Non-Squishy Heals

Heirlooms for a new server, Part I

2012-01-28T12:57:00.002+11:00

Quite some time ago, one of my attacks of Altoholism led me to start new toons on a new server. This was without all the help that I have on other servers, without taking a toon across with bags, money, and the all-important heirlooms.

This is the scenario that any new player faces, one that often gets lost in the mass of veteran players - a quick search for farming honor (once you weed out the botting and pay services) basically boils down to "Now you are at 85, here is what to do". I thought that I would put down some of my thoughts and findings.

If you don't especially want to enjoy the leveling journey, and want to get to max level, heirlooms are your friend. In fact they are almost a necessity. The new player has three ways to get heirlooms. Firstly, they can play the revamped Darkmoon Faire for tickets, and buy the heirlooms that way. It's a relatively simple way to go, but it is quite time-consuming and can take some months. ... I say time-consuming, but one thing that I have come to realise is that at low level, if you are trying to fit out even a single toon with heirlooms, you are going to have to invest a LOT of time. Yes, you will have heirlooms, eventually, but one or more of your toons will be pretty high level before that happens, so just keep that in mind.

After the Faire, there is farming honor to buy the PvP heirlooms, and finally spending thousands of gold and buying the guild heirlooms.

The Faire is pretty simple. Do the quests, as often as you can, and even if you sell any of the BoE Faire stuff two to three months should get you one piece. Keep in mind that planning which heirlooms can or will be handed down to other toons - it will save you a heap of month and or time, but it will also lead to toons in sub-optimal gear, and missing the armor class bonuses. That is a decision only you can make.

In my next post, I'll look at farming Honor, and finally, the guild heirlooms.

Ego, and the crest of the wave

2012-01-01T12:03:00.001+11:00

When Blizzard announced the BattleTag feature, I decided to quickly jump on the bandwagon. Not because I was in the D3 beta or anything sensible lie that, but because I wanted to be known as me, as the identify that I have built up over the last years, that of Saund* in the various incarnations.

Knowing that there would be competition for particular names, I tried multiple variations on Saund* and got constantly rebuffed with the generic error telling me that apparently I had violated one of the rather vague naming guidelines. Given the amount of posting about this around the traps, I thought that this might be a teething problem.

I waited and retried several times over a period of a few weeks, then decided to bite the bullet and switch from the Saund* range to the other wow-related term near and dear to me, being the name of the blog. Now, call me paranoid, but I was thinking that there would hardly be a flood of people wanting their BattleTag to be NonSquishy.

See, I remember, back in the day, when ICQ was the elephant in the Chat room (boom boom, see what I did there?), I was very proud that my ID number was only in the 4 millions. That put me in pretty good (albeit mostly nerdy) company. I remember seeing a tag of someone, somewhere who was in the ten thousands ... NO WAY. That person immediately went up in my esteem and way up in their apparent cool factor. It was almost like name-dropping, seeing who had the best (one of the few circumstances outside weight loss where smaller is better! :) ) number.

You link these two together and I really did assume that I would have a 0001 or at the very least < 0005 number, for whatever it is worth. ... Except Blizzard are randomising the numbers, so my tag is something greater than 6000. Bah humbug. So much for my epeen! :)

4.3 LFD: The good, The bad, and the ugly!

2011-12-12T14:44:00.001+11:00

I know that I am not a hardcore raider, but I do enjoy raiding. I also enjoy doing the best that I can, and having the best gear that I can. Yet, with all that, I still couldn't bring myself to run Trollroics anywhere near as often as I should have. I just loathed the instances with a passion. I rarely capped my VP, and that was on the Pally, let alone other toons.

I would much rather have leveled alts, messed around with professions, or generally anything else. And I did, until 4.3 dropped. I have capped my VP on the Pally the last couple of weeks, including this week when unscheduled RL commitments meant I couldn't raid. I ran BH this week on the Pally too. I am very happy with that, and happy with the speed of the runs and the ability to gear up my prot (and heaven forbid) ret sets nice and easily. I will be getting Valor gear at close to the maximum rate as long as I can keep this up. Groups have been generally reasonable, with few real issues or total morons. I had one group congratulate me on my healing when I prevented a wipe and healed through a full three packs of trash that were inadvertently pulled together. Life was good.

Once I capped my VP on the Pally, I decided to see how far away the Mage was. My poor, weak attempt at a frost mage, but more on that later. His gear was ... well, decidedly average, but a couple of normal heroics and some JP purchases later, and here I was, able to queue for the new instances. What the heck, what is the worst that could happen? ... Famous last words... I am up to about 700 VP for the week, and about half that the week before, so I am well on the way to buy the VP boots for the Pally. My gear has risen exponentially, with most slots now sporting 378 epics, along the way replacing a level 318 staff and assorted other items of dubious nature. These pieces of gear have not all been optimal, and I am sporting a number of spirit items. The spirit, however, does not mean that the gear is not way better than what I had before. Naturally I will replace that when I get non-spirit drops, but that doesn't mean I don't have the right to roll on Spirit cloth, despite one particular moron spending five minutes ranting at me for doing exactly that.

And this is where the story starts to diverge from my experiences on the Pally. Some people are rude to DPS, particularly 'underperforming' DPS (by which they seem to mean anything under about 15k). Although, to be fair, there have been several groups that have not uttered a single negative comment, and the instances have completed quickly and happily, with the occasional wipe. I zoned in to one instance, and had a shammy tell me in party chat "mage, go arcane or fire for pve". My blood pressure started to rise in a manner that would have had a health professional looking at me askance. Firstly, if you wish to offer me advice at least have the courtesy of taking the 2 seconds to look at my name. Secondly, asking a question such as "Pug, did you realise that arcane is a vastly superior spec at the moment and have you considered respeccing to take advantage of that?" would have been far less inflammatory, and might have got a different response, regardless of the facts.

Now, before I get into the specifics, some background. Mr Robot and I have become very close the last few weeks, and I have been reforging and regemming constantly as I have been getting new gear. I have't been shelling out for the most expensive enchants on some of the gear, but I have certainly been doing some. An inspection of my character sheet should hopefully show that although not ideal, I have been putting in the effort to do what I can with the current gear.

I have also, as is my want, done a fair bit of blog reading, Christian Belt wrote a very interesting article (for frost mages) showing that the gap in DPS isn't as bad as it is reported as being, and anyway, I happen to like playing frost, especially given that the spec is so underrepresented amongst the general raiders I do not alike to follow the crowd :D. So, I feel quite comfortable in suggesting that I do not NEED to change my spec. I would certainly say that as a non-raiding character that I run a few heroics on, the requirement for respeccing isn't there. If this WAS a raiding character, and my raid leader was *asking* me to respec and the DPS difference was causing the raid to fail, then I would absolutely consider it. But this was some random knowitall (Zahahadid - Azjol-Nerub by name) ordering me around like his own personal lackey, without any context or thought. I said a number of things in party chat, to that general effect, and that I liked frost and didn't see an issue. This exchange went back and forth, and then just before the last boss was pulled, I was summarily ejected from the group. For no other reason than my spec, and the fact that I wouldn't let this guy bully me.

This sort of behaviour is all that is bad about LFD, and is just wrong on many levels. So, if you happen to be out there and there is someone gearing or or new at the instances, how about offering some gentle advice, not immediately treating them like someone lacking all mental faculties. Understand that they might like their spec, and you don't have the right to tell them to do anything! Also, if you see it happening, then please, speak up!

It's a Black-tip Sunday!

2011-12-04T08:35:00.001+11:00

It was a pretty normal Sunday morning in the House of Saund. Mrs. Saund was watching TV, the Saundlings were entertaining themselves, and I was enjoying yesterday's midafternoon (Thank you time differences) in Azeroth. I happened to be on my hunter, who is currently based in Dal, and at 7:50am happened to wander near the fishing fountain. Seeing a certain Elder standing there jogged my memory.

I have tried on and off to win the fishing derby since it first started, and I figured I had just enough time. I quickly logged over, and hollered in trade for a mage, offering a tip large enough to ensure that I actually got a response, and one quick smart. Ported to Dal, and onto my flying horse, I mashed the crusader aura button and was off to the wilds of Howling Fjord. I carefully equipped my ring to enable me to get back to Dal in a hurry, and got into HF just as the Elder yelled that the derby had begun.

There are still plenty of people on Shadow Council that want to win, as I came across at least three today. I was rapidly adding to my stash of junk in my bags, and getting rather disillusioned as tends to happen about 2.07pm server time, which experience tells me is about when it usually goes off. Then, into my bags, appears the shark. I frantically hit my ring and watched as the agonising seconds tick by as the loading bar crawled towards completion. It paused and I was sure that I would pop out into Dal with the Elder yelling the name of the most recent winner. He hadn't, and I started to hope. I jumped on my horse and flew towards him, clicked frantically, and selected the ring (of course). I completed the quest, and the achievement popped. Master Angler of Azeroth. Yee Har.

I may or may not have actually leaped out of my chair, pumped my fist, and said in a rather un-Sunday-morningish voice. YES! FINALLY. I WON. The kids have watched with amusement my antics in trying to catch a virtual fish in a virtual fishing contest in a virtual world , and they understood at least a portion of what I was feeling. Mrs. Saund on the other hand, just wanted to know what the noise was all about.

I must say, that really made my day a lot brighter. Sad, isn't it!

Patch day pleasant surprise

2011-11-30T10:50:00.001+11:00

I log on this morning, and naturally enough for a large patch, all my addons are broken and I started to wonder how long it would take to get back and running.

I then realised that I hadn't tried to update my addons, and kudos to Vuhdo, updated, and ready to rock. Now just gotta decide whether I have the time or inclination to brave a new 5 man at lunch time ... optimistic or just crazy? You decide :D. Raid finder I think will need to wait for a DBM update!

There were certainly a large number of people swanning around on their sparkly new mounts. I wonder how long that fad will last? :) ... (Irony: saying that and logging on to all my main toons and alts I play even occasionally to pick it up :D )

Back in the groove

2011-11-25T09:24:00.001+11:00

I know that the content is nearing the end of its natural life, but it was still good to be able to go into Firelands last night with the guild and steamroll bosses 1-5 in two hours, including my first view of, and a clean one-shot of Domo.

I have been playing various alts much more lately due to the end of patch doldrums, and haven't done any raiding for a couple of weeks due to various RL commitments. In fact, I haven't done anything of substance healing related on the pally for over two weeks.

Yet, I jump into the raid and off I go, slipping comfortably into the groove of healing, with the known abilities, skills, cooldowns and key combinations. Many people have spoken about muscle memory, but to be able to do that, and still perform well in current tier content, it made me think long and hard about changing mains once Mists arrives.

I could take a week off work, I could play a Monk till my eyes bleed, and I could powerlevel a healer through LFD. I could be raid ready before many of the other guildies, and yet, would I be able to drop into a raid and rely on that muscle memory to do what needed to be done? A quick look at the combined stats for Saunder and Saundin shows the following: 900+ 5 man dungeons entered, 200+ 10 player raids entered, 30+ 25 player raids entered. That is a lot of experience, and a lot of knowledge of a class. Augment that with countless blog and forum reading, and I wonder just how likely success would be if I were to change main.

Oh, sure, it could be done, but it is going to be a LOT of work, a truly obscene amount of effort. Am I willing to put that in? I guess time will tell. One thing is for sure, if that was my plan, then dual speccing would not be my friend, regardless of queue times. It would have to be healing, healing and more healing, to get as much practice as possible, to be useful once again as a guild healer.

If I never see another turkey...

2011-11-21T13:41:00.001+11:00

The Pilgrims holiday is on again, and with it, the chance to level your cooking with very little pain to above 300. So, being the crazy person I am, I have been cooking up a storm on a small army of toons. You don't think of the cost of such endeavours, until you try this on a toon without a lot of financial resources. I was blithely cooking away this morning, and realised that I had just spent about 15g on cooking, from a pretty limited 20g start. Hmmm. It is great not to have to mess with the less pleasant sections of the cooking grind, and it will free up some much needed space in my personal GB, but I probably should have given a little more thought as to whether the investment of 10g just to learn some cooking on a toon I really don't plan to play was sensible ... Ah well, he may be broke, but he will be well-fed :)

My sanity has not deteriorated to the point of trying to shoot rogues though, for which I am profoundly grateful. That is one of the lest pleasant parts of the holiday, especially as less people are clustered in Dal these days.

The case against a Monk main

2011-11-10T16:58:00.000+11:00

There are obviously plenty of people that, based on the rumours, speculation and complete guess work, plus a small sprinkling of facts (What? you think that I'm exaggerating? :D) who are considering at least the possibility of changing their main to a Monk come the launch of Mists.

I'm sure there are a whole variety of reasons that people might do this, which I wont even attempt to explore, but in the end how successful such changes are will depend on where you are in the curve, how much of your own research you are planning to do, and how much you are prepared to work at it.

The curve.
Do you plan to stockpile leather heirlooms for your pandaren? Are you going to take a week off work at expansion release to powerlevel through as much as you can? If you are, then you aren't going to have the safety net that you do for the established classes and specs. I could roll a holy pally tomorrow (wait, I did that only last week :D), and I could find every conceivable talent choice, spec, rotation, cooldown usage and log analysis, plus a whole heap of things I have forgotten, and by the time that pally got to raiding, or even heroics, even if that was a week later, I would know what I needed to do. Google, EJ, and every other blogger under the sun who might have an opinion could be devoured, dissected and consumed. Popular choices could be examined and help could be sought from other, established players. This will not be possible with a Monk for weeks. probably MONTHS after the expansion is released. On the other hand, if you are planning a lesuirely trip to max level, where you may or may not raid, and no one is relying on you, go ahead, knock yourself out. have fun, and enjoy!

If you are planning on powerleveling, and you already have a regular raid spot, you need to understand that you could be holding your raid group back from raiding by playing at less than your best, with an unfamiliar class or class and role. At the very least, you should talk to your guild mates about it. No point in putting all that work in to find that you are the 14th monk healer in your guild :D

Research.
If you are the theorycrafting type, it won't matter if you don't have access to the established resources because you will do the work yourself. (as an aside, if you do, PLEASE blog about it so that YOU might become the resource! :) ). you will crunch numbers, see spreadsheets of figures in your dreams and you will lose sleep over whether n.1 DPS is acceptable or whether you need n.204. Whether you can stack haste till your eyes bleed or whether you need exactly 14,203 haste and NO MORE. If this does not sound like you, I would suggest that changing mains and expecting to be competitive and ready to raid in a short time is ... optimistic at best.

Finally, effort.
Regardless of the theorycrafting, are you prepared to use whatever resources may be available, spend large amounts of money redoing some minor (or not so minor) element of your character? Are you prepared to spend a LOT of time out of the game, as well as in it? If the answer to all of these is yes, you are possibly ready to give up your current comfortable main and switch to a Monk. Possibly., but probably not! :D

Guild Transfers

2011-11-02T13:51:00.000+11:00

I have some questions about the way that the new guild transfers will affect people. For some guilds, wanting to start a new life on a different server, maybe even a different faction will be a blessing. It will break them out of their existing ruts and enable them to explore greener pastures.

However, for the average player, I'm not quite sure how it will work out. I have transferred two characters in my years of playing WoW the first to build up my second Pally, the second to fund that Pally as my new main, and haven't transferred more partly due to the reluctance of having to actually spend more real money on the game. More importantly though, is the social aspect. When I left Aman'Thul to raid full time with a real life friend, I left behind relationships and the familiarity of a long established understanding of the server, its denizens, its economics, and its benefits (Oceanic time-coded server meaning it is day in game when it is day outside, and an almost total PvP dominance).

A few of those people I stay in touch with, a very few. I have added a couple to my Real ID list, but it isn't a substitute for being able to see them in Stormwind or Dal, to be able to help them with a quest, or whatever. Inevitably, those relationships have faded, leaving only a bare husk of what they were. Now I know that things change, but I miss some of those people. I miss seeing people who I had interacted with as you pass them by but weren't close enough to add as Real ID friends. If my current guild decided to transfer, (and I haven't had even the slightest murmur that anyone is even considering it) I'm not sure that I would wish to go through that again. It is not a nice position to be put in - do you stay with your guild and raid group or do you stay with the people you know in the wider server community? Which is easier to build up again? Which is more valuable? Questions that will have different answers for everyone, I'm sure.

It isn't fair to try to influence people to another point of view, and I wonder if ultimately, it isn't a selfish move for a guild to make which boils down to them saying: Chose this circle of friends/associates, or get left with another circle you weren't as close to, and to add salt to the wound, spend real money to remain with that particular group. Personally, I think that guilds who do transfer may end up losing a number of people who were, or felt they were, pressured into moving, only to realise that they don't want to be treated in that manner or that the things they thought were important were less important than they realised.

The Ultimate Fail Tank

2011-10-30T06:43:00.002+11:00

There are many, many, many morons that would lay claim to the above title, but here is my nomination.

I was on my mage, and doing the Horseman. We zone in and the tank starts the event, then goes afk, and stands there for the rest of the fight, before miraculously coming back just as we killed him. Before I go further, I must compliment the heals and a ret pally who did the tanking.

So, here is this Warrior tank, who has already left a bad taste in my mouth. I then look him up on the armory and look at what I have found: Only two chants, one of which requires a level 35 or higher item. 3 missing gems and almost full S10 resil gear. Now, granted, I know all the shortcomings of the Armory, and this may just be his PvP set, but WoW-Heroes shows the same gear. For the purpose of the exercise, lets assume that *is* his PvP set. Still, there is no excuse, at all, for you to zone in to a holiday boss, then go afk, for the exact period of time of the fight. So, Unchartable of Cry me a River - Korgath, how appropriate, cry me a river that you have been nominated for the Ultimate Fail Tank.

Annual Pass, Marketing and so on

2011-10-23T07:16:00.002+11:00

I'm not at Blizzcon, and I have been following the announcements with only mild interest as to the specifics. As has been pointed out by many, you cant make assumptions on just how much of these announcements will actually see the light of day on the live servers. Certainly many will fall by the wayside, or be changed significantly.

So, rather than rant or wail or salivate over features that are still pretty much vapourware, I thought that I'd talk about the Annual Pass. You have almost certainly heard about it if you have been following any of the Blizzcon news. Without going into the fine detail, Pay for 12 months WoW subs and you get a goodie pack including three things. A BoA Mount, Diablo III free and guarenteed access to the next WoW Beta.

Lets start with what that is worth: The mount I will ignore as I have never bought mounts from the store, and don't plan to start now, so scratch that. Guaranteed access to the next beta. That's a nice little perk, and would certainly be interesting. Would I pay for that alone? Probably, but not a great deal. I really enjoyed the cata beta and was surprised at the repeated disappointment I had as I checked my inbox for the Diablo III beta invite that still hasn't come ;). I am, as mentioned multiple times, a software tester in my day job, and there isn't much closer to the dream job than helping to iron out the bugs and polish the game I have spent so many hours on. I know what dev's need to replicate bugs. I know how much easier it is to fix a bug with a comprehensive bug report and I love finding those bugs and reporting them well.

Access to the beta would also give me a taste of the content if I continue my trend of taking the first few days of an expansion off work and powerlevelling to start doing the end game content. I have plenty of toons to experience the richness of the content, my Pally has the single track of getting to a new level cap ASAP, hopefully making some serious gold on the way from profs ahead of the general leveling curve. So that access would be nice, but hardly life-changing.

And finally, the big one. Free Diablo III. That is a serious inducement, IF and only IF, you are planning on subscribing to WoW for the next say six months and you were thinking of buying D3 anyway. If that's true, then it's a no brainer. However, and this is where I really start to wonder, how many people that fall into that category would have bought D3 anyway, in addition to their current WoW subs?

I spent so many hours on the Diablo games that I suspect that in the end, I would have bought the game regardless. Yes, it absolutely annoys me that there is no paladin planned for the moment and that I have a very strong suspicion I will need to buy a future expansion to get one, but as much as I whinge and moan would that stop me buying the game? *sigh* Experience says that I'd give in, probably pretty quickly. I am also not planning to cancel my WoW subs any time soon. Granted that can change in a very short time, and I have a friend who went from serious player and fellow WoW tragic (When 50% of all conversations I used to have with him at work revolved around WoW, tragic is probably the best label you can hope for :D ) to not renewing his subscription in the space of a week. Things change, attitudes change, priorities change. I know this, but I don't understand this decision from a marketing point of view. Are Blizzard so worried about the people starting to leave WoW that they need to lock them into paying for another 12 months? Are they so frightened that the KungFu Panda expansion (Sorry, MoP) :) will be a colossal flop that they need to *give away* D3 to get people to stay? is the much-delayed D3 so bad they need to give it away?

What about how the real-money auction house will impact on things. There is a very real possibility that I will continue playing WoW longer than I otherwise would have because I will finance the subs by selling D3 items for real money and using that to pay for WoW time. I was considering doing that anyway. I could end up paying for 12 months WoW, not needing to pay for D3, then not needing to pay for WoW either :D.

I just don't understand the reasons behind this decision, I don't get where the marketing people are going here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm going to sign up for this offer, and do it in a heartbeat, but in the end, what have Blizz done? I think they are going to lose money on this, at least in my case, and I assume in the case of others like me. It will be interesting to see what happens in 12 months time. Am I still playing WoW? Am I still playing D3? Have I thrown in my day job to farm items in D3 for the AH market? LOL. I think we can safely scratch THAT one!

