What a day…

19 07 2008

I ran 3 heroics yesterday–finished them all, too. Think I got 12 badges, total, yesterday. Not only that, but I leveled my alt holy paladin, Syrenicus, to 23 — he’s in Neo Imperela now, along with my level 16 shadow priest, Daulan. Had a great time running WC for once–we had 4 people getting run through by Detlo. Was a good break after H-Mechanar too. Also started a 5’s team–my Evoker’s gear still doesn’t hold up, and we don’t have the best team synergy, but in a couple months I’ll have my S4 wand and gloves! =)

However,the best part of yesterday was definitely gearing up. I got 3 gear upgrades! In H-Mech, the robes dropped from the Cache of the Legion–surprisingly, an upgrade. In H-SP, Quagmirran’s Eye dropped, finally affording an upgrade from Vengeance of the Illidari (the Hellfire Peninsula trinket that I’ve had since 63). And in H-MgT (which was a great run–we had Spartackus, a T6-geared bear tank, as well as some of his T6 guildies come along) I got my Jaded Crystal Dagger! Combined with the Merciless helm I got from BG’s, my gear’s really starting to shape up. I’m only 39 badges away from the Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons too–should get some of them later today in Kara. I’d have them next week if I wasn’t going out of town. =( As it is, I’m still starting to get really well geared, and am a little closer to epic’ing out. =)





My first arena experience

18 07 2008

Well, I took part in my first arena match yesterday. Took my 4/5 Evoker’s and my S2 helm into 6 different matches, actually–in addition, I still had my 2/48/11 spec…an interesting choice for Arena, to say the least. Although Detlo and I didn’t win any of our 2v2 matches, they were still rather fun. Arena is certainly a lot different from BG’s, that’s for sure! Still had a good time, though. Hoping to get some S3/S4 gear out of these games (obviously the stuff that doesn’t require ratings.)





My opinion on Kael’thas

15 07 2008

A quote from User: Illidan Rocks on WoWWiki:

“As far as Kael’thas is concerned, if he survives after this it will only give Blizzard a chance to warp him further. He now bears little resemblance to the sympathetic character seen in The Frozen Throne. In his first WoW appearance, he’d gone from being an unfairly persecuted hero (or anti-hero), to totally evil. In his second appearance, he’s now evil and a Wretched or zombie. What will Blizzard do to him if he comes back a third time? Unless they plan on redeeming him somehow I would rather he just stayed dead. I feel pretty much the same way about Illidan. I would like to see him as a hero again, and if they aren’t willing to do that with him I don’t want him resurrected.”

Poor Kael’thas. He was such a cool guy in TFT! In fact, he was probably my favorite character. Even in WoW, he was still not (IMO!) evil, just misguided–he *was* still searching for a cure for his people, remember? That’s *WHY* he was working on the Sunwell in the first place! To see him reduced to a 5-man kill quest–that’s just dumb. I’m sorry.

A character with as much depth as Kael’thas Sunstrider shouldn’t be reduced to this! He deserves a chance at redemption. Blizzard has (IMO!) destroyed one of their best characters in current Warcraft lore.

Of course, as much as he deserves a chance at redemption, he *is* officially dead now. Unless he makes another appearance without his head. O.o





AFK…

7 07 2008

…bbl. Saturday, to be exact. Not only should I take a short break anyway to cool off a little (although I NEED to grind rep and do dailies!), I have college orientation to attend!

I’ll post when I get back. It’ll be something meaningful, I hope.

I just noticed I officially don’t have any greens! I wonder how long I’ve been that way…

Incidentally, I made it to 372 jewelcrafting today, too. I’m really looking forward to crafting epic gems :)





Why raiding is so much fun

7 07 2008

I was originally gonna write a post in which I did a lot of QQing about my class. But then I realized: NO ONE WANTS TO READ THAT! So instead, I’m gonna write a much better post. (If anyone wants to read my rant, please let me know and I will e-mail it to you.)

It took me a while to think about this–why raiding is so much more fun for me than are 5-mans, soloing, or PvP–but I eventually came up with a few reasons.

A) Coordination: It takes a lot of effort to organize and successfully pull off a 10-man raid. I don’t even want to think about how much work it would take to put together and adminstrate a 25-man. I’m glad I’m not raid leader. Our RL does a great job every week putting this thing together, and it often becomes much more fun than anything else partly because it’s so well organized.

B) Camaraderie: Maybe it’s because the raid’s so well organized, I don’t know–but I really enjoy working with my fellow raiders every week that I’m in the group. We’ve definitely, I think, become fairly good friends, and really have a good time during the raids.

