Friday, November 30, 2007

A raid = a hockey game?

Went to a hockey game yesterday, the first in more than 15 years I think. I live five minutes walk from the hockey rink and our local team is pretty successful, but I have not really been that interested really... But this time one of our subcontractors from work who sponsors the hockey team was hosting the game this evening and invited me to come along. So I did. Good food, imba seating, free beer and wine, and this particular match was between the two league leaders (=supposedly intense exciting fight) so how could I not go?

Anyways, the game was pretty intense, and the visiting team scored their first goal after just a few minutes of play. Our local heroes defended well and evened it out after just a few minutes more.

As I sat there watching the game play, screaming in joy when our team scored and muttering away when the visiting nasties did, I experienced a very tangible echo from our raids...


I could almost hear our GM if he had been raid leading the hockey team, "guys, guys, why did the other team score?" and almost see the rest of us standing there trying to look inconspicous "who me? did I do something wrong?".

The tempo of the game also reminded me of raiding, fast intense action followed by a whistle blow and a lot of waiting around, or in our case, fast intense killing followed by a break and the ressing of any dead people lying around.

Even the constant switching of hockey players, chains going in and out (I am not a hockey fan even in Swedish so I apologize if I use the wrong English sports term) reminded me of the main/alt switching that sometimes happen in our raids. Need two warriors for the trash pulls up to the curator? Niemas problemas, I log my druid or our GM his warrior. Could use another shackle for Moroes? Say no more, let me pull my shadow priest out and replace my warlock.

As the game progressed, the visiting team got the upper hand. 2-2 after the first period and the second ended 4-3.

Our local boys' usual goalie had been injured in a previous game and the goalie standing in today was just borrowed from another team. He was not used to playing with our team and they not with him. This became obvious as the visiting team kept pushing and pushing and scoring and scoring...

Sometimes when we raid we are like the dura-bunny, like a well-oiled machine, we all know each other, we are prepared without having to think about it, we cover up for each others mistakes and we just keep going and going. Sometimes when we raid we have new people with us. We must stop and explain things. We must adjust. We must react to things that we are not used to and we do not understand each other that well all the time. During these raids we occasionally (but not always! not by far always!) wipe. With those groups we need more team practice before we can go on and on and on and on....like our home town team and their borrowed goalie.

Despite the not-so-good prospects of winning our locals kept trying to get back and score and keep the fight going. Much like us on our last ZA attempt, when we wiped and tried again and wiped and tried again. Unlike our hockey heroes, however, we ended my first ZA raid by getting that damn troll boss down (tired, sweaty fingers, high heart rate, dry eyes from staring at the bloody screen, damn scared of missing a taunt or getting an unlucky crit, but we did it!), but the hockey raiders had a time limit to contend with as well and after 3x20 minutes played they had to admit defeat to the visiting mobs.

The game ended 7-3 to the visitors and it was a downtrodden team and audience who walked home from the hockey rink that night....

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First go for Nalorakk

So…Zul’Aman…

My first visit there, second or even third for some of my guildies, no boss down ever.

Hmm, cool Indiana Jonesy-feel about the place, was humming to myself the characteristic theme song from the movies. And who do I bump into? None other than Harrison Jones, who wanted our help banging a gong to open the wooden gates. And of course we happily obliged :-)

As we fought and oops – I died and fought and wtf! – I died and fought again on our way to the first boss several notes of interest turned up.


Interesting note 1: You can’t mount up on the stairs (apparently stairs are not considered to be outdoors, no matter how much open sky you have above your head) but you can mount once you get off the stairs.

Interesting note 2: The trolls can be mind controlled, frost trapped and sheeped, although the MC and traps broke sometimes after just a few seconds for no apparent reason – needs researching as to why.

Interesting note 3: The beasts can be frost trapped, sheeped and sleeped, and it can be all this at the same time! This we discovered on the last pack before the first boss when one of the beasts somehow got loose and stomped towards our bunched up raid of two-or-three-shottable but very fast reacting healers and dps’ers.

