Category: general

Another 80 and some musings.

Kurn / / dungeons, general, hunters, mages, paladins, ramblings, shamans

Well, the mage is 80 and it’s led me to some thinking about my alts and how I play this game.

My first toon, forever my “main”, even if I don’t raid with it, was Kurnmogh and I love my hunter all day long. Kurn and I have been through it all together. But sometime in there, I rolled a bank alt toon, which ended up being a human female paladin, named Madrana. Levelling Madrana (as holy!), back in the day, was a welcome reprieve from farming Essence of Air out in Silithus, which is basically what I’d do on Kurn when I wasn’t raiding or couldn’t get a guild group to go to Strat UD (my favourite instance) or UBRS (for my bloody T0 chestpiece!).

Madrana got to be a pretty awesome healer, pre-BC, even if most of her heals were Flash of Light and I didn’t understand half the mechanics of a pally.

Burning Crusade launched and my brother rolled a human warrior on a PVP server, where some of his RL friends played on Horde side. His goal: to level up and kick their asses. I know, my brother is a dork. So he calls me up when he’s level six or so and is like “I NEED A HEALER COME HEAL ME!”

Having already levelled a healer to 60, there was no way I was going to do it again (haha, I was so sure back then…) so he encouraged me to roll up a DPS class. And so my mage was born. I hit 30 and then discovered the utter chaos of Southshore on a PVP server. So I left Darkspear and brought the mage “home” to Eldre’Thalas — and my brother brought his warrior over.

At some point during this time, I also rolled a shammy, who would eventually be Katarah, but she started life as Shockra. I know, horrible name, eh?

I got the hunter, pally and mage up to 70 in BC but ignored the shammy.

In Wrath, I got the hunter, pally, shammy up to 80 and then got the priest going. And I’m getting a druid up there, too. :P

I think that, for the most part, playing my alts (not necessarily levelling them, but playing them) is my break from my raiding “job”. I raid 12 hours or so a week on Madrana and I heal, so it’s work. I like to get Kurn into whatever raids I can because I like to take pride in my hunter and I like to see how I’m doing compared to people playing their toons full time.

I got the shammy up because I wanted to understand healing better, from a shammy perspective. I’m not quite sure that I do, but I definitely know that I can’t DPS worth a damn on the shammy. ;)

And then I started playing the mage, for fun. And with the advent of 3.3 and the dungeon finder, I was having a BLAST going through instances on my mage. True, there was usually a wait, but I loved learning these stupid instances again from the perspective of a pure caster. I’ve sheeped things! I’ve provided food! I’ve buffed intellect! Good times.

Now that there are the four 80s (whose recent achievements are on the right over there… the order is Madrana, Kurn, the shammy and the mage), with a fifth to level by Cataclysm (stupid druid), I have plans.

Madrana is saving her Emblems of Frost for tier gear, first and foremost. Kurn, meanwhile, is upgrading via Emblem of Frost gear from the vendor, not going for tier armor yet, because hey, I don’t have access to the marks that drop in ICC.

Kurn is also my leatherworker, so after enough rep runs and such, I should be honored with Ashen Verdict and be able to buy patterns for various boots — boots that I’ll use on Kurn, the shammy AND Madrana, probably, because the crafted plate boots just aren’t as good as the crafted caster mail boots.

So how to fund the purchase of Primordial Saronite and such? Simple. The shammy and the mage will be using their Emblems of Frost for Primordial Saronite and finish gearing themselves up with Emblems of Triumph.

Both of them should get 19 Emblems of Frost a week, assuming no ICC runs, until the new VOA boss comes out (Tuesday?) at which point they’ll get 21 a week, one would presume. It’ll be slow, but at least I won’t have to spend 3000g on a single Primordial Saronite. I don’t know how many the shammy has, atm, but I’m pretty sure I’m into the 40s, so I’ll have enough to purchase the patterns as soon as Kurn hits honored.

So that’s the plan.

Also, I’m 18/0/53 on the mage. I’ve glyphed for Frostbolt, so it no longer slows (!) but causes 5% more damage, and I have Focus Magic and Torment the Weak (which I really didn’t understand, but TOTALLY do now — everything is a damn slow! Go go TTW!!). The mage’s achievements are hilarious, because I’m a brand-new 80, so everything I do is an achievement. Got a dungeon/raid emblem, achievement. Didn’t use the defense crystals in VH, achievement. Etc, etc. It cracks me up.

Happy new year, everyone. Looks to be an exciting year in terms of WoW. :D

More 10-man bitching.

