Yesterday was a sad day.
One of my best friends in the guild had decided to leave us and join another guild. I was very unhappy to see him go and I will miss him a lot, but I understand his reasons for wanting to leave and I can’t say that they are wrong.
I know we will keep playing together, heroics and bg’s and dailies and hopefully even some pug raids, so its not like it was goodbye for ever, but still… And now my friends list is about twice as long as usual, after I put all his chars on it ;P
Yesterday also brought a shocking revelation!
Last year, this guy I played with rather much got fed up with the game and everything and decided to go out in flames, which he did rather dramatic and eloquently, I must say. With the hindsight that comes when you have seen both sides of the fence, so to say, I can understand his reasons for not being happy and they were not all unfounded, but he was a bit on the black-list for a while there.
He popped up a few times after that but presently he ceased showing up. I assumed he had transferred servers or quit playing, and eventually I forgot about him.
Last night, another WoW-friend of mine whom I met a few months ago and play a lot with from time to time nowadays told me he had a confession to make. He told me he knew me, that we had been playing together a lot before, and then he told me he actually was the very same guy I mentioned above, the one who blew up and (I thought) quit the game!
I was like hahahahahaha omfg are you serious? It’s you? It’s really you?
Curiously enough, I was not angry or upset or anything like that, I was just hilariously wtf-ed and had a lot of questions. Where did this char come from? Did you lvl him from scratch? Where is your other char, the one you played before? And what I found most amazing was: How could you keep this a secret these past months when we have played together?
Writing this, I still feel like I am about to bubble over with incredulity and zomg-ness, but what I feel most is actually genuine happiness that he’s back :-)
I promised him not to mention any names in my blog and I won’t tell anyone who he is, but it will certainly require some serious wilful restraining on my part, cause what I really want to do is stand on the rooftops and shout to everyone I know that he’s back.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Lost friends and found friends
Kara - for gear or badges?
I am sometimes told I have a low heal bonus. Well, it’s really not that much to brag about, only a little over 1500 or so, which compared to the many +2k healers in my guild is pretty low. I do my best to increase it though, I run heroics for loot and badges, I do bg’s to get some of the good pvp healing gear, I do the dailies for gold and rep to get me some of the sweet rep rewards.
I have a wish list of Karazhan drops that would be nice upgrades for my healing outfit:
Red Riding Hood's Cloak
Blue Diamond Witch-Wand
Ribbon of Sacrifice
Masquerade Gown
Hnadwraps of the Incarnate
Pauldrons of the Solace-Giver
All of the above may drop in the first parts of Karazhan up to the Curator. The bosses of the upper part of Kara also has a lot of nice drops but usually we don't go further than the Curator in one go.
So last night I signed up for the scheduled Karazhan run, hoping for a chance to snag some of the nice healing drops in there, and get a few more badges so I can buy my very first piece of shiny stuff from that greedy smith Hauthaa.
However, I did not get invited to the run :-(
Well, that’s ok, there were a lot of people that had signed up and wanted to go, I do not expect to get to raid every time I feel like it.
But then I take a look at who is going, and I see three healers that are fully decked out in high-level epics, all badge geared and with heal bonuses way over 2 k. None of them need even a single drop from Kara and if anything of the above dropped it would probably be disenchanted or go to some hybrid class’s offspec.
Naturally I felt a little disappointed, thinking that why the heck do these people go for Kara runs when there are other players out there who would seem to benefit more from it, but I guess the guild management had done some planning and in their infinite wisdom come to the conclusion that for this run it was actually better to bring healers who didn’t need any drops and let the less-geared who could benefit from drops sit it out.
Anyways, with my usual luck regarding drops and rolls, probably none of the things on my wish list would have dropped for me had I been in there.
And if I don’t get into the guild Kara badge farm runs I can always go pugging since it seems that is allowed now, hoping for some better luck in drops there :-)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Pug Runs?
You know what a pug is, right? Pick-up-group, a group consisting of people not all from the same guild or circle of friends, a group of people most of whom you don’t know.
Pugging 5-mans happens all the time, but raid pugging is a little more delicate. Most serious guilds don’t allow their members to go pugging raids, since that means those guildies won’t be available for guild raids to that particular raid instance that week or until it resets.
