Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Busy as all hell..

I have been busy packing and cleaning to posts are going to be sparse. I have started to collect some video from fraps, slowly but surely. I don't know when I will have time to work on it though.

On a side note, a couple friends and I had started leveling alliance gnomes, partially because they are funny to look at, mostly to race change them to into goblins when the expansion came out. Then Blizz slapped us down and said, "Nuh uh bitches!" Yeah, so no instant 80 goblins, as least that's how it's looking. Oh well, I will probably still leveling her (yea, it's a chick with bright pink hair and such) because it gets me away from things when I just want some time to myself without people asking about enchanting and other such things.

Thanks to those who asked horrific questions about elemental shaman at Blizzcon, I wish I coulda gone, but that was when I was finishing too much stuff at work. The worst part is that there was only 1 decent question asked, too bad it was paired up with crap about another class which was the only thing that got answered.

At least in the notes it looks like totems might radically change, for better or worse I'm not sure, we'll see. Also, it looks like we might get some more mobility instead of being turrets in pvp, which should be nice. I know that description gets used a lot but it's pretty damn accurate. Blow stuff up before it gets to you or die. It's actually not that simple, earthbind rooting people helps a lot now that ghostwolf means you can be slowed below 100% run speed. Resto shaman also look to get a huge buff eventually, which is awesome. The new chain heal is very nice, but it still can prove much less effective in some hard modes than other AOE healers.

That's all I got for now, I just didn't want to leave you all hanging.

B Rab

Friday, August 21, 2009

My Last Day

Now with WoW or blogging sillies, with work. I finally get to turn in my big research project. In a couple weeks, I head back to school to finish my MS in Biostats and get back to teaching for the school year, so I'm heading back early to get moved in with my roommate and settled down. The good news? That's no more time consuming than my current job, so posts should remain pretty constant as long as I can find something to berrate, bitch, or cry about. Sometimes I might even through up helpful advice.

I still want to do some work with fraps, maybe try my hand at making a video, but first I need to clean some junk off my computer. WoW got down below 30fps yesterday, and even down to 15fps when I was doing some raiding, I didn't like that. I know, people play with like 3fps and stuff like that, but that kind of stuff pisses me off. So tonight I'll switch gears and play some Halo or COD4 and clean up my computer. Then fraps, then movie.

I want to put up a screenie of my new UI, but I am not quite happy with it yet. I think I need to do some work on getting the nice black box frames at the bottom or something to keep recount/bartender/sexymap/chat frame in.

I'm always full of promises right? This weekend while I'm packing I should be bored enough that hopefully I actually come through on some of this stuff!

Elemental Shaman Note! The totem of electrifying wind (I think that's the new name, I still can't tell you which totc is the raid and which is the dungeon so stay off muh back!) which has a chance to grant 200 haste for 12 seconds upon successful lightning bolt casts is finally an upgrade over the Totem of Hex. Some quick details: there is no known icd (internal cooldown) on the proc, although a lot of testing is saying it won't proc for around another 6 sec in straight lightning bolt or regular rotations, so if there is an icd, it is like to be around that 6 sec mark. This totem will be better on everything except fights where you are hitting the 50% haste mark while casting (Vezax, Hodir, Thorim). Yes, I said Thorim, because the easiest way to beat him is having a spriest get himself some frost resist gear that is hit capped, and gem for stam. When you MC the dark rune acolytes, they give you a 20% haste buff, these can be stacked 3 times if you have 3 spriests willing to make this sacrifice. There is a spot in the arena that you can stand in and it will never get the lightning cone attack, you wear frost resist to eat all of Sif's bitchiness.

See, fun stuff, you learned the fun/quick way to do Thorim, and got some free shaman advice. Some people pay for that shiznit. Well, they don't pay me, but...well, nevermind.

I'm looking for a good way to end this post, hopefully one that's entertaining. Maybe this clip of one of Oxhorn's Shorts will keep you going today...



B Rab

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Moving On


On a side note, that's obviously from youtube, so the comments going on don't apply to me, per se...

Not from WoW! You haven't succeded in that, yet, Blizz. No, in fact, my 5 other real life friends and I have made a move to a new guild to raid 25s. It was nice that most of the people we have been playing with for a long time understood the situation.

So onto my new home. Obviously, being the first run for the us, we were pretty quiet in comparison to our normal raids. Testing the waters, seeing what flies, trying not to offend anyone on the first night out. I should at least have seen them naked before we have our first big fight, imo. I think that we will fit in well eventually, immersing ourselves will be the difficult part at first.

