tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75874169730167272492024-02-19T15:41:04.043-08:00Chronicles of a CasualUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-80293656238093231672013-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:002013-11-13T14:10:50.325-08:00You Don't Know Jack- Adventures at Blizzcon 2013 Part 1<div style="text-align: center;">
<u>A Near Miss</u></div>
<br />
<br />
The last two days have been an explosion of Blizzcon stories on Twitter. Aside from enjoying all the different tales of who met whom, this has resulted in an intense desire to share my thoughts. Lucky for all of us, I have this blog thing!<br />
<a name='more'></a>I can't tell the tale of Blizzcon without covering the days leading up to the convention. If you follow me on Twitter I'm sure you have at least a vague idea of the story I'm about to share. If you don't, then pull up a chair and enjoy.<br />
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Reverse scroll to three or four months ago (whenever Blizzcon tickets were sold.) I wasn't planning on attending the con. I tend to be weird about money and I just didn't think a convention was something I wanted to prioritize for. Things changed shortly after my girlfriend broke up with me. I was probably feeling lonely or impulsive (probably both,) but I decided that it would be fun to get out of my box and experience something new. Meet some new people. Travel alone. Exciting things.<br />
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I started poking around to see if anybody close to me and a spare ticket. Low and behold, I remembered one of my guildmates mentioning something about having one. This guildmate happened to be (what I thought at the time) a good friend of mine. He went by the name Illumi, but his toon name back then was actually Brosideon. His real name is Quinn Morrow. Ilumi was the other ret paladin raiding in Apotheosis back then. He and I had this amusing almost frat guy type of friendship. I know for a fact that we bothered people in raid with what came to be known as "bro-ing out." He sort of enabled me to tap into this caveman-like portion of my personality. It was stupid, but also fun. He and I would compete as DPS. I was always the better paladin (his words, which I silently agreed with,) but it was a close enough race to be exciting most of the time. After my dad died he even extended the kindness of giving me his phone number. He would text me once in a while to see if I was doing okay. As far as Warcraft goes, it felt like a friendship.<br />
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Ilumi and I spoke about Blizzcon and came to the agreement that I would buy his extra ticket and split a room at the Hilton with him. Months passed. I occasionally checked in with him on the plans, but I never really got around to hashing out things in detail. Fast forward to 2 or 3 days before my flight. I started trying to get in touch with Quinn to finalize things. I didn't know which day he was arriving or if my name would be on the hotel room or anything. I also didn't know how much money I owed him. This is where the story goes south. As these days passed it became increasingly difficult to get in touch with Ilumi. At one point my phone wouldn't send his a text message. I don't know if it was a random coincidence or not, but it made me nervous. He always seemed unavailable on RealID as well.<br />
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My flight was scheduled on Thursday. Come Tuesday I was extremely concerned. I had a date planned that evening (which went GREAT by the way,) and I decided that after I would jump online and bug Ilumi. I knew he'd be on raiding. Before my date I tried to ping him. All I got at that time was a message that said "sec." After the date I got back on and spent 4 hours trying to get a response from him on RealID. He just ignored me. It was unbelievable. When I was reasonably certain that something shady was going on, I just started asking him to be straight forward. I needed to know what was happening, even if it was just an explanation that I was getting screwed. No abusive language was used. I refrained from threatening him. Still, he just didn't respond. I couldn't believe it. Needless to say, I was hurt and angry.<br />
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Starting late Tuesday night I started frantically tweeting about my situation. I got a lot of responses from people. By the time I went to bed I was hopeful that I might be able to salvage my trip. Most of Wednesday morning was spent on either Twitter or the Battle.net forums. So many people came to my rescue, I can't remember them all. My first break came when two players from my guild, Kal and Chronis, tweeted that they might be able to split a room with me. That did indeed pan out and I can never thank them enough. Not only did I get a comfortable queen bed to myself in a room with two people I knew I could trust, but I also got a ridiculously good deal for the stay. I hope my gratitude was evident. They saved my ass. <br />
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Once I had lodging secured I started digging through the the Battle.net forums for tickets. There were several threads, so I jumped in and fired off a few emails. I ended up finding a couple that were looking to sell on the condition that they could give the goodie bag to the original buyer. That was my only option at the time and I was eager to get something locked down. In retrospect I kind of wish I had been more patient. Those figurines would have looked super cool in my cube here at work. I wasn't looking to press my luck so I agreed. The couple lowered the asking price and we made arrangements to meet. The girl seemed to be earnest and forthcoming. I felt good. By around 1PM on Wednesday I was set.<br />
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Trusting people you've met through the Internet is always a guessing game. Obviously I had to take a leap of faith with the people I was buying my ticket from. Technically I still had to trust Kal and Chronis (although I never doubted their honesty for a second.) It still floors me that Ilumi betrayed my trust. He didn't even have the balls to say anything to me when I asked what was going on. He is an incredible piece of shit. If he even ended up going to Blizzcon, I never saw him. That's probably good for both of us. Right now his paladin is named Iluminatez. He's playing in an Alliance guild called Game Over on Proudmore. If you read this and have the chance to chat with the little weasel, tell him to get fucked. <br />
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To all the people who helped me get to Blizzcon, I can't even begin to thank you. The response I got from twitter when I started looking for help was incredible. Lots of big hearts out there. I am forever in your debt. Knowing now how awesome Blizzcon was, I would have been crushed to not go. Thank you all so much for rescuing me. Kal, Chronis; you're amazing people. Thank you for letting me room with you. You were two of the nicest people I met the whole trip. I appreciate you very very much and hope we meet again. So many feels.<br />
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Since this turned into a wall of text, I'm going to share my tales of the 'con in a separate post. Thanks for reading!<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-81844314294714500392013-06-17T12:08:00.001-07:002013-06-17T12:08:06.138-07:00Pressing PauseWhat follows is my raider resignation post from the Apotheosis forums. I wanted to share it here because not everybody can read the guild content. <div><br></div><div><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1; "><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Apotheosis friends,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><o:p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I don’t want to make this a big dramatic thing, because it’s not one; I’ve chosen to step down from raiding for the foreseeable future. I still enjoy the game and I love the group of people I play with. Life just has a funny way of asserting its self and lately I’ve found myself wishing I had more time to do things other than Warcraft. I’ve been trying to focus on my fitness, my home, and my friendships lately and it feels good.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">I don’t know how long I’m going to be out, but I’ll be around here and there. My life’s priorities are shifting and there are only so many hours in the day. This decision comes with a heavy heart, but it’s something I have thought on for long enough and I know it’s the right choice.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">To the officers: if you need a DPS on any given raid night, feel free to ping me on Twitter. If I’m available, I will always be happy to hulk-smash things for you. If you have questions about anything pertaining to my resignation, please contact me. Like I said, I’ll be around so this isn’t a goodbye post.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><o:p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">-Colin (Jack)</span></p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-71944984891958153642013-04-30T16:43:00.000-07:002013-04-30T16:44:22.063-07:00ProgressionI decided to do a counter-post to a blog entry <a href="https://twitter.com/Jasyla_">Jasyla</a>, my guild's GM, posted <a href="http://www.cannotbetamed.com/">yesterday</a>. The
purpose of this isn't to attack her or point out how she’s wrong or anything
negative like that. What I hope to do
with this is to get myself involved in the discussion in a constructive
way.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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Jasyla does a great job as a GM,
and I think being an officer in a guild is probably tougher and more thankless
than most players think (myself included.)
I commend all of our officers for being the ones with the guts to make
tough decisions for the guild, even if I don’t agree with some of them.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jasyla’s post was about the concept of extending raid
lockouts for the sake of working on progression. This kind of decision is always fraught with
politics and mixed reactions. As a
raider in her guild who was didn't agree with the raid planning last week, I feel it’s my duty to
explain why as well as what I would do differently. What good does complaining do without suggestions to back it up? I don’t have any expectation that what I
propose will be put into practice.
Again, I just want to get involved in this discussion and hopefully put
some ideas out there that can help the group find a happy medium. Make note of the fact that I am dangerously
assuming that there are some people in my guild that aren't okay with extending
under certain conditions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you've read Jasyla’s post (which you should) then you know that our guild,
Apotheosis, is currently 1/13 Heroic in Throne of Thunder. The raid plan this last week was to get to
Tortos and start working on him/her/it on heroic. The raid was to be extended to the following
week, where we would ideally get the kill, and we would move forward.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now for a bit of back story about my recent history in the
game and guild. As a guildie, I’m not
always the best at staying current with what is going on in our forums. I always try to know my role and the fight
strategies, but when it comes down to things like our raid review and planning
threads, I’m typically not involved. This isn't ideal, but I don’t believe I’m violating any guild rules by doing
this. I should be involved because it’s
ultimately helpful to the group, but alas I have a lot on my plate these days
and sometimes things fall between the cracks.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anyhow, as we were hammering away at H Tortos, I started wondering
if we were ever going to move ahead and clear the instance on normal. This thought occurred to me for a couple of
reasons. First, we had been struggling
with the fight for a good portion of the night.
This is to be expected because it’s somewhat of a chaotic
encounter. My heart goes out to our
tanks that have the task of kiting. It doesn't sound fun or easy. When working
on progression, we usually “call it” at a certain point if it doesn't look like
we’re on the brink of a breakthrough.
The second reason is tied into another factor I haven’t mentioned. We have only cleared ToT twice. Historically (to my knowledge at least) when
we’re progressing through heroics, unless we've farmed the raid a bit,
there’s a certain point in the week where we decide to move forward and clear
any remaining content on normal. When I
found out our plan was to prioritize progression, I became a bit agitated.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m normally pretty okay with extending, but I think that’s
because it has happened under different conditions in the past. As I was asking questions about extending, it
was presented to me that a significant number of raiders are opposed to
farming for the sake of farming. In
general I agree, but since when was clearing content more than twice considered
excessive farming? Or even farming at all? I’m not saying that
we need to set some minimum number of clears before extending is
“acceptable.” What I’m getting at is: up
to a certain point in the tier, clearing normal modes <i>after</i> progression time is still beneficial. I will elaborate on this below.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This experience has shown me that I need to
be more involved in the raid review and planning processes because it’s a lot harder to be
upset with a plan when you participated in shaping it. On the topic of the planning process, I think
that the selection of which heroics to tackle is something to seriously
consider. I believe the guild did this
well in the previous tier. It was widely
known that Spirit Kings was more challenging than Elegon, so we worked on the
sparkle dragon first. We came in and did SK later and were able to defeat the
encounter, possibly via the benefit of obtaining gear from easier heroics or
even normal modes. I don’t know for
sure, but Tortos may not be the next easiest boss to work on. We could possibly kill the turtle on normal, move
forward, and then work on H. Ji-Kun.
Something like this sounds more agreeable to me (if Ji-Kun is actually easier.) This assumption is of course missing
empirical evidence (which I’m sure exists) of which heroics are easier and
which are more difficult.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Gear is always going to be a factor in discussions like
this. Some of the guild simply won’t be
as concerned about it. I can accept that
even though I don’t feel that way myself.
The things I focus on for enjoyment in raiding are directly related to
my gear level. Raiding is fun to me
because I like feeling like I do my job well.
Part of that is doing as much DPS as possible. It would be dishonest for me to deny the fact
that I want this or that item to drop for me.
Obviously clearing bosses is going to be a determining factor for
whether or not that need gets met. When
I find out that we’re planning on clearing the raid once over a two week period
verses twice, of course that isn't going to be something I view as ideal. Of
course I’m just a small sampling of how people may feel and what I want isn't the point anyway. It’s true that gear doesn't help people avoid one-shot mechanics or contribute to better decision
making, but upgrades have their own value in the context of progression and I
think sometimes that value is understated.
I feel that’s a valid statement in this case because we've only cleared
Throne of Thunder twice. Naturally, that argument
gets weaker and weaker as more kills occur.<o:p></o:p></div>
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An argument can also be made for the value of practice in
the context of progression. How will
people know how to do the hard modes without hard mode practice? I think this is a valid concern, however I
think this is somewhat of a case of trying to run before we can walk. In my opinion the group can benefit greatly
from the practice of normal mode mechanics, some of which we still struggle
with (myself included.) If we dig into heroics full bore
we will certainly learn. The point is that if we’re still
going to be clearing some encounters on normal, in an effort to prioritize gear
acquisition, a refinement of normal mode execution will also occur. Both of these things will be beneficial for progression.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, what is my ideal situation for progression planning? Let
me start by again pointing out that this is an armchair analysis of a process
that I am largely not currently participating in.
Also, I would like to pay a massive amount of respect to the people in
my guild that do the raid planning. I
have nothing but appreciation for those individuals because that planning is a
huge reason why Apotheosis is able to be successful. No raid group can get by without it, that’s a
fact. These people don't get any sort of tangible compensation for their effort so I can imagine that the success of the guild is an important way for the officers and coordinators to really see the fruits of their labor. I would think this is part of what makes progression so important.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The raid group that I’m a part of <i>needs</i> progression. Without
it people get bored and burned out quickly.
I’m sure the challenge of heroics (as opposed to the prospect of better
gear, achievements, other tangibles, etc.) is all a lot of our players need to
justify extending a lockout. I
understand that this is a multifaceted decision. I guess my major disagreement with all of
this is the turning point where a guild commits fully to progression at the
cost of normal mode kills. Moving forward, I think progression with my
group could be handled similarly, but also with a few twists. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
First, issues like this can be largely avoided with
more participation in raid review threads on our forums. Mandating participation is too heavy handed
in my opinion, so I would propose that some kind of small EP bonus be offered
as an incentive for being actively involved. This
way the officers can get more people in on decisions like this as well as the
other positives that come from raid reviews.
