Holy How-To #7 – Your Tools and Cooldowns

Kurn / / healers, healing, holy how-to (wrath), paladins, raiding

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the seventh of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Some time ago, I talked a bit about healing instincts and how my paladin healing instincts consistently screwed me over when playing any other healing class. For example, forgetting about Penance on my disc priest. Don’t get me started on Nature’s Swiftness or Tranquility on my druid, much less Nature’s Swiftness and Tidal Force on my shaman. I’m a good enough healer that I can sort of “fake” my way through content with which I’m already familiar if I’m performing the same role, like healing. But I’m not going to think to use Pain Suppression or any of the other tricks of various healing classes the way I do when I’m on my paladin.

Why is this?

Continue reading “Holy How-To #7 – Your Tools and Cooldowns”

Failadins ahoy!

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, paladins, ramblings

I cannot believe how many paladins out there on wowlemmings, or even those applying to my guild, are using this piece of crap libram:

Libram of Veracity

This libram is good for ONE encounter in ICC. One. That is the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter. For that, it’s downright awesome. I still haven’t spent any emblems on it, but I should probably get around to it. (I still have Libram of the Resolute for my Valithria set.)

I have to really insist that any Holy Light style holy paladin use Libram of Renewal. It doesn’t matter that its item level is 200. Let me say that again in words that some paladins who may be less theorycraft-oriented may better understand:

Your Gearscore doesn’t matter.

You remember back last month? When I was all like “What I Look For in a Holy Pally App“? Remember how I was complaining about things like the head and shoulder enchant choices and there was all this debate about mp5 vs crit?

Yeah.

I WISH that was all I had to complain about. There’s this one app who is wearing, I kid you not, three frost resistance pieces, gemmed straight up intellect with a Nightmare’s Tear, using the Libram of Veracity, specced 51/2/18, misses out on Imp LOH, Imp BoW (for 3/3 Imp Conc Aura), misses out on Imp BOM for Imp Judgements, is glyphed for Seal of Light and Flash of Light and yeah, did I mention the FROST RESISTANCE GEAR? It’s gemmed with +20 or +34 intellect, too. It’s like… hi. You fail in so many ways that it might be fun to pick you apart if looking at your armory didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out.

(Edit: He actually has Rot-Resistant Breastplate, Belt of the Lonely Noble and Recovered Reliquary Boots… but still only has 491 haste. Gah. Oh, and he’s withdrawn his app.)

What I think is going on is all these people have rolled paladin alts because they reason that finding a guild as a healer is going to be easier than as a DPS.

So they go out and try to gear themselves.

And they’re doing it Wrong ™.

They reason “hey, this is a holy libram! It’s ilvl 245! It’s available for 25 Emblems of Triumph! This must be awesome!”

And it’s not.

They reason “hey, people won’t take me on their runs if my GS is too low so I should get anything over ilvl 200 that I possibly can, even if the stats are awful!”

And they’re wrong.

They figure that anything with spellpower on it, particularly if it’s plate, MUST be good for them, regardless of all the other stats and how all the stats work together.

And they’re still wrong.

I was so frustrated by seeing all this failure that I was going to do a Holy How-To on how to appropriately gear a holy paladin who’s just hit 80, but then I remembered that Codi at Moar HPS had already done a post like that this last week!

<3 Codi

Most of the pieces have goodly amounts of haste on them. Listen to her, folks. She’s smart.

I guess what really boggles me the most about all this is that the most recent app I described says, and I’m not kidding, “I look in forums, healing sites, pally sites” when asked how he researches his class.

What <insert long string of expletives here> sites recommend ANY of the crap he’s wearing!? Or his spec? Or his glyphs?

This is really what spurs me into writing stuff on the blog. If there are bad holy paladin sites out there, I need to put my crap out there to counteract all that awful influence. :P

And speaking of privacy…

Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, guild

(Edit: Please scroll to the bottom of this post to read my additional clarifications, as well as read my responses to the comments.)

So I was going through my search terms and found this:

“what guild is madrana in skywall”

Not cool, guys.

Is that my bad? Maybe. I mentioned the server names to differentiate between the Hyjal and Skywall guilds I applied to. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but my issue with this is that I deliberately went out of my way to prevent mentioning the guilds. I didn’t do it just for kicks, I did it because I have respect for the two guilds.

To have someone googling to find out what guild I’m in is a sign of disrespect to me and to my guild. It deliberately goes against my wishes to keep my guild tag relatively anonymous.

So knock it off.

