Macro it!

Mornara killed Ultraxion for the first time tonight on Normal mode. It was a pretty fun fight, though there is really no room for error in there. Well, there is room for one error, as long as it can be fixed by a speedy battle res. But in general it was a fun fight. I liked it a hell of a lot more than Zon'ozz, who I now refer to as the ping pong boss from hell. But that's a post for another time.

It was not Darkfall's first time killing Ultraxion, but only about half of us had killed him before. So there was some learning to be done. Fortunately I had some good advice from DraNgNon, who had killed him before on normal mode.

I'm embarrassed to admit that several of the wipes were my own fault, either from not staying in for Hour of Twilight, or not getting out for Fading Light. However I was having a very hard time making sure that I clicked the button at the right time. I mouse with my right hand, and also hit my Vent talk button with the right hand as well. And doing both of those at the same time to call out the bad stuff was not working for me.

So I remembered the cardinal rule of tanking. The cardinal rule of playing WoW. The rule that underlies all the other stuff you need to do: Keybind! Keybind your abilities, but especially keybind your cooldowns. And if Heroic Will isn't a (fight specific) cooldown, I just don't know what is.

/click ExtraActionButton1

So, keybind that sucker: make a macro and put it on a action bar. Once I did that we got him on the next try.

Granpa Deathwing

hi everyone, sorry for the long hiatus.

Today, the New York Times has an article discussing the upcoming release on Star Wars: The Old Republic and its impact on Wow. The writer has been playing both games quite a bit lately and has some rather insightful commentary. He doesn't think the games will really fight for players, although I disagree, since not everyone who plays MMORPG has unlimited time and funds.

Anyhow it mentions the time and effort BioWare has put in making the voice acting and visuals slick for SW:TOR, which makes the text-base questgiver interactions in Wow seem clunky. The article also points out that Wow has lost 2 million players - 2 million!!! - since Cataclysm came out.

Partway through the article, it has this fabulous picture of Deathwing.



whoa! hey whoa! that's not what Deathwing looks like when I see him, every damn time I log into the game. what I see is Granpa with ill fitting dentures, not mighty scary dragon as above.



wait, wait. those two images are the same exact scene. I bet that Wow wouldn't lose nearly so many players, if the first picture really was what we saw in the game.

and before anyone thinks, well that's just not possible with the graphics maybe they haven't looked at SW:TOR after all. or even Rift.

Tired

Perhaps now isn't a great time to be making this post. Perhaps I should wait until I'm calmer and in a more reasonable state of mind. Perhaps if I were able to chill the fuck out enough to do that I wouldn't need to make this post at all.

However it is not the case that I am calm. It is not the case that I am feeling reasonable.

Let me say it again: I AM NOT CALM.

I'm tired, sick and fucking tired, of having people second guess every single raid call I make. I'm unhappy to hear that people aren't enjoying the raids. Especially since the people complaining most loudly are actually the ones causing the raids to be so excruciating. And I can not stand it when no matter what strategy I use for a fight someone doesn't like it. Often the same someone who whined about the original strategy until I changed it to the new one.

It saps my will to lead raids when I hear that the guild raids suck, or are run badly, or use strategies that are terrible. Fuck, it saps my will to play at all, when I get constantly get told how terribly hostile the guild is by the very person who is making it such a hostile environment to begin with.

Sadly, I'm not drunk and won't post this to the guild boards. But I'm having a really hard time looking forward to my imminent guild leadership with any thing other than horror.

Vile of the Sands

Kalimdor Archaeology. it is so dead boring. and yet that is what Kuan is stuck doing, waiting for queues to pop for arena, battlegrounds, waiting for raids to form and parties to be ready. becuase Kuan is an Alchemist, and he needs Vile of the Sands.

did I mention how boring it was yet? one can't get all the spiffy Archaeology achieves, those mostly require going across all the continents. but the goal is to get as many Tol'vir Dig sites as one can get. and those are only in Kalimdor.

Kuan's gotten 3 Canopic Jars so far, but no recipe, only mummified guts. on the other hand, he picked up [Ring of the Boy Emperor] early on, and now, a scepter which I really thought was going to be some BoA wand.

but nooOOooo:


And here I thought having a Red one was cool.

