Weekly Progress Report: 12/18/2012

Hmm it's been a while hasn't it?

Well, enough chit-chat. We are officially 13/16 of the silly little raid bosses as of yesterday, with Empress Shek'zeer downed we strolled into TOES and slayed the Guardians before calling it a night.

Empress was messy. Let's just say we had some unfortunately timed explosions and also an add up into phase 3 but we survived. Somehow. I won't dwell on that point too much.

Healing Shek'zeer

Apparently this is one of the most healing intensive fights. Well, sorta. I find it's mainly timing and cooldown management, as is every other fight out there??

Otherwise, I haven't been doing anything else. Dailies are a thing of the past. I've camped my toons by ALL of the battle pet masters and have been doing those dailies instead.

Dominance Offensive? Meh, I don't care my druid is NOT going to grind another faction. My warlock does about 2 sets a week if I feel like it. The story I should say is quite interesting and I am definitely looking forward to the next stage of my progression. However dailies suck and seriously, Krasaran Wilds is SO far south who the hell has time to fly all the way down there? Not me.

I also finished my first legendary gem several weeks ago but again, what the hell am I supposed to put it in??

Turny the Lazy Tree

Weekly Progress Report: Actual Progress

It's Tuesday! Tuesday means that everything has reset, for us to do it all again in a more efficient manner.

Last week was the release of Mr Bigglesworth. Go look him up. For collecting 12 rare drop pets from old world raids, you are rewarded with an awesome icy whiskered kitty from the depths of Kel'thuzad's prison. Or whatever.

In an effort to never have to do old raids again I sent ALL my possible toons into Naxxramas, AQ40, and MC and managed to find all 12 pets. Perhaps I'll visit them again to make some money or help others finish their collection. I mean, I did respec to Fury for Viscidus after-all.

In the raiding world we are doing great. Just last week we were still on Garalon and as of yesterday we are 5/6 HoF, with Ambershaper Un'sok's corpse rotting happily away. I also won my FIRST upgrade after setting foot in Heart of Fear, T14 legs.

This is on my druid by the way. T14 legs are nice, however, my warlock has won THREE T14 legs off of the Sha of Anger! I don't have enough specs to use them all!

Perhaps this week will be a lucky week and I will finish my healing 4P, then I can report on it. It reduces our swiftmend by 3 seconds. Very interesting indeed.

Turny the Distracted by Battle Pets

Fiery Warhorse: Check

With the release of patch 5.1, I once again rationed my available alts to "camp" out the locations of all the various new battle pets.

I was quite distracted as were doing our weekly MV, and was creating a priority list of which pets to catch. I had narrowed it down to the new mechanical animals, the infinite whelp and also the kun lai yeti.

I was lucky to see a spawn of the Anodized Cub and decided to check out the Arcane Eyes near Karazhan. Again, my lucky paladin managed to find one stray eye, a poor quality, but an eye nonetheless and realized her hearth was down.

"Well, I might as well go kill the horseman while I'm here" I thought. About 100 stuns later I looted the horseman's corpse and amongst the mess was...The Fiery Warhorse Reins!

Ack! Well that's one check off my Very Long Term Bucket List. I had given up on farming Kara for this mount as the fight was relatively trivial and that the mount has only ever dropped twice in our guild.

Truby the Horse Hunter

MoP LFR Tips: Terrace of Endless Spring

Hello reader! I totally forgot that I was supposed to finish up my MoP LFR Tips pages!

We have been making slow progression in the real raiding-land, with Garalon successfully dead, we are now beginning to work on bosses that drop real T14 tokens for real tier items. Exciting! (But not really)

Anyways, to get into ToES, one must have completed the HoF achievements by having killed all the bosses.

ToES is relatively easy except for Tsulong. Tsulong is another fight that requires RAID WIDE co-ordination and from what DS has taught us, is that it taught us to tunnel vision and ignore mechanics.

SO here we go!

The First Guardian Bosses

I have no freaking clue what these are called in game, but essentially they are 3 Jinyu guardians who have been corrupted. This fight is almost idiot-proof and the only thing I see that you can do is:

• Dispel/purge the heal effect that the healer dude puts on the other fishes.
• Prepare yourself for lightning rings, stand out, then run in to avoid the multi-step lightning AOE, it hurts, but not too hurtful, but come on, just try to stay out. You'll see.

Tsulong

Tsulong either goes really great, or really bad.

I think Tsulong deserves a srs bsns paragraph to describe the intentions of his mechanics.

Tsulong is a DPS and healer race. Ignoring all other mechanics for now, essentially Tsulong shifts between two different phases, day and night. During the night, you DPS him hard while avoiding damage. During the day, you heal him hard and protect him.

Why?

Ok, the reason is that during each phase, his health inverses to whatever you put it at. Say at the end of the first night phase you get him to 60% health. When day flips over, he'll be at 40% health that you have to heal up. Say at the end of this day phase you heal him up to 60%, at the next night phase, he'll be down to 40% health.

Got it?

SO the key is to do lots of damage, and lots of healing.

Now I shall explain the phases.

• Night Phase: There is a sunbeam on the ground. The main purpose of this beam is to eliminate his stacking AOE debuff that ticks for something like 20k. I recommend building up about 10-15 stacks of this debuff based on your ability to survive, then dip into the sunbeam to remove the debuff and spread out.
• Spread Out for Night Phase: Why? During this phase he summons random purple circles on the ground, where if you stay in them you get feared. And the circle is big. If everyone is grouped up, everyone will get feared. This is a HUGE dps uptime loss. And we want lots of DPS.
• Day Phase: Healers, stand in front of him and wait for him to do a cone attack. You want to be hit by this as you regen mana and do 500% healing. Heal the fuck out of him. When he gets debuffed, DISPEL this immediately. I believe it's called Nightmares. Nightmare ticks for 2% of his health, which is a lot. Think about it this way, for each 2% tick, you have to either heal back 2% more or do 2% more of his health in damage. If this ticks for its full duration, you might as well wipe or kill yourselves.
• Kill Adds in Day Phase: Focus on the unstabale adds that spawn on the outer ring, if they reach Tsulong, he takes 2 million damage. 2M damage that you either have to heal back or dish out in damage.

That's it. If you hit the enrage, either heals sucked, or dps sucked or stacking sucked. You'll know.

Lei Shi

The 2 bosses after Tsulong are snoozefests. When Leishi hides, AOE the corners to reveal her, then if she summons guardians, focus fire on one and if she pushes you back, run towards her for reduced damage. Blah.

Sha of Fear

Sha of Fear is relatively easy but still requires slight explanation.

Tanks should take turns standing in the golden light, which generates a wall behind them preventing his big fear attack and reducing damage taken.

Occasionally he'll send a group off to the side platforms. Kill the add, then click the portal in the middle to return to the fight. Healers make sure to heal hard and touch the little orbs around the add to get mana back.

The Sha also summons adds that'll wreak havoc outside of the light wall, you must run behind them to DPS them. The thing is, if you are outside of the wall, you are susceptible to his high damage fear, which the Sha casts when he is full energy. Run back in the wall when he is at around 80 energy.

Easy sneezy!

Truny the Tipper

MoP LFR Tips: Heart of Fear

Welcome to my continuing post on LFR tips for the new raid finder encounters in MoP, today I will provide some quick tips for the Heart of Fear.

I am too lazy to open up a new tab to research what the names of the bosses are so just bear with me.

Imperial Vizier Vorlok

It could be Zorlok. He consists of 2 phases, with phase 1 being a "preview" of each of his cool abilities, and the 2nd phase being an amalgamation of all the abilities until he is dead.

• Attenuation: If the boss flies to the left side of the room first, he will cast spirals of DEATH that you must dodge or you will DIE. Well you only take 50k damage in LFR mode but don't touch them for good practise. A nice trick we've noticed is that these shoot out in a spiral so you can just run around the empty spots. Or dodge!
• Verve and Swerve: This may or may not be called that, but if he flies to the RIGHT side of the room, STAND UNDER THE SHELLS that he summons to reduce his yelling ability's damage by 40%. Last time I caught 5/6 healers standing outside on the brink of death. DO NOT wipe the raid and waste everyone's time.
• MC: His last ability occurs when he flies to the top of the room and will MC random people. DPS them to 50%.

Blade Lord Tayak

This boss is much easier than his real counterpart and can be done with a couple healers and five sane DPS left alive. You'll see what I mean.

For this boss you want to spread out around him as he'll throw out tornadoes and also "hit" random person with a debuff that ticks for high damage every 3 seconds. If you get hit and you are near someone, they get debuffed as well.

His most important ability is when he disappears and a magic arrow appears on someone's head. At this point, as this is raid finder I recommend stacking onto the TANK and melee as he'll do a huge cleave that does split damage to everyone in the cleave. Most likely you'll have a lot of people die to this since his cleave is hard to control anyways.

