My Needed Improvements

Here is how my MT experience went with Gruul … he was the windshield I was the bug. So in this post I think I’ll try to compare myself with the guilds other main tanks and see what I need to improve on besides my gear(I am the least geared of the warriors in this example and I would guess equally geared with Honors). I’ll be using screen shots from various Gruul attempts to see if I can come up with anything for me to fix, but as most of you know, we won’t find anything against my skill because I am perfect and my epeen is huge and masculine.
(Also the WWS provided here are the attempts I saw where the tank was MT and their longest lived)
Here is the screen shot of my MT experience and how I held up against Gruul. On an overall average Gruul hit me for 3550, that’s actually not too bad considering I have at the least 16.5k health in a 25 man raid. I cannot really compare this stat with the other warriors because the longer the fight goes the harder Gruul starts hitting as he “grows” during the fight. I did not live long enough to go through that many growths so even though I took the least average damage it unfortunately doesn’t count toward some leet tanking ability only I possess, it’s just because I missed a heal and got my sack stomped on ending the fight early. Maybe to give an idea I can show it this way though.
I was hit for an average of 3550 living through 75 attacks made by Gruul.
Honorshammer was hit for an average of 3864 living through 105 attacks made by Gruul.
Brindle was hit for an average of 4096 living through 159 attacks made by Gruul.
Lanorah was hit for an average of 4179 living through 233 attacks made by Gruul.

Gruul got off 3 crushing blows, which was 4% of his hits against me. If we took away those 3 crushing blows Gruul was hitting me for an average of 3362. Looking at the other warriors they were hit for 2% and 3% crushing hits, so I am highest at 4%. I have over 500 defense so there are only two explanations, I didn’t spam shield block as much as the other guys, or the crushing blows came at unlucky times when shield block was on its cool down. Since its only a difference of 1% I’m going to assume that it was an unlucky hit but I’m also going to keep it in the back of my mind to be more mindful of shield block. Even though I do honestly spam the crap out of shield block, it’s my best friend. It is entirely possible i was just unlucky with the crushes as shield wall is only good for 4 hits every 8 seconds(if im understanding it correclty). Now if I really wanted to lower my crushing blows id switch to a paladin. Honors only took 1 crushing hit, but paladins have better a better crush avoidance spell than shield block which is holy shield because it works more often(8 hits every 10 seconds). What sucks about holy shield is that it only mitigates 35% where shield block does 75%.

Next we’ll look at Gruul, out of 75 swings at me from Gruul, He missed 36 (missed 48% of his swings). When I first looked at this I thought that was pretty good, but again comparing to the other warriors it’s not so great. He missed Brindle an amazing 57.2% of his attacks, Gruul missed 91 attacks out of 159! Lanorah also is right up there with 54.9%,Gruul missed 128 attacks out of 233. These guys were missed more than hit! What is to be taken into consideration with this is that both of these tanks are avoidance tanks. Meaning they Gem their gear for parry and dodge, whereas I have been going for mostly stamina. At the moment I can’t decide which is the better route to go yet, Stamina or avoidance, from looking at these numbers I think an avoidance tank is pretty damn convincing. Honors pointed me at a good article found here, it makes the argument that stamina is better than avoidance. Honors is going the health route and in a 25 man raid runs at around 17.5k health, but he also gets hit a lot more than the avoidance tanks, Gruul missed him only 40% of the time,but because he has more hit points he gives the healers more breathing room and less surprises. Still looking at Brindle and Lanorah’s numbers it’s hard to decide. Here is Honors explanation for the difference between an avoidance tank vs. effective health tank (that’s a stamina tank) which I found to be a good explanation. Avoidance tries to make the worst case scenario less probable, effective health tries to make the worst case scenario survivable.

Here is where you can really tell the difference between my dodge and parry verse the other tanks.
Brindle parried 16% of the time and dodged 18%. 11.6% damage mitigated overall (awesome)
Lanorah parried 12% and dodged 21%(impressive) of the time. 7.3% damage mitigated overall
Honors parried 15% of the time and dodged 15% of the time. 5.8% damage mitigated overall
I on the other hand parried 12% of the time and only dodged 14% of the time. 5.6% damage mitigated overall(I do not know how much these numbers are affected by how short my fight was, if they are affected at all).
With these stats though it is a blatant smack in the face I need to use my dodge trinkets more (this still won’t put me up with Lanorah and Brindle because remember they are avoidance tanks but it should help alot). I think I should work them into maybe two separate macro’s so I don’t forget. Maybe use 1 trinket with shield block and one with devastate which would use them every time their cool down is up. Leaving me with shield wall and last stand as my life savers. Right now I have been saving them incase my life gets low.I rely on 2 trinkets, last stand , and shield wall to make me “invincible” until I get a few heals, but i think this is hurting me more than helping me.

I guess after writing up this blog I need to decide if I should gem for avoidance or stay with max stamina. Right now an avoidance tank seems like it’s an amazing thing, but if you look at some of the farther progressing guilds most of them are gemmed for stamina. What I get to walk away from with this is that I need to use my trinkets more and possibly be more mindful of my shield block. What these reports cannot show is how much having max stamina helps the healers and my gear compared to their better gear. If it could I think I might have held up a little better to the other tanks. Over-all i do not think i would be stable MT on gruul, but i feel like im getting damn close. *see the other tanks stats below*

Lanorah vs Gruul (This one gruul actually died)

Brindle vs Gruul

Honors vs Gruul

Grats to Mal katai

Gruul down, holy Sh*t grats to Mal Katai! I didn’t get to be there for the kill so that blows , but I am genuinely happy they killed him. I logged on to late to get an invite, I would of liked another shot at tanking him again. They had a warrior MT and Honors was OT, I watched the video, you guys both did an awesome job. I guess in regards to my previous post about trying things different I don’t think I was wrong for trying to push a new strategy, but maybe I was because what we were trying before obviously worked. Both strats work, but who knows if the other way could have been easier or if everyone just had to take their licks to learn the encounter. Who knows, but now that he’s dead who cares, grats to the guild on the kill!

I hate drama as much as Gruul

Friday night we were back in Gruul’s Layer, lots of wipes later and still no Gruul kill. Honors was MT for 5 attempts and I was MT for 1 attempt, neither times went well. Frustration is mounting and I feel like venting.

Frustration#1: That big MotherF&#ker wont die!

