Playing a Warlock

Since I have not raided last few days I have some free time when I finally login to WoW late at night. Last night for example I only logged in when the raid was actually almost done, so I guess on second thought it's not so much free time, it's more that I'm not worn out from raiding and want to go to sleep but I login and want to play even if it is pretty late.

Doing dailies for rep and gold is nice and all but I wanted to do something else and doing PuGs late at night when all I want is a short and fun game session is out of the question. Hmm what to do? Level an alt of course :)

Now I could have gone to one of my level 70 alts but on a whim I decided to forget about Northrend for a while and logged into one of my low-level alts, a level 22-ish Warlock. Now I have not played him much, got to level 22 over a very long period of time and in the past whenever I did play it was not much fun, seemed to be just another underpowered clothie caster. This time I decided it would be different, so I bought every Bind-on-Account item I could get my hands on using my priest's stock of badges and Stone Shards and sent them to the Warlock. I got the shoulders (+10% xp, yey :)), Staff of Jordan (great 2H stave) and 2 trinkets with both an equip stat boost and a proc every time a mob dies (+health and +mana, great for leveling and perfect for a Warlock).
I also sent the little guy (he's a gnome) 200g and splurged in the AH, getting some nice green gear for all other slots. Some of his previous gear was from level 15 or even 12, sheesh!

Well what can I say, the new gear sure made a difference, plus getting new abilities as I dinged levels. I'm now level 28 and feel like a real bad-ass, DoT-ing and Fearing my way to victory. With my big blue bodyguard by my side I'm consistently taking down groups of 2-3 mobs my level and even higher (1-2 levels higher usually).

My best kill so far was of an elite one level higher than me who had a caster add, it was a really tough fight as the caster banished me right at the start. Luckily I'm Demonology specced so my Void Walker managed to last till the banish was over and I could stream some health to him. I finished the fight with both me and the VW almost dead and me OOM, but eventually we won.

It is definitely a huge difference from my mage - of course I leveled him during Vanilla WoW, very different game then. But still, as a mage I was always dying (or afraid of it), almost never attacked multiple mobs and my down-time was significantly longer. I find that in comparison a Warlock is tons of fun :)

I understand from reading forums that until level 52, Affliction is the preferred spec for leveling. However I personally prefer Demonology even if it is a bit slower, as I feel safer that my pet can tank several mobs at a time without dying, and it is not so easy to get agro from him. I'm also not following any leveling guide, instead I'm just doing quests as they happen, whatever is in my log and seems interesting, even if it involves a lot of running / flying on griphons. Still I'm looking forward for level 30 and a mount.

Traditionally I've always found levels 30-40 the hardest to level (most boring), with 40-50 being not much better. In addition, the current work pressure will ease off eventually and I'll go back to raiding so not sure I will have time for more leveling. So I'm not sure I will get the Warlock much higher. But we will see :)

On Social MMOs

Keen has an interesting post about Bringing the Social Game Back. I had some comments but they became too long, hence this post :)

There are two main ways for players to interact with each other in an MMO: either by competing or by cooperating. Note that these don't map directly to PvP and PvE since you still have cooperation in PvP (your side's team) and competition in PvE (no direct example comes to mind but I could imagine a scenario or two).
There are also more minor forms of interaction, such as trade, crafting and chat.

I don't think Keen is right that the way to make MMOs more social are things like forced groupings, harsher death penalties or more "meaningful quests". The first only relates to PvE content and in any case anything which forces players to do something will end up alienating some part of the player base. The second is too negative - too much stick, not enough carrot. The third has nothing to do with social - you can have epic solo quests as easily as grouped ones. One suggestion I especially didn't like is the "No map / crude map" one. I'm sorry but it is never a good idea to make a technically worse game in order to force your players to work around those limitations. Some will. Most will leave for greener pastures, and with good reason.

But I agree that more social MMOs would be a good thing. How to achieve that?

* Provide strong incentives for player cooperation, without making it too much "stick" or too much "carrot". Examples could include better XP while grouped for leveling; easier game mechanisms (than WoW's - I don't know what other games have) for forming groups for group quests/instances/raids; a strong guild system with benefits for players the longer they stay in the guild; etc.

* Provide equally strong and interesting game features for players who prefer competition. This can take the form of PvP, RvR, PvPvE, or even competition-based PvE.

* Trade, crafting and chat (as well as other social tools such as ingame voice) can all enhance the social aspect without having artificial limitations (e.g. no auction house as Keen suggested). In a game focused more on PvE and PvP these will probably be minor, but there is plenty you could do even in such a game: special crafting mats which require groups to get; recipes which require active (same-time, no alts) cooperation between players with different professions to produce; The "carrot" to offset these limitation would be that the items produced from such cooperative efforts would be better than average.

I think a game which would combine all the above in a strong and polished way would be even more successful than WoW :)

A Forced Break

Raiding has been very good since joining the new guild, just yesterday we cleared Ulduar25 up to and including Thorim and I won a very nice pair of boots, finally replacing my very old Naxx10 boots. We've gotten Yogg in 2nd phase down to 60% so only another 30% to go and we will be able to enter 3rd phase.

However, due to work pressure I have decided I don't have any choice but to put in some extra work time in the evenings, which means I need to give up raiding for a while :(

A List of Useful WoW Sites

Now here's a nice list of useful WoW sites:

http://wiki.twistednether.net/index.php?title=WOWUtils

It's a wiki too, so anyone can help edit it and add more sites. Very handy.

Thinking of the new 3.2 Raid Instance

There are so many 3.2 news items right now, it seems almost a shame not to write about them.

On the other hand, I hate writing about PTR changes. Here one week, gone the next... so much for the buckets of words you spent on them :)

But I will say this, so far, I like the gem and profession changes (although I wish the Alchemy perk had been beefier). I like the token changes, badge changes and the new druid look (but I wish holy priests wouldn't get nerfed). I like the possibility to extend the raid lockout.

