Tuesday (8 Dec) - Stuffing the Sock

Tuesday (8 Dec) - Stuffing the Sock

All the Wild family is clammoring for attention and I've gotten woefully behind on the news. This is going to have to be a quick and dirty run down of the past several days.

This past Sunday Wild got in on the weekly ToC 25 run, which has proven to be a successful restart of guild 25 man raiding. Of course, Icecrown Citadel will have a say in that, but more on that in a moment.

Without the usual fanfare and in the interest of brevity we downed all three Northrend Beasts, plus Lord Jaraxxus, the Faction Champions, and after a protracted fight even the Twin Val'kyr. Then, for the first time, this raid had a chance to battle the final boss, Anub'arak, getting in three attempts before calling it a night. Pd, the non-guild druid healer that is a regular in this group, led all healing by a decent margin, but Wild has been closing the gap and finished second, edging out our uber priest by a tenth of a percentage point.

#1: Pd, 2924 hps, 17.0% healing
#2: Wild, 2520/13.8%
#3: uber priest, 3102/13.8%
The other five healers had 10% healing or less.
Interesting healing fact - 84% of Pd's heals came from Rejuv, a pure Heal over Time spell, while 46% of Wild's heals came from that spell. Pd's gear is maxed out to take advantage of rejuv, and to get that kind of output he has to be spamming the spell non-stop. Wild does his share of rejuv spamming, because that is a key buffer when raid healing, but I also fill in with other spells depending on the situation. And as any good druid will say - there are many ways to heal.

Wild had opportunities for loot, but did not win any of the rolls. What Wild did get was enough Triumph emblems to get his total to 30, enough to go by some shiny new gear. Wild traipsed over to the npc Quartermaster in Dalaran after the run and bought [Runetotem's Spaulders of Conquest], Wild's first Tier 9 set piece.

Philly has been busy as well slaughtering the denizens of Outland and taking their loot as she continued her levelling. Philly is level 66 now and halfway to level 67. She has also skilled up Inscription (430) and Jewelcrafting (427) by quite a bit, as she closes in on the max skill level of 450. Philly's favorite moment levelling so far was the Torgos kill. Torgos is a level 65 elite buzzard that Philly soloed. She died at the same time the bird did, and discovered that the vast Auchindoun edifice was between her ghostly self and her corpse. It took almost four minutes to find a way through and around the ruins of the place to get back to her corpse, rez, and still loot the body of Torgos to complete the quest. That was close. Her new three socket helm did wonders for her stats - courtesy of Torgos.

If I haven't mentioned it before, DER's family has a new member, Andro the warrior (not to be confused with Ando the druid). Andro (level 15) and Wild's Jocelyne (level 14 paladin) have been getting in some battlegrounds when we have a chance. WSG is hard on level teens, so we may level up a bit before we go in again, but it was fun. I'm pretty sure Jocy will be the main pvper for the Wild family for awhile.

That gets us mostly up to date, I think. So how did things go with the new patch, you must be wondering?

At first, not well at all. Blizzard was something they usually aren't with patches - they were cautious and careful. Servers were brought up gradually, over many hours, rather than just turning them all loose at once. This certainly frustrated players on servers that were on the back end of that strategy, but I think it allowed them to find and fix bugs without having to bring tons of servers up and down all day for hotfixes. Someone noted that in North America alone, there are 247 realm servers. By the time Wild's server was available, I think many of the issues had been resolved. I was finally able to login sometime after 5pm. I had already updated every addon that had a patch 3.3 fix, and initially it looked like all was well. But it wasn't. One of my key addons, X-Perl, which manages my "frames" for party, group, and individual players, was broken. I had to set the User Interface (UI) to the Blizzard default. It wasn't until late last night that an "alpha" version (ie, largely untested) became available. Getting the word out that this version looked like it fixes the worst issues was poorly managed, and even this morning I saw chat messages in game pleading for a fix to this addon. So far the untested alpha version has been working.

Tuesday also became the day the Mrs decided that it was time to put up the Christmas tree. I probably needed a break from WoW, anyway, as I was still frustrated with the server not being up yet. We have a new dog that will be seeing her first Christmas this year, as well as some older cats that look forward to "helping" us with the decorations. By the time we finished up, including dinner, it was past 7pm and I was very much in the spirit of the season. The server was up as well, and Wild popped in to see what was up. About twenty guildies were in game, and all of them were in one or the other of the three five man dungeons in the new Icecrown Citadel. There is a starter quest on Dalaran called "Inside the Frozen Citadel" that sends players to the first of those dungeons, The Forge of Souls. Each dungeon must be done at least once, in a specific order. Once that has been done, players can enter the 10/25 raid instance called Icecrown Citadel (ICC).

It took Wild longer than I expected to find the new dungeons. There is no flight path to learn that I could find. On the Icecrown map the Icecrown Citadel is shown to be at the most southern of the zone, but after flying all over that area it became apparent that the map was not accurate. Apparently, patch 3.3 has mucked up the Icecrown map. Eventually Wild found it, on the western side of the zone, above an area known as the Fleshwerks. At least that is where Wild is marked as being at on the map, and that is the direction I have to fly from Dalaran to get there.

There are two entrances. One is an L-shaped tunnel dug into the mountain with all three five man dungeons located in a central chamber that also includes a Meeting Stone. Wild tried to turn in his quest, which requires entering the Forge of Souls (FOS? - not sure what acronym this will become). However, there were so many players/groups trying to enter that all Wild could get was a message stating that no more instances could be made. Maybe on Wednesday. The other entrance to the 10/25 ICC raid is around the corner and a bit higher up on the mountain. It also has a Meeting Stone.

Wednesday morning - Happy got in game first (gotta keep that gold flowing). He immediately noticed something unusual. Nobody was spamming the trade channel looking for people to join groups or raids. The new dungeon finder tool may finally do what no other grouping tool has done - end the looking for group chatter in trade chat. But the reason is not the tool itself, its the fact that Blizzard is bribing us all to use the tool by rewarding players who use the "random dungeon" feature to get extra emblems of triumph and even the new frost emblems (for Tier 10). Nothing like loot to change a person's way of doing things.

Finally, a word about guild raiding. My guess is that Ulduar is dead now. Why fuss with Ulduar for T8 gear when just doing heroics will get players the triumph emblems they need to buy T8/T9 gear (all heroics now drop triumph emblems instead of the T7/T8 conquest emblems, which are now next to useless). ToC "might" still be run, but only to gear up raiders enough to be productive in ICC. All eyes are on ICC now. Where will the guild raid go on Friday night? My bet is 25 man ICC. Won't we all want to see it?

Wednesday night (tonight) is our alt-10 ToC/Ulduar run. Will we stay that course, or will we try to get into 10 man ICC? Will enough of us have completed the three five man dungeon pre-requisite to get in there? I don't know. It's iffy for Wild. Finish three new, high difficulty dungeons between now and 6pm tonight?

Uh, excuse me, but Wild says it's time he got in game and into Icecrown Citadel.