I should get some new ele shaman advice up soon. The guild I moved to has an elemental shaman who is just ridiculous. I don't really understand how he does it. I plan on looking at some of the recorded parses and seeing what's different between us. It might just be the his ridiculous understanding of everything about the class. I definetly got put into my place, apparently I'm only the second best elemental shaman on the server. Oh well, I'll have to see if I can't learn some of what he's doing and bring it back, or else go resto and hide my shame.

I know a lot of people have been throwing their hat into the ring on this discussion about Ony and new class/race combos. Consider mine tossed as well...

Man, the things I could learn to do with my free time if I didn't play WoW. Well, I can guarantee you I wouldn't be trying to learn this, but you get the idea.

Anyway, back to my original point, the two major news articles.

1. Onyxia v2.0 - She's back(!) and she's meaner(?). I know there has to be mixed camps on this. First of all, there are two groups looking at this right now, those who did Onyxia at level 60 and those who didn't. To those who didn't, finally getting to see the fight will be exciting and new to them, in fact, it's the same as creating new content for this audience. Everyone else, therefor, falls under the "have already been there, done that" category. Now I think that even this category gets split up into those who barely got to see the encounter back then and those who had to farm it to get everyone Ony cloak's. The majority of the first part of this group is probably excited to have a boss revitalized and revamped so baddies can't go 2-man her at 80. I think that most people that farmed her, at least the majorrity who I have talked to, are less than thrilled about reusing content that they are already bored with from oh so long ago. My opinion? Fun for a while...I could always use another bigger bag anyway, I only have 10 open slots on my main, and even with 5 alts fully loaded with bags, I have about a free bag on each... I don't know where I get all this crap! I'm thinkin' I should take it to the flea market and sell it... To your mom! JK... What am I, 10?

2. I was only skimming over new race/class combo's until one caught my eye, and quite frankly, pisses me off (Hey, you, troll, better than being pissed on, I get it, I've heard it before) -- A dwarf shaman?! A DWARF SHAMAN?!!! Excuse me, but F' dat homey. On a side note, I will be leveling a NE druid, so I can make him a troll! Cause trolls rock mon! Can I get a 'woot woot' for the best race in all of WoW? Yea, you might think that something like this is an 'opinion' or 'up for debtate', but I assure you, neither of those are accurate. Especially with the flat 20% haste racial now. Sometimes, I pop Berserking with Bloodlust (Heroism some of you, which I don't hate because you're ally, just because you're not trolls!) and cast 1 sec lb's. Man, sh*t is crazy.

Anyway, I'm out to go chris brown some work and some WoW research, and by that, I mean knock it out!! Booyah, oh no he didn't...


I may be a hybrid, but don't expect to me to cast heals if its gonna nerf my deeps...
B Rab

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Really?

Who wants to hear some fun tidbits about WoW currently.

We, as a newly rerostered raiding guild (I will talk more about this later since it is still frustrating me), can currently down T9 content, but don't have the dps to keep the arena manageable on Thorim. Conclusion? T9 < Ulduar.

Honestly, have any of you felt a challenge yet? The current "raid" feels cheap. I feel cheated. We can take in AOE healers who can hardly break 1k hps, dps in heirloom items, and still come out victorious. Both of those, surprisingly, are not lies. We have a resto druid who constantly puts out 900-1k hps, if he gets to 1100 he thinks he did well, as well as a holy priest who manages a constant 1k also. It's no wonder that some of our best dps are healing now. In comparison, our old spriest, who went to a holy/disc dual spec, and me, obv an elemental shaman, are both putting out between 4-4.5k effective on aoe fights.

Our old healers/dps are carrying the new healers/dps, and our backs hurt. I never thought I would get to that point, but last night, I logged in for 1 reason. To talk with another guild about combining. Afterwards, I did the daily, since I am 2 emblems away from my 245 shoulders, and then logged. There was no more healing heroics so people could get new gear for things. I can't take it. The worst part is that, now, people can have 2-4 pieces of conq without stepping into Ulduar. You have no idea who is good or not just by gear. Well, if you look at weapons you get some clue, but now even H ToC, the joke that it is, is fixing that for a lot of people.

