Props .... out to ... :)

I've read more than one blog and forum post that are full of people's frustrations and dissatisfaction about players, game mechanics and our game designers and so I thought I'd start a post that I can come back to and add to over time. It is way too easy to fall into a trap of focusing on the negative aspects of WoW. I have met some amazing players in game. Some have been masters of their characters, others steeped in the lore that holds our world together and others simply good fun to spend time with.

My inspiration came from a couple of places. Firstly there was BBB's Happy Days are Here Again post and his Cub Report post then Animositas' post on the forums and finally there was Twoflower.

Thus, my first 'props' go to Twoflower of the Legacy guild. We met in a dungeon, Tsu healing, as usual, and Twoflower tanking. The run wasn't anything special ... 'just' a normal cata heroic. Same old, list, run, hit and heal. It was some of the most enjoyable healing I've done for a while and it was by and large due to Twoflower's considered tanking. He maintained control of the fights, managed his character and worked in well with a more than competent team of dps'ers. Healing 'pugs' rocks when the team is good. Healing 'pugs' is blissful when the tank is confident :).

15/5/12

My second props go out to Pete the Turtle and his owner Adaptiive from Frostmourne. We rolled a dungeon and scored norm Halls of Origination. No biggie ... Tsu's well more than over geared these days for normals and I run them for fun. The tank took one look at the dungeon and bailed and we waited and waited ... no tank ... so I asked Adaptiive if he had a tank pet. He replied that he had but that he was, well, not very good or words to that affect and popped out 'Pete' the tanking turtle. Pete tanked us through the first few trash mobs with a bit of nice cc work from Adaptiive on the frost trap and Dandella from Rexxar on the polymorph and Maddogkarl of Nagrand dropping that nice rain circle of healing. We got to the first boss ... and went what the hell lets have a go and :) a beautiful job of tanking was done. Pete and Adaptiive, are my latest people to demonstrate the cool people you meet in WoW. Really I should extend that also to Dandella and Maddogkarl as they were happy to go along with the hairbrained scheme in the first place. About half way through the boss fight, Skrynik the druid of Nagrand joined the group and was somewhat amused to discover that at the end of the fight he'd be replacing a turtle pet. :)

11/7/12

Well I'll be honest. I've been trying to avoid this props as I've never actually met the guy in game and technically I want to target people I've actually encountered. He does, however, reflect all that I like about people who play our game. I came across him first back in 2010 when looking for some advice on bear tanking (sigh, yes you all know where I'm going with this one now) and saw his post for the day ... Come join the raid from the Heart in which he invited us all to join a global activity. It's clear from his post that there were many people who were involved from crafters to mage porters but it was he who acted as the lynchpin. Now in 2012 he's 'at it again' this time getting together a group to track back over a lot of the achieves that for one reason or other were missed out. Following his blog it is easy to see the sense of community that has developed around his blog and that he is very much a part of. Thus, John 'Big Bear Butt' Patricelli, props to you. Cheers for your sense of humour, enthusiasm for just getting in and enjoying yourself and taking us all along for the experience :).

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).

Thou shall research before runs ... thou shall research before ...

uhuh

Now ... how many times have I been in discussions about the importance of researching before you go on runs and how much difference this actually makes.

My woody little druid has had two experiences recently that illustrate the worth and meaningless of this advice.

We had a guild run ... our second officially organised as a guild run type event. It was into Dire Maul for a guildies Warlock mount. We'd convinced her that it would be more fun to run the quest line rather than just train it. It lead to our first ever guild run where ten people registered for a run through Stratholme. Two level 80 tanks and a collection of other high level characters made this a walk in the park. It helped that they also KNEW WHERE TO GO! We used the raid function to sort two groups then degrouped to form the two groups for the run. The only people online were the ones who were in the run. We rolled through the place having had plenty of chatter in guild chat between the two groups. The positive feel in guild after was palpable and only made us more enthusiastic to tackle the next part of the warlock quest ... leading us to Dire Maul. I had not bothered reading ... I am ashamed to admit ... assuming that the two or three runs I'd done 20 levels ago on my furry kitty druid would be sufficient and hey ... someone else would know ... wouldn't they ... ahhhh no. Again we used raid to build the groups so every one knew who was with who then split to form two running groups. The first group went in with the warlock for its quest and got to the busy part of the group. My woody druid's group went in and we all turned to each other and went ... soooo ... Who knows the way? One moment of the experience saw the five of us running around one of the rooms in confusion as we could not even see the door to the next section right in front of our noses. Much tabbing in and out got us to a point where we knew what to do for the first section when the main group announced that they had what they needed to do and we should all come and see the newly aquired horse ... ahhh if only we'd read strategy notes on Dire Maul ... even just looking at a map would have been good!

