Thursday, December 31, 2009

Craziness and Car Accidents

Apparently some people still come around to this site (much like I did with some other blogs), and for that I say thank you. Still not much to report in WoW cause of the holidays. I hope that changes in the new year (stuff like me actually making raids and such).

This post is mostly for me to just write down something that's been on my mind lately, and not WoW related at all. It is also not a happy tale, so tread carefully.

Recently I was in a vehicle accident on my way to a business trip. I was driving, and there was one passenger. We hit a patch of ice and slid into a metal light pole going 45-50 mph. I suffered a broken left clavicle from the seat belt locking up and my passenger suffered two broken ankles.

I used to fear being pulled over by cops while driving friends, or anyone for that matter. The waiting in the car before the officer walks up would be awkward to me. I don't fear that as much anymore. It has lost it's significance in light of the idea of wrecking and causing either permanent disability or death of a passenger.

I feel bad enough in this instance where both of my passenger's ankles got broken (minor breaks from what I know, no cast on either). Part of this comes from the fact that he has lost his mobility, at least temporarily, while I walk away with a bit of a stiffness in my shoulder. If his injuries had been worse, including death, I honestly don't know what I would do. Especially because I would face it everyday since he is a coworker. Knowing that my actions (however out of control of the situation I had been) resulted in the death of another would wear me down.

But that didn't happen, so I deal with what did. This is my first broken bone, but apparently if you're going to break a bone, the clavicle is the one you want to break. I'm not in a cast or a sling or a brace (although this worries me somewhat that the bone isn't going to knit) and my instructions were, "No heavy lifting. If it hurts, stop doing it."

I do really mean to post things here, and I'm making it a New Year's Resolution to do so. I have a personal list of Shamany (Elemental) things to buy with Emblems of Frost, in the order *I* was going to buy them, but my status in the guild is shaky at the moment. Nothing bad, just that we needed healers instead of DPS but some new and old Resto Shamans have cropped up...we shall see what happens there.

Until I post again, have a Happy (and safe) New Year's Eve.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

No Excuse

Ok, no excuse for not posting. Haven't had anything to say really.

I did make the switch and am no longer playing my Paladin. My shaman is my main now, and he's Elemental mostly. Resto is creeping up as what he does though, so I'm keeping an eye on getting better at that too.

In other news, I not only switched to playing my shaman, I also switched servers and factions to be with a different guild. So far so good. My gear was a bit low for starting out with them, but they accepted me anyway and I hope they haven't regretted it yet :). (As an aside, my gear has gotten much better since my time with them). We clear 25m stuff easy peasy and are now trying 25m Heroic ToC. The crazy thing is that is where they want me as Resto! Apparently I do well enough healing.

That's all for now.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A follow up on 969

Wow. Just want to thank Honorshammer at Honor's Code for the link to my post. Didn't think that was going to happen especially when I talked with another Tankadin in my guild who basically said, "Well, duh." when I mentioned this.

Next to address some of the comments on the last post.

Argon, the rotation that you are using has a lag in it. Even with a fully spec'd Judgment giving you an 8 second cooldown on it you will have to wait to use it again (by this time your Shield of Righteousness would be usable however). Since everything is an instant cast (in theory) you look at the GCD of 1.5 seconds per spell. With this in mind you need to cast 6 spells before you can use the same 9 ability (6 * 1.5 = 9) and 4 spells before you can use the same 6 ability (4 * 1.5 = 6). You're only casting 4 spells between your 9s.

Lanashara, I used these two

Nines
/castsequence reset=9
Judgement of Wisdom, Consecration, Holy Shield

Sixes
/castsequence reset=6 Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous


Alternate between them and you'll have the 969 rotation. The reset=# is just there so that it'll start from the beginning when you pull the next group.

Kaziel, I haven't tested this recently but if I'm reading what you're saying correctly you'd have each ability on it's own /cast command. Afaik if a macro hits a /cast command it can't cast that triggers the GCD it will stop the macro. I've always used /castsequence though, so I could be wrong about that.

