Friday, January 30, 2009

Guild Groupie

Ever since that Obsidian Sanctum run I've been keeping in touch with my Heroic friend. I don't have a ton of non-guild time to do heroics, etc, but I managed to do half a Culling of Strat run with his guildies when they dropped their terrible PuG. Once again he sent me a tell that said his guildies were happy to "have a good healer pug for a change". I get down on my healing a lot because I run with a lot of challenging groups, so it's nice to get an ego boost once in a while.

I had looked up the guild and if they're saying nice things about me I'm really flattered. Our server isn't exactly a top WoW server, and we have very few notable players that are active in raiding and on the message boards. I've always been a trade chat/message board lurker, so if I recognize names it means they're about as close to "server superstars" as you can get in my world. When I looked up the guild on the armory I saw at least 4 or 5 names I recognized, including my priest hero Tony from way back in the late vanilla/early BC days. I know he has fallen from his pedestal a bit, but he's still fantastic and knows what he's doing.

Does this make me some sort of weird guild groupie? I keep wondering how I managed to impress this random heroic friend so much they've been persistently asking me to run with them. What if they invite me to this guild? That would be a really difficult decision to make.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Gear Upgrade Post January

I'm gonna try not to go nuts posting these gear upgrades, I think once a month is good. I'm getting to the point where purples are required for upgrade. Here's the things I can still get outside of raiding:

Mantle of Deceit (Culling of Strat)
Elegant Temple Gardens' Girdle(40 Badges)
Signet of Hopeful Light (Argent Crusade Rep)
Band of Guile (Culling of Strat)
Annhylde's Ring(Utgarde Keep)
Wand of Ahn'kahet (Old Kingdom)
Handbook of Obscure Remedies (25 Badges)

This is the tough one:

Chestguard of the Lost Conqueror (80 Badges)
Heroes' Robe of Faith

I'm not convinced it's any better than the Moonshroud Robe I'm wearing now until the 4 set bonus comes into play, and that's a while down the road. So this is definitely LAST on the list. Heck, I think I'd pass if it dropped in Naxx if someone else needed it more.

Reinspired again

So, as these things usually go, after I posted my QQ things got a little better. I decided to stop moping and go do some Sholazar Basin quests with the guys and get a little world PvP in. I think I finally found a place to go take out my frustration on some allies. It's like STV all over again. Must be something about Nessingwary that brings out the worst in people. Then I went to Wintergrasp and we actually managed to defend. I went out and farmed a ton more Water Eternals for my Wispcloak project. I made one for PX, who wants to heal on his shammy, and Tran doesn't need his so I'm going to send that one to Zon's healer. I wasn't going to make one for new drood Dru right away since I don't know if he'll stick around, and also because he's already wearing a purple cape that dropped from Patchwerk. I don't really want to spend a ton of my own money for a marginal upgrade for him. But he was making a huge deal over TS over how great my cloak was and how much he wanted it and how could he get the mats so finally I whispered him and told him to send me whatever mats he had and I'd take care of the rest, since I was giving it to the other healers anyway. I didn't want it to get around that I left him out when he clearly wanted one. It's just money right?

*edit* I had this huge rant in here that, in hindsight, is not very nice or appropriate for what I'm looking to accomplish. I don't really want to get into heavy guild politics, it's just not cool. So I'm sorry if you're looking for something that isn't here anymore

Sunday, January 25, 2009

WoW Rage

I'm really struggling to get anything done this weekend. I'm so frustrated about us not raiding that I'm starting to not even want to play. I've resorted to bribery to get our healers going, I'm making Wispcloaks as fast as I can, but that's only going to go so far. It's pretty hard to heal a dragon to death. If I can keep our new drood I'll be happy, but I'm not feeling terribly optimistic.

There's this one tank I've been running with and he's making me crazy. I just can't keep him healed. We got stomped by Trollgore about 10 times this morning. All I need is one badge for the Egg of Mortal Essence. One! Is that too much to ask?

I think I'm just going to pug it tonight.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Mishmash

I'm having a 'random WoW thoughts' kind of day today while I'm working, listening to WoW podcasts, and reading the WoW Insider/ Matticus posts here and there.

I was playing this cool puzzle game, Aurora Feint, on my iPhone on the train this morning, and the chat that's at the bottom when you are connected to the internet was totally talking about WoW. That was pretty funny.

Something I forgot to mention about that Obsidian Sanctum run I did (which I'm still smiling about BTW) was how proud I was of not having to be told not to "stand in the fire". I was healing Zon outside of the portal and moving out of the little pink circles that kept popping up under my feet. Around the second or third one he says "Oh yeah, don't stand in those". I was already on it. I actually had to remind him to move a few times :-D

Sunday, January 18, 2009

ZOMG T7

So I thought this weekend was going to be one big fail, but I was wrong.

I got a whisper from one of my random heroic buddies asking if I wanted to do 10 man Obsidian Sanctum. I joined up and there were only 5 people in group, so I asked Tran and Zon if they wanted to come. They agreed, but we were still having trouble getting the rest of the DPS. Eventually, we ended up running it with 8 people

When we got in there, turned out Zon was the only tank and Tran and I were the only heals. We were all in TeamSpeak and thoroughly convinced we were going to fail with 8 people and 1 tank. We were wrong.

