PUGing Ulduar

Who said it couldn’t be done?  Yesterday started off innocently enough.  I got bored and joined a pug 10m Naxx group.  Interestingly enough my last guild leader joined the group.  This group carried 3 terrible DPS players through the Spider Wing.  We stopped at the Safety Dance though because on of the healers left.

After I hearthed to Dalaran, “LFM FL 10m Ulduar” scrolled across Trade Chat.  So I whispered back and a little did I know, half the group I was running with migrated to this raid group!  We downed Flame Leviathan with one tower up pretty easily.  Only one of the choppers died.  Two Emblems of Conquest as loot isn’t too shabby.  Too bad the Pyrite Infuser didn’t drop.

Two people dropped from the raid but everyone remaining decided to continue with 10m Ulduar!  One of the Pallies respecced Holy and we looked for a priest and druid healers.  And off we went to do XT-Deconstructor.  I hate that boss’s voice…but we downed him (her?) in 1 try and got the achievement for not allowing him to heal from the scrapbots.

Next we tried Razorscale.  We wiped twice but on our third attempt we had a pretty epic finish.  Everything was going good until our MT randomly died at ~15%.  Our OT picked him up and we got him down to around 1% before he dropped.  Then the rest of raid started falling.  All that was standing was a Rogue and 2 healers.  That rogue legitimately downed 0.5% of the boss’s health by himself!  Epic and fittingly he won the gloves that dropped from Razorcscale.

The last boss we downed was Kologarn.  We wiped once but the second time we downed him no problem.  He was an interesting fight to say the least.  And I won the Spire of Withering Dreams!  We tried some trash and failed, then we tried the Iron Assembly and failed.  But hopefully we’ll be able to pick up the group today.

Guild Drama

Tell me, why did this have to happen to my new guild? In my last post I wrote that I joined a new casual raiding guild and today I was so happy when they decided to pick up that Naxx run we started before. However, all was not meant to be…like usual.

Two individuals in our raid were kind of arguing for no reason whatsoever.  We were wiping against the harder bosses in Naxx and people were getting a little frustrated but our MT just got super pissed at very minor things the rest of the guild was doing.  This completely tore the guild apart.  Most of the 80 raiders began leaving.  I was very concerned about the future of the guild and whether I would have to change guilds/servers/factions.  Well when the dust settled the MT left the guild (along with his crazy 25m rules, heard he was a nice guy in general but his rules were just too strict and he kept yelling) and the guild leader managed to reinvite most of the 80s that left.  Disaster averted!

This is the first time I’ve been in any part of guild drama and at the expense of my guildies (and possibly myself) I’d have to say it was entertaining, although I’d hate to have this happen again.  Well I think this turnover was an overall good thing for the guild and I’ll be sticking around a bit longer in the hopes that this guild does work out.  It has potential: 2 superbly geared mages, 1 amazingly geared resto shaman, 1 amazingly geared warlock, and around 10-15 25m Naxx ready raiders.  Here’s to me not spending a dime on server/faction changes!

In Progress: 25m Naxx

Quickie right here. In the midst of 25m Naxx, just downed Patchwerk. 3.6k DPS, 4th in the raid in DPS. Who says BM can’t DPS?

Edit:  Ok I’ve got some time now to expand this post now.  Well yesterday in Trade chat someone from the guild <Deadman Walking> was looking for DPS for 25m OS.  So naturally I whispered him that I’d DPS for them.  I’ve ran a couple of raids with this guild and they’re very organized and know what they’re doing.  So we downed Sarth no problems.  And of course Hyaline Helm of the Sniper dropped!  Luckily I was only rolling against only one other Hunter and I won!  So I currently own the helm I’ve been wanting for a long time and am expecting to use well into patch3.2.  Not too shabby.  I kind of felt bad though because the person who invited me into the raid was this Hunter that I rolled against.

Then the guild (and 5 pugged individuals, including me) immediately went off to do 25m Naxx.  We downed Spider Wing easily.  No wipes, but the Aged Winter Cloak dropped and I supposedly won it with a roll of 91 but they gave it to someone else.  It’s not that much better than the cloak I currently have so I didn’t complain about it, although the added Crit would’ve been nice…  Anyway they decided to do Construct Wing second and that really made my day.  Or so I thought.

