The Road from Durotar

Collected musings

2011-12-08T10:54:00.003Z

I'm enjoying patch 4.3. It's great (and sadly slightly surprising) to enjoy the new instances. While they're still new - and people still have use for the drops - they're both interesting and challenging.

Wipes do happen, and while there is some whinging people mostly accept it and carry on. This will all change once people are overgeared and just running them for the badges.

It occurs to me that when that happens I can just stop, and PvP for JPs - even though the exchange rate is a bit painful. I'd rather be playing against real people than just going through the motions with a group of people who'd rather not be there. I do though first need to get the caster shield and mail shoulders drops - they're my lowest iLevel pieces, and only upgradable there or in raids (or the troll heroics) :(

Grulnak still doesn't "feel right" in some instances, like Shadowfang. Shank on the other hand fits right in. In my (possibly odd) mind, it's OK for an orc to be in a dwarf / orc dungeon (like Blackrock) or an "open air" one, but human instances like Shadowfang or Karazhan needs an undead.

Syl is totally right

2011-12-06T14:50:00.000Z

Syl over at Raging Monkeys is totally right about MMORPG being a misnomer. I think the "massively" is more of a nuanced point, but the RPG bit definitely doesn't hold true. More's the pity.

Patch 4.3 goals

2011-12-02T14:03:00.003Z

With the patch out my goals are:

Learn the new instances while they're still new
Take advantage of void storage and transmogrification and -
- Complete my tier 1 set (I only saw it drop while on my priest in classic)
- Complete an 'orc thug' set (big spiky shoulders and not much else, like the original loading screen orc)
- Complete a Go'el-type shaman set
Level Grulgok some more (he's currently 82) while the 7th anniversary bonus is still in effect

Grulnak 4 - 1 Grulgok

A question of character

2011-11-25T07:56:00.000Z

WoW generally operates on a Dungeons and Dragons level of depth and characterisation: we go into dungeons, kill creatures and take their stuff.

Our motivations are some mixture of curiosity, greed and desire for greater power. And perhaps if Alliance-side some view that we're the heroes and they're the bad guys. But from the Horde side that last one doesn't work for me - we'll smash you if you get in our way or threaten us, but otherwise we'll live and let live.

This has been bothering me for a while now, especially as I can't help seeing Grulnak as a bit of a hippy, into balance with the spirit world, ancestor veneration and the like. So I've been faced with a choice of some severe retcon on his character or finding a character who fits my in-game goals - raiding, gearing up for this and exploring raids I missed in classic WoW.

So I've been reviewing my alts - Grazznak the warlock; Eadwyn the Forsaken death knight (and hence faintly magical warrior); and Grulgok. The first two have excellent soloing prospects but, being both in their 60s, seem unlikely to ever get to 85. Logging into Grulgok, reviewing his gear accumulated in Wrath, and fitting him with a pair of two-handed axes gave me a real buzz. I can see him, with alchemy and enchanting to make up for his weaknesses in a magical world, and a cunning and ambitious nature sending him into dungeons for loot to enhance his power and standing.

But I die a little inside every time he has to run any great distance without ghost wolf, cross a significant body of water or wait for a heathstone on cooldown.

So, whether to make Grulgok my main, or to find a way to progress Grulnak without dungeon grinding?

Tanking at max level no longer fun

2011-10-14T19:10:00.004+01:00

Since well geared max level characters have been able to get useful gear out of dungeons (i.e. from badge gear), tanking them has stopped being fun. The simple reason being impatience - at least some of the group just want to kill the boss asap and get out.

As a healer as long as I have enough mana I'm ready for the pull.

As a tank the process is more like -

Assess the kill order and mark
Chose a good time (i.e. are the mobs moving, is there a patrol nearby?)
Pull
Get to melee range
Get off an AoE move

Half way through step 1 a modern PUG is bored. If someone's not started dps before step 4 has started it's a miracle. And of course any deaths are the tank's fault.

Before max level the impatience isn't there. And in the original game well geared max level characters didn't go into dungeons, except perhaps to help a friend.

But this has now changed, and the fun has gone with it.

Too much metagaming

2011-06-17T15:14:00.000+01:00

It occurred to me today that one of the reasons that WoW has lost its shine for me is my approach to the game - I'm metagaming, not roleplaying.

Shank is a third of the way through level 84, and fairly decently geared in mostly blues from instance drops. I'm aiming, not surprisingly, to get as geared as possible as quickly as possible, to speed my entry into heroics. So resources like Kadomi's shopping list and Vexryn's gear list are being consulted to fill the gaps. With the odd exception, such as avoiding the Schnottz quests (just too Nazi / pop-culture, sorry) and hence missing out on a shoulder upgrade, my next actions are governed by a researched optimal path rather than roleplaying considerations or just exploring the world. And so I've done a complete about-face from when I first set off into this game over 6 years ago. It also serves to highlight to me just how far behind current progression I am.

However, I think it's an inevitable part of playing a MMOG (and yes, I've deliberately dropped the 'RP' part). Ever since I first stepped in to Zul'Gurub at level 60, and found myself woefully ill equipped to tank my first raid, and later learned what raid preparation was really all about with Grulnak, the metagaming part of WoW has been on the ascendant for me. And in a MMOG I think this is correct - unless you're in a role playing guild on a roleplaying server you're otherwise letting your group down.

So my conclusion is to (1) accept how things are and not let it bother me so much and (2) find another outlet for my inner RPG nerd.

Back from hiatus

2011-04-27T22:56:00.001+01:00

Having geared Grulnak up to heroic healer levels with some serious instance grinding shortly after he dinged 85, I then went on hiatus. I've felt for a while that orc shamans are just out of place in instances and raids (although not battlegrounds) - "I want to gear up so I can see the content" just isn't an RP reason for instancing!

So I've been pondering just what character I would feel comfortable raiding with, and played some Eve Online.

Eve I liked, and probably would still be playing if not for what was for me a deal-breaker: the lack of collision detection. Fair enough, it's a standard MMORPG thing, but in Eve just feels wrong. The two most significant example are (1) how, when in warp, you can fly right through planets / moons and (2) similarly if you're fighting near a structure in space you'll often fly right through it in pursuit of your target. It's a silly thing to put one off a game, but that's personal preference for you.

So back to WoW and some decisions - for race it has to be Orc or Forsaken, for role it has to be tank or healer. For raiding motivation the only Orcs I can see fitting the bill are warlocks / mages, as in a quest for knowledge / power. I've tried playing Grulgok before with mercenary as the justification, and it just felt wrong. So that brought me to the Forsaken and after first levelling Bekket to 80 and then changing my mind I've now decided to make Shank my PvE main. Time permitting Grulnak will still see a look in as an explorer and battleground PvPer.

Grul - 85

2011-02-19T20:12:00.000Z

Ding, 85, finally. Now the gear-up begins in earnest.

Ironic achievement

2010-05-24T22:07:00.001+01:00

On my eighth kill of the non-heroic Black Knight he finally drops the Black Heart, so of course I roll Need. As of course do the dps DK and druid. A good time to roll 100 :)

Most of the group are happy for me, but not the death knight. I'm not sure it's me who's Needy...

I'm assuming the cross-realm bribery attempt is ignorant, rather than cynical. You can never be sure though!

How to enjoy PUG tanking

2010-05-24T21:38:00.001+01:00

This isn't actually a general guide, as it only really works for someone in my position -

I'm fairly decently geared already
I'm not raiding, so Frost emblems aren't really of much interest to me*

Only sign up for specific dungeons
I need six items from the ICC dungeons and one from heroic Black Knight. So I don't run the original level 80 heroics, with their "gogogo" mentality", only the harder instances where people expect things to be a bit slower and more careful. So the difficulty comes from the mobs, not your group members.

Be humble
When I stuff up I admit it, and hopefully learn from it. And I'll at least listen to advise, even when it's not well presented. Not using Spell Reflect on Devourer of Souls? Doh! But I'm learning, and one day I'll be perfect...

Outgear at least one of your DPS
This certainly helps. It feels a bit wierd the first time you're the best geared in the group, but in a good way.

Confidence in your abilities
Partly it's reassuring to know that, once you have comparable gear to the DPS, you can comfortably hold threat. So all those times you were told you were a noob, it probably wasn't (always) true. It's also nice to know, when the healer randomly dies, you can probably string together some cooldowns and probably complete the fight.

All the stress and grief it's taken to get to this point really has been worth it, and tanking is fun again. I do still need to make more effort on reading up on tactics though, rather than find out the tricks afterwards.

* I have one item from Frost emblems, the chances are I'll never have enough emblems for a second item, so why endure the pain?

Sights I never saw at 70

2010-05-17T22:45:00.002+01:00

The Grand Ballroom in Karazhan, with all the guests still dancing.

A great thing about being the tank is you're leading the way and making decisions about pulls (whether or not your group follow them is another matter...).

As a healer you're probably right at the back, and you often only see areas - especially in a raid - when they're partially cleared.

As an encore to Molten Core I thought I'd take a look at Karazhan, with the minor goal of getting the Mongoose enchant for Grulgok. Moroes was surprisingly easy, but I need to go there again with my priest and a tank (as the priest is 180 rep short of exhalted with the Violet Eye - another nagging lose end). I'm not sure which name to refer to my priest with at the moment, as I'm not sure whether to keep him as a dwarf, or faction change him to a Foresaken or a female blood elf.

"Soloing" Molten Core

2010-05-15T21:16:00.005+01:00

Not sure it quite counts - I dual-boxed the place with Grulnak and Grulgok - but I was still pretty pleased to get the achievement.

I'd been as far as wiping to Majordomo in classic WoW, so I'd never seen Ragnaros and this felt like a nagging loose end. WHU's Extreme Soloing guides had given me inspiration (and tactics for most of the fights) so I was pretty sure this should be doable with two fairly well geared 80s, although I had my doubts a few times.

Grulnak was spec'd 40/0/31 - restoration as far as Cleanse Spirit for decursing, then as much elemental dps as possible. Grulgok kept his normal tank spec, which probably wasn't optimal, but since I'm too poor at the moment to get him duel spec it was more convenient for general play.

My main worry was nature and fire immunity (since my only AoE is Thunder Clap, Fire Nova and Magma Totem), but it was a lot better than I expected, with only the fire elementals being flame immune and no nature immunity that I could see. Hence the core hound packs where killable, although some managed to respawn two or three times on me.

The only bosses to cause me problems were those where I needed to move the two characters simultaneously - so one wipe on Gehennas (where running out of AoE and decursing at the same time proved slightly hard), several on Baron Geddon and one on Majordomo Executus.

I was worried for a while that Geddon might not be doable for me, at least not without fire resist gear, as I was just taking too much damage. In the end I switched Grulnak to full resto spec, shielded up Grulgok then ran out of range before running back in to reshield and heal to full when necessary. Meanwhile with Grulgok I just needed to run out of the AoE, pay attention to which direction my healer was in after the disorientation of being blown up, and very slowly "dps" Geddon down.

With Majordomo the major factor was to pay enough attention to Grulnak to notice when he's been teleported into the lava pit, and when he has aggro from Majordomo. I failed on lava awareness the first time around but otherwise he was straight forward.

So I finally got to see Ragnaros in person. A very cool experience, even to my jaded eye.

Again I was worried that here was a boss I couldn't beat. With no real fire resistance Grulgok was punted far and wide, at best taking massive falling damage at worst landing in the lava ring and dying there. Eventually I managed to position Grulgok such that he would land on top of the ridge that Grulnak was using to prevent knockbacks on him, and hence take less damage but most importantly not end up swimming in lava.

Apparently the punt can be addressed by spamming Intercept, and hence never having to worry about where you land.

Need more rage^H^H^H^H attitude

2010-04-22T05:50:00.001+01:00

This post was going to be titled "No more tanking for PUGs", but then I calmed down, and then got irritable.

I've had enough of PUGers like that overgeared ret paladin (who drops consecrate on the portals in VH before the mobs have even appeared) or worse that warlock (who's hurling abuse while waiting for the second boss in Occulus to be pulled, not realising or caring that the shadowpriest is still mounted having got tangled up with a patrol and I've gone back to help out).

I'm geared enough now that the dungeon finder thinks I'm ready to tank Forge of Souls heroic (it went nicely, thanks), so I no longer need to enter heroics in a slightly apologetic fashion on account of my gear.

It's time to make sure that I'm always on top of my own game, and then (ab)use the power given by the fact that few people want to tank PUGs (for some odd reason), and call out those manifestations of Gabe's theory.

If you want to run a heroic in a competent fashion, that's great. If you want to faceroll the Emblem piñata with no consideration for the fact that those other pixels in your group are actually other people, then welcome to the vote kick.

As an aside, I'm not sure whether FoS went well because people know that the ICC heroics are hard and hence pay attention, or I just got lucky, but it was a welcome end to an otherwise not fun evening.

For those not geeky enough to get the title, that's computer literate humour apparently...

What role to fill in farm content?

2010-04-19T20:46:00.001+01:00

Number one daughter woke me at 6am this morning, and being awake I had a couple of choices. I could make an early start on my day's heavy workload, or tank a quick dungeon in the hope of upgrading one of my shockingly poor tanking trinklets.

So I find myself in Azjol-Nerub. Boss one goes down like clockwork. As we get set for Hadronox I notice that the feral druid's dps is fairly low, especially given his Gearscore (4.8k). I wonder if he's phoning it in, or perhaps if the mage (2.3k Gearscore) has somehow managed to AoE his way to the top of the meter. Switch Vigilance to the mage, proceed to down Hadronox, only minorly irritated by the paladin healer pulling the add groups before I'm ready. Essence of Gossamer drops, which more than makes up any worries I have.

Then, on Anub'arak the adds get a bit out of control on the third burrow phase, I fail to tank an elite which eats the healer, we wipe.

Proceed to PUG wipe post-mortem. Do not pass Go, do not collect Emblems of Frost.

First thing first, I apologise for letting the healer die. The tone of the rest of the debate was actually fairly pleasant for a PUG - one of the dps blames the healer, the druid blames the dps (and me by implication) for letting the little adds get out of control, and not killing the elites fast enough (and mentions in passing that he's in PvP gear, hence the low damage for his Gearscore). I'm guessing we were too tired, and too close the end, for any real rancour. Either way no one quit, and we killed the boss fine on the second attempt.

I came away from this wondering, not for the first time recently, if I should give up on tanking altogether. In a more reflective mode, I'm wondering what role do I want to be in on farm content.

I've tried dps. While it has had it's fun moments for me, more often it's routine at best, and I find myself slipping into bad habits with one eye on the Recount numbers. And when a tank or healer drops, or isn't very good, I find myself wishing that I was in one of those key roles.

I enjoy healing, especially in non-farm raids. But on farm content it's very dull and it becomes tempting to be distinctly lax.

I enjoy tanking, when I'm not feeling pressured for speed or by trigger-happy dps. On the plus side, although it does become somewhat routine there's always the need to pay attention - whether because the dps outgear you hence you're struggling for threat, or through bad play or bad luck. Hence it's never as dull as the other roles can be.

My problem with tanking will always be the amount of preparation involved - both being geared and knowing the fights - especially given my relatively limited gaming time. And I'll never enjoy farm content - I'd far rather be switching to a new alt where smaller investments of time can make much greater difference in capability. But if I can keep this in perspective I'll probably keep tanking.

An Ode to Blackrock Depths

2010-04-12T08:04:00.000+01:00

Or what vanilla WoW got right but WotLK gets wrong.

In my youth Blackrock Depths and Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire were pretty much the end game for casual players. I'm not sure whether that's the reason for the scope of BRD, or if in the days of 40 person raids Blizzard just had a bigger vision that's now been toned down into bite-sized chunks of content.

Whatever the reason, Blackrock is still the epitome to me of what fantasy RPGs should be about. It's a big, multi-layered instance, that actually feels like real architecture rather than just a complicated corridor. When was the last time you got lost in a TBC or WotLK instance (apart from Occulus that is)? When was the last time you actually had a choice of routes?

