I DONT THINK THE BLASTER BENDS THAT WAY

No Cross faction Chat :(

2011-08-17T00:13:00.001-07:00

Well it looks like cross faction chat is now out of The Old Republic. I guess it was too much to hope for it being kept in especially after some interesting experiences I have had in WOW with people in PVP making characters specifically on your faction to start arguments over PVP.

Bit of a shame though as I know a lot of my friends want to try out both Imperial and Republic and it would have been nice to chat with them while we were playing different factions. I guess I was hoping the testers would have been a bit more mature and not start slating each other cross faction... Should have known better.

Never know though we could get something like real ID going forward maybe.

Zetter

Pre order is in!!

2011-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

So as promised in my last post when it comes out I am likely to be quitting WOW for The Old Republic.
I opted for the middle ground on pre order by going for the digital deluxe edition. I couldn't really justify splashing out £150 for the collectors edition though I know a few people who have (well more to the point I think the Mrs would have killed me :)). I only hope BT get their finger out and get high speed broadband rolled out soon so I can get it downloaded in less than three days.

So far my plan is to roll a trooper though specialisation I have yet to decide Commando is appealing with its big guns but I must admit I don't want to get tied to healing this game so I may give vanguard a spin.

Lets hope a 2011 release date is still on target.

Zetter

Not with a bang but with a whisper

2011-05-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

I guess there are not many people following the blog anymore except maybe some old guildies of mine but it seems a good a place to close as any. Anyone who still drops by has probably noticed I have not posted in quite a while.

To coin a phrase from Granny Weatherwax off the Discworld "I aint dead"

Basically I have had a lot going on at home and raiding in the Kingdom of Rust has effectively ceased. In an odd sort of way I expected it to all end in a big drama or everyone moving to a new game en mass. But like I guess a lot of guilds in Warcraft at the moment we didn't "rage against the dying of the light" but instead slipped slowly towards the end with key members of the raid team moving on to stuff like Rift or taking the summer off early. No one quit in a huff or disappeared without a word though which was nice.
I think at once several people who to be honest I have known through WOW and IRL for 4-5 years decided that the game had run its course for them and it was time to stop.

The great thing about 10 man raiding is you form nice tight knit raid teams and really get to know the people you are playing with. The downside is the loss of a few key players can turn a well geared progressing guild into a non event in very short order. In the space of a month or so we lost or are losing both our tanks, a healer(raid leader) and several heavy dps. This left us with the option of recruiting five plus people including both our tanks or calling it a day after several years.
Personally as the reluctant Guild Master I didn't have the heart or time to start it all over again and from the guildies remaining no one really felt we could recover as most of the people who left were friends in one way or another outside the game. So as of the end of this month Kingdom of Rust and probably my time raiding in WOW will come to an end.

I must admit in the time I have been raiding I have had a blast. From the first falter steps in Kara (Shade I still hate you!) all the way through to standing over the Lich Kings corpse it has been a great time with a lot of really nice people who I would not have known in any other way.
I have lots of fun memories of the heady days of killing Gruul (sometimes with the aid of shaky scanned diagrams when I was raid leading) through to the end of the story arc at the Frozen Throne.

Is it over for me in WOW as well? Well I dont know but I have found myself logging on less except for raids recently and I know I will be signing up for the Old Republic when it is launched as I am a Star Wars nut. So I wont be taking the blog down as there is a distinct possibility it will be revamped as my adventure in the Old Republic.

To anyone who reads this still thanks for taking the time to follow my musings over the past few years and to the Bloggers who I have followed over the years keep on writing as I have spent many happy hours following your adventure in Azeroth.

Finally to the guys and girls from Kingdom of Rust and before them Ascendo Tuum thanks for all the fun times both inside the game and outside it. If you ever get tempted by blasters and lightsabers you know where a few of us will be.

Zetter

Getting Older

2011-03-06T04:10:00.000-08:00

Larisa over at http://www.pinkpigtailinn.com put up a moving post this week about leaving her guild and the happy ending of getting back with them. Also she linked an interesting post by Calli at http://pewpewlazerz.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/a-confession/ over getting older and not having reflexes like "rattlesnakes on crack" anymore which is a great line which tied in with some of the issues she had been having playing DPS in a progression guild.

I find myself in a similar position as I hit the big 40 this year and am now finding that my reflexes are not what they used to be, hard modes in games such as Call of Duty or Halo are a lot harder as I don't get that first shot off before some computer generated baddie filled me full of pixilated lead.
However in WOW I think I am luckier in a way as I play a healer. If you have read the blog in the run up to Cataclysm I was originally on the roster as a dps type (boomkin) but after various changes switched back to healing. Now I run a Boomkin offspec and have done some of the easier raids such as BH and consistently find myself mid to bottom on the dps meters. I think its because I just don't pick up the rotation quickly and don't react to procs as quickly either.

But healing now healing I rock at. I have been consistently been one of the top healers in the guild all the way through BC and Wrath. I can carry idiots through 5 man PUGs abet with a bit of sweat but most times unless they insist on pulling the whole room most people tend to walk out of an engagement alive (of course I lose the odd dps but hey don't stand in the fire for ages stoopid).

I have pondered why I am much better at healing than dps a bit recently and feel its because healing is slower paced but much more tactical. Generally during boss fights you are always planning ahead, especially as a druid as it takes time to run up HOT's and we don't have much in the way of tank saving specials like lay on hands. I find during fights I am planning using cooldowns for damage spikes, anticipating curses/ magic debuffs, planning Innvervates so I can get the best use out of them and watching timers for tank switches.
Hyper reflexes don't seem to help much with healing especially during Cataclysm as if tanks dip too low saving them is an uphill struggle with huge health pools. Also if you not pre planning for damage spikes or AOE raid damage generally its too late when you are not getting things in place before they happen.

So does anyone else find this they their reflexes are not what they were? Do you find the tactical pace of healing doesn't need hyper reflexes but the ability to plan ahead a few moves and keep your head when things go a bit wobbly?

Zetter

Efflorescence

2011-02-26T00:44:00.000-08:00

Usually I don't post much about specific talent builds in the game. I am a middle of the road player and leave the heavyweight discussions on whats hot in the talent builds to people like Keeva over at http://treebarkjacket.com/2011/02/26/ptr-efflorescence-smart-heal/ or Beruthiel at http://fallingleavesandwings.wordpress.com/ who do some great stuff on builds/ theory crafting.

However at the moment on thing that has left me in a quandary is dear old Efflorescence. I currently have it in this build http://www.wowhead.com/talent#0hbhZMZMfzIbcruoko. As you can see I have fully talented into Efflorescence and do use it quite a lot during raiding but I am beginning to question if it is worth it or not.

Our raid composition for healers is generally me, a pally and a holy priest with sometimes (if the pally is tanking) two holy priests (on this point Tessy from http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ should on no account going forward let her son anywhere near her router near raid nights!) so I generally find myself tank healing on a lot of fights to a greater or lesser extent. With the fact we always have a holy priest in the raid as a raid healer I am questioning if it is worth keeping Efflorescence in the build anymore.

I think Efflorescence should be a lot cooler than it is and at the moment it doesn't feel like its competing with Circle of Healing or Healing Rain. I kind of want to hang on it as I feel almost I should as a nod to my raid healing past but I am wondering if a build like http://www.wowhead.com/talent#0hbhZMZrfzIbcrzodo would be more beneficially to the type of healing I am doing?
Has anyone else out there tried out dropping Efflorescence from their build and how has it worked out? I think I may try it for the next raid and see how it pans out though I think I will miss out on seeing green puddles all the time.

Zetter

Wipes, Wipes and more Wipes

2011-02-12T02:07:00.000-08:00

Well all this week the Kindom of Rust have basically had the crap kicked out of them by The Ascendant Council.
What has made it doubly frustrating is we have had about 10 <4% wipes with the damage from the end burn phase killing us before we manage to finish of the Elemental Monstrosity.

The first night was quite enjoyable as we really made progress people learned the fight and got their moves down. So having to call it at the end without a kill had the refreshing smell of raiding back in BC when we hit the wall for a couple of nights on Curator in Karazan. However the second night did involve me swearing profusely at the PC due to the number of near misses on a kill.
I think we will get them on Monday as all the raiders have now had a good bash at it and when it happens it will be very very satisfying I can tell you.

Zetter

Odd role changes in healing raids

2011-01-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

If you have been following the blog for a while you have probably noticed that I will probably end up being a healer forever. Despite dalliances with tanking and the tempting mistress that is DPS I always tend to gravitate for my hardcore play back to healing.

Now for part of BC and all of Wrath raiding I was a raid healer.

If there raid wide damage to heal or constant AOE pulses going off I was your Tree, with a flourish of my leaves rejuvenation, wild growth or back in BC lifebloom would be rolling on all you lucky people to stop you slipping into the land of no DPS dealing death.
Basically for most of BC and all of Wrath the only tank healing I did was in 5 Mans or when content was really on farm and we ran with 2 healers instead of three. Tank healing was the domain of Pallys, Disco priests and in our case our resto Shammy.

Now I find myself in Cataclysm and druid healing has altered. Rejuvenation got a kicking (thankfully boosted recently with the hotfix), Wild growth is ok but if a shed load of damage hits the raid its like using a bucket of water to put out a factory fire and tranquility/ Tree of Life are on reasonable cool downs to prevent them being of use except in real pinch moments.
Meanwhile Holy Priests still have major tools for raid healing, Pallys have a lot more tools and Shammys get nice things like healing rain (who's area of effect is going up!!!).

So for the moment enter Zetter the tank healer! Rolling his Mighty 3 stack of lifebloom backed by rejuvenation, Nourish and with the hmmm mastery Symbiosis of he can keep that tank up and swinging. Also he can help out on raid healing with rejuvenation and tree of life pops.
Big movement fight no problem! his hots just keep on healing till he can get off a healing touch!

Meanwhile oddly enough our pally healer is raid healing ahhh bless who's a good little plate wearer then :).

I think its will all change again as Wild Growth is getting a buff on cool down and healing power so I can see myself swinging back towards raid healing again especially as Pally beacon still rocks but I have enjoyed the change of pace and my time in the sun.

Oh and yay I finally got blown up by Deathwing!

Zetter

Archaeology and Azeroth the grand tour!

2011-01-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Gordon over at http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2011/01/14/why-my-wife-wants-to-kick-the-sht-out-of-the-guy-who-designed-archaeology/ did a nice little piece over his obsession with troll archaeology and big swords.

I can sympathize with him as I am similarly obsessed with night elves and the only damn thing I need off them http://www.wowhead.com/item=64645 I think I am on my 100th solve since my last rare off them and its becoming a bit of a lost cause now for me as I think with raiding kicking off I can probably do better soon.

However one of the great things I found about my travels during my Archeology leveling is to find out about how big a change the shattering wrought to Azeroth. When the patch hit to be honest I was on a bit of a down time from WOW so didn't do a lot of sight seeing after the shattering. Boy did I miss a lot!
I mean even going to Tanaris I was merrily puttering along and then suddenly though "hang on a sec I don't remember Gadgetzan being this close to the sea" well of course it is now dummy after the blooming great tidal wave.
Also you find yourself wondering what the Horde are up to in Azshara after all they appear to be building the equivalent of a Railway Gun which worryingly is pointed straight at Stormwind!
Then you move on to Darkshore and find that basically the night elves have received not to put to fine a point of it a "bit of a kicking".

So thank you Blizzard for making a profession that shows off these massive changes to the world while driving me mildly insane by giving me odd items such as http://www.wowhead.com/spell=91761 which is generally only great for freaking out new players in Goldshire.

Zetter

First Raid Of Catacylsm

2011-01-11T05:16:00.000-08:00

Last night Kingdom of Rust finally entered our first proper raid in Cataclysm. After a lay off over Christmas and giving people time to gear up we sallied forth into Blackwing Descent to see what the new content was like.

After a bit of a chat we decided to take on Magmaw as our first try. Everyone had read up on the tactics so we did the recommended one camp of ranged moving between two points when the lava parasites spawn with one of our melee and a hunter smacking the boss up side the head to force him onto the spike.
Three hours later on the last try of the night we finally got the git down! This was after one 2% wipe when we hit the enrage timer which was a real pain.

The healing team consisted on myself (yep I'm back healing I appear to be mediocre at dps), our Holy priest Kai and our Holy Pally Faster. Basically it was I and Kai on the raid and Faster looking after the tanks.

From a resto druid point of view on 10 mans this was a real test of manna use and popping cool downs such as TOL/ Tranquillity. We lost quite a few tries due to DPS being low on heath after a lava AOE spray and then being one shotted by a lava bolt so you cant afford to have DPS on low heath for too long after lava spray or they could be the unlucky one on the receiving end of a lava bolt which will kill them as it hits for about 50K damage.
I can see this fight becoming a lot easier for resto druids when the new patch hits and Rejuvenation becomes a viable raid healing tool again with the manna cost being halved. I found that overuse of Rejuvenation during the fight at the present cost basically just ran me dry of manna which was a shame as it will be a good tool to use on the run between lava parasite spawns.
Nourish isn’t great on this fight due to the cast time and its requirement to have a HOT on the target to make it a good heal, Healing Touch also suffers from cast time issues and I was mainly using Effervescence as the raid was tightly grouped coupled with Wild Growth/ Lifebloom where possible to top people off.
Of course dependent on healing group composition I could have healed the tanks but we felt that Faster would probably do better on this due to bacon and generally Pally tank healing power.

A good fun raid boss overall but it was a real step up in terms of manna use from heroics.

Zetter

LFG just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water!

2010-12-29T03:51:00.000-08:00

With Christmas and work I haven't posted a lot, also I have been playing WOW rather than writing about it recently.
But overall things are going well I have made my way to 85 while reading all the quest text (loved Mount Hijal lore it was awesome and very druidic). I have also managed to get both my primary professions to 525 as well so things are going well for commencement of raiding in January with the guild.
I have not been getting on with DPS really as a boomkin as for some reason even with following rotations and add ons I still cant seem to push out the numbers I would like. So I healed a few heroics and found it fun still, after a bit of readjustment to the new way of healing (damn you Blizz did you have to nerf Rejuve that much!) I found myself doing quite well with my guild groups and have decided that I will probably be healing in raids rather than dpsing for main spec. I had a chat with the raid leader about it and it looks like it could be ok going forward.

All the above leads me to the main point of the post (yep yep ramble, ramble) as I needed some Earthen Ring rep to get some legs and a back I decided (as no one was about) to heal a normal pug group with the dungeon finder. Now bear in mind at this point I have healed a lot of heroics including Stonecore, SFK and Deadmines with minimal wipes. All I can say is I pity any poor deluded fool who uses the Dungeon Finder for Heroics.

We zoned in and it was Grim Batol I had not done this instance before but I was pretty confident on normal that I could adjust to boss tactics on the fly and I had a brief read of the abilities beforehand. Before I had even fully zoned in the druid tanks was off! In fact so far off he was out of range with a charge straight into the first group, I legged it to get in range as his health started dipping and quickly lobbed some big heals in as fast as I could. The party stayed up but I was at 50% mana and before I could take a drink he was off again! Damage was flying about all over the shop and the tank was dipping like hell despite me having 3x lifebloom on him and spamming healing touch coupled with the odd swiftmend.
This fun continued part the way to the first boss with me sweating buckets and CC just not happening. Finally he did a pull on one of the bridges and did not gather up all the mobs. I pulled healing aggro and despite fade went splat. The tank then quit without a word and we joined the queue for another one. The next tank was a bit better and at least waited for everyone to drink/ eat between pulls, though still insisted on pulling everything. After a few deaths and me drinking like a mad man when ever I could we finished the dungeon.

This has made up my mind on one thing now I am NEVER using Dungeon Finder for heroics. I don't think I could take the stress or the repair bills if people act like they did in the normal.

Also to the druid tank, I didn't catch your name as you went off so fast I was mainly watching grid. I hope to hell you never inflict yourself on a heroic group as you would be wasting their time and your as you obviously dont have a clue what you are doing. This isn't Wrath, Healers use mana now and you take a lot of damage when you pull lots of mobs as you gear is not great yet. Also if you pull a lot of mobs at least get aggro on them all so they don't kill your healer otherwise he dies then you die then the group dies. Tanking 101 bloody read it in fact here is a link to a great site for some advice that you probably wont read or take but hey its worth a shot.

http://thebigbearbutt.com/

Zetter

Damn you Blizz show me the leather!

2010-12-12T12:14:00.001-08:00

I am having great fun in Cata leveling, Harrison Jones in Uldum is just awesome and very very well put together.
One thing that does bug me a bit though is the total lack of decent caster druid leathers you get from big quest rewards or dungeons. In the past this wasn't an issue as you could just collect whatever cloth bits came along and round out with leather when you found it.
But with the Leather Specialisation skill if you pick up cloth and do not go all leather you take a fairly hefty hit on intellect to do it. While leveling it isn't so much of an issue but I can see this being a bit of a pain when I am gearing up to raid in Heroics.

