I began the weekend by doing some light fishing and failing utterly at catching a giant sewer rat under Dalaran. After some time, I decided to instead get my exploration achieves done. The only ones left were in the backwoods of Kalimdor and it was going to take some time in the doing. As I rode around the world, I chatted with guildies as they prepared to take on the Ice Crown Citadel (ICC), the home of Arthas, the Mother Farkin Lich King (MFLK)
Since I deviated from my ‘normal’ play style (hyper-aggressive solo play) for the purpose of seeing the “end game”, this represented the “holy grail” of Warcraft. Yes, the Ruby Sanctum raid was released afterwards, but from a story perspective the MFLK is the “you win Warcraft” dealie. It comes with gold, prizes, and a nifty “the Kingslayer” title to rub in the faces of those not willing to sacrifice significant portions of their free time to a video game. Fidelis has downed the sucker once before, but it’ll be a while before the raid becomes “routine” and thus it is still special.
The gear that drops in the place is amazing by my current standards, with most of it being of “item level 264” compared to my paltry mix of 219s and 234s. From a “gear score” perspective, I weighed in at a bit over 5k. That’s not godlike, but it is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Pick-up groups by comparison demand, on average, a 5.5k-5.6k score and experience to play with them. Bear in mind PUGs would also likely demand a 5k GS to take on the level 12 elite “Hogger”, so I was curious to see how I’d really fare.
In fact, according to a couple of sites you can use to determine your appropriate raid dungeons (www.wow-heroes.com being chief among them) I was very much ready to take on ICC in both 10 and 25 player modes, although the 25 man group would be “challenging”. All righty then. I figured I gear up a bit and try it out sooner or later.
A few minutes after the guildies entered the Citadel, I swam ashore on a small island tucked away in the corner of Azuremist Isle and was heralded as a world explorer! I may not (or ever be) a Kingslayer, but by gods I’m now “Strev the Explorer”. Suck it, Dora
The following day I blew the bank. I depleted my emblem reserves and purchased a new trinket (with Triumphs) and a new belt (with my precious Frosties). My cash supplies, already low, were devastated as I gemmed and enchanted a T10 PvP bracer I had acquired the previous week in VoA. The gear boosts put me around 5200. I felt I was now “ICC-ready” by guild standards and, as luck had it, there was open space in that night’s 25-man raid.
I spent the every evening watching videos and reading up where I could, but reading about how to dance doesn’t mean anything until you’re on the dance floor. I picked up the supplies I thought I’d need… a few flasks of the frost wyrm (bonuses to damage that last through death) and runic mana potions. An hour before ‘go time’, we still had slots to fill so I volunteered and no one objected.
A short while later I flew my drake over hordes of undead and landed outside the gates of the Citadel aside the Knights of the Ebon Blade as my guildmates arrived in turn. Extremely nervous, I stepped inside the swirling vortex, anxious to see if I was really ready for the trials that awaited…
Once inside, I found myself in a staging area, complete with vendors and a host of NPCs. This took me by surprise. My reading and viewing hadn’t mentioned them at all. They had just focused on ‘boss fights’ and I wondered gamely what else had been glossed over. We’d see soon.
The guild’s group was staffed a bit light and we wound up ‘outsourcing’ for a couple of healers and a couple of DPS slots. While the final preparations and buffing sequences were being made, I surveyed the terrain. It was an enormous structure, with vaulted ceilings and very wide halls and doorways. What it lacked it décor, it made up for in sheer magnitude. Beyond the first archway, giant skeletal creatures roamed and even the ‘trash mobs’ had well over a million health. This was going to be epic.
We cleared the first few mobs and soon faced the first boss of the instance: Lord Marrowgar. I had somehow missed reading up on him and now faced with a giant winged skeletal thing I was having second thoughts about the entire venture. I’d never live it down if my first foray into ICC caused a raid wipe…against the first boss. I quickly hatched a plan. I eyeballed a mage, Eleanor, and decided that I was going to hug her. Where she went, I would too. She’d been around a bit and, logically, knew the right places to stand and when to move. My brilliant and cunning plan lasted about eight seconds.
As luck would have it, I was the first person randomly picked to be stabbed by a giant bone spike erupting from the ground. Impaled and unable to do anything but suffer major internal bleeding, I wondered if I had missed a visual cue to move, but as the battle progressed, it seemed that was random. Several people at a time would get impaled by the spikes. I dodged around when it looked like Very Bad Things were about to happen and I learned to quickly blink out of range when I heard the terrifying phrase “Bone Storm”, a nasty whirlwind-type attack that ended with lines of frost radiating outwards, dealing massive damage. In the end, I probably spent more time dancing then blasting, but I managed to avoid looking like a total idiot.
He fell and we proceeded through the dungeon to find Lady Deathwhisperer. As the leader of the Cult of the Damned, she summons adds to the party. As ranged DPS, my job was to “Seek, Locate, and Destroy” these as quickly as possible, turning fire back to the boss when opportune. Her health, already at over 13M, was supplemented by the Mana Shield of the Gods. All damage went to her mana (all 11M of it) until it was depleted. Once down, instead of summoning goons, she summoned spirits one has to flee from or take the resultant 25k damage “stupid tax”. Naturally, I get targeted with one of these but was able to avoid it for the duration. Once defeated, she dropped the best bracers I’d seen. The Lady’s Brittle Bracers, which sells for nearly 6k on the AH is one of the rare drops that doesn’t bind when picked up and would be a significant improvement over the bracers I had just replaced. My hopes were quickly dashed as my roll was far too low (four other casters beat me on that one), but I remain hopeful for the next run and, by gods, there WILL be another run.
We continued along and boarded the Skybreaker, a flying gunship normally encountered in Icecrown proper as a quest hub. It would carry us to the upper section of the citadel, but the journey would not be a pleasure cruise. This time we would do battle with the Horde’s rival gunship in the skies above the citadel. Some of our melee fighters strapped on jetpacks to board the enemy vessel as the rest of us manned guns and tried our best to deal with both the enemies we could hit from the edge of the ship and the boarding parties assailing our own craft. In the end, we lost miserably while attempting for an achievement that didn’t involve multiple hops back and forth from ship to ship. On the second go through we played it straight and was victorious. We landed on a ledge by an ominous door, with a trove of treasure nearby. The loot we rolled for included another nice piece of caster gear I lost out on, but with nine more bosses to go, my spirits were high.
Throughout all of this we had encountered a number of delays due to people dropping, GF/wife aggro (not mine, yay!), and real life emergencies. An hour had elapsed and we rebuffed up before opening the door leading into the upper spire of the citadel. Even this event was met with resistance, in the form of one lone orc.
The orc was a death knight with some 34M health and some very interesting mechanics. He summons ‘blood beasts’, nasty little critters with their own abilities that mimic player skills, but the far more dangerous bit was his blood magic. All range people spread out wide as he gained strength from his magic and people that were too close sped this process along. If it got too high Very Bad Things would happen, but we avoided that brand of nastiness. Mostly the fight was a damage race we won handily, but it yielded nothing of any use to cloth wearers.
Feeling more confident I could handle whatever the Lich King could throw at us, I strode inside to fight the stuff of nightmares…
We now found ourselves within the Plagueworks, presumably where the Scourge Plague was developed and the source of its noxious spread. The hall quickly came to a fork and two giant plaguehounds patrolled the area along with a quantity of plague scientists. We took on the scientists first. We tore into them and showed the Scourge exactly what we thought of “science”. We pulled the dogs (“Precious” and the aptly named “Stinky”) separately, as mini-bosses they warranted a bit more caution. We cleared a couple of traps that summoned more AoE fodder, then entered a large circular room that screamed “this is going to suck”. In the middle was an enormous misshapen thing named Rotface. At this point, the Raid Leader took the time to explain to everyone what was going to happen…twice.
As we engaged Rotface, the name of the game quickly became “Dance Your Ass Off”. A solid quarter of the ground became toxic. Slime rained down from above and worst of all slimes appeared. The slimes were death made bubbly and if they encountered another slime they merged and became god-awful. One tank’s role was to Run the Slimes while another focused on Rotface. As new little slimes appeared, the targeted player had to run and find the tank circling the outer perimeter to merge ‘his’ slime with the tank’s big one to prevent multiple large oozes from wiping the raid. I was one of the early recipients of a slime, so I darted this way and that circling around to find the tank while avoiding the toxic floor. The somewhat bemused raid leader noted “you’ll never catch him that way, Strev” and I realized I was looping around the room in the same direction as my target. I hastily 180’d and passed off my slime.
As Slimefest ’10 continued, I became adept at strafing to avoid the noxious goo and we felled Rotgut with minimal casualties. We then moved to the room on the opposite end of the ‘fork’ and encountered Rotface’s twin, Festergut.
Festergut required very little from me in terms of dancing for two good reasons. First, he isn’t overly complex, just a major DPS race where you have to melt away his 40-something million health in only five minutes. Second, I spent most of the time watching the fight from the floor after I was killed a minute into it. He occassionally will target a player with a gas spore (guess who was first!) which does godawful damage, but also hurts nearby players, so the strategy is to ‘eat it’ and run away from everyone else. I ate it, but got back just in time to get smacked with another random nuke.
It was very close. The raid leader announced the two minute remaining mark and we still had a good chunk to go. We hit the one minute mark. Thirty seconds and everyone was blasting their hearts out before Festergut could do it for them. Running out on the timer meant he’d be oneshotting each player and a wipe in seconds. Five seconds and he was down to 2% health. Enrage went off and three people joined me for floor time, but we got him at five minutes and one second. We breathed a deep sign of relief as we nursed our wounds and raised our dead.
We turned our attention to the main ‘tine’ of the fork and proceeded up it. A wall came down from the ceiling and we had no choice but to proceed. A short trip later we found the Plague’s origin and the heart of the Plagueworks. Before us was its creator, Professor Putricide. This large laboratory contained a number of tanks, a table covered with flasks, and the aforementioned undead. We went over the strategy and dove into the fray.
As we chewed on the good Professor, he began to release unstable experiments and we hurried out of the way of Very Bad Things. Swaths of the dancefloor became toxic and horrible oozes attacked us… I failed the dance horribly. With all of the confusion, I couldn’t find the oozes to target and between panning around and running slightly behind the group, I was easy pickings and got caught in a number of patches. I know this because of a helpful addon someone had which reports the number of times someone “fails to get out of the way” of certain events. Lovely. Despite our best efforts, it spiraled downhill and we wiped hard.
We regrouped and assaulted the Professor again. This time I was much better at Avoiding Stupid, but I was still unable to consistently both find/blast the oozes and dance swiftly. We failed to get the Professor below 50% before we wiped again and the decision was made to call off the assault.
All total, the raid cost me about 100 gold in supplies and repairs, but the experience itself? It’s worth so much more to me than any quantity of gold.
We’ll meet again, Professor. Mark my words.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Strev's World Tour
A series of events left me burning a vacation day and what better way to spend the time than by knocking back a couple of beers and just futzing around in Azeroth?