This may have beneficial on alts overall, but in many other ways, I'm just not happy with 3.2. I'm also not happy with the lack of mention still about ele shaman in the latest ptr notes. Are we in that good of a place right now? Maybe I'm just missing it since I have been lost in grid for the last couple weeks.

Anyway, to alleviate all the guild stress about taking a step back, to where half-ass Ulduar bosses are progression again, I'm going to just run away. Well, not just me, probably more like 10-12 of us are considering joining a different guild. They have been around since pre-tbc, but they may have the worst name ever on our server. They couldn't down Yogg for weeks post-double nerf. They say their problem is their bottom end is reallllllly bad. I don't know, we'll see. If that doesn't work, its probably going to open back up transfer discussions between at least the 6 of us who know each other in real life. Man, WoW is just become like a shitty soap opera or something.

To take your mind off of it, here's some Mr. Conway Twitty -- Just kidding, it's Trailer Park Choir, and it's better...(official video)


The actual music video is better and linked above, but they disabled my embedding. It may not pertain to WoW, but it cracks me up every time I hear it.

Alright, I feel like after all that I at least owe you something helpful. Resto shamans -- if you have the dps where the fight won't be incredibly long, stack haste. T9 requires a fat amount of chain heal now that it hits so many people. Hell, so does Ulduar. If you aren't going oom, thicken up the hps with some much needed haste. You could even go crazy like Mek from Ensidia and stack it to above 800 (hopefully armory link inc later when I get home). Plus, when we get out of T8 bonuses, you need to get enough haste to make up for losing the .2 sec off chain heal for 5% crit instead. What this means is take haste gear for off pieces, rob those poor elemental shaman blind of their crit/haste gear without mp5 on it. We will hate you for it, be forewarned.

Ele shaman, at least if you are doing 25's, hard or not, eventually here we will get to replace ilvl 213 boots with at least ilvl245, at least that's some good news.

- B Rab

Friday, August 14, 2009

Friday is the new plaid

I have no idea what that even means.

For those of you posting up guides on how to do Lord Jaraxxus, I'm about to one up you. That's right, I'm posting Tankspot's video for those of you who haven't seen it. It does a good job explaining the fight, especially since now that I had to deal with people a lot more often as an officer, I've given up trying to be funny while explaining the fight. That's someone else's job now.



Much credit goes out to them for consistently throwing out good video's.

Now the plan is to move on to some funnier movies though. Heck, I've even considered downloading me some Fraps and making a couple of my own. Maybe some PvP, maybe some random nonsense, I don't know. I think I will probably start collecting this weekend if I can get it up and running smoothly with all of my other addons that I have.

Thanks to a newly unblocked youtube, I can provide hours of entertainment in my corner.


Hopefully, it will be something along the lines of this, but I'm probably cooler, so it will be better. Check out all 4 of these videos about doing a little Thunder...well, you know the term.


Inc video soon and new UI,

B Rab

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Moving in Stereo

"Its so tough to get up
Its so tough
Its so tough to live up
Its so tough on you"



Man, that's exactly how I feel going to work at my internship for these last 7 days I have. I never thought I would be so excited to go back to Grad School and start teaching again. Statistics before you ask. Anyway, they have pretty much run out of project for me to work on here besides my final report that I am touching up to hand over -- at least it's supposedly confidential, although maybe one day when it gets published I'll throw in a link, and you can all see just how sweet I am at other stuff besides just WoW.

Some quick and easy upgrades:

Elemental shaman, if you find yourself still using the original badge trinket (Yeah, I was since it was either that or dying curse when I'm already 25hit over the cap without gems or socket bonuses), go do the reg ToC. It's supa easy and plus it drops an equivelant haste trinket. I ran some RAWR models from Binkenstein's blog over at EJ (sorry no links since I'm at work and it's blocked), who I think is probably one of the smartest Ele Shaman theorycrafters I've found so far. It was around a 30-40 dps increase change between the trinkets. Plus if you are still using this on all those mobile fights in Ulduar, switching it out gets your casts off faster between movement phases.

Resto shaman, there is also a nice int trinket from reg ToC. The best part -- a chance to return mana upon spellcast. These are my favorite kinds of trinkets. Unfortunatly, I have yet to grab it, it dropped 3 times in a row when we were farming it for getting someone soe other piece of gear that I can't remember for the life of me. Why didn't I get it? I had dc'd during the previous boss and continued to have internet problems all night. I kept getting text messages that it had dropped every time, those jerks.

