Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Epix... I has some

I haven't had a ton of time to log in because I've had visitors, but I have been able to do a bunch of crafting. I'm getting pretty close to my original pre-Naxx goal. Which is funny, because I've already been there and cleared the Arachnid Quarter. Anyway, time for another gear review. Now that I've got my wowhead script set up, I'll itemize here for easier reading instead of the weird combined setup I used last time:

*edit* You know what? I don't like the way this new list works. I'll make another gear post later today with the new format. Sorry about that.

Now that I'm Imba certified for Naxx, I am also going to start getting my resilience set upgraded. My merciless/brutal getup is still pretty good, but it won't be for long. I haven't started doing any serious bgs or arenas because I've been so focused on my PvE gear. Once I have everything maxed pre-raid, then it's all dependent on how much raiding we do, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. I'll have to keep up with my Frostweave Cloth purchases and start with the crafted resilience set. It's a Stam/Intel/Crit set so I should be able to set it up with a solid discipline spec. I'm gonna have fun setting up for PvP. It's also time to be reviewing my bars, they're not ideal right now. Maybe I need to buckle down and set up a custom UI. That's just so much work though. We'll see

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Arachnophobia... nah, we got it

We started Naxxramus this weekend and despite my misgivings about our gear level we did great. We started late and had some trouble getting a full group, which is not unusual. What was unusual was we were having trouble filling a dps spot. Had two tanks, two and a half healers, and all but one dps. After two mages came in and dropped out, Bob came online with his DK, which worked out real well. Jr was running the raid, since the guild rule is pretty much you want it you lead it, and that worked out really well too, except that he has a bad habit of interrupting people. Some of that's just a function of the headphones, but when I specifically try and talk to the other healer, butting into the middle of it will just delay things more.

We started out with the Plague Quarter. That did not go so well. We were having real problems with those two gargoyles guarding the doorway. We tried everything we could think of, even running me and Jag the offtank all the way to one side and the rest of the raid all the way to the other to try to mitigate damage. I had no problems keeping Jag up, but it still didn't seem to help. So after a few wipes we decided to try a different wing. There was a lively discussion of which wing the internet said was the easiest. I'm of the belief that "easy" and "hard" are relative to what your strengths and weaknesses are, not what the internet says, so I was getting a little antsy about the whole thing. Finally, they settled on the Arachnid Quarter.

I have to say, the Arachnid Quarter went really well for us. It went well to the point that I don't really remember if or how many times we wiped from start to finish of that wing. We wiped a few times on Widow, it just took a while to get the timing on killing the adds down. I was really impressed with the tanking abilities of the DK. I was able to stick to him like glue and didn't have any trouble keeping him healed up while the rest of the raid was alive. I even had time to keep PoM and Renew up on the tank as well. I really like that I can shield the DK whenever I feel like it. Of course, he was a good tank too who was adaptable to whatever strategy we wanted to try, which made it that much easier.

All the loot was taken and used, that was good too. I'd much rather see that than d/e fodder. It took us a good 2 hours to clear that wing, and there was some talk about trying to do another one, but some people had to go so we called it while we were ahead.

It was so nice to have two strong healers and an off healer for this raid. Since War's a drood he took over the main tank heals, I took the off tank and AOE, and Tran did Flash of Light top ups and dispels as needed. The hardest part for me, having done mostly 5 man heroics, was sticking to my own job. I'm so used to doing ALL the healing and dispelling, it was difficult not to go nuts healing everyone. There was a couple times I just had to take a deep breath and say "trust them, it's OK". Everything worked out great.

Monday, December 22, 2008

I'm OOM

Zully's mana regen is looking pretty good, but my personal mana is running low. I healed until my brain fizzled out. I'm sure I spent at least 8 hours, probably close to 10 healing this weekend. Naxx alone was 4+ hours long.

Hesp was laughing at me and saying that's like a second job. She is so right. Too bad I don't get paid for it, heh. I'll do a separate post on Naxx in a little bit.

In other news, Danny is going to do 2s with me once she hits 80, we'll probably start after the holidays. Tess is up to 80 now, I'll be dragging him to every heroic possible. I made back about 600g doing Icecrown quests, and spent about 350 of that buying 2 more Moonshroud and a whole mess of Frostweave. I made my Aurora Boots before the raid and got them chanted up with Spirit. My spirit is a little off ratio with my intellect, but it should be OK once I get a socket put into my new belt. It's good to have a pocket warrior or two.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

I'm Broke!

Well, my quest for Moonshroud is over whether I like it or not. I'm down to about 150 gold spread across all my toons right now. Well, maybe a little more than that, I haven't actually robbed the lowbies of their meager funds yet. However, I did manage to get my tailoring up to 415 with that last expensive push for cloth, so I can make my own Moonshroud every 4 days now. I better go dig up some Fire and Shadow to make the other two types of cloth to sell, because at this rate I won't even be able to repair.

The other good news is I still have plenty of quests to do to make some funds. I'm about halfway through the chain to get Sons of Hodir rep in Storm Peaks, and probably about halfway through the quests in Icecrown. I picked up the Flesh Giant Shoulders yesterday and put the Scryer enchant on it even though they'll probably get replaced pretty quick. Tran was linking some blues from the Heroic Utgarde Keep run he was doing last night and I was turning quite green with envy for the Drood he was running with.

Also, ironically WoW insider had a post about the healer shortage today, and the comments section has loads of people with the exact same issues as me. I'm not alone in being overworked and "underpaid".

The Healer Shortage and How to Fix It

Best Comment Ever:
"Healing is like tetris.
Dps is like mortal combat."

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

HealMeHealMeHealMe

There's two sides of being a priest that are challenging in WoW. The first is healing, which is the act of keeping yourself and your group alive to kill monsters or other players. The other is being a Healer, which is not getting a moment's peace because your group wants to stay alive to kill monsters or other players.

I made the mistake of logging on "just to check my auctions" when I should have been going to bed last night. I didn't even get halfway through posting the guild auctions on Rosy before I got a whisper from Tran asking if I could come heal Heroic Violet Hold. See my previous post about not healing any more heroics until I have better gear. But, as I've said before I'm a total pushover, so I rationalized that it was a timed instance so it wouldn't be so bad to do that and then go to bed, right? If we wiped I'd just say bye bye and take off. Ha.

So our usual team of Zon, Px, Tran and me went. Bob filled in the other dps spot with his DK. I was all kinds of wound up last night, so my teamspeak conversation went something like this:

Me: Bob, you're pulling too much aggro
Bob: Heal me Heal me

Me: Zon, you're out of Line of Sight
Zon: Heal me Heal me (implied, Zon is pretty good about not asking for heals)

Me: Px, get out of the fire
Px: Heal me Heal me

Me: (shields Tran)
Tran: Don't heal me!

What I really wanted to say, and probably did a few times, was "I'm on it!" What do you DPS types think I'm doing over here? Picking my nose? Reading a book? Having a thoughtful conversation with my cat? Come on now.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Nerd Rage

I got mad this weekend. REAL mad. Break my headphones spiking them on the floor mad (this will be remedied at Best Buy after work today). I think it's been so long since I had a new max level character as my main I forgot that Heroics are hard. Let me repeat that. Heroics are hard. Difficult. Frustrating. I think I need to find something soft to put on my desk to chuck so I don't break stuff I need again.

I tried to do 3 heroics this weekend. Zul'Drak we didn't even get the first boss. Violet Hold, we tried it 3 times. Wiped on the second boss twice and the last boss the third time. Got through all the bosses except the last one in the Nexus.

Thinking back on it, maybe I shouldn't have been so mad. We did pretty well considering. But I wasn't really as upset about not being able to finish as I was that I wasn't able to heal as well as I thought I should be. I wasn't sure if it was spec, I am using that Grace and Spirit build I talked about last post. Oh yeah, next time I feel like respeccing, Grace is gonna go. It's annoying. Basically, it's just a weird HoT that needs to be refreshed every 4 seconds, which kills the 5 second rule. I guess I didn't realize how second nature the 5 second rule has become to me until I started worrying about the timing of my heals. I think I'd rather have the extra 4% to all heals from 2 more points in Spiritual Healing. It fits my style better. The rest of it seems pretty good, my normal GH hits for around 6500 and my crits are hitting for 10k+. Tanks are running around 22k right now, so that seems decent. Maybe a little on the low side, but pretty good for a hybrid. I do miss reflective shield for questing though.

