WTT [Food] for [Thought]

And so we move on

2008-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Firstly I wanted to apologize to all those who have been visiting my blog when I wasn't, really I should be more active. During the last month (wow has it been that long already?) I was on a hiatus from WoW, not because I was getting burnt out, but because I had family visiting for 3-4 weeks. I only got back to raiding last saturday and boy has it been good. So let me recap what I have achieved in one week of raiding.

Before: 2/5 Mount Hyjal and 0/9 Black Temple.

After: So I came back on saturday, my guild had cleared the first 2 bosses in Mount Hyjal but were wiping on the 3rd boss. The guild's main warrior tank was MIA so I took over the enviable task of main tanking. We go in and 1-shot Kaz'rogal with me tanking, the trash and the boss both on one attempt.

Woot 3/5 MH.

On our Monday raid, we head to BT for some fun, I brought my hunter for High Warlord Naj'entus cause you know, its a one-tank fight really. After 9 wipes my druid is called in to tank. 2 more attempts and one dead warlord.

Woot 1/9 BT

On our saturday raid, we had already cleared MH's first 3 bosses the previous night and this was to be our dedicated night for attempts on Azgalor. We went in and learnt the trash which was the hard part. After learning trash which took us 3 attempts I do believe, we got Azgalor on our second attempt. That officially makes us a T6 armor set geared guild. Oh I snagged me some pretty purples too.....Thunderheart Gauntlets anyone. Though they arent a super upgrade to the Badge gauntlets, they are however making a difference of around 300+ armor for a loss of a very minor stamina and agility. All in all a very happy bear here.

Woot 4/5 MH.

So in one week of my return my guild went up 3 bosses and we also got in some solid attempts on Supremus last night. Its a matter of time before we crack that loot pinata outta the way.

Some old some new

2008-06-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

1. My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God and I didn't.

2. I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.

3. Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.

4. I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.

5. Don't take life too seriously; No one gets out alive.

6. You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me

7. Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

8. Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.

9. I'm not a complete idiot -- Some parts are just missing.

10. Out of my mind Back in five minutes.

11. NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room-spinning medicine.

12. God must love stupid people; He made so many.

13. The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

14. Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.

15. Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

16. Being "over the hill" is much better than being under it!

17. Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted to Be When I Grew up.

18. Procrastinate Now!

19. I Have a Degree in Liberal Arts; Do You Want Fries With That?

20. A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

21. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

22. Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere!

23.They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken.

24. He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless DEAD.

25. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up three thousand times the memory.

26. Ham and eggs...A day's work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig.

27. The trouble with life is there's no background music.

28. The original point and click interface was a Smith & Wesson.

29. I smile because I don't know what the hell is going on

Sore

2008-06-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

So I realize that I haven't written much for a while now and isn't for lack of excitement but rather but the kinda mood I have been in recently due to an altercation me and some others had with my GM which has for the most part been resolved. Also with work on an upswing at the moment finding time to write a blog entry becomes increasingly harder, not to mention I have family visiting in a weeks time........which is not to say I don't have things to talk about.

Most importantly my guild in the last week downed 3 new bosses. Yup that's freaking amazing and we did it. Last Monday we got Anatheron in Mount Hyjal, unfortunately this was the day the altercation took place and both me and the guild's other main tank didn't attend. However I got a raid invite from another big guild on the server for a Mount Hyjal run and I got to down Anatheron as well. I wasn't one of their main tanks being how they would rather use a guild tank for the encounter, however he died and I was a close second on threat. Now I don't mean to say that the tank was bad or anything, he just wasn't nearly as geared as me is all. So anyway this meant that Anatheron had his eyes focused on me and we were slowly losing the raid due to some mistakes, eventually for about 30% of the fight I had only one healer on me and towards the end the infernal tank died as well and I did tank the boss as well as one infernal to his demise. The total number of survivors...3. Me, a rogue and a healer. It was a moment of glory, which I gladly basked in. I got myself a nice Pillar of Ferocity for my effort (being the only feral druid in the raid) and a standing invite to the guild, which I gracefully declined since I still felt a need to work things out with my GM despite the occurances.

So anyway because of the evident altercation I didn't attend the progression raid on Friday and my guild went to try out Tidewalker which was hard needless to say without a druid tank and what was evidently wrong placement, nonetheless they made some solid attempts and after much coercing I attended the Saturday raid despite things still standing as they were and lo and behold we one shotted Tidewalker. Unless that is you are counting the afk pally running into Tidewalker while we were buffing, luckily he was the only casualty. Needless to say we were happy since not only was the attempt clean but we had 0 deaths....not one person died. Amazing, so we went on to Leo and 2 shotted the guy....after which we went to bed (for those that have real lives :P)

Come Monday we were to make attempts on Fathom Lord, the last hurdle in here before Lady Vashj, so we come in after reading the strats, I tanked the shaman, 2 pallies tanked the hunter with one of them exclusively on the pet, the guild's main tank handled Fathom Lord himself and another warrior stood watch on the priest. Our first attempt was a little chaotic since we were not fully prepared for it. On our second attempt we lost too many dps-ers but got the boss down to 30% despite it and on our third attempt cleaned him up with 2 minutes to spare and only 2 deaths in our roster. Darn snazzy wouldn't you say.

(p.s. Nice pink staff eh..eh)

(p.s.s Not to be used while tanking bosses because the hit in dodge 2.85% is considerable, I hotswapped it once I was dps-ing on Fathom Lord)

This puts us at a respectable 5/6 SSC 2/4 TK and 2/5 MH.

In the end the incident which put a lot of us off was in a way a turning point. The attitude of a lot of people has changed and we have started feeling a sort of synergy building up amongst us, elitist attitudes are being left in the sidelines and raiders are being given a free reign to voice ideas and opinions instead of strats being stuffed down their throats. Overall I am happier for this change and hopefully this is far from temporary in its nature.

How to tell armor class

2008-05-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

Just a random thought that came to me this weekend. Sorry for the sad lulz

I think I broke it

2008-05-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

Now for a while I have felt that I have reached a stagnant point in terms of gear progression and for me that means that I am not improving. My tanking gear has always been fully enchanted and gemmed for optimal tanking stats and I have one of the best threat generation amongst the tanks that I know, but the experience against Void Reaver where the off tanks were unable to build enough threat leaving me to single tank him made me realize that a bit more threat generation would have gone a long way to prevent me the repair bill. But currently my gear is at the most optimal for my current progression level. Why...ok let me break it down

1) Head : Stag Helm of Malrone: Sure its not the best tanking headpiece but it means I have the 2-set bonus from Tier 4 which most would recall is frikkin awesome.
2) Neck: Necklace of the Juggernaut: This BoJ reward neck piece is possibly one of the best barring the ones which drop in end T5-T6 raids.
3) Shoulders: Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders: Now this is necessary for me because I use Resilience to hit my uncrittability mark and 2 piece bonus means another +35 resilience so irreplacable except with S2 or S3 pieces.
4) Back: Gilded Thorium Cloak: Definitely one of the best in game cloaks for druids with the exception of the BoJ cloak.
5) Chest: Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic: The 2nd piece of pvp gear for my 2-pc bonus. Its in many ways comparable to the Malrone's chestpiece (T4) and in some ways better with the huge amount of stamina on it.
6) Bracers: Band of the swift paw: Definitely one of the best in game with the exception of T6
7) Belt: Waistguard of the Great beast: Now the reason I prefer this belt to the more oft used Belt of Natural power is its relative ease of obtaining it coupled with the hit rating which is sorely missing on bear tanking gear. I also prefer the added agility on it.
8) Leggings: Tameless Breeches: This is one fantastic pair of leggings and can only be outclassed by stuff that drops in Sunwell.
9) Boots: Vindicator's Dragonhide Boots: Fairly balanced stats and with the resilience it gives me the option of losing some defence in case of need.
10) Rings and Trinkets: I currently have the 2 best rings in-game for a druid tank along with 2 of the best trinkets (arguably) making them both irreplacable.

