And here’s what I was talking about with those darned boomkins sitting in melee range.
nearly there. Def rating 530
Those guys charge anyone when they activate. As a DPS I bring stuff to the tank if I get aggro, and if I know that I’m a critting maniac (like on my boomkin), I stay there to keep it easier for the tank to pick up the mob again. Otherwise I’m gonna be doing the chicken-waddle to and from the tank more than I care to.
There’s another kind of mob like that after Ionar, who will randomly charge someone who’s standing at range, so I park my butt right near the tank on that part, too.
I had the awesomest H HoR run evar 
over the weekend. I randomed in on my pretending-to-be-a-boomkin druid (she’s supposedly a bear but I don’t tank randoms since they scare me) and looked around. I avoided my reflexive reaction to drop group then, 'cause normally I hate HHoR with the fire of a thousand suns. But I noticed we had a pally tank and pally healer, and pally tanks are great there, so I stuck around.
Holy crap, it went like clockwork. Smooth initial part, no deaths at all, and I held up on my end with good DPS output and only a couple ‘whoops, pulled that off the tank as I wasn’t assisting’ incidents with the group pulls at the start, which were easily remedied. The run from the Lich King was easy as well; we just ripped through everything. I even found the time to joke during one of the initial gauntlet spawns, "Nothing like a BElf group to make a tauren gal feel fat 
" - I was with all BElves; two pallies, warlock, rogue. At the end, everyone exclaimed how awesome that went - and one of the group even got his HHoR achievement for the first time, he’d commented earlier in the run how he’d had no luck getting past the first two bosses before.
On the other end of the spectrum, my poorly-geared mage got into a H ToC random. Warrior tank, and three from a single guild - ICC10/25-geared shaman healer, and a pally and rogue. The latter two were even worse geared than I was. We kind of struggled through the first parts, but the Black Knight was a disaster. The pally especially seemed to have no spatial awareness of where the ghouls were, and got himself blown up a number of times. The shaman tried to blame the warrior’s positioning but this typically happened at the end of a phase when the Knight was dead and thus there was no real reason to be standing anywhere other than Not Near Ghouls. (On one memorable occasion, all three of those guildies went splat at the end of the second phase explosion, while the warrior and my wimpy mage lived. Because we ran.) We also died a few times during the final phase when there’s just the BK, and the healer has to heal the ever-living crap out of everyone while the DPS race their health bars vs. the Knight’s to the bottom.
The tank started yelling at the healer, and the people who didn’t run, and finally the guild voting bloc pulled out a vote kick and booted the tank. We got a DK replacement who was well-geared, well-spec’d, and it still took two tries to finish the run. So I have no idea how this healer made it in her guild’s runs. Maybe she had an elemental main-spec and was healing to get her guildie friends through runs faster, and had no aptitude for it. I dunno.
Make that 535. Why is this the magic number as it says my chance to be critically hit is reduce by only 5.40%
Got the Juggler achievement last night on the 3rd try without any addons/cheats! You guys had me all stressed out over this! Moved the 20 torches over to the “1” button on my action bar and I moved the camera angle to overhead and I scrolled up to the point where the green targeting circle virtually filled up the the screen…and the did [1][mouse click][1][mouse click][1][mouse click][1][mouse click][1][mouse click],etc…picked up the speed on the second attempt and almost got it (36, I think) and then just kept going hard even before the timer resets so I had a good jump on the next round. Bang…just like that. Did it on the strip of dirt below Krauses Landing.
Also, picked up “Loremaster of Northrend” by finding 2 elusive quests in Zul’Drak when I was touring the Northrend flames to honor/desecrate…and had just enough blossoms to get the pet. Now, I just need to join the Brew of the Month club, to get the “What a long strange trip it’s been” and the mount!
WoWWiki article on Defense - basically, it boils down to that a mob of your level has a 5% chance of critting you. For every level above, add 0.2% to their chance, so a raid boss (lvl 83) would have a 5.60% chance of critting you. You are currently uncrittable in heroics, and need just a bit more defense to be uncrittable in raids.
