Kili Rants

My, it's been a while...

2010-10-31T10:43:00.000-07:00

Guess I haven't had a lot to rant about lately. Well, I haven't had as much time to rant, to be honest, as I had to go out and become a productive member of society and find a full time job... After I stopped posting here (and the Moonkin Repository forums, and the WoW Druid forums, and everywhere else I frequented in my abundant free time while jobless), my guild managed to down 25 man LK and several heroic 25 man encounters... and then....

Starcraft 2 happened. And the Cataclysm Beta. And burnout. And suddenly people stopped showing up for ICC, or for much of anything. I got a beta invite courtesy of a guildie who has a friend with connections, and leveled my main on the beta server to 82, and then my friends in beta got more interested in Starcraft 2 and were never on when I was, and I got bored of playing by myself.

Now that 4.0 has dropped, we've managed to scare up enough interest to raid one or two nights a week again, with the help of a few non-raider friends and a PUG or two willing to fill a spot for a chance at offspec or unwanted drops. And I'm still not back in full forum-lurking mode yet, although I most likely will be by the time I'm 85 and trying to gear up to raid new content.

Meanwhile I've been logging onto WoW a good bit less, and reading more. After my most recent re-read of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, I started lurking more at the Westeros.org forums, and finally created an account to post there. The only thread I've dared to post in so far is one in the Entertainment subforum dedicated to WoW - for the ASOIAF related threads, I still feel too much like a noob to contribute anything.

This morning I decided to contribute to a conversation about the best and worst of 5 man dungeons over the history of WoW, and I thought I'd share it here as well:

Vanilla

Favorites:

Deadmines - every new character I rolled, Deadmines was my test of whether I knew what the heck I was doing. I'm a bit of an alt-a-holic, so I've done it a lot, but every time I look forward to it... and I'm actually looking forward to the level 85 heroic version.

Maraudon - I farmed this place like mad on my main back in the AQ40 days trying to amass a set of Nature Resist gear. Still not tired of it - there was a lot of variety in the mobs and bosses, and interesting scenery. I hated Desolace itself, but the dungeon made up for the crappy zone.

Least favorites:

Stockades - except for my crazy compulsive need to complete the quests for this place, I wouldn't have done it more than once. OK, I take that back, it's a great place to farm wool cloth for my tailoring alts. Nothing good drops there, and every single pull is an adventure in stopping the mobs from fleeing at low health directly into another room full of mobs.

Wailing Caverns - loved the gear drops, but I hated how difficult it was to find your way around the place, and how likely you were to miss something if you weren't in there with someone who knew the map like the back of their hand. I'm also not a fan of any place that has a Q-bert jump that you are required to make to be able to follow your group (see also BFD) as under pressure I nearly always miss the jump and fall into the gap/water/slime/etc.

Honorable mentions:

BRD - as I mentioned earlier in the thread, it always felt sincerely epic. There were so many bosses and rare spawns, and so much good gear to be had... with a good group, it was a pleasure to run (and with a bad one, a nightmare).

UBRS/LBRS - being able to get through UBRS with pretty much any 5 man group always felt like an accomplishment. LBRS I hated, except for doing stealth solo runs as a druid to farm my Wildheart Boots.

BC

Favorites:

Steamvaults - My main being a druid with feral aspirations at the time , I farmed the hell out of this place trying to get to exalted with CE and pick up the Earthwarden. I had a lot of good groups, and a lot of bad groups. This is another one of the dungeons that I liked specifically because it was an accomplishment to get through it smoothly, and I always felt like I could contribute well to making that happen - especially when I was the one leading the 5-man.

Blood Furnace - I always preferred this one to Ramparts, even though it took longer. More interesting pulls and boss fights.

Least favorites:

Shattered Halls - I'd have liked this fine if my main wasn't a resto druid by the time I started running it on heroic mode under pressure to complete the attunement chain for SSC/TK. I'd just joined my guild at the time, and the GM and officers took a few raid nights and divided us up into 5-mans to get everyone through the attunement chains... every group they assigned me to failed miserably. Either the warrior tank couldn't keep all the mobs off of me (oh hey, GIVE ME A PALLY TANK PLEASE) or on the Warbringer boss fight, I'd get targeted by the boss during an aggro switch and creamed almost instantly. Attunement was removed two weeks after I joined the guild, so I never did complete that quest, and avoided it like the plague as a healer from then on.

Auchenai Crypts - If you can get past the first pull, it's not bad. 80% of the groups I have been in were not able to get past the first pull without a wipe.

WOTLK

Favorites:

Drak'Tharon Keep - I liked the story surrounding Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak... The dungeon is interesting and relatively easy... and infinitely preferable to Gun'drak with the snake wrap boss, the achievements that require a pretty specific group makeup, and the altars you have to remember to click or someone will have to run back later on (and probably run into mobs that you tried to skip) to be able to finish the place.

Utgarde Pinnacle - Again, I liked the story in Howling Fjord, and the dungeon was interesting. It provided a bit of a challenge to the undergeared, and even with a decently geared group there were challenges. The achievements were fun, the fights were varied, and playing smart would make the place a heck of a lot easier to complete. On my shaman alt, dropping tremor totems when fighting groups with a berserker... on the shaman and priest, cleansing the diseases from the aboms when the group healer was a resto druid... On my feral druid alt, being smart about how quickly and how much to pull, and where to position... I like dungeons that make me feel like playing smart makes a difference (but isn't 100% necessary to finish it without a wipefest), at least until everyone's decked out in welfare epics and can brute force and AOE everything to death without knowing what the heck they're doing.

Honorable mentions:

Oculus - I hated the place before they nerfed it, solely because every random dungeon group I got into, as soon as they saw the Oculus loading screen, the tank would drop group and we'd be left standing there for 20 minutes waiting for another tank, or the rest of the group would immediately fall apart. Since the nerf and the incentive cache at the end, groups stay together better, and you can actually enjoy the place. I always liked fighting on the drakes, and the variety of the other fights.

Utgarde Keep - Short, sweet, and easy as pie.

Nexus - I loved the lore.... the dungeon always felt like it was just a touch too long for my taste, compared to the other WOTLK instances. Too much trash, perhaps.

Halls of Reflection - It's a pain for undergeared groups, so I hate to PUG it... but as soon as it came out, I loved being able to see the storyline played out. It was exciting as heck the first few times through.

Least favorites:

Old Kingdom - Gah. Talk about miserable failures in PUGs...

Pit of Saron - The abbreviation POS is extremely apt. A bad tank or a bad healer will make this the most miserable dungeon experience ever. Tank and healer will each immediately begin blaming the other for any wipe or near-wipe. Every heroic PUG with a priest healer I've been in, the healer has left immediately after the second boss, because they were only there for the cloth belt. The pulls on the hill leading up to the gauntlet are the biggest pain in the butt ever for druid healers who used to be the only ones without the ability to remove diseases... Of course most PUGs with the ability to interrupt the caster mobs didn't think to do it to make anyone else's job easier. A tank who is not watching to make sure the healer is in range and not being beaten on will cause multiple wipes in the gauntlet... People not paying attention to their debuffs on the last boss will also cause multiple wipes... And the drops from the last boss are highly sought after, which means after you struggle through wipe after wipe, learning to despise the idiocy of the PUGs you're in there with, someone is sure to justify ninja need rolling offspec on something that you've been running the place for weeks on end to get for your main spec. Hate. Hate. Hate.

Another Kingslayer, and another 80

2010-05-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I've had a rant to share, but I thought I'd toss up a couple-few updates, in case anyone bothers reading (and for posterity's sake, when I look back fondly on my WoW career as an old lady... lol).

First off, I've picked up another Kingslayer title, this time on my priest alt. Her weekly ICC10 group used to struggle mightily with Rotface and Dreamwalker, but over time we've gotten a bit more cohesive as a unit, and picked up a few more skilled players (the ever-increasing zone buff doesn't hurt either). Two Saturdays ago, we downed LK, and I found myself standing around Dalaran on an alt with a Kingslayer title. It feels odd.

A couple of nights ago, my hunter hit 80 - that makes 7 level 80 characters, and only the second one who isn't a hybrid. I took my time for the last several levels, after the dungeon finder went live I'd queue for one random per day (when I felt like it, which was certainly not every day) to get my two triumph badges, and quested while waiting in queue. From level 78 on, I stopped questing, just to stretch out the pre-80 experience and get more triumphs in hand before hitting max level. I was able to purchase 2 pieces of T9 the first night, and a third piece last night.

I also made the decision to respec Survival (from my BM leveling build) as soon as I hit 80, so when that last instance run was over, I ported straight from Dalaran to Ironforge, and hit the trainer to respec. Set myself up with a spec for me and my new wolf from the WoW.com Survival 101 guide, got Power Auras all configured to notify me when my cooldowns were up, and started learning how to play all over again.

About 10 heroic runs later, I got into a group with someone who was running RankWatch, which was the only reason I became aware that I completely forgot to train my level 80 abilities. Epic fail.

Otherwise, let's see... my guild recruited half of a guild from another server to solve our raid attendance woes, so progression may pick back up again once the newbies get used to Sindragosa, which they hadn't even downed on 10 man before the transfer. We've at least been seeing LK and getting a few attempts in every week now.