So that leaves me at an artificial ceiling in terms of improvements unless I finally succumb to using macros in lieu of click tanking. Now I like to have a comfortable time tanking without any fear of losing threat to those pesky locks. However my current guild has a couple of extremely well geared locks and by extremely I mean the kind that generate threat in the 900-1100 tps range kinda locks and thats with Salvation. Now under ideal conditions I can put upwards of 1300-1400 tps but as we know conditions arent always ideal and I have had times when the threat of the locks has come close to the point that I have had to put my taunt button ready in case the locks push above me so that I can gain snap aggro.

Now the locks also do this to toy with me since I kinda pride in my threat generation and as a result am always the first dps target tank because of it. So seeing that I am at a ceiling while the dps keeps getting geared had me worried and finally forcing me into doing the thing I hate most....theorycrafting. I finally downloaded Rawr and did some testing with a possible change in spec and last night blew a 110 BoJ and will possibly blow some more for epic gems.

So what did I buy:
1) Cloak: Slikk's Cloak of Placation: More dodge, more stamina (slightly less armor) for increased survivability which my following changes will need.
2) Gloves: Handwraps of the aggressor: These gloves not only have higher stamina but also more agility, strength and haste, making it a higher dps pair of gloves. The haste is a double edged sword for a tank, since it increases the attack speed and as a result it also increases the number of parries and as a result more attacks in the same time period and more incoming damage. Be sure that your healers are capable of handling this change, even though its a minor change but I already have haste on my leggings so this is slowly adding up.

But now I have broken the coveted 2pcT4 bonus making the continued use of the head gear only a waste. So how did I correct that change. I equipped the Grimgrin faceguard. Now this is a questionable tanking helm for a druid, it has a lot of agility and stamina so increases survivability but at a loss of some serious armor. It also has a fairly serious dose of AP and hit making it even more of a threat generator.

So after getting these I socketed them with Solid Stars of Elune for all, and enchanted them exactly the same way they were before. So where do I stand with these changes (in dire bear form unbuffed):
Stamina: 18.7k (gained around 1k HP)
Armor: 30.5k (lost 1k armor)
Dodge: 39+ (gained 2% dodge)
Hit: 54 (gained 24)

and a bit more of stats in other places. RAWR showed that my overall threat generation is up and so is my threat ceiling in an unlimited rage situation. Now to test out how these changes work out and report them in the future to see whether breaking the set bonus was any good.

Until then adios.

Hunter madness

2008-05-14T10:44:00.001-07:00

Also some updates on my hunter. Hes grown up into a fine dps machine and is currently roaming outlands as a level 64. On hitting outlands his levelling was minorly halted due to the fact that Thrallmar rep has a pretty sweet bow as a rep reward at exalted, not to mention a very fine Polearm as well. Its a combination of these that I just ran some quests which had hunter gear and left the others to pursue instancing. It got me pretty far and I'm almost half way through honored with Thrallmar and there are still quite a few quests to go.

He's also quite a ways through honored with Cenarion Expedition for their arrows as well as their glyph and followed the routine of using unidentified plant parts and the follow up chain quests to get him most of the way there. I used the rep to buy myself the arrows from friendly rep and also the warden's haubrek.

In the meanwhile I was also collecting Marks of Thrallmar for the delectable Mark of Conquest which I now have. Many a level 70s stomped on me while I worked hard in getting them but it was worth it. On a side note, one level 70 pissed me off enough for me to bring my main and scare him the hell away forever.(Level 70s picking on anyone less than 2 levels below them, unless provoked, is bad form.)

Its also something worthwhile to note that during a Slave Pens run with a level 70 warlock, I outdpsed him(me being level 62 then) by putting out a combined dps of over 540, which needless to say pleasantly surprised me. I must say that Steady Shot greatly increases your dps and simultaneously your threat generation because since I got it, I have pulled aggro of Apollo more often than it should happen.

Currently I am at over 1100AP and around 15% crit(200+dps). My pet has about 5k HP, 8k armor and 130+dps. My raiding guild's hunter class lead has challenged me that I will never outdps his hunter and in the rare event that I do he will owe me 500g. Hopefully with the plethora of advice available online.....he shall pay(BRK don't let me down).

Anyway that's all the updates I have on the youngling....in time he too shall see more of the end game.

Add to my list another success

2008-05-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

So Monday, I log onto Argonaut and start prepping for our raid, which is one I rarely attend since it conflicts with my other RL engagements. Anyway I log on, get a raid invite and see that we have 20 guild people for the raid and only 2 tanks.....so we pull a couple more from people's friends list and decide on doing VR (post buff and pre re-nerf). Now the guild's main warrior tank hadn't logged in...fine, nor had any of the other well geared tanks....ummm

Me: "We still running this place with just one decently geared tank and 2 Kara and blues/green geared tanks?"

GL: "Yup"

Me: "....."

So we go in, clear the trash, this being my first time ever main tanking in TK was fun. We only wiped once on trash because one of the tanks didn't heed my call to move his target away from the group which led to them being tossed outside into the path of another group.....wipefest ensued. So we move on, clear all the way there, no more wipes. Now our guild has never downed Void Reaver...ever, we once made a couple of attempts on him post buff but people weren't paying attention to the orbs and as a result dying. So the GL made a change, all healers stood inside the circle and only the ranged dps stood outside. That was essentially like 12 people. Now 3 tanks, melee dps and the healers were going to take the pounding but atleast they didn't need to worry about the orbs.

Those of you who have attempted VR know that he needs multiple tanks because he does a knockback which reduces threat severely, so this way tanks can rotate threat and not lose it to the dps. I realized this was going to be a problem, but after 5-6 knockbacks I still had threat and the other 2 tanks were unable to get Void Reaver off me, when they finally did they moved Void Reaver outside the circle and doomed the healers to an orb resulting in our first wipe. This was on the whole a bad thing, because the dps were being limited by threat generation. However ridiculous my threat generation is, I don't usually manage to hold threat after my second knockback with my regular tanks. So on our third attempt I chaffed an elixir of major agility, ate some agility food and used a scroll of agility to maximize crit and threat generation. This time around my threat generation was huge, the locks didn't come close until much later, the other tanks got aggro only to lose it to me in seconds and we managed to kill him just a couple of seconds after he hit the enrage. I can tell you hit me hard during enrage(somewhere in the range of 19k) but he couldn't one shot me and that was all the time we needed.

VR down.

Need more rage

2008-05-06T11:47:00.001-07:00

And no this isn't a reference to our beloved Ratters....read on.
But first my obligatory excuse for not posting :Tis the bee-sy season for us worker bees(see what I did thar) and this has resulted in me posting less and less. To be honest there hasn't been much to report until recently. But recently some good news has accumulated, beginning with my guild has downed Rage Winterchill (hence the title), and to be honest the guy is a breeze as long as you have a pally tank to help with the waves. We also are at a stage where we are one-shotting the whole of ZA and pushing for the third chest (almost there), and lastly we downed Solarian last night and truly she is an idiot check as Karthis pointed out.