I don't especially like what I'm reading about the new raid instance. If I understand correctly, it will be basically a ring-style event rather than a proper instance. Now don't get me wrong, I like beating difficult boss fights (right now my guild is wiping on phase-2 of Yogg-Saron and I'm loving every minute of it :P). But I also love a dungeon's atmosphere, I loved it that SSC and TK and Karazhan and Molten Core and BWL and AQ (20, never did 40) etc. each had a unique look and feel and that as you progressed inside you not only saw new bosses but also new interesting rooms opening up. The instance would draw me inside and the feeling of being in an epic place enhanced the pleasure of fighting epic battles. Let me put it this way, would the Ragnaros fight had felt half as epic if you hadn't had to make your way to the very center of a huge underground cavern full of molten flowing Lava? If all you had to do was enter a bare round room and poof he would appear in the middle of the simple dirt floor?
The trash clearing up to bosses is also part of the challenge of an instance and while I never liked too much trash, too little trash is also I think problematic. No trash at all is just not appealing to me and I think ultimately detracts from the fun of the raid.

What can Blizzard do to spice-up the new "ring-of-blood raid"? Maybe have the look of the room change when the boss appears, so that you actually got a room with different size, LoS mechanics, etc. for every fight. Even better would be if at every "stage", the raid started out not directly fighting the boss but at the beginning of a small instance with a short distance and a small amount of trash to clear before getting to the boss room.

But in my nightmares I dream it will be none of the above, that instead we'll get a simple arena, dirt floor and all, and bosses appearing out of thin-air, completely devoid of atmosphere, lore and setting, like giant pinyatas ready to shower epics if only the raid can get the tactics right... if that becomes the new end-game raiding instance I fear I will lose a big part of my motivation for raiding :(

There I go, writing buckets of words about un-released content that is sure to change 10 times between now and release... so I think I'll stop now :)

Ulduar-10 Hard Modes

Apart from the regular Ulduar-25 runs during weekdays, my new guild also does Ulduar-10 runs during the weekend. Sometimes it is 2 groups, usually a strong "A" group (who have cleared Ulduar-10) and a much weaker "B" group.
Last weekend there were not enough people for 2 such groups so there was only one group, a mix of people from both groups. Since there was pretty good firepower and healing, we took on some hardmodes and achievements.

XT - we managed to kill him within I think 200 seconds or something like that. Very nice DPS, even I as a healer helped a bit :)

Hodir - we went for getting him down within 3 minutes, did a very good job with the crit buff but we were just 6 seconds short - I blame it on the fact that I had to heal all the time so couldn't help the DPS :)

Freya - we went at first right to the biggest challenge, taking her down with all 3 adds up. The complexity and intensity of the ensuing fight has to be experienced to be believed, I seriously have to say I didn't feel as challenged since trying OS+3. As a healer, the amount of stuff I have to do and be aware of is way above a normal Freya fight. Unfortunately, I was suffering from lag and DC issues (which in fact I have been suffering from for the last week or 2) all evening, and a healer not there 100% means an almost sure wipe in this fight. Nor was I the only one with such problems, plus we also started with an under-geared OT who was simply impossible to keep alive when he was tanking the 3 big adds. Well to make a long story short, after quite a few tries the RL decided to give up, we took down one of the adds and proceeded to 1-shot Freya+2. I guess all those attempts on Freya+3 helped us learn the fight well :)

We continued to Mimiron however it was too late to do anything serious with him so we just did normal mode, no hard mode for him. After Freya+3, one-shotting Mimiron seemed almost easy :)

I read in another blog that hard-mode fights were just "gimmicks", or "more of the same (boss abilities)". Having experienced first-hand some of them, I have to say that this is only partially true. At least so far for Council, Freya and (from what I've read) Mimiron, this is plain wrong. In addition, while there is nothing different about the Hodir fight mechanics when you are going for hard-mode, execution becomes everything and this does change the fight - it's no longer enough to beat the enrage timer, you now have to really execute perfectly in order to beat the much harder 3-min timer. If good fight execution isn't a test of hard-core raiding, then I don't know what is :)

Running Molten Core

Last night there was no raid scheduled and I decided to pursue an old dream of mine, try to get the legendary Thunderfury for my DK. What set it off was a friend telling me he wanted to work on his reputations and mentioned a few names, including Hydraxian Waterlords.

So my friend (on his rogue) and myself (on my DK) started out to Molten Core. Neither of us had the required object to douse the runes but we figured we would get all bosses except the last 2, he would get rep and the bindings for the sword have a chance to drop from bosses before the last 2. However it turned out that Blizzard have changed it, now when a boss is killed his rune automatically goes out, so we would clear MC.

When we got there, I found out my DK was not attuned to MC so we quickly did the ATC quest (took us all of 5 minutes). Luckily for us as it turns out, a druid friend decided he wanted to come as well. He is boomkin specced but he healed us a lot and really without his healing we would have wiped a lot more so I'm glad he came.

As it is, we did manage to wipe, 2 times due to silly stuff and once due to wrong tactic. The first time we wiped was trying to take out Shazzrah before Geddon, instead of course we pulled both her and Geddon and a patrolling hound at the same time, plus I got lag spike at the same moment (but we would have wiped even without the lag).
Second wipe was when I pulled Geddon while rogue was AFK, I and the druid forgot that Geddon does a magic debuff on the raid that burns mana and without a paladin or mage to remove it, the druid's mana was gone in a second. Without healing on me and too low DPS, I died with Geddon still at 50% health (rogue came back to find himself dead :)).
Third wipe was on Majordomo, we thought the healers would be a problem so I suggested the druid go bear, taunt one healer to him far from the pack, quickly take him down with the rogue and so on, while I tank the rest of the pack. Well that turned out not too good, especially as I DC'd mid-fight. Also it turned out it was not a problem at all to AoE down the entire pack.
So after that wipe we simply AoE'd the entire pack down, with the rogue using reduced-healing poison and interrupting heals where he could and we quickly won the fight too.

Ragnaros actually was a bit harder than I expected, not because of the boss (he hit like a wuss) or adds - we took him down after only 1 pack of sons and the sons ofc we AoE'd down within seconds of them spawning. The problem was, I had never before been at Ragnaros as melee/tank so I didn't know where to stand, and the knockbacks he did threw me in the air so high that I took considerable falling damage every time I landed on ground. Thankfully the druid was able to heal me through it and eventually the rogue found the right place to stand so that I fell into the lava every time. TBH I don't remember the tank and melee getting thrown around like that at level 60, but it's been a long time and I played a mage back then so I didn't pay too much attention to melee positioning.

