Weekend at Pookies’ February 14, 2011

Well, I didn’t spend the weekend propping up dead people … or since I was doing archaeology … did I?
 
A couple of things:
 
First of all, I decided to drop enchanting on Pookies and level inscription instead. This was for a couple of reasons.
 
Enchanting is notoriously difficult to level, and I was stuck at around 510/525 after using up all of the Greater Cosmic Essence that I got from disenchanting quest gear. More Greater Cosmic Essence did not seem to be forthcoming.
 
Secondly, my guild does not have a max level scribe, whereas we have multiple max level enchanters. (Masochists.) We could have used a scribe from a utility standpoint (i.e., to make glyphs), and it was also the last profession we were missing for the achievement Working as a Team.
 
I used El’s Inscription as a guide (this is not an ad; the site is 100% free). My alt Fuhlamer is an herbalist, so I got him to farm all of the herbs I needed. When all was said and done, I probably farmed about 1750 herbs in a single day, but I didn’t spend a copper on herbs. (I did end up buying a single Fiery Pigment because I got unlucky with milling.) I would have needed another 200 to 250 herbs if my GM hadn’t insisted on buying the last twelve Inferno Pigments that I needed in order to get to 525.
 
As I was leveling, I tried to make druid glyphs when I had the choice. This is because I knew which glyphs (for resto and balance) were actually useful and might sell on the AH. Although I didn’t spend any gold on herbs, I did have training costs and the money I made from selling some glyphs helped to offset that.
 
So the other thing I did this weekend was archaeology. I mean … a lot of it. When I wasn’t leveling inscription, I was trying to farm up that elusive trinket, Tyrande’s Favorite Doll (which I have a tendency to spell with a “u”).
 
I probably did archaeology for a total of at least 20 hours over the weekend. I even tried out this hair-brained idea from Wowhead’s Zin’rokh page (maybe a post on that later) that was supposed to increase chances of getting ultra rares. Alas, I am still not in possession of Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. What I am in possession of now, however, is the Scepter of Azj’Aqir:
 

 
I guess it’s a nice consolation prize. I also think it’s just that my guildmate was trying to farm this mount and dug up the trinket, and then in trying to farm the trinket, I dug up the mount.
 
Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way. Love is not in the air for me, although he will be in two days. My boyfriend is currently back in Germany visiting friends and family, aber er wird Mittwoch nach Hause kommen (but he will come home on Wednesday).

Theralion: A big gay joke February 10, 2011

Last night was raid night, and our goal was to down Valiona and Theralion for the first time.
 
We started the night out at Throne of the Four Winds, there Conclave of Winds went down with little effort.
 
In transit to Bastion of Twilight, we noticed that we controlled Tol Barad, so we made a quick detour to kill Argaloth. He finally dropped some useful tier loot—my pants! Unfortunately, this piece doesn’t have haste on it (I’m still working towards that 2004 haste), but the (much) higher int makes the upgrade worthwhile.
 
In Bastion of Twilight, we made short work of Halfus and worked on Valiona and Theralion for about 1.5 hours before getting them down:
 

 
Finally, the night ended with Omnotron and a heavily nerfed Magmaw going down in Blackwing Descent (no complaints about the Magmaw nerf, BTW, he was just insane before).
 
And now for the soapbox portion of today’s post:
 
By now it’s no secret: Theralion is out of the closet. I guess the developers wanted to have a gay character (which is great), but they couldn’t wrap their heads around a way to do that without turning him into a walking joke (which is a bit insensitive, to put it lightly).
 
In beta, Theralion had a voice which could be described as, erm, just a lil’ bit campy. He has abilities such as Fabulous Flames and Dazzling Destruction, and isn’t it just hilarious that the silly gay dragon has such silly abilities? Isn’t it? Oh, by the way, he also drops a mirror, because all gays are vain and Theralion couldn’t possibly be an exception to that rule. Really, Blizzard? How about Theralion’s Lifelike Dildo?! Theralion’s Can of Crisco? Theralion’s Bottle of Poppers? No, Blizzard? Would that just be taking it too far?
 
Now, let me go on record as saying that I have nothing against gay men who, intentionally or not, conform to any number of gay stereotypes. I know that I sure do, and that’s just fine by me. I think that people should be whoever they want to be, from sassy queen to growling leather daddy (or from growling queen to sassy leather daddy … really, whatever floats your boat). But in a game devoid of LGBT characters, to only present gay stereotypes in a way that is clearly meant to incite ridicule is really unfair. And you are kidding yourself if you think that Blizzard put this boss in for any reason other than for the lulz.
 