So my current progress stands at:
Kara - FULL
Zul'Aman - FULL
Gruul's Lair - FULL
Magtheridon - FULL
SSC - 2/6 (Lurker and Leo)
TK - 1/4 (Solarian)
Hyjal - 1/5 (Rage Winterchill)
BT - 0 (<---Only a matter of time)

So lets look at the bosses I got
Rage Winterchill:
Personally the guy itself is the easiest boss I have seen, its the waves before him that will test the raid more than he will. So assuming you have a pally tank make him stand right in front of the knights looking towards the direction the waves will come from. Make sure no one stands in front of him at all points of time, because they will aggro the mobs in the wave due to proximity before the tanks. Now all the other tanks stack up near him. As a druid tank you perform the hurricane pull with barkskin, let it go for 2-3 ticks and switch to bear form the moment they get close enough to start hitting you, by now you should have aggroed the majority of the mobs and once near you the Paladin's consecrate will catch the rest of them up. At this point in time all you do is swipe, an occasional demo roar if the warrior isn't doing his job, and watch to make sure no mob goes rogue on your caster groups who will be AoE-ing like there is no tomorrow and the tears swelling up seeing their dps meters will make them incapable of reacting in case of a loose mob, and if one mob goes rogue you or another non-pally tank goes and pulls it back to the group for the AoE to continue.

You do this with all pulls except with the abomination pull, where tanks take one or 2 abominations and pull them aside from the group until they have solid, and by that I mean solid aggro on them, at which point all tanks converge again on the pally tank for the AoE to commence. Healers will need to be solid because the tanks will be dealing with not only the melee damage from the abominations but also the poison aura from all the abominations.This is only an option assuming your healers can heal you through it, else it will need to be single target killing which is slower and can be an issue since the waves are timed and if you aren't done with one wave before the next one comes it could result in serious mana issues.

The necromancers don't involve any tanks since they are sheeped for the most part then single targeted by the raid dpsers resulting in an explosion the kind of which leaves behind only a mushroom cloud.

Note: It is important for mana users to drink/eat after each wave

When the boss finally comes after the 8th wave apparently he can be held off by 3 rogues distracting/vanishing him, but it didn't work too well for us, so we let him come. At this point one tank picks him up and then drags him towards Jaina and her buddies who help in killing him. Now he has only 2 things to worry about. The first and foremost is "Death and decay" which causes damage in a certain area, its in the range of 2.7-3.3k per tick, and the only option is to run out of it. The downside is to see this you need to max your graphics, I relied on DBM to warn me and ran towards raid members who weren't moving at all. As soon as it ends, you feral charge him and continue tanking him near Jaina. His second and more annoying ability is to encase you in ice which causes some serious damage (by serious I mean killer), so there are 2 options, to heal through it or to use your PvP trinket. With our abundance of well geared healers we decided to heal through it.

This fight was to be tanked by a tank less geared than both of the guild main tanks (me and my buddy Tier), since this tank had seen this fight on his healer alt (I don't like to give up my position as main tank but I don't like to argue either so went along with it). Half way through tanking Rage, the tank died and I had enough threat despite being in cat form to immediately pick him up and make Rage eat some dirt.

The rest as we know is now history.

Solarion I shall discuss on another day.

Edit: Can't seem to be able to upload pics to Blogger so they will come in later.

The weekend that was...

2008-04-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

The past weekend was extremely fruitful in many ways. Mainly because I got a minor gear overhaul, not in small part due to the badge vendor finally getting unlocked. So it began with one more run of Heroic MgT for my trinket, I have most of the stratergy down for that place and know almost all the pulls, so its far less painful than it used to be. We got to the third boss, got her down and another dang Vial of the Sunwell, this has been the 6-7th time the stupid trinket has dropped.....this slew of bad luck is beginning to get to me.

So I went to our friday night raid, we went into SSC and 2 shotted both Lurker and Leo. We are stuck there at the moment due to a lack of resist set for one of our tanks and a paladin tank for Tidewalker. So what did we do after finishing our raid rather early, went to Hyjal for fun times.

We went in (for the second time) and tanked the overwhelming waves that come. We had 4 tanks, 2 druids and 2 warriors. We on our final attempt got as far as the final wave. This netted us a couple of Hearts of Darkness, one epic and loads of fun. A couple more times and we will be seeing the first boss easily and this is with our guild still not fully geared, there are barely a few folks with even one piece of T5 gear. I know a lot of folks will berate this decision, but being a newly formed guild we just want to have a bit of fun and learn to raid well with each other, cause come next expansion we want to able to handily tackle the raiding content and fast. To tank the mobs that come in the waves, might I suggest the hurricane pull, Cast Barksin--->Cast Hurricane--->Bear form. Without any pally tanks Hyjal can be tough so we improvise.

So that was an eventful night, went to bed, had a nice full day with friends, came home for our Saturday night raid. But wait a minute we were 3 folks short, we cancel the raid and discuss how to increase raid attendance and have opened recruitment for a few classes, none of them for tanking. So after the hour long officer discussion I got a group together for a Heroic MgT run, it netted me a Rod of the Blazing Light and the oh-so beautiful Commendation of Kael'thas. I figured that every time the vial dropped it was because I had a healer in the group who didn't have that damn trinket, so this time I took a healer who I had helped in getting the trinket and it worked....try it folks, it may work for you. That trinket alone took my unbuffed HP in bear form to over 17k....yummy.

Got up on Sunday, did my usual morning routine, went and had lunch, came back in time for our ZA raid. Scheduled at 12 ST, by 11:30 ST there still weren't any invites being sent. Concerned I asked in Officer chat to find out that it had been delayed for an hour because of the badge vendor being at 99%. Fine...delay the raid for something silly....*rubs hands together*, I went and got myself a nethercleft leg armor crafted for 125g, 2 x Solid Stars of Elune for 46g total, picked up my badges, all 170 of them, and went to the Isle.

Oh the nasties...the nasties. There were a buttload of folks parked directly over the badge vendor, including half the alliance on our server and if that was unexpected then to add to the problem they were all flagged. Not only that, they were patrolling the Greengill coast to kill any flagged Horde players from completing the quest for the badge vendor. Now be it Horde or Alliance, that is a self-defeating thing to do. Due to the large number of folk there I lagged and my computer dc-ed and blanked out.....ummm..ok. So I restarted the computer, logged in and there was no one near the badge vendor for miles....???What? Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I went ahead, got my Tameless Breeches and the Ring of the Stalwart Protector, stepped back and a minute later there were literally hundreds of folks back there, apparently what I had witnessed was a glitch, but boy did it make my job easy, instead of having to avoid clicking a flagged alliance, I simply got my gear by walking up to the vendor.

I gemmed my leggings and put the armor kit. I put on my new gear and headed to ZA. With my new gear I sat at a pretty 17.8k HP, 31k armor, 38% dodge unbuffed in bear form. Now a full 1k ahead of my corresponding warrior Main tank, this was awesome.

So we went into ZA, got the first 2 bosses in one shot along with their chests...woohoo(I had over 800dps on the Eagle boss to come in top 3 dps). Then we got the 3rd boss in one shot. This is as far as I had been, and it was here that our one-shot streak ended. By the way, as a result of my new gear, I didn't go below 50% of my health at all and as a result never once benefitted from the evasive maneuvers from the trinket I just got, still wondering if its a good thing or a bad thing. But as a result of this gear I took exactly half the damage the warrior tank took against Narlokk the bear boss. Anyway against dragonhawk, I had a tough job of keeping the dragonhawks under control which imo is a hard task. So we finally got him on our 4th attempt, even though I died on that attempt, it was not before all the dragonhawks had been dispatched with, leaving my raid free to dps down the boss. Following which we got the Hex Lord and the quest fetched me a neat 5 BoJ and finally Zul'Jin, whom I have to say isn't really that hard with a good group, but the Eagle Phase is a nightmare for melee dps. I popped out and used Tranquility once to help out, but besides that it was a nightmare. Though the run did net me a Hood of the Third Eye for my healing set, which might I say is looking quite nice, easily in the 1400+ range.

