The forgotten few

Before I began my raiding career, I read a lot of blogs and I still do. In reading them I came to a point confident in the knowledge that everything that I need to know as a raiding feral druid to maximize my potential, be it for tanking or be it for dps. However imagine my suprise when I realize that there are things that are not often mentioned and to date I am yet to read about them at another blog.

Now there have been several blog posts on :

1) Potions/Elixirs/Flasks

2) Enchants

3) Gems

4) Armor Kits

But these permanent/temporary enhancements to our abilities are not all of them. There are 2 more that are there to help in our output.

1) Adamantite Weightstone :
Description: Increase blunt weapon damage by 12 and add 14 critical hit rating for 1 hour

Requirements: 2 x Netherweave Cloth, 1 x Adamantite Bar , 1 x Blacksmith with 350 Blacksmithing

Pros: Until Patch 2.4 the initial part of the +12 damage didn't apply to us in feral forms, even so the 14 critical hit rating did and thats a significant enough boost to not forgo. However post 2.4 the +12 damage also gets added. This extra damage results in more threat as a tank and more dps as a kitty. The crit rating coupled with Primal Fury mean extra rage while tanking (again a plus) and extra combo points while kitty-ing (more rips).

Cons: Since you aren't going to pursue Blacksmithing as a druid you are going to need a really good Blacksmith as a buddy, look at the warriors in your guild as possible targets. Chummy up and hope for a free hand me down.

2) Greater Rune of Warding:
Description: Enchant a piece of chest armor so it has a 25% chance per hit of giving you 400 points of physical damage absorption. 90 sec. cooldown. Lasts for 1 hour.

Requirements: 1 x Khorium Bar , 1 x Blacksmith with 350 Blacksmithing

Pros: It doesn't overwrite your permanent enchantment, persists through death and under ideal conditions can provide over 10k of damage absorption over the course of its effect. As a tank less damage taken can be the difference between life and death and every little bit counts towards a successful guild first or another wipe. Its requirements being low make it all the more lucrative.

Cons: 10k~ish damage absorption over 90 mins, c'mon the first boss in a 25 man hits me for about 3k damage....every couple of seconds. You also need a Blacksmith friend for this.

Now thats all I have on me for now and the second one may even be laughable, but considering that its 10-16k damage that a healer doesn't need to heal me for and can save 2-3 squishies with that makes it somewhat worthwhile....somewhat. On the whole this is meant to illustrate that we need to think outside the box and find things to maximize our potential. For example think of doing World PvP buffs in the areas you are raiding in. Say Hellfire Superiority while attempting Magetheridon. So all of you go out there and give it your best.

Kael'thas down

You know.....the half dead one.

So anyway after yesterday's rather downer of a post I decided to post something about the recent addition to WoW, namely the Isle of Quel'Danas (can't the blood elves use easier to remember names).

So anyway I get home from work last night, turn on WoW and let the computer download the latest patch....all 261 MB of it. Fortunately most it must have been downloaded earlier via the background downloader, since the first 250 odd MB of it seemed to download nearly instantly. Yipee. Well anyway I patiently allowed the rest of the patch to download and install and agree to the Terms of Enslavement...skipping through the details of the terms and just praying that somewhere in between Blizzard didn't put in anything that legally bound me to owing them my next 7 generations, not like MMO players get laid anyway for those generations to come into existence.

So anyway, I log in, pick up a couple of quests in Shattarath for this Isle, take the portal to silvermoon, take the wyvern to the Isle (WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CAN'T WE USE FLIGHT FORM IN OUTLAND.....WHY....WHY?). Land, talk to the people I need to, clear my quest log for these new quests, start doing a couple of dailies.....Kill stealing, you know the usual. So finally a couple of friends in my guild wonder if anyone wants to do Magister's Terrace. Now being the only available tank (the other one was already doing it with another group), I agree to check out the new place. So we get a group together, Me (feral druid/tank), a fury warrior, an affliction lock, a frost mage and a discipline priest. The lock and the mage were alts and were mostly blues and greens. Nonetheless, we do the summons, head on it and start.

