I’d Rather Be Wowing!

Three unexpected events happened over the weekend:

1. Expecting another egg yolks from the Mysterious Egg, I ended up getting my Green Proto-Drake’s Rein this week. I had to do a double take to make sure that it was truly the mount and not the pet. It was such a relief after watching guildies after guildies (well, 3 of them :)) got theirs.

2. Expecting Ulduar 10 run, we ended up having enough people (okay with several pugs) to run Ulduar 25. And unexpectedly downed Razorscale and Deconstructor. Woohoo. Too bad this is going to be my last Ulduar 25 raid until 2 more weeks.

3. Expecting not getting the Matron’s title from the Children’s week, with the help with some guildies, I steamrolled over the School of Hard Knocks - the only one I needed for the title. And I spent a really fun 2-3 hours worth of bg. It was less painful than I was expecting - with the worst probably be EotS. If you are working on yours, please be courteous to the regular PVP-ers, and at least try to play the game.

Our 25 raid alliance is in the brink of being put to hiatus. Even with the attempt to merge with other raid group, we are still struggling to fill up the raid by pull time. This problem is aggravated with our stagnancy in Ulduar 25. Many people in the group have voiced their opinion that we are just not ready for Ulduar yet, and we could benefit from going back to Naxx. I’m not sure why the “raid management” haven’t considered that as an option. For the first time, we cancelled our Ulduar 25 raid yesterday and it will be most likely to be cancelled again this Sunday.

But if there’s a silver lining from the whole ordeal, is that we are able to put more time on our Ulduar 10 run. Though that’s also not without any problem. We are back to our healer problem as one of our healers decided to quit (temporarily) and another healer is moving to new place (which has also hinted her burnt out from healing). That leaves us with 1 reliable healer that can make it to 90% of the raid, 1 healer that can come to maybe 50% of the raid, and me. Yes, I’m back to the healing saddle again. Most of the time, we managed. But I can imagine that we really need to start recruiting healers again. Sigh.

We made several progresses in our 10 man run. This week, we managed to finally get our guild’s first kill on Deconstructor XT-002, Ignis, and, just yesterday, Kalogarn. If our 25 man raid is cancelled this coming Sunday, we plan on tackling the Iron Council. Hopefully by Monday, we can get to Auriya.

As much as I love our 25 run, I still love our 10 man run more. The sense of closeness is different in 10 man group. We open up, talk, and joke more just because we have fewer strangers in the group. We have less downtime. And because of that we can strategize more. Overall, it’s easier to identify and fix mistakes in such a small group. If getting the best gears in the game is not an issue, I would not have cared about 25 runs at all.

Last Thursday and Sunday, our raid alliance set foot to Ulduar for the first time. We killed Flame of Leviathan after three pulls. It might sound bad for not being able to one-shot him, but it was mostly because we pulled before destroying the towers, sending the wrong characters up to the turret, and things like that. Let’s say, bad research :). I have no doubt that we won’t have any problem the next time we fight him.

But then, everything went downhill. We wiped many times on the Ragers guy on the way to Ignis (which was a bad idea to start with), spent many attempts on Razorscale, and finally moved on to XT-002 (and wiped for 3 times) before we called it.

But it weren’t the wipes that frustrated me the most from this week’s runs, as I  fully understand and accept wipes during progression raid. There were some changes during this week’s raid and I’m not yet certain that as a raid group, we have fully adapted to these changes. We lost the leader of our raid alliance due to real life issues about 2 weeks ago. Our guild’s leader, who is usually 2nd in command, took over. And to accommodate for less than full attendance, we merged with another raid group from our ally’s guild (this guild has 2 raid groups, only one run regularly in the original raid alliance group - but now the other raid group wants more consistent group as their number is also dwindling down).

Yesterday, the raid leader from this group was leading the run as our “usual” leader was not available. And I felt like being in a PuG.  The raid members from our guild have nobody to represent us. Worse, when we tried to chime in the raid chat before pulls or after wipe to address our concerns about the strategies we were using, there did not seem to be any indication that the raid leader was even acknowledging them. We don’t know the raid leader enough, the only person who has interacted with him was our GL, which wasn’t there.  The members from their guild that were in the original raid alliance, do not seem to speak up often. Not in the raid chat or vent, at least.