Well the Construct Wing (both 10 and 25m) is where the majority of my gear upgrades lie.  The thing is most Naxx groups I enter are afraid of the Construct Wing.  This time though we were able to down Patchwerk, as my original post spoke of.  We wiped once but that was because our MT dropped midfight.  Bummer, but on our second try we downed him pretty easily.  Like I stated up top I was doing a very solid 3.6K DPS and was forth in their mostly guild run.  This was also with my new helm not fully gemmed and not enchanted!  This makes me feel really good about my DPS.  As most DPSers know, Patchwerk is Naxx’s “gear check” or as my track coach would put it, “gut check.”  You have to down him in 6 minutes or else he enrages and wipes the raid.  If the DPS isn’t there, you fail.  If the tanks don’t know what they’re doing, you fail.  Healers only have to keep the 3 tanks at full the entire time and you just burn him down.  Patchwerk is a pure DPS race boss and many (all) Hunters use it as a fair, raid-environment check of their DPS.  We managed to down him in around 4 minutes.  I have no doubt in my mind that this raid could’ve finished Naxx in another 2 hours even though we were carrying ~2 other lesser geared DPS.

But alas, fait would have no such thing.  Blizzard’s servers in the Chicago area decided to drop when we were about to try Grobbulus and 8 members of the raid dropped.  We waited for around 30 minutes and then the raid leader decided to call it a night.  Unfortunate, but true.  All I have to say is that was definitely the smoothest run I’ve had EVER.  I think I might have to join this guild in a couple days since my guild seems to be failing.  Luckily I know someone in that guild who will hopefully invite me.  I just don’t want to jump ship that quickly and seem like a jerk to my guild leader who I’ve been doing heroics and raids with since February.  I also hope that they continue the raid tonight and I’m able to catch them when they’re about to finish Naxx.

Patch changes!

Ok first off I’d like to say I’ve been really, really busy lately.  Raiding and volunteer work (and Michael Jackson’s death) has really been making me spend my time doing productive things.  Last week I was able to get into a 25m Naxx raid.  My current guild has been joining another guild on the server to do 25 mans.  So we did Naxx, OS and downed Flame Leviathan in 25m Ulduar.

But enough of that.  I’ve got some spare time to talk about Patch 3.2 and BM changes that WILL increase BM DPS output!  First off we originally had a change to Catlike Reflexes.  Not only will it increase dodge, but it will also decrease the cooldown of Kill Command.  This will definitely be a DPS increase but I’m still not sold on this talent just yet.  I don’t think it’ll be much of a change.  Today however I read on MMO-Champion about changes to Animal Handler and the pet talent Wild Hunt.  Now these 2 talents will substantially boost our DPS (hopefully).  Animal Handler now increases pet attack power by 5/10% instead of expertise by 5/10%.  I’m not entirely sure what expertise does since Hunters have absolutely no use for the stat but the AP boost looks nice.  Animal Handler was already a very versatile talent since it reduced the chance your pet’s attacks get blocked/dodged/missed (I think that’s what expertise does) and increases the effect of Master’s Call, which is probably the most underrated Hunter ability.  Now the attack power boost will make you’re already awesome pet even more awesome!  Wild Hunt, a talent all Hunter have at least 1 talent point in (I assume) is also getting buffed.  Only BM Hunters, however, are able to put 2 points in this talent.  According to MMO-Champion, rank 1 has increased the AP boost from 10% to 15% so I’m assuming rank 2 will increase AP by 30%, up from 20%.  The last ability buff I’m going to touch on is Deterrence which is the Hunter “Oh Shit” button (I guess next to Feign Death) when everything hits the fan and you need a couple seconds of invincibility (sort of; maybe for that Feign Death CD to finish).  Now Deterrence doesn’t require you to face the attack and you’ll block all physical and magical attacks (plus a cool new animation!).

So now with the changes to Animal Handler and the buff to Wild Hunt, BM Hunter pets will now gain at least 20% attack power , which in turn affects DPS.  I’m not sure how attack power is calculated though.  It’s either your pet gains a 20% attack power bonus (10+10=20), which I doubt, or your pet gains 10% from Animal Handler and then an additional 30% (presumably), after the 10% bonus from Animal Handler, from Wild Hunt (rank 2).  This second scenario will boost your pet AP by more than 20% I believe.  Well, I’ll leave it up to the number crunchers to calculate the real attack power/damage increase.  All I know is BM Hunter DPS are about to get buffed.  Meanwhile, SV Hunters are about to get nerfed (with changes to Entrapment and LnL that I didn’t discuss because I don’t care for SV) and MM Hunters will remain the same.  This will hopefully lower DPS gap between BM Hunters and SV Hunters.

Raidful week

From a raiding stand point I’ve had a pretty good week.  I started a 25 man Naxx raid and went through the Spider Wing before I had to go to sleep.  My new belt dropped so that made me happy.