Why is this such a big deal? Think about how often mobs (and bosses, especially) swing to hit you in a run. If they crit 5% of the time, they’re going to do a whole lot of damage with each crit, and you will have a very unhappy healer who will find it exhausting to keep you up, especially in cases where you have a lot of mobs on you, or when a big boss is beating you up for an extended fight. If the boss gets in a couple good hits and then a crit, your health bar could go really low before the healer realizes it, and you could be dead before the next heal lands.
To Kushiel and Rik, I’m not sure if you’ve thought about this already, but have you considered using the camera hack to zoom way out so you can get more of a bird’s eye view of the goings on? Also, you can try turning on friendly nameplates (usually Shift-V; enemy nameplates are V) to better track who’s where. I do both of those on my toons, and this makes it much easier for me in 5mans. (In raids is another matter, and it’s generally accepted that you mark tanks + whoever else needs it)
That said, I am tentatively excited. We may be starting a second raid team for people who can’t make our night owl raiding runs; a guildie couple got moved to third shift recently, for example. We *finally *have enough geared tanks and I’ve volunteered my alt priest (once I get enough raid healing xp :p) to help out. I’ve been talking to the guildie who’s setting it up about the logistics involved, and hopefully it will take off.
For those of you with multiple raid teams, how do you handle signups, etc?
Midsummer related news: Been running THREE toons around to the fires. One for the brazier, one for the title, and one for the XP. Still no scythe or pet. shakes fist at RNG gods
I’m starting to wonder if some of my problems are because I’m running on really, really bad hardware. Like minimum everything. I’ve seen screenshots people have done from really far away, and I can’t set the camera that far away, I’m guessing because my graphics settings won’t allow it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to upgrade my hardware for Cataclysm or if I ever decide to do 10 or 25-mans.
HoL just happened to be where I got a screenshot; I see this boomkin behavior in every instance.
I’ve done the thing that lets me zoom way out, but I already have a hard enough time seeing what’s going on without making everything tiny on my screen. Also, as I’ve mentioned before when talking about the issues I had playing a tauren hunter, zooming the camera way out results in a lot of auto-zooming depending on what walls or other immovable objects are behind me, which causes me great disorientation. I’ve tried the nameplates thing, but they move around even more than the mobs and other players do, and it’s an exercise in frustration trying to click on the one I want. Then add in the numbers and notifications and spell effects flying all over the place. The more visual clutter, the harder it is for me.
Speaking as a part-time boomkin, I really think it’s because of the major critting I seem to do, plus in heroics I do the most damage on multi-pulls by AOEing. If I try to single-target each mob my DPS falls way down and I tend to turn into an OOMkin fast. I want the mobs to stay near the tank if I’m AOEing so they’ll continue to get aggro from what he’s doing too.
Boomkins are also sturdier than many caster-types (barring shamans) and may feel less danger from standing near the tank. As my clothies I tend to hang way the hell back to give me more time to shield/blink/fade/run.
That’s 5.4% against a mob of level 80. Heroic bosses are 82, and raid bosses are your level +3.
Note that you cannot have both friendly and enemy nameplates enabled at the same time, AFAIK. So if you turn on friendly ones, hostile ones will disappear. IMO, DPS and tanks should always have enemy nameplates enabled.
Plus, nameplates don’t always appear directly above the mobs or characters they’re representing. The more there are in a small space, the worse the problem gets.
That’s because by default you can’t. There’s a setting you have to manually change. The command is something like /console cameraDistanceMax 50, but you’ll have to double-check the exact syntax. You can find the camera console variables here.
Note that all this affects is the maxiumum distance you can scroll your camera out to. You can still scroll it back in tighter if you want. Normally I’ll only have it aaaaaaaaaall the way out on fights where (a) there’s nothing over my head to knock the camera back towards me and (b) I need a *really *huge field of view. EoE (Malygos) is a classic example of this. Most of the time, I’ll just have it far enough out to give me a good range on everything without constantly knocking against anything hanging off the ceiling; when I’m DPSing, I scroll it pretty far in unless there’s something I need to watch for.
Is there a good way to make yourself more visible to, uh, yourself? For example, when I’m in a 25-man raid that involves a lot of stacking (Marrowgar, Festergut) I tend to lose myself in the crowd and can’t tell if I’m positioned right. I wish there were a way to mark myself but would be invisible to everyone else.