C) Synergy: As a mage, I mesh with many other classes well. For example, locks can pop a Curse of Elements on the target (+80 Fire), paladins can throw BoW, BoS, BoK on me (lots of choices) and sometimes are nice enough to use Judgment of Wisdom on their targets. :) Hunters have that lovely +5% to all damage bonus, too, which is nice. Shaman totems are amazing: Wrath of Air for the +101 damage, *Mana Spring/Tide*, and the other totem which I can’t remember that adds 3% to your crit chance and 5% to hit. Druids, of course, have the most powerful buff in the game. In the raid last night, there was at least 1 fight where I was over +1000 fire damage buffed, and it was partly due to the awesome synergy that a mage has with other classes.





ZOMG! Prince 40%!

6 07 2008

Yeah. Now we’re talking.

Downed Shade first try, only 1 death :)

He didn’t drop any caster gear (I haven’t seen any caster gear in any instance for 3 weeks)

Downed Illhoof, no sweat. We chose to just DPS down Illhoof and only have our offtank on his minion, which worked really well. Didn’t even have a death, after wiping on him *multiple* times last week.

He didn’t drop any caster gear, either.

Did chess event. First tiime I’d ever done it; wow, it’s really a lot of fun! Finished it first try.

No caster gear dropped.

On to Prince we went, rather confidently. First two tries were good (we kept ranged DPS by the door and ran behind that corner to the left of the door for Enfeebles), but I forgot to put my hit rating gear on. Oops. ^^’

I gotta admit, I really like the fight, despite its being so difficult. (1M health? That’s more than any other boss…justified, I know, but still, it was quite a shock at first!) We did excellently for going into the fight not having done it before as a guild.

Third try, we did rather well too, but were still wiping around 40-50%. And that’s where we stayed for the rest of the night.

Great job to all–Mymichelle, Zerlan, Fingan, Detlo, Wackko, Sinithos, Galistul, Nathanielle, Reanimator, Nightscraper, Raiseplz…went really well tonight :)

Oh, and it’s proven now–<Neo Imperela> is so leet that we can have out-of-combat wipes. :P Right after Illhoof, on the way to chess, we were pulling the Spell Shades out onto that wooden platform…right before we pulled, Nathanielle accidentally backed off the ledge, Mymichelle levitated into some trash mobs to try and rez him, and Zerlan jumped down/died/ankhed in order to rez. Good times. :P

I’m within 2 badges of my new trinket–Icon of the Silver Crescent–now, which is nice! Also ran 3 instances today (2 partially) in order to get my shiny new Kara key! Now I don’t have to wait for Raiseplz every week, lol.

I can’t do Kara next week, sadface…I gonna be out of town during most of the week. Good luck to our raid team.

Still working on the druids with Sinithos; we’re both at level 21 now, and doing really well. Working through Hillsbrad right now. I gotta admit, healing as a druid is really fun, and definitely offers more variety than paladin heals.





So now I’m gonna write all my letters in….

1 07 2008

the font that’s used in the mail system for WoW. I spent maybe 10 minutes searching for it on the Internet, and came up with the Morpheus font. Not too horribly difficult to read after you get it past size 10 and off of that tan parchment background they have in game.

And yes, I do plan to use this in virtually everything I do with my word processor now.





Blog growth

29 06 2008

It’s amazing how much more traffic my blog’s gotten ever since I started running Kara. I suppose that’s only to be expected considering that there are probably many more people interested in raiding than there are interested in reading my rambling about my characters, but I’m really impressed and gratified. It’s good to know that there *is* someone out there reading! <3





Valuable experience: 100%

29 06 2008

Despite throwing ourselves at both Illhoof and Netherspite tonight, we couldn’t down either of them; however, we still gained some valuable experience for raiding (and I realized it was about time I upped my First Aid skill!) We did a great job tonight regardless of whether or not we downed any new bosses–we’re not running tomorrow, so we’re gonna start up again on Thursday with a fresh run. Looking forward to it.





Running Jokes

29 06 2008

I’ve noticed a few things over the last few weeks as we’ve started running Kara as we’ve been talking on Vent; most importantly, I’ve learned a valuable raiding convention.

“It’s always the mage’s fault.”

(corollary: “Okay, thanks for the biscuits, you can leave now.”)

Um…

I feel so used. It was not until *after* I started Kara that I learned one of the oldest rules in raiding. As it stands, apparently if something goes wrong it’s the mage’s fault. If a mob’s Frost Trap breaks and a hunter ends up dying, it’s the mage’s fault cause he didn’t DPS down the frost trapped mob. As a side note, gnome mages can be blamed even if they’re not in the raid group.

