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    For Saga: Barbarians on Utopian shores


    2011 - 04.18

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in A funny thing happened on the way to the PuG, Adventures in videogaming | 2 Comments »

    It’s Saga‘s one-year blogaversary and she’s been suggesting post topics for her readers. Here’s the topic she gave me:

    … since you’re into mysterious buttons and I know I’ve learned about some blog stuff from your site in the past. How about giving us a list of which blogging add-ons/tools you use/recommend and why? And if that topic is too boring, you can tell us what you do to keep positive when you feel frustrated after a bad day in WoW/a bad PUG. I know you live in PUG Utopia (lucky bum!), but surely you still run into them occasionally. You still seem very positive about the Pugging experience, so I’d love to hear more about it :)

    I don’t know if this counts as sneaky or cheating, but I’m going to answer both points as separate posts. ‘Giving each subtopic the full consideration it deserves’ or just ‘shameless padding’? Not sure, you decide! I thought I’d start with the second part — coping with bad pugs, or just a bad day in game — as I’ll need to think a little more about what to cover in the other.

    When the UDF fails me

    For me the first thing which keeps me calm in the face of idiocy is the thought “what have I lost?”

    If I’ve queued for a random then there weren’t sufficient guildies available to put together a guild group. So, without the help of the LFD tool, I would be completely unable to run a dungeon. Ok, ok, I could try to recruit people from tradechat, and I’ve seen people attempting to do just that. I normally relegate the global channels to their own (hidden) chat tab, so I’ve no idea how successful they are, but it *is* an option. But short of putting together a group the old-fashioned way, my options are “queue using the dungeon finder” or “don’t run a dungeon”.

    There are a bunch of reasons to run dungeons: for valour points (from heroic dungeons), for justice points, for gear drops, for reputation, for levelling XP, for fun. It seems possible  that too many people are neglecting that last item: fun. I *like* running dungeons. I like running dungeons on my levelling characters, especially in the 60-80 range. I like running dungeons on my 85s — it’s one of my favourite things to do in game. That’s not to say I’ve no interest in the rewards that come from dungeon running: Ano and Cent are chasing valour1 points, and Tremble still needs drops and JP gear from heroic instances, but I enjoy 5-man dungeon running as an activity, not just as a loot delivery system.

    Then there’s the question of “need”. If I don’t log in at all tonight, I won’t feel bad because Ano-the-paladin has missed out on 70 valour points. My guild isn’t the sort of guild where failing to acquire VPs from your daily heroic is considered bad form2. I guess my point here is that because I don’t feel like I *have* to complete a dungeon on every play session, if I do get a terrible terrible group, it’s disappointing but not horrifying.

    That also makes it relatively easy to deal with people who are obnoxious, as my worst-case scenario — I drop group and take a deserter debuff — doesn’t worry me.

    Finally, I try hard not to lose hope and get snippy. When we wipe to EncounterX’s PredictableMechanicY because the tank can’t be bothered to [sidestep/jump/turn and face away/sing the Botswana national anthem] to avoid it, I don’t scream about it. “Sorry, I just can’t heal through PredictableMechanicY :( All together now: Fatshe leno la rona, Ke mpho ya Modimo …” is often persuasion enough, and if the tank goes away thinking she carried me I won’t lose any sleep over it. When it becomes obvious that the not-a-word-since-the-helloes, minimally-geared DPSer doesn’t know the fights in this particular instance and is too shy/embarrassed/boneheaded to say so3 rather than railing at them for not speaking up when they had the chance,4 I just speed-type abbreviated encounter summaries, Gnomeaggedon-style. “I’ll cc the purple add. Sidestep out of the way of Blitz (it’s a charge attack). Kill the boss.” “Sidestep away from Binding Shadows. Stack up on the centre of shadow gale (big swirly thing). When the adds come, you and you take left as we look at the door, you and me take right.” Ok, maybe I’m a bit more wordy than Gnome. You’re shocked, I can tell.

    A bad day in WoW

    This one is thankfully much easier to deal with. If I’m having a bad day in WoW, I … go do something else for a bit. Obviously it’s not *quite* as straightforward as that — I don’t bail in the middle of a raid if I’m playing badly or annoyed with the healer — but generally speaking, if I’m not in the mood, I’m not in the mood. I can think of many more fun things to do than I can possibly find time for so it’s not difficult to go do something else instead.

    Failing that, you can always head to the blasted lands and murder a bunch of slave-driving nagas. Go on: do it for the murloc babies.

    Won't somebody please think of the children?

    Background for the above image shamelessly stolen from this post over at Revive & Rejuvenate. Angelya takes wonderful screenshots.

