A Bear in the Trees

Where did I go?

2011-05-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

I have a second baby!

My son was born about 2:45 pm on Easter Sunday.

Someday, I will have time to write again. Maybe...

D to the I to the N to the G

2011-01-18T11:33:00.001-08:00

hit 85 last night.

too busy for more. sorry.

exhausted bear is exhausted.

Hibernation

2011-01-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

I've kind of fallen off the map since October... I mean, it's winter, I'm a Bear, I'm supposed to hibernate, right?

Real life reared its ugly head (lots and lots of family commitments, amongst other things), combine that with a bit of apathy at our failure to take down Arthas before the end of the expansion (well, our 25-man failure anyway... our primary 10-man group that ran at times I couldn't be available did succeed), and that apathy making me slow to worry about levelling in the new expansion, lots more family commitments, the taking up of StarCraft 2 (blasphemy, I know, to play a non-WoW game...), a few more family commitments, and getting ready to take a nice vacation to the southern Caribbean (which is, in part, another family commitment...) and I've been just a wee bit busy.

I hit 84 this week, and hope to have 85 down over the weekend, and start into heroics either next week or the week I'm back from vacation.

And at some point, I'll work on the posts I have started, or maybe come up with some new ones!

So... it might be a bit, but you should start to see me a little active again...

Hope everyone had a safe and fun holiday season!

Sometimes I surprise even myself...

2010-10-21T06:48:00.000-07:00

... and if you don't get the reference then you fail, hardcore.

I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts while my ridiculously busy schedule of ridiculousness keeps me from writing anything meaningful.

After our bug-filled jaunt into ICC last week, we decided to start fresh this week even though we only got 5 bosses down last week... And due to illness/inability to form coherent sentences/real life causing low attendance/etc, we waited until Wednesday night to go in this week.

To make a much longer story very short: we smashed 7 bosses (Lower Spire + Fester, Rot, and Princes). A typical first night for us.

I was surprised by a couple of things during the run, though, that I wanted to share.

First, remember a few posts back? I said that the death of cat DPS was greatly exaggerated? Boy was I right.

Now, I realize they thought it was underpowered and made a couple of changes to bump it up. They may have done so even before I posted my previous thoughts. They may have done a little before then, and a little after. I'm here today to confirm that cat DPS is most definitely alive and well, even before the Cataclysm.

For the first time in my experience, I actually led the DPS chart on a couple of fights. One of them by a good margin.

At the end of the Saurfang fight I was sporting over 13k DPS. Once I get near my gaming machine again I can try to post up a screenshot - I got one that should show the Recount breakdown to show how much is attributed to melee, Rake, Rip, Shred, and Ferocious Bite. Much like pre-4.0, the breakdown was fairly even - roughly 25% each going to melee, Rip, and Shred, with the remaining 25% divided up among Ravage, Rake, and FB.

After a top half performance on Rotface, we moved to Festergut. We had a mage leading the chart for most of the fight, but I was a close second until we hit 25%. It is so incredibly liberating to actually have something to do differently when the Raid Leader announces "Kill shot range." Anyway, mere seconds before Fester fell down I passed him, finishing with 12.5k DPS to his 12.3k. The breakdown of damage was shifted slightly. I don't have the screenshots to compare at hand (I will offer more details once I do), but while the same general breakdown showed, it was shifted. (i.e. Rip had the highest percentage on Saurfang, IIRC, and Shred had the highest on Fester, again, unless my memory is failing me.)

I'm loving Nom Nom Nom, even if it did get the much less cool name Blood in the Water. Once the boss is in range, your life becomes Shred/Rake to 5 CPs, FB, do this two or three times depending on the time left on Savage Roar, then Shred/Rake to 5 CPs and Savage Roar, wash, rinse, repeat and watch the boss die. Since you don't really have to worry about refreshing Rip, the only timer you really have to watch at that point is Savage Roar.

Speaking of timers, I was moderately more impressed with my output because I haven't been using a debuff tracker addon. Last time I tried to load BadKitty, it was broken, and I haven't checked in the past week or so to see if it was fixed. I suppose it's technically harder to play this way, but given the proclamations of doom and gloom for Kitty DPS I wasn't worried about it until Cata actually dropped. So I was doubly surprised to find myself on top of the chart.

Moving on... My DPS as a tank seemed relatively high as well. There were even a couple of fights that I beat out a couple of our lower-geared folks that just must have had a bad fight that boss. I dunno *shrug*.

Speaking of tanking, my single-target threat has been WAY up - to the point where I'm stealing threat from our other tanks if I don't watch it - while my AOE threat has been way down, so-so at best. That 6-second cooldown on Swipe is a pain in my arse. Tab-targeting helps, but having the Pulverize buff fully powered helps as well, and you need to consume 3 stacks of Lacerate to get there, which requires focusing on one target. I still don't have a good handle on how to get and hold AOE threat, but I also realize that I might not have that until Cata comes and we get Thrash.

In completely unrelated matters, I finally completed the holiday uber-meta. Picked a candy bucket in Telaar and got Achievement spammed... Got my Violet Proto-Drake and danced in the... wait, I already spent 5k gold to get 310% flying. blizz can I have my 5k back? See, what I was reading over the past few weeks (sorry, I'm a bad blogger and don't have sources to link, it's been too long and I don't remember where I read them to begin with, but Wowwiki confirms it) said that if you already had a 310% speed mount, you got Master Flying for free, but this was not true if you gained the mount afterward. So, I spent my 5k, and then heard afterward that enough people complained about the holiday meta that they changed it so that it granted the Master flying skill. Thus I curse my impatience but please Blizzard give me my 5k back.

Anyway.... cheers!

Pre-Cata 4.0 Bear Thoughts

2010-10-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

So my guild went in to ICC 25 this week a day late due to the patch, to try to relearn on the go how the game is played, so I got a good look at how to do things bear-wise until Dec. 7th. I was actually pleasantly surprised with a few things, but I thought I'd roll that in to how to Bear in patch 4.0!

I'll cover all of the abilities in more complete detail in a later set of posts...

But first off, here is the spec I went with for my first go around...

Bear Build for 4.0!

Without the points to get to Perseverance (which I'll want at 85), I actually had one more point to use in the Feral tree than I will when I get that far. We'll have 5 more points then, 2 of which will be in Natural Shapeshifter to get to Tier 2 resto, 3 in Perseverance, and I will find 1 point from somewhere (current odds are to take one out of Stampede) at that point for Master Shapeshifter... but we'll see.

For now... that looks like a solid build. I have all the points in everything I want in the Feral tree, plus Heart of the Wild. I personally don't think it would be bad, while using 4p t10 armor, to put 3 points in King of the Jungle to enhance Enrage even further for in-combat use, but excepting the tier bonus there's no reason to put points there at all.

On a side note, the tooltip for the four piece bonus to t10 armor still reads that "Enrage no longer reduces your armor and instead..." I'm hoping they actually updated the mechanic so that it doesn't make you take extra damage, because Enrage no longer reduces armor anyway. Even if they didn't, the bonus makes you take less damage, and more than overcomes the extra damage you take from Enrage anyway, so... I guess it all works out. Anyway, back to the task at hand.

Tanking seemed... a little clunky to me. Times were, the only rotationally used abilities Bears had on cooldowns were FFF and Mangle. Now we've added Swipe and Maul to the mix, and given us an ability that wants us to build up Lacerate stacks, then remove them, AND an ability that wants us to have Lacerate ticking all the time.

So, in short, there's more buttons for us to press, and more limitations in how and when to press them. To make matters worse, Maul and Swipe both now cost 30 rage (although Swipe's rage cost is supposed to be coming down, and word is they're reducing the threat generation to match, but keeping the cooldown.) I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with that change - the 6 second cooldown on Swipe is a royal pain - but at least we'll be able to use Swipe at the beginning of a pull for initial aggro now.

I found myself doing things distinctively different for single-target and AOE pulls, which was... not entirely true previously. For single-target, Mangle and FFF followed by Maul. Maul and Mangle when off cooldown, fill in the space with Lacerates until 3 stacks, then Pulverize. If you have the Pulverize buff up, 3 stacks of Lacerate, and Maul and Mangle are on cooldown... FFF again. If that's also on cooldown... then Swipe, or consider Pulverizing to refresh the buff duration. Doing this, I've been putting out comparatively massive threat - typically outpacing our DK and Warrior tanks. Of course, maybe they just don't have their rotations down yet, or maybe I had rogue/hunter threat help, I don't know for sure.

For AOE pulls, I tended to start out with Lacerate, Pulverize immediately to have some buff up, then Swipe. From there, I was tab-target Maul, Mangle, and Lacerate wherever I needed threat. Swipe when off cooldown, and Pulverize whenever I could a) eat more stacks of Lacerate than the current buff had, or b) the buff was about to fall off. I found myself sometimes having no issues with rage at all, and sometimes being rage-starved it seemed no matter what I did. Either way, I was getting compliments from several folks on our run with doing awesome threat. One player who has regularly had issues with generating just a little too much threat said he was going all-out and couldn't catch me. Again, maybe I had help, but that certainly gave me some confidence.

All in all I didn't have many problems with threat generation, and when I did they seemed to be tied to rage starvation.

On the downside, the first night we got to Saurfang and had to stop because the door was bugged and wouldn't open after he died. The second night, we killed Rotface before giving up because several of our players were having bug issues with the raid instances - getting dropped out of the instance, not being able to come back in, WoW crashing when they came in, WoW crashing when they were summoned - just generally annoying bugs. I hope they get it all fixed soon.

I haven't had a lot of chances to cat yet, but I have a few thoughts I'll share when I get the time to. As for my last post about it, I realized later I did my dummy testing after they buffed us a little bit. Anyway, happy hunting!

The Death of the Cat

2010-10-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

... is, I think, over-exaggerated.

Ghostcrawler has posted that it's a little low, and they'll address it, but I was able (without an exceptional amount of optimization, I might add) to pull 7.9k on the dummy with only Mark of the Wild as buffs...

Then again, that's lower than what I used to be able to do.

Oh well, I'll post up with my full opinions when I get a chance. Bear and Cat spec, and I have an idea at a hybrid but it might be a little brutal.

Do Blog Posts Have Expiration Dates?

2010-09-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

I was skimming over some of my old posts and realized how out of date the information in them is, even though it was written within the expansion that's about to end. Part of it is due to changes during the expansion, part of it is due to my growth and experience as a player, and part of it is due to changes in the itemization of gear. At the least, my spec has changed a bit because of changes to Mangle and I have a different opinion about a few spec choices than I did before, even if I haven't yet spent the gold to change them, but since the blog is not simultaneously both clairvoyant and auto-updating, well, this info hasn't made it into written word yet.

On a completely unrelated note, a clairvoyant, auto-updating blog would be simultaneously awesome and horrendous. It would certainly cut down on writing time, but some thoughts should never be let out of the cage.

But, with the imminent Cataclysm, I think I'm going to wait until then to completely rework any guides. It seems kind of pointless, so the only *current* info I'll still be putting up has to do with raiding until Cata comes and I get the chance to play with the new toys.

I hope my guides, even though out of date, will still serve some use to folks. As such they'll be kept up but marked to indicate that they've passed their expiration date.

While I think reworking them would be great, I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to write out that type of guide, especially with five levels to gain before I have access to everything.

With all that said, there are a LOT of changes coming, and I felt it would be a good time to build everything from the base up. I think it will be good for both new players and old to reexamine what we know about how to play a Druid. In accordance with this goal, I'll be stepping through key abilities new and old to talk about what they do, how they work, how they're useful to us, and what do we need to consider about WHEN to use them. Since it's getting one of the biggest overhauls, I'll start with Maul and move on from there.

At the moment, I plan on focusing on Feral abilities. Resto doesn't seem to be getting quite as big an overhaul as Feral, and I don't expect to have any practical experience with it any time soon, so I think I'm going to hold off on that for now.

Of course I'll also discuss talent trees and all the choices therein, but those I don't feel like touching until the info is final.

Lastly, it is my sincere hope to find some time before Cataclysm drops to work on the style of the page. Blogger's template works, it gets the job done, but... it's so bland and basic. Thus I intend to find the time to work out some changes. That's kinda low on the totem pole right now though, so don't hold your breath.

On Babies and Crying

2010-09-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

Days like today are what I expected when I first learned I would be a father. The upside is that they've happened FAR less often than I expected, and I'm so very glad for that.

The suckiest thing I've had to deal with so far about having a baby is that when there's something wrong they can't tell you what it is, because they only have about four or five responses to stimuli, and really only varying degrees of one response to negative stimuli.

When they're happy they'll smile and laugh and play with things. When they're content they'll be calm and look around and observe things. When they're tired they'll rub their eyes.

But when they cry, sometimes there's not much you can do to figure out what's wrong, because they cry whenever anything is wrong, and my baby is no different.

When she's too tired and fighting sleep, she cries. When she's hungry, she cries. When she's constipated or gassy, she cries. When she gets her foot caught in the rails of her crib, she cries. When she has a headache, she cries. When she has an ear infection, she cries. When she has a fever, she cries. When her gums or teeth hurt because she's teething, she cries.

Sure, some of those we can usually figure out - we can check her temperature, we know when she's being fed an how much, we can watch her on the monitor and see that she's in the middle of her crib. But at her age, since she's started teething, it's kind of a roll of the dice trying to figure out what is causing her to fuss if we've ruled out the obvious.

Getting back to today... I had about 3-4 hours of sleep last night. The largest uninterrupted period was around two to two and a half hours. She woke up and fussed and fussed for about an hour until we got her settled enough to go back to sleep, then she slept for that two-ish hours and woke up again and refused to go back to sleep without laying on Mom or Dad's chest to prop her up a little bit.

All because of a little ear infection.

So I'm at work for the afternoon, but I'm only tackling easy stuff because I can barely concentrate enough to do anything worthwhile. This post is about the most coherent thing I can muster.

Thankfully, she usually sleeps through the night and this is only the second time she's been sick. I can count on one hand the number of times since she turned 6 weeks old she's not slept through the night. But that doesn't help me feel any better today.

To all the parents out there who love and care for their children, I salute you for your effort and hope that the days like today has been for me are few and far between for you...

The Lich King

2010-09-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

... Also known as Prince Arthas Menethil.

Our first attempts came this week, and our progress was up and down, to say the least. The good news is that we got through the first phase and transition, and got to see the defiles and val'kyr a few times. The bad news is that we did not continually progress, and of our ~10 attempts the 4th or 5th was our best attempt.

The only oddity in our strategy was that I stayed in my bear spec and gear, to be able to have a 3rd tank available for certain parts of the fight. Most notably, it allows us to have 2 tanks available to handle raging spirits during the transition back to fighting the Lich King, allowing our MT to focus solely on getting back to the right spot with Arthas rather than having to worry about a Raging Spirit at the same time.

Although I'm not 100% certain it's necessary and I suspect we will not use that angle when we make our successful run, I do think it is extremely helpful while we are learning the fight, because it slightly increases our success rate in that transition. The downside is that it cripples my DPS during the portions that I'm trying to cat form, with me beating out only the tanks at that point.

We had a LOT of trouble, the times we got to see defiles and Val'kyr, with both proper handling of defiles AND DPS getting the Val'kyr down. Unfortunately we only got to see that a time or two. We had some odd wipes in the first phase and during transition and although we were getting better again at the end we had lost our momentum and then ran out of time.

We are resetting next week, to allow, especially for our less-well-geared members, a chance at some more gear and a heaping load of badges, as well as getting us 8 more Sanctification tokens.

I should probably write something other than our raid updates eh?

What can I say it's a convenient topic.

Internet Dragons

2010-09-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

EA is killing those internet dragons!

It took us most of the night and 4 wipes (a couple to frustrating lack-of-movement mistakes), but we had good DPS all around and killed Sindragosa dead with time to spare on the last run.

We tanked her turned to the right as you face from the door out to her ledge. Run to the stairs when she pulls you in, run to the stairs when she starts her air phase. The five marked players spread out along the bottom step just far enough not to take too much damage from the ice tombs coming down. DPS the tombs at the proper speed so that they come down just after the last ice bomb from her. Stop DPS after 4 or 5 stacks of Chilled to the Bone and let it fall off. Wash, rinse, repeat. Move to Phase 2.

That part we had pretty well down, except for one frustrating oops during the ice tombs that entombed nearly half the raid.

We struggled mostly, on 3 of our 4 wipes, with not losing players during the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2. But once we figured it out we were fine. Start by the back leg. Person with mark move to the front and get ice blocked, THEN everybody follow. Get behind, drop Mystic Buffet and DPS the tomb, then back on Sindy near the front leg. Marked player run to the back leg and get tombed. Everybody except half the melee DPS (we only had 5, so it was easy) run to the tomb, drop stacks, and kill the tomb. Player with mark run to the front, get tombed, and everybody except the OTHER half the melee DPS do the tomb thing again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Even on the winning run we had a couple of mistakes - one of our ice tombs ended up behind her tail and left for dead, and we'd lost enough folks by the end that our marked players were just instructed to get the heck away from everybody else before getting tombed, and left in the tombs to die. But in the end it was another victory for EA, another step to finishing ICC before the Cataclysm reshapes WoW.

On to other news...

Although I don't heal at the moment I've kept up with tree-like Druid news. I hate the current implementation in beta of Tree of Life, but I don't think I'm alone in that. What I actually wanted to mention was about the Restoration Mastery.

In it's original incarnation, the Restoration Mastery provided extra healing to your HoT spells if they had lower HP *when the HoT was cast*. This caused quite a stir in the resto community, as well it should have - it's exquisitely terribad. When the proverbial fecal matter hits the proverbial air movement device, the last thing we want to be casting on a player is a HoT. It may be more mana efficient over the length of its application, but it doesn't get the player healed NOW, which is what is needed at that time. Combine that with Blizzard's push to get us to stop blanketing with HoTs and you have a recipe for disaster.

On a side note, it actually wouldn't have been an awful Mastery if they had allowed it to recalculate for each tick. I think that would have encouraged thoughtful proactive pre-hotting without giving too much benefit to raid blanketing... but I digress.

The Mastery now provides additional healing to our spells cast on players who already have a HoT ticking on them. This is most beneficial, IMO, to give us some more oomph as tank healers, as the tanks will *always* have HoTs ticking on them. It also happens to discourage clipping, which I'll explain in a minute. What it really allows is for the better healers to cast a Rejuv or other HoT on a target we expect to take damage, then when the damage hits and we need that extra oomph the HoT is already there to boost our heals. I like it.

About the clipping thing? Yeah, so if you are healing the tank, and you cast a Rejuv to boost the rest of your heals, and then you start a Lifebloom stack, it becomes important not to clip the Rejuv, since you'll only refresh the original, not recognize that there are already HoTs ticking. This is true on the rest of the raid, but not quite as important as on the tank. Once it falls off, you can reapply and get the boost because the Lifebloom is ticking... Which, when you refresh, will still be getting its bonuses.

I haven't seen nearly as detailed information about Feral Masteries, but I really like the fact that (at least at the moment) shifting forms allows us to shift our masteries. We still can't shift gear, but it should help with those fights were we want/need to be able to do both roles...

As for Arthas... you better bring it, buddy. Go big or go home. EA's coming for you.

Invading the Dragon's Lair

2010-09-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

For the first time on 25-man, Epic Adventurers assaulted Sindragosa in her lair this week.

Although we were ultimately unsuccessful, it was a valiant attempt, and from what I understand we did *very* well for being our first ever 25-man attempt.

In our initial two attempts, we had ice blocked folks spread out across the bottom of the stairs. We learned fairly quickly that they were too spread out in the positions we had them - it was too difficult for the DPS to get all the ice blocks down quickly enough. We moved them in a little closer - just barely far enough apart to prevent them from killing each other when the blocks come down - and we were mostly successful at that portion of the fight. It helped that we had 4-5 druids along (one traded in for a sick hunter in the middle) and 3 shamans, so lots of brezzing.

Other than that, it all essentially came down to execution - don't get too many stacks of damage, kill the ice tombs quickly, and DON'T STAND IN THE RAID when you are targeted for an ice block. We only wiped once to that - we all had a good laugh, because it was an epic wipe-causing mistake. Oddly enough, we determined at this point that if everybody outside the ice tombs dies, the boss and tombs despawn and those in the tombs don't die.

We showed good progress the entire night, with the exception of the ice block incident. By the time we had had enough, we had reached and gotten mostly through the final phase - she had around a million HP left on the last wipe of the night, and the raid leader had called for us to ignore the ice-blocked folks and just burn Sindy as hard as we could. Unfortunately we'd lost too many to gradual attrition at that point, and couldn't keep enough people alive any longer.

Based on our progress, we've been told we may extend the lockout - little more time for a few more shots and I think she would have gone down, and then we can spend time learning the LK fight. I'm impressed with our first night in, although I think 3 nights of raiding in a row might just kill me if we have to keep it up more than a few weeks.

The Final Push

2010-09-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

.... or the beginning of the end! Or something like that.

Our guild leader has declared that we are making the final push to kill Arthas on our 25-man raids. We are ceasing all alt activity on progression raids (we had been allowing alts through the gunship, then through deathwhisper when we began doing heroic lootship), and are scheduling a 3rd night every week in addition to more serious usage of lockouts to extend raids week to week.

With everything we've been hearing about anticipated dates for Cataclysm, it was decided that this is the time to make a serious push to complete the end game raid of Wrath.

On our first night this week we smashed everything we took a shot at, with the exception of one wipe on Blood Council due to failure to avoid AOE around black balls. Our second night, we have PP, BQL, and Dreamwalker still to go among bosses we have successfully defeated. We hope to get those three and have a go at Sindragosa on the second night.

I didn't post about it last week, but IMO we took a step back - we had a couple of failures on Dreamwalker and took 7 tries to down BQL. I'm hoping that the renewed focus on actually progressing will give folks the oomph to have clean attempts on the second night, and get down, for the first time, everything we have already downed, all in one week.

It's time for us to quit goofing around and get it done!

Reclaiming Gnomeregan

2010-09-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

The quest chain to reclaim Gnomeregan opened up this week...

Does this mean Cataclysm is imminent?

Inquiring minds want to know!

From what I've heard is going on in the beta I would suspect it's still a fair distance out, but the release of this quest chain would indicate it's closer than I had expected.

Need more time to down the Lich King!

The Alt Club

2010-09-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Rambly post is rambly, about alts and paladins and tanking and dps and gearscore and another baby and I don't know where I'm going with this but hey it'll be fun.

It seems like everybody in my guild has at least 5 or 6 level 80 alts. I have 10 characters on Baelgun, but my reduced play time due to marriage and baby has meant that my alt-o-holic ways have been curtailed almost entirely.

Lately, though, since Kaethir has basically reached the point that even frost badges are useful for nothing except primordial saronites for LW patterns, or down-ranking for gems or heirloom gear, I have taken the time to work on my highest alt, Alrom, instead of repeating the same random dungeons with a supremely over-geared tank every morning. A week or so ago, he finally reached the level 80 plateau, and started the rep/gear/badge/daily grind. *Dance time* I have finally joined the Alt Club!

I have made no secret of the fact that one of the things I love most about playing a Druid is the versatility of being able to play whatever role I choose (provided of course that I have the gear, spec, etc. available at the time. It should be no surprise, then, that my first alt is from the only other class in the game that is capable of all 3 major raid roles, a paladin. A dwarf, which I suppose is a little odd for most players, but, well, there it is.

Being a fresh level 80 with essentially a few quest blues and greens and 3 pieces of heirloom gear to his name, I have been queuing as ret with him, dealing with the longer queue times in order to be a contributing member of the group rather than a severe liability. I suffered, the first few days as an 80, from being limited to normal dungeons due to Blizzard's insistence that you have a GS in the 2500-ish range before you get to go into a heroic dungeon. Once I picked up a couple of decent low-level pieces and bought my first T9 piece, however, the heroic queue opened up for me and off I went!

Melee DPS as a paladin instead of a kitty is a world of difference. No button-mashing, no energy management, no worrying about clipping a DoT, no worrying about losing a buff or a debuff or any of the other 100 things a kitty has to worry about. Just hit whichever ability is left-most on my bar and not on cooldown. If I've managed to flub that up and nothing is off cooldown at the moment, hit Divine Plea. Wash, rinse, repeat. Watch things die. It's so easy and smooth it's sickening. Of course, maybe that's because I'm in a heroic with overgeared players and it doesn't matter that I can't get above 2k DPS yet. Heck, 1.5k most of the time.

By the way, that notoriously long queue as a DPS? Meh. 8-10 minutes is the worst I've seen. That's still forever, compared to sub-30 seconds as a tank, but come on. Half the time I queue up, take a flight path, do one Tournament Daily, take another flight path and the queue hits before I land. I suppose in today's 'gogogo' world where 20 seconds is too much time to wait, most people would be upset. Me? I'm more than happy, even though I can't tank yet and that's really what I want to do.

I have been working up a prot set and spec in the meantime, and although I'm not there yet being a lot of times the only player in a group that is still actually pulling upgrades from heroics, it is moving quickly. I need to get Kaethir off his furry rear end long enough to buy and cut a couple of gems for Al, for the pieces that I don't expect to be replaced within a week or so (like that prot t9 piece I bought), and take the energy to find an enchanter to put something, anything, on those pieces I'm bothering with gems for. I'm not even really close to the 535 defense I'm told I need for heroics, but once I get there, look out, there'll be a fail-pally tank on the loose.

Since I don't want to be a total fail-tank when I do get to delve into heroic tanking, I have been taking some of my questing time to put on all my prot stuff and see how it works. It's quite painful, in some respects. Part of a prot pally's mana regen is based on incoming heals - which you don't get running around solo. I am satisfied with the survivability, but the loss of DPS just makes soloing too slow to be much fun, so I am only going to be soloing as prot to make sure I keep my weapon skills at a reasonable level with whichever weapon is currently my best prot weapon.

Tanking also seems a little more smooth with a paladin to me, but then, I haven't been put in a situation where I really have to use all the paladin's tools yet. It is a little overwhelming how much is available when things go wrong - hands, seals, hammers, etc. - compared to the bear's available responses, which are: bash, growl, and make myself harder to kill. I suppose on one level it's easier to bear tank, because when stuff goes wrong you just do more of what you were already doing anyway. Of course, I'm probably just blowing hot electrons because this will all be moot come Cataclysm anyway, but still.

Awhile back, I wrote a post wondering about what I would do with Alrom once I got him to level 80. Turns out he's going to be doing the same things Kaethir does, except while wearing plate, casting spells, and wielding weapons, instead of fur, roars, and claws. I suppose there's some psychological or metaphorical connection I should be making here, but at the moment the only thing that comes to mind is that I like tanking, I like damage meters, and I like hitting things. Or maybe it's more that I'd rather do that than play whack-a-mole. Or whack-a-not-green-bar. Whatever.

I do still enjoy healing, and I may in the future trade in one of my pally specs for a holy one to find out what it's like. Frankly, not being able to be a proactive healer frightens me, but in a heroic I don't expect slow reaction times to lead to wipes, and I don't intend to use this character in raids except, maybe, for the occasional weekly raid quest or alt-able portion of our guild raids. Time will tell.

On a completely non-WoW-related post, my wife is pregnant again, or so the little peed-on stick tells us. Some people seem to think that we are crazy, but I like the idea of having our first two kids so close together. My wife insists that we'll be waiting for awhile after this one before trying again, even though she's the one that wanted a big family when we started this whole shindig. I can't help but think that she said that last time and, well, look where we are now. Not that I'm complaining, I like fatherhood. Here's to hoping my second child is as happy and easy to take care of as my first.

