Weekend (9 Aug) - Auction House Woes
About the only activity over the weekend has been at the Auction House and the Veterinary Hospital. Our 11 year old cat had surgery on Thursday and we got him home Saturday night. That has pretty much absorbed our time for the past few days.
Last week Wild got in his two nights of ICC but did not get to run the scheduled Ruby Sanctum raid on Friday night. Wild learned later that the run was called off when the raid leader was called in to work and couldn't make the raid. Wild has yet to set foot in the game's newest dungeon. Wild wasn't able to make the ICC25 on Saturday afternoon, either. Philly fidgets, unable to get time for the ICC 5 man runs she wants to get done.
Meanwhile, Happy and Lost struggle through ever shrinking profits. The "walking the dog" syndrome has thoroughly infected both horde and alliance now. Happy has four full bags of different items that he deals with every day, and rarely has more than half a dozen items "not for sale." Right now more than a quarter of his items are off the market. And many of his posted items just sit there at the lowest price, with no buyers. Even Happy's best item, frost wyrm flasks, went upside down this weekend, with prices on the key ingredient (frost lotus) becoming increasingly pricey while a bidding war drove down the price of the flasks so far that Happy stopped selling them. Ironically, frost lotus is selling at bargain prices on the alliance side, but high priced items like that are not good choices to try to buy or sell through the neutral auction house, and they cost too much for Lost anyway. This weekend will be a complete loss for Happy. Very little cash coming in, and very little worth buying to restock his shelves. Lost is still making a profit, but her stock is very small and the AH is not offering her any bargains to rebuild.
Naithipe was around, flitting here and there in Kalimdor, disturbing the Timbermaw tribe in Felwood and using their tunnels, but said nary a word about what she was up to.
EZ plans to make the Monday pvp night, and is looking forward to trying out her Stormstrike enhanced dual blades - unless the cat decides to change our plans.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
General (7 Aug) - Did You Know?
General (7 Aug) - Did You Know?
The next expansion pack for Warcraft, Cataclysm, is officially set to arrive on 1 Nov 2010. Did you know that this is less than three months away? That's about a dozen romps in Icecrown Citadel. That's practically JUST AROUND THE CORNER."
Yea, but did you know that neither of the prior two expansion packs were released on the initial release date? Did you know that the beta test server is not even up yet? But did you also know that once we hit November nobody will be able think about anything but Cataclysm?
Cataclysm could also be labeled "Back to the Future" for healers. There is a great couple of you-tube videos about the history of healing and what is expected to happen with Cataclysm.
In the days of Vanilla WoW healers had to pay a lot of attention to mana regen and "over healing" (which was essentially healing wasted on someone who did not need the heal). Wasted healing used up mana, and using too much mana meant you'd run out before the fight was over, and the raid would wipe. These were REAL concerns in Vanilla WoW. Two techniques to combat running out of mana were popular in those days - "interrupt" healing and "down ranking." Down ranking meant using, say, rank 5 of a spell instead of it's full power of rank 9. Down ranked spells cost less mana. A lot of effort was expended determining what rank of a spell was the right rank to keep the raid alive while not running out of mana. Interrupt healing was used with long cast, high powered healing spells. The healer would start casting the spell, and if the target took a big hit he'd let the cast finish and the target would get the heal. But if the target did not need a big heal, the healer would interrupt the cast, aborting the heal so he wouldn't waste the mana.
When Burning Crusade came out, healing changes made down ranking less important, and large increases in mana regen gave healers a major boost. Tanks got some help, as well, making them more survivable and requiring less healing. Boss damage increased to compensate, but not enough. Healing still required good mana management, but over healing became less of an issue, and interupt healing became less necessary.
The Wrath of the Lich King expansion eliminated down ranking all together and took the BC changes a step further. Mana regen was insane and healing changed completely to accommodate. Well geared healers could constantly spam a healing rotation that ignored over healing. Healing became a brute force process with almost no worry that the flow of mana would ever dry up over the course of a fight. WotLK attempted to address that by making bosses more and more powerful. Bosses like the Lich King, Sindragosa, Halion (in Ruby Sanctum) could two shot a tank unless that tank was receiving a virtually endless, massive infusion of constant healing. AoE damage across an entire raid also rose and so AoE heal spams became common on almost every boss encounter. All that extra damage was added to soak up the massive healing that our mana regen could deliver. How well a healer managed his mana and selected his spells took a back seat to how fast those heals could be delivered.
In Cataclysm, the idea is to go back to the days of Vanilla Wow healing. Mana regen is getting a massive nerf. The main mana regen statistic, MP5, has been DELETED from the game in Cataclysm. Yep, it's gone completely. All mana regen will come from Spirit. Spirit will only be available on healing gear, although there will be arguments over loot distribution from elemental shaman and balance druids who must use mana for their DPS. Spell power is also being restructered. It will appear on "caster weapons", but all other spell power will be combined into Intellect. So, for healers, it seems that intellect and spirit are the two major stats in Cataclysm. Having a spell power caster weapon appears to be a must as well. Haste still has a secondary role. I'm not quite sure where crits come in; it's still there, but it does not appear on the list of stats that will be on gear. The hit stat is also still around, but again not much information about the changes to it.
Well, that took me a bit off topic. Back to healing in Cataclysm. Mana regen will be greatly reduced, while the cost in mana to cast spells is going get higher. Healers are going to have to pay close attention to how much mana they have and keep their over healing numbers down if they are going to last an entire encounter. The damage being dealt to the raid is also going to get higher, but the thinking is that the very high spike damage abilities are going away. Tanks should be able to survive those big hits better, allowing healers to plan their spell casting more carefully. That's the strategy, anyway.
For you melee types out there, your most favorite (or hated) stat, attack power, has also been deleted. All attack power will come from either agility or strength, depending on which is appropriate for that class. There are lots of other stats having to do with tanking and melee, but those just make me want to take a nap, so I'll . . . . snnnooooooorrrzzzz . . .
There is a mountain of other stat changes that will make the number crunchers go numb with excitement. More to come.
The next expansion pack for Warcraft, Cataclysm, is officially set to arrive on 1 Nov 2010. Did you know that this is less than three months away? That's about a dozen romps in Icecrown Citadel. That's practically JUST AROUND THE CORNER."
Yea, but did you know that neither of the prior two expansion packs were released on the initial release date? Did you know that the beta test server is not even up yet? But did you also know that once we hit November nobody will be able think about anything but Cataclysm?
Cataclysm could also be labeled "Back to the Future" for healers. There is a great couple of you-tube videos about the history of healing and what is expected to happen with Cataclysm.
In the days of Vanilla WoW healers had to pay a lot of attention to mana regen and "over healing" (which was essentially healing wasted on someone who did not need the heal). Wasted healing used up mana, and using too much mana meant you'd run out before the fight was over, and the raid would wipe. These were REAL concerns in Vanilla WoW. Two techniques to combat running out of mana were popular in those days - "interrupt" healing and "down ranking." Down ranking meant using, say, rank 5 of a spell instead of it's full power of rank 9. Down ranked spells cost less mana. A lot of effort was expended determining what rank of a spell was the right rank to keep the raid alive while not running out of mana. Interrupt healing was used with long cast, high powered healing spells. The healer would start casting the spell, and if the target took a big hit he'd let the cast finish and the target would get the heal. But if the target did not need a big heal, the healer would interrupt the cast, aborting the heal so he wouldn't waste the mana.
When Burning Crusade came out, healing changes made down ranking less important, and large increases in mana regen gave healers a major boost. Tanks got some help, as well, making them more survivable and requiring less healing. Boss damage increased to compensate, but not enough. Healing still required good mana management, but over healing became less of an issue, and interupt healing became less necessary.
The Wrath of the Lich King expansion eliminated down ranking all together and took the BC changes a step further. Mana regen was insane and healing changed completely to accommodate. Well geared healers could constantly spam a healing rotation that ignored over healing. Healing became a brute force process with almost no worry that the flow of mana would ever dry up over the course of a fight. WotLK attempted to address that by making bosses more and more powerful. Bosses like the Lich King, Sindragosa, Halion (in Ruby Sanctum) could two shot a tank unless that tank was receiving a virtually endless, massive infusion of constant healing. AoE damage across an entire raid also rose and so AoE heal spams became common on almost every boss encounter. All that extra damage was added to soak up the massive healing that our mana regen could deliver. How well a healer managed his mana and selected his spells took a back seat to how fast those heals could be delivered.
In Cataclysm, the idea is to go back to the days of Vanilla Wow healing. Mana regen is getting a massive nerf. The main mana regen statistic, MP5, has been DELETED from the game in Cataclysm. Yep, it's gone completely. All mana regen will come from Spirit. Spirit will only be available on healing gear, although there will be arguments over loot distribution from elemental shaman and balance druids who must use mana for their DPS. Spell power is also being restructered. It will appear on "caster weapons", but all other spell power will be combined into Intellect. So, for healers, it seems that intellect and spirit are the two major stats in Cataclysm. Having a spell power caster weapon appears to be a must as well. Haste still has a secondary role. I'm not quite sure where crits come in; it's still there, but it does not appear on the list of stats that will be on gear. The hit stat is also still around, but again not much information about the changes to it.
Well, that took me a bit off topic. Back to healing in Cataclysm. Mana regen will be greatly reduced, while the cost in mana to cast spells is going get higher. Healers are going to have to pay close attention to how much mana they have and keep their over healing numbers down if they are going to last an entire encounter. The damage being dealt to the raid is also going to get higher, but the thinking is that the very high spike damage abilities are going away. Tanks should be able to survive those big hits better, allowing healers to plan their spell casting more carefully. That's the strategy, anyway.
For you melee types out there, your most favorite (or hated) stat, attack power, has also been deleted. All attack power will come from either agility or strength, depending on which is appropriate for that class. There are lots of other stats having to do with tanking and melee, but those just make me want to take a nap, so I'll . . . . snnnooooooorrrzzzz . . .
There is a mountain of other stat changes that will make the number crunchers go numb with excitement. More to come.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Thursday (5 Aug) - Sleeping Dragons and Deadly Elevators
Thursday (5 Aug) - Sleeping Dragons and Deadly Elevators
This is a continuation of the ICC 10 raid started on Wednesday and posted as "Cashing in on Frost Emblems"
Valithria Dreamwalker is a sleeping dragon in Frostwing Hall, the third wing of Icecrown Citadel. Wild hasn't made it to this boss very many times, but there is one thing that Wild knows about it for sure - it's his favorite boss fight in ICC by far. Wild and healing partner Ch have the best assignment you could want for a boss fight. Our job is simple - stand in front of Dreamwalker and heal her as fast and hard as we can. When Dreamwalker opens a portal, we enter into a shifted world where it's just the two of us with Dreamwalker. We get to fly around in this very safe zone and capture bright, lazily floating orbs. When our portal period ends, we are released back to battle going on outside, but again our role is to heal Dreamwalker. We do this over and over, making sure we never, never, miss a portal opening.
The rest of the raid is dealing with five different kinds of mobs, exploding holes in the earth, and all kinds of other madness, doing all they can to keep those mobs from damaging Dreamwalker and extending the fight. Poor Pl is healing like a madwoman to keep everyone else alive - Wild and Ch? We heal Dreamwalker. Because when we heal the dragon up to 100% health, we win.
That is only a little simplified. Wild, when he is out of the portal, also takes two global cooldowns (gcd) to pop rejuvs on Pl and the main tank to help with their survival, and when Pl drops below 50% mana Wild will toss her his innervate to keep her battery charged. I'm sure Ch does a little raid healing on the side when she is out of the portal as well, but neither of us can take too much time at that because the monsters will keep coming at us as long as Dreamwalker is below 100%.
