Random Friday

Went through my screen shot folder, trying to clean it out, and came across a few randoms from the past couple days.

This one is noteworthy because we did it as a guild. There happened to be 8 of us on and in the proper proportion of tanks/heals/DPS.

It did take a couple tries. The first 2 attempts on Sarth we let the pally tank him and the DK picked up the adds. There were two problems. The rogue could pull aggro just by looking at Sarth and the pally never quite got the hang of positioning Sarth in such a fashion as to keep his tail out of the raid.

Switch and have the DK on Sarth and the pally on the adds. This eventually worked, but it got scary. Twice we think the pally taunted Sarth. He swears he didn’t (and I didn’t get the combat parse, bad me), but there is no way in hell that Sarth just randomly decides twice to face the OT (in the middle of the raid of course) and let loose an attack. Not when said pally tank can only keep aggro on a single target by everyone holding back.

The pally went down at some point and the warlock can’t dodge flame walls to save her life (literally) so it was more like we 6-manned it.

Of noobs and nitwits

There are different levels of skill one may encounter when participating in any group activity.

WoW is no exception.

There are people that just don’t have good spatial awareness, can’t react quickly to changes in their surroundings. Maybe it’s the person, maybe it’s the equipment. /shrug

There are people that honestly and earnestly want to improve.

They are missing some skill or some knowledge but are making an effort to progress.

These people often ask for help in the way of mentoring or where they can go to learn more. They generally feel bad when they aren’t performing at the same level as the others around them. If they do something that causes a wipe or slows down the group, they feel awful.

These are the people that can get better, they just need a little help to point them in the right direction.

And lo, the mobs have been heard

I’m not talking about the mobs in game that we slaughter in droves, I’m talking about the mobs of players that had issues with the upcoming emblem changes.

Feast your peepers on this little tidbit of blue:

The Heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Conquest.

(Found on MMO Champ and here’s the WoW forum thread.)

So the normal daily will no longer reward an Emblem of Triumph.

While I’m sure that this will not appease those hardest against the emblem changes, the removal of Emblems of Triumph from the normal daily does mollify me a little bit. Remember, I’m not really worked up about this… just the tier pieces! But I will point out I made this suggestion back here… maybe one of my lurking readers is a Blizzard employee? I doubt it, but that would be cool. =)

It made no sense for players to have the option, no matter how time consuming, to earn Coliseum-level epics by doing NORMAL daily dungeons. I don’t think it even makes sense to earn Triumph off of the heroic dailies, but I’ll take what I can get.

MMO Champ is predicting a possible release of 3.2 as early as next week.

Are you ready?

I know I’m looking forward to my priest getting Journeyman level riding and new quests opening up at the Argent Tournament.

Now that drakes in Occulus will scale with gear I might set foot back in there again.

Curious to see how the reduction in mana cost for Arcane Blast will play out with the reduction in replenishment. I’m thinking it will be a buff for me as I can never count on having replenishment.

I’ve been watching MMO Champ as they follow the changes on the PTR, but I’m seeing all sorts of stuff on the official forum that I somehow missed. So many things to look forward to!

…

For the Alliance, don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya:

My first toon was a night elf warrior, mining and blacksmithing. This is almost enough to make me want to visit him again:

Mathiel in Darnassus has finally earned himself enough money from your repair bills that he was able to buy himself an anvil.

…

And that makes 100 posts!

I am the champion

No time for losers

‘Cause I am the champion of the world

Or…

I finally managed to beat my guildmate for top achievement points in the guild.

This will be a short-lived victory, I’m sure, as he *ahem* has more time to devote to garnering achievement points – or as we jokingly refer to them: “virgin points.”

When the dust died down from the hacking incident over the weekend, I ended up running around and doing a bunch of random things on my mage.

…

Headed out to Sholozar Basin and finally started questing in earnest out there. I had picked up a few quests here and there, just enough to start doing Frenzyheart dailies (which are really more like monthlies for me) and a few oddballs from Freya.

I’m thinking he’s named Lucky in the same way that you name the 3-legged dog with no tail and 1 eye “Lucky.” It probably only took me 2-3 shots to get the apple, but the DK I was running with took a few more.

Haxxorz Suxxorz

Dear Sir or Madam that hacked my guildy’s account:

Please die in a fire. Thank you.

Yours most sincerely,

Arioch

…

Saturday morning while our pally/druid was at out work, someone else was at work in his account.

The hacker wiped out the guild bank and discretely left the guild while no one was on.

Blizzard somehow noticed and shut the account down, sending emails to our guildmate notifying him of the breach.

His druid is naked save for a purple shirt.

His DK’s mining pick was sold. But he gained a stack of Northern spices that he can’t even use…

On a positive note, for the first time that I can ever remember, this player now has bag space.

…

I bet they laughed when they looked at our guild bank.