Cultists and Elementals

These two short scenes are how I think Mornara dealt with the the elemental invasion ahead of the Shattering. I wrote them almost a year ago, but never got around to posting them. Ah well, better late than never.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cultists wandered the streets of Orgrimmar. Grim orcs in robes gathered in the shadows to preach death, destruction, and despair. Death by fire and earth, wind and water.

Mornara strode by, her armor clanking only a small amount. Cult of the Damned or Twilight's Hammer Cultists, all of them were far too in love with death. She smiled grimly, well, with the idea of death anyway. She couldn't see a difference in goals between either cult. So she was on her way to report to someone who would let her help clean the current crop of them up.

Mornara frowned. "Stupid idiots, the whole lot of them." Having just finished with the Scourge and the Lich King in Northrend she wasn't sure what these stupid cultists were afraid of. Yes, there had been some earthquakes, and bunches of elementals appearing here and there. But with the war in Northrend finished, aside from cleanup actions, there were plenty of soldiers back in Kalimdor to keep it all in check.

Some of the followers gathered around a shadowy preacher flinched aside as she stomped past. Mornara sneered at them; never mind that the orc they were listening to was ranting about the world breaking in fire, they were afraid of a single death knight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The shock traveled up Mornara's arms as she parried yet another strike from the gigantic earth elementals in front of her. Her arms were numbed just enough that she couldn't move fast enough to dodge the next blow. Mornara roared in pain and anger as a stone arm of one elemental smashed into her shoulder. It didn't dent her armor, but she felt the muscle in her shoulder pull and perhaps tear as the rock and stone landed on her.

But before her roar of pain finished echoing she felt a druid's spell wrapping around the torn muscles. Energy soaked into her shoulder like the warmth of a summer day spent lying on the grass under a tree. The pain left her shoulder and Mornara was able to parry the next blow from the elemental in front of her.

Out of the corner of her eye Mornara saw one of the elementals peel off following the path of a bright chain lightning strike. The elemental was headed towards a figure surrounded by balls of lightning. As the troll shaman raised his shield and prepared to fend of the elemental Mornara saw it was Kuanchichi. She yelled to attract the elemental's attention, and sent an orb of shadow streaking into its body. Fortunately the elemental decided that Kuan was less interesting and came back to hit Mornara. But before it reached her Kuan cast a huge gout of fire and lava and the elemental crumbled at Mornara's feet. Kuan gave Mornara a tusk-filled grin and started firing lightning bolts at the next closest elemental.

"Damn elementals," muttered Mornara under her breath as she cast an area of disease on the ground and all the earth elementals got even angrier at her.

Machinanima Idea

I've had the song "The Last One Alive" by VAST stuck in my head for a while now. Perhaps because I only have a few albums ripped into my work laptop and since I like it it keeps coming up in the mixes. It's actually a pretty good song, and one that I can fool myself into thinking I sound ok when I sing along with.

I think that this would make great theme music for a Death Knight video. Start out with a recently rolled DK and use shots from the starting area and then shots from ICC and specifically the Frozen Throne where you fight Arthas.

Vast - The Last One Alive

There’s a place not that far from here,
where people go when their dreams have died.
As I walk from its faceless streets
I must be the last one alive.

Start out with your DK in the later phased sections of the DK starting area, so that everything is dead and ruined and empty.

Where are you?
You're not with me.
Numb my mind with this fantasy,
watching people live and die on screen.
Where are you?
You’re not with me.
Where are you?
I'm free.

From there cut to the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel, specifically the sections where Arthas beats up Darion Mograine and then gets chased off.

You left me high and dry; it changed me.
You lied to me, now I am angry.
And if the sun comes in your room
and awakes you from your vanity
you won't find me cause I’ll be atop a mountain
Pissing on your grave

After that go back to the Dk starting area, but earlier, so there are some terrified Scarlet peasants running around. And have a Valkyr resurrecting the protagonist DK.

There’s a place from where I just arrived
and I escaped the last one alive

Where are you?
You’re not with me
where are you?
I’m free.

Have your DK walking out of either Zul'drak or Naxx with lots of dead scourge in the background.

You left me high and dry; it changed me.
You lied to me, now I am angry.
And if the sun comes in your room
and awakes you from your vanity
you won't find me cause I’ll be atop a mountain
Pissing on your grave

And end with a carefully cropped set of shots of the DK standing over a dead Arthas. (Carefully cropped so kill stealer Tirion isn't there.)


