The Repair Bill

My Poor Kid =/

2008-04-28T17:33:00.004-05:00

Hey guys just wanted to check in real fast.

I don’t think I have signed onto wow and played since last Wed night maybe? My kid (she is only 1) has picked up strep throat + Tonsillitis. The last few months have just been hell as far as picking up coughs, colds, ear infections (which required the ear tube surgery, and now this. What a mess.

Anyways she really doesn’t want to eat or sleep because she is feeling so crappy so my time at home is pretty much holding her and trying to get her to get a little bit of sleep or eat a little something. Which of course makes it impossible to raid.

I hope to be back in action as far as raiding mid week (the DR said tonsillitis sticks around for about 12 days). Anyways was just checking in with everyone and tossing out a hello since I havn’t been able to post in a while!

Tanking Weapon Toss-Up

2008-04-23T10:34:00.006-05:00

Monday night I found myself spamming general chat looking for a healer to do some 2v2with since all my teams seemed to be inactive this week. A pally healer friend of mine helped me out and I was able to get my 10 games in for the week. We went 4-6 which isn’t bad for never PVPing together before. I did respec as always but now I’m thinking with season 4 around the corner I might just go in as prot to get the points until the next season comes around. This would really help me save up some money for once. I have been really broke lately and having a little bit of extra coin couldn’t hurt.

After doing my arena games I jumped into a ZA raid to finish off the last two bosses. Hex lord was one shot (which was really nice) and I think we got the last boss in 3 attempts. He dropped the tanking axe which I was lucky enough to pick up. The axe comes with a gem slot, 20 parry, and 12 hit rating compared to the mallet having 3 more stam, 16 defense, and 14 expertise. I’m still back and forth on which I find to be better the axe or the mace (I like the expertise on the mace but I really dig the parry on the axe + the gem slot). I think maybe what decides overall is that the axe graphic looks tight and the mace looks like sh*t on a stick.

I have to raise the gold for another mongoose enchant (just spent like 400-500 gold on the mace and now It’s going to be a situational weapon..grrr) but here is the axe stats.

Last night I had planned to miss the raid because it was my nieces b-day party but instead I found myself at home with a sick baby. I took my kid to the doctor and somehow she picked up tonsillitis and has been running a consistent temp of around 102 =/. I’m hoping her fever breaks today and she can finally get a good night of sleep. Having a sick kid is not fun and really pulls at the old heart strings.

Last night while I was getting barfed on the guild was in Hyjal where they killed boss#2! Grats guys, hopefully I’ll get to see this guy next week.

T5 Helm Obtained

2008-04-21T10:59:00.006-05:00

As a whole the guild didn’t do much as far as “raiding” goes this week. TK, Gruul, Mag all went untouched, but that was cool with me. Having a slower week every once in a while I think gives people a little bit of a needed break. We did clear SSC though and the big Vag died again. She dropped defender helm token x2 and I was lucky enough to pick one up. I also flew up to the new badge vendor this weekend, stood around for about an hour trying to work my way through all the lag and horde. Once I was able to finally get him targeted I picked up the badge belt which was a pretty nice upgrade for me.

I wasn’t able to gem my new items like I would have liked since the AH was bone dry, I guess from everyone buying their own badge upgrades, which is bull sh#t. People should realize I’m the most important person on my server and therefore should leave at least 2 of everything on the auction house should the chance arise I need something. Once I get a little bit of money I’ll go back and re-gem these so that they are utilized to their full potential.

It looks like the guilds next progression target is Kael. I personally would like to see myself moving forward in Hyjal or BT instead but I think that comes from the fact that I just don’t like TK. In fact I think I hate that instance, the trash sucks and makes the whole instance feel “slow” which leads to my ass getting tired. Compare that first hallway in TK (so much waiting on pats) to the first pull in Hyjal (waves of trash mobs on a timer) and that’s my argument for why TK sucks. However as far as bragging rights I think saying you were around for a progression Kael kill is > than a Hyjal boss 2 kill, so I guess eventually it needs to be done.

As far as my next upgrade I think I’m going to shoot for the T5 pants so I can get the four piece bonus, although I have heard it really doesn’t proc that much which will be a bummer. Besides getting two new pieces of loot I really don’t have much to write about, so I guess this post will have to be somewhat short.

Tonight I hope to wrap up ZA and I also have to get my arena games in. If you find yourself in an arena against me be nice and give me a free win. =)

Vashj Down!

2008-04-15T11:29:00.007-05:00

The big Vajayjay is down!

Friday night the guild zoned into SSC with the only goal being to kill lady Vashj, the remaining bosses would be placed on the back burner for now. Normally I hate when farmed bosses are left alive while trying to progress on a new kill because there is always someone who needs an item from a certain boss and 2 of the 3 left alive dropped tier 5 tokens. In this case though it needed to be done, lately when all the bosses but vashj were down most people would log instead of try vashj attempts, which meant we were not getting any hard core attempts at her. Friday night we spent about 3-4 hours learning the fight, I think our best attempt was around 23%, but it got too late and several people had to log. The raid was called and it was posted we would try again on Saturday. I felt that 23% on our second night ever of attempts on her was great. This boss is known to be a brick wall for most guilds and many cannot get past her even after months of trying.

Saturday night we had basically the same group of people ready to give her another shot. I was really happy to see it was almost the same people that way no one would really have to “learn” the fight and we could start getting in solid attempts right off the bat. I think it was on our third or fourth attempt that we got her down.

That was an awesome feeling to finally see her die. I think there were a few key actions that really made the difference between the wipes and the boss kill.

1. The guild communication over vent was excellent. People calling out which area the nagas and striders were spawning. This made it possible for our tanks and kiters to pick up the adds before they killed anyone (My job during the vashj fight was to tank the naga's). We also had great communication on the tainted elementals which allowed the “tainted core” people to adjust positioning fairly quickly so the core could be passed around effectively.
2. We had such strong dps individuals that three of the four “ramps/stairs” to vashj were able to be soloed instead of requiring 2 dps each. This freed up three extra dps to be up top to kill down the nagas and striders before they stacked up. *On previous wipes the adds piling up seemed to be our largest problem, 2 seems to be the safe limit on nagas for me to tank, when i get 3 it really puts alot of stress on the healers and i usually end up dying.*
3. On phase three we had the hunters shoot down the sporebats flying over vashj. This seemed to make a really big difference. With the sporebats dead they weren’t dropping the poison all over the raid floor which allowed the tank to move vashj around much easier and leaving the raid much more room to be safe.

Vashj dropped 1 defender (that went to the MT, I think I have enough dkp to beat out the other tanks for the next one to drop), 2 champion (if I’m remembering correctly), and a dps leather belt.
*Side note: why does Vashj’s snake hair keep moving even after she is dead? If they are still alive you should be able to kill them for extra loot imo*

I feel that Vashj is one of the BC milestones and I can now scratch her off my list of things to beat. That’s an awesome accomplishment and what makes it even better is that it was a guild first, I wasn’t just “ran” through the kill with a guild that has been farming her for weeks.

Sunday night we went back into SSC to clear out the remaining bosses. After the Fathom-Lord kill I looted my badges and noticed he dropped the tanking necklace which was a nice upgrade for me.

The main tank has the most dkp of anyone so he pretty much can have any item he wants but he passed on it in preference to his badge necklace. Before bidding can start the server crashes……that’s special. I’m pretty sure it’s because “karma” wanted to bite me in the ass since several of my posts lately have revolved around my need to spend dkp and get loot. maybe “Karma” is trying to teach me not to be so selfish. The instance server comes back about an hour later and FLK has despawned along with his loot.

The GM holds bidding on the items even though they have despawned so that he can submit a ticket and have the lost loot recovered and sent to the people who win the bids. The bidding starts and I find myself bidding against a feral druid, which i win the necklace for 400dkp. *I had what i found to be a humerous story posted earlier but i took it down so as to not offend anyone.* Since I won the necklace I’m hoping for it to show up in my mailbox any time now, as of Monday evening I still didn’t have it. If I don’t get it maybe that will teach me a lesson to not be such a loot whore, if I get home today and find it in my mailbox.. well then f&ck you “Karma” I got that shit anyways *flips the bird*

Raydz Public Service Announcment #2!

2008-04-10T11:23:00.003-05:00

Don’t view Asian CGI chicks, they f*ck with your head and freak you the hell out.

She now haunts my dreams with her freaky dry eyes, torments me with her f*cked up smile, and to top it all off she refuses to give me a happy ending.

Here she is - but you will regret it

On a side note, core dps wasnt on last night so we did HKM,GruuL,Mag instead of Vashj attempts (lame). Again the gruul shield did not drop (also lame). Tonight is ZA, maybe I can snap up a dragon hawk shield.

Crap night turns Golden -- Winterchill Down!

2008-04-09T10:50:00.015-05:00

Winterchill down!
Hyjal was easy - Hydross pwnt us - wtf Last night started out even more rocky than normal, I almost immediately logged off. Raid started an hour late. Druid tank was having a hard time on tanking his mobs so people started ragging on him, causing him to quit the raid and guild. Hunter pulled frost phase aggro on Hydross, not sure if it was hunter or tank tps = 2 wipes (I’m nature tank so I’m not to blame!). Edited 4/12/08 - Tanks had a hard time keeping adds in line = 2 wipes Every wipe people are blaming each other, pointing fingers, hunter catches tons of hate and leaves the raid. Several people are replaced. Pull five we finally kill him, small amount of dkp awarded because we sucked so much ass. GM calls people out on how much they are sucking and embarrassing themselves, straighten up your act or leave. Plate DPS shoulders drop. A chance to spend some dkp! I toss up an opening bid of 10 dkp (10 dkp out of 2000dkp so it was a next to nothing bid) to see whom im up against. No matter how much I want to spend my dkp im not going to take an item from a fury warrior who could really use the upgrade. 30 seconds pass by, all other warriors have the item so I win. I still made dkp off the boss kill, my goal is to run it down before I transfer/guild implodes, even with that loot my dkp is still going up.

Pulls to lurker go good, lurker is one shot (thank god), mallet drops! Nice tanking upgrade for me over kings defender. /ready to spend 1000+ dkp (in the past this item has not gone cheaper than 800) /bid opens /Raydz bids 100 /Raydz wins /jaw drops DPS plate bracers also on Lurker. /Raydz bids 10 /Raydz wins


My plan to blow out dkp this week so far is not going well. I ended up coming out of the instance with more dkp than I had and I got 3 pieces of loot. Dkp sitting somewhere around 2200 now. The dps pieces are nice, ill use them for grinding. I have mixed feelings about the mallet, I am totally happy about the mallet stats most especially the expertise rating. I’m not very excited though that the graphic looks like a nautilus with a broom stick shoved up his ass. Yeah I get the “lurker” is a water boss but seriously, the graphic is just stupid.
	+	=
After lurker we stood around for fifteen minutes deciding what to do. Some people wanted to finish up farm bosses, some wanted to do Hyjal, some wanted to go to Vashj. I was up for Vashj or Hyjal even though my confidence in the group wasn’t at an all time high I still wanted to do something new. It was decided lets go play in Hyjal, so many people are just burnt on SSC they wanted a night of something different. Everyone catches a port to Shatt, takes the free port to caverns of time (love that port now) and a few minutes later were going over the strat for Rage Winterchill. The real key to this fight is getting through the 8 waves of undead. My main job was to pick up the necromancers and keep them from shooting healers/pally tank. Me, a healer, and too mages are assigned to necro duty. The last several phases I found myself tanking two necro’s , spell reflecting and bashing when possible, and keeping an eye on the other two sheeped necro’s incase they should pop early. The whole plan went off smooth as butter. 8 waves down, everyone alive, tons of npc’s still running around ready to help kill Winterchill. Smooth as butter until Winterchill shows up that is, and one shots a shadow priest, kills our tank in two hits, pops around the raid killing several of our dps (not sure where our healers were). I’m bashing away at the boss trying to get aggro when he finally turns to me and I start tanking him (Hunter MD’s really saved the raid at this point). Even though a druid and I have established aggro at this point I see about half the raid dead and realize there is just no way we can do this. That is until the npcs and Jaina all join in. Winterchill’s life starts falling at a rate that everyone redoubled their efforts. During the fight you have to constantly be aware to get out of the death and decay (red bubbling stuff on the ground), but other than that this boss turned out to be cake. Last night we one shot Rage Winterchill.
Rage INC!
Tanking Rage
Rage Down!
The same group that got owned by Hydross four times earlier in the night turned around and did an awesome job on a boss encounter none of us have ever done before. What turned out to be a hellacious night turned into a great progression raid night. Nothing dropped off trash or Rage that I could use but it was still well worth it to be there for the kill. I think tonight were going to try to finish up our SSC run and turn our sights onto Vashj, hopefully we stay away from the retarded ass wipes and lean more toward the smooth as butter play style. In regards to my previous post of loot thirst, it looks like I have been given a glass, but everyone here knows that im a loot whore so what im really looking for is a keg =P

Dying from Loot Thirst

2008-04-07T13:19:00.005-05:00

Picture a man crawling through the desert dying of thirst mumbling “water….water….” over and over to himself.

Now take that image, and picture Raydz (my warrior) crawling through serpent shrine mumbling “loot…loot….”. That’s how I have been feeling the last 2-3 weeks, I’m slowly dying from loot thirst.

Full clear of SSC/TK/ZA/Gruul/Mag…(besides kael and vashj)..ZERO tanking drops. My dkp keeps piling up with nothing to spend it on. I’m thinking about wadding it up and stuffing it down my pants to pick up the ladies, since that’s about all its good for at this point. I get the feeling that I need to bid high on everything tanking or even plate dps at this point just to insure I get it, since there is a lot of guild drama going on. I commented before having too much dkp is dangerous because a guild can fall apart at any point. I’m sitting on over 2k dkp at this point which compared to almost all the other raiders this is “a lot”, but I’m not hording it on purpose there is just no tanking loot falling. If something happens to make the guild break up before I spend my dkp I may be forced to kill a lot of people IRL and I don’t want to do that.

The ZA run this weekend didn’t help with several of the “frayed” raiders any. Last night we were planning on giving the 3rd timer chest a real hard core run. Our dps was massive, heals were spot on, and MT and the OT were doing fine. Even though It was suggested to do eagle first, then bear, then onto dragon everyone decided they should do bear then eagle to pick up the extra 5 mins first just in case anything went wrong. Clear up to bear, bears dead, 21 minutes on the clock to head to eagle. 21 minutes left means things are looking pretty good for a third chest attempt. We mount up, take off to eagle, start clearing up the ramp.

That’s when we notice we have no seed on the birds…
The lock is back at bear boss….
AFK…..

Everyone starts throwing out all these ideas to kick him from the party, kick him from the guild, who to replace him with, do we have enough time to replace him for the second chest, etc. Everyone talking on vent at once and not paying attention ends up on a ramp wipe.

The hunter in the raid goes psycho because he really wants the 2nd chest for the axe and gun, and this is the second time in a row the 2nd chest was messed up due to someone leaving after bear. I’m pretty sure he turned into the hulk at his computer. He was screaming on vent, and just generally losing his mind until he quit the raid and logged, I didn’t laugh out loud at the time, but I found the whole thing quite humorous. What made it even more funny is that when the lock returned he was like “Guys I am really sorry I went afk”…*and then gave the rest of the explanation which is what made it funny*. I understand when RL stuff comes up or even emergencies, so when someone goes afk like that most of the time it’s not their fault and nobody has any right to be mad at them. I was totally expecting the guy to say he had some type of RL problem he had to deal with immediately, and I would have been cool with that. Instead we get a “guys I am really sorry I went afk….but lord of the rings came on”. Now I don’t need anything off chest 1, chest 2, boss 1, boss2, or lynx BUT if I had needed chest 2 I would have been really really pissed, but since I didn’t I just laughed my ass off. I’m not sure If the GM is going to give this guy trouble for it, I guess something should be said because he ruined the chest for everyone else because he wanted to watch LOTR? I can’t wait to hear what the hunter has to say when he finds out why we missed chest 2.

I can’t wait for the reset on Tuesday, SSC has GOT to drop something for me this week. There is a lot of unrest going on in the guild and I want to dump these dkp points and make sure I snap up some loot before anything happens.

VR is harder now but still do-able.

2008-04-01T13:37:00.007-05:00

Another week goes by, no big news. No new bosses down, many core raiders still out due to spring break wrapping up.
I am happy that even though we didn’t have the usual core group the backup guys brought their A game and we were able to still clear our farmed bosses in SSC/TK/Gruul/Mag (This means not Vashj and not Kael but everything else ). My dkp pool is bursting at the seams and of course nothing drops that I need besides a trash mob trinket.
I picked this trinket up for like 25 dkp (I’m pushing 2000) so it was really cheap and I’m pretty happy with it. I’ll gladly take the free HP.

Before zoning into SSC I was informed that the OT tank who used to “rank” above me has decided to quit wow. This means the guild lost their nature resist set so they whipped me up a full set in about 30 minutes by everyone cleaning out their banks. This puts me in a hell of a spot because I was bent on spending my earned DKP on 1-2 items in SSC, then transferring back to my previous server to hang out with my old friends/previous guild. The guild really pulled together to get me that set and if I bail now I’m going feel like a total jerk off. Hopefully when I spend my dkp and I’m ready to transfer back I’ll have enough mats in the bank I can pay most of the set back in other materials such as ore/primals and leave on a semi “okay” note. I still need to put the appropriate leg armor on the leg piece but here are the pieces as they are now.

We went into TK killing Alar, Solarian, and decided to give Void Reaver a shot even though he is supposed to be “bugged”. I’m not sure if he is really bugged or if he is just supposed to be hard now. He was buffed and it’s really noticeable making VR much more difficult now. I bet the guy at blizzard who designed this boss was just pissed everyone thought his creation was so easy.

“So Bob did you hear everyone calls your guy Loot Reaver now?”
*Bobs eyes narrow in malice*
“Oh really….I’ll show those bastards.”
*bob opens his source code and turns up VR's difficulty level x4*

VR is actually much harder now per what the ranged classes say, but as far as tanking him he’s still the same easy fight. Apparently he doesn’t turn now in the direction he throws orbs, and he throws more of them, plus he doesn’t target the person he throws them to so the ranged never know who to get away from.
Even though he is harder now we still killed him on our second attempt and passed the T5 shoulders out making several people happy.

Hopefully this week goes better as far as raiding, I’d like to see some more attempts on vashj or get back into Hyjal.

On the PvP front nothing exciting, went 50% win/loss on all teams. I did however manage to pick up my veng legs giving me 4/5 veng which is pretty nice. Now I’m just going to keep saving my points now until the next season.

Last night we hit up ZA to try to get our hunter his Trollbane axe from the 2nd timed chest. It didn’t drop, a healing staff did which went to my resto druid RL friend (finally got his ass online to play). We missed the third timed chest by about 2 minutes so I think we’ll hopefully get it in the next couple of tries. I picked up a dps plate chest piece off of eagle but I don’t think I will really use it that much since veng is better in almost every way.

Tonight I think we are going to try to beat the 3d chest timer before our SSC raid begins. I realized I linked several new epics I picked up this weekend but most of them are so situational they will be rarely used, Hopefully I can start spending my DKP on some much needed tanking upgrades.

Did Mag Shrink?

2008-03-27T10:58:00.007-05:00

Apparently its spring break for several of our core members this week so finding geared raiders was an issue last night. The officers decided to grab pretty much any level 70 that wanted to come and we headed off to go kill Mag.

I went back through my blog to see if I had any previous good screen shots of Mag but I couldn’t find one. The reason I was looking is because last night everyone was commenting on how much smaller Mag looked. I wasn’t sure if I totally saw it or not but he did look different to me. Maybe everyone in my guild is just crazy. I don’t think I read anything about Mag’s graphic being “shrunk” since he is less powerful so I’m curious if it was?

Mag Last Night

I tanked Gruul and Mag last night which was kinda fun, I think I kinda missed being in the MT seat. We had very few tanks on last night so I tanked the first warlock and the second warlock which was mis-directed to me. Tab – sunder- cleave – tab – shield slam – cleave – tab – sunder – tab – taunt – cleave. Etc.

That was kinda fun since I normally only tank the last one and both were dead before Mag spawned and I easily picked him up and tanked him against the wall. Mag is much easier now since his nerf, especially the cube rotation.

Mag also drops a lot of loot now. 3 chest tokens, his random loot, his head, 20 slot bag, and a bag full of gems which had 3 purples and 2 blues. I picked up a gem which will be made into a 15 stam gem as soon as I find a JC online in the guild who has the cut. Mag also dropped 25g / 3 badges for each player which I thanked him for. I don’t see any reason to ever miss out on the free badges, gems, and 25g in the upcoming weeks it seems like he has been turned into the outlands “onyxia”. HKM and Gruul went smooth as well, each dropping an extra armor token , 10g each, and 3 badges. I’m really enjoying the fact that raid bosses drop badges now, doing 3-4 bosses a night plus going into ZA will give me a steady supply of badges and will hopefully keep me out of Kara as much as possible.

In this post I’m going to include a few pictures that I forgot to bring the other day pertaining to my previous post about the new patch.

Already the alliance on my server are calling the new zone "Horde Island" since we have no chance of living long enough to quest there.

Here is one of the waves cresting the hill in Hyjal. Notice the Alliance NPC footmen ready to help. Behind them but out of the picture is dwarf gunmen, sorcerers, and knights which will also help

On our second to last wave people started losing connection in groups which eventually lead to 12 dc'd people and ended in a wipe and our only attempt for the night.(The aboms are cool looking)

Server Disconnects pooped on my first Hyjal.

2008-03-26T15:54:00.002-05:00

Tuesday, new Patch Day:

Downloading wow patch at work, all pumped up to maybe check out some new 2.4 instances, maybe raid Hyjal, or even do a new daily. Get home and see that my ISP is down. I give them a call, it will be down all through the night.

Anger…..Skin begins to turn green, muscles bulge and cloths begin to rip and tear. That’s when my girlfriend says “Hey your mom called today to see if we wanted to stop by for dinner so she could hang out with the baby for a while.”

Hmmmm my parents have an internet connection through a different provider that is even better than mine…..I begin to shrink away from the incredible hunk back into the bronzed god that I am and pack up my laptop to play wow there ..and get a free dinner out of it.

So first off I log on and like most everyone else head off to IF and then to the new island to see what it’s all about. As of my last view of my server its 4 to 1 horde to alliance, after last night I’m pretty sure it’s more like 25 horde to 1 alliance. Upon landing all I saw was a field of red ganking horde. This may have been the roughest alliance ass raping I have ever had. I had a monstrous rez timer and no-where to run. I’d rez and walk a few feet toward the ocean and die, rez walk die, rez walk die. Finally I got far enough out in the water I went under, swam for a while, beached myself, and then hearthed. The beating was so bad I thought about stealing my kids bottle and curling up under a cover and crying myself to sleep.

My first hour in the new patch was not enjoyable. I did do the two daily quests in northern hellfire later on and those were pretty quick and painless. I have been grinding primal shadows for a resist set so I’ll probably work those two quests into my pre-raid schedule.

After my quests were done I was informed we were going to head into Hyjal just to see it for kicks since everyone was tired of getting ganked or done with their instance. Hell ya im all down for that. The raid forms up and before long I was checking out the inside of Hyjal. I really dig the idea of participating in “The battle of mount Hyjal” since I enjoyed playing the campaigns and beating the Hyjal map in Warcraft Three. We start the event surrounded by alliance footmen, knights, ranged dwarf gunmen, sorcerers and Jaina Proudmoore. We start the event and floods of scourge start flooding at us on two minute timers. I would charge in and grab the cryptfiends, aboms, or necro’s depending on what wave came out and hold onto as many as I could, the rest were held onto by our pally tank and another warrior. The hunters would peel off a mob from the paladin and kite him over into the npc’s then kite it back into the aoe killing field. This would get all the alliance army to help kill the scourge along with us, which I thought was really cool. First attempt were in there kicking ass tearing through wave after wave with time left to eat and drink. Then all of a sudden tweleve people are instantly disconnected on our second to last wave and unable to log back in. With that many people gone (including the pally tank) we couldn’t do anything about the free mobs raging about and it was a wipe. We hung out for a while waiting to see if these guys could log back in but it turned out they couldn’t so the raid was called. I really think we will be able to one shot this boss on our next attempt, from what I read the waves of scourge are harder than the actual boss encounter. I hope instead of jumping right into SSC tonight we go give Hyjal another shot first.

