School of Hard Knocks: Turby Gives You Moral Support

Before I start my babbling and rabbling about what could possibly be the most hated achievement in WoW, let me give you some motivation: It Can Be Done!

Would you just look at it!

School of Hard Knocks, is part of the meta achievement for the Children's Week events. It is hidden innocently enough amongst other simple achievements, such as hearthing with your child, or eating candy. This achievement is also so wrong in so many ways, and having saved this achievement as the final one that I needed for the Violet Proto-drake makes it that much more satisfying.

What's wrong with this achievemnent you say? *Chuckles*

In an ideal world, these achievements are "sound" at best. It requires the player to step up and do what you are normally supposed to do in battlegrounds, capture things and everywhere like such as. However, we live in far from an ideal world, especially within our gaming confines.

Occasionally, you may find that a person from the opposite faction is actually HELPING you with your achievement (so you can gtfo their battleground), but that could be rare, and you might as well play the battleground as it should be with slightly shifted priorities.

What's not okay with this achievement is that it requires what some people call "consideration" *GASP*. Most players tend to become so self-interested and tunnel-visioned that they end up preventing their own faction friends from completing their achievement. Though that is not their fault, it is the design of it all.

Let's take a look at each of the 4 objectives.

Arathi Basin: Claim a node. This requires you to (to be the first to) click on an unclaimed flag. The flag click is channeled and you must complete it before you get credit. This objective is simple but could prove to be a challenge if your entire team is spread out all around the map. The ideal scenario would be a small group would head to a flag and you hope that everyone else draws attention from you. OR, you slaughter your foes, and be the first to click the flag, that would be ideal.

How I got this on Truny, was that I ran straight to mines with a small group, slew all the enemies there while standing close to the flag, and clicked it! Turby did not have such luck, it took him a couple runs of AB before he was able to claim an empty flag. Since there are 5 flags around the BG and they change hands occasionally, do this one last.

Alterac Valley: Capture a Tower. This one is hit and miss, and when you think of it is absolutely horrible. Think of how many people are in AV, and think of how many towers there are. 40 vs 4. Given how AV is ran nowadays, most towers do not change hands. If you are lucky, you may find a large group of people exchanging claims. But don't bank on it. I was lucky enough on both my hunter and warlock to claim the first tower that they approached, this comes with a habit of always running to that tower and defending it from my young days.

Warsong Gulch: Return a flag. This requires the opposing faction to grab your team's flag, and drop it, having either been killed or if they are nice, cancelling their flag buff. WSG is one of the BGs where this achievement does not mix well, as self interested players will hang out in the flag room, waiting for someone to drop the flag. Out of boredom, I camouflaged up to the ally base and helped 2 random players click their flag by right clicking my flag buff (after having slewn one of their hunterse for my own achieve).

Eye of the Storm: Capture a flag. As of late, this is probably the single worst objective due to how it totally does not sync with the game play of eye of the storm. EoTs requires each team to CLAIM and DEFEND TOWERS, and ALSO capture flags for more points. What seems to be happening is that EVERYONE will run to the middle area where the flag spaws and start AOE'ing. NO ONE manages to get the flag and the game drags on and on and on and on.

The whole point of the battleground is ruined.

I think I was very very lucky with Turby, in that the group that I joined WAS playing EoTS normally, capturing towers, and also claiming flags. Or perhaps that one group had really really dumb alliance who didn't want to touch the flag at all. About six of us managed to capture flags one by one and return them to our bases with no one on our tails. I saved this one for last because I thought it was the easiest one, and for my hunter, it actually was the easiest one.

However, when I attempted to finish this achievement on Truny.....this was later in the day. And people started to emerge. Essentially, no one captured any towers, and EVERYONE just stood in the middle AOE'ing. I think I managed to grab the flag once, once we managed to slaughter all the AOE'ing mages, but we had no towers to go to, nor was there anyone running with me to re-claim a tower, as they were ALL guarded by the opposing faction.

I queued up with a friend later, and every group, same deal. I reckon it's all due to luck and your group. I shall save this last objective for later in the week, and perhaps my warlock will have a violet drake come Christmas time!

