Monday, November 9, 2009

Achievements - Personal and Guild

Two new achievements, one by our guild, and one by me. The first achievement is breaking 20,000g for the first time. This has mostly been due to my AH sales of crafted items from Inscription, Tailoring, and Enchanting. I think I'll hold onto the money for now, I still have several characters that will need Epic Flying (5000g each), and maybe I'll buy a few high-end Tailoring recipes if I rack up enough gold to cover it all.
The second achievement was our guild's first kill of the Beasts of Northrend in Trial of the Crusader 10. Not only did we down the Beasts, we killed Lord Jaraxxus as well, but were stopped cold by the Faction Champions fight. We have yet to be able to take down a single champion in that fight, and are studying our strategy to see what needs to be done.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The pendulum swings in patch 3.2.2

A while back I wrote a post about gear progression and talent builds, from freshly dinging 80 through the current content. Patch 3.2.2 has changed all that, and I'd like to delve a little bit into this.

Category 1: This remains the same, Arcane is still the best build here because it provides you with 6% spell hit from talents, leaving only 289 spell hit to reach the hit cap.

Category 2: Things have been shaken up here because of the buffs to Arcane damage in patch 3.2.2.
Here are the relevant changes:
Mages
Arcane Blast: The buff from using this ability now stacks up to 4 times instead of 3, and each application increases mana cost by 175% instead of 200%. In addition, the duration of the buff has been reduced to 6 seconds.
Arcane Missiles: Casting this spell while both Missile Barrage and Clearcasting are active will cause only Missile Barrage to be consumed.
Talents
Arcane
Missile Barrage: The effect from triggering this talent now removes the mana cost of Arcane Missiles. In addition, the chance for Arcane Blast to trigger this talent is now 8/16/24/32/40%. All other listed spells continue to have a 4/8/12/16/20% chance to trigger it. This talent no longer has a chance to be triggered when spells miss.
Fire
Combustion: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of Fire spells by 50% while it is active. In addition, Living Bomb periodic ticks will no longer interact with the count or the charges on the talent.
To sum things up, Arcane damage has increased. Fire damage has increased slightly, and Frostfire damage has increased slightly (from combustion).
This makes changing specs after reaching 368 spell power a little dubious. Arcane damage is on par or better than Frostfire, and Frost spec outputs the lowest damage of all specs by a significant amount. Arcane is still heavily dependent upon spell haste, and Frostfire places a higher priority on spell crit, so depending how your gear is you may be better off with Frostfire.
Category 3: Again the choice to go to Fire spec is dependent upon gear at this point. If your gear is heavily into spell crit, then Fire is going to be better, but if you have a lot of spell haste heavy gear then Arcane will still be better. I'd recommend comparing the two for yourself with your gear selection to see how it works out. I use rawr, and I recommend it.

For further reference Arcane is receiving another buff in patch 3.3, further support for the Arcane spec, which I am highly in favor of. I just wish that Blizzard would make a viable Frost raiding spec possible. Replenishment does not make up for the loss of 1000+ dps.
Mages
Talents
Arcane
Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Why do guilds fail?

