Holidays, oh how I hate thee

Sorry for the haitus...there are a few weeks every term when my day job gets really, really busy, and I just haven't had time to write.

So, the little undead priestess Xanzia is now 77 and closing rapidly in on 80. Why have I made her such a high priority to level? Turns out Jewelcrafting, which Xanzia is particularly good at, has several choice recipes that you only get through running heroic instances. Thus...MUST get to 80. I MUST. I MUST. I M....

*ahem* So, anyway. This weekend was all excitement and joy wrapped up into one big happy egg-shaped package. You know it as Noble Garden, and it comes bundled with its own share of Achievements.

The good thing about Achievements is that when they first came out, they practically saved the game for me. It was getting kinda boring...I could either play PvE or PvP, or I could go raid. But with the new system, I was able to pay more attention to what I was doing, spend a little more time doing some things, and receive a reward! It's like a Dilbert desk decoration I used to have...press a button, watch Dilbert smack the keyboard a few times, and ding! Out rolled a few M&Ms. Similarly, get a non-combat pet, and ding! Out pops an Achievement for you, everyone around you, and your entire guild to see. Get nine more, and ding! Out pops another Achievement. Get up to 25, and ding! Yet another Achievement! Ding! Ding! Ding!

Granted, I've often felt like Pavlov's dog might have felt if the dog had had to pay a monthly fee, but the Achievement system has definitely done its psychological duty. I'm still addicted.

I found some time ago that I really have to limit my Achievements to a single character. Before the Lich King came onto our radar, I had two max levels, and each was running through Achievements. Took too dang much time, that did. Besides, with Wrath, some of the Achievements are...silly. "Go over there, and /love that animal. Good. Now go over there, and /love that animal." Repeat 20 times, and you have yerself an Achievement. But I just can't do it twice. Can't. The first time, it's challenging. After, it's just silly.

Which brings me, in my typical roundabout style, to holidays. Holidays were kinda fun and cool, till they became Achievement competitions. Oh, some are fine..."Go make the big guy in red some cookies." Others are painful, though. It's when you pit me against my fellow WoWers, clicky - a - clicky, that it's just annoying. Ferinstance, consider that dang Wolpertinger quest. It's one thing to have to get drunk and then click on a small barely-visible bunny-ish thing. It's another thing entirely to have to do all that clicking BEFORE anybody else does it.

See, that's what's annoying about it. It's tough to think about the joy of Christmas, or Easter, or whatever the holiday is, when I'm wanting to be /rude to half of my fellow players because they somehow clicked faster than I did, and I didn't get the credit.

Most of the holiday Achievements for Noble Garden are like that. They're primarily based on Brightly Colored eggs that show up in four different areas, behind trees and shrubs and stuff, as blue and other color pixels that you have to right-click on before anybody else does. Everybody knows where these four areas are, of course, so the entire server seems to be there with you competing. Most peoples' modus operandi seems to be running around in large circles...quickly, since one of the things you get early on boosts your running speed. Problem is, that just means you're running faster than normal as much as everybody else is running faster than normal. What happens, thus, is everybody making big laps around the areas, often in phase with each other.

What I found to work best was, where possible, finding a spot where 2-4 (ish) eggs would occasionally spawn. Park yourself there, in a place where a short movement will put you in any of the spawn points, and wait. You'll miss out on some eggs as Speedy Gonzales times five runs past and nabs it, but there are frequently times when the egg will spawn and nobody else will be around.

With that, and a little bit of luck, I was able to finish Noble Garden yesterday and get one holiday closer to the pretty protodrake reward. Plus...ding! I got a title...now I'm Narrissa the Noble. Yay!

Now, back to leveling Xanzia before they get any more kibbles for me to ring the bell over.