Frustration #2: During Gruul attempts my RL friend who plays in the guild with me popped off his during the Gruul fight. He started raging on and on about how a paladin can’t be the MT and it can only be done with 2 warriors, I feel he’s wrong on that after comparing all the combat stats a pally tank holds up the same as a warrior with equal gear. Now does that mean I think Honors or I should be MT on Gruul? Honestly no I don’t think we are geared enough for him, we have a better geared tank in the guild who I feel needs be there. The fact that the better geared tank is a warrior is irrelevant; if it was a likewise geared paladin I’d be saying the same thing. Anyways back to my RL friend, he sometimes has a quick temper when he gets really frustrated and unfortunately it was honors who soaked up all the BS he decided to spew out. Now I feel like there is some weird tension there on our 5v5 team and that sucks (Went 4-6 over the weekend as we tried a 3 dps 2 healer approach, apparently 2.5 dps /2.5 healer worked better for us last week). I hate drama, it can lick my sack.

Frustration #3: I think the big reason Dirty was going Apesh*t on Friday was because he has made several attempts over the past few weeks to impart some of the working strategies on the Gruul kills he has done in the past, and from what he has told me he’s been completely shot down. It’s possible the way he tried to present this was “Your setup is stupid let’s try my way” (I doubt that is what was said but for the sake of the argument let’s just say it was), which of course anyone would probably rail against. Therefore I tried to talk to the raid leader and suggest setting up our positioning differently, I also was shot down. I didn’t even get a “Let’s talk about it later”. As a guild we have gotten Gruul down to 4%, so the raid leader sticks to that and won’t change the setup or acknowledge that there is the possibility of a different course of action. True 4% is close, but that’s happened 1 time in 15 tries? We setup as 5 different groups circling Gruul with assigned healers to that group, If you want a heal you have to be in range of your assigned healer. Well you can’t control where shatter sends you, the chances of you landing back by your healer are not very good. So you end up with healers scrambling all around to heal their guys, and it becomes a big mess. Here is the basics of Dirty’s suggestions without going deeply into an explanation. Ranged + assigned ranged healers to the West side of the room, Melee + Melee Healers to the East side of the room. Instead of being assigned a group to heal your healing groups are set up very much the same as when fighting Onyxia. Groups 1,3,5 go left (this consists of ranged and ranged healers), groups 2 & 4 go right (melee and melee healers), healers heal whomever is on your side not just your group. With this setup we have a 50% chance(one side or the other) of a landing in the correct area after a shatter instead of a 20% chance, not to mention its more organized keeping the healers from running all around. There is also more to add on this strategy having to do with ranged collapsing on top of each other to avoid cave ins most of the time and then spreading out for shatter but I’m not typing it all out. Now because of dirty running his mouth I think this will be ignored even more just because it’s his suggestions. What can be said in his defense is that he’s been in a lot of Gruul kills with another guild, and he is an experienced raider. Pre-BC we raided through BWL together and since level 70 he has been up into TK and SSC so he’s been around the block. Not to mention he is one of our best healers, throughout Gruuls he did the 2nd most healing done with I think the lowest over healing. He is a good player, knows what he is doing, and I agree his attitude can suck balls sometimes, but should that keep us from trying something new?

Having said all that I used to be a guild master and I organized and ran raids ALL the time. When you start wiping you instantly get 10 people whispering you with their suggestions and what you are doing wrong, in most cases you just ignore them and stick to your strategy until the guild clicks and you get your boss kill. 15 tries later and we haven’t killed Gruul, I would venture to say maybe we could switch up strategies three or four times and see if we have any better luck. What could it really hurt?

Kara Cooler

Grrrr Blizzard has slipped a “Cooler” into my Kara group. What is a cooler you ask? “In gambling lore, a cooler is someone whose luck is so bad that they can pass it off to others: a mere touch will turn a winner into a loser.” They even made a movie about it. The idea is that you’re sitting at a black jack table on fire, just winning and winning. The casino will send someone to play next to you as a “cooler” therefore turning your luck around so you lose all your winnings. I believe that blizzard put a cooler into my Kara group because I was on fire with loots. For weeks in a row purples rained down upon me and I was basking in epic glory, if I needed something it dropped. Last night we killed curator and I would like to get my tier 4 gloves and also the leggings, neither dropped. Now I have to ask you Honorshammer, how much did blizzard pay you to switch guilds you bastard!? *I’m not being serious I was just thinking last night about how Honor’s has horrible luck with loots and I don’t want to be drug down with him! =P *

Raiding Limbo

Last night I started out the night with a Steam Vaults run, I have been sitting at honored with 500 rep to go to revered for months now. Steam Vaults went smoothly and now I’m revered, which is good because I think my plan is to start stock piling badges over the next few weeks. I used to not really care about badges because for a long while my guild was on a strong Kara streak and had regular attempts at Gruul, so I figured I would get the nicer gear before I would earn the badges anyways and for Kara and Gruul my gear is acceptable. At the moment though our guild feels like it has hit this weird phase that I can’t really describe except by saying mass recruiting but for no purpose. On our website it says recruitment is closed but almost every day people of all classes will post an application and get into the guild or get invited without even posting an app, for instance in the case of my class we have at least 7 active warriors right now and just invited another into the guild a few days ago.
This was posted in our guild forums the other day (many more have entered the guild btw since this post)
18 Hunters
16 Druids
13 Warriors
13 Paladins
11 Mages
10 Priests
10 Rogues
10 Warlocks
1 Shaman
What the hell are we going to do with 13(14 now) warriors? I’m sure now you are thinking the only reason I care about more warriors in the guild is because I don’t want to have to share all the loot.
To that I would be honest and say that’s about 40% true, if every warrior took turns rotating through Kara or Gruul’s how long would it take for everyone to really get geared up. We also don’t have a DKP system so the possibility of one of our older established tanks losing his tier 4 shoulders or pants to a brand new guy is a very frustrating possibility. I’d have to shoot myself if I was a hunter in the guild. The other 60% of why this bothers me is by flooding the guild with lots of new people you are diluting your core group and slowing the possibilities for progression, taking longer on runs because the boss fights will have to be explained every time, and allowing for a lot more wipes due to new people learning the encounter. Now if there was a problem with attendance keeping us from going to raids I would be all for going out and recruiting new people, how else would we get to see 25 man content? I’d like to point out that I have talked with many of the new people in the guild and so far everyone seems really nice I’m just confused as to what were gonna do with all these people? It hasn’t been attendance keeping us from raiding, it seems like we normally had 30+ 70’s on, so what the hell is going on? I have no idea, I don’t know if it’s that the people who normally arrange the raids are burnt out with their mains, are tired of wiping on Gruul, or if behind the scenes they are asking people to go to Gruul’s but no one wants to? It also doesn’t even deal solely with the 25 man content, it also applies to Kara. My original group I used to run with stopping going for a few weeks, then started again but only went like one night a week and didn’t really go past curator. I have started running with group 2 and I enjoy raiding with those guys but they are a late night crowd and I don’t know if I can keep staying up that late. This is why I think I’m going to put some effort to mass badge collecting, which I admit I should have been doing all along anyways but got a little lazy. I really like the people in my guild and enjoy how we all rip on each other (which I’v been taking the brunt of the jokes from everyone lately, I get so sick of people lashing out at me because I’m so sexy.) and have a lot of laughs together, and that’s the only reason I have stayed. Pre-BC when I was more “hard core” for raiding I probably would have bailed a while ago since it feels like we have “lost our way” when it comes to raiding. I know a lot of people are angry because the guild totally skipped its last scheduled Gruul attempt. If we end up skipping again on Friday (Our next scheduled attempt) I would guess that we’ll lose some people over it. Now, with my luck Gruul will be all set up and ready to roll and my internet will make me look like a tool, in which case someone working at my ISP is going to walk out to their car and find I have smeared dog crap all over their door handles. As I re-read this post I guess it was maybe half a rant and half confusion because a lot of us in the guild don’t know what’s going on. What’s up with recruiting people when we have the #’s to raid already? What’s up with not raiding on scheduled days? What’s up with this weird burning sensation I have when I pee?