Blizzard did end up going with the “normal,” growling dragon voice for Theralion for release. But this whole kerfuffle really brings a couple of issues to light:
 
1. there is a complete lack of LGBT characters in the World of Warcraft (this is whole ‘nother essay on its own, and there is a lot of reading out there for those who are interested); and
 
2. the only way that Blizzard can think to introduce obviously LGBT characters is by pandering to stereotypes.
 
I hope that, in light of the Theralion, someone at Blizzard is taking a long, hard look at LGBT character development and how LGBT characters can be introduced to the game in a respectful way.
 
And let me be clear about this: I love a joke as much as the next guy. Really. I love gay jokes. I joke about myself with my guild all the time. But we make light of gay stereotypes because, while we recognize the rights of gays to be incredibly vain and to talk the way they talk and to cast fabulous and dazzling abilities with jazz hands if they want to, we know that’s not how every gay person is and we accept people for the people that they are. Does your average player understand that, Blizzard? What in the hell were you hoping to achieve by sticking this walking(/flying) stereotype into your heteronormative game? To expose your player base to an LGBT character that they can relate to or to give everyone a big laugh? You are nowhere near the point that you can get away with shit like this.

RAAAAWWRRR!!!! Er … GAAARRRR!!!!!!! February 7, 2011

So on Saturday night a bunch of us were online when someone said, “Wait … what is Garr doing in Mount Hyjal?”
 
Apparently Garr has been brought back a one of five rare elite bosses that spawn in the world (one in each new Cataclysm zone). He has 30 million HP, a bunch of adds (just like in Molten Core), and is generally a pushover. That is, assuming that you aren’t on a PVP realm and the other faction isn’t trying to grief you while you’re fighting him. And, of course, we are on a PVP realm and the other faction was trying to grief us as we were fighting him.
 
And so it took us multiple attempts with breaks in between for chasing down Horde, but we eventually got this sucker down (with the help of a friendly druid who happened to be passing by).
 

 
High off of our Garr kill, we decided to go and kill a Whale Shark. I mean … why not? There’s an achievement for that. Plus, how hard could it actually be? Hm? How hard?
 
Well, if you haven’t run into this animal before, it hits for 780631 to 1159297 damage, which, in case you didn’t know, is enough to one-shot anyone. It also resets if you don’t hold its attention by staying within a very specific range of him (outside of melee range—for obvious reasons—but within 20 yards). So Whale Shark is a kitefest where you can expect your kiter to mess up and die at any moment. The good news is that when we finally killed Whale Shark, even those who were dead got the achievement.
 
Lastly, I have been archaeologizing all over Kalimdor like a madman. In the past couple of days I’ve knocked out 6/7 Night Elf rares (that’s right, all of them except for the one that I actually want), and I am now working on my second Tol’vir rare (yes, it’s the ring!!!). I finished Fossil long ago, and all of those fragments are just sitting in my archeology tab waiting for patch day. I haven’t even touched Orc, Draenei, Nerub, or Val’kyr., and I’m saving my Troll and Dwarf fragments for now because I know what I want, and I want it now. I want that doll. ‘Cause I’m Mr. Vain.

IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!! February 3, 2011

Last night was raid night, and our first order of business was to head over to Baradin Hold (with 20 minutes left before the battle) and do an Argaloth take down. With Argaloth’s death, I got the 1000 Valor Point achievement, and …
 

 
Yeah!!! World one millionth and guild third!!! For serials though, I mostly gave up on achievement point collecting in the middle of WotLK when I decided to stop playing as much. Thanks to the slew of new achievements that came with Cataclysm, I was able to finally reach nine thousand achievement points rather easily.
 
After Argaloth and knocking out Halfus (we knew we’d get whelps since it was discovered that which adds are up is not random), we decided to head over to Throne of the Four Winds to try our hand at the Conclave of Winds, a Four Horseman-type encounter where three Djinns must be killed within 60 seconds of one another.
 
As the “instant casts healer,” I was stuck on the Rohash platform. Rohash is the most trivial of the three platforms. He deals low damage to random raid members on his platform, and when everyone else is doing their ultimate he does a version of Malygos’ toilet bowl thinger … but it only ticks for 2 500 damage per tick and then plops you down for about half of your health bar in fall damage. It’s not very challenging since your DPS generally runs off to split the AOE ultimate damage on a neighbouring platform before the toilet bowl happens, and a stack of Lifeblooms while in the air and a Swiftmended Rejuv plus Lifebloom bloom after hitting the ground is enough to get a druid back up to full health relatively quickly.
 
