Episode 41 Supplemental

To clarify more because I already know for sure that I sort of screwed up the elemental spell rotation when I was saying it. Here's a bit more info:

Regarding Totems:
The first rule is that any totem that pulses (poision, disease, tremor, mana, healing etc ) are always party only.

Second rule is that totems that buff ( str/agi, woa, tow, etc ) are always raid-wide.

RESTO:
Spec:(0/16/55)
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxIZxzeuVxoxkrIRt

Rotation: (CH=Chain Heal, LHW= Lesser Healing Wave, HW= Healing Wave)
CH Spam
CH ->> LWH ->> LHW (best HPM)
CH -->> HW-->>HW (best HPS)
(based on taking the Tidal Wave talent: You have a 100% chance after you cast Chain Heal or Riptide to lower the cast time of your next 2 Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave spells by 30%)

ELEMENTAL:
Spec:(57/14/0)
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hEh0qcdItGxst0xxco

Spell Rotation: (FS=Flame Shock, LvB= Lava Burst, CL=Chain Lightning, LB=Lightning Bolt)(I accidentally said Lava Bolt instead of Lightning Bolt in the podcast)
FS, LvB, CL/LB filler, LvB, CL/LB filler, and repeat

Flameshock being your starter to maximize DOT and LvB as often inbetween to gain the crit effect. The rotation will have to be adjusted depending on your current haste rating.

ENHANCEMENT:
Spec: (16/55/0)
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hVbhqZhhxcoxdAIkufot

DPS Rotation:
Lightning Bolt if MW is at 5 stacks
else Stormstrike if available
else Earth Shock if available
else Lava Lash if available

Remember, these are all starter rotations and specs. If you get specialized, you'll end up tweaking your rotation and spec to a much greater degree.

Worst Achievement Ever

You know, I'm down with the hard achievements where it takes massive coordination, massive skill with healing or dps or tanking. I'm okay with wiping on a boss for hours and hours knowing that the next time will be an improvement.

Here's the low-down on this [Less-Rabi] Achievement I spent 6 hours attempting last night.

Defeat Moorabi in Gundrak on Heroic Difficulty while preventing him from transforming into a mammoth at any point during the encounter.

For the first 50% of his life, his transformation is easy-sauce to interrupt. 40% is even doable, hell even 35% is doable. His casts and cast cooldowns are all based on the percentage of his health. Silence, slows, poisons, hurricanes don't work to slow down his cast time. When he's below 25%, his casts come even faster all the way to .5 secs. Latency + Instance lag > transformation spell.

We even tried to trick of holding down the interrupt spell before he casts and releasing the button when it started to go off. It still wasn't fast enough. We tried counting, pre-empting a series of interrupts, going slow, going fast, and even the exploit!

This thing is 100% luck. Sure you can probably get it on your first try if people just happen to hit the interrupt at the EXACT right moment his is going off and it excluded all latency/lag issues. But this achievement I'm throwing in the bin in terms of any real skill.

I'm guessing the devs designed this one sitting next to the f-ing instance servers and therefore never considered latency issues. We'll definitely keep trying this one but even after we get it, I won't really feel like I achieved anything but a run of good luck.

QQ QQ QQ bite me!

Stop and Pocket the Gold

I love the achievement titles for PVE dungeons. I just think it's great to have a reason to go back into these places. I swear, I never even noticed the mounds of treasure in Utgarde Pinnacle the first two times I ever ran it. I was too busy staring at my GRID or DPSing the mobs down. HUGE freaking piles of gold and statue of Medusa was all lost on me.
Blizzard put a lot more interest in their dungeons in Northrend than they ever have before. They definitely didn't stop with the exterior environment. Also the boss encounters are a lot more interesting as well. Some of these achievements really spice things up as well. It's so funny because you go through the heroics with good gear and you're like "wow easy sauce." Then you go back trying to get it with the achievement and you're like "wtf? only amber drakes? are you insane?" lol.

My Polarity was Off

Tonight we ran our 25 man Naxxramas run. Everything was going quite smoothly actually however we were having major lag issues inside the instance. This made us sort of short on time when we finally reached the last boss of the night, Thaddius.

Now last week, I thought I gave pretty darn good instructions of how to hit this mofo up but tonight I was sooo off! I'm pretty nervous when I talk to the raid which sort of sucks being the raid leader. And I'm even more nervous when I'm rushed.

Because we have two east coaters and a couple of people who have early morning jobs, I usually start to get really nervous around midnight because I know I'm pushing my limitations.

I always like to give the quick and dirty version of a fight anyhow because I hate raid leaders who read out the fight or think that you need to know every freaking aspect of the entire encounter. When you drone on and on about a fight or encounter people start to tune you out. All most people care about is "what do I need to do" not what the whole theory behind the fight is.

So last week, my Thaddius instructions got flushed out and I was able to explain to people where to stand for negative and positive charges and how to path when your polarity switches.

This week, I was trying to rush it and ended up spewing all over myself and mixing my analogies and directions. It was so messed up. I ended up saying "I'm sorry guys, I f*cked that up"

But by then, I had wasted all the breath I wanted to on explaining and just had to hope people were able to decipher what the F- I was trying to say. Next time, even if we're rushed on time, I'm not going to try and rush my instructions. I'll take the time I need to say the few things I need to say right. lol.

Negatives Left of Thaddius, Positives right of Thaddius.
Negatives who turn positive, go through his legs to the positive side. Positives who turn negative, strafe left to the edge of the platform and run across to the negative side. The flow moves in a clockwise direction.

I tried coming up with a 9 o'clock 3 o'clock analogy but it got jacked up big time so I'm not trying that again. lol.

Twilight Duo

(less than 4% of the US ranked guilds have done this achievement)

This Saturday, my 10man group pushed progression on the Twilight Duo Achievement. The event requires that you leave at least two drakes up while you're fighting Sartharion. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of good strategy guides or videos regarding this encounter for 10 mans.

We decided to leave Tenebron and Shadron up for this attempt because they seemed more realistic. It's the craziest thing ever. The whole fight is relatively easy...
not. It's like being asked to do the chicken dance while eating a pepper, balancing ten knives on your head while doing back flips. lol.


Okay, so with Sartharion up alone, the instructions go like this: Nuke the dragon, kill the Lava Blaze adds when they come out, avoid voids zones and get in the gaps when the fire wall comes out.

With Tenebron up, the instructions are: DPS Sarth, kill the Lava Blaze adds when they come out, move to Tenebron when he comes out 1min into the fight, Nuke him down, stay out of voids on the ground, then nuke the whelps that spawn, move to the gaps when the fire wall comes out.

With Shadron also up, the instructions are: DPS Sarth, kill Lava Blazes, nuke Tenebron when he comes out, nuke his whelps, move to the gaps, avoid voids, shift to whelp and add cleanup when Tenebron goes down, then nuke Shadron down, then go into portal and nuke his disciple down, then nuke Sartharion down, kill lava blazes, and move into flame wall gaps and avoid void zones. :D



And that's just the instructions I gave the DPS. Since we attempted this with only two tanks and two healers (feral druid/prot pally and disc priest/resto shammy) the add control became super harry. Because the healing was so intense, it was incredibly hard to stop all of the adds from going straight to myself and the other priest. When the portal of whelps spawned (we opted not to go in to destroy eggs), the prot pally grabbed as much as he could and I had to pause healing and let people get dangerously low as to not pull immediate agro. Then I had to use NS and go all out to catch up once agro was established. All the while there are two mini drakes on the tank and the raid is taking add dmg. It was intense.

I did over 1 million healing in this one encounter. What's hilarious about that is that my job was to heal the prot pally who was on add and drake duty and the rest of the raid. Taint's job (disc priest) was to heal the MT druid on Sartharion. He did close to 1 million healing on ONE GUY!!! lol. If you look at the Damage-In stats image, you'll see the MT took 1.1 million damage!