Last weekend the same woody druid had an opportunity to go on a guild run to Halls of Lightning. She'd been hinted to that this event might be coming up and spent an evening reading Halls of Stone and Halls of Lighting strategy notes as the hint had not been clear about which of the two we'd been able to go on. Friday night dawned and saw us in HoL. A very nice place, the run went slickly, again tanked by one of our level 80 tanks admirably supported by a level 80 shadow priest, a 78 shadow priest and the woody druid at 77 ... yup ... we had a 4 man guild run through HoL that was smooth and slick. ... The only problem my woody resto druid had? Despite learning from the Dire Maul trip and spending time doing 'homework' so that she would be 'prepared' ... she did not recognise a damn thing in the place until she's cleared the final boss and was running back to the entry (why she did not hearth I am not sure) when she went 'hmmm I wonder if these were the ramps and platforms the notes were talking about?'

sooo .... does she keep researching before runs, or is she better to suck it and see then go read the notes to work out what the goodness was going on?

Feral Healer ...

Some weeks ago Myst discovered that xp in BRD was sweeeeet running at half to three quaters a level for a messy run where we completed maybe a third of the place before we all went ... bah, it's late, I'm tired goodnight ... kk so we'd started at that time of night where a sane person would have gone to bed. Now that run was back when she was only JUST big enough to get in.

So, last night sees her back in LFG not too fussed if she didn't get a run as she had to do the run around in EPL finding the little girl's dolly and handing in a couple of quests at Hope's Chapel so a bit of time spent riding long leagues as she didn't have a lot of fp up that way other than the obligatory refuge, southshore and chillwind point ones from SM runs back ages ago. Riding up the road well west of HC, comes a whisper ... 'BRD yes?' ... 'sureeeee' I reply ... coool. Hand in my quests and she dings 53 ... nice. Allocate another talent point registering that mmm crap the tree looks messy reflecting her first respec into feral when I was ooo yah pure dps that began morphing into mmm maybe being a bear would be fun resulting just in a bit of confusion that would horrify most theory crafting people. One summons later sees her standing at the stone in BRD with my head spinning and rushing to catch up with people managing to agro every damn thing in the cavern before the entry portal. Dead on the ground the healer goes ...' where did you die?' In horror at my stupidity I'm 'ooo don't ask, I wont be long', run back, res and catch up looking decidedly incompetent. 

Myst was the smallest dps in the group by two levels and her dps and damage output I thought was looking shabby until I realized that I was being outpdps'ed by a lvl 57 hunter by only 100 points so I didn't feel quite so bad after that. Part way though the run, the very, very competent holy speced healer priest looks at me and goes 'Can you heal?'. My immediate thought was ...'crap my dps is so bad the healer wants to swap'. I reply, 'Well I don't have dual yet so all my points are feral but I have a bit of spirit/int gear with me, I could have a go'. 'cool' she replies 'I'm dual shadow/holy but have not had a chance to run it yet'. So we swop and I slip via Item Rack into 'something more comfortable' and manage to heal us through a couple of tight fights. :) ok, so our health dipped a lot more than it did with our seriously good healer (she has, apparently 3 80's and all healers and I can believe that with how she ran) but only one res needed so I was pleased and ooo so can't wait for that 1000g to build up so I can go feral/resto. I know resto/balance makes more sense in gear but I'm enjoying being a kitty dps and have used bear in solo work and enjoyed that - i've not been game enough to list as tank yet - think I need to ask some guildies for a favour and have a go at tanking them before I do that. 

Myst clearly was not as good at healing as the holy priest and so after a bit we swapped back at her suggestion :(. She was finding the healing a bit boring but hey, we got a long way through the place before, yet again, we all decided to go home.

Two runs in there and mmm Myst is now 2 bar of xp off 55 and needing some training. I would have liked to ding again but our tank needed to sleep and quite frankly, so did I.