Passion in the Maelstrom

Note: this post could be kind of NSFW! I mean. It's not strictly NSFW? But it could still be tough explaining it to a coworker or supervisor that happened to read some of it over your shoulder.

It's kind-of-but-not-really fiction starring the inimitable Grubtor, who you can read about here.

Also it's embarrassingly long.

Warnings made, may I present to you:

Passion in the Maelstrom!

I hadn't been planning on doing LFR that week, but I'd been unlucky with tokens and still needed new pants or a hat for the four-piece bonus, and picking up a Maw of the Dragonlord wouldn't hurt either, so I decided to queue up. It popped in a couple minutes and I accepted the summons, instantly transporting me to the top of Wyrmrest temple.

The aspects and Thrall were standing around in a circle, staring mutely at each other or glancing at myself and my twenty-four compatriots as we tumbled out of thin air. I considered wandering over to Nozdormu to give one of his immortal nipples a friendly tweak, but being the Aspect of Time, he knew my plan before I did and was already growling an icy "I'll shave off your beard if you come an inch closer, dwarf" when I tried to give him a sly glance.

"Hah! You're just afraid I'll flip up your skirt and see how far the tattoos go!"

Did you know that you can hear a Dragon Aspect grinding his teeth in rage from 30 paces?

Without warning, there was a hearty Draenic laugh behind me and I was almost knocked flat on my beard by the impact of a meaty slab of hand. Recovering my balance, I turned around to stare up at the ridiculous gray bulk of a Draenei hunter.

"Ho ho! That was good joke, short bearded friend! You are making him so mad, it is for laughs! Ho ho ho!"

His laughter was deep and booming, and although I didn't know his name, I already felt that he was something special.

"Ho ho ho! It is very well to be meeting you, short bearded friend! I am Grubtor! And this," he said before sticking two cheek-tentacles into his mouth and issuing a sharp whistle, "is my ferocious and faithful war-moth, Tinkles!"

With a plink! a small moth popped into existence by his knee. A little below his knee, actually. It flapped its wings and shivered, surrounding itself with a brief nimbus of iridescent pink dust.

"Do not be afraid, short bearded friend! Tinkles is a highly trained war-moth and will attack only on my command!"

At the word "attack," the moth darted forward - I flinched in spite of myself - and burrowed into my beard, where I could feel it digging around. I was too astonished to so much as splutter. Grubtor frowned. "Tinkles! Cease attack! Cease! Come to Grubtor!"

After a few moments the moth emerged and fluttered lazily back to its position by Grubtor's knee, leaving a trail of sparkling motes behind.

"Are you hurt, short bearded friend!"

I peered at Grubtor.

"No. I ... am not hurt."

"Ho ho ho! It is well! You are hardy as well as bearded! I am sure with allies such as yourself, we will succeed in none time with the killing of dastardly Deathwing!"

I shook my head to clear it rather than try to understand what had just happened, then looked around the platform where the raid was pretty much assembled. At least half of our allies were slack-jawed and empty-eyed, strings of drool trailing from their chins. Gem sockets gaped black and empty everywhere I looked, while the tell-tale shimmer of powerful enchantments was largely absent. As I watched, one human paladin that had been walking in circles slowly sank down into an awkward sitting position, pulled his shield off his back, and began to absent-mindedly gnaw on it. I shuddered and didn't even think about trying to find the other tank. I was better off not knowing.

"Yes, Grubtor. These... are definitely some... stalwart. Um. Companions." I sighed.

Suddenly the Aspects stopped staring about blankly (or in the case of one, glaring at me) and began channeling things into the big floating butterscotch candy otherwise known as the Dragon Soul.

"Ho ho! Grubtor sees the encounter is to be beginning! Munificent!"

The paladin continued to gnaw on his shield, so I went over to nudge him with a foot. "Hey. Hey uh. Paladin. You should probably, you know. Stand up. Tank some things. Some of these purple dragons? Tank them?"

No response.

By then, Alexstrasza and Deathwing had finished being dramatic at each other and some of the purple dragons started to show up. My taunts didn't seem to have the necessary power to bring them down to attack me (my mum had always stressed politeness, and the best of the worst that I could summon was "I bet you're only ok at singing 'happy birthday'!") and many of my stalwart companions seemed to be too noble to taunt anything, so several dragons began to fill up the platform with fire. I started to heal the various people standing in it.

To my astonishment, Grubtor, who had been occupied with the loving, caressing inspection of what appeared to be a lightweight ballista, sprang into sudden action. He stood behind the paladin and fired a crossbow bolt that spiraled into its target and made a rude farting noise. When the dragon whipped its head around, he jumped up and down pointing at the paladin. "Ho ho purple dragon! It was him that fired the taunting arrow, yes!" Enraged, the dragon swooped down upon the paladin, who gazed back at it impassively. Incredulous, I began casting a heal on him.

Grubtor was a blur, darting and running to every which side of the platform, pelting the attackers with bolts more akin to javelins than anything else, his crossbow ratcheting and twanging furiously. Being bitten by a dragon had roused the tank, such as he was, into a modicum of activity. He'd stood up and was attempting to place the shield in between himself and the dragon, while occasionally shouting incoherent gibberish at new dragons as they appeared.

