Final Wrath Project: Rusted Protos!

Well, I mentioned my Ulduar idea to the raid last night, and everyone seemed pretty excited by the idea of finishing up Glory of the Ulduar Raider. I'm really looking forward to it. Ulduar was, in my opinion, the finest raid of the expansion, and we've actually got several people in the raid that didn't have a chance to experience it. The inflated health pools and DPS numbers from the ICC gear will really help take some of the stress out of things too. Steelbreaker is going to be hitting for a lot less on a tank with more health to soak it and will almost certainly die before the first tank blows up. Large health pools will mean we're less likely to get instantly blown up by lightbeams on Freya +3. And DPS through the roof means it will be much, much easier to kill Yogg before everyone goes crazy.

I'm honestly not sure if we'll be able to manage everything in the space of two weeks - the hardmodes were actually tuned pretty tightly and overgearing content only counts for so much. But I certainly think it's possible, and having a rusted proto to fly around on in Cataclysm would be really neat.

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.

Weather (entirely unrelated to WoW)

I currently live in the twin cities in Minnesota.

Tomorrow, I have to drive to Madison, WI to do a physical agility assessment with the Madison Police Department. Then drive back.

The entire month of October, the temperature rarely dipped below seventy degrees.

Today, it suddenly looked like this outside:

FML.

In which I shall dance carefully around substance

To begin with, this blog is not remotely secret from guildies, and in fact I've linked to it from the new guild website I've put up on guildomatic. I have also been serving as raid leader for the guild since April, albeit with a several-months-long break from raiding during the Summer. To complicate this issue, I was a friend of the guild leader in the real world before I started playing WoW, much less before I joined her guild. I'm not sure how aware of this fact several of the guild people are, but I could easily see it turning into a dramabomb at some point in the future.

What I'm getting at here is that if I want to talk about my guild, or about raid leading, or anything like that, I have to be very careful about it. The thing is, I also do quite want to talk about my guild and raid leading.

Ok.

I think I want to start by just going over some things that I think are true, so that even though they've been said a million times before, I'm clear about where I'm coming from when I talk about things. Then I would like to congratulate myself for prefacing clarification with possibly one of the vaguest statements ever uttered by a human being. Yeesh.

Be of brave heart, self! Onward! Hiyah!

• The term "casual" is a loaded one, which is why I put it in square quotes. What I mean when I use it is: we raid two nights per week and three hours per night. This isn't a particularly strenuous raid schedule, and we're not going to be getting server firsts in Cataclysm, but I think we'll be able to do quite well.
• As has frequently been noted by innumerable people, Starting the Raid Late is the barbed and venomous bane of pretty much every small, "casual" raiding guild. Even if all you're trying to run is a 10-person raid, an endeavor exponentially less complicated and awful than running 25s, it's pretty easy to find yourself with 8 or 9 people in the raid waiting on the last person or two, and then someone goes to Dalaran to respec or hops on an alt "until the tank shows up" or whatever, and by the time the last person logs on and zones in, you're making your first pull 45 minutes late.
• This sucks. It is no fun for anyone. And it cuts in to time that could actually be spent killing new bosses and listening to each other cheer on vent, which is why we do it, right?
• This, then, is the fundamental reason I think that a guild doing any raiding at all whatsoever needs to have rules.

If you accept my argument above, then everything else is just dickering, to paraphrase a misogynist aphorism. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that in 2-4 months this is going to cause Issues in the guild, and I'm probably going to be the guy that has to be a dick. I am really, really not looking forward to this, for a whole sticky web of interconnected reasons.

Note to any guildies reading this: if you think I'm thinking of you, well, maybe? But probably not in the way you think I am. A safe zone example of the bridges I profoundly do not want to come to, let alone decide how to cross and/or burn, is my boyfriend's participation in the raid. First, I love him. Second, I love playing with him. Third, he is in my perhaps biased opinion one of the best - if not the best - healers on the server. Fourth, he may or may not be able to convince his job to play nicely with our raid times. I encourage the reader to refer to my foundational Argument For Why We Ought To Have Rules, found above. What am I going to do if fair enforcement of guild policy mandates that I bench my boyfriend?

Honestly, as I am not a terrifying and emotionless automaton, I have no idea. Here's hoping I don't find out.