Also last night in Kara some of us were discussing what the symbol on my shield means. Today at work I have spent a lot of time researching ancient languages and hieroglyphics and found the answer. It means Fu*# you.

Arena Kill Order

Here’s the deal, I have been getting pretty bored at work lately because I am in between projects. I have been toying with the idea of adding onto a mod I currently use, Arena Live Frames (ALF). I’m writing this post almost to help me get my thoughts in order on what it would take to do this. Using ALF = upon mouse over of an enemy this add-on builds a box on your screen that shows the classes, hp% of the opposing team, and which target each of your team members are clicked on. When the arena starts our chats begin as we try to decide a kill order, and being new together it seems like we don’t decide fast enough leaving the enemy to get the first hit. I’m sitting here thinking now, how great would it be that besides the classes/hp of the enemy team it also shows a kill order? Picture you’re against a team of Hunter, Mage, Priest, Warrior, Shaman, when you’re ALF loads up your kill order is already there for you, no discussion needed.
Hunter – 100% - 4
Mage– 100% - 2
Priest– 100% - 1
Warrior– 100% - 5
Shaman – 100% - 3
I just looked over the code for ALF and it doesn’t seem like adding an extra box with a kill order in it to the graphical interface would be hard. The hard part is figuring out the kill order, not only do I have to take into account classes but also the specs. To take every possible combination for a 5v5 arena team there are 59,049 possibilities and that’s only dealing with the classes! Yes I know that doesn’t seem possible but it is (9 different classes and five different team slots = 9x9x9x9x9). Now take that number and add on two (I used two because some classes found in arena’s are specced one of two ways, holy priest or shadow priest, fire mage or frost mage, etc) different possibilities for specs for each class. That 59049 number blows up again to 1,889,568(9 classes, 2 specs each, five team slots). Now what if you have two of the same class same spec on the team, which do you kill first? I guess you would try to kill down the guy with lowest hit points, so that’s more code that would have to be written. Wow, I’ve pretty much talked myself out of this already.
*10 minute break passes at this point while I was writing this *
I just spoke with Krawl (I work with him in RL at a software development company) and I was going about figuring out my kill order totally wrong. This could be done much easier by giving each class/spec a set number amount. For example, let’s say no matter what combination of classes I am against if there is a priest and he isn’t shadow I want to always kill him first. So we assign the priest the number 1. If we detect that he is shadow spec (he runs out in shadow form) we assign him a number 5. Why 5? Because in between a holy priest and a shadow priest you might want to give a resto shaman the number 2, a resto druid the number 3, and a paladin the number 4. Now building our kill order map( ill call it KOM) it looks like this so far. Priest (Any Priest not in shadow form) – 1
Resto Shaman (Resto because he cast earth shield on someone) – 2
Paladin (Hard to tell his spec and also do we care?) – 3
Druid (I don’t think we can tell if he is resto or not?) – 4
Shadow Priest (in shadow form) – 5
Mage (If he is not frost) – 6
Warlock (do we care about his spec?)– 7
Frost Mage (we could tell from his frost shield) – 8
Rogue (Does his spec matter?) – 9
Shaman (Any spec not resto) - 10
Hunter (Does his spec matter?) - 11
Warrior (Does his spec matter?) - 12
(There is a lot of reworking that had to be done on this, this is just used for my example). So what if you go against a team that is rogue, paladin, druid, hunter, and warrior. You would have
Rogue – 9
Druid – 4
Paladin – 3
Hunter – 12
Warrior – 13
Reordering this list by lowest number first the kill order would be.
Paladin – 1
Druid – 2
Rogue – 3
Hunter – 4
Warrior – 5
As I said the KOM needs a lot of work and the mod would have to watch for who is healing, because what if the druid is resto and the pally is only DPS? We’d have to switch the kill order by healing done? Would you want to switch the kill order after the fight has even started? I don’t know I’m not a big arena buff yet and don’t know all the secrets.
I think I’ll start picking apart the mod the next few days and see if the work needed to do this would be worth it. Even trying to think about it with the KOM approach the amount of work here seems daunting, so my first thoughts on this are; My current rating doesn’t seem so bad =P, but it would be a very handly tool to have. *edit 10/24/07 15 mins after post --- would i even need to show the kill order, maybe just put a big arrow pointing to the guy who should be killed first, then an arrow on the next guy after the first one is dead? All the KOM math would still have to happen but a pointing arrow seems cleaner*

I kinda like Smelly Hookers

What the hell happened to my good luck! Horseman dead 18 times this weekend, DPS plate helm dropped 0 times. WTF is that!? I’m going to take one of these 700 magical brooms I’v gotten off him and shove it right up his @ss! The horseman event is quickly losing its “Fun” Factor, even though the pvp outside is remaining a lot of fun. You know a zone is going to be fun when the ground is littered with skeletons.

