Hanging out

I spent the evening wrapping Xmas presents and preparing for our holiday travels, but did pop on very late for a few minutes to do the JC and a few other dailies.

I was very happy to hear the Badger group took down Kel'thuzad without undue trouble before I got on. 2x full Naxx-10 clears is nice. I've got January 6 penciled in for a Heroic raid night. Probably Sartharian and then a little Naxx if Sarth is as easy as advertised.

I've noticed I'm having a lot of conversations about DKP with people lately, not really my favorite topic. Then when I popped in on the remaining Badger group people on vent, Bloc pointed out in jest that we'd hardly spoken since he got "demoted" to the second group. Hmm. Well, first, I really did make a conscious effort to avoid the groups getting labeled first/second (or A/B) by going with Bear and Badger, but I guess that would never be perfectly successful. And honestly, there was a little concern early on that we hadn't distributed the dps very evenly, but I think we've seen that isn't an issue. I was never worried about the tanks or healers (only that a few of us were slow to level for various reasons). But having both groups clear Naxx is just about the same amount of time should settle any issues about first/second (Bear got their earlier by calendar days by raiding more often, I think the 2 groups ran about the same number of raids to get there).

But what really dawned on me afterwards is that if I want to have conversations about more interesting things than DKP, I should be more active about seeking out better conversations. On non-raid nights, I've tended to just kick around and not even bother getting on vent. But maybe I'll start making an effort to run around checking in with people. There is some danger to guild cohesion of running in 2 groups like this, but I don't think it'd be hard to head off.

Running 25s should help a lot too. And maybe we'll start looking for opportunities to swap up some people across the 2 Naxx-10 groups as well. I think it's easy to overlook what we have going here -- a decent sized guild of strong raiders and the makings of a really good team for the Heroic raid instances. This isn't l8raid anymore. We aren't going to be struggling to fill or relying on new people who don't know the encounters or are undergeared. People used to drift in and out of l8raid, which meant the DKP system was really important. It shouldn't be that way anymore.

The crux of a lot of the DKP questions is whether we should have the same DKP for 10s and 25s. I'm inclined to have one pool for a two main reasons. First, it's a lot simpler to administer. Second, if somebody has been unlucky in the 10s, I think they should get priority in the 25s.

I see two potential problems that could arise. First, people could 'game' the system by passing over small upgrades in the 10s to save points for the best-in-slot item from the 25s. This is really only a problem if we discover the people passing on small ups can't effectively do their jobs in the 25s. Currently, I don't anticipate this being a problem (partly because Naxx is not that hard) but we'll have to see. Second, somebody could stockpile DKP in the 10s, grab a bunch of best-in-slot loot from the 25s and then leave the guild to raid elsewhere. I don't think that's going to be a problem either.

There's a side issue in that one DKP pool makes people hesitant to take off-spec gear. On one hand, that means people work harder to optimize their main spec (good). On the other hand, the flexibility of people being able to respec might be handy for maintaining class balance in the 25s. Maybe we'll re-introduce the 1/2 price offspec loot option in the 10s after a bit.

Another funny side issue is that people could basically all end up trying to farm DKP in the 10s for use in the 25s. Note that if everybody does this, nobody gets any DKP because everything gets sharded. At that point, maybe we cancel the 10s and spend all week in the 25s. Or just run 10s when we have some newer toons to gear up (who would take loot and generate DKP). I suspect this issue will self-correct quickly.

So we'll see. I'll probably get on late and hang out a little again tonight. I won't stay up late so that I won't risk being tired for driving tomorrow. Fingers crossed that I can dig up enough bandwidth over vacation to at least check in daily for the JC quest and a /wave.

Kel'thuzad down!

On Monday... yeah I still suck at being timely. That was a pretty fun fight and a gratifying win. We spent about half the raid night cataloging the various ways to screw up the fight -- have somebody stand too far outside initially and overaggro the trash, try to melee Banshees, leave Abombs untanked, let skellies bleed through to the middle, stand in the void zones, forget to heal the victims of the frost block, stand in the void zones, stand too close to the tank and get him frost blocked, stand in the void zones, etc.

But sorting through all the chaos and closing it out felt pretty good. Then we went and got schooled on real balls-out chaos by trying Sartharian with 1 drake up. I think we set up the fight with too much depending on me -- tank the drake, collect the fire elementals, avoid the flame walls, avoid the void zones. Collecting the fire elementals is the hardest part of that and focusing on that caused me to screw up other things like avoiding the flame wall. We tried it again last night with a different drake and it seems like it would help if the healers are close enough to me for the consecrate to pick up the Lava Blazes. But since I'm moving around, they have to heal and also avoid the frontal cone breath of the dragon, which is also hard.

We never really felt like we got going seriously on the Sartharian+1 fight. However, I'm unsure whether it was technical/positioning or we just need a little more gear. For example, after Monday, it felt like we needed 3 healers, but maybe you have to be able to 2-heal it to manage the dps to kill the drake's portal add(s), the blazes and still get Sarth down before it gets crazy. OTOH, I think we were the worst geared group to do the ZA bear run, so I believe we're capable of fairly strong technical play with practice.

We did some more Naxx again Tues & Wed, but moved at a leisurely pace. We tried going for the achievement kill on Grand Widow without success. We also noticed we're about a full minute short of the 3m achievement kill on Patchwerk. Patch is a simple fight, so that probably indicates we're a bit undergeared for achievements yet in Naxx.

It felt like the last couple of nights were a little less joyful than last week's Naxx. Maybe a accomplishment-hangover following the excitement of our first KT kill and realizing we won't have another big accomplishment like that for a little while? Or maybe with the kill achieved, people have started thinking more about gear optimization as their next thing to work for. Sadly that depends on loot distribution, which is less team-oriented and maybe less fun-oriented. Or maybe it was anticipating the slower raiding schedule of the next couple of weeks due to holiday vacation travel. Or maybe it was just all the extra wipes testing ourselves against the harder versions of the battles.

Hopefully, the breaks over the holidays will get people pumped up again. I'll be frequently unavailable until around Jan 3rd. I will be trying to get online with the craptop to at least do the daily JC quest. If I can get >5 fps, I might try to do something more complicated, but I'm not counting on it.

I'm planning to put Heroic (25) raiding on the schedule first week of next year (Jan 6). It looks like we can clear Naxx-10 in two nights for both raiding groups, so it's time to measure ourselves against the Heroic versions and see how far we can get.

Slacking

Oof, I didn't post for almost a week. I don't know if anybody reads the blog anymore since I moved to blogger, but maybe they don't now.

The problem has been that RL has gotten unusually busy with preparations for the holidays and things. Plus, there's been so much to do online that I try to jump on when I have a few free minutes instead of trying to keep up the blog. And then there's the problem that jumping on all the time has led to some concerns about how much time the game can consume.

So last week (Tues) started with a night off somewhat unexpectedly. Then we got rolling again pretty well on Wednesday. I considered trying to get into a Heroic Thurs or Fri but got on late and everybody was formed up running heroics or Naxx or something. Sat, I did get into a heroic when Dethno graciously respecced dps so I could tank Heroic Azjol-Nerub.

Sadly, that run didn't really go that well and left me feeling like a bit of a slacker as a tank. I'm still trailing a bit as far as gearing up and instance knowledge and I felt that fairly acutely when we had trouble Sat night (especially with the better geared tank respecced to dps next to me). Fortunately, things started to turn at least a little bit. I picked up a good belt from the Heroic and we had a nice run Sunday including getting my T7 legs and even better, our first defeat of Sapphiron in Naxx.

I also made the epic tanking ring this week, so overall the gear is coming together. It's still clear that Dethno and Ragon are probably going to be the best geared tanks when we get to 25s, which has made me wonder whether I should be planning to go to those as dps, a third tank or poor healer. I'm starting to pay attention to dps gear some, but I've also been thinking about evaluating the OT things my spec brings:

The first 2, I'm pretty sure end up being about 10% extra effective mitigation to the MT (plus a little extra rage for low dmg bosses):
Devotion aura with +6% healing and +1291 armor (via Imp Devo in prot tree)
Blessing of Sanctuary: -3% damage and every block/parry/dodge gives 10 rage

These 2 talents seem helpful, but I haven't verified how useful they are:
Judgments of the Just: Active judgments reduce mob attack speed by 20%
Divine Guardian: 30% of damage taken by party/raid members within 30 yrds directed to the Paladin when Divine Shield is up (4m cooldown).

I've been meaning to check with recap if possible, but I worry that JotJ doesn't leave a visible debuff on mobs we fight, so I worry that it might not work on bosses. It's a Req 45 talent, so it really ought to work on everything, but I'd feel better if it were confirmed.

...wanders off mid-blog to Maintankadin.com...
Ok, JotJ rocks. I was worried might not stack with Demo Shout or something, but it does and it's a big mitigating factor. OTOH, I learned that the +heal part of Imp Devo doesn't stack withe Tree healing buff. So that's only effectively useful on the nights Darsonsind isn't in the raid. Interesting.

But when I'm a pure OT, I should probably start working on getting better use out of my under-used 'Hands' spells. I'm used to thinking about Hand of Protection and Hand of Freedom, but their use doesn't come up so often (hmm, I wonder if I could HoP on Dethon during Gluth -- can he still shockwave/thunderclap when under HoP?). I think I can improve by using Hand of Salvation and possible Hand of Sacrifice more often.

Hand of Salvation is -20% threat cast on a high dps. The few times I've thought to use it, there have been range issues. But I can find more opportunities for it, epecially when OT.

I'm wondering about using Hand of Sacrifice more often as extra mitigation for the MT. I could eat 30% of the MT damage for 12s (every 2m). Maybe if I was using this and the Div Guardian, it'd be worth setting a beacon on me to spread the healing automatically?

Mostly, I've been focusing on doing a little dps, occasional heals, but with practice maybe I can mix in some more specials, too. I wonder what will be the most utility in 25s -- fill in the gaps prot, or full ret in weaker gear. I guess we have a few weeks to work it out either way.

Dragons!

We opened the evening in the Obsidium Sanctum under Wyrmrest Temple. Everybody had been saying the boss there, Sartharion, wasn't too tough with 10 and leaving none of the drakes up. I wouldn't say it was easy. It was chaotic and I felt like I was working hard to try to corral the adds, but we did win without wiping, so I guess by that standard it wasn't hard.