What happens is that these two particular drakes give an aura that increase damage done by fire and shadow by 100% so the fire breath on the MT from Sarth is completely insane. What got us on almost ALL of the attempts was the healers being over-run by whelp and adds. The rest of the failed attemps was people dying in the void circles on the ground. LOL.

WTF is wrong with you Blizzard? Putting pink void graphics on a red lava graphic ground and calling that fair! hehehe. not to mention the amount of ground graphics from aoe dmg they've added in patch 3.0.8.



It took us 24 attempts but we finally got the perfect storm and defeated the entire encounter with everyone still alive. It was close for a few people though....some were hanging on by 400HP during the whelp transition phase.

I can't say I'm not completely terrified about adding Versperon to the fight as his aura reduces ALL HP by 25%!!! But I'm looking forward to trying. :D

Heroic Mania

Got on last night to do my Sons of Hodir dailies and instead got roped into massive Heroic Run Mania. hehehe. We're sort of shooting for the [Glory of the Hero] Achievement for the red proto-drake. As you can see, it's like a list of 39 Achievements that must be accomplished on Heroic Dungeon mode.

It's hella fun. Normally when you get to a point where you have a lot of gear, the only reason you step foot into a heroic is only to maybe see it or help another guildy get a piece of gear they really want.

With the Achievement condition added to most raiding and instance categories, it brings some crazy @ss fun back into 5 mans. Unfortunately to us, five is no longer our magic number. We sort of have six people in our "immediate family" and so one person gets left out so we'll end up having to do all of these things twice. It's not a big deal but it kind of sucks we can't all be together for the initial run.

Also because we decided to create our family as two book ends, it means that out of six of us, two are main tanks and two are main healers. This doesn't work for five mans unfortunately. lol.

Sad and I ended up respeccing because our class mechanics and gear were better suited for dpsing the 5 mans. I went Elemental and he went Retadin. After changing out my gear from the offspec stuff I had won from raiding, I was able to get my hit rating to about 296 (11.28% +1% from heroic presence) which supposedly was good enough for heroics. And Sad got his well over 9% with racial talent.

We hit up the heroic instances Utgarde Pinnacle, Utgarde Keep, Violet Hold, The Culling of Stratholme, and Occulus with the goal in mind to knock off as many Glory of the Hero achievements as possible. We got 8 out of the 15 achievements from the runs. A few of them require doing the heroics multiple times though like [Experience the Drake Rider].

The hardest of the entire night was the achievement where we got both [Ruby Void] and [Emerald Void] at the same time by only killing Ley-Guardian Eregos with the Amber Drakes. Essentially it required us to kill him without a tank or healer. It was crazy. We were at a point where we had someone counting out time stops every 14 seconds, someone counting out channel debuffs, someone yelling out when he phased, and everyone nuking him at the same time.

We got it on the 18th attempt. The first 10 attempts though were eaten up by trying defeat him with all Emerald Drakes. ZOMG. That was miserable.

I think even with all the achievements we picked up tonight, we're still not even 40% through the list. However, we just started and have plans to make it through most of the list this weekend.

My dps wasn't bad at all. I finished the entire night with an avg of 2020dps with only a 36% dps time. My highest was around 3600 and my lowest was 1800ish depending on the encounter. I don't really have an elemental shaman tutor so I was sort of going off of what I had read and my own experience.

The instance I think I shined the most in was The Culling of Stratholme and I don't know if it's because the boss fights suited me more or because we were super motivated to get the [Culling of Time] Achievement. I think we got the achievement with 3 minutes to spare.

What's so damn annoying about this achievement is that you can go as fast as a speeding bullet but you have to wait for the whole RP NPC bullcrap to go by before you enter into engage in the next cycle of the instance.

So we were all yelling "OMG, ARTHAS, PULL! GO ALREADY" or "STFU already and go!"
hahaha. It's a timed event obviously and being held back by the NPCs was frustrating and you can yell all you want at an NPC cuz he can't get pissed off.

When you kill the timed event guy, he always drops a [Reins of the Bronze Drake] kind like the Armani War Bear event. This time though, we're starting earlier so everyone can get the mount before they take it away somehow. :D Taint won the roll yesterday. I plan on winning the next one!!! hehehe. With my luck though, I'll be last but I'm okay with that as long as I get one.

Episode 40 Supplemental

The night of the jacked up horde city pug raid. This was right after when we lined up in front of the mail box. Suddenly we had a whole line form. Apparently the horde get a black war bear too but it just looks brown from our end. :D


DPS Meters from the night


Healing Meters from the night

Sons of Hodir Reputation Grind Start
Quest chain starts here: [They Took our Men]
and I think they're correctly referred to as Titans not Giants as I said in the podcast. oops.

Starter items mentioned from Heroics:
[Water Drenched Robe]
[War Mace of Unrequited Love]
[Essence of Gossamer]
and one I forgot to mention for melee dps [Hemorrhaging Circle]

We finally got our 25 man JAE runs going and it's been pretty fun getting to raid with everyone. I'm normally cornered in my 10man team so I don't get a chance to visit with everyone else. (edit 01.23.09: didn't even realize it until @nofax1 pointed it out but it's not Malygos flying around after you kill him but rather Alexstrasza the Life-Binder)

Currently, we're raiding 25mans Tuesdays and Fridays and 10mans Wednesdays and Saturdays. lol. Yeah, it's a kind of kooky schedule. Our 25 mans have Military wing and Frostwyrm Lair and Malygos to finish but we just started once a week Jan 1st.

My 10man team is currently working on the Glory of the Raider Achievement. I love the extra challenge elements. It's such a great way to add something to the epic farming grind and a perfect way to bring life back into an instance. I wish they had did something similar to this with Karazhan. I miss that place.

If you have an suggestions or requests for episode topics, please hit me up at wowcastpodcast@gmail.com

:D

Novel Patch 3.0.8

lol. holy crap it's a bigggun!!!

I'm currently reading through the patch notes. gonna scribble down my favs and highlights.

1. Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55
Watch out WOW, Alachia multiplied across 50 servers! oooooo yeah!

2. Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
TAG! TAG! TAG! DOT = MINE BIOTCH!

3. The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.
I wonder if this will actually be motivation for more wipes in raids. hehe.

4. DK: Summon Gargoyle: Damage dealt by the Gargoyle reduced by approximately 20% and maximum duration cut to 30 seconds.
Pwnage from the sky no more!! Arena targets will be happy about this one

5. Druids: Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form.
That's right. Don't let them tell you they can't help you decurse or depoison anymore..lazy crit chickens! lol

6. Druids: Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
*sniff* why they gotta nurf the trees?

7. Mage: Arcane Blast: This ability has been significantly changed. Arcane Blast now increases the damage of the next Arcane spell by 15%. However, using Arcane Blast itself does not consume the charge itself. Each time you cast Arcane Blast, the damage of Arcane spells is increased by 15% and the mana cost of Arcane Blast is increased by 200%. This effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 seconds or until any Arcane damage spell except Arcane Blast is cast.
Hmmmm...we just might see the return of the Arcane mage in WoTLK!

8. Mage: Slow Fall is now castable on others
Base jumping FTW!

9. Pally: Hand of Reckoning(NEW): Available on trainers at level 16. It’s a 30 yard range taunt that causes Holy damage
Go train up!