I don't know if it was fun for you, but it was fun for me! Wwwhheeeeeeeeee!

Milestones

2010-09-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

I realized only a short while ago that my blog was approaching it's 100th post.

Then I forgot about it and went on with life for awhile.

Lo and behold, when I went to post this morning's content, I realized that it WAS the 100th post... YAY!

It's taken me over 10 months to get here, and I would not have been able to find the desire to go on if it wasn't for the folks that come by and read and occasionally drop a comment on some of my inane ramblings.

Thanks for everything, I apologize if I have damaged your sanity, I hope you've found something enjoyable, funny, informative, or entertaining, and I look forward to the next 100!

*party*

Cataclysm Glyph Changes

2010-09-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Keeva for making the first post I saw about this.

I've lamented before about the role of hybrids in WoW, and the fact that despite playing the single most versatile class in the game, I am not any more versatile than any other player during a raid - I am locked into my spec, gear, and glpyhs, and even with the most closely related pair - dual feral - I cannot effectively switch between the two during a fight, because even if I make the spec changes to have the minimum required talents for each, I can't change the glyphs or gear that push each into the realm of competitive with other classes.

The blue post announced that glpyhs will no longer be consumable - once learned, they will be interchangeable and available in the glyphs interface. While it doesn't address some of my issues with hybrid-ness, I do see great possibilities from it.

With this announcement... well, we still can't change things mid-fight, *but* we will, I think, be able to share one spec and carry only gear (not stacks and stacks of glyphs) to switch back and forth, and have a sliding bar of how far we can go from one spec to the other that is easy (relatively) to manage, rather than requiring multiple addons and piles of glyphs to keep up with.

In my personal case, it *might* allow me to revert to a feral/resto spec setup. If it's not too hard to get required talents for both from the talent tree, I can change glyphs when needed, and I'm already carrying 3 gear sets around at all times.

Maybe I'm being a little optimistic, and maybe I'm reading a little too much into this announcement, but this has me even more excited than I already was for Cataclysm. I just hope EA has had the time to work out killing the Lich King by then.

Teaching the Professor

2010-09-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

The only term I could use to properly define the Professor Putricide fight is controlled chaos.

On second thought, I'm not so sure about the controlled part.

We had faced him a few times before, but without much success, never making it to phase 3 and making it through the transition from phase 1 to phase 2 cleanly only a couple of times.

This week was destined to be different...

We smashed through the Lower Spire and Putricide's two... "sons" on the first night without much difficulty. This has been a regular ritual for us for a couple of months now, and the second night started out with a roll through the princes and their queen, and we moved on to the Professor. We've been skipping Dreamwalker the past few weeks even though we've healed her successfully a few times. Our successful strategy has involved 4 tanks, and we've been down two of our regular progression tanks and one of our backups has been spotty on attendance. Since adding me into the mix we have 4 regular progression tanks, with an extremely solid backup Paladin tank and a serviceable backup Druid for a total of 6 tanks geared enough to fill at least an OT slot. Take out 3... and we don't have the tankage necessary. I suppose at this point we might be able to do it with 2 or 3 tanks (putting our best one by himself on one side for the 3 tank setup...) but that's the raid leader's job to decide, not mine.

Where was I? Oh yes, Putricide.

Our typical MT and raid leader took the Abom - I don't have any experience with it and I think it gives him less to pay attention to so he can better direct the raid. I controlled the Professor himself, and our backup Druid - who is usually specced Balance for most of our raids, and is an excellent Boomkin at that - stayed feral but went cat form until the 3rd phase. This was the role I had on our previous attempts, when we had one of our other main progression tanks with us.

Unfortunately I'm turning into an old man, and our report isn't up yet so I can't check it to remember exactly how many times we wiped... but we made it to the 3rd phase if not every time then almost. I know we wiped once to debuff stack buildup (and my craptastic hardware crashing...) and we wiped once more due, in essence, to poor handling of Putricide by us tanks not moving him properly.

We did have an issue on 2-3 of our attempts with having an ooze or gas cloud up during the shift to 3rd phase, which draws DPS away from the boss, giving his slime puddles time to grow. Probably not coincidentally, our successful run had no slime up (and no slime puddles up!) at the time of the shift.

Malleable goos on me were occasionally a problem, but we got that worked out.

In the end, of course, we taught the professor a lesson. What it is, beyond "don't mess with us or we'll let you kill us a few times before we kill you," well, that I don't know.

We had been planning on locking out next week to have more time for attempts on Putricide and maybe Sindragosa, but after a vote revealed a decent chunk of folks that still want/need the gear and marks from the bosses we've downed we decided that we'll do a fresh run next week.

On the upside there is actually some gear to be had for me. One of our raiders took a sojourn through another guild to get a LK kill and then came back, opening up our ability to do heroic lootship, which we did succesfully this week (even though we were all dead at the end). Unfortunately, I lost the roll by 1 to a rogue on the heroic version of Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder. Add in all the additional Marks we'll be pulling, and soon I have no doubt we'll be knocking on the Lich King's door.

Onward, Epic Adventurers!

The 75000% bank fee...

2010-08-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

Totally off topic...

So I had a $0.02 check that I had held on to for awhile (since May...) because I didn't really want to spend the time to go to the bank for $0.02. But I got another check I was taking, so I took it to the bank along with me last week, cashed my two checks, and went on my way.

Then last Friday I saw two charges on my account, for $0.02 and $15.00. Fifteen dollars for processing a check that didn't go through, and the two cents for the check itself.

I realize the $15 is a flat fee - but that's 75000% of the check itself.

Fun times.

Once Bitten, Twice Cheesy... and also, MOAR DOTS!

2010-08-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I can't help myself with the cheesy achievement title ripoffs for post titles.

One week after our first ever BQL kill, we downed her again - this time I was DPSing, and picked up the Achievement for being both bitten and not. Despite this, I was mildly disappointed in the run. Even after we down a boss the first time, I expect the next few times we kill it to continue to be difficult, especially if we rotate in new/less geared/less skilled/whatever players. We did wipe once, due to bite issues and an early DPS death, but the second attempt saw her down with 5s left on the enrage timer - an eternity compared to our first kill - without any real drama. Am I being silly, thinking that it should still be a challenge for another few kills after the first? Or perhaps for thinking that it WASN'T a challenge the second time around? Or maybe even just for being disappointed? I don't know.

Even so, I'm still very pleased. We had issues with disconnects (not during the fight) and such all night, and still managed to deal with things and get the run as far as we were going to get it.

On the upside, since we hadn't got Fester and Rot the first night, we went to do them and I stayed all feline-ish and managed on Fester to place 2nd on our DPS chart. I'm certainly pleased with myself for it - even if a couple of our heavy hitters weren't quite doing what they could, the fact that I was even in the ballpark is impressive to me. Someone who doesn't normally DPS outside of raids, hasn't really DPSed at all in several weeks, and even then was not quite in the top rank having just started doing this a couple of months ago... yeah, I was happy.

I can't remember if I've said it before, and I'm too lazy to go looking through my archives to find out, but pretty much the most difficult thing for me to learn, to get my DPS to the next level, has been that there are times as a Feral Cat that the best thing to do is NOTHING AT ALL.

When I first started, I was unknowingly locked into the idea that the way to increase DPS was to constantly be hitting buttons - obviously, if you're doing something with your energy you're doing more DPS than if you're not, right? And that's true... for every individual second in time. But when you look at the whole...

It becomes a delicate balancing act between available energy, combo points, buffs, and debuffs. It becomes very easy to mash buttons to get MOAR DPS NOW!! but then, in 10 seconds when you need to rebuild your combo points very quickly after your Savage Roar so you don't lose uptime on your Rip, you don't have the energy to Shred in quick succession to do so, and it becomes better to just sit and watch white damage - which should be, by around a 10% margin, the biggest percentage of your DPS anyway - so that when you need that burst, you have the energy to do so.

Something else that it's taken me awhile to really understand is that when the priority system says "keep up Savage Roar" at the top, it really means that we need that buff up no matter what. Don't wait for 5 CP, don't force another ability off first, just make sure that buff stays up, because it buffs every single thing you do. If that means hitting it with 1 CP, so be it - but understand that you're going to need to do it again fairly quickly in that situation, and be prepared for it.

To critique what I did wrong on that fight, that I could do better:

92% uptime on Savage Roar. I spent 21 seconds of the fight without my most important self-buff. Need to be more precise.

91.6% uptime on Rake. 22.5 seconds downtime is too much. I also clipped this several times - poor energy efficiency.

80.1% uptime on Rip. 48 seconds downtime. While it's expected that there will be a *little* more downtime here - you need to build up CP at the beginning of the fight for this - it's still too much downtime. 20% of the fight I didn't have it going. Have to be careful with clipping here as well, although I've noticed that for some reason it occasionally won't let me clip it.

It's hard to tell, in retrospect, if I had proper use of Berserk and Mangle - I only used Mangle twice and we had a couple of warriors who were keeping Trauma up, and I used Berserk the maximum twice allowed by the enrage timer. Given the warriors I probably should have skipped Mangle altogether, although it's entirely possible I just fat-fingered it a couple of times, as it's right next to Shred.

Hope that was a helpful look at things for somebody.

Anyway, I also managed to pick up a couple of pieces to keep my healing set from falling waaaay too far behind, just in case I'm ever called on to really respec for it or I decide its time to go back. Not spending frosties on it, at least not until I have all my crafted patterns bought, but I'm still trying to keep a reasonable set together.

We didn't get a chance to go after PP - we didn't push hard for progression this week. Next week after we down our usual crew we're looking at locking out for a second week, to get good shots at PP and Sindy in.

How to 22-man Lower Spire

2010-08-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Have a regularly-scheduled 25-man raid.

Step 2: Have a couple of your regular players be in the military and get deployed.

Step 3: Have a couple of your regular players get married. To each other! (GRATS to Trukaos and Daphne)

Step 4: Have a couple of your regular players out for a few weeks while they deal with having to move from Kentucky to New Jersey.

Step 5: Have a couple of your regular players take a pre-Cata/RL overload/etc. break.

Step 6: Have one of your regular players have random company at their house.

Step 7: Show up to said regularly-scheduled 25 man raid, with only 22 players available.

Step 8: Love the 30% buff. Faceroll through Saurfang.

Step 9: ???

Step 10: Profit

And then there were two...

2010-08-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

Two bosses between EA and the Lich King.

After a few false starts, tonight the Blood Queen fell to the might of the Epic Adventurers!!

We had wipes at 6m HP left, 4m HP left, and 2m HP left (as well as a couple of "oops the first bite died"), but in the end we were successful.

Nice job everyone, now lets get Putricide and Sindy.

Edit: Now that it's morning, and my brain is caffeinated again...

In the end, of course, it all came down to execution. No DPS deaths due to:

1. Not biting in time.
2. Biting too early (and thus messing up and running away in fear during the NEXT bite phase).
3. Not being able to bite due to location/bug/etc.
4. Standing too close when she makes it rain.
5. Standing in fire.
6. Not getting close fast enough when connected by red lines.

...and only one healer death, who was promptly rebirthed. Our regular crew includes 4 druids; if a battle-rez will fix it, we're usually good.

The only sad part, IMO, is that even with the 30% Strength of Wrynn buff we only had 3 seconds left before her Berserk. Sheesh.

Our 10-man progression crew has killed the Lich King, and from what they've said and what I've read, the Sindragosa and Lich King fights are even more unforgiving of mistakes than this one. It'll be a long hard road, but I'm sure we'll get it done.

I'm on a BOAT!

2010-08-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

*smiles* I stood in the middle of *OUR* boat and swiped/mauled for 5 minutes straight. I guess that's worthy of an achievement? I dunno, but I lol'd anyway.

The Blood Queen escaped last week - some of our team really hasn't figured out how to bite the proper DPS, or stay far enough apart not to die when she rains fire down upon us. Or something like that. In any case, we didn't get as close as we did the week before. But another venture tonight, I hope, will provide the cure!

The good news is that instead of having Dreamwalker and Blood Princes still up, only Dreamwalker remains this week among bosses we have downed. We 24-manned her last week, so even if we are down a player or two I don't expect a problem there this week, and we can spend most of the night working on Blood Queen and/or Putricide.

On a completely unrelated note, my daughter starting teething while we were at GenCon 2 weeks ago. She's got 2 on the bottom, and (we think) one through on the top... and she's been amazingly not hard to deal with the entire time.

Before you know it she'll be driving the boys wild! ;)

Wish us luck

2010-08-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

So I'm back from GenCon all ready to go, we downed our usual Lower Spire + Fester and Rot last night (and on only my 3rd time tanking Rotface, first time on 25, first time truly tanking the slimes!), and we're going in again tonight. We'll probably go after the Princes and then Dreamwalker before giving the Blood Queen another shot.

Last week we wiped with her at 1% and 0.1% (She had 620 HP remaining. Yep.) so I'm confident we'll get her tonight! Wish us luck!

Comings and Goings

2010-08-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

It's fun to have a title for a post that sounds really really interesting but the post is nothing important. Although I don't think I can afford to piss any of my (2) readers off....

Anyway, we had some trouble last week (already down a tank and then my cable went out) so we decided to extend our ICC-25 lock out for this week. Wish us luck - while we've downed (upped?) Dreamwalker once, it's the only boss remaining that we HAVE actually completed.

In other news, this will probably be a lighter-than-usual week for me, since I'm headed off to GenCon with the wife and little one Thursday, and won't be back until Sunday afternoon.

Thanks folks, and I'll be back!

An Open Letter

2010-07-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Insight Communications,

Normally you provide me with excellent internet service.

But when it dies right in the middle of the Dreamwalker fight we still don't have quite to farm status yet, it makes me want to wish your company would die in a fire.

Yours truly,

Kaethir

Edit: In case anyone is assuming I am making a threat, I am doing no such thing, and I understand that outages happen, I am merely expressing frustration and displeasure at the inconvenient (to me) timing of the most recent outage experienced at my house. I am not stupid enough to make threats on the internet.

I AM RENEWED!

2010-07-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

a.k.a. That Stupid Green Dragon, redux.

Inevitably, I post things that are innacurate.

My last post went up early this past Thursday morning at its predetermined time. I tend to use Blogger's post options to set posts to appear a day or two after I write them to give me time to reread and edit them should I find errors or sections that I feel have been written poorly.

An unfortunate consequence of this is that when I post things like status updates about my guild's raids, if I write them early in the week and set them to post Wednesday or Thursday morning, it means that my guild has a chance to prove me wrong.

Such it is that now (Thursday morning as I write this, mere minutes after my previous post went up,) we are no longer stumbling over that stupid green dragon.

The fact is not lost on me that the Strength of Wrynn buff now stands at 30%, which makes several of the fights we would probably STILL be on the edge of beating go from difficult but beatable to laughably easy. One comment that came over vent on Tuesday after we downed Saurfang was, 'remember when this guy was HARD?' It would still be incredibly difficult if we didn't have that buff, I think. It has, IMO, kind of reached the level of insanity, though. I popped Survival Instincts and cracked 116k HP. One hundred sixteen thousand.

Not that I'm really complaining... if it allows us to see content that we would otherwise not be able to even attempt, I'm all for it.

Back to the dragon. We went again with a 4-tank setup with 6 healers, 3 of whom went the portals every time and 3 of whom did not. My little corner of the room had relatively few spawns until the end, and most of them that weren't Suppressors were zombies, so I spent a lot of my time being an agile little angry bear and running around trying not to get too many stacks of Corrosion until the DPS could take care of the zombie. We wiped once due to the DPS curve, and then healed her just as things were starting to get out of hand again.

PROGRESS feels so great.

We moved on to try Putricide instead of the Blood Queen, and while we did get better in general through the night we were unable to succeed in the kill. We seem to be still on the curve of success in the DPS department, and one DPS falling over to an orange slime (Gas Cloud?) or green slime (Volatile Ooze?) kills us in the long run because we can't continue to get them down fast enough to keep damage up on Putricide himself. But much like Blood Queen, we were getting better, and I think that in a few week we'll be working on Sindy.

We have now completed every boss but the main wing bosses (Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa) and the Lich King himself.

RAWR!!

Edit: and this was not supposed to go live until tomorrow morning, but I clicked "Publish" before I set the time. I am a Fail Blogger.

That Stupid Green Dragon

2010-07-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

So in the absence of one of our progression tanks I've had quite a few opportunities over the past month or so to tank on our progression runs. Whatever our leadership had decided was holding me back from at least being a fill-in for our progression tanks has at least to a certain extent been abated, and as near as I can tell, we have our 3 main progression tanks and the 4th (fill-in) spot is run by 3-player committee based on who is available for the run and which role each of them prefers. The short version is that with one of our tanks just now returning from a bit of a hiatus, I've had a lot of chances to do that thing I do.

It's been a heck of a lot of fun.

EA has progressed to the point where we almost always 1-shot the first 6 bosses in ICC (through Saurfang plus Festergut and Rotface), and we've got the Blood Princes down to two shots, max.

I like the Blood Prince fight. There's a lot of insanity going on, but for the most part it's survivable insanity, as long as you are at least mildly situationally aware. I've only had the opportunity to tank the fight once, and I had Keleseth (or Taldaram... whichever one is not the one that requires you to run around collecting balloons... on second thought I *think* it's Taldaram) for the duration. Tanking that prince is a piece of cake. I've also had the opportunity to DPS it a time or two, and it's a bit rough on feral DPS, but it's still fun. Feral Charge comes in handy for target switching.

The past couple of weeks we've taken a couple shots at Putricide and Blood Queen. Putricide was insanity, but we only tried him once or twice. Blood Queen is fun - I think we'll get her in a week or two with a few more upgrades and a bit of patience and another couple times to figure out how all that biting stuff works.

We are, however, still stumbling over healing the Dreamwalker, which we've been putting the most work into over the past month and a half or so. We've tried going healer-heavy (which failed miserably), we've tried taking in a 2-tank team with normal healer count (which did even worse), and I think we've finally settled on a plan we believe will work - she was healed to 91% on our best attempt.

We went light 1 healer (bringing 6), and went with four tanks, one specifically for each doorway. The added tanks gives us better control over the adds as well as the opportunity to have a little extra time to handle adds because they're beating on a tank instead of DPS or heals. We are *slightly* slower downing the adds, but since we have the extra tanks it's not quite as big a deal. It does seem to matter more when a DPS dies (as we are more on the edge of the DPS curve for survivability), but it matters a little less for most of the adds to die quite as quickly. I am hopeful that we'll have this fight down within a couple of weeks as well.

That's the state of EA progression raids. Hope everything's going well with your guild's raids.

Entry Number Two

2010-07-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

I seem to have avoided asshatery in my Random Dungeons, for the most part. Perhaps it's the times I'm running them, perhaps it's that I typically run with 1-3 guildmates, or perhaps it's my sunny disposition, but typically the worst I've had to deal with is people that are a little slightly overeager and are willing to slow down if they die once or twice.

Saturday, however, I was running a random and apparently found the Worst Rogue Ever (tm).

I was running with no guild members this day and got dropped into a fresh Nexus run - piece of cake, right? ... Right? Oh the immortal Warning Signs.... before we've even really had time to buff, the rogue is running off saying "go go go!"

We progressed through the Horde Commander and up the tunnel towards Ms. Many-of-Me-Deal-With-It. The rogue was generally being annoying, pushing the limits of idiocy that I allow in groups I tank for. Once he pulled while we were still fighting a group (I think/assume, I was busy tanking and didn't see who pulled) but it wasn't an issue due to the rest of the group. He attacked the last frozen enemy well before I was even in the area. Since he did this quite deliberately, I skipped my typical warning and went right to "you pull it, you tank it" mode... which didn't matter because he essentially stun-locked it until it died.

We cleared the group at the top of the tunnel, and I used FFF to pull the group from inside the boss's room... shortly after which, the rogue aggro'd the two groups on the far side of the room that no group has killed since it was realized that you don't have to. Unfortunately, the idiot rogue got them over towards us and then Vanished... and people took a LOT of damage (including one dead DPS) before I realized what had happened and Swiped. The rogue died shortly thereafter (thankfully) but the healer was a bit undergeared... and combine that with myself trying to get used to a new unit frames addon (Shadowed UF) and I missed my defensive cooldowns and we wiped.

Intensely irritated at this point, but still just wanting to finish the instance, I told the entire group to let the tank (ME!) pull. The rogue spouted off with something, at which point I pointed out that he was the one who had pulled multiple groups (and to be fair, I think I called him a name which might have vaguely insulted his intelligence). I found the response back of "NO U!" to be bothersomely childish, so I proceeded to add him to my Ignore list and attempt to continue on.

When we got back in and buffed and ready to proceed, I once again FFF'd the remaining mobs from the boss room. Watching carefully this time, I saw the rogue go attempt to pull the other two groups... which promptly killed him and returned to their locations. Oddly determined to continue on this course of action, the other 4 players downed the adds and went after the boss.

Partway through (during her second split), the rogue made it back to us... and pulled those two groups into the room. I found out at this point, that you cannot vote-kick while (a) in combat or (b) during loot rolls. More prepared for asshatery at this point, I was able to collect the mobs and keep them under control until the sane members of our DPS crew could down them.... and then we found out that, for reasons unknown, we could not kick this idiot for another 15 minutes.

Determined to press on, we attempted to continue. When the rogue proved that he intended to continue causing as much disruption as he could (pulling a group and tricks-of-the-trade to the healer!) we backed off a bit and all basically said "BRB 15 mins" and stopped doing anything.

He left after 10, wasting 10 more minutes of our time.

I actually kind of feel sorry for that pally healer; the replacement DPS that came in told him to stop hitting this and worry only about healing and was generally just a butthead - but at least he didn't deliberately try to get us killed.

In any case... Åries of Emerald Dream... you are my Asshat of the Day

Thoughts on the First Beta Rebuild of Talent Trees

2010-07-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Of course, the first day after I finally post some thoughts about the changes to Cataclysm talent trees, MMO Champion gets ahold of the first pass at redoing the talent trees.

I went over and took a gander at it. I'm still cautiously optimistic, but the hope that my optimism isn't misplaced has taken a hit.

EEEEEEwwwww....

I understand that this is a first pass, and it's a bit harder for Druids, and feral Druids especially, but oh lord did they rip our trees to shreds.

Blizzard stated one of their goals to be making each choice count while still allowing some flexibility - as I see it, there is very, VERY little flexibility in the Druid trees that are currently in Beta - in fact there are only, give or take, two to three points that can even be in the discussion to move as a Bear tank, and we are forced to take kitty talents to even get to that point... and a big part of the issue is requiring 5 points to get to the next tier each tier... if the requirement were slightly lower (say, 3 points?) it would actually allow us to select the talents we really want as opposed to those we HAVE to take to get to the next tier. Heck with the way the trees were shown there, you could have the second tier require 3, the third require 7, the fourth require 12, the fifth require 18, and so on, or maybe even just 3/10/15/etc....

Plus... Mangle at Level 10??? Interesting choice... should take a lot of the pain of low-level levelling away...

Blah. I suck at writing today. What do you think?

Cataclysm Talent Changes

2010-07-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

Likely by now you've already seen the blue post, but just in case you haven't, here it is, along with a link to the source:

When we first announced our design goals for class talent trees back at BlizzCon 2009, one of our major stated focuses was to remove some of the boring and "mandatory" passive talents. We mentioned that we wanted talent choices to feel more flavorful and fun, yet more meaningful at the same time. Recently, we had our fansites release information on work-in-progress talent tree previews for druids, priests, shaman, and rogues. From those previews and via alpha test feedback, a primary response we heard was that these trees didn’t incorporate the original design goals discussed at BlizzCon. This response echoes something we have been feeling internally for some time, namely that the talent tree system has not aged well since we first increased the level cap beyond level 60. In an upcoming beta build, we will unveil bold overhauls of all 30 talent trees.

Talent Tree Vision

One of the basic tenets of Blizzard game design is that of “concentrated coolness.” We’d rather have a simpler design with a lot of depth, than a complicated but shallow design. The goal for Cataclysm remains to remove a lot of the passive (or lame) talents, but we don’t think that’s possible with the current tree size. To resolve this, we're reducing each tree to 31-point talents. With this reduction in tree size we need to make sure they're being purchased along a similar leveling curve, and therefore will also be reducing the number of total talent points and the speed at which they're awarded during the leveling process.

As a result, we can keep the unique talents in each tree, particularly those which provide new spells, abilities or mechanics. We’ll still have room for extra flavorful talents and room for player customization, but we can trim a great deal of fat from each tree. The idea isn’t to give players fewer choices, but to make those choices feel more meaningful. Your rotations won’t change and you won’t lose any cool talents. What will change are all of the filler talents you had to pick up to get to the next fun talent, as well as most talents that required 5 of your hard-earned points.

We are also taking a hard look at many of the mandatory PvP talents, such as spell pushback or mechanic duration reductions. While there will always be PvP vs. PvE builds, we’d like for the difference to be less extreme, so that players don’t feel like they necessarily need to spend their second talent specialization on a PvP build.

The Rise of Specialization

We want to focus the talent trees towards your chosen style of gameplay right away. That first point you spend in a tree should be very meaningful. If you choose Enhancement, we want you to feel like an Enhancement shaman right away, not thirty talent points later. When talent trees are unlocked at level 10, you will be asked to choose your specialization (e.g. whether you want to be an Arms, Fury or Protection warrior) before spending that first point. Making this choice comes with certain benefits, including whatever passive bonuses you need to be effective in that role, and a signature ability that used to be buried deeper in the talent trees. These abilities and bonuses are only available by specializing in a specific tree. Each tree awards its own unique active ability and passives when chosen. The passive bonuses range from flat percentage increases, like a 20% increase to Fire damage for Fire mages or spell range increases for casters, to more interesting passives such as the passive rage regeneration of the former Anger Management talent for Arms warriors, Dual-Wield Specialization for Fury warriors and Combat rogues, or the ability to dual-wield itself for Enhancement shaman.

The initial talent tree selection unlocks active abilities that are core to the chosen role. Our goal is to choose abilities that let the specializations come into their own much earlier than was possible when a specialization-defining talent had to be buried deep enough that other talent trees couldn’t access them. For example, having Lava Lash and Dual-Wield right away lets an Enhancement shaman feel like an Enhancement shaman. Other role-defining examples of abilities players can now get for free at level 10 include Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Shield Slam, Mutilate, Shadow Step, Thunderstorm, Earth Shield, Water Elemental, and Penance.

Getting Down to the Grit

Talent trees will have around 20 unique talents instead of today's (roughly) 30 talents, and aesthetically will look a bit more like the original World of Warcraft talent trees. The 31-point talents will generally be the same as the 51-point talents we already had planned for Cataclysm. A lot of the boring or extremely specialized talents have been removed, but we don't want to remove anything that’s going to affect spell/ability rotations. We want to keep overall damage, healing, and survivability roughly the same while providing a lot of the passive bonuses for free based on your specialization choice.

While leveling, you will get 1 talent point about every 2 levels (41 points total at level 85). Our goal is to alternate between gaining a new class spell or ability and gaining a talent point with each level. As another significant change, you will not be able to put points into a different talent tree until you have dedicated 31 talent points to your primary specialization. While leveling, this will be possible at 70. Picking a talent specialization should feel important. To that end, we want to make sure new players understand the significance of reaching the bottom of their specialization tree before gaining the option of spending points in the other trees. We intend to make sure dual-specialization and re-talenting function exactly as they do today so players do not feel locked into their specialization choice.

