The Angry Dwarfs

For the last few days, I’ve been playing Eve Online. I received a trial invitation from one of my friends (with one extra week of playtime), and started flying around big empty areas with planets, asteroids and other stuff in it.

In short – it’s much more fun when you play it by yourself, compared to looking at pretty videos, screenshots and observing someone else doing the flying. If I had to sum it up in a few words – it’s basically the good old Frontier, only played in an online environment. And yeah, I know that by saying this I’m basically reducing this incredibly complex game to something that could be fitted on a single floppy disk (only with better graphics), but I have only good memories of both Frontier and First Encounters, so it’s absolutely not negative.

So far I’ve been mostly running tutorial missions and finishing the first epic arc. The tutorials are lengthy, but they explain the basic game mechanics quite well – and award ships and skill books. The epic missions on the other hand were a bit disappointing – they provide a nice storyline to drag you around the Empire (and grant a new player something from 10 to 15 million ISK while doing so), but it looks extremely unfinished and ends without any sort of a real ending. I’ve expected maybe a bit more of action, especially for something that long. Still, the cash and experience was nice to get.

Right now I’m mostly playing around, doing random odd jobs to find something interesting. On the weekend I was mostly doing missions versus NPC pirates and then salvaging their wrecks – while not very hard at the starting level, it’s a bit boring when the pirates die in a few missile salvos and don’t have the chance to fight back. Not that I really want them to fight back though, as I’ve already lost a good few frigates by jumping into something that I couldn’t handle. Missions themselves aren’t very profitable (at least the Level 1 ones I’m able to do), but switching ships after the mission and reducing 20 enemy wrecks to sellable parts or raw materials can usually double the income. I’ve already made back more than I’ve spent on a destroyer fitted to salvage things, but most of the time the rewards aren’t that great.

This week will be exploration week – running around systems and scanning for minerals, pirate bases and other stuff that can be found in space. Lets hope that I can find anything at all. ;)

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Thanks to a tweet from the Blog Azeroth forums I’ve noticed a new challenge of sorts to write some advice for new players. It was started by Khi over at Tree Burglar (and here on Blog Azeroth forums) and I really hope we can come up with some solid posts and possibly get it read by the ones who need that information the most. Anyway, since lately I’ve been levelling two healers from level one mostly by the LFG, here’s some tips from an experienced tank for the ones that are just starting.

Before I start, there’s one thing that you absolutely need to remember.

Even with the heirloom gear, you can’t solo the appropriate level 5-man dungeon. The 5 in “5-man” is there for a reason.

With that initial tip out of the way, lets start with some tips for the tanks. All of this is based on my healer experience in random 5-man dungeons.