It was possibly too big, but groups would happily spend several hours in there - probably at least one person was aiming for their Molten Core attunement but others perhaps wanted to raid the Black Vault, or you'd be with a blacksmith that needed to use the anvil. On your first visit there you couldn't even get to the end - your first priority was to get your Shadowforge key. Did you need to start a fight in the bar to get to the latter parts of the instance, or did the succubus there owe you a favour and hence would arrange an exit for you?

It was an exploring, questing journey, not a race to the end boss to get your emblems then zone out.

Lowbie PUGs - fun and profit (sometimes)

2010-03-30T20:12:00.001+01:00

Frequenty PUGing of level 80 heroics has made me a bit weary of the responsility of tanking or healing, so I've been dabbling with my lowbie dps-with-utility alts, namely Crennick (level 34 mage) and Adanadel (level 66) hunter.

The first thing you notice about lower level groups is that they're more friendly and helpful than the end game groups. Perhaps they're playing for fun (after all, if they were power levelling they'd probably not be there) rather than running the instance mainly for badges.

The other thing you notice is how different instances are at different levels. In Scarlet Monastry you only see two or three mobs per pull, so as long as you pull and don't charge in, and watch for patrols, you can't really go wrong. This is probably a good thing - the tank we had there was clearly DPSing with a two-hander and not really tanking at all. Since he'd handle perhaps two mobs at a time this let me play utility - sheeping the extra mob, nuking them off the healer or counterspelling a caster - so was more fun than pure dps, although you've got to feel sorry in general for groups that "tanks" like him end up in. Perhaps just he's queuing as a tank for a shorter queue, perhaps still learning - the only drawback to the latter is that nobody seemed to be pointing out his mistakes, so how's he going to learn? Perhaps the Dungeon Finder has taught us to be too deferential to tanks?

After Lich King and classic instances, Burning Crusade instances come as a bit of a shock. You forget how big some of the pulls are in those places, and how groups used to expect at least one - preferably two - of the DPS to have crowd control. The problem is these days everyone forgets in instances that they have CC abilities, so the tank gathers all the mobs up, DPS AoE them down - and quite often the tank dies.

As a result Adanadel's Mana-Tombs group got through three tanks (a druid, a DK and a warrior) and three healers (a druid, a shaman, then another druid) before eventually clearing the place. In a group with a mage and a hunter this really should never have been a problem, but it's rarely any good using crowd control once the tank is already dead! Lesson learned (or more correctly re-learned) but it just shows how lazy we've all become compared to the "bad old days" of BC's sometimes brutal instances.

Heroics no longer fun

2010-03-27T20:48:00.000Z

Disclaimer - yes, I've installed Gearscore. But only for these reasons -

When I'm tanking, I'll have a quick idea of how badly the DPS outgear me
I'm curious to know what my own gearscores are (for Grulnak and Grulgok), so that I have some reference point for the numbers that are bandied about in chat.

I've never voted to kick anyone because their gear wasn't up to scratch, only ever based on their attitude.

Anyway, onto the real point of this post.

The other day I signed up to tank a random heroic, and as is often the case all of the other players significantly outgeared me. I'm not badly geared, having unbuffed 556 defense, 22.9k armour, 26.9k health and a combined dodge and parry of 37.8%. Along with 23 expertise and 156 hit rating I'd once have been considered pretty well geared for a heroic tank.

Because (I assume) of my gear level, the random was an "old" heroic - Utgarde Pinnacle - which we proceeded to faceroll through. There was a slight moment of tension when only myself and one other wanted to kill the first boss - the remainder wanted to get on and get their Frost emblems - but presumably because I was the tank they hung around for an extra few seconds and killed her too.

The sad thing is, this wasn't challenging, or even particularly fun. The run was messy and displayed all sorts of bad habits - but it didn't matter because of the gear levels involved. I wondered at times if a tank was even needed - perhaps just a plate geared DPS on the boss fights, perhaps not even that.

I usually enjoy - and occasionally get wiped - when healing the ICC heroics, but the "old" Wrath heroics are just pointless for overgeared players. I'm almost pining for the original WoW days, when raiders simply didn't run heroics.

Treading water

2010-03-23T21:38:00.000Z

My wife and I have a new baby (now 3½ weeks old) so my raiding has come to a sudden halt, and WoW is very much on the back burner.

When I have had the chance to play it's been the occasional daily heroic to gather up those non-raid healing upgrades available to Grulnak, some heroic tanking and my ongoing alt angst.

In the last couple of days I've got the Arcane Loops of Anger and the Drape of the Violet Tower. A couple more emblems will net me the Band of the Invoker, which is my last clear Emblem of Triumph upgrade, and then time will tell whether I continue to gather Emblems of Frost for further upgrades, or when / if I can get back into raiding.

Having satisfied myself that Grulgok can competantly tank heroics (although definitely with room for improvement) my question is how much I want to tank heroics for PUGs, and how much effort I want to spend gearing up a second character to ICC 5-man levels.

And then of course there's the eternal alt question, which really boils down to whether I want / need a character who's more human / "generic fantasy" in motivation and appearance.

Why chose a shaman?

2010-03-19T21:21:00.001Z

Alterac Volley did a piece giving a thumbnail description of the classes. I'm not quite sure who the audience were for this - experienced players probably have a pretty good idea of what the classes are about, and new players will get more value out of the Blizzard descriptions (whatever their well-publicised shortcomings) and are more likely to find them. Two things did strike me though about these descriptions:

they are applicable to levelling and PvP (where good players exploit the full abilities of their class) but not really to end-game raiding where players are far more pigeon-holed. In fact, very little prepares a new WoW player for what the end game has in store.
the shaman description is way off. Are shamans really this little understood?

So, with a view to my audience (primarily me, and my constant alt indecision, with a view to who my main should be for Cataclysm), here's my view of what makes a shaman.

We're a damage / healing hybrid, with the emphasis on the damage. Sort of a reverse priest.

We have a strong healing spec, especially in small groups - we're better group healers than a paladin, better tank / burst healers than a druid.

We have good damage specs, and no aggro dump... so we probably cause tanks more problems than any class other than dps warriors! Elemental is a bit boring, and doesn't scale that well at high gear levels, enhancement is melee and therefore Blizzard (and raid leaders to a lesser extent) hate them. Still, we can do good damage, in distinctive and flavourful ways.

But what keeps me coming back to my shaman?

Reincarnation - with credit to Babasyzygy the "method school of acting feign death". The single thing that I miss most when not on my shaman.

Wolves - Ghost Wolf, especially instant GW, is my second favourite shaman ability. It's odd that I don't really have much interest in druid and their forms, but Ghost Wolf always cheers me up. Spirit Wolves are also deeply cool.

Water Walking - especially now that we can ride on water too. I have fond memories of walking across Darrowmere Lake as a shortcut to Scholomance, and since then it's never got old.

Totems - I wouldn't say that I "like a class that uses totems to support your attack", and their lack of mobility is a bit of a pain, but I'm rather fond of my cleansing and tremour totems. It's just nice to be able to drop these and forget about poisons, disease and fear (to some extent). If dispelling becomes less spammy in Cataclysm their advantages may become less clear cut, but they're invaluable at the moment.

To me those are the highlights, and the first two especially means I'll struggle to ever demote Grulnak from being my main.

Heroic tank

2010-02-09T20:42:00.000Z

Grulgok tanked his first heroic last night, in the company of a guild healer and ret paladin, and two hunters from the Dungeon Finder. Thankfully the dps were fairly well disciplined and so the run went fairly smoothly, but it will be a while before I'm ready to throw myself into random heroics with confidence.

I'm hoping that the Dungeon Finder will soon let us add cross-realm friends, as a counterpoint to the existing ignore functionality, as I'm starting to appreciate the level to which it's the dps who make a run good or bad - as long as the tank is up to a certain minimum standard of compentance and gear. And as a corollary feeling slightly guilty of some of the instances I've run as an elemental shaman with more of an eye on my dps output than on my threat.

Level 80 (in plate)

2010-02-07T23:05:00.000Z

I dinged 80 on Grulgok just after midnight last night, and have spent the day trying to get to 535 defence to be uncrittable in heroics. Despite having items such as Hellscream's Handguards of Conquest which were just not available to those who first hit 80, it's no easy feet.

A big part of my trouble is that, not having tanked at 70, the trinklet scene is looking very sparse. I am cheating a bit of course, relying almost exclusively on Polar's Easy Pre-Naxx Tank Gear List and some AH and crafted items, so I am trying to shortcut a lot of the grinding of the level 80 normal instances.

Overall I'm rather enjoying the tanking experience, although I'm not sure Grulgok will ever become my raiding main as my low attendance would be too problematic. It's good to be out ahead of the group, planning the pulls and so on, rather than just following behind and throwing heals. And bizarrely the frenetic nature of warrior tanking (compared to what I understand to be the more measured, rhythmic pace of paladins or death knights), which in turn leads to a feeling of better control (or at least lots of options) is a big plus of the class contrary to my initial expectations.

Loving tanking

2010-01-19T22:19:00.000Z

I've pretty much settled on levelling to 80 with Grulgok, my orc prot warrior, and retiring Shank to the warmth of Booty Bay.

Thanks to the Dungeon Finder and the daily random (I still can't quite believe that I can collect Emblems of Triumph without even being 80 yet) I've been spending a lot of time tanking. In fact I'm barely questing enough to line up my next dungeon quests and do the non-dungeon quests that give good tanking blues.

Currently I'm glad to be an orc, and a warrior rather than a death knight at that. The prot tanking style is very (perhaps too) active in style, compared to that for DKs. While I'm constantly struggling against the global cooldown I do find that it is more proactive, more controlled and more fun.

And being able to charge while in combat - or even charge at all - is as great as ever.

At the moment I'm finding I have nice AoE threat, and most runs go fairly smoothly, although there are still the occasional bad pulls or over-eager DPSers. I'm not sure how much of it is due to my increased confidence, and hence less feeling of stress and inclination to blame myself when things go badly, but that certainly can't hurt.

I need to enjoy it while it lasts though - once I get to 80 I'm expecting that life will suddenly get much harder as the average DPS gear level will step up considerably compared to my own.

A question of roleplaying

2010-01-13T21:57:00.000Z

I'm still struggling to decide between my various alts, currently my plan is to concentrate on just two characters, a tank and a healer. I've narrowed the choice down to: shaman and warrior (orc), shaman and warrior (dwarf, once Cataclysm arrives) or priest and warrior (Forsaken).

Dwarves are probably my favourite race in the game, followed closely by orcs. Having recently written the Alliance off as bland I probably won't go down that route, otherwise it'd be very tempting. The main appeal with the undead is that they're human-like, and hence seem to be better catered for by Blizzard. I'm often struggling to work out what my motivation is for some quests as an orc, whereas for a human / dwarf / undead it's more obvious. The drawbacks of this plan are several: I don't like the posture of Shank, my undead warrior; with a priest instead of a shaman I'd really miss reincarnation, water walking, ghost wolf and other flavour spells; and I'm not fond of the embittered outlook of the Forsaken.

So, I'm currently tending towards an orcy future, but I need to get more into the right roleplaying frame of mind. Because even though I'm on a PvE server, I don't want to play a MMOG without the RP.

More tanking practice

2009-12-31T22:40:00.000Z

I've been trying to get a random group for Old Hillsbrad for Shank to tank, to compare with the death knight experience of the place. Since it still has an attunement it's not worked for me so far, but I do find the queue for randoms is quick.

There's still lots of room for improvement in my tanking - things like remembering to use Last Stand or potions (or even remembering to keep an eye on my own health), remebering to put Vigilence on someone in the group, and re-marking skull once the first target goes down (although frequently enough skull is the last target standing...!).

I also can't always remember which skills I have already on Shank, and which only on Grulgok, such as Intervene.

There are also various things about my setup to address, such as ensuring my camera is zoomed out enough to see caelNamePlates properly and what's going on in general. I also need to get a tanking configuration for Grid, especially to show me if anyone other than myself has aggro.

I'm getting there though - and finding warrior tanking a lot easier than in the old days (walking uphill both ways through snow, etc...). Thunderclap (and Shockwave where necessary) are amazing against large non-elite packs, such as the skeletons at the end of Auchenai Crypts.

Meanwhile Grulnak half way to friendly with the Ashen Verdict, in search of a rather nice ring upgrade.

My least favourite role?

2009-12-29T19:46:00.000Z

Having decided to quit the Alliance I'm going back through my list of things to try out properly by doing some instances on my Night Elf hunter!

I wanted to make sure I had a decent view of the pure dps role, and ever since hunters were the definitive raid pullers (and the better ones the kings of crowd control) the class has appealed to me.

I'm glad to have tried it, having found that their utility and survivability - plus the tactical aspect of having a pet - makes them my favourite DPS class.

Thanks to Dungeon Finder I managed to find a couple of groups to Hellfire Ramparts. Although the main lesson there was don't use DF during daytime, with one of the groups turning out to be incredibly juvinile.

In one group the tank was very inexperienced - but was good enough to forwarn us of the fact - so I even got to do some old-school hunter pulling. The tactical view that you get as a ranged DPS, the ability to rescue the healer with your personal tank (and be gratefully noticed!), the ability to survive bad pulls - or even complete them yourself after a near-wipe - all add an extra facet to the DPS role that makes it more than about the numbers.

To do the role full time I'd need a lot more practice, but in the meantime I'm happy to put Adanadel to the top of my DPS alt list. And then retire him again.

Why I ??? tanking

2009-12-14T22:52:00.001Z

Best feature of patch 3.3? Clearly the cross-realm Dungeon Finder. On the end-game side it may weaken the ties of guild, as PUG runs now appear to be the norm. On the enormous plus side, not only have the PUGs I've seen so far been far better behaved than you might expect (although no brighter or able to express themselves without l33t speak) but also it's really revitalised the pre-end-game experience, as you can now realistically run instances again with same-level groups.

I've been tanking on my death knight and druid (in the latter case despite signing up for tank / healer / dps) and really enjoying it. It seems as though, since everyone's clear that it's a totally random PUG, players' expectations are lower and hence they (generally) play their class properly and give thought to things like threat. Or it may just be that, since damage meters don't work cross-realm, one major source of idiot play has been removed.

I'm currently back to the view that tanking is my favourite role, in a way because of the leadership it confirs. In a good group you set the pace, decide which groups to pull, and so on. In fact, my major source of stress in the past has been when I'm tanking but not to a pace I'm comfortable with, usually due to some pushy dps who wants to kill stuff now! I'm currently too slow, and also not fully aware of the big picture, but that will come if I get a chance to practice and the more basic parts of tanking become second nature.

I still enjoy healing, especially in the harder instances that have come with the patch. The downside to healing is that sometimes you just feel you're following the group around and watching green bars, but in challenging situations you do get a chance to put your skills to use and really make a difference. Sometimes your efforts even get noticed by the group! Another upside to healing is that I can realistically gear up to a suitable level for end-game raiding, something that I don't think I could commit enough time to as a tank.

And so dps would seem my least favourite role. Partly it lacks the significence of the other two roles - not because dps isn't important, especially in raid situations, but because you're just one cog of 3 in a group. This is part of what I think leads to the obsession with meters - given what's seen as the least important of roles, there's a natural desire to be the biggest fish in the smaller pond. That being said, I'm really glad of having an elemental dual spec - not only is it really handy to switch between roles in some raid fights, but it's also great being able to blow stuff up really quickly while questing!

The view from the other side, revisited

2009-12-08T20:29:00.000Z

While waiting for the patch to hit I've been spending some time on my Alliance druid, as with Conquest emblems about to become outmoded I'm not really motivated to do many end-game instances. I'm really enjoying the versatility of a druid - while feral levelling spec'd he can still pretty much heal so can fulfil any role I wish. I also rather enjoy being a buffing class. On the down side I'm still not a fan of feral dps, although I do enjoy stealth and by now I have sufficient talent points and abilities for the power of the spec to offset my fundamental lack of comfort with energy-based classes.