My first impression was that it looks outdoorsy, can I use root...NO, travel form.....No dumbass, this sucks....oo shiny. So this was the first time I was doing an instance without any clue about mobs or bosses. So taking the names at face value was my only choice. Physician = Doctor or something (keel him, cause he probably heals and also must be a range attacker like a priest), blood knight oh must be a melee guy like a warrior, warlock...warlock, blood mage, must be a mage...etc. Ok turned out the blood knight can heal, the physician melees and so does the blood mage. Fine be that way. There are a couple other funky mobs like the Naga witch who does ranged attacks and uses forked lightning attacks, an ethereal smuggler who randomly teleports near a player and casts arcane explosion really fast...etc etc.

My last impression of this place was that the trash is harder than the bosses. The pulls usually involve 4+ mobs. The final pull before Kael is actually a 6 pull. A tanks nightmare with only one proper CC, and the kicker is that you are more likely to die on trash than on the boss. We 1 shotted the first boss, 2 shotted the next 2 bosses and 1 shotted Kael. But we died atleast 5 times to the trash, including 3 to the penultimate pull.

Since most of the strats are already online, I'll only mention minor details here and there.

Selin Fireheart:

The first boss is very much like the final boss of Steamvaults, every now and then he channels from a floating crystal and gains mana, its time to attack the crystal and dps it down fast, before he gets enough mana. Once its destroyed he spams a sort of AoE attack like arcane explosion until his mana runs out. His mana starts at 0 to begin with, so its not too hard as long as the floating crystals are taken down.

Vexallus:

The second boss is in a room full of mana worms, its truly a beautiful sight for the first time. Its also in this room that you find the body of the guy whos the quest objective for the Magister's terrace quest to unlock its Heroic mode. By full I mean like 30+ mana worms, luckily for us they are non-elites. A tanks needs to pull em, and the dps AoE's them down. The plus side is they give the magic dps a buff which increases their damage output. When you pull about 10-15 or so will come at a time, so don't be alarmed. There are basically just 2 of these big pulls but nothing hard at all. Your clothies may die, but well who told them to wear cloth armor. This brings us to the second boss, he's basically like Curator if you have ever done him. I used my Violet badge to resist some of the arcane damage he dishes out. Every couple of seconds he lets loose an orb of electricity or something which needs to be dps-ed down, while the tank tanks the boss. At 10% he goes into some sort of overload and spams an arcane explosion kinda ability, except that it does 1k damage, has infinite range and adds a debuff which increases damage taken by 10%. So well kill him and fast. Also make sure you come into this stage with high or full HP.

Priestess Delrissa:

The third boss is in a large courtyard kinda room with 4 adds. You need to clear the front half of the courtyard before pulling her. If like us you try to kill the mobs on her side of the courtyard you risk pulling her, in our first attempt we decided to clear the entire courtyard but the moment we attack the mobs on the left side of her, she got pulled as well. It may be possible to pull them without pulling her, but its avoidable. Anyway this boss is a mayhem fight, the 4 adds with the boss are random and can sometimes be resistant to CC. Treating this like a 5v5 PvP match I hear works best and some tanks may consider donning their PvP gear. I remained in my tanking gear for the majority of this fight and made sure that there was no aggro on the clothies as best as I could. The boss is ridiculously easy to kill if you focus fire her, but its the adds that can kill your clothies really fast. I suggest that a tank handles the melee guys while the priestess and the casters get killed by the casters. There was a lot of mayhem during our attempt and I have nothing of use to share. We got a shaman, a fury warrior, a warlock and a rogue. The shaman heals and removes buffs. The warrior pummels and occasionally fears. The warlock has an imp pet and fears, the rogue uses vanish, cheap shot the usual. Keeping the rogue away from the clothies was key.

After this you come up to the dreaded 6 pack. 1 blood knight, 1 blood mage, 1 warlock, 1 naga witch, 1 ethereal smuggler and 1 sister of torment. We died to them thrice....thrice. So our winning strat, we pulled them down the narrow hallway at the end of which they stand, and I tanked the blood knight and the blood mage for the most part. The sister of torment was banished. The naga witch was sheeped and the ethereal was feared. The lock I believe my dps dispatched fast, so he was basically not a concern. My god the mayhem.

