Wednesday (28 Jul) - Ya Just Gotta Laugh
Wild has been a bit spoiled with the ICC10 runs the last couple of weeks. Our warrior/tank/raid leader, Bd, who generally runs with Group 1 (Tues/Wed), has been running with Group 2 (Wed/Thurs). Whether he is on his warrior or on his druid . . . whether he is the actual raid leader or just helping out . . . whether we have a super group or one full of alts - his presence, direction, and leadership ensure a fun and smooth raid. Bd went back to raiding with G1 this week, and Wild missed having him in the G2 raid Wednesday night.
The G2 is a good raid, with good people. Interesting people. Kind of crazy people, too, with never a dull moment. For example:
The raid leader, Lady Hunter, is a great friend. She is always ready to help another guildie or friend, and she is a wizard at filling a raid. It seems like she knows half the players on the server, and it's only a matter of time until she gets to know the other half. You can't say no to her when she asks a favor or wants you in her raid - it's just not possible. Once the raid starts, she tends to let the raid establish it's own flow, and so the raid tends to move forward in fits and starts, with several raiders involved in determining the next course of action.
Our lead tank, Tn, is a good tank, and in general he sets the pace of the raid. That is a tougher job than one would think, because in between assaults on trash mobs and bosses, there is a lot of, well, absences from the raid, side tracked conversations, forgotten things that need to be gotten, pizza deliveries, child taming, bio breaks, and the list could go on. Ideally breaks should be restricted to defined periods with a defined start and end, but it never seems to work out that way. So one could excuse Tn when he suddenly sends out an "are u ready?" over raid chat, and then proceeds to engage the boss or trash in front of us without waiting to see who happens to be ready or not. Fits and starts, fits and starts and What? Did we start!? It certainly keeps the healers on our toes.
Our second tank, when its Rs, keeps us all amused in between battles with foam swords we can duel with, children's rocking horses (which the girls really like), and numerous other toys and non-combat pets to wow us with. He's a walking circus clown whether in bear form, chicken form, or sporting leaves. Wild likes to shift into his murloc costume and become part of his show.
Then there is Dn, a death knight who is generally our best DPSer by a fairly good margin. He is pure death to hostile mobs, but he also dies more than any other raider since he and the tanks are always challenging each other. Can Dn pull aggro off of the tank, or can the tank hold it? They just love to push it to the limit. Wild heals him just as I would a tank, because I never know when he'll over-aggro and take the full brunt of a boss attack. Dn also has a mischevious side and may pull mobs at random if the raid has been sidetracked too long. One never knows what is going to happen from minute to minute.
Wild and a holy priest, Cr, are the regular two healers in G2. Sometimes we have a third healer, usually a paladin. Cr is a truly excellent healer and we complement each other well in our healing styles. She is geared as well as Wild and between the two of us we can put out a ton of healing. We struck up a whispered conversation in the raid Wednesday night that went on for most of the evening and was a lot of fun, talking about healing, approaches to different fights, who we liked to heal and who we worried about keeping alive, etc.
Hmm, that's a lot of stuff going on and you might have noticed I haven't even mentioned the actual raiding yet. Well, that's kind of how it feels in the raid, too. We never seem to be quite organized, a lot of things don't seem to be going the way they should, and yet -
1 - We wiped TWICE (and almost a third time) on the initial trash mobs before reaching the first boss. Why? Umm, "why" is not a question worth posing because the answer doesn't exist or would take so long to explain we'd forget why we asked in the first place. Of course, the wipes might have something to do with an impatient raider pulling trash when there were only four other raiders paying any attention. Did we clear the trash, though? We did.
2 - Lord Marrowgar: Another, let's get this thing going moment with the tank running in without a confirmed ready check from the raid. Was it messy? Yes. Was it insane? Probably. Did Marrowgar go down? Yep.
3 - Lady Deathwhisper: Well, we managed to pull an entire room full of adds at once, when that is usually a FOUR pull process. Did raiders die? Yes. Did we wipe? Nope, we cleared all of the trash in that one titanic pull. How did Lady DW fair? The fight went smoothly and flawlessly and she died.
4- The Gunship: Wild's turn in the spotlight. Wild always wears a rocket pack just in case he has to make an emergency jump to the enemy ship, which generally isn't necessary in ten man. Wild also always tests his rocket pack with a couple of jumps on our own ship before the battle starts. Wild made his usual jump, to the top of part of the ship superstructure. He's made that jump a dozen times without a hitch. Time for a hitch. Instead of landing where he expected, he glanced off the superstructure and bounced into the air. Had Wild been on the ball, he might have been able to redirect his flight back to the deck of the ship. Instead, I watched dumbfounded as Wild sailed over the rail of the ship. Note that this is a FLYING ship. It was a long fall. Wild died. Fun and games at Wild's expense went on the whole time Wild rezzed at the graveyard and worked his way back to the raid. Wild won't live that down any time soon. Oh, yes, we won the encounter, once Wild was back and we got started.
5- Deathbringer Saurfang. It took a looong time before all the comings and goings and this and thats ended and we actually started the fight. Once we did start, we were superb. We had a DPSer Marked early in the fight, but we kept pouring heals at him and kept him alive until Saurfang was down to about 33%. Wild then also got Marked, and between Wild, the two tanks, and all the other healing, Wild and Cr finally had to let the Marked DPSer die so we could keep up everyone else, including the Marked Wild. No one else died, and Saurfang fell.
We rolled past Saurfang and brought down mini-bosses Stinky and Precious, but tanks died both times and it seemed we were losing our battle focus. We pushed on to face Festergut. We gave it two attempts, but I think the energy was gone and neither attempt went very well. We'll go back at him on Thursday.
Healing for the night:
Marrowgar:
Wild, 4622 hps/39.4% healing
Cr, 4105/31.6%
Pally, 3767/24.8%
Deathwhisper:
Wild, 3312/34.4%
Pally, 3513/31.3%
Cr, 3113/28.1%
Gunship:
Wild, 2616/41.8%
Cr, 2263/28.1%
Pally, 2429/26.5%
The Saurfang fight has a healing mechanic that invalidates the recount meters.
The two failed Festergut Attempts:
Wild, 4854/40.2%
Cr, 4668/39.1%
Pally, 2133/12.8%
The G1 was also in game Wednesday night, their second night since they start on Tuesdays. For the first time G1 gave the MM guild our first kill of the extremely difficult Professor Putricide in the second wing (Plagueworks), and all ten raiders in G1 got the achievement for clearing Plagueworks. What a huge accomplishment! When G2 ended our raid at 9:30pm, G1 (which starts a half hour earlier than G2) was still raiding. When G1 wrapped up not only had they cleared the Plagueworks, they brought down a boss in the third wing - Valithria Dreamwalker. Another first for the guild.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday (26 Jul) - Icecrown Citadel 25
Monday (26 Jul) - Icecrown Citadel 25
I guess I've been retired long enough for the days to start running together. I think both the Mrs and I sort of lost track of the days when the big RV trip we'd been planning suddenly got placed on hold. What week is this? Mery failed to show up for her Monday night pvp, standing up Lao and Sis, when my days got mixed up. Mery will have to make it up to them.
I'd also promised a recounting of the ICC25 guild run on Saturday (and I can just say "guild" now instead of having to state which guild). The run was scheduled for 3pm, but when Wild logged on at about a quarter till a good chunk of the guild was in Blackwing Lair helping some guildies get the achievement for completing it. It was almost 4pm before the BWL run was completed. Wild's past ICC25 runs with MM have always been fun, but in general have not been that productive. I looked through the achievements of several guildies but could find no one who had defeated a boss in ICC25 beyond the first wing. Should be interesting.
With that in mind, Wild was pretty happy at how quickly we were able to pull together a full 25 man raid. We had 21 guildies plus four non-guildies, all of whom were friends of the guild. Wild also made a decision before the run to spend 30 frost badges to get his i264 idol. Wild has been wearing his i245 idol for a long time because the newer one was only a modest upgrade and there was always something else better to spend those badges on. Well, from a healing spec perspective, there just isn't anything left that Wild needed that required frost badges. Wild has been wanting to put some more effort into his moonkin gear, so buying that last upgrade to his healing gear will allow Wild to spend his future badges on his DPS spec. Wild still needs an upgrade to his i245 healing bracers, and would like to upgrade his necklace and one trinket which are both i251 items. Adding the i264 idol to Wild's gear increased his gear score to 5999.
For the ICC25 run we had three tanks and five healers. Our raid leader, Bd, was not tanking for this run. He was on his druid and was one of the healers. In addition to the two druids, we had two of our best priests as well as our #1 shaman healer.
We cleared through the initial trash mobs without any problems. I couldn't say that for the last couple of ICC25 runs Wild was on, so this was a very good start.
Lord Marrowgar loomed, and we attacked him with gusto. I think we surprised ourselves when Marrowgar went down on our first attempt. I have to admit that the buff to ICC had increased last week to 30%, up from the 25% prior to that. The buff does help in beating the ICC bosses, but everyone still has to be on the ball, know the fight, and not make mistakes to succeed.
Marrowgar dropped the Frigid Eye ring, the one Wild had lusted after on the AH at 12k gold. Wild wanted it, but he didn't absolutely need it. Wild had comparable rings (both his rings were i264), but the Eye had more +haste on it, and Wild was trying to max out his haste stat. But Bd's druid was wearing an i232 ring, and frankly passing on that ring so that Bd or another needy raider could get it helped Wild more than if Wild got it. Wild passed, and Bd ended up winning it. It was a huge upgrade for him.
Lady Deathwhisper came next, and she also fell on our first try. The Gunship came next, and because it was ICC25, and there would be many more raiders jumping to the enemy ship than we have in ICC10, Wild would not be able to heal from the rail of his own ship this time. Wild would be healing the jumpers (along with two other healers) and would have to jump to the enemy ship along with them. Wild has done the jump before, though, so I wasn't that worried about it. There were two tanks jumping as well, and one of them had not done it before. We had some rough spots during the battle, and one of the jumping tanks died on the rail of the enemy ship. Wild got a battle rez on him, but he had to wait until the jump phase to accept it so that he could have some protection. Wild jumped right to him on the next jump and kept him healed long enough to escape back to our ship. We beat the Gunship on our first try.
That brought us to Deathbringer Saurfang. For most of the raid, it was their first look at him in ICC25. While we set up for the fight someone talked to the npc that starts the event. There is almost two minutes of talking between npcs before the fight would start. The first time you listen to it, it's really interesting, with a lot of lore. Now, those of us who have heard it over and over just wanted it done with. While we were waiting, Bd whispered Wild. "So, you join the guild and suddenly we are burning through ICC25!" Wild sent back an "Aw shucks, thanks! but I think our success has a lot more to do with the great group of raiders the raid leader put together - ie, you!"
Deathbringer Saurfang went down on our first attempt. The first wing was toast, and we we still moving forward. The second wing trash fell, including mini-bosses Stinky and Precious. Festergut waited for us, and for many in the raid it was their first look at the filthy, odorous monstrosity in either ICC25 or ICC10.
Bd spent a good bit of time going over the fight, and then turned us loose to give it a try. For a first attempt it went exceedingly well. We had two raiders die, but Wild and Bd got them both battle rezzed, and we battled Festergut for a very long time. Too long, in fact, and we reached the end of the enrage timer and Festergut then wiped us.
We set up for the next attempt, with our only worry being whether we had enough DPS to bring him down before the enrage timer hit. Figuring that now everyone had seen the fight at least once, our DPS should rise on our second attempt. It did, and Festergut fell.
Five bosses down in ICC25 was an outstanding accomplishment for the guild. It was 6:30pm, and I was already in trouble with the Mrs for being late to dinner and wondering if Wild would have to bow out of the raid before it was over. Other folks were checking the time as well, however, and we eventually decided to call it for the night.
In other news Lost's Tuesday morning sales were 16g. Prices at both the Horde and Alliance auction houses were very high after a big weekend. Lost's sales may go down this week since there were very few bargains and Lost has not yet been able to build up any stock to take advantage of those prices. Even Happy was being cautious, though, because those prices will definitely fall by large margins once more stock starts filling up the AH.
I guess I've been retired long enough for the days to start running together. I think both the Mrs and I sort of lost track of the days when the big RV trip we'd been planning suddenly got placed on hold. What week is this? Mery failed to show up for her Monday night pvp, standing up Lao and Sis, when my days got mixed up. Mery will have to make it up to them.
I'd also promised a recounting of the ICC25 guild run on Saturday (and I can just say "guild" now instead of having to state which guild). The run was scheduled for 3pm, but when Wild logged on at about a quarter till a good chunk of the guild was in Blackwing Lair helping some guildies get the achievement for completing it. It was almost 4pm before the BWL run was completed. Wild's past ICC25 runs with MM have always been fun, but in general have not been that productive. I looked through the achievements of several guildies but could find no one who had defeated a boss in ICC25 beyond the first wing. Should be interesting.
With that in mind, Wild was pretty happy at how quickly we were able to pull together a full 25 man raid. We had 21 guildies plus four non-guildies, all of whom were friends of the guild. Wild also made a decision before the run to spend 30 frost badges to get his i264 idol. Wild has been wearing his i245 idol for a long time because the newer one was only a modest upgrade and there was always something else better to spend those badges on. Well, from a healing spec perspective, there just isn't anything left that Wild needed that required frost badges. Wild has been wanting to put some more effort into his moonkin gear, so buying that last upgrade to his healing gear will allow Wild to spend his future badges on his DPS spec. Wild still needs an upgrade to his i245 healing bracers, and would like to upgrade his necklace and one trinket which are both i251 items. Adding the i264 idol to Wild's gear increased his gear score to 5999.
For the ICC25 run we had three tanks and five healers. Our raid leader, Bd, was not tanking for this run. He was on his druid and was one of the healers. In addition to the two druids, we had two of our best priests as well as our #1 shaman healer.
We cleared through the initial trash mobs without any problems. I couldn't say that for the last couple of ICC25 runs Wild was on, so this was a very good start.
Lord Marrowgar loomed, and we attacked him with gusto. I think we surprised ourselves when Marrowgar went down on our first attempt. I have to admit that the buff to ICC had increased last week to 30%, up from the 25% prior to that. The buff does help in beating the ICC bosses, but everyone still has to be on the ball, know the fight, and not make mistakes to succeed.
Marrowgar dropped the Frigid Eye ring, the one Wild had lusted after on the AH at 12k gold. Wild wanted it, but he didn't absolutely need it. Wild had comparable rings (both his rings were i264), but the Eye had more +haste on it, and Wild was trying to max out his haste stat. But Bd's druid was wearing an i232 ring, and frankly passing on that ring so that Bd or another needy raider could get it helped Wild more than if Wild got it. Wild passed, and Bd ended up winning it. It was a huge upgrade for him.
Lady Deathwhisper came next, and she also fell on our first try. The Gunship came next, and because it was ICC25, and there would be many more raiders jumping to the enemy ship than we have in ICC10, Wild would not be able to heal from the rail of his own ship this time. Wild would be healing the jumpers (along with two other healers) and would have to jump to the enemy ship along with them. Wild has done the jump before, though, so I wasn't that worried about it. There were two tanks jumping as well, and one of them had not done it before. We had some rough spots during the battle, and one of the jumping tanks died on the rail of the enemy ship. Wild got a battle rez on him, but he had to wait until the jump phase to accept it so that he could have some protection. Wild jumped right to him on the next jump and kept him healed long enough to escape back to our ship. We beat the Gunship on our first try.
That brought us to Deathbringer Saurfang. For most of the raid, it was their first look at him in ICC25. While we set up for the fight someone talked to the npc that starts the event. There is almost two minutes of talking between npcs before the fight would start. The first time you listen to it, it's really interesting, with a lot of lore. Now, those of us who have heard it over and over just wanted it done with. While we were waiting, Bd whispered Wild. "So, you join the guild and suddenly we are burning through ICC25!" Wild sent back an "Aw shucks, thanks! but I think our success has a lot more to do with the great group of raiders the raid leader put together - ie, you!"
Deathbringer Saurfang went down on our first attempt. The first wing was toast, and we we still moving forward. The second wing trash fell, including mini-bosses Stinky and Precious. Festergut waited for us, and for many in the raid it was their first look at the filthy, odorous monstrosity in either ICC25 or ICC10.
Bd spent a good bit of time going over the fight, and then turned us loose to give it a try. For a first attempt it went exceedingly well. We had two raiders die, but Wild and Bd got them both battle rezzed, and we battled Festergut for a very long time. Too long, in fact, and we reached the end of the enrage timer and Festergut then wiped us.
We set up for the next attempt, with our only worry being whether we had enough DPS to bring him down before the enrage timer hit. Figuring that now everyone had seen the fight at least once, our DPS should rise on our second attempt. It did, and Festergut fell.
Five bosses down in ICC25 was an outstanding accomplishment for the guild. It was 6:30pm, and I was already in trouble with the Mrs for being late to dinner and wondering if Wild would have to bow out of the raid before it was over. Other folks were checking the time as well, however, and we eventually decided to call it for the night.