    Fatshe leno la rona,
    Ke mpho ya Modimo    Fatshe leno la rona,
    Ke mpho ya Modimo
    --
    1. Am I the only one who keeps seeing “valour points” as “velour points”? I keep wanting to exchange them for a fluffy bathrobe [↩]
    2. if anything, it could be argued we’re a little *too* relaxed at the moment, but that’s a topic for a different post! [↩]
    3. That doesn’t always surprise me. These days, there aren’t that many people who check whether all of the players in their party know the fights in the current dungeon, but so often when the question is asked, it’s done so in a way which positively discourages speaking up. “I need to get this finished quickly: we all know this dungeon?” or “Does anyone (read: any nub) NOT know these fights?” does not exactly imply willingness to teach. [↩]
    4. It’s the vicious cycle. Angry LFDers pounce on people who make mistakes or don’t know the fight, which makes people reluctant to ask for tacs reminders, which means more frequent screwups, which makes angry LFDers pounce on the person who screwed up [↩]

    I’m becoming a dwarf


    2011 - 03.15

    Posted in Adventures in videogaming | 1 Comment »

    …or so it would seem.

    I haven’t drank a magic potion to shrink me to 4’2″

    I haven’t grown a beard I can plait1

    I haven’t adopted a terrible fake irish/scottish/generic celtish accent2

    I haven’t taken to living underground

    I haven’t forged (geddit?!) a passionate relationship with a mining pick.

    I *am* drinking a beer the size of my head.

    –

    If you ask me, the true spiritual home of the dwarves is in fact somewhere in the German-speaking countries. So earlier I was in Vienna, and now I’m in Munich’s largest park (“The English Garden”), one of perhaps 400 or 500 people sitting in the glorious sunshine drinking gorgeous weissbier from heavy, one-litre steins.

    This one’s for Brann!

    PS: expect a more regular posting schedule from next week; recent work insanity and now this holiday have made it all but impossible of late.

    PPS: this was written in the park on my blackberry, and I could save a draft but not post it live. hence the odd timing.

    --
    1. although, thanks to accidentally sleeping in on the morning of the flight, I’m closer to being able to than I ordinarily would be. Think Captain Birdseye, the old one :) [↩]
    2. my abysmal attempts at German don’t count [↩]

    Thanks, Murloc Mom


    2011 - 02.25

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, General purpose whinging, Raiding for fun (profit be damned) | 1 Comment »

    We weren’t able to take the Murloc Mom’s advice on Tuesday as (seemingly) *all* of the European servers were largely unavailable. I’m still not exactly sure why — apparently TeliaSonera had some general connectivity problems in northern Europe, but we experienced the most drawn-out disconnect process I think I’ve ever encountered, resulting in 7 multi-hour DCs but leaving three of us left alive on an almost empty server. Weird.

    We regrouped last night to have another go at the Omnotron Defense Council and, after a few warm up attempts and one unfortunate reset (if you accidentally leave the “room” when dodging abilities or slimes, the bosses despawn) we managed a pleasingly controlled first kill — no standing in the bad for us! As the only melee DPS in last night’s group, I had a lot of fun zooming from boss to boss, particularly when sprinting to interrupt Arcanotron. After that, we went killed Magmaw again1, 1-shot the elevator boss with no casualties and had a couple of exploratory attempts on Maloriak, dying in a welter of adds and fire shortly after the 25% phase transition.

    You know, it’s odd, but I think Rebuke might well be my favourite thing about retribution in WoW42. And now that I’ve moved my enemy castbar out of the corner of the screen (wtf was I thinking?) to somewhere prominent, I can provide group utility beyond an emergency Lay on Hands every so often.

    Ret actually has even more utility, but everyone seems to forget about it. Now that we’re three months in, there aren’t so many “CC is awesome — here’s a list of who does what” threads/blog entries being posted but back when they were a more frequent occurrence, very few of them ever seemed to include Repentance. Now ok, it does have the significant drawback of a cooldown which matches it’s duration, so if it’s broken, it’s broken, but think of the upsides!

    1) It’s instant cast –  it can be used while running into range, or precisely when the mob’s in a good spot if it needs to be repositioned first.
    2) It’s instant cast — so it’s very easy to co-ordinate with cast-time CC abilities like fear, hex and poly.
    3) It lasts for 60 seconds, provided there are no tab-targeting errors or misplaced AoEs.
    4) The CC’d target doesn’t move, so you don’t have to worry about suicidal sheep sauntering into cleaves.
    5) The CC’d target doesn’t regenerate (unlike polymorph). If you’re feeling particularly clever post-4.0.6, you can drop a stack of censure on your target first, and it will actually take damage from the DOT without breaking the CC.
    6) It’s flexible — it affects humanoids, dragonkin, undead, giants and demons. Handy!