Kael'thas Sunstrider:

This brings us to Kael'thas, a shadow of his former self. For the most part he is a tank and spank fight until you hit the second phase. In the first phase he spawns a phoenix hatchling which does AoE fire damage and explodes when killed. Umm.....NO MELEE AT ALL. We had the warlock kite him while he and the mage burnt him down. Me and the fury warrior beat upon Kael the whole while. Now at 50% I believe he goes into Phase 2. No more phoenix. Instead there is a gravity lapse, making it very melee unfriendly, not to mention orbs, huge orbs that you need to avoid at all costs. He also seemed to be doing a constant damage to the party which resulted in a dead healer. Thankfully no longer needed for tanking, I rezzed the healer and threw a tranquility on the party. The healer died, the warrior died, I died, the warlock died, Kael died, the mage died....wait what...yup both the mage and Kael exchanged killing blows to help with finishing Magister's Terrace. Kael dropped the cloak of blade turning...yipee.....NOT. Drop something useful next time n00b.

For the rest of the instance remember:
1)Stay out of the purple bubbles
2)Locks cannot be feared
3)Isn't too hard except for trash and Kael

Best of luck in your endeavors and happy hunting.

The up swings and the down swings

Now I know everyone is caught up in the excitement that is patch 2.4 but seeing as how my more accomplished bloggers have traversed every possible detail there is to be seen I let myself get distracted away from WoW for a day and talk about something else entirely. For those who want a happy and WoW related read, pass this by and come by again when I have something of interest to say.

Today I was reading an article on CNN's website.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/news/0803/gallery.real_stories/index.html
This article chronicled the stories of multiple folks who have been facing the effects of the current downturn in our economy. Now it is of no surprise to us folks that the economy is in a state of recession. Many fear to say it, other deny its very existence but market trends indicate that such is the case. I am not a student of economics but I surely don't want to be searching for a job right now. The reason I am writing this article is to discuss the spending habits of Americans and their reasoning behind it.

I am not American by birth or citizenship or nationality. But after having been here this long I have noticed a trend amongst Americans (I don't mean to generalize here but this is what I have often observed) to spend far beyond their means. For example, a person gets a good job, they go and buy a good car. That may or may not be perceived as spending beyond their means but for a person who staunchly refuses to believe in job security (believe me there is none) this classifies as spending beyond their means. For me spending within means would mean that I have enough money in my bank to pay for that car twice over, i.e. If the car costs 15k, I have 30k in my bank a/c. Before having such significant savings for it, I wouldn't even contemplate buying that car. Even back when I was making as much as 70k /yr I didn't buy a car, instead I used the bus service, which was a royal pain, but in the end when I did buy my car I had the satisfaction of knowing that the car was something I could easily afford.

Now applying the same thought to buying a house almost negated a purchase, considering that houses often sell for 400K or more. I don't have 1 million sitting in my bank account, yes I sure wish I did but that is not the case. Buying a house is a far more complex decision in my opinion and not one that can be easily broken down for the layman. There are those who swear by renting, but many financial pundits agree that buying is the smarter choice on the long run. However recently there were often articles stating that this is the best time to be renting seeing the constantly dropping prices of homes. Such conflicting stories leave much to be desired and often result in very very confused buyers. So how does one decide when is the right time to buy?

Buy Low Sell High

Probably one of the most oft used comment in trading and economics. But is it really easy to find out how and when prices are going to fluctuate? No. There are several economic indicators but most if not all are hard to find and capitalize on. Another oft used saying is "Buy when theres blood on the streets" first used by Baron Rothschild, which in simple terms encourages to make purchases in times of recession. How does that make sense? many would ask and many could be right. The only reason to think otherwise is optimism. Depression, inflation etc are all market fluctuations that take place to stabilize the market. Say for example someone sells a car for 300k (far more than its worth) and along comes another car maker offering a car just like it for 30k, suddenly a person who earns 60k can afford one and his purchasing power increases, the company that made cars for 300k now lays off people because of losses, it becomes an employers market, salaries drop as a result and the market tried to readjust resulting in a depression and finally stabilizing. This basically means that assuming a straight line for where the economy should be we see crests and troughs, and buying when we are at a trough makes the most obvious choice. So since in times of recession prices are bound to be at their lowest and hence at the ripest for purchase. Take for example the current situation of Bear Stern, last year it was selling at 170+$ a share, now its valued at 2$ a share, and guess who's buying it....take a moment....read the news...yes its JP Morgan, yes they have some federal backing but they are buying it at 5 times the value. Consider this, people who bought the stocks at its lowest a week ago at 2$ a share are now posting a 400% profit....in a time of recession.