A Death Knight, one of the warriors hand-chosen by Arthas for his prowess in combat, stumbled off the edge of the tower to his second death. I rolled my eyes. After the Lich King's defeat, the former lieutenants of his that found their way into our ranks seemed to be both foul-smelling and imbecilic, leading me to wonder how he'd ever been considered a threat in the first place.

Before too long, Ultraxion fluttered up from below and started declaiming things. I rolled my eyes again. The dragons are undoubtedly the campiest race on the face of Azeroth, and this guy somehow managed to be the campiest. Ultra, honey. You're the fifth boss in the instance. You can be the shadow which blots out the streetlamp, making an alley look scary, ok? The sun is just overreaching.

But I'm wandering.

Grubtor spent most of the hammed-up speech looking bored and occasionally petting Tinkles, but once the start of combat got close he pulled out a vicious, serrated super-bolt of some sort, then turned to me and winked.

"Ho ho, short bearded friend!" He was clearly trying to keep this sotto voce, a skill that I don't think he's ever likely to master. "This one is to make froofy pink dragon bleed!"

"WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT BLEEDING? WHO SAID THAT? AND I'M NOT FROO-OOOOWW!"

Grubtor had cranked the crossbow back as far as it would go and then let fly. The "tank" was covered in twilight dragon blood and began swinging his hammer wildly, flinging globs of the Light every which way. The slim, Night Elf druidess standing next to me buried her face in her palm for a moment - I think I could hear her mutter "just one more piece of tier and I can never come back, come on, one more piece" - then transformed into a dire bear and charged forward growling, wresting Ultraxion's attention away from the mostly-dead Gnome rogue he'd been chewing on, letting the tiny angry man fall to the ground. I gave him a renew.

The encounter went pretty smoothly. Once the paladin had cleared the blood out of his eyes, he managed to somehow taunt whenever the druid was afflicted with fading light. Of course, when he got fading light he just died and got resurrected by one or another Death Knight or Warlock, which I found hilarious.

After it was all over and Ultraxion had gone tumbling to the ground to join the Death Knight from earlier, I snuck a few peeks at everyone's healing epeens and compared them to my own. I felt pretty smug - I'd grabbed the red crystal as soon as it had appeared, then yanked the blue crystal out of the hands of another holy priest, who'd stamped his feet and disappeared from the raid in disgust.

The weird thing about turning from Alex into Kalec is that your hips actually get wider. Strange, huh?

Anyway, then I looked at the epeens of our damage dealers and my eyes widened.

Grubtor's epeen was massive. It was majestic and radiant in its glory. It was bigger than the next six epeens combined. "No wonder that dragon went down on us so quick..." I whispered.

While I was caught in the throes of admiration, a Draenei restoration Shaman clopped up on her fastidiously pedicured hooves (how come I'd never seen the hoof-polish merchant in the Exodar?), batted her eyelashes at Grubtor, and said "oh why hello Mr. Hunter. I'm sorry I'm such a silly shaman, but would you mind telling me where the Skyfire is going to dock for us to board?"

"Grubtor is smart and experienced, of course he can! It is that way!" Time seemed to slow down while Grubtor pointed with his left arm, his right for some reason curling up until he touched his shoulder with a fist. At this point, his shoulderguards, cuirass, gloves, and pants simply burst off of him, unable to contain his magnificent physique. The shaman and I gasped at the same time as he stood revealed in naught but his bracers, boots, and chainmail boxer-briefs.

They actually said J U I C Y across his behind.

"Well well," said the Shaman, "my name is Kandyce. You can call me Kandy for short. Ta!" and she skipped off to the Skyfire, trailing a finger across his chest as she went. I narrowed my eyes at her. I'd seen him first.

For his part, Grubtor seemed oblivious, looking around at the detritus of ruined equipment scattered on the ground. Eventually he shrugged and as I wandered up he boomed at me, "It is good that guild covers repairs, yes! Ho ho!" And off he went to the Skyfire.

Between the relative competence of myself and the other healers, our lovely bear tank, and Grubtor's turgid epeen, the next couple encounters went smoothly and we found ourselves standing on islands in the Maelstrom.

The smells of salt water and the scent of burning decay swirled together in the mist that sprayed over us. The center of the Maelstrom was a glowing red vortex, bubbling and sloshing with the corruption seeping from Deathwing's injured body. As he reared out of the water and clung to the rocks with his twisted, ruined limbs, I had eyes only for Grubtor.

The sheen of moisture on his skin.

The smooth action of his body as he pounded bolt after bolt into Deathwing's claws and tentacles.

The good-natured bellow with which he ordered Tinkles to attack, and the miraculous fact that the moth seemed to obey (although I'm unsure how much damage it could possibly have been doing).

As we advanced through the platforms, I found myself healing Grubtor more and everyone else less. A naughty urge began to bubble up from my unconsciousness, and although I tried to push it back down I eventually gave in. Blushing furiously behind my beard, I sidled up behind Grubtor (J U I C Y indeed) and cast another heal on him - a different one.

He shivered when it hit him, looking over his shoulder (still shooting crossbow bolts! Accurately!) to say "Short bearded friend! Never have I felt such a heal! What was it!"