Turby the Orphan Keeper

PS: Also, I am not sure how healthy this achievement is for our orphans with us cursing non-stop???

Why Visual Input is Important

I may or may not have complained about SWTOR's gameplay feel via the distinct disjointedness of my button presses to what I see on screen, but I realized how this flowed through to affect my enjoyment of my warlock!

Just to re-iterate on my SW:TOR experience, let me transpose my trooper's abilities onto an existing warlock just so you know what I'm talking about.

Alright, pretend you see a mean enemy and you want it dead now. You cast shadowbolt at it to kill it! As you are casting shadowbolt, the enemy detects you and starts running at you! WHAT? How? Now from what we are used to, the enemy will take 100 points of damage when the shadow bolt lands. Their red health bar SHOULD go from X to X-100 when the bolt touches them. However, this is SWTOR, so the enemy has ALREADY taken 100 points of damage while your shadowbolt was in mid flight, however the visual display shows your shadowbolt split into 3 points of damage, 33, 34, 33. You see these 3 numbers and expect their health bar to go down in those little increments, but when look at the enemy's health bar, but it has already gone down in the entire 100 chunk. Does this annoy anyone else???

Anyways.

Since my Warlock has now been re-instated into "active main" status, I am doing everything I did on my hunter, but on my warlock...now. One of the first things on my list was to knock off the Cata dungeon hero achievements, so I queued up for whichever dungeon I could possibly "solo/rely upon myself" to complete and went on my way.

It was in deadmines that I noticed something weird, I was doing 28k DPS on the bosses, but I didn't "feel" like I was that strong. I pushed all my buttons correctly, lined up my soulfires and soulburns, kept my ISF up had my dots up, but something was off.

I had dot and pet damage turned on.

Because of ALL THE GODDAMN dots that I use, along with my pet's damage and also the dot that our pet leaves my target, all I see are dot ticks and my imp's fireball damage popping up on screen. It's not very glorifying to see 5,000, 10,000, 1,532, etc etc. However, I was maintaining 25k+ damage on this target!

Now I must break off and talk about my hunter. A hunter has a single dot and a pet that does not leave a dot on the target. Our attacks are straight-forward and hard hitting. Kill Command, Arcane Shot. On a regular boss pull I'll use my cooldown and see number such as: 75,000, 25,000, 25,000, 15,000, 60,000 etc etc etc. It's a little more reassuring than seeing little iddy bitty dot numbers tick away.

I turned off my dot damage.

Aha! So I see that my incinerates are actually hitting for 25k and critting upwards of 50k! Aha my conflagration hits pretty hard. Ohh, so Chaos Bolt still kinda sucks.....

Everything made sense again! In my mind, I was still stuck in early Cata when our shadowbolts and soulfires were quite lack lustre, hitting for 8k and critting for 16k so I had assumed that my incinerates were just hitting for something along the lines of 15k.

Now I must talk about Beta. The preview of our future talent trees (no matter how deadly simple or incomplete they are) is one of the driving forces behind my warlock's return. Our convuluted set-up spells are pretty much gone, our pets are sound, and --we can see our nuke damage without it being covered by dot damage---!!



 So yeah, the end!

MoP Beta Updates: Demonology Warlockery

I had bitched and moaned about not receiving a Beta invite for weeks on end and once I finally got my invite....I ignored it. Yes, I like to complain just for the sake of complaining. For testing's sake I copied over my hunter and my warlock and I downloaded all the necessary files a couple days later.

I checked out my hunter first, everything is pretty much the same, save for an extra cooldown talent we can choose for the 5th tier of talents. Also, hunter pets are currently showing up in their ORIGINAL sizes. Cool but very distracting.

What I was actually interested in is to check out the State of the Warlock, and if I can play my beloved Demonology again.

New Class Mechanics

The horrible Soul Shard mechanics have been removed and now we get a new resource bar called Demonic Fury. This is a bar that by default has 200 fury and we generate fury via our nukes, shadowflame, and our wild imp firebolts. The higher this bar goes, the more damage we do. The incentive to filling up this bar is because of Metamorphosis.

