Thursday, January 27, 2011

"how to beat a demonology warlock as a frost dk"

I saw this search term about a week ago and I tried to ignore it but this weird voice in the back of my head compelled me against my will and self control to comment further upon it.

This is how I see the origins of this search term:

Upon the very first trash pull of this group's dungeon adventures, this frost DK opens up with howling blast hitting all the mobs, he is happy with Recount. He then sees this Felguard whirlwinding the mobs, and all of a sudden his entire monitor is aflame. The warlock is Hellfiring while moving around! He tries to hit more Howling Blasts but because he did not setup his initial diseases and rune-priorities, he is out of RP.  He has lost, the existence of his penis is nil. Cutoff by this demon and devoured by this Warlock. Ok wait no Warlock's don't eat penises. Scratch that.

Simple answer: Unless your gear level is insanely over the warlock's or if the warlock has no clue what they are doing. You can't*.

I've seen how..whoa why did my text change to blue? Oh well. I've seen Howling Blast crit for 12k at level 83, however Felstorm also crits for a similar amount, but SIX TIMES over six seconds.

*At the very least I have not seen this happen even once when I was on my Warlock. And yes I have driven many a frost DKs to their glorious frothing deaths trying to dish out as much damage as possible.

Now, why are you trying to "beat" anyone on the meters? I can now assume that you are not using your MIND FREEZE, or STRANGULAE, or even DEATH GRIP to help interrupt mobs? And why are you opening up with a Howling Blast? Are you sure the tank has aggro? I bet you ALWAYS grab aggro on at least ONE mob from the tank at the beginning of each pull. (Especially the bitter Feral Bear Tank) The healer back there is hating you but is also semi-content that your "damage" is just behind the warlock's, which should be pretty high.

Oh wait did you mean single target boss fights?

I don't know? Probably because a Demo lock can turn into a DEMON for a short duration and do 40% more damage. If they are 85, they do an ADDITIONAL 10% damage with a cooldown we get called Demon Soul, and it also increases our casting speed by 15%. Also, that demon's Felstorm is pretty nice for single target burst damage.

I don't know.

I'm at the point where I only use recount when I am on my healing toon to make sure my heals actually work. I KNOW that my Warlock will average 10-15K anywhere, and also my hunter will average 9-10K anywhere. (8K as Beast Mastery /sad) The numbers that my toon can generate versus environmental factors and my gear can only be so much.

Oh maybe you can pop your Runething cooldown that resets all your runes and spam Howling Blast! See my DK is Frost as well but I stopped playing him cause he is busy (once again) being a Jewelcrafting Slave. He must not leave the JC Daily Quest Giver EVER.

You want to proc Molten Winds ok I am totally making up the name but we have that one talent that procs a free Howling Blast everytime you hit with Obliterate. Use Obliterate sometimes!

OH WAIT to use Obliterate you should maximize the amount of runes that you have available to trigger it. More Obliterates, more free Howling Blasts more damage. If that pleases my lord.

So in conclusion: I don't know, get a better weapon to increase HB damage? I'm not even sure how it works.

Truny the Warlock

Sex Change

I have an insanely short attention span. When I made my first WoW toon, I played it for a few weeks then decided that I wanted to try out all the classes. My second toon was Truny. I tried to be varied in my toon selection, the first was a male troll, second was female undead, third was male tauren, third was male etc etc, I wanted one of every combination and permutation. Yes I have multiple toons on multiple servers but Turalyon is where my wealth resides.

Anyways, I've been running as a Female Undead toon for the longest time and I've kind of given her a quirky sarcastic attitude. I've found that this style does not work with my other toons, such as my resto druid who speaks in technical writing.

I'm afrid my toon will slowly undergo a gender comformity change as well. Will he begin to use the words "g*y and f*g more?"

Thoughts? Go for it? Try it out, if no-likey, switch back?

Truny the Sexy

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Fail-Pug Anecdote Time!

To be more precise: "What would have been a Fail-Pug had it not been for Turny the Useful Bear".

Hmm where to begin? Alright, Turby had recently dinged 85. Congrats!

Via dungeoning alone apparently he was qualified for heroics and his first heroic was an In Progress Deadmines. He one-shotted Ripsnarl, Cookie, and Vanessa. Good job. Heroics are hard stuff!

He won one of the Best in Slot Hunter Stat Sticks and he needed to enchant it right away. Like "RIGHT NAO!"

This is where my druid comes back into the story. He is the enchanter of the crew. Turny has the 2H Weapon Mighty Agility enchant in his spellbook, which is exactly the enchant our Hunter was looking for. However, due to some rather questionable design features, this enchant is available for use at skill 470, but requires a Runed Elementium Rod that can only be used at skill 500. AND, to actually LEARN the formula for the rod you needed a skill of 515. What the f**k?

Oh, and the recipe can only be bought by going through the few intro-quests of Twighlight Highlands...and I just realied how many iterations of "gh" there are in the name of that zone. Anyways, this means that you must be at least level 84 and have a skill level that is 45 over the enchant-you-want to create it. At 515, this enchant doesn't even grant a skill-up. Wow, that was 15% as annoying and inconvenient as any FF14 feature. (Which means it wasn't THAT bad, or FF14 is JUST THAT BAD...)

(Apparently this is going to be fixed as of 4.0.6 but I do not care anymore, as both my enchanters are over the 470 mark)


Thanks to this error, I was forced beyond my will and control to level my druid to 84, which meant doing the tedious Bilgewater Harbour quests yet again, and also spend MILLIONS of gold buying enchanting materials to level my enchanting to 515 to learn the elementium rod recipe. That was how much Turby wanted this enchant, not my fault at all.

ANYWAYS, to get to 84 I decided to simultaneously quest and queue as a healer in the Pugger tool. Ten minutes later I was in a group for Vortex Pinnacle.

Our "tank" was horrible. Beyond comprehension. I knew that they were doing this on purpose to troll us. Queueing up as a tank in a DPS spec wearing PVP gear and ungemmed T7s. That was the little lie I told myself before having to Vote Kick him anyways. Reason: Not a tank.

Was I being irrational and impatient, was my ego in the way? No. Let me explain.

It is one thing for a properly specced properly geared person to Not Perform So Well. But this DK...umm....he would run up to a group of mobs, and would auto-attack and use one special attack on a single target. No howling blast, or death and decay or whatever those other spells are.

Chaos ensues. Everyone is aggroing everything, I the healer am taking damage, the clothies are all aggroing different mobs in an attempt to save me. We lived of course, I have uber heals and didn't even have to use the disgusting new tree-form. (I know I know I can glyph back to the old form but I am still bitter from the removal of perma-tree)

I COULD have been super patient, and explained to the DK that Blood is the new tanking tree, that he should be in Blood spec and perhaps use AOE or perhaps try to generate threat or perhaps suggest to him that he research on his own a bit about DK tanking before attempting the new dungeons? But how did he get all the way to 83 without realizing this?

There's a very fine line between being patient and helpful towards complete crazies you know? Though it was kind of sad as he genuinely seemed to have no clue what was going on; if he was "tanking" in a dps spec then his DPS was not that spectacular either (1,500....). So he was probably doing it to be annoying. Or had no clue what the heck was going on. Ebay. *Revelation* OMG EBAY! That's why! That's why he was full of unenchanted purples and pvp purples! Ok ignore what I just typed earlier. I can't believe I wasted so much brain power on why that DK was so full of fail.

tl;dr: So we had an Ebay tank and we kicked him and Turny tanked, and did okay-tanking even though bear tanking with all of its cooldowns need more time to maintain AOE aggro. Single threat is completely fine and I hit 84 and made Turby his stupid enchant. =)

Turny the Restless...Not Tree

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Why I Hated Halls of Origination, But Not Anymore

Ok it's time for me to put you into a trance-like state. Please my dear adventurer, click on the Eye of the Reminiscing and experience my Story through your own eyes.

Click on Thing to See Truny's Dream 0/1

You are in a dungeon group and you have popped into the Halls of Origination. "Oh lord, seven bosses", you think to yourself. Please proceed through the lavishly decorated corridors. You feel something odd in the air. "Ah, there are no trash mobs in here, why?" you think to yourself once again. Your party treks through the dimly lit musty halls, you feel a strangely light yet very cold breeze teasing the air of this ancient structure.

Now we shall warp to the Vault of Lights. In front of you is a marvelous hall, laden with Titan architecture. You feel under your feet the delicate yet sturdy glass encased flooring, underneath which contain strange moving panels.

Truny's Dream Viewed 1/1

FUCK YOU MOVING PANELS!! You know what all this time and throughout so many runs through Halls of Origination I had thought that "if I stood on top of an empty panel I would fall through to my death!" You know how much effort it took to not aggro mobs, maintain AOE dps, and navigate that place all while trying to dodge panels?? Since at the time I was running Halls, the Pugger tool was at its all time low, this was when people would literally leave the party because your name had a vowel in it so I seriously did not want to test out the suicidal theory of "Maybe I Won't Fall". It wasn't until we started doing guild runs that I found out "oh they are safe!" UGGGHH!!!

But now that I think of it, this dungeon has probably become 85% less tedious now that I know the panels are safe. Where is the difficulty in it?