In other news Lost's Tuesday morning sales were 16g. Prices at both the Horde and Alliance auction houses were very high after a big weekend. Lost's sales may go down this week since there were very few bargains and Lost has not yet been able to build up any stock to take advantage of those prices. Even Happy was being cautious, though, because those prices will definitely fall by large margins once more stock starts filling up the AH.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Weekend (25 Jul) - Cousins
Weekend (25 Jul) - Cousins
Wild's cousins on the alliance side are small in number and still learning. While some help has been provided to them, and they have at least gotten to the point where they have a guild, for the most part they will have to make their own way. Their numbers may grow, too, when Cataclysm arrives. To support that, one of the youngest cousins came up with an idea.
The Wild family's banking business, with Happy at the helm, has done well and continues to prosper, bringing in the resources needed to support the family. So, says the young cousin, why not establish a similar venture on the alliance side? It would have to start out small, and grow over time, which means it needs to be established soon if it is to grow enough to support the new adventures coming in Cataclysm. Someone would need to volunteer, and be willing to put in the kind of hours Happy does to keep the business solvent.
That young cousin and volunteer is Alwayslost, a young lass just learning her paladin trade. Taken under the wing of her brother Java, who loaned her his heirloom shoulders, Lost completed her initial paladin training at her home village of Ammen Vale on Azuremyst Isle and then moved up to the marginally larger town of Azure Watch. Lost then made her way to the major city of Exodar on the shoreline of the island as a level 10, where the nearest Alliance Auction House was located. Lost did not come completely out of nowhere, however. While living with her birth family at Ammen Vale she became a local scholar, writing correspondence which got her notice, particularly at the major knowledge center of Wowhead. Finances had always fascinated her as well, and she was eager to try her hand at the Auction House business.
Lost picked Happy's brains, getting him to teach her how to work the AH and, more importantly, how to get started. Happy started from scratch, and so must she, Happy told her. Start small, and grow from there. Wild noted that Happy's advice was a bit vague (Happy hates to divulge his secrets). So Wild offered his own advice. Things are not the same as when Happy started up his business, Wild told her. Back then, low level green items sold for a small amount of silver, and the disenchanted materials could then be sold for a profit. Today, those same green items could sell for many gold each, and the mats made by disenchanting them would be worth almost nothing. That approach simply won't work on the kind of scale Happy used to handle every day. Today, it's a matter of learning the prices and the ebb and flow of posted items throughout the week. Look for materials that go up and down in pricing, the bigger the difference the better, and do the obvious - buy when it's low, and sell when it's high. Good research, good monitoring, and a good eye for a bargain are what's important.
Based on her new knowledge, Lost, with a small stake from Wild, made her first moves on the Alliance Auction House. First, she did a complete scan of all items and all prices. That took 15 minutes to build up the database of over 30,000 items being auctioned. Lost then worked through all of the enchanting dusts, essences, and shards for sale, looking for bargains. She found two, which was pretty good for her first attempt. She bid on 2 greater magic essences and six greater mystic essences selling very low and with only 30 minutes left on the auction timer. Lost was outbid on both once, but she rebid, and her bids held. She'd won her first items. Lost then broke down the greaters into lessers (one greater = three lessers) and then posted the lessers for sale. If they sold Lost would make double back what they cost her. We're talking small numbers here - ie, a few silver. Ya gotta start somewhere.
Lost then took a bigger risk when she bought 5 large brilliant shards at 3 gold each. They were well underpriced as all of the other shards were selling for over 4 gold each. Lost reposted the 5 shards at 3g 98s, which became the lowest price posted. Should they sell, she'll make a profit of close to 5g. She also could have gotten a bargain on some illusion dust, but Happy was quick to let her know that illusion dust was one of those mats where demand fluctuated quite a bit. It might be a bargain, but if demand was low it simply wouldn't sell regardless of price. If that was the case, it was better to wait and see how low impatient bidders would go and then consider buying.
Philly had a busy saturday morning, getting her daily JC quest done and getting in her first Wintergrasp pvp battle of the day - which she lost, but still earned some WG shards needed for heirloom purchases. Philly also got herself invited to the weekly frost raid against Noth in Naxxramas. Philly had heard what happened to Wild, who forgot to collect the quest and may have lost his chance to get his badges this week. Philly made sure she had the quest. Noth is crazy easy. The fight normally has several phases when Noth teleports out of range while mobs flood the chamber. But Noth died before he ever got off his first teleport. Philly was 6th (out of 7) in DPS (she went as a shadow priest) but still did respectable (for her) damage on the boss at 3906 DPS. Philly now has 37 frost badges and will eventually have to start thinking about what her first purchase of gear should be.
Late Saturday night, after Happy had made his final AH check and gone to bed, Lost also hit the AH to see how her new business was doing. She was a bit disappointed. Her mailbox was empty. No sales. Lost bit her lip and bounced on her toes a couple of times, drawing attention from a couple of alliance males nearby, but oblivious to that. It hasn't even been 24 hours yet, she told herself. Give it time.
Sunday morning, Lost was up early but had to wait for Happy to get done with his business. It took awhile, making Lost antsy. Happy had a very good morning and even smiled when he passed the baton to Lost. Lost couldn't wait to open her mailbox. She could see before she even got to it that there was mail waiting. Sales! Lost had sold all of the goods she'd placed on the AH - except for the large brilliant shards. Lost learned her first two lessons. (1) it takes time for things to sell, so don't be in a hurry; and (2) sometimes you lose. Lost figured she'd make a killing buying those brilliant shards for 3g and selling them for 3g98s. After all, she was posting at the lowest price. But that price didn't hold up. When she checked the AH there were more than 20 bids posted for less than her 3g98s, several as low 3g25s. The silver lining is that those shards, once reposted at a lower price, should still make Lost a small profit - at least she hopes so.
Lesson (3) - Remind yourself to learn the market before taking too big a risk. Happy wasn't sure Lost has learned that lesson yet. She made a few more savvy purchases, and then mulled over the list of arcane dust for sale. There was more than a 50s difference between the lowest priced stack and the next lowest. Here was an opportunity. Lost seemed to forget, however, what Happy had told her about learning the ebb and flow of the market. Was Lost sure this was the bargain she thought it was? Lost bought the "cheap" dust and reposted at a higher price. Both Happy and Lost will be interested to see how that pans out.
For her first day on the job, however, Lost did pretty well, recording sales of just over 22 gold. Not bad at all.
On Monday morning Lost checked her mail and nearly swooned. She had 25 sales, including all of the arcane dust. She made 46 gold. Happy reminded Lost that this was weekend sales, and that she should be cautious during the early part of the week as pricing tends to rise and demand falls. So it may look like a good time to sell high as well, but most of those high prices will find no buyer. However, keep a eye out for real bargains, because sometimes sellers dump their stock to very low prices when sales slow in order to get at least something for their farming trouble. Come around Thursday, things will start to settle out with more expected pricing levels.
There was even more action over the weekend as Wild joined his new guild in running ICC25 on Saturday afternoon. More on that to follow.
Wild's cousins on the alliance side are small in number and still learning. While some help has been provided to them, and they have at least gotten to the point where they have a guild, for the most part they will have to make their own way. Their numbers may grow, too, when Cataclysm arrives. To support that, one of the youngest cousins came up with an idea.
The Wild family's banking business, with Happy at the helm, has done well and continues to prosper, bringing in the resources needed to support the family. So, says the young cousin, why not establish a similar venture on the alliance side? It would have to start out small, and grow over time, which means it needs to be established soon if it is to grow enough to support the new adventures coming in Cataclysm. Someone would need to volunteer, and be willing to put in the kind of hours Happy does to keep the business solvent.
That young cousin and volunteer is Alwayslost, a young lass just learning her paladin trade. Taken under the wing of her brother Java, who loaned her his heirloom shoulders, Lost completed her initial paladin training at her home village of Ammen Vale on Azuremyst Isle and then moved up to the marginally larger town of Azure Watch. Lost then made her way to the major city of Exodar on the shoreline of the island as a level 10, where the nearest Alliance Auction House was located. Lost did not come completely out of nowhere, however. While living with her birth family at Ammen Vale she became a local scholar, writing correspondence which got her notice, particularly at the major knowledge center of Wowhead. Finances had always fascinated her as well, and she was eager to try her hand at the Auction House business.
Lost picked Happy's brains, getting him to teach her how to work the AH and, more importantly, how to get started. Happy started from scratch, and so must she, Happy told her. Start small, and grow from there. Wild noted that Happy's advice was a bit vague (Happy hates to divulge his secrets). So Wild offered his own advice. Things are not the same as when Happy started up his business, Wild told her. Back then, low level green items sold for a small amount of silver, and the disenchanted materials could then be sold for a profit. Today, those same green items could sell for many gold each, and the mats made by disenchanting them would be worth almost nothing. That approach simply won't work on the kind of scale Happy used to handle every day. Today, it's a matter of learning the prices and the ebb and flow of posted items throughout the week. Look for materials that go up and down in pricing, the bigger the difference the better, and do the obvious - buy when it's low, and sell when it's high. Good research, good monitoring, and a good eye for a bargain are what's important.
Based on her new knowledge, Lost, with a small stake from Wild, made her first moves on the Alliance Auction House. First, she did a complete scan of all items and all prices. That took 15 minutes to build up the database of over 30,000 items being auctioned. Lost then worked through all of the enchanting dusts, essences, and shards for sale, looking for bargains. She found two, which was pretty good for her first attempt. She bid on 2 greater magic essences and six greater mystic essences selling very low and with only 30 minutes left on the auction timer. Lost was outbid on both once, but she rebid, and her bids held. She'd won her first items. Lost then broke down the greaters into lessers (one greater = three lessers) and then posted the lessers for sale. If they sold Lost would make double back what they cost her. We're talking small numbers here - ie, a few silver. Ya gotta start somewhere.
Lost then took a bigger risk when she bought 5 large brilliant shards at 3 gold each. They were well underpriced as all of the other shards were selling for over 4 gold each. Lost reposted the 5 shards at 3g 98s, which became the lowest price posted. Should they sell, she'll make a profit of close to 5g. She also could have gotten a bargain on some illusion dust, but Happy was quick to let her know that illusion dust was one of those mats where demand fluctuated quite a bit. It might be a bargain, but if demand was low it simply wouldn't sell regardless of price. If that was the case, it was better to wait and see how low impatient bidders would go and then consider buying.
Philly had a busy saturday morning, getting her daily JC quest done and getting in her first Wintergrasp pvp battle of the day - which she lost, but still earned some WG shards needed for heirloom purchases. Philly also got herself invited to the weekly frost raid against Noth in Naxxramas. Philly had heard what happened to Wild, who forgot to collect the quest and may have lost his chance to get his badges this week. Philly made sure she had the quest. Noth is crazy easy. The fight normally has several phases when Noth teleports out of range while mobs flood the chamber. But Noth died before he ever got off his first teleport. Philly was 6th (out of 7) in DPS (she went as a shadow priest) but still did respectable (for her) damage on the boss at 3906 DPS. Philly now has 37 frost badges and will eventually have to start thinking about what her first purchase of gear should be.
Late Saturday night, after Happy had made his final AH check and gone to bed, Lost also hit the AH to see how her new business was doing. She was a bit disappointed. Her mailbox was empty. No sales. Lost bit her lip and bounced on her toes a couple of times, drawing attention from a couple of alliance males nearby, but oblivious to that. It hasn't even been 24 hours yet, she told herself. Give it time.
Sunday morning, Lost was up early but had to wait for Happy to get done with his business. It took awhile, making Lost antsy. Happy had a very good morning and even smiled when he passed the baton to Lost. Lost couldn't wait to open her mailbox. She could see before she even got to it that there was mail waiting. Sales! Lost had sold all of the goods she'd placed on the AH - except for the large brilliant shards. Lost learned her first two lessons. (1) it takes time for things to sell, so don't be in a hurry; and (2) sometimes you lose. Lost figured she'd make a killing buying those brilliant shards for 3g and selling them for 3g98s. After all, she was posting at the lowest price. But that price didn't hold up. When she checked the AH there were more than 20 bids posted for less than her 3g98s, several as low 3g25s. The silver lining is that those shards, once reposted at a lower price, should still make Lost a small profit - at least she hopes so.
Lesson (3) - Remind yourself to learn the market before taking too big a risk. Happy wasn't sure Lost has learned that lesson yet. She made a few more savvy purchases, and then mulled over the list of arcane dust for sale. There was more than a 50s difference between the lowest priced stack and the next lowest. Here was an opportunity. Lost seemed to forget, however, what Happy had told her about learning the ebb and flow of the market. Was Lost sure this was the bargain she thought it was? Lost bought the "cheap" dust and reposted at a higher price. Both Happy and Lost will be interested to see how that pans out.
For her first day on the job, however, Lost did pretty well, recording sales of just over 22 gold. Not bad at all.
On Monday morning Lost checked her mail and nearly swooned. She had 25 sales, including all of the arcane dust. She made 46 gold. Happy reminded Lost that this was weekend sales, and that she should be cautious during the early part of the week as pricing tends to rise and demand falls. So it may look like a good time to sell high as well, but most of those high prices will find no buyer. However, keep a eye out for real bargains, because sometimes sellers dump their stock to very low prices when sales slow in order to get at least something for their farming trouble. Come around Thursday, things will start to settle out with more expected pricing levels.
There was even more action over the weekend as Wild joined his new guild in running ICC25 on Saturday afternoon. More on that to follow.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Thursday (22 Jul) - Rockin' With MM
Thursday (22 Jul) - Rockin' With MM
Night #2 of our push into the Plagueworks wing of Icecrown Citadel commenced very close to our scheduled start time of 6:30pm. We had to re-clear trash to get to the waiting Rotface, but that did not take long. For Rotface we would be back to using three healers. There were so many moving parts to this fight it took three healers to keep track of all the damage being done.
Before all that, though, there was the matter of Wild's guild decision. While everyone was assembling for the raid, Wild whispered his friend Bd, who was an officer in MM and one of several MM guildies who had in the past given Wild an open invitation to join MM. "Hey, Bd, I have a favor to ask."
Bd was busy helping to get the raid set up, talking with the other raid group that was also planning a run, chatting with friends, and in general doing ten things at once, which is quite normal for the cheery and always upbeat warrior. "What do ya need?" he whispered back.
"Do you think you could invite Wild to join MM?" Wild whispered back. Five minutes later I still hadn't received a reply. Wild had already been invited into the raid by Lady Hunter and I was standing inside ICC with about half of those raiders. Perhaps Wild felt a small bit of anxiety when the answer didn't come back immediately - but I also know Bd. He's probably already forgotten I'd whispered him, I figured, so Wild whispered him again. "Hey, Bd, do you remember me asking you for a favor?"
There was a short pause, and then Bd yelled over vent to the whole raid, "Sh-t! Wild doesn't have a quild tag!" at the same time Wild was whispering him again, "If you'll have me I'd like to join MM."
"Hells yea!!!" he sent back. And Wild got his guild invite. Wild got a lot of congratulations and plenty of teasing about how everyone thought Wild was already a guildie. There was no question that Wild had made the right choice.
Now, back to Rotface. I think I've described this fight before, so let's take a look at it this time purely from Wild's point of view during the actual progression of the battle. Wild was assigned to keep heals on the off tank, Bd. The off tank's role was to kite around the nasty oozes that would spawn all too frequently during the battle. Simple, right? Not exactly. The main tank dealing with Rotface got a dedicated healer, and the raid healer also had a special role in purging the ooze when it formed and making sure that the raider with an ooze on his trail was kept alive.
So, here goes. The main tank counts down, and just before the charge Wild drops a Regrowth on him to give him a bit of heal of time (HoT) lovin' for the start of the fight. Wild runs in a few steps behind the tank and takes up position under the butt of Rotface. Yea, Wild needed goggles and a full mask to stand under that leaking hole. Wild started healing, adding more HoTs to the main tank and dropping some "just in case" hots on the off tank who I was responsible for. The first 30 seconds aren't too bad. Rotface made his first move, twisting around and taking a big breath before hawking out a long stream of vomit. Wild, knowing that was coming, ducked between Rotface's legs to avoid the spew. At the same time the first ooze formed, attaching itself to one of the melee raiders. Wild refreshed the HoTs on the off tank, who was on the move toward the raider with the ooze. More nasty yellow-green stuff is coming from the walls, and Wild has to dance aside to avoid it. Rotface spews again and the maneuvering Wild catches some of it. Healing himself on the move, Wild sees that a second ooze has formed and that in the space of two seconds the off tank is down to half health. Wild hits his "oh crap!" spell, getting the off tank back to full health and follows that with more HoTs. The two oozes merge into one larger ooze that the off tank is now kiting. That's the good news. The bad news is that a third ooze has formed and is chasing the main tank healer. The main tank is losing health fast while his healer is on the run. Wild pours healing on the main tank, and then quickly switches back to the off tank, who was getting his rear chewed on by the big ooze. Wild is still dancing back and forth between the legs of Rotface avoiding his vomit. A raider is dead. When did that happen?
"Wildshard has a mutated infection." Oh crap, now Wild has an ooze on his tail. Wild breaks away from the group of raiders around Rotface and heads toward the door. That is just so Wild can get his bearings and look for the off tank. Wild is running along the outer edge of of the chamber, and the off tank is behind me. Sigh, that's not going to work. Wild pops a couple of HoTs on himself and does a 180, taking some peripheral damage from the ooze as I pass by it, and then kiting the thing between the off tank and the big ooze that is chasing him. I definitely did NOT want to get close to the big ooze, so as soon as I made the pass, Wild veered off and immediately started healing the off tank. The small ooze merged with the big one, with the off tank avoiding most of the damage associated with that merger.