It took us four attempts to start to find a rhythm. We got Dreamwalker to 73% on that fourth attempt. We pushed that to 81%, to 83%, and, on our 8th attempt, to 87%.
Wild and Ch were monitoring our healing. With the buffs we get from the orbs in the portal, our healing numbers become insane. Pl, healing the entire raid non-stop and without the buff, was averaging around 3700 hps, very good for this fight. The healing numbers for Wild and Ch - Well, each of us started with around 9k hps at the beginning while we were still settling in. As we got better Wild took the lead for awhile, as I was getting 11-12k healing pretty consistently. Ch hovered under 9k, and then found her own rhythm, taking off around attempt #7 and pacing (and sometimes passing) Wild.
We never gave up and never even seemed to get tired, although I can't say that for the rest of the raid that was battling mobs that whole time.
On our tenth attempt we saved Valithria Dreamwalker. Wild's healing was 14,903 hps and Ch passed even Wild with 15,638 hps. It was truly awesome, and was Wild's first kill in ten man, along with more than half the raid. Our little G2 raid can now say we've down 7 of 12 bosses in ICC.
One of the drops from our lovely dragon was [Lich Wrappings]. This is a cloak. An i251 DPS cloak with +hit on it. Wild's DPS cloak for his moonkin form is i226 ... and it's a pvp cloak to boot (pve raids don't like to see raiders wearing pvp gear). Wild rolled on it for off spec, and shockingly no main spec DPS caster needed it. Wild won it. For Wild's moonkin gear, that is a very good upgrade, worth the nearly three hours we took to beat the encounter.
We were all prepared to end our evening at this point when the raid leader idly suggested that if we felt like it, maybe we could go see Sindragosa?
Sindragosa (yes, another dragon) is the 11th boss in ICC, the main boss between our raid and the Lich King himself. Of course we really weren't ready to tackle that dragon, but wouldn't it be fun just to make faces at him? Wild had never even seen him. Neither had 7 other raiders.
Did we all stay to check out Sindragosa? You bet we did.
Opposite the chamber where we rescued Valithria Dreamwalker is a large enclave where several large hallways meet. On the other side of that enclave is a huge circular elevator. Like many elevators in Warcraft, this one is diabolically clever and mischievous. Two raiders died taking that elevator down into the deep bowels of ICC where Sindragosa has a chamber with a ceiling so high she can fly completely out of our view. A whole story could be made about elevators and all the lives lost taking them. Blizzard has a wicked sense of humor sometimes.
The chamber in front of us was empty. On the opposite wall was a closed door. We entered the chamber. Once we reached the center, large spiders began dropping from the ceiling on long threads of web, and the walls literally burst forth with mobs. It was called a gauntlet, but we didn't really move through it since there was no where to go. For the next five minutes wave after wave of mobs poured into us, and we went into a killing frenzy that turned my entire screen into explosions of pyro-technics plastered liberally with blood, gore, and body parts. In other words, we had a blast!
Eventually the mobs had enough and the door on the opposite end opened. We rushed through it, only to be confronted by another chamber. We all stood at the top of a wide but short set of stairs. Two large groups of mobs guarded the left and right sides. Behind them were two mini-bosses, the dragons Rimefang and Spinestalker. We took each group, and then each dragon, in turn, killing them all. We had been warned ahead of time about a key piece of information. When the last mini-boss fell, which was Rimefang, Sindragosa (who was flying around over our heads making us nervous) would dive down to attack us. Having just killed two large groups of mobs and two dragons, we would not be in any position to take her on. So our strategy when that happened consisted of - run for the elevator shaft! No, not the one across and beyond two chambers, but the one up a winding corridor to one side of Sindragosa's chamber. Ten raiders screaming bloody murder (our own) charged up the corridor for the supposed safety of the elevator room at the end.
Sindragosa hit the bottom of that corridor with a thunderous jolt that shook the whole area. She filled the corridor with her girth, teeth and wings and claws and piercing eyes. She crammed herself into the top of the corridor outside the elevator room and snapped madly at cringing raiders. Then she turned and stomped her way back down and took flight once more. All ten of her potential morsels had managed to elude her.
We all returned to the chamber, listened to the strategy, and made a real attempt to kill her. We wiped, but it gave us a first look at how the fight worked. We'll be a lot more ready for her the next time we meet.
This is a continuation of the ICC 10 raid started on Wednesday and posted as "Cashing in on Frost Emblems"
Valithria Dreamwalker is a sleeping dragon in Frostwing Hall, the third wing of Icecrown Citadel. Wild hasn't made it to this boss very many times, but there is one thing that Wild knows about it for sure - it's his favorite boss fight in ICC by far. Wild and healing partner Ch have the best assignment you could want for a boss fight. Our job is simple - stand in front of Dreamwalker and heal her as fast and hard as we can. When Dreamwalker opens a portal, we enter into a shifted world where it's just the two of us with Dreamwalker. We get to fly around in this very safe zone and capture bright, lazily floating orbs. When our portal period ends, we are released back to battle going on outside, but again our role is to heal Dreamwalker. We do this over and over, making sure we never, never, miss a portal opening.
The rest of the raid is dealing with five different kinds of mobs, exploding holes in the earth, and all kinds of other madness, doing all they can to keep those mobs from damaging Dreamwalker and extending the fight. Poor Pl is healing like a madwoman to keep everyone else alive - Wild and Ch? We heal Dreamwalker. Because when we heal the dragon up to 100% health, we win.
That is only a little simplified. Wild, when he is out of the portal, also takes two global cooldowns (gcd) to pop rejuvs on Pl and the main tank to help with their survival, and when Pl drops below 50% mana Wild will toss her his innervate to keep her battery charged. I'm sure Ch does a little raid healing on the side when she is out of the portal as well, but neither of us can take too much time at that because the monsters will keep coming at us as long as Dreamwalker is below 100%.
It took us four attempts to start to find a rhythm. We got Dreamwalker to 73% on that fourth attempt. We pushed that to 81%, to 83%, and, on our 8th attempt, to 87%.
Wild and Ch were monitoring our healing. With the buffs we get from the orbs in the portal, our healing numbers become insane. Pl, healing the entire raid non-stop and without the buff, was averaging around 3700 hps, very good for this fight. The healing numbers for Wild and Ch - Well, each of us started with around 9k hps at the beginning while we were still settling in. As we got better Wild took the lead for awhile, as I was getting 11-12k healing pretty consistently. Ch hovered under 9k, and then found her own rhythm, taking off around attempt #7 and pacing (and sometimes passing) Wild.
We never gave up and never even seemed to get tired, although I can't say that for the rest of the raid that was battling mobs that whole time.
On our tenth attempt we saved Valithria Dreamwalker. Wild's healing was 14,903 hps and Ch passed even Wild with 15,638 hps. It was truly awesome, and was Wild's first kill in ten man, along with more than half the raid. Our little G2 raid can now say we've down 7 of 12 bosses in ICC.
One of the drops from our lovely dragon was [Lich Wrappings]. This is a cloak. An i251 DPS cloak with +hit on it. Wild's DPS cloak for his moonkin form is i226 ... and it's a pvp cloak to boot (pve raids don't like to see raiders wearing pvp gear). Wild rolled on it for off spec, and shockingly no main spec DPS caster needed it. Wild won it. For Wild's moonkin gear, that is a very good upgrade, worth the nearly three hours we took to beat the encounter.
We were all prepared to end our evening at this point when the raid leader idly suggested that if we felt like it, maybe we could go see Sindragosa?
Sindragosa (yes, another dragon) is the 11th boss in ICC, the main boss between our raid and the Lich King himself. Of course we really weren't ready to tackle that dragon, but wouldn't it be fun just to make faces at him? Wild had never even seen him. Neither had 7 other raiders.
Did we all stay to check out Sindragosa? You bet we did.
Opposite the chamber where we rescued Valithria Dreamwalker is a large enclave where several large hallways meet. On the other side of that enclave is a huge circular elevator. Like many elevators in Warcraft, this one is diabolically clever and mischievous. Two raiders died taking that elevator down into the deep bowels of ICC where Sindragosa has a chamber with a ceiling so high she can fly completely out of our view. A whole story could be made about elevators and all the lives lost taking them. Blizzard has a wicked sense of humor sometimes.
The chamber in front of us was empty. On the opposite wall was a closed door. We entered the chamber. Once we reached the center, large spiders began dropping from the ceiling on long threads of web, and the walls literally burst forth with mobs. It was called a gauntlet, but we didn't really move through it since there was no where to go. For the next five minutes wave after wave of mobs poured into us, and we went into a killing frenzy that turned my entire screen into explosions of pyro-technics plastered liberally with blood, gore, and body parts. In other words, we had a blast!
Eventually the mobs had enough and the door on the opposite end opened. We rushed through it, only to be confronted by another chamber. We all stood at the top of a wide but short set of stairs. Two large groups of mobs guarded the left and right sides. Behind them were two mini-bosses, the dragons Rimefang and Spinestalker. We took each group, and then each dragon, in turn, killing them all. We had been warned ahead of time about a key piece of information. When the last mini-boss fell, which was Rimefang, Sindragosa (who was flying around over our heads making us nervous) would dive down to attack us. Having just killed two large groups of mobs and two dragons, we would not be in any position to take her on. So our strategy when that happened consisted of - run for the elevator shaft! No, not the one across and beyond two chambers, but the one up a winding corridor to one side of Sindragosa's chamber. Ten raiders screaming bloody murder (our own) charged up the corridor for the supposed safety of the elevator room at the end.
Sindragosa hit the bottom of that corridor with a thunderous jolt that shook the whole area. She filled the corridor with her girth, teeth and wings and claws and piercing eyes. She crammed herself into the top of the corridor outside the elevator room and snapped madly at cringing raiders. Then she turned and stomped her way back down and took flight once more. All ten of her potential morsels had managed to elude her.
We all returned to the chamber, listened to the strategy, and made a real attempt to kill her. We wiped, but it gave us a first look at how the fight worked. We'll be a lot more ready for her the next time we meet.
Wednesday (4 Aug) - Cashing in on Frost Emblems
Wednesday (4 Aug) - Cashing in on Frost Emblems
We had something of a mishmash of raiders for the Wednesday night ICC10 run with three of our DPS and one healer being new to the instance. Philly, who has aspirations to get into ICC before Cataclysm kills it, was encouraged by the fact that at least two of those raiders had lower gears scores than Philly did. Philly is hoping to into ICC next week with the guild, and may even try a PUG to get the weekly done, which is Lord Marrowgar in ICC. That said, we had our two veteran tanks and two veteran healers available for the raid, so the core raiders were intact. I would also note in passing that half the raid was comprised of women players.
For a change the initial trash mob clearing went very smoothly at the beginning of the raid. Nobody died and everyone made it to the doorstep of Marrowgar without triggering any traps. We also started pretty close to on time. Our priest, Ch, had forgotten to pick up her flasks for the raid, so she hearthed back to Dalaran to pick them up and then flew back on her mount. It's a pretty short flight, and didn't take long, although the warlock in the raid teased that he was affronted by her not asking for a Summons directly from Dalaran to where the rest of the raid was standing. We don't always have a warlock in the raid, and we forget. Like I said, it was a short flight, and then a short walk through two rooms to get to us. Trash had been cleared along the right side of the first room, and then down the middle of the second. The tank, Bd, joked that Ch had a habit of triggering the traps and releasing nasty mobs, but we were all surprised when, partway through the first room, she DID spring a trap. In rushing to her aid we managed to trigger a second trap. And then a third. We fought through them without wiping. I guess we could call it progress that we only triggered three of the traps - there are four total.