So that rounds up the events that happened in the weekend that was. I am a content bear for now.

WWS Report for SSC(Friday): http://wowwebstats.com/akinrsxahefqs

WWS Report for ZA(Sunday): http://wowwebstats.com/q6cu4koleozea?m

Apologies and success

2008-04-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

I know that lately I have been anything if not regular with updating my blog. Work ramped up leaving me very much separated from what I enjoy to do.....besides gaming that is. But the week hasn't been deviod of any news. As you may all know I joined a guild which was slightly behind my old guild in terms of progress but now that is no longer the case.

With my new guild I went into SSC 2 days in a row and we downed 2 new bosses, Lurker Below and Leo the blind. Ok I have already downed Lurker before but Leo was a new one for me as well and to top it off it was a result of my suggestions that we actually got him. We initially had 3 tanks for the fight even though its largely unnecessary, whereby each tank was assigned a zone and if Leo ended in their zone during whirlwind, then it was that tanks job to drag him back to the middle and tank him there. Unfortunately the other 2 tanks (besides me) were prot warriors and they had no chance in hell in killing their inner demons on time. This did give me the opportunity to go kill them each time....gleefully might I add, but it hurt our raid and left me as the only viable tank.

After my talking with the other tank, we decided that he tank with more dps gear and that I remain in tank gear just in case. The third tank was told to go fully dps. With this setup we got Leo on our 3rd attempt of the night. Woohoo.

Besides that our guild's only ZA group cleared ZA and now I'm planning on leading another group to accomplish the same.

Also my new guild leader asked me to become a Class Lead and an Officer, which I accepted after seeing the specs and gearing options taken by our guild's feral druids. This may mean I will have to learn more about the other 2 specs and also give out the reason for my success as a druid tank but meh.

On other unrelated news during our last attempt at Mags I dished out 700dps in tank gear, now I know us ferals are OP in PvE, tank and spank in the same spec. I really wanna see my dps with my dps gear. Anyway thats all I got for you folks this week. I will be writing something later on as well. Until then ciao.

Change

2008-04-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

In case you guys were pondering over my absence over the last week, there is a good cause for it. Well for a while now me and a couple others in my guild, which is casual in nature, have been pushing and pushing for some reforms to improve the guild's performance and chances at downing bosses. The reason we felt that was necessary was primarily because we continue to wipe on content way behind us due to lack of discipline and what can only be surmised as greed.

The lack of discipline is fairly easy to place, but the greed is the one thing that irks me more than anything else. There had been a point when our progression was moving along really well, we had Gruul's down to a one shot and were making attempts at Magtheridon, not to mention those attempts were improving. Then at some point dozens of people decided that they no longer want to raid on their mains, since that class was boring (mind you the same class they had 70 levels to play through and decide whether they liked them), this was further compounded by the fact that their mains had already been geared with the T4 drops and more from Gruul's. Now as one of my guildies who was obviously as displeased with this change as I was said "We were supposed to gear everyone up and move forward together as a guild, rather than gear every tom dick and harry and their dozen alts." What makes it worse is that I have yet to get my T4 shoulders despite them having dropped over 20 of those tokens. How? Because we roll to determine loot winners, being casual and all, as a result alts have continued to get gear over me due to my persistently bad rolls.

The gear irks me some because I didn't get the upgrades that could help me further on, but what pisses me off even more is that because of this influx of under geared alts, we started to wipe on Gruul and had issues with post nerf Mag, despite downing him successfully pre-nerf several times. This was a blatant abuse of our casual nature and of our looting rules. I made several suggestions to have a cooldown period on changing alts to mains, giving loot to mains over alts, putting wowwebstats for people to see how they perform and to take interest in trying to improve themselves etc. I didn't ask for a DKP system or not including underperformers, instead I asked for some changes that could benefit us over the long run. What I got was a rant from the officers telling me that I am pushing the guild in a hardcore direction. This was the proverbial "last straw".

I took a break from my guild forums for a couple of days and mulled over my course of action. I realized that I want to raid, I also want to raid effectively, loot doesn't matter to me and I am ok with it being distributed albeit fairly. A guild concerned with progression will need to make the executive decision to gear a tank at some point or forgo progression altogether imo and hence my lack of concern. I also don't wish to push my guild into a direction its evidently not ready for. The kicker is that I don't want to cut away all ties from this guild because I have been somewhat responsible for its nature and I want to stay part of something that is a break away from a break. I enjoy hanging out with the folks there, I may not necessarily agree with the officers but they are all fine people and we get along fabulously when not discussing raiding. So how can I have the cake and eat it too? How do I make a decision on this evident turmoil I am facing?

I move Argonaut to another guild, a guild concerned with raiding, a guild that gets 25 people for all its raids. I keep Arjun in my current guild. I realized that I enjoy raiding and tanking in particular but being in the company of friends is something that is irreplaceable. So I talked to an officer in game about my decision, followed by a post on the forums informing the guild of the same. I didn't gquit immediately but allowed the information to sink in before making the jump, since in my heart of hearts I was waiting for anything that could sway me to stay. Utopia this ain't. I moved Argonaut over the weekend to my new guild "Nocturnal". The folks are nice but raiding is definitely their primary concern. They are an up and coming guild who have formed a mere weeks ago and have already made more progress than my previous guild. The warrior tank is also from my old guild and an officer since he is a RL friend of the GM and an able tank. He and I have tanked together since the time we used to wipe on Moroes and are as a result very well situated to tank together because of our abundance of communication.

What amazes me most about their progress is that there are folks who aren't nearly as well geared but they have what I assume is popularly termed as raid discipline. They don't make amateur mistakes, infact I would go out on a limb and say my old guild outgeared the bulk of the folks here and yet we used to wipe on trivial content. Be it the hunter who refused to replace his greens through quest rewards while sporting 4/5 T4 or the altaholics who had T4 on all his alts. These guys are very serious about their goal, which is End game. Being the best geared Druid Tank I am also expected to be one of the guild's main tanks and also dps when my tanking services aren't as much in demand. On the whole this place could be a new learning experience for me and hopefully leave me better for it. I guess we take what we can get.

The forgotten few

2008-03-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-26T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-13T21:58:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-03-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-06T06:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-05T10:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-02T21:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Icepack anyone??

2008-02-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

Well last night was both fun and exciting. I got to finally restart playing volleyball after 3 years and boy was it fun, until this morning that is, my arms hurt, my shoulders ache, my neck refuses to turn, my thighs are still recovering but my arms below the elbow are both red and hurting like hell. But it was fun.....yeeeaaah. So right about now I feel like the kid in the picture below, except that I'm having to work.

Besides that, my guild went into SSC again last night and got the Lurker down to 14%.......14 frikkin percent, and the reason we wiped....oh yea the beautiful reason was that the fishes respawned in the middle of the fight, which as far as I understand they are not supposed to. So when everyone jumped into the water during the spout....well...they never came back up. Plus it was late and we would have had to do a reclear of the trash again so we called it a night. Go Blizz Go.

Well hopefully next week we get him and I can post another yipee post. Till then have a good weekend.