I had started the day fishing away when I heard that you could fish up a giant sewer rat for a pet in the Underbelly of Dalaran, but lost interest after a few hundred casts and accidentally completing a fishing daily I had for ages and had forgotten about. I also knocked out a couple of fishing achievements, mostly by accident. It’ll be a long time before I can fish in Dalaran without catching junk 80% of the time, but I’ll be back for you, rat... someday.
By a happy accident I discovered that “ice block” protects from all falling damage, so I picked up the “fall 65 yards without having to be picked up with a spatula” achievement after jumping off my drake in mid-flight over the Crystal Song forest. Between that, my previous fishing expedition, and probably alcohol, I decided to return an old goal of mine: get the bloody “Explorer” title by uncovering every piece of every map. This is, in a word, daunting, but I had two major advantages. First, I only needed to explore the ‘vanilla’ areas and could ride around through most of them with impunity. Second, I’m probably clinically insane.
Throughout the course of the day I rode hither, thither, and yon and peeked over peaks, delved into dales, and forayed into forests. I earned a couple of explore awards, earning cheers from my guild mates. I earned a couple more and got a few more “Grats!” messages. By the time I had earned seven or eight, the fanfare had subsided remarkably. By the twelfth, it became more of a “Holy crap—you’re still at it?” At long last, I had explored the entirety of the Eastern Kingdoms. Now, off to Kalimdor!
My work was cut out for me there—I had spent most of my time leveling in the Eastern Kingdoms so there was a LOT more exploration needed in Kalimdor. Out of the twenty zones there, I had nineteen to go. Not to be dissuaded, I started in Theramore and worked my way west and around. I was very thankful for all of the flight paths I had acquired so long ago. As zones were cleared, I’d frequently return to Theramore or Darnassus, grab a flight path out to an area I needed and explored through it and a neighboring zone.
Another half-dozen zones got checked off my list and I was rapidly becoming jokingly hated in the guild channel. The only accolades I received were from guildies who had just logged on and didn’t know any better.
A break came when it was time for the guild’s weekly raid run! This week it was Patchwerk, a large abomination found not too deep in Naxxramas (however that is spelled). Patch isn’t a particularly difficult boss, as he serves as a gear check for the dungeon. In layman’s terms—if your group can’t beat this boss, you have no business going any further in this dungeon. He is an insanely hard hitter, but there’s no dancing involved. He is about as straightforward tank and spank as you get. The only ‘gotcha’ is he must be downed in five minutes or he’ll wipe the group.
As usual, we had too many for the 10 man, not enough for the 25 man group, so we did the logical thing. We ran the 25 man with 18 or so people. We entered the dungeon and it reminded me immediately of the old sewer missions from City of Heroes. The rooms were much larger, but it all the ambiance of a sewer complete with rivers of green slime. We clustered together, buffed up for the fights, then began pulling large amounts of “trash”. Trash sweeping was a breeze with the raid burning through armies of abominations and swarms of slimes (it’s alliteration day at Warcraft Wanderings). The only real “gotcha” I discovered as I was proceeding through the first rooms: the rivers of sludge do a ton of damage coupled with a debuff that nearly emptied my mana pool. They were a little too wide to hop over, so I wound up having to drink a couple of times to stay ready to fight. In short order, we faced Patchwerk.
It was a slaughter. He practically melted before us and we earned an achievement (“Make Quick Werk of Him”) by defeating him in under three minutes. As per usual, there was no loot for me, but that was fine. The turn in was 5 frosties, 5 triumphs, and 40ish gold. The raid disbanded and the “big kids” went on to fight the Lich King. Me? I tackled the Vault of Archeon (again, I know I can’t spell) with 24 other like-minded individuals.
Knowing what to expect makes a huge difference in dungeons and raids and the run went incredibly smooth. For the first time, I received epic lewts from a random roll, being one of the lucky 25% or so to get a toy for the effort involved. My reward? Tier 10 PvP bracers that were much nicer than my current ones, at the cost of some +hit. This leaves me in a bit of a bind and what’s going to happen is that I’ll wind up using them solely for PvP fights. This is fine, since I do a fair amount of battlegrounds, but I still need better PvE ones.
Afterwards, I returned to my exploring and knocked out a few more zones before bed. All total, I earned some 32 or so achievements over the course of the day and am left with only six zones before getting the Explorer title.
I know what I’m doing on Sunday now!
I had started the day fishing away when I heard that you could fish up a giant sewer rat for a pet in the Underbelly of Dalaran, but lost interest after a few hundred casts and accidentally completing a fishing daily I had for ages and had forgotten about. I also knocked out a couple of fishing achievements, mostly by accident. It’ll be a long time before I can fish in Dalaran without catching junk 80% of the time, but I’ll be back for you, rat... someday.
By a happy accident I discovered that “ice block” protects from all falling damage, so I picked up the “fall 65 yards without having to be picked up with a spatula” achievement after jumping off my drake in mid-flight over the Crystal Song forest. Between that, my previous fishing expedition, and probably alcohol, I decided to return an old goal of mine: get the bloody “Explorer” title by uncovering every piece of every map. This is, in a word, daunting, but I had two major advantages. First, I only needed to explore the ‘vanilla’ areas and could ride around through most of them with impunity. Second, I’m probably clinically insane.
Throughout the course of the day I rode hither, thither, and yon and peeked over peaks, delved into dales, and forayed into forests. I earned a couple of explore awards, earning cheers from my guild mates. I earned a couple more and got a few more “Grats!” messages. By the time I had earned seven or eight, the fanfare had subsided remarkably. By the twelfth, it became more of a “Holy crap—you’re still at it?” At long last, I had explored the entirety of the Eastern Kingdoms. Now, off to Kalimdor!
My work was cut out for me there—I had spent most of my time leveling in the Eastern Kingdoms so there was a LOT more exploration needed in Kalimdor. Out of the twenty zones there, I had nineteen to go. Not to be dissuaded, I started in Theramore and worked my way west and around. I was very thankful for all of the flight paths I had acquired so long ago. As zones were cleared, I’d frequently return to Theramore or Darnassus, grab a flight path out to an area I needed and explored through it and a neighboring zone.
Another half-dozen zones got checked off my list and I was rapidly becoming jokingly hated in the guild channel. The only accolades I received were from guildies who had just logged on and didn’t know any better.
A break came when it was time for the guild’s weekly raid run! This week it was Patchwerk, a large abomination found not too deep in Naxxramas (however that is spelled). Patch isn’t a particularly difficult boss, as he serves as a gear check for the dungeon. In layman’s terms—if your group can’t beat this boss, you have no business going any further in this dungeon. He is an insanely hard hitter, but there’s no dancing involved. He is about as straightforward tank and spank as you get. The only ‘gotcha’ is he must be downed in five minutes or he’ll wipe the group.
As usual, we had too many for the 10 man, not enough for the 25 man group, so we did the logical thing. We ran the 25 man with 18 or so people. We entered the dungeon and it reminded me immediately of the old sewer missions from City of Heroes. The rooms were much larger, but it all the ambiance of a sewer complete with rivers of green slime. We clustered together, buffed up for the fights, then began pulling large amounts of “trash”. Trash sweeping was a breeze with the raid burning through armies of abominations and swarms of slimes (it’s alliteration day at Warcraft Wanderings). The only real “gotcha” I discovered as I was proceeding through the first rooms: the rivers of sludge do a ton of damage coupled with a debuff that nearly emptied my mana pool. They were a little too wide to hop over, so I wound up having to drink a couple of times to stay ready to fight. In short order, we faced Patchwerk.
It was a slaughter. He practically melted before us and we earned an achievement (“Make Quick Werk of Him”) by defeating him in under three minutes. As per usual, there was no loot for me, but that was fine. The turn in was 5 frosties, 5 triumphs, and 40ish gold. The raid disbanded and the “big kids” went on to fight the Lich King. Me? I tackled the Vault of Archeon (again, I know I can’t spell) with 24 other like-minded individuals.
Knowing what to expect makes a huge difference in dungeons and raids and the run went incredibly smooth. For the first time, I received epic lewts from a random roll, being one of the lucky 25% or so to get a toy for the effort involved. My reward? Tier 10 PvP bracers that were much nicer than my current ones, at the cost of some +hit. This leaves me in a bit of a bind and what’s going to happen is that I’ll wind up using them solely for PvP fights. This is fine, since I do a fair amount of battlegrounds, but I still need better PvE ones.
Afterwards, I returned to my exploring and knocked out a few more zones before bed. All total, I earned some 32 or so achievements over the course of the day and am left with only six zones before getting the Explorer title.
I know what I’m doing on Sunday now!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
A Study in Scarlet
Began the evening with Strev for a quick run do turn in the last day’s worth of dailies for the Argent Tourney-thing, bested the champion and was proclaimed the Champion of Gnomeregan. I’m certain Mekgineer Thermaplugg will be tickled pink to hear. I eagerly await my parade when I return home, carried on the back of leprous gnomes. Anyways, this let me pick a new faction to become buddy-buddy with, so I picked humans. I figure they need all the help they can get. So I get to continue the dailies for fast and easy coin.
Flipped over to Shooty Aggro Girl (with Wolf!) and banded together with the Spastic Newbs of Azeroth to beat the living crap out of some religious nutjobs in their own temple, sort of a “World of Waco-craft”. We stormed the library twice, the armory, and finally the chapel itself. Over the course of a couple of hours, I learned vital things.
1) Wolves may not be trusted, ever. They are pack animals and are likely to bring back a pack of mobs with them as they chase down a lone runner. If a pack of mobs are not handy, in a pinch a boss will suffice.
2) Explosives are AWESOME! Considering my running sidequest of “Steal Aggro from Tank, Take a Shot” (it’s a repeatable quest), this is helping loads. Charge into battle while firing multishot, drop a trap, disengage and fly backwards a fair clip, then fire off another multishot and I’m starting to complete with Myrial’s blizzards for widespread pain distribution.
3) I need to seriously review my mana management or get an engineer to come up with a conjured water-based IV drip I can wear into battle.
Now at level 36, I need to review talents, glyph up, and so forth—fun weekend research. I’ve got some pages bookmarked; time to use them.
After we called it a night, I popped back on Strev for the sole purpose of collecting those two frosties that have eluded me for days. Popping my robes and pants into my pack, I queued and fifteen minutes later, I found myself in… Pit of Saron! Not a cakewalk, but very doable, even with a sub-optimal group, which is precisely what I had.
The healer was vastly undergeared for the instance and the tank, a gnome warrior (some people really do make them, it seems!), had serious issues with aggro control. This combination led to two team wipes against the first boss, a guy I’m used to steamrolling. By that point, I’m a little annoyed and the other two DPS drop party. I decided to stick it out and we quickly replaced them with a paladin and a druid, both apparently off-speccing. I love seeing these two classes in my groups more than any other. We buffed and charged into the fray.
We started knocking chunks off our adversary quickly, when he pulled out his first ‘special’ move—a random person gets smacked with “Soul Corruption”, creating a ball of EVIL energy that will utterly devastate a clothie and will heal the boss when it collides. Unfortunately for all concerned, the targeted individual was the boomkin standing four feet to my side, just off camera. Insta-gib and for the third time I’m tasting the floor. Sigh.