Interesting note 4: The beasts sometimes apply a debuff called Crushing Armor (I think) to the tank which reduces your armor by 10 k for the debuff’s duration! I was pretty glad I still had 13 k armor left when that debuff hit me. If you are not a thick-hided dodgy bear like me yell out loud when the debuff hit you so your healers won’t miss it.

Interesting note 5: And if that nasty armor debuff wasn’t enough, the beasts also roars deafeningly on occasion, increasing their damage output by 25 %!

After a few wipes (well now I tell a lie again, it was more than a few…or maybe I don’t tell a lie? How many is a few? More than one, obviously, but is it five? Ten? Hmm, think I must research this matter more thoroughly…

On a similar key, one of our raiders went afk yesterday saying ’brb 1 sec’. Of course he was away more than 1 second, and his attempt at explaining his very long 1 second by claiming he was so fast he was experiencing time dilation so that 1 second for him probably was more than that for us was not recieved favorably by the rest of us. The next time he went afk he hedged his bets by saing ’brb, several seconds’. Naturally one of us timed him, and he was gone for a little more than a minute (hmm gone in 60 seconds?), which some of us found a little too much to fit in the ’several seconds’ time frame. But how many seconds is several actually? Oh well, back to the topic at hand after this lengthy off-on-a-tangeting…)

I start again:

After a few wipes we got some tactics for the boss friends pulls down (since the boss himself was such a chicken he always ran away when we had killed his compadres).
The two mounted trolls in the middle of the stairs (cross and skull).
One tank on each, nuke the skull til he dismounts at about 15%. Sheep his beast, kill the skull and start nuking the cross. Kill the cross first when he dismounts, his beast second and then go for the sheeped beast.

The four-pack in front of the troll boss’s last runaway hideyhole (top of his terrace).
One tank on one of the mounted trolls (cross), sheep one of the unmounted trolls (moon), MC the other pedestrian troll (green) and use it to attack the last mounted troll (skull). Go easy on the dps on the skull first to let the MC’d troll get aggro and use him as tank when you kill the skull. Have a tank of your own ready to pick up the mount when the skull troll dismounts, kill the skull fast, the mount second and the MC’d troll third. Cross troll and mount next, sheeped troll last. Easy as pie ;P

And so the boss, nowhere left for him to run....

Not really a tricky fight, just get the taunts right and its not that bad a fight. Get the taunts wrong and its a wipe for sure. Make sure that you are below the tanking tanks threat but above all else’s – that is the tricky part when the threat levels start to come close to each other, one unlucky crit will too easily make the boss switch attention. So we spent a few tries getting the hang of it and it was with real sweaty fingers (on my part at least) that we downed him!

And the sweet troll boss dropped [Bladeangel’s Money Belt ] for me!

Real nice of him!

And since Zul'Aman resets every 3 days I see us going back there a lot to kill off Nalorakk and the rest of his friends many many times :-)

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Guildies gone missing

I got a whisper the other day from one of my guildies asking why a certain person had been gkicked. I racked my memory and answered that the particular player hadn’t been online for more than two months.

In our guild we do it like this: if someone isn’t online for more than a month without in some way letting us know he/she will be gone for quite a long time but still wish to remain in the guild, that player is moved to inactive status. After another months inactivity the player is gkicked.

Hmm, not a very nice way to treat people we like, my guildie said, and I replied well that it wasn’t very nice of the player in question to not even bother letting us know he/she would be away for some time. He (I will from now on refer to any player as he unless I know it's a she, not because of any gender issue, just because of lazyness) could have told us before he left, he could have contacted any of his msn contacts, he could have dropped a note on our guild forum.


Well, maybe it wasn’t a planned WoW break, maybe it was just a period of not playing that somehow got prolonged into lasting more than two months. Its no big deal, it's a game and sometimes you get tired of a game and then your top priority is probably something else than letting people that you don’t know and don’t really care about know you won’t be around for a while.

But what if you do care?

Last night our GM and raid leader for the night didn’t turn up. He had scheduled a raid in the GroupCalendar and people had signed up but he himself failed to appear on time. Or after time, for that matter. Long after time.

Three hours after the start time he had still not turned up and his msn was still offline. He is not online every day and but if he schedules or signs up for something he is there. Always.