Once he hits 20%, you get to have fun with tornadoes. I recommend that at 11%, most DPS should slip into the slip stream that has formed and blast to the other end of the room to await the boss's demise.

Garalon

This either goes great, or not so great.

1. Assign at least 2 people to be the Pheramone bitches. One person, preferrably ranged will pull the boss, and EVERYONE must be patient. They have to wait for this ranged person, who should run up real close to the boss to receive a debuff, and this person should kite the boss slowly around the outside ring of the room.

If an impatient warrior charges in on pull, he will most likely get the debuff and spread it to everyone wiping the raid.

 Everyone else should stay near the middle, away from the person who is kiting. Once this person has 20 stacks of debuff, the 2nd person should pick up the debuff by "touching" the debuffed person. Hence why everyone should be away from the original kiter, in case pheramone jumps. That's peramones, and most likely some people are familiar with this but are too lazy to do the kiting. Though I'm not sure if LFR stacks the debuff any higher than 20. If so, only one person needs to kite unless you really want to reset stacks.

Pheramones do I think 10k damage every 2 seconds to the entire raid, with increasing damage every stack that the kiter has. So if 4 people accidentally get pheramoned, you have 4 x damage going out. Dead.

2. Everyone DPS his legs. If possible, try to stand within the little circle around his leg to get a damage buff against his legs. This does the leg's total health in damage to the boss and slows him down to save the kiters.

3. If all the legs are dead, hit his body.

4. STAY OUT FROM UNDER HIM. This is denoted by a purple circle. If you touch his no-no spot he will cast Crush which does huge damage to the entire raid and stuns everyone.

Wind Lord Mekalajak

Who the hell knows what his name is. This boss is rather simple. Pick up the spears around his room and on the initial pull, CC one of each type of add that he has. 

Now burn down the healer add.

Then burn down the other add.

And burn down the 3rd kind of add.

Do not use any external CC's other than the ones provided by the mechanic.

Burn the boss. Collect your gold and complain.

Amber Shaper Unsok

The reason amber shaper unsok can potentially be a difficult encounter is that it puts the onus of keeping everyone alive, and doing things right to so many people. Here's a quick list of priorities for your success.

1. Ranged focus on amber slime adds. Make sure the entire area is clean of them and kill them when they spawn.

2. Everyone focused on MC'd people. Mind controlled people in this encounter turn into Amber Monsters, you will see these yellow golem like people running around. DPS them to 20% to free them since once they run out of "control", they die.

Now the important part.

Anyone who is transformed has 2 important roles. If you are in Phase 1, stack your "1" ability on Amber Shaper, this does 250k damage to him and stacks a +10% damage taken debuff on the boss so he'll die faster.

Also, pay attention to where your cast bar is. Occasionally the controlled people will "explode" hit your "2" button to stop it.

That's it.

In Phase 2, the boss goes IMMUNE, so anyone who is controlled should stack their "1" button on the giant amber monstrosity. You can't miss it.

Also if you are running out of control and no one is DPSIng you, go use "3" to eat a slime pool. You gain back 2M damage but it may delay your death.

Once the monstrosity is dead, continue to kill adds and stack the "1" button on the boss who is active again.

Grand Empress Shek'zeer

She is quite simple (phew) luckily. Tank and spank. Tank and spank her adds, then dispel anyone who is running in fear in P3. No seriously, that's about it.

For healers if you want to be picky, you can track her wind bombs and prepare any cooldowns for when their energy is running low since they explode for moderately high damage.

Feel free to ask for clarification or additional tips that I have missed.

Truny the Impatient

MoP LFR Tips: Mogu'shan Vaults

Now now calm down, I know I said I'd stop writing tips and reviews but let's face it, the more knowledge we have out there the better it is for all. In order to facilitate a smooth run where everyone can get their gold, item (yeah right), and VP as quickly as possible and never see each other again I am going to provide my Quick Tips for LFR.

And honestly you should not be wiping in LFR. That is just sad.

First off is Mogu'shan Vaults (MV).

Stone Guards

This is the first boss in MV and consists of 3 random dogs with varying abilities. From what I've seen in raid finder, the tanks just hold them all together and everyone just AOE's them down while the healers heal through everything. With that said, here are the abilities to take note of to save your healers some stress.

• Cobalt Mines: Activates with the cobalt guardian and is a crystal that will deal damage and root you when it explodes. Move out of the blue circle.
• Jasper Chains: If you are chained to someone, run close to them or you will burn to death. Ideally ranged would run to melee so the melee can keep poking.
• Amethyst Pools: Stay out of shit.

Feng the Accursed

The second boss has 3 main abilities that I would like to highlight.

• Earthquake: I think it's called something else but it's an earthquake. Stack up to heal through it if the tanks don't know how to use a shield. Make sure to spread out in case the boss casts a lightning fist onto the ground.
• Wildfire Spark: In P2, just keep doing what you are doing but pay attention to Wildfire Spark. If you get this debuff, run out of the group and will drop some fire onto the ground. DO NOT drop a pool of fire into the melee or ranged groups. Most likely people won't see this and you'll kill them.
• Arcane Resonance: This is probably the most important ability which occurs at P3. If you get a debuff on you and you start pulsating arcane energy, run away from everyone so no one is inside that little circle. For every person in that circle the damage increases. So if you are in melee with EVERYONE...yeah.

Garajal the Spiritbinder

This is the last boss of the 1st half of MV and probably the easiest.

• Healers take note of anyone with Voodoo doll debuff on them. They take damage with the tank.
• DPS make sure to click the totems around the room which are spawned periodically and go into the spirit realm to kill spirits, they do damage to players in the real world. ALSO click the special button you see once you are done to come back to the real world or else you die. You ALSO get a nice damage debuff aftewards. Healers can also go in to refill all their mana when they come back out.

Spirit Kings

The first boss of the 2nd half of MV. He consists of 4 "phases", which get more and more "complex" as the fight goes on.

• Qiang: PLEASE stack with the tank in FRONT of the boss to absorb his huge cleave attack, then run through the boss for his huge smash attack (denoted by a very obvious animation)
• Xian: Kite shadows and kill them as necessary.
• Meng: Group up to lightly AOE each other, and when he starts running away he will stack a debuff on himself that will slowly reflect more and more damage going from 0 to 100%. This is when you will see lots of people die.
• Subetai: Dodge his volley and free anyone stuck under his pinning arrows.

Elegon

Elegon would make a nice mount. He also deserves a real paragraph.

In P1, everyone will be inside the celestialy looking area for a 50% damage and healing received buff and pew pew pew. Elegon will spawn an add that should be nuked down.

Elegon will then begin to "Draw Power". This part is crucial. Once he is finished casting, he will send 6 orbs to the various pillars around his platform. The raid should split up and make sure each orb gets killed before it reaches the pillar. For each successful wave of orbs dead, Elegon receives a +% damage received buff, which is great for burning him down faster in P3.

IF THE ORBS don't get killed, PAY ATTENTION. If an orb reaches a pillar, you will see a pillar pop up and this is your queue to get out of the middle since the floor will completely disappear and you will fall to your death and people will call you very mean things.

Once the pillars are up, kill the pillars, stay out of lightning pools and kill the adds.

That's it. Rinse and repeat until he does this a 2nd time. After the 2nd time, stack on Elegon and burn him down.

Will of the Emperor

This is the final encounter in MV and has a lot of tank dancing and add control. I will provide tips for individual roles.

• Tanks: Your only goal here is to survive and also dodge the giant construct's "combos". They will either slash to their left or right, or do a smash. When you see them winding up to slash left, dodge right and you get a buff. If you see them raise their leg, they are about to stomp, so move back. Each time you dodge you gain a buff and once this buff reaches 5 points you get a special "opportunistic strike" ability that hits for 500k. This should be a steady source of damage for the raid since...
• DPS: Your main goal is to kill all the adds before even touching the big emperor constructs. CC rages, keep Strengths out of the raid as they stomp, and burn down Courages from behind. You are allowed to DPS the boss only when ALL the adds are dead.

Ideally, you will know if your group is good or a fail by telling how many adds are up by the time Titan Gas, a mass AOE damage phase, hits. If only one mob is just dying as this phase hits, you should be good as long as everyone is consistent. Also, anyone comfortable in melee, including hunters or healers can also deal with opportunistic strikes.

So that's my short run-down of MV.

Truny the Impatient

Time To Induce Change!

Instead of bitching and moaning like an old person about doing dailies, I have decided to enrich my own experience along with anyone else who cares.

When I do dailies on my warlock, who does them either with guildies or solo, I like to help anyone else, be it horde or ally to kill their mobs. Why? Because we are so damn efficient and seeing those poor souls kill so slowly makes me anxious. I've received many a cheer/bow/thanks.