That was our new party’s only ‘whoops’ moment and the rest of the dungeon went flawlessly. We even trounced the Devourer of Souls in a record time!
Happily tucking away my prizes, I returned to Ironforge and fell asleep waiting for the parade to carry me home.
Flipped over to Shooty Aggro Girl (with Wolf!) and banded together with the Spastic Newbs of Azeroth to beat the living crap out of some religious nutjobs in their own temple, sort of a “World of Waco-craft”. We stormed the library twice, the armory, and finally the chapel itself. Over the course of a couple of hours, I learned vital things.
1) Wolves may not be trusted, ever. They are pack animals and are likely to bring back a pack of mobs with them as they chase down a lone runner. If a pack of mobs are not handy, in a pinch a boss will suffice.
2) Explosives are AWESOME! Considering my running sidequest of “Steal Aggro from Tank, Take a Shot” (it’s a repeatable quest), this is helping loads. Charge into battle while firing multishot, drop a trap, disengage and fly backwards a fair clip, then fire off another multishot and I’m starting to complete with Myrial’s blizzards for widespread pain distribution.
3) I need to seriously review my mana management or get an engineer to come up with a conjured water-based IV drip I can wear into battle.
Now at level 36, I need to review talents, glyph up, and so forth—fun weekend research. I’ve got some pages bookmarked; time to use them.
After we called it a night, I popped back on Strev for the sole purpose of collecting those two frosties that have eluded me for days. Popping my robes and pants into my pack, I queued and fifteen minutes later, I found myself in… Pit of Saron! Not a cakewalk, but very doable, even with a sub-optimal group, which is precisely what I had.
The healer was vastly undergeared for the instance and the tank, a gnome warrior (some people really do make them, it seems!), had serious issues with aggro control. This combination led to two team wipes against the first boss, a guy I’m used to steamrolling. By that point, I’m a little annoyed and the other two DPS drop party. I decided to stick it out and we quickly replaced them with a paladin and a druid, both apparently off-speccing. I love seeing these two classes in my groups more than any other. We buffed and charged into the fray.
We started knocking chunks off our adversary quickly, when he pulled out his first ‘special’ move—a random person gets smacked with “Soul Corruption”, creating a ball of EVIL energy that will utterly devastate a clothie and will heal the boss when it collides. Unfortunately for all concerned, the targeted individual was the boomkin standing four feet to my side, just off camera. Insta-gib and for the third time I’m tasting the floor. Sigh.
That was our new party’s only ‘whoops’ moment and the rest of the dungeon went flawlessly. We even trounced the Devourer of Souls in a record time!
Happily tucking away my prizes, I returned to Ironforge and fell asleep waiting for the parade to carry me home.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Hall Passes
I’ve run into a fairly curious problem—the random daily heroic. I’m eager to get more frosties to upgrade by gear, but for the past few days, I’ve simply been unable to complete one. This is unusual and starting to be quite vexing. I missed out one day due to playing Anyth. (I don’t begrudge this at all—I quite enjoy playing Shooty Aggro Girl.) The problem started the following day with a really bad tank in the Culling of Stratholme.
CoS, being the fairly easy heroic that it is, usually gives me an ‘ok, cool’ vibe. This time, I got The Tank From Hell. Could not maintain aggro and after the second (!) party wipe, he bailed in disgrace claiming “lag”. Free Pro-tip: claiming you have lag when you suck fools no one. Re-queued and hoped for the best. Got the worst heroic: the Halls of Reflection. It makes Oculus look fun.
HoR is hard. No ifs, ands, or buts about it: this dungeon is Blizzard’s way of getting even with us for laughing at the ease of heroics. I’ve tried this dungeon a number of times and EVERY single time either the party wipes multiple times before the first boss or the tank bails as soon as he finishes zoning in. Yeah, it’s that hard.
These are the Lich King’s private chambers and the first encounter is set up thusly: the party and a couple of NPCs enter a circular room with a couple of alcoves and a tunnel heading off from it. In the center of the room is Frostmourne, Arthas’ blade. Arthas’ generals show up and summon wave after wave of five-man teams to beat you down. The teams typically consist of a healer, a rogue, a mage, a fighter, and a hunter. They fight like players and crowd control is required (no polymorphing though—they are undead), as are dispels and spell interruptions. This is a vast difference from PvE gameplay to this point and will kill an inexperienced party quickly. PvPers have a slight advantage, as we’re –used- to fighting with crowd control, interruptions, and the like. By using the alcoves as a physical shield, one can often lure the ranged attackers in for easier pickings. Since the waves come non-stop, mana management becomes key. Oh, if you wipe? the waves reset.
The fifth and tenth waves are the Generals themselves with their own host of nasty abilities, but I digress. My experience: Zone into HoR, tank says “The Hell” and bails. We wait, get another one, wipe 3 times, and quit. I requeue—get HoR AGAIN…and promptly wipe again. The healer bails and the party disbands. Throughout all of this, we make it to the first boss…once. Frustrated, I occupied myself with battlegrounds instead.
Fast forward to last night. I queue up for my daily and get…HoR. Seriously, what is going on here? There’s 15 dungeons to pick from…I have no instances locked, but the PRNG seems to be picking on me. Ok, 1:3375 chance, but still annoying. I’m not playing this game, so I bail. When my timer is up, I re-queue…AGAIN HoR (1:50625). Ok—it wants me to play it, I’ll give it my all. Two wipes later, I’m irritated and spend most of the rest of my evening running daily quests for the Argent Crusade and PvPing.
It’s getting late, so I give the random heroic one more go… Halls of Mother-Farking Reflection AGAIN! (1:759375 chance). This time though, I seemed to have joined a group in progress. Oddly, it didn’t warn me.
They were obviously recovering from a team wipe and I was filling a DPS role that had bailed. Oh, irony. They had dropped the first boss, though—which was farther than I’d ever gotten before and it had reset down to wave 6. I took my place in the alcove and waited for the oncoming onslaught.
My gods, it was a team that knew what they were doing. For the first time, I was hopeful the Curse of HoR would be lifted. The tank maintained aggro, the healzor healzed, and I single targeted the things what needed killing in the right order: priest, rogue, mage, fighter, ranger, and saved my counterspells for the healer. We were relentless and wave after wave fell. My spirits began soaring when we faced down…and killed the second general.
The second ‘part’ of the dungeon works like this… you take the tunnel and beat down Arthas’ personal guard and then you get surprised when doppelgangers of your party leap out of the walls to kill you. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Six seconds after the tank engaged the guard, the server crashed. We were all frozen, but still able to party chat for about 20 seconds, so we knew this was affecting all of us. We were disconnected and after logging back in twice (the first stuck me on the HoR load screen until I DC’d again), I found myself without a party and back at my hearth point.
I cursed bitterly and called it a night.
CoS, being the fairly easy heroic that it is, usually gives me an ‘ok, cool’ vibe. This time, I got The Tank From Hell. Could not maintain aggro and after the second (!) party wipe, he bailed in disgrace claiming “lag”. Free Pro-tip: claiming you have lag when you suck fools no one. Re-queued and hoped for the best. Got the worst heroic: the Halls of Reflection. It makes Oculus look fun.
HoR is hard. No ifs, ands, or buts about it: this dungeon is Blizzard’s way of getting even with us for laughing at the ease of heroics. I’ve tried this dungeon a number of times and EVERY single time either the party wipes multiple times before the first boss or the tank bails as soon as he finishes zoning in. Yeah, it’s that hard.
These are the Lich King’s private chambers and the first encounter is set up thusly: the party and a couple of NPCs enter a circular room with a couple of alcoves and a tunnel heading off from it. In the center of the room is Frostmourne, Arthas’ blade. Arthas’ generals show up and summon wave after wave of five-man teams to beat you down. The teams typically consist of a healer, a rogue, a mage, a fighter, and a hunter. They fight like players and crowd control is required (no polymorphing though—they are undead), as are dispels and spell interruptions. This is a vast difference from PvE gameplay to this point and will kill an inexperienced party quickly. PvPers have a slight advantage, as we’re –used- to fighting with crowd control, interruptions, and the like. By using the alcoves as a physical shield, one can often lure the ranged attackers in for easier pickings. Since the waves come non-stop, mana management becomes key. Oh, if you wipe? the waves reset.
The fifth and tenth waves are the Generals themselves with their own host of nasty abilities, but I digress. My experience: Zone into HoR, tank says “The Hell” and bails. We wait, get another one, wipe 3 times, and quit. I requeue—get HoR AGAIN…and promptly wipe again. The healer bails and the party disbands. Throughout all of this, we make it to the first boss…once. Frustrated, I occupied myself with battlegrounds instead.
Fast forward to last night. I queue up for my daily and get…HoR. Seriously, what is going on here? There’s 15 dungeons to pick from…I have no instances locked, but the PRNG seems to be picking on me. Ok, 1:3375 chance, but still annoying. I’m not playing this game, so I bail. When my timer is up, I re-queue…AGAIN HoR (1:50625). Ok—it wants me to play it, I’ll give it my all. Two wipes later, I’m irritated and spend most of the rest of my evening running daily quests for the Argent Crusade and PvPing.
It’s getting late, so I give the random heroic one more go… Halls of Mother-Farking Reflection AGAIN! (1:759375 chance). This time though, I seemed to have joined a group in progress. Oddly, it didn’t warn me.
They were obviously recovering from a team wipe and I was filling a DPS role that had bailed. Oh, irony. They had dropped the first boss, though—which was farther than I’d ever gotten before and it had reset down to wave 6. I took my place in the alcove and waited for the oncoming onslaught.
My gods, it was a team that knew what they were doing. For the first time, I was hopeful the Curse of HoR would be lifted. The tank maintained aggro, the healzor healzed, and I single targeted the things what needed killing in the right order: priest, rogue, mage, fighter, ranger, and saved my counterspells for the healer. We were relentless and wave after wave fell. My spirits began soaring when we faced down…and killed the second general.
The second ‘part’ of the dungeon works like this… you take the tunnel and beat down Arthas’ personal guard and then you get surprised when doppelgangers of your party leap out of the walls to kill you. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Six seconds after the tank engaged the guard, the server crashed. We were all frozen, but still able to party chat for about 20 seconds, so we knew this was affecting all of us. We were disconnected and after logging back in twice (the first stuck me on the HoR load screen until I DC’d again), I found myself without a party and back at my hearth point.
I cursed bitterly and called it a night.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Some Enchanting Evenings...
Fidelis is, at its heart, a social and raiding guild. They’ve downed the Lich King (once) and host fairly regular runs through ICC with their “core” group. They don’t have quite enough to field the 25-mans, so often pad with outside help. Unfortunately for me, I lack the knowledge and gear to be a successful raider there, so I chatted with a few members for advice.
Several offered to carry me through the run. I was grateful, but declined—I still had not learned the moves for the bosses and one poor dancer on the floor can wipe a raid (LEEEEROY!). There was also the matter of gear. Regardless of everything else, I want to make a good impression and carry my own weight on one of these. Someone suggested I try out one of the Trial of the Crusader (TotC) runs first, and that sounded like a good idea.