You know what, the entire Vault of Lights is completely unnecessary, I say we have to fight all FOUR of the elementals at the same time. Sure, bring their melee dps down so the tanks could handle it, but it would be major fun to dodge fire, dodge tornadoes, dodge spikes, and break bubbles all at the same time. It would be like a Common Raid Hazards Tutorial. This is all a reason to get rid of the annoying troggs. Seriously they are just annoying. Right now, the "ok for the fire guy, avoid fire, for the water guy, avoid water, for the wind guy, avoid air, for the earth guy, avoid ground" is kind of lame and boring.

Truny's Revamp

Vault of Lights Difficulty Increased by 300%

Upon entering the Vault of Lights, your party is face to face with four imposing elementals. Brann warns you that you must kill them in a certain order for the mirrors to activate correctly since their elemental energies sync and un-sync the air in the Vault.

You pull all four at the same time. They retain their normal abilities with the same cooldowns, they may cast simultaneously so make sure you can break bubbles while running from fire/tornadoes/whatnot.

The Earth and Fire elemental must be tanked. The Water and Air elementals have no threat table and will continue to cast their annoying spells. Un-cc'able.

To know which Elemental to down first, a randomly generated code will trigger a weather effect in the Vault. You must then kill the elemental which possesses the opposite "power" to the weather. With each weather effect, the elemental with the SAME type as the weather will receive some massive buffs so you want to down the opposite one quick so they become weak again. Because killing them would cause a surge of their elemental source to neutralize the weather effect. This shall be a brilliant display of graphics and lag!

Starts Raining: Kill Fire, dodge lightning from rain. Water boss will cast annoying water surges.
Room Burns: Kill Water, dodge fire on ground. Fire boss will cast more fire novas.
Room has Earthquakes: Kill Wind, jump at least once every 5 seconds to avoid quake debuff. Earth boss' spikes will have six directional prongs that extend from his body.
Room has Wind Directional Indicators (MWAHAHAHA): Kill Earth, face the correct direction. Room is engulfed in a hurricane, you must run in the same direction as the hurricane for its 5 second duration to avoid massive damage.

Really, do we want another Wind Direction thingy. Ok fine maybe....

Room has Hurricane effect: Kill Earth. Two "rideable" tornadoes will spawn and your top dps will mount them for an insanely fun buff to help kill the Earth mob. Everyone else still has to run in the direction of the Hurricane except for the two tornado-mounted dps.

See, that would be fun and interesting. I've been finding myself zoning out everytime we enter the Vaults, this should be a refreshing change. This fight would require no CC, but all awareness. We already have the "all CC" pulls in Vortex Pinnacle.

Truny of the Light

"demon warlock low on damage meter"

First of all I"d like to thank you for sticking around Kluptomania. Musing upon my insane incomprehensible ramblings.

Now, I like to use Google Analytics to see what search words people use to find this blog. Ever since I sewed up the Breeches of Mended Nightmares It's been boom boom boom "breeches of night vs flame" or "breaches of nightmare warlock", "etc etc etc".

A lot of people want someone to tell them what's best. I mean, who doesn't?

Ok, what is the tradeoff between the two craftable ilvl 359 pants? Haste or Mastery.

Do you need haste, or mastery? Done.

Remember, we're still in the "Naxx" period of stats. It won't be until Deathwing will we see our haste AND crit AND mastery at over or near 30%. Those were good times ICC weren't they?

Can you find enough mastery or haste from OTHER gear to makeup for the gain of this big chunk, given that you are not trading anything off? You probably need hit.

ANYWAYS. So this one search phrase struck me deep "demon warlock low on damage meter"

WHY?????

No, everything is not as it seems. Let us analyze the situation.

1. First I need your complete stats, armory detail, and spellpower with your pet out.
2. What pet are you using? Felguard right?
3. Define "low". Low as in consistently low, low for that ONE fight and you got angry and googled why, low as in pretty good but not high enough like 11k to me is low single target. 20k is low aoe, please define "low"
4. Where? In a raid? Which boss? In PVP? Who cares? In a dungeon? Single target or aoe?
5. Were your party members overly geared compared to you? Or are you under-geared or using poor stats?

Did you know you can cast your next spell when your first spell is about 75-80% complete? Are you using Felstorm when appropriate?

If it's in AOE trash, general dungeon damage. Really. No one cares. It's nice to do 500K damage within the first five seconds of a fight, but really, no one cares.

If there's a lot of CC action going on, and there are other burstylicious classes in the group, such as rogues, hunters, everything else that doesn't have casted spells, your 2 second cast will be useless but whatever.

Are you using your cooldowns? What level are you? Maybe you're level 60? No still, you can top the charts.

Are you utilizing decimation and molten core?

You see, the sad thing with WOW is there is an optimal "way" of pushing your buttons to maximize the numbers in which your character can produce. So if I ever wanted to say cast "drain soul" during a fight it would not be optimal. For RP purposes maybe, but if your main concern is dishing out damage, then please refer to my "How To Push Buttons" post.

Now I've seen some warlocks purely cast Incinerate as Demonology, which is fine. But Incinerate costs double the mana of Shadowbolt at end level and is weaker by about a thousand damage unless molten core procs.

If you specced into Molten Core, use it. If you specced into Decimation, use it! I know it's easy to not even realize you're specced into something until your spellbar magically lights up!

So your options are:

1. Play as you like. Uninstall recount.
2. Optimize your spells, stats, whatever. Or level. I needs the details!
3. Become a survival hunter.

Truny the Warlock

Monday, January 24, 2011

Beast Masters Unite!

Turby's back and I have an array of brand new pets to wreak havoc upon all of Azeroth! But wait! Exotic pets means Beast Mastery mode which means I'm pretty...odd!

I remember reading somewhere that Cobra Shot was supposed to be buffed by "SOMETHING" to make it a BM's signature shot am I correct? I read through my talent trees and hidden spells in the book and the only thing that "BOOSTS" Cobra Shot is this weird Frenzy talent where I consume some sort of frenzy to make myself..err shoot faster. Hmm.

That's it?

Bestial Wrath, wow so many changes, can its duration be any shorter?? Sure I feel like a machine gun for the FIVE seconds it is up but ok then that's it?

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EYES OF THE BEAST SPELL??

If there was ONE single RP-ish spell in the game it was this spell, I would "switch" over to my Puppy and help out lowbies, or jump around, or explore, or scout, kill some critters, harass people. WHY?? According to Truny, she says its "probably another fuckin' PVP nerf". I disagree.

I think it was one of the spells that got CUT, because it was not so useful in PVE or PVP. SO what?? Eagle Eye is kinda useless when you can fly around, sure it's kinda useful in PVP but...STILL!

This is completely lame, after my small Mini-Rant on Spirit Beasts I actually found TWO within a 10 minute time-span and wanted to muck about as a spirit beast healing people but NOO Eyes of the Beast is gones forever, we hates it...forever!

Also, do you have a favourite pet you stick to? Mine used to be the Devilsaur, Puppy. But now that we can carry FIVE pets I find myself switching pets after every pull, using Charmaggon for Blood Lust, using Jojen cause he's sparkly, or Turny cause he's...a Turny or even Torby. Yes I named my Terrorpene Torby, this might change in the near future.

ALAS, I also finding myself switching specs every pull. The Bestial Wrath Machine Gun Effect is nice, but I am finding in groups that need more damage to get through tough bosses/pulls or that I need CC I prefer Survival over BM. Just to..survive. Wyvern Sting is kick ass. "I will freakin' trap AND sleep these two mobs yeah!"

Changes Required to BM

Truny says "YOU MUST UNDERLINE YOUR TITLES DAMMIT!"....ok I did!

1. Cobra Shot does..something. No that wasn't very helpful was it. Let's try again.

1. Cobra Shot leaves a Cobra Poison on the enemy, dealing a small amount of nature dot, and increasing our pet's critical chance against the target no scratch that, and increases our pet's damage against that target by 5%.

2. Kill Command's focus requirement has been reduced to 30. Cooldown is four seconds. Damage has been increased by 50%. On a sidenote, at level 84 I've seen Kill Command crit for 15K on my level 84 pet. But then again other classes can chain together 30K crits so, yes that should be fine.

3. Bestial Wrath lasts LONGER DAMMIT!

4. Eyes of the Beast is back. Feck around all you like!

5. Arcane Shot. Ok, I am having some relationship issues with Arcane Shot. I will spam it during Bestial Wrath. That is fine. But during "normal" fighting, I tend to have enough focus for ONE extra Arcane Shot before Kill Command's cooldown is up? I also use it at the end-leg of fights where Kill Command is on cooldown, Kill Shot is on cooldown, and I need to move. Or something. Arcane Shot is...weird. Get rid of it. Change it to Beast Shot. Who knows.

Solution: During Bestial Wrath, COBRA SHOT becomes spammable instant cast shots. This way, we can regenerate our focus like crazy, executing more Kill Commands, and not having to use Arcane Shot. Ever. This also solves the "BMs love Cobra Shot" bullshit.

6. Army of the Pets. Come on, we can "carry" around five pets with us, why not summon all of them out in a dazzling flourish of bestial fury "GO PUPPY, PUPPY, PUPPY, PUPPY, and Gregory! Show them the true meaning of despair!! MWAHAHAH!!"

Solution: New Spell

[Army of the Pets]

Focus Cost: 100 <- You bet your butt it costs 100 focus!