New Metamorphosis

I was quite excited when I first saw that Meta no longer has a 2.1 min cooldown, rather, now it costs I believe 100 demonic fury (DF) and expends 6 fury every second. In Metamorphosis form, we are unable to use our dots, this is very important, which means you MUST have your corruption/doom on your target BEFORE you meta, else you waste precious cooldowns.

Of course you would ideally cast Meta once you are at 1,000 (max) DF. Our fel flame turns into twilight beam that cleaves everything in front of us, and our shadow bolts become an insta-cast demonic slash. Instant cast spells during a cooldown are AWESOME.

New Rotation(?) Babble

It seems right now that our "rotation" is kind of funky and we should just hold off on making any sweeping judgements. Currently it seems we want our corruption/doom (doom is from a glyph that changes corruption, but it may not be better than corruption) on the target at all times, and also our shadowflame dot, which can be applied via Shadowflame breathe, or Hand of Gul'dan. All of these abilities generate DF for us, along with our Wild Imps.

Wild Imps is a demo ability that can either allow us to summon 5 imps out at once to bombard our enemy, or if we don't cast the ability, it has a PASSIVE ability to summon an imp for us every 20 seconds when we cast shadowbolt. The imps' fireballs generate DF for us.

5 imps and our current demon + our big cooldown demon = 7! We need MOAR!!

Shadowflame Hand of Gul'dan has been changed to have "charges" that refresh every 15 seconds, with a maximum of 3 charges? Or 2? Hand of Gul'dan is kind of odd now that it has a targetting reticule, and after you cast your first HoG, the targetting reticule does not go away, which means you have to click ESC to get rid of it. This makes gameplay feel as clunky as Demo is currently =P

Once our DF is full, based on this rather simple rotation, we cast Meta and go balls to the walls. Our hellfire turns into immolation aura, which is an insta cast. Then we spam our new shadowbolt, now turned into demon cleave, and I assume that our fel-flame can be used for AOE and or to refresh our corruption/doom dot on the target. This feels rather incomplete but I managed. The new Meta feels kinda burst, kind of like Bestial Wrath (thumbs up!)

Oh, I almost forgot about Soulfire! Soulfire has been changed in that it now hits like a mofo truck and always crits when it lands. It is affected by "Molten Core", which reduces its cast time and it seems Molten Core just...randomly procs? Also, Soulfire is now our absolute execute due to its increased damage (50-60ks).

The New Talents

Pretty much everything that we have points in our current talent trees are either built-in to our abilities or have been amalgamated into our abilities. For example, our beloved Molten Core proc seems to happen randomly, and it is targetted towards our Soulfires. Though the description of Molten Core, when it procs says that it can be triggered with Soulfire when a mob is hit with Soulfire at 25% or less health, Soulfire itself does not mention that it triggers Molten Core, nor could I find anything in our spellbooks that mention Molten Core *twitch*.

The new "talent" tree consists of 6 tiers of "custom" "talents", which allows us to use a new ability, or to give us flexibility in choosing what kind of utility spell we would like. For example, we can choose between Shadowfury, Instant Fear, or Death Coil.

The only talent I was really interested in was Dark Grimoire: Allows us to summon stronger versions of our demons. I immediately summoned out my Wrathguard and was immediately happy that I may never have to use a Fel Hunter ever again.

New Glyphs

I kind of like how glyphs are being played upon. Rather than having some "Mandatory" glyphs that directly affect DPS, a lot of our glyphs are pretty much utility/cosmetic effects.

Four glyphs that I would like to talk about are:

Glyph of Shadowbolt: Splits your shadowbolt into 3 smaller shadow bolts. This glyph provides no dps benefits, but it's badass! After being cast, our SB's split into 3, fly up into the air, then bombard our target for 3 hits of damage (at the same time, server side I suppose). Best. Nuke. Ever.