If you already know my guild name, I ask you to please respect my privacy. Please respect my decisions to leave out bits of information like the name of my guild. Please don’t mention them here. Please don’t make me pay $10 for a name change. Please don’t contact me in-game because I WILL tell you to stop and if it continues, I WILL report your ass. I have no problems with that.

If you don’t already know my guild name, I will respectfully ask you to let it go and not go looking for it. If you like my blog, my writing, my thoughts, my holy paladin tips and tricks, you will respect my wishes in this matter.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have to think a bit about posting anything else that’s at all related to guild stuff and my personal raiding experiences. And let me tell you something — that’s not cool. To have to think about censoring myself on my own blog because some creepers out there just HAVE to know what guild I’m in? Definitely not something I ever wanted to experience.

—

Edit, June 25th

Okay, I’ll admit it was unsettling to see a Google search term so very dedicated to finding me in WoW. I may have overstated my discomfort because I was definitely unsettled.

I also made a few mistakes.

1) In my previous guild, my character’s name was not Madrana. Some tool already had “my” name on that server. So I added a letter to it. As such, I tried hard to refer to myself as “Madrana”. This obviously allowed people to find me much more easily once I transferred, because I reclaimed “my” name. Had I been smart, I’d have used a whole other name entirely, but I was SO GLAD to get “my” name back that I didn’t really think about how many times I’ve used “Madrana” on this blog.

2) Apparently, I misjudged this thing called “popularity”. When I did realize that I was using the same name in-game as I was using to identify my paladin on the blog, I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Who the hell wants to track me down? I’m just some outspoken, opinionated holy paladin. You’d think that looking at my traffic stats would help me realize that I actually speak to a lot of people every time I post. But no, apparently 5131 visits and 9551 pageviews in the last month means absolutely nothing to me. :P

3) I posted about my discomfort. It was a natural instinct. A reaction of “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!” and then a decision to write about it to the very people who were reading the blog and subsequently searching for me.

Doing so probably only exacerbated the issue — and this edit probably will, too.

So what am I going to do about this?

Well, the first thing I’ve already done is poured myself a great big cup of “CALM THE FUCK DOWN” and chugged that. :P

The second thing I’m doing is editing this post to reflect my thoughts on the matter now that I’m calmer, and I’ll be responding to comments as well.

The third thing I’m doing is this: explaining, in greater detail, why it unsettled me and why I would appreciate it if you didn’t look me up.

I go to what I feel are pretty great lengths to protect the identities of the people I talk about in my blog. I rename everyone, except pretty much Majik, because he’s just a DK and they’re all noobs. ;) (Thank you for that search term, whoever you are.)

If you were from my former guild, you would know who I was talking about when I said the main tank, the raid leader, the other holy paladin. But the general public wouldn’t know without a LOT of homework and digging. To me, that was acceptable. That showed my former guildies (if they ever came across it) that I wasn’t out to share insider information about the guild or anything like that. By masking my identity, to an extent, and by doing what I could to rename everyone else, I was, in my mind, creating a safe place for me to talk about the trials and tribulations involved in raiding, without ruining anyone’s reputation, without calling people out behind their backs, without all that drama.

It was about me complaining about X person or Y situation and it wasn’t detailed enough to draw identities from it, in my opinion.

The situation suddenly, overnight, became “crap. How do I protect my current guild from identification the way I did my old guild?”

When I say that the GM is an amazing healer, I mean it. When I say that I absolutely adore one of the raid leaders (and still quite like the other), I mean it. But what happens if I were to comment on something else that isn’t quite so awesome?

I was free to do that in the previous guild situation. I felt that 95% of people didn’t know my toon/server/guild name. (Don’t disabuse me of that notion if that’s not the case, please. :P) Now, not only do I actually have guildies reading, which is a whole new dimension for me to deal with, but now some people, probably about 40% (again, don’t disillusion me) of people reading know what guild I’m in. Probably by my complaining about that or asking you NOT to look it up, that number has grown.

Someone who commented on this post yesterday noted that the publish button is called “Publish” for a reason. And it’s true. A lot of bloggers forget that once it’s out there, IT IS OUT THERE. And there’s no real taking it back.

I’m not going to go back and edit out my name or the name of my server. I’m not going to go back and erase this post. I’m not going to do that. Because even if I did, it’s still out there. People have still learned the information.

So it’s less about me being creeped out by being contacted by a random creeper (although please don’t do so. :P) and more about protecting the people I’m playing with. I LIKE these people, you know.

