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2008-07-31T12:29:00.001+01:00

Sadly, due to stuff and things happening in WoW, I am no longer playing and thus will no longer be blogging about it.

Sorry to any readers I may have gained.

Possibly the Best Webcomic Ever

2008-06-17T11:07:00.002+01:00

Dark Legacy Comics is very, very funny, and I would advise you go and check it out.

I would like to thank Too Many Annas for linking to it in this post. I got a good few hours of entertainment from that comic strip!

Crit-Proofing Your Bear

2008-06-15T13:12:00.005+01:00

So, raiding time is fast approaching. Maybe your guild is moving towards having enough people ready to start Karazhan. Maybe you have just reached 70 and want to join a raiding guild as a new tnak. Whatever reason it is, you have before you the task of gearing your bear for the job of taking hits and staying alive long enough to be healed. You need Ronseal Crit-Proofing for Bears.

Well, no you don't, you need enough defense or resiliance to eliminate the crit chance of the boss that's hitting you. But I thought it'd be amusing to say that... moving on.

The first thing you need (note, 'need', not 'would like' or 'should have', need) is three points in the talent Survival of the Fittest. Those are three points you've spent the moment you chose to be a druid tank. I can't stress this enough as I've seen druids apply to be tanks in a guild without having any points in this talent. This talent is essential. Consider yourself to have 58 talent points to spend, since three are already spoken for. Well, I say three, but you also need Mangle which is another two points, and since you're getting Leader of the Pack in order to get Mangle, you might as well improve it so you're getting a bit of healing coming in as well. So that's 7 points pre-spent as soon as you became a bear tank. Okay, you've pre-spent a lot of points, because there are a lot of talents which are so useful that you'd be a fool to miss them out of your build.

Okay, you've already got 3% less chance to be crit, that's good. You need a further 2.6% from defense, ideally, or resilience. This means you want to aim for a defense rating of 415. This isn't always easy, of course, since leather armour with defense on it is hard to find, and gets harder to find the more you progress.

I would advise every druid, leatherworker or not, to start their pre-Karazhan gear build with the Heavy Clefthoof set. Sure, you don't get the bonus if you're not a leatherworker, but that doesn't matter. Getting crit immune is important, losing a +20 str set bonus is not. That set provides you with a lovely 108 stamina and 74 defense rating, as well as 4 yellow and 4 blue sockets, which you could gem up for an additional 72 stamina, using just green gems. Of course, that is one route, but I would advise gemming to the socket colour so you get the additional +11 dodge rating from the set bonuses. I would personally put +9 stamina Solid Azure Moonstone in the blue sockets and +3 defense rating, +4 stamina Enduring Deep Peridot in the yellow slot. That will mean you get an extra 12 defense rating, 52 stamina and 11 dodge rating, resulting in these three pieces of gear giving you 160 stamina, 86 defense rating (36.4 defense skill) and 11 dodge rating. Very nice from just three pieces, and one of the major reasons that this set is quite hard to replace.

You start with 350 defense skill and need to get it to 415. With the Heavy Clefthoof set you are on 386.4 defense skill, so still a way to go.

The next item I would advise adding to your set is the Strength of the Untamed necklace, requiring revered with the Cenarion Expedition. This isn't hard to get. A few Steam Vaults runs and questing sessions will net you revered really quickly, especially if you have gotten to honoured through the plant part hand in quest. That is an additional 19 defense rating from the neck, as well as 27 stamina and 18 dodge rating. That's an extra 8 defense skill, bringing us to 394.4 defense skill.

You can probably count the Violet Signet as part of your gear, since it only requires friendly with the Violet Eye. This ring will provide you with 13 defense rating and 27 stamina. Very nice from something you basically get paid to take. An extra 5.5 defense skill to add to our pot as well, bringing us up to 399.9.

So far the items I've advised have been fairly easy to get. This next one is a bit more of a pain, but it's so totally worth getting. Earthwarden used to be the definitive druid tank weapon, pretty much. It's still great as it gives 500 armour, 39 stamina, and 27 defense rating. The down side is that it requires exaulted with the Cenarion Expidition. However, it's very much worth getting, since it's still a useful weapon for a long, long time. Getting this adds a further 11.4 defense skill, pulling us up to 411.3, not far to go!

Now you could go for either the Iron Band of the Unbreakable from normal mode Durnholde Keep, or the Elementium Band of the Sentry from normal or heroic mode Arcatraz. The Iron Band will bring you to 418.5 defense skill, while the Elementium Band will bring you to 419.7.

From those seven items, each resonably easy to get, you are now a little over uncritable. Congratulations. The rest of your gear can be stamina and armour heavy, with some agility for extra dodge and crit chance.

Checkout the Feral Druid Rated Gear List for ideas for other pieces of bear tanking gear, but always remember to maintain 415 defense rating!

Raid Leading

2008-06-14T13:30:00.003+01:00

For a while now I've been a raid leader within my guild. I've been given the Karazhan, the Gruul's Lair and the Magtheridon's Lair farm runs. I've also been asked to focus those raid spots on 'mini-raiders' (our rank name for people who are Karazhan/Gruul geared, the rank above being 'raider' for the Serpentshrine Caver/The Eye geared people) to get them up to the rank of 'raider' as fast as possible. Now, this poses a few problems for me. Firstly, our 'mini-raiders' are normally that rank for a reason (in a guild that has been clearing Karazhan with three groups a week, before we started to focus on SSC and TK, and which contains numerous people who will run heroic content, they have managed to stay under-geared): Either they are brand new to raiding and thus need to learn how to do their DPS rotations/threat generation rotations/healing class style or they don't have the time or inclination to raid or instance and get properly equiped for it. We do have some mini-raiders who are that rank because they've only just been accepted into the guild and haven't managed to get a raid yet and are working hard, through heroic instances and such, to gear themselves for the challenge they will face, but these mini-raiders are, to my perception, in the minority.

Also, I want to clear those instances. That means, generally, not taking a whole bunch of totally green rookies. It means taking at least five of our A Team players (I normally try to take a tank who is proven to be able to tank Prince and Nightbane, ie me, two healers who are either capable or on the verge of being capable of healing the instance between them, and two damage dealers who can reach or exceed 1k DPS). These veterans aren't there for gear, so it increases the opportunity for gearing up everyone else there. Sadly, I normally can't fill the last five spots with mini-raiders. There's rarely enough of them signing up for raids, so I have to take raiders who just want the badges (or coerce raiders who don't want anything into coming).

Now, once in there the more experienced raiders have very little patience for tactics discussions. They know how it's done, and they just want to get it over with. Understandable, since Karazhan isn't the most titilating of instances. Of course, if we want our mini-raiders to actually learn what they need to do then they need to be told what is going on so they can learn the fight, learn whatever skills it might be teaching so they can transfer those skills to the later fights. Should they ever get there.

Being a raid leader involves a lot more juggling than I thought it would when I took the role. I had this vision of herds of people who wanted to do raids signing up for them, me picking from those who signed up and always making a good enough team to clear Kara, while gearing up our mini-raiders so they could join us in the more interesting content. It's really not working out like that. I'm often having to scrape for a last tank, another healer, some more DPS who will be able to pull us through, etc. Out T5 level guild has recently failed to clear Karazhan, twice. And it's getting to the point where it's just humiliating for me. I find myself hoping that very few mini-raiders sign up so I can take a full compliment of vets and get the place nuked in three hours or so. I hate follow up runs, really do, and we have no time on the calendar for them anymore. Sunday is my Karazhan run, Monday and Tuesday are SSC or TK nights and then we're reset and on to Gruul/Maggy on Wednesday or Friday, another SSC or TK night on Thursday, Saturday and Wednesday are for ZA... so there's no spare time to get a mini-raider, two-run-requiring group through Karazhan.

Woe is me? I guess. I just feel sorry for the mini-raiders who are trying and may not actually get to progress because of the small amount of time they are given to raid in. Which is why I suggested maybe giving the Karazhan raid leadership to a mini-raider who could then schedule Karazhan runs on the nights that the raiders are in TK or SSC, get a full complement of mini-raiders together and start to learn the fights as we had to, working as a team. I think our mini-raiders would actually really benefit from this. Instead of being dragged through there, learning nothing and not actually participating on the fun that is damage meters and competition between almost equals, they would be pulling together, learning to communicate, finding out how their 'oh crap' buttons worked and when to use them, etc. However, this idea is doomed to failure, most probably. We don't really have the tanks or healers at the mini-raider level to cover runs while SSC or TK is happening. We have a lot of mini-raider DPS, but not much in the tank or healer flavour.

Le sigh.

Serpentshrine Cavern

2008-06-10T18:36:00.003+01:00

Last night Coup de Grace entered SSC for the first time. We romped in, kicked a load of fishy butt and downed Lurker on our third try. Our first try was a 'feeler' try, since our main tank was helping his father book tickets... yeah.

On our second try Lurker despawned because we were killing an add while he was spouting (according to a few people in the raid, at least. I think he just ran away scared).

Our third try was the charm though, we kicked his fishy but and everything worked excellently.

I have to say, Lurker is one of my favourite bosses so far. Nothing is too hard, and everything is actually quite amusing. He starts spouting and you leap into the water. He whirls and throws you back a little. He looks like a big fish and dives under the water to get away from you. It's a blast. Also your ranged DPS don't need to worry about pulling agro, they can just blaze away and get the highest DPS they can manage.

I was there as Ghosthoof, so I got to DPS for most of the time, then pick up one of the melee adds when they came. I have to say I was nervous since I'd read a lot about how hard the melee adds hit. However, after tanking two of them with ease when two of our tanks died I have to say they don't hit so hard. It was actually quite fun.

Very cool fight, very cool night. Only down side was that he dropped a bunch of junk that no one really wanted all that much. Ces la vie.

Is The Internet Really Scary?

2008-06-07T10:53:00.003+01:00

4 Haelz wrote this post about the people on the other side of the screen.

It got me thinking about stuff and things, and goodness never follows thinking...

I have attended 'internet meets' - large (and not so large) gatherings of people who only know each other through the internet. In my specific case these internet meets were for an online game called Discworld MUD. The first meet I went to was in Manchester, when I lived in Leicester. I didn't really know that many people there, not that surprising since there were about fourty or so, many of whom I'd never even spoken to online.

But, guess what? I didn't get axe murdered and thrown in the river! There was one person there who was super weird, but not axe-murderer weird, just not-understanding-social-norms weird. Sort of creepy in some ways, but mostly just weird.

At that, my first meet over eight years ago, I met the girl I am still with today. About a week or so later I was staying at her sisters house, where she was living.

My story is by no means unusual within that particular community. One guy left England and lived in America for a bit, in order to be closer to someone he met on the game and really liked. One guy left Holland and moved to England. People moved around the UK to be closer to each other.

Before the girlfriend I currently have, I'd started a relationship with a woman I'd never met who lived in Sweeden. My parents made jokes and jibed me about how she was probably a 50 year old fat balding guy from Swindon or something. I told them that they were being a bit dim. They worried because I'd never even seen her, and what if she was ugly. I asked them if what they had always told me, that a relationship should be based on who a person is, not what they looked like was actually full of crap. They said no, and tried to weasle out some excrement about how she might be putting on a front and actually be really mean in real life. I argued back that, when talking to someone in a text based environment (as Discworld MUD is) the ONLY thing that can come across is personality, and after six months of being the same person maybe she was really that person?

Now, WoW is a little different. We often use Ventrilo or Team Speak to talk to one another in real time. People's accent, pitch, tone and intonation come across. We have visual avatars which say something about what we value, not a lot, but something. But we can't see each other. We have to work with the limited information we can get about the person on he other side of the screen.

You Guild Master might have a hump and warts all over his face. It doesn't matter. If he can lead the guild, organise things for people to do and play his chatacter he's the greatest guy in the world.

That Blood Elf paladin healer who you grouped with through Shadow Labs, who kept everyone's health bar on full without losing even half her mana? She might be a severely obese chain smoker. To you she is a goddess of health bars, welcome in every group from now until the heat death of the universe.

That hunter who couldn't trap for the life of him, who didn't know when to feign to avoid pulling agro and caused more wipes than you thought possible in the Botanica run the other day? He could have been a highly paid, super-good-looking, sporty guy. It doesn't matter. To you he'll always be that huntard who needs to learn to play.

Who you are 'out there' doesn't matter once you are online. How you interact with people matters. What you know matters. People who claim that you can't judge them based on what they do on an online game are full of it. How you act on an online game, in an environment where you are faceless and can get away with whatever you like with no chance for retribution is all that matters to the people who will never meet you. I can judge you based on your actions on the online game, as that is all I know of you, all I care about from you.

I think that is the scary part for the older generation. Who you know becomes irrelivant. What mask you can wear, how you dress, the car you drive, the way you hold yourself. All of these things which they have cultivated become irrelivant. They no longer have a working frame of reference. How do they interact with someone when they can't see who they are? Some of the older generation have taken the leap. They've got online and learnt the new communication norms, the new social norms and how to decode what is going on so they understand it and can relate to it. Most will never do so.