I don't think I have the tools or artistic ability to get this done right (or at all), but if someone wants to do it I'd be happy to volunteer Mornara's likeness for the protagonist DK. :)

Mailbox Dancing

Ohhhh Myyy. (said like George Takei)

I just realized what outfit Telt will be wearing once Transmogrification comes out. Oh, yes.

Long, long ago Telt made an outfit. I'm not sure what I was thinking. It did take some work to get the pattern for Red Winter Clothes, so it could have been after that. Possibly it was when she got a hold of the Crimson Felt Hat from level 60 dead side of Stratholm.

Regardless, my snooty blood elf priest has an outfit called Mailbox Dancing.

Yes, you read that correctly. Hey, a young blood elf sometimes makes decisions that weren't the wisest at the time. Bloodthistle is not cheap, and a girl's gotta make ends meet somehow.

I'M SO CALM

So there is a legendary for the 4.2 patch and Firelands. It's a caster dps staff. It has lore for the blue dragon aspect, as well as being a stupendouslu awesome dps weapon.

It requires a lot of effort from a whole guild to make. There are at least 3 big collection quest stages where you only get boss drops. There are a few solo sections, some lore-ish and some actually challenging. And there is a boss that takes a raid to kill.

We'd chosen a mage to get this staff first. It wasn't perhaps a well thought out choice, but he was actually in the raids when we started getting the first quest item drops. I accept responsibility for that ill-thought out and foolish choice.

Tonight that mage gquit.

The legendary is roughly 2/3 done.

I am ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS. I managed to keep my calm and get the raid going tonight, but most of the time I wasn't talking on Vent I was saying "fucking ******".

Perhaps it wasn't explicitly stated when he initially got the first quest items, but I thought there was some sort of agreement whereby the guild worked to get him the staff and he stayed in the guild, at the least until the staff was finished.

I want to be absolutely clear here. It's ok to leave a guild if you're not happy in it. If you don't fit in it's far better to leave before you cause trouble. However, it is NOT ok to get a guild's help for what is basically a group quest credited to one person, and then bail before finishing all of the quest. Especially when only one person can get the quest items at a time. If you're not in it for the long haul you should not be trying to complete a legendary.

Also the circumstance of his gquit are enraging.

He'd been busy on our first raid night of the week, and had missed killing the first 4 bosses of FL. Tonight he wanted to bring his rogue alt, because his mage was saved and he wanted to make sure that his mage got all the quest items he could for the week. Officers said ok, but we're going to bring mains before we bring your alt. Now, because we had to work around him it took us some time to get the raid set up. We had 2 spots open and were about to bring his rogue alt in when I don't even know what he was angry about but he gquit all his toons.

Just fucking like that.

We weren't willing to blindly gear up his rogue and so he took the guilds hard work and ran off with it.

Fuck I am so angry.



****** No, I'm not going to give out his name. I'm sure if you want to figure it out you can, but I'm not going to give it to you.

Attack on Taurajo

I have been leveling Khyrie in Kalimdor. With all the leveling speed buffs and doing an instance every so often I've been doing green quests almost all of the time. However, I really wanted to see as much of the post-Cataclysm quests as I could.

There have been some really good changes to the way that many of the zones were upgraded and streamlined. A fair amount of it sadly feels on rails, but the new quests in general are interesting and entertaining. However, the Southern Barrens really just ripped my heart out.

What used to be the single big rolling plain of the Barrens, is now split in half by a huge and horrible lava filled cleft. The Northern Barrens remain similar to what they used to be: a relatively safe area where the Horde is carving out a place to live in Kalimdor. However the Southern Barrens are drastically changed.

In particular I almost cried when I saw that Taurajo was a burned ruin filled with looters.

There are several quests to go back to Taurajo from the refugee camp to the north. Someone wants you to kill looters, but Winnoa Pineforest wants you to Honor the Dead. You've got to take a Tauren funerary totem and place it by the dead bodies of four Tauren who stayed behind in Taurajo to make sure that others escaped.


Omusa's Spirit says: No, stay with the others. Escort them north, away from the fighting. I will stay here with the wyvern and cover your escape. Go!
Omusa's Spirit says: ...wait, is it over? I've been run through... Ah. Of course. I understand now. I am expected elsewhere.
(Then Omusa's spirit flies off on a spectral wyvern.)