Wild turned back into the center only to hear that the big ooze was about to explode. Wild veered back out, hoping to find a spot that had not been occupied by another raider when the exploding pieces of big ooze came raining down around us. Wild was safe, other raiders were not so lucky and died.
Things started going downhill. Some oozes got loose and ran amuck in the raid, spraying AoE damage on everyone in range. Wild was frantically trying to keep too many raiders alive, and when a big ooze swallowed up the off tank, Wild could not get heals to him fast enough and he died.
It was a wipe.
We made a promising start on our first attempt, getting Rotface to 61%. Our best attempt was our 5th, when we got him all the way down to 18%. All told we tried 7 times. We didn't bring him down, but I think we were all a lot more confident at the end than we were at the beginning.
What now? The raid leader made a smart call. Rather than get into a rut against Rotface, which might have the not so good side effect of enforcing the bad habits that were causing us to wipe, she opted to switch to a fresh, new boss, and let us think about Rotface for next week.
So we left the Plagueworks and headed for the fourth wing, Frostwing Halls. Ok, wait a minute. What happened to the third wing? It's still there. Let me explain. Once the first wing has been cleared, raiders can choose to go to any other wing in any order. All we have to do is clear the trash mobs to those bosses. Normally, the wings are done in order as the encounters generally get tougher wing by wing. But then each encounter has it's own special requirements, so a wing and a boss may be chosen because the raid makeup best fits that particular fight. That was the call made this night. The best choice of boss for our group was found in the Frostwing Halls. The boss? Valithria Dreamwalker.
If that name is familiar it's because we attempted this boss last week, and most of the raiders this week has now seen this boss at least once. Several raiders hadn't, though, including Lady Hunter, who was playing her paladin, Kt. Wild and Kt would be the two priests that get to have all the fun of going into the phased area of the dungeon through portals and flying around and healing the dragon. Last week Wild was petrified of that fight - now Wild can't wait to get in there. The really hard healing job went to our priest, who would have to stay outside the portal and heal the entire raid.
We made four attempts on Dreamwalker, making modest progress and getting her health up to 63% (remember we win this battle by healing her up to 100%). The only thing we couldn't figure out was why Kt's healing numbers never came close to where they should be. It didn't really affect the outcomes of the attempts this week, as the raid was wiping on the swarming mobs long before we'd have time to fully heal the dragon, but it would become an issue if we didn't figure it out. Wild was healing for over 10k hps, which was still a bit low, but Kt was healing for under 5k, lower even than the priest, and even with all of the healing buffs provided by going inside the portal. That's one thing we'll need to figure out for next time.
Ok, so again, like last week, we came away from our second night of raiding without a boss kill. But Wild didn't mind. He had a new home, and good friends to share it with.
Night #2 of our push into the Plagueworks wing of Icecrown Citadel commenced very close to our scheduled start time of 6:30pm. We had to re-clear trash to get to the waiting Rotface, but that did not take long. For Rotface we would be back to using three healers. There were so many moving parts to this fight it took three healers to keep track of all the damage being done.
Before all that, though, there was the matter of Wild's guild decision. While everyone was assembling for the raid, Wild whispered his friend Bd, who was an officer in MM and one of several MM guildies who had in the past given Wild an open invitation to join MM. "Hey, Bd, I have a favor to ask."
Bd was busy helping to get the raid set up, talking with the other raid group that was also planning a run, chatting with friends, and in general doing ten things at once, which is quite normal for the cheery and always upbeat warrior. "What do ya need?" he whispered back.
"Do you think you could invite Wild to join MM?" Wild whispered back. Five minutes later I still hadn't received a reply. Wild had already been invited into the raid by Lady Hunter and I was standing inside ICC with about half of those raiders. Perhaps Wild felt a small bit of anxiety when the answer didn't come back immediately - but I also know Bd. He's probably already forgotten I'd whispered him, I figured, so Wild whispered him again. "Hey, Bd, do you remember me asking you for a favor?"
There was a short pause, and then Bd yelled over vent to the whole raid, "Sh-t! Wild doesn't have a quild tag!" at the same time Wild was whispering him again, "If you'll have me I'd like to join MM."
"Hells yea!!!" he sent back. And Wild got his guild invite. Wild got a lot of congratulations and plenty of teasing about how everyone thought Wild was already a guildie. There was no question that Wild had made the right choice.
Now, back to Rotface. I think I've described this fight before, so let's take a look at it this time purely from Wild's point of view during the actual progression of the battle. Wild was assigned to keep heals on the off tank, Bd. The off tank's role was to kite around the nasty oozes that would spawn all too frequently during the battle. Simple, right? Not exactly. The main tank dealing with Rotface got a dedicated healer, and the raid healer also had a special role in purging the ooze when it formed and making sure that the raider with an ooze on his trail was kept alive.
So, here goes. The main tank counts down, and just before the charge Wild drops a Regrowth on him to give him a bit of heal of time (HoT) lovin' for the start of the fight. Wild runs in a few steps behind the tank and takes up position under the butt of Rotface. Yea, Wild needed goggles and a full mask to stand under that leaking hole. Wild started healing, adding more HoTs to the main tank and dropping some "just in case" hots on the off tank who I was responsible for. The first 30 seconds aren't too bad. Rotface made his first move, twisting around and taking a big breath before hawking out a long stream of vomit. Wild, knowing that was coming, ducked between Rotface's legs to avoid the spew. At the same time the first ooze formed, attaching itself to one of the melee raiders. Wild refreshed the HoTs on the off tank, who was on the move toward the raider with the ooze. More nasty yellow-green stuff is coming from the walls, and Wild has to dance aside to avoid it. Rotface spews again and the maneuvering Wild catches some of it. Healing himself on the move, Wild sees that a second ooze has formed and that in the space of two seconds the off tank is down to half health. Wild hits his "oh crap!" spell, getting the off tank back to full health and follows that with more HoTs. The two oozes merge into one larger ooze that the off tank is now kiting. That's the good news. The bad news is that a third ooze has formed and is chasing the main tank healer. The main tank is losing health fast while his healer is on the run. Wild pours healing on the main tank, and then quickly switches back to the off tank, who was getting his rear chewed on by the big ooze. Wild is still dancing back and forth between the legs of Rotface avoiding his vomit. A raider is dead. When did that happen?
"Wildshard has a mutated infection." Oh crap, now Wild has an ooze on his tail. Wild breaks away from the group of raiders around Rotface and heads toward the door. That is just so Wild can get his bearings and look for the off tank. Wild is running along the outer edge of of the chamber, and the off tank is behind me. Sigh, that's not going to work. Wild pops a couple of HoTs on himself and does a 180, taking some peripheral damage from the ooze as I pass by it, and then kiting the thing between the off tank and the big ooze that is chasing him. I definitely did NOT want to get close to the big ooze, so as soon as I made the pass, Wild veered off and immediately started healing the off tank. The small ooze merged with the big one, with the off tank avoiding most of the damage associated with that merger.
Wild turned back into the center only to hear that the big ooze was about to explode. Wild veered back out, hoping to find a spot that had not been occupied by another raider when the exploding pieces of big ooze came raining down around us. Wild was safe, other raiders were not so lucky and died.
Things started going downhill. Some oozes got loose and ran amuck in the raid, spraying AoE damage on everyone in range. Wild was frantically trying to keep too many raiders alive, and when a big ooze swallowed up the off tank, Wild could not get heals to him fast enough and he died.
It was a wipe.
We made a promising start on our first attempt, getting Rotface to 61%. Our best attempt was our 5th, when we got him all the way down to 18%. All told we tried 7 times. We didn't bring him down, but I think we were all a lot more confident at the end than we were at the beginning.
What now? The raid leader made a smart call. Rather than get into a rut against Rotface, which might have the not so good side effect of enforcing the bad habits that were causing us to wipe, she opted to switch to a fresh, new boss, and let us think about Rotface for next week.
So we left the Plagueworks and headed for the fourth wing, Frostwing Halls. Ok, wait a minute. What happened to the third wing? It's still there. Let me explain. Once the first wing has been cleared, raiders can choose to go to any other wing in any order. All we have to do is clear the trash mobs to those bosses. Normally, the wings are done in order as the encounters generally get tougher wing by wing. But then each encounter has it's own special requirements, so a wing and a boss may be chosen because the raid makeup best fits that particular fight. That was the call made this night. The best choice of boss for our group was found in the Frostwing Halls. The boss? Valithria Dreamwalker.
If that name is familiar it's because we attempted this boss last week, and most of the raiders this week has now seen this boss at least once. Several raiders hadn't, though, including Lady Hunter, who was playing her paladin, Kt. Wild and Kt would be the two priests that get to have all the fun of going into the phased area of the dungeon through portals and flying around and healing the dragon. Last week Wild was petrified of that fight - now Wild can't wait to get in there. The really hard healing job went to our priest, who would have to stay outside the portal and heal the entire raid.
We made four attempts on Dreamwalker, making modest progress and getting her health up to 63% (remember we win this battle by healing her up to 100%). The only thing we couldn't figure out was why Kt's healing numbers never came close to where they should be. It didn't really affect the outcomes of the attempts this week, as the raid was wiping on the swarming mobs long before we'd have time to fully heal the dragon, but it would become an issue if we didn't figure it out. Wild was healing for over 10k hps, which was still a bit low, but Kt was healing for under 5k, lower even than the priest, and even with all of the healing buffs provided by going inside the portal. That's one thing we'll need to figure out for next time.
Ok, so again, like last week, we came away from our second night of raiding without a boss kill. But Wild didn't mind. He had a new home, and good friends to share it with.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday (22 Jul) - A Guild Decision
Wednesday (22 Jul) - A Guild Decision
There was an ICC10 raid Wednesday night, and the best way to describe it was to use the old adage: "We came. We saw. We conquered!"
Icecrown Citadel's Lower Spire can no longer contain us. Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, the Gunship, and Deathbringer Saurfang all fell on our first assault.
We then moved on to the second wing, The Plagueworks. The two mini-bosses, Stinky and Precious, went down quickly and we reached Festergut. We had a little blip in our march on our first attempt, when a couple of raiders got confused about how the spores worked. Do that wrong and a lot of raiders die - which they did, very early in the fight. Instead of trying to salvage it, we did an intentional wipe so that we could start over more quickly. Festergut went down on our second try. There was a funny moment on the second attack, though, again involving the spores. In ICC10 Festergut periodically puts a spore on two raiders. Every raider needs to get close to one of those spores in the seconds after they spawn. The spores then explode, doing modest damage to the raid, but also leaving a debuff on all those close to the spores that greatly reduces shadow damage. This is critical, for without that shadow debuff Festergut's Pungent Blight attack will one shot kill an unprotected raider. Most of the time we are positioned so that little movement is required to get to a "spored" raider. On some occasions, though, the random nature of who gets them forces a raider to have to run to the center or run out to the edge. One raider who had to do that got so excited she ran out to the edge like she was supposed to - and then kept running, with three of us, including Wild, running after her to get close enough to get the spore debuff! We all got the giggles, and luckily we also got her to stop running in time to get our debuff.
Normally we would have had time to take on the next boss, Rotface, but we ended things early so that MM guild officers could have a meeting.
Wild and Philly learned the results of that meeting early Thursday morning. Philly was in game to get her daily Jewelcrafting quest done. She'd been neglecting that task lately, and that's bad because it takes four days of quests to be able to buy one new JC recipe, and Philly still has many recipes she needs to buy. These dailies are pretty easy to do, but this particular one got her into trouble. The quest was to kill Vyrkuls for a necklace (vyrkuls are like vikings). Philly usually flies to the far corner of Northrend to kill the mid-level 70s vyrkuls, but she knew there were some level 80 ones much closer to Dalaran in Icecrown. Philly went there, instead, found the town of Yrm-something or other and started killing. On her third target the single vyrkul she attacked drew five more. Even now I don't know where they came from. Philly was alone on a winding mountainous trail with that one vyrkul. My guess is that those incoming vyrkuls were on the paths below and above Philly, but it was still surprising that they would all aggro at once. Philly kept her cool, DoTing up the angry mobs and taking them down, healing a time or two when her health started to drain. She killed all six, and started looting bodies to get her necklace. Crazily, the looting caused another group of five vyrkuls to come running again. I don't know if that is some mechanic of this particular area, which Philly had never been to before, or if it was a bug. Fearing she would be fighting those five mobs over and over, Philly decided to mountain goat her way down the mountain. She managed not to jump to her death, and finally got out of range and clear enough to call her flying mount and get out of there. Philly got her quest done, but that was quite a bit more excitement than she was expecting on an early Thursday morning.
But back to the plans of the MM guild. There are many guilds out there, and I have to include FS in that group, where they are pretty much just marking time until the Cataclysm expansion comes out. Wild posted on the FS website last week asking if there was interest in a Ruby Sanctum 25 man run. There was not a single reply, not from other guildies, not from guild officers, not from the guild leader. Not even a no. Utter silence.
Not so with MM. The MM guild leadership is very active in trying to keep guildies engaged and find fun things to do. The schedule for the weekend was announced:
Friday - a Trial of the Crusader (ToC) raid, 10/25 man, depending on how many can make it. Philly is excited about the possibility of getting into that raid.
Saturday - the guild is planning an ICC25 raid, which Wild will try to make.
Sunday - a mystery "spankathon" raid; if it's something Philly is geared for she'll probably try to get to that as well.
I really like that the MM guild is still so active and their guildies are still engaged in activities.
There has been another guild related event that happened a couple of days ago. Wild's long time friend and former guild leader for FS, Lady Jo, posted on the guild website that after five years she is hanging up her gear for good. Players come and go, but Lady Jo is one of those special folks and will be greatly missed.
Wild will soon be making his own post on the FS website:
"Wildshard is moving on -
It's been a wonderful run with FS. Wild joined FS in his level 40s way back in the vanilla days of wow, and not many weeks after the guild originally formed. FS has been Wild's home all this time.
But it's time to move on. Wild will be joining MM, where I've been raiding for the past several weeks.
I wish FS all the best."
Yes, Wild finally made the decision to change guilds. The decision has been building for some time. In one sense nothing much will change, since Wild has had virtually no interaction with FS for quite some time. My friends in FS will still be my friends, even though Wild is no longer in the guild. And it'll make communicating with MM friends and learning about MM guild events much easier.
It still makes Wild pretty sad, though.
There was an ICC10 raid Wednesday night, and the best way to describe it was to use the old adage: "We came. We saw. We conquered!"
Icecrown Citadel's Lower Spire can no longer contain us. Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, the Gunship, and Deathbringer Saurfang all fell on our first assault.
We then moved on to the second wing, The Plagueworks. The two mini-bosses, Stinky and Precious, went down quickly and we reached Festergut. We had a little blip in our march on our first attempt, when a couple of raiders got confused about how the spores worked. Do that wrong and a lot of raiders die - which they did, very early in the fight. Instead of trying to salvage it, we did an intentional wipe so that we could start over more quickly. Festergut went down on our second try. There was a funny moment on the second attack, though, again involving the spores. In ICC10 Festergut periodically puts a spore on two raiders. Every raider needs to get close to one of those spores in the seconds after they spawn. The spores then explode, doing modest damage to the raid, but also leaving a debuff on all those close to the spores that greatly reduces shadow damage. This is critical, for without that shadow debuff Festergut's Pungent Blight attack will one shot kill an unprotected raider. Most of the time we are positioned so that little movement is required to get to a "spored" raider. On some occasions, though, the random nature of who gets them forces a raider to have to run to the center or run out to the edge. One raider who had to do that got so excited she ran out to the edge like she was supposed to - and then kept running, with three of us, including Wild, running after her to get close enough to get the spore debuff! We all got the giggles, and luckily we also got her to stop running in time to get our debuff.
Normally we would have had time to take on the next boss, Rotface, but we ended things early so that MM guild officers could have a meeting.
Wild and Philly learned the results of that meeting early Thursday morning. Philly was in game to get her daily Jewelcrafting quest done. She'd been neglecting that task lately, and that's bad because it takes four days of quests to be able to buy one new JC recipe, and Philly still has many recipes she needs to buy. These dailies are pretty easy to do, but this particular one got her into trouble. The quest was to kill Vyrkuls for a necklace (vyrkuls are like vikings). Philly usually flies to the far corner of Northrend to kill the mid-level 70s vyrkuls, but she knew there were some level 80 ones much closer to Dalaran in Icecrown. Philly went there, instead, found the town of Yrm-something or other and started killing. On her third target the single vyrkul she attacked drew five more. Even now I don't know where they came from. Philly was alone on a winding mountainous trail with that one vyrkul. My guess is that those incoming vyrkuls were on the paths below and above Philly, but it was still surprising that they would all aggro at once. Philly kept her cool, DoTing up the angry mobs and taking them down, healing a time or two when her health started to drain. She killed all six, and started looting bodies to get her necklace. Crazily, the looting caused another group of five vyrkuls to come running again. I don't know if that is some mechanic of this particular area, which Philly had never been to before, or if it was a bug. Fearing she would be fighting those five mobs over and over, Philly decided to mountain goat her way down the mountain. She managed not to jump to her death, and finally got out of range and clear enough to call her flying mount and get out of there. Philly got her quest done, but that was quite a bit more excitement than she was expecting on an early Thursday morning.
