WTFlux

Yeah, it was one of those nights…

It was the night you dream of.  My guilds’ A-team lets me tag along to Kara with my alt.  4 hours and 30 minutes later every single boss, and optional boss is down.  22 badges, from 0-2500 friendly with violet eye.

Here is the hilarious amount of loot I got:
Edgewalker Longboots
Chestguard of the Conniver
Girdle of the Prowler
Fiend Slayer Boots
Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix - WOOHO!

and I got another pair of boots but I can’t remember what they were. I felt like prince (the songwriter, not the guy in Kara) with all the purple raining down on me. I guess I did ok, I mean I still have 2 green items on right now, but I haven’t seen the WWS reports yet. I never pulled aggro, my tanks had misdirects when they needed it. I provided some crowd control (didn’t need it much at all) and did my best version of Massive Quantities of Sustained, Ranged DPS.

It was funny because at the end, when we were taking screenshots of the group with all our orphans out (you couldn’t join the raid if you didn’t have an orphan) - everyone was kinda thinking - “Man, if we did that, we should be able to hit the ZA timed events…”

Hopefully they will invite me on another run.

If I have a super night tonight in arena- I may get - Vengeful Galdiators Waraxe!!! Only 300 more arena points to go!

Bobo’s Magtheridon try number 2:

We owned all the summoners in very quick fashion - with Mag being released inbetween the 2nd to last and last summoner. Plenty of time to get him picked up and against the wall, ready to click on the cubes and interrupt the Blast Nova.

-> enter wiping from 10pm server to 1am

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGG.

I honestly don’t know why we kept wiping. I’ve never been a cubie clicker, I’m pretty sure all you have to do is click on the cube and be still, not casting anything when Mag starts his Blast Nova cast. We just couldn’t coordinate this for some reason. Either a clicker would somehow die, or forget which cube to click, then they would click early and try to click again only to have exhaustion and be locked out. It was pretty frustrating. Our guild leadership and raid leader was wonderful, calmly trying to figure out the problem, calmly adding suggestions to help. At the end of the night, I had to remember this was (including me) most folks SECOND TIME they have ever seen Mag.

We can chalk it up to experience, and keep trying I suppose. I really think once we get Mag and start on Gruul, we might really start to get some progression going. WE JUST NEED TO CLICK BETTER!

/wrists

I’ve never been to Magtheridon.  It reminded me a lot of Ony with just a few pulls to the boss.  The fight doesn’t seem that complicated.  Handle the summoners, drag Mag away from raid, click on cubes when he is about to nova. 

Except that about 85% of our raid had never set foot into the place.  As a matter of fact, it’s one of the first few Bobo’s House of Gank 25-man raids we’ve ever done.  We wiped a few times trying to handle the elementals (we only had 1 lock) from the summoners and finally had a run where we burned all the summoners down really fast and didn’t loose ANYONE.  Mag was pulled right up to a corner, everyone was settling in for some DPS.  Everything was going great, we felt like we had things under control. 

Then we had a 15-20 second lag spike.  This of course ruined this chance at a kill, and wiped the raid.

At the time, we just thought- “hey bad luck, lets rez and do this again”.  We felt really good about everything that was happening and people were doing great.  The next 3 attempts were plagued with a really perplexing issue of aggro.  Our main tank (a paladin) would throw his shield to start the fight, and the mob would immediately take off towards a warrior on the other side of the room.  Then once somehow 3 summoners aggroed at once to the initial summoner and roflpwned us.  The behaivor of the summoners was vastly different than the first 3-4 tries we did.

It is possible that it was just late and the tanks weren’t as sharp picking up their assignments as they were at the start of the night, but it didn’t really seem that way.  It honestly seemed bugged.

Oh well, I probably would have lost a roll for something and been pissed, but it was fun doing new content and getting close on the first night of attempts!

BRK is a wonderful writer. He’s knows hunters forwards and backwards, and he’s done a ton of research on them. He’s also very funny, and can tell wonderful stories. To top ALL that off, the dude works at NASA.

Having said all that about him, I honestly think the best post he’s ever written was today - titled “We Love Lists“. He explains 10 things you should do when you hit level 70. I was skeptical at first, but after reading them and his explanations, dang…he’s right on target.

So. Go- read, and learn.

I thought Beast Master hunters were supposed to just do some massive quantities of sustained, ranged, dps? I crit an aimed shot yesterday for 2340 - at level 68, followed by a white damage autoshot crit of 1140.

I had about 30-40 stacks of knothide scraps and leather clogging up my bank. A guildie turned them into heavy knothide for me. I have 55 heavy knothide now. Should I keep them? Save them? I think I’m going to need to save them for the leg enchants or something. I guess that means I need some cobra scales now.

My Mage is still really fun.  I kinda still suck with them, but it’s fun to get my +fire damage gear on and watch big numbers crit all over the place.

I don’t miss crafting professions.