All in all it was a very nice full-clear of MC, we did it 3 people in about 2 hours, including 3 wipes which we could have easily avoided. Of course we ran past most of the trash instead of trying to kill them, as that really would have taken too long. It was a fun evening, a little bit of a challenge and brought back a lot of nice memories (just before the Ragnaros pull the druid goes "ok no pulling now before you give us 15 minutes of tactics", that set me lol-ing, we really did have some of the longest tactics sessions back at 60 on Ragnaros :)).

No bindings of course, but enough gold to cover the repair bill and then some - not really good gold/hour but than, that wasn't the purpose. Oh, and my DK got the Molten Core achievement, which is nice :)

Running Ulduar-25 with the new guild

Here are some impressions from the few runs I've done so far with my new guild:

* Raid setup is fast - while typically in my older guild, even though we were doing only 10-man raids, it took us a long time to get started. According to guild rules we were supposed to start invites at 19:45 server time, in reality we would still be missing people at 20:00. Many times our raids would start only at 20:10 or later - sometimes much later. With the new guild, you are supposed to show up online at 19:30, even though raid invites are at 19:45. Invites start on time and no special effort is made to make sure people come, e.g. asking if people need a summon. People are just expected to show up on time at the Ulduar entrance, and typically they do. Yesterday was a very good start for example - invites were on time and raid was filled by 19:50. I had to go AFK for 5 minutes - by the time I got back (19:55), most of the area leading up to Flame Leviathan was already cleared... by 20:05 FL was down.

* Optional (non-tier loot) bosses are skipped if possible. In my old guild we did FL, followed by Razorescale, XT and Ignis (who is IMO the hardest boss in the first wing). Only after first wing is cleared did we use to continue to the second wing, where we would go for Assembly first, followed by Kologarn, and the bosses after him. My new guild takes down FL, XT, skips Razor and Ignis and the Assembly and goes right for Kologarn, opening the way to the harder bosses. Last night we wiped some on Thorim but had we taken him down quickly and managed to do Freya, we would have had all of today for Vezax and Mimiron and Yogg-Saron - bosses which are still hard for the guild. I like this method of clearning Ulduar and I'm sorry we didn't think of it in my previous guild. Live and learn.

* Minimal setup time before boss fights - if someome doesn't know tactic it is explained briefly but the sentiment seems to be "lets do it and if we wipe at least you would have seen the fight which is better than a long explanation". On the one hand I like this, spending 20 minutes in my old guild explaining tactics to people new to the boss was something I always found very annoying. However I think the new guild takes this minimal setup approach to an exterme, for example, there is almost no healer setup done, except when required by fight mechanics (e.g. split up the group on Razorscale to 2 sides or gauntlet and arena group on Thorim). On the one hand this saves time, on the other we have wiped in the past due to healing problems... well, time will tell what is the correct balance.

* Back to the DKP - a 10 man raiding guild is small enough to just roll on loot, I think (I hope I am right) that after a week or two all people got at least some loot from bosses. In the new guild they use a DKP based system, on the one hand this is good due to the inherent advantages of a DKP system (the more you raid the more chances at winning loot), on the minus side it seems to make people only care if they have enough DKP, some people I've seen out-bidding on items even when it was clear the other person bidding needs the item more.

* We have nothing to be ashamed of - basically the people who came over from the old guild are 1 DPS, 1 tank and 2 healers (well and 1 social :)). In tems of doing your job in the raid, knowing to "get out of flames" and being high on meters I think we are all doing a great job. Our DPS has been as high as 3rd place, incredible considering his gear (mostly 10man Ulduar). On healing meters we are lower but healing meters in any case don't measure everything and the important thing is that the raids we are in manage to take down even hard bosses (there are some hiccups but those will go away as our gear gets better).

Oh yeah, last point - it feels good to be raiding regularly again :)

A New Guild

Sometimes, love just ain't enough...

I remember a song in the 90s with those words, or something similar. Somehow it was the first thing that jumped to my mind when I thought about why I had to leave my current guild.

Sometimes people leave their guild because they don't love it, or they don't fit in somehow. Last night I left Phalanx on my main, Solidfaith. I did this together with 4 other people, not because we don't love Phalanx, but because raiding had completely stopped lately and there was no solution in sight.

In hindsight, perhaps it should have been obvious. A 10 man serious raiding guild is a strange beast, caught in the middle, not good enough for the serious raiders who want 25man loot and achievements and the casuals who only want/are able to play once or twice per week, who cba to read boss tactics or show up for raids prepared and on time.

So, as much as we (the Phalanx officers) tried, we just couldn't recruit serious raiders. And the casuals who sometimes joined us claiming to want to raid but then barely showing up to raids just made things worse. As we lost raiders due to attrition and RL reasons, we simply didn't manage to replace them.

Some people might think that us leaving Phalanx is just another variation on the raider who has geared up enough in his current raiding guild and jumps to the next higher level. But there is a big difference between leaving a guild still actively raiding and leaving one which doesn't even manage to have enough people online to raid, night after night.

My new guild has at least 3 people I know previously (have guilded with), apart of course from the people I moved-in with from Phalanx. There are also several people I have pugged with who I know to be good people. So I felt comfortable right from the start, not a "stranger in a strange land".

In addition, right after we joined last night we were invited to a 2nd 10-man Ulduar run (the guild does 25man raids during the week and 10man during the weekend). Even though we were new and this was the "b-group" we still managed very nicely, taking down FL, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim and Freya. Not exactly the order I am used to but still half of Ulduar cleared after a late start and with people not used to playing with each other? Not bad :)

In addition, even though I am new and have no DKP I still was allowed to win (by roll) several items of gear - I won new shoulders and a new 1-h weapon (dagger) which are a very nice upgrade to my gear.

So long Phalanx, it's been a long road, not easy but with a lot of satisfaction. We did very well for a non-hardcore guild IMHO, and I have nothing but respect for all the great people who made it happen, including those who due to RL could not show up for every raid. I'm sorry it didn't work out better but I think those left behind understand.

