going to do with his offspec and he wasn't sure. Then again if every fight requires two tanks which they have in tier 10 than his offspec won't matter.

Option one is resto. With the gear changes they are making it will be even easier to keep a resto set. I still should have no competition on spell leather gear. I like healing, and I really like the direction the resto tree is heading. We have a lot a great spells but have been pigeon holed into two. When I get my chance to heal I'm looking forward to using more spells and handling something other than hotting the raid.

At the moment we have 3 folks who plan on healing for Cata. When we have had three other healers I haven't healed at all. As long as most content requires 2 healers your fourth healer isn't going to be healing much. Of course two of our three healers have switched mains more than once this expansion so who knows how long they'll be healing. The other is burned out on healing, he hasn't been showing up to all of our raids anymore. Whether I decide on resto as my offspec or not I'm going to be collecting the gear as I can. There is no chance that I'll not be needed to heal at some point.

Option 2 is feral dps. This one is the most interesting to me right now. I like the idea of switching from ranged to melee depending on the boss. This would provide a lot of flexibility for us. Nights where we are heavy in either ranged or melee I can help balance things out.

There are a lot of issues that could come up. Gear being the first, how would I roll on gear and what would I prioritize. Balance would be my main spec and spell leather would be mine. If I have a rogue and bear druid to roll on gear my feral set will be behind my balance one. I would be passing on all leather until two others have it and passing to even more when it comes jewelery. I'm not sure I'd be able to keep the gear competitive.

I also wouldn't want to get stuck as a cat all the time. Balance is my main spec and I wouldn't want to shelf it for weeks for whatever reason. Another downside of two dps specs is long random queues. I generally don't mind, but if I'm in a hurry I don't want to have to respec to get a faster queue.

Option 3 is feral tank. This really isn't an option, tanking really isn't my thing and requires more responsibility in raid setting than I can handle. I generally have a tv on and two children asking me questions while I raid. I just don't see having a pve spec that won't see the light of day other than randoms. I would just use it for instant random queues, which is easily done with a resto spec which I would have a lot more use for.

Option 4 is balance pvp. It would be nice if Blizzard let you have more than two specs. For an inflated price of course. Looks like they are planning on giving balance druids tools to compete rather that just an insane aoe spell every 60 seconds (hoping to have both). If I'm not needed to heal and can't keep up a freal set it would be nice to use my offspec for pvp. Not having to respec for arenas/pvp would be pretty nice.

Well, I'm starting to work on a feral set again, I had one but vendored it for bag space. I'm also going to brush up on my balance pvp. The better I am with a fairly gimp spec the better I'll be if the spec becomes good. That's all.

I did it My Way

2010-05-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

As I have been working on my Lakini's Past posts the biggest mystery for me in wow has come back to mind. I had forgotten about it through wotlk, it's not something I worry about anymore. The question is why do some many people fail at gemming/gearing/knowing how to play and still want to raid and think they need a raid spot? I have never been able to figure why people who have no time to enchant their gear or look on the internet on how to play their class would get emo when they didn't get raid/instance invites. It's because you are bad and people don't want to carry you. I'm not you tour guide to a raid, your supposed to contribute and being outdpsed by a bc moonkin means you are not pulling your weight (unless you were another hybrid of course).

To be fair (not that life is), Blizzard does a terrible job at helping noob players in game. There should be a tutorials, keybinds, macros and other such things in game as well links provided in game to websites on how to play. Most players have no idea about this stuff leveling, I know I didn't. You go along being terrible, making up some weird spec until some kind person helps you, or some jerk lets you know how bad you are doing. Dps meters should be part of the blizzard ui, how else is dps supposed to know how effective they are?

One type of player out there I love Mr. Sensitive. This guy makes the women from that horrible bachelor show look like they have together. This guy cries more than my three year old daughter. Anything that might construed as criticism is a personal attack. Giving this guy advice is like telling a pregnant women she's being over sensitive. They may leave your guild, it's more likely refuse to raid or even log in for a few days. This person needs time to deal with emotional trauma. If you can't handle someone asking you about your rotation or giving you a tip, get therapy. If that is too expensive for you then just get a first person shooter and turn on god mode. You won't have to be good nor will anyone try to help you.

Back in bc we had a rogue who was just bad. Of course a wonderful guy, but not good. He didn't want to do Kara anymore on his rogue because he had pvp gear, which was awful for pve. He was rolling with like 64 hit and didn't enchant most of his gear. Our guild leader spent a lot of time putting together a personal message to help him improve his dps. I played a rogue at the time so he sent me a copy to check it out before he sent it to him. It was a really good guide with good info. Soon after receiving it the guy quit the guild.

That is exactly what he should have done, someone taking the time to help you improve your toon when are far to lazy too is rude and selfish. Why should he pull his weight? That was my and a few other peoples job. No wait, the guy is jerk for thinking that he can suck all he wants, play however he wants and that other should invite him to raids whenever he felt like going. This guy managed to combine sucking, ignorance and being over sensitive. Sadly this isn't that uncommon.

My favorite has to be the guy has to the "I did it my way" player. This guys knows how to research his class and he knows he is doing it wrong. He knows how to spec, but following a guide and using a "cookie cutter" spec isn't fun. There is room in any spec of any class for your own flavor while using an optimal spec. That's different enough for this guy, he skips important talents in favor of ones that are useless. This guy is always near the bottom on dps, which why you bothered to check his spec. His dps is terrible for his level of gear, his goal isn't to be as good as he can be, it's to feel like he special for doing it "his way".

The great news for me is I don't raid with anyone who fits any these molds here. I'll see these guys in heroics but spending 20 minutes in really easy content with them isn't a big deal. Do not try to change these people, you are wasting your time. I still feel bad for my old buddy Ferth for all the time that guy put into trying help drama queens like these to be burned by most and have to carry the rest. That guy was too nice (not a problem I deal with). That's all.

Lakini's Past, Vanilla wow on Altar of Storms

2010-04-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

So back in May of 2006 five of us rerolled onto the newest pvp server at the time Altar of Storms. We switched servers so we could get decent bg queues. The only way to do this was go either pvp/alliance or pve/horde. We renamed the guild Heroes Inc, my idea, Corpse Campers was shot down. Ferth, Sameth, Nolio and I stuck with our previous classes and Sticker decided to make a mage.

I thought for a while about what I would do if I rerolled, figuring it might happen. I decided to roll a female rather than male on my druid. If you checked out my armory from my first Lakini's Past post you may have noticed the hot pants I was wearing. I went with gathering professions on my main (skinning/herbalism), to gather for while my alt was a alchemist and leatherworker. This way I would gather while playing my druid and mail what I gathered to my alt

It didn't take long to recruit some folks. Ferth's friend from some other game joined us, a druid named Origami. We also added a group friends, Ashur Lilura, Agamemgnome and Robella. We did a decent job of leveling together. We had some folks who leveled faster and some who leveled slower (much slower). I leveled my druid and my rogue at the same pace until 40 to pass the time. I leveled instancing and pvping.

My focus at this time was pvp, I knew nothing of raiding other than it required 40 people and that I wanted no part of that. I ran warsong gulch at level 18 until I was friendly for the sweet gear you could get. I followed that pattern in each bracket, grinding rep and honor as I leveled.

We did every instance at least once leveling up, except Shadowfang, because Ferth was our tank and didn't want to. It was pretty cool leveling this way and I think it's why I hate solo leveling. I enjoyed leveling as a group and not rushing to 60. When we had enough people to form two instance groups our jerk feral druid would try to get it so I would tank as balance so he could dps as feral. That's how those Canadians are though.

There was a pvp guild leveling at about the same pace we were called Focus. They were good and I enjoyed pvping with them. They split into two guilds the other being SlashSpit they ran bgs and I never lost with them. This was by far my favorite pvp experience in my 5 years if wow. We didn't just roll people we also played other very good teams once cross server bgs came out. I really hope rated bgs can bring this back

Once we all got past level 50, the Focus pvp conglomerate started to fall apart. I could start doing av so I used that to increase my wonderful pvp rank. We started to run our won full warsong groups, which we crushed everything in our sight. Most people hurried from level 50 up, we faced alot of level 50 to 52's easy kills. Around this time a druid named Baconstrip joined the guild, he left to help his friends with there guild. Soon after he returned and his friends Krawl, Jenet, Talonfist, Robzwench joined us. I remember what classes they played I don't feel like saying what they were.

As BC neared we had picked up our key to UBRS and we able to clear it. Our focus was trying to do ZG. It was tough recruiting enough people, we started seeing the folks who were with us long enough to get some gear to get into 40 man guilds. We were about ready to tackle ZG when one "special" person who was new to the guild had a meltdown in UBRS and got his 6 or 7 friends to quit. That was the end of any attempt to do ZG until after bc came out. I had been part of the raid when it started but had to bail because my baby got mad. I wasn't there when the drama went down, so I don't remember/know what happened,

In the last month or so before the expansion hit, a paladin named Honorshammer joined the guild. He wanted tank, I don't remember if that ever worked out for him. We also got a group of friends who joined around that time. A rogue named Sylvara, a hunter Pheona (or something like that) and a warrior Danath. A couple of kids Ferth knew joined near the end of vanilla Sevenn the paladin and Faceraser the mage.

We had some other folks join who stuck didn't really fit into my story, or I forgot about. Sucks for them, they could have been mentioned in a blog some people read. They blew it, that's all.

Second Class no More

2010-04-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has announced some major changes to raiding for Cataclysm and it's great news for ten man raiding. Details found at this link http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24401856405/cataclysm-raid-progression-refinements/

Ten man raiders aren't second class citizens any longer. Ten man raids aren't where 25 man guilds pick up extra emblems and feel special for crushing content they over gear. Details aren't set it in stone of course, but it appears people will be able to choose the size raid they want based on their preference alone.

Like I said it's great news for ten man strict raiders, which I'm not because pugging 25 man ICC is easy and has a separate raid lockout. Most 25 man raiders are screaming, kicking and crying their way to shelter to avoid the falling sky aimed square at their crotches. This means 25 man raiding is dead, they won't be able to pick extra badges, and of course Blizzard can't possibly make 10 man and 25 man raiding content equal in difficulty. Then again, I don't know where I would be without the six extra frost badges I have picked in my 25 man ICC runs.

It would seem if anything that the QQ flood shows there is plenty of interest in 25 man raiding out there. That's hard to see through the tears though, maybe when they dry the kids will see it's going to be okay, that Blizzard will find a way to make sure people who undertake the challenge of adding 15 more people to a raid still feel like their special and better than people who don't. That's all.

Lakini's Guide to the Frostwing

2010-04-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

This has been a long time coming, luckily no one ~~in their right mind~~ is depending on my guides for anything other than sweet artwork. I have been pretty slow with this hoping I would do well enough on Dreamwalker to write a guide about it, well that isn't happening anytime soon so here it goes.

First is a big green dragon that has some ugly things shooting some kind of death rays at it. Success is healing the dragon to full health, it starts at 50%. There are waves of trash mobs who attempt to stop you from doing so. The dragon makes these portals that have green things that healers fly into, it gives you a stacking buff that last 30 seconds and increases your healing and mana regen. The goal is to get as high a stack you can before you are zoned back into the fight. Then you heal spam heal the dragon until she opens another portal and repeat.

Anything that happens in this fight that isn't taking portals and healing the boss in unknown to me. This is one of only two fights I have not dpsed in ICC and hopefully I never have to. Stårk and I go into the portals while Black stays out and heals the group. About the only thing I do real effectively in this fight is innervate Black, sweet, sweet focus macros.

Honestly I haven't figured out the best way to go about this fight. I generally use my standard spec and switch out my Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation for Glyph of Nourish. I put up one lifebloom, rejuv, regrowth and spam nourish. Since I always seem to fail at being near the front for the next set of portals I have plenty of running time to cast my instants. I use my nature' swiftnesss healing touch macro when available and swiftmend if I remember. With this method I do anywhere from 8 to 10k hps. Which is adequate but quite a bit less than 13 to 14k that Stårk does. It's barely better than what I do the Blood Queen. The thing is, the fight is easy. I don't need to be better for us to one shot it without breaking a sweat. I haven't really worked at figuring out a better way to do it.

Now for the pain of Sindragosa, it's pain alright. I am going to try my best to remember all the things that go in this fight. Sindragosa is big dead dragon that hates you and wants to kill you. Her voice is painful to listen to as well.

So phase 1, we tank the boss near the steps and try to convince Stårk to wait to put down his totems until after Honors has aggro. She has this thing where a healer and caster dps get this stacking debuff. Everytime you cast with it you get a stack and when it wears off you take damage. I only go to about 5 stacks before I sit there for 5 or 6 seconds wondering who thought this was a good idea. Speaking of good ideas 2 melee get a debuff that is fairly similar that stacks per attack. Sucks if you dual wield. There is also an aura that does raid wide damage and she will occasionally pull everyone to her and if you don't run away quick enough you get hit for enough to kill you unless you're a tank.

The hit/casting debuff is a horrible mechanic. It does make the fight more challenging which is good, but not attacking as dps is not nor ever will be fun. Since the game is supposed to be fun, this fails. As a healer not healing for 5 seconds adds a challenge but isn't that bad. Healing isn't about keeping up a rotation and try to max you hps. It is about keeping people alive, I have stopped healing for five seconds just because no one needs a heal. I have never stopped dpsing because the others have the dps covered. I have only dpsed this a handful of times and I never want to again. Having eclipse proc and then standing there forever isn't fun, jumping up and down and doing nothing sucks. Not that I would do that, I would cast hurricane as my last cast so I would still be doing some dps while waiting.

There are air phases where she takes off and puts to people in blocks of ice. She then shoots big frost bolts at the ground, you need to have the ice blocks between you and the frostbolt or you'll take around 20k damage. She shoots four then lands again, you need to dps the ice blocks down to get the people out of them. If you get them out too soon that is bad.

When she targets someone for an ice block they have about five seconds to find a good spot. When she takes off into the air we gather on the stairs and have the two people move to the bottom. This way there are never any frostbolts behind the group making it mush easier to los them. We repeat this fun until 35% when phase three starts.

Then the boss puts another stacking debuff on everyone which can be cleared getting los. She will now ice block people like the air phase, you need to dps them down and use it take remove the debuff. As long as you manage your 37 debuffs and don't get multiple people in ice blocks this phase isn't that tough. The enrage timer can be an issue but with 10% damage buff it shouldn't be.

So, that's my guide there, enjoy it. I'm sure my knowledge and vagueness will propel you and your raid group to new heights of excellence and success. For those of you waiting to see my visual guide my scanner is failing me and I don't feel like fixing it. That's all.

My Thoughts on the Druid Preview

2010-04-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Well, as you folks know I don't really concern myself with feral spec, two specs are enough for me to worry about. There will be no reposting of the changes either, I have no time for that. I do have to say I'm disappointed in the new base line talents, other than the mushroom one. Adding feral abilities baseline is a horrible idea in my opinion. Abilities I can only use in cat/bear form are generally not worth learning if you don't have a feral spec. Every druid has some use for cylcone (maybe not in pve), the only baseline balance spell added to the game in the first two expansions. There is zero use for lacerate or savage roar if you aren't feral specced, none. Seeing the druid preview and having 2 out of 3 new abilities be fairly useless for me is a pretty big letdown. It's part of being a hybrid though and not something special to druids.

So, you may have noticed there are quite a few resto druids who are crying about the changes, or lack changes. I love the idea of having tree form being a cooldown, I would actually shapeshift during the fight rather than just look like a tree. I get to use any of my spells without losing the passive buffs from tree form, sounds great to me. Any of you out there who say you would have rolled a different healer if there wasn't tree form please reroll. If you think what makes druid healing is looking like a tree please fail at another class, thanks. I'm not down on folks who like and want to keep tree form full time, nothing wrong with that. Just down on the "special kids" who think if you can't look like a tree then it isn't worth being druid.

