Emperor’s Birthday And LFG

Happy B-Day Dawg!

In Japan, Wednesday December 23 was a national holiday to celebrate the emperor’s birthday and as such I decided to use the free time to rest up and play some WoW while trying to get over a cold. For quite awhile now it seems, one of my favorite things to do is to run 5-mans, catch up on my favorite podcasts, and knock back a couple brews. In case you’re curious, some of my favorite podcasts of late are Uhh Yeah Dude, The Best Show On WFMU, and Stop Podcasting Yourself. The first two have kept me entertained for years and all three are highly recommended.

And now, on to WoW related matters:

Because of the constant need for healers, I was able to very quickly gear up my holy priest which is great. Sure, this cost hundreds of badges to do, but it was a lot of fun and honestly not too difficult to do overall. However, I now find myself all geared up with no real incentive to run more heroics. I suppose I get a little bit of reputation from one of the lesser known factions, but aside from an achievement for reaching exalted it’s not that big of a deal. I still really enjoy healing, but there’s just not much of a reason to do so anymore.

So with my priest all geared up I decided to get some emblems for my mage. As I mentioned before, he’s currently in mostly ilvl 200 stuff with a couple pieces from Naxx. Although I know what I’m doing when it comes to the instances, more often than not the LFG system grouped me up with people who didn’t, presumably because of my gear score. This involved many wipes, disconnects, and lost time. It really threw me for a loop considering that as a healer almost every run is amazingly quick and easy. I can only assume this is a result of gear score.

I trudged through it however because there wasn’t much else to do. I couldn’t go around it, had to go through it. Eventually I had enough badges to get the T9 gloves and pants, as well as the ilvl 245 DPS wand which is pretty cool. After picking up the new pieces, I instantly headed over to the auction house and spent a ton of gold on epic gems and enchants. One thing I noticed was that after I got this new gear, the other people I was randomly grouped up with seemed to be much better than before. No more wipes and runs were quick and easy again. Go figure.

Something I wasn’t used to however was the wait to queue up which sometimes took up to 15 minutes. While this might not be too bad compared to the pre-3.3 world, it felt like an eternity compared to my 2 second wait as a healer. So in the search for a way to kill time I decided to grind reputation to get the Frostsaber mount from the people near Everlook. From what I’ve heard this is one of the longest rep grinds in the game and I have to agree so far. Another added barrier is that the mobs you have to kill are pretty spread out and far away from the turn-in spot which further adds to the difficulty. But, it helped the wait go by and maybe eventually I can add the Frostsaber to my collection.

Now as for the previously mentioned wipes, I can’t really blame people too much as these things are bound to happen from time to time. We’ve all had to learn the game and sometimes it takes a wipe or two to do that. However, while on my mage I had a bad experience of a different kind while doing heroic Utgarde Keep. The group I was put into was made up of four people from a guild called Swift Retribution from the Cenarion Circle server. After many sub-par groups, I figured running with a guild would surely be a good thing since they know each other’s play style. We had one wipe right off the bat which wasn’t a big deal and then proceeded to tear through the instance at a decent pace.

We downed the first boss and things were going smoothly until I was unceremoniously kicked from the group in mid-fight of a trash pull before the second boss. There was no communication in party chat the entire instance, presumably because they were all using vent. There was also no explanation as to why I was kicked, and no good reason I could come up with myself. Before I knew it I was right back in the snowy hills of Everlook where I began completely stunned at what just took place.

Of course I understand the need to kick someone if they are under performing, but I was doing everything a good DPS should and there was no good reason for the kick. The main issue I have here is that it’s disrespectful of other people’s time. It took me at least 15 minutes to get into a group and I expected to complete the instance, get some badges, and be on my way. At the very least, some sort of explanation would have been nice. Had there been any explanation really I would have probably understood. It seems to me that from this experience, as a guild, Swift Retribution is really reinforcing the idea of PUGs as being an overall negative experience.