Thinking about how to beat the boss in the harder mode where you leave one of his (her?) 3 drake buddies up is trickier. There's an awful lot to tank, adjust and react to -- portals with a mob to jump in and fight, lava spawns, waves of fire to find the gap and hide from. That might take some creativity.

It's also tempting to practice the main fight since I think I could do better on add control. Maybe if the healers were positioned more in a group so I knew where the adds would be going. Are those random occasional meteors just effects or do they do damage?

From a dragon, we went to 4 horses. That is a complicated fight and it took awhile to (a) figure out the roles and (b) me to stop sucking at taunting. It felt easy on the win, though, so I suspect it won't be so hard next time.

I think that encounter has the longest runback from the GY, too. Between working a bit slowly across the two different instances, the extra wipe by my macro mis-writing and that runback, we didn't have much more time than a quick get-to-know-you wipe to end our evening with yet another dragon, the Frost Wyrm Sapphiron.

The frost dragon fight might benefit from a little Frost Resist gear. It may not be strictly necessary, but we'll have a few days to get a piece or two ready for next weekend. Assuming no hitches, we ought to be back to the final section of Naxx next Sun/Mon.

An optimistic schedule might be:
Tues - Sartharian, Spider & Military Wings
Wed - Construct & Plague Wings
Sun/Mon - Frost Wyrm Wing

We can probably fall a bit behind that schedule, e.g., spend a little time trying Sarth with 1 drake up, and just do Spider Wing tonight, and still have a shot at clearing. The main thing I'm even mildly wondering about is if we'll hit a roadbump by not having a Shaman to boost the caster dps, e.g., on Loatheb.

Flashes

...Arthas, fearing for his minions, reaches through the ether to tamper directly with our connectivity...

...Thaddius down, Construct Wing Clear. Dethno relogs, "Did we win? I d/c-ed at 10%" Didn't impair his aggro holding noticeably...

...Loatheb down, Plague Wing Clear. Sure, if *everybody* is at or above 2500 dps (cept the lame OT, of course) you can do it in <5m.

...Gothik adds down, Gothik engaged. Why is everybody standing still? Oh s**t...

...Standing in the basement, only one little light blinking forlornly on the cable modem. Damn you, Comcast!

...Folding laundry, staring and vainly wishing for the some lights to start blinking again. iPhone chirps, Kyoka, "We got him anyway. Lol."

...Tonight, we go back to battle the famed 4 Horsemen of the Apocolypse. And maybe a dragon, or two...

Noctambulating

I took the night off from raiding last night and Uglykid put together the second group of Naxx raiders from the guild. Of course, then he kept having to afk to take care of his little one but they pressed on to take down the first boss in the Military quarter and then the entire Spider wing.

So that's 9 bosses down in total in our first 3 nights in Naxx using 2 mostly different groups of raiders (there was some overlap in the groups). I'm planning to go back with the group from Wednesday this coming Sunday and try to get Thaddius and Loatheb. That'd give us 3 wings clear our first week and I think it's a reasonable shot. It's also possible we might even find a way to clear the military quarter and even pop the last wing open on Monday night.

Having the 2 groups sharing the instance makes planning a little tricky. It's also possible we could use some spare time to investigate Sartherion for additional amusement.

I was thinking of trying to run a heroic or two for badges/rep last night, but getting on late meant everybody was already in a run or Naxx. So I did some quests and JC stuff and listened in on vent a bit. I even fished up some Dragonfin and made the 40 str/40 stam food that I think is optimal for me tanking (finally hit 400 cooking and can start getting recipes). I also took some time to tidy up the DKP listings from the Tues/Wed raids. I still need to work out some options/issues with the DKP interface, but I think the data is reasonably accurate now at least.

Tonight will be another semi-off night. Maybe I'll get on in time to run heroics, or maybe I'll just end up questing for more gold again. I spend a bunch on Titanium so that Dethno could make me the cool crafted shield. I think I owe somebody a Frost Orb still for that and maybe some Eternals. I'm hoping to be able to contribute some nice crafted stuff myself from the epic JC recipes, but it'll take 10 days at least to make the first ring or neck and I'm already wondering if we'll see better drops by the time I can make them. I'll stockpile tokens until the last minute just in case.

I'm still pleasantly surprised that is getting out of the gate on raiding so well. We're probably going to have to plan the jump to Heroic mode (25 person) sooner than I expected as well.

Raid recap

We had 20 people turn out ready to raid Naxxramas on Tuesday night. Sadly, we could only take 10 right away. We formed up the initial group based mainly on the group that had worked together in BC to beat Zul'Aman. However, there's a very good core of additional players who we're going to build a second raid group around tonight. On Tuesday, it didn't look like we quite had the healers to confidently build 2 separate groups (6 is probably best) so we are going to share the instance with two groups this week so that we can have some players from the first group help fill in any gaps in the second group.

Ragonbadger will MT the second group and Uglykid will help organize the raid that goes tonight. This has tempted me to label the groups as the "Bear" group (the one based on ZA running the last two nights) and the "Badger" group since we seem to have a few people obsessed with badgers around the guild these days. ;) That was to avoid any perception that one group is the first/main group and an "other" group that might be expected to have less progression since I think we have enough solid raiders to progress with both. For the first group, after considering healing options, we went with 2. The raid was Dethnotronic & Beros tanking, Sariana and Leoruuc healing, Wiseman, Kyoka, Islowlykill, Sherider, Uglykid and Barantir for dps.

Dealing with groups, raid maintenance (signups, DKP, WWS) kept me from getting around to blogging yesterday (plus the usual RL: work, family, etc.), so I'll review both runs for reference.

The first trick on Tuesday night was to find the way into Naxx. I flew around it 5 times before I spotted the entrance on the bottom middle of the ziggurat. After forming up and heading in, we had no real issues with trash in the Plague wing.

We wiped once on Noth the Plaguebringer, but got him on the second try. We weren't really trying to 1-shot everything. We'd look up the boss's abilities on Wowwiki before pulling, but expected we also needed to see what they looked like live. The basic plan was read, then dive in and wipe, then plan the strat and get to work. Heigen the Unclean took a few more tries since we all needed to learn the pattern of "dancing" to avoid the eruptions. Dethno got the pattern down right away, so I just followed him. I think it was tougher for the dps to do their jobs and manage the dance, but we got it in a small handful of attempts.

We wiped again discovering the gauntlet that leads to the final boss of the Plaguewing, Loatheb. Then we spent some time working on Loatheb, but got a bit discouraged by his apparent dps requirements -- 6.7m hp in 5-6m meant a dps rate about 1/3 higher than we were managing. We left feeling like we might need some more general gear upgrades before beating him. Or it might be possible to get by with some raid stacking (e.g., subbing out weak OT dps for somebody who can crank).

Instead of beating our heads against it, we went and tested out Patchwerk. Our first pull was marred by discovering he summons a slightly wider set of uncleared trash pulls than expected. On the second pull, we found it was hard to keep up with the healing requirements. That got us to the planned end of raid time, so we called it there.

We re-formed on Wednesday evening with Hawksy in for Leo (who will heal tonight's group) and Barantir respecced Holy to go 3-healer for Patch. That did the trick and we got him slow and steady on the first attempt. Then we went and learned Grobbulus. It sounded complicated, but we got the hang of the tank kiting pattern and planned exploding zones pretty quickly and got him down on the third attempt. Ugly had to run afk to take care of his baby, so Auroen came in to learn Gluth with us.

We read that Gluth is one of the harder and more technical fights in Naxx and we struggled at first. It sets up like a 3-tank fight, but you don't have 3 tanks in a 10 person raid. Two tanks normally hold Gluth because he does a stacking Mortal Strike debuff that reduces healing by 10% per stack -- at 7 to 8, you're not getting much heals. But then a steady stream of fairly hard hitting, high hp zombies spawn in the back of the room and have to be kited around for a long time. We did a bunch of tries with Barantir trying to kite them in his holy spec, but it was tough to go a long time without him getting hit, stunned and pwned while also keeping the spawning ones off the healers. Part of the challenge was that hunters can only keep up the frost trap half the time to slow the zombies. A shaman could keep slowing up all the time, but we'd lose the ability to tranq Gluth's enrage (which might or might not be an issue anyway since he doesn't hit that hard).

Dethno and I noticed that as we traded aggro, you could run away from the boss and help with the zombies some because Gluth doesn't hit that hard so letting the Mortal Strike stack up a bit isn't fatal. So we invented a different strat: Beros holds Gluth and lets MS stack up while Dethno kites zombies. At 7 stacks, Dethno calls for 2x frost novas from Wiseman and Sherider to hold the zombies while he pulls Gluth off me for 10s to clear the debuff and re-collects the zombies. That's a lot of work for Dethno, but he nailed it and we got Gluth in the first try with that strat.

We promptly wiped on the next pull and on rez at the GY, Islowlykill said there was free loot in Wintergrasp since the alliance controlled it. So we went there instead on a lark and killed Archavon the Stone Watcher. He's easy but drops class specific loot so while we got him on one try, the rogue and feral druid leggings weren't really useful to anybody.

This group now takes a few nights off (unless helping the group going tonight). We'll plan to go back on Sunday night and take on Thaddius, who looks easy on paper, and maybe work on Loatheb, who doesn't. The general schedule is intended to be 4 nights/week, 3 hours/night, Sun-Wed. 3 hours isn't too fatiguing and I think the Sun-Wed schedule will work out well too. It gets us a couple of nights with a fresh instance, a couple of days off and a couple more right before the reset. It also leaves Fri/Sat open for people to do other things like spend time with their S.O. or PvP. The "Badger" group can pick a different schedule next week if they'd like to since we'll have 2 instances going. I'll have to remind them to think about planning.

Raid night

It's time to raid again, Naxxramas-style. I'm looking forward to getting my ass handed to me repeatedly on content that the BC Sunwell guilds all say is ridiculously too easy.

However, I'm not looking forward to making 8+ people unhappy when we set up the raid group tonight. We have 18 or so signed up for a 10 person raid. Kind of the worst possible number -- maximizing the number of unhappy people without quite having enough for a second group.

Maybe we'll improvise with more rotations or even more raid nights this week, just to try to get everybody a taste. With a little luck, we may be able to field 2 groups next week.

The Oculus

We decided to try The Oculus on Heroic mode last night, in spite of the fact that most of us hadn't ever even see it on non-heroic. Beros, Hawksy, Inkx, Primux and Stupidrenren wiped our way through the instance and nearly got through, but stalled too long on the final boss and had to call it due to the late hour.