    Deeply unfashionable it may have been, but when we were running ICC we’d make quite a bit of use of repentance on trash pulls to reduce the craziness. It made deaths to random skellies significantly less common, at least compared to my PuG ICC experiences3. In the new Cataclysm dungeons, it does the same thing. Sure, if everyone in the group is 346-geared+, you *can* just wrathstyle a large number of trash encounters, but all it takes is an unfortunate lagspike, misclick or missed interrupt and you’re ghostrunning back to repair the damage your epics took in a failed heroic dungeon trash pull. Embarrassing.

    Still, this attitude to CC does leave me with an easy dungeon finder group assessment method, particularly when I’m playing on Centrella. I’ll usually ask at the start “want to mark targets for polymorph?” and if I hear “nah, it’s just a heroic” from anyone in the group, I worry less about my DPS and keep fingers poised over iceblock, mirror images and invisibility instead. Chances are I’m going to need all three if I want to avoid expensive repair bills4.

    –

    Words of advice for *cough* young people (It’s Burroughs — NSFW)5

    Woe is me for I have been reading forums again. I have been looking at raid strategy videos. Reading random guildblogs for hints about encounters. I’d like to take a moment to clear something up:

    Cue: This is either a prompt (that’s your cue to move , ‘Cue the music!’) or a long stick you use to play pool.
    Queue: Typically called a “line” in the US, I believe. It’s what you wait in if you’re trying to log in to a busy server at peak times, or what you do when boarding a train6
    Que: In spanish, this means ‘what’, I think. In English it’s a synonym for “spelling mistake”.

    --
    1. using the ‘offtank’ method — it works much better for us than kiting [↩]
    2. Well no. My *favourite* thing is the whinging from Omen and the occasional growl from our tanks when the Lady blesses me with a particular good string of ability procs [↩]
    3. I know that isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but still… [↩]
    4. I’ve recently discovered, and then confirmed,  that even without a runspeed boot enchant, a holy paladin can kite the mechanical trash around the Foe Reaper all the way back to the entrance safely. All you need is a tiny headstart and to use of Holy Radiance on cooldown (for the runspeed boost). *That* was a fun run, as I’m sure you can imagine. [↩]
    5. I have the album this comes from, Spare Ass Annie and other tales. The music was put together my Michael Franti, then of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy. It was a popular late-night play when I was a student… [↩]
    6. if you’re not one of the ignorant swine I regularly encounter on the tube, attempting to shove their way onboard before I and the other 20 people behind me get off. Oh I’m sorry, was that your nose? I must do something about these elbows. [↩]

    Cheap-ass Paladin: Enchants


    2011 - 01.26

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, General purpose whinging, Things I'm learning | 5 Comments »

    Update 22 Feb 2011: This post seems to still grab the odd hit so it’s probably worth pointing out that, thanks to the devaluation of haste and the promotion of mastery/crit, you should be keeping that in mind when choosing your enchantments for retribution. The mastery boot enchant might well be worth a look now, and the mastery wrist enchant will be better than the haste equivalent (but both will be beaten by the new strength enchantment, if you can find it).

    So Ano has reached the point where I really can’t find any more excuses for why I haven’t enchanted his gear. There’s enough 333 and 346 ilevel gear in both his ret and holy sets to be worth it. We’re running heroics. Centrella is (relatively) awash in Hypnotic Dust, and not too badly off for Celestial Essences.

    Then I looked at the cost of Maelstrom Crystals, needed for the top-end enchants. Ouchie. On my server, they go for ~3000 gold each. I’m not paying *that* for anything that isn’t purple, ta1.

    So I had a bit of a google, and didn’t quickly find any second-best-in-slot lists for enchanting. As I was too lazy to keep searching (ret paladin, remember) I thought I’d just suck it and see. I ended up with the enchants in the table below, which excludes the head & shoulder enchants as they’re pretty straightforward — you buy the one you have sufficient rep for.