I have been reading some very interesting posts on raids and raiding which got me to thinking about the people that I raid with, and about pugs and what could possibly improve that situation. I arrived at the conclusion that the anonymity provided by Blizzard is at the root of the problem.
Consider this, when someone posts a comment or article on the internet that clearly shows their identity, they only post something that they are willing to stand behind, something that is aligned with their values, and they they are proud of, or at least feel very strongly about. When you give that same person anonymity when they post, they may be far more willing to "step outside the lines" fling hefty accusations that they can't backup, or any number of other malicious things. I believe the same thing happens in WoW. Right now it's all very anonymous and you create a virtual identity, i.e. a character name, that is in itself not even a permanent thing. Paid name changes cost only $10. The ease with which you can change the only identifiable characteristic of your character is quite low, and I believe gives rise to a lot of the idiocy that goes on. I would be fully in favor of Blizzard showing both the account name, and the real name of the player, and I'm not just talking the name that the account is registered under, because that can easily be faked. I'm talking about names on credit cards. Something that can't be faked. Sure this will still open up the door for people who use the monthly payment cards to stay anonymous, but if they want to remain anonymous then guilds can easily exclude those people. Also showing the account name that characters belong to would be an great leap forward. A lot of people wouldn't go to the trouble of creating another account just because of the costs involved in purchasing a new copy of WoW, BC, and WOLK. This would allow for a lot more accountability to be placed on someone. If you steal the guild bank and transfer servers, guess what your account name follows you, and your guild can make sure that those on the new server know just what you did. No more guild for you. If you want to get back in with a good guild, you now have to buy a new account complete with all the expansions and either transfer your character or create a new one. This would open the door for a site to show you who the good and bad players are. A service like Carfax, except for WoW. A player could place a notice about you on your player report, good or bad, and each account could have a history of activity, server transfers, guild changes, etc. Those players that attempt to infiltrate a guild just to steal, or that guild hop, or ninja loot could be easily identified, and black listed on the site so that guilds can easily exclude them from membership.
This brings me around to mention how our guild actually works, because it aligns with what I've mentioned. To join our guild you have to know someone in the guild. Not just online, but you have to actually have met them, know who they are, etc. Our guild is mostly made up of friends, family and co-workers. It's interesting how the guild has grown, and the connections. I joined upon the invitation of a co-worker. He joined through his sister, who was one of the founding members. There are several husband and wife pairs in the guild, as well as a father and daughter. All in all the guild is drama free, and it's because of the real relationships between these people. There's absolutely no anonymity in our guild, everyone has at least one real friend, relative, or co-worker who knows them, and it works great. Now this is not to say that we have downed all the current content. We're still working on the Antechamber in Ulduar 10, Trial 10 (first boss), and VoA Koralon. We have downed Naxx 10, Malygos 10, OS 10, and Naxx 25.

For interest here are the other posts that got me thinking.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkPigtailInn/~3/k5gBWIP4bG4/why-you-shouldnt-let-one-man-run-show.html
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/09/better-devil-you-know.html

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Mage Talent Progression and Gear Progression

I came across an interesting topic today, so decided to share my thoughts on the whole thing. I'm making a couple of assumptions right off the bat about you the mage, so I'll spell it out. First off you are concerned about performing the best you can in your current gear in a raid and topping the damage meter. Second you don't mind switching between specs, including getting new glyphs, and regemming your gear to optimize your damage. This takes quite a bit of cash. In total for me to switch from Arcane spec to Fire spec I spent about 400g. That included 10g for the respec at the trainer, and the rest went towards buying gems and glyphs for my new spec.
As a mage you are going to fall into one of several categories, which I'll define for you, and this will help you determine which spec will be best for you. One last thing that I assume is that you stack as much spell power as you can. Spell power is the single biggest contributor to damage that you can get as a mage after you reach hit cap for your spec, so stack on the spell power.

Category 1:
In your gear gemmed and enchanted, you have less than 368 spell hit. This would be most mages starting off. Coming out of leveling with the best items you can get from questing and dungeons, and with a few crafted items, you should scrape up all the spell hit you can get. Ignore spell haste and spell crit at this level and focus on getting those items that will increase your spell hit. At this stage Arcane is your best friend. With an Arcane build 56/3/12 you only need 289 spell hit to be capped thanks to Arcane Focus and Precision.

Category 2:
After a while as your progress through gear having a spell hit of 368 will be within reach for you. At this point (or even before that) you want to take a look at your gear and see how your spell crit and spell haste stack up. If you are heavy on spell crit, then at this point it would make sense to go with a Frostfire build 0/53/18. If you are heavy on spell haste then you would probably want to stick with Arcane until you build up at least 20% spell crit. I prefer the Arcane spec myself, so I stay with Arcane up until I reached Category 3. You can even switch over to the Frost spec 18/0/53 at this point if you like frost. If you go frost you want to cap your spell hit, then stack on the spell power and spell haste. I avoided taking Brain Freeze in my frost build, but YMMV, so check it out for yourself.

Category 3:
You have reached the pinnacle of spell hit, you can get to 446 spell hit with gems, enchants and gear. You will most likely have a decent amount of spell crit (at least 20%) even if you haven't been trying to get spell crit. At this point fire spec outshines frostfire, arcane, and frost. The main reason is that much of the gear at this level has huge amounts of crit, spell power and spell hit, and fire spec can do slightly more DPS than frostfire once you have reached the hit cap for fire spec. The build I use here is 18/53/0. The lack of any talents for spell hit means you have to gear to reach hit cap without any boost from talents. I didn't reach this point until I had a decent amount of gear from Ulduar 10, Heroic Trial of the Champion, and Naxxramas 25.