I forgot to bring screen shots to work today to post along with this, but I’ll just include Hyjal pics the next time we head in. As far as the ass raping pictures on the new isle just picture horde everywhere you look with scattered alliance bent over in front of them.

Raydz Public Service Announcment!

2008-03-25T15:42:00.002-05:00

I think I’m going to start adding Public Service Announcements to my blog that even though they may be non WoW related I think it’s important that you guys know about them.

Puppy vaginitis is a NORMAL mucous production in young bitches.

Read more about it here. Puppy Vaginitis

1 long ass night = ZA cleared

2008-03-24T13:26:00.017-05:00

Woot

Because of the Easter holiday we didn’t have very many people on for Vashj attempts Saturday night so 10 of us grouped up together for ZA attempts. Had I known I was going in with progression psycho paths I might not have went, I was expecting maybe to go kill Bear, Eagle and Lynx but it didn’t stop there. I was in ZA from 9:00pm to 6:30am. In our group we had no one who had been past the 3’d boss in ZA so everything after that was all new territory, but that wasn’t stopping these guys.

All the time, effort, and lots of gold (flasks and repairs) paid off though with a full ZA clear. I have now successfully Main Tanked all of ZA and that’s a good feeling. Besides feeling good from clearing ZA, Zul’jin dropped a nice little trinket for me!

My new Trinket

We headed in and beat Bear boss on the timer easily enough. We did not have a Pally tank so we wiped once on the eagle trash ramp which blew our shot at a second timer kill. After making it to eagle boss we quickly one shot him as well. Next we headed out to Lynx and again I would have liked a Pally tank here on the trash, not having one makes too much work for me! There were people in the raid who had been present for Lynx kills but I had never actually seen him die. On our second attempt we killed him and I got to check Lynx boss off my list of bosses to see die for the first time.

Lynx Dead

After the Lynx died the other prot warrior OT in our group said he would step out so we could get a pally tank. From what I read about the Dragonhawk boss is that you absolutely need a pally tank to hold onto the spawned dragon hawk adds. We got our Pally tank in the raid and headed off to clear to Dragonhawk. Since none of us had been to him before we didn’t realize you had to kill the scouts first to keep new adds from coming. That was discovered about half way through and made the trash much easier =).

It took us four attempts to learn this fight and defeat the boss. I was really rooting for the shield but it didn’t drop.

Tanking DragonHawk (Cool Boss Graphic I thought)

Dead DragonHawk (No Shield for me, GRRR)

“Alright guys good job, we calling it a night?” I said
“Well we are right next to Hex Lord we should just go see what he’s like” says some guy.
*Everyone voices their agreement*
In my head I’m calculating the time I’ll get to sleep before I have to wake up for Easter church service and then head to the family holiday get together. Already I knew I wasn’t going to get enough sleep and should go to bed, but I couldn’t leave these guys hanging.

It took like three pulls and were facing Hex Lord. We start talking about strategies on bosskillers website and what we need to do. I think it took about 8 or 9 attempts and we killed him. This boss is pretty damn hard with his insane shadow bolt missiles going all over the place and his ability to steal skills from raid members. Example: He steals the hunters ability to lay down traps. Also at the beginning of this fight you have to deal with the 4 adds he has surrounding him. We ended up killing 3 and leaving one to be shackled the whole fight which seemed to work well for us. As a tank I have to constantly be aware of what abilities he has so I can move the boss away from traps, shaman totems, bash an array of heals, etc. He’s not an easy tank fight like the previous four bosses are. The Hex lord eventually died and again dropped no tank loot. Grrr 5 bosses down and nothing for me! I was a very sad loot whore.

Looking At Hex Lord

Tanking Hex Lord

Dead Hex Lord

After Hex Lord died the same conversation happens with me wanting to go to bed, and everyone else just wanting to have a few shots at Zul’jin. We open the doors to continue and out pours tons and tons of slaves. Thank god for the pally AOE tanking. After that initial rush of slaves there is no trash on the way to him and so a few minutes later were ready to face off against Zul’jin.

Tons of slaves pour through the doors after Hex Lord when opened

Path to Zul'jin has a neat ruins graphic i thought

Facing Zul'Jin
I think blizzard was just to lazy to add a second arm to this boss

Zul’jin goes through five different phases so we figured it would be easiest to learn the phases one step at a time. We knew it was going to be a lot of wiping to learn this boss, and by not really explaining the phases up front we were guaranteeing we wiped on every phase but with so much information out there it seemed like people just needed to see it instead of having it read to them from bosskillers.

Special Note to tanks: Every Phase Zul’jin except from 2 to 3 he does an agro wipe so you have to pick up massive agro on him right away every time, losing people in this fight before phase 5 means trouble.

Phase 1 is simple enough where the tank holds him, melee hangs back to avoid whirlwind, and he does a knife throw that puts a bleed effect on a random person. This bleed effect is only removed by healing that person to full life (much like the big crab boss guy in slave pens, at least I think slave pens it’s been a while since I’ve been in there). On our first attempt we pushed the boss into Phase two where we promptly wiped.

Phase 1

Phase 2 once learned is also very simple. He turns into a bear which will do this special roar that will paralyze everyone for a certain amount of time (can’t remember how long) and will then do about 5k damage per person when it wears off. The first time the pally didn’t remove the roar from me fast enough so I was frozen in front of bear unable to block,parry,dodge, etc. I was smacked down like a bitch in no time. From then on it was decided that the pally would remove roar from himself, me, then the priest who would pick up removing the roar while the paladin kept me alive. That worked well and we were able to push through phase two with no difficulty.
Side note: The pally has 6 seconds before the roar paralyzes everyone.

Phase 2:

Phase 3, WHAT A HUGE PAIN IN MY ASS – WORST BOSS IDEA EVER – MAKES ME MADE ENOUGH TO GO KILL SOMEONE. In Phase 3 Zul’jin turns into an eagle and hovers in the middle of the room. As a tank the boss does no direct attacks so you just dps as much as you can. Why is this boss a pain in the ass? He lets loose about 5 tornados that will chase you around the room, randomly switch targets, or they just go float around the floor in a crazy pattern. You have to avoid the tornado’s and the wall because when a tornado hits you it does 1000 damage. I realize this doesn’t seem like a lot but the tornado can throw you against a wall and then you’re stuck and can be picked up and tossed again over and over till your dead. They also can toss you into other tornado’s which does another 1000 damage and that tornado has the possibility of tossing you into ANOTHER tornado. The melee in this fight have to dodge the tornado’s run up and hit the eagle 2 or three times, then run out again to dodge the tornado’s. We have the easiest part of phase 3. Any spell that requires mana will directly cause the caster 1200 (Im pretty sure its 1200) health. So mages/warlocks have to have constant hots on them so they can DPS the boss. A druid is really your only healer in this phase because flash heals damage you for at least half of the heal in general. This is the longest Phase and possibly the biggest pain in the ass I think I have ever come across for a boss fight. The reason this phase is the longest is because it takes the most time to push him through 20% of his life since the melee has to keep running around and the casters have to wait on life before they can cast again. Our highest damage dealer this phase was our warlock who kept up constant dots.

Phase 3: Cool looking tornado graphics with the feathers and stuff, not cool enough to make me like this shit ass phase though

Phase 4, he turns into a mean ass cat. We handled this boss by everyone stacking up on the cat. He will randomly turn around and do these lighting quick cat claw attacks 10x on a person. It took our healers several attempts to react fast enough to keep our clothies from dying. Each hit was doing around 1000-1500 per hit so if the person got no heals they were dead pretty fast. The cat also turns around and does a charge which would sometimes one shot a clothie but there is nothing that can be done to prevent this except having the clothies wear stam gear which is eventually what we had to do. As far as tanking goes this is a pretty easy phase, just turn him away from the raid and do your thing.

Phase 4:

Phase 5, he turns into a huge dragon hawk. If you made it this far you should probably be able to kill him pretty easy. This is one of the easier phases if people pay attention. He will do a spinning whirlwind of fire which our healers just ended up healing through while our melee stayed on him. What you have to watch out for is the pillars of fire which will erupt from the floor. As a tank you also have to watch for these and be dynamic about moving the boss. If you stay in this pillar for longer than 1 tick you will almost always die. Other than watching out for the fire pillar though it’s an easy phase and we tore him down giving us our first Zul’Jin kill.

Phase 5:

Zul'jin Dead!

As mentioned Zul’jin was kind enough to give me a nice tanking trinket. I still need to get a chest piece and tanking axe from him so I’ll be going back as much as possible. Sunday morning the instance actually reset for us so when I got home from my family day I got online and we went and beat eagle and bear on the timer but missed boss 3’s timer. I logged after boss 3 because I was running on 1 hour of sleep and just couldn’t stay up any longer (bastard dragon didn’t drop my shield). I believe they replaced me and kept going so I’m not sure if I’ll get another shot at Hex and Zul’jin tonight or not, hopefully I will though if they are still alive. If those bosses are dead though I’m f*cking going home and going to bed.

Flood water FTL

2008-03-21T10:51:00.009-05:00

Sorry it’s been since Monday when I last updated.

I live in Missouri and right now we are getting slammed with flood water. My house is located near two rivers which are both about 40 feet above stage level, by the end of day today they are supposed to be around 43 feet. Luckily the house is located on a hill so it will go untouched by water. If it gets to the point i need to start worrying about the flood hitting me i think its time we start constructing floating cities (think water world) because were f*cked. Even though my house is safe right now its still really causing me alot of problems since all the roads around me have been flooded the fire dept has asked us to evacuate, which we did and are now shacking up at my parent’s house (Yes i realize im lucky in that my property is safe from flooding and i feel extremely bad for the hundreds of familys that have been hit, im just talking about my situation). It’s a very odd feeling when you have to take a boat to cross a major highway. So anyways that’s why I have had such a busy week between volunteer sandbagging, packing up cloths to stay at my parents house, and helping other people move furniture to the second level of their houses because they know they will soon get hit with the flood. *Yeah I know I’m a saint, that’s why women find me irresistible.* Here is a quick news bulletin they recorded yesterday on one of the roads I take to work near my house. Quick Video of them evacuating us.

My camera phone sucks because i have dropped it about 100x but I took a snapshot of the road that leads directly to my house, which is under at least 10 feet of water now.

And here is a picture of the fire dept boat I had to take during the evacuation of my subdivision.

Besides the insane flooding I still logged onto wow at night. I had a pretty damn good week too.
We have yet to attempt vashj yet this week but all of SSC is cleared and she is waiting on us.
Void Reaver dropped his T5 shoulders for me that I picked up for a small amount of DKP and the TK trash also dropped a ring that I picked up which also went pretty cheap.

Comparing shoulder graphics (I think i almost prefer the old graphic)

New Shoulder Stats

New Ring

While these are both good upgrades for me what I’m excited about the most is that FINALLY I got a team to hit 1600 rating in arena’s! Woot F*#king A! If you are some awesome pvp guy and you think this is low and shitty well then...you can kiss my sack.

Since we havnt attempted any new bosses this week my post is somewhat short. Even though I have the body of a bronzed greek god I am beat from sand bagging and my brain isn’t working well enough to come up with anything interesting to say. Tonight I think we are trying Vashj and if she doesn’t die tonight we are going to attempt her again Saturday, I also plan to swim to my house Saturday or Sunday just so I can check up on things and make sure no jackasses are messing with my house. *Man that’s weird to say that*
I also may take this opportunity of an evacuated subdivision to walk over to the house those kids live in (the snow ball kids who messed with my house over the winter), collect all their toys and toss them into the river.

Alar: Down, Solarian: Down, Vashj: My anus hurts

2008-03-17T11:02:00.007-05:00

Friday Night – Alar Dies (and I think Tidewalker also, he’s dead but I can’t remember what day he was killed)
Saturday Day – Went and saw “10,000 BC”. It was alright, I’d recommend waiting to watch the DVD if you have been toying with the idea of seeing it.
Saturday Night - Solarian Dies
Later Saturday Night – Vashj kicks our ass
Sunday Night – Vashj Kicks our ass more which then causes guild drama (ugh)
Friday night we headed into TK to down Alar. We killed him after a couple of attempts. Besides the nightmare of Vashj or Kael (Have not seen him yet but I hear he’s hard) I have to say that I think Alar is probably the hardest 25 man fight in SSC or TK. I accidently wiped the raid once (I hate hate hate being responsible for a wipe, luckily it happens very rarely). I can honestly say that this wipe even though my fault I had no control over it, and I’m really curious to know if this has ever happened to any other warriors. To tank Alar phase 1 you need a warrior or a druid to charge up the ramp and melee him before he shoots off too many flame buffets. I’m assigned to ramp charge on platform 4, which is not a problem I have been doing it fine all night and the previous weeks attempts. On this particular attempt I see that Alar is flying to platform 4, I start running up the ramp, charge in……and for whatever go right though the boss and proceed to sail right off the edge (looked like my dude was trying to commit suicide). Since there is no one there to be in melee range Alar begins to flame buffet everyone and it causes a wipe, lame. The rest of the attempts I did fine and my charges all worked as they were supposed to. I will say that as far as tanking goes the fight gets easier in phase two because he stays on the ground floor and you just have to swap Alar around between the tanks as you get a debuff which went pretty smoothly.
It was good to see him die since he had given us a lot of trouble. It also allowed me to complete the next step of my BT attunement which is now on hold till I can get into Hyjal. Speaking of which I would much rather be one of the ashtongue guys instead of an NE, they make much cooler looking warrior’s (the quest line makes you take on the appearance of an ashtongue before you kill alar).

Alar Dead

Me as an ashtongue. F&ck NE i want to be this race

Saturday night we headed back into TK to learn the Solarian fight. At first it was hard getting a full 25 man raid up and going. We decided to just go to Solarian to “learn” him even though we only had 21 people. What a joke this boss turned out to be. Blizzard should just take out the boss fight and put a free loot chest in the center of the room which will hand out the free loot pieces. We killed him on I believe our 2nd attempt. My job of the fight was to tank the spawning priests and help control the kicks/pummels to interrupt the heals. This turned out to be pretty easy. He dropped the tanking boots but I decided to pass on them since I have the jungle stompers from ZA which I feel are right on par with the TK boots and I also picked up the recipe for the Havoc boots incase I ever wanted to craft those. Solarian is maybe the only 25 man boss that gets easier as he dies. At 20% he turns into a huge blueberry and just gets wrecked from that point on. Solarian is the equivalent or maybe even easier to Lurker as far as “difficulty” in my opinion.

Looking at Solarian

Blueberry EZ Mode

Dead Solarian

Lady Vashj is another story entirely. On this boss fight every person in the 25 man raid has a specific duty and if you fail for any reason you will wipe the raid, no other way around it. Vashj bent our raid over and gave it to us without any foreplay or lube every attempt we tried her (in case you’re an idiot this means she is a very hard boss encounter). We consistently get Vashj down to 60% but that’s when the raid gets wiped as we don’t have enough dps on the spawning Naga’s or Striders which then begin to wipe the raid leaving us with not enough people to kill the tainted elementals for the generators.

To many adds!

Eventually we will get this boss down but in my opinion it’s going to possibly be several more weeks of wiping before everything “clicks” and she dies. On a side note I did get to tank vashj for an attempt and we got her down to 58% because the MT got creamed off the bat with no heals. She is a tuff boss to tank because she is constantly stunning and rooting. I think I held my own though with some awesome heals backing me up. I look forward to the day that I have the gear to be the MT for a guild again because I miss it. On a second side note the guild drama I mentioned was because we keep wiping and people starting bashing on other people not doing thier job which caused our actual raid leader to gquit. That’s not good at all, the officers seem to think he just got frusterated and will rejoin, if he doesn’t that could mean bad news for future progression kills. I’m fine with farming the kills we have learned so far for a few more weeks, but ill eventually want to see Hyjal and BT, if we don’t get progression again I may have to look for another guild or soemthing. Until i know for sure though im going to transform into loot whore mode and make sure to get everything i can out of my dkp just incase.

Tanking the big Vaj

I didn’t pick up any new tanking loot (besides the recipe) over the weekend but I did enjoy the new progression kills. Tonight is an off night for the guild but hopefully I can get a ZA group together. I still have not been in there since my server transfer and there is a lot of nice tanking loot there.

He will feel the wrath of Raydz

2008-03-13T11:46:00.009-05:00

Grrrrr Roar Grrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!

*Grabs the small Chinese coder who sits outside my office and smacks him around and then tosses him out the window to let off some steam*

Tuesday we Kill Hydross, Lurker, Leo.
Lurker dropped the mallet and I’m dying for a weapon upgrade. Because I picked up the T5 gloves I didn’t have enough DKP to beat out the other warrior so the weapon went to him. Alright fine I can live with that, he will use the weapon and was the same upgrade as it would have been for me (Kings Defender to Mallet). I did make sure to run him down on dkp so I can start to get ahead of him. The mallet cost him about 700 dkp so it didn’t go cheap. On a side note about the Mallet, what a retarded ass graphic this thing has.

Comparison.

Last night we killed Fathom-Lord and the raid kinda died after that because we ended up getting started late. It sucked only doing 1 boss last night, but i was really tired so it worked out okay for me.

Fathom-Lord has 3 drops I would like.

For tanking he has a very nice neckpiece which I would probably spend over 800dkp to get a hold of this.

He also drops the T5 leg pieces which are not a huge upgrade over the badge pants I have, but I would still like them but id only spend a minimal amount of dkp on them. Last night they did drop and even though I really didn’t want to spend a lot for them I ran the dkp up on them to over 1000 knowing the other warrior wanted them. He obviously wanted them real bad so he kept bidding over me, which I am happy to see. That way when I really want something I’ll have more dkp than him. The game of DKP is ruff =)

As far as the other piece of loot goes;
I have talked several times about how much I enjoy doing arena’s, I find it just as fun as participating in raids. Right now I’m using the Axe that drops from Gruul, but what I really want is a 2 handed mace for the stun effect. I have been saving up my arena points to buy a pvp weapon but if I can get a comparable one from a 25 man I choose to do that and spend my arena points on season armor. “The World Breaker” is such a mace that drops from Fathom-Lord.

The weapon actually dropped last night. As soon as I saw it linked in raid chat my head was instantly filled with 70’s porn music and I began touching myself.

“Hey there world breaker, how you doing baby? You want to come party with raydz? You do don’t you baby, ohhh ya, grab it like you want it”

I was in key position to pick it up with my dkp and the bidding started. Me and another warrior were going after it at first (he was probably just driving my dkp down like I was doing to him earlier, which is fine and the best way to keep dkp inflation down). My dkp was holding strong when another bidder jumps in to the fray.
A resto shaman…..
with an ass load of dkp…..
he wants this weapon bad……
He caps out my dkp and ends up bidding more than me and getting the weapon. He said he wanted it for grinding.

F*C* MotherF*CKING S*IT C@CK $WIOIEFH$&@#($#$()T#*$(HG#HP:ODSIFGSDCNI*THT$@##! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

This shaman is known for just taking random items for off specs and then never using them. Apparently the biggest beef is that he took some T5 shoulders and turned them into an enhancement set but never uses them because the rest of his enhancement set is all blues.

I better see him running around with this weapon while grinding or I’m going to find him in Real life, tie him up, lay him in bed next to his mom whom I’m doing while his dad sits crying in the corner with a broken nose forced to watch.

Thursday night is an off raid night for the guild, so im not sure if ill be taking the night off or maybe try to form up a ZA group. A hunter transfer buddy of mine is dying to get into ZA so If I get on ill see if I can get something going so he can hopefully pick up his axe. If I can’t get a ZA group going I’m going to log off and go find that f*cking shaman in RL.

Oh on a side note, this week in SSC I realized you can spell reflect the rampant infection. 7-8k relflects Very Cool.

Almost had Alar

2008-03-11T10:10:00.008-05:00

Previously in the week we had zoned in and killed Void Reaver (No T5 shoulders for me yet!) and I picked up a pair of tanking bracers. Compared to my current badge bracers I’m not yet sure which ones I like more yet (I still have to slap a stam enchant on the new ones).

Since many in the guild feel we will be stuck at Vashj for a while the officers decided it was time to progress in TK. It was decided it was time to go learn the Alar fight. After the attempts we made I have don’t have a lot to say about him except.

Damn you Alar! /shakes fist. You rotten Mot$er F*#ker piece of Sh#$. WHY WONT YOU JUST DIE!

Sunday night we went into TK to learn the Alar fight. Several times we had him down to 4% but no luck in getting that killing blow. This is one of the hardest bosses I have yet to see on the 25 man content. When I say “hard” I guess I mean one of the hardest for the tanks, I suppose from a ranged dps point of view this is actually pretty easy for them. I have read several places this fight is all about tank coordination and add control, the rest is cake.

As a tank you stand above the room on platforms to tank Alar. There is 4 platforms and he will go from platform to platform around the room. You must have a tank at that platform or he will start doing a fire buffet on the whole raid. The fire buffet is much like Mag’s fire spell and will quickly wipe the raid if left alone. Since we had 5 tanks in the raid (3 prot warriors/2 feral druids) that left us with 3 guys to cover the 4 top platforms and 2 druids to cover the adds on the bottom. That seemed to work out pretty well, with the 3 tanks at the top working in a rotation of covering the platforms. As a platform tank you have to remember to stand on the lip of the platform so the healers below have LOS on you or you will die ( I constantly worry about doing something to accidently fall off).

Me waiting at platform 4 ready to dodge quills or to tank him at my platform.

Me tanking standing on the "Lip" to get raid heals.

I myself caused one wipe which sucks, I hate doing that but it was my first time attempting Alar and even though I had watched the video it really didn’t prepare me enough for working the “quills”. In phase 1 Alar will fly up to the ceiling and start spinning in a circle raining down quills of fire. If you are hit by one of these its instant death. The good news is that they will only fall as far as the upper platforms. When he does this all the tanks have to jump down to the floor to avoid the quill death, which I did just fine and was never hit. The problem is that after he is shooting the quills he instantly flies to platform 1 or 4. The reason that sucks is that he gets to the platform and finds no tank there to tank him, since all the tanks are back down on the bottom level to avoid the quills. As soon as Alar is done with the quills the tank has to immediately begin running up the ramp toward his platform and then charge the rest of the way to get to alar to stop the fire buffet. One the wipe I caused I didn’t reach alar fast enough letting him get about 3 flame buffets off. Mistake quickly learned and I can now get back up to alar with only 1 flame buffet getting out (1 is good , 2 is normal).

As a guild we have phase 1 down to a science now, no problems, no deaths. Tanks know their rotations, druid tanks handle their adds (we did have a problem with druid tanks for a while but that has also been fixed).

Phase 2 is where we still have a problem losing people, which causes us to hit the enrage timer (usually around 4% left, which happened about 4 times Sunday night). Alar has several abilities which I won’t really explain here since this isn’t a “how to” post, but it seems like our dps had problems avoiding the fire and running away from the exploding mobs. Tank wise Phase 2 is easier than phase 1 and you just have to keep up a steady tank rotation on alar to avoid “molten armor” which gets your tanks 2 shot. Also while tanking Alar prot warriors can do what is termed “sweeping” which I found to be quite fun. Pop Spell reflect and go stand in a fire patch. You reflect the fire back onto itself which then puts out the flames. Your reflect does not wear off since the fire patch is technically a channeled spell and is what a prot warrior should be during while you have the “molten armor” debuff on you.

Once we can get the dps to be a little more coordinated in handling phase 2 instead of running around screaming like their dick is on fire I think we will stop having people die and have more dps output allowing us to beat the timer.

Alar phase 2 ground phase

Alar's adds which have to be killed. (I shoudlnt have been tanking these but they were loose. Killing these adds takes off 3% of Alar's life and dps should focus on burning these guys down)

I am looking forward to this weeks raid schedule, im hoping we down a massive amount of farm bosses then leading to progession kills in TK and maybe some shots at vashj.

Warrior Threat Macro

2008-03-10T14:04:00.006-05:00

I used to often have times where I felt my lag affects my ability to produce high amounts of threat. I found a macro on www.tankspot.com in the forums that I thought I would share with you in case anyone out there has the same problems.

Before I found this macro I would find myself tanking and not being able to spend my rage fast enough. I couldn’t spend it fast enough because I was just a little bit laggy which ment that my threat per second was consistently hovering around 600-700, which bothered because i always knew i could produce more. Having a full rage bar means that any rage I was producing while having 95% or more was pretty much wasted because of the cap.

