The taste of success

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present last evenings achievement:


It was a merry crew of bold adventurers who entered Naxxramas last night, a few of us brand new 80's, others had reached that milestone one or even two weeks ago, none of us had set foot in there in this new 10-man variety of the old 40-man raid.

As you may have read in my last post, it was a mission into the unknown (mostly), and it was a great success! Two tanks, two healers and six dps'ers beat the crap out of the three bosses (eventually) our own way and we had a blast doing it!

It was no piece-of-cake walk in the park run, we suffered several wipes but we recovered, discussed tactics, opinions and what had happened and we tried it again another way or the same way only paying attention to different details.

In cases of indecisions the almighty raid leader (me) was offered the choice of the last word. "Kill all the widows friends first and the old lady next." *Raid kills off the four henchmen in point five seconds and the widow proceeds to seriously pwn us.* New last word: "Let's keep them alive while we concentrate on the widow." And so on.

I am so extraordinarily proud of my guildies who volunteered to go with me on this first exploration run! Thank you guys, this amazing and unexpected success is all because of you!

And when you taste the sweetness of a successful kill, the bitter taste of the wipes is all forgotten and you just can't wait to savour the sweetness it again! Which, incidentally, may happen tonight because the bold adventurers are set to go for yet another run!

Wish me luck again!

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So where is that Naxxramas thingy anyways?

It just hit me, today. What have I done?! Was my brain on vacation yesterday? What the hell was I thinking?

I don’t like to raid lead. I am really bad at raid leading. I have sworn never to raid lead again.

So, given these circumstances, the smart thing to do would be to not scrounge up a team of bold adventurers to go exploring Naxxramas on Sunday the 7th, right?

It would probably be even smarter to not say, hey, no gear requirements, everyone is welcome as long as you are level 80!

Possibly the most unrivalled smartness of all would be not to explicitly ask the bold adventurers to refrain from reading up on the fights so we can wing it as we go along?

Well, I have never claimed to be smart, if someone thinks I am it’s at their own risk ;P

I guess I got carried away by the insane amount of fun I’ve been having doing all the Northrend dungeons.

Larue dinged 79 last night in an Oculus run. On the finish of that run she got her Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement, the proof that she has successfully beaten all of the Lich King dungeons on normal difficulty.

On every single first run I’ve been going in not knowing what to expect and I have been very reluctant to let anyone say anything about tactics before we have tried it ourselves first.

Sure, we have suffered a few wipes before we figured out what to do, and on a few occasions we have even left without having finished the run, admitting defeat temporarily.

Most of us have played this game for a long time and we have conditioned reflexes. Black spot forming on the floor (or black wall-to-wall carpeting spot like in the Halls of Stone)? Don’t stand in it! Something sparkly cast on me? Run away from the others, it will probably explode soon. For almost every boss, we have encountered something similar before, and if we didn’t nail it the first time now we did it on the second or third or another time.

But nail it we did, and in all the coming dungeons we will nail it again. Don’t ever doubt that.

And it’s a great feeling to trust in your guildies to react and to be able to play good. Sure, we all make mistakes and screw up sometimes, but hey, so what? It’s a lot of shit going down, red and green numbers flying all over, flashes and bursts and beams of many different colours all over the screen, its easy to miss that you suddenly sizzle a little extra because that pink magnifying glass-beam has started to burn you down like an ant before it is too late, at least if you have never encountered it before. We die, we run in, ress up, and throw ourselves back into battle again. We talk tactics and ideas and suggestion together, not “I read that you are supposed to do this when the boss does that.”

So, high on this instance-running fun, I thought why not check out Naxx as well? The official guild runs weren’t supposed to start until mid-January after the holidays, why not use these weeks until then to do some exploring with like-minded guildies, and since I planned to be 80 by the weekend why not ask around and see if anyone else is available on Sunday evening?

The Northrend dungeons are fast to run through - no more 6-hour runs like BRD or even 3-hour runs like Shadow Labyrinth - and pretty easy on the gear-dependency. (But are they too easy, as the extensive QQ’s of the so-called top guilds seems to indicate? And, really, who cares about that hyped whining? I mean, you buy a game and then you use all short-cuts available to “win it”, and then you complain that there is nothing left for you to do? I wonder if all those “top guild” players always fast forward when they watch a movie, or if they always read the last pages of a book first.)

So, judging by the 5-mans, the 10-mans shouldn’t be that bad either (I hope). I have warned the people going with me that this will be a test run, an exploration run, a fun Indiana Jones-style “We’ll think of something” mission into the unknown and not to expect a full clear and that anything downed, even a trash mob, will be counted as a success!

I have faith in my guildies’ abilities to play good and save the day. I have less faith and more doubts about my own ability to lead them in any way, but as I started this, I’d better do my best to finish it as well.

Wish me luck.

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Ninja needing

You know, I think there are a few things in WoW that really could use some product developing.

For example, take a look at this familiar image:


Come on, only three options! Need, greed or pass? I can think of a whole lot of buttons that could be handy when looting, like ...

Need for an alt
When those sweet BoE agility/stamina/AP bracers drop in a run but you happen to be on your priest, or that nice rare engineering recipe drops when you are running with your herbalist/alchemist, choose this option to let everyone know that you will indeed find a good use for the drop, and you are of course not ninja looting it! You need it for an alt!

Ninja need (coward version)
When you choose this option it will need the drop and automatically send a message to partychat "Ooops, sorry guys, I misclicked", letting you keep your reputation as an honest and fair player.

Ninja need (hardcore version)
Clicking this will need all the items that dropped, and then launch a
/yell Muahaha suckers!!
/hearthstone
/put the rest of the group on ignore
/spam tradechat about how you pwnd those sad suckers in the group you just left

Need (poor man's version)
This option will automatically reply to all queries about why you need a plate defense head when you are playing a shadow priest with a "duh! I need it to sell for gold to cover my repair costs!"

Need (poor man's coward version)
This will scan the chat for the other players choices regarding the loot, and if noone has selected Need it will write in /p Ok if I need this for offspec? and then need the item (and then you can sell it)

Need (poor man's Advanced coward version)
Same as the regular poor man's coward need (= only need when noone else needs), but with the extra finesse of an automatic reply "Oh, I must have read it wrong, sorry" to all queries of how the hell a shadow priest could use a plate defense head for any spec, main or off.

So why settle for a measly three-options-system when you can have it all?

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Faster, the greatest hero of all times!

So I am in the Dragonblight, grinding down the rested bonus of my shaman Larue, taking her a little closer to 76, when I get this whisper from a guildie of mine, a paladin named Faster.

He says he just read on my blog, this blog, that my missing posts are still missing and he wonders how because he can see all of them, clear as day, in his google reader.

I think he must have them locally saved or not marked as read or something, because I've been scouring the internet for any possible location where my lost posts might be residing, and I haven't been able to find them.

I found a few in the public google cache (or whatever you call it) and a few more that I had forgotten to mark as read in my own reader, but that was about it.

I added a google reader subscription to my blog after I'd managed to delete them all, and in that reader I can only see the google cached ones and the new ones I've posted.

Faster persists in saying he can see all my posts in his reader, and I am starting to feel a faint glimmer of hope - maybe I can get the texts back from his reader?

And then I try to log out of my usual google account and onto another. I setup a subscription for my blog in the reader and press update.

The post list starts filling up, and filling up, and filling up... All my posts from the very first day I started blogging in november 2007 is in that list! All of them!! Links, images and all!