This is a guy I talk to almost daily. Sometimes we say not much more than hi to each other, sometimes we talk a lot about WoW and our guild, sometimes we talk a lot about more personal things. He yells at me when we raid (well he yells at everyone when we raid so I don’t take it too personally), we have had some severe clashes of opinions but agree on a lot of things and he has helped me through some pretty rough spots when I needed a shoulder to cry on (jokingly referred to him as my online unpaid shrink once). He is from one end of Europe and I am from the other and we had never spoken before we met in STV a year and a half ago.

Had we met and talked like this in person I would without doubt have called him my friend and I would have been very worried if he had failed to appear like this. It was not like him at all.

The next day his msn was still offline and I was at work and unable to check in WoW. In the afternoon my msn chimed with a message from him and I promptly started yelling at him for his making me worried that something bad had happened to him.

Turns out he had had a severe Internet disconnection and hadn’t been able to relog until just now (well, that was bad but not as bad as it could have been).

So this particular story had a happy ending, but what if it hadn’t …

Lesson learned: when someone you meet cease being just a brief aquaintance and become a real friend that you care about, make sure you have some other way of getting in touch with them than just through a nickname on the ’net.

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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Patch goodies

I have to say that the 2.3 patch is the best patch ever! Sooo many new fun things!

After having flown around the lakes in Zangarmarsh for an hour, fishing in every pool I found I got it! The [Weather-Beaten Journal], which taught me the ability to Find Fish!

Happier than a teenager home alone on a Friday night when his parents forgot to lock the bar cabinet (and that can be the very essence of happiness, trust me on this, I have 3 teenies at home and even remember how it felt like myself ;P) I flew around looking for those yellow spots which indicates FISH HERE! And they are all over the place! Never realised there were so many pools around when I had to find them manually!


Always liked to fish but now I luuuv it! Happy Tess!

Tessy is also very happy about the new daily cooking quests! Given by the goblin named The Rokk close to the Netherwing Dragon sellers in Shattrah, she has so far gotten 3 new cooking recipes:

[Kibler's bits ] to make your hunter's pets even happier (I wonder if the pets would prefer Kibler's bits or [Sporeling snacks]?)

[Stormchops], a fun recipe that makes you zap nearby enemies for 30 minutes. The zapping actually does a little Nature damage, and it is no good to have eaten this if you are a rogue trying to stealth up to kill two humanoid mobs at the same time. The sapped one will get zapped too, getting damaged, and you will have two angry mobs hammering away at you :/.

The ingredients for this dish are 1 Lightning Eel and 1 Clefthoof Meat. Heard someone say that the waters outside Karazhan was full of Lightning Eels, but 30 minutes of fishing there yielded only 2 Eels but a lot of Bloodfin Catfish and Crescent-Tail Skullfish. Flew off to Winterspring instead and fished in the Hotsprings there. Much better droprate - got about 10 Lightning Eels in 20 minutes of fishing there!

[Skullfish Soup] , which conveniently enough is cooked with Crescent-Tail Skullfish,which I just happened to have an abundance of after last day's fishing for Eels :-)

Also happy Joaquime! She is an alchemist and since I like to have all recipes/patterns/designs/formulas/whatever for all my professions I have gotten her exalted with Sporeggar for their [Shrouding Potion]. Btw, was does this potion do anyways? I can't seem to notice that I am shrouded in anyway?
[Edit: Aha, now I know what it does! It works like a rogue's Feint, lowering your threat when you are fighting! Could be useful when healing since I don't have that many (=zero) threat lowering capabilitis)

And in the new patch, another exalted reward was introduced: the Tiny Spore Bat!



This is one if the cutest pet I have ever seen! (Well, the piglet Mr Wriggly and the baby elekk Peanut comes close, but this one sparkles!)

That was all for now, folks, more to come as I continue my journeys thru Azeroth and the Outlands!

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Demonic macros

So,I couldn't resist anymore, I specced my little lock back to demonology...

I use her too much for questing still to be comfortable with that destruction build I tried. Also, I heard that for a destro build to be really effective you need an awful lot of spell hit, which I didn't have (always good to find some scientific reasoning to back your decision, eh?)