Game Review: Turok

2008-02-28T12:38:00.000-08:00

Every now and then comes along a game that shakes the very foundation of the genre for which it was made, it challenges the player base to expect more, the developer community to strive harder and the publishing houses to throw more money their way. Turok is not one of them. Its based of the Unreal 3 engine which has apparently been the hottest thing since the Beatles, every company lazy enough to not work to create their own engine(like Call of Duty 4, Uncharted Drake's Fortune) has gone forward and licensed(maybe not a bad decision) what can only be described as a beauty of an engine. However none of these companies has been able to fully utilize the engine to its potential and as a result everytime we expect a game to look as good as "Gears of War" or "Unreal Tournament 3" we come back dissapointed. Anyway to do a more in-depth analysis of the games components:

1)Gameplay: Fairly straightforward gameplay dynamics, though I found the dive somewhat inconsistent and realized that it expected a near perfectly angled joystick to do the dive, otherwise it would only result in a half-assed jump leaving the player very much vulnerable to whatever they hoped to avoid. Another notable flaw was that despite the amount of cover thrown at you, you couldn't use it like you could in "Gears of War" or other tactical shooters, this makes it more like a positional cover kinda situation. The cover was also not prone to destruction but that I can live with. There are a couple of quick time events thrown at you, but since they use the same button combinations, you begin to expect and execute them easily. Its also a gameplay element thats better to be rid of. The difficulty level isnt too high, the weapons are enjoyable, though for the most part you can use the same weapons through most situations unless forced to use something else based on the situation. On the whole a 5/10.

2)Graphics: As I mentioned earlier, this game is based off the Unreal 3 engine but that doesn't mean it delivers anything close to the level of detail that you see in Epic's titles. Even so it looks fairly good and on par with the current generation of games, just not next-gen.6/10

3)Sound: The game uses sounds as a primary technique to warn you of imminent dangers and lurking dinos/wolfpack members. It does a fair job of alerting you though sound isn't always an accurate indication of the direction they are in rather just a warning of their presence. It also is used well to indicate the presence of larger and more fearsome dinos like the T-rex and does a good job of intimidating the player with its presence.6/10

4)Environments: The environments aren't too varied, its "jungle", "more jungle", "wolfpack base" and "still more jungle". At a few moments it came close to giving the awe-inspiring expanse of "Jurassic Park", but those moments were fleeting and danger filled. So for the most part the player is destined to the dark or closed quarters combat. Not enough variety. 5/10

5)Multiplayer: Now I must confess that I didn't try its entire Multiplayer content, though the co-op mode intrigued me and I managed to coerce another friend of mine to try it out. It was possibly the most fun I had in the entire game, and there were just 3 levels of it. It was fun, the difficulty was ramped up somewhat (or maybe it is meant for 4 players and there fore is much easier that way), but on the whole it was thoroughly enjoyable. 7/10 (points lost because it only had 3 maps)

On the whole I would say its lucky to have been released at the time that it was because of a dearth of new games, allowing it an undistracted market. It would have been unlikely to sell much in a market filled with better games. It doesn't have much to offer and the storyline is basically a plot sketched together by what could only be a group of shit chucking apes with typewriters. What should have been a final boss encounter was simply a bunch of quick times events which can be one-shotted followed by the real boss who had inexplicably not killed you the first time around. The ending is cliched and the dialogue is barely acceptable. The voice acting is borderline ok. They even left out a punching bag guy who helped you in your training and reappears to deliver a sad one liner only to not been seen ever again leaving the player to wonder whether he simply died during the series of events or hes been spared to reappear in a sequel. Anyway its an ok game and I only recommend it for its multiplayer, the rest is only playable if you have nothing more to do.

Overall Score: 6/10

Making the leap

2008-02-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

Aaah, the dreaded gquit. To some of us, more used to loyalty, this seems like a sin, specially in some cases where the guild in question that you are leaving has done nothing to make you wish to leave. I had a similar experience before I joined my current guild, except that I was going to lose some friends and gain some more. My guild had almost entirely broken up, to a point that at best there were 3-4 people online, and gquits happened all day, yet I was unwilling to type the command that would end my association with the guild, why....because the guild in itself....a faceless, selfless entity had only provided me with a home, a place to reconvene with my friends, a place where there was always someone who would greet me, despite however hard their day might have been. Infact it became so private that even whispers were no longer necessary, instead we would talk openly in gchat, but I knew that I wanted more (read raiding and more friends).

This is an important decision to make, what is it that one seeks that your current guild cannot provide, more friends to hang out with, raiding, loot ninjaing, griefing, PvP-ing.....there is always a guild to cater to your needs. I wanted a guild I could call home like my current guild, and also a place where there were more than 1-2 people online. I enjoy hanging out with guildies, running instances with them, group PvP-ing with them, raiding with them, these were the things my guild was unable to provide.

Therefore I went out seeking greener pastures for me and my 2 friends. In the end I found a gem of a guild, where I am still at, filled with wonderful people, and even managed to get one of my friends to come. I still feel sad my other friend didn't come, she was unwilling to submit an application for anything that was in a game. I wish she had reconsidered, even though we still stay in touch I miss seeing her name in gchat. Still, I made lots of new friends, frenemies and loot nemesis, but a full screen of friendly banter, a feeling of belonging which came with my new guild is irreplacable. Its a leap some of us have to make, but sometimes we jump into the fire, sometimes into a cool breeze.

Just look before you leap.

I am IMBA

2008-02-27T11:29:00.001-08:00

Looks like my gear is all good and enchanted and gemmed and stuff. Nice gear score too eh =). Audit your gear by visiting Be IMBA.

PvP for the PvE Feral Tank?

2008-02-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading another informative and interesting article over at Karthis's blog regarding gearing up after the Heavy Clefthoof Set for a feral druid. Being extremely knowledgeable in the itemization woes of feral druids, Karthis suggests an extremely PvE friendly path and one which for the most part I agree with, considering the fact that feral druids in general get the short end of the stick while PvP-ing.

But for those of us willing to jump into the unfriendly BGs and Arenas, there may be viable options for the feral tank there as well. Now from the viewpoint of a feral druid, what exactly are the stats we need to tank and tank well(Not in any particular order):

1) Stamina: We need it as do other tanks, its this very stat that ensures we can survive those hits. But for a feral druid they can do more and is also more important seeing how we are susceptible to crushing blows and hence need a bigger buffer of HP. Most PvP gear has loads of stamina because survivability is key in the brutal world that its made for.

2)Agility: Our only means of damage avoidance is dodge (or the passive miss chance inherent in the game). This means we can either fully avoid the damage or take it for what its worth, though usually our high armor means we mitigate more than other tanks. Most upper tier PvP gear has comparable agility to T4 gear.

3)Armor: Repeat after me "I am an armored bear!! Without my armor I am nothing", bears have the tendency to have ridiculous amounts of armor and are probably(or so I think) the only class capable of reaching the armor cap. This is another candy offered to us in lieu of us having to take crushing blows. PvP feral gear can be easily segregated by the usual green colored armor amount e.g.Vindicator's Dragonhide Boots , indicating that the piece of gear has unusually high armor for its level. With the multiplication factor that armor means more than plate.