Thus, the next time I do dailies, and everytime I do so onwards, I will send a quick message into general chat saying:

"Starting an open group for [Reputation] dailies, send me a tell and feel free to join and leave as you please, we just want our rep and VP so let's get these done faster!"

The group won't do dailies "together" but will be "grouped up" "together" with a similar goal, regardless of our progress. This may take a while to work out some kinks, but essentially my goal is to do this consistently enough that perhaps other people will start adopting the same thing: Guild Wars 2 style questing. This also might not work on the warlock since she's usually done any given hub in 3 minutes, perhaps even before the other party members arrive on scene for the slaughter.

The overall sense is that you show up, kill something/do something and you contribute to your own progress and maybe even someone else's progress. The only downfall is that there is a 5 person limit to this and depending on how spread out we are this could get weird.

But it's a start! This is also a really good way to alleviate the woes of "Fatty Goat Steak"...right?

Turny the Fat Goat

Weekly Progress and Ranting: Squish More Bugs

Welcome folks and folkettes,

Monday was a good day. Monday was the day where we killed Blade Lord Tayak. His tornadoes are really annoying. We changed up our moving strategy to spread around him while we tanked him in the middle, and switch to the various sides of the room rather than physically move him each time he did his thingamabob. This made stacking easier and also tornado avoidance. 25 VP and no upgrades. Yay.

Tuesday is always a good day for us, Tuesday is the day where we do our full clear of MV and then fly on over to squish some bugs. This is it for the good news by the way. If you're familiar with my humble abode, this is about the time where I begin my ranting.

So. The good news was that we downed 7 bosses in 90 minutes. 150 VP. The bad? 0 upgrades for the 2nd week in a row. I sort of lie, I did win an Offhand that I can not use as I have not run LFR for a chance at the main hand yet, and the Wills don't seem to want to drop anything useful for anyone.

LFR? Do I need LFR? Oh god this question again. Well, not really. MV has gotten to the point where I can go back to healing while not really paying full attention to anything. Am I being entitled to loot? Should one feel that after three weeks of raiding that they should see an upgrade? Maybe not. Perhaps we're supposed to be in our heroic 463s and even the crappy 458 JP gear has held us through for this long. Perhaps the kill is the real reward and upgrades are just icing on the cake...as it should be!

I will still refuse to do LFR on my druid until my warlock has capped off VP for everyone to receive the bonus. Yes, a good plan indeed.

I know it all boils down to RNG and luck, but seriously? My heals are definitely not lacking but....well you know what I mean right? Double gold. Double gold!!

On the other hand, my off-off spec, yes not even my off spec, but the spec in which I am attempting to work on, kitty, has more upgrades than my main spec. All 496s. Wtf? This shows you how many items are dropping that no one needs and yes I am looking at YOU spirit plate. /growl

Yes yes, the extra 2% stats isn't going to REALLY make or break the game, and perhaps this is a secret message that is being sent out. A message that is meant to erase the wrongdoings of the past, more specifically the Loot Rain of T9. You don't "need" gear to succeed (beyond a certain threshold of course), but just go in and have fun, and that is totally working! (And pay attention, make sure you are prepared, pay attention, and also maximize your spells, but that is standard practise)

Also I now feel compelled, not feeling forced, to start doing Shado-Pan dailies on my druid. At the very get-go I refused to do anything but raid, and this proved to be a tough situation to augment any off-pieces that won't drop in raid (aka all pieces, every week). Had I felt "forced" to do Shado-Pan perhaps I'd already have bought 2 pieces off of them and won't be as frustrated from the lack of upgrades.

Blame the Warlock

This is one point that I am going to hit home everytime. I blame the changes to the Warlock class. We are just so good.

When you have a toon who can mow down entire quest hubs in mere seconds, playing anything else just feels slow and tedious.

We have a demon who can tank and has excellent threat and rarely needs mending, and also enough burst to eviscerate regular mobs in one or two spells.

Compare this to a boomkin who has to apply both dots then stand around and nuke for 10 seconds.

Ok fine, 10 seconds is not THAT bad, but over the long run. But compare this to 3.

Or a hunter, who has to cast like what.....50 arcane shots to kill a mob? It's gotten better since my hunter has replaced all his slots with heroics gear, but...is it just me or do hunters not have that OOMPH anymore?

Turny the Angry Tree

Which Sha's Face is This?

Sha of Rage!

My lucky charms have proven once again that they only work on my warlock!

I was peeking around the loot tables of the bosses in Heart of Fear and saw the Warlock T14 lookalike helm and HAD to use it! A chance to look sha-like before the actual helm is released with the Terrace!

I queued up for Garalon the giant bug, the 3rd boss in HoF and won this helm with my token along with some gold. The fight itself is pretty simple, stand in his leg circles and pew pew, otherwise stay out of his face!

Pretty cool stuff, alas, the T14 shoulders or its lookalike are not available yet!

Truny the Sha Face

Battle Pets for Warlocks

Now for a happy post that I have been meaning to setup for several weeks: Battle Pets for Warlocks!

You would be delighted to know that there are two rare-ish pets that have been added out in the wild that I believe are perfect for warlocks, especially warlocks who choose to specialize in Grimoire of Sacrifice and are used to having a buddy beside them.

Green + Fire = Win!

 Meet the Fel Flame. The Fel Flame can be found in Shadowmoon Valley in Outlands and they spawn in any "green fire" pool around the Hand of Gul'dan. Expect a LOT of other assholes (including yourself) flying around hunting or camping them out as they seem to have a fairly long respawn rate. These pets are about level 20 if I remember correctly so come prepared!

So mini!

The second pet that I would to introduce is the Minfernal. The Minfernal can be found in Felwood in Kalimdor. They spawn in the area with the big infernals just south of Whisperwind Grove where you will see a bunch of craters on your map. These seem to have an even worse spawn rate than the Fel Flames and again, expect TONS of people in the area. I believe due to CRZ you will have to fight your way to the first spawn.


Also, please note that in 5.1 we will be able to upgrade our pets and unless you are DESPERATE to use these two pets RIGHT AWAY, just catch one, and be on your way to save people a lot of grief. (Or if no one is around...I guess you can catch two)

Truny the Moar Demons!

Should I Run LFR?

We made great progress yesterday, clearing all of MV and the first boss in HoF in a record breaking 90 minutes. Everyone brought their A game and it was highly appreciated, I even ranked on the healing charts for Stone Dogs. Imagine that, ranking for just sitting around watching tv and pushing rejuv every 10 seconds.

Despite all the good and fast, out of our seven boss kills, not a single piece of upgrade dropped for several of us, and that is including using our lucky charms. Zero. Zilch.

On a personal level, this was an absolute waste of time. Regular MV is old content and so is HoF pretty much (anyone worth their salt is already full heroic cleared right?
. For the guild, this was great, we have a head start towards the empress tomorrow and I have a feeling we will one shot Blade Lord Tauralak or whatever the fck the 2nd boss' name is.
Back to selfish loot drama.

Did I need an upgrade? We cleared in record time, and ranked with a pvp blue helm, and the crappy elementium dragonling trinket. Probably not. I know it's just a week of bad luck, but clearing an entire raid and something with not just no upgrades but also a pittance of VP feels pretty shitty. Whoop-dee-fuckity-doo 150 VP that makes my 200 VP from last week go up to 350.

Also, I have completely boycotted playing my druid outside of raid times. No dailies. No heroics/scenarios/LFR. LFR...the only other place where I can *twitch* replace my blue helm with a sub-par purple helm *twitch*. Boomkins just take too long to kill things and I can't be bothered with building a kitty set, as..this all takes time, which we have none of. He's the only one with a maxed out farm but....seriously who the hell has time to kill critters and clear out weeds? Why can't we hire a farm hand to do this for us?

Honestly, getting an upgrade feels...good. Sure sure you can argue that back in the day it would take MONTHS to even upgrade your ilvl 55 blue item to an ilvl 58 blue item and that was an epic excuse, but the game has changed where gear is being rained down and I am just bitching about being unlucky enough to have stayed dry.

Would a 489 helm vs a 458 helm make a significant push towards my mana regen, which has no issues at the moment? Not really. Does the 0.2% extra healing really help when our burst AOE is already kind of crappy? Not really. But......

/whisper: It's blue and ugly.

Then again, it did take me over a YEAR to finally see and win a Fandral's Flamescythe.

It's okay.

Turny the Lootless

The Bug is Dead

This may not be a big deal to anyone since Heart of Fear has already been out for so many weeks and all the top guilds have cleared it on heroic, but we have shuffled our three raiding days to fit in both MV and HoF and I am pleased to say the first boss is dead. I apologize as I do not know the name of this boss, I believe his name is Grand Vizier Maloriak. No wait, Maloriak was in T11....well anyhoo he is the first boss and he has some deadly abilities and some...*cough* fun mechanics that I am actually quite impressed by.