A guildie of mine went pugging a Gruul’s Lair run the other day. No big deal, I would say, it’s not like my guild has done any 25-man raids for weeks, and no raid to the Lair is on the GroupCalendar for the upcoming week. It was reset the day after anyways, so even if any spontaneous Gruul runs should arise my guildie would be able to join.
What might make this a little delicate though is that apparently pugging raids have been a definite no-no, even grounds enough for a gkick, and this was an officer who was doing the pugging. I do not know if the rules have been changed recently, but its a sure-fire way to stir up guild drama by having different rules for members and officers.
My opinion only, but I think that the title of officer is associated with certain obligations as well as privileges. If you call yourself a raiding guild, the grunts of the guild expects the officers to arrange raids.
If you pug raids as an officer, you risk signalling to the rest of the guild that you are unable or unwilling to arrange these raids for the guild, because obviously you want to go there since you did, but you are not wanting it enough to make it happen for the guild, or even worse, that you really just care about the chance to get phat lewt, but you carry the guild tag with you wherever you go.
In this case, I am sure nothing of the above was intended, it was just a chance to have fun in the middle of the night after a bad guild progress run in another raid instance. Still, it sends out the wrong signals, and I think it was a rather bad call.
Last year, in the summer of 2007, we had barely started doing Karazhan on our own and had trouble getting enough people online at the same time to make the raids happen. A trial member in our guild arranged some pug runs to Kara with some of his friends from other guilds and invited some of the guild members who went along with it. I was asked to come, and hesitantly agreed, but after they found out my druid was feral and not resto I was not wanted anymore.
Just as good, actually, because at that time I was an officer in the guild and it would have felt wrong to go on pug runs in Kara when not all of our members who wanted to go were welcome. It would have felt disloyal to my guild, I was an officer and expected to make raids happen within the guild, not go outside it for raiding.
Normal members have more freedom in that aspect, but if the people in charge of the guild go off doing raids in pugs, I can't help but feel a little let down by them. I don’t want the privileges and responsibilities of being a guild officer, that’s why I left that post, but if you want it I think you’d better be prepared that its not all raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens, its a good deal of hard work and drudgery in there too.
But ah well, I don't make the rules and I don't enforce them, I keep my opinions to myself mostly since I don't want to get involved (except I write them here to get any lingering feelings of ill-ease off my chest), and I smile and move along :-)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Sad sad sad
There was this kid that joined our guild recently. Well, he gave his age to be 18 on his application but he felt rather young and immature in his words and actions.
On his first Kara run with us he was all Ooo I hope this and that drops and I want this and generally blubbering away like a child, giving the impression of being very young. But we have a few more members like this, and while it gets really old after about 15 seconds or so its usually bearable, nothing to get too upset about.
The next day he managed to severely piss off some of my friends by filling gchat with a lot of annoying bullshit to the extent that they wanted one of the officers to gkick him. As I was in group with them at the time, the officer asked my opinion too, and I gave it. Had just come online, didn’t know what had been said, and maybe the kid somehow didn’t realise that he was being so offensive, perhaps a small chat officer-to-trial-member would be appropriate. Let’s be the mature ones here and give him a chance to mend his ways, so to speak.
Another day goes by, I am doing some AV’s with my warlock to prep for that upcoming nice Merciless Gladiator gear, when I see the same kid proudly stating in gchat that he always picks on any emos he meets. Eh, say again? Why? Seems his gf was once picked on by an emo and thus it was legitimate to treat all emos badly after that. Also seems there was an emo in his class once, but some headslamming made that one see the error of his ways.
Also, emos was bad for people around them, they dragged people down and mentally hurt them, so it was ok to pick on them and headslam them, thus hurting them both physically and mentally.
Gay people got a swing of the same hammer, seems you become gay by spending time with gay people, which was a really bad thing.
All these statements and then some were delivered as Absolute Truths, not opinions. And not one time, even, oh no, he was repeating himself, hammering home the points, making us all absolutely unable to harbour any hopes that maybe he was just really really bad at expressing himself instead of really really bad at being a kind and decent human being.