This week's haitus

The problem with fantasy games is that we can't really live in them. Real life must come to the party sometime, and this week has been it. I've been away at a corporate conference in the Magic City of Birmingham, AL, just arriving home last night, and tomorrow I and the fam are taking off for Florida. I haven't been blogging over the weekend much anyway, so it'll probably be middle of next week before I get anything written again.

Maybe by then I'll have good news about a possible promotion.

Probably by then I'll have good news about my family situation.

Till then...have fun!

Raid-y or not

I don't raid much. That should be fairly obvious by now; keeping all these alts going through their daily instance runs takes time, and doing daily quests with my main takes time, and gathering mats takes time, and...well, there's only so much time to be had. That, and when I've tried to raid, it's usually involved a lot of rules and regulations as well as more drama than a typical 3-act play. So, I don't raid much. Still, there are some times when raiding can be very, very satisfying.

A friend called out to me one night that the raid needed another person; would I like to come along? This was a PUG raid..."pick up group" for those unfamiliar...and so I figured it would be relatively ineffective. Boy, was I wrong. Despite being a PUG, it was populated by some very good players from some of the elite raiding guilds on the server, there mostly just to have fun.

Now, the thing about raids you can't find anywhere else in the game...besides the great lewtz...is the achievement thing. No, I'm not talking about Achievements, though you get those little things pop up sometimes too. I'm talking about that ultimate gratification you feel after working on something together with a group for a while, once you finally "get it."

Granted, this PUG didn't have much of that at first. I've never seen a group of folks just rip through the first several bosses in Ice Crown Citadel, the meanest raid instance in the game currently. I'm used to my own guild consortium that has a solid raiding core, yet usually the raids I am involved in are the alts and the late night folks who get as little raiding practice as I do. I've seen several of them where we wipe against the first boss in ICC several times and then call it a great night. That's not in itself a bad thing, of course...they made it so you do get something out of ICC even if you never down a single boss...but it's just so different from this group.

But the first night, we blazed through several bosses, only to hit a wall against the Blood Queen. For those who haven't seen her, she's an undead magic-user who does lots of evil things, including one where party members have to run toward each other or kill the raid, and another where party members have to bite other party members...or kill the raid. It's a nasty, nasty fight with absolutely no room for error. After a few hours of raiding, it's naturally hard to have no error, so...wipe. Then wipe. Then wipe. Then wipe.

That's the part of raiding that's no fun. It gets annoying to continually wipe against the same fight, and people inevitably get irritated, first at the encounter and then at each other. People start doing stupid things, like running into more bad guys by themselves before the raid has a chance to apply all the buffs and get ready. When that happens they die, and often others in the raid who are nearby die as well. Add to the frustration the fact that at our gear level each death costs between 7 and 12 gold to repair your gear from, so it gets really expensive after several of them.

All that, combined, meant I was awfully happy that first night to see that we'd wiped for long enough that the trash...random bad guys along the way to the boss...had come back. When that happens, usually the raid decides it's not worth going again, and this one did. Called it...went to sleep. Ahhh.

But...we went back. Last night, we went back after the Blood Queen, and after a few tries, deaded her. Now THAT was satisfying! Got another couple of bosses down pretty quickly...technically, one of those was gotten "up" since it's a reverse fight. You have to heal the boss to full health...what a concept! Blizz just keeps making them interestinger and interestinger.

Another cool thing about raiding, especially with an outstanding group like this, is seeing stuff you haven't seen before. There's a room on the way to the final area where spiders come down at you. Lots of spiders. And we tried...turns out that if you're careful and only go after a few, the rest go away and you have to start over. The Old Standard Way doesn't work. You have to be like the kids in Scooby Doo and run straight into the middle of the room pretending you have no idea what's coming. Then the huge wave of spiders come, and you kill them, then a wave of undead come, and you kill them, then another huge wave of spiders come, and you kill them. Whew. Then...and only then...the door on the other side opens and you get to run out to where Sindragosa awaits.

Yes, I said Sindragosa. THE Sindragosa, leading actress in the cinematic trailer for the expansion. She's famous. And, um, mean.