Since EP drives are already in place, the drive and thread participation
bonuses could be an either/or thing, or they could just both be offered. I think either works.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since it’s already been established that we want to make
progression a priority, I think an expectation could be set to determine if and
when we stop prioritizing a full clear each week. As Jasyla mentioned, such a decision is
slightly different this tier because we’re only looking at one raid as opposed
to several. Given that we’re only two
Lei Shen kills deep right now, I hope we can make getting more normal mode
kills a priority for at least a little while. As I mentioned above,
in addition to potential upgrades, these experiences will (IMO) help us hone
our execution. This decision is
something that can be handled through a raid review (or planning) thread. Obviously these discussions are already
happening to a degree. I think they
would benefit the group more if participation can be increased. Keep in mind that I am pushing for normal mode kills for the boss fights we're not actively working to kill on heroic. Simply clearing ToT on normal over and over isn't what I'm asking for.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Progression is something I value. Joining a guild like Apotheosis was
incredible for me because I came as a player that never did heroic modes. I am fully on board with keeping things fresh
and challenging. I just hope some of my
suggestions for implementing that sound good to more than just myself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-7671876944670075172012-11-18T00:56:00.001-08:002012-11-18T00:56:23.917-08:008th Anniversary GaffesNormally I'm not one of those people who jump on the "Blizzard and WoW are really going downhill" bandwagon, but I just couldn't ignore this.<br />
<br />
Evidently today is WoW's 8th Anniversary. That's tremendous. I for one still enjoy this game quite a lot, so I'm always happy to observe milestones like this. From year to year the festivities surrounding this even have varied. For several years (it seems,) Blizzard was in the habit of handing out vanity pets, as a thank you to players who were around to log in on the anniversary. This year it seems they just didn't give any shits. Negative shits were given even. See below:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0W_zmu5mBp6s8kejFAYNvyc9K4deeV5aWDN-kDzufc9doPEjSx1fXk1aei4j8O36H4DsBQJgu8uCb-ZFrZIaanpeF3mAHJnbYE8Yr38vNSemcl3ynfHd_lHXsSNiEJijBFNJf1CYs_tk/s1600/8th1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0W_zmu5mBp6s8kejFAYNvyc9K4deeV5aWDN-kDzufc9doPEjSx1fXk1aei4j8O36H4DsBQJgu8uCb-ZFrZIaanpeF3mAHJnbYE8Yr38vNSemcl3ynfHd_lHXsSNiEJijBFNJf1CYs_tk/s320/8th1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oh, no pet? :(</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And then I noticed:<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVWBVj93Rpfx6PMJpwBO03hnKZTh6qcC8s5R7KZTGgjJ60Ty6fuK5r9xhblB018HQ_24yltwdOKxaFIj2Os4ugSBk_81P-5pKJdvpV-LZMhaMEvXsk9OjNMyPGDgLLgCjgFJoM6Mgcho/s1600/8th2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVWBVj93Rpfx6PMJpwBO03hnKZTh6qcC8s5R7KZTGgjJ60Ty6fuK5r9xhblB018HQ_24yltwdOKxaFIj2Os4ugSBk_81P-5pKJdvpV-LZMhaMEvXsk9OjNMyPGDgLLgCjgFJoM6Mgcho/s320/8th2.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uh, what? A certain very large dragon? A shattered world? Did they just re-use the letter from last year?<br /><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And, the cherry on top:<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4USWZO1nZtBPnwTz4Hxm09bFpYVeKAo3UADd8sj2FxyBSiKB6jvsJh3PpO-Wxz3XXu8DbUf_scO49jQ-9AFZWO9HuW8dxcBAm1WyI0xJ9fkljzMBeAopjXM-RQnxOEXqpgui3_ADG2_4/s1600/8th3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4USWZO1nZtBPnwTz4Hxm09bFpYVeKAo3UADd8sj2FxyBSiKB6jvsJh3PpO-Wxz3XXu8DbUf_scO49jQ-9AFZWO9HuW8dxcBAm1WyI0xJ9fkljzMBeAopjXM-RQnxOEXqpgui3_ADG2_4/s1600/8th3.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oh, SQEEEE a rep item that is of little to no use to a level 90 toon.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />At first I thought, "oh okay, at least it's a rep bonus item, I can dig that. I need lots of rep still." Then I read the green text. -.-<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
People who play this game generally act like they're entitled to a lot from Blizzard. We pay monthly for this service and sort of expect certain things. Maybe Blizzard was just spoiling us those years we got the pets. I just can't stomach this though. Re-using the thank you letter from last year is just a tacky slap in the face to players. What it really says is "Oh, it's our 8th anniversary already? Uh, sure we remembered! Here's this, uh, thing we whipped up just special for all of you people who have been with us all this time. We hope you don't notice the apparent apathy in our lack of effort! Stay subscribed!"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So lame.<br /><div>
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</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-63860296549056896862012-11-17T13:06:00.000-08:002012-11-17T13:07:24.573-08:00Soloing with a Guardian Druid in Ulduar 10I just wanted to do a summary post about my first foray into soloing 10 man Ulduar on my druid, Lifehack.<br />
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At the moment I have an average item level of just 463. This is totally sufficient for the purpose of soloing Ulduar 10 as there aren't a ton of fights that end up being a DPS race. I was spec'd as a guardian for all of the fights except for Yogg, which is a fight where burst is worth more than survivability. Here is a short rundown of each encounter:<br />
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<b><u>Flame Leviathan:</u></b><br />
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This fight is an absolute joke with a 463 item level. The most time consuming part about the encounter is getting there, destroying any towers you want down, and killing all the adds. I did the first part with a demolisher, using the repair pads once or twice. Once all the mobs were dead, I engaged the boss and wiped. Upon zoning back in, you have a full complement of vehicles parked outside the encounter area. Just jump in a catapult, get to max range, and tell FL what's good. Empty your pyrite, then hit a few ranged attacks and the boss will be dead before it's even in melee range.<br />
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<b><u>Razorscale:</u></b><br />
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Another joke of a fight. Kill the adds, use the turrets, burst the boss down so it stays on the ground, then tank and spank. Nothing special to note here.<br />
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<b><u>Ignis the Furnace Master:</u></b><br />
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A tank and spank with an achievement for a speed kill. I got the kill and the achieve with about 20 seconds to spare. Put your back into it.<br />
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<b><u>XT-002 Deconstructor:</u></b><br />
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Another simple tank and spank. I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to try the heartbreaker achievement, but I feel it would be pretty easy. Killing the exposed heart before it despawns is almost a given, even without DPS cooldowns. Kill the adds that heal the boss (scrapbots?) if you want. <br />
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<b><u>The Iron Council:</u></b><br />
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Easy if you kill Steelbreaker first. Hard if you don't. Don't stand in bad.<br />
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<b><u>Kologarn:</u></b><br />
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Easy, but don't attack anything but the body. I had one of the arms die due to thrash/cleave damage, but I found that if I tried to attack the arms directly, the boss would despawn. <br />
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<b><u>Auriaya:</u></b><br />
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Be sure to kill the adds on this fight as they stack a bleed that will eventually hurt your bear ass.<br />
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<b><u>Hodir:</u></b><br />
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Get on the big snow piles for flash freeze and you're good. Also, use savage defense when the boss gains frozen blows as the melee hits can hit for a decent amount. Be sure to get the NPC's out of their frosty prisons as the buffs around the room will help you kill the boss faster. I didn't get the speed kill the first time around, but I think it may be doable. Remember to move continually to avoid stacking that nasty damage debuff.<br />
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<b><u>Thorim:</u></b><br />
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One of the first fights I encountered that I thought wasn't doable at all. You engage the adds on the ground, kill them, but when you go into the tunnel you get oneshot by a giant static ball of death. There's a trick to this. Part of it will require you to spec into Force of Nature.<br />
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<u>Step 1:</u> Kill the adds on the floor of the area, kiting the last one over to the lever so you can kill it there. When it dies use the lever, run in and aggro the big mob at the end of the tunnel, run back. Use dash and stamp roar here.<br />
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<u>Step 2:</u> Takes pretty precise timing. When you run back out of the tunnel, everything but the big mob will despawn. Get back into the big circle thing in the ground, wait for the mob to charge you, then immediately move to step 3.<br />
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<u>Step 3:</u> Pop force of nature, use the "move-to" ability to set your trees in the big circle, put them on passive. As soon as that's done, run back into the tunnel. When the gate closes, spam click "defensive" mode on your trees so they aggro the adds that spawn out there. If you did it right, the adds will come to you in the tunnel. If not, you're pretty well trapped with no way to get out or die. I had to hearth a few times while I learned this.<br />
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<u>Step 4:</u> kill everything but the Captain. If you do happen to kill him, it's a failed attempt. Keeping this mob alive with you through the tunnel is what allows you to actually engage the boss. Make your way through the mobs in the tunnel, killing them all. Once you get through the door at the end, go out to the gray strip in between you and the boss. Kill the Captain and wait for Sif to enter the RP. Run your ass out immediately and aggro the boss. Don't engage him until Sif comes out or he will bug, be un-attackable, and will despawn. From here it's tank and spank.<br />
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<b><u>Freya:</u></b><br />
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Easy. I cleared all of the guardians and mobs around the room. Just remember that you have to go through the motions of killing all the adds or things the boss spawns before she will stop healing herself.<br />
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<b><u>Mimiron:</u></b><br />
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This is the fight I had the most trouble with. You will need to spec into heart of the wild to successfully solo this boss. Bring a caster weapon for extra oomph.<br />
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<u>Phase 1:</u> Not bad. Run out of shock blast, or whatever the castable ability that hits for 75k is called. Use frenzied regen to keep yourself topped. <br />
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<u>Phase 2:</u> Easy, just don't stand in the red targeting thing on the floor, or the bomb will one shot you. Stay behind the boss when he does the barrage.<br />
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<u>Phase 3:</u> Annoying, but easy. Kill the mobs, get the magnet, pull the head down and hit it with your face.<br />
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<u>Phase 4:</u> Possibly the one thing that will keep me from soloing Mimiron ever again. The boss has 3 sections, all of which need to be killed within about 10 seconds of each other. The bottom two can be melee'd, but the head is only reached by thrash, swipe, and FF. Oh, and wrath.<br />
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Spec into heart of the wild and you can do this. I got the two bottom sections of the boss down pretty low. Below 10%. Along the way, while the boss did it's barrage thing, I got behind, popped into caster form, and nuked the head with wrath to whittle it down. Save HoTW for the very end. When you have the two bottom sections low, where they can be killed within seconds of each other, wait for the next barrage and go nuts with HoTW and wrath. I saved renewal and barkskin for this part since you'll probably tank the boss for a minute in caster. When the head dies, swap back to bear and drop the other two sections.<br />
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One thing that makes this surprisingly hard is the fact that Mimiron does constant moderate to high damage that will eventually take it's tole. As a bear, you really need to do damage to heal yourself, so it's a delicate dance between staying healed and not killing some part of the boss too early. I think I got this on my 9th attempt. It can be a frustrating endeavor because the first 3 phases are laughably easy, but take a lot of time. It sucks wiping after 10 minutes.<br />
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<b><u>General Vezax:</u></b><br />
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This fight is pretty easy and straight forward. I actually did the hard mode unintentionally, but it wasn't particularly difficult. Interrupt the boss when you can, kill the saronite vapors if you're not after the achieve, and win. Try to kill the boss reasonably quickly if you do the hard mode as you will get a shadow damage debuff that will eventually cause shadow crash to hit pretty hard.<br />
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<b><u>Yogg-Saron:</u></b><br />
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In practice, the basics of this fight aren't hard. The thing that can make this fight hard is the assortment of debuffs you might get from the Corruptor tentacles. Spec kitty with Incarnation and Nature's vigil for this. Here''s the breakdown:<br />
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<u>Phase 1:</u> if you haven't done this fight before, you'll zone in and see a NPC named Sara in the middle of the room. She can't be damaged directly. The clouds in the room will spawn adds that, when killed, will damage her. I think it takes 7 or 8 to do the job. Keep in mind that the adds spawn in two ways. First, they will automatically come every 10 seconds or so, regardless of what you do. Secondly, they spawn whenever you make contact with one of the clouds. You can do this intentionally if you like, but be careful not to bite off more than you can chew.<br />
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<u>Phase 2:</u> After you damage Sara down to 0 health, Yogg will spawn and you will have to do a couple of new things. Around the room tentacles will spawn. The first kind you'll encounter is the constrictor. It'll grab you and the only way out is two either swipe or thrash until it's dead. They have low health, so this really isn't a problem. The #1 priority is for you is the Corruptor tentacle. These will continually pump out an array of obnoxious debuffs, most of which a guardian or cat druid will have no way to negate. Some stun, slow, or damage you. When phase 2 starts, killing the first and second corruptors is your first priority. After 20 seconds or so, Yogg will open up portals that spawn around his...body/head in the center of the room. Ideally you won't have an abundance of debuffs on you at this time.<br />
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Throughout the fight you have a debuff on you called "sanity." Certain things the mobs and boss do to you will deplete this down from it's initial value of 100. If you hit zero,i it's a wipe. What matters is, if you left all the guardians up (accomplished by talking to all 4 of them up in the antechamber, before the fight,) you have a way to replenish sanity. Look for the green vertical beams around the edge of the room. Standing in them will give you sanity back.<br />
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<u>Phase 3/brain room:</u> If you can successfully get into the brain room, you just need to run around and kill all the mobs inside. They have extremely low health, but are usually spread out. Kill them, then watch for the emote about the illusion shattering. A door will open up to the room where Yogg's brain is. Your objective is to get it to, I think 30%. For this fight I went kitty and spec'd into incarnation as the burst was invaluable for the brain.<br />
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There are two things to consider when you're in the brain room. First, the floating purple skulls will sap sanity from you if you face them. Avoid this where possible. Second, you are on a fairly short timer in this phase. The boss has a timer for "induce madness." If you're inside the brain room when the timer expires, it's a wipe. Pop your cooldowns and get the brain down.<br />
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<u>Phase 4:</u> At this point your success will depend a lot on how shitty RNG was to you in phase 2. You have a few priorities right at the start. First, you have to kill the guardians that spawn. If you pile up too many of them, they will simply destroy you. Even at 90. Secondly, face away from the boss's face at all times. If you don't you risk going insane. Next, you want to go around the room to clean up any tentacles that are still up. Corruptors are priority #1 in this respect. Once they're down your life will be much easier. If you have more than 2 up at this point you're probably screwed. Finally, you'll want to kill any Crusher tentacles as they put a debuff on you that reduces your damage done by 20% for each crusher that is up.<br />
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Once all the tentacles are dead, alternate damage between the boss and the guardians that spawn. This part will take a couple of minutes, but once the tentacles are all dead, all you really have to worry about is making sure you don't go insane. If you get low on sanity, just scamper up to one of the green beams, kill adds that spawn while you wait, and continue on DPS'ing the boss. I spent the majority of my time in this phase behind the boss as the insanity reducing ability he casts is a frontal cone thing.<br />
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<b><u>Conclusion:</u></b><br />
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All in all, soloing Ulduar 10 on this toon was pretty easy. After seeing it once, I feel that I could go in and do all but two of the fights with total ease. Mimiron will take more practice, but I'm confident it wouldn't take me 9 tries to get it down again. Yogg only took, I think, four or five tries. Some of that comes from how unlucky you get with stunning or slowing debuffs in phase 2. <br />
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Anyway, this was a fun way to get come achievements, transmog gear, and to see some of my favorite WoW content. With health and damage where they are, I suspect that soloing old content like this is something a lot of classes can do. Hopefully this guide was helpful and fun to read.<br />