As a resto druid, I spent most of my time DPS'ing and we effectively 2.25 healed this. I jumped in and helped in P2 when the boss did his Hard Hitting Stand Under The Shell Yell ability that ticked for 60k a second. The spiral dancing and MC control were all great mechanics.

Alas, we have not seen any spellpower leather or healer items for several weeks and my Lucky Tokens have been really shitty on the druid. My warlock seems to win something everytime she uses those??

 I do believe HoF is being released in LFR today...that should be a blast.

We then proceeded to get the 2nd boss all the way down to 40% before everyone started falling asleep. I shall update you on our Thursday run when we revisit HoF. I do remember his name, it was Blade Lord Talaraiak or something like that.

Turny the DPSing Tree

No More Horror Stories

Remember the time when a lot of us had an intimate connection with heroic dungeon bosses? Before the JP/VP acquisition change, we spent a lot of times in dungeons and we had a lot of horror stories regarding these dungeons.

Alas, this is no more. How much do you want to bet that you can't even name 5 of the heroics, and at least 2 of the bosses in them? You can? Well...I can't...

How many "defend this wall" type dungeons are there? Setting Sun, Cow Temple, That One In The Tree, and all of the heroic bosses' mechanics don't really matter. These mechanics were put in place for challenge mode and challenge mode only.

I think the extent of our horror stories nowadays amounts to "oh, this person is only doing 30k dps", or "this person is crazy". There aren't any particular bosses that I can think of with a deadly mechanic except for that Spinny of Doom guy in Scarlet Whatever.

Is this a good change of culture? Having us spend less time grinding heroics, and more time out in the world? I think it is, rather than working together, we can complain about other things such as tagged mobs/tagged rares and over-crowded daily zones.

Speaking of rares, why are people so rude?

Here's the deal: no one has any claim on any mob. If you want it, you tag it and you fight it. As a courtesy, you either help the person, ask for an invite to get credit, or sit around quietly and wait for them to die, if they die. If you are on a PVP server, go ahead and try to gank them, if you are on a PVE server, go ahead and flag yourself and hope their AOE hits you. This is all fair play, but as of late, I have been getting a lot of "rude gestures", being spat on, being cursed at.

Really? It's all a game of speed, if you're slow you lose. Though to be fair I do scan the area to make sure no one is ABOUT to tag it then swoop in for the kill. Though this is limited to latency and LoS. My hunter got spat on after having tracked down a rare crane, by an opposing faction hunter going the opposite way. I guess technically I am supposed to "hate" the alliance, but I don't. My latest encounter was some panda lady that I killed, with 2 flagged ally standing on her hoping that I would tag them. Why would you want a level 90 destro lock to flag you especially when your HP is lower than what chaos bolt could hit for?

In these cases, all you can do is /spit back, say "fuck you, have a good day", /wave or /bow then leave.

Truny the Horrorless

Slow Down

I bet you read the title of this post in that male Pandaren voice didn't you?

No?

Well, eat poo!

The very first time I heard this utterance in Jade Forest while I was rushing my way to 90, I knew exactly what he meant. This statement does not provide any lexical hints or subtleties to the Pandaren culture, but it's an early hint of MoP's new gating system. It's not a suggestion to slow down, it's saying "you are going to slow down, whether you like it or not!"

Think about it, VP is now acquired at a snail's pace. To max VP you would have to do 200 dailies, or 2 LFRs and dozens of dailies and a dozen heroics. Apparently all you have to do is just stroll into Challenge Mode and clear everything a few times to cap VP. Easy peasy cause Challenge Modes are just so easy. *Cough* Or if you're not heroic world first raiders, no one even cares about what your gearing strat is because you're not even going to get the world/realm first so you are non-important anyways. (I agree with this point, yet also disagree)

Reputation is now based on dailies and the few basic quests, but you can pretty much calculate the exact day that you will hit revered/exalted with any given faction.

I am not stating any opinion on this gating (yet), but that's how it is. To appease us, the ones who said there was "nothing to do" at end-game, now there's LOTS to do, however, it's also a lot to do spread out over time whether we like it or not.

Think of how it was, we would equip our tabards, grind out reputations and do dailies until exalted and then never pay attention to that faction again once we've bought our ware (many many wares). As with VP, 2LFR halves would net you half of your weekly total and a few easy heroics could finish that up in ONE day. Then you would never run heroics or do LFR again for the rest of the week.

It's a fine delicate balance, a balance that might have been tipped awry due to everything being tied to VP. We are used to capping our weekly VP in a couple hours, not slowly drip feeding it over the course of an entire week. Heck I usually hit 800/1000 every Monday and fail to even cap. But that's fine. Cata VP items turned out to have lots of BiS items (right?) and actually just a LOT of items that we could buy since they would never ever ever drop in real raids. Perhaps my hunter is a special case, having only received 2/3 pieces of "real" gear while raiding T11 and 12.

On a side note, why does LFR reward more VP than the actual raid on a per-boss-capita? 25 VP for a boss kill...really? Has that been ninja-changed, I don't even pay attention anymore.

See, the issue with collecting ALL the VP in one day so we won't have to do anything, only to complain about having nothing to do. See the deadly evil cycle? Let's say dailies rewarded 20 VP each, we would still do them, and cap out much faster. Would we be compelled to do dailies for any excess factions? Maybe. Perhaps less. We would probably find it redundant and tedious to do Klaxxi after we've valor capped and again go back to the "we are forced to do this for rep" argument.

I use that phrase with heavy irony, but it seems some people find this to be true. No one is forcing you to do anything. Did they hold you at gun point? No. Is an upgrade going to help you stay out of fire faster? No. Do you have absolutely no way of obtaining a similar piece of gear? Aha. There's always LFR? No, too tedious? Well, you can uhhh...hmm.

See, I still think we should utilize a secondary currency to purchase random things for those who don't raid- oh wait, those who don't raid don't "need" gear. Bah. You see the dilemma?

With the release of Heart of Fear, valor gear is starting to look rather unattractive and actually slowly grinding out VP to fill any missing pieces is a much more enjoyable experience than facerolling LFR for a chance of loot.

Ideally, what everyone wants is probably for their VP to slowly accumulate at 100 per hour, and their rep with all factions to accumulate at 1000 per hour..while they are offline so they can log in, be "done", then complain about having nothing to do. The end. (I gotta get back to work)

Turny the Slow Tree

Longing for the Lock

Yesterday during our regularly scheduled raid, I realized something very very scary.

As I am the only healer in the group with an "acceptable" dps "set" (Aka switching to Boomkin and equipping one of the DPS weapons I"ve collected in heroics), I have been boomkin'ing a lot of MV lately and I have to say...it sucks.

Considering I am slightly over-hit and have nothing reforged to benefit my dps, I guess you get what you can get right? I don't do piss poor, but the thing is, I'm not top damage. Ever.

So what? Well, when we first stepped foot into MV I had from the get-go began my strategizing for how my WARLOCK can maximize her damage on the different encounters. This can be done being a healer since all you do is push "rejuv" and people live.

So my scary revelation was that "oh my god, I am what my warlock is to what my hunter was to my warlock back in Cata!"

In other words "I can dish out two times more damage five times more effectively and enjoy the game all at the same time!"

I don't like dots. This coming from a warlock sounds strainge. Dots that don't do anything. Well, boomkin dots DO proc starsurge but I have no crit to push this. And I don't really care, we got the bosses down with me being the measley 5th or 6th and perhaps I should just accept this. The Healer That DPS'd.

Perhaps I am just being a whiny non-advanced boomkin, but when you think of it, I have a warlock with ONE dot and no crazy mechanic of waiting for eclipses and managing the best time to cast a certain kind of spell, and a good time to refresh which dot and which dot to refresh first. I just...kill things and Chaos Bolt eats everything up! Perhaps it's the 100% crit that I longed for.

Or maybe I should just work on a dedicated boomkin set. But that would mean I'd have to play my druid. NO!

Anyways I said I'd post pics, but what pics? Uh of course, Battle Pets! No no I'm not going to start talking about that anytime soon, but pics of battle pets that are perfect for the warlock class. Unless you are a cute cuddly creature loving warlock...then just choose one of the many rats/rabbits/squirrels that they added to the game and be happy with that.

Truny the Not A Boomkin

Dailies Suck, But Not Really

As my hunter dinged 90, I decided that he would not join in on the daily race. His new purpose on Pandaria is to fly around and mine and mine and mine and mine. I am considering slowly levelling up my second tauren druid to fly around and herb and herb and herb. Maybe.