Beyond these levels I have yet to test, but progression looks to favor staying with the fire spec as Blizzard continues to pile on the spell crit on all the mage sets. I do sometimes miss my Frost and Arcane builds, as I like them both, but without spell haste on my gear to support these builds, I am just not competitive in dps.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Difficult Choices

So patch 3.2 hit last night, and I'm feeling the aftermath. CoDS went into the new 10-man crusader raid last night and got chewed up and spit out. We wiped a few times on the very first mini-boss before figuring out that we needed to switch tanks once the main tank got the bleed effect. Also the 15-yard radius around the boss in which spell casters shouldn't stand. We finally downed him but with only 3 left alive out of our 10, and the jormungers (or however it's spelled) ate us rather quickly. I'll chalk it up as a lesson learned: we are way undergeared for that content right now, even the first few mini-bosses. I am glad we got to see a fight first-hand without already knowing the fight, and able to analyze it and down it.
So in the aftermath of the patch I started updating all my addons and updated my rawr with the new gear today, and while I was playing with rawr noticed that my spec is no longer ahead of the Frostfire nor the Fire spec in damage. So that leaves me with a difficult choice now. Do I switch specs to the more popular frostfire spec and fire spec as my main and off spec, or do I keep my good old frost spec as a back and just jump into the fire spec, or do I keep arcane as my secondary spec. I'm a bit conflicted as I have really grown to like my arcane, and I have gotten quite good at it, but I'll be starting all over again if I go with either of these new specs, and I'll now be looking for spell crit gear vs spell haste gear, which means no going back once the change has been made. I guess I have been fighting the inevitable, since Blizzard has piled on the spell crit with the Tier 8 gear, so why fight it? I'll probably swap out my frost spec first so that I can keep my arcane spec available in case I have trouble with the learning curve of a new spec. After I'm comfortable then maybe I'll drop my arcane spec as well.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Malygos and Heroic Naxxramas cleared

Just a short update today.

I picked up The Spellweaver's Downfall, as Circle of Dark Scholars downed Malygos for the first time as a guild on 7/31. It was quite a fun night, then following on the success of Malygos, our joint run with Dread Pirates full cleared Heroic Naxxramas on Saturday, which was a first for me, so I now also have the achievement for Heroic Naxxramas.

As a side note I was very dissappointed with Gown of the Spell-Weaver. According to rawr this is not an upgrade over my Tier 7 chest piece Heros Frostfire Robe. The loss of my 2-piece set bonus is the critical part in that, because if I swap in the Tier 7 head Frostfire Circlet for my Faerlina's Madness, then it would be an upgrade. I'll have to stick with the Naxx runs and see if I can't pick up that tier 7 head.

I also picked up several pieces from Heroic Naxxramas, and I was very dissapointed to find that most of it was downgrades for me. Bindings of the Expansive Mind vs my Cuffs of Winged Leviathan, reasons here are that spell crit is far less valuable than spell haste for Arcane and Frost, and I'm already hit capped, so the spell hit is worthless, and the lack of spirit. Mantle of the Corrupted vs Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads, again the loss of my 2-piece Tier 7 set bonus, the lower spell power (due to the socket in the tier piece), and the spell hit is unused because I'm already over the hit cap. The one upgrade that I did get was my tier 7.5 chest which replaces my tier 7 chest.

This all brings into very sharp focus the complexity of choosing loot. I ended up with several of these pieces because I rolled on them instead of letting them go to be disenchanted, so rest easy that I am not a total loot-whore. I use rawr on a regular basis to generate a list of upgrades from available items in game, but the interface leaves some things to be desired. I would primarily like the ability to filter the list by raid, so when I run Heroic Naxxramas I can see a list of what I need from just that raid, but in the lack of tools like this, it can be very confusing to new raiders on what piece of loot they should really go after, and what they should pass on.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Raiding as a mage