This macro is not to be used except as a rage dump or threat boost. Smart tanking and manually using your skills is always the correct way to go, but if you lag like me sometimes you might need to spam this to get your rage down to an acceptable level and hike up your threat. After establishing agro on bosses (obviously it takes a few seconds to build up to this, you cant just run in spamming the macro right away) I can keep 900-1100 TPS consistently and 800-1000 on trash pulls. If I find my rage getting too high, I can mash spam the macro which can give me burst TPS up to 1500 which is pretty cool to see. This macro does not include shield block or revenge which I use along-side this macro, NEVER let your shield block go unused it’s too important to miss. You also have to be careful to not spam the macro to much fully draining your rage bar in case you need to spell reflect or shield bash a spell. This macro is supposed to help you with threat and rage management due to lag, you cannot tank off this alone. No-body likes a lazy tank, unless your incredibly sexy like me and then allowances are made in exchange for nude photo's.

The Macro (I apologize you cant copy paste it atm, ill add that back in later)

Normal Threat on mobs (800-1000'sh)

Burst Threat when rage gets to high (1100-1500 tps)

Fathom Lord Dead - Onto Vashj

2008-03-10T10:55:00.010-05:00

Lady Vashj INC!

(Very Cool Medusa Graphic kicking)

Friday night the raid formed up and we headed in to take on Fathom-Lord. Three attempts later he was dead. I was surprised at how “easy” this boss is compared to some of the other bosses in SSC. He has a very “High King Mulgar” feel such as having a coordinated pull and adds with special abilities that need to be controlled. My job on this pull was the same as last time which was to tank the priest and kick the heals, which is easy enough. The priest will start to heal the other adds when they hit 65% and will randomly keep trying until that add is dead or back above 65%. I had a rogue to help me kick heals incase I was ice tombed, a warlock to use curse of tongues, and our healer was a shaman who could earthshock the heal if me and the rogue were ice tombed. On the attempt he died we did have one heal get through but thankfully he only healed the Hunter Add’s pet. I was ice tombed so was the rogue and the shaman was standing a little to close and ended up ice tombed as well which is why the heal got through. If I can recall correctly it was the only heal that got through the whole night. I did not bid dkp on the T5 pants because I find that my badge reward pants are pretty on par with these so I will save my dkp for a different piece for now.

I have to say that after Lurker the Fathom Lord is probably the next easiest boss in SSC. I was actually kind of disappointed in the encounter as it is actually somewhat boring.

Dead Fathom-Lord

After killing Fathom Lord several people went and completed a section of their BT attunement, which I hadn’t done yet so yesterday me and a hunter buddy of mine went and got caught up on all the quests, so this week when we kill fathom I’ll be able to get one step closer on the BT attunement. Yes I know that soon it will not be required but I think it will be cool to say I was attuned before the restrictions were dropped.

After Fathom just for fun we all wanted to see the bridge drop to vashj, which had a really cool graphic as it came sloshing up out of the water. It had a sort of "epic" feel to unlock the bridge as a guild first and im extreamly happy i could be there for that. We pulled her just for fun without any real fight explanation because it wasn’t a real attempt and people had to log. I ended up tanking her for a short time, and that chick can dish out some pretty hard core damage between melee and her spells.

My Grim Reaper after she killed me

Pre-Bridge

Bridge Building

Bridge Built (very cool)

Vashj about to whomp me one

This week after reset we plan to do as fast of a clear as possible so that we can get in some hardcore vashj attempts. I have read that many guilds get stuck on this boss for weeks or months at a time so I don’t expect a vashj kill this week but hopefully we can get her close.

First T5

2008-03-06T12:24:00.004-06:00

Snowed again in St.Louis, about 10 inches of snow Monday night.
Worked from home again on Tuesday and Wed. Havnt seen those damn kids yet and I have been watching pretty close, I have a yellow snowball ready for them. Little bastards have it coming, I might also steal their sleds just for the fun of it.
Anyways…

Tuesday night was Hydross, Lurker, Leo. Hydross and Lurker went down on 1 shots and the trash was quick. Leo turned out to be just as big of a pain in the ass as he was last week on our first kill. We wiped several times before he died. So far this is still the coolest 25 man boss I have ever been on. What makes him even cooler is that I picked up the T5 gloves off him. I did spend a good hunk of dkp but I figured I should chase after my first piece of T5, I kinda look at it as a milestone for my character. It was no where near the amount of dkp I would have spent last week though so it did pay off to wait a week. I’m still gunning for the shoulders this week but there is actually a few priests and druids who have more dkp than me now since I got the gloves so the shoulders may be a few raids off yet.

Last night we wanted to wrap up everything outstanding so that on Friday we can go learn Fathom-Lord Karathress and Saturday the plan is to kill Alar before VR. The GM said we arnt not doing VR this week unless Alar dies, so I guess that’s incentive alone to kill him so that people can continue to get their T5 shoulders. Last night was a nice organized mow of Tidewalker over to Mag, then onto to HKM and Gruul. I opted out after Mag because I was so freaking sleepy I couldn’t stand it, which probably ended up me losing out on about 160 dkp. HKM and Gruul are the quickest bosses to gain dkp, our system rewards extra dkp for 1 shots, and for no one in the raid dying. That usually happens on both bosses and they are both dead in about an hour but I just couldn’t stand to stay up any longer. I ended up with a dps helm off Mag that I really didn’t want but I took it so that it wasn’t disenchanted. I rarely do dps, and I also have my season 3 helm anyways but what the heck I guess, I ended up taking it for 25dkp which is nothing.

Tonight is a guild night off and my b-day so ill be hanging with the family and catching up on some sleep, before the mad wipe fest of Friday and Saturday. Now that I think about it I may actually miss a raid on Saturday because I might end up going out with my friends that night gambling or something since several of us have b-days around the same time. Possibly no cool Alar kill for me ><

Hopefully tomorrow night I will get to see a fathom-lord kill.

Leo dead, Karathress in progress

2008-03-03T13:32:00.008-06:00

So sleepy, ready to lay down on the floor and go into hibernation mode.

Friday played until 4 am – woke up at 7am to get ready for golf, Saturday played till 3 am – woke up around 7 again because my kid got up, Sunday played till 2am, woke up at 6 for work. I am such a piss ass at work today, I need sleep so bad!

Friday night the raid got started way late, which sucked but I guess you can’t force people to raid when they don’t want to. We ended up going in and one shotting Hydross and lurker once we finally got the people on, it went nice and smooth it just sucked getting started so late. I ended up getting a really nice pvp ring off Hydross which cost me next to nothing dkp wise so it was a great upgrade for me at hardly any cost. Once Lurker was dead we went on for Leo attempts so people could start learning the fight. We didn’t end up killing him but we did get him down to 6% which I thought we should have stuck around to see him dead but people had to log. After the raid I went and started farming primals because I needed money just to repair, I hadn’t farmed in forever. I farmed for several hours and another JC recipe dropped for me which I sold for 800 smackers. That’s respec and repair fees for a few more weeks!

Saturday night was a progression night so instead of going and killing Tidewalker we went to go do Leo attempts. 4 hours later Leo was dead. I was finally present for a guild first kill and it was a lot of fun to be back to experiencing first time kills as a whole guild again, not to mention the extra dkp that is given out for guild 1st’s. Leo is probably the most exciting fight In 25 man content I have done yet. During his human phase he goes psycho apesh#t and starts spinning around the room doing a whirlwind, damaging tons of people and putting rend dots all over the place. During his demon phase you are sometimes forced to fight your inner demon, if you do not kill the demon fast enough you are mind controlled and start fighting your fellow guildies. Every attempt I ended up fighting my own inner demon at least once per fight, oftentimes 2 or 3 times per attempt and it’s actually pretty easy to beat the kill timer, even as a prot warrior. The demon will cast a shadow bolt, so if you spell reflect it your demon dies extremely fast. I wore all dps gear besides my sword and shield during this fight to ensure I could kill my demon. I was a little worried that I had too little tanking gear for the summoner type guys at the beginning of the fight but it turns out those are a joke to tank and can easily be tanked in dps gear. A defender glove token dropped and the plate tanking belt dropped and went for extremely high dkp so I opted to pass till a later drop. I did not want to blow all my dkp on one item. The T5 tokens are really starting to call to me though so I bet I do start really throwing a lot of dkp at them soon.

Waiting at leo

Dead Leo

Leo Demon Form

Leo Human Form

Fighting my Inner Demon

Sunday night again the raid started late but I chose to go even though it was late and I was soooo tired. We went in and 2 shot Tidewalker and to my surprise we went ahead and headed over to learn the Fathom-Lord boss. He seems like a pretty cool boss but not nearly as fun as Leo. We have not killed him yet but mainly because of one shamans hilarious mistakes. It went something like this. This fight consists of Karathress, his hunter (and pet), A priest who heals, and a enhancement shaman.

I was chosen to tank the priest and stop her from healing the boss and other adds. Move boss into position, tank boss, shield bash heal spells. No problem. I also was given a rogue on my boss incase I was ice tombed during her heal spell so that he could kick it, also no problem me and a rogue can easily cover that. I was given a resto shaman as a healer who could chain heal himself, me , and the rogue. Cool deal the priest doesn’t hit that hard so 1 healer will work just fine….i thought. During our first pull I moved the boss into position, me and the rogue started doing our thing, I saw that my health was getting very very low and I was only getting a random healing when a chain heal would bounce off the rogue to me. I died , raid wiped, we go back and try it again.

Second attempt the same thing happens, I get no heals , we discuss what is going on and I say “I got no heals”, I hate doing that because it’s like calling someone out in the raid, but there wasn’t much else I could say.

Gm asks the shaman “Why didn’t you heal Raydz”
Shaman “I didn’t have LOS, I got it this time though”

Third attempt, priest in place, me and rogue shield bashing/kicking heals. I find myself swigging pots, health stones, last stand because again no heals. I look up and see my shaman running away from me toward the raid.

(we’ll say the shamans name was homer, which it’s not but I don’t want to throw the guys name out there)
Me on vent “Homer, where you going man I’m going to die”
I die
Me on vent “Homer wtf you doing man you’re supposed to be healing raydz & rogue & yourself”
Shaman “Man im trying but I have to run all the way over here to get LOS on the raid then run all the way back to heal the rogue”
Me “Wait what? Oh shit *laugh* No dude *laughing more now* Your not supposed to be healing “The Raid” your supposed to be healing me, “Raydz the warrior”.
Shaman “ohhhhh”
*everyone laughs*
Shaman “Shit im sorry guys, I was wondering why you wanted me bouncing all over the place for this fight it made no sense”

It turns out the shaman didn’t realize my name was “Raydz” which sounds like “raids” and was running all over the place to heal everyone else except me. It was actually pretty hilarious on vent and made wiping kinda worth it for the laugh it got.

Our fourth attempt I got heals, we kicked the heals, but they had trouble killing the shaman in time before he killed the druid tanking him so we wiped again. The shaman has a windfury totem and can dish out an amazing amount of damage quickly so were going to have to figure out a better way to keep up the shamans tank next time. Next week the plane is to get Hydross, lurker, tide walker , leo down as fast as possible so we can spend a while day alone with Fathom-Lord and hopefully get him down as well.

Even though im dragging ass and so sleepy I had a really fun wow weekend because of getting to see some new bosses. Tonight is a guild night off so ill be doing my PVP tonight, hopefully that goes good!

Looking at fathom Lord

Tanking my priestess

Damn Kids

2008-02-28T10:33:00.002-06:00

Last Night I got home and my kid was running a fever from all the antibiotics she is on. I can’t recall if I have mentioned it but this winter has been hell on my kid for fevers, ear infections, coughs, etc. Tuesday morning she had surgery on her ears and had tubes put in to help clear up the ear infections (which went good). She is on a ton of antibiotics right now to keep her ears from getting an infection but it pushes her body into a fever. Since she is feeling so crappy she becomes a little monster so I decided to not play wow and just sit on the couch with her and do my best to make her feel better.

Someone should mail me a father of the year award.

The reason I’m making this post is because by not playing WOW it led to a break-through in one of my current Real Life missions.

My Mission: Smoke some kid in the face with a snow ball.

I’m being 100% serious and honest, this is one of my current goals before the spring gets here and melts all the snow. Yes I understand that it’s just wrong of me a 27 yr old man wanting to zing a hard packed snowball at some kid but there is a story behind this need which I’ll go ahead and relay.

Saturday night after my raid was over I was farting around on the computer when I hear this thump on the outside of my house. My desk in my office sits below a window up against the wall which faces the front lawn of my house. I kinda sat there still for a minute wondering what I had heard. I looked outside and saw that it was snowing pretty heavy and figured that a branch had broke off a tree and hit my house, that’s pretty common during snow. I sat back down at my computer and like a second later there is a loud bang against my window. I jumped up and at the same time I yelled “WTF!”. I was pissed off because I thought that maybe someone was trying to break in or something. I ran out in the front yard in my shorts and a t-shirt and saw that stuck against my window and house were tons of snowball remains and my window was even cracked. I started looking around and sure enough there are tons of tracks in the snow where some kids had been running up and down the street and milling around in front of my house. I did get a brief chuckle that it looked like one of the kids had slipped and did a face plant, possibly when they heard my yell in my house.

I was pretty steamed that I now had a broken window so I ended up shape shifting into “super white trash man”. Standing out in the snow at 2:00 am in shorts yelling into the night “Come back here you f*ckers so I can beat your @ss” was not one of my proudest moments but I was extremely pissed. I stomped back into my house and started dressing so I could try to find these kids and maybe force them eat a yellow snow cone (no I wouldn’t really do that, I did entertain the idea for a while though). While getting dressed I ended up waking my girlfriend who said she would just call the security desk and have them track these kids down. When I was a young teenager I did a lot of stupid crap, had the cops called on us, which sucked so I really didn’t want that to happen to these kids even though they did break my window (I need to tell the story of Dirty/Perverted my RL resto druid friend and me getting chased by the cops on our ATV’s because we were riding through someone’s woods. It’s a especially funny story because he was the one who got caught and ended up sitting in the cop car hand cuffed). We live in a gated community so it wouldn’t have been the cops but our “security” guys who are basically like a mall cop or something but still, I didn’t want any serious trouble for these kids from the subdivision or their parents so I decided to make it a mission to smack a kid in the face with a snowball. I walked around like a psycho in the snow at 2:00 in the morning seeing if I could follow their tracks back to their house but I was out of luck. They had high tailed it into the woods and I lost them.

My break came yesterday when I heard a couple of teenage kids outside so I looked out my window and saw these kids kinda hiding half in the woods. It was starting to get dark so I guess they saw the headlights of a car approaching so they all hide behind a bush and after the car passed they poked out of the woods and let a few snow balls fly which plastered the back of this car. I guess it pissed this guy off as much as it did me because he threw his car in reverse and headed back the way he came. The kids broke and ran for it, I was able to watch them run through the woods and bingo, go into a blue house that’s located a few houses down from mine. The driver of the car never found them so he drove away.

Had I been thinking about it I should have just stepped outside and smoked them all with a snow ball and went back inside like nothing happened. Now I know where some of the kids live, I just have to find a way to pop them with a snowball now. Best case scenario is I’ll catch one of them riding by on his bike and I can hit him making him crash into the snow.

Since I know where they live I could just go and tell the parents but that makes for very little fun for me and might end up getting my house toilet papered. Hopefully the cold lasts long enough for me to complete my mission. I’ll let you know.

*Mission impossible music starts playing*

New Arena Teams

2008-02-27T13:19:00.004-06:00

Saturday morning my arena 3v3 with my RL friends went something like this after each loss. (we went 3 – 7 btw)
Friend 1 “Why didn’t you do ..blah blah”
Friend 2 “F*ck you, It’s because you didn’t ….blah blah”
Me *sigh*
Friend 1 “Well if you would just f*cking heal”
Friend 2 “I hate this class, im never playing him again especially with you guys”
Me “F*ck it that’s fine, im quitting the team im sick of this sh*t”

You would think that 3 guys who are all RL friends would get along during arena’s but we argue more over arena’s that we have argued over anything else. I guess since we are such good friends in RL its easier to yell at each other, tell them how bad they suck, and threaten to leave the team. One of my favorite activities in WoW is arena’s. I love to do them and look forward to them every week. At least I used to. The in game fighting between my friends just eventually wore me out. I want to get back to the point of enjoying arena’s without listening to constant bickering during queue times.

Therefore I quit the arena teams I had with my RL friends, we can all do our own thing and won’t have to fight with each other right? WRONG, apparently me leaving makes my pally RL friend go psycho (this is what I hear from my druid RL friend). Even though the pally said he is never playing that char anymore, hates doing arenas, and only wants to play with “Good” people. Apparently I’m the big a-hole for leaving but whatever I guess, I formed up a new 3v3 team with the hope of playing more than 10 games a week and having a little fun even if we lose a ton of games.

I asked around on my guild and found a SL/SL lock 400 resil to join but then we ran into a hard spot finding a healer with resilience. We eventually decided on a shaman in our guild, who has awesome healing gear but less than 100 resil. The shaman is played by some lady over in England, id let her on my 3v3 because of her accent alone, it’s pretty hot. Sunday night we played 30 games going 15-15. One game I played against a disc priest capnmorgan (I wonder if this was one of my friends from my previous server). If this was my friend from a previous server then good fight man it was close. If this is was not him and just some random guy then, HA! Stomped your ass.

I wrote down most of the combo’s we played against and by far our biggest weakness was playing teams with hunters. They tore our shammy up even with me taunting the pet off her. Until she gets more resil i think we'll be hovering in the 15's for a while because they just burn her down way to fast.

I still enjoyed playing so many games this week even though we didn’t really make any ground. It was good practice and the shammy says she is going to work on her resil, so that will be pretty nice if she can bump it up to 200+ resil.

My 2v2 was rather uneventfull, we only played 10 games which was a bummer but at least we made a little bit of headway toward the 1600’s.

Last night (Tuesday)
We did a clear of HKM, GRUUL, and MAG.
Nothing really exciting to say except that I did spend some DKP and picked up my chest piece. I got it for 200 dkp cheaper than I was bidding last week so that worked out nice. I still need to toss the +150 health on it but it is an upgrade that I think was “sorta” worth it and I do get the 4 piece bonus now.

Tonight I think we are headed into SSC, per group make up though we may be heading into TK instead. Either way my DKP Is still holding strong so hopefully I can pick up another upgrade.

BTW: What happens when you get the shatter stone form and then gruul dies? You sit there for 30 seconds able to do nothing, and yes im standing next to a healer on accident. Im sure it was his fault though not mine =)

I must punish a previous guildie.

2008-02-25T09:43:00.007-06:00

My last post I had commented that I was excited to be going into SSC for 3 boss kills and LEO attempts. I ended up missing the raid because my kid was sick. She has some ear infections that just won’t go away. Tomorrow she has surgery to put the tubes in to hopefully fix the infections. I don’t like the idea of my kid getting surgery of any kind, but on the other hand I’m also looking forward to it because she needs something to make her feel better. Really sucks when your kid is sick and you can’t do anything to make them feel better.

Saturday I logged on to raid and found out that on Friday the guild had done Void Reaver, Hydross, and Lurker. The T5 shoulders didn’t drop for warriors, nor did the tanking mace drop off lurker, so even though I missed out on the DKP I wasn’t too bummed since I didn’t miss out on any loot.

Our Saturday raid’s goal was to kill Tidewalker and go for LEO attempts (I remembered my Tidewalker screen shot this time). During the raid I was chit chatting with one of my buddies from my previous server/guild SO when one of the trash to Tidewalker dropped a trinket which I have been wanting for a while now I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT BECAUSE I HAD MY PARTY WINDOW CLOSED FOR MY WHISPER WINDOW. I heard on vent “Bidding Closed” so I flipped over to the party screen and saw I had totally missed out on my chance to get the trinket. Missed Trinket! Son of a B#T@H! I am sorry my friend from Altar of Storms but I have hired a hit man to find you, give you a vasectomy and then make you go jogging immediately after. I think you’re getting off with a light punishment but I took into account our friendship. Obviously the real fault is my own for not paying attention to the dropped loot…..but I must vent my rage on someone.

We killed Tidewalker and he dropped a tanking ring which is an upgrade for me, but I was competing against two other tanks. It’s not a huge enough upgrade that I wanted to spend all my DKP but I tossed out a couple of bids but these guys wanted it really bad so I let them have it. I’m pretty stingy when it comes to my DKP I always have been. While doing this pretty much guarantees I get any tank loot that I REALLY want if it were to drop, it also is a huge risk because if the guild was to break up I am left with nothing. I’m still aiming for the Lurker tanking mace, Gruul shield, or T5 shoulders but if my DKP starts getting to high I’m going to force myself to spend it on pieces that are upgrades but just not as fun as the ones I really want.

After our Tidewalker kill several people said they had to log for one reason or another so it pretty much killed the raid. That sucked I really wanted to see a LEO kill. I think we ran into the same old problem of people not wanting to put forth the effort to learn progression kills, they just want in on the farmed bosses. That annoyed me.

Tonight I’m not sure what I’ll be doing since there is no 25 man scheduled I might do some more arena games for the fun of it, or maybe see if I can get in a ZA group.
Later today or tomorrow I’m going to write up another post about my arena teams this weekend and all the people I have to find in RL and kill.

*I just noticed there is someone standing right under my character so it looks like i have a different name, but its obviously me, i dont think ingame your own name is shown above your head*

St.Louis has a major Ice storm.

2008-02-22T09:39:00.001-06:00

Wed night: Sleet, Sleet, Ice, Snow, Ice
Thursday Morning: Working from home in my boxers (that’s me half naked for all you ladies…ya.. your welcome) sipping some hot chocolate.
Friday Morning: Working from home in my boxers , sipping some hot chocolate. My week ended pretty good =)

Tuesday night our SSC raid was called because of lack of healers online. This was followed by our GM going apesh*t and as he said “I’m cleaning house”. He was extremely mad about having a raid cancelled and kicked over 50 accounts out of the guild for either inactivity or “I don’t know you”. He said if ever one more raid is cancelled he is going to open up recruitment after kicking out a bunch more people. I thought the whole rant was pretty comical but a lot of people were like “omg we have never seen him so mad”. I probably shouldn’t have been laughing on vent every time someone was kicked out of the guild.

Wednesday night there was enough people online so we did our scheduled HKM,Gruul, Mag run. As it stands with my DKP now I have a good shot of getting pretty much any item that I want next so I was hoping for a shield drop. That turned out to not happen, but I did win the bid for my T4 chest piece.

One of the other warriors who has been in the guild way longer than me was trying for this piece as well, so I ended up passing to him because I felt bad. If I was trying for a piece of loot and one of the new guys beat me out on an item it would probably irritate me pretty bad. This just solidifies my position with DKP even more so now I can hopefully be picking up some tier 5 or the mallet instead of a new t4 piece. I’m not sure if I will eventually spend the dkp on the chest piece or not because of the new badge rewards being better.

Tonight we head into SSC for Hydross, Lurker, Tidewalker, and then Leo attempts, hopefully I can snag a piece of T5 loot.

I havn’t had much to write about this week since all I have really done is HKM,Gruul, and Mag. I spent Thursday night with the family so I didn’t log on, which means I missed my Kara night so hopefully I’ll be able to get in a group Sunday instead. I really need to get on top of farming badges. A different team cleared ZA this week which I thought was really cool. I have been trying to get my own ZA group up and going so hopefully I will have a chance to get in there this weekend.

Part of the Core Group now

2008-02-18T10:36:00.007-06:00

Friday night I logged on with the hopes of raiding SSC. I was invited into the raid right away which was a good feeling. I’m starting to think I have earned my spot as a core raider now and a little bit of the worry of having to sit out is going away. You would think with 70+ level 70’s online and in the guild finding the right group makup would be easy. For whatever reason we had no mages and we were missing our fire resist geared lock so the GM decided that we would go do Void Reaver while we waited for the correct makeup for Leo to hopefully sign in.