I’m comfortable with my guild identity being a relatively open secret. But that’s the kicker — secret. Any references by others to the name of the guild or any members of the guild will either be edited or deleted, depending on how patient I’m feeling. Let us all ascribe to the rather unlikely concept that I’m in a guild that no one knows anything about. :P

Oh, and possibly what annoyed me the most is that someone GOOGLED that shit. Guys. Really. Google? That’s what the armory is for. Use the armory for your stalking purposes. It doesn’t leave any search engine terms for me to gape at and your curiosity is satisfied and I’m much less creeped out. :P I’m a regular armory stalker and have much less issue being armory stalked by people than someone specifically googling to find out my guild name.

So, once again:

If you already know my guild name, I ask you to please respect my privacy. Please respect my decisions to leave out bits of information like the name of my guild. Please don’t mention them here.

If you don’t already know my guild name, I will respectfully ask you to let it go and not go looking for it.

If you want to know what my character’s gear is, down to gems and enchants, ask me. I’ll tell you. If you want to know what my glyphs are, ask me. I’ll tell you. If you want to know any of my character’s stats, ask me. I’ll tell you.

Let’s just leave my guild out of it, all right? <3

The problem with Real ID

Kurn / / facepalm, general, patches, ramblings

The problem with Real ID is not necessarily that it violates people’s privacy by linking their real name to people their Real ID friends know, although that sucks.

The problem with Real ID is that it has created a significantly awkward social situation.

Real ID has been out for all of a day and a half. How many people have you actually accepted or become Real ID friends with? How many have requested it of you? How many people have you requested it from?

Before I had even patched my client, I had requests (via other methods of communication) from my buddies Euphie, Shadowcry, Osephala and Carmentes.

I love them to death, but I am not Real ID friends with them and I won’t be unless this “feature” gets a lot more refined.

How does this make my buddies feel? Well, I can’t imagine it made them feel GOOD. These are people I’ve raided with — for practically four years, in the case of Shadow — and people I really like and respect. And they’re all excited about swapping IDs and then they find out that their former GM and/or healing lead isn’t going to friend them?

Frankly, I’d be pissed if I were any of them, and I appreciate the understanding they’ve shown after I explained my reasons to them. I’d STILL be pissed. ;)

I can understand Blizzard. They want to keep us playing, so what they’re trying to do is move us to communicate within their framework. They think it’s super easy to use and convenient. They know that people play a variety of Blizzard games and want us to be able to talk to each other across those platforms.

This is not bad. This is actually pretty cool. I’m all for convenience and easy communication and honestly, I enjoy the idea of chatting with my brother on Proudmoore while I raid on Skywall. It was actually a fun thing to do while I was in ICC 25 last night.

What is bad is that people aren’t thinking about the consequences. I’m seeing people in my new guild throw around their email addresses in a flurry. I love my new guild, but I don’t know them terribly well and I DEFINITELY don’t want most of them to know my “real life” name and identity at this point. Shit, they’ve found this blog and I was totally unprepared for that. :P Not only that, but do I really want my new guild to be able to find me on Proudmoore or something? Not particularly. If I’m on Proudmoore instead of Skywall, it’s because I’m doing something ON PROUDMOORE. I have five 80s there. I have things to do! :)

And yet, there’s this social pressure — not necessarily with my own guild, but I’ve had hints of it there — to friend everyone you’re friends with in WoW.

Apart from the fact that this completely redefines “friend”, it puts anyone unwilling to jump on that bandwagon in a very awkward situation.

How do you tell people you truly like and whose presence you enjoy in your raid that you don’t want them to know about your alts? How do you tell these same people that you don’t want to share your real name with them? Or your real email address with them? Or the names of YOUR friends?

There are three answers.

1) You tell them straight-out that you don’t want to be Real ID friends with them. This is hard to hear and I swear it’s harder to say. But it sucks for both individuals.

2) You tell them that you’re reserving Real ID friend use to a very small group of people; likely people you actually HAVE met IRL, whose real names you already know and use and that’s it. This is what I’ve chosen to do because it’s TOO COOL to be able to chat with people on other servers while I raid.

3) You don’t tell them how you feel and, instead, get peer-pressured into using Real ID when you’re actually a little hesitant or uncomfortable.

Why has this happened? This has happened because geeks have a problem with social niceties.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very geeky. I really think that I am that rare kind of person who can understand where geeks are coming from and translate their behaviour to non-geeks and vice-versa. I understand both the geeks and the non-geeks.

The geeks see it like this, I’m thinking:

“Man, I wish I could talk to Majmaj while he’s playing SCII and I’m wiping in heroic ICC25.”

Which leads to: “Hey, if I built a system that was common to both and I used email addresses as the actual destination/recipient identifier but used the name linked to the account as the name representing the email address, that could be done! Oh my God, how cool would that be?!”

