slacker

So I've been focussing on Sons of Hodir rep, since that's the faction with the shoulder enchants. Kuan is Honored with them as of last Saturday, which means there are 5 dailies available.

One of the dailies is this spear quest where you basically ride a proto dragon, with a vehicle UI, and try to hang on, stabbie it with a spear, and dodge the dragon's claws. In the end you fall and smash to death with a 10% dura loss. I have decided not to do that daily.

Anyhow doing the 4 remaining dailies is 1100 rep. That puts Kuan about a month out from Exalted, and the Super Spiffy shoulder enchants. I bothered to time it and it takes about 40 minutes with average contention for items/kills that are farmed. Since LK has been out a while, I got called slacker by Karaghiosis for being so low in rep with them. I got a bit bent out of shape about it, after all, it is the Lunar Festival and I really just want to run around and collect coins on all my toons.

Speaking of which, Kuan has 7 coins left to collect, all in Northrend dungeons. We plan on getting them in Heroics of course so there will be rep and badges too. I think we'll try for Thursday for these. As for the alts, I think getting the coins on Ikoli and Mornara is the next most important, at least for the outdoor ones. We'll try that tonight...

...after Kuan does his Sons of Hodir dailies. Don't want them to think I'm a total slacker, after all.

Malygos

Yesterday Kuan and Viljo tried Malygos with the rest of Thwarted Destiny. It was a bit of a ragtag group, since we had to get a prot pally to respec holy so we had 2 healers.

But we tried it. And, um, died horribly. But then we tried it again! And, um, still died horribly. Heh. We did start getting better, but our main tank is not that impressive of a tank. He talks way too much, and isn't the raid leader, and doesn't have very good situational awareness. So a couple of times Malygos ate a spark or two. But there were noticeable improvement in our attempts.

I'm thinking that with a slightly better group we can get Malygos down in the not too distant future. It will probably require two or three more sessions of attempts, but I definitely see it happening. Which would mean that Kuan and Viljo have done all of of the current Wrath raid content, at least for 10-man. They have already seen all of the 10-man raid content and most of the 25 man stuff. So they are doing pretty well with the raiding.

we must always look to the future

And the future is dual spec.

Here is Kuan's restoration spec. I'll use this if I have to before dual specs come out, but I don't think I will reglyph just for a temporary change.

the horde chef

Since I had some waiting around to do whilst getting the AD trinket for Mornara and Kairon, here are the under-300 recipes available to Horde that Kuan still doesn't know, per Crafter's Tome.
Lynx Steak
Scorpid Surprise
Roasted Kodo Meat
Dig Rat Stew
Lean Venison
Succulent Pork Ribs
Lean Wolf Steak
Heavy Crocolisk Stew
Carrion Surprise
Mystery Stew
Dragonbreath Chili
Heavy Kodo Stew
Goldthorn Tea
Charred Bear Kabobs
Juicy Bear Burger
Runn Tum Tuber Surprise

I am going to get cracking on these immediately. Like right now. Kuan is taking the portal to Orgrimmar. There are quite a few that are vendor-bought.

However, there aren't enough to explain why he is like 46 short of the cooking achievement. I will figure that out later.

Unholy

I had originally given Mornara a half thought through frost spec. I've been thinking it through a little bit more lately and I decided that I didn't like it. Especially since really the only thing scaring me away from the Unholy talent tree is the perma-ghoul, since I'm not generally a fan of pet classes.

The spec I will probably have at 80, barring changes to talents and skills etc, is this. Anyway last night I took some time and respecced Mornara to Unholy. Her spec is currently more dps focused than it will be when she gets to 80. I think that is good, since she and Ikoli actually have to be able to kill stuff for their quests, and they want to kill rather than outlast.

Naxx Cleared!

This Sunday was Thwarted Destiny's Naxx raid. Kuan and Viljo signed up and showed up all fully prepped. There were 19 level 80s online so we tried for two different runs. It was mostly successful, at least for the raid that Kuan and Viljo were in.

The other raid had to pull a pug in, and from what I was seeing in guild chat the pug wasn't all that great. So the other raid only cleared 2 or three wings unfortunately.

Our raid however cleared everything! We even managed to one shot every boss except for Heigan, Sapphiron, and Kel'thuzad. Heigan was a pain because everyone was having variable lag and so we all had a very hard time telling when to move. Sapphiron and Kel'thuzad were hard because at least half of the raid, including the main tank, had never done killed those bosses. And in addition on KT, people were having trouble recognizing the Shadow Fissure, and therefore not actually getting out of it...

But anyway we killed everything in Naxx 10! So that is 3 achievements right there. Unfortunately neither Kuan or Viljo won the roll on the Key to the Focusing Iris. But that's ok, we'll kill Sapphiron again. :D

Patch Day!

