Memorial Day Weekend (30 May) - Ruffling Feathers
Normally we stay close to home and look forward to a quiet three days over the Memorial Day weekend. Didn't quite work out that way this time. On Friday we took the dog, Sheila, out hiking. We are planning a trip out to Arizona in a few weeks and plan to hit some hiking trails that we haven't been to in a long time. Sheila loves hiking, but tends to tire and we've been working on building up her stamina for longer hikes. We went out to a favorite wilderness park of ours up in the "mountains" a couple of hours east of where we live. We hooked up with a piece of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs for literally thousands of miles, from Mexico to Canada. We did about seven of those miles on Friday, on a pretty warm day cut with brisk cool air, under a surprisingly clear sky for what we call the May Grey time of year. On Saturday our cul-de-sac decided to stage an impromptu block party. On Sunday we were back to painting for the first part of the day (we've got to run out of rooms to paint pretty soon), and then had our own private BBQ on another super nice day.
In another world a suddenly re-appearing Naithipe turned the Wild family weekend upside down. Rumors that Naithipe had surfaced in Orgrimmar were confirmed by Mery, who caught a glimpse of the glowing red embers and surrounding black cloud of that two hand weapon Naithipe always has at the ready, conducting who knows what business at the Auction House.
Later, Melashand, who was on safari, saw a dust covered and grimy Naithipe skulking about the fringes of the ogre infested mountains of Nagrand. Hoping to learn what Naithipe was about, Melasahnd got more than she bargained for when Naithipe accosted her and demanded she turn over whatever ore she still had laying around. Melasahnd was once a miner, but had long lost interest in the cobwebbed pile of rocks leftover from those days. Naithipe held a badly used and worn mining pick in one hand and seized Melashand's vest with the other. That raised Melashand's hackles and her hand reached for her own greatsword. Melasahnd hissed a warning, but Naithipe pushed her aside and began taking great swings at a node of fel iron with the mining pick. Shaking her head, Melasahnd told Naithipe to take whatever rocks she had left and told herself she'd give Naithipe a wide berth while this new obsession possessed the crazy undead.
More Wild family members were drawn into Naithipe's single minded mission. Bearing newly acquired gear from who know's where and under who knows what circumstances, Naithipe dumped the gear at Wild's feet, curtly told Wild what enchants were needed, and stalked off without another word. Happy was relieved of a rather large pot of gold, and Philly was put to work making gems and glyphs. JB, who perhaps Naithipe trusted somewhat, as much trust as was possible from Naithipe, anyway, huddled with Naithipe for a time, but did not reveal what task or favor Naithipe asked of her. When Wild returned the enchanted gear, though, he delivered it to a calmer (and freshly bathed) Naithipe.
Naithipe then disappeared into the wild country again, and it was assumed she was out there mining rocks somewhere, for purposes still unknown.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday (26 May) - Cantrips and Crows
Wednesday (26 May) - Cantrips and Crows
Wouldn't it be nice if Wild was part of a raid that was somewhere in between having to punch a time clock and ignoring the clock all together? The thing Wild always liked about the FS raids is that start times were set and raiders were expected to be on time (and most of the time were). The single-minded focus on progression was a bit overbearing at times, which tended to stuff out the shenanigans that are a welcome part of the MM raid. I like the shenanigans, but when a raid is planned for 6pm start and doesn't get off the ground until 7pm, and when there are 5-10 minute breaks in the action seemingly between every boss . . . well, that can get a little tiresome, even knowing and understanding why it's like that in the MM raid.
For the first time in memory I actually dozed off waiting for the MM raid to form up Wednesday night. Wild had been in game since 530pm (his own anal retentive personality insisted he be in game 30 minutes before start time), and after doing some dailies, cleaning out his bank, trimming his hooves, and giving his mammoth mount a good brushing, he mounted up atop the big whooly beast and waited ... and waited. Some time later I noticed that Lady Hunter had been /poking Wild for a couple of minutes and the MM raid leader had sent a whisper "icc Wild?" Clearing the cobwebs, I announced that I was conscious again and got my invite to the raid.
It was a bit after 7pm by the time we got down to business. Bd, our regular raid leader, never made it in game, so Mf took the reins. Mf has a number of level 80s and plays whichever seems to be needed on any given night. He's also the second youngest raider in the guild, a teenager slightly older than the 13 year old druid moonkin that was also a compatriot of Wild's who moved from FS to MM. Just thought I'd share that tidbit of random information that flows steadily in vent during the raid.
We were all inside ICC, and all buffed up, but the raid leader/tank was having a bit of a problem getting everyone's attention to get started. So he just started attacking the first set of trash mobs. Wild, who was his healer, half suspected that was going to happen given similar incidences in the past, and followed after him to heal. The rest of the raid shifted from idle to drive and came after us. We had cleared two sets of trash when someone noticed that our buff was gone. The buff, "Hellscream's" something or other, is a raid buff that we get automatically upon entering the dungeon, but can be removed if a raider talks to one of the npcs inside. Someone had, probably not realizing that would remove the buff. We all had to troop out of ICC to reset it, return, and start the trash mob pull all over again.
Even without a rogue with us, we were able to clear trash to Marrowgar with no problems and without tripping a trap. We had three healers, with Wild as the main tank healer, Lady Hunter on her paladin as the off tank healer, and a shaman for raid healing. I must say it was an exciting fight. We were a little rough around the edges, and Wild found himself taking risks with his tank in order to help keep the other tank alive and to spray some raid healing around. We survived, though, and Marrowgar fell. Our group is still at that point where a first attempt kill is still pretty exciting, so we were jazzed up moving on to Deathwhisper.
Marrowgar healing:
#1: Wild, 4614 hps/46.9% healing
#2: Pally, 2659/22%
#3: shaman, 2199/21%
One of the raiders was having serious UI problems and needed to reload. He ended up having to reboot his computer as well, and that lowered the jazz level a bit as we waited for more than ten minutes. Not that the conversations weren't entertaining, although the Mrs gave me strict directions there would be no further talk of "bacon" from Wild. But I do plan to tell her about the "num num num" joke. ;-)
Deathwhisper was a bit of a scary ride as well, but she fared no better than Marrowgar, falling on the first attempt.
Deathwhisper healing (forgot to note the % healing):
#1: Wild, 3039 hps
#2: shaman: 2517 hps
#3: pally, 2087 hps
Wild won a cloth bracers drop from Deathwhisper on a roll of "3" (no one else wanted it, a good time to get such a lousy roll). [Bracers of Dark Blessing] is a small upgrade i251 item that will likely only be used in Wild's moonkin set because it lacks the +haste Wild would lose in his healing set. Still, Wild was happy to get it.
We moved on to the Gunship. I like the raid leader's summary of the fight: "This is an easy battle. The only hard part is living through all of the glitches this thing has." The raid leader set up the groups, one to stay on the defending ship, and the other to jump over to the enemy ship whenever needed. Group 1 was the jump group with the main tank, but when he set up the group he kept the pally healer in group 1 and put Wild in with the second group. Shouldn't matter, as the tank planned to stay close to the rails on the enemy ship so he could be healed without the healer having to jump over as well. On the first jump the tank immediately had problems and died.
Wild, who was keeping the off tank alive on the defending ship, saw it and rushed to the rail. The dead tank was in range, splayed out half off the rail, and Wild battle rezzed him. Wild and the pally got him back to full health, but in spite of that two massive hits killed him a second time. We wiped. That shouldn't happen with the kind of healing we were dishing out, and the tank confirmed that it was glitches that killed him. I think Blizzard should add "glitches" to the list of hostile abilities for this encounter.
Our second attempt went very long. Twice we thought we were close enough to finish off the fight without having to board the enemy ship again, and both times we were wrong. The fight is won when the enemy ship is destroyed, and it just took us longer to get that done than I'd experienced before. But a win is a win is a win. We had taken down the first three encounters.
Gunship healing:
#1: Wild, 3477 hps/46.7% healing
#2: shaman, 2077/26.7%
#3: pally, 2093/16.9%
Only half of our group had ever seen the Deathbringer Saurfang fight, which was our next stop. It would be the first time tanking him for both of our tanks, I believe, and the first time healing for the shaman. There is a lot of things to remember, and after going through them once the best thing to do is just try it, to be able to visualize what you'd just been told.
On our first attempt we made a surprisingly strong effort, getting Saurfang down to 20% before we hit the enrage timer and wiped. We had run out of time and there would be no second attempt, but we were overall pleased with the effort. Lady Hunter said that she might try to get the raid together one more time before the reset so we could take a crack at Saurfang again.
Wild returned to Dalaran to enchant and gem his new bracers. I also sent Wild off on a recon mission. Beneath the wide avenues and tall spires of the floating in air city of Dalaran is what is called the Underbelly. The Underbelly is the sewer system of Dalaran, and yet there is also a thriving community down there that has carved out a way of life. Wild has been down there many times. Players congregate in an open area where horde and allie duels are in play almost constantly. There is even an Inn, called Cantrips and Crows. Wild has been to the Inn many times, to complete cooking quests or passing through to fish the dank, tepid waters which cover all of the lower reaches of the Underbelly. There is also a hostile alliance npc that sits morosely at the bar near the barkeep. He's there for a specific quest, but many a horde has started a fight with him accidentally when the intent was to talk to the barkeep.