Sad to say, my current view of the Alliance side of things is that it's rather bland. On the one hand it's all as it should be, but the familiar genre staples rather pale when compared to my usual experience of dealing with proud, threatening orcs or amoral Forsaken. I also find that the graphical style of the game really doesn't suit humans, or to a lesser extent night elves, which look somehow unconvincing. Dwarves, and the Horde races, suit the style far better.

One poor shaman

2009-11-19T07:55:00.000Z

I'm now about 2000g poorer than I was a week ago, with my first tier 9 piece and about a 10-15% DPS increase to show for it.

I'm raiding mostly as elemental and it occurs to me that that is the right place to be right now. I can comfortably (or even half-asleep) heal anything in the game right now apart from the Black Knight phase 3, Ulduar and ToTC, and those last three I can heal just fine as long as I'm awake. So if I stick with DPSing my way through Icecrown I'll be in a very good position when Cataclysm arrives, and I might even have pulled myself off the bottom of the DPS list by then.

Meanwhile I'm still doing enough healing in instances to keep my hand in, and attempting to keep track of the changes to (or even master) the two different sides of Grulnak is a big enough task to keep me interested.

My new alt

2009-11-10T19:48:00.000Z

An elemental shaman. Not really an alt, just Grulnak in different gear!

My guild are tending to more dps-heavy raids these days, and it seems that ranged dps is more in demand than healers. I've picked up a fair bit of +hit gear here and there, which is enough to make me a pretty decent caster. And although still I find healing more engaging the damage dealer role is growing on me.

I did my first visit (and clear) of ToTC-10 last night. My damage was rather sub-par, and I spent most of the fights in resto mode as we were struggling with only two healers, but it's given me the motivation to get my damage gear properly sorted out. That should keep my alt-oholic tendancies something to feed on for a while, and with reduced time to play at the moment it makes far more sense to be concentrating on just the one character.

Right, time to gather a huge pile of badges and cash...

The view from the other side

2009-10-25T18:05:00.000Z

It's sort of grey and black and glowy...? No - not that side, I mean team blue - Alliance.

The starkest difference between the two factions for me is that, while I'm on Horde, I'm in one of the biggest and best guilds on my server. When Alliance, I'm guildless. I'll have to fix that, but I don't want to join just any old guild, so I need to find a decent guild that will take an unknown level 71 priest.

Aside from that, the difference is very subjective. In some ways, playing a fantasy staple feels much more "right". I've just done the quest where you end up riding Thassarian's Deathcharger, and the atmosphere was the exact antidote to that mish-mash feeling I get when Grulnak is in some instance with three blood elves and a tauren.

The same fantasy genre baggage colours the many other aspects of the game as well. For example, although Grulnak, an orc shaman, is probably one of the most benevolent non-Tauren Horde in the game (at least, the way I play him) his motivation for some quests is tenuous at best. But even his motivation fits the game a lot better than, say, a Forsaken warlock. Although I reject the "Alliance good, Horde bad" view that some players have (there's the whole Defias thing, for a start), overall Blizzard's (perhaps understandably) lazy approach of having essentially one set of quests for two factions does Horde far more of a dis-service than it does the Alliance. A lot of the Horde settlements in Northrend are really well done, and the Wrathgate chain has its moments, but the last time I really felt the game cateered to the Horde was during the Mag'har chain.

That being said I'm probably heading for trouble as an Alliance clothie as well. If my priest ever reaches level 80 why would he (or say a mage) enter the tournament and not attempt to roast his opponent inside his armour, but instead take up a lance and try and fight him at his own game? Of course everyone does (except perhaps on RP servers?), because that's where the game progression takes you.

Perhaps I just need to lighten up a bit. The thing that keeps me playing is the MMO part of the game - if I want to focus on the RPG part then a single player game would fit my prejudices far better.

Was once a (non-raiding) tank

2009-10-15T19:51:00.003+01:00

I'm slowly laying to rest my idea of levelling a tank alt, partially because common sense tells me that I just don't have time for an alt to fulfill the most gear-dependant role in the game, but also because I'm coming to realise that the tanking I remember fondly from vanilla WoW just doesn't exist any more.

Vanilla WoW was a less egalitarian, but somehow more PUG-friendly place, than its WotLK incarnation, almost because it lacked all the improvements we have come to take for granted.

Back then there were raiders and non-raiders. Raiders were either raiding or preparing for their next raid - with no limits on consumables, no daily quests and with the trash in Molten Core not dropping money or nice vendor-junk to help offset the cost of repairs raiding was a serious business. Tanks and healers either had to pay for regular respecs to allow them to farm, or had a farming alt.

Non-raiders were who you found in PUGs. Probably they were gearing up and getting their attunements - Molten Core, Onyxia and Black Wing Lair - prior to applying to a raiding guild, or possibly they'd weren't planning to raid but just wanted to gear themselves up as best they could, but either way they were generally more accepting of their fellow PUGers.

Except of course that, unless you were a mage, rogue or one of the few reputable hunters, you'd struggle to find a DPS slot.

But once grouped, players knew they had to work together to overcome the instance, especially the tricker mob pulls in the harder instances.

Nowadays everyone is a raider, to some degree, and with the fantastic emblem gear available everyone runs heroics - while being much more demanding of who they will deign to group with. A leading DK tanking blogger is seen wondering if 31.5k unbuffed health will be enough to get an invite to a group. It's common to see people assembling PUGs and demanding not only the "Epic" gear achievement but also the achievement for completing the instance or raid that the PUG is planning to visit.

And once in an instance, now that all tank classes have AoE threat abilities, the burden of crowd control is placed firmly on the tank's shoulders. If the tank has the ability to get aggro from the entire pull, but not the gear to withstand it, then they are blamed for the group failure. Unless it's the healer who's deemed to be undergeared, in which case they are blamed.

Once they join a PUG, all players seem to forget any crowd control abilities they may have, presumably only to remember them once they step outside again.

I'm not sure if part of the problem is that tanks are afraid to ask for help with crowd control, for fear of being derided. Whatever the cause it seems to be that now, the group mindset that was once quite common even in the worst PUGs of yesteryear, is absent.

And, while adding good emblem loot to heroics may have made them far more popular, it's made them a far less friendly place to be for the tanks and healers they were originally aimed at - those who can beat the normal level 80 instances but aren't yet geared enough for Naxxramas.

Hence I'm tempted to stick solely to my massively overgeared healer, and leave my tank alts firmly parked in the level 67 - 73 range. And try to remember that I have a spell called Hex.

For the Alliance! (sort of)

2009-10-12T22:18:00.000+01:00

Tukkillen is now a dwarf - I decided that a troll alt really is of no interest to me, and even when same-faction race transfers become available there's really no point in having two healer / caster dps hybrids on the same faction.

He's only sporting the heirloom shoulders - Conquest emblems are too valuable for me to trade down, and Grulnak is unlikely to ever get the Crusader title so the Seals route for the chest piece is out. With Cold Weather Flying, the heirloom shoulders and a change of scene and quests Northrend is looking pretty good for levelling at the moment.

I'd really like to get into some groups to see the Northrend instances from a dwarven perspective, so currently I'm trying out a Discipline "damage" build to give me both grinding and healing options. So far, so good.

I'm not at all sure how much he'll get into the end game though - it'd be nice to be able to heal heroics at least, but I can barely keep one character raid-geared to my satisfaction so two really isn't an option.

Meanwhile Grulnak is back to raiding, at least as much as real life allows. He now has two Valorous Worldbreaker pieces and one Conquorer's, so will get the four-piece bonus once I've saved up enough emblems for the helm. He's still not seen TotC, although I'm hoping to fix that once the raid schedule and mine find some common ground.

WoW on the back burner

2009-09-18T22:27:00.002+01:00

For the last few weeks work and family commitments have kept my Warcraft time to a minimum. I'm narrowing down my in-game priorities accordingly, but there's still more to do than I have time available.

Grulnak could do with several more Emblems - I've replaced the worst of his gear but there's still more to do.

I need to keep improving myself as a healer - there's always stuff to do in terms of addon configuration. For example I should set up Grid to show whether I'm keeping the Ancestral Healing buff up on the tank.

Then there's always the elemental side of his game - getting a proper raiding set sorted out, more addon configuration and of course practice.

And then there's my ever-present alt question, which mainly comes down to "It'd be nice to have a Horde tank" or "Perhaps an Alliance alt".

On the Horde tank list there's Grulgok (level 73 orc warrior), Shank (level 66 undead warrior) and Eadwyn (level 66 undead Death Knight). Orcs are cool, but my main is already an orc, plus it often feels more appropriate to be Forsaken for the distinctly human-centric parts of the game such as the Tournament. My snobbish half feels I should stick to warriors, despite their fiddly (although more engaging) tanking. Death knights though seem to have a much easier time, with straight-forward (or even "boring" as I've heard in some places) tanking. And this is without going into how much easier a time a DK has when soloing, or the coolness factor of some of their abilities compared to the somewhat agricultural warrior. So it's an open question which of them will finally hit the level cap, Eadwyn is favoured at the moment but who knows where I'll end up.

On the Alliance list I again have no clear choice. Having decided I'm happiest being central to a group as a healer or tank I have 3 main options.

With the advent of faction transfers Tukkillen may become a dwarf. I currently favour this route, as he's already level 70 with decent professions and I have a good feel for the class. However I get occasional attacks of cold feet since - although he's retired - he has a distinct place in my and my guild's history. Either way I won't transfer him just yet, not until I can get him Cold Weather Flying plus heirloom shoulders and chest.

Other possibilities include a human paladin (currently level 12 and feeling a bit underpowered). Apparently paladin healing is rather boring, but on the plus side they can tank as well. Similarly there's Duillnar, my level 38 druid - although I don't really feel that either druids or Night Elves are for me.

And of course there's always the human (or perhaps dwarf) death knight option - DKs may be cliched and over played, but then I'm considering being a paladin for whom the same seems to be true :)

OK, the Black Knight can be quite tough

2009-08-23T08:35:00.000+01:00

Logged on last night and asked around if anyone needed a healer. A guild group had just lost their (non-guild) paladin healer in ToC, with just the Black Knight to go, so I offered to fill the spot.

In a PUG you'd ask more questions (like, just why did your healer quit on the last boss), but it was a guild group so in I went.

It turns out that an undergeared tank (by which I mean only about 40% epics, the remainder being good blues) is really hard to keep alive on the Black Knight. And forget him tanking the ghouls as well in phase 2, so the healer will end up aggroing them.

Being a guild group we persevered and defeated him in the end, but it took proper effort and tactics, an over-geared AoE healer and probably a bit of luck.

Facerolling our way to...

2009-08-08T08:01:00.000+01:00

Upgrades? Boredom?

Since the patch hit it seems that everyone is farming heroics for badges, not surprisingly. However, in a group of Naxx-25 / Ulduar-10 geared players none of the heroics - even the new Trial of Champions instance - present much of a challenge. So although I'll undoubtedly be running heroics for a good few weeks, I'm not actually having much fun in WoW at the moment.

Roll on the end of the holiday season, when guild raids will start again in earnest.

Dragon rider

2009-07-09T07:43:00.000+01:00

Last night I finally achieved one of my long term goals of Wrath and bought myself the Wyrmrest red dragon.

Unfortunately, like a lot of these longer term, slowly achievable goals (reaching level 70 and gaining my epic flyer spring to mind as comparisons) it felt somewhat underwhelming. I'm obviously not quite the right mindset for this part of the game, although long term I'm sure I'll be happier riding a dragon than my faithful windrider.

Now, when's the next guild first boss kill going to be?

Raiding update - Mimiron

2009-07-06T06:50:00.000+01:00

After my sight-seeing trip a few weeks ago I was able to see Mimiron in action last night. Of the 10 raiders present myself and 2 others were new to the fight, so killing him on the 6th attempt was a pretty good result I felt, and the shouts on Ventrilo seemed to agree.

It was what you'd call a good wipe night - on each attempt we got a bit further through the phases, looked at our problems, and made different mistakes the next time. It was much more "we'll get him, but maybe not tonight" rather than "wtf, this guy's impossible!".

Llyra's boss guide gave me in invaluable head start on the fight. But even more valuable and impressive was our raid leader and main tank acting as a sort of live Boss Mods: "'Random DPS' - move - Rocket!". Without him I'm sure it'd have taken us rather longer.

I'm also increasingly thinking that Blizzard has got their raid design really right at the moment. We're a strange mix of casual and progression-orientated guild, and we're moving in to the last few bosses that are currently available. Meanwhile the properly progression-orientated guilds are aiming for world- and server-firsts of the various hard modes. They may be an artificial hoop, but people are jumping through them.

It sort of feels like there should be another raid out there, like in Burning Crusade where Black Temple and then Sunwell felt like a proper peak to be climbed. However, if there were further raids in Wrath at the moment would anyone do the Ulduar hard modes? And without the hard modes would Ulduar be decried as "too easy"?

Argent Tournament? Chicken riding?!

2009-06-23T13:40:00.001+01:00

I went to check out the Argent Tournament, something I've been meaning to do for a while. Picked up a few minor quests, and then went to find out about the tournament itself. It turns out they want me to ride a ~~chicken~~ ~~hawkstrider~~ chicken into combat. So much for that.

I might do the goblin dailies, and it looks pretty cool when I'm riding my Wolf around Dalaran with the tournament lance equipped. But the tournament itself will remain a closed book, at least for this Orc.

Ulduar progress

2009-06-17T07:46:00.000+01:00

I've now progressed pretty far in Ulduar with my guild, and we're hopefully not far off a full clear. Given we raid sort of casually, with only 2 days per week in the instance, I think we're doing pretty well.

This last week on night one we downed Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Kologarn, Auriaya, Thorim and the Assembly of Iron, one-shotting them all except for Thorim which took us 6 attempts.

Then last night we killed Freya (3rd attempt) and Hodir (5 attempts or so).

The bosses we're wiping on now, especially Thorim and Hodir, are problematic in that one serious mistake from one raider will cause a wipe. We're not carrying any fools though so before too long I'm sure we'll be one- or two-shotting them. Time will tell...

A bonus moment from last night was that, once the raid had been called for the night, I was able from Freya's room to chain Far Sight to peak at Mimiron. I forget sometimes when looking enviously at other classes all the cool tricks that shamans have.

Tank switching

2009-06-16T07:44:00.000+01:00

It occured to me that Grulgok the orc (although suitably beefy compared to a Forsaken) doesn't really offer much (if anything) storywise that Grulnak doesn't already provide. So I've switched back to Shank as my tank. One downside being that he's 7 levels further back than the character he's trying to replace.

In the interests of Real Life I'll probably make him an enchanter / blacksmith and then drop Grulnika my rogue entirely. Levelling blacksmithing without mining will cost a fair bit, but I figure there's some saving from being able to sell my wares either as armour and weapons or as enchanting materials.

I'm back being happy tanking again, after awakening Grulgok from his retirement to tank Nexus for a guild group. We had a single death, a mage that was two-shotted just before we got to Grand Magus Telestra, and while there's definitely scope for improvement it did reassure me that it's not always the tank's fault when PUGs go bad...

Alts update

2009-06-11T09:18:00.000+01:00

A really bad Nexus PUG a week or so ago made me shelve Grulgok, and Grulnak's to-do list - which is mainly to grind cash - has been boring me a bit, so I've been alt hopping again.

Grumdril got a few levels, then got re-rolled on an RP-PVP server. The population of the starter zones seem a lot more pleasant on the RP server, which reinforces my long-term plan of transfering to one if my guild ever implodes.

Grazznak, my level 48 warlock, had a bit of a run-out. A brief flirtation with Destruction proved costly in bandages, it really doesn't seem like a levelling spec until perhaps level 64 when the Incinerate spell becomes available. So back to Affliction for him.

And then I got to thinking (again) what I'm really trying to achieve with my alts, apart from them taking up more of my Real Life time?

Grulnak is my achiever, my raider, and offers far more opportunities than a tank or melee DPS has access to.