Zetter

Leveling Too Fast?

2010-12-05T00:19:00.000-08:00

From my last post you know I have rolled a baby gnome lock and am slowly questing my way through to (eventually) level 85. I have no desire to really raid on this toon he is mainly a vehicle to experience the new worlds quests and to try something different.
However you just seem to zoom through levels and out level zones too fast now. For example I am now leveling in the Loch Mordan area which has seen a lot of changes due to the Stonewrought Dam being nuked by Deathwing. Some of the quests here are now awesome and have taken it from what I remember being a disjointed leveling experience (with trips to places like Westfall being needed to bolster experience) to a smooth and exiting area with lots of quests being seamlessly woven together.

The problem is with enhanced experience gain you now just blitz through the area and if I had moved on to Wetlands when I was supposed to I would have missed 50% of the quests in the area (including a great one with Bingles the Gnome). This is with me deliberately taking off my heirloom gear that provides experience boost to a least try and put a brake on my leveling. There is I suppose the option to pay to freeze my level for a bit as I do zones but this is a bit of a pain to switch it on and off all the time.

I know the reason experience gain was enhanced was to allow people to get to top level in a reasonable amount of time especially considering the big level climb required. But I do think that for the sake of expediency the experience of leveling and all the stories that have been crafted to go along with it are getting missed in the stampede to level 85.
For new players to the game it does seem a bit of a shame that they will miss a lot of the effort that has been put in to making questing more in depth and quests more than "kill 5 bears" type.

Has anyone else who has started a new alt found this?

Zetter

Having a Homer Moment or D'oh

2010-11-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

Well the shattering has hit Azeroth and zone have been nuked badly so like I most of the blogging community I rolled an alt and set forth to experience the new quest content.
Podling the Gnome Warlock was born (cliched I know)

I had fun in the gnome starting zone which is sooo much better than the old zone and is nicely worked in with the retaking of Gnomer.

While questing though I suddenly remembered it was the last day of the Thanksgiving event and a brilliant chance to level my cooking rapidly on my little Gnome rather than doing it the hard way. So I pottered between Ironforge and Stormwind merrily cooking the festival fair until it came time to head to Darnassus for potatoes.

(Now at this point remember I have not leveled an alt from new for over three years and spent all of Wrath doing high level stuff like raiding)

So I thought "Darnassus eh have to run it". Off little Podling set full of hope, after all his guide had done this before on a hunter and a druid at similar level back in BC days.
Boy things have changed a bit!

I got to Kalimdor ok via the usual route of the Wetlands and then onto Dustwallow Marsh which was a bit nastier than I remembered, however Jaina and all the crew at Theramore helped a bit by putting a bloody great road through the middle of the marsh. I had a few crocodile related deaths but made it through eventually and thought the worst was behind me.

Then I hit southern barrens and the wheels came off badly. Creature levels appear to have changed a bit so my aggro radius was huge, also blizz appear to have increased mob speed a lot so you cant out run them. I got eaten quite a bit.

But still I persevered and made it to the great rift. However the Alliance and Horde are now going at it big style in this area and this proved to be too much. There are really high level Horde (well compared to my level 5 Gnome) like fleas on a dog and I could go no further. Tail between legs I ported back to Ironforge and decided I would have to get a portal if one of the Guild Mages was on as I could not think of any other way to reach Darnassus.

I relayed my tale of woe on Guild Chat (bearing in mind I had been mucking about at this for 2 hours) and wondered if one of the Mages would be on in time when our DK tank Nightmare piped up with "lol mate why don't you just take a boat from Stormwind". "Boat from Stormwind when did that make it in the game?" I asked. "Only about two years mate" was the response.

As Homer would say D'oh!

Zetter

Saying goodbye to The Lich King

2010-11-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

So its the end of the expansion and raiding has finished in the Kingdom Of Rust, we are all on a nice break until Cataclysm where the prospect of fighting for spawns awaits until raiding gets into full swing again.

I am looking forward to the expansion a lot but from a lore point of view I think I will be sorry to say goodbye to Arthas and his undead minions. I don't know why but I have always been fascinated and horrified by the whole Zombie/ getting taken over as undead thing.
I remember watching the Dawn of the Dead remake round a friends a couple of years ago and being quite disturbed by the whole zombie infestation thing. Especially at the start when the main protagonists daughter is infected and then kills her husband who also rises as one of the undead. I think its probably the whole idea of losing yourself so to speak but still being there that I find disturbing.
Personally I think I prefer the approach taken by Lt Gorman in Aliens (don't know if you have seen this) when he and Vasquez are cornered and about to be turned into basically lunch or alien breeders. He pulls out a grenade and takes a load of them with him rather than being torn to bits or eeeew impregnated. I think if I was in the same situation I would prefer to go out with a bang!

Anyway rambling a bit, but this is what I think makes Arthas and the Scourge such a great enemy, not only are people you are fighting beside killed by them but your friends suddenly get up and start trying to kill you! Take this section from the story of Kel'Thuzad's fall to the dark side

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/underdev/1p11/naxxramas/roadtodamnation2.html

damn disturbing or what.

From my point of view especially playing someone tied to the natural world like a druid it felt that you were really fighting for all you held dear as the alternative wasn't just death it was worse.

For cataclysm I don't think Deathwing has the same impact for me as an enemy. Yep hes a dragon and a damn big one at that but really he doesn't seem to have quote the air of evil about him as the scourge. Sure he can incinerate you and blast towns etc but the scourge not only killed you and obliterated your town but you got up the next day and munched down on the survivors. Also from reading the linked extract you probably were horribly aware of it.

So roll on Cataclysm but I don't think I will be as afraid of Deathwing as I was of Arthas and his Scourge horde.

Zetter

Why I still dont join PUG raids on the Peak

2010-10-31T01:20:00.000-07:00

One thing I am looking forward to in Cataclysm is the hopeful end of the gearscore, achievement crap that you appear to need now to even get a mage teleport to Dustwallow Marsh (well at least for a while until the purveyors of said crap can find someone to carry them through content so they can get said achievements/ gearscore).

Here is another classic example of the GS/Achievement Mentality on the Peak at the moment. I was wandering through Dalaran sorting out my UI in my admittedly patchwork Boomkin gear that still needs a bit of work when I got the below whisper.

Now as I said I was sorting out my UI so it was a mess and I generally only raid with the guild so I sent a cheery "no thanks" and went on my way only to get the following DND message.

Yep Mr come DPS in ICC needs my inside leg measurement before talking to him? Obviously this paragon of playing expertise must be ICC at least 12/12 on heroic 10 man and wants a fast run, so is weeding out people who haven't seen the fights? Nope after checking the armoury he hasn't even done Blood Queen or Professor on 10 man or for some reason done Storming the Citadel on 25 man.

It makes you want to cry sometimes it really does.

Zetter

The gangs getting back together

2010-10-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Well after a quiet few weeks it appears people are coming back out of the woodwork for the ramp up for Cataclysm. At the moment our Cataclysm raiding roster includes 15 players for our 10 man team including the return of some old friends from our old guild. The most exiting thing is the amount of people we have who are prepared to do healer and tank roles so we should have a bit of varied rotation going on for raids rather than just the DPS being subbed our or raids being binned because one of our healers cant make a raid.

On the highlight front recently we finally managed to get all the raiders their 10 man ICC drakes including our returning friend Tess from http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ who pitched in with her Shammy to show us how the healing was done :).

Also we ran one of our casual members through Lich King 10 man to get the title and see what all the fuss was about. This looked like it was going to fail as one of our raider had to drop for an emergency. So we decided to 9 man it and at the end of it despite a tank dieing (get in there battle rez and damn your new cooldown!) we added another member to the Kingslayer club.

THE GUILD WITH THEIR DRAKES

Despite my future Boomkin plans I healed both runs due to gearing issues for the people who are planning to change roles in Cataclysm (obviously as one of the two raiding druids in the guild I have a set of about everything from ICC so don't have this issue and it would only have gone to waste otherwise).

Overall I found druid healing hasn't changed much at the moment from pre the patch. The hots are shorter so you tend to use direct healing spells more and Nourish is a bit pointless at the moment (I suspect it will be more useful during Cata). Other than that and the fact tranquility is a lot more useful now it was the same old same old for me and I fell back into healing with little issue. I think this is probably because doing 10 mans with a Shammy and Disco priest as my healing buddies I tended to use every spell in arsenal as my role varied a lot during ICC fights (especially if we lost a healer part way through the fight).
I know I will probably annoy a few other tree bloggers over this but new tree of life cooldown is AWESOME and really powerful. For example on the phase changes on Professor Putricide Heroic when damage is flying about all over the place being able to hit loads of people with wild growth and bomb heal on the move with regrowth really helped. Also with the cooldown at 3 mins I was able to use it for both phase changes. I can see this being really useful for spike damage phases in fight in cataclysm.

Overall though I think this is probably the end of ICC serious raiding now and going forward it will be more fun runs to gear alts/ try out new roles. Bring on Cataclysm!

Zetter

Boomkin!

2010-10-16T06:30:00.000-07:00

Well what a week of changes 4.0 hit and after about 2 hours of downloads, extra patches,add ons not working and my video driver deciding they were too old to display the new water I finally got on line.

The guild decided that rather than raiding on Wednesday (which seemed a bit pointless with half the guild not being able to get on till 10pm) we would hold a guild meeting to discuss who is doing what in Cataclysm. A few people as I mentioned previously have definitely decided to switch roles already and it was a good time to see if we had all the spots filled for a raid team.

Well after a bit of discussion we got most people sorted out for the roles they wanted to do.

Which left me and my resto shammy mate as people who could go any way. I was happy to fill any role but one thing I didn't want to do was be a tank/ healer again as I found that trying to keep up with both roles in terms of addons and gear was too much hard work. So after we had filled the tanks spots and the healer spots I find myself in the unlikely role of Boomer Main spec with a healing offspec.

This should be an interesting challenge as I have never played DPS in my whole WOW playing experience. I have always been a healer or a tank so I am looking forward to the challenge of chasing big numbers for a change rather than playing whack a mole with grid (disclaimer I am still healing offspec so we can cover real life issues in our raid, I am not abandoning the trees completely).

After setting myself up with a few addons to help me out such as power auras and some dot timers I realise that I still have a lot to learn about Moonkin DPS so if anyone can give me some pointers it would be much appreciated.

Zetter

Were you a better raider in BC

2010-10-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

So Wednesday was another busted raid due to a few people being off. On the plus side I got to finally finish Glory of the Hero (yep I could never be bothered before) and basically shoot the shit for a couple of hours on vent.
Eventually the topic got round to raiding back in BC with our old guild and the people we used to raid with (it kind of felt like when you try and recall the people you have worked with over the years). Our pally Faster then threw into the conversation the comment "do you think you were a better raider in BC" now this really made me stop and think for a sec was I a better raider in BC?

I think for me the answer was a definite yes. Despite the fact that I have achieved much more during Wrath such as finishing all bosses, doing several glories of the raider and getting many kills withing a respectable timescale I don't think I am as sharp as when I was raiding in BC.
Its difficult for me to exactly say why but I am going to have a go.

Possibly the bosses just felt harder, even in Kara I can recall us wiping for three weeks solid on Shade ( in fact I think there was some tears over vent when we got the bugger down) before moving on and prince could still wipe a raid several times even when Kara was on farm.

I knew more about classes and buffs during BC due to being a raid leader. Also buffs were generally not raid wide so you spent ages planning where to put your shammys or your survival hunters for best effect on the five people they could affect.

Trash needed tactics we recalled (during our chat) the night we killed Gruul for the first time and on a high went to Tempest Keep, the trash in the first corridor kicked our ass for two hours as we didn't know their abilities!

Gear inflation didn't seems so severe I can recall on my druid finishing BC with a tier 4 chest I had got from Gruul despite having a crack at and downing a couple of bosses in Mount Hyjal pre 30% nerf.

Finally heroics dungeons kept me sharper Shadow Labs was still to be feared even packing some T6 gear, Shattered Halls were a risky proposition with a warrior tank (I still have memories of one of our warrior tanks failing to keep an add off me in there and watching my tree get lumberjacked ,then the long run back as I only had battle Rez) and I only did Acatraz on heroic once successfully during the whole expansion.

Don't get me wrong this isn't a whine post as I have enjoyed Wrath immensely and thank Blizzard for the chance to see all the end game which if raiding had been structured as it was in BC I probably would not have seen.
However as with the fact as an adult I can buy any sweets I want at any time it does seem to make those sweets taste a little less special than when as a child I had to wait/ do some chore for them.

Zetter

All Change?

2010-09-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well patch 4.0 is just round the corner and with it loads of changes to Talents, stats etc etc. In the guild everyone is starting to thing thing what they will play in Cataclysm.

Being a 10 man guild now the real working out starts on how many tanks, dps and healers we are going to end up with and if we need to recruit to fill the roster on certain roles. Blizz had made this a bit easier with the proposed homogenisation of healer talents so for example not having a pally or druid will not be as crippling hopefully as it once was.

However for us the changes have already started our raid leader (who is one of the tanks) has already said that he wanted to take his pally holy for the expansion with all the spiffy spells pallys are getting to move them away from the 2 they currently rely on a lot. Also it looks like we will lose a couple of DPS to globe trotting adventures and maybe a healer dropping from the raiding scene for a bit.

Now for me this could be an interesting opportunity for Cataclysm. One thing I have decided is I am not going to switch mains I have invested too much time on my druid (and though I am ashamed to admit it I am a bit of an achievement lover at heart).

But as far as his role goes the call of tanking is tempting, I did start out BC on my pally as a tank but got sidelined into healing during Kara and found that I enjoyed it so stuck with it. One thing that I do have some reservations on though is if I can hack it as a tank. Our tanks during Wrath were impressive they steered fights got us past Mimeron (when he was nasty) etc etc. They seemed to have a great awareness of fights and tactics. I just wonder if I can match up to it going forward. I think it will be an interesting change of pace though and a real change from healing so if things pan out the way they are looking to it may be a view from the bear going forward rather than the tree.

One thing I have definitely decided though is that I am either as healer or tank going to take DPS as my offspec. Running healer and tank is too confusing for my brain, at least the dps specs of druid have some synergy with their respective healing/ tanking specs. I find the jump from healer to tank is a real jolt for me and I have to totally change my way of thinking about my toon.

So anyone else out there planning to change roles radically for Cataclysm or are you going to stick with the role you know for your main?

Zetter

Subjective time and WOW

2010-09-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

A while ago I heard a report on the radio about a study into the human perception of time. The crux of the research was that every human essentially manipulates their personal perception of time through their lives.

If you think about it you can probably recall times when this has happened those moments of danger when time slows to a crawl and seconds stretch into minutes or when you were young and the summer holidays seemed to last for years rather than weeks.

One of the depressing things the research bough up was as you get older your perception of the passing of time speeds up dramatically. As I approach my 40th year this is definitely noticeable, weekends seem gone in a blink of an eye and the weeks seem to fly by with not enough time to fit everything in which always seemed so easy in my 20s.

This got me to thinking that WOW is a real demonstration of this phenomena in action. I have seen my perception of time slow in game and speed up over and over again.

For time seeming to crawl one of my most vivid memories of this was not surprisingly in a raid in fact in my first raid experience in Kara. I joined my old guild almost as they were starting Kara and after a bit of rejigging ended up as one of the healers and for some reason a raid leader.

We made good progress through Kara despite the fact our healing team was 2 holy pallys and a priest.

Then we hit Shade of Aran and oh my god what a block he was we must have wiped on him for weeks despite all the tactics with banishment of elementals and people not moving during the fire phase it was a nightmare. In fact it was a real moral sapper for the whole team especially as there was no raid ID extension in those days so if you didn't do it in the two raid days we had we had to start all over again!

Then finally one night after multiple wipes just as raid time was almost up it all came together and he was going down the % ticked down 3,2,1 then time seemed to stop 1%, 1%, 1% die you undead bastard die! A healer goes down then a DPS, mana looking low no no no not on 1% then time restarts and he crumples victory! A cheers rings out over vent and time restarts it ambling path again at a sensible rate.

For time dragging I guess at the moment is a good time in WOW to say time is extending horribly for me. I have achieved what I want in Wrath, Arthas lies dead and his citidel in ruins, Cataclysm is looming with new patches heralding a new dawn but its still looking like two months to go which I think is going to seem like an age.

For others time at the moment time in WOW may seem to be racing by, will the next patch with its changes for the classes not gel with current raid mechanics denying them that final kill, will they get their tiger from ZG before it goes the way of the Dodo?

What about you? Can you recall those times in WOW when time seemed to stretch on forever and the tick between seconds seemed like eternity or and afternoon passed in a blink of an eye playing with friends. Welcome to the Blizzards time machine but your not at the controls!

