So, um… is anyone still here?

Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth like that.  There was a lot of stuff going on, both in game and out.  We had some roster changes, as people either got bored of the game and left entirely or moved on to play with real life friends.  That really hindered our progression at the start of Dragon Soul.  Also, many of the people who left were my closest in-game friends, so I felt really down about it.  For a while I lost interest in the game, and though I still logged in regularly I cut back on my game play substantially.  I stopped paying attention to the WoW blogs and news sites, and since I wasn’t sure what to say on my own blog I just stopped updating it.  At one point I was seriously considering quitting the game entirely, and when a former guild leader of mine offered me a paid transfer to his Alliance guild, (which was already 4/8 heroic, while our guild was 6/8 normal at the time), I was very nearly tempted to jump ship.  But, well… I’m a Tauren at heart.  I just couldn’t imagine myself defecting to the opposing faction.  Also, Electric Mayhem is my home, and I didn’t want to leave the good friends I still have there.

Real life wasn’t helping matters.  I got a seasonal part time job, and had to deal with the busy holiday season, family commitments, etc. — which gave me no time to catch up on things once I regained interest in the game.  There were many things that I could have blogged about, but I had no time to write, and still wasn’t sure how to get back into the whole blogging gig.  All the things I wanted to say started to pile up in my mind, until I wasn’t sure what to start with if and when I did start blogging again.  And, of course, the longer I went without blogging, the harder it was to start up again.

The good news is that our guild rebounded, thanks mostly to the addition to our roster of a few very talented and enthusiastic players who are helping to rejuvenate those of us who were getting a bit burnt out.  With the new talent on board we once again started clearing bosses and are now sitting at 1/8 heroic.  That’s not nearly as far as I’d hoped we would be by now, but c’est la vie.  Personally I’m much more optimistic about our future than I was a few weeks ago.  We could still use a few more good players, particularly healers, but we’re looking a lot stronger now.

Meme-ed!

Anyway, Repgrind knew that I needed something to kick-start my blogging again, so she tagged me in that 6th of 6th meme that’s going around:

The rules are as follows:
•Go in to your image folder.
•Open the sixth sub-folder and select the sixth image.
•Profit! Publish.
•Challenge six more saps and link to them.

There’s a problem though… I have multiple image folders, spread across several directories.  Even just my WoW screenshots are located in three different places!  You see, I used to do a lot of art (both traditional and digital), so I have tons of folders and subfolders of that stuff.  But there’s a ton of random bits of sketches and WIPs there, many of which make no sense out of context.  And my WoW folders aren’t divided into subfolders at all, so how do I take the 6th of the 6th of them?  Dilemma.

So I’ve done the best I could with what I have.  After going through several of my art folders and checking the 6th subfolder in each of them, and then looking at the 6th image in each subfolder, I decided to share this one.  It’s a charcoal drawing of a dragon that I drew more than four years ago.  I was mostly testing some new charcoal pencils that I had, and experimenting with trying to draw longer, more “Eastern” style dragons, which is something I’m not very good at.  However, it turned out well, and it has the distinction of being the only piece of art I’ve ever managed to sell, so that’s something.

But you guys aren’t here for random drawing of dragons!  You’re here for the WoW.  “Give us WoW related images,” you cry!  Fear not, for I have heard your pleas.  Indeed, there will be not one, but TWO screenshots to gaze your eyes upon.

As I said, I have three folders of WoW screenshots.  The first is for nice, edited versions, like the ones that have appeared on this blog previously.  For this meme I decided to dig into one of the other two folders, where random screenshots have been deposited.  Because there were no sub-folders, I figured I’d just use the 6th image, but that wasn’t as clear cut as it should have been.  Do I use the 6th file?  Or do I combine similar files that show the same scene in slightly different ways?  In the end I chose to do both.  Extra screenshot for you!

I don’t even remember taking this one.  It must have been taken fairly recently, because that’s the weapon I had mogged until about a week ago.  It also looks like I turned off my UI to take the shot.  But I have no recollection of this.  o.O

Looks kinda cool though.

This one I do remember taking.  I like to fish for lavascale catfish here, because it’s so very picturesque.

Oh crap, I’m supposed to tag some people to do this meme too.  I don’t know who’s already done it and who hasn’t… Hmm…

Well, I guess I’ll just say this: If you are reading this, and you have a blog of your own, and you haven’t already done this meme, consider yourself tagged!

There are so many topics and posts that I could cover… It all seems a little overwhelming.  But I don’t see much reason to re-hash all the new features announced at Blizzcon — you’ve all read dozens of blogs on those topics, right?  Instead I’m just going to touch on a few comments that were made in the Blizzcon panels that I haven’t seen discussed much, (though this could just be because I’m still slightly behind in my reading), mostly related to Druids and healing.

