EPIC

It's been a busy month.  I've still been playing, working, reflecting.  It's just been a while since I've felt like I had something that I wanted to share and so here it goes.

Last night I completed my first heroic dungeon with Mythsaken.  It was Stonecore.  It was a Pug.  The night before I’d tried it, but we kept wiping on the first boss.  The tanks kept leaving after a couple of wipes and I just didn’t know why.  Last night I figured out why they left.  I realized that I qued up for a heroic and didn’t realize it.  Duh! Yeah that is why it was so much harder.  It turned out to be a good mistake on my part.  I felt unprepared to do a heroic and I wouldn’t have intentionally qued for one.  But once I figured it out, it at least made sense why it was so much harder.  Well again our pug group lost two tanks before we got one who admitted he never tanked that instance on heroic and asked if we minded if he gave it a try.  You know after the night before, waiting in que for a half an hour losing 3 tanks and having the group give up before you got the first boss down, I was like hell yeah I want you to give it a try.  Yeah we wiped a lot.  Over and over again.  When we finally got the first boss down, I felt elated.  I even got to go be a “Hero Bear”, switching from cat to bear to tank the boss the last 20% after the tank died.  The second boss was worse if that was even possible.  I was afraid that the group would give up after numerous wipes.  So as a last ditch effort I said I had a crazy idea.  The tank asked what?  I told the group I wanted to change spec to heals and wanted us to try with two healers.  I had been dying early each fight anyway and I had read that using 2 healers in a heroic can be a good idea sometimes.  With no enrages on the boss, it didn’t matter if you lost a little dps.  Now let me tell you I was a bit nervous to suggest this because, I hadn’t healed since I got berated by another player in Tol Barad.  Also, I hadn’t healed in an instance in probably over a year.  Needless to say I felt a bit rusty.  Well we wiped again.  I was surprised that the group didn’t fold then.  We tried it again and we got him down.    I shifted back to kitty spec and we continued on.  I’d shift to bear when we got too many in one of the pulls and we kept marching through the place.  Yes we continued to wipe on the next boss and got the dragon down on the 3^rd attempt.  Working our way to the last boss I glanced at my dps after we did a large pull of the initiates and saw I had over 22K dps on that fight  – woot for me.  Made me glad I upgraded my boots to a piece of pvp gear.    It wasn’t ideal but it was a solid improvement over what I had before.  The last boss was hard for our tank.  He forgot about the hurled boulders – twice.  On the second attempt I paid more attention to him and when he caught a boulder I shifted to Bear and took over tanking her.  The healer kept me up – for a while, but not long enough.  I died.  The healer died next.  We were left with just the two hunters, health below 50%.  Finally we were down to just one hunter.  With barely any health left, the boss on the platform hurling boulders, the initiates overrunning him, I was quietly yelling "kill her" – to the laptop.  (With no vent – I typed the words for encouragement.)  And he did.  EPIC. 

What a great memory.  What a great group.  I wish I had been in there with guildies.  I got one drop for my healing offset and /cried when I saw other items I could use for my off spec get sharded.  But it doesn’t matter.  I had a great night.  I got to be a hero bear.  I got to use my off spec heals.  I felt pretty awesome.  That’s why I like being a druid – they are very versatile.  I definitely will be going back and dragging some guildies if I can. 

Have a great weekend all!

A Tough Week

I’ve been hacked!

I never thought it would happen to me.  I logged on Wednesday morning hoping to do a quick daily while drinking some coffee and waking up before going to work and I got the message that my account was banned for unauthorized economic activity or something along those lines.  My first thought was it was retribution for reporting a player for abusive language (which might be a story for another day).  But after calling customer support, it appears that it didn’t have anything to do with that.  I thought that this other player may have reported me for something I didn’t do, like buying or selling gold, to get back at me for reporting him.  But no, they told me that it looked like my account had been compromised and would send it over to a GM to research and that I would receive follow on instructions in my email.   Now before I had gotten through to Blizz, I had received an email at my work email that someone had tried to recover my personal email password.  So I took an early lunch and went home to reset my password (work firewalls kept me from doing this while at work).  It’s a good thing that I had a different password on my home email than what I use for WoW.  And it’s a good thing that they have personal security questions that adds an extra level of protection for unauthorized password changes.  Well I’ve been working on getting my account restored.  I found and removed a lot of malicious programs on the computer.  If you are concerned about your computer, go to the Blizzard site and read their security info in the account management section.  They even suggest a few programs to use.  I used the free one they suggested and it found 80 infected files, one of which was a Trojan.  And I have Norton Antivirus and thought I was pretty well protected.  Anyway, I ordered two authenticators, one for my daughter and one for me.   I think that a key logger program got on my computer because I was using the curse client automatic downloader, and it got past my firewalls.  So I will remove all my add-ons and wait for the authenticator to arrive before I try to download and reinstall the ones I use – recount, omen, auctioneer, healbot.  Yeah – nothing special, but Blizzard warns you that add-ons may compromise your account.  If you do use them, please do the manual installs and if the sites look fishy, don’t use them. 