But back to the plans of the MM guild. There are many guilds out there, and I have to include FS in that group, where they are pretty much just marking time until the Cataclysm expansion comes out. Wild posted on the FS website last week asking if there was interest in a Ruby Sanctum 25 man run. There was not a single reply, not from other guildies, not from guild officers, not from the guild leader. Not even a no. Utter silence.
Not so with MM. The MM guild leadership is very active in trying to keep guildies engaged and find fun things to do. The schedule for the weekend was announced:
Friday - a Trial of the Crusader (ToC) raid, 10/25 man, depending on how many can make it. Philly is excited about the possibility of getting into that raid.
Saturday - the guild is planning an ICC25 raid, which Wild will try to make.
Sunday - a mystery "spankathon" raid; if it's something Philly is geared for she'll probably try to get to that as well.
I really like that the MM guild is still so active and their guildies are still engaged in activities.
There has been another guild related event that happened a couple of days ago. Wild's long time friend and former guild leader for FS, Lady Jo, posted on the guild website that after five years she is hanging up her gear for good. Players come and go, but Lady Jo is one of those special folks and will be greatly missed.
Wild will soon be making his own post on the FS website:
"Wildshard is moving on -
It's been a wonderful run with FS. Wild joined FS in his level 40s way back in the vanilla days of wow, and not many weeks after the guild originally formed. FS has been Wild's home all this time.
But it's time to move on. Wild will be joining MM, where I've been raiding for the past several weeks.
I wish FS all the best."
Yes, Wild finally made the decision to change guilds. The decision has been building for some time. In one sense nothing much will change, since Wild has had virtually no interaction with FS for quite some time. My friends in FS will still be my friends, even though Wild is no longer in the guild. And it'll make communicating with MM friends and learning about MM guild events much easier.
It still makes Wild pretty sad, though.
Wild's last picture as an FS Guildie
Wild's first picture without wearing a guild tabbard in over five years
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday (20 Jul) - Philly Demands Pictures!
Tuesday (20 Jul) - Philly Demands Pictures!
Following the "Tier-y" Tale, Philly was upset that no pictures were included. So here's a few of Philly preening happily on a hillside in Dragonblight that she thought would be cool. She didn't seem to mind the hostile elite dragons giving her hungry looks as they flapped by. She's wearing her new robe.
Philly then decided to get a little playful, slipping out of the robe so she could show off her new knickers.
Don't like her pics or her knickers? This next pic is the look that chased off those elite dragons. Uh, great pictures, Philly! I wouldn't want her looking at me like that:
Wild thought he was doing great when he was able to catch a raid that was doing the weekly on Tuesday. Wild always waits until the last minute (ie, the Monday before the weekly changes). It was one of the easiest weeklies, too, Noth in Naxx. Five minutes tops and it was done. When Wild went to turn it in, though - sigh, Wild forgot to pick up the quest. Wild can't do Noth in 10 man again for the weekly, so he has to hope that someone will set up a 25 man run in order for Wild to get his weekly badges. I don't have much hope for that, since Noth is so easy any random group of ten raiders can do it. A 25 man is likely too much trouble. Sigh.
The latest Naithipe news - Naithipe was fishing when she started getting badgered by an alliance wanting to duel. The alliance was three levels higher than her. When the allie repeatedly asked for a duel even with Naithipe declining, Naithipe pulled her hook out of the river and turned to face the allie. Instead of accepting the duel, Naithipe flagged herself for pvp and waited to see what the allie would do. You want a battle, Naithipe decided, let's make it a real one. Funny, but the allie suddenly lost interest and left. Which, when Naithipe thought about it later, was probably a good thing, because when Naithipe flagged she was still holding her fishing pole instead of her weapon.
Following the "Tier-y" Tale, Philly was upset that no pictures were included. So here's a few of Philly preening happily on a hillside in Dragonblight that she thought would be cool. She didn't seem to mind the hostile elite dragons giving her hungry looks as they flapped by. She's wearing her new robe.
Philly then decided to get a little playful, slipping out of the robe so she could show off her new knickers.
Don't like her pics or her knickers? This next pic is the look that chased off those elite dragons. Uh, great pictures, Philly! I wouldn't want her looking at me like that:
Wild thought he was doing great when he was able to catch a raid that was doing the weekly on Tuesday. Wild always waits until the last minute (ie, the Monday before the weekly changes). It was one of the easiest weeklies, too, Noth in Naxx. Five minutes tops and it was done. When Wild went to turn it in, though - sigh, Wild forgot to pick up the quest. Wild can't do Noth in 10 man again for the weekly, so he has to hope that someone will set up a 25 man run in order for Wild to get his weekly badges. I don't have much hope for that, since Noth is so easy any random group of ten raiders can do it. A 25 man is likely too much trouble. Sigh.
The latest Naithipe news - Naithipe was fishing when she started getting badgered by an alliance wanting to duel. The alliance was three levels higher than her. When the allie repeatedly asked for a duel even with Naithipe declining, Naithipe pulled her hook out of the river and turned to face the allie. Instead of accepting the duel, Naithipe flagged herself for pvp and waited to see what the allie would do. You want a battle, Naithipe decided, let's make it a real one. Funny, but the allie suddenly lost interest and left. Which, when Naithipe thought about it later, was probably a good thing, because when Naithipe flagged she was still holding her fishing pole instead of her weapon.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Weekend (18 Jul) - The "Tier-y" Tale of the Ring, the Robe, and the Bracers
Weekend (18 Jul) - The "Tier-y" Tale of the Ring, the Robe, and the Bracers
It was an interesting weekend for gear. Philly's "get up" is starting to look like it belongs draped around some outlandish Egyptian queen, one who is equally at ease with reading poetry to her latest flame or gutting the unfortunate suitor for not getting the point of the poem. And getting the point for it. If you get the point. That didn't stop Philly from throwing a gargantuan tantrum over the weekend for the lack of progress in encrusting herself with better gear.
Happy marshalled his forces and suggested that Philly, being a priest and therefore being a cloth wearer, might be made happier if Wild, who was a Master Tailor, were to craft her some nice, frilly things that she wouldn't mind getting blood all over. Wild was a bit dubious, but magnanimously suggested he make her some [Deathfrost Boots]. In fact, Wild was wearing a pair he'd made for times when the moon was full and he wanted to release his inner Moonkin. Happy cringed at the idea, however, knowing that the pattern to make those boots required several thousand gold in materials . . . that Happy would have to buy. Happy had his own ideas. There was a tailoring pattern called [Royal Moonshroud Robe] available on the Auction House. This is a rare drop pattern, and expensive, but not nearly so expensive in materials as those boots. Surely Philly would find the robe attractive enough. Philly, looking over Happy's shoulder, also spied a jeweled belt for sale and crushed Happy to her breast - breastplate, actually, steel studded and linked to the very sharp protuberances of her shoulder gear. Ouch. Philly figured she needed the boots, the robe, and the belt, too. Double ouch. Triple ouch! But things did not go as Philly planned.
Meanwhile, Wild was in game getting his tailoring ready, and sure that he'd also be doing some enchants as well. Wild happened to see over trade chat a "LFM ICC25 need DPS and raid healer." Hmmm. Wild's patience was getting to be as thin as Philly's where gear was concerned. Although there had been some modest progress on his Moonkin gear set, it had been a month since Wild had gotten his last gear upgrade to his healing set. Wild badly needed a new ring and bracers. And he was sorely tempted to tell Happy to buy him the ring of his dreams, which tantalized him on the AH every time he looked: [Marowgar's Frigid Eye] is what it was called, and it was a random drop in ICC25. The i264 ring was a just what Wild wanted - and it cost 12,000 gold. Happy also saw that ring pop up on the AH almost every day, only his reaction was more like a kick in the guts. No way! You could buy a mechano-hog for that much! What is that? It's only the coolest flying motorcycle that . . . well, never mind. Happy dreamed happy thoughts about that cycle for a few moments.
Wild wasn't going to buy that ring. But . . . if he went on the ICC25 PUG raid, maybe he'd get lucky and the ring would drop, and Wild would win it! The raid leader for the PUG not only wanted to know Wild's gear score, he wanted proof that Wild had actually raided in ICC25 before. Wild's not a show off, but faced with having to show his credentials to get into the raid, Wild produced his almost 6k gear score and posted his Achievement for clearing the first two wings of ICC25 and part of a third. Wild got his invite.
Most ICC25 PUGs never seem to get past Deathwhisper, the second boss; or if they do, they take down the Gunship (3rd boss), break up, and call it a success. Most PUGs don't seem to have the patience it takes to go deeper into the place. The fact that this raid already had two well geared tanks, and four healers already in the raid to heal those tanks, was a very positive sign. Wild made it five healers, and I would be raid healing. I figured it would be easy to fill in the rest of the raid with DPS - tanks and healers are the hardest to get. But there were a lot people trying to fill raids - VoA, RS, the weekly, old school raids - you name it, and someone needed DPS for it. It took a little while to fill, and everyone waited patiently while the raid leader gathered the 25 raiders we needed. "Waited patiently" - another good sign. Wild liked the loot rules, too. They were fair and they were announced before we started, and all questions about the rules were answered.
Once we were all assembled and buffed up, the tanks were announced and marked, and healing assignments were laid out. As expected, Wild was asked to raid heal and to maintain HoTs on the tanks.
We bulldozed our way through the initial trash mobs. There was considerable overpulling of mobs and several raiders died, but we weathered the assault and quickly arrived at the first boss, Marrowgar. This raid used the "tank him at the door" strategy instead of Wild's more familiar "tank him at the center" strategy, but other than positioning the fight was the same. In fact, Wild found it a bit easier to re-position after the Bone Storms with the boss held at the doorway. Again, we had a number of raiders die, but Marrowgar went down. A ranged DPS necklace dropped that Wild would have loved to have, but it was off spec and several casters rolled on it for main spec so Wild had no chance.
We moved on to Deathwhisper. Wild thought he knew this fight well, but I'd forgotten all the little "extras" that came with the 25 man raid versus the ten man version. There were more of everything, of course, and the many adds that attacked us could not be "zerged" (killed by the overwhelming force of our well geared DPS) like we could get away with in ten man. And of course there was her mind control, which Wild had a less than pleasurable chance to experience three times during the fight. Death knight raiders immediately froze raiders that got mind controlled to keep us from doing damage to the raid, but that also meant Wild could not heal during the several seconds it lasted. It was a bit rough, and took longer than it should have, but again, like Marrowgar, we were good enough to kill Deathwhisper. Deathwhisper dropped [Ring of Maddening Whispers], which Wild thought was a very cool name for a ring. The i264 ring was a caster ring. It wasn't quite as perfect as the Frigid Eye ring, but it was far better than the i245 ring it would replace if Wild won it. Wild rolled. And got it. Finally, new gear for Wild's healing spec.
We won the Gunship battle handily with no problems at all. The big chest with the Gunship loot held [Boots of Unnatural Growth], a very fine pair of leather healing boots. Wild was the only leather wearing healer in the raid, and would have won those boots automatically - except that Wild was already wearing those boots. The boots went to the moonkin in the raid for his off spec.
The raid was not yet over, but let's return to Philly. After a bit of a layoff, Philly had returned to Wintergrasp for pvp and had helped the horde succeed in defending the fort twice during the weekend. After the second victory, she answered a call for a VoA25 raid. I've talked down the gear rating system called "gear score" or GS for short, many times. However, because it has infiltrated PUG groups so thoroughly, I felt that I had to at least be aware of it. So some time ago I'd loaded the in game addon, and so I could not only check the GS of my own toons, the Wild family could also check the GS scores of those around them. Philly's DISC healing gear is rated short of 4900 GS, and she could have trouble getting into raids where they demand minimum GS scores of 5000, which is a pretty common requirement. But nobody asked Philly about her GS, and she was invited to the raid. Philly was curious, and while we were forming up checked a good many gear scores of the raiders around her. I don't know if she was able to check them all, but all that she checked had higher - usually much higher - scores. Feeling a bit like the underage kid who'd slipped into the "R" rated movie, Philly was determined to prove that GS didn't mean that she couldn't contribute.
The raid killed Koralon and Toravon without any trouble. Philly delivered around 3200 health per second (counting her shield absorption), which was quite good for her, even though she finished 4th out of the 5 healers. One factor in that is that the #2 healer in the raid (over 5k hps) was also a disc priest like Philly, so the two of us tended to steal each other's heals and Philly often found that the other healer had already Shielded targets that Philly tried to Shield. Had there been just one disc healer, either of us would have posted better numbers. After the Toravon kill, Philly won an i245 pvp piece that was also an upgrade for both her healing and shadow specs! And then, when we killed Koralon, there was a priest only drop called [Zabra's Pants of Triumph]. There were two other priests in the raid, but neither of them needed these and Philly won that one too! The raid leader, however, asked Philly if she woudn't mind giving the pvp piece to one of the other priests, who had rolled for and lost the pvp piece roll to Philly. It was only fair, and Philly had no problem trading the pvp piece to the other priest. After the raid, Philly of course wanted to get her new pants socketed and enchanted, as well as see how they looked on her - and she discovered they were part of a set of gear. In fact, Philly already had another piece of the set - her shoulder gear. A quick check verified that Philly now had two pieces of Tier 9.5 gear for her shadow spec. Very, very cool.
Now, back to Wild's ICC25 run. After taking down the Gunship many raids break up, as I mentioned. We were into our second hour and attention spans tend to drift at this point. But the raid leader had been doing a great job, and he held us together for an attempt on the fourth and final boss in the first wing, Saurfang. It was quite a battle, and Wild really appreciated how the DPSers handled the huge number of beast adds that swarmed over us on every wave. Wild had been practicing his "strafing" moves specifically for the Saurfang fight, since getting caught by one of those beasts not only was likely to kill Wild, it caused massive healing to the boss, prolonging the fight. Wild strafed like mad during this fight, and the DPSers around him were very sensitive about keeping those beasts away from the healers. Wild counted five times I had to make emergency strafes to the left or right when beasts closed in on Wild, and watched them die when the alert DPS zeroed in and burned them down. Near the very end of the fight, with a number of raiders down, Wild got a beast on his tail that chased Wild completely out of his strafing lane and sent me fleeing across the outer edge of the raid, the beast still grimly after me. The boss was nearly down, and I think the DPS turned all their attention to finishing him. It was nearly the finish of Wild, as I was running out of room and out of tricks. Saurfang died, and the beast died with him. Wild was still standing.
Three raiders left the raid after loot was distributed. The raid leader told the rest of us that he did not have enough time to tackle all of the trash and go after another boss, but that if we wanted we could do the weekly ICC quest, which would be good for another five frost emblems. And he figured we could do it with just the 22 raiders we had. We were all up for it.
We clawed through the trash mobs, bringing down the two mini-bosses, Precious and Stinky. We nearly wiped on Stinky, though (a mental picture of toilet paper stubbornly refused to go away), and the raid could have cracked open and ended right there (note the clever use of wipe, Stinky, toilet paper, and crack :P ). It didn't, though, and we cleared all the way to the next two bosses, Festergut and Rotface.
Wild had never done this particular weekly, and it was one of the weirdest ones I've seen. The quest required that someone or someones in the raid get a vomit like debuff from both Festergut and Rotface, and then the whole raid had to crowd together at the questgiver in order to be able to complete the quest. We started with Festergut. In order to meet the time requirements of the quest, only half or less of the raid was sent in to fight Festergut; the rest of us hid around the corner out of sight of the battle. The group that fought Festergut would all die, with hopefully some folks with the debuff. Those of us that survived outside (and Wild discovered that Festergut's spewing vomit reached outside the closed doors of his chamber and half of us hiding out there were killed as well). Wild survived, save a few more, and then Wild helped rez all the dead.
We then pulled the same trick with Rotface. We quickly got everyone rezzed again and scrambled to the quest giver, crowding close to each other. When everyone was there we all were able to complete the quest. It was a very strange quest, but Wild got his extra badges. The raid leader was out of time, and we ended it there. Wild thoroughly enjoyed it, and really misses doing 25 man raids.
Philly is impatiently waiting to get her final say in, so here goes.
One must make some concessions for Happy, who at some point got very confused about what he was buying and not buying for Philly. Happy did get Wild the tailoring recipe for the [Royal Moonshroud Robe]. The pattern required several Crusader Orbs, expensive but not nearly so expensive as the primordial saronite was for the Deathfrost boots that were going to be denied to Philly. The robe was a very good one, and a very solid upgrade for Philly. Philly knew she wasn't going to win the argument over the boots, so she switched strategies and began needling Happy to get her the belt. The belt was over-priced, however, and Happy didn't want to pay it, prefering to wait until one turned up at a fair cost. Philly was giving Happy a hard time, though, and Happy decided to compromise. There was a pair of [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale at a reasonable price, which would be a lesser upgrade than the belt, but still something Philly should like. Happy paid 1500 gold for them, quite reasonable for what i245 gear was selling for these days.
