Weekend (2 May)- Sunday Funnies

Weekend (2 May)- Sunday Funnies

This is Children's Week in WoW. Players can adopt an orphan or two or three and take them on a grand tour. There are quests based in Vanilla Wow, Wrath of the Lich King, and Northrend areas. Wild and Philly decided to do the Northrend quests this time around. There are two quest chains, but players can only do one. The other one can be done at the next Children's Week. However, the game is currently bugged and players who did one of these quests last time around can't do the other one right now. Blizz promises a fix . . . eventually.

Anyway, the quest chains are very easy, simple fly here and fly there and talk to people kind of thing, but it does take some time. The reward is an in game pet and personal satisfaction for having adopted an orphan for a day. Wild opted to get the Wolvar pup. After saving over a hundred of them doing the Kalu'ak rep grind, Wild thought it only fitting that he adopt one permanently. Philly went for the more exotic pet, an Oracle that likes to eat bugs. Philly also learned something that no one in the family knew, too, while on that quest chain. One stop was Un'Goro Crater, a vanilla wow area for level 50s that is quite remote. However, had Philly travelled there the normal way she would never have found the spot she had to be at. That spot can only be reached via a portal, and that portal was in Sholozar Basin in Northrend. I never knew there was a two way portal between those two areas.

In the 'scratch your head" department, Happy had two in game mails from a person named "goldforgold." His first said only "lol" and then in his second one he wrote something along the lines of "hey, I guess you must be a banker, but stop stealing my auctions!" Happy has never seen the name "goldforgold" turn up on the Auction House, but then Happy doesn't pay that much attention to the names, unless they are big players with a lot of merchandise like Happy. Either this is an alt of someone else or it could be a gold seller/farmer with an interesting approach, hoping Happy will respond to the mail. Happy will be on the lookout for that name, but deleted the mail. Happy might still respond at some point - he does like messing with the heads of other auction house hounds.

Philly won an early Sunday morning Wintergrasp battle, having a great time with Sis in successfully defending the fortress. We were undermanned that early in the day, but apparently the alliance weren't in any better shape. They staged several attacks and breached into the final chamber, but could not get past us. After getting the win Philly also did the weekly pvp quest to kill elementals. Philly likes that one because she can get all ten kills she needs deep underwater, and few allies have tried bothering her when she's submerged. As an undead Philly can hold her breath a very, very long time.

Completing that quest put her over 250 WG shards, and she bought the pvp heirloom trinket for the +resilience and stun breaking ability. That many shards was costly, but it's a near mandatory heirloom item for pvpers. Philly is still well behind Sis in getting her resilience numbers into respectable range, but she's still gotten a bit tougher to kill.

Wild had two funnies on Sunday, one of the "haha yea right" kind and one of the "haha did I really do that?" kind.

Wild's week was almost over and he still had not gotten into a VoA or into the weekly frost raid. So Wild kept hanging around, trying to get something going. A VoA 25 finally started up. We did our thing and killed both Toravon and Koralon, the only two bosses in there anyone cares about. The issue was that Wild tried to go crazy with his Swiftmend spell as that is one of the changes I'm trying to make in Wild's healing rotation. Wild was very frustrated that he was not getting hardly any swiftmends to land, and I didn't know why. Yes, Wild is very aware that there must be a regrowth or a rejuv on the target before swiftmend will work, and yes Wild was waiting for swiftmend to be available (its on a six second cooldown). It wasn't until after the fight that I figured it out - I had once used swiftmend as a direct spell tied to a button, but at some point I'd changed that to a mouseover. But I still thought I had to direct target the spell, and so I never had a target set when I tried to cast swiftmend. That was the Stupid Ha Ha. I fixed that right away by setting up a macro that would handle just about anything - it would cast swiftmend on my mouseover target if there was one, or on my selected target if there was no mouseover, and finally on Wild if no mouseover and no selected target.

A little later some of us were able to scrape together a ten man for the weekly frost raid, which is against Patchwerk in Naxx. Patchwerk is a straightforward "kill him before he kills you" fight that needs two tanks to be on the ball, healers to keep them alive, and high powered DPS to kill him fast. Of course, if the DPS was in ICC level gear, as they likely were, they should knock him down very fast.

For awhile Wild was the only healer we had, but the raid leader finally got a pally healer to come before we got started. The new healer bragged several times that we only needed one healer as he could solo heal the fight. Wild was already in the raid so I didn't care if he healed the whole thing or not. I just wanted my badges. Wild did his thing, and worked on his swiftmend, which now worked just fine. The main tank rushed through the trash, even when we hit areas where mana users got their mana reduced to almost nothing (slime rivers). Wild managed to keep himself and both tanks alive throughout that mad rush. A couple of DPSers died but we got 'em rezzed in time for the main event. Killing Patchwerk took longer than I thought it would, but there were no serious problems, and no one died during the fight other than Patchwerk. Wild was more interested in how his swiftmends did than in comparing healing with the pally, but still, I couldn't help taking a peek. Wild did 2295 hps and was responsible for 63% of the healing. The pally was at 1715 and 27%. I even looked to see if he'd been DPSing on the side, but nope, not at all. Ha ha, solo heal it? Yea right. The really funny part is that as a pally he probably could have single healed the Patchwerk fight. Ideally, only two raiders take the bulk of the damage in the Patchwerk fight - the two tanks. Pallies have a spell called Beacon of Light. With beacon cast on a raider, every heal the pally does on other raiders also heals the beaconed raider. So, pally beacons the main tank, and then heals the off tank (who actually takes the most damage in this fight) and the pally effectively heals both tanks at the same time. Did the pally use Beacon? Nope.