Anyway, it was after the failed heroic on Sunday night that I declared (over TeamSpeak) that I would not be doing any more heroics till I had better gear, and proceeded to break my headset. The next morning when Zon came on we did an 80 level heroic, Halls of Lightning. He didn't get the sword he wanted, but I picked up Volkhan's Hood and Raiments of the Titans, both of which were pretty significant upgrades. I put a +12 int gem and a +8 mp5 chant on the robe.

I'm up to 6 pieces of Moonshroud. I'm a little surprised that I've been able to get so much. So far I've paid between 200-350 per piece, which for 4 days worth of play time seems reasonable. I'm resisting the urge to buy up the cloth regardless of price. There's one guy that seems to be trying to set a high price, but I'm hoping if I hold out and only buy it when it's below 350 bid or buyout things won't get ridiculous. Only 2 points of tailoring till I can start making it myself! Looks like I'll have all the Moonshroud I need by the time I reach the tailoring level needed to make all this stuff.

My enchanting is up to 431, which means I got to buy some of the really cool recipes from the Dalaran, namely the top level Attack Power enchants. I've got all the warriors and hunters drooling over the Massacre enchant, but it requires 6 Abyss Crystals. So they're just going to have to wait. Or find some magic source of level 80 epics. I also made my Runed Titanium Rod. Don't need it yet, but I want to be prepared.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Yet another Spec post...

Reading is dangerous. I've been soaking up the priest blogs like a sponge for the last few days. Based on the way our guild has gone in the past, I'm going to be doing a lot more heroics than raids. At least I hope so. The idea of trying to run Naxx with only 2 healers makes me queasy.

This means AoE healing is not nearly as important as it is in a raid environment. Circle of Healing is basically wasted on a 5 man group. Plus, it's going to be nerfed via a 6 second cooldown in the next patch anyway. Based on my leveling experience and the stuff I've been reading about deep Discipline healing, it seems like it can be a very strong healing spec, especially for tank healing, which is essentially all a 5 man heroic is.

Spirit and Grace

Basically, I miss out on Borrowed Time and Penance, but I still get the neat damage mitigation of Grace and haste from Enlightment. It has the spirit boosts of Spiritual Guidance and Spirit of Redemption, and gets a good chunk of overall increased healing power from Spiritual Healing.

If I go as far down into holy to get Empowered Healing, I miss out on the really powerful single target abilities, basically turning it into a 3.0 Improved Divine Spirit build, which is pretty pointless IMO.

The main adjustments I can see making to this and still keeping it as a hybrid build would be to swap the three points in Spiritual Healing with three points in Divine Aegis. I decided not to start out that way though because even though Divine Aegis is cool, it relies on crit. Part of the point my hybrid build is NOT to stack intellect like a pally, but to preserve the Spirit focus of a traditional healing priest build.

I could also take the points out of Grace and use them for additional Spiritual Healing, but I really want to see how it holds up as a healing talent. Overall I think it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. 2 points in grace gets up to 6% extra healing done and 3% damage mitigation, depending on how hard you're healing the target. Spiritual Healing gets a straight 4% extra healing every cast.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Moonshroud... I think they make it from pure gold

So now that I'm 80 and my questing is mostly done, I'm looking ahead to my heroic and crafted gear. Heroic stuff is just the luck of the drop, and also depends on me getting more that 5 minutes online at a time. The crafted gear I should theoretically be able to make at my own pace... right?

Well I found out recently that not only do I have to be 425 tailoring to get my Moonshroud specialty, I'm about 15 points short of that, but the cooldown for the cloth is... FOUR DAYS. Are you kidding me? The Moonshroud Robe alone takes eight pieces of cloth, the Moonshroud Gloves are 4 pieces, and the Aurora Slippers take one piece. So if I were to try and make all three items myself, assuming I remember to make the two pieces of cloth exactly every four days, it would take me 26 DAYS to make the set. Um, how does NO strike you Blizzard?

So my basic goal is to spend all my money buying moonshroud on the auction house. It really sucks too, because I need to buy stuff for enchanting too, but it's only a matter of time before the moonshroud cloth is priced even higher than it is now. I think I've planned ahead a little more than some. I fully expect to see it at 500g+ at some point in the future, but so far I've gotten 2 pieces for around 400g. i have a bid in on another piece for 325g, I'll probably lose it, but whatever.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Another Build Post

High Spirit Healing

Arena Shield Healer

I'm locked out... again.

I got through that final push to 80 at about 4:30 yesterday afternoon in the middle of The Old Kingdom. When I popped into group with Mal we had a full group ready to go for some instances, so we ended up doing three. I wasn't sure when the last time he'd done PvE was so we started out easy with the Nexus, and I ended up picking up Tome of the Lore Keepers, so I got more than just XP. We tore through that in about 45 minutes.

Then, after I came back from lunch, we did Violet Hold. That was a TON of fun. It's kind of like Black Morass, but with less running around. We wiped on the second boss the first time we tried it, and apparently you have to start all over when you wipe. The second try we ALMOST wiped on the second boss again (we got the consortium dude both times). I was the last one standing, and all of a sudden I hear Bob on TS yelling something along the lines of "Hit him! Hit him! He's almost dead HIT HIM!" So I target the boss (the focus was on me) and he's got less than 1k health left. I had enough mana to hit my SW:D and BAM! He died. I managed to rez another rezzer, and we got enough health up to carry on with the next set of trash. In the process, Mal decided it would be faster to run back and managed to get himself locked out, so we ended up 4 manning the last boss.

Finally, we ran both sub-80 instances in Azjol-Nerub. I was telling everyone to be careful not to get stuck on the ramp on the last boss when... the tank went running in and engaged the boss. While I was still on the ramp. Guess what happened? LOL. They got him down anyway, so it was alright. Apparently it was the night of the 4 man boss fight. Old Kingdom was uneventful, except that I dinged. So overall, it was a good PvE day.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Woo!

Well, I did it. I hit the big 80. Yay! Heroics here I come! Leveling is nice and all, but it will be good to be back into a max level routine, and not have to camp out at the inn all the time.

I ran 3 instances with Mal and friends today. He swears he's not coming back next weekend, but we'll see. If he doesn't, well, today was a good sendoff. More details tomorrow.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Crusader!

Well, now that I know what path I want to take to get my blues, I've delved into Icecrown. I was thinking of just doing all the low level areas until 80 then get the gold in the higher areas but...

Well, I have some RP tendencies on occasion and I get a good amount of glee from doing a good plotline. What better way to level to 80 than to bolster the forces of the Argent Crusade to fight against the Lich King! Woot!

(And lots of nice blues for heroic running too, as per yesterday's post. Can't forget about the loot)

Monday, December 1, 2008

Quit buggin me, almost level 78

I was babysitting the fax machine at work today and I caught myself thinking about arenas. Not just a passing thought wondering when the season will start, but hardcore consideration of what I'm going to do.

Stop laughing. I know I said I wasn't going to do arenas again.

With Mal being essentially gone, definitely not doing arenas, I need to find a new 2s partner. I just know that 5s is going to be a headache just like it was last season, so I really want to have my own team with agreed upon rules and times. Also, I think I want to try and find a partner outside of the guild. I'm sure running with Krom, Bob, or Zon would be fun, but one thing that was really nice was being able to log off TS and get away for a little bit. When arenas were done, they were done. No need to carry it over into the rest of my game.

I'd really like to get another rogue, but I think a hunter or ret pally would be fine too. I'll probably see if Danny has a friend I could start with, or wants to do them with me. I dunno if her schedule will work with mine, but we could try it. I've got a rogue and a mage on my buddy list that might be open to it as well, or might know someone. We'll see.

Monday, November 24, 2008

OMG Discipline

I guess I have a lot to say today.

In the back of my head I was turning over the instances I did this weekend after writing that last post, and I've been very pleased to find that I can heal a group equally geared to me just fine in discipline spec. It's so nice not to have re-specced for 2 weeks now. Without doing any extensive theory crafting here's what I've found:

1. The uber-buffed shield works beautifully for controlling damage done by over-zealot DPSers, especially with the mana return component. I'm looking at you Px.

