My Name is Dark/Soth, and Apparently I Am an Elitist

I get a guest poster, yay!

You may have stuck around Tuesday and watched the face off between two of my readers in the comments section. If you did not, I suggest you go read them before reading this post.

Dark/Soth is one of my guild members and apparently is an elitist. Actually, I’m pretty sure he’s an elitist. =P

Anyway, I offered him some space to detail his thoughts about the whole thing and his post is going to tie in very nicely with a series I have planned for next week. No post on Friday, you’ll all be too hung over to read it anyway.

So without further ado, I introduce Dark/Soth:

…

Arioch has been badgering me to contribute something to her blog for a while now, and the recent discussion (argument?) with Koalabear21 from DotsandHots provided the perfect topic for me to talk about.

Pretentious Blogging Meme

These things are like a virus…

I caught wind of a voluntary blogger meme through theerivs over at A High Latency Life, and he picked it up from Tree of Life. I feel like I should change my blog tittle to Clearcasting Life just to fit the theme.

Anyway, this is a meme about writing, not about WoW. It is for bloggers, by bloggers, blah, blah, blah.

So with the “this is not about WoW” disclaimer out of the way, I will jump right into satisfying Keredria’s curiosity.

1. How long have you been blogging? What made you start? Who inspired you?

How the time flies, it has been very nearly 1 year since I started blogging. My first post went out on January 19th of 2009. I covered the why of the blog in that very first post, but a brief recap is that I needed a “dump” for the contents of my brain. My primary inspiration was Euripedes over at Critical QQ.

2. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog?

OK in UK

Another tale from the priesty side…

After being neglected for a few weeks, we finally rounded everyone up again for a day of alt fun.

A couple of our group had managed to sneak up to 68 and turned off XP to allow the rest of us to catch up.

We weren’t 68 yet because we weren’t playing without the rest of the group! *ahem*

Anyway, our party was ranging from 66 to 68.

We’ve got the ret pally, the prot pally, the hunter, the shadow priest, and me – the holy priest.

According to the dungeon list, we are all eligible for a good 6-7 of the same dungeons.

Queue up the random dungeon finder so we can get the helpful satchel goodies.

One or more members of the party do not meet the requirements.

WTF?

Bludgeoned to death with a nerf bat

Relevant snippets, trust me:

• Level 1 characters no longer start with food or water in their inventory.
• Quest Tracking Feature
• Instant quest text is on by default.
• Dazed: Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed.
• Health and Mana Regeneration: These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters. As a player’s level increases, the regeneration rates gradually reduce, returning to normal rates at level 15.

All can be found somewhere around here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

So I’ve got that nelf DK off on another server, on another battlegroup even.

All by his lonesome.

And rapidly running out of inventory space.

Solution?

And in stark contrast to yesterday…

Note: No posts for the rest of the week, everyone enjoy your holiday of choice and see you next Monday!

Yesterday was all about warm fuzzies, fluffy kittens, prancing unicorns, and cotton candy.

Damn, I love cotton candy.

But as heart-warming as such posts can be, it just can’t compare with the side-splitting hilarity that is fail.

If nothing else, this new LFG is awesome for churning out blog fodder. The myriad of ways that people can be stupid will never cease to amaze me.

I’ve got a little side project going – a nelf DK on another server.

It’s a PvE server and boy does that feel weird.

I have no idea what battlegroup I’m in, should probably look that up one of these days.

The PuG that did NOT suck

Queue for random daily dungeon.

Zone into Violet Hold.

Member of party immediately leaves party.

Said member was tank.

Well fuck.

Group re-queues to get new tank.

New tank zones in.

Buff up.

Start event.

First portal opens.

Tank is offline.

Well fuck.

We’ve got a ret pally, an ele shaman, a resto druid, and me – the mage.

Ret tank?

Hell no, ele shaman tank FTW.

He actually managed to tank up to the first boss.

Quick, resto druid swap to bear and ele shaman swap to resto!

Bear has never tanked a heroic, but I don’t think the shaman had either…

4-manned that shit with style.

So big props to Wrecum and Faelanna of Cairne.

…

What’s this? a second pug that didn’t suck?

That’s right, folks!

Got into a random AN the other night, 3 guys from Execution of Tortheldrin and a random DK.

The guilded guys are chatting it up in party, giving the pally tank a hard time about what a terrible tank he was.

The shaman gave me a run for my money on damage, it was nice to have a challenge.

Hadronox goes down.

Shaman says, “fuck Ari.”

Oh shit, what did I do?

“you were lighting him up”

He posts recount, I pulled 7.9k. And the tank held her the entire time. Shitty tank, indeed, lol.

Finish up, agree to stay together for more runs.

We did 6 instances total: AN, ToC, UK, DTK, Occ, and OK.

We started to fight the one boss with the volunteers in OK.

By the time someone finished typing if we wanted to go for the achievement, the first volunteer was already dead.

Oops.

The secret to fighting your team members on the last boss in OK?

Fuck strategy.

Let the DK grip you right into the center and just Arcane Explosion.

I used to try and actually CC one, and burst down another, kite them…

Fuck it. Blow them up.

The new Occulus is great.

My drake was sitting at 122.7k HP.