Somehow along the way he involved God and the church too. We should all be lucky the church had been there for us all this time, otherwise we’d all be speaking Turkish and living in a Moslem empire. The slaughtering of people in religious wars over gold and power was justified because it served a higher purpose. Even today, the church was sorely needed to keep people in line.
I told him he came across as a small-minded nasty vicious idiot, which was my opinion. Small-minded because he couldn’t accept that anyone had views and tastes and beliefs that he didn’t approve of, nasty and vicious because he advocated violence, mental and physical, against anyone with a lifestyle that he didn’t approve of, and idiot because he didn’t hesitate to spew this filth among people he had just met and was (I guess) trying to make a good impression on to let him stay and get phat lewtz.
Anyways, after an hour or so of him throwing out more and more filth in ghcat, and not being able to understand that me and everyone else was not agreeing with him and not being able to even concede that I or anyone else might not be totally wrong, I told him I considered him a lost cause and would put him on ignore so I would not have to risk feeling sickened from reading his vile so-called “facts” littering up gchat.
It was really saddening.
Most saddening of all was that this was a kid. Few kids are rational, they are too caught up in the whirlwind of hormones and fear of not fitting in and the general angst of growing up and finding your place in the world, all this in this case reinforced by the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory. I should not have argued with him like I did. He was disgusting and vicious and nasty, but still a kid.
Will he grow up like that, believing he has the answer to everything, that it is ok to hurt and ridicule people that don’t think or look like him? Will he ever find out that it is a person’s actions towards others that are important, not what said person look like or think like or what kind of music she listens to, or will he keep spreading the intolerance and ignorance he so painfully obviously displayed in gchat? Will he ever realise that it is ok to be different and help people instead of being afraid of them?
I hope he will turn out ok. He had some fun things going, like the Murloc song he sang in gchat, so there must be a streak of light in him.
And how much of this is our responsibility anyways? WoW is a game, I play it for fun, not to raise other people’s kids. When I see someone saying things I find unacceptable, I speak up, but if they don’t shape up or at least agree to not agree with me, carefully walking the line, I put them on ignore. I don’t log in to get pissed off or saddened by some little twat’s abysmal ignorance and intolerance. But do we have an obligation to try and help people see the light, so to speak, when they so obviously are floundering around in the darkness?
In a perfect world, I would say yes, we have a responsibility and an obligation to help and support people we encounter. Even in our less-than-perfect world I like to think that we will help each other out. But this... I don’t want to spend my time in WoW trying to foster a generous spirit in some anonymous jerk. Am I selfish? Probably.
He got gkicked later that night. I wonder if he will truly realise why, and if he will grow from the experience and be a better person, or if he will just blame me and think it’s a conspiracy of gay emos out to get him.
I hope for the former, but I fear it’s the latter.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Draenic Wisdom or Mageblood?
When raiding, I choose between Elixir of Draenic Wisdom or Elixir of Major Mageblood for my Guardian Elixir.
Usually, I go with the Draenic Wisdom one, mainly because my alchemist sister Joaquime can't make the Mageblood one and I prefer to be prepared myself and not rely on others.
But is DW really better than Mageblood? Or am I just being cheap, should I go buy that recipe?
So, I embarked on a daring venture out into the world of game mathematics, to see if I could get some solid evidence of which elixir is better for me.
Basic facts:
Jools, holy priest (20/41/0) with the talent Meditation for 30% continued mana regen while casting.
Unbuffed:
My intellect INT = 484
My spirit SPI = 349
According to Wowwiki, the formula for calculating the Spi/Int-based mana regen is
mana/5 seconds (MP5) = 5 * (0,001 + SQRT(INT) * SPI * Base_Regen)
where Base_Regen for a lvl 70 is 0,009327.
Putting my numbers into this I get my Int/Spi-based mana regen to be 358 MP5 out of combat, 107 MP5 in combat.
My MP5 from items (gems, enchants and gear stats that specifically say xx Mana per 5 sec.) is 95.
So, my total unbuffed mana regen would be 453 MP5 out of combat, 202 MP5 in combat.
Now I take a hefty swallow of the juicy Draenic Wisdom and watch my numbers go up, my Int/Spi based mana regen is now 401 MP5 out of combat, and 120 MP5 in combat. Add in the flat 95 MP5 from my items and I get a nice total of 496 MP5 out of combat, 215 MP5 in combat.
