Thursday (28 Oct) - Another Round of Icecrown Citadel
Wild logged in around 5:50pm Thursday night, not sure what was or wasn't going on raid-wise. The G2 ICC10 planned on continuing the raid from Wednesday, and our regular start time was 6:30pm, but things were kind of vague nonetheless. No calendar invite for the raid had been placed on the schedule, either. But the raid leader was in game when Wild logged in and let me know that the G2 planned to raid. If we could get enough folks. The G1, which wasn't planning to raid and for which Thursday wasn't a regular night for them anyway, had decided to raid after all. Not only did they have an almost full ten man raid, they had been lobbying to get G2 raiders into their raid to fill it. The G1 got started about 6:15pm with two raiders who would normally have run with G2. The rats.
It took a lot longer for G2 to fill out our raid, and we wound up with several alts of alts. We had two regular healers, Wild and Pl, which should work fine for most fights. We had one of our regular tanks, but the second tank was an alt who had never tanked in ICC before. Only two of our six DPSers were regulars; the rest were alts. There was the potential for disaster here, but we were going to give it our best shot.
We got started at 6:50pm. Remember that we had killed the first four bosses in the ICC25 run the night before. Even though we were now doing ICC10, both raids were on the same reset now thanks to the patch and those bosses were not available to us. We decided to go back after Rotface, the boss we had failed on in ICC25. Our new tank got kiting duty for the oozes, a tough assignment for someone new to raiding in ICC. We wiped on our first attempt when the learning tank let a big ooze catch him. Kite ooze - good. Letting ooze catch you - bad. This fight also required a priest to take dispel duty since we didn't have a paladin with us. Pl was given that job, and a shadow priest making his first foray into ICC was tapped to switch to healing to help Wild out. We wiped a second time, but made a pretty good shot at it. The pressed into service shadow priest turned healer did pretty well I must say.
It was about 7:30pm and we got word that the G1 had called it a night. They, too, had taken on Rotface as their first target - and couldn't kill him. The G1 "got tired" we were told, and ended their evening without a kill.
On G2's third attempt everything jelled and Rotface went down. We were all pretty jazzed by that. Looks like those two rats that jumped to G1 picked the wrong ship to sail on.
We moved on to take on the easier Festergut next. There was some miscommunication about how the spores were handled with the outside raiders. Wild was the anchor point, but the other two raiders on the outer edge with Wild didn't know that and we ended up moving around a lot more than we should have. We wiped primarily because Wild was out of position too many times at too many critical moments. I asked the raid leader to explain again how it worked. On our second attempt Festergut died.
We decided to bypass the very difficult Putricide and go straight for Dreamwalker. Wild was of course one of the portal healers. The raid leader had one of those "senior moments" when he couldn't remember who else went in the portal and who stayed out. Wild reminded him that normally we had Cr in the raid going into the portal, but she wasn't here. The raid leader then asked Pl if she had ever raid healed on this fight. That drew a laugh when Pl replied that she has been the raid healer on this fight every time we've done it. Pl got to stay in her normal role as raid healer and the shadow priest was again pressed into service as a healer, this time getting to go into the portal.
The battle to save Dreamwalker went very smoothly. Wild had to change his dragon healing strategy because of the changes made by the patch. Pre-patch Wild cast Rejuv and then spammed Nourish until I had to recast Rejuv. Rinse and repeat until a portal opened. Post-patch there was a little more to it, but not really any more difficult. Rejuv was again the starting spell, but following that Wild cast Swiftmend, which then automatically procced another healing spell, Efflorescence. Then Wild spammed Regrowth instead of Nourish until it was time to rinse and repeat again.
It didn't take that long for us to save Dreamwalker and win the fight. Beautifully done. Wild's portal duty healing came in at 17,710 hps. The shadow priest, considering it was his first time ever, did quite well with 8,850 hps. After the fight the shadow priest somewhat sheepishly admitted that he'd forgotten to change his spec before the fight, and had healed the whole battle in his shadow spec. Now that was funny.
Wild was consistently the #1 healer throughout the evening, and I think I'm starting to get a better feel for all of these changes. Wild even made sure to regularly cast Swiftmend, something I'd forgotten to do on Wednesday.
We also took a couple of shots at the Princes because several of the raiders had not seen the fight before. We wiped both times, but it was good experience for the newcomers.
It was a really fun night.
After the raid Wild asked if the raid would be locked for next week so that we could continue working on the bosses we hadn't killed instead of starting over again. The answer was a qualified "I think we will" but Wild will lobby hard for that. Time is running out on our chances against the Lich King.
We are a month and a half away from the Cataclysm expansion, assuming it rolls out on 7 Dec as announced. Things are already happening in game associated with Cata. Up to now the big bad boss of WoW has been the Lich King. In Icecrown Citadel, the Lich King is finally and officially defeated. The new bad-azz is Deathwing the Destroyer, the fiercest dragon of all the dragons with a long history or terror and destruction going back to the very creation of the world. His lair and his prison is deep within the earth of Azeroth in a place called Deepholm. But Deathwing is stirring, and we have started to experience quakes across the land, where the earth shakes and dust rises as Deathwing works to break free. Sometimes his voice reaches the surface, and the very air around us resonates with his powerful voice. Sometime before Cata we expect that Deathwing will break free and begin his assault on the world. We will be helpless to stop him, and that will lead to the Cataclysm. Stay tuned, this is going to get really fun.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday (27 Oct) - Icecrown Citadel 25
Wednesday (27 Oct) - Icecrown Citadel 25
In an earlier post a week or two ago I believe Wild claimed that ICC25 was dead. The patch would come and wipe it away. Well, I was wrong. We had 31 guildies sign up for the combined G1/G2 ICC25 raid on Wednesday night. We had our best tanks, our best healers, and our best DPS lined up to knock'em down. I had made a prediction that we had the makings of a raid that could run the table on at least 10 of 12 bosses. I was wrong about that, too.
The fact that we had so many raiders signed up created a problem for the raid leaders right at the start. Instead of gathering up and getting started at 6:30pm, guild officers met in private for more than a half hour sorting things out. The folks on vent actually started a political discussion about the state of the world. I'm something of a political junkie, but no way I wanted it in my WoW time. But we were that bored. I think it took some of the edge off before we even faced our first hostile mob.
Once we finally got started things did go pretty smoothly, although keeping 25 raiders focused on the task in front of them seems terribly challenging for our guild. We brought down Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, the Gunship, and Saurfang all on our first attempt, clearing the first wing.
The patch had taken it's toll on ICC. The druid battle rez was buggy. Sometimes raiders who were rezzed during battle found that their toon was stunned and could not move for the rest of the fight. Warlocks using their Summoning ability to teleport guildies into the raid reported that sometimes they got an "invalid character" error and the teleport would fail. The most annoying bug, though, which as the night progressed got more and more irritating, was the audio. Every battle sounded like one of those movies where the words you heard were not in sync with the moving lips. For as long as two or three minutes after we had killed a boss, the sounds of that fight would continue as if we were still in combat and boss was still alive. I was surprised at how attuned and reactive I was to those sounds and it was pretty jarring when it didn't match what I was seeing and doing.
I also have discovered that I really, really, miss Wild's tree form. And for a very simple reason. Healing in caster form is fine, and I even like the way Wild shoots his arm into the air and strikes a pose with each cast he makes. But throughout the night I felt vaguely disoriented, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was at first. It finally hit me during the Deathwhisper fight. There were 25 raiders all running around, fighting the boss, the adds, dealing with mind controlled raiders, avoiding death and decay casts by the boss, etc. My eyes were glued to the raid frames, casting heals and keeping raiders alive, and glancing at the rest of the screen every few seconds to make sure Wild was where he was supposed to be and wasn't in any danger. And far too many times - I couldn't find him! I'm so used to keying on Wild's tree form that I just haven't adjusted to seeing him in caster form. Instead of standing out in his tree form, now he looks just like two-thirds of the rest of the raid. I want my tree form back.
We were more than an hour and half into the night, past the halfway point of the night's raid, and we had 4 of 12 bosses down. Too much dead time between battles, too much fooling around, too many raiders needing a minute to do this, a minute to do that. The time added up. The raid leader did his best to encourage the raid to stay on track, but he, too, kept getting sidetracked by issues that seemed to have no end. We had more than a ten minute discussion on which boss to battle next, Rotface or Festergut. These two bosses drop a rare item simply called "the blood" used in an epic quest chain. Players on that chain needed one blood each from those two bosses. Who and how they were to be distributed to after those bosses were killed just went on and on. Finally someone asked who really needed them, and it turned out it was only two players, and one needed a blood from Festergut and one needed a blood from Rotface. If we'd checked on that up front we would have saved ten minutes of dead time.
We finally decided to vary from our normal order and take on Rotface before downing Festergut. Rotface is a bit tougher, but we have killed him many times, so the order didn't really matter. When we attempted to engage him, however, one raider who had come in to replace someone who had to leave wasn't able to join the fight. That took several more minutes to sort out, until he remembered he'd gotten into an ICC 10 the day before and had been in on a Festergut kill. Under the new lock out system in place since the patch, that raider was ineligible to join the raid until after Festergut was killed. We found someone else to join up.
After all that, we wiped on our first attempt on Rotface. There are several points in the raid when Rotface announces that he is going to "do a poo poo" (I kid you not, that's what he says) at which point we all run to outer edge of the chamber. getting caught in his "poo poo" is quite deadly. Half the raid got themselves killed getting caught in that poo poo. We know better than that.
We got Rotface to 13% on our second attempt, but it was like we were facing him for the first time. Too many raiders doing too many things wrong. The concentration just wasn't there.
We had fifteen minutes left on the night and we readied ourselves for a third attempt. Our very good and always upbeat raid leader was unfortunately coming to a slow boil over all of the issues. I could tell he had much higher expectations for this night. Well, so had I. One of the death knights called up his Army of the Dead early. It's a timing issue. Do it late, and you don't get the full effect of the spell. Do it early, and the only somewhat controlled small army that is called forth might wander a bit too close to the boss. Which is what happened, and Rotface engaged before we were ready. Two-thirds of the raid lumbered into belated action to engage Rotface. The other third ran away, assuming it would be a wipe. The chamber doors closed and Wild and the two-thirds of the raid that stayed inside had no chance - since all three tanks had been among that other fleeing third.
Well, it was a quick wipe, and we still had ten minutes, but the raid leader was done. He called it a night, unwilling to witness another potential debacle.
I fully expected us to be back at it on Thursday night, so I was surprised when we were told that there would not be another 25 man scheduled until after Cata was released. We are now really, really done with ICC25. The G2 does plan to raid ICC10 on Thursday, though. Under the new system the first wing, which we've already killed in ICC25, won't be available for the ICC10. I hope the G2 does a better job than our ICC25.
On the positive side, raiding with these folks remains a lot of fun. They/we are good people, we are just not hard core raiders (or even medium core raiders, I suppose). We play hard, but we don't take things too seriously. After the third wipe on Rotface, one of us made this comment: "You know, there are a lot of guilds who can clear ICC25 in two hours on a single night." That's a true statement. No one responded to that for a few minutes. Perhaps we were all considering what that meant for ourselves. The eventual response from another guildie: "If that's what you want then go join one of those guilds."
That's really the bottom line. We like our guild, because of the people in it, not because of how many ICC bosses we can kill in a night.
The other bit of news from the ICC run is that Wild, at long last, won a roll on an item in ICC that I actually needed and wanted. It was [Athor's Abacus], a powerful i264 trinket that replaces an i251 piece. I felt a little bad beating out our ace priest, Ch, on the roll (I rolled a 98 to her 80 something) because she would have been replacing an i232 piece. But after how many times Wild has lost the roll for that item, I knew I might never get another chance. Wild took it.
It's hard to compare healing numbers pre and post patch since this was ICC25 and not ICC10, so it might be a better comparison once Wild has done ICC10 Thursday night. We used five healers, and it seemed that the total healing was a little lower than it was pre-patch. That's just a feeling, and it might have more to do with healers learning the changes in their healing rotations than spell changes and such, but only time will tell. Anyway, here they are:
Overall Healing -
#1: Wild, 4000 hps with 24.4% of the healing
#2: Ch (priest), 3975/22.1%
#3: Pl (priest), 3587/21.1%
#4: Kd (paladin), 3517/13.0%
#5: Tk (paladin), 3220/12.9%
Wild took a bit of pride in the fact that the two G2 healers (Wild and Pl) were #1 and #3 compared to the other three healers from G1. And the G2 did not have our other healer in the raid, Cr, who couldn't make it.
Checking his own numbers, Wild learned that his Regrowth spell critted over 90% of the time, making this spell one of his most powerful go to spells now after the patch. That used to be Nourish, but Wild rarely used that spell because the cast time has been increased by a lot. Another change was to Lifebloom, an instant spell that Wild used to spam alongside his Rejuv spell. Lifebloom can only be used on one raider at a time now, preferably on the tank. Wild was tank healing for the raid, so I got a good look at how the changes worked out for a tank. Rejuv made up most of the healing, but Wild's three stacks of Lifebloom was a solid second, confirming that this spell must be kept active on the tank full time. Living Seed, a proc that Wild wasn't sure would provide much additional healing, was fourth overall. Wild almost did not take the Living Seed talent. Now I'm glad I did. Finally, Wild totally forgot about another spell, Swiftmend. I figure Wild lost a good bit of healing, because with the patch Swiftmend is tied to another new healing spell called Efflorescence. Those two spells combined have the potential to do a lot of healing, and Wild simply didn't use it. Something to remember.
Wild's Tank Healing -
#1: Rejuv, 38% of the healing on the tank
#2: Lifebloom, 29%
#3: Regrowth, 21%
#4: Living Seed, 8% (other spells were below 5%)
Rejuv had 64% overhealing across the entire raid, but that's because I still tend to spam that instant spell on raiders who haven't even taken damage yet. It's a preventive measure that Wild can use as long as mana doesn't become an issue, which right now it isn't. All of Wild's other casts were very efficient, with under 10% overhealing. that bodes well for when Cata hits and mana is supposed to get scarce.
While the healing numbers seemed a bit off, the DPS looked right in line with what was expected, and perhaps a shade higher.
#1: shaman: 11060 DPS
#2: hunter: 10647
#3: DK: 10422
#4-5: 9k+
#6-8: 8k+
#9-12: 7k+
#13-15: 6k+
Wish us luck Thursday night.
In an earlier post a week or two ago I believe Wild claimed that ICC25 was dead. The patch would come and wipe it away. Well, I was wrong. We had 31 guildies sign up for the combined G1/G2 ICC25 raid on Wednesday night. We had our best tanks, our best healers, and our best DPS lined up to knock'em down. I had made a prediction that we had the makings of a raid that could run the table on at least 10 of 12 bosses. I was wrong about that, too.
The fact that we had so many raiders signed up created a problem for the raid leaders right at the start. Instead of gathering up and getting started at 6:30pm, guild officers met in private for more than a half hour sorting things out. The folks on vent actually started a political discussion about the state of the world. I'm something of a political junkie, but no way I wanted it in my WoW time. But we were that bored. I think it took some of the edge off before we even faced our first hostile mob.
Once we finally got started things did go pretty smoothly, although keeping 25 raiders focused on the task in front of them seems terribly challenging for our guild. We brought down Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, the Gunship, and Saurfang all on our first attempt, clearing the first wing.
The patch had taken it's toll on ICC. The druid battle rez was buggy. Sometimes raiders who were rezzed during battle found that their toon was stunned and could not move for the rest of the fight. Warlocks using their Summoning ability to teleport guildies into the raid reported that sometimes they got an "invalid character" error and the teleport would fail. The most annoying bug, though, which as the night progressed got more and more irritating, was the audio. Every battle sounded like one of those movies where the words you heard were not in sync with the moving lips. For as long as two or three minutes after we had killed a boss, the sounds of that fight would continue as if we were still in combat and boss was still alive. I was surprised at how attuned and reactive I was to those sounds and it was pretty jarring when it didn't match what I was seeing and doing.
I also have discovered that I really, really, miss Wild's tree form. And for a very simple reason. Healing in caster form is fine, and I even like the way Wild shoots his arm into the air and strikes a pose with each cast he makes. But throughout the night I felt vaguely disoriented, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was at first. It finally hit me during the Deathwhisper fight. There were 25 raiders all running around, fighting the boss, the adds, dealing with mind controlled raiders, avoiding death and decay casts by the boss, etc. My eyes were glued to the raid frames, casting heals and keeping raiders alive, and glancing at the rest of the screen every few seconds to make sure Wild was where he was supposed to be and wasn't in any danger. And far too many times - I couldn't find him! I'm so used to keying on Wild's tree form that I just haven't adjusted to seeing him in caster form. Instead of standing out in his tree form, now he looks just like two-thirds of the rest of the raid. I want my tree form back.
We were more than an hour and half into the night, past the halfway point of the night's raid, and we had 4 of 12 bosses down. Too much dead time between battles, too much fooling around, too many raiders needing a minute to do this, a minute to do that. The time added up. The raid leader did his best to encourage the raid to stay on track, but he, too, kept getting sidetracked by issues that seemed to have no end. We had more than a ten minute discussion on which boss to battle next, Rotface or Festergut. These two bosses drop a rare item simply called "the blood" used in an epic quest chain. Players on that chain needed one blood each from those two bosses. Who and how they were to be distributed to after those bosses were killed just went on and on. Finally someone asked who really needed them, and it turned out it was only two players, and one needed a blood from Festergut and one needed a blood from Rotface. If we'd checked on that up front we would have saved ten minutes of dead time.
We finally decided to vary from our normal order and take on Rotface before downing Festergut. Rotface is a bit tougher, but we have killed him many times, so the order didn't really matter. When we attempted to engage him, however, one raider who had come in to replace someone who had to leave wasn't able to join the fight. That took several more minutes to sort out, until he remembered he'd gotten into an ICC 10 the day before and had been in on a Festergut kill. Under the new lock out system in place since the patch, that raider was ineligible to join the raid until after Festergut was killed. We found someone else to join up.
After all that, we wiped on our first attempt on Rotface. There are several points in the raid when Rotface announces that he is going to "do a poo poo" (I kid you not, that's what he says) at which point we all run to outer edge of the chamber. getting caught in his "poo poo" is quite deadly. Half the raid got themselves killed getting caught in that poo poo. We know better than that.
We got Rotface to 13% on our second attempt, but it was like we were facing him for the first time. Too many raiders doing too many things wrong. The concentration just wasn't there.