Naxx Alt Run

Last night we setup an alt/social run to Naxx.

On the plus side, it was nice to play a little with my DK, I got his some loot, got to use him a bit and remember why I had so much fun leveling him. During the run I got to do both a little tanking and mostly DPS and I think I did good on both. My tanking spec felt good to me, I had plenty of "emergency" buttons and I think my health regen as blood helped the healers.

As a DPSer I did pretty well (considering my gear), about 2.3k DPS on some boss fights. On trash I think I could do better, I am thinking maybe putting a point in Corpse Explosion, but since that will only really help on trash mobs, I am not sure I will go that route.

On the negative side, Naxx bores me a bit due to having been there so many times :)

Also, we had an OT who's main is a hunter and he didn't know the correct tactic (as a tank) for some of the fights, causing us wipes. Especially on the first boss of the Spider Wing we wiped several times until I replaced him as OT.

The run was also slow due to wipes, low DPS and having to explain tactics to a couple of social people who had not been in Naxx before. We were also only 9 people there as there simply wasn't a 10th person online and this didn't help, but still, looking at Recount during the run when you see someone supposed to be a DPS character doing below the tank, you realize you have some DPS problems :)

Still overall I am happy I went as I got some badges and even the T7 shoulders. We cleared 2 wings which is not too bad. I got the gloves token with 60 badges and got the tanking version of the gloves and shoulders with the tokens since I consider tanking to be my main spec for the DK.

New Computer, Ulduar Advancements

I haven't updated in a while but not due to lack of things to write about, just lack of time :)

For one thing, I got a new computer (yey :)). It's a very nice gaming machine, built to be a good combination of bang-for-buck plus as quiet as practical. The important components - an E8400 Core 2 Duo Intel CPU, HD4870 based graphics card from Sapphire, Sileo 500 case from coolermaster and a Silent Pro 600W power supply. Thanks to these components I can run WoW at ultra graphics mode while still barely hearing the computer fans.

At the same purchase I also (finally) replaced my aging 19" CRT with a 24" LCD screen, specifically a Samsung 2443BW Syncmaster. It's a good TN-based screen, suffering from the usual problems that TN screens suffer from, e.g. don't try to look at the screen from the side, not perfect colors (this specific monitor is a bit on the bright side). But since I'm the only one looking at the screen it works for me. As far as I can see the picture quality is superb (after a little tuning) and the price was just right :)

The computer shop people were kind enough to install (by my request) Windows 7 RC for free and I have to say I am every impressed with this newest iteration of Windows. Everything feels snappy and works very smoothly while at the same time, the eye candy is superb. Of course Windows XP on a new machine would also probably feel snappy but it would not be as pretty :)

I did have some trouble with WoW, for one thing some log files, patch files etc. keep insisting on appearing in another directory, it's not a real problem just annoying. A more serious problem I had was that every time I would exit WoW, it would crash. This prevented addons from saving their preferences, which made playing with them impossible. Since I love my addons, I was about to give up on Windows 7 (I was blaming it) when a Google search finally came up with the real culprit - ClearFont3, a new addon I had installed in parallel to moving WoW to the new computer. There's a lesson here, don't change too many variables at once...

Anyway, now that CF3 is gone all works fine. Thanks to my new screen and computer I'm playing WoW at 1900x1200 resolution and as I said in Ultra graphics mode. Actually a bit below since I lowered shadows. So far I've seen a minimum of 35fps in Dalaran and usually I'm closer to 55 so I'm happy :)

As for in-game, my guild has advanced nicely in 10 man raiding, if a bit slowly. We've cleared the first 2 wings of Ulduar, downed Hodir and are now trying Freya. So raiding is going fine for now.

All in all good times, I just wish I had more free time, RL keeping me very busy. For example I'm starting to get curious about other games, I feel I've been playing only WoW for too long now. Well maybe I'll cut down a bit on WoW, we'll see :)

Respeccing to Holy

Last night we were going for another evening of tries on the Assembly of Iron encounter in Ulduar. Problem was, both our Resto Shaman and Holy Priest were not present, we only had 2 paladins and myself as healers. Since the encounter has a lot of AoE damage, I decided to respec to Holy.

Actually I had been thinking of respeccing from Disc to Holy for a while now, both due to recent Disc nerfs but also because I used to be Holy before WotLK and I missed the AoE healing power. When I tried Holy out as a fresh level 80 in 5-man runs, it was pitifull - low healing output and catastrophic mana regen soon combined to drive me to Disc. However I had read that Holy scaled very well with gear.

Well, Holy certainly lived up to its promise in terms of HPS (Healing Per Second) output. According to Recount I was pushing over 3700 HPS on some of the tries last night, with ~35% overhealing. For 10-man gear, that's pretty awesome. However, I'm sad to say that while the mana situation is not as bad as I remember it from my initial level 80 impressions, it is still pretty bad. I'm guessing Blizzard optimized mana regen for 25-man groups where regen is naturally higher, leading to too-low regen in 10-man raids. I never had much trouble as a Disc priest, but that's not surprising - my main spell as a Disc is Flash Heal, which is very mana efficient as a Disc. Especially with mana returns due to shields.

Sure I still can optimize my gems and maybe enchants too, getting slightly more spirit. Also I need to look at glyphs, there may be glyphs more suitable for Holy priests compared to my current Disc-oriented ones. But overall I'm pretty bummed and not hopeful at all. It's all nice and well to have high-healing output, but when you are running low in the middle of the fight, having used Shadowfiend, pot and Hymn, people are going to start dropping pretty soon after :(

More Fishing and a Bit of Leveling

Solidfaith got to 350 fishing, only 100 points left till the cap :)

After I got to 350 I pushed on to 375, most of it done in Wintergrasp. WG fishing yields all of the fish needed for the Fish Feast, which I have been cooking and using on guild raids.

I also took some time to continue leveling Supersolid, my hunter. It is really amazing how easy it is to level a hunter. Sure if you want to level fast you need to put some thought into it, but if you really want to stick to the basics, just send in your pet, turn on autoshot, and read a book while the mob's health goes down :)

Of course I didn't really do it this way but the point is, it is possible. Even with my DK leveling was not that easy.