We have a druid tank in the guild who talks and talks in vent all the time, dude never shuts up. On Friday he talked more than normal, and as the raid cleared through TK you could actually tell the dude was getting high. I get pretty irritated at people who just talk to hear themselves in vent, I would much rather have a quite vent and everyone paying attention to what they are doing. I was especially getting irritated that this dude was talking and was high because he was making hardly any sense. Friday is my night to relax from a long work week and I really didn’t feel like listening to this j@ck off so against my better judgment I piped up on vent.
“Dude would you please shut the f$ck up, you’re really irritating”
Luckily I wasn’t the only one because the GM said he is kicking the druid out of the raid. When the druid heard that he was getting kicked out he says.
“No wait….has anyone here ever like…killed anyone? *long pause* Seriously…type a number ‘1’ in raid chat if you have ever killed someone…….. *long pause and no number 1’s in raid chat* “
Gm says
“Dude, wtf is your problem, your gone”
Druid says
“Wait wait…type a number 1 then if you have had lasagna in the last week” *Druid is kicked from the raid*
Druid says
“Man…no one loves me and im drinking a sprite that tastes like a coke.” *then logs out of vent*
It was crazy bizarre but I have to say the whole conversation of killing someone strait to lasagna was pretty funny.

After that brief piece of oddness we cleared the last few trash mobs in front of Void Reaver. The trash dropped the tanking ring, but still being new to the guild I didn’t have the DKP to win it. I’m damn close though to finally having the DKP to getting items that I want. T5 shoulders and Lurkers mace shall soon be mine! I was one of three tanks to be in front of Void Reaver. This time I ended up holding agro on Void Reaver for well over 60% of the time which was kind of fun. Void Reaver died in one shot and I remembered to get a screen shot this time.

After Void Reaver the raid headed into SSC for some Leo attempts even though they didn’t have the correct makup the people still wanted to get in some attempts and learning encounters. I was happy to go, but since we didn’t have our main warlock with this fire resist set the attempts were pretty futile. I’m not sure how close they got him on Saturday night since I was out with friends and couldn’t raid that night.

I didn’t get to do as much honor grinding as I wanted with my hunter but I still did earn over 10,000 by doing Pre-Made AV’s. My Horde Arena’s went pretty good this weekend as well. We went 7-3, which I was pretty happy with. We bumped our arena team almost back to 1400 (Yeah that’s lousy I know, but you have to remember we each have a little more than 100 resil and no healer). There is really no other interesting news horde side.

I tried to do some AV on Raydz as well but alliance just kept getting smoked and there was no Pre-Made Av’s going on, but there was a PVP guild doing some premade AB’s and needed a MS warrior. Since it was the daily and I needed to respec for my arena’s anyways I figured what the heck. I was in for a pleasant surprise because these guys knew what they were doing. We 5 capped several games in a row and I earned about 4,000 honor with raydz before I had to log off to go take care of my kid. I also capped out several stacks of BG badges so I went ahead and bought myself a new PVP mount for fun. The Dwarf mounts are pretty tight looking.

Tonight will probably be another PVP night, and starting Tuesday ill be back into raid mode.

SSC for Raydz, New Loot for Hoss

2008-02-14T10:38:00.004-06:00

Tuesday was a SSC night and I was happy to see I was invited right off the bat, as you know in such a large guild I’m constantly fighting for a position in the 25 man raids. Good thing I’m the sexiest tank ever or I might not ever get a spot.

The raid went really smooth over all. We did wipe on Hydross twice because a certain lock wouldn’t stop dps’ing. Later it was found out that he wasn’t on vent, and it wasn’t even the correct guy playing the lock. When he finally got on vent he said “Oh sorry that was my room- mate playing while I went and took a crap”. This dudes room-mate didn’t know the fight or how to really even play a lock and therefore caused two wipes. What I enjoyed was seeing the GM’s mod go to work and displaying that this particular warlock got a 30dkp deduction for being an idiot. I cant say enough how I love the way he runs a raid. If your gonna be an idiot it’s gonna cost you dkp.

I stuck around for Hydross and Lurker but then I had to log out, I’v been having some long days at work and couldn’t afford to stay up any longer. The guild went onto Tidewalker but I’m not sure how they did, sinc e I didn’t play last night. The Lurker kill dropped the mallet tanking weapon but I didnt have enough dkp to purchase it. The good news though is that almost all the tanks have it so the next time it drops it will probably go to me. Tonight is an “off” night for the guild except for Kara & ZA but I wont be on tonight either because of V-day.
I remembered to take a pic of myself at lurker this week =)

I have been spending more and more time messing around with my Hunter lately. While on him I spend a good potion of my time pvping. Tuesday I went and picked up his S3 helmet and a pair of S1 gloves for the resil bonus. His resil still sucks at 120 but with how easy it is to farm honor as a horde hunter I could have him geared out in pvp gear pretty quickly if I really tried. Doing that though means cutting back time with Raydz and im not willing to do that yet I don’t think. I will admit though that pvping has been more fun lately than raiding with Raydz. This weekend is AV weekend, If I can get into another pre-made group I could easily farm enough for two more pieces of S1, im looking forward to that.

Void Reaver Down + Alot of BG's this weekend

2008-02-11T10:59:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven’t updated the blog in a few days, work has been hell and I’m not going to use my own free time to write in my blog, free time at home is for playing =).
Over the last few days:

I was able to witness a new boss kill for myself, Void Reaver down. I was one of the tanks upfront and when I had the agro I tanked the boss clean with no screw ups. All in all that’s seriously an easy boss fight for a tank. Especially since I only tanked him about ¼ of the time since he does an agro dump knock back. We had to reset him a few times because people were not dodging the lighting balls and dying to early but other than that It seemed like a clean run. I forgot to take a screen shot of the kill, I think the reason is because I’m just not that excited about raiding like I was on my old server. Niether of the real life friends I transferred over with feel like playing their alliance anymore (wtf did they want me to transfer for, really pisses me off actually) so they weren’t in the raid. After the VR kill the guild headed off to attempt LEO in SSC but I had to log off because my kid and girlfriend are both sick so I had to make some dinner, help around the house, etc. They didn’t kill him but they are getting closer from what I’m told. Hopefully I’ll get in the next SSC raid and get to experience a LEO kill.
(Added Edit - On friday the guild did Hydross, Lurker, and Tidwalker but due to sick baby i wasnt able to play. I wasnt too dissapointed to miss this because i have already seen these bosses, but it would have been nice to do to catch up on dkp)

This week I mostly did pvp on both my warrior and my horde 70 hunter. Why my 70 hunter? I don’t know I guess because I’m bored on this new server and playing a hunter is at least something different. My hunter at the moment has around 40 resilience, so he needs a ton of work if I plan to really ever arena with him for real. Several times this weekend I joined up in some premade AV’s. AV’s are not made premade through blizzard but there is a mod out right now that will queue everyone up at the same exact time which means your whole raid pretty much gets put into the same AV. On a normal queue of 40 members at least 30+ would get into the same AV. In general chat some people were saying you could get suspended for using this mod, but I have not seen anything about it on the blizzard forums so until I do I guess ill risk it. A normal AV game would last around 12-15 minutes max and we got at least 400 honor each run. I farmed about 13k honor over the weekend on my hunter and I spent more time on Raydz that I did on Hoss, the AV premade honor was awesome. I’m already looking forward to next weekend because I think it’s actually AV double honor! Hoss also has around 1800 arena points to spend so I’ll be picking up my Season 3 helm next Tuesday which I’m looking forward to.

I think I thoroughly enjoy battlegrounds more with my horde than I do alliance for two reasons.
1. As a hunter in a bg I die very rarely when compared to my warrior. Which means im alive and gathering honor from player kills a much longer time. That means besides bonus honor im still raking in points just for staying alive and shooting from afar. As a warrior I have to charge in to the fray and become targeted to kill almost instantly meaning I spend a good deal of my time dead.
2. The horde seem to dominate almost every single battle ground we go in. I did several Arathi Basin and I can’t count how many times we 5 capped the alliance. One time in EOTS we didn’t even let them score a point! Winning almost all the battle grounds is much more fun than losing them over and over with alliance. I have noticed that one key to hordes success in Arathi Basin and EOTS is that we never stop pushing for new nodes. In almost every AB or EOTS I’m in with my alliance I can’t tell you how many times I have seen someone say “Okay Hold these 3!”. Meaning play defense until horde gang up on us and take away a node. When I’m on Hoss (horde hunter) it’s just a constant group of horde going to alliance nodes pushing to conquer a new one while alliance sits there and tries to play D never pushing back. If alliance would just take 3 nodes and then go for a 4th the horde would be pushed back to D allowing for alliance to take control of the board. I just don’t get it sometimes why alliance pugs play BG’s like they do.

I didn’t get nearly as much honor with Raydz as I did with Hoss since alliance rarely wins ANYTHING but I was able to pick up two new pieces of gear. This puts Raydz up to 280 resil which isn’t awesome or anything but it’s a lot better than most. I also did arena’s with both characters over the weekend but I’ll post about that later. It was nothing exciting really many losses with our horde (that’s to be expected with 40 resil) and some new strats with alliance that may/may not pay off.

Tonight the guild has no raids scheduled so I’m probably just going to dive into some more BG’s im not sure with which character yet.

New Server - New Arena Teams - Same ole ass kickins

2008-02-05T12:42:00.000-06:00

Sunday morning we decided to get our arena games in for the week. Since my RL friends I transferred with are broke ass’s I bought the Arena teams (Good thing I got a JC pattern earlier in the week). Several hundred gold later me, dirty, and dirtyoldman were ready to get our ass’s beat in some 3v3 games. We were trying to do things a little different this week and going with a 2 healer approach. I had learned from a different resto druid(badass in pvp) friend of mine that the 2 healer approach is one of the stronger combo’s found in 3v3 matches now. We gave this new team makup a shot, first 3 games we were getting beat, but I could see improvement after each game. My strategy changed very little; mortal strike, dps, pummel heals/spells,call out for pally stun if needed on a healer, execute. As Dirty got used to running/healing/cyclone/roots we then started winning. We won 4 straight and things started looking up until we ran into a hunter/lock/disc priest combo. We played this team 3 times and lost every one. No matter which way we attacked this team I couldn’t kill them before they fully had dirty and dirtyoldman drained of mana which meant GG for us. We ended our 10 games totally frustrated and dirtyoldman pretty much went a little crazy and said he is never playing his pally again. Sure enough the rest of that day and Monday he played his 70 horde shadow priest and hasn’t been back to the pally. He was one of the guys who wanted me to transfer, if he doesn’t play his paladin anymore I may kill him and offer up his soul to blizzard so they can transfer me back. Even though we went 4-6 I can see that this strat may actually work well for us once the kinks get ironed out. I guess we’ll have to see.

I formed a 2v2 with dirty (resto druid) and we only had time for 2 games before the super bowl. We went 1-1. The first loss was my fault as I totally put myself out of LOS and died before he could get the heal off, lesson learned. I hear that a resto druid/arms warrior is one of the best 2v2 combo’s there is, hopefully this will lead to at least a 1600+ team. I’m desperate for a team in the 1600’s I feel like I have put enough work into my PVP set that I should be getting at least close to the 1600’s. I guess we’ll see how the 2v2 works out down the road. Speaking of putting in work on my pvp set I have done a lot of research on warrior pvp items, many of the high ranking warriors use the bloodlust broach instead of the “last stand” type of trinket you can buy. This makes sense to me since warriors are one of the last guys to be targeted in arena’s because of our durability. I decided to purchase it with my badges. I have noticed that popping the trinket on a target when they are below 40% life really helps killing them by adding to the burst damage.

We also formed up a 5v5 team, which has me really excited. I can’t remember the last time I was able to get enough people on for 10 5v5 matches. We went 5-6 for the day leaving us with a 1494 rating. On one of our matches the hunter lagged out and couldn’t join the match which left us 4 vs 5. We actually almost won 4v5 so had he not lagged out we would have ended the night at 6-5, but oh well.
We are set up as follows.
Arms Warrior – The amazing Raydz
Disc Priest – I have never been lucky enough to get a disc priest, I love having them on my team. The mass dispel of mage ice block and pally bubbles is so amazing.
Elemental Sham – Also never been lucky enough to get a shaman in an arena team. They are a little bit squishy and usually the first target but between the resto druid and disc priest they keep him up long enough for him to dish out awesome amounts of damage + lots of purges.
Resto Druid – Dirty, does a good job as resto. I hope he stays that way instead of wanting to pvp in feral.
Marks Hunter – He did a good job but was laggy, so I think next week when his connection is hopefully better it helps the team as a whole and we can burn down the other teams a little faster.
5v5 games are where the most arena points are at, so hopefully I can keep all these guys committed to doing these at least once a week . I think the team build we have will work, it might not be the best setup but I think it’s good enough to get us moving up the ranking ladder instead of down.

I find myself pvping more on my new server than I did on AOS, I think mostly because I still really don’t know anyone to ask for ZA attempts. I do know that I had more fun doing the arena’s this week than I had getting my 2 new boss kills(lurker and tidewalker), I don’t know if that really means anything or not but if I’m having more fun pvping I might try to explore that route more. I’m almost up to 15k honor points again which means I get to purchase a new pvp ring, and I should have enough arena points now to buy my vengeful gladiator gauntlets which will be some nice boosts to my resil.

Tonight is a Gruuls + Mag run, I still don’t have enough dkp to actually win anything unless an item goes to rolls, but hopefully I get an invite anyways so I can earn some more points and meet some new people.

Btw I wish fury was a viable pvp build, Raydz look pretty badass Dual wielding.

Boot Camp Raids

2008-02-04T11:25:00.000-06:00

Thursday it started snowing in Missouri pretty hard so I left work early. Get home and start doing my dailies, a JC pattern drops, sold it for 550g = Woot!

Friday I worked from home because we got like 8 inches of snow, working in shorts and a tshirt = Woot.

Friday night was SSC night which I got an invite to for Lurker and Tidewalker = Woot.

Originally the SSC raid had no spot for me because even though I had signed up for the raid all tanking positions were filled by core members. I am not complaining, that’s the way it should be, core members > new guys, this keeps a guild progressing and gearing up the key people first. In my head it’s the way progression should be handled. One of the prot warriors had noticed that I didn’t get in and told me he wanted to be there for the Hydross kill so he could get his trinket but after that I could have his spot. The trinket did drop and he won it so grats to him. After the kill he let me have his spot because he needed no gear from Lurker or Tidewalker. The Hydross kill was a one shot, and I was quickly switched in with the other warrior and we headed off to Lurker. The GM runs his raids in what almost feel s like a boot camp fashion. If you go afk without telling someone you get the boot, if you keep messing up you get the boot, if you’re under geared you get the boot, etc. I know this would turn a lot of people off but I like the way the raids are run and it keeps people from slacking off and keeps a steady pace through the dungeons. For example, on the lurker fight the GM said if you get hit with spout you get a 20dkp deduction for not paying attention. Our first attempt went bad, people were hit with spout and just like he said 20dkp was taken from those guys (I wasn’t one of them). Next attempt we killed him extremely easily and I think only one guy was hit by the spout but he was dc’d, and no he didn’t get docked which was nice. This was my first Lurker kill, and it was cool to see the big fish down, but since this wasn’t a guild first there was no cheering/happiness which kinda sucked. After the Lurker kill we headed off to tide walker, again this is a guild farmed boss so he went down easily. As a non-MT prot warrior I feel pretty useless on this fight, I didn’t really have a specific job to do so I slapped on the old dps set and went to work using devastate spam. I actually did 550+ dps for the whole fight which I guess isn’t too bad for a prot warrior. After the Tidewalker kill we called it a night, with the idea of killing Void Reaver quickly on Saturday then going back into SSC for attempts on Leo. Saturday night was a UFC night for me so I missed out on the raid but I heard they killed VR but not LEO. As a guild they have not downed Leo yet so I hope I’m in the raid on the night they do kill him, it’s much more exciting to experience a boss kill for the first time when it’s a first for the guild as well.

I still have concerns about consistently getting a raid spot but hopefully I made a good enough impression in my Kara group and in my performance Friday that I can keep getting invites. I actually am not even going to make a big deal about killing these bosses for the first time since i was basically just along for the ride. At least I earned some DKP Friday and was able to start climbing that ladder to get enough to start earning loot.
Lurker Kill (Pics provided by Perverted bc i forgot to take them)

TideWalker Kill

Transfer Thoughts

2008-01-31T11:13:00.000-06:00

*I started typing this post and instead of a few quick thoughts on my new server it sort of became this back and forth tug of war on whether I made the right choice to transfer , so I apologize for the rambling and all the scattered thoughts*

I transferred to Blackwing layer which is one of the “newer” high population PVP servers that I could find. The idea behind going to a high population server is more guilds in 25 man content which means I will hopefully have a better shot of getting into a hard core raiding guild with a level of progression close to what Mal Katai was at.

I wanted to find a guild that was around the same level of progression because I still want the thrill of downing a boss together as a guild for the first time. Being run through an instance that a guild has been farming for weeks is just not fun to me. There were basically three guilds on Blackwing Layer which were close to what I was looking for.
BlackWing Layer Progression

After asking around for a guild that would take a Prot Warrior, Resto Druid, and holy paladin we were accepted into the guild “Strips for Silver” (Strips for Silver/). “Strips for Silver” has cleared HKM, Gruul, Mag, Hydross, Lurker, and Void Reaver which is roughly where “Mal katai” is so it was a good match. Originally we were talking to the officers in the guild “Bleach” (Farthest progressed alliance guild on Blackwing layer) and I think we would have been accepted but then I would have been in the “Farming Run through” scenario, and I just don’t think I would have had as much fun with that. Granted I am a loot whore, but walking around in gear that I didn’t really earn isn’t rewarding. If I wanted that I might as well ebay a character.

My transfer went through Tuesday night so I logged onto my new server and was in awe at how many people were standing around Iron Forge (side note: Logging into a server with your main and having no one on your friends list sucks nuts). The server is seriously packed. I checked prices on the auction house and they were similar to Altar of Storms so I tossed up a few blacksmithing items to see if I could get them to sell. I had these items up for more than a week on Altar of Storms with no luck, but in under an hour I had sold everything I had crafted. The economy is strong on Blackwing so hopefully I will have an easier time of making some cash to handle all my repair bills and weekly respec fee’s.

Blackwing is also in the same Battle group that Altar of Storms is in so it’s possible I will end up in some BG’s with some of my old friends at some point, or end up getting my ass handed to me in Arena’s by these same guys. I have to admit it might have been nice to go to a less competitive battle group to get a higher arena team ranking, but I guess that’s the easy way out and if I did end up with a higher arena ranking I would have always thought about how I couldn’t cut it in a harder battle group.

What I was totally unprepared for and kinda disappointed in was the number of people that can be found in each guild. Tuesday was a raid night for “Strips for Silver”, being my first night and logging in after the raid had started I obviously wasn’t invited but I wasn’t the only one…..
At raid time there were 70 level 70’s logged on and many of them in queue waiting for a raid spot. What does that mean for me being the new guy? I’m not sure yet, the GM had said that their core group was in need of good tanks, so I’m hoping that means I won’t be one of the normal guys sitting in queue riding the bench while others raid. Being totally freaked out by how many people trying to get a raid spot I started rethinking my choice in guilds so I started doing a “/who Bleach”, “/who Bear Cav”, etc. All the guilds were packed like this! That’s why I’m saying I think this server is bloated. There is not enough guilds to support this large of a population. If I cannot get into the main core group of raiders (The GM said that me and the Dirty’s would get spots but this is me being paranoid because I wasn’t even really sure I wanted to transfer in the first place) then I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do.
Side Note: Tuesday night the guild ran HKM, Gruul, and Mag all in one night and in like 2 hours which I was very happy to see that they utilize their time as much as possible.

Wednesday and Thursday are “off” nights for the guild, which kinda sucks I would rather see Friday and Saturday as nights off. For instance I’ll have to miss out on a TK raid this Saturday because I’ll be over at Dirty’s house watching the MMA fight (Brock Lesnar is fighting, which is going to be awesome). I figure I should be able to raid most Friday’s and Saturdays though since I don’t get out much after having a kid.

Last night being an “off” night I was invited to run in a Kara group. By now you guys know how much I hate Kara but I have to start integrating myself into this guild somehow so I figured this was a good place to start since one of the raid officers was in the group. Later I found out that I was invited so they could just check up on me and Dirty to make sure we weren’t retarded and possibly ruin their raids. I’m happy to say the run went smooth, we did a full Kara clear, and I collected my badges as normal.

The thought is now in the back of my mind that if I cannot be a core member of a guild then I might just possibly have to form my own guild. I have been a GM before and seriously it’s kind of a nightmare, but I’d be willing to do it over not raiding. Then I guess I would have no one but myself to bitch at if the raiding wasn’t going as planned. Anyways, that’s a thought but I’m not sure if it’s one to pursue just yet.

As a recap:
Was transferring the right thing to do? Not sure yet, im still 50/50. I found a guild with a good raiding schedule, good dkp system, and with basically the same level of progression as Mal Katai, so that’s good. The economy seems to be extremely strong so I might be able to actually make a little bit of gold, also good. I had to leave behind some really good friends, which sucks ass. There is also the problem of for such a huge population there seems to be a limited amount of good raiding guilds so the number of members per guild is huge, which may mean I might not get to raid as much as I want, that’s bad. For now I guess I’ll see how many raids I get invites to and how the guild does as a whole. If it doesn’t work out I can always guild hop or even form my own guild, which I’m pretty confident I could easily find the members and be up and going in 25 mans in a very short about of time, so that’s always an option.

Until then though I guess I’ll get some team spirit with “Strips for Silver” and see where that takes me.

Good Bye Mal Katai

2008-01-29T14:17:00.000-06:00

With much sadness the decision to move servers has been put into motion. Within the next few days or possibly even tonight Raydz will be moving to the Blackwing Layer server. This is a PVP server in the PST time zone. The main reason I am moving is because two of my Real life buddies have decided it’s time to move on and find a guild with a more hard core approach to raiding and since its in PST the raiding times will suit our schedules better since we are more “late night” type of guys. I’m down with the idea of finding a more hard core guild and one of the main reasons we all play wow is because it lets us hang out together, and since recently having kids we don’t get out that much anymore wow is the primary means in which to do that. I cannot let my friends transfer and not transfer raydz, they are my RL best friends and to not play with them would just be a shitty move on my part. For me this is really a hard thing to go through with because I feel like I have made several good friends on my server and leaving means not raiding with these guys anymore, and seriously that can suck my left nut.

I left what I felt is a “heart felt” good bye on my guild forums without getting all queer about it, so I hope it lets all these guys know how much it’s gonna suck not hanging with them anymore. I’m really going to miss all the trash talking and non-gay (well maybe a little gay) bonding we have had on our Kara and ZA runs and even the larger 25 man runs.

Mal Katai as a guild has been a lot of fun and I got to see some new content with them which has been a blast. I think for my friends it will be easier to transfer because they never really connected with the guild as a whole, where I feel I have made some good friends so it’s going to be hard to leave. I hope me leaving the guild doesn’t cause everyone to flat out hate me and if it does then possibly we weren’t as good of friends as I thought, and that would really suck a root. So to all my former guild mates and arena partners it’s been fun, you will be missed, and I plan to keep in touch through alts and stuff to say hi and make sure everyone is doing good.

And on one last parting note I leave you with this.

Your welcome.

A taste of SSC loot

2008-01-28T16:34:00.001-06:00

Woot!
I was finally able to spend some MKP! Friday we formed up a raid and headed into SSC with the plan of killing Hydross and heading to lurker for a progression kill. Our raid got started about an hour or so late due to lack of healers being online which was kind of a bummer, but after waiting a while we finally got everyone on and rolling. We had a little bit of trouble on the trash because the big bog guys were dying in unexpected ways that we had never encountered before ( I’ll be much quicker to jump out of the huge green pool of boiling acid next time), but it wasn’t long till we had cleared to Hydross. Most of our attempts on him looked pretty good on dps and healing we just had some bum luck with honors internet connection. Honors is one of the tanks on Hydross so when he loses connection that’s an attempt breaker. I know the feeling when your internet is messing up and there is nothing you can do about it, that’s a one way ticket to frustration hell. I felt bad for honors because I know it was driving him crazy. After a few attempts his connection held out and we downed Hydross. Hydross dropped a tanking trinket which I actually won the roll for (I was rolling against the guy who beat me out for the Mag t4 chest piece and had capped out his DKP again. If he had beat me in the roll I may have gone psycho, flew up to Canada, and then broke all his fingers so he couldn’t play WOW for a while. True story, I just might have.), but since I had a good roll I’m now I’m the proud owner of a new defense trinket. In all actuality the trinket isn’t an “amazing” piece, I think I’m more happy with the fact I get to use it as a “trophy” that I have seen Hydross down and able to get an item from SSC by using my MKP. After the Hydross kill the raid was called instead of going to Lurker, it was pretty late and I don’t think we had enough guys online to replace all the people that left so I guess that even though it’s a bummer we didn’t get to kill lurker there was nothing we could do about it. I hope tonight we will maybe be going to Gruul’s or Mag, let’s hope everyone brings their “A” game and we can down both bosses in a low number of wipes.