Drahn's Spirit says: I can feel the embrace now of all living things, the Earthmother's eternal peace. Thank you.


Krulmoo's Spirit says: I ran to wake the others up when the attack hit. Were they able to escape? I tried to fight the soldiers off with a skinning knife...


Yonada's Spirit says: Alliance - they've surrounded the camp! What are they doing here? Why are they attacking Taurajo? Get the children - run! RUN!

I was deeply saddened by the destruction of Taurajo and the sacrifice of the Tauren that I eulogized. I'm not ashamed to admit that Khyrie slaughtered as many Looters as she could find.

Making Bank

For a long time Lithui, my little blood elf paladin, was our banker. He is still currently GM of <Bank of Balou>.



But he's transferred his banking duties over to Nivki, my little goblin rogue. She has that fabulous Goblin racial for discounts on everything. So Nivki is scanning the AH, and listing Ikoli's glyphs and selling random crap that is in our bank.

Possibly I shall enlist DraNgNon's help to transfer GM from Lithui to Nivki.

Karazhan: Shade of Aran

Shade of Aran is roughly the 8th boss in Karazhan. Order depends on if you kill him or Illhoof first. We would usually kill him before Illhoof, because once he's dead you can port up to Aran's room from the front door.


Shade of Aran yells: Please, no more! My son... he's gone mad!
On engagement Shade tries to pawn us off with (true) accusations about his son.

Shade of Aran yells:I am not some simple jester! I am Nielas Aran!
Shade of Aran begins channeling his mana into a powerful arcane spell.

Shade of Aran says: I'm not finished yet! No, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve...
Here is where Aran summons four water elementals.

Shade of Aran yells: At last the nightmare is over...
I often felt a bit bad for killing him, but at level this was such an annoying fight. It was entirely too easy for someone with too much lag or twitchy fingers to wipe the raid during the Fire Wreath.


I'm sure I'm missing a few of his speeches since we killed him so fast. But the general idea is there. Shade is a mage boss, and does lots of magey things.

Bat!

Khyrie reached level 60 a few weeks ago. And shortly after that she went back to Orgrimmar to visit the nice Troll cat druid who explained a few things from the Loas. Most notably there was an explanation of flight form!

The Loas gift the trolls with a bat form! Because it's only regular flying the bat is just a bat, with no fancy armor.
But still! BAT!



Watch out! I'ma bat! I've got rabies and I'll bite you!
But I'm also a druid so I can heal you too!

Garrosh's Horde

Bit of a spoiler for Southern Barrens here.
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Basically you've got the old commander who isn't making any progress defending or taking back the territory that the Alliance took during the actual Cataclysm. So the new commander is coming in to get things going.



So what happened here is that Gar'dul asked you to meet him up in a tower, hoping to get rid of you and the new commander before he was "officially" replaced. However this didn't work out for him. Between your character and Bloodhilt, Gar'dul was pretty handily defeated. And Bloodhilt, well, he threw out the old commander, literally, using a window.

Khyrie was a little bit shocked by this. She is a druid and they do try to strive for some sort of balance. Now Gar'dul had tried to kill her and Bloodhilt, so she wasn't too sad to see him go face first into the ground below that tower. But still "Garrosh's Horde" didn't leave that great a taste in her mouth.

Molten Front Dailies and Quest Design

The 4.2 patch was a while ago, however, Mornara and Kuanchichi have still not completed the Molten Front dailies. Mostly because they are dead boring, and the rest of the game is a lot more fun to do. Those quests are so repetitive and anything new adds on to the very end of the sequence of quests.

Blizzard for some foolish reason decided to make the Molten Front Dailies a giant quest chain that you have to repeat every day. You can't skip the horrible and tedious Wisp Away quest when it is up, not unless you don't want to do the rest of the quests that follow it. Also, is it really the case that the Druids of the Talon and the Shadow Wardens are so completely incompetent that they lose ground every single day and we have to help them retake it?

I think that the cause of all this misguided chain of daily quests is due to Blizzard learning exactly the wrong thing from the Death Knight starting area in Wrath.