Anyways, I like the demo spec and I just luuuv my Felguard, he's so protective of my little gnome (well he is more than twice her size so she can hide very well behind him).

Paynne has by far the most spells possible to use at the same time than any other of my girls (or maybe I just haven't discovered all the other girls' spells...ah well) and I use a lot of macros when I play her.


I have scoured forums and other venues of information to get my macros the way I want the, and I have shamelessly stolen snippets from anything that I thought I could use...so I figured maybe I should share some.


Summon Minion [Edited 2008-03-05]
Since I usually quest with my Felguard out this is a very convenient macro:

#show Fel Domination
/run PetAbandon()
/stopcasting
/cast [nocombat, nopet] Summon Felguard
/castsequence [combat] Fel Domination, Summon Felguard

[Edit: the bold text above (nopet) added to make the macro work as intended]

The macro is read from the top down. The first line shows if the cd on the spell Fel Domination(15 minutes) is ticking.

What this macro does is the following:

If your Felguard is out, in our out of combat, one press on this macro will dismiss him.

Why is it useful to dismiss your pet in the heat of the battle, you might ask. It is useful only if you plan to use your Fel Domination (you know, the spell that lets you summon your minion in 0,5 second - whooosh and he's back) and resummon him, because when you do that, he will come back with full health/mana and all those buffs he had on when you dismissed him! If he dies and you Fel Dominate him back, he will come back unbuffed (although still with full health/mana). Takes a bit of concentration to see what how your minion is getting damaged and keep track of his health as well as your own, and get that key-clicking to work, but if you manage to pull it off the difference between unbuffed and buffed might help save the day :-)

The next line checks to see if you are in combat and if you are not you summon your Felguard the usual 10 second way.

The last line also checks to see if you are in combat, and if you are you cast Fel Domination on the first click and Summon Felguard on the second click.

So, to sum up:
Pet out - click once for dismissal
No pet and in combat - click twice to summon
No pet and out of combat - click once to summon

Pretty nifty, eh?


Paynne and her darling Felguard in the big city.



Seduce
Yeye, I am a warlock, we have a way to cc humanoids, and its called SEDUCE. Ever heard of it? I think many people, including warlocks, have not. It is a tricky thing to pull off correctly, and since it relies on a spell channeled by a succubus who might as well be made of glass, it has a big risk of gettin fubared unless you have practiced it before trying it on in a multi-pull in a 70's instance.

/focus [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=focus, modifier:ctrl] Curse of Shadow
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/petpassive
/cast [pet:Succubus, target=focus, harm, nomodifier] Seduction

We have a hunter in our guild who is one of the best trappers I have ever seen (well we have many bit this particular one I have played with a lot), and when I tank with him in my group I never worry about the mob with the blue square on. I know he will take care of it most assuredly, trapping, kiting, whatever's needed, while at the same time dishing out an enormous amount of damage on the other mobs.

I want to be able to use my succy seduce like that hunter uses his frost traps. I am not even close at the moment, but I will get there (I hope).

This is how you use the macro (btw if you choose the red ? as the icon for you macro it will display the correct icon for whichever spell you have in it):

You target the mob you want to seduce and then you hold down shift while clicking the macro. The mobs portrait will get a shiny border so you see that you have set it as focus correctly.

Now you can target any other mob you like, your focus will still be set on your chosen mob. When the pull starts, I usually hold down ctrl and click the macro to cast a Curse of Shadow on the focused mob to lower its resistance to the Seduce and to get it running in my direction, to me and my succubus next to me, and then I hit it with a Searing Pain to get me high on the mobs threat list. After that, click my seduce macro, watch the mob start spouting hearts, and switch target to the skull.

Now I blast happily away on my nuke target pressing my seduce macro about every 15 seconds or so (I have improved Seduce) to keep the focused mob in the seventh heaven. The Curse of shadows and the Searing Pain is usually enough to keep the mob from going for the healers or my made-of-fragile-glass succy the first times the seduce is reapplied.


Paynne and her hot succubus out on a Seduce practice run.



I have some more nice warlock macros that I will post at a later time, now I better post this or I will keep editing it forever ;P

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Friday, November 16, 2007

Just the Bare Necessities?