Blizzard needs to make more quivers and ammo pouches from level 40-70.

I love the fact that you have to take Halaa to get the special Halaa ammo.

I hate it when I run out of Halaa ammo.

I really want a flying dragon.  I’m really not excited about grinding 5k more gold.

Happy patch day.

I know this isn’t real WoW related, but the internetz ate mah Penny Arcade. Can anyone get to http://www.penny-arcade.com?  The store and PAX2008 websites are both up, but apparently they are not on the same box?

I’m sad.  I needs mah PA.

There have been recent murmurings in the WoW-blogosphere lately about the casual nature of World of Warcraft, and how the hardcore players hate this trend, etc. I’m soo, so sick of this crap. Let’s go back to marketing 101. Very simple very obvious things here, so all you epic raiderz can understand. Blizzard built a game, a MMORPG in order to make money. Their goal is first and foremost to make money, second to make it a high quality game. The game, World of Warcraft has 10 million subscribers. The high - end bleeding edge (have EVERYTHING on farm) content guilds probably don’t even garner 5 percent of those subscribers. Let’s actually say somehow they represented 10% (1 million subscribers). How do you build a game so that the maximum amount of people will subscribe, and make the most possible money? You’ve got to listen to the 90% of subscribers when designing a game, and design and build content that they can perhaps someday attain. Blizzard actually learned how to do both with the expansion pack - The Burning Crusade. No one balances the raid content and the casual content with a kinder learning curve in the entire industry. Thus, we have 10 million subscribers, and a great game. This isn’t subjective, it’s fact. 10 million people don’t subscribe $15 dollars a month to a poorly made and maintained game. Having said that, producing raid content is important to the high end raiders and in a trickle down effect - important to everyone.

Recently a guild called Risen decided to voice their displeasure (commonly referred to as QQ - or crying) about how World of Warcraft was so casual, and all the n00bs can get great gear without any work. (my paraphrase) A recent WoWInsider article also hit on this proclamation, and I’ve mulled it over for a week or so and I want to sound off on this because I can and this attitude annoys me.

The QQ post from Risen concluded the thoughts:

…What happened to the competition? What happened to the encounters that took time to learn? In BT PTR [Black Temple Public Test Realm] I said this, and people told me it would be different on live. It sure didn’t seem that way to me. Nihilum praised the Souls encounter and Illidan both…

This has always confused me. If you don’t want to fly through content, and you want to take your time trying to solve raid encounters, why the hell do you spend hours and hours and hours on the PTR before it even goes live? Why do you look at successful world first videos, share strategies, etc.? Now I have no idea if they did that, but I’ve got a hard time believing they didn’t have any input from anyone or anything. Do you want to go up against hard content? DON’T LIVE IN THE PTR. What’s the fun in that? Experience the content when it is released and play like everyone else. You’re already better than 99% of the population - so naturally you’ll get content down before everyone else.

The competition argument is equally perplexing. Hell, entire websites were conceived because of the very competition you say isn’t there! All we heard about in the first few months of BC was the competition between guilds and all the world firsts flying around like crazy. What more competition do you want? Competition drives quicker results, chewing through content. This is normal, this is constant. I really don’t even understand 1 argument presented by Risen. They even contradicted themselves pointing out that arguably one of the best guilds on the planet - Nihilum actually praised Blizzard for the Black temple encounters and raid content. So I have the best guild saying Blizzard did things right - and a guild that worked really hard pre-BC to knock out Naxx content and got pissed when level 64 quest gear was as good as their epics crying that all their work will be for nothing if they can’t dominate n00bs like the good old days. LOL, aww poor babies. To me it seems like a bunch of spoiled brats are QQing because they beat the internetz and now don’t have anything to do.

Basically the WoWInsider article took a relatively casual friendly stance on the post by risen:

WoWInsider says: “The big complaint that so many people had was that they were a little put off that they could replace their most uber gear with level 61 greens off of Hellboars.”

LOL. I wasn’t put off. No one I played with was put off. We all thought it was kinda hilarious that in our green level 63 quest gear - we looked like pimp clowns. Somehow, as a dumb casual n00b I was able to figure out before BC came out, if level 61 greens are better than epics, why should I spend time raiding right now? You see before The Burning Crusade, there were 2 different types of level 60 players. Raiding players and players that tried to raid, and played casually. The difference was hilarious. A raiding level 60 would completely annihilate a casual 60. Blizzard tried to narrow this gap by giving casual players heroic instances, badges, arena teams, and easier rep grinds. There is still the raid crawl with tier X geared raiders. Now casual players have a chance to close the gap if they try hard and get organized with the time they have to play. Now the epic raiderz don’t have such a big lead on casuals, and apparently they are pissed. It’s not enough that they get to see places and encounters in the game that I’ll never experience, or have weapons or gear I’ll never get to see or equip - but they want to utterly dominate everyone else in all levels of the game. I think it’s hilarious.