The DPS rotations have been done to death by other sites, so I wanted to do something a little different and talk about other spells you may be called upon to use while taking down a boss.
First off let's talk about damage absorption. All mages get Mana Shield, Frost Ward, and Fire Ward. If you're a frost mage, you can also take Ice Barrier. These damage shields are extremely useful on a lot of fights because they can take some load off of your healers. I will put the shield that I'm going to use for a particular fight on my bar so I can just hit a key to throw up the shield. Here are some fights that they are extremely useful: Heigan (Ice Barrier or Mana Shield during the dance), Sapphiron (Frost Ward), Sartharion (Fire Ward), Ignis (Fire Ward when you're in the pot). You should always be looking where you can take some healing pressure off of the healers, first because it will same them from going oom, and second because it might just save your ass in case the healers don't get to you in time.
Next up there's Ice Block, this can save your ass in a wide variety of situations. Can't make it behind Sapphiron's ice block in time? Throw up your own. Can't make it out of a lava wave on Sartharion, Ice Block through it. Pull aggro on some trash? Ice Block will send them right back at the tank.
Blink is probably an underused spell in raiding. There are a ton of situations where I find it helpful. During the dance with Heigan you may find yourself a little behind, you can use Blink to get where you want to be. Lava waves on Sartharion. Any situation where there is an AoE from the boss, such as Loken, Blink will give you a little more time to react. It will also free you from being rooted.
Invisibility has saved me so much money on repair bills I can't even count it all. Once a tank or off-tank goes down and you know it's a wipe, hit that invisibility button early because it will drop you out of combat. Stay away from random trash, such at Patchwerk in Naxx, if you run too far back you will pull the slimes and wipe the raid when you drop out of invisibility.
AoE: Blizzard is the king of AoE, use it responsibly. If you have a warrior tank be very wary of Blizzard. Be aware of your mana pool when using Blizzard as it takes quite a large chunk of mana, so use it sparingly.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Back on Track

After my transfer to the new server, my raiding has gotten back on track, and we have downed new bosses. Last night Circle of Dark Scholars on Aggramar downed Ignis the first time, completing the achievement The Siege of Ulduar. We are also now raiding Naxx 25 with the Dread Pirates, which so far has been going quite well. Overall I'm very happy with the raids what we're now doing, and we are pushing forward making progress and downing new bosses. Our next attempt is tonight and we are taking on the Iron Council.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Guild Collapse

So in what I consider a hostile take-over, the guild that I was an officer of for almost a year has completely collapsed. There were to several factors that built up the pressure that led to this take-over. First our guild master was absent for weeks, relying solely upon his co-gm and girlfriend to manage day to day guild things, including our guild website, guild applications, scheduling raids, and recruiting. Second the co-gm lost computer access, and was absent for several weeks from the guild. Third one of the raid leaders who was also an officer and our best geared tank took a hiatus from WoW because he couldn't afford to pay his monthly subscription. (I'm not sure there aren't other reasons behind this, but I don't know.) The other fact here is that a month or two back we merged with a guild called Crimson Legion, gave anyone from this guild an open invite, no application required, to join, and promoted their officers to officers in our guild, including bank access, but more importantly access to setting officer notes, which is used to store the EP/GP rankings for our guild.
That sets the stage for what unfolded on Tuesday when I logged in to send out invites for our regularly scheduled Ulduar run at 4pm server time. I log in expecting to see about a dozen or so guildies ready and prepped, and no-one is on. Our guild messages says that we are to transfer our mains to Crimson Legion. I check my friends list and several of my friends from the guild are on, and I do a who for Crimson Legion and see that they are all in fact part of that guild now. So I contact one of their officers and ask what's up. (This officer has been a regular raider with our guild) She explains that because no-one was posting raids a lot of members were talking about leaving and some had already left. Ok, so I ask what's the deal with all the the EPGP scores being screwed up. Well the officer from Crimson Legion who was promoted happened to have a mishap with his addon, and bjorked up the ratings. I don't believe that for a second. That was pure vandalism. So what is to be the new system for loot distribution? Well a lot of new 80s feel that the EPGP system is unfair because they don't get a shot at loot, so we're going to go with open rolls.
That was previously discussed among the officers of Sinners Paradise, and the loot system was put in place to prevent guild hoppers from getting lucky on rolls and yanking very sought after loot from regular raiders. (Which happened to me personally on 3 occasions) I was offered an officer position in the guild with guild bank access, but ultimately I decided that I didn't want to stay. Considering that there was no attempt to contact me at all before all this went down, and that I was the second most senior officer in the guild. I don't want to be a part of what has been done, and I consider it all a coup against the current guild leadership by the 'new 80s' and the officer that they complained to.
I would like to offer some advice to guild masters left in a situation like the above for whatever reason. If you are not going to be there for the guild, leave someone who is active with the ability to maintain the day-to-day activities if you want to have a guild left when you come back. In fact it would probably be best to just make them GM and step down. Had I been given access to our website, and been able to promote/demote and invite and kick people from the guild, this whole thing could have been avoided. So I have moved on and am now a member of Circle of Dark Scholars on Aggramar. I have several past co-workers and friends that I know in this guild, and so far all has been well. They have a very simple loot system, but I am comfortable with the people in this guild to know when they should roll, unlike a lot of the players on Ursin, who seem to roll for just about anything they can use even if it's a downgrade to their current gear.