So how did you spend the patch day?

I got my baby warrior Dizzie out of her hibernation, scuttled over to Theramore and cheered at the sight of so many new yellow exclamation marks! I love doing quests! Happy as a hobbit in a wine cellar she ran around exposing agitators – but wait? Why didn’t I get credit for exposing them? Got just 1/5 and I had killed/scared off more than that! Bugged q or what? *getting mad at Blizz for another patch day f-k-up!*

But wait again - *blush* - I realised I was in a raid group…was waiting for the other raiders to show up and we had already started invites… ah well, it was time for me to let my baby rest up a little more and get one of my big girls up to action again.


Wednesday is one of our usual Kara raid days and (despite it being patch day) we clung to tradition and went there to kill off some of the nasty denizens of that dreary cobwebbed place.

For some reason that I can’t recall at the moment I was there on my (usually) lethal feral druid Joaquime (think we were a little short of healers at the time as they were downloading the patch after work and I had offered to heal at the first bosses so we could get the raid started, but I am not sure…my memory is excellent, only very short…)

Anyways, the healers popped up after all and I shifted into bear for the those trash clears to the Huntsman. I haven’t been tanking in Kara for months and was a bit surprised to find that I could not pull aggro from the other tank, a warrior.

Our gm’s warrior has always been a bit tricky to pull aggro from but far from impssible, the other warrior I used to run with was way too easy to overaggro, all I used to do was hit the mob and it immediately switched its attention to me, didn’t even have to use growl or anything. (And before anyone starts yelling at me for pulling aggro off the other tank so the healers have to ping pong heal, I do it to get some extra nice rage going and then I don’t mind giving it back for the rest of the fight).

This one warrior, however, was impossible to peel. Even when I used growl which, if I recall correctly, is supposed to glue the mob’s attention to you for 6 seconds, all I got was a lousy blink of the mob’s target switching before he went back to hammering away on my plate-clad friend. Gah, I had to use enrage throughout that entire trash clear except when I was tanking a mob or two of my own.

Well, this warrior and also our gm’s warrior have been running thru Kara for many weeks now while I have been ambling along far behind on mostly my warlock Paynne or my priest Jools, so I guess I am pretty undergeared compared to them.

And some nice leather gear actually did drop during that run, [Edgewalker Longboots ] from Moreos and [Bracers of Maliciousness ] from the Maiden, both of which would have been a huge upgrade for my kitty cat, but they went to a hunter instead of me. (Actually, the Huntsman dropped the [Bracers of the White Stag] for me since noone else wanted them, could be useful if I ever respecc to Moonkin).

Well, they were more than huge upgrades for the hunter too so its not that I mind him getting them, and I guess I could have argued my case if I wanted them and I didn’t bother, but still…when is a bear a bear and when is she a cat? Is the bare necessities for the bear only and not for the cat?

I am feral specced, which happens to encompass both bear and cat shapes. I am not either-or, I am both. I tank when tanking is needed, I do pretty good dps when dps-ing is needed. Actually I heal when healing is needed too since was healing at the Maiden in my healing gear, my druid HoTs are pretty neat even in feral specc. And now that I think about it, I was actually blasting my way to the Maiden with starfires and moonfires and wrath’s, courtesy of the new +spell damage on the healing gear, otherwise the only way I would have killed any mob was if it had laughed itself to death at the pitiful spell damage I could do in my healing gear. Hmm, I guess this raid did get to see me shine in all my capabilities…=)

For those pulls and/or boss fights that don’t require two tanks I do immensly more dps in kitty shape that in bear, and if we have two tanks already I might stay in cat form for the whole run.

I don’t want to roll on healing or spell damage gear unless noone else needs it, but what about dps gear? The pure tanking items that drops in Kara that I can use are rare, and some of these my fellow tanks have their eyes set on too, so even if they drop I may not get them. Am I doomed to wait until all rogues/hunters/shamans have gotten their leather dps drops until I can get a shot at them? How am I ever gonna get into Zul’Aman if I can’t upgrade my gear? Am I whining about something that is not an issue really?