We had fifteen minutes left on the night and we readied ourselves for a third attempt. Our very good and always upbeat raid leader was unfortunately coming to a slow boil over all of the issues. I could tell he had much higher expectations for this night. Well, so had I. One of the death knights called up his Army of the Dead early. It's a timing issue. Do it late, and you don't get the full effect of the spell. Do it early, and the only somewhat controlled small army that is called forth might wander a bit too close to the boss. Which is what happened, and Rotface engaged before we were ready. Two-thirds of the raid lumbered into belated action to engage Rotface. The other third ran away, assuming it would be a wipe. The chamber doors closed and Wild and the two-thirds of the raid that stayed inside had no chance - since all three tanks had been among that other fleeing third.
Well, it was a quick wipe, and we still had ten minutes, but the raid leader was done. He called it a night, unwilling to witness another potential debacle.
I fully expected us to be back at it on Thursday night, so I was surprised when we were told that there would not be another 25 man scheduled until after Cata was released. We are now really, really done with ICC25. The G2 does plan to raid ICC10 on Thursday, though. Under the new system the first wing, which we've already killed in ICC25, won't be available for the ICC10. I hope the G2 does a better job than our ICC25.
On the positive side, raiding with these folks remains a lot of fun. They/we are good people, we are just not hard core raiders (or even medium core raiders, I suppose). We play hard, but we don't take things too seriously. After the third wipe on Rotface, one of us made this comment: "You know, there are a lot of guilds who can clear ICC25 in two hours on a single night." That's a true statement. No one responded to that for a few minutes. Perhaps we were all considering what that meant for ourselves. The eventual response from another guildie: "If that's what you want then go join one of those guilds."
That's really the bottom line. We like our guild, because of the people in it, not because of how many ICC bosses we can kill in a night.
The other bit of news from the ICC run is that Wild, at long last, won a roll on an item in ICC that I actually needed and wanted. It was [Athor's Abacus], a powerful i264 trinket that replaces an i251 piece. I felt a little bad beating out our ace priest, Ch, on the roll (I rolled a 98 to her 80 something) because she would have been replacing an i232 piece. But after how many times Wild has lost the roll for that item, I knew I might never get another chance. Wild took it.
It's hard to compare healing numbers pre and post patch since this was ICC25 and not ICC10, so it might be a better comparison once Wild has done ICC10 Thursday night. We used five healers, and it seemed that the total healing was a little lower than it was pre-patch. That's just a feeling, and it might have more to do with healers learning the changes in their healing rotations than spell changes and such, but only time will tell. Anyway, here they are:
Overall Healing -
#1: Wild, 4000 hps with 24.4% of the healing
#2: Ch (priest), 3975/22.1%
#3: Pl (priest), 3587/21.1%
#4: Kd (paladin), 3517/13.0%
#5: Tk (paladin), 3220/12.9%
Wild took a bit of pride in the fact that the two G2 healers (Wild and Pl) were #1 and #3 compared to the other three healers from G1. And the G2 did not have our other healer in the raid, Cr, who couldn't make it.
Checking his own numbers, Wild learned that his Regrowth spell critted over 90% of the time, making this spell one of his most powerful go to spells now after the patch. That used to be Nourish, but Wild rarely used that spell because the cast time has been increased by a lot. Another change was to Lifebloom, an instant spell that Wild used to spam alongside his Rejuv spell. Lifebloom can only be used on one raider at a time now, preferably on the tank. Wild was tank healing for the raid, so I got a good look at how the changes worked out for a tank. Rejuv made up most of the healing, but Wild's three stacks of Lifebloom was a solid second, confirming that this spell must be kept active on the tank full time. Living Seed, a proc that Wild wasn't sure would provide much additional healing, was fourth overall. Wild almost did not take the Living Seed talent. Now I'm glad I did. Finally, Wild totally forgot about another spell, Swiftmend. I figure Wild lost a good bit of healing, because with the patch Swiftmend is tied to another new healing spell called Efflorescence. Those two spells combined have the potential to do a lot of healing, and Wild simply didn't use it. Something to remember.
Wild's Tank Healing -
#1: Rejuv, 38% of the healing on the tank
#2: Lifebloom, 29%
#3: Regrowth, 21%
#4: Living Seed, 8% (other spells were below 5%)
Rejuv had 64% overhealing across the entire raid, but that's because I still tend to spam that instant spell on raiders who haven't even taken damage yet. It's a preventive measure that Wild can use as long as mana doesn't become an issue, which right now it isn't. All of Wild's other casts were very efficient, with under 10% overhealing. that bodes well for when Cata hits and mana is supposed to get scarce.
While the healing numbers seemed a bit off, the DPS looked right in line with what was expected, and perhaps a shade higher.
#1: shaman: 11060 DPS
#2: hunter: 10647
#3: DK: 10422
#4-5: 9k+
#6-8: 8k+
#9-12: 7k+
#13-15: 6k+
Wish us luck Thursday night.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tuesday (26 Oct) - Getting Ready to Raid
Tuesday (26 Oct) - Getting Ready to Raid
Tuesday maintenance completed on time, and they even managed to sneak in enough "fixes" that it required agreeing to the Terms of Agreement (TOC) (for the millionth time) and checking the "Load out of date Addons" box. But the patch number stayed at 4.0.1, and the patch date stayed at 10/20/2010. Go figure. No patch notes were released so it's a big secret what they did to us. I do know that Philly's Inscription profession, and JB's Alchemy professions, were all messed up, out of order, and missing (unless you used the search feature to get at it). Guildies were also complaining about problems with other professions. Good job, Blizz.
As promised, here is Philly's results from her first heavy investment in selling glyphs.
Sold: 15 glyphs for a total of 631 gold
Unsold (expired): 20 glyphs
Reposted: 6
New Posts: 1 (a high value glyph that Philly learned today, Tuesday)
Philly's profit so far is a bit over 200g, so the effort has already been worth it.
On Wednesday morning the rest of the remaining glyphs posted on the AH expired. Every price had dropped below 50g as well, so Philly did not repost them. Philly will wait to see if prices start to go up for the weekend, or if Philly really did catch just the tail end of glyph boom and prices will continue to drop.
Happy had a miserable Tuesday, getting beaten in total sales by Lost by a wide margin. Happy points to Lost's near monopoly on greater eternal essences, which she is selling at five times the purchase price, as the killer. Lost points to Happy's poor sales over the weekend. As always, though, this is all subject to change as the week progresses.
There is only one raid planned this week, on Wednesday. ICC 10 raid groups G1 and G2 are combining this week in the hopes of running the table on ICC25. We have 19 signed up so far. This is a big deal for the guild. If we can't field a very solid team that cracks open ICC25, we are going to have real problems with Cata. We should be able to get 10 of 12 bosses down with pretty high confidence. Wild would love to see Sindragosa fall as well (the 11th boss) and get a shot at the Lich King. Yes, Wild is still hoping for that chance. As far as Wild's interface goes for the raid, my raidframes addon, Xperl, is still all gooned up and I will again be using the standard Blizzard raid frames. I've added the addon ClassTimer to help with Lifebloom stacks and watch for Clearcasting and Replenishment, which has worked well in limited testing. I'm still leaving out other addons like DoTimer and Power Auras until I'm sure everything else is working in a raid environment.
You know, Wild hasn't raided since the 14th of Oct, which means 13 days between that last raid and the upcoming Wednesday raid. The last raid before the 14th was the 7th, so Wild has raided on only two nights in the last 20 days. Prior to the patch Wild was raiding four nights a week. No wonder Wild is antsy and looking to shake the dust off from all this inactivity.
Tuesday maintenance completed on time, and they even managed to sneak in enough "fixes" that it required agreeing to the Terms of Agreement (TOC) (for the millionth time) and checking the "Load out of date Addons" box. But the patch number stayed at 4.0.1, and the patch date stayed at 10/20/2010. Go figure. No patch notes were released so it's a big secret what they did to us. I do know that Philly's Inscription profession, and JB's Alchemy professions, were all messed up, out of order, and missing (unless you used the search feature to get at it). Guildies were also complaining about problems with other professions. Good job, Blizz.
As promised, here is Philly's results from her first heavy investment in selling glyphs.
Sold: 15 glyphs for a total of 631 gold
Unsold (expired): 20 glyphs
Reposted: 6
New Posts: 1 (a high value glyph that Philly learned today, Tuesday)
Philly's profit so far is a bit over 200g, so the effort has already been worth it.
On Wednesday morning the rest of the remaining glyphs posted on the AH expired. Every price had dropped below 50g as well, so Philly did not repost them. Philly will wait to see if prices start to go up for the weekend, or if Philly really did catch just the tail end of glyph boom and prices will continue to drop.
Happy had a miserable Tuesday, getting beaten in total sales by Lost by a wide margin. Happy points to Lost's near monopoly on greater eternal essences, which she is selling at five times the purchase price, as the killer. Lost points to Happy's poor sales over the weekend. As always, though, this is all subject to change as the week progresses.
There is only one raid planned this week, on Wednesday. ICC 10 raid groups G1 and G2 are combining this week in the hopes of running the table on ICC25. We have 19 signed up so far. This is a big deal for the guild. If we can't field a very solid team that cracks open ICC25, we are going to have real problems with Cata. We should be able to get 10 of 12 bosses down with pretty high confidence. Wild would love to see Sindragosa fall as well (the 11th boss) and get a shot at the Lich King. Yes, Wild is still hoping for that chance. As far as Wild's interface goes for the raid, my raidframes addon, Xperl, is still all gooned up and I will again be using the standard Blizzard raid frames. I've added the addon ClassTimer to help with Lifebloom stacks and watch for Clearcasting and Replenishment, which has worked well in limited testing. I'm still leaving out other addons like DoTimer and Power Auras until I'm sure everything else is working in a raid environment.
You know, Wild hasn't raided since the 14th of Oct, which means 13 days between that last raid and the upcoming Wednesday raid. The last raid before the 14th was the 7th, so Wild has raided on only two nights in the last 20 days. Prior to the patch Wild was raiding four nights a week. No wonder Wild is antsy and looking to shake the dust off from all this inactivity.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday (25 Oct) - Keeping Busy
Monday (25 Oct) - Keeping Busy
Melasahnd (remember her? Level 62 horde death knight) has been helping out Philly by collecting herbs for her. Melasahnd is a pretty junior Herbalist, but it's the lower level herbs that Philly needs the most, anyway. JB, who is a Grand Master Herbalist, felt that she was "too senior" for such low level work. No matter, Mela got to improve her skills at herbalism while at the same time helping Philly out.
Based on the early results Monday morning, Philly is pleased with her glyph sales. She had set a standard price of 50 gold for each of the 27 initial glyph posts (with a couple of exceptions), even if the current price was much higher than that. All 27 glyphs that Philly posted had starting prices on the AH of at least 50g. About half of Philly's glyph's have now been underbid by other scribes, but that was to be expected. In most cases the underbidding was by a small amount, demonstrating that the 50g standard price was pretty close to the mark. In a couple of cases there were some low ball posts - Philly bought them and reposted back up at the 50g threshold. Happy has long since learned that enchanting mat sales dip in the first part of the week, but Philly doesn't know if that will be the case with glyphs. Philly is intentionally not building a large stock of glyphs since it isn't necessary. As long as she has the herbs, she can instantly make anything that she wants. If the underbidding is aggressive enough, however, she may make extras so that she can maintain her position as the most consistent and lowest cost provider. For right now, though, Philly would like to try to maintain a price point of 50g; or at least re-establish that price come next weekend when in theory the buying should ramp up. Philly has spent half her stake of gold getting all of this put together, with no monetary help from Happy. It better work.
Glyph update - Philly has sold about a dozen glyphs and has been replacing them on the Auction House. Mela has done a great job of collecting herbs to make more glyphs, including some of the rarer herbs that had stymied Philly from making several popular glyphs. Following the Tuesday maintenance break will be a good time to take stock of how Philly has done. The maintenance is planned as a "normal" one and should be done by 11am.
The Monday night pvp did not go off. Both EZ (horde) and Java (alliance) popped in and out of game until around 9:30pm. The DER family must still be having problems with the patch. Things were so bad that Blizzard said that the entire WoW game, from Vanilla WoW to the latest patch, had to be reinstalled. That is hours and hours and hours of effort, fraught with opportunities for bugs and glitches. Blizzard should provide compensation for all the lost game time that is causing. Sis likely didn't make it as I believe her classes have started again.
EZ and Java weren't just standing around, though. EZ needed glyphs, so Philly hooked her up with what she could. EZ also played around with her spells and abilities, getting a better rotation and priority list of attacks together. Mery has sent EZ a ton of materials for raising EZ's cooking profession (detritus from all that farming she did for leather), but EZ has done so little with cooking she needs to ramp up some very basic stuff before she can use what Mery sent her.
Java finally got around to settling on his talent spec. The patch changed death knight specs more than most other classes. Before the patch Java was Blood spec as it was generally the best spec for leveling. Mela, also a death knight, was Unholy spec, which is the first death knight spec I learned. I like that one, too, because Unholy specs get a permanent ghoul pet. Non-Unholy spec death knights only get a temporary pet on a cooldown.
After the patch the Blood spec was restructured emphasize armor and stamina and defensive abilities, making it the preferred spec for tanking. While this spec improves survivability, it is the worst of the three specs at doing damage. High damage specs are generally preferred to speed up leveling.
The third DK spec is Frost. I've never tried that spec, but some DK players liked it pre-patch because it has a dual-wield ability. It was a little more complicated to get the best out of that spec, and I just never tried it. Then I ran across a post on wowhead specifically addressing a non-dual wield spec (a two-hand weapon is used instead of two one hand weapons) for Frost post patch that many people were really liking. Basically, what I got out of that is that post patch this spec is the best for leveling up until 80, when dual wielding will become better again. Java already has an excellent two-hand weapon, and had no plans to dual wield. And, since I've never tried the Frost spec before, now seemed a good time to try it out.
Java was also close to leveling up. He was 98% of the way to level 29, and would need only a few kills to get there. Java specced into Frost, but as recommended in the post, set his aura to Unholy. That combination was supposed to provide the highest damage. To test that out, Java had to go somewhere where the mobs were around his level, and the nearest zone with high level 20s mobs was Ashenvale. Java was in Exodar, so it took a boat trip and a long flight to get to the Alliance city of Astraanar in Ashenvale.
Things got even more interesting when Java asked around Astraanar for some quests. Might as well pick up some easy ones to do while testing out Java's new spec. Two of the quests Java picked up were for a place called Forest Song. I'd never heard of it. Then I remembered something Melasahnd had mentioned a few days ago.
Mela spent some time farming herbs in Ashenvale to get her skill level up after Philly asked for help. I thought I knew that area well, but she ran across an area that I swear did not exist the last time a Wild toon was in that zone. The pics Mela took aren't the best, but this is what she saw:
The large blue banners were Alliance banners. Mela entered far enough inside the compound to see that the npcs were also Alliance, and hostile. Mela could have slaughtered them all, since she could see none higher than level 27, but she had other tasks to accomplish at the time. It was an unsolved oddity.
Back to Java. With those two quests in hand, Java went searching for Forest Song. Given what Mela had seen, Java had a good idea which direction to head. The road she had to take went right past the Horde outpost, and I knew that there were several horde npcs watching that road. Java was able to slip past the horde defenders without aggroing any of them. Java soon found Forest Song, at the far northeast border of Ashenvale. And yes, it was the same place that Mela had found.
Java entered Forest Song, got his two quests completed, and leveled to 29. There were an abundance of quest givers there, and in talking with the npcs the true nature of Forest Song became clear. Ashenvale is a contested zone, with both Alliance and Horde outposts. However, the Horde hold most of it, and have long been working on expanding control of the zone. The Alliance have been helpless to stop that expansion, despite the effort at Forest Song to increase Alliance influence. I had originally thought this outpost had been added by the patch, but further research revealed that it has always been there. As a mainly horde player, I'd never even noticed it, tucked up at the edge of the zone and butting up against a high level elite dragon area that everyone avoided. In Cata the war between Alliance and Horde will grow to a fever pitch in Ashenvale.
Ok, I've gotten a bit far afield here. Java did make level 29, as mentioned, and he did test out his new spec on many, many hostile satyrs and spiders around level 29. It was an exhilarating slaughter! With new AoE spells and a much better rotation of attacks, Java was astonished at the improvement. In prior dungeon runs Java was doing about 70 DPS, well below what other DPSers were doing and very disappointing for Java. Against the mobs of Ashenvale, his DPS doubled to more than 140 DPS. Java was often two shotting mobs, and when he got tangled in a group of four mobs at once, it was thrilling just how fast they all went down.
I think our Monday pvp group will want Java to remain at level 29 for awhile, but it will be very tempting to level this bad boy up. Perhaps Jocelyne should get another look - she's a paladin, like Java, but is only at level 21, I think. Hmm.
Melasahnd (remember her? Level 62 horde death knight) has been helping out Philly by collecting herbs for her. Melasahnd is a pretty junior Herbalist, but it's the lower level herbs that Philly needs the most, anyway. JB, who is a Grand Master Herbalist, felt that she was "too senior" for such low level work. No matter, Mela got to improve her skills at herbalism while at the same time helping Philly out.
Based on the early results Monday morning, Philly is pleased with her glyph sales. She had set a standard price of 50 gold for each of the 27 initial glyph posts (with a couple of exceptions), even if the current price was much higher than that. All 27 glyphs that Philly posted had starting prices on the AH of at least 50g. About half of Philly's glyph's have now been underbid by other scribes, but that was to be expected. In most cases the underbidding was by a small amount, demonstrating that the 50g standard price was pretty close to the mark. In a couple of cases there were some low ball posts - Philly bought them and reposted back up at the 50g threshold. Happy has long since learned that enchanting mat sales dip in the first part of the week, but Philly doesn't know if that will be the case with glyphs. Philly is intentionally not building a large stock of glyphs since it isn't necessary. As long as she has the herbs, she can instantly make anything that she wants. If the underbidding is aggressive enough, however, she may make extras so that she can maintain her position as the most consistent and lowest cost provider. For right now, though, Philly would like to try to maintain a price point of 50g; or at least re-establish that price come next weekend when in theory the buying should ramp up. Philly has spent half her stake of gold getting all of this put together, with no monetary help from Happy. It better work.
Glyph update - Philly has sold about a dozen glyphs and has been replacing them on the Auction House. Mela has done a great job of collecting herbs to make more glyphs, including some of the rarer herbs that had stymied Philly from making several popular glyphs. Following the Tuesday maintenance break will be a good time to take stock of how Philly has done. The maintenance is planned as a "normal" one and should be done by 11am.
The Monday night pvp did not go off. Both EZ (horde) and Java (alliance) popped in and out of game until around 9:30pm. The DER family must still be having problems with the patch. Things were so bad that Blizzard said that the entire WoW game, from Vanilla WoW to the latest patch, had to be reinstalled. That is hours and hours and hours of effort, fraught with opportunities for bugs and glitches. Blizzard should provide compensation for all the lost game time that is causing. Sis likely didn't make it as I believe her classes have started again.