10. Priest: Abolish Disease and Cure Disease can now be cast while in Shadowform
hehe. Welcome to the Dispel club!

11. Priest: Holy: Circle of Healing now has a 6 second cooldown.
What's the point of speccing COH now?

12. Rogue: Feint: Rank 8 now reduces the damage taken from area of effect attacks by 50% for 6 seconds in addition to its existing effects
This is great for all those rogues who can't get out of WW fast enough. :)

13. Shaman: All shaman talent points have been refunded. Please visit your trainer to learn spells and abilities
DOOOOOOO OVER!

14. Shaman: Healing Way: Now only one application is required to reach full benefit. No longer stacks
Might be worth trying this talent out again.

15. Shaman: Magma Totem: The damage and scaling has been increased and no longer generates threat
I actually heard this totem will offer a good chunk of DPS.

16. Shaman: New Talent: Shamanism-Your Lightning Bolt spell gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% and your Lava Burst gains an additional 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus damage effects
Let's hope this does the trick. Elemental Shamans ain't what they used to be!

17. Warlock: Ritual of Summoning: Will now create a summoning portal object which can be re-used for multiple summons for 5 minutes.
Apparently broken right now but will be super awesome when it's fixed.

18. Alchemy: All flasks no longer require an alchemy lab to create

19. Blacksmith: Added a new recipe for shield reinforcements that increases the block value of shields

20. Enchanting: Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them
Finally, I might be able to afford to enchant my own weapons. :)

21. Enchanting: Added a new recipe to enchant bracers with Stamina. You can buy this recipe from Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran.
Woot. Gonna pick this one up for my tanks tonight.

22. Engineering: The engineering Scrapbot can now repair
The poor man's repair bot. At least it's something.

23. Inscription: A new recipe for Glyph of Arcane Blast has been added to Master and Grand Master Inscription trainers
lol. I'm almost certain the mages will be going arcane soon.

24. Leatherworking: The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials.
Why you gotta be a bitch Blizzard?

25. Tailoring: Ebonweave now requires the tailor to be in the Maw of Neltharion in Dragonblight to creating it. Spellweave now requires the tailor to be at the Azure Dragonshrine in Dragonblight when creating it.
LOL. If it's not working, you're standing in the wrong zone! doh!

26. The Obsidian Sanctum: Players will now be affected by Twilight Residue when they leave the Twilight Realm. Twilight Residue grants immunity to Fire and Shadow damage for a few seconds.
It's like they're trying to show us an exploit or something here. lol. I don't know what to make of this one for sure.

27. The Darkmoon Faire exotic vendors have been updated with new items
OOOH la la. I hope it's something good!

28. The white Polar Bear mount is now the proper (larger) size
But it was soo cute!

Hello?? I think they forgot to nurf Death Knights. lol
I'm not sure because I'm not a hunter but it didn't seem like they slashed them the way they had threatened to at all.

One thing that sucks about having raid night on Tuesdays is trying to deal with the issues of patches. Now I have to make sure I get my respec in before raid.

Sucks they opted not to add the pack mule into this patch or maybe that was only an acid-trip rumor anyhow.

*Vista Users*:
If you're having errors with the patch. Do a search for "WoW-3.0.3" (was located in my users\public\public\Public Documents\Blizzard Entertainment folder) to find WoW-3.0.3.9183-to-3.0.8.9464-enUS-downloader.exe and copy into your WoW folder and run from there.

UBER Thanks to @Ithato and @manorton for that tip!

Episode 39: WoTLK Beginnings

Episode 39 is out!
This one is about my day of the WoTLK expansion release and my take on Northrend.

Alachia's Northrend experience from 70-80:

Not Your Mom's DKP

I've always wanted to set up a DKP system for our guild in the past. However, the last time I polled the guild regarding creating a loot system, a slight majority voted for no system.

I was trying not to be a dictator and I really did want feedback from the guild members. I want everyone to be mostly content with how things go and what systems are set up. However, that doesn't mean there aren't people who by relation to someone else got in this guild and isn't afraid to exploit our casual/friendly style of looting.

And it's unfortunate of course because otherwise we wouldn't need any rules or safety nets to ensure that during THIS expansion, good guild members don't get shafted.

However, sitting down and coming up with a DKP system is TEH UBER BITCHIN! It's not easy to decide what's the most fair way to distribute loot...especially for our guild. We only raid 25 man once a week and it's mostly just for fun and so that everyone has a chance to play together. Also, I like to flex the jae muscle just to prove that a few skilled, mature players can do just about anything they put their minds to.

And honestly, I'm not that concerned with loot myself but when I hear that certain great players don't want to raid with other players in our guild because of their loot attitude, it makes me think I need to head-off the drama before we even begin.

So here are the facts:
1. I don't want to deal with assigning loot value to items if at all possible because then you get the common complaint "why is that dagger worth more than that sword?".
2. I just need a system so that it deters people from rolling need regardless of actual need and also to protects dedicated raiders from people looking to just drive-by raid. Example: we had someone in TBC who only wanted to come to the raid to get better gear so they could apply to another guild. So they showed up for two raids and then *POOF* were gone.
3. We're largely just a totally casual guild so I don't want something overbearing which just screams OVER-COMPENSATION!

I've found two loot systems so far that I really like for our guild. The first one is called SK (Suicide Kings) and the second is called EPGP (Effort Point/Gear Point).

SK is extremely simple and the self-titled mod pretty much sets everything in auto-drive for you.

There are the five basic rules I modified slightly for our guild:
1. Players are put in an ordered list by random roll automatically.
2. Any future players added will be inserted at the bottom of the list to keep the current list fair.
3. When loot is dropped, the person who wants it and is nearest the top of the list wins the loot thus suicides himself/herself and gets put at the bottom of the active list.
4. Players who are not currently in the raid (aka not attending the current raid) do not move up or down in the list. There position remains frozen until they are currently in the raid.
5. If no one wants the item, it will be DE'd and sent to the guild bank.[/size]

(rules I took from http://www.wowwiki.com/Suicide_Kings)

The basic commands for the mod to work are simple.
They just whisper me "bid" and the mod automatically determines for me who is closest to the top of the list and therefore the winner of the loot. You can also retract your bid.

If everyone in the raid is fair, this system works great.

HOWEVER, SK is open to MANY exploits. For one, I can see someone holding their position at the top of the list for several weeks hoping for a specific item and therefore not getting upgrades in between that could help their performance.

Another one would be someone near the bottom of the SK list constantly suiciding on items because it doesn't really hurt their position.

Also, I wouldn't put it past some people to secure a position at the top of the list and not show up again until we're on a boss where they need a specific item.

SOOOOO, I started to look at EPGP which is FAR more complicated but is built to deter this type of loot nasty-ness.

EPGP works by awarding players EFFORT POINTS. This number is sort of like DKP points only you don't spend them on anything. You gain EP primarily by being present for raids and downing bosses. Every time you loot on something that piece of gear has a point value assigned to it which is called GEAR POINT. You're "rank" is calculated by EP divided by GP and is called Priority Ratio.

For example, you raid Naxx a full week and it was worth 3000 Effort Points. You got two pieces of gear during that run; one was worth 100 GP and the other 200 GP bringing your total Gear Point value to 300. Your ratio is 3000/300=10. Your fellow raider only got one item that run and it was worth 100 GP. His ratio is 3000/100=30.

He has a higher Priority ratio than you 30 > 10 so when the next piece of loot drops, he'll get priority over you.

The beauty of this system is that it has a built in "decay" which you can set to decay the EP/GP over a certain amount of time. So if you set your "decay" to 10% then at the end of one week the EP/GP will be reduced by 10%. By having a static reduction to the EP/GP, you encourage people to spend early so their GP will begin to decay sooner thus giving them a better Priority ratio (PR=EP/GP).

What this system is designed to do is to encourage regular attendance (keep your EP high), early spending and discourages point hoarding (to avoid decay dropping your PR).