To make matter worse, people, especially from the “new” raid group - but there were some people in our old raid alliance that were guilty for this as well - came into the raid without being ready with flasks. Do they think we are on farmed fights? Or do they think that we don’t even have the chance that it’s not even worth popping some flasks? The excuses were: “I’m broke”; “I didn’t know that I will be going in today’s run” (but nobody except one was invited at the last minute, and that’s because he was in an instance and we waited for him for more than 5 minutes to find replacement — it’s as easy as porting to an AH to buy some flasks); and the best excuse from them all — “I don’t need a flask, healers are keeping me alive anyway, only when dps were dropping that I died.” And guess who’s that coming from. Suddenly the other excuses make sense, if you have a raid leader who does not even think it is important to make the most preparation, how can you expect the members to do the same?

I mentioned earlier that we did some attempts for Razorscale  before moving to XT-002. The decision seems to be prompted from being tired of wiping. Hence, the question of the post, when to move on to another boss in case of wipes?

I have to say that I’m slightly disappointed that we moved on, though it’s probably a good move in general as XT-002 seems to be more doable than Razorscale (at least in strategy). I understand wipes from not having the right tool in the group — too low of dps, not enough healing, not enough gears — or other circumstances like lag during Heigan’s dance. Basically, we know that because of that lackness, no matter how many times we attempt to do it, it is unlikely to succeed. But because we know it, we can make changes to it.

But yesterday, when we decided to move on, I couldn’t pinpoint what we were missing and I felt without it, I don’t know how we can improve as a group. Is it because our strategy is not working? Then, why don’t we work on gelling the strategy for next week. Do we just not have the right make-up of healers? Are we too low in DPS? Are people not dodging fire fast enough? It is making me worried when venturing here again this coming week, that we will repeat the same mistakes.

I love the preview talent feature and the clean simple interface for dual-spec.

I hate that dual spec breaks my Yata.

I love the new quest tracking system where I don’t need to look all over my bag for the quest item.

I hate how the new dailies seem to send you all over the map (more time wasted for traveling).

I love the renaissance feel of Argent Tournament.

I hate mounted combats.

I love fishing in Wintergrasp.

I hate the way inscriptionist can learn/discover new glyphs is implemented (I’ve lost hope of ever learning them on my inscriptionist).

I love being thrown up to Flame of Leviathan to destroy the turrets.

I hate trashes to Ignis (yeah, we have a melee heavy raid group).

Yes, that’s for the sound of cricket for the time that I have been neglecting this blog. I’m still here. It’s just that real life “grinding session” for this rep that I have been working on for almost five years has to happen if I ever want to hit exalted with them Thereby, there goes most of my WoWing time. Thank goodness it’s almost over…or I hope at least *crosses fingers*.

Since my last post was more than a month ago, I think it’s only appropriate to start by summarizing where are things currently stand.

In the raiding department, our raid alliance had started our 25-man excursion. We (or shall I say they) reached our high point about a week ago with clearing up Naxx and Maly. We were supposed to work on Sarth with drake this week, but with some absentees of some of our regular, we ended up being stuck in Thadd this week, to much of my frustration. Our 10-man guild runs are now limited to doing Maly and Sarth, which saddened me a bit since I still haven’t gotten the trinket of Maexx yet. We are currently working on getting Sarth+2drake.

In the achievement department, I’m happy to note that E can finally wear her guild’s tabard once again. And after enduring H. Occ run (have I ever mentioned that it is my least favorite instance??), E now adorns Champion of Frozen Waste title (I know I know, I’m behind from everyone else :)). Finally, E is also a proud owner of the bronze drake, thanks to my nice guildies that are willing to run that place over and over to accommodate to my unluckiness in rolling. Now, if only that mysterious egg would hatch me some green proto-drake :(.

What an exciting day with all the new information about what’s coming up in patch 3.1.

With respect to shadow priesting, I could list all the changes in 3.1 and what I think about it, but Merlot over at the Misery has done a spot on job on it :). So head there instead.

One of the more controversial change is the removal of extra damage component in our dots in lieu for change for crits in each dots tick. The fellows in shadowpriest.com are currently discussing and theorycrafting this change.  Unfortunately, so far the verdict is that it’s at best a “side-grade”, assuming that shadow power will eventually affect the bonus damage from crits (which does not reflect in the tooltip). But everything is not set to stone, and I am optimistic that we will see something good from it.

So how about those new glyphs, heh? Or the lack of it ><.  The ones that are relevant to shadow priests are as follows (courtesy to MMO):

• Glyph of Mind Control — Increases the duration of your Mind Control spell by 30 sec. (Old:  12 sec.)
• Glyph of Dispersion  — Your Dispersion ability now also clears movement impairing effects and makes you immune to them for its duration.
• Glyph of Mind Sear *new*  — Increases the radius of effect on Mind Sear by 5 yards.