Well, I have found two ways to resolve this not-really-a-problem-but-could-be:
* I will check the Kara loot lists and actually do the maths for which items would be an upgrade for me, both in bear and in cat form
* I will keep going to Kara with my druid (well, with all of my attuned girls actually) and get me those nice [Badges of Justice ] for the sweet rewards

I won’t be imba geared in a week or even two with this strategy, but at least I have a plan. And then I will grab that aggro back from those plate-clad target dummies easier than…, than…ehh, well, easier than a very easy thing!

Raid evaluation
- The new ”change out of bearform if you accidentally press a spell that you can’t use in bearform”-ability. NOT a good thing to do while tanking (yeye I know I can disable it but you try to get me to do that in the heat of the battle).
+ We are going pretty well atm. Some new players with us, and only one stupid wipe. Runs still takes a little to long though, we should be able to clear Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden and Opera in less than 2 hours.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Nice and not so nice people

We have a sweet warrior in our guild who is the nicest player ever – he is cool, friendly, helpful and generelly so fun to be around that you sometimes wonder what dark schemes of world domination he is plotting just because your own jaded cynical mind can’t really believe that some people are just nice….

Anyways, this sweet guy tells me that one of his RL friends who joined our guild some weeks ago is going to transfer to another server to play with some other RL friends there, and he (the transferring friend) wanted him to come along.

Didn’t think to check it at the time, but later that evening (after our first kill ever of the skinny flaming dragon Nightbane! wohoo! /cheer! /party time!) I checked the guild roster, and - lo and behold! – the transferee-to-be was not in it. Added him to my friends list and – surprise, surprise! – player not found.


Checked the armory and no match was found for the [insert transferees name, class, race and level here].

So what gives? Banned account? (Don’t know if a ban actually makes your chars disappear from the guild roster and server). His parents got tired of him playing and made him erase his chars? (Yet another reason not to accept underage people in the guild). Someone hacked his acc and transferred his char from the PvP server we’re at to a PvE server so he can never come back, payed for the transfer with RL money and changed his name while he was at it, but left all his alts in place and gear intact? (Don’t laugh, there is a guy in our guild who actually claims this happened to him).

The now mysteriously missing player joined our guild some weeks ago at lvl 65 or so, he quickly levelled up his char to 70 and was pretty fun to play with. He got his Kara attunement done and wanted to go raiding with us. He has been telling me he has several other level 70’s on another server and has cleared Kara multiple times with them (oooo I am impressed! Why tell me? Put your money where your mouth is if you wanna have a shot at impressing me…)

This is the guy that was a little upset when he didn’t get invited to one of the raids in his first week as lvl 70 (I signed up in the calendar! Invite me!) and when he did get invited he won a roll for the T4 gloves over his RL friend, the sweet warrior. This is the guy that the day after (or even hours after) just folds his teepee and leaves. Without a word. Without saying goodbye. Just poof – gone.

We had a similar case some weeks ago, a player that had been with us for a long time but all that time secretly applying to other guilds (sometimes applying several times, changing his age from 15 to 19, not recognising the names of his alleged former gm’s, generally making himself look a fool). Well, secretly maybe isn’t the word for it since the guild application web sites generally are public, but secretly in the sense that he didn’t share with us that he considered us just a stepping stone for gearing up until a Better Guild would let him tag along.

The day after he got his T4 helm from our very first Prince kill he did like a rogue and vanished. Joined another guild because – guess what? – he wanted to play with his RL friends (you know, the ones that were a true PITA to play with before he was all epicced out). Well, nvm, good riddance.

/rant

WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? How can you discover at level 70 that oh, I want to play with my RL friends (hated their guts until now and wouldn’t ever want to be seen dead in their company before but now they are pretty ok, and btw the fact that I just got some nice epics is entirely coincidental and have no bearing on my decision at all – what do you mean those guilds wouldn’t accept me unless I had some raiding experience and good gear?)

Maybe ”RL friends” is a code phrase for ”people who won’t let me join their uber imba raids no matter how much I whine unless I am geared up and act like a total asshat first”?

