Bucket FTW
December 27, 2011 
Uh-oh…moar diversimification! Let me toss shammy heals into the mix now…I call it bucket heals for variety’s sake and y’all are in trouble. I’ll have some more updates shortly…seriously…I promise…
Test
Testing…trying this new blogging from my phone thing…maybe I’ll blog more if I can do it on the fly instead of waiting until I get home and losing the inspiration.
Ragnaros: Flaming Frustration
Hey, everyone! If you found your way here through my Twitter posts (@awetitu) welcome!
Apologies in advance, as we’ve recently been slightly inactive. I’ve only begun running more of FL and other raids in the last month or so, and I’ll be posting more stuff later. I’m currently working on a guide, of sorts, for Moonkin as I’ve recently switched focus in my Guild. I still tank occasionally, but I’m finding Mookin DPS is a welcome break.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a theory crafter, wizard with numbers, log parser or genius. Far from it. I’m just a gamer who loves World of Warcraft and likes to try to get the most out of his ‘toons as he can.
More to come!
Firelands – Shannox and Beth’Tilac.
Oh, the IRONY!
My role has changed recently to Caster DPS as a result of a surfeit of Tanks in Two kings (trust me, it’s not a complaint) and I’m currently Raiding as a Boomkin and not doing too shabbily (well, except for Alysrazor, but everyone knows lazerchikkins can’t fly!) but all the drops I’ve been sucking up for my now Off-Spec/former Main-Spec are Feral pieces, including a damned shiny staff off of Majordomo Stagheim. No T13 shoulders yet, but next week if/when I get those I’ll have the 2-piece T12 and the 2-piece T13 to work with as Boomkin and we’ll see what happens there.
I know that there are other folk what play Bears who are in the same situation and believe me when I say I feel your pain. I’m a perfectly capable tank 99% of the time, but when the tanks you currently run with are as geared out as Kann (Mug’thol) and Laplace (Mug’thol) are you’re along for the ride, and baby, I’m gonna ride this for as long as I can.
I have to be brutally honest here: Blizzard has done some interesting things, but Firelands can’t hold a candle to the sheer fun that was Ulduar. For me, that particular Raid instance was the most fun I’ve had, bar the wiping on the same 4 bosses for 9 weeks in a row when it first came out and everyone was still in 200s and 2500DPS was unheard of. With Firelands, however, there’s opportunity to discover the full utility of your class and in particular the limits of Balance.
On Shannox I’m not using all of my AoE abilities, that’s a straight up DPS race and don’t stand in stuff fight for me, and it bores me to tears. I’d rather tank that fight. Beth’tilac is where the different AoE spells I have are really used.
From Typhoon to Fungal Growth to Starfall to Hurricane, all of them are used as frequently as they’re off cooldown or I have mana. I volunteered for add duty on that particular fight because I’ve always been the straight up DPSer. Balance can hit like a truck given enough standing still and cast times, but to me if I’m playing a DPS class that’s just BORING. It’s the same spell over and over and over (O hai Wrath) until the energy bar has swung all the way to the opposite side and then another spell (O hai Starfire) over and over and over until we’re back on the opposite side. There’s very little to the rotation other than sticking in a Moonfire and an Insect Swarm to keep debuffs on the MoB or Boss going.
On Spiderling duty in the B’T fight I’m using Typhoon to get me a little extra time to toss down a string of Mushrooms, detonating them and adding Starfall and Hurricane to burn the Spiderlings down with assistance from another DPS. This keeps me running from side to side during the fight and on my toes, which I LOVE.
Next post: Lord Rhyolith or No, I’M Driving!
I’m not used to Raiding with Oomkin…
It’s a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately, even in my own Guild.
For some odd reason, there’s not a lot of us (meaning actively raiding Balance Druids) out there. Don’t misunderstand, I do still raid as Feral (Bear) but that’s usually on nights that one of our plate tanks can’t make it (we usually run 2 Paladin tanks). No Warrior Tanks or Death Knight Tanks in this Guild, mainly because they’re both classes that are, apparently, either REALLY hard or REALLY easy to play. I guess it depends on who you ask.