"All shaman talent points have been refunded. Please visit your trainer to learn spells and abilities."

That's right: visit the trainer, NOT http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/shaman/talents.html, which as of this writing still does not have the new talent tree. Bah!

Here's what I'm thinking will be Kuanchichi's new build.

I think considering cast times, all the haste on shaman gear, and just what actually consists of 12% of intellect every 5 seconds - what, maybe 80 or 90 mp5? - that Convection is more valuable than Unrelenting Storm (gee, Wowhead isn't updated either), for all the former still takes 5 pts and the latter now only 3. However kudos to Blizzard for changes that actually make thinking about it a worthwhile endeavor.

I only had 1 point in Unrelenting Storm initially, and I've run out of mana on two boss fights since hitting 80: once on Patchwerk before Kuan got any lvl 80 epics at all, and once on Rasuvious when he ended up casting Chain Heal more than any damage spells, becuase the priest on the raid couldn't see the DOT debuff.

Anyways, now I expect raids Kuan is in to kill things even faster, so he's even less likely to run out of mana. But, we'll see and I'll respec points into it if that's a problem.

Thwardted Destiny is going to try 10-man Sarth with a drake up tomorrow. Let's see how the build works then.

first, some catching up.

Tylara has finally gotten her Armorsmithing done! She is now 244 BS. 6 more points and she will be on Thorium. She is also level 57. 58, and she can go into Outland, the land of no Thorium. Well, damn.

Our plan to resolve this is to do what I did with Eeyan long ago. We will get Tylara and Kairon to 58, questing in EPL, and they shall quest in Outland. When we are not actively playing them, and are instead working on Kuan and Viljo dailies and whatnot, we will park them in Cenarion Hold and swap every 20 minutes or so, and Tylara will hit the hives for the Thorium veins.

Speaking of EPL, our plan for this evening will be to use Kuan and Viljo to escort Tylara, Mornara, Kairon, and Ikoli through Strat enough to get the Scourge Data quest done and the AD trinket appropriate for their class. The tanks will also get the Key to the City. I'm not sure, right now, which version of the AD trinket is good for Tylara, [Rune of the Dawn] or [Seal of the Dawn]

Also speaking of dailies, Kuan and Viljo are now Friendly with Sons of Hodir. They need to get to Honored becuase Kuan got [Mantle of Discarded Ways] yesterday. I'm not sure if I should wait to get them to Honored or blow 8 [Fel Armament] for the shoulder enchant. Honestly, I'm inclined to just wait. The shoulder enchant won't help with the lost hit and the stats beat the T5 shoulders even without the gems and enchant.

The Craft of War: BLIND

I'm pretty sure that this is what every rogue wishes they could actually do...


The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

I hate the queue

I hate the queue, very very much. It wouldn't be so bad, if I didn't get disconnected while in it. Then I have to restart my queueing process. :(

Stupid queue.

meanwhile, Naxx!

One of the tanks in Thwarted Destiny is in India on business and can't make regular raid times. So, he got his act together, logged in quite early Sunday (IST), and organized what was for us a Saturday night 25-man Naxx pug. It was Kuanchichi's first time in Naxx at all and well, whoa.

There's very little trash, it feels like you just go from boss to boss. I guess they culled out the trash in an effort to streamline it for 10-man runs. But a lot of the participants in the raid were from top-notch guilds so we cleared two wings (Arachnid and Plague) even with Kuan's crappy DPS (which nonetheless was better than the balance druid in my group). Kuan ended up getting two of the drops: an offspec mace that went to free rolls, [Angry Dread], and an onspec ring, [Seized Beauty]. The ring is so good he was able to vendor a couple blue rings he'd been carrying around.

Yesterday Kuan and Viljo got into a Thwarted Destiny guild run of 10-man Naxx. The raid leadership decided, probably for optimized loot distribution, to do the harder wings first, so we immediately went to Patchwerk. The problem was, at least 4 people in the raid, including one of the tanks, hadn't seen the fights at all, so after 6 hours we'd cleared the Construct wing and done the first boss on Military. However that boss also dropped the ele shaman bracers, [Iron Rings of Endurance], which Kuan happily equipped in place of his lvl 70 badged bracers, woot. Perhaps in the future Kuan's DPS will be slightly less crappy! A little while later I messed with Kuan's heal outfit and realized that those bracers are also better healy bracers than the leather ones Kuan had. So, two onspec items translated into replacing 4 slots of gear. Yay bag space.

As for Viljo - yes, Viljo went on a guild run with Thwarted Destiny, Clara gquit Darkfall Saturday night! Whoa! And Viljo got his goofy T7 shoulders out of the guild run too, as well as a glove upgrade from the 25-man pug. I don't have the links for those, Clara will have to edit the post and add them in later.