In any case part of the leveling was done killing Rhinos in Borean Tundra. Why kill Rhinos? I get XP for Supersolid, Rhino meat for Solidfaith to cook and use (+16 MP5 and +40 sta, not bad), Chilled meat for daily cooking quests as well as some cooking recipes, leather for Solidd to level up his leatherworking on and the occasional green item for Solidstate to DE. It's slow leveling for Supersolid but very good for most of my alts :)

First Ulduar Wing Cleared

My guild, in spite of having raid attendance problems and therefore a low number of raids over the last few weeks, managed to clear the first Ulduar wing.

Ignis was the last boss to die (last night) and the toughest fight, although I expect this will get easier as people get used to the fight, which is very dynamic.

Actually we had 1 person from outside the guild come and join us (one person had to leave mid-raid and we didn't have anyone in the guild online who could come). But I still consider this a guild take-down as he was DPS and I think if we had a DPSer online from the guild, we would also have managed to take Ignis down.

My guild's main problem now is lack of people. We have very few people who show up on a regular basis, the rest show up for raids only sporadically or not at all (socials). We have missed many raid nights or started late due to this and it is really frustrating for those people who do want to raid. We are thinking of a raid alliance as a solution but it's hard to find another serious guild willing to take 5-10 people and give them raid spots. What will the future hold? Only time will tell...

Fishing

I've been very busy on Solidfaith for the last week, partially because of the Argent Tournament dailies but also because of fishing.
I've always liked fishing in WoW, starting from when I started playing my first character, Solidstate. I can still remember trying out the small pools in Elwyn Forest and the first time I stood on the dock in Tanaris, fishing with the setting sun glowing in the sky and making the water all sparkly :)
I find fishing not just a relaxing alternative to grinding but also a very useful skill to have, giving me access to all the buff food I could use.
Still for a long time I resisted leveling fishing on Solidfaith. I figured having one character who is a max-level fisher is enough. The problem is, I haven't had the time to level Solidstate to 80, so his fishing oppurtunities were limited. The problem really started to bug me when I started getting closer to 450 cooking on Solidfaith. The only recipe currently at 450 cooking is the Fish Feast, which is a great raid buff food. However it requires fish which really require a character with a flying mount to get.

For this reason I decided to level fishing with Solidfaith. What really helped me decide were the recent changes to fishing, which made it much easier - and less boring - to level. Thanks to the fact that you can now fish anywhere, I could level my fishing while still sometimes getting useful fish. In fact I'm now sitting at around 310 fishing but thanks to +100 lures and the Kalu'ak +30 fishing pole I can fish succefully all the fish I need for the Fish Feast - made 5 of them last night :)

Another reason I decided to level my fishing was to be able to do the new fishing daily quests. I find the daily cooking and fishing daily quests to be a great source of a little gold, usually not much but fast to get and fun too. Also if you get lucky you can get a nice bonus, for example I got one time in the reward bag a gray item which I sold to a vendor for 100g :)

Leveling my fishing to 450 is not going to be fast but thanks for the new ability to fish anywhere I am not dreading the process nor am I in a hurry. I can take my time and simply enjoy a few minutes of fishing per day - exactly, I think, the way fishing is meant to be :)

Flame Leviathan (10 man) Fight Notes

First of all when you go into Ulduar you'll see a big area with vehicles around it. You need to talk to the big NPC in the middle in order to activate them.
You jump on and the fight starts when you go down to the big area where the Storm Pillars and trash mobs are. You need to attack the pillars and the big mobs, pretty much ignore the dwarfs (your bikes can take care of them). Make sure to focus-kill the big giants, they hit hard.

We cleared 2 of the 4 elemental towers before getting to the repair pads - not sure if it has to be done like that or you can just clear to the pads and repair even before taking down the towers. Keep your distance from the tower while killing the big guardian spider as the combination of spider and tower will take your vehicle's life down quickly.

The boss fight itself is covered well in guides such as wowwiki. However I will say what I think are the keys to the fight:

• The Siege Engine which is not kiting should stay close behind the boss and use interrupt when possible. The turret operator should spend most of the fight firing anti-air ability on the floating pyrite ammo as this is where the DPS is.
  
• Demolishers should keep distance from boss and pick up any pyrite ammo which drops to the ground and use it - as I said, this is where the DPS is.
• The 2 people who get catapulted onto boss should read up on that tactic and be aware of what they need to do. It is not hard to do but it is very important, otherwise boss becomes too fast to get away from.

A fun fight, very different from anything else I've done so far. Not hard once you do it properly. Should be interesting to do this in hard mode :)

Patch 3.1 Impressions

• I love the UI changes.
• The quest tracking is still primitive but any improvement is good.
  
• Wish I had a better computer to see the prettier graphics :(
• The fishing improvements (being able to fish anywhere at any level fishing) are great. You still won't be able to catch higher-level fish but at least it doesn't matter where you skill-up.
• The new fishing daily quest is lots of fun.
• Speaking of the new fishing quest, it sent me to Sholazar Basin. To get there from Dalaran on a taxi would usually take you in a wide arc, but it has changed - now it seems all flight paths are direct. Taxis are now much more useful :)
  
• The Argent Tournament is great :) I can't wait till I unlock more quests but already I can do 70g just from the few daily quests I have there, and with a fast flying mount doing them is relatively fast. I haven't tried doing a mounted duel yet but it seems like it would be fun :)
• The duel-spec... hmm mixed impressions. One DK in my guild had a serious problem with all of his talents resetting all the time and I had a problem with just 2 talents resetting for some reason. So slightly bugged, at least for DKs (has not happened for my priest). The new "put points before you apply" option is great to have. I wish however the talents trees and glyphs were all like the wowhead talent calculator instead of 4 seperate tabs, the current UI is a bit clunky. Of course just having the option to duel-spec is great, being able to do the daily quests on my priest in Shadowform is just such a huge improvement over trying to do them as healer. Kind of weird though that all your mana resets to zero when you change specs, I hope this is a bug...
• Ulduar... looks great, and we had fun with the vehicles and trying out the trash before the first boss. However we had 3/10 guild mates locked outside the instance and when we died no one could enter. The instance was just overloaded like crazy, after I rezzed and went back to the entrance the amount of people there trying to enter was just crazy. I really wish Blizzard had prepared better in terms of hardware, it was not nice being locked outside.
• There were 3 server crashes on the day of the patch. Very annoying and I hope not something that continues.
  