I yearn to have a tank - in my 40s and 50s with Shank I was regarded as a good one, and when guildies or LFG calls out for one I want to help out. But realistically tanking heriocs would be my limit. Given my available time I'd be at least a tier behind with a tank where I could be with a healer, given that a tank's gear sets the limits for a raid in a way that a healer's gear simply doesn't.

I also want to be able to explore Alliance areas, plus I have the occasional "Dwarfs are cool" moments such as in the lead up to the Razorscale fight. However being on an Alliance character (or even another server) means I'm not in my guild chat.

Also, some recent reading of RP blogs has reinforced my basic decision to play Orcs (thanks Blogatelle!). Plus it's a fair bet that, with the grass-is-greener thing, if I was playing as a dwarf I'd have plenty of "Orcs are cool" moments.

So, this week's alt plan -

Grulnak - Orc shaman - herbalist / alchemist
Grulnika - Orc rogue - enchanter / scribe
Grulgok - Orc warrior - miner / blacksmith (slightly on the back burner)

Currently Grulnika's an enchanter / skinner, but being a scribe would not mean that I didn't have to grind Hodir rep again, but also Grulnak has the matching gathering skill.

Raiding update

2009-06-09T08:57:00.001+01:00

It sometimes surprises me how much my approach to raiding has changed since my first ventures into Zul'Gurub and Molten Core. Some of this is due to raiding having opened up so that you really can raid semi-casually, and partly it's down to more experience and just general immersion on the raiding world.

I'm now at the stage where I'm really anaylsing my gear, spell use and glyphs, rather than just turning up and casting Chain Heal a lot.

After Drug highlighted a guide from Mek on the current LHW style I reglyphed accordingly and added Power Auras to keep track of my Riptide cooldown. This really helped me in Ulduar last night where things are really starting to get tricky. My group downed the Assembly of Iron (earning me the The Antechamber of Ulduar achievement) and then moved on to Thorim (sadly only to wipe several times). It's good to be on to properly hard content (to me at least - "proper" raiders would probably not agree), but the repair bills are starting to hurt.

Properly glyphed it's amazing how much you can do with Riptide and LHW, but more significantly the long cast time of Chain Heal is really starting to make it an occasional situational spell, rather than a mainstay, at least in Normal mode. Perhaps in 25s it'll reassert itself, with the greater number of people and hence closer grouping.

Prot!

2009-05-21T00:21:00.000+01:00

Levelling prot - working much better than it seemed to before. Perhaps now I have some slightly better gear after some WotLK starter quests, perhaps I've just got a better idea of the right ability priorities.

Tanking prot - insane threat generation, and easy AoE tanking. However I need a lot more practice so I can do my threat stuff as second nature, and have more spare brain capacity to monitor the overall situation, the need to blow cooldowns, etc. And PUGs are still PUGs. I just need to be rather better to ensure many fewer mistakes on my part.

And yes, the Orc got the vote. Perhaps because he's 8 levels higher, but probably because he's bigger and more like the T-shirt.

A late Grid convert

2009-05-19T23:43:00.000+01:00

Last night's Ulduar raid was also my first raid using Grid, and I have to say I'm a convert. There's still some tweaking to do, and without Llyra's Configuring Grid article I'd have been totally at sea.

The one (big) downside was when, after a disconnect just as the pull happened on Kologarn, I rejoined to find Grid not working and hence had a good 30 seconds of confusion and downright uselessness. That's the reason I've always tried to minimise my use of Add Ons - after a patch, or if they stop working or being maintained, you're so much worse of than if you had never had them. But for sake of my overall performance I probably need to revise this view, and just work harder on keeping my Add Ons up to date.

Ulduar, casually

2009-05-19T23:12:00.000+01:00

After a not-great time last week, part 2 of our Ulduar raid went surprisingly well.

We didn't progress perhaps as fast as we hoped, and in fact had some real bad luck with disconnects and so on, but had a really good-spirited, enjoyable raid.

Ignis we took down after 3 or so attempts, partially it seemed down to better a healing setup than last time.

Kologarn and Auriaya each took 3 attempts as well - although my disconnects in the second attempts on each were somewhat to blame there.

Overall probably what a lot of guilds in Ulduar would consider a bad night but between a good attitude and some good learning for some of us I think we all considered it a success.

Alt plan (for this week at least)

2009-05-18T18:04:00.000+01:00

A couple of recent events have helped clarify for me where I'm going with my alts, although I still need to ponder my decision some more.

Adanadel, my Night Elf hunter, ran Hellfire Ramparts a week ago with what appears to be a fairly typical group these days for that level - three DKs and a druid. It was a successful run in the usual sense of the word, but not much fun. The Death Knights were ruling the damage meters by some way, and AoE tanking everything happily. I had one chance to show my worth / utility when a lose mob got through to the healer, but need more practice with the class and my setup to pull that off better in future. Later on, in to Northrend say, I hear that the starter gear advantage of Death Knights is lost, and hence by the end game my damage output may be valued. But while hunters are an excellent soloing class I'm not sure I like the damage dealer role in instances, although I'm perfectly happy with it in 2 or 3 person groups.

A discussion of Outland tanking on my guild website reinforced to me that having a tank and knowing about tanking is important to me. However my knowledge and experience are getting increasingly out of date - I can pick up either my level 72 (orc) or level 63 (undead) warrior and tank an instance quite competantly, with only the usual level of difficulties encountered when tanking for a PUG. But in reality I'm currently not as much of a tank as I like to think I am.

I've also realised there are a couple of other factors in my lengthy indecision.

Blizzard has done well to make all classes valuable and cool in some way. Hence quite often, especially when for example I read a blog devoted to a particular class, I'm tempted to play that class.

Sort of conversely, Blizzard hasn't done a very convincing job of the Horde as a faction, in the way that the Alliance does seem genuine. Partially it's because we're used to games and books where dwarfs, elves and humans group together so the Alliance is an easy win. The racial mix in the Horde doesn't really work though - you can see a group of Blood Elves, or of Forsaken, making sense, or a group of Orcs perhaps with a Troll or Tauren to make up the numbers. But the sort of eclectic mix that you see in a game doesn't really work for me, and it's at that point I consider levelling an Alliance character.

Finally, a big part of my temptation to level an alt is to have an enchanter (or at least a dis-enchanter), as enchants are my main cost these days. However, the time taken to level another character (never mind to level the enchanting skill) just doesn't stack up against the cost of enchants! Also I'm suffering slightly from a "grass is greener" thing here - I forget just how useful Herbalism is as a gathering skill - both as a money earner and a money saver - never mind that the double-duration buff that alchemy gives to flasks are another major saving while raiding. All in all I am (or should be) very satisfied with my professions choice.

So, my plan at the moment -

Grulnak - Orc shaman - herbalist / alchemist
Shank - Undead warrior - enchanter (currently miner) / blacksmith
Grumdril - Dwarf hunter - miner / engineer

Or I might level my Orc warrior Grulgok - the down sides to him are that, having been levelled rapidly, he has no real professions, and also I quite like the way that Shank looks in "human" armour. One of my long-term goals has always been to get him the full Imperial Plate set so that, with his Aegis of Stormwind he looks a fair bit like the Stormwind guard he was in a former life (RP backstory - perhaps a bit nerdy?). On the other hand Grulgok is bigger and beefier.

With Grumdril I'm planning to go all "gunpowder fantasy" - a Mechanostrider mount, and then engineering goggles, and later a gyrocopter and bike. In a way it's slightly crazy to level a Dwarf hunter when I already have a level 60 Night Elf one, but somehow Blizzard elves don't quite match my perceptions, whereas I can quite happily embrace the whole dwarf with gun thing.

I might also R-A-F level a Dwarf warrior along with Grumdril - in a way it seems daft not to in case I do decide to switch to Alliance.

Ulduar: lots, guild: 3

2009-05-14T10:12:00.001+01:00

Grulnak's first proper Ulduar run last night featured some high and low points of raiding.

Flame Leviathan was one-shotted, although it went slightly pear shaped at the end and looked for a while like it'd be a 1% wipe.

XT-002 killed us once, mainly due to bad planning / lack of previous experience on the adds. Our second attempt was a fairly easy kill.

Razorscale was duely one-shotted.

And then we wiped on Ignis over and over.

Now, I don't mind wipe nights, but the trouble was that he just didn't feel like a progression boss. He's new to me and a few others in the raid, but we knew the tactics, and could mostly execute them - but only mostly. Sorry to say that the problem was in parts a healer problem, for which I was more than 1/3 responsible, it really wasn't a good night for me. Our raid composition was also slightly off, with not enough hard-hitting ranged dps, but that'd just be looking for excuses so I won't mention that.

Back next week for part two, and I'm sure we'll get him then, but all in all not my best or most enjoyable raid by any stretch.

Lesson for the night - start using WWS, and analyse my performance more. Recount was showing some major differences in output and style between myself and the other resto shammy (who had a much higher output), so I'd have had a good point for comparison.

Ulduar, spoiler free

2009-05-05T11:22:00.000+01:00

I've been conciously avoiding all Ulduar trailers, guides and other spoilers, and last night, stepping into the instance for the first time, this really paid off. Suffice to say - Wow! (or WoW)?

The Flame Leviathan fight is somewhat disappointing though, despite being quite fun and very video game-y it feels rather impersonal.

I'll now change policy and start reading up on tactics and so on - although pleasingly (and conversely) the content is new enough that we're not yet overwhelmed with them. Hopefully from here on in I'll be at or near my guilds learning curve on new encounters, so will need to be more self-reliant rather than learning by watching my fellow raiders.

Raid elation

2009-05-04T22:47:00.002+01:00

I've just been in on my first guild first kill of the expansion, and consequently I'm so full of adrenaline that sleeping may be tricky for a while. These kills really are the best thing that WoW has to offer, and are well worth all the gold grinds, raid farming and so on that prepare you for them.

The raid started off tamely enough - we were scheduled to finish Kel'Thuzad, our remaining boss from Naxx, then take on Malygos 25 to fill the spare time. K'T wiped us once, which didn't bode well, and we then had two 3% wipes on Malygos. Finishing him off with half an hour of raid time still to go, our Raid Leader suggested a quick go at Ulduar, which so far we'd only attempted on normal difficulty, expecting a shot at Flame Leviathan and his "easy epics". We one-shotted him, seeming without difficulty, and then decided for a quick go at Razorscale.

Razorscale on one hand is a tank-and-spank, but actually required a reasonable amount of movement and add targetting, and without most of the raid having experience of the normal version we'd probably have been stuffed. Even so our big problem proved to be low dps, and we assumed when we hit the enrage timer that that was that. The tanks were duely 1- or 2-shotted for the most part, but with various kiting, not-terribly-high healer dps and probably a fair bit of luck killed him 1 minute and 27 seconds into the enrage timer. The ensuing jubilation in Vent was an expression of my best moment in WoW so far this expansion.

One question for the future is whether this will be the first dual spec prefered boss - the healing burden (as long as people stay out of the blue fire) is fairly low, the dps burden high (at least at our current gear level). So, until I can grind yet more gold for that dual spec (and even then will be lacking truely valid raid dps gear), I'm going to be reliant on getting one of those 5 healing spots. Still, that's a problem for another day.

Oh, and Steamworker's Goggles rounded off my evening nicely.

Faster, but much poorer

2009-05-04T12:38:00.000+01:00

On Saturday I got the last few hundred gold together and finally got the epic flying skill, plus a fast yellow griffon. I took it for a quick spin around Shadowmoon Valley (remember that zone?), and was rather underwhelmed, but logging on today and travelling the familiar routes of the Sons of Hodir dailies I really noticed the world of difference it makes. Buyer's remorse averted...!

Still more gold grinding to go though - I had a good night in Naxx 25 last Wednesday, so enchants on my new mace from Malygos, and the helm and gloves from Naxx, plus finally getting my cloak enchanted will set me back around 670g. Then there's dual talent specs, and the dragon mount from Wyrmrest Accord and I've around 3200g to find from somewhere. On the plus side I'll definitely be exhalted with the Sons of Hodir by the time I'm finished.

Finished WoW 3.0.9

2009-04-27T22:21:00.002+01:00

Last night I finally joined a guild run to Malygos, and we downed him on the second attempt. So I've now "finished" pre-3.1 WoW, at least as far as raid content goes.

Good stuff about the fight

I'm (possibly excessively) impressed by how the Aces High daily prepares you for phase 3 of the fight. Although it's rather different in a group setting compared to the solo quest it does save you from the initial "What do all these buttons do?" moment. I also really like the setting and the pre-pull quotes, you really get a feeling of confronting a powerful creature in his own domain and how that may not be such a good idea.

Bad things about the fight

The Vortex ability is a complete pain to heal, what with only shamans having one instant-cast heal. Still, we're better off than paladin's I suppose (unless I'm well out of date with regard to paladin spells). I also find phase 3 completely disorientating, but perhaps I'll get used to that.

As a footnote, one of the good things about being so far behind my guild in terms of gearing and general raid attendance, I was the only needer for Ice Spire Scepter when it dropped. Two more blues to go...

Why I love my guild

2009-04-19T10:19:00.000+01:00

WoW has slightly lost its lustre recently. The gear upgrades are slowly coming in, but my main objective has been to finally gather the 5000g needed for my epic flying mount, which has made the game seem more like a chore at times.

In the meantime my secondary goal has been to finish off the remaining heroics that I'd not yet completed. I had some luck in the last couple of days in that two of my remaining three targets (Halls of Stone and Oculus) were the daily heroics so groups for them were suddenly popular.

Obligatory HoS anecdote - our guild (and probably most people in general) are rather overgeared for heroics at this point, to they tend to be reasonably easy. One early pull suddenly got interesting, then serious - it looked like we'd rescue it for a while but then we wiped. It turns out we'd somehow managed to pull 3 groups, and then aggro a patrolling giant. But only that level of problem, or some of the crazier achievements, keep these runs challenging.

Oculus was well worth doing the once, but did show why people avoid it when possible. Myself and one other member of the PUG I was in hadn't been there on normal difficulty either, which made the experience harder still. We wiped several times on the final boss, beyond the point that probably be tolerated by an average PUG, but did eventually succeed. The one saving grace of the instance appears to be that not only is it much easier than average to get to the last boss from the entrance following a wipe, but also (since your drake is doing the fighting, and if you have enough bag space) you need not be taking gear damage for failed attempts.

Finally to the point of this post - having finished Oculus, rather late in the evening, I noticed in my achievements list that my remaining incomplete instance - Drak'Tharon - was only missing a kill of King Dred. I mentioned this in passing in guild chat, to which one of our nearly-always-online players replied "Well let's go and kill him then" and offered to bring his tank, our raid leader volunteered to dps on one of his alts and a second dps slot was quickly filled. We had to do some badgering to fill the last dps slot (which bizarrely seems to be the hardest spot to fill these days), but in relatively short order had a solid group together and proceeded to clear the place.

My guild - always willing to help (even when it's quite late at night).

Naxx clear

2009-03-24T22:41:00.001Z

Part two of our raid from Sunday has just finished, and given Grulnak his first clear of Naxx.

Sapphiron wiped us twice before we downed him, so getting him on the third attempt felt really good. Kel'Thuzad by contrast was a bit of an anti-climax, as apart from one player failing the "don't step in the red stuff" test it never felt like he'd beat us.

The other highlight of the evening was doing the Four Horsemen the fast / proper way, with myself and just 1 dps tanking the ranged bosses. There's something I like about that sort of assignment - partly the individual responsibility, but also the way that you know your job is done when the rest of the raid turn up and start helping out. Reminds me a bit of one of my first proper raid experiences, healing an add tank on Gehennas in Molten Core.

The lowlight had to be that we got bitten again by the token gremlin with two more tier 7 "Lost Vanquisher" tokens that we couldn't use.