The raid leader was initially going to go with three healers since we had a new priest healer, Pl, with us. We really only needed two healers for the first wing, though. An eager Pl was given a chance to show what she could do as the second healer on her first look at Lord Marrowgar. The other priest switched to shadow spec for DPS, and Wild got the job of main healing and helping Pl learn the ropes.
Our first attempt was a wipe, however. Pl, having never set foot in ICC, had trouble seeing the lines of white fire that Marrowgar spreads across the chamber. It was the oldest rule of Warcraft - Standing in fire is bad. Wild tried to help, healing two tanks, the rest of the raid, and keeping her alive, and Wild succeeded for awhile, but Pl just couldn't find a safe place to stand and died. Wild pulled over 6k healing and actually kept the tanks up for awhile - this fight can be two healed, but not even Wild can one heal it. We wiped.
Pl made some adjustments to her settings so that she could see the thing that killed her, and she got her first Lord Marrowgar kill on our second attempt. She did pretty well, considering:
Wild: 5835 hps, 60% healing
Pl: 3827/27%
Philly, also a priest, wondered if she would be able to do as well healing that fight. Her gear level was practically the same as Pl's.
Wild, who would really like to see some healing bracers drop, watched as a pair of bracers did drop, but they were mail armor, which Wild can't wear.
Lady Deathwhisper followed, getting the same fate as Marrowgar. We were even able to do the weekly ICC quest at the same time, a nice bonus. Two bosses down.
Wild: 4461 hps/53.7%
Pl: 3021/29.6%
We had some fun with the Gunship next. Pl, who doing a great job healing and learning the fights, died on this fight, but Wild got her ezzed quickly and we won the battle. Another pair of mail armor bracers dropped. Someone up there just doesn't like Wild.
Wild: 3314/66%
Pl: 2206/24.1%
We reached Saurfang, the last boss in the wing. We decided to stay with two healers. We were doing well, and the extra DPS would help us take out this boss quicker. This was probably the easiest Saurfang battle Wild has seen to date. the spawning beasts never even came close to Wild throughout the whole fight, and Wild made sure the DPSers protecting him stayed very well healed. One of those DPSers got Marked halfway through the fight, but Wild and Pl poured extra heals on him for the rest of the fight and kept him alive. Saurfang fell on our first try and with no deaths.
On to Festergut. The raid leader took time to explain this fight. It's a simple fight, but positioning must be right at all times. We needed to go to three healers for this fight. Wild was assigned to stay with the two ranged DPSers while the rest of the raid would be crowded into melee range of Festergut. This is the "spores" fight and on our first attempt we handled that part of the strategy like pros, even with several getting their first look at it. There is another trick of festergut's where he targets a random raider and something like vile blight - it's makes the target vomit violently for several seconds, during which you can't do anything. Wild seems to be a favorite target of this spell for some reason. Every week Wild seems to get it 3-4 times on every fight. So it wasn't surprising that Wild was the first raid start trajectory vomiting during the fight. It was early enough that Wild recovered soon enough to save the main tank, which Wild was responsible for healing. The second time Wild was hit with it, however, the tank had just taken a hit - and Wild was out of action. The tank died. We tried to recover, but ended up wiping.
When Wild explained what happened, Ch, who was the off tank healer, said that she didn't know that Wild was incapacitated and asked that I tell her when that happens. I have been without a microphone in raids for so long I don't even think about it anymore. So it didn't occur to me that folks in Wild's new guild wouldn't know that. The vomiting spell had never caused Wild to lose his tank before, either, so the issue had never come up until now.
Lady Hunter chimed in. "Wild doesn't have a mike. Matter of fact, in all the years I've known him I don't think I've ever heard him say a single word."
"Really?" Ch said in astonishment. I made a joke, something about "everyone has their secrets" and then of course someone made the obvious remark that they would buy me a mike, and we bantered back and forth a bit. Wild made a macro while that was going on and then sent it out to the raid.
"Wild is PUKING his guts out!!"
"Will this work?" Wild asked, meaning could they use a text message in raid chat to see when Wild was, uh, indisposed.
Everyone thought that was funny and would work. I thought the whole thing was over, but Bd then chimed in and said, "You know, I think that there was one, time, many many many raids ago, when I might have heard a rumor of a night when Wild might actually have uttered something."
[Note - I've been having a bit of trouble with the program I use to put these posts together. It's called ConnectedText and I use it for a number of projects as well as this one. It's started to lock up without warning, however, and the automatic backup has become unreliable. I lost about half of this post and I absolutely hate having to recreate something I'd already finished. So Connectedtext is no more. I'm trying out Jarte now, which is essentially Microsoft Wordpad with spell check. Ok, here I go now to write the rest of this post - for the second time]
There is a long story I related the first time I wrote this having to do with an old friend, murloc costumes, and the one and only time Wild actually spoke in a raid - but that will have to wait for another time now.
Back to the raid, we killed Festergut on our second try. And yes, Wild had to use his "Wild is PUKING his guts out!!" message - three times.
Wild: 5608/37.4%
Ch: 4605/28.8%
Pl: 4426/27.4%
We moved on to Rotface. Wild always has problems with this fight because there is a lot of movemement required and Wild has always been very "directionally challenged." For some reason being chased by a small but nasty green blob of ooze intent on absorbing my flesh while intentionally running toward a much larger green ooze intent on eating both the small ooze and yours truly rattles Wild's sense of "get the heck out of here!" The good news was that Bd had learned a druid trick that we didn't think was supposed to work but does. We learned that druids can use their Nature's Grasp spell to immobilize an ooze without losing aggro. Losing aggro on an ooze that is chasing you is a big no no, because that ooze then goes looking for someone else to eat who is not going to know that ooze is after them. It's not nice to send your ooze off to kill someone else. No, saying "Surprise!" first doesn't make it right, either.
The only teensy problem with Nature's Grasp is that the ooze has to actually bite Wild for NG to trigger a Root to hold the ooze in place. Well, that dang ooze tends to be nibbling on Wild's heels all the time anyway, and in practice rooting an ooze works extremely well. Once it's rooted, Wild doesn't have to run to the big ooze; he can get out of the way and proudly show off his captured ooze to the off tank who can then come collect it.
For a raid where half the group was seeing the fight for the first time, we did remarkably well. The battle went a long time, and we came pretty close to killing him. It only took one more try to bring him down. The last time this group killed six bosses, it took us two nights. We only needed one night this time. Our new priest healer, Pl, really shined on this fight:
Pl: 4747/37%
Wild: 3491/32.8%
Ch: 2284/22% (Ch was doing all the ozze dispelling in the fight, so was healing only part time)
Oh, and wouldn't you know it, a third pair of bracers dropped. This time they were cloth bracers, which Wild could wear. But they were DPS bracers with +hit on them, great for Wild's moonkin form, but off spec for healing. The warlock won them.
Wild did get gobs of frost badges from the run, what with the badges from the boss kills, the weekly frost quest, and the weekly ICC quest. Wild has 96 frost emblems. I'm just not sure what to use them for.
We had something of a mishmash of raiders for the Wednesday night ICC10 run with three of our DPS and one healer being new to the instance. Philly, who has aspirations to get into ICC before Cataclysm kills it, was encouraged by the fact that at least two of those raiders had lower gears scores than Philly did. Philly is hoping to into ICC next week with the guild, and may even try a PUG to get the weekly done, which is Lord Marrowgar in ICC. That said, we had our two veteran tanks and two veteran healers available for the raid, so the core raiders were intact. I would also note in passing that half the raid was comprised of women players.
For a change the initial trash mob clearing went very smoothly at the beginning of the raid. Nobody died and everyone made it to the doorstep of Marrowgar without triggering any traps. We also started pretty close to on time. Our priest, Ch, had forgotten to pick up her flasks for the raid, so she hearthed back to Dalaran to pick them up and then flew back on her mount. It's a pretty short flight, and didn't take long, although the warlock in the raid teased that he was affronted by her not asking for a Summons directly from Dalaran to where the rest of the raid was standing. We don't always have a warlock in the raid, and we forget. Like I said, it was a short flight, and then a short walk through two rooms to get to us. Trash had been cleared along the right side of the first room, and then down the middle of the second. The tank, Bd, joked that Ch had a habit of triggering the traps and releasing nasty mobs, but we were all surprised when, partway through the first room, she DID spring a trap. In rushing to her aid we managed to trigger a second trap. And then a third. We fought through them without wiping. I guess we could call it progress that we only triggered three of the traps - there are four total.
The raid leader was initially going to go with three healers since we had a new priest healer, Pl, with us. We really only needed two healers for the first wing, though. An eager Pl was given a chance to show what she could do as the second healer on her first look at Lord Marrowgar. The other priest switched to shadow spec for DPS, and Wild got the job of main healing and helping Pl learn the ropes.
Our first attempt was a wipe, however. Pl, having never set foot in ICC, had trouble seeing the lines of white fire that Marrowgar spreads across the chamber. It was the oldest rule of Warcraft - Standing in fire is bad. Wild tried to help, healing two tanks, the rest of the raid, and keeping her alive, and Wild succeeded for awhile, but Pl just couldn't find a safe place to stand and died. Wild pulled over 6k healing and actually kept the tanks up for awhile - this fight can be two healed, but not even Wild can one heal it. We wiped.
Pl made some adjustments to her settings so that she could see the thing that killed her, and she got her first Lord Marrowgar kill on our second attempt. She did pretty well, considering:
Wild: 5835 hps, 60% healing
Pl: 3827/27%
Philly, also a priest, wondered if she would be able to do as well healing that fight. Her gear level was practically the same as Pl's.
Wild, who would really like to see some healing bracers drop, watched as a pair of bracers did drop, but they were mail armor, which Wild can't wear.
Lady Deathwhisper followed, getting the same fate as Marrowgar. We were even able to do the weekly ICC quest at the same time, a nice bonus. Two bosses down.
Wild: 4461 hps/53.7%
Pl: 3021/29.6%
We had some fun with the Gunship next. Pl, who doing a great job healing and learning the fights, died on this fight, but Wild got her ezzed quickly and we won the battle. Another pair of mail armor bracers dropped. Someone up there just doesn't like Wild.
Wild: 3314/66%
Pl: 2206/24.1%
We reached Saurfang, the last boss in the wing. We decided to stay with two healers. We were doing well, and the extra DPS would help us take out this boss quicker. This was probably the easiest Saurfang battle Wild has seen to date. the spawning beasts never even came close to Wild throughout the whole fight, and Wild made sure the DPSers protecting him stayed very well healed. One of those DPSers got Marked halfway through the fight, but Wild and Pl poured extra heals on him for the rest of the fight and kept him alive. Saurfang fell on our first try and with no deaths.
On to Festergut. The raid leader took time to explain this fight. It's a simple fight, but positioning must be right at all times. We needed to go to three healers for this fight. Wild was assigned to stay with the two ranged DPSers while the rest of the raid would be crowded into melee range of Festergut. This is the "spores" fight and on our first attempt we handled that part of the strategy like pros, even with several getting their first look at it. There is another trick of festergut's where he targets a random raider and something like vile blight - it's makes the target vomit violently for several seconds, during which you can't do anything. Wild seems to be a favorite target of this spell for some reason. Every week Wild seems to get it 3-4 times on every fight. So it wasn't surprising that Wild was the first raid start trajectory vomiting during the fight. It was early enough that Wild recovered soon enough to save the main tank, which Wild was responsible for healing. The second time Wild was hit with it, however, the tank had just taken a hit - and Wild was out of action. The tank died. We tried to recover, but ended up wiping.