Then, yesterday (Saturday) my guild did a 10 man Naxx run.  We finished the Spider Wing and did most of the Military Quarter.  We stopped after wiping against the 4 horsemen twice.  A lot of people kept dropping and everyone we were trying to add was already saved to the instance.  We decided to bring one of our lower geared members in and he really did squat but that was sorta expected.  Hopefully we’ll be able to pick this up again before Tuesday’s maintenance.

After Naxx I was leveling up JC when an 10 man OS PuG was popped up on trade chat.  I jumped to join it and my guild went off to either do heroics or VoA.  We finished OS pretty easily.  Downed the 3 drakes in 20 minutes then wiped twice against Sarth.  The first wipe as a legitimate wipe.  We got him down to 2% but his adds at the end overwhelmed us and our OT died halfway through…bummer.  The second time our druid rezzed a DK and he walked forward and aggroed Sarth…  Yea…that kinda sucked.  But we downed Sarth on our next try and guess who won the Dragon Hide Bag?  That’s right I won it.  Check out the DPS for that fight too.

I’m kind of happy it came out really blurred.  That way the other raid members are semi anonymous.  I’m the second Hunter if you guys were wondering.  The other Hunter who out-DPSed me by less than 100 DPS was specced SV and I was specced BM, and we were geared similarly.  I didn’t check out the gear on the Rogue but I guess he was really well geared.  This is about the damage I put out in 10 man Naxx and ranked in the top 3 in most of the fights there also.  However, in 25 man Naxx I was around 7th on the damage charts.  This leads me to believe that the reason BM Hunters are now lagging behind in DPS compared to MM and SV Hunters is because the buffs applied to BM pets (who deal around 40% of BM damage) don’t scale as well as buffs applied to the MM and SV Hunters (whose pets deal maybe 15% of their damage if that) themselves.  Hopefully that made sense.

Quick post

Ok, so I haven’t really posted in a while because I’ve been pretty busy but I have a tiny bit of stuff to write about.  Well, yesterday I did 10 man Naxx.  My group basically finished 2 1/2 wings of Naxx before I had to leave and it took us around 2 hours to do this much.  Not bad considering it took my last group 6 hours to do 3 wings.  Anyways today my guild leader invited me to continue doing the raid after they finished the Construct Wing.  So I’ve still never done Construct, heard it was really really hard.  We downed Sapphiron after wiping once.  Not a hard fight by any stretch of the imagination.  Just be aware of what attacks he’s doing.  

Then we spent 2 hours attempting to down Kel’thuzad.  Unfortunately I was unable to down him, wiped maybe 6 times.  We were close a lot of times probably go unlucky with some iceblocks.  It was always a healer or tank getting iceblocked but our healers didn’t seem to coordinate whenever iceblock came up.  Of course the group fell apart after a while and I went on to help a lower level friend of mine in Halls of Lightening.  My guild leader got someone else to run him past Kel while I was busy.  :(

At Long Last!

I have obtained it!  My epic flyer!  HAHAHA no more slow flying!

dated 6/3/09

I’m sorry if it’s blurry (my WoW resolution sucks!) but I have indeed obtained what I believe to be the best looking mount in the game, even without running animation.  I mean everyone has the Red-Proto Drake but how many people do you see with the Cenarion War Hippogryph?  How many people have the patience to go back to Outland to grind for Cenarion Expedition reputation?  I’ve only seen 1 other person on my server (my server is low population but still…) with it.  All the soloing of Steamvaults, collecting of poachers’ ears, and doing of dailies have finally paid off.

Also updated my about page.

Addons? Addons!

Ok so up to now I haven’t really posted a truly constructive post, mainly what I’ve been up to in WoW.  Well here’s the first of my hopefully many useful posts.  Addons.  Casual players, I’m guessing, don’t touch them: they’re satisfied with Blizzard’s UI (user interface for those that don’t know).  I was  like this basically up to the first time I did Naxx.  Actually I used Omen and Kharthus’s Hunter timer addon but now I use neither.  I know, I know Omen is essential for raiding but it’s warnings first scared me then got annoying so I got rid of it, well didn’t delete it, I just don’t load it up.

So what addons do I use?

Let’s start with cosmetics, X-perl!  Yea X-perl is one of my favorite UI addons.  It just makes everything look clean and crisp.  For those that play Warcraft 3, do you guys remember when you selected a unit and a portrait of the unit (or hero) would appear and look around and stuff?  Well X-perl does that for you character’s (and party’s) portrait.  I just think it’s a nice touch.  Also X-perl organizes your buffs/debuffs right under your character’s portrait.  This holds true for your pets and your party.  Also X-perl allows for a huge number of customization options which is always nice since everyone is special in their own way.  X-perl does seem to be bugged or something because I keep getting disable addon popups.