I’m trying to figure out if this trinket will become a permanent part of my set or a situational piece.
It comes with an ass load of defense, here is how defense applies to a tank. (copy/pasted from blizzard)

Defense - Increases the chance of being missed by an attack. - Increases the chance to dodge, parry, and block. - Decreases the chance of being affected by a critical hit. - Decreases the chance of being affected by a "crushing blow". Creatures that are higher level than your character can land crushing blows that deal increased melee damage. The chance of a crushing blow increases as the level difference between you and the opposing creature increases. Players never deal "crushing blows", only creatures.

Looking at my character standing still (not using shield block) this is how I look on dodge, parry and block.

After popping the new trinket here is how I stand (still not using shield block). The chance a mob will miss me, me dodging, parrying, or blocking an attack each goes up 2.76%
So with a single trinket use I have 4 “skills” that go up by roughly 3%

Here is me using the trinket and shield block. I include the picture of using shield block because while I tank it’s the skill that I let take precedence over everything else. I should never have this skill “not on cool down” so most of the time I’m tanking I have a shield block up so this is a more realistic view of my combat table while I’m tanking something.
You can see here that with shield block up my block value is now 42.27% which isn’t too bad.

I think I’m going to try using this trinket over my auto blocker as a “save me” trinket and see how it works out. I had been using my auto blocker more as a threat generation piece for shield slam but in the long run my threat has been “alright” that I don’t think I need the auto blocker as a main piece.

On a side note about threat: After reading some other tanks on tankspot.com I do feel my TPS is down a tad from what it should be so I have been experimenting with different threat generation rotations with still no major difference. My TPS hasn’t been low enough yet that I’m scared about it, but low enough that it’s something I want to improve. I would like to be sustaining 800 TPS easily like some of the other tanks have posted, but the auto blocker trinket really isn’t helping me with threat a huge amount which is why I’m going to try to ditch it for now. I know I can get up to 800-1000 TPS but that’s only on spikes and not sustainable through a whole fight, so I still have some work to do in that area. I am starting to wonder how much my ISP connection and lag are having to do with my TPS.

Amazing Raydz Addon

2008-01-25T10:12:00.001-06:00

Yesterday my RL buddy who also plays WOW sent me a link for a World of Warcraft add-on builder which runs inside Microsoft Visual Studio. I have been a software developer for several years now and the thought of building WOW add-ons has always intrigued me, I just have never had the time to really dig in to them. 80% of my time developing is in Microsoft Visual studio so when I found out that there was now a WoW plug in for it, I had to check it out.

I only had about half an hour to mess with the creation of a new add-on before it was time to raid so I whipped up the “Amazing Raydz” add-on. It's really only a "tweeked" version of the tutioral mod but it's sure to be a big hit and one of the top downloads on curse gaming.

Obviously being my first add-on I started with something very simple just to see if I could get it to run in WoW. When World of Warcraft loads up there is a moveable frame on the screen which says “Is Raydz Amazing” and a “Yes” button. I didn’t add a “No” button because it would be a waste of time making it because no one would ever push it. When you push the “yes” button the frame disappears, but I also added the event that every time you switch targets the frame pops back up with new text. The frame is now controlled by this line of code which is found in the “code behind” section of the mod.

RaydzString:SetText("Raydz is more amazing than " .. UnitName("Target"));

So if I clicked on ragnaros (the final boss in the molten core) the add would pop up with. “Raydz is more amazing than Ragnaros” and the button text would be changed to "Thats True". Clicking the “That’s True” button will hide the frame again. Obviously besides the mod reminding you of my amazingness every few seconds it’s very annoying and has to be turned off, it was only created as a test to see if I could make a simple mod.

If you have ever had any interest in learning about creating your own mod’s id suggest learning with this tool since it provides intellesence and has a tutorial in the help section to get you started. It even lets you set a World of Warcraft screen shot as your background so when you develop you have an idea of where you are placing your frame which is really helpful.

Read about it Here. I know I'm going to keep playing with Mod Development. Whats great is that since its in visual studio i can mess with it all day at work and it will look like im doing normal work.

Gruul Un-Farmed

2008-01-23T10:56:00.000-06:00

Last week I was able to get my 2v2 and 3v3 games in, but as normal we couldn’t seem to get enough guys on at the same time for some 5v5 matches. I really need to stop letting this group slip and work at getting the guys together to make sure we get our points in or if it’s just not possible then I need to bail and find a different team. My 2v2 and 3v3 both went 6-4 for the week, which I’m happy with. Raising the team ratings is a slow process for us but at least it’s going up. After a few more 6-4 weeks I could sit happy with 2 teams being in the 1600’s. To someone who does arena’s and pvp’s hardcore 1600 is nothing special, but it would be an achievement for me since my time is pretty much 85% pve and then doing pvp in my off time. I do really enjoy pvp but I don’t think I could solely do it all the time or i might think about doing it, it’s my guess that I would burn out on that really fast. To argue that though I have never been in a pvp setting of pre-made battle ground groups or with a hardcore arena team, stomping ass in pvp all day long might be fun. I probably won’t ever go down that road though unless raiding becomes completely futile.

(Bitch Session Inc)
Speaking of raiding becoming futile, I want to scream from how much trouble our guild has been having with Gruul lately. For weeks we were killing him like he wasn’t a problem, most of the time it was a one shot and at the very most it was a two shot. For whatever reason now the past several times in Gruul’s layer has just seriously sucked hardcore. Last night we zoned in and killed HKM (It was an ugly kill btw, mobs died out of order and slowly). Then we went to Gruul and wiped on him, I cant remember what % he was at. The next attempt we wiped somewhere around 8% (He was on like growth 15), and then again another wipe around 14% (again a really high growth). I’m assuming our dps was lacking last night with how high our growths were. I don’t know if we’re still going after Gruul with people extremely under geared or if no one was paying attention but last night was basically a waste of a raid night. This means now we have to spend an extra night this week getting everyone back together to go in and finish Gruul when we could be doing something else productive whether that be a progression boss or farming badges (*shudder* I’m so sick of Kara). After our first wipe we farted around looking at Gruul for a long time, again letting any raid momentum we had die. I think the guild sat there and talked about gaming keyboards for about 10 minutes, then everyone had to buff, or go afk, or whatever other reasons. We f*cked around so much we had 3 attempts on Gruul before the trash timer was reset. At that point the raid was called because no one wanted to re-clear trash.

At what point do you “Un-farm” a boss? Wiping on Gruul and leaving without a boss kill doesn’t feel like “farm” status to me.

If the 25 man we took to Gruul last night is now our “Normal” raid group then we need to take a step back and make farming Gruul’s layer our priority again and sadly put SSC in the background until we can gear up these new people. It’s getting to the point that for several of the “geared normal” raiders that if it’s not our “successful” raid group then they are just going to stop going because they are tired of the repair bills, frustration, and the waste of time (this doesn’t include me it’s just what I have picked up from other raiders). I’m guessing this trend is already starting to take root as every raid on Gruul seems like we have more and more “new” people.

I’m not an officer in the guild or a raid leader but if it were up to me a decision would need to be made. So many new guys are not allowed to come to a raid at one time, if we had that many “new guys” because “old raiders” won’t go then those guys need a kick in the ass. If you won’t come to Gruul because you already have your gear and you’re not willing to help others then you’re not allowed to come to Mag and SSC. I go to Gruul even though I don’t really need anything anymore, yes I have the hope of getting his shield but that’s a 2.5% drop rate so in all reality I know I’ll probably never get it. I go to Gruul every week to help out others and because I enjoy raiding (even though the “enjoy” is really getting stretched thin lately with all the trouble we have been having), if others will not do the same then they need to be replaced for Gruul and denied the chance to go to SSC. You shouldn't be part of the “Core” team if you pick and choose raids, you’re either in or you’re out. If we lose a bunch of core guys because they will not commit and we need to take these “new” people then, we take a step back, gear them up, and then begin pushing forward for progression once we have obtained another geared core group OR actively try to recruit some well geared people if we don’t want to spend the time/energy gearing people up. Either way something needs to be done because it feels like our raids are getting worse?

Finally Some New Tanking Upgrades

2008-01-21T14:19:00.001-06:00

It’s been a busy week for me at work so I apologize I have not posted anything new in a while.

Last week our Nightbane kill finally produced a shield upgrade for me. This was a nice surprise since I had pretty much just given up on it. I slapped a stamina enchant on it and now I have a better shield and not to mention its much cooler looking.

After our Kara run was finished this left me with exactly 75 badges so I went and bought my leg plate upgrade. This was a much needed upgrade as well and I couldn’t be happier with the stamina these things pack. I would rather have my old leg plate graphic back though; I am not a fan of the whole ZA troll/skull/witch doctor graphic. Which I have commented on before.

More good news is that Friday we zoned into SSC and smacked Hydross with a 1 shot. It was snowing its balls off so half way through the Hydross fight I got disconnected but was able to quickly log back in and resume my roll of holding adds. My ISP is much better than it was in regards to handling weather conditions (I used to be offline for a whole day when it would rain) but it did lag me a bit on Friday. A defense trinket dropped off Hydross which I tossed my MKP (guilds way of saying DKP) at it along with Honorshammer but of course with my luck lately I lost the roll. I like Honor’s a lot so it’s a shame I have to kill him soon, if you enjoy his blog I suggest you read up on it while you can. After the Hydross kill we continued to try to kill Lurker. Despite starting the raid about 1.5 hours late the “raid” as a whole had good energy which was only boosted after a 1 shot on Hydross. We cleared trash to Lurker with no wipes and even got a druid an epic tanking staff and an epic totem for one of our shamans, which was pretty cool. Once we got down to Lurker is when everything turned to sh*t, sh*t meaning people had to start logging, people were going afk, people were jacking around in game and on vent. Any raid momentum we had was quickly lost. We got stuck in a rut of 25 minutes in between attempts because we were replacing people. We kept having to wait for people to fly in and get raid ready because others had left. While we were waiting on these people it’s my thought we should keep giving the boss “learning” attempts even if we only have 23 or 24 people in the raid instead of waiting on others because everyone starts getting lazy and wanting to leave. After waiting so long I feel like the attempts we did get in were only half assed and when a raid slows down like we did maybe it should just be called. Which I hate saying because I think most of you know I’ll wipe on a boss all night for the sake of progression, but if we’re at the point where a lot of people are not really trying it seems like a waste. I do want to finish my SSC thoughts positively though the Hydross kill was handled skillfully as if we have been killing him for months and I’m glad I was there for it hopefully next time we carry that momentum onto Lurker.

While writing this I flipped over to my guild site to check our forums and catch up on anything I might have missed over the weekend. Seems the other main Kara group that runs in our guild has challenged my group to a race with a bet of 200g to the group who can clear the fastest. I’m down to give that a shot, even though the other group leader has cleverly “reserved” all the top DPS for his team, which means…they are really gonna be bitter when my group wins. *Directed at Raistlan who started the bet* I guess Raistilan only thinks they can win if they go in with a stacked deck of all the top geared dps? =P. Soon I’ll let you guys know by how big of a time gap we won by, and if by some horrific chance we lose then I’ll let you guys know how bad they cheated.

Also while I was on my guild forums I was looking at the “MKP/DKP” chart. Our MKP cap is at “5” which is what I have. I have gone on all our raids but 1(missed due to weather) so even though I have gone to 16 raids I’m still sitting at “5” points and still having never received 25 man loot since switching to a “DKP” system. Since our cap is so low this gives the chance for someone to raid 5 times and be on equal ground to roll against me for an item. This sucks for me, one of the other warriors has rolled against me twice now and won both times and it’s very possible that by the time another item I want drops he could be back at his 5 cap and possibly out roll me again like he did the first two times. I had commented before on how the “5” cap will not function correctly “mathematically” when I typed it up though I just didn’t realize I’d be the one getting bit in the ass.
“The second problem is our dkp cap is very low so I’m foreseeing most loot going to rolls. With people going to rolls I feel like we’re diluting the true value of a dkp system. All the people who have crappy rolls will be losing dkp all the time, and with a low dkp cap they will never make significant dkp gains to keep them from always competing with rolls on loot. It’s almost like we don’t need a dkp system if we’re going to do it this way because all it’s doing is going back to rolls anyways.”
I feel what would work best “MKP” wise for our guild is to just take the cap off then as an item someone wants drops they can just “buy” the item with however many points they want to put toward it. Such as I would have 16 points right now instead of 5, if something drops and I want to spend 16 points on a new neckpiece then so be it. I feel like this rewards items to the people who raid the most OR donate the most to the guild to help with potions and repair bills. I do see a problem with someone donating thousands of dollars to the guild to “buy” points but that’s either my problem which means I have to farm more and donate or “donation MKP” would need to be regulated in some way.

And finally on a sad note we had some guild drama this weekend resulting in the loss of several good players. I kinda got the “down and dirty” of why people left and I have no idea who is right or wrong and to be honest I don’t really care “why” all the drama started. What sucks is that two of the nicest dudes on “WoW” I have ever met left the guild along with some others. I’m really hoping this all blows over and they come back even though that is looking pretty grim. Drama can suck my root.

Tonight I hope we go in and Wipe out Gruul and Mag since we havn’t done that yet this week and it would be a big bummer to miss out on free loot. Maybe I’ll win a roll for Gruul’s shield or Mag’s chestpiece if they drop.

New Computer

2008-01-16T09:20:00.000-06:00


During our Hydross kill the other day my FPS(Frames per second) hit an all time low of 4fps. I decided it was time to finally pimp my body so I could afford a new computer. After letting several old lady’s use my love stick for about a week (wasn’t too bad some were actually silver foxes) I was able to buy a new comp (Old ladies pay the best if you also decide to sell your body for cash). Speaking of old women naked, this reminds me of a joke which I heard once, and it really isn’t that funny but ill type it up anyways. What’s the difference between an old lady’s boobs and a young chicks boobs? A Navel. Quick bit of advice though, if you plan to sleep with old women for money. If you spread open her "flower" and it reminds you of pulling apart grilled cheese -- you need to get the hell out of there. On my new PC I stood in Shatt and with all my setting turned up max I was averaging about 75 fps which is plenty good for me. I didn’t even have to spend a ton of money on the PC. My old PC was always setting me just a little behind the rest of the raid therefore making my tanking skills look slow and I hate nothing more than looking like a douche or like someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. My biggest “tell” that either my pc is running bad or that I have bad lag is when my rage bar is maxed because my computer isn’t registering the key presses fast enough or because I’m lagged and just sitting still. At this point in time there isn’t much I can do to make my ISP work better, but with the new PC I could already tell a huge difference in my ability to pick up multiple mobs and hold them. I was also amazed at how shitty my previous WoW game play was compared to what it is now. I think with a new PC I can expect to see a boost in my Threat and quicker reaction time on adds. Here is a few before/after screenshots.
Flying out of Shatt Old PC:	Flying out of Shatt New PC:
Looking in SSC Old PC(notice i cant even see Hydross):	Looking in SSC New PC:

Raiding Steps

2008-01-14T11:57:00.000-06:00

I was thinking about our latest ramp up in progression and realized that while we are still a “casual raiding guild” we have taken a “hare-core” approach to the raids we go on. In every raiding guild I have ever been in the rules are the same, and that leads to boss kills. I’m happy to see we have taken these steps and for sh*ts I thought I would list out what has changed in our guild that I feel has lead to our recent success.

1. The guild leadership has decided on a guild course, progression:
In our forums over holiday break it was posted were going to get serious about progression after the new year. Before the new year there was the occasional talk of progression but nothing ever really set in stone and felt a bit “wishy washey”, since progression has been a decided course for the guild we already have 2 new boss kills in a short amount of time. The officer dedication is noticeable. For example “Pre-Gruul kill” we would do like 3 attempts on Gruul and call it a night it took us several weeks to finally kill Gruul. Since the “progression” course was decided we spent 6 hours (19 attempts) on Mag in one night, that’s why we got to kill him and that’s dedication toward progression we need. Can you imagine how many weeks it would take to learn Mag by only giving him 3-4 attempts?

2. The officers pick a boss and we don’t move on to another until that boss is dead:
I feel like this is the best way to progress. You focus your energy and dedication to one specific boss, after several attempts you develop a pattern on that boss till you kill him. Skipping around on bosses trying out several different strategies seems to frustrate people and in the long run is more demoralizing since it wasn’t just 1 boss that kicked your ass, but several different ones.

3. Tutorial videos and strategies are posted on our forums(preparation):
If your part of the raid group you’re expected to have watched these. It’s even brought up in the raid that you better have watched these or you get the boot. From what I can tell almost everyone has been doing their job and studying up for the attempt. In my opinion having seen all the boss’s different spells/cycles and knowing what to expect saves the guild on a countless number of wipes.

4. Development of a core group(most important imo):
If you don’t have the gear you can’t go, that’s the rule. If you’re retarded, you can’t go, that’s the rule. On Mag and Hydross we took a strong core group and both bosses have died on our first night in there. If you look at last week’s Gruul run we broke the “core group rule” and took a lot of non-core people resulting in a disaster and no Gruul kill. I know that sounds harsh, and some of you may be thinking I’m only putting that because atm I’m part of that core group. That’s not the case at all, I have joined other guilds being under geared and not a part of the core group. Yes, it sucks to not go with everyone and celebrate their victories but the chances to get into the core group come along fairly often. A fact in wow is that core raiders will burn out, quit the guild, take vacations, or get the boot for being a retard. If you’re not part of the core group the opportunities will be there, you just have to be ready to take it. Gear yourself up, pick up an occasional heroic with core people to demonstrate you’re not an idiot, let the officers know how much you want a shot and you’re willing to commit to helping any way you can, watch the strat videos even if you’re not in the core group so that when your asked “Want to come to Gruul?” you can say “Yes!” with confidence you’re not going to bring the raid down. In my current guild I have seen the biggest gap of core-group gear to non-core gear that I have ever seen, this tells me that the non-core people are looking for a free 25 man ride to get loot or their toons haven’t been 70 long enough to get fully raid geared yet. With this huge gap in gear, if we start swapping out people core people for non-core people it makes a huge dent in our raid. I have actually been called “selfish” by a non-core raider because they think the core-group is hording all the loot, I think its selfish they think they should get to go after not putting in the work all the other core-raiders have to make boss kills possible. Stopping a 25 man raid from getting a boss kill because you’re under geared but expect to go is “selfish”. We wasted a good raid night on that Gruul run and have yet to get the core group back together to kill him and Mag this week, unless we do it tonight we wasted a whole week of Gruul and Mag loot because we broke the “core group” rule.
When 25 people raid together consistently you get comfortable with that group and build confidence in each other. Then when you go to a raid you no longer have thoughts like “this is going to be a cluster f*ck”. Instead everyone goes in with a positive attitude and a belief that they will succeed, this makes people play better and try harder which leads to less wipes and boss kills.

5. The development of a “dkp” system:
In our guild it’s called “mkp” but it’s the same principle as dkp and the fairest way to distribute loot. You put forth time raiding and build up points, when your item drops you use your “mkp” like money and “buy” the item you want. You are rewarded for the time you put forth wiping and studying up on the boss fights. With a “dkp” system you don’t leave yourself open to losing a roll against someone who is new to the guild/raid group nor do you have to rely on a “loot council” where they give items to the person they feel deserves it and in some cases that isn’t you no matter how much you think the item should go to you.

6. Apply RL pain to people who mess up(optional):
This is one rule we have not applied yet in the guild but I’m still hoping on it. Have everyone go buy a machine that wraps around your finger and plugs into the USB port. The guild master has control of an application that can activate the machine for a specified raid member. When the raid member messes up the guild master flips the switch and your fingers is “skinned” causing incredible pain. Next boss attempt I bet that person doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Even though there is the chance of losing fingers from infection or dying from blood loss I think the risk is well worth the loot and saved gold from repairs.

It’s my personal belief that if you stick to the steps you will have a happy guild and one that does well in progression. The only thing that can keep a guild from progression is breaking the rules or you just don’t have the gear to support that boss yet(which means your picking the wrong boss to focus on). Follow the rules and your progression is determined by how much you raid, even if you don’t raid that much at least you have the satisfaction in knowing that on your raid nights you can expect to do well.

Hydross Down Bitches

2008-01-14T11:35:00.000-06:00

My question last week to “Shouldn’t we kill lurker before Hydross because lurker is supposedly easier?” has been answered. We zone in to kill Hydross Friday, and on the ninth learning attempt we kill him with 16 seconds left before he enrages and 3 seconds left on respawns. I guess it really doesn’t matter which boss we pick to kill as long as we take dedicated geared people. With our Mag kill and now Hydross kill I am really pumped for the guild, I feel like we’ve taken a great step forward lately. I checked our forums this morning and it looks like Lurker is our next target. Even if I hadn’t heard from other people that he is technically “easier” than Hydross I would have little doubt about killing him. Our raids have really stepped up lately and am thankful I get to be a part of the runs.

Friday when I got home I was in a mad scramble to find frost/nature resist gear before the raid started. This has been my biggest “oops” in a while, since I had a few days prior to the raid to be farming the gear. The reason I wasn’t farming the gear is because I honestly just missed the fact I needed it since I wasn’t one of the tanks on the boss himself. With a few freebees given to me from the guild bank and me tearing through the auction house I actually stepped up against the Hydross add’s with 165 nature resist and 155 frost resist (raid buffed). In the grand scheme of possible loot out there, this actually sucks but it wasn’t as bad as I had feared I would end up with and it was obviously enough to get the job done. I have started leveling my blacksmithing again so that I can craft myself the needed gear to make my resists higher and help out our healers more.

I look real g@y in this resist gear.

Speaking of tanking the adds, what a pain in my ass. I was assigned the two adds on the right side and Trelic was assigned the two adds on the left. We would grab our adds and stack them up on the boss so they could be aoe’d down. Seemed easy enough but it was hell holding agro on 4 mobs with all the dps hitting different targets and 1 warrior kept taunting off me for some reason even though he had no resists so that was way confusing.
Besides the adds being a pain in the ass it was a fun fight and I’m happy we got to kill him. Of course nothing dropped I could have used but I was happy to see some deserving people get some nice loot

Saturday night very few of my normal ZA raiders were on so we decided to get a bunch of pugs and give it a shot since the next available ZA night would be after another reset. Eesh what a nightmare, we should have just not gone at all. We killed bear boss but couldn’t make it up the eagle ramp so we called it with just a bear kill. I’m hoping maybe this Tuesday we can give ZA a real shot and beat a boss below the timer and work on the Lynx some more.

The thing about wow is that without body language to see you can never tell is someone is joking or actually being a retard. During our Hydross raid there was this guy complaining that he was being camped and wanted some guildies to come save him. We all said were in a raid and we couldn’t, but he was actually mad we wouldn’t zone out and come help him. I thought he was joking with us at first. The only reason im posting this is because it completely blew my mind. I wasn’t even going to blurr out his name but apparently he is back in the guild or something so I’ll be nice. THIS COMPLETELY BLEW MY MIND
Sorry man - Next time we'll all drop our raid/progression work to come save your ass so you can continue doing whatever stupid shit you were since you are to stupid to avoid being camped.

Our Hydross Kill

Possible Progression this weekend?

2008-01-11T14:52:00.000-06:00

Last night I went to Kara. Lately I have been talking about how much I am burnt on Kara and how I don’t want to go, but the place cannot be avoided. The payout in badges is too much of a reward to skip the place. Our run last night cleared from bottom to top (attumen – prince) killing every boss except beast in 4 hours. You can’t say no to twenty something badges in 4 hours. Four hours of no wiping, no stopping, and in a single night is the perfect way to do Kara and just about the only way I can get pumped up for a run. Nightbane of course did not drop the shield I want, I have pretty much given up on that dream. I’m going basically give up on this item and have the approach that if it drops then sweet, if not then he can shove the shield up his gaping skeletal ass and hopefully it will be lodged in there for all time. I did pick up the tanking cloak off illhoof, which i have always passed to druids in the past. I grabbed it because it has more armor,def,and more importantly stamina than my current cloak but i lose shield block and dodge. I'll wear it for the occasions that require more hp than normal but in most cases ill still be using my trusty devilshark cape.(took screen captures off thottbot so it doesnt show my enchants).