So, anyway, we raided. Accomplished a lot. Got some good lewtz...my mage now has a sparkly new wand that's much better than what she was using. Four hours later, we all signed off.

Joining my lovely lady in bed, on the way to sleep for the night, I tried to sum up the experience. "Love, do you remember when Wrath of the Lich King came out, and I showed you the cinematic?"
"Yes."
"Remember the big blue bone dragon that came out in the video?"
"Yes."
"Well, we fought her tonight."
"Oh, cool! Did you win?"

Nope. The big blue bone dragon killed us off and wiped the floor with our insides, several times. But at least we fought her.

And so...back to alting tonight. But I admit, raiding can really be fun sometimes.

Healing, the extreme sport

Subtitle: The Most Excitement you can legally have in WoW

Took me a few days after that wipefest in Forge of Souls, but I got up the guts to heal a heroic again last night.

Obviously, I'm starting to "get it." No wipes. Not even really any deaths. Well, the warlock died once, but warlocks don't count. Besides, he got impaled on the last boss of Gundrak, and I wasn't quite ready for the OhMyGod Thatsalotta Damage time.

In some ways, I envy those who started the game back in "Vanilla WoW" (never did understand that term...) as healers. They've progressed through healing such epic instances as Wailing Caverns and Blackrock Depths, and by the time they got to heroics in Wrath, I can only assume they were pretty well experts at their trade. Me? Only healing I ever did was last summer on Ahune; a group of guildies got together, and I, in a half-drunken state, agreed to take my level 60-ish Byornfree, decked out in Feral spec and gear, in to heal the 80's as they killed the midsummer boss. Boy, was that a waste...but I got a pretty new ring for my troubles that I wasn't able to wear till recently.

Anyway, healing, I've found, is such a radically different way of playing the game than DPSing or tanking. DPSing from a range, which is how most of my 80's play, is...I'm not going to say easier, but it's definitely clearer as to what all is going on. The trick is to stand back away from the battle a bit, select targets intelligently, and then manage your spells/shots and cooldowns to maximize the damage you cause while regulating the threat you generate. Sounds complex...and it is...but it's absolutely not like healing. DPSing from melee distance, and tanking, are both very similar in that you're right up in the fray, selecting your targets intelligently, and smacking them in a certain way in order to either maximize your damage done or your threat, depending on which role you're playing. It also is complex...but absolutely not like healing.

Learning to heal involves stringing together a whole bunch of little panic attacks. At first, I was in the habit from long years of DPSing of watching the bad guys and where they were, but I also looked at the tank's health bar and pumped some spells in to keep him alive. Took me a little bit to figure out the proper order of spell pumping, of course. Once I figured it out, though, I had yet another lesson to learn: IGNORE THE BAD GUYS.

Now, that's hard to do after years of conditioning. I still find myself occasionally targetting a boss while headed in to that fight. But the problem is, different mobs and bosses do different types of damage. Some do lots of damage to the tank in large chunks. Some do gradual damage to the tanks that adds up to a lot. Some do damage to everybody in the group that has the healer facerolling the keyboard something serious. Some do random damage; you never know who's suddenly going to pop down to half health and then die, just like the warlock did last night...but as I said before, that was OK. It was just a warlock.

Keep in mind that a human being is like a lion in some ways. Specifically, I've heard the explanation of why they use a chair to "tame" a lion...and it makes sense. The lion sees four posts coming at it instead of one, and is unable to focus on all four at once. Truth? Dunno, but it does ring well. I know I sure can't focus on four things at once, much less five. So, as a healer, I've had to learn to constantly scan health bars, picking up any changes as quickly as possible and targetting for heals. At first, it was only four health bars I was worrying about, but then somebody along the way gave me the good advice: "Hey, dummy, you've got to heal yourself too." OK, that wasn't really a direct quote, but this is a family-friendly channel.

