The hardest thing…

I /gquit Neo Imperela yesterday, and apped to Cloudy Day. It wasn’t because of the people in guild–they’re all great people and great players, and I absolutely loved playing with them–but rather just due to a lot of little things. We had been clearing–CLEARING–Kara for 2 months, and weren’t even TRYING to start ZA, really. Attendance for Kara was going down, and raids were a little sporadic at the end. (I found out that the guild wasn’t able to put together enough people for part 2 of Kara this week). I specifically asked Biochemistry what our chances were of seeing 25-mans pre-WOTLK, and he replied “0%”.

However, progression is only a small part of what caused me to leave. I was also put in a position I didn’t feel qualified to hold, and was expected to be at Kara every time, whether I wanted to go or not. At the time I left, I was in 3/5 T5, having got the shoulders (rolling against 4 hunters and 6 locks, I believe) the night before. I had totally outgeared the guild. In addition, we were going throuh some growing pains at NI anyway, what with the new GM Biochemistry. I saw multiple people leave the guild because of things that happened; one of my friends even transferred to Mal’ganis.

I had been thinking about applying to Cloudy Day for a couple of weeks; I kept on giving NI “just one more week” to see if we would even start ZA, or even just get enough people to guarantee a decent raid every week. Finally I just decided enough was enough; it was time to move on to a guild that’s motivated, and won’t expect too much from me in terms of putting me, a relatively new player, in a position that I’m totally unqualified for. (Yes, I know the Kara fights, but I’ve only played for slightly over a year. I shouldn’t be the one explaining them–that should be someone much more experienced in leading raids. I did not feel ready for that much responsibility, to be honest.) In addition, I’ve been raiding more with CD than I have with NI at this point.

I’m gonna miss playing with NI, but I really think I made the right decision. I left with a minimum of disruption, and I think Cloudy Day is right for me. I’ll be playing with Galistul again, which’ll be nice, too. Hoping to talk to Thenino tonight about my application.

On Friday night, I was raiding TK with Cloudy Day, and we absolutely owned face through the first 3 bosses in there. I didn’t die on Void Reaver early this time like I did last time (thankfully). Think I’m getting better at surviving. Ended up winning the T5 shoulders, which were a huge upgrade from my [Fel-Tinged Mantle] from H-MgT. I’m now completely out of heroic gear, save for my [Quagmirran's Eye], which I hope to replace either with a 41-badge trinket or with [Hex-Shrunken Head]–I only dream of the mage class-specific trinket.

Further along in endgame!

I’ve continued to get pugged into Cloudy Day raids. Last night, I was involved in the downs of Supremus and Shade of Akama in Black Temple, which was REALLY exciting. Good times were had by all. Unfortunately nothing dropped for me, but I still had a great time in there, and look forward to doing it again in the future. Akama was especially fun, what with doing multiple things–CC and hardcore DPS–at different times in the fight. The DPS race to get the boss from 100% to 0% within a minute was some of the most fun I’ve ever had–of course I was in total panic mode!

Tonight, things didn’t go so well–we wiped a couple times on both Vashj and Hydross (!) which was really too bad, but I got to see the Hydross fight, which was something I hadn’t done before. Very fun, and quite a unique concept for a fight–we wiped because he had two phase changes very close together and we got overwhelmed by elementals. =(

All this stuff is new to me, and is also very cool. Provides a welcome change from my 22-badge-a-week Kara runs with NI. =O

Onwards!

Well I continued my moonlighting for Cloudy Day last night in Black Temple (!) after Kara; wiped a couple times on Supremus while we learned the fight. All sorts of fun, I’ll tell you what! I’m really enjoying the occasional glimpses at endgame, and Pwni/Thenino is a really good RL from what I’ve experienced. =) Running with those guys is just awesome. It’s really gratifying to look at my DPS meters afterwards and see that while I was alive I was putting out over 1150 DPS too–behind the 2 locks in raid, of course. =)

For the first time recently that I can remember, a majority of our drops in Kara were usable. Was really nice! I really hope that that keeps up tonight when we down Netherspite and Prince and then move on to ZA first boss. =) Hopefully we’ll be ready to start 25-man raids soon, I’m really excited to get on that track!

I’m hoping also for a Mag’s run tonight with Cloudy Day, if things work out I’ll be “Velinath, Champion of the Naaru” later tonight!

PLEASE comment this post if you’d like me to write a specific post e.g. more Kara boss strategies, or some specific nuance of magery–I’m totally willing to try and help out.

EDIT: Well Kara tonight…was interesting. We started raid with only 7 people, and ended up with 10 eventually. Every drop was usable tonight too, which was kind of nice

Under New Management

Well, our GM Mymichelle decided to step down, handing the reins of the guild over to Biochemistry. So far from what I’ve seen he’s doing a great job keeping the guild in line–there were 2 people who were found to be siphoning stuff off of gbank and auctioning it; soon after, they got kicked.