An Arcane Version of Hurricane?  Yes, Please!

In the Classes, Items and Professions Panel there were two brief announcements of interest to Druids:

In 5.0 Hurricane will have an Arcane version — meaning no waiting for AoE. Otherwise, there’s a balance between eclipse, and we like the way it’s working.

This is welcome news for Boomkin!  Arcane AoE is something we’ve been requesting since the beginning of Cataclysm.  This means Boomkin will be able to deal decent AoE damage while in Lunar Eclipse, so we won’t have to sacrifice so much of our single target rotation in order to deal with adds.  This simple change should drastically reduce the amount of time we have to spend gaming the Eclipse mechanic just to be viable.  However, the mana cost of Hurricane will have to be reduced and its damage increased before it will be on par with Wild Mushroom.

While I’m on the topic of Eclipse, with the radical new talent paradigm for MoP Lunar Shower will probably be completely redesigned, eliminated, or baked into the Balance spec.  We won’t have the option to take or drop the ability depending on whether or not we like the way it works.  I’m one of those who dropped the talent, sacrificing some DPS on the move for more control in AoE situations, so I hope they redesign it before baking it into our spec.

Please Stop Insulting My Healing Intelligence, kthnx.

Q: AoE heal is mindlessly spamming some HoTs, any plans to not do this?
A: Wild mushroom healing type spell. But overall, we think the resto druid healing kit is good. Some of the healing playstyle where mindless aoe healing happens is on the encounter design. [yes, they're saying it's the encounter, not them]

Ok, first of all, every time someone calls Resto Druid AoE healing “mindless” it makes me want to kick some puppies.  (Ok, I would never actually kick poor innocent puppies, but it does really piss me off.)  Why does this piss me off so much?  Because Resto Druid healing is not fucking mindless.  Everyone seems to be convinced that Resto Druids run around spamming two spells, Wild Growth and Rejuvenation, over and over again until we win, like we’re some healing version of an Arcane Mage.  This is not true.  And seriously, if there are any Resto Druids out there only casting those two spells I can guaran-fucking-tee you they are failing, and I want you to bring them to me so I can slap some sense into them.

Resto Druids are all about timers.  We have HoTs and we need to know when those HoTs are falling off, and when our mini-cooldowns (Wild Growth and Swiftmend) are available, and when our Mastery buff is about to expire, etc, etc.  Pretty much every spell we have is on a timer of less than 10 seconds duration.  We have to juggle all our spells so that we keep everything refreshed every 10 seconds or so.  So even during a period of intense AoE healing we cannot just sit there and spam the same two spells endlessly.  We have to watch our Lifebloom stack, make sure we cast a direct heal at least every 10 seconds to maintain our mastery, mix Swiftmend into things on cooldown, and deal with our Clearcasting procs effectively.  This is not a mindless process.

When you throw Tree of Life into the equation it actually makes things a little bit more complicated (in my opinion), because now you are trying to roll Lifebloom on as many targets as possible, (meaning each target has their own 10 second HoT that needs continual refreshing/reapplication), while you are also trying to cast a Rejuv + Swiftmend combo every 15 seconds and Wild Growth every 8 seconds, while also making use of the dozens of Clearcasting procs from the multiple Lifebloom stacks without letting them overwrite each other and go to waste.  It is a LOT of juggling to do and it takes practice and skill to really maximize our healing.  It is NOT a mindless process.

Contrast this with the current Paladin AoE healing strategy which is essentially “cast Holy Radiance and let the other healers worry about the AoE while I continue to heal the tanks”, or the Disc Priest strategy which is basically “put down a Barrier, throw out a Prayer of Mending, alternate spamming Prayer of Healing on each group and maybe use PW: Shield every so often”.  (I can’t speak for Shammies or Holy Priests since I don’t know much about them…)  So really, I don’t see how the Resto Druid AoE healing strategy is any more mindless than that of other classes, and I really don’t think they should throw more complexity at us unless they decide to give us some HoTs of longer duration so I don’t have to micromanage them so obsessively.

