Thursday 7 January 2010

The trials of blogging at work

Well I have been blogging for a while now and its quite good fun. The reason I got into it oddly enough is due to the IT Nazi types at work.
When I was in the office as opposed to out and about I used to de stress by reading the wow forums while I was waiting for the gerbil in the central server to crawl back into his wheel and actually process some data for me so I could do my job. This was handy when I was bored and my net surfing varied a lot depending on how busy I was. I also used to be able to sort out guild raids on the site ready for the evening.

ENTER THE IT DEPARTMENT!

Now I work for a biiig company with lots of people sitting in remote locations waiting for stuff to happen. Now obviously it only takes so long to do the Sun crossword so there was a lot of traffic on sites such as E-Bay.

So as in all good companies rather than monitoring people's use after a warning that it is being monitored and coming down on the people who spend 8 hours a day surfing. They purchased a piece of software that basically picks certain site categories such as Games and Entertainment and allocates you an hour a day in 10 minutes blocks to look at them. Fair enough I hear you say your there to work not surf the web. However the 10 minutes once started is then gone even if you only surf for 1 minutes the clocks still running.

To top this all off they then declared my old guild website as forums so that is blocked totally all day. So what do I do I thought to myself during my lunch break. Well blog pages were not blocked they sneaked under the radar so I found myself getting my WOW fix reading all the wonderful blog pages out there Starting with our dear Tess at http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ I then jumped into such great blogs as http://thebigbearbutt.com/ and http://www.pinkpigtailinn.com/ which gave me many hours of good reading and some cracking tips on things like bear tanking.

So I decided that to while away time during lunch/ gerbil waiting sessions by posting my own Rants on line about WOW and raiding etc. This was great as I said a lot of blogs escape the dreaded hours quota time.

However once again the game appears to be up most of the blogs are now on quota time including mine. So I have less time to pop on to my blog or others and chip in with comments as I have the hour limit hanging over my shoulder!
Damn you IT people don't you know us poor chemists need to take our brain away from toxic materials for a while!


Zetter

P.S on a lighter note Tamarind over at http://www.righteousorbs.com/ who is always a laugh is classified by the piece of software as PORN and is completely blocked. Is there something you are not telling us Tamarind :)?

Zetter

Tuesday 5 January 2010

Glorious Raider!

So after starting with a new focused raid guild formed by the grumpy dwarf who has shouted at us all through BC we finally did it last night!

I present to you Zetter the tree who has his DRAKE from Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 man)






Yep after a couple of weeks of tries and battling the Christmas party season a dedicated group of Kingdom of Rust warriors took on big Yogg with only the aid of Thorim in our battle. After a few tries for the brain team (who basically have the hardest job) to get to grips with the fight Yogg lay dead at our feet and good old Brann saw fit to post us the protodrake modelled by yours truly above.

So do I have any tips from the 10 man fight that may be of use as there doesn’t seem to be a lot on the web apart from Videos.

1) For the brain team send a healer in to the 4th portal. We didn’t do this at first and had our Shammy healer go DPS but we found that if one of the brain guys gets hit by a curse, poison or is on low health before they go in it really can kill that person or hammer their sanity. The enrage timer on Yogg is not tight at all so if your dps can get him down in 2 brain phases or possibly 3 its worth the safety net.

2) Have the outside team keep together (and also the brain team if they are out) as much as possible. The group can then steer about focusing on tentacles and get the full benefit of decursing/healing from a focused group. If people wander off there is a good chance they get constricted out of range of everyone and die.

3) In phase 3 don’t risk sanity from lunatic gaze. Chances are people will be in the 40s sanity wise due to unavoidable debuffs so when the gaze cooldown is coming up face away in preparation rather than pushing it to the limit. For the DPS killing the adds they can usually position so they don’t have to face Yogg at all and can keep up full dps with lobbing the odd shot in at Yogg as well.
Affliction Locks rock at this right on Yogg as they can just dot him up and have low downtime when they face away.

4) Healing wise this is a bit of a break after Mimeron (well unless you are on the brain team) as most of the time is taken un decursing and topping up constricted people. In phase 3 its just back to the boss and heal the hell out of the tank doing the adds as they hit hard.


After the fun with Yogg and doing the obligatory parking of our drakes in Dalaran we had a shot at Algalon.




This did not go so well as the guys hits like a truck full of explosives and getting the black holes right was a pain. I think the best we got was about 60% but as hes not going anywhere in the future like the drakes he can wait till we have got our last few players their drakes.