Did the usual gamut of daily PvPs and a handful of quest dailies over the weekend. I've now hit Exalted with both of the new factions, so there's no drive to go full bore with them anymore-- just target a few rare monsters that potentially drop mounts and pets and maybe collect a few McGuffins towards gear upgrades. Raided and went 7 of 8 again-- we tried the final boss a few times and she's nuts by any stretch of the imagination. 4 phases, 2 intermissions, and so many mechanics the "sum up video" for her is nearly 13 minutes long. We got her to 59%, but my god-- it was all the hell combined. We're extending our lockout so next week so we are ONLY fighting her for 6 hours. We'll see how that goes.
Over the past month I've picked up a terrible addiction. Well, moreso than Warcraft itself. It's pet collecting. A few hundred here, a few thousand there… it's adding up quickly. I haven't been going all "gung ho goblin" at all since my return, living on my fortunes of years past and now, I was finally down to 250k after contributing 10k to guild feasts and raiding support. Raiding is an expensive hobby when you don't have solid professions backing them. An average night is about 3k worth of consumables plus raid food. On Moon Guard I don't really have a support network of alts. Canna is mining/herbs and Strev himself is Skinning/Enchantment, but honestly this expansion has been pretty rough on most trade professions-- there's not that many things to enchant/gem/enhance. Competition over the few things that can be made is fierce with finished products often costing less than the mats to make them.
If only I could leverage my other alts, I thought before it all clicked. Pets. The one thing that was draining my coffers could start filling them once more. All pets are account bound. You can buy them on one server and sell on another. After a little delving, I found a website that was devoted to the pet market. This thing is slick. Enter your character and it will tell you what pets you're missing can be found on the AH… with the best prices for bid/buy on every server on which you have characters. Switch to "sell" and you can get the value of all your pets if you want to sell-- and filter to only duplicates. Muahaha! Wait-- THERE'S MORE? You can compare 2 realms to see what the potential profits would be for buying on one server specifically to sell on another. Oh lord, yes.
Pet shopping became "prong one" of my attack. In no time I had Anyth (Whisperwind) and Strevnor (Moon Guard) filling the void between worlds with feathers and fur. No undercutting by coppers here. Wholesale anti-gouging by being 40% off my competition. People think they are getting a deal when I am getting 2000% profit in some cases. For my troubles, I netted about 40k.
Prong two was cornering the market on certain raid flasks. Flasks and raid consumables have a definite cycle and Sunday should have been an expensive day. The average cost for a flask was 450g. It costs around 700g to make them. So naturally I bought every last damn one of them and listed them for 725 - 850 per unit in stacks of 5. By the end of the day, another 40k profit. Not bad for having no idea how to cork a bottle.
The final prong was something I like to call "fishing while waiting for everyone to buy my grossly overpriced flasks and underpriced pets". Fish in Nazjatar come in two flavors only. "Crappy", which are worth 11g per cast and "NICE!" which are much more. On Moon Guard, that 'much more' is 60g. On Whisperwind, that's 110g. Unfortunately, my only max level still on that side is Anythe (my horde mage). Ok. I'll have her fish and buy pets with profits-- kick those back to Strev, who is also fishing but for a different reason.
Strev has done all of the Mechagon stuff to death and can create the ultimate raid food (Famine Evaluator And Snack Table) or 'F.E.A.S.T.' for short. They require spare parts from Mechagon to manufacture and about 1k worth of fish (at Moon Guard prices), but sell for 3.8k each. *cracks knuckles and whips out a pole*
When the dust settled, Anythe fished up and sold 12k worth of fish and Strev has 20k worth of tables sitting on the Auction House waiting for buyers. If they don't move today, they will on Wednesday. That's when prices always spike.
After pulling in another 10k in miscellaneous auction sales, in one day, I earned well over 100k gold and have a large personal stockpile of flasks and raid chow even if nothing else sells.
God it feels good to goblin again.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
Strev's Expansion Tour
Started off last night with my usual daily routine: run a few dailies in BfA, then it was off to earn some sweet easy conquest. I queued up for Comp Stomp and was soon in the Arathi Basin from Classic. Credit where due-- it was fun, running from flag to flag kicking virtual Horde butt. The NPCs were 'as smart as the average Alliance group', so take that as you will. It would send stealthed druids and rogues to try to sneak cap flags-- players with lower health would get dogpiled. I probably spent more time counterspelled than I do in real battlegrounds. Their mage would ice block when appropriate and more than once their DK death gripped me into smackdown range. We won handily and I'll try to run this again tonight prior to raid time.
Immediately afterwards, I flapped over to Nagrand in the Outlands to help out a guildie who was trying to solo the Ring of Blood. Never hurts to help!
I then queued up for an epic battleground and that sent me to Wintergrasp-- which since its debut as a Zone in WotLK has been refactored into a 45 minute "defend your castle" from the enemy. I'm not the type of person who gives up on a battleground, even when things look really bad, but this one. We held out until the 15 minutes remaining mark and we got hammered hard with siege engines breaking through our walls in several points and almost all of our team on the far end of the map farming kills instead of defending. Typical really.
And yet, we won. It was ridiculously intense, with the last 6 minutes holding off wave after wave of siege weapons bearing down on our last doorway. There are times I love being wrong.
Once out, I got a whisper from our GM-- hey, wanna go on a transmog run? "Sure!" In a few moments, we and 8 other dps were storming through 25-man mythic Tomb of Sargeras from the Legion expansion. Funny enough, we wiped on the next to the last boss-- about nine times. Turns out there are still some things from older expansions you need more people and at least a healer for. Still, I came away with a nifty headpiece… until someone offered me 20k for it. Sold!
With a solid 90 minutes of playtime left, I queued up for the LFR in the hopes of getting a little more practice (even if it is on nerfed mechanics). While waiting for the queue, I went over to Mount Hyjal from Cataclysm and solo ran a Heroic 25 Firelands. Honestly, I forgot about my LFR queue. It popped JUST when the final boss, Ragnaros, was at 5%. Wow. Barely had time to loot before it was into BfA's raid. It was a short, painless experience that yielded no real good loot, but was pleasantly chaotic in that LFR "get 'em, Ray!" way.