Instant Cast

Cooldown: 5 minutes. (Chance to be reduced by 3 seconds everytime your pet farts, no just kidding, everytime you use Kill Command)

In a true display of Bestial Mastery, you call upon all of your active stabled pets to ravage your foe for 25 seconds. During this time you and your pets' damage and attack/casting speed is increased by 15% and you feel no fear or remorse and can not be stopped until ALL of you are killed. (Effect stacks with Bestial Wrath)

It's on a Five Minute cooldown so it won't be game-changing in terms of average DPS output but it'd be a Kick Your Ass Down the Street type of Cooldown don't you agree?

Turby the Crazy Hunter

Friday, January 21, 2011

I Can Has Epics: Dreamless Belt

I'm kinda liking this Dreamcloth weekly cooldown mechanic, with enough herbalizing and mining, my two gatherers are generally able to produce enough materials for each of the Dreamcloth cooldowns each week. And having realized that I may have rushed my skill to the max a bit too quickly, the cloth accumulation rate at level 85 actually isn't that bad. I actually have over a hundred Bolts of Embersilk Cloth just sitting around not really doing anything, refusing to be turned into Cheat The System PVP Items. Anyways..

Four Dreamcloths and some mad ingenious sewing-on-the-streets skill later, Truny creates a Dreamless Belt! I replaced Beauty's Silken Ribbon with this belt in my preparation for Raiding, as you can notice the solid chunk of extra HIT that the Dreamless Belt provides. I do lose my favourite stat: Haste, however with Mastery boosting my Felguard's damage as well, if in any case I am incapacitated during a raid (movement, mechanics, etc), my Felguard will still be up in the fray hacking away with all them crazy melee folk!

But I Have A Secret To Raid Preparation

We don't really really need gear upgrades or need to pay attention to what stats benefit us the most...as long as you have THIS ACHIEVEMENT, you are set. The game even says it, no one disprove your claim!

Truny the Warlock

Thursday, January 20, 2011

The Reactive Masses Cry Out: Heroics are Hard!

The more and more I think about it, what exactly is hard about Cataclysm Heroics? They are beginning to nerf stuff! Which element of the heroic dungeon itself is so difficult that people want them to be simplified?
From what I see, this all originates from:

1. Lack of Communication/Organization
2. Tunnel Vision
3. Impatience
4. Ego
5. The Golden Egg

Notice the trend here? All of these are player-based problems, none of which were actually programmed into the heroic dungeon iteself to somehow mind control the player to change their behaviour. In other words:

The problem stems from: "Heroic dungeons in Cataclysm are too hard, because they make me not want to communicate with the rest of my group, because I just want to get this over with to get my gear and I am too good to initiate any exchange of information I just need my points and my gear. If there is any mechanic in which my class can negate, someone else other than myself can do it."

Notice the many iterations of ME, MY and I in that statement. This leads us to the competent players' woes:

"Heroic dungeons seem hard because no one wants to take responsibility, learn fights, use class abilities, or co-ordinate, etc, etc, etc."

"I don't have time to engage in raid-like communicatives just to get through some heroic dungeon", so someone else will?

But you have time to play a video-game otherwise? Why not spend your time with your loved ones or familiy or doing something productive for the community or finding a way to increase your wealth? Ego.

1. Lack of Communication/Organization

Seriously, it is not THAT hard to say "I can banish/sheep/interrupt/trap/blind/slow/sap/fear/mind control/hex/did I miss any yet/root purple triangle, and I will continue to use that unless otherwise!" If someone objects, then work something out. Or you can suggest "Can you please banish/sheep/cc/ so and so mob, we need your cc skills, thanks!"

See, that wasn't so hard! Though with issues 2-5 in the way it could be. But we'll get to those later.

Organization. "I'll tank the boss facing away from everyone but I might have to move because such and such mechanic will make me move so everyone be on guard, aka don't have tunnel vision".

If you don't know a fight. ASK. Say I hired you to do financial analysis and a certain reporting format was different than what you were used to, the simplest way is to ASK. Rather than throwing all the papers out the window then jumping out the building, just ask and the task will be explained to best of my knowledge. No one minds, and no one will think that your penis is 0.5" by asking questions. Seriously no one is thinking about your penis. Actually wait now I am...ok no wait let's keep this post strict and formal and not X-rated.

If a problem persists, then change your outlook and try to tackle the fight in another perspective. The extra add is getting killed where it should be CC'd, MOVE IT AWAY.

2. Tunnel Vision

DPS: Must have highest number regardless of what I do. This means I will spam my buttons ignoring external factors such as fire/poison/cleaves/aoe's/adds. I die, blame someone and leave.

Heals: Must keep tank at full and not heal myself or the party through un-avoidable damage. (Though healer tunnel vision is an entirely different topic) If someone dies, its their fault and I leave just because.

Tank: I must survive but in my quest for survival I am forgetting placement/aoe/mechanics. Etc. If my boss placement results in DPS death its their fault. I leave.

This can easily be overcome by knowing the fights, or at least expecting what might come of a fight, such as aoe/adds. It's common sense. Stay Out of Shit. Also, try to expect what the other roles are going to be up against during the fight. So if the boss leaves a pool of shit on the ground that is REALLY wide, move him out or else NO ONE can damage the boss while avoiding shit at the same time.

3. Impatience

An important factor that affects both the player and their party members is impatience.

"Ugh I don't have time to learn new fights, or I don't have time to learn raid mechanics in a dumb heroic".

Then don't play.

"Ugh I don't have time to wait for these noobs to learn the fight or explain it clearly"

Then don't play.

Say I somehow hired you for that analyst position and I said "Ugh I don't have time to train a new person they'll figure it out themselves or they can just quit". How effective would that be for the employee and for the company? Time and resources wasted in exchange for no productivity. Baaad!

Though this "rush to the end" mentality does seem to be hard-wired into the general WoW play-style so this may be hard to overcome.

4. Ego

Again, asking questions make one seem weak and small appendaged or may make them seem dumb, stupid, mentally handicapped, and homosexual all at the same time. There is a lot of pressure behind asking a simple question such as "Where should I not stand?" Eeep! HOMO!!

Some players may cause issues because they are "too epic" to group with the likes of you. "Your DPS is so low HOMO". Or they are too good to actually explain the fights "Just stay out of shit LOL"

5. The Golden Egg

Yes I am using a concept I learned from reading Stephen Covey. As WoW is designed for the player to now hit 85 and deck themselves out in the snazziest of gears possible, our "Golden Egg" is Gear/Rep/Valor Points. We all have our eye on them, but some of us would rather just have the egg and not work to "nourish" (not the druid spell nourish) their Goose, the medium in which the egg is produced. The Goose is working with your group!

What is so Hard?

Now, other than unfortunate group compositions such as all melee, no interrupts, lack of CC (All DK), what is actually so hard about the new heroics? They are long and tedious yes, but difficult? No?

QUICK NOTES

Throne of Tides
The casters, kill the casters and run out of earth shakings!

Blackrock Cavern
Kill the chain, watch fire stacks, CC dogs, kite shadows.

Shadowfang Keep
Run, stop, stay behind things!

Deadmines
Run, run, run, use cannons, run, adds, adds, adds!

The Stonecore
Don't let the Earthchanger change, be lucky with burrow, LOS, dot, watch out for dust!

Vortex Pinnacle
Dodge whirlwinds, dodge tornadoes, CC TEMPLE ADEPT /shakefist, run into Triangle!

Grim Batol
Bomb things, dodge blitz cc purple, shield behind, kill fire adds, slow and kill adds shadow vortex.

Halls of Origination
Omg this one is too long, stay out of shit and kill adds probably and interrupt Rajh!

Lost City of the Tol'Vir
Don't touch bombs, kite phoenix kill it, kill crocs stay away from Augh, kill adds.

Throne of Flame: Seat of the Inferno
Dodge fire walls, click on geysers, kill small adds kite big fire adds, have at least two people to help absorb Hell Knuckle if no plate wearers, one if plate wearer and watch for platform explosions!

Truny the Difficult

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Turny the Restless Tree Returns: Change in Healing Mindset

After Truny had scoped out the dungeon scene all the way to 85 I began to level Turny the Restless Tree (who no longer is a tree but only for 30 seconds on a cooldown) and decided to heal his way to 85. During the first few dungeons I ran, it felt as if my healing capacity had declined rather than improved despite having found some gear upgrades.

The old wrath mentality of healing that I had was to Keep Everyone At 100% Health. Now it has changed, now its more like Keep Everyone At 75% Health Except The Tank. Though the old paradigm sometimes kicks in, I found that during those spasms of Wrathness is when my healing felt "badder".

No longer can we "lifebloom lifelboom lifebloom everyone" or rely on a Rejuv, Regrowth combination to keep the tank topped off, I mean mobs do MILLIONS AND BILLIONS of damages nowadays.

We almost HAVE to use our cast-timed spells. /shakefist /fu

It's easy to deduce, with Lifebloom proccing That Thing That Makes Our Spells Free (I can't think of the name right now), and with Nourish refreshing the duration of Lifebloom (I discovered this randomly), they probably want us to be sporadically spamming Nourish, as it is a cheap cheap mana cost spell, and use Healing Touch only for large spike damages.

After I got a hang of this "healing style", I decided that I didn't particularly like it. 2+ seconds to cast a spell for any resto druid is a no no, how am I supposed to jump around like a crazy? I can't stop to melee mobs?

On a sidenote, it seems the druid spells post 80 are kind of underwhelming.