    Ret Holy
    Boots Greater Assault is a Wrath enchant, but EJ reckon it’s currently better than haste or mastery. Woo for using up old mats! Haste, as Lavawalker uses a Maelstrom Crystal.
    Wrists I’m a leatherworker, so I went with a draconic embossment for strength but otherwise I’d have gone for Greater Assault, the +AP wrath enchant. Once again the fine brains at EJ says it’s better than haste or mastery, and you can pick up the bits for pennies if your guild bank/friendly enchanter doesn’t have spares. I’m a leatherworker, so I went with a draconic embossment (int) but otherwise I’d have gone for Speed, or maybe Spirit if I was feeling expansive)
    Hands +35 strength is a LOT cheaper than +50 str (2 MCs!) I went with +50 haste rather than the +65 mastery, which is expensive and arguable not as useful, currently.
    Back (cloak) +50 crit is fairly cheap, lots cheaper than the +65. +50 int isn’t the cheapest, but I had a 346 cloak.
    Offhand n/a +100 Int. The old shield enchant (+25 int) doesn’t really compare. Of course, when the Cata enchant is nerfed to +40 int, then it’ll might be worth considering if you’re short of funds and have access to old mats.
    Weapon Avalanche isn’t that cheap, but I have a shiny 346 axe. Landslide, the top DPS enchant, requires a currently-outrageous 5 maelstrom crystals (plus another five to buy the recipe!) I probably should have gone with Heartsong, but I was running low on celestial essences so I went with the old wrath +50 spellpower enchant. The money-no-object option is Power Torrent. I can’t say I’d describe myself as a lifestyle healer, but I think I’d prefer a static buff to an uncontrollable proc, if there was a Cataclysmic option.
    Legs As a leatherworker, Ano can use the great value Dragonbone Leg Reinforcements. Failing that, I’d probably have cheaped out and gone for Scorched Leg Armour rather than the Dragonscale Leg Armour. A choice between Ghostly Spellthread and Powerful Ghostly Spellthread. For now, I choose the cheaper version as Cent is hoarding dreamcloth for epics, but it’s not frighteningly expensive to acquire if you have access to a tailor.
    Chest Mighty stats all the way. The extra +5 all stats  for Peerless Stats isn’t worth the cost to me at this point. Mighty stats all the way. The extra +5 all stats  for Peerless Stats isn’t worth the cost to me at this point.

    So what did I miss out on?

    By my calculations, my ret set is down 20 str, 20crit, 5 of each other stat, plus the DPS difference between Avalance and Landslide — ~220dps, according to EJ. If I’d blindly picked the “best” Cataclysm enchants, I’d have used 16 maelstrom crystals, currently worth ~48,000g on my server. Excluding the cost of buying the Landslide recipe for Cent (another 15,000g).

    My holy set is a little more complicated. The haste boot enchant is better than Lavawalker from a pure stats point of view (currently) but the run speed boost might be handy. The cheaper hand enchant is probably better for throughput. Heartsong is probably very useful from a regen point of view; Power Torrent’s unpredictable healing  (or regen) boost might be great, but it might also happen at awkward times. So the direct reductions are the difference between the two spellthreads (40 int, 10 crit) plus the +5 all stats loss by using mighty stats. Going crazy for the expensive enchants would have cost another 10 Maelstrom crystals (another 30,000g), plus another 15,000g for the Power Torrent recipe.

    Total gold saved: 108,000.

    Whoa.

    --
    1. Actually, it’d have to be an especially pretty purple with a charming personality and elderly rich relatives. [↩]

    If this makes it onto your blog I will die of shame


    2011 - 01.15

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, People of WoW | 6 Comments »

    Arresting title, what? It’s a quote from Vent. What follows is from guildchat, with apologies1

    [Me]: Heh, [Many-alts-person], we’re just (sort of) talking about you, in a way  (guild in-joke)

    [Many-alts-person]: Uh-oh.

    [Many-alts-person]: It wasn`t me, it was [Expert Warrior, currently offline]

    [Me]: [Bosslady] was comparing Warcraft to sex

    [Trap-detecting-mage, spouse of bosslady]: eek, what have I missed?

    [Me]: Clarity-inducing statement: Wow is like sex because…

    [Me]: It can be a lot of fun on your own

    [Me]: but it’s LOTS better with other people

    [Trap-detecting-mage]: haha!

    [Many-alts-person]: :D

    [Me]: except if the other people are horrible.

    [Keanu Reeves Fan]: …AND you don’t necessarily have to mention Megan Fox while doing it.

    [Me]: In fact in many ways, it’s better if you don’t, in my experience

    [Trap-detecting-mage]: It never works as well when you do it with strangers?

    [Bosslady]: Especially not calling out her name in the mid throes.

    [Keanu Reeves Fan]: Unless you are, in fact, doing it with Megan Fox. Either WoW or sex. Both works.

    [New-but-funny Guildie]: and is something yu can do on a sick day

    [Trap-detecting-mage]: you can do it while sitting down….

    [New-but-funny Guildie]: oh my, what *is* it with megan fox ?

    --
    1. and the caveat that it was Friday night, and there were elements happening on Vent too! [↩]
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