So we (sarama and I) switched hosts so a few things are a little goofy right now, but that will all get fixed soon. For now my character display has been removed, partially due to incompatibility issues (or picture issues…not sure which yet) and due to me not playing anymore. At this moment, I have quit WoW due to other obligations, however, I may be able to go back to it soon. Only time will tell. For now, stay cool and I’ll see yall soon.
Some people play the game to relax, while others play it because it’s just fun. Makes you wonder why some other people play the game if its more than that? In a random that I had joined tonight, I had met the most obnoxious healer I have ever met. This had to have been the biggest troll I had ever encountered, and probably up past his bedtime.
I had copied a guildies frost dps spec and decided to use it tonight to see how much I like it. I glyphed up, leveled my weapon skill to 399 before entering the queue for randoms (that damn last point wont ever come unless you’re in a random, it seems…) So at any rate, I queued up, waited a bit and in about 8 minutes, I got in queue for a random that was already in progress. I entered The Nexus and saw a bear run up and aggro some mobs. Assuming the druid was the tank (i don’t have roles displayed on my party frames), I went in and started dpsing. I figured the paladin was the healer. I dps a bit…then realize, I’ve got aggro and I’m not getting any heals…and sure enough, right past me runs the paladin, divine storming up a storm. Instantly the chat log goes:
<Druid>: OMG ANOTHER DK
<Druid>: YOU WANT HEALS DONT YOU?
<Druid>: TOO BAD YOU FAIL GTFO
Immediately, I’m thinking to myself “you can’t be serious…” but then I see the bear turn into a tree and starts healing. Ok. I pulled a knucklehead move. So I released and ran back into the dungeon, thinking to myself “I know this druids not going to rez me.” So I start running back to where the group is. I get close to them and the healer says:
<Druid>: HURRY UP AND GET UP HERE YOU FAIL
<Druid>: WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO MOOCH BADGES
Obviously this druid hasn’t been educated in punctuation and the proper usage of capslock. I turn around and say “nope. would have been here sooner had I gotten a rez.”
<Druid>: I DONT REZ FAILS
“Ok. So this druid is going to give me a hard time on this run…that’s ok, I’ve got pots and a couple cooldowns,” I think to myself. So, this whole run, I go without getting any heals, and the tank manages to hold aggro, so I was fine with a potion here, sacrificing a ghoul for health there…Not to mention I can pop frost presence and equip my tanking weapon should things get really hairy. The rest of the run went without incident until we killed the 3rd boss (that one in the hall with all those annoying little flowers that slow you down). Somehow the druid died, in which he immediately popped off calling everyone whores and demanding a rez…which was replied to with a “we dont rez fails” by little ol’ me (my dk is a gnome…)…well, the rest of the comments can be read in the picture I posted.
We got to the last boss, the whole time the druid trying to get me booted by telling the warrior to stop getting into combat so they can vote-kick me. The healer stood by the entrance and somehow managed to get killed again, so the tank just pulled the boss and started the encounter. We (everyone minus the healer) took down the boss and let the healer cry because I stayed in until the end. I even managed to do more damage than the paladin, who was wearing t10, and obviously very annoyed with this healer, as he bailed group with no word after the boss was killed. Granted, 3k dps is nothing to be majorly proud of, but considering the healer I had and some of the holding back and popping out of combat to get myself healed properly, I think it was pretty good. As my last bit of revenge, I decided to ignore the druid and sit in party until they decided to leave. I even planned on declining the queue if they decided to requeue. Unfortunately, the druid bailed and left their guildie in party with me and the tank, who was also from their realm. Eventually the warlock left and just left me and the tank, and since the tank hadn’t really bothered me, and instead, assisted me in further irritation of the druid by chain pulling, I decided to leave and log for the night.
Why do people like this play the game? Why do people feel the sudden urge to harrass people through a chatbox? How is it that they even can say they know me enough to call me fail? Personally, it didn’t bother me, and those who really know me would think that is odd…and I thought it was too. I did have a plan however, upon seeing such harrassment, and I do believe it worked, so Nikitahh from Muradin…I tip my hat off to you, for being the most ignorant player I have come across.