Wild had gotten a tip that there was more to that Inn than I realized. Supposedly, the Inn featured all of the same benefits of both the topside inn and the separately located topside banks. And sure enough, tucked away in a tiny cubbyhole to the right of the bar, was a mailbox and access to both personal and guild banks. The lag when logging into the topside inn can be very brutal. But players can set their hearthstone to the Underbelly inn, too, where the lag is perceptibly less brutal. All the comforts in a compact space and less lag to boot. Wild set his hearthstone to Cantrips and Crows.
Philly, too, set her hearthstone there and discovered yet another marvel of the Underbelly. Catching a flight from the flight master still requires that players go topside. However, if the plan is to use a flying mount from Dalaran instead of the flight master, Philly discovered that there is a tunnel near the bank area that leads directly to the open air and sky of Dalaran's Crystalsong Forest. Now how convenient is that!
Wouldn't it be nice if Wild was part of a raid that was somewhere in between having to punch a time clock and ignoring the clock all together? The thing Wild always liked about the FS raids is that start times were set and raiders were expected to be on time (and most of the time were). The single-minded focus on progression was a bit overbearing at times, which tended to stuff out the shenanigans that are a welcome part of the MM raid. I like the shenanigans, but when a raid is planned for 6pm start and doesn't get off the ground until 7pm, and when there are 5-10 minute breaks in the action seemingly between every boss . . . well, that can get a little tiresome, even knowing and understanding why it's like that in the MM raid.
For the first time in memory I actually dozed off waiting for the MM raid to form up Wednesday night. Wild had been in game since 530pm (his own anal retentive personality insisted he be in game 30 minutes before start time), and after doing some dailies, cleaning out his bank, trimming his hooves, and giving his mammoth mount a good brushing, he mounted up atop the big whooly beast and waited ... and waited. Some time later I noticed that Lady Hunter had been /poking Wild for a couple of minutes and the MM raid leader had sent a whisper "icc Wild?" Clearing the cobwebs, I announced that I was conscious again and got my invite to the raid.
It was a bit after 7pm by the time we got down to business. Bd, our regular raid leader, never made it in game, so Mf took the reins. Mf has a number of level 80s and plays whichever seems to be needed on any given night. He's also the second youngest raider in the guild, a teenager slightly older than the 13 year old druid moonkin that was also a compatriot of Wild's who moved from FS to MM. Just thought I'd share that tidbit of random information that flows steadily in vent during the raid.
We were all inside ICC, and all buffed up, but the raid leader/tank was having a bit of a problem getting everyone's attention to get started. So he just started attacking the first set of trash mobs. Wild, who was his healer, half suspected that was going to happen given similar incidences in the past, and followed after him to heal. The rest of the raid shifted from idle to drive and came after us. We had cleared two sets of trash when someone noticed that our buff was gone. The buff, "Hellscream's" something or other, is a raid buff that we get automatically upon entering the dungeon, but can be removed if a raider talks to one of the npcs inside. Someone had, probably not realizing that would remove the buff. We all had to troop out of ICC to reset it, return, and start the trash mob pull all over again.
Even without a rogue with us, we were able to clear trash to Marrowgar with no problems and without tripping a trap. We had three healers, with Wild as the main tank healer, Lady Hunter on her paladin as the off tank healer, and a shaman for raid healing. I must say it was an exciting fight. We were a little rough around the edges, and Wild found himself taking risks with his tank in order to help keep the other tank alive and to spray some raid healing around. We survived, though, and Marrowgar fell. Our group is still at that point where a first attempt kill is still pretty exciting, so we were jazzed up moving on to Deathwhisper.
Marrowgar healing:
#1: Wild, 4614 hps/46.9% healing
#2: Pally, 2659/22%
#3: shaman, 2199/21%
One of the raiders was having serious UI problems and needed to reload. He ended up having to reboot his computer as well, and that lowered the jazz level a bit as we waited for more than ten minutes. Not that the conversations weren't entertaining, although the Mrs gave me strict directions there would be no further talk of "bacon" from Wild. But I do plan to tell her about the "num num num" joke. ;-)
Deathwhisper was a bit of a scary ride as well, but she fared no better than Marrowgar, falling on the first attempt.
Deathwhisper healing (forgot to note the % healing):
#1: Wild, 3039 hps
#2: shaman: 2517 hps
#3: pally, 2087 hps
Wild won a cloth bracers drop from Deathwhisper on a roll of "3" (no one else wanted it, a good time to get such a lousy roll). [Bracers of Dark Blessing] is a small upgrade i251 item that will likely only be used in Wild's moonkin set because it lacks the +haste Wild would lose in his healing set. Still, Wild was happy to get it.
We moved on to the Gunship. I like the raid leader's summary of the fight: "This is an easy battle. The only hard part is living through all of the glitches this thing has." The raid leader set up the groups, one to stay on the defending ship, and the other to jump over to the enemy ship whenever needed. Group 1 was the jump group with the main tank, but when he set up the group he kept the pally healer in group 1 and put Wild in with the second group. Shouldn't matter, as the tank planned to stay close to the rails on the enemy ship so he could be healed without the healer having to jump over as well. On the first jump the tank immediately had problems and died.
Wild, who was keeping the off tank alive on the defending ship, saw it and rushed to the rail. The dead tank was in range, splayed out half off the rail, and Wild battle rezzed him. Wild and the pally got him back to full health, but in spite of that two massive hits killed him a second time. We wiped. That shouldn't happen with the kind of healing we were dishing out, and the tank confirmed that it was glitches that killed him. I think Blizzard should add "glitches" to the list of hostile abilities for this encounter.
Our second attempt went very long. Twice we thought we were close enough to finish off the fight without having to board the enemy ship again, and both times we were wrong. The fight is won when the enemy ship is destroyed, and it just took us longer to get that done than I'd experienced before. But a win is a win is a win. We had taken down the first three encounters.
Gunship healing:
#1: Wild, 3477 hps/46.7% healing
#2: shaman, 2077/26.7%
#3: pally, 2093/16.9%
Only half of our group had ever seen the Deathbringer Saurfang fight, which was our next stop. It would be the first time tanking him for both of our tanks, I believe, and the first time healing for the shaman. There is a lot of things to remember, and after going through them once the best thing to do is just try it, to be able to visualize what you'd just been told.
On our first attempt we made a surprisingly strong effort, getting Saurfang down to 20% before we hit the enrage timer and wiped. We had run out of time and there would be no second attempt, but we were overall pleased with the effort. Lady Hunter said that she might try to get the raid together one more time before the reset so we could take a crack at Saurfang again.
Wild returned to Dalaran to enchant and gem his new bracers. I also sent Wild off on a recon mission. Beneath the wide avenues and tall spires of the floating in air city of Dalaran is what is called the Underbelly. The Underbelly is the sewer system of Dalaran, and yet there is also a thriving community down there that has carved out a way of life. Wild has been down there many times. Players congregate in an open area where horde and allie duels are in play almost constantly. There is even an Inn, called Cantrips and Crows. Wild has been to the Inn many times, to complete cooking quests or passing through to fish the dank, tepid waters which cover all of the lower reaches of the Underbelly. There is also a hostile alliance npc that sits morosely at the bar near the barkeep. He's there for a specific quest, but many a horde has started a fight with him accidentally when the intent was to talk to the barkeep.
Wild had gotten a tip that there was more to that Inn than I realized. Supposedly, the Inn featured all of the same benefits of both the topside inn and the separately located topside banks. And sure enough, tucked away in a tiny cubbyhole to the right of the bar, was a mailbox and access to both personal and guild banks. The lag when logging into the topside inn can be very brutal. But players can set their hearthstone to the Underbelly inn, too, where the lag is perceptibly less brutal. All the comforts in a compact space and less lag to boot. Wild set his hearthstone to Cantrips and Crows.
Philly, too, set her hearthstone there and discovered yet another marvel of the Underbelly. Catching a flight from the flight master still requires that players go topside. However, if the plan is to use a flying mount from Dalaran instead of the flight master, Philly discovered that there is a tunnel near the bank area that leads directly to the open air and sky of Dalaran's Crystalsong Forest. Now how convenient is that!
Perching just inside the Underbelly tunnel
The Underbelly tunnel seen from Philly's flying mount
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday (25 May) - The Women Win
Tuesday (25 May) - The Women Win
Philly/Wild talk fairly regularly with an old friend who started with and still has a toon in FS while also having a toon in MM, like I do. It's fun talking about old times, but the topic always comes back to discussing the changes in the FS guild. As mentioned before, ICC25 raids were suspended indefinitely when too many guild raiders either left the guild or stopped coming to the raids. The two ICC10 mans continued with a select group of raiders who have raided together for a very long time. They are all close friends and have worked hard to conquer each new dungeon has it comes out. They've earned their rewards. The knock on these two raid groups, though, have always been that they have been unwilling to open their raids to other guildies to help them learn the encounters and help them gear up. "Start a new ten man" is the common response, and when that fails the guild is again left in kind of a haves and have nots situation. Efforts to convince the two raid groups to rotate in one or two guildies each week to build up enough geared raiders to ensure a successful 25 man was resisted under the rationale that it would slow down the progress of the ten mans. So I guess it was really no surprise that when we reached the tougher wings of ICC25 and struggled, and we had raiders who were not geared well enough or experienced enough because of lack of exposure to the ten mans, the more experienced raiders grew frustrated and stopped coming.