We started by wiping on the first set of trash pulls. But we got the hang of it. Later, when we had to reclear them, we cruised through in just a few minutes. By then we had worked out the CC and AoE issues. We didn't have a lot of either in our group. The mobs reliably broke Inkx's traps quickly. It was nice the rooting worked, but rooting didn't add much for the all spellcaster pulls. Even gathering up the mobs was tricky since the little whelplings are casters. As I ran around picking them up, Hawksy's healing would exceed the consecrate threat and they'd start leaving me. I think the easy time through, Renren went bear, Primux grabbed some and Hawksy just did Circle healing.

We wiped on the first boss, read over our combat logs and got him the second time with just that much practice on avoiding the bombs.

Then we got our dragons, discussed what colors we should use and figured out where the next set of mobs (constructs) were. And wiped on the constructs. I think we wiped 3-4 times on the next 4 pulls of 3-4 spellcasters + 1 construct. We were really feeling the lack of CC. Renren could root the construct, but the casters were giving us trouble. The next couple of pulls of 3 constructs + 1 caster were no problem. I think we had Mocha tank the caster and maybe that would have been better on the previous pulls too.

The we pulled the second boss and wiped again. We pre-read on wiki and it warned of the Energizing cores first and summoning Drake Captains second. However, it seemed like it was the Captains that were causing the trouble so we took a few minutes and tried completely clearing all the nearby drakes to see if that kept them from coming. I don't think it helped, but we were able to dodge the various attacks enough to get through the boss anyway.

The trash mechanic on the 3rd boss took us by surprise -- you aggro and he summons a bunch of adds and ports away. There's no time to set up CC there, so it's a bit tricky to gather them up and also figure out which is the dangerous ones to kill first.

I think we wiped a few more times on the 3rd boss getting the hang of kite-tanking away from the frost bombs and dodging his arcane explosions. It's hard to get clear of the explosion if you have the slowing debuff, so I had to plan the kiting to keep us close to the hiding spots.

The fourth boss was rumored to be the easy one, but we did not find it easy. Maybe because it was late, or we were experimenting with too many different strats, it took awhile to key in on the issue that he's summoning a lot of adds in Heroic mode (4-5 instead of 2-3 on non-heroic). By the end, we settled on a 1 red, 1 green and 3 amber drake strategy so that we could spam time stop and have everybody focus on killing the adds. But we were tired so we started running into execution issues. Plus only Hawksy and I had working mics so it was hard for the amber drake riders to coordinate the time stop. As we were hearthing out, we realized that I should just have been calling all the time stops -- whenever I was low on hp, at the enrage, whenever there were a lot of whelps.

I'd like to go back and try it again tonight if possible. I'm sure it'll be a lot easier the next time through and I'd like to wrap up the daily heroic quest from yesterday as well. I should also make some time to make sure I'm fully prepped for Naxx tomorrow.

Turkey

I've been playing a fair amount over the holiday weekend, but haven't managed time to blog at all. Curiously, the holidays and my pushing for 80 set off a desire to play in my kids who have been begging for turns on the good computer and the wow accounts. So we swap around during the day and then I've been trying to concentrate on leveling at night.

Maybe that'll ease up now since I finally dinged 80 last night. I pushed hard to 79, but then repsecced prot on Thanksgiving evening and spent the night running a whole bunch of instances instead of grinding out quests.

It took a solid run to get the hang of the new tanking rotations. And I took the opportunity to move around some of my key buttons, which also meant a lot of missed keys over the last couple of days. But I'm getting used to where the buttons are now. I decided it was relatively optimal to keep my most frequent keys on '2', '3' and '9', '0', '-' and '=' with the middle ones being the less often cast. I seem to be most comfortable tanking with both hands on the kbd, although in multi-mob situations, I frequently have to reach back and forth for the mouse.

Over the last couple of days, I also started looking into the proble of the new defense cap of 540. Not only that, but it takes 4.8 pts of on-item rating to get a single point of def. It's not a trivial target. I looked up some quest & rep item blue replacements. Got a couple of pieces of the crafted tanking gear (thanks to Barantir) and started re-gemming.

While I was wrestling with the problem, I learned about the new BoP JC gems made from Dragon's Eye. These are 'prismatic' (any color slot gems) that carry a whopping 27 def or other really high stats. And you can now have 3 of them in your gear instead of 1. That pretty much solved my def problem. Or it will when I get all 3 socketed. You get them through doing the JC daily quest and you only get 1 per day.

If I've calculated correctly, I'm actually going to overshoot the 540 mark and get to undo a 'downgrade' to an old lvl 70 blue +def trinket. At first, I was annoyed that there is no new JC trinket with +def, but the Red Monarch Crab as +63 stam, 2 gem slots and a +300 dodge on use. Yeah, I'm going to go with that together with the old lvl 70 +def trinket.

So I think I'll be ready gearwise to raid very shortly. I wonder what the new consumeables will be -- flasks, best food buffs, weapon buffs (do we still get those? I remember a rumor about taking them out of the game). I was briefly tempted to try to push towards getting a quick visit Naxx run in this weekend to explore, but a few of our core raiders are going to help out OotC tonight in their first Naxx visit. So we'll give everybody a few days to gear up and prep and plan to go in loaded for success on Tues/Wed.

If I understand it properly, there are 4 wings. Two are considered eays, two harder and 2 final bosses. That sounds a lot like ZA. That makes me feel pretty optimistic.

I'll try to get in some Heroics this weekend and keep skilling up the professions. It might even be time to start fishing and cooking again.

Things I wish I had remembered earlier

I hadn't really thought about it when the blue text scrolled up saying my skill in 2h swords went up another point. It always surprised me, then I'd remember I'd leveled and raised my skill cap. And then it finally dawned on me that when I respec prot, my 1h weapons are going to be badly unskilled. Boo.

It's a bit late to shift over to leveling prot and I think it was a good decision not to in the first place. Prot pally dps was nerfed post 3.0, pre-WotLK and I haven't seen any further tweaks that seem to reverse that. Prot warrior dps is still good, I hear. Plus warriors can dual wield, so they can probably mess around and skill everything as they level. Maybe I can go back and skill up on the lower level daily pvp quests or something after I hit 80.

The other thing I remembered belatedly was you can cast an enchantment on a scroll now to make it easier to give to other people. Jr was messing around with his DK looking for a profession and I suggested Inscriptions might be fun. He started skilling that up and I saw over his shoulder the enchantment parchment ability. I've burned a lot of enchanting mats recasting mid-level enchants on my gear. I guess I'll stop doing that now.

I hadn't intended to worry about professions, but I'm melting everything I get and skilling enchanting helps clear out my inventory. Maybe I didn't miss much of an opportunity since the enchants I've been skilling with were moderately lame. But they're getting better, so I'll save them and give them our or put them in the guild bank.

Jr and I logged Beros on this morning and dinged 77. Hooray for finally being able to fly again. Elpheba had mentioned that it actually made the late level questing go faster. I hope he's correct. I'm certainly looking forward to being able to fly over the random mobs to get to the quest locations. Especially since I'm generally out of rest exp these days.

So far I've been exclusively focused on solo questing. And I've also basically refused to upgrade any gear. I haven't seen a major upgrade yet and although the quest reward greens are getting closer, I'm philosophically opposed to replacing a purple with a green, so I'm melting them on principle.

But I think it may be time to change the game plan shortly. At 78 or 79, I think it may be time to start running some more instances again in order to get some decent blue gear to take to Naxx. I'll probably respec prot for those as well and get back into the tanking rhythm (and skill up my sword). I'm still cautiously optimistic about possibly making 80 this weekend even though I expect exp comes slightly more slowly in instances than solo questing outside.

76 & Zul'Drak

Short night last night, just barely made 76. Trying to push for 77 or as close as I can get tonight. Hearing about how easy Naxx is is making me itch to raid again.

Random leveling conversation: I was grinding quests in some mine or other and saw a toon named Holycraap (or something similar) which I vaguely recognized. Turns out it's Prima's alt, who raided with us back in the day. She asked how the new guild was going and I said it was going well so far. She suggested that we'd do well in progression. I appreciated the compliment but was wondering how to gently inquire as to the source of her optimism when she volunteered, "because you guys are stubborn."

Well yeah, stubborn, sure, I'd like to think so. Maybe I should change the guild motd to that when I get on later to stubbornly grind more quests in Zul'drak.

BTW, I did the "ride the big giant" quest last night that was pretty good. It still took me 3 tries, though, because I was getting overrun by small mobs and had trouble targeting the healing storm clouds. Is everybody else having occasional trouble with these specialty riding/vehicle style quests or am I just a doofus?

Maintenance day

No, not server maintenance, maintenance day in the Beros household. A lazy Sunday goes a little something like this:

* Get up, have breakfast with the kids while Mrs Beros heads to exercise class
* Little ones distracted by the tv, log on, ding 75 and get Islowlykill to queue me for AV to ghetto port to Dalaran
* Insulate the leaky back door. New door sweep and weatherstripping. Watch Caillou with my 2yo.
* Fail to find an AH in Dalaran, port to IF to train and look for gems for JC quest. Only one Dark Jade on the AH and it's 65g. Wtf? The other green gems are 10g.
* Head outside and rake a couple of bags of leaves. One of the rakes broke and my 5yo appropriated the handle as his staff. While I'm raking, he's patrolling the backyard in his own virtual world as an all-powerful mage. Yeah, you don't need online gaming when you're 5, you can make VR in your head on demand.
* Check the AH again, 2 more Dark Jades are up at 40g each. At least the market it moving in the right direction.
* Shrink wrap the leaky windows in the living room.
* Check the AH again, prices down to 17g. Grab 2, hearth back to Dalaran, get on a bird to Valiance Keep.
* Shrink wrap more leaky windows in the living room. Change some light bulbs.
* Turn in JC quest, log my bank alt and mail back all my food and enchanting supplies. Level each of them up a little bit. Burned up all my Cosmic Essences and greened all my cooking recipes.
* Shrink wrap the dining room windows. Look up the manual for the new rug scrubber (misplaced) so that Mrs. Beros can clean the rugs in front of the tvs (dogs + kids snacking = rugs need cleaned).
* Convince Jr to log his DK off for a few minutes, show him one of the the daily pvp quests in Grizzly, head over to the quest areas out East.
* Dinnertime, then little kids to the bathtub. Jr back on his DK.
* Jr getting bored with leveling in Zangarmarsh, agrees to let me log Beros. And even takes over the kbd for me when I have to go tuck in the little ones.
* End up spending an extra hour with my 5yo who can't fall asleep.
* Come back to find Jr knocked off a half dozen quests, parked Beros by a quest mob and headed to bed himself.
* Chat with Mrs. Beros and Jrette about Disneyworld travel, holiday plans this year and travel in general for the future. Jrette likes to travel and wants to hear about the travels Mrs. Beros and I went on when we were young.
* Log back on a couple of hours later and get back to the grind...