A True Mastery

The original passive Mastery bonuses players were to receive according to how they spent points in each tree are being replaced by the automatic passive bonuses earned when a tree specialization is chosen. These passives are flat percentages and we no longer intend for them to scale with the number of talent points spent. The Mastery bonus that was unique to each tree will now be derived from the Mastery stat, found on high-level items, and Mastery will be a passive skill learned from class trainers around level 75. In most cases, the Mastery stats will be the same as the tree-unique bonuses we announced earlier this year. These stats can be improved by stacking Mastery Rating found on high-level items.

To Recap

When players reach level 10, they are presented with basic information on the three specializations within their class and are asked to choose one. Then they spend their talent point. The other trees darken and are unavailable until 31 points are spent in the chosen tree. The character is awarded an active ability, and one or more passive bonuses unique to the tree they've chosen. As they gain levels, they'll alternate between receiving a talent point and gaining new skills. They'll have a 31-point tree to work down, with each talent being more integral and exciting than they have been in the past. Once they spend their 31'st point in the final talent (at level 70), the other trees open up and become available to allocate points into from then on. As characters move into the level 78+ areas in Cataclysm, they'll begin seeing items with a new stat, Mastery. Once they learn the Mastery skill from their class trainer they'll receive bonuses from the stat based on the tree they've specialized in.

We understand that these are significant changes and we still have details to solidify. We feel, however, that these changes better fulfill our original class design goals for Cataclysm, and we're confident that they will make for a better gameplay experience. Your constructive feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

I'll go into a little more detail, but while my initial reaction was to the negative, I'm shifting to the cautiously optimistic camp. Let me explain a little of both...

First, here's my take on the downsides. Any time you cut something, make it smaller, you remove some element of choice from the equation, and in general that's a bad thing. They mitigated this to a certain extent, but I'll cover that in the positives. It seems rather drastic to cut from 51-point trees to 31. Include the fact that we're gaining 5 levels on the level cap and you're talking about cutting the trees nearly in half. Then you think about how many talents are generally considered "required" nowadays, and wonder where they are going to replace all that. It's scary, to say the least, but that's not what worries me the most. With what they've laid out as their vision and what they want to do with it, I'm confident that it will be ok. Even locking you in to a tree until you've spent 31 points isn't all bad, while it is slightly annoying. Finally, they just restructured a lot of the secondary stats and then they're adding Mastery...? Oh well...

The positive side of these changes is that I think the talent trees will feel less bloated and more streamlined. As well, yes, it will be easier for new players to understand, and will allow you to be what you want to be right away. It remains to be seen if you'll get your iconic druid forms right away or if that will come later, but, for example, to have access to Leader of the Pack (or Berserk, or Mangle) at low level will go a long way to helping a feral druid feel... well, FERAL. Rather than having a lot of points that EVERY feral druid takes, whether tank or DPS, we should see many of those abilities built into specializations or mastery, and the remaining points worked down to a manageable level.

To be perfectly honest, the biggest thing that actually does worry me about this change is that it's coming so late in the development of Cataclysm. I guess this is the reason for Beta tests - to catch these types of issues in addition to code breakage - but I would think this big of a change would be prohibitive this late in the game. I hope that this doesn't make them rush things, because while I've been salivating over Thrash for a month or two now, I would far rather Cataclysm get pushed out a little bit and have them get things like this RIGHT and balanced rather than rushed, half-done, and broken.

With all that said, I'm looking forward to this. I never got to play the end-game of Vanilla (or BC either, really, for that matter) and if this does feel a little more like Vanilla, well, it'll be fun to experience it.

On RealID

2010-07-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

I guess I'll throw my little hat into the ring.

I'm not going to revisit what has happened - if you're reading me, chances are really, really good that you already know what I'm talking about. Every blogger under the sun has had their opinion, most in the three days (give or take) before Blizzard backed off.

I hadn't written anything to this point, because, honestly, I didn't have words to describe what I felt, and truthfully, there are several bloggers that have already written pieces that express the ideas better than I ever could. But I'll try anyway, and hope it does some good, for somebody.

When I first heard about RealID, it was only as a chat functionality upgrade, which I viewed as a neat tool that I might, at some point, take advantage of - purely for my closest real life friends - especially the ones that I expect to be playing quite a bit of Starcraft 2. But nothing sinister... then came the blue post.

The proposed changes would most likely not have affected me personally. As a general rule, I don't bother even looking at the official WoW forums except when a blue post is brought to my attention that I really think it might be useful to see. Since blue posts are generally quoted whole in the places where I find them, the need to see them in the original context is normally unnecessary anyway, and I think I've posted on the forums an entirety of (maybe) one time.

When I first read about the changes as they were explained, my response was relatively indifferent... I felt that it was a generally idiotic idea, but as I said, it didn't truthfully affect me anyway. It was only after some (not long) time reflecting that I realized the true gravity of the situation. It was a terrible idea, one which should not have ever passed beyond the walls of Blizzard's offices. The fact that it did has damaged the company's reputation amongst the people it values most - its paying customers.

The attempt to force players to use their real names on the official forums showed a shortsightedness by Blizzard with respect to the safety and security of their playerbase. The interim - however brief - in which they dared to suggest that they would force players to use it but not their own employees (due to SAFETY concerns, no less!) approaches an unacceptable breach of trust, a break from reality in which Blizzard seemed as if they were trying to play puppet master by forcing players to dance on strings that they themselves were not willing to accept.

I personally think the incident with poor Bashiok proved that they were out of touch with the reality of the Internet that allows their business model to function.

That Blizzard recanted their decision has - somewhat - restored faith in them and their commitment to providing their users with a safe and fun game to play.

Unfortunately, as Tesh commented on the BBB's post, the real concern I still have is that while Round 1 apparently goes to the little guys, Blizzard has committed to turning their gaming universe into a social network of sorts, and they will not let a little setback like this prevent them from getting their way - so, the war's not over.

I generally agree with the goals that they were attempting to achieve when they made the decision to move forward with this; it is my sincere hope that when they decide on another course of action to use to clean up the forums, they do a sanity check before they alienate a (relatively) large portion of their playerbase by announcing an idea so idiotic it produced a thread over 2000 pages long.

In the meantime, I'm going back to killing Internet Dragons.

Kae Needs a New PC

2010-07-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

Epic Adventurers went after Blood Princes for the first time on 25-man this week, and downed them on the 2nd try.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it, because my PC locked up with less than 500k health left to remove.

Yay!

Boo!

All we have left is Dreamwalker, Blood Queen, Putricide, Sindy, and the King.

Onward, heroes!

A Primer on Kitty DPS, Part 2 (The Spec and Glyphs)

2010-07-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

I can't think of anything funny or witty to open this up with, so... here I go again!

Here is Part 1... refer to that if you're a little confused.

I realize that a lot of this will be useless soon, as Cataclysm will change everything, but hey I'm just late to the party getting in on this. It will get reworked come Cataclysm. Besides, I had to get my rant off my (4) readers' feeds.

The Kitty Spec

There used to be a little difference between the best specs for single-target or AOE DPS, but with the changes to Mangle they are close enough together that I'm going to present just one spec...

Just like the Bear Spec, you have a few points in the Resto tree, none at all in Balance, and a ton in Feral.

Restoration Talents

Tier 1

2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild - Increases all your attributes AND makes your buff better? Can I get a few more points in it?

0/3 Nature's Focus - Resto/Balance Talent. Ignore.

3/5 Furor - Gets you to the second Tier, and lets you do a little shapeshifting without always losing all your energy.

Tier 2

5/5 Naturalist - 10% damage bonus. Need I say more?

0/3 Subtlety - Resto/Balance. Ignore.

3/3 Natural Shapeshifter - Makes shapeshifting cheaper... and lets you get Master Shapeshifter.

Tier 3

0/3 Intensity - Not interesting to cats. Not really interesting to bears, either, but at least they'd get something out of it. Next.

1/1 Omen of Clarity - Free stuff is good mmkay?

2/2 Master Shapeshifter - With Natural Shapeshifter, we've spent 5 points to get only a 4% damage bonus (less mana cost is good but meh.) We spent 5 points to get 10% just a few minutes ago. What gives? Well... it's not worth it without spending all 5 points here, and there's nowhere we'd rather spend all 5 points, so here it goes. And really... it's 4% damage bonus across the board, don't complain.

Feral Talents

Tier 1

5/5 Ferocity - Reduces the Energy cost of some key abilities (with the changes to Mangle, it's most important for Rake and Swipe for cats)

5/5 Feral Aggression - Increases damage done by Ferocious Bite - not very useful except in long raid boss fights, but then it can make a significant difference.

Tier 2

3/3 Feral Instinct - The stealth upgrade is a nice bonus. 30% additional swipe damage is HUGE. This talent was left off single-target maximized builds before the changes to Mangle.

2/2 Savage Fury - 20% increased damage to Rake and Mangle (and Claw, but... ew.) So... 20% increased damage to Rake here. Rake is a fairly large chunk of our DPS. Take it!

0/3 Thick Hide - Bear talent, safely ignored.

Tier 3

2/2 Feral Swiftness - Not the most key talent, but the increased movement speed really helps get on target faster and stay on target longer during movement-heavy fights. Increased dodge chance helps survivability as well.

1/1 Survival Instincts - An emergency button for 1 talent point, to help you through those rough patches, worth taking it.

3/3 Sharpened Claws - Static crit chance bonus? Yes, please!

Tier 4

2/2 Shredding Attacks - Shred is one of your key DPS and combo point regen abilities, so reducing its energy cost by 18 is huge.

3/3 Predatory Strikes - This gives you a bunch of attack power (and can randomly give you an instant-cast nature spell. While it is rarely to your benefit to cast spells... it might help? It's here for the huge AP bonus, though.

2/2 Primal Fury - You're going to crit, a LOT. This gets you free extra combo points when you do.

2/2 Primal Precision - A HUGE chunk of Expertise you don't need on gear is great, and you get refunded if any of your finishing moves fail to land. Which they shouldn't, but that's another discussion, and sometimes it's unavoidable.

Tier 5

0/2 Brutal Impact - Increasing the stun duration of Pounce is... well it's PvP-focused and if you're going for a PvP spec you might want it... but here it's not really that useful. Maybe, possibly, if you had free points you wanted to spend, but I'd still spend them elsewhere.

1/1 Feral Charge - Allows invisible-flying-cat-leap and helps in engaging enemies quickly. Worth 1 point.

0/2 Nurturing Instinct - I'm not really sure how this is useful (maybe PvP for a hybrid heal/cat spec?).

Tier 6

0/3 Natural Reaction - Bear Talent.

5/5 Heart of the Wild - 10% increased attack power... yum...

3/3 Survival of the Fittest - 6% to all attributes? Awesome! Oh and cats get to be uncrittable too?? Sweet!

Tier 7

1/1 Leader of the Pack - Static raidwide 5% buff to ranged and melee crit chance is good for 1 point.

0/2 Improved Leader of the Pack - Wouldn't be a terrible choice to put any points you want to move in. Not great, but not wasted either.

0/3 Primal Tenacity - Not a bad PvP talent, but kinda wasted on a PvE build.

Tier 8

0/3 Protector of the Pack - You are not a bear. Bad kitty.

3/3 Predatory Instincts - Damage from Melee crits increased 10%. Not too shabby, and a reduction to damage from AOE effects to boot.

0/3 Infected Wounds - Not a bad debuff.... but doesn't help us at all. Maybe if your raid group needs the debuff, and you've got points to spare....

Tier 9

3/3 King of the Jungle - A key talent to keep us going by giving us a way to quickly regenerate energy, with some side perks on top.

1/1 Mangle - One of our key debuffs, and a damage ability. There's a reason people refer to one cat strategy as Manglespam.

0/3 Improved Mangle - Without this, Manglespam is a costly tactic (and you may actually want to Claw (ew!) instead).... but since it lasts 1 minute you shouldn't be using it often enough for the increased cost to matter, since normally you'll be behind an enemy so you can Shred.

Tier 10

5/5 Rend and Tear -Increases a bunch of your damage on Bleeding targets. Since you make targets bleed (a LOT!), increases a bunch of your damage.

1/1 Primal Gore - You should Rip on any boss fight - trash you won't have time. But for boss fights, gives you the ability to crit. More random free damage, and it only costs 1 point.

Tier 11

1/1 Berserk - Become the flailing cat-ball of death. You know you want to.

You may (or may not) have noticed that I'm 1 point short - that can go where you feel it will be best utilized (1/2 iLotP or 4/5 Furor are probably your best bets).

The Glyphs

Generally speaking, your best three major Glyphs are:

Rip: Increases duration (and thus damage) of Rip by 4 seconds.

Shred: Makes your Shred extend Rip by 2 seconds, up to 6 seconds total - so makes Shred doubly-important when Rip is up.

Savage Roar: Makes the ability that you always have up and buffs all of your attacks buff them more.

If you're weird and just don't like those, consider these Glyphs, which, while subpar, are not horrible:

Mangle: You probably should shift talent points around to take iMangle if you're going to use this. It makes Manglespam better...

Berserk: You get to be a cat-ball of death for a little longer.

Minor glyphs are a little more malleable. The generally accepted "best" are:

Challenging Roar: Not as cool for cats as bears, but makes it easier for you to sacrifice yourself (or try to shift to bear and tank for a few seconds) to save your healer.

Unburdened Rebirth: I honestly don't think any Druid should be without this.

Dash: Remember me talking about how it's important to move quickly in certain fights?

Peronally, I drop Challenging Roar for Aquatic Form and Dash for Glyph of the Wild. Personal choice.

So what's the point? See Part 1. We increase our damage a bunch, sure, but we've made a lot of our abilities synergistic - as I said then, Savage Roar buffs everything, Mangle buffs Rip, Rake, and Shred, Rake and Rip both buff Shred, Shred extends Rip... and on the occasions we get to Ferocious Bite or have to Claw, they've got some buffs too. The really tricky part is keeping everything going properly.

Stay tuned for Part 3 (Gear, Gems, and Enchants)! (Sometime before Cataclysm... I hope...

Really?

2010-06-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Twenty-four hour maintenance... seriously?

My realm's on the list... is yours?

Posted by Laetzin at 06/25/2010 05:57:14 PM PDT (Source)
We will be performing extended maintenance on the realms listed below on Tuesday, June 29th, beginning at 12:01 AM PDT. The maintenance is scheduled for 24 hours as we prepare for the upcoming expansion. These realms will be playable again at approximately 12:01 AM PDT on Wednesday, June 30th.

All realms not listed below will undergo scheduled maintenance beginning at 5:00am PDT and will be available for play at approximately 11:00 AM PDT

Agamaggan
Aggramar
Alexstrasza
Alleria
Argent Dawn
Arthas
Azgalor
Azshara
Baelgun
Balnazzar
Blackhand
Bleeding Hollow
Bloodhoof
Burning Blade
Burning Legion
Cho'gall
Dark Iron
Destromath
Dethecus
Detheroc
Drakkari
Durotan
Earthen Ring
Elune
Emerald Dream
Eonar
Eredar
Garona
Gilneas
Gorefiend
Gorgonnash
Greymane
Gul'dan
Hellscream
Illidan
Kael'thas
Kalecgos
Kargath
Kirin Tor
Laughing Skull
Lightninghoof
Lightning's Blade
Llane
Lothar
Madoran
Maelstrom
Magtheridon
Malfurion
Malygos
Mannoroth
Medivh
Moonrunner
Nazjatar
Quel'Thalas
Ragnaros
Ravencrest
Sargeras
Shadowmoon
Shattered Hand
Skullcrusher
Spinebreaker
Staghelm
Stormrage
Stormreaver
Thunderhorn
Thunderlord
Trollbane
Twisting Nether
Ursin
Warsong
Whisperwind
Wildhammer
Zul'jin
----------------------------
Thank you for your Patience.
Laetzin
Blizzard Entertainment

Patch Day!!

2010-06-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

3.3.5 drops today, for US Realms.

In case you haven't heard, the Ruby Sanctum raid will not yet be available - but I hope the extra time means it's less buggy when released.

See you all on the flip side!

The Little Druid that Could

2010-06-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I was running some regular commentary about my guild and the progress we'd been making in ICC and whatever other random game or real life thought crossed my mind. Well... I figure since I took more than a month to write the first post of my Kitty primer I should ramble on awhile about what's been going on, starting, of course, with the most important person on the planet...

WARNING: POOPY DIAPERS AHEAD!

Kaethir's Cub

My little one was born, of course, back near the end of March. She's grown from the measly 6lb 3oz she was at birth to a whopping 10lb 7oz as of a week or so ago... Needs more meat on her bones, she's not gonna tank any bosses at that size!

She's doing great, no jaundice or major problems, and she's been sleeping through the night almost since the day my wife went back to work. She's been "talking" for awhile now, smiling and giggling and generally making our lives wonderful.

Not to say she's perfect, but, well, she's perfect! She has of course the times that she decides to poop while you're changing her diaper... four times in a row... but I couldn't have asked for a better infant. The few times she's cried there's always been a reasonable reason (gas, constipation, or the doctor sticking her with a giant needle) and so far she's just been a wondrous little miracle.

Sorry, I'm a new Dad, sometimes I just have to get mushy about her.

Movies

I don't recall mentioning much of anything about movies before, but I enjoy good Sci-Fi, Adventure, and Action flicks as much as the next person and I wanted to mention that Iron Man 2 and Avatar are both really good films that have come out in the last few months. You should see them, or so I would have you believe.

Also, I saw an advertisement for The Expendables. Anything with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Terry Crews is going to be either really, really good, or really, phenomenally bad. I'm cautiously optimistic.

One final note on movies and then I'll quit. In a moment of masochism I decided to DVR Transmorphers when I saw it on Encore. I noticed this little ~~gem~~ pile of awful awhile back in Blockbuster. Incidentally, it came out a little before Transformers, which was an infinitely better movie. I watched about 20-30 minutes of it (that I can't get back) before deciding that there was no redeeming quality to it, at all. IMHO, and in no particular order, it had bad acting, directing, casting, special effects, music, choreography, and writing, and the plot (which seemed like some inane mashup of the Matrix and Transformers) had to have been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee. Save yourself.

Epic Adventurers and ICC

On with the show.

When last we left our ~~impaled~~ imperiled heroes, Epic Adventurers had finally downed Deathbringer Saurfang in 25-man mode. We've had a few changes to our raiding schedule since then, but we've continued to press onward.

Our progression 10-man team (which I, unfortunately, am unable to participate in) has downed Festergut, Rotface, and the Blood Princes, while our 25-man team is regularly one-shotting the first 6 bosses (through Saurfang, plus Festergut and Rotface) in one night.

We run a fun/alt 10-man run on Sunday nights, which regularly clears through Saurfang. The group I led in this past Sunday took a couple of shots at Rotface but couldn't pull it off.

I have been learning more and more about the intricacies of playing a Feral DPS, and I've had occasional opportunities to tank even on our 25-man runs, which has been a blast for me. I've been topping 8k DPS against Saurfang, without optimizing my gems. I share some gear between my sets, so it's impractical to completely optimize for either, and I think I've done well with the limitations I have.

The big team is currently stumbling over the Dreamwalker. The strategy we've been employing is to have just 2 tanks to hold down the baddies, each one generally hanging out at the point of the wall in between the spawn points on each side of the green dragon, with the melee DPS roughly divided up between the sides and the ranged DPS and heals more or less roaming around the middle, assisting wherever it is needed. Owing to the nature of the fight, we've been running a little healer heavy.

We seem to be having some difficulty keeping up. I'm not entirely certain where the problem is. This is complicated by the fact that due to my reduced raiding schedule, I'm not there every week.

It has been suggested to me that we should use 3-4 tanks, split up the DPS more, and engage the Adds closer to their spawn points. I'm a little leery of the idea, but I may propose it to our raid leader as something to try. I'm sure we'll get it figured out soon.

Two posts in three days? Is the ground getting cold for anybody else?

A Primer on Kitty DPS, Part 1 (Mechanics, Everybody Else, and the Rotation)

2010-06-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

Kaethir's back for round 3!

Please see the caveats from the Bear and Tree primers.

Please add to those caveats that at the time I began writing this, I'd only actually had a strict feral DPS spec for essentially one and a half raids, so while I think I know what I'm talking about, I may be off a little bit.

Mechanics

Feral DPS is one of the more difficult rotations to pull off. To be great it requires keeping track of 3 boss debuffs, 3 player buffs, and timing cooldowns of these with how much energy and combo points you have and can generate. Our debuffs are two bleed effects and a bleed-damage-increasing effect. Our non-static buffs increase our physical damage by 30% (finishing move, duration varies), increases damage done by 40 for 6 secs (and returns energy!), and reduces the energy cost of all abilities by 50% for 15 secs.

Due to the nature of the beast, Kitties do best on stationary fights where they can simply lock in to their priority system of a rotation and ignore everything else. In ICC, fights like Deathbringer Saurfang and Festergut are pretty much the Cat's meow (I'm sorry, sometimes I can't help being punny.) There is basically no movement and no target switching involved. We get a lot of our DPS from our two bleed effects - Rake and Rip - and the interactions between those, Mangle, and Shred. Yet still, the biggest chunk of our DPS comes from pure melee white damage.

Since one of our most important DPS abilities (Rip) really wants to have 5 combo points every time we use it, and our only AOE ability (Swipe) is too energy-intensive to use for more than a brief burst, we don't tend to shine in fights where there are lots of adds we have to deal with, or lots of target switching for one reason or another.

Even more important than that, though, is Savage Roar. Since it increases the damage done by every attack we do, it is of utmost importance that we keep it up at all times. As you'll see below, it's the highest priority in our stack.

A side effect of this is that one of the most effective gemming strategies for us CAN be to stack Armor Penetration. I will explain that emphasis later.

Also, because you are a Feral Druid, much like bears you will talent yourself into Leader of the Pack, increasing physical critical chance across the raid. Depending on your exact spec, you may or may not provide the random chance of heals that the typical bear talent spec does.

What Everybody Else Needs to Know

What your raid needs to know first and foremost is that if it is possible to assign you a task that lets you rip into a single target (i.e. leave you on Deathwhisper's shield) it will maximize your ability to help the raid. Not that you're useless otherwise, it's just that those types of tasks are how you can put out the most damage you're going to do, and as a DPS that's almost the most important thing you can do.

Secondly, if your raid is cohesive enough to allow for it, Blood DKs should be targeting you with Hysteria in stationary fights as previously mentioned - you can stack all of your buffs with it and it helps every single one of your attacks rather than just some.

Other than that, it's standard Druid stuff - you have a raid-wide static buff (Leader of the Pack, in this case) and a raid-wide castable buff (Mark/Gift of the Wild), and you can Hibernate, Cyclone, Root, and Battle Rez.

This post seems rather underwhelming after my previous entries - perhaps because there's a little less interaction between other players and DPS than there is in the other direction.

The Rotation

Cats don't exactly have a set rotation. They have a priority system, one which can be brutal if you miss on a part of it, but it goes like this, quoted from Elitist Jerks:

1. Keep up Savage Roar
2. Keep up Mangle
3. Keep up Rake
4. Use shred for CP regeneration (remember, that points 2 and 3 are more important)
5. When at 5 CP and Rip is not up, use Rip
6. When below 30 Energy, use TF
7. Use Clearcast Proccs for Shred
8. When at 5 CP and Rip and SR are running with 8 seconds (might be longer, depending on your gear) or longer each, use FB
9. When Rip and SR will drop at nearly the same time (with less than 3 seconds difference), try to recognize it early. Then use SR with a small amount of CP to desynchronize both timers.
10. Use Berserk only at high energy, (but not higher than 85) not directly after TF and as often as possible. If you will get Hysteria or some boss mechanics will enhance your damage, save it for these situations.

With the recent changes to Mangle, keeping it up is easy - hit it once a minute. That's about the only part of this that's really easy.

The post I pulled that from explains a little farther on why some items are further up or down the list. Basically, the idea is that the abilities that buff more things are more important - Savage Roar buffs everything, Mangle buffs Rake, Rip, and Shred, and Rake and Rip buff Shred (but... Rip is less efficient if it's not at 5 CPs).

Among the things I have learned is that one of the quickest ways to get better at Kitty DPS is to understand that while you have to follow this system, you also have to understand the concept of energy efficiency. In other words, if you already have a Rake up, don't Rake again until it falls off. And if it will fall off before your GCD, WAIT for it to fall off, then hit Rake. If you clip the last tick, you have made the energy you spent on your last Rake less efficient. The same is true for Rip, and Savage Roar, although in a slightly different manner.

Being able to wait for the split second it sometimes takes for things to fall off helps in more ways than is immediately apparent. In addition to making the energy you spent more efficient, it forces you to give your energy a small amount of time to regenerate, which means that when you do fire off that next ability, you have more energy to go after the next one immediately, if that is so needed (and it often is).

I have often heard that certain DPS classes have a very smooth rotation. For example, I have some limited exprience with Ret Pallies, and what I have been told bears out my experience - that is, once you start into your rotation, it's fairly smooth - you use whatever ability is off cooldown. Cat abilities (for the most part) don't have cooldowns, so one of the daunting tasks facing a new Cat is understanding which ability it is most important to use when, and why. Hopefully, between the explanations above and those coming when I go through Specs and Glyphs will make the whys a little more clear.

Whew. That was a long time coming! I (can't) promise the next post will come quicker (but I expect it will)!

Cataclysm Changes!

2010-04-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

*chirp* *chirp*

Kae's back! Well, a little.

While I begin working on my Cat DPS Primer, I'd like to throw out some thoughts on the recent announcements regarding Druid class changes in Cataclysm. Yes I'm about a week or so late but hey I've been busy adjusting to having to care for another sentient being!

I'll not quote the entire blue post here, I'll just link to it (and I assume most of you, being relatively interested in the Druid class or at least some Druid-related blogs, have already read it), and then quote individual sections I'd like to comment on. While I'm at it I'll link up the blue post about Rage changes for Druids and Warriors too... once I can find it again!

Cataclysm Druid Preview

On with the show!

Thrash (Level 81): Thrash deals damage and causes all targets within 10 yards to bleed every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. The intent here is to give bears another button to hit while tanking. Talents will affect the bleed, such as causing Swipe to deal more damage to bleeding targets. 5-second cooldown. 25 Rage.

Druids get a second button for AOE tanking! Yay!!

Seriously, I love this and can't wait.

Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.

I read this and went "... ... ... meh?" The only fight I can think of that this might be truly useful is the Faction Champions in ToC... As BBB has said multiple times, we can't judge until after the expansion comes out, but for now... I'm less than impressed.

Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.

As a feral druid, this was also very meh for me, but it seems cool and I think I'll like playing around with it if I ever go Boomkin.

We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools -- primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.

I like what I'm hearing, but I'm interested to know more in-depth of what changes are being made to have bears pushing a few more buttons/having a few more tools (hint: a silence that doesn't stun of any form would be nice, so we could actually move casters without having to LOS them. For example....)

We plan on giving Feral cats and bears a Kick/Pummel equivalent -- an interrupt that is off the global cooldown and does no damage. We feel like they need this utility to be able to fill the melee role in a dungeon or raid group, and to give them more PvP utility.

