Kurn's Etiquette for Forming a PUG Raid

Kurn / / dungeons, facepalm, general, raiding, ramblings

I had what was pretty much the oddest experience I’ve ever had when it comes to being invited to pug a raid the other day. This is what has caused me to write this post.

[Complete Stranger]: u do icc 10 this week

Uh. Is that supposed to be a question or a statement? I thought about ignoring him. I thought about taking his head off about randomly whispering someone he doesn’t know that he sees has a high gearscore and a Kingslayer title.

And I decided to be nice.

Me: No interest in doing it. GL to you.

I figured that ought to be enough and continued the two other conversations I was having. Fifteen seconds later:

[Complete Stranger]: what if i pay u very high amount of gold

I sighed and quickly responded.

Me: I said I have no interest in doing so, thank you.

Ten seconds later…

[Complete Stranger]: ur cranky how rude

Okay, NOW you’re starting to get on my nerves, you illiterate, impolite child. You want to get in it with me? FINE.

Me: I said no thank you instead of telling you to take a hike. I think I was quite polite, actually. You’re the rude one, persisting in your request and just randomly asking me if I’ve done an instance. I don’t even know you.

There, that ought to take care of him, I thought. Alas, foolish me.

[Complete Stranger]: Why no interest. dont u need gear

/FACEPALM. Need gear? From regular 10-man? Are you KIDDING ME? I haven’t “needed” gear from regular 10-man ICC since, well, ever. It’s one of the positives of raiding 25-man. Determined to shut the kid up, I responded thusly:

Me: Apart from the fact that I strongly dislike 10-man raid configuration, I do not need gear. [Heroic: The Plagueworks (25 player)] [Heroic: The Crimson Hall (25 player)] [Fall of the Lich King (25 player)]

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear from him again, having been properly chastised, so I returned to my other conversations. About 30 seconds later…

[Complete Stranger]: ur not nice

/SIGH. Okay, kid. One last try at being polite before I rip you to pieces.

Me: Beg to differ, but you’re entitled to your opinion. Good luck to you.

[Complete Stranger]: Not very nice sir

I got snippy.

Me: Ma’am, actually.

Immediately thereafter:

[Complete Stranger]: Im sorry now i feel bad!!!!!

This is where my head exploded.

It’s OKAY to harass a GUY to do an instance he has no desire to do, but as soon as I say I’m a woman, NOW he feels bad? NOW he apologizes for being annoying?

ARGH.

Okay. Deep breath, Kurn. This all happened last Friday. It’s days ago.

…

All right, I’m better.

This little episode has illustrated the complete lack of manners people have in this game. Of course, in a game where Trade chat regularly degenerates into ethnic slurs and questioning of people’s sexual orientations, perhaps expecting any kind of manners from the population is a stretch.

But I remember a time in this same game where people weren’t quite this rude. I suspect a lot of it stems from the sense of entitlement Blizzard has bestowed upon the players these days, but I digress.

You’re trying to form a pug raid? Fine. Here’s how to do it.

1) Grab your in-game friends. Make sure you all know how to play your selected roles.

2) Make sure you have at least some of the tanks or healers required before you go seeking them out. There’s nothing worse than seeing “LF5M, 2 tanks, 3 healers!” in Trade. You know what that says to tanks and healers out there? That no one in your little group of friends cares enough about shouldering some of the responsibility in a raid to run on a tank or a healer.

3) Once your raid group has formed and you’re trying to add new people to it, type this in:

/lfr

Skip down to Browse and select the instance and size you want to do. Examine the people in the queue for that particular raid.

Whisper them, one at a time, until you’ve filled your raid with what you need or have gone through the entire list. And by “whisper them” I don’t mean “icc 10” and a ninja-invite.

I mean something like this:

“Hi, would you be interested in tanking/healing/DPSing in [name of instance here]?”

To say “heal icc 10?” is just lazy and not something that’s going to get me to want to heal your sorry butt. You’re dealing with OTHER PEOPLE here. You should really do your best to impress them with your grasp of the language your server speaks.

4) Once you’ve gone through all the people in the queue, go back to set your own group in the queue. Select which instance and size you want to do on the first screen of the raid finder interface. Put a note in the comment section advertising what you’re seeking. For example:

“Need 1 tank, 2 DPS and 1 healer!”

Set your comment. Enter the queue.

5) Ask around in Trade or LookingForGroup — don’t spam. The last thing anyone in Trade wants to see is you spamming the same line of text 10 times.

“LF3M ICC10, need 1 tank, 2 DPS, PST!”

That suffices. Once every couple of minutes at most. You want to be short and direct in your advertisement for your raid.

6) Ask your current raid members if they have any friends who want to come.

7) Check your friends list or guild to see if anyone’s logged on since you last checked.

8) Continue the above tactics (also checking the raid queue frequently) to pull in more people until your raid is full or you decide to cancel your run.

Note that at NO TIME is it considered “okay” to see someone randomly run by you in a major city and act like you are entitled to their time and services.

If you are absolutely desperate for just one more person, it might be considered all right to gently inquire as to the potential availability of a random stranger.