I expect I'll ding 76 tonight, I logged about 4 bubbles shy. With luck, I'll find a nice starting quest hub in Zul'Drak where I can knock off quests in bunches. Won't be a late night tonight, though.

I've tentatively decided to stick with my current professions. I'm pretty sure the Enchanting ring-buffs are a solid advantage. I'll gamble that high-level JC will let me make some trinket/necklace that will be best or near-best in-slot. Inscriptions was tempting for the extra Glyph, but it'd be a huge effort to start over and I suspect I'll have plenty of other things to do for awhile.

So I'm more than happy to cut any green gems anybody needs in Northrend. A few more cuts and I can start getting the blue recipes from the trainer. I'll plan to grind it myself in a few days via the AH if I don't get any customers (which I might not since I'm not the only JC around). I'm burning mats spamming enchants on my own gear and will happily share with anybody standing near me. So far, I've melted every drop and quest reward. I guess in a few levels, I might start getting upgrades. In the meantime, it's a reasonably steady stream of skilling mats.

75 in Dalaran

Ground another level staying up late in Grizzly Hills last night and with a little help from Darsonsind. Everybody had been talking about how much fun the escape/escort quest from Silverbrook was, but since I failed it twice before getting through, I'm not bragging so much.

Late in the night, Dethnotronic tracked me down and forced me to level up my JC. Amusingly, he confused my Questhelper by giving me a Huge Citrine, which I need for a JC quest and now the addon thinks I should go back to the Blue Logging Camp to get another.

He also tried to queue me up for AV so I could get a free ghetto port to Dalaran, but it didn't pop for >30m so he flew to me to cut. He re q-ed but I was finishing up quests when it popped 15m later.

I logged of 10k short of 75, but remembered to turn in 2 quests this morning (to ding) and then got Islowlykill to q me again for AV. Took another 25m, but worked finally.

Tonight I can get the lay of Dalaran and work a bit towards 76, but can't put in another quite as long night. Ditto for tomorrow, but Wednesday could be good. I don't think I can keep doing a level a day for the next week, so it might be a few extra days to 80. But I'm catching up a little bit at least.

73, 74...

It's still coming pretty quickly, but I expect leveling to slow down some shortly. I'm hoping to hit 75 before the end of the weekend. Might take another week, even if I can sneak in some extra play time over the holidays (in-laws permitting).

Of minor leveling note, I found I am still able to solo some lvl 73 & 74 elites without too much trouble. I also ended up working with a Deathknight who tried to solo the big bird in Dragonblight (74 elite, 100k+ hp) at 72 and wiped. Together and him tanking, we took it out easily.

I recently realized I haven't been near a trainer in a long time. I wonder what spells/ranks, I'm missing out. I'll probably have to take care of that some time too.

But I think I'll head to Grizzly Hills tonight first.

72 and off to Dragonblight

Should hit 73 fairly shortly. I think I don't have to get up early tomorrow, so if I can fight off fatigue, there's a shot at 74 tonight. Solo questing + Questhelper, ftw.

A couple of people are hitting 80 shortly (gratz Islowlykill on first Noctambulist, pre-gratz to Dethnotronic who's right behind him). Maybe the first week of December will be our first Naxx raid? I'm assuming Thanksgiving next week will make some people hit or miss. I ought to be able to finish the levelling grind over the holidays with a little luck and be ready to go.

Back in town

I didn't get to play more than a few minutes from Orlando, so I seem to be pretty far behind in the whole levelling game. I was able to chip away some and last night got on for a few hours and managed level 71 and almost halfway to 72.

The vacation was pretty good, but because we tried to do a fair fraction of everything in Disneyworld with the kids, I was on my feet walking all day every day and just worn out in the evenings. We were able to manage a decent mix of stuff for the littlest one (characters, shows), and bigger kids. My 5yo discovered he liked roller coasters -- his first one, Space Mountain, was rapidly followed by his 2nd, 3rd and 4th. The bigger kids were worried at first about getting on some of the bigger rides, but we worked it out over the visit.

I should be around more and concentrating on trying to level as quickly as I can. I ought to be able to get in a couple of late nights over the next couple and maybe sneak in some extra playtime over the Thanksgiving break. It doesn't look like it takes too long to really level in total hours. The guy who wrote the guide at wtbblue.com says he got there in a day and a half /played. So my plan is to race to 80 if I can and then when I have some extra spare time in December, I'll go back and fill in the skills and/or rep areas I end up skipping over.

I'm idly wondering about whether I should be adjusting my professions again, too. I'll need to look up the various BoP things you get at max skill, but for example, if there aren't new uber JC trinkets, the few BoP gems aren't super valuable I don't think. So, I'm wondering about the extra glyph slot for inscriptions or even the stam boost to mining (did that make it into the patch? I remember it being proposed).

Northrend

I got my copy of the expansion last night at midnight local, hanging out in GameSpot with probably around 150 warcrafters. It was kind of funny to talk specs and raids and such with the people around me in line. At least I didn't see anybody from any of my classes.

It installed and patched faster than expected and I was on a boat to Northrend pretty soon after I got home. We decided to run the Nexus together (Uglykid, Sherider, Galein, Islowlykill). I pointed out I wasn't prot spec anymore, but it wasn't hard to do the tanking thing ret spec with sword and board. Until the final boss anyway, when I had to port back to SW and get my real tanking gear.

In the end we got everything down and I got about a third of a level of exp, which seems pretty quick for the first day. I suspect it'll slow down a bit towards the end, but it doesn't look like it'll take a month to hit 80.

It seems like exp builds faster doing quests outside (maybe less so if you have rested exp), so I think that'll likely be my levelling focus. But first, I'm going to need to take a few days off for a family vacation. I might be able to sneak in a late night hour or two, but basically, I'm offline until next Thursday. I'll probably be half a dozen levels behind or more, but at least I'll have lots of rested exp, heh.

Expansion day

Technically, I suppose it's expansion night. I'll be heading out to Gamestop around 11pm or so to pick up the box as soon as they'll release it. The store says they're releasing it at midnight local, but I wonder if they could be induced to cheat -- since the East cost stores are giving it out at midnight local (11pm here), who would know if they let it go a few minutes early?

As an aside, I wonder how crowded it will be and/or if I'll accidentally run into any students from campus that I recognize.

I expect massive server instability tonight, so I'll be satisfied if I can get it installed on the 2 comps and then probably just try to log on to verify it's working.

Last night there was a extended round of server instability. I guess it took them longer to install Northrend than expected. Also they bugged a bunch of the pvp gear somehow and lots of it was available for free, heh. Mostly for clothies and hunters, it seemed, but there were a couple pieces of paladin gear too. I hung around online a little later than I intended to to knock of the last 2 close rep grinds I had my eye on: Consortium & Sporeggar. That got me to 18 Exalted. Someday when I'm bored at 80, I suppose I can go back and work on the city reps or fill in some of the other missing ones (Kurenai, Timbermaw, maybe even Arathi Basin).

Illidan down, srsly

Now, that was as rewarding a kill as we've had in a long, long time. I confess that I had my doubts. And they were mostly about me and my ability to do my job FR tanking in Phase 2. Phase 2 is known to be the bottleneck and it really is a pain in the ass. You could say that we spent the last 3 days waiting for me to learn my job. Then everything else fell into place pretty quickly.

The Phase 2 tanking isn't really trivial, although I had hoped I'd get the feel for it more quickly. You have a small useable area to kite-tank the elemental around while it leaves high-dmg flame patches on your last position every ~10s. You move around "painting" the area and trying to keep track of where safe places remaining to stand are, while making sure you don't trigger the enrage either by getting too far from the glaive or the other elemental. You have to deal with the fact that about 30% of the time, the entire screen is invisible due to the flame spell effects. One of the things that came slowly, was building up a mental map of the tanking space in my head so I could maneuver basically blind -- I knew roughly where the next safe place was and as long as I wasn't disoriented, I could get there without seeing the screen.

You also learn the edge of the fire patch effect and get better at minimizing the fire dmg. That's an incremental thing where minor mistakes just use up a little more healing. But the stupid Eye Beam is not incremental. You have to spot its spawn, identify the trajectory, identify the next safe place and get there *fast*. And there's a little bit of adjusting to the other tank's eye beam. When Dethno was dodging (and he was better at it than I was), I'd move my elemental to the inner ridge to reduce the enrage possibility and I'm sure he was doing the same.

By the last pulls, I was starting to plan my kiting path from the beginning so I'd know where I'd be when the Eye Beam first spawned to get maximum time to react and intentionally leaving the inner ring open to move to if it went to Dethno's side first. I was also getting the hang of running blind into the spell effects on a hunch there was a safe spot on the other side. Eventually, it was working. Other than one random mis-timing (I was too close and with my back to the Eye Beam spawn point and died), we got Phase 2 pretty much under control by the end of last night.

And everybody else learned their jobs quick. I was very briefly worried after the 3% wipe and a couple of subs we had to make (late subs can be raid killers), but we had experienced people ready to jump in and pulled it together.

As an aside, I'd like to bitch that this fight is really Blizzard busting out the hate on the tanks. Not only do we get to farm up a full set of FR gear (spending badges or money other people don't have to), but Phase 2 is just plain mean. Nobody but the 2 FR tanks has to do anything complicated --- forcing us to react to the eye beams on top of the kite-tanking and adjusting to each other's positioning is harsh. I'm guessing every guild that killed Illidan went through a long phase of everybody just waiting and watching the FR tanks wipe the raid over and over. And any casual-style guild with rotating tanks is going to suffer even more.

None of the other notable boss fights are as particularly harsh on the tanks. Vashj, Kael'thas, Archimonde, even Illidari Council are all hard on everybody without particularly singling out a couple of resist tanks for abuse. But at least we managed it in the end.

The other thing I can mention is that last night's victory "feels" slightly different from my perspective as nominal GL of versus nominal main organizer of l8raid. I always felt a sense of pride in "my peeps" when l8raid managed a new victory and maybe it's a little more so today because we're together in the guild.

