Upgrades

This is not a comment on gear, I'll save that wander through my brain for another day. This is about upgrading software.

Am I the only person resisting upgrading to Cataclysm for no other reason than I am still quite happy in my Blizz built WoLK sandpit and not really wanting to expand my horizons?

There are so many things still to visit and I know that I'll not do them if I go and start leveling again until much later on.

... And yet, if I don't ... I'll get left behind by the people I play with.

It is a dilemma.

I am also rather enjoying running up a couple of baby toons through the introductory night elf quests (discovering that I could have a nelf mage ... it just had to be done) and running a gnome rogue through the drenai quests (hey ... so I want my girl to have a huge mount as quick as she can and it is cute seeing her smaller than the grasses in the area). If I go run my 80 resto and mages to 85 when do I get to come back to their little sisters?

As I said ... a dilemma.

Raiding update

I thought I should leave a little update for you all to read ...

Our group is now 7/12 in ICC 10 man with the downing last week of Rotface ... finally! It only took us about a month and a half to remember all his mechanics ... using our feet ... if there is anyone comment I can make about that fight (well any ICC fight) that you don't hear so often is 'use your feet'. You often hear 'you have to have good raid awareness' but not often what this actually translates into ... what it means is ... don't stand still :) and last weekend we managed that. It was not conventionally pretty but we did it. Our final effort is here ... you are not going to get a pretty polished sound track, rather you get us blurting names of people who are infected and that is about that, but just thought I'd share our efforts. We have already completed the Dreamweaver fight and oddly enough, where I've heard people talk of this as being the most annoying and challenging fight, if anything for our group, it was the most straightforward.

Our next challenges are Prof. Putricide and the Prince's. The order tends to be dependent on how we feel :). Got to be flexible ey. This will need to balance with the challenge of do we leave ICC for a while once cata and level 85 hits to let people go level thier toons? I'd sort of like to hold us all at 80 for a bit so that we finish ICC at the level it was intended for but suspect that people would like to go and level their toon. For most of the group, the toon they are in there with is their main.

I think this post may disprove the blog title

I'm seriously thinking about finally 'splurging' and adding a tank spec to Tsu.

I think I'll be a crap tank to be honest. Tsu's little sister who is now 73 (so really not all that young anymore) is actually feral/resto speced already (argh back pre patch at 1000g hahah) so I might tweak her feral spec a bit more into bear; she already carries a fair bit of bear spec on her kitty (why ... I will claim a momentary lapse of reasoning) but for some reason does not have a bear form in her spell book (probably because I need to send her to training post patch 4.whatever) but I might, rather than off specing tsu and ruining my ability to go ... nup ... I can only do heals and thus grab my prefered roll ... anyway I'm waffling ...

I think I'll try a bit of tanking on Mystsilver first before I grind out enough points on Tsu to gear her as a tank to see if I can actually do it. I find that although I quite like melee while out questing, the mob effect in dungeons with so many enemies and allies in one spot I find that I tend to loose track of things (that and reliant on a touch pad mouse - not normally an issue in spell casting roles ... trust me ... I know .. you are probably going 'nooooooooooooooooooo omg put this resto on my block list ... but it works fine ... I'll try to remember to put a log up one day to prove/disprove my point). Anyway, so mellee in dungeons I find gets a bit like a bright, busy blast of glary pixels (what can I say ... thank goodness for healer addons)

ICC update

Well we are slowly working our way through ICC 10 man and have now downed 5/12 bosses. Our progress is slow as we really only raid once a week. A second night is proving hard to establish. People wanted a Friday night to complement our now well established Sunday night and to be run at the same time .... and then just about everyone is unavailable. A little frustrating as the person doing the coordinating. The challenge is finding alternate healers and tanks really as willing and keen dps we have a plenty. I think next week I'll try a later time and that may help a bit.

Sunday nights however I would have to say are well established. This one just gone, we turned over the first four bosses in half the time it had taken us the night we all got the achievement Storming the Citadel. Rotface and his twin brother both of whom I suspect were created by bored developers throwing random bits of features together, are a bit tougher. (I'm sorry but in terms of creature design these guys just look like lazy work with blurry features that they could not be bothered to perfect.) It's taken me two goes and lots of reading to have any attempt at keeping straight what is really a relatively simple strategy for my resto chick which is stand in the middle under the feet and heal like hell and oh the other one is run to the tank with my green goo ball ... depending on which boss we are doing. It's a bit more complex for the ranged dps and the tanks having more movement involved or knowing when to switch ... I get lost looking for buffs and things so would fail there I suspect. I think I need a rethink on my UI perhaps. I find it hard sometimes to take what I've read into a visual realm and recognise the things that have been described. I've referred to that issue early on in this blog so I'll not bore you with the details again.

