The Liebster Award!

Fun times ahead – Calidyn of Paladins Stole My Bubbles! has nominated me for a Liebster Award!

I spent some time googling to learn more about the Award’s origins; as far as I can tell there’s been a series of it over the years (earliest I found was from 2010) and each edition has a different set of rules. They all have the same aim, though!

“Well, it is only an AWESOME award given to up and coming bloggers. Given by other up and coming bloggers. It’s a cool way to find other blogs and feel like you are getting into the blogging stratosphere. It is simple, you get nominated by someone else, mention their page and a link to their blog in your Liebster Award Post, answer the 11 questions they give you, then tag 11 other nominees and give them a new set of 11 questions to answer.” (taken from Calidyn’s post because why not perpetuate a good thing :D)

So, let’s get started! (Rest of post after the break because this is a tad long.)

Lucky Number Seven

 

Last night I finally managed to get that last 70%+ done, so after almost two years Myriade is finally max level! Yay!

Timing could’ve been better, I admit, since she’s hitting 90 the same day of the instant boosts. I’ve saved a whole set of Timeless Isle gear so she gets to skip the grind, which is a good thing because I haven’t dared to take her there just yet. Ah, downsides of being stuck on a PVP server…

Still, seventh toon to hit 90 now, hurray!

 

Boom!

Garrosh is down at last, hurray!

Not a guild kill though – I just got really lucky with joining a solid almost-guild group after spending hours upon hours watching trade chat. And to think, they were starting all the way from Dark Shamans so I very nearly didn’t ask to join! Boy am I glaaaaaaad I did.

We were even hit with Battlenet going crazy right before we pulled Siegecrafter – practically everyone aside from me and a rogue got disconnected and couldn’t log back in. I thought that was it, and they actually did sort of call it, but then one managed to get back online and suddenly we were good to go again. Phew!

The strat they use is clever, too – one tank, two healers, with melee heading right and range going left for the intermission phases. DPS is crazy when you have 7 of them! We even lost one melee early on in Phase 2 and still blew through. Obviously the tank and healers were really epic at what they do, too.

No BoAs dropped for me sadly, but I’m so stoked about getting the kill that it doesn’t matter much. Always next time! Plus I picked up a whole bunch of loot from the other bosses anyway – trinket, helm token, leg token, healing mace! Maybe I’ll finally get to go back to Resto again 😀

Yaaaay!

 

Back to Square One

Well, Sunday was our last shot at getting Garrosh down with the team and we didn’t make it.

I won’t lie about being really disappointed – it just feels like we kept getting stuck in a cycle of making really silly mistakes. Dying to Iron Star, dying to Desecrate, people tunneling and ignoring Mind Controls, people standing in Annihilate… overall we did manage to improve on controlling the adds spawned during Empowered Whirling Corruption, but we wasted more time wiping to mess ups than anything else. Our best attempt ever was seeing him hit Phase 3, but by then everyone but the Mind Controlled folks were dead.

Now we’re losing about half the team – at first it was just the two paladins, but now our DK tank is also taking a break to get ready for school and our Enh Shammy wants to spend time with her newborn (who is adorable in all the ways, I swear). Our warlock has been no-show for weeks now and we’ve been pugging to fill his spot, so it’s safe to assume we’ve lost him too. So that’s both tanks gone, a healer and two DPS ):

There’s been mention of merging with a friend’s raid group – they’ve also lost a whole bunch of people, so it makes sense. But they’re a bit behind progression and gear-wise, so the plan is to start fresh all over and get to know each other as a team. Hopefully it works out! Recruitment is hard this late in the expansion.

See you in a month or so, Garrosh… I hope.

Empowered Blah

Garrosh is having the time of his life kicking our sorry butts, I’ll bet!

Saturday’s raid went fairly well – we had a bit of a issue with a mouthy mage pug at first but that sorted itself out soon enough. After that and the usual warm-up attempts we actually started getting to Phase 2 consistently with all the adds dead before getting ported into the other realm. No more spiky tank damage, and DPS and heals were doing pretty good too; three healers but our monk Fistweaved most of the time. Everyone was really on top of the Mind Controls, which was awesome! We were stuck on Phase 2 though, and kept wiping to the adds after Empowered Whirling Corruption, but at least some progress was made!

Sunday’s raid… didn’t go as well, sadly. We wiped right away on trash – always a bad sign – and then had some silly mistakes with Desecrate puddle placement, Annihilate deaths, Iron Star deaths even! Monk had a family occasion to attend so we tried 2-healing –  I thought it worked quite well but MCs kept targeting both healers at the same time which caused more problems. 3-healing was safer but the flip side is Garrosh gained a lot more energy in the other realm. And the Empowered Whirling adds turned out to be a massive road block.

