Raid in Review – Rag’s Fire Flickers

Thought I would take a stab at something resembling a regular feature. I’m shooting for this to be a Tuesday thing, but I fail for this week.

I think I might have tried it waaaaaay back a long time ago with a semi-regular (2 or 3 installments) bit I did reviewing web comix. I am now woefully about 2 years behind on all my comix reading. Man, I’m a slacker.

But I’m staring down burnout as our roster revolves faster than the Gravitron at your local fair.

We lost a main tank due to… creative differences? We weren’t killing Rag fast enough so he moved on to greener pastures. He must have been planning it for a while since he started building a holy set for a couple months and was taken in to the new guild as a healer instead of a tank.

Funny how at the start of the expansion we had too many tanks, great for smashing through heroics for the entire guild, terrible for raiding.

Rogueing it up

After telling myself to remember to train in Orgrimmar I promptly forgot. It was another level or so before I went back and remembered.

With the decision made to level skinning, I made my way to Eversong. LOTS of dragonhawks and cats to skin (and eggs to loot). The leveling guide says to head out to Durotar and on this server there probably wouldn’t have been much competition, but the only thing better than kill sharing on a low pop server is not kill sharing at all.

BoA and Satchel gear has mostly rendered craftable items obsolete for leveling alts. I was able to make myself a pair of gloves before I ran out of light leather, but they were shortly replaced with the contents of a helpful satchel.

Brief tangent: Call to Arms should apply for all levels, not just cap.

Professional development

Now that I feel guilty about treating my rogue like trash…

I spent some time giving a bit more consideration to the future of the character.

At the very least, I have a guaranteed spot as a bank alt set aside.

*IF* by some miracle I decide to actually keep this as a playable character to end game… I’m not real sure what I will do with my bank alt(s).

I had this plan to level the rogue with herbalism and mining and convert it to enchanting and leatherworking once I was ready to hang up the daggers for accounting ledgers.

But I’ve discovered a teensy-tiny little issue with my plan.

Normally, I level via questing with a dungeon here and there to break up the monotony.

This time I’m hitting up quests in between my dungeons.

The result is that I have left the appropriate zones for what I can pick and hit to move on to level-appropriate questing zones.

You’re not helping

I have kittens.

I had a glass vase in the dining room filled with potpourri.

Remarkably, I still have the glass vase.

And potpourri all over the floor.

(To be honest, it’s been there for at least a week but I’ve been too busy – read lazy – to take care of it.)

With the exception of not being given a suitable place to scratch, kittens are generally not directly destructive.

Puppies believe that everything and anything is edible, including solid pieces of wood cleverly masquerading as furniture.

Kittens, on the other hand, tend towards indirect or collateral damage.

Not everything is edible to them, but it still bears investigating. After all, one simply cannot make the edible/non-edible decision until one has thoroughly studied the item in question. Anything that turns out to not meet the particulars of the palate can then be classified as a plaything.

If you could turn back time

Running dungeons with my poor rogue, watching some tanks know their shit and others just sort of flounder around – both in terms of tanking and general game knowledge.

For some, these old instances were old hat. It may be the first time they’ve brought a warrior/paladin/druid through Shadowfang, but they know what they’re doing. Where to go, what to kill, which NPCs to talk to, they’ve got a clue.

It’s like alts are little hivemind experiments with their older, more experienced account-mates. When I was new, I kept to myself and missed out on seeing (and learning) a lot around me. If I were brand-new to the game again, and ever left the questionable safety of my first guild, I would be impressed by the smoothness that some players move through the levels with. But I’m not new to the game and I’m pretty sure most of them are bored sick of being in Wailing Caverns AGAIN.

But what if we could be new to the game again, with a deja vu twist – keeping our current knowledge or at least an innate understanding of game mechanics to rival our current knowledge?

Adventures of the Poor Rogue

I wasn’t feeling very well over the weekend, nothing really wrong per se, just not really right either.

So when I wasn’t half asleep, I devoted some time to my poor rogue.

Over the weekend I went from level 12 or 13 up to 20.

First dungeon, naturally, was Ragefire. Easy peasy, especially with the new threat mechanics.

Realized part way through that I had never gotten around to the training I meant to do and so was unable to Kick. (Leave it to a game to say that you are born without the innate ability to move your foot quickly towards an opponent.)

Oops!

No one seemed to notice or care that I was missing out on that ability but I still felt bad and took care of it as soon as the run was over.

Also did some Wailing Caverns. 1000% better than it used to be and still terrible. I dropped into a group that had apparently been cycling through members and no one knew what had been killed by the previous members. We ran around blindly until everything was dead.

A Tale of a Poor Rogue

So I have a plan.

I *really* want the Insane title on Arioch.

“Wait, isn’t this post about a rogue? Do you even read your own titles?”

Hush, you.

The requirements for the Insane title are currently something like:

• Bloodsail Buccaneers – Honored
• Everlook – Exalted
• Ratchet – Exalted
• Booty Bay – Exalted
• Gadgetzan – Exalted
• Ravenholdt – Exalted
• Darkmoon Faire – Exalted

I’m already exalted with DMF. (And now there is talk of a new DMF stopping location, which probably means new quests that can be done for rep instead of grinding thousands of DMF decks. Bastards.)

Blogception – A blog about blogs?

OK, it’s actually just a post about blogs, not a whole blog, but it sounded cool.

Work with me, people!

I can’t recall the last time I reviewed my blog roll… actually, I can, it was the same time I wrote this post, but the time before that! That, I cannot remember, but it must have been some time in mid 2010.

Time for a refresher!

A lot of the blogs that I was reading, or blogs that were on my “I really should start reading this blog, I’ll toss it on a list and come back to it” list are no longer in business.

Many blogs, including my own, have drastically reduced posting schedules since the heyday of Wrath.

So here’s my question:

There’s a crab in the watercooler

In case you missed out on the excitement the other day, there was a hotfix to threat and an explanation from GC in the Watercooler. I would recommend reading the watercooler post, it was informative and insightful to current development mindset. It’s not every day you get to see the thought process of the designer go, “hey, maybe this isn’t working like we want it to so we’ll change it.”

Here’s the pearl causing all the irritation:

Threat generation for all tanks has been increased to 500%, up from 300%. This applies to warriors in Defensive Stance, death knights in Blood Presence, druids in Bear Form, and paladins with Righteous Fury.

There’s also a tidbit about Vengeance in the patch notes, but no one seemed to be upset by that change, with most agreeing it was a needed buff to help with initial threat gain. That leaves us with an overall buff to tank threat.

And… the watercooler post makes mention of modeling other tanking classes after the DK system of active management.

Cue the end of the world in 3… 2… 1…

Have you ever?

Morality question time!

So there’s this husband/wife team in my guild.

He’s not a bad player, she’s not the best.

He has admitted that he cannot stand raiding with her.

She might do better if he would stop logging in to her account, changing her spec around and moving all her actions in an attempt to “help” her.

So he’s generally in our core team and she comes in once in a while for farm nights.

A story came to light of a conversation between them in which he treated her like shit. Bordered on, if not crossed over into, mental abuse.