I spit the DW out, and instead I take a sip of the Major Mageblood. My INT/SPI and the associated mana regen falls down to their original numbers (358/107) but the MP5 from items is increased by 16. My total MP5 is now 469 out of combat, 218 MP5 in combat.
Seems we have a winner, eh? Combat mana regen is 218 for the Major Mageblood, 215 for the Draenic one.
But wait! There's this little thing called the 5-second-rule (FSR), that applies to Int/Spi-based mana regen. This rule says that your mana regen is suspended for 5 seconds after casting, i e by default you regain NO Int/Spi-mana for 5 seconds after you have finished casting a spell (but all the mana/5 from items still keep ticking). My Meditation allows me to keep 30% of my Int/Spi-based mana regen going during these 5 seconds though. If I don't cast a new spell my mana regen will go up to the full 100% out-of-combat after these 5 seconds.
So, it is also important to look at how much time do you actually spend inside this 5-second-rule.
Although it may feel that you are chaincasting all the time, and thus spend 100% of your time inside this rule, chances are that it is not so. If the spellcast is interrupted, by you or by a mob, when you get small breathers in the fight, your designated heal target is not being beaten on and the rest of the raid is topped off, you might get out of those 5 secs and your heavy mana regen will kick in.
For me, the break-even between the Draenic Wisdom and the Major Mageblood is at 90%. If I spend 90% of my time inside the FSR either elixir will help me generate the same amount of mana/5 on average throughout the figth.
If I spend more than 90% of my time inside the FSR, the Major Mageblood is better, if I spend less the Draenic Wisdom is the choice for me.
I have seen numbers for FSR-time ranging from 65-85%, and to determine my own I downloaded the Fubar addon and the Fubar_Regen plugin to keep track of my mana regen.
After a fast (and I mean fast!) heroic BM run I got the following result:
It seems that in this run I spent about 78% of my time while in combat inside the 5-second rule (FSR), and if I put that number in my elixir mana regen calculations I get that if I drink Elixir of Draenic Wisdom I get 277 MP5 while the Major Mageblood only gives 274 MP5.
And the Intellect and Spirit of the DW has some other bonus effects like increased crit chance and increased health regeneration rate.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the winner is....Elixir of Draenic Wisdom!
Cheers!
If you want to check which drink will be better for you, please use the embedded spreadsheet:
Monday, May 19, 2008
Vial of the Sunwell
This sweet little trinket dropped for me in a heroic Magister's Terrace run, and I promptly replaced the Oshu'gun Relic I have been dragging around for so long. Odd thing about it though, its called Vial of the Sunwell but it shows up in the combat log as Vessel of the Naaru.
But on second thoughts, is it really such an imba trinket?
Equip: Collects 100 Holy Energy from healing spells you cast. Cannot collect more than 2000 Holy Energy.
Every healing spell I cast adds to the stack, up to a total of 20. However, Holy Nova and the Frisbee do not add to the stack (guess they are for some reason not counted as healing spells...)
The stack seems to be everlasting as long as you don't use the trinket. I have had a stack up and logged out for the night, with the same stack up when I logged in the next day.
Also, the charges stay up even if you unequip the trinket, and when re-equipped it retains the stack.
Use: Release all accumulated Holy Energy to instantly heal current friendly target by the amount of Holy Energy accumulated. (2 Min Cooldown)
This is a nice feature, it is an instant spell that is NOT affected by the global cooldown, and you can thus allegedly use it while silenced too. I have not tried his yet but will do as soon as possible.
According to the tooltip (100 Holy Energy per charge) it should be 2000 heal per use, but if I trigger a full stack it heals for 2200 and 3300 if it crits, so it seems the talent Spiritual Healing affects it.
Also, the 2 minute cd is about long enough for a full recharge, so by the time the cd is up it will have a full new 20 stack waiting to be released.
Equip: Restores 15 mana per 5 sec.
Ah, sweet, thank you, more mana is always welcome! :-)
I think the key question to consider about this trinket is when to use it. Save it for an emergency heal, or use is as soon as the cd is up?
If it is possible to use through stuns and silences, like the Time Stop of Aeonus in the Black Morass [Edit: Can't use during the Time Stop, its a stun and not a silence] and the Deafening Roar of Nalorakk, then I would definitely make sure that it was ready for use when that happens.