I’m a little leery of the position I’ve been put in (I’m listed as a raid leader for rank) but I am hoping to rise to the challenge! Right now I’m kind of official raid announcer and master looter. Raids are certainly going faster–official raid time was 1h17m after Opera–we quit for the night after that. 7 badges in slightly over an hour? Nice!

I’m not sure what to think right now, despite the overall positive tone of the post. I’m just hoping everything goes well as our guild moves through this trying time. It kind of seems like we’re headed towards being a serious raiding guild–not what I signed up for, but a transition I’ll try to make. I’m just hoping that the rest of the guild will come too.

Badges, retitling, and more!

Well, I hit 1400 DPS today in H-SP during a boss fight. Very exciting. =D

In more significant news, I’ve chosen to retitle the blog *TEMPORARILY* to reflect my respec. I will probably be respeccing back to Fire at some point however.

Also, I’m getting a lot of badges every day now-6 or more daily. Having some great runs, and looking forward to getting a huge upgrade for my gloves soon, like tomorrow-ish. (Still using the Attumen gloves from forever ago.)

Tried Mag’s for the first time. Terribly geared pug; I was like 4th best geared behind a tank and a couple healers, and was outDPSing people by like 200. One of our DPSers, a rogue, had a 77 gear rating and also pulled Mag once. >_> Poor raid leadership, no Ventrilo or TS, and poor off-tanking and DPS caused it to fail; sad, because I’m trying for Champion of the Naaru!

My druid dinged 38 today too–very exciting!

Mages, I posted this a good 3 months ago, and it still works great. Please check out my post about Polymorph macros if you haven’t already.

Gruul the Dragonkiller killed, more news

Well, that was fun. Got pugged into Gruul (and almost went to Mag’s) for just the last fight; squeezed in the win a scant 10 minutes before Kara started!

Also got farther on my Champion of the Naaru quest chain; just need to do Magtheridon, and then I can have a title! I don’t anticipate any problems with this happening before the expansion comes out–I’ve got plenty of time.

I just finished the last night of Kara (we split it up into 4 VERY quickly-run parts this week) with 1200 dps. =) I can DPS for 1000 consistently, and usually 1200 in 5-mans.

New Personal DPS Record!!

That’s right! We did part one of our Kara raid this week with a very good, very experienced raid leader who led us through it at a much faster pace than we’ve ever gone before–almsot no breaks. A lot of drinking on the fly.

This was my first raid with my new spec–aggro was different handling because with Arcane there’s no buildup as there is with Scorch in Fire. Arcane, you immediately start tossing your big spells. Totally different–but fun!

And there’s definitely a difference pre-respec and post-respec DPS. Last time we did Kara, I was around 600-700 DPS the whole raid–so far, including continuous Blizzard instead of 1 Blizzard -> AE spam on AoE pulls, I’m at 920 DPS. I also died more than anyone else in raid….meaning that yes, this respec helped a LOT. If I had been alive more of the fights, I might have broken 1k. And that would have been EPIC.

Seriously though, a 200 dps increase is nothing to sneeze at (unless those 200 dps are covered in pollen). I’m really enjoying my new spec and will probably not be respeccing any time soon.

Working on my alt druid a lot lately–he’s Balance for leveling as I’ve mentioned, perhaps different than most people would suggest, but it’s fun! Only 3 more levels till I get to play as a fuzzy boomkin!

Ding 18 IRL, and some beautiful new gears.

Well, my birthday was yesterday (9/8). I can now legally gamble (yay!), smoke (not planning to), and buy porn. (Also not gonna happen). Thrilling. =P

I’ve also done another run recently in SSC with Cloudy Day–I also got a chance to see some T6 content running with Cloudy Day as well, trying to down Archimonde. A surprisingly simple fight, but required more coordination than we had. However, in SSC, I rolled 2nd place for the T5 pants–and looked in loot, and saw that there were 2 tokens. So I got my 2/5 T5, and respecced Arcane. It seems to be going well – although I am having some mana management issues and am also adjusting to the huge burst damage. So far it seems like a very fun spec, and I’m looking forward to giving it a test run in Kara tonight. Due to talents, I have +1119 arcane damage now too!

On a realted note….MAD props to Cloudy Day for pugging in some DPS and letting people see this content before the expansion comes out. Pwni did a great job with a multi-guild run, putting it all together and being patient with the people (like me) who had never even been in these instances, or the people (not like me) who were in greens and dungeon blues.

