Saturday, July 26, 2008

kairon's pet abilities

Dash Rank 1:
STV: Stranglethorn Tiger (32-33)

Dash Rank 2:
STV: Elder Shadowmaw Panther (41-43)

Bite Rank 6:
Swamp of Sorrows: Deathstrike Tarantula (40-41), Sawtooth Snapper (41-42)

Claw Rank 6:
Swamp of Sorrows: Silt Crawler (40-41)

EDIT:
Got everything except the Dash Rank 2. Now I just need to get to a pet trainer and retrain Casimir to have dash instead of prowl.

activate: Kairon!

So Clara is over this whole warlocky thing with Mornara. I figured that would happen. She's pulled her shelved hunter Kairon out to play with Tylara. I knew that would happen too. Kairon has a Durotar Tiger as a pet. Every time Clara plays him she makes a little twrrrr sound becuase she likes tigers so much.

It's too bad Kairon has such goofy hair.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

respec'ing Eeyan

Eeyan's DPS is ass even though he's now all in epics. My new Dominos UI lets the theorycraft through and I discovered Ghostly Strike, once all the bonuses are added in, is less damage than I'd thought from the tooltip.

bah. Here is his new spec, dropping all the Subtlety points. I know, people will yell at me about lack of weapon spec but I still don't primarily raid him, and still find myself using Riposte even in Heroics.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Motivational Drama

How do you motivate someone who isn't performing? What if they are an actual coworker?

Last night Darkfall ran SSC. It was an OK run. We downed Lurker and Leo in one shot each. But then wiped until we called it on Karathress. Basically because we were having coordination issues. Mostly due to healers not being able to keep the tanks up.

When we killed Lurker and Leo there was meter spam in the healer channel. As in an officer was running recount and used it to spam the /darkheals with healing done and overhealing done.

I don't like the meters. I think that they miss stuff, and can easily be biased if people are spread out. However despite that I do always run them myself, just to get a rough estimate of where I am. Last night I was doing an ok job healing, one of the wipes on Karahtress was my fault, I had a little bit of lag combined with a little bit of inattention and the tank I was healing died once. I also usually keep track of them as a dps. I know generally where on them I am supposed to be and if I'm not there, I'm missing something: buffs, food, oil, etc.

Anyway after the raid I asked the officer who had been spamming meters why he was doing that. He said they were trying to motivate people to perform better. There was a pally, who was at the bottom of the healing done meter and at the top of the overhealing meter. I asked why they don't just directly talk to that pally. He said that had and that he hadn't changed. This led to a rather large blow up between myself DraNgNon, the first officer and a second officer.

In general I like Darkfall, but there are two problems right now. First there are too many officers. I think there are more officers than raiders now. And really you don't need two officers each for rogues, or priests, or warriors. Too many officers leads to an us versus them mentality. The second issue I see, is they need to decide how they are dealing with people. Either we are all responsible for having good values, per the meters, and the people who suck will get booted. Or we aren't. The officers can't just use the meters to make one person shape up, things don't work like that. If the meters are used against one person they will be used against anyone else who is "underperforming", which hasn't been defined.

Also our old raid leader, who I miss, had a rule about no meters during the raids. he would look at them himself and talk to people as needed, but he wouldn't try to shame people in public. And that is what I feel like happened last night with the meters being spammed. Or was attempted anyway, I think that what really happened is that the person who was doing crappy healing just shrugged it off, and the rest of us started stressing about having an officer spam meters.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Movin' on up

Darkfall down'd Al'ar, Anetheron, and Kaz'rogal this week. Clara and I missed the first two and that was my fault, Viljo should've been there while I watched the puppy. Kuan was there for Kaz, which Darkfall tried on a whim before a TK run, and who went down relatively easy for all that the the trash leading up to him was sheer chaos. Clara didn't make it, she didn't trust the puppy would settle enough.

We were a bit taken aback how easy it was.



Maybe it's 3 years of bias showing through but: chaos or no, it's a lot more mentally comfortable for me, defending the Horde camp.

Anyhow, with that Darkfall leaps up into the top 5000 US guilds on wowjutsu. And, while we still have a rambunctious puppy, I'm thinking we will be back to regularly scheduled wow-playing next week. Then I will get to enjoy hearing Clara swear about Viljo's new damage-a-riffic build, and to the other mages swear about it too...

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

New Spec

So Darkfall went into TK last night to kill Al'ar. Viljo went with them for the first couple of attempts and then had to drop out because the puppy wouldn't settle and was gonna destroy the house. But I did respec him first.

Previously I always had Viljo as a fire mage. But I respecced him to 40/0/21. I'm not sure if I should have taken more points in Magic Absorption instead of Improved Counterspell, but I've got my new spec now.

It was very strange to be using Arcane Blast and Frostbolt. I think my UI still needs work. I did manage to toss together a quick macro to fire off my trinket, Icy Veins, and Arcane Power all at the same time. But the location of AB and Frostbolt need to change, as well as moving a few more frost spells onto my action bar and fire spells off of it.