My main's 10 man crew stopped showing up for a few weeks, and the main organizers have given up on further scheduling, so I'm stalled at 9/12 hard modes in ICC10. One of my good friends from another guild was going to set up a 10 man group to include my main, but some of the people he was counting on including got snagged for a newly organized weekly run within my guild. This may mean my main won't see her ICC drake after all, even though I'm 4 achievements away. :(

My shaman may be getting into that aforementioned new weekly group with some well geared and experienced mains, including a couple of 10m Kingslayers - they didn't have room for my main, but needed healers, and particularly wanted a shaman. Three Kingslayer characters? Is that too much?

Trade Chat PuGs and "Elitism"

2010-04-24T10:54:00.006-07:00

So last night, a group of 4 or 5 of us were hanging around in vent together, bored out of our skulls. It was well past midnight server time, nothing going on, and a couple of us had switched over to lowbie Horde alts to pass the time while chatting to the others.

Sometime after 2 AM server time, one of our crew spotted an ICC25 PuG forming, with a smallish guild leading the run and advertising in trade chat. The raid leader had indicated he'd be checking people out with WoW Heroes, which was fine IMO because he wasn't just going to be looking at Gearscore. All four of us have experience in ICC on our mains. My guildie and I have done Lich King attempts in 25 man, while our friends' guild is working on Sindragosa - I have killed LK in 10 man and am 9/12 on Hard Modes, while the others are working on LK10. None of our alts are undergeared scrubs, and we know the fights better than your average trade channel pugger at 2 AM.

We contacted the raid leader separately and asked for an invite - these are the characters we proposed to bring:
My resto shaman
Geo's arcane mage
Chim's marks hunter
Duce's survival hunter

One of us got in the run - the mage. The rest of us were told we weren't geared enough. Caydance was willing to accept that explanation - that was actually his least geared 80, and his character was showing on WoW Heroes as having ICC25 in the "yellow zone" for difficulty (the rest of us had it as green).

When I questioned the raid leader on his decision regarding my shaman (the best geared of all of our alts), he indicated that there was already a resto shaman in the run, and they thought I was geared enough for a 10 man, but they'd prefer I had fewer pieces below iLvl 232.

I pointed out that my cloak was the only item I had below 232, plus a 232 neck. He then suggested that they'd prefer I had more 10 man items, or at least one piece from 25 man. I was starting to fume a bit here, and pointedly linked my Sanctified T10 shoulders and my 264 pants (admittedly, these are BOE, and were sold to me for cheap by my friend whose guild gets a lot of them... but it's not like I haven't set foot in 25 man before, and most of my gear *is* from 10 man).

At some point in there, the raid leader said they would have preferred I had more best-in-slot gear, and they were hoping to fill their open slots with "better" healers first - "no offense intended", of course, and they'd keep me in mind if they couldn't find a better geared healer waiting to get into a 25 man PuG at 2:30 AM. I flatly stated that it sounded like they were hoping to find people who didn't need gear from 25 man, and good luck on that.

My guildie who had gotten in the raid indicated that the other resto shaman was one of the raid leader's guildies, and had worse gear than I did. I looked him up out of curiosity, and found this.

Oh, now I see. Crappy alt is switching from elemental to resto, and wants a better shot at the healing gear drops, so he didn't want me rolling on "his" loot. Apparently their hunter was exerting the same influence to keep Chimshot and Caydance out of the raid (although Chim was later told they changed their mind on him - apparently it was slim pickin's close to 3 AM server time).

Chim, offended on my behalf, began mercilessly taunting the other guild's shaman in trade chat while they advertised for one more healer and DPS to fill their raid. Astoundingly, Alliance managed to win Wintergrasp at this point (we're not as unbalanced faction wise as Mal'Ganis and Cho'gall, but 4:1 Horde to Alliance, with fewer and fewer Alliance interested in PVP means any time we get control of Wintergrasp it's a shocker). Divided Sky's attempt at an ICC25 PuG was put on hold while everyone scrambled to assemble VOA groups while they still could.

I got into a VOA25 group being formed by a friend, who ended up - due to said slim pickin's - deciding to run with 4 healers - myself, a disc priest, said friend (normally shadow, because he's a horribad holy priest), and another holy priest who just came back from a year's hiatus and is still wearing T7. The friend who started the raid plays from Australia on a relatively bad connection, and was actually disconnected for the entire time on Toravon, and again on Koralon. So essentially, I three-healed both fights on 25 man. With a disc priest, and a severely undergeared holy priest. Very successfully - I think we had two deaths on Toravon (one of them being the undergeared holy priest), and none on Koralon.

Yeah. You guys were waiting for a "better" healer. Good luck with that.

The King is Dead... Long Live the King

2010-02-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

'Nuff said.

A Public Service Announcement...

2010-02-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

... to those who tank Heroic Utgarde Keep:

The Dragonflayer Weaponsmiths stun you so you can't dodge, block or parry.

The Dragonflayer Metalworkers sunder armor.

If you pull all the packs in the first hallway, unless you are extremely lucky, you will wind up getting owned, no matter how good your gear is.

To those who were just in my priest's random heroic: Things would have been fine but your AOE pulled an additional pack. The tank kept them off of you but got owned because of the mobs' abilities. It was not his fault. It was not my fault. Dropping group immediately after the wipe wasted a bunch of time for all of us. And to the tank: if that wasn't a random disconnect, sorry that I bailed.

Jerk-taliation

2010-01-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Over at WoW.com, Matthew Rossi's Breakfast Topic for today was about dealing with jerks in PuGs - sometimes by being just a little bit of a jerk right back to them for the greater good of the group. The comments section is full of stories, and other readers judging the behavior in those stories. Some of them are rather entertaining, while some make me shake my head in wonder at those who perpetrate such things - and then brag about them.

I left a short comment of my own, but really wanted to expand on my "maybe I was a jerk but they deserved it" story, and this is of course the best place for it. Especially since I don't think anyone else is reading this blog anyway, so nobody's going to be bored by it unnecessarily. ;)

A li'l background here... Except for a couple of short forays into Hyjal, BT and Sunwell just for grins, my guild was not raiding at the time Patch 3.0 was released. Hence our first real raiding with the new WotLK talent trees took place in Naxxramas, where there was AOE a-plenty and classes with new knockback spells that positively delighted in using them on trash packs. Being a new moonkin determined to prove my worth to the raid, I got a bit defensive when accused of using Typhoon in those days - especially because my talent build did not at the time allow me to even have Typhoon in my main spec.

It became something of a joke within the guild to blame me whenever a mage Blast Waved an AOE pack, and while I quickly became less prickly about the blame thing, I never really did get over the irritation at mages and shamans who continued to use unglyphed Blast Wave and Thunderstorm on trash packs. Knockbacks on large trash pulls are bad, mmkay, for several reasons. Tanks hate them - especially when they've barely touched the mobs - because it makes holding aggro more difficult. Healers hate them because half the time the mobs aggro onto someone else that they have to heal (or the healers themselves), or they reposition themselves behind the tank when they run back, making the tanks harder to heal until they can carefully adjust them back to the frontal cone. Other ranged DPS hate the knockbacks because suddenly our AOE is hitting... nothing. Melee DPS really, really hate knockbacks because the mobs have disappeared, and they either have to run after them or wait until they run back to the tank - if they make it back to the tank.

I've played all four roles, and I can say without hesitation that the only person who really enjoys the knockback in 99% of the situations is the person who cast it. Now, there's that 1% where a situational knockback can be useful. That's the only reason why Typhoon is unglyphed and in my spec right now. I picked it up when we were farming Trial of the Crusader and starting to work on the hard modes, specifically because it came in handy on Faction Champions when one of the melee mobs was in my face and Nature's Grasp was down, and on Anub'arak when I just couldn't keep one or two scarabs off of me. I keep it now for the blood beasts on Saurfang, and the occasional use in instances when a stray mob comes after a squishy, knocking it back toward the tank.

Of course, Typhoon is a staple in my PVP spec. My friend Geo and I had a fantastic time one night running late night BGs - for once, I had my own personal healbot, as she runs as PVP resto and chose to stick by my side as I ran flags in WSG, etc. The most fun, though, which caused the two of us to giggle like giddy schoolgirls for most of the night, was guarding the Lumber Mill in AB. The two of us would go cat form and stealth near the flag, calling out in vent when we spotted incoming Horde with Track Humanoids. When they'd inevitably think the node was deserted and start to tag the flag, I'd position myself, pop into Moonkin Form, and Typhoon them to a plummeting death. If I had time, I'd target them and /wave. Then we'd re-stealth and laugh in anticipation of the next hapless Hordeling who tried to make an easy cap.

But I digress. My point is that, as a main spec raiding moonkin, I am very sensitive to misuse of Typhoon.

At level 73 or thereabouts, my feral / resto druid alt set out to PuG Utgarde Keep. This was in the good old days pre-3.3, when it took forever to find an instance group for anything other than heroics, and I felt myself fortunate to assemble a group for UK before I had finished questing in Howling Fjord.

The group consisted of myself, a Night Elf priest who volunteered to heal, a moonkin, and a couple of melee DPS, as I recall. Being relatively unused to tanking due to the scarcity of pre-80 instance groups, I was a bit on the cautious side. The rest of the DPS wasn't too difficult to deal with - I had to occasionally taunt off of the DK who was targeting something that I didn't have solid threat on - but the moonkin... oy vey.

Clearly he did not have the experience I had with the group dynamic and knockbacks, and did not consider pre-80 instances as the training ground to learn how to behave in more difficult instances. I'd Faerie Fire pull a 4-pack instead of charging in when I was low on rage or wanting to LOS the casters, and Mr. Chickenpants would gleefully typhoon them away from me before they'd even finished running to me. The other DPS, often not realizing this was a stupid move, would run to begin attacking, again before I'd even touched half the mobs. I found myself running around rounding up stray mobs nearly every pull.