If you’re supposed to be stacking and you can’t see yourself, you’re doing it right. 
For fights where I’m DPSing and positioning is important, I always scroll in closer. Remember that you’ll always be at the exact center of your own screen.
It’s never going to say 100%, because the way WoW presents percentages for hit and defense, etc is somewhat counter intuitive.
A Level 80 Mob has a 5% chance to crit a level 80 player. A level 82 mob has a 5.4% and a level 83 (raid bosses) has 5.6%. When the tool tip says that it reduces the chance to critically hit, it means that it shrinks the “critical hit” portion of the hit table by that many percentage points. So at 535 defense, you have completely removed the critical hit portion of the 80 and 82-level mobs’ hit tables, and 83-level mobs still have a .2% chance to crit you.
The same deal applies to hit rating - when it says “increases chance to hit by 4%” it doesn’t seem that exciting, but when it eliminate half your melee miss chance off the table, it seems much more valuable.
Heh. I noticed in the above screenshot that my own toon is not visible, though she should be right in the middle of the IceHUD brackets. Looks like I’m sharing space with another melee DPS…
Damn, but I’m loving these extra Frost badges from Ahune. With this holiday going another week, I should be able to get that 95 Frost iLvl 264 non-tier chest piece by next Tuesday, instead of the late-July/mid-August I was anticipating - I’m at 80 Frosts now
You can indeed turn both on. When I take my Holy Pally into Wintergrasp and there are multiple raid groups, that’s exactly what I do so that I can see people outside of my raid who need heals and also which enemies need an opportunistic Hammer of Wrath 
So this is probably going to lead to a ‘Let Me Google This For You’ link, but whatever. So WoW itself isn’t the best way to get into the Warcraft lore - I kinda realized this when I was hanging around Shattrath and being all like, okay, I know Kael’thas did bad shit and the Scryers want him dead but having info parceled out randomly through quests and that is really confusing. I could troll WoWWiki, but I think I’d come out just as confused jumping from article to article.
Has anyone published a compendium of Warcraft lore? In some sort of understandable, not just random encyclopedia article fashion? I’m thinking of The Silmarillion here.
There’s a whole mess of Warcraft novels. That’s a pretty good place to learn the lore.
Another good place is to play Warcraft III in god mode.
You can start here:
I just learned lore from WoWwiki, picking up things as I wanted to know them. Like, you want to know why Kael’thas is bad? Go to Kael’thas’ lore article and just read. A lot of the information is redundant across articles where characters, settings, events, and things of power intersect, just told from different perspectives. Kael’thas’ article, for example, touches on Illidan, the Lich King, the Sunwell, the Burning Legion, and a few other things.
Really, it’s difficult to find any kind of “starting point” for WoW lore. The stories, big and small, are all mixed together and interwoven, and there are hundreds of characters whose stories are at least moderately fleshed out. Some of the stories, particularly those of the elves and the dragons, span millenia and cross many paths. Just read up on what you find interesting and branch out as you do.
In game news, I had one hell of a weird glitch today. I piled in with Guns and Co. for the usual random dungeon. We got into Halls of Lightning, and…I froze up. Major lag, the kind where you try to cast something and you just stand there waving your hands in the air for several minutes. I tried to close WoW but it wouldn’t let me, and it turned out my entire internet connection was completely hung. Even after I killed the WoW process, my connection was shaky and laggy until I powercycled the modem on one attempt and restarted the computer on the second attempt. Every time I logged in, I’d get maybe a second of playability (confirmed by a quick message from the party) and then it would hang again. I only managed to log back in successfully once Guns told me they had finished 4-manning it and the group had disbanded.
It’s only speculation, but my guess is I and one of the puggers had addons that interacted weirdly, causing a massive network loop on my end. I need to figure out how to run diagnostics while something like that’s going on.
The upside is that when I logged back in after the dungeon was complete, I got my Emblems of Frost. 
No Triumphs for the bosses, but Im just glad I didn’t have to queue for a second instance.
Aaand on trying to post this (without WoW running) my internet connection just died again. I have no freaking clue. I’m going to bed. :mad: