Cleaning up

Yesterday I did some cleaning on my long-term quest log, finally returning the Eye of Eternity - head of Malygos to the Wyrmrest Temple.

I also got lucky and looted the Onyxia head (again, LOL), and returned it to...

Guild drama ftw.. NOT

If there's something I've got little patience for, is when a guild starts to stress.
We had an imba healer, pushing us for Heroic modes. Unfortunately, many of the guildies are casual, casual enough to ignore TOC 10 HC request because of a daily HC...
Well, the healer is gone now, and as it's the 2nd time he leaves, he won't be back.
That means TOC 10 HC with leftover guild healers is out of the question, now, and probably forever.
TOC 25 is also a serious doubt, since in order to coordinate 25 ppl, a lot of effort is required, and I don't see enough motivation.
And then, part of the guild is pissed off for being left behind, another part is pissed off because of lack of motivation of others, others dont understand what's going on, others are bored, afk, or don't care. Officers and lesser fish alike.

We haven't finished Ulduar, and what remains as a guild is a weekly TOC10 normal and a few heroics, may be an Ony 10. Not fun. At all.

So..

1 - I start PVP Arenas with a fellow mage, for real, and stall PVE.
2 - I do as others, and start lvling alts to 80 (2 at 75, 2 at 72 atm)
3 - I quit guild and move to a pro guild. Disadvante ? Nearly daily raids with horny epics teenager freaks. Blarrgh.
4 - Do nothing and wait, while I continue to push for long run achievs like mount, 40 exalted, etc.
2 - I pause/quit WoW

Insomnia is insane for killing

Tonight I got a great achievement, after getting up with insomnia at 4AM. No battlegrounds running... oh wait, Warsong Gulch. Ok, joined. It starts... and wow, some imba combat. May be the chinese play at this hour, I have no idea.
What I know is that I started to shoot, hit, conflagrate, crit...and suddenly I had over 15 kills.

And then I went for the Wrecking Ball.



Damn flag carrier didnt do as I requested, ie, wait a bit for my 20, but still I outraced him and killed my last 3 while he carried it.

A great one. GZ me !

Always learning....

Just when I thought I knew it all, I learned a new trick. It's good to feel like a noob, at least there's still something to be discovered in this silly game.

The thing is, 99% of all destro warlocks will use imp, and during buff times, they will have their imp phased out, and set to auto-cast, since that's the default behaviour.

However, that will not allow raid buffs to buff the pet. It only occurs with Imp, since all other pets have no Phase Shift. Sure, we all know that. So...

Long story short, I now know how a warlock I saw some months ago had nearly the same gear, but was having his imp dps boosted. It was the bloody raid buffing ! MOTW, BOK, etc, does make a difference.

Oh well, living and learning.. having the humility to accept ones noobness is always good.

Btw, this was found while searching a way for my Imp to escape fire death in TOC 10 HC. I know some solutions now, like (1) telling it to stay near the melee (it will be cast-stomped but will get no fire debuff so it'll live on), (2) having it staying at the entrance and then moving to the farthest position to cast, (3) having it stay near a wall, far away from other players.

I also saw some tips about manual fire shielding specific players, like tanks. Makes sense. 63 added fire resistance is not bad for the 1st and 2nd bosses of the trio.


On a less positive note, my guild is on the verge of collapse, with some angry members not getting invited to TOC HC. Leader is not too much into this kind fof stuff so I wonder if it'll turn sour. Coincidence, I got an invitation to a forming guild from a PUG leader I met this week... from what I saw, there are some very good dps players joining, and I'll have a spot. Oh well,if all goes wrong, I wont be empty-handed.


93 mounts ! And counting... come on, give me a Baron Mount or a Turtle....or both :)

Simcraft or the agony of upgrading

OK, something is dead wrong here.

I've been using Rawr first, and then simcraft, to check on my upgrades.

Since I now have over 160 triumph emblems, it's due time for an upgrade from my T8/T8.5 4-set piece.