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Thanks for coming!<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-9369598815070957262012-11-12T22:36:00.001-08:002012-11-12T22:36:22.805-08:00Screenshots of MoP So FarI've been doing a lot of blog posts without pictures since MoP came out. The reason for that is because I've actually been blogging a lot at work. What this means is that I actually just type up a thought, email it to my personal email, and I post it through the Blogger app on my phone. I don't have access to any images, nor do I have the ability to link items when I post this way. Hopefully I can produce some more fully formed posts soon. Life has been busy lately.<br />
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Anyhow, here is a collection of some of the screenshots I've taken throughout MoP. Some are guild first kill shots, some are just fun things I wanted to be able to remember. I hope you enjoy.<br />
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That's all. I hope you enjoyed :)</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-52406748311701139812012-11-12T22:12:00.000-08:002012-11-12T22:12:59.451-08:00Key BindingsThis post is mostly a way to share my current keybinding set with a guildie. He was complaining on Twitter earlier about having issues with too many binds on his feral druid alt. My keybindings are universal across all alts. I think they're pretty easy to remember, and none of them require any advanced finger-yoga. Here's what I use for my feral:<br />
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<a name='more'></a>This is a SS of my entire UI. If it's not obvious, I'm currently using Elvui, which I think is fantastic. Now, there are some things here that I don't have keybound that I probably should, like bear form. I don't typically end up in BF while I'm kitty, so I don't really care. I click dash, which is bad. Perhaps that should go to Shift+V. I also don't have might of ursoc on my bars. When I remember to, I'm just going to macro that to survival instincts.<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhidmhtOoZfWazM9q-9L-LdMsBvtxqr_y0hMBnOT7jaEveeo1hdY66D5LUxup3pjuc7qSxZ_pHgqqws-BDXWfGEVosoQKJe5eg02SELpRg7MNitJAgpXTmoJXX0OkX9jslshOFn2I4LOVM/s1600/WoWScrnShot_111212_224912.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhidmhtOoZfWazM9q-9L-LdMsBvtxqr_y0hMBnOT7jaEveeo1hdY66D5LUxup3pjuc7qSxZ_pHgqqws-BDXWfGEVosoQKJe5eg02SELpRg7MNitJAgpXTmoJXX0OkX9jslshOFn2I4LOVM/s320/WoWScrnShot_111212_224912.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Now, here's a close up of the bulk of the binds. I say bulk because the bindings I have for my mounts (flight form, etc) are on the far right vertical bar. They're not really relevant for combat, so they don't get zoomed.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eJPI1YMBNoxHY-7DpPwET5qEcuPJQxXZctPsDEjH1iLgf1KEWHJZZEm3VJhyphenhyphenHrVhY2hVWmof2o0sIARnxQJCIwiSfZYiB73DzBNMIFFPCA2NIurQwMQVX1ue0lsY7mdZdTOelBF2d7E/s1600/Keybinds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="32" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eJPI1YMBNoxHY-7DpPwET5qEcuPJQxXZctPsDEjH1iLgf1KEWHJZZEm3VJhyphenhyphenHrVhY2hVWmof2o0sIARnxQJCIwiSfZYiB73DzBNMIFFPCA2NIurQwMQVX1ue0lsY7mdZdTOelBF2d7E/s320/Keybinds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I'm currently not using a ton of macros on my druid, which I kind of prefer. I also have issues with using modifier macros, but that's a topic for another post. These keybinds are designed to be easy to access without having to stretch your hands all over the place. Here's the list:</div>
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Keys, Bar 1:</div>
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1:Mangle</div>
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2:Rake</div>
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3:Rip</div>
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4:Shred</div>
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5:Ravage</div>
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Shift+R: Tiger's Fury</div>
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T:Ferocious Bite</div>
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Shift+F:Cyclone</div>
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6:Symbiosis</div>
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Shift+V:Basically unassigned as I use Shift+S for Prowl</div>
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Shift+D:Swipe</div>
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Shift+R:Berserk</div>
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Keys, Bar 2:</div>
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Shift+1:Nature's Swiftness</div>
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Shift+2:Savage Roar</div>
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Shift+3:Thrash</div>
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Shift+4:Wild Charge</div>
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G:Currently my extra action button macro. Normally this is Skull Bash</div>
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A:Stampeding Roar</div>
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Shift+G:Healing Touch</div>
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F:Mighty Bash</div>
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Shift+E:Survival Instincts</div>
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Shift+T:Barkskin</div>
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Shift+S:Prowl</div>
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V:Faerie Fire</div>
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Generally speaking, for ability types, I like to keep some uniformity across alts. Here's what I use on my main, a ret paladin:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGcfzLkmPyiiDjvoFMKR4C4NDG6UamO-3XMJzUji-0FwmRSkSO8b2X0Gn_U18fdR9DJDW-rMLe1QRP1mN7n_K_JHzsFao5xj1oyto-et2JeYb442wfTQHtn0J5D-7zSzfwbkY-BcJoQBE/s1600/JackKeybinds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="35" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGcfzLkmPyiiDjvoFMKR4C4NDG6UamO-3XMJzUji-0FwmRSkSO8b2X0Gn_U18fdR9DJDW-rMLe1QRP1mN7n_K_JHzsFao5xj1oyto-et2JeYb442wfTQHtn0J5D-7zSzfwbkY-BcJoQBE/s320/JackKeybinds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Shift+2 on both toons is a high priority refreshable damage buff. Shift+D is for AOE on both. I usually use R and Shift+R with damage cooldown abilities. G is always an interrupt (when the toon has one) and F is always a stun or some kind of disorient. Some binds aren't congruent, but that doesn't matter. Sometimes they can't anyway. A certain amount of sameness can help make a keybind easier to work into your muscle memory.</div>
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Anyhow, That's all I'm going to say about that. Hopefully this helps!</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-64943436901802693342012-11-06T12:15:00.001-08:002012-11-06T12:15:00.528-08:00EtiquetteDungeon Etiquette 101:<br />
<br />
Even before starting, this post feels somewhat redundant. Preaching to the choir, if you will. I do hope that, possibly through retweets, this post makes it to somebody who might actually change a few bad habits.<br />
<br />
The inspiration for this entry comes from a dungeon run I did the other night on my druid tank. I was in the midst of a fairly smooth Heroic Shado Pan Monastery run, enjoying tanking things with my face, when one of the pugs said something exceedingly rude to me. We had just killed the Sha of whirlwinds, random add spawns, and ground spikes (Sha of doubt? I’m not sure :P,) and loot was done. The boss dropped a healing neckpiece, which I was hoping to pick up for a resto set I’m building. Prior to needing, I simply watched the roll frame (not the /loot frame) for any other need rolls. I waited a good 15 seconds, saw none, assumed the healer was one of the other rolls, so I went ahead and needed. I won the drop and ambled on out the door to maul some more mobs into submission.<br />
<br />
That brings me back to the rude thing the pug said. I responded, asking if there was a problem. He proceeded to say more rude things on the way to informing me that the healer actually needed that neck. I explained that I’d waited for other need rolls and saw none, so I went for it. While I was explaining, I went over to the healer and traded them the neck. I’m not about to be that guy stealing loot from people filling other roles. I guess the healer must have just waited longer than I did to roll. The rude pugger and I exchanged a few more choice words, we killed the last boss, and that was the end. All the healer ever said was “thanks.”<br />
<br />
The whole experience made me think of how many spoken and unspoken common courtesies there are to observe in a simple pug dungeon group. Truth be told, there’s a good amount of little things you can do to make a run either great, or horrible. I’ve decided to take it upon myself to hash out a list of do’s and don’ts, from each of the three possible roles you can fill in a dungeon. These are, of course, my opinion. Please take the lists with a grain of salt. Throughout this blog post, the word “dungeon” can be used interchangeably with “LFR” or “Raid.”<br />
<br />
DPS Do’s:<br />
-As much DPS as possible without getting yourself or others killed.<br />
-Attack the tank’s primary target.<br />
-Use threat dropping abilities if available/if you pull threat.<br />
-Ask questions about fights you don’t know or don’t understand them.<br />
-Provide courteous tips when you observe a group member who requires knowledge.<br />
-Roll need on gear you absolutely need, greed or pass if you don’t.<br />
-Minimize the amount of damage you take from avoidable sources (i.e. the same as “don’t stand in bad.”)<br />
-Obey fight mechanics<br />
-Utilize your interrupts<br />
<br />
DPS Don’ts:<br />
-Stand in bad.<br />
-Pull for the tank (unless you’re a hunter and you have been instructed to pull.)<br />
-Need on gear that is, black and white, for a role you’re not filling unless nobody else needs it (see rude pugger story above.)<br />
-Need on gear inappropriate for your class and/or spec (i.e. a death knight needing on an agility polearm just because it’s a 2 hander with more weapon DPS.)<br />
-Say abusive things to players for underperforming or any other reason.<br />
-Drop group after getting the item you came to the dungeon for.<br />
<br />
DPS do’s and don’ts make up the majority of dungeon grievances I’ve witnessed. Learning to heal and/or tank dungeons is something I encourage everybody to do at some point. Seeing things from all perspectives can make certain things in these lists make a lot more sense. Things like “don’t say abusive things” apply to all roles, so just assume that’s in every one of these lists. Same goes for standing in bad or being a greedy little loot pig. Healers and tanks aren’t perfect little angels either, so here are their lists:<br />
<br />
Healer Do’s:<br />
-Use the cooldowns Blizzard gave you. Don’t save them for a rainy day, they’re there to save people when you need them. I don’t care if its trash or that you won’t have archangel up in time to smite the crap out of the boss.<br />
-Know the fights beforehand, where possible (“where possible” really only applies at the start of expansions when stuff is totally new to the majority, imo.)<br />
-Ask questions if you’re uncertain of a fight’s mechanics. It’s much harder for the healer to cheese certain things.<br />
-Come prepared to be a healer. Don’t heal in DPS gear or come wildly undergeared for heroics.<br />
-Communicate with your group/tank if you need mana or time for some reason. <br />
<br />
Healer Don’ts:<br />
-Go AFK without announcing it<br />
-Be stingy with cooldowns (see above.)<br />
-Show up without out-of-combat mana replenishment. If I have to wait for you to regenerate 300k mana before the next pull, I’ll flip all the tables.<br />
-Be wasteful or overly conservative with your mana. Most fights should be short enough that, if needed, you can use all of your healing tools. Even the mana inefficient ones. Just don’t use them exclusively<br />
<br />
As the healer, you have an extremely important job. If you suck, the entire run will most likely suck. This is one of the things you might have to prepare for a little bit beforehand. I like to arm myself with knowledge so I don’t feel entirely unprepared. Sometimes I will do a dungeon as a DPS before I go heal it just so I know a little bit more about the place.<br />
<br />
Tank Do’s:<br />
-Observe the importance of your role and come prepared with tank gear and tank knowledge.<br />
-Use your survival cooldowns, even on trash. A dead tank is usually a dead group. Your main job is to live.<br />
-Be mindful of how fast you do pulls. Watch your healer’s mana. Pay attention to group chat and stop if/when you’re asked.<br />
-Avoid standing in bad. This is doubly true because you’re already taking damage others aren’t. Also, if you’re keeping mobs in bad, you’re probably keeping melee DPS in there too.<br />
-Use interrupts, stuns, and other CC to smooth out incoming damage. <br />
-Watch for casters you don’t have threat on. They’re probably attacking your healer.<br />
-Come prepared with addons that help you make sure you have threat on everything. Tidyplates is great for this.<br />
-Keybinds. Make sure you can quickly taunt or blow survival cooldowns. Tank deaths can happen rapidly. <br />
-Assume the DPS in your group don’t know about these lists.<br />
<br />
Tank Don’ts”<br />
-Chain pull if your healer’s mana can’t keep up<br />
-Play like a DPS. Be observant, watch threat on groups of mobs. Don’t hump the DPS meter, even when you have 80k attack power from vengeance. You’re probably going to need to target swap and actively manage certain groups. You aren’t in the group to top the DPS meter.<br />
-Tank in DPS or PVP gear. If you’re a guardian druid or a brewmaster monk, you still need to gear appropriately.<br />
-Ignore mechanics you think your healer should just heal through. One of your jobs is minimizing the amount of damage you take.<br />
-Ignore a bad healer. Communicate with people to see if there is something going inhibiting their performance. If you know you have a bad healer, play conservatively.<br />
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<br />
These lists aren’t always going to be simple to put into practice. There are all kinds of people who play the game, so you may just have to tolerate certain kinds of bad. If you are new to the game or to dungeons in general, observing these rules will make dungeon runs a much happier place. Pug is a pejorative term, but it doesn’t have to be.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-335526829356527782012-10-29T09:51:00.001-07:002012-10-29T09:51:41.223-07:00This Was An Email To a FriendHe's trying to get a Darkmoon trinket. Poor guy asked what DMF stands for.<br />
<br />
DMF stands for Darkmoon Fair. The fair has to be going on for you to actually be able to get the trinket. Otherwise, you just have the deck. Prices can go up or down depending on whether or not the DMF is going, or how soon it will start/end.<br />
*WARNING THIS TURNED INTO A WALL OF TEXT RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN*<br />
<br />
Here’s the breakdown for how many herbs you need to make 8 cards. The thing with these decks is that when the scribe makes the card, you get a totally random one each time. The deck you’re after uses serpents cards, ace through eight. If you look at the AH, the deck is just called Serpents Deck, and the trinket you can get from the deck is called Relic of Yu’lon. Additionally, the individual cards can be found by searching for “of serpents.”<br />
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Anyway, the last time I milled herbs for 2 cards, I had exactly 400 herbs. When you mill a stack of herbs you get two different pigments. One is a common pigment (Ink of Dreams) and the other is uncommon (Starlight Ink.) You need 20 of the green pigments to make the 10 Starlight inks the card requires. The thing is you can trade 10 Ink of dreams for 1 Starlight Ink. A full deck worth of Darkmoon cards takes 80 Starlight Ink and 24 Ink of Dreams. Or just 824 Ink of dreams if you’re using the ink trader vendor. <br />
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You get *about* 10 Starlight Ink and 70-ish Ink of Dreams per 200 herbs. <br />
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Bento’s request for 1000 herbs is about right because that should make 85 Starlight Inks. Warning…math inc. From that 1000 you get roughly 350 Ink of Dreams and 50 Starlight Ink. Enough for 8.5 cards.<br />
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Skip to the bottom for the punch line.<br />
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These are actual prices from the Kael’Thas Alliance AH:<br />
<br />
Starlight InkX10 (102g per)<br />
Ink of DreamsX3 (8g per)<br />
Per card= 10 SI+3 IoD= 102X10+8X3= 1044g per card just from ink. <br />
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Fool’s cap=90g per stack<br />
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The raw cost of making 8 cards, just buying stuff from the AH is as follows:<br />
Only buying herbs:<br />
-Potentially 4500g<br />
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Only buying inks:<br />
-8352g (buying 80 SI/24IoD)<br />
-7900 (buying 50 SI/350 IoD) This is the AH value of your 1000 fool’s cap, by the way.<br />
-6592g (buying 824 IoD)<br />
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Relic of Yu’lon (67500g per)<br />
Serpent Deck (45500g per)<br />
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Aw, you skipped my math.<br />
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SO, (LOL TOO MUCH INFO) you have a few options here. The most cost effective way of doing this is just farming your own herbs and having Bento mill them. It’s much more expensive to buy the inks from the AH, so don’t do it unless you have to. If you have the means, I would probably just buy 1000 herbs from the AH, assuming you can get them for around 90g/stack or less. If Bento says he can get you a complete deck for 1000 herbs, that’s a pretty damn good deal, considering how each time you make a card you have a 1 in 36 chance of getting what you want. Even though you’re spending 4500g for those herbs, you’re getting a trinket worth 10x that much. If you have the money, just buy the herbs as they come up. Don’t spend over 90g per 20 and you’ll stay within that figure.<br />
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Technically you could buy 1000 herbs, have somebody mill them and make them into inks, sell the inks on the AH, then buy ANOTHER 1000 herbs to make your cards and you’d (by the numbers above) only be out of pocket 1100g total for a 67500g trinket. This is heavily dependent on there being a LOT of fool’s cap on you AH, which there is not.<br />
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After November’s Darkmoon Fair, prices for individual cards and trinkets should come down. Your server is selling decks and completed trinkets for a lot more money than mine. Demand won’t sustain prices like that. Still, the cheapest way of getting the deck will be farming yourself. 1000 herbs represents hours of farming though, so if you have the money, just buy them.<br />
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It’s been a slow morning.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-23963178786729531592012-10-19T11:11:00.001-07:002012-10-19T11:17:17.805-07:00Turtles All the Way DownFarming Ironpaw Tokens<br />