The internet is no more scary than the real world. The people on the internet ARE the people from the real world, with their masks off, but at a safe distance. You are always in control as well. It's not like being in a city centre where you can be cornered and mugged/raped/murdered. If you don't like what is happening online you're just a button press away from it not happening any more. There is more to fear from going to buy your loaf of bread than there is to fear online. So long as you're careful with your personal information you're safe online. You can take all the self-defense classes, buy all the knives and pepper spray you like and you still wont be safe out on the street, even on your own street, a few meters from your home.

Ally Scum?

2008-06-05T15:23:00.003+01:00

As I was grinding, 'locking and generally testing my way throgh the Southsea Pirate cove in Tanaris, gathering some of the data for the last entry, I came across a case of 'scummy player' syndrome.

Allow me to relate the tale.

I was fighting two Dock Workers. I have DoTed one of them up and was about to put Siphon Life on the next in preparation for killing it when an alliance druid pops out of stealth and auto-attacks the one I've not attacked yet. Fine, I think, take it, it'll mean I can keep my more mana-efficient rotation going. But that's all this druid does. He hits it once with auto-attack so he tags it, then he backs off. Then I pull a third Dock Worker, which he dutifully taps to tag it and backs off again. At this point the words of Jack Black spring to my mind: Hell no, that's not the way I roll, cock-shiner.

There's no way I'm going to kill two mobs for this scummy ally druid. I'd rather die than let his griefing plan succeed. So I start to run away from the mobs. When I'm at a safe distance I dismiss my pet so the two mobs he hit go on to him. As I'm running I pull about six other pirates, all of which add cock-shiner druid to their agro list. As I get away from each of these adds they run back and jump the druid. I turn around to see my handiwork. The druid is in travel form, dazed, trying to run away from about eight mobs. Lovely.

I re-summoned Hathnagma and run back into the pirate's fort and start killing again. When the druid gets back to his corpse and resurrects I point, laugh and carry on with my questing. Amazingly he didn't try to grief me again.

I know it wasn't because he was an ally, though. He was just one of the legion of players who think that the artificially constructed rivalry between the alliance and the horde is an excuse to be complete knobs to members of the other faction.

Warlock Pets

2008-06-05T13:38:00.004+01:00

For a long time now I've wanted to test my different pets out to see which one is actually the best for me. I see other warlocks running with their imps out or the succubus, but I don't know if they're doing this because they know something I don't or if they just like the play style it forces them to adopt. I personally have always used my voidwalker. The big blueberry tanks for me and I spank the mobs gently until they die.

Since I thought it would also make a kick-ass blog entry I decided I would finally get around to doing the comparison. So here it is, in all it's probably-not-very-useful glory.

Useful Information: I used Recount for my DPS and total damage information and Omen for my threat per second information. I was level 44 when I conducted the test and had bought all of the skills for each pet that was available. Each test was performed over a thirty minute duration.

Anneri (Succubus)

Total pet damage: 28,451
Average pet DPS: 37.3
Average pet TPS: 45

Total player damage: 28,404
Average player DPS: 49.9

Anneri served me well and was actually quite fun to grind with. She didn't hold agro very well, but because of our combined DPS the mobs were often almost dead before they decided to start running to me. She also provides a good amount of utility as she can seduce certain mob types.

Naltip (Imp)

Total pet damage: 9,938
Average pet DPS: 24.8
Average pet TPS: 24

Total player damage: 29,693
Average player DPS: 66.2

Naltip was guilty of the most heinous of pet crimes – making me have to drink. As a lock using a void walker I've become accustomed to using Life Tap, Siphon Life and Drain Life to maintain high mana and life and so avoid the need to drink or eat. Since Naltip had less than a third of my health and created the threat of a wet noodle, I had to have agro, meaning I couldn't use Drain Life effectively and didn't feel comfortable using Life Tap.

Kreenam (Felhunter)

Total pet damage: 12,276
Average pet DPS: 20
Average pet TPS: 20

Total player damage: 34,440
Average player DPS: 68.7

Perhaps unsurprisingly Kreenam was a diabolically bad tank, able to only just keep the agro off of me long enough for me to finish DoTing up the target. I again had to drink, although fewer times than I had to with Naltip. Still, the fact I had to drink makes Kreenam not a good choice for a PvE pet, in my opinion. With a higher total damage than Naltip, and being semi-useable as a tanking pet allowing me to put out more damage, Kreenam isn't the worst of the pets for solo PvE grinding.

Hathnagma (Voidwalker)

Total pet damage: 14,990
Average pet DPS: 17.5
Average pet TPS: 55

Total player damage: 43,537
Average player DPS: 61.2

Hathnagma is my faithful blueberry minion. Time after time she will throw himself into situations, knowing that all I am doing is assassinating a specific NPC before running away, and don't expect her to survive the mob's bodyguard. She is also able to keep agro in all but my most DPS heavy of rotations (I maxed out at 115 DPS on one assassination run and didn't get agro until right at the end, too late for the mob to reach me).

Hathnagma is my favourite solo PvE pet. She allows me to utilise all of the warlocks fantastic grinding abilities and rarely needs to slow down. She also allows me to burn down a single mob without worrying about the others in the pull (for example, Andre Firebeard), which the other pets do not have the health or mitigation to manage. Trying to use Anneri in this way would result in one very dead succubus, while Kreenam wouldn't keep the agro long enough for it to be a viable strategy (and he would die really quickly).

So, there we go. Warlock pet testing.

Please note, none of the images used in this post were made by me, they were all taken from WoWWiki's pages on the individual demon in question.

Past the Half Century

2008-06-03T17:37:00.002+01:00

This is my 51st blog post. I didn't think I'd stick with it this long, I really didn't. I guess I must have some commitment at least.

I've not been playing much recently, due to my exams, but I only have two weeks left of them and then I am on summer holidays. Which will be nice. I should have a fourth level 70 character by then.

Also, go here and read Big Bear Butt's quite thought provoking post about cheese. It's good. No, really, go on over there. Don't let the fact it's about cheese put you off...

To Group or Not To Group?

2008-05-31T12:47:00.003+01:00

Aurik at /hug posted an article on his blog about boosting or PUGing 'old skool' (pre-Burning Crusades) instances. I thought the topic was interesting and wanted to put my own thoughts without bombing the poor guy's comments.

Why Do People Get Boosts?

Many people I know who get boosts do so because finding a group for a given instance is hard, because no one wants to do it. They fail to see the chink in the armour of their logic here. If they take themselves out of the availiable pool of people looking to do the instance, then there's fewer people looking and so getting a group becomes harder. Not many people need to decide to get a boost before a tipping point is reached where most people get boosts because a given instance has a reputation for being hard to pick a group up for.

Another reason people get boosts is because they're sick and tired of people who can't play their class making the instance harder than it needs to be. The mages opening with Pyroblast? the healers who actually can't? The rogues stealthing ahead of the group and pulling? The tanks only even trying to hold agro on one target? The groups who don't want to use the Lucky Charms, or seem incapable of following kill orders? I am talking to all of you guys. You, and people like you, make those of us who have seen what a competant person playing your class at your level can do, not want to continue PUGing low level instances. You guys make it too hard to be fun.

Why Are There Problems With Boosting?

I have already somewhat covered why there are problems with people getting boosts from my first point - they add to the problem of too few people wanting to run a given instance.

People who don't run instances because of point two have a similar effect. They remove the number of competant people from the pool of available PUGers. If you're noticing people doing things outragiously stupid, chances are you are not doing those things yourself. Chances are also good that you are raising the general group competance just by being there, doing your thing. Taking yourself out of the pool means that future competant people will find the same situation you have, and do the same thing you have done.

Why Should I Care?

Well, most of the points I have raised have been about your decisions impact on those who come after you. The general disintigration of the PUGing community for the pre-Burning Crusades instances isn't something that's going to get people protesting in the streets of Stormwind and Orgrimmar, or indeed, caring very much at all. But it's worth bearing in mind the next time you bemoan how crap PUGing lower level instances is, you can either become part of the problem, or part of the solution.

Also, I disagree with Aurik's assessment of the potential experience benefits of not getting a boost. I have always found that a run with people of the right level is of benefit when learning my class. I may not have all of my killer abilities, but I will have my staple abilities (generally, probably exception being Ragefire Chasm) which I can learn to use well. As a tank it's less stressful to learn how to hold multiple targets' worth of threat when you have some give with regards how fast people die to rampaging mobs. If you were to wait until level 70 to learn this stuff (because that's when you'll have all of your killer abilities at their max) then chances are you'll be labled as the worst tank in the world and ditched fairly quickly. Unless you are on a server with a massive lack of tanks, of course, when you will still be fed caviar and told how awesome you are.

Final Thoughs?

Boosting is here to stay. As are losers who ask over trade for a boost for 5g. I play a feral druid, which is possibly the best boosting class in the game (prot/holy paladin might be better, case dependent). I have boosted people through Blackrock Depths, soloed Lower Blackrock Spire, and two manned Upper Blackrock Spire (with the hinderance of a third person we had to call in to activate the first boss) without a healer. But I get nothing out of boosting some little scrub who asks over trade. It's not a profitable thing to do. In the time it takes me to boost them in Shadowfang Keep (20 minutes in and out), for example, I could do three or four daily quests and get about 30 gold and not have the hassle of them pulling agro.

I'd like to not have to boost or be boosted in any instance, but the fact is that I have friends who are going to get frustrated (and am going to get frustrated myself) and ask me for a boost. I will almost certainly help these friends, because that's the sort of person I am, and it can be fun to boost someone who is cracking jokes over the party channel every now and then and isn't trying to help out. 'Helping out', in my experience, often leads to running around like a loon trying to stop them from being killed.

Leveling Professions

2008-05-30T11:51:00.002+01:00

Generally I will level up my professions as I go. I don't spend money on them, really, except for learning new patterns, but I do try to keep them at the right level for me so I don't have to face the grind when I hit 70. Another reason I do this is because you can generally make some money out of your professions. Not much, sure, but it is enough to cover the costs of learning the patterns for most professions.

Enchanting is different. Enchanting is my bane. I want a high level enchanter, because when you start to get the really good enchants you can start to make some money at it, and you also become really helpful to your guild and friends. Sadly, since there is so little money to make from leveling it I tend to let it slip behind my leveling and have yet to get my enchanting skill much over 100 with any of my characters.

What I would like to see is enchants being made more like the glyphs and inscriptions. Namely something that the enchanter can make and put up on the auction house for someone else to buy and apply themselves. Meeting up with morons is the hardest part of selling enchants and making them into self-apply patches would help take away the need to actually meet your customer and wonder if he's ever going to put your fee in the trade window so you can accept and get going.

Also, if you could trade them over the auction house then you'd actually get to see what value most enchanters put on their enchants. The number of times I've had some bottom-feeder tell me that an enchant isn't worth the cost of the mats I am putting into it (they often claim that another enchanter did it for them for a fraction of the mats cost) is silly. I want to see if these people are right. If other enchanters reall are selling an enchant with 2g worth of mats for 20s. Mainly because I'd like to laugh at them, then slap them, then sulk off into a corner and cry.

So, yeah. I want enchanting to be made into a profession which can be done as if on a one-player game, so sue me. I just don't like dealing with the great unwashed of WoW and with every other profession I get to avoid dealing with them.

Class Choices

2008-05-29T11:59:00.003+01:00

Class choice can be hard. With so much conflicting information around it can be difficult to choose which class to play. The best advice I can give is to try it. If you like the look of a class, give it a go. Level it for the first twenty or so levels to get a bit of a feel for it. If you like it then keep going. However, some people like to know a little about a class before they start, so here are some of my opinions, given with a pinch of salt.

So here's a brief class by class... well... ramble I guess is the best word.

Druids

This is my current main class, and one that I've only ever played as feral. However, I know that if I were to take Ghosthoof PvP I would respec resto, because most PvP fights are won or lost by the healers, not the DPS, and druids make excellent PvP healers because they're so hard to crowd control. Anyone who has tried to take out a group of three players, two of who are resto druids protecting a third damage dealer, will know how impossible it is without a good healer of your own and at least six effective damage dealers to keep both the druids busy.

In PvE all three of the druid's specs can be useful. Resto druids can heal with the best of them, balance druids (also known as boomkins) can make some nice DPS and feral druids can tank better than warriors or paladins until abour T5 level.

Hunters

For all that you will be told that hunters are the easiest class, they aren't. You need to invest a lot of time into theorycrafting to get the best out of your hunter. You need to work out which pet is the best for your current gear level. You need to work out which rotation to use with your weapon. You need to work out whether your current gear level means agility or attack power gems are better for you. And as soon as you get a gear upgrade you need to work it all out again. You will also probably find that you need to respec your talents more than any other class because what was a good talent spec when you hit 70 might not be great once you've got a lot of attack power and crit. And so it goes on. Hunters, easy to level, pains in the backside to play at level 70.

Marksman hunters are terrible in a raid environment. Beast master hunters are very good as are survival. However, none will reach their potential without a lot of work. We recently had a T5 equipped hunter doing 300 DPS less than a T4 equiped hunter because of the T5 hunter hadn't put the time in to learn their class. And to head off any suggestions to the contrary, the T4 hunter was also bringing more raid buffs and utility. The T5 hunter was just bad.