Obviously, there are some other sweet upgrades if you haven't gotten to spend a lot of time in Ulduar for every class. The did pretty well on loot tables for covering everyone with at least some stuff, just remember only the reg mode drops the trinkets.

T9 gear changes:
For starters, 2pc T8 + 4pc T8 > 2pc T9 + 2pc T8, so first switch that off piece you aren't wearing keeping in mind there is a hit redistribution between pieces of T8 and T9, and a lot more of it on each piece. To make up for losing the 4pc T8 bonus, you need to make up a total of around 140-150dps that the electrocuted dot was ticking for. It's very unlikely that 2 pieces will do this with the new bonuses or stats.

The new 4pc T9 is a very impressive set bonus, with early estimations of around 250dps being added. The increase dmg value of lava burst by 20% means that we will be switching from the Glyph of the Totem of Wraith back to the Glyph of Lava. The new Totem (200 haste proc chance on casting lb) will be better than the Thunderfall Totem (215 additional base dmg to lava burst).

Finally, a replacement to the Totem of Hex! The new emblem of triumph (I always type badge and then have to delete it) trinket appears to be a solid upgrade with near 100% up time. I'm currently waiting for some more saps to go out and purchase it before I do, but it seems like it will be a very good upgrade.

Tonight the plan is to finish 25 Ulduar and do the Trial of the Crusader or Champion, whichever the raid is, on 25. Pretty impressive being as we only had about 10 of our core raiders left. The three of us that were strongly considering transferring instead stepped up big time and have things going in the right direction for now, should be a good night!

For all my experience, I never knew there was a smiley face under Kara until the other day. Don't know about it? Find it and check it out!

B Rab

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Thirsty...Tuesday?

It's gonna be a long week...

It seems like there has been a lot of conversation lately about "why you play." Each person has their own unique reasoning behind their existence in WoW. People vary across the spectrum of the purely social interaction, to the gold fiends, to hardcore raiders. A lot of people play for a combination of those, each to a different degree.

Why do I play? To keep elemental shamans from getting buffed. I don't want Blizzard dev's to think our damage is low and buff us, so I constantly go out and blow the hell outta stuff. Ha, kidding, I'd always take a buff, but seriously, I do blow shit up. With my mind. And lightning bolts.

On a more serious note, I know I play for a lot of different reasons. I play to stay in touch with friends, people I graduated college with, because otherwise I know that I wouldn't hardly ever see them. I play because it's fun to make money in the AH off nubs -- I can't believe that even after Blizz put in a vender price when you hover over an item, I can still buy/bid my way to a free 50-100g every night on the vender search in auctioneer! I play for loot, because I want to look as badass as I feel when I'm slangin' hate. Obviously it will be replaced, but with better, more impressive gear for my peons/admirers to adore -- they would grovel at my feet, but as a troll I don't normally wear boots, or shower, and they smell pretty god-awful. Finally, I also play for the challenge. Don't get me wrong, I don't like to wipe, but I like the feeling of accomplishment on that first kill of a real boss. Too many bosses these days though just aren't as satisfying as they should be.

It kind of stinks that I don't know when the next time I get to seriously throw some hate will be. It looks like our decision to stick around so we could play with our friends, who only pvp now, will lead to me running resto due to a severe lack of healers. I'm actually ok with this though, sometimes I fall asleep at the wheel just casting lightning bolts. Now I can spend some time staring at health bars but trying to look past them and pay attention during fights. As long as I don't die to a nova on IC like one of our holy pallies has done 5 times, I should be a'ight. Just to get some work in, I've done enough heroics on my shaman to buy 12 runed orbs... Yeah, it was a crazy weekend, but hey, I got 2 main specs and all sorts of alts that need some love. I still need to get my rogue my crafted belt and boots so I can break into the upper 4k range. Of course, a nice MH weapon would be good too, Kel's Reach just isn't what it once was.

At least it should be entertaining with all the new scrubs, ahem, players we have.

/cast Flameshock
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Beserking
/cast Lava Burst
/cast Chain Lightning
/dance
/s Let the bodies hit the floor

B Rab

I know you have all seen this, but this remix makes it all that much funnier to me.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Just another manic monday...

Sunday?! Pfft... I don't know what the Bangles were talking about, I actually wish it was Saturday, but I suppose then the song wouldn't rhyme as well, right?