The huge issue I have with this system is that it totally gives me the EPGPEES! hahaha! Okay, I had to say it at least once. THE MOD sucks. version 5.1.2 cripples itself as compared to the previous versions. It's limited, it doesn't aid in set up very well and I'm not sure how it supports multiple raids if at all.

Also, it uses Officer Notes to store all of the PR ratios which I think is intrusive and cumbersome. I haven't actually had a chance to test this in an actual raid yet but it doesn't seem to have any kind of assistance with automatically assigning GP when people get loot. I have to do that in conjunction with loot distribution which just eats up a lot of time during the raid.

So right now I'm sticking with Suicide Kings until I can find an easy way to implement EPGP.

What sort of annoys me is reading all of these forum posts about DKP (which I did for hours today) about ridiculing having to use a loot system in the first place.

Those that say in the forums: You should just go with strong leadership and respect in the raids. Foster a friendly atmosphere and teach respect to your members. Try to encourage everyone to be fair about loot and keep it all friendly.

/puke

Yea, so I think they forgot the bit about ending world hunger and peace in the middle east.

DUH. Of course I wish I had that kind of guild. Hell, I almost do except for a few here and there that always are looking to exploit everything. If ALL people were TEH UBER AWESOME SAUCE, there would be no such thing as DKP to begin with. There wouldn't even be a choice of dkp. And if you ARE LUCKY enough to be in such a guild of candycane lamp posts and cotton candy clouds, be grateful.

But I hate it when they make the assumption that a perfect little guild can exist everywhere if you just sprinkle a little sunshine and warmth on it. I wish it were so but unfortunately it ain't. You're always going to have one or two people who destroy a "trust" system.

Why not just stick with NEED roll??? That's what I get asked a lot.
Here's my example:
At the end of the year at your job you know you put in a ton of hours and worked your butt off. However, I just got hired on last month and I sit around eating mini Nilla Wafers all day and surfing the net but I happen to be employed as the year finishes. Would you be okay if your boss said we could /random 100 for a raise or /random 100 for a 15k bonus?

I mean, you have equal shot at the raise as me. You COULD get the bonus but then again you might not. That's how I feel about NEED rolls to those few players who just show up when they feel like it and then disappear for months on end.

I really, really respect the players who have put in effort and who have been there with us and for us and I don't like seeing their hard work get exploited. It makes me totally insane.

Alachia's Computer Room

Photosynth of Alachia's Office.

(probably not viewable by mac users so I added pics at the top)

I need more art and pictures to hang on my wall. I want to hang quick sketch a friend did for me of Eeyore back in high school but it brings back such bad memories that I probably won't. Sooo I need new drawings! The watermelon picture is a pastel Sadin did when he was like 8 or something. Kid art is so awesome.

I still need to frame my bumper stickers and Fatality signed mousepad.

But I do love my nook. I redid the furniture arrangement so the space would be more open. I hate feeling boxed in. Also, I like having my office laptop on the dock so when Flipmax comes over, he can just snap in his laptop and is ready to play.

If you're willing to share, I'd sure love to see pics of other people's work spaces and computer stations! That is, if you allow people into your lair!

Photosynth Guest Bedroom

New photosynth created with pics from my new Cannon G10 straight out of the box. I'm still learning how to use it.


(sorry mac users prolly can't view this)

TMNT

First time I've been on WoW for a long time this Christmas break. I'm just about done with the massive purge of my house and I think I'm now ready for visitors. :)

Tonight I was doing the daily cooking quest to gather mushrooms in the Dalaran sewers when I spotted something familiar. One rat and four turtles. Now where have I seen that before??! hehehe.

I thought it was really cute. I named the one in the back Leonardo.

Not a bad first day back in the game. We had raid tonight and cleared Nax to the Frostwyrm Lair. If it weren't for the massive ques preventing us from starting on time, we probably could have cleared the whole thing. It's funny, more and more people in our raid are beginning to realize this is the only "real" instance out there right now. lol.

I'm looking forward to attempting Naxx 25 man this Friday...although most likely we'll only have 17 people again. :( When can I start cloning my toons? hehe.

Blind

I haven't had much time to play WoW since I got back from visiting the folks for Christmas. I've been on this massive purging of my house. I'm currently on day three and about two tons of junk to give away. This is all stuff I've accumulated from pre-house days. I used to be a massive packrat. Now I'm all "tabula rasa". hehe.

I still need to get my hard drive ready for format as I'm going to be installing all the components of my new computer before raid tomorrow. fun fun fun.

Anyhow, thanks a bunch to @jemimus for linking this machinima video. I don't even know where to begin with this piece of work. Not only is it a great piece of animation, it's amazing story telling with ZERO words. It not only captures the essence of a class, in this case a rogue, but also a much deeper history in World of Warcraft (Lady Katrana Prestor).

The animation work is superb and the choreography is the absolute best in machinima I've seen so far. I've already watched this video like 5 times today. Wherever you are Percula, you're teh uber awesomesauce!! I hope there are more to come!


The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

Happy Winter Veil

(present I got Sad and it turns out he got me the same thing only my presentation was more clever of course! :D)

Woot. We got epic lootz for xmas.
Computer upgrades for xmas. I can't wait to finally turn up all my WoW settings again.

On the flip side, xmas was marred by holiday vacation time being nixed by emergency work. I guess in the end, it matches the kind of year it's been...filled with unexpected lemons.

Anyhow, the rest of my loot box was nice as well:
[Book of the Warcraft Archive] which includes Day of the Dragon, Lord of the Clans, The Last Guardian, and Of Blood and Honor
[Day-by-Day Warcraft of the Desk Calendar]
[Mana Potion] (the energy drink)
Two [Arms of the Ergotron Monitor]

Falalalala-Ogrila!

I can Haz Fruitcake?

I was so proud of myself having gone through the Metzen and Grinch Winter Veil quests early this year. I pretty much did them as soon as they came out. Of course, after you complete them, you always get that retarded crap in the mail as a gift...[Bolt of Linen Cloth] trash, [Graccu's Mince Meat Fruitcake] delete, more [Graccu's Mince Meat Fruitcake] delete, delete. You know, you have to keep your bags and mail box tidy!

DOH!!!!! You need that food for ['Tis the Season] Achievement! I flipped out! OH NO! ALL FOR NOT! I'll have to wait until NEXT YEAR to get more!?

So I read on wowhead how some GM's will basically tell you you're SOL and other will restore the Fruitcake. So I thought I'd give it a shot:

Hi,

I recently completed the Treat's for Father Winter and also the Smokeywood Pastures quests. As a reward, I was sent Graccu's Mince Meat Fruitcake which I accidentally deleted. Unfortunately, I need this to complete the Achievement 'Tis the Season. Is there any chance I can be resent the Fruitcake?

Thanks so much,
Alachia
Boulderfist PvP
Shaman 80

So I got an in-game mail message today from Customer Support saying they were able to provide the restoration I requested! Thank you GM! Thank you! Thank you!
I'm so happy!!!!! I was able to complete the achievement and am now going to work on getting Ogrila attuned so I can do the [Fa-la-la-la-Ogri'la] one next.

One thing for sure is that after doing all of these, I doubt I'm going to be a true Merrymaker!

The Winter Veil Gourmet

[The Winter Veil Gourmet] complete!

Beatlejuice helped me out with the Sandworms from 290-315. Actually, he didn't but they weren't hard to farm up at all. Those sandworms are all over Silithus and not many people are out in the desert. I farmed enough to get to the 300 cap and a little extra for after I trained.

I then hit up Honor Hold to get the [Master Cookbook] and scored more cooking points with the extra sandworm meat. Next, I picked up the [Recipe: Ravager Dog] from the HH innkeeper and headed out to Razorthorn Hill to farm the meat up. The drop rate was hella nice.

