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*

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