The first time, I politely asked the moonkin not to use Typhoon, because it made it difficult to tank the mobs when he kept knocking them out of range. He lol'd and said "sorry", but 2 pulls later, did the same thing, this time being one of the occasions when I'd Faerie Fire pulled and hadn't yet been able to swipe.

Again, I was relatively civil. "Dude. Please stop using Typhoon." Again, he halfheartedly apologized and explained that it was habitual. I suggested he take Typhoon off of his bar so he wouldn't "habitually" keep using it inappropriately. And again, he lol'd.

The other DPS were actually starting to find it annoying as well, so the next time he Typhooned a trash pull, the DK joined in on my stern demand that he quit it. Now. "Dude," he said, "just stop using it." I informed Mr. LOLtyphoonkin that the next time he "accidentally" typhooned a group, I would not-so-accidentally refuse to tank the rest of the instance.

Sure enough, next pull... I see the Typhoon animation and 5 angry mobs blown out of my range before I'd been able to aggro more than one of them - and that one got pulled off of me by the other DPS, stupidly not waiting for me to be actually tanking the mobs before opening up. I backed up, went to cat form, sprinted back down a couple of flights of stairs into the second boss's room, and shadowmelded, then hit the hearthstone.

The longsuffering healer, who did not deserve such treatment, I sent a tell of apology. She laughed, and informed me that she'd also shadowmelded, so she survived the debacle.

I don't think I've ever been so happy not to finish an instance in my WoW career.

WTF PuG Moment of the Day

2010-01-29T16:12:00.003-07:00

My intent with this blog is not to skewer individuals I run across in cross-server PuGs - although I have no problem calling out the really annoying ones that behave like spoiled children or sociopathic asshats, there are some players who are still new and haven't learned a lot about this game yet.

And there are some who, no matter what the rest of us would like them to do, would not research how to gear, gem and play their chosen class or spec even if they knew where to go for the information, because they consider WoW "just a game" and that sort of research too much like work. I can kinda see where they're coming from, really... but even when it comes to games, I dislike sucking at things. If I find myself doing poorly at something, I either choose not to engage in that activity except under very specific circumstances (see golf, bowling and other such activities), or I use whatever resources are at hand to get better at it.

Twice yesterday, I found myself in PuGs on my mage where an essential party member decided they were not doing well enough and dropped the group very suddenly.

The first time was a Heroic Halls of Lightning group. I was on my mage, who is now decked out in 4pc T9 and a new shiny Merlin's Robe, along with mostly heroic level or better items (except for cloak, boots, and crappy trinkets). She can put out some very respectable damage, and I'm learning quickly just how fast I need to be ready on the Ice Block/Invis trigger.

The tank, a DK who was very personable and set a nice pace for progressing through the instance, seemed to be slightly on the low end of the heroic tank gear scale, but I'm not one of those who expect every heroic instance tank to have 35k health or more - as I recall, this one was more along the lines of 28k health, which is perfectly fine for the non-TOC/ICC heroics. She/he did a fine job on the first boss, and the "suppression room" gauntlet with the WTFexplodyslag that tends to kill anyone in melee range if you AOE them (one dead rogue at the end, due to overzealous and overgeared lock who just couldn't be bothered to single target). At the first landing above that room, someone accidentally pulled both packs, when you can normally skip either the left or the right one, and the tank admirably rounded them all up, managing to lose only one of the DPS in the process. Great healing, heads-up tanking, and I gave the team a cheerful compliment at pulling that one out with a win.

At the top of the stairs, while rounding up trash to the second boss, the tank informed us that she/he was actually brand new to tanking, and still learning. The warlock took this announcement as a challenge to test his/her ability to hold threat, and proceeded to do his darnedest to pull aggro on the next 2 trash packs. And, unsurprisingly, the warlock died. I tried not to pull, but I did watch Omen carefully and pushed my threat to the limit a few times. After the lock's death, the tank decided we were too geared for him/her, and needed a "better" tank. I was just on the point of reminding our tank-in-training that it is the DPS's responsibility not to be stupid and pull aggro, and he/she was doing fine, when we abruptly found ourselves tank-less. We would have been fine for the rest of the instance, really, and the warlock laughed about the fact that he knew he was setting himself up to die when he started pushing the tank's threat purposefully, but it was too late. We knew she/he was a new tank, but we didn't know they were that insecure about being a new tank.

So the dungeon finder served us up a confident and overgeared DK for our next tank, and the lock and I stayed on the low side of his threat easily. Life went on.

Later in the evening, I determined that I was quickly reaching the end of my use for Triumph badges, and would be better served to queue for specific instances that had upgrades for my weak slots after my daily random for the frost badges. Primarily I picked Heroic VH and Oculus for the trinkets and cloak, and both normal and heroic versions of TOC and the ICC instances. I can't queue for Heroic Halls of Reflection on the mage yet, but there are nice items I could use in the others.

On one particular normal TOC run, we went through the mounted combat as usual and gathered in the middle of the arena to buff and drop a table. The priest, who was the assigned healer for the instance, neglected to buff anyone - even himself. I found this... odd, but chose not to make a big deal of it. If the tank didn't care whether he had Fort, I wasn't going to gripe about it, and really, it's not that hard of an instance. No biggie.

I didn't inspect the priest, but his health and mana levels appeared to be decent - about what you'd expect from iLvl 232 T9 and a smattering of other random epics. However, he did warn us at the outset that it was his first time ever healing an instance. I was happy for his sake that we had the hunter, mage and shaman combo. The absolute worst combination for healers is when you get the shaman (who you'll want to kill first so he doesn't heal), warrior (with his Mortal Strike on the tank), and rogue (AOE poisoning everyone in sight and constantly dropping poison vials that unobservant DPS like to stand in).

So warned, the tank ran in to pull. Now, where the faction champions stand at the beginning of the fight is a very bad one - it's like an invisible wall, where no matter where you stand to DPS them, you are out of line of sight. This tank, not being aware of the issue, neglected to pull them back to a better spot at first - and I mentioned in party chat that he'd need to. By the time, however, he moved them out from the invincible spot, the tank was dead.

Now, I'm not sure what healing spells the priest was using, but clearly, they were the wrong ones. He said nothing about having line of sight issues with the tank, he just apologized for his failure and said goodbye, and dropped group before even zoning in to rez.

While griping in a chat channel about this "oh, I suck, you guys need another tank/healer" attitude that causes people to drop group without giving themselves a second chance, I looked up the guy on armory, just out of curiosity, and was boggled by what I found.

I sincerely hope at some point, if someone other than me reads this blog, that going to that link will not reveal what I'm seeing today.

The priest was main spec shadow, and his shadow spec is perfectly fine. His second spec is Discipline, which he was clearly using for that instance run. Aside from the complete lack of glyphs, the spec itself is a complete mess. I have no idea where he came up with it, but it's good for neither PVP nor PVE. Now, the fella has been 80 for less than two weeks at this point, but he's had dual spec for a month and a half now. He's not bothered to learn how to spec, or how to heal, or even buy glyphs for his second spec.

What really disturbed me, though, was his gear and gemming choices.

The guy picked up 5 pieces of healer T9, so clearly he's intending to heal with them, isn't he? But then he gemmed them amazingly badly. Completely aside from the epic spirit gems in the chest and pants (seeing as how discipline spec priests don't consider spirit important in either gemming or gear choices), and the apparent lack of a meta gem... The guy's using hit gems. In his healer gear. And crappy green ones at that... So maybe that was all he had handy and he just tossed 'em in until he could get better gems off the AH?

He's also equipped a smattering of DPS gear accessories with his T9 - a hit/haste belt from Forge of Souls... The hit trinket from Auriaya in 10 man Ulduar... and the craptastic Darkmoon Card: Death... So maybe he's intending to become a primary healer, hence getting the healing T9 set pieces, but is gemming them temporarily for DPS while he finishes gearing up? Maybe he's not completely clueless about how to gem in reality?

No.... in his shoulders, he has an epic 10 hit / 10 expertise gem.

...

........

...............

Wat?!

Well, my existence has been validated...

2010-01-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

Who knew?

Apparently most realms are infested with badkins to the point that having a moonkin "not suck" is a surprise.

Kili Rants... on why I'm a baddie

2010-01-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I am a keyboard turner.

Go ahead, call me OMGn00b - I beat you to it in my "about me" blurb there on the sidebar anyway. I know it's not the "best" way of doing things, and sometimes it has caused more problems than I'd like it to... but hear me out here.

I was catching up on the last couple of weeks worth of posts at Tree Bark Jacket, and spotted this response to a reader question about how to learn to not be a clicker. It got me thinking about the good old days of vanilla WoW, when I was just starting to play, and how I've evolved into the player I am today. I left a comment about my keybinding philosophy there, and realized there was a lot more to say than I felt comfortable leaving in the comments section. I mean, when my comment starts threatening to be longer than the post that inspired it, I know it's time to hop back over to my own space to vent my thoughts.

See, unlike many of my friends, I came to this game not as an experienced gamer. I didn't have tons of FPS experience, or even play another MMO. I'd played a text MUD, and a bunch of computer arcade/puzzle type games that involved lots of clicking on the pretty pictures on the screen, or with maybe a few preset keystrokes that mimicked an arcade game's joystick/button commands. The concept of customizable keybindings was a bit new to me, and the sheer number of skills and usable items in WoW blew my mind.