As I logged out, I mused that my evening had unintentionally had me visiting nearly all of WoW's expansions in some fashion or another.
Can’t wait to see what the weekend brings!
07/25/19 - Myth Adventures
Wednesday nights are Mythical + dungeon runs. With everyone's desire to get better, gear we threw together teams to stop some mythics. By that I mean "the GM invited the raiders who were online to form up"-- which turned out to be just 4 of us but a tank outsourced from "The Booty Bay Explorers". Ok.. let's see how this goes.
After a bit of discussing, we decided to try the hardest key we had, which honestly wasn't that high level: Freehold (4). I flew over and in short order we summoned the rest of the party and dove in to the pirate-filled, parrot-dive-bombing, cluster that is Freehold. Time to dodge guano and catch a greased pig… quickly.
The thing about Mythics is there's a receptacle at the start of the dungeon for a keystone. Putting a key in it activates "hard mode". This resets the dungeon and starts a countdown. You have 30-something minutes to clear the whole dungeon. Not only the bosses, but also a set amount of trash as well (so no skipping everything, you filthy exploiter, you). Because clearing dungeons aren't stressful enough, right?
Our rent-a-tank? Total insanotank mode, which might be fine in many circumstances, but not here. All total, we took 12 deaths clearing the place due to massive overpulls, carrying mobs into narrow paths now covered with large patches of damaging floor, and such. Amazingly enough, I didn't account for any of the deaths with a LOT of well-timed blinking, ice blocks, and invisiblity.
You don't get boss loot-- only a piece or two when the dungeon is cleared. If you clear it in time, you get a higher level keystone. If you fail to beat the timer, but still clear the dungeon, you get a new keystone for a different dungeon at the same difficulty. If you bail on the dungeon, you get a replacement keystone for the same dungeon, but one rung lower.
Even with all the psychosis, we cleared the dungeon with over 9 minutes to spare. It hindsight it probably helped that we pulled nearly half the trash in like 2 bad pulls.
After receiving my gear down grades and a keystone to call my very own, we decide to use it… and off we go to THE MOTHERLODE! (3)
This goblin-themed dungeon requires a lot of situational awareness and careful pulling. We had neither and we didn't have it in spades. By the second boss, the death count was off the charts. We called it and quit the dungeon. The team apologized for the ruined keystone, but I assured them it was perfectly fine (and it was). Based on scaling, I won't be getting any sort of gear upgrade until mythic 7 or 8 and I knew we wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to that with what we had to work with.
Tonight I have nothing planned aside from a little light PvP. This week is "Comp Stomp"-- play a classic 10v10 Arathi Basin battle ground against… AI-controlled players! OK! Featuring the same intelligence that pilot the NPC teams on the hated Island Expedition, this lets you live out your fantasy of what it must feel like being the Horde crushing the Alliance over and over and over again in real battlegrounds.
Immediately afterwards, I flapped over to Nagrand in the Outlands to help out a guildie who was trying to solo the Ring of Blood. Never hurts to help!
I then queued up for an epic battleground and that sent me to Wintergrasp-- which since its debut as a Zone in WotLK has been refactored into a 45 minute "defend your castle" from the enemy. I'm not the type of person who gives up on a battleground, even when things look really bad, but this one. We held out until the 15 minutes remaining mark and we got hammered hard with siege engines breaking through our walls in several points and almost all of our team on the far end of the map farming kills instead of defending. Typical really.
And yet, we won. It was ridiculously intense, with the last 6 minutes holding off wave after wave of siege weapons bearing down on our last doorway. There are times I love being wrong.
Once out, I got a whisper from our GM-- hey, wanna go on a transmog run? "Sure!" In a few moments, we and 8 other dps were storming through 25-man mythic Tomb of Sargeras from the Legion expansion. Funny enough, we wiped on the next to the last boss-- about nine times. Turns out there are still some things from older expansions you need more people and at least a healer for. Still, I came away with a nifty headpiece… until someone offered me 20k for it. Sold!
With a solid 90 minutes of playtime left, I queued up for the LFR in the hopes of getting a little more practice (even if it is on nerfed mechanics). While waiting for the queue, I went over to Mount Hyjal from Cataclysm and solo ran a Heroic 25 Firelands. Honestly, I forgot about my LFR queue. It popped JUST when the final boss, Ragnaros, was at 5%. Wow. Barely had time to loot before it was into BfA's raid. It was a short, painless experience that yielded no real good loot, but was pleasantly chaotic in that LFR "get 'em, Ray!" way.
As I logged out, I mused that my evening had unintentionally had me visiting nearly all of WoW's expansions in some fashion or another.
Can’t wait to see what the weekend brings!
07/25/19 - Myth Adventures
Wednesday nights are Mythical + dungeon runs. With everyone's desire to get better, gear we threw together teams to stop some mythics. By that I mean "the GM invited the raiders who were online to form up"-- which turned out to be just 4 of us but a tank outsourced from "The Booty Bay Explorers". Ok.. let's see how this goes.
After a bit of discussing, we decided to try the hardest key we had, which honestly wasn't that high level: Freehold (4). I flew over and in short order we summoned the rest of the party and dove in to the pirate-filled, parrot-dive-bombing, cluster that is Freehold. Time to dodge guano and catch a greased pig… quickly.
The thing about Mythics is there's a receptacle at the start of the dungeon for a keystone. Putting a key in it activates "hard mode". This resets the dungeon and starts a countdown. You have 30-something minutes to clear the whole dungeon. Not only the bosses, but also a set amount of trash as well (so no skipping everything, you filthy exploiter, you). Because clearing dungeons aren't stressful enough, right?
Our rent-a-tank? Total insanotank mode, which might be fine in many circumstances, but not here. All total, we took 12 deaths clearing the place due to massive overpulls, carrying mobs into narrow paths now covered with large patches of damaging floor, and such. Amazingly enough, I didn't account for any of the deaths with a LOT of well-timed blinking, ice blocks, and invisiblity.