Oh, and PS. After my rant about the D3 beta key locations ... apparently this is only open to US, Canada, Australia, NZ and Singapore! I'd prefer to be on this list thanks :D

Low level insances in LFD

2011-10-18T13:48:00.001+11:00

I ran a number of instances on the weekend, on a whole variety of characters. I tanked half a Zulroic on the Pally, with some guildies. ... I won't go into detail, but it was a mess. I then healed the rest of that one, and another troll too, where I put up with multiple group drops and fails, to partly atone for my shame at the previous one.

I then ran a few on my Shammy and also on my Warrior, both of whom are in the 18-25 ish bracket. Both of whom have multiple heirlooms, and neither of which are characters or specs I know ultra well. The shammy spent half his time throwing round lightning bolts as Earth Shield on the tank and the occasional long slow heal was all I needed to do, the warrior tanked two full instances with the heirloom 2-hander, because it wasn't causing the priest healer the slightest trouble and I needed to keep damage up so the trigger-happy DPS didn't take my threat.

Low level instances with heirlooms are just so trivial and uninteresting. It is a real shame, as you can recover from almost anything, you need to actively try to be stupid to cause a wipe, and trash just vaporises. I really wonder how it is helping the game when new players will be getting the instances are for steamrolling message very very clearly, even if they themselves aren't in all the BoA gear.

Austral- where?

2011-10-13T13:00:00.000+11:00

Blizzard are running a competition on Facebook where if you 'like' the Diablo III page, you can go into the running for a beta key. Sounds good, I think, and proceed to sign up, or I would have, but it unkindly tells me that due to the fact that "Only residents of Italy, United Kingdom, Croatia, Mexico, United States, Bulgaria, Switzerland, France, Czech Republic, Taiwan, Belgium, Belarus, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Sweden, Russian Federation, Argentina, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Norway, Canada, Spain, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Serbia and Hungary are eligible to enter this Sweepstakes", I can't enter.

From their FAQ: Q. Why is my country unable to participate in the sweepstakes?
A. Unfortunately, some countries have laws or restrictions which prevent us from making contests available to their residents....

What absolute and total rubbish. Like Australia wouldn't let you make a contest!

Right, so I could live in the Ukraine, and that is a better place from a contest view than Australia? Seriously!

*sigh*

Blog cast ... I can't do WHAT?

2011-10-10T16:01:00.002+11:00

So, if you didn't manage to catch me live and want to hear my thoughts, head over to TNB to grab a copy of Episode 145 - The Saund and the Fury ... Though I am no sure which fury ;)

I listened to it myself to see how it all sounded, and I must say that listening to yourself talk while you are doing something completely different and not talking .... Very very odd.

On a completely unrelated note, WoW said some very rude things to me the other day ... It told me that I couldn't create any more characters under this account! Excuse me, What? So now I either need to delete some toons (which requires finding spare bag space on other toons on that server) or *gasp* not create any new alts. And we all know which of those is the most likely :)

OT: Who would have thought it?

2011-10-06T09:33:00.000+11:00

We interrupt this blog to bring you a long and almost certainly rambly post that is completely and utterly unrelated to WoW. In excess of 1300 words without mention of a paladin, Blizzard or anything you have come to expect from me, this is not signifying a change in the blog, it is just something I wanted to write. I usually keep my RL and my blogging very separate, but hey, it's my blog, if you read on, you have been warned! :)

...

Still here? You're nuts. Join the club ...

...

Six weeks ago, I was a pretty normal IT nerd, depending how you define normal :). I didn't get a heap of exercise - maybe walked to work once a week or so, and my diet was hardly wonderful.

I had switched to lite milk from regular on my cereal, and I had switched to carbonated dishwater instead of real soft drinks (Coke Zero, Pepsi Max). I had takeout multiple times a week and lollies and chocolate most days at work. On the weekends I'd hoe into chips or biscuits while watching the TV.

The little diet changes weren't making a difference, and my waistline was continuing to expand. One of the genetic things that guys have as part of their very makeup is that they hate shopping, and especially clothes shopping. Now if there is one thing I detest with a vengeance, it is having to buy new clothes because the perfectly good clothes already in my wardrobe no longer fit.

It's a pretty simple equation I know, the calories out must be greater than the calories in to lose weight generally speaking and medical conditions not withstanding. But I like my food and don't want to eat like a rabbit just to lose weight. This left only one, very drastic course to take. I would have to r... r... run. See, I can barely even say the word! :)

I must give you some background. Being an IT nerd isn't something that is new, and being un-sporty isn't either. I was terribly proud at high school because I set a new record for the 12 minute run - 20 minutes! :) It takes skill to be that unfit. So the thought of running, for pleasure, I really must question my sanity. Oh, what is that I see, a purple unicorn outside my window? Yup, moving on.

I have several friends who have been running for some time. They go out rain, hail or shine and run obscene distances most days of the week. I have previously mocked them mercilessly, and that makes this even more embarrassing. I had heard about a program called C25k. It's designed to get anyone, and they do say anyone able to get off the couch (that would be the 'C'. lol) and run 5k in a reasonable time, over a period of nine weeks, three sessions a week.

I decided that this couldn't be a bad thing to try - even if it took me double the time to get there, I would be doing something to help stave off immanent purchase of larger clothes. I am not trying to run a marathon next month or anything crazy, I am just trying to get fitter. So I started - the program has you initially running for 60 seconds, then walking for 90 and repeating this for 20 minutes, bracketed by a warm up and cool down five minute walk. I managed this first session without my heart actually stopping, but I sure was knackered after it.

Some time in the now distant past, I did a similar thing. Well, I started a similar thing, but the constant looking at my watch and trying to work out whether I was meant to be running or walking and now long I had to go just didn't work. It was clunky, it involved much frustration and it was doomed to failure. I lasted maybe 3 sessions, then gave it up.

Smart Phones change your life in many ways, and here is a good one. There is an app on the Market, yes market as in Android, not Store for you Apple fanbois/fangirls ;) … no, cheap shot, it’s available on both. This app is free, fully featured and this has been the difference to me keeping going. It doesn’t yell at me, it doesn’t try to motivate me, it doesn’t try to be cute in any way, it simply beeps when I need to change pace, and beeps again when you are finished. App goes on, phone goes in the pocket, and off I go. Nothing could be simpler. There is also a paid version with extra stuff like being able to play music etc. The app is called C25k Lite and has a red sneaker as its icon.

In addition to the running and walking three times a week, I have made some more diet changes. They aren’t big ones, but they are sustainable for me. I have cut out one or two meals of junk food in a week, but not all of them. I still have burgers and fries, I just try to have medium not large ones. I have cut down on some of the chocolates and lollies, and started drinking a LOT more water. Literally liters more a day. I have also bought packets of mints, and try to have a mint instead of chips, or chocolate etc. I also do my run in the mornings before breakfast as that is meant to be better as it is burning fat from dinner the night before.

So here I am, some six weeks after I started (I did have to repeat a couple of runs in the fourth week as I was just not able to get them done), and this morning, I ran for 20 minutes. Without stopping. Seriously?? Wow. I just ran for 20 minutes. That is still sinking in. No, it wasn’t fast, in fact it was probably barely above a walk for most of it and the people who passed me must have been laughing mightily at this puffing, panting wreck. But when I started, if you told me that I would be able to run for 20 minutes after a relatively short time I would have referred you to a mental practitioner, after laughing so hard that I would have probably caused myself an injury!

So, I am obviously making a difference in terms of my endurance, but what about the weight. I know that I am probably putting on muscle … at least I hope so, and muscle weighs more than fat. For the first few weeks I didn’t lose anything, but the last two weeks, I have lost a kilo each week (and if you are still reading and from somewhere that uses imperial, sorry, no idea what that is in pounds). Apparently I don’t just put weight on around my middle, I put it on everywhere, and so it must be coming off everywhere. I suppose. I can’t really see it, and I just have to trust my scales. To quote a well-known Australian car manufacturers slogan, Bugger! Presumably the waistline will start to contract once I get some of the rest of the weight off - I was hoping for some instant difference, but then again if I had the instant difference I probably wouldn’t still be doing it!

TL:DR: Pretty small diet changes and some exercise that you didn’t know that you could do will help. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen (second dodgy advertising reference in the one post. lol) and when it does, it is a great feeling. Oh, not the I-am-completely-stuffed feeling, because you will get that too, but the sense of achievement from being able to run for 20 minutes? Priceless. (3rd ad reference. Fail)

Live and twisted!

2011-10-01T07:34:00.003+10:00

Well, Hydra and Fimlys apparently have run out of bloggers to invite to be on the Twisted Nether Blogcast - so, scraping the bottom of the blogging barrel, they have invited me to talk to them this week! Now's your chance to hear a crazy Aussie in person as I talk about blogging, WoW, and probably Icecream :D

Me and my big mouth ... and the nerfs

2011-09-23T11:25:00.001+10:00

So here I was happily going on, with my oh-so-wonderful statement only yesterday that I had managed to avoid saying anything about the nerfs, and yet here I am, writing on exactly that. Me and my big mouth.

I don't mind the nerfs, really I don't, but I think there can be no argument that they are too much - and for supporting evidence I submit our guild raid last night. Shannox, Beth, and Lord Rhy down in short order, which alone would make it one of our better single nights had it been pre nerf. Then onto Baleroc, where we one shot him, despite me having not seen the fight before. I had done research, got some power auras set up and had the general idea, but the theory is always different than the practice - except it wasn't, and it was easy.

With scant minutes to go in our raid time, we cleared the trash before da (not-so) liddle birdy, and then someone started it up. I had a vague idea as to what needed to happen but nothing really concrete, and our Pally tank had no idea at all. Strats were handed out pretty much on the fly, and yet with a MT and MT healer not knowing the fight, with no extensive prep, and with a single attempt, we totally stomped her and had a clean one shot kill.

In a fight where the guild had not had a kill of any sort previously, with 1/5 of the raid (and maybe more) not knowing anything about what we needed to do, we roll in and roll out like it was content tiers back. Make it easier, by all means, we will definitely be able to progress more with the nerfs, and get better gear (which we will need as we wont be able to buy the next tier gear with VP) to prepare us for T13, but I really can't see that we needed *that* much of a hand. It is the sort of difficulty I would expect appropriate for a pugged raid, not an organised guild group with vent.

I don't like to wipe dozens and dozens and dozens of times on a boss, but neither do I feel entitled to gear that easily. Not cool, Blizz, Not cool.

Feathers? and that Helm?

2011-09-22T12:30:00.001+10:00

I managed to avoid continuing the blogosphere bloat about the nerfs to FL. There have been so many words written about them that I certainly don't have anything special or unique to say. However, as I am currently looking at the Pally Tier 13 pics before too many people have blogged about it, I might as well go off my tree and start the diatribe on it.

First, let me say that I think Blizzard have done a great job making something that looks like real plate armour. I play a male human, and seriously, standing around in dresses is SO not my thing. I really, *really* don't want to wear a dress. The very idea of a 'plate' dress is absurd. Tiers 2, 8, 10 and 12, I am looking at you. I do NOT stand in the back in my sissy robes, I wear plate, stand in melee range, and soak up hits. I want to look like the mob gnawing on me is going to have to come with a tin opener to get at me, not spend the rest of the night curled up in a corner picking threads out of its teeth!

Second, I think that the shoulders, while less than ideal, are a huge improvement on some of the previous ones. I am not a walking clothes rack and nor do I need to stop birds landing on my shoulders. Tiers 1, 7, 9 and 12 this means YOU! I particularly like the understated nature of the shoulders - they look like shoulders should. However, Feathers? ... FEATHERS? Seriously, If I want to look like a bird, I'll play a Laser Chicken. Feathers do NOT belong on my plate armour. Feathers belong in my doona! or on my Hypograph.

And then we come to the helm. Hmm, interface, Show Helm, find the not-in-a-pink-fit option, check it. Those wings are ostentatious, garish and would give any self-respecting Paladin a neck ache in less time than it takes to say Angry!Man. Maybe as a healer I can claim that I need the clear vision only possible with no helm.

All in all, 7, maybe an 8 out of 10. Bonus points for the lack of cloth :) Not sure how many pieces I will see though as I have got at least half of my set pieces from the last two tiers from VP.

All is vanity

2011-09-20T14:11:00.001+10:00

In the main, I don't care what my gear looks like. I have never gone out of my way to match my gear in a visual sense, and the limit of what I do is to turn off cloaks and or helms to remove the especially revolting ones. I find it slightly disturbing then, the amount of work that I am going to and the enjoyment I am getting from the gathering of a set to use once Transmogging is available. To be sure I picked a set that didn't require runs of the old world raids - I'm not that masochistic (yet), but I can see how it would appeal.
However, at the moment my set looks slightly ludicrous as I have nothing to match for my feet and a mean looking Human Paladin with his uber set of awesomeness - and bare feet doesn't quite give the right feeling :) Not that I may have put off a single instance until last because it is going to be a pain ... Ok, that is *exactly* what I have done, and the last bit is going to be painful, I just know it. Maybe that will make or break the idea for me.

Painless Trollroic

2011-09-13T09:50:00.002+10:00

The difference between an organised guild group and a random, motley group of puggers is obvious and hardly news. However you don't alwasy need a full guild group to make runs pleasant.

I was tinkering on the pally last night and one of the guild tanks asked me if I wanted to run a Trollroic with him. Even with 3 FL boss kills under my belt for the week I was a long way from capping my VP so I reluctantly agreed to join him. Not that the reluctance was in any way due to him, I might add, but just because of my mostly pugged previous bad experiences.

We picked up another guildy for some DPS, but had to pug the last two spots. The tank and I were in Vent, and I warned him that my experience, especially of ZG, was pretty thin. He told me not to worry and that he would give me the short version of what I needed to know when appropriate, and off we went. I remember him saying previously that he took it as a personal affront if he couldn't do ZG in 30 minutes these days - and true to his word, we happily steamrolled through, with no wipes and only a few minor hiccups.

One set of valor points and 30.1 minutes later, we finished. Now to find pug tanks who I can work with like that and go closer to capping most weeks! ... Either that, or try to be online earlier in the week and play pocket healer :)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

2011-09-09T09:28:00.000+10:00

I guess it's human nature to remember the peaks in whatever we do - the good times become better in our memories, and often the bad times seem worse when you dwell on them.

I know that I have muttered about the vagaries of RNG before, and most likely, I'll do that in the future too, but here is the sort of RNG story that everyone loves ... when they are on the receiving end, of course :)

We went into Firelands last night, and managed to one-shot Shannox. If that weren't enough, he ever so kindly dropped for me some bracers, which even ungemmed and unenchanted significantly improved on my S9 PvP ones (yea, I should have upgraded them to S10 ages ago. Oops!). He also dropped me a spiffy little axe to replace my 365 crafted mace. Wow, one boss, two bits of gear, and not a single roll against me!

Flushed with success, we went on to Beth, and took her down as well. It wasn't as pretty, but it was a good kill and unbelievably, she dropped her shield. No Way! With no Shammy in the group, I had another roll-free piece of loot.

So, what a night. a few unsuccessful attempts on Lord Rhy, but two bosses, three bits of gear, one over-the-moon excited Pally. I guess if the choice was not to dig up the doll, not to get my turtle, for this? I'll take that, any day! To top the night off, back home and one my usual rig after last week's dismal effort, I didn't cause a single wipe. Much better!

I think I can, I think I can

2011-09-02T11:22:00.000+10:00

Unlike the Little Engine, in real life, not everything can be solved by optimism and positive thinking. The guild's main weekly raid was last night and I decided to not miss out on the fun and raid as normal, despite being away from home on a work trip and using a laptop rather than my normal desktop machine.

Now, I didn't just assume that this would happen without incident, I set myself up in the hotel room, and started running a couple of heroics. That all seemed to go relatively well, so I signed up to the raid and waited for an invite. I knew it wasn't going to be ideal, but I really expected it to be quite serviceable. We all know the old adage about assumptions - and didn't that come to bite me last night.

We went into Firelands and started killing some trash on the way to Beth. It won't surprise long time readers to know that this isn't exactly my favourite fight, given the number of environmental effects that happen up on top of the web. It wasn't much of a surprise then that the RL decided to put me down below, despite hardly being a powerhouse of raid-healing. We tried that for an attempt or two and it just didn't gel. So, a little reorganising later, and I was on healing duty up top again.

Now I know that my awareness of nasty things below me needs work, but I am not usually totally hopeless. Usually being the operative word. Several Saund-caused-wipes later, and someone asked me what level detail my graphics settings were on ... Oh, /headdesk, *sigh*. Not a laptop specifically set up for gaming and the detail was so low that I couldn't actually see some of the things that I should have avoided. Not my brightest moment. Even after that things still weren't going too well - I can only assume that as the night went on and more people were using the hotel broadband that lag was becoming an issue.

We ditched Beth and went back to try to kill Shannox, but by this time were were tired, cranky and off our game. At least it wasn't me that caused most of the wipes from that point on. Lessons learned: Broadband speed at 5.30pm is not representative of speed during peak times. Raiding on a machine that is not specifically set up for the purpose is less than ideal (at best) and at worst a recipe for disaster. Benching yourself early and not trying to make the rest of your raid suffer through your issues is probably a good idea.

I remember when ...

2011-08-30T09:05:00.000+10:00

I was leveling my hunter ... oh be quiet. Yes, it's another alt. Where was I? Oh yea, leveling my hunter in Hellfire, blithely decimating the boar population for no particular reason. I have done that zone many, many times, and I know it pretty well. You would think that I would have learned by now that there are these nasty mechanical things that toddle around, shaking the ground for a goodly distance, and making smears of the ground of unsuspecting toons. Don't tell me you didn't just think of the pain that Fel Reavers caused you, and don't tell me you didn't also think of the joy the first time you killed one in a vindictive rage! I've been there. Many times.

I finally realised that I was about to become the lining between red earth and Reaver boot. Except I never did. Yes they were annoying as all get out, but when your pet (who is next to you) is < 10 yards away from a Fel Reaver, and the thing just wanders on past, completely ignoring you, I have to think that we have lost something. Some part of the game that aroused so much feeling and made it so much more REAL. Nerfed like content three tiers back.

I know that the game is being tuned to newer and more casual players, but there are some things that should be left alone - and as much pain as they caused me, that was one of them!

New heights (or depths)

2011-08-26T14:55:00.000+10:00

Every time that I think I have found the definitive support of the 'Saund must be as nutty as a fruitcake' argument, I seem to be able to find better examples. Case in point: I decided that I would start running heroics on the Mage, to work toward VP bracers for the Pally. Obviously as pure DPS, there will be queues to wait for, and time to fill. So what do I do, why, I take up Archaeology. *shakes head*. How crazy is that!

Have I not already spent countless hours digging up stupid little Chests, and looking like some sort of trans-gender crossdressing nutjob with my collection of silk gowns in the as yet fruitless search for something to make me look like a pervert who likes playing with dolls?

at least if I dig up the doll I can give it to the Priest ... and who knows, I might get Zink or one of the other fun things. ... If you don't mind, I'm off to find a nice padded cell and rock myself in a corner with dribble coming out of my mouth ... or start leveling my Arch, whichever comes first!

Sanity Tap it is!

2011-08-24T16:03:00.000+10:00

Credit where credit is due. I name the terrible tanks out there, so here is a story of awesome tanking, with a healthy dose of DPS fail.

I have been making a much greater effort to if not cap my valor points, at least come closer. In addition to getting Pug to 85, and into heroics, and playing the new pally ... and all the other things that a terminal altoholic does when he isn't doing the things he should be :) ... This has led me to a much greater number of forays into the Sanity Tap (aka LFD) than I have done for some time.

I swear that place is bipolar - it's either Wrath-style silent steamrolling, skipping absolutely anything non mandatory, or wiping again and again to the Stupidity boss. His special attacks are just out of this world! There is no middle ground! Case in point, I ran a heroic during my lunch time. Slow learner, I know. You get a good feeling of what the run is going to be like when you zone in to a tank patiently explaining the use of beams and debuffs on Corla. *sigh* Obviously after several wipes, and several people leaving. So he carefully, politely and accurately describes what needs to happen. The DPS says "OK, got it". ... He didn't get it. Two wipes later, and the DPS (a Huntard, no less) was given very specific instructions "Watch the debuff. If you do less damage than the healer (me), and don't screw up the debuff, that will be fine" ... I do the poor tank a disservice, because it came out MUCH better than that. We finally got Corla down, and proceed on to Beauty. The tank needs something or other and asks if we can do him. I don't have the heart to say no, so in we go. The hunters (yes, two of them) try to trap the two smaller puppies. BOTH fail. *sigh*. The tank asks for traps to be reapplied and BOTH hunters ignore him. The tank and I exchange a few whispers, he starts blowing cooldowns and I start going from heroic style finger pressing to flat out raid-level healing. We get him down, and I stop for some much needed mana. One boss to go, One boss to go. It's like a mantra repeated constantly in my head.

The tank explains the last fight, I chime in with a few small strat mods and off we go. The two hunters between them manage to kite about 40% of the time. The rest becomes a series of pingpong taunts as I taunt, the tank waits till they almost get to me, and then he taunts, then maybe a hunter finds his frost trap button ... or maybe not, and I taunt again. It took very little time to realise that it was going to be a long fight. I went into full mana conservation mode, triage healing and using every trick that I could. We got him down, but it was almost three times longer than I had ever been on that boss before. It wasn't pretty, it sure wasn't fast. But, it was valor points :) Museum, I salute you. Awesome use of cooldowns, exceptional patience, great taunting, Your healer appreciated it, and hopefully the DPS will know better for next time!