It has been pretty hectic, trying to respec Solidfaith and Solidstar with their 4 specs, get new gems and enchants, try out new content. I've certainly been kept busy :)

Overall, I very happy - having new content and new ways to do it is always good. There were a few bups on the road due to Blizzard hardware problems, problematic addons and bugs, but I think this patch deserves a rating of about... 8/10 :)

Priest Builds

Thinking about my priest builds, I've come up with this 55/16/0 Discipline build and this 13/0/58 Shadow spec. Will be interesting to test it :)

DK DPS Build

I need a DPS build for my DK, but I'm not sure what will be a good one. Maybe this Unholy based build: 11/0/60.
Doesn't really matter at the moment as I don't have the gear to do proper DPS yet :(

Oh and the new WoWHead talent calculator is really nice, especially the glyphs feature :)

DK Tanking Spec Post-3.1

Death Knight talent trees are taking a massive change after patch 3.1. For this reason and due to the new duel-spec system I need to take a look at the new talent trees and think about where to put my points and which spec to use for tanking.

Looking at the latest PTR talent trees on wowhead, it looks to me that neither full Frost nor full Unholy offer any compelling benefits in terms of tanking, compared to going for a mixed build. So after thinking about it for a while I came up with this 45/5/21 Blood-heavy build.

The 21 points in the Unholy tree are for Unholy Blight. That talent is something I've really fallen in love with and when building my new spec I decided I must have it.

As for the points in the Blood tree, I chose as many talents as possible which would allow me to either heal back up or reduce damage - in any case increasing my Time-To-Live as a tank. Of course straight mitigation would have been nicer but as a second option I think this isn't a bad spec at all for tanking. Of course only time will tell and the 3.1 live talent trees can still look different, so I'll just have to wait and see...

Sartharion + Shadron Down

Until now my guild has only taken down Sartharion + Tenebron. However we are planning to try for Sarth+2D and in preparation we went today to try and down Sartharion+Shadron, as Shadron is considered the harder add.

The fight was indeed hard, however after several wipes we managed to fine-tune our strategy and down Shadron, after which taking down Sartharion is a walk in the park :)

The final stratgy that worked for us was to have one DPS (a hunter) stay outside and DPS/Mis-Direct the spawning fire adds so that they left the 2 tank healers (myself and a paladin) alone. Meanwhile the rest of the group (including the 3rd healer) went inside the portal to down the disciple inside.

Our DPS wasn't very high and it took us time to down Shadron but really this fight was about focus and execution, high DPS would have made it easier but was not essential.

For our 2-drakes attempt next week we're planning to fight Tenebron + Vesperon. We probably won't be able to down Tenebron before Vesperon lands so fight could get a bit messy, but we'll see. I expect our main problem to be healing since keeping the tanks up is hard even with one drake up. With 2 up, I shudder at the damage spikes...

Well, we will cross that bridge when we get there. For now I'm happy with the accomplishment, a new Sartharion add taken down in one night and after only a few wipes. Left us enough time to go heroic UP with my DK tanking, I got revered with Wyrmrest Accord and got a nice new chest, huzzah :)

Slow going till Ulduar and "has WoW peaked?"

A combination of RL keeping me busy and slowdown in WoW have kept me from blogging much. My guild has slowed down raiding although we hope to start some OS+2 tries soon, if we get enough guild mates online and interested.
I've spent the time leveling up Faith's Hodir rep, doing the daily quests on every day that I could. Between that, the odd heroic run (still not exalted with Ebon Blade) and the occational raid I've managed to stay fully occupied without even the time to play on Solidstar or even level yet an alt /gasp :)

I spent one fun evening going with 4 guild mates and doing 9(!) BC heroic instances in one evening, for achievements. We had myself (healer), 2 plate-wearing DPS (warrior and paladin), and 2 hunters. We did manage to wipe here and there when people got a bit crazy with the pulls but otherwise it was no problem, didn't need a tank at all :)

Like everybody else I'm looking forward for patch 3.1 but I do have a feeling that WoW has peaked, barring Blizzard pulling a rabbit out of their hat and re-engaging current and new players. WoW is over 4 years old now, and long-time players, even dedicated ones, are starting I think to feel a little burned-out. Contending with annoying PuGs and lack of raids due to lack of interest and apathy brought about by the lack of new content vs. ease of exisiting raids has meant current level 80 players are losing motivation to login. Although Dalaran is as full as ever, there are many people just running around not doing anything.
Meanwhile new players have to deal with leveling 80 levels in a mostly empty world.

I don't know this for sure but looking at how long Ulduar is taking and considering the scope of the problem and that Ulduar is just a single instance, I would say 3.1 will help people for a while but will soon run out of steam, leaving raiders with the options of grinding Ulduar till the next instance is released or trying "hard mode" encounters which are just the same content made harder.

In my opinion while on the surface it seems Blizzard is still investing heavily in WoW it does seem like design and content is being added very slowely, maybe teams were taken to work on more "exciting" projects such as Diablo-3. Maybe Blizzard see WoW as a stable cash-cow without the need to invest as much in it as in a new game. Or maybe they have simply given up on WoW...

Personally I still enjoy WoW and will enjoy it for a long time to come (I hope). After a long day I'm not looking for too much hard-core action, either PvE or PvP. A bit of grinding, a bit of instances/raids, fishing, gathering, fun with friends. I'm not a Darkfall type :)

But if the world becomes too empty, if people leave in droves for other games, WoW will be a lot less enjoyable. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there...

Solidstar Dings 80, Turns Unholy Tank

Last night I finally dinged 80 on Solidstar, having taken my time about it since I played so much on my priest :)

I did it while still questing in Zul'Drak and in fact Solidstar is close to the 100 quests achievement there. Unlike my priest who found it difficult in Zul'Drak, none of the trolls there could even slow down Solidstar, who with his blood spec had zero downtime while questing and if wearing tanking gear could even solo 3-man quests (rather easily I might add). I'm glad I stuck to this area this time instead of jumping ship for the Storm Peaks like my priest, it let me complete some interesting quest lines involving troll gods.