I’m at 50 something badges right now and if I don’t get my tier 4 pants this week (those never drop anymore either) then I’m just going to farm a bunch of heroics / Kara next week and then buy my badge pants. Which are better for me anyways but with 75 badges I could almost replace 1 tanking neck and 1 pvp trinket and I’d rather do that. Badges are constantly burning a hole in my pocket, I’m surprised I haven’t spent the 50 I have.

Tonight the guild plans to attempt Hydross, progression is key and I’m pumped for it. I realize now though I shouldn’t have stayed up till 3am server time last night, going upstairs to discover my kid is awake because she is sick, and then only getting her and myself to sleep for 1.5 hours before waking up for work. Now I’m probably going to be a piss ass during the raid and mumbling to myself the whole time like rain man about how someone keeps doing something wrong and is a retard. I have watched the Hydross tutorials, read the strategies, I’m going to hit up the AH tonight for some frost/nature resist gear because I wasn’t aware that the OT’s on adds needed it. I must have missed that the first time I watched the video or I would have been hunting/crafting my gear several days ago. Apparently the “add” tanks are supposed to have ½ nature gear and ½ frost gear on. I havn’t farmed resist gear since I used to tank Rag and BWL which needed a shit ton of Fire resist, I don’t miss farming resist gear at all but i guess it needs to be done. Now i feel under equipped for this and i hate that.

I am confused on why we chose Hydross over Lurker. Seems like Hydross needs more preparation ( resist gear concerns on my part) and we have already gave Lurker some shots which we were starting to get the hang of him. From what I have heard from further progressed wow friends who are currently in other guilds on the server, Lurker is the easier boss to fight in SSC. Guild moral seemed to hit a high peak with the Mag kill, then dropped again with the Gruul run mess, I would choose whichever boss has the best chance of dying and raising moral. Which it seems this would be Lurker? Of course I will go to any 25 man raid anywhere, and since I’m not one of the people who forms the raids I just go with the flow and do what is expected of a tank. I just felt like voicing my curiosity.

I think this Saturday seems to forming up to be a possible run at ZA again. This place has currently taken hold in my mind as “the place to be”. It will be reset which means another try at beating the timer and possibly getting my guys some better loot. I keep reading that the best way to beat the timer is to actually kill eagle first. He has quick trash mobs and doesnt take that long to kill himself. Once you kill him you have time left over PLUS you are given an extra 10 minutes. Let’s just say it takes 12 minutes to clear trash to eagle (which it doesn’t I’m just padding the time), and then another 7 minutes to kill the boss (also padding my time here) that means we beat him in the timer. We receive 2x the loot, have 1 minute left over (distribute loot), and gain 10 minutes. That leaves us with a cushy 30 minute timer for bear. My group has missed the bear timer by about 1-2 minutes consistently. With an extra 10 minutes we even leave ourselves room for a wipe due to an unlucky taunt resist and still killing him within the timer. This Saturday I guess we can take a vote on which boss to attempt first. Right now im 50-50 either way since we have only just killed eagle 1x, but then again now that everyone knows it, he seems like a cake walk and an eagle kill in the timer means almost assuredly a bear kill in the timer. Beating the timer means progression which always is a good thing. Guess we’ll see what happens, I just hope I’m not back Monday cussing that we wiped on everything 10x or we didn’t even go.

Eagle Dead, Gruul is not.

2008-01-10T13:46:00.000-06:00

Tuesday night our guild had the plans to one shot HKM, on shot Gruul, and then move to Mag to hopefully kill them all in one night and spend our other 25 man raiding nights on progression. Sweet plan, dig the idea, other guilds do it so why shouldn’t we. The night turned out to be a huge bust, we had 7-8 new people in the run and I don’t know if it’s rude to say it but I think that really wrecked us. When our core group goes, 1 shot HKM 1 shot gruul. When we start letting that many under geared people go it really causes a huge problem. 3-4 new people, I don’t see that as a problem, 7-8 was just too many. We wiped on HKM several times, and couldn’t kill Gruul, and that’s just insane for our guild at this point. Telling people they are under geared or there is no room for them sucks but stressing out the main core group and pissing regulars off sucks more. I’m not going to bitch about it anymore but Honors does a better job of explaining it than I would, as normal I would just rant, cuss, and threaten to kill someone if I kept typing about it. Honors thoughts on the wipe

On a better note group 2 has finally killed eagle in ZA. We went in to beat the timer on the bear which we almost did but because of an unlucky wipe on the final pull before bear it costs us the timer. Once we have the eagle down for sure we’ll probably be using him to beat the timer, gain extra minutes, then head over to bear to beat him on timer as well. I really look forward to seeing that happen and the extra loot for people. I have a hard time holding the group together in ZA because each boss is only dropping 1 epic, and we still have wipes so people get pissed about the repair bills. Two epic drops per boss would really help encourage people to stick around in ZA I think. If I we can’t beat the timer anytime soon that means I might lose some of my group, in my guild that leaves for slim pickings of people who are geared enough to be replacements. If that happens what do I do then, go outside the guild for people?

Eagle Dead!

Eagle Loot

So far this week I have had a pretty successful run in arena’s. I’m sure this weekend I’ll be doing more and hopefully it stays on a positive note. The more I practice and get advice from other warriors I can see noticeable improvements in my pvp play. I intervene and disarm/hamstring people on my healer regularly now, I taunt pets off my healer, and through gear improvements I’m hitting harder now. I wasn’t learning enough just doing my 10 games per week, by upping my games per week I’m getting the much needed practice, and it’s paying off. It’s still my hope to have at least 1 winning arena team.

Sorry this post is a little short but I’m sick as a dog atm and don’t feel much like typing. Maybe some shots at lynx boss tonight or Kara for badges (would much rather work on lynx but I guess I have to do what the mass wants).

Arnea's so far this week
(thats fine f**kers laugh at my score's, you wont laugh when i find you and r*pe your an*s)

Is 6 hours worth a mag progression kill? You bet.

2008-01-07T14:36:00.000-06:00

The guild I’m in (Mal Katai) is often stressed by some of the officers/GM as “casual raiding” but Friday night was nothing but a hardcore progression boss attempt, and it was great. It reminded me of my old hardcore pre-BC guild learning BWL, and I eat that shit up. When you zone into a dungeon with a guild that has the instance on farm it’s fun to see a boss die for the first time. When you go in an instance to kill a boss that nobody has ever done before, learn the fight together, and then kill him it’s so much more rewarding. I’m so glad I was able to raid that night.

My job on Friday was to tank the Warlock on “cube 4” and shield bash his spells, easy enough. He didn’t really hit that hard even when he was at “max” power with the warlocks of 1-3 down. After my lock was down I would go hit up Honorshammer (Pally Tank on Mag) with commanding shout, demo shout & thunderclap on mag. I was also in command of “Cube 4 phase 2” control. The clicking of the cubes is not hard, you wait to see Mag cast his fire spell then you click the cube. Unfortunately this is where we had the hardest problem of the night, but I can proudly say that only 1x in 19 attempts was I ever late on my cube click (the one time I messed up was because I caught a really crappy bounce so a tick of fire got through, which 1 tick really isn’t that bad so not much harm done).

Yes you read that right, 19 attempts roughly 6 hours learning Mag (keep in mind we had no one but 1 guy in the raid who had ever done Mag before, so if you’re thinking to yourself “noobs” you can go F*ck yourself). This is why I say we were hardcore on Friday night. We only lost 2-3 people to wife agro / people needing to sleep for work which is understandable. People hung in there through the wipes, frustration, kept their cool and I can say I was really proud to be a part of that team. After wipe 18 most of the people said they have to go but it came up on vent to give it just one more shot then we’ll call it a night. Good call on the one more shot, we were able to defeat the boss on this last attempt.

The token for my chest piece fell which I decided I actually would like after comparing it to what I had. It wouldn’t really give me any extra stamina but would add some other extra which I felt was worth the MKP. Since several of us have the same amount of MKP it went to rolls. At some point my loot rolling mojo has worn off because I rolled a freaking 3. That’s the first tanking loot I have seen in a 25 man in weeks, and I roll a f$#king 3?! WTFDKDJFLKJSLFJ:SDFDFSFDLKD!!!!. Gruul’s ass better drop that shield or leg token for me this week.

Even though I didn’t score any loot I was still happy to be there. Mag down and I think it has been decided we are going after Hydross next. Any boss the officers would have picked would have been cool as long as we’re trying to progress I couldn’t be happier.

The chestpiece off Mag i hope to get

Us after the mag kill

ZA Lynx Boss Attempted

2008-01-03T13:10:00.000-06:00

Last Night,
HKM = DEAD
GRUUL = DEAD
DPS Sh*t mostly dropped, no new pants and more importantly no shield for me. My DKP is capped since nothing will drop for me to spend it on.
LOOT FRUSTRATION = MAX

The good news is that we got together and did a 25 man raid. I really enjoy raiding (except Kara, at this point I’m so sick of that instance) More good news is that we’re doing Mag on Friday, looking forward to it even though there really isn’t anything on him that I would put dkp towards(possibly the polearm for pvp).

After Gruul I formed up a ZA group.
Disappointing news is we wiped on the trash therefore eliminating a shot at the timer and double the loot. Once on the bear a short “nightmare” began and we wiped about 5x. One attempt it was my fault, I tagged the boss before the druid OT did and I had agro on the wrong phase. Therefore causing me to get the wrong debuff. Druid taunted off me also getting the debuff, in the end causing a quick wipe. My stupid fault, said my apologies, boss reset & retry. Several druid taunt resists later and bad silences resulting in druid deaths = trash mobs and boss reset. That was a kick in the nuts, two weeks before we had the boss almost beat in the count down time. I mentioned on vent that were getting worse in this place and I actually really meant it, I take that on myself also, I messed up once so I’m not without blame. Overall it was blamed on us being rusty to ZA. That maybe exactly the problem, which says to me less Kara more ZA. Some people left the raid from a mixture of it being late and frustration for others. After a short time I found more guildies willing to come which was good news, I would have been very disappointed to of left off on such a bad note. We worked our way through trash and 1 shotted bear boss. That was a good feeling, but still it wasn’t an “accomplishment” since we have already done this several times, I’m dying for some progression.

After bear boss and my need to progress I pulled enough favors from people to stay up late and we headed off to check out the lynx boss. Trash to him is a little longer than bear or eagle but nothing crazy to deal with. At first we were all hanging around the back door (*snicker* back door) of his temple for like 15 minutes not realizing we had to work our way around it. After we figured out we were retarded we were standing in front of lynx shortly after. Along the way to lynx we also found an npc needed for a quest which i picked up a +15 stam gem(pretty nice for free). After 3 attempts at the boss we had him at 50%, but by that point it was 3am server time and everyone was beat. I’m pumped about the Lynx attempts and honestly I feel like ditching any Kara runs in favor of ZA. I’m really glad that what started out as a nightmare run was turned into a satisfying attempt at ZA for me. I realize other people feel like not killing a boss and having a repair bill = fail, but that’s just not the case. There is always a learning curve, and last night I think the group pulled together and did a great job. I'll wipe on a boss all night long if i feel like everyone is still trying and not giving up. Thats more fun to me than killing easy bosses over and over again.

Back

2008-01-02T11:06:00.000-06:00

First off,
Happy New Year everyone! I also would like to add if you have a better arena team than me I hope you choke. This holiday break there was no real raiding going on except Kara so I worked on my PVP pretty much every day. I ran BG’s till my eyes bled and then worked on 2v2 with a pally in my guild till i coudlnt see strait. I think this is the longest stretch of time I have been pvp spec in the last 6 months and its been a mix of fun and frustration. My arena experiences overall haven’t gone very well.

My 2v2 I have chalked up as a team of self improvement and learning. My and Aztk (holy pally) put in about 40 games this weekend of trying different strategies. My 2v2 was around 1560 but now sits at 1440’sh, but I feel like me and Aztk have learned a lot about using line of sight and coordinating pummel/stuns. After a few more weeks of hardcore practice like this I think we can expect to see some true results and maybe a respectable rating.

3v3 started out really well last week, we raised our rating to about 1560 from 1490. It was Me , Oslo(Marks Hunter), and Dirtyoldman(holy pally). Dirty(feral druid) jumped in for a few games and we lost about as many as we won with him leaving us still with a rating of 1560. Then Dirty got his lock on the team (23 resil = not a happy raydz). Ever seen that commercial where Walmart has the falling prices and the money just keeps falling off the board? That’s how I saw our rating. I wanted to light a stick of dynamite and swallow it. I didn’t participate in the games he used his lock on because I knew it was a horrible idea, so it was Oslo, Dirtyoldman, and the lock. The night finished off at 1480, I can’t stress how important resilience is. This week we already got 3v3 games in but those didn’t go well either and it was Oslo, Dirtyoldman, and I. It was so frustrating because we kept playing teams of “rival” this or “duelist” that. Most games it was a flat creaming. Even though several times we only lost 10-13 points per game we kept playing the same teams 3-4 times. It was just insanity, after about 15 games we decided it was too painful to continue. Rating = 1458. We’re going to do some more games later this week or weekend and hopefully get teams more in our league.

The 5v5 team actually came through pretty nice. We went 6-4 for the night raising our rating from 1420 to 1444. Yes I realize it’s still a terrible rating but at least we showed improvement. There isn’t much really to talk about here except our lock did a respec after our first 3 games were a loss and now he is a dps sponge, making it really hard for the opposing team to kill him now. I think it really made the difference since we won all but 1 game after that. Thanks for the respec Splinter!

I had the badges for some new dps bracers that I have been lacking, so I bought them but still need the +str enchant. They were really needed for my grinding set. I’m starting to go broke again and every little bit of added dps helps with farming.

Tonight I’ll be picking up my pvp neckpiece, I put about 14k worth of bg’s in this weekend for it. I can’t wait to have it since it’s such a huge upgrade for me.

I will also be picking up this item for 1000 arena points, it’s also another seriously needed upgrade since I am currently equipping the x-bow from Attumen for my pvp set (yeah retarded I know).

I ran Kara last night from Attumen to Curator and I have to say, I’m pretty burnt on the place. The badges of course are nice and always needed so I’ll keep going but I look forward to 25 man raids so much more now.

This Friday the guild has set aside as day to concentrate on Mag until he is dead, awesome idea in my opinion. The rules have been set, were not leaving until he is dead or until everyone dies in RL at their computers. This is the kind of direction I think we need to set if we do plan to progress. Good call on this officers, can’t wait to kill him.

No Free Time Lately

2007-12-27T16:07:00.000-06:00

Well I think I was actually kind of retarded to think I would get to play as much as I wanted to over Christmas break.

Friday I was home with the baby who had an ear infection which means I didn’t get to do anything but hear her scream and cry. I didn’t get to play till that night and not for very long = nothing really accomplished.

Saturday I was forced to go shopping by my girlfriend, along with millions of other people crammed into tiny ass stores in the mall. There was a point in Bath and Body works while standing in line this old lady who I have never met before thought it would be a good idea to tell me about all the lotions and candles she is getting and for which family members. She kept pulling lotions and sh*t out of her basket to see what I thought of the scents, it was a nightmare from which I couldn’t awake. I hate that place to begin with, I’m not a fan of all the crazy smells, I seriously thought of slamming my face against the wall till I went unconscious. Very little wow played on this day, just old people who look like the crypt keeper shoving scented oils in my face, that lady has no idea how close she was to getting choked out.

Sunday morning I got to play a little bit but then it was off for a Christmas party. Which I did have fun at so I can’t complain about that, but no wow that night either.

Monday I was finally able to relax and get some game time in. I did some 2v2 arena matches which bumped me up to 1560 from 1470, so that was a lot of fun. It’s been a while since I have consistently won in any arena matches. I also got a lot of battle grounds done, but sadly alliance in my battle group almost always lose every match. When horde win it’s a landslide, when alliance actually does win it always feels like we just barely squeaked a win in.
I logged off for Christmas Eve with the family but I did log back on again when I went home. I did some more arena’s with my 3v3 team which went 5-5. After arena’s we went and raided Tauren Mill for the hell of it, it turned into a pretty good sized PvP war, some of the most fun I have had in a long time.

Christmas I didn’t touch the computer and just hung out with the family.

I was able to pick up my chest piece for arena’s which is a huge upgrade to some blue lvl 70 Marshall gear I was wearing.

I think it was last Friday night we went into ZA and had the bear boss to 30% when the timer ran out, I think if we had a mage in the group the added dps plus a very stable cc could have made a huge difference. I don’t know which of the dps in the group I would like to replace with a mage though because everyone did a really good job. Hopefully on the next attempt we can beat the timer, thats a goal of mine.

The guild hasn’t raided Gruul for like two weeks, hopefully we can get in there this week, but it’s looking kind of iffy with the holidays and every ones schedules are so sporadic.

Sorry I haven’t kept up with the blog but like many other people I have been extremely busy around the holidays, I’m betting I don’t get another blog post up until next Wednesday. I know you all miss me, and I know you get lonely and depressed when you have nothing new to read from me. To help deal with these emotions just picture me in all my epic glory being your friend. Then I want you to realize you’re just dreaming and I’m way to cool to be your friend =).

Happy Holidays

2007-12-20T09:28:00.000-06:00

*X files music plays*
Last night on wow I told someone I was going to flatten their tires because they wanted to go to sleep instead of heal in my Kara group. This morning I woke up and I had a flat tire.
Coincidence?
Karma?
I’m not sure, but I do know that my neighbor has a back tire up on a block because I had to steal his. Wonder what he did to deserve such an unlucky hit to his Karma.

In my previous post on Monday I had mentioned that the Kara groups were reorganized to help some of the other struggling groups. My group was assigned on the forums and two of the people on the list couldn’t make the Kara runs so we subbed in two other guys (both new to my group), this put our group with five new people and five regulars. I am happy to say that my new group ran the instance fine. Everyone paid attention, learned the fights, was on time, and basically didn’t do anything stupid. We cleared through Prince but still have Netherspite and Nightbane up because it was getting late, hopefully we’ll find time to go back in there. Our run did take a little longer than normal but that’s totally understandable because we had to explain the fights to some people. To all the new guys that came, good job and thanks for coming.

When these new Kara groups were reformed some of the regular Kara runners (Ones from my group, I’m not sure about other groups) were accidently left out of the re-order. This has lead to a lot of hurt feelings and people just being pissed off. When these people tried to get back into groups whether mine or other peoples supposedly they were just told to bad you’re out of the rotation. If this truly happened that’s a shame because they worked hard to help get the Kara groups successful in the first place. Now that my Kara group is pretty much done for the week I’m already getting whispers from new people and old people alike about who gets to go next week. I have no idea now, were the reorders supposed to be a permanent thing or were they to just expose people to the fights so they can learn and go do it in their own groups? There are a few posts on our forums about the re-order and pissed off people with no real answer as to what we are supposed to do. I’m pretty sure some of the officers read my blog so someone tell me what to do, and save me from having to hurt people’s feelings. I have mentioned that I used to be a GM before, this is one of the reasons I gave it up, dealing with pissed off people, telling people they are out of a group, and managing a ton of different personalities is not something I miss. I feel both sorry for the officers who I think are catching crap from people but they were trying to do a good thing by helping out the other groups and also the people who were left out for not having done anything wrong.

My suggestion is to tell everyone F*ck Kara let’s do 25 man runs 4 nights a week and go to Kara in your free time. At some point if we really want to progress and become a raiding guild we have to do this right? I realize we have more people than the 25 who will get a spot, but if you are left out of the 25 man it’s probably a gear issue. If that’s the case then make a Kara group and go while the other guys are in the 25 man. If I’m one of the guys left out the 25 man raid what happens? I’ll go farm badges in Kara till a spot opens up in the raid. If a spot doesn’t ever open up for me in the raid for weeks on end what then? I’ll go kill one of the tanks in Real Life, bingo! spot available, couldn’t be more simple. With the new year coming up maybe it’s a good idea to make the transition? Or is that even the direction the guild would want to go? I hope it is, I don’t want to farm Kara forever, let’s really dig into some 25 man content and experience more of what WoW has to offer.

Anyways this will probably be my last post till next Wednesday , I won’t have time with the holidays to write anything. Mostly all I do is threaten people with beatings anyways, which if Santa hears me I won’t get anything for Christmas and u know I’m a loot whore so it’s probably just better that I don’t post so close to the holidays.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

Santa's Epic Loot

Stupid new shield

2007-12-17T13:13:00.000-06:00

We’ll after another Nightbane kill and no shield I decided I’m just going to buy the heroic badge shield and continue to wait for an upgrade to drop for me from Gruul or Nightbane. It’s not fair for me to horde my badges while using a crappy blue shield that can easily be replaced. I do hate everythign about this shield though, the fact i had to "buy" it with badges, the graphic is g@y, and its not as good as the shields i have been wanting. After purchasing the shield I have one blue item left to replace, which is my cape. One more Kara clear and I will have enough badges to upgrade that as well. Tonight I think we might be trying Mag again, which would be pretty fun so I hope we do. He drops the T4 chest piece but it’s not really a huge upgrade for me so I would roll on it, but not spend dkp points. He also has a nice polearm that I wouldn’t mind setting myself up with, but again not a huge upgrade so I wouldn’t spend dkp on it, just roll for it.

If Mag doesn’t happen tonight then I think my group might try to run ZA. I’m really itching to beat the bear under the timer, and we still need to get an eagle kill. I would like to see my group start dedicating more time to ZA than we do in Kara, but I know a lot of people still want loot from Kara and who can argue with the free badges, but at some point ZA needs to be beaten.

As far as Kara goes this week it looks like the guild has reorganized the groups because groups 3 and 4 have been struggling. I don’t mind subbing people in and out of different groups to help them learn the boss fights but from what I have heard some of the guys in those other groups cause a lot of wipes from either not paying attention or f*cking around. I’m down as the “Raid Leader” for the new group 3, if people start goofing off even after warnings then they get the /boot. It looks like I am lucky though, I didn’t get any of the guys who I have heard complaints about so my run should still go as smooth as normal and hopefully get a few guys some new gear.

I picked up my gladiator legs after I got enough honor points this weekend. My pvp set still needs a ton of work but I am one step closer. On the arena home front, my 3v3 team (Oslo- hunter, Dirty- resto druid, and I -arms warrior) went 8-7. We gained 1 point after 15 games. Overall we’ve done 39 games and have a 1505 rating. That’s an average of about 1 point every 8 games. Let’s say the rating to hope for is 1850 which I think is the rating needed to buy season three weapons, at this pace we will only have to play another 2760 games =P. I am happy with my 3v3 right now though, we seem like were clicking better, so I’m just waiting for that point when we all “mesh” and we start doing really well. My 5v5 on the other hand got owned, we went 3-7. This week though it was more to just get people their weekly arena points. I’ll keep doing the 5v5 for practice but I think I’m going to hang my hopes of a high ranking arena team on my 3v3, I hope one day that pans out to a good score.

I missed my arena pvp chest by 65 points this week so I’ll have to wait an extra week to get that. I’m going to try to get my pvp bracers this week so I can at least put forth one new item to my pvp set since I can’t grab the chest piece.

Here are the two items I picked up. I’m going to have the shield enchanted tonight before any raiding goes down.

PvP Tourney = Good times

2007-12-17T10:24:00.000-06:00

“This weekend were having a sort of “guild pvp” event, I’m looking forward to it. Should be a lot of fun, monday ill probably post something about how everyone in my guild is a bunch of cheaters and hackers because i didnt win the tourney.” - Posted by me Friday, December 14, 2007

Turns out I was absolutely correct. I did horrible in the pvp tourney.
Why so bad? The only answer is that in my guild I’m surrounded by cheaters and hackers.
Couldn’t they just be better than me? Pfft, not possible.

The only logical assumption is that somehow everyone in my guild found a way to hack the wow mainframe altering their characters stats allowing them to beat me. While I realize this would be a near impossible task for the common gamer, it was obviously carried out and successful to sedate their lust for glory and gold prizes....Okay, I will admit that there is a slight possibility that it’s because a lot of these guys are good and I still have a lot to learn when it comes to pvp as a warrior. I’m still leaning toward my theory of pro-hackers risking jail time over a 300 gold prize though.

During the tourney me and dirty(resto druid) faced off vs a druid/rogue team. They beat us knocking us out of the race for 2v2 teams. What sucks for the druid/rogue team is that they are both in my Kara group. You bitches can kiss your loot goodbye for the next three weeks. “What’s that you say? Oh my goodness did I accidently give that loot you won to someone else? That’s a shame. My apologies” .
The 2v2 tourney was won by an arms warrior and holy pally who defeated a team of two locks.