On other fights, I think its better to use it as soon as the cd is up, otherwise other trinkets might be of better use.
I don't have that many trinkets to choose from, and since I am a stickler for mana regen I will keep the Vial equipped along my Talasite Owl, which I will replace with a Seaspray Albatross as soon as I can get my hands on some Seaspray Emeralds without having to dig too deep into my pocket.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Nice GM!
So I was in Zul'Aman for the very first time, killing Nalorakk and then going for Akil'zon. He died, and he dropped his Signet of Ancient Magics. I rolled for it without really thinking, and I won! On second thoughts, however, it was not a very good one for me so I asked to wait and to double check, but we were going fast and the loot master gave it to me.
So I opened a ticket to have the ring transferred to the second highest roller, a shadow priest. The ticket remained open while we were getting our butts seriously kicked by Jan'alai for some time, and then a GM whispered me, asking about the ring and my petition to have it transferred due to my silly not-thinking-it-through-clearly-getting-an-oooooh-shinies-brain-failure.
So in the middle of the Jan'alai fight the following conversation takes place: (names withheld in case it is against policy to be fun and friendly and polite on the job ;P)
Sadly, we did not kill the fire breathing ugly mofo that night, but he went down later that week!
I had to log out before my ticket was answered again, but when I logged in a few days later I had a mail on my mailbox telling me that the ring had been removed from my inventory and had been given to the shadow priest. Nice one! Thanks a lot for the help, GM's :-)
Monday, May 12, 2008
Join the Peace Festival
After a long discussion in gchat about why world pvp sucks and how much I cry when someone kills me and how happy I get when they don't, sweet guildie of mine promptly set up a love and peace festival on the GroupCalendar.
Sadly, we were the only two that joined that day, and to our shock and dismay we found that Redridge is a dry place indeed, no one there sells any kind of alcoholic beverages!
Joaquime and fellow guildie dancing on barrels in Lakeshire.
Ok, maybe it was a bit of short notice, so you will all get a new chance because he has scheduled a new one on Friday.
Or for those with a screen resolution that makes the above illegible:
Peace & Love Festival
May 16, 2008, 21:30 to 23:30
Are you tired of all the killing and violence in Azeroth? Have you had enough of all evil? Then this festival is for you! We meet in Lakeshire Inn, Redridge. Bring nice clothes and a lot of booze.
See you there!
Saturday, May 10, 2008
WoW Flirts
So when you are out adventuring, and you just happent to meet that cute fellow adventurer that makes your heart double beat, what do you do? Why, you flirt, of course!
Sadly though, Tessy comes across like a hot-air-head when it comes to flirting. She really needs some practice in this area, because what kind of strong handsome stranger would be attracted by lines like "You got me all a-flutter", "My turn-offs are rude people, mean people and people who aren't nice" or "I need a hero"? Only guy to fall for that is someone who was behind the door when the conversational skills was handed out, thats for sure (but then again, maybe it isn't conversation that she is angling for?).
Jools and Joaq both are a little more flirty, and they like to say things like "There's nothing like sleeping in the forest under the moonlight", "Sure, I've got exotic piercings" and "If I wasn't purple, you'd see I was blushing." Well, at least it seems they are both truthful when they say that "I'm the type of girl my mother warned me about."
Szorcha is more direct and to the point, she knows what's going on and what she expects, so when flirting she boldly states "I'll have you know I can flatten steel with my thighs", "I like tall men", and "I'd like to see you in a kilt". She also prefers not to waste too much time as she says "Enough with the flirting. I know you think all dwarven women look the same", but she likes to seem at least a little hard-to-get, so she claims that "I won't fall for a bad pick-up line, you gotta try two or three at least." You go with Szorcha, you better be prepared, she wants it her way.
Larue is not that much of a tease-flirt either, she rather directly hints that "The nights are so chilly on this planet" and when she thinks she's certain to score she says "Are you thinking what I am thinking? Good. Bring ample supply of butter and goblin jumper cables". Butter? Better not ask unless you want to experience it.