Thrash. AOE Bleed. Mm hmm it's weak but useful but weak, just something to fill up the new Maul cooldown.

Roar of Speed. PVP? Increased movement for like...4 seconds?

Magic Mushrooms. The intent of this spell is awesome, setting off stealthed bombs. But seriously? Can the name reference be any classier? (Even though they LITERALLY are magical mushrooms...but still....)

Turny the Restless Tree

Truny's Cataclysm Heroic Reports: 01/16/2010

Heroic Deadmines

Wow, can a single instance get any more epic? Once again this was ran on the Pugger tool several days ago and things went very very smooth all the way up until the "I poison you and you dream" part where some of us died to fire that spawned after we stepped on where they were supposed to spawn and we ran back and two dreams got all mixed up and it was all one crazy dream but I will get to that later.

Glubtok

Let's see what does this guy do? All I remember is that he will summon a spinning wall of flame in which the party members must run around and around kind of like hamsters to avoid it. If you down the boss and not get touched by the fire you get the "Ready for Raiding" achievement, which Truny obviously er achieved on the first try. Nothing special.

Helix Gearbreaker

THIS guy totally jumps onto your FACE and tries to claw your eyes out!! It was SO funny I almost forgot to move away from people when I had a bomb on myself but lucky for the warlock-teleporting! Um, stay away from bombs! (I'll be posting Heroic Guides sometime in the near future give or take 10-12 months for more details)

Foe Reaper 5000

Let's see I believe ONE person has to get into some vehicle to take care of adds that spawn at the botton of the foundry. Everyone else try to stay away from the boss and also avoid his "Harvest", which kind of works like Icehowl's charge. Avoid its path!!

Ripsnarl

I'm so proud four boss names in a row! Uhhh this guy DPS the feck out of him, and then DPS the feck out of his continuous mist adds. They will grow and grow and go kaboom and you will die. Keep DPS'ing them UNLESS the boss is at such low health that you feel confident that he will be downed before you get blowned up.

"Captain" Cookie

He sits in a pot and throws food at the party. "Bad" food left on the ground has a bad AOE, you can choose to eat this then eat some "good" food to cancel the bad food debuff, and if you down him while only ever having one "bad food" debuff on you at max then you get an achievement. Blah blah blah. Eat one bad, eat one good.

Vanessa VanCleef

This place truly felt like an adventure. She'll put you through the four "nightmares" of the previous bosses and they are essentially "Don't touch stuff or you die" sequences. So yes, two of us had lagged and jumped too far into the fire in the first dream and died and we ran back in while the rest of the group downed the first dream boss Globtuk. However, we spawned the 2nd dream as we enetered and everyone died.

We ran back in, and now both dreams were occuring simultaneously. Wipe wipe wipe.

Did anyone leave group? No.

Solution: We all decided to run together and burn down the second dream boss: Helix. Once he was downed, we managed to down the first boss and the doors opened, but the remaining spiders overhwelmed us and we died. But the door opened.

Smooth sailing from then on.

The actual encounter with Vanessa was simple, we just focused on the stream of adds she spawned, and clicked on the rope when the game told us to click on the rope when she BLOWS UP THE SHIP!

Then (spoilers), when her health is low enough she commits suicide by BLOWING EVERYTHING UP!

Good job Vanessa. Kudos to the suiciding!

Deadmines is hectic, long, but fun.

Truny the Dead Miner

20 Minutes Later..Terrorpene!


Flaming Turby of Raaawr!
A few days ago while doing the boring dailies in Tol Barad I noticed a hunter with a very distinctive FLAMING TURTLE pet and I said to myself: "MUST HAVE!"

For more information on taming Terrorpene please visit my Terrorpene page!

I tabbed out and googled something along the lines of "wow flaming turtle pet", and this awesome looking turtle was called Terrorpene (Fear Penis), and spawns in the fiery area of Mt. Hyjal.

Excellent. With some research I brought along with me a prismatic elixir, which provided me with 90 fire resist. This mob channels a deadly fire beam at you but it is four-times weak against resistances. So with 44k HP I barely survived the taming, but survived nonetheless.

I made a macro, turned on track beasts, remembered where I put the tame-beast spell and flew off to Mt. Hyjal. I hung out around the eastern side of the fire lake for about 10 minutes and mined the stray obsidium nodes and got bored and logged out. Whatever.

The next day, after a failed run of trying to find the DUMB spirit beasts in Northrend I decided to log off at the Throne of Flame again so I travelled back to Mt Hyjal and proceeded to find a nice place to log-off. As I was doing all this, good habits had me spamming my macro all this time. That was a failure, as I didn't even notice it blaring in my chat window:

>TERRORPENE<
>TERRORPENE<
>TERRORPENE<

I guess he had JUST spawned, since at the moment before I was going to hit Logout, I saw that I had a Silver Ringed Mob targetted: Terrorpene!

/GASP

I panicked calmly. I landed on the nearest safe stone platform near him, he was in the lava at the north-eastern part of the lava-pool at this point. Popped my elixir and began to tame him.

Competition: In the corner of my eye I saw that someone was seemingly camping this area as well, I mouse-overed them to see it was a warrior and I thought "FCK DON'T KILL IT YOU CAN'T TAME IT GO AWAY!"

My focus at that point was to tame it before this random warrior came and killed Terrorpene out of spite.

He didn't. Then why was he hanging around there?

Anyways, with the prismatic elixir his fiery hatred only ticked for 5k a second leaving me with about 8K hp at the end of the ordeal!

THIS is what we've been wanting in a pet all this time, it GLOWS and smoke fumes out of his horn, aka utilization of modern graphics.

He is currently nameless and goes by "Turtle".

Turby the Turtle

Monday, January 17, 2011

Alright, I Quit!

Problem solved! I just remembered that my Beast Master hunter has atalent called "Spirit Bond". 2% health regenerated every ten seconds, rather than 4% every five seconds. Hmm much less health at a slower rate, but at least I don't have to move or do anything for it to happen. Quittage engaged. (Not that anyone cares as the last time I quit I was still too lazy to cancel my subscription)

And so ends my Demonology Warlock rantings. It's been fun but despite having a flaming horse and being able to turn into a flaming demon who can control an axe tossing axe spinning hits like a truck Felguard, there is absolutely no reason that I should rely on the natural hp regen of wow characters while I turn around to play on my console games, or when I am tabbed out playing another game, reading a book, baking, cooking, out for the night, etc.

Warlock's Fel Armor in 4.0.6

This just in (well, I just checked): "Fel Armor has been redesigned. It now surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power and causing the warlock to be healed for 3% of any single-target spell damage he or she deals."

Ok first of all, I am not a Shadow Priest (which seems to have received some damage buffs, which I don't understand the last few I ran with were doing TRIPLE my damage just from one of their DOTs, while AFK?). This tweak is better than the flat 10% mana increase, which was probably just a random "let's make them rage and QQ for a bit" filler. It worked. This is FEL energy, not vampiric energy, it might as well DEAL AN EXTRA 3% FEL damage to enemies.

How Does This Affect Us Now?

The current Fel Armor, when buffed with the talent Demonic Aegis, generates 4% of our maximum health every 5 seconds for just standing around looking beautiful. Given that I have 114,000 HP, Truny regenerates 4,560 HP every five seconds.

Now that Fel Armor is just a rip-off of a Shadow Priests' ability, we generate health actively through fighting, which I refuse to do. Say I had my Felguard pull all 12 Alliance Infantry units and nuked them down. I would have regenerated 6% of each direct damage spell casted in health during the fight. Who cares about during the fight, I already know how to keep myself alive. For raid bosses and long duration fights MAYBE. "But you can use Harvest Souls to regen health too you know!"

Fack you! I know that but since the animation is TOTALLY an Evocation spell animation I try to NEVER use this spell unless I am TOTALLY out of Soul Shards and NO ONE is around to see me looking like a wannabe mage spell imitator D:

Unfortunately I am going to have to grind out some numbers to further analyze this change.

Boss Fight, 300 seconds duration.

Current Fel Armor: Regardless of what the hell I am doing, I am generating 4,560 health every five seconds. Over the duration of the battle I would have generated 273,600 health. Ok fine, maybe that IS a lot of health but its always good to be safe right?

New Fel Armor: The direct damage spells that we have at our arsenal are: Shadowbolt, Hand of Guldan, Buffed Incinerates, Soulfire, Fel Flame, Immolate. At the beginning of a fight, with no cooldowns blown or trinkets blown or mind blown, we will generally be spamming Shadowbolts with Hand of Guldan and Incinerates thrown in. Shadowbolts hit for about 9.000 critting for double, Incinerates hitting for slightly higher, and Hand of Guldan's hitting for 11k, critting for double. Let's say an average of 10,000 per nuke every 2.1 seconds. So every 2.1 seconds I am regenerating 6% of 10,000, which equals 600 health, if we pretend some of them crit, we can safely say about 1,000 health every 4.4 seconds. That is pretty blah.

Things change in Decimation mode, when Soulfires hit upwards of 35K with trinket procs and cooldowns thus giving us 1,800 health back every 1.5 seconds. This is still lower than the current Fel Armor design though.

tl;dr: I don't want to be a shadow priest and the only viable way to regenerate health "out of combat" is to kill critters, which is still super lame because the whole point of this armor was to regenerate health while AFK.