I'm moved to briefly reflect on the brief history of Noc. About 5-6 weeks ago, I had given up pretty much on l8raiding following some less-than-promising extra-puggy raids on Lady Vashj (my sense was that even as we got the technical aspects down, we didn't have the dps to finish it because a lot of our best dps was worn out from pug raiding). We were farming bears in ZA and running alt-KZ for random amusement while waiting on the patch and expac. I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on the new guild. I wanted to help hold our group together and also thought it might boost morale a little bit in anticipation of the expansion.

The reponse was actually a bit more than I expected, more people flowed in to join. But I sensed a little bit of "cool to join the new guild" that didn't necessarily predict we'd be raiding again soon. But that's ok, forming the new guild was exciting on it's own.

Then 3.0 hit with the buffs to players and nerfs to bosses. And achievements. Achievements presented the possibility of going back to the Old World for killing some overlooked bosses and a reason to do it. Thinking it'd be fun and good for general morale, we fired up those raids and it was indeed great fun. We mostly rolled, but found a few tricky points that made us actually stop and think for a minute. But only a minute or small handful of attempts. MC, BWL and AQ40 all cleared in a week (one night-ender in BWL at Flamegor, one night-ender in AQ40 at Twins).

The raids were full, people were laughing and we had some momentum. So the next natural step was back to the T5's where we could try Vashj & Kael'thas in their nerfed state. I think it took us 2 nights on each of those, but one week later we had a bunch of people with the title, an unexpected bonus. The following week, we followed our momentum back into Mt Hyjal. I confess I was nervous. I had been unable to fill a MH raid a few weeks earlier -- would the fatigued raiders be willing to dive back in? Yes, and we cleared easily to Archimonde. And there we hit our roadblock. We wiped for a few nights, feeling occasionally close but no cigar. IIRC, we went back another week but ended up redirecting back to the T5 instances as an achievement favor for people who missed the first ones.

Bloc had been agitating for more Black Temple. It was supposed to be easy now, he pointed out. Other similar groups like OotC were plowing ahead there, maybe we can too. But I thought our new-found excitement to raid was largely achievement-driven and really, what are the odds we'd beat Illidan if we couldn't beat Archimonde?

With one week left before the expansion, we came back to BT. On our first raid night, Tuesday, Gurtogg was our first new victory there in a long time -- we hadn't set foot in the instance in at least a month or more. On Thursday, we pushed through Reliquary of Souls, Teron, Mother Shahraz and stopped with wiping on the Illidari Council. On Saturday, we beat the Council and found ourselves at Illidan but got no traction. Sunday we came back and wiped for 2 more hours. Monday we came back one more time and on the very last pull of the night (the warlock tank announced he was passing out after that pull regardless), we finally put everything together and somehow we won again. 5 raid nights, 6 new bosskills and 1 major achievement: Black Temple cleared.

A nice start to our little guild. Working together for 3 solid nights of occasionally-frustrating moments ought to be a preview of what we'll see in Naxx and beyond. With hopefully lots of more similarly gratifying achievements, too.

31% and counting...

Even thought we got close, it was a very disappointing evening in BT for me. I personally killed our chances for winning about half the time we were working on Illidan by resolutely failing to get out of the way of the eye beam. It shouldn't really be that hard and I'm pretty bummed about sucking so badly. Especially given we have so few chances left to do this.

With a little luck we can get another crack at it tonight. I'll feel better if I can at least not be personally responsible for the majority of the wipes. Bleh.

38% solution

I was "cautiously optimistic" about the Illidari Council in BT last night. I find it's hard to really predict confidently what encounters we're capable of and when we run into a roadblock (e.g., Vashj pre 3.0, Archimonde after). I usually try to guess based on my estimate of how well I'm doing -- how often do I screw up my job, how likely do I think I can execute on the next pull. And then what are the consequences of an error. One reason I got pessimistic about Archimonde is that I felt like I was up around 95% as was most of the raid, but with 25 people at 95% it's a virtual certainty that somebody will still make an error (the math is left as an exercise for the reader). You kinda need everybody up near 99% to beat Archi. Vashj pre-3.0 was similarly unforgiving, but the patch nerf dropped the necessary performance rate a lot.

The Council is a complicated battle, so I mostly saw my own perspective. I quickly realized that I couldn't perfectly prevent the poison dot (Darksorrow appears to cast it while stealthed for 30s) but I made a shield throw macro and was able to grab him a couple of times before he had fully even rematerialized.

OTOH, it was very concerning that the stupid Mage would periodically vaporize Wiseman with an unsurvivable 16k bolt and we couldn't figure out a way to guarantee it wouldn't happen. We managed what we could, figured there was a risk of bad luck, and trying sending over backup (Taalo) in case of an emergency. On the winning pull, I don't think we even needed the backup and everybody executed their jobs (and avoided the AoE) very nicely. Although, I accidentally let a few people die to Darksorrow when I got carried away trying to help with the burndown at 5% and used up all my mana hitting Malande and couldn't shield pull Darksorrow back to me.

After a very extended discussion of the loots (gratz Hawksy, Dethno and Barantir on the T6), we went up and danced with Illidan for an hour. As advertised, it's a pretty hard fight. And Phase 2 is the key one. We got the pattern on Phase 1 down solidly (I'm guessing the fact that he doesn't Shear makes it a lot easier and less random). Phase 2 brings 2 big fire elementals. We experimented and found you can't seem to slide by with just 1 FR tank. I also explored all the conditions in which you can get one of the elementals to enrage -- bringing their dmg/swing from 5k to 40k (a lot even if you are resisting most of it).

On one magical pull, we pulled through Phase 2 with a bunch of people cranking and got a good look at the next piece: alternating Phase 3/4 where Phase 3 is similar to Phase 1 and Phase 4 is warlock tanking like in Leotheras. At 30% we get to see Phase 5, which is similar to Phase 1 with some kite-tanking to traps set by Maiev (assisting NPC).

Since we were left with the sense that we *almost* had it, we're going back. Tonight or tomorrow, whenever we can fill the raid.

One of the challenges we had last night was that the AoE spell effects, particularly the fire, completely overwhelmed Bloc's computer. I was worried about that, especially when he hearthed to go spend badges on FR gear. In hindsight, we should have had Bloc take Illidan and got Dethno to do FR tanking. Or some other rotation.

Post-raid there was some discussion of upgrading comps & video cards. Bloc's not sure he can afford to upgrade right now and as a result, it's impossible for me not to make a political point here. I'm actually fairly politically active and although I avoid bringing politics online as much as possible, sometimes it's unavoidable. There were reasons I celebrated myself into oblivion last Tuesday, but I won't go into those in detail now.

Something is just freaking wrong when a cop who works as hard as Bloc does and cares as much about his job as Bloc does can't afford to drop a hundred and a half on a new video card for his comp. Why is this a political point? Because cops, like firefighters, teachers, armed forces, etc., are paid by the taxes collected from the rest of us from our paychecks. Americans in general like to bitch about how much taxes they are paying and I think a lot of that comes from not being in tune with where the tax money goes. There was actually some (very) mild complaining about paying taxes in random chatter last night (it comes up periodically, like I said, it's typically American). Everybody across the political spectrum agrees that tax money shouldn't be wasted, but I'd like to think everybody should also agree that cutting taxes to short out the compensation to people like Bloc (or any of our friends who served/are serving overseas) is fundamentally immoral.

Maybe I'm just sensitive from some of the late recent campaign rhetoric that got thrown around about fearing "socialism" and/or the popularity of some forms of "taxes are theft" libertarian ideology to be popular on the internet. I find I run into two types of libertarian types -- young, smart, thoughtful people who go through a "libertarian" phase, and more entrenched types. Partly why I feel compelled to bring this up is that I've personally seen the smart ones get caught up in how cool and effective free markets are and then eventually drift back to the center as they start realizing life is a little more complicated (and sometimes markets fail). Being aware of the issues facing cops and the armed forces members in our group might be a useful step towards realizing that the world is complicated and therefore, so is policy.

Beasting new content

Yeah, it's nerf city in BT these days. We started with Reliquary of Souls, which is a fairly complicated battle. Practically, that meant we wiped once. Then we headed over to Teron Gorefiend. Not too many people had practiced on the simulator for how to react when the ghosts come, but we lucked out that one who had invested "several hours" (Tsuki) got ghosted first and handled it easily. Dethno got it second and having seen it before also handled it easily. Then we cruised through the trash to Mother Shahrazh and one-shot her as well.

As expected, we hit the first major bump at the Illidari Council. There's an awful lot going on in that battle. We did get a few looks at it and got them to ~80%. I felt pretty optimistic about the fight, but I guess I also felt pretty optimistic about Archimonde and we never managed to get that together.

The plan is to go back Saturday and see if we can get another win. It'd be pretty cool to actually get to pull Illidan before the expansion releases.

Bloc whispered me during the raid a slight touch of disappointment that we hadn't been doing more BT previously. I can see what he means since it seemed so easy. We could have taken a night or two we spent on Archi and come to BT, but it was hard to guess what was going to be the best investment of time. I think my original idea of working up from the old world raid instances to the T5's to build momentum worked out pretty well (we've been overfilling lately). Maybe we would have had the enthusiasm anyway, but it did seem to fire people up about raiding and it's nice to spend the majority of the time succeeding.

My experience with l8raid over the past year and change is that the hard part of raiding is keeping enthusiasm, morale and attendance up during the hard parts. We never seemed to quite have a big enough core of willing-to-wipe-all-night players. For awhile we had a big enough pool of people to choose from that we could always fill in enough people to field 25, but that meant always having new people, always re-explaining, regularly worrying about the gear or raiding knowledge of the new players. Over time, I know those worries wore out some of the core raiders, too.

The original idea for Noctambulists for WotLK was that we'd take advantage of running with 10 and form regular, consistent groups each night. Imagine showing up 5-10m before raid start time and knowing exactly when, where and with whom you were going to be raiding that night. Just the thought of not scrambling to find another healer, or explain to the overfull dps who was going to have to take the night off -- that happened again last night and I didn't enjoy it.

There will still be some challenges. First, forming up those groups of 10 runs the risk of somebody feeling left out. Second, we don't really have a lot of people who seem excited to be RL and we'll need at least 2-3 of them. Third, based on turnout from nights like last night, we're going to be back in the 25-person territory again pretty soon.