During the 1v1 I did a little better but was beaten by Oslo a hunter who is also in my 3v3 arena team. It was actually a pretty good fight, if I had just gotten off that last execute it might have turned the fight in my favor. I guess the extra stamina buff you had from hacking into wow paid off, an anonymous letter has been sent to wow explaining what you did, grats on your jail time.
The 1v1 was won by a demo lock vs a rogue but I don’t remember his spec. Locks are just badass, it was demonstrated yesterday over and over.

The 3v3 consisted of Me, Dirty, and Nightwin (same rogue who beat us in the 2v2), we lost our first match, instantly putting us out of the 3v3 race. Not much I can say to this except, Dirty and Nightwin’s fault.
The 3v3 was won by the same arms warrior and holy pally who won the 2v2, they had a rogue as their third. They beat a team of Druid, Druid, Frostmage for the win.

Overall it was seriously a ton of fun and I hope we do it again sometime. Good job on organizing it all Oslo! Next time i'm going to get in some practice before hand.

You're A Vegetable - WTF DOES THAT MEAN

2007-12-14T10:52:00.000-06:00

So im here at working listening to the radio.
Michael Jackson comes with the song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'".
Now I like some songs by Michael, but i dont know wtf some of the lyrics mean in this song. I'm tired and i guess crabby from my long night, crabby enough that these stupid ass lyrics are actually pissing me off.

I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable
Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable
You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable
They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

WTF does the above mean. Him singing this in his high pitched voice just grated on me for some reason and irritated me enough to post about it.

Gruul --> Mag --> Kara = Another late night.

2007-12-14T10:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got home from work to test out my new ISP. It worked, I was on WoW and Vent at the same time, latency was around 250-350, that’s good enough for me to be happy. I gave my new router a little loving last night to let her know how much I appreciate her, she told me I’m the best she ever had. Hopefully this leads to a long lasting relationship of happiness for both parties. My quest now is to get a new computer, but that won’t happen for a few months with the holidays here and my money going out the window for gifts to family and friends.

Last night the plan was to Kill Gruul, Kill Mag, form up a group and go finish up Kara. About 50% of these plans were executed successfully. Gruul died in one shot, he dropped the token for my pants. I bid 5dkp on them but didn’t win them since someone decided to go negative, since I just got the pants of curator I wasn’t going to try to match that. This was the same druid that beat me on a roll for the t4 glove token the first time they dropped, this is the same druid that beat me on a roll for the t4 helm the first time it dropped, this is the same druid that is going to have four flat tires this weekend. Actually I don’t know how old this guy is, if he isn’t old enough to drive then…this is the same druid who will have 2 flat bicycle tires. Maybe he doenst have a bicycle? I'll rip the soles off his shoes, thats right i thought of everything.

After killing Gruul we headed over to Mag, we couldn’t quite get the right makeup that people were saying we needed but we went ahead anyways. Which is totally cool with me, I’d rather wipe on a boss and begin the learning process than disappoint people and decide to not attempt him. I used to be a guild leader/raid organizer and keeping people motivated and happy about progression isn’t an easy thing. If you don’t raid you upset the people who want to progress, if you go in with the wrong make up and wipe you hear BS from people about how we shouldn’t have even tried and then it’s harder to motivate those people to go next time. Raistilan a mage in our guild is shouldering the raid progression, just wanted to give a quick shout to him about what a good job he is doing. I don’t envy you, it’s a pain in the ass with little reward. Thanks for organizing it all.

As far as the Mag fight goes my job is pretty simple. I run in and tank the 3’d warlock, as each warlock dies the others get stronger. It’s a dps race to kill the warlocks, so when the fight starts the guy on the first warlock has the hardest time controlling agro because everyone is balls out dps go go go. With me being 3’d I have plenty of time to get agro and even with warlock 1 and 2 dead the mob really still isn’t even hitting hard. I just have to interrupt his death coils and mending spells, last night I think I most likely did have the easiest job. When my mob died I ran around taunting infernals off healers until Mag was released and honors starts MT him (Honors our pally tank was chosen to MT him last night. He now has a Sh*t ton of hp, grats man and gj!). One of the classes we were short on last night was locks so there wasn’t enough fears/banishes to go around so that’s why I picked up the infernals, better smacking on me than a tree. When Mag pops it was my job to toss up a thunderclap, demo shout, and hit honors with a commanding shout. That was also easy, I think the hardest part of my “Mag fight” experience is to watch the “cube” I am assigned to. This part is where Mag starts casting this fire spell and the five cubes around him have to be simultaneously clicked, also not that hard and I got my “clicks” off just fine. Except the time I was dead, that made it a little bit difficult but I had said I was dead in vent and someone covered me. We didn’t get Mag down but at least we learned something. On our final attempt i was the last guy standing, just for fun i grabbed mag and tanked him against the wall to see what it was like. Suprisingly i actually lived a long ass time with no heals, long enough for people on vent to ask how i was still alive. I should have popped shield wall to see just how long i could last. After getting a taste of tanking Mag i hope one day i get a shot to MT him. After switching some of my gems around i noticed in my kara raid i have 17k hp, i wish i would have paid attention during the 25 man raid.

The guild has decided to concentrate on Mag until he is dead then we move off to SSC, good call in my opinion.

After Mag my Kara group formed up and we headed in. It was already late so the whole time I was hoping it would get called so I could go to bed. Like I said in a previous post, I can’t say no to a raid so I stuck around. We killed Illhoof, shade and the chess event and that’s when people decided it was late and we should call it. I think tonight we’ll probably go in and finish the rest of Kara off. I have decided that if Nightbane doesn’t drop my shield I’m going to use my badges and buy the heroic one for now. It’s not that great of an upgrade but I can’t keep putting it off hoping for a free drop. Yes I realize that as soon as I buy it a shield will drop off Gruul or Nightbane.

This weekend were having a sort of “guild pvp” event, I’m looking forward to it. Should be a lot of fun, monday ill probably post something about how everyone in my guild is a bunch of cheaters and hackers because i didnt win the tourney.

I am sick

2007-12-12T09:55:00.000-06:00

Wow the plate legs off Curator weren’t just a myth. They ended up dropping last night and being the only plate tank I picked them up. I also bought a new pair of bracers with my heroic badges last night, which I needed since Attumen refuses to drop his. I like the heroic bracers better anyways so f*ck you attumen i dont want your sh*t drops anyways. This leaves me with about 40’ish badges and I’ll probably pick up either the cape or shield next depending on what Nightbane and Gruul offer up. What sucks about the legs I got last night is that I’m not sure how much $$ to put into them because most likely in a few weeks I’ll have the t4 ones from Gruul. I’ll probably be a cheap ass and put the +9 stam gems in them and maybe not even attach the +30 stam leg armor for right now.

The last few days my ISP has really sucked hard core because we had a little bit of an ice storm which froze all the lines around my house. If you will remember from previous posts if I have any type of “wet” weather my connection goes to hell real fast instantly driving me crazy. I don’t know why it’s like that it just is, no matter how much I yell and scream at the phone company. We’ll now my ISP is totally down while we have this icy weather so I decided I’m going to drive up to Dirty’s house and use his ISP for Gruul last night. He is a RL friend and doesnt mind me bumming off his connection but also lives 30 mins away. Yes, you are correct, I am sick, i care about raiding that much. I packed up my computer, drove 30 minutes, raided till 1:30 am, packed up and then drove 30 mins home. I feel like I laid down in bed, and instantly the alarm went off for me to go to work. As always I’m writing this post while only being half awake, like I said…I have a sickness. My original plan was to just go bum his ISP for an hour to do Gruuls then pack up go home and get a good night sleep. We’ll my regular Kara group formed up after Gruuls and when it comes to going on a raid I can’t say no. When I got home a little after 2am my girl friend was NOT a happy camper, I wish she would be a little more appreciative that I stayed up all night to fight the forces of evil so that our child can grow up in a future not over run by the forces of undead. She didn’t see it that way though, apparently I’m just a dumbass. That’s fine if she is gonna be all mean to me, I’ll just have to cut her off from the old love muscle. Wonder how she is gonna like those apples.

Before Kara last night we formed up and went in to Gruuls layer. We had A LOT of new people so the run wasn’t as smooth as normal, but we also didn’t have all the regulars on so trying to teach new people a dungeon is better than not going in my opinion. My normal mob to tank on HKM is Olm the Summoner. He is my new nightmare since the last patch change making fear no longer an agro wipe. Before the patch he would be tanked to the left and against the wall of the main entry hall, he would fear you and then switch targets to either his enslaved fell hound or to the other tank. He never moved really from this spot, and was about as simple as it could be. Now with the non-wiping agro he follows the tank around that he feared, and is just a huge pain in the ass needing to be chased after and taunted back to his starting position. Last night two times in a row I got Olm into position and then was feared directly into the mage mobs aoe. I died leaving Olm in a bad spot and with only 1 other tank on him. We had to reset HKM about 3 times before we actually killed him. We attempted Gruul 2-3 times getting him down to 11% but then on our last wipe we got respawns so it was called. I’m not sure when we are going back in to kill him but I hope I’m on for it, I really would like the t4 legs and the shield he drops. I know Honors and Lan both have their eyes on the shield along with me so the plan is to hack the database storing DKP so that it looks like I’m the only one with enough to bid on the shield. Obviously im joking, of course I wouldn’t ever do anything like that……

Tonight I don’t think Gruul is on the schedule so it will probably just be a run to finish up Kara, I hope it goes smooth so I can get to bed at a decent hour.

w00t!

2007-12-12T09:08:00.000-06:00

Going to type up a normal blog but i thought this was funny so i'll link it / copy it here.
Read about it on yahoo here

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007
Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you've selected hasn't found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it's now been awarded—might just improve its chances. This year's winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community.
Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:
1. w00t (interjection) expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay" w00t! I won the contest! Submitted by: Kat from Massachusetts on Nov. 30, 2005 23:18

L2Math!

2007-12-06T10:22:00.000-06:00

The statement that plate tanking pieces drop off of Curator, Attumen, or a shield from Nightbane is a cruel lie. Tuesday the Kara group I am in did a clear from Attumen through Prince. We left Nightbane, Illhoof, and Netherspite for Wednesday, which we went back and did. So a full Kara clear and no loot but a dps ring for me, which I only took because no one else wanted it. I’m sitting at 60 badges right now, I am capable of going and buying a shield but what I really want to use my badges for is the tanking legs then a cape.

Normally in previous posts I would go on a rant and say mean and hurtful things which were probably unfair to these bosses and possibly hurt their feelings because they didn’t drop my loot. I’m going to rise above that this week, stay calm, stay optimistic that next week they will drop my loot, and not say anything harsh about my good friends Attumen ,Curator , and Nightbane…..but…F$*k you creators of AtlasLoot, leading me onto to believe that these drops have a 15% drop rate let alone even exist. I think one of you bastards forgot a period somewhere and it’s supposed to be .15%. The calculations on that mod can kiss my beanbag, there is no way they are correct. If the guy who wrote Atlasloots is reading this, drop me a line, I’ll find you a math tutor. You all should be Tbagged for all eternity for the frustration you have caused millions of wow players with your blatently false calculations. Enjoy Hell F*$kers.
*Yes I realize these drops all do really exists and yes I’m sure the drop rate is spot on I’m just venting and being an ass, Atlasloots is a kickass mod that I wouldn’t ever get rid of and i really appreciate the work those guys did to provide a free mod like that.*

Tonight we plan to raid on Mag which will be really fun and I’m looking forward to it. If we happen to down him then awesome, if not I want to see him just for the experience to say I have been there. At some point though I hope we pick a boss and focus on him till he is dead, much the same thing we did with Gruul. I don’t even care which boss the guild picks, just to have another boss kill notch in my belt would be great.

We had two of our highest dps’ers in the guild leave the other day because we didn’t raid enough, the mage who left I was sad to see go because he really kicked a lot of ass and was an all around nice guy. With them leaving it got me thinking of my thoughts on if we raid enough. Right now we do 1 night of Gruul and then 1 night of progression raiding whether it be Lurker, Void Reaver, or now Mag. That’s only 2 nights a week of 25 man raiding. Although I have to factor in 2 nights for Kara badge farming (it’s certainly not loot farming these days /grumble), and then 2 nights for ZA. 6 days a week of raiding is more than enough for me, it actually leaves me with not enough free time as it is. So Id rather not see us picking up another raid night, I’m happy right where we are. Maybe if we learn the Mag fight fairly easy we could wrap him up with HKM and Gruul in one night as other raiding guilds have done, since they are both pretty short instances. Leaving us still with 1 night for a 25 man progression night. So anyways while I hate to see these guys go I hope we don’t pick up more nights of 25 man raiding, at least not until ZA has been cleared.

Loot Train pushes onward

2007-12-03T17:32:00.000-06:00

The loot train chugged onwards this week which made me pitch a happy tent. For starters I grabbed my season 3 helm. I needed a new pvp helm badly, since the helm I was using before was some blue POS with no resilience. Illhoof dropped a nice mace that I will use as an offhand when grinding, and the ZA bear boss dropped some new tanking boots which were a really nice upgrade with loads more stamina. Here are all three items.

Friday evening Oslo (beast hunter), Dirty (resto druid), and I (arms warrior at the time) decided to try our luck in 3v3 arena. Our luck was not good. We went 3-7 for the night, getting owned pretty hardcore in several matches. What sucks about week 1 of a new season is that everyone is set back to a 1500 rating, 80% of the teams we faced totally out geared us. I was on the verge of getting pissed off but my other 2 team mates kept reminding me that it’s a gear issue and we really shouldn’t even be playing teams like this yet. I wasn’t getting mad at my teammates; I was just getting mad at losing. I hate to lose. I held my frustration in check, took the lumps, and we’ll get about 300 arena points for this week’s games.

*Off wow topic for a second*
Speaking about how much I hate to lose, yesterday (Sunday) I had some family/ friends out. They brought with them Mario Olympics, a newish game for the Wii system. I have a Wii but I really never play it, I just bought one because everyone else wanted one. My little cousins are between 7-12 years old, and wanted to play me. I’m 27 and grown up enough to realize that even if I could beat them in a game I should let them win and laugh and have a good time with it…..pffft F$*k that, I beat their asses and it was amazing fun. Who can beat me playing the crocodile character (who isn’t even that fast ill point out) in track and field? No one is the answer. I didn’t only kick ass on the little kids, I had friends my age over that I smoked also. I didn’t take the gold medal in every single event but the ones I took silver in were the gay events (such as the trampoline or dream racing) that I didn’t want to win anyways (That’s not true, obviously I wanted to win every one this is just my way of dealing with it)… Anyways back to wow.

I can’t express how happy I am at the latest changes to devastate. As a prot warrior I can effectively grind for money now. I can even grind better as prot than I can when I’m spec’d for arms pvp. This works out nicely since I’m prot 5-6 days per week. The new offhanded weapon helps with my grinding, that’s the reason I rolled for it (I was the only one who wanted it anyways). Toss on dps gear, duel wield, spam devastate and execute, then move onto the next mob. It doesn’t work as well as a beast master hunter but it gets the job done much better.

Last night we killed Gruul again, I had to deal with some lag issues which always sucks my balls but HKM and Gruul went down on one shot each again. It’s amazing that such a short time ago we were wiping endlessly, now the guild makes it look like cake. I’d hate to think that everyone is so focused on not screwing up and killing Gruul because I won’t be their friend any more but that’s probably the case. To lose a friend like me would be devastating, I am an amazing person..… Of course I’m being sarcastic I’m way better than an “amazing person” I’m like “Super Amazing to infinity + 1”, and even if someone did mess up id never hold it against them, my lag makes me goof up all the time.. … I’m just rambling now and not sure if I even know what the hell I’m talking about or being funny which is my intent so I’m going to just put this; Gruul and HKM down again on 1 shot, everyone rocks, and now I’m going to leave work I’m F*$king tired.

Lame ass drops

2007-11-28T08:17:00.000-06:00

Ugh, week after week I kill the curator and he never drops the plate pants, same thing with Attumen and the bracers. I’m almost willing to bet I will have earned enough badges to just buy both tanking pieces before I ever see them drop. I had to take out my loot whore aggression somehow last night so when the group zoned out of Kara I snuck back up to curator, opened his metal helmed visor, and pissed in it. It was kind of funny, there were sparks flying everywhere. I still didn’t feel satisfied with that though so I went back downstairs and had an unholy union with Attumen’s dead horse while his undead eyes watched me. I felt better after that, but I did wish I had brought a towel, plate socks are not very good for cleaning up with. Anyways…(i kind of grossed myself out there actually)...I guess buying those 2 tanking pieces with badges isn’t that horrible of an idea since they are better anyways, minus the fact the leg graphic looks like sh#t.

Last night we stopped after curator and tonight I’m assuming we will finish the last half. At least that’s what I’m hoping, I really want to be done with Kara for the week and start focusing on some 25 man runs or at least killing Bear and Eagle in ZA. Group 1 has downed Eagle boss in ZA so now Group 2 has to catch them =).

Nothing else really to post about, I’m going to link up my pictures from SSC the other night because I forgot to bring them in. I think that place is really tight graphic wise, much cooler looking than the eye.

Hope "most" of you had a good holiday

2007-11-27T09:05:00.000-06:00

Wow I hadn’t realized it’s been a week since my last post. I was off work a lot around the holiday so that’s why it’s been so long in between posts, speaking of that I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving. No wait...I take that back, everyone except the 5v5 teams we played on Sunday, I hope your turkey was rancid and gave you massive bouts of diarrhea. Then I hope you realized you were out of toilet paper and had to drag your ass across the carpet like a dog with worms to get clean. Sunday our 5v5 got together and got our faces stomped, we went 3-7. I think our team was a little to “squishy”. It was me (Arms for arena), Aztk (Holy Pally), Luminati (Holy Priest), Faeye (Shadow Priest), and Dirty (Feral druid). It seems like every team we would play we were facing extremely well geared guys, most of the time we lost we were only losing 9-12 points. The 5v5 team still has not been able to get a solid group going yet, I don’t think we have played 2 weeks in a row where it was the same 5 guys. I don’t think were ever gonna “click” if we’re always finding someone new to take a spot. Hopefully that changes soon, especially since the new season starts today.

On the PVE home front I was able to get my breast plate from Nightbane! After killing him 100 times he finally dropped something for me, now I just need his shield. Since everything resets today it’s probably going to be a Kara badge night, unless a 25 man run is tossed together. As far as 25 man raids go over the weekend we Killed High King Mulgar and Gruul, both were one shotted but neither dropped anything I could use. Even though i receieved no loot it was still fun just going in there and killing them so easily when at first it seemed like Gruul was an impossible boss because we wiped over and over and over. Last night our guild gave Lurker a shot. The trash in SSC seemed to be much easier than the trash in TK, so that was a nice surprise. We were never able to kill lurker, I think people were getting hit on the spout and we also had trouble on the adds. Our last attempt was our best though, we got through the spouts okay and eventually killed the adds but didn’t have enough people left alive to kill lurker. We were in there with only 5 healers, I hear that you are supposed to have 7-8 maybe that would have made the difference?

This Thursday we have a Mag attempt planned. Hopefully I get a spot in the raid and get to check him out, I’m be pretty excited to see him for the first time. I’m totally down for checking out all the bosses and stuff but I hope eventually we go back to focusing on just 1 boss at a time. We had VoidReaver down to 48%, if I had to pick the next raid id say we go give him some more shots since it seems like we were finally learning him. It doesn’t matter who we kill next I love learning new boss fights, I just like to see someone get rewarded at the end of the kill. Preferably “Someone” meaning me. To get that first kill though I think we just need to stick to our guns and keep wiping on one boss over and over until everyone finally gets the hang of it. At least that’s my experience from learning the bosses in BWL,AQ40, and even from recent raids,look at how many times we wiped on Gruul. Wipe + wipe + wipe + sleep + wipe + wipe + wipe = boss kill.

Zombie

2007-11-20T15:14:00.000-06:00

Ugh, I am starting to turn into quite the zombie. Last two weeks I have been staying up way to late, last night was no different. Started out the night with a great Gruuls run, full clear with a one shot on each boss. That was the first one night Gruul clear we have had as a guild, it was awesome and now that we have set that bar we can hopefully always clear it that quickly. In my previous post I had stated how much I need new pants, I’m still using blue Felsteel leggings and those have gotta go. Gruul ended up dropping double t4 warrior, druid, priest tokens so I was pumped. I’m not sure if our MKP has been implemented yet or not but both tokens went straight to rolls. I’m not sure which F*$ker at Blizzard didn’t get the memo but I am supposed to win every roll ALWAYS. Both tokens went to druids so Grats to those guys. I hope they realize though that since you took my lootz I’m going to do your sisters in front of a camera and post it all over the internet as payback. Actually that’s a little harsh, Gruul also dropped some dps plate gloves which no one wanted so I picked them up, since I didn’t walk away empty handed I’ll just do your sisters but leave it off the internet. Our Gruul’s run was the tits and I’m really happy I didn’t miss it, can’t wait to go again.

After the Gruuls run was finished I had to make sure I got in my arena games for the week. Me, Slymongoose, and Honorshammer/Dirty(taking turns) went 6-4 last night in our 3v3’s. I got to try out my new axe and I was pleasantly surprised. It hits like a truck on clothies. After our 3v3’s were over I got whispers from my 5v5 team asking if we could get together and get those games in as well. I was happy to do them , I’m an arena junkie any chance for arenas and I’m all over it. Our setup was Arms Warrior(me), Honorshammer(prot pally), Faeye(Shadow Priest), Aztk(Holy Pally), and Slymongoose(marks hunter). We went 7-3 last night which I thought was really good as we didn’t do any skirmish matches and really have not ever played together as a 5v5 before. I should be carrying about 2700 arena points over into season three next week, depending on how much gear has rating requirements I might be sporting the season three arnea helm. I talked to Dirty this morning and told him he missed the 5v5’s because he went to bed early. Dirty was one of the druids who won the t4 pants over me earlier in the night, it’s a shame he missed out on his 5v5 arena points……

I had every intention of going to bed after our 5v5 games because it was already late and I was so tired I couldn’t hardly keep my eyes open. That’s when Luminati asked me if I wanted to go for another shot at Nightbane. Nightbane has two pieces of gear that I really need so how could I pass up on that? Who needs sleep anyways, I can nap at work. I have been running Kara with group 2 lately and we have been tearing every boss up except for Nightbane, he has been a thorn in our side for a long time. Last night Kara was all clear except for him so we formed a group and gave him a shot. There was only one priest in the group last night so even though he kept his fear ward up on me when he could I still had to stance dance a lot. I hate to stance dance it is such a pain in my ass. I already have to make sure I have max threat, keep shield block up constantly, burn my trinkets on cool down, consume healthstones-pots-last stand-shield wall when needed, but to add on the fact of stance dancing is a pain. Anyways I got through my job and the dps/ healers rocked the house last night giving group 2 their first kill. Still no luck on my shield or chest piece, Nightbane is a stingy As$hole. We run Kara again tonight so I’m hoping I can get one of my much needed pieces this week.

Skill > Gear --- I dunno about that

2007-11-19T16:28:00.000-06:00

I often hear people say Skill > Gear. I’m starting to think that’s a situational statement, during a normal boss fight you can have a great (play skill) mage in greens VS an average mage in all epics and it’s my belief that the average player would throw out more dps. I feel like Skill > Gear comes into play more in PVP than PVE. True there are some PVE fights where you have a lot of running around/placement, class specific actions, etc but in most cases I think most boss fights come down to a tank/spank strategy with namely one or two special things you have to watch out for which an average player can handle. The reason I’m even posting about gear is my damage taken compared to Lanorah and Honors on our Void Reaver attempt the other night. I was working on a post comparing the stats but Honors beat me to it, it’s a good post found here. Basically what it says though is that I took 7% more damage than honors and 9% more than Lanorah over all the boss fights. In this post I’m just going to comment on the last boss fight because that’s where I think I “tried the hardest”. Right from the beginning of that fight I ran out and had initial agro (more from my hunters misdirect than anything I did I think). Since I was up first and it was also our last attempt of the night I did everything I could possibly do to mitigate as much damage as possible while keeping up my threat. I guess what I’m pointing out here is that even though I tried my hardest, when I was hit I took more damage than honors and even though I popped my trinkets the second they were up I didn’t dodge as much as Lanorah. I’m pretty sure there was no different spell rotation or other player action I could have done to make a noticeable difference. That leaves me with nothing to fall back on except it’s the gear. I am now the least geared tank of the three of us, and it’s starting to show with me taking 9% more damage than our main MT. I have really stepped up my effort to improve my gear so hopefully I can get in on another hot streak in my next couple of runs. Also the badges have been raining down on me so as soon as I have 40 I’ll be buying the shield block trinket, then after that a shield, chest piece, or leg piece depending on what is needed the most. If I haven’t gotten lucky with drops then after I replace my trinket my shield is my main sore spot. I have tried every run a hundred times to get a better one, I just have no luck with a new shield. I should have just worked on my rep or badges and gotten an epic one a long time ago. Right now my shield works about as good as a stack of porn magazines strapped to my arm. Blizzard should change the graphic so people don’t get confused thinking it’s a real shield.

