Well hello there Arthas

Big news to share...

My guild has asked me to become an Officer, which is exciting to me for a few reasons.  I am looking forward to the challenges of raid leading and helping to deal with guild decisions.  It's nice to know your opinions will be heard and respected.  Plus, it's also great that I can now tell people to quiet down on vent with some authority (aside from the inherent cranky tank authority).

Also, we had an absolutely amazing raid night last night.  We downed the 10 man versions of Blood Princes after 3 attempts and got the Blood Queen after only two (both of which are new encounters for us).  Which means...  Lich King time!!!!

Zomg excitement.  I cannot tell you how excited I was to be experiencing the final fight in ICC.  I was beginning to fear I wouldn't see it before Cataclysm hits.  We've gotten him to about 64% ish after our fourth attempt and had to stop there for the night.

As a side note, my curiosity got the better of me, and was wondering out loud if you could just waltz up to the LK before the event started and say hello much closer.  So in charges one of our Shaman healers.  Turns out, yep.  You sure can!  It made for an awesome guild screen shot.

Boy Arthas, are you just happy to see us, or are there a pair of Death Knights in your lap? (I was told I looked like a piece of the LK's armor so I stripped nekkid in the next shot.  Luckily for you all I did not grab a pic - Oh and BTW, apparently my DK needs to get more sunlight.)

...and the theory crafters go bonkers

I'm having a grand time giggling over the fact the the theory crafters have to be going a little crazy over the news about the talent trees.

For those of you who missed it

Talent trees will have around 20 unique talents instead of today's (roughly) 30 talents, and aesthetically will look a bit more like the original World of Warcraft talent trees. The 31-point talents will generally be the same as the 51-point talents we already had planned for Cataclysm. A lot of the boring or extremely specialized talents have been removed, but we don't want to remove anything that's going to affect spell/ability rotations. We want to keep overall damage, healing, and survivability roughly the same while providing a lot of the passive bonuses for free based on your specialization choice. While leveling, you will get 1 talent point about every 2 levels (41 points total at level 85). Our goal is to alternate between gaining a new class spell or ability and gaining a talent point with each level. As another significant change, you will not be able to put points into a different talent tree until you have dedicated 31 talent points to your primary specialization. While leveling, this will be possible at 70. Picking a talent specialization should feel important. To that end, we want to make sure new players understand the significance of reaching the bottom of their specialization tree before gaining the option of spending points in the other trees. We intend to make sure dual-specialization and re-talenting function exactly as they do today so players do not feel locked into their specialization choice.

Haha, take that you number crunching basement virgins!

Of course, this just means we'll have a full analysis and a new min/max spec to take to make your character the "best" it can be.

Molten Giants

Ok, I haven't posted in a while, but I've been active in game gearing up my warrior to tank our guild's ICC 10 alt runs - which I successfully did last week. (yay! - 5% on Professor Putricide is not too shabby for our first real alt run)

So, now that I've got 3 of the 4 tanking classes at level 80 and have experience Wrath end game content on each one, I feel I have a real good handle of how each of the 3 classes work. Up until recently I had been working my warrior as a DPS, and swapped back to tank because few things irritate me more than not being in control of how the group moves and how quickly the pace goes (Sounds a bit control freakish I realize... but my sanity cannot take it when a tank will pull two mobs at a time).

As such, I would like to give the general populace a few tips:

1) If your tank is a Paladin, ignore the rest of these tips. Paladins are so facerollingly easy to tank with most people will have no trouble holding aggro, even the bad players will excell.

2) If your tank is a DeathKnight, be cautious of the first few pulls, if the DK is any good, you will see things like NOT using death and decay on every pull, you will see pestilence spread diseases, you will even see him / her use cooldowns on trash pulls. If the above statements are true, you can usually cruise through an instance with little to no excitement.