You don't get boss loot-- only a piece or two when the dungeon is cleared. If you clear it in time, you get a higher level keystone. If you fail to beat the timer, but still clear the dungeon, you get a new keystone for a different dungeon at the same difficulty. If you bail on the dungeon, you get a replacement keystone for the same dungeon, but one rung lower.
Even with all the psychosis, we cleared the dungeon with over 9 minutes to spare. It hindsight it probably helped that we pulled nearly half the trash in like 2 bad pulls.
After receiving my gear down grades and a keystone to call my very own, we decide to use it… and off we go to THE MOTHERLODE! (3)
This goblin-themed dungeon requires a lot of situational awareness and careful pulling. We had neither and we didn't have it in spades. By the second boss, the death count was off the charts. We called it and quit the dungeon. The team apologized for the ruined keystone, but I assured them it was perfectly fine (and it was). Based on scaling, I won't be getting any sort of gear upgrade until mythic 7 or 8 and I knew we wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to that with what we had to work with.
Tonight I have nothing planned aside from a little light PvP. This week is "Comp Stomp"-- play a classic 10v10 Arathi Basin battle ground against… AI-controlled players! OK! Featuring the same intelligence that pilot the NPC teams on the hated Island Expedition, this lets you live out your fantasy of what it must feel like being the Horde crushing the Alliance over and over and over again in real battlegrounds.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Power Underwhelming! (Part 2)
Saturday came as Saturdays do. I had a lovely evening with the wife and settled in by 9pm for some raiding. That's the one thing that both good and bad: Moon Guard is Central time, so everything is just a little bit later for me. That's trash for weekdays with my early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine, but on the weekend it doesn't impact my social life.
I logged in 15 minutes prior to 'go time', and got an invite as soon as I materialized. Good sign. I'd taken a bit of time to familiarize myself with the fights to come. They were doosies, but we'll get to that in a bit. I noted that the team was only slightly leaner than the previous day-- even discounting the couple that had been unceremoniously kicked to the curb. We supplemented the group by picking up a nicely-geared warlock from outside the guild. She had phenomenal dps, awareness, and healthstones. A nice combination for a group lacking at least one of those.
We steeled our nerves and dove back into the Eternal Palace for what would be our hardest challenge to this point: the Queen's Court (aka Naga Council).
This is a fight against 2 bosses without a shared health pool. Like similar fights (AQ comes to mind),. they must be tanked separately or they gain a 99% damage resistance buff. Separate health pools and if gets dropped to 1%, you have 15 seconds to kill the other before it heals itself to full, which is as good as a wipe. Throughout the fight three sparks are summoned with constantly depleting health. When each dies, it deals massive raid-wide damage. If multiple die at the same time, it's a wipe. So prioritization, target switching and timing to allow healers to do their thing is key. There's a mechanic that places crap at your feet that must be carried away from the raid, one boss will periodically create a death zone around himself (run, melee, run!) and at different times the other will create a bubble around himself that will kill any non-tank standing outside it. Whew. Wait? THAT'S NOT EVEN THE BAD PART?
Throughout all of this, Queen Azshara is announcing "decrees" that must be obeyed or you'll get stunned, take massive personal damage, or potentially massive raidwide damage depending on what you screw up. These decrees include: keep moving, stand away from all other players, "form ranks" (stand in these spots on the ground), and "don't use the same ability twice in a row". This last is particularly hell for arcane. These, of course, happen constantly even throughout the bosses' specials. This can lead to hilarious timing events as people who must "stand alone" are required to run to the bubble with everyone else or die.
This took us several goes, but we got it down. Then it was on to a much worse fight.
Boss 6 is Za'qul, one of those big things that scream "elder god pets", being all tentacles and void. I'm still traumatized by this one. It take place on one circular arena in three different phases. Now when I say three phase boss fight, I actually mean to say three different planes of existence: reality, fear, and hysteria. Whenever you aren't in "reality" you gain stacks of "hysteria" which act as a constant damage-over-time. The fear realm is pretty vanilla otherwise. In hysteria though, you gain a massive haste buff, but all players are hostile to you and targetable.
Throughout the fight, a glowing rift will appear along the edge of the combat ring. A few seconds later, a giant tentacle will be periodically summoned that will quickly pass through the middle of the arena dealing huge damage and knockback. To counter this, we placed markers all around the otherwise-indistinguishable area to call out where we were about to get hentai'd. This worked well for those of us not suffering from "scrapper lock".
Three circles will appear around the outside edge. stand on them and you will die. After a couple of seconds, they produce adds start casting a "kill you all" spell and summon other smaller adds every 20 seconds. On higher difficulties, the little adds eventually turn into huge adds, but thankfully we didn't have to deal with that.
Now the fun part. After the first cycle, the summoned caster adds cannot be affected in reality. You must battle them in the fear realm, accessible through a portal a friendly NPC has summoned. Players in one realm cannot affect players in a different realm. Accessing hysteria involves standing on portals the boss summons that allows a limited number through.
If the tank is ever alone, he is instantly and permanently mind controlled. On top of everything else, the boss will put a huge visible shield on himself and casts a thing. It's then a DPS race to crack the shield and damage him down.
I probably left out a number of components, but my god, this was rough. We finally dropped him on the ninth attempt.
All that was left is Queen Azshara herself. We noped out of it as we had already been going 3 hours at that point.
We had originally intended on finishing it Sunday, but too many people-- myself included were just exhausted from it all. We opted to let the lock expire. This week we will be attempting the first three bosses on heroic then switching back to normal for the rest. But still-- holy cats! 7/8 on my first week, with half of those being guild progression kills.
For the non-raiders we're setting up a more regular event calendar… Wednesdays will be Mythic+ runs, Sundays will be "fun stuff"…contests, giveaways, social things. Regular PvP things will be added 'soon' and for the RPers RP nights and in a couple of months, D&D sessions.