More cosmetics you say?  Why sure!  SexyMap is a nice addon that allows you to customize the way your minimap looks.  I particularly like it because it looks…well sexy and because it hides the buttons around your map when your mouse isn’t in the minimap.  Also you can scale your minimap for even more sexiness!

My final UI addon is StellarBars.  These allow you to scale your action bars and clean up your interface further.  I shrink my action bars so that I can see more of the screen (as well as zoom the camera out further) since I play on a 13″ Macbook.  I also use Button Facade to further customize my action bars.  Combining these 4 UI addons make my screen look uber sexy!!

Ok onto more meaty addons.  Recount is an addon I picked up when I first started raiding.  It shows you a variety of information that happens in an instance or current fight.  It shows overall damage, healing done, DPS, etc.  Useful stuff for gauging your performance on a given fight, instance, or raid.  Although not 100% reliable since a lot of raid bosses are tricky and will skew numbers, it’s still a good measuring stick of your skill and your gear.  For me this addon showed in numbers the importance my pet had on my DPS.  As a BM my pet is doing 35-40% of my overall damage!!  Very important to keep him alive, yes sir.

Another useful addon I have is Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text.  Yup tells what damage my attacks/abilities are doing (or if I miss which I hardly do now since I’m approaching the hit cap but still do rarely), how much my pet’s attacks/abilities are doing, how much healing my pet and I are receiving,  how much damage the opponent is doing to my pet or myself, when my cooldowns are up, when my mana is low, and boss warnings.  Very useful although it takes some time to get used to all the scrolling information.

Finally my last addon is Bejeweled.  Yup Popcap’s puzzle games is loaded on my toons because 1) it’s a fun game and 2) it gives me something to do while fishing or flying.  Peggle is also available to people who like that game but I never tried that one.

Well, these are the addons I use.  I know that Omen and Deadly Boss Mods (is that what it’s called?) are very useful for raiding although I use neither.  Is there any addon anyone else would like to share?  Please enlighten me!

Starting Anew

Ok guys so I haven’t been playing on my Night Elf Hunter much recently.  I just do a couple dailies and that’s about it for her.  If there’s a PuG for a raid I’ll try and join it maybe but I haven’t seen any in the trade/general chat much.  Just saving Champion’s Seals for the Argent Hippogryph.

I’ve actually started a new character, a Tauren Druid.  Yes I have switched over to the dark side.  I really don’t like the Horde races much but I do like the Tauren.  They’re kind of like the Night Elves of the Horde.  Anyway I wanted to play a resto druid and the only 2 races you can play druids with is NE and Tauren.  I decided to something different so went Horde side.  Plus my brother chose to roll a Tauren shaman so we quest together and stuff.

If anything interesting happens on either toon I’ll let you guys know!

Update

Ok so it’s been a while since I last posted something because of finals and moving out and catching up with friends but I really haven’t been up to much in WoW.

I’ve been mainly doing fishing, cooking, Argent Tournament dailies for money and seals and whatnot.  I’ve also gained exalted with the Cenarion Expedition!  I grinded reputation by doing Steamvaults over and over and over again…  Of course it was to get the Cenarion War Hippogryph!  But then I read somewhere that this mount doesn’t have a ground animation.  Bummer…and it looks soooo cool too…  I decided not to get it and just save up Champion Seals for the Argent Hippogryph.

Also I did a Tempest Keep raid.  Lookie!

Yea Kael was hard even for a group of 25 80′s.  We wiped twice.  The first time we ran in and failed pretty miserably.  Second time we planned some stuff and actually explained the fight and got him down to 1%!!  D’oh!  The 3rd and final time we spanked him hard.  That was a fun little raid.  The legendary bow we got to use was cool.

Also I finally got back into a WG fight and collected enough WG marks of honor to buy the Titan-forged Chain Helm of Triumph to replace my Hateful Gladiator’s Chain Helm.  They are equal in every single way except one gives hit and another gives crit%.  I figured with extra crit my crit% will be well over 27%.  But with the added hit I’ll be at just over 200 and still be at over 26% crit.  I went with more hit but I’m not sure.  Also the Gladiator piece gives me a set bonus with an extra 50 resilience.  I thought I’d save the Deadly Gladiator Helm for pvp and the other I’d use for pve.  What would you have done?

Anyway I need to collect more Emblems of Valor to improve my gear.  Too bad the only way to do them is by doing 25 mans and 10 man Ulduar.