Zetter

I really should stop reading stuff sometimes

2010-09-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

I have (basically because I haven't been able to help myself) been reading a bit on the blogsphere about the upcoming changes to resto druids in Cata.
Am I the only one who is getting a bit worried about them at the moment? I know I know its beta and nothing is set in stone (TM) but at the moment from reading up druids seem to be horribly behind other healers with regards to their usefulness with the current mastery's in raids.
Matticus has a good initial rundown on healing classes and how they are shaping up in Cata here

http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2010/09/13/your-beta-and-healing-questions-answered/

Some of the comments from him and also in the great breakdown of mastery for resto druids by Lissanna over at Restokin
http://www.restokin.com/2010/09/cata-resto-druids-need-a-new-mastery-bonus/

make me a bit nervous about the possible state of druid healing going into Cataclysm.

When we went into Wrath from my point of view no healing class really was at the bottom of the heap by a long way when it came to healing. We all had our niches in raids which allowed all classes to be wanted.
It does appear with the current state of druid healing at 85+ level that we are really suffering from Blizzards attempts to homogenise to an extent all healers so each class can capably do a bit of everything. While this is a laudable goal to prevent issues in 10 man raids due to guild make ups. I hope that all the feedback from those in the beta on druids make us viable healers for raids straight off the bat in Cataclysm as I really don't want to switch mains if I end up healing in Cataclysm to be effective till Blizzard gets it sorted out.

I know I am worrying probably over nothing but there is the smell in the air of release dates being put forward and there is activity on the test realms.

Zetter

You think you know it all......

2010-09-04T10:34:00.001-07:00

As I posted recently my wife has got back on the WOW bandwagon and is thundering through content with her hunter and fuzzy bear know as Thread (still love that).

Now back in BC when I was looking at changing mains away from my pally as a healer to my druid and I wanted a DPS toon to farm for me so I ran a hunter up to level 68 and really got a feel for the class ( at this point I lost interest in the project then respecced my pally as dps). Hence I thought I knew a fair bit about hunters to help my beloved out with her toon.

WRONG

Due to my concentrating on my druid/ pally for Wrath and raiding my ass off I got a rather rude awakening that I don't have a bloody clue about hunters anymore.

Case in point my wife asked me about training her pet. No problem I think I remember this you learn the skills from the pet trainer and train your pet in the skills you want. So I proceed in a confident tone of voice to explain all this to her only to be stopped in my tracks by the comment "but the pet trainer doesn't teach anything".

I wander over and damn me she is right nothing now I am stumped and with rather less confidence fire up wowhead and do some digging for a bit. After a while I come across "pet Talents". Stop the press where the hell did those come from? Apparently hunters changed a lot more with Wrath than I thought, so tail between my legs I explain how pets now have talents apparently and off she trundles again with a parting shot "I thought you said you had played a hunter?"

God help me when Cataclysm launches at this rate if I don't keep my pally up to date all I will know about is Druids!

One advantage of my wife now getting in to WOW I have a great idea for a small anniversary gift for her. I think her hunter will look great on a celestial steed done you?

Zetter

Which is the best way for someone to start in WOW

2010-08-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

So after a year away from WOW my wife decided she wanted to play a game again that was a role playing game that had a bit of depth to it.
So after a lot of head scratching about login names and passwords we finally got her old account reactivated and she set off back into Azeroth with a new character.

Last time she tried out WOW we leveled together and to be honest it didn't work out that well. Being grouped together diluted our experience so we ran into level issues on quests rather rapidly. Also with me being an officer in my old guild I made the mistake of joining the guild with my leveling toon so hence got distracted by guild chat a lot. Over all her interest wained and the account was shut down when she got stalled at about level 12.
This time around we tried a different tact she chose her toon (a Draenei as I think they and the belfs have the more interesting starting zones for beginners being later additions to WOW) and set off in Azeroth. I basically pootled along on my main toon just be be around to give help when needed if she got stuck on anything.
Well it worked a lot better this time round her hunter is now level 16 after only 3 days and she is looking forward with anticipation to getting her first mount having carved a swath through the Draenei with her faithful bear.

This got me thinking for the lower levels of WOW is it really more beneficial to level up alone with advice on hand rather than leveling with someone who knows the game well? I think in our case with me being about all the time previously it took away that "shiny new feel" you get when you first step into the WOW universe. Also WOW does seem to be geared towards solo play at the lower levels to get a feel for the game.
Has anyone had better experiences of leveling together such as Recruit a Friend or have you found like me that the group part of the game really takes off when you have learned your toon by solo play and get into raids and guilds at a higher level?

I hope my wife does get her hunter a long way thins time as I am looking forwards to her experiencing raids and dungeons with the guild. Fingers crossed this time she will have a more fun experience making her own way in WOW rather than having hard bitten me in the background all the time.

Zetter

Finally Got there!

2010-08-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

So apart from changing the layout to something a bit more interesting you may have noticed the picture in the title has changed.

Yes after summer did it worst with people moving house, the world cup, holidays and PC breakdowns Kingdom of Rust finally did Glory of the Icecrown Raider. So we now have all spiffy bony dragons to ride about on (note this doesn't apply to me much as flight form is just awesome).

A big hats of to the guild for all the hard work they put in on this and especially to Nightmare and Faster who skillfully lead us to essentially finish the expansion in terms of raiding. We are going to have a go at LK 10 heroic but getting glory was really our goal to complete before Cataclysm hits. Not bad for a 13 person guild who only raids two nights a week.

The final real hurdle was heroic Sindy and for me it was a nice boss to finish on as it really made the healing team step up to the plate. As always the three musketeers of the healing team pulled together and kept everyone alive to see Sindy bite the dust.

I must admit this has been one of the joys of Wrath for me since we formed Kingdom of Rust to be part of a really tight healing team. It has got to the stage where during fights we know know who is doing what almost automatically with the minimum of discussion its like a well oiled machine springing into action.

A lot of us in the guild have yet to put down a marker on what role they will play in Cataclysm and I am sure there will be some people who want a change of pace from what they were doing in Wrath. But I do know that Kingdom of Rust really pushed on due to a solid regular raid structure and a solid healing team who knew what each other were capable of.

I don't know what I will be doing yet in Cataclysm I am tempted to try tanking as a main role as I have written before. But I must admit the temptation to carry on healing is great as I still love to have the ability to save someone from the jaws of certain death. Also for me healing on my druid is very strategic with lots of forward planning which I like as a game style.
Maybe its the temptation to stay with something I know that is safe and that I can do well I don't know but hey I still have I estimate till November to decide.

Zetter

p.s

BONY DRAGON!

New PC "cheer"

2010-08-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

So I lasted a month!

Yes the lappy was too painful to play WOW on while raiding and we are going to have another crack at heroic Sindy soon so I cracked and took the overtime at work (weekends are for wimps!) to buy a new rig.

This week those nice people at overclockers delivered me a new budget gaming PC.

- Case: Coolermaster Elite 335 Case - Black
- Power Supply: OCZ 500w II StealthXStream
- CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 245 2.90GHz (Socket AM3)
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-US2H AMD 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
- RAM: OCZ Gold Low Voltage 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel
- Hard Drive: Seagate 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
- Graphics Card: XFX ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3
- Sound: ALC888B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC
- Optical Drive: LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter

After a few issues with installing an OS its runs like a dream and it is nice to see WOW running at max detail rather than everything at low. I know a lot of people out there have a great time and do well on low detail settings but for me it basically sucked the enjoyment out of the game after running on a decent system. Running at 10fps in Dalaran/ 15 FPS on raids was not fun and I think would have put me at a disadvantage during Sindy.

One odd thing I encountered though in WOW was running at ultra detail the game caused a critical space error in WOW. Now after updates on Vista had finished and I tweaked the details down a bit it appears to be ok but after a bit of reading on the tech forums it appears poor old WOW has issues with high end system basically overloading the memory allocation from what I can read (caveat I am not a programmer so don't have much of an idea on this so just want the game to work reasonably well). If anyone has a bent that way a detailed explanation can be found here on the O boards

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13705342873&sid=1

It was vaguely reassuring to me that my lowish end gaming system was blowing WOW out of the water at high detail levels. Glad its now behaving itself though as I bought the new machine to play WOW on and get set for Cataclysm/ The Old Republic it would have been a pain if it didn't work well on the game it was bough to run.

Zetter

Oh and PS when you install Vista on a new PC and the LAN doesnt work it help to actually install the MotherBoard Drivers for the LAN as then it may work!

A curse on all IT Killjoys

2010-07-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

Well it finally happened at work, rather than just having a one hour restriction on a lot of the stuff you can surf on the web such as facebook, the warcraft forum, Ala etc per day they blocked anything associated with games totally. This also includes any WOW related blogs, articles,fluffy kittens and pictures.
Not that I got much time to surf the web during lunch recently as I am kind of forgetting what lunch is (I think its that time when people don't phone me as they are having lunch). But on the odd days where I got ten minutes to have a roll or packet of crisps it was nice to see what was happening in the WOW blogging community.

So for those of you who follow my blog expect to see less frequent updates (unless I remember to take Larisa's advice and do them in word and then upload them at home) and I will miss all the blogs I follow on a regular basis. Also now missing my chance to comment on some of the interesting topics.

We live in an IT age where the web is supposed to be an integral part of daily life but it seems not in my corner of it where we seem to be heading for less access to the web than my six year old gets at school.

On a different note I am finding the cata talent trees for druid to be underwhelming to say the least. Am I the only one who thinks needing dual spec if you are going to be Feral tank/ Feral DPS is being made redundant as you can virtually max out the tree to do both as it stands at the moment?
I am sure there will be a theory crafted ideal kitty / bear spec that are subtly different but the massive gap there is now has been eroded a lot.

Zetter

Gaming Rig Dead and how I killed heroic professor on my lappy

2010-07-10T02:02:00.000-07:00

So last week was the week from hell. I had high hopes for July after the rough June I had, but after a quick air dust of the inside my main gaming rig strange things started happening.
First I had a Blue Screen of Death, no issue I thought and reset the machine. This resulted in basically the whole system not posting and then after me prodding various things to see if they were tight and nothing had come loose it posted and booted up windows/ ran well for several hours.
After shutting down and doing something else (gardening) the system would again not post and this degenerated into a spiral of me pulling various components to see what the issue was and I basically got nowhere apart from narrowing it down to the motherboard, CPU or PSU none of which I have spares for to test. So as the rig is 5+ years old and consulting various people who know a lot more than me I am now saving for a new PC as the cost of trying various components is probably not worth it. The down side of this is for the rig I want (middle of the road machine) I think September is the earliest I can get it.

Enter Zetter laptop raider! Yep I do have a plan B which is my Asus lappy with at least a Gforce video card in it. All I can say is thank god Cata isnt out yet as if they boost the graphics any more I think my lappy wouldnt cope. For all you out there raiding on old machines at low detail levels with no effects tuned on to keep the frame rates up my hat is well and truely tipped.
For me I can only think its similar to going from driving an Audi TT to a 15 year old Nissan Micra they both do the same job sort of but you do notice the difference.

Still even squinting at a smaller screen and the fire on the floor being shall we say not so sharp Kingdom of Rust finally managed to get a raid team together to down heroic Professor Putricide. I can say personally for me it was not easy a lot of my oh so nice add ons crowded the screen making it harder to have good raid awareness but I am proud to say I think I only caused a couple of wipes but dieing at inappropriate moments.
We got him to a couple of 1% tries (one of which was 50K left when a tank bit the big one) so we scented blood and with 30 mins to go on the raid we were standing over Professors corpse. I think we would have done this at least a month ago but as I posted previously summer has really taken its toll on us being a small guild with a few people signing off for the summer to return for Cata.
So all that really stands between us and our drakes is the spectre of Sindy. Hopefully we can do this before the buff kicks up to 30%.

On a separate subject I see that Blizz has binned real ID for the forums, its a pity it caused so many casualties along the way. I did miss a lot of the forum furore due to work commitments but it looked like the equivalent of dropping a tactical nuke on the whole blogging community for the repercussion it is having. Hopefully Blizz backing down will convince people that that do still have a voice against the Juggernaut that Blizz has become.

Zetter

Fun with the ICC buff (or how my raid leader is a bad bad man)

2010-07-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

So as I described before we are a bit hit and miss on raiding at the moment due to summer and being a 10 man small guild we cant really drop back to anything lower in terms of numbers as we are sort of heroiced to death.
Monday was a bit of a classic example really. I was hopeing we could have a crack at Heroic Professor but numbers were against us so we chatted up an old guildy and did some of the early ICC 10 heroics. This required us to 2 heal most of it but the new buff made this a bit less stress than it used to be (well except on Lord Marrow who throws out damage like confetti) but overall we were doing well and the lower spire went down quite quickly.

Then disaster! Boom our Boomkin vanished in a puff of electrons and didn't reappear. I though hmm well early night tonight lad but then our raid leader chips in with "lets see how we go 9 manning it". I was thinking this wasn't the best place to try it as we were now on Plague wing/ Blood Queen Halls with all the merry damage involved in it and two healing it wouldn't be offset by the bonus of stuff dieing faster as we had lost one of our heavy dps.

But you know what we managed to do Festergut, Rotface and Blood Queen on heroic while 9 manning it AND we didn't even have heroism. I healed my damn ass off keeping everyone alive especially during Blood Queen which we usually 3 heal due to the raid damage. I really had a blast and was pushed very hard to perform and keep the raid/ tanks alive on some of these bosses. I am surprised by how much of a difference the extra 5% made on the run as I don't think we could have 9 manned what we did without it.
I hope if we can get a solid group together next week we can finally finish our last two major kills needed and get our drakes which would put a nice cherry on the Wrath experience.

Zetter

Is your Dragon Age Party similar to your average PUG in WOW

2010-06-13T01:40:00.000-07:00

I am like a lot of people on a bit of a wind down from WOW at the moment. As I said in my previous post work is mental at the moment so I cant commit to a lot of time on line playing WOW.

Also I am a bit burnt out with the WOW experience, I am still keen on raiding the ICC hard modes but I have a lot of the gear I want for my druid and really don't have the energy to run my 80 pally through PUG raids.
I do have a level 8 lock in full heirloom gear but I am really tempted to save him for having some fun in Catacylsm when he will ideal to experience all the new content.

So to pass the time I have been playing my way in fits and starts through Dragon Age Origins. This is a typical Bioware game with a great story arc and you can play the usual selection of classes such as mage, warrior etc in a D&D type setting.
However unlike quite a few recent games by Bioware you don't just control the lead character in the party you can jump into any of the other party members and control them directly as well. While you are controlling any single character the AI controls the rest of the team and its behaviour can be modified to an extent by setting priorities for the party member. Such as if you have an archer companion you can set that person to attack from range and then switch to melee if an enemy closes with them.
Party makeup is mostly typical D&D with you having a tank, rogue, damage dealers and possibly a healer (though you can rely on health pots).

While playing through the other day I noticed how the AI behaves similar to your average PUG member. The ranged damage dealer (archer though would be a hunter in WOW) constantly over aggroed and got killed, The tank couldn't hold threat, The healer ran out of mana while trying to DPS and then stood in fire like a lemon, the melee dps decided the selected target wasn't the one he wanted to kill and ran off across the room to attack something out of range of the healer.
Of course you can pause the action and jump into control of the companion concerned allowing you to get them back on track but it is a real pain.
I actually found myself shouting at the screen something like "FFS DONT PULL AGGRO YOUR GOING TO DIE!"

To think I was actually playing this game as a break from WOW.
It also lead me to wonder that to keep party numbers high are Blizz actually having toons run by the AI? After all you could just put in a macro to spam some comments like "Go Go Go", "FFS Noob" and "lol you suck" every so often and would anyone notice the difference?

Zetter

Real Life/ Summer Crits Zetter for 50K

2010-06-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't been posting a lot here recently. This is mainly due to the fact I have not been playing WOW a lot or actually been in front of the PC to actually write anything when I have a spare moment.
Basically for June I have been seconded to one of our bigger clients to help them out while one of their staff is off sick. This also while trying to keep my department running remotely via my super admin who is staying on site.
Due to the fact I actually want to see my family during the week I have opted to drive it and bang the mileage up on the car. This is leading to 12 ish hour days with the commute so I don't get a lot of time to do other stuff except sleep/ wind down a bit hence the blogging has taken a bit of a battering.

However we are suffering from a double whammy in KOR this month as Summer has arrived. This has lead as in many guilds to people doing stuff outdoors that doesn't involve raiding or playing the PC. As we are a small guild this has lead so far to two raids being binned totally and counting.
I am a bit in two minds about this at the moment as I think are a few of the guild. On the one hand we killed the Lich King and have finished every raid in the expansion including Ulduar and TOC on hard mode which was a major accomplishment for us considering how late we started. So I am in a way satisfied that I have got the full experience out of the expansion and the raids in it.