Paynne is very picky when it comes to flirting (mostly because she feels that no-one can really compete with her knight in shining armor, the valiant paladin Stauros), so she usually settles for the more careful phrases like "I do not find you completely disagreeable" and "Your ability to form a complete sentence is a plus", indicating that she is really not very interested in anyone else.
Dizzie is more verbal and spontaneous, she can say things like "You are cute" or "At this time, I think that you should purchase me an alcoholic beverage and engage in diminutive conversation with me in hopes of establishing a report" but once in a while her engineering interests shine through, like when she exclaims that "I don't feel that a 1-10 scale is fine enough to capture subtle details of compatibility. I would prefer a 12-dimensional compatible scale with additional parametes for mechanical aptitude and torque." What can I say, it is lucky for her that she is cute ;P
Now Rancour is sure of herself, "I know, my natural beauty is intimidating", and she is sure of what she wants "You're the type I'd like to sink my teeth into", but "I won't bite you where it shows." If the prospective lover seem hesitant when he hears this she asks "Aren't you going to ask me out?", but to be fair she also warns him that "When enraged, and in heat, a female troll can mate over eighty times in one night. Be you prepared?" Well, are you?
Another one who is sure of herself is Sweetsheeks, who tells you that "My mana tap bring all the boys to the yard", "Do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by again?" and "Is that a mana worm in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?". If you get down to business too fast she tells you that "No, no I won't do that. But my sister will". Or if you are lucky, maybe you will hear her say "Normally I only ride on epic mounts, but ... let's talk..." or "I'm addicted to you, baby."
And the real Tess, how does she flirt? Well, I think most of my girls have some fun flirt lines, and maybe I'll use them sometimes, but I have a few nice ones of my own too. So, if you are a cute strong adventurer out doing heroic deeds, maybe we will meet and maybe you will find out what they are...;P
Friday, May 9, 2008
We hate younger peoples!
I don’t hang around my guild’s forum anymore, am not even registered there again, but once in a while I check out the new applications just to see what kind of new people might show up.
There is an age limitation to the guild I am in – people under the age of 18 are generally not accepted unless someone in the guild can vouch for them. (Most 17-year old applicants seem to get accepted without a hassle though for some reason, maybe because the guild leadership is trying to fill out the spots needed to go 25 mans regularly, I don’t know.)
This can sometime spawn some whining from even younger applicants who fail to understand why we have this rule, and in one declined application from a 15-year old someone had posted:
"Hello mates. I wonder why you have the age request and wonder why you guys don't take younger people for trial cause some kids are really mature and are much better then many older peoples so i would say that you guys have some kinda hate for younger peoples.."
This is absolutely true. We hate younger peoples. We abhor them. There are young people on the lawn! *hikes our pants up to somewhere just below our armpits.* (And if you didn’t get that reference you are probably way too young to fit into this guild.)
No, I am just kidding. We don’t hate younger peoples. If you think that the only possible reason for an age limit is that we hate younger peoples, then you are by far too young and immature to fit into this guild.
I can think of many reasons for imposing an age limit, but the main one is that with age comes experience. Experience is what gives us all our shapes. Young people are sort of shapeless simply because they have had no real clinches with reality.
It is a social guild, we chat with each other almost as much as we play. Like many others in my guild, I have a husband and kids of my own. I work, I have real life obligations, and when I do play I prefer to be around people whom I can relate to, with similar interests, a little more experience world-wise, and an understanding that gaming isn’t everything.
When I go out to grab a beer with my friends, I go to a pub that will not allow underage people. It’s the same here, the interest spheres are (generally) just too far apart for me to find it interesting to hang around 15-year olds and chat with them.
Also, adult people usually feel a responsibility to not expose impressionable kids, no matter how mature they are, to the more harsher sides of reality.
I wouldn’t want my kids (12, 14 and 16 years old, respectively) to hang around people who endorse using illegal recreational drugs, who unashamedly tell everyone they skip work to play WoW, or join in the discussions about sex or odd habits that sometimes surface in gchat.
I don't think my kids are old or objective or mature enough to handle that, and I don’t want to take responsibility for having other people’s kids around when the more odd discussions float around in gchat, and I don’t want to have to watch my tongue when joining in those chats.
Hence, the age limit.
And no, there is no way for us to check out if the applicant is truthful about her/his age, we have to take their words for it.