With luck, it'll sort out ok. Having a couple different 10-person groups means we can have one for people who want to raid 4 times/week and other groups that run slightly more casually and everybody can find their comfort zone. Also, the guild website has decent raid management and signup capabilities, which means we can pre-organize the 25s a little more easily. And if we suddenly find that 25-person Kel'thuzad is kicking our ass and we can't fill the raid, we can break back down into 10s and go raid the next 10-person instance instead of grabbing scrubs or sitting around for an hour or so waiting for people to log on.

More raiding, more winning, less waiting around, less uncertainty. That's the long-term plan.

The short term plan is back to BT on Sat. Sunwell was proposed for next Tuesday and was a popular suggestion. I'm even tempted to try a bonus raid on Sun or Mon. Maybe some extra BT on Sun? Maybe another crack at the Vials bosses for people on Mon?

Midnight next Wednesday is just not that far away...

Outland Loremaster

I found the last quests I needed in Netherstorm to finish off the Outland Loremaster achievement. Of course, while I was wrapping it up, Hawksy dinged the Kalimdor Loremaster achievement in guild, which is about a thousand times more impressive (I'm at 230/730 in Kalimdor -- that's just never happening to me). Then he explained to me over /guild where to find the last 4 quests I needed in Netherstorm, which I think shows you our relative loremastery status.

I guess the next things to grind before the expansion are the close-to-exalted reputations. I'm pretty close with Argent Dawn and Consortium so I can probably try to set up some runs to knock those off. I might take a shot at Sporeggar or maybe Kurenai. I'm actually not too far from exalted with Arathi Basin either, but I think I'll let that sit until I feel like killing an evening or three in AB some point down the road (e.g., at 80). I think I'm too far from the city factions to make a real run at those.

But none of that tonight, it's BT night again. I'll see if I can arrange a sober, on-time arrival. Or at least one of those. Looking forward to seeing some new content in there.

Gratz on Gurtogg

The problem with logging on to explain that you're too drunk to raid is that you might accidentally get caught up and end up raiding anyway. That's what happened to me after celebrating the election last night. At least I think that's what happened to me. I vaguely remember something about BT and I'm pretty sure I remember some bosses dying. I don't remember running back from the GY, so maybe it went pretty well? I wonder if I tanked anything.

I heard the raid went on to the first kill of Gurtogg Bloodboil after I finally gave up trying to get my eyes to focus and went to raid my pillow. That's impressive. Also impressive was raiding with effectively 24 people in the raid since I can't imagine I contributed much of anything. I hope nobody got left out so I could be a paperweight.

Of course, since I don't feel like I raided this week, I'm kinda wishing I could go back to BT tonight and kill some more. We only really have one week to see how far we can get in BT before the expansion next week. I wonder if everybody else would be interested in raiding every night, or at least every night until we hit a major roadblock. Or maybe people want to have a couple of nights to knock off the last couple of achievements before we don't worry about those for awhile either.

Black Temple tonight?

Did some achievement-oriented questing last night. To get Outland Loremaster, I just need ~20 more quests in Netherstorm, the other zones are all clear now. I don't seem to have a lot of them on my list atm, though, but maybe if I clear up some of these [2] and [3] quests, new ones will open up. I wouldn't mind a little more Consortium rep on the way either. I think I may try to get in one more Heroic Mana Tombs run, too. I'd like the key for that Stasis bubble just inside, but I think I'm going to need more Etherium Prison keys first. And to get help again like last night knocking off the bosses who come out of the Bashir's landing bubbles.

Pre-questing, Hawksy and I visited the dragon again. Still no joy, though. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Maybe the mitigation/prot strategy is misguided. The other possible way to go would be dps & healing in some combination of Ret/Holy spec and gear. If I could push my dps to 1500, it would certainly shorten the battle, but could I self-heal enough to live for 15 minutes? I wonder how much dmg she does if I go no def gear, no shield.

Last night we encountered an issue that with her knockbacks, Hawksy kept creeping up on me in threat during the long grind-down. I was able to counter it with Hand of Salvation mostly, but it did cut into our dps. I'm not sure why the threat was so touchy, I don't remember that fight being quite so tricky that way before (but it was a long time ago). The way we were doing it, it was clearly going to be a 30-40m fight. One the first attempt, we got a Warder respawn mid-Phase 2 that we couldn't cope with. On the next couple of attempts, we ran into trouble with Hawksy getting aggro or going oom during Phase 2. We decided to call it there and think about creative approaches rather than keep trying to execute perfectly for 30-40m.

Tonight, we planned to do BT, but there's this little election thingy going on down here in the U.S. today. It sure looks like waiting on returns isn't exactly going to keep us up real late, but there's always the possibility it'll be more exciting than the latest polling suggests. And then there's the possibility that the recent polling is way, way off. In which case, I'll probably end up delayed by the riots. It takes us middle-aged white guys awhile to flip over a car and set it on fire, don'tcha know?

Come to think of it, if the results come in anywhere near expected, it's a virtual certainty we're going to be celebrating with at least one pitcher of daquiris or similar. I realized this morning, I've never cast a presidential vote for a guy who got more than 50% of the vote. Even beyond the other reasons to celebrate, Mrs Beros + pitcher of daquiries >>> BT anwyay. So, I think I'm just gonna be late. Possibly real late. I certainly don't mind if the raid gets started without me. I can sub in late or even wait until the next leg. Or if other people are delayed too, maybe even just go tomorrow?

Outland Dungeon Hero

I guess I are one now. Ran 3 quick heroics last night. Which meant lots more pull-and-run-away, which still doesn't actually feel very heroic. Wtb, better mechanic than LoS pulling trash groups to keep an instance interesting.

Now what to achieve? Quests? Reps?

A little more T5

I got held up by RL, but Bloc got the ball rolling for SSC. It still took a little while to fill, but we got Vashj in a couple of tries. We briefly considered going back to MH, but decided to hit up TK and get Kael'thas for a handful of people who wanted that achievement. That took a few tries too, but in the end the mission was accomplished.

The consensus feeling was that next week we should probably see how far we can get into BT and see some new content there. Looks like we'll probably just have to come back at 80 to get the Archimonde, Illidan, and Kil'Jaedin achievements.

I should probably whittle my list of achievement goals down some since there aren't really that many more days before release. I still want to go back and get Onyxia first, though.

Not quite

In spite of the best efforts of everybody involved, the battle with Archimonde did not go to our advantage last night. We did work up to one very promising pull, but 41% was the best we reached.

It's just a touchy fight were any one player can screw up and wipe the raid. I personally wiped the raid myself on the first pull by fumbling the basic tanking buttons and failing to generate any noticeable threat. After about an hour of practice, we took a short break and then did 2-3 "no dps" pulls where we just had people work on survival techniques. After seeing a nice solid 3.5m of no deaths, we went back to regular dps and promptly failed to make it back to 2m. D'oh.

Until we realized that Tremor Totem is only a group wide buff, I was starting to get concerned that I had made a major mistake in volunteering to MT since I couldn't berserker out of the fear. But once we corrected that, the fear was no issue at all, I think.

The basic problem was just what it was before -- the fire. Even when people remembered to run away from the boss and avoid it aggressively, it does switch targets and snake around the raid a bit. And it's very hard to perfectly protect yourself from getting feared into the fire. Plus between the fear and running from the fire, people often found themselves out of range of their decurser and/or healer. Somehow, everybody has to find a way to virtually guarantee that they just won't die.

Personally, I find myself annoyed now at having 2 running nights of doing nothing but dying repeatedly. So tonight, I think we might try a run into KZ to kill the new boss. And maybe I can find time for Hawksy and I to go 2-man Onyxia. I'm fairly certain we can kill her together, although it might take a little while. That should provide revenge and also a lot of data on how my dps/healing stacks up to what I'll need to solo it and how to cope with Phase 2 & 3 (which I didn't see a lot of on Wednesday).

But first I have a lot of trick-or-treating to do tonight, and then probably a lot of candy eating. Which will get my kids all wired up on sugar and delay their bedtime and probably my arrival online time. I ought to be on eventually, but it's a bit unpredictable when on Halloween.

Beros vs the dragon

Score round 1 for the dragon. I spent several hours wrestling with Onyxia last night. It's definitely not a trivial battle. I experimented with different mixes of gear in both prot and ret spec. Onyxia has 1 million hp, so the trick is getting to an equilibrium where I'm self-healing via Seal & Judgment of Light and then slowly grinding her down.

I hit the equilibrium point in prot gear and was able to get her into Phase 2 at 67%. Phase 2 was unexpectedly chaotic -- I forgot she spawns her whelps in clusters. I was able to Consecrate and dps the whelps down, but she's fireballing me while I'm doing it, so the dmg is fairly spiky. I ended up in a pattern of kill whelps, self-heal, hit her a couple of times and more whelps would spawn. I figured she'd run out of whelps eventually, but it was going to take a while, when suddenly a Warder comes patrolling in and it's over.

I'd heard about the problem of the warder respawns before -- it's a source of much controversy in the discussions about who truly solo'd Onyxia first. Some "soloers" have had a friend out in the hallway killing the Wardens as they respawn. Since they don't dps or heal in the Ony battle, you could claim it was a solo kill. However, it seems cleaner to have nobody else in the instance at all.

To solo the instance, you need to do 1,000,000 dmg before you get the patrol. On my Phase 2 attempt, it took me about 35m to get to Phase 2, which is roughly 190dps. That is consistent with my impression of my dps rate in full tanking gear using Seal and Judgment of Light. If I could double that (or so), it'd be close. I'm thinking 500 dps is a good target to shoot for.

After that attempt, I respecced Ret to see if I could increase my dps that way, but I was unable to get back to an equilibrium point of self-healing at her dmg rate. I stared at the Recap numbers for awhile without inspiration and decided to sleep on it.

I woke up with a few new ideas. In prot spec, I think I might be able to occasionally get away from the Light/Wisdom Seals because I'm pretty comfortably mitigating most of the dmg. If I can mix in Seal of Vengeance and stack up dots on her, that should boost my dps a bit, but I'm not sure if it's enough.