Scratch: Now this is healing

2011-08-18T09:40:00.000+10:00

I am very much enjoying my little Hordie pally. I don't have to participate in /trade, I don't have to indulge in guild chat, I just do whatever it is that takes my fancy at the time. If I instance, there is nothing that shows me up as a veteran player - I can act dumb and follow along like sheep if I want to.

Then, there are the times when you couldn't possibly be a newbie. I have had two of them recently, and both used raid-honed skills to keep a group up. In the first, we were in BFD, and one team member went running down a side passage, while the tank keep moving on. The group split into two groups of two, with me madly running back and forth around a corner to drop a few heals on one group, then back to get the other in LoS again. Triage it most certainly was. Pretty it most certainly wasn't. But the group thanked me greatly and commented on my heals. It was such a great feeling to be able to rescue a group from a wipe that at one point I think they were all expecting.

Then the second, this morning. Gnomer. I *hate* Gnomer. The loading screen pops up and I sigh mightily, consider dropping group, but stick it out - at least do it once to get the achieve, I reason. The run was smooth, uneventful, and about as difficult as killing Hogger at level 70. Until we got almost to the end, and the huntard (who I didn't call out, its low level, and these things happen) didn't dismiss his pet when he jumped down somewhere. He didn't notice, neither did the anyone else ... until the pet came back with friends. FIFTEEN friends - I am not exaggerating! This was most unpleasant. Triage, panic, mana bar dropping, melee range and crusader strike just for the extra Holy Power, it was hard.

It was seriously like a raid, and I was not slouching back in my chair any more I can tell you. I was hammering keys (common profiles FTW), checking health meters and hoping that they would DPS this huge pack down before I went OOM. And they did. And we all survived.

It's moments like these why I heal. It's moments like these why I can understand why people become paramedics, or doctors. It's also how new healers could be very much excused for freaking out. It was the best feeling and a great way to start the day.

Scratch: Making (plenty of) money

2011-08-15T10:00:00.000+10:00

Every now and then, you get people who beg in trade - the human equivalent of Topper who sits in Stormwind. They whinge and moan because they need gold to buy this or that, and predictably enough, most of the responses are less than flattering.

Some of these people claim that making money in WoW is hard. I have to beg to differ. Now, I obviously know how to play the game, and how to make some cash, but a little googling and reading will give you plenty of tips. Still, in my isolated, friendless, unresourced little new Horde Pally, at level 25 I have almost 200g, and that is after spending 30g+ on bags and nearly 50g on glyphs in addition to training for any and every skill or talent I can including secondary profs where I have the mats. I do a few dailies here and there, I have two gathering professions and sell the stuff I get, I do random dungeons, and I started with nothing!

So the next time that such an individual pops up, don't feel the need to pander to their laziness because in the land of Azeroth these days, making money has never been easier! To quote from Shrek, "Somebody once asked, could I spare some change for gas, I need to get myself away from this place. I said yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself, And we could all use a little change." And if you are THAT guy or girl, seriously, go earn it yourself and stop harassing the rest of us.

On meeting guildies

2011-08-11T11:49:00.000+10:00

I haven't got cool Blizzcon stories that I can tell about my guildies, nor have I done many road trips and met with them. However, I spent three years with one of my guildies, going through the pain of being turned from a PFY into (at least theoretically) a pair of IT professionals to be.

Those years are sadly long gone, but there are still plenty of stores that can be told ...

One of my most enduring memories from those days comes from the particular ~~hell~~well of timetabling. I'm sure it was intentional to have Computing students be required to turn up at what for many was a completely ungodly hour of the morning, and a Monday morning at that.

Some of us (the early risers and those who didn't party *all* weekend) never saw this as a problem. ... Others, especially those to whom the phrase "8 o'clock happens TWICE a day? You can't be serious!" may or may not have been heard to utter when the timetable was released, well, let's just say they weren't at their best. This early start was exacerbated by the fact that a group of these unfortunates had a 3/4 hour drive before they even got to the Uni, and in the middle of winter somwhere around 42^o South, it was admittedly a little chilly.

To further make the pain of this early start felt more keenly by this group and others like them, the lecture was held in a lecture theatre where the doors were at the front, and you had to climb steps to the back of the room. Naturally enough, if you were early, you sat in the lower half of the room rather than needing to walk up the stairs. (Don't laugh, minimum possible excercise in any situation is an IT mantra!). Latecomers would need to have every single eye, including that of the (usually unimpressed) lecturer on them as they ascended to find a vacant seat. If there wasn't a sadist involved in that timetabling, I would be very surprised!

So, here was this guildy, lets call him ... Kasias :D, who would, without fail, turn up after the lecture had started, and have to make his way slowly up the stairs. Now, our friend Kasias was not, is not, and probably will never be a 'morning person'. In fact, in terms of his level of consciousness, I think Stupor was the most accurate description of him on these mornings.

He can possibly be considered to be awake, but definitely not functioning until probably the second strong coffee or 9am, whichever comes last. So, the first thing he would do on entering the campus, would be to procure a cup of steaming hot, preferably way too strong (read stewed) coffee from the canteen, then proceed to the lecture theatre, stagger up the stairs, giving absolutely no inkling that he cared about anything AT ALL except the converying of that coffee to a place at which he could collapse. Consciousness would slowly return over the course of the lecture, and by the end you might actually get a response from him that resembled coherent thought. Might.

And you wonder why we raid at nights. Bwahahahaha. Don't you love it when you have a blog, and can make sure that these stories are kept for posterity?? :D

The Sense of Entitlement

2011-08-04T09:22:00.000+10:00

I pugged BH this morning, making sure that I get those precious VP for the week. I was healing with a guildy, and as she mentioned, it was so much easier knowing that we could rely on each other - This wasn't a case of *having* to rely on each other, but I focused on the tanks, and she worried about the raid with both of us triaging as needed. We didn't need to talk about it, we just meshed together.

The rest of the run, however, was not as smooth. Oh yes, we got that puppy down, but it was messy. We ended the fight with me with very little mana, most of my cooldowns burnt (not that that is in any way a bad thing, I was pretty happy with my CD use), my judging was good, moving into melee range for Seal procs, Divine Plea used with a mitigating CD.

So, from a healing perspective, I think I did pretty well with not a lot that I would change in hindsight. The DPS, however, were ... average. We ended the fight within 5 sec of the enrage, and with less than half the raid alive. It was a close thing, and could very easily have gone the other way. thankfully, it was a one-shot, and VP for all.

Then I res some people, and look at the loot. Some leather that was totally uninteresting ;) ... and the Pally PvP Healing belt. Ohh, nice! The other pally in the raid (a DPS) who also happened to be the loot master asked if I wanted it, and I replied 'Yes please' and /rolled just to be sure. He then rolled against me, got a higher roll, and didn't want to hand over the belt.

I then got a whisper from another raid member telling me that 'He PvP's'. SO? Lets go through this. I am the only Holy Pally in the Raid, I get first dibs on the gear for my primary role. I point that out, and he says 'Whatever' in that tone that only teenagers can, and sulkily hands over the sparklies.

Am I meant to roll over and give up the loot to him for an off-spec? Was I meant to say 'terribly sorry old chap, here, have the loot as your so much more worthy than me?'. How can he think that he has the same claim on gear that isn't for his role? He was not brought into the raid as a Healer and asked to change to complete the role, he was a DPS. Without comparing the stats directly, that could even possibly be an upgrade in PvE, let alone PvP for me.

Sure, if tanking gear had dropped, I'd have liked it, but I wouldn't even have asked if it was a tank who rolled. It's the sort of behaviour that I would expect from a LFD Pug, not a server group. Still, he *did* give the belt up in the end, so I won't name him ... this time. :D

Scratch: The First BG

2011-08-01T09:10:00.000+10:00

So, I have been merrily tinkering with the new pally on and off. I hit level 10 the other day, saw that I was now eligible for BG's and thought, what the heck ... Queued for AB, and zoned in, and that, as they say, is when the fun started.

So here I am, a brand new, level 10 Pally, in my first BG, and I run up to the gate and wait for the timer to count down. we start, and ARGH the PAIN. On foot. WTB mount. Then I do my usual, and head down to the mine, ... but the mine isn't where I expect it to be and the ground slopes up, not down ... Oh Yea, that's right, I'm playing a Hordie ... LOL. Things are weird when they are all reversed!

Then I realise that Vuhdo isn't configured, *sigh*, so I fix that with my awesome array of healing spells. Seriously though, having Holy Shock and WoG make a pretty potent combination at the low levels, and it is heaps easier than it used to be.

I have on gear that has no Int, no Spirit, in fact no healing stats of any kind. Ah well, neither does anyone else I guess. I then move to the blacksmith, where I see the Horde flag waving merrily. I furiously click on the flag, but there is NO COGWHEEL. I flail around, then panic and (you'll love this) bleat to a teammate about how I cant assault the node. He replies in a somewhat confused manner as we (yes, 'we', the HORDE) already have the node. *sigh* LOL.

I then have a nice little rant in the battleground chat channel to suggest that all we need to do is to cap three and defend. Only, we already HAVE three, and the DBM timer that is up for the Horde winning in ... is a good thing, for the first time in my WoW career!

I explain that it's my first BG and that I am an Ally defector. Laughs ensue all round. We win, and I walk away with 54 honor and a serious and abiding loathing for rogues :D

Name 'em and Shame 'em

2011-07-28T12:58:00.001+10:00

I decided to spend my lunchtime fruitlessly banging my head against a desk and incurring repair bills ... Well, actually I queued for a random H - Not a Trollroic, a common or garden random H. The first pull, the huntard drops his traps without using trap launcher.

We sigh collectively, then wait for his cooldown. He then uses his trap launcher and misses completely. That should have been an indicator to me of the way this run was going to unfold. The tank charges in and I have my hands full keeping the group alive. I'm talking constant DL bombing supplemented by Flash to keep people up here, managing to burn through almost all of my not inconsiderable raid-geared 100k mana pool.

I say in chat, and I quote "That pull was terrible. I almost used my entire mana pool" (OK, I wasn't feeling tactful and subtle, I admit!). I then proceed to sit down and drink. The tank ignores this, and runs off into the next trash pack, which Donhaild, the hunter extraordinaire, manages to completely repeat his initial trapping fail and so the tank gets beaten on by the whole pack, and dies, then asks politely what happened. HA HA HA, nope, that tank just yells "WTF?". I indicate that I had been drinking and he goes "well why didn't you say you were OOM?" I asked whether comments about depleting an entire mana pool were not indicative of needing to drink, suggested he should check the range or mana of his healer, and he drops group. I'd name him too, but my chat log didn't go back that far :).

So we stand around a while and get another DK tank as a replacement. We end up at the first boss, and we wipe. Why do we wipe? because none of the DPS could avoid the beacons of light, and because they had the IQ of roadkill. Their overall DPS wasn't much higher than roadkill either. We wiped after I spent a good four minutes keeping the tank and myself alive, burning LoH, Bubble and any other cooldown I could mash.

Then the tank, Jaxonsmain, says, and again I quote "Nobody broke 10 k that whole fight". I decide to lighten the atmosphere a little and respond with "I have a pretty good excuse", to which he replies "What is the excuse?" ... I wonder if he is joking, decide he isn't, and suggest that "I'm healing". "Oh", he says, "Sorry forgot" You WHAT:? Forget the DPS, sure, but I'm keeping your scrawny undead butt alive and you forget me? *sigh*.

He decides that such discussion is unnecessary and pulls the boss for the second time, then drops group, not a word. This is why Tam always referred to it as the Sanity Tap! I'm afraid that was enough masochistic activities for one lunch time for me. Lunchtime score: 1 x 17g repair bill. 1 x high blood pressure. 3 x Moron. 1 x Blog post. Ha, I win!

The Scratch Project

2011-07-27T10:27:00.004+10:00

TheNewPally(TM)

So, like the acknowledged altoholic I am, I started another toon the other day. It's not a new idea - Kurn has her baby Pally (A baby who raids?!), there is Endy 2.0, etc etc.

It is, however, the first time I have started a Pally since the Shattering and, as we all know, things have changed a lot since then.

Its also my normal deal to kit out new toons with heirlooms, with money, bags etc. I tend to avoid leveling for sake of leveling as I have a goal in mind - I want to get to level X so I can do profession Y, or whatever.

I am not taking this to the extent of the Ironman Challenge - While it's a great idea, it just isn't *fun*, to me at least. I have also been reading and enjoying Glorwynns exploits as a lower level healing Pally.

I really want this to be as much like the leveling experience that a new player would have, not the powerleveling, kitted out alt that steamrolls through everything. So, here are the rules I have set for myself:

1. Level a race or preferably faction you don't know on a server where you have no ties - this will make it more like the new player experience - I have chosen a Tauren, and no, I didn't use any variation of HolyCow for the name. My goodness it's a pain in the neck having to find you way around these cities when you have NO IDEA where things are! Thunder Bluff is a rabbit warren!

2. No gear or gifts of money from other toons or other players.

3. No Heirlooms or free bags (see point 2).

4. Take any profs you want, and make millions on the AH if you can (or care).

5. No money for random acts such as guild signings.

6. No DKs to bankroll you - (after all new players wont have that option)

7. No stable of alts to do everything. 1 mule if you must, to a max of L 10.

The jury is still out on whether the perks from a guild is a good or bad thing in this context, at this stage I will definitely not be looking for a guild.

I don't have any time frame here, this is just something to spend a bit of time on when I fall off the wagon and the altoholism gets the better of me (which it will do, I know).

Oh yea, and I'll be leveling as holy the whole way, though with BGs and LFD that's now easy as - but I'm not going to do it solely via those as Vid did.

Maintenance, Premium content and Globalisation

2011-07-22T13:53:00.000+10:00

I know that to some people I must sound like a broken record, but a recent post from Adgamorix has brought it up again.
I know that in terms of contributing to the total pool, the money that Oceanic players put into the Blizzard coffers is not terribly significant, but neither is it inconsequential.

Blizzard just doesn't really give a stuff about us, and how they might give us equality with other players from around the world.

We pay the same subscription as everyone else, yet we have to put up with not being able to play 1/6 of the available prime time nights, due to maintenance. Do we get a discount for that inconvenience? Nope, we just get ignored and left to carry on our lives.

One of the reasons that PvP hasn't got the same allure for me, and indeed for many players in our timezones is that there is no way to get quality low latency when the data has to travel literally half way around the world and back each time you send a packet to the server.

With the billions that Blizz get from us, even if they wont locate servers here, surely they could give us a maintenance window that was in the early hours of the morning. There is no way that it could be that difficult to put all Oceanic time-coded servers (Oh, what a concession, here, lets change the server clock as that will make you all shut up and go away) into one discrete server cluster and do the maintenance on all of them not at 8pm local time?

I started this post and was thinking that with the various premium content services now available, that I would be prepared to pay extra to have a server located in Australia (or close) with maint windows at a reasonable time, but why should we have to pay extra for the same service as everyone else? Why can't Blizzard treat us like valued customers with a legitimate voice rather than a group of schmucks who just keep dutifully paying their subs?

And now for the fail of the week

2011-07-14T13:53:00.000+10:00

We all like Failpug stories, they warm the cockles of our hearts and give rise to thousands of words spewed out across the blogosphere. I have certainly blogged about my share of these, and I'm sure that I will continue to do that in the future.

So, I now present to you, my readers, the best two fail stories of the week. Which occurred within minutes of each other. I do this because you too could aspire to levels of fail this bad. Or, you could learn from the mistakes of others, and laugh at their misfortune - your choice.

In the interests of fairness, seeing as I am ready and willing to blog about the failings of others, I am also prepared to own up to those experiences of my own fail, and these stories come from that playbook. I won't link to my previous posts - Healing instances with fishing poles, or a wing of Naxx with Spring Flowers, you can find them if you're that desperate. No, this is worse. Much worse.

First up I was at work and needed a break at lunch time so with a guildy, grouped up and decided to run a heroic. I hit the queue, and we popped into a dungeon in only a few minutes. To a loading screen that I really wasn't familiar with ... Um, how can I not be familiar ... Ugh! Who forgot to not select Troll Heroic *wince* argh. So, as we didn't have nearly enough time for ZG, which I have never completed successfully, I explained my stupidity, apologised profusely, and we dropped group.

Now left with a cooldown, we logged off and switched to the druids, me tanking, and him healing. And queued for a random, still muttering to myself about the previous idiocy ... and insta-popped (as you do with tank/heal combo) ... and off I waded, charging off into the first few packs of mobs. I was taking a boat-load of damage, and couldn't hold threat from a wet paper bag. Something was definitely up, but I pressed on, listening to the guildy swear and burn through his mana. Then, into the third pack of mobs, and I had an awful thought. Here I was in bear form, and what is a downside of bear form? No visible gear ... Do you see where this is going? Oh yea, you know how bad this is going to be, don't you!

I had been playing my hunter to burn some rested XP - and left all the heirloom gear on him. So here I was, with nothing at all in head, shoulder, chest, back and trinket slots. Hmmm, wonder why we were having troubles?

I pulled up, explained to another set of poor random sods that I was obviously mentally deficient at that point in time, tucked my tail between my legs and dropped group in abject shame. Lesson Learnt: The druid is now left in caster form if he is ever without his heirlooms. Don't try this at home, girls and boys!

Progressing a Casual Raider Part 2

2011-07-11T16:10:00.000+10:00

I know that Kurn wasn't specifically taking to casual raiders but the points she makes for running dungeons to get those valor points are just as valid if you don't have much time.

As an experiment, (Purely for research purposes you understand - the lengths I have to go to!) I queued for a dungeon during my lunch break. Accepting that you poor DPS bunnies may have prohibitive queue times, normal non-Troll Heroics seem to be fast approaching the Wrath level of speed. Even given the two wipes, we finished Stonecore in under 3/4 of an hour. Obviously running half the Troll heroics would probably be easier, but a) i'm much more familiar with the older heroics, and b) there is no way I could get a Troll completed in under an hour.

What else can you do? Read up on Boss Strats. Don't fail and flail because you couldn't be bothered reading up on the next few fights. Leave the strats open in a browser window even for less reliance on failing memories. OK, your memory might not be failing, but I'm on the downhill slide to 40 now and my memory ... Eh, wot? downhill slide you said, why would you have any other kind of slide?... :D

Check all of your spells. Make sure you are using all of them, all of your cooldowns, any on-use effects. They may be the little extra you need to save a wipe.

Make sure that you stay out of the bad. No, seriously, GET OUT. Whatever role you have in a raid, if you are standing in something that you shouldn't, you are putting more pressure on the rest of the raid.

Make sure that you are well stocked with the best buff food that you can have. If that isn't fish feasts, have it on you. if that IS fish feasts, go fish up a stack of mats. Don't expect your guildies to provide them for you!

And then the granddaddy of them all. Log parses. Instead of spending several leveling your Hunter, or your Mage, go through some logs. Check out any of the excellent log tutorials out there, and if no-one else is recording WoL parses for your raids, do it yourself!

Spend time on the dummies if you can (WTB Healing dummy) to perfect a rotation, find one area, just one, where you can improve and note down your results. Use the low hanging fruit method common to KPI's - take your biggest issue and solve it, or at the very least improve it, then take the next biggest issue, and so on. That way not only will you improve, you will improve the biggest things first.

And if you have done all of those things, talk to other people, read blogs, do whatever, just do something!

Then watch as your guildies heap praise upon your head for your improved performance ... Or realise that since a stack of your guidies are now reading your blog, they know you are trying to do this ... which means they expect improvements ... so you may need to stop blogging and focus more on the do-what-I-do not the do-what-I-say parts of this message! :D

Healing Webring 2.0

2011-07-05T11:58:00.004+10:00

EDIT: Bati at Holy Nova Now! had the same idea, and apparently much earlier than I did (back in April), but I can't say I have ever read her blog, and it wasn't till I saw Zahia's comment that I knew she had revisited the meme! ... Great minds, as they say, think alike! - I promise it was nothing more than coincidence!

I know that things change, that people change and that WoW is not the be-all and end-all of everything. That doesn't mean that I don't feel a sense of loss when people of the community board up their blogs - or worse, just vanish into the ether.

I was looking at my stats the other day (don't worry, this isn't a post all about me) and my greatest source of traffic by a considerable margin has been (and is still) Miss Medicina. That's amazing when everyone's favourite Dwarf Priest hasn't posted regularly since September!

So, in honor of Jessabelle, I would like to restart the Healing Webring. I take no credit for the idea, I take no credit for the questions. But I know how much the answers taught me, about my own healing and the strengths and weaknesses of my fellow healers way back in 2009, and I hope that a new crop of bloggers (and the old fogies that are still here) might be able to learn from each other as well.

It also dovetails nicely into my posts on improving my toon.

As Jess did, I will keep a list of answers to the questions as well.

So here’s how it works.

Post this questionnaire, with your answers, on your blog. Pick the healing class you know most about (or is the focus of your blog) for the questionnaire, and then send it over to another healing blogger you know and love who heals with a DIFFERENT class. Include a link to the blogger who sent you the questionnaire, as well as a link to the blogger to whom you are sending it.