EZ and Java weren't just standing around, though. EZ needed glyphs, so Philly hooked her up with what she could. EZ also played around with her spells and abilities, getting a better rotation and priority list of attacks together. Mery has sent EZ a ton of materials for raising EZ's cooking profession (detritus from all that farming she did for leather), but EZ has done so little with cooking she needs to ramp up some very basic stuff before she can use what Mery sent her.
Java finally got around to settling on his talent spec. The patch changed death knight specs more than most other classes. Before the patch Java was Blood spec as it was generally the best spec for leveling. Mela, also a death knight, was Unholy spec, which is the first death knight spec I learned. I like that one, too, because Unholy specs get a permanent ghoul pet. Non-Unholy spec death knights only get a temporary pet on a cooldown.
After the patch the Blood spec was restructured emphasize armor and stamina and defensive abilities, making it the preferred spec for tanking. While this spec improves survivability, it is the worst of the three specs at doing damage. High damage specs are generally preferred to speed up leveling.
The third DK spec is Frost. I've never tried that spec, but some DK players liked it pre-patch because it has a dual-wield ability. It was a little more complicated to get the best out of that spec, and I just never tried it. Then I ran across a post on wowhead specifically addressing a non-dual wield spec (a two-hand weapon is used instead of two one hand weapons) for Frost post patch that many people were really liking. Basically, what I got out of that is that post patch this spec is the best for leveling up until 80, when dual wielding will become better again. Java already has an excellent two-hand weapon, and had no plans to dual wield. And, since I've never tried the Frost spec before, now seemed a good time to try it out.
Java was also close to leveling up. He was 98% of the way to level 29, and would need only a few kills to get there. Java specced into Frost, but as recommended in the post, set his aura to Unholy. That combination was supposed to provide the highest damage. To test that out, Java had to go somewhere where the mobs were around his level, and the nearest zone with high level 20s mobs was Ashenvale. Java was in Exodar, so it took a boat trip and a long flight to get to the Alliance city of Astraanar in Ashenvale.
Things got even more interesting when Java asked around Astraanar for some quests. Might as well pick up some easy ones to do while testing out Java's new spec. Two of the quests Java picked up were for a place called Forest Song. I'd never heard of it. Then I remembered something Melasahnd had mentioned a few days ago.
Mela spent some time farming herbs in Ashenvale to get her skill level up after Philly asked for help. I thought I knew that area well, but she ran across an area that I swear did not exist the last time a Wild toon was in that zone. The pics Mela took aren't the best, but this is what she saw:
The large blue banners were Alliance banners. Mela entered far enough inside the compound to see that the npcs were also Alliance, and hostile. Mela could have slaughtered them all, since she could see none higher than level 27, but she had other tasks to accomplish at the time. It was an unsolved oddity.
Back to Java. With those two quests in hand, Java went searching for Forest Song. Given what Mela had seen, Java had a good idea which direction to head. The road she had to take went right past the Horde outpost, and I knew that there were several horde npcs watching that road. Java was able to slip past the horde defenders without aggroing any of them. Java soon found Forest Song, at the far northeast border of Ashenvale. And yes, it was the same place that Mela had found.
Java entered Forest Song, got his two quests completed, and leveled to 29. There were an abundance of quest givers there, and in talking with the npcs the true nature of Forest Song became clear. Ashenvale is a contested zone, with both Alliance and Horde outposts. However, the Horde hold most of it, and have long been working on expanding control of the zone. The Alliance have been helpless to stop that expansion, despite the effort at Forest Song to increase Alliance influence. I had originally thought this outpost had been added by the patch, but further research revealed that it has always been there. As a mainly horde player, I'd never even noticed it, tucked up at the edge of the zone and butting up against a high level elite dragon area that everyone avoided. In Cata the war between Alliance and Horde will grow to a fever pitch in Ashenvale.
Ok, I've gotten a bit far afield here. Java did make level 29, as mentioned, and he did test out his new spec on many, many hostile satyrs and spiders around level 29. It was an exhilarating slaughter! With new AoE spells and a much better rotation of attacks, Java was astonished at the improvement. In prior dungeon runs Java was doing about 70 DPS, well below what other DPSers were doing and very disappointing for Java. Against the mobs of Ashenvale, his DPS doubled to more than 140 DPS. Java was often two shotting mobs, and when he got tangled in a group of four mobs at once, it was thrilling just how fast they all went down.
I think our Monday pvp group will want Java to remain at level 29 for awhile, but it will be very tempting to level this bad boy up. Perhaps Jocelyne should get another look - she's a paladin, like Java, but is only at level 21, I think. Hmm.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Weekend (24 Oct) - Saddling Up
Weekend (24 Oct) - Saddling Up
Two plus days in chilly, rain and fog drenched weather in the California mountains might not be too many folks idea of a vacation, but we always enjoy these little getaways. We always stay at the same place, called Cottage in the Woods, and that's exactly what it is. We had our dog and two of the cats with us, and they got a kick out of watching the huge blue and black blue jays, the rabbits and squirrels, and on one night, a family of raccoons. We don't do a whole lot, but that's pretty much the point.
We got back on Friday afternoon, and I have to admit it was a bit of an effort to zone back into WoW and take up where the Wild family had left off. Happy and Lost got their time in game, of course, catching up on the doins' of the Auction House, which wasn't much. Gold is still being made, but there wasn't a lot of buying going on, even though it was the weekend.
Dungeon and raid action on Friday night was also muted. Wild had missed the ICC raids this past week, of course, and was in game for awhile considering catching on with a PUG ICC, but the couple of possible offerings didn't really appeal to him. While standing around chatting with the few guildies that were on, Wild did discover a change from the patch that had escaped his notice. Idols are special gear available only to some classes. They fit in a special slot and provide a select set of stats tailored for specific specs. Wild was going over his gear for the millionth time, but for the first time actually paid attention to his idols. They had changed. Instead of stats tailored to a spec, the idols had become more generic and almost identical between the moonkin and healing specs. They were the same with the exception that one had spirit on it, and the other had haste instead. Not only that, the idols now had a socket for a gem. Since spirit is used by the resto spec for mana regen, and by the moonkin spec for hit - both of which Wild already had more of than he needed - Wild chose the idol with the haste on it for use by both specs. A haste gem was also used in the single socket. Wild now has 959 haste rating, closing in on the magic number he is aiming at - 1015.
On Saturday Wild and Philly both checked in with the guild to see what was up. Our usual partner in crime, Bd, was going to be busy Saturday evening, and no one else had anything planned. Wild and company were on their own.
Well, Mery had a few things to do. She has been working on her Leatherworking skills and pushing to improve her gear. Sometimes the two tasks coincide, and Mery's improving skill as a leather worker was making recipes available that she would like to use for herself. One in particular, though, required that Mery learn Dragonscale Leatherworking. Specialty skills within a skill are going away once Cata arrives, and Mery would no longer have to learn that specialty. But right now, it's still required if Mery wants to wear the dragonscale gear.
Mery figured that since Wild and Philly weren't busy, she'd just monopolize the rest of the day ... and evening ... and maybe the rest of the weekend if she could get away with it. She needed more leather and some other less common materials, which meant farming and questing. She just needed to decide where to quest. Winterspring is a fun place to quest in, but it was just a little too high level for her. Azshara would work, but there was a lot of traveling involved with the quests there. Aha! I know, Mery exclaimed. Un'Goro Crater!
Marshall's Refuge in Un'Goro Crater is the main quest hub for both Horde and Alliance. The Crater is a hot, humid, watery domain of dinosaurs of all types, as well as mobile plants and other strange things. Wild had spent many days questing here, mostly in cat and bear forms. It was a grind back then because killing things in cat form was slow; but it was still fun. Mery got started, collecting a bunch of quests and then reliving the quests that Wild had done. It took Mery about four hours, counting breaks to empty her bags. She also leveled to 55.
Now Mery felt she was ready. There was a quest giver in the Badlands that offered the single quest required to learn Dragonscale leatherworking. Mery crafted four items that the quest required, and had also farmed the ten worn dragonscale that was also required. The Badlands was at about the midway point of the Eastern Continent. Mery had never been there, and so had never picked up the flight path in the Badlands at the outpost of Kargath (for Horde). Since Kargath was the linchpin that connected the flight paths between the north and south ends of the continent, there was no quick way to get to the Badlands from either direction.
No matter how many times that first trip to Kargath is made by various toons, I always have trouble remembering the specific route to take. For Mery's first trip, she decided to come at the Badlands from the North. Mery started at the Undercity, and was able to take a flight path to Hammerfall, the Horde outpost farthest south when coming from that direction. From Hammerfall Mery rode south to the great bridge and tunnel system that was built by the dwarves. Of course, it was also guarded by Alliance dwarves as well. Most of the defenders, though, are level 30 or below and weren't a problem for Mery to avoid, unless she was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. However, she had to delay her start across the bridge when a high level Alliance player showed up as Mery was approaching it. The allie hung around for a bit, and Mery figured he hoped to make Mery's trip more interesting by trying to bring more dwarvish guards and other hostiles into Mery's path. Mery did a little farming for skins and the allie soon got bored and left.
The trip across the bridges and tunnels is a little stressful mostly in trying to remember which direction to go and what tunnels to take. Mery did get sidetracked once, winding up in the tunnel leading into the Ironforge area. Mery had to backtrack, and finally found the mountain pass that led into the Badlands. It took a bit of scouting around, but Mery eventually found the quest giver she was looking for. And the quest giver had no quest to give. What a disappointment.
Mery was so annoyed she hearthed back to Thunder Bluff in disgust. All that effort. Mery even had a pair of very nice leggings she had crafted and planned to wear, but without the dragonscale specialty, she was unable to equip them.
I had a do a bit more digging to find out what was going on. Patch 4.0.1 did indeed remove the specialty requirement. Part of that removal meant taking away that quest in the Badlands. It no longer exists. However, there is a bug where some gear is still tagged as being a specialty item, and still requires the specialty. Mery has a piece of gear she should be able to wear, but because of the bug she can't. Other players have it worse, though. Players who had gotten the specialty before the patch and were wearing gear made through that specialty suddenly discovered that the gear they wore on the Monday before the patch, they could no longer wear on Tuesday after the patch. Ouch.
A Blizzard post and a bug report that took some research to find says that they are aware of the problem and plan to fix it - eventually. Oh, and Mery forgot to talk to the flight master at Kargath before hearthing out of the Badlands and will have to retrace that route a second time. Sigh.
Mery was tired and called it for the weekend. There was still minimal going on with the guild and even most of the players chatting on the Trade channel didn't seem all that enthusiastic about raiding. On Sunday Philly made an appearance to keep tabs on what was - or wasn't - going on. She also belatedly started getting serious about making a little gold from her Inscription profession. Philly posted last week that she planned to take advantage of the short window after the patch when the demand for glyphs (made by scribes trained in Inscription) would be in very high demand. Yet here she is, five days after the patch, and she's done almost nothing. Sure, she has gotten more consistent in doing the research to learn more glyph recipes, but she was not making or selling any glyphs except for family and friends. It was time to rectify that.
What had stymied her before was the effort it would take to go through every class of player and every glyph to determine what was selling, what was not, and then compare that with the glyphs she could or could not make. That took most of the morning on Sunday to do. Among hundreds of glyphs, Philly picked 60 glyphs that at first glance had potential for quick, high profits. She then did laborious further research to determine the best choices to start with. Philly had already stripped the Wild Family bare of herbs to use in crafting the materials used to create glyphs. She had a good stockpile, but there wasn't enough to make 60 glyphs. She eventually settled on 27 glyphs to make and post on the Auction House. Philly will monitor the results all next week.
Two plus days in chilly, rain and fog drenched weather in the California mountains might not be too many folks idea of a vacation, but we always enjoy these little getaways. We always stay at the same place, called Cottage in the Woods, and that's exactly what it is. We had our dog and two of the cats with us, and they got a kick out of watching the huge blue and black blue jays, the rabbits and squirrels, and on one night, a family of raccoons. We don't do a whole lot, but that's pretty much the point.
We got back on Friday afternoon, and I have to admit it was a bit of an effort to zone back into WoW and take up where the Wild family had left off. Happy and Lost got their time in game, of course, catching up on the doins' of the Auction House, which wasn't much. Gold is still being made, but there wasn't a lot of buying going on, even though it was the weekend.
Dungeon and raid action on Friday night was also muted. Wild had missed the ICC raids this past week, of course, and was in game for awhile considering catching on with a PUG ICC, but the couple of possible offerings didn't really appeal to him. While standing around chatting with the few guildies that were on, Wild did discover a change from the patch that had escaped his notice. Idols are special gear available only to some classes. They fit in a special slot and provide a select set of stats tailored for specific specs. Wild was going over his gear for the millionth time, but for the first time actually paid attention to his idols. They had changed. Instead of stats tailored to a spec, the idols had become more generic and almost identical between the moonkin and healing specs. They were the same with the exception that one had spirit on it, and the other had haste instead. Not only that, the idols now had a socket for a gem. Since spirit is used by the resto spec for mana regen, and by the moonkin spec for hit - both of which Wild already had more of than he needed - Wild chose the idol with the haste on it for use by both specs. A haste gem was also used in the single socket. Wild now has 959 haste rating, closing in on the magic number he is aiming at - 1015.
On Saturday Wild and Philly both checked in with the guild to see what was up. Our usual partner in crime, Bd, was going to be busy Saturday evening, and no one else had anything planned. Wild and company were on their own.
Well, Mery had a few things to do. She has been working on her Leatherworking skills and pushing to improve her gear. Sometimes the two tasks coincide, and Mery's improving skill as a leather worker was making recipes available that she would like to use for herself. One in particular, though, required that Mery learn Dragonscale Leatherworking. Specialty skills within a skill are going away once Cata arrives, and Mery would no longer have to learn that specialty. But right now, it's still required if Mery wants to wear the dragonscale gear.
Mery figured that since Wild and Philly weren't busy, she'd just monopolize the rest of the day ... and evening ... and maybe the rest of the weekend if she could get away with it. She needed more leather and some other less common materials, which meant farming and questing. She just needed to decide where to quest. Winterspring is a fun place to quest in, but it was just a little too high level for her. Azshara would work, but there was a lot of traveling involved with the quests there. Aha! I know, Mery exclaimed. Un'Goro Crater!
Marshall's Refuge in Un'Goro Crater is the main quest hub for both Horde and Alliance. The Crater is a hot, humid, watery domain of dinosaurs of all types, as well as mobile plants and other strange things. Wild had spent many days questing here, mostly in cat and bear forms. It was a grind back then because killing things in cat form was slow; but it was still fun. Mery got started, collecting a bunch of quests and then reliving the quests that Wild had done. It took Mery about four hours, counting breaks to empty her bags. She also leveled to 55.
Now Mery felt she was ready. There was a quest giver in the Badlands that offered the single quest required to learn Dragonscale leatherworking. Mery crafted four items that the quest required, and had also farmed the ten worn dragonscale that was also required. The Badlands was at about the midway point of the Eastern Continent. Mery had never been there, and so had never picked up the flight path in the Badlands at the outpost of Kargath (for Horde). Since Kargath was the linchpin that connected the flight paths between the north and south ends of the continent, there was no quick way to get to the Badlands from either direction.
No matter how many times that first trip to Kargath is made by various toons, I always have trouble remembering the specific route to take. For Mery's first trip, she decided to come at the Badlands from the North. Mery started at the Undercity, and was able to take a flight path to Hammerfall, the Horde outpost farthest south when coming from that direction. From Hammerfall Mery rode south to the great bridge and tunnel system that was built by the dwarves. Of course, it was also guarded by Alliance dwarves as well. Most of the defenders, though, are level 30 or below and weren't a problem for Mery to avoid, unless she was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. However, she had to delay her start across the bridge when a high level Alliance player showed up as Mery was approaching it. The allie hung around for a bit, and Mery figured he hoped to make Mery's trip more interesting by trying to bring more dwarvish guards and other hostiles into Mery's path. Mery did a little farming for skins and the allie soon got bored and left.
The trip across the bridges and tunnels is a little stressful mostly in trying to remember which direction to go and what tunnels to take. Mery did get sidetracked once, winding up in the tunnel leading into the Ironforge area. Mery had to backtrack, and finally found the mountain pass that led into the Badlands. It took a bit of scouting around, but Mery eventually found the quest giver she was looking for. And the quest giver had no quest to give. What a disappointment.
Mery was so annoyed she hearthed back to Thunder Bluff in disgust. All that effort. Mery even had a pair of very nice leggings she had crafted and planned to wear, but without the dragonscale specialty, she was unable to equip them.
I had a do a bit more digging to find out what was going on. Patch 4.0.1 did indeed remove the specialty requirement. Part of that removal meant taking away that quest in the Badlands. It no longer exists. However, there is a bug where some gear is still tagged as being a specialty item, and still requires the specialty. Mery has a piece of gear she should be able to wear, but because of the bug she can't. Other players have it worse, though. Players who had gotten the specialty before the patch and were wearing gear made through that specialty suddenly discovered that the gear they wore on the Monday before the patch, they could no longer wear on Tuesday after the patch. Ouch.
A Blizzard post and a bug report that took some research to find says that they are aware of the problem and plan to fix it - eventually. Oh, and Mery forgot to talk to the flight master at Kargath before hearthing out of the Badlands and will have to retrace that route a second time. Sigh.
Mery was tired and called it for the weekend. There was still minimal going on with the guild and even most of the players chatting on the Trade channel didn't seem all that enthusiastic about raiding. On Sunday Philly made an appearance to keep tabs on what was - or wasn't - going on. She also belatedly started getting serious about making a little gold from her Inscription profession. Philly posted last week that she planned to take advantage of the short window after the patch when the demand for glyphs (made by scribes trained in Inscription) would be in very high demand. Yet here she is, five days after the patch, and she's done almost nothing. Sure, she has gotten more consistent in doing the research to learn more glyph recipes, but she was not making or selling any glyphs except for family and friends. It was time to rectify that.
What had stymied her before was the effort it would take to go through every class of player and every glyph to determine what was selling, what was not, and then compare that with the glyphs she could or could not make. That took most of the morning on Sunday to do. Among hundreds of glyphs, Philly picked 60 glyphs that at first glance had potential for quick, high profits. She then did laborious further research to determine the best choices to start with. Philly had already stripped the Wild Family bare of herbs to use in crafting the materials used to create glyphs. She had a good stockpile, but there wasn't enough to make 60 glyphs. She eventually settled on 27 glyphs to make and post on the Auction House. Philly will monitor the results all next week.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Monday (18 Oct) - I Have Too Many Toons
Monday (18 Oct) - I Have Too Many Toons
I have too many toons to have to figure out all the changes that have happened to them due to the patch. Wild is full up and ready, Philly is about 95% there. JB has one spec in place (healing) but hasn't attempted to use it yet. Mery was my test child and she is also ready to go.