And then, being geeks, they CAN create that system. So they do. Voila, hello, Real ID. How’re you doing?

Being geeks, however, they have completely ignored the social niceties required in a situation like this.

The social niceties required are as follows, in my not-remotely-humble opinion:

– a character privacy scale: let the person see all your characters (as it presently is) or certain characters only, where you would get a list of all your toons and select the ones they could see.

– a RL privacy scale: let the person see your full real name (as it presently is) or just your first name.

– a Real ID friends privacy scale: let the person see all your Real ID friends’ names (as it presently is) or select which friends you want them to be able to see through you.

– a self-Real ID friends privacy scale: allow yourself to be visible (as it is now) or hidden to Real ID  friends of YOUR Real ID friends.

– a self-privacy setting: allow yourself to be visible to all your friends when online (as it is now) or just visible to those on the same server as the specific character you’re on. (The way the old friends setting used to work.)

The privacy creep is on, people. I’m not trying to be an alarmist, but when people I don’t know can see that I’m a Real ID friend of someone else, that’s not really cool by me. Doesn’t matter if they can’t link me to my toons or servers within the interface itself; I don’t want to share my name with a lot of people.

In all, I think Real ID, as it’s currently implemented, is a FANTASTIC groundwork for inter-server/inter-game communication. Long overdue, if you ask me. This all works okay, but that’s all.

The geeks have neglected to take into account how people will want to use this and how awkward it might be if people choose not to. They haven’t considered how this will force some people to redefine what “friend” means. Worse, they haven’t considered how this will force some people to EXPLAIN what their definition of “friend” is to some people who don’t make the cut.

I’m sure that the flurry of posts and comments about Real ID will subside soon enough and that within a month or so, no one will really care if you friend them that way or not.

But on launch? Boy, does this have the potential to be ugly.

Kurn's Q&A 22

Kurn / / addons, alchemy, blogging, classes, dungeons, facepalm, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, professions, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Good evening, or perhaps good morning! Had a lovely Tuesday, including dinner with the family at my parents’ house, then got to login and play with the new chat features a little bit. Again, as stated before, please don’t be offended if I choose not to include you in my Real ID network. I feel that the tools they give us are still rather clunky and not remotely refined enough for my tastes to consider sharing with people I don’t already know in real life.

Having said that, BOY HOWDY, do we have a bunch of interesting terms this week! You’d think someone had been BORED TO DEATH at work or something! As such, starting this week, I’ll have an anonymous form for questions you’d like to ask me for this Q&A-style post. Look for it on Wednesday or Thursday.

In the meantime…

I clearly made a mistake last week when I said:

“I like seeing myself in search terms. It’s cute.”

1)

kurnmogh, why is majik the best tank?
kurnmogh, how did majik redefine the mage class and why was he so good?
kurnmogh sucks and majik rules
why is kurnmogh just not as good as majik at wow?

And my personal favourites:

how come kurn can only play any given class in world of warcraft just about half as well as majik?
how has kurnmogh played and lived in the shadow of majik for so long?

Let’s tackle these burning questions individually.

1a) Majik is the best tank because he is a stupidly good player. It’s like he’s an idiot savant.

1b) Majik was key in redefining the mage class because he was frost and he was competitive DPS through ’till Hyjal. His approach to playing his mage was one that involved using Billy, the water elemental, to his full extent, making sure to be hit-capped and generally not dying to stupid things. However, it should be noted that, while still drunk from the traditional pony keg booze after Maulgar, Majik did blink into Gruul, causing a wipe. He was so good because, as previously noted, Majik is an idiot savant when it comes to the World of Warcraft. It also helped that he was a meter whore throughout the ENTIRETY of Burning Crusade and this drove him to swap to an Arcane/Frost rotation which meant that he was constantly Arcane Explosioning on Hyjal waves. Like a tool. Sure, his numbers were huge, but I do believe he started dying more frequently at this point, which had a negative effect on his overall DPS.

1c) We’ll pair the next two together, as they’re essentially the same. It’s true, dear readers, I am not as good as Majik is at WoW. I just don’t have the instincts that he does when it comes to, well, basically anything. Majik is ten times better at this game than I am and doesn’t have this habit of forgetting to do things like pop class-specific cooldowns the way I do. (Nature’s Swiftness? What’s that?)

1d) My favourite questions! Hooray!

– Majik has four level 80s and is working on his fifth. The classes are: mage, druid, shaman and death knight. Kurn has six level 80s and they are: hunter, paladin, shaman, mage, druid, priest. As you can see, there’s some overlap. Majik’s hunter is in his 40s, Majik’s highest paladin toon still would get beat down by Hogger and Kurn hates death knights in general, so the comparison is really versus each other when it comes to a mage, a druid and a shaman.