On the arena home front it wasn’t exactly a stellar weekend but also it wasn’t horrible. First off my 3v3 didn’t do too bad. It was Dirty (resto druid), Padamay (boomkin), Honorshammer (prot pally), and Me(arms warrior). We went 8-6 for the week, raising our 3v3 a little bit. I would really like to see this get back above 1500. Also I would specifically like to point out that Padamay’s pvp skills seemed to have doubled over the last week. She was totally on her cyclone and root game which helped us with several victories (we went 4-1 with her). Me and dirty attempted some 2v2 but the queue time was around 6 minutes and we kept playing the same team who we went 2-2 with, so we decided to maybe try them Monday night or just skip them entirely this week. What I am happiest about is the “Smelly Hookers” 5v5 team, being a brand new team I think we did really well with a 7-8 record. It would have been nice to not have dipped below 1500, but were sitting at 1491 so it can hopefully be raised next week. The team consisted of Dirty (resto druid), Honorshammer (prot pally), Palad (ret pally), Luminati (Holy Priest), Slymongoose (BM Hunter), and Myself (Arms Warrior). The 2 paladins traded spots so everyone could get their points. Our team is a “tri-healer arena team” (Google that if your curious about it) what that means is were running 2.5 healers and the plan is to outlast the other team. From everything I have read this team structure really clicked with me especially since so many pvp players are stacking resilience. I was turned onto this spec by Baconstrip (pvp resto druid monster), and have liked everything I have read about it. Of course winning the battle and reading about it are 2 very separate things, but I think the Smelly Hookers could be onto something here and I’m already looking forward to next weekend. It seemed like our biggest problem is that they could mow our priest down before we could kill their healer, so we’ll have to figure out a way to prolong Lumi’s life. Ideally we would like for them to see Honor’s healing gear and focus fire on him first, since he is prot spec and probably the hardest of us to kill. I also need a lot of work on my pvp warrior skills still and I think my spec needs to be tweeked more, so once I get that down I think my contributions to the team will start showing themselves more. Anyways good job last night smelly hookers and I can’t wait till next week! Repair Bill for weekend:16g --> grinded alot of primals

Scary Night (Halloween boss and My repair bill)

Last night the plan was to go into Kara knock down Shade, Chess, Prince and then maybe Illhoof. We weren’t clicking that great and wiped a few times on Shade. I was a total douche on one attempt. I ran out of the arcane blast just fine, was standing against the wall, then hit my intercept macro thinking the arcane blast had gone off. Well it hadn’t so I charged back in and promptly died, laying on the ground like a schmuck that whole attempt. I caught shit for that all night. *Sarcasm* I never knew we had so many comedians in the guild, everyone was just so hilarious. After Shade died we cleared smoothly through chess and got to Prince. That’s when the repair bill skyrocketed. It just seems like no matter what we did or tried the infernals wouldn’t cooperate. Our dps also seemed to be lacking even when the infernals left us alone for short periods of time. Prince's health just wasn’t dropping down fast enough. *Edit - I had the line "Prince just wasn’t going down fast enough" but was informed that sounded very gay* It didn’t help that it was either me trying to dps(as a prot warrior) when Honor’s was tanking, or Honor’s(prot pally) was dps/healing when I was tanking. On the flip side of that though, on every prince fight I have been on the rest of the group pulled the weight for that guy so he had the chance at loot just like everyone else and it really was never a problem before. I’m going to attribute the wipes to everyone being so tired since we got such a late start and the horrible infernal luck. We’ll go in and get him tonight and hopefully down Nightbane and Illhoof as well.

After the Kara raid was called it was around 1:30 am – 2:00 am server time and I knew I should go to bed but I wanted to see that new Halloween boss. He is a new 5 man boss found in SM who drops random epics. The drops really are not that great(besides the warrior dps helm which is pretty nice) but the boss is extremely easy , and can be summoned by each person 1x a day (there were 5 people in my party so we summoned him 5 times). I picked up a dps ring which is just “alright”, the plate helm also dropped but I passed on it for Devona (another warrior in the group). I’d like to have the helm since I’m still using a crappy blue one for arena’s and could use the added dps until I get my Merc Gladiator helm. I’ll go back and kill him another 5 times today and tomorrow, I’m sure on one of those kills I’ll get the helm. That helm btw has a sweet graphic on it. I also won the epic riding broom and the epic flying broom, I didn’t use them though so I have no screen shots for those. Explanations for the boss fight can be found on several other blogs/sites so I’m not going to go into it. Needless to say, it’s a simple encounter and should be done just for the fun of it if not the random epics. Also there was rampant arguing on our general chat about the new loot and if it dissapears or not. Some were saying his loot will only last 14 days, others said the brooms only last 14 days but the loot remains, and then others said nothign dissapears. I don’t know whats up with the loot but I’ll try to look into it later and edit an answer into this post. I’ll also try to look into the brooms saying “One time use” apparently this isn’t true and you can use them multiple times. Some screen shots are included below. I’m sorry if the blog is a little dry today, I crawled my ass into bed around 3am and had to wake up for work around 6am.
*Edit added - From my post the previous day: I added the +2% threat to my gloves and found it to be worth it, incase anyone was wondering*
Repair Bill: 37g =/

Tanking Kara: Shade of Aran

Last night I was talking to a warrior on my server who said he reads my blog. He had stated that his guild is getting ready to start running Kara and he would find it beneficial if I would blog about what it takes to tank certain boss fights. I’m guessing he is looking for information like knowing to disarm Attumen, where to stand/stance dance on the Nightbane fight, or any other immunities/special abilities that boss’s have which make tanking difficult. So I suppose I’ll give it a try.

Shade of Aran:
He has no agro table and randomly selects his targets, therefore he cannot be tanked.
-The end
Your welcome =)

*In all serious though I think maybe next week I’ll write something up about how to tank the first 1 or 2 bosses in Kara and if i have anything interesting to say i might keep it up.* *edit 10/23/07* --> Looks like im off the hook as i found a warrior blog that does this very thing and is well written. http://thepositivewarrior.blogspot.com/

Maiden Love

*Edit - I just went back and re-read what i wrote and realized i rambled alot. Im to tired to fix it though, hopefully it makes sense.*
Last night I got home, played with my kid for a little while till she fell asleep, and then watched one of the worst movie ever created. I wanted to rent transformers but it was all checked out so looked at the new releases and picked up Bug. I thought I had remembered seeing the previews of this as some type of bug swarm attacking people horror movie, so I rented it (I’m one of those guys who watches the SCI-FI channel movies even though 90% of them suck and I had thought “bug” was right up that alley). Instead it was about crazy people who scratch holes in their skin, have sex, and then die…that’s about it. It was extremely painful to sit through, seriously it was that bad. That’s 102 minutes of my life and 1 dollar rental fee I pissed away. I should have just taped the money to my sack and lit it on fire,it would have given me the same experience AND saved myself some time.