Over the weekend, some of my rl friends in the game and I made a huge decision, a decision to pick the guild back up from the boot straps and get it raiding again. This meant recruiting our butts off all weekend long. Will we make it to a 25 man raid by Tues? I don't know, but that's the goal. If it really happens I think it will be a lot like starting Ulduar all over, at least some of us know the fights and overgear just doing it without hardmodes. The hardest part might be keeping our patience for those of us who have cleared it before and done hardmodes.

On a more shamanistic note, resto shaman I think are in a much better place. I spent the weekend healing several different raids and 5 mans, and I loved it. Mana is no longer the huge issue it once was for many of us. Personally, I've always stacked int and mp5, but I think I can start shifting away from that towards spellpower and haste. If you start going for this as well, make sure you don't make the complete change at once. You want to regem, gem by gem, until you find a happy medium, remember that the increased haste is going to mean more spells casted so you will find yourself going oom quite a bit faster, not to mention you are sacrificing regen stats for it.

5's update: 5v5 is silly.

I suppose I could have more to say about 5's, but it can be very frustrating. We spent yesterday afternoon getting the same 2 teams over and over again. Our matchmaking rating was around 1950, theirs was almost 2400. Where are the other teams? We can't actually get to our matchmaking ranking since we are getting hosed by people with full furious gear, we just cant output the same amount of damage, nor can we absorb as much. We are going to try again tonight, hopefully there are some scrub teams on looking for some points or something for the week. Next time, when the gate opens, I'm going to yell the plain and simple truth: Lok'tar ogar!

B Rab

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Second Impressions

Tonight went a lot better without all the lag. I managed to get in the new 5 man: Trial of the something or other, and the new 10 man, which is some other Trial. Also, I got to heal them and try out the new resto spec.

My first impression is mixed. I absolutely love being able to drop 21-22k crit on tanks now rather than having to get healing way up or else it being around 13k. The one thing I'm not a fan of, which can be fixed, is the new lesser healing wave. I am happy they made the change, its just that whenever I needed a quick heal it felt like this:

"OMG im dying over here"
"Hold on! I'm casting a quick heal, a lesser healing wave..."
"......."
"*gurgle as the dps dies*"
*Heal goes off*

In all actuality, only one person all night died where the quicker heal would have probably helped, but then again, they should stay out of the fire? Be more like, I was floatin like a butterfly, droppin' mad heals. Before you ask, I did a little stinging like a bee when I could, mostly on Gorehowl, or whatever his name was, when he took double damage. Yea, that's right, fat resto crits.

Overall so far, the one thing I would change is picking up some more haste gear. With the buff to mp5, I might even consider dropping some more of my mp5 gear for the ele gear for the haste and crit. I didn't have any mana issues what-so-ever even when chain casting for a while.

For some reason though, I'm having mana issues as ele. I don't know if it's because I have been running stuff without replenishment the last couple days, or if they did something sneakily to my mana regen. The first night when I was in VoA people were making fun of me for being oom, normally on those kind of fights I have 15-17k mana left at the end. Further research will be required.

On a pet project/alt note, I am going to finish leveling my 45 pally to 80 only with BG's. Why? Something different. Plus by the time I hit 60 I should be able to get a crap-ton of epics with which to further pwn nubs. Also, this ranged finisher (I forget the name right now, cause I'm a scrub when it comes to pallies), hammer of something or other, is was OP. I was just running around WSG looking for low people to throw that at. I would be like across the map and it would light up, I'd slam the hotkey and rack up another killing blow. It looks like it will take a bit longer to level this way, and by bit I mean lot. Over 3 games last night I got around 30-40k exp, but I could have easily surpassed that leveling. Oh well, doing something different for once is actually a lot of fun.

On the sad side of things, I may be uprooting and finally leaving my home. It looks like no progress towards raiding 25 mans is being made. Those of us that are considering leaving talked about our options last night. We could either scrounge up a couple new, probably scrub, tanks and start over, or move on to were we could just relax instead of dealing with crybabies non-stop. Man, being an officer just puts like a sticky note on your head that says, "Whine about stupid shit to me." The next time you are gonna bring something up to an officer, think about it's actual importance, not just its importance relative to yourself. That will save a lot of condescending remarks. Anyway, to get back on track, we are still considering putting this back together and trying to keep going even though we are losing all 3 of our tanks and 2 of our best healers on top of what we have already lost. At least 3.2 will help gear up some of these people, should we decide to stay. It's a tough decision though, leaving would take us to a couple guilds who are almost done with 25 man hard modes, which would be nice since I don't think we have enough skilled players in our guild to ever accomplish that. It's also hard leaving behind a lot of people that you know though. Plus, it's always fun downing one of the best locks in the world with his healers on him. Sure, maybe he was targeting someone else, who cares, I totally SS'ed it, so you know it's fo' reazy.