2. My LOLSMITE spec includes every bonus to spell power I could fit in. Now that spell power and healing power are one and the same, this boosts my healing as well as my damage, mitigating some of the loss I get from not having boosts to healing spells.

3. I have a few mana-regen trinkets hanging around now that help A LOT. Between the Bangle of Endless Blessings, that new one I got with the +222 to Spirit auto pop, and the Hymn of Hope, I'm doing OK. I even use the Scarab of the Infinite Cycle to change it up once in a while. I have a pair of straight MP5 trinkets I use out in the world that work good too.

We'll see how it goes when we start leveling out of our purple gear, but as long as I can heal a good group, I think I'm OK as a Discipline healer for now.

Watcha doin? I'm Runnin an Instance

Zully is 75 now and Zan is 22, up from 19. I decided to keep burning off Zan's rest bonus whenever I remember since I really do intend to max level a shammy. My enchanting is up around 400 and tailoring 390. Fishing is at 420ish. Cooking is stalled out for now until I get some more recipes. Haven't won the drop for the Heavy Frostweave Bandage yet. I also got exalted with the Cenarion Expedition doing the DEHTA quests, which gave me the Cenarion War Hippogryph mount and my 10th tabard for the achievement. I'm about halfway through exalted with the walrus men.

I was going to skip over Dragonblight over to the Grizzly Hills or something, but I want to get as many reputations up as possible so I don't have to go through the pain later. There's BC reps I will probably never max out, and definitely not the old world ones, except maybe Argent Dawn once I can solo Scholomance.

Part of what's speeding me out of the beginning zones is the subject of the breakfast topic:

Breakfast Topic: The new 5-mans

I wouldn't exactly say I've been an instance fiend. I've tried to run one a day but with my deep dislike of PUGs it doesn't happen all the time. However, I have managed to run the first four instances at least once: Uthgarde Keep, The Nexus, Azjol Nerub (Which I will probably be calling Abdul Jamal forever), and the Old Kingdom.

UK and Nexus are super easy for people with gear, which are generally the ones I run with. The scenery was cool, but those two seem like souped up RFC or Hellfire Ramparts. Straightforward paths and bosses with the same abilites that have been used before.

Azjol Nerub was basically three boss fights with no trash, which was an interesting concept and went very very fast. The one funny part was the last boss is down a ramp onto a circular platform. So Jr and I are hanging out just at the bottom of the ramp when the fight started. Apparently a wall appears to fence you in, and we got stuck behind it. So Zon and Krom are fighting their little plate butts off while Jr and I are trying everything we can to try and get through that wall. Then suddenly, Jr has aggro. Apparently some adds come down through that tunnel to help the boss. I start healing and dpsing the best I can and Jr is doing his best to keep his pet on the the mob, and another one appears, so we take that one out too. While this is going on the boss is buried and our three melee are standing there waiting for us to finish up so they can start again. This repeats again. And we won, with no deaths. It was hilarious.

After that we decided to try the Old Kingdom. It was AWESOME. I think part of the reason was that none of us had ever run it, which is unusual. Usually Zon has run at least one of his characters through it and knows where to go, what to mark, how the bosses go, etc. This time we were just kind of feeling our way through, figuring out the bosses, clearing all the trash, etc. The last boss was SO COOL. You kind of shift dimensions a ways into the fight and copies of all the party members spawn, but you're all by yourself. Then, once someone finishes all of theirs off they pop in and can help with yours. It's kind of hard to explain, but none of us expected it to happen quite that way. When I first saw the copy of Krom running at me, I thought it was more like a Mind Control where I needed to not hurt him, but I realized pretty quick I was by myself. So fun!

We had a few deaths but no wipes (well, except to the allies at the stone). I didn't get any wearable loot, but I did get a lot of Dream Shards, so I can't complain. With the long weekend coming up I'm hoping to hit 77 and get cold weather flying. That will help out with questing a ton, though the areas are so big I think I'll still be using the flyer to have some AFK breaks.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Easy Right?

You have defeated Your Inner Turmoil.

Oh, if only it were that easy.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Breaking Stuff

Breakfast Topic: Are you leveling your Professions?

You better believe it, WowInsider. Then again, I've pretty much given the thumbs down to the Death Knight for the time being. It would be pretty rough leveling from 1 at level 55.

Zully is a Tailor/Enchanter like most healy type priests. That primal mooncloth/whitemend set was, and for the moment still is, the shizzle for raiding. And seeing as you don't have to 'gather' tailoring supplies so much as kill a bunch of humanoids, enchanting is the natural choice for getting rid of all those useless greens leveling tailoring produces. Tailoring is kind of like engineering in a way though, it costs more money than it makes because all the good stuff is boe, and the rest has pretty much no market. This applies even once max level is reached.

Enchanting for me is a huge money sink while leveling, but ends up paying for itself plus a little in the long run. Being able to disenchant greens has its upsides and downsides. Early on, greens are a great way to make a little extra cash either on the AH or as simple vendor trash. As an enchanter, I just break every green I find. At first, I thought I'd be able to sell the mats for profit like I used to do, but it looks like the market is a little dry right now. I think it's a combination of enchanters having plenty of greens to break to level and the lack of people seeking the new enchants. Until people start getting settled into their blues, pvp gear, and start raiding the enchants for sale market won't really take off again. So for now, free enchants for everyone!

Fishing is easy for me to level, because I'm a dork who likes to do it, and also I own almost every bit of pre-wrath fishing buff you can get, so it goes fast. First aid I just level to say I did it. I can't remember the last time I really used a band-aid with Zully and it actually helped. I may have used one or two in arenas, but usually by the time I remember about them it's too late. Cooking goes along with fishing, and being able to make good buff food is handy. I'm not a big fan of the "cooking award" system of buying recipes, but oh well.

I've been getting a lot of requests to disenchant stuff. I ought to start saying no, at least to strangers, unless they're offering a tip. It cuts into my profits!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Wild Mustard and Rhino Dogs? You're kidding, right?

The expansion is a lot of fun. Duh. How could it not be? I took a few days off work to get some good playtime in. I would have just been thinking about it all day anyway if I hadn't. I got Zully to 73. Not bad considering what a slow leveler I am. I am thoroughly enjoying the Howling Fjord. Those level designers deserve a pat on the back. Everyone's complaining about not being able to fly in Northrend, but I'm jumping off cliffs and leaping over stuff with my new Armored Brown Bear like nobody's business, and I love it. Also, the starting zones aren't very big and there's lots of little towns with flight points to stop over at, so it's not a real burden to get around like it was in Outlands before flyers. I'm also very VERY glad I saved up some gold before the expansion. I dropped from over 4k to around 1.5k training all my professions, buying up some greens for enchanting, and yes, I dropped 500g on that bear. It's SO worth it.

Unfortunately, despite being home to play and all the fun new stuff to play around with, I was a little out of my mind this weekend. I talked Danny's ear off about it already. All of a sudden at least 5 people I can think of off the top of my head just poofed back in out of nowhere after months of being gone. Some I'm happy about, some not so much, but generally I feel annoyed that we were struggling to get it together and do end game stuff and people started leaving. Now all of a sudden when we're back at the beginning again, we're full again.

I'm trying real hard to think of this as an opportunity to pull in people for the eventual end game that we're going to get around to in a few months. I also know there are a lot of reasons people leave, and a lot of reasons people return. I shouldn't generalize, and I shouldn't get so upset about it. Some of it too is that I wasn't an officer when all these people were around and now I am. So if they cause problems, now I have responsibility to do something about it. There's a million "what ifs", and that's my downfall in pretty much anything important in my life. I spend too much time worrying about the bad things that could happen and forget about the good things that do happen.

Oh, and Mal appeared out of the blue on Sunday. I was really happy to see him, we ran around the Fjord ganking Allies and generally being jerks for about an hour before I had to log. I don't think he's going to be playing regularly, but I hope to see him once in a while. I still don't like his new hairdo. LOL.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Midnight Madness

So I'm out front of my local GameStop waiting for my copy of WotLK. The crowd is a little bigger than I thought it would be, and not as friendly. I though people would be, you know, talking about WoW and stuff. Whatever. Apparently their credit card machine is down but they're still going to run them, I just have to wait longer. As long as the midnight line is not a waste of time I'll be happy.

*edit*

I was home in my chair by 12:40. The DVD installed super fast, now I just have to get all the patches loaded. Woot!

