I'm almost done!

With that post I was talking about! But it's also my birthday and my boyfriend wants to take me out to dinner, so I have to go! I'll try really hard to get it posted by midnight!

I haven't been totally idle...

...I just haven't felt like I've had much to say on this blog. I think part of the posting slump has been because the end of the school year ate 30-40% of my raid for the last three weeks or so, and it's been really disheartening to go from progression with a stable group of good people to fishing in trade for pugs and wiping on farm content. Thankfully, last night the prodigal raiders returned, and it was completely delightful clearing content with them. Very few wipes and some great progression on Cho'gall - I am about 90% confident that we'll get him tonight. And he seems like a really farmable encounter, very repeatable once you go back with a group that already has experience with him.

I suppose it may be worthwhile to chat about playing a hunter on Cho'gall. I think that unless you're in a raid where someone else - a frost mage, maybe - has the same sort of control options available to them, you should absolutely have a Survival spec for this encounter, and I think you should have entrapment in it. The reduced cooldown on traps and the 4-second immobilize is so useful.

What we do is we have our add tank pile up the corpse-puddles as closely together as she can, then I lay a frost and an explosive trap directly on that, then a snake trap about 10-15 yards in front of those. As soon as the slimes appear they get frozen in place while all the ranged unload on them with AoEs including serpent spread, which is really phenomenal AoE DPS. Once the entrapment period ends and the slimes get off the frost patch they hit the snake trap, which immobilizes them again. Hammer them with more AoE. If you timed that first frost trap well, it should be coming off of cooldown just about now, and you should be able to chain a third entrapment proc on the slimes right at the end. If you do this well, and your raid is lined up so the slimes aren't blobbing off to the sides of the room, you should be in really great shape and they should really die by the end of the third entrapment proc.

Awesome, huh? It actually makes the encounter really fun. I mostly leave my pet on Cho'gall himself to help the melee push that phase transition into phase 2. Once we really get set with his positioning in phase 2 and kill the tentacles with a quickness, we'll be set. Yay!

Other than that, my concerns with the T12 4-pc remain the same. I'm also not looking forward to questing out Hyjal on my hunter, as I've done it in its entirety once on my warrior and about a third of it twice on my priestess. I guess I should make some gold, at least.

Other than that, I've written a few thousand words of the first novel I've started that I've felt pretty confident about finishing a first draft of. I've also been futzing with Starcraft 2 a little bit again. And I quite possibly have a new job. And with the coming of Spring I've been running again. So I suppose that all in all, things are pretty decent 'round these parts.

You mean to say that WoW has some grinding?

You know, I totally hadn't realized it had been as long as it has since I last updated. Sorry about that. There have been a few things going on, and to be honest I haven't had something that I've really seriously wanted to write about. The "how to gem, enchant, coif, and manicure your hunter" post is necessary, but also kind of a boring pain to write. Other than that, I've pretty much covered the exciting possibilities of 4.06 in my previous post, so until that patch comes down the pipeline I don't have a whole lot to say. Part of that is also that the guild doesn't resume raids until next week. That's right: we're so slowcore we're not even going to start raiding until the entire tier has been cleared on heroic mode by the Paragons and Methods of the world (which are pretty much uh Paragon and Method).

On top of that, I've actually gone back to school. I'm still a little bit surprised by this development - when I first graduated with my B.A. in 2004 I swore "never again, the studying times!" and enlisted in the armed forces. But here I am. It's not eating a whole lot of time yet, but that's going to ramp up as the semester progresses, and since I'm also working (part-time), that reduces the time I've had available to just sit and think about WoW.

Finally, the game itself has been a time sink, hard as that may be for many of you to believe. I came into Cataclysm with two characters at cap with the following professions: blacksmithing, alchemy, enchanting, and tailoring. You may notice that none of those professions are herbalism or mining. I've never had the inclination to play the auction house and don't really have the capital necessary to do so anyway, which meant I couldn't substitute gold for gathering. I have many fine guildies, some with gathering professions, but they also have their own uses for the stuff they farm, and with raiding coming up a lot of our communal farming is going to go into collective consumables such as flasks and feasts. This all left me with one inescapable conclusion: I needed a gathering alt.