Sure, it’s only a game, but there are also people playing the game and I believe you owe them a little bit of decency just as you would in any other circumstance in the real world. Perhaps they did have a justifiable reason to kick me, but without communication it can leave a really bad taste in someone’s mouth, not to mention sully the reputation of your character, guild, etc.

That’s about it for now. I hope this post doesn’t come across as complaining or overly negative, I just wanted to chronicle what’s been happening as I play the game. Until next time, take care and happy new year!

As always, thanks for reading Thoughts of Warcraft. See ya next time. http://thoughtsofwarcraft.wordpress.com.

Halls Of Reflection…And More

I still haven’t chosen a favorite dungeon out of the new Ice Crown Citadel 5-mans, but Halls of Reflection certainly is interesting. So far I’ve found all of the instances to be quite a challenge as well as a good opportunity to snag some new loot. Out of the three times that I’ve actually been inside HoR, two of them were under some odd circumstances.

The first time I entered the instance it was during a glitch where no mobs spawned at all. Even though I certainly wouldn’t count this as an attempt, I was still able to walk around and get a feel for the last section. Once we realized the glitch, our group decided to see if the gunship was there to get some free loot but we were thoroughly disappointed. Of course we were stuck with the 15 minute debuff, but that’s about it for that story.

I later joined up for a random dungeon and found a group who downed everything up until the gauntlet section at the end. They had told me that they wiped about 10 times so far which didn’t bode well for me, but I figured that I would give it a shot just to see how hard it was. Not surprisingly, I found it to be pretty damn hard. This being my first time there, I later assumed that the entire instance was only the last gauntlet section.

We started the event and I pretty much knew what to do. Once the ice walls came down it was fairly obvious that all we needed to do was not die until it came down. It also wasn’t long before I had to go into what I’m now affectionately referring to as “The Zone.” Although I’ve found that I can really force myself to get in “The Zone,” it’s a pretty cool feeling when it does happen. It’s a feeling akin to being on autopilot, where every decision you make is pure instinct based on past experience. Perhaps it’s like the tale of the mother who found the strength to lift a car off of her child. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing, but it was the right thing.

I healed like this for wave after wave of scourge until I finally died at what was literally the very last moment. This being my first time in HoR, I didn’t know if it was finished and considered it a wipe until I was able to roll on loot. It was quite exhilarating and I was able to get some good epics out of the deal too.

That group and I continued to run about four more heroics until the tank started acting odd and doing dumb wipe-causing pulls and high-jumps from bridges. It was then that I thanked them and excused myself from the group and queued up again, only to instantly find myself back with the same group. We all had a pretty good laugh about it and I decided that it must have been fate so we finished the instance.

Finally I was able to get a full clear of Halls of Reflection and it was a lot of fun. I even got some compliments on my healing which is always a nice feeling. There were a few close calls on account of the fact that I started playing not long after I woke up, but overall it was pretty good. However, I did find it a bit weird that almost the whole group had to spend most of the first section staring at a wall. Kinda strange considering that there was so much cool stuff to look at.

As for the final gauntlet, this group had it together and there really weren’t any close calls in the least. It was so smooth in fact that it made me wonder as to whether or the first had any business being there at all.

Stay tuned for more posts. There’s tons to talk about after 3.3 dropped! Thanks for reading.

Brad

The Photo Album: The Dark Portal

Truckspank the priest going shadow while leveling. After reading a couple of the WoW novels, I really like the lore of the dark portal and wanted to just hang out there for awhile.

The Photo Album: Thanksgiving

Sadly, this was the only turkey I was able to eat on Thanksgiving. You miss a lot of major holidays while living in Japan.