While I was farming up the Ravager Flesh, this level 61 Undead Mage comes strolling up to me, checks me out and then dismounts. I then watch as she winds up a frost bolt at me. I turn around, hit her up with flameshock and lava burst and she explodes. I then continue to kill Ravager's as she runs back to her body. I let her mount up and head off when she rezzes..then get on my epic flyer and mow her down again to let her know resto shammy doesn't = total pvp fail. Then I went back to farming the rest of the meat.

Ravager Dogs got me to 325ish before going green. So then I flew to Allerian Stronghold and picked up [Recipe: Blackened Basilisk] and farmed baskies until I hit level 345ish. It brought back memories of the TBC days hehehe.

Flew to Nagrand after that and got [Recipe: Roasted Clefthoof] to finish myself off to 360 although I didn't reall need to.

At 350, you can begin the daily quests in Dalaran to start getting your [Northern Spices]! I can now finally contribute to the group! hehehe.

Ultimately though, I was able to make the [Hot Apple Cider] which required 325 cooking!

Success!

and then I was met with tragedy..but I'll save that post for tomorrow.

Chef Boy-R-Deez-Hard to Level!

I recently got in my head that I would attempt to do every Winterviel quest achievement this year. And no it has nothing to do with the culmination of doing every single world event in the game to get a purple proto drake.. oh wait, actually it has EVERYTHING to do with that! lol. I had no idea achievements got you cool things otherwise I would have started earlier.

So in order to finish [The Winter Veil Gourmet] Achievement, I have to actually cook my own treats! The only problem was my cooking on this toon was level 40! I have three other toons with 375+ but not the shaman. booo!!!

I got from 1-40 doing piddly things like killing wolves in Goldshire etc, it was pretty effortless. 40-75 however took a mental beating on me. I hit up Drac Roughcut in Thelsamar to get [Recipe: Smoked Bear Meat] and spent what felt like an eternity killing grizzled bears until I hit that GLORIOUS level 75!

75-125 was easy mode. I just killed murlocs and crawlers up and down the Westfall shores making [Boiled Clams] and [Crab Cake]. I just kept slaughtering them until I got the recipe for the [Recipe: Cooked Crab Claw] which I had a ton of from killing the crawlers. That took me to 125 easy and then I had to fly all the freaking way to Ashenvale to get the Expert Cookbook. It would have been nice if I had remembered I could use Astral Recall here but I didn't so I took a couple of unnecessary flight paths to get to my destination. I'm still trying to make my shaman skin fit...so far it's still only partially on.

125-200 was also fairly easy grind in Wetlands grinding Bluegill Murlocs who have a decent respawn rate to make [Goblin Deviled Clams]

200-225 I headed to Southshore and hit up the quest from Chef Jessen [Soothing Turtle Bisque] and used the recipe he rewarded to reach 225. You can either farm the turtle meat from the Southshore river, the eastern shore of Tanaris, or the AH. :)

At 225, I hit up the Ironforge cook and he gave me a quest to head to Gadget which in turn gave me the required cooking quest of [Clamlette Surprise]. At this point I'm slamming my head on the desk from the amount of boat trips I'm having to take from the Wetlands to Theramore. Luckily I was able to chat it up on vent while traveling and grinding mob meat or else I'd have gone completely insane. Another option would have been to hit up an audio book or podcast.

After completing the cooking quest, I spent the rest of my time in Felwood killing owls, wolves, and bears oh my! [Recipe: Monster Omelet], [Recipe: Tender Wolf Steak], [Juicy Bear Burger] yummy yummy!

Once I hit 290 and the Bear Burgers went green, I RODE to Silithus as I do not have the flightpath on this toon to pick up [Smoked Desert Dumplings] and now have to kill about 10-20 more Sandworms to hit 300. SANDWORMS! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

To be continued...

Thrall Eludes Me

So 8am on a Sunday, 20 other guildmates and myself set out to kill the King of Ogrimmar, also known as the most beloved horde leader.

There is one thing I must admire about the horde, it's their dedication to protecting Thrall. They love that green guy!

I could give a crap about any of the leaders on the Alliance side except I am growing quite fond of Varian Wrynn, the King of Stormwind. His past is all dark and mysterious and he's all brooding and tainted. heheh. The more I learn about him, the cooler I think he is. However, for the last three years, we've had his kid at that thrown so I haven't fully adjusted to Varian's existence.

We actually had a shot this morning except I totally underestimated how many pre-teens are awake at 8am on a Sunday. We got Thrall down to 50% before the Horde players finally overwhelmed us.

You pretty much only have one shot at him because the longer you stay there, the more reinforcements arrive. My guess is that we'll have to plan an attack where we all log off already next to Thrall's throne the night before to decrease the amount of time the horde are aware of our presence. Riding in with a group of 20+ alliance through Ogrimmar, even through the side entrance, pretty much gives us up immediately. Those without Local Defense turned on still see us visually and come to his aid.

So the next question becomes when is the ultimate time to do the raid? We've already missed two HUGE windows to kill Thrall. The first was when everyone was leveling to 80 right after WOTLK release. The other was before Arenas began. Now we're in for a world of hurt as the horde on Boulderfist are huge Arena junkies and have probably already claimed a lot of the gear in this first week.

4am on Christmas? lol. No seriously, someone suggested it. hehe. Don't think I'm that hardcore but maybe New Year's.

Just Ain't Enough

My guild name is (pronounced jay-aye-ee) and stands for Just Ain't Enough. Which lately seems like a prominent theme for our guild. We honestly just don't have enough. We've got about 8 hardcore static players who want to beat down progression's door on a weekly basis which we've done. Then we have another 16 or so who like to hit up instances and group events on occasion.

We're all friend and family so it kind of makes sense that it works out that way. You're not going to get a set group of hardcore raiders unless you recruit for them and even then you're drawing straws.

So this post is part whine-mode and part perplexity. The first whine bit revolves around the notion that one, there isn't that much 10 man raid content out there right now thus making it hard to get people interested in progression. I mean, at least start the buzz like they did for BT and Sunwell.

If you raid, you'll know the feeling of "what's next". If you don't raid, obviously you're reading this and saying "well at least you get to see Naxx, stop your whining."

But here's the thing, for every part of this game you're on a certain step of its progression. I'm at the part where I'm looking at the 25 man groups and going "lucky SOBs have the man power" and looking at my 10 man raid group going "if I can just keep them interested long enough to keep pushing"

And here's the perplexing part. We have people in our guild who have asked to leave to go join a separate raiding guild with their friends. I'm like sure, no problem. No hard feelings etc. Obviously they are connected with casual family members so like heck if I want to hold them back from doing what they want to do. And they usually get tired of life outside the "white picket fence" within a week and come back. :P

But the thing is, I've asked everyone if they're interested in raiding. No one said anything to me. In fact, when I asked those specific guys point blank if they wanted to raid Naxx, they told me they were interested but weren't sure what days they'd be able to commit to. Not only that, when they do raid with us, they're never able to stay for the whole time (like 2 hrs).

How does someone who can't commit to any time and not honor any time committed get into a raid group? WHAT raiding guild would accept someone like that? We do it because they're sort of family but I don't really know of many raiding guilds who would.

I like raiding with my guild because we're resilient, skilled, and nice (at least the adults are for sure). And most of the people are awesome to hang out with. Some of them I wish I could group with far more often than I get to. However, I'm just honestly getting sick of being used by some of the other members of the guild who apparently were never taught the values of loyalty and friendship.

So we're here, doing what we do best. Running 25 man Naxxaramus with sixteen people (seriously rough). Running 10 man instances with nine people and doing the best we can because we're not afraid of the challenge and it is really all about just getting to do stuff together as a group.