Blushing harder - perhaps he could even see it through my beard by now? - I hit him with another. "That," I panted, "was a Flash Heal. Usually you'd only use it in an emergency, probably on a tank. Using it on a DPS at full health is," and here my voice grew husky with the illicit, deliciously sinful truth of it, "very mana inefficient."

"Ho ho! I am liking it very much! Yes! I think it helps me damage more damagingly!"

I gave in fully to the moment, letting go and dumping flash heal after flash heal into him, occasionally consuming Serendipity with a greater heal. It was wondrous.

Then we were interrupted by the cold splash of a chain heal in our faces, followed by a riptide landing on Grubtor and cascading down his back. It was... it was that shaman!

"Kandy! Hello! Would you also like to be healing me!"

She laughed, walking towards us with a confident stride. To my surprise, I found myself captivated by her ample, jiggling blue mana bar as it swayed with her hips.

"Well, I can't let you boys have all the fun, can I? Hey Priest - I bet you've never felt this before," and with that she cast earth shield on me. It was so wrong - so very wrong, and yet also so right. She'd spoken the truth: I'd never felt the firm yet gentle caress of an earth shield before. I was suddenly jealous of tanks.

It degenerated from there, as the entire healing team healed Grubtor and his epeen more and more, egged on by his lusty and excited bellows of "Yes, my friends! All of you! All of the healing for Grubtor! I am doing most damages, heal me with your heals!"

The druidess snorted in disgust and teleported to Moonglade. The gnome rogue, seeing the Corruption tentacle turn his way, vanished and used his hearthstone. But Grubtor, glorious Grubtor! He was enough! With a final bolt, the tentacle sunk into the sea and he turned his attention on the wing.

As he began to damage it, his hands a blur, Tinkles dusting the wing furiously, I noticed that Deathwing was watching. His tongue was undulating wildly - lasciviously, ecstatically - in the air and his molten eyes rolled this way and that, always returning to Grubtor. When he spoke, it was in a throaty, grinding growl, the sound of boulders tumbling in a magma flow:

"YES, YES!" he said.

"I HAVE BEEN A BAD DRAGON ASPECT! DAMAGE ME, HUNTER! PUNISH ME! YES!"

The wrongness of everything that was happening was as pervasive as it was addictive. We continued to heal Grubtor, rivulets of sweat running between his shoulderblades, mixing with healing rains and glowing with the warm golden glow of the Light.

One by one, healers ran out of mana. Kandy and myself were the last and we both let our final heals go at the same straining moment before collapsing to the ground together, blissfully spent. Grubtor still stood, his epeen straining, still somehow growing. "Yes!" he would occasionally shout or "Ho ho!" or "More damages!"

Deathwing growled back at him, writhing in the middle of the Maelstrom, and although everyone else in the raid was dead I did not fear: Grubtor would clearly kill the wing before Cataclysm finished casting.

And then...

With a final growl of "OLD GODS, YES! I DESERVE IT, I'VE BEEN EVIL! CORRUPTED! YESSS--"

Then the Cataclysm castbar suddenly just finished all at once, eradicating all life on Azeroth, even Tinkles, who took 90% reduced area of effect damage.

As our souls drifted in the twisting nether, I heard a distant echo of Deathwing's voice. It said: "OH MY GOD GUYS I AM SO SORRY. THIS IS REALLY EMBARRASSING. THIS NEVER HAPPENS TO ME. UGH. PREMATURE CATACLYSM, THIS IS THE WORST."

And then I found myself on my back below the spirit healer. Even dead, I was still blissfully exhausted, but (literally) not above further crudity.

"Hey Spirit lady, I can see up your toga. Where do you even go to get wa-" and then, with a ringing, ethereal echo of "creep!" in my ears I found myself on my back at the Maelstrom, afflicted with resurrection sickness. Just before the various Aspects faded back into existence.

"Hey Nozdormu," I said, slightly muffled, "I can see up your skirt."

(Probably) The Last Major Cataclysm Content Patch Is Out

Which means I Should Probably Make A Post.

Breaks like this are what separate professionals from amateurs, I think. Or at least, they're amongst the things that separate pros from not-pros. This month-long posting drought was brought on by a few different things, including lack of anything to talk about, lack of desire to find new things to talk about, holidays, and Skyrim.

I really think this break in content patches was too long. It was getting increasingly difficult to scrape together 10 people for a raid, and in fact the break from raiding for Thanksgiving conspired with a somewhat surprise-patch-release to keep us from putting together a raid for Dragon Soul. I think a few guildies have done the LFR thing, but I really have no interest in it. This is a little bit naughty of me - I could be getting 390 gear! - but playing with 24 people I don't know or care about and will never meet again is just not something I'm going to bother with.

This is going to be a tough patch for the guild in general. We're losing one of our main tanks to major surgery, and I doubt we'll get her back before mid-January. Our enhancement shaman has officially stepped down from raiding, although we hadn't seen her for a bit. Our students are getting nailed by end-of-semester stress and time crunch. I never succeeded in building a healthy off-night social atmosphere, which makes recruiting even more of a bear than it already was. So on and so forth.