Is it just me, or the Glyph of Dispersion does what “new” dispersion is supposed to do?  I wish that Glyph of Mind Sear is a minor glyph, because I kinda like it, but I don’t like it enough to swap any of my currently equipped glyphs. If it is a major glyph, it’s interesting to see that we have this choice, similar to that what mages have, to be better in AoE or in single target dps.

I know that the screenies of T8 have been floating for a while, but I still don’t like how priest set looks, it reminds me of rogues with the face mask and all. I want to keep my halo :). And how about the new waist and boots that we can get from tailoring (BoE), and the possible legendary mace!?  It’s time to start saving up for ebonweaves and spellweaves again.

I hope that this doesn’t come across as a post that were caused from “dissecting” Blizzard’s statements too much. Sometimes I’m just puzzled to they way things were designed.

About homogenization

At one point, Blizzard decides that homogenization of stats are good so that one gear can be considered useful for multiple classes/specs. One big change was the integration between healing and spell powers. I am all up for it, I don’t like loots to be wasted when other people can use it, even if being a cloth caster, I am affected with this the most with respect to the number of people competing for the gears. For most part, I think Blizzard has done a good job to achieve it. The latest example is by removing the druid-only staff, and integrate the druid-stats in general. There are other homogenization that I still find lacking, for example spell power plate can only be used by holy paladin alone. But I can understand the difficulty in changing that.

What puzzled me is how this principle of reducing the chance that the drop loots are not usable by anybody failed to translate for Vault of Archavon (VoA) instance.  According to wowwiki:

On Normal (10 man), he (Archavon) drops two items, which can be a hand, leg or chest T7 (10) set piece for any class (the item itself, not the token) or the new Hateful Gladiator’s Season 5 assortments.

Doesn’t dropping the items themselves - further divided to certain specs for each class, instead of the tokens, , essentially restrict the number of people that can vie for the item? I failed to see the reasoning behind this.

Vh’s Week

Vh is now 80! I was originally planning to keep her ele specced for a while just because she has more chance in running heroic with the guildies, hence accumulate some gears. On Sunday, in the effort of going into a Naxx25 pug (due to some coaxing from a fellow guildie), she was respecced to resto. But then the plan fell through mostly because I don’t feel that it’s fair to go in with such subpar gears (only about 1400 sp after scrambling for enchants) and relying on the other healers to pick up for my slack.  It’s probably meant to happen, however, since later in the evening, as Vh was just hanging around in IF, she received a tell asking her to fill in a healer in someone’s (mostly) guild Naxx10 run. I told him that she doesn’t have a good gear yet, but apparently they just want an extra healer, and one that is not that geared is better than nothing.

After saying yes, I just realized that I didn’t even ask which boss they are at (proving that I’m just excited to have a chance to get in) :). They were at Patch. Could you get a better fight than that to get acquainted with your healing spelss? At least I don’t have to move around and just concentrate on the healing. I have a big mana problem on that fight, with my mana bar empty about only 3/4 of the fight - and mana tide and pot have already been used. Thank goodness for replenishment. My overall healing was much less than the two priest healers, with also significantly less overheal. Is that a good thing? I am not sure, at least I am not blowing my mana for nothing. And I desperately miss my fiend, dispersion, and hymn.

We went on to kill the remaining bosses in that wing. They are pretty uneventful, except to the fact that I was somewhat behaving noobish in a couple of the fight. In Thaddius, for example, I forgot the polarity placement (they did it the opposite to what I’m used to). I died quite early, but at least I didn’t wipe the raid - but something kills them later on, and on the 2nd try,  I was one of the 2 healers left standing. We gave Sapp a try (another noobish moment here too), after 1 really unfortunate bad luck pull and 1 wipe, we lost a healer to DC and it was getting late. And that concludes Vh’s first venture to Naxx.

Vh gets two big upgrade because nobody else seems to need them. And I get another round of understanding and appreciation to all the healers and their willingness to live such a frantic life :). Also, this guild is interested to have Vh comes regularly, but alas, one of their raiding day collides with E’s, so she just has to be happy on being their backup on Sundays. I think she will remain a resto and learn how to heal better.