For some reason we’re really bad at controlling and killing them away from each other. We continuously have at least 3 Empowered adds running around within seconds of spawning, which is horrible. Pallytank’s self-healing and general crazy aggro pulls most of the adds onto him, and someone ends up killing those instead of the few we have isolated. Our DK offtank tries to pull them away from Pallytank and kite them away and someone kills the ones on her instead! Big biiiig sigh. It feels like a really silly place to be stuck at for so long. Hopefully after this reset we’ll be better at it.

One week left – two raid days before February arrives!

Tick Tock Garrosh

13/14 Siege of Orgrimmar normals, now!

We’ve decided to extend every week until we get Garrosh down, now that we’re sooo close. Siegecrafter Blackfuse went kaboom two weeks ago after a horribly embarrassing amount of attempts on him. I think it was about 60? Bad, bad. The fight’s mechanics are really easy, but first we had people suffering from lag and computer issues, then we just had silly mistake after silly mistake… consequences of the Christmas break, I guess! I was on conveyer belt duty and jumped to my death a few times /facepalm.

Last week was a different story, though! Klaxxi seemed in theory to be a fairly complicated fight, what with the crapton of information you need to remember for each Paragon, but having a set kill order simplifies it a whole lot. Once we got the first few ‘oh-so-this-is-how-it-goes’ tries out of the way, they went down without a hitch!

(…You know, except for when I got eaten by the baby bugs. Not sure how that happened since I wasn’t the Mesmerise target, but one second I was alive – the next, splat! Ugh, just you wait, kunchongs. I’ll have my revenge yet.)

They’re a lot smaller when dead…

We put in some attempts on Garrosh after, but our best try only got us to the start of Phase 2 where the leftover Phase 1 adds distracted us and caused the Mind Controls to spread everywhere. Sadly, that was just the one time – we kept getting stuck in Phase 1 on all our other attempts. Tank damage seems to be really high here. I think this is the first fight in the entire raid that I’ve seen Pallytank die to adds over and over.

Hopefully when we go in and try again this week we’ll do better! It’s a bit of a race against time now – we’re losing our Pally healer and Pallytank come February. They’ve both decided to take a break from WoW until the new expansion comes out, so with luck we’ll be able to get them the kill as a farewell present 😀

Happy New Year!

Welcome, 2014!

I don’t make many personal new year’s resolutions anymore, since I never keep them (heh), but I figured WoW ones wouldn’t hurt! 😀

These are just a few of mine:

1. Kill Garrosh!

Attendance issues prevented us from clearing Siege of Orgrimmar before 2013 ended, so this is at the top of my list! 11/14 now, so close – hopefully it won’t be too long before I get that Liberator title!

2. Transmog the Alts!

I’ve been really lax about this because I have no patience for farming gear – or anything, really. But really, it’s getting ridiculous how mismatched they look.

3. Legendaries!

No, not Wrathion’s fancy-shmancy cloak – his daggers! I’ve been sitting on the final collection stage of the questline for months now, and it should really only take six-ish weeks to complete it. I also have Teracgosa’s staff to finish – I’ve only just started the second part of the questline, but hopefully if I run Firelands every week it won’t take too long!

4. Level… someone

Myriade finally dinged 80 over Christmas (a year and a half after being rolled), but I’ve been itching to play a paladin lately too. The question is which one: the Draenei or the Blood Elf? Oh, and I really want to try mistweaving as well. Who knows? …I’ll probably end up leveling all the alts anyway.

And that’s it! May your year be filled with glorious fun and adventure, boss kills, PVP wins, fancy lewtz, shiny achievements and more!

Weekday Waffles: Holidays!

It’s been awhile, hey!

The past couple months have been really busy for me personally – October had a lot of work/travel, November was NaNoWriMo! It’s my first win ever so I’m pretty dang chuffed 😀

Sadly things haven’t been going as well on the raiding front – the drama gods have decided to mess with us again. I’m starting to think it’s a once-per-patch occasion. Since the last update we’ve lost: one tank to real life, one healer who switched to replace said tank, one DPS to poor attendance and another DPS to ragequittery. (Side note: if you raqequit right when the first trash has been pulled because the raid leader had no choice but to pug in someone with the same loot spec as you, there really isn’t an excuse you can make for that sort of behaviour. Don’t say you can’t deal with ‘selfishness’ and expect people to sympathise with you.)

We’ve been trial-ing a whole bunch of different people every week, but none have really lasted. With two or three new folks in the group every time progression’s been slow – we only raid twice a week for a total of six hours, so it’s often difficult to have enough time to spare to work on new bosses. Twin Shamans, Nazgrim, Malkorok and Spoils all took a couple weeks each to beat. We’ve had to extend the lockouts to get those new kills, but half the group still wants gear from the first wing so extensions don’t get to happen very often. I’m one of the lucky few – the only upgrades I need now drop from Garrosh and maybe Paragons for the tier leg tokens (*shakes fist at Celestials*).