Glyph of Nightmares: Our felsteed and dreadsteed are now able to run on water, and leaves a trail of FLAMES in their wake. Uhh hell yeah I'm choosing this glyph! Having permanent water-walk-riding is totally OP, and leaving a trail of flames behind while cackling in the night while riding across a lake is just the flaming icing on the cake.

Glyph of Dark Apotheosis: This is the glyph that makes it sound like we can/should taunt. It gives us another ability that gives us demon wings and changes our abilities sort of halfway to what you would see in Metamorphosis (more on this later). Our soulshatter taunts, and we take reduced damage. I suppose using this ability along with metamorphosis makes us fairly sturdy since Meta provides us with crit immunity and further damage reduction.

This glyph seems to need some working on since my abilities sometimes change between shadowbolt/shadow cleave (the ability we get in Meta).

Glyph of Felguard: THIS is the most important glyph of all: Allows your felguard/wrathguard to randomly equip a 2H axe, 2H sword, or polearm from your bags.

....

......

COLLECT ALL THE WEAPONS!!!

Y'see, I was a weapon collector BEFORE transmog. I can almost confidently say that between my hunter, druid, warlock, dk, warrior, rogue, and paladin I probably own 75% of all the "cool" looking weapon models in one color or another (Except Aesir's Edge grr) from level 60-85. (Including old ZA/ZG, not including PVP weapons).

It's quite unfortunate that my warlock's weapon collection consists mainly of all the staves, one handed swords and daggers, and none of the nice 2 handers that my melee have. *twitch*

Anyways, I shan't waste any more breathe on abilities/mechanics that may not permeate through or survive till next year. I shall prepare a weapon check list instead! (Or hope 1 handers qualify!)

Truny the Weapon Collector

Random Transmogservations: Hood of the Malefic

I have been swapping the look of Truny around recently and went for a "darker" feel, away from the bright colored T13 robes. With a set of darker robes, the Tentacly Helm of Tentacles started to clash and stick out like a sore tentacle so I defaulted back to the famous Helm of the Malefic, or the Warlock Wings Helm.

I'm not sure when this change took place, but the wings on the helm no longer "proc" or flap, now they just "appear" everytime you jump, but don't flap!

I think it's kind of nice that our wings can be triggered via jumping, which logically makes sense since we'd want to slow fall at every opportunity, but I do kind of miss the flapping. With my "extensive" research into this (aka glancing at wowhead comments), I am going to embark on a journey to see if any type of costume/something can proc/trigger the wing flaps again!

Truny the Malefic

Weapon Collection Complete!

For reasons unknown, I agreed to queue up for the weekly DS raid finder encounter this week with a friend on...my warlock!

To prevent myself from falling asleep I chose to stay in my destruction tree, with all our dots, debuffs, banes, soulfires and soulburn buffs/debuffs/dots/nukes to watch out for, just managing an optimal rotation qualifies for a more engaging encounter than LFR.

Well we zoned in at 2/4 complete, perfect! All my buddy wanted was the Spine trinket, and all I wanted was 250 quick VP. The group was impatient and started the encounter with 20 people twice and we perserevered and waited until a more competent cycle of players came through and finished the dungeon with ease.

My intentions for this run was not "MUST FIND ALL THE WEPPENS", but a Rathrak, the Poisonous Mind dropped and I managed to win it. What I hadn't realized a long time ago (since my warlocking interests were meh to low) was that this dagger has the same amount of spellpower as Ti'tahk, which means equipping ANY offhand would give us more stats (less the haste proc).

We then headed into a heroic deadmines to test out this weapon, and I have to say that the poison proc is kinda nice for trash with high HP and for passive damage, it feels "right" in the hands of a warlock.

 (I equipped my scourgelord's baton from Deathwhisper since apparently I did not have a current-content appropriate offhand (must bring my Warlock into DS this week!))

ANYWAYS, this completes my Things That Dropped Out of Deathwing's Butt collection, sans the DPS melee weapons.

Truny The Poisonous

Y U So Mortal?

Or rather, why are WE so mortal? Or rather, why do BOSSES think we are so mortal? It is by our swords and magics that ultimately slay them in the very spots they claim our mortality.