There are several things to consider while making purchases, job security, market knowledge and financial backing. Purchasing a house is also an investment of sorts, buy a house at its lowest and in a ripe neighborhood and within a couple of years post your own profits. But it at the wrong time and lose money the next day. Either way its makes for the wisest of financial planning for purchases, impulsiveness when it comes to big buys can often result in teary eyed credit situation and eviction.

The economy affects us as much as we affect it. It is a widely stated belief that the current depression is in no small part because of the housing boom, where people bought houses for which they couldn't pay and our financial institutions ended up with millions of defaulted loans, numerous laid off as a result of loses and furious investors.People have to place some blame on themselves and not just blame business and the government. People spend too much money, borrow too much and don't save for slow times or when an emergency comes up.

I know many, if not all, of the readers will curse me and call me out on my lack of knowledge but today I felt like discussing the economy and how it affects us and more importantly how we affect it. It helps to know that making wise buying decisions can mean the difference between keeping you job tomorrow or ending up with another bankruptcy story on cnn.com.

Think about it.

Boar Pets are OP

I shamelessly stole this off the official WoW forums but hopefully its funny enough that you guys will forgive this transgression on my behalf. The OP claims that boar pets for hunters are OP....(see what I did there...umm nvm) and as proof gives the following flowchart.

Another poster in the same thread makes a remark that made me laugh, "I had a boar pet but then I got hungry.....Ummm Bacon."

Strat Guide: Lurker Below

Seeing how my guild along with a wee bit of my assistance managed to down the Lurker last night, I thought I'd post a strat guide on how to best deal with him. This guide is also enlightening for people with a bit o' lag and how to overcome it for teh winz.
Last night started well for the most part with me logging in to be the 24th raider in the raid group (seeing that I log in late for the thursday raids regularly, something which my guild officers are well aware of), something which hasn't happened before, I was pleasantly surprised and had a feeling in my gut that tonight was the night. So I log on, fly to SSC, while my guild clears the first 3 sets of trash pulls. I come in help tank the next few, but teh intehnet was not on my side, I was plagued by constant spike lags, random dc's, and all other things satanic. So I asked another feral druid in our guild to tank in my place while I kitty pew-pew-ed, since as kitty my dc wont wipe the raid.

So we clear the trash and head on towards the big boss man, again I ask to kitty, but the first coupla attempts my lag spikes result in me coming back to see "You are dead" message. This really begins to tick me off and I ask the raid to replace me in favor of someone who can actually do some DPS in this situation. Anyhow they ask me to reboot and I end up wiring my internet connection, reseting the modem, and restarting. Much better, plus my uber dps always sees us through the rough patches.

So since I'm melee I stand on the middle island, right opposite the MT, who tanks with his back towards a wall, so that spouts and whirls dont knock him into oblivion and beyond. All melee get salvation, all ranged get dps enhancing buffs. Why you ask, well Lurker does not attack ranged unless there are no melee alive, in which case is pretty much a wipe cause then he shoots water bullets or something which are extremely high damage and result in one hit kills. So melee --- Blessing of Salvation, ranged --- Blessing of uber dps. Also even though this is a given, even with salv give the MT a coupla seconds to build aggro or like some of our fury warriors (you know who you are) you will be eating dirt real fast, along with slowing down the dps of the raid. So now you dps. But is that all....of course not, theres a lot more. Lurker has 2 abilities to watch out for:
1) Whirl: Its basically a knockback to the players on the middle platform (where Lurker spawns) along with high damage, 3-4k on leather. For melee you can either

a)Stand right up close to him that the scalding water is just one step ahead, this way the knockback will still leave you on the platform, instead of knocking you back into the water. (Recommended for those with lag, pray your healers like you)

b)Using DBM time your run to the extreme outside edge of the platform and not get the knockback or the damage.
For ranged dps and healers standing on the middle platform, always stand towards the outside edge.

2)Spout: This is generally the raid killing ability of the Lurker. Its heavy damage, can be upwards of 10k, and knocks you far away from the raid and into the hungry bowels of the scalding water with a 500 damage every 3 second tick, low on health and heavy damage = kiss your furry a$$ goodbye. This is generally preceeded by a "Lurker takes a deep breath" Raid warning followed by either a clockwise or anti-clockwise spout which he does for slightly over 360 degrees. Now for this there are 2 options for those on the middle platform

a)Dps while standing behind him, and the moment he starts spouting run in the same direction while sticking to the inner edge, this way you can continue damaging him, as well as outrunning the spout. (Note: You cannot outrun the spout without the half a circle lead without using some speed enhancing abilities, I wouldn't suggest you try either.)

b)Jump into the water while the spout passes over you.

c)(What I did as a result of spike lags) Jump into the water in front of you, remember you can dps while in the water, blew my trinks and dpsed him hard, he follows his spout by a whirl which landed me perfectly back on the platform. (Recommended for folks with lag spikes)

3)Enrage: He doesn't enrage so this fight isn't time dependant. Survival is key.

