This is a little long time coming, but we downed Sarth + 3D last Thursday for the first time, and repeated that in less than an hour yesterday (although we did have about 4-5 “false start” wipes). With that, I am going to presume we have got it all down pat, and 3dSarth is officially on farm.

Firstly, I would just like to say that was one of the “smartest” healing I have ever done. not that nothing else requires strats and awareness (lady Vashj was a huge test of my patience, awareness and my guild’s love for me lol). It’s just between the first time I joined wow 2 years ago, till the day I left spirestone, I have been in constant company of more experienced and more loving/caring gamers that I have played with for the last… 6 years. What that means then, is that  when I am doing stupid things, they are not as open with me than, say, perfect strangers. While i thought i did most things fine, I had say I was more than likely carried through half of the raids I was in – which gave me experience, definitely, but I was somewhat of a liability for the most part.

that’s not to say that my current guild is brutally harsh. For some odd reason last week, when we did down 3dSarth, I was making simple stupid mistakes: Lava waves, void zones, stuff that the week and weeks before I managed to avoid successfuly in failed attempts, I was doing it all. They realised I was possibly sick/tired/distracted, and just soul stoned me instead without a nasty word.

Last night was beautiful. except for the wipes, I did all the avoiding shit well. Not a single void zone or lava wave – and it felt good. I was on raid heals and it felt like everything snapped into place after my stupids last week.

- help MT heals when I am near MT

- help Add-tank heals when he runs next to me – or when he starts dropping like a rock (lots of DC on one of the healers)

- Help Drake Tank heals

- Keep all the mages up

- moving away from louds/mass mobs/mass avatars so I can see if there’s a void zone near me at all.

What I did learn while learning these fights was that progression, when it does happen, can kill guilds. In their frustrations at the wipes, the constant mistakes that sometimes happen, the learning progress itself, we have lost quite a few. Some dramatically, some in a quiet manner.

The original main tank disappeared suddenly, and so we had to run Naxx a few times to gear up the new tanks (not to mention a few heroics, a few normal raids). then suddenly no tanks, not even alts, wanted to turn up – and there goes that plan. we had to recruit new ones.

We lost a druid healer, who decided that all the new recruits must be scrubs since apparently some “scrub guilds” have already got it on farm (never mind the internal drama that caused the guild to have to recruit new people in the first place) – and proceeded to join a guild that had 3dSarth on farm – then spamming the titles at everyone in the guild.

I fear for Ulduar, but I will embrace it too – challenges are good, I just hope no one else goes crazy

With Wotlk, Inner Fire has increase in usefulness in providing more spellpower rather than just defense. Where I used to only think about it in pvp (not that it had help much, imo, i was still squishy), now I have to remember to re-buff it every now and then.

With its re-buff timer a little off from the other buffs though, 3.0.9 sought to change it to a 30 mins re-buff timer, which is awesome. I have a tendency to forget amidst all the hustle and bustle of raiding, and I tend to forget to re-buff it.

3.1 changes also sounds awesome:

1) i miss my divine spirit. I know, I know, I have barely cracked my mana pool recently, except doing 10 man Saphiron, still… Would like to play with divine spirit.

2) While i am not going to spec into Disc any time soon, the new power word: barrier sounds like a good “partner” with the heals going on.

3) Improved AoE Heals: Increments to heals, the change to the “group-only heals” is definitely an improvement. It seems to indicate Ulduar is going to be hard on, not just the mana, the raid group as a whole. expect more AoE damages? ya!!!!! (or maybe, they want to stop the QQ and expect us to save the idiots who are dying to themselves.)

Yeah, I can’t wait!!!!

Guild dramas are never good for the guild. some pull through unscath, some pull through with scars – and some just plain fall apart.

When I first joined Thaurissan, it was to play with friends. The unfortunate part of insisting on playing with friends is that we might just not have enough friends who wants to play wow, who are playing wow, who wants to transfer or who even cared to log on for anything. It seemed, with friends, people have a lower tendency to fulfill their responsibilities that normal people would fulfill because “it’s ok, we are friends, we shouldn’t be fighting over a computer game”.

Therefore, things like punctuality, caring to gear up, read up on strats so as not to waste time etc – completely flew out of the window. There were nights when 8p.m raid starts ended up starting at 10, and 10p.m starts almost at 12 midnight. Sometimes, clearing a single wing or less took 3 hours or more. As someone who goes to work at 8.30, i have to be getting up at 7a.m. and those timings soon began to hurt my real life.