I had the default UI for a while, until I learned more about different addons to change my button bars and other interface features. I didn't even know enough to turn on the extra action bars in the default interface for a while. Macros? Ha. Not a clue. I had the basic 12 action bar buttons to shove as many useful things as possible into, and then I clicked on things in my bags, or put them on the extra action bars once I figured out how to show them, and clicked on those.

Then, after a few weeks of low-level messing around, my good friend Dave, who was much more experienced in this sort of thing than I, informed me that I needed to keybind my commonly used spells and items, or I would be considered a baddie. "Don't be a noob clicker. Keybind everything." "EVERYTHING?" "OK, well, the stuff you'll actually use very often."

Trying to go from mostly clicking to mostly keybinding was a real learning experience. Of course, Dave didn't play a druid, which was my main by that point, so he didn't have any real advice on how to keybind effectively. If I could go back in time and teach myself a few things, I'd have done it very differently. Over the last 2 years, I've learned so much about how to play this game better - but unfortunately, unlearning 2 or 3 years worth of ingrained habits is... awkward at best. And at worst, disastrous.

So I downloaded Trinity Bars because they looked oh-so-cool when my hubby was playing with them and the different button skins, and gave myself a whole buttload of action bars so I could see everything in case I forgot what keybindings I assigned, and proceeded to assign away. I tried to use things that I would remember for various abilities - "D" was for my Decursive spam key (back when Decursive actually decided what spell to use on who, before Blizzard broke that functionality). "I" was for Innervate. Since "M" was assigned to open the map, and Shift-M was the miniature zone map for battlegrounds, I used Ctrl-M for my mount. Since "B" was for opening my bags, I used Ctrl-B for Barkskin. Oh, but I was so clever in how I assigned things that I could remember.

I even was smart enough to keep my most commonly used abilities on the left hand side of the keyboard, on easier to reach keys. This was, unfortunately, not because I needed my right hand free to use the mouse - it was because, coming from other types of games, it was most intuitive for me to use the arrow keys to navigate. Because of this fact (and my Decursive keybinding), I ended up putting some very important binds on the WASD movement keys (well, not the "W"). I also didn't really "get" the usefulness of strafing, so once I hit level 70 on my druid, I bound Cyclone to the "Q" key, chuckling at the humor in this due to the massive QQ from all other classes whenever Cyclone was used.

At some point while learning to be a good healer at level 70, I came across the nugget of information that it was just way too slow to select a target then cast a heal - the real pro healers used mouseover macros or click-casting mods. At the time, I was still a bit macro-shy, but I read about the vaunted addon combo of Grid plus Clique, and decided I could master this healing thing by click-casting. And I got really good at it.

Since most of my heals were being cast by mouse click hovering over my Grid, I got used to moving by keyboard while healing - although my WASD movement keys were largely unavailable, so I would just keep my left hand on the arrow keys while my right hand was moving the mouse. Somewhat awkward, but it worked for me, and it worked well. Druids are a great class for healing on the move, and in late BC, rolling Lifeblooms on multiple tanks while tossing out a few spot-healing rejuvs would allow a druid to beat anyone on the healing meter. Well, except for COH spamming priests on raid-damage-heavy fights.

In any event, the advent of click casting heals, while playing a raid healer full time, cemented this whole keyboard turning thing in my head.

Then, after a while at level 70, I decided to level my rogue so I could make use of her herbalism and alchemy professions, saving myself the gold of purchasing flasks and potions for raid use. Leveling on a PVP server, I decided to forego the yawn-inducing Combat Swords spec and work with the sneakier Subtlety spec, allowing me to avoid more involuntary world PVP and come out ahead in more situations than I would have with the Combat spec tools.

My good old friend Dave, again, took it upon himself to give me rogue advice, since his first level 60 was actually an undead rogue. He actually liked to PVP on his rogue, and one of the first things he told me was that if I wanted to be really good, I should practice circle-strafing.

Wat.

He tried to describe how it worked, but seeing as how he'd never bothered to explain the concept of mouse-looking either, the thought of trying to strafe at the same time as turning blew my puny n00b mind. He said he'd taken a few solid days during a vacation, playing all day long in battlegrounds, to practice and master the concept. I finally did a little research on my own about how this mouse movement thing was supposed to happen, and did a little practicing, but it was, as I said earlier, awkward.

It messed with my camera angles to the extent that it sometimes put me in dangerous situations where I didn't realize just how close I was to things that I didn't mean to get near, or causing me to veer off course while flying. Dangerous situations, like flying into the range of the Garadar bat riders, or nearly running into aggro range of bosses. I felt like I had a better sense of where I was going and a better ability to control precisely how I got there if I continued to use the keyboard. Eventually I stopped trying to use the mouse for movement in most situations, because the camera angle frustration and the way I'd often wind up looping around and facing the other direction when I just meant to go a few feet sideways.

Fast forward to Ulduar. As our guild was learning the General Vezax fight, one night our uber DPS warlock - the liaison to the officers for ranged DPS and the one who determined who got raid invites - called me out in vent for keyboard turning out of a coming shadow crash. Never mind that I was actually not getting hit by the shadow crashes, except for a few instances where I tunnel visioned and didn't notice he'd targeted one on someone standing close to me. Those had nothing to do with keyboard turning, and everything to do with a concentration lapse. Moving with the mouse would not have helped.

Now, there were times when moving with the mouse would make a significant difference, like Yogg Saron's purple rays of doom. Clearly there's a significant difference between the slow about-face of keyboard turning and the instant spin of a mouse-look, and especially when you're doing the fight without Freya's assistance, it makes a huge difference. And I made a point of turning with the mouse for that fight.

For other encounters, strafing out of the ubiquitous fire or whatnot is certainly a better option than keyboard turning, and for that reason I did re-bind my strafe keys on my druid (cuz "Q" for cyclone is just too good to change). I make a point of practicing strafing now and then, and I run around Dalaran moving with the mouse more often than not.

Still, when things get frantic, or when there's a chance of something going wrong if I don't move in exactly the right direction or need to keep a close watch on my position, I tend to move with the arrow keys more often than not, because the times when I've tried to use the mouse it has not felt natural. I did an experiment one night on Festergut, moving with the mouse on one attempt, and moving with the arrow keys on the next, and when I used the arrow keys I was able to minimize my DPS downtime because I didn't overshoot where I intended to stand, turn too far, run into someone else's bubble of personal space, etc. I played better and did better overall moving with the keyboard.

So, perhaps I'm a noob. It's not because I don't know how, or haven't tried playing "the right way". It's just that when it comes down to the wire, I suck less playing like a noob.

Oh, Ignore List, how I love you.

2010-01-26T00:57:00.002-07:00

I've been running a lot of random heroics lately, between my 5 level 80s on Skullcrusher. I try to get one a day on Kili and the healers, for the 2 frost badges as well as keeping a stock of triumphs for offspec upgrades on the healy girls and epic gems for the main. My mage has been running as many as I can squeeze in, because there are actual upgrades from some of those instances, in addition to needing triumph badges out the wazoo for T9 and other items.

So I've seen a lot of PUGs - good, bad and indifferent. Most of them I just let roll off my back, but the last few days I've been feeling quite a bit more intolerant of bad pugs - especially bad tanks.

Last night, for instance, on the mage... Heroic Utgarde Keep popped, and as per my usual routine, right after I ported in, I buffed AI, refreshed my Molten Armor, picked out my target for Focus Magic (the resto shaman this time, as the other DPS were a ret pally and feral druid), and start to drop a table. The ret pally hung back with me to buff and then said he needed to run AFK really fast, and the feral druid tried to help me drop the table, but the tank, Mr. Impatient, ran ahead of us and pulled almost immediately, so the shaman followed, and the table didn't get dropped.

Instead, Mr. Impatient Tanky-pants started griping at the DPS who were all back at the entrance (either AFK or trying to set out the refreshments, thank you very much). "Can someone other than me come DPS this stuff?" I abandoned the ritual of refreshment cast, and ran up the steps to help with the first pull. And then mildly chastised the tank by reminding him that some us had to buff, and I was trying to help the group by dropping a table. He, not mollified in the least, then began bitching at the resto shaman for not healing him after the pull was over.

Now if I were the shaman, I'd have healed him before he asked. But since he asked, and in such a nasty tone of voice, the shaman took offense to how badly the whole thing had started, and told him he could eat or bandage, as we were out of combat. I actually bandaged the tank myself, since he was being such a prima donna about it. And the tank, trying to prove something to someone, then ran off at 3/4 health and decided to pull ALL THE MOBS in the first hallway of Utgarde Keep. Now, I've run this instance many times, on many characters. I've run it as a healer with my guild's best geared bear tank - who was much better geared than Mr. Warrior Pants there - and when he tried to pull the entire room, he got positively owned. Hardcore. Armor reduction debuffs FTL.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Impatient Prima Donna Uber Tank died. Quickly. I know the shaman actually attempted to heal him, but couldn't keep up with the damage when Mr. I Wear Plate Hear Me Roar was fully sundered, and proceeded to die as well. I backed up into a corner and hit Invisibility, so I was the only one alive when the tank began to positively berate the shaman, who gave back as good as he got, and the other DPS joined in. The tank felt that he had done nothing wrong, and that clearly the shaman's attitude and lack of skill was at fault. Riiiiight.