When Wild explained what happened, Ch, who was the off tank healer, said that she didn't know that Wild was incapacitated and asked that I tell her when that happens. I have been without a microphone in raids for so long I don't even think about it anymore. So it didn't occur to me that folks in Wild's new guild wouldn't know that. The vomiting spell had never caused Wild to lose his tank before, either, so the issue had never come up until now.
Lady Hunter chimed in. "Wild doesn't have a mike. Matter of fact, in all the years I've known him I don't think I've ever heard him say a single word."
"Really?" Ch said in astonishment. I made a joke, something about "everyone has their secrets" and then of course someone made the obvious remark that they would buy me a mike, and we bantered back and forth a bit. Wild made a macro while that was going on and then sent it out to the raid.
"Wild is PUKING his guts out!!"
"Will this work?" Wild asked, meaning could they use a text message in raid chat to see when Wild was, uh, indisposed.
Everyone thought that was funny and would work. I thought the whole thing was over, but Bd then chimed in and said, "You know, I think that there was one, time, many many many raids ago, when I might have heard a rumor of a night when Wild might actually have uttered something."
[Note - I've been having a bit of trouble with the program I use to put these posts together. It's called ConnectedText and I use it for a number of projects as well as this one. It's started to lock up without warning, however, and the automatic backup has become unreliable. I lost about half of this post and I absolutely hate having to recreate something I'd already finished. So Connectedtext is no more. I'm trying out Jarte now, which is essentially Microsoft Wordpad with spell check. Ok, here I go now to write the rest of this post - for the second time]
There is a long story I related the first time I wrote this having to do with an old friend, murloc costumes, and the one and only time Wild actually spoke in a raid - but that will have to wait for another time now.
Back to the raid, we killed Festergut on our second try. And yes, Wild had to use his "Wild is PUKING his guts out!!" message - three times.
Wild: 5608/37.4%
Ch: 4605/28.8%
Pl: 4426/27.4%
We moved on to Rotface. Wild always has problems with this fight because there is a lot of movemement required and Wild has always been very "directionally challenged." For some reason being chased by a small but nasty green blob of ooze intent on absorbing my flesh while intentionally running toward a much larger green ooze intent on eating both the small ooze and yours truly rattles Wild's sense of "get the heck out of here!" The good news was that Bd had learned a druid trick that we didn't think was supposed to work but does. We learned that druids can use their Nature's Grasp spell to immobilize an ooze without losing aggro. Losing aggro on an ooze that is chasing you is a big no no, because that ooze then goes looking for someone else to eat who is not going to know that ooze is after them. It's not nice to send your ooze off to kill someone else. No, saying "Surprise!" first doesn't make it right, either.
The only teensy problem with Nature's Grasp is that the ooze has to actually bite Wild for NG to trigger a Root to hold the ooze in place. Well, that dang ooze tends to be nibbling on Wild's heels all the time anyway, and in practice rooting an ooze works extremely well. Once it's rooted, Wild doesn't have to run to the big ooze; he can get out of the way and proudly show off his captured ooze to the off tank who can then come collect it.
For a raid where half the group was seeing the fight for the first time, we did remarkably well. The battle went a long time, and we came pretty close to killing him. It only took one more try to bring him down. The last time this group killed six bosses, it took us two nights. We only needed one night this time. Our new priest healer, Pl, really shined on this fight:
Pl: 4747/37%
Wild: 3491/32.8%
Ch: 2284/22% (Ch was doing all the ozze dispelling in the fight, so was healing only part time)
Oh, and wouldn't you know it, a third pair of bracers dropped. This time they were cloth bracers, which Wild could wear. But they were DPS bracers with +hit on them, great for Wild's moonkin form, but off spec for healing. The warlock won them.
Wild did get gobs of frost badges from the run, what with the badges from the boss kills, the weekly frost quest, and the weekly ICC quest. Wild has 96 frost emblems. I'm just not sure what to use them for.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Tuesday (3 Aug) - Chunks Return
Tuesday (3 Aug) - Chunks Return
Chunk #3 - Alwayslost picked a rough week to start her Alliance Auction House business. Even Happy has had to be cautious as pricing has alternately jumped through the roof and then plummeted seemingly randomly. The reason for this is likely because players are not doing as many 5 man Heroics anymore. Players still want to go do their one Heroic per day to get a frost emblem, but with Cataclysm on the horizon doing whole strings of random Heroics has really slowed down. And a lot of the stuff sold on the AH come from those Heroic runs.
Happy has four items that generally sell well completely off both his buy and sell lists because of high risk and crazy postings. Another thing that Lost noticed is that the posting method that Happy calls "walking the dog" seems to be much more deeply entrenched on the Alliance side. "Walking the dog" refers to players posting prices for items only a few copper or a few silver below the lowest bidder. This creates a long list of items for sale, but with prices set very close together. That means that there are no bargain prices to buy out and resale at a higher price, because the difference between the highest and lowest prices are so minimal. Without bargains to get started with, Lost simply can't buy or post in those situations. Lost is still learning what the "normal" prices are, so that she recognizes bargains when they do pop up, but with pricing what it's been the past week it's impossible to know what's normal right now on the Alliance AH.
Still, Lost has been making a little gold, doing what she can. Lost has been listing her daily sales and total money figures each day:
7/25 - Sales 45g 48s, total cash 67g 70s
7/26 - Sales 46g 1s, cash 75g
7/27 - Sales 16g 79s, cash 88g 75s
7/28 - Sales 4g 93s, cash 90g 54s
7/29 - Sales 42g 62s, cash 91g 80s
7/30 - Sales 31g, 0s, cash 78g 71s
7/31 - Sales 32g 4s, cash 84g 42s
8/02 - Sales 75g 3s, cash 106g 17s - her first "big" weekend
8/03 - Sales 108g 77s, cash 194g 43s
8/04 - Sales 18g 99s, cash 113g 15s (restocking)
Happy, always looking for new ways to make gold, has started to notice price differences between the Alliance and Horde Auction Houses that he might be able to take advantage of. For example, large brilliant shards are currently selling pretty well at prices well above their average. All good for Happy, who has a decent stock of them. But get this - a good selling price on the horde side is around 9g at the moment. That same good price on the alliance side is 5g. Happy is considering staking Lost some more gold to buy up the shards at 5g so he can sell them for 9g. Just a thought. The only down side to that is passing gold through the neutral AH (between alliance and horde) costs a whopping 15%. Happy would have to buy the 5g shard for close to 6g in order for Lost's costs to be covered. And the price differential is going to be different from day-to-day.
Chunk #5 - With all that has been going on it's been difficult for little EZ to get any attention. But EZ had made a promise to push herself into the level 40s bracket for pvp as well as becoming a contributing partner with Lao and (eventually) Ando in dungeon runs. EZ has stayed pretty much under the radar, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been hard at work. Most recently EZ has been spending her time in Dustwallow Marsh, home of crocodiles, spiders, and dragons. The Marsh is thick with hostile creatures. The low slung, weeping willow like trees and the rolling terrain full of humps and bulges around winding creeks and streams makes it difficult to see very far, causing numerous accidental encounters. EZ has been working her way up from level 35, and the Marsh's level 38-41 creatures have made that trek a challenging one. But EZ persevered, completing quests from both Brackenwall Village and Mudsprocket, as well as pushing deep into darkest areas of the Marsh to find old lady Tabetha (suspected of being a witch), Witch Hill, and Swamplight Manor. There were some goosebumps along the way, but EZ finally reached her goal - level 40.
At level 40 EZ was able to get swift riding training, and bought herself a high speed swift brown wolf mount. With help from Happy's coffers, EZ also bought the training for Dual Wielding. It was hard to give up the protection of her shield, but JB assured EZ (having grown up dual wielding herself) that once she held those two blades in her hands she would never look back. One of the better blades that EZ could acquire at reasonable prices was [Wirt's Third Leg]. And to dual wield EZ needed two of them. Yes, every analogy in the book, both innocuous and racy, has been used to describe this one-handed weapon. Frankly, the weapon is the ugliest I've ever seen. It's a stick. An unadorned stick. But the two "sticks" pack a significant wallop, and she's unlikely to find better for several levels.
The third thing that EZ got at level 40 was the ability to wear the higher armor mail gear, instead of leather. EZ has been collecting mail armor in anticipation of hitting level 40, and was able to swap out a lot of her gear. Ironically, she has less armor now than when she was wearing leather - but that's because she gave up her shield to dual wield. Her armor would have been even worse without that mail armor upgrade. EZ's one mistake along the way was that she did not assign her talents to allow her to get the biggest DPS spell in her young arsenal - Stormstrike. She came up one talent point short. Rather than spend the gold to respec, EZ decided she would get in some dual wielding practice to reach level 41 and then pick up Stormstrike. At least that's the plan. EZ has run out of rested experience and so will take a couple of days off to get ready for her run to level 41.
Chunk #6 - Philly is trying to find some time in game to finish the five man Icecrown dungeons. She completed the first one, The Forge of Souls, a long time ago. She has yet to do the other two, Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection. Why she didn't complete them I'm not sure, but she can never get into the raid level Icecrown Citadel until she does. What reminded Philly of this? For the first time, Lord Marrowgar, the first boss in Icecrown Citadel, was given the honor of being the weekly frost quest. No boss in ICC has ever been assigned as the weekly quest before, and Philly wants in on that, even if it's with a PUG raid. She can't get in until she completes those other two five mans. Philly should be able to hold her own in ICC, at least against Marrowgar, and probably even against Deathwhisper and the Gunship. The new staff she got from ToC last week put her gear score over 5k so even the PUGs should accept her, at least for the first wing.
By the way, here's a pic of Philly and her Perdition:
If things work out for Philly with ICC this week then Philly and Wild has hatched a plan to get her even more involved. Since Wild raids in ICC with G2 on Wed/Thurs, Tuesdays are an open night for him. Well, the guild G1 ICC raid starts their raid week on Tuesday. Philly intends to ask if she can run with G1 just on the first night and when there is a spot open, so that she can start working to get ICC gear from the first wing, which we have pretty close to being on farm. Things could start to get real exciting for Philly.
Chunk #3 - Alwayslost picked a rough week to start her Alliance Auction House business. Even Happy has had to be cautious as pricing has alternately jumped through the roof and then plummeted seemingly randomly. The reason for this is likely because players are not doing as many 5 man Heroics anymore. Players still want to go do their one Heroic per day to get a frost emblem, but with Cataclysm on the horizon doing whole strings of random Heroics has really slowed down. And a lot of the stuff sold on the AH come from those Heroic runs.
Happy has four items that generally sell well completely off both his buy and sell lists because of high risk and crazy postings. Another thing that Lost noticed is that the posting method that Happy calls "walking the dog" seems to be much more deeply entrenched on the Alliance side. "Walking the dog" refers to players posting prices for items only a few copper or a few silver below the lowest bidder. This creates a long list of items for sale, but with prices set very close together. That means that there are no bargain prices to buy out and resale at a higher price, because the difference between the highest and lowest prices are so minimal. Without bargains to get started with, Lost simply can't buy or post in those situations. Lost is still learning what the "normal" prices are, so that she recognizes bargains when they do pop up, but with pricing what it's been the past week it's impossible to know what's normal right now on the Alliance AH.