Philly got one more chance in game late Sunday night. She decided that it was time to run her first Heroic random dungeon - as a shadow priest. Philly knew that her healing gear was not up to a heroic dungeon, but the only way to get ready for that was to do heroic dungeons. So, unlike Wild, who moonkined his way through the random heroics because DPSing was a nice change of pace for him, Philly went DPS because she really had to to get the gear she'd need to heal. Her DPS gear was lacking as well, but it wouldn't matter nearly as much as healing would. Out of the 17 gear slots, Philly had adequate gear in nine of them (7 ilevel 200 and 2 i245). The rest were i187 or worse, and some of that was even less suitable pvp gear.

The wait for a group was not that long. The tank was a warrior and we had a druid healing. Add a hunter and a DK and our group was set. The dungeon? Drak'Tharon.

Philly had a number of things she wanted to practice on, but part of that would depend on the group. If Philly's group mates were as over geared as players usually are when running randoms, Philly should be able to work on things without worrying about wiping. A lot of a shadow priest's damage comes from DoTs (damage over time). Against trash mobs the ideal spell rotation is to put two instant DoTs on each mob the tank has collected, and then start the longer cast damage spells on a single mob at a time while the DoTs tick on the others. However, Philly quickly realized that the mobs were dying way too fast to bother trying to DoT them all up. So Philly was a bit sub-optimized by single target killing mobs. She did use her Mind Searing spell a few times, which she loved. It's a channeled AoE spell (like a multi-target mind flay), but it uses a lot of mana and she was worried about drawing aggro. It was very satisfying to see a whole group of five mobs go down under that barrage though, and the tank held aggro the whole time. Philly could get addicted to that spell.

On the bosses Philly was able to get her boss spell rotation going pretty well. She has to keep track of a number of things, as the casting priority is very important to get the most damage out of the spells. While I think Philly did a good job of keeping up her rotation, her timing was off, something that just takes practice. In DKT the bosses were pretty cooperative in that Philly didn't have to move around a lot, which also helped.

When we got to King Dred, who is like a big cuddly dinosaur with teeth, the tank asked if we wanted to try for the achievement. I don't know what achievement he was after, but I guess it meant killing Dred without clearing the many smaller dinosaur mobs around him. We tried it, and came close, but Dred does a raid wide fear that Philly forgot about and we ended up wiping. That ended our achievement attempt. Had we taken one minute to talk it over, Philly could have cast a Fear buff on the healer, which would have kept him casting at least through one fear cycle. All those smaller dinosaurs proved too many for the tank to keep control of, and they ended up in the faces of the DPS, and the healer couldn't manage all that damage.

That is the one thing that continues to annoy me about random heroics. There are so many dungeons and so many bosses it's impossible to remember what abilities each have and what to look out for. When selected for a random, you don't know what dungeon it will be until you are ported inside. And there is no pause once inside, either. The group starts moving immediately, and we buff up on the run. I've written a short synopsis of each boss in every heroic dungeon, but I never get a chance even to glance at it or note things that the strats fail to mention.

No matter, we rezzed and killed Dred on our second try - after killing the mobs first, of course. The rest of the dungeon was the usual slash and burn.

It was a good early effort for Philly. I need to think about what I didn't do right, such as being more aware of procs and buffs and such. Practice practice.

Philly got a couple of nice drops for her professions - a glyph of mastery that earned her a new inscription spell, and she also got a recipe for a new gem cut for jewelcrafting.

Philly was the only cloth wearer in the group, so every piece of cloth gear was automatically Philly's if she needed it. There are four bosses in DKT and we got five i200 gear drops, so it was a good opportunity. But none of those drops were cloth. Ironic, isn't it?

How did the numbers work out? Well, Philly finished fourth, which meant that even the tank out DPSed her. I wasn't disappointed, though. I had no idea what to expect, and was actually pleased at the numbers she did put up.

The DK blew everyone away with 3111 DPS while the rest of us were a little closer to each other. The hunter was at 1861 DPS, and the tank slashed and bashed his way to 1759 DPS. Philly got 1517 DPS for 18.9% of the damage. Not great, but enough to feel like she contributed. Just for grins, I checked back on what Wild's moonkin DPS was when he first started doing heroic randoms back in January. He was averaging around 2100 DPS and was already geared well beyond where Philly is now. Something for Philly to aim for.