After giving my dogs a new dvd chew toy I logged onto wow. I wasn’t looking to really do anything last night except maybe grind a few primals and then go to bed. Sunday and Monday were both late wow nights for me and at some point I need to grab a good nights sleep. When I logged on the guild had downed High King Mulgar and was working on Gruul(Grats on your Tier 4 honors, not sure who else got loot but grats to you guys as well). They didn’t down Gruul but they had again came close(10% I think). After their Gruul run some of the group decided to run Kara, and I took the invite against the seductive callings of my warm bed. It was already late so we decided to do Moroes, Maiden, Opera then call it a night. This put us in a nice place to finish up the rest of the bosses on Friday night. I made a promise to maiden id give her some sweet lovin if she gave up her tanking gloves. Besides being a tank im a gigalo on the side incase you didnt know. Did you seriously think it was luck that got me loots every week? Since she is 25 foot tall I’m guessing that it’s gonna be like throwing a hotdog down a hallway, but a promise is a promise.
I’m thinking about adding the threat enchant to the gloves, but it’s kind of expensive so I can’t decide if I should just hold off for my tier 4 gloves. I might buy it just because im really interested in seeing how well the enchant works, 2% added threat every hit could make a huge difference. *I took the picture before i added the gems, but i did socket it before going to bed*

Tonight after giving Maiden the best 3 minutes of her life I will maybe do some arena’s, or possibly run a nice easy dungeon for some rep, or just go to bed and get a good night of sleep.

Repair Bill: No clue i was to tired to repair and just logged. I only died 1x though.

*soup nazi's voice* NO GRUUL FOR YOU

Arrrggg I’m getting really tired of my internet making me look like a schmuck on wheels. Last night the guild went for another Gruul attempt. Fight starts, BAM – disconnect, reconnect – take two swings – disconnect, and that’s how that went the whole fight. They got Gruul down to 4% then wiped, I am arms spec so I know if my internet hadn’t spewed ass all over my gaming experience I probably could have come close to making up that difference. Having such a crappy connection I gave up my dps spot to someone else in the guild. Even though I think 4% was the best attempt they had last night. To my guildies; I am very sorry about the connection problems, I promise I am trying to get these issues resolved. Until they are though I may have to just sit out on the 25 man content, and that’s really going to suck.

Trash Talk

So I find it happens all the time that when competing in arena’s I’m either the one getting cussed at or the one getting made fun of, depending on if we win or lose (If the opposite team is of the same faction of course). Yesterday take for example, doing some 3v3, we lose to a team and before the game ends several of them yell “Raydz Sucks , Raydz Sucks!”. Why is it I gotta be the one being picked on, don’t they know that behind all this plate is the tender heart of a child? Why not yell out “Dirty Sucks”? How do they know that they didn’t permanently damage my psyche forever causing me to become some type of hermit afraid to leave my home because of low self esteem?

Even though that is the complete opposite of what happened, in fact I was a little sleepy at the start of that arena game but that just flat out pissed me off and as luck would have it we played that same team three more times in a row. I can honestly say I play much better when I’m angry. Now don’t get me wrong I wasn’t angry like punching holes in my walls, but yes I was a perturbed. Perturbed enough that every time we got the last standing member down to low health I called off dps and I would run over and T-bag his friend’s dead bodies and yell out anything I could think of to piss them off. I really wish I had some screen shots, I forgot though because I was trying to type as much as I could. Chat looked something like this though
Me - “Wow that first game must have been a fluke”
Him – “F&$K you “
Me-“Seriously you should uninstall wow forever or perhaps go kill yourself, try a chemical fire.”
Him-“F&$K you F^G, you suck”
*i wish i was better at trash talking*

This went on each of the 3 games we stomped them. I do have to say that adding a little bit of Smack and gloating at the end of a battle brings a lot of fun and emotion to the game. It would be cool if at the end of an arena blizzard turned off all faction restrictions and gave both teams 15 seconds to scream at each other before being kicked out of the game. I apparently need to make some macro’s or something because it seems like everyone else spams all this trash talk on me but I never have enough time to type something witty or cleaver back.

--Macro 1 --
/cast Execute
/whisper %target You and your team mates can lick my chode. <--- I realize this isn’t witty or cleaver i just wanted to put an example up.

I would like to point out that my team has never started the smack talk and if it’s the same faction team I try to end it with a “Good Game Guys” or a /salute even if we lose. Anyways this whole post was created because I’m curious how common trash talking in arena’s is, is this possibly the most enjoyment people get from an arena battle? *Poll on the top left side of page*

*stand over enemy body*
/sit
/emote lays his b**ls on your chin
/stand

Smelly Hookers

This weekend I really did not get much accomplished. Friday night I hopped into a guild Kara run for Curator which I was hoping either the plate pants or tier 4 gloves would drop off him but neither did. As far as Kara loot goes, I really only need items from Curator or Nightbane with a few dps “wish lists” from random bosses. I will still gladly tank Kara for any group that needs me but besides those bosses if another tank needs a spot he is more than welcome to it. While I still do enjoy Kara I am really looking forward to the new 10 man instance coming out for the new encounters and graphics (I’m a graphics whore). Also in guild news they tried Gruul on Sunday. I believe they came closer than they ever have by implementing more ranged dps, but just couldnt quite get him down. I had some family stuff to do on Sunday so I missed out , but hopefully I can get a spot tonight if we go.

My quest to raise the 2v2 arena team is going alright. When Dirty (resto druid) and I first got on this team the rating was 1340’ish, we have raised it now to 1540. It would be a little bit higher but the other 2 people on this team had a ruff go over the weekend. Tonight if 5v5’s or Gruuls doesn’t happen I think me and Dirty are hoping to take the team up to 1600. 1540 is the highest I have ever had an arena team rank, sad but true.

Speaking of 5v5’s the previous team I was on “Jackson Five” was never able to get on at the same time and we missed two weeks in a row. That’s a lot of arena points missed out on so yesterday I bought a new 5v5 team and am hoping to get a couple of good guys together tonight and see how we do. Lined up so far I have myself (Arms Warrior – for pvp), Dirty (Resto Druid), Lumanati(Holy Priest), Ilna(affliction Lock), and I’m looking for one more hard core dps guy. I’m almost worried we are a little heavy on the healing, but both healers have good gear so I think the plan is to outlast the team. Wish me and my fellow “Smelly Hookers” luck!