1. Always know where your healer is and what is he or she doing. Don’t run away on your own and start whacking some mobs behind two corners – the healer needs to see you to be able to heal you. Your healer is being attacked by a mob? Taunt it off.
2. Watch the healer’s mana bar. If it’s less than 1/3 full, don’t pull anything, stop and wait for the healer to regain mana. This is extremely important at the lower levels, as the healer doesn’t have any mana regeneration abilities yet, and their only option is to sit and drink. They can’t do that while in combat, they need a short break. While I know that nowadays everyone wants to finish the instance fast, so they can go and queue for the next one (and this is regardless of a level), it’s really simple. Letting the healer refill their mana bar takes 30 seconds. Dying because the healer had no mana and running back will take you at least 2 to 10 minutes, and in some extreme cases like Blackrock Depths, 10 minutes might not be enough, depending on where you died. Which would you prefer?
3. Learn how to tank. This is obviously different for all classes, but generally if you look over the spell tooltips, you will notice some of them have “this ability does a lot of threat” or similar on them. Use these. If after that you’re still not sure about what you should use, ask someone – either a friend or just do “/who your class 80” and ask someone that’s not in some instance (if you’re going to ask politely, most people will respond politely). You’re here to hold the mobs on you – if you don’t do that, they will run and smack that squishy mage (or what’s worse – that squishy priest that’s healing you) in the face and most likely kill them.
4. Positioning is important. Never turn your back to the mob that you’re tanking, unless you have a  damn good reason to do so – like taunting a mob off the healer for example – and even then only do so for a few seconds only. Always try to position yourself in such way so you can see all the mobs you’re tanking, keeping in mind that you need to be in range (and line of sight) of your healer. Overdoing it is also bad – once you’re in a position, you shouldn’t move unless the mobs or the boss drop an AoE effect on your head.
5. How you pull the mobs is also important. Shoot them, charge them, Faerie Fire or Hand of Reckoning them, but don’t just run in and body-pull a group. Remember that you have to do some damage to the mobs to keep them on you, so only taunting is not enough. And if you forget to hit one mob out of the whole pack, you can be pretty sure that it will run to the healer very fast, as we don’t usually have threat reducing talents at the early levels.
6. As the tank, you’ll be expected to know where to go, even if it’s your first time seeing that dungeon. The old world instances are all rather complicated (with the exception of maybe Stormwind Stockade) and they still don’t have ingame maps even after 5 years. If you don’t know the way, don’t be afraid to ask in the party if someone does. Chances are good that there will be an alt of someone who done it hundreds of times. Don’t forget to learn the way while you’re there. Also, WowHead and WoWWiki are good resources to check before signing up to the LFG – you’ll find maps, boss and loot lists, tactics, comments, dungeon quests and where to get them, all sorts of useful stuff.
7. Have at least some sort of tank gear. Below level 68 it doesn’t really matter that much and there won’t be much tanking drops, but don’t forget to have a one-handed weapon and a shield if you’re a paladin or a warrior (even if you have the heirloom 2-handed weapon), or the appropriate talents if you’re a druid. Other than that – gear with defense rating, stamina, agility, strength, and of the highest armor class you can wear is good for you. Remember that you’re here in this dungeon to tank the mobs, not to kill them. There are 3 other people that will do the killing for you.
8. Use your cooldowns. Tanking classes get their defensive cooldowns pretty early. Learn to use them whenever you can (and take a lot of damage) – their cooldown was cut down from half an hour to just a few minutes, so there’s no reason to save them. One warning for the paladins and druids though – trying to cast your healing spells while tanking is not a good idea at all, unless a) the healer is already dead, b) you’re absolutely certain that you can survive the few seconds before the cast finishes (especially as a druid, since it takes you out of bear form).
9. After entering the dungeon, ask if the healer is ready, then start running after mobs. Maybe they need to regain their mana first, because they were questing? Maybe they need to switch from a dps spec to a healing spec (and they can’t do that while you put the whole group in combat)? You can’t expect them to be ready and simply asking costs you nothing. Also, see the second hint about the detailed reason why.

The last few tips are not only for the tanks, but also for the dps.

1. Don’t ask or nag the healer to heal you. The healer already knows that they’re in the dungeon to heal people, and if they’re not AFK, there’s a big chance that they’re already casting a heal on you. Same goes for resurrecting dead people – I can see that you’re dead, and you can keep asking for a ress but that won’t happen if I don’t have enough mana after the fight (or we’re still not out of combat yet).
2. Being polite keeps you alive (or gets you back from the dead). If I see something like “preist res” in the chat window, then I really hope you know your way back from the graveyard, because you’re definitely not getting resurrected by me. The characters we play have names, and the game itself even has a name auto-completion system included after you type the first few letters and press [Tab]. It doesn’t get any easier than this. My priest’s name, Ranshe, doesn’t have any accented letters that might be hard to type, so there’s absolutely no excuse to not use it. We’re all living people in this LFG group, even if you will never see us again.
3. Being polite also extends to gameplay. Don’t run off in a random direction by yourself while the group goes the other way – if there’s a boss or a quest mob, just ask in party chat and we’re all going to go there. If you see other players need an item that’s of a higher level and they can use it right away and you don’t – don’t press the need button, you’ll have more chances to get it or something else.
4. Focus on your job and let the others focus on theirs. Pulling mobs and tanking them is the tank’s job. Healing is the healer’s job. They will do that even without your help. You are a dps here – that means your job is dealing damage to the mobs the tank is tanking. Do that.
5. If you’re not the tank, stay away from taunt buttons. Yes we know you have them, yes we know that your Death Grip looks cool or that your Hand of Reckoning deals damage. Don’t use them unless you have a very good reason to do so – like saving a healer that would otherwise die. Any other case is just going to get you dead faster.