The emo kids are also throwing a fit over the lack of new resto spells. We are getting dispel magic which is wonderful, being the only healer who can't dispel sucks. Maybe if they gave it a fancy name and hadn't announced that all healers would gaining the ability the children out there would have been happier. The not getting a new spell crying is mainly driven by just wanting a something new. I don't need any new abilities other than dispel. Resto druids have everything they need in my experience, there is no healing job I don't have the tools handle. They are also going to be making some changes to some spells as well, which should be interesting. I'm hoping they mix things up enough with all the healers so I have more variety healing. 95% of my healing is done with two spells, I'd like to mix it up a bit.

The balance changes that have been released are on my wait and see list. The eclipse change is something I need to see in action before I'm going to form an opinion on it. They are scraping the current implementation and it looks as if they are getting rid of what people (I) hate about it, so that's good. Magic mushroom should be fun, I'm going to need to see it in action and the different talents that go with it. Balance druids are finally going to get a silence, which would be glorious. It silences and drops a sun beam on the person and the silence sticks until they move out of it. Root then silence with a couple cyclones after may prove to be op in a team setting.

I do wish they were giving moonkin form the tree form treatment. I'd love a cooldown that shapeshifted me from caster form to an angry looking moonkin and buffed my damage. It would be nice to not lose my 846 passive bonuses when I want to heal. That is an issue that really needs to be addressed for pvp balance druids.

Well, that's it. I need to see some beta testing before I get to worried/excited about anything. I'm 99.9% sure I'm going to stick with the balance/resto druid forever in pve. If balance looks like it is going to on par with the other dps casters I'll pvp with it. I'm going to level a mage and if balance isn't cutting that will be the way I go with pvp. That's all.

Half Way Home

2010-04-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

Well, you have probably noticed that Devolve has downed the Lich King. The first time we successfully transitioned from phase 2 to phase 3 was the only time that was necessary. Phase 3 is cake compared to phase 2 and the transition after. I got to enter frostmourne where I healed an npc who will not be named for those who haven't done the fight. It was pretty cool, would have been better if war stomp hadn't been on cooldown. First time that has been a problem in pve for me. That won't make mush sense if you haven't done the fight. I'll explain it some other time (pro blogging right there).

More than anything I'm relieved. The first ten bosses are fun (except Marrowgar, he sucks), then comes the brick wall of sadness that is Sindragosa and the Lick King. I'm not really talking about difficulty, learning the fights is not fun. Sindragosa just plain isn't fun, I'm not going to get into details, I'm getting ready to finish my guide, but no fun here. No part of the fight is enjoyable and it takes forever to get to the difficult part. Then if something does go wrong it's a wipe, well it was before the 10% buff in there. The Lich King is actually a fun fight, but if you take as many attempts as we did to get him down, the horror that is phase 1 will get to you. By horror I mean incredible boredom, if weren't for that disease that I have to run to a tank with I would be tabbed out for first three minutes of the fight. I only heal that phase to help me stay awake, I really don't need to.

Well, this is getting whiny. Like I said we are half way home and it's time to see who is going to disappear. It will also be fun to see what if any changes will be made to our group to push heroic. I'm pretty excited about it trying heroic mode, it's been almost two months on the last two bosses. I can't wait to see what kind of pain the other bosses unleash on heroic and to finish up the last three achievements we need for the meta.

We are only doing one night of ICC this week, to give people a break I suppose. I don't need a break from ICC, just from the Lich King. We are going to be doing Ulduar to finish some achievements this week. We haven't tried Mimiron hard mode in a long time. We were probably just about right geared for it then, we way over gear it now. I will probably cancel my account if we wipe, or at least yell at people on vent. That's all.

Lakini the Kingslayer

2010-04-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

I'm rerolling for Cataclysm

2010-04-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

It's a simple as that. I'm sure most of you have read that tree of life form is going to be a cooldown and not a permanant. There is a huge and very rational uproar on the wow forums. When I'm healing I will not always be a tree? No way!!!!!

Are you serious, I mean, if I'm not going to look like a treant how am I supposed to heal. I'm not healing in caster form, that's stupid. I mean, I won' t have leaves, what the hell? No leaves, no branches, no trunk. Clearly resto druids will no longer be desired in raids or any content for that matter. What use is a healer that doesn't look like a plant?

What's gonna happen to that big necklace, I was gonna paint that thing purple at some point. NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't believe the druid I rolled nearly 5 years ago in anticipation of healing as a tree once the first expansion hit is being screwed over like this. This is the greatest injustice in the history mankind. Why must I suffer like this?

Resto druids were perfect and now they are going to be rotting piles of garbage wrapped in dirty diapers that cats died on. I mean all the spells, the mobillity, being able dispel magic, who cares about that? It's not like that crap matters. It's all about looking like a treant and not caster.

I'm going to roll a shaman who also isn't a tree and heals in a regular caster form. Since Shaman have never had tree form it doesn't matter that it will pretty much the same as if just used my druid. I mean if I can't be a tree druid I'll be a different healer that isn't a tree. Anyone who isn't mentally challenged can see the logic here. It's not stupid to reroll to a different class because of a cosmetic change that will have me looking the same as the new character I choose.

On a less pretend rant note I realize the change is more than cosmetic but threatening to reroll over the change before seeing how it works is beyond stupid. I'm sure the well thought posts out there are by the same folks who hated the idea of tree form and hated how it looked when it was introduced. I'll get around to putting my thoughts about the druid changes on here later. Can't wait for that can you? Oh and the sky is falling, THAT IS ALL!!!!!!

Novel

2010-04-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

I know that at some point I need to bust out a sweet Frostwing Halls guide among other planned posts, but it is story time. Grab some popcorn, or cookies, maybe some gold fish crackers and get ready for a poorly written, details forgotten and rushed because I don't have the patience to include everything story. After reading this you'll see why I rarely do this.

One night after our ICC raid had concluded (early because of me) I decided it was time for a random heroic. I pleased to see that I got Heroic Halls of Reflection with not one other players gearscore over 4400. I normally pay no attention to gs for heroics because they are easy and I am overgreaed enough to make it work no matter how bad they are. Unless it is heroic hos, I have had better geared groups fail, and didn't give the guys a chance. Which I should have, bailing before we even tried was a bit lame on my part.

So to kill time I logged onto my dk to do a random while my deserter thing went away. Despite my noobness at tanking I can handle any nonicc heroic. I got Halls of Stone which is long and stupid, but that's what I get for bailing on the other guys right? The healer was decently geared while the rest of us were a little noob that way. The dps was pretty bad, I was second damage rocking my 1700 dps. Didn't matter no wipes no issues until we finished the ever exciting part with Brann. We had already done the rock boss but could still skip Maiden. Four of us wanted to kill her the healer didn't, now to be fair clearing to the boss and killing her even with our bad group took about five minutes.

Just before I pulled the first group on the way to Maiden one of the dps asked if we were going to kill the other boss. The healer said we weren't and that I was going the wrong way. This didn't sit well with me, he wasn't in charge, and he wasn't going to tell me and the rest of the group what bosses we were going to do. I kept pulling to the boss I got a whisper asking me if I was reading party chat which I wasn't. I didn't care where he wanted to go. He stopped healing on the last pull at some point but none of us died. He then started typing some nonsense and said he wasn't going to heal me. He left the group before I could start a vote to kick him.

We got a new healer in about 10 seconds and took another 5 minutes to finish the instance. What I hadn't noticed was that the healer was from my server which meant he could write me long messages that I could ignore. I did respond with a "You mad buddy?" he was too busy working his tenth grade english skills on me to notice.

Now I'm not going to reveal the identity of the child in question. That night I still thought there might be chance that he was an adult and if he was I would mess with him, I don't pick on kids. He kept typing me messages about how important I thought I was and about how my gs was low. I sent him a tell letting him that I was going to log and I was a crappy alt tank and if he wanted to keep going on he could write me a novel and mail it to me. I switched back to Lakini to do my daily and hopped on vent to tell my story to Boston (my guild leader for those of you who are new around here). He suggested I make a blog post a belittling the player in question and claim I was having an illicit affair with his mother in both trade chat and on our realm forums. At least that's my recollection, it was late and I forget things and make up stuff. After a problem free random I logged on my dk to check my mail there was nothing.

The next night I logged on my dk to check my mail again, I was really disappointed. I got message that removed all doubt the kid couldn't be old enough to drive. In his message titled novel, he asked to mail my main. Really bro? You couldn't figure out who my main is? I sent him response letting him know that the fact he couldn't figure out my main meant that whatever he had to say wasn't worth my time and to not bother mailing me anything else.

For those of you who didn't notice my death knights name is Deadlakini, my mains name is Lakini. In fact every alt I use has "Lakini" in the name. Get it? So what you would do to unravel the mystery of who my main is is to log onto the armory and search for Deadlakini. You would then click on the guild tab and near the top of the list is Lakini. If you are not a total and complete intellectual failure you would surmise that Lakini would be Deadlakini's main. Boy wonder, who's mail which was mostly about my bad gear is rocking a 5200 gs including a sword with hit and some crappy gems. Which is fine, unless you are calling me out about my gear and calling me bad. Dude has never killed any boss past Suarfang and his gs is over five behind mine in either my resto or balance gear.

Once again gs is a number and something I am not nor will I ever brag about. It was the tool idiot boy was using to tell me how he was better than me. He didn't even bother to armory me and try figure who my main was. He just assumed that he and his sweet gs plus achieves would just blow mine away. His gs is actually about the same as my dks dps gs will be when I get around to spending my emblems.

So let this be a lesson to you kids, before you get all condescending on someone make sure they are on their main. You could also try killing a boss outside the the first wing of ICC and using all epic gems. Once again, I'm not bragging about my gearscore and I never told the kiddo what is was. I didn't turn and rub it in his face, troll him in trade or on the realm forums. I haven't heard from him today and assuming he has figured out who my main is I doubt I ever will. That is all!!!!!

Gearscore

2010-03-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have seen my last idiotic complaint about gs without making a good old rage post. " GS = no life" really? I mean really? Nothing screams "I'm a 14 year old and my mommy doesn't let me play during the week because I'm failing at ninth grade english than spouting that stupidity. GS = mod, right?

For those of you who do not know what Gearscore is (what you are doing reading this if you don't I'm not sure) it is mod that assigns a "score" to your gear. People with the mod can mouseover you and see your score. There are other features that get more in depth that know one has ever used before so they aren't relevant to this post.

So this is how it works, some guy in trade is all LFM ICC 10 5.2 GS. I know that sometimes folks will request gearscores that are over the top, but that's not what this is about. Then some guy who doesn't have a gearscore high enough to get an invite posts something stupid in trade, and the beat goes on.

Getting a gearscore that will get you into icc 10 is possible to get without doing a raid. You can do enough random heroics to get the gear you need. Getting into toc 10 isn't very difficult either, same with voa 10. They also have these things called guilds, you could join one and get into randoms quicker and even do a guild raid (crazy I know). If you spend anytime playing this game with a level 80 you can get a good enough score. If you don't have enough time then what are doing trying a tier 10 raid? I have been trying to figure who would be the typical player out there who gs is ruining there ability to raid. I think I have it.

You are a dude in your early 20's about six foot, ripped abs huge arms you know, women want you, men want to be you. You have already become a millionare due to your incredible intellect and charm. You spend most of your time hanging with Snoop, P. Diddy and the like, with a supermodel on each arm. With all the parties at the playboy mansion and what not you don't have much time for wow. With the rest of life coming so easy you log into wow in between love making sessions wanting to a raid, thinking it will be no different.

You try and try but people won't take you because of your gearscore, they don't care that you can do 10k dps in your naxx gear. They assume because you haven't logged in six months and haven't enchanted half your gear that you won't be able to carry them. So you being witty, you point out how gs doesn't not equal skill in trade then log of to your choice of women to have sex with.

That's it right, it's not that your some stupid kid who plays a couple of days a week wants to be carried though end game right, can't be. It's that you can't stop women from ripping your clothes off so you can't play, not that you just want godmode on an mmo and want to raid when you feel like it.

If you are too lazy to put in some time to gear your character so you are geared enough to the content you want then too bad. It's too easy for someone to see that you aren't geared. Even if you are good enough to pull your weight in lesser gear. 95% of people can't and no one has an obligation to give you a chance or to carry you. You see the problem isn't a mod, it is you want to do whatever you want in game without getting the gear required.

I don't want any "I'm busy" whining. I work full time am married with two kids, volunteer one night a week and my alt I play only on weekends would be geared for ICC if had played more than once in the last three weeks. That last sentence was pretty long. If it isn't worth the time to gear your toon then it must not be that important. If you want to be entitled don't do it in trade please. Well, I feel better, you probably feel great as well. I mean this is a great post, it's certainly better than doing work or doing a boring random. That's all.

Anybody There?

2010-03-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post we now have a twink guild, which is for twinks. I'm sure some of you out there think that we are twinking to crush level 10's in Warsong. You are both wrong and foolish. With bg xp you will level unless you turn off expierence at which point you will only be in bgs with people that have it turned off as well. The only bracket that is playable in our battle group is the 30's, so I'm working to get Twinklakini to level 39 (currently level 21).

So if you log in on your main on a non raid night you are not likely to see many other people online. The chances that one or more of these people are wanting to do a random or voa, or the weekly raid is slightly above zero. Still need just under 400 frost emblems to get everything I want so I keep going. I do voa for the emblems, the only thing I have ever got was resto tier 8 a while back. I have lost the tier 7.5 balance chest to a resto druid and lost some pvp pants despite winning the roll (some raid leaders can't keep track of two different rolls). I have been healing randoms which is okay. I still run into the tank who wants pull the whole instance at once, or the tank leaves mid pull because an achievement didn't work out and such.

By the way if you want to do heroic achievements get a group in trade. Do not try to convince a bunch of strangers to waste their time. If you are too lazy to get a group together than you don't need the achievement. Of course this is about achievements that require extra time or effort. I managed to get Glory of the Hero without pugging any, you can do it too. Unless you are even more antisocial than I am or your guild mates refuse to help you (find a new guild).

Anyway, it seems like folks are fairly disinterested at this point. I know people still need emblems, which is why we reset instead of having a full week on Sindrigosa and the Lich King a few weeks ago. They don't want to do anything other than ICC to get them. Which is understandable because the other stuff is fairly boring (much more so solo). It will be interesting to see what happens when we down Arthas, will folks check out? The way they have set up doing heroic versions of fights should keep things interesting, being able to pick which fights you want to heroic and regular in one raid ID.

When it comes to time for the next expansion anyone who put much effort into raiding is going to be a "Kingslayer", for me it will rank slighty higher than "of the Shattered Sun" and "the Patient". I want to be the Bane of the Fallen King (title for killing the Lich King on heroic 10) with my Reins of the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher, I know I'm not the only one. I'm confident we'll will get it done, our guild leader always seems to be able figure these things out. That's all.

Real Quick

2010-03-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm taking a little break from blogging. I have stuff to write about but I'm busy and not motivated. So here's a quick update for you folks, which you no doubt have been dying for.

I picked up Vestments of Spruce and Fir, I knew it was the best resto chest piece available to ten man raiders but it is also better for dps than the 251 tier 10 balance chest. At least according to a blog I read written by someone who knows math and such. If math says it's better than I'll take it.

We are trying to kill the Lich King this week, ~~we have six hours of wiping planned~~ we should down him on Thursday. I finally changed out my dps ashen verdict ring the healing one, I'm also staying resto for everything I do until I'm asked to dps in a raid. I figure if I'm gonna be a tree when we down the Lich King I'd better off healing full time until the deed is done. I'm not switching my ring back until I'm dpsing progression again which would be heroic mode.

Let's see, we made a twink guild which is not called Tony Danza thanks to Ofn, we got Fluffy Bunny Feet instead. I would have gone with Wes Mantooth, but no one asked, that and I didn't think of it until today. I'm starting out as a mage for convenience but there is a good chance I'll go disc priest or paladin of some kind.