All that said I think my dps went up a lot :( I was pretty easily doing about 1200-ish dps last night. And considering that I was still trying to figure out what rotation to use and was attempting to keep the puppy from eating the house at the same time, that is still about 200-300 dps more than my fire spec was doing. :( I am forgetting, but I *think* Viljo was hovering around 900-1000 dps. Ah well I guess this means I get to figure out how to farm as arcane/frost as well as raid.

Monday, July 14, 2008

more on Clutter

So I recently posted two screenshots, and they had so much clutter. Here is another source of clutter:
sheep:~ dracon$ cd /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/Interface/AddOns/
sheep:AddOns dracon$ ls -F
AuldLangSyne/ DBM_ZulAman/
Blizzard_AuctionUI/ FuBar/
Blizzard_BattlefieldMinimap/ FuBar_AmmoFu/
Blizzard_BindingUI/ FuBar_BagFu/
Blizzard_CombatLog/ FuBar_BongosFu/
Blizzard_CombatText/ FuBar_ClockFu/
Blizzard_CraftUI/ FuBar_DurabilityFu/
Blizzard_GMSurveyUI/ FuBar_ExperienceFu/
Blizzard_GuildBankUI/ FuBar_HonorFu/
Blizzard_InspectUI/ FuBar_LocationFu/
Blizzard_ItemSocketingUI/ FuBar_MicroMenuFu/
Blizzard_MacroUI/ FuBar_MoneyFu/
Blizzard_RaidUI/ FuBar_OutfitterFu/
Blizzard_TalentUI/ FuBar_PerformanceFu/
Blizzard_TradeSkillUI/ FuBar_PetFu/
Blizzard_TrainerUI/ FuBar_PoisonFu/
Bongos2/ FuBar_RecountFu/
Bongos2_ActionBar/ FuBar_RegenFu/
Bongos2_CastBar/ FuBar_SkillsPlusFu/
Bongos2_MapBar/ FuBar_ToFu/
Bongos2_Options/ FuBar_TopScoreFu/
Bongos2_RollBar/ GotWood/
Bongos2_Stats/ GotWood_old/
Bongos2_XP/ Numen/
BuffTimers/ Omen/
CT_Core/ Outfitter/
CensusPlus/ PallyPower/
CharacterProfiler/ Perl_ArcaneBar/
ClassTimer/ Perl_CombatDisplay/
DBM_API/ Perl_Config/
DBM_AQ20/ Perl_Config_Options/
DBM_AQ40/ Perl_Focus/
DBM_Azeroth/ Perl_Party/
DBM_BWL/ Perl_Party_Pet/
DBM_Battlegrounds/ Perl_Party_Target/
DBM_BlackTemple/ Perl_Player/
DBM_GUI/ Perl_Player_Pet/
DBM_Hyjal/ Perl_Target/
DBM_Karazhan/ Perl_Target_Target/
DBM_MC/ Recount/
DBM_NAXX/ SolarianAlarm/
DBM_Outlands/ SpamSentry/
DBM_Serpentshrine/ TheoryCraft2/
DBM_Sunwell/ VoidReaverAlarm/
DBM_TheEye/ oRA2/
DBM_ZG/


Yikes, eh? Since I made my last post on Clutter, though, it occurred to me I should look at the non-Ace addons for updates. And lo and behold, Bongos2 had some bad news: I have written a new action bar addon, called Dominos, and am no longer supporting this one. Please feel free to try it out, along with Trinity Bars, and Bartender 3.

So, I went and looked at the Dominos addon. It seemed OK. Likely to be more sustainable as he makes more use of the Blizz API. I read the forum posts becuase you get a good feel for addons by what people whine about. So I decided to try it. I loaded it on Tylara, becuase she has the least tweaked, and messed with button spacing, etc. I decided I liked it. Bongos2 has a bug, in which it won't let all the TheoryCraft2 info through, and Dominos doesn't have this bug.

I have 8 Horde alts on Hyjal, and 2 computers with different button layouts. Imagine how overjoyed I was to find out that layouts from Bongos2 can't be imported to Dominos. Not. You'd think since the same guy wrote em, he'd thought of that. Anyhow last night, prior to raiding Hyjal Summit, I got the 3 toons in Darkfall straightened out on the laptop and all Hyjal toons on the desktop. That took me about 2.5 hours. While I was at it I slid some buttons and windows around to reduce the clutter (the last few screenshots I've posted shows there is plenty of room for improvement there; I used some of that room). That means 9 folders under Interface/Addons can go away, too. 10 really. I have CT_Core in there, and am really only using it for quest levels. Not worth it, I disabled it.

Overall it doesn't look much different at first glance, but the devil is in the details. It's a lot cleaner, and my raid frames no longer contend with my buff timers.

Meanwhile Hyjal Summit was so fast and furious I missed out rolling on the trash mail caster chest, let alone doing something as mundane as screenshotting the raid UI. Ah, well.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Eeyan goes on a Raid!

He got to hit both Magtheridon - thus completing his Trial of the Naaru - and Gruul. He still hasn't done the quests to get the other part of the Champion title.

