Friday Musings & Links

Link Highlights
I’d like to link to Banana Shoulder’s most awesome Holy Paladin guide here. 
I’ll also link to to the Duegalicious not once, but twice.  Here, where he tells Blizzard what I want to tell them only with fewer cuss words re: tier 8, and here, where he takes a slightly different slant on priest gearing.  I was looking at pre-Naxx, he was looking at pre-Heroics, which is a fine distinction.   And slightly holy slanted, because poor Dueg is disillusioned and refuses to acknowledged the full awesome that is disc. 
Also, even if you don’t tank, I think this post is hilarious.  <3 Tarsus.

Just Random
And re: this post on WI, all I have to say is: baby murloc noises.  Duh! 

Naxx25
We cleared three wings on Wednesday and our revised loot system consisted of less suck and fail.  I took some gear on Ambrosyne-after no one else rolled on it.  I now have a good set of shoulders that look exactly like the shoulders she had before, which looked exactly like the shoulders she had before that.   I am all for gear matching, Blizzard, but you could have changed the color slightly more.  I mean my boots already don’t match, so wtf.  I’m fairly certain that we can clear Naxx25 this week, so maaaaybe, when it’s not progression content, they’ll let me bring my priest.  >.>  <.<

Speaking of the Baby Priest
Our Maly25 raid was canceled last night (due to sign ups and also to reasons I can’t publicly announce), so it became a Run Heroics Night.  Of the four upgrades that could have dropped for me in AN, I saw none of them.  Josh, who has notoriously bad loot luck sometimes, did get several upgrades for his unholy DK, though.  Pffft.  I did get boots that were a smidge better and enough badges for my neck, putting me at a whopping 3 epix.  Woo!  I could technically enter Naxx now and do alright, but I feel compelled to put more effort in before loothoovering making the full main switch and bringing Lyr to raids, spending my hard earned DKP.  :P 

And A Final Public Service Announcement
Listen kiddos, don’t give your guild “Do X or I’ll quit” ultimatums.  Especially not if your guild just recruited a whole bunch more of Whatever Your Role Is and you are, technically, replaceable.

Just sayin’.  If they keep your sorry ass, you can be sure they’ve at least lost respect for you.

Why Instating DKP and Being an Officer Sucks

Oh, lord.

So we tried instituting DKPthis week.  We expected it to need some ironing out, and to slow things down a bit while we got the hang of it, but we were not expecting the absolute explosion of clusterfuck that it turned into.  The fact that the addon we were using exploded mid-raid and lost EVERYTHING did not help. 

There was much cussing in officer’s chat, let me tell you.  And maybe some weeping.   Late last night we discussed all of the massive flaws in our sytem, tossed some things out, debated how to handle Blizzard’s shitty itemization for boomkins with our loot rules, and decided that everyone was going to be unhappy with us no matter what we did.

Joy!

I am especially anxious about all of this, because I am our unofficial PR Officer.  I consider it to be my job to run interference for our more cranky officers, to bring the concerns of the raid to Mach, and to catch the rumblings of displeasure before they erupt into /gquits.  While Mach and Atrop and Zoja are in /o handling the DKP mess, I was in /r going “Uh, sorry we are a massive pile of fail atm, we didn’t expect this magnitude of clusterfuck, please be patient with us while we learn to tell our ass from a hole in the ground.”

While those words aren’t exact, the tone was similar.  I have no trouble going lol, we fucked up. ‘Cause…dude, we totally did.   

We’ll hash out the last few details tonight, and reveal our Less Fucked Up DKP System for our fresh Naxx25 on Wednesday.  I hope.

I actually don’t mind being an officer, at all.  It can be stressful, but as long as I have some tools at hand to fix the problems that land in my lap, I’m usually okay.

Now I need to go make an Official Post on the forums explaining WTF is going on…

Naxx25: for the lulz

For the record, my raid leading skills ARE as poor as my flowchart making ones, which is why I’m not a raid leader.  <3  You should see my healing assignments, they’re hilarious!   