Monday, June 1, 2009

BlizzCon tickets sold out

So I attempted on both May 16th and May 30th to get Blizzcon tickets for this year, however both time I narrowly missed the mark. I got in queue around 5345 the first time and 5315 the second time around, and it seem that only 5000 tickets were released both times. I'm a little frustrated by the whole thing, as I was on top of being at the site on time, but still didn't get tickets. I have a feeling that Blizzard is really missing the boat by choosing not to accommodate the number of people that want to attend. It's great to be an exclusive event, but if there is a huge gap between the number of people who would attend, and the number of people that get tickets, then why not close that gap? Is it a tactic by Blizzard to keep the event exclusive? Couldn't they at least meet 90% of the demand instead of say 50%? It would still keep the event exclusive and sold out, but when we're buying tickets this far in advance, don't you think they can scale things (at least some) to handle the load?

I also have some doubts as to the fairness of the system that they are employing, knowing a lot about the internet. Refreshing the page is quicker for those geographically closer to their servers (CA), and so they can get a refresh in less time than others. The only really fair way for them to do tickets is by lottery, since even if you're on a slow connection or half-way around the world, you'll still get a shot at tickets.

In closing I just want to say that although I didn't get tickets, I made my best effort, and congrats to those who got tickets.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Childrens week PvP achievements



So I completed the dreaded School of Hard Knocks achievement. I had almost given up on it until I saw my friend Heem complete it, then I became determined to knock it out. First I went to my bank and took a look at my gear to determine the best survivability gear that I could muster. I pulled out Deadly Gladiator's Silk Handguards, Deadly Gladiator's Silk Raiment, Glacial Waistband, and Glacial Slippers, and Medallion of Heroism. Then I went to the auction house and bought some resilience gems for the PvP gear, and spell power gems for my Sapphiron gear, and finally I went and bought Medallion of the Horde, since I knew I'd be needing it. I was all set to enter the battle grounds.

I entered EotS first, since it was the holiday battleground, and I thought it might be fairly busy. It took me some time to get used to my keybindings, I rebound Z,X,C,V and G to some of my 'get out of jail' abilities, e.g. Blink, Medallion of the Horde, Will of the Forsaken, Ice Block, and Medallion of Heroism. The first time through I was pretty confused with my new key bindings, and I attempted to cap the flag as much as I could, but I was repeatedly foiled by a shaman that kept knocking me off the middle, and even got MC'ed off the edge once as well. We lost, so I queued again, determined not to give up. This time through I got the second cap of the game, and I earned some achievements.

Next up, Arathi Basin. I really didn't stay in Arathi Basin for long. I had incredible luck, as I got thrown into games that were near the end. The first game I didn't even have time to run the the mine before the game ended with a loss. Second try I made it to the mine, along with a hunter, and there was a lone DK guarding it. It was depressing really that it took both of us focusing on the DK to take him down, and I had to use Ice Block to get his attention on the hunter or I would have died there. So we both survived, DK is dead, and we both rush the flag with our orphans at our side. I end up capping and about a minute later the game ends with another alliance win.
Next up WSG. (I figured save AV for the last as it'll take a long time) I queue and immediately am in a match. I take position above the flag room on the platform to the right, and just wait for the alliance to come for the flag. Our first attempt was horrible, alliance just steam-rolled us, and I think I may have taken down only 1 of their flag runners. Second WSG, same strategy, a bit more even of a match, and I take down two or three runners, but still don't return the flag. Third try, absolutely amazing this time. We steam-roll the alliance, I downed at least 5 flag runners, and I got the achievement this time as well as a perfect win 3/0 against the alliance and pick up a couple of WSG achievements along the way.

