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I’m still here
Just a quick update to say that I am still playing WoW and that I am actually still playing on Shandris with Vishyna and the rest of The Asylum. It looks as though I’ll be staying for good after all.
Still raiding. Got some new gears. Tanking Zul’Aman. Had a go at Hyjal Summit and the Battle for Mount Hyjal.
Will post more later. Bai.
Real life strikes again
I know that posts like this usually signal the end of a WoW blog. In my searches for other WoW blogs I’ve seen more posts like this than I care to count and they are usually the last post on the blog. I can’t promise that this one won’t suffer the same fate, but I will say that I do enjoy blogging and I hope I can make it back here to carry on soon.
To avoid being completely vague, I will say that Vishyna has decided she is moving out of our house. She’ll be leaving this weekend.
I will not be staying in The Asylum or even on Shandris. The Asylum was founded and is lead by several of her coworkers so it doesn’t make sense for me to stick around there. And I won’t feel comfortable playing on the same realm with her.
With that being said…
T4 geared Feral Druid (Horde) with some experience in SSC looking for guild. Willing to transfer realms.
We really get around
On Friday night I crafted myself a pair of Boots of Natural Grace (bought the pattern on the auction house). I also crafted the Primalstrike Vest and Primalstrike Bracers for my Kitty set. Immediately after crafting my Primalstrike stuff I went on a Heroic Black Morass run for the daily and guess what? I had enough badges for the Band of the Swift Paw. I had intended for them to replace my Umberhowl’s Collar for my tanking set, but they also replaced the Primalstrike Bracers from my DPS set. What an incredible waste of 3 Primal Mights.
With some of my new gear I’ve lost a considerable amount of defense rating and resilience. I’ve had to supplement it with enchants here and there to keep myself uncrittable. I’m currently rolling with Enchant Chest - Major Resiliance and Vindicator’s Armor Kit on my gloves and boots to keep myself over the limit.
Ok on to the raid details.
As much as the majority of folks in my guild would love to stop running a weekly Karazhan raid and focus more on 25-man content, it’s just not practical right now. There are too many people (myself included) who still need gear from there. Not to mention the 22 Badges of Justice you get for a full clear.
I’m 3/5 for T4 now, but only one of those is an item that I will continue to use for any length of time (the Mantle of Malorne), and I still need the helm from Prince. Megalis has seen that dude die about seven times now and still no helm.
And speaking of badges, I need to save up 100 of them for Embrace of Everlasting Prowess which makes the T4 chest obsolete. Not that I have the T4 chest. I’m still rocking the Heavy Clefthoof Vest. That chest piece, plus a ring, a cloak, an optional necklace and some other odds and ends add up to quite a few badges that I still need. And 3-5 badges here and there from heroics just isn’t going to cut it. I need those weekly Kara runs.
So anyway, the guild ran two Kara raids on Saturday. My raid finished a full clear in about 4.5 hours. Not quite as quickly as the raid a couple weeks ago (3.5 hours) but we had several people on the bench that had to get swapped in and out as well as two or three wipes. I sat out for Chess and Opera. The Curator finally coughed up his damn gloves for me. Still no staff from Illhoof, helm from Prince or tank ring from Shade. The gloves do make me happy though. I was using one of those crappy PvP pieces you can buy at honored rep with all the outlands factions.
Sunday was a quick clear of Gruul’s and then over to SSC. Gruul dropped the Aldori Legacy Defender for the main Warrior and he had it gemmed and enchanted before we even got to SSC.
SSC was really fun. Lurker went down first try. As usual the new people were dead almost right away. Remembering that Lurker whirls after each spout as well as on a regularly scheduled basis is key and I see a lot of people who either don’t care about it or forget about it standing right up next to Lurker pounding away on him as he whirls.
We headed straight for Leotheras after that. We had one wipe on the two bog giants. It was supposed to be one, then the other but while we were fighting the first one the second one was aggroed.
Then there were the two trash pulls just outside of Leo’s chamber. We planned on sapping one but something went wrong and the Rogue was spotted. That would have been fine but someone pulled the other trash right next to the group we were fighting and it went downhill quickly. I didn’t stick around to even try and salvage it. I ran back up the ramp and jumped down to the previous level. The mobs had to run a long ways around to try and catch me and they gave up before that happened. One of the priests got bubbled so it wasn’t a full wipe and we were back in action a couple minutes later.
Once inside Leo’s chamber there are five or six more trash pulls before him. Incredibly, we had the Boots of Unending Courage drop on two of these trash pulls. Still no greatstaff for this Druid :(
The rest of the trash before Leo was cleared and we were ready. The fight was laid out for those that hadn’t researched it or done it before. Our Warlock put on his fire resist set to tank Leo’s demon form. Myself and a Paladin were chosen to tank the human form.