That loooong rant out of the way, I’m really not feeling the proposed Wild Mushroom-type spell.  If it’s anything like the Boomkin mushrooms, they’ll want us to use a targeting circle to place mushrooms and then detonate them to send out a healing explosion.  (An explosion that heals?  Say what?)  Now, I understand that they want us to have to think more about heal placement or some such crap, but targeting circles are clunky and irritating (for one thing), and they also take time to place and detonate.  If we can put out three at a time, as the Boomkins do, that’s 3 GCDs to place them and 1 GCD to detonate them, for a total of 4 seconds to cast them.  Did I already mention that most of my HoTs have a duration of less than 10 seconds?  I did?  Oh, well, then I’m sure you can see how I’d love to spend 4 seconds placing mushrooms while all my HoTs fall off.  Oh, and then people will move away from where I’ve placed the mushrooms so I’ll have to place them again, because modern encounters are all about movement.  So they’d probably only really be good for stacking phases.  Also, if the way Blizz handled the Boomkin mushrooms is any indication, they will nerf our other AoE spells into uselessness in order to “encourage” us to use the mushrooms.  Yay.  Looking forward to that.

DPS Off-Specs Are De Rigueur Next Season

In the Open Q&A Panel there was one question about the MoP healing design that stuck out for me:

Q: Healers’ design in MoP. Bring more healers to a 25-man raid? New healing class to be introduced, so increased pressure on existing healers to justify their slots.
A: I don’t think we’ll change the number of healers we expect raids to bring, some will mix it up, some won’t.

There has been a lot of discussion in the WoW Blogosphere recently about encounter design and the number of healers raid groups should be bringing to those encounters.  Currently there is a wide variation on the number of healers each encounter requires, especially in 25-man raiding.  25-man raid encounters can require anywhere from 4 to 7 healers, while 10-man raids usually fluctuate between 2-3 healers.  This variability in healer requirements can make filling a raid roster a logistical nightmare, forcing raid groups to either sub healers/DPS in and out for each encounter, or forcing healers to develop an excellent DPS off-spec if they want to keep their raid spot.  Now, the question asked in the panel didn’t directly address this issue, but the answer given certainly sheds a bit of light on the topic.

Firstly, we learn that Blizzard expects raids to bring a certain number of healers when they design encounters.  Well, that sure seems like news to me, considering the variability we’ve seen in the Firelands raid tier.  I only wish they would let us know what that number of healers is.  Is it 3 for 10-man, or 2?  Is it 5, 6, or 7 for 25-man?  Or do they really expect us to change the number of healers from fight to fight with no understanding of how that creates hardship for raid teams?

Secondly, we learn that Blizzard intends to continue designing raid tiers that “mix up” the number of healers required for each encounter.  This is not good.  It means that we can likely expect to have the same issues of raid role composition going forward into the next expansion.

Finally, I’d like to comment on what Blizzard did not say here.  Based solely on the answer to this question it would seem that Blizzard is either unaware that changing healer requirements from encounter to encounter causes issues for raid groups, or that they don’t think the problem is severe enough to bother becoming more consistent in their design.  This saddens me.  I hope that people will continue to try to bring the issue to Blizzard’s attention so that Blizz will actually address the problem.

Ramping Up Inter-Faction Conflict… For Now

Mists of Pandaria doesn’t have any particular “big bad” cast as the villain.  Rather, Blizzard has stated that they want the MoP expansion to focus on the conflict between the Alliance and Horde.  At first this made me unhappy, because I’m not the biggest fan of PvP, and I would much rather see the Alliance and the Horde working together to defeat common enemies than be at each other’s throats all the time.  I know, I know, it’s called World of Warcraft, I get it.  But it makes no sense for the two factions to be intent on destroying each other at all costs when there are enormously powerful villains out to destroy the world, which neither faction can defeat on its own.  I firmly believe that the many races of Azeroth need to learn to work together if they have any hope of survival, and if I could make my toons full members of the neutral factions and work toward world peace I probably would.

However, Blizz said something during the Lore Q&A Panel that gives me hope for the future:

The pandaren are ultimately going to be part of the solution between Horde and Alliance.

There have also been other comments (which I don’t have sources for at the moment) about how the Pandaren are generally peaceful people who only fight when they have a very good reason to.  This makes me hopeful that after an expansion of increased inter-faction conflict our warring societies will learn to overcome our petty squabbles and focus on what’s really important — saving Azeroth.  If so, there’s the potential for a lot of story and character development in the panda expansion, and it probably means that the expansion after MoP will return the focus to the big bads that are the real threat.

Yay!  We’re now 4/7 heroic Firelands, and it’s about time!  I’m so sick of fighting this damn fire bird.  I have no idea why our raid team has so much trouble with her.

Our kill was really epic too.  We had a night of horrible attempts where we didn’t even get through a full set of phases once.  People were dying to tornadoes, fieroblasts, brushfires, lava spew — all the avoidable damage mechanics that people should really not be getting hit by anymore.  We also had a few attempts where the meteors didn’t die fast enough so we lost people to firestorm.  It was incredibly frustrating.  I was honestly completely fed up and about ready to bench myself because I was seriously sick of working on the fight without any noticeable progress.