Femtifire's link is exactly like I'm saying and pre-dates mine by quite a bit. (Guess I'm slow to the game) Here's that link again: http://sacredduty.com/?p=5.

And finally with a few days under my belt using the macros as stated above...it doesn't feel right. I knew that I would lose flexibility to react (mostly at the beginning stages since everything *should* be on cooldown when you're doing this right). I noticed a lot of times that I'd do a 9669 on accident starting out because of misfiring of the macro. The next few days I'm going to work on using each ability on it's own keybind till I find something I'm comfortable with. I've already tried the key set I stated in my last post, but switching between Q and E was troublesome for me.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

My mind just exploded.

I kid you not. What follows is an epiphany I recently had while reading about 969 rotation for Pally Tanks.

I've not been having as much fun on my Pally tank and much of that has been due to frustration with threat (i.e. making me feel like a horrible tank). I admit that I do not currently use the 969 rotation that many believe is optimal threat in most situations. This is because I couldn't wrap my head around it. It's just too long of a rotation for me to memorize.

Then it happened. I was fishing around for what the 969 rotation was (since I had forgotten it) and finally found it at Raider101. But it wasn't complete. Here's the important part of that page:
# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)
The last Judge loops to the first Judge and you should be able to start the rotation over. But SoR won't be up because you just used it. So you have to switch to HotR instead and continue on. The complete loopable rotation is actually this:
# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Judge(9)
Which is the rotation I remember reading about.

Ok, so what?
Here's the epiphany. You can separate the 9 and 6 parts of the rotation. I'm going to assign what I will use as keybinds to the abilities so as to abbreviate.

The 9s
1- Judgement
2- Consecrate
3- Holy Shield

The 6s
Q- Shield of Righteousness
E- Hammer of the Righteous

The above rotation becomes this:
1Q2E3Q1E2Q3E1

Notice how the numbers and the letters have a mini rotation relative to themselves.

Here's a more pronounced version
1-2-3-1-2-3-1
-Q-E-Q-E-Q-E-


Short version - This is a new way of looking at the 969 rotation that may be easier for some people to wrap their heads around. I know personally remembering 1-2-3, Q-E is going to be much easier to remember than the longer sequence.

Corollary - With this in mind two macros could be developed, namely a 9s rotation and a 6s rotation that you would then alternate, simplifying the overall rotation to 1-2-1-2. As with all macros, you will lose flexibility by doing this.

Friday, September 11, 2009

3.2.2 Shaman Changes

First thing first. I'm still with the same guild, but I've been playing my Elemental Shaman more than my Tankadin.

With that out of the way, I was browsing MM0-Champion and noticed the new additions to the 3.2.2 patch changes.
*Flame Shock: The duration of all ranks has been increased by 6 seconds.

*Lava Burst: This ability no longer ever consumes a Flame Shock debuff off of the target.

*Glyph of Flame Shock: Redesigned. This glyph now makes Flame Shock periodic damage able to be critical strikes.


So they're basically making the current Glyph of Flame Shock baseline and changing the glyph to give us our Tier 8 two piece.

What happens to our T8 two piece then? Is it getting changed, or will it be redundant to have T82P and Flame Shock Glyph?

EDIT: Hey look, Wowhead tooltips!

Monday, August 24, 2009

DPS again

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm leveling a Horde Mage. I'm liking it so far (only 22ish though). The barrens is as long as I remember it from my old days of Horde, but the mounts at 20 is helping alot. I've also taken a note from a friend of mine and taken herbalism in order to make gold since I don't have a high level character feeding me money. I'm sitting on 20g at my level and I've already bought my regular mount (5g). I might even be able to afford a glyph or two soon.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

My Bad

So I may have over reacted when I talked about 3.2 changes. Apparently in addition to the Earth Shock change they also changed Wind Shock into Wind Shear. This new spell works like Wind Shock in that it lowers your threat but it has some added benefits.