It was at the last minute I realized, sheesh, I have never been in more than a 10-man with Eeyan. I did the best I could with my UI last-minute. After all his layout requirements are much, much different. I think it's still too much, he doesn't need to see party or party targets.

A'lar

We tried A'lar tonight. Darkfall tried it last week, but this was my first time.

Since Kuan is caster DPS, it's hard to get a decent picture.



That's from phase one, which is easy. We only got one try in on phase two becuase people were lame and bailed in the middle of the raid, leaving us standing around for 25 mins, buffs ticking down, after all the trash had cleared.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Spec for Al'ar

Darkfall is trying Al'ar right now. I'm on puppy duty so I'm not there, and I'm a little bit grateful for that. I have no real idea what spec I would have for Viljo. Clearly my beloved fire isn't going to work against the Phoenix God.

So I'm considering an arcane build with a bit of frost thrown in. A couple of the other mages I respect in Darkfall have things similar to41/0/20 and 40/0/21 as their specs. The one I talked to last night basically said a rotation using Arcane Blast and Frost Bolt was what he used.

As far as those specs go I've altered both of them from what the other mages use. I'm leaning towards the 40/0/21 build, just because I do enjoy having iceblock more than once every 5 mins. I don't know how useful iceblock is for Al'ar, but I suspect it's more useful than Slow.

Anyway thoughts from those of you who play mages that aren't fire? Or anyone at all? And yes I've considered going fully frost but I'm just not a fan of pet management. is the water elemental that easy to control? I'm guessing not, what with it's own frost nova and all.

Clutter

I'm almost to the point of reworking my addons a bit. I have too many. And they add to the noise.

Anyhow, I am posting this screenshot of Kuan's Raiding UI mostly so I can link it into Darkfall's forums. It's a highest-quality jpg so even though I shrunk it, I'd rather Google store it than my little server.



The buttons are Bongos2. I'm going to swap to Dominos, I already have for Tylara. It's just a pain to reconfigure and I haven't put myself in that pain with my 70s yet.

No, I'm not trolling for suggestions, but if any are made, I will probably check them out.

New Boots for Telt

Last night we got the puppy settled enough that I got to go raiding. DraNgNon still watched him, because he feels that the world is his chew toy, including the power cord...

Darkfall was raiding Mt Hyjal last night. I was originally going to bring Viljo, but they were lacking healers again so Telt came along. I do enjoy healing with her, so that wasn't an issue. And she was the only priest with Improved Divine Spirit, so I was needed for buffing.

Rage, the first boss, and his trash wasn't too bad. Telt and a healy pally were assigned to keep the pally tank up for trash and then Telt was on the MT for the boss. She still doesn't have the stupid fricking PvP Trinket so she died in an iceblock. But she got picked for a battle rez and ended the fight alive.

The second boss Anetheron was much less cooperative. We did manage to get him to 21%, but the trash up to him was giving us a bunch of trouble. I was having a hard time keeping the pally tank up, between the massive spikes of damage from all the mobs he was tanking and the fact that I was supposed to be shackling a banshee. The only way it worked for me was to just ignore the banshees, and even then he sometimes went down. :( If I pre-cast heals too aggressively at the start of the fight I was pulling aggro from the mobs.

The excellent part of all of this was that Boots of the Divine Light dropped. Twice even. Telt got the first pair of boots and then a shadow priest took the second pair. They are nice boots, but not quite as nice +healing wise as the badge boots, and both the other holy priests had those. I blew some badges to get epic gems and had them cut and socketed immediately. :D

Monday, July 7, 2008

tangible progress

Eeyan hit 375 Blacksmithing today. Finally. I caved in and bought all the adamantite for that last point. He needs to do a buncha dailies now.



But: here is the real tangible progress. Tylara is 40, and now has a warhorse.



She doesn't sit well on a horse. Poor girl, all she wants is to keep her hair under control. And now she has a charger too large for her frame to deal with.

Hmm, just what is that on the front of the barding? A Sun-cat?

Sunday, July 6, 2008

bits and pieces

So this last week has indeed been a week of alts.

Tylara and Mornara are almost 40. Thanks to our guildie Smoovesta they have cleared all the Scarlet Monastery quests. Leveling is so fast, and paladins and warlocks are so overpowered, that we are just sort of randomly picking quest lines to follow.

I have also been playing Ikoli some. On the 4th of July Viljo walked her through Sunken Temple in a run made painful by fireworks-inspired puppy demands. Long long ago, I had some notion of having her Disc/Shadow. That just doesn't work with the current priest trees. Since I ultimately wanted her to heal, I just now respec'd her sort of into holy/damage (note that is actually a lvl 60 spec; at 60 I might want to change it up some). Her heals are boosted a little, and even though she's not spec'd optimally for end game healing, she's only 54 and has to be able to kill something in game, so she shouldn't be, unless I want to make Viljo drag her around for 16 levels. At least this way I can start getting a feel for where I want all the buttons.

We tried to run Eeyan and Viljo through Kara on the 4th too. That didn't work so well and I dropped out to play with the puppy.