“Amber, why did you assign Atrop two beacons?”
*adjusts*
“Now Zoja has two.”
“FUCK IT I DON’T CARE ANYMORE PULL THE BOSS.”

Moving on…

Last night’s raid was, I think, a good one.  It’s true, we had a spat of loot drama-but that was mostly an example of bringing the wrong type of person to the raid just to fill a slot.  We have non-raiders in our guild.  We love them, we do.  But sometimes they’re non-raiders for a reason otherthan availability.  Like, oh, being complete-if sweet and adorable-nubcakes.  The person in question did not realize that one) we were abiding by our own main spec/off spec loot rules by denying them the piece and two)  the weapon in question was TERRIBLE for their offspec anyway.  Yes, you may have a 1h mace for your feral set now, but WHY for fucks sake?  WHY? 

We cleared the same content as last weeks first stab, Plague, Spider, and Patch-only we did it far more smoothly.  The only reason we didn’t go further was the fact that we rolled out DKP for the first time last night as well, and the process had some wrinkles.  On the other hand, the actual boss killing went more smoothly.  Last weeks Patchwerk was a hilarious comedy of errors, with numerous b-rezzes on the OTs to pull it off in the end on the fourth or fifth attempt.  This time we one shot him without a single death.  Awesome!

Of course, balancing out the awesome was some good old fashioned BoO lulz.  Clearing to Patchwerk, in the first abom pull or so, a boomkin casually mentioned that he could target Grobb.  Huh, wasn’t that weird?

Naturally, one of the mages frostbolted decided to see if he could shoot him from where we were, an experiment that was quickly followed up by cries of “OH SHIT!  Run, run!” on vent.

By the way, announcing that you accidentally pulled a boss several rooms a way is a perfectly legitimate use of vent, as was using it to announce said mage a “tardbucket.”  Most of us got out the portals, though the tanks dryly pointed out that it was good the bank paid their repairs.  We lol’d, mocked, dispensed the Purple Diamond of Shame, and moved on. 

The above healing assignment scenario really happened, which means I’m going to be finding new ways to arrange healing assignments aside from scribbles on the back of my phone bill.  I also did run the entire instance with my Piccolo on, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on.  I carry with me as a joke and bring it out whenever someone drops a train set.  But I…usually take it off immediately after.

Oops?

All in all though, I was pretty damned pleased.  People got shinys, bosses died, and it was a fun night.

Public Humiliation Time

I love telling guildies that I’ll post their mistakes in the blog.  So here you go, a BoO Fails Roundup of Recent Naxx Runs:

Atropus says, don’t tank KT in blood aura!

Cinnia says, don’t pull Grob from the beginning of the damn wing!

Ambrosyne says, don’t raid progression content with a Piccolo equipped!

On the other hand, we downed Patchwerk for only the second time tonight, and we did it in one shot without battle rezzing out OTs repeatedly.  Sweet!

To Hell With It Friday: Screenies Galore

Anything you say can and will be used against you in my blog.

For that matter, anything I say can and will be used, too.

The Uber Disc Priest blew himself up on Thadd, kek.

When you get your bloss to play and he rushes through levels, sometimes he misses the basics.  He’s a good mage just…er…yeah.   Also, Rivyn is really fucking weird.

Dueg made the mistake of visiting me on my server, and had to listen to me on Maly.

I think the gnome found a hole, guys!

TO HELL WITH YOU PHASE THREE.

After Maly, I posted WWS and proceeded to peer at it.  At first, I laughed.  I laughed because Mach really wanted to come along despite that fact that we didn’t need two tanks, so he threw on his healing gear…and healed as prot.  And healed nearly as much as I did.  I’m not sure what that says about my skill, but at least my WWS didn’t look like this:

/headtilt “Did you lose your Flash Heal button, man?”

I’m no holy priest but I’m sitting here rubbing my forehead at that.  Here, let’s trade toons.  You take the pally, and spam big heals on the tank…and I’ll take your priest and make sweet, sweet love to the plethorea of healing options you have.  Okay?  Okay.

