Forgot to mention that I have an ingame friend who’s a Pally and his name is “Bombadil”, which I think is pretty cool that he was able to snag that name!
Of course, I think it’s pretty cool that I was able to snag “Quasimodem”, “Qmodem”, and “Quasibabe” for some of my other toons as well.
Q
So you had only 4 last night, but it sounds like there are 4 more in waiting (Tom Scud, Bosstone, Quasi, and me) Is there a 60s 10-man raid to have some fun with? I see Black Rock Spire. I never did a full Kara run either…maybe at 70. I can’t wait till the day we’ve got a couple 5-man teams running around. Coming soon!
lizardling, I too have some lowbies (20s - 22drood, 24shammy) who have been floundering in inactivity. Maybe we can quest/instance together and start a second 5-man group night.
Welp, another night of hammering away at Blood Queen. If not for some general brain farts and one technical glitch (which cost us our second-to-last attempt when someone DC’d just as they got hit with a link), we’d have had her down. Next week, for sure.
First, we ran into problems with the bites and fears synching up again. It took a couple of attempts to shake that out, especially since the RL initially thought we had 15 seconds to bite (the way it is in 10-man) instead of 10 seconds. There followed various other screwups that cost us dearly, from just about everybody in the raid, myself not exempted–on the first air phase, I freaked out when I saw a red line connecting me to the other tank, assumed that BQ’s linking ability had bugged, and tried to stack on him, with the end result that I got killed by Blood Bolt splash damage. :smack: But honestly–who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to use similar graphics for two very different mechanics on the same fight? Still, I really need to get rid of that “do something quickly while panicking instead of actually looking at what debuff I have” instinct.
It didn’t help that as far as I can tell, they don’t do healing assignments, and there was no one healer focusing on me. Especially in the earlier attempts, I was having to constantly burn cooldowns to keep from dying. I think they’re just used to their other tanks–who (a) have better gear than I do and (b) are classes for whom Stamina scales better (a Paladin and a Druid), so there’s just more of a margin of error. And I hate to point fingers, but when you’re in a fight with no spike damage, when the tank is going down 'cause she’s just not getting enough heals… (I’d look at my death reports, and I’d see myself going from 100% or close to that, down to zero, in anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds, with no major heals on me at any point. Once or twice, there were no heals at all, though that may have been while we were in the process of wiping anyway.)
But, I think we’ve managed to shake most of the stupid out of our systems. We’re pretty consistently getting her down to 10-15% health; one or two more people still alive on any of those attempts would have been a kill.
That would be fun!
I have a mid-20s hunter I could take out of retirement, too. I’d have to learn how to play him, though!
Last night’s events: Flame Leviathan + Ignus with the guild, 10-man, to do the weekly raid quest. I went on my hunter because she does better damage than my druid-as-thunderchicken. Flame Leviathan is always fun, plus we got a number of people the achievement for not repairing up the vehicles before engaging. I also won the roll to engineering-salvage the FL remains - no titansteel bar this time, but a bunch of eternal shadows did drop, and I was running low on these for epic gem transmutes for my alchemist. Ignus, eh, I’m always iffy about doing him, but it went pretty well. We thought Bad Things were going to happen when the offtank died somehow, but a druid got a battle rez off and we pulled it out. I did a whole lot of the killing of the adds once they were pulled to the pools on the sides - seems like a lot of our DPSers were ignoring that part, so I’d hear “need someone on the add… never mind!” as they went down.
After that I logged in on my boomkin and did a random dungeon - HToC! The tank and healer were from the same guild on Tichondrius. The Tich people have been getting somewhat of a rep for being hardcore, demanding, and snobby, so I sometimes wince a bit when I see one in the group. Imagine my surprise when the tank dies during the Alliance Champions portion of the instance. :smack: I whipped out the battle rez and healed him up, and it went more or less smoothly after that.
…Really?! Even in my slacker guild, we do healing assignments. Two tank healers and one raid healer, with appropriate specs for each job. We also announce in raid chat who has what healing assignment so everyone knows - that way if a particular healer is incapacitated/killed, people know what might happen as a result.
The healers should be asking for assignments. I don’t respond to the Ready Check until someone tells me who I’m supposed to focus healing on (I prefer raid heals since I’m holy spec).
Hey, the Alliance Champions are much tougher than the paladin in the second part, and probably overall tougher than Paletress, too. Not quite as bad as BK phase 2, but I’d say I’ve seen more wipes on the Champs than on the second round.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a tank death on the first phase. Squishy DPS who gets a bad hit/stupid DPS standing in poison puddles, sure. I’m probably spoiled. 
I agree that Paletress is a bitch compared to Eadric.
It’s a Hunter. You can pretty much literally roll your face across the keyboard and be fine. 
IME, it works best to assign one person to shattering the adds (with a backup in case the main person gets thrown in the crotch pot). Because the adds are shattered by a *single *hit of high enough damage, as opposed to total damage, it’s incredibly inefficient to have everyone switch targets every time, given that you need one precise kind of hit to kill them. You’re better off with having everyone else stay on the boss.
Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. Seriously, these guys are so anal that they require everyone to use DBM*, and yet, as far as I can tell, they don’t assign healers.
I *want *this guild to work out, and I like most of the people in it, but there’s starting to be a small mountain of little things that really bug me about them.
*Which I’m really pissed off about. I assumed that when they said DBM, they meant, like everyone else I’ve ever met, any bossmod that works for you. I even said in my app that I use DXE. No, as I discovered Tuesday night, apparently they actually mean that everyone has to use DBM. I really love DXE, and I think it’s about a billion times better than DBM, an opinion that’s being solidly confirmed as I started using DBM last night. Ugh. You can’t even make the fucking top and bottom bars grow in different directions! Or change the alpha! And I don’t know about ICC, but for TotGC, DXE’s timers were definitely more accurate.
[quote=“Shot_From_Guns, post:8730, topic:488294”]
It’s a Hunter. You can pretty much literally roll your face across the keyboard and be fine. :D/
[QUOTE]
:D:D:D:D
THAT is the funniest thing I haver seen you write, SFG!!!
Wish I’d known that! :smack::smack::smack:
Quasi
Too bad I can’t take credit for the concept. It’s pretty common parlance in the WoW world to talk about a class or a spec as being “faceroll”–that is to say, it’s so easy or overpowered that you can play it by rolling your face across your keyboard.
I have to agree, hunters are easy mode. (Well, playing a mediocre hunter is really easy compared to mediocre at other classes.) I got this addon called Watcher and set up two “now it’s time to push this button” reminder sets, one for each spec (BM vs. Marks). I looked at the shot priority rotation lists on the Elitist Jerks forums, put those into the setup for reminders, and easy-peasy. I play her so infrequently that I forget what the best shot rotation is, so this puts icons of the next shot that should be used, moving across the screen and counting down to zero at the left end of the timeline bar.
Yeah, we didn’t assign someone - we used to when we ran Ulduar, so most everyone (including me) was thinking “my job is to DPS the boss” and not “oh yeah, what’s up with the adds, again?” :smack:
Can you use DXE “out of the box” or do you have to configure a lot of stuff? I prefer addons that will have good functionality on install but let you play with the setup a lot. (I have no idea how I ever managed to make it through setting up Grid+ Clique for healing, but I did. At least I managed to use that experience to write up a tutorial on our guild website for other priests that wanted to use Grid+Clique.)
I’ll admit to some fondness for other boss mods for stupid reasons. I liked BigWigs Bossmods for the Final Fantasy music clip that would play when a boss was downed. DeadlyBossMods cracked me up on an Onyxia fight - it was playing those “more dots!” sound clips, including the screaming and “minus 50DKP!” whenever someone died. Oh, and the “run away, little girl!” sound clip from BBW out of Kara, for whenever you’re being chased or if you have to run out of ground fire.
100% usable straight out of the box, and almost 100% tweakable after that.
ETA: Here’s a demo video someone did for DXE. I found the presenter to be a bit annoying, and there’s some stupid scripted dialogue you can skip past, but the actual demo portions are pretty good.
I ended up playing my warrior most of yesterday, and dinged 62. I was questing in the Plaguelands, and darn it, I was determined that I was going to finish out all the major questlines there before heading to Outland.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using a leveling guide addon called TourGuide; I like it because it gives me a nice, efficient questing sequence and I don’t have to wander around wondering “where should I go next?” like I did when I leveled my human paladin. The downside, as I’ve probably mentioned before, is that it doesn’t take into account things like rested XP (really no way for the authors to predict how much rested XP a user’s toon is going to have), and I don’t think it’s been adjusted for the fact that Blizz increased XP rewards in the Old World to speed things up. So what happens is that by the time my toons get into their 50s they’re starting to over-level the quests. That situation got so bad when I was running my belf paladin through Outland that I actually went and turned her XP off for a while when she hit level 70 so that she could finish Outland without dinging level 75, which was what was going to happen at the rate she was earning XP. I wanted to actually finish all the Outland zones without completely over-leveling everything. (I did eventually say, “Hell with it” and skipped Shadowmoon Valley in favor of turning her XP back on and heading to Northrend).
In the case of my warrior, she was already level 61 before she even arrived at Chillwind Camp in WPL, so I spent the first couple hours doing quests that involved killing mobs that were so far below me that I got no XP from them. Then, after a while, I came to the conclusion that the only class that really has any business in the Plaguelands is “paladin”. Because aside from the minimal XP I was getting and the pathetic monetary rewards and the utter scarcity of mining nodes, I spent almost my entire time there afflicted by debilitating diseases with 10-minute durations that I could do absolutely nothing about.
