Archive for June, 2008

Dreamstate?

June 18, 2008 at 4:23 am · Filed under Uncategorized

As promised, I decided to post about WoW today. The winner was the dreamstate-resto build. Now, I can’t comment on it too much due to the fact that I didn’t get much time in as it because it was just too much for me. I started out Kara as Dreamstate and respecced back after Moroes.

Firstly, HT sucks. It takes almost as long as a priest’s greater heal (fully talented) and it does not get the same output. I think it might be different if I had some more spell crit but as it is, I was no where close to satisfied. The +healing based on intellect was nice and HT would pick up a higher coefficient than, say, Regrowth or Lifbloom but it still did not pack enough of a bunch for me to decided to switch entirely.

Secondly, mana. Where did my unexhaustible fount of mana go? I found myself actually having to drink…. I haven’t had to drink until after a boss fight at all in Kara as a tree! Why, with my mana regen so incredibly increased is my mana gone so quickly? Simple, HT costs a lot. I may be super mana regen man but I’m spending it far faster than I can regen it. Now, I don’t need to be at full mana all the time but I do need to retain some mana sometimes. Thirdly, gimped HoTs. Granted, I should not be throwing out HoTs at all if I’m in dreamstate but the problem for me was that the other resto druid in the group was already stacking HoTs and there was almost no healing to be done.

I know. I didn’t give dreamstate a fair chance. I know I’m biased because I’m a tree and that’s the only goddamned good resto spec *stubborn fuming*. But I was so far revolted by dreamstate that I can’t ever think of respeccing back. It makes me cringe to think of it. I can certainly see the solo bonuses since you get pretty far into the balance tree but other than that it’s just useless to me. And I don’t want to say that the dreamstate-resto druids out there suck. What I am saying is that from what I was able to test, there was no true bonus to dreamstate compared to my being a tree… Well except for seeing my armor and moving fast. Why don’t you get on that blizzard? Tree Armor FTW!!!

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WOW…

June 17, 2008 at 12:49 am · Filed under Uncategorized

So yeah…. I started out this post talking about my guild downing Gruul’s last night and thereafter was bombarded by work here. So this is an advance posty thing to promise to you and me and the other guy who reads this that I will most definitely have a WoW post for you today. It may be Gruul’s, it may be somehting about mages, or it might be my summary of the dreamstate/resto build and why I hate it. I will see you soon.

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Gruul Woes

June 12, 2008 at 10:44 pm · Filed under Druid, Healing, Mage, Raids, WoW

Oh, Gruul, you silly drooling bastard. Why do you taunt us so?

I am a sad cow this morning friends. Yet again, we were shown last night that we “are not prepared”. Yeah, I know that’s Illidan but I’m talking about Gruul. I’m allowed, artistic license.

So last night, we had a ZA run scheduled for 7:30 server (8:30 my time). We ended up with a lot more people on than necessary and saw that ZA hadn’t reset yet, so Gruul’s was on the agenda. Now, we blasted through High King last time and nearly downed Gruul. This time, things went a little different. We waited around for quite awhile to make sure we’d get enough people on to start. Then there was the summoning, the quick runs to Ogri’la and surrounding areas for flasks, and the waiting for afks. When all is said and done, we got into Gruul’s around 9 server or 10 my time. Well, I was a bit discouraged. I was actually already pretty tired from earlier that day (jogging in 90 degree weather sucks) and didn’t look forward to another late night, but I was all for killing that giant gronn punk-ass.
Let the wipes begin friends. We cleared the trash easily enough and set up for High King. The explanations were long unfortunately and I started to get impatient but we started.
First wipe: the mage aggro-ed the Firehand getting into position. We set back up. Second wipe: our rogues weren’t interrupting enough on the seer and he was getting heals off. It took a long time to down him and our mage bit it due to an unluckily timed fireball. Third wipe: the fel stalker was running wild and knocked off the mage’s healer, mage died. Fourth wipe: mage died. Now, I understand that in a lot of raids, it’s a long run back from the graveyard but Gruul’s is not one of them. We could have shaved several MINUTES off of our time getting set up between wipes if people would just RUN THE FUCK BACK, LAZY!!!!!! It honestly really started to piss me off. I mean, I get that it might be a force of habit but even after we said that everyone should be running back to save time, they still just laid there. It took so much time between wiping and setting back up that I actually started singing Too Many Annas’ Druid Got Back Song because first, it’s genius, and second I was soooooo bored. Finally, our fifth and last wipe was put down to several things. We had 2 mages in the raid and so switched the current tank with the other. That mage did well at first but eventually died. Then the mage that was tanking before picked it up and my heart lifted. It was an excellent grab. But before she was able to, Krosh killed 2 of our healers. So we were down to healers and only 1 add was dead. We wiped. Then we decided to call it.
My observations on this fight are pretty scarce. I was watching the mage though. I understand that to be successful, a mage is going to have to wipe a few times or have this fight pretty down before going in. I am not one to lay blame on anyone because I know tanking Krosh is rather hard so I fully believe that the real problem here was just inexperience. I think if we had our guild’s mage, we would have kicked ass but I also think that the mage we had is on her way there. To my guild’s credit, no one was a jerk about it. There were polite suggestions and advice. People were asking if she was making sure to steal the shield as soon as it came up, that sort of thing. I just hope she wasn’t too discouraged based on that fight. There are few fights up to this point where if anyone but the tank or healer dies then the raid wipes and it’s not an easy fight considering how fast you have to hit spellsteal to make sure you don’t die.