It really doesn't matter how tiny and how casual your guild is, or how flat of a hierarchy you try to have: being in any sort of a leadership position takes time and energy, and if you don't put that time and energy in it begins to wither. Much the same as happens with a blog, in fact! Or well, anything else in life, I suppose.

It's been tough to put that time in, though, not least because I haven't been playing much or any WoW. There aren't going to be any more big mechanical adjustments to the game until Pandaclysm comes out. There was that little cowflop a blue dropped in the forums about how hunters just haven't figured out how to play Survival correctly, which is absolutely untrue. The problem with that spec is the same one it's had since Wrath: Explosive Shot damage doesn't scale with weapon damage. End of story. Even if they hadn't nerfed it, I expect top-tier raiding hunters with heroic Arathars would have been MM by now, and they certainly would have been MM with heroic Dragon Soul weapons. A physical DPS spec that doesn't scale with physical DPS is just not going to compete.

In fact, I hadn't looked at the 4.3 patch notes before now and I see that they buffed Explosive Shot damage by 15%. This is hilarious because the original nerf was 25%, and that was too severe so they nerfed the nerf by 10% (making it a 15% nerf from Cataclysm release). Now they're reverting that 15%. Hah! Guys, we could have (and did) tell you this was going to happen before 4.06 came out. Also before 4.0 came out. Tie ExS to weapon damage, dudes!

But in the grand scheme of things that's no bigs, really. The original "you're doing it wrong" comment was insulting and infuriating for the top-tier survival hunters, raiding in the spec because they do heroic tens and don't have an alternative, but balance stuff ebbs and flows. Frankly, the various specs in the game are the most balanced they've ever been, IMO.

Killing Nozdormu in a five-man dungeon is pretty WTF. Also it makes me kind of sad, considering he's still the hottest thing in the game.

But that's it, you know? What else is there to talk about?

I think that what I really need to do is reach out to some of the other small guilds on the server and - as dramaful as this could be - maybe try to arrange some kind of a merger or something. I dunno. I'd be playing more WoW if I had people to play with. As it is, I think my habitual absence means others are less likely to be playing.

Bonus addendum! If you look at my achievements, you'll note that I got Stood in the Fire. I have to protest that I did not actually stand in the fire. I tried to use disengage to get across the gap between pillars faster. It didn't work - instead, I fell into the Maelstrom. Definitely not fire. It actually confused the client, which decided that I'd died to elementium bolt and advised me to move next time. No, game! I fell into the Maelstrom between platforms. Did not stand in anything.

In full compliance with Cataclysm blogging regulations

I have a number of things I want to write posts about right now. I would like to update the pre-raid gear list with more information about haste, mastery, crit, and reforging and possibly change the items again. I would also like to write a post about survival's damaging and crowd control abilities and how to use them. I need to write some recruitment posts for my guild and then spam them all over the internet. But first, it would seem I have been slack in the attention I've paid to the very clear Cataclysm blogging guidelines and regulations.

It states quite explicitly in Section 1, Paragraph 17, Section 12, Sub-section b32:

All bloggers are hereby required to write, implement, render in comic format, or in machinima music video format, at least one (1) post bewailing their experience in one of the new heroics and questioning aloud their basic worth and dignity as a human being due to their failures in said heroic.

So yes, as you can see, quite straightforward and I suspect I've waited rather too long to make the post. The licensing board is probably already looking askance at me.

Anyway. The boyfriend was wondering last night if I might like to go on a heroic with his holy paladin. I of course said yes and we queued up for Blackrock Caverns, whose final boss drops a bow I would like very much. The trash went relatively swimmingly, although the first boss did kill me, so a quick tip is in order for him: on heroic difficulty, do not disengage out of skullcracker. Just run out. This was true of defile on the Lich King as well: it seems like a good idea, but for the purposes of certain abilities, the game does not update your position from a disengage until after you've landed. So I fell over dead well outside the range of his AoE, hooray.

Still, stuff like that doesn't dent my self esteem too much. I just note it for the future and move on. We kept clearing and I kept up an illusion of being relatively competent. Which, by the way, is one of the things Lyria and I say to one another when we're pugging the rest of the group through the RDF: "well at least we'll have a good healer and one competent DPS." I also like to tell stories about the hunter that rolled on the strength cloak against my little warrior. I am, for the most part, really confident about my abilities and skill at this game in opposition to the frothing hordes who are often quite bad.

In fact, allow me to back up in time for a bit. My favorite example of individual ability in this game is the BC raid encounter Archimonde. He was the last boss in the Battle for Mount Hyjal, and (like Yogg), he destroyed guilds. The mechanics of the fight were such that if any one person died - and it was pretty easy to die - the raid almost certainly wiped. It was also true that all of the things that killed you were avoidable. You just had to plan ahead for the fears, kite the doomfires correctly, and use the slowfall item when he threw you up in the air.

I have no idea how many times my guild at the time wiped on that guy, but I caused maybe one of them. Myself and Lyria were one of maybe five or six people out of twenty-five that essentially never screwed up. Had the entire raid been composed of usses, we'd've killed the bastard after like 3 wipes and gone "hm, I don't see what the big fuss is."