The Boring Story

My druid was the first to hit 90 for "professional" reasons, that is to raid immediately. This was a painful process as I had never actually "played" my druid from 1-85 out in the world. I either tanked or healed all the way to max level, then healed at end game. Since doing dungeons wasn't cost-effective I had to indulge in the traditional method of leveling: questing. What? What do I even?

Playing a boomkin is....nice, but annoying. It kills SO slowly. On one hand I can multi-dot and kite many mobs indefinitely with my self heals, but on the other hand, it just takes so goddamn long. By the time I hit 90 I had to gear up slightly so I started doing dailies and building rep. It would be two more weeks until I even touched my warlock.

Since my druid had such a huge lead on rep, I couldn't just abandon everything and let my warlock finish everything. I hit revered with Klaxxi, Cloud People, and exalted with Golden Lotus on the druid and I by the time I had revered with GL my warlock was 90 and ready to go. This was the darkest time, as I was sometimes doing GL on two characters.

Dailies suck. This is no news to anyone. But they sucked especially because I was a boomkin that killed very slow. The Boomkin That Killed Very Slow. Sure, moonfire is a great tool to tag mobs before all the other assholes that are questing can get to them, but once again, very very slow.

The moment I hit exalted with Golden Lotus I completely stopped playing my druid and assigned him to finish up the Tiller dailies, since they are easy and require less killing.

As I had mentioned in my previous post, a destruction warlock is the perfect killing machine when coupled with a voidwalker. It feels like being a hunter back in their prime where you just land in any hub, then completely decimate said hub within 30 seconds without taking any damage at all.

Where it used to take my boomkin about a full 30 minutes to do the full Golden Lotus hub hopping cycle it would take my warlock about 8-10. Hop in, havoc, tag everything and mow them down then hop to the next  zone.

Dailies now do not suck. My warlock has taken over doing Shado Pan and August Celestials, and is now doing the Tillers for sport (and fish?). Kill 10 Chiji Students? No problem, 4 dead within 10 seconds of me landing in the area.

Now with my hunter, he doesn't feel as "strong" as he used to be. Perhaps I got too used to end-game, wielding a Vishanka for most of the end half of Cata, but now my attacks feel rather insubstantial. Or perhaps I'm just irked that I can't do back to back 200,000 hits with my pet?

Anyways, the irk with dailies now, is that some of them are horribly designed.

That ONE Horribly Designed Daily

Now we were promised changes to one especially excruciating daily, "The Bigger They Come". Or what I like to call it: "The Fly Around Looking For Non-Existant Elites That Other Assholes Are Looking For Quest".

This quest, which would otherwise take about 2 minutes to complete turns into a 20 minute mad dash to tag and kill. Really? What happened to the share tag? Why can't we work together? This just harvests anger and rage. Perhaps the Sha designed this quest.

What happens is you either find the elite and kill it and be happy, or...

You find a mob, fail to tag it but end up facepulling extra mobs, then get hit by a fear and run into even MORE mobs, then DIE, which gives you a ton of down-time. Not very efficient. And kind of sad too.

Otherwise, I need to start posting some PICTURES!

Truny the Efficient

The Greatest Apology to Warlocks Ever?

As I love doing so every now and again, come with me my dear reader who may or may not still be that warlock from many years ago, and travel with me back to late 2010 when Cataclysm launched.

/cast Reverse Time

It was an exciting time, the first time in fact that we could do anything relevant such as...earn exp in the newly shattered world. There were many new zones and dungeons to be explored and we leveled our merry way to 85. Then something happened. Class changes were put through, raiding got more serious and everyone got a lot more competitive. Warlocks still held their own as formidable dealers of chaotic damage but something just felt wrong. Our spells were awkward, and the felguard was no longer the optimal pet.

I thought I was burnt out, or that I was doing something completely wrong, or that I had to just accept the fact that either Demonology was ultra clunky feeling with disjointed mechanics, or that I HAD TO KEEP ISF UP AND CHAOS BOLT HIT LIKE A WET TOWEL. Fun and enjoyment in the class itself had been lost. I defaulted to my hunter who could dish out just as much damage with a great feel to their class and had a great bond with his pet. I tried to keep my warlock relevant up till T13, running the occasional LFR until she was FULL 384 and pretty much abandoned her by the inscription trainer until further notice.

It was sad, yet there was nothing I could do.

--Begin: Rave on Destruction Warlocks--

Then MoP Beta was released, and having read of the complete overhaul for the warlock class, the first character I copied over was Truny. I tried out all the specs and found that:

1. Demonology: OMG teh demonz!
2. Destruction: Chaos Bolt just EATS everything up!
3. Affliction: Nice! Malefic Grasp!

The potential was HUGE, and having had a taste of this delicious malefic fruit I would at least log into my warlock once a week (we still sucked) to make a glyph or whatever, in the spirit of looking forward to the changes to come. I also embarked on a journey across Azeroth to collect ALL the shiny 2-handers that my future Wrathguard could wield. I believe he has a heroic Kiril, Fury of the Beasts that nobody wanted.

After the talent change revamp hit near the very end of DS, I gave my warlock a spin in Dragon Soul and just as I had predicted, the potential in the new changes was amazing. No longer did we have to spend MORE time juggling dots and managing buffs than we did paying attention to the fight and maximizing our "rotation", but instead we were just destructive powerhouses. Once again in my full 384 gear I was performing at and beyond what everyone else who was in full regular to heroic DS gear. (I know, this isn't Diablo where gear matters but that's a lot of missing stats).

What Changed

First and most importantly was that Chaos Bolt was actually WORTH casting. At level 85, if anyone even remembers, or if they had even cast this spell...what did it hit for? 30k crit? How much did incinerates crit for? 40k? Yeah. Now it is a GURANTEED crit, with even more damage based on how high your crit chance is and hits for over 100k, and sometimes 300k.

We are once again pretty useful when it comes to trash mobs. You gotta love this:

1. Spread immolate on EVERYTHING.
2. Rain of Fire - Which is now cast it and does not require channeling
3. Havoc 2 mobs, you can either incinerate or DOUBLE chaos bolt them.
4. Pick off weak mobs using Soulburn, which hits ALMOST as hard as chaos bolt, but can be cast indefinitely as long as you have embers, which you get back if you land a killing blow.

Oh, another note on Havoc. This spell actually duplicates the next spell you cast to another target rather than just apply the damage done. In otherwords, you get TWO physical chaos bolts, or six incinerates while this buff is up. DOUBLE DRAGON!

Essentially, even with trash we have a very powerful "execute" that can be used on EVERY SINGLE mob as long as you catch the killing blow. Go try it out and giggle with glee as you chain cast 150-300k on 7 mobs. GO do it now.

Though when I first tested out destruction, the "rotation" felt kinda....non-existent. I would put on my curse, use my one dot, use conflagrate up and spam incinerates until my ember meter filled up. That's it. The rest is managing how to spend those embers throughout a fight by maintaining a balance of chaos bolt usage vs saving up for execute. There isn't much going on, which one may find that the class has become too over-simplified. This could be the cast for single target fights where you really can't do anything else, and your old brain is just twitching to keep some buff up or looking for some other complication.

My thought was to add just a SLIGHT tiny smidgen of RNG into our nukes, perhaps we have a chance to proc 3 mini-chaos bolts. Maybe? Perhaps we auto-cackle when we cast chaos bolt?

I am definitely not complaining, we've got it all. A flaming mount that can cross water, a VERY powerful execute, a very satisfying nuke, NO mana management, and we set ourselves on fire as each fight goes on.

On dailies, my warlock does not worry about doing dailies because she is so efficient at doing them. Since I  had levelled my druid to 90 first, and he had such a huge head-start on rep, I felt obliged to get him to revered/exalted just because all this rep would have gone to waste if I abandoned my druid. Being a boomkin sucks. Well, not really. Having multiple dots and self heals is nice, but.......it's very slow. As a warlock with very solid voidwalker tank, I could pull multiple mobs and kill them withing 3 globals all the while continuing to pull multiple mobs. So much more efficient.

Now we have news that we can embark on a quest for green fire, and can cast Cataclysm....what else is missing? Are we not allowed to ask for more? I say we stop complaining....

What about Warlock demon flying mounts?

Truny the Warlock

Blood and Thunder

I had discovered an interesting little shrine in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and couple weeks ago, which detailed the origins of our beloved rare Thundering Cloud Serpent Alani. This got me thinking to the popular Horde phase of "Blood and Thunder". Is there some intricate web of history and lore that ties the origins of the horde and the burning legion straight to the land of Pandaria?

Alani was born out of warfare. Well, moreso exploded out of a bloody lake after it was struck by lightning.

Is there some scandal brewing here? Or perhaps the ideal of blood and thunder is just a common theme for Blizzard designers? Or is this ANOTHER cultural reference that I am not getting? Wrathion did hint at fel meteors striking Azeroth, but how does this relate to events that have happened in the past that could tie Pandaria to the burning legion.