The aftermath of the Frogger boss. Ouch. Actual bosses caused far fewer deaths.

Brotherhood of Oblivion: Dying Our Way to Epics…

The Brotherhood Ventures Into Naxx25

First off, I’d have to say: we did amazingly well, considering it was our first go as a group.  It was a mostly guild run, with a few friends pulled in.  I don’t think we had an actual “pug” in the lot.  We had 6 healers, which was all of ours were there for a holy priest and a tree.  Meaning half of them were paladins.  I think ouroutsiders were a ret pally, a boomkin, and a very excellent BM hunter.  Spider and Plague wings went down, as did Patchwerk.

Oh, Patchwerk.

That was where we met Multiple Wipesville.  Mach put me in charge of healing assignments (asshole!), and that’s where I came to regret it the most.

So we had 3 tanks: Macharious teh Uber Pally, Zoja my pet warrior, and Zlord teh Other Warrior At The End of the Alphabet.  We had Mach MT and the Z’s OT-which, in hindsight, wasn’t the best idea.  Zlord’s been unlucky and not even been on full clears of 10 yet, so he’s not as geared as the other two, so having him OT was…bad.  Like, OMG SPLAT bad.  Yet he couldn’t dish out the required threat MTing.  It an attempt to compensate for Z’s gear and even out damage spikes, I put our resident tree druid on him to assist Yarp teh holy pally.  In hindsight, Kyr would have been the better choice, but that’s hindsight for you.  I’m pretty sure that Kyr has higher crit and better gear than Yarp (though Yarp kicks ass), and in theory wouldnt’ have run into the mana issues that Yarp (and I) did. 

Yeah.  Mana issues.  See, Divine Plea?  Kind of bad to use on that fight without Wings.  But anyway.  Ron and I, Team Awesome, were on Zoja.  We were…slightly less than awesome.

We saw a lot of this:

Zlord has died.
Zoja has died.

….  /facepalm

We finally took him down (3/4 tries?), but did we do it by keeping the OTs up?

Fuck no!

We did it with battle rezzes, so it looked more like this:

Zlord has died.
Zoja has died.
Zlord has died.
Zoja has died.
Manoshi has died.
Bionicpally has died.
Manruler has died.

Sorry, melee deeps!

Much musing and tweaking (and tank swapping?) will be done on that fight next week, I’m sure.  And maybe less dying.  Less dying would be cool.

On Failing Less While Healing KT

Or, Amber States the Obvious
As usual, this will be mostly holy-pally flavored, with some disc priest ponderings mixed in.  But the UI tips work for anyone!

The key to being a success healing the Kel’Thuzad fight is a simple one:

Use Holy Shock.  And more than that: use it at the right time.

If HS is something you use a lot of, learn to hold off, and watch for the FB cast.  I’m normally assigned to the tank/off tank, but one eye is always on my chat log.  As soon as I see the alert, off goes HS.  I leave the topping off heals to other healers, but that instant heal is priceless. 

I was lucky enough to be healing our first couple of KT deaths with a disc priest and a resto druid.  While a Flash (of Light OR Heal, for my priesty friends) is quick enough to save FB’d folks, the instant nature of HS and Penance are too good to ignore.  Use ’em and abuse ’em, and it should help reduce deaths from lag and other unfortunate mishaps.   Squishies, don’t forget your bubbles.

Another important key is: know who the fuck to heal, ASAP!

In 10 mans it’s a sight easier-after all, it’s a much smaller group to look through.  But most UIs will let you do custom highlighting, and this is really what you need to suceed.  For more on this, check out Penance Priest.  I use X-perl, which does allow you to use custom highlighting…but uh, I can’t get it to work.  I’ll play with it some more, but in the meantime, DBM throws marks up on the affected members and I can see those on my raid frames just fine.  Looking for the skull is easier than looking for, say, Sidearm the Nubcake Critchicken.