I think I love you.
I have my goblin mage’s trinkets hotkeyed to Frostbolt, and considering that’s pretty much the only button I push for playing her, you won’t believe how often I hear “that’s still rechargin’!” “Can’t use that yet.” etc.
I’ve got the stone already - the Volatile Alchemist Stone - equipped in the other Trinket slot. 
It’s n-i-c-e.
And, in fact, Rik, the phenomenon is broader than just coding. It’s all through engineering, and of the “outsider” perception of it. Scott Adams has commented on this in Dilbert. A good quote summarizing the informal logical fallacy: “Anything I don’t understand is easy to do.”
If there’s a bug, assume it’s unique and and not amenable to “search-and-replace” fixes* or any other form of picking low-hanging fruit. Especially if it’s a longstanding and mildly pervasive bug. And especially if the effect of the bug is cosmetic and not generally disruptive, which eliminates any real incentive to address the bug in the first place.
*What’s a “search-and-replace” fix? It’s where you find the text or number that sets the undesired characteristic and change it globally. It’s mostly mythical, the same way that there’s no search-and-replace fix for the human inability to run faster than 28 MPH. Go ahead. Search the human genome for that number and change it. I’ll wait.
Well… I personally like the instant 50% pet heal “Feed Pet” does*. Since my dps pets can take a beating in chain fights, it’s nice to reduce downtime compared to bandages or Mend Pet. So I’m gonna keep a few stacks of pet treats handy.
Yeah, that’s why I said “most of.” I’ll probably keep a stack, although since I’m still leveling I rarely need to heal my pet.
Also, JCs can now make a real ret pally ring. The mats might be slightly prohibitive (JCs would have to provide the chimera eyes) or you probably already have a 346 ring from heroics that are close to this. Anyways, that’s what I found out in the JC realms.
squee Used the Looking for Guild tool tonight. Result:
Just almost got my Storming the Citadel (25 Player)! I say almost because I didn’t know you don’t get boss credit if the boss is downed while you’re released. 
I’ll get you later, Marrowgar! I only died once and that’s because I dc’ed on Marrowgar, lol.
So I’m running into a problem with lag and getting dc’ed on high activity areas - like 25 man raids. 
Suggestions?
Also, can you come in at any phase of a raid? Like, if I’ve done Storming the Citadel, but miss the guild going for the next phase (The Plagueworks), can I join back for the third (The Crimson Hall)?
That’s always an annoying lesson to learn. For everyone else’s benefit: Never EVER release while a fight is in progress. You won’t get credit, you won’t be eligible for loot, and getting a battle rez means they have to wait for you to load back into the zone instead of instantly being back on your feet and contributing again.
If you’re not saved to the raid instance, it will put you in at their current phase and save you.
If you are saved to the raid instance, it will need to be the exact same raid lockout (essentially, the same raid leader) – and then you’ll be saved to the current progress. If it’s not the exact same lockout, then you can’t participate until after you’ve reset on Tuesday.
Wednesday is my usual night to play my low-level Alliance hunter with my RL friend, but I had some time beforehand so I queued my pally up for a 4.1 heroic for the first time (Zul’Aman). Apparently there was a Call to Arms or whatever for healers, so in addition to my three upgrades (bracers and ring from bosses, shoulders from quest) I got the little bonus sack o’ loot (no pet though). FINALLY I got to replace my 346 PvP bracers.
ZA was tricky. Unlike the Cata heroics, I was regularly OOM on boss fights and had to drink occasionally between trash which is usually rare. Plus a couple of the bosses had what seemed to be fairly tricky mechanics. It was nice to get that rush of panic when I’m OOM and the boss is still at 10% and I’m trying to squeeze out desparate heals as they become available :).
My ZA and ZG runs over the past two nights have been pretty bust. We’d make steady progress, with a moderate amount of dying trying to learn mechanics, and this is all fine. But then the instance server would crash, killing our momentum and making us suddenly realize it’s past bedtime. I think we had 3 crashes Tuesday night, and two last night, all mid-bossfight. It sucks waiting 10 minutes for everyone to log back in, rez, and start the encounter over again. Perhaps we’ll have better luck this weekend (I did get a caster dps ring from ZA though, which was nice).
That’s probably the same ring I got in ZA. We were lucky, with no crashes and two people who knew the fights well. I think we wiped 3 times, but we usualy had a few people down at the end of each boss fight.
I didn’t have any problems with crashing until later, on my other toon, while gathering. Game froze and I bot a Blue Screen of Death and everything; my computer even forced me to do a CHKDSK before I could restart the game.
That’s funny Skammer, because Wednesday night is the night my RL friend and I play WoW together. Unfortunately, when he logged in (the first time since Tuesday’s patch) he discovered that he was only getting a frame rate of 2-5 fps, which made the game pretty much unplayable.
We tried downloading an updated video driver for his video card (which is an older Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder), but that didn’t help.
Some searching on the Blizzard forums uncovered a multi-page thread of other players complaining about the same problem. Towards the end there seemed to be consensus reached that the problem was limited to older Radeon/ATI cards, and the solution was to go into the graphics settings and turn off shadows. My friend did that, and his frame rate jumped up to 28-32 fps. (we have no idea what his framerate was before the patch - he’d never looked, since he’d never had this problem).
By the time all was said and done though, we didn’t have much time to actually play much. Hopefully Blizzard will try and find a solution for this particular problem.