How do you gently inquire? Like so:

“Hi there, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m putting together a raid for [instance, size] and I was wondering if you’d like to join us as a [tank/healer/DPS]. If not, no problem, I just thought I’d ask.”

If they say “sure” or another few words agreeing to the run, please be sure to thank them and then toss the invite.

If they say “no” or anything else stating that they’re not interested, here’s how to respond:

“All right, thanks anyways and have a good day!”

If they do NOT respond, do NOT keep whispering them.

Every person that you antagonize or annoy or piss off is someone that will potentially never run with you, ever. They may put you on ignore. They may remember your name from that day you annoyed the crap out of them. It’s a social game, people. You have to play well with others to do anything in terms of raid content and to succeed at high-levels of PVP. Everywhere you look, there are PEOPLE and, sadly, we can’t ignore them all. (WTB larger ignore list, PST!!!)

TL;DR Version:

– Don’t piss people off
– Don’t randomly demand time or services from someone you don’t know
– Don’t act upset if any random people don’t want to join your run — they owe you nothing

This public service announcement has been brought to you in part by the Kingslayer title, which Kurn has now hidden on her paladin, opting to display Hand of A’dal instead.

Why Ranks Matter

Kurn / / addons, dungeons, facepalm, lfg, ramblings

The bottom line is, ladies and gentlemen, that ranks matter. No, not guild member ranks or PVP title ranks or arena rankings. Not guild progression rankings, not server progression rankings or anything like that.

I’m talking about spell ranks, ability ranks and talent ranks.

While levelling, I can understand that you don’t train every ability to its top level every opportunity you get. I will probably still think you’re a moron for not training, but I can at least understand that stuff happens and you ding unexpectedly or you forget to train.

As soon as you hit 80, though, I expect you to train all of your spells available in your spec. Both your specs, if you have dual spec.

Why?

I’ll try not to rely on my primary argument, which is “BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T, YOU’RE AN IDIOT!” as that is not remotely helpful. It is, however, the ultimate message I would like to impart on people, so if you don’t want to read another 1500 words explaining why you’re an idiot if you don’t, you can stop here. ;)

As soon as you hit 80, you can’t instantly queue for heroics using your crappy greens or outdated blues. I would imagine that most fresh 80s these days, at least those who are alts, buy a couple BOE ilvl 200s or get some crafted gear or, if they’re lucky, have a main who is rich that buys them pretty BOE things from raid instances. Once they’ve done that and manage to trick the system into thinking they’re deserving, they queue up for their random heroics to get badges to try to start collecting tier 9 ilvl 232 gear. (This is why I miss revered rep as the requirement for heroic keys. Oh, Burning Crusade, when a human’s Diplomacy was the most OP racial ever.)

It’s not that it’s a horrible thing to go to heroics quickly, particularly if you know what you’re doing. The thing that you need to be aware of, though, is if you’re a drag on your group.

What do I mean by that?

I mean if you pull 1k DPS at 80, you’re a drag on your group. You obviously haven’t done any research on your class and don’t know your DPS rotation or priority system.

If you’re a tank who can’t hold aggro against people in T9, which is a lot of the people running heroics these days, you’re being a drag on your group. I’m not saying to expect to hold aggro against people in 277 ICC gear, but you know, don’t be that moron whose AOE threat moves doesn’t do anything.

If you’re a healer and you can’t keep the tank AND the DPS AND yourself up through regular damage (not like DPS standing in the fire), you’re a drag on the group.

Part of not being that tool that everyone hates because they are dragging you through the instance, is doing your job, whatever that job is.

That means training all ranks of all your spells. No, really. It does. Doesn’t matter if you’re a prot or ret paladin — if your healer asks you for wisdom, you need to have the max rank available for them, even if it’s not improved.

If you’re a hunter and you’re using Aimed Shot Rank 6 instead of Rank 9, you’re not doing your job because that is a crapton less damage, depending on how often you use Aimed Shot.

Even if you’re not a team player (why are you even playing this game if you have no interest in being a team player?), there are reasons to make sure your spells are up to date. The most compelling for the non-team player is this:

Your damage/healing output suffers when you’re not fully trained. If you’re not a team player, chances are you care about your damage or your healing. If you use mana, did you know that lower spell ranks cost the same as the highest rank? That means that you’re doing less damage or healing for the same cost the regular rank would cost. Wouldn’t you rather spend your 500 mana doing 1000 damage or healing rather than 500 mana on 250 damage or healing? I know that I sure would. You’re basically throwing away mana on something much less useful than it could be. So quit it. Train your spell/ability/talent ranks!

If the idea of letting down the team (group) because you’re not fully trained doesn’t actually bother you, or if you’re not too fussed over your DPS or HPS, then the above arguments just don’t make sense. Fine. I get that. What I don’t get is you inflicting your dumbass self on people who actually care to play their characters properly. Are you really that much of a douchebag?