Monday, November 10, 2008

Fair and square... well close enough

I was up in the Throne of Kil'jaden doing my dailies and minding my own business when this BG/Arena geared warlock decided to start shit with me. I'm perfectly happy to start stuff with allies out in the world, I much prefer that to instanced PvP, but I usually am a good girl and leave the allies alone when they're doing their dailies, especially in places like Ogri'la and the Throne where there's a very small area to move around in and no real competition for the quest objectives.

I had just re-specced to discipline before heading out. Which must be why we raided the next day. I'm gonna go broke re-speccing. Tran was giving me a hard time about bashing Holy the other day, but I find it far FAR easier to do dailies, especially the Island, with resilience/stam gear and a 2/3 discipline spec. I have better damage, but less mana regeneration. When I'm spending time in the air hopping from area to area the mp5 takes care of itself. And I'm having enough issues with my big heals while raiding without losing 2k off the top, so staying Circle Holy all the time is out of the question. But I digress.

I was pretty much at full mana when his felguard started attacking me. I tossed up my uber buffed reflective shield and feared him, got a few DoTs up and a smite. After that, he chain feared me a few times, but I was able to keep my bubble up and him out of contact long enough to keep myself up above 7k health. At some point he swapped over to that demon form, but all that really did was make me damage him faster. It was kind of funny. I don't know why, maybe they're less resistant to Holy in that form? When he feared me into the mobs (inevitable) it started to get hairy but at that point he was almost dead, so I just refreshed my DoTs and let them finish him off so I could deal with the fire elemental that was pounding me.

To be fair, I didn't win because I'm uber, he lost because he was bad. He should have used the felhunter, not the felguard. He also should have kept me dotted up, which he didn't. And I don't know what that demon form's all about but I was kicking the crap out of him while he was like that.

I thought I'd taught him a lesson and tried to continue with my dailies on the other side of the area. This time he caught me in combat at half mana, so I called for friends. He would have gotten me eventually, but I held him off for the half minute or so it took for Tran to come rescue me.

But when the odds were even, maybe even stacked a little towards that lock's side, I won. Except for terrible hunters and sub 70s I don't think I've ever done that without someone else getting involved before it was over. w00t!

Fail

We attempted ZA again yesterday. In case I didn't know this already, we are grossly undergrared if we can't do ZA after nerf. There's nothing wrong with that. This is more raiding than we've ever done. Really if we wanted to do ZA we needed to run Kara about a billion more times, take down ALL the bosses, and get everyone who wants to do it geared up. And as much as I bitched about it before, we need need need more healers. Especially with a chokemaster like me healing. I don't know what my problem was yesterday but I just could not get those greater heals off in time. Sigh. Zon must want to slap me upside the head by now.

*edit*
I loaded up our entire roster of 70s into WowJutsu and we're not nearly as undergeared as I thought. On the other hand, it looks like the half healer who was there with me made out like a bandit at the post-ZA Kara run. Maybe if he gets some better gear I'll have a little more help, since he seems to be one of the ones who wants to run this stuff.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Officer Duties

It hasn't been all that long, relatively speaking, since I became an officer, but seems like forever. Some of that's because once I made a real commitment to the guild I started acting like one, even though I wasn't yet. And unlike many of the other clubs I've had leaderships positions in, I truly enjoy being a guild officer.

I like being the webmaster. I like interviewing and inviting new members. I even like taking care of the guild bank. And you know what? I'll admit it. I liked gkicking those two people. Not because of any power trip, but because I recognized a problem before it became a major issue and acted on it right away (with a little coaching from Tran and Px). And the reason I found it was because of my regular officer routine.

When I wake up early enough to log on before I leave for work, I spend my 20 minutes picking through the guild bank and scanning the auction house with my bank alt. One thing we always have a glut of is crafting patterns. Well, all of a sudden 10 patterns disappeared. I checked the bank log and a low level paladin had withdrawn them, despite the patterns being above 200 skill level and in all different professions. So I let Px know, and they were demoted to Initiate so they couldn't access the gbank. He sent them a letter to contact an officer about it. The very next day a different person of about the same level did the exact same thing, except this time they took all four of the green gems that were put there for general use. Secretly I was glad the patterns were gone, but the gems pissed me off. The same process was followed for this alt.

Well, the next time the offender logged on, I asked about it. I was really nice about it, only implied that maybe they were using them on other characters not in the guild. The person denied the whole thing, and when I pointed out the bank log entries, he blamed it on his sister. And then, right before I gkicked him, he had the nerve to ask me for high end enchanting mats from one of the back tabs! Justice was served, and we only lost a few patterns in the process. I considered petitioning a GM about the stuff that was taken, but I honestly didn't want the patterns back anyway.

Speaking of the bank and bank alts, there's been so much stuff to auction in gbank the last week or so I think I'm going to make my secret squirrel mage my personal bank toon and use Rosy for the guild auctions. I don't want to split the auction money unfairly either way.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

*yawn*

This pre-expansion slump is getting really boring. I'm not sure if that's good or bad though. It has been kind of nice to come online and just chill, but at the same time I always like running heroics and quests, and that's just not happening with my usual crowd right now. Tran's spending most of his time at desktop while hovering over Shat, Krom's farming BGs with his lock, Px is grinding up another warrior at breakneck speed, Gar's brought his priest up and is mostly on a different alliance server. I haven't even seen Zon online for more than a few minutes at a time lately. Mecc's back, which is kinda cool. He's bringing out my 'competitive spirit' talking about his new priest. We'll see how that works out.

I poached my first ENM the other day. Hesp decided to come over and join me. I jumped her right in with PX and some of the guys while we were grinding scourge for the welfare expansion epics. I felt kind of bad, I kinda ditched her once I was done, but she sent a tell later that said things were going good. It's nice to have another priest main to talk priesty stuff with, even if she is on the dark side.

I felt the need to fill the hole in the universe left by Mal by rolling a troll shammy. I won't remotely be able to fill those shoes, but it makes me feel better anyway. It looks like Danny is going off to be a raider, free market or otherwise, so I don't think she'll be joining me. That's OK, I just hope we still do stuff together.

I'm such a dork. I bought a long sleeve t-shirt that says "save the healer, save the group" and if I get it in time I'm totally going to wear it to the midnight launch at GameStop. Now I just need to decide how early I'm gonna get there. I don't really NEED to wait in line because I have it all pre-ordered, but I kinda want to hang out and talk to the other WoW dorks outside the store for a while. If it's too cold and rainy I'll probably show up at like 10 til Midnight, otherwise maybe 11? I'm thinking about this waaay too much.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Server Maintenance

That's three times this week I've been unable to go about my auction house business because of either zombies or a server maintenance period. I hope this is preventative maintenance before the xpac comes out. I am searching for a place that is open at midnight to purchase said xpac. I am so far unsuccessful. If all else fails I guess I'll go to teh Walmart at 8am, that's the earliest open I could find. I don't really want to wait until 10 when Best Buy opens.

I guess I'll update my add-ons again, something's been kicking back an error at me. I think it might be (gasp!) Outfitter.

*edit*
I did a little digging to see which GameStop locations have done midnight openings for other games, and the one 5 minutes from my house is having one. Woot! That's WAY better than driving to a Best Buy 20 minutes away! Northrend's gonna be my beeotch at 12:05am.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Zombies made me late for work this morning

There I was minding my lvl 20 bank business, selling the massive spam in the gbank, when I was attacked by zombies. This was rather inconvenient. However, I personally don't mind the zombie invasion. It's cool to have a world event shake things up once in a while. I actually think I'm gonna go do that quest to get the argent tabard, put it on, and cleanse lowbie areas for fun. It fits in with Zully's character rather nicely.

In other news, the headless horseman is useless, IMO. Why doesn't he drop better stuff. Those rings are crap for any decently geared 70. This holiday is vastly inferior to the brewfest. I fished up over 100 fish in the search for Mr. Pinchy. No luck yet. And when am I going to get my stupid fishing hat already? Sigh.

I got to poke my nose into Mag's lair yesterday thanks to Val. OMG massive AOE damage. I did OK considering, but the raid leader was clueless so we had no chance at the boss. Zon brought his warrior along too, that helped me out tons, I'm used to healing him. He's definately my favorite tank, and good at what he does. I'll admit, I was nervous about going in there, especially with a PUG. Having someone who knew what was going on to explain it to me and tell me I'd do just fine was exactly what I needed. I know you won't read this, but thanks zon.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

LOL SMITE!