And of course, being the second pull of the instance, we were not yet able to vote kick Mr. Tank Wearing Pants on Head. When he was informed of our desire to do so, he laughed at us, refused to either leave the party or continue to pull, and said "go ahead, you'll have to wait for another 20 minutes to find a new tank while I insta-queue into the next one."

After several minutes of him bragging about himself both in game (playing for 4 years, six level 80's) and out of game (married with a child, and therefore "mature" and not twelve years old as he was accused of being, WITH A GOOD JOB... as they all seem to have....), I finally reminded the rest of the party to put Mr. Asshat Tank on their ignore list so they wouldn't have to group with him ever again, and proceeded to set him straight.

You see, it may make our wait longer, Mr. "Ghettoboy" of Bloodhoof-US, but every single person in that party would rather have sat there for 30 minutes watching paint dry while waiting for a new tank instead of spending one minute more in that group with him.

But there have been groups where I didn't specifically take issue with the tank in party chat, but privately decided that I'd prefer not to group with them again and so quietly added them to /ignore. Tonight's run, on my resto druid, with a DK tank, was just such a run.

Again, Heroic Utgarde Keep... The tank was overgeared for the instance, and had no problems holding aggro... just... as BBB would put it... he was a "Rockstar Tank".

He rushed from pull to pull, without waiting for everything to die, with no regard for the rest of the party being able to keep up. He didn't wipe the group, but it was perilously close at times, and I ended up getting complimented by one of the DPS for my healing. At the time, the warlock was lying dead and I was afraid he was being sarcastic. But apparently he recognized the extra effort I was putting in to keep the group from going down in flames.

Case in point - first boss. There was no discussion of whether or not anyone wanted to do the "On the Rocks" achievement, and usually an overgeared group can accomplish it without specifically trying so long as the tank and the healer are not the ones targeted for frost tombs. Unfortunately, I was the first one targeted for a frost tomb, and not a single person made a move to break me out. And the only person in the party who could heal, the ret pally, was tunnel visioned on killing the boss and couldn't be assed to notice what was happening and throw a heal. I suppose I should have said something in party chat... like.. "HELP!"... but I didn't expect them to be reading party chat anyway. After I died, I reminded them "Situational awareness is a good thing." and let it drop.

The ret pally rezzed me, and I proceeded to rebuff myself, heal up, and sit down to drink (which reminded me that the mage in our party never offered to drop a table), and before I'd even cast a single heal on myself, the tank was off and running down the hallway. I cast Innervate so I wouldn't have to drink as long, but I refused to run to catch up with him until I could drink. As I said, he was overgeared, and a blood DK, so he was still at around 2/3 health when I caught up to the party.

He continued his rockstar chain pulling ways after that. The point at which I decided he was going on my ignore list was when he decided to skip a couple of trash pulls on the way to the second boss, and announced it in party chat - but the lock wasn't aware the groups could be skipped and managed to blunder too close to them and pulled two trash packs, dying around the corner of a stairway out of line of sight for my heals. I had to frantically spam the tank to keep him up, as well as the ret pally who pulled a couple of mobs and probably was getting heavy damage from the Rune of Flame.

I had to find the lock's body, stop to rez him, rebuff and cast a heal, and by the time I started moving again, the tank was already up the stairs, at half health, fighting another trash pack. If he'd been in the instance with a lesser healer, the group would have wiped several times from the way he was blazing ahead with no concern for the rest of the party. There was no time to loot anything except bosses, when he paused long enough to click the "greed" button... There was no time to skin the dragonkin and worg mobs... there was no time to look away from the computer screen to figure out why my cat was making that bizarre noise (pretty sure she was snoring).... It was "run run run", "go go go", push as fast as possible, and I had several close calls trying to keep him up when he'd run too far ahead and pulled too much before I was in range to heal him. When they pull the boss before making sure the healer is in range? Just stupid.

At the end of the instance, after the last boss was dead, I'd already put him on ignore. Working with tanks like that is stressful - you have to keep a finger on your emergency buttons and hope you can keep up, or you'll get lambasted for it. But since my settings show chat bubbles and party chat bubbles, I saw him blandly state "I know I tank fast."

Yeah. You do. So, Draeneichic of Shattered Hand-US, you can stress out other healers from now on. My three healing alts won't be subjected to your run-and-gun rockstar style.

One of my favorite guildies is a rockstar tank. He's a great tank, mind you, but he does that whole chain pulling, keep up or be damned thing on both his warrior and his DK (who is a lot more squishy). He doesn't care who's in range, he wants to get in, get things dead, collect his badges, and be gone. He has no patience for anyone who may need to loot mobs for cloth to level tailoring, or want to skin or mine in an instance because they don't go out farming. Apparently all of us who aren't swimming in gold to the point that the loot from instance mobs is completely unnecessary and we can afford to purchase all needed trade goods on the AH are complete and utter noobs.

Yeah, he's an elitist prick. He knows it. He doesn't like to tank runs where I'm healing anymore, because I called him out for it. Well, that, and I let him die once on my shaman because I stopped to mine some cobalt and he didn't bother to notice that I wasn't in range before pulling a whole hallway of mobs.

I put up with it from my guildie, because he's a friend. I refuse to subject myself to that kind of behavior from random PUGs. I'd rather spend 5 more minutes in LFG waiting for a tank that doesn't make me want to shoot him in the face. With a bazooka.

Fantastic! Amazing! Spectacular!

2010-01-25T14:07:00.001-07:00

As a blogger, I'm inconsistent and often indecisive. When WoW.com put out a call for applications to write their resto and balance druid articles, I immediately wanted to apply - get paid for blogging? Yes please! - but started to realize how very difficult it would be for me to come up with topics, and how very hard I would take criticism that all prominent WoW writers face, whether writing for a major site like WoW.com or maintaining a guide on the official forums.

Lissanna from Restokin.com was a natural choice for the job, but she declined to apply, as she's too busy with grad school... So without Liss in the running, and with my own reluctance to apply, I sat back to wait and see who WoW.com would wind up with. They've introduced new writers lately for several features, and I figured we'd end up with an obscure individual for the resto/balance druid column like myself, who knows some good resources and has a penchant for writing, but with a little more confidence.

Thus, today, when the announcement came, I was stunned. I was astounded. I was inordinately pleased.

One of the best known moonkin theorycrafters out there is the new WoW.com "voice of the boomkin" - Tyler Caraway, better known on the druid class forums, DPS role forum, and TheMoonkinRepository.com as Murmurs.

I did not expect Murmurs to apply. I'm curious now about whether any of the other well known forum moonkins - from TMR, Elitist Jerks, or the official class forum - bothered to apply, and what kind of sample articles Murmurs provided.

One thing that makes me happy... I will be able to read the moonkin posts on WoW.com without constantly second-guessing the theorycrafting behind the advice, since I know Murmurs will have done his research with all due diligence.

Excellent choice, WoW.com.

ZOMG EPIXXX ZOMG!

2010-01-21T12:17:00.001-07:00

Less than 24 hours after dinging 80, four of my bored friends carried my little mage butt through heroic Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection.

I replaced my weapon twice (lulz), my neck, and after the run was over I did one random heroic and had enough badges to pick up T9 shoulders.

In random heroics, I picked up the belt from Ymiron and the ring from Ingvar. If I hadn't had real life stuff to attend to last night, or plans to be productive today, I may well have been able to grind enough heroics and normal mode TOC/ICC 5 mans to be fully epic'd out by now.

Patch 3.3, great for gearing out new alts. Combine that with my last post's rant on how doggone easy it is to play an arcane mage, and I very well may have a non-healing alt worthy of bringing to ICC-10 within a week or two.

Score!

Kili Rants... on Level 80 #6

2010-01-20T03:12:00.001-07:00

My cute little bundle of hurt hit 80 tonight - red pigtails and all.

I originally started my mage as fire spec, with advice from a guildie who was the best mage I know. Leiseletta was going to be "The Burninator", and I ran battlegrounds with her at 19 and 29, with some semi-twinked gear, and had a good bit of fun.

The low level PVP, by the way, was my reasoning for her Engineering profession. I'd considered picking up something else instead, but if I can force myself to level it I think I'll stick with it. The toys are fun, and I still may PVP on her again.

After bouncing around between a few other alts, I got the urge to pick her up again after Patch 2.3 improved leveling in the 30's and beyond, and after talking to another friend, I followed his advice and went frost for the survivability... and for the ability to ride around in a big circle, aggro 7 or 8 mobs, and AOE them down, coming out alive on the other end with a quest half done.

Leiseletta was my last alt to 70 before WOTLK hit. She was intended to be my PVP alt, but I didn't have enough time to get used to mage PVP (and not being able to heal myself, zomg) before the expansion, and time to level my main again. And then my priest. And then my shaman. And then another druid. And another druid. (And let's not forget the fits and starts of playing my rogue and hunter!)

Throughout this process, off and on, I soloed my way through Borean Tundra - with a little help from a guildie on a couple of difficult group quests - and struggled to find instance groups for Nexus and Utgarde Keep. I finished a couple of quests at the first quest hub in Howling Fjord, and put the mage back on the shelf again for a few months... and then, 3.3 hit. Cross server instance groups meant I could quest for about 20 or 30 minutes while in queue, port directly to the instance no matter where I was questing, and then pop right back to my quests when done. Following Jame's leveling guide, I started at level 72 in Howling Fjord, and was just nearly level 79 when I finished HF due to all the instance XP. I hit 79 after doing 3 or 4 quests in Dragonblight.

