Friday (11 Dec) - The New Dailies

Friday (11 Dec) - The New Dailies

The changes in how the daily dungeon quests are done is still a little confusing. There used to be two dungeon daily quests, one for normal mode and one for heroic. The quests were for specific dungeons, and they were acquired by visiting the quest givers in the outer area of Violet Hold in Dalaran. Players picked up those quests and then turned them in when completed. Those don't exist anymore. Instead, there is one daily quest (I think there's just one) for dungeons, which is acquired by selecting the random dungeon option in Dungeon Finder. The "quest" is to finish the dungeon, and the reward (emblems and gold) are either automatically added, or there is an npc at the end to talk to complete it. That got Wild in trouble as he failed to talk to Lady Sylvanus (and I'm not even sure she had the ? over her head showing there was a completed quest), leaving the final dungeon, Halls of Reflection, without turning in the quest. Now I don't know how to turn it in, and Wild put in a ticket with a Game Master to find out.

There is also a daily raid quest now, and that one is picked up in the Violet Hold area. On Friday night the guild alt-10 raid made a visit to Naxxramas to kill one of the bosses there, Raszuvious, for that quest. When Naxx was new Raz was a fairly difficult boss because it required mind controlling two of the mobs. With the gear we have now, Raz had no chance at all, even with only two healers, one of them severely gimped with user interface problems. We beat Raz and collected the 5 frost and 5 triumph badges awarded, plus something like 33 gold, for 15 minutes work. Wild already has more frost emblems (the emblems that eventually can be turned in for Tier 10 gear) than he got in two months trying to get the triumph emblems for the T9 gear. Of course, I hear that T10 gear costs a lot more frosts than it cost to buy T9s with triumph. They get you one way or the other, all in the name of keeping us in game grinding away.

The other thing the alt-10 group did on Friday night was die - a lot. We went to 10 man ToC, and we had a world of trouble. For ToC we had three healers: Wild, h-priest, and Tal, a pally healer and alt of someone who is becoming a regular. All three of us were getting finger burns from mashing keys like madmen all night. All of us hovered around 3k healing on most attempts (a huge amount in 10 man), with Wild maxing out at over 3600 hps in one fight. The new gear Wild got in the Icecrown dungeons were a big help, but our problems weren't really related to healing as far as we could figure. Even when later on when one of the healers had to leave, and Sp, Wild's druid healer counterpart, joined us, the problems persisted.

In the early going there was inexperience on the part of the tanks, and there were plenty of tweaks and suggestions from the raid leader, who was DPSing instead of tanking this night. One tank in particular was new to tanking ToC. Eventually, though, he switched from his bear tank to his death knight tank, which is his main, but things did not get any better for the raid.

From Wild's perspective there was just way more damage being done to us across the raid than I was used to seeing in this dungeon, which could be a combination of things without some specific cause. For example, healers seemed to be a particular target for some reason, and we got taken out of action many more times than usual. Tanks had stacking debuffs that grew too high to heal through (which shouldn't happen), DPSers were slow to get out of fire, or get to where debuffs could be removed, etc. We tried to address each and every possible reason for the troubles we were having.

In the end we had to admit that this just wasn't going to happen for us, after nearly three hours of trying and making 12 attempts. The really sad part is that we never got past the second part of the first encounter, Northrend Beasts. We've beaten that encounter more than once in the past, with much less trouble. Momma told me there would be days like this.

On the real life front we will be on vacation the week of 13 Dec (this coming Sunday). We are taking the RV to Monterey, CA, and visiting friends along the way. We used to live there and we still love to get up there when we can. We should be back for Christmas week. So there will be no WoW for the Wild family. We'll have the laptop, but I don't trust my WoW password to the wireless (and not very secure) connections at the RV campgrounds. So DER and his family of toons will have to regale you while we're gone. :-)

See ya'll in a week!