We lost a huge portion of our DPS on the first whirlwind, but I think some of them got a better idea of how to avoid it next time. The human form tanking part is rather easy. I just have to grab aggro before anyone else does, then let the Paladin take the aggro from me. If I get a demon summoned on me I can kill it very easily and get back to swatting at Leo.
We only had enough time for the one try, but we gained some insight into the fight that just can’t be gained from reading about it or watching videos of it. Next time we’ll give ourselves a better window and have time for several shots at Leo. Hopefully we won’t need them all though.
Three different raids this weekend. I had a great time and I think everyone else did too. Making that progress at the end was super nice too. We’ve killed Lurker several times now and we always just left after that. I’m glad we were finally able to press on.
Raid night cancelled
I’m not sure if it was yesterday’s patch or an update to the addon itself, but EP/GP - our raid loot system - failed horribly and we weren’t able to raid. We didn’t learn this until we were already standing in front of Gruul’s Lair though. Bayre and Docblood, our guild leaders, spent almost two hours trying to fix it while the rest of us dueled each other and members from a few other guilds who were gearing up to head into Gruul’s.
Finally the raid was called off and I went about finishing my SSO dailies.
The first two I turned in were the ones in Shattrath that give Shattered Sun Supplies and I got two Badges of Justice!
As of patch 2.4.2, The Multiphase Survey no longer rewards a Shattered Sun Supplies :(
I finished all of the SSO dailies aside from Rediscovering your Roots and finished out the night with only 2k more rep to go until exalted. If I can get half of the dailies done tonight I’ll be exalted and I can buy my Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve.
After I am exalted with SSO and the only thing I want from dailies is money (and the rare drops from fishing/cooking dailies of course), I’m going to focus on clearing out my quest log. It’s full of dungeon quests that I have put off. Seer Udalo, Auchindoun…, The Warlord’s Hideout, How to Break Into the Arcatraz, and many others.
I’ve got plenty to keep me busy on non raid nights.
Thanks for the reminder
Just wanted to thank Phae for the link in her recent Community Spotlight post and reminding me that I needed to update my character images from the guildlaunch signature creator. The old one was from when Meg was level 67 and questing in Nagrand so the stats were far from where they are now.
Old
New
It’s funny, many of the gear upgrades we get as we play seem to be so frustratingly small, but they really do compound over time to make for huge changes in a character.
I still need to log in my old Warrior and put some actual gear on him - rather than the Tuxedo set he’s wearing now - and get a new character image for him too.
Leotheras is officially on notice
Sunday’s raid was delayed until Monday (last night) due to Mother’s Day.
That ended up being another trip to Lurker and no Wildfury Greatstaff for me. Our top Warlock has devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to creating a fire resist kit to off-tank the Leotheras fight. Over the weekend he finally reached the point of being ready to attempt it. Unfortunately his mother ended up in the hospital and he was not able to play. I haven’t heard the details of why she was hospitalized but I do very much hope that she is ok. A human being’s health is much more important than a game and I think the entire guild shares that sentiment. We will have our shot at Leo soon enough.
Lurker went down without much of a fight save for one warm-up wipe. My stupid ass got hit with the first spout on our second try so I spent the entire battle drifting in the water just slightly out of range of battle rez. Our tree druid disconnected while underwater and got scalded to death before he could log back in. Nevertheless, Lurker was killed without the two of us. The fight actually went really well considering I was a Guardian tank and the main tank had to pick up my Guardian then jump back to Lurker afterwards. Lurker dropped another Cord of Screaming Terrors, a Mallet of the Tides and the Ancestral Ring of Conquest.
Our main Warrior tank was all over the mallet and I don’t recall who took the belt because I was too busy comparing the ring to to my own. I had no doubt that the ring was an upgrade for me, but I wanted to know how much of an upgrade. I ended up taking it to replace Delicate Eternium Ring from my tanking set and Averinn’s Ring of Slaying (correction: it was the Band of Ursol that got replaced. I’m still wearing the other one) from my DPS set. I’m kinda being stingy with my EP/GP ratio right now as I am up against a warrior and a priest for the T4 tokens that still haven’t dropped. Those being gloves, helmet and chest.
And speaking of the T4 chest, after Lurker was down we ported back to Shat for repairs, restock, etc. and regrouped at Magtheridon’s Lair. We ended the raid at 11pm (cst) after four wipes. Each wipe was due to either early or late cube clickers which results in a Blast Nova. On our last attempt we made it to phase three (30%) just as the Blast Nova took most of us out. We still got him down to 28% before everyone was dead though.
It was a learning experience for many of us since we hadn’t been there before. The guild itself has attempted Mag before but that was long before myself and many other people that are raiding with us now had even joined.
