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.