Back to heroic Blackrock Caverns. The second boss in the instance is Corla, and her mechanic is very very simple and very very easy. She has, on heroic, three little guys on the platform with her, and they get zapped with beams. The beams stack a buff. If the buff reaches 100, they turn into large, very hard-hitting mobs with big health pools. So a player has to stand in front of the beam and block it, but if the player lets the buff stack to 100, she or he gets turned into such an add.

Stand in the beam to about 85, step out, let the buff fall off. Step back in. Kill boss, collect loots. That's it.

First attempt I let the buff stack to 100 and wiped the party. Second attempt I stood out too long and wiped the party. My boyfriend avoided death somehow and rezzed me, but the enhancement shaman dropped the group in disgust. Someone put us back in the queue for a replacement DPS. I accepted the resurrection and stood up with my camera exactly facing the boss platform with the role check dialogue up. I clicked accept, then went to right-click the screen to change my facing, clicked on one of the cultists on the platform, and shot it with an arrow. My boyfriend and the (quite good!) DK he'd already rezzed were killed.

There are times when I think my choice of hobby is strange, because at the time I felt literally nauseous and even writing about it summons some of that back. You know, how would one relate that as a story to friends or aquaintances? "Oh what was I doing last night? Just chilling at home, doing this thing that my boyfriend and I do together for fun. Did I have fun? Good heavens no! It made me feel like shit!"

I've been reading a lot of posts about how healing the new heroics has made people cry, so you'd think it would help that least I'm not alone in getting a touch of miserable from one. But most of those posts have been written by healers, who actually are facing a much more challenging game right now. Their heals are smaller, more expensive, and are being thrown at much larger health pools. I think a lot of the emotional stress they're facing in the new game is from sort of a sense of futility and diminished power: it does not feel powerful and cool to spend 2.5 seconds casting The Big Heal to nudge the target's healthbar .01mm upwards.

In contrast, I failed at a very easy, very simple mechanic. One I've done just fine on normal and one I've certainly done just fine with on Netherspite in Karazhan. The very simplicity of it denies one very much ability to try to make yourself feel better, even. I ended up just staring at the screen and hoping I'd suffered a stroke fifteen minutes ago and would soon collapse: at least then I'd have an excuse!

No such luck.

I still don't have one, but I do think I have the second cousin of one. I think that I pretty much just panicked. I remember watching how fast the debuff stacked up and starting to freak out. Then I looked at Corla's health bar and how slowly it was going down and freaked out more ("how long will I have to do this!?"). Then standing out of the beam and waiting for it to fall off, knowing that every second the wipe looms closer, well: I'm pretty sure my veinous system was just packed with spiky crystalline nodules of adrenaline.

This would all be well and good if I had to run away from a lion, but what I needed instead was the sort of collected calm that I experienced during Archimonde attempts. I needed my eyes to be making circuits of the screen, checking the debuff then checking watcher then checking omen then back to the debuff. I needed fingers that weren't shaking, and most of all I needed to not have the sense of impending doom and attendant panic.

I still need the bow from the last guy in there - and Corla herself drops an alright trinket - so I'm going to be going back tonight and, god dammit, I will be calm.

Shattering of the world is duly scheduled

Sometimes the nature of the game being a game is funny to me, because we're all pretty sure that the shattering of the world is scheduled for a week from yesterday. It seems like maybe a thing like that ought to be a surprise, but of course it can't be in a project as massive and carefully managed as WoW.

I know I keep saying this, but lord in heaven I can't wait. I think we're probably going to clear ICC one more time and try to get titles for a couple more people. I'm really leaning towards letting that field go fallow once the Shattering happens, though. Of course it's not a unilateral decision and we'll have to talk it over with the raid, but the other end of that decision is that, what with us all wearing ICC gear and the various Ulduar HMs having been nerfed, we could maybe get rusted protos before Cataclysm, whereas I absolutely don't think we're getting bone dragons beforehand. And for that matter! ICC and its bone dragons are ugly and boring, but Ulduar and its rusted protos are pretty and fun! And I've still never seen Algalon and you see way more Kingslayers than you see Starcallers.

Anyway, this will be the argument that I shall make to the raid tonight.

Moving on to an utterly different subject, apropos of absolutely nothing, I'll mention that I watched a bit of youtube of what I guess is heroic Deadmines earlier. My boyfriend had brought it up on his computer and was watching it (because it was from a holydin's PoV and there are few things he likes more than holydins) and I wandered in and went "what's that?"

To which he responded "aw, it's cute because you don't know what Deadmines looks like."

This is true because I've never actually been in it. I grew up Horde, as they say, and am pretty familiar with Wailing Caverns (I think that's the level-equivalent dungeon) but I have never actually set foot inside the mines.

But yes, watching the video made me all kinds of excited, especially because it had a boss fight in it, and even though the player characters were premades decked out in free T11, that boss was living a long time. It had a whirlwind thing it did, and the (totally amazing looking!) trollish feral druid got itself out of LoS of the healer and then stood in the whirlwind and it died. Truly, in these days of overgeared Wrath heroics and bosses with total life expectancies rarely exceeding ten seconds, that's pretty impressive.