Guild blog
Fellow guildie of mine decided to start a newspaper-blog, sharing news and stories and gossip about our guild and the people in it.
Love to have a new fellow blogger, welcome to the blogosphere my friend! I think you will find that blogging about WoW is about as addictive as the game itself...;P
Check it out at Templar Gossip.
Looking forward to reading lots of juicy news there...:-)
Monday, May 5, 2008
Not such a Lucky Day for me :-(
Got a tell from a guildie, asking if I could heal heroic Magister’s Terrace. Well, of course I could, been through it all just a few days ago, remember?
Cocky, cocky, cocky… should have known better than to make such a bold statement…
It was me, my shadow priest friend, a rogue, a mage and a paladin tank heading into that sunny place. We got through to the second boss with a few minor glitches, but generally doing ok. On Vexallus, however, it was a dead end. Literally. I have never felt as useless as a healer.
If I diverted my attentions away from the tank to toss a Renew or Power Word: Shield on any of the dps’ers dealing with the adds for a second too long, the tank’s health dropped precariously and I lost him more often than not. Tried both spamming Greater Heal and Flash Heal with the same results. Dead dps or a dead tank.
If I tried AoE heals like Circle of Healing when all of us got hurt, the instant ~1000 heal/gcd did not add up fast enough to keep the tank alive through the boss’s massive onslaught. Result: a dead tank.
We had a shadow priest with us and we tried with his Vampiric Embrace backup heals, and we tried with him in healing gear for backup heals, and we tried making him shield/renew every add-taker so I wouldn’t have to add the precious second and a half of the global cooldown from shielding another group member to my cast time for the tank heals. Same results, all dead, dead, dead…
We wiped 7 or 8 times at that boss, getting him down to 10 % on some occasions, but never did we get to kick his sorry excuse of an ass.
*walking out of there with a huge repair bill and a hanging head, confidence in my healing skills seriously shaken and general spirits somewhere down around my ankles*
Soooo… time for some more research! How can I avoid feeling sucky again?
Trawling dah intarnet yields some conflicting information, but they seem to agree on some things.
Only been in there a few times, and only twice in heroics, and I was a bit busy both times trying to keep my group members alive so I cannot vouch for all this information from my own experience. (Yet.)
Weirdly enough, Vexallus melee attacks are Arcane damage only, albeit about 3 k of it in heroic. He has a ranged attack as well that does about 2,5 k Arcane damage with a dot that ticks for 250 Arcane damage every 3 seconds for 12 seconds.
He also has a randomly targeted Chain Lightning (Nature damage) that jumps from target to target with increasing damage, making it imperative that all group members are positioned as far away from each other as possible.
At 10 % health he will start casting Overload, a AoE spell with unlimited range (=it will hit all of you) that does 1 k Arcane damage and gives a stackable debuff that increases Arcane damage taken by 10 %.
Vexallus also spawns a pair of adds, called Pure Energy, when he reaches 85 % health and then at every 15 % drop in hp until he reaches 25 %. The adds move slowly flying around the room, (although likely to hit the tank at first since he is closest to their spawn point) sparking off Arcane energy bolts dealing about 3 k damage to the targeted player.
When killed, the adds give a debuff in the form of an Arcane dot, ticking for 300 damage per seconds for 30 seconds but also increases the player's damage output by 50 %. These debuffs stack up to 10 times.
Sounds like a real heaven for a healer, right? No trouble at all healing through this inferno of Arcane blasts and dots ticking away...;P
Anyways, I found some tricks that might make me feel a little better (and maybe get him to drop that sweet Rod of the Blazing Light for me...)
If you have a lot of gold (or some Primal Manas just lying around unused) you can get some Major Arcane Protection Potions, or maybe some Arcane resist gear, maybe equip your Violet Badge for the fight, which will make your healer breathe a little easier.
A lot more healer-friendly than the usual zerg seems to be the approach known as the Slow and Steady.
In this case, after each add is dead, you just hold dps on Vexallus until the debuff has worn off after approximately 30 seconds, to avoid stacking the debuff and make the healer miserable. The 300 damage per second tick is easily healed through with a Renew.
When all players are debuff-free, start dps’ing again until the next pair spawns.