If this would also silence them for a bit, that would be excellent. It's still nice, but not mind-blowing.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Feral tree and the druid is in bear form -- these values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Feral tree and are in bear form, so you won’t see Balance, Restoration, or Feral druids in cat form running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today -- there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so the Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is that all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

I really don't know what to make of this yet.

Overall I'm very excited about the changes, and I can't wait to see them in action!

Coming soon: The beginning of the Cat primer!

$^#!$%!#$%!^!&#$@%$&@

2010-04-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on a couple of posts, but I just about want to strangle someone today...

Came home from a weekend mostly out of town (hadn't touched my computer since I shut it down Friday night or early Saturday morning) to emails from Paypal stating that Blizzard had cancelled my billing agreement and from Blizzard indicating that my account has been permanently disabled due to violations of policy about selling in-game gold or items for cash.

I have a feeling my account got hacked.

Rage.

Happy Easter!

2010-04-05T11:05:00.001-07:00

Hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday weekend!

... and if you don't celebrate Easter, Happy Noblegarden!

Now For Something Completely Different!

2010-04-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

While I lay around and try to build a wall as a base for a shed in my backyard thereby avoiding getting pictures of my new little cub up, I'd like to drop an entry into the "Asshat of the Day" bin.

I hopped on to do a quick random, and finding no guildmates on I went ahead and hopped in as a tank. The loading screen dropped me into an Utgarde Keep... one that had just barely started already, as they had cleared the group just at the top of the stairs inside the door. There was a Shaman healing, a hunter, a warrior, and one other (sorry, I can't remember clearly) DPS, and me the big bear.

We said hello and started moving. I pulled one guy because I could time it right, then pulled one of the two groups. A little mishap in rage generation left me out at the end of that fight, and my enrage down... and the warrior pulled the next group. Hoping he was just a little overeager, I waded in and we downed the group with no problems... but while still looting the bodies, he pulled the next two guys.

He then proceeded to pull the first group with a Forge Master before I was even close enough to FFF.

It was at this point that I said, and I quote, "Please stop pulling for me, k thx." I got no response, but I hoped I had gotten the message across.

Up through the proto-drakes everything went mostly fine, although he continually pushed the edge of what I was doing. The first group through the door on the far side, though, he just couldn't wait and charged in before I did... but barely, so I just went with it.

We came into the Prince's room, and I moved forward enough to FFF one of the four Vyr'kul in the room, and then I backed up to wait for them to come to me and ensure we didn't accidentally aggro the boss. This, however, was apparently too slow of a tactic for the warrior, who charged in to the middle of them as I was still moving backward to pull them further.

It was at this point that I decided it was time to invoke the, "You pull it, you tank it" maxim.

After this champ keeled over dead (I apologize if the healer was actually trying to keep him up; the healer was (I think) the lowest-geared character on the run), I charged in and grabbed all of them. I took my sweet time to make sure we had gotten all of our loot, and then I rezzed his sorry butt.

His response? "Now you've pissed me off."

I actually think he tried to pull aggro from me for the rest of the run. Not sure if he taunted or not, I just did my thing and never lost aggro on anything that mattered. I outgeared him by a fairly significant margin, so I don't think he *could* have taken aggro from me without taunting. He continually toed the line of charging in before me, apparently trying to time it so that I was already hitting the button when he charged, and on a couple of the less-threatening baddies he did even go in first, and I let him take the things he hit. If I'd have had more time I'd have let him die another time or two just to make my point, but I was in a hurry and he never did anything incredibly out of line (like charge a boss...) so I went with it.

Let me be clear, folks, when I'm tanking heroics, I may not be the fastest tank out there, but I don't mess around. I stop after kills only long enough to loot and double-check my healer's mana, and I move again. If that's not fast enough for you, be ready for a repair bill, and don't get pissed off at me for it, because its your own damned fault.

Amoroso of Malfurion, you are the asshat of the day.

The Greatest Achievement!

2010-03-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

For all my readers,

It's probably going to be silent around here for awhile. If I have time I'll put something together, but since I became a father early Wednesday morning that could be awhile.

Thanks always for reading, and I'll be back!

Public Service Announcement

2010-03-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

It is possible, with a good healer, for a level 74 Ret Pally in herloom gear and a smattering of greens and blues to tank the mushroom trash, the faceless ones, and the last boss in Old Kingdom.

So if you're tanking Old Kingdom, and 3/5s of the group asks you to go kill the mushroom trash before killing the boss, don't be an arse, because you might get kicked, and they might just not need to wait for another tank from the queue.

That is all. Move along, citizens.

Oddities

2010-03-12T06:12:00.000-08:00

I attempted to point out in my last post that my guild achieved I've Gone and Made a Mess on our last venture into 25-man ICC, a fact for which I am proud - it was only our second Saurfang kill, and only our second attempt that night.

I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.

So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.

We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run. I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan. Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase. So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.

He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.

Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.

He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.

I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt. I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there. I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs. Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.

Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle. I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow. I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times. Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%). Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.

I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake. I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.

All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.

Thanks for reading!

I've Gone and Made a Mess!

2010-03-11T10:16:00.001-08:00

*points at achievement widget*

*grins*

The Best PuG Healer I Ever Had...

2010-03-09T09:04:00.000-08:00

... was an elemental shaman.

I kid you not, I hopped on to do a random, got dropped into Halls of Lightning.

We buffed, said g'morning (with some requisite complaining about not having enough coffee,) and off we went. I was in a (small) hurry, I didn't pay much attention other than the fact that the Shaman was my healer.

We cleared through General Whatshisname (killed him in record time for me, according to my DBM) and I took it slow through the Slag, expecting my slow pace to allow the DPS to kill them slowly and thus have no one die to mass Slag death. Unfortunately, the rest of the group didn't pick up on it and two of them went down on the steps on the far side when a bunch of the mobs died.

We rezzed and moved on. I was glancing at Recount and not picking up on the fact that there were really 5 bars on my damage done meter, all showing greater than 2.5k DPS. We smashed through the brittle golem dude (Volkan? I can never remember, and again in record time), and into the halls of random-spawning-dudes. It was about halfway through here that I noticed the blue bar was on top of the damage done meter. The BLUE bar. The Shaman bar. The Shaman that was the healer's bar. Not only was she topping damage done, but she was 200 dps above the next highest player.

I got a record time on Mr. Lightning-Disperse too. He was almost dead when he reformed. Do I even need to mention the record time on Loken? She ended up just 100 DPS behind the leader, presumably because she actually did have to heal at some point.

Of course most of us were overgeared, but it's still a little ballsy to run Elemental as the group healer.

Llivia, I salute you.

Progress Once Again!

2010-03-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

I have no time to write!

The impending birth of my first child and pressure to finish my project at work mean that I can't spend a lot of time commenting on blogs or writing my own posts!

However...

I have just enough time this morning to report that Epic Adventurers has finally defeated Deathbringer Saurfang in his 25-man incarnation!

We made it to him this past Wednesday with enough time for 3-4 shots before we would have to stop for the night.

Our first attempt got him down to 18%. Our second, we were doing fairly well until he decided to start picking on our healers with Mark of the Fallen Champion, and even then, we got him down to TWO PERCENT before we were overwhelmed.

One of our hunters had to leave, and we replaced with a Shaman. The third attempt of the night was the charm - we got spammed by achievements... and then got spammed by a guildmate, whose addon congratulates guildmates for achievements.

A couple quick notes - we ran 2 tanks and 6 healers for the fight. I can't speak for any of our other healers, but personally, until the first set of beasts came out and for quite a few of the gaps in between beasts, I was dropping out of tree and using Moonfire and Starfire to help out with the DPS on Saurfang himself. Actually, for about to first 50-60% of his health, I was healing only minimally, when the beasts came out. We simply didn't need 6 healers at that point. Believe me, every little bit helps when you're struggling on that fight. It was about the 2nd or 3rd Mark that I had to stay in tree form almost exclusively.

There was much rejoicing!

Silence

2010-03-01T11:05:00.001-08:00

I apologize for the great echoing wall of nothing around here of late.

I've been exceptionally busy, and unfortunately that will likely continue as my baby is due very soon.

Have faith! I shall return!

So close!

2010-02-22T08:17:00.000-08:00

By chance I got picked up by a guild group going in to Gundrak over the weekend to try to get Less-rabi. It only took us 2 tries, and since I have such a wonderful guild they also helped me pick up Share the Love, and that leaves me just 2 achievements away from Glory of the Hero. It also gave me the opportunity to honor the Elder in Gun'drak, and I took a few minutes to pick up the last few Elders around Northrend, leaving me just 4 dungeon Elders from the meta.

A quick note on Less-rabi!...

Most of the strategies I read for it were designed before everybody overgeared the instances so completely. It is now doable with just 3 interrupts (maybe less) if you have a suitably geared party. We did it with one Bash, one interrupt from a DK, and one Kick from our rogue, and he was dead before he could try to cast again. It's still a rough achievement, because that last interrupt needs to be ON THE BALL, the cast time is so short that if you are mid-GCD when it comes you will not successfully stop it.

Hopefully, within a couple of weeks, I will have the opportunity to go get Respect Your Elders and My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time, for my ugly new mount. And once I pick up those four Elders, I will have completed 3 of the meta achievements needed for the uber-meta and the 310% speed mount. Hopefully they won't do something silly and remove that.

Nothing really interesting to report otherwise, I'm still mulling over my options with respect to specs.

Blarg. I am ded.

Cat Druids and DPS

2010-02-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

Since I'm considering changing my secondary spec from healing to DPS, I figured I should do some research into Cat DPS and try to formulate a plan to be at least decent at it from the get-go. What results below is some of my stream of consciousness formed into intelligible words, thoughts, sentences, and yes, even paragraphs. Please keep in mind that this is from research, not from first-hand experience.

You hear from a lot of people that DPS as a feral Druid is one of the hardest ways to do DPS in the game, at least if you want to put out good numbers for it. What is it about Cat DPS that makes it so hard?

The key issue is the number of, for lack of a better term, things that you have to juggle. You have two ability resources to keep track of (Combo Points and Energy), 3 buffs for which you have to keep track of the buff or a cooldown for it (Savage Roar, Tiger's Fury, Berserk), and 3 debuffs that you, again, have to keep track of, or track of the cooldown (Mangle, Rake, and Rip). Plus you need to find time for your other big hitters (Shred, Ferocious Bite). FB, SR, and Rip all require both CP's and Energy, Berserk has multiple uses and you don't want to have just used Tiger's Fury, everything needs Energy, and your priority list includes things like "Use X if Y and Z have more than 8 seconds left."

I've heard of addons that give you helpful hints of what order to use your abilities in. I'll have to look in to that.

To go into a little more detail, here is the "priority list" as gleaned from EJ's Cat DPS Guide.

1. Keep up Savage Roar
2. Keep up Mangle
3. Keep up Rake
4. Use shred for CP regeneration (remember, that points 2 and 3 are more important)
5. When at 5 CP and Rip is not up, use Rip
6. When below 30 Energy, use TF
7. Use Clearcast Proccs for Shred
8. When at 5 CP and Rip and SR are running with 8 seconds (might be longer, depending on your gear) or longer each, use FB
9. When Rip and SR will drop at nearly the same time (with less than 3 seconds difference), try to recognize it early. Then use SR with a small amount of CP to desynchronize both timers.
10. Use Berserk only at high energy, (but not higher than 85) not directly after TF and as often as possible. If you will get Hysteria or some boss mechanics will enhance your damage, save it for these situations.

That's scary, to say the least. It's hard enough to keep a priority list 5-6 items long (Maul, Swipe, Mangle, Lacerate, FFF, Demo Roar) with all the possibilities in WoW. Ten, I think, will be nearly impossible.

Should this eventuality come to pass, however, I will make a valiant effort!! And, of course, report my results to the ravenous masses of my readers!

What's that? I was getting a little evil-dictator-ish? You mean I'm not? And I only have 3 readers? *sigh* Fine.

I may even do a Cat primer... although if I do it before I switch, it will be purely from research, not from personal experience.

Ramblings

2010-02-17T05:00:00.000-08:00

Rambling the First, on Hybrids

My apologies to the author whose post inspired me, I cannot recall which blogger it was to give credit. I can, however, use a post from my own blog's history as a starting point.

In examining the fact that Druids simply don't follow the rules, I mentioned the fact that we can, to a certain extent, shift roles mid-fight by shifting forms. While this remains true and does showcase our hybrid capabilities, we aren't and can't be good enough at a backup role to be truly hybrid, with half an exception for bears and cats.

Blizzard has made a point of making characters with multiple roles specialize and remove their hybrid capabilities in order to be competitive with other classes. While this is a good thing in general - hybrids shouldn't be able to be the best simultaneously at 2 things - it has the (I hope) unintended consequence of removing some of what I consider the key benefits of playing a hybrid class. While being able to switch between tank, healer, and 2 different forms of DPS is nice, we can't effectively switch in the middle of a fight, which would seem to me to be one of the key benefits of being a shapeshifter.

The shifting of stats for bears means that bears and cats can fake it - the gear they want shares stats, with the exception of cloaks, amulets, rings, and trinkets - but you're not going to have "enough" survivability as a bear or be solid enough at DPS as a cat to make this worthwhile, and if you've taken the talents to be really great at one you're going to be missing key talents for the other, not to mention the glyph clashing. The other two forms that share key stats - boomkin and tree - cannot really share because the forms that make each great are not attainable at the same time, and even if they were, you need spirit as a tree and hit as a crit chicken, and each is not needed by the other. This means that unlike cats and bears, where the gear (if not the gems and enchants) can be shared, trees and boomkin are unable to really move between each other.

They are doing away with a number of secondary stats in Cataclysm. Perhaps some of the Druid's hybrid-ness will return, but I doubt it.

In this blogger's humble opinion, the era of the true hybrid is over, and has been for quite some time. Being one of the things that drew me to this class, I hope it can come back, but I mourn its loss and expect that it is gone for good.

Rambling the Second, on Dual-spec

On a side note, Blizzard can we please have 7 specs? I would so have one of each Druid spec and a PvP spec or three. I would even pay 1000g apiece, at least for 2 more than I have now, so I could have a cat and boomkin spec. What's that you said? No other class in the game could use more than 3, and most couldn't even really do that? So what, *I* could use it! ;)

Rambling the Third, on My Specs, My Guild, and Raids

Speaking of specs, I'm toying with a couple of ideas. While I enjoy making like a tree and leaving (ooooh, bad pun!), I have an issue that I've been pigeonholed into that role in my guild's raids (long story, if you've read my earlier posts you should have a taste) and it causes me to have an issue with gear. Specifically, I don't get the opportunity to roll on gear for my main spec.

I've attempted to discuss the issue with my guild and raid leader, and while a resolution may still be forthcoming, I'm not hopeful.

This leads me to some decision making regarding my options. The last resort, always, is to leave and try to find another guild. I'd like to avoid that if I can, because frankly I love my guild, I'm friends in real life with a number of the members, and I don't really relish the thought of trying to find a new one that I would fit in to. Since I don't want to do that, I'm left with trying to find options that simultaneously allow me to stay in the guild, continue running raids, and actually have a chance to roll on gear for my main spec sometime.

The second-most extreme (beyond /gquit) option I have thought of is removing the ability to do anything but tank by respeccing by secondary spec into another bear spec. I think I've just about ruled that out though, because I believe that would lead to no guild raids for me.

I could also forsake the 25-man raids to run my own 10-mans. However, with Wednesday and Thursday claimed for 25-man runs and Tuesday a hit-or-miss night to have the folks in my guild on to play, that seems like an iffy proposition at best. I tried running Mondays in the past, and by then most of our players have their mains locked. My Friday and weekend availability is not steady enough to run then. Plus, given that I have committed to my significant other that I will only raid on a regular basis on one night a week, that would preclude me from running in the guild 25-mans, which I also would like to continue doing.

The option that seems to present me with the best situation is to change my offspec from tree to kitty DPS. This would allow me to roll on leather gear and weapons that I would actually use for my main spec even if I'm in my offspec, because the two forms share stats now. The major downside to this plan is that I lose the flexibility of having a healing spec. If I'm not tanking I become just the meat in the room. (For all you DPS out there, I'm kidding. I love you guys.) Also, I still couldn't roll on tanking accessories for things such as the cloaks, rings, amulets, and trinkets, but I can get by with Emblem items for most of those.

Of course, this plan also requires me to do the research and take the time to learn how to be good with the class with the hardest DPS rotation in the game... or so I've been told it is. Stay tuned, my blog name may become somewhat of a misnomer.

Rambling the Fourth, on Blog Changes

Check out some changes on the site, I added some perma-links to the bear and tree primers on the right, and a real blogroll and limited the blogroll updates to the latest 5. Also, I actually touched my profile. No pics yet, but I'm working on it!

Rambling the Fifth.... ok I'm done.

As always, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week!

Monday's Double-you Tee Eff Moment

2010-02-15T06:41:00.000-08:00

After braving the ice and snow to make the short trip in to work this morning, one of the folks who work down in the datacenter with me came over to talk about his new tattoo, the sight of which caused several of us to need surgery to rebuild our heads after they exploded.

When asked why, the response was, "I realized that I've loved Terry Tate longer than I've loved any woman."

I regret that I don't have a picture to show you, but this masterpiece, which apparently took 4 hours to complete, depicts the Office Linebacker about to sack one of his charges, and is located on the left side of this man's chest.

I have no idea what he's smoking, but I want to, because I need to stay as far away from it as possible.

I'm sorry if your head exploded too. I have the name of a good surgeon...

Offspec Progression

2010-02-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

My guild's first foray into ICC 25 a little over a week ago brought down only the whirly bone dude, although most of the first night folks went back in the next night and were eventually able to bring down Ms. MANY-ADDS-DEAL-WITH-IT.

Due to a number of reasons the 10-man I was running gets trumped by 25-man runs, on which I have been relegated to my off spec.

We went back in this week, and in the first night we were able to clear Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and Orgrim's Hammer. I suspect that by the time this post goes up, folks will have given Saurfang a shot, at least once or twice.

I've learned a couple of things on these runs, and I'd like to share a bit.

The Relative Difficulty of Trash

As a tank, I was in the thick of every single fight from the front door in. Every fight, every enemy, required me to do something, turn this away from the raid, taunt that, swipe, maul, mangle - and more as a raid leader, because it was up to me (and my co-leaders) to decide which enemy needed to die first, get the raid where it needs to be, and lay out strategy to proceed. While there is trash that is harder or easier, it's not exceptionally noticeable because there's always something to do. I suppose that's part of why I like tanking.

In my tree form of a 25-man raid, with 6 other solid healers, the trash fights, especially those leading up to Marrowgar, are boring. Not just any boring, either, but sleep inducing, I-want-to-go-on-follow-and-go-afk boring. I cast approximately 20 spells before we got to Lord Spin-a-lot's chamber, most of which were Wild Growth when skeletons blew up. It's a striking change when you actually get to the boss and you have to kick it into gear and really heal. A comparison for thought: on the trash, every single one of our healers was over 70% overhealing. For our successful attempt at Mr. Whirly-bones, only 1 of us, and that one a Paladin, was over 60%.

The one time any player died, it wouldn't have mattered how much on the ball I was. A rogue got Saber Lashed by one of the Deathbound Wards and died in 2 hits.

I really didn't understand how different the trash was until I saw it from the healer's perspective.

Healing Assignments are Important

I'll just say this. In the last two weeks we've had 6 attempts at Lord Marrowgar. In attempts in which there no healing assignments given beyond "heal the tanks and your group," we were 0-4. In attempts in which the healers were given specific tanks to heal, we went 2-0.

Lady Deathwhisper Requires a Bit of Luck

Despite Blizzard's recent trend for trying to remove the RNG from having such a huge impact on success or failure, there are some situations in which it still is.

It's a bit rough on healers, sometimes, when she decides to MC one of us. The difficulty increases when she does this right as adds are spawning, because this is when the tanks take the most damage. It's just dumb when she does this, a couple of random attacks from pets or players hit the MC'd one before a hunter or DK CC's them, and then a DnD appears under their feet right before the MC breaks. Admittedly, this is a relatively rare event, but there are some combinations of abilities during her fight that are very hard to keep everyone alive through.

It gets just about as bad in phase 2. I watched, during our success this Wednesday, as four ghosts spawned literally one each side of one of our other trees, and before he could realize it and move, they had collapsed on him and he popped like all his sap had frozen and made him explode.

The Gunship Battle is Easier Than I Thought

I already thought it was fairly easy, but we were probably making it harder than it had to be anyway.

Although I was told by several guild members that I could, healers standing on the edge of the Skybreaker cannot heal raid members doing melee damage to the battle mage on Origrim's Hammer. They are too far away. However, just as one member mentioned to me, it doesn't matter. The only raiding party member that should take any damage AT ALL is the tank on Saurfang. Those that can't be healed while they're over there don't need it. What this means is that the strategy I was using when leading 10-man raids, which included sending a healer with the boarding party, is a little off and could be improved.

Now if I could just convince my raid leader that he should let me tank every once in awhile...

On "Exploits"

2010-02-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted much this week, but I think my drought is finally over.

Keeva, BBB, Meka, Tam, and others have posted their thoughts on the recent in-game fixes for "exploits" regarding vehicle combat and Lovely Charms. I figured I might as well toss my 2 pennies into the ring.

Just in case you're like, the new guy, or have your head under a rock, or have no friends, or some other issue which has prevented you from hearing about what happened, I'll give a short synopsis. Skip it if you already know what I'm talking about.

The Issue at Hand

So the Love is in the Air event has been going on all this week in Azeroth, and it will continue through the end of next week, and players who want a Violet Proto-Drake (gogo 310% mount!) are trying desperately to get all the achievements needed for the "Fool for Love" meta-achievement. With the redesign of the event, players need to collect Lovely Charms, 10 of which will form a Lovely Bracelet, which you then turn in for a quest in one of your capital cities for 5 Love Tokens and a Lovely Card. The Tokens are used to purchase items needed to complete the achievements.

The issue was in collecting the Lovely Charms. It originally triggered solely off of killing blows, which had a couple of (I assume) unintended consequences. First, as Keeva pointed out, was that healers were screwed, because they very rarely score killing blows in dungeons and sometimes struggle with killing mobs for dailies. Second was that any player could go to the starting area of Ulduar or pick up the Battle Before the Citadel daily, mount up, and promptly massacre legions of badguys at a time, trivializing the collection of these Charms.

In the maintenance this week, Blizzard altered the code that allows collection of the charms to prevent this from being used and simultaneously allowing healers to gather Charms by being in dungeon groups, triggering both this post and the ones linked above.

Kaethir is an Exploiter

Being a tank and healer, I was in the part of the player base that was facing a somewhat tough road to collect all the Charms I would need, and being someone with relatively limited playtime, I wanted to get the Charms as quickly and painlessly as I could. I used the Battle Before the Citadel quest to gather about 160 Charms, enough for 4 days worth of the daily bracelet turn in quests, in roughly 30 minutes.

I can only imagine what those who went into Ulduar did - there are more enemies that die faster there. It's entirely possible that the same amount of time would have provided hundreds more Charms.

Despite the outrage some others have expressed, and the fact that this probably technically qualifies as an exploit, I have no problem with people farming up Charms quickly in such a manner. For those that have limited playtime, it may have been your only realistic method in which you can collect these in the time allotted and still have time to visit all 4 capital cities plus complete a couple of other minor dailies while still completing your daily random dungeon for your frost badges. If you are a healer... especially before the patch, this might have been your only way period.

Secondary to the concern that this trivializes some of the achievements (which, by definition, mean you should have expended some effort to achieve something), is that some players were farming thousands of Charms, creating hundreds of Bracelets, and then hawking them in Dalaran or on the auction house for 20g+ apiece. Personally, I think it's in poor taste but not unacceptable. If I had farmed enough to have extras I didn't want, I would certainly have sold them - although I would have put them up for much, much less, given how easily they were obtained.

Does it Matter?

Honestly, I don't think it really does. Blizzard put something out there without fully realizing the consequences, took a few days to change it, and now everybody's in an uproar over it. It's not the first time this has happened, and won't be the last.

I didn't hear word one about it being an exploit, or being wrong, or being anything but an easy way to get Charms before Blizz took it away.

Shame on us for not realizing it? Maybe. Shame on Blizzard for letting it sit for a couple of days before fixing it? Definitely, since they obviously didn't intend for it to work that way.

In the end, though, this is no Martin's Fury, nobody got banned (as far as I know) and it's not worth expending any more brain power or breath worrying about.

It's 5 o'clock somewhere...

2010-02-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

... and that somewhere is here, incidentally. Actually it's 20 after.... And here I am, still waiting on Blizzard to get their shit together and let us play again.

I understand they have a job, and being the real world shit happens, but damn if it isn't frustrating.

BRRRAAAAAIIIINNSssss....

2010-02-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

My head, it is empty of ideas at the moment and I feel a zombie-like need to devour someone else's.

That's ok, it's usually about this empty, and I'm sure something will will shake loose from the cobwebs up there soon.

Meanwhile, in the real world (*gasp*! rl? inorite?), the Colts lost to the Saints in the Super Bowl, and those of us that follow both our own religion and that of football have about 6 months of wailing and gnashing of teeth before the new season starts again. Congrats to the Saints and the City of New Orleans - now if you could just stop building things below sea level I'd feel a lot better about your mental status.

I kid, I kid. It was a good game and I really thought it was going into overtime before Peyton Manning threw that ill-fated pass. Such is life!

Also of note in the real world, within the next 13 days I have the following events for which I must do something that resembles being socially acceptable, in no particular order: Valentine's Day, my birthday, my sister-in-law's birthday, and my 1-year wedding anniversary. And my first baby is due in just under 6 weeks. I suppose that's what I get for going and finding a great woman to marry, but if I randomly disappear here in awhile, you can probably guess what happened.

Back here in the fabricated reality of the blogging world (I refuse to call it the blogosphere), things churn along as they always do. My reading list has grown so large so fast, that I felt it would be overly burdensone to continue expanding the widget (or gadget, depending on your terminology) over there to the right. It already consumes more space than I'd like it to. Sometime in the (not exceptionally distant) future, I hope to have a working gadget which will display, for example, the 5 most recently updated blogs from my whole list, and a link to the entire blogroll. Maybe I'm just throwing a pipe dream out there, and maybe I'll get a picture up there in my profile someday too. If nothing else I should be able to provide a page with the blogroll. I just have to be the little ~~engine~~ blogger that could. "I think I can I think I can..."

Kaethir out.

Tankalicious

2010-02-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen it already...

What has Bell over at 4Haelz done?

Chumpavon the Ice Failure

2010-02-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one disappointed with the Toravon fight... and, well, most of what Blizzard has done lately?

Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might. The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.

When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep. As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves. Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.

Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep. By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places. The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock. Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock. I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.

I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not. Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup. We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:

"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."

... and that's really all it took. Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.

VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one. IT'S A JOKE! I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!

Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.

Trees Make Good Tank Heals, Too!

2010-02-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

I was skimming over some blogs the other day when I stumbled across a post by Vixsin of Life in Group 5, a post in which he discusses shamans and the desire to be a capable tank healer instead of the always-assigned raid healing. Lo, and verily hath he filled the role of muse, and cometh to deliver unto me the gift of a blog post.

I hope you know what I just said, because I'm not sure I do.

At any rate I was struck by the similarity of some of his thoughts to ones I posted waaaaay back at the beginning of ABITT's life.