The only missing things are the comments, but there were not that many of them and although I was very happy whenever I saw that someone had taken the time to leave a comment I think I can live without them.

So, now I am going to copy/paste the posts back to my blog! If I am feeling ambitious enough I may even fix the links and images (they won't work after the copy paste) but for now I am just so deliriously happy that I have found my rantings and musings again!

Thanks a lot Faster!

(And although I am so very happy now, I am a little questioning as to why can't the post retrieval be somewhat easier? First of all, having a delete all-option without a confirmation required is downright nasty, and my posts are obviously stored somewhere on the google domain, so why can't there be a restore all-option as well without having to go through the hell of trying to find someone who can do it for you?)

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Northrend Beware!

'Twas a bright and sunny day when the merry adventurers gathered at the guardian stone lion keeping his silent watch in the beautiful harbour of the humans' capital of Stormwind.

The old world was explored, its adventures experienced, now a new world was beckoning- but you can't leave the old world behind without a going away-party!


Our bold adventurers said their goodbyes and eagerly awaited the coming of the boat that would take them to Northrend - a land of ice and cold and questing and new shiny bright fortunes!


Inspired by the moment (and maybe a little carried away by the free drinks provided ) the daring crew came up with one master plan after another!


Others were more concerned about their own immediate safety.


But we all made it safely across the cold Northern Sea and arrived in Valiance Keep.


A whole new world out there, to explore and discover and to make new friends (and the occasional enemy) in! Northrend beware - Ascendo Tuum is about to hit you!

To be continued...

(And yes I know I am late posting this)

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Missing missing posts

You know which posts I miss the most from all of the 70-ish or so that's missing from my year-long blogging?

It's not all the discussions concerning mana regen and healing tricks and druid tanking and stuff like that - much of that has changed and can be found on other websites as well. It's not the macros posts - I still have the macros on my chars and can put them out here again if I want.

I miss my personal posts and rantings- the ones about what I had experienced myself in this virtual world - the post about the priest being a Jedi, the one about Daissy's (then known as Dizzie) first trip through the Dark Portal, the post about my lvl 6 priest Tessytoots participating in taking down the Turpster on Sporeggar, the one complaining about the questionable imagination of Blizz gear designers, my fare-well Vashj-posts and many other topics like these. They were sort of my own WoW-history, and it was fun to occassionally re-read them to see what I was going on about back then.

I'm starting to lose faith in Blogger Support and I doubt I'll get my missing posts back - it's been almost a month since that fatal day now.

At least I am backing up my posts now - I have two different feed readers saving the posts, I e-mail them to me as soon as I publish them, and I copy-paste the entire html code into a notepad file that I save on a different hard drive. Only thing I can't backup are the comments, but I am trying to find a way to do that as well.

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“I was only following orders…”

As a stark contrast to the hilarious murloc quest in my previous post, I have to tell you about the most nauseating quest I have ever encountered in this game.

No, I am not talking about the quest where you feed the wolves in the Scalding Pools some not-too-healthy-meat to make them sit and shit and then you have to look through their droppings to collect the microfilms they have apparently been eating.

I am talking about a quest chain that the Dalaran people in Amber Ledge gives you. You have to capture a Beryl Sorcerer and drag him in chains back to the mages in the tower. For the next part, you talk to Librarian Normantis, hiding inside the tower with the captured mage chained to a chair next to him.

You know, there is a famous psychology experiment from the 1960’s, led by psychologist Stanley Milgram, followed up in many subsequent studies around the world, all with the same result.

In the experiment, volunteers were helping Milgram with a study of memory and learning in different situations

The experiment paired people and one of the volunteers, “the teacher” was asking the other, “the learner”, questions. Failure to respond properly resulted in a electric shock delivered to the learner by the teacher. For every wrong answer the voltage was increased. As the learner experienced more and more painful shocks they started asking for the experiment to stop and to be released, sometimes even saying they had a heart condition, or crying and screaming for the teacher to stop asking questions and stop administering shocks.

If the volunteer teacher asked the psychologist experiment leader that they be allowed to stop hurting the learner they were invariably told to go on and increase the shock voltage for every wrong answer, no matter how much the learner was begging for release.

I know what you think now, you think most people chucked the shocker at the psychologist and went to check on the learner, especially after they heard the screaming or learned about the heart conditions.

Well, think again.

65 % of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock. 65 % of all the learners were going ahead with the painful treatment of another human on no more solid ground than “the psychologist told me to keep going. Many were uncomfortable doing it, even crying, and begging the psychologist to let them stop, but they kept going at the psychologist’s urging.

Now, there was a trick to this experiment. There were no electric shocks and “the learner” was in reality a paid actor. The experiment was not about memory and learning, it was about people’s willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

It’s a interesting and rather discomforting read, read more about if you are interested.

Anyways, back to WoW and the quest I was telling you about.

Apparently, the mage you just captured hold some very valuable information as to where Lady Evanor, some Kirin Tor bigshot wizard, is being held but he won’t tell this to Normantis, the quest NPC and some other Kirin Tor bigshot. Normantis scornfully says that “Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain 'extreme' measures - even in desperate times such as these” but me, Paynne, an outsider is not bound by such restrictions and can take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information”, so he hands me a Neural Needler and tells me to do what I must while he sorts out the bookshelves.

Eh, use a Neural Needler to force someone to talk? Sounds an awful lot like torture to me.

And torture it is.

I was actually pretty reluctant to do this quest, but I told myself it’s a game, it’s pixels, and I want to do all the quests here! I want to level!

So I use the Neural Needler on the mage. Not once, not twice, but it takes four times before the interrogation is complete and he tells me what I want to know. He is cocky at first but at the end he begs for mercy and pleads with me to stop.

Zap Needler – Aaargh! Do your worst, warlock! I’ll tell you NOTHING!

And zap again – Aahhhh! Release me! I am of no use to you, I swear it!

And again – Stop! I beg you, please stop! Please...

And again – Alright! And he spills the beans to me and tells me where the lady wizard is.

So I go rescue the Kirin Tor mage from her arcane prison with a very foul taste in my mouth and images of Abu Ghraib and My Lai flashing through my head – I was only doing a quest! I was only following orders! I was only obeying the authorities and not following my own gut feeling as to what is right and what is wrong!

Yes, I know it’s a game and not “for real”, I know it’s only pixels, I know I have no qualms about killing off a whole camp of defias thugs or ogres or murlocs or whatever to complete a quest. Their shouts of “You no take mushroom” or mrlrlrlllgglglglg does not affect me the way this captured mage’s pleas does.

And why is that? Killing stuff in this game is fun, it’s fun being evil (muahahaha!) and destroy things and wreak havoc on the enemies! But torture, even torture of pixels, is NOT fun. The peon whacking and booterang throwingare pretty fun, but this one is nauseating.

As a side note, why has Blizzard put a quest like this in the game? They have made it impossible to kill the children in the game, which seems to indicate that they have some kind of reservations about what is right and wrong in this game of wholesale violence and abundant killing sprees. So why put in a torture quest like this? Is this maybe part of an experiment like Milgram’s? Is Blizz (or someone else) interested in the completion rate of this quest too see how many of the players are willing to go through with something like this in a virtual world.

Maybe I’m silly, or maybe I am overreacting, but that is one quest I am not gonna do again on any of my girls. Even having done it once was too much actually and I feel pretty disgusted about it.

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Most hilarious quest

In Winterfin Village in Northern Borean Tundra there are a few quest chains available where you, among other things, have to free Murloc Tadpoles from cages held by nasty Murlocs under the evil influence of the huge mak’rura Claximus.