– Given that Majik raided full-time on his mage for years, that’s not a fair comparison. This leaves us with two alts, the druids and the shaman. I fully agree I can only play the druid and shaman half as well as Majik can. Why? This is largely because I have spent all my time really focused on the paladin and the hunter.

– Thus, while I fully admit I can’t play a mage, druid or shaman as well as Majik, due in part to my not being an idiot savant, if he wants to try to level up his hunter or paladin to get a good comparison going, he is welcome to do so.

– As to living in his shadow, I’ve got to say that it was cold there in his shadow, to never have sunlight on my face. I was content to let him shine, that’s my way. I always walked a step behind. So he was the one with all the glory, while I was the one with all the strength. I wonder if he knows that I’m really his hero or everything he wishes he could be? Clearly, I am the wind beneath his wings.

Now that I’ve learned from my lesson regarding search terms, let’s move on!

2) unbound plague ticks damage

Here’s a parse of a mage in the raid having Unbound Plague for 10 seconds before passing it off:

[23:34:40.353] Mage afflicted by Unbound Plague from Professor Putricide
[23:34:41.515] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (999)
[23:34:42.459] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1249)
[23:34:43.463] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1561)
[23:34:44.410] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 1410 (A: 541)
[23:34:45.424] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 2439
[23:34:46.359] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3049
[23:34:47.507] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3811
[23:34:48.433] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 4764
[23:34:49.354] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 5955
[23:34:50.399] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 7444

Here’s me in the same raid for 11 ticks:

[23:37:09.981] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 681  (A: 289)
[23:37:11.135] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1212
[23:37:11.978] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1254 (A: 261)
[23:37:13.153] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1895
[23:37:13.965] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2368
[23:37:15.331] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2960
[23:37:15.877] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 3701
[23:37:17.203] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 4626
[23:37:17.827] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 5782
[23:37:19.300] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 7227
[23:37:19.964] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana Absorb (9034)

So you can get an idea of the damage: it starts out very low and ramps up hugely. The damage it does isn’t too bad, but if someone with Plague Sickness gets it, that damage is increased by 250%.

3) any new way to cheat unbound plague

Well, I don’t condone cheating. Are you talking about better plague visibility now that AVR and AVRE have been broken? If so, you may want to look into using HudMap:

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/hudmap.aspx

4) dbm mark vengeful shade

Okay, here’s the problem with Vengeful Shades; they’re not able to be targetted. That means you can’t click on them to mark them, you can’t hit V and see their health bars. You just have to watch for them when they spawn and run the hell away.

5) does feign death work on frozen orbs on toravon

Yes.

6) elixir mastery will double flasks?

Okay, let’s explain this again.

As an alchemist, you get this fun thing called “Mixology” which doubles all elixir and flask *durations* and increases their effects slightly.

In order to have the *possibility* to proc extra flasks, you must be an elixir-specced alchemist, that is an Elixir Master. This will not proc all the time. This will not double your haul. This happens approximately at a 10% rate from what I’ve noticed. So for every ten flasks you make, you will roughly get one extra.

7) how many people go into frostmourne on 25 lk

On normal, this is one at a time, approximately once a minute throughout the final phase when he casts Harvest Soul on someone. On heroic, EVERYONE goes into Frostmourne.

8) lightning-infused leggings worth it

I recently crafted mine, replacing the heroic Legplates of Failing Light. After looking at the Ruby Sanctum loot tables at MMO-Champion there are NO new legs being added. That means that there are no legs higher than ilvl 264 with haste on them. So yes. Definitely worth it for any holy paladin.

9) server transfer raid lockout

It all gets cleared. I had done my daily random heroic before I transferred my paladin. Then I transferred and ran another — none were barred from me, and I also got 2 extra Emblems of Frost by virtue of doing another “first” random.

10) shadow trap lich king

Don’t stand in them. It’s not rocket science, folks.

A note about Real ID

Kurn / / general, patches, ramblings

Miss Medicina posted about 3.3.5 and Real ID stuff today.

I am someone who is very, very protective of her real life identity and would like to thank Miss Medicina for reminding me to let you all know that I do not plan on sharing my Real ID info with ANYONE I don’t actually know in real life. And even then, I’m not sure everyone I know will get my info. Not only do I like my privacy, but I don’t really like the idea of some people seeing me online on ALL of my toons at any given point.

There are three or so ways to get a hold of me if you really need to reach me: email, commenting here and twitter, in order of likelihood of my seeing stuff.