I think that (assuming I have the time) even though I am now 80 I will continue questing with Solidstar, as I am sure it will be still easy even though he is no longer specced blood. The reasons are as you might imagine, it is good gold and it is more interesting than grinding daily quests :)

As for my level 80 spec, I will miss being a DPS but I missed tanking too, I always had a lot of fun being a tank on my druid and I am looking forward to it on my DK. I chose an unholy 7/11/53 spec which is not a "classic" Frost tanking spec because frankly I tried out frost tanking while I was leveling and it was very boring and I hope unholy will be more exciting and fun.

I am a bit worried about mitigation, but I have seen a DK tank all through Naxxramas so hopefully it will work out. Of course I will have to play around with the spec due to patch 3.1.0 but I'll cross that bridge when I get there :)

Enchanters on Strike

Pugnacious Priest has an interesting post up about Enchanters and DE (Dis-Enchanting) BoP drops from 5-man runs. The question is, should enchanters stop doing DE for free (or at all) in 5-man runs? The usual example given is that miners/herbalists/skinners don't share items they loot inside an instance run.

For the first 2-3 years my main has been my mage and one of his professions is Enchanting so this is an issue I can relate to from the enchanters' side. I remember how hard/costly it was to level my enchanting and how many disappointing PuGs I was in where I DE items and didn't even win the roll on the shards - as the person providing the ability to get the shards, this was annoying.

But I think the idea to stop doing a DE service in PuG runs is not the solution. To explain why, I will first quote a comment made on the above blog:

I don’t get this campaign. Based purely on probability, enchanters are going to get the same number of shards for themselves either way.

True. But if the "campaign" catches on, there will be less shards on the AH and more people needing to buy shards (since a lot more stuff that would have been sharded gets vendored). This will drive up the cost of shards on the AH.

On the one hand this will be good for enchanters who have enough shards that they are able to sell the surplus on the AH for a bigger profit.

But in my eyes most people, including many enchanters, will lose out from this when all is said and done. Taking a large number of possible shards out of the economy will make it harder to enchant yourself, your guild mates and your friends (with the exception of hard-core raiders and people adept at making gold). I just don't see this as a good thing. So really, stopping DE BoP blues in 5-man runs will help the "rich" and hurt the "poor" and this is true for both Enchanters and other people.

Enchanting is not a gathering profession and should not be compared to one. However it is also unique as a crafting profession - except tailoring which has the same problem - in that there is no gathering profession directly related to it. This is why enchanting and tailoring are so often taken together.

As for those claiming Enchanting is a money sink - this is also true for other crafting professions, although it depends on the amount of time and effort one is willing to put into it. I've heard of people making lots of money from enchants - but they spent a lot of time on trade channels for that. To some extent enchanting should be less of a money sink these days with scrolls available to recoup some of the cost from doing enchants just for leveling up.

One possible solution would be to make Enchanting more attractive by beefing up the benefits from being an enchanter. E.G. better self-enchants, or a skill so that enchants which enchanters do an enchant on their own (soulbound) gear have a lower cost of mats compared to enchant done on scroll or in trade window.

But I think a better solution would actually be to take a look at the sister profession I mentioned, tailoring. Tailors have no lack of mats since tailoring mats drop from all mobs and so are readily available for farming. Furthermore being a tailor gives you an edge when farming cloth in WotLK as you get more cloth drops.

So what I think is, enchanters should get en edge where if they farm mobs they get a higher chance at getting green items and the DE table for green items should be changed to allow a greater chance for dream shards and even higher-level shards. This would make leveling enchanting much easier, provide enchanters with the ability to farm their own mats and solve the original problem with DE BoP drops - since with these changes enchanters will no longer be as pressed for shards, at least not for themselves.

Heroic Nexus Achievements

Tonight some guild mates were asking for a healer for heroic Nexus while I was playing on Solidstar (who is level 77 BTW and now can fly again - forgot to post about that :)). So I said "sure" and logged Solidfaith.

When we started the tank asked if we would mind doing achievements and since none of us minded we went for it :)
First up was Split Personality, we simply bunched up the images and AoE'd them down so that they died together. We did this both twice and easily got the achievement. I was a bit worried a couple of times when the time stop prevented me from healing the tank when he was low on health but we pulled through.
Next up was Chaos Theory, this was significantly harder. We basically followed the tactic on the wowhead comments and kited the boss, but there must be something not mentioned there because in all of our attempts we were swamped by adds. Finally after several wipes we got the kiting speed just right or something and managed to get the boss down before the damage got too much.
Finally was Intense Cold, I already had this from a previous Nexus run and for the others it did not prove difficult to get - just keep jumping. I had to be quick on the dispelling of the Crystal Chains but otherwise an easy fight and the others got this one easily.

Till now I've never been a big fan of achievements, it seemed to me to be a system for making you jump through hoops and artificially making content harder than it was.
Well this is still true in my opinion and I still don't think I'll actively go chase achievements for their own sake.
However, heroics lately have been getting very easy when running with guild mates due to our much better gear, and the challange of doing these achievements, especially Chaos Theory, added a lot of spice and fun. Suddendly we were wiping, discussing tactics, laughing and happy when we managed to get a boss down - things I haven't done in a long time in a heroic run :) So it felt good and we I get a good guild group together for another heroic instance I might actually suggest going after achievements, you know, for challange and fun... :)

OS+1D

Last evening I went to OS with my guild in order to try Sartharion with one drake up. The last time my guild managed to do OS+1, I was not in the raid and they had a tank from outside the guild tank for them.
This time it was an all guild run and after a few learning wipes we managed to do it and I got the achievement :)

At first we had some tries where we tried to clear the whelps from each portal before DPS-ing the mini-boss or even go into the portal to kill eggs, but those tactics didn't work well. Inside the portal the eggs are spread out so it is hard to get all or even most of them down in time. Outside the portal, the OT had his hands full with the mini-boss and the whelps proved to be a bit of the problem to take down - hunters would shoot only to get agro and get a face full of whelps, therefore being forced to melee. We had a mage who died several times when he tried to AoE and go agro. Whelp agro on clothy = dead clothy :)

The way which finally worked for us was to nuke the mini-boss as fast as possible, before the whelps became too much. We wiped once when DPS was a bit slow and the OT healer didn't manage to keep him up but the second time we tried we managed, including a quick heal from me on the OT (I was MT healing). Once the boss was down the tank could concentrace on the keeping agro on the whelps (without dying from the combined DPS of too many whelps + mini-boss) while the DPS were free to AoE them down.

