**
My** buddy jayjay!
Never knew that “Ogg” came from an E. Fudd quote, though!
Seit?
Thanks
Q
Well, paraphrase, then.
We had to reschedule our Thursday raid to Saturday night, but even with the delay, we did it: Nefarian down. We’re now 12/12 regular and 1/12 Heroic, everybody has their Defender of a Shattered World, and we have Guild Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. (I’ll have to wait until the middle of next week to get my phoenix, though, since I’ve got just under 7k rep to go to Exalted and the weekly cap is 3.5k.)
My fellow tank and former GM from FoW is also stepping up to officially be our raid leader now, too, which should help. Authority was a bit dispersed up until now, which isn’t the best thing on progression content.
We also got our guild 50k critter kill achievement! Moohoohahaha, the armadillo is mine! This is thanks to an excellent strategy that my friend Joe and I figured out together.
1.) Go into the Ironforge side of the Deeprun Tram. If you’re Horde, don’t worry: it’s neutral territory, so you’ll unflag after 5 minutes without PvP activity.
2.) One good spot to stand is a bit in front of the entrance, before the pair of pillars across from it. This is one of the Deeprun Rat spawn points.
3.) Pull out a companion pet that kills critters. The best option seems to be Toxic Wasteling, but the other pets that I know to kill critters are Willy, Lil’ KT, and Lil’ Ragnaros. The Toxic Wasteling just kills them the most frequently.
4.) Buff yourself with Stormchops.
5.) AFK while your buff and pet kill hundreds of rats. The buff will last exactly the length of time before the game automatically logs you out for being idle.
6.) Horde-exclusive: The position I suggested in #2 will also put you in the path of Haggle, a level 20 Alliance-flagged NPC that wanders around, sleeping on benches and rummaging in the trash. If you stand where he will aggro on you on his way by, you can remain online indefinitely. (You cannot be logged out while you are in combat.) You won’t re-flag unless you actively attack him. (Your Stormchops will only attack him if you’re flagged, and a Stormchops hit on him will not reset your PvP flag timer–it will just keep counting down and then the Stormchops will stop attacking him once the flag falls off.) In my tanking gear, I was able to avoid every single attack he made (naked, I could not). You’ll take durability damage from his attacks, but IMO even a 100g+ repair bill is worth picking up thousands of critter kills from leaving yourself online overnight. (And I do mean thousands–even with no Stormchops buff for most of the night, I was getting probably somewhere from 4k to 5k kills overnight. YMMV if you’re using a pet other than the Toxic Wasteling.)
Um. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but a 10-man BH is only going to have six DPS at most.
Things like Arctic Fur are actually used in small numbers. For those high-value items, I would sell them in stacks of 1. No point in waiting until you have a lot of them–just sell them as you get them. If you sell them in large stacks, they might even be less likely to sell, because someone might only need one or two for a recipe.
Something to be careful of: pay attention to how many Auctioneer has seen. After the name in the tooltip, it will say something like “Seen 120.” If it says “Seen 0” or “Seen none” or whatever it is, that means it’s never been listed during one of your scans. For a Rare (blue) drop, you should *always *double-check with Wowhead to see what the average price across all servers is. If you’re really not sure, hang onto the item and ask us about it here.
No, 4k is the Exalted price. Full price is 5k, so 20% off is 4k.
That’s it, I’m afraid. And even Exalted doesn’t get you very much, it feels like to me. I always loved it when NPCs for a faction start saying really nice things about you when you hit Exalted. They did that with the Shattered Sun Offensive, and with the Kirin Tor in Dalaran.
I had to shut my mouth very hard to not bust out laughing and disturb the whole office. I’m never going to be able to watch myself making bandages again.
I’ll never understand tanks and DPS who play without nameplates. How do you target anything? How do you keep an eye on the relative health of all of the targets in a pack? How do you keep an eye on your threat levels of more than one target?
You’ll have to take a screenshot–I’m not sure what you’re talking about here, I’m afraid.
IIRC you shouldn’t have to do anything to set Ackis up… You just install it and then click the “Scan” button at the top right corner of any profession window.
We find it’s actually helpful to burn Lust/Hero/TW on the first drake, as soon as the tank has aggro. Because of the way the fight is designed, (a) you’re taking the most damage in the beginning and (b) you do more damage the more drakes you kill. This means that you have two different reasons to Lust early: you get through the worst portion of the fight faster, and you get to the higher-damage portion of the fight faster.