Finally Schriko made a big speech about how we knew how to do this, and the only thing that was different was the firestorm, so pull it together already.  And it was amazing!  Suddenly everyone survived the first full round of phases and Alysrazor was well below 50% health after the first grounded phase.  It was starting to look like we might be able to pull it off… But then our Mage, Naishee, who was responsible for killing the meteors, disconnected.  Our other ranged DPS attempted to quickly switch to meteors, but failed to kill them.  In desperation we stacked up in the middle of the room, Minstrel popped Barrier — which had only just barely come off CD — and we healed our asses off to keep everyone alive.  (Yeah, that’s right — we handled it just like Vodka.  LOL)  To our surprise we managed to get through the firestorm with only Naishee and Opa dead.  Since Naishee was offline I brezzed Opa and we went into the final grounded phase only one DPS short.  A few breathless seconds later and Alysrazor was dead.  It was awesome.

Unfortunately, because Naishee was offline he didn’t get credit for the kill.    But, on the other hand, we’ve learned something very important: If we can just manage to disconnect our Mage we can down anything.

Why is it that I suddenly have to develop a life just in time for Blizzcon?  I have been really busy this weekend running around doing errands and haven’t had a chance to catch up on the latest news since Friday.  There’s tons of stuff that I want to write about, but I want to get caught up first so I actually know what I’m talking about.  Also, I’ve been so tired that I just couldn’t concentrate on reading or writing, so when I finally got home yesterday I just played some mindless low-level stuff.  The next couple of days are also going to be really busy so who knows when I’ll finally get the chance to blog about Blizzcon or the other things I’d had planned.  *sigh*

This is also why I may not have commented on other blogs much lately.  Sorry!

Kashina’s Evil Twin

I caved in to peer pressure and rolled a baby toon on the Winterhoof server so I can hang out with my fellow bloggers from Crits and Giggles.  For some reason I decided to go with another Druid; and, being the infinitely creative soul I am, I gave it the same name as my main.  So now I have a baby Worgen Druid that I’m leveling feral, since I haven’t played feral since late Wrath.  (I’ll pick up a Resto spec at 30 though, because Resto > all.)  I don’t know how much I’ll work on her, but Worgen Druids are pretty damn cool, and if she ever reaches max level I might actually play her since I’ll know how.

Fingers Crossed!

As I mentioned previously, I’m currently unemployed.  However, I finally got a couple of job interviews this week, so hopefully things will go well and I’ll have a chance to be a productive member of society again.  Here’s hoping!

I’m feeling a weird mix of excitement and anxiety about the next expansion.  I’m cautiously optimistic about most of the changes, though there are a few I am skeptical of.

But I don’t think I deal with change very well… I feel like I’ve just finally figured out what I’m doing in Cataclysm and soon everything will be completely different.  Will I be able to adapt?  What if I’m not very good at playing the new style of Druid?  I don’t think I’d play at all if I couldn’t be a Tauren Resto Druid, so what if I find I don’t like her anymore?

However, what makes me most anxious is the fact that several of my guildies and friends have told me today that they are either thinking of quitting because they don’t like the idea of a panda expansion, or they are thinking of making a Monk as their new main.  It made me realize that we’re probably going to have some roster turn over, and possibly even have to rebuild our raid team.  The thought of it makes me feel a bit sick.  I love our guild and the people in it.  I don’t want to lose them.

I know that change happens, and no matter what there’d probably be a bit of turnover and adapting to do.  And at least we have many months to get used to the new ideas.  But I still feel a little worried.

So I did what I usually do to relax — I ran a few dungeons on my main.  I haven’t run any with her recently because she gets pretty much all of her Valor from raiding, so I’ve only been running dungeons on my Priest.  Now, I love my Priest.  She’s a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong.  But she’s not Kashina.  And oh, running Troll dungeons on Kash tonight was almost magical!  Sure, the PUGs were fail, but I kept us alive (despite everyone’s suicidal tendencies) and danced around fail patches with fleet-footed ease.  I’m comfortable on my Druid.  I’m at home on her.  Her spells flow naturally from my fingertips.  When I play her, it’s almost as though I might actually be good at this game.

So now I feel better.  The expansion will come, and I’ll have to go through all the insecurity and stress of re-learning how to play again, but I’ll figure it out.  And if I don’t?  Well, there are many more important things in life.  Besides, right now I have Kash, and Kash is amazing.  Time enough to worry later.

News!  News!  News!

I imagine that most of you will have already heard the news, but I want to blog about it anyway.