Last up was AV, which I wasn't looking forward to. First attempt I get into a match where the alliance basically own us. I look at the map and there is no red to speak of, about 2 minutes later the game ends in a win for the alliance. I queue again and this time I get a fresh game. I make a run for Stonehearth Bunker, and it's already been capped, so on to Icewing Bunker. I arrive with only one other Horde there who has already taken out several archers, so I cast invisibility and sneak up to the flag. I start capping, and an archer plugs me with an arrow. The awesome DK who is with me jumps on the archer and I begin capping again. This time I finish and voila I have the achievement. I wasn't real motivated to finish the AV, so at that point I left, having got my achievement, but I am a little intrigued by PvP now. This is probably the best I have ever been geared for PvP, and with the right trinkets, and key binds, I was a lot more survivable than ever before. I still wasn't using a PvP spec or the right glyphs, so there is still even more room for improvement, and when I finished the whole thing I realized that I had a Scroll of Enchant Chest - Exceptional Resilience sitting around in my bank. So now I'm planning my next foray into PvP, and really considering giving arenas a try. I know there are several good players into PvP in my guild, and I might just see if we can get a 3v3 team going.
Also to Euripedes at Critical QQ, my sympathies, perhaps you should take the week off of battlegrounds?

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Naxxramas 10-man guild run first full-clear in 1 night

I have some very exciting news this week. Tuesday was our regular guild run through Naxxramas, and we usually run two groups a week through 10-man Naxx. This week I went to the first 10-man group, and we had everything we needed except for the off-tank. Our MT is a DK that is specced for single-target tanking, so we picked up an awesome Prot Pally OT, and started on our run. We started on Arachnid quarter first, we downed Abun'Rekan very easily. We took out Faerlina with not problems, and we didn't use the adds to remove her enrage, our healers just healed on through. We finally got to Maexxina and we wiped due to the slow releasing of players from the web wrap, and she got off a web spray after she was Frenzied. So our second run I focused more on the web wraps, and despite her getting a web spray after Frenzy, we still downed her.
Next quarter up was plague quarter. Our DPS was pretty good, so we had practically no problems here. This was my first encounter with Heigan that I lived through, and it's really to the credit of our healers that I survived. I did get hit several times by the green lava, but our healers kept me up, and we downed him before we got to the second round of the dance. Loatheb went well, to our healers credit, and the plague quarter was clear.
Moving on we went to the Construct quarter next. Our first real challenge here was Gluth, and our team of kiters (a hunter named Foxkin, and a new DK) had issues and died before we could down Gluth. Our second attempt we reassigned our shaman to be on kite duty with the hunter and with his earthbind totem the kiters were able to keep the zombies under better control, and we downed Gluth. Thaddius went amazingly well considering that several people were new to the fight. Our timing on the mini-bosses was good as usual, and there were only a few minor bruises from the positive and negative charges, and Thaddius went down without much of a fight.
On we go to Military quarter, and we took down Razuvious without a problem. Gothik is one of the easier fights here in my opinion and I got to do the undead side. Four horsemen took two attempts, and I was tanking in the back with our hunter Foxkin for the first part of the fight. I died (due to our single shared healer in the back not being able to handle healing us both) just as the after the first boss went down, and our MT picked up tanking for me. I sat and watched as the group successfully downed the remainder. This was a difficult fight for our healers, and I have much respect for them.
We downed Sapphiron rather easily despite many people not having frost resist gear, and being new to the fight, but after the air phase of Sapphiron everyone understood what to do from there on, and I kept on decurse duty faithfully.
Kel'Thuzad has proven a difficult fight for us for some reason, maybe we're just tired, or maybe we are a little low on DPS for this fight. Anyhow someone always manages to end up dying to a Shadow Fissure, or our healers don't get a heal off on a Frost Blast target, and we have had our OT or MT go down in phase 3 but still somehow managed to bring down Kel'Thuzad. This was really the fight that I came for, hoping to get the T7 head, but no drop this week. I did however pick up the T7 legs from Thaddius, so it was a good run for me. I'm getting down to a mere handful of items left for me to upgrade in Naxxramas 10, so I'm hoping we will soon move up to Malygos 10, or even Naxx 25.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Phew Loot is out