Kurn / / facepalm, general, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

madboat10

So why am I bitching when I got an achievement? Basically, because I don’t particularly care too much for achievements and mostly because I then got swapped out on Saurfang (for a DPS, no less) and lost out on 2 emblems and 275 rep, since I’m human. I think, anyways. Don’t you get 250 rep (regularly) for a boss kill?

Anyways, this has me out of sorts. I don’t *want* to do 10-mans with the guild as it stands. I could probably pug it or go with the group I did it with the first week it was released. And then, I’d get all 8 of my badges and all my rep, assuming a decent group.

Honestly, the rep doesn’t bug me as much as the badges do. Being forced to run 10s to get badges to get my tier faster really pisses me off. But until I have… oh, let’s see now… a minimum of 310 badges to get the cheapest combination of 4 pieces of T10… then I’m not going to quit bitching about losing out on badges.

Assuming I get in for all of ICC25 and do my random heroic daily each day and do the random weekly raid (8 + 12 = 20), my total at the end of the week will be 98.

At a rate of 35 badges for the next 2 weeks or so, I’ll have 70 (2 weeks) + 98 (estimated total by next Tuesday) = 168 badges. Which is enough for 2 pieces of T10 and leaves me with 48 left.

Assuming that the next wing opens up after that two-week period, it will have three bosses, Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide. That’s up to six more emblems on 25 and up to six more on 10, meaning up to 12 more emblems a week.

Presume it now takes 3 weeks to get into the next wing, not four.

35 + 12 = 47

47 x 3 = 141 more emblems over 3 weeks, assuming you get every badge available to you, even though there are limited attempts on Putricide.

141 + 168 = 309 by the time raids reset on February 2nd and my guess as to when we’ll be able to get into the third wing.

Are you freaking kidding me?

It’s possible that I’m going to have to keep up with this nose to the grindstone thing until FEBRUARY?! And even THEN, I won’t have enough for 4 pieces of tier?!

This is the third reset right now. I’ve missed two days of daily randoms on Madrana and have missed out on one boss fight (2 emblems). I’m six emblems down and two of them aren’t my fault. I cannot continue to lose out on emblems like this or it’s going to take another 2 weeks of dailies to catch up.

This is ridiculous. I need to talk to my RL friend about stuff and how if the guild isn’t going to assure its members that it takes into raid of full emblems, I’ll just pug — to better the guild. How dumb is that? I’m working MY ass off to be able to get “Your Holy Shock spell causes the next Holy Light you cast within 10 sec to have 0.3 sec reduced cast time.” as my 4pc set bonus. Who do you really think is going to benefit from that? That’s right. THE TANKS WHOSE ASSES I AM KEEPING ALIVE. And they can’t even assure me that I’ll get all my badges in a week?

I spend a lot of time thinking about guilds and communities and some of the failures I’ve seen. I can point to where and why each guild I’ve been in has done poorly or broken up. I know exactly where the problems were.

In this guild, the problems lie in communication. Plain and simple. They need a communications officer to express to the guild what the officers are thinking and planning. If I can be blamed for anything in the past, *lack* of communication was never one of my faults, so this drives me absolutely bonkers.

10-mans. I knew they were a bad idea from the start, when I had to split up my guild into two Kara groups based on availability, social cohesion, group makeup, the ability to summon Nightbane and, oh yeah, skill.

/facepalm

Kurn / / facepalm, general, ramblings

On 11/25/08, I did Oculus for the first time. I did it on my hunter.

Since then, I have done Heroic Oculus precisely once, on my paladin, for my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title.

Random heroic for my hunter today? Oculus. On the bright side, I got the achievement for the heroic version of the dungeon (over a year, a YEAR after I got the regular one) and Ruby Void and Emerald Void.

But ugggggggggggggggh. I hate that place.

Patch 3.3 Hilarity

Kurn / / general, hunters, icecrown citadel, paladins, ramblings

Good gravy, it’s been a busy 18 hours or so. Apart from some sleep, I’ve managed to:

– update almost all of my addons so I don’t get crazy LUA errors anymore

– do Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection on my hunter (all using the LFG feature which is FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!!!)

– kill Razuvious (target of the weekly raid quest) on my hunter and my shaman

– tank a random heroic. I was a little surprised when I joined the random heroic queue on my paladin and it’s like “A GROUP HAS FORMED. YOUR ROLE: TANK.” And I was like, eh, why not? Best thing ever is that, halfway through, someone in the group was like “oh thank God we got a good tank!” and I’m like “haha, bad time to tell you I’m holy, 95% of the time?”