Traps make the hunter a very good PvP class for taking out melee classes, while an appropriate talent spec can make them very good caster killers as well.

Mages

Mages tend to have to arrange their talents for either maximum DPS or for survivability. Mages, like hunters, have tricks they should learn in order to maximise their DPS, but it's no where near as difficult or time consuming to master a mage as it is to master a hunter. Mages also have the easiest and most sought after crowd control in the game - Polymorph.

Deep fire with some arcane tend to be the highest damage dealers, while deep frost with some arcane tend to be the most survivable. The arcane tree provides some nice boosts to your damage, but it is generally better to go deep into either fire or frost and fill out in arcane.

Mages have some nice PvP power, but due to their cloth armour can find themselves the prey of rogues and other high burst damage DPS classes.

Paladin

Paladins have two viable raiding specs, holy or protection. Retribution is alright, but will often find itself skipped for a better DPS class. I've seen people boast about getting 800 DPS in their retribution gear, but invariably an equally geared true damage dealer will be on more like 1100 - 1200 DPS.

Holy allows the paladin to root their feet and heal almost constantly, with the right gear, while protection paladins are the best multiple (4 or more) target tanks in the game due to consecration.

Priest

Discipline priests are rumoured to be excellent in PvP, although I have never really played with one.

Holy priests are generally the first thing to be killed in PvP, but they make excellent raid healers, with a vast number of abilities meaning that they can either take main tank healing or group healing duties, and do both very well.

Shadow priests provide a raid with a lot of utility and are able to provide another source of mana for your other casting classes, which can greatly reduce the cost to the raid of pots. However, shadow priest damage is not amazing and most of the time one shadow priest is enough for a ten man raid.

Rogue

Rogues make fantastic PvP and PvE damage dealers. With the right spec a rogue will almost always be the top of the damage meters and kill charts. Rogues also benefit from being able to choose their fights by using their stealth ability. On more than one occasion as my shaman I've found myself sapped as I ran along with the pack in AV and had to watch the rest of my group rush off while I awaited the inevitable stun-lock death.

Once you have mastered the stun-lock you will be most of the way towards being an imba rogue in PvP, while the correct skill rotation will enable you to be the best damage dealer in an instance.

Shaman

The only really viable talent spec for a shaman in PvP is resto. Enhancement is particularly bad as it requires you to get up close and personal, without any means of crowd control.

Elemental shamans are exceptional damage dealers in a PvE environment, and provide good raid buffs with their totems, and even in poor gear will be able to keep up with the other DPS classes. Enhancement shaman provide good damage with excellent raid buffs. An enhancement shaman in a DPS warrior and rogue group will boost the DPS of those group members, sometimes by as much as 100 DPS each. If that bonus DPS were added to the shaman, instead of to the rogue or warrior, then the enhancement shaman would be the highest damage dealer in almost every raid.

Warlocks

A well played destruction or affliciton warlock is a boon to any raid, providing a large amount of damage output with some of the best AoE and raid utility power in the game.

Demonology warlocks suffer greatly in a raid environment, and should not really be allowed in unless there is no other choice.

In PvP warlocks are able to fear, an excellent form of crowd control, while DoTing up multiple targets and healing themselves at the same time. Many people complain that they kill the warlock, only to die a while later from the warlock's DoTs.

Warlocking

2008-05-29T11:05:00.002+01:00

So, I get a little bored of daily quests. Okay, very bored. I can't just do the same thing day after day (some may argue that leveling is just the same thing due to the nature of Blizzard's quests, but at least each day you're in a different place with different mobs).

Because of this I wanted to make a new alt. So, some time soon I am going to adding a warlock to my group of 70's.

Now, I know that many people will probably consider me a little crazy, since I only recently got my shaman to 70 and am in a guild that, aside from not needing any more warlocks at all, needs to concentrate on progression raiding and gearing up mains rather than gearing up lower geared alts. But I just don't like running around doing nothing except farming mats for consumables and raiding. I want to be doing something else, something that will keep my interest for a good length of time.

Also, leveling a class that could actually do damage (shaman) was a real eye opening experience. My priest was hell to level, I hated it. My druid was nice to level, he plodded along being really hard to kill, but also being really slow to kill stuff. Then my shaman just blazed through mobs as if they weren't there. I'd often be able to kill something before it even made it half way to me. It was amazing.

So now I'm going to play about with a class that has innate tanking from its pet and see how that suits me. The only realistic choice was a warlock, since hunters at level 70 are so god damn complicated, with shot rotations and weapon speed theorycrafting to consider, that it's not worth the hassle.

PvP Part 2

2008-05-29T03:17:00.003+01:00

A while back I wrote a post about my opinions of PvP and the skill required to take part in it. You can find that post here if you want to read it first and come back to this post.

Little has happened to change my opinion of the order of importance in a PvP battle. I still firmly believe the order goes: Class synergy > Gear > Connection > 'Skill'.

People who PvP a lot will argue for the 'skill' component to be higher, claiming that they have this 'skill' as shown by the way they have gotten better at PvP. Most people like this that I talk to will argue that the gear they have picked up as a result of the boring PvP grind hasn't helped, they have simply gotten more 'skillful' and so more able to win in PvP.

As an example of my order I would like to tell a little story. I play a PvE tanking druid, as anyone who has read much of my blog will know. I PvP with my tanking gear on because I will often be able to take the heat of three or four of the enemy guys for a good while, and if they are focusing on me then they are not working towards the objective of the battleground and they aren't even HK farming very well! One on one I will almost always beat a rogue. The only time I don't is when I meet full S3 rogues who manage to start off by stun-locking me while I'm in cat form. Even then it's a close run thing since if they let me have a moment to change forms to bear then they start to find that their once imba hits are now weak and pathetic, and if I get to face them then I have between 36 and 40% dodge rate, so they tend to fail at continuing their stun-lock. Then it's just a matter of DoTing them up with Lacerate, continuing to use Maul and Mangle whenever I can and watching their health dissapear. They can make it take longer by using Evasion and Cloak of Skill, but for every seven or eight seconds the fight lasts I'm getting an extra 750 health from Improved Leader of the Pack procs, and they're doing 75% less physical damage each hit they manage to land due to my armour mitigation. If a friendly healer comes along then the rogue will normally be able to kill them before I kill him, since it does take me a while, but it can be funny when an S3 rogue jumps you, stun-locks your poor feeble cat-self, gets a good slice of your HP off of you and then is winning the war of attrition, only to find that his hard work is undone in seconds by some priest who just happened along. The feral druid class synergy is so much better than the rogue that I can often take two rogues who are equally geared as me, since they hit for next to nothing on my thick bear butt while I still hit for my full amount.

Of course, as a feral druid I don't have the burst damage to kill a healer. On the other hand though, a healer can't kill me. So it tends to become just a case of /greet and move on.

On the other hand, my elemental shaman is killed as soon as any PvP fight is engaged. I think this may be because of the reputation of the shaman as a 'free kill', but then any class that has the entire enemy line start to hit them is a 'free kill'. The only class I've seen be able to stand up to a long duration of enemy focus fire is a restoration druid in really good gear. It took a full group's worth of horde to kill one restoration druid in a recent AB I was in, for example. Shaman are fun in PvP before level 70, where it seems that people have decided that the shaman must die first and so they focus in on me with an accuracy that would make most 'smart missiles' blush and admit their total lack of 'smartness'.

Tempest Keep Take One

2008-05-28T21:12:00.004+01:00

Yesterday Coup de Grace took their first tentative steps into a tier five instance. Our raid leader who was initially supposed to be organising the run was hit by a terrible case of Real Life just before it was supposed to start, so I decided to take it on my shoulders to get things moving. I invited everyone who was online and signed up for the run and monitored people logging on and brought them into the raid when they were on. It took a little while to get 25 people together but we eventually managed it, despite the run looking like it was cursed to never happen.

Our plan was to go into Tempest Keep and take out Void Reaver. We spent two hours on the trash on the way to him. I don't think anyone was really prepared for how long that would take (except the two people in the raid which had been in The Eye before). So, we arrived at Void Reaver eventually and a little bit of tactical discussion took place. Then a little bit more. Then a bit of reorganising the groups. Then a little more discussion. Finally I suggested we take a pop at him and then decide what had gone wrong if we wiped, which people agreed to.

I was tanking, along with three other tanks - a warrior, a paladin and another druid. The agro was passing between me and the other druid tank as Void Reaver did his knock back. Our first attempt went really well. We lost too many people to the orbs so we didn't beat the enrage timer but we got him down to 9% before he killed us all. After a small number of adjustments in the raid layout (spreading the healers out and keeping the tanks on the same side of VR as the tank healers) we managed to down the big fel reaver. So now that's Gruul on the first night, Maggy on the first night and Void Reaver on the first night. Lovely.

Progress

2008-05-10T11:51:00.002+01:00

Darkmaw had his first Karazhan outing this week. Despite being still in greens and some blues (one green was level 62!) the guild was willing to take me. I came third on the damage meters in some fights too, fourth overall, which I was so happy about. At least I was contributing to the effort, not just soaking up the loot.

I got a cloth robe and the nature damage ring as well as my T4 heap piece, which was great and has really boosted my DPS. Now if only I could get an upgrade for my level 62 green cloak...

We also did our first guild-only Gruul run this week. One-shotted both bosses and walked away with the loot. I went there with Ghosthoof and took home my T4 legs. Excellent.

The reason we were able to get a guild run to Gruul is that we recently absorbed another guild. It's fantastic to be able to integrate a bunch of people with such similar aims!

There was me thinking the guild was self-destrcuting a while back, now we have 30 sign ups to one Gruul run! We are also running multiple ZA runs and multiple Karazhan runs for badges and gear for lower geared characters (like my Darkmaw!)

What do you need?

2008-04-29T14:07:00.004+01:00

So, Darkmaw is now level 70 and has a flying mount. Now when I feel like instancing I can really take my pick of which role I want to fill, which was the point behind leveling him.

I am really enjoying the simplicity of the shaman class too. Two buttons for damage and no waiting. Root your feet, use the time the tank pulls to plant totems and allow them to build threat and then unleash with lightning bolts. If there is only one mob then you can rotate in chain lightning too (or if you've got a tank that can actually build multiple target's worth of solid threat).

In PvP I can kite warriors and rogues (sometimes) using a mix of frost shock and totems. I can control a magic user for a while using earth shock and totems. I can stand at the back and chain lightning and lightning bolt the crap out of people for maximum honour kills.

It's really a lot of fun!

Now I just need to work on his gear a little and I'll be ready for Karazhan runs. It'll be a novelty to have someone in the run who needs the loot!

Officer Status

2008-04-27T10:32:00.003+01:00

Because of one or two moments of Real Life, our guild was an officer or two down. They asked me if I wanted to take on the role. When I asked what I had to do they told me that I didn't need to do anything, just take part in the officer chat. I thought that I could easily fill that role so I accepted.

Now I'm a raid leader, class leader and an officer. How do I find myself with these ever increasing responsibilities? I had hoped to be one of the coasters again, like I was when I first started raiding (well, to be fair I didn't coast, I was just over-awed by the whole '40-man raid' thing and often didn't know what the hell was going on). Plan A out of the window then.

Class Leadership

2008-04-27T09:48:00.003+01:00

A while back I was given the role of class leader for the druid class. I wasn't asked if I wanted it, or even if I knew anything about balance or restoration druids (which I don't). But, class leader I was. It was okay though, since being class leader seemed to involve doing nothing at all very much.

A few weeks back I was asked, in my capacity as class leader, to vet a new applicant. Fortunately the guy was a feral druid, so I was at least dealing with a spec I knew about.

I looked at his gear and it frankly sucked. It was fine for tanking easy 5 mans, but nowhere near good enough for Kara. He was missing easily obtained quest gear and had some total trash in their place. I then looked at his talents and saw that he was totally PvP spec. A more hard core guild would have told him to get lost, but we're a nice guild and so I instead gave him some pointers (such as talent choices and gear upgrades if he wanted to Kara with us) and accepted him into the guild.

He wants to come to Kara as a DPS class. With a feral build. I rejected him from the Kara run I organised on Friday because his gear was not good enough to be a feral DPSer. It's not good enough to tank either, and it could be made so with a little bit of solo effort.

He tanked a heroic guild run that had one of our paladin healers (with 2.1k + healing), and our best hunter (who consistantly manages over 1k DPS). Wipe city? You better believe it was. I checked out his new talent spec this morning and he's not maxed out Survival of the Fittest (an absolute must have talent), he's chosen to have Imp. Mark of the Wild (+35% effect on MotW) and Natural Shapeshifter (-30% shifting costs) over Furor (+10 rage for bear or +40 energy for cat when switching) and Naturalist (+10% melee damage). Apart from not maxing out Survival of the Fittest, his feral talents are good.

I wish I could see what gear someone had in their bags, I really do. That way I could tell if he means to tank with only 369 defence (without Survival of the Fittest, too) or if he has a bunch of defence gear in his bags and the armoury image is just his solo grinding gear or something.