Well last night I completed all the required actions to request my account to be restored.  I received two emails from Blizzard this morning – one saying that the account was restored to me, and one directing me to change my password again.  So it looks like this Weekend Warrior will be able to get online this weekend.  I need to let the GLs of the guilds I have characters in know what happened so they can look to see if anything is missing in the guild bank.  I also need to check to see what might be missing from my toons.  They sent me emails letting me know what was restored already.  Lots of gold was returned, over 20K, and lots of equipment from my main toon Myth.  My daughter was sympathetic.  It was nice to hear her talking to her friends telling them that she couldn’t raid because my account got hacked and we were trying to scan for viruses and that she may have to spend some time helping me get some things back together on my toon.  She doesn’t really need to do this, but the offer made me feel good.   We have been sharing a computer for several weeks while her laptop was in the shop for repairs, so she hasn’t logged on to play since my account was hacked.  I hope hers is ok… My wife, who doesn’t even like that I play WoW, was even sympathetic to my problems. 

So it’s been a challenging week for me, many obstacles outside of work and at work.  Starting out with dealing with an asshat of a player in Tol Barad, to getting hacked and feeling like someone broke into my house and stole my property.  There was no playing WoW to unwind for me this week.  No loot, no progress.  But no worries.  Not now anyway.  I’ll pick up the pieces and start over again. 

And I’ll leave you with a movie quote and wish you all a great weekend!  Keep “A positive mental attitude and a superior state of mind.” - (Steven Seagal) and deal with all life’s problems as just a series of challenges to overcome.

Note to self,

Remember that things are always changing and not always for the better.

After recently leveling my Druid, Mythstaken, to level 85, I started to dig in a bit and do some research on the gear that would be good upgrades and the optimal talent spec and rotations.  I had been trying to keep up with this all along the way, but honestly until I finished leveling I was just concerned with leveling.  Now I’m like, let’s figure out what I’m doing wrong and see what I can do to make it better.

My usual sources for information are other blogs that I can sneak a peak at (past work firewalls), and the Elitist Jerks forums and Tankspot.  I find that I can get a good overview from some blogs, but I know I will have to bite the bullet and read and reread some of the info to make sense of it all.    At the bottom, I included some links to some interesting sites, well worth the time in my opinion.

It seems that the overall impression in the blogosphere seems to be, OMG they nerfed ferals.  I thought we were doing pretty well.  Must have been masked with all the shiny new gear upgrades I got from leveling and getting used to the changes that were made to the talents.  Anyway…

Note to self:

Remember to not “hunt and gather” excuses to hold as armor to protect your beliefs that you are a better player than you are.  Or rather, do not accept the limiting “beliefs” that you “NEED” better gear to do better DPS or Tanking.  Do not use what you read in the forums or blogs (about how ferals are nerfed and cannot do the same competitive DPS as they did in the last expansion) as an excuse for why your DPS is low.  Remember that most of what you are reading about relates to the top end of the game.  Performance by the folks that really understand the theory crafting and play to raid, as opposed to myself (your typical casual average Joe) who would really like to raid in this expansion but haven’t quite figured it all out yet. 

You see, I really want to improve.  I read WoW blogs and really appreciate the time and energy people have put into researching and sharing their findings.  But If I start to buy in on the current mind set on the state of feral dps, I’m afraid that I will come to believe that it won’t be worth the effort.  I mean if all these more experienced players are finding that they don’t enjoy playing their feral spec due to all the changes from the last expansion and the resulting decreases in dps that are being seen then why should I bother.

Hmmm … that’s a dilemma. 

Change in general is always difficult.  You get used to certain ways of doing things and dislike it when forces outside your control make you change the way you have to do something.  Especially if it was something you really liked.  It is never easy to embrace change, but it certainly is something that we all must deal with.  And deal with it we shall!