Still, Lost has been making a little gold, doing what she can. Lost has been listing her daily sales and total money figures each day:
7/25 - Sales 45g 48s, total cash 67g 70s
7/26 - Sales 46g 1s, cash 75g
7/27 - Sales 16g 79s, cash 88g 75s
7/28 - Sales 4g 93s, cash 90g 54s
7/29 - Sales 42g 62s, cash 91g 80s
7/30 - Sales 31g, 0s, cash 78g 71s
7/31 - Sales 32g 4s, cash 84g 42s
8/02 - Sales 75g 3s, cash 106g 17s - her first "big" weekend
8/03 - Sales 108g 77s, cash 194g 43s
8/04 - Sales 18g 99s, cash 113g 15s (restocking)
Happy, always looking for new ways to make gold, has started to notice price differences between the Alliance and Horde Auction Houses that he might be able to take advantage of. For example, large brilliant shards are currently selling pretty well at prices well above their average. All good for Happy, who has a decent stock of them. But get this - a good selling price on the horde side is around 9g at the moment. That same good price on the alliance side is 5g. Happy is considering staking Lost some more gold to buy up the shards at 5g so he can sell them for 9g. Just a thought. The only down side to that is passing gold through the neutral AH (between alliance and horde) costs a whopping 15%. Happy would have to buy the 5g shard for close to 6g in order for Lost's costs to be covered. And the price differential is going to be different from day-to-day.
Chunk #5 - With all that has been going on it's been difficult for little EZ to get any attention. But EZ had made a promise to push herself into the level 40s bracket for pvp as well as becoming a contributing partner with Lao and (eventually) Ando in dungeon runs. EZ has stayed pretty much under the radar, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been hard at work. Most recently EZ has been spending her time in Dustwallow Marsh, home of crocodiles, spiders, and dragons. The Marsh is thick with hostile creatures. The low slung, weeping willow like trees and the rolling terrain full of humps and bulges around winding creeks and streams makes it difficult to see very far, causing numerous accidental encounters. EZ has been working her way up from level 35, and the Marsh's level 38-41 creatures have made that trek a challenging one. But EZ persevered, completing quests from both Brackenwall Village and Mudsprocket, as well as pushing deep into darkest areas of the Marsh to find old lady Tabetha (suspected of being a witch), Witch Hill, and Swamplight Manor. There were some goosebumps along the way, but EZ finally reached her goal - level 40.
At level 40 EZ was able to get swift riding training, and bought herself a high speed swift brown wolf mount. With help from Happy's coffers, EZ also bought the training for Dual Wielding. It was hard to give up the protection of her shield, but JB assured EZ (having grown up dual wielding herself) that once she held those two blades in her hands she would never look back. One of the better blades that EZ could acquire at reasonable prices was [Wirt's Third Leg]. And to dual wield EZ needed two of them. Yes, every analogy in the book, both innocuous and racy, has been used to describe this one-handed weapon. Frankly, the weapon is the ugliest I've ever seen. It's a stick. An unadorned stick. But the two "sticks" pack a significant wallop, and she's unlikely to find better for several levels.
EZ and her pair of "third legs"
The third thing that EZ got at level 40 was the ability to wear the higher armor mail gear, instead of leather. EZ has been collecting mail armor in anticipation of hitting level 40, and was able to swap out a lot of her gear. Ironically, she has less armor now than when she was wearing leather - but that's because she gave up her shield to dual wield. Her armor would have been even worse without that mail armor upgrade. EZ's one mistake along the way was that she did not assign her talents to allow her to get the biggest DPS spell in her young arsenal - Stormstrike. She came up one talent point short. Rather than spend the gold to respec, EZ decided she would get in some dual wielding practice to reach level 41 and then pick up Stormstrike. At least that's the plan. EZ has run out of rested experience and so will take a couple of days off to get ready for her run to level 41.
Chunk #6 - Philly is trying to find some time in game to finish the five man Icecrown dungeons. She completed the first one, The Forge of Souls, a long time ago. She has yet to do the other two, Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection. Why she didn't complete them I'm not sure, but she can never get into the raid level Icecrown Citadel until she does. What reminded Philly of this? For the first time, Lord Marrowgar, the first boss in Icecrown Citadel, was given the honor of being the weekly frost quest. No boss in ICC has ever been assigned as the weekly quest before, and Philly wants in on that, even if it's with a PUG raid. She can't get in until she completes those other two five mans. Philly should be able to hold her own in ICC, at least against Marrowgar, and probably even against Deathwhisper and the Gunship. The new staff she got from ToC last week put her gear score over 5k so even the PUGs should accept her, at least for the first wing.
By the way, here's a pic of Philly and her Perdition:
If things work out for Philly with ICC this week then Philly and Wild has hatched a plan to get her even more involved. Since Wild raids in ICC with G2 on Wed/Thurs, Tuesdays are an open night for him. Well, the guild G1 ICC raid starts their raid week on Tuesday. Philly intends to ask if she can run with G1 just on the first night and when there is a spot open, so that she can start working to get ICC gear from the first wing, which we have pretty close to being on farm. Things could start to get real exciting for Philly.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday (3 Aug) - Guilds, A Look Back - And Forward
Monday (3 Aug) - Guilds, A Look Back - And Forward
Major FS guild news: On Sunday the longest serving raid leader and guild officer in the history of the FS guild gave his farewells to the guild. Rh was Wild's raid leader from the moment Wild first stepped into Molten Core back in the Vanilla days of Wild, and has been one of two raid leaders at every single FS raid Wild has ever been on. No matter what the situation with the guild, losing Rh is a significant loss for FS. The good news is that Rh said that he was not leaving the game, so I can hope to see him around. Rh's departure marks the fourth senior raider (counting Wild) to leave the FS guild recently.
Monday Update - Well, now I know what Rh was up to. I thought he might just do a little raiding without the pressure of leading one. I even thought (wished) he might end up in MM. However, he had other plans. Rh is now the guild leader of his own guild. There are 26 level 80s in his new guild, and I can count at least a half dozen that moved over from FS. Many of the rest of those 80s are likely alts. Now I know what the FS guild leader meant when he responded to Rh's departure, quoting "To ye and all that departed with ya I wish ya the best of luck!" Dare I say that this is the third new guild that has been born out of FS. I will have to dig up the last time I laid out that history so that I can add this chapter to it.
Unfortunately for all of you, I did do that digging, and what follows is a short history of Wild's travels through guild drama over the years:
2 Jun 2009 post: Given the recent guild drama I spent some time reminiscing with earlier posts having to do with raiding. Wild first got into raiding when his guild and another guild collaborated to form a cooperative joint raid venture that we called the "coop."
This was back in Apr 2006 and Wild was still making his slow, tortured way to level 60. By the time Wild reached level 60 the single "coop" had been renamed G1 and a second raiding group, dubbed G2, had formed. With two groups heading into Molten Core Wild was quickly swept into his first adventures in large raid gaming. "Large" being forty players, something now long gone from WoW. After some bumping between the two groups as an alternate, Wild earned his stripes as a regular with G2, gaining 7 of 8 Tier 1 pieces, the best of the best raiding gear at the time. Tier 1, now that takes one back. Wild is wearing Tier 7 gear now (well, one piece, anyway). [2010 update - Wild is wearing Tier 10 now]
In Jun 2006 the G1 coop, struggling to keep up it's enthusiasm, fractured. The raid leader for G1 broke ranks and formed his own guild, taking members of G1 with him. The new raiding guild then formed a partnership with the other supporting guild of G1/G2 - at the time I likened that arrangement to the supporting guild being the minor league franchise feeding their more talented players to the major league raiding guild. G1 died. A proud G2 elected to keep going, set up their own website, and Wild's guild, FS, offered to continue to help out. At the same time, Wild's guild was thinking that we may be ready to form our own raid group.
It didn't take long. On 4 Jun 2006 FS held their first guild only Molten Core run. Wild had had to make a decision that day - Wild was a regular in G2, and G2 was entering Blackwing Lair - end game for WoW at the time. If Wild went with his guild, vice G2, it would be a lot longer before he saw BWL. Wild went with his guild, and became not just a "regular" but the main tank healer for the guild on our first ever run. With more than half the raid making their first trip into MC, we hoped to at least try one boss. Over the course of two nights we downed FIVE. Now that was a rush. FS guild raiding was born.
The raiding guild formed out of G1 did not survive, nor did the guild that supported them. G2 still raids today and is one of the most successful non-guild raiding groups I've ever seen. Wild was glad to have been a part of that. Things might have been very different for Wild had I gone with G2. G2 is in Ulduar and has downed seven bosses - FS has downed two. But FS is Wild's home, and he's still glad he stayed.
To continue the Truncated History of Guilds Wild Has Known (and be glad this is truncated), Wild needs to introduce the Feral's Guild.
Back in 2007 Wild ran with two couples quite a bit. One couple had been good friends with Wild way back in his 40s, then left the game for awhile and then came back. The other couple were long time guildies that loved to include Wild in whatever they were doing. The husband half was a feral druid and we made a pretty good tank/healing pair along with Mrs Feral for the DPS. The guild leader and Mrs Feral were good friends, but they were both rather, opinionated, and the two often quarrelled (uh, maybe I should say, had differences of opinion).
On 23 Jul 2007, the Feral's, unhappy with the guild's raid progression, had one to many disagreements with guild leadership and left to form their own guild. Very few guildies left to join them, but two that did happened to be the other couple that Wild ran with. There was never any pressure by the Feral's for Wild to follow them, but they clearly would have welcomed Wild into their guild. Their approach to raiding was to work hard and play hard. There was a four night per week raid minimum that Wild knew he couldn't meet, and several other rules as well. I'd learn that they weren't that tightly adhered to, but Wild was happy with his current guild, anyway.
The Feral's were popular players, though, who had a lot of friends, and their guild grew very fast. In fact, their progress quickly outpaced FS. Wild kept in touch, and even joined them on some "retro" runs to older dungeons for fun.
In Sep 2007 Wild reached something of low point where he had missed out on most of the new 5 man dungeons in Burning Crusade while levelling to 70, was floundering in getting his Kara attunement, and saw the guild already starting Zul'Aman. It looked like Wild was falling so far behind there was no hope of catching up. The Feral's offered another option, which Wild considered, but ultimately Wild came out of his doldrums and fashioned a better plan.
Between Sep 2007 and Mar 2008 The Feral's guild exploded in popularity. They had a great rep for both fun and hardcore raiding with exceptional success. During that time, however, there was considerable in-fighting and twice chunks of the Feral's Guild broke from the guild to form their own. On the surface it didn't seem to slow the guild down at all. However, after the second exodus of raiders the Feral's established a coop with another guild for raiding that seemed to leave out some of the raiders who had stayed with the guild. The pot continued to boil.
In May 2008 the guild fractured in a more fatal way. With hints of guild leadership skullduggery and senior raiders walking away with guild bank loot, there was a huge dust up. In the end the core group that backed the Feral's gave up the guild and then packed their bags, leaving not only the guild but the server as well. Wild's friends were gone permanently. The original guild stayed around as a social guild for some time after that, but it is gone now, too.
FS, meanwhile, is still here and raiding.
The above 2 Jun 2009 posts were put together on the same day that "surveydrood" posted the "how serious are you about raiding" survey. Which is how he got his name in this blog, of course. This survey, I believe, marked the beginning of the end for FS.
Two weeks later our new guild leader made his first announcement of new raiding plans. FS raiding did begin to improve in a big way, but that very success created a fracture between more social guildies and the harder core raiders that would widen over the next several months.
On 7 Nov 2009 the social side of the guild lost it's leading and most active member, guild officer Lady Hunter, who finally had to admit that the scales had shifted too far. She left the guild for MM.
On 19 Jul 2010 the former guild leader, a founding member of the guild, and the original guild cheer leader on the social side not only left the guild, but left the game. While she had not been an active player for months, her mere presence had at least been an icon for the social side of the guild.
On 22 Jul 2010 Wild, too, moved on, joining MM.