I've been listening to bosses a lot lately and I'm not sure if it's just the recent HoT dungeons along with DS, or if it's recurring all over the place, but bosses really like to call us mortal before engaging in combat. In calling us mortal, I assume that they are inferring that they themselves are immortal? Or perhaps of something above mortality but not immortality? Or they just have nothing better to say, and that calling heroes mortals is just something you say, sort of like "hey how are you?"

Why is this?

Two that stand out are Asthmathion, the first boss in HoT and Ultraxion. "You *gaaaaaaasp* are *gaaaaaaaaasp* mortalsss * gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaassssp* ......................................................

/checks watch

*gaaaaaaaaaaaasp* now ...*gasp* you should dieeeeee like one!

Then we faceroll him down to his death in 20 seconds. Yeah we're mortals so what? Can't you think of anything else clever to say? Like "*gaaaasp* give me back my....inhaaaaaler"

Anyways.

If anything, we as players are probably the most immortal things out there right along with respawning NPCs. We're not tied to the storylines so our deaths are not permanent, and even in death we have minor control over our characters, such as walking around as a spirit. Bosses die, and they are gone forever. Ignoring the weekly resets, they're pretty much dead and there's no one to b-res or res them!

So here is my plea, the next time you are fighting a boss that claims how mortal we are...tell it in their face that it is us, the mortals that shall inherit Azeroth, for they should fear the Dawn of the Mortals.

Turby the Mortal

The Forgotten: Argent Tournament Mounts/Pets

Shhhh, we do not speak of the Argent Tournament openly. This was a period of time that a lot of us would gladly like to forget and stow away in the deepest darkest recesses of our memories.

In short: We don't always fight the Lich King, but when we do, rather than combining our forces, we weed out the weak and participate in a "tournament" to find the strongest heroes to assault Icecrown Citadel.

Trashless instances aside, the argent tournament brought forth something unprecedented, and that is a SLEW of mounts and pets for collectors to grind. This tier of raiding came into existence in a patch also known as the Great Loot Rain. When "casuals could do faceroll dungeons for raid-level gear", and this was a shift that would shape the gear-distribution structure of WoW henceforth.

I didn't care much for mount and pet collecting back when the tournament was out, but now as we sit at the precipice of Cata looking forward to MoP, where are the most accessible pets/mounts located that do not require the God of RNG's aid? Argent Tournament.

A couple of weeks ago I had finished grinding out my faction special mount, the Sunreaver Dragonhawk, which cost 150 champion's marks/seals. Due to my aversion towards doing quests, I managed to do this the "long" way, and that is by only doing the "easy" quests. These "easy" quests would rake in 7/8 marks a day, rather than the full potential ...12?

Quests I Would Always Do:

Chillmaw: 3 seals. Fly over to Chillmaw, MD her to my pet, multishot down her adds. Done in 15 seconds. Though it'd be nice if she spawned right in the tent so I don't have to fly all the way over to her mountain.

Kill 15 cultists: 2 seal. They are conveniently located close to the tourney grounds, which means I don't have to move far. 15 auto-shots and they are dead.

Free 4 Prisoners and Kul: This goes nicely with the cultist quest because they drop the keys to free the prisoners and Kul, and they are in the same area. 1 seal.

Kill Darkcaller Kharos: 1 Seal. Sometimes the crusadser quest givers give this one, and the target is usually one of the NPCs that I snipe down for the previous 2 anyways.

Quests I Would Sometimes Do:

Throw Harpoons at Krakens: Since this quest requires me to ride a slow hippogryph all the way out to sea, I tend to skip this as I do not like wasting 45 minutes on game-speed-quest-mounts. Though if I have time to kill I will do this quest, but it tends to take me 4 rounds of riding the hippogryph as I tend to get bored and go afk.

Convert 6 Heroes: This involves looting 6 crystals, then clicking some item to redeem fallen heroes in the fallen heroes area. I would sometimes do this if I felt like clicking 6 gems, then clicking a quest item 6 more times. Again this ends up taking way longer than expected as I get bored and alt-tab. Way too much effort.