3) If your tank is a Warrior, be very cautious of the first few pulls. Warrior tanking takes a lot more finesse than the other two I have mentioned. Good warriors will be constantly swapping targets to maintain threat levels on the mobs, and try to adjust his / her positioning to hit most (if not all) of the mobs with a thunderclap and maybe a shockwave. DO NOT GO CRAZY WITH DPS until you feel the tank has a decent threshold on aggro.

4) If you are a DPS with some sort of threat transferring ability, USE IT, ya tard!  Look, I'm more than happy to keep mister bad guy focused on me, but keep it up and I WILL let you die.  And then laugh.

Why are these tips necessary?

Setting: VOA 10
Tanks: Warrior & DK
Trash pulls - I charge in and in the middle of the charge get a heroic throw off and maybe an auto attack which is quickly followed up by the mob turning around and beating the snot out of a hunter. So I got a good chuckle out of it, but the hunter more or less acused me in raid chat of losing aggro. Well.. Guilty as charged buddy. Hope you learned your lesson.

Gee, you mean to tell me a 5800 GS hunter can't just unload against a mob while a 5000 GS tank is trying to establish aggro? Who'd a thunk it.

That was not the only excitement on the run however. The off tank (who was lesser geared than I) had the joy of dropping dead while it was his turn to tank the boss (when he remembered to taunt - I knew I was in trouble when before we get started I receive a whisper from him saying "Remin me how many taunt.") The amazing thing, however, is that ALL of his cooldowns remained unused. DKs are great in this fight. Ice bound fortiude can reduce your incoming damage and Anti magic shell is great to pop right when you see some of those frost swirly things (What.. I'm a tank, it's a frost swirly thing to me; I got bigger problems to deal with).

He receives a battle rez and miraculously got back in the fight to taunt off and relieve some of the pressure cause by the 8 debuffs now stacked on me. DK gets his 3 debuffs and a quick taunt swaps Toravon back to me and I sit there tanking watching my debuff stack up... 7....8....9 "Hey, you feel like taunting any time soon?" 10...*splat* "Guess not") which the boss died seconds after.

I still remember the days when our guild was first venturing into Molten Core and the very first pull featured two molten giants whith a very very touchy aggro table right at the start. The guild was commanded DO NOT ATTACK UNTIL YOU SEE THREE SUNDERS ON THE TARGET.

In fact, I remember a 40 person guild run wiping because a hunter pet wolf growled (which it just does automatically by entering combat) before the tank had even hit Vael in BWL.   Which, by the way, was quite amusing.  Fight starts *growl* dragon immediately turns and does a fire breath followed by the quick deaths of 14 raid members.  Heh...

Raiding required discipline... It's not like that currently.

Here's hoping Cataclysm brings at least a little of that back.  I would love to see an adaptation of the Dire Maul Tribute run.

Failpugs and You - How You Can Cope

I was a bad boy last night.

I'd logged in to take care of some odds and ends, and queued up for the daily random 5-man.  The destination?  Azjol-Nerub.

The tank started on it as soon as we ported in.  "All noobs leave now!" he said, heading down the path.

You have got to be kidding me, I thought.  This is freaking A-N, for pete's sake, and he was going to be an ass over this?

Nobody responded to his comment, but naturally he'd already run ahead before the rest of us could buff him.  He'd already engaged the first bit of trash, but he oriented himself in such a way that it was hard to get behind him so I wouldn't pull aggro.  It didn't matter anyway, since he had difficulty holding aggro with the casters nearby.  Trash disposed of, he turned to me.  "Surprised you haven't left yet," he said.

An evil thought entered my head as I stared at the screen.  Oh, he wants to play, does he?  Then let's play.

"Gee," I replied as he pulled the first Watcher to him, "and I was just about to ask if you wanted to do Watch Him Die."

"Yeah yeah!" said the healer.  "Let's do the achieve!  gogogogo!"

I looked at the health bar of the first Watcher.  "Too late," I said, dangling the lure over the edge.  If I played this right, "No-Noob" would take the bait and do something stupid rather than actually think through the suggestion.