Especially because I am no early bird.

Thereafter, raids soon stop happening altogether, because people did not feel like they owe anyone the responsibility to mention that they can not turn up. So, the remaining of the guild start panning out options we can all take, and started looking at a merger. The good part of the merger is more people to fill raids, and therefore possibly hitting a 25 man raid instead of just 10 man (and even then still flailing for more people). One of the guys’ brother and cousin is a part of the other guild too.

The bad part was the times they could raid, so we decided that could be kinked out and moved.

If first impressions could be a good starting point, there never was a better one than how one of the officers started off with me. In leading a discussion (albeit half jokingly), we started discussing how big boobs were a health hazard altogether. I was told to stop it as “it is outraging the modesty of women” and there were women/children in the guild. It reeked of pretentious heroism and sexism, so i pushed it and asked who are the women and children in the guild – but no one could answer to my queries.

Then we started discussing the kinks and flaws of their raid grouping, which left one of the two 10-man groups under-staffed. They were hard, and pushy, and just pure didn’t care as long as we fulfilled their needs. So I popped into ventrilo and asked a few questions – and suddenly it was, “are you a female?” “don’t worry we can fix it”. and someone swore, and it was “don’t swear please, we have ladies in the guild.”

remember i mentioned pretentious heroism and sexism – this began to reek further of fat stupids with one hand on the mouse and the other on their cock. Giving another day to see what they made of the “we will fix it”, I noticed it only went to further under-staff us or replace it with more undergeared people – so I left.

I maybe female, but I know how raid make-ups are meant to look, thank you very much. I adore my friends, but not enough to tolerate people telling me what I should say, read or hear. Women swear too, just walk out of your hole in the ground more often, and you will find them.

I have never given 2 hoots about being a female gamer. i think it’s overrated at how people laud and laud and go mad about female gamers. we exist, period.

That all said and done, I also really dislike it when people assume we don’t want to read/see/hear things.  all the fuckery about “no vulgarities, we have ladies here.” or “stop talking about boobs, we have ladies here” – is utter wannabe bullshit. The way i talked about it, we were talking about how big boobs equate health hazards. in no way does that outrage anyone’s modesty (According to one guy in guild). pretentious heroism gets you nowhere.

anyways. I failed my first step into heroic naxx, and failed patchwerk healing. in my defense, i will just say that the dpsers’ health fell below 30%. my automatic healing thoughts were, if there’s a fuckup, i have a dead dps. I wasn’t assigned any healing tasks either… but i know i have always been asked to heal the ot and according to strats, i am meant to heal only tanks…

still instincts took over, and the first guy that died wouldn’t stop QQ-ing.

i am just going to sit and farm reps in h vh now.

pooey.

This sounds terribly evil but hey…..

we had to pug almost half the raid the other day as many members couldn’t turn up. infact, my new guild is so small, it was incredibly hard to maintain an “8-man”, much less hope a 10 man would turn up. At the end of the day, i think it’s quite reward and interesting, given that we are meant to learn anyways – to play together, to know each other’s quirks and obviously the boss encounters.

My guild master is quite… a casual person. so he doesn’t armory the pugs he invite. We hit the jackpot of lulz, and procured a hunter who claims he got hacked, and as such has no trinkets whatsoever. However, he still has his epic druid stave… and everything else on him.

what made him suck wasn’t just the lack of gear. it was sitting at the back, while doing bosses, and noticing him just sending his pet out to dps while he sits and stares into the sky. At Maexxna, since we had a huge lack of ranged dps, we put him on “un-webbing” duties. The very first webbed person died, as he was just standing there, as usual, watching his pet dps the boss.

of course, what became more obvious later on was how this was most probably his first time in naxxramus. he didn’t know where to go, nor what to do. this was something that we had to find out from painful experiences rather than hearing it from him.

so let it be said again, i know i am beating quite a dead horse, but if you are a fresh 80, and if you haven’t played this game before – hell if you just recently ebayed the account, do everyone a favour and at least run normal heroics.

BAKA DESU!!!

Guess I got my wish, x 2!

Merry Christmas and happy new year (all belated)!! everyone!

I finally managed to ding 80, despite all my delays, distractions and sight-seeing. all this was done without too much questing into Zul’Drak. Essentially, I dinged with all of Dragonblight, Howling Fjord, 90% of Borean Tundra and like 30% of Grizzly Hills quests done.