One member turned me on to maxdps.com, which helps people select specific equipment, enchantments, and gems to maximize the ol’ damage output. All of the gear I have now is pretty much as good as it gets without spending many thousands in the AH (per piece) or by raiding specific instances and hoping for the best. Blech. Then I figured since I already had my gear to where it is going to be for a while, I could work on the enchantments for it.
My own enchanting skill was around 200 and my goal was to get to 400—which would give me nice spellpower boosts for my rings. These can only be cast on the enchanter’s own gear, so no outsourcing for me. Grimly, I headed to the AH.
Over the course of the weekend, I spent most of my time either farming for gold or blowing it on the AH for enchanting materials. In the end, I did get Enchanting 400 and my shiny rings buffed, but at the price of Strev’s 401(k). I’ll likely be running a lot less heroics and killing a lot more elementals for the next week to make up for it. As a side perk, I’ve found that gems you can buy with PvP honor rewards will sell for around 110-120 gold each and the fights make a nice distraction from mindless grinding.
I’m very well geared for TotC-- now I just need to learn the boss fights.
Anyth continues along nicely and by that I mean “blazing through levels like mad”. I’m thoroughly enjoying playing through all of the dungeons I skipped over back when vanilla was the only flavor available. Having way too much fun with “disengage”, which lets me hop backwards out of melee range and now that I can Feign Death, aggro management issues should be a thing of the past. (“I’m winning on aggro!”)
Funny side note on Recount. So, I’ve been using it a while and had flipped the meters at some point from “DPS” to “Damage” because I liked the way it was displaying the numbers more. I had noticed that I was just not out putting what I thought I should be no matter how much I tried. The tank was almost always beating me out. This came as a surprise, but it was getting more and more annoying as time went on.
The breaking point was when Myrial asked about her DPS and Karthex reported back numbers that were –nowhere- near mine. I had myself in 4th place (not shocking since Myrial has the Blizzard and my AoE is virtually non-existant), but Karthex noted I was solidly first. The hell? That’s when I discovered I could expand the Recount box. Doing so, I found that for the past few days I hadn’t been tracking “Damage”. I’d been tracking “Damage TAKEN”. Hilarious. I corrected it and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that goes in the coming days.
Several offered to carry me through the run. I was grateful, but declined—I still had not learned the moves for the bosses and one poor dancer on the floor can wipe a raid (LEEEEROY!). There was also the matter of gear. Regardless of everything else, I want to make a good impression and carry my own weight on one of these. Someone suggested I try out one of the Trial of the Crusader (TotC) runs first, and that sounded like a good idea.
One member turned me on to maxdps.com, which helps people select specific equipment, enchantments, and gems to maximize the ol’ damage output. All of the gear I have now is pretty much as good as it gets without spending many thousands in the AH (per piece) or by raiding specific instances and hoping for the best. Blech. Then I figured since I already had my gear to where it is going to be for a while, I could work on the enchantments for it.
My own enchanting skill was around 200 and my goal was to get to 400—which would give me nice spellpower boosts for my rings. These can only be cast on the enchanter’s own gear, so no outsourcing for me. Grimly, I headed to the AH.
Over the course of the weekend, I spent most of my time either farming for gold or blowing it on the AH for enchanting materials. In the end, I did get Enchanting 400 and my shiny rings buffed, but at the price of Strev’s 401(k). I’ll likely be running a lot less heroics and killing a lot more elementals for the next week to make up for it. As a side perk, I’ve found that gems you can buy with PvP honor rewards will sell for around 110-120 gold each and the fights make a nice distraction from mindless grinding.
I’m very well geared for TotC-- now I just need to learn the boss fights.
Anyth continues along nicely and by that I mean “blazing through levels like mad”. I’m thoroughly enjoying playing through all of the dungeons I skipped over back when vanilla was the only flavor available. Having way too much fun with “disengage”, which lets me hop backwards out of melee range and now that I can Feign Death, aggro management issues should be a thing of the past. (“I’m winning on aggro!”)
Funny side note on Recount. So, I’ve been using it a while and had flipped the meters at some point from “DPS” to “Damage” because I liked the way it was displaying the numbers more. I had noticed that I was just not out putting what I thought I should be no matter how much I tried. The tank was almost always beating me out. This came as a surprise, but it was getting more and more annoying as time went on.
The breaking point was when Myrial asked about her DPS and Karthex reported back numbers that were –nowhere- near mine. I had myself in 4th place (not shocking since Myrial has the Blizzard and my AoE is virtually non-existant), but Karthex noted I was solidly first. The hell? That’s when I discovered I could expand the Recount box. Doing so, I found that for the past few days I hadn’t been tracking “Damage”. I’d been tracking “Damage TAKEN”. Hilarious. I corrected it and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that goes in the coming days.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Razorscale Must Die!
Spent most of the day unconscious recovering from a cold, but got a little daytime play in to pad the bank account. Leveling enchanting is absolutely nightmarish. Getting to 325 has cost about 1k gold and from what I’ve been reading on the boards, it’s about to take a major jump up. Based on current auction prices, the next 15 points will cost me 25-40 gold each. To get to 450 will take a Madoff-scheme.
After researching, I hit a couple of places to farm rhinos and mammoths then a cave for fire elementals. The meats, skins, and materials gathered netted me about 400 gold for an hour’s work. That will probably improve as I get better at it, but it was enough to keep me fluid.
Ran my daily and one other heroic besides, allowing me to upgrade a ring and finally top 5k GS (yes, yes—I’m dead to Brian), but the Big Thing was getting ready for the night—where I’d be participating in My First Guild Raid. We would be storming Ulduar to complete the weekly challenge, which was beat the snot out of Razorscale, a horrific dragon. My raid experience thus far was a single pug in the Vaults, whereas my guild, Fidelis, is actually organized, requiring members to Have Their Shit Together. I already have a deep-seated neurosis about not pulling my weight on any task (seriously—when running with Rogerses and doing 80% of the damage, I still fret about not doing –enough-.) and this would be a trial by fire. Knowing one idiot can wipe an entire raid group (LEEEEEROY!), I was nervous.
I read up on the encounter beforehand and had a basic idea of what the dragon was capable of doing and was very grateful we’d be running a 10-man easy mode version of the dungeon. I installed teamspeak 3, picked up a couple of flasks, some potions, a few other things and flapped over to the instance door to chill out for a bit. In retrospect, I should’ve read up on the rest of the dungeon too.
All total, we had enough people sign up for the raid that I thought we might do two quick runs. Boy, was I wrong.
The group decided to run the dungeon as a 25-man group… in Heroic mode… with only 18 people.
I zoned in to find myself…not in a dungeon, but in an outdoor instance in a ruined city. People were running around jumping in siege engines, motorcycles, and “destroyers” (another type of vehicle). With no idea what to do, I jumped in a siege engine someone else was driving and found myself as a ‘gunner’. One person steers, the other fires. We were on some sort of staging area and while we waited for everyone to get situated, I practiced with the weapons (one ground, one airborne, one option to load myself into the catapult to be used as ammo (WTF?!!?). Just as I was comfortable with the operations, the raid leader announced we had too many siege engines and we needed a couple more destroyers. My driver hopped out to oblige. Damn it!
I dashed (read:blinked) over to the destroyer he had picked up to continue my gunning and found a completely different set of controls. Ground and aerial was reversed, I had some options for firing a hook to grab crates, and dumping nitrous into the engines for a speed boost. Oh, gods. I practiced the weapons a few seconds, then we started rolling out into the city proper. We were assailed immediately and constantly from the ground and air by an army of dwarves with tanks and golems. The raid leader told destroyer gunners to grab as many crates as we could for our drivers, so I did as I blazed a path of carnage around us. Giant stone pillars crumbled and after a few moments, we battered down the gates to the inner city of Ulduar. Apparently we earned an achievement for clearing the area without having to repair any vehicles. So far, so good. We jumped out of the tanks and headed into the ‘inner’ bits, where there were three distinct paths. We headed east, which was Razorscale’s roost and where I actually knew what was going on.
The encounter works pretty much like this: dragon is untouchable and assaults from above until we get 4 harpoons repaired and can drag her to the ground. Meanwhile, armies of dwarves erupt from the ground in moleman-style tunneling vehicles. Once the dragon is down, we get a short time to DPS her down until she breaks free and flaps back up and the cycle repeats until we get her under 50% health and she can no longer fly. It’s timed, so 12 minutes or so after we start, we effectively lose, as her damage, which is already 14k+ per hit, will increase by 900%. (Good luck with that.)
Ok. Razorscale’s stats: 17M health, drops patches of fire from above that does 7k damage a second—burns on the ground for nearly half a minute, has a 35-yard wing buffet that’ll do about 5k from falling damage when you get blown back, a nasty breath attack that does about 15-16k damage, and the aforementioned ‘standard’ attack.
I have nearly 19k health unbuffed, so any single attack I can take on the chin but, like everyone, I have to be VERY careful with fire patches.
It plays out exactly like a LARP field battle should. Everyone was flanking, dodging, and attacking for a common purpose.
We failed. Horribly.
We weren’t quite outputting enough damage and by the third time she flew back to the sky, she was around 70% and we had five minutes left on the clock. To make matters worse, our primary tank and healer were dead and raiders started dropping like flies. I was probably 5th from the last to go, but it was a TPK.
We regrouped and picked up another healer who had just logged on and returned to the fray. As the dragon lazily circled overhead, we quickly decided what went wrong and how to fix it. Namely, we had fired the harpoons too early, so DPS was still working on dwarves instead of being able to focus on the boss. We engaged again.
This time the difference was noticeable, but would it be enough? Instead of whittling her down by 8% on the first landing, we carved off 16%. The third time she landed, she wasn’t able to take off again and we hammered down hard. It was an utterly exhilarating experience and it ended with the fell beast slain!
Although I won no loot in the rolls, I happily returned to Dalaran to collect my reward and call it a night. Can’t wait to see next week’s!
After researching, I hit a couple of places to farm rhinos and mammoths then a cave for fire elementals. The meats, skins, and materials gathered netted me about 400 gold for an hour’s work. That will probably improve as I get better at it, but it was enough to keep me fluid.
Ran my daily and one other heroic besides, allowing me to upgrade a ring and finally top 5k GS (yes, yes—I’m dead to Brian), but the Big Thing was getting ready for the night—where I’d be participating in My First Guild Raid. We would be storming Ulduar to complete the weekly challenge, which was beat the snot out of Razorscale, a horrific dragon. My raid experience thus far was a single pug in the Vaults, whereas my guild, Fidelis, is actually organized, requiring members to Have Their Shit Together. I already have a deep-seated neurosis about not pulling my weight on any task (seriously—when running with Rogerses and doing 80% of the damage, I still fret about not doing –enough-.) and this would be a trial by fire. Knowing one idiot can wipe an entire raid group (LEEEEEROY!), I was nervous.
I read up on the encounter beforehand and had a basic idea of what the dragon was capable of doing and was very grateful we’d be running a 10-man easy mode version of the dungeon. I installed teamspeak 3, picked up a couple of flasks, some potions, a few other things and flapped over to the instance door to chill out for a bit. In retrospect, I should’ve read up on the rest of the dungeon too.
