I must punish a previous guildie.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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