So, I'm comfortable with druid healing and hunter DPS. I'm good with priests, too. Shaman, paladins, and whoever else is out there is still a mystery.
Java got a few minutes to throw a talent spec together and get a quick look at the changes to paladin DPS. Holy power is a new mechanism, sorta kinda like runes for death knights. And there are several new spells. Java is pretty excited about that. More buttons he can push. Java slaughtered a bunch of low levels to figure out what the spells do, but hasn't tested himself in any real, hostile situations yet.
On Monday night Lao and EZ went into a random dungeon (Zul'Farak). The last time EZ was in there she kept running out of mana. No chance of that this time. EZ's mana bar barely moved through the whole fight. Not that EZ was using his spells all that effectively, though. EZ had new spells to learn on the fly. Her DPS was up nicely, but she was trounced by the paladin and the rogue in the group. The dungeon was a trivial effort, thanks to the patch and to the excellent healing from Lao. I gotta think Blizzard will dampen it down so that things will be a bit more challenging. Either that, or they're going to let us play god for a few weeks and then wack us with reality with Cata.
We are on extended maintenance this morning, Tuesday. They started at 3am with a planned 11am end time. The tweaking continues.
Wild talked with Bd Monday night about the G2 ICC raids. Lady Hunter maintained her lock on ICC, and they expect to be battling Sindragosa and the Lich King again this week. Bd graciously allowed that they were far from being able to kill LK yet, so Wild wasn't missing anything. However, if they can get him down I hope they do. It's possible the G1 might have a spot for Wild on Tuesday night. I'm not sure if I'll be available, though, since we will be leaving on our trip early Wednesday and still have a lot to do. Wild is turning philosophical about it all - Wild wants to get his shots at the Lich King, but if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen.
And now we're off for a couple of days. Ya'll have a great weekend!
I have too many toons to have to figure out all the changes that have happened to them due to the patch. Wild is full up and ready, Philly is about 95% there. JB has one spec in place (healing) but hasn't attempted to use it yet. Mery was my test child and she is also ready to go.
So, I'm comfortable with druid healing and hunter DPS. I'm good with priests, too. Shaman, paladins, and whoever else is out there is still a mystery.
Java got a few minutes to throw a talent spec together and get a quick look at the changes to paladin DPS. Holy power is a new mechanism, sorta kinda like runes for death knights. And there are several new spells. Java is pretty excited about that. More buttons he can push. Java slaughtered a bunch of low levels to figure out what the spells do, but hasn't tested himself in any real, hostile situations yet.
On Monday night Lao and EZ went into a random dungeon (Zul'Farak). The last time EZ was in there she kept running out of mana. No chance of that this time. EZ's mana bar barely moved through the whole fight. Not that EZ was using his spells all that effectively, though. EZ had new spells to learn on the fly. Her DPS was up nicely, but she was trounced by the paladin and the rogue in the group. The dungeon was a trivial effort, thanks to the patch and to the excellent healing from Lao. I gotta think Blizzard will dampen it down so that things will be a bit more challenging. Either that, or they're going to let us play god for a few weeks and then wack us with reality with Cata.
We are on extended maintenance this morning, Tuesday. They started at 3am with a planned 11am end time. The tweaking continues.
Wild talked with Bd Monday night about the G2 ICC raids. Lady Hunter maintained her lock on ICC, and they expect to be battling Sindragosa and the Lich King again this week. Bd graciously allowed that they were far from being able to kill LK yet, so Wild wasn't missing anything. However, if they can get him down I hope they do. It's possible the G1 might have a spot for Wild on Tuesday night. I'm not sure if I'll be available, though, since we will be leaving on our trip early Wednesday and still have a lot to do. Wild is turning philosophical about it all - Wild wants to get his shots at the Lich King, but if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen.
And now we're off for a couple of days. Ya'll have a great weekend!
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Friday (15 Oct) - A Tale Of two Faction AH's
Friday (15 Oct) - A Tale Of two Faction AH's
Wild was both overjoyed and dismayed Friday night. After the ad hoc Thursday night ICC raid Wild got into, the guildie raid leader asked if anyone was interested in a Ruby Sanctum (RS) run on Friday night. Wild was a definite yes for that. He planned to run around 7pm. So, Friday night Wild logged in around 6pm to ensure he got an invite. The raid leader from Thursday was already in game and already in a raid. But it wasn't RS. It was ICC. The G2 ICC group had decided to run a third night. They had locked the raid and were working on Sindragosa, the 11th boss in ICC. Wild was despondent. A keyboard glitch has cost Wild a whole week of raiding with G2 and a shot at the Lich King. The G2 raid killed Sindragosa for the first time. And they spent a good part of the evening learning the Lich King fight. I was overjoyed at the progress. What rattled Wild's cage, though, was that the ICC run was unscheduled, and one of Wild's greatest complaints with FS was failing to keep raiders informed of events and essentially keeping only a core subset of raiders in the loop. Wild can't hang around in game all day, while others who can get to go to these ad hoc raids. I know I'm venting a bit, but just when Wild sees his goal in front of him, circumstances are locking him out from even trying to achieve it. Wild sent an in game mail to Lady Hunter, who runs the G2, and who still has a raid lockout that would start us at the Princes, I believe. I asked her that if she decides to run that raid before Wednesday to please contact me. I want in that raid. I'll be quiet now.
The Horde and Alliance Auction Houses went in diametrically opposed directions over the past three days. Happy has been euphoric. Demand for enchanting materials on the horde AH have gone through the roof. Happy is selling almost everything he has at prices to four times higher than average. Happy made ten days worth of sales over the past three days. The flood is ebbing, but even at low tide Happy is still making more than on any normal day. It won't last, and I still don't quite get why the surge for mats. Happy is taking full advantage, though.
On the Alliance side it is the complete opposite. Nobody is buying anything. Eighty percent of the mats Lost put up for sale expired without being bought. Prices, if anything, are even lower than they were before. Poor Lost's profits are at a trickle. What makes it even worse is that there isn't any real price dumping, which would become bargains Lost could exploit later. The prices haven't fallen enough for Lost to buy up stock. This is the first time there have been such widespread differences between the two Auction Houses. I really don't have a reason for it, either.
Wild ran the weekly frost raid in Naxxramas Friday night as a way to forget that he was missing out on the Lich King battle going on under his nose. Actually, I need to change the name from the weekly "frost" raid to the weekly "JP" raid. JP, or justice points, is what has replaced frost badges now. The raid group was pretty awful, and we even wiped on our first attempt when they tried to just bludgeon their way through the fight, when there are mechanics to the fight that just can't be ignored no matter how over-geared you think you are. We killed the boss, Rasuvious, on our second attempt.
The JPs Wild got from that quick raid maxed him out at the hard cap of 4,000 justice points. Wild can't earn more without spending down some of those points. The problem is that Wild can't find anything he cares to spend them on. As best I can determine, JPs can be used to buy Tier gear, some special gear sold along with the Tier gear, and heirlooms. Wild could buy all of his T10 gear for both healer and moonkin specs if he wanted to. But JPs can only purchase the i251 level version. To get the i264, Wild still needs one special token per piece of gear, tokens that are only dropped by a couple of bosses in ICC 25 man. Nobody is running ICC 25. Nobody. Wild has full i264 gear except for his bracers (which has no T10 equivalent). The i251 T10s would be a downgrade.
So Wild looked at it from another direction. Another change made by the patch involves gear type. Different classes of players wear different types of gear. From the lowest to highest armor type, there is cloth, leather, mail, and plate. In general players try to use the gear type appropriate to their class, but sometimes choose to use lower armor type gear, usually because the stats are better. For example, Wild's appropriate gear type as a druid is leather. However, Wild can also wear cloth gear, and on his healing set is using two cloth items right now. Moonkin often wear quite a bit of cloth because Blizzard did a very poor job of providing leather caster gear for ranged DPS (since druid moonkins are the only class that would wear it). So moonkin use a lot of cloth gear, because there is plenty of it to support mages, warlocks, and priests.
What Blizzard has done now is encourage players to use only their appropriate gear type, by giving all players a trainable talent that provides a fairly strong buff if ALL of our gear is of the right type. Wild does not get that bonus because of those two pieces of cloth gear he wears. Just as an aside, I don't like this. If Blizzard only wanted us to wear a certain type of gear they should have just made it so that it was the only type we could equip. As well as giving us gear that is as good as what, say, Wild could get in cloth. But no, now we have a situation where it would be foolish for Wild to roll on cloth, even if it was better than the leather item I have, because of that buff. It also means that perfectly good gear that no one of the right class needed will be destroyed because the guy who could use it is the wrong armor class. Badly done.
Back to Wild and those two cloth items he wears. One is those bracers. There are no bracers of any kind short of Heroic mode ICC where Wild can get i245 or better leather bracers with haste on them. Wild desperately needs haste, and I refuse to replace those cloth bracers. There are no bracers Wild can buy with JPs that have haste of them. None. The other cloth item Wild has are his gloves. There is a leather equivalent that Wild can buy with JPs. It has haste, but less than what the cloth gloves have. I will most likely buy them, anyway, as I have to buy SOMETHING so that I don't lose points by being maxed out. Wild's best bet for his bracers is a drop in ICC - by Sindragosa. It's an i251 piece, but it has haste and it would be an upgrade. Wild can dream, anyway.
Later ... ok, Wild made a couple of gear changes. Since I had to spend some JPs, I opted to buy the leather i264 gloves [Gloves of the Great Horned Owl]. It has only slightly less haste than the cloth gloves, and it's short one socket, but fully enchanted and reforged properly and it'll do. After swearing Wild would enter Cata with cloth bracers, I decided to play with the [Wrists of Septic Shock] Wild had picked up and left languishing in his bank. They are i251 leather bracers, so they are both an upgrade (from i245) and gives Wild an all leather gear look and buff. No haste, but I reforged it to get a small amount added, and used a haste gem in it's one socket. When I tried out the new gear - Well, it was pretty nice. Very nice, in fact. That armor type buff is pretty potent. Wild gained health, mana, spell power, crit, and mana regen. I did take a hit in haste, although it was a small one, dropping from 27.78% haste to 27.60%. Wild has a long way to get to the "ideal" haste rating. That percentage equates to a haste rating of 804. The number Wild is aiming for is 1015.
Wild was both overjoyed and dismayed Friday night. After the ad hoc Thursday night ICC raid Wild got into, the guildie raid leader asked if anyone was interested in a Ruby Sanctum (RS) run on Friday night. Wild was a definite yes for that. He planned to run around 7pm. So, Friday night Wild logged in around 6pm to ensure he got an invite. The raid leader from Thursday was already in game and already in a raid. But it wasn't RS. It was ICC. The G2 ICC group had decided to run a third night. They had locked the raid and were working on Sindragosa, the 11th boss in ICC. Wild was despondent. A keyboard glitch has cost Wild a whole week of raiding with G2 and a shot at the Lich King. The G2 raid killed Sindragosa for the first time. And they spent a good part of the evening learning the Lich King fight. I was overjoyed at the progress. What rattled Wild's cage, though, was that the ICC run was unscheduled, and one of Wild's greatest complaints with FS was failing to keep raiders informed of events and essentially keeping only a core subset of raiders in the loop. Wild can't hang around in game all day, while others who can get to go to these ad hoc raids. I know I'm venting a bit, but just when Wild sees his goal in front of him, circumstances are locking him out from even trying to achieve it. Wild sent an in game mail to Lady Hunter, who runs the G2, and who still has a raid lockout that would start us at the Princes, I believe. I asked her that if she decides to run that raid before Wednesday to please contact me. I want in that raid. I'll be quiet now.
The Horde and Alliance Auction Houses went in diametrically opposed directions over the past three days. Happy has been euphoric. Demand for enchanting materials on the horde AH have gone through the roof. Happy is selling almost everything he has at prices to four times higher than average. Happy made ten days worth of sales over the past three days. The flood is ebbing, but even at low tide Happy is still making more than on any normal day. It won't last, and I still don't quite get why the surge for mats. Happy is taking full advantage, though.
On the Alliance side it is the complete opposite. Nobody is buying anything. Eighty percent of the mats Lost put up for sale expired without being bought. Prices, if anything, are even lower than they were before. Poor Lost's profits are at a trickle. What makes it even worse is that there isn't any real price dumping, which would become bargains Lost could exploit later. The prices haven't fallen enough for Lost to buy up stock. This is the first time there have been such widespread differences between the two Auction Houses. I really don't have a reason for it, either.
Wild ran the weekly frost raid in Naxxramas Friday night as a way to forget that he was missing out on the Lich King battle going on under his nose. Actually, I need to change the name from the weekly "frost" raid to the weekly "JP" raid. JP, or justice points, is what has replaced frost badges now. The raid group was pretty awful, and we even wiped on our first attempt when they tried to just bludgeon their way through the fight, when there are mechanics to the fight that just can't be ignored no matter how over-geared you think you are. We killed the boss, Rasuvious, on our second attempt.
The JPs Wild got from that quick raid maxed him out at the hard cap of 4,000 justice points. Wild can't earn more without spending down some of those points. The problem is that Wild can't find anything he cares to spend them on. As best I can determine, JPs can be used to buy Tier gear, some special gear sold along with the Tier gear, and heirlooms. Wild could buy all of his T10 gear for both healer and moonkin specs if he wanted to. But JPs can only purchase the i251 level version. To get the i264, Wild still needs one special token per piece of gear, tokens that are only dropped by a couple of bosses in ICC 25 man. Nobody is running ICC 25. Nobody. Wild has full i264 gear except for his bracers (which has no T10 equivalent). The i251 T10s would be a downgrade.
So Wild looked at it from another direction. Another change made by the patch involves gear type. Different classes of players wear different types of gear. From the lowest to highest armor type, there is cloth, leather, mail, and plate. In general players try to use the gear type appropriate to their class, but sometimes choose to use lower armor type gear, usually because the stats are better. For example, Wild's appropriate gear type as a druid is leather. However, Wild can also wear cloth gear, and on his healing set is using two cloth items right now. Moonkin often wear quite a bit of cloth because Blizzard did a very poor job of providing leather caster gear for ranged DPS (since druid moonkins are the only class that would wear it). So moonkin use a lot of cloth gear, because there is plenty of it to support mages, warlocks, and priests.
What Blizzard has done now is encourage players to use only their appropriate gear type, by giving all players a trainable talent that provides a fairly strong buff if ALL of our gear is of the right type. Wild does not get that bonus because of those two pieces of cloth gear he wears. Just as an aside, I don't like this. If Blizzard only wanted us to wear a certain type of gear they should have just made it so that it was the only type we could equip. As well as giving us gear that is as good as what, say, Wild could get in cloth. But no, now we have a situation where it would be foolish for Wild to roll on cloth, even if it was better than the leather item I have, because of that buff. It also means that perfectly good gear that no one of the right class needed will be destroyed because the guy who could use it is the wrong armor class. Badly done.
Back to Wild and those two cloth items he wears. One is those bracers. There are no bracers of any kind short of Heroic mode ICC where Wild can get i245 or better leather bracers with haste on them. Wild desperately needs haste, and I refuse to replace those cloth bracers. There are no bracers Wild can buy with JPs that have haste of them. None. The other cloth item Wild has are his gloves. There is a leather equivalent that Wild can buy with JPs. It has haste, but less than what the cloth gloves have. I will most likely buy them, anyway, as I have to buy SOMETHING so that I don't lose points by being maxed out. Wild's best bet for his bracers is a drop in ICC - by Sindragosa. It's an i251 piece, but it has haste and it would be an upgrade. Wild can dream, anyway.
Later ... ok, Wild made a couple of gear changes. Since I had to spend some JPs, I opted to buy the leather i264 gloves [Gloves of the Great Horned Owl]. It has only slightly less haste than the cloth gloves, and it's short one socket, but fully enchanted and reforged properly and it'll do. After swearing Wild would enter Cata with cloth bracers, I decided to play with the [Wrists of Septic Shock] Wild had picked up and left languishing in his bank. They are i251 leather bracers, so they are both an upgrade (from i245) and gives Wild an all leather gear look and buff. No haste, but I reforged it to get a small amount added, and used a haste gem in it's one socket. When I tried out the new gear - Well, it was pretty nice. Very nice, in fact. That armor type buff is pretty potent. Wild gained health, mana, spell power, crit, and mana regen. I did take a hit in haste, although it was a small one, dropping from 27.78% haste to 27.60%. Wild has a long way to get to the "ideal" haste rating. That percentage equates to a haste rating of 804. The number Wild is aiming for is 1015.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Thursday 2 (14 Oct) - Wild Uses his Tongue
Thursday 2 (14 Oct) - Wild Uses his Tongue
The MM guild G2 ICC10 raid on Thursday night was a rousing success. Not only did they clear their way into the third wing, they made a first kill of the Blood Queen, a battle Wild would have dearly loved to have been a part of. But since Wild missed the Wednesday run, and since all ten of the Wednesday raiders were back for Thursday's run, there was no room for Wild.
Wild fussed around with his gear for awhile, hanging around hoping to get into a weekly frost raid, but none seemed to be forming up. Wild considered doing a random heroic, but that didn't seem like much fun at all. How come when Wild hangs around Dalaran there isn't anything happening, and when Philly hangs around Dalaran guildies throw ICC raids at her?
Wild was pondering Philly's fate (he had a few ingenious ideas how to get back at her) when a guildie whispered. "Hey, Wild, in an ICC group?" Wild didn't know this guildie, BB, that well, but he's been around a long time and we've raided together on occasion.
"Not this week," Wild whispered back.
"We're trying to cobble one together tonight, want to join us?" BB replied.
Are you kidding me? "Sure!"
It really was a cobble it together kind of thing. We wanted only guildies in the raid, and three groups of raiders had already done ICC this week. That didn't leave a whole lot of folks, and we were likely to see a lot of alts. BB was a tank, though, and he already had a second tank coming. With Wild healing, we just needed one more healer and some DPS. Nobody was in a great deal of hurry, and as guildies popped in game we'd grab them or their alt and press them into service. At least two guildies who agreed to come had not even set up their toons since the patch, and BB told them to take whatever time they needed to get ready. Wild got to know a few more guildies that I don't usually raid with, and they got to know Wild. Wild was happy to get a raid, and didn't mind waiting around chatting, which is what Wild had been doing before the raid turned up anyway. Wild even ran across an old friend from the Karazahn raid days! He was in the guild as a warlock, but I knew him way back when on his druid. Wild gave him a shout out and we talked about old times and old friends, many of whom were long gone now.