• Mists of Pandaria is, indeed, the next expansion.  I can’t say that I’m completely thrilled about it, since I probably would have preferred an Emerald Dream or something to do with the other island nations we haven’t met in WoW, but whatever.
• Pandarians are the new race, playable by either faction.  Both factions will start in the same Pandaria starting zone and then choose a faction at the end of the zone.
• Monk is the new class.  Obviously Pandarians will have monks as a class option, but will other races be able to roll monk?  If so, which ones?  Will all Pandarians be monks perhaps, or will they be able to roll other classes too, and if so, which ones?  I bet these questions are being answered in the WoW panel right this minute, but I don’t have access to that stream.
• The focus of the next expansion is going to be the conflict between Alliance and Horde, not so much on the next “big bad”.  I’m a little disappointed by this, though I know I’m probably in the minority.  If I really lived in Azeroth I would be a member of one of the neutral factions working toward world peace, so you can imagine how a ramping up of the conflict doesn’t sit well with me.
• There were a bunch of other random announcements that flashed past on the trailer, (Pet combat system?  Say what?  Looks like some new types of instances too, I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be solo instances.), but I didn’t write them all down and now I don’t remember them.  They might not all pan out either, I mean, we all remember the abandoned dance studio, right?  Oh, and the talent system is being revamped, which is not a surprise.  I mean, common, there’s a whole panel devoted to WoW talent trees, so this was obvious.

And of course, my favourite announcement:

• WoW players that purchase a year long subscription will get Diablo 3 for free!  Plus they’ll also get a guaranteed beta key for Mists of Pandaria and an in-game mount based on Tyriel from Diablo.  O.M.G.  This is totally awesome!  I have no plans of quitting WoW, and I totally planned to get D3 anyway, so this is absolutely win-win.

I was so excited I had to tell someone, so I sent a text to my husband at work letting him know.  One of my husband’s coworkers is an avid Starcraft player, so this was our exchange:

Me:  Big announcement from Blizzcon – free D3 for WoW subscribers!

Husband:  My coworker says “Fuck WoW players!”

Me:  Tell him, “Suck it!  Haha!”

Ok, I feel like all the most important news has been revealed and/or confirmed.  Everything else will probably just be details.  I can wait for other people to fill in the details.

State of the Raid Update

We didn’t get any new bosses down last week.  In fact, last week was pretty painful and frustrating.

First of all, we spent 1.5 hours at the beginning of raid helping someone from the Sun/Mon raid group get their charged fragments for the Legendary quest chain.  This was probably a bad idea.  Now, I understand why he wanted to come with us — he wanted our expertise to make the process smoother — but it’s really not that difficult to do and the second group could have handled it easily.  I don’t mind helping a friend out, and one of our regular teammates was going to be late anyway, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal.  However, it did take up a large chunk of raid time, and then we found ourselves struggling with the heroic bosses we’d been able to kill before, so we ended up short on time and feeling like we’d lost a lot of our progression time.

Now, I don’t blame the guy who wanted our help.  We should have turned him down and had him do the quest stuff with the other raid group –  especially since they ended up spending very little time on heroic stuff this week and cleared their raid about 3 hours early, so they would have had plenty of time to help him — but that’s our fault as officers for not making the right decision.  And honestly, I feel like we just played badly this week.  If we hadn’t spent ages wiping to heroic Shannox and Rhyolith we would have had more time to work on progression too, so it’s not just time spent doing Legendary crap that slowed us down.

Also, one of our members got married on the weekend, (Yay!  Grats to him!), so he was too busy with wedding plans to raid with us and we had to sub in an alt.  Now, the person we subbed in is very skilled, so I’m certainly not blaming him for our poor performance this week.  But it might have been a minor factor, particularly on heroic Staghelm, since we lost one of our raid cooldowns by bringing a different class.  (And, let’s face it, our H. Staghelm strategy is pretty unforgiving.)

Heroic Alysrazor is still giving us trouble.  People need to learn how to avoid the fire tornadoes.  You would think that after hundreds of pulls on both normal and heroic people would have figured this out by now, but I feel the need to point out that the tornadoes always spawn in the same places.  This means that it’s possible to know where they are going to spawn and then stand somewhere else.  If you can find a place where the tornadoes are not going to spawn, then you can run to that spot every time and — amazingly — you will not be hit by spawning tornadoes.  Alternatively, if you find that tornadoes are spawning on top of you every single time, you can move about 10 yards from the place where you usually stand and voila!  No tornadoes will spawn on you!

This is, in fact, exactly what I do.  I know that there is a particular spot to the south of Alysrazor’s room where no tornadoes spawn, so I always run my chicken ass over there.  I’m not sure where safe spots are in the rest of the room, so I always go back to the same place.  As the tornadoes spawn I also hit Barkskin because sometimes the arrival of the tornadoes lags my computer a little bit and that gives me enough damage reduction to survive if I screw up.