Ditto to Daed’s recommendation to always save this for a tank. There are fights where being able to cycle CDs is important or even essential. On Nef, for example, I’m having to take a couple of Electrocutes in ph3 with no CD, and it would be really awesome if we had a PS for one of them.
It’s a moot point for us currently until we pick up a Priest healer, but Smite spam still works as long as you wait until one drake is dead? Does that carry through to Heroic?
Enchantments are extra enhancements that you put on your gear. They are optional for someone who’s soloing. The only time they’re really required is when you’re going to be raiding. The good ones can be very expensive, so for Wolkie I wouldn’t even worry about it.
In our 10-man guild we use a healer channel, and the best guilds I’ve been in have always used them. (In 25s, we have often also had tank channels. We don’t bother with it here because there are only two of us, so we can just whisper.)
Woohoo! Congrats!
Ick, seriously? That would bug me. A lot. IME the people who think they’re good enough that they don’t need healing assignments generally aren’t, and the lack of assignments is usually because the healing lead doesn’t know WTF they’re doing and are afraid to reveal that they’d have no clue how to go about it.
On Chimaeron, your main concern is to maximize your kiting time. Here’s what we do to help with that:
1.) As we come up to 20%, the DPS back out to maximum range.
2.) When it becomes clear which tank will have aggro at 20%, that person backs the rest of the way into the corner if they’re not there already, and the other tank legs it across the room to back their ass into the opposite corner.
3.) The tanks pop all their CDs to stay alive as long as possible.
4.) I watch Omen and call out who will be the next target. This may change as the top DPS use their threat-wiping abilities to drop back down to the bottom of the list.
5.) The DPS attempt to kite as much as possible while also burning him hard. If he gets into melee range, they pop survival CDs if they have them (e.g., Evasion).
Good luck!
Did I miss the PvP for Dummies tutorial, or does Blizzard just dump you in with no help at all? I’m working on my Baradin rep so I’m starting to do Tol Barad, and my strategy seems to be pick a location and defend until I die. Not being experienced in PvP, this happens a lot. 
I’m pretty useless as more than pew-pew-pew because I’m not sure what attacks to do or what strategies to use.
I guess I missed making my point. There were 6 DPSs, indeed. And I WASN’T THE WORST! W00T! Celebration time!
I suppose it’s a matter of expectations. My expectations, frankly, were (A) pit-bottom of the DPS charts, to be exceeded by tanks and maybe a healer, and (B) gruesomely and stupidly dead at the first felfire phase. Neither happened. It was, by my standards, an exceptional outing.
YMMV.
Very timely! I’m in the same boat. I’ve done TB twice now - the first time I found a big group of my team and just stood there healing everyone like crazy. We eventually won and I really racked up HKs and HPs.
Encouraged, I tried again a few days later and was… less successful. People seemed to be more spread out, and no matter where I went there were a lot more enemies than friends which was bad. We lost. I don’t really know what the strategy is (other than, as a healer, find a battle and heeeeaaaaal).
Highlight of the otherwise fail attempt. I was riding from one stronghold to another and got jumped by two allies. A hunter and something else. I have almost no PvP gear, but it took the two of them at least five minutes to kill me 
. I kept hoping someone friendly would come by to help me out, but there was no calvary. At least I was keeping these guys busy so they couldn’t help actually capture or defend anything.
There is almost no in-game instruction re: PvP (not that there is much regarding PvE, to be fair).
There are really two levels of PvP: strategy and tactics. Strategy has to do with the battleground itself (capture the flag? defend nodes? grind down resources? kill a boss?) while tactics is how to counter specific enemy players or groups of players.
As a beginner I’d try to figure out the basic strategy first (i.e. in Tol Barad you want to either defend at least one node as a defender or take all three as an attacker) and try to identify the best way to apply yourself (again, for Tol Barad that will likely be to listen to the 1) channel and zerg whatever base someone is calling - generally in there once you die you want to go to attack another base).
Once you have a general idea about the strategy you can start figuring out some tactics - what classes to attack first (hint: kill the one in the dress, and prevent them from killing your ones in dresses), how to CC, what spells to interrupt/silence, and what to do when you’re being targeted.