We thought we had our ten raiders, and began filing into ICC. One of the raiders, though, had forgotten that he'd been in an aborted ICC earlier in the week and had killed the first boss, Marrowgar. He could not join us. It took us another twenty minutes before a guildie logged on and was practically dragged into the raid. She didn't have a lockout problem because she'd never been inside ICC. She was a priest, and we had two other priests already. No matter. We had ten raiders. There was a discussion about who the healers would be, since the other two priests also had healing specs. That gave us three priests and Wild as possible healers.
"Which of you four want to go DPS?" BB asked. Wild was quick to say that I preferred to stay a healer. That got a laugh from the rest of the raid. Someone quipped, "When was the last time someone volunteered to heal?!"
The two priests already in the raid quickly volunteered to go shadow spec DPS. That left, uh, the new priest with no ICC experience as the second healer. "No problem," said BB. "Wild is experienced and geared through the gills and can handle whatever healing we need." Made Wild feel good. No pressure, though, huh?
Wild's entire experience in a group dungeon post patch was that one random heroic five man, which told him only one thing of note - he needed more haste to speed up his spells. Wild had worked on that by reforging several pieces of gear, giving up hit and crit stats to increase haste. But Wild really had no idea how things would be in a ten man ICC raid.
Wild was also using the Blizzard standard raid frames since Xperl was still out of commission. I'd been playing around with some other addons to help with buffs and procs, and when pulled into the raid I still had one of those addons, Power Auras, active. All this jumped into Wild's mind the second we started combat on the first set of trash mobs.
Wild cast his first healing spell. Nothing happened. Just didn't get the key pressed, I thought. I use mouseover commands for healing, using the number pad, with each key tied to a specific spell. It's fast and simple. Wild cast another spell. Nothing. More attempts, more Fail. We were just working trash mobs, but the damage was starting to mount, and our young priest healer must have been wondering when all this uber geared, experienced healing was going to start helping her out. With no other option, Wild started click healing, something I haven't done for years. Click healing is: Click on a raider, and then click on the heal you want. Click on another raider. Click on a heal. It is slow. It is cumbersome. It takes my eyes away from what is happening around Wild. It affects Wild's ability to move. It sucks.
We got through the trash mobs. Wild's healing numbers weren't bad, but I had worked up a sweat trying to heal everyone. Fortunately, the new priest was doing an excellent job. I let the raid leader know that I needed to reboot (the game, not the computer). I planned to turn off Power Auras and pray that the reboot would fix the problem. It was the only thing different from the UI setup I had when Wild ran that random heroic, and the mouseover commands had worked just fine.
The reboot did not fix the problem. Now I was looking at either a bug in the Blizzard raid frames (unlikely, since no one else had the problem), or - gulp - maybe my keyboard driver problem from Wednesday wasn't as fixed as I thought it was. We were standing in front of Lord Marrowgar. It's a good thing that Wild is very paranoid about his healing. In addition to the macros on the number pad, Wild also has all his healing spells arrayed on a button bar - just in case. Well, here Wild was, in a just in case scenario.
I made some quick adjustments to my user interface, positioning the button bar with all Wild's heals next to the raid frames which had the buttons for targeting each raider. It was still click healing, but it was the best I could do.
I don't know how we did it, but Wild and his superb understudy kept the raid alive and Marrowgar died. We tackled Deathwhisper, and despite all of the requirements of movement to stay away from various things that would get Wild killed, we defeated Deathwhisper. We moved on to the Gunship. Wild was so taken with the sight of being able to see the rocket pack on his back (Wild didn't have tree form anymore, and that had always hidden the pack) I misused it when I was playing around and got myself killed. We were all goofing off and no one seemed to mind. The Gunship was a hoot, and we won.
The Saurfang fight was coming up next, a level of difficulty harder than the three previous fights. My finger was getting cramped from all the clicking. The priest was beating me in total healing and Wild was really glad she was doing so well. We started the Saurfang fight. There is a minute and a half of talking before the fight actually starts. It's actually a great story, the first or tenth time you heard it, but really, get it over with already! I was looking at my user interface for the umpteenth time, hoping for inspiration on what the problem was with my macros. I looked at the macro spells arrayed on a three-by-three bar which mirrors the number pad. I noticed something odd. The three-by-three bar did not have any numbers on it. At first I didn't know why that seemed odd. Then a burning light burst out of my head and seared my eyes off. Ok, not really, but that's what it felt like. The three-by-three bar did NOT have any numbers on it. That meant that the key binding that told the computer to execute the command placed on the buttons of that bar was missing. My spells weren't working because none of the number pad keys were bound to the macro commands I'd put on that bar. And I suddenly knew why.
Time was ticking down and there were only seconds until the fight started. Wild opened up the addon Dominos and went to the keybinding panel. I quickly set the key binds for the number pad and pulled out of Dominos just as the fight started. My macros WORKED again! The postmortem was easy. Dominos had a newer version which I had loaded some time after the random heroic Wild had been on. Installing the new version had wiped out the key binds, which doesn't usually happen, but, in this case, it did. It was a trivial fix, but oh my, the pain it caused until I figured it out!
Saurfang died, and a bit later, so did Festergut. Wild led in healing in both fights, but Wild gave the priest healer a huge amount of credit for stepping up and doing a magnificent job.
We ended the night sort of how we started it. We attempted Rotface, failing on our first attempt purely out of lack of concentration. We set up for a second attempt, our last of the night. Buffs were done and everyone was ready, bu not ready check had been sent yet. At that moment, in real life, all hell broke loose downstairs as a major cat fight broke out. The Mrs was hollering for help. Wild typed in a quick "BRB" (be right back) and rushed off to rescue whoever it was that needed rescuing.
While I was gone the raid leader sent the ready check. He knew Wild was missing, but figured it wouldn't be for long. He started the fight. Wild was only gone a couple of minutes, but a couple of minutes is a very long time in combat, and an eternity if you were the poor priest required to heal the entire raid in a damage heavy fight. When Wild joined in three raiders were already dead, including the tank that was supposed to control the many oozes that spawn. Oozes were loose all over the place and the wipe, when it came, was already inevitable by the time Wild joined in.
Given the ragtag nature of the group, we were all pleased with our progress. We got to get in a guild raid instead of missing out or hooking up with a PUG, and had a great time. The run also showed Wild that the changes brought forth by the patch have made us at least in part over-geared for Icecrown Citadel, in which the boss fights were not changed at all by the patch. The fact that we could clear the first three bosses that easily, with Wild click healing it! says a lot about how much more powerful we are now. It's also a warning. All this power is short-lived. The dungeons and raids we will be facing in Cata will be tuned to account for these patch improvements. Beware.
Oh, and Wild has something to say to Philly. Nice ICC boss kill, Philly. Nice - one - boss kill. Notice the FIVE bosses Wild killed, with a broken interface. So there. /sticks tongue out.
The MM guild G2 ICC10 raid on Thursday night was a rousing success. Not only did they clear their way into the third wing, they made a first kill of the Blood Queen, a battle Wild would have dearly loved to have been a part of. But since Wild missed the Wednesday run, and since all ten of the Wednesday raiders were back for Thursday's run, there was no room for Wild.
Wild fussed around with his gear for awhile, hanging around hoping to get into a weekly frost raid, but none seemed to be forming up. Wild considered doing a random heroic, but that didn't seem like much fun at all. How come when Wild hangs around Dalaran there isn't anything happening, and when Philly hangs around Dalaran guildies throw ICC raids at her?
Wild was pondering Philly's fate (he had a few ingenious ideas how to get back at her) when a guildie whispered. "Hey, Wild, in an ICC group?" Wild didn't know this guildie, BB, that well, but he's been around a long time and we've raided together on occasion.
"Not this week," Wild whispered back.
"We're trying to cobble one together tonight, want to join us?" BB replied.
Are you kidding me? "Sure!"
It really was a cobble it together kind of thing. We wanted only guildies in the raid, and three groups of raiders had already done ICC this week. That didn't leave a whole lot of folks, and we were likely to see a lot of alts. BB was a tank, though, and he already had a second tank coming. With Wild healing, we just needed one more healer and some DPS. Nobody was in a great deal of hurry, and as guildies popped in game we'd grab them or their alt and press them into service. At least two guildies who agreed to come had not even set up their toons since the patch, and BB told them to take whatever time they needed to get ready. Wild got to know a few more guildies that I don't usually raid with, and they got to know Wild. Wild was happy to get a raid, and didn't mind waiting around chatting, which is what Wild had been doing before the raid turned up anyway. Wild even ran across an old friend from the Karazahn raid days! He was in the guild as a warlock, but I knew him way back when on his druid. Wild gave him a shout out and we talked about old times and old friends, many of whom were long gone now.
We thought we had our ten raiders, and began filing into ICC. One of the raiders, though, had forgotten that he'd been in an aborted ICC earlier in the week and had killed the first boss, Marrowgar. He could not join us. It took us another twenty minutes before a guildie logged on and was practically dragged into the raid. She didn't have a lockout problem because she'd never been inside ICC. She was a priest, and we had two other priests already. No matter. We had ten raiders. There was a discussion about who the healers would be, since the other two priests also had healing specs. That gave us three priests and Wild as possible healers.
"Which of you four want to go DPS?" BB asked. Wild was quick to say that I preferred to stay a healer. That got a laugh from the rest of the raid. Someone quipped, "When was the last time someone volunteered to heal?!"
The two priests already in the raid quickly volunteered to go shadow spec DPS. That left, uh, the new priest with no ICC experience as the second healer. "No problem," said BB. "Wild is experienced and geared through the gills and can handle whatever healing we need." Made Wild feel good. No pressure, though, huh?
Wild's entire experience in a group dungeon post patch was that one random heroic five man, which told him only one thing of note - he needed more haste to speed up his spells. Wild had worked on that by reforging several pieces of gear, giving up hit and crit stats to increase haste. But Wild really had no idea how things would be in a ten man ICC raid.
Wild was also using the Blizzard standard raid frames since Xperl was still out of commission. I'd been playing around with some other addons to help with buffs and procs, and when pulled into the raid I still had one of those addons, Power Auras, active. All this jumped into Wild's mind the second we started combat on the first set of trash mobs.
Wild cast his first healing spell. Nothing happened. Just didn't get the key pressed, I thought. I use mouseover commands for healing, using the number pad, with each key tied to a specific spell. It's fast and simple. Wild cast another spell. Nothing. More attempts, more Fail. We were just working trash mobs, but the damage was starting to mount, and our young priest healer must have been wondering when all this uber geared, experienced healing was going to start helping her out. With no other option, Wild started click healing, something I haven't done for years. Click healing is: Click on a raider, and then click on the heal you want. Click on another raider. Click on a heal. It is slow. It is cumbersome. It takes my eyes away from what is happening around Wild. It affects Wild's ability to move. It sucks.
We got through the trash mobs. Wild's healing numbers weren't bad, but I had worked up a sweat trying to heal everyone. Fortunately, the new priest was doing an excellent job. I let the raid leader know that I needed to reboot (the game, not the computer). I planned to turn off Power Auras and pray that the reboot would fix the problem. It was the only thing different from the UI setup I had when Wild ran that random heroic, and the mouseover commands had worked just fine.
The reboot did not fix the problem. Now I was looking at either a bug in the Blizzard raid frames (unlikely, since no one else had the problem), or - gulp - maybe my keyboard driver problem from Wednesday wasn't as fixed as I thought it was. We were standing in front of Lord Marrowgar. It's a good thing that Wild is very paranoid about his healing. In addition to the macros on the number pad, Wild also has all his healing spells arrayed on a button bar - just in case. Well, here Wild was, in a just in case scenario.
I made some quick adjustments to my user interface, positioning the button bar with all Wild's heals next to the raid frames which had the buttons for targeting each raider. It was still click healing, but it was the best I could do.
I don't know how we did it, but Wild and his superb understudy kept the raid alive and Marrowgar died. We tackled Deathwhisper, and despite all of the requirements of movement to stay away from various things that would get Wild killed, we defeated Deathwhisper. We moved on to the Gunship. Wild was so taken with the sight of being able to see the rocket pack on his back (Wild didn't have tree form anymore, and that had always hidden the pack) I misused it when I was playing around and got myself killed. We were all goofing off and no one seemed to mind. The Gunship was a hoot, and we won.
The Saurfang fight was coming up next, a level of difficulty harder than the three previous fights. My finger was getting cramped from all the clicking. The priest was beating me in total healing and Wild was really glad she was doing so well. We started the Saurfang fight. There is a minute and a half of talking before the fight actually starts. It's actually a great story, the first or tenth time you heard it, but really, get it over with already! I was looking at my user interface for the umpteenth time, hoping for inspiration on what the problem was with my macros. I looked at the macro spells arrayed on a three-by-three bar which mirrors the number pad. I noticed something odd. The three-by-three bar did not have any numbers on it. At first I didn't know why that seemed odd. Then a burning light burst out of my head and seared my eyes off. Ok, not really, but that's what it felt like. The three-by-three bar did NOT have any numbers on it. That meant that the key binding that told the computer to execute the command placed on the buttons of that bar was missing. My spells weren't working because none of the number pad keys were bound to the macro commands I'd put on that bar. And I suddenly knew why.
Time was ticking down and there were only seconds until the fight started. Wild opened up the addon Dominos and went to the keybinding panel. I quickly set the key binds for the number pad and pulled out of Dominos just as the fight started. My macros WORKED again! The postmortem was easy. Dominos had a newer version which I had loaded some time after the random heroic Wild had been on. Installing the new version had wiped out the key binds, which doesn't usually happen, but, in this case, it did. It was a trivial fix, but oh my, the pain it caused until I figured it out!
Saurfang died, and a bit later, so did Festergut. Wild led in healing in both fights, but Wild gave the priest healer a huge amount of credit for stepping up and doing a magnificent job.
We ended the night sort of how we started it. We attempted Rotface, failing on our first attempt purely out of lack of concentration. We set up for a second attempt, our last of the night. Buffs were done and everyone was ready, bu not ready check had been sent yet. At that moment, in real life, all hell broke loose downstairs as a major cat fight broke out. The Mrs was hollering for help. Wild typed in a quick "BRB" (be right back) and rushed off to rescue whoever it was that needed rescuing.
While I was gone the raid leader sent the ready check. He knew Wild was missing, but figured it wouldn't be for long. He started the fight. Wild was only gone a couple of minutes, but a couple of minutes is a very long time in combat, and an eternity if you were the poor priest required to heal the entire raid in a damage heavy fight. When Wild joined in three raiders were already dead, including the tank that was supposed to control the many oozes that spawn. Oozes were loose all over the place and the wipe, when it came, was already inevitable by the time Wild joined in.
Given the ragtag nature of the group, we were all pleased with our progress. We got to get in a guild raid instead of missing out or hooking up with a PUG, and had a great time. The run also showed Wild that the changes brought forth by the patch have made us at least in part over-geared for Icecrown Citadel, in which the boss fights were not changed at all by the patch. The fact that we could clear the first three bosses that easily, with Wild click healing it! says a lot about how much more powerful we are now. It's also a warning. All this power is short-lived. The dungeons and raids we will be facing in Cata will be tuned to account for these patch improvements. Beware.
Oh, and Wild has something to say to Philly. Nice ICC boss kill, Philly. Nice - one - boss kill. Notice the FIVE bosses Wild killed, with a broken interface. So there. /sticks tongue out.
Thursday (14 Oct) - Philly Points at Wild and CACKLES!
Thursday (14 Oct) - Philly Points at Wild and CACKLES!
While Wild was whining about not getting into the G2 ICC10 group on Wednesday night, Philly was busy on Thursday getting her Inscription act together. DER, you'll find some glyphs in the mail (if Blizzard ever lets you get the patch installed and get logged in.) Sis, better get your order in. Philly called in all her favors and everyone in the Wild family coughed up every herb they had. Philly has been crafting glyphs and getting on the sale-a-thon bandwagon to make a few bucks while she can and for as long as the herbs last.
The MM guild have three ICC raids a week, the two at night (G1 and G2) and one at noon (creatively called the nooners). The nooners raid on Wed/Thurs, just like G2 does. Philly happened to be in game when the noon raid came around. The raid expected to bring the same ten raiders they brought on Wednesday, so openings might not be there, but Philly paid close attention to the chatter. A couple of raiders from Wednesday didn't show. They had their regular tanks and healers. Any DPS interested in ICC? the raid leader asked. Philly raised her hand, batted her eyes (hard to do in that helm she wears) and whispered sweet nothings (which was more horrifying that sexy from an undead). Philly got her invite just so she'd settle down and not scare off the rest of the raid.
Soon enough Philly was in ICC hoping she would have some clue as to how to DPS as a shadow priest in the ultimate raid dungeon. Not only that, on Wednesday the nooners had cleared six bosses (you killed all the easy ones! she complained) and would be facing down Professor Putricide as her first task.
But! Yes, she said But! Guess who got into an ICC raid post patch before Wild? Philly! If Philly had a tongue she'd stick it out at Wild, but she had to settle for cackling maniacally at him. Wild took it in better humor than last night, but Philly knew she'd have to be on her toe bones and watch for any repercussions for a few days.
Philly was mostly ready. She realized she didn't have any mana water and there was no mage to make any. Hopefully she wouldn't have serious mana problems and have to beg some. She had a few flasks of spell power she'd slipped out of Wild's bags, and of course she had all her glyphs in place. Ok, now if only I could remember what my DPS spell rotation was, she mused. Philly planned to stay with the pre-patch rotation most often used since there were a lot of differing opinions on what should change. Shadow Word: Death was being spammed for a couple of days, and Blizzard then nerfed it since it was blowing things away. That's a dangerous spell to play with, too, since it has a backlash that does damage to the caster. Why, but why, though, did Putricide have to be first?!
It took quite awhile to get everyone into ICC. The way that works was completely changed with the patch and there were a number of glitches and work arounds to get through. But eventually we were all inside, ready to go.
Tackling Putricide as a DPS instead of a healer wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. Since ranged DPS and healers were positioned together for the fight, all of the movement requirements were the same. Target switching, always a shortcoming of the Wild family, only required switching between two targets - Putricide and either the green or orange ooze - and Philly managed that quite well. I think Mery might have helped with that as she has been target switching like a madwoman while out in Felwood killing beasts. Some of that must have rubbed off on Philly. The most frustrating thing about it, though, was having to stand still to cast most of her spells when she also was supposed to be moving with the others around her. That's one thing she hasn't quite got the hang of.