In any event, things being what they are, I’m now raiding as Balance, and I can’t say I’m disappointed. The Resto Druid in Guild has been doing this for longer than me so has the gear he needs, which means a lot of the loot drops are going to me (except those damned T13 shoulders…*shakes fist* Curse you, Tristwood!) to get Dreddnought geared out as Balance and as Feral (Bear) because Tristwood doesn’t raid as anything other than Resto. Technically speaking, as Feral (Bear) / Balance I have a little more utility, but he brings the Heals, so I’m not complaining if a drop goes to him.
It’s been a bit of a shift, going Balance, but I’d like to think I’m adjusting well. I can’t wring as much DPS out of the character as I’d like so I’m having a few issues, one is rotation. I know that certain attacks hit like the proverbial truck (50+K crit Starfires and Starsurges) and others are filler (Moonfire, Insect Swarm, I’m lookin’ at you) and I know that I’m supposed to get between Eclipse states as fast as I can, but there’s not a lot else to the rotation. Even Faerie Fire gets left by the wayside in the effort to spam the right spell to get to Eclipse, and with almost 25% Haste Raid-buffed I can’t help but think I’m missing something. Like MOAR HASTE!
I have enough Spirit to get to 17.20% Hit (with 2/2 Balance of Power) and from there I’m thinking I’ll just re-gem and re-forge everything to Haste. It seems my in-combat mana regen is stuck at 931 regardless of what I do so for now I’m going to see about going pure Haste once I have hit capped and see where that takes me.
If there are any of my readers out there that DO play Moonkin, chime in and tell me where I might be going wrong or the rotation you use, I’d LOVE to hear it!
You’re not as big of a deal as you might think…
How does one deal with crises, real or imagined? How does one deal with the impression that you are, at least in your own eyes, failing? What happens when some folks’ interests and the path they choose take them away from the path you thought you had chosen for yourself? Do my efforts really make a difference or not? Does anyone, besides me, really care? Where do I go now, and what can I do?
These are all valid questions, and ones that will eventually need to be answered, but the answers may not be the ones that you’d like. Very often the crises we face are only in our own minds. That piece of gear, this gemming choice, 3 Guilds in 3 months, all your raiding experience is on another server, you don’t have the achievements you should for the gear that you have, etc, etc, etc. I’m not saying that these concerns aren’t valid, but realistically? Yeah, they don’t matter THAT much.
In the grand scheme of things, these are about as important as a fart in a windstorm. It’s not the stench that’ll kill you, it’s the plywood and debris that you’re ignoring because you’re so wrapped up in your own fart that probably will.
I’ve been playing this game for a while now. I started playing during The Burning Crusades and through Wrath and into Cataclysm. I’ve been in a few different Guilds in that time, starting with leveling in “Dude Spooning” and “Harry’s Adventure Co” and “Legion”, got my first real taste of raiding in “Flagrant”, my first taste of progression in “Shadow Council”, “Scumdogs of Azeroth”, “Infinite Destruction” and “Causa Nex”, my own bank alts in “Functioning as Intended” and “Gold Diggaz”, the “small Guild” experiment that was “Deal With It”, “God of War” and currently “Two Kings”. This is on my PvP server only. I also play on an RP server, but have only ever been in one Guild there, and that’s “Stormwölves”.
I suppose, after a while, you kind of get tired of Guild-hopping. There does seem to be an ebb and flow to player Guild movement, however, and as people follow friends and move around, old Guilds die and new ones are born that, funnily enough, have all the same faces as the old one. Soon enough you get into that whole “Why are we re-levelling another Guild when the old one was already so advanced and who’s that new guy, I’ve not raided anything with most of these people, oh, look, Dave’s got his new Guild, we should join him there and let’s bring so-and-so from such-and-such and remember that guy we used to run with let’s get him too and hey…”, new Guild name, same faces…wtf?