All total, we had enough people sign up for the raid that I thought we might do two quick runs. Boy, was I wrong.
The group decided to run the dungeon as a 25-man group… in Heroic mode… with only 18 people.
I zoned in to find myself…not in a dungeon, but in an outdoor instance in a ruined city. People were running around jumping in siege engines, motorcycles, and “destroyers” (another type of vehicle). With no idea what to do, I jumped in a siege engine someone else was driving and found myself as a ‘gunner’. One person steers, the other fires. We were on some sort of staging area and while we waited for everyone to get situated, I practiced with the weapons (one ground, one airborne, one option to load myself into the catapult to be used as ammo (WTF?!!?). Just as I was comfortable with the operations, the raid leader announced we had too many siege engines and we needed a couple more destroyers. My driver hopped out to oblige. Damn it!
I dashed (read:blinked) over to the destroyer he had picked up to continue my gunning and found a completely different set of controls. Ground and aerial was reversed, I had some options for firing a hook to grab crates, and dumping nitrous into the engines for a speed boost. Oh, gods. I practiced the weapons a few seconds, then we started rolling out into the city proper. We were assailed immediately and constantly from the ground and air by an army of dwarves with tanks and golems. The raid leader told destroyer gunners to grab as many crates as we could for our drivers, so I did as I blazed a path of carnage around us. Giant stone pillars crumbled and after a few moments, we battered down the gates to the inner city of Ulduar. Apparently we earned an achievement for clearing the area without having to repair any vehicles. So far, so good. We jumped out of the tanks and headed into the ‘inner’ bits, where there were three distinct paths. We headed east, which was Razorscale’s roost and where I actually knew what was going on.
The encounter works pretty much like this: dragon is untouchable and assaults from above until we get 4 harpoons repaired and can drag her to the ground. Meanwhile, armies of dwarves erupt from the ground in moleman-style tunneling vehicles. Once the dragon is down, we get a short time to DPS her down until she breaks free and flaps back up and the cycle repeats until we get her under 50% health and she can no longer fly. It’s timed, so 12 minutes or so after we start, we effectively lose, as her damage, which is already 14k+ per hit, will increase by 900%. (Good luck with that.)
Ok. Razorscale’s stats: 17M health, drops patches of fire from above that does 7k damage a second—burns on the ground for nearly half a minute, has a 35-yard wing buffet that’ll do about 5k from falling damage when you get blown back, a nasty breath attack that does about 15-16k damage, and the aforementioned ‘standard’ attack.
I have nearly 19k health unbuffed, so any single attack I can take on the chin but, like everyone, I have to be VERY careful with fire patches.
It plays out exactly like a LARP field battle should. Everyone was flanking, dodging, and attacking for a common purpose.
We failed. Horribly.
We weren’t quite outputting enough damage and by the third time she flew back to the sky, she was around 70% and we had five minutes left on the clock. To make matters worse, our primary tank and healer were dead and raiders started dropping like flies. I was probably 5th from the last to go, but it was a TPK.
We regrouped and picked up another healer who had just logged on and returned to the fray. As the dragon lazily circled overhead, we quickly decided what went wrong and how to fix it. Namely, we had fired the harpoons too early, so DPS was still working on dwarves instead of being able to focus on the boss. We engaged again.
This time the difference was noticeable, but would it be enough? Instead of whittling her down by 8% on the first landing, we carved off 16%. The third time she landed, she wasn’t able to take off again and we hammered down hard. It was an utterly exhilarating experience and it ended with the fell beast slain!
Although I won no loot in the rolls, I happily returned to Dalaran to collect my reward and call it a night. Can’t wait to see next week’s!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Anyth-ing and Everything
Geared up Anyth and set my sights on adventure. Now that [M|Z]yrial are “legit” players, it was time to get the rolling ball o’ hurt going— friends with (referral) benefits! Myrial (Mrs. Rogers) and Kartok (Car talk? Karbon? Oregano?—I can never get his name down right. It's Jacob's latest alternate character) lagging behind a couple of levels, Team Yrial found itself plowing through Westfall like a pack of wolves through a Burger King (not a pretty sight). We had a mission: get Deadmines-ready. This was going to be a bit of work, for as I recalled DM had something like a level 16 or so requirement, but people used to freak out if you brought someone along who was under level 19. Triple xp being what it is, I need not have worried.
After dinging a couple of times, we headed over to Lakeshire to get a new batch of quests and a happy new flight path. Returning to Stormwind, I picked up a number of useful abilities to slap into my bag of tricks: the “I can run slightly faster skill” and “fire traps” being chief among them. Surprisingly enough, my pet wolf seems to be getting triple xp as well, as he is easily keeping pace with the rapid level gains and staying about a level behind at any given point.
We had the manpower and the time, so what to do with it? After some waffling on Deadmines or not, opting for the Random Dungeon sounded like a good idea to me. Even with two members being moderately overgeared, I figured the level difference with the elites in the ‘Mines would have caused serious problems. Also, I haven’t done hardly any of the “vanilla” dungeons, primarily because it used to be such a bitch to get a group back in The Day, and since it was ALL new to half the group, it would be All Good.
Ragefire was our first stop and we might have been able to four-man it. Our randomly assigned fifth was a paladin new to the class, but it rarely showed. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time at the beginning trying to get my pet to stop taunting and there was the entire “LAVA BAD!” episode with Zyrial, but overall it was a fun and fast run and the random reward bag gave me a piece of gear far superior to anything the dungeon itself would’ve rewarded. I’ll likely outgrow just about everything in a couple of days playing this character, so it’s hard to get –too- excited about drops, but it’ll make those couple of days easier.
By the time we finished, we were all 17-18 and the dungeon button glittered merrily in the evening light. Oregano pushed it and almost instantly we were in hell: the Wailing Caverns. I was amused to note we had gotten another paladin. This labyrinth of a dungeon sucked harshly, although the xp flowed like water. When it was described as “a maze of twisty passages, all alike”, I laughed it off with a grue joke. When we had spent fifteen minutes aimlessly searching for “the monkey in the corner”, I had long since stopped laughing.
At some point during all of this I hit 21 and realized with horror I hadn’t spent my talent points… since level 11. GLAH! During a mana break, I alt-tabbed, picked a solid marksman pve build from the forums, and corrected that quickly.
The highlight of the trip was after we had found and slain the last boss required to awaken the sleeping druid. Taking a shortcut, Oregano leapt off a high outcropping and the rest of us followed. What follows is exactly my thoughts in those last 3.5 seconds: That must lead back to the beginning. Right then. Gods, that’s a long drop. Like really long. Oh crap—no Slow Fall. Tank died, Zyrial died….this is gonna-- *splat* …followed shortly by the deaths of the other two party members. We had all jumped off the proverbial bridge because our friends had. If only I had listened to parental advice years ago! I came close to waking The Wife with my laughter, but it was utterly hysterical.
As a perk, the death allowed us to circumvent having to find our way through the maze back to the beginning, so it was worth a few silver in repairs. Only in MMOs can suicide be considered a travel expedience.
We finished the dungeon without further incident and returned to Stormwind to train and take care of business. Now at level 22, there were an insane amount of new skills to purchase—I still need to see what they all do and slot them on the ol’ action bar.
My next goal is to return to the Land of Emo Elves (blech) for the sole purpose of picking up my feline mount—Hi ho, Kittycat….AWAY!
After dinging a couple of times, we headed over to Lakeshire to get a new batch of quests and a happy new flight path. Returning to Stormwind, I picked up a number of useful abilities to slap into my bag of tricks: the “I can run slightly faster skill” and “fire traps” being chief among them. Surprisingly enough, my pet wolf seems to be getting triple xp as well, as he is easily keeping pace with the rapid level gains and staying about a level behind at any given point.
We had the manpower and the time, so what to do with it? After some waffling on Deadmines or not, opting for the Random Dungeon sounded like a good idea to me. Even with two members being moderately overgeared, I figured the level difference with the elites in the ‘Mines would have caused serious problems. Also, I haven’t done hardly any of the “vanilla” dungeons, primarily because it used to be such a bitch to get a group back in The Day, and since it was ALL new to half the group, it would be All Good.
Ragefire was our first stop and we might have been able to four-man it. Our randomly assigned fifth was a paladin new to the class, but it rarely showed. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time at the beginning trying to get my pet to stop taunting and there was the entire “LAVA BAD!” episode with Zyrial, but overall it was a fun and fast run and the random reward bag gave me a piece of gear far superior to anything the dungeon itself would’ve rewarded. I’ll likely outgrow just about everything in a couple of days playing this character, so it’s hard to get –too- excited about drops, but it’ll make those couple of days easier.
By the time we finished, we were all 17-18 and the dungeon button glittered merrily in the evening light. Oregano pushed it and almost instantly we were in hell: the Wailing Caverns. I was amused to note we had gotten another paladin. This labyrinth of a dungeon sucked harshly, although the xp flowed like water. When it was described as “a maze of twisty passages, all alike”, I laughed it off with a grue joke. When we had spent fifteen minutes aimlessly searching for “the monkey in the corner”, I had long since stopped laughing.
At some point during all of this I hit 21 and realized with horror I hadn’t spent my talent points… since level 11. GLAH! During a mana break, I alt-tabbed, picked a solid marksman pve build from the forums, and corrected that quickly.
The highlight of the trip was after we had found and slain the last boss required to awaken the sleeping druid. Taking a shortcut, Oregano leapt off a high outcropping and the rest of us followed. What follows is exactly my thoughts in those last 3.5 seconds: That must lead back to the beginning. Right then. Gods, that’s a long drop. Like really long. Oh crap—no Slow Fall. Tank died, Zyrial died….this is gonna-- *splat* …followed shortly by the deaths of the other two party members. We had all jumped off the proverbial bridge because our friends had. If only I had listened to parental advice years ago! I came close to waking The Wife with my laughter, but it was utterly hysterical.
As a perk, the death allowed us to circumvent having to find our way through the maze back to the beginning, so it was worth a few silver in repairs. Only in MMOs can suicide be considered a travel expedience.
We finished the dungeon without further incident and returned to Stormwind to train and take care of business. Now at level 22, there were an insane amount of new skills to purchase—I still need to see what they all do and slot them on the ol’ action bar.
My next goal is to return to the Land of Emo Elves (blech) for the sole purpose of picking up my feline mount—Hi ho, Kittycat….AWAY!
Friday, August 13, 2010
Anyth Oaklie
Popped in to run my Daily Heroic—it turned out to be Trial of the Champion (the arena one) and I wound up with The Worst PUG Evar. Well, maybe not –ever-, but at least in a long while. The tank started off by letting us know it was his First Day Tanking (never a good sign, but everyone has to start somewhere, right?), so I paid extra close attention to the ol’ threat-o-meter for the battle. I need not have bothered.
We cleared the jousting rounds with little issue. Well, I got knocked off and trampled, but that wasn’t wholly unexpected. By the time I got back, we were ready to face a wave of Champions… three nasty, buff, spell casting, immune to polymorph bosses and that was where it all went to hell. The first run through we quickly discovered that unless the tank tags all three quickly, they will make a bee line to the healer and the party falls down very quickly. Ok, lesson learned. Throughout all of this, we have a VERY mouthy 5.8GS DPS, whom I shall call Jerkface, ragging on the tank. We point out we know he’s new and cut him a –little- slack, tyvm.