Unfortunately, this means I had to give up my [Inferno Waist Cord], as it only gave me +fire damage, so I was using a [Sash of Serpentra] for a while–terrible belt, but better than nothing. However, I got up to 60 badges today, so I bought my new [Voodoo-woven Belt], which I can keep for a long time. =)

It’s been an exciting last couple days. I’m anxious to see what the future will hold!

I’m also working on building a new computer–plan to dual screen so I can play wow on one monitor and browse the Internet/theorycraft on the other. I’m just waiting for a motherboard to ship right now–should be here tomorrow!

Druid at 35: Getting some gear, respeccing Balance!

In order to both kill stuff faster and also get some experience with multiple specs, I respecced my druid from Resto to Balance. I’m planning to keep as Balance until either Tree of Life or until I get Lifebloom, haven’t really decided yet. Either way, I will be able to get some experience as a boomkin for a while, and until then leveling should be a lot faster!

Unexpected news

As of today, I’m officially an officer in Neo Imperela. The whole thing kinda came out of the blue to be honest. I suddenly got pulled out of our PvP channel into the officer channel (10 man guild premades FTW!), and the first thing I hear is “So we’ve been talking about you” from Mymichelle, our GM. Was a bit nervous, as you can probably imagine! Of course soon afterwards she mentioned the whole officer thing. I totally didn’t expect that at all! I’ve jumped on board with this, and am looking forward to helping out the guild as an officer. Should be a really good experience, too. Looking forward to hopefully leading a raid through Kara or something in the near future!

Also, I’ve been running a LOT of Auch stuff recently. Reg Slabs, H-Seth (Got half of my nightbane quest done tonight!)…All of this kinda makes me want to start running Auch again. I seriously hadn’t done but maybe one heroic there since I started doing heroics, and I only ran Slabs once or twice when I hit 70.

It’s really great to hear that I’m doing a good job with this blog. I got a great compliment from my GM about it, and that was just unbelievably good to hear. I hope it’s living up to my readers’ expectations, and that my writing’s maturing as I continue to blog. As I said a few posts ago, if there’s anything WoW that you’d like me to blog about, drop me an email, comment, or whatever, and I might write about it.

Random commentary, personal progression

I spent most of yesterday running instances. Neo Imperela tried to put a ZA run together but unfortunately we couldn’t down Nalorakk (we were short a healer, and there were some connection issues for some members of the raid). Even with the problems we still got him down below 50%–a good attempt, considering.

I did 4 or 5 instances yesterday, I think. Most of them were to gear up one of our new 70 tanks as well as our newest member of the guild, a 70 hunter, but in addition to that, I also made it to Revered with the Sha’tar, meaning that I was able to get the [Glyph of Power] last night–22 spell power and 14 spell hit looks really nice on my well-gemmed [Cowl of Tirisfal].

I gotta admit, sometimes it’s fun to go back to non-heroics and just rock through them. I sometimes tanked my own mob just because I knew our healer could handle it and that I could kill it. =) Really fun times.

It was nice as well to go through these instances because I haven’t been to H-SL or H-Arc before, so it’s been a long time since I’ve run these instances. I hear they’re pretty difficult on Heroic, and often I simply can’t find people to run them.

However, I’m definitely happy with where my character is headed, and am excited especially for Wrath of the Lich King–I’m pretty sure that we’ll be owning 10-man content. =) Part of the reason that we didn’t see endgame in BC was because we started so late, but it’s also that we just didn’t have enough raiders to do the 25-man stuff. Both of those reasons will be nonexistent in WOTLK, fortunately. =)

I’m also excited for the way the Mage class is shaping up in WOTLK. apparently we’re getting mega-damage-buffed, and our talent trees’ extensive reworking is exciting too. I absolutely love some of the new talents–some of what there is is going to be absolutely stupid good for raiding.

But all that’s still a couple months away. There’s still more BC content to experience, and I’m not planning to miss much of it! I’m looking forward to gearing up, even so close to WOTLK, and fully intend to be in the raid when our guild moves forward progression-wise, if at all possible.

Abrupt change of topics time! I want to talk a little bit about my druid. I’ve specced him Resto, and he’s moving through levels at a decent pace, albeit slower than he would if I was leveling Feral. He’s level 33 right now, and should be hitting 34 in the next couple days depending on how much /played I give him. I’m really having fun whenever I heal with him, and I’m hoping to get him to 70 before the expansion hits. I might write a blog sometime about the various types of healers, strengths and weaknesses, and so forth. Probably won’t include shamans, simply because I don’t know too much about them.

I’ve been losing a lot of gold lately. I’ve had to buy a lot more stuff than i originally expected–the glyph, extra raid consumables, jewelcrafting patterns, gems like the [Chaotic Skyfire Diamond]-200g…it hasn’t been good for my finances. Even doing dailies hasn’t kept up with the gold loss. Therefore, it looks like I won’t be getting my epic flyer before WOTLK, but that’s okay.