Anyways, on a lighter note, I did finish my Spellcloth Tailoring quest yesterday on my mage, and that kicks ass. Level 64 mage owns nether-whatever. Well, a passing level 69 orc hunter did help me out so I gave him 10 gold because I thought that a good deed should not go unrewarded. I found a few mage sites that I want to take a better look at and I’ll post them soon. TTFN

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Where have all the mage blogs gone?

June 12, 2008 at 12:57 am · Filed under Mage, Other Blogs, WoW

I decided to be bored today at work and do some research for my budding level 64 mage. Looking around for some info and/or maybe a pre-kara gear list I realized something, there are almost no mage blogs. I mean, there are a ton of hunter, druid, and priest blogs. A few scattered warrior, rogue, shaman, and paladin blogs. A smattering of warlock blogs. (Did I miss a class?) But, gentle reader, I have found NO mage blogs. Now, I’m aware that google may skip a few, and being at work restricts my access to certain sites that may have a link to a mage blog. But seriously? I can slam my face on my keyboard on google and come up with Priest or Druids or Hunters, why no love for the mages?

So I have decided that I will speak out for mages everywhere and do my dang homework. I will become a damn fine mage with up to date info and theory crafting. First thing I will do is come up with a pre-kara gear guide so stay tuned for that.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean I will stop posting about resto druids but I will make it a point to not include guides due to the sheer volume of other awesome Trees out there, for example The Part Time Druid or Resto4Life. Anyways, I hope to have something worth reading soon. Till then, ttfn.

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ZA Wins and Woes

June 10, 2008 at 10:42 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

I’m going to be putting up a resto druid workup soon. We just got a new resto druid in the guild that PvP’d mostly and was asking me for advice so I want to be able to have something for him. More on that later though.

 

My guild has been killing the first 2 bosses of ZA with ease for some time now. We actually missed the timer on Akil’zon by about 2 seconds or so a week ago. Well last night we decided to give the timed event another shot on at least Akil’zon. We all got all potted up and well fed, dealt with some Pally Power (addon I guess) buff issues (Blessing of Might on a Resto Druid? Silly pally) and started the event. We were all pumped up and ready to get it on. We started off and dropped the first group of adds almost immediately and started for Akil’zon when everyone around me started to run in place… I said so in vent saying that I might DC and everyone else said the same thing. Apparently, Wildhammer decided to go down 1 goddamn minute into our timed ZA run. What the hell man? So finally the server comes back online and we find we have about 15 minutes left. So we decided (after some very odd occurences where we weren’t in a raid together but still cleared trash) to take the bear down instead to see if we can make the timer. Well, we didn’t. We got there with around 6 or 7 minutes to spare which was ample time but we had some buff issues and didn’t start till we had around 4 minutes left.

Well, we beat Nalorakk and got the Fury (link to be added at a later time) and decided to move on to Jan’Alai, who had troubled the guild so far. Jan’Alai, I have to say, is a really fun fight. I like the dancing between fire bombs and the need for huge heals on the AOE pulls. It keeps you on your toes. This was my first experience with Jan’Alai and while I liked the fight itself, I was really hoping for my [Helm of Natural Regeneration] to drop. It didn’t but we did kill him on our first attempt. Hmmm… No kill when Moo isn’t there but One-Shotted when he is….Coincidence? I think not. After that, I wasn’t able to stay much longer due to some GF-aggro issues and called it a night.

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High King + Kara= Owned, Gruul… not so much

June 10, 2008 at 9:24 pm · Filed under Raids, WoW

Well, it was quite the eventful weekend. On Saturday, me and a few other guildies were bored and just PvPing or grinding alts and our GM says “Ya know, we have enough on, anyone wanna do Gruul’s?” Well, everyone wanted to do Gruul’s damn it. Several of us had gone through it before but never on a guild run and Synergized, my guild, hadn’t been able to down HK the last 2 times we tried it. Every time we’ve tried going back since the second try, no matter if it was on Group Calendar or not, we haven’t had enough people so we were excited that we finally did.