Overall my feeling is that Naxx is much, much easier than Karazhan ever was, probably excessively so (albeit that I like that raiding is more accessible now). Before the Wrath-is-coming final raiding nerf some bosses were always challenging, or at least required you to be on your toes, even when we outgeared them - the Prince, Netherspite's beams, Nightbane with the Charred Earth, even Aran if you got bad timing with the polymorph / elementals part. Currently in Naxx, with our group that still needs a fair number of drops from there and is by no means overgeared, and usually with one or two players learning the occasional boss, as long as everything is set up correctly we generally one-shot a boss, and failing that get them the second time. Aggroing a patrol while clearing trash is "oh, time to pay attention" rather than "oh, #@!%". I need some more gear before I'm ready for Malygos and more still for Ulduar, but already I feel I'm done with Naxx 10.

Although the Undying title would be nice.

The RNG hates us

2009-03-23T10:28:00.001Z

Interesting Naxx run last night, the upside of which was that, on my second visit to Heigan, I seem to have the dance down pat. No excuses from now on...

The downside was the loot drops, which were a bit of a travisty. Our group consisted of 3 shamans, 3 priests, 2 paladins a warrior and a lock. So of course both tier 7 tokens that dropped were the Lost Vanquisher - Rogue, Death Knight, Mage and Druid!

All the non-plate healing gear that dropped I also had, except that I replaced my ilevel 200 blue leather helm with Noth's Curse. All in all, the Random Number Generator was not shining on us.

The lack of mages or hunters also made Gluth a bit interesting, but between a paladin tank (well, more a paladin aggro-and-run-away) and my frost shock and earthbind we managed the adds just fine and one-shotted him. In fact we one-shotted all the bosses except for the Grand Widow, where our attempt to get the Momma Said Knock You Out achievement didn't go so well.

Back on Tuesday for part two, which seeing as we've cleared 2 2/3 wings already should give me my first Naxx clear.

The Wyrmrest Accord

2009-03-21T18:50:00.000Z

Exalted with the dragon folk now. A nice pair of gloves, and (once I've found another 4000g) a rather cool new flying mount.

D-P-S

2009-03-11T09:15:00.000Z

For some reason (perhaps that we're generally older than the average player) our guild rarely has a shortage of healers, and at the moment seems to be quite full of tanks. Consequently in the last couple of days the later evening heroic runs tend to be looking for DPS more than anything else, and having reasonably decent elemental gear (a lot of which is my raid resto gear) and not being due to raid for a week or so I thought I'd respec and try a different role.

Having done three runs over a couple of nights as a DPSer, my general impression was that I'd rather be healing!

In Wrath, as a damage dealer, you're judged pretty much entirely on your damage output, and mine is frankly not really up to it at the moment. Partly this is lack of practice (and no doubt skill), partly it's that I'm not really fully prepared - I still have my healing glyphs and enchants, so I'm not properly optimised, and also I've not specifically targeted damage gear on previous instance runs so have a lot of wasted mp5 and consequently I'm lacking in other areas. Although that said my raid gear (when viewed as elemental gear) is as good if not better than would be expected on someone just starting out on heroics.

Although damage output has always been a primary consideration, previously the mark of a good DPSer was the other aspects of their class - the ability of a hunter to chain trap, for example, or a quick-thinking rogue pulling a lose mob off the healer. In Wrath, with AoE tanking, crowd control is rare if not totally absent, so the damage meter is all that counts.

I did enjoy raiding Karazhan as shadow on Tukkillen, but there at least was wanted for shackles on Moroes, and group buffing with Vampiric Embrace / Vampiric Touch.

So, for now, it's back to healing.

Doing the dance

2009-03-06T07:43:00.000Z

Last night was the first night of Grulnak's second Naxx raid, and my first experience of the Plague Quarter. The Heigan dance was quite fun to learn, although it took me longer to get the hang of than I'd hoped. I was a popular target of combat resses (because of my Disease Cleansing totem), so had more "learning experiences" than the other players who were new to it. I'll find out in the next week or so whether once learned it sticks with me the way it should. Loatheb was also fun in a slightly sadistic way - seeing how many heals you can get into the 3 second window. Fights like this though are presumably tuned on the assumption that you have raid warning addons, which presumably in turn makes them difficult to impossible without them..?

Naxx first / second visit

2009-03-01T22:49:00.001Z

My first proper visit to Naxxramas today which was somewhat more detailed than Tukkillen's Mind Vision tour of part of the place when it was still in Azeroth.

We started slowy as we had 2 or 3 new players plus at least one new character who were new to the place, but after clearing the Arachnid Quarter with no real trouble took a step or two up to the Construct Quarter.

It was good to actually walk around the place, and see bosses I'd only read about, but given that over half the raid were familiar with the place and well geared it wasn't the challenge you'd normally expect on an early visit. Still, we had some good learning experiences on Grobbulus and Thaddius, killing them on our second attempts and everything else first time.

A couple of loots - a Band of Neglected Pleas and Pendant of Lost Vocations to help kick start my next gear-up grind. However, I doubt I'll be up to speed by the time Ulduar arrives, so no first-kills for a while...

Prepared

2009-02-28T10:46:00.002Z

My guild did a "tourist raid" to Black Temple last night, which gave me a chance to see content I assumed I'd never see when watching the Burning Crusade intro movie.

As we'd hoped 17 level decently geared level 80s and a level 78 made short work of the place, although we were never quite confident of that. We wiped once on the Council as we were too spread out for the 3 healers to look after the raid, and didn't interrupt Lady Malande properly - in a way it was reassuring that the bosses still had some punch. The Illidan fight was over fairly quickly though with only 2 deaths.

I also netted a souvenir set of tier 6 shoulders which look rather cool, although very last year...

You don't really get a proper appreciation to for the place when you steamroller it rather than learning your way through a series of tough wipes, but I'm still very glad to have finally been there.

Some alt musings

2009-02-24T20:35:00.001Z

Now that I've reached Grulnak's major goal of being Naxx ready, and the slow process of incremental upgrades continues, my thoughts naturally turn to my numerous alts. Although I'm very happy with my shaman - especially as Northrend gear looks so much better than the spaceship glows of much of Outland - and reputation grinds and achievements somewhat temper the desire to turn to a new character, I am going to need a few alts I think.

Posts from Kinless on his number of alts per expansion, and from drug with his views on the pros and drawbacks of alts have had me pondering this for a while. I came to the conclusion that from my various characters I want to have -

A casual raider - to see (hopefully) all the content in WotLK while it's still current.
A tank - I used to really love tanking, except for on the runs when I hated it
A scout - by which I mean someone who can go places they're not wanted and see things that are tricky to get at in some way. Noteably the high end raids and enemy faction cities (although I can always hope onto an alt for the latter!)
A hero - not necessarily a hero in the traditional sense, but just a character that's more identifiable from my pen-and-paper roleplaying background.

Grulnak's doing very nicely in the former role, although it remains to be seen how far my casual-ish guild can do in terms of the full scope of WotLK content, but we seem to be a good deal further up the curve than we were with Burning Crusade.

On the scout front a priest seems to be better in this role than a rogue, thanks to Mind Vision. It's tricky to find your way around an unfamiliar instance within the confines of the spell, but you do so at zero risk. A druid can potentially fulfill both the scout and tank roles, although druids (quite reasonably) really do miss some of the rogue skills such as Distract. I often feel when in an instance with a rogue that I'd love to be in their shoes, although in practical terms this may not match reality. As a healer you are generally the last to move, and the tank leads - for example in Karazhan I never saw Moroes' room while it was still populated, the tank would go ahead and bring targets back to us waiting on the stairs and we'd not move forward until the room was partly cleared. On the reality front though rogues rarely scout ahead, not least because the possibility of triggering some event such as a gauntlet means the group sticks fairly closely together.

For a hero I'd probably pick a human paladin, a (dwarf?) rogue or a night elf hunter (although in my mind a hunter wouldn't be a pet class), or perhaps a dwarf warrior. All proper fantasy archetypes, unlike most of my Horde characters.

Naxx ready

2009-02-24T08:50:00.000Z

Between replacing a couple of haste pieces with mp5 pieces - a crafted Stormhide Belt and the Newt-Eye Ring from more Icecrown quests - and enchanting most of the rest of his gear Grulnak is now up to my guild's minimum Naxx requirements, plus somewhat over on crit.

While finishing off his gear upgrades he joined his second raid with the guild (following a somewhat straight forward VoA a few weeks ago) this weekend - Obsidian Sanctuary 25 with no drakes up. The no-drakes was in deference to the fact it was my first time there, but since we managed that on the first attempt without a single death that was probably erring on the side of caution.

I'm now wondering whether to spend some of my small store of Emblems of Heroism on a new neck or to replace my recently acquired belt, but I figure I'll wait until I see how drops pan out once I get into Naxx. Since most of the guild will be champing at the bit to get into Ulduar as soon as possible I still need to optimise my gear upgrades as much as possible so as to be in on a guild first kill one of these days! I also need to keep at it with the heroics, not least to help with the rep grind so I can access the better enchants.

The tank shortage is back

2009-02-19T19:19:00.000Z

Had my second or third experience of "LF1M - hc tank" last night, and the guild group eventually called it a night and broke up. I did my Sons of Hodir dailies, a few auctions, then called it a night myself.

Then this morning I cracked and bought two BoE crafted epics - a Wispcloak and some Revenant’s Treads - from the AH. Nearly 1000g poorer, and hence further away from my epic flying mount, but at least I'm now (barring enchants) up to my guild's Naxx gear requirements.

My trouble is at the moment I log in fairly late, once the baby's asleep, and hence I miss instancing prime time. Fine for doing a few dailies or whatever, not so good if you're trying to gear up.

I'm tempted to transfer Grulgok senior from his PvP server and start levelling him, but I'm going to wait until I see the effect of dual specs on the tanking situation. The trouble is that at the moment everyone who wants to tank has done got all their heroic drops (or at least I assume that's why the tank shortage has resurfaced now). The chances are that even once dual specs are available you'll get more DPSers who can't really tank but have a second "grouping" spec, rather than tanks who become more available once they can more easily switch out of their PvP or grinding spec. But time will tell.

Obligatory ding 80 post

2009-01-29T22:02:00.000Z

Very nearly managed to hit level 80 in CoT: Stratholme last night, but unfortunately finished the instance 95% through the level and too late to continue. Bit of a nuisance having to go to work the next day!

Logged in today very briefly to complete the task.

Time played at 70 prior to expansion: 15 days, 6 hours
Total time played prior to expansion: 38 days, 21.5 hours
Time played on hitting 80: 42 days, 7.5 hours

So 3 days, 10 hours to level through Wrath, at just over 8 hours per level. Still pretty slow considering I had Questhelper to help me, but it still seemed slower than it actually was as I felt under (self-imposed) pressure to catch up with my guild.

Now, time to gear up!

Another instance and some consensual PvP

2008-12-11T11:19:00.001Z

I've now added Drak'Tharon Keep to my collection (in non-heroic mode obviously). A slightly worrying group - 3 death knights and a rogue - but it all turned out well. It's nice that Wrath instances are fairly short, so you can think "yes, I can fit an instance in" at the end of the evening. I replaced three more epics with drops and quest blues - I must remember in future that not only does all-melee make Chain Heal even more useful than usual, but also there's no loot drama (for me at least).

I also spent some time in Venture Bay to get coins for the Totem of the Bay. I quite like how there are PvP dailies in the Grizzly Hills - it's a small dose of PvP just to remind us that the Alliance and us are not friends, but without the grief of being on a PvP server. Even when flagged, there seems to be more of a truce on a "carebear" server. It's still annoying when you get overwhelmed by a level 80, but the frequent ganking that's so annoying isn't a factor.

Levelling pressure - counterpoint

2008-12-09T23:43:00.001Z

Just to balance out my earlier post, I had an enjoyable evening of "not yet at the end game" WoW tonight. While listening to our two teams who were in Naxx (and congratualting them on their progress - 3 bosses for one group and 4 for the other) I'd done a fair few quests and was getting ready to log for the night when some guildies started talking about going to the Nexus. Not having been on a successful run there I volunteered to heal.

I'm not quite sure about the look of the place - it felt a bit too Outland-y to me - but then I suppose a mage's tower and a space ship are fairly close in concept (to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke).

Anyway, it was a good run - plenty of banter, no wipes and only two deaths (the mage who AoE'd without warning, and the tank on the last boss shortly before the boss went down). It was also a complete contrast to my only visit there with Grulgok, where we couldn't get past phase 2 on Grand Magus Telestra. The last boss, Keristrasza, is a real pain to heal as a shaman, since the central mechanic is that you can't stand still for long without getting a nasty debuff. It would have been slightly easier if I was full resto spec and hence had Riptide - in fact that talent would probably by itself have removed most of the stress. The BC and WotLK talent changes really have made us so much more complete healers...

As a side note, until you've raided yourself the zones and bosses don't mean much to you. When someone says "we've downed Boss N" at the moment I'm kind of asking myself "Nice work, but is that like downing Attumen or like downing Netherspite...?". Must get into Naxx...
~

Not hardcore

2008-12-09T09:01:00.000Z

Apparently if you have a level 80 already then you're hardcore - in that case being one blob short of 75 I'm definitely in the casual crowd these days.

I'm currently in the Grizzly Hills, having previously mostly completed Dragonblight, and in general I'm really enjoying exploring the new zones and doing new and fairly varied quests. Uncovering sights such as the Ebonhold (??) or visiting Dalaran have been real treats, but overlaying the whole experience is the feeling that I'm just not levelling fast enough. It's entirely in my mind, but there's definitely a sense of pressure there. My guild has their first Naxx raids tonight, and I'm quite disappointed to be as far "behind" as I am. Being a large guild there are always some that are ahead of the curve, but I'm feeling way behind the curve.

For a while now I've been focussing on Grulnak at the expense of my warrior, but from now that focus will mean that all other alts are totally on the back burner until I'm levelled and geared. I'm questing reasonably efficiently at the moment - or at least I assume so as it seems that I'm often handing in several quests at a time - while still paying some attention to the quests and absorbing at least a bit of the lore, but levelling is seeming really slow. At the current rate I'm doubting I'll ever have a second level 80, but if the next expansion is another 18+ months away then that view may well change.

It sounds like Naxx is reasonably undemanding in terms of gear compared to Karazhan, and Drugfreeyth's Shields Up! blog seems like a great resource to help me get geared up quickly. My goal now is to ensure that when my guild starts to move beyond Naxx I'm ready to go with them. Our raiding is inclusive enough that I'm not worried that I'll get excluded, but more that I want to be in the early waves to see the content and be in on some guild first kills not in the later stage when the raids are on farm and alts start to go through.

In other news I've now met my first nature immune mob, which in the Burning Crusade was my cue to switch to enhancement. The immunity situation seems less marked this time around, and for now I'll stick with elemental although with my resto-heavy spec it's not nearly as fun as it was at first. I'll see very shortly whether Lava Burst changes that at all. In the meantime I've started to stockpile enhancement quest rewards in case I do switch.

Elemental quest rewards are starting to be significantly better than my current gear in terms of Stamina and less so in Int, but still behind my gemmed and enchanted gear in terms of spell power and crit. My current gear's days are clearly numbered though.

One random thought I had in the Grizzly Hills is that the place doesn't look nearly cold enough. It's got a nice "alpine highland" look to it, but wouldn't it be great if now (in the northern hemisphere winter) it was all snowy, but perhaps in summer looked as it does now?

Herbalism

2008-12-02T00:07:00.000Z

Grulnak is level 73.5 as of last night, and has maxed out his Herbalism. I hence got a new rank of Lifebloom - which I'd never noticed having before, although I knew in theory that herbalists got some sort of bonus similar to what miners and skinners got. Although I'm able to self-heal anyway I really like Lifebloom - not only does it have the obvious bonus of needing no mana I love the way little flowers grow around you when you use it.

I'm noticing an improvement in levelling speed now that I'm using QuestHelper - I can't recommend it enough - although I'm finding myself hampered by bag space issues. I really need to use up the old buff food / elixirs I'm carrying around - or at least vendor them.

Azjol-Nerub

2008-12-01T00:06:00.000Z

Azjol-Nerub is how dungeons really ought to be - and is also a complete nightmare.