I can't think of anything else to say or complain about, maybe next time. That's all.

Lakini's Guide to Randoms

2010-03-12T20:51:00.000-08:00

This guide is mostly (pretty much all) for moonkins. In a perfect world, guildies would do a random with you and you would get those frost badges you want. Sadly most burned themselves out running them with alts everyday and don't need many more badges because they only fill one roll anyway. In a less perfect world I could queue as a healer with decent queue times and do a random with no trouble. Sadly in the world I'm in, most dps in randoms significantly under perform. Folks in full tier 9 can't do the dps I could the day I hit 80. I have given up on tanking on my dk due to having more than a couple of groups who didn't have the dps to kill bosses. Which is incredible considering how easy heroics are.

So Lakini must suck it up and wait ten or more minutes to do his random, longer if he afks out of Occulus. I have found that unless the tank or healer is beyond horrible that I can carry a group though just about any heroic. Damage has inflated so much that one player can do the dps an entire group would do when we first hit 80. Now it's time to find out Lakini's tips to maximizing your heroic dps. Most people would charge money for this, or at least shipping and handling, not me.

First you must not run out of mana. When you are drinking you are not dpsing and you have to be in the group longer. Hurricane is your go to spell for pretty much everything that isn't a boss and eats your mana. Innervate the first time you are at half mana and use on cooldown after. The other tricks I use may not be available to you, too bad. Being an alchemist I use my Endless Mana Potion on cooldown as long as I am out of combat. It has a minute cooldown and if you in combat it won't start until after it is over. I also use Sliver of Pure Ice on cooldown, any trinket with spell power with a regen proc or on use will help a bit.

As I said before hurricane is where it is at for clearing that stupid trash as fast as possible. While Gale Winds isn't that great for icc, (not good even) I keep it for randoms. 30% more damage on aoe trash is quite a bit. If Starfall isn't up for the pull moonfire one add then hurricane. If it crits it procs Nature's Grace which is a big buff to your aoe.

Lastly I'd say don't complain about the failures that may end up in your group, in party chat anyway, Also don't bother complaining about it on the damage dealing forums either. The people you are whining about will never read and on one cares. Anyway keep the peace, just do way more dps than the scrubs get your emblems and be done. That's all.

My New Best Friend

2010-03-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Here he is Akraashak. He buffs my dps, he buffs it a lot. The most I have ever done on Festergut was about 6k. Tonight I was at 9.9k before my first vomit thing and the second knocked me under 9k. Granted we were using the 5% damage buff, but that isn't a 3k dps difference. His pet warlock also gives me a buff that soft crit caps me. Guess I'll need to do a little regemming. So, I love Akraashak, he puts a smile on my face a song in my heart. You could probably learn a thing or two from him. That's all.

Lakini's Guide to the Plague Wing

2010-02-26T22:37:00.001-08:00

Well, another wing cleared another award winning (not really) guide from me. The plague wing has stupid trash that explodes and bosses that have weird voices. So, this guy Professor Putricide makes these big ugly guys and you need to kill them. I'm not sure what qualifies that guy to be a professor, I didn't notice any credentials in his lab.

First we will worry about Festergut, he is the easier of the two "things". He is pretty much a gear test, if you have the gear you have to try hard to fail here. This not a great fight for ranged, much like all the others so far. Unless you get to stand in melee range, then yes it is. He does some stuff which has our raid leader yell stuff like big aoe damage or big tank damage. If you are healing just heal the group more or the tank more when told to.

He puts these spor looking things on people and everyone needs to be close enough to it for some reason. The exact reason, is unknown to me, but I do know when Ofn gets it and runs away from the ranged rather than towards them we die. So you get to run and not dps when the spor is out. Also the boss picks a ranged person and makes them run around like an idiot and not dps or heal. You need to make sure you far enough away from the other ranged or it can hit more than one person. It doesn't pick a melee person as it would interrupt their dps rotation, we couldn't have that. So for pro dps the key is to convince your raid leader to put you in melee range, if that plan fails make sure toss out any dots while you have to move.

When we first started doing this fight I was the third healer so if you are new to the fight you may want to go with three. Last week we did it with two and we didn't have any issues, I think improved gear makes the difference.

Next is Rotface he involves coordination, so watch out. The important things for us ranged dps and healers is too be out of the way when he vomits and know where to run when you get volatile infection. Your dps can swing pretty heavily depending on how many times you get the infection. For instance a couple of weeks ago I got it zero times and did 7900 dps on the fight. Last week I got it twice and someone got me killed, 5300 dps. Pretty big difference. Anyway this fight is about kiting slimes and dispelling at the right time. I don't do those things, so this is pretty easy for me.

At first we tried three healing the fight but we didn't have enough dps to finish him off before the slimes finished us off at around 25%. Once we got the slime kitting and dispelling down we didn't need my healing and with the extra dps we easily burned him down.

Now the so-called Professor, he's a butthead. This is one of those fights as dps that you know that your personal best isn't coming. Tons of moving and target switches make sure of that. So one of your tanks ends up in some abomination suit I guess. He sucks up slime the old PP throws down. If you like making jokes about sucking this is a great time to do so. I don't, but to each his own.

This guy has three phases, phase one is pretty easy. He summons on green slime and an orange slime while making pools of slime. He does this until he is at 80% or maybe 75% no one knows for sure. By no one I mean me. We position him on the right side of the room and dps him then the stupid green slime then back to him. We are able to start to phase two before the stupid orange slime comes out.

To start phase two he stuns everyone and them drinks some stuff from his table. He becomes less attractive and starts throwing some other goo on the ground which is bad and should be avoided. He still summons the slimes. The green on picks a person who is he freezes in place, when he gets to him he does a knockback and it hurts people. The orange one picks a person to follow this person needs to run away, if the slime gets to them they blow up (which is fatal). So, all you need to is watch out for goo, slime and kill adds while dpsing the boss to 40%, which as you probably guessed means you are 5% away from phase three. The last part of the previous sentence was not intended to make sense.

So in phas ethree you say goodbye to slimes and your goo sucking abom, which means the goo will flood the room if you don't kill him fast enough. He also becomes even less attractive. Make sure you raid leader doesn't call for bloodlust right at the start when no one is in position to dps the boss. Not that that has ever happened before, just trying to prevent it from ever happening. PP also has some stupid things that kill everyone so you need to dps him down quickly.

Once he is at zero percent, you have phase four. During phase four you hear complaining about loot and celebration of the killing of the "professor". It's a great time to go afk if you are a druid like me, I don't want any of his loot.

So remember my caster friends, unless you gain dps by switching targets, moving and getting stunned on occasion your damage won't be as good as normal. Until you overgear the fight the best dps advice is to avoid the goo and death at all costs. If you are a shaman healer make sure to spam heal yourself oom, works for Stark. That's all.

A Visual Guide to the Plague Wing

2010-02-26T22:37:00.000-08:00

He are some of those pictures you have been dying for.

Here is how to set up on Festergut

Here is where to and not to run with the spore

Here is a picture of Rotface

Here is Professor Putricide

Here is a picture of when not use bloodlust at the start of phase three

Lakini's guide on gearing your balance/resto druid in ICC

2010-02-23T09:58:00.000-08:00

Raiding ICC as both resto and balance has been challenging on the gear front. I want to make sure that I can do great dps and be capable of filling any healing roll needed. I have made a balance and resto gear list. It isn't perfect or meant to be taken as the "Bible" on what gear to get, it's just my list. This is all available to you if you raid 10 man ICC long enough and can handle spending honor and or gold on gear for pve

List Balance

Helm Lasherweave Cover
Neck Soulcleave Pendant
Shoulders Lasherweave Mantle
Cloak Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky
Chest Lasherweave Vestment
Bracer Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers or Wrists of Septic Shock
Weapon Tel'thas, Dagger of the Blood King, Scourgelord's Baton
Idol Idol of the Lunar Eclipse
Gloves Lasherweave Gloves
Belt Belt of Petrified Ivy
Pants Lasherweave Trousers
Boots Boots of the Frozen Seed
Rings Ashen Band of Endless Destruction/Cerise Coiled Ring
Trinkets Muradin's Spyglass/Whatever you can outside of toc 10

The dps really is pretty self explaintory, you'll have 250 hit, use a +20 hit gem to reach the cap. Use ONLY 2 blue gems for the meta, stamina spell, or spirit spell, really doesn't matter which. Red slots use 23 spell power, yellow get 12 spell, 10 crit if the set bonus is worth it and like I said you'll need one hit gem.

Resto

Helm Thaumaturge's Crackling Cowl
Neck Soulcleave Pendant/Choker of Filthy Diamonds
Shoulders Shoulderpads of the Searing Kiss
Cloak Wrathful Gladiator's Cloak of Subjugation or Heartsick Mender's Cape
Chest Vestments of Spruce and Fir
Bracer Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers
Weapon Halion, Staff of Forgotten Love
Idol Idol of the Black Willow
Gloves Lasherweave Gauntlets
Belt Belt of Petrified Ivy
Pants Lasherweave Legplates
Boots Boots of the Frozen Seed or Blessed Cenarion Boots
Rings Ashen Band of Endless Destruction/Signet of Putrefaction
Trinkets Sliver of Pure Ice/Purified Lunar Dust

The resto set is a bit more complicated. I don't see the four piece set bonus which isn't very good as a reason to pick up poorly itemized gear. This set should take celestial focus out of your spec unless you have zero haste buffs in your group. Well, it should put you close enough with buffs that you can socket your way out of it. This is made with a dps first mind set as far the ring goes. If you are more attached to your healing ring, switch in Ether-Soaked Bracers into your dps set and find another spot for a 12 spell 10 hit gem.

I made a post earlier stating I was going to stop spending emblems on my balance gear to focus on my resto gear. I have discovered this is a pretty bad way to go about it. So IF you are counted on to dps on progression I think you should buy the balance gear first even if you are main spec resto. Maybe it's just the balance druid in me, and I'm biased. The set bonuses for balance are very good, the ones for resto are not. The itemization for balance tier 10 is pretty much perfect, two of the five resto pieces are very good the other three are not. I will never have 5/5 tier 10 resto, even if I was never going to dps again I wouldn't buy them.

Aside for them set bonus thing, gear for resto drops that is equivalent to tier gear, having that gear drop after buying resto tier 10 while rocking your 232 balance gear fails. I was going to pick up my tier 10 resto pants instead of my tier 10 balance helm, but decided there is no other way to get the helm. Tier pants drop from voa and there are the pants off of Saurfang that are just as good. Saurfang dropped the pants (not his pants) two weeks later.

What your "main" spec isn't relevant. If you are switching roles on progression bosses and your offspec gear/spec/gems enchants are fail you are doing a disservice to the other raiders. I know those lazy mages and rogues don't have to spend the gold to keep up different sets of gear, but that's why they sit when you have 11 or 12 raiders they are expendable, no offense.

I'm not going to give a specific order to spend badges on, there are too many variables that go into it. Just remember that tier gloves and pants drop in voa, you probably won't replace ilevel 264 badge gear. Spirit crit items are fail for resto, but decent for balance and Maghia's Misguided Quill is fail for everyone. So there you go, not much in the way of sarcasm and pictures, but that's how these things go. Maybe if I can find away to hide identities I'll grab random moonkins off the armory and mock and ridicule their gear choices, people love that. That's all.

Lakini's Past, Draka

2010-02-21T20:56:00.000-08:00

I thought it would bore people if I told them how I went from a noob who swam from Menethil Harbor to Westfall because I didn't know there was a tram to the pro I am today. I have played too long for this to fit in one post. Draka was the server that was "new" and normal (not pvp) when I got the game so that's where I started.

So my first character was a night elf male druid, Chadwickj. I created him December 24, 2005, a couple of months after patch 1.0.8 hit. I logged him in to update him on the armory. One look will show I still didn't know what I was doing. The weapon enchant was to level enchanting, alright. It will also show you I never made to 60 on him, much less 70 or 80.

I'm not one to read the instructions or anything like that so I logged in made my druid and went to questing. I didn't what endgame raiding was or anything like that. I played Warcraft 3 and loved the Malfurion, he was a caster druid. So naturally I assumed that druids in World of Warcraft would be similar, not so much. So I had a few problems, I was confused about finding his body after death and always spirit rezzed. I also couldn't figure out how to repair. By the time I hit level 10 I had those things figured out and could beat down the Hogger of Teldrassil, Oakenscowl.

I then went to Darkshore and continued to level and worked on the many druid quests you pick up. I didn't have trouble with them until it was time to get sea lion form. I read on some website that part of the quest was done in Darkshore the other Westfall, which I took as Winterspring. I tried two ways to get myself there, one I went through Ashenvale to Azshara and tried to swim there. When that failed I went through the tunnel from Moonglade which once I died dropped me in Felwood and I eventually spirit rezzed my way to Winterspring. This all pretty rough for a level 16.

I played the game solo until I was around level 24 when I saw in general chat in Darkshore that a group needed one more person for Blackfathom deep. I had a bunch of quests for it, one I tried to solo, it went badly. A gnome warrior named Ferth invited me to his group, there was a dwarf priest named Sameth, a druid named Reavlin and someone I forgot about a long time ago. The run took forever and I was up way longer than I should have been. The folks in the group were pretty nice, I beat that loot whore Reavlin for Rod of the Sleepwalker, noob feral.

I saw Ferth and Sameth around a couple of more times before he asked me to Gnomer. I had tried it earlier that day with bad results. He also asked if I was interested in joining his guild, I was level 35 or so and unguilded. I had never really had an intention of joining a guild. I still had no clue about endgame and didn't see a reason to be in one. I checked out their guild forum and it sounded good to me, so I joined.

It was Ferth, Sameth, Reavlin, Mareck and a couple of other paladins who left before I talked to them. The four of us tried to level together (not Mareck, he was level 46 or so), Reavlin failed to log in some weeks. We did every instance leveling up, Sameth was shadow and I was balance, we took turns healing and dpsing. Ferth and I also did our share of warsong. He would kill people and I run the flag, most of the time while everyone else turtled (failures).

Ferth was able to recruit a few more players, one day he recruited some guy named Nacho, later to be known as Sticker. His friend Nolio was soon aded to the guild. I think we added another hunter, and a warlock as well. The goal being to get enough people to run premade wsg.

Draka is the server where I learned how to make money on the ah. I remember selling Large Glimmering Shards for 20 gold, a crazy amount of money back then. I used these tricks later to become rich. I rarely quested, I just didn't like it. I would grind for stuff to sell and ran plenty of instances so leveled fast enough for me.

Right after I hit level 50 Ferth went to the realm forums to ask how long bg queue times were at 60. I knew when I saw he started the thread our time Draka was over. The answer was too long so we decided to reroll. By this time we had about ten members, Ferth, Sameth, Sticker, Nolio and I left, the others decided against it. Mareck had dissapeared much earlier, though he'd back as you'll find out.

At this point I was still pretty noob, I had never heard of macros (well for wow). I still had no idea how bad balance was. Those were fun times, things were simple and wow still seemed huge. That's all, well, not really, but for now it is.

Blood Queen Video

2010-02-18T23:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Neo for posting this

A Good Night to be a Moonkin

2010-02-18T21:10:00.000-08:00

Tuesday night we formed up our first wing clear. Our first raid night of the week is a quick hour of the first wing, voa and maybe the weekly raid. This is generally the night I get the stomach acids in high gear for boss looting time. I also have my look of disgust on and my sarcastic comments ready for action. No acid or disgusted looks on this night, still sarcastic comments, but the only time I don't use them is when I'm sleeping.

After we downed Marrowgar we saw our buddy Infiltrator Minchar. I had met him once before on my dk in an alt run. He gives you the quest Deprogramming. I wasn't real thrilled, from our first expierence is seemed somewhat difficult. It was my job to keep him rooted and away from the raid and alive. The idea of costing the raid 5 badges didn't sound appealing.