1. It's off the GCD. You can cast it whenever you want without worrying about your rotation (for the most part).
2. It's an interrupt. Which negates my whole thing about the Earth Shock change. I never cast Earth Shock except as an interrupt and the damage was a bonus.

Just wanted to clear that up.


In other "news"...I'm thinking of switching guilds, and even more so, switching factions. And I think I'm going to shed my Tanking role and go back to my DPS roots. There's more feedback (i.e. quantitative numbers) with a DPS class (which also means it's more visible to other people, for better or worse).

** Originally this was going to be a "tangent", but as I type it up I find myself wanting to go into more detail than a "tangent" should have.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Rant, among other things

Rant first. I dislike people who dislike the Draenei because they are "Space Goats." Yes, Draenei come from a different world and escaped it's destruction in a space ship. But did you know that this same world is the origins of the Orcs? So it's ok that the Orcs traveled from their home world to Azeroth through the Dark Portal, but it's not ok that the Draenei traveled from that same world to Azeroth in a spaceship? That's kind of hypocritical.

Maybe it's because Orcs are more of a staple in the Warcraft world than the Draenei, having been in the Warcraft games. I have not played the RTS Warcraft games, so I don't know if the Draenei are mentioned there at all. I have read the Warcraft novels though and the Draenei are definitely mentioned in them. These books were published in 2001, six years before the Burning Crusade expansion came out.

While for many people the Draenei may have come out of left field, I'd like to give Blizzard more credit than that even if their brief mention in the Novels was never fleshed out. The simple fact that they remembered the Draenei and used them means either a good memory on Blizzard's part or they were on the table for awhile waiting to be used.

/rant off

In other news, apparently Blizzard named a gun after BRK. You can read about it on his new blog site (since he has stopped actually playing). If you enjoyed BRK's WoW blog (or you've never read him and you have a sense of humor), I recommend switching gears and reading his personal blog.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

3.2 is coming

Another post in the same day! Insanity!

Well, 3.2 is suppose to hit today and I was going over class changes for the Paladin and the Shaman again. Overall I like the changes (especially the Totem Bar change...been waiting for that for awhile), but one of the Shaman changes caught my eye today:

Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting

I fear (purely speculation) that this is a PvP change since Earth Shock has a relatively short CD and perhaps it was deemed too powerful in PvP. From a PvE standpoint, I used Earth Shock a lot to interrupt spells, specifically the Eye Beams on that gauntlet after Heigan in Naxx and also on the Watchers during Razorscale. It was my way of helping reduce damage to the raid during those fights, and I will miss it dearly.

Even so, I still think 3.2 will be a good patch and we all will learn to adjust to changes that have been made. And maybe, just maybe, I can keep my Shaman Hit capped without using that JC Hit trinket that gives an insane 96 Hit (with Two Hit Dragon's Eyes).

Ulduar Raiding

Another long spell of not posting. And again I'll say that it's just how I am :(. I get topics I want to write about sometimes, but it's never on a consistent basis. This time around it's raiding.

Our guild does a weekly Ulduar 10man raid. It has been going on for about 16 weeks. In that time we have managed to kill 5 bosses: Flame Leviathan, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, and Auriaya (but only once). It's my personal opinion that we aren't doing well in here. This is how our progression went.

Flame Leviathan is a joke. I'm fairly sure we killed him the first time we stepped into Ulduar (after a wipe or two as we got the vehicle controls down).

Our next target was XT, skipping the two optional bosses. This was the "original" or at the least harder version of XT with the lower enrage timer. We just couldn't put out the DPS to down him under the enrage timer (but to be fair, we were getting close). We were making it to the enrage timer though. Our problem was a mix of tactics and raw DPS output. We were positioning XT at the stairs, meaning all four trash piles had adds streaming from them. That left one DPS on the heart (along with the tank, who would be me). Shockingly enough, we actually downed XT with this tactic after the enrage timer was lengthened. Now we tank him to the side and only get two trash piles spawning allowing more DPS to focus on the heart. XT is not a problem for us now (if we have our regular healers).