1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Saundin, Holy Paladin
2. What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) 10-man raiding, but also plenty of PvP and 5-mans
3. What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Beacon of Light. It was awesomely OP in Wrath, and is still the friend of tanks everywhere.
4. What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? I don't use Light of Dawn anywhere near as much as I should. Mostly because it requires positioning, which is one more thing to think about.
5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? The ability to be a healer, but to be in melee, to be able to heal while something is chewing on your face. Non-Squishy Heals, you know you love them.
6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Being the only class/spec combination in the game that needs a seperate loot table, hence less loot by definition.
7. In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? On the bench. ROTFL. If I *have* do do a 25 man, it would still be the tank-healing role that I do in 10s.
8. What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Druids. The synergy of Divine Light bombing while a Druid rolls the HoTs is awesome.
9. What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Hmm, that's harder. I really don't worry about what other healing classes are int he team, and I don't have any one class I dislike haling with.
10. What is your worst habit as a healer? Not using all the cooldowns I have available nearly as often as I should.
11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? My own tunnel vision that results in me floor-tanking.
12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? The changes that have been made to make the healers more similar have actually harmed this IMO as I think it has weakened the ability for us to heal tanks. I'd sacrifice the AoE heals for better tank healing any day.
13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? Raid success has to be up there, and apart from that I need to do a lot more to fine tune what I do.
14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? that every Holy Pally is instantly geared from the awesome (*cough*) selection of role-specific loot from bosses.
15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Mana management, by far. especially in the early 5-mans one you hit max level.
16. If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Bad use of cooldowns :( Too much standing in bad :( ... apart form that, all the normal Pally stuff of overhealing etc
17. Haste or Crit and why? Aside from there never being a time at which haste is bad, I have way too many moments where people die when my heal is 90% cast. whatever the cause, crit isn't going to fix those!
18. What healing class do you feel you understand least? Shammy's are the healers I have played least, but they are by all accounts the most similar to Pallys in their healing style.
19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Vuhdo, definitely. No Vuhdo, no healing :D. DBM to tell me when to get out of stuff, Power Auras to do nifty things like show how many HP I have and when cooldowns are active.
20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? Lol. Balance? Holy Pallys? ha ha ha. Int till your eyes bleed. Then haste till they bleed quicker.

So there we go. I should go back and see what I answered last time and how that compares ... in the meantime, I tag Shintar at Priest with a Cause and Fannon at the Dwarven Battle Medic to start things off. - If you haven't been tagged and want to jump on the bandwagon, please do, just leave a comment so I can link to you!

P.S. Jess, if you are reading this, I hope you don't mind!

I have created a page where I will link all the Answers

Votekick me for your own failures will you? Shame!

2011-06-26T07:06:00.003+10:00

So this morning, I jump on and queue for Ahune. On my Pally - with an iLevel of 355 and some 91k mana unbuffed. I would hardly call that undergeared for a seasonal boss. I have been doing said seasonal boss every day of the Midsummer festival, and never had a wipe.

Then, today. The tank runs in and his health is dropping ... drastically. It takes me half my mana pool of DL bombing to get him back up to full health, and then mixed HL/DL to keep him there. I haven't looked at his gear - which is only fair as my priest is borderline and I have been doing it on him :), I'm healing him as best I can. The core comes out, the DPS is woeful, and when Ahune resurfaces, the tank and a DPS stay beating on the boss, so the DPS gets one-shot and the tank loses a stack of health. I am holy bombing like mad to try to get him up, and I get caught by a frost spike. Yea, OK, my bad, but the tank died in between me going up, and then coming down.

Here is the exchange that followed:

So, Proginoskes-Stonewall Let's look at the iLevels of your gear, as reported by the armory:

Gun - 359
Neck, Back, Waist, Trinket 2 - 346
Shield - 333
Wrist, Legs - 318
Sword, Trinket 1 - 316
Head, Shoulders, Chest - 308
Ring 1, Ring 2 - 295
Hands - 289
1 Missing Glyph
7 Unenchanted items
113k health

...and you think that it was MY fault you died? You don't even apologise, and you VOTEKICK me? For not being able to keep your sorry excuse for a butt alive?

Not Happy, Jan! NOT HAPPY. So I am off to Stonemaul, to look for some officers in the guild of Redeemed. Because they are going to get an insight into the type of players they have in their guild.

If you know anyone in that guild, I'd advise you to tell them that their guildmembers can behave in ways that are among the worst that I have ever encountered.

Update:
Apparently, this moron is the co-GM of the guild. Well, so be it, but if that is the sort of people that are in the guild leadership, I will not play with you. If you think that sort of behaviour is normal, then if I happen to pop an LFD with any one of your members, I will let everyone know the behaviour that they can expect and drop the group.

I hate internet dragons

2011-06-24T11:28:00.000+10:00

What's that I smell in the air? the smell of some serious irony. My pastime, as popularised by the media, would be the slaying of internet dragons - has been for a quite a while now :)

The bane of my existence in Wrath was one specific dragon, Sarth. I can't count the number of times I finished that fight as a smear on the floor having failed to avoid flame walls, or been hit by one end or the other of him. Until last week I had never even managed to do Sarth + any number of additionals. We did an old world raid night, and I didn't die to the fire. This may or may not have had anything to do with the way that 8 raid-geared 85s took apart Sarth +3 before a flame wall even had the chance to worry me :)

I have long known my issues with situational awareness, and while making various attempts to rectify this, also tend to find myself in situations where I can avoid such things. Hmmm, I wonder whether my guild consciously decided that putting me in with the melee on Magmaw is a wipe-prevention strategy as it means I don't have to worry about standing in bad stuff. :D More than likely.

So we have been happily going through the current raid content and last night took out Haifus without too much drama. Given a serious lack of preparation for future bosses, I wander up to ... oh noes, another dragon. No, TWO dragons. Joy. NOT. One who pukes purple fire you need to get out of. And swirly things you need to get out of. And stuff you need to run away from or you find yourself in a different phase :) ... Twice. At least our MT did it as well. Both times :D.

Here we were, having carefully listened to the explanation and strat, and the first time the purple fire bellows forth, and what happens? Well moving wasn't what happened. *sigh*. I Fail.

We were coming up to the last attempt of the night and I managed to survive through a couple of switches between the two dragons, and then ended up smeared on the floor. Again. I'm pretty sure it was something completely avoidable, but I spent the last 15% of the fight resorting to calling out percentages and hoping against hope that the rest of our raid group would carry the day. Which they did, with considerably less help from me than they should have. It was an epic kill, with only a few of the raid left alive, but who cares a kill is a kill!

So I have decided that whilst very much enjoying the generic pastime of killing internet dragons, I really prefer to kill humanoids ... or demons ... or beasts ... or pretty much anything EXCEPT actual dragons. *sigh*.

Progressing a Casual Raider Part 1

2011-06-23T13:45:00.000+10:00

I don’t think it is too much to assume that there are others like myself who have limited playtime and get lured away from improving their main by yet another alt because there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to improve your toon.

So, I have compiled a list of various things that can be done when you don’t have the hours necessary to run a Troll heroic or something equally useful that will still result in a better outcome for your raid group or PuGs because you have improved your skills or gear. Feel free to add your own in the comments and I’ll put them in too. None of these things alone will take a lot of time - they may take some more research than actual play time, but that research will pay off handsomely for your raiding.

Basics
Make sure all your gear is chanted, glyphed and gemmed to the best of your finances. Grind the rep with Therazane for the shoulder enchant. Get a spec that is recommended, even if that is straight off EJ. Make sure your spec is for the current build as skills and talents may have been nerfed or buffed in minor patches.

Rep Gear
For many specs there are a couple of pieces of rep gear that are BiS or close to. If you haven’t already maxed those rep factions out, do it now.

Crafting
Is there craftable gear that you could use? Remember to include non-armor pieces such as cloaks, rings etc. Often guild crafters will craft things for free if you can provide the mats. Is there craftable gear in upcoming content that will help? Currently there will be a while stack of new craftables to make in 4.2, most of which have pretty steep mat requirements. Even if they aren’t able to be crafted at the moment, you can still stockpile mats towards them.

Questing
Have you completed all the quests that will open upcoming content? Now is a great time to make sure that you have done all of the Hyjal quests so you can start the Firelands dailies as soon as 4.2 drops – there are some pretty cool items from those vendors once you open them up.

BH
If you don’t do BH as a guild, make sure that you run it every week in a PuG now and after 4.2 to get the chance at the gear. Time versus difficulty and return is right up there.

Seasonal Events
If there is anything you could possibly use from the Seasonal bosses such as Ahune, run them every day. My Priest could use the staff and either of the healing cloaks as awesome upgrades … Ah yes, I was talking about improving mains. Moving on :D.

Archaeology
Is there an item available through long repetitive hours of grinding that is an upgrade? No, I am not suggesting that you do this to the exclusion of all else, but while you are waiting in a queue, while you wait for a raid to get started, survey a few dig sites.

BoEs
Are there any BoEs that you can use that you could beg/borrow/steal/buy to improve?

Honor
No, you may not like PvP, but for pretty cheap honor there is some seriously impressive gear that can easily fill a weak spot in a PvE set … HOWEVER, if you are Horde-side on Shadow Council-US, please disregard this completely. We do not need more good players to try to wrest TB away from, thanks! :D

4.2 Conversions
Check what current valor gear you can buy after 4.2 drops for your stack of JP’s

That’s a big list of ways to improve when the actual use of your skills and abilities hasn’t even been touched. Next I’ll talk about the non-gear things :)

To Alt, or not to Alt, That is the question

2011-06-20T12:08:00.003+10:00

I had this great post ready and waiting to go, and then I made a fatal mistake. That mistake, of course, to read posts from the rest of the blogopshere.

Lets set the scene. I am an altoholic. This is not news to pretty much anyone. If it is news to you, welcome, you must be new here :). I am also a casual raider, in a casual raiding guild who have been raiding only sporadically in Cata. Finally, and most importantly, I do quite a bit of my playing in smallish chunks. Think NR heroic chunks sometimes not even that, not Cata heroic chunks, and most certainly not Troll heroic chunks.

This means that there isn’t a lot I can do to easily upgrade my mainspec gear on my main toon. I raid once, sometimes twice a week, and we clear four or five bosses. I run another heroic or two a week, and maybe a Troll if I am allowed by … Note to self: Various bloggers have their game-world terms for their spouses or kids. Must continue to resist the urge to call one’s wife ‘the Troll’. That would be very very bad for my future playtime – or very very good for my playtime, but that eventuality would probably mean I wasn’t in the mood for gaming as I would be divorced. … Lets settle for the simple and infinitely safer Mrs Saund.

Ah, anyway, quite rightly, Mrs. Saund does expect that I perform some sort of rep grind that usually involves repetitive daily quests for minimal non-rep reward. There seems to be some advanced decay system present in that rep however as no matter how hard I try, getting exalted and staying there with rep faction Mrs. Saund takes up much of my potential playtime. The boss who hits hardest in the playtime stakes requires some 7 hours of effort, five days a week. Seriously? I could be in a VERY impressive guild with that sort of time. Broke, and divorced, for sure, but I’d have lots of pretty purples, at least until my paychecks stopped and my subs ran out. :)
So, what can I do in the playtime I have? Playing alts is one of the things that I enjoy, so I do that. Or starting a new alt, for no other reason than Blizzard made tanking heirlooms … *sigh*. Whoops, fell off the wagon again. Hello everyone, I am Saund, and I am an altoholic. I haven’t created an alt in … 8 days. (Except that it is even worse than that as I have been helping run an RL operations centre after a flood and hence out of Azeroth for the last four days – so effectively I created my most recent alt 4 days ago. *shakes head*) ... Ophelie would understand, she likes this sort of stuff, but for the rest of you, think standing below the Loch Modan dam when the Shettering hit. Then needing to clean up. And needing to plan and run logistics for those doing the hard work. And needing to drive 9.5 hours to get to the Wetlands. ... More or less.

500 words later, and I get to the content of my now-deleted draft post, on how good alts are. *sigh* … I still think alts are good, and fun, but am I spending my time the best way possible? Am I helping my guild by being all that I can be as our only Holy Pally? Um, well, no, I can’t say I am.

So, next post, I’ll talk about what I should be doing with the playtime I have ... what I should be doing as a Holy Pally who isn’t perfect and needs polish.

What, a pug that worked?

2011-06-09T13:04:00.000+10:00

I ran several dungeons yesterday, starting with a couple non-troll heroics on my pally, then one normal on my priest, which was a whole world of self-fail I'll talk about at some other stage when I am less traumatised :D

The first one was nothing remarkable - DPS and a tank who knew what to do, how to do it and didn't see the need to waste time talking about it. Normal Pugging behaviour really.

But the second, that was notable for all the right reasons after a bad start. I see the satchel pop up for a healer in a normal Cata instance, so happily stop my useless attempts at winning TB ... (I mean, really, 4 TB battles yesterday, 4 losses. Alliance on SC are totally unable to function as a unit and do the most basic things in PvP). Up pops Vortex, and the tanks says that they will need to respec, which is no problem. but he respecs, and drops groups without another word. *sigh*. While waiting for a new tank I start talking with the Shammy and ask if he wanted to heal and I'd tank some trash. He wasn't too enthused at that idea, and the question became academic as another tank joined the group.

This was where the run looked up, and it only got better. The tank zoned in, and started with a warm greeting - I know that I try to say something when I join a group, but often only a quick 'Hi' or similar. This was something more than that - something that put me, at least, into a great frame of mind for the run to come.

The run continued, with the tank often interjecting a comment here or there. It was nothing profound, but it really gave the whole run much more of a guild-like feel. Bosses dropped, a tanking helm came my way (replacing a ret helm with no socket) and the tank congratulated me on it, despite wanting something else from the boss.

We had a wipe (only one) on the last boss, but nobody got upset, nobody quit, and it all just worked. Everybody seemed to take their cues off the tank and there were no snarky comments, no issues at all.

It was a great example of how a pug can work, without the all-too frequent hassles that can occur. Maybe we all need to make that extra effort - not just a couple of words, but a few lines here and there to help break the ice and warm the atmosphere - and hope that our fellow puggers take their cues from us!

Frustrations

2011-06-06T05:41:00.000+10:00

Its been a pretty frustrating week in Azeroth for me. First I missed the raid on Thursday as I had come down with the winter lurgy, which happens, except the guild got Chim down for the fist time. Typical.

Then as I often do for no good reason, I got up at 5am Sunday, and went fishing. (Playing on SC while living in Australia means 2pm server time is 6am local, so the fishing derby is on then. ergh!)

So I flew off to Howling Fjord, and sat myself down at a pool and off I went, to try again for the incredibly elusive black-tipped shark. I choose Howling Fjord because it isn't as popular as Grizzly or Borean, and because I have a chance at the Dark Herring - another achievement I have on multiple toons that are NOT my main. *sigh*. Time is passing, and my chances of winning the derby are again vanishing, and then, I see it, the shark! I flail around to click my trusty Kirin Tor ring and start hyperventilating, and talking to my computer. My 9 year old who was sitting next to me looks at me strangely and asks what is going on. Try explaining the concept of winning a virtual fishing contest that relies on RNG and only happens once a week at a totally screwy time of day while still concentrating on turning the quest in to a 9 year old :). The loading screen finishes and her I am, in Dal, ... only to see that someone has beat me to it by about 10 seconds. ARGH!

Some day, that ring will be mine, but by then all my alts will probably be 85 just to spite me.

What a difference 24 hours makes

2011-05-27T09:42:00.001+10:00

Yesterday I was reading some more of the copious quantity of words that have been posted about the 4.2 raid nerfs. I was organising my thoughts and working out how to put down my take on the issue. No, really, Saunder with an opinion on a hot topic? Never. Lol.

In a nutshell, I really didn’t think that I particularly wanted the nerfs – we were progressing slowly, but quite nicely thankyou. I had taken a poll of four, so that’s a decent sample of people that agreed with me. (The fact that I scientifically picked Saundin, Saundo, Saundeth and Pugofcrydee – my main plus 3 other toons of my own, only proves the truism that there are lies, damn lies and statistics :D. It also proves that while I may have MPD, at least when I argue with myself, I still win, but all the decisions have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting, you see?).

So no, I didn’t consult any of the other raiders and this is entirely my own opinion (No it’s not. Yes it is. "Be Quiet! I order you to be Quiet. Order, eh? Who does he think he is? ... Be Quiet! Oh, but you cant expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you! SHUT UP! Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away! SHUT UP! WILL YOU SHUT UP! Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! SHUT UP! Oh, come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" ... Schizophrenia, the last resort of the altoholic and Monty Python :D …
Last night, however, our raid composition was different from normal, we had problems with healing (but apart from one ill-timed BoP, not me thankfully), with slowing parasites (blamed on the lack of our boomy and his mushrooms) and other issues. After a frustrating hour we went to BH, just to get a raid boss killed for the week and called it a night.
So, Um, bring on the raid nerfs. That way, we won’t be so dependent on who turns up on raid nights :D

Day 5: My Favourite Item

2011-05-21T06:24:00.000+10:00

Urg. Favourite Item, across the years that I have been playing, the toons and specs? Definitely something that needs thinking about as I return to Saga's 20 days of Wow.

I would have to say that given the degree of my altoholism, my heirlooms have to be my most favourite items. They certainly give a huge help to those up and coming toons.

My first heirloom was the Plate Healing shoulders, as they were out before I finished leveling the Pally. A long, long time ago, how that hunter used to make me smile, and I knew if I had the chance I could trap to stop the people dance and maybe they'd be happy for a while (sorry Don Mclean, if Weird Al can mangle it, why not me? :) ). It's been many moons since Kara was cutting edge content for the guild I was in and the Stalker's War Bands were the bees knees for my hunter :D, and after using those shoulders I passed them onto Saundin when I moved him across to SC.

After Saundin had reached max level, they were handed down to Saundeth, my DK, who happily leveled the entire way to 70, with Plate healing shoulders, just to get the xp bonus. Fun Times.

My Best Wow Memory was Day 4
and Day 6 will be my desk. ... Maybe, if I tidy it :D

The Hypocrite II

2011-05-16T09:00:00.001+10:00

I finally dipped my toes into the murky world of the Troll 5-mans the other day. Shiny int-sprinkeled plate and all. We took over two hours, and went through 10 tanks, and no, I'm not exaggerating.

We had a very experienced DPS who explained the various fights to me, along with such gems as "use whatever the biggest heal you have is, and spam it". Although, it was completely warranted. Nothing short of Divine Light bombing was going to keep that tank up, and even then there were several wipes. Some of that trash is ... horrible. I'd like to do it with a guild group who actually communicated and knew what they were doing to see how much of an impact that made.

I had a set of cheat notes on the bosses, but there is nothing like having someone explain it as you are there. I doubt very much whether I would have finished the run without this DPS. Because of his skill and knowledge, I was happy to let things slide, more things than I would normally.

That included his language - he used 'gay' as a term several times through the run, and he wasn't talking about homosexuality either. I was sick of the run, wanted to have it done with, and definitely didn't want to do it by kicking him due to the help he was giving me. But did I speak up and suggest he use another term? Did I point out that some people, including some I am very good friends with, would take serious offense at the term? No, I just sat back and let him go, because it wasn't affecting me enough to make me want to call him on it.

Oh, and did I mention that he is a guildy, and one who does boss strat explanations in our raids? Yea, nice complicating factor there!

I wrote about my inadvertent use of the term 'nazi' back in November. But using such an emotive term, or accepting the use of such a term is not excused by me not wanting to rock the boat - I mean realistically, even if I didn't say it myself, I certainly did nothing to stop it, and that makes me just as responsible.

Maybe he was just having a bad night, maybe he was tired and strung out, I don't know. But at the very least I will be keeping a much closer eye on the guildy in the future, and next time, I'll pull him up on it, regardless. Does that fix it? Nope, but its better than doing nothing I guess.

Day 4: My best WoW Memory

2011-05-14T07:38:00.000+10:00

As I continue with Saga's epic challenge, it is hard to isolate just one memory that I would call the best.

To me, such a memory should embody the reasons I play, and who I am in the game. It should include the sense of community you can only get from an MMO, the sense of achievement when you overcome against the odds.

I remember an incident, back in Jan 2010, where I was healing a Heroic Forge of Souls. It was one of *those* runs, where the DPS were not even coming close to pulling their weight, and I was expending ridiculous amounts of effort to keep everyone alive.

We were on the Devourer and not one, not two, but all three DPS managed to be textbook cases of what not to do. The first stood in a Well of Souls, and died. The rest of the DPS took this as a warning and ramped up their DPS, just in time for the second DPS to get hit with Mirrored Soul and yup, you guessed it, they kept right on DPSing. The only time in the whole run they were flat out not embarrassing themselves and ... they killed another DPS. I think I might have actually wondered at that moment if the third DPS could find a new and interesting way to make a fool of himself, which was, as we all know in PuGs, tempting fate.

Those who remember the boss will, I'm sure already guess what is coming. Indeed, of the mechanics that are likely to kill a player, there is only one left. ... I see the emote flash up: "Devourer of Souls begins to cast Wailing Souls!". No, no, this can't be happening. "For crying out loud, get out of the way of that laser ... no, really MOVE, do NOT just stand there, Noooooooooooo". The final DPS stood as if he was rooted to the floor, watched the beam move a quarter of the way around the room, and proceed to turn him into a floor-tank.

Devourer was now a 80%. *sigh*. The tank showed no inclination to give up, and that suited me fine. The three DPS watched and their howls of pain slowly turned to amazement and then joy, as the tank slowly whittled him down and I healed, healed and healed. Finally, after an insanely long time, the boss fell over. We both just stood there, drained, but the DPS went mad. It wasn't fun, it wasn't pretty, but it was so rewarding to succeed in spite of everything stacked against us.