Oh, and one last thing.

If you piss off the healer, you’d better not take any damage at all for the rest of the dungeon. This also includes tanks.

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With yesterday’s kills of Sartharion (with Tenebron up so it won’t be totally easy) and Malygos (we used the key we got last week), Misaka is now a Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

We started the evening with Sartharion, but one drake is nothing especially interesting and still perfectly in range of our gear, so it was more or less a formality to kill him. The only thing worth noting was the start of my absolute bad luck that evening – I’ve got healing aggro from whelps before the tank could grab them, and later that same tank managed to somehow position Tenebron in such a way that his last fire breath killed me again.

Next was Malygos, and it went even better, as we one-shotted him. Few people managed to die in third phase, so we ended the fight with only 4 dps drakes, but it was enough, and we still had over a minute to the enrage timer. After finishing with the tier 7 content, we went to Ulduar. There things began to be much more interesting.

Flame Leviathan wasn’t as hard as we expected (remember that the vehicles scale with gear, so with blues of iLevel 200 you can’t really afford to make mistakes there), but my bad luck that was silent on Malygos woke up again. I was driving a demolisher, as I’m pretty good at it – but I was Flame Leviathan’s target for what seemed half of the fight. Obviously, if your vehicle won’t survive long when he gets to you, you have to turn and run away as fast as you can, rolling pyrite stacks or not. I survived though, and thanks to a good gunner I’ve always had enough pyrite to continue dpsing right away.

Ignis took two tries, as our MT wasn’t totally familiar with the way he should kite the boss around the middle. On second try he did much better (after a very short explanation of the best path) and we killed him without much effort.

Razorscale went down in a similar way – one try to see how it goes, fixing the tactics, second attempt and a kill. That’s okay with me, since we do look at what was the problem and figure out a way around it, but it might be a bit better if the explanation and role assignment was done better before the first try. It hurts my raid leader feelings a little, but as I’m only a raider there, so I guess I should just deal with it – and it’s not like we blindly throw ourselves at the encounters again and again.

XT was just like Razorscale – at the first time we went with only two healers, but the resto druid got an unlucky chain of debuffs (Searing Light – Gravity Bomb – Searing Light in a row) and ran a bit too far, and I simply couldn’t outheal the Tantrum all by myself. Second time we went back to running with 3 healers, and it went much better.

So then, next week we’re going to extend our Ulduar raid ID (we don’t need new gear, so we don’t have to farm what we’ve killed once) and we’ll see how far we can go. This part will get a little more interesting, as the bosses start to hit like trucks there – especially Auriaya from what I remember from doing it on Vrethir back when it got released.

From my personal healing point of view – I was still a bit afraid that my limited mana pool won’t be enough, but I only ran out of mana on the less coordinated first tries, especially on Ignis. If we follow the tactics better and don’t take unnecessary damage, it’s fine. I go through a lot of mana potions during the raid though, so I have to remember to log in and make a few stacks of them this week.

Oh, and if anyone looks at the armory and wonders why I’ve looted some epics – we run the need before greed system in the raids, so if we want something for some reason – be it gear for leveling to 85, pvp, LFG or whatever, we can need it. So far I only collect them, haven’t equipped anything apart from the badge DPS totem yet, so I won’t get the Epic achievement too fast. But there’s nothing bad in having some gear prepared for when I want to use it.