After getting them socketed and enchanted, Happy handed over the surprise present to Philly. Philly took one look at them, stamped her foot, rolled her eyes, and crushed poor Happy with the words. "Great, did you bother to check my gear? I already HAVE THESE BRACERS!" Gulp.
If one looks, there is now a nicely enchanted and gem socketed [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale on the AH. Happy, always one to make lemonade out of lemons, thinks he'll actually make a profit from the sale. That's Happy, always finding that silver lining.
Philly, in the end, got her Tier 9.5 pants and a pretty new robe, so she was pleased as well. But I don't think she's going to stop bugging Wild about those boots.
It was an interesting weekend for gear. Philly's "get up" is starting to look like it belongs draped around some outlandish Egyptian queen, one who is equally at ease with reading poetry to her latest flame or gutting the unfortunate suitor for not getting the point of the poem. And getting the point for it. If you get the point. That didn't stop Philly from throwing a gargantuan tantrum over the weekend for the lack of progress in encrusting herself with better gear.
Happy marshalled his forces and suggested that Philly, being a priest and therefore being a cloth wearer, might be made happier if Wild, who was a Master Tailor, were to craft her some nice, frilly things that she wouldn't mind getting blood all over. Wild was a bit dubious, but magnanimously suggested he make her some [Deathfrost Boots]. In fact, Wild was wearing a pair he'd made for times when the moon was full and he wanted to release his inner Moonkin. Happy cringed at the idea, however, knowing that the pattern to make those boots required several thousand gold in materials . . . that Happy would have to buy. Happy had his own ideas. There was a tailoring pattern called [Royal Moonshroud Robe] available on the Auction House. This is a rare drop pattern, and expensive, but not nearly so expensive in materials as those boots. Surely Philly would find the robe attractive enough. Philly, looking over Happy's shoulder, also spied a jeweled belt for sale and crushed Happy to her breast - breastplate, actually, steel studded and linked to the very sharp protuberances of her shoulder gear. Ouch. Philly figured she needed the boots, the robe, and the belt, too. Double ouch. Triple ouch! But things did not go as Philly planned.
Meanwhile, Wild was in game getting his tailoring ready, and sure that he'd also be doing some enchants as well. Wild happened to see over trade chat a "LFM ICC25 need DPS and raid healer." Hmmm. Wild's patience was getting to be as thin as Philly's where gear was concerned. Although there had been some modest progress on his Moonkin gear set, it had been a month since Wild had gotten his last gear upgrade to his healing set. Wild badly needed a new ring and bracers. And he was sorely tempted to tell Happy to buy him the ring of his dreams, which tantalized him on the AH every time he looked: [Marowgar's Frigid Eye] is what it was called, and it was a random drop in ICC25. The i264 ring was a just what Wild wanted - and it cost 12,000 gold. Happy also saw that ring pop up on the AH almost every day, only his reaction was more like a kick in the guts. No way! You could buy a mechano-hog for that much! What is that? It's only the coolest flying motorcycle that . . . well, never mind. Happy dreamed happy thoughts about that cycle for a few moments.
Wild wasn't going to buy that ring. But . . . if he went on the ICC25 PUG raid, maybe he'd get lucky and the ring would drop, and Wild would win it! The raid leader for the PUG not only wanted to know Wild's gear score, he wanted proof that Wild had actually raided in ICC25 before. Wild's not a show off, but faced with having to show his credentials to get into the raid, Wild produced his almost 6k gear score and posted his Achievement for clearing the first two wings of ICC25 and part of a third. Wild got his invite.
Most ICC25 PUGs never seem to get past Deathwhisper, the second boss; or if they do, they take down the Gunship (3rd boss), break up, and call it a success. Most PUGs don't seem to have the patience it takes to go deeper into the place. The fact that this raid already had two well geared tanks, and four healers already in the raid to heal those tanks, was a very positive sign. Wild made it five healers, and I would be raid healing. I figured it would be easy to fill in the rest of the raid with DPS - tanks and healers are the hardest to get. But there were a lot people trying to fill raids - VoA, RS, the weekly, old school raids - you name it, and someone needed DPS for it. It took a little while to fill, and everyone waited patiently while the raid leader gathered the 25 raiders we needed. "Waited patiently" - another good sign. Wild liked the loot rules, too. They were fair and they were announced before we started, and all questions about the rules were answered.
Once we were all assembled and buffed up, the tanks were announced and marked, and healing assignments were laid out. As expected, Wild was asked to raid heal and to maintain HoTs on the tanks.
We bulldozed our way through the initial trash mobs. There was considerable overpulling of mobs and several raiders died, but we weathered the assault and quickly arrived at the first boss, Marrowgar. This raid used the "tank him at the door" strategy instead of Wild's more familiar "tank him at the center" strategy, but other than positioning the fight was the same. In fact, Wild found it a bit easier to re-position after the Bone Storms with the boss held at the doorway. Again, we had a number of raiders die, but Marrowgar went down. A ranged DPS necklace dropped that Wild would have loved to have, but it was off spec and several casters rolled on it for main spec so Wild had no chance.
We moved on to Deathwhisper. Wild thought he knew this fight well, but I'd forgotten all the little "extras" that came with the 25 man raid versus the ten man version. There were more of everything, of course, and the many adds that attacked us could not be "zerged" (killed by the overwhelming force of our well geared DPS) like we could get away with in ten man. And of course there was her mind control, which Wild had a less than pleasurable chance to experience three times during the fight. Death knight raiders immediately froze raiders that got mind controlled to keep us from doing damage to the raid, but that also meant Wild could not heal during the several seconds it lasted. It was a bit rough, and took longer than it should have, but again, like Marrowgar, we were good enough to kill Deathwhisper. Deathwhisper dropped [Ring of Maddening Whispers], which Wild thought was a very cool name for a ring. The i264 ring was a caster ring. It wasn't quite as perfect as the Frigid Eye ring, but it was far better than the i245 ring it would replace if Wild won it. Wild rolled. And got it. Finally, new gear for Wild's healing spec.
We won the Gunship battle handily with no problems at all. The big chest with the Gunship loot held [Boots of Unnatural Growth], a very fine pair of leather healing boots. Wild was the only leather wearing healer in the raid, and would have won those boots automatically - except that Wild was already wearing those boots. The boots went to the moonkin in the raid for his off spec.
The raid was not yet over, but let's return to Philly. After a bit of a layoff, Philly had returned to Wintergrasp for pvp and had helped the horde succeed in defending the fort twice during the weekend. After the second victory, she answered a call for a VoA25 raid. I've talked down the gear rating system called "gear score" or GS for short, many times. However, because it has infiltrated PUG groups so thoroughly, I felt that I had to at least be aware of it. So some time ago I'd loaded the in game addon, and so I could not only check the GS of my own toons, the Wild family could also check the GS scores of those around them. Philly's DISC healing gear is rated short of 4900 GS, and she could have trouble getting into raids where they demand minimum GS scores of 5000, which is a pretty common requirement. But nobody asked Philly about her GS, and she was invited to the raid. Philly was curious, and while we were forming up checked a good many gear scores of the raiders around her. I don't know if she was able to check them all, but all that she checked had higher - usually much higher - scores. Feeling a bit like the underage kid who'd slipped into the "R" rated movie, Philly was determined to prove that GS didn't mean that she couldn't contribute.
The raid killed Koralon and Toravon without any trouble. Philly delivered around 3200 health per second (counting her shield absorption), which was quite good for her, even though she finished 4th out of the 5 healers. One factor in that is that the #2 healer in the raid (over 5k hps) was also a disc priest like Philly, so the two of us tended to steal each other's heals and Philly often found that the other healer had already Shielded targets that Philly tried to Shield. Had there been just one disc healer, either of us would have posted better numbers. After the Toravon kill, Philly won an i245 pvp piece that was also an upgrade for both her healing and shadow specs! And then, when we killed Koralon, there was a priest only drop called [Zabra's Pants of Triumph]. There were two other priests in the raid, but neither of them needed these and Philly won that one too! The raid leader, however, asked Philly if she woudn't mind giving the pvp piece to one of the other priests, who had rolled for and lost the pvp piece roll to Philly. It was only fair, and Philly had no problem trading the pvp piece to the other priest. After the raid, Philly of course wanted to get her new pants socketed and enchanted, as well as see how they looked on her - and she discovered they were part of a set of gear. In fact, Philly already had another piece of the set - her shoulder gear. A quick check verified that Philly now had two pieces of Tier 9.5 gear for her shadow spec. Very, very cool.
Now, back to Wild's ICC25 run. After taking down the Gunship many raids break up, as I mentioned. We were into our second hour and attention spans tend to drift at this point. But the raid leader had been doing a great job, and he held us together for an attempt on the fourth and final boss in the first wing, Saurfang. It was quite a battle, and Wild really appreciated how the DPSers handled the huge number of beast adds that swarmed over us on every wave. Wild had been practicing his "strafing" moves specifically for the Saurfang fight, since getting caught by one of those beasts not only was likely to kill Wild, it caused massive healing to the boss, prolonging the fight. Wild strafed like mad during this fight, and the DPSers around him were very sensitive about keeping those beasts away from the healers. Wild counted five times I had to make emergency strafes to the left or right when beasts closed in on Wild, and watched them die when the alert DPS zeroed in and burned them down. Near the very end of the fight, with a number of raiders down, Wild got a beast on his tail that chased Wild completely out of his strafing lane and sent me fleeing across the outer edge of the raid, the beast still grimly after me. The boss was nearly down, and I think the DPS turned all their attention to finishing him. It was nearly the finish of Wild, as I was running out of room and out of tricks. Saurfang died, and the beast died with him. Wild was still standing.
Three raiders left the raid after loot was distributed. The raid leader told the rest of us that he did not have enough time to tackle all of the trash and go after another boss, but that if we wanted we could do the weekly ICC quest, which would be good for another five frost emblems. And he figured we could do it with just the 22 raiders we had. We were all up for it.
We clawed through the trash mobs, bringing down the two mini-bosses, Precious and Stinky. We nearly wiped on Stinky, though (a mental picture of toilet paper stubbornly refused to go away), and the raid could have cracked open and ended right there (note the clever use of wipe, Stinky, toilet paper, and crack :P ). It didn't, though, and we cleared all the way to the next two bosses, Festergut and Rotface.
Wild had never done this particular weekly, and it was one of the weirdest ones I've seen. The quest required that someone or someones in the raid get a vomit like debuff from both Festergut and Rotface, and then the whole raid had to crowd together at the questgiver in order to be able to complete the quest. We started with Festergut. In order to meet the time requirements of the quest, only half or less of the raid was sent in to fight Festergut; the rest of us hid around the corner out of sight of the battle. The group that fought Festergut would all die, with hopefully some folks with the debuff. Those of us that survived outside (and Wild discovered that Festergut's spewing vomit reached outside the closed doors of his chamber and half of us hiding out there were killed as well). Wild survived, save a few more, and then Wild helped rez all the dead.
We then pulled the same trick with Rotface. We quickly got everyone rezzed again and scrambled to the quest giver, crowding close to each other. When everyone was there we all were able to complete the quest. It was a very strange quest, but Wild got his extra badges. The raid leader was out of time, and we ended it there. Wild thoroughly enjoyed it, and really misses doing 25 man raids.
Philly is impatiently waiting to get her final say in, so here goes.
One must make some concessions for Happy, who at some point got very confused about what he was buying and not buying for Philly. Happy did get Wild the tailoring recipe for the [Royal Moonshroud Robe]. The pattern required several Crusader Orbs, expensive but not nearly so expensive as the primordial saronite was for the Deathfrost boots that were going to be denied to Philly. The robe was a very good one, and a very solid upgrade for Philly. Philly knew she wasn't going to win the argument over the boots, so she switched strategies and began needling Happy to get her the belt. The belt was over-priced, however, and Happy didn't want to pay it, prefering to wait until one turned up at a fair cost. Philly was giving Happy a hard time, though, and Happy decided to compromise. There was a pair of [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale at a reasonable price, which would be a lesser upgrade than the belt, but still something Philly should like. Happy paid 1500 gold for them, quite reasonable for what i245 gear was selling for these days.
After getting them socketed and enchanted, Happy handed over the surprise present to Philly. Philly took one look at them, stamped her foot, rolled her eyes, and crushed poor Happy with the words. "Great, did you bother to check my gear? I already HAVE THESE BRACERS!" Gulp.
If one looks, there is now a nicely enchanted and gem socketed [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale on the AH. Happy, always one to make lemonade out of lemons, thinks he'll actually make a profit from the sale. That's Happy, always finding that silver lining.
Philly, in the end, got her Tier 9.5 pants and a pretty new robe, so she was pleased as well. But I don't think she's going to stop bugging Wild about those boots.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Thursday (15 Jul) - Wild Steps it Up
Thursday (15 Jul) - Wild Steps it Up
Wild missed the Tuesday night raid, getting in game only long enough to let the raid leader know I wouldn't be able to make it. On Wednesday, though, there was time for some adventure.
The MM guild is making a concerted effort to keep guildies engaged as we all wait for the Cataclysm expansion to come out. In addition to the two ICC10 raid groups, they've announced that weekly Ruby Sanctum raid on Saturdays, and a "Mystery" raid scheduled on Sundays. Depending on what is going on over the weekend, Wild would like to try to get in on those.
The guild is trying something different with the ICC raids as well. With two raid groups now running, sorting out who shows up and when, and then putting together two balanced raids has been taking as much as an hour out of our raid time. So they decided to stagger the raid start times, with one raid still trying to get off the ground at 6pm, and the other moved to a 6:30pm start. When Wild checked in on Wednesday night, I learned that only one raid group started on Tuesday, and the second raid group had been moved to Wednesday with a 6:30pm start. So raiders who could be in game by 6pm should show up for the Tuesday run, with those who prefer a 6:30pm start running on Wednesday. Ok, so which group do they need Wild in, if they need me at all?
The Tuesday group (group 1) had all three of their healers back for Wednesday, so Wild got an invite to the Wednesday group (group 2). Wild's favorite tank, Bd, was tanking, and the raid leader was Lady Hunter, who Wild hadn't had a chance to raid with for awhile. We got started by 7pm, and when the group has both Bd and Lady Hunter, you know it is going to be fun and, well, how to describe it? Full of surprises.
Bd is perhaps the best tank I've ever run with. Not only is he an outstanding tank, he always makes sure that everyone knows their role for each and every fight. When things don't work he make corrections in a very positive way, and often in whispers so no one gets embarrassed. He also loves a good joke, and his raids are always fun. Lady Hunter adds even more merriment to our raids, to include a steady stream of oneupmanship going on between her and her husband, who was the off tank with us this night. Topping all of that was Pch, one of those players with more level 80s than I have toons. He was on his deathknight for this run, but I've seen him on his shaman and his hunter, and probably others that I didn't know was him.
Pch got us off to a "normal" start for this group on the initial trash mobs before the first boss. Bd was setting assignments, and mentioned that Pch would be doing the first pull using Death Grip, a DK talent that from some distance away can grab and pull a mob to where he is standing. All Pch seemed to have heard was "Pch pull mob," which he did. We hadn't even finished buffing, and here came a whole group of mobs.
Shortly after that we managed to release all four of the heavy hitting mobs that are triggered by traps in the floor, traps we had a rogue to diffuse, but somehow didn't. We survived both of those because we all know that crazy things like this are kind of the norm for us and we stay on our toes. Some raid leaders would go ballistic over mistakes like that. For us, it adds flavor to the evening. :P
We did wipe on Marrowgar, on a non-attempt triggered when Pch played Dare with Marrowgar and Pch's ghoul pet got a little tpo close. Marrowgar ate the ghoul and then proceeded to kill off the rest of us.
On our first real attempt on Marrowgar, we may be the first raid to try to kill him with only four raiders. We started with ten raiders, of course, and we got him down to about 25% even though we lost a tank and had to rez him, and then the priest healer died and had to be battle rezzed as well. I should point out that we only had two healers, even though we usually have three. The healing assignments looked like this:
main tank healer - holy priest
off tank healer - Wild
raid healing - we don't need no stinking raid healer
At 25% we lost a tank again, and with no battle rezzes left we were stuck with just one. That was a monumental challenge for the healers due to a stacking debuff that keeps increasing the damage on the tank. Both Wild and the priest were going crazy keeping the tank and ourselves healed, while the DPS started dying one at a time. Despite the attrition in DPS, we got Marrowgar down to 6%. That's when the priest died again. We now had only one tank and only one healer - and only two DPS. Maybe because there were so few of us Wild was able to keep up with the healing, but the four of us battled Marrowgar and we brought him down. Wild set what I think is his best health per second ever on an ICC fight - 5361 hps and 53.8% of the total healing. The priest also had an impressive 4186 hps with 39.9% healing.
That energized us even further, and we pounded through Deathwhisper, the Gunship, the weekly raid special quest to kill the Rotting Frost Giant, and Saurfang. We cleared the first wing. We had several raiders who had never gone past Saurfang. We all trooped into the portal behind Saurfang's dias, and into the second wing. Just inside the second wing there is a short hallway that splits into a T shape with halls going to the left and the right. There are nozzles set into the walls at several points and opposite each other. These nozzles spew out a freezing white stream of frost that is instantly fatal if caught in it. Think of it as a new raiders initiation into the second wing. Wild has done this part enough to know how the nozzles worked. Wild and Pch were the first to approach the nozzles. We waited until the first stream subsided and then scooted past the nozzles, watching ahead of us and them slamming to a stop when the next set of nozzles began streaming frost. Two raiders that watched us waited too long to follow and got caught in the stream from the first nozzles when they resumed. They died. Wild and Pch knew the pattern, though. Wait for the stream to stop, run to the next set of nozzles, stop and wait for that stream to start and subside, and run to the next, turning the corner of the T and continuing that pattern until running out of nozzles. I think five raiders died, a couple of them twice, until they had picked up the pattern.