I don’t mind players who want to progress more in raiding than what we can offer – we are not going to Gruul or any other raid instance yet – we do Kara, and only Kara, and maybe not even that somedays when we don’t have enough people online because they have other RL things to take care of. If you want more that is ok, you are not automatically an asshat just because you are not content with the way our raiding progresses or because you want to explore more.

You are an asshat when you won’t tell anyone about your concerns or your wishes and never care about the work other people put in to organize runs, you are an asshat when you see the other people you play with as just means to an end, as some in-game feature whose sole duty it is to help you get attuned, get geared up, get group and raid experienced so you can move up to the next tier of soulless in-game features who should help you get that next set of pretty purple outfits (and let’s not forget its also their duty to use their lvl 70’s to boost your alts thru all lower lvl instances for even more leet loot)

We juggle around to get a fun solid raid party going and you just want us to carry you through it? Well, think again…

Yes you were there to help make a successful raid that day, but just because you were there someone else weren’t. I haven’t raided with my darling druid tank Joaquime for a long time because we have many tanks in the guild atm. I want that staff from Illhoof for Joaquime almost as much as I want that staff from Curator for my warlock, but I go to the Illhoof fights with Paynne for now because we need her warlock powahs for that fight. My shadow priest Jools is just shedding her baby teeth in Kara and I won’t bring her to any of the later bosses until she’s geared up a little more. My precious rogue Tessy hasn’t even been to Kara yet beacuse we have had an abundance of melee so far.

But I don’t care about that (very much). I have fun raiding no matter which girl I play, we are getting a solid core of good fun players who value our way of doing things, even if it means that we wipe sometimes and don’t raid at all other times.

Just wish we wouldn’t have to suffer these other morons so frequently. Ah well, if wishes were gold all my girls would have epic flyers by now.

/rantoff

Nightbane raid evaluation
- Came to the raid with my warlock Paynne and a 28 slot soulshard bag that was - empty! Not a little empty, it was a lot empty, nada, totally devoid of anything resembling the pink crystals..*embarrassed just thinking about it* Major horde ganking outside as usual, had to sneak down into the cellars just to get me some shards.
+ Took us a few tries to master the fight, and I switched over to my priest Jools since her mana regen and vampiric embrace healing would help keep us all up – and we killed the ugly malnourished one!

Funniest thing in the raid: our gm and raid leader was going to summon Nightbane, however he tried to accomplish this by using his hearthstone instead of the urn! Wasting one of my shards as I had to run outside to summon him back! Tactics suggestions ensued, all on the lines of ”maybe the OT should try hs-ing, perhaps he’ll drag the skellys with him?”

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Infinite Mystery part 2

Well, BFU is dead again, after a textbook example fight with me as one of just 2 Staffless casters (note the very real difference between staffless and Staffless, the first being just without any old stick, the latter being found very lacking in the Staff of Infinite Mystery-department).

But in accordance with the great and infinite mystery of luck (or lack of it) the pretty purple stick did not drop.

Anyways, we proceeded to kill Aran, manage the Chess Event and finally kick the Prince's large behind too, all in one smooth run (well, with a few bumps but nothing major).


Raid evaluation
+ I miss my felguard! I feel incomplete without him :-(. However, it is a little more challenging to use different pets for different fights.
- Can't really think of anything negative (this must mean I am improving!)


On another note, my rogue Tessy has finally reached 375 fishing and got her eye on this:

The "Gone fishin" comfy fishing chair from the WoW Trading Card Game! Isn't it lovely?

You can buy the card for about 50 dollars on E-bay and I am debating with myself wheter this constitutes "Playing too much! Way too much!" - no spending any real money on virtual property! or if I can somehow explain to myself why I really neeeeed that comfy chair....

I'll let you know how it turns out....

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Infinite Mystery

Ever since I saw it drop on my first Curator kill some months ago my warlock Paynne has been drooling over this beautiful staff - The staff of Infinite Mysteries!

Paynne wasn’t there when we downed that big ugly mofo that first time (was short on tanks at the time so I was there on my fit and well-shaped and not at all fat bear tank Joaquime) but she has been there several times after that. The staff has not dropped.

Paynne has missed some of the Curator kills though these last months and I know the staff has dropped then because it seems half the casters in our guild is running around with that pretty purple stick bouncing on their backs.


