Intermission

Still pretending to be a parent to Tir’s son so still no time to log on. (My parental status will change by or before July 7th. For those of you that just can’t stand to not read me in my WoW absence, I do have a blog chronicling my experiences: www.iknowwhymotherseattheiryoung.wordpress.com . No hurt feelings if you don’t check it out.)

I do make an effort to raid one night a week.

So here’s how that’s played out:

April 6th – told them I wouldn’t be there.

April 13th – sick as a dog, told them I would return the following week.

April 20th – “oh, we thought you weren’t raiding at all for the next couple months so we replaced you.” Continue reading →

I’m In!

OK, sorry about lack of posts again, real life interferes – just ask Tir if you want more details. But expect a sketchy schedule of posting roughly whenever it’s physically possible (read: not much) over the next 3 months.

Anyway, along with being too busy to post, I’ve been too busy to log in… and then we both get beta invites!

So, I can’t do much, but here’s a couple observations:

1 – It’s hard to test when you can’t play.

Tir was able to make a cute little panda and zone in. I’m on the same server… Failure. Failure. Failure. Too many pandas in play already. Judging from his screen, there are roughly a quarter million pandas in a gigantic black and white (and red!) clusterfuck around the third quest objective. Oh well.

2 – Character creation is pretty cool.

I don’t think they’ve fixed the difference in how skin tones appear on the creation screen and in the game, but being able to preview the colors and styles in a pane to the side is pretty cool. Much easier to remember you like the third on the left instead of counting clicks. Unless you’re a female gnome monk – then your character creation screen is kinda bugged out; enjoy your black background.

3 – Yes, I made another blood elf.

Well, I couldn’t make a panda, what did you expect? The starting area was full of blood elf monks so apparently I wasn’t alone in my panda-less situation.

4 – Playing without add ons sucks!

Seriously, just yuck. The map is in the wrong place and I have to look WAY up at my character pane to see how much chi I have.

5 – There are spellbook improvements.

Active and passive abilities are broken out on to separate tabs. Can’t really tell you much more because I only got up to level 4 before having to log out.

6 – Starting weapons for monks are wrist wraps.

And they are bugged. At least for blood elves. They display at full durability yet you have two red sword icons indicating they are broken and you do shit damage… until you take them off and put them back on.

7 – Blood elf monk “roll” animation is hopefully incomplete…

It’s going to be awfully silly just using the normal jump animations stretched out over a few more yards. With a puff of smoke added, leaving us with this conclusion:

If you didn’t want to click through, the joke revolves around the roll appearing to be a fart-powered jump.

8 – All the other classes still have their trainers in the belf starting area… but no new monk trainer.

There’s a bunch of wounded outrunners, but I can’t honestly remember if they were there before or not. Theoretically, no one needs trainers any more. But I haven’t rolled a pre-existing class to verify that.

9 – You choose your specialization at level 2.

Actually, it’s a lie. The pane is available and the icon blinks furiously at you, but you can’t do anything with it. And some of your talents are literally mystery talents and others aren’t implemented or functioning.

10 – Filtering at vendors is cool… in theory.

If you’re brand new and run up to the first vendor and see nada, might be a bit confusing.

11 – Quest drop rates seem to have been improved.

One of the reasons I chose to roll a belf was my familiarity with the starting zone. Fairly recently I ran my baby warrior through here and the drop on lynx collars was terrible. Now, I’m getting one off almost every kill. Which leads us to…

12 – AoE looting is awesome.

Forgot about it at first and was wondering how I got 2 collars off one cat, but I was looting the corpses of momma and baby together! Isn’t that sweet?

13 – As a monk, changing your weapon type changes your attacks.

Because “jabbing” with wristwraps is fine, but “clobbering” with a staff is better. Be prepared for changes to icon appearance and spell names… possible borking of macros as well.

And… we’re out of time.

Where you stand matters

As I’ve mentioned before, our Group 2 raids on Tuesday/Wednesday and is currently only raiding on Wednesday to alleviate lag issues that plague some members on the higher-population start of the raiding week.

So we’re trucking along Wednesday night, downing H Morchock in 2 pulls (even with the additional nerf, everyone needs to take stomps appropriately on the side with one healer).

We’re clearing trash on Yor’Sahj and two things come to mind.

The first is something I think about every week, regardless of the toon or group I’m with: The trash gets cleared in a circular path around the boss, starting at the portal entrance. Continue reading →

Because I said I would

So sorry about the lack of posts. Lately I’ve had the choice to either play WoW or write about WoW… playing won out.

I’m having a blast on my little secret project DK, with most dungeon runs being civil and smooth.

Most.

Then I get this gem of a tank.

He’s not a bad player, per se. (And I say “he” as he was claiming to have an enormous and magnificent dick.)

OK, he was bad.

Level 79 and direct queued for Drak”tharon Keep. Apparently he had been in the instance before, but after the first boss was dead and was attempting to get the achievement for completing the dungeon before hitting level 80. Continue reading →

Of Deserter Debuffs

More crazy adventures of my top-secret DK!

One of my earlier runs was in Ramps.

OK, MANY of the earlier runs were Ramps, I thought that’s all I was going to get until I was eligible for Utgarde and then maybe Stonecore for all of eternity after that.

Ramps is generally a well-designed dungeon.