I didn't really go into detail, and seeing Vixsin's incredibly well-organized, well-laid-out, and detailed explanations led me to want to do something similar to my original post. A decent chunk of this will overlap with the mechanics discussion in my first Primer on Tree Healing post, but I think this will be a more understandable method of going about it.

For reference, here are the healing spells available to Resto Druids, in no particular order, with the abbreviations I'll be using for them in parenthesis:

Rejuvenation(R), Regrowth(RG), Lifebloom(LB), Nourish(N), Swiftmend(SM), Healing Touch(HT), Wild Growth(WG), and Tranquility(T).

Here's some more reference material for you, in the form of talents which affect these spells (leaving off talents that affect them all relatively equally):

Empowered Rejuvenation(ER), Empowered Touch(ET), Gift of the Earthmother(GotE), Improved Rejuvenation(IR), Improved Tranquility(IT), Living Seed(LS), Naturalist(Na), Nature's Bounty(NB), Revitalize(Re), Tranquil Spirit(TS), Genesis(G), Moonglow(M), Nature's Splendor(NS), Nature's Majesty(NM).

Whew. That's a lot of linkage! You probably didn't bother reading all the popups from that (much less actually clicked the links), but that's ok, I don't think you actually need to know what all of them are. In a minute or ten I'll try to make it all make sense.

Now, instead of just leaving them all shotgunned at you, I'll try to associate each of these talents with the spells that they improve. To whit, in all my noobish-html-table-skill (if it looks bad, I'm blaming the post editor for removing supposedly unnecessary nbsp's or something):

Spell	Talent
	ER	ET	GotE	IR	IT	LS	Na	NB	Re	TS	G	M	NS	NM
R	x			x					x		x	x	x
RG	x					x		x			x	x	x
LB	x		x								x		x
N		x				x		x		x		x		x
SM						x
HT		x				x	x			x		x		x
WG	x								x		x
T	?				x					x	?

I hope that makes half as much sense to you and/or looks half as good as I had originally intended. If so, I count it a win.

Without going into even more excruciating detail, the point I'm trying to get across is that while you can't really take enough talents to be the best at everything as a Tree (there's too much to spread it all around,) the talents that assist individual spells help enough of a variety that you won't be limiting your abilities in one area to work in another. If you've focused on one role or the other, you're going to be better at it - but not much!

Note that a lot of the talents that benefit Nourish also benefit Healing Touch. You take these if you want to pretend that you're a paladin healer - you get to focus on having a fast cast smaller heal and a longer cast big heal. These Trees tend to be a little better at being tank healers than raid healers. A lot of times you'll also pick up talents for Lifebloom as a tank healer - that's really where it shines.

If you've gone the other route, Wild Growth, Rejuvenation, and Regrowth, you'll tend to be a better raid healer.

You don't have to skip more than 1 or 2 of these talents, but you DO have to make cuts somewhere. There's even another talent (Nature's Grace) that I didn't mention, which would benefit Regrowth, Nourish, and Healing Touch (and maybe even Lifebloom too!), and I have all of these talents except for Nature's Grace, Tranquil Spirit, and Naturalist. So, I've currently got a small advantage for raid healing over tank healing.

Note that I said small - I could honestly find 3 points (probably from IT and/or Re) to take Nature's Grace, or maybe all 5 from those two spots to take Tranquil Spirit, and even without those you're talking about a difference of 10% mana cost of HT and N, or 20% casting speed increase for 3 seconds on crits. Those are nice bonuses but the majority of my heals would remain the same. Lifebloom, pretty much the quintessential tank-healing HoT, wouldn't change at all.

Gear and glyphs, of course, also figure in, but much like the last few talent points, you're talking about small shifts rather than big ones - if you focus all the way one way or another it can make a somewhat significant difference, but if you don't want to pigeonhole yourself, it won't hurt you either!

These last three points mean that, barring strange itemization or off-the-wall talent specs, Trees don't have to change specs to focus on tank or raid healing! They're not going to be bad at either no matter what spec they have!

How so, you ask? Well let me tell you.

They change the spells that they are using. That's why we have so many!

Assigned as a tank healer, my spells of choice are going to be Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Nourish, Wild Growth, Swiftmend, and Healing Touch, in... roughly... that order.

Assigned as a raid healer, my spells of choice are going to be Rejuvenation, Wild Growth, Swiftmend, Nourish, and Regrowth, and again, in more or less that order.

Notice the major differences - as a tank healer, spells that have a casting time are added (as in HT), or moved closer to the top of the priority list (a la Nourish and Regrowth), where as in my raid healing I focus more on spells that are instant cast (to allow me to heal more players in shorter time).

Just as with all aspects of being a druid, we are VERSATILE - perhaps moreso than a lot of folks realize - and our only true limitations as a healer are that we don't have a way to shield another player, and we can only remove curses and poisons.

Don't be afraid, as a Tree, to tell your raid leader that yes, you CAN tank heal, or that you're more comfortable with it than raid healing, because you're perfectly capable of that role!

... and I'm still unhappy with this post, but I'm gonna put it up anyway, 'cuz that's how I roll... for today, at least.

On Raids, and the Leading Thereof

2010-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting experience Tuesday night that involved pugging into a raid that I ended up leading. At the end, I thought it would make a good blog post and started thinking about how to compose it into a story worth hearing.

So imagine my surprise Wednesday morning when I look at my feeds and see that Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs has posted an article about pretty much the exact same thing. I'm still going to forge onward, however, because I have a slightly different tack than him.

There was over an hour 'till Wintergrasp, I had done a HoR for my chance at a Battered Hilt and Ephemeral Snowflake, I had completed my daily random, and the weekly raid quest was Marrowgar, which I'll get via our weekly trip into ICC anyway. Consequently, I was trying to decide if I wanted to hop over to Alrom and keep working him toward 80 or go do the Argent Tournament dailies and make a little money. I'm always short of the money I want, so I used my Argent Tabard and ported in to start picking up dailies.

Before I got more than 2 picked up, I saw somebody calling for tanks and heals for ToC10.

"What the hell," I thought, "that's my two specs and I can still use a couple of items out of there." I offered to go and was invited.

Upon informing the raid leader that I was tank/heals with a preference for tanking, he asked me to heal. A couple more minutes for them to pick up another tank (which actually flipped once found, from a DK to another bear), and we were "ready" to start.

I say "ready" because other than a definition of the tanks, nothing was really said in vent, I couldn't find another definitive healer in the group (turns out it was a shaman), and nobody really talked about a strategy. AT ALL, despite the fact that they had us all hop into a vent channel.

The shaman was new to raiding (as I later learned), and DID stand in the fire and die. And rez himself in the fire, and die again. And got battle rezzed... and died again, but I'm not sure if that was in the fire or not. Even given that, we lived a surprisingly long time with only me healing. I do an amazing amount of HPS when there's no other healers to turn half of my heals into overheals.

After that fiasco I guessed we were in for a very long run.

One of our only two ranged dps (don't go there), both of which happened to be warlocks, offered to bring his healer in, popped out and came back on a druid (which gave us 4 in the group, another was kitty), and during the interim I took the time to organize the heals, put the shaman on raid healing and split the tanks between the trees. I kept waiting, at this point, for the raid leader to lay out some sort of strategy. Mostly, all that was said was to kill the snobolds and run to the raid if you got one.

We made it through Gormok almost flawlessly on this run regardless, and the worms came out to say hello, and upon this event we ran into problems again. I don't remember all the specifics, but among other things they weren't both turned away from the raid, and at one point I stood in front of one even though it was turned away from the rest of the raid (I know, I'm a fail druid) and I died.

I actually got battle-rezzed and going again, and enough of the raid lived long enough to kill the first Jormungar. Soon after one of the two worms died, though, we had the bear tank, a rogue, and me alive, as everyone else had succumbed in one way or another. The other rogue actually released, thinking it was a wipe. But when the remaining Jormungar went underground, the bear rebirthed the second tree. Once our health was stable again (the burning debuff hit both of the healers), I rebirthed the cat druid, and we were back in business with half a raid.

Icehowl was a piece of cake, although he took forever.

It was one of the most stressful boss fights I've ever healed through, and I absolutely loved the challenge of it. We got congratulated for "epic healz", and thinking back I actually feel bad for not telling the bear what an awesome job he did.

About this point, the original raid leader said something about his DBM being messed up and asked for somebody else to lead the raid, the response to which was crickets chirping over the vent channel.

Despite my experience leading raids and especially ToC10 raids, I didn't exactly leap at the opportunity. I HATE leading PuG raids, with the rare exception of a weekly raid quest like Patchwerk that involves finding enough bodies of the right kinds to fill spots and saying go. I like our guild runs - I know everybody, more or less, and they're generally nice people who won't rip into somebody for screwing up, or go all elitist on me, or generally exhibit behavior that would warrant a kicking. In a PuG, however, there's really no such safety net, and I don't like being the person that has to deal with it. In addition, our guild folks generally know what they are doing, as even the ones that aren't seasoned raiders know enough NOT TO STAND IN THE FIRE. Oh, and one last thing - I've never been a raid leader as a healer. It's a different way of doing things than what I'm used to.

All this went through my head once, twice, maybe three times. Then, at the continued silence, I finally said, "Kaethir can lead if nobody else wants to."

Of course, being the first one to speak up meant that I got handed the reins. Yay me. I found out very quickly that we had a fairly knowledgeable, nice, and well geared group, and ended up not minding leading this raid at all.

I can skip the play-by-play from there on out. I took the time before each boss to lay out the general strategy (with some help from the more seasoned raiders in the group.) We only wiped one time the rest of the way, on our first attempt at the faction champions, despite only having one ranged for permafrost and adds during Anub, three folks learning the fights as we went, and our shaman healer being new to raiding at all. The warlock got lucky, as a LOT of dps caster gear dropped, with him being the only main spec to use it.

It was one of the more enjoyable PuGs I've gotten into, despite the fact that I got handed the lead I didn't want.

Tamarind waxes poetic about what calls people to lead raids and why, despite the fact that it can be stressful, people come back and do it again. I won't comment directly on what he said, but he made me think about why I'm willing to do this when the call comes. To me, it's really quite simple. I know the fights, I know what people are supposed to be doing, I like helping people learn, and perhaps the most important thing of all...

If I'm the one leading, I can't complain about the quality and/or skill of the raid leader. Perhaps, a bit more bluntly, if I'm the one leading, we're not going to screw up because there's no strategy in place, or because the healers aren't assigned, or some other silly thing (although I have been known to occasionally leave a point or two out of the explanation of a fight.) Having cut my teeth, so to speak, leading guild raids in an environment where I could make a few mistakes as a leader and not get reamed for it, I've developed the confidence that I know what I'm doing enough to lead others, provided of course that they're willing to be led.

Finally, a request to all those out there that want to get a raid together but don't want to lead... find a raid leader BEFORE you start the instance. It will make things easier.

We might get TWO buttons?

2010-01-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like to point out a blue post by Ghostcrawler that I came across...

Yes, a lot of the focus of the post is warrior tanking, but there's some other aspects thrown in.

The part I'd like to point out is this:

3) There are differences in how tanks generate AE threat, and therefore damage. Warriors are jealous of the DK and especially paladin persistent area-based damage, and the others are jealous of the warrior's burst AE threat on incoming adds. Druids are jealous of anyone with more than one button.

For the love of Elune, yes, please, give us something else we can use instead of just spamming swipe and hoping our gear is strong enough to out-threat everybody else with it.

Frost Emblem Accessories Redux

2010-01-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

You thought I forgot, didn't you?

Before I begin with the Tree stuff, while not exactly a retraction, a... change of heart... on the items from the Bear accessories post. I stated that I would likely buy the Corroded Skeleton Key fairly early in my purchases. On further review, I made the mistake of looking at the ridiculously high Stamina number, combining it with another item and thinking, "Wow, I can get that much Stamina AND some other stats for the same cost (or less) as another item..." forgetting that, there's no need to buy this in addition to the other item, and Stamina doesn't get me anything substantial except the ability to take a bigger hit (or more smaller hits) before dying. While I will still have this on my list of things to purchase - 3000+ health in bear form from a single trinket is not to be laughed at - it has been moved far down to the end, because it is more beneficial to buy the other items that provide a (smaller) stamina boost in addition to stats which improve survivability over the long term instead of just against burst damage. As such I'm drawing close to 95 Frost Emblems and trying to decide what to buy to give me the best improvement fastest (yes, I know, isn't that what that post was all about? HUSH YOU my gear has a few pieces that differ from that analysis and I have to take that into account.... sheesh!)

Here we go with an examination of Back, Neck, Rings, and Trinkets purchasable with Frost Emblems for Trees, follow up from the post on Tier 10 and the Tree. Much like the Bear posts before it, this carries the same disclaimers.

Trinket

Purified Lunar Dust
Stats: 153 spell power, your spell casts have a chance to gain 305 mana per 5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

The only trinket of note available for Frost Emblems is Purified Lunar Dust. Talisman of Resurgence is available for Triumph but I'm not 100% sold on it... Int is nice but I think I would rather have spell power in my trinkets. Perhaps I'll pick that one up later, but I really do like the Dust. Big chunk of spell power, and a fairly significant mana regen ability. If this procs at ANY decent rate, it will be up for the entirety of any boss fight. This will be relatively high on my list of items to pick up... but that might be just because I'm still using an iLevel 200 trinket.

Idol/Relic

Idol of the Black Willow
Stats: The periodic healing from Rejuvenation grants 32 spell power for 15 sec, stacks up to 8 times.
Cost: 30 Emblem of Frost

Quick math, 32 * 8 = 256 spell power. The Triumph item (Idol of Flaring Growth) grants 234 spell power for 9 seconds, but has a chance instead of being definite, but it's a fairly high percentage proc, which means this essentially gets you 22 additional spell power for 6 additional seconds, but it has to "build up" anytime it falls off. I like it, but it's not a huge gain, and will probably end up fairly low on my list of items to replace.

Cloak

Drape of the Violet Tower
Stats: 177 armor, 69 Stamina, 69 Intellect, Blue socket, 52 crit, 30 mp5, 97 sp.
Cost: 50 Emblem of Frost

Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky
Stats: 177 armor, 69 Stamina, 69 Intellect, 60 Spirit, Yellow socket, 52 crit, 97 sp.
Cost: 50 Emblem of Frost

So here we have the choice between a Blue socket and 30 mp5 vs. a Yellow socket and 60 spirit. I'm a tree, I like me some Spirit, and it allows me to get some haste out of the deal. I'll take the second.

There are no rings or neck items available for Emblems of Frost, although for rings the Band of the Invoker and Heartmender's Circle and for Amulets the Evoker's Charm and Frozen Tear of Elune are worth mentioning from Triumph Emblems. (For that matter, I completely brain farted in the Bear accessories - Clutch of Fortification is da bomb, and Shard of the Crystal Heart ain't bad either, not to mention the AWESOME Glyph of Indomitability, all available via Emblems of Triumph.) Personally, I'd rather have the Spirit items than the mp5 ones, but I don't think any of them are outright bad choices.

One final random note... if you get this far please let me know if the WoWHead popup tooltips are working... they should be, now (*GASP!*)

Hope you found this worthwhile and enjoyable! Thanks for reading!

Icecrown Ramblings, Part 2

2010-01-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

So there's been a little hubbub lately (at least over at I Sheep Things..., I thought there were others but my brain fails me at the most inopportune times) over how to go after the escape from the Lich King encounter in Halls of Reflection. I thought I'd throw my $.02 into the ring on this little thing.

For those that didn't just go read the post I linked, or have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain. Everybody else can skip the next paragraph (or two).

In this, the last encounter of the three Icecrown Citadel 5-man instances, you come upon Jaina Proudmoore fighting (and losing) to Arthas. She freezes him temporarily, then you, your crew, and Jaina must escape from him before he catches you and turns you into some mindless slavering undead minion to go out and make more mindless slavering undead minions. As you run away, Arthas throws up ice walls and summons bad guys to kill you, and you must beat them as Jaina breaks down the walls - which she does, conveniently, just as you beat each wave.

What Rhii refers to as an exploit and I will refer to simply as the cheesy way to do things is that you can apparently run off to the side after you start the encounter, let Arthas meander his way past, and fight the bad guys without him sneaking up behind you.

In case you didn't get the idea from that last paragraph, I think this is just silly. Let me explain. Please take my comments with a grain of salt - I've not experimented with this, but I'll make some assumptions (yes I know) about what goes on from what I've read.

First, although this was initially not the case, there is no advantage time-wise to running the encounter this way - you still have a limited amount of time to beat each wave or Arthas catches Jaina and you all die. So advantage: push.

Second, although reports differ on how the adds spawn when you are following Arthas instead of leading him, there's at least a chance that the adds spawn in the middle of your party. In case you have your head under a rock, that's a nightmare for a tank. When leading, the adds spawn by Arthas, and while the ghouls jump a long distance and land in a semi-random pattern, you can see them coming and prepare, and the other adds run in - giving the tank a point of contact to gather them up. While this might mean that the DPS has to wait half a second to go crazy on them, it also reduces the chance of random spawn on healer causing wipes. Advantage: non-cheesy way.

Third, the most common reason I hear folks say for doing it the cheesy way is that it's easier. I can't make a definitive personal comparison because I've never run it the cheesy way, but I can say this: I have never failed at the encounter, and have been part of more than one group that has completed the encounter in time to get the Achievement. The encounter is far easier, IMHO, than the first encounter of the instance in which you face waves of undead that hit harder and have a more difficult approach in which to gather them up from. If you can get TO that encounter, there's no reason you need to try to use a poor choice in the design of the encounter to try to make it easier, because it's not that incredibly hard to begin with.

I guess I could have summed this all up by saying: I don't think there's any reason to do it that way.

Personally, since I'm the tank 95% of the time, I just run on ahead and if the rest of the group wants to try to follow him without a tank, I'll let them. I suppose I could do the same thing as the healer, although that seems slightly more suicidal. In either case, I have yet to have anybody choose to do so.

If anybody comes along and disagrees, please feel free to share your reasons in the comments.

Icecrown Ramblings, Part 1

2010-01-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

Illorien, Rena, and I took a 10-man crew back into ICC Wednesday night with hopes of getting through the lower spire in its entirety for the first time. We've managed to have the same core group for each of our runs, with the last 2-3 slots a bit of a swinging door amongst our guildmates, and for reference, this is the crew we were running with Wednesday:

Tanks (2)
Myself and Illorien (DK)

Heals (3)
Rena and Dendorian (Both Holy Paladins) and Recom (Tree)

DPS (5)
One each Warrior, Hunter, Mage, Warlock, and Elemental Shaman.

We still semi-wiped a couple times on the trash leading up to Marrowgar - those Deathbound Wards are brutal when they spawn in the middle of trying to clear other trash. We made it through to him in under an hour, though and two-shotted him. It probably would have been a 1-shot but one of our healers got hugged by him during 2 bone storms in a row, getting backed into a corner and simultaneously cold-flamed and whirlwinded.

We pushed through to Deathwhisper, and 2-shotted her as well. We've gotten our add strategy down to a science, left our Shaman on the boss full-time, and had no issues whatsoever with the add part of the fight. Our wipe occurred because we didn't really understand about the random ghosts that spawn and target a raid member - personally I'd never noticed them before, probably because we had to move her enough due to her death and decay that they never really did anything to our melee. This run, however, one decided to spawn in hugging our tree, followed by one hugging Illorien. The second run we avoided that and downed her easily.

Although I didn't talk about it much, last week we made it to the Gunship Battle but had issues with it, which was strange because we had 1-shotted it the first time. I went into a bit more explanation of the fight this time, had a little better strategy, and also had a better plan for holding the adds on our boat. There was no issue at all this time and the Skybreaker had nearly 250k hp left when Orgrim's Hammer fell from the sky.

To go into a little more detail, previously we had both cannons focusing on the rocketeers in the back of the Hammer, and had not asked our ranged DPS to try to kill the axe throwers. This was a mistake - the axe throwers get more powerful over time if they aren't killed - so this time we put our Warlock and Mage in the cannons, and had the one on the left, with the clear view of the back of the boat, target the rocketeers, while the other cannon focused on killing the axe throwers. Our healers and ranged stayed near the front edge of the boat, and our raiding party consisted of Illorien and Rena, the Shaman and the Hunter.

We cleared that with enough time for four or five shots at Deathbringer Saurfang, and while we had seen the fight once before, we had only really had time for one shot and hadn't learned much from it.

So I explained the fight again and had everyone spread out. Illorien, Chelm, and I were of course on the boss, and from my left to right we had the Mage, Paladin, Warlock, Tree, Shaman, Paladin, Hunter. I'm not sure about that spread, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and put everybody in range of at least 2 Healers.

After a wipe or two we had the tree stay in caster form and try to help with DPS and CC, and we seemed to do okay with that. Our best effort had him down to nearly 2.5M (or roughly 25%) before he enraged, and he got off at least 2 Mark of the Fallen Champion each time. I've had folks suggest we try to 1-heal it. I'm not sure if that's the best idea but it's something we may explore in the future.

I'm still running through the fight in my head, trying to determine where we need to shift our strategy or work on execution, because he was still getting blood power too quickly, although we've gotten pretty good at controlling the blood beasts.

We may try to get together again on the weekend and give it another shot.

I had intended to chat about Halls of Reflection, but this developed into enough of a post on its own so I'll touch on this later. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you on the flip side!

Dungeon Walkthroughs

2010-01-21T05:38:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned Icedragon over at Druid Main before...

I wanted to point out that she's been working on walkthroughs of Northrend Dungeons, completing guides on Oculus, Azjol-Nerub, and the Nexus so far, and she's been doing a wonderful job! For any newer players especially, go take a look!

Tomorrow I'll yak a bit about our latest foray into the Lich King's lair and maybe touch on doing Halls of Reflection the right way.

The big 5-0.

2010-01-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

ABITT (nice acronym for not trying for one, eh?) has reached 50 posts today.

For all of you that have found your way over here and took the time to read some of the random thoughts that leaked out of my brain and into this little electronic medium, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoying my little ramblings for as long as I continue writing them!

Perhaps I will even work on my profile some, or add *gasp* pictures!

Alt-o-clock!

2010-01-15T07:04:00.000-08:00

So I've bought some Heirloom gear and been working on my getting my highest level alt to somewhere near respectability lately.

The difference in levelling speed is ridiculous.

Now, I haven't been levelling by using the LFD tool - I'm a little leery of trying to do so at this point - but as I get going I just might start doing so.

But Alrom is my level 69 Paladin (at least for today!) and I've been coming up as a Retribution spec. Fairly soon, though, I'll be faced with a decision...

What do I want to do in the end game, with my first alt?

Do I want to stick with the Tank and Heals method of my main? Or do I want to have a DPS or PvP spec to play with?

So I pose this question to any readers that wind their way over here. What do you do with your alts? Do you try different roles, do you play the PvP or PvE game that you don't on your main? Or do you stick with your favorites and play the same game?

Personally I suspect I'll keep Ret as my main spec and Prot or Holy as off. But that's just me and it's a little selfish reasons why - I like tanking and healing and I also like short LFD queue times...

Tier 10 and the Tree

2010-01-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to mirror my post on Emblems and Bears with one about Emblems and Trees! The same restrictions apply, and if you need it there's an abbreviation glossary of sorts at the bottom. Here's the restrictions disclaimer, quoted from the other post:

I'll be comparing this gear to the Tier 9 level gear as well as trying to decide what's the best value - the most bang for your Emblem buck, if you will. Of course, this will depend on the gear you're currently wearing. If I say a particular piece is the best upgrade, but you're wearing an item from ToGC in that slot and still using blues elsewhere, replace the blues first.

The Tier 9 level I'll be using is the base level - for those of us that did some 25-man ToC (or heroic ToC at all) and may have picked up trophies or heroic versions of gear, remember that your mileage will vary, because your Tier 9 gear is a little better than what I'm putting forth here. Also note that I'm not examining accessories (back, neck, rings, and trinkets) yet. If I can work up the courage I might tackle that later.

Head

Tier 9: Malfurion's Headpiece of Conquest
Stats: 485 a, 92 Sta, 92 Int, 64 Sp, M/B sockets, 72 crit, 113 SP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Helm of Abundant Growth
Stats: 506 a, 103 Sta, 103 Int, 82 Sp, M/Y sockets, 74 haste, 131 SP
Cost: 75 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Helmet
Stats: 517 a, 109 Sta, 109 Int, 88 Sp, M/R sockets, 80 crit, 140 SP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available

Here we go again! Similar to what I pointed out for Bears, items available via Emblems of Triumph, at least, tend to be better than the lowest-level Tier items (the ones being considered here!) without considering the set bonus. I tend to think the Restoration set bonuses are in general fairly strong *but* I tend to focus more on primary stats in my analysis. Keep that in mind!

So, for the things that we care most about here, you're looking at a difference of 9-16 Int, 18-24 Spirit, 18-27 spell power, plus your choice of socket and haste vs. crit. (Or if you look at it a little differently and use the T10 as the target if you will, with the other two items as starting points, 7 to 16 Int, 6 to 24 Spirit, and 9 to 27 spell power... depends on how you look at it!) With what I've been reading lately about the benefits of haste, I might try to stay with the Helm of Abundant Growth for awhile and make this one of my later upgrades, but we'll have to see how the other stats pan out versus later upgrades; 95 Frost Emblems is a LOT. For the record I prefer red sockets over any other - spell power being king of all things spellish - but I don't have much of a preference for blue or yellow over each other. Then again, if what I've read about haste is to be believed, maybe I should be looking to yellow gems...

Shoulder

Tier 9: Malfurion's Spaulders of Conquest
Stats: 447 a, 68 Sta, 68 Int, 52 Sp, B socket, 60 haste, 96 SP
Cost: 30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Shoulders of the Fateful Accord
Stats: 467 a, 77 Sta, 77 Int, 67 Sp, Y socket, 59 crit, 109 SP
Cost: 45 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Pauldrons
Stats: 477 a, 81 Sta, 81 Int, 71 Sp, R socket, 63 crit, 116 SP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available

We have a fairly similar stat progression on our shoulders, including choice of socket, but instead of having the choice of haste or crit, it's a straight move from haste to crit or stay at crit. 9-13 (4-13?) Int and 15-19 (4-19?) Spirit isn't incredibly compelling, although 13-20 (7-20?) spell power is a better deal at 60 Frost Emblems than the previous item at 95. I think for now, I put this item *slightly* ahead of the head, especially if you already have the Shoulders of the Fateful Accord, as you're not losing haste coming from that item (unless of course you've gemmed for it.)

Chest

Tier 9: Malfurion's Robe of Conquest
Stats: 596 a, 92 Sta, 92 Int, 72 Sp, R/Y sockets, 72 Crit, 122 SP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available

Tier 10: Lasherweave Robes
Stats: 636 a, 109 Sta, 109 Int, 96 Sp, R/Y sockets, 80 crit, 149 SP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Vestments of Spruce and Fir
Stats: 665 a, 123 Sta, 123 Int, 84 Sp, B/Y/R sockets, 108 haste, 162 SP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Having done the research that I have, I'm struck by the eerie similarity between my thoughts on Tier gear for bears and trees. Perhaps it was Blizzard's itemization decisions this time around, but just the same as for my bear set, I want to get the four piece bonus for my tree gear, and the chest is *probably* the piece I'm going to leave out.