…and at some point I still have to decide on my Classic class. ;-)
I logged in 15 minutes prior to 'go time', and got an invite as soon as I materialized. Good sign. I'd taken a bit of time to familiarize myself with the fights to come. They were doosies, but we'll get to that in a bit. I noted that the team was only slightly leaner than the previous day-- even discounting the couple that had been unceremoniously kicked to the curb. We supplemented the group by picking up a nicely-geared warlock from outside the guild. She had phenomenal dps, awareness, and healthstones. A nice combination for a group lacking at least one of those.
We steeled our nerves and dove back into the Eternal Palace for what would be our hardest challenge to this point: the Queen's Court (aka Naga Council).
This is a fight against 2 bosses without a shared health pool. Like similar fights (AQ comes to mind),. they must be tanked separately or they gain a 99% damage resistance buff. Separate health pools and if gets dropped to 1%, you have 15 seconds to kill the other before it heals itself to full, which is as good as a wipe. Throughout the fight three sparks are summoned with constantly depleting health. When each dies, it deals massive raid-wide damage. If multiple die at the same time, it's a wipe. So prioritization, target switching and timing to allow healers to do their thing is key. There's a mechanic that places crap at your feet that must be carried away from the raid, one boss will periodically create a death zone around himself (run, melee, run!) and at different times the other will create a bubble around himself that will kill any non-tank standing outside it. Whew. Wait? THAT'S NOT EVEN THE BAD PART?
Throughout all of this, Queen Azshara is announcing "decrees" that must be obeyed or you'll get stunned, take massive personal damage, or potentially massive raidwide damage depending on what you screw up. These decrees include: keep moving, stand away from all other players, "form ranks" (stand in these spots on the ground), and "don't use the same ability twice in a row". This last is particularly hell for arcane. These, of course, happen constantly even throughout the bosses' specials. This can lead to hilarious timing events as people who must "stand alone" are required to run to the bubble with everyone else or die.
This took us several goes, but we got it down. Then it was on to a much worse fight.
Boss 6 is Za'qul, one of those big things that scream "elder god pets", being all tentacles and void. I'm still traumatized by this one. It take place on one circular arena in three different phases. Now when I say three phase boss fight, I actually mean to say three different planes of existence: reality, fear, and hysteria. Whenever you aren't in "reality" you gain stacks of "hysteria" which act as a constant damage-over-time. The fear realm is pretty vanilla otherwise. In hysteria though, you gain a massive haste buff, but all players are hostile to you and targetable.
Throughout the fight, a glowing rift will appear along the edge of the combat ring. A few seconds later, a giant tentacle will be periodically summoned that will quickly pass through the middle of the arena dealing huge damage and knockback. To counter this, we placed markers all around the otherwise-indistinguishable area to call out where we were about to get hentai'd. This worked well for those of us not suffering from "scrapper lock".
Three circles will appear around the outside edge. stand on them and you will die. After a couple of seconds, they produce adds start casting a "kill you all" spell and summon other smaller adds every 20 seconds. On higher difficulties, the little adds eventually turn into huge adds, but thankfully we didn't have to deal with that.
Now the fun part. After the first cycle, the summoned caster adds cannot be affected in reality. You must battle them in the fear realm, accessible through a portal a friendly NPC has summoned. Players in one realm cannot affect players in a different realm. Accessing hysteria involves standing on portals the boss summons that allows a limited number through.
If the tank is ever alone, he is instantly and permanently mind controlled. On top of everything else, the boss will put a huge visible shield on himself and casts a thing. It's then a DPS race to crack the shield and damage him down.
I probably left out a number of components, but my god, this was rough. We finally dropped him on the ninth attempt.
All that was left is Queen Azshara herself. We noped out of it as we had already been going 3 hours at that point.
We had originally intended on finishing it Sunday, but too many people-- myself included were just exhausted from it all. We opted to let the lock expire. This week we will be attempting the first three bosses on heroic then switching back to normal for the rest. But still-- holy cats! 7/8 on my first week, with half of those being guild progression kills.
For the non-raiders we're setting up a more regular event calendar… Wednesdays will be Mythic+ runs, Sundays will be "fun stuff"…contests, giveaways, social things. Regular PvP things will be added 'soon' and for the RPers RP nights and in a couple of months, D&D sessions.
…and at some point I still have to decide on my Classic class. ;-)
Monday, July 22, 2019
Power Underwhelming! (Part 1)
Over the weekend, Canna timewalked her way to 110 and earned the Void Elf heritage gear. Yay! I'm a little torn as to whether to continue her to 120 or not. I mean she's 112 now (mostly from mining and herbing) and I still haven't made up my mind. Even with generous catch-up mechanics, leveling the Necklace of Suck is a serious pain. You're given a level 35 Heart of Azeroth once you reach 120 now, so you automatically get access to a major azerite power, but past that is a grind that's painful to do on multiple characters. I've been EXTREMELY diligent with Strev (read: borderline psychotic) and he's heart level 56 a month into 8.2. The thought of doing that on two (or more) characters a day would be ridiculous.
Strev spent the time raiding The Azeroth Inc. Way.
As mentioned previously, my last raiding was w-a-a-a-a-a-y back in Cataclysm with Fidelis, which was in my opinion a pretty laid back guild. Members were supported and encouraged (guilted) into making sure they had flasks, etc. Emphasis was on performing mechanics correctly over raw output. Our raid leaders, Kheth and Sodamodem were very chill. It was a fun time, but honestly, we didn't do so hot on progression.
Fast forward to the now. In Azeroth Inc, the raids are significantly more intense, which is a direct reflection of our raid leader. I honestly didn't know how things were going to go-- I knew the team was still in the "forming" process, with a small clique that had been with the guild a while and a BUNCH of newer players that had joined since 8.1. Many were geared at my level-- some significantly lower and one that was way short of even the LFR requirements. This caused me (and it would turn out a few others) concerns. We were all there to be successful.