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Misaka and the group of raiders finally went somewhere tonight. We were planning the Naxx run for more than two weeks already, but weren’t able to get enough people online to actually do it. Now we did, so I’ve seen more action than just logging onto Misaka and her bank alt to do a few dailies, maybe run a random heroic if I feel like doing it, and then log out.

The result is below (and please forgive my crappy graphics settings).

Chilling in Kel's throne room

The whole run was pretty good, apart from one wipe on Faerlina with adds not being close enough to the boss. Doing everything took us about 3 hours and we haven’t really had any problems anywhere. Of course, it’s only Naxxramas and just a bit harder than a heroic dungeon, so it wasn’t a question IF we can do it in blues, but rather how good can we be at it.

We weren’t also able to do Noth, because one player did the weekly raid this week for some reason. Ah well, we have an achievement for killing Kel’Thuzad and all the rest, so it’s not like it’s a big problem. We can always go and poke Noth or do the weekly raid some next time.

From my point of view, it was a decent run. I’m still not totally accustomed to heals with cast times, which was probably most visible on Loatheb, but on the bits where we went with only two healers, I was pretty close in healing done to our resto druid, Triev (pretty close being 45-55% for each one of us). I can blame it on lag though, since the latency on Arathor is a bit higher than what I’m used to on Deathwing – and also I’ve had some times when my screen froze for a few seconds. Before the raid, I was worried that I will have mana problems with the pretty low mana pools in blues, but only on KT I’ve ended the fight with about 5% left.

I could probably still improve things – one thing I’ve noticed is I should somehow make a Power Auras setting to remind me that I’ve ran out of totem range and have to reset them. I should also bind Tidal Force and Blood Fury to something, so I actually use them at all. Fortunately my gear is mostly done – I only need a new cloth chestpiece and gloves, but as it requires them to a) drop at all, b) not be sharded while I have to greed for them, this might take a while.

Next week we’re planning to do Sarthartion +1 or more, and maybe we could also do Malygos since Gevlon got the key item. We’ll see.

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I’m totally not good at this “blog” thing. Truth be told, there’s just a lot of things happening (both in and outside of WoW) which I don’t think anyone that might read this would be interested in.

So, to keep to the little more interesting things than my random problems – I’m leveling a Horde Priest on Sylvanas-EU. If anyone by an accident sees a little blood elf called Ranshe running around and trying to lolsmite mobs to death, you’re more than welcome to give me a poke. Or a Glyph of Smite, because it costs about 60 bloody gold pieces on the AH, and so far I’ve only got 21. ;)

Why a priest? Well, I never really played one, and I wanted to see how it is to heal with it. And I have a friend playing on Sylvanas, so I figured it might be a good place to try something new.

I really doubt I’ll do much raiding on her though, since from what I saw on the trade chat it’s all about something called gs and achievements – and without a main on the server it’s not gonna be so easy getting into them. On Deathwing I never really bothered with gearscore, so I don’t have any clue at all how much my characters have – and I don’t really care about that, and neither do most of the raiders. On Sylvanas it looks like I might be actually using it, even if I don’t like it.

Well, we’ll see about raids when I get to 80. If I get there at all, because there’s a big chance I’ll be bored well before that. I’ve already been a bit yesterday (and it’s a character that I’ve made on Thursday night), when I got to the point where mobs HP jumped up about twice and my damage haven’t. After getting a few more levels it got a bit better though.

Oh, and on a totally different note which doesn’t really deserve a separate post now – in a near future I will be probably writing more posts that are totally not about WoW, complete with a little redesign and stuff. But now I’m gonna go and level up my little priestling to 20, so I can finally get a mount.