Take 2: Tank runs in, tags everything and we settle down to focus on bigbad #1. I alternate half the fight polymorphed as a sheep and the other half cautiously nuking out the brains of those who oppose me. Spells are flying everywhere and poison patches are thrown at us liberally. Turning my focus from my target for a second, I see that everyone else is dead. Oh, crap. Three seconds later, I embrace the cool floor. All the way back there is intra-party bickering between the Healer (appropriately named “Treeah”) and Jerkface, with the Tank feeling pretty bad because he couldn’t hold aggro.
While recovering my body and re-buffing, I was able to reconstruct what happened: Jerkface didn’t understand certain key concepts like “Aggro is everyone’s responsibility” and “Don’t stand in the poison patches” which led to a swift demise. The healer pointed out he can’t heal stupid and Jerkface starts a vote to have the healer booted from the party. Thankfully, it failed…much like attempt three.
Take 3: Same damn thing happens with the party wiping. The tank is starting to crack under the pressure and Jerkface insists it is Healer-FAIL’s fault for not doing its (I have difficulties assigning sexes to trees) job. This time I approve of a vote to kick a party member and we say goodbye to Jerkface and get a hunter replacement. Excellent!
Take 4: After all of that, it was a shame we wiped again. This time, I swallow a bitter pill and initiate a vote to kick the noobtank. It passes and we soon get a Paladin named “Noobedfish” whose first words were “What happened to your last tank?” After explaining, Noob notes sadly he hit 80 yesterday. We tell him that, honestly, he couldn’t do worse and we steeled ourselves for battle.
Take 5: The PalaNoob rushes forth to engage the enemy and the difference was immediately apparent. Everything –worked- the way it should and we made quick work of the rest of the instance. I felt bad about sending the first tank away, but my guilt was quelled after getting a nice upgrade for my shoes.
After all of that, I really didn’t want to run more randoms even though I needed the emblems. Weighing my options, my two next big goals were a trinket for Strev and a weapon upgrade for Anyth. Trinkets are pretty hard to come by, so it looked like I’d have to set my sights on a PvP-reward one. They come with a 48k honor price tag and I only had half of that squirreled away, so it’d be a few battles before I could claim one. To get an heirloom weapon for Anyth, I’d need to burn a ton of emblems I didn’t have…or… sacrifice part of my character concept and spend stonekeeper shards to get a gun. The PvP-vendor doesn’t sell bows.
Opting for the gun, I hustled over to Wintergrasp, chatted with the vendor, and discovered I was 20 short of the 325 needed. As I was determining this, I was obliterated by a rogue that was hidden in our fortress. Brian is right—they are always there just out of sight and always waiting to kill YOU. The battle for Wintergrasp was due to start shortly, so I queued up and did that. We won and in the process I earned the rest of the shards I needed to make Anyth a Happy Girl. I’d just need some ammo and a new pouch.
Logged on Anyth and found she was still in Elfville. No worries. I hustled to the mailbox, hefted the ancient dwarven hand cannon, and completely failed to equip it. Anyth didn’t have the skill. I run over to the Weaponsmaster and discover they can teach me to wield just about everything…except guns. Terrific. A search on the ‘net confirms that the only place I can learn to use a gun is the dwarven captial, Ironforge. *headdesk*
Long story short, I made my way to Ironforge and picked up the skill—playing a mage has REALLY spoiled me with the city teleports. The weapon upgrade effectively tripled her DPS and I’m looking forward to my next run with Zyrial.
Ran a few more BGs and am getting tantalizingly close to replacing the last non-epic piece of gear. Soon!
We cleared the jousting rounds with little issue. Well, I got knocked off and trampled, but that wasn’t wholly unexpected. By the time I got back, we were ready to face a wave of Champions… three nasty, buff, spell casting, immune to polymorph bosses and that was where it all went to hell. The first run through we quickly discovered that unless the tank tags all three quickly, they will make a bee line to the healer and the party falls down very quickly. Ok, lesson learned. Throughout all of this, we have a VERY mouthy 5.8GS DPS, whom I shall call Jerkface, ragging on the tank. We point out we know he’s new and cut him a –little- slack, tyvm.
Take 2: Tank runs in, tags everything and we settle down to focus on bigbad #1. I alternate half the fight polymorphed as a sheep and the other half cautiously nuking out the brains of those who oppose me. Spells are flying everywhere and poison patches are thrown at us liberally. Turning my focus from my target for a second, I see that everyone else is dead. Oh, crap. Three seconds later, I embrace the cool floor. All the way back there is intra-party bickering between the Healer (appropriately named “Treeah”) and Jerkface, with the Tank feeling pretty bad because he couldn’t hold aggro.
While recovering my body and re-buffing, I was able to reconstruct what happened: Jerkface didn’t understand certain key concepts like “Aggro is everyone’s responsibility” and “Don’t stand in the poison patches” which led to a swift demise. The healer pointed out he can’t heal stupid and Jerkface starts a vote to have the healer booted from the party. Thankfully, it failed…much like attempt three.
Take 3: Same damn thing happens with the party wiping. The tank is starting to crack under the pressure and Jerkface insists it is Healer-FAIL’s fault for not doing its (I have difficulties assigning sexes to trees) job. This time I approve of a vote to kick a party member and we say goodbye to Jerkface and get a hunter replacement. Excellent!
Take 4: After all of that, it was a shame we wiped again. This time, I swallow a bitter pill and initiate a vote to kick the noobtank. It passes and we soon get a Paladin named “Noobedfish” whose first words were “What happened to your last tank?” After explaining, Noob notes sadly he hit 80 yesterday. We tell him that, honestly, he couldn’t do worse and we steeled ourselves for battle.
Take 5: The PalaNoob rushes forth to engage the enemy and the difference was immediately apparent. Everything –worked- the way it should and we made quick work of the rest of the instance. I felt bad about sending the first tank away, but my guilt was quelled after getting a nice upgrade for my shoes.
After all of that, I really didn’t want to run more randoms even though I needed the emblems. Weighing my options, my two next big goals were a trinket for Strev and a weapon upgrade for Anyth. Trinkets are pretty hard to come by, so it looked like I’d have to set my sights on a PvP-reward one. They come with a 48k honor price tag and I only had half of that squirreled away, so it’d be a few battles before I could claim one. To get an heirloom weapon for Anyth, I’d need to burn a ton of emblems I didn’t have…or… sacrifice part of my character concept and spend stonekeeper shards to get a gun. The PvP-vendor doesn’t sell bows.
Opting for the gun, I hustled over to Wintergrasp, chatted with the vendor, and discovered I was 20 short of the 325 needed. As I was determining this, I was obliterated by a rogue that was hidden in our fortress. Brian is right—they are always there just out of sight and always waiting to kill YOU. The battle for Wintergrasp was due to start shortly, so I queued up and did that. We won and in the process I earned the rest of the shards I needed to make Anyth a Happy Girl. I’d just need some ammo and a new pouch.
Logged on Anyth and found she was still in Elfville. No worries. I hustled to the mailbox, hefted the ancient dwarven hand cannon, and completely failed to equip it. Anyth didn’t have the skill. I run over to the Weaponsmaster and discover they can teach me to wield just about everything…except guns. Terrific. A search on the ‘net confirms that the only place I can learn to use a gun is the dwarven captial, Ironforge. *headdesk*
Long story short, I made my way to Ironforge and picked up the skill—playing a mage has REALLY spoiled me with the city teleports. The weapon upgrade effectively tripled her DPS and I’m looking forward to my next run with Zyrial.
Ran a few more BGs and am getting tantalizingly close to replacing the last non-epic piece of gear. Soon!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Surely you joust?
Most of my time last night was engaged in getting a new lowbie set up for play for when a couple of married friends of mine I'll call "the Rogers" have paid up and become "legit". Thus, Anyth the Night Elf Hunter was born.
I really, really hate the NE starting area: it’s too spread out and gloomy. The land of Emo Elves. Yeah, I had to get out of there fast. Since Zyrial (Mr. Rogers, whom I've referred) and I will enjoy triple xp when we’re able to slum around together eventually, it made sense to at least move over to his starting area. So at level 3, I began a grand adventure across Azeroth, mostly involving standing around and waiting for boats at various harbors. After getting on the wrong one only twice, I eventually made my way to Stormwind and made Goldshire my home.
Twinking her up with a little gold, three decent packs (the last pack slot being used by an ammo bag), and heirloom shoulder guards, I filled a few random things with arrows and quit at level 4.
A note on the heirloom gear—I finally figured out that the only thing I could really buy Anyth of use with the currency I had was shoulders. Everything else requires tokens that would come at a cost of upgrades to my main and I just can’t afford to slight him yet.
Took Strev through a few random dungeons and wound up for the first time in “The Trial of the Crusader”, a dungeon that consists entirely of a jousting arena. After a few rounds of jousting, you have to best groups of increasingly difficult opponents with your skills until you fight the Lich King’s black knight champion. Challenging, but rewarding…or so I thought. Although I received none of the epic loot that dropped (which was fine—it was all vendor-bait to mages), I did get rewarded with a few “Champion Seals” which excited me, until I realized there was nothing I could buy with them of any use to me.
Through dungeoneering I did get enough Emblems to finally acquire my fourth piece of T9 armor, giving me a bonus to critical strike percentages that can only be described as “Wow.” Hitting 4.5k GS was also a feel good moment. As I’m not going for the 5th and final piece of T9 (no additional set bonus and it’s slightly worse than my current robes), I can go ahead and start saving up for the T9.5 set.
Gettin’ there.
I really, really hate the NE starting area: it’s too spread out and gloomy. The land of Emo Elves. Yeah, I had to get out of there fast. Since Zyrial (Mr. Rogers, whom I've referred) and I will enjoy triple xp when we’re able to slum around together eventually, it made sense to at least move over to his starting area. So at level 3, I began a grand adventure across Azeroth, mostly involving standing around and waiting for boats at various harbors. After getting on the wrong one only twice, I eventually made my way to Stormwind and made Goldshire my home.
Twinking her up with a little gold, three decent packs (the last pack slot being used by an ammo bag), and heirloom shoulder guards, I filled a few random things with arrows and quit at level 4.
A note on the heirloom gear—I finally figured out that the only thing I could really buy Anyth of use with the currency I had was shoulders. Everything else requires tokens that would come at a cost of upgrades to my main and I just can’t afford to slight him yet.
Took Strev through a few random dungeons and wound up for the first time in “The Trial of the Crusader”, a dungeon that consists entirely of a jousting arena. After a few rounds of jousting, you have to best groups of increasingly difficult opponents with your skills until you fight the Lich King’s black knight champion. Challenging, but rewarding…or so I thought. Although I received none of the epic loot that dropped (which was fine—it was all vendor-bait to mages), I did get rewarded with a few “Champion Seals” which excited me, until I realized there was nothing I could buy with them of any use to me.