All along the way to the first boss, we cleared trash and my damage was all right. Not stellar, but that's just the position my spec is in right now. I should check out fire, but after thousands of hours I'm quite comfortable with arcane. The whole time I'm checking to see how I stack up against the other arcane caster: the raid leader. He's not on the charts. At all. Halfway to the first boss, I found out why.
He was bristling with rage. Not quite "50DKP MINUS", but it was close. He had spent the entire time watching DPS and healing meters, examining gear for enchantments, watching who is doing interrupts on casters, and who wasn't. He's is the first to admit he's a total a-hole, but we all knew why. The goal is to down bosses, not coddle carries when we're doing progression. He gave a fair warning that "if you think you're not cutting it, bow out now-- no harm no foul, but if you keep going you will be called out." No one dropped. From that point forward, he was good to his word, calling out lack of ring or weapon enchants, pointing out a couple of people who were much lower on the DPS charts than would be acceptable. "We can carry through the first one or two, but then you WILL be cut." He explicitly forbid any of the healers from interrupting casters. In short, he put the Fear of God into the group.
It worked. We had DPS unable to interrupt because everyone else was trying to interrupt. We upped our game as best as we could.
We downed boss after boss. The first week they had gone 3/8 on Friday and added boss 4 on Sunday with many attempts. For my own part, I'd watched the videos and gone through the crappy LFR version of the fight whose watered down mechanics left me almost at a disadvantage on one fight. My saving grace is I dance very well and dodge a lot of avoidable damage, but it comes at a cost of DPS uptime. Fights that require repositioning aren't terrible-- that's what blink/shimmer and displacement are for. If I have to keep running? That's a problem. Short version: several fights required a lot of constant movement, but we prevailed.
Boss 1 is a pretty vanilla fight, all things considered. At the beginning everyone is hit with either a poison mark or a frost mark requiring you to constantly move or stay still respectively. I, of course, get the one requiring movement. Standing near someone with the opposite mark causes a burst of raid-wide damage and resets the stacking debuff you constantly get from not doing what you were supposed to be doing. Periodically the boss will target people with crap that must be carried out of the group and will shoot out poison and frost arrows that must be dodged. Failure to dodge means more stacks or raid-wide burst damage depending on which flavor you soak. Pretty straightforward.
Boss 2 is an underwater fight against a giant moray eel. You have to maintain a /range 6 distance from everyone else to prevent extra damage, but being able to swim up/down makes this cake. Otherwise the big gotcha is: you can't be healed unless you have a temporary buff (bioluminescent) from killing one of two puffer fish on the platform. If you have the buff though, swimming over open water makes you a tasty morsel for a giant fish (insta-kill). Bonus: the eel is constantly pulsing knockbacks that push you towards open water. A couple of times you have to swim through jellyfish-infested waters chasing the boss down. Touching a jelly will insta-kill and the new platforms will be more broken up than the previous. Not a hard fight, overall. It was after this fight, the leader made good on his threats and sent to lowest performers packing.
Boss 3 gave me Al-Akir flashbacks from Throne of Four Winds. The boss stands in the middle of a ring in a pool of water and there's a lot of tornado dodging, dispel-able debuffs that do massive raid-wide damage when dispelled (or will pretty much kill the debuffed player if they expire on their own. Positioning is of paramount importance and I can't emphasize how wonderful my shimmer talent (you get 2 blinks) was here. The party constantly ran in a counter-clockwise circle to stay ahead of the tornado spawns. I would blink ahead of the group, which gave me enough time to plant and fire off arcane blasts. Yay! Periodically, you have to run a gauntlet to get to the eye of the storm and beat down an add before 'bad things happen' with knockbacks that can send you into the storm. Again, blink to the rescue, allowing me to return to where I was pre-knockback.
Boss 4 was against Lady Ashvane who has been transformed into a monstrosity by Queen Azshara. Her gimmick is she has a shield that must be popped before you can really damage her and every time the shield comes back it is 150% bigger. She summons corals often throughout the fight that emit bubbles. Bubbles must be soaked for damage and a stacking debuff by different players. If a bubble hits the boss, she regains 10% shield. Every so often six players will be paired up with symbols over their head. After a few seconds a beam will connect you to your partner, destroying any corals (or players) between you.
Boss 5 was a new fight for all of us, against a giant tentacled eyeball ringed with teeth. This wasn't terrible. There's a lot of add prioritization, and a LOT of "move to tiny spots between the crap that is covering the entire floor", and we got it on the third go.
The whole run was a whisker over three hours and we were pumped. We agreed to come back the next day and do what we'd can against the next boss: "The Naga Council". All total I left with a couple of gear sidegrades, but a ton of valuable experience.
I'm now a regular member of the raid team.
Tomorrow I'll cover Saturday's run.
Strev spent the time raiding The Azeroth Inc. Way.
As mentioned previously, my last raiding was w-a-a-a-a-a-y back in Cataclysm with Fidelis, which was in my opinion a pretty laid back guild. Members were supported and encouraged (guilted) into making sure they had flasks, etc. Emphasis was on performing mechanics correctly over raw output. Our raid leaders, Kheth and Sodamodem were very chill. It was a fun time, but honestly, we didn't do so hot on progression.
Fast forward to the now. In Azeroth Inc, the raids are significantly more intense, which is a direct reflection of our raid leader. I honestly didn't know how things were going to go-- I knew the team was still in the "forming" process, with a small clique that had been with the guild a while and a BUNCH of newer players that had joined since 8.1. Many were geared at my level-- some significantly lower and one that was way short of even the LFR requirements. This caused me (and it would turn out a few others) concerns. We were all there to be successful.
All along the way to the first boss, we cleared trash and my damage was all right. Not stellar, but that's just the position my spec is in right now. I should check out fire, but after thousands of hours I'm quite comfortable with arcane. The whole time I'm checking to see how I stack up against the other arcane caster: the raid leader. He's not on the charts. At all. Halfway to the first boss, I found out why.