Testing: I'm going to do a test, to see how long our health ACTUALLY regenerates without Fel Armor. From the last time I remember it was something along the lines of 1-5 health every MINUTE.

Truny the Healthy

Friday, January 14, 2011

Truny's Cataclysm Heroic Reports: 01/13/2010

Heroic Halls of Origination

Oh this is going to be a fun report, I only remember three or four of the boss' names, which are all the last bosses in that last big ring of bosses. This was also ran through the Pugging machine. Surprisingly we had a very very good group, which makes for a consistent five good groups in a row. Please note I only run maybe one every other day except for guild-runs as the DPS queue is still an eternity.

This dungeon seemed huge and daunting at first, what with SEVEN bosses and various high HP trash mini bosses but once again if Everyone Knows Their Shit and uses Common Sense, HOO can be a smooth run like any other.

First Boss: Holy Shields Run Down Hit Switch Snakes

Our group chose to jump down off the platform together so the tank could take the majority of the snake's lashings as they hit fairly hard and there is a good number of them. Other than "co-ordinating" jumping off a platform together there is not much to this fight.

Warlock Can Has Trinkets: This boss dropped Anhuur's Hymnal, I guess his own Hymnal, which won and replaced her normal version with. It has a nice chunk of hit, and the extra 1,700 spell proc is nothing to laugh at!

What Can Warlocks Do?

Um, you COULD setup a Demonic Circle in front of the boss, so once all the switches are hit, you DITCH the group and teleport up and DPS the boss. Make sure not to steal aggro. Otherwise, run with the group and help them kill snakes with Hellfire. Any excuse to use Hellfire during an encounter is a win for me.

Second Boss: Mini Marrowgar Not Sure What He Does Tank N Spank

This boss has an achievement linked to him/her/it. Prior to the encounter you will see a bunch of stray Camels wandering around in front of the boss' platform. You may mount one if you please, but your demon WILL despawn as your new "pet" is now the camel. If you stay on the camel for the entire fight, you get an achievement something like "SOMETHING STRAW CAMEL SOMETHING SOMETHING".

How do you "lose" your camel? The boss does earth spikes which will kill your camel, so keep moving around since you are able to move and cast at the same time with the camel! /shakefist

This has me wondering, why can't we cast and ride our own mounts which we are so very well accustomed to having ridden for YEARS? My warlock could probably raid and bake a cake and cast at the same time on her Felsteed. Heck the Felsteed can probably DPS with its flaming hooves and all. Right..RIGHT??

Anyways, just Stay Out of Shit and when he spawns adds umm..KILL them. And you are good to go.

This dude has no interesting drops for Warlocks.

Third Boss: (/big breath) Four Elementals Prior Moving Floor Room Stay Out of Shit Lasers and Circles Pew Pew

Well, his name sums it up right. He has no drops for warlocks Moving on now.
And now in no particular order except for Rajh, the last four bosses.

Setesh

This guy has no particular aggro table so you can go balls to the walls with him. He will run around and summon portals, Kill the Portals! The portals summon nasty adds which the tank will be kiting around. He casts nasty things on the ground and we no like nasty things so no standing in said nasty things. Easy peasy. KILL PORTALS!

Isiset

Ok let's see, Isiset will occasionally cast a Supernova, in which you must turn around to avoid being stunned kind of like Commander Something in TOC-5. At certain points of her HP % she will SPLIT into essentially what her spells are. I would say kill Astral Rain first, as it is her AOE damage spell. She will split two more times, rinse and repeat nothing special here.

Ammunae

This fight is more or less a tank and spank, but the boss will spawn plants on the ground to heal him or to explode the party. One thing I found interesting with this fight, as I was on the lookout for plants spawning, I saw my FELGUARD automatically running up to the plants as they were growing and killing them for us!!

HOW INTELLIGENT!

I guess my Felguard HATES plants, the fight went fairly smoothly since he would be ON THEIR ASSES the moment they started spawning. Now I believe the hunter's pet did not do the same thing, there must be some sort of defense mechanism built into the Felguard?

/whisper I was kinda creeped out not having the direct my demon. Oh well.

Rajh

This guy has every ability that I would love to add to my Fire Arsenal of spells. Fiery tornadoes /drool. Avoid Fiery Tornadoes. The tornadoes also leave a trail of fire in their wake. Avoid fire. He will jump on people, and prior to jumping the ground will glow, I believe this can be interrupted by the melee as it will one shot anyone he lands on. I believe those are the only things to "move to avoid" otherwise let the melee classes interrupt his other spells.

Once he starts glowing, apparently he's recharging his energy, you will be doing 100% more damage at the expense of taking a small fire damage over time. Pew Pew him down!

Rajh Tips: You can run around with Hellfire and get in real close to the healer and ranged just to mess them up and freak them out!

The end.

Blagroon the Intelligent Felguard

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Truny's Useless Tips: Enchant Off-Hand - Superior Intellect

**** UPDATED AS OF FEB 8, 2011****

Enchant Off-Hand - Superior Intellect now adds 40 INT to our offhand, thus wielding an enchanted staff vs a MH+OH almost equal. Though please feel free to read what it USED to be, and see how instead of making some creative changes, they just nerfed the enchant as that was the easy thing to do. Though keep in mind, you can STILL enchant your Main Hand weapon with a "cool" enchant such as Power Torrent of Hurricane and have your 40 INT, whereas with a staff you can only choose between the Wrath 80some INT or a "cool" enchant. Up to you!

****END UP DATE****

Throughout my toons' levelling adventures, I come upon a lot of BOE green items and also craft a lot of Useless Items To Level To Max. What I do is send them all to the resident enchanter: Turny the Used To be Tree. After saving up so much dust and essences Turny's enchanting skill finally got high enough to discover the recipe to Enchant your Off-Hand for 100 Intellect!

100 intellect is a LOT. When you think about it, that is about the same amount of INT gain when upgrading two or three ilvl 333 pieces to ilvl 346. That's a pretty gosh darned good upgrade.

Given that a dagger/sword/mace at ilvl 346 has around 1,720 spellpower, and so does a staff at the same ilvl, the only difference remaining are STATS. Stats such as INT or Stamina or Haste or Whatever. With this enchant it seems to make carrying a Staff a thing of the past. Let us compare.

Currently I am using Biting Wind and the Book of Origin (Note this is an ilvl 333 offhand)

With this combination my stat gains are, (INCLUDING the offhand enchant):

Stamina: 418
Intellect: 379
Crit: 98
Haste: 156
Spellpower: 1,729
Mastery: 105

Now I also have a Cerith Spire Staff from heroic Throne of Tides. ACTUALLY I don't even remember when the hell I ran heroic Throne of Tides, but its been in my bag for a while so.../shrug. Wait maybe I have the Staff of Siphoned Essences from Grim Batol...which would make more sense...I need to confirm this. Nonetheless both staves have the same amount of INT and SP anyways! The stats on the staff are:

Stamina: 454
Intellect: 302
Hit: 202
Haste: 202
Spellpower: 1,732

It seems the only direct int/spellpower we can enchant a staff with is the Wrath 81 spellpower enchant. With this in mind, it closes the gap but mind you if my off-hand were ilvl 346 the two weapon combo would still beat out a staff by about 17 INT.

HOWEVER, not only does a main hand with off-hand combination beat out a staff by 17 INT, BUT you can still enchant your Main Hand weapon with something cool, such as spellpower, or Power Torrent, or what I am using now because Turny's skill is not high enough: Hurricane. (Which is essentially the new Black Magic enchant, increasing haste occasionaly by 450). A staff would not be able to have this nice proccable enchant on it.

Solution: A new enchant.

[Enchant Other End of 2-Handed Weapon - Ocean's Wrath]

Enchant the pointy tip of your 2-Handed Weapon giving a boost of +75 Intellect, and causing your damaging spells to sometimes increase your intellect by 450 for 12 seconds.

Truny the Enchanter

Truny's Cataclysm Heroic Reports: 01/12/2011

Heroic Blackrock Caverns

I was thrown into an 'in progress' Heroic Blackrock Caverns last night through the pugger tool and came upon the group running back towards Corla Beams Stand In Front Move At 80 Go Back from a possible wipe.

The group looked pretty solid and I started to wonder who had left and who was from the original party that started the instance in the first place.

Did Corla Beams Stand In Front Move At 80 Go Back require a certain amount of communication, co-ordination, and perhaps a lucky group composition to complete. Maybe.

Our group dps consisted of two casters and a single melee. Ideal for this fight. This boss is also one of those fights were If Everyone Knows What They Are Doing They Are Fine. Beams were blocked, debuffs were dropped and fears were interrupted and it was scarily smooth sailing from then on. I thought to myself "see, that wasn't so hard, I wonder if the previous person who left was the one who caused the wipe, or perhaps everyone in here except the healer is new?" Oh well.

Any Tips For Her?

You MUST always offer to stand in front of the left beam, because that is the side I always offer to stand in. By the way it has way better feng shui than the add by the ramp. On the pull, cast your two little buttons, please refer to my "Rotations" page if you already haven't seen it. Run up to the first Twilight Slave (or whatever the hell they are called), and drop your Demonic Circle. Pew pew as normal but keep an eye on the debuff, it is safe to start running out when the stack HITS 80, just jump out and spam Fel Fire to keep up your damages. The stack should be at 86-ish by the time you jump out. Now pew pew as normal, and if the boss' heals are getting interrupted you won't need to "help" with the other beam. Watch for the debuff to drop off and warp back to block the Slave and you win.