The good news is we finally got Thok down last week, yay! So far that’s been our biggest hurdle – we hardly ever had enough time to put in proper attempts on him. All in all, I think it took maybe a month between our Spoils kill and Thok’s. We decided to switch it up from our previous tries and one-tank it and that made a whole lot of difference. Pallytank was just ridiculously pleased to go Ret for once! He kept saying he hasn’t had the chance to DPS in a normal raid since the Spirit Kings in MSV. I think he just wants to show off the fact that his Ret spec’s almost as ridiculously geared as his Prot’s 😛

Holidays are kicking in now though, so Siegecrafter Blackfuse is going to have to wait ’til after Christmas. I’m a bit disappointed about that, but overall I know Pallytank and I are getting a bit frustrated with all the nonsense that happens every week so having a break is a good thing. Hopefully by then the silly problems with disappearing raiders will be over!

Here’s wishing everyone very merry holidays!

Through the Gates!

So last night as planned, our little Friends’n’Family group ran Flex Gates of Retribution for the first time.

It went pretty well! We had 17 people in total – all time high! Better yet, apparently during last week’s run a lot of people were on their alts, but seeing as we were attempting harder bosses this time around most of them decided to bring their mains. The difference was HUGE. And since we had four main-spec healers, I even got to stay feral for once! Hurray!

Galakras gave us the most trouble – we wiped a few times and had to reshuffle the tower/ground groups to try to keep them as balanced as possible. First, we underestimated the damage needed on the tower boss, so we didn’t send enough DPS up. Then we sent too many. Oops! I guess the scaling in terms of 10 vs 17 people is just a bit hard to estimate. We finally decided to send two of our top DPS up along with another DPS and healer, and that ended up being just right. Except then our healer forgot to follow us to the next tower because she’s too used to being in the ground team, and the tank went splat.

By then we’d probably met our quota of silly mistakes for Galakras, so on our next attempt everyone pretty much buckled down and focused. Towers went smoothly, except for when my poor aiming skills made me completely miss my first shot at the damn dragon. And my second shot. Also my third. But I got him on my fourth try (while also noting that I should probably not be the one in the cannon on future runs) and down went Galakras! Fireball kiting was messy and landing all over the place, but the good thing about having so many people in the group is that there were enough to soak no matter where it went. Only two dead when Galakras died, yay!

Iron Juggernaut was much, much easier. Galakras was my favourite fight to heal on my first Flex run through this wing, but Iron Juggernaut is my favourite as feral. I get to stay on the boss the entire time! Such a relief to have a fight like this after all the target-switching and running around before. True, Sha of Pride is pretty Patchwerk-y too, but c’mon – a giant metal scorpion > a purple blob of goo anyday. Plus, I’d read on the Fluid Druid forums that the Wild Charge talent is great for when we get flung backwards in Phase 2. I tried that out last night, and OH. MY. GOD. that was the MOST FUN I’d ever had. I literally charge back onto the boss while still in mid-air. I’m not kidding. It was AWESOME. I’m still having gigglefits just thinking about it.

Dark Shaman weren’t quite as fun. It’s just ridiculously hard as melee given the huge crapton of damage going everywhere. The tornadoes, the poison, the slimes, the stupid walls that oneshot you. I died an awful lot on our Normal mode attempts last weekend, and was determined to figure out how to survive last night. Apparently, the best way to live is… to run away. It’s not so bad with the tornadoes; those can be avoided quite easily. The poison stream too. But the slimes? Run. If I’m fast enough I dump an Ursol’s Vortex, if any aggro onto me (and A LOT do) I Typhoon them away. I tried to Wild Charge through the Ashen Wall as well, but my health still took a huge hit when I flew through the elementals. Maybe Displacer Beast will work better, I’ll test that next time.

We killed them on our second attempt with three-quarters of the group still alive. I’m crediting that to us being fortunately light on melee – there was only myself, a warrior, and the two tanks. The warrior was brave and died. I ran away a lot and survived. Yet another reason why I love feral: I can dump a bunch of bleeds on the Shamans right before they cast their Poison/Ashen Spell of Doom, then run away and let my dots do the work until the tanks kite the boss out of danger zone. It’s not a great solution and leaves me sitting idle more often than I’d like, but at least I stayed alive, and I still managed to top meters. It’s probably not going to be as easy in Normal, but it’s something. Next step: figure out best time to cast Heart of the Wild for 45 seconds of pretend-Boomkinness!

Sadly we started late, so we didn’t have enough time for Nazgrim. I still think that’s an easier fight compared to the Shamans, though. Hopefully we’ll find time to finish him off this weekend; if not, there’s always next week!