Healing Naxx 10 – The Saga Continues

This past Sunday morning (6 p.m. server time) I joined up once again with the people from the Raiding 101 group and we headed in to Naxx 10 man. Even though it was only Naxx, I did my best throughout the week to gear up as much as I could via the new LFG system to get just a little more healing coming through. I also made a point to be sure that all my gear was gemmed and enchanted out. So far I’m really enjoying the vibe of the group. Although many of the people are different from week to week, I think it’s a pretty nice and valuable thing that the raid leaders are doing.

The group had already taken down a couple of the bosses earlier in the week, so we were able to get a little deeper into Naxx than last week. We began on Maexxnna and I think we had one wipe, but we were off to the Plague Quarter soon enough. Noth went down far easier than the week before. It was actually pretty shocking considering how hard it was to heal him before. Of course after that we headed off to Heigan the Unclean and the infamous “dance” of his. Everyone knew this is where the trouble would start, but then again it was called Raid 101 for a reason.

Up to this point I had only done Heigan as a DPS once and needless to say I died pretty early on. After about 3 wipes we were about to call the raid as it was nearing towards our three hour time limit for the raid. But, we decided to try one more time and that’s when I finally got the hang of the dance. My strategy, although a little flawed, was to just run straight through without stopping. This got me clipped a couple times, but with a preemptive shield and some HOTs I was able to make it through, although it was pretty close.

Luckily, as a holy priest I have a ton of instant cast spells which really saved the day. While running I was able to get off some Prayers of Mending and a few Circles of Healing. Not too bad. I think it took about three dances or so before downing him, but it was quite the thrill with people screaming into vent again. It was definitely a good feeling. My main thought while running was pretty much just “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!”

With spirits high, we decided to give Loatheb a try. Despite being past our three hour limit, everyone was still game for it. The main thing he does, from a healer’s perspective, is to only allow healing for three seconds at a time, every 20 seconds. I had the Deadly Boss Mobs add-on installed, but it was really confusing. One alert would pop up on the screen and then stay there, while another alert would pop up somewhere else. I pretty much had no idea when the window was so I just kept casting normally and hoped for the best. This strategy almost made me run out of mana, but we had a druid who stepped up to heal as well so we were ok.

I gave it my all and got an invite to join the group’s progressive raiding team which is pretty cool. Again, because of the crazy time difference I won’t be able to make it to too many raids, but it’s a pretty cool feeling to get recognized. It kinda make me feel like a “real” healer, although I still haven’t gotten used to that title 100%. So I’m gonna try and make the schedules match up as best I can and see what happens.

Trial Of The Champion – Thoughts

Considering that I played WoW as a mage for about a year and a half, I still question my abilities as a healer from time to time despite getting frequent compliments. In all fairness, I think I’m actually not too bad at healing and have taken to it quite well. Most heroics are incredibly smooth with little to no “Oh shit!” moments as I like to call them. However, I still find myself getting very nervous when trying out new content for the first time. A large part of this nervousness is probably due to the fact other players don’t want to, or don’t have time to explain strategies, especially in PUGs.

If I remember correctly, this is how the conversation went during my first time in heroic TOC:

Me: “I haven’t healed this yet so please let me know any tips, etc to heal better here”

Tank: “easy”

To make matters worse, the first time I tried healing TOC it was on regular and it wasn’t long before I was kicked from the group for the usual “L2p n00b!” style stuff. That was a pretty crushing moment. For whatever reason, I become a far more sensitive player while healing. I should point out here that it’s not the offense of being called a “n00b” by some kid, but more so that it makes me question whether or not I’m a good healer. There seems to be a lot more personal responsibility on behalf of the healer as opposed to the kid only eeking out 700 DPS in the same instance.

So, needless to say I was damn near terrified to try out the heroic version when faced with it via the random dungeon finder. In fact, I was even a little afraid to hit the “Enter Dungeon” button each time for fear that I would end up healing H TOC. But I manned up and figured I had to learn it eventually so I put my game face on and did my best. This is where it gets pretty surprising to me.