The actual part of Rohash that does get a little bit frustrating is his ability Wind Blast. While casting Wind Blast, Rohash will turn to face a random direction as he revs up (think Winding Up from Mimiron), and then he blasts the area in front of him while rotating clockwise for 6 seconds. Again, think Mimiron, except Wind Blast knocks you off of Rohash’s platform instead of killing you outright. The problem with this is that each of the Djinns in this encounter require that at least one person be on their platforms at all times, or the lonely Djinn will channel a raid wiping ability. So everyone getting Wind Blasted off of Rohash’s platform results in raid wipe.
 
I know what you’re thinking. “Well, Pookies, just fucking avoid the Wind Blast then … it’s raiding 101, l2play, etc.” Well, to make Wind Blast more interesting, Rohash is constantly surrounded by 3 tornadoes. These tornadoes randomly path around Rohash’s platform and knock anyone they hit backwards off of the platform (basically preventing melee from being effective DPS again Rohash). These tornadoes and gray and seem to prefer to path right in front of Rohash just as he’s about to do Wind Blast, so if you get unlucky it’s virtually impossible to see which way he’s facing. Really, fun times.
 
We did eventually learn how to deal with Wind Blast more effectively as the night went on (pro tip: use Travel Form and angle your camera so you can dodge tornadoes while running around Rohash), and the other platforms worked out some of their issues (those issues mostly revolving around the fact that their platforms were far more demanding than the Rohash one), and we did get Conclave of Wind down after about two hours.
 

 
Omnotron rounded off the night, and we said our bye byes for another week.

Back with a bang January 28, 2011

Whelps, I plunged back into the raiding scene on Wednesday, and as a healer! After checking Bastion of Twilight and seeing that we had a rather unfortunate drake comp for Halfus, we decided to head over to Blackwing Descent.
 
The guild had previously made some progress in Blackwing Descent working on Omnotron with two healers. We worked through some minor issues such as people not running from Toxitron adds and Magmatron’s shield going off because of pet attack damage (!!!), and we got the lot down after about one and a half hours of work.
 
Omnotron was a Council-type fight, but compared to Council it was a walk in the park. More of the raid damage in this fight is completely avoidable, and when it did tick it did so for far less than Council AOEs. So what we did have to heal through felt manageable. Stacking during Magmatron Incineration Security Measures let us use of our 1337 healing Venn diagram (consisting of priest, shaman, and druid healing circles). When all was said and done, I walked off with a shiny new ring (Security Measure Alpha).
 
Next on the docket was Magmaw. I had read up on Magmaw on Wowhead, and by all accounts the fight was supposed to be easy peasy lemon squeezy. In fact, I was wondering why the group had done work on Omnotron when Magmaw was right there! Well, was I in for a shock. The healing required for Magmaw is really insane. It was hardly doable with three healers, so I can’t even imagine what it would have been like for two. Every mana cooldown was used on cooldown. And even then all three of us were OOM by the end of the fight.
 
Some of the issues we had with Magmaw included ranged not stacking properly in melee range, our add kiter not staying within healing range, a lack of add DPS, a lack of “chain gang” coordination, and of course the damage just being over the freaking top. But we did eventually get the worm down.
 
Getting Magmaw felt really good. During the first five to ten attempts of the night, it really felt like the fight was completely undoable from a healing point of view. The first five or so attempts also had us wondering whether or not our ranged team would be able to burn through the adds quickly enough. But we worked through it when some other groups may have given up, and our perseverance paid off.
 
Since Wednesday I’ve been continuing to work on my gear through JP, I did a Baradin Hold run with guildies, and, for the first time since dailies were released, I did 25 dailies in one day and was unable to turn in the 26th. That was a surprise.

DING DING DING DING DING January 26, 2011

Well, my boyfriend is back in Germany for three and a half weeks, and you know what that means: WOW! ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT!!!! WOW!!!!
 
I did manage to get a bit of questing done in the weeks before he left, and I got to level 85 early last week (Armory says January 16th). My guildmate Zaltrix gave me a Chestguard of Nature’s Fury as a “Welcome to level 85” present.
 
Today marks my return to raiding. EoTS is still on a one-night-a-week schedule. My guildmates are happy to have their third healer back. They were able to make some progress with just two, downing Halfus last week (quite the feat if you consider the gear that most of the raid had). I’m really out of practice when it comes to healing in raids. I remember not doing such a bang up job of it in T10 after taking a break for most of T8 and T9. But we’ll see how it goes tonight, won’t we?

And we’re back! December 14, 2010

This time around, I remembered to pre-order the Collector’s Edition of the expansion for my cool Collector’s Edition pet. I had my box delivered to my office at around noon last Tuesday, after which I had to sit through another five hours of excruciating torture sitting at my desk with the box beside me before I was able to go home, install, and whip out my Lil’ Deathwing. The Deathwing mousepad that also came with the Collector’s Edition conveniently covers up that spot on my cheap IKEA desk where my mouse has worn the paint off of the fibreboard.
 