Click to embiggen the most badass gathering alt ever.

I am really kind of in love with her. I'd been thinking that I needed some sort of gathering alt since Cataclysm was announced, but hadn't been able to think of a race/class combination that interested me. My boyfriend's suggestion of how awesome a wolf lady cuttin' things up with two two-handers would look took a pretty instant hold, though, so there she is, looking as righteous as I'd imagined. She's good for 4-6k single-target DPS at 82 and she has a pretty decent prot spec. She's tanked a few instances in old Azeroth, Outlands, and Northrend. There's a lot of frantic button-pressing in warrior tanking, but being able to spell reflect and interrupt casters is pretty wonderful, and charging is as much fun as its always looked. She's really a joy to play. So across my various active high-level characters, I now have six professions, all making progress. The lowest is over 485, and the highest is I think 516. I've definitely had some help from guildies getting this far (and a lot of it!), but it'll be nice to eventually be able to supply flasks, belt buckles, enchants, and spellthreads to the guild as well as a number of 359 craftable items.

What else? I'm up to 20/28 of the achievements for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero, which is getting tantalizingly close. I've got a couple trivial ones left (No Static at All and Prototype Prodigy), some DPS check ones (Faster Than the Speed of Light and Sun of A...), and then a couple finnicky ones that you need to clear long heroics to get to (Rotten to the Core and Don't Need to Break Omelettes). I'm hoping to have it done within a couple weeks, but it all sort of depends upon when everyone can and can't be online.

So that's what's been going on. Still a little freaked out about raiding - the fact that crystals are a mat for the Cata run-speed enchant totally sucks, not to mention +20 stats. It looks like I'm going to be starting raiding with a number of suboptimal Wrath enchants, just because that's the only thing that's available to me. I'll take a look at my various crafting professions and see if there are any purpz I can craft and melt for less than the 2-3,000 gold crystals cost on the AH, but it's not looking too good. This won't be an issue in a month of course, but right when you start raiding is exactly the time that encounters are hardest - that's exactly the time you want the best enchants.

Oh well! I'm sure next week will be some pretty awesome fun.

One of THOSE posts

So it's been a couple weeks since I've posted.  The reason lies, as it so often does, in real life.  After two years of on-again, off-again temp work in Florida, I moved to the Twin Cities in Minnesota and got a full-time, permanent position.  And while I'm thankful to have a job, a place to live, and a bed to sleep on, I'm getting up very early and working a lot of hours.  I've been habitually late to raids and often performing poorly when I'm there, in large part because I'm just so freaking tired.  I've had to make the difficult decision to step down from raiding in general, which means Prathi is mostly getting shelved.

This is kinda sad for me - I was really excited about the set bonuses on hunter T10! - but I just can't make the time to raid right now.  I really, simply can't.  And that means I'm not doing the research, raiding, and reading to make it possible for me to write this blog.  I'll be leaving it up - and I think I'm going to update the gear guide now that triumph emblems fall from heroic bosses like delicious candy - but I think Piercing Shots will be on hold until, at least, Cataclysm.

That said, I haven't stopped playing entirely.  I've got a poor neglected disc priest that's having a lot of fun with the random dungeon feature.  And thank you to the two people that have written emails recently!  I'm sorry for being so silent.  For Nicoran - the only way I can think of a pet grabbing aggro off of a tank is if the tank hadn't actually hit it.  Make sure your pet is set to passive (/petpassive) and wait until an avenger's shield (or whatever) has hit the boss before you ctrl+1.  Remember that some bosses have aggro wipes as well, and a pet with dash on could conceivably get back in and bite the boss before the tank had re-established aggro.  If this is happening on a boss without an aggro wipe and well into the fight, then... something's going wrong.  Maybe a mischievous rogue is trixing pets?  I dunno.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a happy holiday!

Reposting a guest post!