We wiped on trash more than anything else, and usually finished the bosses with everyone still alive (it’s all or nothing with us!). One funny trash wipe was caused by me when one of our dps went afk for a minute to grab a drink and I took the opportunity to polymorph our healer into a bunny using the Noblegarden bunny wand. She was able to drop her totems (resto shaman) without a problem so she didn’t bother clicking it off. DPS comes back, tank pulls, shaman is furiously mashing keys and cursing wondering why she can’t cast any heals. Tank dies, everyone else dies, everyone starts chatting trying to figure out which of the mobs polymorphed the healer.
“Um, that was me…”
“YOU polymorphed our healer?! :smack:”
Heheh, ahh good times, good times…
My first clear of a raid! Cho’gall down! woo-oot! I was middle of the pack dps, and I think I can do better (gotta learn to use Corruption better/more often).
It was my new guild’s first clearing of Cho’gall too, so I’m happy to help them make some progression. No new loot for me though. I need that shoulder token!
yay!
10M? If so how did you guys do it? When we did it last phase tank pulled him to the wall, melee went after the adds that came up from 6pm to 12 and range attacked from 12-6 using assist targeting. But it was still much harder than it seemed like it should have been. The early phases were pretty easy compared to what one would expect so maybe the last phase is intentionally that much harder?
And good luck on the shoulders. In my raid I got them first drop it was nice!
Yes, 10N. I can tell you what I know. I love being DPS, less to know:) The first phase had the tank pulling him from his starting position (12) to the opposite side of the room (4 or 5) Everyone stacks behind boss., then after big add, the tank would take him to the other side (7 or 8). This would give us a little extra time to kill the big add before the little adds. (And then swap back and forth every big-add)
Phase 2 had us focusing on the tentacles when they popped up and then right back to boss.
Aside from those mechanics, the basics of not getting Corrupted, avoiding fire, clearing MC, etc still hold throughout.
Not sure if it made any difference, but by chance we had all rdps. So little adds went down smoothly, and getting MCed was handled easily since we were all standing on top of each other (Dragon’s breath cleared MC without having to switch target)
I hope that helps.
Yeah all ranged would make the tentacles easier. I think our problem both times was trying to smoke the boss after maybe two rounds of the tentacles. We also had very little problem with corruption etc that’s why the final part seemed so harsh. The big adds and the lil’ spawned blood thingies were it seemed to simple. SV specced hunter for that fight maxed into trapping abilities ftw.
Today will be my first day back in quite a while, I don’t think they messed with the hunter much other than pets. So that leaves me with playing around the new instances, anything worthwhile?
Weeeell you can buy a Winterspring Cub in Everlook now! Ha ha ha! 
[QUOTE=RyJae]
Today will be my first day back in quite a while, I don’t think they messed with the hunter much other than pets. So that leaves me with playing around the new instances, anything worthwhile?
[/QUOTE]
Umm pray that you get lucky with PuGs. They’ve only been out for a couple of days and the bosses have some very punishing mechanics. I’ve had some decent luck, but I’ve yet to complete either instance in a full PuG.
I do like the new instances despite them being a little tougher than the other heroics. Picked up some nice upgrades already, a bow for my hunter, and some leather gear for my druid. Healing the instances can get pretty intense at times, but as more and more people learn the mechanics and what to CC it’ll become less hectic. Some bosses seem impossible with an all melee group, the bird boss in Zul’Aman is a perfect example. Tried it yesterday with a Ret pally, DK, feral druid, warrior tank, and me healing on my druid. We eventually had the DK switch to his hunter and the ret paladin went holy to just spam dispel. There was no way I could ever keep up with the damage and the debuffs going around on 3 melee. Even the bear boss can be a pain with more melee, but that’s a bit easier to get around.
After all this crap, Al’Akir should be cake.
Grr, that new epic staff quest they previewed is kind of pissing me off.
It’s one thing to make a legendary based around some throwaway boss like Thunderfury. It’s perfectly find to make it some silly optional sidequest linked to a raid like Shadowmourne. But making it an incredible questline involving multiple raids is just not okay.
I want to travel through time, I want to see lore characters, I want to see the story in one of my favorite fantasy universes. It’s annoying with raids, but whatever, I’ve seen most of the story and if I haven’t I can look it up, but locking up solo content behind raid content is going too far to me.
I don’t care about the staff, at all. I don’t want to give casuals all the best gear, but I want casuals to be able to see the major lore eventsy. On some level I understand how hard it would be to balance raids for solo play, or whatever, but I wish I could see the story without having a perfect schedule. Why can’t they just make these major lore events insanely difficult solo quests? I know it’s an MMO, but I think this mixing of raid and solo content is a bit too far (and yes, I realize it was worse before with attuning, I don’t care). Hell, lock raids story to casual only if you want to, but the whole “a bunch of solo quests that you can’t do until you’ve beaten 3 raids” is a bit too much.
But no, one of the most major lore events is tied to raids, and that’s tied to an epic staff. So my sole max level character can’t even use it. Now, the BDL is awesome and all that, but the chances of even them agreeing to do the crazy shit in the Firelands I’ll probably need to do to finish the questline is preeeeetty slim, especially when someone like Kene (or <insert caster>) would benefit far more greatly from the item. They’re essentially locking major world content to not even the hardcore raiders, but the subset of hardcore raiders that have a caster.
Okay, I’m getting a bit too butthurt about a game I haven’t even had time to play recently. It just tweaked me, I’ll calm down now.