He was bristling with rage. Not quite "50DKP MINUS", but it was close. He had spent the entire time watching DPS and healing meters, examining gear for enchantments, watching who is doing interrupts on casters, and who wasn't. He's is the first to admit he's a total a-hole, but we all knew why. The goal is to down bosses, not coddle carries when we're doing progression. He gave a fair warning that "if you think you're not cutting it, bow out now-- no harm no foul, but if you keep going you will be called out." No one dropped. From that point forward, he was good to his word, calling out lack of ring or weapon enchants, pointing out a couple of people who were much lower on the DPS charts than would be acceptable. "We can carry through the first one or two, but then you WILL be cut." He explicitly forbid any of the healers from interrupting casters. In short, he put the Fear of God into the group.
It worked. We had DPS unable to interrupt because everyone else was trying to interrupt. We upped our game as best as we could.
We downed boss after boss. The first week they had gone 3/8 on Friday and added boss 4 on Sunday with many attempts. For my own part, I'd watched the videos and gone through the crappy LFR version of the fight whose watered down mechanics left me almost at a disadvantage on one fight. My saving grace is I dance very well and dodge a lot of avoidable damage, but it comes at a cost of DPS uptime. Fights that require repositioning aren't terrible-- that's what blink/shimmer and displacement are for. If I have to keep running? That's a problem. Short version: several fights required a lot of constant movement, but we prevailed.
Boss 1 is a pretty vanilla fight, all things considered. At the beginning everyone is hit with either a poison mark or a frost mark requiring you to constantly move or stay still respectively. I, of course, get the one requiring movement. Standing near someone with the opposite mark causes a burst of raid-wide damage and resets the stacking debuff you constantly get from not doing what you were supposed to be doing. Periodically the boss will target people with crap that must be carried out of the group and will shoot out poison and frost arrows that must be dodged. Failure to dodge means more stacks or raid-wide burst damage depending on which flavor you soak. Pretty straightforward.
Boss 2 is an underwater fight against a giant moray eel. You have to maintain a /range 6 distance from everyone else to prevent extra damage, but being able to swim up/down makes this cake. Otherwise the big gotcha is: you can't be healed unless you have a temporary buff (bioluminescent) from killing one of two puffer fish on the platform. If you have the buff though, swimming over open water makes you a tasty morsel for a giant fish (insta-kill). Bonus: the eel is constantly pulsing knockbacks that push you towards open water. A couple of times you have to swim through jellyfish-infested waters chasing the boss down. Touching a jelly will insta-kill and the new platforms will be more broken up than the previous. Not a hard fight, overall. It was after this fight, the leader made good on his threats and sent to lowest performers packing.
Boss 3 gave me Al-Akir flashbacks from Throne of Four Winds. The boss stands in the middle of a ring in a pool of water and there's a lot of tornado dodging, dispel-able debuffs that do massive raid-wide damage when dispelled (or will pretty much kill the debuffed player if they expire on their own. Positioning is of paramount importance and I can't emphasize how wonderful my shimmer talent (you get 2 blinks) was here. The party constantly ran in a counter-clockwise circle to stay ahead of the tornado spawns. I would blink ahead of the group, which gave me enough time to plant and fire off arcane blasts. Yay! Periodically, you have to run a gauntlet to get to the eye of the storm and beat down an add before 'bad things happen' with knockbacks that can send you into the storm. Again, blink to the rescue, allowing me to return to where I was pre-knockback.
Boss 4 was against Lady Ashvane who has been transformed into a monstrosity by Queen Azshara. Her gimmick is she has a shield that must be popped before you can really damage her and every time the shield comes back it is 150% bigger. She summons corals often throughout the fight that emit bubbles. Bubbles must be soaked for damage and a stacking debuff by different players. If a bubble hits the boss, she regains 10% shield. Every so often six players will be paired up with symbols over their head. After a few seconds a beam will connect you to your partner, destroying any corals (or players) between you.
Boss 5 was a new fight for all of us, against a giant tentacled eyeball ringed with teeth. This wasn't terrible. There's a lot of add prioritization, and a LOT of "move to tiny spots between the crap that is covering the entire floor", and we got it on the third go.
The whole run was a whisker over three hours and we were pumped. We agreed to come back the next day and do what we'd can against the next boss: "The Naga Council". All total I left with a couple of gear sidegrades, but a ton of valuable experience.
I'm now a regular member of the raid team.
Tomorrow I'll cover Saturday's run.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Ready to Raid
This week is WotLK Timewalking, which is always fun. The chest at the end was a downgrade for Strev, but the real fun has been chain-running dungeons as Acannasta forevermore known as "Canna" here…as in "I can na' heal. I can na' DPS for crap." ) Timewalking weeks are a godsend for lower level DPS who like running dungeons. Suddenly queue times are back down to 5-10 minutes! As a result, she's mind flayed her way up to level 105 without doing any Legion questing. The real downside of so much Shadow playing is I'm starting to miss doing nice AoE on Strev from a safe distance. More than once I've tried to tab through enemies on Strev to place non-existent dots.
I haven't been pvping much this week-- the reward is a helmet downgrade and the weekly brawl is "classic Ashran", which is a never-ending back and forth battlefield. That's an ok concept, particularly if you like killing people for the sake of killing people, BUT this makes it impossible to actually "win" and get the completion rewards, which defeats the point of my wanting to queue for it.
Over the past few days, I made a concerted effort to "get gud" so as to not be an embarrassment for Friday's raid. I picked up consumables: runes, flasks, and potions. I took cooking to max so I can drop the new feasts if needed. I watched the videos. I ran the first wing in LFR to get a feel for the basic mechanics of the first three bosses. I bought a subscription to Raidbots.
For the uninitiated, Raidbots is an absolutely amazing site that lets you run DPS simulators based on gear and equipment, compare talents, gear in your bags (it ain't all ilevel, kids), tells you what potential loot drops from all sources would have what effect on your DPS, etc. It's a free site and all a sub really buys you is the ability to skip the line (a 1-2 minute wait) when running your sims. I correctly estimated my time was worth more than the $3 monthly price and had a few merry hours discovering everything wrong with my build. After juggling gear, talents and such, I was able to improve my output by around 20%, which absolutely floored me.