My prayers were rewarded by the WoW gods.  The tank whirled and headed for the first boss.  "No it isn't!" he declared.

I began to follow but got caught in a web, requiring the mage to zap me free.  Two fewer DPS in the fight was even better than I hoped for.  By the time I arrived and took my position on the last boss, the tank and one of the DPS had already wiped.

Almost immediately, the tank dropped.

Scratch one obnoxious, overbearing tank before he caused even more trouble.  I hope he liked the debuff, too.

The reason why I related that story is because the level of asshatery in random 5-mans seems to be rising lately.  I don't even need to bring it up in guild chat; others have noticed it too.  One guildee has gotten so disgusted with it that he refuses to run pugs at all, and several others will only go with fellow guildees; no random characters, period.  Speculation has wandered from the end of the school year to the Cataclysm blues to the BP oil spill (okay, I made that last one up).  Whatever the source of the recent spate of pugfail, I've begun picking and choosing some passive-aggressive resistance.  If I can get away with it --and it won't harm the rest of the group too much-- I wait for an opening and use a bit of reverse psychology on the offending party. 

Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes completely over their heads.  I'd rather not say something like "Hey Jerk, why don't you leave before we kick you out?" but instead manipulate the person into bad decisions.  It's much more fun that way.

Just like Home Alone, but with Zombies!

The suggestion was innocent enough.

“Anyone up for Glory of the Hero?” one of my guild members asked. 

I had a few parts of that achievement to fill, so I said “Sure.” Others chimed in, and we quickly assembled a group.  Paladin as the tank, Shaman, Druid, and Quint as DPS, and Shaman as healer.

“A-N is out,” I said, “I just did that for my Daily.”

“How about CoT?” the tank suggested.

“Zombiefest? I’m game for that.”

We queued up while the healer read up on how to do the achievement. She relayed all of the information to us while we were handling the first few trash mobs. The goal is simple: kill 100 zombies in one minute. To execute the achievement, you have to first kite Salaam the Fleshcrafter (the caster boss) all the way into the Stratholme Town Hall, then you take your old sweet time beating him down. Once that’s done, you clear out the Town Hall portion of the instance. Then, send a player back through the front entrance to collect all of the respawned Risen Zombies and pull them back through the Town Hall and out the secret exit. Once that’s done, kill all of those kited zombies and the ones out front.

“This is going to make Zombieland look like a Disney movie!” she said.

Salaam was in rare form, constantly talking about needing samples, while the tank kited him into the Town Hall. “Just use Auto Attack,” he said.

I felt like a bot, watching Quint swing every couple of seconds. All for the cause, I suppose.

We dispatched Salaam, had dragonkin burgers for a light snack, and our DPS Druid went back through the front door to go get a few zombies.

Did I say a few?

When he came back, there was a huge stream of them following behind, like a John Carpenter version of The Pied Piper.

“Time to kick some zombie butt!”

Salaam wanted a sample? How about these samples!  That zombie splat sound was awfully sweet when you multiply it by, oh, say, a hundred or so.

Achievement gotten, we rushed on to take care of the last Infinite Dragonflight boss. We had just reached the gate when someone asked, “Hey, did we get Arthas?”

“Oh crap, we forgot him!” the tank cried.

“Well,” I said, “Arthas is eminently forgettable.”

Our Shaman DPS peeled off to go trigger our not-quite-worthy charge while the rest of us took out the boss with only seconds to spare. (I still think that we should let Arthas die, but that’s just me.)

“Crap!” the Shaman said. “They all respawned!”

“Hang on!” the tank replied. “We’ll get there.”

Too late. The Shaman and Arthas bit it before we could get through the gate.

“This has got to be the stupidest CoT run I’ve ever been in,” the DPS Druid said. “We get the achievement but forget Arthas.”

“This is just like Home Alone,” I said, “but with zombies.”