Well I reported earlier this week that the loot from 25 Vault was not distributed, the GM ticket finally went through and the loot should be on it's way to recipients. I felt very bad about everyone not getting their loot from this run, and it's certainly a relief that I have been able to make up for it. Thank you for your patience while this was resolved, and enjoy your lewtz!

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Guild Progress Sarth 1D 10-Man down

Last night was another achievement for Sinners Paradise, and I got to take part in the action. We picked our best raiders for 10-man Sarth with 1 drake, and made another attempt this week. On the 3rd attempt we downed the drake, and then dropped Sartharion. Congratz to all the members who got the achievement, and let's do it again next week!
On the down side, I put together a 25-man VoA run, and just as I was distributing loot the whole raid got booted out of the instance. I have opened a GM ticket to find out what the loot was and get a list of who was in the raid so it can be distributed. I'll post an update when I hear something.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Deathchill Cloak

I have a bone to pick with Blizzard over this little goodie. The Deathchill Cloak is unique among tailoring recipes because it requires that you complete the achievement Loremaster of Northrend. Which is comprised of the sub achievements:
Nothing Boring about Borean
Empire of Zul'Drak
I've Toured the Fjord
The Summit of Storm Peaks
Might of Dragonblight
Fo' Grizzle My Shizzle
Into the Basin
Icecrown: The Final Goal

I had completed Howling Fjord first, not problem really, just happened to complete it while leveling and after I was aware of the Deathchill Cloak I took aim at the other achievements. Dragonblight fell next, followed by Borean Tundra, Grizzly Hills, and Zul'Drak, then I dinged 80. That left me with Sholazar Basin, Storm Peaks, and Icecrown. I swapped back and forth between Sholazar Basin and Storm Peaks for a while before finally finish off Storm Peaks first, and then Sholazar the next day, which left me with just Icecrown, so I set to work on it. I merrily went along completing quest after quest on my way to 140, when I ground to a halt around 120. All I had left were group quests. I spammed general chat in Icecrown one evening and a nice death knight joined up with me to complete some group quests. We went to my first quest that he didn't have, and I disappeared from his screen. We went to one of his group quests (that we both had) and it was pretty easy with him tanking and me DPS'ing. So I completed 2 or 3 more quests. I continued with this method, and made it to 128 quests out of 140 before reaching the point that I couldn't find anyone who had the same group quests that I had. I finally turned to my guild and begged for their help to complete those last few quests, and it took my guild mates almost 12 hours to work their way through the quest chains to open up the quests I had to complete. That is just plain stupid. That was a huge barrier to getting a decent, but not amazing item recipe and a big drain on my guild. Bad design on Blizzard's side for that one. I hope that future quest lines don't require everyone to have access to the quest as it's a real big discouragement for completing those quests.

Naxx 10 Cleared

Our guild cleared Naxx 10 last night. We had been wiping on Thaddius because of people not making the jump, or crossing the charges, but last night we downed him on the 2nd try. Move on to Sapphiron, after several wipes with only 2 healers, we convinced a pugger to switch to his Druid and heal. I even got to load up decursive and decurse the drain life's for this fight, and after several tries we took down Sapphiron and I won the key to Malygos. After downing Sapphiron, we moved on to Kel'Thuzad and he was a really fun boss fight. We wiped on several attempts mainly due to Frost Blast taking us out before our healers could react. On my last feast for the evening, early into the fight our off-tank dropped, but our main tank sayeth that we should continue, and he'd tank the adds. So on we went, and on, and on, and finally we downed Kel'Thuzad without any off-tank, thanks to our excellent heals. We all celebrated, then distributed loot (nothing dropped for me on Kel).