Well, on Tuesday the guild leader for FS announced that he was testing the waters again for a possible third ICC ten man. Frankly, I think that is doomed to failure, just as every other attempt to maintain a third ICC10 has eventually failed. Nothing has changed in the guild to make a third raid any more likely than before. No one in either of the established ICC10s wants to help a third team get on their feet. The explanation seems to be along the lines of why shouldn't the new team go through the learning curve like they did? Why should they sacrifice time and badges and progression? So, we were talking about that, and my friend, who is an alternate and part time raider in the ICC10 man that was still working on downing the Lich King, told me that the raid leader had informed him that he wasn't really good enough for their raid and that he would no longer be invited. It's just sad.
Of course, the subject of leaving the guild came up again, with the major factor seeming to be that we are still here because some of our oldest friends are still here. That begs the question of well, why don't we all just leave together? Here's the bottom line - of all of Wild's oldest friends in the guild, none of them play much anymore. Even my friend only recently started playing again after leaving the game for months, and may decide to stop playing again. Wild is the only truly active player. If Wild had left FS any of the previous times that we had gone through this, Wild would have missed out of opportunities to raid the best 25 man dungeons in the game, from Mount Hyjal to Naxxramas to Ulduar to Icecrown Citadel. The 25 man raiding will return, even if it goes dormant until Cataclysm. And Wild doesn't want to miss that. FS has survived longer than any other guild Wild would have jumped to, and despite it's problems is still a strong guild. I like MM, and have invested Philly in their future, but there is no overriding reason for Wild to join MM, and every reason to believe that FS will rise to the challenge of the 25 mans when the time comes.
Moving forward to the Tuesday evening raid with MM, we had an interesting problem. There were so many MM guildies wanting to raid that the raid leader started looking at whether we could field a 25 man raid instead. While we were working through that Wild got a whisper from one of the FS guild ten man raid leaders. He asked if Wild was interested in joining a ten man Ulduar run. Wild had never finished Ulduar, clearing two wings and part of a third, defeating ten of 13 encounters. So it would have been interesting to do a complete a clear with the kind of firepower we could bring to that older dungeon. However, there is nothing in Ulduar that Wild could use. Even the legendary main hand mace that can be obtained only through defeating the last boss, Algalon, and doing another series of quests, is not as good as the mace Wild is currently wearing, which dropped from the very first boss in ICC25. He mentioned that they were doing a "mount run." I didn't remember there being a mount reward in Ulduar, and didn't find any information about it when I checked, but regardless I wasn't much interested in a mount anyway. I declined, saying "thanks, but I am running ICC10 with MM on tues/wed now." I got a "have fun" back from him and that was that.
Back to the MM raid, we had more than enough to field two ten man raids, but that would then leave a couple of folks out, so we pushed the time out a little later and we were able to pull together a full 25 man raid without having to bring in PUGs. We had two very solid tanks, even with Bd, who usually tanks, going on his druid healer instead. We had six healers: THREE druids, two holy priests, and a paladin. Two healers were assigned to the main tank, and Wild was assigned as the sole off tank healer. The other three raid healed.
I admit to being a bit worried when we finally got started. Afterall, Wild had been in on an MM ICC25 last friday that self-destructed when we couldn't properly pull the trash mobs. That raid had needed PUGs to fill it, and we didn't have that issue this time, but then this guild has very little experience in ICC25. The raid leader acknowledged that this was his first time leading an ICC25 raid. That part I wasn't worried about at all; he was a good raid leader, had tanked in ICC25 raids, and knew the fights.
We started on the trash, and worked through it efficiently and professionally. We had a rogue, and were able to avoid all of the traps as we killed our way to the first boss, Marrowgar. We had only one miss-step, when we aggroed a second mob group before we had finished up the one we were working on. A few raiders died, but we fought through it, killing all of the mobs and saving a wipe.
We set up for Lord Marrowgar. The positioning strategy was different than either of two other strategies I had seen before, but the basics were still the same. For this strategy, the main raid set up to the right of the entrance with the tanks standing at the door. This is the opposite of what I was used to. The tanks would pull Marrowgar to the door, and the rest of the raid would then run up behind Marrowgar, settling in well within melee range to avoid the lines of cold fire that would start spilling out as soon as the battle started.
This is a two tank fight, with both tanks needing to be properly positioned at all times so that the huge damage of Marrowgar's Cleave is shared across both tanks. We opted to go with three tanks to further spread out the damage being done by Cleave. Wild was the only healer asked to solo heal one of the tanks, which I've done before in ten man but never had to do in 25 man. The other two tanks had two healers assigned, although two of them were asked to raid heal as well.
We made two attempts. On both attempts Wild was hard pressed to keep his tank alive, and we failed to get to phase 2 of the battle before wiping. The tanks were struggling to coordinate their movements, which are absolutely critical to this fight. Out of position tanks were taking the full brunt of Cleaves and despite extraordinary efforts by the healers it was inevitable that tanks would start dying.
On our third attempt Wild kept his tank alive into the second phase, where Marrowgar wanders around attacking random raiders. We were able to rez the two dead tanks but shortly after Marrowgar returned to Cleaving his way into the tanks, their positioning slipped and they started dying again.
Maybe I should say something about what was going on while we were raiding. There were at least five lovely - and very vocal - ladies in the raid, and egged on by the rest of the raid, the one liners and running commentary on vent had us all in stitches. On the mild side were comments that it was a good thing that the healers weren't playing the drinking game where we took a shot whenever a raider died. That got an immediate response from the healers, Wild chiming in with "what makes you think we're not playing that game?" and another healer with "what, I'm not supposed to be drinking after each death? Oops."
On the subject of sex (of course, sex was a topic of even more import than booze) there were eye popping depictions - from the ladies! - of boobies:
( . )Y( . ) anyone?
And then someone had to say something about bacon being a better flavor than au naturale and the pronouncement from one young gentleman that he intended become rich as the inventor of the bacon flavored douche. "I'm the bacon douche king!"
And then there was this:
It was a long time before we even thought about running another attempt on Marrowgar, which at some point we tried and wiped a fourth time. Nobody was much bothered by that by then.
So, we didn't really get anywhere, but it was a heckova lot of fun, and one of those rare chances to bring a lot of friends together.
If it mattered, Wild led in healing with 3195 hps and 19.5% of the healing. Wild was out hpsed by our main priest healer with 3699 hps, but she came in second to Wild in total healing with 18%. Bd, on his druid, got 3rd place honors with 3049 hps/16% healing. The other druid, who was also an alt of a tank, finished last (6th) with 1738/9.3%.
For Wednesday we plan to switch back to ICC10 for a more serious raid, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss Tuesday night for anything.
Philly/Wild talk fairly regularly with an old friend who started with and still has a toon in FS while also having a toon in MM, like I do. It's fun talking about old times, but the topic always comes back to discussing the changes in the FS guild. As mentioned before, ICC25 raids were suspended indefinitely when too many guild raiders either left the guild or stopped coming to the raids. The two ICC10 mans continued with a select group of raiders who have raided together for a very long time. They are all close friends and have worked hard to conquer each new dungeon has it comes out. They've earned their rewards. The knock on these two raid groups, though, have always been that they have been unwilling to open their raids to other guildies to help them learn the encounters and help them gear up. "Start a new ten man" is the common response, and when that fails the guild is again left in kind of a haves and have nots situation. Efforts to convince the two raid groups to rotate in one or two guildies each week to build up enough geared raiders to ensure a successful 25 man was resisted under the rationale that it would slow down the progress of the ten mans. So I guess it was really no surprise that when we reached the tougher wings of ICC25 and struggled, and we had raiders who were not geared well enough or experienced enough because of lack of exposure to the ten mans, the more experienced raiders grew frustrated and stopped coming.
Well, on Tuesday the guild leader for FS announced that he was testing the waters again for a possible third ICC ten man. Frankly, I think that is doomed to failure, just as every other attempt to maintain a third ICC10 has eventually failed. Nothing has changed in the guild to make a third raid any more likely than before. No one in either of the established ICC10s wants to help a third team get on their feet. The explanation seems to be along the lines of why shouldn't the new team go through the learning curve like they did? Why should they sacrifice time and badges and progression? So, we were talking about that, and my friend, who is an alternate and part time raider in the ICC10 man that was still working on downing the Lich King, told me that the raid leader had informed him that he wasn't really good enough for their raid and that he would no longer be invited. It's just sad.
Of course, the subject of leaving the guild came up again, with the major factor seeming to be that we are still here because some of our oldest friends are still here. That begs the question of well, why don't we all just leave together? Here's the bottom line - of all of Wild's oldest friends in the guild, none of them play much anymore. Even my friend only recently started playing again after leaving the game for months, and may decide to stop playing again. Wild is the only truly active player. If Wild had left FS any of the previous times that we had gone through this, Wild would have missed out of opportunities to raid the best 25 man dungeons in the game, from Mount Hyjal to Naxxramas to Ulduar to Icecrown Citadel. The 25 man raiding will return, even if it goes dormant until Cataclysm. And Wild doesn't want to miss that. FS has survived longer than any other guild Wild would have jumped to, and despite it's problems is still a strong guild. I like MM, and have invested Philly in their future, but there is no overriding reason for Wild to join MM, and every reason to believe that FS will rise to the challenge of the 25 mans when the time comes.