During the Cataclysm leveling/gearing period, I'm going to try to encourage guildmembers to log on during our normal raid times. Obviously we won't be scheduling raids or anything, but I really would like to have 2-3 dungeon groups just chaining dungeons together for 2-3 hours during Cataclysm. Most importantly it will be so fun! And less importantly (but still important), it will mean we'll be free to do things like exercise our atrophied crowd control reflexes in an environment where it's far less likely to be broken by a hellfiring 'lock whose mind and all his soul are bent unwaveringly on the sole purpose of making us wipe and then calling us noobs before demanding a rez. Instead! We'll all be on vent, we'll be able to talk with each other about Buffy or whatever, marking a mob with a blue square for frost trap will mean I'll frost trap it, etc etc.

To say it for a millionth time: I really can not wait.

Leveling MM in Cataclysm

The subject line is what this post will really be about, but first! I wish to report on how I did with the "physical agility assessment" for the Madison PD: it went relatively ok. Minimum passing scores were: 25 sit-ups in one minute, 15 push-ups in one minute, and a mile and a half run in no more than 14:30. I performed 40 sit-ups, 26 push-ups, and made my run in 12:15. None of these are superlative, of course, and three to four years ago my scores would have been much better. But I've been working on getting back into shape, and clearly it's had some effect.

Moving on back to hunters! First, as soon as Cata drops (and I'm able to log in), I'm going to convert my secondary spec to something like this. Here's my thinking:

• It's irrelevant to a long boss fight, even one with adds because you'd need the killing blow, but when it's just you and yourself out questing, Rapid Killing + Rapid Recuperation will suddenly be awesome. I probably won't even bother using Aimed Shot due to that long cast time, but getting 50 focus every time something dies means I'll be able to spam Arcane Shots constantly.
• On the rare occasions when I want to MD a bazillion things onto my pet, Glyph of Misdirection and Bombardment mean that I'll be able to AoE down some pretty large packs with no problem, especially if I bring out my trusty Crabadin.
• The points in BM may seem strange, but they're mostly there to get me to Pathfinding as soon as possible. Especially if I can manage to farm the five thousand gold to get 310% speed flying, that extra 10% bonus will be awesome.
• I'm not bothering with Piercing Shots (even though I named the blog after it) because having another DoT is not really relevant when you're killing mobs that die within the space of two globals.

In conclusion, it's looking like leveling a hunter will continue to be the easiest thing in the world. And I honestly think this will be faster and easier than leveling BM. A really substantial pet tank is nice, but entirely eliminating downtime (and killing things as fast as the GCD refreshes) will be even better.

But wait, there's more!

Sorry, the post was going to be over when I finished talking about that spec, but I just noticed that MMO-champ put some updates up. Most importantly, there are now pictures of all the race/gender combinations with the new tier.

• I still hate hunter T11, but at least with the hat turned off (who the hell makes all the hats in the game? Lawd hammercy!), Pradzha will just look a little goofy.
• Goblin hunters will just look like murlocs.
• Worgenlocks with the helm enabled will look like goofy dogs that got stuck in a silly hat.
• Female orc warriors will look totally righteous.
• Although my BF continues to adore priest T11, I am mostly indifferent. Once again, I would never enable the hat. I guess it's sparklier than T10 though, so that's good.

Ok, done for real.

UI update and some other stuff

Making the post yesterday finally motivated me to try to fix more of the issues with my UI, so I added tipsy, WiM, and SexyMap to my list of mods, as well as moved some stuff around and changed some of my settings in Watcher. I won't do another full post, but I'll take another screenshot of it and post that. I also still need to add some functionality to my interface - pretty much watching for the longer cooldowns to come available. I think I can do that with Watcher too, though, so that's cool.

On an unrelated "yay, Cataclysm!" note, I'm sort of frozen with indecision right now. Which is fine because it's not coming out until December 7th, but I'd really like to have reached some sort of conclusion by then. Essentially I want to add a third real alt to hang out with my hunter and priest, not least because I really (really!) need an herbalist/miner. I am considering three directions to go for this:

1. Dwarven male enhancement shaman.
2. Worgen female druid.
3. Worgen female fury warrior.

Option 3 wasn't on my radar at all, but for some reason when I mentioned the things I was thinking about to my boyfriend (in addition to being sad about not being able to have a troll druid), he said "wouldn't a female Worgen fury warrior look really cool?"

And I was like dot dot dot while imagining a badass wolf-lady cuttin' off heads with two enormous axes.

And then I was like "yes, yes it would."

SO. I have no idea. One of the tangles in this particular knot comes from the fact that I have all the heirlooms necessary for an enhancement shaman or a feral druid, but I have zero of the heirlooms for a warrior. But I'm almost done re-doing the whole Argent Tourney thing (just a couple-three days of valiant dailies left to go) and I have a fair amount of champion's seals, so I could absolutely buy the plate heirlooms with those if I wanted to. And the advantage of starting up a Worgen character would be getting to see the Worgen starting area. And then, since you can mail heirlooms cross-faction, I could make a little goblin rogue and take a look at their starting area. So yeah. I'm leaning towards the fury warrior option, I think, but still firmly in the clutches of indecision.