4)Uncrittability: Without this don't even expect to have any decent guild accept you as a tank. If you aren't even uncrittable then you are an even bigger liability than a tank with lower stamina but uncrittable. TO become uncrittable there are 2 stats that a tank can use. The first is defense rating. For a feral druid with the appropriate talents, only 415 defense is required to be uncrittable, and seeing how 350 is achievable without gear, the last 75 is achieved through some trouble seeing how there is very little leather gear with +defense rating on it. So to achieve it using this stat, most druids need a combination of rings, cloaks, enchants and more stuff (think Earthwarden) to get a total of 156 defense rating. This is also the preferable method to become uncrittable seeing as to how defense rating also increases our chance to dodge. The other and usually more criticized route is through Resilience. Yes, this PvP only stat is the bridge that allows us to cross over once we lose the Heavy Clefthoof set. Its also a cheaper way to achieve uncrittability, since only 103 resilience is needed for 415 defense. Also seeing how resilience is available by the bucket load it makes for an easier task and frees up more room for stats like agility, stamina etc. Even with 2 pieces of S1 gear say shoulders and gloves, you get about 20 resil per piece and another 35 through the set bonus. That instantly puts you at 75 resil through 2 pieces of gear, leaving you to only secure 28 more to become crit immune or to pick up some defense gear.

5)Damage output: The higher the damage output, the more the threat, the more room there is for dps to go all out. As a tank during Gruuls, I regularly top the damage output amongst tanks, usually doing twice as much as the closest competitor. This allows the dps to open up faster and with more aplomb. Since most PvP gear is also concerned with damage output, there is usually hit rating, attack power, ignore armor like stats which help in achieving this. e.g.Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves

To examine my points via an example, I will compare the Vengeful Gladiator's Chest piece to the T4 Malorne chest piece which drops of Magtheridon.
Using the PvP chestpiece I:
lose 130 armor
lose 3 strength
lose 3 agility
gain 18 stamina
gain 9 intellect
gain 12 hit rating
gain 19 critical strike rating (0.86% chance to crit)
gain 26 resilience
lose a set bonus(maybe)

Seeing how the comparison stands, I am willing to trade in my Clefthoof chestpiece a little earlier seeing the ridiculous gain in stats I achieve. There are also some other merits to gearing up this way. Since most gear drops at the initial levels become minor to laughable upgrades, I can pass and help others gear up faster to open up access to more competitive raiding instances. On the whole pursuing PvP for the more inclined can surely be a worthwhile pursuit.

Thanks to Karthis for his invaluable information regarding Crit Immunity via the article "On Being Uncrittable".

Thoughts on Geekdom

2008-02-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

Is it bad that after I saw this video on youtube about "Why a geek will steal your girlfriend in 2008"

all I could think of was "All your babes are belong to us"

W00T

2008-02-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

So evidently I am excited....what about would make for a good question. Well for the last coupla weeks our guild has been doing exploratory excursions into SSC, we clear the trash upto both Hydross and 'The Lurker Below', and then we tend to engage 'The Lurker Below', albeit with no success so far, but we finally got a good rhythm on him last nite, and in all possibility hes going down pretty soon.

So anyway, the reason for my excitement has nothing to do with 'The Lurker Below', but rather the trash. You see the trash in SSC drops a lot of good epics, some of them are even great epics. But last nite one of them dropped the motherload as seen from the perspective of a druid.

It was all happy chit chattery on vent, when the ML said "Oh Argo, you are not gonna believe this", to which I responded "If you are playing with my heart, I will hate you forever", he linked the item I have always dreamed of, and followed it by stalling for a couple of minutes, each second I died a little bit inside, and was constantly telling myself to not have high hopes, that this was just a bad joke. Finally after much waiting I saw the most golden words in history "You have received loot [Wildfury Greatstaff]".

I finally had the best end-game tanking staff for druids, some may argue that Pillar of Ferocity is better, I dont think so, that staff has str instead of agility or dodge. I would gladly give up some stamina in favor of agility/dodge our sole means of damage avoidance. After the raid I got it enchanted with 35 agility, and now I'm a happy bear.

16342 HP unbuffed (Bear form) = win.There is one ML exalted with me for today.

Kara foh Kicks

2008-02-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

So what do you do with a group of 10-12 players, mostly epicced out but with a slightly wonky(yes I said wonky....shoot me) class balance. As in disc priest, balance druid, no mage(by "no", I don't mean it as a spec, but simply the absence of one), and way too many hunters than can be good...well for most of us in Village Idiots it means we raid Kara....yay.

For most guilds in 25-man content, Kara is and should be on farm status, and easily 10-mannable with the added advantage of being a staging ground for quickly gearing up scrubs and alts alike, as well as badges. Sure 25-man loot is good, but badges, now they in enough numbers are looking as good as tiered loot. Infact I have for some time been looking at turning in my Heavy Clefthoof Leggings for something with more bang for the buck. I have the T4 leggings but the astounding loss in stamina definitely has been an unconvincing argument for me to make the switch. On the other hand the nearest replacement is miles away as well. But behold, patch 2.4 promises one of the best leggings available in the form of Tameless Breeches which not only augment my stamina but also add an equally considerable amount of agility (translate: Dodge and crit), and some more strength. Not only that there is a brilliant staff Staff of the Forest Lord , Ring Ring of the Stalwart Protector and gloves Handwraps of the Aggressor. Theres also the Embrace of Everlasting Prowess, but personally I prefer the Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic instead(and I recommend PvP simply for that alone, I think its better than T4 from Mag). All this for a measly 100-150 badges(ok not so measly), but still, giving access to such gear for something that can be done by even the majority of casuals makes the end-game more accessable.

Sure there are lots of folks far into the 25-man content, likely kicking Archie in the groin to make him both reel in pain and also to make him drop the huge satchel where hes hiding his goodies, who disagree. Why should the casual get such good gear for so tiny an effort? Why should their effort be marginalized due to casuals with similar gear? To them I say this(in the words of my GM)....sod off ya buggers. This game is dominated by the casual players, by casual I mean players with limited to no access to the end-game. Most of them are casual not as a result of lack of desire/knowledge/elitist views of most raiding guilds, but mostly because they lack the time and/or dedication to subject themselves to a regimented raiding schedule.

As a result even if they are part of a raiding guild, they will slowly get left behind in terms of gear and begin to feel even more and more left out. With this change Blizzard is basically welcoming them back, they can now have access to some of the end game level gear, but that doesn't take away from the raiders the fact that they have seen Kael at his strongest and kicked his whiny butt, creating such a big crater that it take a huge honking piece of crystal to close up the hole, and told him to inform Illidan that contrary to popular belief, they are prepared.

For now with casual effort one can atleast begin to see raiding content, and for raiders having trouble in SSC/TK, there are upgrades to be had to help them along without depending on the all-so-trusty drop chances. This may mean that there will be loads of scrubs with some of the best gear in the game, but does that change the fact that they still need another 24 idiots to down Gruul...nope. Raiders, These rewards can help plug in those holes in your gear that let you down, these rewards help gear friends up faster, to be able to raid with you more often, and these rewards make even the casuals happy. So go to Kara and farm the heck outta that place till Prince screams at your very mention, cause those badges are going to go a long way in your raiding progression.

So lets all just get along, else I have some crackers to stuff you guys with, I hear it goes well with your whine.

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary

2008-02-20T12:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of wise men once said that and despite their inherent wisdom most of us continue to ignore the truth in those words. So how often is it that people want the rewards without the efforts? I would say given a choice, all the time, but those more grounded in reality realize that without putting forth the effort, no rewards are coming to you on their own accord. I too have felt the same way too often, in real-life my desire to get into a top rank MBA without working for it is probably one of my biggest ones, in game my desire to get my epic mount until very recently was the same. Though finally getting it taught me a lot.