After looking over the talent tree, it looks like a holy damage spec is doable. It came out kind of like my old "Don't Crit Me!" spec, except this one has WAY less bonus to healing.

LOLSMITE Build

I logged on after being out for a 5 day weekend and the crew seemed happy to see me. I was utterly exhausted after traveling all day though, so I wasn't feeling very chatty. Did the Horseman quest with a few folks and wandered around getting candy from various inns and doing zone discoveries as I went along. Overall, pretty boring. I was also feeling a bit lost knowing that Mal wasn't going to log in. Danny was online but wasn't feeling real chatty either. Gar said they cleared Kara while I was away. I'm only partially surprised, I've been reading that some guilds are doing 45 minute Kara runs with one or no healers, so I'm sure they were able to pull off a run without me. I wanted to get more details, specifically who they roped into being solo healer, but my brain had shut down and I couldn't put a coherent sentence together, so I gave up and called it a night.

Monday, October 20, 2008

No one touches my dreads!

I've decided one of zully's unofficial achievements is going to be her lack of an appearence change. I've always liked her tusks and hair. I do have a few other changes planned though. I am looking for a high damage disc holy spec for leveling. Like a lolsmite type build. We'll see. I realized it's silly to get bent out of shape over pain suppression since I won't be focusing on pvp right now anyway.

I think I'm going to rename morning. I've been tossing the idea around for a while, but my trip home this weekend has inspired me to find a good Iroquois name. I will start looking for a suitable small NY village name and go from there.

I also think I'm gonna start a troll resto shammy. I like my draenai shammy but with Mal gone I don't think I'll level her anymore. I like healing so I think it would be fun to try a different healing class.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Echoes of Doom

The Big Patch hit yesterday

The Good
Achievements. This is a huge thing for me personally. This one is definitely going to vary depending on each person's game goals. Those people whose only goal is to kill every Allie they see (you know who you are) are not going to care about achievements, not even the PvP based ones because it doesn't need to be tracked. Same thing with hardcore arena enthusiasts. They already have a tracking system.

I, being the compulsive gamer I am, will probably spend months doing stupid crap like going back to Mulgore to become exalted with Thunder Bluff, and going back and doing all the Hellfire Peninsula quests (gag) just to get achievements. I'm also, sadly, excited about the 'low level quest' tracker. And I felt like a loser for liking fishing.

The Bad
My new talent tree. I hate it. I'll be honest, I've been using cookie cutter specs since I started having to split between Disc/Holy and Pure Holy depending on my role. I'm mostly mad that the Disc/Holy hybrid is almost impossible now because you have to put SO MANY points into Disc to get to Pain Suppression. There's pretty much no point in doing a hybrid without Pain Suppression. Once I get more points to put into it when the xpac comes out maybe I'll like it better, but I don't know what I'm going to do now.


The Ugly
The server is packed right now. Shat is packed, Org is packed, there's Alliance rogues outside of every city waiting for unsuspecting lowbies to ride out. And much like the real world, the economy is a mess. I deleted my auctioneer database, it's useless right now.

Most of my addons have updates, but I think I'm gonna try switching to Healbot since grid/clique quit being developed a few months ago, but addon problems happen every patch so I won't bitch about that too much.

Overall, I think the patch is good. I hope the pre-expansion event is good, and I hope it happens after I come back from vacation :-P

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Knowing is half the battle

I was pretty upset when I wrote my last post, so I overreacted a little. I was able to catch Mal online yesterday and ended up talking to both him and Danny. I wasn't planning on asking him why he was leaving, I figured it was private and if he wanted to tell me he would, but we were already talking about some other stuff so I asked.

He has a really good reason for leaving, and it has nothing to do with WoW. So I'm hoping that after he gets things straightened out he'll be back again. I also added his g-mail talk and e-mail address to my buddy list so hopefully we'll still talk. It almost feels like summer camp though, everyone cries and confesses and promises to write but it never really happens. Only time will tell.

I thought that was important to talk about that, since my last post was all boo hoo I'm gonna quit now.

We had our first guild Zul'Aman run on Saturday. Overall I think people were positive about it, despite all the wipes. It really give a feel for what a real raid is like. Kara's a real raid too I guess, at least the bosses are, but it doesn't have the timed urgency like ZA does. Attumen is a cakewalk compared to the timed ZA events.

Unfortunately, my other half got some really bad news just as we were about to hit the first boss, so I wasn't about to be like "oh that's nice honey" and turn around and keep raiding. And, as I've mentioned before, we're low on healers (meaning we were running ZA with 2 priests) so when I had to go that was it, bye bye. Fortunately, no one seemed upset about it. I was scheduled to leave in about 20 minutes anyway and they knew that, so maybe that helped, I dunno.

No more Arenas! w00t! If I never do another arena again I won't be sad. The next time I hit end game I'm gonna do raids. No more of this pvp ladder BS.

Monday, October 13, 2008

There's a tear in my beer

So I lost my 2s partner today. Mal's gonna stop playing, maybe for a while, maybe forever I don't know. I'm really sad, we've been playing together on and off for a long time. Yeah, I'm crying about it. I'd say I'm getting upset over a game but it's not the game. I hate losing friends, and I feel like I've lost two of my three good WoW friends recently. It makes me want to quit too.

Friday, October 10, 2008

*Snore*

I'm bored out of my skull waiting for this new patch to come out. There's absolutely NOTHING going on. I hope someone tries to pull off a raid this weekend. I know, the whole "if you don't want to be bored plan something" routine. I can barely get a heroic together, let alone a raid. Everyone I know is hardcore grinding a lowbie trying to get to 70 before the expac. I pretty much haven't logged in to Zully or Morning except to do the Island. This little shammy I rolled is a ton of fun, but I suspect the carebear server will get old real fast. I could never have a normal server as my main server, but it's nice to have somewhere to relax when you're tired of getting your face melted, chopped, or blasted off by someone bigger than you. Which is going to be happening a LOT MORE once the 70-80 grind begins.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Happy Patch Day!

My day off fell on patch day this week. Whoopee. I can't believe I'm staring at the clock waiting for the realms to come up. I played Guitar Hero and watched yesterday's Chuck, but now here I am looking for something to do. I guess I could clean or something.

Anyway, I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed I was outside of shat farming spiders or something and MostHated came out of nowhere and... helped me. Admittedly, I sometimes have trouble remembering what I dreamed and what I did when it comes to WoW, but that was DEFINATELY a dream because there's no way that assclown would EVER help someone. Even in the dream I got a measure of glee when Zon stabstabstabbed him into oblivion.

I then proceeded to dream about going with my boss on a trip to LA in a private jet. Whatever.

Monday, October 6, 2008

New Talents and New Toons

I think I've decided on my pre-patch build. This is a very heavy discipline build, as I don't think we'll be raiding for a little while. I probably ought to come up with a heavy healing build as well just in case, but this will be my primary spec until WotLK. It's set up for world pvp and bgs, not arenas. I also don't think we'll be doing many more arenas this season. It seems pointless this week at least since the season's gonna end next Tuesday. I kinda wish I had bought my Brutal pants though. Maybe I can get Mal to try with me one more time.

Mal and Danny convinced me to roll a new toon on the server that Mal's section of EnM defected to back in the day when they fell apart. (I had no idea or I may have done the same). The only problem is it's an alliance side carebear server. Blech. But, it's worth it to get some time with them and not being distracted by my lvl 70 guild duties. Laa is my third ally Draenai shammy. Maybe she will go somewhere.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Unproductive

I almost wish I'd just taken this weekend away from WoW. I almost did, but once I sat down in my computer chair I was too wiped out to do anything else, so I just stayed there. My other friends were out of town anyway, and I already did a lot of chores during the week, so whatever. We didn't raid, do our 5s arenas, or run any instances until Sunday afternoon. I don't think I ran a single BG all weekend. And Sunday afternnon, we missed 2 badges in Mechinar. We missed half of the key to the lockbox before the elevator, and that fire boss kicks our asses every time. WTF. About the only thing I realy accomplished was I spent a good 2 hours+ farming herbs with Morning, and discovered two flasks while making potions. It's nice to finally be alchemy specialized.