Dying to unavoidable damage on Alysrazor is a very bad thing.  We only have one battle rez available.  If we have to use it on someone dying to the first set of tornadoes then we have no further margin for error.  If the another person then dies on the second set of tornadoes, we are screwed.  So stop dying to tornadoes!

(Now that I’ve jinxed myself by ranting about dying to tornadoes I’m going to die to one this week.  Just watch.)

Anyway, a combination of factors led to a frustrating raid week.  Blah.  This week might not be much better, because we’re going to be short a couple people due to Blizzcon and a honeymoon.  We’ll have to see how it goes.

My Baby Mage is Growing Up!

Khizzara continues to level up steadily.  Outland wasn’t nearly as tedious as I’d feared it would be, largely because I have some awesome guildies.  I think I mentioned this before, but when I was still level 59 one of my guildies gave me a run through Molten Core for XP and shiny purples.  This was great because I managed to ding 60 without ever setting foot in Hellfire Peninsula (I’d finished Winterspring to get to 59), and I’m actually still wearing a couple of the purples that dropped in that MC run even though I just dinged 68.

So anyway, I was able to skip Hellfire and jump straight to Zangarmarsh, which I’d only quested through maybe twice previously.  Our guild leader and main tank also has a baby pally tank that he’s been leveling up with me, and so far we’ve managed to stay within about 2-3 levels of each other at all times, which is astonishing.  This has allowed me to bring my own pocket tank dungeoneering with me very frequently.

As soon as possible I jumped to Nagrand, which is my favourite questing area in Outlands.  I’m not sure why… I mean, every time I go there I suddenly remember that the quests are terrible grind-fests that make you fly across the entire fucking zone all the time, not to mention the quests that actually send you to other zones… But it’s still the most beautiful area in Outland, which is probably why I love it so much.

My time in Nagrand turned out to be pretty brief, because when I started getting group quests a couple of other guildies realized that they had alts at my level too, so the four of us ran around knocking out the group quests and queuing for dungeons together.  It was so much fun!  Especially pulling enormous packs of mobs, running into melee range, spamming Arcane Explosion, doing 3.5k dps and then dying because mana worms explode and I wasn’t smart enough to Ice Block.  Good times. 

Epic Fail Story

Speaking of my baby mage, she managed to create a moment of epic fail for herself.  I was questing by myself in Nagrand, (before the other three guildies joined me), and had just picked up the quest chain from Altruis the Sufferer to kill the elite demons in Forge Camp Hate.  While I was debating my chances of doing those group quests by myself I went to pull out my map to get my bearings.  This set in motion a cascading domino effect of fail.

First, I should backtrack and set the stage.  About 20 yards from Altruis and his Nether Drake is a aggressive Aged Clefthoof mob.  The named elite talbuk Bach’lor paths through the area as well, with a herd of about 10 non-aggressive talbuks that follow 30 yards or so behind him.  Bach’lor and his talbuk herd tend to cross the path of the Aged Clefthoof next to Altruis.

Khizzara went to pull out her map, and hit Blink accidentally.  I blinked right into the Aged Clefthoof, which happened to be surrounded by Bach’lor’s herd of 10 talbuks.  No problem right?  The talbuks are non-aggressive.  Except I hit Arcane Explosion instead of Arcane Blast…

About three seconds later there was a little mage corpse lying in the field, trampled almost beyond recognition.  Epic. Fail.

MageWerks

EM recently picked up a couple of awesome players who were formerly members of a hard-core progression raiding guild, but had decided they wanted a more relaxed schedule and a guild that could feel more like home to them.  In addition to being top-notch raiders they are also incredibly nice people and a lot of fun to raid with.  Even better, one of them is a fellow blogger!

Brony had stopped blogging for a while when her former guild pressured her to switch from her Mage to a Priest, but since joining us she has gone back to her first love.  Now she’s bringing her bubbly personality and deep knowledge of her class to both EM’s second raid group and the internet once more.

Anyway, you should all go over to MageWerks, say hi to Brony, and read all about the mysterious workings of the arcane (and maybe a little bit of fire and ice too).  Oh, and puppies.  I’m sure there’ll be puppies.

Reputation Grind

Ok, a lot of my frequent commenters already know Reprind.  In fact, a few of you may be saying to yourselves, “Hey wait!  Rep is in MY guild!”  And that’s true — because Rep is a part of not one, but three guild blogging families.  She raids with both Shadow Rising on Drak’Theron and Crits and Giggles on Winterhoof.  I get to claim her as one of EM’s own because she recently brought two alts over to EM and is leveling them up quickly with an eye to raiding in our second group.