See, the Death Knight starting area is quite well done. You wake up a slave of the Lich King and he and his lieutenants send you to do stuff. You get one or occasionally two quests at the same time, and until you do those quests you don't get to do anything else. It is extremely linear, but that's ok, because you're a slave of the Lich King. You have no free will. LK says jump, while in the air you ask how high. LK says kill peasants: you get evil encouraging whispers as they die. Eventually the Death Knights are released from his control, but up until then any Death Knight is on a straight and narrow path of doing exactly what they are told.

But in the Cataclysm expansion Blizzard decided that they wanted to take more advantage of their fabulous phasing technology. This is fine on the surface of it, but it has led to very linear story lines. There are usually a couple of paths to take, but they all ended up at the same exact place eventually. For example in Mt Hyjal, you can do the 4 ancients in whatever order you want, but you have to rescue all four of them before you can move on to the next part of Hyjal. Unfortunately every Cata zone is like that. There are few to zero side quests that are in there for fun or randomness or to help flesh out the world. Everything is all about YOU the HERO coming to save things.

I really wish that for the next expansion (Mists of Pandaria or whatever it is) Blizzard goes back to their older style of questing where things were a lot less linear. But especially I want any daily quests to not be some sort of linear chain of painfulness.

PvP Update

Kuan and Mornara continue with the PvP.


We've apparently been doing a fair amount of it. 25,000 conquest points is not an insignificant achievement. And i think we're both at the point where we have no more armor to buy with honor points. So we're doing BGs but mostly because we want the daily 25 conquest points from them, and they have achieves. :D


What type of a name is "Plaguecruncher"? I suppose it at least references the fact that Mornara is unholy when she has a named ghoul and is doing lots of diseasing.


Also, if I can manage to pull the opposing team off of Kuan, the ele shaman is a beast in the arena. This fight they foolishly went after me first.


Braingobbler is a name much more likely to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. We're going to slaughter you in the arena and then my ghoul is going to eat your brains!

Moat Monster!

As I've said before Patch 4.2 added new cooking and fishing dailies in Undercity and Thunder Bluff. There are some excellent ones that are both poignant and funny, but my favorite by far is Moat Monster!



It combines a few of the previous cooking quests in UC into a most awesome fishing quest.









Making fun of the Aliance never gets old. ;D

This week in Raiding

This week the Firelands nerfs hit pretty hard. A week ago Darkfall was at 4/7, and we'd only killed Shannox and Rhyolith on 25man. By the end of last night we were 6/7.

On Tuesday we had 22 DF people in the raid suddenly. I'd like to think that all of this was due to the super recruitment efforts of everyone, and for sure we did have a bunch of new people show up. However, the suspicious part of me also considers that some people were motivated to show by news of the nerfs.

Anyway, my suspicions aside, we had a very awesome raiding week. That first night we killed Shannox, Rhyolith, and Beth pretty handily. Our only slowness was due to having to pug a few people in, and to needing to swap people around later in the evening. We even had time for a few pulls on Baelroc.

Thursday we killed Baleroc and then Alysrazor. Despite about half of the raid not having seen Aly before and all of us having to learn the fight together as a 25man we still killed Aly the first night we actually saw her on 25man.

As a side note, my new trick for getting the raid to kill stuff is to tell them not to worry about dps and just focus on getting the mechanic down. It worked like a charm for Bael.



In preparation for Sunday night I watched both the Majordomo and Ragnaros fights. But honestly I figured we'd be really lucky if we got Domo down. The mechanics are deceptively simple, and it's one of those fights were one person can easily wipe the whole thing.

At raid time last night we had 25 people on and ready, plus a few more people who logged on after we'd started. It was fortunate we had some extras, because we needed to make some replacements as the evening wore on and a thunderstorm took out one person's connection while general lag/bad connection from Australia took out another person's.

We killed Domo on the last pull of the night. It was the thirteenth pull. Again it was our first night of seeing the fight as a group, or for most people, seeing the fight ever. And given that and how unforgiving some of his mechanics can be I'm super proud of how well we did. Really, when I think of how long it took to kill Lurker or Leo or Yogg or the Lich King, I'm absolutely awesomely impressed with us. I am super proud of Darkfall for getting to 6/7.



***
All that said, there was a lot of tension in and after the raid last night.

There has been a tendency in the last couple of our raids for people to argue about strategy on vent. I and others have suggested that people keep it to whispers. However either way, there are a lot of people with their own ideas on what we'll be doing. This is fine, I like suggestions. I like that people are engaged. But I want to keep vent clear. And I don't always see or have time to respond to all the whispers I get.