As for the “biscuits” comment, that was a rather amusing joke at the beginning of the Kara raid two weeks ago. :P

Additionally, there have been some great times in Vent, from Detlo’s demotion in guild ranks to “eeyore lover” to the recurring jokes about the “10k stam gem” (which started out as an accidental substitution of “stamina” for “health” in a discussion), usually coupled with a discussion of the “I WIN” button.

Not that anyone will find this too interesting, but I thought these were rather amusing moments. I might try and expand so that it’s actually funny at some point.





ARAN: 30%

28 06 2008

Possibly even less.

Yes that’s right, coming back to Kara today, <Neo Imperela> cruises through the entire first half of the instance including Curator. I personally spent a good 4 hours raiding; unfortunately, after 12 server, I could no longer stay due to commitment tomorrow morning early.

Started out no problems as usual getting Attumen. Lots of healer/tank gear throughout the entire instance, and starts out with Attumen’s plate heal drop. Took him down w/o breaking a sweat.

Moving on to Moroes–a harder fight for me as I had never actually taken him down–I only got into the group afterwards. Again very smooth despite some shackle breaks on the spriest. Really went well! Got another copy of my belt to drop, too–no one needed that, so it got squished. A LOT of stuff got squished this run.

As we got to Maiden, we were on a roll; no wipes, and only minimal deaths. Deadly Boss Mods’s timers for Redemption is off for the first couple, so I took some extra aoe damage from her, but I found that stepping onto her consecrate helps a lot. Unfortunately, we did wipe on our first shot at Maiden; however, we had no trouble on our second attempt and downed her.

The Opera Event this week was Little Red Riding Hood. A nice healer cloak and a plate helm dropped. Fortunately I did not have to deal with running :) Everything went really well, and we got through with no wipes.

After the Opera Event, I was 2nd on teh DPS charts, which was really nice to see. [Flask of Pure Death] probably helped a bit. :D

We had a couple nervous moments on the trash heading up to Curator, but overall it went well. Got to Curator, cleared the trash in his room, and started the fight–got him through 4 evocates, and then he enraged–CAKE. Not only did we not wipe on him at all after only getting him to 30% last week, we even got a no-death clear on him. Grats to Kythrine for picking up her T4 gloves!!!!

Of course, two pulls later on trash, all our healers went down and we nearly wiped on trash. :P Stupid mana-immune wyrms. Kinda embarrassing. ^^’

We wiped once on Aran before I had to leave, but we did get him down below 30%, which was great!

Really no caster gear from the instance at all, which was sad, but it was nice to have gotten as far as we did! Looking forward to possibly finishing tomorrow!!!

Great run to: Raiseplz (RL tonight), Kythrine, Zerlan, Fingan, Detlo, Bohsca, Sinithos, Tamaro, and Galistul!





CC strategy in WoW

27 06 2008

Yes, I thought my next theory post was gonna be on paladin heals. Meh. I wanna experiment with at least one other class (probably druid, with their awesome HoT’s) before I do that, so I have a little more to base my ideas off of.

(Copy-Paste from <Neo Imperela> guild forums)

#showtooltip
/clearfocus [modifier][target=focus,dead][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("focus", 5)
/stopcasting
/stopmacro [modifier:alt]
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph
/stopmacro [nogroup]
Sheeping <%f>

Basically what we have here is a macro that will improve mage DPS in groups by not requiring you to retarget your sheeped enemy. Basically before any pull, select the the mob you’re meant to sheep and alt-click this macro. That’ll set it as your focus. After that, you can select the main target, and simply use the macro while the main target is selected: it’ll sheep the mob you designated as your focus rather than the target.

The line /script SetRaidTarget (”focus”, 5) will put a moon raid symbol on your focus if you are the group leader. You can change the number for different raid symbols.
If that’s a little unclear, my apologies; if you have any questions feel free to ask

PART 2:

(Please forgive the pretentious tone throughout this post)

In addition, I’m gonna go ahead and expand a little bit on focus frames; if you haven’t played around with them as a CC class, I suggest it, as it makes it much easier to watch your CC while still playing effectively.

A focus is essentially a second target for you to work with. By default, your spells and abilities are used on your target, but, as in the above macro, your spells can be targeted on the focus.

The one drawback (an easily remedied one) is that Blizzard did not include a focus frame with the default UI, so you have to download a unit frames addon that includes a focus frame. I recommend X-Perl UnitFrames as a very good add-on with a focus frame, but if you want something that doesn’t modify all of your unit frames, there are mods available that simply add a focus frame to the default Blizzard UI. I know that at least one of these mods is available via WowAceUpdater.