They’ve since then wrote a post to talk about all the noise they made with thier comments. They go on to say:

…Yes, there are enough raiders who have seen Illidan to make it worth Blizzard’s time to continue to create content for them. No, nowhere was it said that 5mans, 10mans, and even solo content should be excluded. It is all being put out in this game slower than it is in AC1, and AC1 has been out for what, 9-10 years, and has less than 1% of the player-base of WoW…

I see the argument they are trying to make, and I think it’s made with raid-blinders. They are looking at things through their epic raiding glasses, not through the 9.5 million subscriber glasses. No, there is no way in hell there are enough raiders who have seen Illidan to make it worth Blizzards time to continue to make RAID content for them at the pace they want it. My point is backed up by results and fact. Blizzard knows it isn’t cost effective to do this, they haven’t done it, and never will. AC1 might be able to get away with it BECAUSE they have less than 1% of the player-base of WoW. There is a REASON they have less than 1% of the player base of WoW, and I’ll leave that up you to to extrapolate.

Then they throw out the Charles Barkley - “I’m not a role model” card:

…The post was -not- made to get attention from Blizzard. The post was not made to try to get anything changed…

Sooo, one of the top 20 guilds on the planet throws out a post telling the world why they quit WoW, and how horrible and boring WoW is, and damn those casual n00bs for getting free epics, etc. - and they DIDN’T expect any backlash? ARE YOU SERIOUS? I’m sorry, that’s ignorant. I bet they know now. It doesn’t matter if they care about the WoW community - they are a part of it.

Actually I wasn’t mad at them, hell I could care less about Risen - this is something that has been brewing in the community since The Burning Crusade came out and raiding guilds weren’t the only people covered in purple anymore. It could have been Risen, or Death and Taxes - whatever. In a private moment, I would think most raiding guilds grumble about this issue. No, raiding guilds don’t deserve more input on content, no Blizzard isn’t going to cater to you, no- no one cares if you quit. It’s not because I’m being mean, it’s because you’ll be back - and you’ll pay your money just like everyone else. Don’t be fooled - Blizzard is a company, they want to make the most money possible. That is priority number one. It seems kinda harsh and cold - but that’s the way it is.

Link Dump:
http://risen-guild.com/
http://www.wowinsider.com
http://nihilum.mousesports.com/en/news/

HAHHAHAAHAH.

Score one for me. I thought I would have some fun with my 5 year old. The one who likes to burn my hearthstones and leave me out in the middle of no-where when I log in.

I’ll double cross the double crosser! I took my “bird lady” to Darnassus (she’s kinda just chilling there anyway receiving Runecloth and turning it in for faction rep at the moment) and HID her in the city. Next I think I’ll strand her on some floating piece of wreckage in Netherstorm.

What are some places I could strand a level 70 with a flying mount that would surprise my 5 year old? Calling all cartographers!!!

I am by no means a hardcore WoW player. I do not know the best place to farm for everything. I like to try and maximize the time I get to play WoW, and hopefully this will help someone out. I hear that grinding for primals sucks, and while I agree to some extent - it’s not hard and can be done alone. These are locations and mobs I can kill quickly and access easily. They may not be the best locations, but it’s what I’ve found that works for me. Feel free to comment.

Mote of water:  Skettis Surger about a 50% drop rate on motes, sometimes you get 2.

Mote of fire: Enraged Fire Spirit alternate to other mote of fire mobs- about 30% drop rate or Searing Elemental sometimes crowded.

Mote of shadow: Collapsing Voidwalker - easy to kill.

Mote of life: Fungal Giant and Withered Giant easy to kill and if you are a flower picker- you can pick/skin these guys.

Mote of Mana: Phase Hunter / Mana Wraith / Mana Seeker - in that order of the amount of mobs to farm in Netherstorm(they all have similar drop rates +/- 30%) and Netherwing Rays in Shadowmoon valley.

There ya go.  Go nuts, get yer motes.

At work yesterday, I received a phone call.  My wife was calling because my son was playing World of Warcraft.  He’s 5 and he loves to just travel around Azeroth basically doing nothing but riding gryphons, mounts, etc.  He calls Griffendora (level 70 shadow priest) the Bird lady, because she is my only toon with a flying mount.  He LOVES flying around.

My wife said she heard him screaming hysterically about “red” guys getting him.  Then he sighed very loudly… “She died”.  Apparently he flew from Shattrath to the Skettis area and was introduced to Giant Kilari.  Pretty funny.  When he gets one of my toons killed, he usually just logs out and logs into another toon.  I can only imagine what people think watching this play out every day, let alone my guildmates.

I got home from work, sat down for dinner, and my little guy said:

“DAD!  Did you buy one of those crabby guys for your guy?”

I had gotten a ravager as a pet at lunch, and apparently he had logged on to my hunter.  He’s got a ravager on his level 12 space palladin hunter, and he calls them “crabby guys”. Priceless.