Hi everyone!  I've got a couple ideas for posts kicking around in my head, and at the very least I can explain what people mean by "stutter-run," but I couldn't manage to turn any of them into a coherent post yet.  So to buy myself a little time, I'm re-posting a guest post I did for World of Snarkcraft.  It's awkward because, while I raided with them at the time, I moved servers and guilds recently.  But I don't have anything else written, so here goes:

At the end of August I had to move.  I won't go in to any great length about why I had to move, but one of the results was that I had to give up playing WoW until I'd settled some things.  Some things have now settled, so I renewed my sub last night.  I didn't do a whole lot – I said hi to the guildies that were on and did a quick heroic ToC-5.  WoW looked a lot prettier than it used to, but I'm not sure if that's innacurate memory or what.  It was mostly just nice to play a little again.

In a sad confirmation of stereotype, one of the things I've been missing has been upgrading my gear.  We all know and love that warm, internal glow from finally getting a shiny new purple.  It's a little bit like the glow a chronic gambling addict gets from their infrequent payouts, I think.  Especially because the longer you go without it, the warmer it is when you finally get another taste.  And man if it hasn't been a while since I had a taste, you know?  I've replaced two things since before the first time I killed Yogg-Saron in the middle of the Summer, both the rings, neither of which came from a 25-person raid.

I'm not sure exactly when I'm going to be able to return to raiding, but it's going to taste pretty sweet when I do.  Especially since I'm sure the rest of the guild is swimming in 245 gear at this point.  Imagine the situation like this: it's a kid's birthday, and he's in the back yard with all his friends.  There's a pinata full of his favorite candy – maybe some kit-kats – and all of his friends are stuffed full of hotdogs, chips, cake, and soda.  They're lying on the ground in a disordered, groaning semi-circle.  You hear the whoosh sound of him swinging the stick a few times, then a sharp crack followed by an avalanche of crinkling wrappers.  Giggling quietly, he scoops up the candy and runs upstairs to stash it in his room.

That's going to be me in the Coliseum.

Distinctly second in the list of stuff I've been missing is the people.  Ha-ha!  Just kidding!  As an emotionally healthy human adult, of course I value interpersonal relationships far more than I value pixels named with purple text.

Hm.

Has anyone else ever heard a saying that goes something like “if you tell a lie to yourself enough times, you might begin to believe it”?

I'm not sure if that's true.  But, moving on!

I really have missed my guildies, seriously.  Reading Snarkcraft has been the cause of some occasional wistfulness, because it reminds me that I haven't been able to hang out with Seri and Jov, both of whom are pretty excellent ladies.  Axiom is just in general a really fun environment to raid with.  Making fun of the raid leader, making fun of Crutches (can I just say that the Hammer of Ancient Kings is apropos for him), misdirecting bombs onto the druid co-GM, pulling off the tank and wiping the raid in the first 5 seconds of an attempt (my specialty!), imagining the female Orc warrior Kerp speaking with the male Polack voice of her player, just on and on.  It has really been a drag missing out on all of that for a month.

On the other hand, there have been compensations.  This has been a really great way to get out of doing dailies and otherwise farming consumables.  Dragonfin Angelfish, for example, is pretty much never available for sale anywhere ever.  Saving myself the outrage over the prices for alchemy mats has also probably done wonders for my blood pressure.  And can I just say that I could happily live the tortured, immortal existence of an Anne Rice vampire just so long as I never, ever had to encounter the trade channel.  Sadly, that boat has sailed, so no lace and black velvet for me.

For real though, everyone: none of it is funny any more.  None of it.  Any joke you were going to make in trade?  It isn't funny.  Every time you say “anal” and then link an ability or item, it actually creates a hole in the universe.  These holes – and there are, by now, trillions of them – vacuum up and destroy the elementary particle of human joy, known as the “fabulon”*.  Relentlessly and forever.  They don't go away, people.  Now that we've made them, they're going to be here until the heat-death of the Universe.  And while it's true that kittens and puppies generate fabulons at a steady rate, we are rapidly approaching the point at which the holes will be depleting them faster than they can be replaced.  Please, think of the children.

*Entirely different from the god worshipped by the shadowy cult of Naga known only as “The Bravo Demographic”.

OMG it's Tuesday!

I've started working on Part 4, I'll get it up at some point tonight, I promise! Man, I've really defeated my own purpose of posting on Tuesdays so that people can read it during downtime. I guess I should move post days to Monday.