I don’t think anyone should contact the druid, personally, but, I did leave you a nice picture to look at that shows what stuff I could screenshot after I was out of the run. Anyway, goodnight all, I’m off to bed.
Halion is a 3 phase boss, as most big bad bosses. Halion, being a dragon, is much like Sartharion and Onyxia in terms of basic dragon abilities. They have a frontal cleave (which seems to act a s a chain cleave, from our guild’s attempts) and a tail swipe, however, it seems the tail swipe at the most just momentarily stuns the player, however, being that a stun is DPS loss and movement loss, it is best to stay out of this as best as possible. He is quite a simple boss, however, once the main mechanics are realized and once you see it a few times.
Phase 1 Abilities:
Phase 2 Abilities:
Phase 3 Abilities:
Putting it all together:
Phase one, just like each phase is purely tank and spank. You will have one tank tanking the boss as everyone else sits to Halion’s side. Do not move too close to the front as he has a cleave, and a breath, and from some attempts, it seems the cleave manages to hit people standing next to the person who might be too close (More information on this after further testing and reading). As mentioned, also stay away from the tail as he does have a tail swipe that will stun you. The big thing to look out for is Mark of Combustion. When a raid member recieves this DoT, they must run away from the group, preferably closest to the outside wall of fire, which Halion put up at the beginning of the fight. Upon getting away from the group, the debuff MUST be cleansed and then the raid member must return to the group to continue. Do not waste time running out or moving back in. The second thing to watch for is the fiery rock. The ability was explained prior, but there is another twist to it. There will be a trail of fire which leads from where the rock hit. Everyone who has done any sort of raiding should know what to do here: Get out of the fire trail. Upon reaching 75%, Halion will fade away and a portal will be in his place. Everyone must click on this portal and go into it, preferably the tank first. Our guild found it easiest to leave a tank and a healer in the physical reality to pick up Halion for phase 3 while the other tank and rest of the healers and DPS went into the twilight realm.
The twilight realm is pretty much the same as his physical reality, however, you will not get meteors. Instead, in its place, you get big purple orbs that circle around the fighting zone. They will occasionally form a beam between the two which will inflict massive damage (“To infinity and beyond!” to quote buzz lightyear…) and will one shot you. Our tactic was fairly simple. DPS and healers stayed near Halion’s flank (hind leg) and the tank rotated Halion staying just ahead of the orb by the head and the dps following the flank around, staying just behind the orb, far enough away to neither get tail swiped or hit by the purple beam. The orbs will rotate in a clockwise fashion. During this phase, Mark of Consumption will be going off, and as it is like Mark of Combustion, whoever gets this mark must run away from the group and be cleansed ASAP. At 50%, a new portal will be spawned away from the dragon, in which it is prefered that all ranged should go through it to meet the other tank and healer int he physical realm, which begins phase 3…Hard Mode differences:
In all, this is a simple fight and you will have this down with a bit of practice.
Ruby sanctum has come out today! The excitement was met with much bitter guild talk, however, so my evening has been far from pleasant. Between looking for jobs and trying to keep my raiding schedual with my new guild, I have neglected to look up the strategies for the Halion fight, and I and about half the guild that went to successfully down Halion had not read the fights either, and this led to much “That is bullshit” and “There is no excuse to not have looked up those fights” being said in vent, however, being the type of person I am, unless it is nonsense directed toward me, I will not speak up, rather I will sit there and let my annoyance with these people subdue before I say something that would probably offend even a sailor.
Yes, I once led a guild; Yes, I once was a raid leader. I know the frustrations. One thing I did learn upon leaving such status of raid leader and guild leader is that you can NOT risk lowering the moral of your group. This would mean that on new content, instead of wasting time saying “oh so and so didnt read up on this fight so we’re going to sit here and come up with things that we can do while he reads this up” and then decide “well lets just do a quick and dirty explaination so everyone is on the same page and make a few pulls and see what we can work better on.” You should be skipping the wasted chat and go to the second idea as if it were instinct.