Along the way, with some help, I have been power-levelling my tailoring, so that when I hit 80, I can either be immediately decked in moonshroud robe and gloves, or just have 1 last click. Moonshroud “set” takes approximately 20 days to complete, and that’s assuming that you are mooncloth spec. That didn’t quite happeened anyways.

Holy Talents for Raiding

Firstly, I am a cheap jerk. The talent tree i proposed for myself didn’t quite work out, at least not in many people’s opinions. Within the new guild’s runs, I have actually managed to be the cause of several wipes on heroics, simply because:

1. I suck at moving heals
2. I couldn’t heal on time
3. Or, I could heal on time and heal quickly, but the cooldowns were slower than needed.

just basically, the heals were not sufficient or on time. Frankly, I didn’t know if it was me or other people, because the tank himself has never tanked before Wotlk. he was a warlock. therefore, it could have easily been a mish mash of me learning heroic fights, unable to keep up with the heals and him needed to learn tanking and re-speccing.

Furthermore, a change of groups, with me running heroics through with a different tank did seem to work just fine.

after a few play arounds though, i have had enough. I couldn’t afford to maintain my repairs costs, and perhaps having to pay for others’ repairs since they were guildies and i seriously am beginnign to think that’s my fault. So I switched to the 14/57 recommendation and am sitting it out to test it. Haven’t been able to test it much yet though, i think the wipes scared people off :p

intercession to show off my epic carpet

Gearing for raids

Fortunately, or unfortunately, my guild wanted to dip their hands straight into raiding the moment i dinged 80. While i have managed to get my hands on a moonshroud set, eventually, it is nothing like the mooncloth set in its time and era.  It doesn’t cover my shoulders, for one, and there’s definitely no other matching head/pants set to cover me till another tier up.

The easiest way to go about gearing myself at least partially towards naxx (since most upgrades will definitely come from naxx itself) was to actually grind heroics and rep. Rep gear, while not as awesome as the TBC variations, can still hold their own at least till that wonderous Staff of Draconic Combat decides to stop evading the rest of the world.

While we are on the gearing topic though, I just thought I should mention this:

Haste rating is important!!!! Well, to a certain extent, but definitely something to be aware of.  as to why, I am unable to fully describe it yet. it just seems that it’s better to be able to cast quickly, especially with bosses that needs “moving about” as part of your strategy, than to have a deep fried healer.

While i was a tool and vendored a good quest reward, Wyrmrest accord gives a good enough (sans spirit) one handed weapon with haste rating - Gavel of the Brewing Storm. While, on it’s own, it it’s not very statistically delicious, compared to malygos’ favor, the haste rating and the crit rating, plus the additional spellpower (and throw in a good off hand into that all) will somewhat make up for the sadness. :p

Deathchill cloak is currently a bitch to obtain just yet.

that’s it for now!

Ok so, I have been slack. Sorry. I have been enjoying myself with WOTLK and a couple of RL dramas that I just didn’t even think to update anything – anywhere. Add to my ISP woes (which has been there ever since what, June and still remains unresolved), I have a right!

Firstly, I have switched servers on one of my 3 main priests. With the change in jobs, I would have virtually no time to play as per American raid times. The question was which server? I really didn’t know. In the end, I chose to join a server where a couple of real life friends are, and crossed my fingers for the best.

I guess I will always remain a hordie – draenei was just so not me that I couldn’t get myself going.

That all said though, I recognised some people may wonder why I have that many priests – and all heading towards the holy tree (or already are there). Well, nerfed or otherwise, I have always been a healer through games. I find that hard to change now, and swatting flies with swords (or other weapons) just don’t interest me. I find it extremely challenging to be a healer, and now that we all can’t just easily sit back as much anymore (according to other souls), I really welcome it.