Good news, it's really easy. Assuming your raid knows how to not aoe near the guy and you have druid who knows how to use a focus entangling roots macro. My dps dropped 2k below normal, which is a good trade for five emblems. Deathwhisper finally dropped Boots of the Frozen Seed. I didn't know what to think, I was pretty used to being pissed after she died it was confusing.

Things quickly went back to normal on the gunship when Frost Giant's Cleaver dropped for 5 millionth time in a row. I have seen this axe drop more than I have seen dps caster trinkets drop this entire expansion. Oops, I'm not supposed to be complaining. We killed Saurfang and he dropped Leggings of Unrelenting Blood (which wowhead still hasn't heard of). I wasn't sure it was they were when they dropped, I hadn't seen the name of the pants before. Sadly it was still a bad night to be a warrior, maybe someday you'll get a weapon Blue, maybe. That's all.

Finally Skilled

2010-02-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

I'm sure many of you are confused by the title. I mean, I'm skilled as they come, right? Of course I am, what kind of stupid question is that? The really stupid kind, in case you are wondering. We finally killed that jerk Anub'arak on heroic. We had about 35 attempts left, so we got a fancy achievement.

I scored a staff that I wanted until a week or two ago. It is itemized better than other weapon combo I have, but is ilevel 245 and not 251. Once I get my tier 10 gloves I'll have the hit I need to use it if it ends up being better. I really wanted to upgrade my 232 balance gloves with a trophy, but I failed at rolling. I use them for both healing and dps so they would have lasted my quite a while. I still would have passed the them to Pinkshift who has tier 8 on still. I guess, I mean, maybe 2 piece tier 8 is better, or maybe no one told him he could do heroics to get emblems to buy tier 9. Got me there.

I'd like to go for the next achievement in there of clearing with 45 attempts left, but I won't hold my breath. I'm not sure why I would hold my breath, I'm not underwater. That saying sucks, unless you are pirate or something like that. Anyway, people seems to hate that place. I give about a 5% chance, the fact that wiping six times means we are done gives me my old shred of hope. Which will no doubt be used as toilet paper and flushed as soon this is read, but oh well.

This post is getting a little crazy right now, not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm typing crazy things or because of some other reason I don't know about. So remember kids, say no to drugs, yes to books and maybe to candy, depending on who is giving it to you, or if there are any syringes or cauliflower in it. That's all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lakini's Guide to the Crimson Hall

2010-02-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

Back by popular demand comes another perfect guide for ICC. We will learn how to ranged tank, heal or dps the blood council and how to heal on the Blood Queen. You will be able to take advantage of my incredible knowledge to help your group win like I do. I thought I would liven this up with pictures, which are part of separate post below this one. I'm fairly lazy with screen shots these days. Naxx was so easy I stopped taking them and never really got back in the habit. So I drew so some sweet pictures to show you how it's done.

First we have three blood princes, they all failed somewhere and now are here to be killed again. We run three tanks (one ranged) three healers (all ranged) and some other guys. You dps an empowered one while the other have one hit point but don't die (which is stupid). Each prince
has irritating abilities that cause trouble when they are empowered. This fight is about execution so if you aren't good at that you should probably give up now just roll another alt.

The best way to maximize dps in this fight is make sure you are not the one shooting the stupid yellow balls. By the way, there are stupid yellow balls that need to be dpsed in this fight. When you hit them they float up, if they hit the ground the knock everyone back and do some damage. Doing this kills you dps, so avoid this at all costs. Other than that try to keep movement to a minimum, your dps is going to lower than on a normal fight.

I have also had the pleasure of being the ranged tank. Moonkins make pretty bad ranged tanks for this fight. I have trouble keeping aggro when the dps switches to my target. The ranged tank has gather giant spheres (not balls) that spawn all over the room to be able to survive the damage. Each one lowers the damage you take and you need at least four when your prince is empowered. So when the dps would switch to my prince they had to pull back quite a bit to not get aggro. My advice here is to find a hunter or lock to this. They are better at it.

Healing this fight hasn't been real intense for me. The biggest challenge is managing my innervate and my mana restore trinket since Stårk is a noob and goes oom if I don't innervate him. I just make sure to use trinket on cooldown and innervate myself early then him once the cooldown is back up and I'm fine. Otherwise I'm just trying to see how much over healing I can pull off.

The Blood Queen is not very nice, she gives out a dps buff that I want while doing enough raid damage that I have to heal. The fight is fairly simple, but it isn't forgiving. If any of your dps can't pull 5k dps normally then don't bother. The enrage timer doesn't allow for such things.

There a few abilities us healers (and pretty much everyone else) must worry about. She has an unnamed ability puts some red things over your head that attach to someone else red things on their head. It does damage to both people and anyone else around. You have to run together to break it. You want to meet in the middle, if you run towards melee because you aren't watching where you are going someone might flip out. You don't want that. Hunters don't disengage, and rogues don't run the wrong direction, that is also bad.

She also has an air phase which is real fun. She fears and then flies in the air and throws crap (not literally) at people. As you may have guessed if people are near you it hurts a lot. There is this whole biting and mind control thing which I won't go over as it isn't something healers need to worry about. Unless Ofn comes to bite you during the air phase and you blow up. So run from him, he has sprint so you need to be ready.

Lastly make sure your hots are up, your innervate is ready for Stårk and that your warlock remembers that you NEED replenishment. He may forget if he is anything like ours. That's all.

A Visual Guide to the Crimson Hall

2010-02-09T21:53:00.000-08:00

The title is a lie for the most part.

This is a picture of the Blood Princes,
it has no real purpose other to show you
how badly I draw.

This shows you where to run when you have that stupid red thing.

This is me running from Ofn trying
to bite me during the air phase.

Change in Priorities

2010-02-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

As we have gotten further into ICC I have done less dpsing. Every fight we have to work on left I will be healing. Well, there is that fight where you heal the dragon. It looks as if we are going to try to 4 heal it. Our prot paladin whom you probably have heard of is dieing to heal that fight. If he successfully lobbies to be one of the three healers (if four doesn't work) for that fight I'm going to work on changing things around so I can dps the Blood Queen and Festergut. I won't do that with the three princes though, that isn't fun to dps.

Assuming that doesn't happen (which is pretty safe) resto is my real main spec. If I am only dpsing "farm" content the minimal dps loss from switching my ashen verdict ring and changing out a couple of gems won't matter. The big difference would be spending my frost badges on on my tier healing gear. My dps won't increasing like it would if I picked my four piece T10 but that isn't huge either. I mean, I'm very lucky with drops and I'm sure I'll pick gear from voa anyway.

So, I need Blessed Cenarion Boots. I almost have enough badges on my dk to buy two Primordial Saronite and have six thousand gold laying around to buy three more. Finding someone who can make it would be nice. The boots socketed would give me enough haste to drop Celestial Focus and use more traditional healing spec while still having 1 second global cooldowns.

As far as rolling on stuff goes, not sure what to do. The way I roll on healing gear works well enough for me. I pass anything that would be healing set only to our other healers and still get upgrades. Really I wonder if I should be rolling on dps stuff. Gear in my bags doesn't help us. At this point there aren't that many things I would roll the casters on anyway. Weapons off the Lich King are probably the only real quandary for me.

I know some of you are waiting for more guides from Lakini. These take time, I apologize for the wait. I'll try to make it worth it, that's all.

Random Loot Makes Puppies and Cows Cry

2010-02-03T21:46:00.001-08:00

I have kept the QQ to a minimum, but I have all I can stand and I can stand no more. The joy of random loot and by random I mean getting the same crap over and over again and never seeing other drops. Drops haven't been bad for me, I have got some very nice upgrades. However the are some pretty noticable trends in the loot we get.

First is spell leather, I am the only person in our group who wants this gear. Logically after clearing the first wing eight times you think that I would have all that I need and we would be sharding it some on occasion. Logic doesn't belong in random loot land. I have zero pieces of leather from the first wing. This isn't a new trend it is the trend. For this reason I have said no full time resto druids are welcome in our group. I don't want to have to roll when the spell leather drops every other month.

Second, there are two handed weapons with strength on them in ICC. Or so I have been told, I have never seen one drop in there. I don't want one, which is nice for me. The group has cleared the first wing 9 times not one has dropped. Isn't that "interesting" as Blizzard would call it.

I believe that these bosses have eight drops and I know they drop two per kill. Sadly for us these bosses seem to have about four drops on them and drop two of them per kill. If I didn't know better I would think the game is programed to drop stuff you don't want to make there are enough abyss crystal for everyone. Why else would spell plate drop all the time in ten mans? You'd think each group had 4 holy paladins the way the stuff drops. Spell cloth drops far less even though it is the only option for three classes.

While I'm complaining here a list of useless stupid trinkets in the game that make me wonder if the person itemizing this stuff is on crack. Hmm. . . on second thought I'll just say the frost badge trinket for dps casters hurts my brain it is so bad. Nothing says this game is too complicated for me and need "special help" than buying this trinket. If you are caster and you have toc 10 trinket vendor it now, they are aweful. If you need a trinket buy the emblem of heroism one, it is better. I'm not using an ilevel 200 trinket because I couldn't get one of those pieces of garbage to drop. Speaking of random loot both of our heroic faction champ kills dropped those things, nothing like blowing up 245 gear because it is worse than 200 gear.

Lastly, I hate weeds, the stupid things refuse to leave my yard alone. I know the rest of you are buried in snow but it is 75 degrees here (not complaining about that) and rain helped weeds take over. And another thing, whoever invented rope is a real a-hole. Good thing I don't have that smile chart anymore. That's all.

Lakini's Guide to ICC

2010-01-31T16:21:00.000-08:00

Well, it's really a guide for the first wing for dps casters. I stopped doing anything like this a while back, but I think this is really helpful.

For starters, make sure you don't have crappy gear. Max out your gear score at all costs. Gearscore is a mod that helps kids point out how they are better than you and one that makes undergeared players/moralists/moms mad. Download the mod which I won't link due to ~~laziness~~ time constraints and make sure it is up to date. You don't want one of thse stupid messages telling you "so and so has an updated version why don't you?". Like I said before max out that score, even if means equipping one of those aweful toc 10 caster trinkets. The fact that there are blue trinkets that are give you more dps, isn't as important as your gearscore being higher.

The first boss is a jerk and has a real long name that I won't type. He does all sorts of things that lower dps. First he puts fire on the ground if your group doesn't stack in melee range you will have to move to get out of it on occasion. Make sure to finish your cast before you move, healers are there to heal right? Then while moving out of the fire maybe throw up a dot or jump, or of you are pro like me do both. Second he likes to put people on bone spikes that other people have to dps. Don't switch, it lowers your dps, let someone else do it. Third he yells "Bonestorm!" and spins around like an idiot. If your healers didn't forget to raid the previous content I recommend just standing there an nuking, it doesn't hit that hard. Just make sure to stop right before he's done because the aggro wipe.

The next boss a good one, unless you are me looking for loot you want off her to drop. Stay on the boss the whole fight unless you are forced to do otherwise. There is no time to figure out which mob will spell reflect you to death. If death and decay is placed under you run right away or it will make you die. Also trying to find a good spot where you won't get los while your tank moves the boss around.

Next is the gunship which is easy and doesn't matter. The key is to aoe and not die.

The last boss is pretty great, except the are these blood beasts you have to kill. If you are a moonkin you are supposed to typhoon them which means less dps. Screw that, I mean who cares if you get hit a couple of times by those things. The problem you that you have with them hitting you is the boss get blood points, you don't want him to have those. We only had 9 players when we downed him this week and he only got like 69 blood points, you only have problems if he get 100. I could have done more slightly more dps if hadn't typooned.

Anyway, some of the stuff I said is good advice most isn't, that's all.

Two or Three?

2010-01-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

This is the question that faces our raid team, two or three nights of raiding a week. It wouldn't be much of a question if this didn't mean adding more people, it does. There is a lot of different ways to look at this but I'll look at it from the clearest perspective I have. How will it effect me, pros and cons.

Pro, we will be able to work on heroic toc and finishing Ulduar, which I very much want to do.

Con, the "new" night will be when I cannot play, on Tuesday. This means the first wing or two of ICC will be closed to me, with it's 5 or 6 drops and 14 or so badges a week.

Pro, not having to worry about making every raid. Right now if I can't make a raid it might not happen, with more people it's less likely.

To me these are the big ones. There are other issues but most of them aren't my concern. As much as I want to see us finish other stuff I really don't want to get back to the way it was for tier 9. Regular toc and ony were cleared on on Tuesdays, I didn't raid on Tuesdays. My gear sucked and so did my dps and healing. We worked on heroic toc on Thursdays where we downed one or two bosses or worked on Ulduar achievements. Without doing the easy content I was undergeared for the hard content.

Right now my my healing gear and dps gear is moving along nicely. I can heal any encounter or dps and perform well. If our schedule changes I will fall behind, no way around it. I'm up for whatever the guys want and think is best for us. Glad I don't have to figure this out. That's all.

Stat Juggling, Caps and other Interesting Gear Choices

2010-01-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

Well, first off I don't think I'll cause any trouble with this post, but you never know with me. I mean this should be fairly boring, a post about trying to figure out to gear myself.

In a nutshell (if nutshells held information about wow) I want 263 hit rating, 400 haste, enough crit to be capped during lunar eclipse (too much to explain if this is going to fit in a nutshell) and lots of spell power. I have 263 hit, 591 haste and have no hope of getting crit capped in our current raid set up. What this means for me is I only scale well with spell power and crit. Moonkins with different ten man raid setups or who do 25 mans really aren't scaling well with crit either (good job Blizzard).

Part of the reason moonkin dps is in a sad place right is because of this. Back in olden times (3.0) I "won the meters" every other fight. Them days are gone, unless we are doing Vezax then I win again. Anyway I'm doing just fine in dps right now. I'm able to keep up with the other casters, which is all I'm looking to do. They are buffing balance in the next mini patch so I should see another slight bump in dps. So, spell power is wonderful, crit is good, haste is meh, spirit is a less enthusiastic meh and hit is my enemy.

As far as resto goes things have have changed since my intial gearing back in 3.0. With the nerf to Gift of the Earthmother haste is now a stat you want capped so you have a one second global cooldown. For me that is 856, 936 if I want to spec out of Celestial Focus. Getting that much haste isn't easy considering how many pieces of leather caster gear has crit instead of haste on them. I'm at 827 haste in my healing gear, socketing 80 haste. I have too many shared pieces to socket any more, I'm already adding 20 haste to my dps set because I use the gear for both specs.

So now we see why I didn't do a backflip when Chestguard of the Failed Experiment dropped as our first and still only piece of spell leather. It isn't and upgrade over Robes of the Shattered Fellowship, it has less spirit no haste and the same amount of spell power. Eventually it will be better, but for now it sits in the bank.

My gear is coming along fine, so far I have been able to keep my healing gear on par with my dps gear. I have 3 drops and picked two pieces of tier 10. The third wing is opening up next week and it looks like the end of me making every raid we do. That with my below average luck will start the falling behind in gear thing again. I'm sure Boots of the Frozen Seed and the leather pants wowhead hasn't noticed yet will start dropping every raid I'm not there. Such is life, that's all.

How far will we go?

2010-01-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

Fear is starting to creep in as the expansion nears. Around the time we start working on Arthas (regular mode) the alpha testing of Cataclysm should be starting. Last time around this this killed raiding for the guild I was in. Things are quite different now, we won't just stop raiding when we see the changes for the next expansion, but I do believe the clock is ticking.

Rerolling, lack of interest, us having real lives and so on have prevented us from ever "finishing" the current tier of raid content before the next one was released. So far we have only finished tier 7, and I don't see us ever going back to finish tier 8 or 9.