Through dungeoneering I did get enough Emblems to finally acquire my fourth piece of T9 armor, giving me a bonus to critical strike percentages that can only be described as “Wow.” Hitting 4.5k GS was also a feel good moment. As I’m not going for the 5th and final piece of T9 (no additional set bonus and it’s slightly worse than my current robes), I can go ahead and start saving up for the T9.5 set.
Gettin’ there.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Two Out of Three Ain't Bad
Over the weekend, I finally found a guild to hang my hat: Fidelis. They are a friendly bunch and raid often—and there’s usually about ten people on at any given time. This is a little bit of a change for me.
Typically when I wind up guilded in a game, I am a big fish in a small pond or quickly become one through aggressive leveling and/or gearing. This time, I’m very much a minnow in a guild that’s been established for over a year. Checking my ‘score’ on WoW-heroes shows me ranking about 128th or so overall in the guild in relative terms of gear. I’m still not capable of doing Icecrown, but I should be able to handle lesser raids now—we’ll see as the weeks progress.
I simply had to find a way to get the old gearscore up. Even if I never wind up storming through a 25-man Ice Crown Citadel run, it still never hurts to be a little more efficient in providing DPS in dungeons. My three lowest pieces of gear would simply have to get upgraded: hat, necklace, and a trinket.
Ran a bunch of random heroics and got enough badges to replace the hat. I now have three pieces of Tier 9 equipment and am looking forward to eventually getting a set bonus for four pieces of it. It’ll bump up my critical percentages nicely when I do.
I did get a random little treat in the mail after doing something like 100 random pugs—the WoW development team sent an auto-mail congratulating me on apparently really liking pugs and rewarded me with a pet pug! It’s cute as hell and I don’t even like dogs. Good times!
The necklace was a bit of a problem. Seems as though there wasn’t any epic-level necklaces available for badges and the drops on the heroics for something useful was abysmal. I searched on wowhead for suitable gear replacements and came across a brilliant idea: get a PvP reward!
As you likely know, I don’t shy away from PvP fights and what I lack in skill I make up for with dogged enthusiasm. As usual, there was two pieces of gear available: one that was “pretty good” and one that was “wow” and each were priced accordingly. Setting my sights on “pretty good”, I began a blitz on random battlefields.
Random battlefields offer a number of advantages. First, win or lose, you are given bonus honor (read: points used for PvP rewards), although winning gives considerably more. Second, the time it takes to enter a battleground is ALWAYS under two minutes. Finally, it makes no difference how drunk you are while playing, since you’re going to die a LOT anyways and no one really cares if you screw something up. So, too intoxicated for dungeoning = just right for PvP.
To our credit, we won about half the time and over the course of Sunday, I earned a shiny new necklace and my gearscore is rapidly approaching “4500”. I won’t get into Icecrown with that, but I can consistently hit around 3k DPS when fighting and the random guys I fight with seem to be appreciative of my skills. Or at least, no one sneers at my score anymore. Good enough for now.
The last item on my list, the trinket, I still have no idea about. That may wind up being another PvP reward. We’ll see.
Finally, I continued my Eternal Quests for Achievements by fully exploring every zone in Northrend and starting the Eastern Kingdoms. There is a world to discover and I’m doing it a little at a time. Also raised enchanting to 200 and fished up to about half that. Fishing seems to be a nice little time killer while waiting for a dungeon group to form.
Now if I can just remember to switch my weapon back so I don’t charge into battle with a fishing pole in hand.
Typically when I wind up guilded in a game, I am a big fish in a small pond or quickly become one through aggressive leveling and/or gearing. This time, I’m very much a minnow in a guild that’s been established for over a year. Checking my ‘score’ on WoW-heroes shows me ranking about 128th or so overall in the guild in relative terms of gear. I’m still not capable of doing Icecrown, but I should be able to handle lesser raids now—we’ll see as the weeks progress.
I simply had to find a way to get the old gearscore up. Even if I never wind up storming through a 25-man Ice Crown Citadel run, it still never hurts to be a little more efficient in providing DPS in dungeons. My three lowest pieces of gear would simply have to get upgraded: hat, necklace, and a trinket.
Ran a bunch of random heroics and got enough badges to replace the hat. I now have three pieces of Tier 9 equipment and am looking forward to eventually getting a set bonus for four pieces of it. It’ll bump up my critical percentages nicely when I do.
I did get a random little treat in the mail after doing something like 100 random pugs—the WoW development team sent an auto-mail congratulating me on apparently really liking pugs and rewarded me with a pet pug! It’s cute as hell and I don’t even like dogs. Good times!
The necklace was a bit of a problem. Seems as though there wasn’t any epic-level necklaces available for badges and the drops on the heroics for something useful was abysmal. I searched on wowhead for suitable gear replacements and came across a brilliant idea: get a PvP reward!
As you likely know, I don’t shy away from PvP fights and what I lack in skill I make up for with dogged enthusiasm. As usual, there was two pieces of gear available: one that was “pretty good” and one that was “wow” and each were priced accordingly. Setting my sights on “pretty good”, I began a blitz on random battlefields.
Random battlefields offer a number of advantages. First, win or lose, you are given bonus honor (read: points used for PvP rewards), although winning gives considerably more. Second, the time it takes to enter a battleground is ALWAYS under two minutes. Finally, it makes no difference how drunk you are while playing, since you’re going to die a LOT anyways and no one really cares if you screw something up. So, too intoxicated for dungeoning = just right for PvP.
To our credit, we won about half the time and over the course of Sunday, I earned a shiny new necklace and my gearscore is rapidly approaching “4500”. I won’t get into Icecrown with that, but I can consistently hit around 3k DPS when fighting and the random guys I fight with seem to be appreciative of my skills. Or at least, no one sneers at my score anymore. Good enough for now.
The last item on my list, the trinket, I still have no idea about. That may wind up being another PvP reward. We’ll see.
Finally, I continued my Eternal Quests for Achievements by fully exploring every zone in Northrend and starting the Eastern Kingdoms. There is a world to discover and I’m doing it a little at a time. Also raised enchanting to 200 and fished up to about half that. Fishing seems to be a nice little time killer while waiting for a dungeon group to form.
Now if I can just remember to switch my weapon back so I don’t charge into battle with a fishing pole in hand.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Down in the Valley
Been gearing up over the past few days by various means and am almost entirely in “item level 200” and better gear, which is fairly good but not great. I’ve been reading up a bit on the various armor tier levels, and apparently I have no pieces of it yet. I think the only thing that ‘counts’ for tiers is matching armor that gives set bonuses. Since I’d been spending my hard-won emblems on trinkets and jewelry, I haven’t gotten any of the tier 9 or tier 9.5 pieces yet—in fact, I was quite surprised when I found the salesman for these, since they were in a different building altogether from the reward vendor I’d been visiting. So, now it’s just a matter or deciding which tier to buy (probably 9—it’s so much cheaper).
Ironically, as I get better it’s been getting considerably more fatal for me in dungeon groups. My DPS output has grown nicely, but now “passable” tanks have a hard time holding aggro…which means learning how to throttle DPS after the first few encounters—and if one of the other DPS providers die, my aggro percentage suddenly skyrockets and hilarity ensues.
Tried out arcane on secondary and… well, it was ugly. The single damage output was nice, but losing all of the slows…ice shield, ice block…Steve…nearly all of my “survival” skills, really… led to a series of extraordinarily violent ends. I chalked them up to ‘learning the ropes’, but given that my big thing in dungeons is blizzard AoE damage, I’m not certain that the trade off for single target nuking is worthwhile in non-raid situations. I’ll try arcane again in a few days when I’ve forgotten the repair bills.
For fun, I wandered through one of the newbie instances (Gnomeregan—designed for players in their low 20s) for the sole purpose of getting an achievement for killing the tiny bad at the end of the underground industrial complex that was once the home of the gnomish race. I blithely wandered through refreshing my shield every minute or so. At one point I stopped to open a door and realized that every monster I had met along the way had been aggro’d and was trying to catch up to me. Given they couldn’t dent me, I let dozens of them gather around before dropping them all in a couple of seconds with a blizzard. There’s something about a huge cloud of large numbers that makes me happy I chose “mage”. Shortly thereafter, I earned my achievement with a couple of frost bolts and went my merry way.
On a wild hair, I entered a random PvP queue and found myself immediately in Alterac Valley in a battle-in-progress with our side losing badly. It’s a large outdoor map littered with towers, graveyards, and a handful of mines. The short version is each side gets a few hundred “reinforcements” (read: rezzes). When the opponent’s all get used up, or if you kill the npc “leader” on the other end of the map, your side wins. Destroying towers lowers the number of remaining reinforcements the other side has and capturing mines bolsters your own.
What I was used to from “back in the day” was nearly everyone heading for the far end, mostly ignoring the opposing team to instead focusing on dropping towers and the end guy as quickly as possible. This was...completely opposite. We held a narrow pass as long as we could and held the Horde back with clouds of ice and arrows. In the end, we lost, but it was stupidly close and I still picked up a couple of achievements for the effort.
Now, back to the Heroics!
Ironically, as I get better it’s been getting considerably more fatal for me in dungeon groups. My DPS output has grown nicely, but now “passable” tanks have a hard time holding aggro…which means learning how to throttle DPS after the first few encounters—and if one of the other DPS providers die, my aggro percentage suddenly skyrockets and hilarity ensues.
Tried out arcane on secondary and… well, it was ugly. The single damage output was nice, but losing all of the slows…ice shield, ice block…Steve…nearly all of my “survival” skills, really… led to a series of extraordinarily violent ends. I chalked them up to ‘learning the ropes’, but given that my big thing in dungeons is blizzard AoE damage, I’m not certain that the trade off for single target nuking is worthwhile in non-raid situations. I’ll try arcane again in a few days when I’ve forgotten the repair bills.
For fun, I wandered through one of the newbie instances (Gnomeregan—designed for players in their low 20s) for the sole purpose of getting an achievement for killing the tiny bad at the end of the underground industrial complex that was once the home of the gnomish race. I blithely wandered through refreshing my shield every minute or so. At one point I stopped to open a door and realized that every monster I had met along the way had been aggro’d and was trying to catch up to me. Given they couldn’t dent me, I let dozens of them gather around before dropping them all in a couple of seconds with a blizzard. There’s something about a huge cloud of large numbers that makes me happy I chose “mage”. Shortly thereafter, I earned my achievement with a couple of frost bolts and went my merry way.
On a wild hair, I entered a random PvP queue and found myself immediately in Alterac Valley in a battle-in-progress with our side losing badly. It’s a large outdoor map littered with towers, graveyards, and a handful of mines. The short version is each side gets a few hundred “reinforcements” (read: rezzes). When the opponent’s all get used up, or if you kill the npc “leader” on the other end of the map, your side wins. Destroying towers lowers the number of remaining reinforcements the other side has and capturing mines bolsters your own.
What I was used to from “back in the day” was nearly everyone heading for the far end, mostly ignoring the opposing team to instead focusing on dropping towers and the end guy as quickly as possible. This was...completely opposite. We held a narrow pass as long as we could and held the Horde back with clouds of ice and arrows. In the end, we lost, but it was stupidly close and I still picked up a couple of achievements for the effort.