With WOTLK, there’s alot of new things to be seen and experienced. One of the biggest things that affected me as a priest the most were:

• The change in Spirit vs mp5: I believe the change hasn’t affected much other healing classes (healadins are still screwed), however the benefits in Spirit now pretty much made mp5 useless.
• Change in racials/uniqueness: Personally, I really didn’t care much for the uniqueness of each race. Call me stupid or what not, this change didn’t hit me hard enough to miss anything. rather, I am glad to have obtained Hymn of Hope, different as it maybe from when I first used it as a Draenei.
• New Talent Trees: This one was the biggest confusion of my life, for many reasons. As some theorycrafting has suggested – here, here and here and more – having a 14/57/0 talent tree is probably the best raid healing spec to go. The thing is, while i respect some of their opinions, especially elitist jerks, I can’t fathom the need to chuck 57 points into holy and only 14 into discipline.Futhermore, while I understand there’s a change now in tanks’ threat generation, I am still not confident enough to lose silent resolve entirely. In these 2 days that I have been playing with groups in easy instances, the amount of threat generated by me is weirdly enormous. So I’m settling on this talent tree until I can see what raiding looks like. and of course, for the mental agility. then again, the tanks I have been with, bar one, have been full of fail.
• Prayer of Mending now generates threat. Previously, one of my ways of “helping” the tank build threat was to throw PoM up and then fade so as to lessen my threat. Looks like that aid just went out of the window.
• Spellpower now covers both bonus spell damages and bonus heals. The only bad thing I can think of is idiots who would try and snatch an “obviously for heals” gear for themselves with some really reasonable excuse.

I know huh, “welcome to WOTLK, Ani, like a whole month later”.

Funny thing is, I have stopped missing flying around by myself just. For the endless questions though, here’s the info:

You can’t fly in Northrend until you are 77 and have acquired Cold Weather Flying, at a wonderful cost of 1000 gold. The trainer is in Dalaran, right opposite the FP. I can’t wait to get my Flying Carpet though.

Levelling wise, as you have noticed, I am incredibly slow. RL shit aside, I just felt crap when I levelled with my main priest. Life can be so sad, you know, when you are friendless in the digital world. not.

Anyways, based on 2 different levelling scenarios and perspectives, I have come to the conclusion that:

• Borean Tundra is best done with friends. While there are just “few” (i guess people would debate that) group quests, the area is huge and quests require you to travel the whole distance, with plenty of quests and lots of aggro mobs every step of the way waiting to whale on you. and when I say friends, I don’t mean go pick up a random that will annoy the shit out of you in 5 minutes.it is not a very friendly environment with shitty people.
• Howling Fjord, while looking similar in size, has more “compact” quests. Quests don’t require you to travel too far from sources and are more easily managed, sans the stupid The Giants’ Run quest, which makes me want to bite whoever thought that quest line up – and it’s not because it makes you travel either.These quests are, in my humble opinion, more solo friendly.

Quest rewards wise, both sides of the new continent has something to offer in terms of gear. XP wise, Borean Tundra seems to offer more at the end of it (considering all 150 quests!!!) than Howling Fjord does. When I first did Howling Fjord, starting at 70, I walked into Dragon Blight at about 71.5, as compared to my second time where I started at 68, and enter Dragon Blight at about 72.

However, the better advice is, do both sides. For one, when you enter Dragon Blight, you would have a slight edge over the mobs. it’s only just a little bit, it is still worth it though.

Fun quests of note: The toy truck quest in Borean: Plains of Nasam and the quest where you insult a mob’s mother: Adding injury to Insult.

Let me just end this with a couple of pugging stories:

Priest: LF1m, Heroic Utgarde Keep!!!! PST!!!

Paladin, lvl 72: Can you wait?

Priest: (repeating request)

Paladin: CAN YOU WAIT?!?!

Priest: (repeat)

Paladin: Wait! and I will come tank for you!

Priest: ???

Paladin: Wait for me to level! and I will come tank for you!

*facepalm*

I ran Old Kingdom with my guild and a pugged Frost DK for a tank. Gear wise, the tank isn’t too bad. However, he can’t seem to keep threat, and insists he’s no AoE tank. Fair enough, some people just can’t the heat. However, he deemed it necessary to tell us, a group consisting of lvl 78 shaman and lvl 76 rogue, how to do each and every boss.

It was a relief to finally finish Old Kingdom, until 2 intances later, we met up again with the same Frost DK.

Who promptly decided to teach us every boss again.

so yes, i got very bored.

Then Wotlk appeared! Well, ok, so I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know when. and even when i knew when it was going to be, I wasn’t too excited enough to go find out more about it. So when I pre-ordered and grabbed my copy of WOTLK, i seriously had no idea what I was in for.