More Lich King practice tonight. Sadly, since my BF has an unavoidable work thing, I'll be coming on my priest to heal instead of on Pradzha. I mean that's fine - the priest, after all, has all the initial kill achievements from like April and March - but I'm just not as confident on her any more as I am on Pradzha. We're actually having to fill in two of our regular spots with, er, irregulars though, so it probably won't be a kill until Thursday anyway.

Finally! Veritas Aequitas of Thorium Brotherhood - US is recruiting for T11. The website is obviously a work in progress and isn't really in use yet. I promise we do have people in guild chat though, and we are making our raid nights happen.

Archery and Alchemy

Today's MMO-champion update on alchemy has some exciting stuff for me, personally.

• Turning into a dragon and carrying friends around will be pretty cool (although it makes the pressure to buy 310% speed flying even greater). 
• Having a pure agility flask means that the profession bonus from alchemy will be just as good for raiding hunters as the bonus from jewelcrafting or blacksmithing, which is awesome.
• However, I'm seriously going to need to level an herbalism/mining alt, because I'm going to have to have stacks and stacks of the 1200 agility potion so I can add it to my cooldowns macro.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to it. I started playing after (I think) patch 2.3, and I stopped playing for several months a month before Wrath was released, so this will be the first time I'll have been actively playing when an expansion comes out. Jumping in to leveling, and then trying to get a small guild assembled and ready to raid is going to be a challenge.

Well well well

Preliminary findings from the research staff here at Piercing Shots indicate strongly that focus is fucking awesome.


So that's good.

You can take a look at the specs I've gone with on my armory page, linked to the right, and especially with so little wiggle room I'd say they're mostly right. I'll probably re-do the BM spec and shift points from Kindred Spirits into something else, but other than that, I feel pretty good about them.

I'm mostly going on intuition, of course, but I think I've got a pretty good plan for both BM and SV worked out so far. BM feels, I dunno, clunkier? Maybe it's just that arcane shot isn't very interesting, and the lack of cooldown on it makes focus management annoying. The focus fire proc is also fairly uninteresting - you just kind of use it when it's up. Anyway, what I eventually settled on with it was:

Send in the pet and Kill Command.
2 x Arcane Shot
2 x Steady shot
Kill Command

Repeat ad nauseum. I think in a boss fight I'd probably wait for the first focus fire before I blew my cooldowns for the first time, then I'd just blow them on cooldown for the remainder of the fight.

Survival was a ton more satisfying for me. It just felt like it all clicked together like a kid with Asperger's and a new Lego set, you know? You're almost always either using your big focus dumps, generally Explosive Shot, or saving up focus with Steady Shots. I felt like very occasionally I could sneak in an Arcane, which made me feel awesome, but I also had to be careful for times when Serpent, Black Arrow, and Explosive were all coming up soon and I'd need a nearly-full bar of focus (without, of course, letting it cap out).

I haven't installed Recount yet, so I don't have a clear picture of the damage I'm doing to training dummies, but Survival just feels like it's doing more damage than BM. A lot of that is, I think, the same problem that BM has always had: your pet is doing so much of your damage, you can begin to feel like you're just kind of chaperoning him around. Survival feels like it's actively slinging death down range.

Its icon is also way cooler.

Haven't reforged or re-gemmed anything yet, but I have to say it's kind of nice how the disappearance of armor penetration means I don't have to feel bad about things like my cloak from heroic Beasts any more. On the other hand, it's tough to know what I should really be striving for on my gear. I'm thinking in general I'll re-hitcap myself and then reforge for mastery.

I also think it's interesting that the official hunter forums have been really concentrating on MM and how to play it now. I mean, guys, come on. It's wide open now. You can play MM, sure, but why not experiment with the other two?

Publicity!

Man!  It's been an exciting couple of days in terms of "woah my blog thing exists".

1. I've gotten a couple comments!
2. And an email!
3. And been linked twice in one day on WoW Ladies!

The email was a short one asking for my thoughts on focus.  In short: I'm totally excited about the focus change.  Hunters are a physical DPS class, and having our mechanics depend on blue rage has just always been weird.  I've heard it rumored (although I can't back this up) that the original hunter design used focus or energy of some sort.  They couldn't figure out how to balance it (not that vanilla was balanced) before release and the use of mana was a kludge.

I mean, what other caster has a white-damage swing timer?  What other class in BC was required to DPS with a macro such that its casting-time ability didn't interfere too much with its auto-attack?  Who else had to farm and chain-chug Fel Mana Potions?  Which other caster mortal strikes its own damage as a mana regen mechanic?  It's all just weird.  Our mana management technique consists of "max DPS until you're out of mana, then viper for as little time as is possible".  It's not fun and it doesn't add anything to the class.

From what I've heard/read, they're thinking of maybe changing steady shot to grant you a short-duration buff that increases focus regeneration.  That alone is way cooler and bodes for way more dynamic DPS button-mashing than anything we do right now.   Like rogues and warriors we'll be able to blow our potion cooldown on haste or crit pots instead of mana  pots, while long fights won't punish us uniquely.  Resource management will be an ongoing mini-game for the course of the boss fight, rather than hitting a brick wall and having to awkwardly heave ourselves over it with AotV.