I was until the beginning of Jan at about 500g and had been fluctuating around that number for quite a while, by quite a while I mean over 3 months. It seemed that all the money I made was lost on raids, enchants, gems etc. I had mentally decided that it was impossible to achieve both a constant raiding schedule interspersed with in-game moolah was never gonna happen. Yet a month later the picture is entirely different. I have my epic flight form, and over 1k in the bank, so what happened?

To put it bluntly I grew tired. Travel was slow and painful, grouping to do quests with my other guildies with epic flyers resulted in a lot of waiting on their part. Constant tells in gchat with other player's gold progress was beginning to break me until finally I decided I was gonna put in a couple of hours to do the dirty and grind/farm. And so it started, I asked a couple of friends about the best places to farm and began grinding while chatting most of the times on gchat. Some places were easy farming some were not, and market fluctuations constantly forced me to farm different things. One week it was cobra scales, another heavy clefthoof and a third it was primal fire.

But heres the deal, you aren't the only one aware of such farming spots, a lot of other people are, which results in competition, the most hateful of which is amongst members of your own faction. Why only them, well because they can clearly show you their displeasure and I like to stay on the good side of people, most of the times atleast. So after a while I decided that farming was not my thing. I was still only half way to my goal which meant giving up would be a sign of weakness. My farming also led to my constant whining on the gchat channel that this was hard work, almost to a point where I am sure people were wondering if I wasn't coercing them to pay me to shut up, despite that not being the case.

So unable to bring myself to farm and with lack of tolerance for my bickering, I sought alternate measures. It took me a while but it finally dawned on me that the one way to farm without competition (mostly anyways) was to do quests that I had left behind when I hit the big Seven-O. Infact I had left an entire zone (Netherstorm) to do with a friend, who ended up blowing through them anyway, so I got down to doing quests, and being heavily raid geared they were a breeze, even group quests. I could basically pull entire packs upon packs of mobs and down them with barely any health loss. It was so easy a ret pally could do it. Killing level 70+ elites which would normally been a crash course in "Hand over the money to my dead raid priest", turned into a fun and easy way to earn a buttload of cash. Not to mention selling all those quest rewards and DE-ing the random greens and auctioning the random blues. Towards the end people were constantly offering to fund my final leap, of which I took on one offer since questing with epic flight form is way too easy and faster.

Anyway it taught me that even the seemingly unattainable is far easier to do when you get started. Before I got started I had already decided that my ambitions were flawed and this would result in months over months of soul-crushing grinds, but that is no true. We often become pessimistic to avoid short term effort even if it may result in long term gain. The onus is on us(hehe) to define and establish our goals not simply through words but through effort. In the words of another wise man "Action expresses priorities." - M.K.Gandhi

p.s. Who says there is nothing to be learnt from video games =)

Overposting...sure, why not

2008-02-19T12:53:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article on http://gizmodo.com/ which I thought I had to share with the rest of you folks. Its on the HD-DVD demise issue again, but sure is funny and packs in some sound advice....well mostly anyways.

A Consumer's Cheat Sheet to HD DVD's Death and Blu-ray's Victory

HD DVD is dead. Officially. That may mean a whole bunch for the early-adopter tech geek crowd that's been wading in the kiddie pool of technological bickering and backhandedness for years, but what does it mean for the average consumer with only a cursory interest in high-def DVDs?

Here's our cheat sheet Q&A for you to whip out if you ever have to explain the high-def format wars to your parents.

Q: I chose sides early in the HD DVD/Blu-ray shenanigans and unfortunately, made the right decision and supported HD DVD. What do I do now?

A: Try and sell your HD DVD player or Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on as fast as you can. Go list it on craigslist or eBay already. The mainstream hasn't heard about HD DVD's demise just yet, which means you can find some chump to buy your player and movies on the cheap. How soundly you
sleep at night is up to you.

Q: Really? You mean my player is useless? Won't there be any more movies released on HD DVD?

A: A few more releases that are already in the pipeline might trickle out in the next couple months, but just watch as all the studios abandon the format and go exclusively Blu-ray. You're better off
just selling off all your stuff unless you want to keep it around to win our retro Gizmodo tech contest of 2028.

Q: But what if I already have a gigantic HD DVD library?

A: It depends on how gigantic it is. If it's not too big, you can re-buy your library on Blu-ray. If it's huge, you might want to buy a combo player, like the one from LG, in order to ease your transition.
Either way, you're going to be out a bit of money. You might want to just shoot yourself in the face now and be done with it.

Q: I chose sides early in the HD DVD/Blu-ray shenanigans and chose Blu-ray. What do I do now?

A: Besides calling up your grandmother to rub it in her face, there's not much you need to do. Just sit and wait for your favorite movies to come out on Blu-ray.

Q: Right, but how long do I have to wait, exactly, before I can watch Batman Begins on my PlayStation 3?

A: Beats me. Now that Blu-ray is the de-facto format, the studios should be falling over themselves trying to remaster their already released HD DVD movies onto Blu-ray. If we had to guess, it'd
be within the year.

Q: OK, now that the war is "officially over," is it time for me to buy a Blu-ray player?

A: Maybe. It's still relatively early in the technology's lifespan, which means prices for Blu-ray players are still quite high when you compare it to the sub-$100 upscaling DVD players you can find at Wal-Mart. Plus, the BD library is incredibly thin when compared to DVD, so you might not be getting much use out of the player in your day-to-day movie watching. But if you really do want to get into
the HD game (and have an HDTV to back it up), it's finally safe to buy a player.

Q: So you're saying that I'm going to be paying more for these movies on Blu-ray? When will the prices drop to DVD levels?

A: That's tough to say. For example, Superman Returns is only $14.98 for the DVD version but $23.95for the Blu-ray version. It's going to take a few years yet for that 23 to drop to 14. If you had to force us to guess, we're going to say about three years. That's 2011.

Q: I don't buy movies, I rent them. When are Netflix and Blockbuster going to get in gear and stock a bunch of Blu-ray movies?

A: As soon as the major studios start releasing Blu-ray movies in bulk. If you recall the VHS to DVD transition, it took quite a while for VHS tapes to phase out, and this transition will be quite similar.
Again, if you forced us to guess, we'd have to say 2010.

Q: Screw it, I'm convinced. I'm going to go out and buy a player today. Which player should I buy?

A: Unless you're morally opposed to gaming or having a gaming device in your living room, you should go with the PlayStation 3. It's software-upgradeable, plus it's relatively cheap even when compared to standalone Blu-ray players. You even get a gaming system thrown in.

Q: Speaking of gaming, what if I already purchased an Xbox 360 and want to be able to watch Blu-ray movies? Will I have to buy a PS3?

A: Maybe not. Even though Microsoft backed HD DVD and released an HD DVD add-on, they weren't staking their entire console on the format (hence, the add-on). This means that Microsoft has a big minus in their column when comparing the 360 to the PS3 in terms of high-def DVD
playback. It's a hole they're going to want to patch up right away, so don't be surprised if you see a Blu-ray add-on for the 360 some time in the near future.

Q: Can you sum up what I, the average consumer, should do at this point in one sentence?

A: Wait one more year for the Blu-ray format to mature, for more titles to be released, and player prices to drop before jumping in.

Original post at :http://gizmodo.com/358219/a-consumers-cheat-sheet-to-hd-dvds-death-and-blurays-victory/

The End is Nigh

2008-02-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

So while thinking of the topic to discuss today, a friend of mine pinged me to say this

This got me thinking all about the debate that had been raging for quite a while about which was the better format, which is better for the consumer....etc..etc. Jump to the present and its clear that it no longer matters which was the better format because ladies and gents,we have a winner. Sure its a more expensive technology and people complain about it being inferior to HD-DVD, but atleast now consumers can invest on a next-gen DVD format player and not lose. I am sure there are lots of people out there who are unhappy, but this will atleast allow a consolidation for the consumers and the manufacturers, and hopefully there should be enough models out there to rival the low costs of the HD-DVD players.