For the same cost, you get 14 more Sta and Int, and if you count +20 Spirit for the blue socket (leaving the same remaining sockets), you also get +8 Spirit, not to mention the 13 spell power. Considering that the lesser of these upgrades was already a 17 point, 24 point, and 27 point upgrade (looking at Int, Spirit, and SP), that's huge. In addition, it gets you haste, which I think you want over crit. Sound familiar? This takes the cake, I think, over either other piece for my first tree target.

Wrist

There is a wrist item available for Emblems of Valor, or the PvP Titan-Forged Armwraps of Salvation from Wintergrasp... but nothing for the Emblems we're covering, and those PvP wraps aren't all that helpful.

Hands

Tier 9: Malfurion's Handguards of Conquest
Stats: 373 a, 68 Sta, 68 Int, 60 Sp, R socket, 52 crit, 96 SP
Cost: 30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available

Tier 10: Lasherweave Gauntlets
Stats: 398 a, 81 Sta, 81 Int, 71 Sp, R socket, 63 haste, 116 SP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Gloves of the Great Horned Owl
Stats: 416 a, 92 Sta, 92 Int, B socket, 80 crit, 72 haste, 132 SP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

The Gloves are indeed a straight upgrade from the Lasherweave Gauntlets for the same cost, but I want that 4-piece Tier bonus and unlike the chest upgrade, this one doesn't offer you something you want more for the cost of moving away from the Tier pieces. Instead, it takes a red socket and replaces it with a blue one. Unless by some chance I end up with the chest piece (VoA new boss drop?), I'm going to stick with the Lasherweave Gauntlets and leave the Great Horned Owl on the shelf.

As for the order in which to purchase... 13 Int, 11 Spirit, and 20 SP place it firmly in the middle of the Shoulder and Head class. Much like the shoulders, depending on what has happened with the head I'll probably take this ahead of it, to keep the haste bonus longer, because the difference in stats to Emblem cost just isn't all that different.

Waist

There's not much available here. Belt of Petrified Ivy doesn't really look all that great to me due to its lack of Spirit, but otherwise it does have a significant amount of haste and spell power, which is good. Belt of the Living Thicket for Conquest Emblems or Furious Gladiator's Belt of Salvation from PvP might be better (or at least not worse) options. Personally, I'm probably going to be holding out for a boss drop as none of these really strike me as must-have... unless I really have emblems to spend, then I might give the Ivy a shot. That'll be quite awhile, though, as I have a lot of gear ahead of it.

Legs

Tier 9: Malfurion's Leggings of Conquest
Stats: 522 a, 92 Sta, 92 Int, 72 Sp, R/B sockets, 72 haste, 122 SP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available.

Tier 10: Lasherweave Legplates
Stats: 577 a, 109 Sta, 109 Int, 96 Sp, R/Y sockets 78 haste, 149 SP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

I like this upgrade, it's solid, but it just doesn't offer the same level of bonuses as the chest piece does for the same cost, so it doesn't get placed ahead of it in line. 17 Int, 24 Spirit, and 27 SP do make it a little more attractive than the head, shoulders, or hands, although not by much. It probably gets put second in line.

Feet

There are no items available for Emblems for feet. There's the crafted Blessed Cenarion Boots, but that's about it other than boss loot.

I did it! I did it!

*looks up*

... and the sky didn't fall after all. Imagine that!

As I finish up this part of my venture, there's something I'd like to mention. I've seen a couple of other blogs post lists for whom the priorities on items differ vastly from mine... And wonderful Meka commented to such an effect on the bear gear post.

They're not wrong. The key is always that the "best" upgrade is not necessarily the one with the best stats, it's the one for which you gain the most benefit. I'm examining primarily what gets you the most base stats per Emblem spent and the most base stats per single upgrade, because this is how I want to spend my Emblems and is what I think is the best way to go about things. If you think it's more important to stay haste or expertise capped, then it drastically changes the priority in which you purchase items! I really hope you've enjoyed my comments and I hope you found some value to my (less than scientific) analysis, but I encourage you to take it into consideration and make your own decisions! I'm just somebody who rambled on those newfangled blog-thingies!

Abbreviation Glossary:

a: Armor
SP: Spell Power

Stat Abbreviations:
Sta: Stamina
Int: Intellect
Sp: Spirit

Socket Abbreviations:
B: Blue
M: Meta
R: Red
Y: Yellow

Ever Onward

2010-01-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm putting the finishing touches on my Tier 10 examination of tree gear today. It'll go up tomorrow morning.

This counts for getting it done on Tuesday, so you don't get to feather me and call me a boomkin.

For the first time I've really had a few subpar experiences in random groups, but I wanted to call attention to something else.

I was tanking a random Gun'drak the other day, when I got in they had already downed the snake boss and had apparently lost their tank. I really have no idea why, although when I glanced at GearScore I suspected it was somebody who wasn't willing to be patient with alts or new 80's, since most of the crew was relatively low.

We proceeded through the trash to the Colossus. Having noticed a few things about the play of a couple of the DPS, and in an effort not to call anyone in particular out, I asked in party chat (perhaps not quite verbatim, but close enough)...

"Please don't take this the wrong way, but has everybody been in here and know the boss fights?"

I received three variations of "yup" in reply, and one "Staring over here at the lady all in blues and greens I see..." followed by the confirmation that no, she hadn't been in here before. I was surprised because I actually thought at least one other of the DPS on the run would say that. Perhaps it was an alt.

In any case, I said it wasn't a problem and proceeded to tell her the key to the Colossus fight (which isn't really key anymore, if you have a relatively normally geared healer): Stay out of the purple stuff. We proceeded to smash face and move on.

The lady in question commented something to the effect of "Wow, a nice person. So refreshing!"

We moved through the rest of the instance and although it went a little slow, we cleared it without an issue. I took the time to try to explain at least the necessary details of each fight (and a little more with Eck - I tried to get her puked on for her achievement but it didn't work), and we had no problems at all.

I was struck, though, by the fact that she hadn't wanted to admit she hadn't been there, essentially for fear of arseholes, and the fact that she was that incredibly surprised by the fact that there are regular, nice people out there.

A lot of folks talk about the general lack of good behavior amongst players in WoW. I hope that what I did as a general course of being a decent human being inspires some kindness in others, and while I know that all the bad behavior and the disillusionment associated with it is a symptom of greater societal issues, I also hope that we can one day reach a point where it's no longer an issue.

Perhaps I'm just being idealistic.

Hope everyone's doing great with the new year and see you on the flip side! Thanks for reading.

The Guns of Icecrown Citadel

2010-01-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

Illorien, Renakashin, and I finally managed to get another scheduled guild run into ICC 10-man Wednesday night.

This is just our second outing as a group. One of our guild officers was running a second 10-man group in parallel that night as well. Epic Adventurers had not, as of the beginning of these groups, downed any boss in ICC except for Marrowgar, and the group the three of us were leading had not even done that.

Wednesday was a day for progressing!

We had a bit of a time sorting out players for each group and a lot of turnover at the last two DPS spots in our run, but we ended up with this group dynamic:

Tanks:
Illorien and Myself

Heals:
Renakashin, another Holy Paladin, and a Resto Druid

DPS:
Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Ret Pally

So a bit late we started in. My last post on ICC10 detailed our troubles with regards to the trash leading up to Marrowgar. Tonight there was no such trouble. We managed to lose a player or two to lacking of target marking and not being quick enough on taunts of the trap-spawned saber-lashing Deathbound Wards, but no wipes and we were shortly facing down the monstrosity that is Lord Marrowgar.

Lord Marrowgar!

We originally stayed with the strategy we had tried (and been getting better with) on our last run - tanking Marrowgar in the middle, spreading out the DPS and trying to contain the insanity. Our first attempt was going fairly well until I crashed and had to reboot. I didn't see what happened while my computer was starting up again, but I can't imagine it was pretty.

When I got back in it was suggested that we tank him off to the side of the room instead of the middle. Something about him only being able to use his fire in the same general direction or something - being a tank, I'm in front of him and I can't tell you what it looks like from the other side, but somebody felt this would help with being able to avoid the fire (or possibly bring everybody closer together for killing bone prisons.) It was also noted that he seemed to like to be in one corner or the other at the end of his whirlwind, which would mean less moving him and the raid having to avoid it.

It was an excellent suggestion, and our second attempt was flawless. Illorien and I occasionally had to switch sides of the room - he really did end his whirlwind in one end of the room or the other basically every time - but with Feral Charge I was able to close the distance quickly, and Illorien was quick enough to stay more or less with me. Our DPS worked well at breaking prisons and getting back on the boss, and he went down without a single player death. Progress for our crew and Frost Emblems for the win!

The trash before Lady Deathwhisper didn't provide anywhere near the challenge that the trash before Marrowgar did our first time in. Then again, if we'd known anything about the Deathbound Wards the first time in, we wouldn't have had nearly the issues we did. In any case, it was a simple matter to pull a small group at a time and down them healers, casters and melee. The two big spider-looking guys are a minor pain, but they went down without causing us any issues.

Lady Deathwhisper!

For anybody that hasn't done this fight (and if you've found your way here, you probably have!), it's not an exceptionally difficult fight, if you have reasonable DPS and good coordination. Simply put, you have to maintain enough DPS on Deathwhisper's shield to kill her before she enrages while still having enough of the right kinds of DPS to take out the adds in each wave before a new wave spawns.

We tried a couple of different plans, but the one that worked for us was this: We put the ret Pally on Deathwhisper full time. The Warrior and Hunter were targeting the Adherents, while the Warlock and Mage targeted the Fanatics. Once all of any group were down, the ranged DPS switched to Deathwhisper until the new group of adds spawned. We had the Pally and the Warrior switched at first, it took folks awhile to figure out exactly what was needed on the adds, and Ill and I found out we needed to mark targets for DPS to focus on when there were multiple targets for physical/magical DPS.

While Ill and I had to tank the Fanatics, our damage was focused on the Adherents, since that's where we were limited less. I did discover fairly soon, though, that I had one single ability that could do more than 100 damage to the Fanatics: GO GO FERAL FAERIE FIRE. Yeah, I know, 1000 damage every 6 seconds or so isn't much, but it helps, dangit! One of our attempts ended up doomed when we lost both our Mage and our Warlock with multiple Fanatics up. Let me tell you how much you're not going to be able to kill them without magical damage.

I think Illorien and I failed a little in our explanation of the fight - our successful run had more than once in which the adds went down with 15+ seconds to spare before the next group spawned. I can only surmise that we had DPS switching to the wrong adds because we were calling out to focus fire on an Empowered Adherent or Deformed Fanatic, and we hadn't clearly laid out that you need to stay on the correct type of add because you can't really help with the others.

On what was to be our last attempt of the night because of time, we broke through her shield with all adds down and just under 3 minutes left on her enrage timer. The nice thing about this point in the fight is that it takes a ton less time to take her down than it does to take her shield down. It took us less than 2 minutes to bring her down after her shield fell. On a high from a successful fight, we decided to press on and try the Gunship Battle.

The trash in between is PVP-ish except for the frost drake. None of it caused us much issue, though. Unlike the Faction Champions fight in ToC, these aren't true PVP-like mobs, and they go down a LOT easier. The drake's a chump, too, and easy to kill.

The Gunship Battle!

It took awhile to explain this fight because most of our raid hadn't been here before. There's a lot of random stuff to talk about, but here's the gist of what we did.

Our raiding party to the other boat consisted of Illorien, Renakashin, the Warlock, and the Warrior. Our guns were manned by the Hunter and the ret Pally. Everything was going well up until the end of our first raiding party trip across to the other side. Rena had issues getting back across and died. Fortunately, she was close enough to the edge that our tree was able to Rebirth from our boat, and before long we were up and going again. Our Warlock went down, then our Mage. I tried to Rebirth the Mage but a portal opened up and he got one-shotted by the mob that appeared on top of him.

We added our hunter to the raiding party going across. Somehow, through all this craziness, we managed to stay ahead of the Horde. When we lost our ret Pally shortly before the end of a raid to the other boat, some folks were ready to wipe - but we were close enough to the end that Illorien hopped in the cannon in his place, and before another battle mage came out, Orgrim's Hammer fell from the skies.

With no more trash and still on the high of success, we put off sleep for just a little longer to give a shot at Deathbringer Saurfang.

Deathbringer Saurfang!

I probably didn't do a good job of explaining this fight - I know I failed to mention why I was spreading everybody out as much as I was. We failed, but with it already being late and in a one-more-shot mode for the last 2 encounters we decided to call it for the night. The deathblow was 2 of our healers going down. I think we gave up a little too much blood power before that happened anyway - I was off on my taunt from Ill, among other things - although we did burn down the blood beasts relatively quickly. I'm positive our next run will be even more successful.

EA's other group had also reached Saurfang by the time we ended. As of the time of writing of this post I do not know if they were successful or not. In either case, our guild made a huge step in progression through the Citadel.

Thanks for joining me on this little detour! I know we may be a little behind the curve, as new content dropped this week and we haven't quite cleared the old content yet, but this was a big success for us and we look forward to more consistent success in the future.

How to Make Friends.... or Something Like That

2010-01-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

Sorry, the tree post is still coming, but it'll have to wait. I'm busy, and want to put a positive note out today.

I had one of my best cross-server pugs the other day, and I felt it deserved mention.

We pulled Nexus, and I casually glanced at folk's gear scores before we started. 3 of the 5 were 5k+, and the other two didn't miss it by much. I figured this would be a clean, easy run. We feasted and buffed and off we went!

Little did I know how clean and easy. 17 minutes later, a scant 2 minutes after the LFG buff wore off, Keristraza collapsed.

I picked up Split Personality on Grand Magus. She was down nearly 60% before her first and only split.

For the first time in my WoW experience, I really did chain-pull most of the instance, pulling each group before we were finished with the last. Nobody really had any issue with it. My pally healer did almost as much damage as she did heals outside of boss fights.

I was impressed. It's times like this that I wish Blizzard had implemented an addendum to their cross-server ignore feature, that would give you a preference for people in cross-server groups. I think that would be fun, and allow more interaction and relationship-building than the current system, perhaps even sister guilds on other servers.

Also, I keep growing gradually closer to my Glory of the Hero proto-drake. I think I'm going to make a serious push to get it in the next month or so.

Hope folks had a happy holiday season! Back to the grindstone.

Life's Little Joys

2010-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

The tree post is coming.

When I have time to write it.

Rawr @ busy-ness.

Frost Emblem Accessories

2010-01-04T05:00:00.001-08:00

*EDIT*

I've changed my mind a bit about the importance of the Corroded Skeleton Key. Please see this post for details.

*END EDIT*

As a followup to Tier 10 and the Bear, I'd like to take a quick look at what is available from an Accessories standpoint for bears. There's not a lot so this should go quick!

Trinket

Corroded Skeleton Key
Stats: +228 Sta, Use: Absorbs 3200 damage, lasts 20 sec.
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Great trinket, gives a purchasable upgrade from the Coren Direbrew stamina trinkets. Meh-inducing use ability, but better again that the Direbrew ones. Will purchase sometime in the middle of my planned leather item upgrades. The issue at hand is that the only significant increase is in stamina, which will only help in that it will let me back off some of my two-color gems to single color because I won't need the stamina bump as much.

None of the other trinkets are worth talking about.

Idol/Relic

Idol of the Crying Moon
Stats: Periodic damage from Rake or Lacerate causes you to gain 44 Agi for 15 seconds. Stacks 5 times.
Cost: 30 Emblem of Frost

I like this item a LOT. I'll take 220 Agi over the 135 from Idol of the Corruptor or 200 dodge rating from the Idol of Mutilation any day. I'm probably going to insert the combination of this and the trinket (90 badges) at the top of my list, ahead of my leather items, as the next leather item on my list is 95 badges.

Cloak

There are a few options here which seem promising, but probably only one we want. Each of them costs 50 Emblem of Frost. Here they are:

Might of the Ocean Serpent
Stats: 177 a, 95 Str, 103 Sta, Y socket, 45 exp, 65 ArP

Recovered Scarlet Onslaught Cape
Stats: 177 a, 90 Agi, 90 Sta, B socket, 60 crit, 105 AP, 52 ArP

Sentinel's Winter Cloak
Stats: 737 a, 90 Str, 124 Sta, Y socket, 48 def, 48 dodge

At first, I thought this was a slam dunk, but on second thought I'm not quite as certain. I like the Might's expertise, but it is otherwise inferior to the Cloak. We'll rule that out. The Cloak nets you 139 Sta (assuming 15 from a 2-color gem), while the Cape nets you only 120 (assuming 30 from the socket). I like the dodge rating, but 90 Agi will net you more dodge than that 48 dodge rating. 560 more armor is nice, but it's not affected by our multiplier. I don't think either one is a bad choice, but I think I may be going for the Cape rather than the Cloak.

There are no rings or neck items available via Frost Emblems. Given my current items, the cloak will probably come after I've manage to upgrade most of my leather items.

The tree post is coming soon!

Abbreviations Glossary:

a: armor
AP: Attack Power
ArP: Armor Penetration
exp: expertise

Stat Abbreviations:
Agi: Agility
Sta: Stamina
Str: Strength

Socket Abbreviations:
B: Blue
M: Meta
R: Red
Y: Yellow

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Hug your bear.

That is all.

Dragonform Druid!

2009-12-31T05:00:00.000-08:00

Special thanks to Syrana over at Sideshow and Syrana for this post!

You see, the Christmas gift over there was free ideas for blog posts! Unfortunately I didn't find my way over there until after the 25th... but Syrana was nice enough to give me one anyway!

@Kaethir – Sure, you can have a topic too! It looks like you enjoy your shapeshifting abilities (druids do cheat! *shakes fist*)… so if you could create a new form, what would it be and what would it be its optimal use?

That's a tough question, because we already have forms for each of the major roles in the game, AND forms for travel, in three different ways. So I'll take a different approach and back into a use for it...

Lore-wise, druids are all about being in tune with nature... so in-tune that they can take the form of beasts to carry out their tasks, or even the "elemental" plants. So, where in nature could we find something that would be both cool to shapeshift into AND have a role that is not one we can already fill?

I thought first about things like elephants (sorry, Elekks) or mammoths, and while there might be an interesting idea there (transforming into a mount other players can use) I didn't think that was quite worthy, at least not on its own. I thought about rhinocerous, but what role would it fill? The most obvious would be a tank, but we are already bears.

Moving on, I considered small animals - but what fun would it be to shapeshift into a squirrel or raccoon? I had a chuckle at the thought of a skunk, but... well, just no. We already have a "small bird" flight form, and for the life of me I can't think of another interesting use for a small bird. A BIG bird, maybe... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Tree of Life got me thinking plants... but that seemed even less interesting than the other options. A carnviorous plant? Meh.

I started thinking about game mechanics, and how it could be awesome for druids to cheat even more... and I finally stumbled on an idea that I liked, and thought it would be fun even if it just gave druids another DPS option.

How awesome would it be to be able to fly in combat? Yet another way us druids could break the rules. So, what form could we use to fly in combat? How about a dragon? Then we'd get to breathe fire and still dish out the physical damage!

Some of you are probably saying that dragons aren't really beasts or animals, especially because they are intelligent creatures in WoW lore, so druids shouldn't be able to shapeshift into one. A proto-dragon or a drake then, perhaps?

Of course, there would have to be some kind of limitation to keep us from being able to run away from any fight whenever we wanted. We're already good enough at that. Also, we'd have to be limited on how to use it indoors so we can't skip areas you have to run to reach, or get to areas we were never intended to get to. Since I'm having fun with this, however, I'll leave that thorny obstacle up to Blizzard.

I envision the dragon form druid to be a hybrid ranged/melee DPS form - we're shapeshifters, we can gain a little size but we're not going to suddenly become Onyxia or Malygos. This fits with my earlier assessment about not shapeshifting into the form of an "intelligent" creature, as we can shapeshift into something the size of the smaller drakes or Icecrown proto-dragons. It would make sense, then, that while we have armor approximate to heavier DPS - armor bonuses of, say, 250%? - we're not going to be able to tank in this form.

Our dragon-ness is what gives us our combination of melee and ranged abilities. We can swoop in and attack with teeth and claws... or stay flying at range and rain fire down on our enemies. In the optimum situation, we could do a little of both, and if we are restricted from one or the other, it will hurt our output. We could engage enemies in flight and really show our talents - continue melee on Onyxia in phase 2 - but we'd be weak if opponents managed to catch us on the ground and root us in place. Of course, we can shapeshift out of those, but that's precious seconds we AREN'T doing what we want!

Out of combat... perhaps we COULD have another player jump on while we fly around. Not the most incredibly useful of abilities... unless we're helping a friend take a low-level alt to all the flight masters. Or even better, ferrying one other player with you to the meeting stone for a raid. Then you don't have to wait for anyone else to summon! We'd have to keep our flight speed from swift flight form for this to be remotely useful, but perhaps in combat our flight speed could be slowed.

There would, of course, be a couple other thorny issues for Blizzard to figure out, like how in the world you fit this into the already-crowded druid talent trees, but it would be a great way to make the class that much more fun and continue the time-honored druid tradition of cheating our way to the top!

Tier 10 and the Bear

2009-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take an in-depth look at the stat bonuses on Tier 10 gear and the other items available with Emblems of Frost for bear tanks. If you've read this blog at all, you probably know already that fairly soon I'll follow up with a look at the gear with respect to trees.

Bear with me, these are going to be long. Perhaps not quite Bearwalls, but long.

I'll be comparing this gear to the Tier 9 level gear as well as trying to decide what's the best value - the most bang for your Emblem buck, if you will. Of course, this will depend on the gear you're currently wearing. If I say a particular piece is the best upgrade, but you're wearing an item from ToGC in that slot and still using blues elsewhere, replace the blues first.

The Tier 9 level I'll be using is the base level - for those of us that did some 25-man ToC (or heroic ToC at all) and may have picked up trophies or heroic versions of gear, remember that your mileage will vary, because your Tier 9 gear is a little better than what I'm putting forth here. Also note that I'm not examining accessories (back, neck, rings, and trinkets) yet. If I can work up the courage I might tackle that later.

If you are confused as to any abbreviations, please see the end for a glossary.

Without further ado, let me begin.

Head

Tier 9: Malfurion's Headguard of Conquest
Stats: 485 a, 104 Agi, 120 Sta, M/Y sockets, 80 crit, 64 exp., 129 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Hood of Lethal Intent
Stats: 506 a, 120 Agi, 136 Sta, M/Y sockets, 82 hit, 165 AP, 64 ArP
Cost: 75 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Headguard
Stats: 517 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, M/R sockets, 88 crit, 143 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

I'm going to go ahead and mention something here at the top that I've noticed across the board. Take a look at the Tier 9 vs. Hood of Lethal Intent. I didn't put the iLevel of the items in my summary. Hood is an iLevel 245, while the Tier 9 is a 232. Something they did with the purchasable gear is that the individual items are generally better than the tier pieces in-slot if you don't raid enough to get the Trophies (or Marks of Sanctification for Tier 10). The 2nd level non-heroic tier gear is approximately on par with the pieces you can buy without having to raid. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but that's what you see here. The only reason to stay with the T9 gear is if you desperately need the expertise...

It is also good to note that the Hood is a bit more DPS-centric, with hit vs. crit and ArP vs. expertise. The major stats win out though, and you should take the Hood unless you feel that the Tier bonus is worth the stat drop and you can't afford to lose another piece.

You lose expertise for ArP in the step up to Tier 10 from Tier 9, or hit for crit coming from the Hood. I'm not excited by the loss either way, but the nice step up in base stats - +40 or 24 Agi, +24 or 8 Sta - far outweighs the loss. If this pulls you off your hit or expertise caps, try to shift your gems or enchants to compensate. The downside is that it costs you 95 Frost Emblems to do this step - that's a fairly huge cost. Let's see how that pans out as we go forward.

Shoulder

Tier 9: Malfurion's Shoulderpads of Conquest
Stats: 447 a, 81 Agi, 89 Sta, Y socket, 60 haste, 119 AP, 52 ArP
Cost: 30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Duskstalker Shoulderpads
Stats: 467 a, 93 Agi, 101 Sta, Y socket, 67 crit, 135 AP, 59 ArP
Cost: 45 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Shoulderpads
Stats: 477 a, 107 Agi, 107 Sta, R socket, 71 crit, 126 AP, 63 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

Here we see again the disparity in items available with Triumph Emblems... And again, unless you want the set bonus, take the Duskstalker piece instead of the Tier-9.

The step up to Tier 10 nets you +26 or +14 Agi, and +18 or +6 Sta. It has the same secondary stat set as the Duskstalker piece, which loses haste for crit, an acceptable change as a bear. It also has a red socket instead of yellow, which I consider a plus for a bear - yellow gives us crit or hit, red gives us Agi or dodge.

To compare spending 95 Frost for the head vs. 60 Frost for the shoulders... Comparatively, 35 badges gets you 10 to 14 Agi and 2 to 6 Sta (depending on which piece you're coming from for each choice.) That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more stats per Emblem used to spend the 95 Frost, provided you're making the same jump (T9 to T10 or Emblem piece to T10). Not by much, and I'd probably go ahead and spend the badges early anyway to get the boost while I rebuild to the bigger number.

Chest

Tier 9: Malfurion's Raiments of Conquest
Stats: 596 a, 104 Agi, 120 Sta, R/Y sockets, 74 crit, 70 haste, 161 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available.

Tier 10: Lasherweave Raiment
Stats: 636 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, R/Y sockets, 96 crit, 159 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Shadow Seeker's Tunic
Stats: 665 a, 162 Agi, 162 Sta, R/Y/B sockets, 108 crit, 92 exp, 184 AP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

There's a solid upgrade here no matter which way you go, but the Shadow Seeker's Tunic is clearly a MUCH better upgrade than the T10 piece. +40 or +58 Agi, +24 or +42 Sta, AND an additional blue socket (which equals +30 Sta).

Continuing to examine against the previous most-efficient use of Emblems... I'm taking this over the head item or the shoulders. It's definitely more efficient than the head, and enough of a boost over the shoulders that it is worth it to me to wait for 95 badges.

I'd also like to point out that I think the secondary stats are better for bears on the Tunic rather than the T10 Raiment. I want the 4-piece T10 set bonus. This very well might be the only piece I don't pick up.

Wrist

None. Oddly enough, the highest wrist purchasable with Emblems require only Emblems of Valor. I'm moving on...

Hands

Tier 9: Malfurion's Handgrips of Conquest
Stats: 373 a, 81 Agi, 89 Sta, Y socket, 52 hit, 60 crit, 119 AP
Cost: 30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None Available

Tier 10: Lasherweave Handgrips
Stats: 398 a, 107 Agi, 107 Sta, R socket, 63 haste, 126 AP, 71 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Cat Burglar's Grips
Stats: 416 a, 120 Agi, 120 Sta, Y/Y sockets, 80 crit, 129 AP, 64 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

I see an interesting dilemma here. Multiple sockets and 13 better each Agi and Sta, as well as crit vs. haste in secondary stats. I like the red socket better - I'll use it for an Agi or Agi + Sta gem - but multiple sockets may outweigh it. It won't outweigh the set bonus in my mind, though, and this isn't enough of an upgrade to make me choose the Cat Burglar's Grips over the T10 piece.

It's also not enough of a bonus to make me spend my hard-won, precious Emblems of Frost here before spending them on the Tunic either, though. Still going for the chest.

Waist

There are no Tier pieces here, and nothing is available from Triumph Emblems either. There is a Frost Emblem item, and for comparisons of Emblem spending here it is...