Round about the time I hit level 79, I began to consider what spec I wanted my mage to play as, and asked the best mage currently in my guild for some advice. He suggested arcane, as it is rather high DPS, and good for fresh level 80s as well because of the ability to take two 3% hit talents, requiring less hit gear. I did some research on specs from the good mages in my guild, copied their glyphs, and purchased dual spec (figuring frost may still come in handy for some leveling situations, as well as when I feel the urge to PVP).

And then I took myself to Ironforge, to the training dummies, and realized... I have no idea how to play arcane. I was pretty good at frost, used to watching for Brain Freeze procs and setting up shatter combos, but I didn't even know what arcane spells to put on my bar.

So I asked my friend Phil. OMG what spells do I use??? lolnoob And he told me: "Arcane Blast. Arcane Missiles." That's it? "Pretty much, lol." Well what about all this other stuff? Arcane Barrage? "Use that when you have to move." You've got to be kidding me. That's all there is to it? (No answer.)

So I mentioned in a custom chat channel that I was trying to learn to play arcane. And two of my friends with mage alts assured me that it was as simple as that. Arcane Blast x4. If Missile Barrage has proc'd by then, use Arcane Missiles. If not, use Arcane Barrage. Pop cooldowns where available. Profit.

And then, my head exploded.

Seriously, and people think balance druid rotations are simple. I have no DOTs to keep up, only one proc to watch for, a fantastic buff to toss on someone else that also helps my DPS, multiple cooldowns I can pop on demand for burn phases, I don't have to look like a giant turkey with antlers, and I can surround myself with three copies of my adorable self once every 3 minutes instead of making unobservant people wonder why there are 3 idiot resto druids in melee range punching the boss.

It almost makes me want to change mains.

Well, almost. I love my stupid looking lazer turkey. I love being able to heal myself when the excrement hits the air conditioning, I love druid lore and druid gear and not having random strangers walk up to me and demand food.

But I wish that I had some of what my mage has as well. A direct damage spell to use on the run. On demand burst damage cooldowns. Being able to see my adorable avatar while I DPS instead of a hideous mutant owlbear. DPS stats that scale appropriately instead of having haste rating lose effectiveness on half my rotation after 400. A rotation that requires less multitasking for the same or better effect.

I'm not asking for spellsteal, or an interrupt, or OMGCHIKINBLINK. I'm not even asking for an aggro drop. But this mage thing? Way. Too. Easy.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2010-01-16T12:00:00.001-07:00

I logged on last night without much in mind - I figured I'd do the random daily on my level 80s, and work on leveling my mage a bit more... It was Friday night, and one of my guildies had been trying to start up his regular TOC25 PUG again, and I thought if he was online, I might bring my main and try ONE MORE TIME to get that stupid trinket from Anub'arak.

Another guildmate, a non-raider whose brother is part of my regular 10 man crew but who himself is often ignored as bad or annoying (to be fair, he is only 14, and only started playing with WOTLK), was trying to organize an ICC10 group, and not getting a lot of positive response. I personally didn't plan to join the group - again, I was thinking I'd do heroics until TOC25, if it happened - but as 7:00 server time approached and the TOC raid leader was not online, I got a tell from a friend who'd agreed to main tank and lead Mura's ICC10 group, asking if I had a character I'd like to bring. As my main was saved, I offered him a choice between rarbare, loltree, shammy heals, bad enhancement shammy, priest heals, or bad spriest. They had a resto shaman and resto druid already, so my priest in healing spec was a good fit for the group, and we managed to pull together a pretty solid team of well geared alts and a few mains who hadn't done 10 man yet this week.

The group flew through the first wing, at least until Saurfang, where we had a couple of aborted attempts and a full wipe before we got serious and made healing assignments. Yeah, I can't heal everyone at once. With our team, we decided the best route was to have the resto druid watching the ranged dps and other healers, the resto shaman chain healing the tank and melee DPS, and me primarily on tank heals, while tossing up PW:S on the ranged when the blood beasts were targeting them just in case. I'm not discipline spec'd, but every little bit helps, and in this case, we got well into enrage before the first mark went out. And nobody died, at all.

Next up, Festergut. We had a couple of people in the raid who were unfamiliar with the new wing, so it took a couple of tries, but we made the enrage timer with 40 seconds or so to spare. We were feeling cautiously optimistic about Rotface, although the first couple of attempts went poorly as we tried to orient the newer people to the specifics of kiting and joining the oozes. We hadn't tried it with healing assignments, and were just setting up to make another attempt when the ready check failed - the rogue was AFK, and his friend / housemate / brother or whoever he was (their characters are named similarly, and they were playing from the same location, that's all I really know) said he was having girlfriend issues and he honestly didn't know how long until he was back at keys.

We sat around for a couple of minutes, then deliberated in vent for a while. Several of our members expressed the opinion that they didn't really expect us to be able to kill Rotface. After all, while our 25 man raid had killed him two weeks in a row, as did my 10 man team, and made it look easy, the "elite" 10 man group still hasn't gotten Rotface down, and our offtank's guild was still struggling with him on 25 man. The option was put forth to take our group to TOGC10 instead, since some of the raid had not yet completed the instance on heroic. After a few grumbles about "old content", we took a vote, and the consensus was to take a 5 minute break, and if the rogue had not returned, head to TOGC. If he had, we were going to try Rotface a few more times.

When five minutes had come and gone, the raid leader was AFK. By the time he returned, the rogue was also back, and the Rotface vs. TOGC argument started up again. The "we're just going to wipe endlessly" crew eventually won, and we headed to the Argent Tournament, prepared to breeze through said "old content".

And failed on Northrend Beasts. Multiple times.

Again, we did not do healing assignments, which was part of the problem. The other factor was that many of us had not set foot in TOC since Icecrown was released, and were a bit rusty on the fight mechanics. We wiped because people weren't killing the snobolds fast enough and healers were getting stunned and unable to keep the tanks alive. We wiped because people forgot that you don't get the speed boost on Icehowl on heroic mode. The last wipe happened because I was targeted 5 times in a row for fire bombs, couldn't stand still long enough to heal myself, and died all the way across the arena from where I normally stood. The resto druid battle rezzed me as Acidmaw and Dreadscale entered the arena, but I was the one who'd been healing the Dreadscale tank on the earlier attempts, and I was standing on the other side of Acidmaw popping my Shadowfiend when he died, and Dreadscale promptly began cruising around the room biting people's heads off.

Alas, we gave up. Oh well, at least I got my priest her first Ashen Verdict rep ring, some frost badges, and some nice new offset shoulders. I had 3/5 T9, so I can use them without losing a set bonus.

Oh, and the TOC25 group started up about half an hour late, breezing through the place before we were done with Saurfang. I didn't have the heart to ask if the Reign of the Unliving dropped. (Although I do know Death's Verdict dropped, and one of our DK main raiders lost it for the second week in a row, to a non-raider rogue... boy, was he steamed.)

It's the little things that make me happy...

2010-01-15T16:27:00.001-07:00

... Like selling the Battered Hilt for a little over 12,000 gold... That'll give me a nice little cushion while I wait for enchanting materials to stabilize and try to figure out a new way of making decent gold that doesn't require lots of farming. My next thought is using all that Infinite Dust that's not selling because people are undercutting and flooding the market like there's no tomorrow to make Imbued Frostweave bolts, which seem to list for a decent price. I just don't know how well they sell.

... Like getting Professor Putricide down in my 10 man group before our competitors, the "elite" 10 man group, managed to. Since the de facto leader of this "elite" team has intentionally snubbed me and cut me out of even raids that I was already saved to, it's just a nice little /rude in his face.

... Like getting the Blue Drake mount from my first Oculus run post-nerf. I only wish I'd gotten it on a character other than my main, who uses 310% speed swift flight form exclusively. My priest, for instance, who was in a Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run yesterday where I saw my first blue proto-drake drop, but lost it.

... Like managing to heal Heroic Pit of Saron in a PuG on my shaman from the very beginning with zero deaths. Does wonders for my self-confidence, since I stopped queueing her as heals for weeks after a particularly bad series of wipes in that instance.

... Like getting my mage leveled to the point where I'm getting something other than Azjol Nerub and Old Kingdom for the random daily. Man, those places were starting to annoy me.

Battered Hilt!

2010-01-13T01:41:00.002-07:00

First time I've seen it drop, and I won it on my enhance/resto shaman. *happy dance*

Of course, after looking at the rewards, and thinking hard about it, and I decided to try to sell it.

If it takes too long to sell, I'll probably assign it to one of my alts who needs it the worst... but right now, I need the gold, badly. Pre-3.3, I was making a thousand or two gold a week on enchanting mats - using Auctioneer Advanced / Enchantrix to scan for greens and blues to DE that would net me 3.5g or more in profit, sending to my druid for disenchanting, and back to my bank alt to list.

Now, after the group disenchant option, the AH is drowning in stacks and stacks of vastly underpriced Abyss Crystals, Dream Shards, and Infinite Dust. The only enchanting mats that still seem to be selling well are the Greater Cosmic Essences. I'm hoping the prices stabilize a bit instead of continuing to drop like a rock, and I can set a new "normal" price range and start unloading enchanting mats again.

In any event, my regular income has vanished, and I have been upgrading gear and having to buy gems, head and shoulder enchants, etc., as well as having to stock up on flasks for raiding. I detest daily quests, and the disenchanting business was working oh-so-well for me for many months. *sigh*

I really need to start farming on my herbalism alts again, and making flasks to sell, as they are holy cow expensive with everyone and their uncle trying to progress in ICC.