Another ineffective raid leading approach I seem to be noticing is the calling out of people fucking up and not even asking or knowing what is really going on. Assuming someone is fucking up because it is new to them is one thing (everyone makes mistakes) but then calling them out and assuming they are fucking up because they are being stupid something entirely different. This is a game, and when it comes to teamwork, there is no “you” in team, just as there is no “I” so instead of assuming it is one person fucking up, ask them the circumstances of the issue and work toward fixing that. If it is a single person problem, fine, but if it is a collective issue, maybe it is time to rethink and make everyone adapt to a different tactic.
Example: Blood prince council. Empowered shock vortex is a debuff that latches on to each player. When the timer for this goes off, they explode, hitting people around them and sending the people they hit flying. This happens all at once, there is no “one person gets it, get away from them” ability, EVERYONE gets it. Everyone has to spread out to avoid hitting each other…but what does melee do when there is nowhere to spread out? Find a partner. What if you’re the odd man out and theres nowhere to run because someone just snaked the person you were moving to stand next to? You get called out in vent and it makes you feel belittled, doesn’t it? Being told everything you’re doing wrong and nothing about what you’re doing great on can really lower a person’s moral, and thus is a very illogical raid leading approach. Yes, the bad people will be bad, but sometimes, you need to work with them and give them positive reinforcement to make things work out. If after a little TLC doesn’t seem to work, tell them they need to learn or find a new place, but find a tactful and kind way to say it. The anonymity in this game really makes for truely mean behavior.
At any rate, this ends this rant. I’m going to be working on a detailed explaination to how we downed the Halion encounter, and I will post it for anyone interested, should they have not already completed it.
So I’ve been doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that in the last few days. So far, I’ve successfully completed a 4-piece pvp set with a couple extras, but I’m far from done, to be completely honest. I still need a trinket, cloak, some bracers…MIGHT keep my pve boots since those are plate and I like my armor pen…either way, I guess I’ll figure it out eventually. I’m not looking forward to when they remove Armor Penetration, mind you, but when they do, I’m sort of interested on how they are going to divide up the gems (any information you may have, feel free to post a comment, preferably with a Bluepost to back it up or screenshots from Cataclysm beta would help too).
So, Thursday night was a very interesting night. We cleared Rotface on hard mode and then proceeded to Festergut, but luck not being on our side, we already had 2 people missing, so we were 23 manning it, and then a healer DCed. We gave him about 20 minutes and said “screw it…let’s go assault Orgrimmar!” For an hour, 22-25 people (depends on who made it there and who bailed) held down the AH and the building next to it with a repair vendor. We got a few hordies their city defender title, which I guess is cool…but we were bored and wanted to cause some havoc, and we did just that. In the same night, I was given my guild invite to the 4th progressed guild for the server, so yay me.
Anyway, tonight, I had a question about addons, so I guess I’ll make an addon category to throw this under with other stuff…So my first addon I’ll talk about is bartender. Most of you may know about bartender already, but there are still some out there who don’t. It’s nothing fancy, really, except you have extra bars you can use (up to 10 bars total), and it completely replaces your default blizzard action bars. You can see an example in the picture I posted with this article. There are tons of options (personally wish there were a few extra options to manipulate the bars, however) and it is pretty self explanitory. The big issues I’ve seen sofar are with druids. The action bars may require some configuration for the states, in which case, you’ll be sort of glancing at what skills are on the bar as you do it. This issue I found was with moonkin and treeform. It is really not a big issue, however, and easily remedied, but it will mess with a few first time users. The other alternative to this addon is dominos, however I personally prefer bartender.
At any rate, that is all for today. Now get out of here, you’re botherin’ me.