If you set your addon up so that you can watch the buffs and debuffs on your focused mob, it’s much easier to refresh CC. For example, I have a focus frame located in the upper right corner of my screen, next to the minimap. I’ll include a screenshot here:

NOTE: IN THIS WORDPRESS TEMPLATE, YOU WILL NEED TO RIGHT CLICK THIS IMAGE AND CLICK “View Image” IN ORDER TO SEE WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT

As you may note, Polymorph has been cast on the focused mob–the mob in the upper-right hand corner. In this case, I’ve already set the mob as my focus and sheeped, so I’ve been watching the focus frame to see when Polymorph’s about to break. This also works for unreliable CC; you can instantly react to a broken Shackle or what have you by using a macro such as

/stopcasting
/cast [target=focus] Shackle Undead

if your focus is already set. This macro will interrupt your current spellcast and re-shackle the focused mob. This works wonders for any CC class, be they healer or DPS, as they can easily stay on their target while still maintaining CC. You’ll notice in my sample screenshot that I’m targeting the mob that needs to be burnt down first, while still keeping my sheep target CC’d effectively.

Focus is a wonderful tool for any CC class, and I highly recommend its use. It allows for much greater versatility in a fight. The macro that I included in my first post can be modified to work with any CC; for example, by replacing “Polymorph” with “Shackle Undead”, you can use this as a macro for shackling.

Mages: on a related note…
I also suggest making macros for spells like Ice Block, Spellsteal, and Counterspell:

/stopcasting
/cast (name of spell)

so that you can cast these spells instantly without waiting for your current spell to finish casting. This has proved helpful to me in many instances with casters, especially summoners, so that I can instantly interrupt a summon. This makes things especially easy in Blood Furnace. The Ice Block macro, I think, needs no explanation–everyone loves an instant panic button.

(Please forgive the pretentious tone throughout this post)

No alternate text supplied.

(end copy-paste)

Hope this was of some interest! I use this constantly when I’m in groups and highly recommend it to any CC class.





New alt!

27 06 2008

Working on a new drood alt with Sinithos, who’s also starting a druid. We just got bear form–all sorts of fun! Planning to level together to 70 when we’re not playing mains.

Starting this week’s guild Kara run tomorrow; I just got the design for a +30 arcane resist ring, which should help with Curator. Been grinding my jewelcrafting up, and am now at 365 :)

Probably the biggest news recently was finally hitcapping. I just did that today with the help of a rare BoE +30 spell hit chest from AH. :)





Curator: 30%

22 06 2008

We woulda had him if Hateful Bolt hadn’t been on Detlo right before he got crushed.

ANyway though, nice job, we’ll get him next week! :)

Story is, I wasn’t gonna log in today actually–but ended up doing so. Glad I did since I got into the Kara group while we were going after Curator. Guess there were tanks and heals online, so we decided to run it today–I was all sad I didn’t get in to down Maiden, but at least I got in for Curator–looking forward to next week. :)

During one of our attempts to down him, I hit 8100+ on two Fireballs during Evocation–Ignite was ticking for 1685 :) was the most amazing thing ever. Only slightly better than my ownage 7k on second MgT boss heroic.

Anyway, I’m gonna start doing a lot more dailies, and try to buy  some J/C recipes on AH. :)





Maiden: 20%

20 06 2008

<Neo Imperela>’s first try at Maiden yields a 20% finish. We weren’t able to duplicate it, but we did a great job for a first try! Good luck to everyone tomorrow!

Got an enchant for Galistul too, so that’s nice. I’m hoping for some J/C designs soon; I’m too poor to purchase any. Looking at probably getting my epic cloak from badges tomorrow or Sunday–I need about 8 badges.

Ran H-MgT today with a pug–we did finish, grats to Hoofgar Bizarrobob Sylendar, and Tarpep for a nice run. Unfortunately my robe did not drop, so I have to do it again >.< Coulda used the mace from Kael but that didn’t drop either. I was on adds for the second boss, set up a macro to do it, and ended up popping a 7k+ (10k with ignite) fireball on the boss. Kinda nice. And a HUGE grats goes out to Bizarrobob for SOLOING Kael’thas from 20% to 0% to finish off the run.

I’m working on a montage video for Kara for <Neo Imperela>. I’ll post stuff here when I get it done.

Oh and it’s official, I was 3rd (I’m pretty sure!) on the Kara DPS charts tonight. YEE!!