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!