He also signed up for our collaborative Gruul's Lair run... as DPS...

Gruul, Take Two

2008-04-26T23:37:00.002+01:00

So, our second collaborative run of Gruul's Lair was just a short while ago. It could have gone better...

Firstly, our partners in crime, Team Foxhound, had only four members on when we should have been starting. Not good. We had 14 members online, but two of them were rejected because of gear and so we were bringing one person too few to the raid as well.

It took an hour and fifteen minutes for Team Foxhound to get their members ready and for us to find how many extras we needed. We then had to call in friends to fill the last five places (FIVE!). Fortunately one of our healers logged on, after having already told us they'd be much too late for the start, and we only needed to pick up people for four places.

To start with, we sucked. Big piles of suck. No one would move with the mage when they ran in to start the pull, so all five of the bosses would stomp him and then run loose. Nice. That happened about five times. Each time there was a count down, and each time the mage was mashed and the wipe inevitable.

Then we filled the last space we had with Someone Who Knew What They Were Doing!

From then on it was lovely. We had another wipe on the High King before he managed to fully assert himself, then we downed the King and two-shotted Gruul. Lovely.

Sleeter also landed himself a pair of shiney T4 legs. Very nice. I also got the epic boots from SSO before we set off for Gruul, so I got myself some very nice equipment upgrades yesterday!

Gruul the Big Whuss

2008-04-23T12:44:00.002+01:00

So, Coup de Grace (the guild I'm in) teamed up with Team Foxhound to make a run on Gruul the Dragonslayer. Being the first collaborative effort we undertook it got off to a slightly rocky start, but we were soon in the instance and taking down the trash.

It was wonderful to be attempting an instance which wasn't Karazhan!

We got to High King Maulgar and spent a while sorting out the order as well as who would take on what role. After about ten minutes of tactics we started the fight. I was there as Sleeter and was on healing duty for HKM's tank. I thought that it would require more healing than it did, to be fair. I was still on about 80% mana when the king dropped. First attempt.

So, either all the tactics and preparation from everyone paid off, or he's just a big whuss. I'm more inclined to think the latter, since it was a joint run on an instance for the first time (for most of us). We shouldn't be able to one-shot bosses on our first time in an instance unless the boss is a wimp.

HKM dropped two Hunter/Mage/Warlock tokens and a Warrior/Priest/Druid token. I rolled 10, so missed out on the token.

Then we went on to Gruul. We wiped a couple of times getting the shatter phase right, but then we started another attempt and my PC turned itself off (as it had been all night). I rushed to get the damn thing started again and loged in just in time to see Gruul fall over dead. Taking him one healer down? No worries!

Again, Gruul dropped two Hunter/Mage/Warlock tokens, but his third token was a Paladin/Rogue/Shaman token.

Another nice progression night for Coup de Grace though! Loverly juberly.

Nurturing Instinct

2008-04-16T09:46:00.003+01:00

I've read a lot lately about the changes to Nurturing Instinct. Most of it discussion about whether or not it's a raid viable talent now. I'd have to say that, in my opinion, it's not.

The two forks of NI are:

Agility becomes +healing

Cat form gains 20% extra incoming heals

Now, if one considers that even a feral druid might be called on to heal, then the agility to healing looks very tempting. However, you shouldn't be called on to heal in your agility gear. And if you are then all the +healing in the world is unlikely to help you, since you're mp5 and mana pool are going to be totally gimped. You might get +500 healing from your agility, but if you're only able to put out 30 seconds worth of healing (for the rest of time, since you have no spirit either), what will it matter? It could be argued, I'll admit, that since your base agility is 66 then this will always yield at least +66 healing. It's a nice amount just from a talent, and if you were a healer and it was in the restoration tree then it would be a very nice talent. However, I personally don't have two points to spare, especially on making myself better at a role I've no desire to fill. At the moment I am trying to free up two points for Shredding Attacks which I should really have since the natural position for druid tanks is off-tank, which means we spend a lot of time filling a DPS role as well. Trying to then find another two points for NI would be even harder.

The other fork of this talent, +20% healing recieved in cat form, might be quite nice. I have healed as a holy priest, and I know that it's nice to heal a warlock because they take extra healing. However, I don't factor in the fact that a lock takes extra healing when I hit my button, so I end up over healing them a lot. I imagine the same taking place in this case. The healer wont be paying a lot of attention to the druid's form when they throw out their heal so there will be no increased efficiency.

I firmly believe that NI is a PvP talent. Where it will shine is when the druid shifts, spams a few heals on themselves and then shifts back to cat, meaning that heach heal has their +agi-as-heal on it and each heal over time has their 20% healing on it. Which would be very nice indeed and might mean the difference between life and death against a player. A raid boss isn't so easily impressed, though.

Epic!

2008-04-10T10:59:00.003+01:00

I got my epic flight form, finally. I'd had the Sethekk Halls stage sat in my quest log for a good long while, then the other day it seemed like the perfect time to actually go ahead and get it over with. We were grouped to get the guild mistress' shadow priest Karazhan keyed (no, you don't need it any more, it's nice to let yourself in though) and once that was done the GM switched to her mage and we stormed Sethekk Halls heroic.

We only had a few little difficulties on the first boss, until we got the tactics sorted out and killed him with ease. We took out the raven god with very little trouble, considering our tactics at the start were along the lines of "What's he do? Add? Okay, we take them out, right?" No mention of his AoE sleep or his feather cyclone, or his fading or indeed anything else that might have helped us cope better with the fight. But we still did it, went on and took out the last boss, despite him wiping out the DPS, leaving only me tanking and one of our raid healers healing me. It was a lot smoother once he'd killed those pesky DPSers.

So, now I get my instant cast epic, which I can do my skinning in and not get stunned out of. Wonderful!

Sort of makes up for the stuff I've been reading about druids not being able to tank in T5/T6 content. Only sort of.

Self-Destruct Time?

2008-04-10T10:41:00.004+01:00

So, as always happens, I'm staring down the barrel of a guild self-destruct. We have had a minor splinter of people leave the guild, mostly because one left and pulled the rest 'of his friends' with him then that was followed by the GM handing over power for personal reasons, which took her husband, another officer of the guild, out of the mix too. Their both still there but they're sitting back for now.

Arse biscuits? You betcha.

I was really starting to enjoy the guild. We were honestly on the verge of stepping into Gruul's Lair. Now that's all been kicked in the nuts and we're on the verge of falling into the abyss. Or at least spending a good while longer being trapped in Karazhan. If that's the case I can see more people leaving us, which will result in our further fall from grace.

How do people manage to hold guilds together for so long? How do guilds manage to find 25+ people who aren't asshats or drama llamas? When you get right down to it, how can you avoid Real Life Factors biting your guild in the butt?

On a brighter note, my activities as raid leader look like their on their way back. I was asked to take over last night's Kara run and we managed to down up to Curator (excluding Nightbane), each boss taken out in one attempt. All that despite the guild drama happening before our eyes, as three members left (only one of which was an actual raider, but a damn good raider) and the guild leadership transfered hands. We lost a few people on Attumen, lost a few on Maiden, had a few people die on trash pulls, all due to the major lack of focus. I think we did well to get as far as we did with most people's minds being totally elsewhere.

I said we'd start on Nightbane on the next run, since we were all so unfocused. The off-tank argued saying that he only wanted to Kara for one item from Nightbane. Everyone else seemed up for a few tries on him, and we'd one-shotted all the bosses. So we tried Nightbane. It was abundantly clear that no one really had the focus for him, so the raid was called. Sometimes I hate being right, other times it's nice to think that you know your team well enough to sense when they're going to manage a fight and when they're not. Shame I couldn't avoid the evening ending on a sour note, really.

Bear Tanking is Dull?

2008-04-09T08:02:00.003+01:00

So, I was reading this blog entry over at Elitist Jerks. It struck me that I'm the oposite of this individual. I like tanking because it's much less stressful. I don't have to watch bouncing health bars and feel I must do something about them. I don't feel I have to compete (unless we bring along a PUG tank who feels it's his duty to show how large his e-peen is by pulling agro) because the only thing that is my responsibility is keeping agro and maybe bear-charging to the rescue.

I was just interested in the difference of opinion here. I know a lot of people say they prefer it if things are 'interesting', but I find bear tanking interesting, I keep my rotation up, use my rage as soon as I can, get as much threat as I can muster and watch the mobs hit points vanish. That for me is interesting.

I also like the fact that I can tank better than a warrior in almost all situations. It's good.

Raid Loot Rules

2008-04-08T15:44:00.004+01:00

I can't think of anything more likely to cause guild drama than the loot rules the guild implements. Strict systems of DKP can lead to DKP hording, meaning that people who could potentially be gearing themselves up and helping the raid more choose to have a potential upgrade sharded because they're after a 'better upgrade'. Lax systems which don't use DKP can lead to coveted items going to someone who is just lucky, rather than to someone who is recognised as deserving it.

Which system is better? I think it depends on the instance and on the group of people you have at your side. If you're in a friendly, helpful, unselfish guild that is raiding ten-man content then rolling could well be your best bet as the group you are in will likely be able to see past their own wants to the guild needs and let the person who needs the loot most have it.

If you're in a large guild of drama llamas raiding 25 man content then you probably need a solid DKP system to stop people bleating about the unfair allocation of loot to new people, or whatever they're about to bleat about. With a strictly defined system of loot allocation there is little room for people being unaware of who a given piece is going to, should it happen to drop.

Is there a middle point though? Can you have a DKP system without DKP hording? Can you have a roll based system where people are rewarded for the effort they put into progression runs? It's almost impossible to design a system that will work for every single guild, because the drama llamas in one guild might be mighty beasts, able to make drama out of something others see as perfectly fair and reasonable.

In Coup de Grace we have a very loose set of raid loot rules. Primary specs can roll for an item, but if you win an item you're expected to set aside your right to roll on the next item. You don't have to, you can roll, but if you are rolling against someone deemed to be in greater need of the item then your roll may be ignored. If no primary specs want the item then the off-specs get to roll. If no off-specs want it then it gets sharded and the shards put in the guild bank. It has served us well so far, some runs yeild loot like water for one class which is the way things go some times. Other runs only serve to boost the prowess of our off-spec abilities. But most people are happy to pass over their priority if it means gearing someone else up who needs it.

We've been considering implementing a DKP system for our progression into Gruul, but it's hard to know how this will change the dynamic of the guild. Will people suddenly start to feel entitled to items, even if they can't really make use of them? Will our newbies start to get shafted, only ever getting the detritus no one else wants? It's really difficult to know what is for the best.

Karazhan from the other side

2008-04-02T10:08:00.004+01:00

So, my first week as a raid leader is over. We did two days of Karazhan, on the first day we did everything up to Curator and then went on to Shade of Aran and then the Chess Event. It went well, we had a little trouble on Aran like always, but the group knows the encounters well and mostly just one-shotted the bosses.

The group composition wasn't the greatest. We had three rogues, a mage, a shadow priest, two holy paladins, a holy priest (me), a protection paladin and a protection warrior. The amount of melee DPS would come back to haunt me when it came to taking out Prince.

We had the Romeo and Juliet fight for our Opera Event. I'd made the call that we'd just go in an do whatever spawned for us, because I had faith in my team. However, I over-looked the fact that one of our tanks wasn't actually a guild tank, he was from the guild the GM used to be in, and was just filling in for us. To say he lacked confidence would be a bit of an understatement. He was a good tank, so long as he wasn't worrying about not knowing what to do when. We told him his tank target and he was on her when she spawned. However, he then went and tanked the next boss as well. So that caused us some problems. We also lacked a bit of co-ordination when taking them both down and it meant we had to start all over again (no wipe, just start that phase again). As soon as the non-guildie tank was on his target in the third phase he seemed to be happy and it went well.

Whatever they've done to the Prince fight, I hate it. He now seems to position his infernals to be just perfectly in the wrong place at the wrong time. In one of our attempts he threw three away from us and then dropped a fourth, making a line of infernals which we couldn't get past without running through the flames. Well, we could so long as we moved as soon as the infernal dropped, which most didn't. Sadly, the only boss which remained at the end of the second run was Prince. He mocked up by going down to 5% on one try and 6% on another, but because our melee DPS kept getting themselves nuked by the enfeble and nova we didn't have enough DPS left going into phase three to actually take him down.

I am quite happy with how it went as a run, and although my healing suffered because I was trying to monitor everything and call out what needed to be done I don't think the run actually felt my drop in healing. I think I prefer just being there and doing just my job, rather than trying to make sure everyone's job got done at the same time as trying to do my own.

I have to admit, the most stressful part of the entire thing was having master looter. The possibility that I'd totally mess up and assign a tanking shield to a rogue was always present in the back of my mind and I double- and triple-checked each click I made to ensure the right people got the right loot.

Also, remember how I said I wanted to go as my healer so that I wasn't assigning loot to myself? Yeah? Well that didn't work. There were two drops for my healer. For one I was uncontested, but for the other the GM decided that the item was a priest item, not a paladin item and so although one of our palas wanted it, it was to go to me. Foo. Maybe next time I raid lead I should go as my tank 'so I don't have to assign loot to myself'. Maybe he'd get some damn tanking drops then.