Finishing tier 9 when it was new would have been the easiest to clear. Just five bosses and you could extend the raid ID giving you 50 shots over as many weeks as you need. We didn't get it for many reasons, the one that sticks out to me was we only had nine from our group and had to get someone on their alt to help for our 25+ wipes on heroic Anub. Now I fail as far being able to show up to every raid, I can't make next Thursdays raid for instance. My employer didn't ask me before scheduling a mandatory meeting that night.

I was working a post on gearing for heroic Arthas, but then I wondered if it was worth the effort (gearing, not the post). I guess the answer to the question "how far will we go" is as far those least interested in progression want to go. Only time will tell how far that is. I'm sure this comes off as a bit on the dramatic side for some of you out there, but it's the way I see it. That's all.

Glory of the Raider

2010-01-09T19:27:00.000-08:00

Catching up

2010-01-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

With the holidays behind us I can finally return to blogging. I know it's been hard waiting for me to post, the wait is over. I'm going to do a review of 2009, I figure I'll review the entire expansion when I'm bored waiting for Cataclysm.

We have done four clears of the first wing of ICC, we'll be trying the new one tonight. Stårk our resto shaman has returned with heals and bloodlust so I can back to dpsing. The fights are all pretty easy at this point. Morrowgar was hard, which was unacceptable so he was nerfed. As far as drops go I'm not going to complain. I have seen zero spell leather so far, in fact I only wanted to roll on 2 out of the 32 pieces of loot that dropped. I won one and received the other though charity. I'll take it. I must warn any of you who thinking resto druid next expansion might be fun, I have picked up five spell leather drops from our ten mans since Ulduar came out. That's about one piece of spell leather every two months, you want to roll for it?

I've quit doing random dungeons as a healer. The near instant queue isn't worth having to watch the terrible dps make the instance take much longer than needed. I have decided to try out this argent tournament thing, which keeps me entertained while I wait.

Let's see death knight has been 80 for a bit. My dps gear is now passable, I still have a couple of really bad pieces in my set and have way too much haste on my gear but it works. I'm going to start spending my badges on tanking gear so someday I can be defense capped. Which at the rate I play my dk will take a month or more. I'm using an unholy spec which seems to work well in heroics and on trash in icc.

The highlight of the last couple of weeks was doing Flame Leviathan with just three the other day. It gave Boston and Blackhaus a chance to see just how great I am at being a gunner. I'm horrible, I pretty much miss everything. In the past I could miss everything and other people would shoot the stuff for me. When you are the only person shooting it doesn't work that way. So after one wipe on the trash Boston started shooting things and I was less terrible (still terrible, just less) and we killed him in less than a minute.

Lastly I'm just one achievement shot of Glory of the Hero. I should get Amber Void and my shiny new drake this weekend. I'd like to clear as many raid achievements as possible as well, starting with the Naxx ones I missed. I'd also like to win the lottery, I won't hold my breath for either. That's all.

Break from Arena/PVP

2009-12-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

With arrival of 3.3 I am no longer am interested in pvp. The amount of time required to keep up to date gear and to play just isn't justified anymore for me. I have limited amount of time to play, more time than I need to keep my druid geared and ready for the latest content. What I did with the rest of the time was arenas.

I was spending more time than I wanted to doing games and not achieving the desired results. The majority of my game frustration comes from Blizzards fail implementation of class balance. They do a passable job at pve balance. It's not perfect, but you can effectively raid as any role your class is designed to do. There a few "dead" specs but it's not like sub rogues, frost mages and bm hunters can't fill the same roles with different specs. The same cannot be said for pvp and never will be.

I'm not quitting because I'm fed up, I'm quitting because I found something better to do. The random dungeon feature has revived my interest in alts. I find solo leveling boring and don't want to be carried through raids I already do with my druid. Doing dungeons while I level is fun and I learn how to play the class in a group environment. I now don't have any reason to run randoms on my druid other than the two frost badges so I can run them with my dk for amusement.

It really comes down to random dungeons on my dk > arenas on my druid. I also have 80 rogue and 76 hunter I can play if grow bored with the dk as well. So goodbye respeccing and reglyphing once a week. Hello fail tanking and dps. That's all.

Deadlakini

2009-12-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

I'm finally going to get around to posting about my dk. I've made you wait long enough, I'm sure the wait has been painful. I went with the name Deadlakini because all of my alts need Lakini in the name and it is super cool to have "dead" in a dk's name. Honestly, if your death knight doesn't have death, dead, dk, or arthas in it's name you are stupid. Come on, how can you name a death knight and have that in there somewhere?

Well, I'm 77% percent on my way to level 78. I originally specced blood for leveling and grabbed dual spec at 70. I decided to go with an unholy spec as I would plan to use it for pvp. Since I don't like unholy I'm back to blood. I'd like to try out frost spec but I'm waiting on having weapons to dual wield for that. I have discovered I dislike having a pet, which makes unholy less enjoyable. I don't need something running around that I need to control. I never liked worrying about my pet on my hunter and I liked it much less on my dk.

Over the last weekend I started to to queue for random dungeons, it has worked really well. I recommend for anyone leveling an alt 70+ to do one whenever you get a chance. I generally wait 10 minutes or so, but I'm questing while I wait so there isn't any downtime. I have only queued up as dps, I'm running a leveling build and don't have my bars set up for tanking. It is nice to get some instance experience rather than trying to start in heroics cold turkey.

I'm not sure I'll do anything with this toon at 80 other enchant and grab herbs. The world doesn't need more undergeared melee dps. I haven't done any research since level 55 and I'm capable of doing better dps than plenty of 80's I've seen random heroics. I'm going to try to put a tank set together. I also need to download some dk mods and maybe do some research. I'll see how motivated I stay with this toon. If I keep doing as few arena games as I am now I'll have plenty of time. That's all.

Filling in

2009-12-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

As we head closer to Christmas people are bound to disappear and ~~Bloodlust~~ Stårk is going to be gone for three weeks. We as a group have very little, well, no success missing one of our tanks or healers. If Honorshammer, Boston, Blackhaus or Stårk are missing we have mostly been screwed. On new or difficult content that is. The only time I can think of that would be an exception was when Grimadin filled in for Honorshammer, when toc was fairly new (still easy stuff though).

So we entered ICC not knowing what the night would hold. The previous week we had to three heal the first boss. This night our roster was Boston (dk tank), Honorshammer (pally tank) Blueshield and Danath (dps warriors) Ofn (rogue) Pinkshift (feral druid) Donkatonk (mage) Neo (lock) Blackhaus (holy priest) and me. Honors and Pink despite having healing spells weren't going to be any help as far that went so it was on Black and I. The last time Black tried to heal something together it was heroic toc and we were both out of mana the only time we downed the the first of the three beasts. We were also down Boston that time and my gear has improved since then but that still scared me.

The encounter had been nerfed since the week before so down bloodlust and a healer we went for it. We didn't have tank assignments we just healed them both. I kept every hot I had on both tanks (as much I could) and healed anything else taking damage. I managed to die as I was about to go oom and was battled rezzed then I rezzed someone who was dead. I popped a mana potion and soon the boss died.

We moved to the second boss who can be tough considering group make up, according to forum QQ this can't be done with a dk and paladin tank. We have done this twice without wiping with those tanks. The fight seemed more difficult with only 2 caster dps, but it was fairly easy.

The gunship went a lot smoother this time around. It wasn't glitched at the end either. The most difficult part of this fight is when people are jet-packing back from the enemy ship. They take a ton of damage from an angry dwarf. Knowing this from being killed our first week on this fight I made sure to be ready to heal them. It seemed to make a difference as no one died. Once you get that transition down there it's a pretty easy fight.

Now this Saurfang guy at the end was going to be trouble. This a fight where having ranged is pretty important. The boss summons two adds that buff the boss each time they hit someone. So you are supposed to kite them and blow them up. We obviously couldn't do this, we had to heal through it. The fight went faily smoothly until he was at about 10% we had a couple of people explode. I normally don't battle rez unless asked to, in case the raid leader wants to save it. This time I decided to rez Ofn and hope that would be enough. He summoned two more adds the dps was told to ignore them. One of them wanted to eat me. I used nature's grasp and he sat in roots while we finished the boss.

To my suprise (and everyone else's I'm sure) we cleared it with no wipes. It only took about an hour and a half, which keeps Tuesdays open for me to keep raiding this. Our normal raid nights are now bad for me, but as long as it only takes that long I'll be fine. Hopefully my raiding schedule will be better by the time the next wing opens.

For me it was really nice to know I'm capable of filling the roll of healer (other than the third healer) and we can keep moving. Most of this expansion my healing gear has collected dust, it's nice to get to use it. This also has me rethinking the whole rolling a pure, my ability to fill in for Stårk, kept everyone's mains in the raid and keeps the gear progression going without a hitch. Unless we are talking about my gearing of course, eight kills and I haven't had anything I would want to roll on drop yet. Come guys, five leather melee dps drops, zero leather caster drops of any kind, that's not nice. That's all.

Random Dungeons

2009-12-12T21:23:00.000-08:00

So, I like this patch, it makes me smile. They put in new fancy things that amuse me, for now. My favorite is the random dungeon. I can now do a heroic when I feel like it and don't have to ask around. The frost emblems you get are nice as well.

I have done five or so of these and have noticed some trends. First if you are a hybrid and not a failure (only can dps) queue up as a tank or healer unless you want to wait 10 to 15 minutes. Also tanks tend to out dps the dps, most of the dpsers are failures in gear or skill. Healing heroics is really easy, I spend a good amount of time dpsing in them as a healer. Also people don't like Oculus, why I don't know.

I have really enjoyed these, as an antipugger I approve of them. As healer I get a queue in less than two minutes. Even if the dpsers are failures we still don't wipe. Tast run I did was Nexus, we had a hunter who was in aspect of the viper the entire time. He also kept attacking a boss when he was immune instead the adds to break his immunity (as did the warlock) and never moved to get rid of the debuff off the last boss. I did more damage than he did in the instance. These things are so easy it doesn't matter. Assuming you don't get the new heroics, I'm bailing if I see one of those.

So props to Blizzard for this, now to get them to not have it cost eight trillion frost emblems for the gear I need. That's all.

My Moonkin Future

2009-12-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

Well after reading what GC has had to say this week about balance druids I don't see staying balance for Cataclysm. Here are the links to the threads.

He has done what a feel is a good job of laying out the vision of pve balance and acknowledging the problems in pvp. He also acknowledged the complaints with balance pve (eclipse), but made sure to say they like it, it isn't going anywhere and also gave zero vision for balance pvp. I understand why, they don't have one.

When I started playing this game I picked a druid, figuring to a be a power spell caster, not an overweight punching bag. Balance is a fringe spec that doesn't get the time that others do, and will remain fringe because it isn't that fun to play. Eclipse the perfect example, they tried it, everyone hated it, but they put too much time into it to come up with something different, so an entire expansion of this crap. There is only so much time the developers have to work the game and playing one of the specs at the bottom of the priority list isn't fun. If they don't get it right the first time then wait for another expansion, no thanks.

I know that just sounds like QQ, but it's just common sense. The devs are good at what they do, but they only have so much time to balance this game with it's thirty specs among all the other things they do. They only have so much time to dedicate to balance druid pve and if the dps itself is passable they are going to let it be. When it comes to balancing pvp it's a quality of life issue for everyone when buffing. Part of the reason season 5 sucked was because of out of control overpowered classes. Classes/specs being underpowered really only effects those class/specs. Right now balance is bad that only effects balance druids and there aren't that many. If I were them buffing balance would be at the bottom of my priority list too.

Anyway I could go resto, but I really enjoy caster dps. I'm thinking of leveling a mage, I'm not basing anything on current performance, I'm basing it on the developers philosophy and track record. Pure classes will always do more dps, and if mages aren't at or near the top they will be buffed. Hybrids dps gets buffed to make sure they will still take you. It might suck, but as long as it doesn't suck so bad that raids stop taking you, you are fine. I'm not real interested in that.

They may "get it right" this time, make eclipse fun and interesting (opposite of current) and they may give balance the tools to be a viable casters dps in arenas. I could see balance being reworked to be fun in pve, I doubt it, but it's possible. I have no reason to believe that balance will ever be viable in pvp, prot specs became viable before balance, what else says screw you more than making tanking specs viable for pvp dps before a dps spec, pretty much nothing.

So, I'll be working on leveling a mage. I have complained about moonkins and wondered what it would be like to play a pure caster, time to find out. That's all.

WTB a 1600 rating

2009-12-02T22:08:00.000-08:00

We've hit a wall in 2's, one made of rogues mostly. Blue and I have been stuck between 1500 and 1550 for about a month. We have been losing to some comps that I can't figure out. Maybe these are just hard counters and we have to hope to avoid them. I'm not gonna list weird comps like double frost mage or something stupid like that. Anyway here is my list of evil in rank evilness.

Group 1, Could beat us in season 4 gear

Mage Rogue. It seems like we mostly play this comp in the Ring of ~~Fail~~ Valor where my los leaves while I get blowed up. They generally sheep Blue and skill me down with counterspell and 45 stuns. I get off maybe 3 gcds before I die here. Our only success comes when Blue is able to get off bladestorm before they poly him and they are so badly geared they die in it.

Lock Rogue. With this comp they generally blow Blue up while I get seduced, feared and blinded. Blue is stunned in place while the lock free casts on him, then we lose.

Elemental Shaman Rogue. Same as Lock Rogue except anything I cast gets interupted or in the case of cyclone grounded.

Group 2, we can win if we are significantly better than them.

Disc Priest Rogue (notice a theme yet). Mana burn and the rogue's control are our main problems here. The rogue always sits on Blue keeping him away from the preist so he can mana burn me. Most of our wins here come if they aren't well geared and Blue blows up the priest in the first 15 seconds or the rogue doesn't do enough damage to Blue to pressure me into exposing myself to mana burn.

Resto Druid Rogue. A lot of control here, if they do it right we almost always lose. Luckily this doesn't seem to a comp we run into a lot. When rogues have like twenty class/spec combos that are viable in 2's some comps don't get as much play.

Ret Pally Rogue. The reason I list this lower is a few these teams aren't smart enough to cc me and blow up Blue. Some try to kill me, we win those most of the time. If they do this right, even if they have to run to blind me, they win.

Resto Druid DK (not a rogue). If the DK wants to he can the druid can keep Blue cced the entire match. Luckily no one would ever die so they don't try that. If the resto druid is smart he chases me so the dk can peel for him and spread his diseases (the Dk's not the druids). If we keep them separated Blue generally kills the druid before the dk ooms me (which he usually needs to do to kill me).

We tend struggle mage + anything as well. They are just too good against warriors with no dispel. We don't see many mages outside mage rogue. Could it be that other healers can dispel? Anyway, I'm not real good at figuring this stuff out. If any of you have any ideas ~~you'd better~~ feel free to comment.

While I'm posting I must share the highlight of my weekend. Running warrior/druid/disc, we beat two different beast cleave (enhance shaman/beast hunter/holy pally) teams. Both teams were able to kill our priest in the first thirty to forty-five seconds of the fight, then the hunter fails to kill me while Blue kills the shaman with the pally trying to heal. He then kills the hunter, then the pally. Thank you for never turning on the warrior for me and making 2v3 easy. I guess that's why they have 1200 ratings. Like ours are much better. That's all.

Reading Through the Lines

2009-11-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

Well, looks like I'm batting .000 for raiding this week. I won't be raiding on Tuesday either, what can you do? Though I most likely will be able to do heroic 10 man toc on Monday, if we have enough people. So what to do, blog of course.

You may be wondering if there is a point to this, maybe there is. Alright, there is. I just figured out something sweet for blogging. I now know how to put a line through words on here. You see all the "pro" bloggers do this, I'm joining the bandwagon now.