Weekend Repair Bill:14g

Im a bad tank o_O

Last night was somewhat of an off night for me. I was doing a few quests in Netherstorm for some quick cash when a guildie asked me to tank arc for him so he could get his key frag for Kara. I said sure but warned them that I’m not prot (arms atm for some arenas) so if they have massive amounts of dps going then threat might be an issue. Turns out most of the guys going didn’t have that great of gear so threat was never an issue, except the time I was trying to hold my baby and tank at the same time while Kim made her a bottle. At that point the healer died and I felt bad so I gave him 2.5g to cover that repair. Speaking of that healer, he informed me I’m a bad tank in party chat. You know that first hallway at the beginning? I was tanking one of those large elite squid monsters, and two of the non-elite’s that come with him. To make my job easier I had asked the dps to just kill off the non-elites really fast, but either no one was paying attention or they just didn’t care. Dps was all over the place and I was taunting/sundering my balls off to keep agro, and I’m not prot so that made it all the more difficult. What I really wasn’t concerned about was those little maggot things that spawn. Seriously though they are 67 or 68 non-elites big deal if one or two is hitting you, even if you have one on you and your life gets low…maybe try healing yourself? As you can guess he died and started crying about it and how I’m a horrible tank. I wanted to point out that A – DPS was everywhere so it was all I could do to keep the elite and other non-elites on me and B – Sorry I assumed he was a good enough player to handle a level 68 non-elite. I wanted to type all this out but I just left it at a “You’re an idiot”. Maybe I should have tried to grab everything but if I had lost agro on the bigger things how would he have healed through that if he couldn’t heal through the maggots. That kind of left the rest of the run with a little tension, but I wanted to make sure my guildie got keyed. Long story short we finished the run, guildie got his key frag, and I later tracked down the priest in RL and made love to his mom. I guess I have to ask myself was I expecting too much of a Pug, have I become a lazy tank since I mostly only run with guildies, or did he just suck?

After the arc run a lower level guildie wanted help with the ring of blood quests so a bunch of us gathered up to do them. We show up and there is like 10 horde there doing their quests so instead of starting a huge war we dismount and help them out. It worked out well because they stuck around and returned the favor. I kept itching for something to happen since I was specced for arena’s and can pop recklessness out in the “wow world”. For a second I did think Sh*$ was about to go down because the horde tank started attacking me, but I realized he had targeted me accidently because he was trying to “tank” me (sunder, sunder, taunt) instead of the ring of blood monster. After the guildie got his quests all down I went for a quick flight down to Halaa and was able to join in on a raid, pop recklessness, and get about 15 tokens. Which was a nice way to cap off the night.

I think tonight there might be a Kara run going down I can squeeze into , if not ill probably try to raise my 2v2 arena rating up.
repair bill: 7g

FU$&ING A , Good Arena Night!

After relaying some advice to Dirty(resto specc’d druid) which I had received from Baconstrip about what it takes to have a good arena team we tried out this new strategy in some 2v2 arena’s. Let me tell you last night’s 2v2 arena’s compared to last weeks felt like night and day. I myself didn’t do anything differently except try to keep my hamstring on both guys as much as possible so dirty could kite them easier. The real difference came from Dirty’s stealth,kite,and heal strategy. I basically got a free card to bash faces without fear of dying, it was great! Now I realize our rating is still below 1500 so in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing great to be proud of, but after a few ruff weeks of arena’s winning was a nice change of pace. We ended the night with a record of 9-2, I think throughout the week were going to keep trying to raise the rating even though we have our 10 games in. Wish us luck! =)

FU$*@NG A, Good Gruul’s Layer!

Last night was an excellent night for me. I logged on and chilled in Shatt until the Gruul’s layer run started forming. About 25 minutes later everyone is gathered up at the entrance and buffs begin. The few pulls before High King Mulgar go down with no problems, I love that there is hardly any trash in Gruul’s. I don’t know how many people used to raid Molten Core back in the day, but tons of trash with a quick respawn timer sucked. I think we wiped on HKM twice before we downed him, but both times it was just goofy mistakes so we reset him and continued on until he was dead. He dropped Pauldrons of the Fallen Defender x 2 and Maulgar's Warhelm( View his loot). I was pumped to see the pauldrons of defender fall again, I have been wanting these ever sense I passed the first time. I love the dodge rating these bring to the table even though they offer less stamina. I’m going to throw out a quick explanation on the way Mal Katai does loot. It is very different than what I was used to in my previous big raiding guild (I’m referring to my raiding guild pre-BC which we did MC, BWl, AQ40). My previous guild was pretty hard core and we had a DKP system. If we didn’t do a run which counted for DKP then it went straight to rolls. That’s the way it was done, period. For those of you not familiar with how a DKP system works here is an explanation. Mal Katai does it differently in that the guild master asks everyone to send her a whisper if we want the item that dropped and what item we are currently using. The GM will look over who wants the item and say who she thinks should get the drop based on what equipment they are currently using, but everyone who wants it is still allowed to roll. What usually happens is that whomever wins will normally pass their roll to the person the GM said should get it, either because they are happy to give it to this person or because they felt pressure into doing it. This is what I did the first time I “won” my tier 4 shoulders with a roll of 95, but I passed for a druid who still had green shoulders. I know that there are Pro’s and Con’s to both methods, for instance what’s good about the way Mal Katai does it is that she is helping direct the flow of loot to help better up the “guild” as a whole and will help our progression. What’s bad is that the individual who wants an upgrade and wins the roll feels guilty about it if his gear is better than someone else who needs the item, at least I did last night.
As you might have surmised I won one of the roll for the shoulder piece and took the item even though I had the epic shoulder piece from Kara where as some of the others had blues and even greens. At the moment I’m battling with my old mind set of “It was an upgrade for me, gives me a set bonus, makes me a better tank, and I won the roll” verse “ TankB could really use these because they are a huge improvement and it will help our healers out more”. I think I would be more comfortable with the “Pass to the lowest geared guy” idea if I hadn’t been burnt by this before. I spent several months in a guild as the highest geared DPS(a different character, different server) passing on almost everything so other guys could get caught up, and shortly after that the guild fell apart, and I wasted several months. I can say that was a different group of people and I don’t see Mal Katai going that route, so I should probably get with the program and start thinking less of my loot and more for the guild. I got a few tells last night about my roll/loot so I know I stepped on a few toes and feel guilty about it, but then again should I? I put forth work to improve my gear just as much if not more than many others. I will say though that my luck with drops on average seems to be much higher than a lot of other guys so I know that’s probably frustrating to other tanks seeing me gear up so quickly when they cant get thier loot to drop. *yes i have crappy gems in the shoulders right now, but im broke!*
ANYWAYS onto some fun stuff, after we killed High King Mulgar we went and took some attempts at Gruul. Our mage Faceeraser was playing “Eye of the Tiger” in vent, it was a new boss fight, and the boss graphic rocks. I must say this was the most fun that I have had on wow in quite a while. My job was strictly DPS which as an arms/prot hybrid at the moment I wasn’t topping the charts or anything but I think I did my fair share, at least while i was alive. We didn’t kill him and after 3 wipes(I think 3 wipes) it was late so the raid was called. I think we may be going back in tonight to give it another shot, im looking forward to it! I have included a few pictures of him for anyone who hasn’t yet seen him. He reminds me a lot of that monster in star wars that Luke fought in Jabba’s place.
Repair Bill: 22g

Moobs again?