It's potentially quite a short instance, consisting as it does of two bosses preceeded by trash waves, followed by a final boss, so it may well prove to be a popular instance for farming at heroic level.

It's a refreshing change from instances where you slowly work your way through a room full of mobs a handful at a time, each waiting their turn to be slaughtered. The trash for the first boss is on a timer, so if you kill a group too slowly you have problems getting mana back before the next, and so on to the inevitable conclusion. The second boss is similar, in that he works his way towards you.

It took the group I was with several wipes, some respecs and changes to composition before we got through to the end though. We started off with a well-geared but low level (72) warrior tanking with a death knight DPSing and myself healing with my 32/0/31 grinding spec. The tank and DK then respecced to swap roles with myself respeccing to a fuller healing build which gave me Earth Shield - 22/0/41. This worked better but we still had lose casters causing damage and far too much inbound damage in general. We then lost our two plate wearers who coincidently were replaced by higher level equivalents (this time both level 74) and managed to clear the place. It was still rather touch-and-go in places though, and I had to blow a number of potions to make up for the lack of drinking time between waves. I didn't have any problems with the "potion sickness" debuff though - perhaps this is only confined to raids?

At the end of it all I got two more blue quest rewards that replaced old epics - but at least I've not yet replaced an epic with a green.

My other conclusion for the weekend was that elemental dps really is a bit dull. I was doing a quest to kill 30 undead which turned out to be kill 10, drink, repeat. Due to the way the mobs of that quest spawn there wasn't even interest to be gained from travelling to find the next group. From a character point of view I prefer elemental to enhancement, but the constant lightning bolts are rather repeatative. Perhaps Lava Burst in a few levels will make things a bit more interesting.

A tale of two rogues

2008-11-22T00:03:00.002Z

I played a couple of sessions on my rogue Grulnika recently which turned out very differently.

The first was for a bit of a breather after playing Grulgok my warrior, which proved to be a mistake. I was being fairly blase about attacking mobs, relying on my superior damage to take them down, and tackling some quest mobs which were orange to me. As a result I needed to use escape moves such as Sprint and Vanish much too often, and was still dying occasionally when these didn't rescue the situation. Then as I prepared to log out I realised that I hadn't even been using poison on my weapons.

The second session was far more rogue-like in objectives and playstyle. I did the quest to kill Captain Ironhill in Dun Garok using lots of stealth and distract to mainly only kill the mobs that were in my way, and tracked down the Captain in what I think is an alternative spawn point for him. Either that or I'm getting the various dwarf fortresses mixed up. Anyway it was a far more satisfying experience and felt far more right for the character.

At the end of this though I'm still left with an underlying problem in that I don't really have a feel for rogue combat and just don't enjoy it. So while I'd love to have Grulnika able to open any lock in the game, or sneak around Ironforge, a normal instance run will never be fun with her.

Expansion? Not yet...

2008-11-14T08:41:00.000Z

My pre-order didn't arrive in time, so no Northrend for me.

Instead I spent yesterday evening getting the last quarter of a level on my warrior and then doing a bit of fishing on my shaman while listening enviously to my guild's discussions of the new zones.

On the plus side the launch, or at least the servers, seem more stable that with the Burning Crusade. No midnight crash this time!

On the fishing front, it was painfully slow getting from 325 to 327 skill. I'm not sure whether I'll bother with this profession in the expansion. However, it was good to be able to fish up the Lurker, or to sit and fish while waiting for a Kara or SSC raid to form up.

The pause while waiting for the expansion has given me time to consider which characters to level. My current plan is to level my shaman first, then get my rogue to 60 using Refer a Friend, then my warrior to 80 while occasionally spending some time on my Alliance druid.

My shaman will be my main raid character, so I want to get him levelled and geared before my guild get too many first kills without him.

While it may make more sense to have my level 60 hunter as my dps character, and they are better as a soloing character because of the pet and the ability to kite, I think that a rogue will be more fun in that she can sneak around. I also quite fancy getting some rep with Ravenholdt - that whole side-plot has always appealled to me dispite the way that Blizzard has kind of left the story hanging with no real point to it. Ideally I'll get her levelled before the 90 day link on the Refer a Friend account expires.

I'm still not sure about the druid, although that's my most likely Alliance character at the moment. I don't like feral dps, so levelling a class that I don't like a quarter of is inherently questionable. However as long as balance continues to seem viable as a levelling spec then he has a good chance - and in two levels he gets Innervate. I like his overall look, and the various coolness aspects of the class such as aquatic and flight form (one day!), and sneaking around as a cat. And support classes just suit my play style. If male humans looked a bit less, well, odd, then human paladin might well be my main, and druids are a good second choice.

WoW dead end and the Gnomeregan Problem

2008-11-13T08:46:00.000Z

My levelling experience on a PvP server was undoubtedly made less painful by the fact that Azeroth is empty at the moment, and hence ganking was rare. This was fine for me as an experienced player, but I'd really hate to start WoW for the first time at this stage.

As players inevitably get bored and leave the game, if there's a barrier to entry to new players then that ultimately spells a problem for the game. New players will still get hooked on the easily and polished introductory experience, but probably at about level 20 they'll realise that most of the game is at the end game which is 60 (and presumably later 70 and 80) levels away. Some will be happy to level slowly and enjoy the journey, but not all.

I'm wondering how Blizzard is planning to tackle this - will all characters soon start at level 55, with an introductory process to teach them how to play their class? Or does WoW just have a built-in expiry date?

There's also the Gnomeregan Problem, in that for years the vast majority of players have been able to reclaim the gnome's homeland solo, but they're still exiled, and even more so for the Darkspear trolls. More bothering to me is that Ragneros - a god - is now a pushover at 70, and presumably will be trivial at 80. Although there are upsides to this - our guild ran Blackwing Lair after the 3.0.2 nerf and so I got to see a zone I'd wanted to see for a long time - it also damages the feel of the game. It's traditional in computer games for the player to overcome challenges that should be impossible, but you just can't see LotRO ever letting the player slay a major figure in this way.

Top 10 WoW Memories - 5 to 1

2008-08-11T22:11:00.001+01:00

5. Fury in Feralas - I started levelling Shank, my warrior, using a 1 hander and shield. I realised it was painfully slow going so tried a 2-hander for a while, but decided that the extra damage taken wasn't worth the trade off and went back to sword and board. This was before I discovered bandaging between fights rather than eating! Then at level 44 I finally switched to a dual wielding Fury build, and loved it. The endless rage generation, Bloodthirst, the various procs and the constant stream of damage numbers was just a world away from waiting for a slow 2-hander to swing.

4. Proving the rogue wrong - back when the end boss of Sunken Temple was a level 55 elite, Shank answered a "LF tank, last spot" call while "only" level 51. A few of the group weren't sure about the idea, most notably the rather vocal rogue, but decided to give it a try. The run was very smooth, earning praise for my tanking from the healer priest. But most personally rewarding, given that I had a levelling dual wield Fury build at the time, was the whisper from the rogue at the end asking "Are you prot?".

3. The Leeroy video - when WoW was first announced I avoided playing it, as I had a good idea of how much time it would take up if I didn't resist. When the Leeroy video came out I crumbled - although the nerdy comedy side of it was pretty unappealing, the look of Blackrock Spire made the game seem just a great realisation of what I saw in my minds eye in my pen and paper roleplaying days. Chalk up one for viral marketing.

2. Venturing out into the world - I still vividly remember crossing the bridge from Durotar to the Barrens for the first time. There was a real sense of stepping into the unknown, and knowing that a lot of stuff out there was seriously threatening to my virtual self. Also first stepping into Ashenvale, into the shadows and the undergrowth, expecting to be ambushed by Night Elves at any moment. Back then I didn't realise that, on a PvE server, you're actually quite safe from the "opposition" nearly all of the time. Walking into Thousand Needles was also pretty amazing, but from there on the sense of wonder in each new zone slowly diminished, as you get blase eventually.

1. Guild first kill of Hakkar - Zul'Gurub was my guild's first real raiding, as we just weren't big enough to do the 40 man raids such as Molten Core. It was also my first experience of the raid experience of wiping then overcoming. Although some of the ZG bosses were pretty painful we actually clicked on Hakkar on our first night of trying him, when we thought we were just practising for the next raid when we'd try properly to down him. The great thing about the Hakkar fight is that when you "get it" there's a great rhythm to it, the coordination of 20 people culminating in the kill was a great moment.

Top 10 WoW Memories - 10 to 6

2008-08-09T13:08:00.001+01:00

A shared topic suggestion over at Blog Azeroth finally prompted me to set down my top 10 memories. This is something I was intending as one of my first blog posts, a few things have changed since then, and some great memories added to the list.

Not quite making the list is my number 11 - winning the tier 4 shoulders on our first kill of the High King, the first time I've won tier epic loot. Mainly a milestone because I'd always assumed, back when Molten Core was where you went to raid, that I'd never be a raider. Also because, after a nightmare first few nights in Gruul's Lair, it seemed questionable whether we'd get the momentum to step up from Karazhan to 25-man raiding.

10. Mana battery - Although the most important roles in a raid group are arguably the main tank and healers, most of the time they / we don't get much in the way of appreciation, unless someone has done something obviously outstanding. As a shadow priest you seem to get much more in the way of vocal support, just for being a mana battery.

9. Bandages in Maraudon - fortunately I wasn't one of those healers who only level First Aid at the level cap. As Tukkillen, my priest, a particularly bad pull in Maraudon - where we fought our intended victims followed by two patrols in a row - I managed to save when out of mana by bandaging myself, then one of the DPS, and lastly healed the tank using mana I'd regenerated during the bandaging. I'm not sure anyone else in the group noticed, but I was pretty pleased with myself.

8. Helpful people - this really deserves a higher place, but not enough specific incidents stick in my mind. However, for all the gankers, the ninja looters, the drama queens and the plain insufferable, there are equally times when strangers go out of their way to help you for no benefit to them.

7. Making a killing on the Auction House - I came to the game late, so was approaching the level 40 mount cash crisis while lots of other players were gearing themselves up for Molten Core. Fortunately I was a herbalist at just the right time, when Kingsblood was the only way to grind rep with the Thorium Brotherhood for certain brackets. I knew nothing of why, but one day a guildie announced that they would pay 1 gold for a stack of Kingsblood, sent to him Cash on Delivery. This was a lot to me, so I duely sent him a stack, but he must have been innundated as it was returned a few days later. That weekend I put the same stack on the AH for 5g, which was a huge amount of money to me at the time. Those raiders paid for mounts for first my warrior, Shank, then for Grulnak, before the market calmed down somewhat.

6. Tanking Zul'Farrak - as a shaman. We were having a really bad run, with a classical bad warrior tank who only believed in tanking one target per pull. We'd had a number of wipes, and everyone was getting grumpy with the general lack of mutual trust that develops in that situation. After a last wipe on the "friendly" witchdoctor the warrior quit, and no replacement could be found. Back then a shaman could generate pretty good aggro with Rockbiter, Earth Shock and Lightning Shield, and I considered myself a pretty good tank on my warrior, so I volunteered to give it a go. For some reason the group agreed, and we proceeded to clear the place as a careful, focussed 4-man party.

Some weekend thoughts

2008-08-04T19:33:00.000+01:00

I'm getting more and more hopeful that Blizzard is getting on top of the tanking shortage. Although with my usual caveat - the shortage is only there for PUGs, not guild groups or raids, at least in my experience.

The problems with tanking to my mind are (a) it's rewarding rather than fun, and stressful, (b) for warriors, and paladins to a lesser extent (they can AoE grind) if you're specc'd to tank that's pretty much all you can do and (c) to be able to tank an instance you need to have gear nearly on-par with what the instance drops, whereas dps and healers can visit the same instance with a lesser level of gear (at least, in general). Another issue is that, unless you're a druid, if you're an off-tank once your tank target is dead you can't contribute much to the raid.

There are a couple of blue replies from Ghostcrawler on a beta thread about Death Knight tanking that seem to indicate that they're aware of these issues and trying to resolve them, although it sounds like they'll be resolved for Death Knights first then possibly for other tanking classes later.

On a totally separate (but still WotLK-related) subject, although I want to try dpsing in Karazhan as enhancement - to see Windfury apply to me for once rather than the melee in my group - elemental dps suits me more from a character concept point of view. However currently my grinding dps gear is about 50% blue elemental gear and 50% epic resto gear that benefits enough from the +damage that healing gear now provides to be not be a replacement priority. However to be a full-strength dpser I should enchant the gear I have, and I'm certainly not going to put damage enchants on my healing gear. This makes me wonder if, in the expansion, resto shamans will put as much emphasis on crit as elemental shamans. Certainly we benefit from criticals to some extent (with talents such as Ancestral Healing benefiting from crit, and Tidal Mastery increasing it) but my resto gear and talents provide considerably less crit at the moment than would be expected from an elemental shaman. So unless the balance of criticals in a typical resto build changes considerably, the expansion's move to Spell Power rather than damage or healing to reduce the necessity for multiple gear sets would seem only a partial implementation.

And of course, the new Spell Power changes are already causing a fuss in some circles, such as this WoW Insider thread. I'm particularly unimpressed with the mage who think's it's unfair, unless they're given healing spells...

Zul'Aman

2008-08-01T07:41:00.000+01:00

My guild has been focussing on ZA again recently, although I've mainly missed out on the place as I've been focussing my limited raiding on the 25 man raids. This week I've been able to raid quite a bit, so got a good look at ZA along with SSC and Kara all in one week.

It's always fun to see some new bosses, although the enjoyment is rather reduced if you fight them once they've already been learned rather than going through the wiping/learning process. I just followed instructions and healed as much as I could. We killed everything apart from Zul'jin - although my guild has killed him before we just couldn't manage it this time, either having problems with the Eagle phase or being battered enough after the Eagle phase that we'd not really be prepared for the Lynx. The Feather Vortex must be one of the most annoying boss mechanics ever invented, although I assume it's rather trivialised if you have a resto druid. We got as far as Dragonhawk once or twice, but in the end had to call it a night.

After the raid I took stock of my Enhancement gear, which is in pretty good shape and really just needs enchanting to make it ready for Karazhan. Another good gold sink there...

Remember you're a hybrid

2008-07-31T07:40:00.000+01:00

A note for my alt-itis - I was only geared enough to heal last night's speed Kara because I've focussed on my main, and got him well geared.

A great advantage of being a hybrid, especially at this stage of the expansion when people are farming raids for badges rather than gear, is that you can pick up some nice drops for your off-specs. I got 2 nice pieces of enhancement mail from the run, as well as the badge haul and the two tier pieces.

It occurs to me that I need to take advantage of being a hybrid more often, and occasionally spec out of resto for PvE. This might add a bit more fun, and might even make me give up on a few alts - who knows.

Love my guild

2008-07-30T22:12:00.002+01:00

I was pottering about in Nagrand when our raid leader proposed a speed Kara.

Plenty of interest from DPS, but only me as healer, until another shaman respecced resto. I was pretty confident we could do it with only 2 healers, the leader was a bit unsure until I assured him it'd be fine.

2 hours and 30 minutes later we'd cleared the place - 2 healers makes for an extra dps spot, which in turn makes the healing easier! One wipe on Netherspite - everyone was too spread out for us to keep up with the healing - and one on the trash just after Chess when a patrol joined in and we'd not quite got our act together after the event.

Even better, I finally got both of the tier 4 drops out of there - a good roll on the helm and being the only needer for the gloves. Just the legs to go and I'm full tier 4..! Oh, and of course we netted a stack of badges apiece.

The full epic mail healing goal can be ticked off now. We may be casual raiders, but we're damn good at it.

More positive tanking

2008-07-29T19:30:00.001+01:00

A good night last night. Shank, my warrior, was accepted into Grulnak's guild, and promptly asked to tank Slave Pens. I was a bit unsure of it as I was the minimum level for the instance, but the healer was happy to try it so in we went.