With this line thing I can say whatever I want, put a line through it and it doesn't count. Doesn't count? You might not think that makes any sense, but it does. ~~It makes perfect sense if you aren't an idiot, which you are.~~ The possibilities are endless

Picture it, we are working on a new boss in Ice Crown and some noob is screwing it up. I'll use Blue as an example, because he is a big boy and won't get his feelings hurt. Before I would be real vague or not bring it up at all. I don't mean like a year ago, I mean since I stopped being a jerk (on this blog).

Tonight we struggled with "Some ugly undead guy". ~~We didn't struggle Bluenoob did.~~ He we couldn't avoid fire and ~~was~~ were too low on dps. He we also had trouble not pulling aggro from the tanks. ~~Blue~~ some of us also spent the night in the wrong vent channel and he we had many bathroom breaks do to ~~his~~ our weak bladder.

As you can see ~~if you are not stupid~~ this is probably the greatest thing ever. So get ready for words with lines through them. They are coming ~~not really~~ and you are going to love it. ~~That's all.~~

The Auction house

2009-11-18T22:07:00.000-08:00

Is it me or has it become really popular to post about how to make money on the auction house? If you are looking for that look elsewhere, I've got nothing for you. Well, one thing, I'll get to that later.

When I switched from Alliance to Horde I lost my alts, not having cash to bring them along. So I needed an alt and alts cost gold if you are going to have them flying anywhere. So decided to end my 3 year break from the ah.

Back when Altar of Storms was new I set my self up to make a ton of gold on the ah. Long before Goblins or MMO champion was telling everyone how to use cheap mats to craft greens to de and sell the mats, I was on it. When I hit level 60 I had 1000 gold, my epic mount, two pieces of tier one and a couple of other expensive pieces of gear. I also ran with Staff of Jordan from level 35 to 60. That may not sound like much now, but then it was a fortune, or it least it was to me. Once I hit 60 I was burned out on it.

So, I decided to endure the pain of leveling enchanting on my death knight. It sucked, but I paid for my epic flyer and now have a near max level enchanter. I hate finding someone to do an enchant for me and finding someone to de greens for me. Problem solved. Now I don't need to keep selling anymore. I paid for what I needed to and I have 7000 gold with nothing to spend it on. I can't stay away though, I should, stupid people have joined in the fun and have crashed the market.

Anyway, the one tip I will give for the ah is this, patience. Selling things for less than the mats cost to make them or just selling things for less than people will pay is fail. This isn't a message to Ofn, he has made way more gold than I have and doesn't need my advice. There are names I see selling and I know to not put my stuff up. I have seen people sell items for cheap then once they are gone I put up mine and sell them for double. You can tell these people don't know what the stuff is worth, I really should have bought the stuff myself and resold, but I prefer not to get into that.

The new folks selling remind me of BC raiding, when you needed twenty five to move past Karazhan. So you'd recruit noobs who did 300 dps and didn't pay attention to what was going on. Well, I guess we could have learned to stop recruiting those people a little quicker. Bad news on the ah, the noobs can't be gkicked, you're stuck with them until they decide to go. I'm still making gold, not as quickly as I'd like, but I'm in no hurry. Look at that, I finally made a post about the auction house and did it without freaking out. Miracles do happen, that's all.

Heroic TOC 10 and my dps

2009-11-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

Well, I have found some moonkin blogs from people who know math or know people who know math. I had only done minimal research this expansion up until this point, enough of that. From what I have read, the theory I have been going with is correct. I did find some guides on how to dps the fights in TOC which was helpful.

I put my a link to the wowmeter for the raids I go on. My dps on the beasts was almost identical on the fights I have saved. The problems I run into are on the worms with whole disappearing thing, and Icehowl's charge and stun. I lose a significant amount of eclipse time and my dps tanks. I don't think I have cracked 4k on the guys which is bad. Tonight I can remember at least four different times I lost most of or all of an eclipse because of these mechanics.

Jaraxxus has given me issues as well, not tonight, at least on our kill. Tonight I broke 5k on him, by far my best effort. The difference between that and 3700 dps fight I hvae recorded is cast 16 more starfires. Rng worked fairly well for me and movement was pretty minimal for me. Hopefully, tonight wasn't a fluke and I can improve on that.

We finally downed the faction champs on heroic, Honors will have an in depth story on that. It was pretty hairy until we downed all but that last two. I tried rotate cyclones on the targets we weren't dpsing as we got to the last three.

I got one attempt at dps on the Twins before I switched to healing. This is the one fight I do well on and I was over 7k when we wiped. The raid damage is pretty high, high enough that each healer including me was doing 5.5 hps. That was a lot of rejuvs and single lifeblooms. We are extending the raid id so next week we'll have this down and start working on Anub. That will suck.

Quickly I have been resisting posting on my adventures at the AH because I'm trying to be nicer. As long I'm going with If I can't say anything nice I don't anything at all, you can expect to never hear anything about it. Rest assured my head is ready to explode. That's all

Some Rules

2009-10-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't decided on a new name, I'm sure you can handle the wait. Anyway, I have been hesitant to start this up again, I don't really like what it had become, a place where I complain mostly. The following are posts that aren't allowed.

First, no Blizzard sucks at pvp balance posts. I might as well post, I live in a desert, it is hot in summer, nerf the sun. No point, it will always be hot here and pvp will never be balanced.

Second, why won't this thing drop QQ posts. Everyone has something that they wish would drop (probably). Pointing out how something hasn't dropped 10 times doesn't make it appear (though whining on vent seems to work).

Third no posts that attempt to cause trouble. I only posted those to get the drama over with. I prefer if people are so unhappy in a guild that and won't stop crying they just save everyone the trouble and leave right away, not two months later. If some argument is brewing, do it now not in two weeks. That being said, no drama here.

I'm sure most of you are trying to figure out what I have left to talk about. Mostly whatever is going on with me and the thoughts I'm thinking that you should know about, unless they have something to do the list up there. I'm not saying I'll never mention pvp balance or fail loot but that will never subject of the post.

Anyway those are the rules if this returns the QQ blog it was before, I'm done.

New Name

2009-10-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

I need a new name for this thing, I'm thinking I should use a druid talent, like Force of Nature or Natural Shapeshifter, ideas?

Quiet long enough

2009-10-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

So, much like Brett Farve I'll be returning after a short retirement. Unlike Brett Farve I will not be waffling back and forth for months to avoid training camp as there is none for blogging. That's not all.

Last call

2009-07-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

Where to begin? I'm now moved into my new house, which was responsible for my 2 month absence from the game. The whole thing is really miracle, getting out of the condo we had been trying to sell over two years and getting this house. After our condo sold I lived pretty much internet free for seven weeks, I checked my e-mail about once a week and that was about it.

I didn't get much e-mail, the mail I got I didn't really enjoy. They were about the raid group I was in breaking off forming a new guild. I voted no, things were pretty much perfect for me. My only complaint was I wasn't able to find time to play with some of the folks in the other raid group. Mostly Ferth and Sameth, I really don't know the game of wow without them. Alas, I was out voted, everyone else to one, I think (not sure though).

I hadn't missed the game much at this point and was ready to quit. I wasn't and never became interested in making the choice. There was no good choice for me, just one that made more sense. Leaving the people out of it was an easy choice, join the guild with people you have been raiding with. The schedule, pace and the fact there is no adjustment need to keep raiding with made it fairly easy. With the people involved it's much more complicated, I enjoyed playing with everyone in the guild so picking either group would mean have not being guilded with people I like.

So, yesterday morning I logged back in for the first time. First I posted a message on the Heroes Inc forums saying I was going to move Lakini into the other and see you soon. I logged on and Bluetide noticed me and I got an invite to Unusual suspects, I would have named it "I Wish I was in the Casuals" but whatever. I then logged into my alt I used for selling stuff for the guild bank and put the 60 gold I had back in the bank and deleted the guy.

Later that evening I logged on to my alt Homerjay to say hello to the guys in Heroes, but I had been kicked out the guild so I didn't bother. I had seen before quiting on Lakini that a couple of other guys from Unusual suspects had alts left in Heroes, I thought that work for me to. I'm not really sure what to make of it. I didn't have any issue anyone in the guild before I left and didn't think anyone had one with me, guess I was wrong.

Well, I logged onto Lakini and ran some bgs with the guild to get rid of some rust. I was hoping pvp would be balanced when I came back, not so much. I was generally unkillable as were the other healers, unless a couple of top of the food chain dps or 8 regular dps got a hold of me. We then lost wintergrasp and I was done.

Not quite what I hoped for on my first day back, reminded me why I had given a lot of thought to never coming back. I still have raiding to do though, I set out kill everything in this expansion and I will. The new guild also added a group from another guild, I know a few of them. It's a little to weird to be in a guild where I don't so many people. This my second guild in my four years of wow, and no doubt my last. I am looking forward to getting back to raiding and to see how I can screw up warrior druid in 2's, it should be fun.

This is also the last post on this blog, my wow time is not going to be like it was before this and blog doesn't make the cut. With Honorshammer blogging as he does anything interesting I do will be written about anyway. This is also the only post I remember missing my usual sarcasm and rudeness, sorry. That's all, and I mean this time.

A Post before I completely disappear

2009-05-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

So I'm moving, which means I'm going to be gone for a bit. I haven't had time to post on here, which sucks for you, sorry. I have had a lot things I would have liked post about and while I have time I'll go for it. I don't sense this post being popular with most people I know, not that I do many that are.

Arena/pvp balance talk has died down a lot in Heroes Inc since 3.1 came out. The system as a whole is much better. In fact, there used to be a lot of complaining about arenas on the guild forums and that has disappeared. Is everything fixed, if you run melee/healer in 2's it is. Everyone who runs arenas seriously in Heroes inc runs a healer melee team and have pretty good ratings.

There is one exception to this, Bluetide and I have run moonkin/elemental in arenas. Two fail pvp specs on 2's team is fail. Anyone who knows how to play their melee healer comp will beat us. While locks and hunters are the worst 2's classes they wreck us, double melee (who isn't awful) is instant death as well.

So after getting just under 1400 we dropped to 1280 or so and went to the ptr search for a comp doesn't suck. We'll probably go resto druid/warrior, ret or dk is also a possibility. This is the way of arenas in wow. Comp is still king, I honestly think they could fix this.

Right now dps casters are trash 1 vs 1 against melee. In general melee classes have more ways of slowing, silencing, stunning and killing casters than caster have of getting away. Melee are designed to kill healers and healers are balanced to survive melee and dps casters are designed to be 3 shot by ret pallies.

I really don't think it's that complicated, all dps casters need an instant cast root or stun. All melee have some sort of interrupt or silence. Melee has more gap closers and slows than casters have to get away, combine that the burst most melee can do with no cast time. Melee need tools to get to ranged and ranged need tools to get away. You know, make it so skill is the difference. I can kill any melee who is terrible (except ret pally, they can auto attack me to death), but any dk, rogue, or warrior who knows how to play will plow me and pretty much any other dps caster.

Enough QQ, I'll just spec resto and Blue will roll melee and we will get a much better rating as long we our have faces ready to roll.

I'm am in no way attempting to diminish what anyone has done in arenas (expect ret pallies) nor am I saying that we would take a melee/healer comp and yawn our way to 1850 or 2000. What I'm saying is we could sleep walk our way to higher ratings than we have now with healer/melee. Also, I know that enhance is terrible and feral isn't great either, I also know that frost mages are not trash against melee (just healers).

Out with the old in with the new

2009-04-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

3.1 is here and the reign of terror that was 3.0 to 3.0.9 has ended. Patch 3.1 is the way it should have been the day the expansion came out. So I thought I'd give old 3.0 a good beating before I move on.

Pvp was a huge failure. Arenas were geared for hardcore players so most everyone else abandoned them. With folks running around in welfare naxx epics bgs were painful and there wasn't much to gain by doing them. Class imbalance was crappy as ever.

Pve gets a C+ to B-. Making all content available to ten man groups was brilliant, excecution was not. Ten man content gave worse gear and tended to be more challenging. Not that the content was challenging outside Sarth +drakes. Sarth +3 drakes ten man was the hardest encounter in the game and really wasn't doable without 25 man gear. 25 man content was extremely easy (for the most part). Most could be pugged by with pretty much anyone with a pulse.

Other stuff, achievements are pretty sweet. Quests in Northrend were pretty good and the art is well done. One can't help but wonder if they had spent the time they did making the dk class and their starting area (which was really well done) fixing classes already in the game that needed work how much better the game would be class balance wise. 3.0 was not ready and if they weren't busy making an extremely overpowered class it would have been a lot better.

Onto the good news. Dual specs are wonderful, the ability to switch specs without finding a trainer, redoing glyphs and your bars is awesome. Click of a button (yes I click my activate these talents button, I'm sure you hardcore players have it keybound) I'm resto or balance. My only complaint is your mana goes to zero when you do, stupid. What do rogues have there energy drained to zero? Dks lose their runic power or maybe warriors losing rage? Yeah, that's the same.

Battlegrounds are less bursty, though I would assume not being balance making a difference. If I'm going to pvp it has to be as resto, you know why. Bgs have been pretty fun, I can tank a couple of people, though one person who is good with their stuns/silences can get me. I'll do arenas to get the rating for some gear, how much I do depends on how much I like it. I used to do bgs to get gear for arenas now I'll be doing arenas for better gear for bgs.

Ulduar is hard. If your guild was hiding bad players in Naxx good luck to you. 3.0 was the time of the crappy 25 man guild clearing content, it's over. We have downed Flame Leviethan and Razorscale, I'm thinking we have a good shot at clearing the rest of first wing on Monday. With all the hard modes this place will keep us busy for a long time. My only complaint is most of the caster gear is geared towards healers, though most casters aren't healers. Oh well, at least casual pvp is back, that's all.

What to do?

2009-04-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has no intention of fixing balance druids for pvp. While every spec was supposed to be viable it's clear that balance is one of the specs that isn't included. So what should I do? Resto and feral are better, but not by much and I just don't have a desire to use either spec in pvp. I have a rogue but I just haven't enjoyed it, though it may be worth revisting after the patch.

As far as my non 80's I have a 73 hunter, 58 dk, and 35 shaman. The hunter has never really interested me in pvp, but they have performed well. I have no doubt that dks will plenty viable despite the nerfs they are getting. I'd like to try resto shaman, but 45 levels is too steep for me. Maybe I could get Ferth to send me some cash to level it so I can pop heroism and drop some totems for his raid group. I could just not do any arenas and only pvp once a week with the guild with my druid or rogue.

Anyway, most of you guys know me pretty well, I'm fairly lazy with bgs and leveling and I'm very good looking. What do you think I should do?

It's April Fools Day

2009-04-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

So expect to see talk of moonkin pvp buffs from Ghostcrawler. No doubt the only day of the year it'll be brought up.

I hit the wall and fell on my head

2009-03-25T19:02:00.000-07:00

For me Burning Crusade was a huge learning experience. One thing I learned is I should avoid things that frustrate me. So for Wrath I have made some changes and have been pretty successful. However in there is something I haven't been able to get away from. It is called loot luck, mine is really bad. Yes, I have hit the loot/dps wall. In the world of ten mans things are okay. I have one thing left I need, it has a 40% drop rate and I haven't seen it drop since no one else needed it.

My 25 man luck has been awful, I have looted 73 valor emblems and for all those boss kills I have added 2 pieces of gear to my raid set. Both pieces were picked up in pugs. Too bad for me we don't use dkp in heroes (not suggesting it) I have been on every 25 man run and have grabbed one piece I only use for heroics and a healing belt.

So what? Who cares if I'm getting loot? Well as my dps has plateaued and we are trying to Sarth +3 drakes and what we are currently missing from my vantage point is dps. What can I do to increase my dps? Pray for my tier 7 helm and run 25 man content and hope I get gear. Pugging 25 man content just isn't enjoyable, my only motivation is gear and I don't get it.