We did not kill Putricide, though. After four tries, the raid leader decided we'd go after Dreamwalker. Philly was pleased with her performance, however, coming in third in DPS. Her best single fight DPS was 4277 with the #1 DPSer getting 5251. Our overall raid DPS wasn't bad, just not good enough to bring down Putricide.
If Philly worried about the Putricide fight, she was twice as concerned with Dreamwalker. Wild loves this fight because he gets to go into the portals and can focus his entire effort on healing the dragon. Wild was barely aware of what was going on with the other raiders outside the portal; but Wild knew that the directions to the DPS were long and complicated. It was "if this mob shows up then kill it first, unless this other mob arrives then stop and go after him, oh, and this is your first priority - unless this other thing happens, then do something different." Wild didn't know how they were even able to tell the different kind of mobs apart, much less keep straight which mob to kill in what order and under what circumstances.
I'll tell you what, though, Philly learned fast. Philly was teamed up with a warlock and assigned to the left side of the room. Warlocks have a number of minions (specialized pets), and one of them, a doomguard I believe, would be used as a tank to keep the mobs from getting to us while we killed them. One of our two healers for the fight was Cr on her priest, and the other was also a priest who had never done this fight before. Those two would have portal duty. A third healer, a shaman, had to keep the rest of us alive.
The start of the fight was easy enough, the four archmages that guarded Dreamwalker went down pretty fast, and for a few seconds there were no new targets, so Philly cast some heals on Dreamwalker. She almost missed seeing the first mob come into our area, a zombie, but Philly had put focus on the warlock and I could see what she was targeting. Philly picked up the zombie target and opened up on it. It, too, went down pretty fast, but there were already two more mobs coming our way, another zombie and an abomination. Zombies were our first priority kill - unless there was an "abom" and that then became the priority. The doomguard was tanking the zombie, though. Philly spread her DoT (damage over time) spells on both mobs and when a tank picked up the abom Philly burned down the zombie. Things weren't going so well on the right side of the room and a raider had already died. We adjusted and kept going. The fight went very long, though, as the portal healers were having some issues and the dragon wasn't getting enough heals. We wiped.
We wiped on our second attempt, too, but we had our rhythm down and we saved Dreamwalker on our third try. Philly also won a fine cloak called [Lich Wrappings]. This fight was the most fun I've ever had as a DPS in a raid. By the end of the night I could easily tell the difference between all of the mobs we faced and which ones needed to be killed in what order. Philly felt like a sharp shooter, picking off targets with the help of the warlock as they rushed in at us. It was even more fun than doing the portal healing. I think we have the makings of a real DPSer in Philly.
That was all we had time for, but it was truly a blast. It also showed that Philly had nothing to fear about her gear or her abilities in heavy duty raids like ICC. She was definitely good enough.
When Thursday night rolled around Wild made sure he was in game early enough to ensure that they knew he was ready if needed. But that story will have to come in the next post.
While Wild was whining about not getting into the G2 ICC10 group on Wednesday night, Philly was busy on Thursday getting her Inscription act together. DER, you'll find some glyphs in the mail (if Blizzard ever lets you get the patch installed and get logged in.) Sis, better get your order in. Philly called in all her favors and everyone in the Wild family coughed up every herb they had. Philly has been crafting glyphs and getting on the sale-a-thon bandwagon to make a few bucks while she can and for as long as the herbs last.
The MM guild have three ICC raids a week, the two at night (G1 and G2) and one at noon (creatively called the nooners). The nooners raid on Wed/Thurs, just like G2 does. Philly happened to be in game when the noon raid came around. The raid expected to bring the same ten raiders they brought on Wednesday, so openings might not be there, but Philly paid close attention to the chatter. A couple of raiders from Wednesday didn't show. They had their regular tanks and healers. Any DPS interested in ICC? the raid leader asked. Philly raised her hand, batted her eyes (hard to do in that helm she wears) and whispered sweet nothings (which was more horrifying that sexy from an undead). Philly got her invite just so she'd settle down and not scare off the rest of the raid.
Soon enough Philly was in ICC hoping she would have some clue as to how to DPS as a shadow priest in the ultimate raid dungeon. Not only that, on Wednesday the nooners had cleared six bosses (you killed all the easy ones! she complained) and would be facing down Professor Putricide as her first task.
But! Yes, she said But! Guess who got into an ICC raid post patch before Wild? Philly! If Philly had a tongue she'd stick it out at Wild, but she had to settle for cackling maniacally at him. Wild took it in better humor than last night, but Philly knew she'd have to be on her toe bones and watch for any repercussions for a few days.
Philly was mostly ready. She realized she didn't have any mana water and there was no mage to make any. Hopefully she wouldn't have serious mana problems and have to beg some. She had a few flasks of spell power she'd slipped out of Wild's bags, and of course she had all her glyphs in place. Ok, now if only I could remember what my DPS spell rotation was, she mused. Philly planned to stay with the pre-patch rotation most often used since there were a lot of differing opinions on what should change. Shadow Word: Death was being spammed for a couple of days, and Blizzard then nerfed it since it was blowing things away. That's a dangerous spell to play with, too, since it has a backlash that does damage to the caster. Why, but why, though, did Putricide have to be first?!
It took quite awhile to get everyone into ICC. The way that works was completely changed with the patch and there were a number of glitches and work arounds to get through. But eventually we were all inside, ready to go.
Tackling Putricide as a DPS instead of a healer wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. Since ranged DPS and healers were positioned together for the fight, all of the movement requirements were the same. Target switching, always a shortcoming of the Wild family, only required switching between two targets - Putricide and either the green or orange ooze - and Philly managed that quite well. I think Mery might have helped with that as she has been target switching like a madwoman while out in Felwood killing beasts. Some of that must have rubbed off on Philly. The most frustrating thing about it, though, was having to stand still to cast most of her spells when she also was supposed to be moving with the others around her. That's one thing she hasn't quite got the hang of.
We did not kill Putricide, though. After four tries, the raid leader decided we'd go after Dreamwalker. Philly was pleased with her performance, however, coming in third in DPS. Her best single fight DPS was 4277 with the #1 DPSer getting 5251. Our overall raid DPS wasn't bad, just not good enough to bring down Putricide.
If Philly worried about the Putricide fight, she was twice as concerned with Dreamwalker. Wild loves this fight because he gets to go into the portals and can focus his entire effort on healing the dragon. Wild was barely aware of what was going on with the other raiders outside the portal; but Wild knew that the directions to the DPS were long and complicated. It was "if this mob shows up then kill it first, unless this other mob arrives then stop and go after him, oh, and this is your first priority - unless this other thing happens, then do something different." Wild didn't know how they were even able to tell the different kind of mobs apart, much less keep straight which mob to kill in what order and under what circumstances.
I'll tell you what, though, Philly learned fast. Philly was teamed up with a warlock and assigned to the left side of the room. Warlocks have a number of minions (specialized pets), and one of them, a doomguard I believe, would be used as a tank to keep the mobs from getting to us while we killed them. One of our two healers for the fight was Cr on her priest, and the other was also a priest who had never done this fight before. Those two would have portal duty. A third healer, a shaman, had to keep the rest of us alive.
The start of the fight was easy enough, the four archmages that guarded Dreamwalker went down pretty fast, and for a few seconds there were no new targets, so Philly cast some heals on Dreamwalker. She almost missed seeing the first mob come into our area, a zombie, but Philly had put focus on the warlock and I could see what she was targeting. Philly picked up the zombie target and opened up on it. It, too, went down pretty fast, but there were already two more mobs coming our way, another zombie and an abomination. Zombies were our first priority kill - unless there was an "abom" and that then became the priority. The doomguard was tanking the zombie, though. Philly spread her DoT (damage over time) spells on both mobs and when a tank picked up the abom Philly burned down the zombie. Things weren't going so well on the right side of the room and a raider had already died. We adjusted and kept going. The fight went very long, though, as the portal healers were having some issues and the dragon wasn't getting enough heals. We wiped.
We wiped on our second attempt, too, but we had our rhythm down and we saved Dreamwalker on our third try. Philly also won a fine cloak called [Lich Wrappings]. This fight was the most fun I've ever had as a DPS in a raid. By the end of the night I could easily tell the difference between all of the mobs we faced and which ones needed to be killed in what order. Philly felt like a sharp shooter, picking off targets with the help of the warlock as they rushed in at us. It was even more fun than doing the portal healing. I think we have the makings of a real DPSer in Philly.
That was all we had time for, but it was truly a blast. It also showed that Philly had nothing to fear about her gear or her abilities in heavy duty raids like ICC. She was definitely good enough.
When Thursday night rolled around Wild made sure he was in game early enough to ensure that they knew he was ready if needed. But that story will have to come in the next post.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Wednesday (13 Oct) - Effin (Fn) Computer!
Wednesday (13 Oct) - Effin (Fn) Computer!
I had two presents on Thursday morning. First, a new release of Auctioneer cleared up the couple of problems Happy had been having, and he is now back up to full speed. The Auctioneer problems may have discouraged some of the regular sellers from posting, and certainly a lot of casual posters were off getting their toons set up for the patch, because the pickings on the AH were slim. That suited Happy just fine, and he emptied a few bags worth of materials into the AH at premium prices, and they sold, and sold, and sold. Happy couldn't give away large prismatic shards last week, as they bottomed out at just over a gold apiece (average price is usually over 3g). Happy sold truckloads on Tuesday, bumping the price up over 10g and they still sold. Happy was the only provider. Things are calming down just a little, but Happy hopes for another strong day.
Second, the addon Chatter got a new release and it seems to be working. That will allow me to adjust my UI to give me a bit more screen space. Sadly, Xperl is still in the doghouse. No release to fix the raidframes, and no prognosis on when there will be one.
Speaking of raid frames, there was an ICC10 G2 raid Wednesday night. Wild and most of the family had been in game on and off all day (dam but I have a lot of toons!). I'd logged off a bit for dinner and then came back in game around 6:10pm. Well, I tried to log back in game. I loaded the Blizzard Launcher, no problem. I clicked on Play (the new launcher has a VERY irritating and loud BONG! when you click play - who thinks of these stupid things?). Anyway, I got the login screen, selected Wild's account, and entered my password. I then checked my Authenticator and entered the numerical code. Only what I typed was gibberish.
Was this some new kind of hacker attack? No. When I hit one of the number keys at the top of the keyboard, instead of the number I was getting the special key instead. I wasn't really all that worried at first. Some issue with the Capitals key or something. I tried various things. They didn't work. Wild is supposed to be in game by 6:15pm for invites. It was already 6:20pm. Figuring I had a keyboard problem, I stole the Mrs keyboard and hooked it up. The problem didn't go away. I rebooted the computer, and I'm starting to get a little worried. The reboot didn't change anything. Also, the number pad simply ignored my pounding on it, obviously in league with the rest of the keyboard to keep me out of the game.
I was starting to get pissed, too. I had my second computer up so I could use see Vent and which I used to check boss strats and stuff during the raid. Surprisingly, the keyboard worked just fine on the other computer. It's the same keyboard. Hurry! Just switch to the other computer! Sorry, not an option. I didn't have the Patch loaded on that computer yet - and that would take hours.
I opened vent and went into the chat section so I could talk with the raid leader. I explained the problem. They really, really wanted Wild in the raid and they started helping me try to debug the problem. They were very excited about getting started, too, as it would be the first raid since the patch and we all had a million things to try and questions to get answered about what it would be like.
I lost count of the number of things we tried, from changing USB slots, changing cables, etc. It finally came down to either a failed keyboard driver or a BIOS problem with the computer itself. Windows keyboards used to have a Function key (Fn) known to cause this kind of problem, which could only be fixed through the BIOS (for non computer types messing with the BIOS is like doing open heart surgery. It's possible to kill the patient in there.) I didn't really want to mess with the BIOS, so I went after the driver. Then I learned it was even worse. I went into the Control Panel to get to the System so I could reinstall the keyboard driver. But now my mouse started acting up, highlighting things I didn't want and basically not allowing me to get to the System button.
The raid had to get moving, and I understood that. They replaced me (/cry!) and I listened in for more than an hour as they worked their way through ICC with great success. Later, after a lot more attempts and several more reboots, the keyboard driver started functioning normally again. I don't know what I did to cause the problem, nor do I know what combination of things I did to make it go away. It's a disturbing mystery that I hope never pops up again.
Wild missed out on Wednesday night, finding himself already getting behind his raid group. It's only one day, but unless someone from Wednesday can't make the Thursday run, Wild won't be raiding with them Thursday, either. And next week I will be out of town - on Wed/Thurs. That would make it two weeks without raiding with my group. This really sucks.
Let's end up with a positive note. When I finally was able to get back in game I took Mery for a spin. She's been farming leather in Felwood and I wanted to get an idea of how things would be different with my under 80 toons. I specced her as Beast Master, which is what she was before. Hunters got a little love from the patch. Mery no longer needed bullets of arrows for her ranged weapon. I have to admit here that I got the bag issue wrong. Hunters don't get five bag slots, they get the same four slots as everyone else. The ammo slot on the character sheet was eliminated instead of becoming a bag slot. I think Blizzard missed an opportunity there. Anyway, a really nice thing Blizzard did was allow hunters to bring along more than one combat pet. Only one can be active at a time, but now hunters can switch between pets without having to physically go to the Stables in a major city to get it. Mery brought her tanking pet Sassy and her DPS pet BlueWitch to Felwood, and went to work.
It was awesome! Pre-patch Mery had to pay attention to her mana pool and had to switch between high damage settings (which quickly ate up her mana) and mana conserving settings (which greatly lowered her DPS). Now, post patch, she simply could not fire off spells fast enough to make the slightest dent in her mana. I think it dropped to 90% once, but the regen was so fast it was unbelievable. The only thing slowing Mery down was the time it took to skin the piles of dead bears and scavengers Mery brought down. The new Kill Command was pretty nice, too. A special, extreme range spell that can only be used when the target is below 20% health. "Kill command" even showed up on the screen when the conditions were met to use it. And use it Mery did. There is also a Scatter shot spell that Mery didn't have before. This is a short range, shotgun like blast that disorients the target. Mery tested it by agrroing mobs before Sassy could get to them, and them hitting Scatter shot when they got close. A wonderful way to stop a charging mob for a few seconds to get back out to range and start shooting again. Mery just had to remember that Sassy also stopped attacking when Scattershot was used, and I had to be ready to re-engage her when the stun wore off. Mery's overall DPS went up nicely as well. Mery is much happy.
I had two presents on Thursday morning. First, a new release of Auctioneer cleared up the couple of problems Happy had been having, and he is now back up to full speed. The Auctioneer problems may have discouraged some of the regular sellers from posting, and certainly a lot of casual posters were off getting their toons set up for the patch, because the pickings on the AH were slim. That suited Happy just fine, and he emptied a few bags worth of materials into the AH at premium prices, and they sold, and sold, and sold. Happy couldn't give away large prismatic shards last week, as they bottomed out at just over a gold apiece (average price is usually over 3g). Happy sold truckloads on Tuesday, bumping the price up over 10g and they still sold. Happy was the only provider. Things are calming down just a little, but Happy hopes for another strong day.
Second, the addon Chatter got a new release and it seems to be working. That will allow me to adjust my UI to give me a bit more screen space. Sadly, Xperl is still in the doghouse. No release to fix the raidframes, and no prognosis on when there will be one.
Speaking of raid frames, there was an ICC10 G2 raid Wednesday night. Wild and most of the family had been in game on and off all day (dam but I have a lot of toons!). I'd logged off a bit for dinner and then came back in game around 6:10pm. Well, I tried to log back in game. I loaded the Blizzard Launcher, no problem. I clicked on Play (the new launcher has a VERY irritating and loud BONG! when you click play - who thinks of these stupid things?). Anyway, I got the login screen, selected Wild's account, and entered my password. I then checked my Authenticator and entered the numerical code. Only what I typed was gibberish.
Was this some new kind of hacker attack? No. When I hit one of the number keys at the top of the keyboard, instead of the number I was getting the special key instead. I wasn't really all that worried at first. Some issue with the Capitals key or something. I tried various things. They didn't work. Wild is supposed to be in game by 6:15pm for invites. It was already 6:20pm. Figuring I had a keyboard problem, I stole the Mrs keyboard and hooked it up. The problem didn't go away. I rebooted the computer, and I'm starting to get a little worried. The reboot didn't change anything. Also, the number pad simply ignored my pounding on it, obviously in league with the rest of the keyboard to keep me out of the game.
I was starting to get pissed, too. I had my second computer up so I could use see Vent and which I used to check boss strats and stuff during the raid. Surprisingly, the keyboard worked just fine on the other computer. It's the same keyboard. Hurry! Just switch to the other computer! Sorry, not an option. I didn't have the Patch loaded on that computer yet - and that would take hours.
I opened vent and went into the chat section so I could talk with the raid leader. I explained the problem. They really, really wanted Wild in the raid and they started helping me try to debug the problem. They were very excited about getting started, too, as it would be the first raid since the patch and we all had a million things to try and questions to get answered about what it would be like.
I lost count of the number of things we tried, from changing USB slots, changing cables, etc. It finally came down to either a failed keyboard driver or a BIOS problem with the computer itself. Windows keyboards used to have a Function key (Fn) known to cause this kind of problem, which could only be fixed through the BIOS (for non computer types messing with the BIOS is like doing open heart surgery. It's possible to kill the patient in there.) I didn't really want to mess with the BIOS, so I went after the driver. Then I learned it was even worse. I went into the Control Panel to get to the System so I could reinstall the keyboard driver. But now my mouse started acting up, highlighting things I didn't want and basically not allowing me to get to the System button.
The raid had to get moving, and I understood that. They replaced me (/cry!) and I listened in for more than an hour as they worked their way through ICC with great success. Later, after a lot more attempts and several more reboots, the keyboard driver started functioning normally again. I don't know what I did to cause the problem, nor do I know what combination of things I did to make it go away. It's a disturbing mystery that I hope never pops up again.
Wild missed out on Wednesday night, finding himself already getting behind his raid group. It's only one day, but unless someone from Wednesday can't make the Thursday run, Wild won't be raiding with them Thursday, either. And next week I will be out of town - on Wed/Thurs. That would make it two weeks without raiding with my group. This really sucks.
Let's end up with a positive note. When I finally was able to get back in game I took Mery for a spin. She's been farming leather in Felwood and I wanted to get an idea of how things would be different with my under 80 toons. I specced her as Beast Master, which is what she was before. Hunters got a little love from the patch. Mery no longer needed bullets of arrows for her ranged weapon. I have to admit here that I got the bag issue wrong. Hunters don't get five bag slots, they get the same four slots as everyone else. The ammo slot on the character sheet was eliminated instead of becoming a bag slot. I think Blizzard missed an opportunity there. Anyway, a really nice thing Blizzard did was allow hunters to bring along more than one combat pet. Only one can be active at a time, but now hunters can switch between pets without having to physically go to the Stables in a major city to get it. Mery brought her tanking pet Sassy and her DPS pet BlueWitch to Felwood, and went to work.