The lessons I learnt? Well, for one I found that my natural cool temper was very beneficial. Whenever a wipe happened I was able to keep cool and just be encouraging to the things that were going well and hand out advice for the things that were going wrong. Because the majority of the people who attended had done it before my job was really easy, so I didn't have to do anything drastic and people helped out when I was explaining things like the Netherspite fight. I was also allowed to do my own tactics which was great.

Everyone said it was a good run at the end, but they would since it's not right to kick a guy for his first attempt. The guild officers and I decided as well that next week there wouldn't be a second Kara run, since this week the group one followup run had to be cancelled due to a lack of tanks and the group two run had to borrow a tank from another guild. Also some people are taking their raiding spot for granted, which they can when there are two runs and only just enough people to fill the slots. So, although I might retain the raid leader title I wont be leading a raid for a while.

Raid Leader

2008-03-27T10:57:00.004Z

I got invited to a party with the guild officers the other day. I wondered what I'd done, and as they set up the group I was racking my brain to think if I'd actually done anything bad recently.

They took a while 'sorting things out', and then asked me if I wanted to take over the Sunday Karazhan raid. They said they were very pleased with my knowledge of the instance and my attitude while inside and thought I'd make a good leader.

I was very flattered and accepted. Now I've just got to get the Sunday group, which is invariably full of the dregs the Wednesday group decided to leave out, up to 10 members (a task, since the Wednesday group will poach people for a few bosses and take them out of the running for Sunday) and through the instance in one piece.

So far there are four people signed up on Group Calendar, and I am going to have to rattle the guild a little to get more people on there.

I predict it is going to go wrong in some way...

I decided that I would go as my healer, since I can stand at the back then and try to watch what is happening and nip anything I don't think is good in the bud. I don't think it would have been too bad if I'd gone as Ghost, since both healing and tanking are important roles and it's better to do them yourself, I think. Also, since Sleeter is better geared than Ghost it will mean I am less likely to need anything myself, so I don't have to feel bad for assigning myself gear.

I've never lead a raid before, and I am quite nervous about it...

Aside from that though, I am totally content and happy with my guild. We have our little drama llama, a over enthusiastic and abrasive hunter, but even he is often more amusing than irritating. So, the guild move was a good idea! Win.

New content!

2008-03-27T10:50:00.002Z

Since I last made a raid post my guild has entered Zul'Aman. I went with Sleeter, as he has by far the better gear of my two level 70 characters. It was hard, but we downed the bear boss on our first attempt and we killed the hawk boss after four attempts. Since we had only planned on downing the first two bosses we called it there, but it was an amazing first venture into ZA.

I love seeing new instances and fighting new bosses. I like seeing new content too, but I don't like the rush to get there. Take the new 2.4 island as an example. I can't face going there while there are still a billion players lagging up the place, so I'll have to wait, and probably miss out on some good fun and some of the daily questing in the process.

Ah well, can't win them all.

The world, it is gone...

2008-03-27T10:20:00.000Z

I know I've not posted here in an age, but since the 2.4 patch has caused a lot of interesting behaviour which has resulted in Blizzard nuking all of the servers I have characters on, I decided I would post a few things here. Hooray!

The reason I've been so busy is that I've been leveling a shaman, Darkmaw. I wanted a good, solid ranged DPS class and since I've seen shaman top DPS and damage done meters over and over I decided that one of them would be right for me. Also, they get to wear mail and hold a shield, way better protection than most casters!

He's been really fun. I leveled him to 59 as an enhancement shaman and I have to say that the enhancement tree has some amazing abilities, all linked to critical strikes. Getting a high crit rating and then popping all your abilities over and over is great.

Now I'm elemental though, and have yet to really test my new powers on mobs of my level. I am a little concerned as I don't have a full elemental kit yet, but it shouldn't hold me back too hard... no, really...

An Update on Arrogance

2008-03-02T09:08:00.002Z

Since I've posted twice about the arrogance in my old guild I thought I'd post a little something on my new guild.

There doesn't seem to be any arrogance. It's shocking and will probably chance once people are comfortable with each other, but for now it's really nice.

Sure, sometimes a guild member will tell you what you should do on your character, and sometimes they're right sometimes they're wrong. But no one takes it as far as arrogance. I was told by a guildie that I would be better off putting different meta gems in my head piece on my healer, they're right in one sense, the gems they suggested are more stereotypically healer gems and they might be better for me than the one I chose. However, I had reasons for choosing the one I did (+18 stam, my hit points suck and I have the gems in my gear to activate it, I don't have the gems to activate the other suggestions) and once I explained he saw that I was right to choose the gems I did (although he said that since I died fewer times than the paladin healer that I didn't need to worry about health... lol).

I have really good feelings about this guild!

Some Pondering

2008-03-02T08:57:00.002Z

So, the first week of raiding with Coup de Grâce is behind me and I'm having time for some reflection. It's a really good guild, full of fun people. There's normally something going on, whether that's a group going in battlegrounds together, or a heroic instance run. This gives the guild a much more tangible sense of life than other guilds I've been in and it's great.

I am a little concerned about whether I will get to raid with Ghosthoof or not. They need a priest for shackle, I accept that. And unless we constantly steal the shadow priest we had, I will have to bring Sleeter. Without a shackle it really wouldn't be worth taking Ghosthoof, because it would just be too hard.

Also, the two tanks that we went with this week have gear so much in advance of Ghosthoof that I wonder if he'll ever really get a look-in. Will he ever actually get to be main tank for a run, or will I be off tank always? I know that if there is a warrior tank in the raid they almost certainly have to be main tank, since they can't DPS for cookies.

The GM has assured me that I will get to tank, but then they assured the other druid in the raid that he will too, and if the gear I saw him in the other day was his tanking gear then that raid is going to be fun. Plus he seems to like being a resto druid better than a feral druid anyway.

All in all it's going really well. We've cleared Karazhan in two attempts which my last guild would never have managed. In fact, I think my last guild will only get to raid once 2.4 comes out and they drop they key requirement to get in!

The Second Run

2008-03-02T08:18:00.004Z

Another superb run for Coup de Grâce in Karazhan last night. We started where we left off last time, at Curator, and proceeded slowly to him. Being a casual guild sometimes means putting up with tardyness and general shenanigans before people knuckle down to focus on the raid. Indeed, sometimes a casual guild might not manage to do this at all, but CdG is a very good guild.

Curator only took one attempt because he's such a walk over (and I may have mentioned it last post, my guild is a little over-geared for Karazhan). I had a little bit of problem with one of the other members of the raid coming too close to me and arcing her flair onto me, but with some quick re-positioning each time I was able to get away and safe.

The Shade of Aran took us three attempts to get the tactic right. This was my first real attempt to see how the guild works as a team, since it's the first fight which you can't just bull-rush by out-gearing it (well, not until you've got some fairly hard-core gear). We did really well, in my humble opinion. As soon as everyone got the tactic (back, in some cases) we downed his sorry ass. One of the great things about being a healer is that you rarely get to know how close you were to killing the boss, unless you purposefully check. This meant that Aran falling over dead was quite a surprise to me.

The Chess Event was, as always, totally free epics. We didn't really discuss how to do stuff before we got in there, some people were asking how to move about half way through the event, some were totally lost, yet we still managed to kill the king and win the encounter. Stupid really, but excellent too, in my opinion!

We then moved onto Prince Malchezaar. Our first try on him (and my first try ever) went badly because of infernal drops. Our second try went terribly because the paladin healer over-agroed due to the tank paladin's Captain America Move being resisted and some bad heal timing. Our third attempt was easy, the infernals all dropped in the other part of the room and we downed him without losing anyone.

I picked up my T4 head piece and the healing cloak form Prince, so I was really happy about that. Our GM was upset because her dagger didn't drop, but it's hard to feel bad for someone when the whole drop (almost) was yours!

We then moved on to the 'non-essential' bosses. Starting with Nightbane. We one shotted Nightbane which was nice, back to old ways!

We then went back for Terestian Illhoof. He took one wipe for everyone to see what they needed to do, and then we killed him on the second attempt. I died twice on the second attempt, however. He sacreficed me and I didn't get any heals, then I got combat ressed and after a short time he sacreficed me again, and again I got no heals. Poot. Still, it was okay because after that the guild seemed more inclined to stop what they were doing in order to take out the chains.

Finally we went back for Netherspite, who we thought was going to be the hardest boss. We managed him in two attempts, the first was okay but our tank didn't get into the green beam fast enough on most of the phases. Even when our paladin tank was in there he lost the beam once he ran out of mana, which meant we had to mix the tactic up a little.

We decided that the warrior tank could take the green beam solo, but when it came time for the paladin to take it we would have a hunter ready to strip if off of him. I also said I'd take some of the starting ticks for mana-regen. Second attempt was a breeze, everyone running around where they were supposed to and the big dragon fell.

Not too bad for a guilds second trip into Karazhan as a unit. We have killed everything in there now and await next Wednesday's reset with baited breath.

First Karazhan Run

2008-02-28T08:28:00.003Z

So, my guild ventured into Karazhan last night. It was the first time we went in there as a guild, but we had eight players who'd already been in there before which made it very smooth.

There were only three members of the raid who were not fully epicly equipped as well, which made most of the instance a total cake-walk.

I had to go as my priest because they were short one healer. A priest from another guild had said they would go, but were in a battleground when the time came and didn't want to leave there, so they got replaced by Sleeter.

The trip to Attumen was easy. We lost one person on the trash, one of our mages over-agroed and got a horseshoe in the face. But other than that it was by the numbers. Killing Attumen himself was a breeze, even with our main tank disconnecting during the fight.

The trip to Moroes was easy also, our AoE wiped out the groups really quickly, which is more than the AoE from the guild I first went in with was ever able to do. Not a fair comparison though, since that guild was actually at Karazhan level, while this guild really isn't, it's a lot further on.

We wiped once on Moroes, which was my fault. I forgot just how often the add needs shackle casting on it, and just how often it resists. I left it too long to re-cast and it broke and resisted twice in a row, which meant I died and then it went through the raid killing everyone.

Kind of sucks to be firstly under-geared compared to everyone else and secondly be the one to cause the wipe. Never mind though.

Maiden went by the numbers and we got her down first try. Then the Opera event was Big Bad Wolf. We lost three DPS but still killed him with ease.

The night was called before Curator. We'd spent a lot of time waiting for AFK players which had resulted in it taking us almost two hours to get to Moroes, even though we were burning through the mobs like they weren't even there.

So, yeah. We will probably get to see past Karazhan really soon, providing we can get enough numbers.

The morning after...

2008-02-24T10:32:00.003Z

So, normally after making a bid decissions, such as leaving a guild I've been in for months, that I've helped and tried to nurture, I feel uneasy the next day. I question if the move was a good one. I wonder if I've made the right decision.

Not this time. I think my new guild is going to be great. I have the feeling, right down in the pit of my stomach, that they all know what they are doing and know why they're playing the game. It feels good.

Now, the pessimist in me is wondering where it's all going to go wrong...

New Guild

2008-02-24T00:21:00.004Z

So, after agonizing over it for too long, I decided to bite the bullet and jump.

I did my best to leave my old guild on good terms, didn't want to burn my bridges there because they're nice people, just not the guild for me.

So, I've jumped ship and joined a new guild, one that is actually talking about raiding Karazhan, has a date set for their 'next' (although might be their first) run through. It's refreshing. The guild leader is in good gear. The officers are all decked out for Kara. It's very positive!

So far we've done a night of BG pre-mades. We did well, only lost one Eye of the Storm fight when we were just starting up. It was also really close, only about 20 points in it.

So, it's just going to take a bit of time to see if they're as good as it says on the tin!

Boosting

2008-02-23T10:50:00.000Z

Normally, and in the general order of things, I don't mind boosting. I'd rather not be doing it in most cases, but I understand that some people want the gear without the fuss of having to group with low level players who've not got a clue how to play.

I've even been known to ask for a boost or two myself.

However, I feel it's self-evident that when you join a guild for the first time you want to make a good impression. You don't make a good impression by asking for boosts right after you have been welcomed in. You make a worse impression when boosts are all you ask for all day. You can really add the cherry to this terrible first impression by asking for access to the guild bank, on your first day, after asking for ten boosts.

Seriously, is it that hard to comprehend? Asking me personally wont make it any different either. I'll not boost someone new to the guild because I don't want to waste my effort. Also players who're asking for boosts the whole time are not people I want to share a guild with anyway, so I'm not going to encourage it by boosting them.

How it shouldn't be done...

2008-02-23T09:19:00.003Z

There are indicators that a group is going to go badly. For example, when one of your number can't access the Durnholde instance, because the attunement process is too complicated for them, you can guess that person is going to be a liability. At best they're going to be the same as having no one at all in their place in the group. At worst they're going to be the root cause of wipes.

Warlocks not being able to find their backside with both hands was just the start of my troubles.