Anyways, some nights ago Big Fat Ugly was going to go down again, and I brought all my lucky charms with me (well, I tell a lie, I don’t have any lucky charms but I wish I did). Anyways, my (lack of) charms seemed to work, because at Moroes the Nethershard Girdle dropped and I rolled 100 (yes, top score, max roll, the gods of random chance were on my side!) and won it. Or, were the gods on my side now… seems I would have won it even if I had rolled 1 beacuse noone else wanted it…

Also, Big Fat Ugly flatly refused to die that night, and after some stupid tired wipes we decided to call it a night for the night, get some sleep and come kick his butt clear-eyed and clear-headed the next day instead.

I was a bit worried about my damage output in the fight, being demo specced and dragging my lovely sweet Felguard around with me to protect me and chug away distributing pain to anyone trying to hurt me is a sweet way to fight out of instances, but he seems to be pretty impotent against the Curator’s flares and my shadowbolts kept getting interrupted by the arcane discharges, making that 2,5 sec cast time into something more like 5-6 seconds (although it felt like forever or at least 10-15 secs, standing there shaking and sparkling purply) (phew that was a long sentence…)

So I decided to do some talent reshuffling, going for a destruction build with enough in demonology to get demonic sacrifice for that extra spell damage boost..

Back to Curator the day after, quickly clearing the way and into Big Fat Ugly Not Long Left To Live’s room.

Sadly enough, Backlash doesn’t seem to proc on the arcane discharges from the flares, so my hopes for some insta-Shadowbolts was crushed. However, Immolate, insta-Conflagrate and insta-Shadowburn when caught in the discharges and Shadowbolts when not seemed to work pretty good, so eventually Big Fat Ugly Not Long Left To Live turned into Big Fat Ugly And Very Dead.

And when the loot master asks for a drumroll before he shows what has dropped, you just know that it is going to be something pretty….

Sadly (for me) some of my fellow raiders didn’t actually have that staff either, and also sadly (for me) it turned out the gods of random chance were actually laughing at me since I rolled 5 (5!) and thus lowest of all casters present and the pretty staff of my dreams went to a mage instead.
/cry /cry /cry /cry /cry /cry /cry….

Ah well, he’s a sweet mage and I am happy for him and glad he got a nice upgrade. (Also, there will be one less to compete with next time the bloody thing drops…)

I also take comfort in a saying we have here in Sweden that goes something like this:
If you are unlucky in games, you are lucky in love.
So I expect a whole lotta sweet luuuv will be coming my way (hmm, maybe I’d better start dropping some tangible hints to my husband…)


Raid evaluation
+ Sweet fellow warlock who keeps track of soulstoning and health stoning and other warlock duties (also reminded me of how to keep your imp alive during the fights…Passive! Passive! Passive! NOT Defensive! Gah, I have been felguarding too long…)
- I forgot to put the Curse of Doom on the BFU at 1 minute left til evocation – twice!

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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

New Blogger!

I have been littering our guild's forum with tales of my adventures and misfortunes and general tidbits of useless (or...?) information for a long time now.

Sometimes our evil administrator pops up and threatens to lock the threads when I have managed to derail them far enough (and he actually does it once in a while, showing me da powah of forum admins).

Now I will litter this blog instead, sparing my guildies the "oh, a new post, gotta check it out, blah, it's just another of Tessy's rants!"-feelings of disappointment and general sourness at my inability to stay focused on the topic at hand.



This means that you, dear reader, will have to suffer my tales of constant wonder and amazement as I discover more and more of the world of Warcraft (yes, it is possible to discover a new spell in your spellbook at level 70, and wonder if you just had forgotten that you had that spell or if you actually never have used it).

Also a lot of pissed-off ranting will occur as I detail my encounters with the more nasty type of WoW-player (i.e. gankers, fellow raiders who fail to be on time for raids, people who start escort quests without checking too see if everyone is ready, etc).

Irony might be employed to highlight some of my experiences, and sometimes I might cry over some silly thing (or not so silly maybe).

In general, I will use this as a safety valve to blow off some steam or share some of my happiness with the world at large.

Enjoy!


Type rest of the post here

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