Moving forward to the Tuesday evening raid with MM, we had an interesting problem. There were so many MM guildies wanting to raid that the raid leader started looking at whether we could field a 25 man raid instead. While we were working through that Wild got a whisper from one of the FS guild ten man raid leaders. He asked if Wild was interested in joining a ten man Ulduar run. Wild had never finished Ulduar, clearing two wings and part of a third, defeating ten of 13 encounters. So it would have been interesting to do a complete a clear with the kind of firepower we could bring to that older dungeon. However, there is nothing in Ulduar that Wild could use. Even the legendary main hand mace that can be obtained only through defeating the last boss, Algalon, and doing another series of quests, is not as good as the mace Wild is currently wearing, which dropped from the very first boss in ICC25. He mentioned that they were doing a "mount run." I didn't remember there being a mount reward in Ulduar, and didn't find any information about it when I checked, but regardless I wasn't much interested in a mount anyway. I declined, saying "thanks, but I am running ICC10 with MM on tues/wed now." I got a "have fun" back from him and that was that.
Back to the MM raid, we had more than enough to field two ten man raids, but that would then leave a couple of folks out, so we pushed the time out a little later and we were able to pull together a full 25 man raid without having to bring in PUGs. We had two very solid tanks, even with Bd, who usually tanks, going on his druid healer instead. We had six healers: THREE druids, two holy priests, and a paladin. Two healers were assigned to the main tank, and Wild was assigned as the sole off tank healer. The other three raid healed.
I admit to being a bit worried when we finally got started. Afterall, Wild had been in on an MM ICC25 last friday that self-destructed when we couldn't properly pull the trash mobs. That raid had needed PUGs to fill it, and we didn't have that issue this time, but then this guild has very little experience in ICC25. The raid leader acknowledged that this was his first time leading an ICC25 raid. That part I wasn't worried about at all; he was a good raid leader, had tanked in ICC25 raids, and knew the fights.
We started on the trash, and worked through it efficiently and professionally. We had a rogue, and were able to avoid all of the traps as we killed our way to the first boss, Marrowgar. We had only one miss-step, when we aggroed a second mob group before we had finished up the one we were working on. A few raiders died, but we fought through it, killing all of the mobs and saving a wipe.
We set up for Lord Marrowgar. The positioning strategy was different than either of two other strategies I had seen before, but the basics were still the same. For this strategy, the main raid set up to the right of the entrance with the tanks standing at the door. This is the opposite of what I was used to. The tanks would pull Marrowgar to the door, and the rest of the raid would then run up behind Marrowgar, settling in well within melee range to avoid the lines of cold fire that would start spilling out as soon as the battle started.
This is a two tank fight, with both tanks needing to be properly positioned at all times so that the huge damage of Marrowgar's Cleave is shared across both tanks. We opted to go with three tanks to further spread out the damage being done by Cleave. Wild was the only healer asked to solo heal one of the tanks, which I've done before in ten man but never had to do in 25 man. The other two tanks had two healers assigned, although two of them were asked to raid heal as well.
We made two attempts. On both attempts Wild was hard pressed to keep his tank alive, and we failed to get to phase 2 of the battle before wiping. The tanks were struggling to coordinate their movements, which are absolutely critical to this fight. Out of position tanks were taking the full brunt of Cleaves and despite extraordinary efforts by the healers it was inevitable that tanks would start dying.
On our third attempt Wild kept his tank alive into the second phase, where Marrowgar wanders around attacking random raiders. We were able to rez the two dead tanks but shortly after Marrowgar returned to Cleaving his way into the tanks, their positioning slipped and they started dying again.
Maybe I should say something about what was going on while we were raiding. There were at least five lovely - and very vocal - ladies in the raid, and egged on by the rest of the raid, the one liners and running commentary on vent had us all in stitches. On the mild side were comments that it was a good thing that the healers weren't playing the drinking game where we took a shot whenever a raider died. That got an immediate response from the healers, Wild chiming in with "what makes you think we're not playing that game?" and another healer with "what, I'm not supposed to be drinking after each death? Oops."
On the subject of sex (of course, sex was a topic of even more import than booze) there were eye popping depictions - from the ladies! - of boobies:
( . )Y( . ) anyone?
And then someone had to say something about bacon being a better flavor than au naturale and the pronouncement from one young gentleman that he intended become rich as the inventor of the bacon flavored douche. "I'm the bacon douche king!"
And then there was this:
It was a long time before we even thought about running another attempt on Marrowgar, which at some point we tried and wiped a fourth time. Nobody was much bothered by that by then.
So, we didn't really get anywhere, but it was a heckova lot of fun, and one of those rare chances to bring a lot of friends together.
If it mattered, Wild led in healing with 3195 hps and 19.5% of the healing. Wild was out hpsed by our main priest healer with 3699 hps, but she came in second to Wild in total healing with 18%. Bd, on his druid, got 3rd place honors with 3049 hps/16% healing. The other druid, who was also an alt of a tank, finished last (6th) with 1738/9.3%.
For Wednesday we plan to switch back to ICC10 for a more serious raid, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss Tuesday night for anything.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday - (24 May) PvP Rises Again
Monday - (24 May) PvP Rises Again
Last week we changed our pvp night from Friday's to Monday's due to travel schedules and other real life considerations. We are also trying out a start time closer to 9pm than our usual 10pm to get in more matches with less bleary eyes the next morning.
It had been awhile since all three of us were able to pvp together and we were excited about getting back into action. We called on our level 30s team of Ando, Lao, and EZ. Ando keeps us alive with his healing, pesters the allies with moonfire and other damaging attacks, and specializes in running off with the alliance flag. Lao is a devastating shadow priest that leaves piles of corpses in her wake. Both are level 39s in the level 30-39 bracket, and over the course of the evening set the standard for high end healing and damage dealing. EZ . . . well, EZ makes for great bait. Alliance pvpers anxious to get horde kills quickly pick out level 31 EZ as easy bait. But EZ has a range of tricks to stay alive, and between Ando's support healing and Lao's deadly assault that allie, and often the allie's friends, wind up dead while EZ moves on to tempt another allie into the trap.
We got off to a slow start in Warsong Gulch with a horde team that couldn't get organized and spent most of the battle farming kills at midfield instead of capping flags. We lost. From there we won two out of our next three WSG matches in very convincing fashion, and with Lao and Ando leading the teams in damage and healing respectively. The second loss was a heartbreaker as the two teams were very evenly matched and very strong on defense. The allies managed to cap the horde flag only once. We successfully defended every subsequent attempt, and managed to grab their flag a couple of times, but could not hold it. As time was ticking down we had one last chance, taking their flag and getting all the way the entrance to our hold before time ran out and we lost 1-0.
We also had a spirited battle in the Arathi Basin, where winning requires taking and holding various key bases. The alliance seemed to forget this, massing their forces in one or two spots. They ignored the fact that we had captured one more base than they had and were accumulating resources faster than they were. That resulted in large, running, pitched battles, which was exciting and challenging. A couple of times Ando led EZ slipped way from the main battles and charged into alliance held bases intentionally as a diversion. The first time we did that, putting up a tough but eventually futile assault before getting killed, EZ lamented "that that didn't go so well," to which Ando responded, "it accomplished what we were after," which was to keep the allies on the defensive and maintain our advantage in the number of bases we held. We won. Actual strategy in a pvp match? It works. Will wonders never cease.
EZ was 96% of the way to level 32 when we called it an evening. EZ hung around and signed up for another match in order to get that last 4%, but forty minutes later and still no match and she also called it a night. I'm certain she'll get herself to level 32 before next week's adventures.
Last week we changed our pvp night from Friday's to Monday's due to travel schedules and other real life considerations. We are also trying out a start time closer to 9pm than our usual 10pm to get in more matches with less bleary eyes the next morning.
It had been awhile since all three of us were able to pvp together and we were excited about getting back into action. We called on our level 30s team of Ando, Lao, and EZ. Ando keeps us alive with his healing, pesters the allies with moonfire and other damaging attacks, and specializes in running off with the alliance flag. Lao is a devastating shadow priest that leaves piles of corpses in her wake. Both are level 39s in the level 30-39 bracket, and over the course of the evening set the standard for high end healing and damage dealing. EZ . . . well, EZ makes for great bait. Alliance pvpers anxious to get horde kills quickly pick out level 31 EZ as easy bait. But EZ has a range of tricks to stay alive, and between Ando's support healing and Lao's deadly assault that allie, and often the allie's friends, wind up dead while EZ moves on to tempt another allie into the trap.