So we all get ready with consumables and everything, all that pre-raid stuff. I log off quickly to shut down some unnecessary addons and enable some others (Wyn’s UI FTW). We head into Gruul’s and start the explanations. Blah blah blah. Turns out, there is a ramp to the right on the wall that the mage can run to in order to tank Firehand, but they have to invis up to it before the pull. But anyway, we wiped once due to an issue with the mage’s positioning but after the first time High king was dead and I was looking at 2 T4 Druid, Warrior, Priest shoulder tokens. Now this was a big event, because in all the weeks we had been running Kara (literally around 8 full kara runs) we had only seen the Fallen Defender tokens drop (gloves or helm) once off Curator. So for the rest of us, we were excited. The the rolls began and our priests got them… ARGH!!!!!!!! Oh well, my current shoulders are better by themselves anyways but it would have been nice. So we distribute loot and move on to Gruul.

Now let me say something about Gruul. He’s a pretty fun fight if done right. You basically dance around like a damn monkey on a hibachi the whole fight but that’s why I like being a druid, I can pull that off. But if he isn’t done right… well, he sucks. We wiped the first time. I don’t know exactly what went wrong but he was running around the room chasing our tank, it was actually pretty funny to watch. The second time we wiped due to shatters. I was thrown into the air and when I landed I saw at least 6 people on my DBM “Too Close” indicator and just said “Oh Shit”. The third time went perfectly; we had the right postioning, enough DPS, good heals getting off, everything going perfectly. Then someone pulled aggro off the tank… I mean, it’s a raid boss fight man, you gotta watch your threat, especially when we need to have everyone below the both MT and OT, but I digress. Anyway, they pulled aggro, it was a dumb move but who would have thought that the person who pulled aggro just happened to be in one of those pathing dead zones that monsters can’t get to. So he went after the person, and reset. He goes “Evade Evade” and bac to full fucking health. So now we have a ticked off Gruuls with 9 grows at 100%. Wipe. After this, I think everyone was severely pissed and out of it, we wiped twice just trying to get rezzes and everyone set back up due to accidental aggro. Respawns came up and I had to take a time out to help my poor drunken fiancee (bachelorette party) up the stairs and hold her hair back for a bit. I come back and find that they had started the trash again and that they wiped. So everyone rezzes we start over again and wipe for the last time on Gruul. We called it a night but felt pretty good about it. We had taken High King down for the first time and we were confident that Gruul would eventually follow. I think the real problem was after the reset, everyone kinda lost their will after that. Oh well, HK down in 2 attempts and Gruul is waiting.

The next day, Sunday, we decided to run Kara again. More for the badges than for the loot because, besides tier pieces, no one really needs much of an upgrade from there. Now, I thought we were pretty awesome before going in but after.. just wow. We sped through all of kara in 3 hours with not a single wipe. Not on Nightbane nor on Netherspite. We literally took Attumen down in less than 5 minutes from pulling the first trash. After we were done we just kinda looked around and said “What the hell? Was that it?” There was talk of clearing the servant’s quarters just for kicks but we decided against it. I know this may not come as so great an accomplishment to those who are used to it but it was a weekend of landmarks for us. Plus I got some new boots [Slippers of Dutiful Mending]

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Not really a post…

June 10, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I tried to make a post earlier about this weekend but they’ve got me kinda overwhelmed at work. So I will leave you with these Words of Wisdom:

-Gruul can evasion bug and really take the piss out of your night.
-Velveeta Shells and Cheese are perfectly fine how they are. You do not need the recipes on the back of the box, do not fuck with them!
-If you say “This is it” really fast on a lower quality mike in vent, it will sound like “This is shit” and cause some problems.
-Damn and hell and dick and cock are all swear words and not swear words. Not a swear word: The dick found out the evil cock had beesent to hell. Evil roosters are not exempt from being damned.
Swear word: Go to hell you damned dickhead cock muncher!
Fuck does not have this distinction.
-Rogues are bashed by everyone else for the simple reason that they do not play a rogue.

-Rouge is fucking make-up. Rogue is a class. Learn how to spell it.

-Only morons believe themselves to be right all the time. Next time you refuse to listen, think about that.

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I fail IRL…

June 6, 2008 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Life, Me, WoW

This is a conversation that happened yesterday between me and my fiancee… Judge for yourself.