I thought Emperor Shaohao had shrouded the lands in mist before the well of eternity exploded?

I think the only way for me to find an answer to this riddle is to continue to eviscerate every living creature other than the Pandarens in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, collect 7 more Skyshards and ask Alani myself!

Turny

No Time for Dailies

Hello dear reader,

I had intended to write this post the day Mogu'shan Vaults was released, however I did not have much time. Ever since the first raid was released, we were sitting at "end-game" whether we liked it or not, despite being VERY ambitious this was the plan and we weren't going to deviate from it.

Let me give you a recount (get it, recount?) of my druid's Pandaria experience thus far:

1. Level to 90 as fast as possible while gearing up along the way. I did not read any quests, nor was I actually present for probably 30% of my leveling experience (questing with an efficient buddy with a ridable mount helps).

2. Hit 90, and run Sha of Anger IMMEDIATELY upon receiving a luck token, and grind heroics until they are sick of me and vice versa.

3. This part gets messy: grind dailies because ohgodwhy.jpg

Dailies. This aint fresh news to nobody, but... I'm not quite sure where I stand on the topic of dailies.

First off, I felt compelled to do EVERY SINGLE faction's dailies, everyday. My motivations might be different than most. See, how I see doing dailies and getting rep, gear, and mounts are tinted by how I perceive society as a whole from an American standpoint. Wait what? It's sort of a Keeping Up With the Joneses notion where if you aren't in a certain "stage" of the game, then you are behind and "bad". It's not exactly how I see view society, but how I think society wants me to think about itself. Y'know?

I knew for sure that I wasn't going to be server first 90 anything. I had actually put off levelling for several days to check out pet battles. Thus, right off the get-go I wasn't going to be the "best" druid. Someone else had hit 90 before me therefore I am irrelevant. See what I am trying to get at? Other than playing the game, which from what I see is actually pet battles, and materials collection, I was made myself do the "other" thing...dailies.

The moment where the answer to my question of "do we get tabards?" was a resounding "no", I decided that I disliked the entire reputation system only on the basis of "needing" to gear up and have all the mounts right now.

My major qualm are the Golden Lotus dailies. There are a LOT of dailies divided into multiple hubs, which provides one "reward" at the end which may or may not contain something useful/useless. My ranting on the Treasures of the Vale thus ends here because I did find a Sky Shard in one of my bags so now I know they DO work. (However, someone had already found 10 shards and caught Alani, so that mount is no longer special)

These dailies involve a lot of killing, then some clicking, then more killling and clicking and ends with a "big boss" type quest, then sends you away to do more killing or clicking. This would be fine if I had TIME. By the time I get off work to bed-time I have about 4 hours of playtime. Yesterday was a non-raid day so I did these dailies with glee. However on raid nights, there's no TIME since I "have" to do them on multiple characters with various professions. And you know what the sad thing is? Truny hit honored, which means she has to do all THREE hubs of dailies! BAH. Luckily a destruction warlock is about three times more efficient than my poor boomkin.

I wouldn't mind if the Golden Lotus dailies were just THREE dailies that reward 550 rep each. For example the dailies could be:

1. Kill this dangerous monster.
2. Traverse this dungeon and kill another monster
3. /wave at Alani

Instead of committing genocide on everything in the vale amirite?

This, my friend, is just one faction. At revered, I opened up Shado-Pan (SP) and the August Celestials (AC). SP requires you to go all the way to Townlong Steppes to kill yet another hundred or so mobs. Fuck that I don't even have time to fly to their hub let alone do their lame quests. AC has a hub in Krasarang Wilds? What am I a time traveller you might as well send me back down to Tanaris to do a quest.

I have rationalized these two factions, and considering that my VP acaquisition rate is so slow, there won't even be a feasible method for me to have every faction unlocked to buy everything they have to offer anyways. My plan is to have Truny work on Shado-Pan, she is the most efficient killer, and the mobs from those quests are rather annoying to kill; and to have Turby work on AC once he is 90 and once he hits revered with GL in his own sweet ass slow time.

After hitting revered with the Tillers and Klaxxi I sighed a breath of relief that I would never have to interact with them ever again on my druid. The sad thing is that my VP acquisition rate slowed completely down and I'll be damned if I can ever manage to cap my VP in any given week.

So now we go back to the age old question of "what can we do at end game?"

If you think about it, dailies are a HUGE part of end game, they unlock the gear, and also provide the currency as a means to obtaining said gear, they unlock recipes and also the mounts. ALL the mounts (except the Yaks).

If you take out dailies, what have you got left? Dungeons? Meh already outdated. Scenarios? Interesting but the rewards have been insignificant since day 5 unless you somehow managed to level up through gathering. It would be nice if they FULLY COPIED LOTRO and gave scenarios/dungeons their own set of currency rather than a pittance of VP and crappy blues.

We have challenge modes, those look interesting. Beautiful transmog gear and ugly phoenixes. I guess we can spam challenge modes non stop for months on end?

LFR? Does this even count? People are crazy in LFR despite long-winded explanations on every single mechanic, which may or may not be relevant.

Farms? Farms are getting annoying. It's nice to have your own plot of land, away from all the crazy people but really it takes so damn long to plant all my crops, why can't they just be planted and stay happy? Does everything I plant have to be infested/weeded/attract angry birds? There isn't much interaction with the farms other than the Annoying Random Event. You plant your stuff, then leave.

We have one thing left, and that one thing is by default the defining "game thing" of WoW: Pet Battles. But who has time for that with all these dailies in the way?

So, what is the point of all this? To gear up? To appreciate the art of the new mounts? To have fun with friends? I think the one single line that the Panda from the Pandaria Cinematic resounds quite well with the game, "what is worth fighting for?"

Nothing. You've heard this line before "slow down!"

Turny the Needs to Slow Down

Who the Heck is Xi'an of the Endless Shadow?

I haven't stalked myself on Armory for quite some time since setting foot in Pandaria, and I just noticed that our Mogu'shan Vaults progress was 4/6. What the heck? Who was the 4th boss? Who is Xi'an of the Endless Shadow? Then I remembered, oh yes, we did down the 4th encounter. It was so horribly easy that I  totally forgot about it, and that we are making attempts at Elegon, who is in fact the 5th boss, not 4th.

I thought the 4th encounter was called Spirit Kings? We 2 healed this and I fail-kin DPS'd it with 1000 latency.

Turny's Tips for Spirit Kings

Are you ready for this? Now that I remember doing the encounter, I believe there are 4 kings that you must defeat, each with fairly trivial mechanics, and once they are defeated, they keep one of their mechanics that you have to deal with on top of any new king you encounter.

I'll be damned if I remember what they are called.

Guy Where You Stack Then Don't Stack and Move Out of Wall
So, stack in front of this guy. When you see a giant ground animation, run out, or through him TOGETHER with your tank so you don't die. If the group does not run together, the tank may die since his main attack is split amongst everyone for a bajillion damage. He summons a line of soldiers that everyone must move together to safety out of.

He continues to summon walls after he is..re-dead.

Pro-laggy tip: If you are SUPER laggy, run out a second before everyone or just stay out.

Guy That Has the Shadow Things
This guy summons shadow things that follow you and ..don't really hit that hard, but kite them and kill them and stay out of shadowy pools.

He continues to spawn the shadowy following things when he is down.

Guy That Shoots Arrows and Pins You and Spins
This guy shoots arrows in volleys of 3, with increasing damage with each volley. Very simple to move out of unless you are dodging a wall of soldiers and trying to kite a shadowy figure. He'll also pin random players to the ground, who need to be freed akin to Bone Spike in ICC and he will spin. That's about it.

I'm not sure what he does when he is down but it is probably trivial.

Guy That Goes Mad and Reflects Damage and You Stack and Do 40k Damage to Each Other
This guy is tricky, and it's ideal that you get him as the last boss as he has an ability that makes everyone mad and take heavy damage until you've been friendly fired enough. This adds a hectic element to the fight especially with all of the other king's abilities going on. But pretty much stack, then stay alive. He also reflects damage when he goes into coward mode? So...don't tunnel vision!

We will be attempting to make Elegon dead tonight so I shall update you shortly!

Turny the Failkin

Brewfest Woes

The timing of the Mists of Pandaria launch and the dawn of the Direbrew Festival this year is just horrendous. I only have 2 characters who can queue at a chance for the one single holiday mount I have not been lucky enough to find: The Brewfest Ram.

Very painful. To add to this pain, is it just me....or has anyone noticed that a lot of groups that queue for this FAIL HORRIBLY? Honestly, the Coren fight is more hectic to heal than what we have seen so far of Mogu'shan vaults. The one clincher to this fight is Ursular Direbrew, she spawns when he is at about a third health and will CC anyone highest on her threat list. This SHOULD go to a DPS, not the tank, or healer. That should be enough explanation.