It was awesome! Pre-patch Mery had to pay attention to her mana pool and had to switch between high damage settings (which quickly ate up her mana) and mana conserving settings (which greatly lowered her DPS). Now, post patch, she simply could not fire off spells fast enough to make the slightest dent in her mana. I think it dropped to 90% once, but the regen was so fast it was unbelievable. The only thing slowing Mery down was the time it took to skin the piles of dead bears and scavengers Mery brought down. The new Kill Command was pretty nice, too. A special, extreme range spell that can only be used when the target is below 20% health. "Kill command" even showed up on the screen when the conditions were met to use it. And use it Mery did. There is also a Scatter shot spell that Mery didn't have before. This is a short range, shotgun like blast that disorients the target. Mery tested it by agrroing mobs before Sassy could get to them, and them hitting Scatter shot when they got close. A wonderful way to stop a charging mob for a few seconds to get back out to range and start shooting again. Mery just had to remember that Sassy also stopped attacking when Scattershot was used, and I had to be ready to re-engage her when the stun wore off. Mery's overall DPS went up nicely as well. Mery is much happy.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday (12 Oct) - And This is only a Patch!
Tuesday (12 Oct) - And This is only a Patch!
I must say up front that the improved graphics look wonderful. The colors are brighter and the image is sharper. Nice work. I'd also have to say that for such a monstrous upgrade the number of nasty problems have been relatively few. I've been able to login with no trouble, and have been disconnected very few times. Blizzard ran three rolling restarts during the day, two of them unannounced, but there have been no hard crashes that I was aware of. And most everything is working as intended, with a few exceptions that haven't hurt the Wild Family directly.
The troubles that I have had are with my addons. Testing addons is a time consuming process, and I am still far from complete. Wild does have a working interface now, although it is not the interface I had before the patch. Problems that affect raiding are the most serious for Wild, so it was pretty disappointing when the raidframes addon Xperl did not survive the move to the patch. The addon authors are working on it, but as of yet it remains broken. Wild is going to be forced into testing the standard Blizzard raidframes, updated for the patch, but still a bare bones shell of what I have (had) with Xperl. I hate the way the standard raidframes look. The boxes for each player are too big and have laughably inadequate resizing capability and can't be moved. But it will have to do at least for one night of raiding. Fortunately, my button/bar addon, Dominos, is working with no issues. My pre-patch Dominos profiles actually worked (where Xperl's failed). I'm also stuck with the standard Blizzard chat boxes again - another outsized, can't resize it properly thing. The addon Chatter is badly broken and the one fix attempted so far locked up my computer. Going to avoid that one for a couple of rounds of fixes. Many other helpful but not critical addons I've ignored until I'm comfortable with what I do have.
All that said, Wild reached a point where I needed to test all this stuff out to see if I could actually play effectively. Wild signed up as a healer for a random five man Heroic. I had to wait a whole 50 seconds to get a group. Healers get groups fast. I can't recall the dungeon, but I remember one of the bosses was Ingvar the Plunderer. One of those viking style dungeons. I was using the standard Blizzard raid frames for the party/group frames, a new feature from the Patch that I really like. It's the same bare bones setup, but for a five man group it was more than adequate.
Druid healers no longer heal in our Tree Form. That went away with the patch, may our tree of life rest in peace. Druid tree form is now a special ability usable once every three minutes and lasting 15 seconds. The rest of the time Wild will be in his every day caster gear. I'll get used to it, I guess, but it sure seemed strange. Wild must have long forgotten the early days of druid healing when we'd never heard of tree of life.
Stats were also completely changed and the numbers were eye popping the first time I saw them. Pre-patch Wild's health was 20,977. After the patch, in the same gear, it was 31,987. Honestly, though, it doesn't mean much, as the damage we take will be that much higher, so in my view it basically evens out.
What I wanted to know was how my spells worked when I healed and how much mana was I using. On the test realm folks were saying that mana was not an issue, even though a specific goal of Blizzard's with the changes was to force healers out of the "spam heals on everyone endlessly because I never run out of mana" style of healing. A five man heroic won't tell me much about that, but it would at least give me one measure of the impact.
So, here are my immediate thoughts about healing after the patch:
1) Holy cow, my Nourish spell takes FOREVER to cast! Spells with longer cast times now take even longer before they hit their target. Pre-patch Wild never had to wait on a spell. It was cast and forget (and maybe a quick peek to make sure it had finished). Now I found myself WAITING for the spell to finish, anxious to get another spell going. That was not a good feeling. Wild started his day with 24.52% haste (which speeds up spell casting), but after seeing how long those casts were taking I plan to push my haste numbers up a lot further. Already Wild has used the new reforging ability to change +crit to +haste on both his T10 shoulders and a ring. It's now at 25.98% and I have more work to do on that. A least I have Nourish down to slightly under two seconds to cast, which is awful but not unbearable.
2) Mana was a non-issue. Wild never got below 97% mana the whole fight, even when our tank died. Well, the silly tank ran off and left his group. He was a paladin, so I guess he figured he could tank and heal both, but guess what, he needed Wild and he left me behind. Wild and the other players arrived just in time to see the tank fall and see all those mobs turn against us. We had a DK, though, and he picked up the adds and we were fine. That paladin didn't leave Wild behind after that.
3) It's possible for Wild to pull aggro again. The paladin tank was competent, but several times Wild's heals got the attention of mobs and Wild took some hits. Wild found he needed to wait another heartbeat or two before dropping that first heal to make sure the tank had firm control. Paladins have been complaining loudly about what they feel are nerfs to pally tanking. IF that's true then Wild got a first hand look at that problem.
It was an easy romp and Wild got some practice in. I felt a little more on edge, but I think that was because my interface is very different and because I didn't know what to expect. Looking at the healing numbers afterward didn't tell me all that much, either. They were about the same as pre-patch numbers in heroics, but then the mobs and even the bosses die pretty fast, so it's hard to make a comparison.
Thinking about tonight's raid, I'm betting we will give ICC a first shot instead of the safer (and probably boring) option of Naxxramas. But we'll see.
I have also been laboriously working through all my other toons. Poor guys and gals are getting ghetto talent trees as I am not spending a lot of time researching the "best" specs, particularly when there is still a lot of disagreement on what "best" is now. It's a pain having to find a trainer for each and every one of them, not to mention seeing profession trainers as well. DER and Sis have already heard Philly's lamentations about issues with her Inscription profession, which in total is an improvement on a pretty broken profession, but still has a ways to go.
Enough. I need to get back in there!
I must say up front that the improved graphics look wonderful. The colors are brighter and the image is sharper. Nice work. I'd also have to say that for such a monstrous upgrade the number of nasty problems have been relatively few. I've been able to login with no trouble, and have been disconnected very few times. Blizzard ran three rolling restarts during the day, two of them unannounced, but there have been no hard crashes that I was aware of. And most everything is working as intended, with a few exceptions that haven't hurt the Wild Family directly.
The troubles that I have had are with my addons. Testing addons is a time consuming process, and I am still far from complete. Wild does have a working interface now, although it is not the interface I had before the patch. Problems that affect raiding are the most serious for Wild, so it was pretty disappointing when the raidframes addon Xperl did not survive the move to the patch. The addon authors are working on it, but as of yet it remains broken. Wild is going to be forced into testing the standard Blizzard raidframes, updated for the patch, but still a bare bones shell of what I have (had) with Xperl. I hate the way the standard raidframes look. The boxes for each player are too big and have laughably inadequate resizing capability and can't be moved. But it will have to do at least for one night of raiding. Fortunately, my button/bar addon, Dominos, is working with no issues. My pre-patch Dominos profiles actually worked (where Xperl's failed). I'm also stuck with the standard Blizzard chat boxes again - another outsized, can't resize it properly thing. The addon Chatter is badly broken and the one fix attempted so far locked up my computer. Going to avoid that one for a couple of rounds of fixes. Many other helpful but not critical addons I've ignored until I'm comfortable with what I do have.
All that said, Wild reached a point where I needed to test all this stuff out to see if I could actually play effectively. Wild signed up as a healer for a random five man Heroic. I had to wait a whole 50 seconds to get a group. Healers get groups fast. I can't recall the dungeon, but I remember one of the bosses was Ingvar the Plunderer. One of those viking style dungeons. I was using the standard Blizzard raid frames for the party/group frames, a new feature from the Patch that I really like. It's the same bare bones setup, but for a five man group it was more than adequate.
Druid healers no longer heal in our Tree Form. That went away with the patch, may our tree of life rest in peace. Druid tree form is now a special ability usable once every three minutes and lasting 15 seconds. The rest of the time Wild will be in his every day caster gear. I'll get used to it, I guess, but it sure seemed strange. Wild must have long forgotten the early days of druid healing when we'd never heard of tree of life.
Stats were also completely changed and the numbers were eye popping the first time I saw them. Pre-patch Wild's health was 20,977. After the patch, in the same gear, it was 31,987. Honestly, though, it doesn't mean much, as the damage we take will be that much higher, so in my view it basically evens out.
What I wanted to know was how my spells worked when I healed and how much mana was I using. On the test realm folks were saying that mana was not an issue, even though a specific goal of Blizzard's with the changes was to force healers out of the "spam heals on everyone endlessly because I never run out of mana" style of healing. A five man heroic won't tell me much about that, but it would at least give me one measure of the impact.
So, here are my immediate thoughts about healing after the patch:
1) Holy cow, my Nourish spell takes FOREVER to cast! Spells with longer cast times now take even longer before they hit their target. Pre-patch Wild never had to wait on a spell. It was cast and forget (and maybe a quick peek to make sure it had finished). Now I found myself WAITING for the spell to finish, anxious to get another spell going. That was not a good feeling. Wild started his day with 24.52% haste (which speeds up spell casting), but after seeing how long those casts were taking I plan to push my haste numbers up a lot further. Already Wild has used the new reforging ability to change +crit to +haste on both his T10 shoulders and a ring. It's now at 25.98% and I have more work to do on that. A least I have Nourish down to slightly under two seconds to cast, which is awful but not unbearable.
2) Mana was a non-issue. Wild never got below 97% mana the whole fight, even when our tank died. Well, the silly tank ran off and left his group. He was a paladin, so I guess he figured he could tank and heal both, but guess what, he needed Wild and he left me behind. Wild and the other players arrived just in time to see the tank fall and see all those mobs turn against us. We had a DK, though, and he picked up the adds and we were fine. That paladin didn't leave Wild behind after that.
3) It's possible for Wild to pull aggro again. The paladin tank was competent, but several times Wild's heals got the attention of mobs and Wild took some hits. Wild found he needed to wait another heartbeat or two before dropping that first heal to make sure the tank had firm control. Paladins have been complaining loudly about what they feel are nerfs to pally tanking. IF that's true then Wild got a first hand look at that problem.
It was an easy romp and Wild got some practice in. I felt a little more on edge, but I think that was because my interface is very different and because I didn't know what to expect. Looking at the healing numbers afterward didn't tell me all that much, either. They were about the same as pre-patch numbers in heroics, but then the mobs and even the bosses die pretty fast, so it's hard to make a comparison.
Thinking about tonight's raid, I'm betting we will give ICC a first shot instead of the safer (and probably boring) option of Naxxramas. But we'll see.
I have also been laboriously working through all my other toons. Poor guys and gals are getting ghetto talent trees as I am not spending a lot of time researching the "best" specs, particularly when there is still a lot of disagreement on what "best" is now. It's a pain having to find a trainer for each and every one of them, not to mention seeing profession trainers as well. DER and Sis have already heard Philly's lamentations about issues with her Inscription profession, which in total is an improvement on a pretty broken profession, but still has a ways to go.
Enough. I need to get back in there!
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Tuesday (12 Oct) - Patch 4.0.1 is Here
Tuesday (12 Oct) - Patch 4.0.1 is Here
It took two hours this morning (Tuesday) to download the last piece of code then install the full, several gig patch. The new Launcher looks cool. Of course, that's all that I can access right now, as maintenance will continue at least until Noon, and almost certainly for longer than that.
Update #1 : Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 2pm. Uh huh. Sure.
Update #2: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 4pm. I have some more tidbits culled from various sources. Hunters, who can only use three general use bags because the 4th bag slot had to have a quiver of arrows or an ammo pouch in it, can now use that 4th slot once again since arrows and ammo have been removed from the game. Hunters get the last laugh, too. Not only do they get their 4th bag slot back, the gear slot that used to bold the ammo being used has been redesigned to hold a special, hunter only bag in that slot. So, instead of having only three bags, one less than everyone else, they now have five, one more than everyone else. How about armor? Pre-patch there was no penalty for a player wearing gear of a lower type than the best type they could use. Wild, for example, can wear cloth or leather, leather being the best all other things being equal. Well, Wild does wear some cloth gear because the overall stats on that gear are better, Well now that will hurt, since wearing your best type gear gives a stat buff to the gear. If Wild wears cloth, he won't get the buff. I just heard about that today. Sigh. Ok, now about Glyphs! Glyphs are buffs that go in six special slots. Scribe make them and sell them. The glyphs are consumed when used, so if you want to change a glyph you have to buy them each time. The patch changed all that. Now there are nine slots to fill, and now you only have to buy a glyph once, and you've learned it and can use it as many times as you want. That seems to suck for Scribes. However, the catch is that once you've put glyph into a slot it can only be removed by using a special dust - dust that is made by scribes. Those scribes (Philly!) are going to get their once of blood - I mean gold. I'm going to like this new method, I think. Better hope I can get logged in at 4pm, or I'll be hunting around for more things to talk about.
Update #3: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 5pm. This is a game we play every single time there is a significant upgrade. Blizzard pretends they have a clue and we dutifully try to login each time knowing that the servers will still be down. But what if they are up?
Monday night I prepared for the incoming patch by cleaning up the user interfaces of all my toons, clearing old addons that I don't use anymore, and basically doing the housekeeping chores that I have been neglecting. I checked my addons for updates, and there were very few. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The only major addon that has an upgrade for the patch is Xperl. I saved Xperl profiles for all my toons and I hope that will be good enough so that I won't have to recreate a lot of time consuming work when I install the upgrade. My UI can survive almost anything except a failure with Xperl or Dominos.
After logging off for the last time I also made a thorough backup of all of the critical folders in case something goes very badly wrong.
Part of this morning has been spent building new talent trees for Wild and Philly specifically. Talent trees underwent a massive overhaul and have to be rebuilt from scratch. I dithered over Philly for a bit. She is still main spec Shadow for ranged DPS, but I wasn't sure what I wanted her off spec to be. I love DISC healing spec, which is her current off spec, but I have never really gotten comfortable with it and as a result she just hasn't been a very good healer. Holy priest healing is a lot closer to druid healing, even more so now with the changes in the patch. I'm going with Holy off spec.
DER's extended family has already completed their research and are ready to go the instant they can get in game, according to Sin during Monday night's dungeon crawling with Java and Esor. I'm afraid the rest of Wild's family is going to get overhauled in bits and pieces over the next several days, and will have to be fit in around Wildshard, who will have priority. Philly will get some time, too, but her early in game time will be spent on glyph making and gem making duties as needed by Wild and everyone else in all our families as we restructure our gear to meet the new requirements of the patch. I hope Philly has enough materials to meet the demand. They are likely to be extremely pricey for a while.
The three of us did run some dungeons Monday night, primarily the Scarlet Monastery (SM) graveyard, but also some Razorfen Kraul. We then attempted to tackle the Houndmaster in SM with just the three of us (or four, counting Sin's combat pet). That was probably the most fun of all, even though we were badly outnumbered and out leveled by the mid-30s elite mobs. In two and threes we could handle the attackers, even though the three of us were only level 28/29. The Houndmaster, though, is boss level difficulty and has elite hounds to help him. Esor tried to tank first with all of us doing DPS. We died. Then we tried tanking with the combat pet (a bear) and Java healing. That was actually working, but Java ran out of mana for healing halfway through the fight. We died. We tried kiting the Houndmaster out of the area, hoping to separate him from his hounds. No joy. We died. But it was hysterical fun anyway. We hung around for a bit to see if we could get into a pvp battleground, but it was closing in on midnight, when the servers would go down, and most of the server population had already logged off. A great way to ring in the patch. With friends.
I will continue to update this throughout the day, assuming I don't get swept in so deep I can't extricate myself.
It took two hours this morning (Tuesday) to download the last piece of code then install the full, several gig patch. The new Launcher looks cool. Of course, that's all that I can access right now, as maintenance will continue at least until Noon, and almost certainly for longer than that.
Update #1 : Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 2pm. Uh huh. Sure.
Update #2: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 4pm. I have some more tidbits culled from various sources. Hunters, who can only use three general use bags because the 4th bag slot had to have a quiver of arrows or an ammo pouch in it, can now use that 4th slot once again since arrows and ammo have been removed from the game. Hunters get the last laugh, too. Not only do they get their 4th bag slot back, the gear slot that used to bold the ammo being used has been redesigned to hold a special, hunter only bag in that slot. So, instead of having only three bags, one less than everyone else, they now have five, one more than everyone else. How about armor? Pre-patch there was no penalty for a player wearing gear of a lower type than the best type they could use. Wild, for example, can wear cloth or leather, leather being the best all other things being equal. Well, Wild does wear some cloth gear because the overall stats on that gear are better, Well now that will hurt, since wearing your best type gear gives a stat buff to the gear. If Wild wears cloth, he won't get the buff. I just heard about that today. Sigh. Ok, now about Glyphs! Glyphs are buffs that go in six special slots. Scribe make them and sell them. The glyphs are consumed when used, so if you want to change a glyph you have to buy them each time. The patch changed all that. Now there are nine slots to fill, and now you only have to buy a glyph once, and you've learned it and can use it as many times as you want. That seems to suck for Scribes. However, the catch is that once you've put glyph into a slot it can only be removed by using a special dust - dust that is made by scribes. Those scribes (Philly!) are going to get their once of blood - I mean gold. I'm going to like this new method, I think. Better hope I can get logged in at 4pm, or I'll be hunting around for more things to talk about.
Update #3: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 5pm. This is a game we play every single time there is a significant upgrade. Blizzard pretends they have a clue and we dutifully try to login each time knowing that the servers will still be down. But what if they are up?