The quests themselves are pretty easy but sometimes annoying because you have to free 20 of these babies, not an easy task when the shore is crawling with people doing the very same quest, and the caged Tadpoles respawn is very slow.

However, as a guildie pointed out, the baby murlocs make such a cute sound when they are rescued and run around after you and the evil Murlocs have the coolest ability ever – the Demoralizing Mmmrrrggglll!

For the finishing quest in the chain, you get to borrow a Murloc Suit to trick the evil ones into believing you are one of them!

Dressed in this, you can perform many of the usual emotes and the Murloc dance is cooler than even the Moonkin one! Sadly sadly sadly though, this suit is only useable in Winterfin Village and Winterfin Caverns, so unless you plan to spend a lot of time there it’s no use keeping it :-(

But do take your time to try out the different emotes while disguised as a murloc!






Murloc dance ftw!

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Still no light at the end of the tunnel...

Blogger Support seems to be reachable only by a very long and very winding path and a whole lotta luck seems to be required, but I keep trying to get through to them to get my lost posts restored. I feel a bit empty every time I log in here, but hope ain't lost yet.

Meanhwile, I have managed to salvage some of my old posts from various caches and I will be putting them back here as soon as possible.

I even have some new posts forming in my head now that I have gotten past that initial shock and stun trauma from the severe Total Blog Post Loss.

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/facepalm and /banging head against the wall

For those of you not familiar with blogging but want to start I have a few tips:

1. Always always always back up your blog posts.

2. Never ever mark all posts and press Delete if all you want to do is remove the labels.

Now excuse me while I crawl away to cry and feel sick in the corner while hoping and praying that the staff at Blogger support can help me retrieve the missing pieces of my life.

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Eavesdroppers?

Have you ever noticed that the npc's in WoW seem to interact with you in more ways than one, ie the normal responding when you right-click on them.

Take a look at this screenshot from a guildchat conversation:


Doesn't it seem just like that Goblin Commoner is responding to me talking about excess gold lying around? It's really good timing, is it really a coincidence?

Is Blizzard monitoring our conversations and making the npc's respond to it? Or am I being paranoid? And btw no thanks, I am not cold, I don't need that extra jacket, and it doesn't really look very comfortable anyways with all those straps on it, and why are you coming at me with that needle thingy, aaaargh get off me get off me, get aaaaargh....

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Guild Photos!

This here is my guild!

Well, almost half of it anyways, about 35 of the 85-ish unique members of Ascendo Tuum joined up this night for a guild photo shoot at the top of the stairs to the Dark Portal to mark the momentous occasion of the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Quite a few of us were there on time and I, being a good warlock, had brought 2 huge bags full of Soul Shards, so as people logged in we invited them to the raid and summoned them to us.

(I am the small one on the left in front in the pretty purple dress.)

This was not my first guild photo session actually, I took screenshots on another momentous occasion some time ago too: The drunken Silvermoon City Raid!

We started out with a picnic in Blade's Edge Mountains.


(Note Jools' pretty summer dress that sparkles and flames when she dances.)

A guildie had been rising in the ogre ranks and was now hailed as King of the Ogres! He invited us all to join the party and we all took to quaffing a lot of Ogre Brew.



Quaffing has a side effect though, it makes the surroundings blurry!


We were gonna have us some fun in this highly inebriated state! We hearthed to Shatt, took the portal to the isle and flew off to Zul'Aman!


Ogre Brew stays in your system for a loong time! And no, we were not going to ZA, we had a slightly higher aim than that - we we're going for the Belf boss!


And the Belf Bashing was a great success! Their leader was going dooooown!


But the Belfs were calling in the reinforcements and suddenly we were the ones going down instead...


And this was my very first Ascendo Tuum guild photo ;P

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The New Look

Well, of course I was gonna visit the barbershops when they opened up in Ironforge and Stormwind. My RL visits to the hairdressers are always pleasurable, and besides the actual haircut it includes gossiping, a scalp massage and a glass of wine or two. Of course I wanted to treat my loyal WoW girls to that as well :-)

And now there was this achievement too! Being the achievement nut that I am I just had to take the flock to get stylish(er).

First one out was Jools.

Her old look with that long blue braid on her shoulder wasn't very cool, it was a bit of an strict old-maid school teacher look, not at all appropriate for my sweet Holy priest.
Now she has a soft shoulder-length bob haircut with a slightly side-swept bang and a white ribbon to hold the longer hair back from her face.

She didn't dye her hair but kept the cornflower blue color since it sets off her reed facial tatoos nicely.





Next one out was Joaquime, my feral druid.



Like Jools, Joaquime also kept her original hair colour, but unlike Jools she kept the long tresses, not feeling truly feral without a mane of hair in caster form as well.


She has a slightly stricter hairdo now, no more hair getting in her eyes as it is gathered in a loose braid at her back, holding it back from her forehead with that gorgeous tiara.



Paynne went to the hairdresser's as well, but after quite some time trying out the different hairdos and hairdyes available, she realised that there really is no such thing as improving pure perfection.

She did try out a set of larger earrings, just for the sake of the achievement, but she had to go back right away and get her old ones back.




Tessye had similar problems, there really was no other hairstyle that looked good on her no matter what combination of colours or styles she tried out, so after a lot of agonising in the barber shop chair she decided to keep her golden brown hair curled up on her head - the perfect hairstyle for a sneaky rogue.

She was daring enough to try out a new eyebrow ring and nose ring instead of her old earrings, which actually look kinda cool on her.






Larue dyed her dark curls light greyish blond but she didn't really feel comfortable in that hair colour so she had to go back and get rid of the dye job. With that dark skin of hers the dark hair colour looks much better.



A good friend tells me that half the job when tanking is to convince the group or raid that you are capable of dealing with any issues or emergencies that may arise - in other words: you gotta look like you know the drill ;P

As such, it was way overdue with a makeover for my little warrior!

Her pink pigtails is gone, replaced by a darker reddish colour and a thick ponytail down her back. Now she looks like a real warrior and would get into any over-21-nightclubs without a hassle!



So, achievements all done, new looks for a few, and generally overall satisfaction with looks all around! Now, all I need is that scalp massage and the glass of wine...

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Mae WoW

So, Hallow's End has ended and we are all a bit more well-endowed in the epix department, some of us has completed the achievements for that Hallowed title, some has a new pet, a funny hat or a hat that laughs. Some lucky bastidds may even ride around on a flaming horse.

But the best thing this Hallow's End brought imo was the chance to use a pretty fun variety of a classic Mae West line...

Is that a broom you are riding or are you just happy to see me?

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Fishing the Lurker

These new Achievements really are my cup of tea - what better way to spend the last weeks before Wrath than revisiting all of the old world and do all those dungeons and raids once again so you'll get credit for them.

Tessye, my rogue, my master fisherman and master cook, is of course doing all the achievements related to those professions.

Last night I was flying around in Outland fishing and killing stuff to complete the Outland Angler and the Outland Gourmet achievements, when I saw that there was a nice little mission called the Lurker Above.

Never been raiding with Tessye but so what, these days you don't need an attunement to enter SSC and she is a rogue with Master of Deception and Camouflage, she can sneak past most mobs.

(And by "sneak past", I mean keeping to the side of the gangways, bypassing mobs, cause looking away for a split second and running right into a bog giant will get you spotted and killed, no matter how good a sneaker you are - this I discovered the hard way.)