Long Explanation: If you are the tank, ignore her, if you are dps, HIT HER so you take one for the team. If you are a healer, yell for someone other than the tank to aggro her.

Lastly, why are people doing 10-20k dps on him? My level 89 warlock managed 35k. Isn't the level 90 baseline 40k? Is this a dire sign that the game is shifting?

Truny the Shuddering Warlock

Check: Spiritbinder Down

Apparently yesterday was raid night for us, and apparently we downed the third boss encounter in Mogu'shan Vaults, the Spiritbinder.

I apologize dear reader, I do hope you are the same reader...anyways...I failed to pay attention to the name of the boss yet again, but I did remember that his name had "Spiritbinder" in the end.

This boss is a solid DPS check. I had tweaked around my talents a bit to help with pushing out just over four million points of damage on our successful pull. That's a lotta wrath! We essentially 2.65 healed, except for when the boss goes into OMGDAMAGE mode where I popped Super Tree and threw everything on everyone.

The Spirit Realm
We rotated healers accordingly depending on who had the Voodoo Doll debuff on them, and my one and only tip in there is: pre-hot anyone going in, refresh your lifebloom on the tank then spam regrowth once inside. Once everyone is full and you come back out, you get all your mana back anyways, this isn't really a healer fight but a damage dealing check.

Alas poor Yorick, nothing useful dropped nor did my Lucky Charms prove to be any useful. Perhaps one day there will be some sort of bonus loot for me (a guildie did win shoulders on their roll, which proves they sort of work....)

Low Level Sha of Anger Kill
I am questing hard on Truny the Warlock and I have to say, levelling as a destruction warlock is oh, probably seven times faster and easier than my boomkin. It's nice that my boomkin can multidot and kite while self healing, but blowing everyone up is just a LITTLE bit more fun.

I was questing in Kun'lai and was in the final stages when a potential Sha of Anger group was forming. I thought to myself "I'll just ask for an invite, no one will realize that I'm level 88". I got invited. I contributed. Sort of. Luckily for the new reforging mount I bumped my hit from 9% to about 13.5%...close enough. I got killed by the wandering or respawning trash once, but I did contribute my measly 22k dps to the effort and was rewarded with a shiny pair of T14 legs. Shiny. Alas, I could not equip it. At least once I hit 90 I shall have a pair of 496 pants and a pair of free 476 shoes.

LFR
LFR is released today. *Shudder*. I am conflicted. Shall I just bear down, and run this? Will the first few weeks of LFR be as smooth as when DS came out? I assume only most raiders who have seen and possibly cleared a few bosses of regular MV will be geared enough to enter? Not saying that non-geared people are batshit crazy but...you know how it is...

...my last few Coren Direbrew runs have been horrendous. How does one manage to pull anything less than 20k dps at level 89+???? HOW?? To be fair, my healer spamming wrath can do that much.....

...anyways. Another concern of LFR is that..well as more toons hit the 90 mark and use LFR as a gearing tool, will I eventually become bored out of my mind with Mogu'shan Vaults? From what I see, regular puts up enough damage to keep my healer awake but.....perhaps we shall switch to heroic in a few weeks.

Anyways, Spirit Kings is our next kill and from skimming the dungeon journal those individual kings just seem like a whole bunch of stacking/dodging.

Turny the Tree

I Fear

Something has been bugging me ever since I dinged 90 and began my epic journey in gearing up for raiding: what is the point of the Justice Point?

I know just recently they unlocked the once "require honored" ilvl 450 justice gear, but one issue I have with that is that there are no sp leather helms, and all the other slots are pretty much obsolete since I have already found full 463 items

Into the Mists

This shall be my official "Hello Pandas" post. So, hello Pandaren, Jinyu, Klaxxi, and Ook Dookin' Houzen. Hi.

I told myself a couple months ago when the burnout of Cata (shudder, let's not mention that word much ok?) started to set in that I would take Pandaria in stride. However, plans don't usually go as planned especially with pokemon, farming, new mounts and exploration all up and open for grabs. (I even saw the rare Alani with no access to it....)

I created a battle plan. With the previous expansion my warlock Truny led the way to 85 before anyone else followed by my hunter, then druid. With Pandaland, my plan is Turny the Tree will progress ahead as he led the way through the yawn-inducing ilvl 410 end game content (and cause we're raiding right away).

One issue did rear its ugly head upon me: I hate questing. It took my druid a good while to quest and dungeon all the way to 85, for sure not in a week's time and let me just give you an example of how I quest.

How Truny Quests:

1. Bitch about having to quest. GW2 makes questing and the fact that there are other people around ALSO questing a dream. Anyways.
2. Bitch about having to click on the quest giver. Seriously, just mail/call/text me.
3. Afk break.
4. Come back, and read the quest text. Accept quest.
5. Afk break.
6. Bitch about questing.
7. Log-off and go gather mats on either my miner/herbalist.
8. 1 hour later. Come back. Do the quest.
9. Realize that I had neglected to pick up a nearby quest. Get frustrated. Log-off.
10. Gather more mats/explore/afk.
11. Come back, accept 2nd/3rd/additional quests.
12. Go do quests, complain about other players and the fact that I have to move and do things.
13. Turn in quest, and bitch about the 372 ilvl reward (this is a bonus step from this expansion).

But seriously, the previous expansion started out with us requiring 272s to get into the newer dungeons, which was on par with heroic Arthas. Now, what do we need? Is it 353 to get into the new dungeons? Isn't that....ZA/ZG 2.0? SO we are pretending that HoT and Deathwing never existed? Go figures.

ANYWAYS, I believe the single greatest point of Pandaria is the changes to the warlock class. I LOVE playing my warlock now. Who doesn't like a guaranteed 200k crit, with spammable 150-200k kill-shots?

Warlock Changes for Destruction

Truny comes into this expansion in full LFR gear with a single heroic Zon'ozz wand and she is totally keeping up with everyone else who has regular or heroic items (not that gear matters in WoW, this isn't Diablo). The new destruction system is great, despite looking rather simple, the game ends up being a matter of managing your resources properly. I have stuck with Destruction over Demonology since it just feels like it has more oomph, or perhaps for ONCE I am actually seeing large numbers rather than a stream of many smaller numbers (I did pick up a heroic Kiril for my Wrathguard on the last day of the previous expansion).

I think I am being vague. I shall delve a bit more upon Destruction, though this blog will NEVER again have a guide as the game pretty much tells you what buttons to push and it's not really that hard to figure out nowadays and there are better sites with pretty pictures for that stuff.

So destruction. Let's take a before and after look. (If I can remember)

Before: Cast your curse, use your T13 bonus to proc your free Soulfire. KEEP UP IMPROVED SOULFIRE AT ALL TIMES. Bane, corruption, immolate, conflag, incinerate. Leave out chaos bolt because it SUCKED. Or use it, whatever, warlocks sucked then. This was actually okay. Keep up ISF at all times and watch for procs and keep dots up. Remember to soulburn when appropriate.

Our Demon Soul cooldown was iffy for demonology cause our pet sucked.

After: Curse. Conflag twice, immolate, spam incinerates until your embers fill up and you burn with a demonic fury like never seen before. Now you have an option. Do you want to use your ember on a Chaos Bolt? It hits like a CRUISE SHIP. OR, do you want to save your embers for a vulnerability phase? Or for Soulburn? Or do you want to Soulburn multiple times? THIS can also crit like a truck. OR do you want to use it for AOE? Spread your immolate and rain of fire? Oh, rain of fire is set-it-and-forget-it now.

Demon soul is spec specific and it doesn't REALLY matter which pet you are using. Well it does, but...whatever.

One really nice thing about Soulburn and its associated glyph is that if you kill something with Soulburn that is worth honor/exp, you get your ember back, which means you can potentially Soulburn something else. This is great for small packs where you may potentially chain crit for over 150k on 3 mobs before anyone else can do anything. It's part of the Great Apology for warlocks I believe.

One thing I am scared of is an impending nerf to our huge numbers. But, enjoy it while it lasts!

Actually, this post was just to mention how awesome destruction feels now, so goodbye.

Truny the Warlock

Cross-Realm Zones

I dislike the new cross-realm zones, which constitutes probably ALL the zones out there.

The shiny excuse is that these zones are underpopulated and players lack socialization and all that jazz. Right? No!

I believe this cross-realm BS was implemented to lighten the sever load once MOP hits. That's it.

You see, I grew up post-WotLK launch. I levelled to 80 pretty much in complete silence. Azshara was MY zone for a brief period of time in 2008.