The Fire Boss Drag Through Damage And Adds boss went down smoothly as well, it was my first time in here and I was told to "Kill adds", but the adds had spawned when the boss was at 10% health. Very quick kill.

Tips Tricks?

I don't know, blow cooldowns and burn.

One nice thing about the adds in Blackrock Caverns, is that it trains people to stack, as seen in the Meteor strikes the four little elemental thingies cast that appear after the Fire Boss Drag Through Damage And Adds boss.

Beauty. This fight is more annoying than difficult as Beauty tends to fear and knockback, which really irks me since anything that interrupts my casting makes me shout 'EFF YOU!'  On heroic, her little dogs will aggro and they can be CC'd to reduce the tank and healer's strain. I *think* we killed one on the initial pull but I am not sure if they reincarnate like the Molten Core felhounds. /shakefist

What Do?

Try not to get frustrated when you get feared/interrupted from your killing.

As for the last boss, the Shadow Clones Replace Switch boss, our mage kited his adds around, as they seem to have a healing debuff and slight damage over time beam, and everyone else just focused on the boss himself. Done and done.

I guess BRC isn't as difficult as the other heroics in terms of Frustrating Items One Must Pay Attention To, right?

Truny the Cannot Remember Any Boss Name in BRC

I Can Has Epics: Breeches of Mended Nightmares

Once upon a time there was an island called Tol'Barad and a great variety of exotic herbs such as Azshara's Veil, Whiptail, and Cinderbloom grew. This island was fought over fiercly by the Horde and Alliance forces, for they sought control of Baradin Hold, a keep that handed out extra daily quests in which people could mindlessly grind through to obtain rep to purchase a fairly awesome dragon mount that they can "Away From Keyboard" on in front of the auction house to show off the size and girth of their penises. The reputation could also lead one to obtain some very fancy shmancy trinkets but that is not as important as penis size.

Truny the Warlock had known about this island but her preconceptions held true that this place was just like Wintergrasp. She thought the moment she stepped in she would be decimated by a rogue, but those were just bitter old memories. She has axe toss and felstorm at her disposal even while stunned now! With nothing left to do and finding Uldum quests rather meaningless and feeling a sudden urge to obtain a consistent source of reputation, Truny traversed through the portal from Orgrimmar to the dreary island.

What are you talking about? Get to the Breeches of Mended Nightmares already!

SHUT UP I'M GETTING TO IT!

As it turns out, Tol Barad was not a World PVP zone (In a Normal Server), but just a daily quest hub where players can Not Group Up and Kill-Steal Each Other in order to finish their daily quests the fastest. (Please note that Truny had only discovered this two days ago and had only done two rounds of dailies in total.) On her first visit, the Island was controlled by the Alliance so Truny made a big loop around the main questing area. Herbs were everywhere, and the mobs were very generous in their Embersilk Cloth drops. It was late and Truny hadn't pondered to much about that and went to bed.

The second day, yesterday, Truny's faction controlled the Island which opened up six more dailies for her. More mobs to murder. Something about killing Problim, something to do with a crypt, and something to do with Crocodiles in a swamp of Whiptail. At the end of this amusing romp, Truny ended up with a large quantity of Embersilk in her bags and a hefty amount of Volatile Life as well! As Truny went to open up her Tailoring panel to convert all the Embersilk Cloth into Bolts, she noticed that her Tailoring skill was actually sitting at 521. FOUR away from max? She scrolled down to find one of her Dreamcloth Dream cooldowns had become available again. 522. Scrolling back up she saw that there was enough materials to make four Fireweave Blue Random PVP Items That Were Orange in Skill And Sell for an Okay Amount, and BAM.

Luckily Truny had also completed the first few quests in Twilight Highlands, the ones which involved helping the clan kill their leader, which meant Truny had access to the Cloth Trader to craft some ilvl 359 items. At the time she had exactly seven Dreamcloths in her bags, which means she probably wanted to make herself a new pair of pants over a new belt. Just because.

She had a choice to make either the Breeches of Mended Nightmares, or the Flame Ascended Pantaloons.

The End. (Back to mindless prattle)

Ok, so I had to choose. Did I want an extra 241 mastery, making my demon hit 1.5% harder, and increasing my damage done in demon form by 1.5% or did I want an extra 1.7% haste.

I chose the Breeches. Actually, I chose haste, with the reasoning that the quicker I can fire off my nukes, the more I could proc Impending Doom to reduce my Demon-form's cooldown. This means I should really use Metamorphosis more, and not just save it for boss fights, since half our mastery's description is for our Demon-form! However, I did reforge some of the crit on the pants into Mastery just so I didn't feel as bad, though I would have felt worse for not taking the haste at all. I COULD have chosen the other pair and reforged the crit into haste, but you could only reforge I believe 80ish out of the 200ish stats which I thought wasn't enough to justify the extra bit of damage my demon did versus faster nukes. That made no sense at all did it?

So there we have it, Truny's first epic item, crafted entirely herself. It did not require raid reputation to obtain, nor did it require fairly difficult to obtain/expensive materials to craft, and the stats are actually better than some piece of shit you find at the bottom of the garbage disposal. I believe the only difference between the crafted purple cloth items and raid purple cloth items is a single gem socket. WoW has definitely changed. But then again we're only at the Naxx equivalent stage of Cata now right? When Deathwing's Citadel comes out we'll need to hit Exalted reputation with Hellscream's Deathslayers (the raid reputation faction inside Deathwing's Citadel) to purchase ilvl 512 recipes, which require SIX Deathwing's Toenail Clippings to purchase, and only one drops off Deathwing. The item itself will require twelve Deathwing's Toenail Clippings, 200 of all volatile elements, and one THOUSAND bolts of Embersilk Cloth. Yes these are some big mother effen pieces of gear. For example:

[Cremation Slippers]
1,420 Armor
+1,245 Stamina
+1,245 Intellect
(  ) Prismatic Socket
(  ) Prismatic Socket
(  ) Prismatic Socket
+625 Haste
+625 Crit
+700 Mastery

Equip: Increases movement speed by 5%, does not stack with other movement effects.
Equip: Your direct damaging spells have a 15% chance to Cremate the target, causing 3,528-4,682 fire damage and 15,293 fire damage over 15 seconds to the target and all surrounding enemies in 8 yards. (45 second cooldown)
Use: Ignite the very ground you stand on with the fury of the Firelords, enabling you to levitate, slowing fall damage, and allows you to walk on water. (Triggered, lasts until cancelled)

Drool. The only thing you can complain about these slippers are the lack of socket bonuses, because of the prismaticness.

I've revealed too much.

Truny's Breeches

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Patch 4.0.6: Initial Freak-Outs

I know the patch notes are still in preliminary status but that does not warrant that I can not freak out about what I am seeing!

So how are the beautiful Demonologists going to be slightly affected by this? My notes in italic.

Curse of Exhaustion now reduces movement speed by 30%, down from 50%. Its range has been increased to 40 yards, up from 30.

-I don't use that. Dismissed.


Demon Armor and Fel Armor no longer cost mana and last until canceled.

-Cool so its like an aura, or presence, and I don't have to refresh it anymore. Cool.

Drain Mana has been removed from the game.

-WHY? I thought Warlocks were the "DRAIN THINGS" class of WoW, and it was pretty fun draining the mana of out of Paladins so they could do NOTHING!

Fear now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

-Ok cool.

Fel Armor now increases the warlock's maximum mana by 10% instead of regenerating health.

-What the fck? The whole reason I put up Fel Armor was because I KNEW I would regenerate small ticks of health at a guaranteed interval, this works in perfect harmony with Life-Tap and Hellfire. Hence our survivability! Why not 10% more HEALTH? Who cares about Mana?? Without our little passive heals we're just like every other class out there now? Gaah.
Seduction (Succubus) now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

-I don't give a shit, Fel Armor doesn't regenerate health?? Dismissed.
Talent Specializations

Demonology

Demonic Rebirth now highlights summoning spells when active.

-Ok thanks, that is useful, especially we need to be extra on guard cause our Fel Armor does not regenerate health anymore WTF??

Demon Soul: Imp redesigned. It now increases the critical strike chance of all non instant cast Destruction spells by 30%, rather than increasing critical strike damage. Duration reduced to 20 seconds.

-This should go under Destruction. Dismissed.

Felstorm (Felguard) damage has been reduced by 20%.

-Great, wait is this total damage or base damage? We totally did not see this coming! This is probably a nerf for PVP I just know it. Whatever just kill the demon before it attacks you! It will STILL hit for close to 9K so not too big a deal.
Immolation Aura damage has been reduced by roughly 30%.

-Great, now our passive AOE has been reduced, I guess once our mastery level goes high enough with T12s and all we won't notice the change? Grrr Fel Armor! Probably a PVP nerf? Yeah I think so.
Inferno no longer increases the radius of Hellfire, but instead increases the duration of Immolate by 6 seconds in addition to its existing effect.

-The only one useful change. As I am quite paranoid Hellfire will end up pulling stray mobs, oh wait what am I talking about this is probably a PVP nerf so the Warlock won't end up burning everyone DUH. Immolate lasting longer is a nice touch. But it would have to last 700 seconds longer to make up for Fel Armor, maybe. What's with the PVP nerfs just live with it I never minded that a rogue USED to kill me all the time. This was before my Felguard had Axe Toss and Felstorm. Still, it made things exciting and deadly.

Master Demonologist (Mastery) benefit from mastery increased by approximately 33%.

-Instead of 1.5% it is now 2% bonus damage per mastery point right? That's nice, it should offset a bit of the Felstorm changes (all other demon attacks untouched).
In Conclusion, Fel Armor no longer regenerates health and increases our MANA by 10%. That is absolutely ridiculous. I hope there is some sort of compromise here, as one of the reasons I play my warlock was because I knew she could passively heal up to full while questing whereas all my other characters had to actively do so. Don't just think of end-game implications of changing Fel Armor, no wait, or is this a PVP change? Or...why is health regeneration being removed? I believe Fel Armor used to regenerate 5% health, and now it is sitting at 2%. Does this 2% give us an advantage in raids via survivability, in that we can take a chance to be 2% less competent because our health comes back automatically and magically? Not really.

Is it a PVP change? That warlocks are unkillable because their health keeps coming back and they are unkillable? No. I think our drain health is kinda lacklustre and now we can't even drain your mana.

Now that I think of it I do end almost every boss fight with full health, but that's because I know where to stand and run right? RIGHT??

So, are you sure? 10% more mana for Truny would mean her mana would go up from 77k to 85k? That's like TWO spells oh joy!

Think of the levelling experience without the passive heals, people from 1-early 85 are not going to be raiding/running heroics/partaking in epic drawn out PVP battles (Right?)! I stopped playing my hunter because he could not heal himself with an awesome green armor (Yeah I'm lazy)!

Ok I am done freaking out now. I am sure something good will come out of this, perhaps it is just to unite all Warlocks to make us cherish Fel Armor and not take its effects for granted anymore. Or, whatever, we'll see bahaha!

Truny the Freaking

Truny's Cataclysm Heroic Reports: 01/11/2011

Heroic Lost City of the Tol'Vir

We ran this as a mainly guildie run, four of us to be exact and a LFD healer who was an excellent paladin healer. We didn't have much issues which makes for a boring blog entry however I did undertake on a suicidal experiment on the Bombs Throws You Earth Spikes boss. My results were inconclusive though bahaha.

So if you stand within a cluster of bombs that are about to explode, I believe the boss actually detonates them, and you take 30K damage per bomb in range (with soul link). I still didn't have the guts to actually TOUCH a bomb, but since this was the first time I was actually in close proximity to the explosives, I could clearly see that the ground will GLOW within a certain radius around each of the bombs, and that is not a safe and happy place to be.

We also happened to have an entire arsenal of CC spells available to us: Polymorph, Ice Trap, Fear.

On the Crocodile Spawns Smaller Crocodiles Then Augh boss, I recommend you saving your Felguard's Felstorm for the killage of the small croc spawns. Just do it.

Heroic Stonecore

I believe the toughest part of Stonecore is actually the first few pulls where the dude will turn into an earth elemental and deal huge AOE damage to the party. Fear him or banish him when he transforms. Let everyone gather up their resolve and game-face, unbanish it and murder it!

I ran this with the Pugger Tool. We had a random melee dps who shall be un-named and classless who just KEPT DYING every single pull. Have you ever had one of those people? They would just randomly die before even the tank takes damage, and they would die and die again? The sad part was low damage output they were generating as well. In the three to four thousand range. Odd.

CORBORUS: Of all the boss names in the game I remember this guy's name cause he's this awesome stack of stone cheerios worm who knocks Millhouse Manastorm off a cliff!

So What? What Do Demonology Warlocks Do Here? Spam Hellfire. He'll shoot red crystals onto the ground which will spawn into little explosive crystals hellbent on blowing your party into the abyss. You can save your Felguard's Felstorm for these if you see them coming, or run up to the red crystals and pre-Hellfire the ..err hell out of them! Also, when the boss burrows and spawns the little itty bitty creatures, first MAKE SURE YOUR HEALER LOVES YOU, then spam your Hellfire to save the rest of the party some grief. Remember, Hellfire is the AOE King and people HATE you for it hence you must always use it!

Dragon Fire Pillars LOS: For this guy, if you play your cards right you'll take absolutely ZERO damage in this fight other than life lost through lifetapping. Dodge fire pools, line of sight the boss when he casts crystal barrage and just stand far far away! I still can't remember his name, Stonebane? It's Stone-something isn't it?

OZRUK: Wow the second boss name I actually remember, Stonecore must be something special. When he yells "ROCK MY HARD BODY", wait a couple seconds, as by then he would have cast [Elemental Bulwark] (or something like that), which reflects spell damage. If you have Deadly Boss Mods, which you should already, a little notice will pop up that he will cast this Bulwark thingy. This is important because after this, he will leave a PARALYSIS debuff on you which is removed by damage, and hence the spell you want him to reflect back onto you is Immolate. This Paralysis will deal about 50k damage if it stays on you for its entire duration, and that is bad because an immobile warlock is a dps'less warlock! Again, just immolate the boss when his Bulwark is up as it lasts long, and ticks lightly on your robes. The tank should be facing him away cause he does a HUGE ground slam which radiates outwards from him in a V shape doing something like 1298532908532 damage. Otherwise, remember when he says "ROCK ME NOW!" you just singe him, don't do anything else....

Also in the chaos of the battle I am not able to confirm if his Elemental Bulwark thinger has a duration or just reflects one spell, but I thought it was safe to put up Shadow Ward to absorb any accidental Shadow Bolt reflections.

HIGH PRIESTESS AZIL: Dang I just need to google up the dragon boss and I've got this place down pat! Stonecore? No that's the dungeon name....anyways... She is pretty much the same as normal mode except her Force Grip hits like a mother effen truck and must be interrupted. Again, make sure your healer LOVES you and hellfire down those adds that join the party! Again, your Felguard can take out ALL of them every 45 seconds. And also, watch for the dust clouds on the ground cause that is when she will THROW A BOULDER at you and you will die.

So these so called Valor Points are slowly adding up perhaps Truny can purchase a single piece of pretty T11 by mid March?

Truny the Warlock

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Are Protection Paladins OP?

In PVE? Remember when I mentioned playing my paladin a couple weeks ago and thought retribution felt a bit clunky? That was actually their off-spec, my paladin's main spec was actually protection, and it was through tanking that she actually got up to the mid level 50s.

I decided to try out the "new" cata protection, worked hard to sort through all the holy righteous items in my spellbook and organized them according to how I think I would push my buttons in a general pull and started queuing as tank.

HOLY CRAP! From what I see, protection paladins do not die even more now! With this new Holy Power mechanic and Word of Glory self heals, my paladin could solo almost the entire lower blackrock spire save for the trolls that hex you into a frog then chop you into iddy biddy bits. Heck we could probably solo any dungeon at level? Which is kinda scary and sad.

Threat was almost never an issue, with hammer of the righteous being a nice guaranteed AOE along with our shield throw and holy wrath I levelled this paladin all the way to outlands and she is already 64! I was tanking the outlands instances half-afk while watching Mad Men with wow in the background.

From the 28934302 or so dungeons I tanked only two people had beat me in damage. The AOE damage generation is disgusting. (And I am proud to say one of them was a demo lock, and the other was a DK who was EIGHT levels above everyone else)

It was fun tanking, but in the back of my mind there spawned a slight sadness, this would all end soon, the Wrath Style run in and pull everything, once Truby hits 85 with a gear level of 329 it'll all be down to careful pulls, sticking to crusader strike and hammer bash.

tl;dr: Truny says "I think protection paladins are kinda fun because I can smash buttons randomly and be a useful tank while levelling really fast".

Monday, January 10, 2011

Demonology Warlock Rotations

You want rotations I'll give you rotations. Fine don't read the tooltips or anything just work off someone else's golden egg, let your goose die. Do warlocks have a rotation or is it a spell priority list? You don't care you just want me to tell you what buttons to push and hell I'll tell you what buttons to push for one, two, three, four or more targets and for bosses.

I actually had this issue when playing my paladin as protection, I wasn't sure what buttons to push which spells were important and tried to google it but then got too lazy and just figured everything out myself, but thats a different post.

Single Target Trash:

PUSH THESE BUTTONS


-Curse of Elements

-Bane of Agony
Hit these right as the tank is about to get aggro cause they'll waste two GCDs and you want to utilize your GCDs for actual damage.
-Immolate

-Hand of Gul'dan
-(Pet's Felstorm IF there isn't an AOE mob AFTER this mob or if this mob will take more than 45 seconds where the cooldown will refresh)
-Shadowbolt until Decimation
-If Molten Core procs, use three Immolates UNLESS you are in Decimation mode then stick with Soulfire, and refresh Hand of Gul'dan when it is off its cooldown. Always refresh Hand of Guldan over using your Incinerates since the buff lasts long enough that you can always cast a refreshing spell and still get the three incinerates finished.

Spam Soulfire

If you have to move: Spam Fel Fire while moving and the next spell you cast is most likely Hand of Gul'dan. Also, gauge how fast the rest of the DPS is, perhaps you only have time for one or two soulfires, and there might not be enough time for another cast, if so, chain a Fel Fire after your last Soulfire and spam a few Fel Fires. You have to maximize every single second that a mob has any HP that you are able to contribute to damaging it.

Two Targets Trash:

Multi-Trash as I like to call it have too low an HP for curses and banes.