Enough to say that one night a week using the raid lock functions has allowed us to get to 5/12. I'd love to see us at 6/12 by the end of Sunday night at least; it's not a restart so lets be honest, I'm only suggesting one boss fight. I have noticed that we seem to do okay learning one new fight in a night so there is a possibility of getting to 7/12 on Sunday as we are already half way there with the 6th boss.

I'm really looking forward to getting to Valithria Dreamwalker. As a healer race to heal the dragon, its a dramatically different concept in battles for me. I like the idea of the healers being the critical role rather than the perceived support roll in the standard set up for boss fights (personally I disagree, lets be honest ... no heals = wipe unless you are say a mob of 80's running deadmines. The healers are always critical, I don't believe in the idea of support and main roles as it suggests the raid could survive without them which is nonsense).

I've learnt how to do pictures ... so ...

this is one of the first 'bad guys' the resto chick downed all by herself in Northrend. He was not elite, but gee he didn't want to give up. There was good reason to go shadowmeld; he respawned quite quickly!

This is the resto's sister, a frost mage :) who has also hit 80. This image is going back a while now, all of these ones are really, but she sat waiting outside the Mag. Tce. for what seemed like an age. For a flimsy clothie who seemed to manage to discover graveyards easily, this girl did most of her questing and leveling completely independent of most other people. This was one of the few runs she a

ctually went on as part of a group until she changed rhelms and so I was quite happy to sit and wait and wait ...

Ah, now we are 80 in this shot. I've always thought it a shame that with the introduction of the dungeon finder functions, you form a cross-rhelm group, belt through the instance and then disband. I'd have no idea what most of them look like. I insisted that we have a bit of a look before we headed off this time. I was quite impressed by the globe although it is definitely Azeroth, in some parts it looks a lot like Earth.

I thought I had a couple of other shots from the raid in southern Silthis, more the point, I know I do, but I am not sure where so I'll have to have a poke around and see if I can find them.

my faith in GM's returns

After an abysmal experience some months back when I tried to find out why I could not log onto an area of my account on wow only to be told that I had to supply some nobody in a country I don't have a lot of faith in their security with details that would allow them to have my entire identity in their hands ... at one point I was informed that it was okay to mail my birth certificate and a bunch of other documentation as US mail is federally protected .... fine I replied, that will do me great after someone has flogged my stuff and anyway, it ain't in US mail until it gets to the US .... anyway, it wasn't the mail I didn't trust, it was the guy on the other end of the email that I just didn't trust .... (okay get out off my soap box and tell my story) ... the stupid thing was that the guy kept trying to tell me that I had the controls set to a different email ... rot and nonsense if ever I'd heard.

On Thursday last I was playing on line trying to grind some gold as you do so that I could buy a bike ... hey ... if I own one in real life, why not have one in game (although I do think the engine noise spoils the game sound). Come Friday night while in an instance (ICC one on less sigh) my long time partner in crime of a shadow priest whispers me to ask why my gear score was so low (in the middle of a boss fight lol) I flicked open my resto's character tab and saw with a sinking heart that there was no weapon equipped and, of course, in the middle of a fight, you can't equip anything! I whisper back, open my bags and start juggling healing a boss fight with reading through my bags as fast as possible for my Midnight Sun Dagger ... but alas ... it was not there. My shadow priest friend assured me that even without it, my healing was going well (don't want to boast but ... IGJAM - by the way, I'm not a fan of swearing).

Come Saturday I'd gone through my bags and bank several times and noticed that not only was my dagger gone, but so was my Alliance Lance - not a big deal, I could grab one easy. I still have no recollection of throwing out the dagger or vendoring it and the lance, well the lance could only be dumped - vendors don't buy them and I don't remember throwing it out.

So, somewhat reluctantly given my past experience I opened a new ticket basically saying, can you tell me if I either threw it out or vendored it so that I would know which to be annoyed with myself for. I logged my email (the one that is supposed to be linked to my account that the previous GM said was not linked to my account so go figure) and there was a letter from the GM saying that there is a limit to how often they will return items, but I should now find it either in my inventory or my mail ... I'm going to log after this and see ... baited breath ... but has my faith in the GM system returned?

Mind you, it would be cool if they replaced it with this version of the dagger - it's from the 25 man version of ICC and so I just can't imagine getting a chance at getting it.

Raiding continues

Okay so we went to ICC again last night ...

We downed Lord Marrowgar on our third attempt at him with a bit of go-go juice in the tank and only one of us flat on the floor pixelated at the end of the fight (not counting the two battle rez's during the fight). We were most impressed and decided in a moment of comunal forgetfulness to ingore the somewhat ignoble wipe we had on one of the trash mobs at the start of our second run. At that point, I was asked by a mate if they thought we'd get there and, well, you can imagine my response. I had expected to have to work a couple more tries so was a little surprised to get him down. Both loot items were hunter gear and so the one hunter in the group was, to say the least a little happy and as we are all about the same with our gearing, and we are all pretty cool guildies, none of us had a bad word to say about that outcome.

oh I would so like a new weapon for my tree. She still weilds the titansteel guardian and a book. I don't know if bosses are frightened by a tree waving a book. I rather suspect that they laugh at her instead.