*I am not going to change what the raid is doing every single time someone has a new suggestion*

*I* am running the raid. The officers are helping me. As raid leader it is my job to delegate and get input to determine what we'll be doing. I need to work on delegation, but in general things are NOT going to be improved by changing them every pull. Darkfall is not a bad guild, but we're not world or server first guild either. And I'm sorry, but we have a variety of skill levels present in the raid. Darkfall has never used the cookie cutter strategy for our kills, we don't usually have the "ideal" raid composition to do so anyway. So we try and fail and progress until we've got our own strategy that works for *us*.

We have made phenomenal progress in Firelands, and I'm sad for anyone who isn't proud of that.

Firelands: Lord Rhyolith dialogue

Lord Rhyolith is the 3rd boss that Darkfall killed in the Firelands. He is a gigantic fire elemental who lives on an island surrounded by magma.

Rhyolith has two phases. For the first phase Rhyolith doesn't care about the raid. He just starts walking to the magma and once he gets to it will drink and then kill the raid with fiery death. The raid has to steer him away from the magma by hitting his right and left leg. He's also stomping which creaties volcanoes and spawns adds. So the melee is steering Rhyolith over active volcanoes to reduce his armor and the ranged is killing the adds. Rhyolith also causes the craters of the volcanoes he stomped on to erupt spewing lines of magma all over the place.

Phase two happens when Rhyolith gets down to 25% health. He breaks his remaining armor and goes all molten. If he hasn't been steered over enough active volcanoes by this point and still has any of his damage reduction buff you're going to die horribly.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Hah? Hruumph? Soft little fleshy-things? Here? Nuisances, nuisances!
Lord Rhyolith yells: I'll crush you underfoot!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Buuurrrnn!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Succumb to living flame.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Sear the flesh from their tiny frames!


Lord Rhyolith yells: Oh you little beasts...
Lord Rhyolith yells: Succumb to living flame.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Stomp now.
Lord Rhyolith yells: Graaahh!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Buuurrrnn!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Augh - smooshy little pests, look what you've done!


Lord Rhyolith yells: Oww now hey.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Eons I have slept undisturbed... Now this... Creatures of flesh, now you will BURN!
Once you've got him to 25%, and his armor is off you're mostly home free.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Uurrghh now you... you infuriate me.
Well home free unless you've taken too long and he superheats, which will wipe you.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Broken. Mnngghhh... broken...


The above shot is our first 25man kill and below is our first official 10man kill.

Poshken's Ring

With patch 4.2 a number of daily random fishing and cooking quests were added to Thunder Bluff and Undercity. Some of these are hilarious and some of them are sad.

One of the fishing quests in Thunder Bluff has you going to the caves in TB and helping one of the undead there who has lost a ring. Since it is a fishing quest you fish until you've caught a bloated fish that, coincidentally enough, has eaten the ring.


So here is this undead who has a ring that he offers a reward for, but he can't remember how he got it or why he keeps it?


I read that quest text and looked at the ring and almost cried. Poor Poshken.

Roach Coach

4.1 added a whole new set of cooking and fishing quests in Thunder Bluff and Undercity. The Undercity cooking quests are all about finding something for the Kor'kron Overseers to eat.



If you stick around a bit after turning in the quest you'll see some actual Kor'kron coming to get the (in?)famous Three-Spice Crunchy Stew.


Hungry Overseer (1) says: Aren't you worried about what's IN that?
Hungry Overseer (2) says: Not at all! If my gut could take three years of Razor Hill barrack's Stinky Cactus Grub Soup, a bowl of roaches isn't going to kill me.
Hungry Overseer (1) says: Roaches?! They wouldn't! Would they...? That's disgusting.
Hungry Overseer (2) says: HAH HAH HAH! Enjoy your stale rations, then. This slop's delicious.

It amused me that when I did this on Mornara both of the Overseers were female orcs.

up through Lich King

after an entirely too long hiatus from working on this stuff, I have uploaded all pre-wow 3.0 screenshots I had, and am working on the 3.0, pre-Lich King shots. here they are. I wonder if I shouldn't just put a permalink on the LHS of this blog.

doing this reminds me I should be more mindful of screenshot opportunities as I play in Cataclysm. they can't all be achieves, boss kills, and stupid things people say in chat.