Having just gotten my druid to 85 a few weeks ago, I’m just going from a leveling mindset to a self evaluation mode of thinking.  What gear should I be trying to get?  Where can I get it?  What’s the best priority rotation?  Which talents are best for tanking, dps, pvp?  So that’s why I’m just becoming aware of the above discussions of “the feral isn’t what it used to be” debates.   To be honest it is a bit disheartening to read the opinions of others that they are so upset with the changes that they are switching their mains because of it or canceling their subscriptions because of it.  

But after a lot (too much to admit) of reading old blogs and forums about how the different classes have changed in the different expansions, I’ve come to see that there is a bit of a bigger cycle to it all.    Inevitably any class which is too far ahead in certain talents and abilities will always get “adjusted” either directly (a class nerf) or indirectly (all other classes get buffed).  Change will always continue to change things.  Funny how that is.

So if you are as stubborn as I am about playing a class or spec regardless of whether it is the flavor of the month, you should at least put some time into learning to play it as well as you can.  So for now for me, it’s back to digesting what it means that expertise and hit rating are not as important to raw dps as it used to be.   In Wrath, the first thing you wanted to do was to make sure you had enough expertise and hit if you were having trouble getting your dps to improve, then when your gear was at a high enough level, switch your gems to stack armor penetration.  That has all changed in case you haven’t noticed it.  The key reasoning about this is below, but for the undistilled version of this, go read this stuff for yourself over at Elitist Jerks:

“It's a tradeoff between convenience/ease and raw dps. There are three factors that make hit & expertise not required for optimum dps:

1. White hits & associated fury swipes only make up ~1/4 of our damage 2. Energy abilities that miss or are dodges do not use up their entire cost 3. We are not GCD capped; that is we have downtime between abilities while we wait for energy to build up.

The third factor is what really makes hit & expertise not required. Even if you miss, because you have not expended the entire energy, and because you have free GCDs anyways, you can simply re-use the ability until you hit.

The big caveat is that, as you were made painfully aware, you really need to be able to keep on top of your buff/debuffs and be able to make quick decisions on what ability to use next. If you are able to react quickly and correctly to your misses, then you lose little dps even with 0 hit and 0 expertise, and because those stats have been converted to other dps stats (hopefully mastery) overall you gain DPS. However, if you find yourself unable to keep tabs on what's missed and what's hit and your bleed uptimes suffers, then you will find hit & exp more useful.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that your theoretical max dps will suffer if you have hit and expertise, but if you can't pull off the mechanics in reality then theory doesn't help that much.”

So far I’ve stumbled across some interesting sites for information and if you are so inclined please check them out for yourself.  I cannot hope to provide nearly as good information as they have already done.  The best that I can hope to do is to share what ever good information I can find.

Here is a link to where to find the elusive Earthern Ring Quartermaster to get your tabard for the reputation grind.  But don’t just go there for that.  There is a link there to the Cynical Brit’s Rep guide and a 35min utube video he put together.  If you enjoy listening to him as much as I do, you will like this video.  Also go and listen to his POD casts.  You do not have to be an EPIC LEET player to enjoy.   (I know I’m not and I enjoy listening.)

Want to know more about how to be a good feral kitty, check out Glitter’s guide.  She has put together a nice concise guide that is still very comprehensive, without the detailed theory crafting that can make me go huh. 

Interested in Restro but don’t know how or what to do or where to start.  Keeva has a great site she put together.   Here is also a link to her blog.  And she has an awesome voice, I love the Australian accent.  /sigh.  I first heard about her from listening to the RAWRCAST Podcast when she was a guest.  By the way, Stomp and Half – I hope you guys start doing your POD casts again.  I really miss you.  Anyway, I had not touched my Restro spec since they took away our tree form.  I miss be able to be a tree all the time, but I also miss trying to heal a bit.  So I’m trying to relearn it all.

That’s it from me.  Hope you all had a great week and have a great weekend!

The Big Eight Five!