Scroll forward to today and the news that a new guild has split off from FS. This comes after a long, slow exodus of casual raiders who didn't fit the new mold of the guild, and the departure of several harder core raiders unhappy that the guild wasn't progressing fast enough to suit them.
FS is not gone. It has evolved away from it's original balance between social and raiding and become a semi-hardcore raiding guild. The driving force behind the guild I believe is still surveydrood. This is really his guild now. I've always liked him and still do. He should be proud of what he's created and the many accomplishments of the guild since he stepped up the plate. I sincerely wish them well. Casual raiders like Wild, however, need not apply.
Major FS guild news: On Sunday the longest serving raid leader and guild officer in the history of the FS guild gave his farewells to the guild. Rh was Wild's raid leader from the moment Wild first stepped into Molten Core back in the Vanilla days of Wild, and has been one of two raid leaders at every single FS raid Wild has ever been on. No matter what the situation with the guild, losing Rh is a significant loss for FS. The good news is that Rh said that he was not leaving the game, so I can hope to see him around. Rh's departure marks the fourth senior raider (counting Wild) to leave the FS guild recently.
Monday Update - Well, now I know what Rh was up to. I thought he might just do a little raiding without the pressure of leading one. I even thought (wished) he might end up in MM. However, he had other plans. Rh is now the guild leader of his own guild. There are 26 level 80s in his new guild, and I can count at least a half dozen that moved over from FS. Many of the rest of those 80s are likely alts. Now I know what the FS guild leader meant when he responded to Rh's departure, quoting "To ye and all that departed with ya I wish ya the best of luck!" Dare I say that this is the third new guild that has been born out of FS. I will have to dig up the last time I laid out that history so that I can add this chapter to it.
Unfortunately for all of you, I did do that digging, and what follows is a short history of Wild's travels through guild drama over the years:
2 Jun 2009 post: Given the recent guild drama I spent some time reminiscing with earlier posts having to do with raiding. Wild first got into raiding when his guild and another guild collaborated to form a cooperative joint raid venture that we called the "coop."
This was back in Apr 2006 and Wild was still making his slow, tortured way to level 60. By the time Wild reached level 60 the single "coop" had been renamed G1 and a second raiding group, dubbed G2, had formed. With two groups heading into Molten Core Wild was quickly swept into his first adventures in large raid gaming. "Large" being forty players, something now long gone from WoW. After some bumping between the two groups as an alternate, Wild earned his stripes as a regular with G2, gaining 7 of 8 Tier 1 pieces, the best of the best raiding gear at the time. Tier 1, now that takes one back. Wild is wearing Tier 7 gear now (well, one piece, anyway). [2010 update - Wild is wearing Tier 10 now]
In Jun 2006 the G1 coop, struggling to keep up it's enthusiasm, fractured. The raid leader for G1 broke ranks and formed his own guild, taking members of G1 with him. The new raiding guild then formed a partnership with the other supporting guild of G1/G2 - at the time I likened that arrangement to the supporting guild being the minor league franchise feeding their more talented players to the major league raiding guild. G1 died. A proud G2 elected to keep going, set up their own website, and Wild's guild, FS, offered to continue to help out. At the same time, Wild's guild was thinking that we may be ready to form our own raid group.
It didn't take long. On 4 Jun 2006 FS held their first guild only Molten Core run. Wild had had to make a decision that day - Wild was a regular in G2, and G2 was entering Blackwing Lair - end game for WoW at the time. If Wild went with his guild, vice G2, it would be a lot longer before he saw BWL. Wild went with his guild, and became not just a "regular" but the main tank healer for the guild on our first ever run. With more than half the raid making their first trip into MC, we hoped to at least try one boss. Over the course of two nights we downed FIVE. Now that was a rush. FS guild raiding was born.
The raiding guild formed out of G1 did not survive, nor did the guild that supported them. G2 still raids today and is one of the most successful non-guild raiding groups I've ever seen. Wild was glad to have been a part of that. Things might have been very different for Wild had I gone with G2. G2 is in Ulduar and has downed seven bosses - FS has downed two. But FS is Wild's home, and he's still glad he stayed.
To continue the Truncated History of Guilds Wild Has Known (and be glad this is truncated), Wild needs to introduce the Feral's Guild.
Back in 2007 Wild ran with two couples quite a bit. One couple had been good friends with Wild way back in his 40s, then left the game for awhile and then came back. The other couple were long time guildies that loved to include Wild in whatever they were doing. The husband half was a feral druid and we made a pretty good tank/healing pair along with Mrs Feral for the DPS. The guild leader and Mrs Feral were good friends, but they were both rather, opinionated, and the two often quarrelled (uh, maybe I should say, had differences of opinion).
On 23 Jul 2007, the Feral's, unhappy with the guild's raid progression, had one to many disagreements with guild leadership and left to form their own guild. Very few guildies left to join them, but two that did happened to be the other couple that Wild ran with. There was never any pressure by the Feral's for Wild to follow them, but they clearly would have welcomed Wild into their guild. Their approach to raiding was to work hard and play hard. There was a four night per week raid minimum that Wild knew he couldn't meet, and several other rules as well. I'd learn that they weren't that tightly adhered to, but Wild was happy with his current guild, anyway.
The Feral's were popular players, though, who had a lot of friends, and their guild grew very fast. In fact, their progress quickly outpaced FS. Wild kept in touch, and even joined them on some "retro" runs to older dungeons for fun.
In Sep 2007 Wild reached something of low point where he had missed out on most of the new 5 man dungeons in Burning Crusade while levelling to 70, was floundering in getting his Kara attunement, and saw the guild already starting Zul'Aman. It looked like Wild was falling so far behind there was no hope of catching up. The Feral's offered another option, which Wild considered, but ultimately Wild came out of his doldrums and fashioned a better plan.
Between Sep 2007 and Mar 2008 The Feral's guild exploded in popularity. They had a great rep for both fun and hardcore raiding with exceptional success. During that time, however, there was considerable in-fighting and twice chunks of the Feral's Guild broke from the guild to form their own. On the surface it didn't seem to slow the guild down at all. However, after the second exodus of raiders the Feral's established a coop with another guild for raiding that seemed to leave out some of the raiders who had stayed with the guild. The pot continued to boil.
In May 2008 the guild fractured in a more fatal way. With hints of guild leadership skullduggery and senior raiders walking away with guild bank loot, there was a huge dust up. In the end the core group that backed the Feral's gave up the guild and then packed their bags, leaving not only the guild but the server as well. Wild's friends were gone permanently. The original guild stayed around as a social guild for some time after that, but it is gone now, too.
FS, meanwhile, is still here and raiding.
The above 2 Jun 2009 posts were put together on the same day that "surveydrood" posted the "how serious are you about raiding" survey. Which is how he got his name in this blog, of course. This survey, I believe, marked the beginning of the end for FS.
Two weeks later our new guild leader made his first announcement of new raiding plans. FS raiding did begin to improve in a big way, but that very success created a fracture between more social guildies and the harder core raiders that would widen over the next several months.
On 7 Nov 2009 the social side of the guild lost it's leading and most active member, guild officer Lady Hunter, who finally had to admit that the scales had shifted too far. She left the guild for MM.
On 19 Jul 2010 the former guild leader, a founding member of the guild, and the original guild cheer leader on the social side not only left the guild, but left the game. While she had not been an active player for months, her mere presence had at least been an icon for the social side of the guild.
On 22 Jul 2010 Wild, too, moved on, joining MM.
Scroll forward to today and the news that a new guild has split off from FS. This comes after a long, slow exodus of casual raiders who didn't fit the new mold of the guild, and the departure of several harder core raiders unhappy that the guild wasn't progressing fast enough to suit them.
FS is not gone. It has evolved away from it's original balance between social and raiding and become a semi-hardcore raiding guild. The driving force behind the guild I believe is still surveydrood. This is really his guild now. I've always liked him and still do. He should be proud of what he's created and the many accomplishments of the guild since he stepped up the plate. I sincerely wish them well. Casual raiders like Wild, however, need not apply.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Weekend (2 Aug) - Chunks
Weekend (2 Aug) - Chunks
Chunk #1 - There was a second night of ICC10 on Thursday Night. Wild was off his game as I was pretty tuckered out from the stress of caring for our sick kitty. Our evening started with Festergut, the first boss in the second wing of ICC. We wiped early on our first attempt; came back and fought all the way to the enrage timer on our second attempt before wiping again; and then after a mixup and wipe on our third attempt, we brought Festergut down on our fourth try. Wild led in healing with 5592 hps/40.7% healing but Cr was right there with him at 4605/30.7%. Cr paid Wild a nice compliment, whispering Wild that she was learning all kinds of great healing tips from him. I'd been feeding her data from recount to show her how her healing was going and what to look for to make improvements. She really had no idea whether she was a good healer or not, and Wild gave her confidence that she was doing very well.
Note that for our second night we had been joined by Bd, who ran ICC10 with G1 on Tuesday/Wednesday on his druid. He was tanking for us (G2) on his warrior Thursday night. The guy is indefatigable. Rotface is a difficult fight, one that G2 had yet to master. On our first attempt, though, we got him to 37%, our best performance to date. Wild was playing in a bit of a fog, and wasn't feeling well, but was trying to hang in there. On our second attempt Wild blundered about and got himself killed early, leading to our second wipe. We had more troubles on our third attempt, losing ground, but gained most of that ground back on our 4th attempt when we got him to 40%.
On our fifth attempt the raid was awesome and we brought Rotface down for the first time! Wild was just barely hanging in there, but Cr stepped it up and led in healing with 4613 hps/40.3% followed by Wild with 3549/36.7%.
After the victory over Rotface the raid leader, Lady Hunter, gave us a choice of bosses for our next assault, both of which would be new bosses for our G2 - Valrithia Dreamwalker or Professor Putricide. Wild hates Putricide. Loathes Putricide. Wants nothing to do with Putricide. The raid voted to take on Professor Putricide. Gah.
We only had time for one attempt, and we barely scratched the surface of this fight, getting Putricide to 79% before wiping. It had been a long time since Wild's last shot at this fight in ICC25 with FS. It didn't seem quite as awful as I remembered it to be, but maybe when I'm more alert I'll remember why.
Chunk #2 - I really thought about taking Friday night off. I usually don't have a raid on Fridays anyway, but the MM guild has started scheduling Friday night runs and this one happened to be Trial of the Crusader (T0C). Wild has done ToC many times and doesn't need any of the i232 gear in there. However, for Philly, most everything in ToC would be upgrades. I had signed Philly up for the run, hoping she was geared well enough to get into the raid. Philly begged for the chance, so I dutifully showed up at 6:30pm, Philly in tow. It would be my third straight night of raiding. ToC has both 10 man and 25 man versions, but we only had enough for ToC 10. Philly got an invite. I offered that she could either go shadow priest for DPS or could heal. Philly's main spec is shadow, so I was really hoping she would be given that role. Fortunately there were already three good healers available, including another priest, and Philly got to pew pew! (that's warcraft-ese for killing things).
Philly hasn't done much raiding. She did get into a ToC25 a few weeks back and did clear it. She was very undergeared but the rest of the raid was able to pick up the slack. She's done 5 man Heroics, an occasional Vault of Archovan (VoA), and that's about it. This was her first guild raid and for all practical purposes she was a nub at it. Wild couldn't help her much, either. He is a healer through and through, and isn't much more experienced as a DPS than Philly is. And DPSing as a shadow priest is nothing like DPSing as a moonkin. I think shadow priest DPS is a lot harder, because there are a lot of timing issues that are absolutely essential in getting the most damage out.