An interesting group - 62 paladin healer and 66 paladin, 63 hunter (one of the guild leader's alts) and 70 enhancement shaman for DPS. The run mainly reinforced what everyone knows already - a guild run is much more fun than nearly any PUG. I happily left the shaman to off tank the kill target and just looked for aggro on everything else. The fun on boss fights was to see if I could keep aggro at least most of the time! My tanking was better thanks to last week's practice, but mainly because I was working with the group not fighting against them.

Step one: acceptance

2008-07-19T22:22:00.004+01:00

Im coming around to the view that, however sensible it might be from a real life perspective to only play one character, alt-isis is something I'm stuck with.

Anyway, I've started up Shank (my warrior) again - must stop reading warrior blogs, perhaps that will help!

I was pottering around in Hellfire Peninsula doing that damn quest where you have to kill the fel cannons (it's noticably difficult compared to others of the same level, but I was starting to love fury dps again) when a call in General came for a tank. Not a great run, although I won't go into details, but in some ways quite a good reality check.

I'm fairly sure I used to be a pretty good tank, but now I'm only a fairly average tank - although a lot better than some I've run into! Partly it's rustiness (things like I was forgetting to use Shield Block to make Revenge light up) and partly I can get a bit flustered when things go wrong early in the pull - perhaps because I don't quite have confidence in myself, or perhaps because I don't have confidence in the dps...! I am starting though to learn things like letting the aggro-monster mail wearer off-tank skull, then just concentrating on keeping everything else off the healer.

The tank shortage also seems to be wearing off a bit. I think this has partly been self correcting, as people have seen the shortage and levelled tanks. And it's worth remembering that on the day when you're on your tank you can be in a group that then needs a healer.

I think the rumoured changes in WotLK should help things further - if Death Knights can tank with any talent tree (i.e. just specialising in different directions) then hopefully warriors will also be able to tank while also having a spec that lets them quest. There's also the possibility that we'll be able to switch between two talent trees, which will help even further. That will hopefully fix the tank shortage for 5-man groups (and in anything larger healers remain more in demand than tanks).

Hence, at least for now my plan is -

Shaman main
Warrior tank alt (ideally geared enough to tank a heroic, but nothing further)
My rogue for sneaking around, opening lockboxes, and disenchanting greens
And a balance / resto druid for seeing the Alliance side of the game

Goals update

2008-07-18T22:23:00.001+01:00

I ran Old Hillsbrad last night, finally ticking off the "Revered with Keepers of Time" goal. While I was there I had a proper look around for the first time, with a visit into Southshore to see some soon-to-be-NPCs, and the bit in the inn where the Scarlet Crusade founders do their thing. I was a bit disappointed to find you can't get as far as Dalaran, but the instance has to have limits somewhere.

It was a slightly daft group - a 66 mage and all the rest of us 70s. We started out pretty complacently before a few deaths made us take things a bit more seriously, and I probably reinforced the DPS warrior's bad habits by healing him far more than would have been possible in a same-level group. Still, a good fun run.

My goals list for Grulnak is now fairly wrapped up. I still need to get to revered with Sporeggar and max out my weapon skills and fishing. I've also still got to complete Magister's Terrace, would love to go to Blackwing Lair, and ideally would take a look at Mount Hyjal. I've also added to that list exhalted with the Cenarion Expedition for the flask recipe, although that's more of a nice to have. I've got other goals to do with gearing (for example I'd like to improve my Scryers rep to get the better shoulder enchant), but I'm now wondering how long it will be before a release date for WotLK is announced, and presumably raiding will start to ramp down. I'll then start to concentrate more on my alts, with a view to getting them to appropriate levels ready for the release.

It's really just a question of how much raid content we'll get to see before the expansion.

Slightly embarrassed

2008-07-11T22:21:00.000+01:00

Serpentshrine Cavern last night. Now we have our resist tanks we did Hydross first, getting him on the second attempt in what seemed a very straight forward fight - but which we then noticed was completed 8 seconds before the enrage timer...! Second guild kill and first for me, and netted me the Blackfathom Warbands. A 15% upgrade to the Whirlwind Bracers that I spent many raids waiting to drop from Attumen.

One of the hidden advantages of being a resto shaman is that if healing mail drops, you've got a pretty good chance of an upgrade if you need it - except for those rare occasions when we have 4 or 5 shamans in the raid. I occasionally think back on being a shadowpriest, competion for cloth caster drops is not one of the plus points of that class!

We then went on to Lurker, where my performance was frankly sub-par. Three deaths to spouts in three attempts, including 2 deaths on the go where we got him, very embarrassing. One I'm claiming as a bug - it seems there's a small ledge on the inside of the main ring, if you're swimming there the game still treats you as being out of the water... In my defence I was standing in such a place that if the Lurker went clockwise, which he did every time, then he'd spout me pretty much immediately. However I should have had ample raid warning to get in the water. Must do better!

On a slightly scary note, the first 2 bosses of tier 5 content have no drops left for me (thanks to the drop and my badge boots). I must be a proper raider...

Favourite instance number 2

2008-07-10T22:17:00.003+01:00

Blackrock Depths is probably my second favourite instance. It's got a real feel of scale to it, and although it can be confusing the non-linear nature of the place is so much better than the "one long corridor" approach that's so common in a lot of other instances.

Despite spending a lot of time in there on three different characters and taken pretty much every route imaginable I'd never been all the way to the end, with runs usually finishing at the Molten Core portal.

Last night I rectified that, with my trusty Earth Shield and a 2-handed axe talent build. I had a few nasty moments, and a few stupid moments of forgetting to switch to my enhancement gear after casting Earth Shield, but made it through OK. I can see why people didn't bother with the Emporer - The Lyceum is frankly a pain - but I'm glad to have done it.

I also got the Circle of Flame which looks rather good. I might just add that to my "about town" gear set.

Gnomeregan and Stratholme

2008-07-07T23:03:00.003+01:00

I spent Sunday morning on my druid, Duillnar, in Gnomeregan with my stepson's paladin. I still don't like that place - partly the look doesn't really work for me, and partly I can never find my way around. Also, how can a place that small ever have been a city for an entire race? Ironforge has a much more epic scale to it, that's what an underground city should be like.

Anyway, we got through it fine, killed the end boss for a nice quest reward, and were finished in time for lunch... :)

I really enjoyed the druid role - although I don't much like feral cat dps the versatility is great. Our tank was a level 46 paladin, who unfortunately didn't really know what he was doing yet, so gave me a chance to occasionally go bear to pull a mob off the healer. Equally I could have healed if we'd needed it.

An odd group set up though - 2 paladins, a holy priest, enhancement shaman and myself. At one point we had a death on a trash pull. "It's OK", said the tank "I can res". "Actually, we can all res" says I...! I wonder how often that happens...

For now I think I'll stick with the druid. Although I could level up my shadow priest, and could still group with the stepson's paladin knowing we just needed to find 3 dps, I like the option of being able to tank.

I then spent Sunday afternoon in Scarlet Strat, and Monday in UD Strat, finishing up some Argent Dawn quests and getting myself up to Revered. My guild wants to see Naxx before it moves to Northrend, and while I had most of the materials to get attuned at Honoured rep getting to Revered with them was unfinished business from pre-Burning Crusade. It turns out that two elemental shaman can kill level 60 elites real quick, at least until we pull too many mobs and casting pushback starts to be a pain. Two shamans and a rogue are even quicker - we built a really good pile of Bile Spewer corpses, and barely saw the Baron before 2 elementals and our own dps downed him.

Seeing the inside of Naxx almost made me wish I'd been more of a hardcore raider before. Almost...

The screenshot above is there to remind me how much I love being an orc, even while I'm dabbling with druidism!

More alliance alts

2008-07-02T22:17:00.002+01:00

My shaman is slightly in limbo at the moment, with real life making raiding difficult. Instead I've been dabbling with alts again...

Big Bear Butt inspired me to start up a Night Elf shadow priest. I think the slightly darker, mysterious side of the NElf lore goes quite well with the class. He's level 12 currently, and I'm enjoying seeing the Draenai starting area for the first time, but I'm not sure about him long term. Having already levelled a 70 shadowpriest there's an easy familiarity to playing him (although I miss a few skills I've not got yet like Psychic Scream). But conversely he's not showing me anything new. I'll probably level him to 20 to get Mind Flay, and to see the rest of the starting quests, but then he'll probably get retired. If you got Shadowform at 20 I'd probably keep him going, because that's when the class becomes really cool, but 20 to 40 is a fair old time commitment, even these days.

The main reason he'll probably get retired though is my druid will probably take his place. I'm looking for a character to go with my stepson's dwarf paladin, and he seems to fit the bill better. Partially because he's feral, and hence in rogue gear, as opposed to the priest in a robe - he just looks cooler. Then there's the ability to do all 3 roles - tank, dps and heal - compared to "just" 2 for the priest. And while I'd rather be tanking in plate than in fur, the shapeshifting thing is rather fun.

I still have to try out my hunter in a good instance group though, just to see how that goes.

And my latest plan is to have a dwarf death knight, once they're released, to satisfy my need for a character in plate. That will also mean I have one each of my three favourite races - along with a slew of other characters I'm doing my best to leave retired.

What I want in WotLK - more caves

2008-06-25T21:23:00.001+01:00

Black Fathom Deeps is my all-time favourite instance in the game, purely for the feel of it as you go inside. For me it invokes my old pen-and-paper RPG days in a way that no other instance quite does. Something to do with the low wide tunnels with sandy floors I think, but I'm not really sure.

Thinking about this today I decided that what I'd most like to see in the expansion is more new cave layouts. I'm not sure what's so right about BFD, but I know that the newness of some of the zones in the Burning Crusade was spoiled by the reappearance of the same old cave layouts we've been seeing all the way through the game. As soon as you go inside you know that there's on or two locations where the quest object will be. A little while ago in Searing Gorge on my hunter I came across a layout I'd not seen before and the disorientation of not recognising it immediately was very welcome.

Fully epic'd - what next...?

2008-06-24T07:19:00.000+01:00

A run of the second half of Kara last night netted me enough badges to replace my last blue with the Necklace of Eternal Hope. Now that everyone's in epics I may be relatively only as well geared as my previous best - 2 or 3 purples and Zul Gurub blues - but it feels like some sort of milestone.

The run itself wasn't great - we're now running through second and third alts and the occasional new person. This means some characters are undergeared and too squishy, and understandable mistakes by the newbies can be frustrating. I'm was there for the badges but mainly the t4 head from the Prince to replace my only non-mail item. We didn't down him when we probably should have - the tank was a bit undergeared and didn't really have enough health, but although we got to phase 3 on our third attempt keeping both the tank and the dps alive at that stage proved too much, and we were too tired for a 4th go.

In terms of development of my shaman I'm getting towards the end until the expansion. I'm not sure I want the t4 head piece enough to clear the trash between Curator and Aran again, so I'll keep turning up to our progression raids in SSC and meanwhile do a few other goals like maxing out skills and soloing a few level 60 instances. I'm also going to move my non-resto talent points into Enhancement, purely to get instant ghost wolf. It just seems right for the character.

Apart from that I'm not really sure were to go next. I've decided to park the warlock again - it occurs to me that he doesn't really get me anything new, apart from the possibility of a high level enchanter. If I want to dps I can respec to Elemental and although they're not popular as dps for 5-mans due to the lack of crowd control a warlock is probably the next least popular choice except when there's demons around, as fear and seduce aren't highly throught of.

I might spend some time on my hunter, at least to try some Hellfire Peninsula instances as dps/cc - I want to test instancing with dwarfs and the like. Overall I prefer the Horde as a faction, due to humans being smug and gnomes being gnomes, but I feel that orcs should be in the majority as the centre of the Horde, not a tiny minority as they actually seem to be.

I might level my orc warrior, for tanking and because undead have tiny shoulder armour. This sounds ridiculous, but try comparing how the Warbringer set looks on the two races. Or perhaps (unlikely) if I decide Alliance is where it's at then a human paladin is called for.

I'm also tempted to try Eve Online for a total change.

Fantasy rather than sci-fi is where my heart is though.

One blue to go

2008-06-17T22:46:00.003+01:00

I have my tier 4 chest, now just my neck to replace - and I can do that with 4 more badges...

It was an odd night. We had a fair bit of trouble on Maggy due mainly to clicking problems, but then got Gruul on our first attempt - perhaps we've now really got the hang of Shatters, and we kept both tanks alive throughout which is pretty rare.

Rolled 18 for the chest, but fortunately there was only one other shaman / rogue that needed it (and no paladins in the raid) and he rolled an 8... :)

Locks rock

2008-06-16T18:42:00.000+01:00

With a few refinements to my grinding technique following feedback from some guildies the warlock is starting to look really promising.

I'm now using my imp on passive as a mana battery, for his superior regeneration rate, and using fear where possible rather than drain tanking.

I've got some +damage now, although not quite enough it seems, and grinding seems much quicker. I still need a bit more practice though, as unplanned adds can make things a bit dicey, especially caster adds. I occasionally found I was fearing one target out of two or three without having DoT'd it first.

Another advantage I discovered with having the imp out was that I could use him to nuke when necessary. I found when fighting Vilebranch Soothsayers (who heal) that even with Curse of Tongues up they'd often be able to get a heal out. My untalented shadowbolt takes an eternity to cast, so I couldn't stop them that way, and fear wasn't really an option in the surroundings. But if I attacked with the imp as they started to heal between us we could often finish the mob off before the heal landed.

I got him up to 48 at the weekend, and got his enchanting up to 125 so he can disenchant some of his older gear and useless quest rewards. Now it's time to go back to Searing Gorge, where I was so recently with my hunter.

My lock might make it beyond 60, or my warrior itch may become too strong... It's tough having a retired alt with a high level trade skill - when you occasionally need it (in this case to make an enchanting rod) you remember how much time and effort you've put into that character in the past.

Warlock alt?

2008-06-10T18:01:00.001+01:00

I didn't get much chance to play over the weekend. What time I had was spent getting an extra level on my lock and getting my head around playing him again. Generally he proved quite fun, but I'd rate him as much less easy than a hunter to play. Part of the problem is that your crowd control (i.e. seduce) is both harder to use and less obvious when it breaks, another aspect is that with a hunter with 3 targets you'd set the pet on one, trap one and let the other hit you a bit while as a lock I was CCing one and trying to DoT and drain-tank the other 2, while having to re-apply CC as well... A bit stressful when you're learning again.

I grouped up with an enhancement shaman in STV to kill an elite troll (slightly problematic, due to add density and my noobness, although he also seemed to have forgotten he could heal himself) and a more powerful elite giant (straight forward). These couple of encounters were a steep learning curve, but also reassuring in terms of the lock's versatility. Overall it seems that while an affliction lock is just a good a grinder as a BM hunter you don't get quite such as feeling of power as the warlock - as a hunter both you and your pet are doing some big hits, while as a warlock it's more about lots of little sources of damage. On the plus side though you can summon whichever minion is the best for the task at hand, and you're much less attached to them if they have to die to keep you alive.

After prompting from my guild that I really needed some +damage instead of just int and stamina, I crafted a couple of items of the Dreamweave set. I'll get the robe when I find some Wildvine, or when the AH price for it drops from insane levels. It sounds like that will help help a lot with the grinding. It's a bit of a bonus that he already has 300 tailoring - as my first tailor to get over level 35 I trained him up ages ago so that he could make decent bags, way before I sent my now-retired priest down the tailoring route.

On the way into work this morning I was pondering if the warlock alt was such a good idea though. There are many factors to this.

Warlocks are a pretty complex class, what with having to keep account of DoT durations, the sheer number of spells (for example, you know what curse to use when, but you just need so many hotkeys for them), and having crowd control that's a little unreliable. Is this a good idea for an alt? On the other hand is there such thing as a simple class, if you want to play it well?

There's the question of what this alt is for. He's not a "tourist" alt, as he's the same faction as my main so visiting all the same places and doing the same quests. Also not a leisure / escape alt - he's in the same guild, so if I'm on him I might be asked to help out if my shaman is needed. Given that, should I just drop the idea of another alt and spend the time on my main? There's plenty of stuff for my shaman to do, even if it's less compelling than the quick rewards of levelling a new character.