Monday, March 30, 2009

3.1 PTR Tailoring Changes

I also noticed something pretty cool when I did my testing on the PTR. The lightweave embroidery cloak enchant, has been overhauled. It is no longer a damage proc, but it now grants 250 spell power for 15 seconds, with a 45 second internal cool-down, and a very good proc rate. Here's all my spec testing data on WWS. I'll see if I can come up with some numbers on the proc rate.
Analysis so far supports the internal cooldown of 45 seconds, with the shortest time between procs in my data being 45.25 seconds.
In looking at my data on the proc rate, it's not totally clear what damage will proc the effect. In particular it looks like the damage tick from frostfire bolt will not proc lightweave, but I need more data to determine if this is true. Given that variable I come up with a proc rate of 44.2%-55.9%. The results are based on 19 procs out of 43 damage spells/ticks, and 19 procs out of 34 spells/ticks excluding frostfire bolt periodic damage. I'll do some further testing later to see if I can get a proc out of frostfire bolt periodic damage.

3.1 PTR mana regen testing

I logged into the PTR over the weekend to do some DPS testing and mostly to take a look at how the lower mana regen will affect my current arcane build. I tested my current arcane spec DPS vs the heroic target dummy (raid boss level dummy), and came out with 1927 DPS WWS data. I only made it through my first mana gem and 1 evocate before I was OOM. This kind of hints that I'll be facing serious mana issues when I raid with this spec unless we have the replenishment buff. I was curious to try the dual spec out also, so I visited my trainer and purchased dual spec for a cool 1000g. I specced frostfire to check out their mana regen, and visited my same ol target dummy and lit him up again, this time only doing 1730 DPS, with this build. Again here is my WWS data. I was able to use my 1st mana gem, then evocation, then the 2nd use of mana gem before I was OOM. It seems that mana is less of an issue for this build, so I may be adopting FFB as my secondary spec in future. Of course I do still love the frost build, and the ability to give my raid the replenishment buff would in fact be awesome, so I can't say I'll make that call just yet. I will probably just come down to the decision of what our raid needs, DPS or replenishment. I may even end up respeccing into FFB as primary and frost as secondary. What do you plan to use your secondary spec for?

Friday, March 20, 2009

Quick update

Well, my life has been a little turned around lately after just getting back from our honeymoon, putting together our second reception, and now we have more exciting news, our first baby is no the way! So I may continue to take some time between updates, but I'll still be here.

There have been a lot of changes since my last post in my current gear, new patches, and lots of guild runs.

I'll give you a little guild history pre-WOLK. I joined the guild Sinner's Paradise on Ursin just after patch 3.1 came out. I had been applying to some of the top guilds on our server to try and squeeze in a peek at raiding content before WOLK came out. I had applied to many of the top guilds, and for very good reason I was rejected from these guilds due to my gear. I kept on crawling down the guild rankings until I found some guilds that had cleared Kara and started on Black Temple and SSC. I sent in-game mails to guild masters of these guilds asking to join and before long I had an invite to Sinner's Paradise. The first week was good, we cleared Kara, and I started to pick up a few more epics. I had PUGed Kara a few times at this point and had some gear, but I was still in some greens, mostly blues, and a handful of purples. (I had finished off my Frozen Shadoweave Set at this point). Week 2 the guild just fell apart. I logged on at the raid time on the schedule on the web site, and there were only a handful of people on. The tank that had led us through Kara the week before had left the guild, and from this point on the guild didn't do any more runs of Kara. I gave up at this point on my chances of doing a guild run through any of the 25-man raids and just tried to find PUGs where I could. I did get into a Black Temple PUG, that downed Illidan, but never got to do SSC, or Sunwell. Then the patch hit, and there were 10 new levels to gain, new abilities to train, new instances to run, and I had a blast leveling, which brings me back to raiding. I asked for several weeks around our guild about raiding, and there was really no momentum to do anything. Lots of people were leveling mains or alts, but we obviously didn't have the numbers to do a 10-man. So I PUG'ed some raids for a while, and after a few weeks our guild had a new announcement, OS on saturday 2pm server time. I was happy to see we were finally going to do a guild raid. Our Saturday run went pretty well, and we pulled in a few friends from other places to fill out our raid, and we downed Sartharion. We have progressed a little further now and are ready to take on Sartharion +1 drake at this point. We have cleared all four wings of Naxx-10 at different points, but not taken down Sapphiron or Kel'Thuzad on a guild run yet. We have begun recruiting and are approaching doing 25-man guild raids.