There are no trash mobs in ToC. There are a series of gladiator like events, starting with a triplet of mobs called the Northrend Beasts that come at us one group at a time with no pauses in between. We took down Gormok, the pair of frost wyrms (Acidmaw and Dreadscale), and finally Icehowl. Icehowl has a Charge where he targets a specific raider, and it is critical that the targeted raiders get out of the way. Philly was playing with some altered movement keys to improve her strafing moves. Icehowl targeted Philly three straight times. I mean, get real! Philly could have screwed up using the changed movement keys, but the strafing worked and Philly got out of the way all three times. The three mob groups all died, and Philly felt pretty good (well, at least not too bad) at her damage dealing. We had 5 DPSers and our numbers after the Northrend Beasts encounter was:
#1: deathknight - 3769 DPS/27% total damage
#2: hunter - 2891/19.7%
#3: Philly! - 2320/17.3%
#4: tank - 1243/10.1%
#5: tank - 1222/8.9%
Ok, tanks are not supposed to show up in the top 5 DPS in a ten man raid. Not sure what the issue was, but Philly enjoyed her moment while she could. Things would get a lot tougher.
There was another priest in the raid who was one of the healers. He had done the priest buffs for the Northrend Beasts, and Philly wanted to do her part, too, so she decided to do the priest buffs in preparation for the next encounter. Wild, the slacker, only has one buff he's required to cast for a raid. Priests have three, and they all take mana to cast and cost "candles" which Philly has to buy. Philly carries around three stacks (60 candles) to make sure she has enough with her at all times.
Philly did the priesty raid buffs, and then there was this moment as she looked at her "other" personal buffs. Buffs like Inner Focus, which give her additional spell power. And Vampiric Embrace, a shadow spec buff which provides extra healing for the entire raid. Philly had forgotten to cast either of them for the Northrend Beasts fight. Sigh.
Lord Jarraxus was the next encounter and we struggled with him. Philly had a chance to work on changing targets as her job along, with two other ranged DPS, was to bring down the Mistress of Pain, a almost mini-boss that spawns periodically during the battle, as well as groups of rock elementals that could be a real pain. My problem as a DPSer has always been learning to target mobs quickly and accurately - I'm still learning. It's just so different from healing. Philly struggled through that and although her DPS fell off we managed to take down Jaraxxus. Yes, Philly used ALL her buffs this time.
The third encounter is a group of six npc mobs called the Faction Champs, and it's designed like a pvp arena match. Philly's job, in addition to helping kill each mob in a specified order, was to cast Mass Dispell (to remove buffs that help the enemy) whenever I could and to use Fear in rotation with the other priest, who would be doing the same thing. Philly was also specced to be able to do a spell called Psychic Horror, which basically scared the snot out of the target for three seconds, even forcing the target to drop it's weapon. How fun is that? Well, it is kinda fun, although being chased around the chamber by a warrior with murder on his mind and a big two handed sword in his hand in between those Psychic Horror moments was a lot less fun.
We drew a bad combination of enemies for this fight. Three of the mobs were healers, and that was going to make this a very long fight. Too long, actually, on our first assault. We targeted the shaman healer as our first target, and the computer played shaman simply outplayed us. We couldn't kill him. Every time we'd get close another healer would heal him back up, like they knew we were focus firing on that shaman. We were all cursing that shaman as one by one we died, unable to keep that shaman from healing back to full health each time we dented him. We wiped.
For our second try, the raid leader opted for more DPS! instead of healing and our healing priest switched to shadow priest. The extra DPS made the difference and we were able to bring the shaman down. With him out of the way, the rest of the fight became one of attrition as we killed one of them for everyone of us they killed, with the numbers in our favor. There were four raiders standing when the last enemy fell. Philly wasn't one of them, though, being the second raider to die. With Philly in motion nearly the whole fight, she had to rely mostly on a couple of instant DPS DoTs for damage dealing, and the rest of the time was dispelling or Fearing things. Her DPS dropped way off, but she was getting the job she'd been assigned done.
Entering the coliseum after the Faction Champs fell were Fiola and Eydis, a matched pair of bosses that shared the same health pool. Kill one and they both die. The trick is that depending on the situation only one of them can be attacked at a time. A second trick is knowing what "color" or polarity (light or dark) you have to be to be able to attack the right target. Wild has done this fight many times as a healer and once you get a feel for it it's not that hard. As a DPS, though, Philly had to be a lot more aware of what was going on. Shooting at the wrong target will deliver no damage, and not being wrapped in the right color will get you killed. Considering it was Philly's first time doing this in ten man, she did pretty well in making the polarity shifts every time - but once. The resulting explosion from missing that transition nearly killed her, but Philly was thoughtful enough to have Shielded herself and survived it. She shifted polarity and continued the fight. The strategy for the fight was a little easier than Wild remembered from a targeting perspective, too. DPSers had to figure out which of the two bosses to attack under the strategy Wild learned, but this time it was the two tanks who made that decision. For the DPS, we were told to always attack the target being main tanked. So all Philly had to do was ensure that she was attacking that target. The battle went pretty long, but we finally killed them.
Philly had another "Oh crap" revelation after this fight, unfortunately. Before coming into the raid, Philly had studied up on her spell rotation so that she would get the order right. Under the correct conditions, a powerful Damage over Time (DoT) spell called Shadow Word: Pain (SW:P) would automatically refresh itself on the target, meaning Philly would not have to cast it as long as she kept up her rotation. SW:P contributes a LOT of damage. Philly forgot one tiny detail about her rotation. Before SW:P can be "refreshed" she has to cast it one time during her opening string of spells. She forgot to make that opening cast of SW:P. That little slip meant that she hasn't had SW:P on any of her boss targets the whole evening. That really sucked. Lots of learnin' moments for Philly.
Philly entered ToC10 knowing that there was loot in here that could replace half her current set of gear. She had only three pieces that were better than what she might find here: her two pieces of Tier 9 (shoulders and pants) and her boots. Did I tell you about her boots? No? Philly is looking at Happyface in a new light. After Wild nixed the idea of crafting a pair of i264 Deathfrost Boots for Philly due to the cost, Happy quietly began monitoring the AH and trade chat for bargains on the costliest item, primoridal saronite. Little by little, Happy started getting them, one bargain at a time. Happy then had a long talk with Wild, and just before the start of the raid Wild presented Philly with a newly crafted and nicely enchanted pair of Deathfrost Boots. Philly would have kissed them both, but, well, you know, lips of an undead, and all that . . .
Philly is a jewel crafter, you will recall. Jewelcrafters can craft special gems that are more powerful than those everyone else uses. For example, the best spell power gem in the game has +23 spell power. The JC only spell power gem has +39 spell power. There are restrictions - Philly can socket only one each of each primary color gem - red, yellow, and red, so she can't have more than three total special gems socketed across all of her gear. Philly has never felt she had gear worth buying the recipes and expending hard to get tokens for the material to make those special gems. Until now. The Deathfrost Boots had two gem sockets, and Philly knew it was time to use her special gems for those boots, as Philly will still be wearing them come Cataclysm, I'm sure.
After killing the Northrend Beasts, Lord Jaraxxus, the Faction Champions, and the twins Fjola and Eydis, Philly had won no loot. None. There was only one drop that she could even roll on - a really nice +mana regen trinket that would have been a great addition to her healing set. But healing is her off spec, and a main spec healer won it. Philly was looking at all the potential loot that "might have been" and figuring she was now likely to finish ToC with nothing to show for it.
The last boss in ToC is Anub'barak, a great big bug. It's a straightforward fight, although it has it's tricks and traps, with a lot of swarming adds and three phases to the fight. On our first attempt Philly got surrounded by mobs and died in the opening moments of the battle. So much for seeing how SW:P helped out her DPS. Sigh. The raid got Anub to 14% without Philly's help, and wiped when we hit the enrage timer. Would a living, breathing Philly have made the difference? Maybe.
We had an aborted second attempt when an unlucky spike trail took out several raiders at once. The pull surprised folks and I don't think we were really ready to go.
On our third attempt we killed Anub to finish off ToC. When all was said and done Philly could at least say that her DPS was better than that of the tanks. :-)
The other four DPS beat her by fairly wide margins, however:
#1: hunter - 3950 DPS/21% damage
#2: warlock - 3625/19%
#3: deathknight - 3590/19%
#4: hunter - 2338/13%
#5: Philly - 2111/11%
It wasn't what Philly was hoping for, but it's something she can use to motivate herself to improve on.
Philly got her last chance at loot after the Anub kill. A leather DPS item dropped, which made a nice grab for the feral druid in the raid. A caster staff also dropped called [Perdition]. It did not have +hit, so it wasn't a "DPS staff" but the staff could be used by either DPS or healing casters and so both could roll on it as main spec. Three raiders rolled on it - and Philly won the roll.
[Perdition] is an i232 staff that is significantly better than the i200 pair of main hand dagger and off hand that Philly was currently wearing. If Philly had been asked what one slot she wanted most to upgrade, she would have said it was her weapon slot. Philly had no problem tossing those two pieces in the trash as the staff was better than both even before it was enchanted and gemmed. Oh, and the staff has one gem slot.
It was getting late, but Philly rousted Wild out of bed (ok, Wild, it wasn't THAT late). Wild agreed that Philly's new staff should have the best enchant on it, and used five of his own abyss crystals (out of the 15 he owned) to enchant the staff with +81 spell power. Philly then cut her third special gem to fill the gem socket in that staff. Philly may one day replace that staff, but for now it's the biggest upgrade she's gotten in some time - after those boots, of course.
What was funny was that when she first equipped Perdition, removing the two i200 items that the staff replaced, Philly earned the achievement called Epic, which meant that Philly was no longer wearing any gear less than i213. It was a nice accomplishment for Philly, but the gratz and kidding from the guild when the Achievement was announced, while welcomed with good humor, highlighted just how far Philly still has to go.
There are more "Chunks" to follow.
Chunk #1 - There was a second night of ICC10 on Thursday Night. Wild was off his game as I was pretty tuckered out from the stress of caring for our sick kitty. Our evening started with Festergut, the first boss in the second wing of ICC. We wiped early on our first attempt; came back and fought all the way to the enrage timer on our second attempt before wiping again; and then after a mixup and wipe on our third attempt, we brought Festergut down on our fourth try. Wild led in healing with 5592 hps/40.7% healing but Cr was right there with him at 4605/30.7%. Cr paid Wild a nice compliment, whispering Wild that she was learning all kinds of great healing tips from him. I'd been feeding her data from recount to show her how her healing was going and what to look for to make improvements. She really had no idea whether she was a good healer or not, and Wild gave her confidence that she was doing very well.
Note that for our second night we had been joined by Bd, who ran ICC10 with G1 on Tuesday/Wednesday on his druid. He was tanking for us (G2) on his warrior Thursday night. The guy is indefatigable. Rotface is a difficult fight, one that G2 had yet to master. On our first attempt, though, we got him to 37%, our best performance to date. Wild was playing in a bit of a fog, and wasn't feeling well, but was trying to hang in there. On our second attempt Wild blundered about and got himself killed early, leading to our second wipe. We had more troubles on our third attempt, losing ground, but gained most of that ground back on our 4th attempt when we got him to 40%.
On our fifth attempt the raid was awesome and we brought Rotface down for the first time! Wild was just barely hanging in there, but Cr stepped it up and led in healing with 4613 hps/40.3% followed by Wild with 3549/36.7%.
After the victory over Rotface the raid leader, Lady Hunter, gave us a choice of bosses for our next assault, both of which would be new bosses for our G2 - Valrithia Dreamwalker or Professor Putricide. Wild hates Putricide. Loathes Putricide. Wants nothing to do with Putricide. The raid voted to take on Professor Putricide. Gah.