Oh, yeah...and then there's the mana issue. My gear being only fairly mediocre, my mana regeneration isn't what you'd call awesome. There's nothing like hitting the button to heal the tank and not seeing anything happen. Then..."Oh, hmm, I'm out of mana. Hope nobody dies while I remember where my potion button is." Add to that the evident, current desire by most tanks in the game to outrun their entire group (OK, I admit to doing that too while I'm on my tank) so that everybody in the group is managing spells and mana regen at a frenetic pace.

It's like the time at the West Point theater when I did lead spotlights for Chicago (the band). There's a certain point at which you really don't CARE what song they're playing any more; all you're trying, hoping, and praying to do is keep up with cues. At least there, everything was on a script, and MOST of the show went according to plan; while you're healing, there's no script. You can only run behind the tank, try to keep up, and focus on health bars. No looking at scenery. No looking at mobs. No wondering what the DPS is doing to get them down. Your entire GAME is a set of green bars.

And that's just party healing. Can't wait to try out raid healing, with 10 or even 25 bars!

Those of you who've Healed for a long time...my hat's off to you. And to every healer who's ever freaked out because my warlock used to hit his Life Tap button frequently and at irregular intervals...I'm so, so, so sorry. Let him die from now on. :-)

Reputation, Schmeputation

Waaaayyyyy back when, when we had to walk to Orgrimmar in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, I had one character that I played. Just one. Malqueso. Didn't even have a bank alt yet. Weird to think back on this, but that's the way it was. He is a hunter, and there's a class-specific quest line ending in Sunken Temple that winds its way through Azshara. All you sourdoughs will know what I'm talking about...every class has class quests in ST...but n00bs probably don't do them often any more; who needs that level 52 garbage when you're headed toward level 80?

Anyway, I was one of the n00bs back then that didn't think that there might need to be an order to what I did. I'd mistakenly run north into Felwood at about level 25, died very quickly, and mentally written that zone off as "mean." It didn't occur to me that the furbolgs in Azshara MIGHT be creatures that I really shouldn't oughtta kill, no matter how much they wanted to attack me (instead, if you spend many hours in Felwood, the furbolgs in Azshara start to like you). And hey, I was pretty good at killing things back then, so kill the furbolgs I did while running around Azshara doing my quests.

Later I needed to get to Winterspring. Now, you know that any character other than a Death Knight has to run through Timbermaw Hold to get to Winterspring, right? I did that. The furbolgs still didn't like me much, and so kill them I did, all the way through. I think I was well beyond Hated by the time I was done clearing a path to the flight point up there.

Needless to say, when it came time to look at the cool rewards available through having, say, Exalted reputation with Timbermaw, I cried at the number of Bad Furbolgs (as opposed to the Good Furbolgs, of course) I had to kill to consider even getting close to Friendly. And it's not like you could go do something non-repetitive; you had to kill, and kill, and kill, and kill the same mobs, and then kill them some more. It was WoW's cure for insomnia.

But that was a long, long time ago. Now, we're all experts at gaining reputation...starting typically at neutral, then becoming friendly, honored, revered, and exalted, in that order. Some reps you can gain by wearing tabards through instances; some you have to do daily quests for, and others you can turn stuff in to obtain. In any event, each faction has a set of rewards for those they hold in high regard. And those rewards?

Often, largely useless.

This occurred to me last night. My druid alt became Exalted with Wyrmrest...the dragons...during an instance. Yay! So afterwards, off I went to the Wyrmrest Temple to see what cool stuff I could get...I remembered wanting the epic something, but couldn't recall exactly what.

Turns out...it was bracers. I already had bracers. They'd dropped last night, a much better set than the ones from Wyrmrest. Not the first time that's happened, either...every time I'm close to being ready to qualify for something, it seems like something drops that makes me not want what I just worked so hard to become qualified for. Granted, there's a new instance, ICC, where the reputation rewards are pretty high level compared to everything else, but I betcha when the next thing comes out those rep rewards will be as useless as Timbermaw rewards are now.