However there is that little itch that I would like to scratch before the curtain falls on Wrath and that is A DRAKE! We are currently 2 bosses away from that achievement admittedly two rat bastard hard ones on heroic (Professor and Sindy) but I think we can do it with a few trys and I think they I would truly be able to put wrath to bed so to speak ready for Cataclysm. Fingers crossed we can get a few raids going to do this last bit.

Zetter

The ups and downs of summer (or how I fail as a fighter pilot)

2010-05-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

So as is probably happening in other guilds people are taking advantage of the good weather and playing football, going fishing or having nights out. Hence our raiding being a small guild is taking a bit of a hit.
We have been lucky with some in game friends of some of our members pitching in and helping us out. But this has resulted in some reassigning of roles on certain fights.

One of these is heroic dreamwalker or "the healer" fight. Now during this with our normal group makeup as the raid healing specialist I am left outside to keep everyone up while our pally tank (masquerading as a healer for this one) and shammy healer do the bomb healing of dreamwalker. This suits me down to the ground as I am used to healing loads of raid damage and keeping an eye on loads of people at once.

But as our Shammy was off for a couple of raids I got volunteered to go into the dream portals with our pally. I rapidly learned that A) The perspective on the cloud thing's is all off and B) It confirms why I suck at Malygos 3rd phase C) God knows how I did so well at all those flight simulators when I was younger as I appear to have no spacial awareness.
I didn't gain stacks at a decent rate, I lost stacks at bad moments, we wiped at 95% healed (best try of 5) and as it was getting late called it there for the night.

Thank the lord our Shammy is back on Monday and I can do back to keeping the raid outside alive. I am a bit hacked of at myself for being so crap but hey at least we killed blood princes on heroic with a one shot thanks to the 20% buff rather than going through our usual 5 or so wipes due to orbs, pulling adds from upstairs ect.

Zetter

Should Gnomes be more angry?

2010-05-19T02:41:00.000-07:00

While I was walking the dog the other day I was pondering what to write about as mostly it has been raid stuff and to be honest we have done ICC so its just really rambling about getting stomped on by Sindy in heroic for a few weeks.

Then it hit me Gnomes!

I mean Gnomes they are a bit like the Marmite of WOW you either love em or you hate em. I get the feeling the goblins will end up the same way in Cata.
Personally I love em, some of the funniest encounters I have had in WOW have been due to Gnomes including the time that one of our Gnomes couldnt finish the Ogrilla quest line because he couldnt reach the portal due to being too small. Also while raiding in BC the raid were doomed to failure if our favourite Gnome lock didn't die on trash (we went to great length to ensure this happened including use of misdirects by one of our hunters). One of my favourite bloggers plays a gnome and who could hate the race that make engineering devices that are more likely to kill you than what you are using them on!

But I feel that gnomes on a whole should feel angry on how things have panned out for them in WOW. In the run up to Catacylsm it appears that we finally get to retake Gnomeregan to give the Gnomes back their homeland. I am sure this will be a great run up to the start of Cataclysm if its like the old zombie invasion and will keep everyone occupied for a bit.
However if I was a Gnome I would be pissed that is has taken this long! I mean alright it would take a bit of time to get organised to take it back but seriously two expansions???

I mean things get a bit quieter after Vanilla so what do the Alliance do liberate Gnomer? Nope they bugger off through the dark portal and sort out the Draenai's problems even though they only ditched their star ship at the start of the expansion. Fair enough I guess the Burning Legion are a bit of an issue but Illidan got sorted out and then its time for the Alliance to sort out Gnomer surely?
Nope then its off to Northrend to deal with the Lich King as well as Yogg ect. If I was a Gnome I would put in a complaint to the Alliance or see if Thrall and the Horde are more helpful. Some Gnome leaders should go up to King Wrynn and have a word, I mean for gods sake the community have already sent a commando raid into the place while leveling and killed the boss in there so how hard is it for the Alliance to get their finger out and mop up a few Troggs?

Damn maybe I should have rolled a Gnome in the first place? Pity they cant be Druids.

Zetter

Flasks Check! Reagents Check! Fully Repaired Check! Shammy in the raid?

2010-05-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

So after Monday where we got some of the people their Lich King kill who missed the first one it was back to hard modes in ICC to get set for an all out out assault on the good Professor in heroic mode.
However both our resident Shaman couldn't make the raid so we put together a group with our boomkin covering healing duties and set about the hard modes. It went quite well with an offspec healer we got 3 out of the lower spire down and did Rotface/ Festergut.
But the lack of heroism in the raid really showed. We couldn't quite get over the hump that was Sarfang falling short by a few % and also bloody queens enrage proved a bit too tight without it as well.
I am looking forward to mages getting timewarp in Cataclysm as at the moment for a strict 10 man guild Herosim/ Bloodlust is something that seems really difficult to live without. It really gives you that extra edge on tight fights like Blood Queen and Sarfang and being without kind of hobbles the raid.

I don't know if any other strict 10 man types run without a shammy on heroics but I would be interested to hear how you view their necessity/ lack of to really pushing into hard modes in ICC 10. For us they have been the extra oomph that has got us past some of the harder fights mentioned above and I think without that magic buff we would have a bit more gearing to do to get the likes of Bloodqueen down.

Zetter

Will cataclysm be a lot more boring for healers?

2010-05-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

Reading some the thoughts from Blizz behind Cataclysm it seems that in raids a lot of the limiting factor on fight length will be healer mana as we wont be getting the regeneration we have enjoyed in Wrath (though this has been a bit over the top for most fights if you had replenishment).
This will be coupled with more regular damage to the tanks and raid to be healed through. But they will be removing the spike damage we have seen in wrath where if you are not bomb healing a target at certain points a tank can get almost 2 shotted.
I just wonder if this will make healing less of a challenge for Cataclysm where you will be worried about mana conservation above all and how you eak every last drop out of you toon while the tank take a monotonous pounding. Overhealing will become a big issue again with people watching it like a hawk.
I am asking myself if I will enjoy this way of doing things if it heads this way (though as you know I am tempted to reroll tank for Cata). I am a healing child of the Burning Crusade/ Wrath where overheal was only an issue if you regularly ran out of mana and you like on a knife edge of high raid and tank damage in a lot of fights. While it can be a bit stressful I wonder if the watching my mana bar and being a dispelling monkey route will be as fun?

Zetter

Sarfang Heroic Down!

2010-04-29T04:21:00.000-07:00

So last night on the last gasp we finally got Sarfang down on Heroic 10 man in ICC. The extra 5% buff helped us out as it was a close run thing and was preceded by 2+ hours of solid wiping on the bugger.

Now our problem on this being a strict 10 man guild is there are in total on the raid team 13 people. Three of those are healer Me the tree of Awesomeness, our Disco priest who is usually our tank healer and our resto Shammy who heals his ass off and doubles as hard core dps. All the other team are tanks or dps with various offspecs.

Can you spot the missing puzzle piece in this kids? Yep we don’t have a holy pally (well we do but its one of the tanks offspec….) and for this fight it really really helps to have a bomb healing holy pally that can heal two people at once with Bacon.
The reason for this is that Mark of the Fallen Champion is unavoidable and you will get at least two before he is dead. Also it hits like truck if you take your eye off the person with it they are going to die this also get worse if they have boiling blood on them as they are then taking additional damage. If the marked person dies its game over as Sarfang will heal and the enrage will hit.

So to tackle this we had to run with two healers to meet the DPS requirements. Our Resto Shammy went Enhancement leaving our Disco priest and yours truly to heal the fight. As our Disco priest isn’t ideally suited for raid healing he took the tank and I got the raid along with whoever got the mark.

Talk about having to use all you talents to get through this healing the marked person is basically like healing a tank with a crap health pool who is taking about 50% of their health damage ever 2 seconds. I was running 3x stack lifebloom, Rejuve, Regrowth while throwing in Swiftmend and Nourish when I needed it. I was also dropping Rejuve on raid members who got boiling blood in any gaps I could find. Even then it was still too much when two marks hit as I found if the marked person got a boiling blood as well the damage was overwhelming and I couldn’t keep up on two targets.

After some review a nefarious plan was hatched. Basically once the second mark hit our tanking pally as soon as he didn’t have agro from the boss popped a Divine Intervention on the Melee that was Marked. This essentially took the mark out of the fight for Three Minutes and left only one mark + the raid for me to heal.
Obviously this also killed the tank but a quick battle Rez from yours truly (in between everything else J) got him back into the fray ready to taunt off the surviving tank at the correct time.
Last try of the night and it went to the wire! The fist mark landed on our dps warrior, which was good as its physical damage and he’s got lots of health/ armour so healing him was a bit easier. The second mark hit our rogue so he got a DI from our pally tank who I promptly battle rezzed.
Then we were into end game with the last 10% and one dps out of the fight. Mana was running low and a 3% a third mark appeared I was healing like a madman running blooms on both marks along with every other healing spell I could squeeze into a GCD. The last 1% went on for an eternity with me watching about fifty different things at once then he finally dropped and we completed the Storming The Citadel Achievement on heroic!

Also while all this healing and tanking shenanigans was going on our esteemed ranged DPS team were killing off blood beasts who in heroic can really move and also cant be allowed to hit anyone.

Overall it was the sweetest kills I have had for ages against the odd and using every trick and talent in the book with the team we had to get the kill in. I have never healed so intensely in my life and it showed to me how 10 mans can really push you use your toon to the maximum with all the talents they have to get a boss down especially as druids are normally raid healers and don’t have all the OMFG bomb heals and damage mitigation buttons that classes such as pallys have.

Zetter

No disparity in Raiding anymore

2010-04-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

So Blizzard have done what to be honest I thought they would never do and put 10 man and 25 man raiding on an equal par for Cataclysm.

I never saw this coming as all through Wrath Blizz have put 25 mans on a higher pedestal i.e. you want Shadowmourn get in there and do 25s or you can whistle. The only thing I would have thought Blizz may have done was share the raid lockouts so you cant do 25 man then do 10 man on off days. This would give strict 10 man guilds a chance on server firsts as the 25 mans guilds would be unlikely to burn early raid time lockouts doing 10 mans.

However it looks like they have gone the whole hog with 10s and 25 mans sharing loot table and lockouts. The only advantage in 25 mans now is better droprate on stuff and the chance if you have a bigger guild to all raid together rather than in separate teams.

I checked out a lot of the blogs I read Such as Pink Pigtail Inn, Big Bear Butt and a few others who tend to be good barometers of the community.
Opinion seems to be split as you would expect. Some people being worried that 25 mans wont be worth the hassle now especially with the logistical difficulties of getting 25 people together at a time. While others see this as a chance for 10 man content to be taken seriously and 10 man only guilds to have a shot if they want it at server firsts and cutting edge progressions which has previously been the domain of the high end 25 man guilds on the servers who can come in with better gear straight away.
I have not really had time today to check out the official boards but my guess is there is so much QQ going on as there is for most changes that Noah better build another Ark.

My personal view is that I am all for this! As I have stated before the thing I didn't like about 25 man raiding when I was organising it was the huge amount of pissing about I had to do just to get the signup sorted and people in the right groups etc etc etc. Yes this was in BC where you had to worry about shammy buffs only being group wide etc but most of the difficulty wasn't in the actual raid it was in making sure everyone knew what they were doing before we started.

Compare this with Wrath and my strict 10 man guild and we are busting some moves in heroic ICC already and are making great progress at only two nights a week we have a tight team who plays together all the time and are moving in the same direction i.e. there is no dross who you have to take to make up the numbers. Also as a druid healer I don't just get to cast rejuvenation and wild growth all day on the raid I can find myself tank healing on Blood Prince Council or a bit of both on Lady Deathwisper.

How will this change the landscape of 25 mans I don't know. But I suspect there will be a lot more 10 man guilds in Cataclysm or guilds that run two 10 man teams. I think it will have a big impact as a lot of people do raid for gear and to "keep up with the Joneses" so if the incentive of gear is gone some guilds will fall or "downsize". One thing I will say for Blizz is they have no fear of throwing a Nuclear hand grenade into the game now and again.

Zetter

Random Phone Call

2010-04-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

I know this is a bit off the WOW topic but I just thought I would relay it as it was the first time I had come across it and to be honest it could have caught my wife out.
Due to changing our telephone and issues we are having with it we have taken to leaving the answerphone off and picking up on most calls now. This has inevitably lead to discussions with various individuals regarding the joys of double glazing and swapping all our utilities again.

However the other day my wife mentioned she had been phoned by Microsoft of all people to explain there was a security risk on her copy of windows that they had detected during her Internet use! Fortunately she was busy with other stuff and didn't have time to speak with the person or thank god do anything on the PC they recommend.
This was followed the other day by some kind gentleman phoning from somewhere who claimed to represent an "Internet security firm". He was unlucky as he got me this time and when he launched into his spiel I informed his that I was puzzled regarding my windows security breach as I had a Mac. This immediately floored him as my god who the hell owns a Mac? All his carefully crafted keylogger were of no use as no one hack Macs! So he mumbled something and then hung up.

But I just though it was worth throwing out there for you if you know any PC using people who are not that clued up that the keylogging/ hacking brigade have moved off of dodgy websites and are now phoning people to get them to click on links directly under the guise of "security". Its a clever way of getting people to put a Trojan on their system or possibly give someone remote access to their PC for a while so they can have a rifle through possibly all you bank details.

Of course if any Microsoft Employees want to correct me that they do personally phone their customers and monitor their copies of Windows XP for security breaches on the internet I will take it all back :).

Zetter

Celestial Steed

2010-04-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of posting on the new buyable mount on various blogs so I am not going to say much about it to fear repeating what has been said already.
However I am not overly shocked as recently I have started playing on the wife's Xbox 360 I got her as a present. Its pretty obvious from this the way games are going i.e. you buy the core game which is totally playable but then if you want to delve further its micro transactions all the way to get those "extra" little bits like new companions etc. So it isn't a surprise that this business model is translating to the MMORPG games as well as people will always pay for extra "fluff".

My main point on the steed is the look of it. Am I the only one who thinks its looks a bit like the child's toy My little Pony?
I mean my eight year old is quite into my little pony and the Celestial steed wouldn't look at all out of place in a stable with them. It would probably be called Stardancer or Moonrider or something. It does kind of amuse me when you see this big Orc or Human warrior with a sword the size of steel I beam sitting on something that looks like it should be in a child's cartoon series.

I mean you can see it now Thrall calls out for his finest warriors to tackle the Scourge threat. Up ride Tharg on his lizard that he tamed against all odds to prove his warrior status, then comes Gnar on his protodrake he took from the dying hand of its former owner in Ulduar after defeating the death god threat, finally Tuuurg arrives a veteran of many battles on what looks like his baby sisters pony club ride. Lets be honest Tuuurg is going to to either have the piss ripped out of him the whole campaign or pray to god some scourge abomination rips his head off and eats him before he is forced to do the job himself to avoid the wisecracks from Gnar and Tharg.

Zetter

The pressure is off a bit now

2010-04-09T00:40:00.000-07:00

Well after our Lich King kill the other week I got chatting to our raid leader about various stuff and mentioned that I felt a bit more chilled out about raiding going forward.

For me the Lich King was the big target to complete the lore the and finish the long trek I started when I first ran into the Scourge waaaay back in Vanilla. So now I feel I can settle back a bit and enjoy trying the hard modes in ICC and we can finish off some stuff we missed back in Naxx as well. The pressure just is not there that there was for that Lich King kill and I figure we probably have several months to work on our drakes from Glory of the Icecrown Raider.
It is a nice position to be in as since we formed Kindom of Rust we have been essentially playing catchup on things like Ulduar and TOC due to us really starting to focus raid so late in the game. Now we have a bit of luxury to take our time on Hard Mode ICC and also pick off those niggling achievements we missed.

On that topic I finally got my Undying title on Monday. After all the heartbreaking almost successes back when Ulduar was new we had really given up on this as other things took over raid time. But finally after 9 manning most of the instance we stood over the corpse of KT without anyone having died.
This despite our favourite Warlock nearly killing us on Four Horsemen when his Imp decided to take a shot at one of them while we were moving into position. I think our raid leader would have actually boarded a plane and flown to his house to kill him if we had screwed undying up again!

I wonder if any other guilds are in this position now with regards to end game? Have you finished ICC 10 or 25 and are regarding hard modes as something "nice to do" but not with the same drive you had for killing the Lich King?
Maybe you have the objective to get one of your guildies Shadowmourne or finish off No Lights in the Darkness while you can still get Mimerons head?
I know for me finishing ICC on normal is a real milestone in the game and sort of sets me up to look onwards to the challenges in Cataclysm I am now starting to think what career my druid will head into in Cataclysm will he stay healer or go tank maybe even try DPS as a full time main spec. Where as before I was all fired up to finish all the raid content and didn't really want to think about Cataclysm now I find myself really looking forward to it with anticipation.

Zetter

P.S Deathbringer on heroic is a real git and totally kicked our asses so a lot of work to do there before we down him!

Kingslayer!