Because Arthas died, we had to go back through all the respawned trash, rez our Shaman, retrigger Arthas, and then fight the exact same trash again.

Samples, anyone?

Getting that Cataclysmic Itchy Feeling?

I spoke briefly with Souldat today while I was waiting in line to go smash Ahune*, and he mentioned that when Cataclysm is released he is definitely going with a Warrior tank.

While I didn't really have the time to follow up on that statement, I was curious about what people think about their class for Cataclysm.  A lot of Alpha stuff hit the WoW blogosphere like an overripe tomato, and there's plenty of goop all over the different classes.

The Ret Spec Paladin seems to have weathered the storm a little bit, with Crusader Strike becoming part of the starting rotation (Holy Shock too).  Although the loss of Purify will hurt a bit, I find I don't mind the Ret Pally's arsenal overall.

I'm not going to comment about the Holy Spec Pally, because I'm only recently returning to that spec, and Cat will drop long before Tomakan reaches 80.

That said, what do you think?  Did your class get nerfed?


*My son was asking who Ahune was, and I described him as the WoW version of Jack Frost who wanted to blanket the land in winter, and since this is the Summer festival we had to beat back Ahune to preserve Summer.  I didn't think my wife was paying attention until she started humming something.  "Why on earth am I humming The Christmas Song?" she asked out loud.

I've Been Meme-ified

I typically don't do memes.  All more's the irony that I've responded to a meme on my non-WoW blog and now here in the past month.

This came from Anea, formerly of "Oh Look, an Alt!" who has since moved her blogging over to Wordpress and Ethermead.  This is a WoW-centric meme, which is no great surprise.

1. Raider, farmer, PvPer, or altoholic?
If I've the choice among the four, I guess it'd be a farmer.  In reality, I'd create a fifth entry, Questaholic, to stick my playing style in.

2. Favorite raid or dungeon?
Halls of Reflection.  How often do you get a chance to fight alongside Sylvanas Windrunner outside of the Wrathgate sequence?

3. Number one choice for a new playable race?
Naga.  A certain number of them could be cast out by Azshara for not living up to her standards, and they are forced to make their own way in the world. 

4. Class you suck the most at?
Warrior.  I created one, got him to L8, and dropped him.  I just didn't want to keep going.

5. Original UI or modded UI?
Moderately modded.  I've slowly been replacing the original UI with modded equivalents, and by the time Catclysm drops I'll have completely modded the UI.

6. Profession you've never levelled past 200?
Almost all of them.  The only professions I've leveled past 200 are Cooking, First Aid, Mining and Jewelcrafting.  (Fishing will get there, however.)

7. Favorite flying mount?
I like my drakes, but I prefer the old Swift Yellow Windrider.  It doesn't take up much viewing space, it doesn't scream "look at me!", and it doesn't look dorky running along the ground.

8. Nozdormu -- friend or foe, you figure?
Friend.  Unless Deathwing corrupts him, of course.

9. Useless item you have in your bank that you'll never get rid of?
Saltheril's Party Invitation.  I have no freaking idea why I want to hold onto it, but I just do.

10. Most expensive thing you've ever bought?
One Battered Hilt, 9300G.  I wanted to see the quest chain, finish up Loremaster for Northrend, and get the best non-raid weapon in the game.  I had more than enough money to cover it (and a Tyrannical Beheader to tide me over), but I waited until the price dropped from 11000G down to below 9500G before I pulled the trigger.  That waiting period sure took long enough, but it at least allowed me enough runs in the ICC 5-mans to see if the hilt would drop.  To this day, I've still only seen the hilt drop once:  on my second run through the Pit of Saron.

11. Favorite starting area?
Alliance:  Draenei.  Far and away the best of the Alliance starting areas, and emphasizes the otherness of the Draenei and their need to convince the races of Azeroth that they aren't in league with the Burning Legion.  What I've seen of the Alliance starting areas, it's easier for the Humans especially to see the Horde races as "those big ugly lesser beings who need to be exterminated."  I can't see the Draenei and Dwarves especially going for that sort of leadership long term, although Night Elves and Tauren Druids have worked together quite well.