Of course once the mini-boss and whelps were down the fight becomes trivial and we quickly got Sartharion down as well, to the sound of much cheering :)
I even got lucky and won the 22 slot bag - pretty soon everyone in the guild will have one :)

From a healing standpoint, our Shammie healer had his hands full healing the party (they were taking quite a lot of damage) as well as helping with the OT, while trying not to die to the whelps and fire adds. I think his job was the hardest, I certainly didn't feel very strained in healing the MT although I had to be on my toes - either because he is a DK or just because of the nature of the fight, damage on him was pretty spiky and his life could quickly go down if I missed a heal (e.g. when I tried to help with the OT).

As a group we still need to practise the fight, sometimes people still get cought in the fire walls. Once we do the current mini-boss a few more times we'll be ready to try out a harder mini-boss or even OS+2 which will be really hard :)

Solidfaith, Champion of the Frozen Wastes

Last evening my guild downed Malygos again and this time I was there. Finally I can remove that silly Jenkins title and use the much better Champion of the Frozen Wastes one :)

OS+3D

Wow, I haven't blogged in a long time have I? :)

Well TBH nothing much has been going on. I've slowed down leveling Solidstar and instead have been busy doing heroics and daily quests with Solidfaith in order to get his reputation with the various factions us. It's a slow process and there's nothing much to tell about. I usually do the heroics with a paladin tank from my guild who is a really good player - his character on our guild is actually an alt of his. His main is a druid tank on one of the best 25man guilds on our server, one of the (very) few who have managed to down Sartharion-25 with 3 drakes up. More on that in a bit...

On the guild front things have also been slow. Now that we've cleared the content I can't really post about new boss kills :) We are still suffering from a tank shortage - our remaining tanks are good enough for Naxx but not really up to Sar+1D. So we're not doing much except re-clearing Naxx every week. This is good for gearing up (Solidfaith now has the complete T7 outfit) but is a bit boring.

Now to the subject line of this post and the reason I am writing today:
Last evening I was not raiding (got in a bit late and the guild had the 3 healers they needed) when I got a whisper from my friend's main, the druid I wrote about above. It seems he was organizing a PuG to go do OS+3d and wanted me to come heal.
Now, the very idea of a doing a raid in a PuG is usually something I avoid like the plague and the thought of even trying to do the hardest raid in the game in a PuG mights seem laughable. Only in this case my friend was bringing in people from some of the best raiding guilds in the server (I was by far the least geared and experienced raider there). Basically he had a few friends here and there, they looked up people from their own guilds and friends list and pretty soon we had a run going.

Considering how hard OS+3 is it is not amazing we wiped and did not manage eventually do to it. What is amazing is how long the raid lasted and how pro all the people were about it. We must have been in there for 3 hours straight and there was not a single AFK. Wipe after wipe everybody would simply release, run back in, quickly get health and mana up and be ready. I'm sure we did easily over 20 attempts, and the repair bill for even cloth wearers like myself was over 150g easily. People owned up to mistakes, tempers did not flare up and everyone was focused on getting the fight done.

That raid, for all the wipes and the fact that we didn't manage to do what we set out, was one of the most intensive and fun nights I have had in a long time in WoW. I'm not sure I'm up for that 4 times a week - but as a one time deal it was pretty sweet :)

Solidstar Dings 74, Malygos Down

So Solidstar dinged 74 a few days ago, following a few quests in Dragonblight.

Leveling as blood vs. frost feels significantly easier and since I've learned the trick to use Dancing Rune Weapon and follow it up with Death & Decay I can down groups of mobs insanely fast as 2x(D&D) on mobs takes down their health like you wouldn't believe :)

Malygos 10-man has been downed by my guild, again I missed the raid :( But I'm happy for the guild and really it was only a matter of time as we were taking him down to below 10% on a regular basis so it was really only a question of getting slightly faster on phases 1+2 and doing the tactic of phase 3 correctly, all of which are just a matter of gear+practise.

Now that my guild has cleared all the 10-man content all that remains is to do the harder versions of OS+2/3 and gear up in preparation of patch 3.1.

Solidstar Dings 73, Sarth+1D Down

Well it's been an interesting week. Solidstar has dinged 73, still in Borean Tundra. I've actually gotten the achievement for doing N-quests there (can't post link atm :( ) so I'm done with BT - time to move to Dragonblight. I'm still leveling Frost and it's not bad, can kill mobs and my damage-in vs. self-healing from Death Strike ratio is low enough so that I don't have downtime (or rarely do).

However it's boring and the few PuGs I've done were not much fun, so I've decided to go back to my favourite which is full blood. This should help me level a bit faster :)

In guild news, my guild downed Sartharion with 1 drake up. This is big news and a hard achievement for a 10 man raiding guild and I've very proud of the guild for pulling this off. I was not in the raid that day - the cost of having to get only 10 people together for a raid is that there are always a few spare left out. Since I had been raiding a lot and there were 4 healers online I passed on my spot.

However the MT in that fight was a druid from one of the best 25-man raiding guilds on the server, who came to help as his alt is in our guild. Without him I am not sure the guild would have managed, and in addition we are losing our paladin MT in 2 weeks for a period of 2.5 months as he is going for an extended trip in South America. That will leave us with no real good MT, as our current other tanks are either not as geared, not as good/experianced players or currently can't play (we have a druid tank with a dislocated shoulder :( ). We need a good tank quickly...

Hopefully our tank troubles will be solved and we'll keep the positive momentum we got from downing Sarth+1D. Keeping fingers crossed :)