Having said THAT, be sure to check out the Battle Net page about Real ID. There’s going to be a lot of misinformation going on and it’s important that you educate yourself about what Real ID friending someone means and does not mean.

PS: Ruby Sanctum is patched into the game but will remain INACCESSIBLE, people. We’ve got at least another week’s wait on that since they want to make sure this launch goes relatively smoothly on US servers before they patch Real ID into the European servers. And THEN we get to play with the scary dragon.

Post of Miscellaneous Stuff

Kurn / / blogging, general, guild, paladins, raiding, ramblings

1) I’m behind on comments. I am bad. I will respond soon. :) Er, that might be Soon ™. Actually, probably tomorrow.

2) I have the makings of a post in my head about healers and tanks and obligations to guilds. More of an observatory post, looking back on the changing roles of healers and tanks within a guild over the years. I hope to post this sometime this week.

3) Getting to be around time for another Holy How-To post. I still find myself reluctant to do anything about healing meters and parses and stuff. Anything anyone is particularly curious about? Wondering about? Need to know about? Would LIKE to know about?

4) My new guild has done a few pulls on heroic Sindragosa 25 (before I showed up) and plans on playing with her tonight, so I’ve tossed in probably a dime’s worth of information in on the discussion. Tips and tricks for helping me NOT sound like a know-it-all tool would be welcome. ;) I seem to have three settings:

a) No comment. I just literally don’t say anything. I have trouble with this.

b) “If you have any questions, let me know!” which I say a lot in general (see #3 above!) but then that means not saying anything. With which I have trouble, as noted.

c) “UR DOIN IT WRONG”. (See basically every post I’ve ever written.)

Tips and tricks for helping me steer clear of “C” would be lovely. Not that I think they’re doing anything wrong or whatever, but I AM prone to opening my big mouth and would like to pre-emptively shut it, just in case.

5) Oh, yeah, PATCH DAY TOMORROW, in all likelihood, as per MMO-Champion. Dammit, I better get used to Sindragosa without AVR, pronto.

6) The guild got another holy pally app today who doesn’t totally suck on paper but lacks a shoulder enchant and a bracer enchant. He uses the 245 holy libram, not the Libram of Renewal. He’s glyphed for Seal of Light (yet gemmed straight intellect with one exception) and picked up 4/5 Toughness instead of 3/3 Imp Righteous Fury (right, armor’s going to be useful at all, there, buddy) while building down to Divine Guardian. He’s not quite off the mark enough to be “UR DOIN IT WRONG” but enough off the mark to concern me, so I wrote a quick review for my GM who was then basically like “<3” and asked him questions about his choices in his app thread. I can’t WAIT to see how he justifies ANYTHING!

7) Blog maintenance. At some point this week, I’m going to upgrade to v3.0 of WordPress. No IDEA how this will affect some of my plugins, if at all, so maybe Thursday is when I’ll tackle that. Pray for an easy upgrade.

And with that, back to working on my RL friend the resto druid’s website. Yes, folks, my life is really that thrilling.

Huh.

Kurn / / guild, raiding, ramblings

I don’t have a raid tonight.

I have been raiding 4-5 nights a week for 16 months. For the last 10 months or so, the nights were typically Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, with a Tuesday on the schedule for at least two months in there.

It’s Sunday and I don’t have a raid.

It always takes time to adjust to a new raiding schedule and I REALLY like the idea that I don’t raid on Sundays in case I have a family dinner (like I do tonight) or in case I go up to the cottage (like I’ll be doing next week or the week after) but I have this weird feeling that I’m going to forget that I don’t have a raid on Sundays several times over the next few weeks.

What actually might take me a little bit longer to adjust to is eating dinner around 7pm like a normal person does, so that I’m eating pre-raid. 10 months of raids at 11pm means I’d have dinner around 8-9 or even at 10. Starting at 9pm means I should be completely done cooking/eating/cleaning by 8:30 at the very latest.

I think I’ve already adjusted to the four-hour length instead of a three-hour length, because the raids on Wednesday and Thursday really flew by. Probably because I LIKE these people. One of the reasons I was really attracted to the Hyjal guild was that they had four raids a week, Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 8:30pm-11pm. Same raid days, smaller little nuggets of raidy goodness and MUCH earlier, which was a huge difference from my previous guild.