For me, I am a happy camper as is obvious from my excerpt with my friend, and as is he. For a darn good reason too, we both have a PS3, and as we all know that Sony played a huge gamble with selling the PS3 with a built in Blu-Ray player. This alone introduced a lot of homes to, voluntarily or not, this technology, and more often than not, defined their camp of choice. In the end this gambit payed off for us and for Sony, though there sure were a lot more things to attribute to their success, including their midnight deals that shook the HD-DVD camp in irrecoverable ways.

It also means I can expect all my favorite movies in Blu-Ray and watch them happily on my PS3.It means I no longer have to worry about whether or not I will get shafted by giant corporations,well atleast not in the immediate future. Infact I would suggest most people who want a Blu-Ray player to buy the PS3 instead, specially if they have an avid interest in gaming. Its one ofthe only, if not the only player which can be updated to the latest version of Blu-Ray specifications.(I may be using the wrong lingo, so forgive me if thats the case). It serves as an excellent gaming machine, and in the year to come, there are several big name titles, some of which are sure to become classics. It can also surf the web, and hence be used to download movies from the internet(note: I am not suggesting illegal downloads, there are legal means to download movies), and watch them right there on your PS3, or save them for future viewing. You can also set it up as a media center, photo viewer, music player.....etc..etc. Sure the Xbox 360 can do loads of these things too, but so far I dont see a Blu-Ray player in it, and to boot with a high failure rate I would keep miles away from the demonic machine and its red ring of death.

So for those of you who invested in the losing camp, I offer you my condolences. To those on the winning side, I offer my congratulations, and to those who have waited out this battle, now is the time, go witness the next generation of High Def DVD's. To those who are afraid of the high costs of Blu-Ray players, I can offer this example of my friend purchasing the PS3 for a mere 250$, sure he went through a bunch of rebates,but for the eagle eyed bargain hunters, such low prices are there for the taking. If I see any interest, I may post on how he got the deal.

Till next time....Ciao.

Doing that thing we do

2008-02-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

So last night my guild and I went to do our routine inspection of Gruul's Cave and as usual finding it to not be as clean as expected, ended up spanking him and his cronies. One of our raid members theorized that the cave in was a result of Gruul's mom, who was apparently irritated by the noise being perpetuated by Gruul and his buddies and was simply asking them to quiet down while she watched the latest episode of Lost and pondered on how Walt had grown so big so fast.

Anyway, so we went in and were at an unusual lack of co-ordination, instead of our usual 1-shotting the place we took 2 wipes before taking down High King and 3 before successfully killing Gruul. It was unusual because we had most of our standard raid setup and raiders, but somehow it felt off, it could be a result of the last few weeks of raids getting cancelled due to Super Bowl, Valentine's Day and some folks quitting WoW to reconstruct whatever semblance of their life there is left to rebuild, but c'mon RL. Anyway thats a topic for another time.

It was a slightly disheartening evening too because I lost out on T4 shoulders for the millionth time, and this time to someone who has 2 other alts with T4 shoulders, and despite that individual claiming this to be his new main, it left much to be desired. Now in our guild, we have a non-DKP looting system, with basically everyone who can use the item rolls, and it is at the discrepency of the rollers to pass in favor of say tanks/healers. This is a result of our guild's fervent desire to stay away from the trap of becoming raiding centric.

Also our guild has a lot of level 70s, most of whom are not frequent raiders, and I have lost my T4 shoulders to first timers, despite having been there for each and every attempt by our guild. Which brings me to the thought that is plaguing me at the moment, At what point does a casual raiding guild need to pay attention to regular raiders over casual ones? Because last night when I saw the alt roll for the piece of loot, I initially refused to roll and only rolled at the insistance of my guild mates. I don't want to sound like a loot whore, but being one of the guild's main tanks, I am consistently pressed to increase my survivability and my lack of gear upgrades only makes it harder. I am infact geared mostly in badge reward gear, PvP gear, arena gear and rep reward gear with only 2 pieces of T4, trinket(Moroes) and my cloak from raids. I rarely ever find tank gear (being a feral druid), and since most of it comes from tiered armor I feel that at a point a guild needs to decide whether to continue gearing alts/casuals, since they too have a right to roll, or take a stance and gear the folks who are not only regular but also put in a lot more effort, but since that shows signs of a progression centered guild its unlikely in our case.

Also in our setup, as is inevitable, there are folks who don't take raiding seriously either, and as a result have unenchanted, ungemmed and sometimes green gear, which can make it even harder on the people who spend their time to enchant, gem and read up strats just so they can perform that much better, at that point is it still fair to follow the setup of roll for loot?

But all that ranting is simply an outlet. I love my guild and most of my guildies, even the cold hearted warrior who took my T4 shoulders, but sometimes I am left to wonder on whether whatever thing we do, we do right or wrong?

A sorry state of affairs (Movie Review: Jodha Akbar-Hindi)

2008-02-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

So my saturday was probably not the best of its kind. I was unwittingly dragged through an itinerary who's complete details were not fully relayed to me until it was too late. What was supposed to be an enjoyable Chinese lunch, turned into a lunch followed by what can only be described as one of the most horrendous cinema experiences ever.

I was dragged through a movie called "Jodha Akbar", for the uninitiated, its a bollywood film with generous doses of songs and some of the worst on screen performances of your lives, and it will probably do well because it features some of the more famous actors out there who's presence alone with atone it in the eyes of the Indian masses for its decidedly bland story.
Its a period film which features, Akbar, the grand-daddy of one of the world's most famous emo men out there, Shah Jahan, for those who don't recognize the name, he's the Mughal emperor who was behind the construction of the 'Taj Mahal', one of the tentative '7 Wonders of the modern world', and if this movie is anything to go by, I don't blame the kid for being emo. Akbar is also the great-grand-daddy of Aurangzeb, who was probably the Indian equivalent of the 'Angry White Kid'.
Still the movie afforded me an insight into my friend's taste in movies, and also a bad sign. The movie's subject though was undoubtably not a bad one, for Akbar was probably one of the most powerful Mughal emperors who embraced and worked to bridge the gap between both the Hindu and the Muslim religions. He was a muslim emperor who showed an unusual resiliance towards the arguments of his own community and married a Hindu princess.
Anyhow, the movie was probably not the best way to portray his deeds and on the whole was a mish-mash of ideas and some of the more important details were thrown in too quickly, resulting in what can only be described as unwatchable for the most, though for the avid hindi movie buffs with both time and money.....maybe. 3/10

So why am I here

2008-02-16T08:51:00.000-08:00

As an individual I am not particularly verbose/talkative most of the times, but when provided with a platform to speak a lot, apparently I do. In most recent months after joining my current guild(in WoW), I started posting a lot, much to the appreciation of some folks while apparently brewing disdain in the heart of others. Until this happened

Now of course Dali has some valid points there....I do smell weird, but going on to attacking my accent (some say I sound like Arnold, but c'mon when was the last time you heard an Indian guy make an even remotely close approximation of a big bulging body builder's Austrian accent....I call lies on that one), and as for spelling and grammar........I do beleive; I'm not to bad at that, myslef.

So seeing that he has called for a posting probation on the forums, a vote that will in all likelihood get ratified, I decided to build myself another platform to speak from and be even more unlikely in my choice of topics.....if that is even possible. So hope to hear more from me...a lot more.