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Like I wrote on Twitter, I thought I don’t have that much things to write about, and then I suddenly got an invite from a friend to heal his ICC-10 guild run. Apparently we’re not the only ones on Deathwing having low healer signups. ;)

The run was pretty cool, as expected from a guild run – the Gods of War folks there are more or less on the same progression level as my guild, so it went pretty much similar. We went through the first wing without much fuss, as the only bad thing I can remember was losing a roll on a staff with spirit, and I’m not that much bothered about it – I have one from ToC-10, the better one will drop sometime again, and /rolls are fair enough for me. After that we killed Festergut after sorting out the healing and after some tries on Rotface that was it since we were out of time. Overall, a nice run.

That was my second time healing ICC at all, and the first time in the new wings. A very interesting experience, even (or maybe especially) if I messed up a few times. I wasn’t the only one messing up though. ;)

We had a lot of problems on Rotface, which I think were due to not cleansing the Mutating Infection at all. That made healing the debuffed people unnecessarily hard, and led to some deaths. Still, I hope we can get the run going further today or tomorrow, as it was really fun running with them.

Another raid was for the weekly – being Ignis, it was really awesome. Or maybe I should say it differently. It was so bad that it was really awesome.

We had it all.

• A demolisher passenger pulling the adds before Flame Leviathan and therefore engaging Flame Leviathan with only one siege engine and two demolishers inside the room.
• Half of the group getting lost and going to kill a tower that was already disabled by talking to Brann at the start – therefore not being inside the room when we accidentally started the boss.
• The same demolisher passenger that was shooting everything that he shouldn’t and didn’t get me a single pyrite barrel even though I was basically standing in the middle of 10 of them. I ejected him from the passenger seat in front of Flame Leviathan because he was useless anyway.
• One tank where you should be having two, with a dps DK trying to grab all the adds (he failed a bit at it, but was really trying to do it as best as he could, so he’s excused).
• A mage with no enchants and empty sockets doing less dps (and damage) than the tank (incidentally the same person which was the demolisher passenger in the above fails).
• The same mage also kept saying “this time we’ll get him”. We finally replaced him to get a real offtank.
• The shadow priest saying “I have 10 fps that’s why my damage is so low” while he was second and doing 4.5k dps.
• And finally the so called “raid leader” looting the healing cloak to the paladin who lost it, ignoring two dps rolls and my higher healing roll as well. Fortunately Spellforce of the Gods of War guild is a cool person, so he offered (and even insisted when I said that I don’t really mind) to trade it to me. Thanks a lot. :)

Before this pug, I was quite surprised that hardly anyone pugs Ulduar. Now I’m not.

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Eh, what? Very patient? Me?

That must be some mistake then. Silly post office, even in Azeroth you can’t trust them.

I like the pet, but I still think the Core Hound I got from the authenticator is cuter. I like the mail as well, and I think it’s the first time even though they’ve sent it from “WoW Dev Team”, not from some NPC like Breanni.

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So, apparently the blog had it’s first birthday a few days ago, and me, in my whole post-holiday confused state of mind, totally forgot about it. Oh well. If I had one New Year’s wish to make, I’d wish for myself to write more posts here. We’ll see how that goes. ;)

It’s not like I don’t have any real excuses for lack of posts, though. First thing that was on my mind for much of the whole holiday break, was levelling my shaman Misaka I’ve mentioned last time. In the last few weeks I’ve levelled her from 20 something to 77, and I’m working on getting her to 80 and geared at least somewhat appropriately for our Undergeared project before this Saturday. Should be a totally possible goal now that I think about it.

On my main server I’ve had a few things to do as well, especially after the New Year, as I’ve been volunteered to become an officer of my guild, and I’ve accepted the offer. After that, I’ve had my head a bit full with raids, catching up with the forums, managing DKP for the runs, and other things like that. The guild got a bunch of new recruits all from one of the other guilds (we haven’t fished for them really, they just weren’t happy there), and we managed to switch our raiding focus to consistently having two 10-man groups each week, and also clear the first wing of Icecrown on 25-man without too much problems.