So, left to do: FoS, PoS, HoR, weekly raid on the paladin. FoS, PoS, HoR on my shaman.

We’re doing 25-man Icecrown tonight, I believe. They put together some 10-man groups earlier and at least one of them killed all four bosses, so we’ll see how that goes. What’s unfortunate is that it seems that the content is a cakewalk so far. I mean, my previous guild, who, on Monday, killed Heroic Northrend Beasts for the first time (and they’ve been trying since the FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER) walked in there and killed Lord Marrowgar on the second attempt. I’m not thinking my current guild is going to have many problems.

Also, my tank gear apparently doesn’t suck. Granted, I had 5% extra health from Luck of the Draw (? The buff you get when you do pugs.) but party-buffed (kings, fort, and a Guru’s Elixir), I had 45,248 health. Kind of nuts. But I did upgrade from my T7.5 gloves and T8.5 shoulders to T 9.10 (ilvl 232) gloves and shoulders, so I’ve got 2pc-T9 bonus and 2pc T8 bonus and it helps that I picked up some ilvl 245 gear (Arbiter’s Muse and Bracers of the Shieldmaiden) from TOC25 last week. I figured if it was going to get DEed anyways, I may as well pick up some cheap off-spec loot so I don’t look like a moron in heroics.

And apparently, I don’t. :) Just need a new freaking sword or mace or something.

What is equal parts hilarious and sad is that my paladin’s tanking gear is better than my hunter’s gear. Period. /sigh.

Well, at least my hunter is no longer stuck on the steps up to the airship at the end of Halls of Reflection. A GM moved me somewhere because I kept getting DCed. Annoyingly, I could move my pet up the steps through Eyes of the Beast so I saw the dude with the daily, I saw the Captain’s Chest and I saw the port to Dal… but couldn’t interact with any of them. :P

Anyways, very much liking the new content. I’m hoping Icecrown Citadel won’t be a total joke of an instance like TOC.

OH! And I nearly forgot!

My hunter got to exalted with the Kirin Tor.

I have never done a single dungeon run wearing the Kirin Tor tabard.

ALL of that rep — 3000 to friendly, 6000 to honored, 12000 to revered and 21000 to exalted (42000 rep!) — was earned over the last year by virtue of cooking dailies, fishing dailies and dungeon dailies. And that wasn’t even every day. That was just when I felt like it. When I realized I was freaking halfway through revered a couple of months ago, I was like “damn, that’s a lot of rep!” and so I’ve tried to do at least the cooking a little more often than usual. But still, not daily.

I’m just so very amused that I got exalted with Kirin Tor (giving me 10 exalted reps!) without doing anything I wouldn’t have normally done.

I have no words…

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, general, healing, paladins, ramblings

Seriously, I ran a VOA 25 pug today with, bar none, the worst holy paladin IN THE WORLD. I feel so bad for him that I’m not even going to post his name. It’s just so TRAGIC.

Some of his stats:

1616 bonus healing

15.08% chance to crit (20.08% holy crit)

13819 mana

(All unbuffed.)

His ONLY spec is holy, 51/20/0 and yet he’s wearing TANK SHOULDERS and using the exalted AV trinket (yes, I’m serious) AND … Majestic Dragon Figurine. Seriously.

Surprisingly, his spec isn’t utter crap. There’s just a couple of points I’d re-allocate, but it’s a decent spec.

The glyphs are criminal.

Glyph of Flash of Light… which… unless you’re doing a spellpower/FoL build/gear set, I would never use.

Glyph of Judgement. … right, because it’s so much better for a holy paladin than any other glyph you can take, right? 10% extra damage on your judgements? AWESOME, right?! /facepalm

And then… the pièce de resistance…

Glyph of Crusader Strike.

Oh. And 0 minor glyphs.

When I noticed, after the tanks died on Koralon and he himself died on Emalon, that he had 16k mana, raid-buffed, I whispered him and said “Hey I know you’re probably new to being 80 or being holy. I raid as a holy paladin and one of the best sites I ever stumbled across was http://www.bananashoulders.com/ so you should definitely check that out for gear, gemming and enchanting advice for holy paladins. :)”

He wrote back with “ty for tip”

I can only PRAY he’s currently reading everything Siha has ever, ever written.

I uploaded the logs (because I log damn near everything) and was pleased to see my overall damage on my hunter, but then curiousity got the best of me and I saw that the paladin in question really failed hardcore, and that’s when I started armorying him.

Oh, the pain.