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I’m one of those players who actually enjoy repetitive farming. For some reason the simplicity and repetition appeals to me. I also enjoy the prospect of random drop chances. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours farming for turtle meat on my warlock, Illex. The spot I was in isn’t totally unknown. During the time I spent there I saw a few people try to come in and start farming themselves. I like to think my prodigious warlock multi-dotting skills scared some would-be farmers off. Anyway, here’s some info on the spot and what it’s good for.<br />
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The spot in question is at the north end of the Pools of Purity in the Valley of the Four Winds. I certainly wasn’t the first person to find this gem, but I think it’s worth sharing regardless. These pools are apparently a congregation point for level 86 turtles in the zone. They have pretty low health (around 110k) and don’t do anything particularly obnoxious. As a clothie, it’s important to stay out of melee range as (if you’re doing it right) it’s pretty easy to have your health drop when you get converged on by a crowd of turtles. When they’re out of melee range they have some kind of instant cast ranged ability that shoots water bubbles. Don’t concern yourself with this; it does minimal damage.<br />
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What’s the point of farming these mobs? Well, there are a couple of good ones. As a farmer, I like there to be multiple reasons for committing myself to something like this. First, my warlock started the process as a level 85, brand new to Pandaria. Illex has an average item level around 372, which any fresh 85 can get from the gear vendor at Halfhill. I wanted to get some XP out of the deal (one of the reasons I didn’t use my paladin,) and I got plenty. By the time I was done, I ended up about 38% into level 86. The main reason people farm this area is for motes of harmony. The mobs have a ridiculously high respawn rate and a pretty decent chance of dropping motes. Spirits of Harmony aren’t of any use to my lock right now, but the 56 motes I rounded up may come in handy at some point in the future. The primary reason I had for culling the turtle population was for their meat. Stacks of various Pandaria meats, fish, and veggies can be turned in at Halfhill in exchange for Ironpaw tokens. The sheer quantity of potential meat drops makes this a viable way of amassing tokens much faster than normal. Over the course of two days of fairly light farming, I got 40 tokens, enough for that flippable table I was after. I’m going to take a look at whether or not this will be an efficient way of power leveling different ways of cooking. 40 tokens could buy a lot of different types of cooking ingredients.<br />
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In summary, 2-3 hours at the pools of purity isn’t going to have a crazy gold per hour return unless you’re utilizing the Spirits of Harmony with a crafting profession. However, this spot is still extremely useful. My efforts got me 401 turtle meat, around 280g in gray trash drops (the turtles drop a 6g gray shell fragment,) 56 motes of harmony, two blue 410-425 ilevel items, about 90g in repair costs and 36(!) green items. Prior to moving my lock to Halfhill, I considered utilizing a potion of luck during my farming. Given the volume of stuff I got from normal drops, I don’t feel it would have been worth it to burn 3 potions (9 golden lotus, or more than half of the SoH I ended up with.) Having a dot class (affliction locks are beastly for this, trust me) makes this easy and fun. I could dot up and kite around as many as 12 level 86 mobs at a time. Classes without a couple of ranged instants can obviously do this, but it’ll be a little less fluid. All in all, this was a fantastic way for me to land a flippable table in a very short period of time. The Pools of Purity have multiple uses, so keep them in mind for your farming needs.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-71281940436657135912012-10-17T13:24:00.001-07:002012-10-17T13:24:23.125-07:00Silence isn't GoldenIt’s been some time since I’ve done a blog post. I have quite a few reasons for that, most of which end up sounding lame. This blog is something I enjoy doing. I don’t believe I ever had a huge reader base, but I certainly have some level of guilt for just falling off the face of the earth. Generally speaking, putting out blog posts is (obviously) fairly low on my list of real and virtual priorities.<br />
<br />
I’d like to take a few moments to wrap up Cataclysm and to make a few statements about my impression of MoP so far. I’m posting this from work, so there won’t be any fun pictures at first. I’ll make a note and add some things later tonight when I’m home. Personifying my characters is fun and I feel that including image content is a vital component to the entertainment value of a blog. For now though you’re just going to have to enjoy what I’m writing.<br />
<br />
Cataclysm:<br />
Cataclysm was an enormously fun expansion for me. I won’t rehash my chronicle too much, so if you’re a new reader just go skim some of my other posts. The bulk of my Cata time was enjoyed under the banner of my current guild, Apotheosis. As a member of the guild’s 25 man (and woman) raid team, I had a blast. We went 8/8 in heroic Dragon Soul, got the raid meta-achievement mount, and did so with style. <br />
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As a player, Cataclysm brought me a lot of really cool “firsts.” I got my first heroic boss kill, my first piece of heroic loot, my first raid mount, and lots of other stuff. I was able to get a full best in slot ret set and turn it into a couple of rankings (H Morchok and H Spine.) I consider myself so fortunate to have been brought on with Apotheosis. Cataclysm was a fantastic time because of the great members and officers I get to play this game with.<br />
<br />
Now that Mists of Pandaria has been out for a few weeks, I feel like I have a decent idea of what the expansion has to offer. A lot of fuss is being made about the quantity of “required” tasks raiding folks have at hand. I’ll get into that as well as my initial impressions on raiding, and even a little bit of gold making.<br />
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Dailies:<br />
The snarky pseudonym “World of Dailycraft” has popped up numerous times throughout Twitter and the bloggersphere. Mists did indeed bring forth a bounty of reputation factions and corresponding dailies. I’ve voiced my opinion on this topic a few times via Twitter. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. To start with the main positive, I think it’s great that Blizzard has given players such a wealth of content to enjoy. Most people, however, probably feel that is beside the point. Due to the fact that several of the factions are the sources of valor point gear, raiders are up in arms about issues of time investment. I won’t lie; I’ve felt a lot of that same frustration. Upon hitting 90, I immediately went to work on Golden Lotus rep. That’s probably a good first step because the GL dailies are right at your front door if you’re hearth is set at Shrine in Vale. Other rep factions aren’t so close, but none are particularly far either. Distance isn’t the issue anyway. <br />
<br />
When you’re looking at the big picture of what you could potentially do, every day, the volume of work is staggering. Assuming you cleared the appropriate zones, once you hit 90 you can immediately start working on Golden Lotus and Klaxxi rep. Between those two, depending on your rep level, there’s probably 5-15 dailies available per faction. That may be an underestimation because I’m not currently working on Klaxxi rep. I’m revered with Golden Lotus, so I feel I have a decent feel there. Upon hitting Revered with GL, you can then go work on Shado-Pan and August Celestials rep (which I haven’t touched yet.) I don’t really think I need to hash out the numbers here. It’s a lot of dailies. Add to that the fact that you can do daily quests for The Tillers and Anglers, and you might never have time for dungeons, pvp, farming, eating, sleeping, etc.<br />
<br />
Now, it’s really easy to just look at all this stuff and throw your hands up in exasperation. Daily quest farming isn’t very fun. In an expansion with gorgeous vistas, new dungeon and raid content (that is actually fun and engaging,) pet battles, and a new PVP season, you really just have to prioritize. Unless you’re unemployed, you probably don’t have time to do everything, every day. I obviously can’t speak for everybody out there, but I think that’s a fair statement. If you’re a raider, you’re probably going to have some desire to acquire the valor point gear that’s available. One limiting factor that I think ZOMG DAILYCRAFT haters overlook is the fact that VP isn’t exactly growing on trees. You can cap out and gain only 1,000 valor points a week. Since items cost between 1250 and 2200 (right?) VP each, I don’t think it would be very reasonable to just rush to get these reps ALL maxed out immediately. Keep that in mind and just work on the ones you want. Hopefully the gating enforced by the VP cap can help people smooth out the race to rep acquisition. Hardcore progression raiders probably have a different opinion on this topic, but they’re limited by VP just like the rest of us.<br />
<br />
Raiding:<br />
So far I’ve done a few raids in MoP. As you know, there are two world bosses. I’ve done both the Sha of Anger and Galleon. I have mixed feelings about world bosses because of griefing. I just think it’s annoying that PVP flagged horde can (and do) show up to my raid to try to get hit by AOE. It’s obnoxious and it’s probably why Sha and Galleon aren’t currently scheduled official raids for my guild.<br />
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Elsewhere, in the relative safety of Mogu’shan Vaults, Apotheosis has been deftly chipping away at encounters. As a retribution paladin, I’ve enjoyed all of the fights immensely so far. I feel they’re engaging without being gimmicky. My favorite is probably Spirit Kings. I enjoy the pace of the fight as well as the variety of mechanics to contend with. Apoth is currently 4/6 and has a lot of momentum toward getting our first Elegon kill.<br />
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Ret DPS feels strong at this point in the expansion. I like the changes made to holy power generation a lot. Not having a lot of open GCD’s makes the spec feel a lot more entertaining. I’ve mostly gotten over how stacking haste makes me feel dirty. I love our level 90 talents (although I haven’t really used holy prism.) Both Execution Sentence and Light’s hammer have bad ass spell effects AND great damage. I think they’re fun talents that have the perfect amount of paladin flavor.<br />
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Gold:<br />
Finally, I just wanted to share some thoughts on gold making. I haven’t ever really been successful at making what I would consider “large” amounts of gold in Warcraft. Back in Wrath I remember I went through a phase where I successfully farmed and sold herbs. Unfortunately, that was somewhat short lived. I think I made around 10k when the market shifted and my stuff stopped selling. I had no income to speak of in Cataclysm. The only thing that really propelled me was a large sale I made to a guildie when I moved servers to raid with Apotheosis.<br />
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I’ve kind of gotten tired of this habit of acquiring gold and just sitting on it like I’m afraid of being broke. Mists has inspired an adventurous (sort of) spirit in me concerning gold making. So far I’ve had what I would consider a moderate level of success. I’m still sort of backward, from the point of view of *real* success, because I still farm most of my mats. However, there are always multiple ends for which it makes the means worth it. My adventure started when I decided to make myself a Darkmoon Card trinket. My scribe was on an alt I had been thinking about moving to Eldre’Thalas anyway, so I just went ahead and pulled the trigger. From there, I leveled from 525 to 600 (which Blizzard has made amazingly easy) with herbs farmed by another alt, my druid. Inspired by Team Brofist co-founder and ret paladin pal Ilumiqt, I decided to make a second scribe. My transferred alt had a bunch of low level inks that made the 1-600 process a breeze. In the end, I made myself a trinket and netted around 20k selling cards.<br />
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On top of that, during the process of farming herbs for my inscription, my druid leveled from 85 to almost 88. She also acquired an enormous amount of ghost iron, which my alchemist has had a grand time turning into trillium and living steel. Almost all of this stuff sells. One thing I learned along the way, with help from my friend/guildie/healer Serrinne is that persistence pays off. Posting, reposting, adjusting my approach, sitting on inventory, it doesn’t really matter what I do, as long as I’m doing something. Since MoP came out I’ve added about 50k to my coffers. I’ve set a personal goal of hitting 100k, which I should be able to do pretty soon. There’s something fun about the success of an auction. I’ve tried to flip a few things, which isn’t always successful, but that’s just part of the game. Since the market is so active right now, it’s a fun time to get involved. I don’t really have a plan for my 100k. I may just end up sitting on it, but who knows. I’d like to continue making gold so that I can enjoy stuff like that ridiculous yak or maybe even one of the engineering mounts. Who knows?<br />
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Anyway, thanks to those who came back to this blog. I’ll do my best to keep it updated from time to time. I think I will work on a new banner as well. Stay tuned for some updates, guides, and hopefully just some good fun reading.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-30942637331753239742012-06-09T16:38:00.000-07:002012-06-09T16:52:01.627-07:00Conflicted<br />
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For those of you who follow this blog at all, it’s been made <a href="http://jackthepally.blogspot.com/2012/05/im-hoping-today-will-continue-being.html">apparent </a>that I place some value on the acquisition of gear.<br />
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“I place some value on the acquisition of gear” can be taken a myriad of ways. In WoW there are people who will do anything to get an upgrade. Guild masters and raid leaders go to great lengths to implement impartial systems to help manage not just these players, but all loot distribution. I hope at the end of this post it is apparent that I’m not one of those people who might be branded as a “loot whore” or worse. I don’t think I am. The following situation may lead you to think otherwise.<br />
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Before I proceed, I’d like to lay down a little context before I dive into what happened. This blog details fairly well the story arc of my raid progression in this game and more specifically in Cataclysm. To summarize: this blog has its name for a reason. Prior to February 2012, I was by any measure of raid progress, a casual player. I still am, but I’ve moved into a different tax bracket so to speak. In February I was lucky enough to apply to join my current guild, Apotheosis of Eldre’Thalas. At the time, I think Apoth was 4/8 in heroic Dragon Soul. The guild I came from was 8/8 normal with no real game plan for conquering heroic modes pre-nerf.<br />
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My reasons for leaving Cereal Killers of Kael’Thas were simple. First, our raid times were a bit unrealistic. My body does poorly with six hours of sleep or less. Secondly, I have always wanted to be a part of a raid team that progresses to high levels. I’m not the kind of guy that could belong to a group like Blood Legion or Method. I don’t think I have the talent, but besides that, I have a social life that I’m pretty attached to. Apotheosis is a focused group that knows how to get things done effectively and efficiently. I feel so lucky to be a contributing part of this group. The last four months, in which I helped the guild get its first heroic Zon’ozz, Ultraxion, Blackhorn, and Madness kills, have been all that I could have hoped for.<br />
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Given my history of *never* being a part of a progression guild, I have found myself thirsting for tokens of my experience. Titles, gearsets, achievements, mounts; obvious “things” that most progression raiders want. My feelings toward this experience can be likened to that of a kid going to their first concert. You go, you buy the t-shirt, and you keep that ticket stub in your sock drawer till the end of time. Well, maybe that’s not close enough. What I’ve gone through sort of feels like I got drafted in to the NBA straight from high school. You bet your ass I’m going to keep the shoes and jersey from my championship game forever.<br />
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Attaining these symbols of my achievements in Cataclysm is only one aspect of why I value gear acquisition. I’m competitive and I like doing DPS in a raid. Naturally, I like getting stuff that makes my numbers go up. I’m a whack-a-mole playing, button mashing retribution paladin. Somewhere along the line we (rets) collectively got hit with this “meathead club” label. It’s like, in a raid, we’re the equivalent of that dimwitted lineman on the football team that just gets pointed in the direction of the bad guys and gets a single, unfuckupable instruction: kill. I try to avoid that. In my casualness, I take my role in raids pretty seriously. I always do my best to exercise my utility to make things flow smoothly for our group. I do things to make myself feel like I’m earning both my raid spot and the items I receive. Part of that is doing maximum damage. Say what you will about the simplicity of ret DPS; I take pride in my work regardless of public opinion on such nonsense. <br />
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Now, to get to the point, the conflict at hand surrounds a weapon. Heroic Gurthalak, Voice of The Deeps (this name is full of delicious puns that get often overlooked.) To say that Gurthalak is coveted by several raiders in our group is a gross understatement. Now, it’s important to note that my guild uses the EP/GP loot system. How it actually works is a bit more complicated than I’d like to get into, but like most systems it rewards raid attendance and penalizes via loot acquisition. EP points are awarded for things like coming to raid on time, killing bosses, clearing new content, etc. Loot costs EP. When you acquire loot, you lose priority in the system, which allows a person below you to move up in the list and be next in line for the item they’re after. I really enjoy the EP/GP system because it’s fair and objective, and the priority aspect helps combat the problem with DKP systems where people stockpile points.<br />
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Prior to this week’s raid lockout, I was aware of my standing in the EP/GP priority and I knew that if one of our warriors got a piece of loot before Madness, I’d be in line to get the next Gurthalak. At least, that’s what I thought. See, there was a measure of assumption on my part. Our blood death knight was actually above me in priority, so when the sword dropped, he ended up getting it. Based on the strict parameters of the addon we use for EP/GP, it was perfectly legitimate. However, I was dumbfounded.<br />