There are three types of people in the random heroics these days.

a) People who are just there for their two Emblems of Frost, period. These people are generally very well geared and are probably raiding ICC content.

b) People who are farming Emblems of Triumph. These people are generally decently geared but still need a few Emblems in order to get their 4-piece bonus or something along those lines.

c) People who just hit 80 and are starting the grind towards 232 T9. These people are generally horribly geared and don’t know the instances because they didn’t bother running them on regular the first time around. (Halls of Lightning, Halls of Stone, Utgarde Pinnacle, Oculus, Trial of the Champion, Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection, just to name a few.)

All of the people above are interested in completing an instance quickly and efficiently (although quickly and efficiently differ based on whether you just want your Emblems of Frost or you’re farming Triumph). No one wants to wipe. No one wants some moron to screw things up and cause a wipe. No one wants to be stuck with these people for any longer than they have to be. The overriding mindset is get in, kill the minimum amount of bosses for the run to work for you, get out.

So imagine if you’re not running the instance with one tank, one healer and three DPS. Imagine instead that you’re running with half a tank or half a healer or the equivalent of 1.5 DPS.

By not training your ranks, you are doing everyone in the group a huge disservice. Does it matter if there’s someone there who can pick up your slack? No, because even if there is, there’s not guarantee that there will always be.

I’ve been thrown into a group where myself (the healer) and the tank were the only ones who should have been in a heroic. The three DPS (and I use that term loosely) were all clearly new to 80, didn’t know their abilities, their capabilities and were still wearing things like heirloom shoulders and chests and weapons.

There is a difference between doing a boss fight as it was intended (most likely in in ilvl 187/200 gear) and doing a boss fight with two well-geared players and three people who didn’t even care enough to finish training before queuing up for heroics. What do I mean by that? I mean that I don’t care if you’re appropriately geared for a heroic (with 187/200 gear) so long as you are doing your best. If I have a hunter in my group with a 3000 gearscore, or whatever is considered laughably low-end at this point, I don’t care as long as they know how to damage the mobs and knows how to control their pet and would actually know where their Freezing Trap and Wyvern Sting buttons are for emergency CC. I don’t care if their Explosive Shot hits for next to nothing as long as they’re trying to do their best.

Part of doing your best is training.

Of course, sometimes, training is not enough.

I run RankWatch on most of my toons. It was a very popular addon a few months ago when it was discovered that your abilities on your action bars did not update in your inactive spec when you trained. I discovered this by doing Instructor Razuvious the very first week of weekly raids on my restoration shaman, who I had levelled as enhancement. I’d been healing on her for 3 months or so, random dungeons, VOAs, the odd Sarth or Onyxia…

I got a whisper from someone running RankWatch, telling me that, among other lesser-used spells, my Chain Heal was three ranks out of date.

Chain Heal 4. Chain Heal 7. For 835 mana each time I cast it, CH4 was healing people for 600-700 (plus spellpower and bonuses) instead of 1055-1205.

For three months.

I felt like an idiot and whispered the person back, thanking them. I took some time to verify my ranks (on all my toons) and then got the addon and started running it myself.

While RankWatch was welcomed in the early days of random dungeons (perhaps because the people running dungeons actually had standards then?) it’s as if I’ve just insulted someone’s mother if RankWatch goes off now.

Part of it might be my settings. I have it set to go off in /say so that if it’s a healer, for example, who triggers it, the tank might realize “hey, the healer needs a second to get their ranks in order”. (This is rarely the case, but I maintain it’s faster and more efficient in a group than the whisper-spam which people, in my experience, take less well than a simple /say announce.)

“Turn that shit off,” people will say, “it’s annoying.”

I generally reply with something along the lines of “What’s really annoying is that you’re using Rank 1 Devastate at level 80.”

“lol,” is the typical response I receive.

Good to know my tank is taking his or her job as seriously as I take mine.

The good news is that I’m seeing less and less dual-spec related mistaken ranks. The bad news is that I’m seeing more and more people who just haven’t bothered to train.

Blizzard is forcing us together because there’s currently no form of cap on the amount of Emblems of Frost we can earn a week, something I’m relieved to know they’re changing in Cataclysm. As long as game mechanics strongly encourage me to group with people I don’t know or care about once a day, I’m going to insist on certain things: a tank in a tank spec with tank gear; a healer in a healing spec with healing gear; DPS in a DPS spec with DPS gear. I’m also going to be that annoying person throwing out RankWatch warnings if you’re using out of date ranks of abilities and if you’re NOT trained and REFUSE to train, I’m going to try to vote kick you and will leave the group if I can’t kick you yet. Even if you’ve already pulled and I’m the healer.

What brought this on? I was running RankWatch silently in an Alterac Valley in the 61-70 bracket this weekend on my level 66 priest. I had to unload the mod because of all the spam I was receiving, notifying me that others had failed to train or failed to use their max-rank abilities. And the Alliance was just confused as to why we were losing. I resisted the urge to call people out for not training, but of course you’re not going to do as much damage as a 64 shaman who is trained, even if you’re 68 if YOU haven’t trained.

Thankfully, I don’t see it all too often in dungeons, but I still see it enough to think it’s important to explain some of the my justified hatred towards people who deliberately don’t use max ranks.

In lieu of two posts I want to make…

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

… I joined Twitter.

Which is kind of silly, ’cause I have a “RL” twitter account I don’t really use and another one that I used for quite some time and then a more professional one… and now a WoW one.