Blizzard, I don’t care what you do to your game. It’s your game, after all. But you certainly have to understand that there are some very good players out there who run into these completely misguided, uneducated and plain dumb individuals… and it makes us want to cry. A lot.

Ugh.

Kurn / / general, healers, healing, paladins, ramblings

So I screwed up my Grid for my pally by messing around with it on my shammy. /facepalm. I spent about an hour redoing it, including all my custom buffs and debuffs. I tried to install GridStatusRaidDebuffs or whatever it’s called, but all I got were general LUA errors stemming from it, so I went back to doing things manually. I just hope I didn’t forget anything.

I also changed some Clique configurations. Previously, though I used Clique a lot, I didn’t have a couple spells bound to clicks. Now:

Left-Click: Flash of Light

Right-Click: Holy Light

Middle-Click: Cleanse

Thumb Button: Holy Shock

Shift-LC: Target

Shift-RC: Sacred Shield

Shift-MC: A macro to cast Beacon of Light on my focus target

I don’t make enough use of a focus, so I thought I’d try that last one out and see how it works. Typically, I am assigned one tank and told to keep beacon up on another. So I’m hoping to save time in binding a click to a focus/BOL macro.

And speaking of BOL… I finally have, at least temporarily, given up my Holy Shock Glyph. For the time being. Beacon of Light is just so freaking expensive and I’m wasting tons of mana on it per fight. How much? In just a five minute fight like Twins, I’m casting BOL five times. If I had the glyph, I’d be casting it 4 times.

Time / cast # for me / cast # with glyph

00:00 / 1 / 1

01:00 / 2 / 1

01:30 / 2 / 2

02:00 / 3 / 2

03:00 / 4 / 3

04:00 / 5 / 3

04:30 / 5 / 4

Each time I cast Beacon of Light, I’m spending 1461 mana (1538 minus 5% from Glyph of Seal of Wisdom). So, in a short fight like Heroic Twins, that’s 1461 mana I’m saving.

But I’ll still miss my 5-second Holy Shock. :(

And finally, I switched from crit on my shoulders and helm enchants (35 crit strike rating combined) to mp5 (18 mp5 combined). 18 mp5 isn’t a huge amount, but I have a ton of crit and I do NOT have a ton of mp5, so I’m hoping that’ll help out a bit. (If I ever get a Heroic Solace of the Defeated, I’ll go back to crit. :P)

So we’ll see how I do in Sunday and Monday’s raids, given all these changes. I just hope I can remember my new clique bindings!

Hee.

Kurn / / general, hunters, ramblings

Every so often, I get the urge to go flex my hunter muscles. And it always sort of surprises me when I don’t fail utterly.

I did a GREAT Ony 10 yesterday on the hunter, which started off with a really bad/stupid wipe and we had to replace the OT, but honestly, the second attempt was successful and beautiful.

We had two tanks, two healers and six DPS.

I did 4.6k DPS, we got her down without a deep breath and we got the speed kill. I was third on DPS, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because I did two volleys on the whelps instead of four, like the other hunter.

And you know, I’m not in terrible gear, but it’s really not amazing. Seven of my pieces of gear are ilvl 200 (cloak, staff, ring, ring, trinket, trinket, boots), three are ilvl 219 (chest, gun, bracers), one is ilvl 226 (belt — which I just realized I had more than enough conquest badges for), three are ilvl 232 (helm, shoulders, pants) and two are ilvl 245 (neck, gloves).

Any time I get the chance to go be a hunter for a little while, I’m pretty happy to do so. I know I’m not going to top DPS in general and I know that it’s much easier to find a good DPSer than a good healer, so I do continue to heal, but it’s nice to have a change of pace now and again.

One of the reasons I chose to continue healing on Madrana for Wrath was that I really felt I could make a bigger difference by healing for my guild rather than DPSing for my guild. It’s also frustrating to have to care much about DPS. As a healer, I care about DPS to the point of “did we hit enrage or were the healers totally OOM?”. As a DPSer, I care about it to the point of “ffs, 2.5k DPS isn’t going to do it. What’s your hit rating? WHAT?! Go gem hit, for crying out loud, and do NOT come back without being hit-capped!” or whatever. (Well, 8% hit, but anyways.)

I really wish I could do some fun stuff on the hunter, get back into the swing of it, shake off the dust and get some boots that aren’t BLUE. :)

Wow. Just… wow.

Kurn / / coliseum, general, healing, raiding, ramblings

Heroic Twin Val’kyrs down. Using the DUMBEST STRATEGY I have ever encountered in my ENTIRE LIFE.