Because I knew that TOC may be a problem for me I read up on the strategies a little bit so I would know what I was getting into. Basically what I took away from this was to turn your back when the one guy does the thing, some zombies blow up a lot, and that’s about it. As we dropped boss after boss I was astounded at just how it easy it was. Perhaps the other people I was grouped with were well geared and experienced. I’m not sure why, but it was absolutely no trouble at all to heal. Sure there were a couple tight moments, but even during the black knight boss I just kind of stared at my computer amazed at how little damage people were taking.

Right after the run I wanted to do it about 10 more times because of the great drops and my new found confidence. Hopefully I don’t get too confident, but now I feel much better about my skills as a healer and ready to tackle some more difficult content. I’m looking forward to healing the hell out of heroics this coming weekend with the LFG tool so I’ll be sure to post anything interesting that happens.

Thanks for reading Thoughts Of Warcraft! @ http://thoughtsofwarcraft.wordpress.com

Brad

Easy Tier 9 Thoughts

At this point I’m sure you’ve heard all of the arguments both for and against the relative easiness of getting geared in full tier 9 simply by doing heroics. From what I’ve read, I don’t think I really fall into either camp. Here are some of the main reasons that I’m going after a full tier 9 set.

It’s A Goal: This one is pretty important for me and it’s part of the reason that I stopped playing Chipdipson. With Chip, I was close to gaining exalted reputation with Ebon Blade. Coincidentally enough, that was the last faction I was grinding. With no other real rewards from heroics, I quickly became disinterested. Also, without being in a solid raid group, the carrot on a stick of the T9 gear will more than keep me interested in heroics.

It Looks Cool: Pretty self-explanatory. Since I started playing the game, I’ve never had a full set of tier anything so now I just want to see how it looks on my characters. There’s something pretty special to me about just seeing it all match. I came pretty close to getting a full PVP set on my priest, but later got bored of the grind considering that there was so many heroics to learn. Basically, I’m not overly concerned about what set of tier gear it is, I just want a full set of something.

Raiding: This reason probably falls in line with some of the typical arguments, but perhaps my way of thinking about it is a bit different. From what I know, most people seem to want to get geared up in T9 so that they can jump straight to Ice Crown Citadel. As a healer, I’d rather keep running Naxx until I can comfortably heal anyone through it, and then progress to Ulduar or whatever. I haven’t had a chance to raid much at all since I began playing WoW, so I would hate to skip entire swaths of content just to get more epic gear.

Thanks for reading. Leave a comment and I should be back with another post soon.

Brad

First Impressions Of 3.3

Anybody who has read a little bit of the blog before knows that running 5-man dungeons is one of my favorite parts of the game, so it’s no secret that I’ve been chomping at the bit to try out the LFG tool that came with 3.3. So much so in fact that I’ve just been leveling some alts and mindlessly grinding rep just to kill time on my mains.

During this time I was able to level fishing and cooking quite a bit on my priest and get almost all eight other characters on my account to around the level 20 range so that they can start hitting instances. With one character of every class leveled pretty good, I’d say that the most intriguing one is Partydoctor, my druid. He’s a boomkin in the making now, but I’ll probably go dual spec at 40 as tank/heals.

Ok…down to business.

DPS:

As Truckspank, my priest, gradually became my new main, my trusty old mage and first character ever, Chipdipson, has been doing nothing but collecting dust and making the occasional bag for a long time. With the ease of finding groups now, I decided to get him some tier 9 badge gear and so far it’s a (fire) blast. Considering that there is vastly more DPS in the game than tanks and heals, I was really surprised at just how fast I was able to get into a heroic group. Chipdipson currently has a couple pieces of gear from Naxx, but for the most part it’s all just rep rewards and heroic loot. It is however pretty well enchanted and gemmed which seems to make a pretty big difference.