After XT, we hit up Kologarn. I don't remember exactly, but I'm *fairly* sure we one shot him our first try. After XT (the way we were doing him), Kologarn was easy. These days, Kologarn is our stopping point however. We wipe a few times before downing him every week. Someone dies from the Eye Beams, either a healer or a DPS. If it's a healer, then we have a healing issue and people start dying when they're grabbed by the Right Arm, or I go down as the main tank because healing becomes too thin. If it's a DPSer that goes down, we don't have enough DPS left to free the person grabbed by the Right Arm meaning we get picked off one at a time till we wipe.

Of all the bosses (other than FL) I think Razorscale is our easiest kill. I know when I'm tanking I don't feel the pressure of enrage timers like I do on other bosses. The stacking thing that Razorscale does doesn't seem to do much, since we've never had to worry about it even when our DPS has been low. The only way we wipe on this boss is if an overzealous DPS dies in the Mole Phase, and even then we can sometimes make a comeback.

The details of our only Auriaya kill are fuzzy to me. I do know that we didn't directly kill the Defender, since the Void Zone he drops is what was killing us every time on other attempts. Other than that we just pulled out the DPS and healing that week.

And that's it, that's all we've done in Ulduar. Some of the problem is that we only go into Ulduar once a week and by the time we kill the bosses we can, we don't have time to try any of the others. We basically need a flawless kill on each of the bosses to even be able to attempt Auriaya. I'm hoping with 3.2 we can get better gear elsewhere and dive deeper into Ulduar, but from what I'm hearing the fights aren't all about the gear.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Lore

Been awhile, I know. I'm horrible that way. I'd like to blame it on my uncharacteristic illness (incidentally, Strep Throat != not fun), but that only accounts for a handful of days.

What I have been doing recently is reading the Warcraft novels. I got the Archive which contains the first four: Day of the Dragon, Lord of the Clans, The Last Guardian, and Of Blood and Honor. Needless to say, I'm enjoying them. I think this is partly because they're decently written and partially because they are familiar from playing WoW. Lord of the Clans and The Last Guardian were especially reminiscent because they are the story of Thrall and Karazhan, respectively.

It got me to wondering which part I was enjoying more. Did I only like them because they're part of the game I play, or do they stand on their own merit? In the long run it doesn't matter. I got my enjoyment out of it, and there's nothing else that matters beyond that in a book.

Short post, but it's a post. See you next time.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Elemental Shaman Pre-Naxx Gear. . .sorta

I was planning on listing some options for Elemental Shamans pre-Naxx, but my research wasn't going well. It is my opinion that the number one stat for Elemental Shamans (or any DPS really) is Hit Rating until you are hit capped. Unfortunately there are about zero (decent) Mail spell caster items with hit on them that you can get from Heroics or reputation vendors.

What this left me to was to just find whatever items I could with Hit rating on them. For reference, elemental shamans with Elemental Precision need 368 hit to be hit capped for Naxx. If you're a JC, there is a lovely trinket Twilight Serpent and you'll be able to pack this with two Rigid Dragon's Eye. This is a huge hit rating for one slot weighing in at 96. If you're not a JC, you won't be able to get this trinket or the gems.

If you're into PvP (or if even if you're not) the Wintersgrasp Mail Spellcaster armor has hit on it. It'll take commitment to get all the items though and there's some less than optimal stats for PvE (resiliance) but it is an option for hit items. I started down this route and ended up finding the JC stuff and stopped doing WG as I don't enjoy PvP. Your milage may vary.

There's a cloak in normal HoL (Cape of Seething Steam) that has a splatter of hit (29) on it and is easy to get (or atleast you've got more than one chance a day at it).

All your gem slots should be filled with Rigid Autumn's Glow (exalted with SoH to get the pattern) if you're still low on hit.