I now only raid Monday or Tuesday so that means I have to choose between Sarth 3d and finishing Naxx and Sarth 25 man next week. I'm not convinced we (I) have the gear for sarth 3d, if I was then I wouldn't make this post. We would down it this week if we were, or get pretty close. While Sarth 3d is a complicated fight, it isn't for me. My job is to dps, avoid fire walls and blue circles. I have that down, I don't need more practice, I need more dps. I'm also pretty sure it is a waste of time to try it without my group buffs, so if I don't go they are doomed to fail in my opinion.

For our 25 mans we do a two epic per run, one tier piece/weapon and one other piece. In our run earlier this week I got nothing and those who would compete with me on leather spell gear did. This means nothing for the next run though, I have a worse chance of getting gear for our next run as there will be fewer bosses downed. So in all likelyhood I will once again come away with nothing but emblems I don't want.

The ultimate goal for me is the Glory of the Raider achievement. So do I sign up for Sarth 3d and hope I'm wrong about our gear level or do our guild heroic naxx /sarth run and hope to improve my gear and my dps for our try next week? If I could do both I would, even if I knew I would get no loot and we weren't going to get three drakes down, but I can't. I have no idea what I should do, other than buy a rabbits foot, find a four leaf clover or capture a leprechaun. Maybe then luck would be on my side. That's all.

Happy Thoughts

2009-03-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

I don't have time to blog much anymore so when I do I'm highly motivated to do so. That motivation is generally anger or one of it's friends rage or disgust. Not today, today I post about happy things.

Raiding with my guild in 10 or 25 man form is pretty great, I've kinda of soured on 25 man pugs, I think already said why. Heroes Inc is a great bunch of people to hang out with and kill things with. Mood is always good, no one gets bent out of shape or is 12 years old. Sometimes we take a talking break when the Undying get ruined, but we're getting used to it. If I had time I would have posted about our victory over Sarth +2 drakes and how great I was. All I remember now is heroism is good.

I like my druid, things aren't perfect. Things really couldn't be worse as far as pvp goes, but I don't pvp so I'm fine. Dual specs will be sweet, tried it out on the ptr and I love it. Soon I can heal heroics wthout it costing me 100 gold.

I have figured out how to get my graphics card to function properly so I can run at max settings and quest where ever I please. Rather than using minimum settings and having my graphics card overheat. Just have Zul Drak and Ice Crown left for questing. Questhelper + swift flight form = win.

I quit pvp, that makes me happy. I have tried and tried to enjoy pvp, giving up was the answer. Why I didn't figure this out earlier I don't know. That's all.

My Favorite post ever

2009-03-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

It's been about a year since I made this post, I still love it. This was inspired by the sadness of viewing the armory and wws from my guild. Back when I made this post we were doing 25 man bc content and no one read this (for the most part). This meant I could say I wanted, though I did throw a paragraph in at the end in case people did read it. I didn't add it here because well, those folks are gone and seemed to have figured out how to gear anyway. The info is out of date of course, but this still a winner in my book.

How to gear up like a noob

So many people make guides on how to gear up to get the max out of your toon, few give you the secrets on how waste materials and enchant most all of your gear with little or no benefit to your dps or what not. This guide will focus on dps gearing. I don't know quite how to noob it up as a healer or tank, I don't quite have the skill for that. This won't focus on specific gear but stats your looking to grab that won't really increase your dps. You can't really control the gear you have as far as drops go, so that doesn't count. We will avoid the obvious, such a priest getting strength enchants, you not going to fool any noob into thinking you know what your doing. The goal is make your gear look like it is done right to another noob.

Caster dps first, spell hit is the most important dps caster raid stat, so avoid it. Non-noobs (I think I invented a word) will eventually get +16% needed to cap to be capped. I think the number around 210 or so if you have no talents that increase your chance to hit with spells or lower spell resistance by a certain percent. Elemental shaman don't count here, their talents give them 12% meaning it's near impossible not to be hit capped, so if your an elemental shaman either avoid those talents or load up on spell hit.

Socketing, now a non-noob would have every socket with +8 spell hit gems, unless your missing a really nice bonus by doing so, until capped. They would then replace the gems as their gear improves. There are lots of options for noobs though. Blue slots +9 stamina, +12 if you're rich, there is also the +spell crit and spell penetration gem (it sucks and is cheap). Red slots you need to +9 spell damage here, noobs and non-noobs alike will do this. Yellow, the spot made for a +8 spell hit, you can go with +8 spell crit or int, the spell damage/spell crit is the most popular. Another important thing is to stack stats that don't benefit your class/spec that much. Shadow priests and non destro locks stacking spell crit is a good example. Nothing says noob like socketing a +5 spell damage +4 spell crit gem on a affliction lock. A non-noob playing these classes once they are hit capped would go pure spell damage (maybe spell haste as well, I haven't researched these classes enough), though noobs will generally be stacking crit where hit would go.

Enchants, here is another chance to increase your dps and fail. One method is to put a + stamina armor kit on every spot you can, increasing your dps by exactly zero. Shoulders, helm and legs are good slots for this as there are really nice enchants for those spots and that's not what were are looking for here. As far as weapons go, there are a lot of possibilities some noobs do enchant there weapon with +40 spell damage, which is what non-noobs tend to do as well. If you want to set yourself apart grab the +30 int enchant instead, or go the lazy way and get nothing on there. You should always have at least one piece of gear unenchanted, not your cloak though. Spell penetration lowers targets resists, only one raid boss has such resists if I recall (don't remember which one). So the +20 spell penetration is a must for noobs, non-noobs get the +2% threat reduction, poor non-noobs (me) get nothing.

Melee dps, well once again +hit is the top stat (for most) for melee classes. A non-noob class guide will let you know the amount of + hit you want. Rogues for instance the cap is around 340 or so. As far gems go, until capped every slot should have +8 hit gems in them, other than the 2 blues you'll need if you have meta gem the requires them. Also if a red gem bonus gives you +hit then take that as well. That's not the noob way of doing things though. They key is to socket crit (once again). +12 ap gems are pretty noob too. If your a rogue and really want to noob it up while raiding go subetly with daggers, your dps will be horrible, you'll suck in pvp too. Enough about rouges the key is too be well under the recommened +hit for your class and know what stats are best for your class and not get them. Don't socket strength if your a warrior or enhance shaman for instance.

Enchants, same as casters go for stamina kits wherever you can. Hunter's have a lot of options for their melee weapon, fiery weapon enchant is a great one, cheap and useless. Everyone else should get nothing, or a pre bc enchant. Most melee are going to have weapons from pvp or arenas. Make sure to get the weapons that are the wrong speed for you class. Rogues grab the slow off hand, fury warriors and enhance shaman fast off hand. Daggers are a must for rogues, they are gimped compared to swords or fists and noobs don't know that, so they are the natural choice.

A few last pointers, putting resilience gems in pve gear is great noob idea (unless the gear will never see a raid, then just an average noob idea). A few other noob ideas that aren't gear related, don't research your class to find out the best spell/attack rotation, noobs make up there own and the dps meters prove it. Also don't attack from behind as melee, nothing like getting your tank crushed because your attack got parried. Also run damage meters but don't extend your range to 200 yards, keep it at 30. You will rule your own dps charts and can link them to friends, of course the raid leader will have you 10th in dps.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-03-10T22:41:00.001-07:00

So I can't sleep so I thought I would complain about some stuff. I have happy posts I'm working on, don't worry. If I make fun of you in this post it's only because you screwed up and won't cry, gquit or need to be held in your mommies arms if I point it out.

So three straight attempts at undying where one incident of noobery cost us the title, and that jerk Kt not dropping the crap I want to go with it. I have been wearing the same stupid gear for 2 months, screw you Blizzard. You and the person invented "let's all pass on stuff then we'll free roll so we can out roll Lakini for the only thing that he can use that has dropped the whole night", to hell with you.

Here is a list of how the people in my raid group are failures.

Ellevis, tanks in tornadoes
Tonk, stands in blue circles
Ofn, dies constantly
Zadorr, sometimes dies 4 times in one fight
Bluetide, stands in blue circles and forgets reagents so he can anhk
Taxiderm, md's on the wrong person and had a stupid wasp pet
Honorshammer, his computer fails us on Raz every week
Mag, Bandaidez and Origami have the same flaw which goes without saying
Lakini, can't tell the negative side from positive, is rude and can't remember why Vundermann and Blackhaus are noobs, they are though, trust me.

Whoever screwed up pvp, up yours! Whoever thought that dks were balanced and fine for pvp, you are a failure. Well, I'm out of things to complain about that won't have people tearing up. I mean I could go on, but I'm starting to feel better. I should probably quit while I'm only this far behind, which is pretty far. Though I do have to say, I love the folks in our raid group. They put up with me, which means they are pretty great and downed Sarth +2 drakes. That's all.

Why are you such a Jerk?

2009-03-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

If you haven't noticed my blog is a bit on the pessimistic side right now, and I'm not as wonderful as normal to play with. My dad has decided to become a loser and is living out the plot from some bad movie on the lifetime network. This kind of depresses me and makes it hard for me to sleep, which makes me more cranky. So, my bad, I'll get over it soon, that's all.

Moonkin's 3.1 and such

2009-03-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

Druid patch notes

Druids

• Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.
• Abolish Poison: Now ticks every 3 sec, up from every 2. Now lasts 12 sec., up from 8.
• Maim: This ability is now considered a stun, and shares a diminish category with all other stuns. It no longer has a chance to break from the target taking damage. Duration lowered to 1 sec. per combo point.

• Talents

Balance

Owlkin

Feral

Restoration

overhealing

mana

Barkskin

Pretty much nothing for balance druids. Improved mark buff isn't great but I'll take it. Another pvp nerf to balance druid, no comment on that.

Seems like it is back to normal for balance druids really, Blizzard is following their pattern perfectly. Make major changes for expansions, then do nothing significant until the next one. I'm fairly happy with the state of moonkin pve. Damage is good, good group buffs. Moonkin rotations are not real fun and neither is being proc based. I'm beginning to notice my inconsistency in my dps. On our last Naxx run I did 2800 dps one fight and 4800 on another. I did nothing different on them, didn't have different buffs, same group, way different results.

I'm not asking for a dps buff, the damage is fine. I'm asking to not be all over the place on my dps. I have heard people suggest the eclipse use charges rather than have a duration. This is genius as far as I'm concerned. I can reapply dots, battle rez, or get thrown against a wall and put in a web wrap and not have eclipse wasted. Really that's all I want, I promise.

I have little faith for this though, Blizzard has not done anything worth mentioning to balance druids outside an expansion since patch 1.8. Which was when I started playing over three years ago. I have some thoughts on pvp as well, but I'm I have complained enough, that's all.

I'm bored

2009-03-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

There is so little left to do in wow right now, I don't have a reason to log in. Which is good for people looking to read a blog post Monday, bad for me. Every time I log in on my horde shaman I quickly remember the Barrens were designed by Satan and I hate it there. That and a shaman at level 18 isn't real fun. Though I think the main reason for lack of motivation that way is I don't want to be anything other than a moonkin. I don't really want to be horde either, not that I want to get rolled in pug bgs and wg. I'm not going to bother repeating my problems with the state of pvp right now.

Using my rogue for some heroic fun is fail. I just don't like mutilate, combat is gimped and I don't have weapons for it anyway. Maybe after 3.1 I'll give it another shot.

Honestly other than raid nights I'm less motivated to play than I was waiting for this expansion. Maybe I'm just losing interest in general. I don't know. I have tried going after achievements for fun, with mixed results. Something about riding around lowbie zones discovering places doesn't thrill me. Doing heroic achievements does, but finding folks for that is hit and miss. Seems like most who are doing heroics aren't geared enough to do the ones I'm after.

So my next plan for amusement I'll be trying to make a feral set for soloing level 70 heroics. It would qualify as a challenge and give me something to spend emblems on. I still like raiding, no burnout or boredom there. It would be fun to do the old content I haven't seen yet, or try something like 5 manning Magtheridon. That might entertain me briefly. That's all.

A post from Lakini

2009-02-24T17:11:00.000-08:00

I haven't been able to post much since my recent job change, this has no doubt been ruining people days. Not this day, this day you shall be happy, unless I say something that makes you mad.

In pve land we are working Sarth +2 drakes and still gearing folks in naxx. My whole optimal gear plan hinges on getting my tier 7 helm, which I have lost many rolls on. That's what I get for having a gear plan. Folks have even replaced their tier 7 helm before I got mine. If it wasn't so important I would have it already.

This week, Heroes Inc will be taking a couple of shots at 25 man naxx. With good turn out I expect to clear just about everything. We cleared the both plague and spider wings with 21 a month ago, no reason we can't improve on that.

Homerjay is level 80, and now I remember I didn't like pvp that much on him either. I don't think I'm going to play different toons for pvp and pve after wotlk. If they don't make arenas/bgs enjoyable for casual players I won't bother doing any pvp at all. I don't want to put in hours of getting 3 shot in bgs to get some gear so it takes a bit longer to kill me then more hours to make it slightly better. I play games for fun, that isn't fun.

Our fives last week was a perfect example, we went 0-10 never losing more than 7 points. We matched against far better teams every time. Most matches we only lost 2 or 3 points. There is nothing at all fun about that.

My next attempt at entertainment is trying dps as rogue. I won't in raids until Lakini is done in Naxx and Ellevis is fine with it. Rogues are not in good place for pve right now, unlike balance druids. That and melee is more of a challenge, pulling aggro is instant death and all the whirlwind/tailwhip and red circle attacks to ran away from. Heroics and such should supply be fun if I can find groups and get some gear so do more than 1000 dps.

The playing on the horde server thing is going fine. Not having much that interests me outside raid nights it can be fun. The server is really different, people are nice. Everyone I run past out questing buffs me if they can. Rather than stealing named mobs for quests people ask if I want to team up. It's quite different.

Part of the appeal of rolling over there was to do low level instances as we level, that's how I have leveled in the past I really enjoyed it. People are leveling at all different speeds and I'm the slowest, so that's not gonna happen. Not a big deal, I do enjoy solo questing in peace and want to do the horde side quests. The Barrens however make me cry, gonna wait till I'm rested enough to hit 20 quicker so I can turn into a ghost wolf (I'm playing a Shaman for those who don't know).

There has been some discussion about who is willing to reroll and who isn't. It seems no one from the other raid group wants to, an amazing coincidence. I'm not sure what I want to do. I like being alliance (until I pvp), mostly I love being a balance druid. I don't love everything about it, but I doubt there is anything else I would enjoy as much. I chose resto shaman because I didn't want to dps as anything else. Well, that's all.

I have my Reasons

2009-02-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

So, after much discussion quite a few folks from Heroes Inc are making horde alts on the Turalyon server. I knew that some folks were planning on rerolling for the next expansion, so I thought we should pick a server now and level when bored with what's going on aos.

When I'm not raiding I'm pretty bored with the game. I like pvp, but leveling my rogue just doesn't amuse me, for those who haven't heard I dislike leveling on a pvp server. So it made sense to me if folks were going to reroll, having alts to level during downtime (on a pve serevr) would make it so everybody could reroll, without having to rush at all (which I hate).

I'd like to see things from the horde side, level in peace and do all the quests, you know level in stv for the first time. I mean once I get my rogue to 80 that will entertain me, but getting smacked around bgs isn't always what I'm looking to do.

Blizzard keeps making leveling easier, they have added more quests, mobs and quests are giving much more xp and the amount of xp needed per level has been lowered. So leveling a player from 1 to 80 in a year to year and half should not be hard for anyone. To my dissappointment it doesn't seem all are on board. Our server sucks for alliance, wintergrasp is a joke, we are outnumbered 3 to 1. I just finished a game where we spent the battle fighting for the workshops never making it any where near the keep. I see no reason to stick around, long term anyway. Though there is no way I don't finish out Wrath on this server with my druid, none.