It turned out I'd have an early chance to see how I'd mesh with most of the raid team in a Heroic Warfront. The difference between "regular" Stromgarde and Heroic was night and day. You can't solo queue for these-- it has to be a raid group of 10-20, with enemy power (and quantity) scaling based on the number of people you bring. There's a 430 chest at the end as a quest reward, which I think is the equivalent of Heroic Raid loot. We brought 15 eager people, including one carry. We hopped on Discord and began.
It started off well. One team went to the mines, my team went to the lumber mill with group three helping wherever as needed. We won our respective battles in time to see our main base was under attack from the enemy leader. We hustled back… and lost. Not as in "wiped", although we did do that. As in…the enemy boss killed our Commander and we all stared at the "DEFEAT" screen in disbelief. Clearly, we had to up our game. We recruited some more healers and another tank from LFG and made a second go at it with 20 people.
It was tough, even nerve-wracking at times. There was constant pressure to advance the front, gather mats, and defend simultaneously. We lost one of our footholds once and that was enough to compel us to send squads to investigate and deal with enemy encroachments, no matter how small. It was a war of attrition and we won. It was glorious. For my own part, depending on the encounter I bounced between first and seventh or so on the dps charts. I'm built for single-target, not AoE, and it shows. All in all, I don't think I embarrassed myself, so that was nice.
I'm now ready to raid tonight.
I haven't been pvping much this week-- the reward is a helmet downgrade and the weekly brawl is "classic Ashran", which is a never-ending back and forth battlefield. That's an ok concept, particularly if you like killing people for the sake of killing people, BUT this makes it impossible to actually "win" and get the completion rewards, which defeats the point of my wanting to queue for it.
Over the past few days, I made a concerted effort to "get gud" so as to not be an embarrassment for Friday's raid. I picked up consumables: runes, flasks, and potions. I took cooking to max so I can drop the new feasts if needed. I watched the videos. I ran the first wing in LFR to get a feel for the basic mechanics of the first three bosses. I bought a subscription to Raidbots.
For the uninitiated, Raidbots is an absolutely amazing site that lets you run DPS simulators based on gear and equipment, compare talents, gear in your bags (it ain't all ilevel, kids), tells you what potential loot drops from all sources would have what effect on your DPS, etc. It's a free site and all a sub really buys you is the ability to skip the line (a 1-2 minute wait) when running your sims. I correctly estimated my time was worth more than the $3 monthly price and had a few merry hours discovering everything wrong with my build. After juggling gear, talents and such, I was able to improve my output by around 20%, which absolutely floored me.
It turned out I'd have an early chance to see how I'd mesh with most of the raid team in a Heroic Warfront. The difference between "regular" Stromgarde and Heroic was night and day. You can't solo queue for these-- it has to be a raid group of 10-20, with enemy power (and quantity) scaling based on the number of people you bring. There's a 430 chest at the end as a quest reward, which I think is the equivalent of Heroic Raid loot. We brought 15 eager people, including one carry. We hopped on Discord and began.
It started off well. One team went to the mines, my team went to the lumber mill with group three helping wherever as needed. We won our respective battles in time to see our main base was under attack from the enemy leader. We hustled back… and lost. Not as in "wiped", although we did do that. As in…the enemy boss killed our Commander and we all stared at the "DEFEAT" screen in disbelief. Clearly, we had to up our game. We recruited some more healers and another tank from LFG and made a second go at it with 20 people.
It was tough, even nerve-wracking at times. There was constant pressure to advance the front, gather mats, and defend simultaneously. We lost one of our footholds once and that was enough to compel us to send squads to investigate and deal with enemy encroachments, no matter how small. It was a war of attrition and we won. It was glorious. For my own part, depending on the encounter I bounced between first and seventh or so on the dps charts. I'm built for single-target, not AoE, and it shows. All in all, I don't think I embarrassed myself, so that was nice.
I'm now ready to raid tonight.
Monday, July 15, 2019
A Guild That Raids (Redux)
The main reason I moved to Moon Guard was to join up with an actually active guild on an active server. To this end, Azeroth Inc. has been a very good call. The lowest number of online people I've ever seen has been around 12 with population ranging from 30-50 in the evenings. Guild chat is lively, interesting, and in the game. I hate having to log into Discord because that's the only place conversation is happening.
Now that I've been flying for a while and I'm done with the current story campaign, I've been spending my time split between Acannasta and Strev. Strev is always in the 'go find gear' mode, which wound up with me doing a LOT of pvp this past week for a massive weapon upgrade. Canna I'm just trying to level up-- I hit that post Vanilla slog and ran into a wall. With DPS queue times for level 60+ in the 20-30 minute range, it was going to be a questing in zones I hated or had done to death. Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.
The guild's first raid of 8.2 was on Friday. I didn't bother with signing up. I've been lazy-- haven't watched the boss fights, was missing enchantments, no flasks… definitely not bringing my "A" game and if I'm going to debut, I want to not be a joke. As a bonus, the last time I seriously raided was… omg. Cataclysm. They announced that the raid was being streamed for anyone who wanted to watch. Ok! Let's pull up a chair.
Here's what I learned: this group had never raided together before, but were skilled enough dancers. Most were lower geared than Strev. The guild master is also Arcane.
So…How'd they do? Over the course of a couple of hours, they cleared 4/8 bosses, with 2 on the first attempt. Wow.
By Sunday evening Canna hit Draenor and I flipped back over to Strev to check on a couple of things before logging. Seconds after logging in, the GM whispers me: "ilvl?" "416" "Wanna come raid?" I told him straight up that I didn't have my shit together or know the fights. "It's fine. We'll teach you." Holy crap. Well, ok-- you know what you're getting.
Apparently things have changed a bit since "the day" and raid sizes are flexible you aren't locked into 10/25. I make me way to the raid entrance while the GM scrambles to assemble the rest of the team. In the end, we didn't raid. Our guild's "normal tanks" were on vacation and as a group we decided we'd rather gear up alternate tanks than waste time and resources with under-geared ones.
In the end, I was left with a chunk of self-imposed homework: learn the fights for Friday, get flasks, optimize gear and review raiding simulations. I sim a little under 30k dps (about 1k higher than the GM), but I feel like I should be hitting higher.
Now that I've been flying for a while and I'm done with the current story campaign, I've been spending my time split between Acannasta and Strev. Strev is always in the 'go find gear' mode, which wound up with me doing a LOT of pvp this past week for a massive weapon upgrade. Canna I'm just trying to level up-- I hit that post Vanilla slog and ran into a wall. With DPS queue times for level 60+ in the 20-30 minute range, it was going to be a questing in zones I hated or had done to death. Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.
The guild's first raid of 8.2 was on Friday. I didn't bother with signing up. I've been lazy-- haven't watched the boss fights, was missing enchantments, no flasks… definitely not bringing my "A" game and if I'm going to debut, I want to not be a joke. As a bonus, the last time I seriously raided was… omg. Cataclysm. They announced that the raid was being streamed for anyone who wanted to watch. Ok! Let's pull up a chair.
Here's what I learned: this group had never raided together before, but were skilled enough dancers. Most were lower geared than Strev. The guild master is also Arcane.
So…How'd they do? Over the course of a couple of hours, they cleared 4/8 bosses, with 2 on the first attempt. Wow.
By Sunday evening Canna hit Draenor and I flipped back over to Strev to check on a couple of things before logging. Seconds after logging in, the GM whispers me: "ilvl?" "416" "Wanna come raid?" I told him straight up that I didn't have my shit together or know the fights. "It's fine. We'll teach you." Holy crap. Well, ok-- you know what you're getting.
Apparently things have changed a bit since "the day" and raid sizes are flexible you aren't locked into 10/25. I make me way to the raid entrance while the GM scrambles to assemble the rest of the team. In the end, we didn't raid. Our guild's "normal tanks" were on vacation and as a group we decided we'd rather gear up alternate tanks than waste time and resources with under-geared ones.
In the end, I was left with a chunk of self-imposed homework: learn the fights for Friday, get flasks, optimize gear and review raiding simulations. I sim a little under 30k dps (about 1k higher than the GM), but I feel like I should be hitting higher.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Merrily We Grind Along
I hate Nazjatar. Utterly. Completely. It is now my second most-hated zone of all time. (Karnak, you will forever be number one in my heart.) Yet, for the sake of flying mounts to come, I endure the area for an hour or so every day. I'm perfectly ok with this taking a few days longer if it means skipping "hunting 3 rares" or other ludicrous dailies that give a smattering of rep.
I feel like the zone was designed with the idea that you already have flying and I feel so bad for classes that can't drop combat every now and then. Bear in mind even "Greater Invis" is shoddy at best, since your bodyguard will break it and throw you back in combat. Between that and the mob density, it's just zero fun. So I inch towards my Revered rank and will be so glad to take to the skies… eventually.
Meanwhile, I can spend hours in Mechagon happily doing my thing. My biggest (read: only) gripe with Mechagon is that some dailies don't show on the map until you're right up on top of them. Otherwise, it is my zone!
Aside from rare fish to catch, pet battles, dailies, and a couple of WQs, the big draw is up to 33 rare elites than spawn on the island. Nearly all give a chance to drop a nifty thing, be it a tinkering blueprint, pets, mounts, music tracks for a jukebox, toys, paint for your mechanocat-- I have a mechanocat now! (To get robotic feline mount, you craft a laser pointer.) Not all bosses are up every day and some require certain events to be triggered and what have you. All in all, it keeps things fun and interesting.
Two big fun things I got over the weekend was a rare blueprint for a jetpack and some secret fish-finding goggles. The jetpack is a "not exactly cheap" consumable, but it lets me fly in Mechagon for up to 20 minutes by double jumping to activate. It'll just be a novelty in a couple of weeks once everyone can take to the skies normally, but for now it is amazingly convenient.
The goggles do something! When activated, for an hour I can see "secret fish" hanging in the air in little bubbles (about 1 fish bubble appears every 30 seconds or so). These are often just "white quality" fish you could get from fishing in the zone, but every now and then you get a rare one, which is a little coin and takes you closer to an achievement which grants the Hyper-compressed ocean toy. (All the fish in one place!)
I feel like the zone was designed with the idea that you already have flying and I feel so bad for classes that can't drop combat every now and then. Bear in mind even "Greater Invis" is shoddy at best, since your bodyguard will break it and throw you back in combat. Between that and the mob density, it's just zero fun. So I inch towards my Revered rank and will be so glad to take to the skies… eventually.
Meanwhile, I can spend hours in Mechagon happily doing my thing. My biggest (read: only) gripe with Mechagon is that some dailies don't show on the map until you're right up on top of them. Otherwise, it is my zone!
Aside from rare fish to catch, pet battles, dailies, and a couple of WQs, the big draw is up to 33 rare elites than spawn on the island. Nearly all give a chance to drop a nifty thing, be it a tinkering blueprint, pets, mounts, music tracks for a jukebox, toys, paint for your mechanocat-- I have a mechanocat now! (To get robotic feline mount, you craft a laser pointer.) Not all bosses are up every day and some require certain events to be triggered and what have you. All in all, it keeps things fun and interesting.
Two big fun things I got over the weekend was a rare blueprint for a jetpack and some secret fish-finding goggles. The jetpack is a "not exactly cheap" consumable, but it lets me fly in Mechagon for up to 20 minutes by double jumping to activate. It'll just be a novelty in a couple of weeks once everyone can take to the skies normally, but for now it is amazingly convenient.
The goggles do something! When activated, for an hour I can see "secret fish" hanging in the air in little bubbles (about 1 fish bubble appears every 30 seconds or so). These are often just "white quality" fish you could get from fishing in the zone, but every now and then you get a rare one, which is a little coin and takes you closer to an achievement which grants the Hyper-compressed ocean toy. (All the fish in one place!)
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