Lifeblood, Berserking, Elemental Mastery

So, I am an idiot.

Here's Kuan's Chain Lightning macro. It's set this way so I don't blow a substantial percentage of the Berserking buff waiting on the GCD of an instant cast (proc'd by the Elemental Mastery). Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst are similarly macro'd.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/castsequence [combat] reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning

I totally spaced on how Lifeblood was a 20s buff of 480 haste with a 2m cooldown.

Berserking is still a 3m cooldown.

Elemental Mastery is 3m too, but subject to Feedback, which reduces its cooldown by 3 seconds every time.

I messed with putting the sequence with Lifeblood in between there, and tried it on a heroic dummy just to watch the result, and was unpleased. That setup really doesn't work too well, since the cast sequence will "stick" on the spell that isn't on cooldown.

So, I'm going to unwind the cast sequence. It'll blow a portion the Berserking at first pull but it won't really matter, the GCD is also hastened.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Lifeblood
/cast Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning


Kel'thuzad

Last night a bunch of us Darkfall people did our usual Monday night fun run. Yesterday's destination was Naxxramas 25, and associated achieves.

Most people were missing a fair number of achieves. In fact Mornara hadn't even completed Naxx on 25man ever before. So there was much achievement dinging through the evening.



The above picture includes Morn (tanking), Vikai and Earthen meleeing the boss, and Kuan and Klasky (Klasky and a mirror image?) off to the right attacking from range.

After we'd killed Kel'Thuzad we headed over to slaughter Sartherion and then Malygos. And it turns out that Malygos once again drops blue and Azure drakes. So we'll be hitting my Malygos on a regular basis for that drake.

Venn Diagrams

I am usually amused by a clever Venn Diagram. I try to find where I fit in the picture.


WoW Venn Diagrams I try to actually stand in the best spot. The location of most overlapping healing goodnesses and least boss bad-on-the-ground.


Sometimes this is easier than other times, but no matter what it's important to try. But as a tank I sure do love all the overlapping healing that I can just stand in and soak up.

Too Much to Drink

Khyrie might have had too much to drink while on the Speed Barge in Thousand Needles.


But hey! At least she got to barf on a gnome!

Firelands: Beth'tilac dialogue

Continuing my series of dialogue from the Firelands bosses we killed Beth'tilac the other night.

Seeing as Beth is a giant horrible spider she doesn't actually say anything. She just sits on her web for a while and sends lots of smaller spiders of varying sizes at the raid. After a while she deigns to drop down and try to burn the raid with her fiery spiderness.

Fortunately the raid is not quite as flammable as giant horrible spider would like.

Summer Doldrums, Lord Rhyolith, and Guild Administrivia

Summer Doldrums

Darkfall is deep in the summer doldrums. We usually have anywhere from 14 to 18 people on on a raid night, however roughly 4 or 5 of them are not going to come to a raid, either due to lack of level or gear or interest.

So the tentative plan we've got is to pug to fill a 25man on Tuesday, see how many we've got on Thursday, and do a 10 on Sunday. Last night was Sunday so with only 15 people interested in coming to the raid and only 3 heals and 1 tank in that group we went with a 10man.

I have to say that it was excruciating to have to pick and choose who to bring to the raid. I did my best to fill the raid with raiders and get a good class balance. Unfortunately that left out several people that either I'd really have liked to bring or who will be quite grumpy about not being there or both. I'm not looking forward to dealing with the drama from that, but I need to remember that I'm Here to Kill Dragons. And while I may want to keep people happy my *job* is to lead the raid to victory and shiny purples. Hellshot can soothe the ruffled feathers. (Sorry to throw you to the wolves Hellshot.)

That said, over the past couple of days we had 4 people leave the guild. And then Hellshot and I booted all their alts. So the guild info log looks pretty bad, but it's just 4 mains leaving. I'm always sad to see people leave, but of those 4 people I'm not actually sure that we're going to miss any of them as a raid.

Lord Rhyolith

So Sunday night we went into FL10, and actually did a fabulous job. Shannox was already down from Tuesday night. I think we were all a little bit burned from wiping so much on Beth'tilac (also on Tuesday), so we headed to Lord Rhyolith first.

We had a pretty good start, and once we worked through the add control, fire avoidance, and especially steering issues we got him down. I had been worried about the second phase, but once Rhyolith turned molten he seemed to fall over really fast.