I can only imagine my “RL” twitter followers will be relieved to see a distinct lack of WoW tweets from now on, though. ;)

So I’m @kurnmogh over on twitter. Already have connected with someone who had actually apped to Apotheosis back in the day when we were searching desperately for an ele shammy. Kind of a crazy-small world we all live in!

The two posts I want to make will be coming up this week:

1) Spells, downranking and RankWatch.

2) Courtesy and etiquette regarding asking someone to pug a raid with you. (ie: How NOT to piss Kurn the hell off when randomly approaching her in Dalaran, which people apparently don’t know how to do so I’ve turned off my Kingslayer title, you cretins!)

Many thanks to Rilgon, a fellow hunter who feels strongly about his WoW.com representative in a similar way that I do, for talking a bit about Twitter in our recent mails and thereby (perhaps unknowingly) encouraging me to branch out into that brand of social media.

Kurn's Q&A #15

Kurn / / cataclysm, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, priests, q&a, raiding

So I sat down to do this on Tuesday and realized I had a lot of other stuff to attend to, not the least of which was the Montreal Canadiens/Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game. GO HABS GO.

Ahem.

Anyways, here are 10 keywords that sent people to my site over the last few weeks that weren’t terribly well addressed in my blog. (You wouldn’t believe how many people google things like Toravon, still!)

1) shared lockouts kurn wow

Hah, cool, someone out there wants to know what I think of the shared lockouts in Cataclysm. I already addressed this, but as a recap:

– I LOVE the fact that 10s and 25s will be on the same lockout. LOVE it. No more overextending myself or feeling guilty for NOT overextending myself!
– I am apprehensive about the gear being the same regardless of raid size.
– I am downright terrified that any other incentive to run 25s will just not be enough and that people will flock to 10s just because they are less of a logistical nightmare.
– I will probably quit playing, period, if I can’t run 25s.

2) leet holy paladin healing techniques

Okay, that one made me laugh. First, I recommend my Holy How-To posts. Second, I recommend just overall awareness of your class abilities and researching fights to figure out in which fights they might be useful and, more importantly, at which points WITHIN the fights those abilities might be useful. Third, make sure you keep your buffs/debuffs up. A good holy paladin puts Sacred Shield on their tank and keeps the hot running. A GREAT holy paladin makes sure everything is always refreshed, including their judgement debuff if there’s no one else sharing that judgement, which means judging every 20 seconds. Of course, doing it when you can spare the GCD is the key, or else your targets are going to go splat.

3) best way to down dreamwalker

Well, technically, you don’t want to kill her. You want to heal her. ;) The key to the fight is not dropping your stacks of Emerald Vigor or, on heroic, Twisted Nightmares. Keep taking each portal, stack those stacks up and spam the living crap out of the boss.

4) “vengeful shade” addon

Don’t know of one. If you do, please, for the love of all that’s holy, tell me. Stupid Vengeful Shades. Why do they have to be so damn vengeful?!

5) /cancelaura power word shield threat tanks

This one confuses me. If you’re doing /cancelaura, it means you have the aura on you. So if you’re doing “/cancelaura power word: shield”, you’re getting rid of your shield.

There is only one time where I can foresee this being something you would ever WANT to do and that’s if you’re a protection paladin with points in Spiritual Attunement and your healer is a disc priest and you’re not getting mana back from being healed through damage being taken.

None of that has to do with threat, exactly, except that if you’re a prot pally, your threat depends on your mana in that it’s costly to keep throwing down Consecration.

If you have a disc priest shielding you in a dungeon (which is the only place it should matter — you should be taking enough damage to get mana back from shields in raid content) then just ask them not to shield you unless it’s an emergency, because you get mana back from being healed, not shielded.

All other tanks have no excuse to ever not want Power Word: Shield on them. It doesn’t affect rage mechanics, people. It used to. But not for a long time, now. Patch 3.0.2, to be precise.

6) 2 druids 3 mark of fallen champion

Ouch. I mean really, OUCH. I guess I would have to recommend bringing three healers for this, leaving one healer (a druid) on the raid until the last instant before the third mark comes out. Better still, bring a paladin and 2 other healers and that way, one of the druids can be on the raid full time.

7) best food for discipline priest

Since Borrowed Time and a moonkin aura/swift ret aura plus a Wrath of Air totem make the haste “cap” for disc priests really easy to hit, so they get a 1s GCD, the best food is either +46 spellpower (available in a Fish Feast or a variety of other foods) or +40 crit. +40 crit is over a full percent of crit, so it shouldn’t be looked down upon, particularly if you’re actually healing single targets as part of a tank healing team, because you DO want to proc Divine Aegis as often as you can. If, on the other hand, your primary responsibility in the raid is to cast Power Word: Shield, you’ll want +46 spellpower, since every bit of spellpower strengthens your shields, due to Borrowed Time.

8) best in slot pants for holy pally

I totally don’t even want to TALK about our stupid pants.

Actually, I take that back. I do want to talk about them. At great length. While ranting.