We killed all three of the drakes with just a wipe or two, but the last boss was a challenge. I really think we could have done it with 8, but one of the guys was being an ass and really wanted to bring in a friend, so I brought in Tess to help offtank. We wiped a whole bunch, but once we got Sartharion in the right position so we could actually see the flame waves, we got her. Pretty much everyone died except Zon and I think 2 dps. I died right near the end and was spirit healing him like crazy, I had just come out of angel form when the boss went down, then Zon died from a dot just a few seconds later.

I won Tier 7 gloves. It was so fun. I needed a good challenge. And thinking back on it, our guild was the entirety of the tanking and healing. Everyone else was DPS. We can so do this as a guild.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Work and Play

I never actually got around to what I wanted to talk about yesterday. No sidetracks this time.

Ever since I heard that Blizzard will (eventually) allow dual-speccing, I've been waiting for it. And waiting and waiting and waiting. Some days more patiently than others. I would run a Holy spec for instances and raiding and a Discipline spec for questing and PvP. That's pretty much the way I've been set up since I joined my guild and needed to be able to do both effectively. As far as the actual spec goes, I like both of them just as much for their purpose. However, the way I think about respeccing and the length of time I spend in a spec tells a lot about the way I play WoW.

I think of my Holy spec as a 'work' spec. I'm only in it when I need to be to do the big heals. I really like doing instances and raids, and my real talents shine when I'm doing that kind of healing. But to me it's still a chore to be in Holy spec, and I get out of it whenever I can. I'm in Disc spec right now because I know I won't be raiding for a little while, and if I'm running with Zon it's good enough for heroics.

I have the most fun in my Disc spec. I can get out there and kill mobs non stop if I'm wearing my heal gear (my heal set is good for questing this time around, unlike the old Mooncloth gear) or if I'm in a dailies area and worried about allies, I can pull out my resilience set. The spirit on it is terrible, but that's what Honeymint Tea is for. Out in the world my resilience set is good enough to keep me alive for quite a while, and even beat some classes if I've got full mana. In battlegrounds and arenas, not so much, but as I've said before instanced PvP is really not my thing.

I think a lot of it has to do with being on a PvP server. If I were on a carebear server I wouldn't have to worry about getting jumped, so I could just suck it up and quest in Holy. It's not a bad spec, Disc is just more DPS and "armor".

Maybe this kind of attitude does mean that Blizzard needs to fix healing. I don't mind the way it works now, but when I'm doing heavy duty healing it is a lot of work.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Matticus is my hero

Blog articles like this make me giggle and bounce up and down in my chair:

Saving a Blown Pull With Clutch Heals

Raiding on my mind

I was wishing for dual specs again the other day when I dropped yet another 50g on a respec to discipline for arenas. The arenas went sorta ok, we were still getting used to it and two droods and a priest isn't exactly a winning combination. We ended at 1340 for the week. I haven't managed to get Bb in the arena with me yet. Maybe this week. I'm still not sure about doing arenas with a guildie. Well, I guess now Tess and Dani are guildies too :) My evil plan is now complete. Well, as close as it will get.

Val sent me a message from his DK yesterday. He moved his mage over to another server, but I think the grass is greener. I was saying the other day when he was getting ready to leave that he'd consider coming back over to SDS. I encouraged him, but that was before War left. I'm not entirely surprised. I think War's looking for an active raiding guild, not a social one like ours.

I've got so many ideas about jump starting guild raids to try and progress, but I'm not volunteering for a few reasons:

1. The way things have worked is if you plan it, you lead it. I don't think I'd make a very good raid leader. I'm happy to do all the administrative bullshit to get it together to increase our chances at progression, but I'd really rather have Zon or Tran or even Jr lead the actual raid. I'm just not aggressive enough to keep 9 rowdy raiders together.

2. I'm not convinced that we even SHOULD try and do raid progress because of the way our guild has always run. Want to run three warriors and two paladins? Great. Show up with no potions or buff food and broken gear? Oops. Constantly aggroing stuff with your pet or can't control your dps in heroics? Well come raid anyway, you signed up for it. No organized 5 mans to gear people up. No advice or guidance about specs or stats. No looking at dps output or any other kind of stat. Nothing. Changing this would be a fundamental change in the way our guild operates, and I don't know if that's really something we SHOULD change. It would leave people out and I know we don't want to do that. It would also be a lot more work, and I don't know if we want to do that either.

3. From the conversations I've heard about raiding over TS, I get the distinct impression there's another officer who wants to organize the raids. He's been around a long time and his opinion carries a lot of weight in the guild. I don't want to step on his toes, both because I respect him as a longtime guild member, and because getting on his bad side would be very bad for me.

That's my raiding rant. Which is funny, because I didn't intend for this post to go that direction, but I seem to have it on my mind a lot. Personally, I think Blizzard is making a mistake trying to push all PvE players into raiding. It really hurts small guilds and free-agents.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

All hail Zully, champion of the Undercity!