In ret spec, I was taking about equal thirds dmg from her melee, her cleave and her fire breath. The big difference is the melee, which I can virtually eliminate in prot spec. I misread Recap's report of 95% misses though, as indicating that somehow she was presenting as a lvl 63 boss (meaning I didn't need so much def gear). This morning I realized that I was blocking away that dmg -- she only hits for around 500 -- and a full block is being counted as a 'miss'. I can't get the +30% block in Ret spec, so I'm taking a lot more hits. What I need is gear that approaches "passive uncrushability." No, there's no crushing blows any more, but the passively uncrushable goal is to push normal hits off the table w/o needing Holy Shield (e.g., you stack enough avoidance and block rating that you block everything anyway). I will lose some block value in Ret spec as well, so I'll probably just take more dmg overall, but maybe I can crank my mitigation up enough to get to equilibrium.

I looked at getting passively uncrushable previously and it will require re-gemming and re-enchanting gear. However, with the patch, I now have a fair amount of redundant tanking gear since I had both the warrior and pally badge gear. All of my gear is set up for stam, which isn't ideal for this project. I don't actually need much stam, just enough to survive the rare spikes.

So, I think the thing to do is to set up a full-on mitigation tanking set. Then see if I can push up the dps rate while still maintaining the dmg/heal equilibrium. I'm still unsure about a few relatively minor issues, but since the balance point is so close, they might end up being important.

1) Ret or Prot? Mitigation will be easier in prot, but it'll be harder to get to 500 dps. Higher dps is easier in Ret gear *but* only if I have the mana to use my Ret abilities. Now, Judgment of the Wise returns a lot of mana, so I have a lot more mana in Ret spec and Divine Storm actually contributes some healing, but my dps won't be so high if I'm stuck fighting with Seal of Light to maintain the healing rate.

2) Blessings: Sanc or Wisdom? Sanctuary seems helpful in prot spec since blocks produce some mana regen. For example, I noticed when the whelps were up, my mana bar immediately went full (due to blocking the low-level mobs). OTOH, mana is a big issue no matter what and Wisdom is probably better overall mana regen. Is the -3% dmg worth it?

3) FR Aura. I'm pretty sure FR aura is the right way to go. I played around with more and less FR gear to try to minimize the fire damage, but I did wonder several times whether just to focus entirely on the physical dmg (although you can't mitigate the Cleave entirely). I resisted a fair amount of fire damag with just the aura up, but I wonder if I'd resist any w/o it.

4) Find a faster weapon? I was using the relatively slow 100 dps Unbreakable Will for tanking last night. The tooltips on the Seals all say "chance on hit," which, if accurate, means I could increase the healing rate with something that swings faster. Or I could use a int/spl-power/m5 weapon, but that'd kill my white damage -- which is all I have if I'm tanking with SoL. I wonder if SoV dmg goes up with spl power. If so and I can keep it up, it might be possible to tank with a healing weapon.

5) Finding the "safe spot." According to the paladin who tanked Ony solo pre-3.0, there's a spot you can stand in her room that won't aggro the patrol. I'm a little skeptical given that you can't control Ony's position in Phase 2, plus the whelps are all over the place. But I could watch the video (I haven't watched any yet).

6) Pre-empting the whelps. I wonder if I could survive jumping in and popping all the whelps one side and getting rid of them. Maybe in prot spec with a consecrate/holy shield combo.

Some other random technical notes: you don't actually have to be at perfect dmg/heal equilibrium if it's close because you can bubble every 4m (prot, 5m ret) and bandage & holy light. I went through a lot of bandages last night, heh. LoH is also every 20m, but obviously if you cast it twice, the patrol will be up. The fight is so long, you can't really count on these, though they help with the spikes. You're a bit RNG dependent for spikes because you can avoid the Cleave occasionally and resist more of the fire breath. But you can also get a run of not avoiding/resisting anything for a bit.

At the end of last night, I was about ready to give up, but now I want to go back and experiment some more. I think the first thing I need to do is bring a healer with me so that we can run some tests (e.g., they can heal me if I'm south of the equilibrium point), maybe I can get Recap-master Hawksy to come try things out for an hour or two. I'm figuring we'd try a couple of pulls and reset by having the healer run out while I just die. If nothing else, I'm pretty confident we could duo Onyxia, which would be at least a little interesting.

I'd also really like help clearing the stupid warders in the first place. They actually hit harder than Onyxia does and although I could get to equilibrium (in prot, not ret), it takes forever to grind down their 83k hp -- and there are 4 of them. And maybe if I can figure out the equilibrium point and plan for Phase 2, I can do the lame version of the solo and have somebody out in the hallway killing the respawns for me. That'd at least be something.

But not tonight no matter what. Tonight is back to MH to kill Archimonde. Then maybe to SSC to kill Vashj in the instance Bloc arranged to have cleared for us last night while I was messing around in Dustwallow. :) And then Friday, I think Kyoka was requesting a KZ run to the new boss before he goes away (possibly this weekend). I might need some more badges too to get more epic gems for tanking gear resocketing anyway. But maybe there's time for some quick tests Friday, or maybe Sunday will work.

BTW, somebody asked in /guild last night, "what if we don't get Archi?" We're going there for up to 3 full hours tonight. We know the strat. The only way we don't win is if noobs repeatedly run the fire through the raid. Like I said last night, if that happens I'm /gkicking people. Seriously. I think everbody wants to go back to BT on Saturday.

More time-travel

This time back to the Battle of Mt Hyjal, as planned. The class changes with 3.0.2 have us worrying a lot less about class balance when filling a raid lately. 5 dps warriors? No problem. But since we hadn't been back to MH specifically, we weren't sure how the tanking would work. Since it turned out that somebody was going to have to respec prot, I volunteered to tank with Dethno, who was the only other one already prot.

I think I ended up personally delaying the raid at least 10-20m as I sorted through all my tanking gear to set it up after all the stats and mechanics changes. I had to manage the harder def cap, enchant a new tanking weapon and set up the action bars with the new abilities. I stared for longer than I should at my badge tanking gear. I had gotten both the warrior and pally versions of the chest and legs and now they are only subtly different.

I finally got there and we went to work. Rage went down easily. We immediately noticed without much surprise that the dps numbers are through the roof. Harder to spot was that I think healing has gotten a proportionate buff. You can't really measure healing via a meter, you just notice who does or doesn't die. Of note, nobody died to an ice tomb. I don't think our reaction times were that much faster, but I suspect the fast heals people cast land a little harder, making it that much easier to survive.

A better indicator of the differences was seen on Anatheron. First, Dethno died, suggesting that the mobs are actually hitting a little harder now. Dethno and I had been discussing that through the run, it looks like they rebalanced avg melee dmg to be increased to compensate for the removal of crushing blows. Or something. Dethno felt like the dmg numbers scrolling up were bigger than usual all night. But on the other had, when Primux ended up with aggo, he didn't die. He's a dps warrior wearing mostly pvp gear. And the healers kept him upright for ~60% of Anatheron's health. Very interesting. I can only guess that once the healers adjusted expectations to a squishier tank, they were able to keep up with the dmg.

Kaz'rogal posed no particular problems. I was surprised to see that I was able to go pretty much all out dpsing in melee without causing mana problems, even with the nerf to JoW.

On Az'galor, we finally broke the winning streak. Dethno took 2x 9k hits in 2s somehow. We were unable to determine if that was just deeply unlucky or if something went wrong mechanically. Thrall's pets were taking dmg at the time according to Recap, so I wonder if there was a pet parry in there somewhere and Dethno got parry-gibbed in response.

We got it on the second try without much trouble, in spite of the fact that we were very heavy on melee dps, which meant a lot of us were hanging around on the felguard hill chilling most of the battle. However, it also meant a high probabiliy of a relatively useless melee dps player getting the doom, which happened several times.

Then it was on to Archimonde. We managed 3 pulls, but I wouldn't call any of them good. I think the extra time was worth it to the people who hadn't seen the battle before, but it did not appear as if we were in any danger of getting on a roll and killing him. I made an executive decision to call it before it got too late figuring we'll be better off working on it fresh on Thursday.

Several people who missed Vashj/Kael want to go back there too, so I'm thinking we work on Archi first and when we kill him, we celebrate by getting Vashj in SSC for those who still need. T6 and T5 helms all around!

On my personal todo list tonight, I'm going to spend a few minutes fixing up my gear sets on item rack. I also noticed that my spl power trinket is no longer than good for tanking, so I'm going to go make the 42 def tanking one. That's going to shoot me way over the def cap, so then I can look at swapping in dps gear into tanking since more of my threat comes from str now. I'm also going to go do the 2 easiest dailies on the Isle again. I'm idly trying to get the 5 daily quests in a row achievement among other things.

And then I think I'm going to Dustwallow to dance with the dragon for a bit. I know it's possible to solo Ony, but I don't know if it's better to be prot or ret spec, wearing dps, tanking or FR gear. So I'm going to bring everything and experiment. For extra fun, I'm not looking anything up in advance. A bunch of people wanted to kill the new boss in KZ tonight and I'm tempted by that too, but I keep putting off the Ony attempt. I think it's just time to try it.

Just a little time-travel

Just did a few more of the heroics last night. We got a group of 5 and ran through Heroic Black Morass, Durnholde and Auchenai Crypts. I just have Magister's Terrace and Mechanar to go now.

Speaking of achievements, in addition to the rep ones, I've got to remember to go solo Onyxia this week. Guardian reported doing it fairly easily as ret spec this past week. Not sure if he brought tanking gear, FR gear, or what. I thought it was supposed to be a couple of hours long as a battle, but he said it only took 10-15m. Apparently, you can hit her in the air during Phase 2 if you are standing right underneath, shortening the battle a lot. I'll load up all my gear and go experiment one day this week.

Not tonight. Tonight, I'm going to try to be on time to get Mt Hyjal going as early as possible.

Head Banging

I spent Saturday night down in the mosh pit at Archimonde's feet, learning the fight, getting blasted into the air and watching trails of fire get run through the crowds. We "beat our heads" against Archi for a couple of hours and I think we got a good handle on that encounter.

On one hand, it's primarily a survival battle, not a dps race. Archi does many things that can kill you and if you die, he gets a "soul charge" buff which largely means everybody else dies too. The methods he has for killing you include: a Grip curse, an Air blast and the fire you aren't supposed to stand in. The Grip is the easiest to cope with. It needs to be cleared quickly, but since both druids and mages can clear it, it's generally under control. A minor challenge is that druids can't clear the curse while in dps form (or healing?) so the decursing druids have to focus on pretty much just that.

The Air blast just takes a little practice. You pick up an item, Tears, before the encounter which slows your falling speed for 2s. You go flying up in the air, wait a bit, then proc the Tears and land with minimal damage (proportional to how well you time the item).