So, I got a sweet guildie who were exploring the world and thus not unwilling to be in a raid group with me to make just such a group. Enter SSC and stealth up. I thought for sure some on the mobs would be able to see through stealth, but none did - they were all unable to see me! Well, except that bog giant I had that unfortunate close encounter with.

I stealthed along to the gangway support strut that makes a handy ramp down into the water and went down. Sadly, the fishies in the water could see me so I went down for real as well :-(

Since I am such an avid fisherman and do the daily fishing quest, I have a lot of Elixir of Water Walking in my bags, so for next try I popped one of these before I dared venture out over the water. For some reason I did submerge once I left the ramp, and the fishies were onto me pretty fast, so try #2 was a fail as well :-(

Well, not like I was gonna give up that easily! I had engaged all the guild in my tries through gchat and I couldn't just back down now, could I? They even almost started a bet poll on my chances of one-womanning the Lurker if I ever got to his little isle.

So, next try, on the platform closest to the isle, standing just above the water, I drank an Elixir, went into Stealth again and then I popped my Sprint.

But it was still the same, as soon as I went into the water I sank down! Luckily, this time I jumped up asap, managed to get up on the water surface and started sprinting over the water to the isle.

And I got there! Not a single fish attacked me!

Could fish the Lurker up in peace and quiet in the little isle...

Took me a fair few tries before the old cunning fish finally took the bait and came up for me, but I am now a proud accomplisher of The Lurker Above!

And no, I didn't one-woman the old smelly bucket of dead carp, he took one hit at me for 17 k and I went down like a very dead rogue :/

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Professions, professions, professions...

So, tomorrow it will be patch day, and loads of new stuff will be available, among it all a new profession, Inscriptions, and the rest of the professions have been polished up with new fun and/or cool features and recipes.

I know for sure I will get this new profession on one of my girls, but which one? Being the levelling freak that I am, all of my girl are capped in their primary professions, so it is not just a question of ditching any old profession and start levelling the new one.

Tessye, my first, my precious, has been a skinner and leatherworker since day one. Those trainers were the first ones I encountered in Goldshire so I picked that up, not knowing that there was anything else, and it’s been a good choice for a rogue so far and it seems to be a good choice in WotLK too.

Since skinners see a lot of dead animals without their clothes on they can become Masters of Anatomy, by which they will know that exact spot where to out the dagger to wreak maximum havoc on a poor mob of any kind. Good knowledge for a rogue :-)

There will alse be nice gear available to leatherworkers and some bracers and leg patches that are LW only, like different Fur Linings and leg armors.

Joaquime, my druid, is an herbalist and alchemist, transmute master. The herbalists get some extra love with the Lifeblood HoT. Not that she really needs another HoT, being a druid, BUT this one is useable while shapeshifted! This will be very handy when soloing in cat form or tanking in bear. Also, I really don’t want to lose herbalism on her, since picking flowers in epic flight form must be the fastest, simplest way ever of farming herbs.

Alchemists get some sweet loving too. They can already make and use Mad Alchemist’s Potion, which is a really cheap alternative to Super Mana/Healing Potions, and now they will also be able to learn Mixology. Increased effect and twice the duration of every flask and elixir, yes thank you!

Paynne, my little warlock, is a tailor and a miner. Being a clothie, her tailoring will provide her with something new to wear every now and then, which is important for the fashionable warlock. For some reason, tailors will also be able to get more cloth drops than non-tailors.

She already has a cool epic flyer but will probably make herself a flying carpet as well,

Mining is actually a nice boost to a warlock with the Toughness spell, and she is capped and has an epic flyer, which makes farming ores rather fast and not much of a hassle. Daissy, her fellow gnome warrior, is a miner too but she still has a slow-ass copter and mining with that takes forever! (Yeye, I will get her an epic flyer too, but I am not that rich yet!)

I don’t want to drop Daissy’s mining since as a warrior she also benefits from Toughness. She is also an engineer, which needs lots and lots of ores and bars to make her cool fun trinkets and weapons. Now engineers will get a whole lotta new fun recipes, like new goggles, a portable mailbox and the very handy Army Knife. They will also learn how to make a chopper, but like Paynne she already has a cool mount, her pretty pink tiger.

Jools, my priest, is a jewelcrafter and an enchanter and there is no way in hell I’ll drop any of those painfully levelled professions.

The enchanters will get some new enchanter-only ring enchants and also be able to create some soulbound wands with spellpower, crit and some stats on them. The JC's will be able to make some BoP trinkets like the Sapphire Owl and cut some nice BoP gems, so all in all I am happy with keeping those professions for Jools.

Larue, my shaman, is like Joaq an herbalist and alchemist, potion master. The potion mastery is very handy and often procs a few extra free pots. This mastery may be slightly less useful now since the use of pots will probably diminish since the Potion Sickness means you can only use one potion per fight – no more selling a stack of Super Mana Potions for 30 gold, but it's still nice to get some free pots so I don't want to drop her Alchemy.

Again like Joaq, Larue does not really need the herbalism HoT since she can heal herself, and this is one profession that won’t hurt very much to drop on Larue since she’ll get her Alchemy needs satisfied by Joaq’s herbing anyways.

So, one possible free spot out of all 12 professions in total on my six lvl 70 girls...

There is another choice though, my lowbie hunter Cuddling is currently skinning and herbing her way through the 30's and I could drop the skinning for inscriptions. There are a few quests associated with Inscriptions and I might as well get some lvling xp out of them a well.

Ah well, I'll see what happens tomorrow :-)

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Remind me again why I still play on pvp servers

Please. Do that. Tell me why I still have some chars on pvp servers, and please tell me why I still play them on occasion.

I logged in on Tesz the other day. Tesz, my level 36 troll mage that I have on the Laughing Skull (pvp) server. I hadn’t played her for some time and wanted to give my hunter Cuddling some rested bonus, so I popped in to Tesz.

She was in the inn in Tarren Mill. I checked her quest log and she had quite a few quests in the area. I’ve been peeking a little on Jame’s levelling guide and he lists a lot of quests in Hillsbrad, so I had been questing a bit there and was looking forward to doing some more.

She ran out of the inn and died. A ?? stealthed druid oneshotted her. Haha, how hilarious.

Well, the graveyard run is not long in Tarren Mill. I decided Hillsbrad would not be fun to quest in today after all, so after Tesz had ressed she started casting a teleport to Orgrimmar, and then she died again.

After having played on a sweet normal server for some months now my hard-earned reflexes like “when you know gankers are about, find a safe place to ress lest you get ganked again” seems to have been lost.

Yes, it was the same ?? druid again, some sad person with a Challenger title, that had stealthed up and oneshotted her, then he shifted into cheetah and ran away from the guards.

Elapsed time since log-in: About a minute. Number of deaths, gank-related: Two. Amount of affection felt towards pvp servers and gankers in general: Zero.

Third time up I ressed inside the inn and teleported away.

I was close to deleting the char and never look back but I decided to give it a last try, and flew off to Desolace instead, and after having completed a few quests without anyone bothering met here I headed off to Arathi Highlands, where I kept questing for yet a few hours.

In fact, that entire day I saw no Alliance chars at all save that sad druid in Tarren Mill and a lvl 31 warrior in Arathi who snuck away when he saw me and Tesz was just a few hundred xp’s away from 38 when I logged out.

And to remind myself: I play on these servers because I have some friends there, both real life and in-game ones, and although I still quest a lot by myself I don’t want to lose touch with them entirely.