But, as a former raid leader, I know how much a raid can benefit from throwing themselves at a particular fight for a couple of hours, even if they don’t get it down. The practice (and the log data!) is invaluable. So, the four-hour duration (and therefore, the same amount of raiding as what I was doing, only compressed into three days, not four) appeals to me, given that I knew we’d be pushing progression. Not that the other guild wouldn’t be able to do so, but I KNOW that a lot of times, raids just plain aren’t as efficient as you want them to be and a 2.5 hour long raid is difficult to spend time throwing yourself at the encounter if you want to get anything else done.

Wow. I don’t raid tonight. Well, at least this means I’ll get to enjoy Father’s Day/Mom’s Birthday dinner without feeling rushed or being late. :)

Musings and Ramblings

Kurn / / apotheosis, blogging, guild, raiding, ramblings

I just spent about an hour working on my guide to getting the Key to the City, but I just couldn’t get the narration right. Most of the time, I just have a basic idea of what I want to say and say it, but I kept screwing up my narration. Perhaps 3am is not the best time to try to record myself describing a key run.

It’s now four in the morning and I find myself thinking about the nature of guilds. This is likely unsurprising, given my recent transition to my new server and guild, but it’s not just stemming from that.

Rohan, over at Blessing of Kings, always has neat stuff to say, but the other day, he posted about Group Content and Group Creation. Go read his post, then come back. I’ll wait.

Rohan talks about how there are two types of group content: transient and extended.

As I was reading the post, it dawned on me; I pretty much loathe tranient group content. I participate in it just about daily and sometimes more than once and I think the Random Dungeon Finder is amazing for a lot of reasons. But I hate the non-permanence of it.

It used to be that, back in the day, you would search high and low for a group to run a dungeon with you. Or, you’d get together with guildies and find another person or two and go tackle a dungeon together.

These people were always on your server; there was no cross-realm queue. These people were people you could add to your friends list and ask them if they wanted to tank/heal/DPS for you some other time. These people were potential recruits for your guild, too.

I remember doing a Molten Core attunement run once, back in the day. I was level 60 on my hunter and I was taking a tank and two DPS with me through to the part of BRD where you get the quest item. I’d done the run half a dozen times before and knew my way through BRD. All we needed was a healer.

After spamming Trade and LFG for a few minutes, a druid whispered me, saying he’d go.

The run was a success. We had one ugly moment with Ambassador Flamelash, but the druid healer gave us all some fire resist potions he had (!) and the second time was the charm. So impressed was this druid with the overall efficiency (and yes, leadership) of the run that he asked me if we were recruiting druids.

He was already guilded so I insisted he take his time to determine if he wanted to app to us, since I didn’t want to ninja him from another guild. A couple of days later, he applied and was accepted.

That he turned out to be someone who would chase greener pastures, leaving our guild not once, but TWICE, is more or less irrelevent. He was some pug who we picked up and was a valuable addition to the guild when he was with us.

That kind of experience is all but dead and gone now, with the Random Dungeon Finder. And I hate it. I hate that I don’t recognize people in my pugs on any server. I hate that I’m doing my daily content (for frost badges) with people I don’t know and may never see again (which isn’t a horrible thing in many cases, but still!). I don’t like that I’m doing weekly raid content (VOA/weeklies) without my guild. Of course, I COULD just do it with my guild, at least on my pally, but my hunter doesn’t have a real guild. Neither does my shaman, my druid, my mage or my priest. For those toons, it’s great to be able to pug the content.

I remember the days where you used to have to get someone to vouch for you before you’d be invited to any raid pugs. I couldn’t stand the warrior officer back in our old, old, pre-BC guild, but he knew damn near every serious raider on the server and forged those relationships so that he could get into pugs — and he’d sometimes have spots for others, which everyone jumped at.

This whole expansion has really been the rise of the pug raid group. Everyone can pug anything. This bothers me. Maybe I’m being a snob, maybe I’m being unreasonable and stubborn, but I really feel like raiding, the high-end raids, should be the domain of, you know, raiding guilds. I think that there was something special about belonging to a guild in the original game. I remember when we, as a guild, first set foot in Molten Core, four years ago. We basically just went in and farmed trash a bit. We got Arcanist Bindings, our first piece of T1 gear ever, which went to our resident Arcane mage, Jaymie.

It was this epic experience, though. Getting the Molten Giants down, the Lava Surgers, Firelords, Lava Annihilators, the Ancient Core Hounds (LOOT YOUR HOUNDS!!!)… There was a very real, noticeable progression with our group. We went from 20-some people farming trash to a group of about 30-35 people killing bosses. Lucifron’s first death was freaking amazing. Magmadar relied on us hunters to use Tranq shot and not miss. And, by golly, I MADE SURE my hunters didn’t miss! Downing him was a freaking miracle made possible by me and my trusty sidekick, Toga.