2010-04-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

Well we finally did it the Lich King is down on 10 man normal. I am immensely satisfied with this on a personal level as this is the first time in WOW I have downed all raid content (yep I know I still have to do 25 mans but its the same fight in essence as ICC 10 man hard modes are the same with a bit of a twist).

I was born to borrow a phrase from the Causal Raid Leader Blog a BC Babe having started WOW approx 3 months before BC hit. So I didn't really get chance to do much end game stuff in Vanilla.

During BC I got to Mount Hyjal but never far into it and never saw black temple which I always regretted a bit (I was stopped mainly by burnout while raid leading 25 mans).

But now except hard mode ICC I have done it all and what a great story arc it has been by Blizzard.

First we crushed Naxx while taking a side trip to throw a spanner in the works of Malygos. After this an old god needed putting down and a Titan himself needed showing that Azeroth wasn't to be reformatted. we made a quick trip for some reason to pump up our skills in front of the various leaders in a Coliseum. Then it was onto the main event to take down the man who caused so much damage to Azeroth.

The final fight was great and to the person who invented the defile spell a big congratulations for providing the ultimate fire/ void zone no excuses for standing in this one as you don't just kill yourself it wipes the raid. I wont say anymore about the fight for those who want to see it fresh but it did test my small group hard.

I have always liked the scourge angle of WOW it was a very powerful piece of lore and probably my favourite of all the lore in WOW a part of me feels a bit sorry Arthas is dead as he was great protagonist who could not only kill people but raise them to fight against their own friends.

Roll on Cataclysm Blizzard I am looking forward to taking a gnome lock through your new starting areas!

Zetter

Achievements are a double edged sword

2010-03-27T02:23:00.001-07:00

Don't get me wrong I like achievements its a fun way to track your progress through the game and they can bring some fun rewards like titles and better mounts etc.
If course they have a downside with the "must link achievement" to do anything crowd. But overall I find them a fun insert into the game and they have encouraged me to do some things in game I probably would have missed just so I could get the achievement.

However as they are a per character thing rather than an account thing they are acting as a brake on something for me.
My druid is well set in the achievements stakes he has done a lot in raids and also completed a lot in Wrath/ BC he has also healed for most of it. For Cataclysm I fancy a change of scene however I really am going to have to just do another role with my druid be it DPS or Tank if I want to retain my achievement record it is going to HAVE to be on my druid as if I reroll on another toon all the achievements and mounts etc are out the window.
At least as a hybrid I have the option to change and as a druid I can change to any form of damage dealer/ tank. For someone such as one of my friends who plays a mage he is stuck as if he wants to go as a tank or healer for the majority of his play time (i.e. raids) in the bin goes the mage and you start afresh.

This got me thinking would it be a bad thing if the majority of achievements were account wide? I know this has been put about a lot on various forums with the main objections being the abuse of it in end game and certain server firsts.
The main objection I have seen is that you could get for example kingslayer on one toon and then rollup with a new toon you don't have a clue on and get invited off the back of it. However this is a bit of a moot point with dual spec anyway as I could link my Starcaller to get into a group as a tank when I have never tanked the fight but no one would know until I totally dropped the ball on the fight by not having a clue what I should do as a tank (my gear is actually good enough by a mile to tank Algy but this is from ICC drops while I have been healing it).

Server firsts could probably be excluded from account wide but to be honest this will affect 0.001% is of the wow population as to quote Highlander "there can only be one!" or well 25 for the raids :).

I doubt it will happen and for me it is only a slight niggle with the system. So I guess for Cataclysm I will be rerolling my druid as probably a tank (I already have a sort of agreement with one of the guild tanks as he fancies rolling healer) I may have to rename the blog at this point though what do you think to I DON'T THINK THE BEAR SWINGS THIS WAY?

Zetter

Friends Through WOW

2010-03-20T02:09:00.000-07:00

I read Larisa's post a few days ago with interest on loneliness on her blog http://www.pinkpigtailinn.com/. Yep I know it was a few days ago but my blogging at work has been seriously curtailed with ongoing issues involving budgeting errors and fantasies about assassinating one of our development managers who is the bane of my life at the moment. Although I think currently blowing him up could be a bad move in career progression.

This struck quite a chord with me as I don't make friends easily and tend to have a circle of a few close friends who I have known for quite a while. I am quite shy by nature and would be one of those people who at parties would end up parked next to the potted plant if I didn't know anyone there particularly well.
This should have made life in WOW a bit difficult for me as when I started I knew one person who I had actually met in real life in the whole game. If you believe a lot of the posts about WOW you would think I wouldn't have stood a chance as the whole community should be populated by elitist assholes or <16 year olds with delusion that they actually behave in a mature and adult manner. Yes I have run into some of these people but from guilds I have been in to blogs I have read the overall experiences I have had have been positive and the people friendly and helpful.

I started off knowing one person I have actually met in real life. After playing WOW I have now met at least 10 of the people I have played with having been out for drinks with then and visiting Sweden for a get together a couple of years ago. People have chipped in to keep others playing or allow them to do server transfers, others have sent computer bits to people they know in the guild to help them out. So for those who think WOW and by its extension the Internet can be an uncaring and hostile place there is another side to it where real friendships can be forged over the ether.
So thanks to all of the people from AT and KOR who have made this a fun experience for me despite some ups and downs it has been a really positive experience.

Zetter

To prove that gear is serious business

2010-03-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

So we are cracking on into ICC and we are basically having a few pops at Mr Litchy himself. Though Defile is proving to be a bit of sticking point at the moment.

Our team is quite tight as we only have 12 raiders in the guild at the moment. So this team has so far gone through all of Ulduar Hardmodes and most of ICC on 10 man. We rotate DPS regularly but have ensured that everyone gets a crack at hard content and get the rewards from it including Drakes and titles even if we have to do the hard stuff several times.

One of our top DPS is our beloved Elemental Shaman who was one our main tanks on his Pally through BC and switched to DPS for WOTLK. Generally he is high if not top of the meters and when in PUGs such as VOA he ranks high as well so he knows his class and how to use it.

He may be the worst speller in the whole of Aerie Peak, so much so that half the time we don't know what he is on about (and yes he is English) but he can put out big numbers.

On Monday we were once again clearing ICC and a nice spellpower DPS cape dropped. Our Shammy rolls on it and wins, he equips it and the below flashes up on our screen.

Yep he finally got his epic achievement I guess now he can get into those Naxx 10 PUGs on the Peak now.............

I always did love the request for link EPIC as if this made you a better player. I know this request has been mostly superseded by the infamous Gearscore but it still made me smile to think my friend who has done all of Ulduar hard modes on 10 man and nearly finished ICC could not have linked EPIC to get into some Naxx 10 PUG.

Zetter

You forget how much of your hard drive WOW takes up now

2010-03-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

Well this weekend it finally happened that moment that all PC users dread my HDD went boom. I wasn't surprised as it had been a bit iffy for a while and I didn't lose anything important as I backup anything I cant afford to lose after a couple of painful experiences many years ago.

So I took this opportunity for a clean fresh install and an excuse to lose all that accumulated crap you tend to build up on the drive over a few years. I guess you all know what I mean (well unless you are one of those people with borderline OCD who takes everything off as soon as you have finished it) the old games that you keep in case an expansion comes along or that old app that may come in useful someday. Well its all gone from my system now and the rig is once again clean mean and ready to rumble.
This may also have something to do with me getting an Xbox360 in the family recently so I am planning to keep my PC rig for WOW and a few other apps.

After the usual obligatory putting windows, antivirus and connecting to the web it was time to put WOW back on. Now I admit I was lax and didn't backup the wow directory but I had all day to set it up while was doing other stuff.
What can I say OH MY GOD it takes ages I forgot that the vanilla disks and BC are on CD (remember those?) due to part of the world (and yep I am looking at you America) not getting on the DVD train that early. So that's about 8 cd swaps. Then comes the patching.... 12 hours later I am finally back on line.
I will back WOW up next time especially if the HDD is looking iffy god help me if this was the day before raid night I would be back on the lappy which is never fun for raiding.

Zetter

Will there be a reckoning in Cataclysm?

2010-03-01T05:18:00.000-08:00

I had the day off today (well sort of damn Backberry was still going) so I decided to do the daily heroic does on my druid and pally to get the free frost badges.

As I was wandering through Nexus on my druid basically keeping the raid up with the odd rejuve and not concentrating at all the thought struck me what if blizz decide to ramp up heroics in Cataclysm a bit to make them more well heroic. Will the playing community have got into really bad habits with all this easy heroic running so new heroics in Cataclysm like a .308 round to the head?

I ran a lot of heroics back in BC and there were still some that worried me even in guild groups when I was in t5 gear. Places like Shadow Labs, Arcatraz and Shattered Halls could still mince groups as well as any raid if people screwed up CC or mispulled. I don't think I ever really overgeared any BC heroic as much as I overgear WOTLK heroics.
Will Blizz reset the balance a bit and not make them facerollingly easy? If they do this will a lot of people be shocked after the ease of runs we have had during WOTLK are we getting more and more unprepared by being spoonfed easy gear from heroics that are easier than old BC normal instances?
Are we prepared!

Zetter

The perils of Saturday morning LFG

2010-02-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

To be honest the title is a bit unfair as this wasn't really a fail run but it amused me never the less.
So I popped on at 8.30 this morning as I wanted to get a daily heroic done as I was getting booted of the Internet shortly due to my lovely wife wanting to catch up on last nights rugby game and hogging all the bandwidth by downloading it on BBC Iplayer.
So first try in LFG one of the DPS (and sorry but it is always dps for me) didn't accept the invite guess coffee was brewing or the online porn he was watching while waiting was at a critical stage maybe.

But second try no problem I got into a group for Halls of Stone but they had done one boss which always makes me a little suspicious as generally people only drop a group if it really sucks. So I quickly scope out the tanks hit points just to make sure of the level of healing I need to put out and hes rocking at 51K hit points so I thought no issues should be an ok run maybe their healer disconnected or something.
We hit the maiden of Grief and it seemed to take a long time for her to die we missed the speed kill by quite a margin which is odd these days. I decided to inspect the dps to see what was happening not that I was really bothered as the boss died its just that the tank out dpsed the whole group.

I think the gods of LFG were have a laugh with poor Zetter and for that matter the tank on this fine Saturday. To get one poor dps can be considered normal, to get two can be considered unlucky but all three!!!!
The pally was wait for it wielding Stormherald yep I am not joking the level 70 crafted mace! I guess he missed all those blue or even green upgrades white he was leveling to 80 but hey purple is best as we all know.
The hunter had a green two hander and didn't actually have one gem or enchant on any of his gear and I swear was using auto shot through the whole fight, the lock also seemed to have passed the gem wagon by though he did at least seem to know there were other spells he could use apart from Shadowbolt.

Now the run went fine, ok it was a lot longer than I thought it would be with the tank manfully or should I say dwarfully putting out a fair portion of the DPS. But I dont think I have ever seen such a collection of dps in one place at the same time. Oddly enough though a couple of them actually had I level 264 bits (ungemmed of course) not sure if this was to push their gearscore up or they had used all their gold for wine, women and song.
I thanked them all at the end of the run for the group and resisted the temptation to ask if they had ever wondered what those sockets in the armour were for ( I dunno maybe they thought they were for putting flowers in or something).

But if you are the Stormherald wielding pally and by some miracle you read my little blog can you let me know what you are thinking?? I assume as you have stormherald you played during BC to a reasonable level so you must understand something of game mechanics so why the hell are you using a level 70 mace at level 80? Was it bequeathed from your dying father after Loken killed him or something so you swore to destroy his minions with your fathers mace?

Answers on a postcard to Zetter

Gear Score madness

2010-02-21T10:45:00.001-08:00

Well it finally happened on the peak! After ages of people asking for achievements for everything (including when the fire watcher was released in VOA one genius asking for the VOA 10 achievement to join a group for VOA10 on the week it was released) now its gear score tastic.

By the looks of it now you cannot get into any raid without having done it before and also having some form of gear score (5K + for ICC it appears I have no clue what my druids is at all). It makes me glad I generally raid with the guild as for anyone new coming through even with an alt has had it for PUG raids even for older stuff like TOC which to be honest you could do easily as long as you know the fights.

Personally it really hacks me off as from where I sit gear score means precisely dick. Even asking for the achievement is a little better as you are asking if someone has seen the fight even if its from face down on the floor.
I have in heroics encountered people with nice gear on inspection who have turned out to be either asleep or not in possession of a keyboard I still shudder at the memories of full t9 ret pally pulling <1000 dps. I am sure their gear score is respectable but I think my dog could play better by licking pizza off the keyboard.
I hope that Ghostcrawler wasn't joking in his hint that Blizz could come up with a way to break gearscore such as the I level 600 shirt ect.

I don't know why this annoys me so much as it really doesn't affect me due to A) my main being well geared and B) me only raiding with my guild as a rule.
I think it is that I have always had a bit an issue with elitism especially when it is used by people who consider themselves elite by to be honest are so far off of it its laughable.

I get it sometimes at work as even though I am a qualified chemist I need by the nature of my work to wear overalls a lot. Ours are bright orange so we look like binmen it is amazing some of the assumptions that are made by people on sites we work on (generally those who wear labcoats as they work in a nice clean environment) as to the level of our skill and knowledge. Nothing give me greater pleasure that to put people such people right especially as I have 20 years experience in my chosen field.
Overall my experiences over the years at work have taught me never to make snap judgements on people as I meet all sorts of people who have all sorts of appearances depending on the work they carry out. I have met lorry drivers with doctorates, a man dressed like a tramp who in fact turned out to be a multi millionaire and people who are qualified way beyond I would ever be but who outside their chosen field I wouldn't have trusted to make a cup of tea as their common sense appeared to be have been pushed out of their heads by the knowledge they had accumulated.

I try and apply this in game to anyone I have grouped with I tend to judge on how they perform not on their gear or achievements. I only wish others would do the same but addons such as gearscore just push snap judgments even more and I wish it would go away as soon as possible.

But yesterday I saw someone asking for a 4K gearscore to do Naxx 10 so I guess we have a way to go yet....

Zetter

Liability Lady

2010-02-15T04:53:00.000-08:00

Is it just me or does doing anything involving Jaina Proudmoon in game make as much sense for survival as standing in a thunderstorm waving a large copper rod about?
The woman appears to be a liability and I am amazed anyone NPC wise followers her into battle as you life expectancy is probably less than the guys in Red Shirts in Star Trek (remember them?). It was bought home to me how much of a liability she is when I was running Pit of Saron on my druid.
As soon as you walk in her entire contingent of troops get annihilated on the spot. Then as you move in you free up slaves to boost up the numbers again so the good lad and lasses of the alliance shake of their bonds and put their shoulders to wheel again to help. So after fighting our way through the tunnel and vanquishing the boss she lets those same brave souls get frost bombed to death at the end.
Don’t get me started on her attempt into Halls of Reflection not only does she let you nearly get killed by ghosts after having a cosy chat with Frostmourn but all she can do while you are running out is break down some bloody walls while you kill off the ravenous undead. She could at least throw a bit of AOE in to help kills them lets be honest an ice wall can’t be that tough. Finally you get cornered and it’s only the fact that someone had some brains to bring a warship up to help you out that you survive.

Give me Thrall any day of the week at least when I helped him escape from Old Hillsbrand the guy stepped up to the plate and did some tanking/ killing of enemies in fact he was pretty good as I recall.

Zetter

Faction Choices

2010-02-14T08:08:00.000-08:00

I read a lot of the WOW blogs especially when I am bored at work and waiting for things like the system to update or people to phone me back.
One thing I have noticed is a majority of the bloggers appear to be Horde in fact people are faction xfering as well now to the Horde side. I just wonder why people tend to go one faction or another especially in the Blogsphere.

There was a general underlying feeling that Horde was played by the more Pro/ mature players back in Vanilla is it a reflection of that?
It takes time and patience to maintain a blog so I don't see the LOL NOOB crowd posting much on the blog and the rants are great so is there more of the grumpy old men/ women type of personality writing blogs?
Probably me thinking quite stereotypically and there are probably as many reason for people rolling Horde rather than Alliance as there are blogs out there but I can help shaking the feeling that the blog community could be a slight underlying proof of that old belief regarding faction choices?

Personally I rolled Alliance as I wanted to play a Dwarf initially I had played dwarfs in most RPGs I have ever played so it felt natural. Then when it came time to reroll I had built up friends/ guild mates in my faction hence I rolled another Alliance race now going forward it would be unlikely for me to ever play Horde as a main unless all my friends shifted as well.

On this point I will always be cursed to be in the losing side of battle grounds as it appears that in the Battle group Misery the Horde breed their new players to be AWESOME NINJAS OF DEATH in PVP.