Yes, I realize it’s a game. It’s an MMORPG, and people will come and go, get married, have kids, lose jobs, fall in love, fall out of love, go overseas, and what have you, and player movement is to be expected. You build relationships in games like this, whether you intend to or not, and a good part of your interactions in game are based on those. You leave Guilds to follow friends, you run into toons you leveled alts with, sometimes catch people coming back to the game after a year off, or run into more folks that you had no idea played that you know in real life.
But what happens when those relationships affect your satisfaction with the game?
What if moving around as frequently as some do affects your love for Warcraft?
I think I’ve almost reached a tipping point. I’m hoping to find a large Guild that will be stable and around for a while that I can just hide in for a bit. Just sit in a corner and not take up too much space and not draw attention to myself. Maybe level a few more alts so I have all 10 classes at 85 and 20 different specs.
We’ll see what the next few weeks bring. Happy Hunting!
Tl;dr: send money for charity to my PayPal!
Tl;dr: send money for charity to my PayPal!
Hello, everyone!
It’s that time of year again, where I strap on the pads and punish myself on the lacrosse floor for two very good causes. For those of you that don’t know, every year for the past three (3) years, and now entering our 4th year, I play in a marathon lacrosse game to benefit some national (Canadian) charities. Our game this year will be 18 hours long, played under Masters rules and watched over by The Guinness Book of World Records, as in years past. This year, also as in years past, we are playing for the Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness (http://www.ccfaa.ca) and Spirit of the Stick (http://www.spiritofthestick.com/) and our game will be played from 6PM on Friday June 10, 2011 to 1PM on Saturday June 11, 2011 in Aurora, Ontario, Canada.
I put this appeal out, as I do every year, in the hopes that I can raise some money to put towards these two worthwhile charities, and I urge you strongly to check out LaxDOVE’s website for more information (http://www.laxdove.ca).
This is also the part where I ask you to open your wallets, if you can, and give a little cash towards these good causes.
Without funding from you gentle readers, the public, The CCAA and Spirit of the Stick could not exist, and it’s from the wallets of folk that care and folk that want to make a difference that these charities are able to carry out their work. I realize that the majority of you readers are in other parts of the world, but please at least consider contributing to these worthwhile causes because without your support, they would not exist. That, and if I raise enough money I get shinies…but that’s beside the point. If you do feel motivated to contribute, please send your pledges via PayPal to awetitu@gmail.com
I’ll be logging my floor-time and Tweeting from the event as it happens, you can follow me on Twitter – @Awetitu, as well as snapping a butt-load of pictures for updating to my Facebook. PM me for details if you don’t have me added as a Friend already and we’ll go from there.
Thanks for taking the time to read my wall of text, and I hope you can help!
To PvP or not to PvP, that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the Stings and Arrows of Survival Hunters, or to Bear arms against a sea of Mages and by Moonfire end them. To Soothe, perchance to Root or Cyclone…
A new phase in Dreddnought’s career is about to start.
I have PvP’d as Resto before, and had moderate success. I don’t take it at all seriously as some do and am there solely for the LULZ. I used to run with a Destruction Warlock, but I’m thinking it might be more fun to run a Double Boomkin team and I’m looking into viable specs and gearing options. Certainly we would both be able to function as pocket healers in a pinch, as well as break out the BOOM when needed.
I think I’ll be running the old double 2-piece thing (2 pieces of Kodohide, 2 pieces of Wyrmhide) to maximize Resilience and Intellect benefits. I’ll be forced to gem and enchant the hell out of it for Spirit to take advantage of the Balance of Power talent to get to the spell hit cap as none of the gear has Hit or Spirit on it, but it’s the price you pay, no? Wish me luck!
Ask the Devs? More like: I’ll answer that, because it’s easy, and delete that because it’s not.