Frost Emblems: Vengeful Noose
Stats: 374 a, 120 Agi, 120 Sta, R/Y sockets, 64 haste, 129 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

For me, and the item I'm coming from, this provides a boost of nearly 50 Agi and 25 Sta, as well as another socket. That's about the same boost as I'd get out of my chest item with 35 less badges. We have a new front-runner.

Legs

Tier 9: Malfurion's Legguards of Conquest
Stats: 522 a, 102 Agi, 120 Sta, R/B sockets, 64 hit, 80 crit, 129 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available.

Tier 10: Lasherweave Legguards
Stats: 577 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, R/Y sockets, 80 exp, 159 AP, 96 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

Here we get it easy, a straight Tier 9 to Tier 10 comparison. Solid statistical upgrade in Agi and Sta. I like the expertise on the T10 item, but I like the blue socket on the T9. 38 Agi and 24 Sta for 95 Emblems is not as strong as either the Tunic or the Vengeful Noose. This might be the 3rd or 4th upgrade I target from among this group of items.

Feet

There are no Tier items for feet, and nothing is available for Emblems of Triumph or Frost.

So, among these items, I'll be targeting the Vengeful Noose first, followed by the Shadow Seeker's Tunic next. I'll have to examine my secondary stat layout at the time to determine the next upgrade from among the hands, legs, head, and shoulder items. At that point, I will likely buy them from the cheapest to the most expensive, because there isn't particularly a huge difference in cost to benefit ratio.

Look back soon for the Tree version... or perhaps the Accessories! Thanks for reading!

Abbreviations Glossary:

a: armor
AP: Attack Power
ArP: Armor Penetration
exp: expertise

Stat Abbreviations:
Agi: Agility
Sta: Stamina
Str: Strength

Socket Abbreviations:
B: Blue
M: Meta
R: Red
Y: Yellow

Yet another Primer Followup

2009-12-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

BBB posted an excellent intro to being a bear the other day... you should go read it if you haven't already.

Hope everybody had a great holiday!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-23T05:48:00.000-08:00

We didn't make our 10-man run last night - our guild 25-man, which usually runs on Thursday nights, was scheduled on top of us due to Thursday being Christmas Eve. Instead of fighting for attendance (and probably losing) we went along on the 25-man and I broke out the leafy goodness. We went into Ulduar to get Razorscale for the weekly raid quest (and I picked up the Three Car Garage and Shutout achievements along the way).

We moved on to Onyxia and one-shotted her. I was lucky enough to pick up a Stormrage Cover from her for my healy set, which is amazingly now approximately equivalent to my tanking set despite 95% of my badges going to my tanking stuff.

We downed the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus before a couple of wipes on the Champions put me out of time for the night. I picked up a Ring of the Darkmender as well. Sometimes, I'm glad I'm not tanking! Our guild rules would have meant I probably didn't get a chance to roll on at least one of the items I won, and there were very few tankish drops I could have rolled on.

On the blog front, I'd like to link a post from the Big Bear Butt himself... Hilarious take on the mindset of a lot of tanks out there. Read it and laugh, and thank me later. I'm also in awe that he took the time to point out A Bear in the Trees. In case you were wondering, it was mostly reading BBB that inspired me to start this little endeavor of mine.

With tomorrow being Christmas Eve and family plans over the weekend, I'm not likely to get a post up again until sometime next week. I've only been going a couple of months, but so far it's been a fun ride and I hope anybody that's found their way here has found some use and/or enjoyment from my inane ramblings. I'm planning on exploring some thoughts on high-end rings, trinkets, and relics soon - I have a feeling my first 100-150 or so Frost Emblems will be spent on this kind of gear... I don't know yet though, I'll have to dig into the specifics of the Tier10 gear.

I hope everyone has a safe and fun Christmas holiday! If you're not inclined to celebrate Christmas, then I hope whatever holiday or holidays you celebrate around this time of year are also safe and fun!

Merry Christmas and see you on the flip side!

I'm a Druid, and I Cheat

2009-12-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

I have an admission to make.

I cheat at WoW.

I can't help myself. Every time I log in to the game, I just have to take the plunge and give myself an advantage.

Some might tell you that because WoW is an MMO, and Blizzard controls the servers and data, that it's impossible to cheat. They're wrong.

It's quite simple, really, and even allowed by the rules of the game.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, roll a Druid. It's the only legal way to cheat.

You can do it all as a Druid - tank, melee dps, ranged dps, and healing - and no matter which one you do, you can fake at least one other long enough to get through most rough spots.

I'm a bear main spec... but if I'm OT'ing in a one-tank fight, I can go cat form and do reasonable DPS, a little better with a slight gear shift. If there's a fight where only one tank is needed part of the time and a second is needed the rest of the time (I'm looking at you, Onyxia) I can shift to cat for awhile to increase DPS, keep my bear gear and tank it up when the phase shifts. I know several kitty DPS folks that have beared up in emergencies to finish off fights if the main tank goes down.

My tree offspec uses a lot of spellpower gear... So in times in fights where there's not a big healing requirement I can shift out of form and throw a Moonfire and a Starfire or Wrath (or the occasional Hurricane) to help out with DPS a bit. The fact that trees use a lot of HoTs makes this a lot easier to do as well, as you can keep the healing going even when out of form. The inverse is true as well - I've seen several Boomkins shift out of form to help healers out of a tough spot.

And although it's even worse, you CAN even fake bridging these gaps - every once in awhile I've been in spots rough enough that Boomkins bear up, or kitties shift out and try to heal. Those are usually desperate situations and often fail... but the fact that you even have a shot to do so is amazing.

The cheating doesn't stop there, though. You also get swift flight form as a druid - and all those quests that require you to pick something up off the ground, you never have to land and jump off your mount - often this can mean the difference between having to fight something for a pickup and being able to just grab it and fly away.

If we get into a spot we can't deal with... well we can't vanish like a rogue or feign death like a hunter... but we can run away with the best of them. Cyclone or Entangling Roots and cat form/dash or travel form...

And YOUR Entangling Roots or Frost Nova? Shapeshift and they are gone. Polymorph? Fuggedaboutit.

Jack of all trades master of none? Try more like master of all trades.

You know you want to cheat to get ahead. Everybody does. So just do it and roll a Druid.

Just in case anybody's wondering, I'm being a little facetious. Druids don't really cheat, it just feels like it.

New Mount!

2009-12-18T05:41:00.000-08:00

So I forgot to mention this the other day...

I'm pretty sure it was after our first wipe on Lord Marrowgar, we had released and run back in, and were buffing up the group.

Somebody mentioned, looking at the crazy-looking undead boss...

"That would be a sick mount!"

Universal agreement followed.

Blizzard, MAKE IT HAPPEN.

RIP Chris Henry

2009-12-17T13:50:00.001-08:00

You may or may not have heard, Cincinnati Bengals WR Chris Henry passed away early Thursday morning.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

The Trash of Icecrown Citadel

2009-12-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

I had originally planned on titling this post the Guns of Icecrown Citadel. Turns out I was a little ambitious in thinking we would make it to the gunship battle on our first trip in.

I had heard that the trash in ICC was rough for any ill-prepared groups. In ways it was better and in ways it was worse than I had expected... but I'll get to that.

We decided to try to get as good a group together as we could, focusing on getting our best DPS. We struggled to find healers in our guild willing to come, one of them flat out stating that she was afraid of the place. We pugged in an excellent but very slightly under-geared priest for the final healing spot... Here's the breakdown:

Tanks (2):
Me (Bear) and Illorien (DK)

Heals (3):
Holy Paladin (Renakashin, co-leader), Tree Druid and Holy Priest

DPS (5):
Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, 2 Mages

The TRASH!

The first thing you encounter on the way in the door is a pair of undead that are pure melee but explode when killed, doing a fairly decent chunk of damage. Plus, every so often, another one paths in from the next room. A little mismanagement of this led to us losing a couple of folks while we cleared them out - once you've taken the top of that set of stairs, they stop coming in from the next room. There's another group of these that run around the room - we pulled them out and downed them fairly easily. Illorien held them in place, I pulled them out one at a time for the DPS to go nuts on.

We were at last able to begin moving into the room. It has essentially 5 sets of mobs, one group in each corner and one dead ahead in the back half of the room. It also has a special secret surprise, that I'll get to in a moment. The right and left corners closest to the door each have a humanoid Undead caster and three of the Damned - the exploding undead I mentioned previously. The corners further from the way in each had a spiderlike Undead caster as well as the groups of the Damned. The spiders throw random web wraps around that players must be broken out of, and don't appear to have a threat table, or at least cast randomly enough that the threat table doesn't seem to matter. The group in the middle is made up of 2 of the spiders, 1 of the humanoid Undead casters, and 2 non-explosive melee Undead. Our general plan of attack for the four corners was for the DK to hold down the melee while the DPS and myself burned down the caster, then for me to pull out the Damned one by one for the DPS to burn.

The corners went smoothly. The casters really don't like to move, and it's impossible to move the spiders via LOS if any member of the raid is in its LOS. We discovered with the last group that the DK's death grip can yank the spider out and (at least sometimes) not disturb the group of melee. It worked, though, and we decided to use a similar plan of attack on the group in the middle, singling out a caster at a time for death, followed by the melee.

Illorien dropped a Death and Decay, and I charged a spider. It was well on it's way to dying when I hear over Vent, "There's a giant coming... Giant coming!" I turned around and saw two gigantic undead slaughtering the ranged DPS and healers. It was the first of our wipes trying to deal with those two giants. The one spider went down, but that was it.

Those two giants were epic trash for us. We tried several strategies for fighting them, all of which failed for various reasons. You can't pull them out of the room - they run back in and reset. We tried several different methods to split them up so that the DPS could burn one down without worrying about the other one. We tried pulling them into the corner of the room... None of our methods worked... they were too close to the other group so we pulled them, or they managed to take out DPS somehow... Illorien noticed that they were using Saber Lash - an ability Lord Marrowgar also uses - that does melee damage to the target (tank) and his nearest ally... which meant that we absolutely had to have the tanks on top of each other to take the Saber Lashes.

When we realized that, we decided to stop trying to separate them. Illorien and I grabbed them and brought them to the front edge of the room, just inside where they would step out and reset and far enough away not to aggro the other mobs. Then we turned them away from the raid and let the DPS burn down one target, while the two of us prayed for healing fast enough that double Saber Lash wouldn't do us in. It worked like a charm.

The last group of mobs, already down one member from our first run-in with the giants, went down with ease.

The next room, smaller than the last, has just one group of adds in the center, but has two of the giants sleeping on opposite sides of the room, and there's not much room to maneuver without almost certainly waking them up.

Illorien was trying to scoot in a little bit and pull some of the smaller trash and one of the giants woke up. Since nothing else aggro'd, we counted our blessings and downed it. We were then able to move in to the now-vacated side and aggro the smaller trash while keeping some distance from the other giant.

It woke up after we had started in on the smaller trash. I picked it up and burned a couple of cooldowns to stay alive while the DPS dealt with the smaller casters, then Illorien pulled everything else with him to stand in front of the giant. With both us there, the giant wasn't going to kill us by itself, so the DPS burned down the smaller melee mobs and then we brought down the giant.

After a grueling hour plus we had made it to Lord Marrowgar.

We wiped several times on him before we ran out of time, as our pug healer had to go guild raid on his main, and several of our guild folks were itching to end early due to early mornings. We learned a bit, and tried a couple strategies, but I think our group as a whole might not have quite been there, gear-wise. We tended to do alright in Phase 1 - our folks moved out of the fire and broke down the bone prisons fairly efficiently, our healers were generally able to keep up, and things went smoothly. Then Phase 2 - the whirlwind - came along, and as long as it wasn't badly timed with respect to a bone prison, we usually handled that fairly well. Usually the issue came at the end of the whirlwind, when we had a little trouble with folks struggling to keep away from the boss while the tanks dragged him back into position while still staying out of the mass of cold fire on the ground. Several times we lost people as the second Phase 1 started because of how crazily spread out folks were and the healer's need to focus on the tanks. I think a combination of being a little short in a couple of places lead to everybody needing to be danged near perfect.

We got him down to almost 50% on one run.

For being our first ever time going in to the instance, I think we did fairly well, especially considering basically none of us have any Heroic ToC gear.

I'm not sure if we'll try again next week, or perhaps give a go at Heroic ToC10. That was pretty rough on us.

Good luck and hope you get a chance to clear it!

Thoughts on the Dungeon Finder

2009-12-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

I've had a bit more chance to use the Dungeon Finder and the new reward system, and as with most changes in WoW, I've found that there are things about it that I like, and things about it that give me pause.

The Good

It's FAST

I've never had it take more than about 30 seconds to find a group, or fill out the last couple of spots in one that's already half made. Only once have I had an issue because someone refused to go, and I requeued and was in an instance in a few seconds. Only once have I run into the "additional instances cannot be launched" problem, and with the teleporting into instances feature, we just did that and it launched one and got us in almost immediately. Plus, with teleporting in at the beginning, there's no waiting once a group is formed, you're in and going.

Teleporting in and out of instances

I was a little wary of how this feature would work, at first, but since I've used it, it's awesome. No more waiting for people to fly to instances, no more having to run back out and use the stone to get people back if they realize they goofed and need something. Since it puts you back where you were, if you were in a major city you'll be able to quickly repair or purchase whatever you need there very quickly and disrupt the play of your group less. Two thumbs up on this new feature!

The Emblem Reward System - Part A

I'll mention a part of this that I'm still wary about later, but I like the fact that you no longer have to loot emblems, or turn in the daily quest, just finish the dungeon. It's smoother even though it takes a little away from the immersion of doing this for a quest. I like it!

The Quality of Groups

I was nervous about having random groups/pugs. In my experience it's all too easy to end up with an idiot or someone who just generally doesn't know what they're doing. (I'm ok with newbies, but there's a difference between not having done content before or being new to pugging/heroics and not knowing what you're doing.) If you're willing to accept constructive criticism and especially if you're willing to speak up and say, "Hey, I've not done this before/I'm new at this/etc," instead of trying to push blame on other folk, you'll do well. Anyway, in my experience pugging with random folks, I've generally found people that are knowledgeable, decently to well geared, and generally amiable. A far cry from what I expected.

Rewards for more than one random dungeon

You get gold and Emblems of Frost for the first random dungeon... but you get gold (albeit less) and additional Emblems of Triumph for additional random dungeons. I think my guild has seen an increase in dungeon running because of this...

The Bad

It's FAST!

Perhaps it's been a wash with the increase due the last good point above, but I think my guild, at least, has seen a decrease in guild-centric runs because it's so fast to just queue up and pug a random dungeon. There's a little less incentive to bother with pulling a guild run together because you don't have to work to find fill-ins.

Communication, or lack Thereof

Although the experience has been generally good for me, I dislike the fact that you really can't screen candidates at all ahead of time. I dislike it not just for the possibility of getting thrown in with idiots, but because I think the general WoW population has an expectation that everyone knows the fights everywhere, and I think the lack of communication ahead of time could easily lead to newbies getting put down and having a bad experience because of other people's expectations of them. Am I making any sense? I don't know.

Teleporting into dungeons you've never been to before

I can't tell you where the entrance to the ICC 5-man instance is. That saddens me. I think this distances you, a bit, from the storyline behind it all. Not a huge loss, but I think perhaps you should have to go to the instance at least once.

The Disenchant Option/Downroll Need Prevention

I've not experienced this myself but I've heard others complain about it. The protection they put in the game to prevent downrolling has a drawback. Druids cannot roll need on cloth gear. Shamans and hunters, I would assume, cannot roll need on leather, paladins can't need on mail... they've prevented need rolls on items that are not your highest available armor type.

I can understand why they did this - I've heard quite a few complaints from cloth-wearers on Druids stealing their cloth loots. The issue is that in 5-man instances, it's entirely possible that you have a group where the only player that is possibly capable of using an item can't roll need on an upgrade because of this... and with the disenchant option, that item could be destroyed before there's ever a chance of it getting traded back to them, because greed rolls on the same priority as disenchant.

This needs to be fixed.

The Don't Know Yet

The Emblem Reward System, Part B

One issue I've occasionally had in the past is how WoW handles disconnects during boss fights and receiving Emblems for them - usually it's worked ok, once or twice I was unable to loot the Emblems properly. I have no idea how the new reward system will handle this.

The Disenchant Option

Apart from the issue mentioned above, I've rethought my previous position on the Disenchant option and I don't think it's going to have as drastic an impact as I thought... you do still have to have an enchanter in the party, which means that not everything will be getting disenchanted....

Blarg. I am ded.

Ok not really.

Impromptu Weekend ToC10

2009-12-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

I don't often get time to play much on the weekends - family commitments, time with the spouse, and my other two geek-related time consuming hobbies (Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons) combine to form just about the ultimate WoW blockage on the weekends.

Last weekend rolled around with no major plans for Saturday afternoon, I figured I had a good chance to get something done. I haven't had a chance yet to go in to the Icecrown Citadel raids, illness and houseguests had prevented me from having a chance to do ToC last week, and the weekly raid quest was for Lord Jaraxxus's head, so I decided to try to put together an impromptu run for ToC10. Encouraged by the fact that we had cleared it last week, I was hopeful to get a run in before dinner plans with the wife, and started putting a group together about 2:00.

Luckily for me, the two friends that have been my co-leaders for the raids weren't able to get into a ToC10 earlier in the week, so their mains weren't saved, and another guildie who has been bringing her healer almost every time was able to come, so we had most of the core tanks and heals we brought previously. We filled in with one pugged healer and 3 pugged DPS and set off. It took us until after 2:30 to get it all together, but it worked! The breakdown:

Tanks (2):
Bear (me!) and DK

Heals (3):
2 Holy Paladins and 1 Disc/Holy Priest

DPS (5):
2 Hunters, 1 Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enh. Shaman

I was hoping for 3 ranged DPS. Lord Jaraxxus is a little easier with more ranged DPS - there's less need for melee DPS to switch to Mistresses, and those pesky Infernals die that much faster - and gives you more chances to survive issues with Anub. I was confident that this would work, however, so we ran with it.

The Northrend Beasts!

Everyone was familiar with this fight (even though one of the pugs had only seen it on 25-man), so it went fairly smoothly. Gormok went down like the chump he is - I started with him, the other tank taunted off of me, I taunted back... I think that was the last time I taunted until he had barely 30k health left. We lost one of the hunters during the jormungar portion... so when the first worm fell, the other tank picked up the remaining one, and I shifted out and battle-rezzed him. Druids cheat so hardcore. Nobody got hit by Icehowl's charge, so he was easy. One down, 4 to go.

It's difficult, on our server, to pug into good groups for ToC. One of our pugs commented at this point, "finally got a good group!" When everybody knows what they are doing and most of them are geared well for the instance, things tend to go well! :)

We moved on...

Lord Jaraxxus!

A little stategery and we're ready to go for the next boss. Jaraxxus started out normally, although it took a little long to drop the first Mistress - I don't think the melee DPS switched to her right away, but once they did she fell quickly. The infernals came next, and this is where we started to get into a little trouble. It was my fault mostly, I think, for not marking which infernal to focus on. They're already difficult to really hold aggro on (at least for me... maybe I'm doing something wrong...) and without either excess ranged DPS or me marking a clear target it took too long to down them and they ran too wild near the melee, did too much damage, overstressing the healing. There were still one or two of them up when the second Mistress came.

Things got a little crazy after the second set of infernals came. We were already behind due to the craziness of the first round of adds, and at some point, I forget exactly when, the DK, the other tank, went down. I immediately had to stop what I was doing, of course, and pick up Jaraxxus, trying my best to keep the adds aggro'd on me. We lost a couple other folks - three or four in total - but beyond me trying to keep ahold of them we ignored the adds the rest of the way and we'd done enough damage before starting to lose people that he went down just before things were really about to get out of hand. It was a little close, but two bosses down, and no wipes yet!

The Faction Champions!

Our kill order: Priest (not Shadow, I don't remember if he's Disc or Holy), healing Shaman, Warlock, Rogue, Boomkin, Paladin. We wiped once or twice - our first run went pretty well and we downed three of them, especially good considering our hunters forgot to use frost traps and I called out the wrong target after the priest went down. (I was sloppy that day, I don't know why.) The DK pestered the paladin, keeping him (or is it a her?) essentially out of the fight. The rogue went down early the first try due to burst damage, and losing his kick interrupt really hurt.

The champions continue to give us more trouble on our runs than any of the other bosses, and I'm not entirely sure why. We're getting better with them, though, and I consider that a good sign.

The Twin Val'kyr!

We one-shotted them. There was a little confusion as to which people were supposed to be on which side of the room, but the fact that we pull the two of them fairly close together in the center of the room made that a little less important - we had a fairly even distribution of light and dark and that's all that really mattered. None of their special abilities did much of anything, and we didn't have issues with too many of the wrong-colored orbs hitting our guys.

I felt a little bad when I won the Loop of the Twin Val'kyr, as that is just about the only upgrade left in ToC10 for Illorien (our DK and co-leader).

You might think, from what I've said, that we were moving fast! No, one of our pugs complained because it was taking us awhile in between bosses. Admittedly, we had a few folks go afk for a couple minutes for issues that probably could have waited, but we don't fly like that. It's one of the endearing features of our guild, I think, that we understand that people are human and things happen, and we're willing to work with the time people give us. One of our breaks was because all of us leading the raid were a little under the weather and one of us went to make tea because her throat felt like it was wrapped in ropes of fire, and another break happened because one of the healers had a puppy get into a roll of toilet paper. I can understand the desire to get through things fast, but please... people are human, cut them a little slack if they can't stay 100% dedicated to a game for nearly 2 hours at a time.

Anub'arak!

Before we started up the event that drops you into Anub'arak's cavern, our pug shammy opened up a trade and gave me 8 gold. Luckily I figured out what was going on before I hit the water, and clicked off the water-walking buff he had put on me. Our DK escaped a similar fate, but I'm not sure if he saw it and clicked it off or had another method. I gave him his gold back, 'cuz I'm just a nice guy like that, but it was funny anyway.

One of the folks on the raid had never been to Anub before, so we had to explain the entire fight. Much like our last clear, we had a slightly sub-par healer setup - 2 paladins and 1 priest. Determined, however, we set out to vanquish our foe!

Our first attempt was doomed fairly early on. We lost both our hunters to some craziness in Anub's first underground phase. Our shaman made a valiant effort to use his small ranged arsenal to pick up the slack in dropping permafrost, but we lost a healer as well and had an add still up heading into phase 3. We wiped shortly thereafter.

Despite our relative success during our demise, we decided to switch one of our paladin healers to tanking the adds, move the DK to Anub himself and I pulled out my tree gear and filled in the healing slot. In addition to providing a steadier flow of smaller heals for phase 3 goodness, that helped the other 2 healers a bit by providing the Tree of Life aura.

The second attempt was nearly flawless, as we didn't lose anybody until Anub was well into phase 3 and our victory was nearly assured.

It took us about 2 hours in total, and while I was ready (and actually started trying to refill the spots of folks who left) to give ICC a shot, I was out of time.

Tuesday, I expect my little crew will be giving our first shot (or at least, the first shot with me there!) at ICC's 10-man raid. I haven't even had a chance to do the 5-man in heroic mode yet. We'll see what happens though, and I'm hopeful we can get through it!

Greed vs. Disenchant...

2009-12-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

So Patch 3.3 dropped this week and I got my first chance to run the "random daily heroic" cross-realm instance the other day. First impression was that the interface was pretty smooth, and pretty quick. For those of us that can do multiple roles, I'm not sure about the fact that it dumps you straight into the instance - I carry my healing gear with me so that I can change on a moment's notice, but does everybody? I know you're supposed to be able to port back into the instance if you have to leave but I haven't had a chance to really use that yet. Other than that (maybe), I like it.

My run went REALLY well. We pulled HoL, and ran it quickly and efficiently. No deaths, knowledgeable and highly-geared crew. Loken fell like a chump. AoE damage to the party seemed a little rougher and harder to handle, but that could just be coincidence, I'll need some more play to tell if that's really the case.

I also got to use the new option to disenchant loot as it dropped for the first time.

My first impression was that this was awesome - no more spending ridiculous amounts of money every time I need to enchant something, as I should have quite a bit of the mats available already instead of having to purchase all of them.

When I had a chance to think about this a bit, I was more subdued and a little nervous.

This has a huge impact on the in-game economy. Players will be making less money on average, I think - everybody will now have to deal with the enchanter's eternal issue, do I greed and sell this item, or do I disenchant it, get mats, but no money? Unless enchanters can no longer disenchant items, enchanters now have a small advantage - they can greed every item and decide LATER if they want the money or the mats. Maybe that's not really an advantage, but it looks like one to me.

At the same time, the auction capability of enchanting mats just disappeared almost entirely. Enchanters can no longer rely on that as a source of income.

How does this affect the rest of the auction house? DOES this affect the rest of the auction house? Will there be inflation or deflation due to this? Am I overestimating the impact? Am I an idiot?

Don't answer that last one! :)

As far as myself personally, I will be disenchanting everything until I have a decent stock of needed mats, and then going back to greeding until I need more mats. I suspect that a lot of players will take this track, and it will mean a decrease in gold in-game for awhile, followed by a big upward spike as more and more players stop disenchanting because they don't need the mats anymore.

As far as tanking or healing and mechanics go, I didn't notice a huge change, but I haven't had a lot of opportunity to dig into it. I'm hoping I'll get more chance over the next week. Most of my playing time this week and late last week just about got eaten with several different issues, but I should have some more time in the coming week.

I haven't had a chance to try the new 5-man dungeons or either of the raids yet. I think we'll be going into the 10-man next Tuesday and I hope to have a better report for you then.

Happy patch week everyone!

It's a girl!

2009-12-09T08:19:00.001-08:00

I can't remember if I've mentioned it here before or not, but my wife is pregnant.

And we found out today, that it's a girl!

Down with the Sickness

2009-12-08T06:05:00.000-08:00

Yeah.

Whatever my wife caught, it kicked my arse.

Plus dentist appointment today and ultrasound tomorrow.

Not back as soon as I had hoped!

Hope everyone is having a great week! Don't worry, I'll be back!

Busy Busy Busy

2009-12-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lack of communication recently... Work has been busy, and I had a family Christmas party and a Magic: the Gathering tournament over the weekend.

Then this morning, my pregnant wife calls to say that she feinted at work...

She's fine, but we had to take her to the doctor, which made work even more busy!

I'll get back on the horse soon, I hope!

Cue the Final Fantasy "Win!" Music

2009-12-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

I had a great night last night, and I'm gonna tell you about it. If you don't want to know, be a grinch and go away.

It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily. Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared. We churned through it in under 30 minutes. Piece of cake.

Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid. Let me back up a little before I get into it.

So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about. The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity. One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts. Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.

So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before. Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.

Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up. We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids. Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.

We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.

The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):

Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK

Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)

DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid

We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly. We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.

Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue. I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked. The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed. Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.

Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us. The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).

We moved on to the Twins. I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel. So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.

We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready. Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad. The second try was flawless.

I was extremely excited at this point. We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.

I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.

Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down. It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.

Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10... The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing. Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end. I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off. Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.

Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata. Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.

As always, thanks for reading. I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....

See you all on the flip side!

Addons Continued

2009-12-02T04:00:00.000-08:00

I'm going to finish up my addon discussion from yesterday and then throw a couple of tools out there that make addon management easier.