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Shaman vs priest healing

So, my shaman Larue dinged 70 recently and have been trying out the Resto way for a little while. I have been healing mostly on my priest and a little dabbling on the side in the druid way of healing while still specced feral. In short, I have healed very little on my shaman, and while there are many similarities to the priestly way of doing it, there are also differences and it takes some getting used to.

A brief spell comparison
(Casts times with talents, mana costs without talents, healing amount without heal bonuses, spells or effects from set bonuses, trinkets and similar not included)

Slow large heal
Priests have Greater Heal, 2,5 secs cast, 825 mana, heals for about 2550, while shamans have a similar ability, Healing Wave, 2.5 secs cast, 720 mana, heals for about 2300.

Faster smaller heal
Flash Heal for priests, 1.5 secs cast, 470 mana, heals for about 1200. Lesser Healing Wave for shamans, 1.5 secs cast, 440 mana, heals for about 1100, so not much difference here either.

HoTs
Priests have Renew, instant cast, 450 mana, ticks for 222 heals every 3 seconds (about 255 with Improved Renew)

A draenei shaman has the racial ability Gift of the Naaru, which has a 1.5 secs cast, costs no mana and heals for (your level * 15 + 35) damage in total over 15 secs, which for a level 70 character means 217 heal every 3 seconds. This spell has a 3 min cd, which makes it marginally useful unless you have some way of remembering that its cd is up and its available for use.

Shamans also have Healing Stream totems, which can be considered a form of HoT as long as the group members stay in range of it (within 30 yards if the shaman has the talent Totemic Mastery). The Healing Stream costs 90 mana to pop and heals 18 damage (23 with Restorative Totems) every 2 seconds for 2 minutes. (Its not as low as it seems, Larue's current heal bonus of 931 makes this totem heal 81 damage every 2 seconds.)However, this totem can't be used at the same time as Mana Spring totem though, they both use the water totem.

Group heals
Priests have Prayer of Healing and (if specced for it) Circle of Healing. PoH has a cast time of 2.5 secs, heals group members within 30 yards of the priest for about 1000 and costs 1070 mana. CoH is instant, heals the target and group members within 15 yards of her (not the casting priest) for about 430 and costs 450 mana.

Shamans have Chain Heal, their white lazer beam heal with a 2.5 secs cast that heals up to three targets for about 900, 450 and 225 respectively (1080, 540 and 275 with Improved Chain heal) for a cost of 540 mana.

On-damage heals
Priests have Prayer of Mending, an instant spell that for 390 mana throws a frisbee to her target. When the target takes damage the frisbee heals her for 800 damage and then jumps to another group member within 20 yards.

Shamans place an instant cast Earth Shield on their target. The shield is instant cast, costs 450 mana and stays on the target with 6 charges that heals for 270 every time the target gets hit.

Oh-shit heals
When that oh-shit moment turns up, a priest pops a Power Word: Shield on the target, quickly followed by a Flash Heal or if time permits, a Greater Heal.

When a shaman needs an emergency heal, she pops Nature's Blessing, followed by presumably a Healing Wave.

Aggro dumps
A priest has Fade, which drops her aggro level for 10 seconds, and by the time Fade fades, someone else usually has worked up enough aggro to keep the mob from going for the priest again.

A shaman has a Tranquil Air totem that she can pop. However, since this affects the entire group within range (30 yards if you have the talent Totemic Mastery) it's usefulness is very limited.

Luckily, since a shaman can wear mail she usually can take a little beating before she goes down, which hopefully gives the tank or other enough time to re-establish aggro. (As a comparison, my freshly dinged shaman in greens and blues has 7200 armor whilme my epicced-out priest has 1500).

Mana preservation and regeneration
Mana regeneration for both priests and shamans at lvl 70 are calculated in the same way. Priests have a talent, Meditation, that allows 30% of this mana regeneration to keep going while they cast. Shamans have a somewhat similar talent, Unrelenting Storm, but this is deep in the Elemental tree and out of reach for a Resto shaman.

Priests have the talent Inner Focus that gives you a free spell cast every three minutes, and also a talent Holy Concentration that may give you another freebie.

A talent in the Discipline tree, Divine Spirit, also gives a buff that improves the priest's Spirit-based mana regeneration, and the Improved version also increases the healing bonus. (This talent requires at least 21 points (23 for the Improved version) so if you choose this one you can't have the Circle of Healing from the Holy tree)

Priests also have a Shadowfiend, a pet on a 5 minute cooldown that gives the priest mana back when the pet deals damage.

Shamans have no talents for mana-free spellcasts but they have a Mana Spring totem, that for a measly 120 mana pops a totem that with Restorative Totems will replenish 2800 mana for the 2 minutes its up.

Resto shamans also get the Mana Tide totem, which has a 5 minute cd like the Shadowfiend and gives mana back to all group members withing range.

Cleansing
Priests can Cure Disease and Abolish Disease (for those nasty mobs that keep contaminating people), they can Dispel Magic and Mass Dispel (extra powahful area dispell)

Shamans can Cure Disease and pop a Disease Cleansing Totem when hanging around unwashed mobs crawling with germs. They can also Purge mobs, but can't dispel magic effects from friends. They can however Cure Poison and use Poison Cleansing Totems.

Fun-ness
I have been healing on my priest for so long now I can probably do it in my sleep (but don't tell my fellow raiders I do this! ;P) and I still enjoy it. There are certainly still things to learn and ways to improve, but overall I am pretty happy with my priest at the moment. I will not bring her to Karazhan anymore because that probably would make me fall asleep, although she still could use some of the drops in there I have been there too many times to find it even remotely fun on my priest. I save the ZA and 25-man runs for Jools, that is where I enjoy playing her the most.

Shaman healins is not yet as instinctive but it's novel and fresh and although there are many similarities it is different enough to be interesting, and I am really looking forward to honing her skills and abilities in normal and heroic 5-mans and it would be great fun to take her to Karazhan.

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How to kill a dragon

You need:
- One dragon, in this case Lethon who was walking around in Duskwood. Lethon used to be a 40-man raid world boss back in the old misty pre-TBC days, but nowadays it can be defeated by:
- One tank, lvl 70, decently geared.
- One healer, lvl 70, also decently geared.
- Lots and lots of time

How to do it:

Let the tank engage the dragon and establish aggro. Positioning is not that hard when there are only 2 people in the raid, so tank it wherever you like.

Healer, stand to the side of the dragon where you have the tank comfortably in range. Don’t go too far back because it might hit you with the tail, and don’t go too far to the front because it might spew Noxious Breath all over you.

Should the healer get caught in the green fumes, it’s not the end of the world, just remember that the debuff increases the cooldown on all your abilities so you will have to be alert and rotate your heal spells until the debuff wears off.

By virtue of standing right in front of the dragon, the tank will get caught in his breath and get the stackable debuff that also increases Nature damage taken. When the tank has the debuff he will need some extra healing. Nature resist gear helps.

Occasionally Lethon fires off a Shadowbolt Volley to one side of him. Easiest is to eat the bolts. Their damage is not worth the bother of turning the dragon around to get the bolts to the opposite side of the healer and is easily healed through with a single Renew.

The dragon also emits a green cloud of sleep gas that crawls slowly across the ground towards a raid member. This cloud sleeps anyone caught in it for 4 seconds. If the healer runs away from it, it will turn and go for the tank. The cloud’s edges are pretty well defined but you actually get the sleep debuff a bit before the cloud reaches you, which makes judging when to run away a little tricky. The tank takes the sleep without losing aggro, and the only time it’s worth running away from the cloud is when the tank has the Noxious Breath debuff, in which case a healer sleeping for 4 seconds may prove fatal.