Now, back to the Heroics!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Meter Reader
I’m getting a lot more confident with the heroics as I team with more random groups. Although last night saw no new useful gear drops (and I remain perpetually slighted by the RNG when it comes to miscellaneous loot), I remain hopeful as the week progresses. If nothing else, I continue to gain reputation with the Wyrmrest Accord thanks to a nifty tabard I picked up. Once I get far enough in their good graces, I’ll be able to purchase some very nice shoes. You just can’t sell shoes to anybody, you know.
I’ve found a new bane: the DPS meter. Every now and then someone in a group I’m in will ask for a DPS count and at least half the time, someone has some add-on that reports the % of damage each person has done total. I already have anxieties that I’m not doing “enough” towards earning my keep on these runs, but now immutable numbers are presented. To my credit, I always beat out the healer (thankfully. That WOULD suck) and tank and am usually the 2nd highest damage outputter, but it seems like an unnecessary stressor.
Aside from the dungeon runs, I’m consciously working towards finishing the tournament aspirant quests and hoping the payoff is worth it. Otherwise there aren’t any “daily” quests that are “must do” for me. I think the next week or so is going to be casual exploration and clearing out old dungeons as I slowly gear up, so my updates will likely start coming less frequently. There’s only so many “Ran Gundrak x2, Violet Hold, Halls of Lightning x2” posts I’ll subject someone to.
Unsurprisingly, I’m starting to collect achievements, although it isn’t all consuming (yet). The most ‘fun’ are the completely unintentional achievements for doing something stupidly tricky in a boss fight in a heroic dungeon, most of which have been accomplished by doing things “the wrong/hard way”. “We get an achievement for burning down the boss without targeting his minions? Sweet!”
Need to find a good cash generator during the ‘off’ times—there’s a considerable amount of gear calling to me from the AH that costs thousands and at some point I want to try out an arcane spec to increase my single target damage output—although I think my blizzards are pretty nice right now. Add another couple of items to my “research later” queue.
I’ve found a new bane: the DPS meter. Every now and then someone in a group I’m in will ask for a DPS count and at least half the time, someone has some add-on that reports the % of damage each person has done total. I already have anxieties that I’m not doing “enough” towards earning my keep on these runs, but now immutable numbers are presented. To my credit, I always beat out the healer (thankfully. That WOULD suck) and tank and am usually the 2nd highest damage outputter, but it seems like an unnecessary stressor.
Aside from the dungeon runs, I’m consciously working towards finishing the tournament aspirant quests and hoping the payoff is worth it. Otherwise there aren’t any “daily” quests that are “must do” for me. I think the next week or so is going to be casual exploration and clearing out old dungeons as I slowly gear up, so my updates will likely start coming less frequently. There’s only so many “Ran Gundrak x2, Violet Hold, Halls of Lightning x2” posts I’ll subject someone to.
Unsurprisingly, I’m starting to collect achievements, although it isn’t all consuming (yet). The most ‘fun’ are the completely unintentional achievements for doing something stupidly tricky in a boss fight in a heroic dungeon, most of which have been accomplished by doing things “the wrong/hard way”. “We get an achievement for burning down the boss without targeting his minions? Sweet!”
Need to find a good cash generator during the ‘off’ times—there’s a considerable amount of gear calling to me from the AH that costs thousands and at some point I want to try out an arcane spec to increase my single target damage output—although I think my blizzards are pretty nice right now. Add another couple of items to my “research later” queue.
Monday, August 2, 2010
A Whole New World
Friday night I settled in with random dungeons and a burning desire to reach ‘the next game’. By the end of the night, I hit 79 and each quest took me another sliver towards the shiny light at the end of the tunnel. Over the course of the night, I had finished a most incredible quest arc that was heavily based on Norse mythology and unwittingly handed over Thorim (the “Thor” equivalent) to the Lokem (the likely misspelled “Loki” equivalent). This understandably upset a lot of giants I had just gotten to kiss and make up with Thorim and they charged me with a quest to visit the Halls of Lightning and cut Lokem’s lying tongue from his head.
Terrific.
Saturday morning was much of the same as I met, loved, and hated various people in pugs. Explored a few zones between dungeons and knocked out a couple of the accomplishments for doing so. Ventured into new dungeons and had a blast with many of them—a few stand out as ‘notable’.
The Oculus: I have nothing but hate for this dungeon: seething, blind hatred. A solid portion of this hellfest is a three-dimensional dungeon riding the back of a dragon whose powers replace your own. A considerable amount of coordination is required to pull off the end boss fight, even on ‘normal’ difficulty—all total, I think I took 6-7 deaths on that run. I dreaded to see what the “heroic” (read: more difficult, but more rewarding) version of the hellfest would be like. Using vent or another chat program is the only thing that could make this workable.
The Halls of Lightning: A fun giant-filled romp, notably marked by getting to beat the living crap out of Lokem for being such a jerk.
The Culling of Stratholme: I’m always a sucker for time travel timey-wimey stuff and this… was excellent. The basic plot is something is screwing with time, so effectively you have to save Hitler from getting shot. Close though. The party and I travelled back to Warcraft III (not kidding) to play out the mission where Arthas, the Soon-to-be-Lich comes to Stratholme to find plague is beginning to take hold and all of the innocents must be slain as they begin turning undead. Escort Arthas through town and kill everybody. Intense fun and it culminated with a battle against the demon Mul’Ganis. I swear I need to find those Warcraft III disks again.
I had run around with Brian and Jacob individually off and on and ending alone after a successful dungeon run, I found myself with 4% to level 80. Hmmm…I flew around lazily debating on grabbing another group to knock it out, when I decided to check my quest log for anything ‘stupid’ I could do….and I found it. I had forgotten to turn in my quest after cutting out Lokem’s tongue. That and another quest from the Halls of Lightning gave me what I needed and I dinged 80 at 241 hours played!
At that point, my game changed considerably. I might have been 80, but I was a baby 80 with equipment that reflected it. My “gear score” (forever after notated here as GS:) was about 2300 and to put that in relative terms—I was doing maybe a third of the damage I could be doing had I “epic lewts”—maybe less. I upgraded a couple of tiny things, then Jacob and Brian introduced me to heroics.
Wow.
Heroic dungeons lived up to the name with bosses several times harder than the regular iterations, with a lot less room for error. As I ran through the first few, my equipment took a serious leap in power and I started rapidly closing in on 3k gearscore.
To digress, I believe in my heart I’m a fairly competent player (if not speller) when I know what to expect—a few of the dungeons I had never seen and hilarity sometimes ensued. (Don’t get me wrong, I always warn the groups I’m with if it’s a new experience—and –usually- someone gives me pointers, but not always.) The best example was getting locked out of a boss fight due to not knowing a wall would suddenly appear. Insert team wipe here. Most instances with friends worked extremely well—Brian makes a damn fine tank and I’d sucker him into a five-man any day of the week.
The worst experience? Heroic Oculus. I got to see the horror that is this dungeon and we foolishly didn’t abandon it altogether. Despite having a fairly solid grasp on how the encounter works, we still suffered multiple team wipes and in the end gave up altogether.
Registered in the Argent Tournament—a martial tournament (with jousting!) reserved for level 80s. Not really sure how it all works, but I have to do several days worth of daily quests before I can compete in the arena. An aspirant is me.
I finished the weekend by shopping for a couple of new epic-level pieces of gear: a ring reward in return for hard earned emblems and a pair of bracers which drained most of the rest of my cash reserves. GS now 3234 and starting to feel a little less like a newb.
With some luck, I’ll get a few more pieces over the coming days.
Terrific.
Saturday morning was much of the same as I met, loved, and hated various people in pugs. Explored a few zones between dungeons and knocked out a couple of the accomplishments for doing so. Ventured into new dungeons and had a blast with many of them—a few stand out as ‘notable’.
The Oculus: I have nothing but hate for this dungeon: seething, blind hatred. A solid portion of this hellfest is a three-dimensional dungeon riding the back of a dragon whose powers replace your own. A considerable amount of coordination is required to pull off the end boss fight, even on ‘normal’ difficulty—all total, I think I took 6-7 deaths on that run. I dreaded to see what the “heroic” (read: more difficult, but more rewarding) version of the hellfest would be like. Using vent or another chat program is the only thing that could make this workable.
The Halls of Lightning: A fun giant-filled romp, notably marked by getting to beat the living crap out of Lokem for being such a jerk.
The Culling of Stratholme: I’m always a sucker for time travel timey-wimey stuff and this… was excellent. The basic plot is something is screwing with time, so effectively you have to save Hitler from getting shot. Close though. The party and I travelled back to Warcraft III (not kidding) to play out the mission where Arthas, the Soon-to-be-Lich comes to Stratholme to find plague is beginning to take hold and all of the innocents must be slain as they begin turning undead. Escort Arthas through town and kill everybody. Intense fun and it culminated with a battle against the demon Mul’Ganis. I swear I need to find those Warcraft III disks again.
I had run around with Brian and Jacob individually off and on and ending alone after a successful dungeon run, I found myself with 4% to level 80. Hmmm…I flew around lazily debating on grabbing another group to knock it out, when I decided to check my quest log for anything ‘stupid’ I could do….and I found it. I had forgotten to turn in my quest after cutting out Lokem’s tongue. That and another quest from the Halls of Lightning gave me what I needed and I dinged 80 at 241 hours played!
At that point, my game changed considerably. I might have been 80, but I was a baby 80 with equipment that reflected it. My “gear score” (forever after notated here as GS:) was about 2300 and to put that in relative terms—I was doing maybe a third of the damage I could be doing had I “epic lewts”—maybe less. I upgraded a couple of tiny things, then Jacob and Brian introduced me to heroics.
Wow.
Heroic dungeons lived up to the name with bosses several times harder than the regular iterations, with a lot less room for error. As I ran through the first few, my equipment took a serious leap in power and I started rapidly closing in on 3k gearscore.
To digress, I believe in my heart I’m a fairly competent player (if not speller) when I know what to expect—a few of the dungeons I had never seen and hilarity sometimes ensued. (Don’t get me wrong, I always warn the groups I’m with if it’s a new experience—and –usually- someone gives me pointers, but not always.) The best example was getting locked out of a boss fight due to not knowing a wall would suddenly appear. Insert team wipe here. Most instances with friends worked extremely well—Brian makes a damn fine tank and I’d sucker him into a five-man any day of the week.
The worst experience? Heroic Oculus. I got to see the horror that is this dungeon and we foolishly didn’t abandon it altogether. Despite having a fairly solid grasp on how the encounter works, we still suffered multiple team wipes and in the end gave up altogether.
Registered in the Argent Tournament—a martial tournament (with jousting!) reserved for level 80s. Not really sure how it all works, but I have to do several days worth of daily quests before I can compete in the arena. An aspirant is me.
I finished the weekend by shopping for a couple of new epic-level pieces of gear: a ring reward in return for hard earned emblems and a pair of bracers which drained most of the rest of my cash reserves. GS now 3234 and starting to feel a little less like a newb.
With some luck, I’ll get a few more pieces over the coming days.
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