Category: ramblings

Today's Edition of Kurn is a Shammy Noob

Kurn / / general, ramblings, shamans

Around level 65, I soloed Banthar, Bach’lor, Gutripper and Tusker, with no issues.

I received the Totem of the Plains as my reward from good ol’ Hemet Nesingwary.

Now, I’ve been master looter of more than my fair shair of raids.  I saw the Totem of Healing Rains drop a dozen times, easily, watched as the Totem of the Maelstrom got DEed every time it dropped…

Never once did I pay any attention to the flavour text that says “Counts as an Air, Earth, Fire, and Water totem.” Nope. Not once. Not even when I got my own Totem of the Plains, my first relic item on my shammy.

Until I was chatting with a friend back on Eldre’Thalas who was like “you’re not still carrying your four totems around with you, are you?”

“… why wouldn’t I be? Don’t I need them in my inventory to be able to drop, you know, totems?”

“Do you have a relic?”

“Yes…”

“Kurn, read the relic.”

“Huh.”

So I put my totems in my bank (rather than destroying them on my friend’s advice) and proceeded to drop all my totems as if I still had all four in my inventory.

I love (and also hate) that this game is so vast that I still learn things about it three and a half years in. Like, things that aren’t even new. Relics were introduced when, pre-2.0? Way to go, me. Way to go.

Attention world!

Kurn / / ramblings, shamans

The shammy has Steve, repeat, the shammy has Steve and is parked at Valiance Keep.

Level 68. I’m scared, to be honest. Now the tough stuff begins. And honestly, Borean AGAIN or Howling Fjord? Hm.

/facepalm

Kurn / / paladins, ramblings

Back in the day, when my hunter was my main raiding character, I would always be REALLY picky about other hunters. How they played, how their spec was, etc. And I was pretty noobish myself back then, but I could trap spam (feign + retrap = win!) and I knew not to pull something to my trap with Serpent Sting and I knew how not to make my pet wipe the raid… Hell, my pet would pull Baron Geddon and Shazzrah, purposely!

Having spent the last two years raiding with a holy paladin, I’m still more or less picky about hunters, but I’m even pickier about paladins — holy paladins.

A RL friend asked me to go to H. VH on my hunter tonight, with her on her shadow priest. So I went, and our tank was a RL friend of hers. The other DPS was another shadow priest from my friend’s guild. All that we were missing was a healer.

Enter: The PUG Pally.

As soon as the guy zoned in, I inspected his talents.

51/5/15. Cookie-cutter, right?

WRONG.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sxA0gGzGVzMxotaZVf0x

Go on, click the link. It’ll open in a new window.

Let’s go over the problems with his spec, shall we? First, the holy tree.

Spiritual Focus: Good.

Divine Intellect and Healing Light: Good and Good.

Illumination and Improved Lay on Hands: Good and Good.

Improved Concentration Aura and Improved Blessing of Wisdom: Mehhhhhhh and Good.

Divine Favor, Sanctified Light and Blessed Hands: Good, Good and … wait a second, wtf. Blessed Hands? Really? I have a bad feeling about this.

Holy Power: Good.

Holy Shock: Good… wait, wait. WAIT. No Light’s Grace? NO points in there? NONE? Oh, dear Lord.

Infusion of Light and Holy Guidance: Good and Good. (Really, though? No Light’s Grace??)

Divine Illumination: Good. And yet no Enlightened Judgements? Oh, this just gets better and better.

Judgements of the Pure: Great talent. But how often is this noob going to actually judge when he has to be within 10 yards of the mob?

Beacon of Light: Good.

Next, the prot tree.

Blessing of Kings, Improved Blessing of Kings: Have 0 issues with this, honestly. Perhaps the best part of the whole spec.

And then the ret tree…

Benediction: Good. (Thank God he didn’t pick up Deflection, which I was almost expecting.)

Improved Judgements and Heart of the Crusader: I prefer to stick 2 points into Improved Blessing of Might, but there are arguments for improved judgements. Not having Enlightened Judgements just kind of RUINS any arguments this noob could possibly have made for picking it up, though.

Conviction: Half the reason one goes into ret anyways, good talent.

So some seriously questionable talent point choices by this guy, who was wearing a leather chest with 72 spirit on it enchanted with 8mp5…

Well, the run actually went okay, except for the PUG Pally telling me in /party “hunter move” instead of actually healing me. I’d moved out of the fire before you hit enter, buddy, thanks for the lack of the heal and leaving me down 10k health when everyone else in the party was topped up just fine.

So what WAS this dude doing instead of healing me?

Consecrating. Consecration hit mobs 121 times for damage.

He Holy Shocked mobs twice.

Meleed 9 times.

Judged — and this is what got me — JUDGEMENT OF VENGEANCE twice. I don’t know what’s more insulting, that he only judged twice in the whole instance or that it was Judgement of Vengeance. Hi, yeah, that’s a TANKING *seal*. Why the hell aren’t you judging light? Why the hell aren’t you judging? I mean, you have Judgements of the Pure AND Improved Judgements… oh, that’s right! You don’t have Enlightened Judgements for the 30 yards of extra range! Dumbass.

