WTFlux

WE WON 2 MATCHES!!!!! WOOOHOOO!!!!

Ahem…sry about that.  Yes, we did win 2 of our 10 matches.  Yes, they were against real live people.  We beat 2 warlocks (lol?) in the Ruins, then beat a priest/warrior combo in the Circle of Blood.  The warlocks went down smooth, kind of like A & W creme soda.  I think I heard Lexy purring after the match.  Our first ever legit Arena win! 

Then we came up against some rogue teams which we definitely seem to have a problem with.  I think everyone kinda has problems with Rogue teams though, so I don’t feel to horrible about that. 

Our second win was decided about 20 seconds into the match.  We saw a priest and took off right after him.  Bestial Wrath, Intimidation and some crazy shield stunning thing and the poor priest never had a chance.  We had him down in like 15-20 seconds, took a breath and started after the warrior.  This is about where the video started - I’m retarded and didn’t catch the whole thing. 

Anyway we had a blast and went 2-8. We ran up against the same Priest/Hunter team 2-3 times and couldn’t really deal with them that great.  Dark just needs better gear, respec to Ret, and to do more dps.  We could get the priest down, but by then the hunter would have me almost dead.  The priest would die, and get one last greater heal in and the hunter would kill me, then prance around the arena kiting poor Dark everywhere while King Bangladash was taking bite sized chunks out of my wee little dwarven pally.  lolz.  At least we had a good time, eh?

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

OK!  Here we go.  ARENA TIME BABAY!  Darkmatteroz and myself jump into the 2v2 arena.  Our SOLE goal is to get 1000 arena points.  Let’s see how we do.

Match 1 - Loss (no kills)
Match 2 - Loss (no kills)
Match 3 - Loss (no kills)
Match 4 - Loss (no kills)
Match 5 - Loss (I killed a pet)
Match 6 - Loss (no kills)
Match 7 - Loss (it was 2 vs 1)
Match 8 - Loss (no kills)
Match 9 - Loss (no kills)
Match 10 - WIN!  (they quit)
Match 11 - Loss (no kills)
Match 12 - Loss (no kills)

So there you go.  No I am not kidding about Match 7.  Rohh the rogue beat both of us, pretty badly.  ALL BY HIMSELF.  mmmmkay.  Time to go back to regular BG’s.

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!

Something really cool happened last weekend.  I was doing some quests when an officer notified me via whisper:

Hey - they are talking about you in officer chat 

Oh great, thanks for that.  Did I do something wrong?  Offend someone?  WHO DOES THAT?  Then after a bit of agonizing silence, the GM whispers me and says:

Congratulations, we are going to promote you to officer of Bobo’s House of Gank! 

WHOA.  That was unexpected, but really really cool.  It’s nice to have people you don’t know in real life acknowledge your helpfulness, and value to a group of people.

And I dinged 70 with Carterpants.  BUT I’M AN OFFICER IN MY GUILD NOW!  WOOHOO!

Earlier that night I got the quests for Shadow Labs and started looking for a group.  A few guildies wanted in, and all I needed was a healer.  One replied in LFG channel and off we went.  A real life buddy was tanking so I wanted to inspect the priest to see if he was up to the challenge.  One look at him and I started giggling like a girl. 

Nearly full T6 holy priest.

We get into the instance and the priest says- “Just have the tank AoE tank everything, don’t worry about traps or CC just FF”.  Basically the pally tank would aggro everything and we would just zerg them all.  The freaking priest healed BOTH the pets and the entire group without any problems, zero wipes.  My first time fighting Murmur with Carterpants and this dropped for me: Sonic Spear.

So to recap in 1 night I did the following:
Got promoted to Officer in my guild
Got Sonic Spear
Dinged 70
Got my Flying Mount

…then my guild needed my shadow priest for Kara and I got 6 badges.  What a night.

( photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

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.

I’m still fuming over this.  I was in Terrokar forest questing by myself.  I saw a 70 horde hunter on his mount, and went out of my way to avoid him.  I went about questing.  Next thing I know he rode over to me and dismounted.  I didn’t really think twice, I tried to avoid him- but he pressed the issue.  I hit my mark/pet attack macro, and hit every instant shot I have, got off an aimed shot- and started a shot rotation.  When he sent his pet on me, I immediately feigned death and shrugged it off.  For some reason he never sent it back - so now Lexy is chewing on him, and I’m hitting a few good crits and kill commands are flying.  I look down, and notice I’m not dead yet - and I killed him straight up!  I was feeling pretty good about myself - this was my first 1 on 1 level 70 horde I’ve killed with Carterpants.

Then he resurrected.

Apparently the graveyard was basically next to his dead body.  I didn’t even have time to bandage, and he killed me.  I rez, go to my body and find he’s still there, eating to gain health.  I pop in, and lead with an aimed shot crit and KILL HIM AGAIN!  This time I did it without a pet!  Then his serpent sting ticks 1 more time and I die.   So now I’m up 2-1.

I think he’s probably learned his lesson, getting owned by a level 67 at 70 must suck.  So I rez and just start to quest again.  I accidentally aggro a warp stalker, and run away a bit to feign death.  Then he shows up again.  Hoping against hope, I stayed in feign death.  He rode over, looked around, circled back, looked around some more.  Stared at me.  Finally he jumped off his mount and I popped up and unloaded all my dps, but died (he was at full health, I was at about 40% since I had just rezzed).

When I rezzed this last time he was gone.  ARGGGG.

Hey Kittytrainer - I hope you feel good about that.  If I got owned by a level 67 when I was 70 straight up at full health, I’d probably want to kill them too, but l2take your beatings next time.  How the hell did you get those epic PvP rewards anyway???  LOLZ.

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/