Our options for pants are HORRIBLE. Our T10 251/264 pants are awful. Even the 277s are pretty crappy. Seriously, here’s the comparison:

http://www.wowhead.com/compare?items=50866;51168;51271

Holy Light spamming paladins (which is the vast majority of us) should be looking for the following stats, in order:

Intellect, Haste, MP5, Crit, Spellpower

There is 0, check that, 0 haste on any of those pants. There is a mediocre amount of MP5 on any of them but the 277s. There is a huge amount of crit on these pants that I desperately wish could be converted to haste. And a truly ridiculous amount of spellpower! What gives?! This is our TIER?!

Assume we do not have access to any 277 legs.

http://www.wowhead.com/items=4?filter=qu=4;sl=7;ty=3:4;minle=251;cr=23:103:21;crs=1:1:3;crv=0:0:0

There are precisely 8 options item level 251 or over that we can consider. There’s 10, but you can’t be Horde AND Alliance, so you lose out on the mail and plate legs out of TOGC due to being on one faction or another.

Right now, I’ve got ilvl 258 Legplates of Failing Light. 116 intellect, 92 haste, 3 sockets. Pretty hot, right? Right. So hot that only two other items even come close to them.

The crafted Lightning-Infused Leggings offer 123 intellect (+7 from the Failing Light pants), 100 haste (+8 haste) and three sockets as well. The trouble is, you need to find a leatherworker who’s revered with the Ashen Verdict for these mail pants and then the mats include 8 Primordial Saronite. If you have nothing left to spend emblems of frost on, this is really easy to get, particularly if you’re raiding, but if you’re saving your emblems, the saronite alone can cost upwards of 1000g each.

Is 7 intellect and 8 haste really worth 8k+ gold?

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

The plate version? Even worse. The Puresteel Legplates also cost 8 saronite and aren’t even a haste upgrade from the Legplates of Failing Light as both items have 92 haste. 8k+ gold for 7 intellect, basically? No thanks!

The other real option is the heroic Corrupted Silverplate Leggings. 123 intellect (+7), 99 haste (+7) and three sockets. It’s an upgrade and it’s one that doesn’t cost eight thousand plus gold. The trouble here is that it requires killing heroic Marrowgar. On 10-man. Which means I’m never going to get these.

There’s another option, also a 10-man heroic drop, this time off Putricide. The Rippling Flesh Kilt gives the same amount of intellect (123) and 96 haste. Basically, if you’re running 10-man heroic ICC, the Marrowgar pants are easier to get by virtue of being an easier fight, but if you get Putricide down, go for these pants if you haven’t gotten the Corrupted Silverplate Leggings on heroic.

If you don’t have ilvl 258 pants like I do, the 251 versions of the Corrupted Silverplate Leggings and Rippling Flesh Kilt are nice enough, but if you’re really looking seriously at those, consider getting the mail legs crafted. They’re just a better upgrade overall.

I’m eventually going to have to bite the bullet and get either my ilvl 277 pants or the heroic Leggings of Dying Candles, both of which will actually only be a net gain of +3 intellect for me and hope that all my other 277 gear’s haste will compensate for the worst tier pants I’ve seen since T4. I value the Leggings of Dying Candles over the tier due to the extra socket and the increased MP5 versus the tier, by the way.

Whew.

9) boa libram for holy light

There is no Bind on Account (heirloom) libram, period. The best libram for Holy Light using paladins is the ilvl 200 Libram of Renewal, available for 15 emblems of heroism.

10) chestplate of septic stitches how should i gem

Honestly? It’s not a great breastplate. Let’s look at it.

There’s no haste. Three sockets is great for 3x+20 intellect, but… eh. The Lightsworn Tunic or, better yet, the Chestguard of Siphoned Elements off of Blood Queen Lana’thel in ICC 10 is a much better choice.

That said, if you’re asking how to gem it, you probably already have it. The answer is almost always “all intellect”, unless you’re a paladin who stacks spellpower and casts mostly Flash of Light. If that’s the case, that is a GREAT chest for a FoL spammer. Gem it with all +23 spellpower if you’re a FoL machine or if it’s for your Dreamwalker set. :)

Heroic Putricide

Kurn / / addons, cataclysm, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

We did our first heroic Putricide pulls last week, I think it was. And we got him down tonight. I think we spent 22ish attempts on him this week, maybe 25 or 26 total.

Honestly? Not a big deal.

Granted, our kill was messy. I was absolutely the LAST healer standing and that is ONLY because I actually used a healthstone. And I should have used Lay on Hands but, as it turns out, I didn’t need to.

WHEW.

I thought heroic Sindragosa had a lot of stuff to be aware of — positioning, instability stacks, who has unchained magic, the Icy Grip cooldown…

It feels like heroic Sindragosa pales in comparison to heroic Putricide. What’s really dumb is that there are not a lot of changes on heroic Putricide, except for the addition of Unbound Plague and some changes for the transitions.

I guess that, ultimately, we knew the Putricide fight on normal well enough (and we should know it that well!) to really be aware of the regular mechanics and deal with them being thrown at us differently and adjust to a new mechanic.

We don’t have that kind of familiarity with Sindragosa. We’d only done 3, maybe 4 kills of her before we killed the Lich King and started in on the heroics.