That would be about it for now. I’m back to getting level 78 and unlocking the Sons of Hodir once again, and then I have an Ulduar raid to run, to maybe finally get my last Sigil.

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If you’re making a new raiding guild, that’s completely fine with me. After all, this is a game for everyone, so one more guild is not a problem. But, if you’re going to talk to random guilded people, like the person in the screenshot below, you’re just doing it wrong.

Popularity: 7% [?]

A lot of the features mentioned in the 3.3 patch notes was focused at low level players – changing some mobs from aggressive to neutral, dual wielding (and two daggers) for rogues from the start, and all the other similar things the endgame players usually don’t care about at all. Since now I have a low level character, I can test it out, and that’s what I’ve done while leveling my new shaman.

Questing

There are two biggest features of the recent patch for a low level. First one is the new map and quest interface. You notice it right away, when you open the full zone map. It shows your quests in that zone and offers markings, so if a quest item drops in some area, that place will be marked with blue color on the map.

Some of the players might say, “meh, a copy of Questhelper”, and they will probably have a good point there – Blizzard is known for taking ideas from popular addons and making their own versions of them. Usually the builtin versions are simpler and lack advanced features, but they are good enough if you don’t need any extra stuff.

I’ve never once used the Outfitter’s automatic changing of gear depending on stance, so why would I want to have an addon that does the same thing as the Blizzard Equipment Manager, and can also do a number of other things I don’t care about. It’s the same deal with the ingame quest interface and Questhelper. The game already has a quest interface, why would I want an extra addon that does the same thing (and takes a lot of memory at the same time)? So I can have an arrow showing me where to go? No thanks, that’s why we have a map in this game, and now that it shows almost exactly where to go, it’s even less needed to have anything extra or even look at Wowhead.

That being said, knowing where to quest is very helpful, and some of the quests can be very vague. That’s where I usually open Wowhead and check the quest out, or I just remember how I did it on my other characters, as I have a few of Alliance chars on level 80 already. With my shaman though, I can’t really do this – I have no idea at all where should I go next or where the quests are supposed to be done, so I have to rely on either Wowhead or now, the ingame quest interface.

So far it works very well, and the only quests I have to still look up on Wowhead are the dungeon ones, as the old world instances still don’t have any maps for them. If I had a wish that I could pass on the developers to work on, it would be exactly that – you can still easily get yourself lost inside an old world instance. Maps, like the ones the Northrend instances have, would be very helpful.

Instances

I’ve already mentioned last week about the new LFG system, and how cool it is on level 80, but for a new player, it’s even better. While I was leveling my druid, I think I haven’t been in an instance once until Hellfire Peninsula, but with Misaka, I can get a group in a few minutes, even for the instances I’d never run otherwise like Stockades.

Not only it provides me with a change from all the questing, but it also gives nice experience, even though I don’t have any heirloom items on her. Without any extra dungeon quests, I can gain a level by just doing two instances, and even with the size of the old dungeon, it usually takes less time than questing. Dungeon quests speed it up a lot, especially if there are a few for the instance – doing a full set of these can grant you another half a level worth of experience points. And in the meantime I can of course quest normally, and don’t have to sit in Undercity and wait for people – the new LFG teleports me from wherever I currently am, right to the start of the dungeon, and puts me back into where I was after. It’s not a big issue in Northrend, but in the old world, where the instance can be on a completely other continent or in a similarly annoying place, like Gnomeregan and Stockades, it’s just a blessing.

Of course there are also the rewards for doing random dungeons. Since I’m not doing level 80 heroics yet, I don’t get emblems – instead I get a bag with a random blue item inside for each random dungeon I finish. The items are sometimes useless – for example you can, and most likely will, get a neckpiece with strength for a caster – but sometimes it’s something you will definitely use, and they’re usually better than the green quest rewards.

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