Wednesday - if enough people show up - we are planning on paying a visit to Leotheras. Leo doesn’t have much of a loot table (mostly crafting patterns), but he does have T5 gloves (Nordrassil Handgrips for me specifically) and that’s nothing to complain about.
Upgrading, slowly but surely
Saturday we finished the Kara raids that we had started earlier in the week. My raid downed every boss and I didn’t see a single piece of loot worth bidding on. I’m still waiting on the two T4 drops in there.
It did leave me sitting at 58 badges though. And I got to progress a few quest lines including the one that gives the Violet Badge and the one that now requires me to run Heroic Shattered Halls. I’m also now revered with Violet Eye so I got to upgrade the ol’ Violet Signet.
So Sunday, with 58 badges eating a whole in my bank, I started a Heroic Botanica group and got my badges. I made haste back to Shattrath and purchased a Waistguard of the Great Beast, then picked up two Delicate Living Rubies to socket into it. It was nice to finally replace my last green item - Manimal’s Cinch - which is honestly pretty damn good for a green.
Oh yeah, while I was in Bot I also replaced both my Dreamer’s Dragonstaff (DPS) and my Braxxis’ Staff of Slumber (Tank) with a single click of the Need button. Aside from being a super-easy heroic dungeon, another reason I like to run Botanica is that Warp-Splinter drops a really sweet Feral Druid staff on Heroic mode. And this time I got it. It’s called the Feral Staff of Lashing and it’s hard to beat.
After Botanica a Priest in our guild was looking for a group for Heroic Ramparts. He needed the Thrallmar rep so he could get his healy head glyph. Vishyna and two others from the Bot group came along. One of those others was a really well geared Rogue. I have a hard time keeping threat off of him. And in Ramps - with very few CC options - it got even worse.
In Bot we had the same Rogue for sapping and a Mage with us for sheeping and the mobs don’t hit as hard so the tree friend that was healing us was able to keep up without pulling threat. In Ramps however, it was a different story.
The Mage was out, so we had Vish to MC and the Rogue for sap. Thing is, the mobs in HeroRamps hit MUCH harder than those in HeroBot. And there are lots of big pulls. That poor priest had to heal so big to keep me up that his global threat was surpassing my swipe threat on extra mobs. And I couldn’t afford to go through each mob and lacerate them because either the Rogue or Vish is going to pull threat off of the main target. And I don’t even want to talk about how often I got stunned or just how many parries/dodges/misses there were.
Vish and the Rogue were staying so close to my threat that if I missed a maul or a mangle too close to a missed white attack, there was going to be a loose mob. And when I go to chase down that loose mob I’m no longer swiping the other targets. And when I’m no longer swiping the other targets, they kill the healer.
In the end it wasn’t too bad for anyone besides the poor Priest. He ended up getting smashed about seven times I think. I went down twice - once on trash and again on Omor when the felhounds killed the Rogue who was trying to keep them occupied then ate the Priest. Luckily Omor was already at 2% when I went down and the remaining two people were able to finish him off.
Nazan and Vazruden went down easily and guess what’s in the chest. A Tree-Mender’s Belt. Remember that other belt I just bought for 60 badges? This one is only ever so slightly less good than that one. And those 60 badges could have been spent on Footwraps of Wild Encroachment or something else I need to upgrade.
I’ve always maintained that the best way to guarantee something for a particular slot will drop for you is to spend lots of time or money getting a different upgrade for that slot. This is just further proof.
If you’ve never heard of or tried the “Be Imba Character Auditor“, you should. It’s really neat.
You can tell it your server and player name and it will fetch all your data from the official Armory. This doesn’t always work though, so go ahead and create an account so you can use the custom character data feature. For that you have to look yourself up on the armory, then view the source of your armory page in your browser and paste that source into the Bi Imba tool.
The Character Auditor can tell you what items you don’t have enchanted and will suggest enchants. It tells you which of your items are low level compared to your other gear and has the link to the official armory to find upgrades to those items (although I personally think the “Find an Upgrade” feature of the Armory is completely useless).
It looks at your talent spec and makes note of anything that seems out of place. For instance I have one point in Balance to get the Nature’s Grasp ability because I eventually will need to do some PvP to get a few pieces of gear. The Character Auditor makes note of this with “Smells like PvP”.
It noticed that I was slightly over the Defense cap and told me how much I can afford to drop.
It looks at and scores all of the gear you’re wearing, including set bonuses, enchants and gems. It will let you know what socket bonuses you have lost by gemming with the wrong colors and the overall stat gain from all of your gems combined.
At the very bottom of your character audit is a little graph of where you are in gear progession relative to raids and where you should be raiding to get your next upgrades.