If the healer’s mana permits (which it should), use any damage spells when possible or wand away as much as you can between heals to help dps the dragon down just a tad bit faster.

At every 25 % interval of his health, Lethon does a special ability – he summons shades, one for each raid member except the tank. These shades are immune to AoE and when they reach Lethon they will heal him a little. Kill these as soon as they spawn. In a 2-man raid you have 1 shade to take care of, which is not hard and even if you don’t kill it, the amount of health 1 shade gives to Lethon is practically negligible.

That’s it basically. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One comment though, unless you are really dead set on 2-manning the dragons, bringing an extra dps along will speed things up greatly. Won’t be as cool though, but if you are after the kill rather than the achievement, by all means do it. By the time Lethon was down to 56 %, I had used my Shadow Fiend 5 times, and since it has a cd of 5 mins, you can easily figure out how long we had been at it. Sadly, I messed up then and got caught in the sleep cloud while the tank was heavily stacked with the Noxious debuff. But we will get him next time!

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Achievements

In the WotLK (or maybe in the next patch already?) I understand that so called achievements will be available. I have steered clear of reading much about the beta testing or the Wrath news that has been flooding many WoW-sites and blogs because I want it all to be fresh and new for me when I first enter Northrend, but some things I have not managed to avoid, and achievements was something that stuck.

If I understand it correctly an achievement will be some sort of in-game goal to aim for, but I don’t know if there will be any special rewards upon achieving the, er, well, achievement.

It would be nice if you could set up achievements of your own as well, like a to-do-list of things you want to achieve in-game (dammit, is there another word for this? I feel like a broken record, repeating the word all the time), and there are plenty things I have done or participated in already that feels like achievements.

Just a few basic ones here:

- Level a character to 70 – Check! Got a rogue, a druid, a warlock, a priest and a warrior to 70.

- Get Exalted with Darnassus by level 40 and get a tiger mount – Check! My shaman got Exalted at around level 35 and has never had to ride around on a huge ugly elekk mount.

- Get Exalted with Darnassus by level 30 and get a tiger mount – Don’t know yet. My draenei hunter is working on it but is still 6 k away at lvl 29,5.

- Tame a lvl 10 bat from Ghostlands with your lvl 10 hunter after having run all the way from Ironforge – Check! (With a little help from my darling husband through WPL and EPL)

- Dressing your bank alt in fancy clothes by doing the Valentine’s Day quest and running her at lvl 1 from Ironforge to Hillsbrad Foothills – Check! My bankalt gained 2 levels and a hot evening dress from that trek.

- Doing a full Karazhan clear in less than 3 hours – Check! (Well, except the animal boss in the servants’ quarters)

- Doing a heroic Steam Vaults run in less than 45 minutes – Check! As we zoned in we were told that “this instance will reset in 45 minutes”. When Kali'thresh lay dead on the floor we still had 10 minutes left on that timer.

- Doing a raid on a Horde capital and kill their leader – Half-check! (Raid part done, on Orgrimmar and Silvermoon City, but sadly the leaders escaped with their lives)

- Getting Exalted with Stormpike Guard without permanent mental damage from the small-minded viciousness floating around in bgchat – Check! (I think, not that I care what you say, l2play f***ing noob!)

- Getting Exalted with the Wintersabre trainers in Winterspring for a pretty lavender mount – Check! My pink-pig-tailed warrior now rides happily around on her precious tiger.

The list can go on and on, the entire WoW way of playing is so much based upon achieving things (rep, honor, items, skills, levels) so I guess that if you want to, you can find an achievement to fulfil and a reason to celebrate every day.

So, what are your achievements?

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Mana-macros

In light of all the announced coming changes to buffs and debuffs in a raid environment I feel it is a bit unsafe to write more about what to do to keep your mana up when raiding.

Except for one thing - how to save mana by actually using the abilities and trinkets that you have equipped.

My memory is excellent! - only very short! So I rely a lot on macros and addons to help me remember to squeeze those nice on-use abilities out of my gear.

I have the talent Inner Focus from the Discipline tree. This talent gives me a free spell every three minutes.

Now, there are two ways to use this one - either save it for those oh-shit-situations when you need a heal NOW and you have absolutely no mana left, or you use it every time it's up.

I go for the latter alternative, and it helps me stay out of the 5-second rule and thus regenerate more mana, hopefully avoiding those oh-shit situations altogehter.

I have macroed Inner Foocus to my heal spells, like for example Greater Heal.

/cast Inner Focus
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

Every time I click the macro, it tries to cast Inner Focus. If it's available, good, the blue spiral spell effect flashes and I begin to cast a mana-free Greater Heal. If Inner Focus is on cooldown, I get an error message but I cast a Greater Heal anyways, using mana for it.

The first conditionals, [target=mouseover, help], makes me cast the macroed spell on my mouseover target if it's friendly.

The second conditionals, [ ], is for when I don't have a mouse-over target or I do have one but it's hostile, in which case the macro behaves like a plain /cast Greater Heal, casting it on my current target or myself if I have no selected target and auto-self-cast enabled.

For added clarity, I put #showtooltip Greater Heal at the top of the macro. This shows me the usual spell tooltip when I mouseover the icon.

I also use the stopcasting technique for my Greater Heals, so I have put a /stopcasting before the actual /cast Greater Heal. This means that every time I click the macro I restart the cast.

(Why do I do this? you may ask.

I do this because of the 2,5 seconds cast time for Greater Heal. When you are on tank healing duty and don't want to waste mana and drop a full Gheal on an almost topped-off tank, you interrupt the spell and start casting it again right away.

You also don't want to wait around until the tank gets noticeable damage, because if you don't have a Gheal in the pipe already by then, those 2,5 seconds will feel like an eternity and you might end up with a dead tank.

So, start casting Gheal by clicking the Gheal macro. If the cast is almost at the end and the tank is still at almost full heal, click the macro once again to abort the cast and start it again. If the tank is taking damage, finish the cast and heal him up. Rinse and repeat.)

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

But wait! Being a lazy twit efficient healer I have put even more in my macros XD. You are allowed to use 255 characters in every macro so why not make the most of it?

I have three trinkets that I use when healing: Essence of the Martyr, Vial of the Sunwell and Figurine - Seaspray Albatross. All of them have very nice on-use effects - if you remember to use them.

Same here as for the Inner Focus spell, hold on to the trinkets or use them? It's like a bottle of wine, either you save it for that extra special occasion that might never happen and it may even turn rancid and yukky, or you drink it and turn that mundane tuesday evening into a sweet mellow night.

So I put my trinkets in my macro like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use Vial of the Sunwell
/use Essence of the Martyr
/use Figurine - Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

I get an error message saying Item is not ready yet or You must equip that item to use it, but the spellcast is not hindered.

I have macroed all my heal spells like this now, on the philosophy that it's better with a mellow tuesday afternoon that happens over and over than an extra special saturday night party that might never come ;P

(The /stopcasting is only used in the Gheal macro though, since it's useless in instant spell macros like for Renew, Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing and I don't want to accidentally interrupt any casts of Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing or Binding Heal.)

Edit: *slaps head* Forgot one vital part of this macro! There's really no use in burning all your spell and trinket cooldowns unless you are in combat, so I have added the conditional [combat] before every spell cast or trinket use.