It’s short, has easy access back to the quest givers once the dungeon is completed, there aren’t an insane amount of trash pulls, the pulls require a little care for an undergeared or underskilled group, and it’s fairly linear.

The only big problem that Ramps has is the first patrol.

If you zone in and a party member takes 4 steps forward to be in range of the quest giver, they are now in range of the patrol at the end of his path. And he pulls the first two guards with him.

All hell breaks loose which sucks when your tank hasn’t loaded or the healer is still in their DPS spec. Continue reading →

Button Pounding DK Scrub

Good band name?

We’ll get back to the regularly scheduled 20 days of WoW Blogging after I do some blogging about WoW.

Ironic, no?

Anyway, I have a feeling that my secret-DK project (which really needs a cool code name) is going to be ripe for the blogger fodder.

Got Slave Pens.

Again.

There is a disease running rampant through the group. One that saps 25 strength. That’s more strength than I have on most of my gear pieces, I could just run around without my pants for less effect. And when your party is all melee, it starts to take a bit longer to kill things. Continue reading →

Aluminum Armor and Heirloom Expectations

I think I’m going about my baby tanking warrior in the wrong way.

How can it be wrong?

I mean, I haven’t logged on to him for a bit now, not since I replaced all his gear after the holiday-induced leveling spurt.

And that’s what is wrong.

I look at him on the character selection screen.

He looks back at me.

And I wuss out.

…

What started as a “just need to get my glyph bitch up to the next level for his herbalism” project turned into a rather enjoyable experience. I wanted to run around solo, not bother anyone with my complete failness of ret pally.

But questing in Outland really hasn’t changed much since it was released so the dungeons made a nice break to the drudgery.

I have no heirloom gear on him. Hell, I headed out with a leather helm. On a ret pally. Yeah, it was that bad.

So I queued up.

And didn’t do too bad. Sometimes I even did well.

To boot, I wasn’t even nervous about it.

I look at him on the character selection screen.

He looks back at me.

And I don’t flinch.

…

I have a secret project at the moment. I’m running a new DK on a new server. There are few who know of my identity and they have been sworn to secrecy.

Again, leveling in BC zones just doesn’t sound that appealing. I want to fly around, pick flowers, beat on rocks, and kill things every 10-20 minutes when the queue pops for a DPS.

Being on a new server, and too cheap to mule crap over, I’m in the DK starter blues with a couple upgrades I’ve managed to snag from repeated runs of Ramps or Slave Pens.

Even with a completely fucked up rotation (more of that on another day), I’m doing well. Not always the top of the meters, but never the bottom. I’m even getting the hang of that melee thing, something I might be able to transfer to my paladin.

I look at him on the character selection screen.

He looks back at me.

And I jump right in.

…

So I was thinking about this, why I feel so nervous on my tanking warrior and feel no issue on my DPS toons?

I mean, yeah, it’s a new role for me, but I’m decked in full heirlooms! I’ve got a shield without intellect on it! I should be rocking the joint!

Memories of leveling Selwyn well up; of being terrified that I would fail – fully decked out in heirlooms, with the best enchants, the best gems. Leveling Selwyn was almost painful for me. Zone in to a group. Four strangers. Which one would die? Would it be my fault? What if they were too stupid and I couldn’t save them?

Selwyn was eventually saved by have a group of supportive friends band together to be my pocket group. (Most people look for a pocket healer, I needed a whole freaking group).

But I don’t want to do that with my tanking. When I healed my friends, I could yell at them to quit doing stupid things and they would usually stop standing in fire. When I started healing random people again, there was no yelling (other than at the computer screen) and they continued to stand in fire. Those are the types of people I’m going to end up tanking for, I want to be prepared.

I should be prepared, in my shiny heirlooms, with their pretty stats. I mean, I walk in to a dungeon and people see the telltale gear and go, “Hey, this guy’s in heirlooms! That means he knows what the fuck he’s doing!”

But I don’t. (I’m not a guy either, but I can understand the assumption.)

And I think that’s where the root of my problem is.

With the heirlooms comes the expectation that the player has a clue. That they know where to go in a dungeon they haven’t seen in 2+ years and certainly not since Cata “simplified” it. That they have 3 other tanks in progression raiding and know what to do when the mage goes off and pulls one pack while the hunter has tab targeted to a different group and the rogue has gone afk and the healer has no mana… *flail*.

With my other characters, in their quest greens and occasional boss blue, there are no expectations. The rest of the party looks at me and assumes that I’m a complete and utter noob. They might be pleasantly surprised to see me not be a total jackass or they might not even notice I’m there.

I’m wondering if it would actually be easier on me to tank by stripping off the heirlooms … what do you guys think? Am I crazy?

Actual WoW Update

Taking a quick break from the 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge (which really should be called 20 days of FREE CONTENT IDEAS!!) to insert a post that is actually about WoW.

My guild’s second group has altered our raiding schedule. This is the group that I raid in on my priest and used to be Tuesday and Wednesday. Since we’re regularly doing a 1-night clear, Wednesday ends up being open.

Apparently quite a few people in the group are experiencing excessive lag on Tuesdays so we’ve shortened the schedule to just raiding on Wednesday.

Until we’re ready to go “hardcore into heroics”… Continue reading →