There's the fact that I'll very rarely if at all be asked to bring a DPSer to a raid over a healer, even though there are some occasions when you really need a lock or two along. Not something for me to worry about really though - I'd be reluctant to bring an alt to an instance that my main didn't already have all his drops from, as it's frustrating when you see a drop you want but you're on thw "wrong" character.

Another slight worry is that I'm quite goal oriented - I'm already thinking about what gear I'll want for him when he gets to 70. I really must remember this is just an alt. Alongside this is the sheer level of competition for cloth DPS gear - one of the great things about the shaman that gear competition is very low outside of a 25 man raid, you're often the only person there who needs it when the right armour drops.

Overall though I think I'll keep him running - if nothing else my shaman's future is mainly daily quests outside of raids, which don't appeal all that much.

Grrrr

2008-06-06T12:05:00.000+01:00

I really can't make my mind up. My hunter dinged 60 last night, picking up a nice blue for a pretty easy quest in the process. And now I'm thinking of retiring him.

I've come to the conclusion that spending time on two characters on two different factions is more hassle than it's worth, especially given my limited playing time.

On the plus side you get to do different quests, and have unfettered access to all of the cities and areas. Especially on the Alliance side some of these are pretty cool - the temple area of Darnassus, Ironforge and Aerie Peak being amongst my favourites.

On the downside you miss out on some of the social side - I've not really got to know my NElf's guild - and can't keep an eye on LFG or general guild chat for groups forming or invites that your other character might be interested in.

Given I'm not going to switch factions entirely (apart from anything else, the human NPCs are just too smug), I had the brainwave to restart my orc warlock. Despite deciding in the past that I'm not too keen on him I think after getting to like my hunter's style of play the other pet class might be worth a second look. Warlocks have some pretty cool tricks up their sleeves (although nothihng quite matches Feign Death), plus he's already a decent-ish level (45). It'll be interesting to see how he is for grouping - will peoples' distrust of NElf hunters outweigh their preference for Ice Trap over Seduce?

Just to note, probably unsurprisingly, that Zeth'Gor was much easier on my level 59 hunter than on my better-geared level 61 warrior. But I'm not bitter...

Goals Update

2008-06-05T12:42:00.000+01:00

Time for a goals update, 6 months on from the last one. My WoW has been distinctly casual in a way since then, although I've raided far more than I ever did pre-Burning Crusade.

Gear sets: I'm now up to 2/5 Tidefury, but not at all working towards completing this. I'd still like the head from the Big Bad Wolf, as the ultimate orc shaman piece. Meanwhile I'm 1/5 t4, hoping to get the chest and head at least and perhaps the gloves. Along with the t4 chest and a few more badges for a better neck I'll be in full epic healing gear. On top of that the t4 helm will make it all mail gear. I'd also like to get a decent caster staff and try out elemental dps at some point.

Netherdrake: Still no cash, so this is going nowhere. I can't see myself doing a major rep grind before WotLK comes out, so this is definitely a back-burner item.

Revered with Sporeggar (Transmute recipe): Again, no progress on this one. Low down the list, but maybe I'll get around to it.

Revered with Keepers of Time (just for completeness): I'm 213 rep short of this goal, so I'll definitely do it at some point.

Fishing: I'm up to 324 fishing, which is enough to catch Sporefish or start off the Lurker fight. I'll get this to 375 before WotLK, but it's bottom of the list of the skills I want to max out.

Other skills: Still need to max out my Axes, Maces, Staves, Two-Handed Maces and Unarmed skills, although apart from Two-Handed Maces they're pretty much there.

Quests and instances: I still want to complete the Hero of the Mag'har quest chain. I've also still got to complete Magisters' Terrace (my one visit there so far saw us unable to kill Kael'thas) and I'd like to get to the Emperor in Blackrock Depths (my previous visits there all stopped at the Molten Core entrance). On top of that I'm hoping to persuade the guild to go to BWL sometime before WotLK hits.

Beyond these it's just a question of seeing how far we get in TK and SSC before summer and the impending expansion slow raid interest down too much.

Why I WoW

2008-06-05T12:40:00.000+01:00

The other night we did our Gruul + Maggy raid, and it occured to me that this is in a nutshell why I play Warcraft: group play and group achievements.

Maggy was straight forward. We had two wipes - the first due to a poor choice of tanking assignments, then second due to clicker error - after which we fine-tuned the healing assignments and got a fairly clean kill. Given that as a casual guild we had both new alts and new raiders present that seemed a pretty good performance. Came second on the roll for the tier 4 chest, but I'll get that eventually.

Maulgar was also a first-time kill I think. The mage tank died a bit early (and I briefly tanked him by somehow out-healing his damage...!) but otherwise it was all good. Gruul we had a few problems with - 3 wipes I think, all at between 3% and 8%, and people were starting to get a bit tired. But on the fourth attempt we kept the whole raid alive much better and although we lost the main tank our off-tank outlasted Gruul. It was a bit dicey towards the end - I was just spamming max-rank Healing Wave on the tank - but it always felt like we'd kill him.

On the small scale helping out with a group quest, or running an instance with a decent group, up to a raid of people who mostly know and trust each other (in that wierd internet friends-who-are-strangers way) is what the real draw of the game is. The exploring, levelling and progressing "computer game" part is what you start off with, but it's not what keeps you playing 3 years later.

Into Outland

2008-06-01T12:20:00.000+01:00

My hunter reached Outlands for good yesterday. He'd been there earlier in the week on hitting level 58, so I ventured through the portal and I set his hearthstone to Shattrath, but needed to return to Azeroth to get his cooking up to speed. The bear flanks proved fairly easy to collect in Winterspring, but sandworm meat was much more frustrating to come by in Silithus. He got there in the end though, and also completed a few more quests in the process, so was 59 before I could call Azeroth done with.

Apart from spending a fair bit of time in Felwood and the early parts of Winterspring, mainly because I was finding the Timbermaw and Jaedenar quests quite fun, he saw very little of the final zones in the old game. Winterspring was touched upon, EPL only visited to hand in a quest, and WPL saw about 4 quests done as did Silithus. Un'goro and Burning Steppes were also only visited in passing. While I'm glad of the new speedy levelling experience, as this will be my 4th character to 60, it seems a shame that more recent players of the game will miss out on some great zones and quests.

Warrior stubbornness talent...

2008-05-31T08:54:00.000+01:00

No, not a suggestion for WotLK, but perhaps a requirement for the player behind him / her. I'm already starting to doubt my warrior levelling plan after a bad time in Zeth'Gor on Wednesday.

On the one hand it's a good thing about TBC that mob settlements are more dangerous than before - or so it seems. With patrols and the like you can't just wander in and start killing your quest targets, you need to keep an eye out. On the downside the place just highlighted the problems with being a warrior - it's kill or be killed, and if you're outnumbered much at all it's you that's going to die. Through sheer stubbornness I eventually got the "Burn" quest done, but must have died about 4 times in the process.

I'm going to concentrate on my hunter for a bit, and get him to level 61 or 62. It'll be interesting to compare how he fares in Outland compared to Azeroth, and also try grouping as it seems that there's much more instancing happening in the 60+ bracket than the 50-58 bracket.

To explain a bit about my alt list from yesterday, mages and warlocks are still off the menu for reasons I've mentioned before. From that list I can also remove druids (forms just aren't me, but otherwise balance / resto would really appeal) and priests. Despite priests being a better dps / healing hybrid than a shaman, due to having some CC, I'd rather be a shaman I think. And on the healer side I'd prefer a paladin to a priest, due to being less squishy (although mages seem to be the only real squishy in WoW), or at least wearing cooler armour.

Rogues are still cool, but I can't see myself levelling one just for the ability to sneak around enemy cities and some of the instances. I know there's more to the rogue class than that, but those are the main attractions of it to me...

So, maybe a human paladin, probably levelled to at least 24 to see the Draenei starting areas and replace my delete Blood Elf, perhaps further but probably not in any realistic timeframe. An undead warrior, perhaps forever stuck at level 61 (a dwarf warrior would be cool I think, but not worth the grind, my shaman makes an orc warrior rather superflous, and there is a certain zombie chic about that Forsaken). And an orc shaman main with a Belf hunter alt.

At least for now...

Indecisive (still)

2008-05-27T16:41:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last week, if not the last month, thinking about my alt situation.

At the moment I can barely spend enough time on WoW to keep one character current with our raiding and geared up. And being an altoholic is really not helping. So, as I've decided a few times before I need to decide who my main will be for WotLK, perhaps a few alts that I really can't live without (and properly treat them as alts), and leave all my other characters (and plans for new characters) well alone.

I'd got down to the point of having my characters be, in this order - shaman (main), NE hunter (alliance tourist and relaxation alt), orc rogue (explorer, once levelled some day) and perhaps a human paladin.

Then an article over at WoW insider - New WoW shirts at Jinx - led me to their "Tanks... You're Welcome" design, that had me pull out my warrior alt again. There's something really special about tanking - in a bad group it's just stressful and awful, in an OK group you really make the difference between a good and bad run, and good groups are just great. But unless my warrior was my exclusive main, with some real time commitment to his gear, I'd not see nearly as much of the game as I can as a healer with significantly less time commitment. And there's loads of cool things about my shaman that I'd undoubtedly miss.

So my new probable lineup is shaman (main), NE hunter (alliance tourist and relaxation alt) and undead warrior (who I hope to be well enough geared to tank a heroic by the time WotLK is about as old as BC is now).

It's about the big numbers

2008-05-21T19:41:00.000+01:00

I've not been playing much recently, or posting at all. Real life (mainly my 5-month old daughter) has overtaken my WoW life, but I'll post a backlog of entries soon to make this diary a bit more complete. Sparse though it is a quick read back through the last few entries give me a great reminder of where I've been, and a bit of an insight into where I'm going.

Last night's Maggy + Gruul raid was frustrating to start, with 45 minutes needed to fill the raid due to lack of signups, and a few guildies arm-twisted into coming when they hadn't planned to, or to bring certain classes (warlocks mainly) that we'd have struggled without.

Maggy was straight forward - one wipe after some dodgy tanking / healing assignments, then a mostly clean kill on the second attempt.

High King Maulgar was the fun bit. I think we got the pull right on the third attempt, but the mage tank died while Olm was still being finished off, and with Krosh on about 20% it seem like a wipe was imminent. We cranked up the dps on Krosh with him 2-shotting various raid members (including myself), but an ankh had me back up and adding my lightning bolts to the effort. By the time we got onto the High King we had a couple of bear tanks left, a fair few healers and not much by way of dps. This gave me an excuse to stick to dps for the boss, and although elemental shaman damage dealing is about as dull as it gets (lightning bolt, repeat...) it's actually rather fun.

My theory is this - firstly there is more satisfaction to seeing damage numbers than healing numbers, you could argue that the whole levelling game teaches you that big white and yellow numbers are good. But also with dps you have a progress bar - your enemy's health bar. This goes down at a nice steady pace, with the occasional jump as several hits register simultaneously. By contrast with healing you're either playing whack a mole (raid healing) or watching a wildly fluctuating health bar on some tank until the fight stops. The excitement there comes from wondering, when your target's health gets worryingly low, if your or another healers heal will land before the nameplate goes red. Stress vs fun - what would you chose?

To round the evening off we killed Gruul, for a first kill for me. It took a few attempts - I think 4 - before we got him. The wipes seemed to be down to deaths by Shatter, which would diminish the raid to the point of failure. Although there's a degree of skill involved in avoiding this, it's also down to a fair bit of luck as to where people land after the knockback.

Maggy down!

2008-03-27T22:37:00.000Z

We'd been planning to have a second attempt at Void Reaver, but as he was bugged in the patch we decided to go for Magtheridon instead. Our level of progression may not be all that impressive for some I'd imagine, but we are fairly happy with it especially as we killed him (it?) on our first night.

We got the hand of the fight routine on the third or fourth attempt, but then had problems with interrupts when our clickers were trying to click the cubes. At that point we'd lose loads of people to the blast, and wipe. This happened several more times, but eventually we got him.

Lost the roll for the tier 4 chest piece, but most importantly was there for a guild first kill!

Solo Lower Blackrock Spire

2008-03-22T22:25:00.000Z

I spent some time recently in LBRS, gathering gems for the UBRS key. I'm not sure if it's been made easier than it used to be, as all the bosses dropped a gem on my first kill. That certainly never used to happen, and you then had to roll for the gem against other members of your group. Or I could have just got a lucky streak.

A 0/20/41 spec turned out to be ideal, although I didn't have quite the damage output I'd have liked I could switch to resto gear before each fight, Earth Shield myself and then switch back to enhancement gear and just beat things down with my 2h axe. I got killed a few times, firstly by letting a runner bring friends in one of the early orc caster groups, then by a spider pack and finally by the last big group of orcs before Overlord Wyrmthalak's area. The last group turned out to be more than I could handle, although I might have been able to get through using one of my elementals in the end I just used an invisibility potion to get past. I do love alchemy sometimes! This meant I had my fire elemental for use on the boss, in order to kill him before the adds overwhelmed me. The other two bosses - Highlord Omokk and War Master Voone - turned out to be straight forward, although the troll was hitting surprisingly hard.

I've tried this before on the test server using a premade rogue, and although an experienced rogue player would have done a much better job than me, and the rogue did give the ability to stealth past nearly all the trash that I had to clear with my shaman, a character with medium dps and the ability to heal was as good if not better at the role than a high dps character with crowd control. Maybe Blizzard has got this class balance thing right after all...!

Scarlet Monestary redux

2008-03-05T22:27:00.000Z

Ironforge is officially my favourite city in the game. It just has so many nice touches. It's almost tempting me to start levelling a dwarf, but I'm resisting so far.

I've been intending to take my hunter to Sunken Temple to see what I think of the dps-and-cc role, and to see how instances feel grouped with humans and dwarfs instead of undead and blood elves. However it occurred to me to keep him at 49 for potential battleground use, rather than get him to level 50 or 51 and then get distracted. So instead I started looking for a group for SM Library with my NE druid. You can feel pretty confident when you can say "LFG, can tank or heal", and so it proved, we had a group together pretty quickly. I just need to bear in mind that you can't really do this at max level, at least not for the tricker instances.

As I should have expected, the outcome wasn't so much an idea of what grouping is like on the Alliance side as a reminder what it's like to PUG in an early instance, when people know their roles even less than a nightmare end game pugger. Fortunately we had an experienced tank (yours truely) even if on an unfamiliar class, otherwise between being unable to deal with runners or to focus fire on skull we'd have hand a pretty bad time. Or maybe I'm claiming undue credit, and we were just overpowered or lucky.

In hindsight I was lucky - I learned to tank from my mistakes in Pyrewood Village and with advice from a friend with higher level characters. I also got to run the Monestary several times with a semi-regular group that quickly came to trust one another, to the point that I was regularly invited to tank from then on. I'd learned a lot by then, and had forgotten my level 17 self who didn't want to use defensive stance because it lowers your damage output...

Raiding TK - sorta

2008-03-02T19:01:00.000Z

We're a casual guild, but after a while of our raiding getting rather too casual things were getting rather stagnant. Things have definitely picked up a bit though - after our first kill of Maulgar recently we made our first tentative steps into Tempest Keep early on Saturday.

The plan was to have a pop at Void Reaver - or Loot Reaver to his friends, as he's known for his obliging nature. However we were forewarned that his trash is pretty tough, and so it proved. We were doing pretty well to start off, but as we got closer to the VR things got tougher fairly quickly. We got as far as killing one of the four trash groups in his room before the trash started respawning, and we called it a morning.

The group really enjoyed the run - it's always great to step into a new instance for the first time. Seeing as we managed to get a full raid for a very early morning start, I'm confident that we'll be back soon, and I'm sure progress will be made. Meanwhile I've got some great screenshots, and another item has moved from my wish list to my working-on list.