I just thought this was a little humorous so I’m adding a quick little post before going home. Today I had 2 more people directed to my blog from google. Their searches were “how to fix manboobs” and “moobs or boobs”. I am sorry to those of you who are coming to this blog looking for Manboob help and not finding any. The best advice I can give you is to eat less, get off the computer and run your ass off. Just by mentioning moobs or manboobs again on this blog I bet I get another few hits again tomorrow. It’s very possible I’ll do away with all this wow talk and become the leading authority for moobs on the web.

*light blub over head*
This thought just occured to me as i was wrapping up this post. Maybe i can help the wow community by possibly getting world of warcraft exposed to people who generally woudlnt play and sparking thier interest. If I drop a few keywords here in this post, maybe google will pick up on them and direct the people searching for these items to my blog and hopefully my posts have done the smallest bit of good to intrigue them. What kind of new people would we want to attract to wow? I dont have a specific type of person in mind but as an expieriment lets pick out a few random words and see if anything happens.
2 keywords im just gonna randomly think of: G-string and Pasties

ISP crapped on my Gruul attempt

Last night was the guilds attempt at Gruul. It was new, it was exciting, it was challenging, it was our guild working together to learn a new fight, and…… it was all done without me. Yesterday on my way home from work it started to rain, which is bad news for me and raiding. I wish someone would invent an internet connection that was not affected by rain. Wait what’s that you say? Your internet doesn’t crash when it drizzles? You can normally play just fine no matter what the weather? Ohhhh that’s right, for some reason I have the worst connection on the planet and just about everything affects it. I fully believe my connection is going to degrade to the point where I’ll be posting on my guilds forums “Sorry guys I can’t make the raid today, the suns too bright so my internet will not work” or maybe “Hey guys good luck tonight, I won’t be on because school buses are yellow and you know how much that affects my internet”. On days that my internet is knocked out I can switch to a dial up connection at a screaming 26.4k connection. For those of you who don’t know what a dial up connection even is, I hate you. Mine will not even let me connect at 56k. Surprisingly I can play wow with a connection like this, my latency runs about 700 or 800 if I’m not in a town or in a raid. I did try to make the raid with this connection but there was no way, once I was around the raid members my latency shot up to about 7000 and to try to stay in the raid I would have just been a hindrance. The guild didnt down Gruul but i believe they got him down to 38% which is awesome for a first attempt. You should be able to read about it later on Honor's Blog or Raistilan's Blog While the guild was off attempting Gruul a few of my 3v3 team logged on and we attempted a few new strategies, which ended up getting us a 4-12 record for the night. The dial up connection can handle arena’s so that wasn’t a problem, we just weren’t meshing well. We were going to keep practicing but the wait timer jumped up to 5 minutes so we decided we have had enough abuse for the night. I believe that Gruul’s Layer is reset now so the guild is going back in there again tonight, I really hope that when I get home its clear skies.

Weekend = Ouch

Man I had a ruff WoW weekend. If any of the new people stopping by this blog happen to be a young 20’ish hot chick, preferably rich, please find it in your heart to get in contact with me, I need a shoulder to cry on.
Dim painfullweekend as integer Painfullweekend = 0 Friday night group 1 ran Kara, and I didn’t get any plate drops (painfullweekend = painfullweekend + 2). Exactly I thought wtf also. We cleared up through curator and not a single piece of plate. Now because of this I’m a sad loot whore, and who’s to blame? I’m leaning more to the side that this is blizzards fault and not Honorshammers, even though it’s a close race for who gets the blame for this travesty. Seriously honor’s has some of the worst luck when it comes to loot. I may have to start treating him like he has some disease so he doesn’t infect my loot mojo, but I don’t think that has happened yet so the fault falls squarely on blizzards shoulders. Since it’s still early this morning I haven’t called blizzards customer support yet but I’m going to call and file a complaint, I always have good luck in Kara what the hell did they do to change things! Well no actually never mind, as I’m typing this I did just realize I got the crossbow off the first boss (painfullweekend = painfullweekend - 1). I took it for the stats when I DPS(no one else wanted it so don’t freak out hunters My New Xbow ), so I guess I’ll try to recall that harsh email I sent to the better business Bureau about how stingy blizzard is.
Oh, this was ALMOST cool. I finally got to do the big bad wolf opera event. This was seriously my first time even though I have ran Kara so much that I have been exalted in that rep forever. Here’s how it played out. I’m standing there looking at the npc who starts the opera event thinking “Man were going really slow tonight, I wish someone would start it”. That’s when I start hearing people on vent saying it’s the BBW event and how easy it is. I was really curious how they knew what we were going to get before starting the event so I go to ask, turns out my wow had frozen and they had started the event not knowing I was locked up. I have enclosed a picture of my first exciting BBW fight and what it looks like……….from the other side of a locked door(painfullweekend = painfullweekend + 2).
While in Kara we attempted Nightbane, usually he goes down without a hitch but we wiped four or five times on him and decided to move onto Curator. I know one time for sure it was my fault we wiped, so to any guildies reading this who was in Kara I apologize for that. Nightbane goes through cycles where I tank him on the ground, then he flies up into the air and rains skeletons down onto the group. Between the phases I have to grab him when he lands and get him into proper position. Well for some reason I kept missing him and he would kill a raid member before I could get aggro back. When I say “miss” I mean “you swing at Nightbane and miss” not “you’re in the wrong spot jackass, Nightbane is killing the party”. Maybe I need to work on my hit rating, although it has never been a problem before, It could have just been a really unlucky set of events for me. Nightbane didn’t go down Friday night and we havn’t made it back in there so I’m hoping we can go kill him and clear the rest of Kara tonight. I also included this picture where it looks like he is snuffing me out like someone putting out there cigarette, which is how it felt (painfullweekend = painfullweekend + 2).
On the pvp front my arena team mates were never on at the same time so that was kind of a bummer. I formed up a 2v2 team with Tatersniffer (pve specced mage), who was then played by his wife. We were just in it to get some points, not expecting to do well since she has never pvp’d with his mage and the spec is all wrong for it. I’m glad we didn’t expect to win because it was a beat down, we went 1-9 for the night (painfullweekend = painfullweekend + 2). I did however pick up my arena shoulders this weekend which makes me feel a little bit better (painfullweekend = painfullweekend - 1).
That’s a painfull weekend rating of 6! Any lesser man would have killed himself, good thing im a trooper. Weekend repair bill: 18g

Someone is reading this?...Seriously?