It's just this attitude out there that drives me crazy. Like apparently, we have to keep running and going and struggling so that whenever THEY feel like they want to come a long, apparently we'll be here...as always.

And this wouldn't even be much of an issue at all except that THIS IS IT! This is it until the next expansion! I have to make this work somehow for the next one to two years?? Gone are my days of questing innocence and joy. Now it's back to scheduling, information prying, begging, organizing, drama sorting, loot grief, farming, grinding, arguing, and nonsensical lameness.

I really want to write to Blizzard and beg them to move to a dynamic party and raid system. Just adjust raid difficulty based on numbers. This would solve ALL of my problems and grief.

Never, ever enough.

Thrall Must Go Down!

I landed in Azshara flight path at around 8:45pm last night. Technically, I rode into the flight path because my shammy didn't have it. lol. She had to ride down from Felwood. Ah the joys of rookie toons. Why couldn't they have retrofit all level 70 toons with all the FPs!? They did it for DKs at level 55.

Anyhow, as I waited for the rest of my guild (only 17 of us, 5 or so who weren't 80 even) to show up, I was calculating in my head the number of horde we might encounter. Our first designation in the line of horde capital city slaughters was Ogrimmar, Mr. Thrall himself. The horde on our server not only out number us but they're also FAR more PvP oriented than the alliance. There actually used to be two major horde guilds who would always KOS alliance. They scare me to this day. :)

Needless to say, 17 wasn't enough to combat the forty plus horde who rose to Thrall's defense. We got to his chamber and had a boat load of elite mobs on us and were able to dps them down fairly quickly. However, wave after wave of horde showed up and completely annihilated us! This I think was our punishment for waiting until after Arena season started to do this raid. lol. They love their orc king lemme tell you!

So we did a rez, ninja portal to Theramore and hit up Cairne Bloodhoof in Thunder Bluff. He was far easier of course as there were only two level 80 horde who came to his defense. Then we hit up Lady Sylvanas Windrunner in Undercity and Lor'themar Theron in Silvermoon City. They all went down without much ado. Lady Sylvanas tried her best though. She has this annoying habbit of dropping target and teleporting around her platform. Neither of these guys had many horde come to their defense. Only about five horde tried to keep us off their beloved leaders. We just kept the pvp-savy players in the back to deal with them.

We were able to get the [Wrath of the Alliance] achievement though although we had to hunt for two additional horde to kill in Silvermoon City.

After we finished up in Silvermoon City, we decided to cruise LFG, Trade, and General Chat to try and gain more numbers for Thrall again. We got about 10 more players and half were 71 or 72. We seriously thought we had a shot until we rode into his chamber and even MORE HORDE showed up this time.

So now I'm using http://www.timezoneconverter.com/ to plot out the best time to raid Ogrimmar. I'm going to push 2am Australian time as a lot of Aussies play on this server. That would make it a 7am raid our time. hahaha. MAN, the things you have to do in the name of taking down Thrall on a crazy horde-ridden pvp server.

I don't even care much about the [Reins of the Black War Bear] so much as I care about having finally raided all of the horde cities. :) Victory shall be mine!

Raid Map Video

That's right, this video is the culmination of a great candy and a mousepad and my ability to find amusement in stupid things.
BTW, I love maps. I spend a good twenty to thirty minutes daily looking at that mousepad map even though it's super sparse.

I was going to do another take on the video so the sound quality would be better but I ran out of skittles. In meh belly! oh well. FYI, my favorite flavor is a tie between Lime and Strawberry!

Here it is:


When I first started out at level 80, I was very unsure of what kind of content was available. I was kind of shocked to find out it's only Naxx, Obsidium Sanctum, and The Eye of Eternity. Two of those are one boss encounters. I was all excited about getting to raid Ice Crown but guess I'll have to wait.

I hear the next installment will be in Ulduar, Storm Peaks so I'm looking forward to that as it's my favorite place in Northrend at the moment.

PS. Yes, I have fallen and died in the no-fly-zone of Wintergrasp because I was not paying attention to the debuff it puts on you giving you a few seconds to get out or land.

PPS. this is my 600th blog post! woot!

AnthonyRayStark

So I was out in Hillsbrad Foothills to complete the Winterviel quest in Alterac Valley and decided to uncover some undiscovered area. Along the coast of Southshore, I discovered this tomb that read In Loving Memory Anthony Ray Stark.

Did some research and it turned out to be a friend of a developer who also worked at Blizzard. I knew about the ones in the Barrens but didn't know about this one.

It's just so weird stumbling upon someone's memorial. It gives you pause and quite a surreal sense as you're in a virtual world at a virtual plaque honoring a RL person who died probably before his time.

/kneel

RIP.
http://www.wowwiki.com/In_Loving_Memory

Greatfather Winter Hates Me

Just hit up a bunch of Mountain Buzzard's in Loch Modan to farm 5 small eggs for the Feast of Winterveil quest [Treats for Greatfather Winter]

On the plus side, I leveled my cooking to level 10 with [Gingerbread Cookies]. On the down side, after I turned in the quest, all that bastard gave me for it was a single [Bolt of Linen Cloth]!!!

You see, this is why people stop doing idle quests like this. lol. It would have been so much cooler if he'd given me coal. WAIT A SECOND? Is Greatfather Winter trying to tell me something???

I'VE BEEN GOOD DAMNIT!! I HAVE!!

Shaman Noob

Seriously, you're an idiot. No SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, you are a raging idiotic moron who doesn't deserve to have a level 80 shaman. YES, this is what I've been screaming at myself for the last hour.

SO FIRST, two nights ago I finally figured out that not ALL of my totems are raid-wide. BUFF type totems like Windfury or Wrath of Air effect all raid members while poison cleansing only works for my immediate 5 man party. This makes a HUGE difference when you're counting on YOUR totem to cleanse the MT during major boss encounters.

And instead, I'm standing there going "it should have ticked the poison off by now"
It made a huge difference when I finally figured it out and was able to move myself into the MT group for bosses like Maexxna where poisons reduce healing by like 90%.

SECONDLY, this entire time while we're progressing Naxxaramus I've been feeling so gimped. My best crit on a Healing Wave was like 6,300. My avg CH was only doing 3k on the initial jump. I was like, my gear isn't this bad. I have close to 1900 bonus healing with buffs and food and totems and earthliving weapon....WTF is wrong with my healing.

So I just relegated myself to raid healing mostly and we got by fine. But let me tell you how down-trodden I felt when I just couldn't do much to keep the MT down when necessary. I was like...I SUCK!

Today I was playing around with my healing and crit and checking to see the numbers.
I kept checking tool tips as well to make sure I'm always using the highest rank spell. It all shows up correctly as using max rank Chain Heal and Healing Wave.

But for some reason today I was particularly annoyed with how low my heals were hitting so I pulled out my spell book on a whim and hit CH and HW from there instead. WHAM!!! Almost 2k more on CH and 6k more healing from HW from the spell book.

So I quickly hit up my macro list and looked at my CH and HW macro to see what they say! OMFG!!!

#showtooltip
#showicon Chain Heal
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Tidal Force
/cast Chain Heal(Rank 5)

and
#showtooltip
#showicon Healing Wave
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Healing Wave(Rank 11)

The max rank CH is 7! and the max rank Healing Wave is 14!
I had actually modified my macros when I was 80 but Blizzard has been doing this crappy reset of my macros every now and then and it looks like it reverted it back to my pre-80 quest days. WTF!

Anyhow, still my fault for not double checking considering my spells seemed so weak!
I just feel like an idiot. The strain I was putting myself and the raid under this past week....all cuz I was totally gimping my healing spells!