Did you have class-specific questions re: PvP? I’m sure we have someone versed in your class that can provide more specific instruction.
Wow! Was this on your priest or pally? I’m guessing Paladin, since it’s hard to believe it would take a hunter 5 mins to burst down a clothie with low resilience… unless they didn’t know how to interrupt or silence? A Prot or Holy Paladin I could totally see though.
Grats!
I think it will take one more week for me to buy the mount as well - I think I’m like 3.6k from Exalted. :smack:
We didn’t get any pulls on Nefarian this week due to absences, but we should get some attempts in this week. Would be nice to get that title.
I’ve been having fun PvPing lately. Somewhere along the way I had maxed out my honor, so I went a-shopping. Got 2 pieces and a set bonus and in doing so, saw my PvPness grow substantially. As a mage I’ve been getting a lot of use out of my dragon’s breathe and my counterspell to stop other casters. I love countering a major heal spell right before it completes:) What’s really getting to me are the pets that focus on me. I wish there were a way to find the pet’s owner a bit quicker. Maybe an addon?
I’m getting a bit tired with the amount of time it takes to hold TB. Even so, no one seems to get on board with trying to protect the towers. They just want more Honor.
I’ve been in on a TB win only once. Seems way too hard to win while attacking.
It was my pally, who’s in pretty good (PvE) gear. I wasn’t doing any damage at all - just healing, healing, healing myself (and I used my bubble). I think he was kinda pissed :D.
Cheers on your kill! I thought you needed Heroic kills for Glory of the Cataclysm Raider, or do you just need to do the weird achievements for them? I could be confused and am too lazy to log on and check for myself. Congratulations, regardless.
Yes. In 4.0.3, the debuff to Halfus was based on how many drakes were released and was a 50% damage modifer per drake, so the buff began immediately, and you saw Smite spam Disc priests just mashing that button throughout the fight. The way the buff works since 4.0.6 is that once you kill a drake a 100% debuff is placed on Halfus, but is not there until the drake is dead. So, you can get a much larger damage modifer than before, it just requires you killing all of the drakes. Atonement/Smite healing is fine as soon as you have 1 drake dead, though you may still need to manually target some shields and whatnot, as it is a “smart” heal and you still want to keep Weakened Soul and Grace up on tanks as much as you can. All of this carries over to Heroic.
Well, we’re currently 9/13 Heroic on a 13 hour a week schedule, so I feel that we are good enough to not require strict healing assignments. Everyone helps keep tanks up, with different classes playing to their strengths at the balance between tank/raid healing. The only required thing to talk out is a raid cooldown rotation, which is fairly simple to figure out via a short Mumble conversation. We talk mistakes out on Mumble for progression in order to figure out what we need to change, but a specific healer channel isn’t necessary for progression in any way as long as communication is still happening. There isn’t a “healing lead” in the guild, either, as every healer’s voice is pretty much equal (once you pass your Trial). I think healing assignment channels are necessary if there’s one person that is running the show as far as what needs to be done, but there’s not even a “first among equals” thing going on in my current guild; we’re all just equal and will make suggestions as necessary for progression. Perhaps it’s not as efficient as it could be, but overall it works just fine. Not sure if your comments were meant to be as critical as they came off, but I felt a need to defend my guild’s practices.
Well that was annoying (and momentarily panic-inducing). I tried to log in to the game, and I got the popup message that they had detected a change in my login pattern, that my account had been locked, and that I would need to confirm my identity and create a new password before I could log in again :eek:
It took two password resets before I realized what the problem was: last night I set myself up with a VPN to help ensure my privacy on Usenet. The VPN was making it appear that I was trying to log in from a location quite some distance from my actual, normal location. So after the second password reset I turned that off and was able to log in with no problem. Whew!
Consider me whooshed, then. 
IME, the people who gank, and especially those who gank in really stupid spots (like on the roads in TB) tend to be the worst PvPers. They have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing, and they can only win when they have numbers on their side. Ergo, when you get jumped on the road in TB, the person attacking you will probably be terribad, and even if they manage to get you down, it will take forever (and will actually help your faction, because those bads are taking up slots on the opposing team that would otherwise be doing something useful).
If you wanna do any brain picking over the fight, or if you have anything to share from your attempts, please do!