Ok you know what I am going to get straight to the point

Cross realm zones suck because it increases the competition for rare-spawns, especially the various dragon mounts that consume much time. Now I am not an avid camper, I have rarely wasted any time camping anything since it's a) boring and b) my attention span does not allow me to do so, but I do make my daily route around Storm Peaks and Deepholm for the occasional chance at glimpsing these rares.

Cross realm-ness has MY Storm Peaks filled with lame other players from Zangarmarsh, Thrall, and I am not even sure if it is myself who has become the intruder into their realms?

This is an issue. Storm Peaks has gone from an average of 1 or 2 people on at the time that I do my daily routes to around SEVEN HUNDRED, there are probably FIFTY people from each faction gathered at EACH of the spawn points at any given time of day! I may or may not be exaggerating but anything more than ONE is no good.

Now I ask, why does a game which has promoted the exclusion and separation of other humans via random dungeon queues, improved anonymous LFR looting and anonymous pet battles now promote the sharing of zones? It makes no sense! Why would I even want to chat with someone who will potentially steal MY rare? See the issue here? I am stealing THEIR rare as well, they could probably care less about seeing me!

Besides rare hunting, which will be PROLIFIC in MoP since we have already hunted ALL the rares up to Cata, this COULD benefit people levelling up but COME ON, seriously think when was the last time you had trouble doing a quest in WoW? There's no such thing as group quests or elites, or anything that involves much brain power while levelling and anyone else out in the field is just seen as a hindrance to your fast progression right?

So in conclusion, if the rare spawn mount in MoP has any chance of looking BETTER than the heroic or raid meta mounts, and if I happened to find this rare, then I would probably not give a flying baboon's arse about cross-realm zones. Otherwise, good luck hunting with the THOUSANDS of others in YOUR zone.

Mount Collector's Frenzy

Pink, purple....






Dearest reader,i type this from my phone so please bear with me. As the dawning of the pandas approached,i began to panic. I did not have the life binders handmaiden! Deep despite having completed the ds meta mount, with the removal of the last two fights as part of the requirements, anyone and their cat can obtain the dumb twilight drake! Ad the two week countdown began, I crossed my tree limbs and being one of the five handmaidenless raiders ,o slowly waited for the loots to distribute. Luckily, I won! Next up is ragnaros mount!

Harbinger of Twilight

Blah blah blah, nothing new save for exciting Patch 5.0.4. Despite super exciting talent changes for Warlocks and Perma Tree Form (YAY), nothing else is new and hence I haven't been updating much. Heroic DS blah blah blah, today we were treated with a surprising delight. We managed to magically get Deck Defender on heroic mode thus finishing our Meta Mount. This amongst UI's messing up and everyone still getting a feel of their classes. Though I'd have to say I really like the resto druid changes, our heals feel beefier, the new talents give us a bit more flexibility with cooldowns, and I am still trying to justify the useless use of our new healing magic mushrooms.

(Not sure what's wrong with the lighting in this picture either, whatever)

The end.

Turny the Harbinger

Azeroth is Saved

My beloved druid Turny's fate had been sealed the moment he hearthed away from Anub'arak's rotting corpse beneath the Argent Tournament grounds. He would be the one to lead in "progression". (Shut up, I know MOP is close and everyone has killed Heroic Deathwing, but shush). We've been working for a couple weeks on Heroic Madness and let me just
say....wow can this fight be any more boring? You think Spine is boring, think again. 3 Platforms of mind-numbingness, then one platform of mildly intense healing, then apparently Deathwing's head platform is all out madness...at least for our first kill anyways.

We've been working out a lot of kinks. A LOT of kinks. We had our mechanics pretty much down on the get-go, and it was mainly an issue of (in order), surviving impales, placement of parasites, not running off the platform while zoned out (guilty), and nuking down adds. Anyways, Azeroth is safe and now I must go pick up garbage for the Darkmoon Faire folk.

Turny the Tree

Looks Nerfed to Me

In response to Ratshag's pondering of whether or not the Reins of the Raven Lord drop rates have been nerfed, I think they have! (Or probably not)

I haven't been to Sethekk in a while, I used to run it almost everyday on my druid when it was pretty much druid exclusive to no luck.

His post reminded me about this mount that I was still missing, and that..well I can has! It actually looks better and featherier than I had expected!

Turby the Hunter

July Updates

Wow, I just realized I haven't updated my blog in a very long time!

I'm still here!

Sooooo what's been going on? Firstly I've just finished going through job transition in the real life, always exciting to have more money! I got my big accounting exam results back as well, I passed yay! I also bought a new car, which I am going to inspect and pick up tomorrow..yay!

How about in game? Well, I decided that I really like healing, so I secretly made a SECOND druid. A resto druid. He made lots of friends in Azeroth via QUESTING and was quite glad to finally hit 85 to do the Gearing Game. As of now he is 386 and has slain the "real" Deathwing twice. He's in boomkin gear but he can hold his own.

How about NORMAL characters? Well, as we all know the 30% "buff" was implemented yesterday, and PROBABLY because of this buff Turny the Resto Tree is officially 7/8H. Oh Spine...................so boring. We're going to attempt Heroic Madness on Monday...and...I shall perhaps report on our shenanniganings!

*Yawn*

Turny the Local Grocer

400 Achieved!

Ahh what's this blog without the occasional loot raging?

So one of my goals was to hit a PVE ilvl of 400 or higher before the end of this expansion, and today and last week's bounty had hit the spot!

Despite still having a 378 offhand, the Vagaries of Time that everyone seems to have is my druid's new toy, a significant spellpower upgrade from my 397 Visage. However, maces suck. Transmogs for maces lack in beautifulness. Anyways.

Hagara proved to be a Bountiful Bitch, as she dropped both the pretty heroic T13 red shoulders (love those red stones), and a Girdle of the Grotesque.

Ultimately I gained about 400 spellpower and 1% mastery. Also I got lucky on Spine (working on heroic now) and got lucky with the passive 880 spirit trinket which allowed me to transmog out around 900 spirit into pure throughput via mastery. (I found 3,200 spirit was plenty comfortable).

I know everyone and their rainbow shitting cats are have been 8/8 HM for half a year now, but I'm just glad we manged to get 6/8 (as of 06/25/2012) to be doing something "current" while it is still "current". Sort of.

I need a red-offhand!

Turny the Explorer

The Deed is Done

Destroying Ends and Stuff

Wow it's been a while since my last post. It's been a busy month with exams and job transitions abound.

Wow Updates!

Hmm, my druid is now 5/8 HM and almost breaking the 400 ilvl barrier. This is great, because I do not intend to quest on my druid come MOP, he can start healing fresh off the boat to Pandaland. I would have to say that despite being drop-dead-boring on regular mode, heroic mode encounters actually keep me on my feet, and awake, and looking at my screen....sometimes.

I now have four toons with the oh so special "Destroyer's End" title. In order of acquisition: my hunter, druid, ....wait for it ..... rogue......and then...warrior!

Yeah! I haven't touched my warlock for several months and her progression goes as far as 5/8 regular mode DS. I could just use her for one run to get her street cred upped, but screw that shit. Having previewed the feel of warlock in MOP, continuing to play in our current state is just a waste of time.

What has this world come to? Where my MELEE toons are more fun, and have progressed more than my once main character? My arms warrior has a really good feel to him, his attacks feel hefty and smashy. On the other hand, my assassination rogue is quite fun, despite juggling dot uptime, slice n dice uptime, and also maximizing my envenoms, it feels very "right", unlike a warlock. (Though if combat and sub had a specialized dot, then all hell would break loose cause everyone would want to use it).

But yeah, I have lost track of what I was talking about again so goodbye.

The DS Weapon Collection is Complete!

 Let me reintroduce to you my sturdy warrior Bruny. Bruny likes to mine gems for a living, and has pretty much set up residence within Twilight Highlands.

As you can see to the right, Bruny is wielding Ashkandi, and when someone is wielding Ashkandi, they've probably transmogged it onto something, and what other 2H sword is in the game at the moment?

Yes, Gurthalak, Voice of the Almost Never Drops!

I've actually delayed this post for about three weeks, which is how long my warrior has had possession of the Tentacle Rape sword. I'm not even sure why I went into LFR with my warrior, probably helping a friend roll on things (I know, it's bad). Of course, Deathwing drops this sword, and of course, the tank wins and everyone sighs in frustration and leaves. Now I have made a habit of going afk during loot rolls. It just takes THAT long to get things done.

All the melee users had left and the very nice tank traded me this sword! And thus concludes my almost six month long hunt to collect all of Deathwing's weapons (for no reason at all). (Also, my rogue managed to collect his useless dagger)

So as I had mentioned before, if I ever won this sword on either my DK or Warrior I would respectively switch specs to Unholy/Arms. So I respecced to Arms, worked out the nuances and it seems my warrior does fairly well managing to maintain about 24k in half tanking gear.

Not that I'll ever DPS with him ever again mwahaha!