E’s Week

E has been trying to sneak in Wintergrasp whenever she could. Sometimes she got unlucky and miscalculated the time and ended up logging in when the battle has already over (and when they win too - to rub it in the face!). In any case, she only needs 10 more marks to get the head gear (Titan-forged Hood of Dominance).

In term of progression, for the last 2 weeks, we are able to clear the four wings (we were a bit stumped after the Heigan’s spot was fixed). But this past week, we had a signficant improvement in term of clear time and we were able to finally take a peek of Sapp - but were totally annihilated by him. We are continuing again today, and this time with the help of a few frost resist gear. We’ll see how it goes :).

Another week, another rounds of pugs - especially for OS, VoA, and Naxx. One in particular though, kinda stood up. This happened to be the pug that Vh was trying to get in. The raid leader is a very spirited person. And when I say spirited, I mean intense. He’s very generous in dishing out sharp banters (read: insults) that I think is appropriate when running with or targeted toward guildies and friends, but not really for strangers during pug. For example, someone after responding that they can watch out for locust swarm timer with the addon, he would say “yeah, Naxx10 needs an add-on cause Naxx10 is serious business.” At first I thought he only did it with his guildies, but apparently I was wrong. Under his ruling, some of his other guildies also plays this insult game. I guess that’s just how they are.

Anyway, the run pretty much fell apart after failing to kill Anub twice in a row - which is also the first boss that we tried. I don’t know if the fact that we couldn’t get the, supposedly, easiest boss down was the one that is causing it (which cause few of the healers to leave), or it is the chain quitting after fingers were beginning to be pointed toward people with less than 1.5k dps (with one guy casually told them to get their dps to at least 1650 before coming back), and the low performing mages pointed out that they tried to get the little swarm adds under control (whether or not this caused them to have less than 1.5k dps is reasonable, I do not know).

All I know is that, the raid leader, which throughout the fight also “insulted” the tanks for not kiting Anub appropriately (which coincidentally their first time tanking as well), continously saying that we are an “Epic Fail” group, is part of the low 1.5k dps team (yet, I found it amusing that he was on the top in healing meter). His reason for the low dps is simple, he is in ret pvp spec. It seems that it’s just fun and game for him. Boredom maybe? For me, it’s one thing to demand other people to step up their game, but it’s entirely different thing when it’s done in such a crude manner and when it comes from a person that is also part of the problem.

But I can’t help it, I’m so happy when I realized (after wasting several candles) that Prayer of Shadow Word Protection is now raid wide!!!

And really loving the buff for elemental shammy, it’s going to make switching Vh back to resto really difficult :).

Or so they say….

I was able to finally found the time to log in to WoW yesterday after coming back from a trip and taking care of RL stuff that got neglected during the trip.  The first order of business was speccing back to shadow. If you read my previous post, I’ve mentioned that we have mostly taken care of our healers shortage. Then I proceeded to get the daily quests done.

First to come in mind: “Ugh, is the lag in Dalaran always this bad?” And I realized that I’ve forgotten where everything is at in Dalaran. And that darn lag certainly didn’t help in not getting frustrated when you found out that you just went to the wrong side of Dalaran.

Now that E’s fate is clearer, E bought Sundial of the Exiled which brought me to this tangent thought. You know how nowadays people seems to inquire more about your gear - how many sp you have, etc - this trinket, for example, doesn’t really have static +sp on equip, but it does add a significant chunk on your dps, how do “include” this fact when telling people about your gear?

E put herself in LFG for some heroic runs. I figure that if she gets to do some dps-ing for our Naxx run this week, I better re-familiarize myself with her “rotation” or for a more correct term, the casting priority. It was awful - I kept letting my dots to drop or refreshing them too early. I was spoiled that when healing, you don’t necessarily have to face your target, that I was frequently oblivious of my orientation when casting. But after a while, things started to fall into places. I start remembering to use my shadowfiend and dispersion early. Ahh…it feels good to be a shadow again.

Of course when our GL decided to go to Naxx on a wim that night, we didn’t have enough healers again (one of our healer was locked with another group and the other one was out of town for another week). After our fruitless attempt to secure a healer, I relently offered my service. So, I was back to holy again while wishing that the dual-spec would be implemented soon. Suffice to say that it was not the prettiest healing duty ever, but we kept everybody (most of the time) alive :). The best comment that I heard yesterday was when my GL inquired to how the heck I managed to last cause whenenever he looked up at my mana, he saw my mana was only about one fifth. I’m sure it’s an exaggeration, but I guess months of experience in managing mana as a priest stick regardless if you’re a holy or a shadow.