I'm also clearly, in my opinion, not doing very well with handling things so far. I can justify this in part by noting that, even though we did just kill Arthas, the guild is in a very fragile (perhaps even frangible!) state. It has franged before, in fact! And some of our current members are actually fragments of this previous cataclysm, if you will, that we have since grafted back on to the trunk. One of these fragments has been guildless since he originally separated some months ago, but then came to a night full of Arthas wipes on Wednesday, the day before we got our kill. He was filling in for one of two regulars who weren't able to make it that night. When that person returned, there wasn't space for him, and I knew that person would be returning, but I didn't warn him. He was understandably upset when he got benched Thursday, and I'd assume more upset when we then killed the LK. He is also connected in to a social network the full extents of which I am not fully aware of, but it seems possible to me that mis-handling this further could again cause damage to the guild.

So!

The hilarious irony of all this is that, when we were both a member of the same (hordeside!) 25-person raiding guild, I frequently talked with my boyfriend about how easy it would be to fix all the little drama problems in the guild. I still think that perhaps, as GL or RL, I might have handled some issues differently, but I am also forced to face the fact that I was largely full of poo. Especially because I was in an extremely odd position in the guild, such that I sort of ended up being friends with leaders of both of the most prominent squabbling factions in the guild. I indeed I think even made a post on the guild forums at the time about how I thought everyone involved was just terrific and why couldn't they all be friends!? You would think that the very fact of having to make such a post would tip me off that it wasn't that simple, but I suppose not.

Angst having been appropriately wafted around like spoiled myrrh from a censer (does myrrh spoil?), I should point that I actually am the happiest that I have been with my guild situation since a certain moment* in Burning Crusade. I have my boyfriend, several RL friends, vent is friendly and welcoming, raids are fun and wonderful: it's just great. I love it so much. And that's why I'm afraid I'll break it.

*I actually posted this story to LJ a long, long time ago - you can read it here, if you like.

lol months behind noob

Click to enlarge

Whoo!

I am very very very very very satisfied with this kill. I realize it's like... way late, and no chill of the throne, and 30% buff, and etc. I really don't care. We first started working on Arthas in early May, and then our raid fell apart due to summer slump, raider burnout, etc. Also, that raid collapse essentially happened on the GL's birthday, and I was a part of it happening, so it felt good to right that wrong for her.

I'll probably go back to my "Hand of A'dal" title in a bit (hello, she's a space goat, she calls A'dal "uncle Addie"), but it's fun to put on the Kingslayer title for now. And this will continue to help recruiting for a really solid raidteam for Cataclysm.

Yay!

Stories!

I'm sort of floating around the WoW blog biome today, mostly looking for writers I really enjoy to add to my teensy weensy little blogroll over there to the right. I have some sort of vague idea that doing this (and then commenting on other blogs) is part of how one gets one's own blog read. My first find is Righteous Orbs, which I very much enjoy. Reading through their stuff, though, I realized that a lot of what I like is that they're telling stories.

"Of course!" I said to myself, "these strange human creatures love their 'stories'! If only I had tales of my own to tell, perhaps I would have some readers!"

You know it's serious when every single sentence and fragment is concluded with an exclamation mark. One of the best sources of stories is pugging frequently. Pugging puts you in groups with random people who may or may not have a firm grip, or even a trembling palsied grip, on any of the game's concepts. Pugs are how you meet melee hunters, undergeared tanks that went off their meds and have developed delusions of being skilled and overgeared, healers who spend 80% of their time just watching healthbars go down, etc. You know, all of the stuff that makes for all those great (if somewhat mean-spirited) stories. Sadly, even during periods when I'm pugging constantly to try to gear up, I seem to mostly have good luck with groups. The vast majority of the people I play with are at least mildly competent, and a good half the rest suffer only minor impairments.

While this makes grinding gear much more pleasant, it makes for something of a shallow, scummy pool to try to skim stories from. Luckily, with Cataclysm coming out, I'm sure there will be several months-worth of gibbering, drooling primates hooting imprecations at one another in the midst of wiping to trash. This misery, in turn, will become alchemically transformed into delightful stories! Yay!

Unrelated: I halfway expect to finally get our Lich King kill tonight, after the summer slump destroyed the raid for so long. And if not tonight, I am absolutely certain he'll die next week. I am quite excited.

Oh, and I've added disqus comments to the blog, so conversations thread now. Hooray!