Links:
Bartender Addon: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/bartender4.aspx
Dominos Addon: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/dominos.aspx
So it’s been a few days since I left my previous guild and kind of went about it by myself. I threw in some apps at a few respected guilds on the server and did my first heroic bosses last night (except lady deathwhisper…and gunship, because I’ve done that one before) and I gotta say that that stuff is pretty hardcore. Rotface we got down to less than 1% on the first try and then the second try we had to wipe it because two of the healers DC’d. That is AWESOME! Anyway, coming back into this without AVR or HUDMap to aid me, I learned a few valuable things:
Improvising in a raid is paramount to your success. It can make or break the raid. Saurfang, for instance, has a requirement that you have enough ranged to handle the adds. If you are running melee heavy, you just have to improvise. Last night, we had DI’s go off on melee instead of ranged and they just healed the crap out of ranged folks, which is apparently something they do not normally do, but as we only had a small handful of ranged to deal with the adds, they needed each one to be up and killing the blood beasts. The rogues and paladins stunned etc. I even helped by waiting a bit for the ranged to get some threat and a boomkin to push the adds back up behind Saurfang again before I through out some cleaves. After many attempts and many changes to their normal strategy to down this boss, we killed him and moved on.
It is a level of quality like that that you do not find in many groups. Adapting is an important part of raiding, should you choose to do it, just as it is in PvPing and maybe your daily farming routes. Once you learn to adapt to things quick, you have just made yourself a better player.
For all those guys who know…and fear their significant other…or any woman, for that matter…when they are bleeding uncontrollably. Thanks, Ryan, for the link lol.
lol I just found a post that CLEARLY explains how the loot roll system works /rollseyes
“In my Programming for Business Majors class the other day my professor gave us a lecture on how computers randomly generate numbers. We learned that since there is no equation that produces a random number, it is impossible for a computer to generate a truly random number. There are however alternative methods that produce results extremely close to a truly random number. These are called pseudo random numbers.
On the drive home I was making real life connections to the content in my professor’s lecture. In other words, I was wondering how the loot roll system in World of Warcraft worked, aand what system they used to generate the pseudo random numbers. One method amongst many to produce a pseudo random number is to measure noise or static and convert that into a value. Later on that night in an ICC 25 run on my Death Knight I decided to try something. Right before I did a /roll, I screamed as loud as I possibly could. I rolled an 89! I did it again on a later boss. Whist screaming, I rolled a 93! I must have been louder that time. Needless to say, I won everything I wanted from ICC that night.
In conclusion, if you scream and make loud noises as you make your loot roll, you will have a great advantage over your peers! Try it and post your results here.” -Rapelay, Tichondrius
Yep. So my family will be hearing me scream alot more.
So today I noticed…if I don’t run WoW through steam, I get some really screwy UI issues. The day prior, I was looking for my screenshots but couldnt find them. Today, I found the answer. Currently, since I am using Steam to play WoW through (so that I can use the overlay for the in-game web browser) for whatever odd reason, it directs alot of the information (UI elements etc) to a different folder than the ordinary “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft” folder. If you EVER have this issue, this is the directory you should go to.
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files
Just replace “%username%” with your username for the account you play WoW under or may have played WoW under at the time of taking the screenshot or last UI change that you liked. From there, you should be able to essentially copy and paste this into the original wow program directory and use it for each profile until windows decides it needs to store the information elsewhere…again. lol
With that said…here’s one of my favorite screenshots…an easter egg from Lost in WoW.
So I’ve played around in both the raiding PVE elements and the Player Vs. Player elements…
I have had my share of deaths in both. Recently, I regemmed for armor penetration and replaced my Needle-Encrusted Scorpion since it really kind of…sucks? (procced Armor penetration is kinda crappy…i’ll take 80% passive armor pen over 100% procced armor pen any day). Am I worried about them removing armor penetration from the game in the form of a state? Yes I am.
Why is that? Because it has made PvP entirely too fun for me. I go into a battleground, in my raid gear and demolish clothies and decimate plate wearers as if they were a clothie as well. But…as it is a game and is widely played by a large group of players, it has to constantly change to keep people’s interest, so, as I look at it now…motherfuckers best refend me some epic gems to re-gem with when they remove it!