And the hilarious part is that I sat there scolding Flipmax for using (Rank#) behind his spells in his macros. "Don't do that! Just leave it blank. It'll go to max rank for you."

I AM AN IDIOT!!!!

Sure enough, when I removed the Ranks from my macro, it hit the correct spell rank and WHAM... immediate 10k! I've never hit a 10k heal before! Taint was like, "welcome to the 10k club"

10k, 12k, 11k HW and 5-7k CH! What a difference the ranks made...like the diff of being level 75 and 80.

Anyhow, It'll take me awhile to live this one down. I think I made a similar mistake back when I was a mage or something. It only took people a few months to forgive me. lol.

WoW, I'm a moron!

EDIT: finished Naxx today and yes, healing was super easy when your Chain Heal crits for 10k on the first jump!!!! LOL. It's so nice to be normal again!

Best Quest in Northrend

*****SPOILER ALERT FOR QUESTERS IN DRAGONBLIGHT!!!*****
(also much thanks to those who refrained from telling me about this so it was a surprise. hence, I waited so long to blog about this. I figure most have seen this by now..if not, this post is a spoiler!)

Okay so I haven't done every quest in Northrend..not even close to it..but I can definitively say the Veteran of the Wrathgate is one of the coolest quest chains I've encountered in WoW...ever. It begins in Dragonblight.

I can only tell it from the Alliance side.

I was daunted by the long series of quest chains starting at Star's Rest in Dragonblight. I was like, "omg! does it ever end!!! LONGEST QUEST CHAIN EVAAAA!" lol. But once we got to Wintergarde, it all really became worth it.

The really cool quest chain sort of reaches it's starting point at [Into Hostile Territory] from High Commander Halford Wyrmbane in Wintergarde, Dragoblight. This will lead you down a 9 part quest chain which includes riding a steamtank and using a chain gun, and finally ending in the world's longest speech given by an NPC for [Finality].

I failed to listen to the NPC Lore speech because I went afk to the restroom. It's recommended that you read it as you'll be missing out on some good lore if you don't. :)

Upon completing that, ANOTHER five part quest chain starts from [An End and A Beginning]. You'd hope it was the end..but it's not. lol. This one is pretty darn easy though because it just has you riding back and forth between Fordragon Hold and Wyrmrest Temple which was easy for us cuz we had flying mounts by then (so cheating hehehe).

There is one interlude of flying back and forth called [On Ruby Wings]. Since I failed to read the quest properly, we were on the ground killing scavengers with our bare hands when we could have been riding a bloody dragon breathing fire on then!!! LOL. NOOBS!!

After we finished that, it told us to go back to Fordragon Hold which opened up [Return to Angrathar]

This is when your jaw drops open and you go "WOAHHHHHH!! OMG! CUT SCENE?!" soooo epic even for those of us who don't follow the Lore!



After we watched the cut scene, we got a BONG!!!!!! Achievement [Veteran of the Wrathgate]!!! We were like, hell yeah!! And then we talked to the dragon again and watched the cut scene a few more times hehehe.

What is sooo soooo sooo cool about Northrend is that parts of the game terrain will change for you depending on what part of the lore you've uncovered. Like before we watched the cut scene and completed Return to Angrathar, the Wrath Gate was totally covered with scourge mobs. Afterwards, it's burning ashes and flowers scattered about.

Also, after that moment, you will always hear screaming, fleeing soldiers as you fly over that area. It's totally freaky and by freaky I mean REALLY FREAKY.

Luckily a HQ version of the machinima cut scene exists on youtube so I don't have to fly out to the Wrath Gate every time I want to watch the video :D

....of course, it doesn't end there. Going to do a video blog I think of the final part of this quest chain cuz you need to be able to hear me do an impression of Flipmax when we got to The Betrayal section of the quest chain.

Naxxaramus: Arachnid

So last week I started raiding Naxxaramus with my guild. Paladin Tank, Feral Tank, Resto Shammy, and Disc/Holy Priest as our main staple and a slew of excellent DPSers.

Like I said before though, the graphical content of the instance did not impress me a bit which I thought it would. However, some of the fights are so very unique and really, really fun.

I posted in my guild forums what our group has learned from Naxxaramus. I thought I'd share the same information here as well. I also posted to wowhead so hopefully more info can be out there about these encounters. As of right now, not much has been posted from the current WoTLK version of Naxx.

This may not be the RIGHT way to do these bosses but it's how we did them. lol. Just going to add that in as a disclaimer.

Naxxaramus is currently located in Dragonblight just east of Wintergarde. It's a floating ziggurat, you just fly up to the bottom center to enter.. As someone in my guild says, "You just do it ID4 style!"

The instance is broken into four quarters and one Frostywyrm Lair.
Arcahnid Quarter
Anub'Rekhan.Grand Widow Faerlina.Maexxna

Plague Quarter
Noth the Plaguebringer.Heigan the Unclean.Loatheb

Military Quarter
Instructor Razuvious.Gothik the Harvester.The Four Horsemen

Construct Quarter
Patchwerk.Grobbulus.Gluth.Thaddius

Frostwyrm Lair
Sapphiron.Kel'Thuzad

--------------------------
I'll start with the easiest Quarter of Naxx which is the Arachnid.

Anub'Rekhan- Big beatle guy.
MT: Tanks Anub'Rekhan against back wall. We put a fearl tank on him (sprint is a great bonus). Watch for Locust Swarm. Take off running along the extreme edge of the room as Locust Swarm begins. AVOID green liquid ooze in the drains as they will gib your stats by 90%. RUN RUN RUN away during Locust Swarm. After swarm stops, drag him back to the back wall again. This is to avoid the add spawn area during your Lucust Swarm Run.

OT: Tank add spawns. We had a prot pally do this.

DPS: Spread slightly to avoid aoe dmg of impale. During impale use slow fall or levitate or cat form to lessen dmg if you can. Focus boss until adds spawn. DPS adds down and then back to the boss. Rinse and repeat.

Healers: OT will take big spikes during add waves with multi-adds on him/her. Just a warning to the OT healer.
MT healer will need to follow MT during Locust Swarm sprint to heal spike dmg from impale etc. Just stay far enough away inside the circle of the room to avoid the Locust Swarm debuff.

Grand Widow Faerlina- Humanoid with 4 humanoid like adds
MT: Tank Faerlina on the platform. Before the Frenzy timer goes off, make sure she is dragged to the first kill-target worshipper (add).

OT: Tank either all 4 adds or how many are not crowd-controlled with sheep etc. Watch the health of the first kill-target worshipper. Worshippers should NOT be killed until Faerlina goes into frenzy. Must make sure the kill target is RIGHT NEXT TO Faerlina when she is frenzied when it dies.

Assigned DPS: Help lower the HP of the kill-target worshipper then move to boss.

DPS: blast Faerlina to high hell. When she is IN frenzy, finish off the kill-target worshiper.
Move out of reign of fire.

Healers: Dispel poison. Heal.

Rise and Repeat until she's dead. Must kill the worshippers to get her out of Frenzy. And she hits like a TRUCK in frenzy = wipe.


Maexxna- big spider
MT: Tank her in the middle Call out contdown until webspray when everyone but the tank will be incapacitated for 8secs. Call stop DPS on Maexxna when she is at 34% to avoid webspray when she enrages at 30%. Be ready to pop last stand, pally shield wall, survival instincts, pots, etc before webspray during enrage. coordinate with healers.

OT: HEAL or DPS for the majority of the fight. You can tank the spider adds that spawn but they are easily aoe-d down without an OT. If OT remains in tanking gear, they can chose to taunt Maexxna during her enrage stage and pop a survival ability to get her off the MT during one of the websprays. We had the OT heal.