Adapt, or go broke, I guess.

Kili Rants... on class roles, and why DPS isn't just "meat in the room"

2010-01-12T14:18:00.003-07:00

So one of the WoW blogs that I have read with regularity for quite some time now is John Patricelli's, amusingly titled The Big Bear Butt. Having been a feral druid, I find the image familiar, and I love his knowledge of feral druid-y things, as well as his smart and witty takes on things outside the game.

Yesterday BBB highlighted, via another blogger he reads, a guest post at World of Matticus from last week, full of brashness, ego and controversy: Tanks and Healers Should Get the Biggest Rewards.

Tanks and healers are the most important classes for any group. Tanks set the pace of the group, the flow of experience and man the vanguard as they lead the team into battle. Healers mend the broken bones of their companions and keep the tanks a live – without the healers there could be no tanks and there could be no group. These are the two most important classes that exist in any MMORPG. But the DPS? They’re just meat in the room.

Now I've nearly always played a healer, and I've done my share of tanking as well - occasionally on my main, on my lowbie warrior pre-BC, my pally was leveled as prot from 40 on (and will be prot again when I'm ready to pick her up again), and on my feral/resto alt Kilikitty, who is strangely enough never kitty, but either bear or tree.

The reason my main is no longer a healer is that the guest blogger is correct - there is an enormous amount of stress and responsibility in raiding as a healer. Toward the end of BC, it became apparent that with a few notable exceptions (i.e. Brutallus with its short hard enrage timer), Blizzard's usual method for ramping up the difficulty of raid encounters was to require more out of the dedicated healers.

Sunwell especially was brutal on the healing classes - sure, Kalecgos required strict attention from mages as well to deal with the curses, but as one of the few healers who could also decurse, every global cooldown was an exercise in assessment and instant decision making. Do I cast a heal on myself? Do I decurse the tank? Do I heal the tank? Do I heal the mage so the mage can decurse the tank? If I heal the mage, will the mage continue to DPS the boss and let the tank die? Is anyone else healing the tank? Oh yeah, and beyond that, having to be aware of portal timing and location, as well as keeping enough distance between myself and the rest of my group, and having range on everyone I need to heal. It was severely stressful, and every wipe caused most of the healers to second guess every decision they made, except perhaps the paladins who were assigned to spam heals on the tank and ignore everything else, including their own health bar.

So yes, I switched to DPS because it was lower stress, and I was ready for a change... but let me tell you something.

Anyone who considers the DPS "just meat in the room" has never wiped to an enrage timer, or because sub-par DPS caused a fight to drag on so long that the healer ran out of mana or couldn't keep up with increasing damage.

True, most fights aren't designed that way these days - especially in 5-mans, where you get the majority of the Prima Donna Tank attitude. Sure, a tank/healer combo can duo pretty much every group quest out there, and a good many 5-man dungeons to boot. It may take a good while to kill the mobs, but they'll go down eventually. DPS in those cases is not essential, to be sure, although unless the healer has excellent regen, without some DPS to shorten the fights, they may not be able to last until the mobs are dead.

Of course, with good DPS, in some cases having a dedicated tank or healer isn't essential. Even the toughest group quests can be powered through without a dedicated tank, if there's a good healer, and with a tank and good DPS, you probably only need a hybrid DPS to toss a couple of heals now and then. We had a well geared tank and 4 DPS combo run heroic Violet Hold without heals a couple of months ago - the ret pally kept Judgment of Light up, and I tossed a couple of HoTs after boss fights, and that was it. Of course, that was a case of being seriously overgeared for the content.

But here's the crux of my beef with this post:

And raiding? That’s even more stressful. Not only do we even already acknowledge the importance of tanks and healers in this situation. We have Main Tanks and even Main Healers but who’s ever heard of a Main DPS before? There’s a huge amount of pressure to do these jobs right. Sub-par DPS can join a raid (even if it’s not desirable) but sub-par tanks cannot tank one and poor healers cannot heal one.

The "main tank"/"main healer" designation is irrelevant. In some guilds - mine for instance - the designations are never used. We have one bear tank, an officer, who far and away outgears our other tanks, and he's a most excellent tank. He does his job, he does it well, it's rare he misses a raid, and if anyone would be referred to as our "main tank", it would be him - but he's not. During BC, one of our other officers played a warrior, and at the time he was acknowledged as "main tank", but those were different days, when there were bosses that some classes could not tank (Illidan, I'm looking at you), and good epic gear was harder to get. We have not, as far as I can recall, ever used the term "main healer". Healers are given assignments based on the fight's requirements and their own personal preferences and class strengths, and no one class or person is any more important than the others.

There is no "main DPS" designation because DPS does not need one. Tanks and healers don't really need one either. The "main tank" designation is more of a recognition that this person is your most skilled and/or geared tank, and will most likely be given the most demanding tanking assignments. Designating "main healers" doesn't even serve that purpose, because different healing classes are best suited to different tasks. On one fight, the most crucial healing task may be to spam big heals on the tank, in which case a paladin might be best for the job, but on the next fight, there will be heavy raid damage better suited to AOE healers, and the tank healer's job is less demanding. It's just as valid to recognize the critical role played by the best DPS players in your raid, although the mechanics of different fights may give that honor to different people. "Main DPS" is not a term people use, but you might as well, if you're going to say "main healer".

And yes, a group with skilled and geared tanks and healers can often carry sub-par DPS in a raid, but many, many raid encounters are designed with soft or hard enrage mechanics, and the majority of the DPS cannot be bad and still beat those bosses. DPS players are a dime a dozen, and surely playing as DPS is less stressful than healing or tanking, but you will not get anywhere with a raid of 10 tanks and 15 healers. You need the whole team, and the whole team needs to be acknowledged as important to the success of the group.

For instance - two nights ago, a friend of mine and I queued together for a random heroic. He was a ret pally just gearing up to tank (geared enough for heroics, but only uncrittable at the time due to resilience from a couple of PVP epics), and I was playing my resto druid alt. We queued and instantly got a group... for Heroic Halls of Reflection. In vent I heard "oh crap...." but instead of bowing out, he decided to see if he could meet the challenge. He warned the group that he was a relatively new pally tank, and asked them to give that some consideration by giving him time to pick up mobs, focus firing appropriately, CCing when asked, and generally playing smart. All was well for the first 4 waves of mobs, truly, but when the first boss came out we came to a realization - our warlock absolutely, positively sucked.

Greg tanked the fight like a champ, and I healed my little tree heart out, but the fight dragged on, the stacking debuff stacked too high, my heals did less and less, and eventually we wiped because of a lack of DPS. We all ran back, except the lock, who eventually responded in party chat and said "sorry, was on the phone". And Greg, more kindly than I expected, asked him if he was on the phone during the whole boss fight as well. And linked the damage meter, with the lock bringing up the rear at less than 650 DPS. To be fair, it was only in the triple digits because of the debuff that lessened the damage output in addition to my healing output, but considering that he'd only been doing 1200 or so on the trash waves, I'm going to have to say we only got that many stacks of the debuff because his DPS was so abysmal in the first place.

We votekicked the lock, who was replaced by a hunter from our server. This hunter was one I knew of, and apparently the rogue in our group from another server had run across him before as well and not been impressed. Truth be told, the hunter was no great shakes either, but he at least kept a reasonable level of DPS, and we were able to breeze through the rest of the instance.

Yes, DPS is a dime a dozen. We were able to replace a horrible DPS with a mediocre DPS and finish a tough heroic. Most content is simply too easy, or designed such that a group with some sub-par DPS can be carried. That does not mean DPS should be considered as unimportant, or second class WoW citizens.

And as BBB points out in his blog post, the reason this has become a prevailing attitude is because of WoW's encounter design that demands dedicated tanks and healers, and discourages hybrid specs. You simply can't any longer have a hybrid spec that will serve to do more than one thing even close to as well as those who specialize, and in order to beat most encounters, unless you're overgeared for them, you do need to specialize.

John's suggestion, one that would certainly turn the game on its head, is to do away with dedicated tanks and healers entirely, and make every class a hybrid, able to perform whatever role the group needs, albeit in different ways. Rogues evasion-tanking, priests bubble-tanking, etc., with different mechanics to cause threat and avoid damage...

Dedicated healers? Do away with them as well.
Give every class a mix of healing and damage spells. Every class would be hybrid DPS/Healers.
You could choose to specialize in DPS or heals, the same as any other hybrid, but the capability of tossing heals would still be there, just like the Shaman, Druid and Paladin.
If you change the dynamic, tune content so that the DPS are mostly responsible for healing themselves, and working together to toss the tank a heal or two but mostly work together to control and kill the mobs.

While this changed dynamic would turn the game on its head to the point of it being nigh-unrecognizable, it does hold a certain appeal for me.

I came to this game from a text MUD, and was somewhat disappointed when I could not create a character that was anything close to my main there - a half-elf bard.

Bards on TorilMUD were almost, but not quite, a rogue - we could stealth like a rogue, and lockpick like a rogue, and wield rogue weapons (my stabby little glaives were bequeathed to me by a rogue friend, as items were not soulbound in this game). We even got the same backstab attack. Since there weren't damage meters, it's hard to say for certain, but I'm sure that our damage output was nothing like a rogue's, and we couldn't sneak up on enemies and one-shot assassinate them like a rogue could (albeit only once a day).