Pookies is only level 83. Before Cataclysm was released, I told my guild that I would be behind the leveling and gearing up curve because of real life issues. I leave for a two-week vacation to Hong Kong tomorrow to visit my mother. When I return, I will have three weeks to spend with my boyfriend before he returns to Germany for an indefinite amount of time. (He is a German national who is only in Canada to do his Master’s.) Fortunately, my guild has been very supportive of my decision to not sign up for our weekly raids and to level a little more casually until my boyfriend goes back to Germany. At that point I’ll have nothing better to do than to play WoW with every spare minute of my day and drown my loneliness in enough beer to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. That’s the plan, anyway.
 
I just thought I’d post a little update here. Eye of The Storm and Pookies are still kickin’. 😀

Tick tock on the clock/and the raiding’s mostly stopped June 11, 2010

That’s right. EoTS decided to call it almost quits at New Year after a couple of years of productive raiding. We still run our 10-man on Wednesday nights as a way for everyone to get together for a night of fun. But it’s extremely casual. As in, we haven’t even killed LK on 10-man normal yet. But we are working on him! We can clear up to him in a single raid night and we’ve given him about one full night so far.
 
Pookies continues to not be a bear. He maintains his crappy T9 resto set, but he is laz0r chicken pretty much full time … except for to get quick random queues and for Blood Wing, Dreamwalker, and LK attempts.
 
I’m sure I’ll update when Kingslayer finally happens. But until then, I’m not sure there’s much to update this blog with! Pookies out! (Pewpew on, heroes!)

A Tribute to Skill October 23, 2009

RAWR! Last night EoTS finally cleared TOGC with a really messy Anub kill! We were having some major issues with the healability of P3, and last night we had a couple of sub-10% wipes. Our tanks died on our kill. Our shadow priest Dispersion-tanked the adds. Our hunter Deterrence-tanked Anub. It was down to two DPS at very low health and I’m pretty sure we all thought it was a wipe when the achievements flashed up on our screen.
 

 
We managed to finish with 37 attempts left, which means we gots an extra weapon and a couple of Trophies. We managed to snag the following heroic weapons this run: Blade of the Silver Disciple for me (!!!), Reckoning for our DK tank Balion, Fordragon Blades for our hunter Karazorel, and Lothar’s Edge for our retadin Allrik.
 
It’s great to have finally downed TOGC, and the fact that we got a bunch of useful loot doesn’t hurt, either! Here’s the parse from last night. There are bits of missing data here and there because I kept on getting disconnected, but the Anub kill is there.

Finally, some progress October 16, 2009

We had not made any progress in weeks. We had been spending most of our time getting Ulduar hard modes down for people who still needed them for their GotUR metas since we were making zero progress on heroic Faction Champions.
 
Heroic Faction Champions has caused a lot of frustration in our guild. None of us could figure out why we sucked so hard at it (not even taking one of the opposing team down). Tensions were running far too high. It seemed that every new idea we tried just flopped.
 
Last night we finally got them down, and I wish I could tell you why. But I can’t. We tried to use the pet healing exploit, but even that didn’t seem to work too well. I know for a fact that our CC was shit and that our healing was not assigned. I guess you’re just bound to get it down if you try enough times.
 
Kill order: resto shaman -> healy priest -> rogue ret paladin -> lock -> balance druid
 
We definitely identified the shaman’s Healing Stream Totem has being the most dangerous thing in this fight. It was outhealing the shaman and priest’s healing combined. After killing the shaman, it was all about survival. One of our DKs swapped at that point to focus exclusively on shutting down one of the enemy melee (previous to that I believe we were simply cycling some Chains on the melee between our two DKs). We finally got it and we were happier than pigs in mud. Parse.
 
We struggled for a bit with the Val’kyr. We had melee and healers on the “inside” with one colour, while ranged were “outside” with the opposite colour trying to soak while doing DPS. That did not work. We had low DPS, people were getting hit by the little orbs anyway, and with our losses we could never get the shields down in time and the Twins would heal.
 
After four or five attempts, we decided to try a burn strategy instead (more in-line with our strategy for normal). Everyone took one colour, and we stood at the opposite-coloured portal and did our thing. On our kill we just got lucky and only had to burn down one shield.
 
We got them down. I managed to push almost 7500 HPS by using my mind-numbingly boring RJx5-WG rotation. (In 10-man since you only have two groups to worry about you can use every third RJx5 spot in the cycle to put RGs on the tanks or Nourish spam.)
 
We did get Anub about five tries and have learned how to get through P1 very reliably and set up for getting Anub to P2 in two surface phases. Now we have to perfect P2 and P3 … and hope that we can down Faction Champs again next week.