The first couple of days was painful, mostly because my ISP chucked a shit for some reason, and I have been constantly lagging myself out of existence. Secondly, I wanted to explore. Combine that with shitty internet, I definitely didn’t get far in terms of exploration, kept dying to mobs I didn’t see and then walking the distance to my corpse. Questing was on equal footing in terms of painfulness.

This still hasn’t been resolved by the way, I have just been wandering and levelling in absolute patience.

However, what I have seen so far is absolutely gorgeous. The graphics has been getting better. It’s nowhere near uber realistic, but one can notice the wonderful glow on the gears now, and some of the scenaries are quite picturesque.

Quests are obvious grinds, kill 30 of these, 15 of that, 13 of that… and so on. it didn’t make it less interesting though. The story line, while obviously a part of Warcraft 3, was refreshing to read through as if you were one of them (duh! thus rpg, right?!?)

Talents wise, for levelling, I have switched to shadow purely because of the lagging out episodes. At least I know my dots and mindflay would last, and I have a higher chance of surviving an encounter. So far, I have even deliberately trained myself and have won versus like 4-5 mobs, and it has made things a hell lot faster and challenging (i died at 10 mobs). in the event of lagging out, I did survived as expected (phew!)

p.s sorry about the shitty quality of the thumbs, i haven’t figured out how to mess around with wordpress.com yet.

moving along…

Content wise, I think blizzard did a great job. The music is a lot better than the previous 2 that they have released. There is also a collection out there known as Music of warcraft or something, saw it at EBgames. I haven’t considered buying it yet, as I wasn’t quite a fan of their previous choice of game music… however, the current lot of music is definitely worth paying the extra for.

Quests, races, towns and storyline wise, in a short liner, it has been awesome. I am not 80 yet, of course, but I am also taking the time out to try out everything. The vastness of the maps, the way all the quest links in and all, it’s pretty amazing. It’s virtually like a mini-mmorpg has been launch just from the size of northrend itself.

There are two starting points for both races: Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. Personally, I have felt that Howling Fjord is just a little overcrowded. After visiting Borean Tundra though, I kind of understood why. The quests at Borean Tundra seems to span a bigger area, and with a faster respawn rate of the quest mobs. Despite the fact that I do enjoy getting zerged by mobs, I am afraid there’s only so much I could have handled.

The fun-er quests are in Borean Tundra though. There’s one quest where you get to kill pigs and ride kodos around within 10 minutes. Yet another where you get to ride a truck, round up mobs and blast them into pieces. If you pick up the right “injured friends”, you can drive faster or get stuff done to mobs to make the quest easier.

One thing I did dislike is the fact that I couldn’t fly in Northrend. After all that was done towards learning to fly and so on, the one thing i couldn’t do was fly?!?!

Also, and this really isn’t the fault of blizzard’s i guess, my mods are either broken, have not been updated, or purely just not friendly with me anymore. I ended up messing it around a little and have to settle for the above set up. it’s not too bad for now, but things might have to change if i intend to raid.

which brings to question, should i care to move to an oceanic server then? with a change in jobs, that’s probably the best for me. and if so, perhaps i should switch my draenei to being my main? she is, after all, in a friendless server.

Carebears can hurt

So we finally got a group together for Slabs, when Jin decided that he had to do his mongoose enchant right THERE AND THEN!!!! If not, he wouldn’t go into Slabs. Stevo, my friend, didn’t wanted to do it without him, particularly since we have all waited a while. However, Jin didn’t have the mats… as to why he decided he had to do his enchantment right there and then when he had no mats was beyond me.

Anyways, I got tired of his bratty whinings, and tired of having to “wait for him”. So I offered to lend him the mats just so we can all move on, and I can see Stevo ding. And then I went to bed without so much as a second thought.

A week later, I still hadn’t gotten some form of “hi this is how i will repay you” from Jin, so I asked Stevo what’s the go on that since they were mates and etc. Then I got the bomb. Jin reckons that because I didn’t discuss any form of payment plan with him, that it was a GIFT from me to him. To discuss any payment plans now would be unfair to him, so as such, he will not negotiate anything of that sort.

So ok, I was stupid to hand over mats like that without talking about how it was to be repaid. It didn’t mean I was gifting someone I didn’t know.

Now, a whole year along, Stevo’s quit the game. He’s kindly offered some stuff to me. Jin suddenly appeared from distant planet, and just pretty much TOLD ME to farm some gold for him, so he can buy his new goggles.

ehm.

how about no? are you fucking stupid?