Last night I dinged the big Eight Five on my warrior, Amukamukamuk!  It was such a great feeling.  I had not played him for about a month since I had switched over to playing my Druid.  I was having too much fun being a feral cat and questing and getting to 85.  Anyway, I had been a bit disappointed that I had taken so long to level up.  But I really wasn’t in a rush.  Real life has been keeping me busy.  I’ve joined a new guild this year and it’s been fun getting to know them and I have been enjoying the new content.  I even started a Worgen Druid to see that starting area.  So the time I have played has been fun.  But last night was really a lot of fun.  I just meant to log on to see if I needed a shield spike someone offered to send me and maybe do a little mining to unwind.  It had been a busy day, with some extra running around – taking my son back and forth to an after school activity.  As I glanced at my experience bar, I noticed that I had just a little over one bar to go to 85.  I actually did a double take.  I didn’t remember being so close before.  Why I didn’t finish up leveling over a month ago I have no idea.  I guess that is what happens when you get really busy with life eh?   So with just a bar to go, I picked up some of the quests in the northern part of Twilight Highlands, the ones that start you killing a few tentacles.  Well by the time I dinged, I was being transported to Thrall to help defeat Deathwing.  My achievement pops up as I stood helpless to defeat the big bad guy that caused all the problems in Azeroth.  Yep, and as I feel it important to let folks know when you caused the wipe, I informed my guild that I failed to defeat him and doomed us all.  Sorry, my bad!  They were pretty understanding and all and congratulated me on getting to 85.  I was like, hey I just dinged, Thrall, I’m not geared enough for Deathwing my man.  You’re going to have to give me some time to get my rep up and stuff.  Well after dooming us all, I accepted another quest where I ended up falling into the maw of the tentacle thing and doing those quests in there.  Awesome fun folks and you get an achievement for surviving – excellent.  So really just wanting to unwind and gather some ore, I head into a section of Twilight Highlands guarded by some dragoons.  Hey, no biggy, I’m sure I’ve been here before.  No wait, one of them guys grabs me and what the… I’m going to be ripped apart wait… I’m just here for some ore man.  Ah, must have stumbled into a new quest chain for Grim Batol.  I haven’t had that much fun since I started playing a couple of years ago.  I was surprised by the content.  I hadn’t looked up what gear I needed and grinding quests to get that gear, I was just exploring and taking things as they came.  I’m sure folks will tell me that I’m doing it all wrong and my daughter told me I’m still a noob, but that didn’t diminish all the fun I had last night.  So, to all of you who may have stumbled across this blog of mine, and maybe you are reading it a year from now – don’t let others tell you you’re doing it wrong.  If you are enjoying yourself, you are doing it right!

To gank, or not to gank, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of the opposing faction,

Or to take arms against a sea of horde,

And by opposing end them?

What I’ve learned playing on a PVP server:

Chose your battles wisely, 

Do not charge openly into an overwhelming number of enemies,

For you will die in vain, and embolden your enemies seek revenge.

Pick the time and place of your battles.

Que for battlegrounds, hone your skills. 

When defeated by superior player, acknowledge their victory,

But learn from your mistakes.

There will come a time when you will be faced with a difficult decision. 

To Gank or not to Gank.

This morning I was presented with an opportunity to attack an AFK member of the opposing faction.  A level 85 Paladin who appeared to have gone AFK while waiting with his level 40 something companion near a summoning stone.   While I was on my level 82 Druid, I simply let them be when I first saw them.  I was working on finding the elders for the Lunar Festival, and was not interested in PVPing at the time, especially not against a level 85 Paladin and his buddy.  However, after completing my goals within the area, and having had a cup of coffee, I noticed that they had not moved from their spot for maybe 20 minutes or more.  Well, this level of complacency about these two hordies on a horde dominated PVP server seemed to demand some type of action on my part. Soooooo, while I prefer even/balanced PVP or even the opportunity to win against overwhelming odds, I decided to gank the Paladin.  But I did not touch his companion.  I hope that I gave them something to think about when they returned to their characters.  As it turns out, despite the moral dilemma I experienced about ganking an AFK player, I feel as though it was the right thing to do.  When I first started playing on a PVP server, I would have let it go.  I guess over time I’ve become more accustomed to the PVP code of conduct on the server.   Or I have simply been ganked enough to feel the need to take some revenge.  Either way, it was in fact the highlight of my morning and it reminded me of the conversation between Captain Jack Sparrow and William Turner.

[Will draws his sword.]

Jack Sparrow:  Put it away, son.  It’s not worth you getting beat again.

Will Turner:  You didn’t beat me:  you ignored the rules of engagement.  In a fair fight, I’d kill you.

Jack Sparrow:  That’s not much incentive for me to fight fair, then, is it?

My first toon was a Warrior.