PUSH THESE BUTTONS

Target first mob and cast:
-Incinerate
-Send your pet in
-Hand of guldan on first mob
-Felstorm
Switch to second mob:
-Incinerate
Switch back to first mob:
-Shadowbolt (or Incinerate of molten core is up)
Once the first mob procs your Decimation:
-Soulfires

Soulfire the first mob until its HP is low enough where another Soulfire cast will not make it in, then just chain a Fel Fire to the last Soul Fire you are going to cast and switch back to target number two:

The second mob should be dying so fast that Decimation will proc on again and you can just continue to cast soulfire, remember to always use Hand of Gul'dan when its cooldown is off, throw it in between soulfires.

Three or More Trash:

PUSH YOUR BUTTONS LIKE THIS

With three or more mobs you can be lazy and take advantage of how disgustingly powerful demonolgoy AOE really is. At the pull, just to be civil and not looking like you want to kill everything in a hellish rampage, cast:

-Immolate on whatever mob and then..
-Hand of Guldan it
The hand of guldan aura is very important for AOE pulls because it increases what is secretly your strongest weapon:
-Felstorm.
-Seed of Corruption for kicks and giggles (optional)
-Hellfire and run around like a crazy burning chicken with its head cut off! When your first Hellfire effect runs out or before the first one you can also throw in a ShadowFlame cause it looks cool!

People will HATE you.

Anecdote Time

A long long time ago, and once upon this time, Truny and a group of eager adventurers set out on a mission to murder everything in their path in the grand and mysterious dungeon in the sky known as the Vortex Pinnacle. The group was having a blast, murering along at their pleasure until the rogue said something, "I wish I could spam Hellfire". The waves of bitterness in rogue's words also left a very bitter taste in Truny's mouth, yes even digitally across the internets. Truny the Warlock tried to keep everything in line by jesting "Yes it beats spamming Seed of Corruption", and all was silent again. The group approached the terrace where the Grand Vizier of Whirlwinds Coalesce Stack on Tank or Move Out Take Damage resided, and the group decided to stack. The boss was downed and the party moved on. The rogue proudly linked his damage meters, topping everyone as he was the only melee class, and was unaffected by the whirlwind's slowing effects on casting spells. However he was only a few thousand above Truny, even though her casting speed had been hindered for most of the fight. Though Truny had no expectations of his kind of people to actually analyze the numbers to breakdown what actually happened. The group continued on, murdering hard, until they saw in the distance on a high windy terrrace, a large dragon. Guarding this dragon, was a phalanx of wind elementals! Half a dozen of them to be exact, give or take! The group engaged in a fierce heated battle and in the AOE frenzy Truny cast a Seed of Corruption for kicks and giggles and immediately the rogue said "You cast Seed of Corruption (so your number is even higher than mine QQ)", Truny promptly ignored this comment. Now, the dragon before the group turned out to be the Dragon Boss Wind Changes Move Haste! The party engaged in an epic battle with Truny reigning supreme on the damage meters, which was expected, as this fight will benefit casters who know where to stand. The rogue did not link any meters this time. Nor did they link anything when the party finally traversed to a far platform where Asaad the Wind Guy Triangle Stand In lay, and ultimately laid. So in conclusion, FUCK YOU ROGUE NO ONE CARES ABOUT DPS ANYMORE JUST HELP US STUN AND INTERRUPT AND SHUT THE FUCK UP!
The end.

Boss Fight


PUSH THESE BUTTONS

A boss fight is similar to Single Trash only the boss has waaaay more HP. Start off with Curse of Elements and Bane of Agony, followed with Immolate. By now your pet should have ran up to the boss, hit Felstorm. Hand of Guldan. Shadowbolt until molten core procs that is when you use your powerful Incinerates. Watch for Hand of Guldan' cooldown, if you think you can't make it to refresh it because you have to move, Fel Fire. Watch for your pet's Felstorm cooldown, or save it if the boss has adds. If the boss has adds, refer to Single Target Trash.

Now, by the boss pulls you should alread have a feel of how the group is performing DPS wise and also how the tank is threat wise and also the healing patterns and tendencies of the healer. If you are not aware of all this, get practising it is important to know if the healer is a tunnel-vision style or just like yourself, awesome.

We Can Has Cooldowns

I tend to save my cooldowns for boss fights because 1. I am lazy, 2. I save them for boss fights.

Demon Soul, on a 2 min cooldown I sometimes pop this at the beginning of a fight, just to help trigger any phase shifts, which means it will be back up when the boss is low health and in Decimation mode.

Metamorphosis, I also sometimes pop Meta along with Demon Soul at the beginning of a fight and become almost godly, if I know the fight is long. Since our main nukes will reduce the cooldown of Metamorphosis, Depending on the group DPS, Meta might be back up for action when the boss is low on health, and I can use it to boost Soulfire Spam Damage. It all depends.

If the boss is Melee friendly, pop Meta and leap your way in there and cast Immolation Aura as well, for the bonus passive damage. We all know that though.

Soul Burn? You COULD use it for an instant Soulfire to proc a talent called Improved Soul Fire which increases your haste by 15%. I actually do not have this talent, and I am too lazy to respec but I can see that you can use this as a mini-trinket or an opener to Single Target Trash fights or Boss fights.

What Happened to Corruption?

I believe they made changes to this spell where it only benefits Affliction warlocks. Previously, Corruption was part of our spell list and it would proc Molten Core, nowadays, something else procs molten core. I think its Immolate, or something. But its NOT corruption. I believe it is from Immolate damage.

And that pretty much sums it up, unless I forgot to talk about a certain ability. I have a feeling it is the ability that is bound to the "8" on my bar, which for some reason right now I can not recall what the HELL it is.

**Oh my goodness this post is SO old! In order to update this, throw in CORRUPTION, and keep this up on the boss! Also, the Fel Hunter is our high DPS pet now, if you'd like, start off with the Felguard, use his fel storm and switch out to Fel Hunter!
Truny the Rotating

Friday, January 7, 2011

Truny the Warlock's Useful Tips: Tailoring Tips

One of the first things I noticed with Cataclysm was that the new cloth, Embersilk Cloth did not seem to be dropping as abundantly as Frostweave. Even with the passive hidden "cloth scavenging" that all tailors have as a passive ability, mobs tended to drop an extra 2-3 cloths, sometimes six (HA like twice in two weeks), but more often than not just two.

From my experiences back in Wrath, my tailors would generally find a LOT more cloth while running dungeons than solo'ing, though this is slightly true, say I am questing for an hour with humanoid mobs as the killables, I would find maybe 12 pieces of cloth, whereas in a dungeon I'd find 20? (Say what?) That is still more, mind you.

Seeing that WOW crafting is still "grind to the end just like the actual game until anything is useful", a lot of the "low" level cloth items require 4-6 bolts of embersilk cloth, which means 20-30 pieces of cloth, for ONE skillup. And as I mentioned before, in a single hour, or a single dungeon run you MAY find enough cloth to make about five bolts. Congratulations.

So anyways, I had noticed this after the very very first dungeon that Truny ran and immediately I thought something was wrong and I promptly went straight to the source, wowhead. There were some comments such as "oh go grind here or at so and so area", but one special comment noted that the quickest way to accumulate embersilk cloth was to use a
"Potion of Treasure Finding" and go grind out mobs in the new Cataclysm zones.

This potion gives you a buff where you will have a small chance of looting a
"Tiny Treasure Chest", which can contain a bit of gold 1-4 usually, a chance of 4-11 Embersilk Cloths (usually at LEAST one bolt), and a lower chance of a handful of random volatile elements.

This sells for about 180-220 gold per potion, and the buff lasts for an hour. It is quite worth it, because if you find even ONE treasure chest with 11 pieces of cloth this is probably more than you will ever find just by grinding out the mobs (that may not be true but I am just really bitter about the drop rates if that is not already quite obvious).

But Where Do I Kill

Oh yes, another comment made was to recommend people to go to Deepholm, and grind the Stone Bats and (Something) Flayer mobs that run around the area. They are located WEST of the temple of earth, on the first ledge. This place is extra great for Demonology Warlocks because our hellfire ticks can pull the bats, the flayers and hell everything around us and burn them to the ground in seconds since both these mobs have really low health (5k for the bats, 10k for the flayers). I spent more time looting than actual killing and make sure your Felguard does not killsteal any of the bats as he can one shot them! They have a fast fast respawn rate, as they are quest mobs, and the flayers sometimes drop 1-2 pieces of embersilk cloth, and the bats will drop a "flesh" which is used 450+ cooking which actually sells for a lot on our server.

In the duration of one potion I usually find a few volatiles, not important, and if drop rates were loving me, about 250ish embersilk cloths, YES about forty to fifty bolts of cloth! Considering that one piece of cloth is selling for like 823432 gold on our server, as holds true with EVERYTHING Cataclysm related, the treasure finding potion is 200 gold well spent.

It also helps that my second profession is herbalism, and my Death Knight has maxed alchemy, though money is flowing in so fast I usually just buy the potions when I run out rather than actually logging off and logging back in and spend the time to actually click the "Make" button and send the potion via mail D:

Speaking of this gold rush has anyone noticed this as well? I bought the free well not free but the 4,500 gold "310% flying speed" skill a week ago but now I have more than I had to begin with already? All I did was sell some herbs??

Truny the Tailor