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What unfolded ended with me getting the sword. After our DK won the roll, I whispered our GM and cried outrage. Keep in mind that my statements and responses were metered, polite, and reasonable, but I was shocked and a little mad. From that moment, I simply waited while the officers assessed the situation. About five minutes later, our DK traded me the sword.<br />
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Much after the fact, I was given details on precisely what happened. Even before I got a whisper off to our GM, conversations were already set in motion to question the decision. At the eye of this storm was a request given to the tank by our GM, which was that he provide a reputable source to show that HGurth is better than H Slicer. At that point our DK concluded that getting the weapon wasn't worth causing a fuss and he decided to give it to me. The officers of the guild didn't tell him the had to, he just did it. I actually didn't know these details until this morning, but frankly I'm not surprised. Chronis has always been a classy team player. <br />
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Situations like this lead me to my next question: is heroic Gurthalak a tanking weapon? Before I answer that, I need to point out that I’m not a blood death knight, nor do I profess to know how to play one. Don’t get me wrong, I know the basic mechanics, but I’m not a skilled player like the guy who wanted the Gurty. That being said, to answer the question: no I absolutely don't think Gurthalak is a tank weapon.<br />
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The issue of what is or isn’t a blood tanking weapon is full of gray areas. The very nature of the fact that death knights use a two handed weapon to tank (where no other class in the game does, save druids with polearms and staves,) makes this question exceedingly hard to actually answer. From my armchair analyst perspective, it is my opinion that the usefulness of the stats on said weapon will qualify or disqualify it as being an item “for tanking.” Speaking specifically of Gurthalak, one could argue that it has more strength and stamina than heroic Experimental Specimen Slicer. Strength gives death knights parry, and stamina is a top stat for a lot of end game encounters. I think citing those stats as a legitimate reason to give the weapon to a tank over a DPS is reaching a bit. The complete lack of secondary stats on Gurthalak, in my opinion, further disqualifies it as a tanking weapon. I have a strong suspicion that the best in slot blood dk weapon for end game is the slicer. It’s covered in mastery, and reforgable crit. It also has a socket that can be utilized to further tailor the weapon however the DK pleases.<br />
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In this same vein, I was presented with an argument for tank gear levels. If a tank is geared enough that they can afford to have no (or almost no) avoidance or mitigation stats on a weapon, does that present a valid reason for the player to use the weapon? At this gear level, there is absolutely no argument to be made for the threat benefits of a higher item level weapon. Threat for tanks now only matters at the beginning and transitions of fights. As I mentioned before, our blood DK is a great player, so the threat argument is even more moot. The next question asks, “why isn’t it beneficial to have the tank do more DPS?” Well, if DPS matters enough that we need our tanks to step up, then that in its self is the reason we shouldn’t give the Gurthalak to the tank first. Let the DPS get theirs, then drops can go to tanks and offspec DPSr’s.<br />
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Absolutely all of this is based off of my own opinions and suppositions. The black and white of it is that the player who was originally awarded the sword was the one with the priority to receive it. I made an argument for my cause and won. These words are not self-congratulatory. I don't feel awesome. That doesn't mean I don't think I am right when I assert my opinion on this situation. The whole thing is just so bittersweet.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-490536503372429632012-05-13T20:54:00.002-07:002012-05-13T20:55:26.313-07:00Savior of AzerothTonight we finally killed Heroic Madness of Deathwing. The kill was ridiculously clean.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>It only took 8 pulls in tonight's raid. I can't even tell you how exciting this is. I haven't <i>ever ever ever ever</i> cleared content to this level. Obviously, I have to give ALL THE PROPS to my guild, Apotheosis of Eldre'Thalas. Such an amazing group of players. Nerd screams are music to my ears. <br />
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The only thing that could possibly deter from this glorious event was the fact that the loot sucked harder than the infinite vacuum of space. Hunter bows (in the plural, when we only had one hunter,) both of the godawful daggers, and a couple of polearms (which will be put to good use actually.) Loot that is almost guaranteed to be disenchanted (or at the very least NOT USED for non-transmog purposes) has no place on an end tier boss. Extremely lame.<br />
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I'd like to take a brief moment to thank Thrall for not dropping anybody on our final attempt. Way to go, buddy.<br />
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Here are a few screenies from the kill. My DPS (see attached clip) was meh. 61k feels week when compared to our beastly shadowpriests and their spellweave cleave-o-rama 86k. I would imagine that my contribution was apparent in the logs where you can see things like how much parasite damage I did.<br />
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I'm pleased. Chances are good I'll miss the kill next week, but that's okay. Being a part of my guild's first kill is really all I could have hoped for. Congratulations again Apoth. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-3904755673373064242012-05-10T11:49:00.001-07:002012-05-10T11:50:54.822-07:00Cataclysm Bucket ListI’m hoping today will continue being a slow workday. @Druidmain just reminded me of a blog post I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Bucket lists have become rather popular of late, which makes sense since we’re nearing the end of this expansion.<br />
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As a person, I’ve been called a completionist. I know that’s not a real word, but I think it’s easy to see what the label entails. I love tangible progress and completion in life and gaming. It’s probably why I enjoy mowing lawns. You can stand back and see exactly where you’ve been, where you’re going, and how much you have left. I also enjoy the simplicity of putting in my earphones and taking a walk out on the lawn for a while. Despite being a fairly avid gamer, spending time outside is still extremely important to me. <br />
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Anyway, as a completionist, World of Warcraft is an extremely suitable game for my personality. I have all these neat tangible modes of progression and achievement right at my fingertips. Completion is at the core of my WoW bucket list. If you’ve played WoW long enough, you understand that there really isn’t a way to “beat the game” in a literal sense. MMO’s just aren’t wired that way. Still, as a player I have some goals in my sights that will go a long way in making me feel that I’ve completed, or “won” in this expansion. A few of the other goals are just things I’d like to do before the world of MoP opens up for me to explore. The fact that they’re secondary goals doesn’t devalue them in any serious way. They’re just not in the same vein as my “beating the game” aspirations.<br />
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-The first, and probably most predictable item on the list, is to kill Heroic Madness of Deathwing. This is far and away my most important bucket list item. In all the years I’ve played this game, I haven’t ever achieved something akin to clearing content to the highest level. To any of my readers who aren’t familiar with what content is, here’s a grossly simplified synopsis:<br />
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In WoW you make a character that you use to travel the world with. This character has an age of sorts, based on how much you’ve done in the game. The maximum age or level is currently 85. Once your character is at level 85, one of the ways you can play the game involves a progressive ladder of encounters that are generally referred to as “content” or “raid content.” These encounters serve to be the means through which your character acquires progressively better items. The better the items your character has, the stronger they are. As such, the further you get into raid content, the more enabled you are to move onto the next tier of more difficult encounters. It is also worth noting that within the game is also a story line. These encounters serve as a way for you to interact with and destroy key villains in the story.<br />
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These villains are called “bosses” in the context of raiding. My girlfriend likes to refer to bosses as “dragons” as it simplifies the concept to her when I talk about raids. They’re obviously not all dragon, although many ares. Each tier or level of content is a group of raids, or “encounters” where you and a group of players venture into a place in WoW to kill these dragons. Again, the (literal) end goal of raiding is the acquisition of items for your character. Once a boss dies, the group receives several items that can be distributed to the players in that group.<br />
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Content, as a concept, is finite. In the current expansion of WoW, there are three tiers of raid content. Heroic Madness of Deathwing is the name of the last encounter in the last tier of raiding for this expansion. It is, ironically, not the most challenging boss fight, but it is in fact the end of the tier. Deathwing is a dragon who is considered to be one of the biggest bad guys in the game. He used to be a trusted guardian of nature, but he was corrupted by ancient evil and has been trying to more or less destroy the world ever since. He’s a dick and when you kill him your character gets a title (that displays next to their name as they walk about the “world”) that says “Savior of Azeroth.” Azeroth is the name of the planet in game. I’ll be Jacklalanne, Savior of Azeroth.<br />
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Now, although I noted the literal goal (gear acquisition) of completing content, that isn’t why I want to kill Deathwing. Aside from the tangible benefits (the title, and potentially a giant purple sword that spawns tentacles that destroy your foes,) I want to do this for the personal achievement. Prior to a few months ago, I haven’t ever been the caliber of player who clears all the content in the game. Ever. To be able to do that is cool. It serves, for me, to validate the time and effort that goes into playing this game. I also can’t understate the importance of being able to be a part of my guild’s first Heroic Madness kill. I love the group I’m in and it’s important to me to feel like I contributed to this grand achievement.<br />
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-My second, and far less important goal, actually goes hand in hand with the first. I’d really like to have an actual “best in slot” set of items from this expansion. I haven’t ever, and I just think it would be cool to have the best gear I can possibly obtain. I’m well on my way at the moment, and I’m looking forward to hopefully achieving my goal.<br />
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-Thirdly, I’d like to be good at pvp. Actually, let me rephrase that. I’d like to find one of my characters where I feel at home when I pvp. I don’t currently have that on my druid. I’m actually hoping that my elemental/resto shaman ends up filling this gap, but we’ll see. Pvp is extremely fun for me, but it almost has endless potential for frustration. Feeling like I’m “good” at something in pvp is definitely a bucket list item.<br />
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-Finally, I hope I can get my main, Jack, a cool high level mount before the end of the xpac. Up to this point, I haven’t acquired any rare or difficult to obtain mounts for him. Mounts serve as somewhat of a status symbol and it makes me a bit sad that Jack doesn’t have anything cool to ride around on yet. Hopefully we can do the Dragon Soul meta achievement soon. You get a fancy dragon from that, which will suffice.<br />
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I think this is a pretty simple and attainable bucket list. My guild, Apotheosis, is amazing. We might kill Heroic Madness tonight. I think, excluding goal 3, the others will come in time for MoP. I’m definitely hopeful. This expansion has been fun and even if I don’t get any of the above things done, I’ll still feel like my time was well spent.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-59882465391399052652012-02-23T22:13:00.003-08:002012-02-23T22:13:57.568-08:00Apotheosis goes 4/8 in H Dragon Soul! H Zon'Ozz Down!This will be a quickie. Tonight was a solid progression night for my new guild, Apotheosis. I had a good feeling we'd get heroic Zon'Ozz down tonight, but I figured there was also a fair chance that we'd spend some quality time wiping.<br />
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Much to my surprise, we killed him on the 6th pull! I continue to be amazed by how talented the players in this raid are. I cant say how happy I was to be a legitimate contributor to the DPS effort. From there we went on to drop heroic Hagara and do some excellent first attempts at H Ultraxion. 7.6% wipes=kill coming to a blog near you, soon!<br />
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In closing, it was another fun, educational raid night with Apotheosis. I derped a little on Hagara, but I learned a lot from the kill as well. Next time will result in a much better showing from yours truly. Here's a kill shot from Ozzy. Enjoy!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VCVUDUj-GhfQCQhS_QNJCcqlwU_aQIBqjz__5vJ5Pa5r_6zG1XE8leI37Y7YuP0xJDtnBtJaSj-lABHvdafsRiIAmKDB7GfEV8VwrFs2EB8XCM4yTs8Rk0OmRnx5u830_TK0cUmGEhc/s1600/ApothZonGuildFirst.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VCVUDUj-GhfQCQhS_QNJCcqlwU_aQIBqjz__5vJ5Pa5r_6zG1XE8leI37Y7YuP0xJDtnBtJaSj-lABHvdafsRiIAmKDB7GfEV8VwrFs2EB8XCM4yTs8Rk0OmRnx5u830_TK0cUmGEhc/s320/ApothZonGuildFirst.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-58438641236701148122012-02-22T17:31:00.000-08:002012-02-22T17:31:59.459-08:00Wait, Where Did That Other "n" Come From?Oh my a lot has happened since my words last graced this blog. My last post was <a href="http://jackthepally.blogspot.com/2011/12/43-retribution-bis-list-non-heroic.html">my non-heroic BIS Ret list.</a> Lol. Non-heroic.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Since I posted that, a lot has happened in the game. I learned how to tank with my face on my druid, Lifehack. I resurrected (ankh'd?) my shaman Syntaxx, LFR-style, and oh yeah, I server changed and got Jack into a new guild. And I (had to) change his name to Jacklalanne. Just a couple of changes.<br />
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Rewinding a bit, I'd like to go over the reasons why I'm no longer raiding in my previous guild, Cereal Killers. To start, I want to say that leaving wasn't a simple or easy decision. CK has some people in it I've been playing WoW with for at least five years. As a group of people, I've always enjoyed them immensely. Speaking specifically of our 10 man raid group, everybody involved was fun loving and awesome to play this game with. Sure, I bitched on twitter a lot. More than I should have. <br />
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Cereal Killers is a very casual guild with a few full time raiders that may or may not be in varying degrees of disenchantment with World of Warcraft. We weren't on the bleeding edge of progression by a long shot. Our first Madness of Deathwing kill was, I think, three weeks ago. Something I'm still proud of them for. Given the casual nature of our approach to raiding, sometimes I found issues with the way we dealt with our own progression. Those issues weren't the main reason I left the guild. They were a factor, yes, but a minor one.<br />
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My biggest issue with CK raiding was the hours. Our schedule was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, from 10PM to 1AM. I have a job. That job has me out of bed around 7-7:30AM 5 days a week. Several months of getting 6 hours or so of sleep 3 days a week was starting to wear me down. Migraines, grouchiness, even confusion were starting to seep into my life in exchange for raiding. After one devastating migraine, I decided it wasn't worth it and I started seriously looking for alternate raid groups.<br />
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Along the way, changing guilds started feeling like a breakup. It was, in fact, an emotional experience when I finally got around to saying goodbye to the raid. I still have alts in the guild, but leaving felt so permanent and serious. It hit me right in the gut. WoW is such a social experience for me. I don't think any of my CK guildies ever read this blog, but if they did I'd hope they know the reasons I left weren't personal. I think I did my best to convey that to everybody before I left.<br />
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That brings us up to the next big question: where did I go? Almost since I started really using Twitter in earnest, I've followed a player named Tikari. He's helped me with my blog, my rogue, and even just the game in general. I like Tikari, in as much as you can like a person whom you've only really associated with in bits of 140 characters or less. Tikari is a member of the guild Apotheosis on Eldre'Thalas. Through Twitter I found several of his guildies and followed them as well. One was Kurnmogh, who came recommended to me when I asked my tweeps about a good Paladin to follow. Kurn just so happens to be the Guildmaster of Apotheosis.<br />
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For several months now Kurn has been looking for a Ret paladin. Given the fact that their raid times end when mine used to begin, they were initially very attractive for that reason alone. Upon closer inspection, Apotheosis was alluring for so much more. After much deliberation, and consulting my lovely girlfriend (whom my raid times matter to very very much,) I decided to apply. <br />