Rather than stopping there we decided to roll on to Lady Deathwisper and have a 'cuppa tea' with her and a bit of a natter. Instead her adds and trash handed out butts to us on a platter. We gave it two goes and then admitted that while it was nice that one of the guildies was able to talk us through the fight, nothing beat being battered one week and going back the next to exact revenge in a similar way to beating the Lord some half hour or so earlier. I did hear a story of someone being able to down the ICC bosses in not much more than an hour ... my thought ... yerrrr right ... show me the logs so to speak.

I'm not sure how my healing is going. I tend to spec tallents for mana regen/threat reduction and haste over crit and then gem for spell power as I use a lot of HoT and while crit is nice, not running out of mana and keeping out of the eye of the boss so that I can get in one more cast I sort of feel is a little more important. Even though we are not maxed on hp or anything like that (can you max your health? good question ... I don't know but our health as a group is mmm growing) it is not often that I find myself wishing for a bit more health on a tank so long as the healers are doing their job. Anyway, last night the MT healer (the pally healer) ran at about 30 - 35% of the healing, the raid healer at about 25% I think and me a little under that so my first reaction was hmmm third in the healing. But ... I then looked at the overhealing stats and saw the same pattern. Does this suggest that although I'm not outputting as many heals as the other two, more of them are actually being effectively used by the system to top up a character's health or are the other two better healers because they output more heals than I do. I can shift a few tallents around in my build to pick up mastershape shifter, I've always avoided as you need 3 points in shapeshifter that just reduce the mana consumed in shapeshifting (which is sparrow fartish small in the first place) to gain a 2% bonus in my healing of master shapeshifting. There is another tallent I can pick up that gives nourish and healing touch bonuses I've avoided in the past as those two tended to be less used spells. I do use nourish in raids more often so it may now be worth my while picking them up. I suppose I could finally dual spec, one for my day to day and instance work and one for raids. hmmm dunno.... but I've also not answered my own question about whether or not I think I'm a better healer as I'm not over healing as much. I use to watch the over heal stats like a hawk and try to keep them as low as possible in instances pushing my timing on HoT on the theory that a good player manages their resourcse and over healing represented wasted mana. Now I don't bother and just spam HoT giving the tank in particular a slightly inflated sense of invincibility by rarely not having full health.

raiding

Well we finally stuck our noses into ICC. Completely inexperienced we got the boss down to about 1/5th of his hp on our second of three wipes. The MT pally healer was 'embarrassed' that we wiped 3 times on the first boss and then called it (the wiping apparently was the embarrassing bit). That just cheesed me off as we'd all gone in knowing that we wanted to have a look but also knowing that we really should be only in maybe EoE or somewhere like that. We were inexperienced as a group both at raiding but also raiding as a group. ... some had raided ICC with pugs. Which part of all that spelt 'walk in the park' to the pally healer. The fact that she seemed to think that all she had to do was heal the MT and not worry about herself and was the first healer dead each time leaving a pair of inexperienced druid heals. grrrr. When I did throw a few heals at her I got told not to bother, she'd be right ... go figure.

what did I say in my last post about raids having nobs on?

The positive of the night was that people just generally went in with a suck it and see approach and enjoyed them selves.

urgh raiding bah

Raiding has nobs on it.

There really is no nice way to put it.

It has nobs on it big time.

You list for a run and log before the scheduled departure time so as to be ready and it is half an hour after start time that you actually step foot into the raid for starters.

Then there is the inevitability of either someone not showing or after the first catastrophic wipe, someone leaving resulting in the rest of the group twiddling their toes in the sand for the next 20 min trying to work out if anyone knows someone.

oo and don't get me started on the nob heads who spam for raiders but insist on full gear scores, well hello, like the first raiders into an area had high gs! I don't volunteer for these runs. Pulling my toe nails out would be more fun. So would picking Tsu's bark off one sliver at a time.

Invariably you run out of time and don't finish the whole run (okay so Naxx is an exception there as you can do one wing at a time)

so mmm give me a good heroic group any day over a raid. Fewer people fast, coordinated play, less dummy spitting and childish crap ... much better. I like the sheer speed that the groups in the random pick up function produce. They are not in it for a Mother's club natter meeting giving the run an almost ruthless feeling with no time to make a mess of things.

maybe ICC and those areas are more interesting, but all in all, I think Tsu's a heroics girl and not a raider. Raids are too slow for her liking.