Weekday Waffles: A Flexing Thing

I’m sticking the waffle tag on this post because I have a whole jumble of thoughts on flex raids that are demanding to be spewed out, and waffle tags mean I’m allowing myself to do just that.

(Also, I’m hungry, but a recent bout of food poisoning prevents me from indulging myself on random food lest my stomach revolts again.)

We had our second ever Friends’n’Family Flex (heh, alliteration) last night. Not everyone from last week showed up, but we had a few new takers, so we ended up with 14 up to Norushen, and 15 at Sha. Pretty good turnout! Our Normal group’s mage hopped on his DK since we were short a tank, and did really well for having never tanked any of the SoO bosses before.

They had me go Resto again too, and I think I did fairly well – our regular Resto druid was still beating me by miiiileees, though. I’m low on mana more often than I ever was back in ToT, which can’t be a good thing. I’ll have to work on that! I’m debating on whether I should buy the legendary cloak for healing, but 10K gold is a LOT for me especially when I hardly heal anymore! The Twisted Treasures of the Vale kindly gave me an extra 540 cloak last night, so for now I’ll use that instead.

Next week the plan is to hit up the second wing, Gates of Retribution. I’m excited because I think doing the fights on Flex will help us in Normal. Only a handful of us from the regular group usually make it for Flex – timezone differences on weekdays mean that half of them are still at work (or asleep, even) – but practice makes perfect! On the other hand though, I’m kinda worried, because I don’t know if our casual little Flex team will be able to handle it. In complete honesty, the few are kinda carrying the many, and there’s only so much they can do.

This isn’t meant as a rude/braggy/whiny comment, just as a statement of the team’s weaknesses. Last night we had 8 DPS (9 on Sha), but at least two were consistently below the tanks. We had to run with four healers because the fourth also did less healing than both the tanks. It’s not that big a deal on the first couple bosses, but Norushen was a bit of a struggle. People died to the death beam, died to standing in silly stuff in the Test realms. Sha was even harder. Pride levels were jumping too high too soon, people stood in Self-Reflection, didn’t stack/spread properly. The raid was getting multiple stacks of the debuff because those of us who knew to dispel weren’t getting the Gift; we had to dispel without it and eat the Pride to avoid people dying. We got it down eventually due to a combination of luck with the Gift allocation as well as our top DPS really outdoing themselves. But from what I experienced of the second wing on flex last week, I don’t know if luck and three strong DPS will get it done.

Really, I don’t mind that our team isn’t strong, numbers-wise. I know some of us have the benefit of better gear and greater familiarity with the encounters. I’ve never been one to focus on recount (except to evaluate my own performance), but I do think that certain minimum standards are important. Unless tanks are rocking some serious vengeance and have gear a TON better than you, they really shouldn’t be doing better DPS/healing. When the raid lead’s explaining the fight and pointing out important mechanics, it’s not just polite, it’s crucial to pay attention. Mistakes are fine, but not when they’re repeated over and over again without even an effort to avoid them. Casual or not, at least put in some attention to making your gear the best they can be – enchant, reforge, don’t leave gem slots empty. If you can’t afford the expensive stuff like Dancing Steel/Jade Spirit, even Windsong is better than nothing! I’ve been groups where my teammates were a lot better and more experienced, but I know I at least put in my best effort in those situations. If I can’t bring in the best numbers, I can at least make things easier by not dying or screwing mechanics up for them.

It’s weird that we’re so aware of these standards for Normal progression, moan about the lack of them in LFR, and yet make excuses when they’re not met in Flex. Raiding with friends and family is nice for sure, but there’s still degrees of separation there – not everyone knows each other. I wouldn’t want one of my friends thinking poorly of another! Obviously it’s always hard to tell a friend they’re doing something wrong. I feel guilty right now just writing this post. Sometimes though, it’s necessary. You don’t have to tell them in public, you don’t have to say it’s “wrong” at all! Everyone’s adult enough to be able to take gentle advice, right?

I guess my point (and I know it’s taken forever for me to make it) is that the same rules that work for Normal-mode raiding should still apply for Flex. I’m not saying kick from group, I’m saying point it out nicely. Killing bosses is a team effort; if you want progression, everyone needs to work towards it. If not, then it might be better to just stay on the first four bosses until the stronger members have enough gear to let us brute-force our way through the next encounters, because dying over and over fruitlessly might be the worst thing for a casual for-fun-only team. It’s important to figure out what people want and whether they’re willing to work for it, instead of pushing them into things.

Hopefully this all kinda made sense (and didn’t come across as self-important or bitchy, because that wasn’t the intention). I just feel that things like these need to be cleared up, because everyone really just wants to enjoy themselves. You can’t really do that if you expect one thing and end up doing something completely opposite! Fingers crossed for us to just have fun next week.

/endwaffle