"The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on." - Robert Bloch

Zug Zug,
B Rab

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

3.2 = bleh

First off, grats to anyone that could really manage to do much of anything last night. At one point, for around an hour, I couldn't see mailboxes, npcs, or other players, but I could see all the chat and stuff like that. The one positive of that was that I was running around 80 fps in Dal, ha!

I got in the heroic daily, which was being closely guarded by some crappy alliance players (in skill, not because they are alliance) who weren't really prepared for 5 top end geared players to come pack in their shit. That was about the extent of my night though, we tried to do a couple different of the older raids (from earlier in WotLK) for some of the members who were just getting back into the game, but constantly seeing the "Transfer aborted: Instance not found" for about 10 minutes we gave up on those ideas.

The new BG is fun. I did get to spend some time in there, well for as long as I could take it. Luckily I only died at most a couple times per game, because it was like this:

You have died.
*Click release spirit*
*Wait 5 min...now you're a ghost over your body*
*Couple more min... Graveyard!*

Getting a spirit rez turned out to be a lengthy process. At least I had some fun on the gunship, got to go back door on the alliance just how I know they like it, and kill some dude or something at the end. It's quite the mix of a couple bg's, and pretty entertaining.

Sometimes people amaze me, the one raid we did manage was to get a couple 10man VoA's going, some people just don't believe you when you say that the new boss won't be there yet. It took a good 5 min of running at the portal before we were able to zone in. Anyway, we decided (this was before we gave up on 25's) that we would combine the groups when we were done for a 25 man VoA. We finished up and were waiting on the other group, and one of the other officers says in raid chat: "Stay in group, we will combine with the other group when they are done and do 25 man." This next part, I wish I could say was a joke, not 30 seconds later, with the message still on screen : "So are we gonna do 25 man? Cause we are like, 15 people short." There was just a collective groan over vent. This is, by the way, the same person who came to the 10 man VoA, and when we get up to Emalon (no deaths yet) says, "Oh, does someone have a repair bot, my pants, wrists and mace are broken." Really? REALLY? Whether or not you are a fan of Gevlon and his blog, all I could think was that we are carrying this M&S (Morons & Slackers).

On a final note, I was planning on putting up a new UI this week, but it's going to have to hold off until I can get blizz's new totem bar, and all my addons taken care of. There needs to be some sort of function to be able to hide it/turn it off. When I change specs it comes back, when I reloadUI it hides it, it's kind of entertaining.

So do any other shamans have an opinion on any of there changes? I was trying to do some healing all night, but we kept getting healers to fill up roles. It was probably good that I didn't with the way the lag was. At least the pally tank changes are nice for when everyone is just standing there while his health goes down. Ardent defender came into play quite a bit.

Until next time: trolls be wilin' out, mon'

B Rab

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

That place is a mad house!

So last night, while we were recouping from this weekend's guild drama, I helped some of the newer guys through a naxx10. Around the end, the gm and other officers asked if we wanted to start a 5's team, to prepare for when 2's was no longer as viable.

I spent all the time I could in between matches resocketing resto gear for spell power, and changes enchants from stamina into spell power. In the end, we went 6-5, not bad for just jumping into the arena without an exact idea of how we were gonna work on things. 5's is such a crazy thing at the moment though, we would face a team that was rated real low down by us at one point, then we would face teams with a matchmaking rating over 2300. Some of these 2300 teams rick roll'd us to quick deaths, a couple of them we managed to beat. In the end our matchmaking rating was around 1900 even though we only went 6-5. Let me tell you, there is so much more shit goin' on with 10 people running around than with 4. Keeping track of people's trinkets without gladiator would be next to impossible, at least for an arena nub like me. There are spells flying everywhere, rogues being giant douchebags while they stunlock people, and my god I've never seen my totems go down so fast with all those people with pets. I cannot wait until that's over! I would put down a tremor totem and it would be killed when a fear was already almost done casting. Even though all its ridiculousness, it was a really good time. Maybe pvp is for B Rab, who knows, only time will tell. At this rate though, I might end up with a fun new weapon, mabes. At least survivability seemed good when I wasn't getting focused. I was able to get most melee off of my long enough to put in the big hurt. I don't wanna brag, but I did have at least 2 kb's in all of our wins...yuuuup, I know, I'm sweet. And modest.