My current status is as follows:

Spell Power 2209
Spirit 549
Crit 412
Hit 374
Haste 535
Int 874

Simcraft say's I'm doing 4721 dps on a dummy. And it's true, I've tested and it's as it says. 100 dps +/-.

Now... the fun part is when I decide to change all my items to Tier 9 - Conquest.
Spell Power 2239
Spirit 560
Crit 464
Hit 366
Haste 517
Int 923

The upgrade in dps is .. very small. 4855 DPS.

T9 2pc bonus is better than T8 4pc bonus, but...it's not enough. So I tried to do smaller changes, only going for the T9 2-set, and keeping the T8 2-set bonus.

Theoretically, T9 Gloves+Head give me the best bonus, up to 4870 DPS, which is terrible, because I was hoping to go for the 245-head, but it looks like the T9-head will be better for my combo. I surely would like to try but... 45 emblems is a lot to waste.

So... what to do ? Keep my T8 set until I get a Crusader Trophy ? That'll take ages, givent the guild pace :( with ppl rolling for them, and with lucky guildies getting two while I'll never get a single one.

On this topic, guildies are freaking out for missing TOC HC tries. It's true, it's bad not to be invited at all, irrespective of wether we can go, or not, or if we have enough dps.

And talking about TOC HC tries, my pet messed up terribly. Imp gets the fire debuff after I get fire targetted, and dies miserably. So, two things to do: Switch to afflition for this fight, something I wanted to avoid to keep my dps high, or... may be set a fixed location for my pet to dps, far from the ppl. Yeah, think I'll try that. Set it far away from others, and let him dps the boss. Easy peasy

All Quiet on the Northrend Front

In the last days, nothing new happened, besides me continuing to farm a few mounts, and a silly mistake.
I finally got the Polar Bear rare drop (1%) from the Brunhildar village daily. It was my first ever rare mount drop, yay.
Needless to say, I continue to go for the Baron mount, ZG mounts, the turtle, and this week, the Headless Horse mount. Today I lost with a /roll 82 against a 84 :(((

Also, I imbued myself with a spirit of sacrifice to farm Argent medallions.

And the first thing I did was to fuck it up, by clicking on a tabard and buying it for 50 medallions ! It could not be bought back, and the fucking GM told me he can't do anything because the tabard is part of an achievement. FUCK IT, I had the achievement already, 3 months before (the Achiever)...

Oh well, 50 medallions down the drain. I need 620 or so... it's 62 days of daily farming for 1 hour... is it worth ? Sure, I'll get about 150g per day on that but still...

On a more positive note:

- I'm now past 90 mounts
- Today I got my first TOC10 achievement, defeating the Twins in less than 3 minutes.
- Two more days and I'll get a 245 head and two T9 items to replace my T8/T8.5, and will be able to deliver above 700 haste ! That's awesome !
- I started to twink my 29 rogue, buying a lot of heirlooms but .. found out that Blizzard fucked the twinks, by forcing ppl to go for no-xp exclusive battlegrounds, that are... empty. Oh well, guess I'll enjoy 29 until I ding.

Off-Blizzardwise, my LOTRO account is ready to be reactivated and I've been having a lot of fun with DDO.

TOC Heroic - going down !!!

Yesterday we rocked TOC normal in about 60 minutes, with I think, only one death and no wipes. After that, we decided to give it a try for TOC 10 HC mode.

We knew it was not going to be easy, and it wasn't. Our warrior tank died time and time again, during the Acidmaw phase. Later on, a druid tank came online, and the RL switched them. One or two more tries and down they all came.

We had 3 casters and 2 melee, and snobolds went for us all the time, which was bad, but still, it was never a problem to get to phase 2 in time. Sometimes the jormungars would get in with the 1st boss about to die, but healers could handle it.