Monday night I prepared for the incoming patch by cleaning up the user interfaces of all my toons, clearing old addons that I don't use anymore, and basically doing the housekeeping chores that I have been neglecting. I checked my addons for updates, and there were very few. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The only major addon that has an upgrade for the patch is Xperl. I saved Xperl profiles for all my toons and I hope that will be good enough so that I won't have to recreate a lot of time consuming work when I install the upgrade. My UI can survive almost anything except a failure with Xperl or Dominos.
After logging off for the last time I also made a thorough backup of all of the critical folders in case something goes very badly wrong.
Part of this morning has been spent building new talent trees for Wild and Philly specifically. Talent trees underwent a massive overhaul and have to be rebuilt from scratch. I dithered over Philly for a bit. She is still main spec Shadow for ranged DPS, but I wasn't sure what I wanted her off spec to be. I love DISC healing spec, which is her current off spec, but I have never really gotten comfortable with it and as a result she just hasn't been a very good healer. Holy priest healing is a lot closer to druid healing, even more so now with the changes in the patch. I'm going with Holy off spec.
DER's extended family has already completed their research and are ready to go the instant they can get in game, according to Sin during Monday night's dungeon crawling with Java and Esor. I'm afraid the rest of Wild's family is going to get overhauled in bits and pieces over the next several days, and will have to be fit in around Wildshard, who will have priority. Philly will get some time, too, but her early in game time will be spent on glyph making and gem making duties as needed by Wild and everyone else in all our families as we restructure our gear to meet the new requirements of the patch. I hope Philly has enough materials to meet the demand. They are likely to be extremely pricey for a while.
The three of us did run some dungeons Monday night, primarily the Scarlet Monastery (SM) graveyard, but also some Razorfen Kraul. We then attempted to tackle the Houndmaster in SM with just the three of us (or four, counting Sin's combat pet). That was probably the most fun of all, even though we were badly outnumbered and out leveled by the mid-30s elite mobs. In two and threes we could handle the attackers, even though the three of us were only level 28/29. The Houndmaster, though, is boss level difficulty and has elite hounds to help him. Esor tried to tank first with all of us doing DPS. We died. Then we tried tanking with the combat pet (a bear) and Java healing. That was actually working, but Java ran out of mana for healing halfway through the fight. We died. We tried kiting the Houndmaster out of the area, hoping to separate him from his hounds. No joy. We died. But it was hysterical fun anyway. We hung around for a bit to see if we could get into a pvp battleground, but it was closing in on midnight, when the servers would go down, and most of the server population had already logged off. A great way to ring in the patch. With friends.
I will continue to update this throughout the day, assuming I don't get swept in so deep I can't extricate myself.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Weekend (10 Oct) - The End of ICC 25?
Weekend (10 Oct) - The End of ICC 25?
Most guildies I've talked to believe that Patch 4.01 will arrive this coming Tuesday. There are major changes in that patch that affect raiding. The biggest, and most personal changes are to player talents and gear stats. Both undergo a massive overall which the patch will implement. The word from the players in the PTR (the test server realm) is that DPS (and by extension healing) is insanely higher than before, but that the mechanics have changed so much it will take time to figure out how to achieve those numbers. One shaman friend said that his healing per second in the PTR fell to half of what he was getting in Live WoW at first, and it was a lot of work figuring out how to use his altered spells and adjust to the changed stats. Wild has not attempted the PTR, in part because copying Wild's character over to the PTR can be a painful and time consuming process, but mostly because I don't have the time.
Our Wed/Thurs G2 ICC10 group plans to raid Naxx10 instead ICC10 next week if the patch goes live. Going to Naxxramas will give us a chance test out these changes in a more forgiving environment. If we all are comfortable with our specs, gear, etc, then we might switch over to ICC. The MM guild intends to continue fielding two ICC10 raids. I think.
After last night's ICC25 raid (which I'll get to in a minute) there was a discussion on what would happen with the ICC25 co-op post patch. Once the patch hits we can only kill a raid boss in ICC once per week, either in ICC10 or ICC25, but not both. If the ICC10 raids continue to run, none of those raiders will be able to join the ICC25 co-op. That's most if not all of the raiders currently going to the co-op raid. The ICC25 co-op would die. The possibility of turning the co-op into an "alts" run was discussed. "Alts" almost by definition are not the equal of their mains so such a run would not be nearly as successful as our current group, and the run would only be for farming reputation and justice points and collecting what few i264 pieces of gear we could get from whatever bosses we were able to kill. Philly would probably be interested in that, but I think it will be difficult to get enough folks to attend.
From Wild's perspective, the G2 ICC10 should continue, assuming that the changes don't make ICC10 a lot harder than it already is. We still have a ghost of a chance to reach the Lich King, but ... the Blood Queen encounter and the dragon Sindragosa are both very tough battles that we have almost no experience at. And the Lich King battle itself? Most raids took weeks to finally beat it. It's pretty long odds. And of course, by going to the ICC10 raid, Wild will not be able to be in the ICC25 co-op.
For PUGs the patch is going to turn raiding into the Wild Wild West. With the ability to move from raid to raid, and with PUG raiders trying to match up raids with the bosses they've killed or not killed, it's possible that actually forming a coherent raid long enough to kill more than a boss or two might become a nightmare. The new raid feature that is supposed to manage all that and tell us whether we can join a raid and what bosses we have access to (and might lose access to if we joined the raid) is going to make or break this, I think.
On Friday night we had a successful evening. We swept through the first wing of ICC25. We did have a bit of a bump right at the start, when we were not able to kill Marrowgar in Heroic mode. After two failed attempts, we switched to normal mode so that we didn't lose any more time. Our only Heroic kill was the Gunship. Festergut and Rotface in the second wing also went down easily, and we got the weekly ICC raid quest done as well. Putricide stymied us, though. We only had time for two attempts, neither of which went particularly well.
Wild was pressed into service as a main tank healer since three of our six healers were druids. Wild and a priest (who always tank heals) took care of the tanks. Wild got the job because I wasn't fast enough when the raid leader asked who wanted to tank heal. Everybody, even the priest, said No Way! micro-seconds after the question was asked. Wild just shrugged and said, well, I guess that leaves me. My shaman friend from FS, Bf, was also in the raid as a healer and we chatted a bit. My other talkative friend, Cr, doesn't come to the ICC25 and in fact hasn't been coming to the G2 ICC10, either. Not sure what is up with her. Anyway, Bf is the shaman that used to run as an alt with the FS ICC10 raids, but was later told that he wasn't good enough and was no longer going to be invited. So Bf was pretty happy with his play in ICC25, coming in first in healing. You go, dude! Wild wanted to protest that his healing was down a bit because he was tank healing and not raid healing, but then I'd have to excuse the other raiders who had to tank heal on nights Wild was raid healing. Overall, though, Wild was happy because he kept his tanks alive. And that's what counts.
Healing:
#1: Bf (shaman) - 4368 hps, 17% of healing
#2: Priest - 4117/16%
#3: Wild - 3786/14.7%
#4: Bd (druid) - 3471/11.9%
#5: druid - 2774/10.1%
#6: shaman - 3325/10%
Saturday Night - Wild joined the ICC25 co-op raid for our Saturday foray with a bit of melancholy that was shared by many in the raid. The raid leaders from BH who host this raid will not be raiding 25 man when the patch comes out, which appears almost certain to be this coming Tuesday. Since Wild's MM guild can't field it's own 25 man raid, this could be Wild's last night ever as part of an organized 25 man raid.
We spent most of the evening battling Professor Putricide. The tenacity of our group despite repeated wipes brought back memories of those old days in places like Molten Core, and even more so, Blackwing Lair, where we spent whole evenings trying to kill one boss. Putricide finally died on our seventh attempt. We then turned to the Princes, and that triplet of bosses went down on our first attempt. We could have taken the easier route and gone after Dreamwalker next, but we decided to tackle the Blood Queen. Blood Queen is truly an original and unique encounter, something that is an almost lost art with the newer dungeons. All those Twilight Saga book/movie lovers should appreciate that the Blood Queen is about vampires, both the good (becoming one and helping the raid) and the bad (becoming one and being mind controlled by the Blood Queen). It was a struggle, but we battled her hard, giving it four attempts before we ran out of time.
Our final tally on the two nights were complete clears of the Lower Spire and the Plagueworks, plus bringing down the Prince and bleeding for the Blood Queen. Eight ICC25 bosses down. This group had the desire and the potential to take on the rest of ICC, but now it's over.
Please excuse Wild for a short retrospective. Back in Vanilla WoW Wild started solo by doing quests. Wild eventually joined a guild and started doing a few five man dungeons. Ten man dungeons followed, including Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS), which we pounded on every week for months. It was an awesome place to raid, but it was just preparation for the real test. At long last Wild entered the forty man Molten Core. Ten deadly bosses spread across a long, torturous cavern layout and blanketed with trash mobs that could not be taken lightly. The very first end game boss, Ragnaros, was the ultimate goal. Months and months of effort and Wild got his full clear and his full set of Tier 1 gear. I regret destroying that set, now. I kept it for years, but some time ago finally cleaned out my closets and got rid of it.
Twenty man raids followed - Zul'Gurub for one, but the most remembered by Wild was the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Six very unique and challenging boss encounters, including the one Wild always feared, Buru the Gorger. It was also the heyday for the forty man raids. After Molten Core there was Blackwing Lair, which Wild loved even more than Molten Core, and the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, which we never really conquered. And there were others.
The Burning Crusade killed forty man raids. Instead, we were given a couple of ten man raids, Karazan being the one Wild most remembers for the very tight raid group we had during the months of battling that place. But Burning Crusade wasn't about ten mans, it was about twenty-five man raids. BC spawned SEVEN 25 man raids which culminated with the Black Temple. Wild was engaged in every one of them except the Sunwell Plateau, which was a patch addition not long before the next expansion arrived. Wild never saw the inside of the Sunwell Plateau until long after it had been bypassed for the newer challenges of Wrath of the Lich King.
Now it's time for WotLK to pass into history, yet another chapter finished. Wild faced down the 10/25 man raids of Naxxramas and Ulduar to get to Icecrown Citadel, and in a few weeks time it, too, will be relegated to nothing more than a dusty, historical tombstone visited only by the curious. The last latest addition to the 10/25 man raid, Ruby Sanctum, got barely a look and was ignored by most of players and guilds. Like Sunwell Plateau, Ruby Sanctum will sink into disuse without Wild having ever set foot inside.
Cataclysm is coming. Four new raids, all 10/25 man, are coming. One in particular has Wild's interest, Blackwing Descent. This is a continuation of the conflict within Blackwing Mountain, home of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In Cata there are six raid level dungeons in all, in addition to seven new five man dungeons.
Come Tuesday (if the patch rumors hold true) we will have one foot in our existing world and one foot in the next. And the next step after that is Cataclysm itself.
Most guildies I've talked to believe that Patch 4.01 will arrive this coming Tuesday. There are major changes in that patch that affect raiding. The biggest, and most personal changes are to player talents and gear stats. Both undergo a massive overall which the patch will implement. The word from the players in the PTR (the test server realm) is that DPS (and by extension healing) is insanely higher than before, but that the mechanics have changed so much it will take time to figure out how to achieve those numbers. One shaman friend said that his healing per second in the PTR fell to half of what he was getting in Live WoW at first, and it was a lot of work figuring out how to use his altered spells and adjust to the changed stats. Wild has not attempted the PTR, in part because copying Wild's character over to the PTR can be a painful and time consuming process, but mostly because I don't have the time.
Our Wed/Thurs G2 ICC10 group plans to raid Naxx10 instead ICC10 next week if the patch goes live. Going to Naxxramas will give us a chance test out these changes in a more forgiving environment. If we all are comfortable with our specs, gear, etc, then we might switch over to ICC. The MM guild intends to continue fielding two ICC10 raids. I think.
After last night's ICC25 raid (which I'll get to in a minute) there was a discussion on what would happen with the ICC25 co-op post patch. Once the patch hits we can only kill a raid boss in ICC once per week, either in ICC10 or ICC25, but not both. If the ICC10 raids continue to run, none of those raiders will be able to join the ICC25 co-op. That's most if not all of the raiders currently going to the co-op raid. The ICC25 co-op would die. The possibility of turning the co-op into an "alts" run was discussed. "Alts" almost by definition are not the equal of their mains so such a run would not be nearly as successful as our current group, and the run would only be for farming reputation and justice points and collecting what few i264 pieces of gear we could get from whatever bosses we were able to kill. Philly would probably be interested in that, but I think it will be difficult to get enough folks to attend.
From Wild's perspective, the G2 ICC10 should continue, assuming that the changes don't make ICC10 a lot harder than it already is. We still have a ghost of a chance to reach the Lich King, but ... the Blood Queen encounter and the dragon Sindragosa are both very tough battles that we have almost no experience at. And the Lich King battle itself? Most raids took weeks to finally beat it. It's pretty long odds. And of course, by going to the ICC10 raid, Wild will not be able to be in the ICC25 co-op.
For PUGs the patch is going to turn raiding into the Wild Wild West. With the ability to move from raid to raid, and with PUG raiders trying to match up raids with the bosses they've killed or not killed, it's possible that actually forming a coherent raid long enough to kill more than a boss or two might become a nightmare. The new raid feature that is supposed to manage all that and tell us whether we can join a raid and what bosses we have access to (and might lose access to if we joined the raid) is going to make or break this, I think.
On Friday night we had a successful evening. We swept through the first wing of ICC25. We did have a bit of a bump right at the start, when we were not able to kill Marrowgar in Heroic mode. After two failed attempts, we switched to normal mode so that we didn't lose any more time. Our only Heroic kill was the Gunship. Festergut and Rotface in the second wing also went down easily, and we got the weekly ICC raid quest done as well. Putricide stymied us, though. We only had time for two attempts, neither of which went particularly well.
Wild was pressed into service as a main tank healer since three of our six healers were druids. Wild and a priest (who always tank heals) took care of the tanks. Wild got the job because I wasn't fast enough when the raid leader asked who wanted to tank heal. Everybody, even the priest, said No Way! micro-seconds after the question was asked. Wild just shrugged and said, well, I guess that leaves me. My shaman friend from FS, Bf, was also in the raid as a healer and we chatted a bit. My other talkative friend, Cr, doesn't come to the ICC25 and in fact hasn't been coming to the G2 ICC10, either. Not sure what is up with her. Anyway, Bf is the shaman that used to run as an alt with the FS ICC10 raids, but was later told that he wasn't good enough and was no longer going to be invited. So Bf was pretty happy with his play in ICC25, coming in first in healing. You go, dude! Wild wanted to protest that his healing was down a bit because he was tank healing and not raid healing, but then I'd have to excuse the other raiders who had to tank heal on nights Wild was raid healing. Overall, though, Wild was happy because he kept his tanks alive. And that's what counts.
Healing:
#1: Bf (shaman) - 4368 hps, 17% of healing
#2: Priest - 4117/16%
#3: Wild - 3786/14.7%
#4: Bd (druid) - 3471/11.9%
#5: druid - 2774/10.1%
#6: shaman - 3325/10%
Saturday Night - Wild joined the ICC25 co-op raid for our Saturday foray with a bit of melancholy that was shared by many in the raid. The raid leaders from BH who host this raid will not be raiding 25 man when the patch comes out, which appears almost certain to be this coming Tuesday. Since Wild's MM guild can't field it's own 25 man raid, this could be Wild's last night ever as part of an organized 25 man raid.
We spent most of the evening battling Professor Putricide. The tenacity of our group despite repeated wipes brought back memories of those old days in places like Molten Core, and even more so, Blackwing Lair, where we spent whole evenings trying to kill one boss. Putricide finally died on our seventh attempt. We then turned to the Princes, and that triplet of bosses went down on our first attempt. We could have taken the easier route and gone after Dreamwalker next, but we decided to tackle the Blood Queen. Blood Queen is truly an original and unique encounter, something that is an almost lost art with the newer dungeons. All those Twilight Saga book/movie lovers should appreciate that the Blood Queen is about vampires, both the good (becoming one and helping the raid) and the bad (becoming one and being mind controlled by the Blood Queen). It was a struggle, but we battled her hard, giving it four attempts before we ran out of time.
Our final tally on the two nights were complete clears of the Lower Spire and the Plagueworks, plus bringing down the Prince and bleeding for the Blood Queen. Eight ICC25 bosses down. This group had the desire and the potential to take on the rest of ICC, but now it's over.
Please excuse Wild for a short retrospective. Back in Vanilla WoW Wild started solo by doing quests. Wild eventually joined a guild and started doing a few five man dungeons. Ten man dungeons followed, including Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS), which we pounded on every week for months. It was an awesome place to raid, but it was just preparation for the real test. At long last Wild entered the forty man Molten Core. Ten deadly bosses spread across a long, torturous cavern layout and blanketed with trash mobs that could not be taken lightly. The very first end game boss, Ragnaros, was the ultimate goal. Months and months of effort and Wild got his full clear and his full set of Tier 1 gear. I regret destroying that set, now. I kept it for years, but some time ago finally cleaned out my closets and got rid of it.
Twenty man raids followed - Zul'Gurub for one, but the most remembered by Wild was the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Six very unique and challenging boss encounters, including the one Wild always feared, Buru the Gorger. It was also the heyday for the forty man raids. After Molten Core there was Blackwing Lair, which Wild loved even more than Molten Core, and the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, which we never really conquered. And there were others.
The Burning Crusade killed forty man raids. Instead, we were given a couple of ten man raids, Karazan being the one Wild most remembers for the very tight raid group we had during the months of battling that place. But Burning Crusade wasn't about ten mans, it was about twenty-five man raids. BC spawned SEVEN 25 man raids which culminated with the Black Temple. Wild was engaged in every one of them except the Sunwell Plateau, which was a patch addition not long before the next expansion arrived. Wild never saw the inside of the Sunwell Plateau until long after it had been bypassed for the newer challenges of Wrath of the Lich King.
Now it's time for WotLK to pass into history, yet another chapter finished. Wild faced down the 10/25 man raids of Naxxramas and Ulduar to get to Icecrown Citadel, and in a few weeks time it, too, will be relegated to nothing more than a dusty, historical tombstone visited only by the curious. The last latest addition to the 10/25 man raid, Ruby Sanctum, got barely a look and was ignored by most of players and guilds. Like Sunwell Plateau, Ruby Sanctum will sink into disuse without Wild having ever set foot inside.
Cataclysm is coming. Four new raids, all 10/25 man, are coming. One in particular has Wild's interest, Blackwing Descent. This is a continuation of the conflict within Blackwing Mountain, home of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In Cata there are six raid level dungeons in all, in addition to seven new five man dungeons.
Come Tuesday (if the patch rumors hold true) we will have one foot in our existing world and one foot in the next. And the next step after that is Cataclysm itself.
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