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I spent a decent chunk of Saturday leveling my shammy, since the raid was full (though they didn't go anyway - short tanks). I didn't really do any instance runs, except a couple on Yoka, who is stubbornly still 70. Ugh, i just can't bring myself to level her. Not even for Alchemy purposes. I don't know where I developed this aversion to melee, I love playing melee in every other game. I guess a lot of it is I've learned how to survive at range.

I decided to finish up Dragonblight after I went around and did the quest chain for the Wyrmrest Temple daily. Finally. Turns out I missed an entire village full of Tanuka on the west side. Part of this was the Wrath Gate quest chain. I had an issue with the cut scene, I couldn't get any sound, but I got the general idea. This led up to the Battle for the Undercity, which was basically a half hour long interactive cut scene. They incorporated the Lament of the Highborn from the low level newbie concert, which I thought was a nice touch. In the end we were victorious and everything returned to normal. Even trade chat. Sigh.

Other than moneymaking I'm really not sure what to do with Zully. Battlegrounds are next on my list but I'm rarely motivated to do them, especially with my internet connection being so flakey. Hopefully the maintenance guys will figure out the problem today.

Friday, January 9, 2009

The Lurker Below

I've been slacking a little on my posts, but I haven't had much time to play, or much time to post. I've actually had (gasp!) work to do while at work. So I've got to keep it short.

I've met a few goals recently. I finally did that last daily to get my epic fishing pole from the walrus men, and just in time. I popped in for 20 minutes last night and there was a group in SSC sneaking over to fish up the lurker for the fishing achievement. Naturally, I popped on my blue overalls and lucky fishing hat and dove right in. I managed to drag Tess along with me too. I've gotta get him set up on TeamSpeak soon so he'll get included in more stuff. Tran said they couldn't get him into Wednesday's VoA because he wasn't set up. This won't do.

We did regular Oculus the other night. It was pretty cool, fortunately you just get kicked out of the instance if you fall off your dragon. It was fun to heal on foot and dps in the air too. I think I got that "time stop" button down. Now I just need to do Utgarde Pinnacle and I'll have my achievement so I can make the Wispcloak. Good thing I saved my clams.

I'm all about the bad puns today.

My shammy Zan is level 27 now, and that's with picking every flower I see and obsessively grinding out the city faction reputation so I can get exalted with all four. The flower picking has also finally led me to an auction money source, since it's practically free to produce those glyphs. I found a few that are running between 18 and 30 gold a piece. Sweet.

The guys have been getting me and Joun mixed up on TS lately. This is amusing and annoying at the same time. Oh well.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Raid Dilemma

I have an interesting dilemma. I want to raid. Really REALLY want to raid. I've wanted to raid since the day I started in WoW, and all 65+ days of game time I've put into Zully. My guild is spinning up to do some raiding, and I'm thrilled. They've made it pretty clear that they need me in order to start doing it, since I'm the Holy Troll, which makes me feel good and freaks me out at the same time. Pressure! Ack!

The problem is, raids take time. Big, uninterrupted blocks of time. Most of my big uninterrupted blocks of time are between 12a and 4a server time, or on the weekend not between 6p and 9p server time. I highly doubt the east coasters are going to want to wait until 9p server time to start a raid, and I also doubt that the west coasters will get up early enough to be done by 6p server time. I'm assuming a minimum of 4 hours of raid time, but they usually run 6-8 hours. A lot of our geared players fall into one of those two categories.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to let everyone down by not being able to raid, but I don't want to plan my life around raiding in WoW. But I REALLY REALLY want to raid. This is so frustrating.

Friday, January 2, 2009

The Crunch

I made a "Goals Sheet" for PvE gear today. I feel accomplished and dirty at the same time. My statistics teacher from high school would pass out if he saw me doing this. Between WoW and my job, I use more math than I ever thought I would.

The reason I did all this work to make my own sheet is... because I can. I feel that I've been at this long enough that my own judgment for my healing style is going to be better than a cookie cutter web program or message board telling me what gear to get, what spec to take, and what spell rotation to use. I'm starting with the gear. Once I have that down, I'll work on a custom spec. Then, I'll work on spell rotation.

I'll link results from my spreadsheet, but it's not quite done yet. I have all the formulas set up so I can plug in different pieces of gear and come out with how it actually affects my character's stats. I used WoW Wiki to get the conversion formulas and check them against my listed armory stats.

The part I'm working on is what I want to use for my goal ratings, and figuring out the appropriate formula to show me what the deficit between current gear and goal gear is to help in my gear/chant/gem selection. The one painful thing about 'going custom' is I need to consider gem gear. I've been taking the easy way out and picking higher stat non-gem items. I haven't looked at badge gear either. I figure any badge gear I get is bonus and I'll worry about it when I have enough badges to buy some.

So far this is what I'm thinking for my goals. I'm basing them on Elitist Jerks to start with until I get a handle on the formulas. The hardest part is getting the numbers to scale based on what raid level I'm running at. It would be stupid to set goals based on 25 man raid gear at this point.

Spirit/Intellect - Equal Rating, no more than 25% advantage to Spirit
Haste - 10%
Crit - 15%

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