We got off to a slow start in Warsong Gulch with a horde team that couldn't get organized and spent most of the battle farming kills at midfield instead of capping flags. We lost. From there we won two out of our next three WSG matches in very convincing fashion, and with Lao and Ando leading the teams in damage and healing respectively. The second loss was a heartbreaker as the two teams were very evenly matched and very strong on defense. The allies managed to cap the horde flag only once. We successfully defended every subsequent attempt, and managed to grab their flag a couple of times, but could not hold it. As time was ticking down we had one last chance, taking their flag and getting all the way the entrance to our hold before time ran out and we lost 1-0.
We also had a spirited battle in the Arathi Basin, where winning requires taking and holding various key bases. The alliance seemed to forget this, massing their forces in one or two spots. They ignored the fact that we had captured one more base than they had and were accumulating resources faster than they were. That resulted in large, running, pitched battles, which was exciting and challenging. A couple of times Ando led EZ slipped way from the main battles and charged into alliance held bases intentionally as a diversion. The first time we did that, putting up a tough but eventually futile assault before getting killed, EZ lamented "that that didn't go so well," to which Ando responded, "it accomplished what we were after," which was to keep the allies on the defensive and maintain our advantage in the number of bases we held. We won. Actual strategy in a pvp match? It works. Will wonders never cease.
EZ was 96% of the way to level 32 when we called it an evening. EZ hung around and signed up for another match in order to get that last 4%, but forty minutes later and still no match and she also called it a night. I'm certain she'll get herself to level 32 before next week's adventures.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Sunday (23 May) - Farming the Coldarra
Sunday (23 May) - Farming the Coldarra
Strange coincidences keep cropping up where the Dungeon Finder is concerned.
Philly had recently reached Exalted with the Kirin Tor faction, and wanted to start working on faction rep for the Wyrmrest Accord. That led her to spend a couple of hours doing quests in the Coldarra area of Borean Tundra. The early quests are low 70s level that don't even show up on the map unless Philly turned on the special setting to see them, which she did. Most of those quests are tied to a starter quest that's dropped by the Spellbinder humanoids in that area. Philly got lucky and picked up the starter quest on her first mob kill. Eventually the easy questing led her to the Nexus, where the five man dungeon of the same name is located. Philly's only trip inside the Nexus was the aborted random dungeon run of the other day (the one where the healer wouldn't heal). Philly poked her head inside anyway, and then left to finish her questing.
Philly got to Friendly with the Wyrmrest Accord, and that enabled her to buy their tabard, which grants higher reputation points when worn during heroics. That task completed, Philly signed up for her first random heroic of the day. Want to guess where it was? Yep, the Nexus. Like I said, strange coincidences.
The Nexus group was a potent one - three paladins, Philly the priest, and a druid healer. I don't know what Philly's problem with healers are, because our druid quit the group after taking down just one boss. We certainly weren't having any problems, and how easy is it to heal a group in which every player can heal? Perhaps he had mother aggro or something. Anyway, one of the paladins healed until we got a new healer, and we finished the run. Philly did 2193 DPS and made liberal use of her AoE spell on the trash as Philly would never be able to pull aggro off of three paladins.
Back in Dalaran, a Wintergrasp battle was nearing so Philly hung around for that. We won handily. At this point Philly always heads back to Dalaran to work on her dailies or grab another random heroic. Also as usual, raiders were spamming the general chat around WG asking for VoA raids. A VOA25 was forming. No gear score requirement was mentioned. Philly's own WHGS in shadow was an underwhelming 2297, and even lower (2121) as a healer. Funny, but the only reason Philly "looks" better geared in shadow is that she uses higher ilevel pvp gear in that spec, which most raid leaders would rather I not be wearing into a pve raid. Coupled with that and the fact that healers are in greater demand than DPS, Philly whispered the raid leader, "DISC priest lf voa25". There wasn't an immediate response, not unusual if the raid leader was checking Philly's gear score or looking at her gear on the Armory.
Philly was prepared to head back to Dalaran, but surprise of surprises, Philly got an invite. It took about fifteen minutes to form up the raid, and while waiting I felt like an underage teenager that had slipped into an "R" rated movie. I figured Philly would get booted at any minute. But the raid filled with Philly still in it, and she was joined by four other healers (a holy priest, a shaman, a pally, and a druid - wow, one of everything!). There were no healing assignments made. Philly, in her first appearance in any raid whatsoever, decided she'd be best off doing "shield spam" duty. This is what disc priests do when assigned to raid heal. Or so I've read.
We started on the trash. I was using a special addon to Recount that attempts to calculate how much healing was "saved" by having a Shield on someone that was taking damage. It's not perfect, but it gives disc priests a better sense of how well they compare to other healers. I was also very interested in what Philly's numbers would be in a full raid like VoA with all of the buffs raiders get. And of course, I was hoping that Philly wouldn't get killed too quickly or too often.
Philly did fine on the trash, and soon we were in front of Toravon, who drops i264 gear. Philly was in the big time, now. Philly figured she had two main worries - one, would she run out of mana spamming Shields across the raid, and two, would she get eaten alive by the first Spark that elected to spawn close to me. Philly's healing priorities included ensuring that there was a Shield on both tanks, that Philly always had an active Prayer of Mending (POM) in play, use her Prayer of Healing AoE on every AoE attack by Toravon, and firing off a Penance on the tank or anyone else taking damage as often as it was available. All that activity did draw Philly's mana down to around 55% midway through the fight, and when a shaman cast Bloodlust to speed up the DPS, Philly loosed her shadowfiend pet on Toravon, which does a little damage but more importantly also regens Philly's mana over 15 seconds. Philly got a few spark tickles, but Philly was also keeping a Shield on herself (clever girl) and was never in any serious trouble.
Toravon died. Among the three drops there was a cloth item that Philly rolled on, but she rolled low (24 out of 100) and didn't get it. But Philly was dam proud of getting her first Toravon kill.
We then went and killed Koravon as well, with only 22 raiders. A beautiful DPS cloak dropped, but then Philly realized it was for Mages only. Sigh.
There was considerable interest in getting to Emalon as well. Although Emalon is a "lesser" boss, the fight mechanics require a lot of coordination. We were grouping up to see if we'd have enough after those that wanted to leave had left, but it became a moot point because someone aggroed a trash mob with no tank in sight. We ran for our lives. Philly had a bit of a head start, and made it as far as the foot of the long, high set of stairs up to the exit, listening to the death screams of raiders behind him all the way. The screams gave way to the aggro warning that the mob had targeted Philly. It was moving much faster than Philly could go. As it came up behind me Philly cast Fade, temporarily dropping all aggro. It went to kill someone behind me that it had missed, and then came back after me - and ran straight past Philly and after the one raider that was farther up the stairs than Philly was. Philly was under no illusion of safety, though. It didn't matter whether that raider escaped or died. Either way, the mob would be coming back for Philly. Sure enough, the mob killed the raider and set it's sights back on Philly. With Fade still on cooldown, all Philly could do was gain a few seconds with Dispersion, which greatly reduces damage for a few seconds. Not enough seconds to reach the exit, though, and Philly died.
The raid broke up and Philly didn't get a chance at Emalon.
I'm still a little astonished that Philly was able to sneak into a VoA run. She now has the Achievement to prove she's done it, too.
On the Toravon fight Philly's health per second (hps) was 4415, and she contributed 12.5% of the healing, good for 5th (ie, last) among the healers. The others did around 5k, with the pally at the top with 5652, also aided by his Bubbles (the pally version of a shield).
Philly's hps was lower on Koralon, but she contributed more total healing: 4282 hps, 17.9% healing. Philly moved up to 4th in total healing, but surprised herself by leading in hps. The shaman came in second with 4147 hps.
Overall, Philly's numbers were 3780 hps/13.7% healing, counting bosses and trash mobs. She was second in hps, and beat the druid in total healing for 4th. Philly did a lot better than I expected.
Philly proudly displays her Toravon and Koravon kills:
Strange coincidences keep cropping up where the Dungeon Finder is concerned.
Philly had recently reached Exalted with the Kirin Tor faction, and wanted to start working on faction rep for the Wyrmrest Accord. That led her to spend a couple of hours doing quests in the Coldarra area of Borean Tundra. The early quests are low 70s level that don't even show up on the map unless Philly turned on the special setting to see them, which she did. Most of those quests are tied to a starter quest that's dropped by the Spellbinder humanoids in that area. Philly got lucky and picked up the starter quest on her first mob kill. Eventually the easy questing led her to the Nexus, where the five man dungeon of the same name is located. Philly's only trip inside the Nexus was the aborted random dungeon run of the other day (the one where the healer wouldn't heal). Philly poked her head inside anyway, and then left to finish her questing.
Philly got to Friendly with the Wyrmrest Accord, and that enabled her to buy their tabard, which grants higher reputation points when worn during heroics. That task completed, Philly signed up for her first random heroic of the day. Want to guess where it was? Yep, the Nexus. Like I said, strange coincidences.
The Nexus group was a potent one - three paladins, Philly the priest, and a druid healer. I don't know what Philly's problem with healers are, because our druid quit the group after taking down just one boss. We certainly weren't having any problems, and how easy is it to heal a group in which every player can heal? Perhaps he had mother aggro or something. Anyway, one of the paladins healed until we got a new healer, and we finished the run. Philly did 2193 DPS and made liberal use of her AoE spell on the trash as Philly would never be able to pull aggro off of three paladins.
Back in Dalaran, a Wintergrasp battle was nearing so Philly hung around for that. We won handily. At this point Philly always heads back to Dalaran to work on her dailies or grab another random heroic. Also as usual, raiders were spamming the general chat around WG asking for VoA raids. A VOA25 was forming. No gear score requirement was mentioned. Philly's own WHGS in shadow was an underwhelming 2297, and even lower (2121) as a healer. Funny, but the only reason Philly "looks" better geared in shadow is that she uses higher ilevel pvp gear in that spec, which most raid leaders would rather I not be wearing into a pve raid. Coupled with that and the fact that healers are in greater demand than DPS, Philly whispered the raid leader, "DISC priest lf voa25". There wasn't an immediate response, not unusual if the raid leader was checking Philly's gear score or looking at her gear on the Armory.
Philly was prepared to head back to Dalaran, but surprise of surprises, Philly got an invite. It took about fifteen minutes to form up the raid, and while waiting I felt like an underage teenager that had slipped into an "R" rated movie. I figured Philly would get booted at any minute. But the raid filled with Philly still in it, and she was joined by four other healers (a holy priest, a shaman, a pally, and a druid - wow, one of everything!). There were no healing assignments made. Philly, in her first appearance in any raid whatsoever, decided she'd be best off doing "shield spam" duty. This is what disc priests do when assigned to raid heal. Or so I've read.
We started on the trash. I was using a special addon to Recount that attempts to calculate how much healing was "saved" by having a Shield on someone that was taking damage. It's not perfect, but it gives disc priests a better sense of how well they compare to other healers. I was also very interested in what Philly's numbers would be in a full raid like VoA with all of the buffs raiders get. And of course, I was hoping that Philly wouldn't get killed too quickly or too often.
Philly did fine on the trash, and soon we were in front of Toravon, who drops i264 gear. Philly was in the big time, now. Philly figured she had two main worries - one, would she run out of mana spamming Shields across the raid, and two, would she get eaten alive by the first Spark that elected to spawn close to me. Philly's healing priorities included ensuring that there was a Shield on both tanks, that Philly always had an active Prayer of Mending (POM) in play, use her Prayer of Healing AoE on every AoE attack by Toravon, and firing off a Penance on the tank or anyone else taking damage as often as it was available. All that activity did draw Philly's mana down to around 55% midway through the fight, and when a shaman cast Bloodlust to speed up the DPS, Philly loosed her shadowfiend pet on Toravon, which does a little damage but more importantly also regens Philly's mana over 15 seconds. Philly got a few spark tickles, but Philly was also keeping a Shield on herself (clever girl) and was never in any serious trouble.
Toravon died. Among the three drops there was a cloth item that Philly rolled on, but she rolled low (24 out of 100) and didn't get it. But Philly was dam proud of getting her first Toravon kill.
We then went and killed Koravon as well, with only 22 raiders. A beautiful DPS cloak dropped, but then Philly realized it was for Mages only. Sigh.
There was considerable interest in getting to Emalon as well. Although Emalon is a "lesser" boss, the fight mechanics require a lot of coordination. We were grouping up to see if we'd have enough after those that wanted to leave had left, but it became a moot point because someone aggroed a trash mob with no tank in sight. We ran for our lives. Philly had a bit of a head start, and made it as far as the foot of the long, high set of stairs up to the exit, listening to the death screams of raiders behind him all the way. The screams gave way to the aggro warning that the mob had targeted Philly. It was moving much faster than Philly could go. As it came up behind me Philly cast Fade, temporarily dropping all aggro. It went to kill someone behind me that it had missed, and then came back after me - and ran straight past Philly and after the one raider that was farther up the stairs than Philly was. Philly was under no illusion of safety, though. It didn't matter whether that raider escaped or died. Either way, the mob would be coming back for Philly. Sure enough, the mob killed the raider and set it's sights back on Philly. With Fade still on cooldown, all Philly could do was gain a few seconds with Dispersion, which greatly reduces damage for a few seconds. Not enough seconds to reach the exit, though, and Philly died.
The raid broke up and Philly didn't get a chance at Emalon.
I'm still a little astonished that Philly was able to sneak into a VoA run. She now has the Achievement to prove she's done it, too.
On the Toravon fight Philly's health per second (hps) was 4415, and she contributed 12.5% of the healing, good for 5th (ie, last) among the healers. The others did around 5k, with the pally at the top with 5652, also aided by his Bubbles (the pally version of a shield).
Philly's hps was lower on Koralon, but she contributed more total healing: 4282 hps, 17.9% healing. Philly moved up to 4th in total healing, but surprised herself by leading in hps. The shaman came in second with 4147 hps.
Overall, Philly's numbers were 3780 hps/13.7% healing, counting bosses and trash mobs. She was second in hps, and beat the druid in total healing for 4th. Philly did a lot better than I expected.
Philly proudly displays her Toravon and Koravon kills:
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Weekend (23 May) - Texas Hold'em
Weekend (23 May) - Texas Hold'em
It was a weekend of numbers. I considered naming this post "Happy takes a Dump" due to the sudden reluctance of buyers to spend any gold on the Auction House this weekend. Friday's "take" set a new low and Saturday didn't start off very well, either. Still, Philly wasn't shy about spending Happy's money, what with the revolving door of new gear needing enchants and gems, but those modest expenditures (after all, Philly can craft her own gems) still took a bite out of what little cash was coming in. JB's high profit flasks and a windfall by selling two high end herb bags saved Sunday from an otherwise poor take as well. The spell power flasks that JB makes via her Alchemy profession are excruciatingly expensive to make, but careful buying of materials and selective selling make it Happy's most profitable product at the moment. The Fiery Weapon enchant is one of those feast or famine items. The enchant is very cheap to make, although only a relatively few enchanters have the recipe. There is no consistent demand for the enchant - but when someone wants it, they generally want it RIGHT NOW; otherwise, it languishes on the AH with no interest. The "RIGHT NOW" aspect is where the gold can be made, setting a high price and betting a customer will not be able to wait for a cheaper price. That means Happy holds his stock off the AH when silly enchanters get into a bidding war and drop the price down to what is nominally still profitable, but far less than what is possible. Happy has sold the enchants for as low as 40 gold, to a high of 72g.
I also got into a debate with myself over gear scores (hey, if I can have two accounts and multiple toons I'm certainly capable of debating myself - I'm just never sure who won). Gear score is a statistic developed by the site Web-Heroes. It takes a lot of data about a character's gear (ilevel, gems, enchants, etc), crunches some numbers, and then comes up with a score that can be compared to other characters and also used to get a sense of what level of dungeon/raid that character is geared for. The heaviest weight in the score is the ilevel of the gear. The scoring makes no effort to assess whether that gear is the right gear, or how good or bad the character is as a player. Used correctly, it can help assess a character's progression, and can be an aid in determining whether a character is adequately geared for a dungeon/raid. In PUG raids it can be abused, refusing to allow good players into a raid only because of some perceived flaw in their gear. It is also used to deny players from being accepted into guilds that insist on a certain minimum gear score.
However, none of the above was what got me talking to myself. What confused me was a forum thread that started with the question: "What would my gear score be if I was decked out in all ilevel 232 gear?" Taking into account that entire gear sets all at the same exact level is, from a practical perspective, both nearly impossible and unwanted, since there is a high likelihood that the player would have to refuse gear better than i232 to achieve it. But I think the idea was to get a feel for whether someone who's ilevel average hovered around i232 was good enough for, say, ICC10.
The general answer was that an ilevel gear set that averaged around i232 would result in a gear score of around 4500-5000. This stunned me. Wild's "average" ilevel of his gear is well into the i250+ area. Wild has only one i232 piece of gear; the rest are i245 or better, mostly better with 9 i264 pieces out of 17 total pieces. Wild's gear score is 3111.
The more I read the more confused I got. I checked the gear scores of a few friends who I knew were among the best decked out raiders in the two guilds - raiders who have downed the final boss in ICC10. You don't get any better gear than that short of hard mode ICC. None of them had gear scores beyond the 3000's.
The answer to the riddle was a simple one once I found it, as is the case with most riddles. There is an addon that players use in game to calculate gear scores on themselves and anyone else they want to. I made an assumption that the in game gear score addon was based on the same algorithm used by the wow-heroes site. It isn't. In fact, the in game addon gear scores are in general nearly twice as high as the wow-heroes number. So, Wild's 3k plus WHGS (wow-heroes gear score) equates to something like 6k on the in game addon. Mystery solved.
Then there was Saturday night, when I was doing a different kind of number crunching and gaming - Texas Hold'em poker. Our cul-de-sac, and other friends around the neighborhood, get together to play cards on a very irregular basis. If we're lucky (ie, when we're not broke) we play about once a month. There's no schedule, and it's usually pretty last minute, and half the time not enough folks show up. It was a very chilly Saturday evening and we had a good turnout with seven players. Chilly evenings are important because we play in a garage in which we refuse to close the door in order to allow the cigar smoke to escape. Plus, the colder it is the more beer we drink. Chilly is good. ;-)
I won't go into all the rules other than to say it's based on regular poker rules, and that a "hand" is based on two down cards for each player and five community cards which each player uses to build the best possible five card hand.
We have two blinds of 2 and 4 dollars, and a bet limit of 10 dollars, fairly high stakes when you figure the buy in is 60 dollars. For me that's a good bit of money to lose, which is why we don't play that often, and why I often go home early or just hang around and chat (it doesn't take long to lose that 60 dollars). The first night I was invited to play more than a year ago I walked away over $300 richer. I've been paying it back and then some ever since. Playing cards with friends is fun, but rarely profitable.
We usually play from around 7pm to around midnight, or when the number of players falls below four. The longer the weeks between games, the higher I can set my own stake, so I brought $100 on Saturday (we haven't played in about three months).
On a bad night I'm usually home by 10pm, so the Mrs feared to ask what happened when I came home shortly after 10pm. Even for me, losing a $100 that quick would mean both extremely bad luck and even worse play. When I started this post, I didn't know if I would be in the Mrs doghouse or taking her out for a Sunday breakfast - fortunately, it was the latter. The card game finished early because three players burned up their stakes early and, down to four, with two holding very small piles of chips, they opted to get out while they still had some cash to lose. I won the pot on the night, winning $182 of other people's money. Of course, I'm sure I'll spend the next few Texas Hold'em nights losing it all back.
Philly got herself a surprising first kill on Sunday; more about that in the next post.
It was a weekend of numbers. I considered naming this post "Happy takes a Dump" due to the sudden reluctance of buyers to spend any gold on the Auction House this weekend. Friday's "take" set a new low and Saturday didn't start off very well, either. Still, Philly wasn't shy about spending Happy's money, what with the revolving door of new gear needing enchants and gems, but those modest expenditures (after all, Philly can craft her own gems) still took a bite out of what little cash was coming in. JB's high profit flasks and a windfall by selling two high end herb bags saved Sunday from an otherwise poor take as well. The spell power flasks that JB makes via her Alchemy profession are excruciatingly expensive to make, but careful buying of materials and selective selling make it Happy's most profitable product at the moment. The Fiery Weapon enchant is one of those feast or famine items. The enchant is very cheap to make, although only a relatively few enchanters have the recipe. There is no consistent demand for the enchant - but when someone wants it, they generally want it RIGHT NOW; otherwise, it languishes on the AH with no interest. The "RIGHT NOW" aspect is where the gold can be made, setting a high price and betting a customer will not be able to wait for a cheaper price. That means Happy holds his stock off the AH when silly enchanters get into a bidding war and drop the price down to what is nominally still profitable, but far less than what is possible. Happy has sold the enchants for as low as 40 gold, to a high of 72g.
I also got into a debate with myself over gear scores (hey, if I can have two accounts and multiple toons I'm certainly capable of debating myself - I'm just never sure who won). Gear score is a statistic developed by the site Web-Heroes. It takes a lot of data about a character's gear (ilevel, gems, enchants, etc), crunches some numbers, and then comes up with a score that can be compared to other characters and also used to get a sense of what level of dungeon/raid that character is geared for. The heaviest weight in the score is the ilevel of the gear. The scoring makes no effort to assess whether that gear is the right gear, or how good or bad the character is as a player. Used correctly, it can help assess a character's progression, and can be an aid in determining whether a character is adequately geared for a dungeon/raid. In PUG raids it can be abused, refusing to allow good players into a raid only because of some perceived flaw in their gear. It is also used to deny players from being accepted into guilds that insist on a certain minimum gear score.
However, none of the above was what got me talking to myself. What confused me was a forum thread that started with the question: "What would my gear score be if I was decked out in all ilevel 232 gear?" Taking into account that entire gear sets all at the same exact level is, from a practical perspective, both nearly impossible and unwanted, since there is a high likelihood that the player would have to refuse gear better than i232 to achieve it. But I think the idea was to get a feel for whether someone who's ilevel average hovered around i232 was good enough for, say, ICC10.
The general answer was that an ilevel gear set that averaged around i232 would result in a gear score of around 4500-5000. This stunned me. Wild's "average" ilevel of his gear is well into the i250+ area. Wild has only one i232 piece of gear; the rest are i245 or better, mostly better with 9 i264 pieces out of 17 total pieces. Wild's gear score is 3111.
The more I read the more confused I got. I checked the gear scores of a few friends who I knew were among the best decked out raiders in the two guilds - raiders who have downed the final boss in ICC10. You don't get any better gear than that short of hard mode ICC. None of them had gear scores beyond the 3000's.
The answer to the riddle was a simple one once I found it, as is the case with most riddles. There is an addon that players use in game to calculate gear scores on themselves and anyone else they want to. I made an assumption that the in game gear score addon was based on the same algorithm used by the wow-heroes site. It isn't. In fact, the in game addon gear scores are in general nearly twice as high as the wow-heroes number. So, Wild's 3k plus WHGS (wow-heroes gear score) equates to something like 6k on the in game addon. Mystery solved.
Then there was Saturday night, when I was doing a different kind of number crunching and gaming - Texas Hold'em poker. Our cul-de-sac, and other friends around the neighborhood, get together to play cards on a very irregular basis. If we're lucky (ie, when we're not broke) we play about once a month. There's no schedule, and it's usually pretty last minute, and half the time not enough folks show up. It was a very chilly Saturday evening and we had a good turnout with seven players. Chilly evenings are important because we play in a garage in which we refuse to close the door in order to allow the cigar smoke to escape. Plus, the colder it is the more beer we drink. Chilly is good. ;-)
I won't go into all the rules other than to say it's based on regular poker rules, and that a "hand" is based on two down cards for each player and five community cards which each player uses to build the best possible five card hand.
We have two blinds of 2 and 4 dollars, and a bet limit of 10 dollars, fairly high stakes when you figure the buy in is 60 dollars. For me that's a good bit of money to lose, which is why we don't play that often, and why I often go home early or just hang around and chat (it doesn't take long to lose that 60 dollars). The first night I was invited to play more than a year ago I walked away over $300 richer. I've been paying it back and then some ever since. Playing cards with friends is fun, but rarely profitable.
We usually play from around 7pm to around midnight, or when the number of players falls below four. The longer the weeks between games, the higher I can set my own stake, so I brought $100 on Saturday (we haven't played in about three months).
On a bad night I'm usually home by 10pm, so the Mrs feared to ask what happened when I came home shortly after 10pm. Even for me, losing a $100 that quick would mean both extremely bad luck and even worse play. When I started this post, I didn't know if I would be in the Mrs doghouse or taking her out for a Sunday breakfast - fortunately, it was the latter. The card game finished early because three players burned up their stakes early and, down to four, with two holding very small piles of chips, they opted to get out while they still had some cash to lose. I won the pot on the night, winning $182 of other people's money. Of course, I'm sure I'll spend the next few Texas Hold'em nights losing it all back.
Philly got herself a surprising first kill on Sunday; more about that in the next post.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Thursday (20 May) - Welcome Back Party
Thursday (20 May) - Welcome Back Party
[Note: Somewhere in between picking up the dog at the kennel, getting our cat Toby's teeth cleaned, and getting the rest of our four footed family settled back into a more normal chaos after getting back from Palm Springs, I forgot to post this. See, it wasn't my fault! :P ]
It wasn't exactly a planned party, but when the MM raid leader, Bd, saw Philly login around 10pm Thursday night, he immediately lassoed her into a five man heroic. Bd was running on his druid alt as the healer. Philly had the added pleasure of having Lady Hunter also in the group on her paladin alt. She would be tanking. The other two DDSers were from MM and were also alts looking to improve their gear and have some fun. The MM guild is very active with alts, and grouping up with them for random heroics is becoming a daily pleasure for Philly.
The random dungeon choice of UP was a bit of deja vu for Philly, as she had done UP with a random (non-guildie) group earlier in the day. I didn't know we could get the same dungeon more than once a day, but apparently so. It was a pretty straightforward run with no surprises. Philly pulled 1825 dps, which wasn't bad, and at least beat the DK (1492 dps) but came in behind the fury warrior (1984 dps).
After UP players then switched alts around, and Bd played his own DK, becoming the tank while Lady Hunter's paladin moved from tanking to healing. It was a strange combination. Lady Hunter said it felt so weird that "Wild" wasn't healing and she was (she's usually a DPS). Bd and Lady Hunter were both still learning their specs and we had some fun in the next dungeon, Violet Hold. VH has a set of randomly selected bosses, and we got the toughest of them, the one with all the X's and Z's in his name. Most groups simply overpower him, but we weren't geared well enough to do that. We wiped on the first try. Also in VH, if you wipe you start over from the beginning. On our second run through VH we followed the strategy of kiting the difficult boss on a "run and shoot" kind of approach, and although it took a little longer than a heavier geared group would have taken, we killed him. Killing him with finesse instead of muscle seemed all more sweet.
In between the boss fights in VH we had to fight waves of adds, and we somehow managed to dally too long and got multiple waves. Both the healer and the tank died before we could get ourselves organized, but with three mobs still alive the elemental shaman in the group essentially tanked them while Philly switched to healing to keep the last three of us alive long enough to kill them. We are a versatile bunch. The tank also died on the final boss (even with Philly sneaking in some Shields and tossing in Prayer of Mending - I can't help healing even as a DPS), but we we brought him down anyway. It was riotuss fun.
From VH we decided to up the ante and go for a more difficult challenge, heroic five man Trial of the Champion (ToC). The random dungeon finder wouldn't let our full group of five port into ToC, however, stating that two of our DPS were not geared well enough. Philly was a bit gratified, though, to learn that she met the gear requirements. All that work building her gear set was starting to pay off. The two DPS alts were willing to switch to their mains, but we quickly decided that we weren't going to let the opinion of the dungeon finder change our plans. Casting caution to the winds, we ignored the dungeon finder, flew to the Argent Tournament grounds (where ToC is located) and entered the dungeon the old fashioned way - we walked in.
This was Philly's first introduction to ToC. She had planned on doing normal mode ToC first, to see how difficult that would be, but what the heck, we went for it in heroic mode. Heroic ToC drops i219 gear, so Philly might get a chance at an upgrade.
The first encounter in five man ToC is a joust with a wave of three groups of mounted mobs, followed by jousts against the Grand Champions, the three bosses. Philly is the most practiced in the Wild family at jousting on horseback, and she acquitted herself well in what for most is a pretty easy opening battle. The keys to making this battle easy are: (1) always keep up a full three stack of defensive shields; (2) if the health of your mount gets low, grab another mount as there are several lined up along the wall; (3) when a boss goes down keep him down by running over him or he'll run and re-mount; and (4) if you die during this part of the encounter you can run back from the graveyard and re-enter and re-mount (something that most dungeons don't allow and I often forget).
After the jousting we all dismounted to face the three bosses again, this time on foot. Just don't forget to replace your lance with your regular weapon. We downed all three of them on our first try, and we were feeling pretty good about our decision to tackle ToC in heroic mode.
The second encounter is against either Eadric or Paletress. I prefer Eadric as his only "trick" is to blind and damage players that are looking at him when he casts Radiance (so don't look at him!). Of course, we got Paletress.
Paletress entered the arena with her three groups of adds, which we killed efficiently to set up the showdown with Paletress. We hammered away at her and quickly pounded her down to 25%. Paletress then cast Confess, and a shadowy mob formed. Philly quickly noticed that her DPS casts at Paletress were now being reflected back. Philly wasn't planning on killing herself, so she stopped attacked Paletress and targeted the new mob, which was in fact stronger and more deadly than Paletress herself. I think all the DPS took some heavy hits before we switched targets, though, and in the end we wiped. On our second try, though, we hung in there through the Fears, kept our DPS firmly on the Summoned boss when it appeared, killed it, and then finished off Paletress.
The third and final encounter is against the Black Knight, and we have to fight him three times: as an undead, as a skeleton, and then as a ghost. If we were going to have real trouble, this is where it would be. Amazingly, we killed him all three times on our first attempt.
After our heroic victory over ToC, we decided to farm Toc a couple more times on normal mode as a couple of folks wanted the stone keeper's shards and frozen orbs that drop. Normal ToC only drops i200 gear, but that didn't stop Philly from getting lucky.
Philly did quite well in the gear department, as a matter of fact. She picked up two i200 trinkets, one with +hit and the other with +int. While their use is pretty situational, they give Philly some flexibility in gear choices depending on what she needs. Philly also won [Gaze of the Unknown] from the Black Knight, an i219 helm with a lot of +hit that immediately found a home on Philly's hit capped set. She also won [Embrace of Madness], an i219 chest piece that was a solid upgrade for both her healing and DPS sets. All in all a very good evening that ended well after 1am.
[Note: Somewhere in between picking up the dog at the kennel, getting our cat Toby's teeth cleaned, and getting the rest of our four footed family settled back into a more normal chaos after getting back from Palm Springs, I forgot to post this. See, it wasn't my fault! :P ]
It wasn't exactly a planned party, but when the MM raid leader, Bd, saw Philly login around 10pm Thursday night, he immediately lassoed her into a five man heroic. Bd was running on his druid alt as the healer. Philly had the added pleasure of having Lady Hunter also in the group on her paladin alt. She would be tanking. The other two DDSers were from MM and were also alts looking to improve their gear and have some fun. The MM guild is very active with alts, and grouping up with them for random heroics is becoming a daily pleasure for Philly.
The random dungeon choice of UP was a bit of deja vu for Philly, as she had done UP with a random (non-guildie) group earlier in the day. I didn't know we could get the same dungeon more than once a day, but apparently so. It was a pretty straightforward run with no surprises. Philly pulled 1825 dps, which wasn't bad, and at least beat the DK (1492 dps) but came in behind the fury warrior (1984 dps).
After UP players then switched alts around, and Bd played his own DK, becoming the tank while Lady Hunter's paladin moved from tanking to healing. It was a strange combination. Lady Hunter said it felt so weird that "Wild" wasn't healing and she was (she's usually a DPS). Bd and Lady Hunter were both still learning their specs and we had some fun in the next dungeon, Violet Hold. VH has a set of randomly selected bosses, and we got the toughest of them, the one with all the X's and Z's in his name. Most groups simply overpower him, but we weren't geared well enough to do that. We wiped on the first try. Also in VH, if you wipe you start over from the beginning. On our second run through VH we followed the strategy of kiting the difficult boss on a "run and shoot" kind of approach, and although it took a little longer than a heavier geared group would have taken, we killed him. Killing him with finesse instead of muscle seemed all more sweet.
In between the boss fights in VH we had to fight waves of adds, and we somehow managed to dally too long and got multiple waves. Both the healer and the tank died before we could get ourselves organized, but with three mobs still alive the elemental shaman in the group essentially tanked them while Philly switched to healing to keep the last three of us alive long enough to kill them. We are a versatile bunch. The tank also died on the final boss (even with Philly sneaking in some Shields and tossing in Prayer of Mending - I can't help healing even as a DPS), but we we brought him down anyway. It was riotuss fun.
From VH we decided to up the ante and go for a more difficult challenge, heroic five man Trial of the Champion (ToC). The random dungeon finder wouldn't let our full group of five port into ToC, however, stating that two of our DPS were not geared well enough. Philly was a bit gratified, though, to learn that she met the gear requirements. All that work building her gear set was starting to pay off. The two DPS alts were willing to switch to their mains, but we quickly decided that we weren't going to let the opinion of the dungeon finder change our plans. Casting caution to the winds, we ignored the dungeon finder, flew to the Argent Tournament grounds (where ToC is located) and entered the dungeon the old fashioned way - we walked in.
This was Philly's first introduction to ToC. She had planned on doing normal mode ToC first, to see how difficult that would be, but what the heck, we went for it in heroic mode. Heroic ToC drops i219 gear, so Philly might get a chance at an upgrade.
The first encounter in five man ToC is a joust with a wave of three groups of mounted mobs, followed by jousts against the Grand Champions, the three bosses. Philly is the most practiced in the Wild family at jousting on horseback, and she acquitted herself well in what for most is a pretty easy opening battle. The keys to making this battle easy are: (1) always keep up a full three stack of defensive shields; (2) if the health of your mount gets low, grab another mount as there are several lined up along the wall; (3) when a boss goes down keep him down by running over him or he'll run and re-mount; and (4) if you die during this part of the encounter you can run back from the graveyard and re-enter and re-mount (something that most dungeons don't allow and I often forget).
After the jousting we all dismounted to face the three bosses again, this time on foot. Just don't forget to replace your lance with your regular weapon. We downed all three of them on our first try, and we were feeling pretty good about our decision to tackle ToC in heroic mode.
The second encounter is against either Eadric or Paletress. I prefer Eadric as his only "trick" is to blind and damage players that are looking at him when he casts Radiance (so don't look at him!). Of course, we got Paletress.
Paletress entered the arena with her three groups of adds, which we killed efficiently to set up the showdown with Paletress. We hammered away at her and quickly pounded her down to 25%. Paletress then cast Confess, and a shadowy mob formed. Philly quickly noticed that her DPS casts at Paletress were now being reflected back. Philly wasn't planning on killing herself, so she stopped attacked Paletress and targeted the new mob, which was in fact stronger and more deadly than Paletress herself. I think all the DPS took some heavy hits before we switched targets, though, and in the end we wiped. On our second try, though, we hung in there through the Fears, kept our DPS firmly on the Summoned boss when it appeared, killed it, and then finished off Paletress.
The third and final encounter is against the Black Knight, and we have to fight him three times: as an undead, as a skeleton, and then as a ghost. If we were going to have real trouble, this is where it would be. Amazingly, we killed him all three times on our first attempt.
After our heroic victory over ToC, we decided to farm Toc a couple more times on normal mode as a couple of folks wanted the stone keeper's shards and frozen orbs that drop. Normal ToC only drops i200 gear, but that didn't stop Philly from getting lucky.
Philly did quite well in the gear department, as a matter of fact. She picked up two i200 trinkets, one with +hit and the other with +int. While their use is pretty situational, they give Philly some flexibility in gear choices depending on what she needs. Philly also won [Gaze of the Unknown] from the Black Knight, an i219 helm with a lot of +hit that immediately found a home on Philly's hit capped set. She also won [Embrace of Madness], an i219 chest piece that was a solid upgrade for both her healing and DPS sets. All in all a very good evening that ended well after 1am.
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