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.