After the last pair is killed you immediately go for Vexallus, dps'ing him down fast and furiously to avoid that nasty Overload. The Overload can be interrupted it seems, so a warrior with Shield Bash, a rogue with Kick or a mage with Counterspell would come in handy here ;P
Another useful tip I found was that the chandeliers in Vexallus' hall seems to act like grounding devices that suck up the debuff, so if the dps stand as close to these candles as possible the debuff will hit them and then pop off. No need to wait that 30 seconds for the debuff to wear off then.
Other interesting facts I found about this fight was that he actually does no physical damage at all, meaning that he doesn’t actually need to be tanked by the tank. A warlock or shadow priest with good Arcane resist can tank him, and I have read that a Demo warlock’s Felguard actually makes a great tank for this encounter – something I’d definitely would like to try next time I bring Paynne in there.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Fishing Friendliness
Now this is how fishing unites people from different factions:
Me and a tauren fishing side by side, no ganking!
It's moments like this that makes me keep my faith in humanity :-)
Lucky Day for me!
This here is me on my pretty new mount, a Swift White Hawkstrider that dropped for me on a heroic Magister's Terrace run last night :-)
It was a pretty fun run actually, although it started out a bit weird because the tank in our group was someone that had been on my ignore list for a long time, so I couldn't see anything he wrote in partychat.
This guy was in our guild for many months a long time ago, and struggled with us as we were progressing through Kara. He got our first T4 helm drop from our first Prince kill, and promptly the day after he /gquit.
Turned out he had been applying to other guilds for some time without telling any of us, not satisifed with the way our guild progressed, but apparently satisifed enough to keep coming for the phat lewt.
When asked why he had done what he did he had some vague explanations, all contradictory, and none of them even remotely reasonable. Asshattery, in other words, ooh shines for me-mentality, you know the type... So I put him on ignore and he has been there ever since.
Ah well, I thought when I saw that he was going to tank heroic MrT for us, let's give him a chance and if he acts nicely maybe I will remove the ignore. I thought it a bit strange that he was in the group to start with, since all the rest were guildies of mine.
I told one of the members that he was on my ignore list so he would understand why if I didn't reply to anything the tank said. After a while this guildie whispered me again and asked if he, the tank, was still on ignore, and when I indicated that this was the case, he told me "lucky you".
Seemed there was a lot of whining going on on the part of said tank, no surprise really because I could induce that from the others' comments in partychat.
No reason to whine really, it was a heroic run and a few deaths and wipes were not something you should be surprised at, nor whine about.
Anyways, it was a pretty smooth run for me, I healed the rest as well as I could and mostly kept them alive.
I greeded on the purple drop from the first boss and apparently noone needed it, so the tank was upset that the one who won the greed-roll (not me) couldn't disenchant it.
The second boss went down without a hitch, but the third boss was a bit trickier.
On our first try I got stunned and couldn't heal for long enough to lose some of us => wipe, and on our second try I got feared into one of the packs to the side behind the boss => wipe.
This seemed to spawn yet another bout of whining on the tank's part, since my guildies made quite a few acid remarks to him in partychat.
The third try went smooth and the Pristess dropped Formula: Enchant Cloak - Steelweave and Vial of the Sunwell for me!
So we proceed to the last boss, getting there without a hitch. It was my first time ever in heroic MrT and I died pretty fast on our first try at Kael'thas himself.
The second we were all dead the tank left the group, apparently after having said a few choice words about me.
No big deal, I asked in gchat for a tank for last boss, and we got one right away.
I was just surprised that the whining ex-guildie tank didn't kick us all out of spite, since he was the group leader, which would have teleported us all away and left him free to find another group and kill the boss.
Because the last boss did drop a very special treat for us - the abovementioned Swift White Hawkstrider!
We all needed on it and I won it with a 100 roll! Happy me!
And later that night we went to Kara and I finally got a replacement for my Essence Focuser - the Maiden of Virtue dropped the Shard of the Virtous for me!
(Hmm this was really a me! me! me! post, but I was really happy for my drops yesterday :-)
On a side note, as I logged in today I got a message that said "Ignore removed because player no longer exists" - and yep, it was the whining ex-guildie tank that had removed himself from our server ;P