Here is the stats from our last attempt where I lived the longest(I didnt live as long as honors or lanorah or take as many hits so keep that in mind), I think I made a respectable showing of myself but still I didn’t do as well as my fellow warrior Lanorah.

Name	Avg Hit	Avg Crushing	Parry %	Dodge %	Total boss missed %	Dmg Mitigated
Raydz:	3660	2% 5208	22%	22%	58.7%	6.1%
Lanorah:	3667	2% 5903	24%	22%	62.3%	9.8%
Honors:	3612	5% 5722	12%	18%	45.39%	5.9%

Raydz:
Lanorah:
Honors:

Keep in mind though that this is just the last boss fight, overall I didn’t do as well as either tanks. Realistically I’m probably missing some key bit of information and I didn’t do as well as honors either on the last attempt. I’m really hoping once I get the new gear these numbers improve elevating me to thier mitigation levels, because if they don’t that means it’s some action im inadvertantly doing. I don’t want to face the reality of being a shitty tank because then I’ll have to get all depressed, move into my parent’s basement, masturbate to my porn shield while bawling like a baby, and no one wants that.

Another observation concerning gear is that in our ZA group last night we kept fumbling with the bear boss. I feel like I can say the problems we had last night came 100% from the gear some guys were using. Even though these guys played their ass off their gear was less than what the instance needed and it showed, so now when I hear Skill > Gear, I don’t know if I always agree with that. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to invite someone to ZA because of their gear, who am I to tell someone no, but it does mean that the rest of the group might have someone else’s short comings to pick up and i dont know if it's fair to them either.

Group 2 Bear Boss Down

2007-11-15T11:02:00.000-06:00

Last night I started forming up group 2 for ZA, I wanted that damn bear boss dead so bad I think I was giving myself a complex. First and foremost I want to say thank you to Celoria for helping group 2 out with all the potions! I think I said thank you 10x in game but you really unloaded a lot to help the group, so I thought you deserved another big THANK YOU! I was able to stock up our healers and casters with mana pots, health pots for tanks, and feed everyone helpful foodstuffs. It made a huge difference last night, if you ever need anything from me please just ask!
That being said, after grouping up we zone in and start killing trash up to Bear boss. I forgot to time our trash killing, I won’t forget next time because I want to get an idea of how we are going to do on the “timed” run. We killed the bear on the second attempt. He went down extremely smooth and easy, when I think back to yesterday it’s like… “what the hell was our problem?”. He dropped some lame ass claw that no one really needed which was kind of a bummer, but at least we get to say 1 boss down!
After killing the bear boss we cleared to the eagle boss. The trash on the way to eagle couldn’t be any easier, so that was a pleasant surprise. The bear rider trash on the first boss makes the eagle’s trash mobs look like a joke. The eagle himself on the other hand…his storm is a pain in the ass, and so are his damn bird spawns. We attempted him 4x before the group decided they wanted to jump into Kara for some badges. Our best attempt we got him to 48% I think. Every attempt though we improved significantly and the next time we go in there he will probably die. There is a lot of fun to learning a boss fight where there really is no help from strategies guides or from people who have been there before, makes the boss kill more rewarding in my opinion. ZA so far Bear boss dead – Eagle 50%
So now It’s time to point out what a ninja I am…again…. Two weeks ago in Kara the raid leader forgot to put it on ML on Moroes. Two loot windows pop up on my screen, I click greed on both of them. I just don’t pay attention to that shit, I never look to see what it is, I never need any of that stuff so I just greed, it’s almost like a habit now. I hear a lot of groans on vent and I realize what I did. Everyone else had passed on the loot and I greeded so therefore I got them. I felt like an ass that entire run and apologized over and over, honestly that stuff bugs me when I f*&k up someone else’s loot. Low and behold I inadvertently do it again last night. The raid leader forgot to ML on Attumen, two purples flash up on my screen but this time everyone is yelling in vent for me to pass. Ever since I did that in Kara two weeks ago it’s been forged into a joke about me being stealing every ones epics, so through all the joking everyone actually knew to yell at me to pass. Even if they hadn’t of yelled I learned my lesson and would have passed anyways, which I did. So everyone passes and people start clicking on the boss to get their badge, I did as well. What I didn’t realize is that I had the “loot all items” clicked on in my interface, so when I click on the boss it asks “would you like to bind this item to you” of course I would it’s my badge,I clicked yes. Well it gave me some bracers that were supposed to go to a paladin. I was so angry at myself I was cussing up a storm in vent, I hope I didn’t upset anyone’s delicate ears. So there I was again apologizing to someone because I stole their loot. Ugh ugh ugh, I feel so bad when I do something stupid like that. Basically I guess this whole last section is just a long apology to the paladin I stole the loot from =/ I think tonight were hitting up the eye again for another shot at void reaver, im looking forward to it...as long as its on Master Loot.

circus music playing

2007-11-14T15:10:00.000-06:00

Real quick post about what I think about this ZA plate armor set graphic.

I think they did an excellent job designing a plate mail clown suit. Hopefully in later patches they will implement some honking rubber horns that you can equip as an off hand weapon or a flower that squirts water as a necklace. I can almost bet they got the artistic inspiration from that movie “Killer Clowns From Outer Space”. Maybe if I can collect this whole set ill rename my character to John Wayne Gacy and be “Pogo the killer clown” (John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer who had a part time job as pogo the clown for those of you who don’t know). Or maybe there is the possibility me and my fellow warrior guildies could all wear this and pile up on one horse like it was a little clown car?

This set looks like hunk of walking SH&T. Maybe with the next instance release we'll get lucky and the plate armor will resemble Care Bears. Have i ever mentioned i fu#$ing hate clowns?

GOOD PLATE EXAMPLE.

BAD PLATE EXAMPLE

GOOD PLATE EXAMPLE.

BAD PLATE EXAMPLE

This set is the one of the gayest things I have ever seen, I’ll wear it for the item stats but hate the way my character looks.
/rant over

At least the trash was easy

2007-11-14T09:27:00.000-06:00

Last night I logged onto WoW and saw that group 1 had headed into ZA, I was worried for a while that I had missed my ZA chance but a few hours later a second group formed up which I got to MT. Me and Dirty run ahead to the ghostlands and try to start summoning people. I say try because horde were camping the stone making life hell for a lot of people. I think blizzard tried to prevent stone camping because they put guards all around the flight path and summoning stone, but some horde guys found a few safe areas to ranged attack without having the guards pull. After pissing us off enough by cancelling our summon portals, we finally killed enough horde that in between their rezzes we were able to get the group summoned. After you zone into ZA you talk to a npc, Harrison Jones (Harrison Ford & Indiana Jones Mixed, I love the names Blizz uses). He is an archeologist who has found a way into ZA and needs help opening the doors. The doors open and immediately the group is swarmed with 2 big elite trolls which require one tank each and dozen slaves which are aoe’d down. First trap mobs go down nice an easy, it was the same for most of the other trash as well. In fact from zoning in to the first boss we never wiped, I was really happy about that (While clearing trash ZA group 1 announced they had killed the bear boss, Grats to you guys!). I will admit though that a lot of the trash are kind of a pain in the ass. There is a shaman “Witch Doctor” who will toss down totems making all the mobs invincible, so that totem has to be burned down every time it’s up. There is also bear riders that pull in packs of 2 that separate from their mounts which are kind of a pain as well. It was nothing we couldn’t handle though and before we knew it we were setting up for the bear boss pull.

The bear boss is an endurance tank and spank fight. I am sad to say we didn’t get to kill him last night, we did manage to get him to 24% though. I was tanking his humanoid form and we had a feral druid tanking his bear form. The rotation went well, he really doesn’t hit as hard as I thought he would, some of our healers just seemed to run out of mana a little bit too early. When I say he doesn’t hit that hard I mean his normal melee attacks, but he does cast bleed effects on the tanks which seemed to be our downfall. The healers would burn all their mana healing the tanks through the bleed effects. We had 3 pally healers but I think having a resto druid with leet HOTS might have made the difference. I was with a good group of guys last night so even though it ment more wiping none of the healers were asked to leave so someone else could come in. After the first three wipes on the boss he reset so all the trash needed to be killed again. I was impressed that we cleared from the front to the boss again in 16 minutes, and during that time we had people outside repairing. After another couple of wipes on the boss some people had to go to bed so it was called. I was really hoping for a boss kill last night, but were planning on going in again tonight so hopefully we get a down a boss, or even 2.

Here are a few screen shots I grabbed at ZA but I forgot to get a good picture of the boss while fighting him =/ .

Bastard Horde =P

Boss taunting us.

Last Pull before boss.

Gruul T-bag

2007-11-13T09:40:00.000-06:00

Last night we formed up our 25 man raid to go take down Gruul. Theoretically one day we’ll be doing HKM and Gruul in one night but as of now we still have a few wipes on him so it ends up being dragged into a 2 night event. We did however kill him last night, this being my first time on a Gruul kill, second time for Mal Katai. It was really awesome to see him die after having wiped on that boss so many times. Two hunters won the legging tokens, I think we DE’d some shaman boots since we had no shaman in the raid, but I managed to walk away with a nice two handed axe. I slapped a savagery enchant on it and now it will be my new arena weapon. It’s a nice upgrade from the despair sword I was using. The graphic on it is a little goofy though.

This week our guild is switching over to a “dkp” type of raiding format, which I think is the fairest way to run raids so I’m 50% excited to see these changes come into effect. The other 50% that’s not excited is because lately I’m on fire with my loots, anything that drops that I want I always win the roll, so now I have to put aside my loot whoreish ways and get in line with dkp. This type of system does need to be in place though, my luck will not hold out forever and the people who just have horrible luck but raid all the time need to get their dues. DKP systems are what I am used to from pre-BC raiding, they help keep a solid loot distribution structure and honestly they push people to stay on a little later and not skip scheduled nights if they can help it. I do have a little trepidation at some of the “changes” our guild made from a normal DKP system, but I’m hoping they all turn out to be good idea’s and I’m just biased because I have never done it this way before. The biggest change that worries me is that lets say I have 5 dkp and so does another tank and we both want the same item. We both say we want the item, so it goes to rolls. Makes sense, the winner of the roll gets the item and it cost him his 5dkp, that’s the way dkp has always worked and is solid. We’ll now one of the “changes” implemented is that not only does the winner lose his 5dkp, but the other guy rolling against him loses 2 dkp. It’s kind of like being “Charged” for your roll. I see this causing problems in two different ways, the first is that people are allowed to “buy” dkp by donating mats to the guild bank (The fact you can buy dkp I’m not sure how I feel about that yet, but I do see where people who constantly donate potions to the guild should be rewarded for that). Roughly 200 gold in donated mats will buy you 1 dkp. If you want an item and lose, you just spent 400g in hard earned mats and time on a crappy roll with nothing to show for it. The idea of a dkp system is to reward people with loot and in most cases take away the chance for it to go to “rolls”. The second problem is our dkp cap is very low so I’m foreseeing most loot going to rolls. With people going to rolls I feel like we’re diluting the true value of a dkp system. All the people who have crappy rolls will be losing dkp all the time, and with a low dkp cap they will never make significant dkp gains to keep them from always competing with rolls on loot. It’s almost like we don’t need a dkp system if we’re going to do it this way because all it’s doing is going back to rolls anyways. I’m not sure if I explained my concerns well enough to make sense but by now you’re bored to tears so ill just say this; I’m really happy were going to a dkp type of system, a little worried the “changes” made to dkp will imbalance it. This morning before work I downloaded the last bit of the patch which goes live today, I also stopped in front of the mirror and was shocked by how sexy I am. I’m really excited about being so sexy and also all the new boss encounters and possible loot that will be released today, I have been looking forward to this for a long time. It’s easier to progress 10 people through an instance than it is 25 so I see ZA being farmed before the EYE or SSC, or maybe I’m just on crack and ZA is gonna beat my ass 4 nights a week without ever seeing a boss kill. I think tonight I’ll be going into ZA so tomorrow ill post some screen shots if I’m lucky enough to go.

Poked in the Eye

2007-11-09T12:55:00.000-06:00

Last night we formed up our 25 man raid and headed toward the eye with the plan to take on Void Reaver. After fighting a war with horde for a while we managed to get everyone to the zone and into the instance. This was the first time in the Eye for all but two of the raid members. As we wiped on our first pull of mobs I have to admit I had my doubts we would even be able to progress down the hall, let alone to Void Reaver. The next pull went better, and then the next was better after that, until finally we seemed to be making some headway. I later was pleasantly surprised how quick everyone learned to deal with the trash pulls, next time I don’t think we’ll have to worry about constant explanations which took more time in the raid than the actual mob killing. We cleared trash for about 2 hours before we got to Void Reaver. We did get one epic drop from the trash which went to a resto druid, Grats to Dirty! On the way to Void Reaver we passed the Phoenix boss but did not attempt him, apparently he is really hard and we’re not ready for that so he was bypassed. I will note though that I think he has a kick ass graphic and I am looking forward to attempts on him because I bet he does some bad ass looking spells. Besides being a loot whore I’m also a graphics hoe, I always judge a book by its cover when it comes to bosses. I guess I’m shallow when it comes to WOW =P.	Epic Trash Mob Drop Phoenix Boss
After all the trash killing we finally arrived at Optimus Prime, in my head I kept connecting the Void Reaver to Optimus Prime, even though they have very little similarities. Apparently I have seen that movie one too many times. Hopefully later in the dungeon I’ll find a mob which resembles that hot chick who is also in the movie wearing the short skirt and cut off shirt. Anyways we never did get to kill Optimus but we did get to put in 3 attempts on him. We only got him down to about 78%, which was kind of a bummer, I was hoping we would do better than that. We kept losing too many people to the arcane balls, I don’t know if people didn’t understand or weren’t paying attention but I think that’s what killed the attempts. I was one of the off tanks on him so my job was only to fight for aggro and tank void reaver when it came to my turn, i think i did alright and didnt mess anything up. Overall In my opinion we did better on trash than I thought we would, but not as well as I had hoped on the boss. I think next time we’ll move through the trash much faster and get in more attempts at the boss.

During the raid the Guild Master was talking about a new kind of loot system she is wanting to implement, I didn’t get to hear all of the explanation but it was already making me leery. It was explained as “Like DKP but NOT”. I don’t know what this means but I’m really hoping that it keeps a fair level for everyone. Someone was arguing in chat why not just use a standard DKP system, even though I don’t know what the exact plans the GM has for a new system, I also want to argue with what’s wrong with a normal DKP system? Honorshammer usually posts the raid-stats on the guild site the day after a raid so ill be examining how I did tanking compared to other the tanks sometime next week. I am thinking though it will be harder to compare because as an OT on Void Reaver my job is to just fight for agro, so I was using rage on shield slam and devastate and not really shield block. Therefore when I was hit I was probably being hit for harder than I should have been. I’ll let you know next week on that. Overall I had a ton of fun last night, new instances new strategies it was a shit ton of fun. Thanks Raist for organizing the run good job man!

Random Spewings

2007-11-06T09:35:00.000-06:00

Here are some random mumblings.

Last night our 5v5 team got together last minute and we got our 10 games in. Again we had a different class make-up than the previous 2 weeks so it took us several games to get into a rhythm (no one ever wants to do skirmish warm-ups), but by that time we were already down to 0-4. We finished the week at 4-6 with a 1446 rating; at first I wasn’t sure if we were going to win any. On the games we did “click” we beat 2 very well geared teams getting 18-19 points for each of those wins, so that was exciting. I am about 100 points away from my season 2 helm, but I’m going to just sit on my points until season 3 comes out. Another thought I’m having is I would love to set aside 1 day strictly for 5v5 practice. I don’t even care if we run the rating into the dirt, it will be reset to 1500 when season 3 gets here (In 1-2 weeks). Hopefully after a bunch of practice we can do better in season 3 than we are doing now. I know we are limited by our gear, but we are better than what our ranking is. I’m of the mindset a little practice can make a big difference. If we practice and still don’t do well, I will take all the blame. I am cursed with this sexy ass which is obviously distracting my friends and hindering their pvp.

Speaking of the next patch I am really looking forward to a lot of the new content, besides season 3 arena gear there is the new 10 man instance. Which is awesome, I’m pretty burnt out on Kara and would love to see some new boss encounters. Also when doing these 10 mans the bosses will now drop badges (excellent idea blizzard), so my previous post about a massive heroic run badge grind maybe not needed now in such an extreme.

I did a few heroic runs this weekend of slave pens and steam vaults, those went over pretty well and I added 9 badges to my inventory. Is it just me or does Slave Pens and Steam vaults seem to be on an equal level of difficulty? In fact I don’t know the answer to this question, are all heroics supposed to be the same level of difficulty since they are all “heroic”? They all give the same badges of honor, it would make sense they are all on the same tier of difficulty. I realize on non-heroic runs slave pens is obviously way easier than steam vaults, but I don’t think that a heroic slave pens should be easier than a heroic steam vault run.

Anyways I feel like I’m just passing time now till the new patch comes then I’m hoping I can get in a solid team to really start cracking away at the new 10 man dungeon, which I realize is going to be extremely tuff, but I’m excited none the less.

Dragging Ass Today

2007-11-02T15:12:00.000-05:00

Last night around 10:30 server time we formed up to run the last half of our Kara run. I have been staying up really late all week raiding/grinding so after last night’s run I am completely dragging ass today. The run itself was great, we one shotted shade, Illhoof, chess (of course), and Prince. I picked up a better pair of tanking boots off chess, which I like better than my boots of elusion. Our hunter made out like a bandit last night getting his t4 gloves, t4 helm, a nice belt, and maybe even a dps cloak if I can remember correctly. It was around 1:00 in the morning my time when we decided to try to kill Nightbane, 5- 6 people had never attempted him before so I had figured we wouldn’t kill him. We gave him 3 attempts and on the last one he was down to 25%, which I thought was really impressive being the first time for so many. We all plan on going back after him this weekend and getting our kill on him and Netherspite. I didn’t get to bed till around 2:30 am and had to wake up for work at 5:30, so I’m feeling completely trashed and don’t feel like writing anymore.
I will update you on how plan “Manly” went (see previous post). My hot neighbor wasn’t home, therefore I had to switch to a secondary sexual target…her poodle. After that magical moment was done plan “Manly” can be called a complete success. I’m just joking, sorry if I grossed you out, of course I would never let a dog prepare dessert for me, I’m not some sick freak, jeez.

My Tank Points

2007-11-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

With this blog post I’m going to analyze my “tank points” and what I can do to make them better. Honors pointed me at this mod and I have found it to be extremely helpful, thanks for the tip. What will also be kinda cool is in a few months I can hopefully look back at this post and see how much my character has improved. A few minutes ago I got done going over my screen shots and getting my thoughts in order to write this post when the thought occurred to me that I’m turning into a big Fu*#ing nerd. When I’m done with my nerd post I’m going to have to go home and do my girlfriend while watching a porn then demand she cook me some dinner while I go beat up the neighbor so I can get some manliness back into my life. No wait change of plans, I just realized my neighbor is actually a chick……. and not to bad looking, instead of a fight ill just do her as well and tell her to cook me a dessert. Okay with these manly plans firmly in place I feel like I can now start analyzing my tanking numbers and let my nerd flag fly. First off there are 2 stats I don’t really understand so if anyone reading this can lend a hand I would appreciate it. I don’t understand what miss% is, is that the chance a mob will miss me or how much I am going to miss a mob? There is also hit %, I don’t understand the mechanics behind this number, so an explanation on that would be really helpful as well. What I will look at is my total reduction, my dodge, my parry, my block, crit % against me, and crushing % against me. What sucks is I don’t have screen shots of other tanks “tank points” so I don’t know what I NEED to have to be a strong tank in Gruuls or later dungeons, I can only guess.
Here is a screen shot of me just standing still not doing anything but looking sexy. My total reduction is 80.74%, compared to other tanks in my guild is this good? Of the main tanks in the guild (the guys I compared against in my previous gruul post) I would guess I probably have the lowest total reduction because my gear is not as good on several key pieces. I only compare myself against the tanks in my guild for the following reasons; We are all doing the same raid encounters therefore get exposed to the same mobs, so the only differences between us is similar gear, talents, and play style. I can’t compare myself against guys in SSC+ because they have the opportunity to get amazing gear that I can’t right now so I would just look like a schmuck and not be able to do anything about it. I also can’t compare myself against some tank who hasn’t done heroics or Kara yet because his gear wouldn’t hold up to mine so I would look amazing and could think I have nothing to improve on.
As you can see in the previous picture I have a 15% chance to get crushed, this is why you have to constantly spam shield block as a warrior. With shield block up my 15% chance to get crushed goes to 0% , my chance to block is upped to 47.71%, and my reduction goes up 1.7%. If you’re a warrior and not using shield block constantly for these advantages, not to mention it almost always enables revenge, then you’re a turd. This is why I put talent points down to get improved shield block because it adds the ability to block 1 extra attack and increases the duration by 1 second. These numbers tell me it was well worth it. side note the hit% went down from 8.4% to 0%, I guess that’s good?
Now this screen shot shows the advantages of using my pocket watch. My reduction jumps up from 80.74%(that’s me just standing there) to 87.54%(6.8% difference), that’s sweet in itself but what’s really tight is that my dodge skyrockets from 24.41% to 40.26%. I’ll be holding onto this trinket for a long time I think. Now keep in mind my shield block isn’t up for this screen shot so I am still able to get crushed. I cannot only use my pocket watch and think I will be in a good position to survive, always always always keep shield block up. side note the hit % is back to 0 again
This screen shot opened my eyes to what a crappy waste of a trinket Adamantite figurine is. It does give me 32 defense which is nice, but I have enough defense to go around. So what bonus does its “use” give me? All that it does is raise my total reduction by .95%, and that’s only for 20 seconds. I need to fill this trinket slow with something much better, most likely the shield block trinket received by turning in heroic rewards. For right now I could replace this trinket with a pile of dog sht and wouldn’t really notice the difference. side note, the hit% was not affected and remains at 8.4%*
This screen shot is what I look like if I use my shield wall and last stand macro. I use this macro basically to save me when tanking a boss and I get low health. That’s actually what my macro is called “save me” which is what it normally does. Also in this macro I burn my two trinkets as well (The trinkets were not burned in this screen shot, only SW and LS). I have made it a point now that to use the trinkets as often as I can, not just when I’m in trouble so the trinkets are usually on cool down and not available in the macro. Shield wall when used reduces the damage by melee attacks by 75%, as you can see it works, my total damage reduction is boosted to 97.97%.
Now if I were to use my “save me” macro and my trinkets were available to be used , here is the screen shot for that. My total reduction is 98.93%, and dodge is at 40.26. In reality though this isn’t all I would be at because I forgot to add in shield block for this screen shot, which I WOULD have up. If I was in trouble and used my “save me” macro and used my shield block my numbers should look something like this. Total Reduction – 100% Dodge – 40.26% Parry-16.16% Block-47.71% Crit-0% Crushing-0% Hit-0% Now this doesn’t mean I’m invincible, if I was up against Gruul he is still going to ground and pound me because of his level vs me BUT to me it is still some impressive numbers.
The most important thing I walk away with in this review is that I need to replace that trinket BAD. My total reduction can also be raised with new pants, chest, and shield, all of which need to be replaced if I ever plan to be a stable MT on Gruul or later raids. Now that this is done I’m going to go wash the nerd off me and execute plan “manly”.

My Needed Improvements

2007-10-30T15:43:00.001-05:00

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

2007-10-30T10:55:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-29T14:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-26T09:01:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-25T14:21:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

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)

2007-10-19T09:45:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-19T09:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-17T10:01:00.000-05:00

*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

2007-10-16T10:38:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-15T17:42:00.000-05:00

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