Cheers to everyone for the conquests and successes.
We finally got Heroic Cho’gall down on Wednesday, so now we’re 10/13. Pretty excited about putting time in on Sinestra, but we’re going to focus on Heroic Ascendant Council first, which seems fairly straightforward.
I’m interested in setting up a dedicated capture box. I have Fraps and can usually get it to capture just fine, but sometimes it will just tank my framerates/performance. So, anything to help with that would be great. My other questions are more about encoding, so I’ll ask Lobsang. Thanks for your help.
Well, at this stage in the game, I agree that HPM is definitely not going to be the number 1 (or maybe even top 3) consideration as far as what spell to cast, but it does seem to matter much more now than it ever has before. Healer mana strain is basically a metric in how much your raid is fucking up; the more often a DPS eats damage, the more constrained you are mana-wise.
I do wonder if spells like Chain Heal and Prayer of Healing (highest HPS and HPM) make that issue a no-brainer for us, since they’re such high throughput and fairly mana-light. Also, I do wonder how they’re going to raise the bar come the next tier. It does seem that all they can do to tax us directly is give larger bursts of damage, as the rest is indirect and dependent upon others to avoid mechanics. Also, dropping the number of healers via tighter enrage timers/higher DPS requirements is also a way to go, as they have with Cho’gall and Sinestra (which are primarily 5-healed). It will be interesting to see where they go with raid design in 4.2.
Again, my only point with “sniping” is that I just don’t think it’s an issue in any regular raid group, and is only a real concern in PUGs. I don’t care if anyone in my healing corps is choosing to help do any jobs; if the boss dies, then I’m happy. However, you do raise the other interesting point of when a group should decide to drop a healer, since (as I noted above) I do think that’s going to be a further point of constraint, and potential drama over raid spots for some guilds as we move on in content. Obviously, if one healer can do the “job” of two, one can be dropped for a DPS, but it’s rarely the case where you can definitively figure out that’s the case. How many healers are most 10/25 man guilds running with? We usually have 7 for 25s, but I think we could do most of the farm with 6 at this point. I just don’t have anything to point to in order to make that case clearly.
I need a hug. Been camping the TLPD casually for more than a month. I’ve only seen Vyragosa twice the whole time, and then a dead TLPD right after I started.
Tonight it happened again - pretty sure it spawned at the Waterfall spawn point because I was covering Frozen Lake. Le sigh.
The desire to camp it will go down once I get my Reins of the Drake of the West Wind though.
got my 1st 2 chaos orbs. crafted an Elementium girdle of pain (515 - 520 skill increase!!). It just sold on AH for 3995 :).
Building towards my next item to get from 520 - 525. Just bought a couple of truegold. The alchemist had one banked and I had the mats for one. They sell for 600 on AH (Mats alone worth 460) I offered 60 for the cool down and 540 for the banked one. Does this sound OK or was I overly generous?
My favorite line from the April Fool’s patch notes:
Everyone in my guild hates my druid’s elite gathering. It seems we fight over rice barrels daily
Also, had a hilarious instance of guild griefing in our BWL raid last night. After downing ODS, our paladin offtank likes to skip the elevator and just jump down and bubble before he lands. This time the priest cast levitate on him mid-jump. By the time he realized what was happening, he was already over the center of the lava pit. His screams of despair over vent were absolutely classic.
You know those two mobs right before magmaw where the tanks have to be the furthest from the mob the other tank is tanking? well we had a hunter that wasn’t stacked with the group so he got pwned on the first switch. well he was a good trooper and tried to release and run back… well the mobs were still up so when they did thier switch they both go running down the stairs to the entrance to get him again… oh there were some good laughs over vent
my new guild has quite a few people levelling up from the start at the moment and I was unsure what to level between a priest, druid or hunter but a PuG in VP where the priest life gripped an annoying DPS to his death clinched the deal. And now I see levitate can be used for ‘comedy’ effects, sweet. Last night Embeejai the gnome (atheist ofc) Shadow Priest hit level 10…
Head-slapping PUG moment from this weekend - my shaman randomed into Sethekk Halls, and the pally tank is holding no aggro at all. Literally, in the second trash pull, everyone except the tank has mobs beating on them. I look at the tank’s buffs and say in /p, “Hey tank, you might want to throw up Righteous Fury.” The mage points out: “Righteous Fury is the least of her worries. She’s got rez sickness!”
It was true - this tank actually queued up for a dungeon with 5 minutes of rez sickness left to tick off. It was too early in the run to /kick, so we made the best of it and our epic healz (:D) carried us until the debuff had expired.
Fortunately that run put me over 68 so I could leave BC behind and move onto Northrend. When did cold weather flying drop to 400g? That was a nice surprise.
Patch 4.0.1 (2010-10-12): Cold Weather Flying now available at level 68 for 500 ; Tome of Cold Weather Flight has been removed. Faction discounts too of course.
Wasn’t in-game much this weekend, but I got my “Honey” toon caught up to most of the others. (My friend is absolutely obsessed with that honey badger video, so on a whim a bunch of people rolled alts with names starting with “Honey” to run dungeons together. We have Honeycap, Honeyzeid, Honeynym, Honeydots, Honeytits, Honeysleu…) I would have leveled a lot faster, but since she’s Undead, I wanted to check out the new quests in Tirisfal and Silverpine. Some pretty epic stuff! I’m going to skip most of Hillsbrad, if I keep questing at all outside of dungeons, but I did stop to do the first quest after the breadcrumbs: the one where you get to be a questgiver. Whoamg so hilarious.
Congrats!
In 10s, we’re running with two or three healers depending on the fight.
That mob is such a bitch. I’ve only even seen it dead once, and that’s because my friend had just killed it so I flew over to congratulate him.
That was you? I remember that one! I loved the composition!
I haz a productive! I got all of my toons that are actually in my guild up to 30 this weekend. Earning xp is ridiculously easy with the guild perk that increases the xp you get. I was pushing out something like two levels an hour in the 20s, just questing! If I ever decided to do dungeons to earn JPs and buy heirlooms, I’d be jetting through the levels on turbo.
There’s a little part of me that wants to hate Blizzard for Johnny Awesome because Blizzard obviously has a thing against belfs, but the thing is, it’s true. Johnny Awesome is a perfect stereotype of a blood elf. He joins my crushes alongside Kael, Krasus and Belloc Brightblade.
I’ve tried to get a goblin out of the starter zones three times now but failed, I think I finally have a race in wow that I just don’t like. Yes I am a goblinist…
Our DPS is pretty on the ball so I think we stuck with using 7 healers for pretty much everything. Some fights we use 8, just to make it easier. I’m of the opinion that the less stress you put on the healers the better. Of course being one of the healers may have biased my opinion.
We didn’t get a chance to try H Cho’gall because of a stupid lockout issue (part of the raid who wasn’t there for the Ascendant Council kill got locked to a separate heroic raid ID), but we’ll have to see how we’ll manage with the higher DPS requirements. Out of curiosity what was your healer comp when you downed him?