I even remembered to take a screenshot this time.

After Rhyolith we headed over to Beth'tilac.

Poor Earthen, he really prefers to be boomkin, but with me the only tank in the raid he had to go bear for Beth and the trash leading up to that giant icky spider. It worked out pretty well though, he did a super job with the drones, keeping them in the corner and away from all the spiderlings. The rest of the bottom team was also fabulous with add control. And the top team still had the meteor avoiding dance down. I think it only took us 3 wipes to get Beth'tilac down. Two of those were web fails, and the third was spiderling fail. Once those were corrected Beth fell over pretty handily.

It was nice to end the raid on the high note of having killed two bosses in one night, especially when one of them was a new kill for us. Darkfall is officially 3/7 Firelands now. Only Shannox is a 25man kill, but I'm confident that when we actually have a full Darkfall raid in there the other bosses will be 25man kills as well.

Darkfall Officer Administrivia

I also need to make a few posts on the Darkfall forums.

One post with raider attendance requirements. I'll also try to stress that if we drop to 10man sometimes I'll try to fill the raid with an eye to raider rank, but that will come second to class balance. It's nice to bring all raiders, but we need healers and tanks along too. It's also important to make sure that we don't overstack a certain class, especially in 10man. And, of course, noting that everyone is welcome to sign up for the waitlist, especially if you were bumped from the raid due to space issues.

A second post saying that we're actually going to try to be disciplined with raid times. I think we can give ourselves a lot more time to work on the bosses, if I start raid invites at 8:45 and we plan to have the first pull at 9. Of course this means that *I* need to be home and ready to go at 8:45, which is not going to be easy.

A third post will deal with the way we're dealing with EPGP. I bumped the decay to 7% last night. There was a lot of discussion in gchat once I did that. I'm not sure that everyone understands how EPGP works. Regardless, it'll work a lot better once we start regularly killing bosses, and people stop worrying that the loot they see today is the last time they will ever see it.

A fourth post will announce how we're doing the Eternal Embers for the legendary caster staff. Currently they are going to the person in the raid with the highest number of embers. If there is a tie they will go to the higher rank person. I know several people were unhappy about that, but we do actually want someone to get the staff. And with anywhere from 1 to 3 embers dropping from bosses it won't take too long to get the first person their initial quest done.

Firelands: Shannox dialogue

Shannox is the first boss that Darkfall killed in Firelands. He's a big flamewalker (or fire naga as I say when my brain stops and my mouth keeps going) with two hellhound pets.

The basic strategy for killing Shannox is to have one tank for him and one for his dog Riplimb. Rageface, the third dog, will randomly attack people and needs to be focused down ASAP. Shannox will also drop traps on the raid and throw his spear for Riplimb to fetch. Riplimb needs to be kited over the crystal prison traps to freeze him so that tank debuffs can drop, and Rageface should be kited over the immolation traps for extra damage on him.


Shannox yells: Yes, I smell them too, Riplimb. Outsiders encroach on the Firelord's private grounds. Find their trail. Find them for me, that I may dispense punishment!

To get Shannox to spawn you have to kill a bunch of raid trash. Then he patrols around a fairly large area of the raid instance.


Shannox yells: A-hah! The interlopers! Kill them. EAT THEM!

Once you've actually pulled him though you've got to keep the group of them all fairly close together. Shannox and Riplimb will enrage if they are 60+ yards apart.


Shannox yells: Go for the throat!
Shannox yells: The Firelord will be most pleased!

Every so often Shannox will tell Rageface to eat someone's face. If that someone had done something like stand in an immolation trap or the healers weren't on top of their game you've now got a dead raider.


Shannox yells: Oh, you murderers! Why? Why would you kill such a noble animal?

Of course once you kill Rageface, Shannox is extra angry that you killed his dog.



Shannox yells: Riplimb! No... no! Oh, you terrible little beasts! HOW COULD YOU?!

And he gets even angrier when you kill Riplimb.


Shannox yells: Twist in flames, interlopers!
Shannox yells: Ohh... the pain. Lord of Fire, it hurts....



Darkfall's first kill was on 10 man, but we have now killed him on 25 as well. If the trapping of Riplimb doesn't go perfectly it can be really hard for tanks to drop their stacks of the nasty debuff without leaving the healers out of range.