I saved these last two addons for a separate post because I feel they warrant a little special attention. I've mentioned both of them (and talked about one a little in-depth) in a previous post, and my feelings on both of them are mixed. They are both very useful tools that get abused and used for status instead of as tools. I'm speaking of course, of GearScore and Recount.

GearScore - Everyone
Recount - Everyone

There are a few differing methods to measure "gear score." Be Imba and Wow Heroes are two websites that provide you with gear scores, and the GearScore addon is another. These each differ somewhat in the numbers used and the methods to achieve those numbers (for example, I have roughly a 4700 gear score as given to me by the GearScore addon, and Wow Heroes reports me around 2550), but the purpose of them is the same - to give you a singular number that is supposed to indicate how well geared you are.

Recount is just one of many of the class of addons known as damage meters. Damage meters in general provide you with a host of useful statistics about your performance. Recount in particular, for example, tracks damage done, damage per second, healing done, healing per second, damage taken, healing taken, rezzes, cleanses, rage gained, and on and on, for your entire party or raid.

Both of these types of addons are wonderful tools, and if used properly, can help you better evaluate what is best for you or your raid.

The problem is that they are very often NOT used properly. For many they merely provide a status symbol for themselves - they have to have the highest score, top the dps meter, and feel no problem telling everybody that doesn't match them that their gear is inferior or they need to learn to play their class or whatever other childish thing they can throw out there.

You can usually tell the two types of people apart, although not always. Folks that ask for meters to be posted to party/raid after every pull, folks that refuse to take anyone who doesn't meet their minimum gear score on a heroic or low raid, folks that automatically blame the person who is lowest on a dps chart or gear score for a failure in a raid... all of these are *probably* going to be irritating or poor teammates. There are exceptions, but in general I have found this to be the case. On the flip side, there are folks that use these tools properly, to help themselves learn how to gear and play their class, to screen the general gear level of possible raid participants, to judge themselves on their own standards, and not judge others... these players tend to make good raiders and raid leaders.

I encourage the use of these addons for players who are willing to let them be what they should be, and for everyone else... please do the rest of us a favor and ignore them.

Moving on...

You may have noticed that I run more than a couple addons. Truth be told, I could make do without a few of them, but I find them fun and useful. More than a couple of folks I've talked to don't want that many addons for the simple reason that it means a lot of time spent keeping track of addon versions and updates. I was the same way before a friend introduced me to one of my favorite WoW tools:

WoW Matrix.

In a minute I'll explain why, but equally important to me now is the Curse client from Curse Gaming.

Both of these are tools that manage your addons for you. Instead of keeping track of the latest versions of each of your addons, you just start up one of these applications, let them check your addons against the latest versions available and have them download and install the updates for you if they exist.

The reason I use two of them is that I dislike Curse's policies and limitations but I am forced to use their client for certain addons. Early on WoW Matrix was the only player, but once Curse decided to put their own client out there, they stopped allowing WoW Matrix to access addons stored on their servers, and prevented those addons from being hosted elsewhere, thus ensuring that players would have to use their client. Then, they made sure that there were 2 levels of their client available for use - the free version, and the "premium" subscribtion based service. The main drawback (in my mind) to the free version is that you can only download 1 addon at a time. In the latest editions, you can queue up several downloads at a time for install, but you still have to tell it to update each one individually. In WoW Matrix, you can update all your addons (that need it) with a single click, whereas the Curse client requires a subscription to do that.

Either way, though, these two tools make a nightmare of management quite easy. No more downloading individual addons, no more unzipping and making sure things are in the right place.

There are risks to doing this... you're giving an application free reign to write to your hard drive, and even if it's one you trust, that application is getting files from individual users, which is always a risky proposition. There is that to consider, and I won't pretend that the risk isn't there. I use these tools, but then I trust myself to fix my computer if something goes wrong, and I run virus, adware, and malware scanners to be prepared for bad situations.

... and that's all I've got to say about that.

Kaethir out.

Bearly Useful AddOns

2009-12-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

I can't stop bad puns. They just happen.

So, everybody probably knows that some addons are really useful in WoW. I'd like to talk about what aspiring bears should check out, a few for trees as well, and a few that are generally useful to all.

Ok, I don't have any bear-specific ones, but some are more necessary for bears than others.

Deadly Boss Mods - All Raiders

The number one must-have addon for raiding is the nearly ubiquitous Deadly Boss Mods. If you have any hope of making it as a raider, pug or guild, you absolutely must have DBM. It's nicely configurable, but even straight "out-of-the-box," as it were, it's exceptionally useful and almost impossible to be successful without it.

Just in case you DON'T know what it is, it provides you with warnings when all the things you need to pay attention to (with respect to the bosses you are fighting) happen. It warns you when you are standing in fire, it warns you when a boss is about to cast something that needs to be interrupted, it warns when you're too close to certain things that will kill you. It's not perfect, but without a doubt it is the mod that has done the most to make me an effective raider. It helps in all dungeons as well, providing similar information when needed.

Omen - All Non-Healers (and maybe even them too!)

Omen, according to it's description, is "a lightweight, multi-target threat meter." Tanks and DPS, especially, need to be able to see who is generating threat on mobs, especially if they are in danger of stealing aggro from the tank. Off-tanks on big mobs should be #2 on the threat table, and everybody else needs a way to tell when they can't push their DPS any harder without causing problems. I'm sure there are other threat meters out there, but Omen is the one I've always used. Easily configurable to show/hide the window for grouping or solo play.

Grid - All Healers/Rezzers/Raid Leaders

As a healer, Grid needs something like Clique (see below) to bring it to it's full potential, and requires some work with it to really show you what it's full usefulness is. Grid is not the only unit frames addon out there, and I would encourage you to choose the one that you like best, but it's very configurable, very powerful, and has several modules coded up for it that you can use to extend its capabilities.

The short version of what Grid does is display an entire group's or raid's status for you in a single box on the screen, rather than having to drag groups/units out of the raid interface. With proper customization, it can also display all sorts of information for you - if a player has a raid target icon on them, if a player has debuffs you can dispel (and which kind!) on them, if a player has certain buffs on them (and how many stacks!), if a player has an incoming heal and how much of their life that heal should refill, how low they are on life/mana/rage/energy/runic power, and on and on.

For healers it lets you quickly assess who needs healing, target and heal them (more powerful with Clique! see below), for raid leaders it lets you more easily assess raid composition and dead/alive status for possible battle rez, etc. etc.

Out-of-the-box, Grid is not very well configured, but with a little work it's one of my favorite addons. Do a search for some advice on customization if you plan to use it.

Clique - All Healers/Cleansers

Clique plays well with Grid and other unit frames addons - it lets you cast spells by clicking the different buttons on your mouse while hovering over the unit frame of the player you want to cast on. As a druid healer, I can leave my target as the tank I'm healing, and still cast rejuvenations, swiftmends, wild growths, etc. at the rest of the raid. Requires a little configuration so as not to be annoying, but a big part of the reason I'm an even semi-useful healer.

Let me rephrase those last two addons together, in case you missed it. With Grid and Clique together, you can cast any spell in your arsenal at any player in your raid without ever actually targeting the player.

There are options to use Clique for offensive actions, but I've not found that particularly useful, myself. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Those are the really, really important ones I use, and I have a bunch of them that I find randomly useful as well...

Outfitter - Druids, lazy people

A lot of the usefulness of Outfitter has been superseded or made obsolete by Blizzard's Equipment Manager, but I still find some use in Outfitter. It provides easy methods to switch between gear sets, and for me, I like the fact that it will automatically switch between gear depending on which druid form I'm in, or if I decide to go fishing it will (theoretically...) put my Nat Pagle's Extreme Angling Fishing Boots on without me having to do it manually. It does integrate with the equipment manager and allows easy updates to sets defined there.

Titan Panel - Everyone

There are other "panel" type addons as well, but what this does is put a bar (or two) at the top (and/or bottom) of your screen which displays information you can configure as you so desire. I like to use things like the gold meter (records the gold each of your characters have, and shows you the grand total in addition to the individual numbers), the performance (shows you frames per second and memory usage), the loot type (shows you if your group/raid is using Group Loot or Master Looter and what level of item is limited by this), and CritLine (tracks your hits and tells you the highest normal and critical hit for each of your attacks/spells/abilities). That's just a small sample of what is available in it, and it's more of a convenience feature than anything, but I like it and think it's useful.

Atlas/AtlasLoot - Everyone/Raiders

Atlas is an addon that shows you maps of just about everything in WoW. It's useful for finding flight paths and dungeon locations and points of interest in the game world, and has annotated maps of every dungeon so you can see where you have to go to finish quests or dungeon requirements. AtlasLoot provides you with lists of loot available from each boss, in each dungeon - useful for picking out where to focus your efforts to get the best upgrades available to you.

ArkInventory - Everyone

ArkInventory is a bag management addon. It shows you all your bags in one window, and all your bank + bank bags in one window, with customizable options for sorting how items are displayed in the window. Makes bag organization a thing of the past. Also records what is in each character's bags and bank, and shows you how much when you hover over items in addition to allowing you to view each character's bags and bank. Also provides search capability on bags and banks. Occasionally buggy, but extremely useful.

Auctioneer Advanced - Everyone

Shows you sell values and projected auction values when you hover over items. Has a lot of functionality on the auction house, most of which I have not explored.

Gatherer - Miners, Herbalists, and Dwarves

Records the location of items you gather from the map, and displays them in the minimap and on your map interface.

DruidStats - Druids

Provides some information about what items actually mean to you stat-wise in your druid form (as opposed to just seeing the base stats). It's a bit rough and not as powerful as I would hope, but I find it useful.

FishingBuddy - Anybody working on Fishing

Get this if you're working on fishing. Ignore it if you don't fish. If you're in between... think about it.

Tomorrow I'll touch on the two naughty addons, and some other useful tools.

Of Loot and RNGs

2009-11-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a fun holiday weekend!

The world is funny, sometimes in what it gives you. No matter what the odds of something happening are, that slim chance sometimes wins out. You love it or hate it (or sometimes just have to laugh!) depending on which way the long odds went... and I had an example of this last week that I thought was so ironic I could do nothing but laugh.

If you read about our loot rules last week and thought about it a bit, you may have realized that it's rather difficult in *most* of our 25-man raids to get gear that you have to roll for as an off-spec roll, because there will usually be at least one main spec in the raid that can use it and thus will get to roll first. This makes it a little rough on those of us that raid in our non-main spec, but it's really probably for the best this way.

That's neither really here nor there. Since I don't normally get a chance to bear up in our 25-man guild raids (because we have 3-4 designated progression tanks ahead of me), I usually end up rolling on healing gear, which has been mysteriously slim of late, and I don't usually get to roll on tanking loot.

Last week, due to illness, I had a chance to tank on our Ony/Vault/ToC run. I was ecstatic at the chance to run my main spec in our guild raids as well as having the opportunity to roll on tanking gear as my main spec.

I was disappointed, then, when the only real tanking upgrade that dropped was a sideways one for me - a chest item with identical main stats and gem slots, and a few shifted secondary stats as the one I'm already wearing. (I passed on rolling for that, since we had folks that could get much more use out of it.) I had to laugh, though, because two pieces of leather casting gear (that I would have really expected to be snapped up by one of the casting druids on the raid) fell to off-spec rolls, and for a change of pace my rolls were decent enough to win.

Why is it that the RNG decides to ship me healing gear on the one night I'd really like to see tanking gear drop?

Black Ice Friday

2009-11-27T04:00:00.000-08:00

Being Black Friday today, I'm not going to be anywhere near a computer long enough to write a proper post, so I'll just point you over to Icedragon at Druid main and her great post about some techniques useful to bears.

My only comment to her: SWIPE! :)

I know, I know, bad pun in the title, but I can't help myself.

HAPPY TURKEY DAY!!

2009-11-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like everyone to have a fun, happy, and safe holiday!

Don't eat too much!

*Note: Eating too much on Thanksgiving is not the same as eating too much on any other day of the year. On Turkey Day, it is defined as eating so much that you can't keep it down. Any amount less than that is ok.

Raiding and Loot Rules

2009-11-25T06:13:00.000-08:00

I was wondering if any of the two readers I have would care to share their guild's loot rules for raiding?

My guild has tried a few things, but being the way we are we've always decided to stick with generally simple rules, adding one now and again to further the best interests of progression, fun, or fairness. While I personally think we have too many rules (and we're considering adding another one!), I do think our system works pretty well, is not too complicated, and is mostly fair to all involved.

Here's our rules:

1. Rolls are called for main specs first, then off spec.
1a. Your main spec is the role you are performing on this particular raid. If you wish to roll on a different spec, clear it with the raid leader first.
1b. If you have already won an item from either of the two main general categories we set out (see #2 below) as a main spec item, you roll as if it were an off spec item.

2. There are 3 categories of items we separate: tier pieces/trophies, normal gear, and random stuff. Random stuff, for example, is Onyxia's Enlarged Onyxia Hide Backpack - everyone can roll on random stuff provided it's something they can use (i.e. they don't already have Onyxia's backpack.) For the other two categories, winning an item in one category does not preclude you from rolling on an item in the other as main spec.

3. We are working on progression and feel that appropriately geared tanks are essential to success. In addition to anyone performing the tank role on the raid, our designated progression tanks get first pick of tank loot.

4. On caster items, +hit gear goes to DPS casters first, and +critical strike gear goes to healing casters first.

We have no other rules beyond that. The one we are considering is giving first pick rights to different melee classes based on which stats benefits them more, especially on accessories such as rings and trinkets that multiple classes can use - i.e. agility rings go to rogues before warriors. That is a complicated one, especially for specs such as my main, where it's not agility vs. strength that is looked for, but, in logical terms, (agi OR str) AND stam.

We decided against using tools such as DKP because our guild does not want to completely discourage PUGs or guildmates that don't have very much time to raid from coming - if they don't have time to come 2 nights a week, that's ok, they'll still have their shots at gearing up.

We're a pretty mature group in general, almost always willing to help each other out, and that helps - we have regulars that will step out to let folks that don't get a chance to go every week have a turn, and folks that are willing to pass on items that are small upgrades for themselves to let others get much bigger upgrades.

So... is this kinda normal, or are we way out in left field?

Suspension of Belief - Real Life

2009-11-24T09:02:00.000-08:00

So I'm back from my trip and despite getting to play WoW all week last week I don't have much of anything interesting ready to talk about, so I get to tell you a little bit more about my life.

*Gasp!* Yes, I have a *real* life, day job and all. I know, I know, calm down, it's not the end of the world.

My wife and I were married in February of this year and are expecting our first child next March. We're extremely happy and can't wait to get on with the business of parenting. I'm sure we'll do enough complaining when the time comes, but it's a wondrous event for us and something we both wanted. She's not a gamer, which makes WoW one of the few things we don't share, but don't let that get in the way, she's a great person. I couldn't ask for a better woman to be with, as each of us makes the other better. Or so I like to tell myself! ;) You'll probably hear more about her as this site goes on, but for now that's just a little about her.

What I wanted to talk (read: rant) about a little more today is my truck. More specifically, I made a bad pun in the title because I'm going to talk about my recent issues with repairing my truck's ball joints and sway bar linkages. If you really just want to hear about WoW, come back tomorrow or the day after, as I'll have something for you then... However, if you are curious about some of the stupidity that happens in my little world, read on.

A few months ago my truck started making noise behind the driver's side front tire when I turned the wheel, especially when I was stopped or moving slow, and before the truck had warmed up. Those of you who know a lot more about cars than I do (or were paying attention just a minute ago) can probably already tell where the issue was, but me being only a semi-handyman asked a good friend of mine who could probably rebuild an entire car from spare parts, to take a look and see what he thought it was.

So, a month or so ago at our weekly dinner/hangout/play Magic at Skyline Chili, he and I went out and take a look behind that wheel. He grabbed a flashlight, I turned the wheel all the way to the left and hopped out to see what there is to see.

The first thing I noticed was a rusted bolt with no head and a loose plastic sleeve sticking up into midair, about two inches from a bar with an empty hole on the end.

My friend, looking for the source of the noise, had ignored this already, but when I asked him about it he said that, yep, that's a broken sway bar linkage that needs to be replaced, but not likely the source of the noise. He had me go back and turn the wheel back and forth a few times. Sure enough, there's grinding and complaining from my wheel assembly.

Turned out that the factory lower ball joint on this 135,000+ mile truck had started to go bad - the boot had been torn up, and being factory issue, when the grease leaked out there wasn't a grease joint to add more back in. The upper ball joint, just as old as the lower, probably needed to be replaced too, although it wasn't making any noise yet. So my friend tells me that if I'm going to replace the lower ball joint and the sway bar linkage, I might as well go ahead and replace the upper ball joint too, since it'll need it eventually and it'll save on labor whether we do it ourselves or have a shop go after it... and then he says that being a suspension part, you don't just replace one side, so we're going to replace 4 ball joints and 2 sway bar linkages.

The next day I rolled over to the tire/service station near my house and discussed with them the need to replace the aforementioned joints and linkages, and was informed that the cost would be roughtly $800-$1000 for the entire job. I thanked them and went to the nearby auto parts store to buy parts. I spent $279 (ok ~$330 after you include the alignment when done, but still - major savings.)

The Saturday before my trip, my friend rolled over, bringing jack stands, a *good* jack, and his toolbox, which contains a larger selection of tools than mine, and we set to work disassembling the area around the front wheels of my truck.

I'll shorten this part of the story for everyone's sanity. It was a long, hard day of work. He and I were both grease, sweat, and blood up to our elbows. We'd had to take a hacksaw to get one of the sway bar linkages off and a sledgehammer to dislodge the lower ball joints. The press I had rented for us didn't quite fit right and required jury-rigging (read: more sledgehammer) to properly seat the ball joints. We did it, though, and it was a job well done.

I can see some of you asking where the stupidity is, in this story. It's coming.

That all went down Saturday afternoon, and after replacing these joints, I needed to take my truck to a service station to get it aligned before going on my trip on Monday. I called around to a few places and found one that was open on Sunday, and dropped it off before my wife and I went north to see my family for my sister's birthday.

We got a call later that afternoon from the service station. I was told that the ball joints were the wrong ones. They said that when they got the truck up on the rack and the suspension sagged, the joints slipped. The guy talked to me about how he could look at the database for the place I bought the joints and see they were the wrong ones. They would be happy to replace them for me, at a cost of $100 parts and $100 labor for each joint - $400 to replace two parts I had paid $60 total for to begin with.

Incredulous, I made other arrangements for travel on my trip and told them I'd pick my truck up in the morning before I left.

A week later, after I got home, I rolled over to the service station I had stopped at originally, the one close to my house, and asked for a front end alignment. Two hours later my truck was fine, all realigned, and I picked it up. Sure enough, there was no problem with the ball joints. My truck is running smoother than it has in a long, long time.

I really don't know if one station saw something the other didn't, or if they were trying to pull a fast one to get some money out of me. I have no idea if that is common practice or not. I would think, though, that if you want return business you wouldn't tell somebody they need $400 worth of work, when they don't. My friend suggested that it might be because we replaced the joints ourselves - that service stations will tend to tell you stuff is wrong because you did it yourself. Personally, I wouldn't do that - if a person is smart enough and willing to put in the effort to do maintenance on their cars themselves, they're probably smart enough to tell when you're feeding them a line of b-s about something they did being wrong.

Oh well. C'est la vie.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program...

Back!

2009-11-23T13:14:00.001-08:00

I'm back!

Short new post today...

I'd like to ask for folks to keep my guild leader and good friend Kevin in your thoughts, he's in the hospital with pneumonia, or perhaps the flu.

Thanks!

A Primer on Tree Healing (Part 3, Gear, Gems, and Enchants)

2009-11-20T04:00:00.000-08:00

Here we go again.

Gear

Trees can use both leather and cloth armor, although if we do roll on the lower armor cloth pieces, we often annoy our slightly squishier friends. I would recommend, if you want your priests, mages, and warlocks to LIKE you, that you pass on that and focus on the leather pieces.

Also, I know that some guilds, like mine, prioritize gear with hit rating on it for DPS casters, since healers do not need that statistic, and crit rating for healers, since it's more important for them than DPS. Keep that in mind as well when rolling for gear.

In the interests of ranking stats, I've put an importance on each of them below. But much like with tanking, in my humble opinion the selection of gear is all about finding the right balance. Thankfully most selections are quite clear; one piece is a strict upgrade over another. But what separates good players from great players in this department are those that can examine two pieces that are sideways upgrades of each other - lose in one area and gain in another - and make the choice that helps them the most. As healers, we need to balance our mana regeneration with the power of our heals and the size of our mana pool, keeping in mind that the power of our heals will affect how much mana we need to be regenerating.

All that being said, trees should look for, in order: spell power, spirit, crit rating, and intellect. If the gear doesn't have spirit, it might be ok if it has MP5 to make up the mana regen difference, but you need to take into account the spell power from spirit in addition to that. If the spell power listed on two items is the same, but one has mp5 and no spirit, and the other has spirit but no MP5, take the one with spirit.

Spell power is not as important for trees as it is for other casters - but it is still the granddaddy of stats. There's a wrinkle for us, though, since we get 15% of our spirit as spellpower in tree form. Thus, when evaluating gear, remember that it's ok to lose a (very) small amount of spell power for a reasonable gain in spirit (quickest, easiest math is 3 points of spell power = 20 points of spirit). Counting gems for spell power, spirit, or mp5 becomes tricky as there are a lot of options for gems. More on that later.

Spirit helps our mana regen in addition to our spell power, and it the long fights of both Ulduar and ToC, that's greatly needed. After spirit, it's important to look for crit rating and intellect. We already get quite a bit of crit rating for various spells from our talents, but the closer we can push ourselves to 100% crit, the more healing we're going to be putting out and the more procs we'll get out of Living Seed and other abilities.

Intellect increases both our crit chance and our mana pool, and to a much lesser extent, our mana regneration. Mana pool is important - the larger our mana pool, the longer we can cast continuously without needing mana help. We should focus more on mana regeneration that mana pool size, because we need to have continuous production over the course of very long fights. If you have enough mana regen that you can go the length of an innervate cooldown without completely running oom, then focus on increasing intellect.

Gems

Gems give you the flexibility you need to make up shortcomings from your gear selection, and while this is true for everybody, it is especially true for the tree.

I mentioned before that gear selection is all about balance for us - tanks generally stack as much stamina as they can, and most casters stack as much spell power as they can, but we need to be more careful if we want to be as good as we can be. In my bear gear, I often recommended using the 2-color gems, but here I highly recommend using single-color gems matching the socket, to best match your needs, with one possible exception.

Red gems should always be spell power gems. There really isn't anything else in red that helps us.

Blue gems should be spirit or mana per 5 seconds - the split needs to be determined by your individual casting habits and mana regeneration needs. I split mine about half and half.

Yellow gem slots are the ones you might consider using 2-color gems for, to get a little more spell power, spirit, or MP5 out of them. The yellow part, whether a single-color or 2-color gem, should either be critical strike rating or intellect, but I wouldn't place a particular importance on one over the other.

Also don't forget the Unique-Equipped Nightmare Tear for +10 all stats.

I'll talk about how the jewelcrafter only gems play into this a bit later.

There are quite a few meta gems that are available for consideration. I'm currently using the Bracing Earthsiege Diamond for spell power and reduced threat. The critical strike rating and mana gem Beaming Earthsiege Diamond probably isn't a bad choice, nor is spell power and intellect with Ember Skyflare Diamond. Intellect and chance to restore mana on spell cast from Insightful Earthsiege is probably worth taking a look at although I don't think it will rank too terribly high. MP5 and increased critical healing from Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond is probably first on the list of things I may test if I decide to change. I'm not a big fan of the minor run speed increase but pair it with spell power in Tireless Skyflare Diamond and it might also be worth looking at.

Enchants

Not so many comments this time around...
Head - Arcanum of Blissful Mending (Wyrmrest Accord)
Shoulders - Greater Inscription of the Crag (Sons of Hodir)
Chest - Powerful Stats or Greater Mana Restoration
Hands - Exceptional Spellpower
Legs - Brilliant Spellthread
Feet - Greater Spirit
Wrist - Fur Lining - Spellpower (for leatherworkers), Superior Spellpower or Major Spirit (for everybody else)
Back -Wisdom (+10 spirit)
Weapon - whichever spellpower enchant is the best for the weapon you're using

Professions

I still like Leatherworking and Jewelcrafting. Although LW only grants you spellpower, it's a HUGE chunk, and JC allows you the flexibility to select the gem that balances out your abilities. If you're fine on your spirit and mana regen, you can use your red slots to pump your spellpower, but if you're having issues, say, regenerating mana, you can drop the JC-only spellpower gem down to a normal purple one, and replace a blue MP5 with the more powerful JC-only. In the bear posts, I was looking at what got me the maximum of something - here I'm looking at flexibility, and that's one of the biggest advantages of JC.

...and once again I'm done.

Still out of town, will be back on Monday, but I can't promise a reasonably decent post then. I should have something by Tuesday. As always, thanks for reading, and if you have a comments, flames, or suggestions feel free to let loose!

Kaethir has issues (aka More Bear Followup)

2009-11-19T04:52:00.000-08:00

I realized when finishing up the tree primer last week, that when I covered my bear enchants I managed to completely forget the weapon slot!

So, here, short and sweet, is the last piece of that discussion.

I have yet to see a good dagger or fist weapon and offhand setup for feral druids. It may exist, however, and keep that in mind when selecting enchants, but my analysis is based on using two handed weapons (staves and polearms).

I have seen folks go different routes, with Blood Draining or Berserking, but really, in my mind there are only two options, and those are Mongoose and Major Agility.

I've seen somebody with way too much time on their hands do the math, and declare that given average time between procs of Mongoose, the overall benefit over the length of a fight will be better with Mongoose as opposed to Major Agility. I've used both, I haven't seen a major difference in my survivability. I'm currently running Mongoose, but if you don't trust it and would rather have a consistent bonus, go for the +35 agility.

Told you it was short and sweet.

Raid Composition

2009-11-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

The last piece of the tree primer isn't ready yet, so I'd like to throw some thoughts out there about raid composition, how you choose how many and of what type of player to bring.

In my experience it's been pretty standard in 10 man raids to have 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS. For 25-man, the formula has been 2-3 tanks (depending on the raid), 6-7 healers (depending on the raid and the strength of the healers), and 15-17 DPS (depending on the number of tanks and healers).

I've run a couple of pugs lately (VoA and Ony) that have eschewed this "conventional" wisdom and run only 2 healers in a 10-man and 5 in a 25-man. The 10-man was a VoA in which the raid leader brought me - an experienced but not exceptionally well geared druid healer - and a shaman who had never healed a 10-man raid before, along with tanks that didn't know the fights exceptionally well.

In that situation, I considered our 1 wipe (on Emalon) a success. I was pushing out nearly 3k HPS and the shammy just a shade under 2. We lost a player or three each boss, but the raid succeeded and most of the players lost were due to factors unrelated to having only 2 heals, such as tanks unfamiliar with the encounters, or DPS going too fast before tanks had aggro.

The Ony raid was unsuccessful, but a number of factors contributed - the advantage of having less heals SHOULD be that you have more DPS, but we still seemed to struggle at times with killing things fast enough.

I don't have any overriding thought on this more than I wanted to put the question out there - am I being overly careful in thinking we should have better than a 1 to 4 healer to everybody else ratio? Does it depend on the strength of the healers, or the rest of the raid? Is the world going to end if anybody answers these questions? News at 11!

err... Something like that. As always, thanks for coming, and comments are welcome!