We then cleared the trash, including the two mini-bosses Precious and Stinky, and we stood in front of Festergut. We were out of time, though, and Festergut would have to wait until Thursday.
So now it's Thursday - wow, that day went by fast, didn't it? - and we have eight returning toons and two new ones for the evening raid. The two new ones are both healers, Lady Hunter on her pally healer, and another new priest, a disc priest this time. We were going with three healers given the additional difficulty of the second wing bosses.
We tackled Festergut first. For most of our raiders this was new territory. It took three tries, but we brought Festergut down. On the final win Wild broke his own healing record:
#1: Wild, 5524 hps, 41% total healing
#2: pally healer, 4042/28%
#3: Disc priest, 4143/27%
Shield absorption is included in the pally and priest numbers.
With a lot of time left in our evening, we worked our way to the second boss in the second wing, Rotface. Rotface is a royal pain. There are a lot of things to remember, and every piece has to work perfectly to pull off a win. This is a battle that takes a lot of practice. We tried 7 times, the group learning a bit more each time. But we are far from being able to beat this boss.
The MM guild hopes to hold our two raiding groups together for next week. We do need to have some consistent attendance, particularly now that we are into the second wing, so that we can build on what we've learned. For once Wild would like to eventually be able to say he cleared the entire raid, something that has mostly eluded him with the exceptions of Kara and Naxx.
Wild is getting some mild pressure again to move over to the MM guild, saying it would be easier to include Wild in MM guild events, and that the last of the old timers from FS would come with him if Wild only agreed to come. I doubt thats completely true, but Wild is tempted. Always tempted. I hold on to the thought, though, that the best place to be doing 25 man raids once Cataclysm arrives is still FS. Wild will continue to straddle both worlds.
In the meantime Naithipe moves through her world oblivious to all the drama around her. Her latest demand is for khorium ore. A lot of it. Of course it is rare. Of course it is expensive. And of course it will take hours and hours of someone's time to collect it. Of course, that doesn't bother Naithipe at all.
Wild missed the Tuesday night raid, getting in game only long enough to let the raid leader know I wouldn't be able to make it. On Wednesday, though, there was time for some adventure.
The MM guild is making a concerted effort to keep guildies engaged as we all wait for the Cataclysm expansion to come out. In addition to the two ICC10 raid groups, they've announced that weekly Ruby Sanctum raid on Saturdays, and a "Mystery" raid scheduled on Sundays. Depending on what is going on over the weekend, Wild would like to try to get in on those.
The guild is trying something different with the ICC raids as well. With two raid groups now running, sorting out who shows up and when, and then putting together two balanced raids has been taking as much as an hour out of our raid time. So they decided to stagger the raid start times, with one raid still trying to get off the ground at 6pm, and the other moved to a 6:30pm start. When Wild checked in on Wednesday night, I learned that only one raid group started on Tuesday, and the second raid group had been moved to Wednesday with a 6:30pm start. So raiders who could be in game by 6pm should show up for the Tuesday run, with those who prefer a 6:30pm start running on Wednesday. Ok, so which group do they need Wild in, if they need me at all?
The Tuesday group (group 1) had all three of their healers back for Wednesday, so Wild got an invite to the Wednesday group (group 2). Wild's favorite tank, Bd, was tanking, and the raid leader was Lady Hunter, who Wild hadn't had a chance to raid with for awhile. We got started by 7pm, and when the group has both Bd and Lady Hunter, you know it is going to be fun and, well, how to describe it? Full of surprises.
Bd is perhaps the best tank I've ever run with. Not only is he an outstanding tank, he always makes sure that everyone knows their role for each and every fight. When things don't work he make corrections in a very positive way, and often in whispers so no one gets embarrassed. He also loves a good joke, and his raids are always fun. Lady Hunter adds even more merriment to our raids, to include a steady stream of oneupmanship going on between her and her husband, who was the off tank with us this night. Topping all of that was Pch, one of those players with more level 80s than I have toons. He was on his deathknight for this run, but I've seen him on his shaman and his hunter, and probably others that I didn't know was him.
Pch got us off to a "normal" start for this group on the initial trash mobs before the first boss. Bd was setting assignments, and mentioned that Pch would be doing the first pull using Death Grip, a DK talent that from some distance away can grab and pull a mob to where he is standing. All Pch seemed to have heard was "Pch pull mob," which he did. We hadn't even finished buffing, and here came a whole group of mobs.
Shortly after that we managed to release all four of the heavy hitting mobs that are triggered by traps in the floor, traps we had a rogue to diffuse, but somehow didn't. We survived both of those because we all know that crazy things like this are kind of the norm for us and we stay on our toes. Some raid leaders would go ballistic over mistakes like that. For us, it adds flavor to the evening. :P
We did wipe on Marrowgar, on a non-attempt triggered when Pch played Dare with Marrowgar and Pch's ghoul pet got a little tpo close. Marrowgar ate the ghoul and then proceeded to kill off the rest of us.
On our first real attempt on Marrowgar, we may be the first raid to try to kill him with only four raiders. We started with ten raiders, of course, and we got him down to about 25% even though we lost a tank and had to rez him, and then the priest healer died and had to be battle rezzed as well. I should point out that we only had two healers, even though we usually have three. The healing assignments looked like this:
main tank healer - holy priest
off tank healer - Wild
raid healing - we don't need no stinking raid healer
At 25% we lost a tank again, and with no battle rezzes left we were stuck with just one. That was a monumental challenge for the healers due to a stacking debuff that keeps increasing the damage on the tank. Both Wild and the priest were going crazy keeping the tank and ourselves healed, while the DPS started dying one at a time. Despite the attrition in DPS, we got Marrowgar down to 6%. That's when the priest died again. We now had only one tank and only one healer - and only two DPS. Maybe because there were so few of us Wild was able to keep up with the healing, but the four of us battled Marrowgar and we brought him down. Wild set what I think is his best health per second ever on an ICC fight - 5361 hps and 53.8% of the total healing. The priest also had an impressive 4186 hps with 39.9% healing.
That energized us even further, and we pounded through Deathwhisper, the Gunship, the weekly raid special quest to kill the Rotting Frost Giant, and Saurfang. We cleared the first wing. We had several raiders who had never gone past Saurfang. We all trooped into the portal behind Saurfang's dias, and into the second wing. Just inside the second wing there is a short hallway that splits into a T shape with halls going to the left and the right. There are nozzles set into the walls at several points and opposite each other. These nozzles spew out a freezing white stream of frost that is instantly fatal if caught in it. Think of it as a new raiders initiation into the second wing. Wild has done this part enough to know how the nozzles worked. Wild and Pch were the first to approach the nozzles. We waited until the first stream subsided and then scooted past the nozzles, watching ahead of us and them slamming to a stop when the next set of nozzles began streaming frost. Two raiders that watched us waited too long to follow and got caught in the stream from the first nozzles when they resumed. They died. Wild and Pch knew the pattern, though. Wait for the stream to stop, run to the next set of nozzles, stop and wait for that stream to start and subside, and run to the next, turning the corner of the T and continuing that pattern until running out of nozzles. I think five raiders died, a couple of them twice, until they had picked up the pattern.
We then cleared the trash, including the two mini-bosses Precious and Stinky, and we stood in front of Festergut. We were out of time, though, and Festergut would have to wait until Thursday.
So now it's Thursday - wow, that day went by fast, didn't it? - and we have eight returning toons and two new ones for the evening raid. The two new ones are both healers, Lady Hunter on her pally healer, and another new priest, a disc priest this time. We were going with three healers given the additional difficulty of the second wing bosses.
We tackled Festergut first. For most of our raiders this was new territory. It took three tries, but we brought Festergut down. On the final win Wild broke his own healing record:
#1: Wild, 5524 hps, 41% total healing
#2: pally healer, 4042/28%
#3: Disc priest, 4143/27%
Shield absorption is included in the pally and priest numbers.
With a lot of time left in our evening, we worked our way to the second boss in the second wing, Rotface. Rotface is a royal pain. There are a lot of things to remember, and every piece has to work perfectly to pull off a win. This is a battle that takes a lot of practice. We tried 7 times, the group learning a bit more each time. But we are far from being able to beat this boss.
The MM guild hopes to hold our two raiding groups together for next week. We do need to have some consistent attendance, particularly now that we are into the second wing, so that we can build on what we've learned. For once Wild would like to eventually be able to say he cleared the entire raid, something that has mostly eluded him with the exceptions of Kara and Naxx.
Wild is getting some mild pressure again to move over to the MM guild, saying it would be easier to include Wild in MM guild events, and that the last of the old timers from FS would come with him if Wild only agreed to come. I doubt thats completely true, but Wild is tempted. Always tempted. I hold on to the thought, though, that the best place to be doing 25 man raids once Cataclysm arrives is still FS. Wild will continue to straddle both worlds.
In the meantime Naithipe moves through her world oblivious to all the drama around her. Her latest demand is for khorium ore. A lot of it. Of course it is rare. Of course it is expensive. And of course it will take hours and hours of someone's time to collect it. Of course, that doesn't bother Naithipe at all.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Wednesday (14 Jul) - Back In The Saddle
Wednesday (14 Jul) - Back In The Saddle
I spent over an hour writing up Wednesday's raid in Wild's comeback after several days of real life interruption. It was full of furious combat, hilarious anectdotes, depth of insight, amazing triumphs ... ahh well. A couple of stray keystrokes in the heat of reliving the moment and it was all gone. Whatever I did locked up the computer and nothing I tried would bring it back. It took a power off to get the computer working again, and of course nothing I'd written had been saved.
Well, you are all saved from reading it - at least until I combine it with the Thursday night adventures. But I really, really, hate having to write things twice!
I spent over an hour writing up Wednesday's raid in Wild's comeback after several days of real life interruption. It was full of furious combat, hilarious anectdotes, depth of insight, amazing triumphs ... ahh well. A couple of stray keystrokes in the heat of reliving the moment and it was all gone. Whatever I did locked up the computer and nothing I tried would bring it back. It took a power off to get the computer working again, and of course nothing I'd written had been saved.
Well, you are all saved from reading it - at least until I combine it with the Thursday night adventures. But I really, really, hate having to write things twice!
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Weekend (11 Jul) - Mery "Litlbotm" Owns
Weekend (11 Jul) - Mery "Litlbotm" Owns
Quick Real ID Update: New security problems with Real ID are already starting to crop up. Using Real ID, only players who have been granted permission will see that player's real first and last name in game. However, User Inferface (UI) addon authors have discovered that a very simple script can be used to collect the real names of any Real ID player without their permission. The malicious script could be buried in an addon without the player even being aware of it.
Breaking Real ID News: Blizzard announced over the weekend that they have heard the voice of their customers and WILL NOT implement the use of real names on their forums. The in game Real ID system stays but will remain a voluntary feature. All it took was about 50,000 complaints (and then they locked the forum thread on the subject).
Warning - grab a cup of coffee, a beer, or whatever your favored drink is and settle in. This is a long one.
Merylitlbotm is not sensitive about her name. She's quite proud of her derriere, thank you. And from a Tauren's point of view, the prominent feature is quite attractive. That doesn't mean that she won't rip your face off if you make fun of her. But unless you really want to risk your life and not just your face, I'd suggest not teasing her about her "sensitive" side. More on that later.
Mery is a merry cow now that she has a new gun to tote around. Her new [Precisely Calibrated Boomstick] with it's +5 damage scope carries a much bigger punch than her older gun and shoots twice as fast. Mery laid waste to much of Feralas over a couple of days, reaching level 46 - and discovering that she'd better stock up on ammo at the rate she is now going through boxes of mithril slugs.
Mery wasn't done yet, though. She took a page out of Naithipe's book and did some research on melee weapons. Her current weapons, Steelclaw Reavers, were still a fine pair of matching axes, but they were getting a little old and looked more and more out of place next to the new Boomstick.
One of the best weapon upgrades she could get at her level was the [Scout's Blade], which is a pvp dagger that can be purchased with pvp honor points. Mery still had a bag full of pvp Marks that could no longer be used for anything except to exchange them for - yep, honor points. Mery decided to convert those marks to honor and go shopping. Wow, did she hit paydirt! Not only did she have enough honor points to buy the dagger, she was able to upgrade her pvp stamina trinket, and even bought a new pair of bracers.
Mery had an idea where she could get her other weapon upgrade to go with the new dagger, too. Once she can corner Wild and get him to enchant her bag of new goodies, she'll be heading back to Feralas to try them out. And then she'll be in the hunt for some flying creatures called hippogryphs.
Later . . . Wild rendezvoused with Mery in Orgrimmar after Wild had passed along to Happy what enchanting mats he needed and Happy then sent them via in game mail to Mery. The Steeclaw Reavers had been enchanted with +15 agility, agility being one of the most important stats for hunters. The Scout's Blade was a higher level weapon, and Wild was able to use a higher level enchant on it, giving the blade +20 agi.
Mery gathered up her new toys and headed back to Feralas. Arriving at the horde town of Camp Mojache, Mery sought out the witch doctor Uzer'i. Uzer'i collects beasts, but he has a unique way of capturing them. The witch doctor fashioned what he called a "beast muisek vessel" that when cast on a subdued beast shrinks them down and stores them in the vessel. Uzer'i sent Mery off of on many quests to capture so many beasts that Mery soon lost count.
Her final task was to capture mountain giants that live in the far northern tip of Feralas. It was Mery's first trip to that region, and the level of beasts, mostly bears, gorillas and wolves, were 2-3 levels higher than Mery. Mery had her own gorilla, though, Sassy, and had no trouble navigating through the mobs and/or killing them when required.
Mery found the camp of the mountain giants. They were all level 49 elites. Elites? Oh boy. Wild had a very vague recollection of this particular task from his own boyhood days. What he recalled was that the giants could be shrunken down into normal giants and then subdued for storage in the muisek vessel. So level 46 Mery decided to try that.
Mery and Sassy approached a large, wide shouldered mountain giant, targeted it, and tried to shrink the giant down to palatable size. It didn't work. The irritated elite giant lumbered after Mery, and Sassy had to engage. We didn't see the level 50 gorilla behind the giant, but it saw us, and soon Mery had a hostile gorilla in her face even as Sassy was trying to stay alive against the giant. Mery ignored the gorilla, focusing on ensuring that Sassy had a firm grip on the elite giant and keeping her healed until Mery felt she had some measure of control over the fight. Mery then changed Sassy's target to the gorilla, and backed out of the way as Sassy charged the gorilla, the giant stomping after her.
As soon as Sassy grappled the gorilla Mery changed her pet's target back to the giant. Sassy was now tanking both mobs, and Mery was free to blast the giant with everything she had. It was close, but the giant fell and then shortly after that so did the hostile gorilla.
Mery and Sassy were more careful after that, making sure any nearby mobs were killed before tackling one of the giants. The pair of adventurers killed/subdued six more elite mountain giants, and then shrunk them down for the witch doctor. All in a days work.
The reward for all that effort was a new main hand axe called [Force of the Hippogryph], with it's very nice +12 agi stats to go along with the +20 agi enchant Wild provided. The additional benefit was that along with the new axe, the series of quests also helped get Mery to level 47.
Later still . . . Mery loves her combat pets. She had her intrepid tanking gorilla, Sassy, and her diving bombing, screeching DPS predator bird, Fleshrypper. Sassy was level 46 and got most of Mery's time. Fleshrypper kept lagging behind, though, and was at level 43. It wasn't the bird's fault; Mery only used Fleshrypper for pvp. Lao suggested that Mery do more dungeon runs where a DPSing bird like Fleshrypper would be right at home. At Mery's level, though, her choice of random dungeons was very slim - Mauradon, Zul-Farrak, and Sunken Temple. Not a lot of choice there. Mery will never let Fleshrypper go, though, since she had to brave Alliance neighorhoods to hunt her bird down, one found only on Alliance territory. She wanted her next pet to be just as special.
Her next pet?
Maybe Mery should share what her current pets look like:
Once Mery got it into her head that she wanted another pet, she put in her research to find just the right one. She wanted one that would be the polar opposite of Fleshrypper who, when you get right down to it, is a flesh eating vulture. Her next pet would show a softer side. That's a clue to start tip-toeing carefully around Mery.
Mery happened to be in Thunder Bluff thinking over this new idea, visions of a new adventure starting to take shape. She was interrupted- and I swear this really happened - by a level 13 rogue who whispered her this catchy pick up line, "i thin ku r ugly but ur myk inda cow."
That rogue's carcass, what's left of it, will never be found.
Mery had made up her mind. She parked both Fleshrypper and Sassy at the Stables and took along a level 30 combat bear cleverly named Bareon. Bareon, poor thing, became expendable when Sassy came along, and he has been languishing in the Stables since then. Bareon was insurance, should there be problems with the trip. Ultimately, Bareon would have to be adandoned back into the wild once Mery was ready to tame a new combat pet.