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast [combat] Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use [combat] Vial of the Sunwell
/use [combat] Essence of the Martyr
/use [combat] Figurine - Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

This way I won't pop the cd's just by shooting a frisbee to the tank before he engages a mob, when I am still full of mana.

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Bye Bye Vashj

Some months ago I moved Jools over from the pvp server Vashj to the pve server Aerie Peak.

The reason for this was that I really enjoyed playing her but she very rarely got any invites to runs or raids when she could attend because the healer spots were usually filled by badge-bloated officer healers.

I played a lot with some out-of guild friends, but they were doing the more hardcore raiding every night and I was feeling a little lonely.

So I moved her.

This was the first time I played seriously on a pve server, and I got a serious woot! Is this for real?? experience!

There were never any problem summoning raiders or replacement cause of summoning stone wars. It actually took me several Kara runs to realise that half the people outside at the stone were Horde!

While I still felt that initial adrenaline rush upon seeing a Horde when out questing, it petered out when I realised that they would not try to kill me, not now, not when I was attacking a quest mob, not ever.

Suddenly, whole areas of gameplay opened up again. I created a new alt and I will take her through Stranglethorn Vale again, a place that I really loved with that jungle theme and abundance of quests, but I have not been lvling there for years because the sheer amount of ganking I’ve experienced there.

My warrior dinged 70 just some weeks ago, and while it was pretty ok doing the last lvls in Outland since there was hardly any people around, Horde or Alliance, I dread the coming of the Wrath of the Lick King, when the new areas will be filled with people levelling, questing and - ganking.

Sure, I realise that you can accidentally flag yourself for pvp in various ways and get killed by a player of the opposite faction, but in almost all of my pv server encounters with Horde I won’t have to worry about that.

So, I was thinking of moving the rest of the flock over to Aerie Peak too. I have spent my entire time on Vashj detesting gankers and now I will get an awful lot of time to spend on playing instead of swearing, corpse running or moving to another area to quest.

The fact that sort of clinched it though, was that the guild I joined with Jools turned out to be a collection of real sweet and fun people! I didn’t have to worry that I wouldn’t find any new friends because I already had!

So I started sorting out my bags and told my Vashj friends about my plans. I will miss them but I feel this is the right way for me to go. It’s a bit expensive though, Blizzard charges 20 Euro per transfer, so I am looking at a total cost of 120 Euros, but I have no doubt at all it will be money well spent!

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Srs raiding is the shit!

I stopped by Cenarion Post and picked up a brand new pretty feathered speed-bird for my srs raiding priest and then I flew off on said bird to the Coilfang reservoir and swam down the drainpipe to be ready and prepared, yes sir!, outside Serpentshrine Cavern at 2015 sharp yesterday.

I had a big picnic basket with me, 100 Sacred Candles with me, 20 charges of Superior Mana Oil, 5 Flasks of Mighty Restoration and more Golden Fish Sticks than even the most devout lover of fish'n chips could devour in a lifetime.

- Read up on tactics? Check.
- Repaired? Check.
- Bags full of mana pots? Check.

I Was Prepared.

Going to be raiding srsly two days a week now, Mondays and Wednesdays from 20.30 til whenever are now marked Do Not Disturb in my calendar, in the company of 24 more like-minded people in the Raid Core of Jools' otherwise casual Aerie Peak guild.

Yesterday was the kick-off for the Raid Core after the summer holidays, and we were going to Serpentshrine Cavern to kick the tender asses of the Lurker and Leotheras the Blind.

Was I nervous? Yes. Was I thrilled? Yes.

I had been on a Lurker kill before, after a wipeless Maggy kill followed by a successful High King Maulgar and Gruul kill, when we were all high on success and raid adrenaline and kept going to SSC and the lurking fish boss there, so I wasn't too worried about that fight.

I remembered some basic facts of SSC, like don't jump down the elevator, don't fall into the water, stay out of the green mist when the Bog giants die, and such, so the trash pulls went by pretty fast and I kept my tank alive without a fuss.

What is very important about the Lurker fight, btw? That's right, jump into the water when he takes a deep breath and stay there until he has finished spouting.

This was an ah, right-moment for me as he took his deep breath and aimed straight for me when he stared spouting. Result:

But I since wasn't the only one that kicked the bucket that fight we ressed, buffed up and fished that scaled monster out of his hidey-hole again.

What are the odds of the damned slimy boss taking that deep breath of his and immediately start spouting at the very same person (=me!) that just happens to be slightly slow jumping off the island.

Very high, it seems...

Wasn't that bad though, I had a rather good view of the fireworks from my position safely away from the action ;P

After we got our revenged and looted phat epix from the dead pile of stinking scales and fishbone, we headed onwards!

And who is to say that the guild spirit is not one for all and all for one? When one of the tanks got knocked into the water and the trash mob followed him there, he was first joined by a healer and a dps to help beat him down. After the rest of us had taken the mobs still on the platform down we all followed suit, like a flock of lemmings we threw ourselves down into the water!

Leo was a bit of a badass though, and sadly he lived to see another day while we got seriously pwned by him.

Possible reasons why we didn't kill him:
- seasoned raiders were a bit rusty and new ones were a bit unused to the chaotic havoc-wreaking and dazzling, screaming fireworks (it is very different from the 10-man raids)
- general bad luck
- and of course the general scape-goat: LAG! (although sadly I can't blame my mistakes yesterday on that because it was totally lag-free)
- hmm can't really think of any other reason...:)

But his respite won't last long, tomorrow we will take him down!!

I got an unexpected surprise as well in there, one of my friends from my old pvp server popped in on a newly created lvl 2 alt just to say hello!!

What I Learned From Yesterday's Raiding

from my own and my fellow raiders experiences and (mis-)fortunes.

1. Warlocks are handy. They will summon you back up to the platforms if you are a noob and fall into the water and an even bigger noob and can't find your way up.

2. If you die on the elevator down and your dead body goes up and down on it, don't accept a friendly ress unless the platform is at the bottom.

3. If you don't kill off your Inner Demon fast enough and end up being mind-controlled, and the raid wipes before they can kill you off, you end up being mind-controlled for the entire 10 minutes, after which you just die.

4. Don't pull more than one trash pack at a time.

5. If you rely on BigWigs or some similar boss mod to help you time your actions, do remember to enable it for the particualr raid instance you are in.

Hmm think that's all for now, folks, will undoubtedly have more words of wisdom to share after tomorrow.

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Gem from bgchat

You know, too often bg chat is full of morons spewing filth around, accusing everyone but themselves to be clueless noobs and that this bg will be lost due to that.

Well, once in a while you just happen to see a conversation that, due to some hilarious timing of events, just makes you laugh. I happened upon such a conversation today as I was doing some last honor grinds for my Runed Ornate Ruby, and I even had the presence of mind to screenshot it.

Enjoy!

The hilariousness of someone complaining that people were not coming down to join him at Frostwolf Keep while at the same time failing to defend a tower at said Keep was certainly not lost on me or many others in this bg ;P

(And no, he was not the only one down there by far, so he didn't lose the tower due to overwhelming Horde forces.)

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Making the most of your mana

The flip side of the mana coin is the saving of it. Using less mana for a give spell also makes you sweet blueness last longer, and this is why we choose certain talents.

The Discipline Tree holds some nice talents that help tremendously with saving mana.

In the second tier you’ll find Inner Focus, which gives you a free spell cast once every three minutes. There is a trick to this talent, and that is to actually remember to use it. I have worked it into a macro to help save the toll on my excellent but very short memory (I'll get to the macro section later).