Within the first couple minutes of joining up with a group, I instantly remembered just how fun it is to blow stuff up. With my current frostfire spec, almost all of my damage comes from three spells: Scorch, Fire Blast, and Frostfire Bolt. The big damage comes in when hot streak procs and I get a free Pyroblast. Rinse and repeat. While this may sound simple, it’s surprisingly fun as hell to play. When buffed up enough, I can get some enormous crits going which is so much more invigorating than healing.

Healing:

Even though I had a ton of fun bombing through heroics with Chipdipson, my priest is still new main and as such is my main concern in terms of getting some nice tier 9 badge gear as soon as possible.

Although I’m pretty confident with my healing abilities at this point, there are still a couple heroics that I’m just not comfortable healing yet. These would have to be Halls Of Lightning, the Trial of the Champion 5-man version, and of course Oculus. It doesn’t help the situation any more when I think back to almost getting booted from a HOL group last year as DPS and some bad TOC experiences. I suppose there’s no way around it and I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it one way or another if it comes up as the random dungeon.

The first four groups or so that I joined up with were simply amazing. They were quite possibly the smoothest heroics that I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing. The two that really stick out in my mind were Nexus and Violet Hold. Of course these were fairly easy even while undergeared, but it was absolutely astounding at how quickly the bosses went down. As a healer, I only had time to throw out a renew and a flash heal or two before the boss was down and we moved on to the next one. It was a pretty nice welcoming to the future of LFG.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned…the next post is about Easy Tier 9 Through Badges.

-Brad

Hunter Leveling

Well, it’s been a little over a month or so since the last update so I figured it was about time. I’ve probably had the time to write new posts, but my interest in writing seems to ebb and flow every couple months and I really wasn’t interested in writing anything during the past couple weeks. But, now I am.

Although I’ve recently started an army of alts in the past few months, 9 of the allotted 10 per server, I found that leveling my hunter was not only the most fun but also quite relatively easy. As far as pets go, I’ve stuck with tanking pets almost the whole time. I kept the first bear that I tamed for quite sometime until I got bored and wanted to branch out a bit. From there, I tried a number of cats from Stranglethorn Vale but I very quickly came to hate the way that they always stayed in stealth mode. It didn’t seem to make any tactical sense at all to me. Obviously, I’m not stealthed so if I pull aggro it will only slow down the reaction time of my pet even further if he’s stealthed. So, I went right back to tanking pets and found a gorilla that has been working out pretty good.

From a rotation standpoint, it seems weird that I find myself using the same three attacks time and time again when there are so many others to choose from. I suppose that’s the only downside of playing a dps class. You find what works and stick with it…for 80 levels. In an unrelated area, I still find it odd however that both the bear and gorilla can’t tank multiple mobs. Maybe there are some talent points that I need to add later as the leveling process continues, but it would seem to me that that would be their main job right from the get go.

Despite now being what I would consider a seasoned WoW player, I found myself in yet another frustrating noob moment as I was leveling Leatherworking. While browsing around online recently I learned that at level 40 I think, Hunters can use mail armor, which pretty much makes Leatherworking useless. As a result of my frustration, I’ve since stopped playing him for a little while. I plan on coming back later on and will probably even get him up to 80 within the next 6 months or so, but for now I’ve had enough. He’s currently at level 38.

It may be a bit odd that I went from spending all of my time leveling him to dropping him like a bad habit, but whatever. It’s a game and I’m doing whatever is the most fun for me at the time. Perhaps with 3.3 here now I might bring him back out again and have some fun.

Healing Naxxramas

While killing some time on an alt as I waited for patch 3.3 to drop, I found someone spamming trade chat about running Naxx for something called Raid 101. I sent a tell out to him and was surprised at his politeness and general good demeanor. At this point I’m a little overgeared for Naxx as a result of heroic badge gear, but I still have yet to heal many raids. As it turns out this is precisely what Raid 101 was about so I confirmed the run.