I hope folks don't go overboard with their alts, I don't want to do much other than level until wrath is over, or the long nothing new time between expansions starts. I hope those who aren't planning on going give it a shot. Other than eachother there is nothing worth staying on aos for past this expansion. That's all.

Team Lakini can't make up it's mind

2009-02-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

The following is my opinion, as usual, and will probably make someone mad. So now is when I begin to worry about us. We have had one person quit the game, one person get too busy to raid until their alt was 80 then they had time again (that is what happened, coincidence or not). Now someone else wants to reroll. None of these things have ruined us or set back a lot, but you can't say this hasn't hurt the group. There are still things to be done and as long as this keeps going on they won't. We still haven't downed Sarth with a drake, we have only done 3 naxx achievements so far.

Since we had to start bringing different people or toons our naxx clear time has gone up. We cleared it one night a few weeks ago and since it's only been 3 or 4 wings, which means less time for Sarth which means less work on progressing. I realize some people are still trying to find the class spec they really enjoy and want to play, that makes sense. I'm happy that I chose to go with a moonkin, it's not perfect but I like it. This is a game, which is meant to be played for amusement, if that isn't happening something should change. I don't think anyone should play a class or spec they don't enjoy, I don't.

I kind of wish we had known the raid groups ahead of time so folks could have rolled classes that that would have made better groups (as far as comps go). I'm not real picky about what I play, any type of healer or ranged dps (not hunter, I would be a huntard) would have worked for me, not everyone is this way though. I don't think this would have prevented our current problems, but it would be easier to deal with.

I do blame Blizzard for making raiding ezmode and battlegrounds torture for casual pvpers. When you start pve at 80 you find what content you can handle, when you start in pvp you get steamrolled by the death knight parade for a few weeks, it just isn't fun and in the end not worth to a lot of people. Leveling alts > getting plowed in bgs.

So I'm left to wonder if we are just content to kill all the bosses and get purples or if we want to do all the achievements and hard modes out there. The way we are waffling we won't get them done. I've given up on the them for this round, here's to hoping we have the attention span and class make up we need to push through Uludar and all the challenges it has. My goal was to kill all raid bosses and we are well on our way, which I'm loving. We have potental to a lot more than that, whether we will or not remains to be seen. That's all

My job ate my Blog

2009-02-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

I now work when I used to blog, so now I don't blog much. If you work where it's okay to sit around and blog or play wow send me an app. I really like my job, but if there is one where I get paid to goof off I'd like to do that. That's all.

Blame Canada

2009-01-20T11:10:00.001-08:00

Well, that is the name of the raid group at the moment. I haven't really said a lot about what has been going on in the world of raiding, I figure it's about time. As you may have guessed from my screen shot from last week we have cleared all ten man content. We have one thing left which is Sarth with drakes up. Ten man Sarth with drakes up is the hardest content on the game right now and I can tell. Nothing else we have tried in wotlk compares to it. Since we don't have access to 25 man raid gear the challenge is even bigger. Last night after one shotting Malygos for our second kill we gave Sarth with two and then one drakes a good 14 attempts, before killing the last drake then killing Sarth. The difference in difficulty is huge, Sarth alone took us all of 3 minutes to kill.

Lots of different things went wrong on different attempts but I think our dps need to be much higher to pull off getting beyond one drake. Two of us were at 3,000 on our kill, I'm thinking we will all need to be around 4000 to do 2 or 3 drakes. I only have 2 upgrades left so I'm not sure how I'm going to up my dps another 1k, but I'll see what i can do.

Looks like Blame Canada has lost two of it members, not sure why they aren't raiding anymore. We will need to add some caster dps for sure. We lost our resto shaman and warlock leaving us with two dps casters and two healers. Grabbing anyone in guild is out of the question, sniping someone from the other raid group is bad form. We lose someone so they need to recruit? So that means we need recruit, eww. I don't have to do it which is nice, for me. Finding someone who fits sounds like a nightmare. It has been really nice having almost zero change in the guild roster over the past 6 months.

I would also wonder what if any issues might be caused by recruiting someone into the guild. There is no logical reason for it bother anyone in the other raid group, except that people don't like change, but it shouldn't really effect them. Like I said before people aren't going to taken from one group to the other, it isn't fair to the group losing a person.

Our group is pretty used to playing with each other. Raiding and looting specifically is so much less complicated when you know everyone you are raiding with is there for the long haul, not for loot so they can join a more progressed guild. So adding a new face doesn't excite me, but we can't go with only ten. Raids will end up being called when ever someone can't make it and there will be burn out.

On another note what would happen if one of our wayward memebers returned and wanted to join back up (they didn't leave the guild, just stopped raiding)? For me it depends on why they left, it's purely real life issuse and there is room I have no problem. If they just bored with raiding or something along those lines then I would not be okay with it. If that's why they left I don't really care, it's not commitment for life, it's a game, but once you do that your gone as far as I'm concerned. I'm not interested in raiding with someone who is there when it is new then disappears, then reappears when they deem it interesting again or something new comes out, I'm just not.

Anyway, Ten man raid group looking for 2.5k+ lock, mage or shadow priest who is fine with only doing ten man content who can raid Monday and Wednesday nights. We have Naxx and Malygos on farm, working on Sarth +drakes and gearing up for Ulduar. Pst Ellevis for more info.

I don't see anything in here that should make anyone mad, but I did put my opinion on things in here and ussually does the trick, that's all.

A Weekend of Violence

2009-01-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

It has become my custom to respec for pvp/arenas for the weekend. We did a few bgs on Saturday night and got a couple of achievements. Afterwards I did some 2 vs 2 arenas with Bluetide on his ret pally. We got as high 1580 or so but finished at 1522, we did like 45 games over the week. I also did some games with the 5 vs 5 team on Sunday, we upped our rating to a sweet 1389 (I think). I played in seven of those games, we won all of them. We played this awful 5 dps team four times and then a team called "We Need the Points" the other three.

Despite the many flaws in arenas right now I'm having fun. I don't need to tell you there is no class balance in wow. You probably already heard burst damage is out of control. Moonkin/ret pally is a decent comp and it is fun. Having done hundreds of games with Honors during season 4 I know to play with the class. Our basic strat for teams with a healer is to have Blue jump on him while I cyclone the dps, starfall, then nuke away. Healers who aren't holy pallies don't survive this, and a lot noob pallies don't either. If it's 2 dps Blue charges in and beats on one, once he bubbles I Starfall and nuke his target (I'm stealthed until then). The starfall nerf, which I won't get into, will make both these less effective in the future. My rogue is now 76, soon I'll be doing all my pvp with him and since they aren't nearly as good as balance druids in pvp I won't have to worry about being nerfed.

Really right now I much prefer arenas to bgs. With so many people rerolling death knights because their class is awful at pvp they are full of them. I already wined about that though. The only time I'm sad in arenas is when a couple of melee get a hold of me, bop is pretty great for that though. Anyway I lied before about rogues, assassination rogues are op. I can hold my own in Wintergrasp against 80's as long as they aren't a ret pally for the most part. Level 80 clothies who are not mages are pretty easy, mages are killable. I look forward to seeing what I can do in the arenas when I hit 80. That's all.

How to outdps your friends as a moonkin Part Three

2009-01-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

So we have gear, you need this to do your job. I'm not going to post some list of preraid gear or anything like that. I also am not going to tell you what heroics to farm or what best for each gear slot. Lots of people have done that already I and I refuse to do a raid or heroic for a certain piece of gear. I will tell you what emblem rewards to grab and some rep pieces and a couple of crafted items you'll want as well how to enchant and gem your gear. Any gear that drops in 25 mans won't be mentioned as I don't do them.

First priority is to get hit capped. The make of your group determines how much you need. The cap is 17% and one percent hit is 26.23 hit rating. Talents should give you 4%, a shadow priest will give you another 3% or you can spec improved faerie fire, and a Draenei in your group will give you another 1%. Ring of Northern Tears is a great option if you are short.

Rep rewards, I'm just going to pick a couple that are easy to get without using the tabards in level 80 dungeons. The Dark Soldier Cape from the Knights of the Ebon Blade and Sash of the Wizened Wyrm from Wyrmrest, if you do all the quests and some dailes you should able to get the rep needed pretty quickly and these both help you get hit capped.

Onto emblem rewards, emblems are pretty easy to get these days as heroics are much easier and shorter than they once were. Assuming you are not hurting for hit rating I would go for Sundial of the Exiled first. It's the second best trinket for a moonkin (#1 available through 10 man content). Second would be Idol of Steadfast Renewal, unless you do 25 man naxx there is no other Wotlk option. Some would use the Idol of the Raven Goddess, I don't think less than half a percent to crit for your group is real great. Third and fourth would be the Encircling Burnished Gold Chains and Ward of the Violet Citadel depending on what piece would be a bigger upgrade for you. Flameheart Spell Scalpel from the Kirin Tor pairs well with the offhand as well as Titansteel Guardian which can be crafted by a blacksmith. Then I would grab Plush Sash of Guzbah, unless you are hit capped and can't rid of any. Vine Belt of the Woodland Dryad works just fine if you don't need hit.

You can also get your tier 7 gloves and chest piece from emblems, mine dropped fairly quickly for me so i didn't. The gloves are pretty easy to get as they drop from Sartharion who is easy. By easy I mean we got the achievement for 8 manning him our first attempt easy. The chest drops pretty far into naxx so if that seems far away the chest might be something you grab sooner. Both pieces drop off Archivon so make sure to do that every week.

As far gems/enchants go, gem hit until your capped. Enchant spell power on gloves over hit, 28 spell power > 20 hit. Once you are capped Spell power > haste > crit > int > spirit > mp5. So enchant and gem accordingly. Spell power is best until you hit 3200 spell then haste is better (according to my sources). Never gem anything other than hit, spell power, haste if possible. Critting does a lot to help our dps but it's expensive (45.91 for 1% crit, 32.79 for 1% haste), which makes socketing haste over a crit a no brainer.

I ran out of things to say, sucks for you, that's all.

Champion of the Frozen Wastes

2009-01-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

How to outdps your friends as a moonkin Part Two

2009-01-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Today my friends we learn what to do when you're dpsing. A lot of people playing any class miss the boat here, you can have all the purples you want with a sweet spec, but if you don't know what to cast when you may get a message from Ferth with tips on how to increase your dps.

Your spell rotation depends on your gear, your spec and what you are dpsing. I'm going to assume you have both gale winds and eclipse in your spec. I see these as must have talents if you plan to do heroics/raiding as balance. Also I'm going to bank on you having the Glyph of Moonfire and Glyph of Starfire, I can only think of mean things to say about someone who would be running with anything different.

First we have the wonderful world of trash mobs. This is pretty simple, when there are multiple mobs use hurricane. Gale winds makes a huge difference in dps here. The faster your group kills trash the better and most of the time there are to be 3+ mobs in a pull. Hurricane and /lol at Bluetide. Not really, that would be rude. In the rare event that you get one trash mob it depends on the hit points it has and the dps of your buddies. Go with a moonfire, starfire until eclipse procs then wrath if it's going to take a while. For things that die quick it doesn't really matter, spam wrath works for me.

Working with Eclipse there are different procs based on what rotation you use. I prefer to use starfire to proc. I like to keep rng out of my dps as much as possible, which is why I don't like this talent. The 20% damage on wrath is on every cast (that doesn't miss). It's possible to have your chance to crit with starfire increased by 30% and never crit.

My rotation for bosses is moonfire, starfire until eclipse procs then wrath until the proc is over. This is where it gets fun, and by fun I mean irritating. Eclipse can proc then you get stunned, or the boss can't dpsed or someone need to be decursed or moonfire is falling off. If you are unlucky you can cast 10 starfires and not crit, which kills you mana and is bad for your dps. What you do when eclipse is up is a big part of your dps. Whether you should cast moonfire depends on how much longer eclipse is up when it wears off. It is almost over 2 or 3 seconds just keep spamming wrath otherwise reapply it. Once eclipse is over then starfire and reapply moonfire until it procs again.

In a prefect world bosses would just stand there and let you just stand there and cast until it dies. Most bosses aren't so kind. If you need to dps a single add that dies quickly spam wrath, it it takes a while to kill use a normal rotation. Hurricane if there lots of adds, Starfall is nice here too. I don't use insect swarm at this point, without the glyph it isn't a good idea. Unless you are one those wonderful bosses where movement is required. If you have to move cast it and if moonfire is on its last few tick reapply that as well.

A few other things, make sure treants are up on cooldown (on bosses where they are usable) and make sure heroism/bloodlust is cast when they are up. Also use on use trinkets during this as well (heroism, not treants). If you have Starfall it does a good amount of dps for one gcd. Another thing, don't stand in fire, red or black circles or blizzards. Moving lowers dps, but not as much as dying.

On healing, if you are brought as dps, dps. Unless the raid leader asks you to start healing or you need to heal yourself, don't do it. If all the healers are dead I think your safe to start healing with out being told to. Your healers should be able to handle it, you don't see feral druids who are dpsing switching to bear and taunting because the tank is getting low do you? No, that wouldn't be good.

How to outdps your friends as a moonkin Part One

2009-01-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

So I made a moonkin dps guide and I'm tweaking it a bit, I'm also noticing the typos I made which makes me sad. This guide isn't the best, most comprehensive or properly proof written, but it has the info needed to be not suck at being a moonkin. This and the other two posts I made before will stay pretty much as is though this expansion. I'm making another post that address changes due to patches and such. The idea is to read part 1, 2 and 3 then check the update post for anything that has changed.

First is spec, your rotation depends on your spec, so there. The way you should spec depends on what class/specs you raid with and your gear to an extent.

Improved Faerie Fire is my enemy and depending on your raid comp something you may need to take. It gives your raid 3% or about 78.69 spell hit on targets you cast it on. If you have a shadow priest the talent is useless. If you don't have a shadow priest you may consider it based on your comp. I chose to drop it because I run with only two other casters who are both capped and it lowers my dps and ruins my spell rotation. If your group is caster heavy and and many aren't hit capped I would run with it until they get Naxx geared which will easily cap them.

Second you must spec around mana regen. There are four regen talents available to you. Listed in order of which is best highest is Omen of Clarity, Intensity, Dreamstate, and Moonglow. I always take moonglow because of where it sits in the balance talent tree, the other choices aren't better in my opinion. Clearcasting should be in any build as well. If your gear doesn't have much spirit I would go with dreamstate if you have a decent amount intensity is the way to go. You should spec for as little regen as you need.

Talents to avoid are anything past tier 3 in resto, anything in feral. The only talent in the balance tree that I would never take is genesis. You can check the breakdowns on my dps and see that you don't have five talent points to increase dot damage by 5%.

My build is 55/0/16, out of the five or six builds I have tried this by far my favorite. With any kind of mana battery I only had mana trouble on Gluth, if I had used my innervate on myself I would have been fine. Rather than break down every talent, if you wondering out there post a comment and I'll respond.

KT Down

2008-12-30T14:10:00.000-08:00

So last night Team Lakini took care of the Construct quarter, Sapphiron and the big guy. Seemed a bit hollow to me, clearing Naxx that is. Probably because it's easy, yes the no lifers who cleared everything in the first fifteen minutes of Wotlk were right. Naxx is way too easy.

Sapphiron is the only fight I would say is hard. Just about every other fight took two attempts to get the fight down. Kel'thuzad himself was a one shot. It didn't feel like progression, the most attempts on a boss was five, Sapphiron. The raid is well done the boss fight are fun, except a couple of evil ones. The probelm is you can basically get a couple of uncrittable tanks some dps and healers and you're good at least through the four quarters.

I was hoping for more of a challenge, the dps and healing required was too low. We beat enrage timers wth only 4 dps and were able to do wings of the place with only two healers one of which hit level 80 the day before. If we had wanted to we could cleared the place the day our 10th hit 80 if we had 6 hours to raid. I'll make post comparing Naxx to Kara pretty soon, but I'm out of time, that's all.