Mal and I played our first 10 2s games on Saturday, and we were both pounding our desks in anger at that point so we stopped. We did a bunch more on Sunday and got all the way up to 1580 or so and then dropped back down to our 50% win ratio with a 1516 rating. Druids are so OP. I hate them SO MUCH. Sigh.

Apparently my guild tried to do Kara without me last week. I think someone said they skipped Attumen and weren't able to get Moroes. This brings up a weird dilemma on my end. On one hand, it would be nice to have more 70 healers so I don't feel guilty and obligated every time a Heroic or Kara run spins up. I'd probably spend more time offline with my RL friends and that guy that lives with me. You know, the one I'm married to who never gets to see me and tells me what an addict I am all the time. That would be good for me AND that nagging burnout feeling I've been having.

On the other hand, I know I'm going get territorial if any new 70 healers show up if they haven't already been in the guild for a while. It's counterproductive, I know, but I can't help it. I've been one of two or three high level priests ever since the guys helped me get my whitemend / primal mooncloth set done. I don't even remember exactly when that was it seems so long ago. It even took me a little while to get over Tran switching to a healer from DPS. I guess I just get used to seeing certain people playing certain roles and get all thrown off when they switch it up on me. I'm messed up, I know.

On a positive note:

ZOMG CLIQUE+GRID IS AWESOME

I don't have to lose target to throw hots on other party members! I can truly spam FlashGreaterFlashGreaterFlash in Heroics! I don't have to hunt for stuff on my toolbar to heal! I can still click buttons if I panic! Now if I would just use my trinkets more...

Also, Mana Burn + Power Infusion = Win. That is, if I don't get too carried away and forget to heal myself or my partner.

Friday, September 26, 2008

A Few Changes... and a Little Danger!

I've put this blog out public again, so I pulled down a few posts I thought were inappropriate for the entire world to see. I also went back through and tried to anonymize things a little so no one gets harassed. Except maybe some Allies; they can kiss my ass.

In other news, the other day Zon made a comment that I look "dangerous". I was in my PvP gear at the time. That made me smile, Zully does look pretty badass in her PvP gear. Then again, most everyone looks badass in their gladiator stuff. I did go to the effort to get the dark Tabard of the Shattered Sun and made a Dark Silk Shirt so my bright green elbows weren't showing. Even tomboy nerd girls like me have Barbie Doll tendencies on occasion.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Add-Ons List

I'll figure out the best way to post this later. Need to take advantage of the brain fart while I'm having it.

Current Addons
Auctioneer- Auction House economy tracking. Standard Deviation for all pricing data. Also auto-sells greys and helps price enchants. Used to be better when enchanting mats were higher. Mental note: start charging more for "with mats" chants. 10% of AH mats should be about right.

Omen - Threat Meter. Still learning this one. Custom settings by Tran

Grid - Unit health / debuff tracker. Still learning this one. Needs custom setup.

Quartz - Cast Bar / Buff / Debuff

Deadly Boss Mods - Boss Effects warning system for PvE, Tower/Flag status tracking for PvP

WarcraftRealms - Statistics. Because I'm a stat nerd.

Outfitter - One button gear and trinket management. Setups for Holy Set and PVP set. Need to learn the TrinketQueue system and reset the auto AV and Argent Dawn trinket macros.

DamageMeters - Damage / Healing statistics tracking. Because everyone always asks for it.

QuestHelper - Adds map waypoints for quests and searching of items / mobs / NPCs ingame. High memory cost, turn off before raids

FishingBuddy - Just for fun, and the fishing tourney. Easy right click cast/loot. And stats, because I'm a stat nerd.

Addons to Try
Clique - Right Click / Macro style healing. This is instead of HealBot, works better with grid from what I hear

FocusFrame - Allows visual tracking of /focus target. I really should be using Focus, especially for shackles.

Useless/Annoying/Difficult Addons
Bartender - Too much customization, does not eliminate "scroll wheel" bars

Default Customizations
I need to check my keybinding settings and put some "oh shit" buttons near WASD

I need a chat-log modifier or custom settings. Between grid and quartz the chat log is getting in the way and the combat log keeps disappearing.

I was still getting some spell cast lag in AV at Vann's doorstep. I think I can live with this but turning the distance down a bit might help

I need something easier lock my toolbars from dragging things around, I always forget to turn it on.

Kar -again

So it looks like our "once a month" Kara run is still on track. I got some seriously phat loot out of it. I got my T4 gloves, a set of healing bracers, and 2 high end enchanting patterns, Mongoose and Surefooted, not to mention I'm up to 30+ badges again between Kara and the two heroic Botanica runs I did. I think I've eliminated all the PvP gear from my heal set, but I'm uber squishy now. I'm not sure exactly what to do about that. Enchants I guess. And badge upgrades.

We've been farming the Brewfest boss too, everyone's gonna have epic trinkets by the time this holiday is done. I felt so guilty about winning everything in Kara I passed on the warrior trinkets with Morning last night so Gar could have them. It wasn't just that though, he's been a regular off-tank and it's stupid for me to roll against him for something he needs with my pitiful little mini-70 who does nothing but the Island and BGs.

I've gotta say, after doing some uninterrupted raiding, what was I thinking wanting to do this weekly, especially in a guild our size? Healing for 5 hours straight really wipes me out, especially since it's just me and Tran right now. I need to talk to him about healy-raid stuff. Maybe it's just the way my thinking is right now, but I feel like I make way more mistakes than he does. I don't know if it's because he's just better about keeping his mouth shut, because I'm doing more overall raid healing (we never really determined who is "main heals"), or if I'm just making a lot of mistakes. Maybe I just need more practice, I dunno.

Raiding is even harder now then it was before I started my 2s team because I want to keep my arenas going as well, so I have to spec back and forth between Full Holy and Holy/Disc in order to be effective when I need to. It's not the gold, that's easy enough to get, but every time I respec I have to make sure my bars are setup, remember which "special skills" I'm using, etc. It doesn't take very long for me to get warmed up, but going from 5k+ heals to 3k heals in one day on the same spell button gets really confusing.

Also, I need to get Grid+Clique set up this week. I had my first total heal disaster doing heroic Botanica this weekend. I'm wearing my soft brace this week to take some of the stress off my mouse hand, so my movement is a little more limited. I accidentally de-targeted the tank just as he pulled and I missed his portrait on the first click. By the time I finally got him targeted and started the heal, he was dead. 14000 to 0 in 2 seconds or less. Total wipeage. The tank has to trust me, and when shit like that happens it's like letting someone trust-fall into hot tar. I need to get it together, especially with us doing more raiding. So it's time to get advanced instead of stupid. I've always resisted any kind of mod, but every time I finally adopt one I'm happy I did.

I can't live without Grid. Take my Grid away, and you might as well put a blindfold on me and tie my right hand behind my back.

I have a feeling once I get used to a "click hover to heal" system it will be the same thing, it's just hard to break 2 years of habit. However, it's ridiculous to upgrade my graphics card to cut out the spell effect lag and then add half a second or more "lag" on my end moving my cursor from one end of the screen to the other.

In other news, My 2s team is still batting 50% in 2v2. I was just getting back into the swing when I had to log off yesterday. Poor Mal, he's been waiting for his chestpiece FOREVER. I finally broke down and bought my Merciless chestpiece and the blue gems and enchanting mats to get it up as far as I can, hoping desperately that I'd be replacing it right away. It set me back a good 200-300 gold. I need to be good about doing the island again, especially now that I have two 70s I can run it with. Unfortunately, he rest of the ladder didn't get the memo that now that my blue is gone we're supposed to win. And with the raid, our 5v5 team didn't run this weekend like we were supposed to, so I'll be up tonight AGAIN. Good thing I'm planning on season-pass subscribing to Heroes through iTunes instead of trying to watch it.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Gee Zully, Why Don't You Tell Us What You Really Think

I was browsing the server message boards yesterday and, to my horror, MostHated is back. So either his ban hammer wore off, or he came back from his vacation in hell, or something like that. I was hoping to never see his ugly night elf mug again, and was also hoping that Expatriate would be buried face down right next to him.

They're both crazy epic'd out so I know one on one I'm no match, but it does make me feel a little better that MostHated is a Beastmaster hunter. I've learned quite a bit about handling that spec. The hardest part is the first part: "Live until the red wears off".