Why does Rep want to raid with three guilds on three different servers?  I can only assume that it’s because Rep is insane.  Also, she loves Paladins to an extent which might be unhealthy.  Is there a Paladins Anonymous?  Because maybe there should be.

If you like Paladins and/or achievements, Reputation Grind is the blog for you.  Go check it out!

Khizzara dinged 58 two days ago.  My first thought was, “Yay!  She’s ready for Outland!”

My second thought was, “Oh, God… No.  Not Outland.  Anywhere but Outland!” 

I am now facing the grim prospect of either questing through Hellfire Peninsula for the 6th time or running Hellfire Ramparts approximately 92 times in a row.  (Followed by Auchenai Crypts 87 time in a row, natch.)  And oh God, all the level 58 DK tanks who think Death Grip is supposed to be used for every pull and don’t have access to Death and Decay yet.  And then the level 60 DK tanks who have Death and Decay but never remember to use it.  And each pug group shall also have at least one Frost DK in Blood Presence spamming Howling Blast.  (And every DPS DK in Blood Presence does know how to use D&D + Blood Boil to grab aggro for some reason…)

Urgh, maybe I can just stay in the lowlands.  How long do you think it would take me to reach 70 if I just ran around Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms?  I could get Loremaster while I’m at it.

Uck, but then at 70 I have to go to Northrend again.  And at 80 I have to do Hyjal again… or maybe Vashjir if I don’t care about getting access to Molten Front dailies…  But I’d still have to do Deepholm.  Oh God, not Therazane again!

Hmm… I still haven’t leveled a Shaman, Warlock or Rogue yet…  Where’s that character creation screen?

The number of skeletons is kinda misleading — it only took us two pulls to get him down this week.  We might have been able to one-shot him, except that our Holy Pally forgot to beacon the tank.  So he was merrily healing the raid through Flame Scythes and thinking, “Hmm… why is the tank dying so quickly?”  *facepalm*

However, our second attempt was perfectly executed.  Cat-Phase-With-Orbs was handled flawlessly, we easily beat the enrage timer, and we didn’t have a single death.  I gotta tell ya, it’s a beautiful thing when we’re on our game.

In a way, it’s too bad that we killed him so quickly.  We spent a few hours working on Heroic Alysrazor and made some really good progress on her.  However, we decided to move on so that we’d have two hours to work on Staghem… and then he rolled over and died without a struggle.  We also one-shot Ragnaros (though it was messy), so we were finished an hour early.  We could have spent that hour on Alysrazor and might have gotten a kill.  :/

Second Verse, Extremely Similar to the First

I already gave an overview of our H. Staghelm strategy in the comments to this post, but I’ll outline it again here for all those who don’t read comments.  A couple of caveats first:  I’m not sure this strategy would have worked pre-nerf, because we allow the raid to eat a lot of Flame Scythes using this method.  I’m not sure that would have been viable when the damage was 15% higher.  Also, because of our raid composition we have a TON of raid healing cooldowns available to us.  This means our strategy may not work for other group comps.

*EDIT: I originally had the number of Flame Scythes wrong for the first three Scorpion phases.  The strat has been corrected behind the cut.  This might be important if anyone is crazy enough to try our strategy, because if you follow the way I had it originally written you might end up with an extra Scorpion phase, which would probably be bad (if not fatal).

Follow me behind the cut for strategy goodness.

In fact, here’s a list of all the raid cooldowns our team has available:

• Druid: Tree of Life Form and Tranquility
• Disc Priest: Barrier (and Pain Suppression, though that’s not as useful for this fight)
• Holy Paladin: Aura Mastery, Guardian of Ancient Kings (or whatever the Holy version is called)
• Unholy Death Knight: Anti-Magic Zone
• 2 Warriors: Rallying Cry x2

Many of those cooldowns are on a short CD so we can use them multiple times throughout the fight.  Barrier and Anti-Magic Zone in particular are very powerful and can soak 2-3 Flame Scythes near the end of each Scorpion phase.  I was holding Tranquility in reserve for any possible “oh shit!” moments, but we ended up not using it.  (I think this the other healers’ way of preventing me from dominating the meters too much.  *shakes fist*)

You may have already guessed that our heroic Staghelm strategy is very similar to our normal Staghelm strategy.  We still have most people stacking up and splitting Flame Scythe damage, even though that makes people lose their concentration stacks.  Why do we do this?  Because our DPS players feel like they still do more DPS in Scorpion phase without the concentration buff than they do in Cat phase with concentration.  Don’t ask me to explain how that could be, because I can’t.  Anyway, this is how we handled it:

First Scorpion Phase:  Our Rogue, Mage and DPS Warrior stand behind Staghelm while everyone else stacks on the tank.  We spread out after the 7th 9th stack of Adrenaline.  We used Aura Mastery for the 4th 6th Scythe, AMZ for the 5th 7th, and Barrier for the 6th & 7th 8th & 9th.