We only had time for one attempt, and we barely scratched the surface of this fight, getting Putricide to 79% before wiping. It had been a long time since Wild's last shot at this fight in ICC25 with FS. It didn't seem quite as awful as I remembered it to be, but maybe when I'm more alert I'll remember why.
Chunk #2 - I really thought about taking Friday night off. I usually don't have a raid on Fridays anyway, but the MM guild has started scheduling Friday night runs and this one happened to be Trial of the Crusader (T0C). Wild has done ToC many times and doesn't need any of the i232 gear in there. However, for Philly, most everything in ToC would be upgrades. I had signed Philly up for the run, hoping she was geared well enough to get into the raid. Philly begged for the chance, so I dutifully showed up at 6:30pm, Philly in tow. It would be my third straight night of raiding. ToC has both 10 man and 25 man versions, but we only had enough for ToC 10. Philly got an invite. I offered that she could either go shadow priest for DPS or could heal. Philly's main spec is shadow, so I was really hoping she would be given that role. Fortunately there were already three good healers available, including another priest, and Philly got to pew pew! (that's warcraft-ese for killing things).
Philly hasn't done much raiding. She did get into a ToC25 a few weeks back and did clear it. She was very undergeared but the rest of the raid was able to pick up the slack. She's done 5 man Heroics, an occasional Vault of Archovan (VoA), and that's about it. This was her first guild raid and for all practical purposes she was a nub at it. Wild couldn't help her much, either. He is a healer through and through, and isn't much more experienced as a DPS than Philly is. And DPSing as a shadow priest is nothing like DPSing as a moonkin. I think shadow priest DPS is a lot harder, because there are a lot of timing issues that are absolutely essential in getting the most damage out.
There are no trash mobs in ToC. There are a series of gladiator like events, starting with a triplet of mobs called the Northrend Beasts that come at us one group at a time with no pauses in between. We took down Gormok, the pair of frost wyrms (Acidmaw and Dreadscale), and finally Icehowl. Icehowl has a Charge where he targets a specific raider, and it is critical that the targeted raiders get out of the way. Philly was playing with some altered movement keys to improve her strafing moves. Icehowl targeted Philly three straight times. I mean, get real! Philly could have screwed up using the changed movement keys, but the strafing worked and Philly got out of the way all three times. The three mob groups all died, and Philly felt pretty good (well, at least not too bad) at her damage dealing. We had 5 DPSers and our numbers after the Northrend Beasts encounter was:
#1: deathknight - 3769 DPS/27% total damage
#2: hunter - 2891/19.7%
#3: Philly! - 2320/17.3%
#4: tank - 1243/10.1%
#5: tank - 1222/8.9%
Ok, tanks are not supposed to show up in the top 5 DPS in a ten man raid. Not sure what the issue was, but Philly enjoyed her moment while she could. Things would get a lot tougher.
There was another priest in the raid who was one of the healers. He had done the priest buffs for the Northrend Beasts, and Philly wanted to do her part, too, so she decided to do the priest buffs in preparation for the next encounter. Wild, the slacker, only has one buff he's required to cast for a raid. Priests have three, and they all take mana to cast and cost "candles" which Philly has to buy. Philly carries around three stacks (60 candles) to make sure she has enough with her at all times.
Philly did the priesty raid buffs, and then there was this moment as she looked at her "other" personal buffs. Buffs like Inner Focus, which give her additional spell power. And Vampiric Embrace, a shadow spec buff which provides extra healing for the entire raid. Philly had forgotten to cast either of them for the Northrend Beasts fight. Sigh.
Lord Jarraxus was the next encounter and we struggled with him. Philly had a chance to work on changing targets as her job along, with two other ranged DPS, was to bring down the Mistress of Pain, a almost mini-boss that spawns periodically during the battle, as well as groups of rock elementals that could be a real pain. My problem as a DPSer has always been learning to target mobs quickly and accurately - I'm still learning. It's just so different from healing. Philly struggled through that and although her DPS fell off we managed to take down Jaraxxus. Yes, Philly used ALL her buffs this time.
The third encounter is a group of six npc mobs called the Faction Champs, and it's designed like a pvp arena match. Philly's job, in addition to helping kill each mob in a specified order, was to cast Mass Dispell (to remove buffs that help the enemy) whenever I could and to use Fear in rotation with the other priest, who would be doing the same thing. Philly was also specced to be able to do a spell called Psychic Horror, which basically scared the snot out of the target for three seconds, even forcing the target to drop it's weapon. How fun is that? Well, it is kinda fun, although being chased around the chamber by a warrior with murder on his mind and a big two handed sword in his hand in between those Psychic Horror moments was a lot less fun.
We drew a bad combination of enemies for this fight. Three of the mobs were healers, and that was going to make this a very long fight. Too long, actually, on our first assault. We targeted the shaman healer as our first target, and the computer played shaman simply outplayed us. We couldn't kill him. Every time we'd get close another healer would heal him back up, like they knew we were focus firing on that shaman. We were all cursing that shaman as one by one we died, unable to keep that shaman from healing back to full health each time we dented him. We wiped.
For our second try, the raid leader opted for more DPS! instead of healing and our healing priest switched to shadow priest. The extra DPS made the difference and we were able to bring the shaman down. With him out of the way, the rest of the fight became one of attrition as we killed one of them for everyone of us they killed, with the numbers in our favor. There were four raiders standing when the last enemy fell. Philly wasn't one of them, though, being the second raider to die. With Philly in motion nearly the whole fight, she had to rely mostly on a couple of instant DPS DoTs for damage dealing, and the rest of the time was dispelling or Fearing things. Her DPS dropped way off, but she was getting the job she'd been assigned done.
Entering the coliseum after the Faction Champs fell were Fiola and Eydis, a matched pair of bosses that shared the same health pool. Kill one and they both die. The trick is that depending on the situation only one of them can be attacked at a time. A second trick is knowing what "color" or polarity (light or dark) you have to be to be able to attack the right target. Wild has done this fight many times as a healer and once you get a feel for it it's not that hard. As a DPS, though, Philly had to be a lot more aware of what was going on. Shooting at the wrong target will deliver no damage, and not being wrapped in the right color will get you killed. Considering it was Philly's first time doing this in ten man, she did pretty well in making the polarity shifts every time - but once. The resulting explosion from missing that transition nearly killed her, but Philly was thoughtful enough to have Shielded herself and survived it. She shifted polarity and continued the fight. The strategy for the fight was a little easier than Wild remembered from a targeting perspective, too. DPSers had to figure out which of the two bosses to attack under the strategy Wild learned, but this time it was the two tanks who made that decision. For the DPS, we were told to always attack the target being main tanked. So all Philly had to do was ensure that she was attacking that target. The battle went pretty long, but we finally killed them.
Philly had another "Oh crap" revelation after this fight, unfortunately. Before coming into the raid, Philly had studied up on her spell rotation so that she would get the order right. Under the correct conditions, a powerful Damage over Time (DoT) spell called Shadow Word: Pain (SW:P) would automatically refresh itself on the target, meaning Philly would not have to cast it as long as she kept up her rotation. SW:P contributes a LOT of damage. Philly forgot one tiny detail about her rotation. Before SW:P can be "refreshed" she has to cast it one time during her opening string of spells. She forgot to make that opening cast of SW:P. That little slip meant that she hasn't had SW:P on any of her boss targets the whole evening. That really sucked. Lots of learnin' moments for Philly.
Philly entered ToC10 knowing that there was loot in here that could replace half her current set of gear. She had only three pieces that were better than what she might find here: her two pieces of Tier 9 (shoulders and pants) and her boots. Did I tell you about her boots? No? Philly is looking at Happyface in a new light. After Wild nixed the idea of crafting a pair of i264 Deathfrost Boots for Philly due to the cost, Happy quietly began monitoring the AH and trade chat for bargains on the costliest item, primoridal saronite. Little by little, Happy started getting them, one bargain at a time. Happy then had a long talk with Wild, and just before the start of the raid Wild presented Philly with a newly crafted and nicely enchanted pair of Deathfrost Boots. Philly would have kissed them both, but, well, you know, lips of an undead, and all that . . .
Philly is a jewel crafter, you will recall. Jewelcrafters can craft special gems that are more powerful than those everyone else uses. For example, the best spell power gem in the game has +23 spell power. The JC only spell power gem has +39 spell power. There are restrictions - Philly can socket only one each of each primary color gem - red, yellow, and red, so she can't have more than three total special gems socketed across all of her gear. Philly has never felt she had gear worth buying the recipes and expending hard to get tokens for the material to make those special gems. Until now. The Deathfrost Boots had two gem sockets, and Philly knew it was time to use her special gems for those boots, as Philly will still be wearing them come Cataclysm, I'm sure.
After killing the Northrend Beasts, Lord Jaraxxus, the Faction Champions, and the twins Fjola and Eydis, Philly had won no loot. None. There was only one drop that she could even roll on - a really nice +mana regen trinket that would have been a great addition to her healing set. But healing is her off spec, and a main spec healer won it. Philly was looking at all the potential loot that "might have been" and figuring she was now likely to finish ToC with nothing to show for it.
The last boss in ToC is Anub'barak, a great big bug. It's a straightforward fight, although it has it's tricks and traps, with a lot of swarming adds and three phases to the fight. On our first attempt Philly got surrounded by mobs and died in the opening moments of the battle. So much for seeing how SW:P helped out her DPS. Sigh. The raid got Anub to 14% without Philly's help, and wiped when we hit the enrage timer. Would a living, breathing Philly have made the difference? Maybe.
We had an aborted second attempt when an unlucky spike trail took out several raiders at once. The pull surprised folks and I don't think we were really ready to go.
On our third attempt we killed Anub to finish off ToC. When all was said and done Philly could at least say that her DPS was better than that of the tanks. :-)
The other four DPS beat her by fairly wide margins, however:
#1: hunter - 3950 DPS/21% damage
#2: warlock - 3625/19%
#3: deathknight - 3590/19%
#4: hunter - 2338/13%
#5: Philly - 2111/11%
It wasn't what Philly was hoping for, but it's something she can use to motivate herself to improve on.
Philly got her last chance at loot after the Anub kill. A leather DPS item dropped, which made a nice grab for the feral druid in the raid. A caster staff also dropped called [Perdition]. It did not have +hit, so it wasn't a "DPS staff" but the staff could be used by either DPS or healing casters and so both could roll on it as main spec. Three raiders rolled on it - and Philly won the roll.
[Perdition] is an i232 staff that is significantly better than the i200 pair of main hand dagger and off hand that Philly was currently wearing. If Philly had been asked what one slot she wanted most to upgrade, she would have said it was her weapon slot. Philly had no problem tossing those two pieces in the trash as the staff was better than both even before it was enchanted and gemmed. Oh, and the staff has one gem slot.
It was getting late, but Philly rousted Wild out of bed (ok, Wild, it wasn't THAT late). Wild agreed that Philly's new staff should have the best enchant on it, and used five of his own abyss crystals (out of the 15 he owned) to enchant the staff with +81 spell power. Philly then cut her third special gem to fill the gem socket in that staff. Philly may one day replace that staff, but for now it's the biggest upgrade she's gotten in some time - after those boots, of course.
What was funny was that when she first equipped Perdition, removing the two i200 items that the staff replaced, Philly earned the achievement called Epic, which meant that Philly was no longer wearing any gear less than i213. It was a nice accomplishment for Philly, but the gratz and kidding from the guild when the Achievement was announced, while welcomed with good humor, highlighted just how far Philly still has to go.
There are more "Chunks" to follow.
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