It's better than my strategy with Arms warriors: "Call for help and hope it arrives before you die"

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Sometimes Life Gets in the Way

I've been ridiculously stressed out in pretty much every part of my personal life for the last few weeks, so I decided to cut the easiest stress maker first and take a WoW break last weekend. I'm really glad I did. I was so much more easy going during arenas this week despite the drama, and just in general I feel a lot more chill while logged in this week.

I'm just going to have to start taking a break when I start feeling stressed out over WoW. I get so involved I forget that when it comes down to it, it's just a game. I can turn it off for a few days and the world will not come to an end. My guildies will still do their heroics, arenas, and BGs, get their chants, run their lowbies, talk on TeamSpeak, and so on, if I'm not there. As I occasionally say, "I'm not that cool", or in other words, the world does NOT revolve around or depend on me. I just forget that occasionally.

I was comforted to find that Mal did not instantly rocket up to 1700 points by switching to a different 2s partner for the weekend. He was a little over 1550 last week, which we have managed to do a few times. I hope I see him on later this week, and I also hope I can run enough AV to get my s2 chestpiece before rollover.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Arenas... 1535 anyone?

Well it's been a little while since I posted. Mostly the same old QQ so I didn't want to overdo it. However, I do want to talk a little about how my arenas are going.

They're not going badly, but I don't think they're going well either

I think I've been kidding myself over the "gear vs skill" part of things. First of all, I don't have as much skill as I feel like I should after dumping oh 2 years of my life into this. Also, despite how hard I've been working to get my gear upgraded, it's still pretty crappy relatively speaking. Krom laid it on me today about my blue chestpiece. Everything else is epic and at least s2 so I think he was being a little harsh when he said I was essentially trying to get great gear from arenas with no work, but seeing as ALL of my arena teams have almost identical ratings, I think a good chunk of the problem must be on my end. And yes Krom, I think I'd rather go club some baby seals than spend 30 games in AV grinding honor. I'd rather die a thousand deaths to roving bands of allies on the Island than that. But I digress.

I'm starting to think Mal is just being nice about my mediocrity because he doesn't want me to feel bad. As much as I appreciate him being a friend and being nice, it's not a good feeling since, again, I've been dumping a lot of time and effort into this and still getting less than mediocre results. He has a friggin 1780 rating in less than 2 weeks on his Resto Shammy. It's not his skill (and probably not his gear) that's the issue here.

Ah well. I guess I gotta just suck it up and grind the honor.

*shudder*

Monday, August 18, 2008

A Close Shave

Spy Emergency saved my ass, and probably my guild's ass too, today. I went to launch it on my laptop since my main machine was occupied with another LAN game and I got a Trojan warning called "Game Stealer" attached to WoW.exe I HATE playing on this windows machine.

Now I have to completely reinstall WOW, redo all the patches, scan, and reinstall all the addons. But at least I didn't get haxored. That would be bad for both me and the guild bank. Also, I'm glad I did it now because I'm leaving for a trip in about 4 hours and I woulda been uber pissed if I couldn't play WoW because the game was haxored and the discs were at home.

I'll be changing my password now too. I need to get one of those authenticator dongles.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

For every good day...

I suck at this game. I've put so much time and effort into it, but you know what? It doesn't really matter. Arenas? Yeah right. Zully can wear as many purples as she wants, I'm just not cutting it. I know it takes two to tango, but it's really discouraging to not even have a 50% win rate on over 70 games. Instances? I'm the easily distracted one that backs into the mobs. BGs? I hide with the rest of the crowd.

Sure, I have my good days where I feel like I rule the world, but then I get a slap in the face day like today that makes me want to quit.

The phrase in Arena talk is "carry me". I feel like that's me all the time, unless I'm helping the lowbies. I want to be in the pros, but I'm still on the pickup team. Sigh.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Can today get any better?

I had a great WoW day today. I got promoted to officer, got 4 badges out of Botanca, got the Bangle of Endless Blessings, got the Boots of Ethereal Manipulation, and a Steamvault run worth of rep. Dang. That's a lot for one day.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Breakfast Topic: Buggy memories

Today's WoW Insider breakfast topic is about bugs or weird happenings that make great WoW memories. I have a few that I can think of, and I have screenshots too :-)

My favorite had to be one of the times I went to Zul'Farrak with Body Count. Mangler and Darkdestiny helped me run through ZF about a billion times, and Mangler in teaching me the arms warrior ropes pointed me at what became my first Epic, Sul'Thraze the Lasher, the two halves of which drop in ZF. Not to mention all the times I ran it with Zully for one reason or another.

I actually have a lot of good memories of ZF. In my opinion, it is one of the most epic mid level old world dungeons. There were so many little different things like the scarabs that all pull if you hit one, the event where all the zombies run up they pyramid at you, and of course, the quest you have to do to get the Carrot on a Stick. First, you have to do this stupidly annoying prerequisite chain in the Hinterlands to get the Hammer of Zul'Farrak where you end up killing like 100 trolls, then bring it with you and bang on a gong to summon Gaz'rilla giant hydra. Post-BC, they have added giant hydras to at least two dungeons that I run regularly, but good old Gaz will always be my favorite.

So here we all are ready to kill the big guy. I'm standing there with my giant sword and Mangler says somthing along the lines of "What are you waiting for? Go do it." I look up at this giant thing and think "OK..." and charge. Well things are going fine, Darkdestiny's healing me with one hand tied behind her back. We're almost done and I get hit with this knockback.

I landed perfectly on top of the wall looking down on the battlefield.

I have a great picture of me before it happened, and me on top of the wall looking down at this giant dying hydra. And I got my Carrot on a Stick :-)

Another good one is my recent trip to the top of the world. It's not really a glitch, it's a pretty well known easter egg type area, but Tran showed me the entrance and took me on a little tour past all the airplanes and the flight master, around and up the hills to the very top. It was so cool. Of course I got a little disoriented and almost killed myself on the guards outside of Ironforge when we jumped back onto the map, but what's a good trip without some excitement right?

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Purgatory

I probably earned myself at least a few hours in purgatory for this:

Guildwatch: Giving Out Epic Gems to Scrubs

I couldn't help myself. Shame on me.

Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?... Discipline Specs

I didn't log Zully on at all yesterday, that whole home ownership thing got in the way what with the repairman and assembly of prefab closet units. I did get a chance to talk to Tran a little bit while I was slowly dragging my squishy little level 18 Warlock Phoenix through quests and he's been thinking about specs for his Rogue. Not having ever played a successful Rogue I didn't really have anything more intelligent to say than 'Oooh, shiny'. So I didn't really ask for specifics.

That did get me thinking about Zully's spec. She's been Holy from level 1. She had a very brief (as in less than 3 days) stint in Shadow around level 62 because when BC first came out Hellfire was as hard as hell for a healer without a group, which for me was pretty much always. Shadow spec did not go well. I had NO CLUE how to play Shadow, and my gear was all wrong, so back to Holy I went. If I ever want to try Shadow, I will roll a Shadow Priest, thank you. Zully's just not cut out for the dark side.

My guildies are very nice about spec. They never pressure people to respec, even if we do have more DPS Warriors than you can shake a stick at. I'm guilty of being one of the DPS warriors, but if I made Morning a tank, it would just land me in another issue: you can't play two characters at once. Almost all of our Tanks and Healers share an account. So if we're having a raid and need a tank and a healer, you gotta pick one, can't run both at the same time. I suppose if every tank player had a healer and vice versa we'd eventually have enough for consistent raids. There's another problem with making Morning a tank:

I'm a lousy tank.

I don't like marking and I'm not confident enough to lead. I like hanging out in the back and calling out when the patrol gets too close because everyone else's view is full of Tauren butt or ogre nads. I'm so used to shedding and avoiding aggro that the idea of pulling and holding aggro makes me nervous. I'm sure I'd get better at tanking with practice, but as it stands now you don't want me up front waving the shield, trust me. There's a reason Zully is my main despite the fact that Morning was my only max level character pre-BC.