Zetter

The sweetest boss kill

2010-02-11T05:16:00.000-08:00

Some kills in WOW are just the sweetest because they are victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
This was the case with my guild KOR on Monday. We were determined to get Bloody Queen Latfia down this week. As you know this is a tightly tuned fight on both 10 and 25 man with the enrage being very very tight and when she enrages you don’t get a couple of extra seconds of dps time she basically one shots the raid with her aura.
So with 20 tries remaining under our belt we went in to take her to the cleaners. Six wipes later with her hovering about 4% mark we knew we just needed that little bit of good fortune to get her down.

So after some abuse from our ever so Grumpy Dwarf hunter and words of encouragement from our pally tank raid leader we girded our loins or in my case roots and set forth again.
It was going well no one and the vampire bites were going to the correct people heroism was blown and still she continued to drop 3%, 2% 1%. But then disaster! The big warning the she was about to enrage popped up and it looked like another 1% wipe as she went nuts and proceeded to one shot most of the raid.

Then she was dead? What the hell! Everyone in the raid was dead what happened?

We definitely got her as the achievement popped up that we had cleared the blood wing. Must have been the dots I thought to myself. But no I was mistaken our resident Boomkin dps nutter landed a 15K starfire crit just as he died and so down went the blood queen leaving behind a nice set of http://www.wowhead.com/?item=51552 shoulders for one lucky druid healer.

Yep it was a lucky kill and yep we probably would have got her at some time that evening but the cheers over vent were deafening and nothing made the kill sweeter than knowing we were one second from making the long walk back in to start again.

Zetter

P.S Then there was last night where we wiped at about 0.5% on the last shot of the evening at Valithria Dreamwalker. Because she despawned as to the only person left standing was our pally healer who was in a bubble so wasn’t seen as a target for the damn mobs causing a reset. Meh sometimes you eat the bear sometimes the bear eats you!

The weekly raid and pug nerdrage!

2010-01-31T03:59:00.001-08:00

I have read with amusement the various blog stories regarding fail/ amazing PUGs generated by the LFG system.
But I have not seen much on weekly raid PUGs, as the weekly raid resets twice I can usually do the 10 man with the guild but pug the 25 man for the second reset when possible. Now most of the recent raids have been Naxx and Ulduar and easy bosses such as FL or patches. This week it was the good instructor in Naxx.
So I joined a 25 man group that was forming and got a summon to Naxx right outside the instructor so they had been clearing the trash up to the boss this was looking good! We picked up a couple of priests for the Mind Control part and we were good to go.

Then the wheels came off a bit as the priest lost the student mob and the Instructor proceeded to gib the healers followed by the rest of the raid. Meh it happens and the priests put their hand up and said they have never done the controlling before. So I figured someone would explain what to do and we would be set.

WRONG!

Then cue one of the greatest examples of nerdrage I have seen for a while. A mage explodes in caps with the comment to the effect "FFS NOOOBS I HAVENT GOT TIME FOR THIS GOOD LUCK WIPING IN ICC IF YOU CANT GET THIS RIGHT" and quit the raid. This then precipitated a mass quit of everyone in a domino effect.
Bearing in mind the mage had done bog all really in ICC and to be honest hadn't even kill Yogg in 10 man ulduar I was frankly amazed. I felt sorry for the priests who basically got slagged on something they had never done before which no one bothered to explain or even ask them about and also for the people who organised the raid.

I am so glad I don't have to pug raid much I think I would end up quitting if I had to suffer stuff like this on a weekly basis.

Zetter

How far do you go to get your weekly fix of Raiding

2010-01-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

My Guild Kingdom of Rust is a fairly focused by casual 10 man raid guild. We try hard during raid times but due to us all having various commitments we raid two nights a week and then maybe on occasions do small raids on the weekend but these are usually a quick hour to clear old content. We have had real success as I have reported over the past month but with two nights we really have to go for it to keep progressing.
Now we do well in the limited time available but if you miss a raid that's half the weeks raiding gone so I try and make it if I am in for every raid. This though has lead me to exaggerate a bit at work sometimes to get back in time for a raid.

For example a few months back we had a meeting for training on a new system that is going to be put in. this was on a Wednesday up north and to be honest I really didn't want to go in the first place as I had a load of other stuff to do but there was no getting out of it. Also this fell on a raid night and I was damned if it was going to screw that up as well. So immediately when it was booked I said I had to get back home on time as I had something on that evening so couldn't be late. I didn't tell them what it was just that it was something I had on that evening.
I have also started on some jobs at daft o clock in the morning like 4 am to get a job kicked out and finished so I can get back in time for the raid.
Of course when you have to be away and miss stuff for work you have to do it this generally goes for everything from birthdays to visits to friends but where it is possible to influence my finish time to make raids I will do.

Now I often wonder is this a bit odd or is it any different from people wanting to get back for a football match they have that evening or going down the pub with their mates? Would I feel less secretive about it when telling people why I want to get back home on time if it was one of these things rather than a computer game?
For me it is the same as all the people I raid with I have know for several years and know quite a few of them in real life so it is like a night down the pub or a visit to a friends house for the evening. But I don't think it is viewed that way yet by a lot of people and I think being honest would get at best some perplexed looks or a worse some serious piss taking/ harsh comments.

So what are your experiences? Are you one of those people who are thinking at this point "seriously Zetter that is slightly weird its only a game". Or have you done the same thing in WOW as I have to get to a raid/ even in Azeroth on time?

Zetter

An aversion to letting people die no matter how stupid they are!

2010-01-23T09:13:00.000-08:00

Like I think everyone else in the blog sphere I have been running heroics every day for frost badges and I have been reading the various stories about peoples mishaps with the LFG system with amusement.
One think I have found in the annoying tendency of people mainly DPS (hey its a numbers game there are more of them in an instance) to STAND IN DANGEROUS CRAP as hey the healer
geared and you wouldn't want to lose your place on the meters by having to move.

Now being a druid raid healing is sort of a natural focus as most of our spells are geared that way. Of course in 10 mans I tend to be a jack of all trades but if there is raid healing to be done im your man (or tree). I have found this has come over into when I run heroics as I tend to have an almost compulsion not to let the groups bars drop even when people stand in the aforementioned DANGEROUS CRAP.
I find myself going to extraordinary lengths to save even the most suicidal lemming from certain death its almost automatic. Pally DPS pulls the boss for a few on a regular basis you can bet I have a swiftmend ready to save him. In fact because tanks are so well geared now its even easier as you can let the tank merrily fight on with a hot on him while you sort out mr aggro puller.

Is this an issue any other healers have with LFG is there some sort of group I can join like healer anonymous? "Hi i'm Zetter and I cant stop healing idiots".

Zetter

P.S Maybe I am starting to break the cycle I had a newly geared tank in Halls of Stone today who to be fair was doing a good job apart from the bloody fury warrior who seemed determined to pull threat off him at every opportunity. Eventually I found myself playing a game and seeing how low I could let the warrior get before I bothered to heal him. Three deaths later he dropped the group and we got in someone more sensible.

25 man vs 10 man raiding thoughts

2010-01-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

As most readers of my small blog know I am raiding with a strict (ish) 10 man guild of old friends at the moment. So far we have done Champion of Ulduar and made good inroads into ICC while playing about in TOGC 10 man.

My old guild who I still play with on occasions is heading down the 25 man route and recruiting for such raids. There have been various posts on the forum about it including some interesting comments as to why some of the guildies want to go 25 man.
One that caught my eye and also the eye of Tessy from Reflections from the Pond was that 25 mans are better because they require more skill and are a lot harder because more mechanics can be put into the fight that you simply cant do in 10 man due to the limited number of classes and buffs that can be bought to the raid. This seem to be reflected in a lot of general discussion on the O boards as well with 10 man being seen as “trivial” content and “something to do on off days”. Also Blizzard to an extent place 25 mans higher with such epics as Shadowmourn not being available to 10 man guilds.

This got me to thinking is this view of 10 mans justified? I have raid lead 10 man and 25 man raids in both BC and WOTLK. The major difference (and part of the reason I dropped 25 man raid leading) I found with 25 mans was the prep reparation work I had to do for the fights especially in BC when you had to work about which group the mana battery (err I mean shadow priest was in) to get the benefit of this class to the right people. In 10 mans this is less of an issue as mostly the raid is very tight and gets to know how each other plays very well so allocation of roles is not needed as people know how to support each other if they are clued up on the tactics.

But as far as fight difficulty goes I don’t think it is grossly different apart from you need 25 people who know what they are doing rather than 10 and getting 25 people who know what they are doing together is more difficult than getting 10. If 10 man raids were so facerolling easy why on my server have so few guilds got the protodrake from Ulduar 10 man admittedly more have than have the 25 man protodrake but consider the number of 25 man guilds on the server you would have expected most of these guilds to have got it. Especially as 25 man content is soooo much harder than 10 man they should in their 25 man gear have been able to face roll their way to a drake when they had a spare Saturday as the fights are that much less complex.
Most of the people who have the 10 man drakes tend to be the harder core 25man guilds and sometimes I bet their 10 man teams are probably the best of the best from a professional guild so it’s almost the cream of the cream going for the 10 man achievements no wonder they do these first before the 25 man hard modes.

I know this probably wont be agreed with by everyone and I don’t subscribe to the view that 10 mans should drop the same loot as 25 mans. But I do feel that 10 man guilds tend to be seen as subclass when compared to 25 man guilds and I feel this to be unjustified at times especially as if you want to make progress in 10 man you can afford to carry no one in the raid especially on harder modes where as from personal experience in 25 mans you can have a few people who shall we say aren’t optimal player and still make good progress. You probably aren’t going to be super hard mode number one guild on the server but I bet you can still clean all of ICC 25 man eventually while still having people doing sub par dps ect. In a 10 man guild this is more noticeable than 25 man and I have seen this back in BC where 25 man was the only game in town and tended to be more difficult.

One thing that would be interesting from Blizzard is if they set the 25 mans and 10 man raid lockouts the same so if you did 25 man you were locked out of 10 mans and vica versa. It will probably never happen as there would be an outcry that you were “depriving” people of badges and some BIS gear. It would be interesting to see if more of the “strict” 10 man guilds got some realm first kills ect rather than the usual 25 man suspects on off days.

Zetter

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation

2010-01-15T04:02:00.000-08:00

So I have been cracking my way through ICC 10 with the guild and we have really everything up to Rotface on farm with him still to be downed.

During the runs through I have been playing with the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation. Now for those unfamiliar with this Glyph basically its makes your Rejuvenation spell tick faster with the tick speed increasing dependant on the druids haste rating. So basically it heals for the same but over a shorter time.
So far I am really torn on this Glyph and have been swapping it in and out a lot depending on the fights.
The bonus of it is that it can really make Rejuvenation work well where there is a lot of heavy raid damage as it will tick fast and top everyone up where previously people could die before they got the benefit of the spell due to the time between healing ticks. Also when tank healing it means you can dump a hell of a lot of healing onto a tank (not to pally standard obviously) and in a 10 man as a healer you tend to be a jack of all trades so Tank healing does come into the equation quite a bit.

On the down side though it can burn through mana fast as if you want to blanket the raid in preparation for some incoming AOE its wears off fast so needs to be refreshed quite a lot. With my haste running at about 750 at the moment I find the duration of it is about the same of a 3 lifebloom stack so if I have lifebloom 3 stack and this up while tank healing it leave precious little time to cast a lot else. As when you start to hammer Nourish you fine everything expiring at the same time and needing to be refreshed.

I think this is going to be one of those Glyphs that will get swapped in and out on a regular basis depending on the boss fight we are in. But from all the glyph choices I have made this one is causing me a real headache.

Zetter

Down to Earth with a bang!

2010-01-13T04:45:00.000-08:00

So after riding high in Ulduar for our drake mounts and making some inroads into TOGC 10 man ( I still hate the friggin faction champs even more so now) we were kicking ass and taking name even stopping off on Sunday to do Sarth +3D with the non zerg method.

And then came the plagueworks………

We started off well doing a one shot on Festergut (the only people left standing was one tank and our Disco priest as he hit the enrage just as he died) then we went on to Rotface.
Well it was getting late and we had cleared a lot that evening so we had a few shots and time ran out with out best effort at about 55% as people got used to the slimes and kiting etc. So I thought on the next raid which was Monday we would kick his ass and move on to the good professor.

WRONG!

On 10 man Rotface is a nightmare at the moment as his slime spawn timer appears to be the set the same as 25 man the slime output towards the end of the fight was mental. We tried a lot of tactics 2 healers, 3 healers heroism at the start…. And at the end of it the best effort was about 25%.
I think we can get it but we really have to be on our toes with slime control towards the end and no one can die under any circumstances.

Still it’s nice to have a challenge on a boss we haven’t really had one since fire fighter / Yogg +1 damn though the repair bill was high for the evening!

Zetter

The trials of blogging at work

2010-01-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

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

Glorious Raider!

2010-01-05T05:00:00.001-08:00

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.

Naxx and undying

2009-12-31T08:16:00.000-08:00

So last night we had a team together to see what we could do raiding wise while a lot of the team are on break for Christmas.
After a full clear of ICC (with me getting http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50805 thanks to some nice passing from some of the raid who also could have used it) we decided to try again to do an undying run in Naxx which should have been easier now you can get to Kel straight off and get the hard bits done first.

Now a few of us and Naxx undying have a long and nasty history replete with runs failing due to luck, bugs and off days. The first run I nearly got it on we got all the way to KT and the tank stood in a void zone with him on 2%, then we went through Instructor Rav bugging on us so we couldn't mind control the adds to failing on Sapph when both our ice blocked people ended up at opposite ends of the room and a couple of people got blown up. Its got so bad that one of our main tanks twitches I swear whenever we mention it.

So once again we set forth and this time it WAS going to happen we wanted that damn title "undying".
So we blew through Sapph and KT first with no issues and also cleared that other deathtrap for the unwary Heigan. This was it we thought hard stuff out the way and keep focus and we got this!

Then we get to Grobbulous, now Grobb to be honest has been our whipping boy for ages no one ever died on him anymore. So we started off ok with the main tank kiting away and me picking up adds.
Then I noticed on vent that people were mentioning they were not getting warnings off the boss mods when they had the disease on them and there were some poison clouds in the middle of the room. For me I hadn't noticed as being a healer I have raid debuffs running on grid so I can see who needs healing when they get infected so I dont pay any attention to skulls above my head as grid tells me whats happening.
This doesn't apply to everyone as everyone is not a healer.... Also our boomkins raid UI decided at this point to throw a major mental and pop up with errors all across his screen. This lead to him not being able to see he was in a big poison cloud in the middle of the room dropped by someone else who's boss mods were not working and he went down splat!

I am thinking I will never be Zetter the undying as to be honest most of the guild twitch when you mention doing it again and I think the bloody game it out to prevent me from doing this one achievement.

Zetter

LFG Fun take 2

2009-12-27T04:08:00.000-08:00

Well another exiting adventure in the Pit of Sauron.

This time everything was going swimmingly the tank has decent hit points nothing amazing but enough the dps was good and we rocked on through the first two bosses.
After the second boss was dead we were ready to head up the hill towards the gauntlet with those summoner mobs. But the tank in his wisdom obviously had a new speed running tactic that he didnt share with the rest of the group and zoomed on up the hill before the mobs spawned.
Now this would have been great if he had told the rest of us but he didn't and this left him at the top of the hill and us at the bottom. Then to top it all off at this impasse the prick dropped the group and left us without a tank. Needless to say then we decided to call it a day with the last boss up.

I swear at the moment speed running is getting out of hand in the rush for badges and with LFG its a consequence free thing to drop a group or basically act like an asshole. Unless there is someone on from the same realm you are immune from being called out as a Twat.

Still here is to you pally tank thanks for letting me die in the ambush by the Giests and leaving everyone in the lurch when you got yourself trapped. We are not Jonny Wishbone psychic extraordinaire and if you had smegging told us what you were planning we would have followed you but as you didn't use that basic human skill of COMMUNICATION I hope to hell anyone you raid with has the sixth sense as I bet you wipe a lot of raids otherwise.

Zetter

LFG Fun

2009-12-26T11:54:00.000-08:00

So the guild is essentially on shutdown at the moment for the holiday with a lot of our members either being with the family or possibly in a gutter somewhere after a few too many shandys.

I personally have also been with my nearest and dearest but have been ensuring once again that I partake in my favourite sacrifice to the gods of wow i.e. doing the random daily every day so I can keep collecting my frost badges for my T10 set.

Now mostly random dungeons recently for me have been fun, as a healer I get groups almost immediatly. Probably not as fast as tanks (who I believe get into an instance before they join the LFG queue through some sort of quantum effect) but plenty fast enough for me. Also virtually all of the groups I have joined have been swift although silent (the art of conversation appears to have died in the LFG channel sometimes nary a word is uttered by anyone through the whole run).

