Another blue raiding weekend
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.
Chain healing in Naxxramas
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.
Leveling a Priest
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.
Good pug, bad pug, I’ve got it all covered.
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.
Dear very patient individual,
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.
A whole year, really?
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.
How to NOT find a tank for your new guild
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.
Patch 3.3 for the low level players
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.
The Undergeared
I’m leveling another Horde character. Meet Misaka, the level 30 elemental shaman. This time I will probably finish the leveling fast though, possibly in the next week or two, as she actually has quite a good reason to exist. After all, she’s not just a random alt I’ve made out of boredom, but a member of on Arathor-EU.
What is Undergeared? You might already know, if you read our GM’s introductory post on his blog. If you didn’t, here’s a short explanation – the greedy goblin Gevlon is teaming up with a bunch of players to clear every raiding content in the game. On normal level of difficulty, but all in blue quality gear.
Sounds interesting enough? Add one more thing to this – most of the characters are either fresh rerolls or non-raiding alts. The most advanced raiding achievement we now feature is killing Flame Leviathan one of the transfered level 80 hunters has. Obviously none of us has an excellent knowledge of his class. This is a big disadvantage to the previous Blue Ulduar run, as that one was done with a group of serious raiders that were playing the same classes they did Ulduar hardmodes with. Here, you can’t really know if the people are skilled or not, at least not until we start getting to 80.
This is what made me interested in taking part in it. We all like to say that “skill > gear”, here’s an excellent chance to prove it. I might not agree with Gevlon on everything he writes in his blog, but this is really something I’d like to take part in. Given that the holiday season is usually pretty slow on raiding in my guild, at the very least I’ll have something to do (and something to write about).
The guild was formed few days ago, and already has about 60 members – mostly rerolled alts of various low levels, a few new deathknights and 3 level 80′s. As the official start was supposed to be on this Saturday, I expect some more people to join then. Of course it should be obvious that not all of these characters will be raiding or even hit level 80 at all, that’s why it doesn’t really matter that there are 10 priests or 12 paladins.
It’s a pretty weird environment though – the guild chat is silent most of the time, apart from occasional class question or people looking for a group to some instance. Granted, all of this is explicitly written in the guild rules, but it still feels kind of weird to me. I don’t really miss the “gz” spam and other annoyances, but it’s really strange to open up the guild tab and see that suddenly you’re the only one playing and you haven’t even noticed when the rest went away. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m going to miss them or anything, especially that I don’t know anything about them anyway. ;)
Random Dungeons With Random People – Fun For Everyone
The patch went online this week, so I’ve started to pug random dungeons for badges and achievements. Just as I was expecting earlier, the LFG tool is a great way to bring happiness to my playing time. Sure, some players are jerks, but there are also a lot of good players around.
The first day of the patch we’ve completed Occulus without any problems at all. Everyone in the group knew what they were supposed to be doing, there were no wipes, no “guys how do I damage with the dragon”, the only time someone died was at the last moments of Eregos fight, when they accidentally ate an orb explosion. A clean, fast run.
Some people are strange though. Or maybe strange is not really a good word for it. Today I went into heroic Pit of Saron to do some dpsing and get used to arms spec which I’ll use this evening in our raid. We wipe at the Forgemaster, lose a dps, then lose a tank, then a healer. Fear not, because here comes the LFG tool to the rescue! We get another pair of players – one deathknight tank, one druid healer. The tank inspects the druid and starts whining about how he’s not going to do this with this “crappy” druid.
So I check out the druid. First thing I see is that he has the Battlemaster title. Inspecting closer shows some random selection of heroics epics with some pvp parts, and a pvp resto spec. Usually neither of that is a good sign, but together with Battlemaster… Who cares. It’s one of the hardest titles to get in the game. Which means the druid should at least know what he’s doing.
Vote kick the whining deathknight, get back in tank spec and gear, grab another random DPSer, and off we go. Finished everything without any problems. Sure, there were a few deaths and a few moments when the group was close to dying, but nothing too unusual.
All in all, I like the LFG tool. Sure, sometimes it gets some jerks in my groups, and signing as a tank obviously reduces the waiting time by a lot as opposed to signing as a dps, but it’s an awesome thing anyway. Other parts of the patch are very cool as well – yesterday I was leveling my little paladin banker and the improvements to the zone map and the quest tracker are very helpful, even though I did these quests several times already. Even the Equipment Manager has been updated – it now shows which items belong to what set (making one little addon to do that no longer necessary), and it also shows which parts of the set you’re missing rather than showing a cryptic message like before.
And then there are the instances, which really deserve a post of their own.