The group contained two of my guild mates, a druid and a hunter. I assumed that the presence of these two would be a good thing. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The hunter kept body pulling. I kid you not, they kept edging up to the mobs until they were close enough to pull them all. Then they'd drop an exploding trap... and stand there while they were being wailed on. To start with I would spam heal him, desperately trying to keep him alive while the tank pulled the agro off of him. This rarely happened because he'd still be attacking things, almost at random. I've never had to use my Fade ability so many times in an instance. Nor have I been in a situation where I've had to Psychic Scream because I have so much hate that fade doesn't get rid of the mobs.

All of the DPS were choosing their own targets, meaning the tank had no chance to tank and meaning I had no chance to stay alive. I was able to heal through the damage, no worries, but sooner or later I had agro that I couldn't Fade or Psychic Scream out of and couldn't heal myself enough.

This instance shouldn't have been as hard as we made it. I've done Durnholde with a group of level 66 - 68 players and we didn't wipe once. This group had a level 69 tank, me healing in epics, a level 70 warlock, a level 66 hunter and a level 67 druid.

I was gnashing my teeth and generally wishing to die of embarrassment when the druid (the guy from my guild) asks if I need help healing. If he'd been in the same room as me I'd have punched him in the face. He was full balance spec. He was wearing Raiments of Divine Authority, various pieces of owl gear, and no item which gave any significant amount of +damage. That was his DPS gear... And he was offering to help me out. I made it clear that I considered his offer to be an insult and that if he really wanted to help me he could follow the marked target order.

I made it clear to the rest of the group's DPS that I would have no problems in the world with healing if only they would follow the targetting order and allow the tank to keep agro. They said they would and then came up with the amazingly bright idea of having the warlock not use seduce (he was terrible at it anyway) and instead help the tank with tanking using his Fel Guard. I said I didn't think the tank would have a problem with tanking if the brainless, slapdash DPS would focus and help her out. She tanked me for noticing that she wasn't a bad tank, I told her that I knew exactly where the problems of the group were.

For one pull, one glorious pull, the DPS focused first on the skull, then on the cross, then on the diamond and finally on the square. I came out of that pull without ever having taken agro, with almost full mana, and with a sense of peace. The next pull was a little looser but it was okay. But the pull after that they were back to their old ways. Fun.

I'm starting to hate my guild

Ghosthoof

2008-02-22T13:50:00.005Z

I think Ghosthoof is ready for Karazhan. I know Sleeter is ready, because he's been there and, indeed, done that.

Now I am simply waiting on my guild being ready to raid. This, I am slowing beginning to realise, may never happen.

They're a wonderful group of people, but some of the more vocal and influential are making noises about not wanting to raid. Never wanting to raid, even. Because of the horror stories they've heard from casual friends finding themselves in hard-core raid guilds.

I want to raid. I'd like to be in a hard-core raiding guild. I want to raid every night again. I want to run Karazhan again, and this time down Prince. I want to see Gruul, Magtheredon, and Serpent Shrine Cavern. I want to have, on the distant, hazy horizon, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.

I think I need a new guild. This one may never make it to Karazhan. But there I get torn. We've recently had a paladin healer leave, putting us back a reasonable way on the road to being ready. We now need another healer. If I leave then that will be another step back. If everyone gets to my situation and leaves, then they will never get to Kara.

On the other hand, of course, do I stay because it's the nice thing to do? Should I crap all over my own enjoyment of the game for the sake of others?

I don't know. It's a hard decision to make.

PvP

2008-02-22T12:42:00.002Z

PvP gives me ulcers.

I sometimes like it. Occasionally when things are going well, or at least as well as PvP goes, it's nice. Sometimes it feels like everyone out there is cheating like crap, except for you.

People running away seem to have some form of speed hack and manage to stay ahead of me in cat form by bouncing along. Sometimes they're right in front of me as they run and I'm hitting my 'do them pain' button and it's telling me they're out of range.

Over and over again it's stated that PvE involves no skill, while PvP involves total skill. I personally think it's not true. Both are about class, equipment and computer spec. If your class has been balanced so that they are better than the class you're facing you win. If your classes are balanced, then if your equipment is better then you win. Finally, everything game-side being equal, if your computer is faster you win.

I don't believe skill comes into it, nine times out of ten. Or at least, no definition of skill that I would recognise. Using your classes abilities isn't a skill, for example, it's your class.

But, I'm probably wrong. Maybe I don't like PvP because I'm not skilled at it. Maybe some day I'll discover something which lifts the scales from my eyes and allows me to see the skill involved. Until then I'll reluctantly PvP, killing some and being killed by others, while I chase gear which I wish there were other ways to get.

Threat

2008-02-20T09:58:00.002Z

Another in my 'posts for the newbies' collection for my guild. We have a lot of players who are new to the game, and I am sure some of them didn't know this.

Now, I know when I first started I hadn't got a clue about threat or agro, and I suffered because of it. These days I generally suffer because other people don't know about it, but that's a side issue.

Basics of Threat

How much Threat you have is indicative of how much a given mob hates you and wants you to die. If you have the most threat then you will generally be the one who the mob is taking out all of their childhood issues on. The tank of the group is constantly trying to be on to of the threat list, the rest of the group should be sailing as close as they can while staying behind the tank.

Because threat is measureable there are addons to help you gauge how much threat you are causing. Omen is a very good threat meter, and can be found on http://files.wowace.com/ which also contains a long list of other, normally quite good, addons. Omen is good because it will flash your screen when you pass 90% of the tank's threat, and a good visual indication like this is better than a quiet little bar creeping upwards.

The more people in a group that have Omen, the better. Omen doesn't monitor other people's threat unless they have it, so if everyone has it then everyone benefits. If only the tank and you have it then it's still good because you can stay below them and let the other members of the group worry about getting themselves killed.

On a very basic level, threat is accumilated as follows:

1 point of damage = 1 point of threat
2 points of healing = 1 point of threat

Talents, items, enchants and gems can all affect this rate of threat generation. Tanks generally want to up their threat generation while healers and DPS classes want theirs to be as low as possible.

Basics of Agro

Threat and agro are two different things, although they are often interchangably used. One "generates threat" but one "has agro" or "takes agro". Having agro means you are the one the mob is mashing or chasing around and trying to mash.

When the pull is first made is the time when agro is easiest to take, as the tank will not have much threat with the mob(s). If you're a healer and the tank fires his bow at a mob who is in a pack of three, then anything you do will cause you to take the agro of the mobs the tank didn't shoot. This is because the tank has zero threat with those mobs. They will run to him because he is provisionally top of their threat table, but any action which causes global threat (buffing, gaining rage, healing, etc) will pull the agro of these mobs.

Once the tank has started to generate threat with the mobs then you need to exceed the threat he has caused in order to pull agro. For example, (assuming no threat mitigation for either tank or healer) if the tank has hit the mob for 300 hit points with his bow and you heal him for 780 hit points (divided by 2 because it's healing threat) before he does anything else, then you will pull the agro off of him. This is because, as a ranged class, you need 130% of the tanks threat in order to pull agro. Melee classes only need 110%. This means that if you're a rogue and you smack the mob for 330 hit points as it runs past you on its way to the tank, then you will have agro. Congratulations, I just hope red works with your current gear combination.

Only healing which actually replenishes hit points counts for threat purposes, so if the tank was only missing 100 hit points in the above example, then you'd not have pulled agro, because although you hit him with 780 hit points of healing, he only took 100 (50 threat) points worth.

What does all this mean? Try to think about the threat you are generating with specific actions. If you pull agro then the tank has to have 110% of your threat before he gets the agro back. If you've pulled agro by opening with pyroblast, this might mean you need the tank to growl/taunt the threat off of you because you're so many points above him on the table. If the tank growls/taunts the threat off of you and the healer then pulls you could have caused a wipe, because the tank now can't growl/taunt the threat off of the healer because the ability is on cooldown, meaning the tank is going to have to exceed the healer's threat, and the healer is still going to be generating threat by healing herself...

It also means that if you've pulled agro the safest thing to do is to stop DPSing and let the tank take the agro back. If you run from the tank then they can't catch the mob and thus can't take the agro. In instances mobs generally run faster than players which means that while you and the tank are keeping pace with each other, the mob is pounding you a new one. If you're hitting the mob with instant cast spells as well? Well, you clearly want that threat too badly, and who am I, as a tank, to argue with that? Also, chasing you around trying to take the mob off of you means I'm not generating threat with the other mobs, and they're now on the healer, who's having to heal you, and me.

In short, threat is what grouping is all about. Knowing how much you're generating and knowing how much the tank is generating. If you're generating it to the point where you're taking agro, then slow down your DPS. It's far better for you to throttle your DPS than for the group to deal with the chaos of your over-agroing.

Lore

2008-02-18T12:56:00.003Z

I've always loved the lore behind WoW. When it's there, that is. Sometimes they just write total drivvel, which doesn't count as lore in my books so can be ignored.

I like reading the texts that are lying around the place when I have a spare moment or two. I especially like finding new texts in old places. It has so far made me a little sad to find no new texts in Outland, despite many places where there are books lying around the place.

Some people I know don't actually know any of the lore, which I can't help feel diminishes the game in a number of fundamental ways. When you're fighting something and the lore is informing why you are fighting them, it makes the fight come alive and gives you purpose. Without the lore you're just grinding for gear, with the lore you can be doing anything, filling any number of heroic and not so heroic roles.

What I'm saying is that knowing a small amount of the lore behind certain things can sometimes mean what you're doing makes more sense. A lot of the lore of WoW is focused on binary opposites, which is standard narrative fare, but some of it makes clear that there isn't a right and a wrong side, there's just Us and Them. Some of the books take it as a core premise that We are the ones in the right. When you read some of the other texts they accept that They could have a point. When you read only one you come to one conclusion, but when you read both your perception can change.

Maybe I should be on an RP realm, but the pomp and ceremony I saw on the few I've been on totally puts me off. I like my lore in its place.

Patch 2.4

2008-02-16T11:31:00.004Z

Big Bear Butt posted this on his blog: PTR patch 2.4 changes to Primal Nether and Primal Vortex?

I have to say that news is making me really happy. It means that there will be a much greater chance for me to get items crafted and for me to craft items for other people. I don't get that many primal nether, so I don't craft nether requiring patterns for other people in case I need the nether myself. So this is going to be fantastic, people will be able to bring me all of the mats for a given pattern and I'll just combine them! Wonderful.

Guild Stuff

2008-02-16T10:23:00.000Z

So, I'm in a casual guild full of new players. I'm not sure if I should move right off the bat. I'm not really a casual player. I like being on every night. I liked when we were running Molten Core, Zul'Gurub and (later) Karazhan every night. I like that part of the game and I like doing that part of the game a lot.

Why am I still in said guild? Well the people are really nice and they made leveling to 70 quite pleasant. But (and there always is a but) I don't know if this is still a good guild for me to be in. I've been obsessively focused on getting to run Karazhan since hitting 70 and I, in my naive way, thought everyone else would be too.

But it doesn't seem to be the case. Factor in that the guild leader invited me to the guild when we were both level 40 and has only reached 66 in the time it has taken me to level to 70, get Earthwarde, get good enough gear to run heroics and keyed up for Kara long ago. The speed that the guy levels I actually imagine I could level another character to 70 by the time he finally breaks through that milestone.

If that's the calibre of the guild leader, is it really going to be the guild for me? I don't know. I'm starting to think it's not.

Links That I Use

2008-02-14T19:50:00.004Z

These are some useful links I use almost daily when playing WoW.

Allakhazam to check quest details and spawn locations for certain mobs. Also to check the best grind areas for a primal or other item I'm not used to farming.

WoW Wiki to find out more complicated information which is harder to search for on Allakhazam, or may not be in the comments for the things I am looking at. I also use WoW Wiki for enchant and gem information.

Wowhead if the comments on Allakhazam aren't helpful or if the information looks a little strange. I tend to find there is less information on Wowhead, but what there is tends to be of a higher quality.

Almost everyone knows them, but I wanted to make a post with them in anyway.

More on Arrogance

2008-02-14T18:52:00.003Z

Maybe I am just irrational, but I really hate people who exclaim about the ease of whatever encounter it is we happen to be about to do. Even if we out-gear the instance and are likely to find it easy. There's nothing that causes wipes more than arrogance.

When I was in my first real raiding guild we did a Righteous Orb run through Strat Living. Now, we'd downed Raggy and Hakkar that week and the guys were talking as if we were immortal. It was a full guild run and they were all laughing and joking about how we should make it at least a challenge and have me (mage) tank.

We wiped on the first lot of trash. We wiped hard.

The warrior said he'd start to use a one-hand and shield. We wiped again.

The healer said he'd stop trying to DPS, we agreed that would be very helpful.

Eventually, after a few more wipes and a lot more humility we managed to finsih the instance.

What I'm trying to say is, instances are easy so long as you respect them and accept that you still need to try.