But over the last couple of days I have been involved in two amazing groups in the new ICC dungeon Pit of Saron.
The first I joined at the end of the run with their first healer having dropped for some reason before the last boss. I think probably because he died at the keyboard from old age. The tank was well geared with 40K hit points buffed but my god the dps was appalling. A shammy managed to pull the boss before the tank and died, then a hunter got killed from a blast from the frost wyrm so I battle rezzed the shammy and we kept on fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting.
Now this boss as you probably know he casts overlords brand on people for dps this means they have to stop shooting as it damages the tank and for healers your heals also heal the boss. Now as a druid this is a bit of a pain in the ass as my heals kind of dont stop when I want them to being hots but normally the dps just burn his ass down anyhow despite the little boost he gets from me. But not these guys I was actually considering using an innervate as the fight went on so damn long and I never use that in heroics in fact generally I dont even notice my mana dropping. Eventually the boss went down after a fight lasting longer than most raid boss fights.

The second run was in the same place Pit of Saron again. I went in with my insane dps Elemental Shammy guildmate and we got eventually a group together. The issue was I was having trouble working out who was the tank as there were a couple of people on high hitpoints with the highest being 3.3K buffed.
Apparently this was the tank at this point I thought "ah well I Will see how it goes maybe hes stacking avoidance" but I think I was wrong on this. Damn from a healers point of view it was one of the hardest runs I have ever healed the tank was spiking like a yoyo and if you know the bit where you go up the hill to run the gauntlet I don't think I have put out so much Heals Per Second for a long time on one target.
I think the tank forgot that spell caster need to be hit and tanked or they look for other people to play with LIKE ME so at one point I had hots rolling on the tank along with with a full lot on me as I was getting the hell blown out of me.

I can say one thing for random pugs it keeps you on your toes!

Zetter

Unlucky Toons

2009-12-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

So we did the first four bosses in ICC again and a few nice bits dropped for everyone. Including to our amazement a bow for our hunter Dalno.
Now why were we amazed? Well Dalno has a theory that when you create your toon Blizz does a secret roll and this affects all your rolling chances for loot going forward though some nefarious mechanism. His belief is that he rolled a one on creating his hunter as he is always at the back of the loot / drop train.
Him getting a good item level weapon early in the ICC campaign is unusual to say the least as previous experience does seem to back him up in his theory. I have raided with Dalno through all of BC and Wrath and he does always seem to be unlucky with loot either never seeing stuff drop or losing rolls on it.
The standing joke back in BC was that me must have run Kara 10 zillion times and never seen the gun drop in there until we were well into TK/SSC and then the damn thing dropped when it was not required in fact I think every gun user in the guild had it apart from Dal as when it dropped he was always away for some reason.

Now on while I was playing my pally drops went my way on a fair basis throughout BC and I thought nothing of Dals bad luck except that it was just that bad luck. However I rerolled my main as a druid towards the end of BC and slowly throughout Wrath I have this sneaking suspicion that Dal was right all along and Zetter was another one of those toons who rolled a one at character creation.
He is never lucky ever in rolls or loot drops the decent gear he gets is through hard work farming badges and making items. He generally gets stuff when others have it or decide to pass as we do in guild depending on who is the most needy for the item (great bunch of people who always look to the bigger picture).

So my dear blog readers what do you think are Dalno and I being paranoid? Or does Blizz have a nefarious system running in the background based on your characters hidden "luck stat".

Zetter

Year In review

2009-12-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

I got tagged by Tessy on this from reflections from the pond and it seemed like a fun thing to so as 2009 has been a busy year wow wise for me.
Thanks to Candy from www.furlinedteacup.com/bibleofdreams for kicking it off.

My Warcraft Year in Review

1) What did you do in World of Warcraft in 2009 that you have never done before?

I finally took the plunge into more focused raiding, before I had been happy to just potter along being fairly casual when one of my close in game friends said he was forming a focused 10 man guild I took the step of joining up with him to see if we could really push the 10 man raiding.

2) What was you favourite new place that you visited?

Like Tessy I got to go with Icecrown Citadel not because its new but because it is really the highlight of all I liked about WOW.
I was fascinated when I first started the game with all the lore involving the Scourge and I was really looking forward to facing off against the undead. Lets say so far it hasn't disappointed and Arthas we are coming to get you!

3) What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

In all honesty probably less drama in game. 2009 has had a hell of lot of ups and down and I am just hoping that 2010 will be a stable run in game with good raid progress.

4) What was you biggest achievement in 2009?

For me it was getting the firefighter achievement in Ulduar as to be honest I didn't think I was good enough to be in a team that could do it. After some goes at it and reading up on the fight I thought it was a bit beyond me but we got it and victory was sweet for all the work we put in.

5) What was you biggest failure?

I think not dealing with some issue in my old guild in a very mature way that lead to issues which I think could have been handled better.

6) What did you get really , really excited about?

Joining a small guild being setup from scratch. Previously I have never been a mover if I could avoid it. I prefer my comfort zone and this was a hell of a jump into the unknown not knowing if it would work or not.

7) What do you wish you had done less off?

Probably worrying about missing things in game. I always hate miss things especially 1st kills and used to get stressy if I missed things because of work or other commitments.

8) Whats you favourite WOW blog or podcast?

I would have to say Pink Pigtails Inn I always boggle at how Larisa manages to write so much I just run out of ideas/ time.

9) Tell us a valuable wow lesson you learned in 2009?

If you try enough you can achieve most things in wow if you want them. I would have never thought I could have gotten as far as I have with raiding. I thought hard modes and drakes were for 5 day a week raiders. Really all you need is a group of dedicated people who are prepared to lean and adapt.

10) People I am tagging to complete this Meme

Being new on the scene I don't really have anyone to tag who hasn't been already but I hope my answers are of interest to people.

Zetter

Fireproof Tree!

2009-12-08T00:38:00.000-08:00

So last night finally after numerous false starts including a 3% wipe on phase 4 the brave troopers of Kingdom of Rust finally got Firefighter in Ulduar down. Also this was the final keeper hard mode we had to do so now we can access Algalon to finally go Ulduar 14/14.
After kicking Mimerons bum we finished of by doing the hard mode on General Vezax for all the people who missed out on him last time. This also went well and we downed him in 3 tries this time despite several of the dps not having tried hard mode before and one never having seen him.
Now only Yogg stands in our way with one keeper aiding us to get our drakes!

What can I say what a fight nothing I have done in WOW before was close to this. When it comes down to it Blizz have designed a very nice fight that you just cannot bull through no matter what gear you have. If people don’t spread out at the right point, control the fires, group together when needed and basically keep situationally aware its over.
One top tip I found for the resto druids out there is consider re glyphing with Glyph of Rejuvination this helps a lot during phase 2 when the whole raid is basically taking a spanking and people do drop below 50% health on a regular basis the extra bit of healing helped a lot.
Our setup for this was me (a resto druid), A holy priest and a shaman and on our successful try/ good tries we found it was best for me to concentrate fully on raid healing. In phase 2 where there is constant raid damage I basically concentrated on rolling Rejuvination on the whole raid while the priest and the shaman took care of the spike damage when someone was targeted by rapid burst. This would vary depending on you healer setup of course but this tactic got us through phase 2 with everyone on a consistent basis.

Zetter

OUCH Time in TOC Heroic

2009-11-20T01:27:00.000-08:00

Well the guild after a successful kill on Dr Zoidberg (Ze General for his proper name) on heroic mode had only Yogg left to down this reset. As a few of our guildies hadn’t done Yogg we set about the great blob with gusto. After 3 wipes as people got the feel for the tactics we got him down with no one being either dead / driven bonkers.
Overall a good start to the evening especially as at least half the raid had never seen past Yogg phase 1 before.

So with Ulduar cleared and our tails up we started on TOC 10 man Heroic. OMG can anyone say OUCH TIME.
We came close on the Northrend beasts with a wipe at 8% when Mr Icehowl went nuts and blew the raid to bits with an enraged stomp (I ate 48K damage which was nice). I must admit as a healer the damage on the tanks was insane both our tanks are in the I level 232/ 219 area they were eating massive spikes at certain points basically requiring spam healing all the time to keep the tanks topped off in case of a run of big hits.
The 10 man TOC heroics really do require pure 10 man guilds like ours to have farmed 10 man normal TOC to death. You do need to squeeze every bit of DPS, Avoidance, and Healing out of your raid to beat the enrage timers 25 man raiders who are having a bash at 10 man heroics really do have an advantage with being able to access weapons and gear of (I) level 245 before they go into heroic 10 man. Pure 10 man guilds basically don’t get this unless they pug 25 mans or run VOA/ Ony pugs and hope to get lucky.

With the new instances and Icecrown radiance they are supposed to be balancing the loss of tank avoidance with more predictable steady damage that peaks and troughs with boss abilities. This in my opinion can be no bad thing as the heroic TOC Northrend Beasts just seem to be massive spike damage on the tank that require spam healing. Take the twin worms for example our disco priest got a poison on him requiring him to move to the tank to get it burned off by the tanks fire debuff. This means he had to stop casting big heals so he could inch his way towards the tank. I was support healing on the raid and running what HOTs I had time for on both tanks, before I had chance to really run up spam healing with nourish the tank ate 2 big spikes went from hero to zero within a second.
Compare this to Ulduar hard modes and it is completely different Ulduar makes fights more difficult by requiring the raid to tighten up on their performance and use environmental conditions to their advantage. Sure the tanks / raid get hits hard/ more but not insanely so to pass these challenges you need to stop casting at certain points, stand in buff effects, taunt when the other tank gets a debuff and everyone’s favourite DON’T STAND IN THE FIRE!

I am hoping Icecrown will be similar to Ulduar rather than TOC. TOC was a nice filler but I don’t like the fights a lot and oddly enough I miss trash, it was nice to warm up on trash before the fights kicked off. Also the step change from normal to heroic mode massive and the ramp up is of the order of upping the incoming damage to the tank to insane levels.

Zetter

More VOA BS

2009-11-07T03:54:00.000-08:00

Well thanks to my mate the PC is battle rezzed. Can you believe it was the power switch that was shorting. So now my reset button is my power switch temporally.

So yesterday I decided to join a VOA 25 man pug seeing as I missed out on all the Wednesday fun. This went fine with the fire boss down and unfortunately no t9.5 leg drop but hey ho Zetter the druid is on of those "unlucky" toons i.e. all he gets is from hard graft.

So we move on to Emalon he's down easily and a pvp + spellpower ring drops I'm thinking hmm may be worth a role as I do dabble in pvp a bit. When suddenly the Raid Leader announces that only people with an area team can roll WTF!
Now I didn't make a bit issue about it just sai I thought it was a bit out of order, to be honest it was only deadly gear and I have enough honour to get what I want.

However I have read about this on Ala recently and it appears to have spread to the Peak now as well.
Personally and I am aiming this at people who are starting to set this rule this sucks. I wouldn't mind but I bet none of you ask people to link say Firefighter Achievement or Secrets of Ulduar before any of the PVP crowd can roll on T9.5 legs.
I can appreciate sometimes it must be a bit of a gyp for someone to win some nice legs who hasn't done a lot of PVP where you may have sweated blood in the arena. But it is the same for a lot of us PVE types who see Jonny Druid get some T9.5 legs while not having set foot in Ulduar or TOC. Dishing out loot in PUGs on the basis of what form of the game someone plays the most is bang out of order especially when you don't announce it before raid start.

So be warned all you VOA PUGers on the Aerie Peak realm it may be worth checking going forward what odd twists the Raid Leader is going to throw your way next!

Zetter

PC goes BOOOM

2009-11-05T05:11:00.000-08:00

Well from the high of Monday I came down to earth with a bump last night.

I was just getting ready to kick of with the guild and another run through TOC and Ulduar when the PC turned itself off.
Now I guess most of you out there have experienced that sinking feeling when something like this happens you know in your heart that something serious has happened. I tried the power switch it was dead, so I unplugged it and when I plugged it back in the PC immediately started up and as soon as the posting beep happened bam it shut down. I fiddled with a few bits but I suspect I have a motherboard failure as the PC shouldn’t switch itself on as soon as it’s plugged in.
So today its round to my good friend in the guild who is an electronics wiz to get him to trouble shoot it which I suspect will be a while as it doesn’t appear to be an obvious fault.

So what did I do last night while my guild was busting out Orbituary in Ulduar? Set up my laptop with all my bloody add-ons and game controller ect ect and update WOW on it so I can at least get by in the raids for the next few weeks, though at severely curtailed resolutions and detail settings.

This has happened to me a few times in my gaming career and if you talk to my afore mentioned friend I am death and dismemberment to anything electronic related its like I have some sort of damn aura that causes things to blow up.
It’s also not hit at a great time finances wise as myself and my beloved wife have just had to shell out on a new car when the gear box fell out of her old one. Overall its bough back to me one of the things I said a few years ago why the hell didn’t I just stick with a basic machine for WOW and get an X box to play other stuff on that just works without all the faffing about!

Zetter

Kicking ass and taking names!

2009-11-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

So it’s the end of the first week of raiding in my new guild.
Well strictly speaking its not my new guild as everyone in it are people from my old guild and some raiders from my old guild also join us. Also my alt is still in my old guild. Complicated no? Better to think of us as alternative reality version of AT being slimmer.

Anyway back on track so in the first week of hard try’s we have been blasting through the ten man hard modes.
Concentrating on Ulduar hard modes as to be honest these are a lot more interesting than TOC hard modes (and though I hate to say it at least there is some trash to deal with). TOC is on the radar but with limited time we decided to milk TOC normal for its badges and then push on into Ulduar hard modes with the time we have.

For the first week we have kicked Thoradim’s ass on hard mode to get http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=3178, Hordir has lost his rare catch for http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=3182 , Steelbreaker has been broken for http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2941 and we have knocked on wood two times (we tried three and were getting there but time was marching on and we decided to show a couple of raiders Mimeron as they had never seen the full fight).

We also decided to do a few of the TOC achievements so the twin worms went down together for http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=3936 and a couple of lucky people in the raid got to play with the twin mistresses for the Lord Jaraxus achievement http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=3996.

Not a bad start for our new focused raiding adventures. The question is now can we get our rusted iron drake before Blizz pull them which is probably going to happen with the release of Icecrown.

I must admit this was overall a great week of raid experience for me I don't know why it was more relaxing than normal raids I have been on with everyone know their roles. There was still the usual piss taking going on but it just seemed to be smoother and more focused.

I know we are behind the curve a bit on this achievements and have slightly over the top gear being in L232 stuff mostly but we are certainly roaring up the realms ranking due to a lot of guilds concentrating on 25 mans.
Roll on Icecrown as Kingdom of Rust are coming!

Zetter

SATNAV a blessing and a curse

2009-10-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

I have worked at the same place roughly for the past 19 years (sad isn’t it) doing different jobs but the same location. Due to this I know every way to and from work from my house including all the little byroads you can use to avoid traffic build up/ jams.
Now recently they have begun construction on a new link road right past our site that when finished will be a dream as it will mean we get relegated to one of those little backwaters and getting into and out of work will be a joy. But while the building is going on as you can imagine the main route I used to use to get i to work has become a nightmare so I used my knowledge and plotted an alternative using all the little cut through routes I know about to avoid this on my commute.
However due to that wonderful invention of SATNAV (yes I have one too and its damn useful when you do a lot of customer visits so I wont knock them too much. Going round London with a map on your knee it not recommended for a long life!) every other bugger can now find all this little routes only know previously to us “in the know”.

While stuck behind a line of traffic on a route that was previously only taken up by the odd horse I got to thinking had wow to an extent been polluted by the SATNAV culture?
I use and I think so do a majority of people add-ons such as quest helper or similar to make dailies easier and locate the optimum point to get 10 of X to drop. But has this killed off those top secret little farming/ questing spots known only to a dedicated few and has WOW lost a bit of its mystery because of it. Like my commute home local knowledge or in WOWs case game knowledge doesn’t quite have the same impact as it once had because a lot of people have a little arrow on their screen and a calm female voice telling them “turn left here and continue for 200 yards”

Zetter

Moving on

2009-10-25T01:57:00.000-07:00

So yesterday was one of the toughest days I had since I started playing WOW after our GM and raid leader left I had some long chats with a few people I have played with in the guild and decided to pack up my druids bag (or should that be food and water bowl) and leave my home of the past two years with my raid toon to join my old raid leaders small focused 10 man raid team.

It has almost been like leaving a long standing job I tend to be a joiner of stuff for long periods. This is reflected in my work as I have work for the same company for nearly 20 years (a miracle in this day and age) though in different roles I still travel the same route to work every day.Fortunately the parting of ways was handled without a great deal of drama in the guild and despite a bit of shock and surprise we are all still on good terms with me leaving a couple of alts in the guild to chat with friends and keep in touch with people.

I think I had decided either way I was out of raiding in AT even if it was a case of joining another guild to raid who wasn't run by one of the people I knew out of AT. I couldn't raid lead anymore and I did not think it was fair to stay in AT as a raider and I would I think inevitably be drawn back into raid leading again as it has happened before.
I wasn't happy any more raiding in AT and as this takes up a lot of my allotted play time I really needed to make a change to the part of the game I liked doing the most.