I am excited about the next expansion overall, and for me, the focus change is just another example of everything they're talking about doing right.  It's always possible to screw things up, of course, but so far it looks great. Here's a great thread with a bunch of posts from GC explaining the vision behind the focus change.  I agree with pretty much everything he says here and I think his posts provide a ton of insight.

Focus, please!

I promise I'll get around to posting about faction champions eventually, but the Blizzcon class panel yesterday had some pretty huge news for hunters. Copied and pasted straight from MMO-champion (with typos fixed):

• Hunter's mana is GONE!!!
• Hunters now use focus, no longer care about intellect or mana regen.
• Focus regenerates contunously, Steady shot improves the rate of getting focus back.
• Rogue energy comes back at a 10/sec rate, Hunter focus comes back at 6/sec (12/sec with steady shot)
• A shot costs 30 to 60 focus.
• Hunters will have fewer cooldowns on abilities
• Ammos will become an item, not a consumable.

Just to be up-front about it, I think this is fantastic news. I dislike mana as a mechanic for pretty much every class out there. I played Warhammer online for a brief stint and spent my time there as a healer. Every class in the game uses action points instead of mana, and it's a way more enjoyable mechanic for pretty much everyone involved.

Consider how hunters raided in Burning Crusade, for example. To begin with, we wore a lot of rogue leather because it just had way more agility, crit, hit, and AP than most of the mail in the game. We used Elixirs of Major Agility and Elixirs of Major Mageblood for buffs and then chained Fel Mana Potions every cooldown. The amount of farming necessary was just awful, but more importantly, it just wasn't a fun mechanic. We aren't healers and can never make a choice between throughput and longevity - we just do as much damage as we can as fast as we can and hope that our consumables keep us out of aspect of the viper. That's it.

The problems have been reduced today, but on fights with a lot of target switching, or in a 10-man that's missing a ret paladin to judge wisdom, we're back in the same boat. Mana usage is never a choice or a strategy for us; the most we can do is viper sting someone other than the primary DPS target. So if there's no JoW on whatever it is we're hitting, and if the single mana pot per fight doesn't suffice to keep us going, then we're out of luck and have to cut our damage in half to regen some mana. There's no choice or skill involved, and that makes it a bad mechanic.

Accordingly, I'm thrilled with the focus announcement. It's looking the current plan is for steady shot to give you a focus-regeneration buff, something that's unique as far as I know. I think it will also open the doors for skilled hunters that can really track and plan their damaging ability priorities to outshine their compatriots.

Ammo becoming an item rather than a consumable is a satisfying change as well. I imagine they'll function something like totems or librams, and I also imagine that they'll be bringing back quiver graphics with this change. I liked rolling the quiver haste bonus into the class itself, but I didn't like losing how cool my troll huntress looked with her dual mojos on her hips, her striker in her hand, and her quiver across her back. And let's not kid ourselves: a lot of the appeal of playing an MMO is seeing your character's look change and evolve with the effort you put into her.

The new expansion is looking pretty good so far, and the notes for other classes and about some of the gamewide changes to mechanics are making me quite optimistic. It looks like they're doing the "complete overhaul" thing that people keep asking they do to individual classes, except for everything. This may finally be the last expansion for the game, but it's looking like a good one.

Cataclysm official

I was going to post about the Faction Champions encounter today - and I still may - but for the moment, the official site for Cataclysm, the next big WoW expansion came out. It includes a cinematic trailer that's worth waching, although the voiceover guy hammed it up a little bit too much for my tastes.

The new race/class grid is interesting. As predicted by MMO champ, the undead hunter looks like it's going to happen. Everyone has their favorite and their least favorite of the new combinations, and undead hunter is definitely my least favorite. Hunters are all about life, connection with their pets, and the dynamism and finesse needed to use ranged weapons. I think the undead make fantastic warriors, with their immunity to pain and the brute strength of the zombie. They make great priests, both in that they're connected to the religion of their previous life as well as having passed beyond that initial life into a second one. They're great for mages and warlocks, with their grim determination to accumulate power. Hunters? I just don't see it.

The boyfriend actually made a great point about a couple of the new race/class combos when they were first getting bandied about as rumors: if Tauren are getting paladins, how is it that the undead aren't? Squish a warrior and a priest together and what do you get? A paladin.

My favorite race in the game remains the trolls, however, and it looks like we're finally getting troll druids. I'm totally excited about this change, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Trolls have always been jungle and forest dwellers whose religious traditions have revolved around a variety of natural and animal spirits. Along with the announced streamlining for 0-60 leveling, I'll definitely be rolling a troll druidess. I'm not sure how serious I'll be about her, but it'll be neat to have the option to play with her.

The other stuff looks interesting one way or another. I look forward to heroic Shadowfang Keep, seeing the inside of Uldum, flying over the sundered Barrens, so on and so forth. The Worgen look neat and I'll probably roll one to play around with. Not sure what class it will be - I've never played a warrior (or any class capable of tanking), so that seems like a possibility.

All in all, I'm surprised it even exists. I was fairly convinced that Wrath would be the last of the WoW expansions, especially with the Blizzard next-gen MMO in the works. I guess I'm just glad I don't live in Azeroth, I think the apocalypse has been happening there for the last 30 or 40 years.