The second tier also houses Absolution, which reduces the mana cost of you dispel magic and cure/abolish disease spells. 3 points to max out this and get a total mana cost reduction of 15 %. Worth it? No, I don’t think so, the raid encounters that need heavy dispelling ain’t that many (the Maiden and Nightbane in Karazhan are those that come to mind requiring a lot of dispelling, maybe Jan’alai in Zul’Aman too).

In the 3d tier you’ll find Mental Agility, which reduces the mana cost of all your instant spells by 10 % if maxed out with 5 points. The spells affected by this talent is quite a bunch actually, Renew, Prayer of Mending, Circle of Healing (if you have that one, 41 pt talent in the Holy tree), Dispel magic, Abolish Disease, Cure Disease, Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death. Don’t know about your healing spell preferences, but the first three ones are pretty much my staple healing spells, coupled with Greater Heal for tank healing, so you don’t see me leaving home without this one.

The 4th tier has Mental Strength, which if maxed with 5 pts gives 10 % more mana, which is pretty good. I have around 10 k mana raid buffed, so this would mean another 1000 mana, or 2,5 renews or 1,5Gheals. However, going this deep into the Disc Tree requires sacrificing a lot of the goodness from the Holy Tree, and if you do wanna do this dive into Disc, the sweet talents of Divine Spirit and the Improved Variety is just beside it.

2 tiers further down you’ll find Pain Suppression, which for 16 % of your base mana will give you a 20 % mana cost reduction for all spells for 15 seconds every 3 minutes. Getting this means that you have spent at least 31 talent points in the Discipline Tree, and that’s simply not viable for a raid healing priest unless in very specialized encounters of which I can’t think of any right now.

Same goes for Enlightenment – good talent but way too deep in the Disc tree to be a possibility for a healing priest.

So, Discipline Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Inner Focus – get it.
Absolution - skip.
Mental agility – get it unless your healing style relies heavily on cast spells like Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Prayer of Healing (maybe not all 5 points if you have something else you really really want).
Mental Strength – skip.
Pain Suppression- skip.
Enlightenment – skip.

Holy Tree

In the Holy Tree you have to dive down to the 4th tier before you find a talent that reduces mana costs, and the use of Improved Healing is a somewhat debatable one. 3 points for 15 % less mana cost for a single spell (come on, how many times do you use Lesser Heal or Heal?). But these point means that your Greater Heal will cost 701 mana instead of 825, and it is one of your mostly used spells, so I’d go for it.

Healing Prayers in the 5th tier – 2 points for 20 % less mana for Prayer of Mending - frisbee bouncing back and forth ftw! Pass it forward and keep it up! - and Prayer of Healing, a spell not used quite as often but still often enough that the mana reduction with this talent is pretty tangible.

The 7th tier holds Holy Concentration. 6 % for 3 talent points may not sound much but it feels like it procs a lot and it actually often helps you regenerate mana as well – the WoW-gods don’t realise that you have cast a spell because you are not using any mana and thus they let your sweet bubbly 100% mana regen kick in while you secretly laugh at them and drop the mana-free Gheal on someone who really needed it.

And that’s about it – no more mana saving talents available in the Holy Tree.

So, Holy Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Improved Healing – get it.
Healing Prayers – get it.
Holy Concentration – get it.

Shadow Tree

The shadow tree has nothing a healing priest want. Period. The Spirit tap may sound alluring but it does not kick in unless you are the one that kills the target, and how many killing blows have you managed to get off on raid trash or mobs?

So, Shadow Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Void, null, not applicable. Get back to the holy tree if you wanna heal.
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Stay tuned for the next part: How to use macros and addons to help you keep that blue bar bubbling up.

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Mana regenerating

Have you ever started out to explain something really simple and, as you were at it, humhummed to yourself thinking I’d better explain that too since its kinda related, and might throw in a few words on this since it has bearing on the subject, and while I am at it why not cover this adjacent area as well, ending up with something huge and bloated and not at all what you had intended from the start?

No? Well I have, many times, and I’ll give you a great example of it here. I set out to make a small post with a few tips on how to make your mana last a whole 5-10 minute bossfight, but what I ended up with was this several post long article.

(Disclaimer: The following are my opinions and gut feelings for a holy priest that’s currently venturing into 25-mans like Serpentshrine Caverns and the Eye.)

Regenerating mana

1. Your blue bar is full.
2. You cast a spell.
3. Your blue bar is not quite as full as it was before.
4. Rinse and repeat.

You keep this up and eventually there will be no blue left at all and you will be that horrible shameful thing - out of mana!

Luckily, some of your blue mana will trickle back and fill up the bar again, and you want this to happen as fast as possible so you can keep up your spellcasting, right?

The mana regeneration rate comes in two flavours – a sweet bubbly champagne for when you are not casting (= out of combat, fiddling your thumbs while watching your party take damage, or whatever excuse you have for standing around not doing anything useful), and one not quite so bubbly for when you are casting (=in combat).

You want a) as much of the bubbly one as possible and b) to make the not-so-bubbly as bubbly as possible. Makes sense, right?

Now the WoW-gods are a little slow (lagging, maybe?), they don’t understand that you are not casting unless it’s been 5 seconds or more since you finished casting a spell, so once you start fighting you will have to rely mostly on your not-so-bubbly mana regeneration to keep the blueness trickling back.

If you want to know how much time the WoW-gods think you spend casting in every fight check out the Fubar plugin RegenFu. For me, a holy priest, it somewhere between 75-90% of the time, and for a more in-depth explanation of what the so-called 5 second rule is please check out WoWwiki.

So, how do I get that mana juice flowing?

Mana regeneration is made up of two parts: a spirit/intellect-based one and a “restores X mana per second”-one.

According to the same WoWwiki, the formula for the spi/int mana regeneration for a lvl 70 priest is

MP5 = 5 * (0,001 + sqrt(Int) * Spi * 0,009327)

and without talents this will only happen when the WoW-gods are really really sure that you are not casting a spell, i e out of combat or at least 5 seconds after you finished casting.

However, with the priest talent Meditation from the 3d tier in the Discipline tree you can get 30% of the spi/int-regen to continue when you are casting. Take this talent. It’s a must for any priest, holy, disc or shadow, so I'll say it again: Take this talent.

Some of the gear you will encounter has an on-equip use that goes “Restores [a number] mana per 5 seconds.” This is a flat mana regeneration that’s always the same, no matter if you are casting or not, and is usually referred to as mana regeneration from items. There are also gems and enchants with this stat.

So, to summarise:

Really sweet bubbly mana regen = only when not casting = int/spi-based regen + mana regen from items.

Not quite so sweet and bubbly mana regen but hopefully not too flat = when casting = 30% of the int/spi-based regen + 100% of the mana regen from items.

Aha, you might think here, let’s stack up on the mana regen from items since it keeps ticking 24/7! Well, yes, it will, but there are more advantages to going for Spirit and Intellect instead.

Ok, short brief:

Spirit gives mana regen and also health regen and increases healing bonus when talented with Spiritual Guidance.

Intellect gives mana regen and also increases your crit chance with spells and it gives you a larger mana pool to start with.

So, when it comes too stats, Spirit is your dearest friend, Intellect comes pretty close and the cousin from the country Mana-regen-from-items is tolerated but not invited unless the other two are out of town.

Stay tuned for the next part: Saving Ryan’s Privates, eh, no that was not it...ah I have it:
Stay tuned for the next part - The flip side of the mana coin: saving it!

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