Its been a wrench as I have been involved in raiding with AT ever since Kara all through building a 25 man team to do TK/SSC and into the WOTLK. But the new team is almost home from home as there are a fair few others from AT who have taken the plunge with me.
But my days as an officer and a raid leader are over for now and I am back to Pvt grunt tree raider /salute!

Zetter

2009-10-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

So its all hit the skids a bit this week.

After a god awful 25 man raid on Monday where we tried out TOC 25 and got comprehensively owned by the Northrend beasts we ended up killing Flame Leviathan with 2 towers up woohoo! (sarcasm btw there).
This catalysed a couple of things in the guild. We lost our guild master who has basically burned out and one of our raid leaders quit for pastures new.

This has been a major blow for me as both people were there when I started in the guild and I know then both in real life, we have hoisted beers together several times and I really like raiding and playing with these guys. We blew through Kara together when I was but a pally noob tanking and healing. On top of this they are both solid raiders who have consistently stepped up to the plate all the way through BC and Northrend.

So I am left with a quandary now, due to a large amount of people joining the guild with the aim of expanding to 2x10 man raid teams (we have always struggled generally having 15-18 people). We really to get everyone involved should go for 25 mans which means Ulduar but do I really want to through Ulduar again on 25 mans?. Especially when the final fight with Arathas is coming in the next patch and there are still a lot of hard modes to do both in TOC and Ulduar.
Or do I stop raiding with my guild and start raiding with people I know at a pace I want pushing the hard modes in 10 man and making progress but leaving my guild high and dry having lost two raid leaders.

I thought 10 man raiding would make things easier after the Burning Crusade but instead you have people wanting to do 25 mans for the Lootz! People wanting to do 10 man for the progression which is less hassle with tighter teams and people like me caught in the middle trying to keep everyone happy.

Maybe I am just a burned out raid leader as the top man Angy Raid leader put in his final post http://angryraidleader.com/. Stop being a whiney bitch Zetter and see how lucky you are. It just doesnt feel like it at the moment.

Zetter

Zetter is Fur Tankz

2009-10-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

So after a long time raiding on my druid I have collected a fair amount of Feral gear (much to our beloved Tess from http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ annoyance), my offspec was boomer for a long time so I could help dps in raids and instances.Over the past couple of months it seemed a shame to let all that feral gear go to waste (some of it better than my boomer gear) and I fancied getting back in to tanking again as an offspec. This also has the bonus of allowing me to help out in heroics as either in demand spec.

I went straight over to the fantastic starting guide at Big Bear Butt (http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/07/04/modern-bear-tanking-1-specs-and-rotations/) which set me up with the basics and gave me some great macros to help out. Hence was born Zetter the offspec tank RAAAAAAAA.

So hows it been going? Well my first major task after testing out my key binds and macros in the combat dummies was TOC heroic, a big ask this one but it was a guild run so they tend to me more forgiving than jumping into PUGs.It went great despite on of our hunters wanting to see how good my threat generation and multi mob tanking was by Multishotting everything in site on the confessor (you know it was you Darka!). After this I have done quite a few heroics with little issue.Next stop raid tanking! (disclaimer only when our main tanks are not able to or its a fun run I am still a hard core healer tree)
Zetter

Healing in 25 mans

2009-10-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

So last night we were oversubscribed with people for raiding so we pushed into 25 mans with a 23-24 person team and hit Ulduar. Now we did well and got up to the keepers while killing Onyxia in 25 man mode along the way.

As usual I was tree healing and I noticed something in my long absence from 25 mans. Healing was a LOT easier in 25 normal man than in 10 man.
In 10 man we have been running a lot of groups with two healers this generally means that as a healer you need to do a bit of everything tank healing, raid healing, self healing ect ect. Also if one of you drops the ball generally it means the raid wipes or someone dies. Mana becomes an issue during long fights and if you run out there is precious little time to get it back.
In 25 man we had five healers and there are a lot of people to cover each other. For example on the Onyxia fight our pally healer DCed due to the dreaded AOE damage effects and was out for the whole fight. Now in 10 man with 2 healers this would have probably caused a wipe but we managed to get the big git down with 4 of us.

This has got me to thinking 25 mans are still seen as the think to get into. They give better rewards because they are supposedly harder. But in all truth where is the difficulty is it mainly in the organisation of a 25 man raid (i.e. its tougher to get 25 people together than 10 and sort out DKP, , drama what to do ect ect).
Because from a healers point of view the difficulty seems greater in 10 mans as there is no where to hide if you drop the ball everyone will know it as they will be looking at the wrong end of a mace in the face from whatever boss you are facing.
Admittedly the difficulty ramps up in 25 mans during hard mode but so does it in 10 man again as you need to drop healers for DPS to beat the hard timers.

Zetter

2009-10-07T04:36:00.001-07:00

So the other day I was running round Dalaran in a circle basically chatting on guild to a few people about general things not relating to the game.
Then it occurred to me A) why the hell am I running in circles and B) wouldn’t it be better to do something productive like levelling fishing while chatting.
I have a total of approx 160 days /played on my old main and my current druid main.

I am wondering how much of this in days I have sent running round in a circle in either Shat, Dalaran or Stormwind essentially using WOW as MSN to chat to friends on line. I think maybe it’s because I am a guy and find multi tasking hard. Also in real life I tend to fidget a lot if I am still for a long period and I think this translates to my time in wow.

So ask yourself when you look at your /played how much of it was basically spent on an £8.99 Blizzard driven version of MSN.

Zetter

AOE causing Disconnects crit Tree for 30K !

2009-10-05T04:34:00.000-07:00

So the Onxyia 25 kill is still outstanding!

I managed to get into a PUG doing it and got assigned to the main tank healing (though it seems at the moment most of the time to get into an Ony 25 you need to have done Ony 25 and be a class there isn’t a lot of in the raid). After a couple of wipes (one of which left me as the only one healing the main tank as the other healer didn’t run in with us) we got to phase 2.
Then the AOE opened up on the Whelps and WHAM DC from server. After a quick relog the main tank was dead and it was soon to be all over. Also for a Brucie bonus the DC and relog had killed all my clique keybinds so I was healing with one hand behind my back as all my major spells go through clique so are all over the action bar in a random order.
I put this down to bad luck and we went again, same thing happened AOE opened up and straight DC again a relog the tank was alive but once again it had taken out clique.

I kicked some graphic settings but whispered the raid leader that I was having issues and if he wanted to bin me no problems. He swapped me to raid healing to reduce the risk (nice guy for doing that) but after one more wipe as is usual with pugs people got annoyed comments of “noobs” where being flung so the group bombed.

I think next time I will reset my system at low graphic mode for this fight to see if that fixes it but unfortunately PUGs tend to be unforgiving of DCs so I need to get it right 1st time.

Zetter

Still missing Onyxia 25 man.

What a difference a couple of days make

2009-10-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

Well what a difference two days make. After the ups and downs of Monday’s raid I was determined to actually kick a bit of heavier duty butt for the reset on Wednesday.

Spurred on my Tess and Larisa’s success in Ulduar hard modes the other raid leaders and I thought it was time to do some hard mode ass kicking on 10 man. So we assembled a likely group of volunteers for the evening and sallied forth.

We warmed up by one shotting VOA 10 man and our shadow priest got some nice t9 legs and had a try at Heroic TOC 10 man.
This didn’t go so well to be honest as the two healers were me as a druid and our Holy priest and we couldn’t afford more to keep the DPS level up and running. Really we struggled as I think healer wise this fight is made for a pally main tank healer with the super Bacon of Light and us two as raid healer types were having a tough job keeping the tanks up as well as dealing with the raid fireballs and snowbolds that were flying about.

So we decided to make ourselves felt better (and get some gear/ badges) by one shotting Onyxia on 10 man and then coming back and clearing TOC10 on normal.
I landed a nice dps ring for my Boomkin offset as all our spell throwers had it and some of the melee DPS got nice hear including our beloved and permanently grumpy enhancement Shammy who landed not one but two level 232 weapons off the last boss which were a two tier upgrade for him!

After this with two hours left on the raid and somewhat buoyed up by our trashing of the normal raids we headed for Ulduar to have a crack at some hard modes. We did FL with three towers up for a starter which we have done before.
Then we tried XT for the heartbreaker achievement BOOM! One shotted it we lost our lock mid way through but a quick battle rez by me got him in the fight again and XT was dead at our feet sans heart.
Quickly moving on we had a shot at Kologran and the with open arms achievement but missed it by a couple of seconds.
Then we finally with a bit of time remaining went on to Ayriaya and had a shot at doing the crazy cat lady achievement by killing her with both her kitties alive.
There were still the same two healers me as the tree and our redoubtable holy priest and our pally tanks research suggested this was basically the tanks getting the hell kicked out them due to the bleed debuff put on by the kitties.
He wasn’t kidding I was healing the kitty tank and by the end of it I had three hots running on the tank I was spamming nourish like mad and swiftmend whenever it was off CD and I still couldn’t keep up with the damage at the end. The tank finally succumbed to massive bleed and direct damage, me being next on the aggro due to smacking out 80% of my mana in about 30 seconds went next and then they eviscerated the holy priest. But Ayriaya had taken to much of a beating at this point and before the kitties could have the DPS for afters she dropped like a stone and we had the Crazy Cat Lady Achievement as well to round off the evening.

Next Stop Keepers hard modes for Monday!

Zetter

Sometimes you eat the Bear Sometimes the Bear eats you

2009-09-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think WOW playing proves karma really is a living breathing part of life. Take this week for example it appears to have applied totally to me while playing.

On Sunday (not normally a regular play day for me as I spend time with the family and take the kids out) one of my friends in the guild was putting out the call for people to do VOA 25 man. Now I thought meh what the hell could be good could be bad lets give it a go and see how the land lies as I have an hour spare. Well nice group and we one shotted all the bosses and the T9.5 hands dropped for druid healer i.e. me.
I was the only druid healer in the group so the 6 I rolled didn’t matter and also one our kind guild healers even traded me a pvp cloak he won during the run as it wasn’t as good as one he had previously when he looked more deeply into the stats. It was a great hour spend in WOW from a loot gained point of view.

Fast forward to raiding so far this week and Mr Karma has dropped on me with vengeance. Monday we decided to go for Onxyia 25 man with mostly guild and a partial PUG and wiped a lot finally ending without downing her due to people having to leave. Overall it was a really bad luck run with disconnects due to AOE all over the place overloading peoples computers to nasty fears on the tank taking him into the healers for a cleave.
Then yesterday I thought I would pop on for a short while and do the heroic daily. We got a guild run going but then our tank had to go as he was on call and the French had blown up their server he was looking after. After this we got a tank in who basically inspected a couple of the DPS and turned up his nose and left (as hey this is old kingdom serious stuff so much so that I tend to heal/dps as boomkin on the last boss to speed things up).
At this point I had to make dinner so had to leave and eventually wandered back on later in the evening. Got a group was half way through the instance and the world server crashed and reset it, at this point a lot of the group I was with wanted to go to bed so with a half saved instance ID that was the end of my daily for the evening.

Overall this week I think I am now paying back for my lucky glove drop in spades.

Zetter

First impressions we make of players and people in general

2009-09-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well today I have had the joy of contemplating replacing my wife's car as the poor thing I think is about to have terminal gear box failure.
It has been an interesting experience going through car dealers and getting quotes on new car. Now I generally dress comfortably on my days off generally in jeans and T shirts and the razor is optional for the day.
It is quite amusing on how people in these places react to you when you are on about buying a vehicle worth a fair amount of cash. In certain places I got the impression that some of the sales people didn't give me a lot of time as I wasn't in a shirt and tie.
I also have a friend who to be honest is worse than me and could be described as a bit of a slob when he is wandering about and he has noticed the same thing when shopping for large items i.e. being given little attention by sales people as they tend to view that you cant afford the product.

It is interesting that these impressions they form are quite wrong I run a high turnover business unit at my work and my friend earns a very high salary as an IT contractor in the city. We know what we can afford and only go looking for it if its within our budgets.
The upshot of this is at least one person has lost the opportunity to sell a high priced car to my friend due to his attitude when my friend first entered the dealership before a word was spoken.

This got me thinking about how players in WOW can be judged i.e. for grouping for instances or raids. People demand EPIC achievements all the time just to run heroic VH or will kick anyone with the shred of green gear on them as unworthy.
But hold hard a minute group leader could this so called noob possibly be an alt of one of the top guilds on the server having a break or quiet time away from their hectic raiding schedule. This person due to their knowledge of game and super human play style could be able to pump out 4K dps from low gear.
Or could this person be you guilds next great tank / healer i.e someone who can play like god himself but just needs to prove themselves in a group.
I think recently there appears to be too much judgement on initial appearance of players and the perceived skill of them based on the gear they are wearing / achievements done.

So next time there is a group being formed will the leader be the person missing out on that diamond in the rough or the possibility of being looked on favourably by the leet guild on the server. Or will they take a chance and be pleasantly surprised/possibly amazed.

Zetter

Yogg 1 AT 0 and oops we have been slacking in TOC :)

2009-09-22T04:24:00.000-07:00

Well its Monday TOC was cleared by two teams the week before so we were at a bit of lose end for Monday so what to do???
I have a great idea yay lets go do Yogg in Ulduar we had left him up from a run two weeks ago for just such an occasion so I thought it would be a nice idea to extend my raid ID and get some other people to see it who didn't make our first kill.

Now a quick back story on this. AT pushed hard into Ulduar for quite a while with one raid team swapping people in and out as we went and finally got to MR Yogg and downed him in one night of hard try's. Now I know this isn't major compared to progress but it was a big effort for us and was a pleasure to finish Ulduar for the first time.

This was coincidentally at the point that TOC was about to hit so after that first sweet kill we like I guess a lot of other people bombed on into TOC as to be honest it was something we wanted to get started on. Hence we really didn't bother with Ulduar except on off days and fun runs (after all Yogg was dead mission accomplished for the AT heroes).

But yesterday after a successful TOC clear on the Wednesday I extended my Ulduar ID from the previous week and offered the chance up in the guild for people to have a crack at the big blob himself.
Several of our regulars offered to bench themselves to give people who had not been before a shot and off the merry team of 10 trotted to give Yogg a good spanking......... 2 Hours later a very battered AT team limped out of Ulduar after having received a rather harsh spanking from said blob.

I think going forward we will need to put more effort into Ulduar as a preparation for Icecrown rather than TOC as I get the feeling TOC was a bit of free loot filler from Blizz. If the same people who did Ulduar are doing Icecrown we need to keep our edge for that from Ulduar rather than be lulled into a false sense of security by the sweet song of TOC.

Zetter slightly scored and hammered tree.

PUGs are like a box of Chocolates

2009-09-20T03:40:00.000-07:00

As Forrest Gump's mum said "life is a like a box of chocolates you never know what you are going to get". I guess like a lot of people she didn't actually read the little bit of card you get in the box to tell you.

After watching the film the other day this got me thinking about PUGs.

Now recently I have been PUGing a hell of a lot due my drive for http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47241 so I can get the T9 4 piece set. As there are quite a few days I can only nip on to do the daily say "hi" and go off I cant do this in guild runs all the time as a lot of people tend to have done it when I come on. So I drop into the murky world of PUGs again after a long absence when heroics were not worth doing.

Like Forrests mum and looking at the little card to tell you whats in the chocolate box, generally I don't have the time or patience to armoury people to see if they are going to cope in a heroic its just cross your fingers and hope for the best.

As a healer this can be interesting I tend to get into groups easily but the experience can vary from the easy to the ridiculous.
Take the last two days I have run with two different PUGs in fairly similar dailies difficulty wise these being Nexus and Halls Of Stone. But the runs could not have been more different in terms of the challenge to and the speed at which they were carried out.

The Nexus run was a full plate dps affair (well except me I was wearing Bark) with DKs, Pallys and Warriors. Overall the tank couldn't hold threat to save his life and I mainly spent the whole run healing one of the DPS warriors who seemed to be getting hit more than the tank. At one point before the boss in the crystal Garden I got killed and this bunch didnt even notice and proceeded to engage the boss while I was still dead.
We did the run but it was more challenging at times that healing Mimeron in Ulduar as there was threat bouncing all over the place!

Compare this to the run today through Halls Of Stone. The tank was a threat Magnet and the dps were competent. All I did during the run was put Rejuvenation on everyone and the occasional nourish with the last boss going down before I really had time to Blink.

Overall though both were fun runs in their way one was quick with competent people and the other was challenging and pushed me hard to make it a success.

So next time you are in a heroic PUG just wonder will you get the wonderful rich Truffle Chocolate or will it be the hard centre :).

Zetter

Well here we go!

2009-09-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

After checking out various blogs on the web I thought I would have a crack myself. At the moment the sites unfinished so please forgive me if it looks unfinished and I havent got any spiffy themes yet.

More to come when I have time to fix it up.

Zetter