We were eventually able to kill through Golemagg. Killing him spawned Majordomo and we succeeded in spawning Domo a couple of times, even if we never did attempt him.

But knowing that we COULD attempt him was an AMAZING feeling! After attunement, scheduling issues, recruitment problems, balance issues, it was just SO EPIC, such an amazing feeling, to step into Molten Core and know we could down eight of the bosses. We were the little guild that could!

Where’s that epic feeling? It’s gone. Or at least, it hasn’t happened for me in this expansion. It happened in BC — seeing my guild progress from Kara through to killing Vashj and Illidan, now THAT was amazing.

Tier 7 content, barring Sarth and drakes or something like 6m Maly, was too easy to elicit any kind of pride. The proof is that my little raid group went in and cleared the Spider Wing and Plague Wing and got Razuvious down on our first night. Never mind that we never did kill Thaddius and such before the guild broke up; that’s wasn’t because Thaddius was hard. That was because we had no DPS showing up anymore, which is something else entirely.

The end of Apotheosis is where my extended content group and I parted ways. I’ve been looking for a new home, a new extended content group, since then, so that these downings actually mean something to me. I can count on one hand the encounters that really meant something to me since the end of Apotheosis:

1) Sartharion + 3 drakes: This was my big chance with my Bronzebeard guild to really show that I knew my stuff and wasn’t a noob. They’d already done Sarth3D a few times, but it was definitely not on farm. The first time I downed Sarth3D was pretty amazing.

2) Yogg-Saron: In the raid with me was my buddy Euphie and in a chat channel with us was Osephala. Two of my Apotheosis folks were with me, and Euphie and I were healing together for Yogg. Plus I did the healing assignments for Yogg and even made the useless priest be useful by getting him to take the portals. So there! Having Kal and Fad and Saku around was also basically awesome. I seem to surround myself with amazing healers. <3

3) Algalon: Killed this guy with my last guild, with my RL friend the resto druid. The “Astral Walker” title is the only title she and I share that we have earned together at the same time, so it is totally precious to me.

4) The Lich King: My healing strat based on my RL friend’s initial strat. It was super important for me to get him down because I wanted my RL friend to know the guild wasn’t stunted without her, that we could totally use having her back, but that she could feel free to focus on her RL stuff and not worry about the guild.

Plus, you know, being resurrected by Terenas Menethil is AWESOME.

I spent six months on Bronzebeard. Ten months with my last guild. And neither of them felt like extended content groups. Not the way my old Fated Heroes did. Not the way Apotheosis did.

I’ve been searching for a new home for over a year and I’m on to what is technically my fourth guild in this expansion.

Will this be the guild that becomes my new extended content group? Or will this just be another stepping stone for me before we try to bring back Apotheosis? Will this guild be the one that actually prevents me from becoming a GM again with Apotheosis 2.0? Or will this be just another bunch of scattered memories?

I’m not sure, yet. But I do know that there’s one more boss kill that needs to be added to the above list.

5) Valithria Dreamwalker’s rescue — my second “first time”: I’d been in the guild not even 36 hours and we rescued heroic Dreamwalker for the first time for them. THAT meant something to me. It meant more to me than doing it the first time I’d done it. It meant more to me than any other heroic boss downing. (Sindragosa and Putricide come close, admittedly.)

So maybe I’ve found a new extended content group that will last me at least until Cataclysm comes out, and perhaps beyond, depending on what my Apotheosis people want to do.

But I do know that it’s taken me way too long to find a group like these people, a group that even gives me a glimmer of hope of being something beyond a transient-feeling extended group. It’s not to say that I haven’t found some amazing people along the way (basically, all my healers from Bronzebeard save, uh, the other paladins, one of the shammies and one of the priests) but it’s been way too long since I’ve been a part of a group that I actually felt meant something. I’m trying to keep from getting my hopes up too much; SOMETHING has to be wrong with this group, right? Oh, wait, I know! What’s “wrong” with them is that they actually read this thing. ;)

But seriously, the idea that I haven’t felt like I’ve been in an extended group is an interesting one. Is this why I’ve not liked this expansion? Too much transient content and not enough extended? It’s all been transient since the end of Apotheosis, it feels like, even when I was guilded.

I think it’s this transience that makes me long for the days of BC raids. I hated the dungeons, thought BC was pretty lame on the whole, but my God, did I love our raids.

Okay, two hours after starting this post, I think I’m done rambling and pondering for the night, or perhaps more accurately, the morning.

How do you feel about your guild? This expansion? What is your most epic feeling from this game, and did it come from an experience you had with your guild?