What was way worse, and happened to me twice, and to healers too, is that while acidified and running towards the fire-d tank, ppl got knocked back by... no idea which of the bosses, it's something to check. So, after a knockback, we got stalled... and died. In the last attempt, we got it all, snobolds, 2nd bosses coming a bit too early, and I got fire debuffed, but luckily, I could stay apart and not harm the raid, as no acidifed ppl were there. After acidmaw came down, it was a breeze. The jormungar came down very fast, and Icehowl was very easy, although we now have no speed buff, so ppl have to be really fast.

In the end, my first heroic item, Icehowl Cinch.

My afflition DPS struggled again, as I simply forget about checking the 25% health to start soul draining. The difference to shadowbolt is mostly impressive, but if one forgets it like me...

With our strategy, melee get snobolds that arent killed until phase 1 ends, so their phase 2 dps will be worse due to stuns, so there's no comparison possible.

Still, not to bad, I had above 4K dps overall in the kill attempt, which was my goal in the first place.

I'll now have to check for an addon that shows the HP in value and percentage.. I remember SCT long ago had that.... and if possible, a better DoTimer that adds the lifetap timer. Forte has it but the graphics are sluggish and slow, DoTimer is much smoother.

Onyxia 25 and some DDO'ing

Last night we did a Onyxia25 with ~ 20 guildies, and guess what, it worked, after a few tries. And I managed to do some pretty nice dps with my afflition trial build and a fehunter, which died miserably in the end of phase 2, because of the flame breath, me thinks. I learned something which I had forgot,which is never dps too close to her on phase 3, as the fear may send you to her front and the frontal cleave will wipe you immediately.

Besides farming some emblems for T9, and may be completing Ulduar 10 and TOC25, I've got nothing else to do. Really. Unless I level the alts to 80 as full time, something I won't do. I prefer life beyond WoW.

And so I'm now investing a bit on DDO, and it's going great.
I'll now start playing with a friend, so we'll get some parties and have fun.
The community is very nice, we don't get the kind of cretin chats we see in Dalaran or /trade channels, with everyone talking about how good or bad someone is, or spamming, or... In DDO, you ask for something, you get answers, there's even an /advice channel with conversation ongoing all the time, so you can be playing and getting knowledge of the game at the same time. Wherever you go, people speak proper english, not the mumbling some kids use. Moreover, the game rules are based on the original DDO RPG (Core, may be with some 3.5 stuff), so you learn a lot of Dungeons&Dragons. You've got embedded multiclassing, so you can be a Warrior Priest, or a Rogue Caster, or whatever, depending of what enhancements and path you go for. You can exchange spells, and a panoply of things you simply don't have in WoW, and after watching DDO, I find the lack of complexity of WoW pityful. Seeing every raiding warlock specced destro, all with the same t8/t9 gear makes me LAUGH ! There's simply nothing like that in DDO. No one character is the same as another, there are too many combinations and complexity for it to happen.

Naechste halte will be LOTRO. It looks like the Mines of Moria are yet to show up in Europe, so it seems like a good time to jump in.



Oh I nearly forgot, we downed Mimiron ! And then went downwards to a wipe fest with the General. It's hard for casters !

WoW is getting boring again, MMORPG experimenting

This was accomplished on the 1st TOC25 boss, with no +125 flask, last night.
Talk about boring. With the 125-47=78 extra SP, I'd easily do over 5000 dps, which is always a nice thing, considering every one is single-dpsing, although of course, some ppl are afflicted by the snobolds or by the acid, so it decreases their dps. Pity Blizzard always disable the "load out-of-date addons", so I missed my AutoCombatLog to check how I can improve a bit more :(

We downed Jaraxxus easily, but we stalled on the 3rd boss. We're not CC'ing enough, ppl are AOEing (multi-shot), etc.

In the last days, I installed DDO online (now it's free!), DarkFall (it was a promising game, with no farming/leveling and no gear farming, which is the thing I mostly HATE about Warcraft!), LOTRO (I think I'm really REALLY going to level my hobbit Jadena, I wanna see the elves !!!). I still have to play a bit more of the Chronicles of Spellborn (now also free!) and of course, I will surely try Aion, while keeping an eye on WAR, now that I have a dual core to play.