The whole basis of the fight is that there are auras that you should switch to based on what’s happening right then in the fight, and the aura portals are in four spots (two for each) of the room.

But does my guild do this?

No.

On the kill, 3 of us got the light aura, 21 of us got the dark aura. (Did I mention we 24-manned it? No? We did.)

Those 3 were two hunters and a warlock in BT Shadow Resist gear, basically collecting white orbs and dodging as many black orbs as they could.

As I understand it, here are four abilities the twins use.

Light Vortex – surge of light, 16k fire damage to anyone not with light aura every second for 5 seconds.

Dark Vortex – surge of dark, 16k shadow damage to anyone not with dark aura every second for 5 seconds.

Twin’s Pact (Light) – light-coloured shield that people with dark aura should have no issues killing, then interrupting the cast (which is a heal)

Twin’s Pact (Dark) – dark-coloured shield that people with light aura should have no issues killing, then interrupting the cast (which is a heal)

So, just by describing that, one would think that half the raid is light, half is dark, everyone switches on vortex, right? WRONG.

We healed through Light Vortex.

2 resto shammies, 2 holy priests, 2 holy paladins, 1 resto druid.

It meant popping two Divine Sacrifices that overlapped (even if they don’t stack) AND all four druids in the raid popping tranquility for their groups.

But, by golly, we healed through it.

And the shammy blew heroism at the right time. And they swapped DPS targets on time. And we won!

But it was pure luck.

The order of those four abilities (which happen once a minute, I believe?) is random. But they won’t repeat until the fifth time an ability comes up. And THAT is also random, I believe. So we only got one Light Vortex. Had we gotten two, we would have been SCREWED. I was ready to Divine Protection/Divine Sacrifice (which would have killed me) if I had to, but we got through without a second Light Vortex.

Some stats:

Effective raid DPS: 121,717

Effective raid DT(taken)PS: 50,469

Effective raid HPS: 50,966

RAW raid HPS: 91,732

And only 44.4% overhealing.

My RL friend, the resto druid? 9133 effective health per second. To my 4064.7.

Whew.

… wow?

Kurn / / gear, general, hunters, paladins, ramblings, ulduar

Holy crap, holy paladin tier bonuses that DON’T SUCK?!

  • 2 piece bonus – While your Divine Illumination talent is active, your healing spells are increased by 35%.

Oh my God. That is… fucking amazing. I’ve always viewed set bonuses that include talents as being something to encourage the class/spec to actually use that ability. I OFTEN forget to use Divine Illumination. Like, frequently. In reality, I should be using it on cooldown. Now this 2-piece T10 bonus is going to not only force me to remember to use Divine Illumination more often, BUT will greatly offset the fact that healing is halved when Divine Plea is up. This is a brilliant move. To date, we’ve had to use Avenging Wrath (which interferes with bubbling) to help mitigate that loss, or pop +spellpower trinkets and basically pray that we don’t have to cancel DP.

Especially considering the bonus WAS reducing Divine Favor’s CD by 60 seconds, this is a major improvement. I approve.

In fact, I consider this bonus to be just as strong as the 4-piece T9 bonus, albeit in a different way. T9’s 4-piece will encourage people to use Flash of Light and Sacred Shield more to get that FoL hot ticking away at double its regular strength. I mean, I can’t wait to get my 4-piece bonus, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be working hard to get the T10 2-piece ASAP, so I have a choice in fights. Do I aim for more healing via SS/FoL or do I aim for less panic about the tank dying? It’ll depend on the fight.

  • 4 piece bonus – Your Holy Shock spell causes the next Holy Light you cast within 10 sec to have 0.3 sec reduced cast time.

More encouragement to use Holy Shock? Another oh-shit use for it? Hm. My Holy Lights, raid buffed, are already coming in at about 1.2 seconds. I have 673 haste and then usually swift retribution aura and wrath of air and, of course, judgements of the pure. This bonus is probably not as amazing as the 2pc, but nothing to sneeze at, either. It’s not like you don’t WANT your tier, and this bonus will serve as halfway decent incentive to upgrade from T9’s 2-piece bonus, which is utter crap, unless you’re the only paladin in a 10-man raiding guild.

I’m really happy with the bonuses, for once. Can’t wait to see what the models will look like, although I’m going to predict something purple. I could really go for yellow, but I’m guessing pink/purple instead. After all, I got my wish for good set bonuses. Can’t have everything! ;)

In other news, about to go do Ulduar 10 with my hunter!!! I can’t remember the last time I was *excited* to do Ulduar…