After watching my kids play for over a year, trying to get them to get off the game and do something else, I logged on and decided to give it a try.  I spent a lot of time on the character creation screen.  I wanted him to be something that I could connect with.  Coming up with a name was of course a sticking point.  It needed to represent who he was and indirectly how I would approach the game.  Thinking of the Disney movie about Halloween, I remembered the one witch who was talking about running amok and another witch repeating the word “Amok Amok Amok”.  Well the name Amok was taken.  And Amuk was taken.  But then I typed in Amukamukamuk and all was good.  It felt right.  I have many fond noob memories of leveling Amuk and I believe you have to be a bit of a Masochist to play and level a warrior, but that is who I feel best personifies my real life experiences.  I get beat on a lot, but thorough perseverance, I will eventually succeed.   When I started playing, my daughter and my son were playing – all sharing one account.  Well that was hard enough with just the two of them, so I started up a second account and moved my son’s toon over to that server.  So then they could play together and I could play when one of them were not playing.  Well with a second account, I made a Night Elf Druid.  I had watched my daughter playing her Druid and thought it looked like something I would enjoy.  Plus as a bear, it shared the same rage mechanic as the warrior and it felt familiar to a degree, but mostly I loved the look of the cat.   

That’s a longish explanation of why I will be talking about playing a Druid on a blog that appears to be about Warriors.  Well now, it’s my blog so I’ll write about what interests me.  But it’s all related because the way I approach the game, I believe you need to have some understanding of what the other classes bring in order to work well together.   And there is no better way of learning about the other classes than to play one yourself.  I am pretty sure that the most abusive comments I received from players about my tanking, were from players who never tried to tank.

This last week I rolled a troll druid.  I named him Mythstaken, after my other Druid.  I like the name.  It’s a bit of a personal reference to where I am in my life, reflecting on the many things that I believed to be true but I have come to understand that was just not so.  It’s a bit of a playful combination of “Myths” and “mistaken” understandings of what I knew to be the way things are and the way things ought to be.

Now I have played alliance since I started over 2 years ago.  So it is a new experience for me to have a horde character that I actually like.  Some friends I made when I first started playing switched to horde over a year ago and I hated leveling so much that I didn’t want to go through that again.  And I liked my alliance toons the way they were.  I didn’t want to pay for a faction change.  So when they asked me to join their new guild to help them level it a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d give it a go.  I had leveled a Night Elf Druid to 80 in Wrath and am slowly leveling him to 85 and I enjoy playing him so I thought I’d see what it was like with a troll druid.  Besides, I love the look of the troll cat form.  Leveling a druid now is so much easier than it was 2 years ago.  I’m sure that part of that reason is that I have 2 years of experience and that makes a big difference.  But I thought it was a great change to get the cat form at lvl 8 and the bear form at lvl 15.  Why, because I enjoy DPSing in cat form and getting to experience more of what the druid can do at the lower levels means that people can try things out easier with less wasted time it they don’t enjoy it.  So this is my new project in WoW, leveling my troll druid.  I’ll write about some of the experiences, good or bad, along the way.  I have no heirlooms on this toon.  Everything I’m using is from either quest rewards or the Auction House.  The gold I have is mostly from selling ore and herbs and drops I don’t need on the Auction House.

This last Friday, I got him to level 15 and joined my first looking for dungeon with him.  Since I have tanked quite a bit with my Warrior and Bear, I was looking forward to seeing what it was like in the lowbie dungeons.  Remember what it was like before the LFD tool?  You had to form your own groups, travel to the dungeons and hope you had a good group.  Well because of that I ended up leveling mostly through questing before that.  Unless you were in a guild that had players your level, you got runs through dungeons to get gear.  It felt like you had to hurry up to get to the max level so that you could get groups with other players.  I never liked being run through a dungeon.  “Stay here till I clear the room then come in and loot the corpses” – Not the heroic adventure that I was hoping for.  So the LFD tool is in my opinion one of the best changes Blizzard implemented in the last expansion.  It let you get groups for the dungeons with folks your level and learn to play your role in the group.  It made playing the game enjoyable without burdening your guild mates for runs.  Anyway, I managed to tank my way to level 19 over the course of the weekend and enjoy the challenges in the low level dungeons without being over geared or over the appropriate level.  Not a lot of attacks available at that level, just Maul, and Mangle, a taunt, and Demoralizing Roar, but learning to tank with the basics again was a great time.  I have key bound the target markings of Skull, X, Moon, and Square.  Do you know what a big difference it makes when folks are attacking the same target you are?  I had very little trouble keeping agro.  The best group was in Wailing Caverns.  I had a mage in the group and I asked if he could sheep yet.  He said yep and I told him to sheep the targets marked with a moon.  Worked great even if it wasn’t needed throughout the instance, by the time we got to the larger groups, we were used to doing that and it made things that much easier.  Imagine how good we will all be at 85, if we learned to start marking targets and communicating in pugs at level 18. 

Good luck to you all in your own journey!