Here is my current character audit in my tanking gear for anyone interested: Megalis’ Character Audit
Done with Gruul’s
We started our Wednesday raid night off with right at 20 people, so we formed two Kara raids and went to town.
My gear has improved a good bit over the past two weeks so I was given the MT spot this run.
Unfortunately for me and the rest of my raid, I am having a hard time keeping up with the threat that our DPSers can put out there. They are (most of them) horribly ahead of me in gear progression at this point. Not to mention that our Pally gave them all kings/might since they are used to not having to hold back at all.
The Attumen trash went down mostly fine. Had a few deaths from Attumen himself. Cleared our way into the dining hall without a problem. Then it got bad. A death on the AoE pulls. 4 or 5 deaths on one of the 2-pulls from against the wall. A couple more deaths from the 2-pull on the other side.
I need to take a good look at my gear. I think I’m far too heavy on the mitigation side of things right now. I don’t hit hard enough and I miss WAY too much. Even having the DPS give me 3 or 4 seconds to get threat on a pull isn’t a guarantee that they won’t pull threat immediately because my initial swings miss so much. And when I do miss, the healers pull aggro in a split second.
Right after we took down Moroes and his crew Vish and I took a quick AFK and when we got back, everyone was gone! It seems that a few more people had logged in and we had enough for a 25-man, so we were off to Gruul’s.
We wiped right away on Maulgar due to bad positioning of Firehand. We regrouped and took them all down no problems the second time.
Gruul also wiped us on our first shot there. Too many people got hit with cave in I assume. The healers went down, so the tanks went down, then the rest of us one by one. Then during rezzing, one healer got too close to Gruul and aggroed him. One person who had been rezzed started heading for the door. Gruul took out everyone who had been rezzed and went to chase down the runner. I was laying dead in Gruul’s chamber, but Gruul had been marked, so I could see him running through the caves.
After the runner was dead Gruul’s door opened and someone proclaimed that he had reset. But I could still see his mark running back through the caves. The same healer that had aggroed Gruul self-rezzed and started rezzing someone else. Then Gruul - on his way back to his chamber - showed up and stomped him again!
Does that count as three wipes or still just one? Either way, we killed Gruul without a problem on our next *official* attempt.
I got the Greaves of Malorne, making me 2/5 for T4. Oddly enough, those two are both from Gruul’s lair. I thought for sure I would have the two from Kara first. Oh well. I’m personally done with gear from Gruul’s now. It’s nice to know that I don’t have to compete with anyone for the drops there anymore.
The two T4 pieces I’m wearing now make it a bit hard to stay uncrittable (415 Defense for a Druid). Luckily I have recently made revered status with SSO and they have the Glyph of the Gladiator for sale. It’s pretty expensive at 85g (at revered anyway), but that 20 resilience put me over the mark for uncrittableness so I gladly payed it.
I’d rather have the defense and dodge from the Glyph of the Defender, but I’m not yet revered with the Keepers of Time. Five more Black Morass runs though and that bad boy is mine.
Threat
My first character was a Warrior. I leveled for a while as Fury. After hearing people repeatedly gripe about being owned by “MS Warriors”, I switched to Arms. My plan the entire time, however, was to level to 70 and switch to Protection so I could tank for the guild I had joined.
That is eventually what happened. Around level 68 if I remember correctly, I respecced to Protection. I had done a good bit of research on tanking specs and had settled with one I liked. Shortly thereafter I was 70 and it was time to start tanking.
Lucky for me (and everyone else who grouped with me) I was tanking with a Paladin healer most of the time. Lucky because Paladins wear plate and will take a good licking before they die. And that is exactly what our Paladin healer did. A lot.
I sucked at tanking. Not that I’m Uber now, but my skills and knowledge of tanking - and WoW in general - have vastly improved since then. That much I can say with confidence.
Being someone who more or less looks to science for the answers to everything, I started researching the science of tanking. I know, I know… It’s as much an art as it is a science. But without the science - the facts - even the most artistically inclined of tanks will not do well in the end.
One HUGE hole I found in my tanking ability was my complete lack of knowledge of the mechanics of threat. And as I continue to play, it seems to me that there are many, many other players facing that challenge. And lots of them don’t even seem to realize it. And not just tanks either. In fact it’s mostly not tanks who don’t understand threat. Tanks and healers seem to generally have a good handle on it.
My point here is that I’ve been thinking about writing a series of guides on how threat works. Not because I think I understand it better than anyone else, but because I want to. By doing the research it will take to write such a guide, not only will I (hopefully) help the WoW community by creating that resource, but I will help myself understand it that much more.
And that is what I want from my WoW experience. To be the best damn bear tank I can be.
Which, in turn, is why I recently rolled a Warlock. Those SoB’s are always pulling mobs off of me and I want to know how. First hand.
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