Oh, and he used Holy Shock to heal twice. TWICE. All instance.

When you have a 2.5 second holy light cast and you’re not judging for your haste buff from Judgements of the Pure, and you have Infusion of Light, why on EARTH are you not holy shocking for all you’re worth in the hopes of proccing an instant Flash of Light or 1.5 second Holy Light?

Did I mention that despite being specced for Improved Concentration Aura, he didn’t use it? He used Devotion Aura. And wasn’t even specced for Improved Devotion Aura. In an instance where there’s a ton of magic damage. /facepalm.

And yet, this dumbass has Heroic: Twilight Duo, Heroic: Fall of Naxxramas and Heroic: The Spellweaver’s Downfall.

I don’t know if I’m more offended by his shitty spec and playstyle or that he’s managed to get so far in progression. But I’m definitely offended on behalf of good players and good pallies everywhere!

Weird runs…

Kurn / / healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I was online tonight because I couldn’t sleep due to a headache. So I decided to get on WoW and play with my holy pally’s UI.

After futzing with it for a bit, I wanted to try it out in a raid scenario or something and there in Trade, someone was looking for a healer for Normal Vault of Archavon. So I said I’d go.

I get into the group and I look at the classes. There’s a druid… who is in moonkin form. There’s another paladin, who only has 6k mana. There’s a warlock. Three hunters. A rogue. A death knight. And then they bring in another druid, so I figure, hey, it’s a resto druid. Sweet.

Uh, no. The druid is feral and is MTing.

… so I’m the only healer?

Apparently, I am.

Piece of cake, didn’t lose anyone.

Anonymous WWS here, to protect the stupid:

http://wowwebstats.com/23rhuez5aagak

I’m “Gemini”. The moonkin (“Dew”) tossed out a few heals, and didn’t DPS hardly at all, but really, I healed the living crap out of that place.

/flex

Dang.

Kurn / / general, ramblings, shamans

Just dinged level 67 on the shaman. I have soloed all the Nesingwary quests and just now freed Corki for what is hopefully the very last time ever.

I really hate that guy.

Can’t wait to get Steve at level 68 after having gotten Josh at 66.

What’s that? You don’t know who Steve and Josh are?

Josh is the earth elemental shammies get at 66. A former guildie decided to name his Josh when he got him, as his brother had named his mage’s water elemental Billy. This guildie pondered for a while what to name the fire elemental.

After much discussion, he settled on Steve, in honour of pre-BC-era fire mage extraordinaire, Tandrace. Tan was a female toon but didn’t have a microphone so we always teased her about being some dude named Steve. To this day, Tan’s true gender remains a secret…

But instead of naming my earth and fire elementals something different (my mage’s water elemental, for example, is named Clyde), I elected to stick with Josh and Steve, if for no other reason than I <3 Tan and wish to pay her tribute. :)

So overpowered…

Kurn / / general, ramblings, shamans

Back in Burning Crusade, when warlocks were something to be feared, a guildie rolled a warlock alt and called it “Imop”.

“Imop?” I said.

“No, no,” he replied, “that’s I’m OP.”

I laughed.

On Sunday night, I seriously considered renaming my shaman alt “Imop”. Because she really, really is. How so?

I nearly soloed Overlord a couple of weeks ago. That was my first big hint.

The Jump-a-Tron quest in Nagrand? Well, I shocked myself by landing on the nest on the first attempt. And then hauled out the ol’ spirit wolves after the momma bird came looking for me.

12 seconds later, the ol’ momma bird was dead.

That was my second big hint.

What convinced me, though, was going out there at level 65 and soloing Banthar, a level 67 elite. 25 thousand health? So not a problem. Not with spirit wolves, Maelstrom… I didn’t even have to blow Shamanistic Rage.

I suspect that I’ll be able to get Bach’lor and the windroc elite (whose name escapes me at the moment) about as easily, and I now have an Earth Elemental Totem so I’m thinking Tusker will be pretty easy, too.

If all else fails, I have FROSTSHOCK and can kite her over to Telaar. ;)

I’m sure that shaman aren’t quite this OP in raid situations and stuff, but while levelling, putting out this kind of damage, while surviving? The only thing I’ve seen as OP as an enhancement shammy thus far is a ret paladin. (Soloing 3-man group quests in Dragonblight as a ret paladin in holy gear is hilarious.)

Good times!

Strange Sundays.

Kurn / / apotheosis, general, ramblings

It used to be that, back in my old guild, I’d have Sundays basically dedicated to guild stuff. From 3-4:30 (and later, 4-5:30), I’d have office hours, where people could chat with me, one-on-one about their concerns about the guild. I was also always available through private messages on our forum, but my office hours meant instant dialogue between me and the person or people in question. And through in-game chat or on Vent.

From 6-7:30 or so was our officer meeting. These meetings MOSTLY petered out after about an hour, but we’d chat a bit after that about lineups and swapping people in and out and stuff like that. By 7:30, most of that was done, people had been promoted or demoted, ginvited or whatever… and it would be time for invites for our raid at 7:45.

