About Time to Update This Here Blog

It’s been a while since I posted a new entry, so it’s about time that I sit down and force myself to write something.

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.