Moo- [blah blah blah] and then he punched him. El-oh-el.
Ms. Moo- *stare*
Moo- Did I seriously just say el-oh-el?
Ms. Moo- Yeah you did. Is it too late to get our money back for the wedding? Your nerd profile just like quadrupled.
Moo- Shut up. And yes it is too late. I can’t believe I said that.
Ms. Moo- That’s it. No more stupid game for you. I can’t have you talking to someone at the wedding and say “El-oh-el, that was funny”
Moo- Oh no, try and stop me from playing I’ll gank the hell out of you.
Ms. Moo- You’ll what?
Moo- Sonofabitch…
Ms. Moo- Pwned (poned) bitch.

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UI Switcharoo

June 6, 2008 at 10:28 pm · Filed under Addons, Healing, Other Blogs, WoW

I honestly have to say that one of the things I love and yet hate most in this game is switching my UI setup. One of Blizzard’s best ideas was to make this game so customizable. In FFXI (my only other true MMO experience), running any sort of 3rd party program could lead to a quick smack with the ban stick. I love to switch my UI around and find that I am always looking for new setups. It’s just part of the fun of the game for me. The part that I absolutely hate is the time it takes to organize everything when setting up a new UI. When you have 3 or 4 characters with unique keybindings and unique roles, you may spend 2+ hours just setting the damn things up. I just decided to switch UIs so this is fresh in my mind.
For a while I was running a goofy and messy Bongos/X-perl setup that was just plain “bleh”. My buttons had no purposes, everything was just thrown on and unorganized. After a while though, I saw Spartan UI and fell in love. But “every rose has its thorns” and while Spartan UI had a clean look, a wonderful layout, and cleared out plenty of room on my screen; it was still in developement and there were bugs. My WoW would occasionally lock up on entering the game, a wierd orange bar would walk across the bottom of my screen, enemy debuffs would not show up, etc. I am sure that, in the future, the bugs will be fixed and this UI will be fantastic but, while I did play with it for a while, I had to supplement quite a bit to try and make it workable (and also just worked through the crashes). Then, while reading a couple of the blogs I usually read, I happened upon Wyn’s UI at World of Matticus and my heart trembled. The clean look, the lack of clutter, the buttons, the quick-glance layout, the BUTTONS! Oh my, I had to have it! I looked through the post and quickly downloaded the mods she referenced, taking note that I had a few but clearly didn’t utilize them properly. If you are a healer, I strongly recommend checking this out and at least implementing some of it. Even with spartan UI I had some problems seeing my screen and now, after setting up this UI this morning before work, I can easily see a nice clear screen, YAY!. My only problem now is to actually get these buttons set up in a nice, somewhat-less-insane order since I didn’t really have time to do it before work. My thanks go out to Matticus and Wynthea for this. I might actually put a screenie up after our next raid.

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Tree Healers and Tanks

June 6, 2008 at 2:26 am · Filed under Druid, Healing, WoW

Are you a resto druid? Have you ever noticed that while in a group a tank somehow manages to take spike damage and then you’re struggling to get him back up? Did you ever feel inadequate because the tank died due to you not being able to heal the spike damage?

This isn’t uncommon for us Resto Druids. We tend to have problems healing spike damage because we are mainly HoT based. My 3 stack of lifebloom ticks for around 700 per second, with a rejuvenation of around 800ish (haven’t really checked it recently) every 3 seconds. That’s 2900 HP healed per 3 seconds, or 966.67 HPS (health per second). In some instances, especially raids, your tank is going to be taking more than that and there is really nothing you can do except add regrowth to the mix. But, and this is a very big but, if your tank is taking more than that very often (I’m talking rolling lifeblooms and rejuv and you still have to spam regrowth) it isn’t you or the fact that you’re a druid (unless you have really bad +healing but then you would know that), it’s probably the tank. Unfortunately, as trees, we have to pay special attention to the tank’s gear and what fights are going on. We need to anticipate exactly when spike damage is going to hit and what CC’s are breaking soon so we know when to start getting heals onto dps. This is going to sound odd since you’re a healer but learn how to tank. If you learn how to tank then you know more about mitigation and holding aggro. You know why the tank there is taking a crapload more damage than he should and you know why the mage over there is pulling aggro and you can prepare for it. If the tank has crappy gear then you know what you’re in for and can adjust your plan accordingly.

To help with this you may want to check out Healbot at Curse-Gaming. It simplifies this down to a point and click. Your tank is your target but you see the mage just got slapped, just click on his name on the healbot plate and it pops a spell on him. The spells are assigned to your mouse keys in the options and you can customize and add modifiers.

Another nice thing to remember is that your spell does not start casting till you let go of the key, so if your tank is running into a fight and you know he’s gonna take some initial burst before you get the rolling LBs on him, cast a regrowth and as soon as you hit the button, hold down the button for Lifebloom and release as soon as the spell stops casting, rinse and repeat. It helps keep you from allowing your tank fall into an HP hole since it’s easier to help him stay out of it than to pull him out.

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