That's the reason I heal, that's the reason I play.

Previous: My first day in WoW

Next: Favourite item(s) in game

Guild-paid transfers

2011-05-11T13:02:00.000+10:00

Note to self: When does being 'back' to blogging really show? When you read a post, and know instantly that your reply will be way too large for and comment. You post a wall of text, because you have your own blog, and you can! :).

Various things of the digital age have grabbed my attention, but I can honestly say that Twitter isn't one of them. *DING* Lightbulb moment - I reckon I know what it is - why doesn't Twitter appeal to me? 140 characters for an ENTIRE message? ROTFL. You. Have. To. Be. Kidding. So all sorts of juicy stuff apparently floats around the twitter-sphere, then someone blogs about it, and I finally read it :) (Thanks Ophelie).

I am never likely to be in a progression guild, or even a hard-mode guild. My gear isn't there, my experience isn't there, my drive isn't there and more than likely, my skills aren't there either. But really, that suits me just fine. Like Ophelie, I have been in few guilds. My first guild (Unchained of Aman'Thul) was the one I stayed in until it imploded and I left with a large proportion of the remaining people to start a new guild (Blood Rage of Aman'Thul) and raid more. The only other guild I have been in is due to a RL friendship (Southern Cross of Shadow Council). I make a conscious commitment to a guild, and expect to put in and contribute to the guild's wellbeing. I expect to have to prove myself before becoming integral to the guild. If I am changing guild then one way I can show my commitment is to pay my own way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to willy-nilly transfer - if I wanted to transfer, I would explain to the guild leadership that I would like to try out the environment of the guild - start a new toon on that server, and get that toon added to the guild. I'd then participate in general guild chat, as well as try to listen in on vent to a few raids. If after a couple of weeks if the guild seemed the right place to me, I'd then make the decision to transfer, and I'd see the transfer fee as part of the deal - if you want to change careers, you don't generally rock up to a prospective employer and say "Yea, I want a change, your organisation sounds good, but hey, why don't you pay for my retraining" - well I wouldn't. I'd do the training and show up saying "I have decided to change, researched and like your company. I understand that my skills are in different areas, so I have done x, y and z training and I understand that I will need to work my way up in the organisation, not instantly expect a corner office" ... Maybe that's just the Gen-X in me not thinking the world is about me, but were I employing someone I know who I'd pick, even if the applicant who had done the training had less experience or skills. :D

And if that meant that I didn't mesh with the guild for whatever reason, then I wouldn't expect them to pay me to transfer back.

In the end, in this situation, you need to make a decision, and that decision may cost in a real or virtual sense or both.

Back and forth, I sway with the wind
Resolution slips away again
Right through my fingers, back into my heart
Where it's out of reach and it's in the dark
Sometimes I think I'm blind
Or I may be just paralyzed
Because the plot thickens every day
And the pieces of my puzzle keep crumblin' away.

Couldn't have said it better myself :D

Day 3: My first day in WoW

2011-05-10T13:36:00.000+10:00

Day 3 in Saga's blogging Challenge

My hasn't a lot of water gone under the bridge since then? :) According to the Account Management page, it was almost the end of August 2007 when I first signed up.

I had been putting off playing WoW for quite some time as I was opposed to the idea of paying for my gaming experience. I had watched a couple of friends who played, and eventually I succumbed. I rolled a Human Pally on whatever server I was randomly allocated and started fumbling my way around this new world.

I look back and wince at my mistakes, and my mind boggles at the stuff I still had to learn. I had no concept of guilds, or the myriad of informational sites that are out there to help the uninitiated. I knew nothing of instanced content, let alone raids. On a side note, I was put on ignore the other day because I had the temerity to suggest in trade that someone should not expect all the other people around to drop what they are doing and answer the random question that was being asked - all in caps, multiple times, rather than go to Wowhead or wherever.

The old proverb says that if you give a man to fish, you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and he will stop bugging you in the future. Well, more or less :) I see no reason to help people who ask stupid questions all day long when google knows everything. Seriously, what are these people, 12 ... (Don't you love irony)

It didn't take long, and I was well and truly hooked. I won't grace you with my /played figure because, to borrow a phrase from our North American friends, I wish to exercise my right to avoid self-incrimination.

That first toon lasted a very short time before he was joined by others. Altoholism, it seems, was latent and only required a suitable outlet in which to manifest itself ;). Those toons were then orphaned as I moved to an Oceanic server so that Azerothian day and night matched what I could see should I venture out into the actuality, and I wasn't going to pay to transfer them.

Pretty boring and standard, really.

Next: My best WoW Memory

Day, er, 2.

2011-05-08T19:16:00.001+10:00

So, following on from Day 1, here is Day 2 of Saga's Challenge. For ease of reference I will continue to refer to the posts by the days that Saga has suggested.

Why did I decide to start a blog?

Well, there are a couple of reasons that I have spoken of several times. Just read the first few of my posts and the first few after I came black to blogging, and given that I have already expended a fair range of words on them, I won't bother to rehash it.

Instead, I thought that I'd try to look a little deeper and look at the underlying motives. I am sure that most of you will have had the discussions with coworkers, significant others, or random people in the street where you start talking about the boss you downed, the optimisation you did, or why that particular achievement meant so much to you ... and they look at you, and their eyes glaze over, and you trail off with some inane comment as they put another tick in the 'hopeless nerd' column.

Given that I don't have a huge number of people I talk to regularly who really give the slightest stuff (and most of those are probably way over my rants), A blog seemed to be the solution. It's a soapbox where I can rant and vent, discuss my triumphs and my heartaches. Most of you will understand - I mean, why would you read this if it didn't mean anything to you, right? - A place where I can say what I want, and the worst that will happen is I look like an idiot ... No, I'm not gong to dig any of those posts out and link them, so don't ask!

I decided to keep this a very narrow blog, and I try to keep my observations almost completely relevant to WoW. The fact that many of the posts aren't about healing or Pallys, well that's not something I can as easily fix. lol.

I use WoW as a time-out, a relax, and to keep it from becoming a job, I need to unburden, to rant and just to get things off my chest. That keeps me sane. If I can help others, and contribute to the community in some fashion while I do this, so much the better. "Who needs that sentimental bull****, anyway. Takes more than just a memory to make me cry. I'm happy just to sit here round a table with old friends, And see which one of us can tell the biggest lies" That sort of encompasses blogging really doesn't it? :D sitting round the metaphorical table, telling yarns. Thanks, Jimmy, I'm trying to speak but no matter what I do, I just can't seem to make any sound, you took the words right out of my mouth. (Oops, no, that's a different song completely!)

Next Post: Day 3 - My first day playing WoW.

An apology to Lady RNG.

2011-05-06T09:15:00.001+10:00

Dear Lady RNG,

I know that I have complained many times about your vagaries and your fickle nature. I know that have said many unkind words about you, which have surely been misinformed. I promise not to utter such words for at least ... hmmm ... lets not push this too far ... a short but unspecified duration :D

Yours, Saunder.

Oh what a beautiful morning it is - the sky is blue, the grass is green, the birds are singing. Except it's not morning server time as I play on a US realm. It's mid afternoon and the birds have long finished their morning warbling. Regardless, life in Azeroth is good. Last Thursday night I volunteered to sit out of the raid as we had too many healers. Aren't I noble? Not really, I was planning on running the new 5-mans multiple times. I didn't do that, but that's not the point. The guild got Magmaw down, and thankfully, nothing of great interest to me dropped anyway.

We haven't been raiding much and are really only just starting to get back into the regular raiding scene, so it was disappointing that I wasn't there, but I was glad for the guild. Fast forward one week and I was ready and raring to go. In two and a half hours we managed to drop Magmaw, Omnotron and had a good few attempts on Maloriak. That is pretty impressive, and we were stoked. I was particularly stoked because I passed on a tasty ring from Omnotron. Why would one pass up the opportunity of a nice upgrade, you ask? Well, that would be because Magmaw dropped something way more interesting! Breastplate of the Avenging Flame, mine, all mine. The only holy pally in the raid, and on my first kill Magmaw drops that!

Raiding or RL, there is nothing like working as a team to achieve something, something that requires you to work together, something that is definitely not trivial and even better where you personally come out of it with a token of your efforts. As James Brown would say, "I feel good, I knew that I would, now, I feel nice, like sugar and spice".

This is not Day 1

2011-05-04T09:59:00.001+10:00

If you haven't heard about Saga's 20 Days of WoW Blogging challenge, you must have been following the Royal Wedding too closely. And the Japanese Earthquake. Or watching paint dry.

I have read the results of many bloggers taking up the challenge, and so here I am, to do the same. Sort of. See, Holy warriors do not get told what to do by Warlocks. ESPECIALLY Horde warlocks. So I will do the challenge, but do it my way ... OK, what I really mean is that I don't want to commit to blogging every day for 20 days. I have never tried to post daily and now doesn't strike me as a good time to start :D

So, to the Challenge.
Post 1: Introduce myself!

Yea Yea Yea, I did that. Some things have changed. Some things haven't. Certainly my writing style has changed and (I hope) grown. I read some of my early posts and wince. But I come back to two things. One, I think that Fannon is right. I just like blogging, it is something that I do enjoy. Two, there I still see a need for Pally healing blogs that aren't the heroic raiders. Much like friends move on, there is only so much reading you can do, even of people you respect greatly, when they are talking about things that are so far out of your league it is like the pimply-faced IT nerd who longs for the unattainable girl (see image :) ) But don't you slip, Don't you slip in love with the girls on the avenue.

As much as I might like to know whether the Glyph of Awesomeness is better than the Glyph of Win in the Heroic 25-man version of the Blah boss, realistically, by the time I see it, the content may have been nerfed, or the rest of the raid group may be so over-geared that mechanics are trivialised.

I like to read about the people who are like me - the people who are a couple of raid bosses into the current raids. who still need lots of gear, lots of points and may well be running with sub-optimum stuff just because it is light-years better than anything else they have and therefore rejoice when they get a new piece of gear or a new boss down - and I hope you do too.

So here I am. Saunder/Saundin, whatever name I currently wear. I am a Holy Knight, I am a casual player/raider, an altoholic, and a PvP noob* ... /bows. At your service. Oh yes, and in case you haven't realised from my recent posts, I have a penchant for musical trivia. I quote song lyrics at wildly inopportune times. Oh, that's the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh :D (Thats a little obvious, but bonus points if you get the Richard Clapton reference earlier ;) ).

*Although, when this year it was me screaming at the people trying to get the school of Hard Knocks ... maybe I am finally moving out of the total noob stage :D

Next up, Day 2: Why did I start a blog. A question half answered in this post as I got carried away :D

Call to Arms and the vagaries of RNG

2011-05-02T16:31:00.002+10:00

I still haven't been able to do many of the new 5-mans. Not because I haven't had the time, but rather because I'd like to be a bit more familiar with them from guild runs before I brave the pugs.

My nature being what it is, I doubt I will be able to resist the Call to Arms for too long, which is, of course the precise reason that it has been implemented. At that time the only possible thing to say will be "Why don't I sell you my soul? So here it comes, the sound of drums, Here come the drums, Here come the drums. Baby, baby, baby, you are my voodoo child" ... Sounds like the Rogue Traders should supply the soundtrack to 4.1 to me :D. Anyway, I managed to chain run four Cata heroics on Sunday and getting the full rewards from each was very welcome indeed. The fact that I got two more goodie bags in addition to one on Saturday only sweetened the deal. One agil flask, one blue gem and one parrot, none too shabby for something that I'd have been healing anyway.

According to guildies, the queue times for DPS have dropped significantly, and with the bag and the ability to run your weekly dungeons whenever you have time within the week, there should be plenty more tanks and healers prepared to brave the murky pugging waters.

I also think that the changes to the dungeon finder to try to match you with people from your own server will be a refreshing change to some pugs as it will bring back at least some level of personal accountability and reputation that have been missing in the vast and impersonal space to this point.

I still haven't been able to get the trinket to drop, but I am in the process of solving the ring of the Boy Emperor, which was far and away the nicest of the remaining Tol'vir epics left that could have come up. I also ventured into BH for my first kill (Wow, look at Saundin, he is SO up with the times...) with the guild and got the tier gloves, so I really shouldn't complain about RNG. The fact I still haven't got my turtle, and the gloves are worse then my Earthen Ring ones ... that is just Lady Luck playing with me :)

Righteous Fury really isn't a Buff

2011-04-28T16:20:00.001+10:00

It was way back over a year ago when I got on my soapbox to complain that Righteous Fury is NOT a buff. Well, apparently Blizzard have finally accepted that hypothesis and in the new patch all you tankadins will rejoice - RF persists through death, like Warrior Stances and DK Presences have since time immemorial.

About. Time.

Thankyou, Blizz, as a part-time tankadin, that will make my life a LOT easier.

Now, at the risk of restarting the old 'addons are a crutch' debate, all I am waiting for is for Vuhdo to be updated and I'll be set to gather tanking and healing gear from the new 5-mans :) so that I can tank or heal them and reap the rewards of the Call to Arms.

Oh, Ohhhhh, Ohhhhhhh BABY. Apparently it has been updated today. I suddenly have somewhere to be. ... Somewhere with many trolls. :D (no, I don't mean /2 ;) ) .... Cya, I'm off /wave.

The best you can do

2011-04-26T10:52:00.000+10:00

The general requirements for raiding are not exactly news to most people - how many guides are out there that tell you to run the normal dungeons to run the heroic dungeons and then add crafted gear, rep gear, gems and enchants. Then, and only then do you think of raiding.

Why then is the same culture not present for many people when it comes to PvP? I suppose the average battleground is shorter than PvE content and therefore more transitory and there is often so much going on that in the main, people will not bother to inspect your toon.

Plus, there are plenty of scrubs in BGs, that have no idea how to PvP and yes, I'm one of them. A friend, who shall remain nameless, has started doing a fair bit of PvP - crazy loon that he is. I said that one of my Cata goals was to concentrate on a single toon and to dabble into PvP.

Well, much like not blogging, my altoholism got out of hand, and when I fall off the wagon, I do it in STYLE. Having moved to Shadow Council, I didn't have access to the stable of toons I had on AT. So, true to form, once 85, geared-ish for raids and with a guild that wasn't doing much raiding, I started working on a Mage ... and a Hunter (Oh be quiet, I know they aren't names from the correct universe. Shush. I've been re-reading Feist.) ... and a Death Knight ... and not to forget my Druid who would be much higher except I am leveling solely thru LFD, with the same friend who is PvPing on his main. ... And my Priest. That is it. At the moment. Oh, no its not, I started a Shammy too ... Then I started a Pally on a PvP server, because I had never leveled on one.

Wait, I was talking about PvP. lol. Anyway, here I was and decided to start some PvP - and so I just jump in, no preparation, no gear. ScrubzRus. Then, to my deep and abiding embarrassment, not only did I fail monstrously as expected, but it was pointed out to me that I am a BS (Oh, yes, I'm FULL of BS), uh, that is to say, that I could create my own starter PvP set with the skills I have and the stuff in my bank. *sigh*. Off to the forge, and hopefully this time, the best that I can do, ... the best that I can do is craft some gear (with apologies to Christopher Cross).

*Note* The image is not mine, in any way shape or form. It comes from The Altoholic, another blogger who has sadly closed up shop.

Redemption

2011-04-20T13:52:00.005+10:00

[Saundin] casts Redemption on [Non-Squishy Heals].

Non-Squishy Heals is no longer 'Away'.

I gave up blogging for many reasons, but I find that giving up blogging didn't mean I had less to say, it meant I had less places to say it. There is nothing worse for a long-winded person to have nothing to speak about, but particularly, for nowhere to speak :D.

So I am back. Sort of. No, I'm not planning on posting here every day or any such craziness. What I *am* planning is for most posts on Paladins and Healing ... you know, the things that inspired the blog title in the first place :)

And isn't it ironic ... don't you think? It's like rain on your wedding day, a blogger returned, when they've been away (with apologies to Alanis Morissette). I started this blog talking about the respected names that had thrown in the towel, blogs like BRK and Resto4Life. Names that make me feel old in the scheme of things because for many of you out there they are names that you will never know as such valued members of the WoW blogopshere. That first post was almost two years ago to the day, and here I am starting afresh, only this time, it's the loss of Tam, Larissa, Miss Medicina and so many others that we mourn.

Lest I be accused in turn of not understanding the meaning of the word, it is ironic that after the amount I rant and rave IRL about aging rockers who don't know when to quit and come back for that one last time ... Yet here I am, pouring forth the words once again.

Besides, if a Warlock can Soulstone his blog and return, then a Pally can bring his back to life too :D

Terminus

2011-01-27T10:17:00.000+11:00

This is a recorded announcement ... This service will be terminating at the next stop. Please remember to pick up all your valuables and rubbish and take them with you.

I have enjoyed blogging, and hope that I have contributed to the blogging and Pally communities in some sort of productive manner. I have made some great friends along the way, and to Tam, Miss Medicina, Kurn, Aoladari, Endyme, Ophelie and the others who have commented on my posts, I thank you. To those who have lurked, I hope you enjoyed my ranting. I will continue to read the umpteen blogs on my blogroll and post long-winded comments, but the other commitments I have in my life and the way I am playing atm mean that I'm blogging less. I don't want the blog to trail along, dying a slow and painful death, so I am deciding to draw the line under it, as of right now.

I have no immediate plans to quit WoW, and if you happen to come across Saundin, Saundo or Wolftreebear on Shadow Council-US or in LFG, then give a wave.

To Holy Pallies everywhere, take heart! We still rock at standing in the front in our non-squishy plate and keeping the others around us alive. Know that not everyone is raiding current content, or even got their Kingslayer title :D

To male Holy Pally bloggers, get out there, stand up for us and fight the good fight!

To my guild, breathe easier knowing that successes, fails and drama won't be recorded here for posterity :)

To everyone, enjoy the game, and make sure that you never let the fools and idiots get you down, even if those idiots seem to be employed by Blizzard at times. Make sure that you focus on the things that are really important, not the transitory stuff in a video game.

Finally, A small snapshot of Non-Squishy Heals:
174 posts of mostly me babbling to the masses who probably never cared. Many not about Paladins, many more not about healing.
21 months of blogging.
Multiple instance of Foot-In-Mouth (no, I'm not going to count them)
11,300 page views in December 2010, mostly from one post that attracted a stack of search engine hits but more from Tam linking to me.
1 epic toon name fail (Furryferal, who promptly went resto and stayed that way :D)
1 guild offended when I blogged that I was leaving before telling them. DOH!

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Tol Barad on skewed pop servers

2011-01-05T11:55:00.000+11:00

Tam has gone into some detail about one of the issues with Tol Barad, that is Win Trading ... But Win trading isn't the major problem with Tol Barad. It is a completely broken BG.

I used to play on Aman'Thul. I don't know if the Horde were hopeless or vastly lower population, but Alliance had Wintersgrasp most of the time. - I'm talking 80%+ here. This was to the point where there was QQ in /2 (OK, there is*always* QQ in trade, but this was specific to the issue at hand) when people weren't able to get to VoA or the vendors because the Horde had it. Guilds would schedule regular weekly raids with the expectation that it was good odds that they would be able to do VoA and get purples.

Fast forward, and I now play on Shadow Council. The situation is reversed. Alliance suck at PvP. They suck so bad they can lose Tol Barad defending almost as easily as when attacking. Now, I am in a smallish guild, trying to gear out my main for raiding. I run Heroics, and am happy to throw my hand into the PvP soup to try to win Tol Barad. Not because I want the honor, not because I want the marks (although both of those are nice), because I want the chance at a way to drastically improve the gear of my toon without resorting to pugging full raids.

As has been said, there is no mark awarded for a loss. Why, when defending is so easy? That is a disincentive right there. Why is there no sliding scale, no Tenacity-style mechanic, no way to balance the sides? In WG, the longer a faction has the battleground, the easier it is for the opposing faction to win. This gives both factions access to the vendors, rewards, and BH. In Tol Barad, there is no such mechanic. There is no real incentive to try to win because Horde just run round in a pack and zerg cap each base sequentially. How can this be a valid and equitable way to have a BG? An organised group of defenders will *always* win, no matter how good the attacking side is. To cap a node, you only need more numbers, you need no skill. So, if the attackers take 90% of their force to cap a node, all the defenders need to do is move to another node. Easy win. Fail mechanic.

BH and Voa before it are a great way to dip your toe into the world of 10-man raids, especially if you have done mostly 5-man content or want the next logical step in gearing - but the opportunities should be available equally to all.

So I am left with minimal opportunities to gear my toon and help my guild get raiding because we oh-so-rarely have Tol Barad. If we win-traded, then that would be good, but that involves the defending side happy to give up the access to vendors, rewards and BH. At least on my server, that doesn't happen.

Not everyone is raiding yet!

2010-12-23T10:21:00.000+11:00

I read a number of Holy Pally blogs, and there are a good percentage of the bloggers who are already into raiding. I won't list them all, because naturally in doing so I will forget someone important and make a fool of myself :) - My gear is OK, but I am still struggling in Heroics, let alone raids.

Our guild is getting there, but I suspect it will be closer to a month before we are raiding than a week. Several of the guildies have changed mains for the expansion and are learning new classes, others (myself included) are still grappling with the scope of playstyle and talent changes.