The fire trails are both the simplest and hardest element. Why, after all this time, is not standing in the fire so hard? That's not even meant to be critical, it just seems to be simple fact. The game pushes you to focus on your primary job so much that local area effects like fire just sneak up on you. In addition the usual "don't stand in the fire," here, the fire chases you and you have to be heads up about running away from Archi and also not at your teammates.

We focused primarily on surviving on Saturday night and not cranking the dps. But the other side of treating it as a survival battle is that if/when we go all out on dps, the fight will be significantly shorter and it'll be easier to survive. It does look like it will take 5-6m to win. We were able to get to around 2m without wipe-worthy errors on Saturday.

I did feel pretty optimistic about the fight and would like to build on our success, so I think we'll head back to MH on Tuesday. We'll have to clear it ourselves, but Nitnoid assures me it's easy now. OotC had cleared up to Archi in 2.5 hrs Sat night, did a few Archi pulls and then called their raid. And then gave us their raid id to go learn the battle since they're doing BT the rest of the week.

The rest of the weekend, I spent mucking about in the achievement lists. For personal amusement, I went and collected halloween candy from every town. I also got in a handful of heroic runs to work towards the Outland Dungeon Hero achievement. I was explaining the system to my 12yo son and he got really into it. I suggested he do achievements on his druid, but he wanted to play Beros, so I put up the tag and he ran around exploring every zone in the world.

As a curious aside, he told me that he liked getting achievments but in particular liked getting achievements that didn't involve having to kill lots of things. I have also occasionally thought that it's sort of peculiar how many parts of the game (esp questing) involving going to an area and genocidally exterminating the mob population. Mostly we put that out of our minds, but in a virtual reality game where some of the NPCs have stories about their virtual lives, I'm not entirely surprised that the murderousness of it pops to mind now and then. There are days where I think you could build an MMORPG with less pve killing in it (e.g., more like 1 mob per quest tops). I wonder if it'd end up being a lot less popular, though.

Pvp killing seems fine in comparison, fwiw. There you know it's mostly movement control -- you just make the other guys respawn at the GY. For comparison, yesterday afternoon my 12yo and my 5yo got on Beros and Wathirlin and ran around Shattrath infecting people with plague zombie disease. That didn't seem to bother either of them, they seemed to be having a blast, heh.

Whatever, he can explore and/or maybe do fishing or cooking achievements for me if he'd like to. Hopefully people won't think I'm ignoring them since he doesn't answer tells (the DND flag should help). Myself, I did the murderous rampage thing in Netherstorm for a bit late last night to grind some Consortium rep (via Zaxxis badges). I actually find myself looking at a wider range of possible achievements than I had originally considered. There's the 3 non-city rep: Consortium, Sporeggar and Kurenai, the 5 city reps, I'm a handful of quests short of the Lore accomplishments in the Outland regions. And there are a lot of heroic dungeons I need to redo. Sometimes, I think about going back to the old world dungeons too. I'm going to run out of time before the expansion, so I should probably pick a few things to focus on. I doubt I'll be thinking about achievements again for awhile after the expansion releases.

Tonight would be a good night for heroics, I think. Maybe the CoT ones.

Heroic Candy

No, wait, that's not right, I'm mixing up what I was doing last night. First I ran around semi-pointlessly collecting candy (cleared Outlands and Eastern Kingdoms). Then I got recruited into a group running through various Heroics for achievement purposes.

We knocked off Heroic Mana Tombs pretty quick and then headed for Underbog. Of note in Underbog, Wiseman got d/c right before the first boss, so we just pushed on with 4. Later Stupidrenren went briefly afk and we kept clearing the trash with 3: tank (Dethnotronic), dps (Beros) and healer (Leoruuc). Practically speaking, the only effect of going with 3 was that it required more care not to double pull.

The bosses all went down pretty trivially still with 4 -- Wiseman lost power and was never able to get back on. I guess I knew we were overpowering the place, but I don't think I realized by how much.

Wiseman and Dethnotronic appear to have gone completely crazy for achievements. That's amusing to me, but I don't think I'll get the bug that badly. I do want to knock off the rest of the dungeon achievements (at least Outlands). And I might kill time collecting more candy in Kalimdor next time I'm on waiting for a group to form.

The other set of achievements that tempts me is some of the reputation related ones. I'm not exalted with Consortium, Kurenai or Sporegarr. The last two seem like they'd be real grinds, so I might never bother. But Consortium gives some more gem recipes, so maybe I need a few more Heroic Mana Tombs runs -- I think last night's run gave me a couple of K rep, bringing me to 5k/21k. I'd also be tempted by the city reps, but I need ~10k for each major city and I'm not even sure how to tackle it. Runecloth? Alterac Valley quest turn-ins? I need 10k or more with each and I'm not going to spend a million hours on it, though.

Tonight we should get back to raiding. We could farm up the loot we left behind in TK/SSC, or maybe we should just press ahead into Mt Hyjal and see if we can get to Archie for a look. There's not a lot of time left before the reset to go back if we don't get a handle on the encounter. Also, I'm not sure if the rest of MH will really be trivial. We've been running with very low numbers of healers lately (4-5) and it's still T6. I guess we'll figure it out on the fly as always.

Hand of A'dal

The title, Hand of A'dal, was supposed to be removed from the game with the 3.0.2 patch. Apparently rumors of it's demise were slightly exaggerated as a bunch of us are now able to sport it at will. Either it's a bug (and might even get removed), or the fact that we had completed all the related quest lines up to Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider meant we maintained our eligibility through the patch.

But first we had to kill Kael'thas, which we had not done before. Unlike Vashj, we had never really even practiced much on him. I was delayed by a dark and stormy night drive into the city to the train station to pick up my mother-in-law. Not only is it far (45m), but I apparently bugged the directions on my iPhone and ended up having some extra driving around (the end pin moved mysteriously, and thus directed me to a point ~3mi south of the intended location and I had to drive back).

So it was super-late, even for me, when I got on. The rest of the raid amused themselves by killing Al'ar and Solarian before I got there. Kilborne stepped out for me (much appreciated, along with waiting for me to go after Kael'thas) and I got to go in and repeatedly die embarassingly to the melee whirlwind guys.

We were light on healers initially, so Barantir and I both considered respeccing Holy. After seeing how melee-unfriendly the whole encounter is, maybe we should have. But we perservered through repeated deaths, doing what we could.

The fight is complex and technical. But overpowering dps simplifies things considerably. Phase 1 is 4 adds, one at a time, and we realized right away we could kill them so fast, that we could be patient about positioning where we defeated them. Phase 2 is 7 weapons and took 2-3 trials to get the positioning and dps order down, but we were always able to finish them off before the next Phase. Phase 3 brings back all 4 adds to deal with and is chaotic. The published strats warn that it's extra chaotic if you don't have all the weapons down. Yeah, this fight must have been a bitch before the T6 instances opened up (much less the badge and 3.0 patches). We scrambled into Phase 4 a couple of times and learned about the fire bomb on the floor and the Shock Barriar/Pyroblast combo. Phase 5 is just really the second half of KT's hp from Phase 4 and the first time we got there, we managed to finish it off.

Of course, it was 3:30am server time by then, so we couldn't keep the raid together to down VR as we had planned. But Wiseman headed straight to the Caversn of Time and when we saw he got credit for the Hand of A'dal (in addition to the uber MH ring), everybody ran over there to do it too. Not everybody got the title, so it does look like you had to complete the BT quest chain first (or maybe they can still finish it). Kind of a nice unexpected bonus.

A good question is what next. Mt Hyjal and Archimomde? Or try to press deep into BT? We heard a rumor that you can get past Mother Sharazz with minimal SR gear now, so BT is tempting. But I like the idea of killing another end instance boss, too. Maybe we'll /random on Saturday.

G.N.E.R.D. rage

As a general rule, I don't try to keep up with the special World Events like Hallows Eve. Sometimes I find them mildly amusing, or get carried along with others who want to do events like the Headless Horseman. The new achievements system seems to have focused some people even more intensely on getting every possible quest and holiday accomplishment done than usual. So, I wasn't really that surprised at a nearly insta-invite to help out with the G.N.E.R.D. pvp-oriented event.

Of course, I also didn't know what it was, how to do it or where to get GNERDs. But Wiseman and Kyoka patiently explained it to me, so I started flying around dutifully collecting lots of GNERD candy for the buff. To do the accomplishment, you need to notch 50 pvp HKs while under the influence of the candy buff. The tricky part is that if you die, you lose the buff, so you have to have a decent run and bring lots of candy just in case.

We all loaded up on candy and queued for Arathi Basin. And I got to immediately confirm the true OPness of the Ret Pally pvp. I wasn't even playing very well in terms of using all my abilities effectively, but immediately went on a total ramapging frenzy. With 2 healers behind us (Snapdragon and Uglykid), we just walked up and flattened everything in our path. We stomped through the blacksmith, took the farm and headed up to the mill -- using the travel in a big group strat. Without defending nodes, you don't always win this way, but it can work well, especially if you cap fast enough that they don't have a place to respawn (you can get a 5-cap and quick win this way). It optimizes HKs, though and since we each needed 50, that seemed ideal.

I'm crashing through and vaporizing horde when suddenly a box pops up "Achievement: Wrecking Ball" What the hell is that? Heh, it's 20 straight killing blows in a BG without dying. I didn't die until very late in the BG, Wiseman and I finished with 37/36 killing blows (tops) and all of us had >100 HKs. Everybody got the GNERD achievement easily. Wiseman and I also got the 300k dmg in a single BG achievement.

Then we queued for Eye of the Storm since it was the daily. It wasn't a rout, but we won. And I discovered the other side of OP Ret Pallies when one walked up and vaporized me. The nerf bat's a-coming, I'm sure.

Dethno, Wiseman, Kyoka and eventually Bloc headed off to do lvl 60 dungeons. I did some more pvp with Ragon, Sariana, Sherider and Sealth. Then we noticed we had a good 5-person group and went and got Sariana her epic flight form in Heroic Sethekk (Sherider tanking on his pally since neither Ragon nor I would respec, heh). And cleared that achievement for good measure.

I meant to try out the guildlaunch mods to profile my toon, the guild and try importing Thursday's SSC run as a raid (for practice) but forgot. Maybe I'll get a shot tonight, or more likely tomorrow. I'll probably end up an hour or more late tonight, so hopefully others will start the cleaning house process in SSC before I get there. It'll be fun to empty the instance, but I really want to move on to TK and Kael'thas soon.