Reputation, schmeputation.

That group thang

Subtitle: switching from solo to group work successfully

Ever said something that sounded cute, funny, whatever...at the time...to you, anyway...and realized later it was really a very stupid thing to say? Of course you have; I think we all have. Most of us don't do it quite as publicly as, say, the Dutch speed skating coach last night, but the fact is...well, let me switch to speaking only of me. I know that I typically don't try to sound cute, funny, or whatever when it's just me, so odds are, if I'm gonna say something really stupid, it'll be to or in front of other people.

Anyway, a few posts back I made a comment about druid DPS being...what did I say, now? Simple? Easy? Sounded cute at the time, it really did. But last night I got tired of my measly 800 DPS in groups and tried my own advice out...off I went to the web sites to see THE WAY to raise my DPS as a kitty cat. Unfortunately, there isn't THE WAY. There are about as many opinions on how to produce good DPS as a kitty as there are these days about health care in the U.S., and as in that other topic, many of the opinions are based on concepts which can only be loosely considered facts.

So, being a good experimentalist, I picked one and went off with a guild random run with my druid in DPS mode rather than healing mode. Incidentally, the one I picked had basically three different sequences, intended to be run one after another for the sake of cooldowns, and all starting with four Shreds followed by a finishing move. It was like memorizing dance steps...Button 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 6, repeat. Simplicity is nice sometimes.

A brief aside for those unfamiliar with druid cat DPS'ing...it's based on Energy, like a rogue (I guess; I've never played a rogue past level 14). Energy starts at 100 and each special ability costs some amount...some are small costs, in the 5 or 6 range, and others..specifically Shred...costs 70. The Energy comes back over time...refill takes several seconds...and if you're at 0, that means all you can do is try to nick 'em with your claws. The other part of the mechanic is combo points, which build up on a specific target at the rate of 1 or 2 for each special ability the druid uses and are spent by finishing moves that become more powerful or longer lasting when more combo points exist.

Incidentally, the druid DPS has another aspect...location. Some abilities only work behind the target, Shred being one of those. Tuck this away; it'll become important in a bit. But it's not a factor in mage DPS, or lock DPS, or hunter DPS.

Whew...that's the nutshell. Anyway, I learned the hard way that four shreds in a row...well, it doesn't work. For one thing, the math isn't right. Shred once, and you're down to 30 Energy. Shred again...oh, wait, you can't. So you swipe and swipe a couple of times waiting to get back up to 70 energy, and once you're there, Shred! But you are now down to about 4 or 5 Energy and must wait again. By the time I was getting to 4 combo points, what I was trying to kill had already been deaded by someone else.

Math sucks, sometimes. It's important to know, but man, sometimes the mathematical realities of what we're trying to do are hard to swallow. And speaking of mathematical realities, after respeccing and changing my action bar buttons all around for this new shiny sparkly spec, I improved my DPS by about 10. Woo hoo! At least it didn't decrease my DPS, right?

Important Lesson #1 is actually a repeat from a previous post, but more intense here. Blizz has changed druid cat mechanics several times over the past couple of years...some, apparently, significant changes. When looking online, you have to be careful to use current information. In the case of cat DPS, it's...hard. G'head, I dare you. Open another tab and Google for information. You'll see a ton of very conflicting stuff out there.

Important Lesson #2 is also fairly obvious in hindsight, but again, made more intense by this situation. What got you TO level 80, mostly solo for most of us, probably won't help you improve much when you're at 80 doing heroics and raids. In the case of druids, remember the positional thing? When you're soloing, any attack that only works from behind the mob only works once. After the first swing, the silly mobs usually turn around, dang them. There's a nice little pounce attack that stuns the mob so you actually get two swipes from behind, but it's still just two. So while climing to 80, I had pretty much ignored any attack that required me to be behind the thing I was trying to kill. Now, though, in heroics, those attacks deserve attention because there's usually a nice person wrapped in heavy metal making what I'm trying to kill face him, and the Death From Behind approach works nicely.