Quests I Will Always Skip:

Get Shark Meat: I have to go underwater, then swim, then fly back? Swimming slows me down. No thanks.

Get Rhino/Worm Meat: I have to fly ALL the way to Storm Peaks? I might as well just fly back to Dal and log off!

Do Things On That Northern Kvaldir Island: It takes like 30 minutes to fly up there, AND I have to fly all the way back, no thank you!

Joust 4 Champions: FCK U!

Joust 3 Lieutenants: FK U!!

Capture Snobolds: uhh...fly all the way to Storm Peaks???

tl;dr: Quests suck!

2012 Eff-You-a-Thon: Noble Garden

Wow, another year has passed since we've embarked on our long strange journey of fighting over eggs in the various wow starting zones and 2012 brings to us a new mount: The Swift Springstrider (no link, go look it up yourself).

If you were involved in the Love Fest (or whatever the hell it's called) in February, the Springstrider is a white version of the Swift Lovebird!

This mount can be found as a rare drop within the eggs that we find (I found mine after 370 or so eggs), or you can purchase it from the chocolate vendor for 500 chocolates.

That's about the only thing that is new this year, and what I actually wanted to broadcast is my PSA for this event:

--Please note you may be playing with young children so before you swear/curse/spit at the other players who have stolen "your" eggs, please keep in mind that the eggs will continue to spawn until the end of this week!--

Turby the Patient

Ps: Because I like having something to complain about at all times, I have decided to grind eggs on a 2nd character, and that lucky character is my druid (cheetah/flight form ftw)!

The Destroyer's End

Uh huh, very creative post title right there. Shush it and let me finish my story!



"So.....she's pregnant.."

Deathwing has fallen, and as a guild we had the privilege of watching the Real Cut-scene of Deathwing's demise. Now what's special about this kill is not really that it's our first kill, but rather it's "A" kill, and as a guild group. We've been through painful spikes of pugging for for the past few months and this weekend was the first weekend we managed to full on get a guild group together and just tackle DS like no tomorrow. We actually managed to get to spine for the first time and 2-shot it! Sure most guilds have killed DW the 2nd week of release before the nerfs, but that's not the point!

A big grats to Umbrella Corporation!

Now, of course this wouldn't be a post by Truny without the rants. T13 is probably the most boring tier of raiding by far! This point is further exacerbated by the fact that I am a ranged DPS, which means I have fewer things to do than our melee counterparts.

Think back to say Marrowgar. Sure he didn't have a lot of mechanics but he was a cool skeleton BOONE STORMER! There was also things to watch out for, fire, spikes, bones! Now let's look at Morchok, you run to crystals, then run behind a crystal when appropriate.

Essentially other than Blackhorn and Spine, we dont' really have to "do" anything but exist. Here's a look at my epic summarization of the DS bosses.

Morchok: Run to Crystal if beamed. Run behind rocks.
Zonn'zonn: Stack, then run back out. Touch balls.
Yor'sahj: Kill priority: Purple, green, yellow, red, etc etc.
Hagara: Don't die. Kill ice block.
Ultraxion: Stare at debuffs and his cast bar. (It helps that my BM "rotation" comes 2nd nature now)

Blackhorn: Kill everything, focus on sappers, help soak damage, help soak big damage, kill big drake, dodge slams and kill boss. See, this fight actually requires us to have an active mind.
Spine: Kill kill, stack, kill some more, watch for Fiery Grips, kill some more.

Madness: Kill EVERYTHING, kill blisters, burn, kill ALL the adds. Madness is special in that the first 3.5 platforms is insanely mind-numbing and boring. Imagine fighting arthas and all you had to do was run around his platform and kill various adds while he yelled mean things at you.

So now my question is, will T14 be fresh and new? It sure looks like it! It sounds like we are going back to a similar form such as T11 where we had multiple raids and they were fairly tricky at the get-go. Also, will the new heroics be as easy as the HoT heroics, or will they emulate their legendary 346 mentors?

Turby, the Noble