Now that you know about the abilities, its time to discuss the phases. This fight has 2 phases that alternate until the Lurker is dead.

Phase 1: Lurker is above water, being a jerk, not pleased at being made a fool of and being fished up.

Phase 2: Lurker decides hes lazy, so he submerges and sends in his minions, 3 Coilfang Guardians on the middle island, and 2 ranged coilfang somethings(Ranged dps who use multi shot if no one is in melee range) on the outside 3 islands. They are all CC-able. All of them. As a result the outside islands usually have locks and hunters to CC and dps them down. The inner islands are a different story. Generally 3 tanks pick up one each of the Guardians, or 2 tanks and one sheep, and we dps the down in short order, usually freeing up the main tanks mob first so that we don't have to deal with him being tied up along with the Lurker. It is important to kill all mobs before the Lurker re-emerges, or sheep/cc the remaining mobs, because as soon as the Lurkers comes back up. He spouts, followed by a whirl. We figured killing them all was better than letting one remain sheeped and having it break sheep followed by a splattered mage and more mayhem. A thing to note is that if you have a mob sheeped the entire time, then that mob wont come back with the next wave of adds. That means if you keep one Coilfang Guardian the whole time, then the next Phase 2 will spawn only 2 Coilfang Guardian instead of 3, so if you think you would like to keep one sheeped, then it won't become progressively harder.
Now the idea is to rinse and repeat.

Hopefully this guide helps you all down the Lurker. I havent mentioned any timers and stuff, but thats why you need a boss mod, and if you don't already have one, then shame on you for doing 25-mans without a boss mod.

Lurker Down

Lurker down, I dps-ed, one happy warrior, nuf said.

p.s. I told the druid healer to not mention the battle rez in exchange for the innervate, so I have no worries.

Hunter? Really?

From my previous post most if not all of my 1 readers have figured out that I recently rolled a hunter. Being one for the horde I would like to tell you to crush your fears, it is not a NE female (She is my level 1 farming alt who makes more than my level 70 LW/Skinner, mailbox dances evidently pay a lot, *insert random Eliot Spitzer joke here*). It is also not a BE. While trying to decide my race a lot of things went through my mind. Do I want the Troll's bow superiority, berserker, health regen etc, or do I want the Tauren warstomp and HP etc. Maybe even an AoE silence from a BE. In the end I chose neither and went for the only other horde option left, the original horde race from the days of Warcraft 1, an Orc.

Why an Orc?

To be frank the source of my inspiration is another hunter who flaunts his epeen a lot, though it wasn't the epeen that inspired us, but rather the fact that a good hunter transcends the stereotype of 'lol wut aer gans/bos?' and becomes an unstoppable killing machine, one who feels no pity, remorse and cannot be stopped unless killed. Oh yea, that also means I went BM. Hence my choice for an Orc, they have a +5% damage from pets besides the other useful racials, not to mention I wont feel tied down to a certain weapon simply because one is better for me.

Why a hunter?

For a while now I have been tempted to roll an alt, but I didn't seem to enjoy any of them. Rogue...meh, 'WAR'lock....to boring, druid...(wait thats my main). I had thus far refused to play a hunter....why? Well that goes back a long ways. When I was levelling my druid and was only 20 odd seasons in running through Ashenvale, I saw this fellow hordie warrior in trouble with a mob, and in my usual benevolent nature I healed him, he /bow /thank -ed me and we continued our separate ways. As I was resting after killing a mob only moments after I suddenly started taking damage from a cat~ish looking thing, one which I hadn't seen to date, and from a distance to add to my woes was an archer....WUT? Where the heck did they come from, moments later I was dead. It was the first time I had been ganked, unfortunately I later realized that the warrior I had healed was PvP flagged and as a result I had opened myself up for ganking. To make things worse it was one of those irritating NE female hunters with their stupid jumps. I came back, rezzed, drank, buffed up, hunted the hunter 3 times, killing her on each attempt,before letting her go. It was also my first experience with 'Free Honor'. Despite my anger getting dulled, by hatred for the hunter class persisted for a while. If anything BRK made me get over my dislike for the class and instead wonder at their awesomeness. It also made me realize that the only Alliance race I would ever play would be dwarf (well him and Ratshag both kinda convinced me to think such), I mean how can a race of people who drink and party and grow long beards be bad? Except for the women.....except for the women, but then again I'm an orc, its not like I have Miss Universe's coming from my society.