When you have a mage (as I just had in my run) who seems morally opposed to the idea or re-sheeping, who boasts about how he needs to cut back on the damage because his DPS is so rocking (no, mate, you're pulling agro because you're starting with Pyro on a mob I've just pulled with Faerie Fire), who tells the other members of the run who've never been in before that Murmur is really easy, and who seems totally unable to follow the simple kill order (this is another reason you're pulling agro, you aren't hitting the target I'm actually tanking). When you have this mage in your group, you know it's going to go badly. You can't trust him for a start, because he wont re-sheep. You can't keep everyone focused because he's constantly bragging about how easy it all is. You can't keep the healer alive because you're all over the place trying to tank mobs which should be CCed, which the mage has activated and then Ice Blocked to get away from.

I get annoyed at players who make things harder through their arrogance. I try to approach each instance as if it could kill me, which it almost certainly can if I don't treat it with respect. I find this works well enough, as the tank can have a certain calming influence over the rest of the group. However, some days you're fighting a losing battle and the best you can do is to suck it up and keep swiping.

Bear Meets Kara

2008-02-14T12:31:00.002Z

As part of my own preparations for going to Karazhan I've been looking at suggested starting stats for druid tanks. I've found some wild variation, but I'm sure with a little digging and a little creative interpretation I'll find a combination that suits me.

Just for a matter of my own record, here are the minimum stats I've been given for druid tanking:

Defence: Most people agree that un-critable (415) is what you should aim for before setting foot in Kara. Some people say that 385 is enough to get started with. However, since I already have an over-abundance of defence which I'm looking to get rid of in favour of agility and stamina, I don't think this stat is that much of a problem for me at the moment.

Armour: Most are in agreement that you are looking at a base of 20k armour. A few say this is too low, but then they would. People like making things hard on themselves. I am over the 20k mark, so I'm happy with this stat for now.

Dodge: Opinions vary on how much dodge a druid tank needs. The low end says 25% while the high end opts for 30%. This is a stat I'm going to have to work on as I am below the low end of the spectrum.

Hit Points: Once again, opinions vary on just how many hit points you need for Karazhan. This is the area they seem to disagree on the most, however. The low end says 12k self-buffed, while the high end wants 18k un-buffed. That's a big difference. I think my health is okay to start Kara with though.

So, with a little work on getting my dodge up, I should be more than ready for Karazhan. Now, about getting the rest of the guild ready...

EDIT: With the addition of a couple of enchants I am now above the 25% dodge floor, not much above it mind, not much at all. I found that I get up to 44% with my own buffs (idol, badge and mark) and Blessing of Kings. Which is handy.

Damage Meters

2008-02-14T11:10:00.007Z

A lot of people hate damage meters but can't articulate the reason why. They just know, deep down, that the meter is a bad idea.

For me, the main reason damage meters are a bad idea is that most people can't read them. They look at the pretty bars it gives them and that's enough for them to make a judgement.

I had a situation where this became an issue in a Black Morass run I did the other day. There was a discussion over who should take the adds. I mentioned that I'd done it quite nicely with a rogue taking the adds a few times. The rogue didn't like this idea and said that she should be on the bosses because the hunter's DPS wasn't as good as hers. Looking at my damage meter I saw that, yes, the rogue was a small amount ahead of the hunter. However, if you factored in the beast mastery hunter's pet then the rogue was a substantial distance behind the hunter.

"Paladins are better raid healers than priests, look at the meters." Okay, I did. I looked and saw I was 4% behind the paladins. However, then I actally looked at why the rest of the raid had so much healing to their name. You know what? Their healing was actually mostly *my* healing, with a little bit of Improved Leader of the Pack thrown in for good measure. There were a few hundred thousand points of healing which was from my Prayer of Mending, but being counted as other people's healing. Even a few tens of thousands of points which were given to the paladins was actually my healing, my Prayer of Mending.

So, getting tired of people saying how it was such a shame that priests were no longer the best healers based on the damage meters, I did some math. I took all the Prayer of Mending healing (not the over-healing, just the 'enough' healing) away from everyone else, and added it to my count.

You know what? I was top. By a country mile. Even though I couldn't spam a single target for as long as the paladins could, even though I died more often than them because fade isn't actually any good at saving your life in a hell-for-leather healing zerg, I was top on actual healing done.

I told them this the next time they were bragging. They didn't take like it and said my Prayer of Mending and Renew were crap and didn't count. Why Renew had been brought into it I didn't know, maybe they were jealous that a real healer can do HoTs?

Be Imba

2008-02-14T00:55:00.007Z

I've had a day without WoW. It's been painful, but I've persevered and have, against all odds I might add, prevailed. I finished The Truth by Terry Pratchett and have started Night Watch by the same.

The reason for this WoW-free day? Well, it was the first of my tri-annual formatting days. The day where I trash every little thing on my hard drive and start again. I do this mostly because my computer starts to run like treacle on a cold day and I find I spend a lot of time on full rage and fear I may start swiping...

Formatting day tends to involve much hair-pulling and tears, because, as anyone who does it as infrequently as I do will know, formatting and re-installing is never a pain-free exercise. The machine gods demand you suffer as payment for allowing you to violate the mind of your computer... no, seriously...

Anyway, the part that took the longest was waiting for my girlfriend to remove the files she'd been hiding on my computer. Last time I formatted I'd told her not to hide files on my computer again because you never knew when it might occur to me to just blast the whole lot and start again. However, she did, and so I patently waited for her to rip it all to DVD/CD/Whatever.

Seven hours later we were ready to start formatting.

I can't complain, really. Without her the whole process would be near impossible. I'm not all that computer literate. I'd probably just have taken an axe to it if left to my own devices, then grunted in a cave-man-like fashion when it refused to cooperate and start making pretty colours and stuff again. My girlfriend, on the other hand, is amazing when it comes to computery stuff, a real wizard.

The funny part of the whole process, of course, is re-installing WoW. It's currently estimating that it's going to take 8 hours to download the current patch. Funny? I'm laughing my ass off.

Anyway, something more closely related to WoW, to justify this post. My girlfriend pointed me at this site. It's got a few quirky notions about what is needed by who, but on the whole it seems to be a fairly solid audit of your character and I imagine if it starts to get some traffic then its designers will put more work into it to make it even better... maybe.

It's shown me that not only don't the vast majority of my guild even have the Kara key yet, but that most of them would suck up the place even if they managed to get through the door. /sigh

Flight Form

2008-02-13T16:34:00.002Z

When I first started WoW I didn't know anything about the mounts. What had attracted me was the in-depth professions system, combined with the many favourable reviews I'd read about it.

When I discovered you could get a mount it interested me, but when someone mentioned how much they cost I was put off and decided that I'd probably not afford one for a long, long time. Then I hit on a money making scheme and the possibility of getting a horse became a reality. I dropped all of my money on my mount at level 40 (my money making scheme was that good). I was poor, but I was fast!

Then I heard that warlocks and paladins got a 'free' mount. A little digging and I found out that for the cost of a regular spell they got a mount, and I was upset. It was such a huge slice of money to me back then that I felt I'd worked hard for something that other classes got for nothing (or next to nothing).

Then it filtered through to me that they did a quest and got and epic mount, and the unfairness of it consumed me. I took consolation in the fact that my money making scheme was still bringing in the gold and I would have my epic mount money soon enough.

Now I am playing a class that gets Flight Form. I got it at level 68, two levels before every other class. And I got it for 7g. The riding skill and effectively a mount (although, an instant cast mount) for 7g.

I love it! I am not complaining, just boggling at how unfair it is for me to get a 60% mount which can fly and is instant cast, for 7g. Compared to my priest who had to scrimp and save and do a lot of grinding after reaching level 70 in order to get together the 900g for his skill and mount, I think the 7g on mount and skill for druids really needs to be re-evaluated. There are so many advantages to Flight Form that it's just ridicules. For example, you can't be stunned out of Flight Form and you can jump off a cliff and cast it as you fall.

Who would choose a flying mount over Flight Form? No one. So why is Flight Form less than 1% of the price? Only Blizzard could answer that.

King of the Ogres

2008-02-13T15:31:00.004Z

When I was questing in Blade's Edge Mountains I saw the announcement that someone had become King of the Ogres. Ever since then I wanted to do the quest chain and become King of the Ogres myself.

Yesterday I achieved my goal. I became the ogre's new king. And it was great!

Now, it's not the most amazingly difficult achievement. In fact, it's necessary if you want to work on your reputation with Ogri'la and the Skyguard, although, less so for the Skyguard. However, I was so pleased that I was beaming.

Really, it's a nothing achievement, it simply is the first step on a road to another target. But for me it was always a goal in itself. I wanted it so much, almost as much as I wanted Earthwarden.

The actuality of it was not disappointing either. It was great. I ran around the large party, laughing as they knelt and chatted and danced. I drank some of the ogre beer, then some of the ogre coffee because I don't like the WoW drunk effect.

For something so simple, it was one of the most fun things I've done recently on WoW. It's such a shame it had to end, really.

From the Tank's Eye View

2008-02-11T12:34:00.001Z

After writing my thoughts on tanks from a holy priests point of view, I thought I'd write my thoughts on healers from a feral druid's point of view. My initial reaction when I came to the idea was: "wow, that's a short post, just 'whoever keeps me alive so I can do my job'", but I thought a little more on it and decided I'd go through each class and give some of my thoughts and opinions.

Holy Priests

Although I am leaving myself open to accusations of bias again, I'd have to say my favourite healing class is the priest. He has such a wide variety of healing powers and such a deep bag of different tricks that, if given full choice, I'd take a holy priest over any of the other healing classes any day.

Priests have their weaknesses, such as how useless fade is, but their strengths more than make up for these short-falls. Being able to have a buff flying around the group, healing for a lot each time people take damage is wonderful, as is the fact it doesn't give the healer threat, it gives the threat to the healed.

Priests may have some longevity issues in a full-on melee situation, but every class will come to a point where they can't heal any more, and the priest will often have done a much better job at keeping everyone's health up before then.

With a priest I feel safe (until the priest proves to be bad at their class). If they're firing off a Prayer of Mending onto me before each pull I feel doubly safe. I have a priest here who knows their abilities and knows how easy it is to snatch agro on the pull with a few heals, so they're giving me the initial heal agro by making their first heal be a Prayer of Mending heal. The only other ability that comes close to doing this to my knowledge is Earth Shield, which is nowhere near as powerful as Prayer of Mending, from my tankish point of view.

Finally, a priest that doesn't know how and when to use their powerful abilities, such as Prayer of Mending, and/or whose gear isn't up to scratch could be a liability to the party, but you've still got a solid healer there and you can coax them into using their abilities properly.

Holy Paladins

All the time I was leveling my priest I was hearing about how paladins were the only healer worth taking anywhere. It made me a little upset that I had put all this effort in (and that there was still more effort to be put in) and that it would all be wasted. So it came as a relief when I still got groups. Moreover it was a relief when I was a good group healer.

From the point of view of a tank, paladins are great, until the crap hits the fan. I have had many wipes because the paladin tried to keep another member of the group alive against AoE damage and didn't get back to healing me in time. I've also had a number of wipes because the paladin's use of down-ranked heals - they were healing to stay on full mana, not keep me on full health, d'oh.

The utility of a paladin healer isn't great. Sure they can heal until the cows come home, and then some, but only in a serious, going-to-keep-you-alive kind of way on a single target. Once you start having them heal multiple targets they have to up-rank their heals and they no longer fulfill on of their major selling points.

Of course, the paladin's real advantage is her bubble. When she pulls the heat off of you, all she has to do is pop her bubble and it will come waltzing right back like some kind of forgetful puppy, with really large teeth.

I like paladin healers, don't get me wrong about that. But I accept they have their limits and that I have to work that little bit harder to make sure they're only healing me.

Restoration Shamans

Shaman fall into two very extreme categories: those who suck harder than a suped-up turbo Dyson, and those who heal like gods.

The defining point separating the two extremes is how they use their abilities. The worst tend not to make full use of all of their powers, don't pop down totems, don't use Earth Shield (indeed, may not have Earth Shield), etc.

I really like being healed by a shaman with skill and understanding of his class. The other shamans can go take the long walk.

Sadly, the good shamans are few and far between and if you find one, friend him.

Restoration Druids

I have a problem with druids. Their abilities seem to be focused on healing tomorrow, rather than healing today. They've a wealth of heal over time abilities, some really strong ones and some fiddly to use ones. But they seem to lack the very thing that makes a paladin great - solid chunks of healing in response to damage taken.

Druid healers seem to have to predict when I'll be in the greatest need for a heal and then place healing on me to fill that need ahead of me taking the damage, which is a precarious position to be in. To be blunt, I don't trust druid healers.

I've had some really bad experiences with restoration druids, and a couple of nice ones. On the whole I'd take a restoration druid, but I'd be thinking about a holy priest.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I'd rank the healers in this order:

Holy Priest

Great Resto Shaman

Holy Paladin

Resto Shaman

Resto Druid

You may well disagree with me on that ordering, but such is life. Everyone has their opinions.

Karazhan, PUG?

2008-02-10T10:18:00.001Z

Normally I wouldn't answer a request to go on a Karazhan run. Especially when that request comes over the trade channel. However, on this occasion I wanted to go, since it had been so long since I had run Kara.