So don't lose heart if you aren't already raiding. Many small guilds will not have the geared people yet, and even running Heroics isn't fun. We did a guild heroic last night, our first. I was healing, we had two locks, a DPS warrior and a newish bear tank. The poor guy is still gearing up and when we started I had nearly 10k more health than he did.

We rolled the dice and hit up a Random Heroic ... and got DM. None of use had been in H DM before, and we didn't even get to a boss. I was dropping fish feasts like water, and we were wiping a LOT. On trash. After multiple messy deaths we called that, went back to SW and checked out gear etc, added some gems, chants and pots, and requeued, this time to get Throne of the Tides.

It was an epic, epic run. We one-shotted one of the bosses, and eventually managed to score the guild-first H run achievement some three and a half hours after we started. Was it a raid? No. Was it fast? No. Did we do stupid things? Many times. But we stuck at it, we wiped, we refined, we tried again and do you know what, what? We succeeded. It was an awesome experience, cutting our teeth and beating our heads but eventually, we prevailed, and I tell you, it was a fantastic feeling.

Look on the bright side, and don't measure your guild against the server/realm/blogger achievements. Revel in the experiences of playing with guildies, even if it is only a partial group in a normal instance. Sit back and take the time to celebrate your own achievements.

... And I hope that you and yours have a very merry but especially a safe Christmas ... uh Winter Veil season. :D

Failings of LFD

2010-12-19T08:26:00.001+11:00

In general, the LFD feature has revolutionised the game, and in a good way. For those players who aren't in large, active guilds, or even those who are and who are on at different times to the bulk of the players, it has enabled mains and alts alts to be geared without pressure or obligation on the guild.

I have run random after random after random, on multiple toons since the feature was implemented. Granted, mostly with the short queues from a Healer and/or Tank perspective, but I have a fair amount of experience with the highs and lows of random chance. The frustrations of RNG and gear drops, the eminently bloggable failings of sundry individuals and entire groups, the deadly silent steamrolling of Wrath, the amazing synergy you can get with one or more complete strangers, the exquisite knowledge of their classes and mechanics that some players have.

And, until Cataclysm, the Dungeon Finder has been pretty successful. Take one random healer, one random tank and three random DPS of any variety, 95% of which completely and totally outgear the instance in question, and any failings can be glossed over and ignored.

However, as we all know, CC is much more important now than it has been for a long time. The gearing of people is way down, the familiarity with the instances is low, and the general skill level of players has dropped due to the number and scope of changes to each class, and toons needing to get out every ounce of performance from full raid-like buffs - all playing against the need for people to gear up and get badges as soon as they can.

With those factors all combined, suddenly LFD is showing some cracks. Let me use a couple of examples, from my heroic experiences over the last week: Firstly, three random DPS are no longer always going to work - I was dumped into a heroic with a Warrior tank, and another Warrior and two DK's as DPS. With the best will in the world, that isn't going to work in the current conditions.

Compare this to the heroic I zoned into with a druid, a mage, a shadow priest and a DK tank which went off without a hitch. Not a trouble due to the use of CC and backup heals where needed.

Blizzard has tried to stop totally undergeared players from joining this fracas by putting an arbitrary item level limit on Heroic entry - I won't rehash the whole gearscore debate, if you recently returned form Mars and haven't heard it before, get friendly with a search engine ... but I think most people would agree that this can lead to all sorts of problems, not the least of which being that is Blizz are providing this gating mechanism that once you pass that gate you will have no problem running the Heroics, which is patently not the case.

Then there is the whole issue of sticking with a group through to completion. When you had to get a group together all on your own, and the people were from your server, there was a much greater level of accountability and responsibility. Now, you just drop group and requeue, maybe waiting out a (pretty short) debuff. That is the only penalty as almost certainly you will never see these people again.

LFD is still a great tool, but at the moment it has problems. I don't have all the answers but giving a priority to at least one class that can do effective CC might be one solution. Until something changes, there are going to be increasingly frustrated players just trying to get by.

First Heroic

2010-12-16T09:08:00.000+11:00

The other morning I queued for a random heroic, and after completing one, thought that I would jot down a few thoughts. Firstly, and It is probably no surprise really if you think about it, but logging on, hitting the LFD button and walking away with your daily rewards in the bag in anything less than an hour just isn't going to happen. Be prepared to set aside an hour to an hour and a half at the moment in late quest greens and dungeon blues.

Think of early heroics like raids at this stage - you want full flasks, food buffs and anything you can think of becuase yes, it may well be the difference between success and repair bills.\

Also be prepared to think seriously about how likely the group is to complete a dungeon, or you are, if its one of the unpleasant bunch. Hello H Grim Batol I see you there! Luckily, I scored H VP, which seems to be accepted as one of the easiest.

Group makeup is going to really make a difference. if you don't have CC, then you are going to struggle. A LOT. Preferably several varieties. Secondary healers who can spot heal or top you up are GOLD. (I bow before Shadow Priests and praise their squishy names!).

All things considered tho, It is basically a case of getting the easy upgrades that I can after I sit down and do all the research into BiS lists ... Or, of course, use VilePickle's or Kurn's, which are soooo much easier than DIY!

I plan to keep plying the LFD chaos, I have never shied away from randoms and I don't plan to start now. (Talk about self-flagellation).

When expectations are inaccurate

2010-12-13T16:43:00.000+11:00

I never did get around to running instances in beta - there was always something else I wanted to do. As with most people though, I was expecting the Sanity Tap (LFD) to be the realm of the crazed, the moroic or the soon-to-be crazed.

I have run a number of instances using LFD over the last few days and the results have been quite surprising. Possibly with the way that the instances have been easier than expected, the overall experience has been pretty positive - Oh, there are always idiots, but in the main, there has been plentiful use of CC, not a lot of complaining at wipes and a general acceptance that things aren't going to be as fast as they will once everyone is geared.

It's good that the predictions of doom and gloom weren't borne out! Whether the same experiences are repeated once I start moving into heroics is a whole different kettle of fish :D.

Seafood Impossible

2010-12-10T16:19:00.003+11:00

I have spoken before about the whole social obligation of being a productive guild member. One of the ways that I can help the guild is to fish and provide fish feasts when I am in raids. I have done this for as long as I can remember and don't plan to stop now.

So, knowing that to get the fish feasts for raids in Cata, it wont be as simple as it was in Wrath I thought that I would look at starting to prepare, once I hit 85. The recipe requires 10,000 fish to be caught from fishing pools. Lets just unpack that a little. 10,000 successful casts at approximately 15 seconds per cast = 150,000 seconds of fishing (assuming zero failures), or 2500 minutes, or 41.6 hours of continuous fishing. That's like coming to work for more than an ENTIRE WEEK and doing nothing except fishing. That is wrong on many levels. Edit: Of course, the 41 hours would only be true if the fishing pools required no traveling. ARGH!

So, after 41.6 hours of fishing, you need 4 x Highland Guppy, from the river in Twilight Highlands, 4 x Lavascale Catfish, found in Uldum and Deepholm, and 4 x Fathom Eel, found on the border between Tanaris and Uldum. (Edit: Thanks to Kurn for pointing out that the data on Wowhead is minimal at best at this stage - keen fisherpeople should probably download the Wowhead client to help fix this!)

Can you imagine the cost of those fish, and the cost of those fish feasts? Raids wanting to best buffs without the time, inclination or patience will have to pay market prices ... If in fact there are any for sale at all.

If you have a fisherman in your guild who is happy to go down this route, you better get down on your knees and thank them. Profusely and repeatedly, because my goodness they will deserve it.

First Cata thoughts

2010-12-08T08:02:00.000+11:00

Four hours play time 80-81, no guild perks, Heirlooms or rested. Overall, apart from the usual competition for quest mobs, pretty positive.

I had logged out in Blackrock, so that I could find the dungeon entrance, which worked out well. After doing some questing we knocked together a guild group and hit up Blackrock Caverns. Apart from a few boss abilities that you need to get used to it isn't a hard instance. Some of the mechanics are already being trivialised by brute force, which is a real shame.

I haven't tried the Throne yet, but reports from other guildies say that it is somewhat harder. Anyway, with a 100k exp reward for doing the first random of the day, that's a fair incentive to dip in the waters of pugging. I managed to score a 4/5 guild group where I was the odd man out - barely pugging at all as these guys worked together well. We did that a couple of times, then I did a couple more with randoms ... and I( am incredibly happy to say that there wasn't the expected complete moronic dweebishness that m any bloggers, myself included expected.

Instance quests progressively in the dungeon rock, and in fact the whole thing rocks ... excuse me, I'm off to get to 82 and beyond :D

The pain of Opportunity Cost

2010-12-02T07:19:00.000+11:00

In the brave new world I find myself in on Shadow Council, not having all my stable of high level alts and professions, as well as a commitment to focus on a single toon has lead me to reassess what value I place on things.

On Saunder, I have completed the Long Strange Trip and done significant portions of it on other toons as well. Saundin isn't so lucky. I have a lot more of the Journey to go before I finish, and after missing some of the Pilgrims ones due to being on holidays (Rogues, *siiiiggghhhh*) it will be another 12 months before I could get it. This is in addition to the very significant time investment needed to complete all the world events.

So I shelled out for the 310% flying. a) it's not like I am short of money and really, b) when you balance the time taken to complete the achievements and c) the time until I would be able to fly at the fastest speed, it really does make more sense to just buy it now - it pains be greatly as that is spending 4k for something that is free ... I'm sure that I have some Scottish ancestors somewhere, because that is definitely the sort of view one would expect from a frugal Scot :D

The Hypocrite

2010-11-18T14:31:00.000+11:00

There have been a couple of posts in recent times about the language used in some guilds, on Trade and other places in-game. There was one only relatively recently on the topic, and naturally enough, now I am going looking for it, of course I cant find it.

The blogger in question was one of the female bloggers I have come to respect and read regularly and the topic of the post was around the use of words like 'rape' and how the use of them in such trivial contexts as the killing of a boss is most definitely not OK.

I completely support the post, never having had an experience that would come close to the feelings that must be brought up in some people when the word rape is floated around in such a banal manner, but I hope that I can emphathise with the pain and heartache that such events can cause. Of course I sat back in my chair and happily patted myself on the back, because of course I would never demean the victims or the glorify the act by using rape in that context, and then I promptly forgot about it completely.

I was just writing an email, a totally unrelated-to-WoW email, and I blithely put in that I was being the IT-Nazi. I blame Seinfeld and the Soup-Nazi, but that is no excuse. The term Nazi has sort of moved into normal language in my workplace to indicate one who nags and pesters - I was the Coffee-Nazi, who made sure there was tea and coffee for all the people here, and in this email, I was referring to the way I was harping on to get a rather important spreadsheet backed up rather than living on a single machine.

So here I am, and I realise that I am no better than these juveniles in /2 - I am bandying around the term Nazi like any other random descriptive word, which it isn't. It is a term that the entire Jewish nation finds offensive for pretty obvious reasons and is certainly not what I was meaning. I guess at least I have the opportunity to change my behaviour *before* offending someone completely.

I wonder how many of the commenters about the whole Frostgate saga are sitting there in their glass houses, with stones in their hands? Hmm, food for thought next time you go complaining about someones actions, or thinking how good you are.

New Expansion Resolution

2010-11-17T16:43:00.001+11:00

I am not a completionist - well I am, but there are always more fun things to do than grind old world rep :) I bumble along and hope that I don't embarrass myself, my Guild or my class too much when I PuG, Raid, or play generally.

I haven't done a stack of hardmodes (I don't think I have even done hardmode lootship, for crying out loud), and I don't expect to get even a significant portion of PvP or PvE end game achievements. I never even got Mmiron or further in Ulduar (we were behind the curve and moved on to ICC), and I think I only completed Naxx once! I am 4/5 in ToC25, the only 25 man raid I have looked at seriously. What I had hoped to get, and would have been really proud to have earnt, is the Kingslayer title. It really galls me that for once, when I have (for a change) been raiding current tier content, I was *that* close (holds out fingers in the classic fisherman gesture) that I was a reasonable chance of getting to the end of the content. To take my place amongst those who are not just playing the game, but experiencing everything it has to offer (at least defeating the content once on its merits). Nowadays, every man and their dog has Kingslayer - Apparently I am neither man or dog *wry grin*. I don't want to buy the title, I don't want to be boosted to the title on a toon I haven't put the effort into gearing, I want to be a valued member of a functioning raid where I can say that I contributed, that I played a significant role in the killing of the fool who sat there and taunted me for what, 5 minutes, at the entrance of Stratholme. I want to sink my mace into the still-warm carcass of Arthas and take a screenshot for posterity, me, the Kingslayer.

But I have to accept that is now quite unlikely to happen. Actually it's not going to happen - who am I kidding? It really is beyond annoying, because the gear on Saundin will never be ICC-ready on Shadow Council pre-Cata and even if it was, who is raiding ICC these days? The one time that I had the chance to show that I *can* complete current content, and I fail again. Gee, my raiding resume looks even better now ... Yea, I could apply to a guild like Kurn's, I have a single kill on a end-of-raid boss (excluding single boss raids such as Maly/VoA etc), on the 5th of June, 2009. *snort*. Yea, Right. NOT.

So here I am, making a 'New ~~Years~~Expansion Resolution'(TM). I WILL get to the end of the Cata Raid content, as a valued and valuable raider. I WILL look back on Cata without the regrets I have of Wrath. I WILL! Then I WILL sit in SW, and flaunt my title, even if others have it, just to prove that I can.

... and if I don't, at least it will make for plenty of fail stories in the process.

Edit: Well, after putting some reasonable effort into gearing Saundin since I started playing on SC again, and some gear from the rifts, and some honor gear, the guild were happy to bring me on an alt run of ICC10, where I hardly starred, but neither did I fail miserably. Even got Heroic Lootship and my first ever Heroic bit of gear!

Thoughts on levelling and professions in Beta

2010-11-15T14:00:00.000+11:00

After a request from a friend (whether Hunter pets despawn for Worgens when activating the mount form), I have been leveling a hunter on the Beta, and the leveling experience is much smoother and faster than it used to be.

I didn't transfer toons over with my heirlooms, and so I was doing this the 'hard' way. Except the hard way is pretty easy. I have roared along to Level 16 and it hasn't taken me long at all. The levels positively fly, and the quest rewards are good enough that money hasn't been a problem. I have had enough money for all skills and talents, as well as finding a good number of bags along the way. Sure the bags might be lucky RNG, but the money is great and should mean that first toons aren't anywhere near as problematic as they were in the old days ;).

The quest rewards are also significantly better than they used to be - to the point that picking up leatherworking hasn't yielded much in the way of benefits. I remember when I would go out on a new hunter and kill boars or whatever to get enough scraps to make the few pieces of light leather to make something that was significantly better then the quest rewards and drops at the time. (on foot uphill both ways, in the snow ...) Now this is from a very small sample of one low level toon, but it does go to show that things will be shaken up with Cata - and you can't expect everything you once knew to still hold true (hello Holy Pallys ;) ).

Did you say you would Pee Vee Pee?

2010-11-08T09:18:00.000+11:00

I have never really been into PvP although I have dabbled in it from time to time. Yet, with my determination to make one toon the best I can in Cata, not multiple alts all partially ready to do different things, I am thinking that I may need to join the ranks of the regular PvP'ers.

I am getting heartily sick of the pathetic Alliance attempts at PvP on Shadow Council - I think that the Alliance could do a lot better, and rather than just sit in /g and QQ, I have decided that (after PvE gear as that will continue to be my primary focus) I will need to get me some PvP gear and go proudly waving the Alliance flag and jump into the breach. Will I be able to single-handedly snatch victory from the ashes of defeat? Of course not, but maybe I can start turning the tide. Especially with addons like the Gevlon-inspired WG-Clean that are starting to appear, and maybe enough harassment of guildies and /2 to try to drum up some support for a successful WG (and Tol Barad) culture.

It will be a very different goal, especially when in a large part the end result is out of my hands - but hey, apparently so is killing Arthas so what's new :)

Thoughts on Changing Servers

2010-11-04T10:43:00.000+11:00

Having decided to make the switch to Shadow Council, I am playing more of Saundin, and less of my AT toons. This has lead to a few interesting thoughts - if you are considering changing server it would be wise to think about whether these may affect you before you shell out the cash :).

The reason I chose AT in the first place was that it was an Oceania time-coded server. It may not worry you in the slightest, but I find that actually running around in the virtual world when it is the dead of the Australian night, only to be standing in glorious sunshine in Goldshire is a little off-putting.

This leads to other changes - if you like farming, then picking a server that is mostly asleep when you are on the most makes a lot of sense. If I want to do a farming run on SC, I wait until 9pm local time and there are very few people around. However, the other side of the coin is that if I am not trying to farm at 9pm, but pug a random group ... well, lets say that isn't anywhere near as fun - so I will end up farming more as I wait for queues. (I want my instaqueue! *throws tanty*)

Certainly the Battlegroup consolidation will help everyone with the available pool of people and shorter queue times. On an aside, I can't help wondering if it will only raise the level of bad behaviour - the chances of meeting people again are going to drop through the floor so abusing them / ninjaing / being a tosser is unlikely to result in any serious ramifications.

Do you do a lot of daily quests? When the daily quest reset happens at 9pm local time, it can be insanely stressful to try to get things complete before the rest if you need specific loot / rep etc etc.

Your toons and professions, may affect your decision too - I am too much of a cheapskate to transfer all my toons over, so I will not have access to max level professions of pretty much EVERY profession. It was one of my aims to be able to do that, and it means that on AT if I need something made / crafted / transmuted or whatever, I don't need to rely on anyone else. Does that worry you? I guess how much of an altoholic you are will in large part answer that question.

And finally, PvP balance. On AT, Alliance are spoilt. We have WG most of the time, and if we don't, that is in itself enough to pretty much guarantee that the Alliance will turn out and wrest it form the cold dead hands of the Horde. SC is not so fortunate, not by a long way. You may not play PvP a lot, but you may want something from the PvP vendors, or, you may want to do raids such as VoA.

But, and here is the biggest thing, where do I plan to spend the majority of my Cata experience? At max level, Preferably raiding, with a guild I appreciate, people I get along with, and less of the petty drivel that sometimes happens. - I don't get enjoyment out of farming for farmings sake, or from PvP - so I look at all these things and say that they are minor annoyances rather than deal-breaking issues, and I turn my back on my old home, and start looking forward to a brighter future (just not at the times I expect. lol).

Yup, they still exist (Fail tanks)

2010-11-01T10:30:00.000+11:00

I dropped into a random on Saundin yesterday, and Culling of Strath popped up. It is one of my favourite instances, especially now you don't have to listen to Arthas drone on, and on, and on. The run didn't start so well when three of the group didn't talk to Chromie and ran the whole way in. *sigh*. Then, when we were ready to go, the tank went AFK, without telling us, after the first elite pack had been pulled. Nice. Not! He eventually reappeared, having been on the phone, and off we went.

So the tank, announced that we WERE doing the Zombiefest achieve. Not asked, not requested, not anything except I'm-so-cool-you-do-what-I-say-cos-I-am-the-tank. He then proceeded to yell and scream at the hunter, who wasn't placed right where the tank wanted him and said about four times that the hunter wasn't to DPS the ghouls. It was late at night, and I had really only been trying to get in a quick random, so I wasn't feeling overly generous. The tank didn't ask me if I was cool with this, or in any way refer to me about strategy. so I did nothing except heal ... Nothing, in this case, included not changing my aura ... :) What auras do pallys run with in Strath when its just a heroic? Well let me tell you, ret aura and live ghouls is not a good plan. :D But he didn't notice, and I wasn't going to point it out.

Some time later, he realises that for whatever reason the achieve wasn't going to happen (no joke) and we moved off, the run having taken 35 minutes until the time we got to Malganis. Then, the tank (with Malganis already talking), decides that he wants the optional boss - and that he was going to get him without the rest of the group, or any communication ... needless to say, without a tank, a wipe ensued, with the tank returning (and asking why the optional boss wasn't there *shakes head*) just in time to die like the rest of us.

A long run back and the instance was finally over, 45 minutes after we started. If it hadn't been for the other poor fools, I would have dropped group. The end of the expansion doesn't, unfortunately, mean no idiots.

#define 'Home'

2010-10-29T11:54:00.000+11:00

All my serious WoW time has been logged on Aman'Thul and it is definitely the closest thing in WoW I have to a home, (With the exception of the very enjoyable time I spent on Shadow Council). When I was thinking about my plans for Cata, I never really thought much abut changing factions or servers - I'm just not *that* worried that I would spend $100US or more to transfer over my various alts that I, er, need, particularly when there is no guarantee that I would find a new home that suited me.

But Real ID has changed some things, notably the ease in which I can communicate with my RL friends in game without playing some alt I really have no interest in, and 'home' is just not the same any more. What do you need to enjoy the game? I am sure that everyone is different, but I enjoy the social interaction, the guild banter and the fun, crazy things as much as I do being part of a well-oiled raiding team. I enjoy building real relationships with the people I have met over the years and yes, I see them as much as my friends as people I happen to actually know.

The environment that I was in on Shadow Council was much closer to this than what my AT guild has ended up as - slowly but surely there have been changes in the roster, in the people and there just isn't the sense of community and fun that I once had. There are a number of people who I just wouldn't put up with in a RL context because of the way they talk, or their actions to others in the game. AT is unfortunately now for me just where I play, not where especially I want to be.