Why an alt?

With each successive patch I have noticed Blizzards tendency to mess around with core dynamics of a class. Thus far feral druids are fairly constant, but with a soon to come expansion I fear a lot will change and with 2 classes at hand, I will have a smaller chance to get screwed by the blue. Another fact not to be overlooked is that we will all be getting a free tanking class as well which could somehow reduce the need for my druid to tank and hence a dps would always be more useful. Besides I only log on to raid with my main and needed something else to do when not raiding. Plus I like guns, nuf said.

Picked a cool name I hope?

Arjun (See previous post for details), and I named my pet an uninspiring "Stripes". Its a durotar tiger whom I have already taught Claw 3, Bit 3, Growl 2 and Cower(which it came with).

How far in are you?

lolwut? Erm I mean, we are level 18 now. And making decisions about talent choices is getting hard. I really want to take Spirit Bond and Improved Revive pet, but BM veterans say otherwise. I have only had my pet die on me twice, and only because we pulled badly and ended up with 4 mobs over my level at the same time. I still killed 3 on both occassion and got the 4th low on health before being killed myself. I have fairly good pet control but its me wild arrows and pellets I'm worried about. Though for the most part I have an understanding of a good cookie cutter build, but with none of them incorporating some of the talents I'm interested in I need to do some more research to understand why. Because the way I see it Spirit bond helps keep both me and my pet up with constant regen, while Imp. Revive pet helps me recover quickly from an Oh-Shit situation. On the other hand there are so many other talents that are useful as well.....oh well I'm sure I'll find a way around this.

Professions?

Miner and Engineer. More on that later.

Any Advice?

Be fearsome....no seriously, even locks will cringe when they see you.

I'll keep posting an update on my hunter as time goes by, along with raiding updates and successes and tanking strats if necessary, but seeing how so many other bears have it covered I find it unlikely that they have left any stones unturned. For those more inclined leave me a comment on anything in particular you want me to talk about, and I'll give it a go.

Arjun

Arjuna (Sanskrit: अर्जुन, arjuna) is one of the heroes of the Hindu epic Mahābhārata. Arjuna is a central figure in Hindu religion whose name means 'bright', 'shining', 'white' or 'silver'. Arjuna is thus "The Peerless Archer".

Guess which class's alt I just rolled. Time for locks to finally Fear me.

Lurker....O how I loathe thee

Last night my guild and I went into SSC to try and down the "Lurker Below". I was fairly excited because last week we had him down to 19% and the only reason we had stopped was because of repops and time. Now seeing that we got him to 19% lends me a lot of confidence in our ability to down the sucker and move onto bigger and better things. So I log on 10 mins late (I wouldn't normally do that but because of certain circumstances I can't log in any earlier and have made sure to let my guild know about that, also being one of the 2 best geared tanks in our guild I am allowed some leverage) and I see that there are a total of 19 people who are there, 10 mins late and technically still early.

Even so another 30 mins in we manage to scrounge up our raid group and fill it up. What disappoints is that most of these people knew they were going to come to raid yet they couldn't mention that they would be late or make any effort to show up on time. This led to a lot slower clearing of the trash and eventually after 4 or so attempts (followed by some horrible lag resulting in 2 d/cs and consequently 2 deaths for me) we called it a night.

This was disheartening to say the least. We were no closer this week to downing him than we were the last. In fact if anything we had only managed to widen the gap. I also notice a tendency amongst some players to get so disheartened by a raid and possibly their repair bills to not show up again until we have that content on farm. I understand the lure of easy epics but the lack of effort and perseverance amongst so many is sad. Same was the way with our Gruul's runs early in the days, we would have trouble filling the raid until we finally had him on farm, now people are logged in and waiting outside his lair for the invites to start.