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The application process with Apotheosis was ridiculously pleasant. Whereas I've apped to heroic raiding guilds before and found the experience to be wooden and formal, everybody I talked to from Apotheosis was welcoming and nice. True, the application process was structured, but why shouldn't it be? When I applied, I started getting tweets from people in the guild giving me encouragement and preemptive welcomes. I really cant say enough for how nice everybody was to me. In the end I was invited to run a trial period with the guild. As of our first raid last night, I feel I've really hit a home run here.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivss7t6lwG9nNQtVeVWbXxUu_9eTvORHCbbUfAgo1HitH2Dhf5MP8C6pGAHp6LmXmXg15JUtLRqzBeG6iRJsvidT7Xc5fyU1y9gj6Q04nDE61-67XScTSpyLarxiWcFQmLpkPrNSH0Zb8/s1600/Apotheosis1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivss7t6lwG9nNQtVeVWbXxUu_9eTvORHCbbUfAgo1HitH2Dhf5MP8C6pGAHp6LmXmXg15JUtLRqzBeG6iRJsvidT7Xc5fyU1y9gj6Q04nDE61-67XScTSpyLarxiWcFQmLpkPrNSH0Zb8/s320/Apotheosis1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Last night we walked into Heroic Dragon Soul, 25 man, and handily downed Morchok and Yorsahj. The fact that I'm killing heroic bosses in current content is somewhat mind blowing, given the types of guilds I've always been in. Everything was organized and people did their jobs amazingly. I did okay. Morchok has significantly more movement on heroic, which will take some getting used to. Yorsahj hasn't ever been one of my favorite fights as a ret, but I think I did well. I did more DPS on that fight than I ever have, but I ended up being something like 11th or 13th on DPS. That's how good these players are. One of the best parts of the night, right behind when I won <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78403">this hunk of burning love</a>, was when Tikari whispered me and actually gave me feedback on my performance. I love it. We ended raid doing some progression work on heroic Zon'ozz. Our attempts were heartening, with one having the boss below 59%. I'm so excited to go back and contribute.<br />
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This post is a little cheesy probably, but I can't deny that I'm happy with the way things have gone. Even if I hadn't gotten the #2 BIS weapon for a ret paladin, I would still be ecstatic with my new guild. I'm going to do everything I can to make this trial a slam dunk so they keep me around.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-15548372459477404222011-12-14T17:06:00.000-08:002011-12-26T20:28:34.138-08:004.3 Retribution BIS List, Non-Heroic VersionTuesday's raid brought a big change: now I'm main spec retribution. Not only does that mean that I should change the banner on this blog, but I need to compile a loot list! What follows is a non-heroic raiding ret paladin's BIS list. Keep in mind that I'm basically stealing info from <a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1009019-Anaxie-s-Totally-Kickass-Retribution-4.3-BIS-list">this MMO-Champ thread</a>, and credit goes to the OP and all that. I'm just making this so it's close at hand for me and any ret users that may come across this blog. Enjoy!<br />
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Just for clarification, my stat priorities are hit/expertise to cap>strength>mastery>crit>haste. I don't have a lot of theorycraft to offer in the crit vs haste debate, and I think at the non-heroic BIS gear level it doesn't really matter that much. For what it's worth, ret gurus are saying that crit sims out better at high gear levels. Whatever. Right now I have 6% unbuffed, so IDGAF about crit really. Without further ado, here's the list.<br />
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Head: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76876">Helmet of Radiant Glory</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56427">Warmaster Blackhorn</a><br />
Neck: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77090">Necklace of Black Dragon's Teeth</a> Source: The VP vendor in your home city (1250 VP)<br />
Shoulders: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77236">Backbreaker Spaulders</a> Source: Spine of Deathwing<br />
Back: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77097">Dreamcrusher Drape</a> Source: The VP vendor in your home city (1250 VP)<br />
Chest: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76874">Battleplate of Radiant Glory</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55294">Ultraxion</a><br />
Bracers:<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77270"> Rockhide Bracers</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55265">Morchok</a><br />
Hands: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76875">Gauntlets of Radiant Glory</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55308">Warlord Zon'ozz</a><br />
Belt: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77250">Runescriven Demon Collar</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55689">Hagara the Stormbinder</a><br />
Legs: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76877">Legplates of Radiant Glory</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55312">Yor'sahj The Unsleeping</a><br />
Boots: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77259">Treads of Crushed Flesh</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55308">Warlord Zon'ozz</a><br />
Ring 1: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77230">Breathstealer Band</a> Source: Shared boss loot<br />
Ring 2: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78013">Curled Twilight Claw</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55294">Ultraxion</a><br />
Trinket 1: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77200">Eye of Unmaking Source</a>: Spine of Deathwing<br />
Trinket 2: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77210">Bone Link Fetish</a> Source: Shared boss loot<br />
Weapon Option 1: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77191">Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps</a> Source: Madness of Deathwing<br />
Weapon Option 2: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77217">Experimental Specimen Slicer</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=55312">Yor'sahj The Unsleeping</a><br />
Weapon Option 3: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77224">Ataraxis, Cudgel of the Warmaster</a> Source: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56427">Warmaster Blackhorn</a><br />
Relic: <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77081">Gutripper Shard</a> Source: The VP vendor in your home city (700 VP)<br />
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Out of the three weapons, I'm pretty sure the sword from Madness is going to come out on top. Right now I'm using the LFR flavor and it's absurdly awesome. The proc is worth 3k DPS, easy. It sucks that it lacks secondary stats. Wait, no it doesn't. It spawns tentacles that do 3k DPS. That's more than our hunter's fucking wind serpent does in SV spec. <br />
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As it is, I'm okay with having a set that's a little more drop reliant vs having a lot of VP pieces. Thanks to LFR, I already have the watered down versions of the head, shoulders, belt, and sword.<br />
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In closing, all I have to say is thank GOD for transmogrification:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGz2EnrJ569gDWTZHcpLxpgrFTZ1yb5Bp7H4DotDWzIaGZN6ToVB_Wt_jm5zo32PGbS2usVrE3g4aZklfIbpc4mxRo8uvptIvvx4dBCSbU_5lG-613PahUhZ0-vlNM3vU-XAfOMfRUago/s1600/RetBISLols.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGz2EnrJ569gDWTZHcpLxpgrFTZ1yb5Bp7H4DotDWzIaGZN6ToVB_Wt_jm5zo32PGbS2usVrE3g4aZklfIbpc4mxRo8uvptIvvx4dBCSbU_5lG-613PahUhZ0-vlNM3vU-XAfOMfRUago/s320/RetBISLols.jpg" width="254" /></a></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-37433196364327615822011-12-12T13:40:00.000-08:002011-12-12T13:40:29.034-08:00My UI/Inquisition Tracking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The other day, @Orvillius asked me a couple of things about how I track <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=84963">Inquisition</a> in Jack's UI.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kEKLrPA0ooi0Pz4MRlR8_0NDrETuIhvE00bTBAAPRm5091S-mE2mHCiJcttYknNonQMf8u8m1_Lulnrjr_WLfYMHMlXWXmO79XFzngOql8TtxtiDJlW-7bf3wFgvFPqgrIaznFjgACI/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_140418.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kEKLrPA0ooi0Pz4MRlR8_0NDrETuIhvE00bTBAAPRm5091S-mE2mHCiJcttYknNonQMf8u8m1_Lulnrjr_WLfYMHMlXWXmO79XFzngOql8TtxtiDJlW-7bf3wFgvFPqgrIaznFjgACI/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_140418.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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As it is, I'm very satisfied with the UI I've settled on. I use this same configuration with all of my characters and I think it does exactly what I need without being too flashy. I've tried more elaborate interfaces with artsy panels and boxes around everything, but I've ended up preferring simplicity over flash.</div>
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To immediately address the question about inquisition, I use an addon called Retribution FCFS helper, or <a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/clcret">CLCRet</a>. In the above picture you can see how the addon shows me my available cooldowns (wings, zealotry, guardian, and trinkets/synapse springs) in addition to my "next" ability. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPtbVFyq5et7gJu0oFM9uqZrVG_SP2fJAGXERt3ymwAfJTgdVStKra45XnpGgizUEnpW3G8Bd3yMD3ZskCjg4lg2RXwJVfMDxBssTya0ojKfQxnaxZZWSWxNXmGqbHMOiD4jWdDdU63uY/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_140426.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPtbVFyq5et7gJu0oFM9uqZrVG_SP2fJAGXERt3ymwAfJTgdVStKra45XnpGgizUEnpW3G8Bd3yMD3ZskCjg4lg2RXwJVfMDxBssTya0ojKfQxnaxZZWSWxNXmGqbHMOiD4jWdDdU63uY/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_140426.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Here's a shot after I've opened and am about to put up Inquisition for the first time. You can see the addon's suggestion in the center there. Side note: obviously I use the standard Blizzard auras for Divine Purpose and The Art of War procs.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH0SzrSU-RjdfYcr42eE9mRtReTZvNjbRAVcD91TPr9ziXeG9Q_Izf-N4yf1U7CnM3Q21XE7wL3njNa4Osylnrs1PLGODy2j9ehwjwsmy230HfOCHdblt0i2oHS_zMyoQBs5v5RhKZQmc/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_140432.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH0SzrSU-RjdfYcr42eE9mRtReTZvNjbRAVcD91TPr9ziXeG9Q_Izf-N4yf1U7CnM3Q21XE7wL3njNa4Osylnrs1PLGODy2j9ehwjwsmy230HfOCHdblt0i2oHS_zMyoQBs5v5RhKZQmc/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_140432.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The tracker I set up in CLCRet for Inquisition is visible in this shot. Setting the addon up to work in this fashion wasn't too difficult utilizing what I learned from this <a href="http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t53171-ret_fcfs_rotation_helper/p15/#post1502393">EJ thread</a>. The helpful information w/screenshots is about two thirds of the way down the page.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVydggnaCGL8zu6KG1-ovr5tFUkAanaROVEwYW1WJgLmEtPLZNzG7LdXxVEtZ92NXgzmePwQow_wXeTcGqQWdjET4tvwKwUNc2x1Tpo1qmr2oXDxEM8I_ejPRtX_XfNHy01AS7FWhJhco/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_140536.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVydggnaCGL8zu6KG1-ovr5tFUkAanaROVEwYW1WJgLmEtPLZNzG7LdXxVEtZ92NXgzmePwQow_wXeTcGqQWdjET4tvwKwUNc2x1Tpo1qmr2oXDxEM8I_ejPRtX_XfNHy01AS7FWhJhco/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_140536.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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This shot shows you what it looks like when I've got most of my cooldowns burning. CLCRet is counting down the time left on Avenging Wrath and Zealotry while also tracking inquisition. Zomg tentacles.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt__l5d-m_2uuMg-GcKmPEOoiEmgHfAN2xRANxK0k4haoTcENGIXqTzKOOfK05Ayfcas87HI_nfcq3246968_OKH0MRDsTTZvFXLlsm2HiWV5Ar8LteUCc8DHADbMKrbbuOn9852RDb98/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_142419.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt__l5d-m_2uuMg-GcKmPEOoiEmgHfAN2xRANxK0k4haoTcENGIXqTzKOOfK05Ayfcas87HI_nfcq3246968_OKH0MRDsTTZvFXLlsm2HiWV5Ar8LteUCc8DHADbMKrbbuOn9852RDb98/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_142419.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Finally, this one shows how CLCRet tracks overall cooldown times after the abilities in question have run their course.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKHyhbgNpaftQ-6k9mRBFrD-5EbnI054JWT4fsSrGTIReGnu8HiWOlnx-uUC2VmM_0inJKnJkKZYi1Scf4ezlPjeMT7-qyDwmX2wnIPp_qWjQ6tNmaYTRIEa9O6ZLamAXloMTjhxdY8Co/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121211_142344.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKHyhbgNpaftQ-6k9mRBFrD-5EbnI054JWT4fsSrGTIReGnu8HiWOlnx-uUC2VmM_0inJKnJkKZYi1Scf4ezlPjeMT7-qyDwmX2wnIPp_qWjQ6tNmaYTRIEa9O6ZLamAXloMTjhxdY8Co/s320/WoWScrnShot_121211_142344.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I'm posting this shot just because I have three tentacles up and it looks amazing. I'm so looking forward to raid on tuesday. Love this <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78487">sword</a>.</div>
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In closing, here's a list of the UI addons (excluding DBM, Omen, etc.) visible in these shots:</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/pitbull4">Pitbull4</a> -Unit Frames</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/dominos">Dominos</a> -Action Bars</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/recount">Recount</a> -Damage/healing/etc meter</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/tip-tac">Tiptac</a> -Tooltip replacement</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/clcret">CLCRet</a> -Ret Rotation Helper/CD Tracker</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/powerauras-classic">Power Auras Classic</a> -Aura/CD/Event tracker</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/sexymap">Sexymap</a> -Map replacement</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/chocolatebar">Chocolate bar broker display (with several useful plugins)</a> Broker display</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/omni-cc">OmniCC</a> -Actionbar based cooldown display</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/search?search=ForteXorcist">ForteXorcist</a> -Cooldown timeline bar</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/vuhdo">Vuhdo</a> -Healing frames/Raid frames</div>
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<a href="http://www.curse.com/search?search=MikScrollingBattleText">MIkScrollingBattleText</a> -Combat Text</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-2790776781164729282011-12-10T10:59:00.001-08:002011-12-10T15:27:39.775-08:00Ret Procs, Why Debuffs Matter, and How RNG Killed UltraxionOn Wednesday night, Cereal Killers <a href="http://jackthepally.blogspot.com/2011/12/dragon-soul-update-58.html">downed Ultraxion</a> in 10 man normal Dragon Soul. If you've read my little snippet of a post, you can see that we barely beat the enrage. I even think using the word "beat" is somewhat of a stretch.<br />
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I'm only going off DBM's text that informed me that Ultraxion died after exactly six minutes here. Since there wasn't a warning for the boss's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106388">Twilight Eruption</a> cast, I think we may have had the fight finished at exactly the 360 second mark.<br />
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At the time of the kill we had obviously gotten the main mechanics of the fight down well enough. Our only hiccup was when one of our tanks died at the two minute mark. From what I can see on the WoL parse, it looks like Bento took a dirt nap because of healer derp. Out of 13 total attempts, five of them were more or less at the enrage. By try 13, we'd all more or less decided that we just didn't have the group DPS required for the encounter. As you can see, we managed to pull it off in true CK fashion, right at the enrage.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACgXlRs3o95XgyMTzgD4TRJkQnEMSW8wAIKPkKlaRsZfKKZriaztGBJWLKFmgiY7AZOkP83ZfQAp1rcsHls01BT0RWShpgZAbF1CVYDYCI8h9CcKi_KZ0S-bo6yHhw6PngiE69wIIEA0/s1600/WoWScrnShot_120811_004320.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACgXlRs3o95XgyMTzgD4TRJkQnEMSW8wAIKPkKlaRsZfKKZriaztGBJWLKFmgiY7AZOkP83ZfQAp1rcsHls01BT0RWShpgZAbF1CVYDYCI8h9CcKi_KZ0S-bo6yHhw6PngiE69wIIEA0/s320/WoWScrnShot_120811_004320.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wipetown, Population: 10</td></tr>
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<u>Min/Maxing and Enrage Timers:</u></div>
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Ultraxion and my guild's experience with him is representative of our approach to raiding. At first glance, none of us really knew we'd have trouble with the enrage timer. Last week's attempts had me in a healing slot with our discipline priest on DPS duty. That wipefest never amounted to anything close to a kill, so we didn't even consider the lofty-ish DPS requirement. In the guild, it's accepted, without any pomp or arrogance on my part, that I'm a better Ret Paladin than Syuveil is Shadow Priest. Out of the ten of us in the raid, it seems like Syuveil (who goes by "Hammer," and will henceforth be called that,) and myself were the only ones aware that we might need to change our DPS makeup a little to find success. Hammer is our raid leader and he did a couple of things this week that were key to getting us the kill. The first was putting me in as a DPS. The second thing involved our raid group's mage, BLS. </div>
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B always shows up to raid with a great, positive attitude. I absolutely love having him there. He's also a pretty quick study of fight mechanics, which is fantastic too. The one thing he's always struggled at is doing DPS appropriate for his gear level. Now, if you're going back to the screenshot of our kill and looking at his 22k, you're probably thinking that's a bit low. It is, but it's huge for a couple of reasons. Prior to raid on Wednesday, Hammer and B had a session together where BLS actually had to learn to play fire spec, from scratch. Yup, he didn't know how to raid fire at all. Hammer taught him. I can't say enough how proud I am of both of these guys for stepping up, taking the extra effort, and coming through in a big way to help the raid. Given that most of the time this sort of thing doesn't happen in Cereal Killers (though it should.)</div>
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Hammer and BLS are an example of the kind of min/max tweaking that we, and other fairly casual raid groups, may have to engage in to kill Ultraxion. Coming out of 4.2 and ultra-nerfed Firelands and going into Dragon Soul, it was pretty easy to be satisfied with our minimal effort. In the first week we went 4/8, with absolutely no wipefests. We actually hit the enrage timer on Yor'sahj once, but I think that was actually our first attempt. After wiping at 60k, we made an adjustment and won that fight pretty easily. Ultraxion changed the game by forcing us to actually think of the fight in terms of absolute minimum DPS. Here's a bit of numbers to show you how we did it, and why it was nerdscream worthy.</div>
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<u>Ultraxion's Demise: The Numbers</u></div>
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<a href="http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-sdr0dp5eu5d2auhn/sum/damageDone/?s=7194&e=7553">Here's a link to our WoL parse for the kill</a>. Ultraxion has, in ten man normal, 56 million HP and a strict six minute enrage timer. That means your raid has to do 155,555 <i>raid</i> DPS in order to kill the boss in 360 seconds. Removing healers from the equation puts each tank and DPS at 22.2k required. Cereal killers provided 33.5k of that raid requirement from our two tanks and our smite healing maniac Hammer. That leaves a required minimum DPS of 24.4k for the remaining five players.</div>
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As you can see from the parse, only two of our DPS accomplished the minimum requirement. My effective DPS was 28.8k, which allowed for a bit of breathing room, but only lowered the minimum requirement for the other four people to 23.5k. Only one person managed to hit this minimum. Our mage and our shadow priest were at 22.6 and 21.6k, respectively. According to WoL, we eeked out 156,302 total raid DPS.</div>