DPS: Stand to the far left of the lair as you're coming in with the healers.
Blast Maexxna. Kill spider adds as they spawn. Save the goods for the final 30%.

Assigned DPS: Every 20 secs she sends a player to the back wall who gets Web Wrapped. When they do, head back there and use the macro (/tar Web Wrap) to get them out immediately. Then go back to DPSing the boss. We assigned two web-patrol dps and one alternate for when one of the two main guys gets webbed.

Healers: MT healer make sure the MT is topped off and HOTted if possible before each webspray. Keep Poison cleansing totem up but also dispel immediately when tank is poisoned. It reduces healing by 90%!!! Abolish poison ftw if you have it.
Off-healer keep raid topped off during spider adds and keep the Web Wrapped people up as they take dmg when they are cocooned. Also help HOT or top off tank before webspray. After 30% enrage, don't stop healing, don't step off, keep full HOTS, and keep necrotic poison off the tank at all costs! (Pain suppression, PW shield, Hand of Sacrifice, Earth Shield, Riptide, Renew, POM, Lifeblook, Rejuv, Regrowth, NS- all key for this part of the fight)

Use heroism, drums, trinkets at the 30% marker as she is enraged the MT will take HEAVES of dmg. Get her down as fast as possible to avoid more than two websprays during this phase.

Totem Noob

Don't be a noob shaman like me and not figure out until you turn 80 that you don't have to carry around your elemental totems anymore!

hahahaah.

A relic can now takes the place of the totems. I doubt there will be a time when you don't have a relic to replace the totems you used to have to carry around. However, I'm keeping mine in the bank for now. I should delete them but haven't yet. :D

And yes, I know I should go pick up [Totem of the Bay]!

How to Make them all Fit

In our guild, we have around 13-14 hardcore type players. I define hardcore as people who have no life outside of wow and are ready and willing to play every day of the week unless something tragic happens. They have no problems staying up late to raid and have no issues with tweaking their class on a daily basis to improve.

SOOO. Again, we have around 13-14 hardcores and 10 slots for our raids. This remains to be an issue of course for us because we don't really like to leave people out. I WISH we could bring them all. We don't have enough for 25 mans and we have too many for 10 mans.

If in the future Blizzard would just adjust the difficulty of the raid according to how many people you bring, a lot of drama would go away because you'd always have room for those who want to come. Oh well. That's just a wish list.

So, we started Naxxaramus last week, the 10 man version. It's my first time in that floating pyramid ever! I was soo excited to finally get to see it. Also, I was thrilled that we would now have full control over our own progression. No more sister guild to hold us back (yeah I said that - what then!).

We scrounged up enough 80s to hit up the instance. Most of the peeps in our guild are still leveling so at the time, we barely had enough for a ten man.

The inside of Naxxaramus is old-world architecture grahpics. It's nothing to write home about. However, the boss encounters are sooo much fun (especially from a healers stand point)! We got the first two bosses down that night and got stuck on the spider boss Maexxna.

The next night we came back, some people either weren't online or couldn't make it back to the raid so we invited new people. However, as it stands, I try to invite the SAME people who came the NIGHT before in order to be fair and also consistent.

The same thing happened the following night. One person had to go to a party, so then it was first-come,first-serve. However, at this point, a few other 80s were now wanting to go but obviously we couldn't fit them in.

This was seen as being "unfair and purposefully excluding the same people from our raids"

Needless to say, we had one guy get mad because his friend couldn't get in the raid so he left the raid. And the funny thing is that I have no issues with anyone in our guild. I'd raid with all of them because I'm honestly not afraid to ask people to tweak their specs and skills... Wait, I take that back. I might have an issue with one or two who have pretty much made it obvious they don't care to learn how to play...lol.

BUT for the most part, I really enjoy playing with everyone. They all have their own unique style of raiding and game play which brings something interesting to each raid encounter.

So it's really unfair for me to toss people out of the raid for the nilly-willy reason of making sure we can rotate everyone in the guild every night. You really have to be fair to those who spent the night before progressing.

Anyhow, it's quite a headache to manage everyone's happiness. And I know the saying is that you can't make everyone happy but it sucks when people are pissed off because they don't have the whole perspective.

When Naxxaramus resets this Tuesday, I have no idea how we're going to pick and choose who gets to go. Sign-ups work to a degree but they don't solve the issue that people are going to get left out.

Never Give up, Never Surrender

So I get to level 80 knowing that the battle has just begun. I'm all decked out in my spiffy blue quest gear and haphazardly spec'd to my pleasure. And even though I have this feeling in the back of my head that I should be more aware but I'm all GO WITH THE FLOW.

So we do our first heroic run on Monday. We choose Violet Hold (first mistake) because it's the daily heroic. We go with a pally tank, arcane mage (aka OOM mage), world pvp spec'd rogue, a resto shammy spec'd for healing wave, and a feral druid who normally tanks.

This combination equaled WAKE UP CALL!

That heroic dungeon chewed me up and spit me out like an Alabama sunflower seed! pateeweee! spat! Sad, our pally tank, was taking BOAT TONS of damage and I was spamming max Healing Wave to keep him up. This of course cost me all of my mana.

To top it off, Felix had to keep coming out of feral dps to support heal and crowd control so his dps was like 600 at avg. Flipmax was spec'd arcane and he was running OOM like crazy so his dps was only hitting 1100 avg. And our rogue wasn't spec'd pve so he was only hitting up 1300 max.

And even better, we hadn't experienced some of the boss fight before because the first two boss mobs you get in Violet Hold can be random. So we were learning as we were going.

We ended up getting the first two down after trial and error but the tank just dropped on the final boss.

So we were like "WTF man, let's just go do an easy one like Utgarde Keep!"

Yeah, that instance kicked our ass too! Again, dps was shotty and tank kept dropping like a rock and I was OOM after seconds (even with a 16k mana pool). We were able to finish it but it took several wipes.

SOOOO, FRUSTRATED as all hell, I started looking up tanking and healing changes for WoTLK.

L to the f*cking O to the f*cking L!

First, PROT pallies had some major overhauls. They no longer need to stack spell power as they have a talent that gives them bonus spell power from their stamina attributes so they can start stacking Stam gear. SECOND AND MOST IMPORTANT, at level 80, defense requirement is 540 for 25 mans and 535 for heroics. Sad was only at 512 defense thinking the old 490 defense cap applied. Basically, I was healing a crittable tank. OUCH OUCH OUCH.

Significant changes to druids to note as well is they have a built in talent that makes them basically uncrittable (Survival of the Fittest 6%crit reduc. All you need is 5.6% to be uncrittable for druids) so they can forgo stacking defense and resilience and instead grab agility when they can.

As for me, I learned the hard way that spamming Healing Wave was detrimental to the raid because it ran me out of mana so fast. My old spec was more conducive to Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spam. (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZtseuqeoxkrIRt (0,8,63).

After reading Elitis Jerks forums on Resto Shamans more, I learned that even for main tank healing, I'm better of spamming chain when I can because it's my most efficient HPM spell. Then I just stack crit to help boost the healing effect of Chain Heal.

I also repecc'd to boost my mana shield and got rid of Healing Way in order to put points into Thundering Strikes and Elemental Weapons which help boost my crit and healing.

(new spec: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxGZxfezVxoxkrIRt(0/15/56))
I'm still playing around with it though but I did see vast improvements.

The next day we went back and everyone had regeared and respec'd (a whole sep. post about frost mages later) and we pwd the Heroic Dungeon. I was never OOM and the tank never got crit :) and DPS was at a low end avg of 1500. Made a huge difference.

"Never Give up! Never Surrender!" -Commander Peter Quincy Taggart

I HAZ BIG BIRD!

What's better than Petey the Penguin??? BIG BIRD!

And yes, it does eat gnomes!