My question to this is.....what makes for a good motivational factor outside of DKP and such for this circumstance.

One thing that comes to mind, which has no effect on looting is this. Give points to regular raiders for every non-farm raid, e.g Lurker in our case, get 10 points per attempt. Now once the boss is on farm, raid priority should be given based on said points. So say one raider makes it for 10 attempts and another makes it for 5 then the raider with more attempts has priority over the raider with 5, and indirectly a better chance at loot, yet not related to DKP or other such looting methods. Once on farm no more points are accumulated. Now as one of main tanks and a really good dps-er I am personally not worried about fighting for a raid spot, but hopefully this should convince more people to come. Also this can be extended to additional activities like showing up on time etc, similar to DKP except they simply are a meter to allow raid attendance on farm content. I'm calling it the Argonaut's Algorithm =D.

I am considering suggesting this to my guild but would like to hear more thoughts on this or any other ideas that may be out there. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

Swipe away

So lets talk about swipe. Its the only multi mob tanking skill that druids have, barring tab targeting etc. It allows us to effectively hold 3 mobs on us, and at a certain point it actually becomes more effective than lacerate. But yet we often don't use it for the fear of breaking crowd control. I can't begin the count the number of times I have unsheeped mobs because my guild wants me to tank 2 of the mobs and then out of frustration I decide to tank all 3 because the mages wait for the mob to reach me before sheeping/pigging/turtling them. The healers still hold grudges against me for that sometimes.

BUT things are about to change. In the upcoming patch swipe is being changed for the following

(Click image to see original post at MMO-Champion)

Basically it says that swipe will no longer hit targets under crowd control. So if there are sheeped mobs, sapped mobs etc.....swipe away to hold threat on multiple mobs.

(Thanks to MMO-Champion for this information)

Zero Punctuation: Devil May Cry 4

Those of you who have yet to come across this gem of a reviewer I present to you Yahtzee, a british born game reviewer who certainly defines sarcasm. Below is a link to his latest review.

Farts

Acutely aware of some blogger's fondness for the sewer lines of our body, this one if for them

A fart, it is a pleasant thing,

It gives the belly ease,

It warms the bed in winter,

And suffocates the fleas.

A fart can be quiet,

A fart can be loud,

Some leave a powerful,

Poisonous cloud

A fart can be short,

Or a fart can be long,

Some farts have been known

To sound like a song......

A fart can create

A most curious medley,

A fart can be harmless,

Or silent , and deadly.

A fart might not smell,

While others are vile,

A fart may pass quickly,

Or linger a while......

A fart can occur

In a number of places,

And leave everyone there,

With strange looks on their faces.

From wide-open prairie,

To small elevators,

A fart will find all of Us

sooner or later.

That farts are all bad,

however, Is simply not true-

We must never forget.......

Sweet old farts like you!!

One head on pike please

So as per our promise, our guild went in on Sunday to Magtheridon's Lair and came out, after a couple of botched attempts, with his oh-so-precious head. A couple of lucky folks ended up with their appropriate loot, as for me I passed on the chest piece not wishing to replace my Vengeful Gladiator's chest in favor of anything. I am currently at a quandary, unsure whether or not pursuing the 4 piece bonus of T4 for feral tanks is worth it or not. I like the 1400 armor bonus, but I will end up losing a lot of stamina and so its hard for me to decide whether or not the stamina lost will be amply made up by my mitigation.

I also got myself the Skulker's Greaves on Saturday so I used them instead of my Clefthoof Leggings (crit immunity not being an issue for me) to see how the extra dodge in the form of agility would affect me, it would mean I lose about 1k armor (something I am not happy about), a little bit of health (seeing that raid buffed I hit a cool 22k HP even after the little stam loss, leaves me unconcerned), but I gain about 2.6% dodge, which shoud go a long way in some of the fights. Unfortunately the raid leader forgot to WWS the fight and as a result I wasn't able to determine the overall benefits/disadvantages of kitting myself such.

My combination of armor, however unorthodox it may seem, gave me 53%+ dodge whenever my idol of ferocity would proc, and otherwise was at a healthy 48-49% if I'm not mistaken. Which was extremely useful in helping me avoid damage during Mag's since I was the tank assigned to the last channeler to go down, and did so with simply one pally healer on me through most of the fight.

Anywhoo its late for me and time for me to turn in. However this guild first made me happy enough to stay late to post. Ciao.