Having said that, I don’t know if I would have been able to do heroic Putricide without AVRE for the Unbound Plague graphics. It shows who has the plague, what the range is on the plague before it passes to you and shows a cooldown ticking down for how long you’ve had the plague for. And if YOU have the plague, anyone without the debuff from the plague gets a little white circle on them, so you know you can pass to them.

Due to this graphic enhancement, I pulled off the most awesome move EVER on an unsuccessful attempt.

The hunter officer had Unbound Plague. She was actually moving towards me to pass it to me. And then she got Volatile Ooze Adhesive on her. Not only did this mean she couldn’t move, but it meant that ALL THE MELEE were charging over to her to prevent her death from the ooze.

But then, I realized, all the melee would get Unbound Plague.

I took five steps forward, grabbed the plague and backed up so that no melee would get the plague from me.

The hunter didn’t die, no one in melee got the plague and I passed it off to my RL friend the resto druid before I hit 10 seconds.

So, 10/12 HM ICC25 and I pulled off possibly the sweetest move I’ve pulled … basically in this whole expansion. I cannot think of a finer moment and it’s too bad that it didn’t lead to a boss kill.

And the Cataclysm alpha is out, to boot. We live in interesting times.

Classic Instances

Kurn / / general, guide, lfg, ramblings

Spurred on by thought after Cassandri’s BRD – Prison guide I previously mentioned, I am giving significant thought to explaining to people how classic dungeons actually work.

Probably starting with BRD, actually, then moving up to LBRS, Scholomance, Strat Live, Strat UD, UBRS… and then there’s the Dire Mauls; East, West and North.

It dawned on me, when I was in an LBRS group not that long ago on my priest that a LOT of these LFG people have never, ever, ever, EVER run these old dungeons. This group I was in actually CLEARED down the ramp instead of jumping off to the right side. This other group I was in had NO IDEA there was more to the instance than the troll boss!

As a classic WoW player, this almost offends me. But it’s not their fault, so it’s not quite offensive. It’s more like my jaw dropped out of shock. A lot. Repeatedly.

I’m thinking of doing these sort of guides (not really “guides”, but more like run throughs) in video format, with a running commentary, showing the most efficient way through the dungeons. Or at least, how we all used to run stuff. I’d still have detailed text stuff (like how to get keys!) for most of the instances, but I envision sped-up videos of me running through the later Classic dungeons. (Do not ask me for Sunken Temple. I STILL get lost there.)

Something to ponder…

Cool!

Kurn / / blogging, dungeons, lfg, ramblings

Cassandri over at Hots & Dots wrote up a sweet guide to BRD – Prison if you, like many old-school players, know there has to be more to the prison than killing the interogator lady.

As an aside, I’m about 90% sure that the tank and healer combo she refers to in the post consists of my brother (prot pally) and me (disc priest), since we’re on the same battlegroup which makes it possible. Which is just uber coolness in and of itself. My brother was adorably pleased at even the possibility that someone thought he was a rockin’ tank in BRD. What tipped me off was the bit about how they patiently explained how not to aggro the entire damn bar.

Yeah, if that’s not me, I want to meet that person, who was likely the person in charge of attuning their ENTIRE GUILD to MC and Onyxia. The way I was. Curse you, Jailbreak!

(You know, it’s odd. I hated Reginald Windsor. With a passion. But I rescued his stupid ass over 25 times for various groups. Including twice for my friend Majik for reasons that have to do with him being a failure. ;) And now that I can’t rescue him, I find I miss him and the entire Onyxia storyline. Call me crazy, but I always looked forward to Dragonkin Menace, the Burning Steppes quest that started the whole quest chain.)

Wrapping up the Week that Was

Kurn / / coliseum, dps, gear, general, healing, hunters, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings, weekly raids

I actually have a lot of stuff to talk about that I find interesting, fascinating, what-have-you. Let’s break it down into guild raiding and making money/pugging, shall we? We shall!

Guild Raiding

This week was awesome for raiding because of one simple reason. My RL friend the resto druid came back on Wednesday. We agreed I’d do healing for this reset so she could get her healing legs back under her and learn how we do stuff on heroic and what the changes are for heroic modes.

Then, armed with the 15% buff, we proceeded to ruin Lower Spire (we still have a lot of trouble on Deathwhisper on heroic, but to be fair, a lot of people were still learning that fight). The most notable moment was that, while mind controlled on Deathwhisper, I chucked a Hammer of Wrath at my RL friend and killed her and proceeded to get teased about it for the rest of the night.

Reactions:

RL friend: “omg mad you killed me! :(”

Priest: “rofl! judas!”

Holy Paladin: “omf maf!” (yes, we were still in combat, can you tell?)

RL friend to other RL friends: “[my real name] just killed me! totally smacked me down!”

After the fight:

Holy Paladin: “mad nice hammer of wrath on [RL friend] there earlier btw!”

OT: “nice welcome back to your friend!”

It was amusing.