Mery packed a lunch and took the Thunder Bluff flight path as far north as she could go - to the small horde outpost of Zoram'gar in Ashenvale. Few go there, unless you are headed to Blackfathom Deeps. Mery would pass by the Deeps, but continued north into Darkshore, a low level Alliance zone. Mery followed the coastline from the southern tip of Darkshore almost to it's northern border, staying mounted all the way, and avoiding hostiles easily. She reached her destination - the town of Auberdine.
Auberdine is an alliance town, with numerous alliance npc guards of around level 40. Mery could kill them easily enough, but that would flag her for pvp, and leave her open to attack by every alliance player in town. Auberdine is small, though, a waterfront town with only one real attraction - a network of piers that was a major hub for the alliance fleet of boats.
Mery saw no one as she made her way to the shoreline next to the long, multi-berth pier. She splashed into the water, still on her kodo mount, and rode the swimming beast to the very end of the longest section of pier. Having reached her destination, Mery quietly submerged completely - and waited.
If you didn't check out the pics before reading onward, go back and look at them now.
What happened there? Well, Mery intentionally drowned herself.
Now dead, Mery released and her ghost appeared at the graveyard. Mery made her ghostly way back to he pier and walked to the end. Well, almost to the end. A level 32 alliance paladin was standing all by his lonesome at the end of the pier. The boat was gone, so we both waited for it to come back. Mery stood a few feet behind the paladin. I don't think the alliance could see Mery as a ghost, but he kept looking behind him almost as if he could sense her standing there. Mery was sooooo tempted to rez right there on the pier and dare the allie to flag. But that would upset her plans.
When the boat arrived, Mery and the paladin boarded. Mery moved to the front of the ship, climbed up onto the rail, and stepped to the end of the pointed prow. I was a little afraid I'd fall off as it was pretty narrow and I had to jump a bit. Mery was in range of her corpse, and would have to rez before the boat left or it would take her out of range. Mery was certain that if the alliance npcs on the boat sighted her that she could kill them, but that would flag her for pvp and complicate things at the other end of her journey.
Mery rezzed. She would be clearly visible to the alliance paladin that had also boarded. I wonder what he thought, seeing a horde hunter on his ship.
Just a few steps behind Mery, standing on the deck, was an alliance npc. Mery checked the npc's level. The npc was not level 40, as Mery had assumed. The npc was level ??, which meant the npc was at least ten levels higher than Mery. Some past patch must have upgraded the guards on these boats. If Mery got caught she was dead. The npc did nothing, though, probably because the prow of the boat was not part of his aggro radius.
The boat sailed serenely to it's destination, Mery feeling a bit like that scene in Titanic. As the ship slowed to anchor, Mery jumped into the water and swam the last few feet to the shore. Mery was now on Azuremyst Isle, the starting zone for the alliance Draenei. Here Mery made a mistake. This is a very low level zone with very little danger to Mery as long as she did not get flagged for pvp. The small island does have one major feature - the city of Exodar. Javajoo lived there, but Mery had no plans to meet with her alliance cousin. Mery circled around the city, avoiding the guards, but she came too close to the city borders.
"You are in Alliance territory!" was not what Mery wanted to hear. She was now flagged for pvp, and would stay that way until it wore off in five minutes or until someone spotted her and called for her head. Mery headed away from the city, working her way to the north side of the island. Far from prying alliance eyes, Mery waited out the flag. She then got wet again swimming across a narrow channel of water to Bloodmyst Isle.
According to the map Mery's targeted prize roamed all over Bloodmyst Isle, but in fact while they roamed far and wide, there were not really that many of them. It took Mery traversing two-thirds of the island (without seeing a single alliance) before she found what she was looking.
It was a Royal Blue Flutterer. It's a moth. Moths that can be combat pets are relatively new. There are only twelve species of moths that can be tamed, and nine of them start at level 59 or higher, far beyond Mery's ability to tame them at her level. The Royal Blue Flutterer, however, is only level 14, and can only be found on Bloodmyst Isle. They are a common enough pet for the alliance, but they are rare among the horde.
Mery released Bareon back to the wild, and tamed her moth. Mery hearthed off the Isle and back to Thunder Bluff. A new pet is automatically adjusted to within five levels of the hunter, so Mery's moth arrived at Thunder Bluff as a level 42. Mery named her BlueWitch, after a moth called a White Witch that has the largest wingspan of any moth on earth, up to 12 inches.
Mery proudly shows off BlueWitch:
Even later still . . . There is yet one more tale for Mery to tell. But perhaps that should be saved for another time. Ok, forget that. Here goes:
Mery is not really an "accessories" person, or at least we didn't think she was. So, when she asked her alliance cousin, Javajoo, to get her a Blue Moth non-combat pet so that BlueWitch would have some company, there were a few carefully hidden astonished blinks. Blue Moth eggs are only sold in the alliance city of Exodar. They don't cost much - about 50 silver - so young Java, who as mentioned before resided in Exodar, could afford to own one of his own. Hearing the no-nonsense tone in Mery's voice, one that did not brook any answer but one, Java agreed to buy her one as well.
A method to move "stuff" between horde and alliance was already in place via the neutral Auction House in Booty Bay, the seaport town in Stranglethorn Vale. Java bought a Blue Moth egg and sent it in the mail to Rakta, his sister, who was already in Booty Bay. Rakta was joined in Booty Bay by Melasahnd, her horde cousin. The two met in a small room off the main path, where a twitchy looking goblin managed the neutral Auction House. Rakta could hear water lapping outside, and the air in the room was dank and smelled of rotting wood. The whole business of making transactions between the warring factions has an unsavory aspect to it, even when it is for good cause. Rakta's combat owl and Mela's ghoul were restless and starting to size each other up. Best to get this business over with quickly.
Both Rakta and Mela opened the Auction House window and checked for moth eggs. There were yellow and white moths for sale there already for as much as 25g. Apparently that is what some horde would pay to get one. The main concern with transacting business through the neutral AH is that someone might buy your item before the transaction was complete. Rakta was a bit nervous making the transaction. When she went to put the Blue Moth egg up for sale, she accidentally caused the egg to hatch. "Don't . . . !" Mela yelled out frantically, seeing what was about to happen. But it was too late. Rakta now owned a pretty little blue moth. Mery's moth.
Rakta and Mela decided it was best not to tell Mery about that. Mery was already impatient to get her moth, and this was going to cause a delay. Java, too, swore secrecy and bought another Blue Moth egg. Once the egg had reached Rakta (again) through the mail, a successful transaction through the neutral AH was made. Mela took the egg and carefully placed it in the guild bank, and an eager Mery plucked it out of the bank minutes after Mel put it there.
Mery now has a matching pair of combat and non-combat pets. And if a cow could glow, that would be Mery.
This morning Mery said something about needing a blue dress. I'm just not going there. Nope. Not gonna.
Quick Real ID Update: New security problems with Real ID are already starting to crop up. Using Real ID, only players who have been granted permission will see that player's real first and last name in game. However, User Inferface (UI) addon authors have discovered that a very simple script can be used to collect the real names of any Real ID player without their permission. The malicious script could be buried in an addon without the player even being aware of it.
Breaking Real ID News: Blizzard announced over the weekend that they have heard the voice of their customers and WILL NOT implement the use of real names on their forums. The in game Real ID system stays but will remain a voluntary feature. All it took was about 50,000 complaints (and then they locked the forum thread on the subject).
Warning - grab a cup of coffee, a beer, or whatever your favored drink is and settle in. This is a long one.
Merylitlbotm is not sensitive about her name. She's quite proud of her derriere, thank you. And from a Tauren's point of view, the prominent feature is quite attractive. That doesn't mean that she won't rip your face off if you make fun of her. But unless you really want to risk your life and not just your face, I'd suggest not teasing her about her "sensitive" side. More on that later.
Mery is a merry cow now that she has a new gun to tote around. Her new [Precisely Calibrated Boomstick] with it's +5 damage scope carries a much bigger punch than her older gun and shoots twice as fast. Mery laid waste to much of Feralas over a couple of days, reaching level 46 - and discovering that she'd better stock up on ammo at the rate she is now going through boxes of mithril slugs.
Mery wasn't done yet, though. She took a page out of Naithipe's book and did some research on melee weapons. Her current weapons, Steelclaw Reavers, were still a fine pair of matching axes, but they were getting a little old and looked more and more out of place next to the new Boomstick.
One of the best weapon upgrades she could get at her level was the [Scout's Blade], which is a pvp dagger that can be purchased with pvp honor points. Mery still had a bag full of pvp Marks that could no longer be used for anything except to exchange them for - yep, honor points. Mery decided to convert those marks to honor and go shopping. Wow, did she hit paydirt! Not only did she have enough honor points to buy the dagger, she was able to upgrade her pvp stamina trinket, and even bought a new pair of bracers.
Mery had an idea where she could get her other weapon upgrade to go with the new dagger, too. Once she can corner Wild and get him to enchant her bag of new goodies, she'll be heading back to Feralas to try them out. And then she'll be in the hunt for some flying creatures called hippogryphs.
Later . . . Wild rendezvoused with Mery in Orgrimmar after Wild had passed along to Happy what enchanting mats he needed and Happy then sent them via in game mail to Mery. The Steeclaw Reavers had been enchanted with +15 agility, agility being one of the most important stats for hunters. The Scout's Blade was a higher level weapon, and Wild was able to use a higher level enchant on it, giving the blade +20 agi.
Mery gathered up her new toys and headed back to Feralas. Arriving at the horde town of Camp Mojache, Mery sought out the witch doctor Uzer'i. Uzer'i collects beasts, but he has a unique way of capturing them. The witch doctor fashioned what he called a "beast muisek vessel" that when cast on a subdued beast shrinks them down and stores them in the vessel. Uzer'i sent Mery off of on many quests to capture so many beasts that Mery soon lost count.
Her final task was to capture mountain giants that live in the far northern tip of Feralas. It was Mery's first trip to that region, and the level of beasts, mostly bears, gorillas and wolves, were 2-3 levels higher than Mery. Mery had her own gorilla, though, Sassy, and had no trouble navigating through the mobs and/or killing them when required.
Mery found the camp of the mountain giants. They were all level 49 elites. Elites? Oh boy. Wild had a very vague recollection of this particular task from his own boyhood days. What he recalled was that the giants could be shrunken down into normal giants and then subdued for storage in the muisek vessel. So level 46 Mery decided to try that.
Mery and Sassy approached a large, wide shouldered mountain giant, targeted it, and tried to shrink the giant down to palatable size. It didn't work. The irritated elite giant lumbered after Mery, and Sassy had to engage. We didn't see the level 50 gorilla behind the giant, but it saw us, and soon Mery had a hostile gorilla in her face even as Sassy was trying to stay alive against the giant. Mery ignored the gorilla, focusing on ensuring that Sassy had a firm grip on the elite giant and keeping her healed until Mery felt she had some measure of control over the fight. Mery then changed Sassy's target to the gorilla, and backed out of the way as Sassy charged the gorilla, the giant stomping after her.
As soon as Sassy grappled the gorilla Mery changed her pet's target back to the giant. Sassy was now tanking both mobs, and Mery was free to blast the giant with everything she had. It was close, but the giant fell and then shortly after that so did the hostile gorilla.
Mery and Sassy were more careful after that, making sure any nearby mobs were killed before tackling one of the giants. The pair of adventurers killed/subdued six more elite mountain giants, and then shrunk them down for the witch doctor. All in a days work.
The reward for all that effort was a new main hand axe called [Force of the Hippogryph], with it's very nice +12 agi stats to go along with the +20 agi enchant Wild provided. The additional benefit was that along with the new axe, the series of quests also helped get Mery to level 47.
Later still . . . Mery loves her combat pets. She had her intrepid tanking gorilla, Sassy, and her diving bombing, screeching DPS predator bird, Fleshrypper. Sassy was level 46 and got most of Mery's time. Fleshrypper kept lagging behind, though, and was at level 43. It wasn't the bird's fault; Mery only used Fleshrypper for pvp. Lao suggested that Mery do more dungeon runs where a DPSing bird like Fleshrypper would be right at home. At Mery's level, though, her choice of random dungeons was very slim - Mauradon, Zul-Farrak, and Sunken Temple. Not a lot of choice there. Mery will never let Fleshrypper go, though, since she had to brave Alliance neighorhoods to hunt her bird down, one found only on Alliance territory. She wanted her next pet to be just as special.
Her next pet?
Maybe Mery should share what her current pets look like:
Once Mery got it into her head that she wanted another pet, she put in her research to find just the right one. She wanted one that would be the polar opposite of Fleshrypper who, when you get right down to it, is a flesh eating vulture. Her next pet would show a softer side. That's a clue to start tip-toeing carefully around Mery.
Mery happened to be in Thunder Bluff thinking over this new idea, visions of a new adventure starting to take shape. She was interrupted- and I swear this really happened - by a level 13 rogue who whispered her this catchy pick up line, "i thin ku r ugly but ur myk inda cow."
That rogue's carcass, what's left of it, will never be found.
Mery had made up her mind. She parked both Fleshrypper and Sassy at the Stables and took along a level 30 combat bear cleverly named Bareon. Bareon, poor thing, became expendable when Sassy came along, and he has been languishing in the Stables since then. Bareon was insurance, should there be problems with the trip. Ultimately, Bareon would have to be adandoned back into the wild once Mery was ready to tame a new combat pet.
Mery packed a lunch and took the Thunder Bluff flight path as far north as she could go - to the small horde outpost of Zoram'gar in Ashenvale. Few go there, unless you are headed to Blackfathom Deeps. Mery would pass by the Deeps, but continued north into Darkshore, a low level Alliance zone. Mery followed the coastline from the southern tip of Darkshore almost to it's northern border, staying mounted all the way, and avoiding hostiles easily. She reached her destination - the town of Auberdine.
Auberdine is an alliance town, with numerous alliance npc guards of around level 40. Mery could kill them easily enough, but that would flag her for pvp, and leave her open to attack by every alliance player in town. Auberdine is small, though, a waterfront town with only one real attraction - a network of piers that was a major hub for the alliance fleet of boats.
Mery saw no one as she made her way to the shoreline next to the long, multi-berth pier. She splashed into the water, still on her kodo mount, and rode the swimming beast to the very end of the longest section of pier. Having reached her destination, Mery quietly submerged completely - and waited.
If you didn't check out the pics before reading onward, go back and look at them now.
What happened there? Well, Mery intentionally drowned herself.
Now dead, Mery released and her ghost appeared at the graveyard. Mery made her ghostly way back to he pier and walked to the end. Well, almost to the end. A level 32 alliance paladin was standing all by his lonesome at the end of the pier. The boat was gone, so we both waited for it to come back. Mery stood a few feet behind the paladin. I don't think the alliance could see Mery as a ghost, but he kept looking behind him almost as if he could sense her standing there. Mery was sooooo tempted to rez right there on the pier and dare the allie to flag. But that would upset her plans.
When the boat arrived, Mery and the paladin boarded. Mery moved to the front of the ship, climbed up onto the rail, and stepped to the end of the pointed prow. I was a little afraid I'd fall off as it was pretty narrow and I had to jump a bit. Mery was in range of her corpse, and would have to rez before the boat left or it would take her out of range. Mery was certain that if the alliance npcs on the boat sighted her that she could kill them, but that would flag her for pvp and complicate things at the other end of her journey.
Mery rezzed. She would be clearly visible to the alliance paladin that had also boarded. I wonder what he thought, seeing a horde hunter on his ship.
Just a few steps behind Mery, standing on the deck, was an alliance npc. Mery checked the npc's level. The npc was not level 40, as Mery had assumed. The npc was level ??, which meant the npc was at least ten levels higher than Mery. Some past patch must have upgraded the guards on these boats. If Mery got caught she was dead. The npc did nothing, though, probably because the prow of the boat was not part of his aggro radius.
The boat sailed serenely to it's destination, Mery feeling a bit like that scene in Titanic. As the ship slowed to anchor, Mery jumped into the water and swam the last few feet to the shore. Mery was now on Azuremyst Isle, the starting zone for the alliance Draenei. Here Mery made a mistake. This is a very low level zone with very little danger to Mery as long as she did not get flagged for pvp. The small island does have one major feature - the city of Exodar. Javajoo lived there, but Mery had no plans to meet with her alliance cousin. Mery circled around the city, avoiding the guards, but she came too close to the city borders.
"You are in Alliance territory!" was not what Mery wanted to hear. She was now flagged for pvp, and would stay that way until it wore off in five minutes or until someone spotted her and called for her head. Mery headed away from the city, working her way to the north side of the island. Far from prying alliance eyes, Mery waited out the flag. She then got wet again swimming across a narrow channel of water to Bloodmyst Isle.
According to the map Mery's targeted prize roamed all over Bloodmyst Isle, but in fact while they roamed far and wide, there were not really that many of them. It took Mery traversing two-thirds of the island (without seeing a single alliance) before she found what she was looking.
It was a Royal Blue Flutterer. It's a moth. Moths that can be combat pets are relatively new. There are only twelve species of moths that can be tamed, and nine of them start at level 59 or higher, far beyond Mery's ability to tame them at her level. The Royal Blue Flutterer, however, is only level 14, and can only be found on Bloodmyst Isle. They are a common enough pet for the alliance, but they are rare among the horde.