As the week went on I was found myself really looking forward to running, and more importantly healing, Naxx. I had DPSed it in the past with my mage and was aware of some of the basic fight mechanics, but on the whole I don’t really have time to learn boss fights. The scheduling difficulty raids only gets worse considering that I’m living in Japan now and I’m a good 14 hours ahead of EST. So, the more I thought about it, this was beginning to seem like it would be a lot of fun.

I woke up Sunday morning after a long night and really wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. I had stayed up really late calling family in the States, and was awake for about a day. But, a promise is a promise so I dutifully headed out to Naxx and the raid began right on time at 11am. On heals it was me, a holy spec priest on raid/tank heals, and the raid leader who was a disc priest on main tank heals. The rest of the group was a mix of the raid leader’s guild and other random people who came to learn.

Since I was mostly unaware of what the bosses do, I spent a little bit of time reading up on the fights which seemed to help me out quite a bit. I’m more of a hands-on learner so nothing really compares to actually doing it, but a few things stuck with me that helped out a little bit. We started taking on bosses and knocking them out in no time at all. In the end we ended up dropping Noth the Plaugebringer as the last boss and called it there after three hours. I could have used a couple gear upgrades considering that I’m still using PVP shoulders, but I was there for the experience and that’s what I got.

The Noth fight was by far the most intense. I think when someone reposted the timer in raid chat it came out to be about 10 minutes long. 10 very long and stressful minutes, but some of the most fun that I’ve ever had in WoW so far. Because I wasn’t really looking at the boss’s health at all, it was a huge relief when he finally dropped and people were screaming on vent. It really reminded why I play this game.

As for the details of the Noth fight, I’ll try to write what I remember from that crazy experience. We wiped once because of how we layed out the fight, so we switched strategies up on the second attempt. Basically, my mind just went into full-on panic mode and instinct. I frantically kept an eye on my Circle of Healing cooldown and threw it on the tank almost every time it was up. I just glyphed for Guardian Spirit which resets the cooldown to one minute which I kept up on the off tank. I’m very glad that I did because the extra healing bonus saved us from some near wipe moments.

In addition to my “real” healing spells, I also kept Gift of the Naaru on constant cooldown for some extra help. While I use it quite often on the tank during heroics, I’m not sure if it’s really worth using a GCD for it during raids unless I cast it on myself. Aside from that, I kept my re-usable alchemist potions on CD for extra mana, as well as Lifebloom, and Shadowfiend. I think I had time to get a Hymn of Hope in for mana help, and I definitely popped an “Oh Shit!” moment Divine Hymn.

I’m running Naxx again with the same group of people this coming Sunday as well so it should be a nice break from all the 3.3 heroics I’ll be getting in provided that the servers remain stable.

What I learned:

Managing cooldowns: Pretty early on in the boss fights I learned that I should be casting something on somebody on almost every single global cool down. This is something that I’m not really used to since most of my experience comes from 5-man heroics. The closest thing that I think raid healing comes close to is battleground healing, just with a lot more pressure. Sure, there was a tiny bit of downtime here and there, but if nobody needs a heal I should probably do something else like cast Hymn of Hope.

Dealing with pressure: Even though there was another healer there to get my back, it was still very hectic and stressful knowing that 9 other people there counted on me not to suck. Even though I was on raid heals, I’d say the majority of my heals were spent trying to keep the tank up. Maybe it was because I was really tired, but eventually I was able to settle in a good groove and I stopped thinking and worrying and just kind of went off of instinct. In fact, it reminds of some Bruce Lee clips that I was watching last night.

Play nice: I’ve yet to run Naxx PUGs very often because even though the idea of 5-man PUGs is ok with me, somehow raid PUGs are bit scary. The reason for this is because I don’t know all of the fights that well and I wouldn’t want to waste someone else’s time with me trying to figure out what to do. The second reason is because I’m assuming that most other people don’t think like this and would probably waste my time without thinking twice about it. What made this Naxx run great I think is that from the get go we all agreed that we would be patient and polite in the case of a wipe.