I also encountered one of the most stupidly frustrating Blizzard design decisions I’ve ever seen. I was doing the quest for that dying tauren druid (“The Wildlife Also Suffer” or something like that) where I had to kill 8 Diseased Wolves. I searched the area indicated by the quest tracker where the wolves should have been for more than half an hour, and simply could not find any of these wolves. I was starting to wonder if they were hiding in the trees or something. Giant spiders everywhere, but no wolves. In frustration I finally consulted Wowhead, and learned that the wolves and those spiders share a respawn timer. In other words, when you kill a Diseased Wolf, it eventually respawns … as a spider. So apparently the last person to do that quest before me had killed all the wolves, which respawned as spiders, leaving no wolves in the area. So I was running around avoiding the spiders (because I didn’t want to deal with their 5-minute duration, strength-and-stamina-reduced-by-20 poisons), when what I should have been doing was killing the spiders so that they’d respawn as wolves. :smack:
Anyway, I eventually made the decision that the only good reason to be in the Plaguelands these days is to grind Argent Dawn rep. So I said, “Screw this, I’ll come back and grind rep when I’m 80. I’m going to Outland.” So Castariora is now taking a nap at the Honor Hold inn. After learning to fly and purchasing a gryphon, of course 
All that said, I did find her a nice 2H axe and respecced her appropriately. It didn’t take long to max out her 2H axe skill, and I’m definitely noticing an improvement in her killing speed
I did learn something about Enchanting yesterday. It was my lvl 80 paladin who spotted the axe on the AH and bought it to send to my warrior. So I thought I’d have her drop the Greater Savagery (+85 AP) enchant on the axe first. But … it didn’t work. I couldn’t figure out why until I finally realized that when the enchant description says “Requires a level 60 or higher item”, it’s referring to the character level required to use the item, not the item level. So while this axe’s iLvl was something like 81, it only required a lvl 57 character to use it, and so the enchant wouldn’t work. I’m running into this kind of thing so often, that I’m starting to wonder if it’s Blizzard being confusingly imprecise with their wording, or if I’m just being entirely too literally precise when I read this stuff.
While in EPL, i came across something that strikes me as showing up a bit of laziness on Blizzard’s part in the expansions: I wandered up into that High Elf outpost, the Quel’Lithien Lodge, and clicked on the elves there to hear their voices. Turns out they sound completely different from the high elves I talk to in Northrend. They have soft, pleasant voices. The high elves in NR seem to be little more than blue-eyed blood elves who shout everything in sharp voices, and in fact spout many of the same stock click-phrases (you know, the things they say when you just click on them) as blood elves.
Cool! Looking at the lowbies that people have mentioned, it looks like I’ll be rolling a meat shield on Cairne this weekend. Still a lil torn between rolling a pally or trying war again, though.
That sounds odd to require DBM specifically. Is there a syncing issue with DBM, or is it just that the officers haven’t tried out DXE?
You figured that out too, eh?
And in the end, if you want AD rep you’re better off waiting until you’re level 80 and do Strat Baron runs, you can do it 10-15 minutes and bosses alone will net you 1550 rep per run and you have chance to get a mount.
Don’t forget to do the Ring of Blood-chain in Nagrand at level 65, you get silly amounts of xp and a very nice axe from it.
Since I can’t say I’ve ever been confused by their wording I would have to go with you being too literal.
In any case, the level requirements on enchants refer to the ‘to use’-level if them item has one, otherwise it will use the item level. So if you got yourself an ilvl 81 quest reward you could enchant it with Greater Savagery.
Really, none of the diseases, poisons, curses, etc. that you’ll encounter “in the wild” (so to speak–versus in a raid) will be completely debilitating. They may be annoying, and they may mean that you should be a bit more careful until they wear off, but they’re never going to be anything that will stop you in your tracks. (Especially not on content you overlevel.)
OH GOD I HAD THAT SAME PROBLEM. Agree: worst ever.
Woohoo! I helped!
Yeah, Blizzard’s poor phrasing strikes again. The way it’s written it should refer to the ilvl (the level of the item itself), not the level required to equip it. (Not to mention, a lot of BoE items don’t show their “required level,” so how the hell should you know what chants you can and can’t use?)
Mostly column B. They want to be able to check to make sure that everyone has the most updated version, I guess, which you can’t do if people don’t all use the same one you’re using. (Although, seriously, anyone who can’t be bothered to update their bossmod either doesn’t need it to begin with or shoudln’t be in a hardcore raiding guild.) But I also don’t think they really know anything about it at all. I actually spent a long time writing up a big explanation of why I personally like DXE better than other bossmods, along with links to other people who recommend it (including members of a little guild, you might have heard of them, um, FUCKING ENSIDIA).
I guess DBM has custom timers you can synch across the raid, but I didn’t see any of those in use last night. So it really seems to be a case of, “I feel like I have to micromanage the least important aspects of my raiders’ jobs, but I can’t be bothered to actually do mine and research a newer addon that might help everyone do their jobs better.”
The game’s very “jerky” tonight for me. This only happens now and then, and I noticed the population in Alex is “high” right now…
Q
…dated last year wound up in my recycle bin, and I know my memory’s pretty much shot, but I don’t think it was me who put them there.
Woud the game, during a patch, have updated the WTF folders and sent the old ones to the bin? 'Cause I hit “empty bin” just now and they’re both gone. I can get them back with System Restore, right?
Right now, I’m running a WoW repair utility right now, hoping I haven’t fucked anything up.:smack:
Quasi
ETA: Oh, yeah. Meant to mention that Wolkie and Silka are “back in town”. Story later.