Bottom line...once you hit level 80, you're more of a n00b than you were at 79. Ain't that great?

In the end, I looked online at a guild page about druiding and decided to just be a copycat. There's a druid named Sounder in an allied guild who usually does OhMyGod DPS, and I read what he said as though it were an instruction manual. Next run...do as Sounder does...doubled my DPS. Thanks, Sounder!

And yes, I apologize to druids in general for making the inference that druid DPS mechanics are simple. They're not...you have to watch several buffs/debuffs in addition to combo points and Energy, all at the same time while trying to follow mobs around as they move. It's actually quite complex.

And fun.

I'm definitely going to do it more.

My geometry teacher was wrong!

Subtitle: Sometimes your gear really isn't good enough.

One of those vivid memories from high school involves my intense hatred for doing proofs in geometry class. That was when you learned the if-then stuff...if A AND B is true, then C is true, etc. How many of you noble readers remember your high school geometry class? How many of you are sitting in that class right now reading this blog? The cynical educator in me says most of you are, or would be if you were in high school. The statistician in me says there's a finite but greater than zero chance that some of you are doing that. The realist in me says there's probably only two of you reading this blog, and you're close friends and family who would still read it even if I wrote about purple pansies for the remainder of the post today.

*ahem* Anyway, one of the...oh, what did we call them? Theorems? Axioms? Something like that. One of those...things...from geometry class that we used to prove stuff was the rule of contrapositive. Goes kinda like this: if you can say that "if A is true, then B is true" then you can also say that "if B is not true, then A is not true." See? Pretty simple stuff, really...swap A and B around and negate both, and you still have a truthdom...or whatever we called it. Plus, it sounds really cool to me to go around using words like "contrapositive," which is probably why I remember it after all these deca...er, years.

I'm sure you're wondering by this point how this applies to WoW. Yes, there really is a connection. With the new Dungeon queueing option, it won't let you queue if your gear isn't up to snuff. Prior to level 80, you can't queue for heroics at all. At 80, if your gear is craptastic, you can only queue for some heroics. Others open up with better gear scores, to the point where my mage and my tank can queue for any instance in the game. Granted, usually we all just choose "Random" and then it picks one for us...theoretically, one that we'd qualify for if we were trying to queue for it specifically.

So..."If your gear isn't good enough, then you can't queue for an instance" is an obvious statement. Contrapositive..."If you CAN queue for an instance, then your gear IS good enough"...must be true. Right?

Yeah. Right. Mmm hmm. So, last night, a buddy and I decided we were gonna run a random heroic, me on my fairly new healer. My healer has a fair to middlin' gear score, in the mid-3000's, which is good enough for many heroics but NOT good enough for the three new ones...Forge of Youregonnadie, Pit of Thisreallysucks, and Halls of Craptonofdamage. But sure 'nuff, we queued up, and pop! Right into the Forge.

My buddy, Ermakk the Shaman, did a great job supporting me through, even taking a break from his 5K DPS to help me heal, but that last boss in Forge of Souls is just plain mean. Even my brother, one of the l33t (hmm, did I spell that right?) healers of the guild, has troubles with The Boss With Three Faces. I got two tries in before it was obvious that my gear just plain wasn't good enough, so I bowed out, they found somebody with better gear, and I went off to do some other heroic.

So...lessons learned:

1. The contrapositive isn't always true.
2. Geometry teachers lie sometimes
3. If you think your gear isn't good enough, it probably isn't.
4. Don't hang around if you're put into a spot you can't manage as a healer or a tank...you'll just cost others gold.

*sigh* Till tomorrow, then. Hope the server resets OK. If not, I'll just go pick purple pansies.