There are some enchants available that give hit. You should have Icewalker on your boots anyway, there's Percision to gloves, and if you're desperate there's the Titanium Weapon Chain that a BS can make and old world (BC) stuff from Sha'tar (Arcanum of Power)

And lastly, there's a food buff from Worg Tartare that gives 40 hit to bump you up that last bit during raids.

Again, I stress the hit cap for Elemental Shamans with 3/3 Elemental Percision is 368. If you have more than that it's too much and is wasted.

That's the end of the factual stuff, and now for an anecdote. Walked into Naxx on my Shaman with about 360 hit rating (couldn't push it to the full 368), 1600 SP self buffed, and 20%crit. . .walked away with 2k dps overall for a full clear. The guild master commented that I was pushing good numbers for the gear I was wearing (which I agree with, was only hoping for about 1.6-1.7k) and I fully attribute that to my hit rating. Missing takes away alot of your DPS. I also walked away with 7 pieces of gear, which is just crazy to think about.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Deal

Without further ado, the little awaited “What’s going on here” post. So first off, I want this to be primarily a World of Warcraft blog. I play WoW. I do limited theorycrafting of WoW. I wanted a place to sound out those ideas, make comments on others ideas (perhaps more elaborately than in their comments section), and all the other things a blog like area will allow me to do.

As to the informative part, I would say I currently have three characters: my Tankadin main, my Elemental Shaman, and of course the ubiquitous Death Knight alt. I’ve also got a hunter floating around that use to be my main in TBC, but I haven’t played him much since WotLK came out.

My Tankadin is *the* character I play nowadays. He was originally an Alt that I made for two reasons. First, my Hunter was at the point of not having anything truly useful to do outside of raids. So to get on the Hunter and play around for a few hours felt empty and non productive. The second reason was that the Tanks of our guild, while sufficient, were not. . .how to put this nicely. . .the tanking type.

As far as I know, our main tank was originally a DPS warrior who switched to tanking because no one else was available and he just became the de facto tank. Unfortunately he still had the mindset of a DPSer and liked those high DPS values. Now don’t get me wrong, he was a good tank or we’d never have gotten as far as we did (up to KT and Vashj), but I still just got the general feeling that he was average in the tanking scene.

Our Off-Tank(s) flat out weren’t that good. Slow to react, not confident, undergeared and expecting much. Not all of the OTs were all of these things, but enough from that list to make them subpar tanks.

And I thought to myself, “I can do better than this.” And so my Paladin was born. Why a paladin? Well, maybe another time since this is already longer than I thought and I still want to talk about my other two characters.

My main alt is my Elemental shaman. While I believe that I’ve got the mentality to be a tank, I know that deep down I like being a big damage dealer. About the time WotLK came out, a friend of mine who’s only experience with MMOs was Diablo II decided to give WoW a try. Two or three days into his ten day trial he bought the game and TBC and hasn’t looked back. However, he was completely green to WoW’s style of MMOs and so I created an alt to level beside him and help him learn to play. I settled on a Shaman because it was one of the few classes I had never even tried to play, and they fit a role I like to play: DPS / Utility.

My DK came about during the time when my Shaman was still low level and my Paladin was in the process of transferring servers. I needed something to play and DKs start at 55. Plus, I heard the opening quest series was very well done (which I agree completely with). If you’re ever thinking of making a DK to just mess around with, and haven’t yet, I suggest you wait till after you’ve been in Naxx a few times because then you’ll be familiar with the people you interact with at the beginning. Or maybe you don’t want to wait or care about that, but I found it fun to be killing these guys on my main, and doing quests for them on my alt.

Ok, I’ll stop there. Stay tuned for a Pre-Naxx Elemental Shaman gearing plan that’s based solely on my observations and researching abilities on www.wowhead.com, cause I’m going to want one and the best way would be to make it myself.

Friday, April 10, 2009

And so it begins. . .

This is the first post, made seconds after the creation of this place. I hope to make a habit of posting here and will do a real post very soon. (Being optimistic here :))