And if there was any time to change, it's the time where gear is irrelevant. My level 80 Pally in 200/219 gear will be in exactly the same gear as my ICC-geared Pally come a month after the expansion. The gear reset of Cata will be as severe as it was for Wrath - this isn't news to anyone. Maybe its time to stop playing so many toons in such a piecemeal fashion. Maybe I should sit down and level one toon to 85, and make that toon the best I can, rather than have *another* toon at 80 that I don't play. One way to do this would be to load up one toon, take that one over to SC and transfer my 'home' to there for Cata and beyond.

With that in mind, I logged in to Saundin last night, just to see how bad his gear is. (terrible doesn't even begin to describe it!), and to tinker around with nothing too serious. I happened to be in Dal, and saw people from the guild I had been in, names that I recognised and had raided with way back when. (How far back I am not really sure, but as best as I can tell, over 12 months ago). These are people who put up with me logging in just before a raid, raiding, then logging off, and them mostly not seeing me until the next raid. They pushed me to improve and helped me to do it. They welcomed me, didn't judge me, and gave me a spot in their raiding lineup. And then, when I realised I couldn't raid on two servers, and I left them, they understood. Yet these same people welcomed me, chatted to me and said I should come back to their guild. They sent me a ginvite within 5 minutes of seeing me, happy to take me on past performance and behaviour.

I jumped onto their vent and I just fitted back in, like I had never left. No, I am not asking for or wanting a raid spot before Cata, and noone is guaranteeing me one even if I make the switch, But to Aya, Nyssa and Boog, I thank you for (re)welcoming me. To Kas, thanks for the idea ... I wonder whether if I left AT for the same length of time, what reception I would get if I returned? I have my own opinions on that.

I started this post still undecided as to what I wanted to do. Just trying to express myself in a logical fashion has crystalised some of my thoughts and I think the way forward is pretty clear. I think that I will be making a new home, a home that I can contribute to, and can enjoy.

Are you happy with your WoW home? your guild? your server? Because there is no better time than now to make the change if you aren't.

Apathy, Cata, and guilds

2010-10-27T13:56:00.001+11:00

As much as I haven't had the same level of pain healing in 4.0.1 as multiple other bloggers have, I have hardly been doing anything serious since the patch dropped, and haven't raided even once.

I just can't be bothered doing much before Cata when so much has changed and I can't play my main the way that I used to be able to, happily, and knowing what I needed to do :) I am even having thoughts of maybe giving up WoW altogether if Blizz don't make us properly viable tank healers as we used to, or OK Raid healers (which was never in the job description ;) ).

At this point I will wait till Cata comes out, and try to get to 85 pretty quickly, then see what happens from there. I am still enjoying the beta, with the new zones and the OP'edness if the hunter, so hopefully things will continue to be bright after Dec 7.

I'm also half inclined to go guild shopping as my guild right now is marking time at best - there hasn't been a scheduled raid for anything significant in so long that I don't want to think about it - but the again, I am not a hardcore raider, and neither am I realistically likely to compete with guilds who are pushing hard modes well into ICC (Yes, and by the way, despite what Tam seems to think, there are still people out there who haven't killed the Lich King). The lack of attendance from our guild hasn't exactly put some of them on my favorite people list. However, trawling the guild recruitment sites there isn't much in the way of people asking for midrange Holy Pallies with a stable of alts who have RL commitments on a Wed night on the Alliance side of AT ... Not that I am asking for much, lol.

Alt synergy and pally healing in 4.0.1

2010-10-14T10:54:00.000+11:00

In the long distant past, I had basically two characters. One, my hunter, was just played. - You know they type, the one where you really don't do a lot of research, use things are are just OK and can't be bothered trying to improve that little bit.

It was a bit of fun, and nothing terribly serious. Then came my Pally. I would hate to count up the hours that I have spent reading about specs, talents, skills, professions, etc etc etc. I read stacks of blogs, listen to the people that do all the hard work (and I will only mention one here because otherwise I will get into trouble when I miss people. Again.), and try to put the skills and strategies they espouse into place. I have taken a lot of notice of all this information and I hope that my toon is now and least to the point that people don't look at me and cringe about my gem choices or whatever. I am also able to now pass on that information as I not only follow it, but understand WHY I am making most of these decisions. That is really the easy bit. It is pretty quick and simple with the number of resources out there these days to get a decent spec, gems, glyphs, and all the things that make a toon reasonable. It is much, much harder to change your playstyle and improve in areas that are less easy to define.

How many times do I stand in fire? (Please don't talk to the poor people in the guild I had Saundin in on Shadow Council about me and ObS) :). How many times do I use a non-optimum spell choice, or forget to use a cooldown, or a utility spell? The answer is disturbingly often. Am I better than I was back then? I think so. I certainly hope so. But playing a class that has a limited healing toolbox gave me much greater room to cover up my failings because there were less choices - I mean seriously, put beacon and SS on the tank, judge occasionally and spam Holy Light for big damage or Flash for dribs and drabs. Use LoH in emergencies. Use Divine Plea when out of combat. Yes, I am over simplifying, but there ~~isn't~~ wasn't a great deal to worry about really. Most of the time you could bumble along as a not particularly skilled Holy Pally clicking a couple of buttons in combat and a couple of others out of combat.

I was happy doing that, and an adequate healer - but then I started playing a Priest, and a Druid, and so on, and I was amazed at how many healing spells I had at my disposal. I suddenly couldn't perform my role with two buttons, no modifiers and selecting people and casting a few spells of my bars. I had to change, to adapt. I had to start to prioritise and use the best tool for the job, not the one hammer and see everything as a nail. However successful I am healing on those toons, I know one thing: without a doubt I am now more prepared for 4.0.1 and Cata than I would have been had I stuck to the Pally - be a better Pally, go play a Priest :D (and then get on your knees and thank the Blues for plate armour!).

So 4.0.1 drops and I reforged, I added some gems, I swapped out gear, I retalented (and yes, I simply used Kurn's choices, which thankfully puts me in pretty good company apparently according to what I have read over the last few days! ;) ) I found that Vuhdo was updated (I'm SAVED!) and updated my settings, then this morning, I jumped into a BG and then a Heroic and you know what? It wasn't that bad. Of course there are things to learn, but in the main I am not about to go out and slash my wrists and give the game away.

I will go and make all the same changes to my toon on Beta, though because I really don't think that Cata will be as bad as I had expected. I had somewhat convinced myself that the doom and gloom floating around some sections of the blogosphere meant that life was going to be terrible, but in the end, I can change. I can adapt. So can you. :) and just like finding information, improving your toon can come from the most unlikely places - but often the ones closest to home such as your other toons.

4.0.1 Todo List

2010-10-13T13:51:00.000+11:00

...or, I have waaaay too many Alts! :)

So, after my uh, overly optimistic thoughts on when the servers would be up, I started a list of everything that I need to do for each spec on each alt that I am even vaguely likely to play in the time pre cata.

In case you may think that 4.0.1 is just another patch, here are the things that you too may need to do (other suggestions also welcome):

First you need to use your talent points, then see a trainer, check/purchase glyphs, reforge any gear as necessary, check/purchase enchants that may now be more useful (Brilliant Spellthread, anyone? :) ), put the new talents (and old ones you never used!) onto your bars, check all your gear fits your armor class (farewell, Rippling Flesh Kilt, you did me well), check/purchase gems, check your gear set to see if there are things now better than what you had on (I will *not* miss the World's cruddiest iLevel end game libram), see if there are new recipes for any of your professions, and customise the default UI till essential addons are updated.

And that is all before you set foot out of town! ARGH!

You'd think I would learn

2010-10-13T09:44:00.000+11:00

The capacity for human beings to rationalise pretty much anything and to remember only the good stuff is beyond anything that science can explain. I know this for a fact, having watched my wife go through labour :).

Yet, here I was, firmly convinced that I had downloaded all the patch data, that I was ready for the patch and that I would happily log in come maybe 7am local time, some 13 hours after the servers went down, with things, if not good, at least OK.

So I got up, clicked my WoW icon, and watched as the 4.whatever GB of patch was verified, then installed (which, despite having a pretty second PC is no small or speedy task). and then waited for the download of the new launcher and tools.

The spiffy new launcher starts up, but the Play button is greyed out. ... And it thinks, and chugs, then happily announces that my golly, there is another 1.3GB of patch to download. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

So, after turning all my power management off to make sure that it finished downloading by the time I got home, I left, dejectedly, for work.

*sigh* ... Surely this should have been what I expected, not the utopian and unrealistic expectations that I had? Oh yea, and to add to this, I have to go out tonight, so won't be able to play then either. Bah Humbug.

What you should do pre Cata

2010-10-11T10:30:00.000+11:00

There are many things that I would like to get achieved before Cata hits, some of which are looking increasingly far off given the stats of raiding atm *sigh*.

There are other things that we all can do to make the pain of the changes coming in the new expansion lower, starting with dusting off the toons that we want to play early in the expansion and becoming familiar with the new skills and talents in content that we are already comfortable with as soon as the 4.0.1 patch hits. No it wont be the same as the new instances, given the amount of crowd control etc needed, but at least we won't have to learn two different things at once - if you have a handle on the new skills then the new content will be much easier than needing to learn both at once.

Maybe you are all able to hold the multitude of skills and abilities and talents that multiple toons have in separate areas of your consciousness and can swap them in as needed, but I certainly can't to that. Especially given the changes to Pally healing, it is going to take some time for the majority to acclimatise.

Although I am usually not in favour of the practice of taking of bits of gear when you outgear content, I think thbat is exactly what I need to do between the drop of 4.0.1 and Cata release. Hopefully that will make me a better healer post Dec 7.

If I can manage to get into the hang of things, working on retraining the muscles to unlearn old habits and learn new ones, I will be happyish :D

Of course that's what I meant!

2010-10-05T16:34:00.000+11:00

I was emailing my mother today - she is a pack-rat from way back, and keeps way too much stuff that she will never use again. I told her to remember not to Horde. ... She responded and asked me if I meant hoard. Of *course* I did. ... :S Oops!

In praise of GC

2010-09-30T15:10:00.000+10:00

I'm not a regular on the official forums, and there are certainly things that I don't agree with, but seriously the amount of vitriol, rage and so on that GC has to put up with is ridiculous. I'm surprised the poor guy hasn't gone postal long ago.

The level of drivel to reasoned discussion is just so big, the general level of maturity so low, and the level of even simple things like actually reading previous posts on a topic has to be one of the worst I have seen anywhere.

Much like in primary school, many of these posters (and our politicians, but that's another topic entirely) should learn to not say anything if they have nothing nice to say, or if they can't be bothered trying to find the answers to questions that are there for simpletons to find.

Doesn't mean as a Pally I can't complain 'cos GC promised me a pony tho :D

Archaeology in the Beta

2010-09-30T09:16:00.001+10:00

So, lured by the prospect of 'free' level 85 Heirlooms, I decided to have a run around on one of my toons to level Archaeology.

Oh, so to explain that a bit, there are multiple low level vendor trash or white weird stuff you can get from the prof, but at the top end there is some really nice stuff including level 85 BoA gear. So, totally ignoring the whole opportunity cost thing I thought it was a good chance to play at something fun. And it is indeed fun, but it is seriously timeconsuming.

There are four dig sites on each continent (character specific so no fighting for them) and they remain static (so I am informed) over server resets, restarts and pretty much everything. The only way to get a new dig site is to completely use up one of the existing ones. So if there is one you want to avoid, you are down to three. ~~This will be especially a problem for lower level characters~~ (Edit: They will only spawn in level-appropriate areas according to GC) - I did all my playing last night in Eastern Kingdoms, which includes the new Vash'jir zone, where even at 80 I got a fair amount of random aggro.

I won't go into the full gory detail, but you do get some decent XP - around 30k each time at 80, but if you were under *any* delusion that Blizz were going to give you free epix, think again. I managed to level 1-50 in about an hour, and after 100, you stop getting skillups so fast. It will be an interesting thing to do, but if you have never managed to max out your fishing and/or don't actually enjoy that type of way to spend your time, then I humbly suggest that Archaeology isn't for you :)

How important is this game? Really?

2010-09-27T13:44:00.001+10:00

Note: This post contains considerably more personal ramblings than normal. It is somewhat loosely tied back to WoW, but only somewhat :D

I think I have said in the past that I have a somewhat obsessive personality. I probably play WoW far too much to the detriment of other RL activities.

I have, however, been playing almost no WoW at all the past two weeks, and do you know what, I didn't really miss it. Well, I missed it, but not in the addict-missing-his-fix miss it sense :). I spent four days filling sandbags to help shore up a little town down river with the SES. After returning from that (and driving 11 hours in two days) and getting in all of maybe two hours playing, I went to bed exhausted, only to be woken up by one of *those* phone calls. The kind that has you dropping everything and traveling across the country to support relatives in a shared time of grief and loss. Needless to say, I didn't play much in the time I was away. I am not saying this to go woe-is-me, or as a pretty dramatic excuse for not playing or blogging much - I am saying that maybe, just maybe, if you are reading this, you need to stop, turn the computer off, and go talk to someone, ring someone up or something similar.

We all like to think that our family and significant others will always be there, that there will always be time to make things right, to talk, to spend time. Well, they won't. I show my age when I quote lyrics from Mike and the Mechanics, but trust me, singing The Living Years as a teenager and in the years since with no personal involvement is very, very different from singing it (or even hearing it) with meaning and personal feeling. Don't let it be you that is saying "I just wish I could have told him in the living years". It is true that you can choose your friends but not your family, but in the end, they are your blood relations. Go talk to them. Reach out. Say Sorry. Do whatever. WoW will still be there when, (if) you come back.

Vale CJA, you will be missed. A life cut short as you were called Home much too soon for our liking.

Cata L 80 Dungeons

2010-09-12T07:20:00.000+10:00

I know that I haven't been playing the beta as much as I should, and I certainly haven't been blogging about it. I decided to see how hard it would be to get into the initial level 80 instances on my hunter - who is hardly well geared.

I go to the lfd screen and see that you need an average ilevel of 226. So, it is to be assumed that anyone with that ilevel should be able to complete the instances successfully :) Half a dozen quests in Hyjal later, and a couple of quest rewards, and I replaced two level 200 purples with 272 green quest rewards, both with mastery on so that is a nice extra, and took my average ilevel from 224 to 226. It will be very interesting to see just how easy the instances are when you are just meeting the level requirement!

Your guild is not all about you!

2010-09-06T10:24:00.001+10:00

Yes, it is the end of expansion doldrums. Thousands of words have been written about this, and I'm sure thousands more will be as us bloggers try to fill the empty spaces in our WoW lives.

When you are in a guild, especially if that guild is a raiding guild of any level, you are part of a team. There are things that the guild gives you (Social interaction, raid spots, loot, boosting, whatever it might be). Then on the other side are the things you provide for the guild (Crafting, Fish Feasts, specific raid roles, money, etc etc). Think of this like a bank. If you have a bank account, and take money out of it, and never put money into it, the account will eventually run dry. This is as immutable as the laws of physics. So it is with guilds. You have a moral obligation to help the guild as they have helped you.

If your guild is raiding certain content and you have got whatever you want from that content, then just vanishing into thin air marks you are a small-minded selfish cretin (should I say what I *really think*?? :D). IT IS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU! My guild killed Arthas seven weeks ago or thereabouts, and as soon as some of the group got their Kingslayer titles, *poof* they vanished like bathwater down the drain. We have been unable to get more than five guildies to show up for a raid since, to the extent that the raids aren't even being put in the calendar any more.

Seriously, guys, take some responsibility, and show up for the team. 99% of these people can still get gear from ICC, let alone the fact that not everyone happened to be there and still want gear and to kill the crazy princeling once! How about you stop thinking that the world revolves around you and, you know, behave like a normal productive member of society. Because if you behave this way in RL you will end up with no friends and words like 'Leech', 'Stalker' and 'Needy' being bandied around behind your back.

Were I a GM (and no I am not planning it) that sort of behavior would score significant points in the why I shouldn't reward you gear in raids scale. Aside from making my blood boil.

Cata gear reset

2010-09-03T09:41:00.001+10:00

With every new expansion comes a pretty hefty gear reset. This is not news to most of you , I am sure. Anyone who has levelled a toon into BC will know the difference between the best pre-Outlands gear and the first quest rewards in Hellfire. The same applied in Northrend.

Well, let me suggest to you, based on the following two screenshots, that doing a lot of current end-game content is possibly not the best use of your time if you are doing it for gear alone ...

First, I present for you, the quest reward from the very first Hyjal quest:

Now a few points on this: firstly, no, my hunter is not uber geared. He still has an iLevel 200 weapon. Secondly, I havn't cropped the screenshot so you can see the quality of the scenery etc. Thirdly, you will see item stats comparisons built into the default UI. Very cool!

So, lets go with a slightly better example. My Pally is currently wielding Lockjaw, from Rotface in ICC10 and I am pretty happy with it as my main hand. The second screenshot is a random green that I found, killing mobs in Hyjal.

First, you will notice that the stats on Lockjaw on Beta are significantly different to that on Live - a stack more Stam, Spirit replacing Int and 166 extra SP, but no MP5. That is significant on its own, then you look at the green, with a boatload of Int, almost another 100 SP, and heaps more DPS.

Ladies and Gents, hold on to your hats, and if you have particular attractions to shiny epix, be prepared to be very dissapointed. On the brighter side, if you have a toon who is not decked out in ICC gear, don't worry, you will upgrade you gear very very quickly come Cata's launch.

WTB Shrine to Lady RNG

2010-08-31T11:36:00.000+10:00

It would appear that my pally is destined to aimlessly wander the frozen wastes of Northrend fishing - like some sort of purgatory for those eternally damned not to have a turtle mount :)

I fished up another full stack of fish feast mats over the weekend, and still no turtle. I then find that on Saundin, poor, orphaned, lost Saundin, who has some incredibly low fishing skill, that he has fished up Old Ironjaw ... way back in March 2009. Seriously? Gah!

I would like to find the (presumably lost) shrine to Lady RNG so that my pally can devoutly pray at it in the faint hope that somewhere, somehow, he will get a Turtle mount.

LFD Musings

2010-08-18T09:44:00.001+10:00

I know that I am not unique, I mean it has been done right the way through to 80 by the Pugging Pally, but having leveled multiple toons to 80, I can certainly say that leveling via LFD right throughout the BC levels is not only possible, it is pretty easy.

IIRC, I have done < 5 quests in Outlands that are not dungeon quests. None to shabby for a 58-68 leveling spree. Yes, absolutely the heirlooms are invaluable, but more than that, leveling as a healer means you only have to keep one set of things in mind. You don't need to keep multiple sets of gear, you don't need to worry about a few quests here or there, you just log in, hit the LFD button and away you go.

But the Shammy has now hit 68, and I have changed my tune for at least two levels. Especially with the tome of Cold Weather Flying to help speed movement along, the increased gold, items and xp rewards from the NR quests far far outweigh what can be gathered through running BC instances, often the ones that are several levels below you.

I guess I will reassess it once I get to 70 and can queue for NR instances, but in the mean time, I'll pound Howling Fjord quests and see how long it takes me to get two levels that way. I am so sick of Auchindon anyway :D

Cata Instance Entrances

2010-08-16T19:40:00.002+10:00

As Kurn and others have posted, the latest Cata Beta build requires you to find the entrances to the dungeons before you can use LFD to queue for them.

I thought it would be useful to let people know where those entrances are. (I will update this post as more instances become available).

The entrance to Blackrock Caverns is, not surprisingly, in Blackrock Mountain. If you enter the mountain and go from the bottom up to the right, you will pass the Blackrock Spire meeting stone. Keep going and you will see a pile of rubble. You can turn right and see the highly visible purple instance portal.

The entrance to the Throne of the Tides is a little more complex. I picked up the initial breadcrumb quest to head to Vashj'ir. I then did the first simple collection quest to get the Sea Legs buff (Underwater breathing). You then need to head southeast from the quest turn in across the Shimmering Expanse and then East to the Abyssal Depths. Look for the huge whirlpool one the map (you can't miss it) and swim to the middle of it and down, then down some more, then further down. You will come out in a pool and see the Throne instance portal to the north.

(Edit: Added the rest of the 5-man entrance information)

The entrance to the Stonecore is part way up the temple. You need to hang a right as you come out of the building. There is a fairly sizable platform that has the stone and entrance.

Vortex Pinnacle is one of the harder entrances to find - especially if you keep your nose in the ground. Think TK in BC, and look up to the clouds off the caost in the general area of the Lost City.

Speaking of which, inside one of the Northern structures in the Lost City is the entrance to that particular instance.

For the Halls of Origination, on the Eastern side of the pyramid you will be able to go inside, the entrance is there.

Finally, Grim Batol is near the border between Wetlands and the Twilight Highlands

Fail tanks need smacking

2010-08-16T10:20:00.000+10:00

My latest dose of altoholism is to level my Shammy to 80, quick-smart. This involves repeated dipping into the LFD bucket, and coming out with the usual random results.

The good: groups that generally know what they are doing, being considerate for poor healers who lose mana like it decays at a rapid rate in Mana Tombs, who continue after a tank leaves, who are chatty, friendly and get done what needs to be done with the minimum of fuss.

The bad: tanks who quit after the first boss of Mana Tombs because they didn't get the drop they wanted (count for that particular offense now up to four!). A tank who leaves half of the FIRST trash pack alive in Mana Tombs before moving on to the next pack and then porting out of the instance and refusing to come back when the rest of the group asked him why. The tank with a spirit ring and only 3 pieces of tanking gear.