I just wanted to say welcome to all the new people who have been directed to my site from Big Red Kitty’s blog. It actually made me quite a bit nervous to think anyone would actually read this besides a few RL friends. We had all started blogging just so we could keep in touch and easily share our wow adventures/thoughts. Since I had been linked on BRK’s site I went ahead and set up some hit tracking on my blog. I just wanted to get an idea if anyone is actually reading this crap that I spew out onto the web. I was pleasantly surprised that over the weekend I had about 300 unique hits from BRK, some from Honor’s blog, and 3 hits from people who google searched “moobs”. Yes, I’m not lying there was people searching for moobs and somehow got to my blog. So to all the new readers I’d like to say welcome and thank you for stopping by. To those of you who accidently got here looking for moobs im sorry to disappoint and you should try here . Moob Helper

HKM has moobs (man boobs)

Real quick I wanted to add this about High King Mulgar. I have seen him a few times but as I was looking at the graphic of him I posted on this blog (http://repairbill.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-want-his-loin-cloth-to-wear-in-rl.html), I realized that I’m kind of disappointed in the appearance for this boss. He is pretty out of shape to be the “biggest and most fierce of all ogres” and could use a little bit more armor in my opinion....or a bra.

Having said that I’m no genius with 3’d modeling and realize how much work it takes to make a model of this detail, so I’m not knocking the actual work they did on it, just the art they decided to go with. It’s kind of like how I feel about the “Maiden” in Kara, her graphic is very plain and boring. Why toss a 25 foot tall woman into the mix anyways? Maybe I have missed the lore about her somewhere but she just seems out of place and odd.

If I was the person in charge for creating the HKM model what would I have based it off of? Why Ogre from the “Nerds” movies of course. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088000/

I want his loin cloth to wear in RL

Last night was a nice bump in the right direction for Mal Katai. We were able to get back into Gruul’s Layer and kill High King Mulgar. I think we had at least 10 people in the raid which had never been before so we did wipe twice, but managed to down him the 3’d time with only one death. I took the heat for the first wipe because I didn’t get my taunt off on Olm quick enough and he ended up fearing the MT. I should have brought up the fact that someone else had pulled agro on Olm and moved his ass to the opposite side of the cavern from where he should have been but our GM seemed like she was in kind of a foul mood so I chose not to argue. Getting called out on vent for something that’s not your fault does suck balls though.

I think I had the most fun of the night though on our second wipe. We were at one point where our MT died so I picked up the high king, and tanked him for a long ass time. We just didn’t have the dps left alive to kill him. If it ever came down to it I think I have acceptable gear to tank the high king and feel comfortable with it. Granted I had some leet healers left alive to keep me up, but the damage he was hitting me with wasn’t anything crazy or unmanageable. He drops two shoulder tokens and one random item. Which you can look at here http://thottbot.com/c18831 . We ended up having Pauldrons of the Fallen Defender, Pauldrons of the Fallen Hero, and Hammer of the Naaru drop. I didn’t win the roll for my shoulders, instead those went to Snowson a druid. I just now realized he’s also the guy who beat me on my Tier 4 gloves! The list of people I have to kill soon is getting longer and longer. *EDIT 10/08/07 - It was pointed out to me that i had previously added snowson to my list of people to kill, so my list is still the same size*

Were planning on going in for a Gruul attempt tonight which I really hope it happens, I’v never done this boss fight and I love to experience new content.

Repair Bill: 6g

Iv got Crabs o_O

Well I logged on to late last night to get into a Kara group so I went with Raydz and did a few quests to help cover next week’s respec costs. After that I crawled into bed and made a horrible discovery. I have crabs, huge inflamed crabs, and I bet I caught them from Krawl. Which now means Bacon and Oaken you guys need to probably call your doctors for some type of cream or gel.

In all seriousness this post is just to congratulate myself/hunter on reaching level 60! =). My hunter ‘s (Bouncie with her loyal pet Melons) main role will be to funnel cash to fund Raydz for respec bills and eventually an epic mount. I have a level 70 horde hunter and he is a money making machine, so I’m looking forward to the rain of gold once Bouncie is 70. That’s about it for this post since I don’t have much else to say other than I did do a few more battle grounds before I put Raydz back to prot (we are supposed to do Gruul’s tonight). I got a nice execute off a 1 handed weapon which I’m pretty happy with. If anything exciting happens in Gruul’s ill write about that tomorrow.

Raydz Questing Repair bill: 4g

Oh Noeesss!

Wow I just realized that unless I run Kara tonight and get a lucky drop, this will be the first week in a long while in which I’ve gotten no purples! This makes me very sad in my pants and we most certainly cannot have that, so I may have to jump out and spend my arena points on a piece of Merciless Gladiator's Battlegear. Speaking of arena’s, the Jackson 5 got SPANKED. Out of 10 games we only won 1. I’m hoping in a few weeks we can start meshing better and pull ourselves up to winning half of our 10 games. On my 2v2 and 3v3 teams we have started getting better, this week my 2v2 went 7-0, and my 3v3 team went 6-4(3v3 previous week was 9-2). During the weekends I have been going with an Arms spec so while I’m in an arena battle my biggest asset to the team is Mortal strike and execute which I have been trying to apply to the opposing team’s healer. Which the issue we have been struggling with in arena’s is that we have not been able to mow down their healer as fast as they kill off ours. I spend a lot of my 5v5 battles chasing the healer. It’s really irritating when I’m chasing a druid who keeps shape shifting out of any slowing effects (If you’re that druid that kept doing that to me this weekend, you better tell your family and friends goodbye cause I’m going find you in RL and your eyeball is going to grow a knife). Everyone on my team keeps saying it’s a gear issue but I know enough graphics to recognize that many teams we play are close to equally equipped, so I’m thinking our biggest problem is a “Mesh” issue. What also doesn’t help is that all 5 of the team members know each other in real life, so where some people might hold their tongue and not yell at a fellow gamer that rule doesn’t apply here. There was so much yelling and insults that I almost made my own duel flag out of cardboard, a broom, and went to a buddie’s house and threw it down in his front yard. My plans for tonight are a little bit of pve, unless I am assassinated tonight by one of my team members I’m going to respect back to prot and either hit up Kara or maybe do a heroic run.

Repair bill: Since its been almost a week since my last post i forgot to keep track of repair costs, but since i havnt run anything really this week it should have been pocket change.