But we also provided group auras of a sort with our songs - we could sing while attacking, songs that provided a constant stream of healing, or an aura that increased our entire party's damage, or one that regenerated mana... We could forego using an offhand weapon and play an instrument instead, and increase the effect of our songs while still attacking with our main hand weapon.

You could have multiple bards in a party, but only one song being sung at a time - if a second bard accompanied the first, it would also increase the power of the song, allowing both bards to dual wield and do more damage, or adding instruments to provide even more powerful effects.

A typical session of grinding - analogous to trash packs in WoW - would have a single bard in a party with a warrior and perhaps a DPS class or two - and the bard switching between songs: Song of Offensive Harmony (to increase the damage done by the group) until people need heals, then Song of Healing until everyone's topped off, then back to Offensive Harmony or Song of Renewal if you're low on mana, as singing is a constant mana drain.

During a larger group raid, bards would most likely be singing Healing until there's a lull to regen mana, or if the clerics have it well in hand, an offensive song. There were also songs to slow the enemy's attacks, reduce casting time for your group's spellcasters, and do single target or AOE damage (probably less effective than a mage class spells, but nice for soloing).

I loved my bard, and got pretty good at her, but going through it in my head I can't see how WoW could implement the bard class with the current encounter dynamics without them being either severely underpowered, or severely overpowered. With the current dedicated tank/healer paradigm, if you used a bard as a healer, the healing song would need to be extremely powerful to keep a tank alive during heavy damage... or you couldn't use a bard as the group healer, and just make use of the healing song as an additional low level AOE healing boost like Healing Stream Totem, Judgment of Light, LOTP or Vampiric Embrace - with a dedicated healer, this would be pointless, and although other songs could be quite useful indeed, it wouldn't fill that different of a role than a ret pally aura or enhancement shaman totems.

But if the paradigm shifted? If every class had healing spells and abilities that self-healed or AOE healed while doing damage? If boss fights weren't about mobs smacking one person really hard while another person does nothing but spam heals and dispels? I could see room for a bard class there, in a party with a dedicated tank taking relatively steady damage, and everyone else doing damage as well as using some sort of utility spell or talent to heal, whether with a constant stream of healing or an occasional bigger heal to top off the tank.

Even without a bard class, I find that idea intriguing. I don't mind healing, really, or I wouldn't have 3 level 80s with healing offspecs (or main spec, in the case of my priest). But playing whack-a-mole with little green bars all night, and being one of a handful of people who automatically get blamed when someone dies (OMG HEAL ME YOU NOOB)? That gets tiresome. Let the rogue who jokes about bringing his bandages when the group needs a healer come along and toss a heal or two, in addition to the ret pally keeping up Judgment of Light and the enhancement shaman dropping Healing Stream and using the occasional GCD for an instant heal. Of course, feral and balance druids, as well as shadow priests, would probably need some adjustments because of the necessity of dropping forms to cast a healing spell other than healing with Imp LOTP or VE, causing a greater DPS loss due to the extra GCD to shift back into form, and costing extra mana.

But it's got possibilities. It could work, as it did with our Heroic VH party, so long as the encounter design allows it to work for groups that don't overgear the content.

So now that I've bored you with my life story...

2010-01-11T23:12:00.000-07:00

... just think what I can do with ranting about playing WoW!

I decided I needed this blog after leaving lengthy comments on no fewer than three separate WoW blogs in the last few days, as well as telling several stories to my friends because I just couldn't believe some of the stuff people do and say in game - especially with the new cross-server dungeon finder.

Rest assured, this won't all be rants about bad behavior in PUGs, but it's as good a place for that as any. It'll also be a good place to brag about achievements, whine about failures, and question the reasons why I still play this game.

As for that last thing, well, I'm still having fun. That's pretty much the end of it. :)

What Ho! A Blog!

2010-01-11T23:00:00.003-07:00

Well hello there, friends, guildies, bloggers, and complete strangers!

A little about me - personally, and as relates to this game we love, hate, and love to hate: World of Warcraft.

Personally, I am a 30-something female, widowed about 18 months ago, no kids, 2 cats, and currently looking for a job.   I'm also very cautious about giving out too much personal information on teh interwebz, so I'm not going to link to my other blog (yes, I have one), my Facebook page (that too), talk about where I live, etc. A few people - mostly guildies of mine - will know all manner of information that I won't be posting here. Please respect my right to avoid stalkers, kthx.

WoW-wise, I came to the game a little later than some. I was never a gamer, but I married one. I watched him play a text MUD for about 3 years before I decided to give it a try, and when several of his good friends quit the MUD for World of Warcraft, I watched him play that for about 3 months before I gave in and bought my own copy.

I rolled my first character in September of 2005, a night elf druid that grabbed my attention after watching my husband leveling one, even though at the time druids were teh suck. The shapeshifts were just the coolest thing ever to me. An altaholic to the core, that first day I also rolled a human rogue, even though my friend Dave said "be prepared to hear nothing but 'full on rogues' when you try to get into a group". I played them both off and on for a while, and my hubby played around with a few different characters as well, and then our friend Dave suggested I play a warrior for the sake of our group makeup, since he was halfway through leveling a priest at the time, and my hubby was playing around with a mage.   The warrior didn't suit me all that well, though I got her to level 44, with my other two characters in the upper 30's and low 40's, before I gave up on her and went back to the druid, post 1.8, and leveled her as feral.

We started out on Skullcrusher-US, which is a PVP server, because the majority of hubby's friends who were playing were on that server at the time. There was a small faction of his college friends who were playing on a PVE server, and a few of his work buddies who played elsewhere, but the Skullcrusher crew were the real gamers, and most often online to chat with us and help us learn our way around.

I filled my character slots on Skullcrusher with alts galore, and scattered a few alts about other servers - horde and alliance alike. I leveled slowly and finally hit 60 alongside my hubby's paladin in the summer of 2006. By this point, our friend Dave was in an end game raiding guild, and had gotten us invited to their sister guild. Lucid only allowed raiding mains and one alt per raider, so all other alts and friends/family were placed in Lucidity.

I got promoted to Lucid when they started losing members to real life, to further progressed guilds, and to the perceived futility of wiping for hours on end to progression fights when even T3 would be replaced with Outlands greens in just a few months. And then there was division in the ranks between those who wanted to keep pushing to down C'Thun, and those who hated AQ40 with a passion and wanted to try to down as many bosses in Naxx as possible. Many of them just didn't bother to show up for the instances they didn't want to raid, and eventually Lucid took a break from raiding until the expansion, while many of us dedicated a lot of time to PVP.

After expansion, a group of dedicated players in our guild pushed to level to 70, geared up and started mastering Karazhan, while my hubby and I played more casually and took about a month to level.   The guild struggled with trying to keep a solid raiding base with two 10 man teams, and never made the transition to 25 man. Eventually, the officers made the decision to part ways, some heading to Immortality, one of the top guilds on the server, others heading to Vindictive, which was a bit more laid back, and willing to take as many of our members who wanted to apply. My friend Dave, as well as some of my favorite officers, chose Vind, so I followed along, despite the fact that they insisted I spec full resto.

I raided with Vindictive all through the rest of BC, from their first Magtheridon kill to Felmyst, when the combination of a very hard instance and another looming expansion killed interest in raiding. I became a pretty solid healer during that time, with a strong interest in both feral and balance offspecs, and built a good set of gear for either. I was getting frankly tired of healing the further into raid content we got, but I was competitive enough to do my absolute best nonetheless.

Once our token balance druid left the guild for a chance to finish Sunwell in Dark Entropy, I offered to switch to balance, but the officers felt it was more important to have strong healers for what remained of our progression attempts. After we called off raiding, I switched my main to balance, and never looked back. I also leveled my rogue, priest and mage to 70, and a prot pally to 60, and started a tauren balance druid alt on Khadgar-US, where my hubby and some of our friends had rerolled.

The release of WOTLK came very shortly after my husband passed away, and without a job or a social life, I threw myself into leveling and learning my class as quickly and as well as I could, to make sure I could hold my own as DPS and not get asked to switch back to healing. Of course, with my main no longer a healer, I promptly leveled three alts to 80 and have them dual spec'd to heal.

Currently my lineup of reasonably frequently played characters looks like this:

Kiliani - 80 NE Druid - Balance PVE/PVP dual specs - Skullcrusher-US
Kilikitty - 80 NE Druid - Feral tank/Resto PVE dual specs - Skullcrusher-US
Moofyre - 80 Tauren Druid - Balance PVE spec - Grizzly Hills-US (yes, that's 3 level 80 druids...)
Facemeltress - 80 Human Priest - Holy/Shadow dual specs - Skullcrusher-US
Taressa - 80 Draenei Shaman - Enhancement/Resto dual specs - Skullcrusher-US
Tanasa - 77 Human Rogue - Currently unspec'd, usually Assassination - Skullcrusher-US
Leiseletta - 76 Gnome Mage - Frost spec for leveling - Skullcrusher-US
Foxface - 75 Draenei Hunter - BM spec for leveling - Skullcrusher-US
Marisiel - 62 Human Paladin - Currently unspec'd, usually Protection - Skullcrusher-US

I deleted my warrior because she bored me to make room for my feral/resto druid, my warlock is stuck at 21 (and I decided to hold off on leveling her and reroll worgen in Cataclysm), and I have no interest in playing a DK.

So, that's me, in a (rather large) nutshell, and where I'm coming from!