Suicide for Hire

Haven’t shared a web comic in a while, so here’s another favorite.

• Author: Rafael Medina
• Artist: Same (?)
• Rating: R
• Updates: Sporadically, up to twice a week
• URL: http://suicideforhire.comicgenesis.com/

My previous web comic offerings have been pretty tame, but this one kicks it up a notch.

Two high school students are looking for a way to do something with their lives. Rock band? Meh. Start a business helping people plan their own suicide? Sure, why not?

These are not your angels of mercy a la Kevorkian – Hunter is completely unstable and Arcturus can barely keep him in check, when he even bothers to try. Later, we find that Arcturus may not even be completely sane, but he manages to keep both sides of himself functioning.

The story lines are complex as the pair tailors each suicide to fit the customer’s specific situation. There is gore, almost-nudity, political commentary, and plenty of wit. Each story arc is separate, but there are a couple reoccurring characters that are introduced throughout the run. We’re towards the end of one story now so it may be confusing to pick it up today, but the archives are well worth a read.

The artwork is black and white (some of the earliest pages were colored) and in an anthropomorphic style (the characters are humanoid animals). If you’re one of the kind to pass it up as “anthropomorphic = cute” I suggest you set that aside and give this a shot. If you do start at the beginning, the artwork takes a few months to solidify in style, but it’s kind of neat watching a work like this progress and grow.

Test Drive

OK. Did a Naxx 10 with the new fire spec.

Had tanks and healers I could trust.

We were bringing through at least 2 people that had not done Naxx before. One I believe had done it on a different character, but the other was completely fresh and hadn’t even read strats or watched videos.

Did pretty darn good at sticking with the rotation/reaction and not pulling *too* much aggro. Invisibility got used a few times.

I didn’t spaz out. I don’t even think I did any major swearing.

Still having a little trouble on trash deciding when casting Living Bomb is worth it. I try to cast it on the second or third target in the pack so it has a greater chance of living long enough to go asplody on everything.

Whenever possible I would time my movement for when I was casting Living Bomb or firing off a Hot Streak pyroblast.

With the aid of mouseover macros I could keep Living Bomb and Scorch up on Grobbulus while taking out slimes. There was an awkward few seconds where the tank drug him behind a slime cloud and I couldn’t reach him.

We did 4 Horsemen by pulling all of them to the back, 2 in each corner. Somehow I couldn’t drop Thane’s mark (even though I was further away from him than Lady B) and went splat. That fight took forever, sorry guys.

It was amusing on Maexxna when the Living Bomb would detonate just as her spiderlings would spawn. Poof! There goes half their little lives!

Loatheb was kind of neat for getting a Hot Streak constantly.

I get let off easy for utility on most fights and was able to just concentrate on damage. Druids and shamans told me to DPS and they would take care of curses. That just about drove me insane seeing little purple raid frames. I was even just on back-up web duty on Maexxna.

I did goof on KT. Had to pop Invisibility to drop some threat and accidentally snagged one of the adds as my target when I came back. I must have been getting tired because it took me a few casts to notice. /facepalm

I got a ring that I *might* be able to use in my hit set, but I’m not seeing it on my list from RAWR. Might just be a crystal for me. Will play with that later.

But no one cares about all that.

Everyone wants to know what I think about the spec now that I’ve given it a fair shake.

Drum roll please…

Taunt the mob!!!

That was the most commonly said phrase in our two guild heroic runs last night.

And it wasn’t from me.

I was usually screaming through clenched teeth, “Oh my fucking god, how do I fucking have aggro already?”

The hunter once said, “My kitty wishes to levitate,” which I found to be very amusing for some reason.

We did Heroic Violet Hold to start.

The DPS DK ended up off-tanking every group pull.

First we get the ethereal boss.

Fashion First

OK, since I can’t raid in a Naxx 10 until the reset I don’t have any new whining to do about my fire spec.

Time for a frivolous post!

As I have mentioned a few posts ago, Tier 7 is the first tier set I have collected. When I hit level 70 I was able to make my own Spellfire set and purchase the Spellstrike set. That was it. I was watching trade chat roll by with alluring invites to Karazhan and Sunwell and all these other mystical, magical places – but they were all badge runs. Meaning my lack of tier gear and my lack of experience with the fights would have quickly landed me back in Silvermoon City after being forcibly ejected from the raid.

Now I’m in a position where I am earning my tier pieces and so have been paying attention to news about upcoming sets.

Warming Up

Short post since I didn’t do a whole lot of WoW this weekend… I worked on clearing out some quests in Outlands towards some achievements and getting quest items out of storage. Many of those quests involved me being something else.

…

I get disguised as a courier. Apparently, this means blond. And sandals. But I got to do some incredible acting and pulled off the mission flawlessly.

Letting my hair down

Accidently release a great evil into the land, blah, blah, blah… Looks like I also stole my priest’s staff.