The raid would take place from 7:45-11:30, sometimes pushing on towards midnight. After the raid, I’d upload the combat log to WWS to parse, then haul ass to the corner store for a few minutes while it parsed, before it closed at midnight, then would sit for an hour or so going over the parse, either by myself or with other officers.

So basically, from 4pm until about 12:30 or 1am on Sundays, I was all guild, all the time, with a half-hour allocated for dinner between office hours and the officer meeting, which I usually didn’t even make use of for food.

Today, I woke up, worked from 2pm-4pm, sent my supervisor an email, played some WoW, talked on the phone, had dinner, watched TV and played a bit more WoW.

I’m not used to all this time to myself on Sundays. At one point, I was on the phone and went to myself “oh CRAP, I missed the officer– wait. There’s no more officer meetings for me. Huh.”

For the last 3 weeks or so, Sundays have been my own again. The last time Sundays were wholly mine, without the spectre of officer meetings and raids to come was probably in May of 2007.

I have a feeling it’ll take more than three weeks to break myself of the feeling that Sundays aren’t supposed to be mine.

And so it ends.

Kurn / / apotheosis, ramblings

On June 1st, 2007, several former guildies and in-game friends of mine on the Eldre’Thalas server, including myself, created a new guild called Apotheosis. It was so named because Palantir had just had his wisdom teeth removed and he was on a significant amount of painkillers during the officer meeting to decide on a name for our new guild. He flipped through the dictionary and said, in a slightly stoned voice, “Apotheosis.”

A guild was born.

Continue reading “And so it ends.”

Alts in the old world.

Kurn / / general, ramblings

It’s been a very long time since I first fell over the edge of the cliff that denotes the zone change between Tanaris and Un’Goro. Yes, I fell over the cliff. I figured there had to be a better way to get there somehow, but I didn’t particularly care. It was sometime back in early 2006 that I stumbled through Un’Goro for the first time and skinned the crap out of dinosaurs there, got chased down by elite dinosaurs I couldn’t feign through because of the fear and did that stupid escort quest, getting that goblin back to Marshall’s Refuge.

I even remember a time when there wasn’t a flight point at the Refuge.

I’ve been through Un’Goro on basically every toon I’ve levelled. That’s my hunter, my pally, my mage, my priest and now I’m going through there on my shaman, who is probably the highest level toon of them all who has ever spent time here. She’s currently 54.

It’s at this point that I really can realize and appreciate just how much solo content there was in the old world. My shammy has done exactly two instances — a quick ZF run-through and a much more painful Sunken Temple pug. I haven’t touched any of EPL, Felwood, Winterspring or Silithus. I haven’t been to Azshara or Burning Steppes. I’ve just quested through STV and Searing Gorge and Tanaris and now I’m in the Crater.

I realized how much content I hadn’t touched when I picked up the Linken questline down here in Un’Goro last night. I’ve never actually completed it on any of my characters, I don’t think, though I believe each of them started it. So I was at the raft, then back to Marshall’s Refuge, and Linken tells me to go to Donova Snowden in Winterspring. I was like, cool, no problem… and then realized, wait. I haven’t been to Felwood. I haven’t repped up with the Timbermaw to run through their tunnel. And by haven’t been to Felwood, I mean that. Completely undiscovered on this toon.

/facepalm

There’s just so much to DO, so much old school stuff that I enjoyed doing in the past or never quite got around to finishing. I honestly think I’m going to chill out in the old world well beyond level 58. Screw the Outlands, I’m going to work on Timbermaw to get to Winterspring, I’m going to quest my ass off in EPL, I’m going to finally finish Linken’s quest chain and I’m going to do all those grinding quests down in Burning Steppes. I wonder if Dragonkin Menace and ALL the subsequent quests leading to the Onyxia attunement have been removed. As much as I’ve cursed Marshall Windsor over the years, which is a lot, I think I’d be sad if they removed all those quests.

So onward I go, to do the Silithid quests in Un’Goro for the very first time. Bugs freak me out, so I’ve never really done much with that chain.

Kind of nifty that, despite playing for three and a half years, I’m still finding new content, even in the old world.

EZ-mode

Kurn / / apotheosis, general, raiding, ramblings

I’m sad. I really, really am.

We went into Naxx25 for the first time as a guild on Tuesday and one-shotted all the bosses in the Spider and Plague wings. And Razuvious only took 3 tries. (Our priests had fun trying to learn what to do.)

Where’s the work? Where are the wipes? The heart-breaking, soul-crushing 1% wipes?

I remember spending all night working to get Venoxis down. I remember several nights of Jek’lik and Mar’li getting the better of us.

I remember the amazing feeling of getting Lucifron down for the first time.

The epic feeling of getting Golemagg down when one of the OTs had died and the other dual-tanked them.

Vashj, pre-big boss nerf, dying on attempt #80-something.

THOSE were epic.

I mean, we didn’t even take kill shots, that’s how fast we were going.

And I KNOW we’re not that leet. I know we aren’t. We’re used to each other, for the most part, of course, so there’s that helping us out, but we still had people dead on Heigan. We’re not ultra uber. So it must be that the content is just EASY.

It’s kind of sad. I hope the other encounters are at least moderately more entertaining, if not more challenging.