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.