Horde:  Blood Elf.  The big punch in the face with the destruction wrought by the Scourge contrasting with Blood Elves clinging to a semblance of their former glory makes for a good starting point.  The Tauren starting zone is a close second, with the great rolling plains and the influence by the Native American beliefs and architecture.  The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the Tauren --and to a lesser extent the Blood Elves-- are going to have a hard time following Garrosh Hellscream into a potentially genocidal war against the Alliance.

12. Inane goal you worked hardest to achieve?
Collecting whelps for the pet collection achievements.  I've got two down --Azure and Crimson-- with two to go.

(Ordinarily I'd say the Bear Mount from the Brunhildar Village, but since I HAVEN'T GOTTEN IT YET, I can't put that here.)

13. Darion Mograine VS Tirion Fordring, gloves off -- winner is?
Tirion.  The Old Man can still bring it.

14. Game music or your own playlist?
Right now, just the background sounds.  I was playing the game music for a long time, but I've since turned it down.  I typically play with headphones on so as not to disturb people nearby.

15. Particular option or setting that you always toggle on a new alt/server?
The beginner tooltips go bye bye; they only get in the way now.

16. Highest amount of levels gained in one play session?
Ten.  L1-10.

17. Thing you'd most like to experience or see in-game?
I already got to experience it:  seeing the Sunwell back in operation as part of the Quel'Delar quest chain.

18. Worst PuG moment?
Oh, there have been plenty.  Too many to count.  Probably the time in Halls of Stone where I was followed by a bot.  It wasn't an epic fail, but just the sheer humiliation of being the dude selected by the bot software to be followed.

19. Best dungeon/raid moment?
Probably the time in Heroic Utgarde Keep where someone had accidentally pulled extra trash (feared), and only myself and the tank were left.  When I saw the healer go down, I stepped back, bubbled, pulled out Healbot, and managed to heal the both of us through something like eight Vrykul at once with only 6k mana.  Both of us nearly died multiple times --the fight was so long the bubble timer and the mana potions reset-- but we somehow stayed upright.

20. Worst quest ever that you totally hate doing?
Thersa Windsong.  I did it once, and afterwards I swore I'd never do that again.

21. First thing you do when you hit 80?
Well, I only hit 80 once, and I really didn't party in the streets of Dal or anything.  I just kind of shrugged and went back to questing in The Storm Peaks.

22. Character (of yours) you would RP as if you had to?
Nevelanthana, my BE Mage.  Of course, that's because she was originally based on a D&D character of mine who bit the dust over last winter.  Even the traditional BE snarkiness and attitude fit Neve's original personality perfectly.

23. Keyboard, mouse, or both for using abilities?
Both.  Eventually I'll get one of those nicer mice, but that's kind of low on the purchasing totem pole.

24. Thottbot or WoWhead?
Wowwiki for me. :-P

25. Acronym you've seen in chat but don't understand?
There are plenty.  If I see it enough I Google it, but since I don't text and I'm not a long time WoW player, I don't have all the acronyms down.  I tend to type in complete sentences --thank you typing class!-- which is occasionally out of place in WoW chat.

26. Plot point you'd like to see resolved someday?
Toss up:  seeing the Ghostlands restored to their former glory, and seeing the Black Temple restored.

27. Biggest thing you're looking forward to in Cataclysm?
Watching the Theorycrafters freak out with all the changes.

28. Guild event you'd like to see?
You mean Karaoke Night isn't part of the menu?  None in particular, really.

29. Level range you hate being in?
L35-39.  That fast mount is almost there, but just out of reach.

30. Favorite map to quest in?
Howling Fjord.  That place just screams Scandinavia, and I have Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite running through my head when I'm there.