In other news, I know there is a lot of speculation about 3.2 today, I've already noticed a lot of topics on it in my blogroll. This is why I'm not saying diddly about it, other than that I doubt it will be since PTR's were still up yesterday. Yes, I think that is a bigger reason for it not to drop rather than them not announcing the end of arena's and such. I have been wrong before though, and if I was about this, it wouldn't be the worst thing I'd ever done. Personally, it would be nice if they would give us another week to put our guild back in order. If it is today, well, forget WoW for the day I suppose, how often do you really have a smooth night the day a patch drops?

You had me at 'zug-zug',

B Rab

Edit: A friend just told me his patch started downloading when he opened WoW before he left for work... I have mixed feelings as you can see from above.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Guild Drama Crit

It seem that at one point or another, almost every guild goes through a tumultuous time where something goes boom and the people that really care and are in a position to do so have to scramble to keep the pieces from floating off into space like a dead body in Star Trek.

A lot of things happened this past weekend which I was somehow oblivious to until they all became painfully obvious as I put together the raid last night. First, we lost 2 people who had never missed a raid before to possibly greener pastures on another server where they both renamed themselves. Exactly why they left isn't really known, one person received an in game mail supposedly with a few of their reasons, but the list he gave seemed rather shallow and pedantic...kidding, they just weren't good reasons, all explainable. So we lost our best rogue and his holy priest sister (On a side note, this kinda hurt that they never said anything to me since I considered myself pretty good friends with them, more so than many other guildies). This event led to even more problems on Sunday -- with them being gone, and several others out of town for the weekend, we invited social members (people who aren't regular raiders -- they can be either old guildies who are just getting back in, or people who are friends of raiders who aren't geared/don't wish to raid) that wanted to come. This led to a wise-ass remark from an actual hun-tard towards one of around 15 of us' oldest friends in game. His reaction back wasn't much better, but it ended up with the hunter and her boyfriend being guildless. At least she was nice enough to finally speak up on vent, although her speach was filled with profanity and I'm pretty sure she had to have covered her computer screen with spit. With that, we called the night's raid and any future raids for now. Our original, core 10-man group, is going to be working on getting a couple other people their rusted protodrakes.

Afterwards, we had some fun premade bgs, but all in all my WoW morale took a big hit when I saw how quickly little things could blow a huge hole in the guild. I'm looking to find myself an escape route by looking at some other guilds on other servers just in case things really do finish imploding. Some of the other officers are talking about becoming a pvp guild, and, as much as I like pvp, not only am I bad at it, there is really nothing new ever in it. Plus I like to see endgame content. So if we go that route, I'm probably out too.

At least with patch 3.2 on the horizon, things are somewhat looking up a little. New totem buttons, which I'm still out on the usefulness of, if you need a specific totem you might still be left throwing down each 1 individually, especially since mana in arenas is pretty precious, if you are resto at least. Still though, it will be nice for pve and some pvp situations. I know, it's old news, but I'm trying to keep my spirits up and myself interested.

Sorry, not a lot of shamanistic advice today. If you want to have some fun though, don your elemental gear and go hang out in EoTS by the flag. People only come around for the flag for the first couple minutes of the match, after that its all yours when they get sick of falling off the edge. Another fun one is knocking back the siege engines in SoTA around 30 yards when they are coming up a hill, they started just firing at us from ranged when I was around. It was pretty satisfying to see that.

Anyway, I'll leave you with a classic favorite from vanilla:

An alliance army is marching across the barrens to raid Orgrimmar when a shaman comes running up and makes a rude gesture at the general. The general points to 2 of his soldiers and orders them to kill them shaman. The shaman runs away round a mountain and the soldiers follow. After a few minutes the shaman comes back with no sign of the alliance soldiers. He insults the general who promptly sends 10 officers to kill the shaman. The shaman runs round the hill and returns again. The general getting very annoyed orders 40 men to kill the shaman. They all chase him round the hill and for 10 minutes nothing happens. Then one badly wounded soldier comes back limping and says "Sir, it was a trap! There's two of them!"

B Rab