The shaman had connection issues so we ended up 4-manning most of the instance, including Eregos.

So hats off to Dominigo, Venril, and Rukn for a smashing good time.

Dear Blizzard

You nerfed Marrowgar only a week after the encounter went live.

To quote you, “Lord Marrowgar will now do significantly less melee damage in both the 10 player normal and 10 player heroic difficulty.”

What the fuck was that shit?

One fucking week in?

Guilds on my server were clearing it, it obviously wasn’t impossible.

You know what we wanted?

We wanted the known tanking bug to be fixed – where mobs were repositioning themselves for the hell of it.

Or, as Dark/Soth said, we “wanted an adjustment to the Saber Lash mechanic, to improve the detection of the tanks to spread the damage evenly, or a larger range (10 yards), so he could be moved easier.”

Maybe even “an internal cooldown on Saber after Bonestorm ended. No more than 3 seconds or so.”

We did not want a nerf to the damage.

We wanted the encounter to work correctly.

After our first night of excruciating pain in there (we did get him to 4%), our tanks scoured the interwebz for solutions.

This is how we found the tanking bug and an apparent issue with Lord Marrowgar not always “seeing” the second tank, even if he’s within range.

We tried stacking the tanks, we tried them side by side, they were best fucking buddies all night. Believe me – our tanks were lockstepped together. They could have won dance awards for the moves they were putting out. Koralon has a similar mechanic and we have no problems there.

But almost every Bonestorm ended with one tank eating the entirety of a Saber Lash and his co-tank was left standing right there next to him/on him, completely untouched.

I’ll admit, our heals probably weren’t up to par, especially not when the mechanic isn’t working properly.

But we could have done it. We needed to tweak our comp a little. Get everyone to use cooldowns a little more effctively. Focus.

We could have done it.

The only reason I can see that a nerf to the damage would have been necessary if it was completely disproportional to the damage in the 25-man version. Unfortunately, I did not see any hard numbers up on WoWWiki or Tankspot. If he was hitting as hard on 10 man as he was hititng on 25, OK, that would be a problem.

But it was still an obstacle that could be overcome.

It was an obstacle that had been overcome.

It wasn’t impossible.

My guild got Marrowgar down the day after the nerf.

They weren’t nearly as excited about it as we would have been had the nerf not occurred.

Now he’s even tauntable.

Will he hand out balloons and candy this Tuesday?

/end elitist rant

I Spy With My Little Eye…

Muradin’s Spyglass!

Long story, but my guild took down Lord Marrowgar without me on Wednesday (my choice to not be there).

They tried Lady Deathwhisper a couple times and had to call it.

I am really proud of these guys for actually pulling in some pugs and getting shit killed.

Bummed that I missed the first kill?

Yes.

This isn’t Patchwerk

This post is sort of a continuation of my special post of specialness.

I started thinking about just where in the raiding environment “special” raiding had a place.

Patchwerk.

All the melee DPS moves in behind and opens up a can of whoop ass. A rogue usually dies.

All the ranged DPS stands over on the sides and brings the pain without fear (or thought) of retribution.

There is no fire.

There are no adds.

There are no portals, no black/white puff balls, no whirlwind, no spell reflect shield.

I wish I was special

We meet lots of special people in WoW.

When the raid leader calls for everyone to switch to a new target the special people don’t have to switch.

They are so special that they are not included in “everyone.”

They are in a league all of their own.

“All ranged DPS switch to infernals!”

Not the special ones.

They get to merrily pewpew their hearts out on one target.

Their DPS is so crucial on some other target it will overcome any bothersome mechanic like portals continually spawning mistresses.

“Hunters take down frost spheres!”

We were graced with the presence of not one, but two special hunters over the weekend. In the same raid, even.

So special that the adds burrowed and we wiped.

Every time.

I’ve never seen an add burrow before on Anub.

“Ranged DPS on Onyxia only, don’t touch the whelps!”

Except the special ones.

Of course your DPS is higher than mine.

You’re special.

“Remove curses!”

Special players don’t have to clutter up their action bars with pesky utility spells.

I imagine their UI has 3 or 4 buttons that do damage and half the screen is taken up by their Recount.

The other half of the screen is probably a chat pane full of conversations about how special they are.

My job would be so much easier if I was special.

I could just stand in one spot and shoot at whatever I felt like.

Wouldn’t even need to be in vent since I wouldn’t need to listen to the raid leader.

I could stand in fire.

I would be special so the healers would have to heal me.

(My recount and chat panes would be filling the screen so I wouldn’t be able to see the fire anyway.)

Aggro?

I’m special, the tank will pull it off me.

Matter of fact, if something comes my way, it’s the tank’s fault anyway.

I’m too special to be bothered with managing my threat.

Bad tank must be bad if special player is special.

Special people also get to leave raids after the first wipe.

They’re too special to waste their time with the unskilled masses.

But before bailing, special people are gracious enough to share their insight about the problem at hand.

Their astute observations are always appreciated by the people that remain.

“u suck”

With those parting words of wisdom, they leave in a flurry of fluffy clouds and rainbows, borne off in a chariot pulled by a team of unicorns.

Special unicorns for special people.

I just want the unicorns. I hear they taste like chicken.