Anyways! We got Saurfang down in 5 Marks of the Fallen Champion which was SO nice. Way to go, DPS boost! Looking at the WoL for that fight, only one DPS was under 10k DPS (sitting at 9k) and everyone else is between 10k and 14k. Comparing this with my own DPS in ICC with the 15% buff, which hit 8k on Festergut, it’s kind of mind-blowing how much of a difference the gear really does make. I don’t really notice a lot of difference in my healing as I go through ICC every week, even when I get an upgrade. It must be nice to see the DPS increase as a DPS class, though.

Anyways, Wednesday was heroic Lower Spire and heroic Dreamwalker. Boy, did we mess that up. Previously, we’d waited for heroism until about 82%, but we recognized that was WAY too late, last week. In that we hit heroism and like, 10 seconds later, the boss was healed to full. So, last week, we decided we’d stop taking portals and call for hero at 75%.

WAY too early. We were healing for nearly two minutes after hero expired.

We’re thinking one more round of portals after 75% ought to be a nice inbetween.

It would also be useful if I had noticed that I’d been put into combat while swapping my Glyph of Seal of Wisdom for a Glyph of Seal of Light. But I didn’t notice, since I was also doing healing assignments at the time. I went in with my spellpower set and Seal of Light up and didn’t realize until after the raid, when I went to switch the glyphs back, that I’d never made the switch in the first place. /facepalm

Thursday saw us without our regular resto shammy and without our regular disc priest, so we were a little light on healing and that meant no heroic Sindragosa attempts. Shucks. :P (I really loathe that fight with everything I am.) We got Blood Prince Council (almost got it on normal before we realized it wasn’t on heroic!) and BQL pretty easily. Actually, both kills, while one-shots, were messy as hell. I feel like my RL friend the resto druid might have reason to think the healers suck. :P Shadow Prison killed a LOT of people. I think part of the issue there was that I kept the regular holy priest as holy to help with raid healing rather than as disc to help with raid mitigation. Lessons for next week, I guess.

Rotface was messy, too. Hell, all of Thursday was messy. One wipe and a kill on Rotface. 3 wipes and a kill on Festergut. Must remember to assign SIDES to the healers because after 2 wipes, I realized both resto druids (assigned to healing the raid, primarily the ranged) were both on the same side. /facepalm

Then, because we lacked the healing for Sindragosa, we played with heroic Putricide. We got him to 40% after a handful of attempts and were getting the hang of the Unbound Plague, too. Still, we’re planning to hit him up after Sindragosa, I think. We just have a lot more time poured into Sindragosa and, with the buff, ought to be able to get deeper into P3.

Speaking of Sindragosa… AVR is basically cheating. Look at this.

That’s our layout. So when you get a mark on your head and you’re going to get the frost tomb on you, you run to the corresponding mark and stand on the little orange circle in the center of it. Pretty simple. The big circles (which, my guildies hastened to mention, look like parts of the female anatomy. :P) are for frost tomb positioning in P3.

Another look at the mark positions, from above.

So yeah, that’s hax. And I’m not really sure how I feel about it. I mean, being able to paint on the game world is really nice and isn’t it really just something we’ve done with in-game tools thus far? Warlock teleporters? Flares? Elune Stones? What’s the difference between this and those?

The difference, in my mind, is that this is not something that comes with the game. This is an addon that someone developed with this purpose in mind. It’s not something the developers of the game foresaw (I don’t think). I would NOT be surprised if AVR is blocked somehow.

Boss mods work with the game. It makes emotes more noticeable. It times abilities for you so you’re not sitting there with a stopwatch the way you did for Core Hound respawns in Molten Core. All the information boss mods give you are available through the game itself. But this doohickey works separately from the game. It allows players to start dictating information to other players that are strategy-based, not encounter-mechanic-based. Does that make sense?

It’s the difference between telling someone to run left and telling someone to run to that particular spot on the ground that is NOT visible in-game without use of the mod.

I think that’s where I have problems with it as a raider. As a raid leader, GOOD LORD, where was this two years ago!? haha. :) Seriously, though, I like to think that I have a fairly firm grasp on what the developers of the game want us to do. I don’t think they want us to skip three of the four trash packs on the way up towards the tunnel in the Pit of Saron. They definitely don’t want us to try to do the Lich King encounter in Heroic Halls of Reflection from behind. I’m kind of hoping they don’t want us to ignore Light Vortex entirely and heal through it by stacking in the doorway of heroic Twin Valks.

I don’t think this mod is in the spirit of the game that the developers had in mind. That said, I’ll use it ’till it gets banned or my guild no longer requires it. But I’ll feel dirty about it! ;)

Tonight, we’re looking at Sindragosa and I guess maybe Putricide if we get Sindragosa down or if we have unexpected healing absences.

Making Money/Pugging

I’ve been bad. I’ve spent so much money in the last couple of weeks and a lot of it is due to just plain laziness on my part. On Saturday, I was at 4800g on my bank toon, with probably another 800g spread out on different toons.

Considering I had 15k a couple weeks ago, this was unacceptable. I decided to spend yesterday making money.