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Given that our average item level throughout the group should be at or above 378, I feel we can do much better. What follows is a few ways we can improve. These tips are obviously universal and in fact are more or less things you should probably do all the time anyway.</div>
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<u>Missing Debuffs, Auras, and Optimizing Heroism Damage</u></div>
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For Ultraxion attempts, our raid has the following DPS composition: Shadow priest, fire mage, survival hunter, enhancement shaman, and retribution paladin. We're missing both physical (like <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=29859">Blood Frenzy</a>) and magic (<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48506">Earth and Moon</a>,) debuffs on the boss. Since we don't have a boomkin, warrior or rogue, we have to rely on our trusty hunter to fill in those gaps. Unfortunately for us, <a href="http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kaelthas/Judicator/advanced">Judicator </a>didn't have a wind serpent around for <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=24844">a magic damage debuff</a>. I derped pretty hard when he told me he didn't have one. Given that a significant portion of our raid's damage is coming through the magic side, an 8% bonus would have been a ridiculous boon to us on this kill.</div>
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One other obvious thing we're not doing here is pre-potting, or even using potions at all. I'll be doing this next week and encouraging others to do it. Most likely I'll come prepared with a supply of stuff to hand out. Min/maxing like this has never come easy to us. The fact that crafting mats are outrageously overpriced right now isn't going to help that at all, but that's a different post. </div>
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Aside from utilizing potions and available debuffs, I think we could squeeze some more effectiveness out of our heroism use. We don't use heroism countdowns. Usually the raid leader just designates a general time for hero and a mage or shaman to cast the buff. The specified person just kind of fires off the spell without any sort of raid notification. This haphazard usage actually matters on fights like this. If we'd done a few hundred thousand less damage, I wouldn't have my shiny new tier chest and the guild wouldn't be working on soak-the-damage-loot ship. Certain cooldowns <i>must</i> be used before heroism for a maximum benefit. Our shaman has it easy because he knows to drop his spirit wolves before he casts heroism. Our shadow priest could get a decent benefit from his heroism burn by knowing to use his shadowfiend. Simple things like this, when combined with my other improvements, could make our next kill night and day easier than our first.<br />
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Finally, when player deaths occur, using multiple sources of heroism to re-cast can help compensate for lost DPS. This was something we actually planned for if we died and got rezzed by <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105984">Timeloop</a>.</div>
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<u>Last Resorts</u></div>
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We're bad at calling out for an iceblock or paladin bubble in the event of a low % wipe. This is an easy fix that could be beneficial, potentially. If we follow my suggestions above, we really shouldn't need this. However, having last resorts ready and waiting is going to pay off 100% of the time.</div>
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<u>Finally, How Ridiculous Procs and RNG Killed Ultraxion</u></div>
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I am a paladin. My main raiding spec is holy, but I'm often utilized as a DPS. Encounters like Ultraxion (read: where DPS matters,) are where I shine because I can usually do very competitive DPS, which helps the raid overcome things like high boss health or short enrage timers.</div>
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Retribution paladins have gotten some serious love in patch 4.3. here's a list awesome stuff that lets ret pew with a little more pew:</div>
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-<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20113">Two Handed Weapon Specialization</a> got a buff. Used to be 20%</div>
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-<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=31801">Seal of Truth</a> got buffed in a couple of ways. First, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=31803">Censure</a> damage got a significant pre-4.3 buff. Secondly, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20271">Judgements</a> got buffed in the form of a +20% damage done per stack of Censure vs 10% pre-4.3.</div>
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-<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=19740">Blessing of Might</a> now gives 20% bonus melee attack power vs 10% in 4.2.</div>
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Now, it was openly stated that these changes, were part of Blizzard's plan to make ret less bursty and reliant on proc damage. Given my experience with ret so far, I think the 4.3 changes failed in these two respects. However, it is still extremely obvious to me that ret has been buffed. I definitely pew with more pew than I did in 4.2.</div>
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All that being said, lets look at the correlation between my procs and DPS across a few Ultraxion attempts. Of our 13 pulls, only six of them were over five minutes. These will be the parses I look at, in order to be able to compare each one as equally as possible.</div>
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First, here is a graph representing the average DPS done for all twelve wipes:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZJjBmPY_BeJ2c7ABk03NeOY3NEm-nOiYpGRSTZIawSVYMZf01a2maBJSQHLt2isG3Tm-lj1hxx0Hhe2PJZb1yrS5fcPpFUKoKNrRuQZAkwyk-pY4hY-vPBHpfLZlJMVWFAc4hmevpx40/s1600/Wipes+Graph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="102" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZJjBmPY_BeJ2c7ABk03NeOY3NEm-nOiYpGRSTZIawSVYMZf01a2maBJSQHLt2isG3Tm-lj1hxx0Hhe2PJZb1yrS5fcPpFUKoKNrRuQZAkwyk-pY4hY-vPBHpfLZlJMVWFAc4hmevpx40/s320/Wipes+Graph.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see, I managed to do 25.5k DPS on average, which is sufficient for the requirement this fight carries. Since I'm really only looking at five wipes out of twelve (which I cant figure out how to make a graph for without using excel,) it's important to note that over those attempts I averaged out to 25.08k DPS. Could be better, but it is again, sufficient for the encounter if the other DPS are on par.</div>
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Secondly, here is a chart containing my two DPS procs, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=90174">Divine Purpose</a> and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=87138">The Art of War.</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEKXGAD5kINJQoKZipUMCEI8rtR8czMf1jM4HwzRaOLJyk1xOIRIaPax2j0JOhxPDitMFnI_Ezyj9QQVPiLNEcfG1qEwcQ7qq-m_PNPma0sx5EFnXWIVc0hG_GuefZGxPoUiMgyWoV0_g/s1600/Wipe+Procs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEKXGAD5kINJQoKZipUMCEI8rtR8czMf1jM4HwzRaOLJyk1xOIRIaPax2j0JOhxPDitMFnI_Ezyj9QQVPiLNEcfG1qEwcQ7qq-m_PNPma0sx5EFnXWIVc0hG_GuefZGxPoUiMgyWoV0_g/s320/Wipe+Procs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Again, this graph is a cumulative collection of data from all twelve wipes. 146 Divine Purpose procs divided by twelve attempts comes out to just over twelve procs per attempt. Keep in mind that this is skewed to be a bit low because it's including a lot of 2-4 minute fights. The real average over the five relevant wipes is 15.8 procs per attempt. This comes out to 2.8 Divine Purpose procs per minute, based on an average fight time of 5 minutes 41 seconds. </div>
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Art of war procs are similarly grouped, although wipe #2 had a stupidly low number which has skewing effects. 180 total AoW procs comes out to 15 per fight, based on the twelve wipes. The five wipe numbers come out to a much higher 21 procs per fight. That's 3.7PPM if you're wondering.</div>
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So, to recap, the average wipe was 5 minutes 41 seconds with about 16 DP procs and 21 AoW. These numbers combined to net me an average of 25,000 DPS. Obviously other factors come into play for DPS production, like random crit streaks and whether or not Landslide procs line up with other significant DPS events. This analysis is based entirely on speculating that these two procs have a profound impact on my boss damage.</div>
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Now, for the moment of truth: The graph of my procs for the Ultraxion kill:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1UUySCD5VwBvRe7dB_6a7Kw7-KcZM0kYX8kKocVwZh-0Ui8czFo7HZ0LHn3GN1qxmL9C5ZskNwUyocpb36BH48RChU3zBWrXg5MiqDYWOF6N5DX0G9K_QdH69lPVh_t7Uv40u7LaDj6I/s1600/KillProcs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1UUySCD5VwBvRe7dB_6a7Kw7-KcZM0kYX8kKocVwZh-0Ui8czFo7HZ0LHn3GN1qxmL9C5ZskNwUyocpb36BH48RChU3zBWrXg5MiqDYWOF6N5DX0G9K_QdH69lPVh_t7Uv40u7LaDj6I/s320/KillProcs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Both of my procs for this fight were above the average for the five wipes. It's noteworthy to point out that attempts 9 and 12 were the only two that had a higher number of The Art of War procs. Divine Purpose procs comes in at an outrageous count of 29. That's almost twice the average number over the previous five attempts. Here's a graph of my DPS for that fight:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNsccfDqGbw7lP8LINhBqphwOrq4Ta-3CZkcTvbZIFYrXm4NW588IvsWf5wGagnoZpF3Ebkt52NYU86CmXtsmLe6SoXZno34yUFs5l_gkbp9us1VgdcWidJTn0qk4w27H20I0NW_x-aHE/s1600/KillGraph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNsccfDqGbw7lP8LINhBqphwOrq4Ta-3CZkcTvbZIFYrXm4NW588IvsWf5wGagnoZpF3Ebkt52NYU86CmXtsmLe6SoXZno34yUFs5l_gkbp9us1VgdcWidJTn0qk4w27H20I0NW_x-aHE/s320/KillGraph.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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My DPS comes in almost 4k higher than the average from wipes. That's some pretty serious RNG. Dear Blizzard, you didn't fix how proc reliant Ret paladins are. Thanks for the DPS buff anyway!</div>
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<u>Proc Chaining</u></div>
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Divine purpose procs come from the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=86172">talent</a> bearing the same name. Due to the nature of how this mechanic works, everything a ret paladin does damage with (except consecrate,) has a chance to proc DP. That means procs can cause procs. This is an important concept because I know it's what's responsible for the 29 Divine Purpose buffs that drove my DPS up in our Ultraxion kill. DP allows DPS to increase so much because it has several effects. First, it grossly simplifies <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=84963">Inquisition</a> uptime. Taking 3 crusader strike cycles out of the equation means casting more <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=85256">Templar's Verdict</a> (TV), which is the most ideal use of DP unless Inquisition is about to fall off. More TV is the second benefit to DP. The third is proc chaining. The Divine Purpose talent states that ret DPS abilities can proc the talent. Most importantly, what this means is that the more abilities you cast per minute, the greater chance you get to proc. That means increased procs can chain and allow for TV spamming. Art of War procs have the same effect. Exorcism is a fantastic ability that does high damage in its self, but the procs themselves allow for more potential instances for DP to activate. </div>
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The proc frenzy is something you either live or die by (sometimes literally) as a ret paladin. I'm looking forward to next week to see if I can best my numbers and improve both myself and the raid with some of the tips I've covered in this post. Also, I've spent some time in LFR and have added <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78487">Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps</a> and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78470">Backbreaker Spaulders</a> to my ret set.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">LFR was a great success. Stupid easy.</td></tr>
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Along with getting <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77205">Creche of the Final Dragon</a> from our kill, I'm hoping to see an increase in output. Jack and his new tentacle friends have some surprises in store for Ultraxion!</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs22RGxgRUvzEznfb4B8xFnQofunVLbl2fKO04JjqUEmUCDPEyQZDdVL1-iNGsN6l2odTxJzn-X6DNDOa00f9Agk_LO954fhTQyDTejVES6pylONrEl-eLzGznli6uRIitHenwMBqGOFQ/s1600/WoWScrnShot_121011_010725.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs22RGxgRUvzEznfb4B8xFnQofunVLbl2fKO04JjqUEmUCDPEyQZDdVL1-iNGsN6l2odTxJzn-X6DNDOa00f9Agk_LO954fhTQyDTejVES6pylONrEl-eLzGznli6uRIitHenwMBqGOFQ/s320/WoWScrnShot_121011_010725.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rawr tentacles casting mind flay for the win.</td></tr>
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<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-8776226524855326662011-12-08T00:26:00.001-08:002011-12-08T00:32:32.598-08:00Dragon Soul Update: 5/8Tonight was a triumphant night for Cereal Killers. After 12 wipes on Ultraxion, we finally managed to muster the DPS to kill him EXACTLY AT THE ENRAGE. Holy shit. I'm very proud of everybody for pulling it together tonight. For clarity, I was filling a DPS role on this fight. Here's the obligatory screenshot:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcdDD9aAA4ECSnQU__RlCJnlfOXFgHa52322OTFnoZG6gxveapYJw0oQI7jDqueNBfEnOgNE3vmyltwdxVDYIbeI-6-F1iwbC-ZmNlarT8Da7BtYtEMNI3rsnreyK69KwraP2GZiFgzlE/s1600/WoWScrnShot_120811_005103.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcdDD9aAA4ECSnQU__RlCJnlfOXFgHa52322OTFnoZG6gxveapYJw0oQI7jDqueNBfEnOgNE3vmyltwdxVDYIbeI-6-F1iwbC-ZmNlarT8Da7BtYtEMNI3rsnreyK69KwraP2GZiFgzlE/s320/WoWScrnShot_120811_005103.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Kick. Ass. Tomorrow: Blackhorn and beyond. Looking forward to it.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-37486098961132406322011-12-05T23:21:00.001-08:002011-12-06T00:08:42.441-08:00Minipost: Things I've Got My Eye On This Week in RaidThis is just a quick and dirty list of things I'm gunning for in Dragon Soul. Making a list of this stuff is as much for you as it is for me. I've never been one to have a BIS list of stuff hanging out in front of me during raid.<br />
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Morchok:<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77262">Petrified Fungal Heart</a><br />
-Uh, spirit, haste? Yes please.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77214">Vagaries of Time</a>. I may just refer to this as Vag of Time in the future.<br />
-No spirit, but definitely a nice throughput weapon. I'm not having huge mana issues so far anyway.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77270">Rockhide Bracers</a><br />
-Offspec item. Beautiful stats. Probably have to roll vs our pally tank on this (his OS is ret as well.) He likes to pretend to DPS sometimes.<br />
I'll let <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77265">Pillarfoot Greaves</a> get sharded or taken for mogging. I'm getting <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77169">Silver Sabatons of Fury</a> this week, courtesy of my gracious warrior alt.<br />
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Warlord Zon'ozz<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78183">Gauntlets of the Corrupted Conqueror</a><br />
-<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76766">Crit>Mastery</a> for the way I heal holy. Not ideal stats, but I'd be happy with this drop.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77204">Seal of the Seven Signs</a><br />
-Looks like a fantastic throughput trinket. Look at all that int and haste! Yes please.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77259">Treads of Crushed Flesh</a><br />
-Absolutely delicious ret boots. Om nom two red sockets w/str bonus. Fantastic.<br />
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Yor'sahj The Unsleeping<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77253">Heartblood Wristplates</a><br />
-Hell yes. Perfect holy wrists<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77217">Experimental Specimen Slicer</a><br />
-The 3.6 speed on this 2h axe make it kind of a butterface, but I still think it's a solid upgrade over regular <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=71352">Sulfuras</a>. Beautiful stats.<br />
I'll probably pass on a tier drop from Yor'sahj. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76768">Greaves of Radiant Glory</a> are a bit meh with all that mastery. In a perfect world, I'll end up with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=71982">Pyrium Legplates of Purified Evil</a>. Eight essences is going to suck to come by this early in the patch, so I'll probably hang onto t12 for a while in the leg slot.<br />
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Hagara the Stormbinder<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78180">Shoulders of the Corrupted Conqueror</a><br />
-<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76769">Perfectly itemized for holy</a>. Probably one of the higher priority items I can get from currently killable bosses.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77250">Runescriven Demon Collar</a><br />
-Very nice ret belt. I'd probably drop that haste for expertise/hit. Depending on other drops.<br />
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Ultraxion<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78184">Chest of the Corrupted Conqueror </a><br />
-I will absolutely be rolling on this item. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76765">Breastplate of Radiant Glory</a> is beautifully itemized.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77244">Dragonfracture Belt</a><br />
-All this haste+red sockets+int bonuses is making my head spin. Must-have belt.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77245">Ledger of Revolting Rituals</a><br />
-There's no way I'll be able to roll on this over our druid/priests this week. Eventually this non-heroic BIS item will be mine. <br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78013">Curled Twilight Claw</a> and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77205">Creche of the Final Dragon</a> would find a good home in my ret set. Looks like this boss is going to be in high demand.<br />
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I almost forgot the shared boss loot!<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77209">Windward Heart</a><br />
-A great replacement for <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=68983">Eye of Blazing Power</a><br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77229">Signet of Suturing</a><br />