Things we learned on Saturday:
1.) As the Nef tank, it was helpful to have me using Resistance/Mastery elixirs, even though we weren’t wiping to my deaths (a little less pressure on my healers).
2.) We tried the strat to have a Hunter Turtle pet tank the adds in ph1, and it failed terribly. It may work with a Hunter specced into BM, which we didn’t have ours do. We went back to having our DK kiting and that worked fine.
3.) Pushing a 3rd Eletrocute at the very end of ph1 (Nef to 71% > get Ony low > Nef to 70% > kill Ony in the ~5 seconds before Electrocute) worked really well, because it meant that our healers could get everyone topped up again just before the lava came out. (Players who didn’t have to run across the room for their assigned pillars helped out by stacking for AOE heals and bandaging themselves.)
4.) In ph3, we found it worked best to have Nef against one wall, with all of the DPS and healers on the wall side instead of the room-center side of him. The add tank started the adds more or less behind me, kiting away from me, so that I could keep backing up as the fire on the ground behind me faded. Keeping the rest of the raid between Nef and the wall meant that the add tank could cut very close to us with the adds when we get to the point in ph3 where the fire is coming faster. (We wiped on an attempt that might have been a kill because people were standing on the center side of Nef and didn’t run through him to the other side fast enough when the add tank had to kite close.)
Every pet should show its owner’s name. You can then type **/tar owner ** (where “owner” is that name) and your target should swap to that person.
Your own personal Glory of the Cataclysm Raider is all of the Heroic modes and random achievements. ***Guild ***Glory of the Cataclysm Raider is what you get when you get guild credit for every T11 boss on regular, and it rewards the Dark Phoenix mount.
Yup, I knew about that change, but not that that was the only thing affecting Priests. I’d just heard “Smite spam good” and then “Spite spam bad” without knowing the mechanics behind it.
Eh, if it’s working for you guys, it’s working. It’s just something I’ve personally had some very bad experiences with, including and especially a guild where I was getting blamed for the fact that the healers were fucking up.* I *may *be just *slightly *bitter about it still.
*If I never told you the story… I’d joined a new guild after being on hiatus for a while after FoW disbanded, and I was dying. A lot. To the extent that I was starting to question my own abilties as a tank. So I sat down and actually picked the logs apart. What I found was that I was taking more damage than the other tank (probably because he was geared much better) but getting less healing, and the heals I *was *getting were much spikier, so it was impossible for me to predict when to pop a CD to save myself and when a healer was about to notice that I was an inch from death.
Little bugger’s got cold hands, I bet.
Have you seen him? He’s green. I’m not sure his hands even still have circulation.
nodes not roads!!!
How to PvP:
First, download BigWigs or some other mod that allows you to use the /in slash command.
Create this macro:
/bg Let’s do this
/in 30 /bg Stop fighting on the roads!
/in 30 /bg Kill the healers you noobs!
/in 30 /bg Stop fighting in the middle!
/in 30 /bg Don’t we have any healers? Where are you?
/in 15 /bg Someone has to defend damnit!
/in 15 /bg Report afk’ers in the GY
/in 15 /bg Report afk’ers in the GY
/in 15 /bg Report afk’ers in the GY
/in 15 /bg KILL THE HEALERSSS!!!11111
/in 30 /bg You guys suck
/in 10 /bg Srsly, you guys must all be the worst players ever.
/in 1 /bg Terribads. You should all cancel your subs and commit suicide!
/afk
Hit that macro right when the battleground starts and you’ll look like you’re a 2300+ rated gladiator!
Wait!
First download BigWigs, right?
Then all those slashes and numbers, right?
And then commit suicide?
Thanks!
Q
Heh. That’s about right aktep (although I hear it’s much worse on the Alliance side - on Horde I only see that type of stuff maybe one out of 10 matches).
One of the more satisfying wins over the weekend was going up against a 5-man group from the same guild in WSG. There was much trepidation at the start of the match, and some of the sort of “lets just lose quickly” talk I hear about.
But since they were more interested in rep farming than actually playing the match it was pretty easy to just go around them (it helped that they were also pretty bad…). 3 caps in 15 minutes later another win chalked up.
Not quite as funny as Horde getting the third cap just under the 7-minute achievement timer because the Alliance rogue with our flag that I was chasing down decided it was a good idea to stealth. Easiest flag return I’ve ever had, that’s for sure. 