Getting back around to Zully's spec, my arena partner is pressuring me to go Discipline. Here's my list of reasons I don't want to respec:
  1. Zully's always been a heavy healer, and I like it. I know Discipline priests are just a different variety of healer, but I love me my 6k+ heal crits.
  2. A Discipline Priest in full Primal Mooncloth/Whitemend is kind of silly, and I have put every heal related buff I can find on that set. It's a very common gear combo, but I don't care, I'm proud of what I've done with it.
  3. Discipline Priests are built for instanced PvP. See my previous post about not liking instanced PvP. I want to be able to PUG Heroic Shattered Halls and amaze the group (like I did on Monday), and I don't think Discipline Priests are in that category.
  4. I'm bad at the "Push this button to increase your healing/damage/defense" playstyle, and I get the impression that Discipline is heavy into this sort of talent. The only push button talent I've learned to use well is inner focus, and that's because I think the 5 second rule is the coolest mana strategy ever.
  5. Despite the fact I've already admitted I'm a conformist, I really don't want to use the same cookie cutter spec as every other priest on the server. I'm already a Troll Priest among the Undead, and I'd like to stay a survival Holy Priest among heavy Discipine specs.
  6. I really don't think my spec is that bad. I have some awesome auto-popping 'Don't Crit Me' talents that I'll lose if I go Discipline.
I had something very Zen to say about all this, but I think this post has gone on long enough. I'll talk to Mal this weekend about the arena team, but I'd really like to stay how I am until he really proves to me that the spec I have isn't going to be good enough to get the rating we want.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

2v2 Arena Team

I'll say this up front: arena night has been making me very grumpy for the last week or so, to the point where it's been making me not fun for the guildies to hang around on a Monday night, and has become this gigantic thorn in my side I keep ranting about despite the fact that in all honestly...

I don't really care about instanced PvP. I only care about Arenas because it is a Big Deal to my guild mates, and thus it became a Big Deal to me.

I'm a conformist, and I know it. It's not all bad, but it causes some interesting arguments with myself, especially when my schedule gets out of whack. I'm sorry, but I'm tired of logging on for 5v5 at my bedtime then waiting around for 30 minutes or more to do a 45 minute set. It's too late, and I have enough motivation issues at work without being sleep deprived too.

So last night I finally got a break from the Arena issues I've been having. My good buddy Mal and I formed a Rogue/Priest 2v2 team. It was hella late last night, especially after the damn allies killed me while I was trying to turn in the charter. What's up with that, don't you have better things to do than make my life miserable? And what's up with Blizzard putting a time-intensive activity like choosing a team banner in a place where you can get killed? I understand this is PvP, but come on, that's just not cool. Fortunately, I have awesome guildies who rode over and distracted the allies while I turned in the charter. Props to Nativ, Krom, and Farty for the help.

We got our minimum 10 games in and went 5-5. not too shabby considering Mal hasn't had a gear upgrade in ages and I haven't bitten the bullet and gone over to Arena Discipline yet. The idea of speccing out of Holy makes me want to cry, scream, and hide under a rock. But I'll probably try it for him, especially since he's paying for it. That and I'm a pushover and not good at arguing for what I want.

A little Ketchup... Catsup... Catch Up

Before I jump into the heavy duty stuff let me tell you a little bit about my WoW history. I have been playing WoW since about patch 1.4. I played very briefly on an Alliance PvE server with a Dwarf Warrior. About the time I reached Theramore I was bored. It didn't seem challenging. And I had this friend at work who had a Horde character on a PvP server who would regale those who would listen with stories of raids on enemy towns, guilds that "owned Ashenvale", and the death of giant monsters in the depths of volcanoes. That, combined with the humongous Tauren that single handedly laid waste to the tower in Westfall convinced me it was time to give up my tiny warrior and go over to the Horde side.

My first Horde server was Gurubashi. I had an Undead Priest there that made it to about level 45 (She has since been deleted. I will never delete a character over level 20 again). My other long time character Morning the Tauren Warrior was rolled on Bloodscalp, the same server as my friend from work. I had fun then, but I was playing WoW like a single player game and did most of the multiplayer content as pickup groups, which was less than thrilling. I enjoyed my warrior, but the priest class grew on me, despite the PvP problems being a Healer can bring.

Things went kind of south with the first friend who got me onto his server, and I stopped playing Morning and rolled Zully on my current when it was new, since I didn't really want to pay a transfer fee for a sub-40 priest. I figured I had learned the class well enough I could run up a new one in no time at all. I got a couple other friends from work, Gantris and Tar, to join me. We formed our own little guild, Defective By Design, and had a lot of fun leveling, doing quests, and generally kicking alliance butt. I transferred Morning at some point and she was my main for a while, being my first max level character, owning my first epic (Sul'Thraze the Lasher) and having the full Dungeon Set 1 (and part of the epic upgrade set) before the new expansion came out. Eventually, we all left for different jobs, and we're all still friends but the WoW guild went bye bye. Gantris plays on another server now, and Tar is with me in my current guild.

I ended up taking a break from WoW for about half a year about a month after the Burning Crusade came out. I went through several guilds with varying levels of drama and finally ended up on my own, bored and frustrated . I'm not going to get into that now, since I'm sure it will be thoroughly covered in the future. A few weeks before I took my WoW break I joined the guild I'm in today.

My guild graciously didn't kick me for being idle for 6 months plus, and once I got over the "Where did you come from? Who invited you?" period on my return, I made some really great friends. Being a healer sure helped, and I was 'adopted' by one of the long time guild members to be geared up for heavy duty healing. I think their efforts (and, of course, mine) have paid off. I am very well geared for the entry level Karazhan raid, and am doing a decent job at getting my gear for Arena style healing as well. Now I just need to work on my skills, which I have recently learned are better than most, but not up to snuff for raids quite yet.

Despite what my other half would tell you, in terms of the WoW community I'm a casual player. I usually spend around 1-2 hours on days I'm working and pretty much all my unscheduled time on the weekend, which varies from 6 to 18 hours a day. There are many people that have much more time than that to dedicate to it, and it shows. I also tend to get distracted with trivial stuff like fishing and doing quests "just to get them out of my log", but the free-form nature of the game is what keeps it fun for me. So yes, having max fishing is probably a waste of time, but I like it, so tough. But in terms of being Uber, I will probably never fit the common WoW definition of being the best. But for me, setting personal goals and reaching them is enough for me.

That's me, my background, and my play style. Now we can get on with the good stuff.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Most Memorable PVP moment

I was reading up on my WoW Insider and their breakfast topic was "What is your most memorable PvP moment?". It made me think a little bit. What would that be? I feel like there were some pretty memorable battlegrounds back in the day when I was playing with Body Count and we were 5 capping AB almost every match, but that seems so long ago I've probably forgotten more than I remember. It's mostly just a mishmash of whirlwind and mortal strike.

There was this one time with Defective by Design when Me, Gantris, Tar, Utopia, and... was Olga there? I don't think she was. Anyway, we all decided to go over to Theramore and make trouble. Gantris had a brilliant plan: he'd cast water walking on us and we'd walk around the tip of... well I don't have the map handy, but the nearby zone, and we'd come in the back at the harbor. We weren't really high enough level to storm in the front, we were probably only high forties to low fifties at the time. We managed to avoid the civilians (DKs were still around those days) and sit just close enough to the flight point that the n00bs flying in would see us and charge right over to try and engage, and we'd kick their butts. It wasn't terribly epic, because it was Theramore and late at night, but it was still a ton of fun.


Probably my most epic PvP battle was just recently. I was questing my 64ish Warrior Morning in Zangarmarsh with Raj and this mage and... was it a druid? pally? I don't remember the other one. Anyway, they were both from Fallout. They came over and ganked me while I was attacking an ogre. So Raj being the uber warlock he is went over and killed them. So I pop back up and give the ogres another try and they come over and jump us again. This goes back and forth a time or two, and then they decide to bring a friend. So I grab Zully, my 70 priest, and we pretty much destroy them, cuz Zully has uber heals (just no armor). So they call another friend. So we called a friend. So they called 2 more. Pretty soon we've got 5-7 of our guildies against 7 or so Fallout players and our... favorite enemy MostHated (who apparently got the ban hammer, because he's nowhere to be found in the armory). We fought them back to Zabra'jin, the troll city and used the guards to help us out since we were outnumbered. There were people flying in the air, bolts shooting up to knock people off, they'd run in a wave and die, then we'd run out to meet them, and so on. It went on for like 2 hours. I'd like to say we won, but it was kind of a stalemate (if not a minor loss). It was getting really late and MostHated was picking people off in town while they were buffing up/healing, so most of us logged.

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