-Perfect ring. Must-have item.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77210">Bone Link Fetish</a><br />
-I believe this is a BIS trinket for non-heroic DS paladins. Do want.<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77230">Breathstealer Band</a><br />
-I haven't checked out all of the rings from this encounter, but this one is likely to be sought after by me. I love my mastery.<br />
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Getting down these five bosses is a reasonable expectation for this week. If we elect to skip Firelands, which is likely to happen, we should be able to achieve this. Tomorrow is raid night and I'm excited to have another go at Dragon Soul!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-15841261896222194242011-12-04T17:33:00.001-08:002011-12-04T23:01:10.281-08:00Paladins, Stabbing Dargons, and Armor Dye: the 4.3 PostThe time has come for me to chime in on patch 4.3, the most recent update to World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. It's Sunday so it hasn't been quite a week since the patch dropped. That being said, I think there has been sufficient time to get a solid impression of what this content release is all about. First off: Paladins!<br />
<a name='more'></a><u>Paladins: Holy and Retribution</u><br />
If you've payed attention during this blog, you should know by now that I don't play protection spec. That may/may not change, but that's a whole different barrel of monkeys. So far, I feel like this has been a great patch for ret and holy. As it is, I even feel like I wouldn't be surprised if paladins got nerfed in a couple of places. Don't misinterpret and read that as "4.3 made paladins OP ZOMG," I just wouldn't be surprised to see some "balance" adjustments.<br />
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I think it's safe to say that the big thing this patch for <b>holy </b>spec paladins is <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=82327">Holy Radiance</a>. If you've been living under a rock, primary changes to that spell are the cast time and lack of cooldown. Oh, it also generates holy power when you cast it. Holy is my main spec and I was eagerly anticipating the play-style changes this was going to bring to paladins. At first blush, I was outraged that HR was gaining a cast time. Simply put, I was used to the way the spell fit into my raid and dungeon encounters and I wasn't happy about the possible nerf implications. Having spent this week in Dragon Soul, 4.3's new raid, I can say that my worries are gone. Holy radiance is now outrageously powerful. Ask any of the druids I follow on Twitter. Being able to spam cast a spell that costs 8198 mana presents a fun new mana conservation challenge. All in all, I like the change.<br />
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<b>Retribution </b>paladins and melee in general got some serious love this patch. In the essence of time, I'm not going to go link crazy here. The buffs to ret include a buff to the two-handed weapon specialization (from 20% to 25% bonus damage,) and a buff to judgement damage. Melee DPS got a buff in the form of +10% attack power from several different sources. I haven't raided since the changes, but I can definitely feel the buffs when I'm in a five man. Blizzard tried to make it seem like the main motivation behind these ret changes was to make us feel less reliant on procs and cooldowns. I don't really think they were as successful as they could have been. Jack is still either a monster or a decent dps, depending on how lucky I get on procs. That being said, I'm loving getting buffed. Putting up bigger numbers is always a happy time for me.<br />
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<u>Transmogrification</u><br />
Here's the Cliff's Notes version of this section: Jack likes to transmog. This ability to reuse older armor and weapon skins is just plain fun. I was never one of those people who had a special set of gear to cavort around in town in, mainly because of bag space. Transmogrification actually causes additional issues with bag space (mainly bank space,) BUT who cares because it's AWESOME! Look, Jack has a rough mog set for his holy gear:<br />
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<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7587416973016727249#editor/target=post;postID=8442482908015486793">Here's a link to Jack's AWESOME ret set if you missed it before.</a> Mogging is a new added timesink, which in my opinion is a necessary evil. I find myself more and more with nothing I really *want* to be doing, and for some reason I kind of like farming old content. </div>
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<u>Dragon Soul</u></div>
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The guild I'm in, Cereal Killers on Kael'Thas, is currently 4/8 in DS. The bosses we haven't killed yet are Ultraxion, Warmaster Blackhorn, and the two Deathwing encounters. Getting half way through a brand new raid in one week is something I can be happy with in this guild. To make a long story short, due to the fact that we're a mixture of people who do and don't give a shit, actually killing new content always feels like SUPER WIN.</div>
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Out of the encounters we've successfully killed, and the one we've attempted but can't down, I think they're all pretty fun. Morchok is 100% a gimmee boss. If your group cant get past it, you're either woefully undergeared, or you probably should go back to playing Farmville. None of the encounters, save Ultraxion, really gave us a lot of trouble. Warlord Zon'ozz was an adjustment. We've never played tennis with General Vezax's cousin before, so we had to get a rhythm down to avoid tank deaths and other ridiculously easy shit. Zon'ozz was my intro to the new Holy Radiance spam healing method. Honestly, spammable AOE heals kind of trivializes huge raid damage. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that, but I can see some players complaining about the new HR contributing to what makes raiding too "easy."</div>
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Out of the five bosses we've engaged in Dragon soul, Ultraxion is the only one that we haven't bested yet. For some reason we have a bunch of players that are struggling to wrap their head around the "press this button and you won't die" mechanic. I'll spare you the recap of my nerdrage, but let's just say that I wasn't happy. For the most part, this encounter looks tremendously easy. I'm hopeful we'll stab the dargon next week and move on to Blackhorn.</div>
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As a related side note, I gave up the tier token to get my <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=76769">shoulders</a> this week in favor of gearing our priest. He's a great guy who actually knows his shit in raids, so I don't have any regrets. Besides, he was super happy to drop his 359 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=60262">birdbaths</a>. I'm really hoping the good karma comes back around this week because those t13 shoulders are sooooooooooooooo delicious.</div>
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<u>5 Man Hour of Twilight Dungeons</u></div>
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I'm going to keep this section short and sweet, just like the new 5 mans. End Time, Hour of Twilight, and Well of Eternity are all engaging, fun, and full of interesting lore. Lore might be one of the things I'm enjoying most out of all the new content. </div>
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I'm glad Blizzard made the loot from these dungeons equal in item level to the previous tier, instead of being slightly inferior like they made stuff from Zandoms. For people like myself (read: altoholics) the loot in HoT heroics serve wonderfully<span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span>to keep alts geared and even to fill holes in the offspec gear of my main.</div>
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<u>Other 4.3 Things I don't Care Much About</u></div>
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This is the part of this post where I would talk about the raid finder and the Darkmoon Fair. To be perfectly honest, the DMF has never been something I've taken interest in. The only thing that really interests me is the replica gear. I might farm out a set, but that depends on how ADD I'm feeling.</div>
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I'm being kind of a chicken about the raid finder. Pugging results in frustration way too much for me to want to jump into an (albeit watered down) end tier raid with 9-24 people that I don't know/cant communicate with. That being said, I might venture into LFR eventually once my warrior gets some more toys from the new 5 mans. Right now Jack is telling me he's too good for LFR raids. We'll see how he feels after a couple of weeks of good or bad drops in normal DS.</div>
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I was going to post a screenshot from the auction house, but Blogger is having a seizure. The shot had some uncut epic gems up for 7k. That's just ridiculous. Fuck that noise. Come on Blizzard, just put the gems in without making them ultra rare. </div>
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<u>Prospects For The Week</u></div>
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Normally I do a dedicated post for this, but since this entry is so lengthy, I figured I'd just make it longer! This week I'm hoping we see some efficiency and continued success in Dragon Soul. Actually getting down 3-4 bosses on Tuesday night would be a great success. Judging by the effort we put in last week to get our kills, I think that <i>should</i> be possible. I try not to underestimate our capacity for Derp, so we'll see. Per @kurnmogh's <a href="http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?p=2118">4.3 holy paladin gear guide</a>, I'm going to be getting VP on an alt to grab the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77169">BOE boots</a> from the valor vendor. Other than that, I'm going to continue farming HoT dungeons for useful drops. My warrior is hoping to get his t1 pants from Molten core this week so I can flesh out his Might set.</div>
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In closing, I just want to thank all of you who actually read this blog. It's a labor of love and it makes it that much better when I know people are actually checking out my stuff.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-84424829080154867932011-12-04T01:57:00.001-08:002011-12-04T02:27:38.124-08:00Transmogapalooza!Greetings! It's been a few days since I've made a post and I wanted to check in real quick before bed with a couple of fun screenies and a brief update.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>As most of you know, patch 4.3 hit live servers last Tuesday. Among a lot of big important things, 4.3 brought the dawn of the era of transmogrification. I've spent the last few weeks preparing a few potential sets for my paladin. Ideally I'd like to have at least two different setups that I'm really happy with (one for each spec.) As of tonight, I'm 90% done with my retribution mog set. View:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8AC3IcTjxZj6f5AI3HC4oMF9nx_aKPi7aKj_UhMuO0dPlgQYlEqegY8ZKn2vCVqdlHSZT7dUBKEvXpzYnMLV6ZmG5ZSNvII4FsiY-kCrBf-RmP-lniBEQH9o8oMNv3ChOhbomzVgXUaI/s1600/WoWScrnShot_120411_025602.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8AC3IcTjxZj6f5AI3HC4oMF9nx_aKPi7aKj_UhMuO0dPlgQYlEqegY8ZKn2vCVqdlHSZT7dUBKEvXpzYnMLV6ZmG5ZSNvII4FsiY-kCrBf-RmP-lniBEQH9o8oMNv3ChOhbomzVgXUaI/s320/WoWScrnShot_120411_025602.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mmmm so period correct.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkO9m9yMs7Go92C_x3HHKAKruxLtnG45XcqBgUIZ4KXTFtECQFl8kOfYoMnNnybsDWl1wwIqhZTk8vL6EY1gvmXnrmFPPPlDXVfNt14tsvl718GTxdWrp9mBQ49UzVykKXEBYxH2aQgU/s1600/WoWScrnShot_120411_030337.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkO9m9yMs7Go92C_x3HHKAKruxLtnG45XcqBgUIZ4KXTFtECQFl8kOfYoMnNnybsDWl1wwIqhZTk8vL6EY1gvmXnrmFPPPlDXVfNt14tsvl718GTxdWrp9mBQ49UzVykKXEBYxH2aQgU/s320/WoWScrnShot_120411_030337.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still on the fence with that cloak.</td></tr>
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I say the set is 90% finished because I don't plan on sticking with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30090">World Breaker</a>. It's an appropriate weapon for a t5 tribute, but I feel the skin is a bit more warrior than it is paladin. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=28800">Hammer of the Naaru</a> is my mace of choice for this Crystalforge t5 mog masterpiece. Sure, it's a lot of purple, but I just think the giant purple stone on the end of that mace flows perfectly with the look. The cloak pictured is off Illidan and I'm happy with it for the most part. Once I get my hammer and finalize the look, I may cycle through a few level 70 back pieces and pick my favorite.<br />
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As you can see, I'm sporting an <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=31779">Aldor Tabard</a>, which I managed to obtain in one night of farming. Big ups to my guildie Teska for helping me go from neutral to exalted in less than two hours. 71 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=29740">Fel Armaments</a> go a long way. A ridiculously long way. Going from neutral to 3/4 of the way through revered happened with zero farming. I did the rest by running through some quests in Netherstorm. The tabard is really the icing on the cake here. I think it really ties the set together. I'm very happy with the overall look.<br />
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If you're interested in the pieces I mogged to get this look, here's a list:<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30131">Crystalforge War-Helm</a> -Head<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30133">Crystalforge Shoulderbraces</a> -Shoulders<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=32524">Shroud of the Highbourne</a> -Back<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30129">Crystalforge Breastplate</a> -Chest<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30090">World Breaker</a> -Weapon<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30130">Crystalforge Gauntlets</a> -Gloves<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30132">Crystalforge Greaves</a> -Legs<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=30027">Boots of Courage Unending</a> -Feet<br />
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=31779">Aldor Tabard</a> -Tabard<br />
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With a group, none of the above are hard to get. The belt is craftable, and the boots drop off of SSC trash (and thus are easily solo-farmable.) Getting an Aldor tab represents either a lot of farming, or some AH/guildie luck. Like I said, I'm super happy with how my set turned out. Happy enough to devote this ridiculous blog post to it.<br />
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Tomorrow should bring an obligatory "stepping into DS and what's cool about patch 4.3" post, so stay tuned. Cereal Killers took our maiden voyage into the new end-of-expansion raid this week and I've come back with a ton of thoughts on the content. First though, bed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-14439996225704587062011-11-27T21:16:00.001-08:002011-11-27T21:55:57.818-08:00Prospects 4.3 EditionAs many of you know, it was announced that patch 4.3 will be released on Tuesday, November 29th. The guys over at <a href="http://tankspot.com/">Tankspot</a> noted during <a href="http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/legendary/?utm_source=Tankspot&utm_medium=News_Site&utm_term=GBTV&utm_content=Episode53&utm_campaign=Legendary">Legendary</a> that this could be the biggest non-expansion content patch ever. <br />
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<a name='more'></a>Come Tuesday there will indeed be a mountain of new content. I have mixed feelings about the raid/dungeon content. Yes, there will be new awesomeness to be had in the form of loot and shit that hasn't been farmed to death; this is definitely full of upside. I can feel a lot of people cringing when I say this, but I think I'm a little sad that Firelands is going to become a secondary raid. I've only killed Ragnaros twice and as a result, I feel like I'm only just now reaching my stride in that particular raid. Regardless, our group has matured a lot so I'm hopeful about our chances in Dragon Soul. The problem with CK and new content is that most of our raiders are bad at doing their homework.<br />
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Dungeons and raids aside, I'm excited to check out the new changes to ret. As it is I feel like ret is a fairly solid DPS. From what I've heard, the 4.3 changes will move rets even further in that direction. Holy has some interesting things coming on the 29th too. Spamming holy radiance sure looks fun. That's only moderate sarcasm.<br />
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One thing I've had very mixed feelings about is the Annual Pass thing Blizzard is pushing for World of Warcraft. Basically it's a 12 month subscription commitment. The only reason I'm really considering it (I just pay month to month right now,) is for the mount that's being offered with the pass. Firstly, I can't decide if it's worth it or not. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngsn8HOh9xM">Here's a Youtube video of it from MMO Champion</a>. It's cool, I guess. What appeals to me most, and I feel I've been manipulated here a bit, is that it's exceedingly paladin-y. The wings just seem to be a bit flimsy. I know the mount is <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.wikia.com/diablo/images/a/a5/Tyrael.gif&imgrefurl=http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Tyrael&h=160&w=400&sz=216&tbnid=n82uCx9Lo86MQM:&tbnh=49&tbnw=122&zoom=1&docid=M6-PE8Zyl4zsQM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2h_TTs-ELKKziQLzlPnxCw&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAQ&dur=319">themed as a tribute to this guy</a>, but I think Blizzard could have done it better. The mount will be available on Tuesday by those who have agreed to the 12 month subscription. I just find myself wondering where WoW will be in a year. It already seems to be on it's death bed more than just a little. The pass and the mount will be an option for a while still I think, so I'll mull it over for a while.<br />
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I'm not going to drone on about everything in the patch. The new five mans are probably what I'm most excited about, but only because I should be able to fill in some gaps in my gear. Other than that, I'm on the fence about Dragon Soul. I'll get back to you on that.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7587416973016727249.post-15560894070024709182011-11-27T21:04:00.001-08:002011-11-27T22:11:27.199-08:00Blog FormattingTonight I went through all the images in this blog to make them less problematic for mobile users. As a result they're kind of small on a full desktop browser. This blog gets viewed by a lot of my friends in real life, but mostly on their phones. Huge images were causing really annoying navigation issues on the mobile version of the site. Non-mobile users can click the resized images to see them in their full glory. As always, I love feedback. Feel free to leave comments or contact me via twitter at @Colinjhawkins. This change should have happened a long time ago. Mobile users, go forth and enjoy!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2