My ignore list is growing at an alarming rate as I will not tolerate that sort of rubbish. Seriously, these people need to learn that everyone else paying to play this game is not in it just so they can have their own way.

I am also looking for an addon that will enable me to share my ignore lists between toons. I will NOT heal or be in a group with these people. Ever. Even if I have to manage it manually, they can find someone else to inflict themselves on!

And I want to do this in Cata to level! /headdesk. /headdesk.

Oh yea, and words to the wise: Do not decide to prove how uber you are at leveling by telling a friend who was level 73 that you will beat him to 80 (when your toon is level 54) ... even if he has a history of slow leveling. Especially if you put a real tangible bet on the outcome such as a meal at a local establishment of fine cuisine. (lol, well a burger joint anyway) :D Such boasts will inevitably end up with much egg on ones face!

Cata coolness

2010-08-13T17:32:00.000+10:00

I have been tinkering with the Cata beta over the past few days ... After getting my internet shaped due to the download :D.

Firstly, although there are bugs (as you would expect), there are also heaps of really really cool features. Blizzard have done a huge job in terms of making some of the best addons baseline and it is awesome. Some of these features include:
Spells in the spell book showing you the level you can learn them.
Leveling up and seeing a message telling you exactly what new skills are now available.
Multiple selections shown on the minimap!
IM-style chat as default (no more WIM).
100% drop of quest items in starting zones.
Stat differences shown in the tooltips so you know just how better (or not) the new gear is.
Quest notes at class trainers that give you an idea of how to use the initial spells.
Mailboxes in the starting zones! (Finally!)

I still haven't healed an instance yet as the LFD tool is still broken, but there are very few addons whose lack I am really feeling. ... Except Tbag. ARGH! having to open every bag and have no sorting is horribly painful!

Irony and healing in Cata

2010-08-09T10:53:00.002+10:00

The observant amongst you may have already been cackling to yourselves about an immanent dose of hard reality for me. Without going into the whole addon debate once again, in the beta, *no* addons are allowed. All addons functionality has been disabled so that the dev's can work on the content.

Now, from a programming perspective, this makes perfect sense. From my own playing perspective however, it puts me in a bit of a bind ... well actually in a lot of a bind. If I want to experience the dungeons as healing or tanking (or, just to see what self-fail stories I can generate, DPS) then I am going to have to do this without addons. Dungeons that radically change the way that healing happens, with a significantly reworked healing toolbox including a much greater emphasis on mana management.

Hmmm, as the old Chinese curse says, 'May you live in interesting times'. Oh dear me, I feel for the four other poor suckers the first few times I try this! Yet try it I will, because my aim has always been to level to 85 using LFD as soon as Cata comes out. Which means I need to practice now, in beta, and practice and practice some more!

And I don't have a buffer of BiS gear to make it that little bit easier for me. Pugs in the first week or two of Cata are going to be an absolute nightmare. Lets say, for the purposes of the exercise, that I mostly abandon the live realms at the moment and become a pro pally tank and healer, ready for Cata's release. Lets say I know the new instances back to front, and every which way to Saturday. That isn't going to be enough. Not by a long shot. The vast majority of people will be working with a new (unfamiliar) toolbox, with the expectation that they will be able to steamroll through instances, collect phat lewts, without the slightest effort on their part as they have been for months. Kurn has already spent some significant time in the beta, and in LFD. Let me quote from her post the other day "I have successfully healed Throne of the Tides and The Stonecore and 3 of the bosses in Blackrock Caverns". Lets contrast this with my efforts on levelling my Shammy on live - 4 instance in 1 hour, 1 wipe, a level and a half (at 60). These new instances will be HARD for Pugs. There will be wipes, and plenty of them. LFD will become, more than ever before, the Sanity Tap (to use Tam's great phrase). Hmmmm, speed leveling to 85 via LFD? I must be insane.

First Cata post, and a warning.

2010-08-06T16:13:00.002+10:00

OK, so, lets get a few things straight right from the start :) I *am* going to be posting about Cata. Most of my coming posts are likely to be about Cata in the immediate future. If you want to enjoy Cata without the spoilers, you have now been warned.

I haven't even got the beta client downloaded and I am already grumpy. Why? because there are people out there who seem to think that the world revolves around them. People who post on the Cata forums and complain about the uptime of the servers, or the size of the download or the colour of their hair. Whatever. I mean, seriously, this is an invitation ... not a right, not a divine sign that you are the centre of the universe. Blizzard are offering this opportunity to people to help improve the game. There will be pain, there will be bugs, there will be downtime, there will be frequent, large patches. DEAL WITH IT.

I am, IRL, a software tester. (I would dearly love to be a Blizz tester, but moving to California is not possible, even were I to be able to get a position, but that's another story).

Do you know what a software tester likes in their testers? Enthusiasm. Detail. Patience. Understanding. Having noone who gives a stuff enough to properly test is a terrible feeling. Having a really gung-ho tester who cant communicate the precise steps for reproducing a bug is a nightmare. However, if that isn't possible, the best information they have around the bug in a short, clear format is a godsend. Seriously, quit the QQ and help with constructive feedback or shut up.

I should probably post that on the beta forums ... not that most of the whinging, whining, pre-teen morons would read or understand it.

I have taken across my Pally, Priest, Hunter, and my orphaned 80 Pally who has 219 gear at best. Leveling with him will be a really interesting experience. IF you have Cata questions, fire away. I'll do what I can.

This can't be real.

2010-08-06T11:56:00.002+10:00

So, I'm cleaning out my emails, tagging this one and that one as spam, and then I notice a subject line that catches my attention ... "World of Warcraft®: Cataclysm™ Beta Test Invitation". I figure this is some kind of scam, and start reading, just to see how good these guys are.

The sender details actually look legit, the message is from "WoWExpansionBeta@blizzard.com". the links look legit ... Nah, this has to be spam. So, carefully avoiding the links in the email, I go to the account management page. I look at Manage my Games, and I read the page twice. Then I read it twice more.

I am in the beta :D ooooooooooooooh BABY!

Hopefully I will be able to catch up with Rhidach and Kurn, and get to have some posts that people might want actually to read :D ... and now, if you will excuse me, I am off home to start a download ... :D

Edit: no matter how hard you stare at a download bar, it doesn't speed up. ROTFL.
2nd Edit: 2 hours till the first 650MB is downloaded is about as accurate as the Microsoft Minute (tm) ... *sigh*

Opportunity Cost is only theoretical.

2010-08-04T11:18:00.000+10:00

I have read many posts over the time I have been playing WoW about opportunity cost. For those who aren't aware, the cost of farming (lets say Mageweave cloth, just as an example) is the money you would have made instead during the same time doing something more profitable, (like dailies).

Making money for a level 80 character is simple these days. You can do nothing particularly special and end up with hundreds of gold for a couple of hours work. This is especially true when you can do the same dailies on multiple toons :) - The money I could make from doing the Argent Tourney dailies on five toons would quickly raise my gold to insane levels ... if I didn't have a job and family, of course!

However, all these discussions assume that there is someone who is willing to sell the Mageweave or whatever to you for a price less than the gold/hour you get from other activities. Working out an opportunity cost is not a static figure. Firstly, you need to have supplies on the market. No supplies at all means there is no opportunity in the first place :D. Secondly, very expensive mats, say Mithril at the moment, currently running at 300%-400% of my Auctioneer value on the AT AH, quickly becomes horrendously expensive.

Then there are less easily-quantifiable factors - how much am I prepared to pay for having whatever I need *right now* when most market cycle and therefore things will get cheaper eventually, and how long am I prepared to wait for that to happen?

All of these factors mean that opportunity cost is not the be all and end all. Sometimes you will need to go out and farm till your eyes bleed. Or, shock horror, wait. *sigh*. I HATE waiting, and have better things to do than farm.

Enchanting for Juicy Haste in Cata

2010-07-28T09:45:00.007+10:00

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that between them, Ophelie, Codi and Kurn haven't posted to this effect.

Side note: Seriously, guys, and I mean that literally, where are the rest of the good Male Holy Pally Bloggers? these girls are taking over! Ruhtra, Agdamorix, Khraden and I need some support (not forgetting other notable female Healadins such as Ferarro, Tarinae, Val, Endyme, Enlynn, Aoladari, Iamapaladin, and all the others I can't lay my hands on at the moment!)

Uh, anyway, before I get myself into a hole from which there is no returning :D, I was reading a post over at WoW.com and I have to say, love the Haste, baby.

Boots, Bracers, Gloves, and Weapons too, along with Int on cloaks and Shields.

That is one sweet set of chants for a Healadin!

NB: Edited to add yet more Female Healadins...

Altoholism + Vuhdo = Win

2010-07-28T09:22:00.001+10:00

... or at least less fail :)

Vuhdo is one of my biggest saviours in the addon category. I have it set up slightly differently on my various toons and thought that those out there that suffer from too many alts as I do may benefit from a few tweaking tips.

First, I always turn on the class colour-coding. This gives me all sorts of (obvious) information, such as whether I have a ~~mage~~ vending machine in the party, whether I need to adjust my blessings on the Pally for multiple Pallys, and as a healer, it gives me a handy guide as to the amount of damage that a party member can take.

Then, I try to configure my spells in roughly the same manner. This means I can switch from the various healers with some more ease. Its not pretty or polished, but it means I can do heroics without too much trouble. My left hand mouse button get the goto heal. Flash of Light and its equivalents on the priest and shammy. Middle mouse button gets Cleanse or similar - but seriously, how am I meant to work that when a priest has TWO cleanse-ish spells? :D and the right button gets the big one, Holy Light etc.

CTRL modifiers give me secondary spells, such as Beacon and Sacred Shield. Shift is the emergency modifier. Bubble and LoH reside there on the Pally and you get the idea.

I make sure that all resources are shown so I can monitor mana etc for the party to be able to drop Mana Tide Totem on the Shammy or sing my Hymn on the Priest.

When I am tanking, I show threat as two very large red boxes on the bottom half of the panel. seeing all 5 boxes in a party light up like that makes me a very grumpy tank :)

Finally, and I know it sounds silly, but I keep a piece of paper beneath the monitor which has all the spells for all the toons on different sheets. As I start an instance I turn to the appropriate page to save me from brain failure :) ... Although, this is less silly than putting '+' and '-' in *permanent pen* on ones keyboard to remember charges on Thaddius, markings that are still on that keyboard today ... You know who you are :P :D.

Totally and completely off-topic

2010-07-26T14:39:00.001+10:00

< start shameless self-promotion >

I am a big fan of the idea that people, in the main, come to this site to read about WoW. Not just what is going on in my life when that doesn't relate to WoW in any way. Of course, most of you probably (and naturally) also expect to find a blog about Paladins and Healing, but life is just one big disappointment sometimes :D.

If you want to know a little more about the crazy guy I am, I also have another blog that is similarly narrowly focused, this on my other journey, towards being a bike rider.

If that is of any vague interest to anyone, check out 2 Wheels not 4 for the rather sporadic ramblings as I vent on another topic I spend too much time researching.

< /end >

Cataclysm, Professions and Altoholism

2010-07-26T14:08:00.000+10:00

When I started all my toons, I never really sat down and mapped out who should be doing what professions. I knew that I would like to be self-sufficient and able to do most things myself, but I wasn't focusing on the best way to do this whilst also getting the best bonuses from my toons.

Even if I had done this, It would have likely changed anyway :) - I really expected to be playing my Druid more than I have ended up doing so. So, with Cataclysm looming I thought I should set aside some otherwise unproductive time and remap all my professions.

If I started afresh, completely from scratch (scary thought, that :) ), without my resources and heirlooms, I am sure I would make many different changes, but there are some professions I just cant be bothered releveling. I mean Engineering is OK ... and Jeeves is cool, but its a pig of a prof to level. So the Hunter keeps that. Similarly, JC is not only obnoxious, but also expensive. So the DK keeps that.

The Pally will be my main for the foreseeable future and Blacksmithing works well at end-game, but having no high level Alchemy toon, I'm considering dropping his Inscription for Alc, with Mixology, Infinite Potions, Flasks etc. I also have enchanting on 2.5 toons (Maxed on two, level capped on the third), nutcase that I am, so could probably drop one of those to pick up Alc, but it's a prof that really benefits a playing character rather than a non-playing one.

Leveling Inscription and Alchemy, either together or relatively close, will however, make me both broke and single handedly de-forest (de-herb?) Azeroth.

What I would really like is an extra major profession :D that would really help my choices! That not being likely to happen however, maybe I should just drop the partly leveled chanting from the Shammy, and powerlevel him to 80 pre Cata ...

Postscript.

Pre writing this post, I would have told you that I was planning to drop Inscription on the Pally, probably Chanting on the DK, and pick up Alc on the Pally and Inscription on the DK. Merely trying to express my justifications for this has led me to change my mind though! Ah well, I need to join the club of a max level toon of every healing class! :D

Why my addons help your runs.

2010-07-16T08:05:00.000+10:00

Codi is the latest to post about the use of healing addons. In it, she makes a number of points, amongst them "Healing add-ons do more damage than good."

I have an issue with this. I have had an issue with this for well over 12 months, as my previous post suggests.

I have to admit that I think my reliance on the multiple addons that I use to heal ... that I *need* to be able to heal is a part of me. I never liked FPS games because I didn't have the reaction time. Admittedly I haven't tried a decent FPS since I started healing serious raids, and it would be interesting to see how things have changed.

I am an altaholic. I freely admit this. I think there is only so much space in my brain for WoW related stuff - 80's of 3 of the healing classes, plus ranged and melee DPS as well as off specs for three of them ... Yes the Pally is my main, and by a long way. But particularly on my priest there are so many different spells and abilities that ... well, I just like my addons thanks.

I don't run a gamepad and so there is a much greater chance of me mashing the wrong button if I hit the wrong number or other key on the keyboard rather than a few different buttons used as mouse click modifiers.

4 buttons on the mouse plus ctrl/alt/shift beats keybinds etc hands down, at least IMO.

Oh yea, especially when I have never learned to properly touchtype so would have to take my eyes off the screen to find the keys in the first place.

Ask any of my guildies, I have tunnel vision. Delving into the tankadin realm has helped this, but I do not need to add another chunk of (avoidable) latency into my gameplay thank you.

Does that make Codi a better healer than me? Almost certainly. However, in the end, my conclusions are the same as they were back in May 2009. If I use addons and that enables you to have an easier run, whether you be a pugger or a guildy, except from a purist view, do you care? And the only answer I can come up with is that you couldn't give a stuff. Really. This is the age where people rage quit after the first wipe in a PuG, and quit the moment Toravon goes down because they don't need anything from the other bosses. Nobody cares if I use addons. Except on major Patch day, and that is a small price to pay.

What is this 'healing' you speak of?

2010-07-01T13:33:00.006+10:00

I know, I know, this is a blog that started off as the collected ramblings and rantings of a Holy Pally. Due to a chronic and totally incurable case of altaholism, it soon devolved into occasional DK fail stories, Huntard goodness, then branched out into Tree musings (Did you see what I did there? of course you did, so lame, I know!) and the more recently um, er, well the squishiest heals you can have :S. But the what can you expect from someone who created a toon called FurryFERAL and has Resto/Boom specs. *sigh*.

Was there a point to this? Oh yes. Tanking. The spec I picked up because if my jokes are lame, my attempts at dps are laughable. Seriously, just ask my guildies. I totally suck at DPS. So I ditched my soloing Ret off-spec and plunged into the waters of the Tankadin. I have always tried to do what I can for the guild, whether that be crafting, fishing (although that is also FOR A STUPID TURTLE, that I got in < 50 casts on the Priest!) or whatever. I guess I have that hero mentality that many RL medical professionals have - Oh Yes, Saunder will Save The Day(tm) - You need Heals, I cn haz healz. You need a meat shield? I iz tnk!I am looking forward to Cata, as I will have ICC quality Tanking and Healing specs, and will do whatever quests I need to between instaqueues for instance leveling :DJust today I was in a VoA 10 group (I haven't been in one for ages) and they were short a tank. So I volunteer my services, get a whispered crash course on tactics from a very friendly Tankadin in the group. The poor guy was very helpful indeed although probably wondering how a ICC geared tank has never done VoA, and we managed the usual two bosses with nary but a couple of silly DPS floor-tanking ('twas their own fault anyway).

The more I tank, the more I like it, and so all I can do is apologise to you if you came here looking for stories on uber Pally Healing or terrible Pally healing fails, because these days, they aren't as frequent as they once were. If I had to classify myself though, it would still be as a Holy Paladin. It may not have been my first toon or my first class, but it is the one I still love the most.

Casual. Or sort of. Or not. Or what?

2010-06-28T16:46:00.000+10:00

There are many times when the direction of guild members may change. The roster may change, or the goals of the group may change. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.

One of the times when it can change is when you are on the brink of something that will change the game as you know it, for all concerned. We continued our weekly ICC run last night, with me taking my proud place as OT ... now having successfully tanked 11/12. Friday's run was hardly perfect, we had several silly wipes or almost wipes that shouldn't have happened. But they did, and life, it goes on.

At the start of night two, we were left with Putricide, Blood Queen, Dreamwalker, Sindy and Arthas. Knock off the first three (Oh, as an aside, how many Saunders does it take to successfully kill(?) Dreamwalker? One, as long as the one is tanking, otherwise you better be prepared for a long wait :D ). Uh, where was I? Ah yes. On to Sindy. We got relatively close last week, but there was still work to do. After one painfully close wipe and some, er, less successful :D, we got her. Guild first, Sindy down, full guild run. Awesome.

So we move on to Arthas. Not really expecting to do him real damage, this was a couple of tries to see how we went. We got him down to 80% on the last try, and given that some of the raid had never even read or watched a strat, and the rest of us were total noobs, we were pretty happy with ourselves.

So here we are, calling the raid, at 12.30am Monday morning server time. And some bright spark says "Hey, who's available to work on our progression tomorrow night?" ... Let me back up, we raid two nights a week, 9pm until 12.30am-1am. We have raided pretty much those times, and certainly the same days since we came together as a functioning casual raiding guild. Now, just because we are up to LK, we aren't a casual two night a week guild, we are a three night a week go till we get him down guild?

I know that I have the tendency to play too much. I am also studying towards a Masters, and at the cost of full fee-paying subjects, study is not optional. I have a study group that meets Monday nights. I don't WoW Monday nights. I explained this to some of the guild and was told that "well that stops our progression then".

Now wait up. First, when did we go from two to three nights a week raiding? OK, maybe that was a group decision (I have no idea), and maybe it was when I wasn't there (no prob, if I wasn't there, that's life and I have no problem with it). Second, we don't always have enough of a raid team to take a full guild run, and three nights out of four for a pug is a lot to ask. Third, yea, I know that the raid may not happen without me, but there is a big difference in turning up when I say I will, or letting people know if I can't for whatever reason and it becoming my every breathing moment. It doesn't mean it is all on me if I don't want to match others increased hours of play and raiding. Fourth, as much as I love the game, RL commitments beat the game. That's one of the reasons why I would never cut the mustard in Kurn's guild. Or any hardcore guild. Sometimes, I just won't be able to raid. Deal with it or bench me. I know this, I am happy with this. Two nights a week is my limit. It is a limit I know I need to keep to keep the important things outside the game still there for me. So why am I being made to feel guilty for having a life, having limits? Why is it all on me?

Fifth, no, we may not get Arthas down this week. I'm sure we will eventually. Maybe next week, or the week after that. But if we had been more disciplined, more careful on the first night, and not had an inconsiderate moron go AFK for a '5 min break' that lasted over thirty minutes last night, we would have had another hour, or probably more to spend on the LK. If everyone who was coming to the raid was there 15 minutes before raid time, repaired, flasked and ready, we would have saved time. Lots of time. And this is not *my* responsibility. It is the responsibility of *every* *single* *one* of the ten, and we share it equally.

Maybe we need to assess where we are as a guild. Maybe we need to just write it down so everyone knows what is expected. Maybe the people who waste the time need to be spoken to. Firmly. Maybe people need to understand that not everyone wants to spend the same amount of time in the game. ... And maybe I need to shut up :D

Painful Pally

2010-06-22T15:17:00.001+10:00

/emote climbs on his soapbox
... Saunder climbs on his soapbox. AGAIN.

*deep breath*.
In the time that I have been healing on my Pally, I have mostly been either the only Holy Pally or at least the main one. (I know, spoilt :) ) Recently I have had several discussions with one of the guildies who is somewhat opinionated.

Not that this is in itself, a bad thing, as I have rarely been shy to share my opinion (which everyone has a right to hear ;), lol, jk ). But this guy, he just won't listen.

Barely a week after I was reading Kurns's ... gentle and restrained comments on haste :D this guildy was trying to tell me that Holy Pallys benefited in NO WAY from ANYTHING over the haste soft cap. Today he was telling me that Pure Mojo is the only flask and that Frost Wyrm is totally worthless for a Holy Pally, and then went on to say (and I kid you not) "OMG, tell me u arnt using 200 libram". I responded mostly politely and told him of course I was and gearscore should go DIAF. He then proceeded to go on a long rant about how bad the Libram is because it ONLY reduces the cost of HL by 113. /headdesk. /bloodboil. /headdesk.

I think for my sanity I will just ignore him from now on. I mean, seriously, to say things like that then to claim he reads lots and has "talked to HM raiders", Gah! Way to give us all a bad name!

/post message
... You are still mounted
/dismount soapbox

;)