It seemed like it was going to be an okay run. I'd only seen the one PUG request for one member so I assumed (ass out of u and me?) it was going to be a guild run with one member short. Oh boy was I wrong. I checked three members at random and they were all from the same guild so I left it at that and started the hike to Karazhan.

I should remember to check fully before starting these things. About half way to Kara someone mentioned that they'd already downed a couple of bosses. Now, although this is sub-optimal from my point of view, I can deal with that. Then, as I was flying to Swamp of Sorrows, I decided to start checking which classes we had in the raid. Then I start to notice that I am not the only member of this group in a different guild. Four guilds in total.

So, there I am, on my way to PUG Kara and hating the idea. However, because I'm a bit of a push-over I decide to give it a go. I figure I can just leave if we wipe too hard on the trash.

So, we get to Kara and do what seems to be the obligatory 'waiting for someone to finish their battle ground' (why? If you want to instance, instance, if you want to PvP then PvP, don't try to do both at the same time, please).

Then the really fun part starts. The guild can't remember how far they got last time, so in we run. Attumen? Dead. Moroes? Partying in hell. Maiden? Finished. We run further and further in, past empty room after empty room and this sinking feeling starts in the pit of my stomach. Opera event? Done. Curator? Down. On and on we run, until finally there is no more instance left to run to. The entire place is finished, kaput.

Most of the members are from one guild and they're in uproar. They'd never cleared Curator, so how did the entire instance get cleared? Well, I imagine it's because on of your PUG members had already cleared it. Either that or Blizzard has decided that two saved people going into different raids is bad and it should simply nuke the instance.

On the bright side I got to see the very end of Kara, which my old guild had never got to, so that was nice.

That's soooo easy...

2008-02-10T01:45:00.000Z

A little rant, since it's one in the morning and I'm feeling a little cranky and tired. I wish people would just keep their belittling comments to themselves. Saying something in WoW is sooooo easy isn't really warranted. Nothing in WoW is brain surgery, or even rocket science for that matter.

Sure, running five instances for Kara attunement isn't akin to planning the invasion of Normandy, but it's a substantial time commitment, which for more casual gamers isn't something to be sniffed at or looked down on. If you have two hours a night/every other night to play in then getting those five runs can take weeks or even months.

Sure, the instances themselves aren't impossibly hard, sure if you have a heroic level character then you're not going to find the normal level instances on that character hard. But they might be a little different and a little more challenging if you're new to the game, as 90% of the guild is (or at least, 90% of the guild plays like they are new to the game, even when they boast about their level 70 alts).

I guess the thing that put me in this fine mood, if I'm honest, is the instance run I just did with a melee hunter... or to use the colloquialism, a melee huntard. It was supposed to be a lovely run, full guild, no PUG members. But, seriously, he was the worst hunter ever. Ever. He fired off three or four shots on the mob I'd just pulled with fairy fire feral, thus snatching the agro from the start. He ran in when I was taking multiple mobs and dropped fire traps and then stood there hitting the mob in melee (62% of overall damage done by the huntard was melee, third highest ability was raptor strike). It was just a comedy of errors.

Fortunately I was a level 70, we had a really good holy paladin healer and the instance was only Slave Pens, so nothing really went terribly wrong.

I find it hard to tell someone not to do something, though. Especially if it's not causing deaths. It means that the thing giving me an ulcer carries on happening, but I can deal with that, sort of. I just don't feel right saying "stop doing X, start doing Y, I know how to play your class better than you do, froob." Mainly because I hate when people tell me things like that (especially since they are normally the people I perceive to be the one causing all the groups problems).

I often wonder if it's normal to feel I can't try to correct someone's bad playing style, just because I am too high level for the instance and therefore able to pull the group through the tight spots that person is creating. If it were a close call each time, in a group of the right level for the instance, then I'd say something for the good of the run. But if I'm boosting/tanking a low 60's instance then I let it go and hold my tongue.

Karazhan Key Attunement

2008-02-09T22:02:00.000Z

Since we have a lot of new players in our guild I decided I would attempt to write a walk-through for the Karazhan key attunement quest chain. Not that the one on WoW Wiki isn't perfectly fine, of course.

If you want to follow mine, or any other Karazhan attunement guide, I would advise reading through the whole thing before you set off so that you are familiar with the steps you need to take to get the key. For example, if you read the whole thing you'll know you need to run the Caverns of Time: Durnholde (Old Hillsbrad Foothills) instance, but that it doesn't matter at which point you do. This information might mean you can easily slip into a group which is looking for one more, rather than getting to that stage and needing to make your own group from scratch.

The quest chain starts in Deadwind Pass (between Duskwood and Swamp of Sorrows), outside the Karazhan instance. An NPC there, called Archmage Alturus, will give you the quests Arcane Disturbances and Restless Activity. They both involve the same area, just under Karazhan. One requires you to get ten Ghostly Essence, the other requires you to take some readings of a well and a pond. To get the readings you need to go down two hatches near Archmage Alturus, one to the north of the other. You fight your way down the trapdoors and at the end of one underground area there is a well and at the end of the other is a lake. Once you've got your essences and readings you can return to Alturus.

The next step is to take Alturus' report to Archmage Cedric on the shore to the north of Dalaran (the huge candyfloss bubble to the south of Undercity and west of Tarren Mill in Alterac Mountains). This step is easy enough, just a little time consuming as you have to travel from Deadwind Pass to Alterac. These things are sent to try us and we must be equal to the challenge!

Once Cedric has played his minor part you are shipped off to Shattrath to speak with Khadgar (he is located in the middle of the Terrace of Light with A'dal and is the guy who made you follow his stupid elemental guide before choosing which faction in Shat you wanted to work with).

Khadgar will give you the quest Entry Into Karazhan, which requires you to go into the Auchindoun instance, Shadow Labyrinth. If you get a group to this instance and you fail to down Murmur, you can still get the key fragment as you wont agro Murmur if you just run around him to the left, get up on the ledge and open the container. Almost every single group I've ever been in has been more than happy to take out the arcane guardian so don't worry about not getting it done. Even if most of the group doesn't want to help you it's a really weak elite which can be soloed by the right classes. To get into Shadow Labyrinth at least one member of your group must have the Shadow Labyrinth Key or a rogue with a 350 lockpicking level. You can easily get the key from Talon King Ikiss in Sethekk Halls.

Khadgar will then send you off to find The Second and Third Fragments which are in the Steamvaults (Coilfang Reservoir) and the Arcatraz (Tempest Keep) respectively. The Steamvaults doesn't require anything special to get into. The second container is in at the bottom of the lake next to the room in which you fight the first boss. The Arcatraz is a little more tricky. You need at least one person in the group with the Key to the Arcatraz (or a rogue, again with 350 lockpicking), which you get by doing the quest chain starting in Area 52 with Consortium Crystal Collection and ending with How to Break Into the Arcatraz given by A'dal, which requires you to run the Botanica and the Mechanar. You will also need a flying mount to get to the Arcatraz, as you can't be summoned there. The container for the key fragment in the Arcatraz is in a room full of large void elementals, just around the corner from where you enter the room. Both the second and third guardians are easily soloable if your group clears the instance and doesn't want to help you get the fragments, not that that has actually ever happened to me.

Once you have completed that stage, Khadgar will send you off to the Black Morass in the Caverns of Time in Tanaris to get The Master's Touch. To gain access to the Black Morass you'll need to be attuned, which requires you to have completed the quest to free Thrall in the Old Hillsbrad Foothills instance in the Caverns of Time. Entrance into which requires you to have followed an NPC around the Caverns of Time (which you might want to do before you start looking for a group so you don't hold things up).

Once the master has touched your key (or rather, given you his own key) then you just need to return to Khadgar, slap him* for the hoops he made you jump through and complete the quest: Return to Khadgar. Congratulations, you now have your very own, shiny Master's Key and are totally attuned for Karazhan.

The Kara key attunement process can be a total pain. If you want to be self sufficient (as I did the first time I got attuned) then you must run eight instances and do a very long side quest chain for the Arcatraz key. The minimum number of five man instances you have to run is five (you don't have to get the Shadow Labs or Arcatraz keys, someone else will probably have them, not guaranteed, but likely) which is still a large slice of time.

--
* Surgeon General's health warning, slapping Khadgar may be a life limiting move and may lead to, amongst other things: lung cancer, heart disease, brain tumours, obesity, cirrhosis of the liver, skin cancer, kidney failure, kidney stones and fireballs to the face.

Healing preferences

2008-02-09T15:34:00.000Z

I was often asked as a holy priest which tanking class I preferred healing for. It was never a very difficult question, I'd say druid every time.

It's not that I think warriors or paladins are terrible tanks, they have their place and they can do some jobs very well. However, for general purpose, Swiss Army tanking (such as one finds in almost every instance), I'd choose a druid.

For a start, the druid ability Swipe is much more powerful and versatile than Cleave. Swipe is also better, in my opinion, than Consecration, which I never found held threat off of me well enough while I was spam healing the paladin.

Now, I know I am opening myself up to accusations that I've 'never met a good pala/warrior tank', but is that really likely? Is it honestly possible that I ran instances and healed for months and months, meeting druid tank after druid tank that could keep the agro off of me in almost all situations, and never once met a 'good' paladin or warrior tank? Really? I'll save you the effort, no it's not. I met good paladin and warrior tanks. They just weren't as good as the worst of the druid tanks I met.

"But LFM," I hear you cry, "you are just biased because you are a druid tank!" It could be the case. However, I was answering that question long before Ghosthoof was even a twinkle in my eye. In the argument about this particular chicken and egg, the preference for healing druids came first and the creation and leveling of a druid tank came a shockingly distant second.

I hope that has put to rest some of the initial cries of outrage.

I'd like you to know that my definition of a good tank requires the fulfillment of three criteria:

Can take the hits the instance dishes out

Can keep the mobs from hitting me

Gives me an easy time healing

On all three criteria the druid class reigns supreme. I know points one and three might appear to be the same thing, but point three is more to do with attitude and competence. If the tank constantly pulls the mobs around corners so I can't see them to heal, requiring me to constantly move around to get position, then they fail at point three, while probably being able to succeed on point one.

So there you have it, part of the dual reason that Ghosthoof exists.

Feral Druids, some thoughts

2008-02-09T14:57:00.000Z

For me there is only one choice when it comes to druids: Feral.

I know balance can put out good DPS and that restoration is good for PvP healing, but neither is as much fun as being a feral druid.

With my feral druid I need one kit (I keep two, but I rarely switch out of my tanking gear). I don't need to switch out of cat form when I'm grinding because Improved Leader of the Pack means I am healing myself for about as much as the mobs I am grinding are hitting me for. I can two-man-tank UBRS and LBRS without a healer for the same reason. Mangle packs a meaty punch and if Omen of Clarity pops are the right moment (as it often does) I can Mangle four times in a row and then either Rip if they have over 3k health left (highly unlikely) or Ferocious Bite to kill them off (max crit on Bite for my Ghosthoof so far is over 3.2k). I often kill level 70 mobs before the 10 second cool down on my Prowl is ready, which is only a problem in very crowded areas.

Tanking as a feral druid is a dream also. With Feral Charge, Mangle and Swipe I find re-acquisition of threat to be easy, while Mangle, Maul and Lacerate mean keeping threat is a breeze. Combine these abilities with Frenzied Regeneration, so I can heal myself in a pinch, Improved Leader of the Pack, meaning I am healing myself for around 600 - 750 (depending on buffs) each time I crit, and the Primal Fury talent, giving me 5 rage each time I crit, and you have a threat generating machine. I can even hit myself up with Regrowth (and Rejuvenation if I feel the need) before I pull, which allows the healer to hold off healing for those precious few seconds at the start, thus keeping all the agro on me.

In my opinion, all of these points taken together make feral druids the best specialisation for the druid class.

Looking for more?

2008-02-09T13:13:00.000Z

Hello world.

I have started this blog with the intention of posting comments about the feral druid class, the holy priest class and on my experiences in instances with them.

First there needs to be a little about my characters.

My first main character was Samirah. She was a human frost mage on the Kilrogg (EU) server. I experienced my first raids with Samirah and it's a little sad that she is so neglected now. However, I have moved on and she must make way for the New Order of Things. With Samirah I cleared Molten Core, Zul'Gurub and Onyxia, got to the last boss in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj and made a start on Blackwing Lair. After TBC came out Samirah went very much onto the back burner where she has remained ever since.

Sleeter is my holy priest. I've run Karazhan with him and we got as far as Prince Malchezaar/Nightbane. I found healing as a holy priest in Karazhan to be a little disheartening until I learnt how to read the healing meters (about which I am planning to post later). After which I was very content with my choice.

Finally I made Ghosthoof my feral druid on the advice of my girlfriend. I absolutely loved being a feral druid and he is now my main. Feral druids have the major advantage of having acres of health and the ability to do good damage even in taking gear. Ghosthoof hasn't been in any raids yet, but I feel I am at a point with him that I can start Karazhan. I thought that following his progress through the dusty halls of Kara might be fun, which was the main impetus behind starting this blog.

Anyway, there is your introductory post. Hello world.