Mery released Bareon back to the wild, and tamed her moth. Mery hearthed off the Isle and back to Thunder Bluff. A new pet is automatically adjusted to within five levels of the hunter, so Mery's moth arrived at Thunder Bluff as a level 42. Mery named her BlueWitch, after a moth called a White Witch that has the largest wingspan of any moth on earth, up to 12 inches.
Mery proudly shows off BlueWitch:
Even later still . . . There is yet one more tale for Mery to tell. But perhaps that should be saved for another time. Ok, forget that. Here goes:
Mery is not really an "accessories" person, or at least we didn't think she was. So, when she asked her alliance cousin, Javajoo, to get her a Blue Moth non-combat pet so that BlueWitch would have some company, there were a few carefully hidden astonished blinks. Blue Moth eggs are only sold in the alliance city of Exodar. They don't cost much - about 50 silver - so young Java, who as mentioned before resided in Exodar, could afford to own one of his own. Hearing the no-nonsense tone in Mery's voice, one that did not brook any answer but one, Java agreed to buy her one as well.
A method to move "stuff" between horde and alliance was already in place via the neutral Auction House in Booty Bay, the seaport town in Stranglethorn Vale. Java bought a Blue Moth egg and sent it in the mail to Rakta, his sister, who was already in Booty Bay. Rakta was joined in Booty Bay by Melasahnd, her horde cousin. The two met in a small room off the main path, where a twitchy looking goblin managed the neutral Auction House. Rakta could hear water lapping outside, and the air in the room was dank and smelled of rotting wood. The whole business of making transactions between the warring factions has an unsavory aspect to it, even when it is for good cause. Rakta's combat owl and Mela's ghoul were restless and starting to size each other up. Best to get this business over with quickly.
Both Rakta and Mela opened the Auction House window and checked for moth eggs. There were yellow and white moths for sale there already for as much as 25g. Apparently that is what some horde would pay to get one. The main concern with transacting business through the neutral AH is that someone might buy your item before the transaction was complete. Rakta was a bit nervous making the transaction. When she went to put the Blue Moth egg up for sale, she accidentally caused the egg to hatch. "Don't . . . !" Mela yelled out frantically, seeing what was about to happen. But it was too late. Rakta now owned a pretty little blue moth. Mery's moth.
Rakta and Mela decided it was best not to tell Mery about that. Mery was already impatient to get her moth, and this was going to cause a delay. Java, too, swore secrecy and bought another Blue Moth egg. Once the egg had reached Rakta (again) through the mail, a successful transaction through the neutral AH was made. Mela took the egg and carefully placed it in the guild bank, and an eager Mery plucked it out of the bank minutes after Mel put it there.
Mery now has a matching pair of combat and non-combat pets. And if a cow could glow, that would be Mery.
This morning Mery said something about needing a blue dress. I'm just not going there. Nope. Not gonna.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday (7 Jul) - Valithria Dreamwalker
Wednesday (7 Jul) - Valithria Dreamwalker
For the second night of our ICC10 raid we chose as our first target the green dragon Valithria Dreamwalker. In an FS guild ICC25 some months ago Wild had got to experience this battle, which is quite a bit different than most of the encounters in ICC, or anywhere else. Wild was assigned to raid heal, which was a challenging but pretty straightforward task, but not anything like what some of the other healers in the raid were doing. We beat the encounter, so Wild can say that he has experience winning it, but frankly I had no clue even after the fight about what all was going on.
The only other raider in our current ten man group who'd ever seen Dreamwalker was Bf, Wild's shaman friend and FS guildie, who was playing the hunter alt he has in the MM guild. The other eight raiders would be seeing it for the first time, and Wild was going to get to learn how this fight really worked - for the first time.
Valithria Dreamwalker is the first boss in the third wing of ICC, called Frostwing Halls. The main wrinkle in this fight is that Dreamwalker is not the enemy. She had been captured, and it was conjectured she was used in experiments having to do with the spectral world of the Emerald Dream. Our task in this encounter is to save Dreamwalker. Dreamwalker begins with 50% health. Winning the fight requires us to heal her up to 100%. Of course, if that is all that we had to do, it would be easy. However, Dreamwalker's keepers don't take kindly to having us trying to free their pet dragon, and they do everything they can to stop us.
There are five different kinds of attackers, all with different and nasty abilities, and they come in wave after wave throughout the fight. It took more than ten minutes to describe all of the abilities and the rather complex kill order. Sh, our shaman healer, was assigned to heal the entire raid on his own. Wild and Ch, our holy priest, had a different role. Our job was to concentrate all our healing on Dreamwalker. By ourselves, it would take far too long to do that, as the dragon needs about six million in healing to get her to 100%. But Dreamwalker can help a bit. Regularly, throughout the fight, Dreamwalker opens a portal to a part of the Emerald Dream. Raiders entering this place can fly. Floating yellow clouds surround Dreamwalker, and when flown through provide powerful healing buffs that stack as you fly through more clouds. The trip only lasts a few seconds, and the raiders are returned to the real world again, but with those stacked buffs our healing output is monstrously enhanced.
We were excited and restless. Let's get this underway! We began.
We figured to need only one tank, and Mf got the call. The other tank, Bd, opted to switch to fury spec and do DPS. In front of Dreamwalker were four hostiles. Mf engaged them, and the DPS brought them down. Wild waited until the four mobs fell before running in to take up position to the right of Dreamwalker's head. Ch took up her position on the left side of the dragon's head. The rest of the raiders spread out and began tackling incoming mobs. Wild's heal reflexes twitched every time someone took damage, but I tried to focus on my single goal - heals on Dreamwalker. We had one minute of healing before the first portal opened and Wild tried to make the best of it, stacking all his HoTs on the dragon and then spamming my best large heal, Nourish. I was a bit cautious, not sure how the mana would last with that kind of non-stop heavy healing. Dreamwalker's health began sputtering upward from 50% to 52%.
A raid warning announced that a portal would soon open. Wild looked around and noticed the appearance of a number of small, green, eggshaped things floating about waist high to Wild. I tried to interact with one of them, then remembered that it took a few seconds before the eggshape opened into a portal. Wild has seen a lot of different kinds of portals, in all shapes and sizes and ways of opening them. The eggshape began morphing into a circular swirl of green light about three times the size of the eggshape. Wild tried running through it, jumping through it, coming in from one side and the other, but nothing worked. The portal closed, and Wild had not gotten the buffs. The battle around Wild raged on, and on this first attempt the lone tank went down quickly as raiders worked to figure out the fight. Ch had made it into the portal, and her 7k healing vs Wild's 4k healing showed how much those buffs helped healing. Wild asked for clarification on how to get into the portals, and I was told that they didn't really work like the portals we were familiar with, they worked more like vehicles. There is a special bar the game uses to display vehicle commands, the most common being an arrow bent into a half circle used to mount and dismount the vehicle. Wild made sure that bar was active for our second attempt.
We didn't get much farther on our second attempt. Raiders were still learning. Wild failed again to find a way to enter a portal, as his vehicle bar never displayed anything. After another discussion with Ch, she said that the half-circle arrow would show on the swirling portal itself when the mouse hovered over it. Ok, Wild said he'd give that a try on the next attempt.
On our third try Wild successfully entered a portal. What a relief! The first time Wild entered, it took a second to realize anything had changed. Dreamalker was still exactly where he was in the "outside" world. But all of the other raiders were gone. And floating some twenty feet above Wild's head were a ring of floating yellowish clouds that shifted this way and that, as if in response to some unfelt wind. Wild made a move like he was in his flying form, and sure enough, he could fly. A flying tree! Ch had also told Wild that she had learned that when she flew through one of the clouds, it was best to hang inside it a second to catch the soundless, harmless explosion from it. That explosion is what provides the buffs, and if she flew through it too quickly she'd miss the explosion and the buff. Wild had a brief bout of panic when he first tried to fly through one of the moving clouds, with visions of his ineptitude in other flying encounters like the hated Occulus dungeon. Wild started getting buffs, though, and from there on he was a demon flying through the air, pricking clouds, and getting his buffs.
The portal closed and Wild found himself twenty feet in the air. It was a hard landing, but only a pittance of health lost. One buff enhanced rejuv got Wild back to full health and pouring heals into Dreamwalker. After the first portal, new portals came up pretty quickly. Wild had barely started spamming Nourish after dropping his Hots than a new portal was announced as incoming. Mana regen was a completely non-issue with the buffs. Wild spammed his entire arsenal of heals and never dropped his mana below 95%. What power! But things went south soon after that, raiders started dying, with Wild and Ch having to divert healing to try to keep the raid alive, and we wiped.
One tank was just not enough, so Bd switched back into tanking spec for the next attempt. Our fourth attempt went much better, but it was another wipe. Wild had almost caught up with Ch in dragon healing, her with 7.6k healing and Wild at 7.3k. We should be able to do much better, and needed to be quicker in getting the maximum buffs we could.
Our fifth attempt was our best yet, and we got Dreamwalker to 88% health before wiping.
We slipped a bit on attempt #6, although Wild and Ch both had gotten our healing per second (hps) up over 9.5k. The goal, I think, is to get total hps on the dragon up above 20k. We were close to that.
On our 7th attempt Wild missed the second portal. I don't know how. I just couldn't find the handle and it went away before I could enter. All those stacks of healing buffs dropped off and Wild's healing fell dramatically until I could start building them back with the next portal. That proved fatal. The fight went longer than any of our previous attempts, and as the pressure mounted we suddenly saw Dreamwalker start to stir. She spoke words of encouragement to us and warning to her captors. She was getting stronger. She was at 92% when we wiped. Boy, does Wild wish he'd not missed that portal!
We never got any closer to winning her freedom. We made a total of 11 attempts, trying a number of different things, all "learning encounters," ie, failures. Wild and Ch both were able to break over 10k hps, but we would need to either squeeze out even more dragon healing or find a way to keep the rest of the raid alive longer.
Next week we'll hope for another six boss kill night so we can get back at her again. Despite the cost in consumables and repair bills, and the absence of loot, I really do love learning new encounters!
For the second night of our ICC10 raid we chose as our first target the green dragon Valithria Dreamwalker. In an FS guild ICC25 some months ago Wild had got to experience this battle, which is quite a bit different than most of the encounters in ICC, or anywhere else. Wild was assigned to raid heal, which was a challenging but pretty straightforward task, but not anything like what some of the other healers in the raid were doing. We beat the encounter, so Wild can say that he has experience winning it, but frankly I had no clue even after the fight about what all was going on.
The only other raider in our current ten man group who'd ever seen Dreamwalker was Bf, Wild's shaman friend and FS guildie, who was playing the hunter alt he has in the MM guild. The other eight raiders would be seeing it for the first time, and Wild was going to get to learn how this fight really worked - for the first time.
Valithria Dreamwalker is the first boss in the third wing of ICC, called Frostwing Halls. The main wrinkle in this fight is that Dreamwalker is not the enemy. She had been captured, and it was conjectured she was used in experiments having to do with the spectral world of the Emerald Dream. Our task in this encounter is to save Dreamwalker. Dreamwalker begins with 50% health. Winning the fight requires us to heal her up to 100%. Of course, if that is all that we had to do, it would be easy. However, Dreamwalker's keepers don't take kindly to having us trying to free their pet dragon, and they do everything they can to stop us.
Valithria Dreamwalker
There are five different kinds of attackers, all with different and nasty abilities, and they come in wave after wave throughout the fight. It took more than ten minutes to describe all of the abilities and the rather complex kill order. Sh, our shaman healer, was assigned to heal the entire raid on his own. Wild and Ch, our holy priest, had a different role. Our job was to concentrate all our healing on Dreamwalker. By ourselves, it would take far too long to do that, as the dragon needs about six million in healing to get her to 100%. But Dreamwalker can help a bit. Regularly, throughout the fight, Dreamwalker opens a portal to a part of the Emerald Dream. Raiders entering this place can fly. Floating yellow clouds surround Dreamwalker, and when flown through provide powerful healing buffs that stack as you fly through more clouds. The trip only lasts a few seconds, and the raiders are returned to the real world again, but with those stacked buffs our healing output is monstrously enhanced.
We were excited and restless. Let's get this underway! We began.
We figured to need only one tank, and Mf got the call. The other tank, Bd, opted to switch to fury spec and do DPS. In front of Dreamwalker were four hostiles. Mf engaged them, and the DPS brought them down. Wild waited until the four mobs fell before running in to take up position to the right of Dreamwalker's head. Ch took up her position on the left side of the dragon's head. The rest of the raiders spread out and began tackling incoming mobs. Wild's heal reflexes twitched every time someone took damage, but I tried to focus on my single goal - heals on Dreamwalker. We had one minute of healing before the first portal opened and Wild tried to make the best of it, stacking all his HoTs on the dragon and then spamming my best large heal, Nourish. I was a bit cautious, not sure how the mana would last with that kind of non-stop heavy healing. Dreamwalker's health began sputtering upward from 50% to 52%.
A raid warning announced that a portal would soon open. Wild looked around and noticed the appearance of a number of small, green, eggshaped things floating about waist high to Wild. I tried to interact with one of them, then remembered that it took a few seconds before the eggshape opened into a portal. Wild has seen a lot of different kinds of portals, in all shapes and sizes and ways of opening them. The eggshape began morphing into a circular swirl of green light about three times the size of the eggshape. Wild tried running through it, jumping through it, coming in from one side and the other, but nothing worked. The portal closed, and Wild had not gotten the buffs. The battle around Wild raged on, and on this first attempt the lone tank went down quickly as raiders worked to figure out the fight. Ch had made it into the portal, and her 7k healing vs Wild's 4k healing showed how much those buffs helped healing. Wild asked for clarification on how to get into the portals, and I was told that they didn't really work like the portals we were familiar with, they worked more like vehicles. There is a special bar the game uses to display vehicle commands, the most common being an arrow bent into a half circle used to mount and dismount the vehicle. Wild made sure that bar was active for our second attempt.
We didn't get much farther on our second attempt. Raiders were still learning. Wild failed again to find a way to enter a portal, as his vehicle bar never displayed anything. After another discussion with Ch, she said that the half-circle arrow would show on the swirling portal itself when the mouse hovered over it. Ok, Wild said he'd give that a try on the next attempt.
On our third try Wild successfully entered a portal. What a relief! The first time Wild entered, it took a second to realize anything had changed. Dreamalker was still exactly where he was in the "outside" world. But all of the other raiders were gone. And floating some twenty feet above Wild's head were a ring of floating yellowish clouds that shifted this way and that, as if in response to some unfelt wind. Wild made a move like he was in his flying form, and sure enough, he could fly. A flying tree! Ch had also told Wild that she had learned that when she flew through one of the clouds, it was best to hang inside it a second to catch the soundless, harmless explosion from it. That explosion is what provides the buffs, and if she flew through it too quickly she'd miss the explosion and the buff. Wild had a brief bout of panic when he first tried to fly through one of the moving clouds, with visions of his ineptitude in other flying encounters like the hated Occulus dungeon. Wild started getting buffs, though, and from there on he was a demon flying through the air, pricking clouds, and getting his buffs.
The portal closed and Wild found himself twenty feet in the air. It was a hard landing, but only a pittance of health lost. One buff enhanced rejuv got Wild back to full health and pouring heals into Dreamwalker. After the first portal, new portals came up pretty quickly. Wild had barely started spamming Nourish after dropping his Hots than a new portal was announced as incoming. Mana regen was a completely non-issue with the buffs. Wild spammed his entire arsenal of heals and never dropped his mana below 95%. What power! But things went south soon after that, raiders started dying, with Wild and Ch having to divert healing to try to keep the raid alive, and we wiped.
One tank was just not enough, so Bd switched back into tanking spec for the next attempt. Our fourth attempt went much better, but it was another wipe. Wild had almost caught up with Ch in dragon healing, her with 7.6k healing and Wild at 7.3k. We should be able to do much better, and needed to be quicker in getting the maximum buffs we could.
Our fifth attempt was our best yet, and we got Dreamwalker to 88% health before wiping.
We slipped a bit on attempt #6, although Wild and Ch both had gotten our healing per second (hps) up over 9.5k. The goal, I think, is to get total hps on the dragon up above 20k. We were close to that.
On our 7th attempt Wild missed the second portal. I don't know how. I just couldn't find the handle and it went away before I could enter. All those stacks of healing buffs dropped off and Wild's healing fell dramatically until I could start building them back with the next portal. That proved fatal. The fight went longer than any of our previous attempts, and as the pressure mounted we suddenly saw Dreamwalker start to stir. She spoke words of encouragement to us and warning to her captors. She was getting stronger. She was at 92% when we wiped. Boy, does Wild wish he'd not missed that portal!
We never got any closer to winning her freedom. We made a total of 11 attempts, trying a number of different things, all "learning encounters," ie, failures. Wild and Ch both were able to break over 10k hps, but we would need to either squeeze out even more dragon healing or find a way to keep the rest of the raid alive longer.
Next week we'll hope for another six boss kill night so we can get back at her again. Despite the cost in consumables and repair bills, and the absence of loot, I really do love learning new encounters!
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