First up, I took 6 Cardinal Rubies and cut them for the AH. I made a ton of Runescrolls of Fortitude. I hauled out some of the BOE Christmas pets that I hadn’t used and had been waiting to sell. Then I did some dailies at the Argent Tournament on Kurn. Finally became a Champion of Stormwind (I stopped doing anything AT-related with just one more day left for the Champion of Stormwind achievement!), did a bunch of the dailies and got The Bread Winner which totally got me by surprise!

I bought a Teldrassil Sproutling since I realized I had more than 40 Champion’s Seals and there were no others on the AH, so I bought that and put THAT on the AH for 300g.

I traded in some Triumphs for more gems and cut those, too. I also did my random heroic on all but one toon. (On my druid, I got Oculus, to which I said no thanks. Later, I got to try to heal a fail H HoR run, which fell apart… then I got tapped to tank it on my third attempt at the random heroic — which went well!) I did my cooking daily on both Madrana and Kurn, fishing daily on them both as well. I also got my weekly (Marrowgar) done on Kurn because I pugged an ICC 25 and we went through Lower Spire (couldn’t down Festergut because people were dumb) and, as you may have seen by now, I got my bow!

Once just about everything had sold, I had 6600g or thereabouts. Not too bad! From 4800-6600? Excellent.

And then I saw someone in trade talking about a GDKP TOC25 run that would be happening in the next 20 minutes or so.

What is a GDKP run?

I’d heard of these, but never participated before. Basically, every item is up for bids, with a minimum. Bids are made publicly in raid chat. At the end of the run, the proceeds are split among the raiders who lasted ’till the end.

Kurn may be kickin’ it in some sweet 264 gear, including the new bow, but a lot of the gear is still sub-par. Like trinkets. Like my melee weapon. Plus, I didn’t actually HAVE the TOC 25 achievement, which makes me look like a moron when trying to get into pugs. (I’d previously gone as far as Anub and then there was total raid failure.)

So. I indicated my interest to the person organizing it. I got a whisper back saying to ask for an invite at 12:15am (my time). So I repaired my stuff, sent myself 5000g of that 6600g, just in case something AWESOME dropped, and headed to TOC.

I decided that there were three items I was actually interested in, plus maybe I would try to snag a Trophy of the Crusade so I could get another piece of 245 T9. (Already had 245 gloves from Koralon.)

The items were:

Lupine Longstaff – compared to the Orca-Hunter’s Harpoon, it had more agi, more armor penetration, less crit (ugh, for haste!) and less hit, which is nice, because I’ve got a stupid amount of hit. Drops off Twins.

Archon Glaive – clearly better than the Lupine Longstaff; no haste but crit, still more armor pen. Drops off Anub’arak.

Obviously, I was in the market for a new melee weapon.

The other item I was looking at bidding on was, no surprise here, Death’s Verdict. I decided that, if it dropped, I’d go as high as 2000g on it. It drops off the Twins as well, so it was going to be exciting to see the loot off those bosses.

At 12:15, I whispered the guy in charge, got my invite and after about 20 minutes of fiddling with the groups and everything, we were finally ready to go.

I was not prepared for the amount of money that was spent on even the first boss. 500g was the minimum but the Trophy went for 1500g. I resigned myself to not buying a trophy. :P

Satrina’s Impeding Scarab dropped off the Faction Champs. I have that trinket on Madrana for her tanking set. I got it for 2 DKP with my guild. Someone in the run paid 3000g for it.

I was suddenly sure that 2000g would not be enough for Death’s Verdict, if it dropped.

The Twins died easily (I deterrenced Light Vortex! Go me for remembering how to play my class!) and though there was no Death’s Verdict, there was the Lupine Longstaff.

I figured I’d bid 500g, since it had dropped and there was no guarantee that the glaive would drop off Anub.

No one bid against me. Grats me! It’s not often I get to upgrade a bow AND a staff in the same day.

Anub’arak died and the Reign of the Unliving dropped, which set someone back 3400g. No glaive, so I was very satisfied with my purchase of the Lupine Longstaff.

Throughout the run, there were updates posted in raid of how much had been spent on each boss and the last update included the 1500g spent for the “goodie bag”, which consisted of the skins, the patterns, the Crusader Orbs and the Abyss Crystals (4) from the run. The updates added up the total pot and the breakdown per person. Here’s the final breakdown.

So, I paid 500g and got 1196g for a total of 696g in profit, not to mention the gold from the bosses.

All told, I finished the day with 7700g in my bank, with a few hundred spread out over various toons. I got a new bow, I got a new staff, Frost Emblems, Ashen Verdict rep, a bunch of new achievements and had a lot of fun.

It’s never a bad day when you make about 3000g and get new gear. :)

Already?!

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

15% buff is apparently active in ICC.

I think my thought process here is “seriously?! Already?! What?!”

I feel like I just got used to the 10% buff. 15% seems totally overboard.

I suppose we’ll be able to go kill heroic Sindragosa pretty easily this week, then. And probably Putricide, if we have time.

And then… LK on heroic?

No idea.

In other news, I’m trying to figure out what the hell is causing my tank to die from 44k melee attacks from heroic Sindragosa. I’m thinking parry haste hits, although I’m not sure why the tank is taking 44k hits instead of the regular 35-38k hits.