I’ve been sitting here cudgeling my brains trying to come up with a suitable blog post and for the life of me it just ain’t happening…There was an “Ask the Devs” thread started…in under an hour it was at 500 posts and they decided to reinstitute locking threads at 500 posts…which is funny because that’s 26 pages. They claim that it’s been in effect all along, just non-functional, but I have seen threads get as large as 289 pages (yes, almost 300 pages of reports and facts and figures that they COMPLETELY ignored) on the PTR forum and 80+ in the Druid forum as recently as last week, so afaic they realised that they were well and truly boned with the amount of “balancing” and “hot-fixing” they’ve done so far this expansion and decided to try to cut their losses…we shall see in about a week when they finally get around to answering only the questions they want to…
A Raiding we will go!
Wall of Text Incoming: You Have Been Warned!
To clarify: I am NOT on the bleeding edge of Raiding, and I never will be. I’m a Casual Raider. I am Hardcore-Lite at best, Sorta Hardcore at worst, with a serious yen for seeing the insides of these new places and getting my face eaten by your friendly local dungeon MoB.
I will never have World Firsts or Realm Firsts or Game Firsts because I just don’t take the game THAT seriously. If this description turns you off reading my site, then so be it. Don’t click the wrong “x” on your way out. If you are like the majority of players in WoW, read on and who knows, you might just learn something…what that is I will never know, but you could, and isn’t that EXCITING?
It felt good to dip my toes in the Raiding pool (see what I did there?) and I’m almost ready to jump in with both feet again (ba-dum-psssh).
Pugging Heroics is STILL off the table, however. I can deal with stupid in limited doses, but the MASSIVELY broken LFD tool is, at least as far as I’m concerned, great at finding tools instead of players. From the Mage that waits until everyone else has selected “Greed” on the Chaos Orb before he selects “Need” to the Hunter that cussed me out for “Need”-ing on Skardyn’s Grace (“Agility sucks for Bears, you should be stacking Stam,” was about the only printable thing he said…*facepalm*) to the Shaman who claimed that Spirit was absolutely useless to me for my Off-Spec so he should get the blue leather caster bracers, the LFD tool has exposed me, and apparently ONLY me, to all the Failplayers in the game.
But enough about them, this shit is all about me today.
Argaloth? Punk-ass is still trying to pick up his teeth with his stumpy arms.
Magmaw? Pwned his face. Not as a Tank, however…I pwned it as a TREE.
Yes, the Bear!Tree is BACK, baby. I don’t mind it either. My mana regen is not 100% where I want it to be yet (partially due to me spamming heals, as opposed to a rotation, partially due to re-learning Druid healing) but dammit, we lived, we took down the Boss and got lootz! From the massive Q.Q on the Forums I was under the impression that these new Cataclysm Raids were massively hard and fierce and something to be feared to within an inadvertent clench of peeing yourself.
Turns out these Raids are more like Dungeons with more people than sphincter tightening, teeth-gritting, nerd-rageous crap-fests that they’ve been made out to be. It’s all about Not Standing in/Not Running Through Fire and Staying Away from Fart Clouds and Moving with the Diamond and Switching Targets and BLOODLUST NOW! As opposed to the 1-shot “WTF WAS THAT SHIT?” stuff I’d been reading about. It’s one of those: “See, that wasn’t SO bad,” situations as opposed to one of those other kinds.
Argaloth was all about timing and not standing in fire. Seriously. That was about it. Timing Taunts for Meteor Slash (or whatever they’re calling it) and running around like a deranged donkey for 10 seconds before picking the Boss back up again…lather, rinse, repeat.
Magmaw was slightly more complex and I’m reliant on DPS to save my ass as a Tank on two occasions (if not more) and if someone screws up, then I basically get 1-shot, but other than that, as a Tree, Pillar of Fire is dead simple to get out of if everyone stacks and follows the marked person. It’s all “Heal-Through-able” but I don’t recommend it.
The Cataclysm Raids are, for the most part, fun, and learning and progression are actually more enjoyable than Wrath at this point. There are many out there that would disagree with this, and maybe I’m a masochist for thinking it, but I’m actually having a blast running heroics with Guildies (again, I won’t PuG, so don’t ask) and learning new fights. Who knows what the future will bring?