Anyhow, a coworker pointed out to me today in email, that since Kuan and Viljo are attuned for Naxx out of LHC, the AD Naxx quest chains are available, starting with Echoes of War. We will go pick that up tonight so that any future Naxx runs will contribute to completion, even if there are hardly any trash mobs there.

Glyph

I was thinking that I was perhaps too hasty to call Holyharry "the suck" in the earlier post about Gundrak. I mean, it's possible that the knockback messed everything up for him. And that is why Rahlenti kept dying. But that still doesn't excuse the lack of renew.

This screen shot was taken last night, Jan 2, 2009. As you can see it's been a whole week since he bought the glyph of renew which makes renew heal more but have one fewer ticks. So clearly he knows that renew is actually important to have on the tank. He just failed at doing so. :(

Do NOT mess with Sylvanas

I've always wanted to see what would happen once Sylvanas was engaged in battle. Years ago, when we saw an attack on Undercity in the World Defense channel we'd station a guildie in the throne room to report if they made it so we could all come help (and, of course, see).


Well, an Alliance raid made it into the throne room tonight. Let's just say there's no end to her adds, and her proclamation is "Let None Survive!"

And thus it was.

Heroics

Kuan and Viljo did a bumch of heroics yesterday. We did Utgarde Keep, Gundrak, Halls of Lightening, and the first boss in Old Kingdom.

Utgarde Keep and Gundrak Rahlenti tanked for us. So Utgarde Keep was quite smooth. Gundrak, however, we had possibly the worst priest in Darkfall, Holyharry, healing. He died 15+ times in that instance. And one of our wipes on the last boss, was just dumb. Rahlenti died more than 5 secs after the last heal on him. No renew, no PoM. I mean really, how hard is it to figure out to keep a renew on the tank all the time when the boss has a habit of punting? Not hard. Argh, anyway, I'm glad we did Gundrak, it was fun, but Holyharry is the suck. :(

Later in the evening, after we had opened up the Ebon Blade quartermaster and flight point, we decided to do Halls of Lightening. We managed to pug up a group, and did it. It's a really pretty instance! The fights are rather interesting, though I still don't know what I'm supposed to do as a mage for the second boss and his adds. Loken himself is really annoying. I'd end up either running not far enough and getting toasted by the aoe, or running too far and getting smashed by his aura before I could get back in range. So our pally healer, who was very well geared, managed to heal us all while we stayed in for the explode. Because of the no running we burned Loken down in less than 2 mins and got the achievement for that too. :D

Old World Raiding

New Year's Eve, no one is really going to do any serious raiding. So Kuan and Viljo got pulled into a aq40 raid. Back in the day q40 was the shit. When level cap was only 60, for a while it was the highest end raid in the game. But Kuan and Viljo were not in a raiding guild at that time, so they never actually got to see the inside of it.

Turns out that at level 80 the place is pretty much a cakewalk. The only hard parts were the last two bosses, the Twin Emperors and C'thun. We wiped once on each of those, mostly because we didn't get the fights fully explained until they were already in progress, and that's no time to actually expect people to pay attention to the raid chat.

Anyway one of the things that C'Thun drops is Eye of C'Thun. This starts a quest. Viljo won the roll! And then I found out that the quest will eventually turn in at Anachronos, in Tanaris. BUT you can't turn it in until you're friendly with him! Viljo is 7560/36000 Hated. Hated!! OMG, if I ran aq40 every week for a couple of months I might be able to get to friendly and be able to turn in that quest. >.<

But hey, we killed C'Thun. :D

more on Raid Frames

sRaidFrames did not do what I wanted so I ditched it. I tried xPerl and it does do what I want, and then some.

My test raid to try this out? New Year's Eve AQ40 run with roughly 28 lvl 80s. Since I've never seen the inside of AQ40 before, of course I forgot to take even a single screenshot. I spent a lot of the first part rearranging frames, so I'll leave it to Clara to make a post about our AQ40 run.

So far I like it. The player/target/party frames are very similar to Perl Classic, unsurprisingly.

If I get everything tweaked just right, and I see no reason why I would not, I will have less screenspace for raid frames, party frames, and can ditch both Perl Classic and oRA2, which has made me less than happy since 3.0 dropped.

Of course that means I need to set up Eeyan's raid frames all over again. I have Ikoli and Tylara set up based on Kuan's. I would probably set up Eeyan's and base the other toons on that. Tylara, I'm not sure how hers should be. Does a tank care about sorting raid frames by class? What if the tank is a pally?

World Server is Down

...what a misnomer, actually. What it really means is: the continent server is down, if you want to play log in somewhere else. Which is really becuase: the New Years' football games are over and everyone and their dad is logged into Northrend.

So, Kuan and Viljo are... parked in Dalaran maybe? And we've been working on Kairon and Tylara, clearing annoying collection quests in Burning Steppes.

It's late enough that soon we'll switch back...