First Cat Phase:  Same as usual, collapsing to stack on the tank after 7 stacks of Adrenaline.

Second Scorpion Phase with Searing Seeds:  Everyone stacks on the tank, including the people who stood out in the first phase.  Yes, everyone loses their concentration stacks to Flame Scythe, but we found we were accidentally switching Staghelm between forms when we tried having people stand out.  This phase was just like on normal mode, people stacked and ran out when their seed was about to explode.  We spread out after 7 9 stacks of Adrenaline.  I think we used Tree of Life Form after the 2nd Scythe, Aura Mastery around the 5th 7th, and AMZ for the 6th &7th 8th & 9th.

Second Cat Phase: Same as the first, collapsing after 7 stacks of Adrenaline.

Third Scorpion Phase:  Same positioning as the first Scorpion phase.  We used Time Warp here and only pushed 5 7 stacks of Adrenaline.  We used Aura Mastery at 3 4, AMZ at 4 5, and Barrier for the 5th 6th & 7th.

Third Cat Phase with Burning Orbs:  Exactly the same way we handled it on normal mode.  The healers and our Shadow Priest soaked the orbs.  We collapsed after 7 Adrenaline stacks.

Fourth Scorpion Phase:  The Flame Scythes hit really hard at this point, so we only pushed 3 of them.  Positioning was the same as in the first and third Scorpion phases with three DPS standing outside the stack.  We used one Rallying Cry for each of the first two Scythes and AMZ for the third.

Fourth Cat Phase:  Handled like any cat phase, except this is where we killed the boss.  We weren’t in this phase very long before he died…  I’m not sure he even got to jump at all.  (There were 47 seconds left on the Enrage timer when he died.) I’m sure by this point the jumps would deal significant damage.

OMG Your Strategy Sucks, Suggest a Different One

We did find a really interesting heroic strategy that we considered trying this week.  However, because we’d come within 1% of killing Staghelm last week we didn’t want to change things up too much, so we didn’t try it.  It does seem like it would greatly reduce the amount of raid damage to be healed through.

Basically, for the alternative strategy you never allow Staghelm to gain any stacks of Adrenaline at all.  Instead, you keep forcing him to change forms just before he casts the first Flame Scythe or Leaping Flames.  This basically turns the fight into a tank and spank and allows most players to keep their concentration stacks for the entire encounter.

To put Staghelm in Cat form, 6 people (the tank and 5 DPS) stack together while 4 other players spread out at range.  When you want him to switch to Scorpion form one of the ranged players runs into the stack.  When you want to switch him to Cat one of the ranged players spreads out.  No one else has to move until you get Searing Seeds.

Searing Seeds is the part that seems trickiest with this strategy.  For every person who moves out to explode, another person must move in or you risk losing control of Staghelm’s shape changing.  Burning Orbs doesn’t seem as difficult to deal with, since the 4 players at ranged can split the Orb damage, and even move into the stack if necessary while still standing closest to the orb.

There seem to be several advantages to this strategy:

• Raid damage is significantly reduced because there are no Flame Scythes or Flaming Leaps to deal with.  The only sources of damage would be melee damage to the tank, Seed explosions and Burning Orbs.
• No adds to deal with, because Staghelm never leaps.  This allows 100% DPS on the boss.
• No need to worry about a Flaming Leap hitting someone soaking a Burning Orb, and no fire patches on the ground cutting you off from a Burning Orb when it’s your turn to soak it.
• DPS players and Healers can keep their stacks of concentration for almost the entire fight.  Concentration would only drop off briefly for a Seed explosion or when soaking Orb damage.  This would allow for a faster kill and no fear of hitting the Enrage timer.

Of course, there are a few drawbacks too:

• Have to deal with Burning Orbs and Searing Seeds a lot more often.
• The people moving in and out of the stack to make him switch forms have to have extremely good timing.
• It might be trickier to handle people moving in and out of the stack for Searing Seeds.
• Melee damage to the tank might become difficult to heal through because of increased Fury stacks.

Here’s a video from the guild that came up with this alternative strat.  They are Si Vis Pacem Parabellum, and I believe they are from France and on the Sargeras (EU) server, but I’m not 100% sure.  The video is in French, but you should be able to see what they’re doing: